conway & alvarez final june 22 18 correspondence address: janet conway, department of sociology, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: jconway@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 20, 2018 video presentation assemblage thinking and transnational/ translocal social movements of the 2010s janet m. conway brock university, canada sonia e. alvarez university of massachusetts at amherst, usa “assemblage thinking and transnational/translocal social movements of the 2010s” presents keynote addresses by feminist social movement scholars, janet conway and sonia alvarez. conway introduces assemblage thinking as an alternative approach to making sense of the post-2010 global movement ensemble. using the example of occupy wall street, she proposes combining assemblage thinking with decolonial critique to re-read occupy through its indigenous interlocutors as occupying indigenous land. alvarez considers the utility of assemblage to think about activism, protest, and participation in contemporary forms of transnational and translocal feminism. she proposes the concept “discursive fields of action” as an alternative to “social movement” in light of afro-brazilian feminism and the brazilian slutwalk. this video compilation concludes with a series of short interventions by alvarez, rinaldo walcott, öznur karakas, lee cormie and glen coulthard assessing the utility of assemblage thinking. the video may be downloaded from: http://hdl.handle.net/10464/13528 or viewed on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ukptiivvga bourgeois final before ts dec 11 18 correspondence address: robyn bourgeois, women’s and gender studies, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: rbourgeois@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 413-415, 2018 book review unsettled expectations: uncertainty, land and settler decolonization mackey, eva. (2016). halifax, ns & winnipeg, mb: fernwood publishing. isbn 9781552668894 (paper) cdn$24.00; isbn 1552668986 (epub) cdn$23.00; isbn 9781552668993 (kindle) cdn$23.76. 224 pages robyn bourgeois brock university, canada while his father’s political legacy includes the infamous 1969 “white paper” calling for full assimilation of indigenous peoples into canadian society, prime minister justin trudeau will likely be remembered for his commitment to reconciliation and his attempt to “renew the relationship with indigenous peoples, based on recognition of rights, respect, cooperation and partnership” (government of canada, 2018). a foundational component of his election and governmental platforms, trudeau’s reconciliation efforts have included, thus far, establishing the long overdue national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women and girls; appointing canada’s first indigenous minister of justice and attorney general, jody wilson-raybould (kwakwaka’wakw/we wai kai nation); and promoting implementation of the 94 calls to action issued by the truth and reconciliation commission based on its investigation of indian residential schools. this politics of reconciliation, however, doesn’t appear to include meaningful and fair resolution to the issue which lies at the genocidal core of canada’s settler colonial domination over indigenous peoples: land. in perhaps the most prominent example of this, trudeau has doggedly pursued expansion of the trans canada pipeline for the natural gas sector, including putting canadian taxpayers on the hook to the tune of $4.5 billion to purchase the existing pieces of the pipeline, despite vehement opposition from many indigenous communities whose existing land holdings and traditional territories would be impacted. robyn bourgeois studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 413-415, 2018 414 carlton university anthropologist eva mackey’s new book, unsettled expectations: uncertainty, land and settler decolonization, offers critical insights into prime minister trudeau’s and, indeed, much of canadian society’s reticence and refusal to address issues of land in this period of reconciliation. using ethnographic data collected from multiple sites in canada and the united states, mackey argues that the anger many settlers express in connection to indigenous land rights is due to the uncertainty and disruption of their expectation of ongoing entitlement to the land that such rights pose for settlers. in what she refers to as “settled expectations,” settlers and settler nation states construct “a normative state of affairs in which [both] did, or believed it did, have certain and settled entitlement to the land taken from indigenous peoples” (p. 8). colonization and settler colonial state nation-building, mackey contends, is organized around the “repetitive embedding and realizing of settler assertions of certainty and entitlement, and the repeated denial of indigenous personhood and sovereignty” (p. 11). consequently, the settler people that she interviewed, mackey writes, consistently referred to the threats and dangers of land rights to the nation and to a deep sense of entitlement and a supposedly natural right (even a responsibility) to own and develop property/land, even if it may have been taken from indigenous people. they felt they had laboured and improved the land and helped build the nation and that they were entitled to their private property. on these grounds, they felt certain of their entitlement to the land and expected it to ongoing and unchallenged. (p. 8) for this reason, “they also consistently expressed powerful feelings of uncertainty, crisis and anxiety about the future within the context of land claims” and “they felt angry about this uncertainty, treating it as unexpected and unfair” (p. 8). given the power and pervasiveness of this ideology among settlers and the settler nation states, mackey concludes that necessary “legal, political and economic acts of redistribution” required to meaningfully address indigenous land claims “may not be possible or sufficient without a fundamental shift in settler common-sense frameworks, a shift in concepts for thinking about and experiencing relationships and power within spaces” (p. 11). unsettled expectations is organized into three parts. part one provides the methodological and theoretical foundations of this research. here mackey not only articulates her analytical framework organized around settler logics of certainty and uncertainty about land, but also establishes its centrality and necessary repetition throughout canadian colonial history, including contemporary manifestations of the canadian nation state. particular attention is paid to the operations and reinforcements of the settler colonial logic of settler certainty of ownership of indigenous lands through the law. part two is devoted to exposing the operations of these logics within settler discourses collected through mackey’s ethnographic work in communities involved in two existing land claims cases involving (1) the caldwell first nation in book review studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 413-415, 2018 415 southern ontario, canada, and (2) the cayuga indian nation in upstate new york, united states. part three is organized around understanding what decolonization and embracing settler uncertainty might look like through consideration of the onondoga land rights action, as well two examples of existing indigenous and settler alliances (share/cayuga indian nation and noon/onondaga nation) that mackey describes as “offer[ing] provocative ways of imagin[ing] decolonizing relationships” (p. 165). in his endorsement featured on the cover of unsettled expectations, prominent american scholar of white settler studies, mark rifkin, claims that this book is “an invaluable contribution to the scholarly literature on settler colonialism” – and i couldn’t agree more. what i appreciate most about mackey’s contribution is its commitment to decolonization through exposing and critically interrogating the specific manifestations of settler colonial power and domination over indigenous peoples in canada and the united states. power, french philosopher michel foucault warns us, “is only tolerable on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself” and “its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms” (1978, p. 86). secrecy, he contends, is not only indispensable to isolating and silencing those who are dominated, but also for securing the support of dominant groups, predominantly through the ideological and discursive transformation of abuses of power into expressions of freedom for these dominant subjects (foucault 1978, p. 86) for this reason, “secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation” (foucault 1978, p. 86) – and, thus, doing the hard work of mapping and exposing the discourses of domination and operations of abuses of power that underpin settler colonial nation states like canada and the united states are critical to decolonization and dismantling these systems. it is particularly important when such analyses involve land. another strength of mackey’s analysis is its careful attention to how canadian law has played and continues to play a fundamental role in legitimizing, securing, and normalizing settler colonial ownership of indigenous lands and canada’s ongoing domination of indigenous peoples (despite being in this so-called period of “reconciliation”). true decolonization requires addressing canada’s ongoing occupation of lands stolen from indigenous peoples, and eva mackey’s unsettled expectations makes a critical contribution to current and future discussions of how this is possible. this book is required reading for everyone. references foucault, michel. (1978). the history of sexuality – volume 1: an introduction. new york: vintage books. government of canada. (2018, august 12). reconciliation. retrieved from www.rcaanccirnac.gc.ca/eng/1400782178444/1529183710887. choudry final before ts feb 19 19 correspondence address: aziz choudry, department of integrated studies in education, mcgill university, montreal, qc, h3a 1y2; email: aziz.choudry@mcgill.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 1, 191-195, 2019 book review suffer the little children: genocide, indigenous nations and the canadian state starblanket, tamara. (2018). atlanta, ga: clarity press. isbn 9780998694771 (paper) us$29.95; isbn 9780998694788 (epub) us$21.00. 374 pages. aziz choudry mcgill university, canada reading suffer the little children, i was reminded of the words of africanamerican activist, ella baker: “in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been.” at the heart of ahtahkakoop cree legal scholar tamara starblanket’s first book is a searing critique of the exclusion of cultural genocide from the crime of genocide as defined in international law. starblanket also argues that the canadian state has rationalized, legitimized, and evaded accountability for colonialism and genocide – and suggests a way forward. focusing on the ongoing impact of residential schools and the more recent forced removals of indigenous children from their communities via the child welfare system, starblanket argues that this narrow definition of genocide has serious consequences for indigenous peoples. starblanket illustrates that the deliberate exclusion from international law of cultural genocide and forced assimilation measures by colonial settler states such as canada makes it almost impossible for indigenous peoples to articulate a claim of this nature either within canada or in international law. after a foreword written by ward churchill, in the introduction, the author maps out the book’s main arguments. she begins with an explanation of her own location as a cree woman and the sole survivor of her family devastated by the impacts of residential schooling on earlier generations. the book evolved from starblanket’s master of laws thesis, in the course of which she ran up against “the barriers erected by canada’s academic gatekeepers to aziz choudry studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 191-195, 2019 192 prevent or at least limit exposure of the culpability attending certain actions of the canadian state, and those of the colonial society” (p. 23). as the book unfolds, the extent of these intellectual, political, and legal barriers is revealed and confronted. the first chapter, “naming the crime: defining genocide in international law” offers a legal-historical analysis of the term genocide and the definition used in the 1948 convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (ungc). it notes that raphael lemkin, the polish jewish jurist who coined the term and initiated the ungc, understood cultural genocide to be a process of colonialism in his analysis of the nazi occupation and invasion of the lands and territories of eastern european countries. lemkin held that genocide is a process that has two phases: firstly the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group, and secondly, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. he stated that this imposition could be made on the oppressed population that is allowed to remain in a territory, or upon the territory alone, after removing the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s nationals. starblanket painstakingly walks us through how the legal definition of genocide has been narrowed since lemkin’s two-phase version, and the politics that reshaped it. in doing so, she analyzes key debates and arguments at the united nations during the drafting of the crime of genocide in international law, highlighting their serious implications for indigenous peoples. chapter two, “the horror: canada’s forced transfer of indigenous children,” discusses the residential school system in terms of goffman’s notion of a total institution, and lemkin’s two-phase definition of genocide. she contends that the traumatized and destructive patterns it set in motion led to the later forcible removal of future generations of indigenous children by the child welfare system. several pages of photos further remind us of the brutal impact on indigenous children and nations of the carefully-planned process to absorb them into the “body politic” of canada through residential schools “until there is no indian question” as then deputy minister of indian affairs duncan campbell scott once put it. reviving and applying lemkin’s definition, starblanket makes the case for how this constitutes genocide. “coming to grips with canada as a colonizing state,” the third chapter, contends that alongside the dispossession of lands and territories, the effects of residential schools meant that the “ability to transmit to the next generation the healthy characteristics of [indigenous] society in terms of its land, laws, worldview and nationhood becomes severely impeded and, in the worst case scenario, terminated” (p. 205). this chapter draws on steven newcomb’s (shawnee/lenape) (2008) work on the language of domination and political subordination, arguing that metaphors of domination are the imaginative (cognitive) means by which a dominating society – and the language of international law – is able to constitute and maintain a reality of domination and subordination over nations and peoples being dominated. starblanket, like newcomb before her, argues that this provides a vocabulary for book reviews studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 191-195, 2019 193 dehumanizing indigenous peoples and entrenches state domination. she also draws from other indigenous and anti-colonial thinkers to present readers with a clear picture of the violence and dehumanization wrought by colonization, including the psychological damage caused by residential schools and other “civilizing missions.” the fourth chapter, “smoke and mirrors: canada’s pretense of compliance with the genocide convention” addresses what the author calls the “made in canada” approach to genocide, the equation of genocide only with mass killing or physical destruction. it traces the history of a watering down process of an already limited definition of the crime of genocide alongside canada’s refusal to accept cultural genocide as a crime in the drafting of the ungc. she notes that while the canadian government was involved in the drafting of the ungc between 1946-1948, it was engaging in crimes against indigenous peoples’ children. moreover, she suggests that “the canadian state’s effort to remove cultural genocide during the drafting stages of the crime in international law shows its earlier efforts of denial and obfuscation where it claimed not to know that destruction of this kind was occurring in canada” (p. 229). the chapter advances the case that canada is culpable for crimes of genocide due to colonization. in conclusion, starblanket contends that the only solution for genuine peace and justice is the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination as subjects in international law. besides the sharpness of its arguments, a major strength of this book is its accessibility for an interdisciplinary, and indeed non-academic audience. in different ways, it resonates with the work of sharon venne (1998, 2013), irene watson (2018), and radha d’souza (2018) in tracking the histories of international legal and political doctrines, processes and instruments from indigenous/anticolonial perspectives and unravelling their material, real world consequences. starblanket explains international and canadian legal processes with the layperson in mind. her writing is refreshingly clear and direct as she walks us through the twists, turns, and implications of this legal history and its consequences. thus this book is recommended reading for education, legal, and social science scholars, educators, students and broader publics alike – including activist audiences. at a time when many initiatives claim to respond to the truth and reconciliation commission’s (trc) calls to action, this book makes an important intervention. much liberal literature fails to adequately engage with the broader context that understands residential schools and the ongoing widespread removals of indigenous children into canada’s child welfare system as intrinsic parts of colonization and genocide. this point is amply driven home by starblanket’s research which highlights the way in which these processes were used to isolate children from their land, and destroy indigenous nations. histories of racism and colonialism in canada, when recalled at all, rarely go beyond what are presented as unfortunate past episodes, events or moments. as starblanket notes, there is ample evidence to show that not only was there intent to destroy indigenous societies through aziz choudry studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 191-195, 2019 194 residential schooling, but that government authorities were aware of the destruction and did not intervene to stop the brutal treatment of the children, which included many deaths from disease, hunger and other forms of abuse. in her afterword to starblanket’s book, cree lawyer sharon venne affirms: “why target the children? the colonizers wanted to have access to our lands and resources. in order to accomplish this task – the colonizers needed to have no one able to speak for the land and the resources” (p. 284). furthermore, starblanket sharply interrogates the intent and politics of canadian state reconciliation policy and practices. she writes that, it would have been viewed as absurd for any other regime engaging in crimes of genocide against other peoples’ children to evade its crimes internationally and domestically and then, as the perpetrator, to set up another destructive process that purported to investigate the issue and seek to resolve it. but such was the socalled truth and reconciliation commission, a body set up by the perpetrator government. (p. 274) she notes that the trc remedies almost entirely centre on redressing violations of individual human rights rather than that of the group rights inhering in the indigenous nations explicitly targeted for destruction through the forcible removal of their future. finally, suffer the little children belongs on the reading list of anyone concerned with social justice and addressing the ongoing colonialism on which the canadian nation-state stands. at a time when the terms “decolonization” and “decolonial” are being taken up in many settings, and open to a wide range of meanings and interpretations, many of which eschew an actual politics of decolonization and self-determination, this book is not decolonization-lite. indeed, in the words of the late arthur manuel (2015), it makes a vital contribution to “unsettling canada.” for those seriously committed to social justice and confronting and transforming colonial power relations, taking up the challenges that tamara starblanket puts forward – including her perspective on the canadian state’s reconciliation project – would be a step in the right direction. references d’souza, r. (2018). what’s wrong with rights? social movements, law and liberal imaginations. london: pluto press. manuel, a., & derrickson, r.m. (2015). unsettling canada: a national wake-up call. toronto: between the lines press. newcomb, s. (2008). pagans in the promised land. golden, co: fulcrum. venne, s. h. (1998). our elders understand our rights: evolving international law regarding indigenous peoples. penticton: theytus press. venne, s. (2013). ngos, indigenous peoples and the united nations. in a. choudry & d. kapoor (eds.), ngoization: complicity, contradictions and prospects (pp. 75-101). london: zed books. book reviews studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 191-195, 2019 195 watson, i. (ed.). (2018). indigenous peoples as subjects of international law. abingdon, uk & new york: routledge. butz final layout dec 10 15 correspondence address: david butz, department of geography, brock university, 1812 sir isaac brock way, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: dbutz@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 1, 1-6, 2015 editorial: social justice scholarship in a neoliberal governance context david butz editor-in-chief, brock university, canada the articles that follow constitute the first installment of a special double issue of studies in social justice devoted to the perils and potentialities of combining scholarly work in an academic setting with social justice activism. they are also the first pieces published by the journal since it moved to the social justice research institute (sjri) at brock university.1 it is appropriate that the journal’s inaugural issues at its new home focus on the simultaneously fraught and productive relationship between activist and academic work, because the circumstances that brought studies in social justice to brock exemplify some of the challenges, opportunities, and ironies implicit in that relationship. studies in social justice was launched in 2007 at the university of windsor, and published its first eight volumes from windsor’s centre for studies in social justice. in 2013 the centre was dismantled as part of the university’s response to the government of ontario’s governance agenda for the province’s tertiary education sector; an agenda that combines funding cuts with greater provincial oversight, rationalisation of programming, and an emphasis on public-private partnerships as sources of university revenue. studies in social justice was left without funding or an institutional home, a casualty of neoliberal rationalisation. at about the same time – and in response to the same provincial strategy – brock university created and funded five new transdisciplinary research institutes. one of them, the social justice research institute (sjri), assumed management of studies in social justice. the sjri’s establishment is a welcome development for brock faculty and students eager to pursue social justice research and activist work in a supportive and well-resourced academic environment. its programming so far has generated many productive collaborations among scholars and with 1 to learn more about the social justice research institute (sjri), or to become a participating member, please visit http://www.brocku.ca/social-justice-research-institute. david butz studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 1-6, 2015 2 community groups, seeded numerous new research projects, supported the social justice-oriented training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and raised the profile of social justice scholarship on campus. we are thrilled that brock has committed substantial funding to a social justice research institute, if only for a limited period. at the same time, ensuring that the sjri operates effectively to nourish radical scholarship or progressive social change is a constant challenge given the current university governance context, which requires universities to satisfy an increasingly broad mandate with relatively fewer resources. in this context, brock’s new institutes will be considered sustainable beyond an initial period of generous university funding only if they become net revenue generators for the university through some combination of (a) direct funding that covers their operating costs (e.g., external grants or ‘public-private partnerships’), (b) the trickle-down effects of enhancing brock’s reputation or name-recognition (e.g., increased enrolments or research funding), or (c) serving effectively as flexible resources to meet brock’s rapidly-changing obligations to the provincial government through which it is funded (e.g., transdisciplinary or community collaborations).2 the vulnerability and lack of autonomy for sjri that is implicit in this combination of university expectations is at best a worrying distraction from the job of nurturing frontline social justice research and activist work; at worst, it enrolls the sjri into the very mechanisms of neoliberal governance that social justice advocates strenuously oppose. the latter is a constant danger – perhaps even an inevitability – because the sjri is funded directly through the office of research services (rather than through the university’s longstanding faculty and departmental governance structure), and therefore may be required to serve strategic or tactical goals that have little to do with the institute’s social justice mandate. as the articles in these special issues on scholarship and activism stress, the tensions and contradictions i’ve hinted at are characteristic of – if not inherent in – efforts to pursue a social justice agenda focused on transformative social change from within academic institutions that are heavily invested in succeeding in a competitive university funding environment. although most of the issues’ authors share with the founders of the sjri a conviction that the opportunities of pursuing scholar-activism in the present neoliberal governance context outweigh the risks, they also recognise the risks and offer their own experientially-informed strategies for managing them. i hope the sjri is able to learn from their insights. - 2 the difficulty in measuring (b) and (c) results in frequent reporting exercises and the nebulous language of ‘virtual balance sheets.’ social justice scholarship in a neoliberal governance context studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 1-6, 2015 3 readers and authors who have come to appreciate the quality and availability of pieces published in studies in social justice will be relieved to learn that the journal’s relocation to the sjri at brock university has not resulted in significant changes to its mandate, existing rigorous review and editorial procedures, or open accessibility. the transition has involved adopting the creative commons copyright licensing designation by-nd-nc for the journal’s publications, 3 and adding two new sections – dispatches and creative interventions – designed to expand the journal’s interdisciplinary character and stylistic variety. the journal now invites contributions to five sections: • research articles (6,000-8,000 words): original, previously-unpublished, and fully-referenced research contributions that significantly extend knowledge in the broad field of social justice along substantive, theoretical or methodological lines, and which are likely to be of interest to researchers and practitioners. articles are peer-reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers in a double-blind process. • review essays (< 6,000 words): critical and evaluative overviews of particular literatures, theoretical traditions, debates, activist experiences, etc., relating to social justice. review essays are intended as expert overviews for the benefit of activists and researchers who are unfamiliar with the area. review essays are peer-reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers in a double-blind process. • book reviews (1,000-2,000 words): reviews of important theoretical, political and research works relating to social justice issues. book reviews are vetted by the book review editors, but are not subject to peer review. • dispatches (< 4,000 words): reports or commentaries from the nonacademic and academic spaces of social justice practice, discourse and contestation. dispatches may report on research activities, methodological innovations, movement experiences, mobilisation efforts, educational practices, social justice events and actions, etc. they need not employ an academic writing style or speaking position. dispatches are reviewed and vetted by the editorial team, which works with authors as necessary to help shape submissions for publication. they are not exposed to a blind review process. • creative interventions: visual, aural or textual products that reflect on social justice issues using an aesthetic or evocative mode of address. creative interventions are reviewed and vetted by members of the 3 copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by their authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. by virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles may be used, with proper attribution (by), in educational and other non-commercial settings (nc); although articles may be quoted with attribution, they may not be used to create derivative works without authors’ permission (nd) – hence the copyright licensing designation by-ndnc. david butz studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 1-6, 2015 4 editorial team or others with competence in the relevant areas of creative practice. they are not exposed to a blind review process. the editors welcome independent submissions to each of these sections, as well as proposals for guest-edited issues that include contributions in one or more sections. we also invite submissions that combine or overlap categories, as do the articles in the present issue. these pieces are by design hybrids of research articles and dispatches: dispatches in that they reflect on the authors’ personal experiences as scholar-activists in a particular field of social justice practice (i.e., the university), and research articles because they expose these experiences to theoretically-informed analysis, and have passed through a double blind review process. - the journal’s expanded disciplinary reach and stylistic variety, together with attrition in editorial personnel associated with its relocation to brock, has meant assembling a new editorial team, as follows: • david butz, phd (journal manager, editor-in-chief): i am a professor in the department of geography at brock university, and a founding member of the faculty steering committee of the social justice research institute. i was for three years director of brock’s interdisciplinary graduate program in social justice and equity studies. from 2005-2015 i was an editor of acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies, also an open-access, on-line, peer-reviewed journal, and i have served on the editorial boards of four other journals. my research deals mainly with modernisation, social transformation, and political ecology in mountainous northern pakistan, with a recent emphasis on road building and mobility justice. i have also done work on the restructuring of the automobile industry in southern ontario, spatiality in jamaican reggae music, epistemological and methodological aspects of autoethnography, autobiography and autophotograpy, and the limitations of liberal understandings of research ethics. • monique deveaux, phd (editor): monique is a professor in the department of philosophy and canada research chair in ethics and global social change at the university of guelph. she serves on the advisory board of rowman & littlefield's book series, 'studies in social and global justice', and is director of ‘initiatives in global justice’ at the university of guelph. monique’s research lies at the intersection of normative ethics and social/political philosophy; it aims to bring social and political theory to bear on real-world problems, such as inequality, poverty, gender and racial injustice, and issues of culturalreligious accommodation. social justice scholarship in a neoliberal governance context studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 1-6, 2015 5 • vanessa farr, phd (dispatches editor): vanessa is an independent scholar, writer and consultant based in south africa. she earned her phd in women’s studies from york university, and has extensive field-level experience with crisis prevention and recovery in conflict-affected countries worldwide, especially in africa and the middle east. her areas of specialisation include demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration (ddr), the gendered impacts of small arms and light weapons, social development and gender, early recovery programming in protracted crises, and diverse aspects of women’s peacebuilding. • julie gregory, phd (book review co-editor): julie recently graduated from the phd program in sociology at queen’s university, where she investigated how various overlapping discourses buttress images of university campuses as particularly (un)safe environments requiring augmented techno-security apparatuses. her research is concerned with the commodification of fear, risk and security, community-based responses to crime, deviance and justice, and moral panics, social problems and moral regulation. she is also interested in post-subcultural theories and identities. • suzan ilcan, phd (editor): suzan is a professor in the department of sociology & legal studies at the university of waterloo and balsillie school of international affairs, and a founding editor of studies in social justice. she serves as a consulting editor of the canadian review of sociology and as an editorial board member of globalizations and the journal of namibian studies. suzan’s research covers themes at the interface of global governance, humanitarian and development aid, and migration studies, including humanitarian aid and refugees, citizenship rights and social justice, and the politics of poverty and development. • caleb johnston, phd (creative interventions editor): caleb is a lecturer in human geography at the university of edinburgh. he has served as a steering committee member of the glasgow refugee, asylum and migration network, as well as the global justice academy at the university of edinburgh, and currently serves on the editorial board of environment and planning d: society & space. caleb’s research has involved substantive ethnographic work in the city of ahmedabad, india, where he collaborated with two adivasi (indigenous) communities examining a range of issues related to a contemporary subaltern urbanism. he also has a long history working at the intersection of the social sciences and the arts. this work has paid particular attention to the capacity of testimonial theatre to produce sites for popular politics, circulating stories of suffering, and for forging new political attachments. he is the co-creator of nanay: a testimonial play, a documentary play engendering public debate about canada’s live-in caregiver program, which has been performed in vancouver, berlin, edinburgh, and manila. • samah sabra, phd (book review co-editor): samah completed an interdisciplinary phd at carleton university. her ethnographic doctoral david butz studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 1-6, 2015 6 research examined how arab canadians in the ottawa region negotiated various (pan)national identity discourses in their narratives about their own and others immigration experiences. samah works as an educational developer at carleton university, where her main areas of interest are pedagogical practices related to creating inclusive post-secondary educational spaces. this seven person editorial team is complemented and supported by an international editorial advisory board that presently numbers 17 scholars with a wide range of disciplinary and transdisciplinary competencies in areas of research related to social justice. we plan to expand the breadth of the editorial board over the coming months, so please contact me if you are interested in serving. - the opportunity to guide studies in social justice into a new phase of its existence is at once exciting and daunting. i’m delighted to be accompanied on this venture by six energetic and highly-qualified co-editors, and supported by an equally energetic and accomplished faculty steering committee at the sjri. i’m also most thankful to the journal’s previous editors (drs. tanya basok, suzan ilcan and jeffrey noonan) and manager (ms. nicole noel) whose hard work and wise decisions over the past eight years have ensured that studies in social justice is solidly established and well-positioned to further increase its readership, visibility and influence. finally, i wish to acknowledge sandra smeltzer and sara cantillon, the guest editors of this special double issue, whose cooperation and initiative has greatly helped the journal to enter this new phase of its existence on a strong footing. sadati final before ts december 13 18 correspondence address: s. m. hani sadati, department of integrated studies in education, mcgill university, montreal, qc, h3a 1y2; email: hani.sadati@mail.mcgill.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 364-371, 2018 dispatch cellphilming in four atvet colleges: a mirror, reflecting gender issues in ethiopia s. m. hani sadati mcgill university, canada introduction this dispatch builds on jackie kirk’s commitment to participatory work with girls and young women, particularly her highlighting of the significance of the girls education movement (gem) to transform schools. this is something she saw as converting “education systems and societies into environments where girls can achieve and have equal opportunities” (kirk & garrow, 2003, p. 5). this dispatch focuses on my experience of running “cellphilm” workshops (a method described below), which i facilitated with the hope of contributing to social change in support of more justice and equity, specifically for young ethiopian women. the cellphilm workshops were part of my summer internship program activities (in june & july 2017) in the agricultural transformation through stronger vocational education (attsve) project, which is a six-year project in ethiopia, funded by global affairs canada. mcgill university is one of the partners of this project, the focus of which is building institutional capacity to address issues of gender equity, gender-based violence, and sexual health in four agriculture technical vocational education and training (atvet) colleges. ethiopia has a high prevalence of sexual and gender-based violence (sgbv) (gelaye, arnold, williams, goshu, & berhane, 2009) and sgbv is one of the major problems faced by female students in post-secondary institutions (arnold, gelaye, goshu, berhane, & williams, 2008; shimekaw, megabiaw, & alamrew, 2013). the attsve project tries to build capacity in the colleges to combat sgbv and empower females so that they can fully participate in all aspects of life. cellphilming in four atvet colleges studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 364-371, 2018 365 what is cellphilming? cellphilming is a participatory visual research method (macentee, burkholder, & schwab-cartas, 2016). participatory visual methodologies (pvm) can contribute to making spaces for new dialogues in communities, which can lead to changes in perspectives, policy debates, and policy development (mitchell, de lange, & moletsane, 2017). cellphilming is one of the methods employed in pvm, where groups of participants use their camera phone (or tablet) to make videos in response to a prompt, question, community issue or challenge (schwab-cartas, khan, macentee, & burkholder, 2017), and to highlight specific or noteworthy issues in communities. the method is used by practitioners, activists and educators to encourage community members – who might not have filmmaking experience – to get involved in a process that can not only address the social and individual challenges of a society, but also raise awareness and offer solutions (burkholder, 2017). cellphilm workshops: participants and steps participants in the workshops i conducted were students and instructors of four atvet colleges (maichew, woreta, nedjo and waolita soddo) located in four different regions of ethiopia. the number of participants varied between 24 and 28 people (see table 1) depending on the institution, and participants were selected by the attsve project’s gender clubs directors. the instructors, who also participated in the workshops, were gender club leaders. in the selection process (specifically for students) it was important to have relatively equal numbers of participants of both genders. college name number of participants number of groups & cellphilms created students instructors females males females males woreta 11 9 1 3 4 maichew 7 10 3 3 4 nedjo 12 10 3 3 5 wolaita soddo 6 16 0 6 4 sum 36 45 7 15 17 sum 81 students 22 instructors 17 groups & cellphilms in total table 1. cellphilm workshops at a glance. s. m. hani sadati studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 364-371, 2018 366 the steps of the workshops varied slightly among colleges, but generally they were conducted as shown in figure 1. each workshop in each college was one day long except the last workshop (in wolaita soddo), which was a halfday due to the time constraints of participants. after an ice breaking activity, i started each session with an introduction to pvm and the concept of cellphilming, along with screening some samples of cellphilms. the language of the workshops was english. i did not think this would be a problem as english is the language of instruction in all four colleges. however, in practice, the english knowledge of students was weak, and sometimes there was need for translation from english to amharic or oromo. attsve project’s gender officer volunteered to help with translations, and participant-instructors also helped whenever needed. after addressing the importance of (a) visual ethics (mitchell, 2012), (b) selecting an appropriate genre, and (c) identifying the audience of the films (mitchell, 2011), i divided the participants into groups of five or six. the next step was brainstorming about the prompt: “gender issues (gender equity) in my college.” this prompt was in line with attsve project’s goals in addressing gender-related issues at the colleges. during this process members of each group discussed the topic with each other, and each group came up with a list of issues in their colleges and shared their ideas with all participants. after this, the members of each group voted for the most important issue on their list, and collectively selected a topic for their video. the next step was storyboarding, in which the groups planned out a script or scenario for their short video (one to three minutes) by writing or drawing the contextual details, such as time, location, and roles. drawing the script helps to visualize the idea and make it more tangible to every group member. figure 1: workshop outline from my powerpoint presentation. cellphilming in four atvet colleges studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 364-371, 2018 367 filming was the next step. in this stage, participants started filming the scripts they had already created. i encouraged them to adopt the no-editingrequired (n-e-r) approach (mitchell & de lange, 2011). since the tablets we were using had a pause option, we used the pause-shoot-pause-shoot approach (p-s-p-s). another option would have been to use what mitchell, de lange and moletsane (2017) refer to as the one-shot-shoot. the workshops ended with screening the videos made by the groups and by encouraging participants to reflect on them. in the reflection part, participants were asked to share their ideas on what they liked about the video, what they did not like, what they would change, how they see the presented topic or issue, and how they would change the situation or solve the problems in question. a word about the filming devices it is recommended in participatory visual methodologies to take advantage of local technology to avoid the hierarchical power dynamics that arise when people have uneven access to new technological tools (e.g., complicated video recording cameras). for this reason, cellphones are often recommended (macentee, burkholder, & schwab-cartas, 2016). however, in atvet colleges one challenge was that some of the participants did not have access to smartphones with cameras. to address this gap and create an equal opportunity for everybody to participate, the attsve project provided four tablets in each workshop, and each group used one tablet for filming. the tablets were user friendly and easy to connect to laptops or computers, and videos were easily transferable. for transferring videos from tablets to mac computers, one might need to have the android file transfer app, which is free and accessible from the android website. it is recommended that workshop organizers familiarize themselves with the technical issues of the digital devices that they might use in the field. having a basic knowledge of troubleshooting skills can help in problematic situations. as i already knew, there was no internet in the colleges, so i had planned to work without using it. the lesson is that organizers should be ready to handle technical issues and should always have a backup for each situation (e.g., electricity failure). experience in the field each college gave me an opportunity to put what i had learned theoretically into practice. apart from having a background in social science and women’s studies, before leaving canada for this internship program in ethiopia i familiarized myself with the concept of cellphilming by background reading, learning how to run a cellphilm workshop, and practicing with students in a mcgill university class. fortunately, on the last s. m. hani sadati studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 364-371, 2018 368 day before leaving, i participated in a training session in the participatory cultures lab (pcl) about how to run a cellphilm workshop, which was held by joshua schwab-cartas, co-author of the book, what’s a cellphilm? (macentee, burkholder, & schwab-cartas, 2016). although i had already run photovoice workshops in my taship programs for undergraduate students at mcgill university, and although i had been exposed to many discussions and sessions linked to cellphilming for two years in my phd program, running a workshop about this pvm in ethiopia was new and challenging for me. a big part of this challenge was the different context of the four workshops, which were held in different regions of a country that i had not been to before. to overcome this challenge, i tried to familiarize myself with the history of ethiopia as well as its diverse population and culture. lessons learned in total, the four workshops in four colleges resulted in 17 cellphilms. the cellphilm titles show the variety of sexual and gender-based problems in atvets, including (but not limited to) “sexual violence (harassment);” “stop abduction;” “less participation of female students;” “stop emotional violence against females;” and “performance differences between male and female students.” as the project unfolded, i noticed differences and commonalities among the colleges. woreta atvet college overall, the participation of students in this workshop was relatively good. male students were more vocal than female students, but the overall participation of females (after encouraging them to participate) was acceptable (in comparison with other colleges). it was anticipated that female students might be more silent, so it was not a surprise for me. however, this is an issue that one needs to find a solution for on the spot, as the correct solution is always context-dependent. i tried to make the workshop a safe space for everybody, specifically for young women, to be able to share their ideas. for example, i put males and females in separate groups to prevent males from being the dominant voices in mixed-gender groups. in this college, the busy schedule of the instructors did not allow them to attend the full day, so we could not have them as participants. but they observed the activities whenever they were in the session, and helped with translation from english to amharic whenever needed. not knowing the local language sometimes put me in a weak situation regarding having control of the class, but two efforts helped mitigate this challenge. first, i familiarized myself with as many amharic words as i could before leaving canada and cellphilming in four atvet colleges studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 364-371, 2018 369 going to the field. using even a few words in the local language contributed to a friendlier environment and conveyed the message that i was interested in their language and had tried to learn it, which helped foster the instructorparticipant relationship. second, i had the support of instructors, as my peers and colleagues, who already have teaching experience as well as fluent english knowledge. it was helpful to have local teachers with knowledge of both english and the local language and culture to help facilitate the workshops. maichew atvet college the experience of the workshop in the first college (woreta) demonstrated the importance of having instructors involved in the workshop activities to better reach the attsve project goals. so, in maichew college, i encouraged instructors to participate in a full day workshop and each group had at least one instructor with them. the workshop taught me the advantages and disadvantages of involving instructors in the same group with students. although instructors helped with facilitating the discussions in the groups, my observations showed that in different activities, students relied on the leadership role of instructors and yielded to them to initiate activities. the hierarchical relationship between instructors and students reinforced this unbalanced situation. i did not observe any difference between male groups and female groups regarding power dynamics between instructors and students, which suggests that males were relying on their instructor in the same ways as females were. nedjo atvet college based on what i learned from the workshop in maichew college, in nedjo instructors were arranged in a separate group. this adjustment worked very well, and i observed more activity and creativity by students in their groups. one of the main challenges in this college was the low level of participation in group discussions, specifically among female students, when it was time to share ideas with the whole group of participants. this happened in spite of having constant translation from english (my language) to oromo (participants’ language) in this workshop. methods used in the first workshop were not as effective in helping encourage participation. however, the cellphilms created by the students were very creative and interesting. s. m. hani sadati studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 364-371, 2018 370 wolaita soddo atvet college the workshop in wolaita soddo happened in the second week of july when students were finishing their academic year and leaving for summer holidays. due to the busy schedule of the students and instructors, the workshop in this college was held for a half day. accordingly, i needed to shorten the theoretical parts and focus more on the practical activities. the participants were very active in this workshop; it was the most active workshop of all. participants were vocal and happy to speak out and share their ideas. i learned from the coordinator of the attsve project that most of the student participants were graduating from the college that semester, meaning that the students in this workshop had more life experience on the campus (in comparison with other colleges); this might be the reason for their active participation in the workshop. conclusion overall, pvm worked very well to facilitate engagement from a diverse group of 103 people (81 students and 22 instructors) to discuss sgbv issues in atvet colleges. in the process, participants were encouraged to think more deeply about sgbv, share their ideas and reflect on problems that are mostly faced by female students. in this regard, reflections made by male participants on men’s role in causing gender-related issues and the possible ways of preventing them were quite interesting. regarding the process versus product approach (mosher, 2012), in participatory methodologies participants learn through actually performing and doing tasks. cellphilms created by students and instructors confirmed the importance of approaching college communities as active partners in implementing prevention and educational policies against sexual and gender based violence, which is one of the main goals of the attsve project. moreover, the participatory engagement of the students and instructors through cellphilming on these critical issues reveals that people have effective ideas to share, but they need the appropriate tools, support and space to engage with these challenging topics. accordingly, i frequently reminded participants at all the colleges that we cannot think about change and not raise our voice. change will not happen in silence and if we want to experience the change, we need to break the silence. this is what a cellphilm helps to do: raise a voice and make it loud, clear and sharp. it is this point that takes me back to kirk’s work. she (kirk & garrow, 2003, p. 14) emphasised the importance of working “on the problematic issues of girls’ participation,” and analysing these issues with girls themselves. as she highlights, “moving in these directions, we hope that cellphilming in four atvet colleges studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 364-371, 2018 371 space and support may be created for girls to authentically take up agency in ways that have meaning for themselves” (kirk & garrow, 2003, p. 14). acknowledgments i would like to express my deepest appreciation to professor claudia mitchell and dr. lisa starr, the leaders of the attsve project in mcgill university, for all their support. i also thank joshua schwab-cartas, who provided invaluable instructions and advice about how to run a cellphilm workshop. i’m especially grateful to the attsve project’s gender officer, mestefaker alebachew, who helped me organise the workshops and administer the sessions. finally, i would like to acknowledge the crucial role of the attsve project’s coordinators and gender focal persons, who tirelessly helped and facilitated the running of the workshops in their colleges. references arnold, d., gelaye, b., goshu, m., berhane, y., & williams, m. (2008). prevalence and risk factors of gender-based violence among female college students in awassa, ethiopia. violence and victims, 23(6), 787-800. burkholder, c. (2017). about. international cellphilm festival, montreal, qc. retrieved from https://internationalcellphilmfestivalblog.wordpress.com/about/ gelaye, b., arnold, d., williams, m., goshu, m., & berhane, y. (2009). depressive symptoms among female college students experiencing gender-based violence in awassa, ethiopia. journal of interpersonal violence, 24(3), 464-481. kirk, j., & garrow, s. (2003). ‘girls in policy’: challenges for the education sector. agenda, 17(56), 4-15. macentee, k., burkholder, c., & schwab-cartas, j. (2016). what’s a cellphilm? integrating mobile phone technology into participatory visual research and activism. rotterdam, nl: sense publishers. mitchell, c. (2011). doing visual research. london: sage. mitchell, c. (2012). on a pedagogy of ethics in visual research: who's in the picture? in j. hughes (ed.), sage visual methods. volume 1: principles, issues, debates and controversies in visual research (pp. 307-328). london: sage. mitchell, c., & de lange, n. (2011). community-based participatory video and social action in rural south africa. in e. margolis & l. pauwels (eds.), the sage handbook of visual research methods (pp. 171-185). london: sage. mitchell, c., de lange, n., & moletsane, r. (2017). participatory visual methodologies; social change, community and policy. london: sage. mosher, h. (2012). creating participatory ethnographic videos. in j. schensul & m. lecompte (eds.), specialized ethnographic methods: a mixed methods approach (pp. 334-375). lanham, md: altamira press. schwab-cartas, j., khan, f., macentee, k., & burkholder, c. (2017). using everyday media making tools to address gender-based violence: participatory visual methods and community-based technologies. unpublished briefing paper, participatory cultures lab, mcgill university, montreal, qc. shimekaw, b., megabiaw, b., & alamrew, z. (2013). prevalence and associated factors of sexual violence among private college female students in bahir dar city, north western ethiopia. health, 5(6), 1069-1075. azadah final june 20 18 correspondence address: kushan azadah, social justice & equity studies, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: azadahk@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 19, 2018 video montage global movement assemblages: a post-2011 social movements montage kushan azadah brock university, canada “global movement assemblages: a post-2011 social movements montage”, is a nine-minute music video that provides an engaging visual and aural survey of the post-2010 movements, highlighting the protagonism of women, and beginning and ending with indigenous resistance on turtle island. in between, creator kushan azadah takes us from tahrir square in cairo, to black lives matter in north america, to occupy wall street, the gezi park protests in istanbul, to plaza del sol in madrid, to the umbrella movement in hong kong. the video may be downloaded from: http://hdl.handle.net/10464/13526 or viewed on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slaninelnxm block final before ts december 11 18 correspondence address: lee ann block, faculty of education, university of winnipeg, winnipeg, mb, r3e 2b9; email: la.block@uwinnipeg.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 329-336, 2018 dispatch planting a healing forest: community engagement lee anne block university of winnipeg, canada in winnipeg there is a bridge over the railroad tracks. those tracks are a dividing line between the north and south ends of the city; historically they were a dividing line between rich and poor, between settlers, and aboriginals and immigrants. at the foot of the bridge was a car repair shop famous for the writing on its roof, visible as you crossed the bridge heading north. the sign read: “welcome to the north end, people before profit.” growing up in the north end, heading home from downtown, i saw the sign so often that i almost stopped seeing it. now that it is gone, i see it better. i still cross that bridge often, even though i no longer live north. i cross it more often lately to work on the healing forest project. *** lee ann block studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 329-336, 2018 330 the healing forest is a place for learning and healing in st. john's park in the north end of winnipeg. the healing forest is a living memorial to indigenous children lost to or affected by the residential school system. this land is a place for individuals, families and communities to gather, contemplate and heal. our logo reads: “land, learn, heal.” the healing forest is also an outdoor learning space where place-based learning and intergenerational learning connect students to their histories and cultivate citizenship and sustainability. the residential school system in canada was a government policy focused on the assimilation of indigenous children into dominant culture. the federal residential school system began in 1883, with the last residential school closing in 1996.1 approximately 150,000 first nations, inuit and métis students attended residential schools over the course of that 113 year period. often children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in residential schools, where their mother tongues and cultural expressions were forbidden. many children were psychologically, physically and sexually abused, and an estimated 6,000 children died in residence. the residential school experiences have profoundly affected the survivors and their families (truth and reconciliation commission, 2015). the truth and reconciliation commission (trc) was established by the federal government to gather evidence and report on the experiences of those who were part of the residential school system, while providing a safe space for survivors to tell their stories. this process took place through hearings across the country from june 2008 to december 2015. in its final report, the trc generated “calls for action,” which address policy and healing for indigenous people and for all canadians. the healing forest is one community response to those calls. jackie kirk’s work addressing education as a healing process in postconflict contexts and in fragile states speaks very clearly to the intentions of this canadian project: transformation of classroom processes, and teaching methods in particular, can mean that schools are places for healing processes to take place, encouraging waraffected children to feel part of a community and to play an active role in creating brighter futures. transformation within the education sector can be a critical force for broader societal change. (kirk, 2004, p. 53) kirk’s research on healing classrooms (winthrop & kirk, 2005; 2008) for the international rescue committee (irc) is embodied in irc’s healing classrooms for today’s refugee children in countries including lebanon, iraq, democratic republic of congo; and now her work resonates in canada, the last country she called home. kirk acknowledged that as well as being part of a solution, education can also be part of the problem for marginalized groups. she identified education 1 church run boarding schools for aboriginal students existed in the 1860s. planting a healing forest studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 329-336, 2018 331 as a force for instability and conflict with two dimensions: education as omission and education as commission (kirk, 2007). the residential school system epitomizes education committing cultural destruction, but the current educational experiences of many indigenous students in manitoba (kanu, 2016) continue to be limited because their cultural experiences are omitted from their curriculum. the healing forest’s educational project is one effort to address the integration of indigenous/aboriginal perspectives into manitoba’s school curriculum. (existing manitoba curriculum documents use the term “aboriginal.” current discourse includes the term “indigenous,” which is used in this paper). as a teacher educator in the faculty of education, university of winnipeg, i have worked with schools in the north end, both as a practicum supervisor and as a researcher. my research and teaching focus on how difference is named and understood in educational locations. one of the differences i take up is that between indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives. the healing forest has required examining the relationships between those perspectives more closely, both historically and in the present, both professionally and personally. the calls to action of the trc summon us to do what we can in local communities to further our learning about our history of colonialism. when the commission closed, the national centre for truth and reconciliation (nctr), located at the university of manitoba, was formed to house the documents, to continue educating canadians about our history, and to monitor the progress toward achieving the calls to action. in 2015, indigenous lawyer patricia stirbys, and environmental and development advisor peter croal, envisioned planting a forest of 6,000 trees to represent indigenous children who died in residential schools. the forest would include an additional 1,200 trees to represent missing and murdered indigenous women. in discussion with the nctr, the vision grew and changed. nctr would host the project and communities across canada would develop individual healing forests in relation to their histories. at a meeting in november 2017, when i first heard of the healing forest concept from charlene bearhead (the education lead for nctr at that time), i was immediately drawn to it and could imagine the forest happening in st. john`s park. how does a healing forest find a place to be planted? planning for a healing forest in winnipeg began in february 2017 and st. john’s park was identified as the most fitting site. st. john’s park is bordered by main street on the east and by the red river on the west, and is near many schools. it currently includes artifacts and statues focused on settler and military history with no public acknowledgement of indigenous history. the park contains different stories of the north end and its many cultures. these lee ann block studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 329-336, 2018 332 various histories will be enriched by including indigenous histories within the healing forest. the educational project primarily engages communities and schools in the neighbourhood of the park. however, the healing forest is open to all as a living memorial where we can learn to heal some of the divisions amongst and within us. as a community-based project with a focus on examining and healing the tensions between indigenous and settler perspectives, the healing forest project contributes to learning our histories and to encouraging difficult and important conversations among and within our communities (simon, 2013). those conversations were intrinsic to the early stages of the project, moving from a vision to a collective understanding of place and purpose. some of the conversations were internal to myself: how can i position myself as leading a project for healing colonial wounds if i am not indigenous? this question echoes one i hear from pre-service teachers: “how can i teach about aboriginal culture if i am not aboriginal?” i respond to my students by saying “i taught about chinese culture and i’m not chinese.” however, their question requires a more nuanced response, because what underlies it is anxiety about ongoing complicity in the destruction of indigenous cultures. neither i nor my relations were involved in the subjugation of chinese culture. however, i, my relations, and many of my students and their relations are implicated in the subjugation of aboriginal culture. thus, how can i position myself as leading this project? it is my understanding that i am positioned by my privilege and also by inspiration from the people and place i am working with. *** st. john`s park is part of the landscape and history of the city and also is a place in my individual landscape. i walked its paths as a teenager but more significantly as a beginning teacher at a school a couple of kilometers north of the park. my two kids were also in junior high at that time and after a tough day at school, i would stop at the park to decompress before heading home, hoping to spare my children the responses that belonged to the different relationship i had with my students. at the time, i would not have used the word “healing” to describe my walks in the park, but i knew it was good. *** st. john’s is one of the oldest city parks in winnipeg, celebrating its 125th birthday in 2018. this timing was fortuitous to the healing forest as the city’s planning department was engaged in re-development of the park and thus more open to st. john’s becoming the site of the healing forest. access to the city planning department was produced through community engagement. the process of community engagement for the healing forest is described below. planting a healing forest studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 329-336, 2018 333 in my experience, community engagement often begins with a cup of coffee in a fitting place with some good people. for the healing forest project, the fitting place was neechi commons, an aboriginal owned worker co-op. it was there that my colleague deb radi and i met with judy wasylycia-leis. having coffee with judy, who lives in the neighbourhood and is a former member of the legislative assembly (provincial) and member of parliament (federal) for the area, was an invitation to meet community members, as she connected us to others. soon joining us at the table were michael champagne, aboriginal youth opportunities (ayo) and kyle mason, who was the executive director of north end family centre at the time, and is the great-great grandson of chief peguis, a signatory to treaty one.2 next to join was the very reverend paul johnson, of the cathedral church of st. john’s, the anglican church originally built for the scottish selkirk settlers in the 1800’s. paul and the cathedral had been involved in reconciliation projects since 2015. as we spoke, the concept of a healing forest captured our imaginations. after a couple of meetings at neechi, the planning group, as we now called ourselves, moved our meetings to the nearby cathedral and expanded its membership.3 there is much talent and experience at the table. the demographics include people who are indigenous, métis, and white, religious and secular, and of many ethnicities. from the outset of the conversations about the healing forest, it was understood that indigenous and non-indigenous members had both shared and different perspectives on the project. in retrospect, what brought us together was our mutual respect for healing and change in our relations and our shared sense of place. these values became apparent in the first community engagement event we developed. we piggy-backed on an existing community event, “meet me at the bell tower – stop the violence.” initiated five years earlier by michael champagne and ayo, the weekly gathering at selkirk and powers bell tower in the heart of 2 according to the canadian encyclopedia: treaty 1 was signed august 3, 1871 between canada and the anishinabek and swampy cree of southern manitoba. treaty 2 was signed august 21, 1871 between canada and the anishinabe of southern manitoba... from the perspective of canadian officials, treaty making was a means to facilitate settlement of the west and the assimilation of aboriginal peoples into euro-canadian society… aboriginal peoples sought to protect their traditional lands and livelihoods while securing assistance in transitioning to a new way of life. treaties 1 and 2 encapsulate these divergent aims, leaving a legacy of unresolved issues due to the different understandings of their aboriginal and euro-canadian participants. (www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/treaties-1-and-2) 3 we were joined by terry price, a staff officer at manitoba teachers’ society (mts) whom deb and i had worked with, and by kerry saner-harvey, program coordinator for indigenous neighbours, mennonite central committee manitoba. later sarah gazan, also from the mts and an aboriginal curriculum developer, and norman meade, an elder at university of manitoba, became part of the group, as did jason dyck, a member of the cathedral community and a grant writer. shaun finnegan, a landscape designer who lives and works in the neighbourhood, was hired to develop the concept design for the healing forest and became integral to the planning process. lee ann block studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 329-336, 2018 334 the north end was a way to build community and foster inter-generational learning. the community had gathered often in response to violence. michael`s belief is that the community also needs to meet to celebrate gifts. at the bell tower gathering on may 5, 2017, we shared the idea of the healing forest and came together after for a community dinner to talk further. some of the people we met that evening became involved in the project, and others support it. we have met again at subsequent community consultations, such as north end renewal corporation’s picnic in st. john’s park on august 19, 2017, where, along with neighbourhood children, we planted fingerling trees in pots. the indigenous members of the planning group were activists and educators, not elders. then elder norman meade joined us in early july of 2017. the timing was important as we had begun working on the design of the healing forest. norman introduced us to important traditions, such as the sacred tree ceremony and the significance of an entrance from the east. as the concept design evolved through discussion with the planning group and community consultations, we met with a group of elders for further guidance.4 some of the ideas generated by the elders were to add a path around the teaching circle for ceremonies as participants would walk the circumference of the circle before entering; include a sacred fire pit; incorporate a vessel for water and a vessel to offer traditional plants for ceremonial purposes; and have a prayer ceremony on site prior to construction. many of the ideas were incorporated in the concept design. from that evening, our understanding of “knowledge keepers” deepened. the elders see the healing forest as a place where traditional knowledge can be practiced in an urban setting, which is the only setting many indigenous young people have access to. like the bell tower meetings, the healing forest is a gathering place for inter-generational learning. the elders’ insights enriched our understanding of the educational and spiritual possibilities of the healing forest and we continue to draw on them. between 2017 and 2018, the healing forest planning group was able to secure provincial and municipal funding, as well as donations. these funds were used to hire a local landscape architecture firm, ft3, which continues to work with elders, knowledge keepers and the community to refine the design. phase i of the construction, an outdoor learning space, was completed in may 2018 and phase ii, which develops ceremonial spaces and a medicine garden and includes the memorial trees, will be constructed in the spring of 2019. development of a living curriculum for the healing forest is an integral part of the project. the process of developing that curriculum is participatory and place-based (donald, 2009). i am working with teams of teachers in 4 we were joined by norman and three other elders, myra laramee and thelma meade and ray mason, both residential school survivors, at a potluck dinner in the indigenous family centre on september 27, 2017. planting a healing forest studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 329-336, 2018 335 individual neighbourhood schools who have elected to work together on integrating indigenous perspectives. we have administrative support and some funding for release time for the teachers involved. the healing forest curriculum will emerge from existing manitoba provincial curriculum documents, but will be aligned to individual school values, student groups, and teacher interests. it will be a living curriculum connected to indigenous worldviews and focused on history from multiple perspectives, on ecology and sustainability. the healing forest is a place where students participate in intergenerational learning (varley, 2017) and link learning to the land. we are rooted in this place, st. john’s park, in the north end of winnipeg, either historically or presently or both. our stories cross over; our meetings are not accidental. there is an intention to weave stories together in the healing forest. if healing is understood as correlated with illness or injury, then the injuries of colonialism, of broken treaties, of power and privilege, must be addressed in order to begin healing. those taking up the healing forest are positioned differently in relation to these injuries, but we all have been damaged by injustice. coming together to plan, design and construct this place is a healing process through building relationships, and through materialising a place focused on the way we want to live together in the future. *** i saw the sign so often that i almost stopped seeing it. now that it is gone, i see it better. references donald, d. (2009). forts, curriculum, and indigenous métissage: imagining decolonization of aboriginal-canadian relations in educational contexts. first nations perspectives, 2(1), 124. kanu, y. (2016). integrating aboriginal perspectives for educational wellbeing: minimizing teacher candidate resistance. in f. deer & t. falkenberg (eds.), indigenous perspectives on education (pp. 139-156). winnipeg, mb: education for sustainable wellbeing press. kirk, j. (2004). promoting a gender-just peace: the roles of women teachers in peace-building and reconstruction. gender & development, 12(3), 50-59. kirk, j. (2007). education and fragile states. globalisation, societies and education, 5(2), 181200. simon, r. (2013). towards a hopeful practice of worrying: the problematics of listening and the educative responsibilities of canada’s truth and reconciliation commission. in j. henderson & p. wakefield (eds.), reconciling canada: critical perspectives on the culture of redress (pp. 129-142). toronto: university of toronto press. truth and reconciliation commission of canada (2015). calls to action. retrieved from www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/file/2015/findings/calls_to_action_english2.pdf truth and reconciliation commission of canada. (2015). honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: summary of the final report of the truth and reconciliation commission of canada. retrieved from www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/file/2015/honouring_the_truth_reconciling_for_the_ future_july_23_2015.pdf lee ann block studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 329-336, 2018 336 varley, a. (2017). "you don’t just get over what has happened to you": story sharing, reconciliation, and grandma’s journey in the child welfare system. first peoples child & family review, 11(2), 69-75. winthrop, r., & kirk, j. (2005). teacher development and student wellbeing. forced migration review, 22, 18-21. winthrop, r., & kirk, j. (2008). learning for a bright future: schooling, armed conflict, and children’s well-being. comparative education review, 52(4), 639-661. jackson & hirmer fg july 5 16 correspondence address: elizabeth jackson, international institute for critical studies in improvisation, university of guelph, guelph, on, n1g 2wi; email: ejacks04@uoguelph.ca. lisa hirmer; email: hirmer@dodolab.ca isnn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 dispatch stopgaps, beasts + other strategies of being in public space lisa hirmer dodolab, canada elizabeth jackson university of guelph, canada editor’s note: the following is a dispatch from elizabeth jackson, community engagement officer with the international institute for critical studies in improvisation at the university of guelph, followed by a conversation between jackson and artist lisa hirmer, director of experimental arts practice dodolab. -- dispatch: stopgaps and gems during the cold and grey fall of 2014, a group of newcomer and immigrant youth, drawn together by our community partner immigrant services – guelph wellington, gathered at the public library in downtown guelph. they were taking part in a youth leadership program, and i had worked with the international institute for critical studies in innovation’s (iicsi) community research partners immigrant services – guelph wellington and creative arts practice dodolab, to integrate a series of arts-based workshops into the program. i had the pleasure of working with dodolab’s director, lisa hirmer – an artist, arts-based researcher, iicsi community partner, and all around lovely human – to support and co-facilitate the series of arts workshops exploring the youths’ experiences of what i think of as “mundane improvisation” or improvisation in daily life, their reactions to unanticipated challenges and circumstances. we started with a story circle format where youth shared their tales of unexpected challenges or surprising experiences, and how they had responded to and navigated them. as teenagers, as newcomers to a culture that was in most cases very different than their home elizabeth jackson, lisa hirmer studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 168 cultures, and as people who had carried out long-distance emigrations, often alone, these kids had amazing stories to tell. some of them were funny, some of them were silly, some of them were devastating, some of them were very profound. all of them mattered. in later workshops, with lisa’s excellent facilitation, the youth worked with clay, and beads, and pencils, and wire, and so on, to represent these stories, and what they’d learned from each other’s stories, into small mementoes or trinkets that lisa calls “shareables.” i like that word a lot, and particularly in the context of this project, because it sounds like parables. i like it a lot because in this context, in an engaged context, sharing is at the heart of our work and our process. early on, the youth decided that this work could not stay inside our room in the library, and that they wanted to get outside and do something. we’d been hoping they’d want to carry out some kind of intervention, so this worked for us. they also insisted that there be balloons. so, at our last meeting, on a freezing cold november evening, lisa arrived with dozens of shareables she’d had 3d printed based on the youths’ prototypes, and with several enormous bunches of brightly coloured balloons. figure 1: shareables – stopgaps and gems (photo: l. hirmer); 3d printed “shareables” were distributed by youth participants during our public intervention. we all looked at the shareables, did a little filing to smooth their edges, and talked about the stories and lessons they represented. then we all bundled up and went outside, balloons trailing above us. our small parade made its way to st. george’s square, a central point in guelph – it’s where all the banks have their main branches, and it’s also a transit hub, so lots of bus routes start and end there. we were there around 5:00 or 5:30 p.m., peak commuting time on a weekday. stopgaps, beasts + other strategies of being in public space studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 169 and, at least to my eyes, something magical happened. these teenagers, some with hesitance and self-consciousness, others with flair and laughter, mustered up the courage to be vulnerable. slowly, they began approaching strangers and asking if they’d like to hear a story. and i think everyone, every one of those rushing hungry homeward-bound people, said yes. so stories were exchanged, and shareables were handed out, and a whole lot of people had maybe a baffling, maybe a wonderful, maybe a lifechanging, maybe a quite banal moment with someone who was a stranger to them. and then when the shareables were gone and we were seeped through with cold, we packed up and went back to the library, and then home. from my perspective, as an arts-based and community engaged thinker, what i saw happen was an example of what george lipsitz calls art-based community making. lipsitz explains that he and his co-authors “argue that what critics and curators often describe as community-based art making is better described as art-based community making – a form of democratic interaction that enacts the just social relations that social movements often only envision” (lipsitz, cited in estrada, 2013). what i saw happen was an erosion of the socially constructed walls that keep us away from one another; an assertion of belonging in a place and a public that, as we’d learned from the youths’ stories, is often inhospitable. i saw a growth of confidence and community in the youth who had shared their stories with each other, and then i saw a shift in the relationships between these new members of guelph’s community and the many people who had, presumably, lived there much longer than they had, and who moved more freely and confidently through the square. i saw what can happen when stories are shared and trust is built. i saw the joy that a small surprise, a moment of human contact, can bring to someone as they go about their daily life. i can’t say, and it isn’t mine to say, what those youth made of the workshops, and of the intervention, or what they make of it all now, should they think back on it. i can’t tell you, and i don’t know, what those people at st. george’s square made of those stories and encounters. we talked it over, back at the library, and what i can tell you is that one participant realized, and told us with quite some gravity, that this was the first time she had ever spoken english, in public, to a stranger. and i don’t know what that means, but i know that, when i think about it a certain way, it might be everything. -- elizabeth jackson, lisa hirmer studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 170 figure 2: rush hour sharing, stopgaps and gems (photo: l. hirmer); youth speak with other members of the community. dispatch in dialogue elizabeth jackson (ej): lisa, over the time that we have known each other and worked together, we have talked a lot about our understandings of the impacts and potentialities of art with/in community (with “art” and “community” being defined in shifting and various ways across contexts, and with impacts never understood as fixed, pre-determined, or ever fully knowable). drawing on your diverse experiences as a practitioner, and reflecting on our collaboration last year, can you talk about how you understand improvised and creative practices to resist the erosion of public spaces? what is at stake in these acts of resistance, and why are you committed to facilitating these interventions in the regulation of public spaces? lisa hirmer (lh): dodolab, in general, is focussed on revealing and interrupting barriers, moments where humans get stuck inside tangles of ideas and habits. the work is never only about something in and of itself. instead it is about an idea or topic in relation to the public’s understandings and beliefs about that idea or topic. this is because the way ideas move through the public realm is important. it is something we have to engage with. though it's important to note that when i say public i actually mean a specific public, or counter-public or community. it’s just a shorthand for some kind of stopgaps, beasts + other strategies of being in public space studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 171 collectivity, whatever that is in the moment of each project, and not a claiming of authority or erasing of difference. ej: yes, there has to be room for disagreement and conflict in community. lh: exactly. the work of dodolab isn’t about consensus or clear research outcomes. it’s about engaging as an artist with the messy, complicated, contradictory, amorphous realm of public ideas, acknowledging that the “realm of public ideas” is itself a messy, amorphous idea. it is important that the work isn’t just about this, though; it is critical that it also happens in a public way. so both with the public and in public. it cannot be work that happens in isolation. it has to be activated by other voices and so is contingent on those other voices coming together. this means that dodolab’s projects have to create opportunities or mechanisms for meaningful exchange in the public sphere, which means they usually ends up triggering a temporary public life of a type we don’t often experience in north american cities these days. that said there are projects i’ve done that do engage more directly with public spaces and how those spaces are functioning. i see these projects as tiny interruptions, or maybe reminders is a better word? in any case, a small, temporary change in our usual ways of moving through and acting in public space that forces us to improvise different ways of being there – often which are actually always available to us but rarely enacted out of habit or subtle social pressures. i think this works better when the projects are unstable, when they aren’t really sustainable past a brief moment in that particular time and place, with those particular participants. somehow this open nature, you might even call it messiness, means the projects brush up against banal, daily human patterns in a way something more structured couldn’t. there’s a gap where people have to figure it out and decide how to engage with it and i think this is what fosters meaningful alternative interactions – maybe not ones that last but they are at least rehearsing another way of being in public. ej: so dodolab’s work conceives of public spaces both in physical terms and as an intellectual or dialogical space, a making room for ideas and exchanges. i’ve written about my impressions of stopgaps and gems – can you offer some more examples of projects you have created that do this kind of tinkering with public ideas, as you say, and that work to jangle with the selfevidences of what is normal or acceptable behaviour in a public space (in either sense)? can you share some ways in which you have created moments of connection, or disrupted regulated normalcy, in human environments? lh: yes, stopgaps and gems, of course, which we can talk about, but first i want to talk about an early dodolab project, the first annual tournament of beasts, which happened in sudbury with the youth at the sudbury action centre for youth (sacy). the first annual tournament of beasts was a elizabeth jackson, lisa hirmer studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 172 project about how public space is regulated and controlled. it was focussed on the experiences of young people at sacy, which is a drop-in centre in downtown sudbury. it began quite simply with talking to them about their experiences of the city, about how they moved through and engaged with it. one exercise was giving them cameras to go take photos of things they found significant about the downtown. multiple participants came back with photographs of signs stating what couldn’t happen in those spaces (no loitering, no bikes, etc.), and especially many photos of one sign that was posted at each of the entrances of a large downtown park listing the things that weren’t permitted there. the project actually started as a joke, because one part of the sign read something like “no dogs, cats, drinking or golfing,” so we laughed about inebriated, golf-playing canines and felines causing these items to get specifically listed. but more seriously it was a symptom of a strategy of limitation and restriction in the city’s downtown core. so the project was a playful poke at that idea. the youth dressed as animals (a raccoon, a wolf, a moose, etc., but no cats or dogs) and spent the afternoon playing croquet (not golf) in that park. the project was about creating a positive and playful way to disrupt patterns of thinking that seemed to have gotten rather confrontational. it was also about creating a moment of permission for the youth to occupy a space, creating a really tangible way to imagine how things could be different. it also posed a question to the public (as well as police officers and local government) about whether encouraging active use and vibrant public life isn’t perhaps a much better way to create good urban spaces. ej: can you talk a bit about how participants and passersby reacted to it? how did others read this intervention? lh: well, even if no one had seen this intervention, it would have still been about access and a kind of permission that can be created through creative work. the performance of the tournament became a buffer that allowed these kids to just be kids having fun in a park for an afternoon without suspicion, without antagonism. i do think it was significant for people to see that though, a reintroduction of this space and the youth to each other. and passersby reacted quite positively to it. it isn’t just the youth affected by these regulations. one older woman recalled that she had been kicked out of the park for reading a book on the grass for too long. when the tone is to control by limiting then it’s not surprising that the park is often empty. this isn’t to gloss over the very real issues with substance abuse in the park but rather about resetting the tone of conversations around this, which didn’t seem to be working for anyone. activity begets more activity. i do think sudbury has changed a lot since this project took place. there are many larger factors that went into this, but i would like to think this project was a drop or two in that bucket. stopgaps, beasts + other strategies of being in public space studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 173 ej: can we talk about cities for a second? what is it about cities in particular that you wanted to attend to? is it because there are lots of people in close proximity to one another? or having particular relationships with each other and their space? is it about the “ownership” of supposedly public spaces? lh: good question. to be fair, in both these cases the urban context was set by the circumstances of the projects’ origins. but yes, i think the density of people matters, which isn’t to say that interventions can’t be effective in less dense areas, but they would take on a different tone. cities have a density of different experiences, which is to say, people navigating the city in very different ways, but habits or efficiencies mean these experiences only meet at certain nodes, often defined by commercial activity. to me there seems to be a richness of potential interactions, near interactions we could call them, that could be triggered by creative work. ej: i had such a blast participating in the stopgaps and gems workshops and the final outing or intervention. i observed so many of these moments you’re talking about, so many small pauses in people’s habituated routines and ways of interacting – or, more accurately, not interacting – in the downtown space. some of these interactions were quick and cheery, and others were more prolonged and quite moving. can you talk some more about how that project began, and how it unfolded? i’m really interested in the process that led to the final intervention. lh: stopgaps and gems was a project working with a group of newcomer youth. not unlike the tournament of beasts project it began with group conversations though this time it took on more of a storytelling tone. the youth shared stories about unexpected moments of things going wrong and how they worked their way out of the situation – stories like getting on the wrong plane, or getting lost in a new place, where your plans break down and you have to improvise a solution. as they told their stories a pattern emerged where in most cases the thing that led to the way out of whatever predicament was either approaching a stranger or a stranger noticing something was wrong and stepping in to help. in story after story, the issue was relatively quickly overcome with the help of someone the storyteller didn’t know. working with the youth, we created a series of little amulets to capture ideas from these stories. the participants kept some of them to act as portable reminders that they were able to get themselves out of these unexpected situations and of the availability of human aid all around us. but they also embraced this idea of improvised connections with strangers and went into downtown guelph to gift these amulets to passersby. the youth also decided they wanted to carry brightly coloured balloons with them. i think they picked up on the notion that performance and spectacle grant permission to behave differently. it’s important to be cognizant that the act of claiming public space isn’t accessible to everyone in elizabeth jackson, lisa hirmer studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 174 the same way; gender, culture, race, personal histories, etc., shape different relationships to being in public space. this is something i experience myself as an artist who often works in public settings. i see a lot of public art that acts in a very claiming way, which is a much more comfortable position for those who move very freely in public spaces. not to digress too much, since a proper conversation about power and access in public work would require an entire article itself, but i think it very important that the ways in which public intervention can be strange and uncomfortable for many participants not be skipped over. even within this group of participants i think it was clear that there were differing levels of comfort; and though it would be impossible to accurately pull out specific factors affecting this, it is nonetheless important to note. this is why i think the very simple gesture of having balloons was actually quite important. it was a gentle way of claiming presence and making a collective performative space that eased the initial trepidation and allowed these brief, non-commercial transactions to play out. not unlike what happened with the sudbury project, it gave the youth permission to engage the downtown in a different way. figure 3: stopgaps and gems parade (photo: e. jackson); youth with balloons parade to guelph's st. george's square to share their stories and creations. ej: i would add that i think, and some said, that the intervention made them feel more at home, more like the city was theirs; and also more confident and at home with the english language. i also remember watching the teens approach a range of people they’d not otherwise have connected with – including the man in the hot dog cart, who they approached with something to offer versus to ask for – a different, non-monetized exchange that he stopgaps, beasts + other strategies of being in public space studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 175 seemed very receptive to, surprised and happy about. and this turning outward was their own initiative. there was something really profound about the way something that started inside, in a closed and familiar group, ended up – through the participants’ own choosing – with a very public, outdoor, interactive event. one thing i saw underlined by this project, and have seen in so many other contexts – improvised music comes to mind, given the work i do – is the incredible strength that can be found in accepting vulnerability. not always, of course, and the stakes vary by context, but i have seen such powerful work come about when people are willing to acknowledge, confront, and then move within their vulnerability. lh: yes, similar to the sacy project, i think this acted as a probe that reveals possibilities that have always been there but rarely used. ej: and what do you see as the possible impacts, meaning, value of these moments? how might they function in a culture? lh: i think in both cases it would be a big stretch to point to something and say this project changed that. both of these projects were small and temporary by design. they act as probes of what is possible, or what might be possible, which also unsettle things a little, even if just momentarily and maybe that can make space for new ideas to come in or for old ones to be rearranged. i think there is a value in little gestures, ideally from different sources, that build up. to me this is more appealing than big bold moves. in both projects, the uncertainty and discomfort of being in a public space in a strange way was very real and became an important part of the projects. i think at the very least this makes visible the limiting nature of normalized public behaviours. the ways we interact with each other can become very narrow (for what i think are mostly economic/political reasons but that’s a whole other conversation), and so i think highlighting the contingent nature of these constraints is an important exercise. it is good practice to see what are the ways we don’t interact with each other in public contexts but are available to us nonetheless. speaking of exercise and practice, perhaps there is also value in moments where the range and scope of possible public relationships and exchanges are temporarily increased to push back against those limitations – you know, to keep the muscles limber! acknowledgments we would like to thank our collaborator, karen kew, of immigrant services – guelph wellington, for her generous and creative work on stopgaps and gems, and for reviewing this piece before submission. thanks, too, to the youth participants, who shared so generously of their insights, stories, and ideas. the dispatch grows from a presentation jackson gave at mcmaster elizabeth jackson, lisa hirmer studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 176 university’s centre for community engaged narrative arts in march, 2106. our conversation builds upon a presentation we gave at the 2015 guelph jazz festival colloquium, on the theme of improvisation, arts, and well-being. references estrada, a. (2013, july 10, 17:00). ucsb black studies scholar examines improvisation as a tool for social change. the current: uc santa barbara. retrieved from http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2013/013580/ucsb-black-studies-scholar-examinesimprovisation-tool-social-change chandler et al (intro) final before ts correspondence address: eliza chandler, school of disability studies, ryerson university, toronto, on, m5b 2k3; email: eliza.chandler@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 171-179, 2021 editors’ introduction cripistemologies of disability arts and culture: reflections on the cripping the arts symposium eliza chandler ryerson university, canada katie aubrecht st. francis xavier university, canada esther ignagni ryerson university, canada carla rice university of guelph, canada in 2014, in the introduction to their special issue of the journal of literary and cultural disability studies, merri lisa johnson and robert mcruer introduced the field of disability studies to the concept of cripistemologies. as described by johnson and mcruer, although there are many different ways of knowing disability that circulate throughout our culture, epistemologies of disability generated outside of disability experience, community, and activism are the most legible and lucrative within a neoliberal culture, and therefore most readily taken up (2014, p. 128). disability studies, disability activism, and disability arts and culture as imbricated movements led by and for disabled people that advance a disability politic, centre meanings of disability that are generated through deaf, disabled, and mad people’s experiences and knowledge. these ways of knowing disability are succinctly expressed through the term “cripistemology,” which refers to knowing, and not knowing, disability eliza chandler, esther ignani, katie aubrecht & carla rice studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 171-179, 2021 172 through disability experiences as these are understood by and for disability communities (2014, p. 127). when johnson and mcruer introduced the term cripistemology, they were not simply naming well-established practices of understanding concepts of disability through individual and collective experiences. rather, they were drawing on eve kosofsky sedgwick’s 1990 influential analytic, the “epistemology of the closet,” wherein epistemology is always bound to a crisis (2014, p. 131). johnson and mcruer assert that there are many crises to which cripistemologies are bound: from how global health crises impact disabled people (johnson & mcruer, writing in 2014, refer to the hiv/aids pandemic and we, writing in 2020, refer also to the covid-19 pandemic); to how poverty and unsafe low-wage labour produce impairments, debility, and greater susceptibility to communicable disease (puar, 2017); and to how state-sanctioned violence disproportionately causes impairments within black, indigenous, and people of colour (bipoc) communities (rice et al., forthcoming 2021). police violence, provoked by intensifying anti-black racism under pandemic conditions that have exacerbated already massive social inequities offers a potent example of how the social category of “expendable people” is produced through racist, colonial, and ableist logics that disproportionately affect bipoc deaf, disabled, and mad people (johnson & mcruer, 2014, p. 134-135). by calling attention to how the meaning of disability is, in part, formed through experiences of crises, cripistemologies invite us to move past dominant ways of knowing disability, both within mainstream culture, as well as within mainstream disability movements (johnson & mcruer, 2014, p. 131). cripistemology therefore “expands the focus from physical disability to the sometimes-elusive crip subjectivities informed by psychological, emotional, and other invisible or undocumented disabilities” (p. 134) or bodymind non-normativities that evade and remain unintelligible through western knowledge regimes. in so doing, cripistemologies invite us to think about disability, and its socio-political and cultural manifestations and subsequent implications, through perspectives of “characters not easily legible within the identity-based or nationalist terms that characterize the disability rights movement” (p. 129). at the same time as they determine epistemological perspectives, cripistemologies challenge the notion that disability is a fully knowledgeable subject or object of knowledge (p. 130). indeed, johnson and mcruer suggest we orient to disability through a sense of not-knowing, thereby working against the ableist notion of “disability expertise,” which presumes that disability is an experience that can be understood through empirical, and often medicalized regimes of knowledge (2014, p. 131). following johnson and mcruer’s foundational work on ways of knowing disability, this collection captures reflections on and analyses of disability arts and culture in canada from various cripistemological perspectives. we contribute to a growing body of scholarship which engages disability arts, cripistemological approaches to disability arts culture studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 171-179, 2021 173 and its connection to social justice, through the critical perspective of disability studies (abbas, et al., 2004; chandler & ignagni, 2019; decottignies, 2016; gorman, 2007; kuppers, 2014; orsini & kelly, 2016; rice et al., 2015, 2017; ware & sweeney, 2014). we use “disability arts” as an umbrella term to refer to art created by people who identify as d/deaf, disabled, mad, neurodiverse, and/or spoonie, and indigenous peoples who identify with a decolonized understanding of embodied and enminded differences, as well as those whom medical diagnosis and pathologies have been thrust upon (manning, 2018; rice et al., forthcoming 2021). disability arts, which advances a disruptive, anti-assimilationist politic (gorman, 2007; hamraie, 2017), has always been a political project connected to disability studies, rights, and justice (abbas et al., 2004). we take up disability arts, as well as access to arts and culture, as matters of social justice. integral to these overall justice-based projects, disability arts has the power to represent disability as a socio-political experience, one that intersects with other social identities, communities, and experiences of oppression and resistance. when representations of disability and difference are propelled into the public sphere through exhibitions, art reviews, curriculum, scholarly papers, and special issues, like this one, they can change the ways embodied and enminded difference is understood, and how disabled, deaf, mad, and neurodivergent people are treated and experience everyday life (chandler & rice, 2013; creative users, n.d; jones, 2012; rice et al., 2018; springgay, 2008). within these discussions of disability arts, the authors refer to “disability aesthetics” – an aesthetic orientation that recognizes disabled forms as satiating, provocative, and integral to culture in ways that do not rely upon traditional, hegemonic frameworks of beauty (seibers, 2015, 2017). we also take up “crip cultural practices” – practices of creating, producing, and experiencing arts and culture developed, elaborated on, and shared within disability communities, which anticipate and centre disability experiences (chandler, 2019). the contributors to this special issue participated in the cripping the arts symposium,1 a conference held in january 2019 at the harbourfront centre in toronto, canada, that brought together key stakeholders in disability arts, including artists, curators, academics, arts council officers, and other members of the disability community. through panels, keynotes, workshops, artistic programming, as well as less formal “hallway conversations,” communities came together to engage in dialogues about how deaf and disability arts and activism changes how we experience art, culture, and 1 this symposium was organized by ryerson’s school of disability studies, the british council, creative users projects, tangled art + disability, the harbourfront centre, and re•vision: the centre for art and social justice. see https://bodiesintranslation.ca/cripping-the-arts-2019/ eliza chandler, esther ignani, katie aubrecht & carla rice studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 171-179, 2021 174 digital transformation, as well as the ways our culture contributes to, if not leads to, the achievements of disability rights and justice movements.2 for example, we collectively thought through disability arts, intersectional justice, and futurity, as taeyoon choi et al. and janelle rouse present in their dispatches. we explored dynamics of interdependence in leadership and artistic production, and representational politics in arts and culture journalism, as the essays by becky gold and chelsea jones et al. take up. another theme that surfaced was how crip cultural practices, such as relaxed performances, haptic technologies, access guides, and digital platforms are changing the ways we experience art, and evaluate its socio-political impact, as the pieces by andrea lamarre et al.; mary bunch; david bobier and esther ignagni; eliza chandler et al.; taeyoon choi et al.; and christine kelly and michael orsini theorize. we thought with art, performances, and discussions that animated intersections of indigeneity, race, and disability, as well as efforts to decolonize disability theory and activism, as shown in both vanessa dion fletcher and max ferguson’s, and stephanie springgay’s contributions. together, these contributions reflect our firm belief that, in order for disability arts’ potential to enact change to be fully realized, academics, arts reporters, cultural critics and other cultural thinkers must play a role in theorizing and disseminating the impact of this sector’s work to a larger public by thinking with and about disability arts and culture through knowledge mobilization activities. the contributions this special issue begins with a conversation between neurodiverse artist vanessa dion fletcher (lenape and potawatomi) and artist and curator max ferguson. the two discuss dion fletcher’s performance piece finding language: a word scavenger hunt (2019), which she developed in 2018 and adapted during her tenure as the 2019 bodies in translation artist-inresidence, and subsequently performed at cripping the arts. dion fletcher and ferguson critique the ways that colonial epistemologies have shaped our understanding of disability. drawing on her own experience of disability as an indigenous artist whose artwork and disability is largely taken up through white settler culture, dion fletcher and ferguson consider access and language and offer a cripistemology that decolonizes understandings of embodied and enminded difference. andrea lamarre, carla rice, and kayla besse’s article, “letting bodies be bodies: exploring relaxed performance in the canadian performance landscape,” elaborates on their panel discussion at the symposium on how 2 we are grateful for the support of the social sciences and humanities research council for funding this symposium and its knowledge mobilization activities, including the publication of this special issue. cripistemological approaches to disability arts culture studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 171-179, 2021 175 the crip cultural practice of relaxed performances are changing theatre in canada. drawing on interviews conducted with participants of the british council’s relaxed performance training program in the canadian theatre sector combined with audience response research and other sources of information (e.g., media coverage), the authors explore the approaches to access that subsequently evolved across the country. engaging access through the “not knowing” orientation that johnson and mcruer describe, this contribution suspends assumptions about access as a checklist or as a “solution” to the “problem” of disability, and invites readers to dwell with a poetic tension between providing “access to all” and recognizing the impossibility of doing so. they conclude that this approach may be crucial to transforming performance spaces in ways that make accessibility artful and keep accessible practices vital. becky gold’s article “neurodivergency and interdependent creation: breaking into canadian disability arts” thinks through the role that interdependent relationships, leadership, and mentorship play in the professional development of disability artists, topics discussed in the leadership panel gold facilitated at the symposium. grounding her analysis in various examples of art studios wherein adults with the label of, or who identify as intellectually disabled make artwork, gold’s exploration looks at the practices of neurodivergent artists. throughout her article, gold proposes that “inter-able relationships” necessarily forge new and inclusive pathways into disability arts, enabling the sector to become accessible to more people within disability communities. she proposes that, in order to invite those on the margins of disability communities in, we must rethink the significance of independence and autonomy to art-making, as well as the conception of, and importance placed on “disability leadership” in the disability arts sector. through a dispatch from the field, “communicating access, accessing communication,” eliza chandler, esther ignagni, and kim collins describe and reflect on the process of creating an accessible version of the symposium’s program. the authors think critically about how the access documents contained in the program, itself an access document, expressed an unfulfilled commitment to centre disability experiences and perspectives. mary bunch’s essay, “blind sight and haptic visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye,” analyzes the invitation to think differently about visual art, and visuality itself, offered by horak’s exhibition. through his impressionistic paintings, which were on display at the tangled art gallery in conjunction with the symposium, horak explores his experience of blindness. bunch figures a conception of “blind epistemology” to think through what disability arts, in combination with disability studies, can offer discourses about spectatorship in the arts. through a “blind epistemology,” bunch accounts for the productive ways disability art, and accessible curatorial practices such as haptic aesthetics, can disrupt conventions of producing and drawing meaning from disability arts. eliza chandler, esther ignani, katie aubrecht & carla rice studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 171-179, 2021 176 through reflective sketches, jenelle rouse offers an account of her experience at the symposium as a culturally deaf attendee and artist. by engaging with themes of representation, leadership, and futurity as they were taken up in these discussions, rouse describes the feeling of being in community that occurs when d/deaf, mad, and disabled artists work together to achieve social justice through the collective act of cripping the arts. stephanie springgay offers another engagement with vanessa dion fletcher’s artistic practice in her article “stitching language, sounding voice in the art practice of vanessa dion fletcher.” attending to how dion fletcher’s artwork, including her “finding language” performance, also taken up in dion fletcher and ferguson’s dispatch in this collection, springgay animates arts-based indigenous resistances, finding and reclaiming indigenous languages and sovereignty, feminist indigenous corporeality, and decolonizing understandings of neurodiversity. drawing on jolene rickard’s (2017) work, springgay positions selected pieces from dion fletcher’s oeuvre as claiming indigenous sovereignty through direct acts. in an interview with esther ignagni, artist david bobier recounts an almost 30-year history of working in deaf and disability arts. this dispatch offers an uncommon historical perspective of our sector. in describing his practice of working with various technologies – from music boxes threaded with sheets embossed with braille, to vibrotactile haptics – bobier demonstrates how practices for creating and programming art and culture that centre deaf and disability experiences change our cultural interactions. throughout this interview, and most predominantly in its conclusion, bobier positions deaf and disability arts within broader deaf and disability movements for social justice. christine kelly and michael orsini’s paper “beyond measure? disability art, access and reimagining visitor experience” reflects on how canadian arts institutions are affected by the neoliberal demand to prove their value and impact using metrics. drawing on ongoing research into disability arts using affect theory, the authors propose that being reflective about an organization’s social impact, including audience experience, is important; yet it is difficult, if not problematic, to attempt to measure the effect that art produces. the authors propose that qualitatively attending to visitors’ visceral and emotional responses to artwork might tell a different, more complex story about the contribution of an exhibition. in their essay, “representing disability, d/deaf, and mad artists and art in journalism: identifying ableist fault lines and promising crip practices of representation,” chelsea jones, kirsty johnson, and nadine changfoot detail the symposium panel they facilitated, in which panelists discussed the politics of representation in arts journalism through the cripistemological perspective of disability, d/deaf, and mad artists and journalists. the authors highlight key learnings from this discussion, including the effects of evoking ableist tropes and objectifying narratives in media, two of the “pet peeves” described in this panel. jones, johnson, and changfoot illustrate the cripistemological approaches to disability arts culture studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 171-179, 2021 177 productive possibilities of reorienting arts and culture reporting as an act of solidarity with disabled artists wherein journalists educate the public about such topics as the histories of disability arts and their political connections and disability aesthetics, which reassign cultural meaning to both disability and aesthetics. taeyoon choi, aaron labbe, annie segarra, elizabeth sweeney and syrus marcus ware’s dispatch, “disability and deaf future,” recounts the panel discussion these artists shared at the symposium. animated by the overall question, “how do you imagine the future?,” this piece takes us through the roles of the arts in the creation of utopias, dis-topias, and “dystopias” (rice et al., 2017). through their different and intersecting communities, including black lives matter, feminist body-positive online activism, mad communities, deaf communities, digital communities, and tech communities, these artists imagine worlds within and in resistance to the anthropocene. this dispatch makes a strong case for how disabled people and disability wisdoms are core to envisioning, enacting, and living into the future. coda: opening crip spaces and futures to difference the cripping the arts symposium and its generative works contest the dominance of ableist orientations to knowing and experiencing artistic practice, review and commentary that divide artists and audiences. these, and other arts-based resistances, are crucial to social justice mobilizing for the ways they open new spaces and new possibilities for interrogating aesthetic judgment and aesthetic futures, and the normative standards and cultural ideals usually held about such matters. by adopting a cripistemological orientation to disability arts and social justice, the authors, artists and activists featured in this issue highlight the relationship between cripistemologies and crip space. as described by s. e. smith: “crip space is unique, a place where disability is celebrated and embraced” (2020, p. 273). the challenge and promise of crip space rests with whether and how the design responds to crip subjectivities, which may foster a “soaring sense of inclusion” while at the same time hold space for “awkward conversations” that anticipate and intentionally engage inequities, exclusions, and feelings of unwelcome (smith, 2020, p. 274). contributors’ critical, creative, and reflexive engagements with questions of access, inclusion, belonging, knowledge, and futurity within disability arts and culture provide the mise-en-scène against which disability is enacted and experienced as a social justice issue. they also illustrate how resisting social injustice through disability arts involves problematizing what jasbir puar refers to as the “prehensive futurity” (2017, p. 148) of totalizing “solutions” to injustice that erase differences within and among disability communities; such solutions assume injustice is the product of a crisis of universality, presume the desirability of sameness, and bind us to a universal subject and eliza chandler, esther ignani, katie aubrecht & carla rice studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 171-179, 2021 178 universal knowledge, which have been motivating forces in western eugenics, colonial violence, and cultural genocide. resisting injustice thus involves creating space to not know, perform, read, write and feel disability in the ways we already do. acknowledgements we, ryerson’s school of disability studies and bodies in translation: activist art, technology, and access to life, would like to acknowledge and thank the organizational partners with whom we co-produced the cripping the arts symposium: british council, creative users projects, harbourfront centre, re•vision: the centre for arts and social justice, and tangled art + disability. we would also like to acknowledge and thank our funding partners: canada council for the arts, ontario arts council, social sciences and humanities research council’s connection project fund [#611-20171045] and social sciences and humanities research council’s partnership fund [#895-2016-1024]. finally, we, the co-editors of this special issue, would like to offer deep thanks to david butz, whose wise and justiceoriented council guided us through this process. references abbas, j., church, k., frazee, c., panitch, m., & ryerson rbc foundation institute for disability studies research and education. (2004). lights – camera – attitude: introducing disability arts and culture. ryerson rbc institute for disability studies research & education. chandler, e., & ignagni, e. (2019). strange beauty: aesthetic possibilities for desiring disability into the future. in k. ellis, r. garland thomson, m. kent & r. robinson (eds.), interdisciplinary approaches to disability: looking towards the future (volume ii) (pp. 255-265). routledge. chandler, e. (2019). introduction: cripping the arts in canada. canadian journal of disability studies, 8(1), 1-14. chandler, e., & rice, c. (2013). alterity in/of happiness: reflecting on the radical possibilities of unruly bodies. health culture and society, 5(1), 230-248. creative users projects (n.d). home. https://creativeusers.net/ decottignies, m. (2016). disability arts and equity in canada. canadian theatre review, 165(winter), 43-47. dion fletcher, d. (2019, january). finding language: a words scavenger hunt. cripping the arts in canada symposium, toronto, ontario. gorman, r. (2007). whose disability culture? fuse, 34(3), 46-51. hamraie, a. (2017). building access: universal design and the politics of disability. university of minnesota press. johnson, m. l., & mcruer, r. (2014). cripistemologies: introduction. journal of literary & cultural disability studies, 8(2), 127-147. jones, c. (2012). literature review: journalism and disability from a canadian perspective. the canadian journal of disability studies, 1(2), 75-108. kuppers, p. (2014). studying disability arts and culture: an introduction. palgrave macmillan. cripistemological approaches to disability arts culture studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 171-179, 2021 179 manning, d. tisawii’ashii. (2018, april 5). off the cuff: mnidoo infinity squeezed through finite modulations. [keynote address]. thinking spaces: the improvisation reading group and speaker series, art gallery of guelph, guelph, on, canada. orsini, m., & kelly, c. (2016). mobilizing metaphor: art, culture, and disability activism in canada. university of british columbia press. puar, j. (2017). the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. duke university press. rice, c., chandler, e., harrison, e., ferrari, m., & liddiard, k. (2015). project re•vision: disability at the edges of representation. disability & society, 30(4), 513-527. rice, c., chandler, e., liddiard, k., rinaldi, j., & harrison, e. (2018). the pedagogical possibilities for unruly bodies. gender & education, 30(5), 663-682. rice, c., chandler, e., rinaldi, j., liddiard, k., changfoot, n., mykitiuk, r., & mündel, i. (2017). imagining disability futurities. hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy, 32(2), 213-229. rice, c., dion, s., & chandler, e. (forthcoming 2021). decolonizing disability and activist arts. disability studies quarterly. rickard, j. (2017). diversifying sovereignty and the reception of indigenous art. art journal, 76(2), 81-84. siebers, t. (2015). introduction: disability and visual culture. journal of literary & cultural disability studies, 9(3), 239-246. siebers, t. (2017). disability aesthetics. in j. boys (ed.), disability, space, architecture (pp. 5766). routledge. smith, s. e. (2020). the beauty of spaces created for and by disabled people. in a. wong (ed.), disability visibility: first-person stories from the twenty-first century (pp. 271-275). vintage books. springgay, s. (2008). body knowledge and curriculum: pedagogies of touch in youth and visual culture. peter lang. ware, s. m., & sweeney, e. (2014). failure to adapt. a conversation between syrus marcusware and elizabeth sweeney. no more potlucks, 34. http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/failure-to-adapt-a-conversation-between-syrus-marcus-wareand-elizabeth-sweeney/ haver et al final before tc november 26 18 correspondence address: jacquelyn haver, department of education & child protection, save the children us, 501 kings highway e., suite 400, fairfield, ct, 06825; email: jhaver@savechildren.org issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 372-381, 2018 dispatch new directions for assessing menstrual hygiene management (mhm) in schools: a bottom-up approach to measuring program success jacquelyn haver save the children, usa jeanne l. long save the children, usa bethany a. caruso emory university, usa robert dreibelbis london school of hygiene & tropical medicine, uk jackie kirk pioneered research on global menstrual taboos, which initiated critical conversations about how the silence surrounding menstruation affects girls and women’s wellbeing. the 2006 kirk and sommer article “menstruation and body awareness: linking girls’ health with girls’ education” reviewed project experiences from uganda, india and sudan, identified challenges that girls and women experience when menstruation is taboo, and proposed early programmatic solutions. they highlighted challenges with menstrual knowledge, menstrual hygiene, and stigma, and linked those challenges to educational constraints for girls – findings that researchers are continuing to uncover in other contexts today. they noted: where girls are able or determined to attend school throughout menstruation, the insufficient facilities and sanitary protection may nevertheless create discomfort for girls in the classroom and an inability to participate. (kirk & sommer, 2006, p. 8) new directions for assessing mhm in schools studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 372-381, 2018 373 this work, on an under-explored topic with scant literature available to inform it, provided the foundation for a now rapidly growing trajectory of menstruation-focused research and programming around the globe. it laid the groundwork for researchers to explore mhm (menstrual hygiene management) in schools, thereby advancing research, policy discussions, and programmatic solutions to addressing menstrual hygiene in support of girls’ education. girls’ retention and grade promotion in school has improved in many countries due to increased focus on girls’ education among the global development community and local and national governments, and has also spurred a demand to further support girls’ transition and access to secondary education (sperling & withrop, 2015). as more girls stay in school than ever before, there is a new generation of girls who will have their first menstrual period in school and will have to continue to manage their menses in schools. many schools, and the policies that govern them, are not intentionally designed with girls’ physical, social or emotional needs at this life stage, including the availability of life-stage appropriate facilities and uniforms. there is also a lack of support structures, guidance, and rules that enable girls to access facilities when needed or to answer questions in class without standing (sommer, 2010). menarche marks an important biological, and often social, transition from childhood to womanhood. though menstruation directly links to health concerns such as fertility, family planning, sexuality and overall body literacy, it remains an under-recognized public health issue in its own right (sommer, ackatia-armah, connolly, & smiles, 2015). over a decade of formative research has repeatedly documented the difficult, embarrassing, stressful, confusing, fear-inducing, stigmatizing, and sometimes traumatic experiences girls have had while managing their periods in school. many of these experiences are consequences of a lack of education and practical guidance explaining menstruation and how to manage menses once they begin. poor quality or absent school water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure in schools and limited access to materials, further impact girls’ experiences. additional concerns stem from unsupportive social environments that force girls to contend with teasing, secrecy, and social norms that dictate a range of behavioral restrictions including what is acceptable to say, who they can talk with, where they can go, what they can touch, or how they can pray, among others (alexander et al., 2014; caruso et al., 2013; ellis et al., 2016; haver et al., 2013; long et al., 2013; mason et al., 2013; mcmahon et al., 2011; sommer, 2009; sommer, 2010; sommer, ackatia-armah, connolly, & smiles, 2014; sumpter & torondel, 2013; trinies, caruso, sogoré, roubkiss, & freeman, 2015; van eijk et al., 2016). the challenges girls face, along with their reports that those challenges can encourage them to miss full or partial days of school, has increased interest in identifying links between menstruation and school attendance. a crosssectional study in bangladesh found that girls were more likely to miss jacquelyn haver, jeanne l. long, bethany a. caruso, robert dreibelbis studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 372-381, 2018 374 school during menstruation if they felt uncomfortable being at school during menstruation, believed that their menstrual challenges impacted their performance in school, attended schools that had locked toilets, or faced restrictions during menstruation (alam et al., 2017). a cross-sectional study in rural malawi found that a third of girls interviewed missed at least one day of school during their last menstrual period (grant, lloyd, & mensch, 2013). studies evaluating the impact of material and education provision on school attendance, however, have yielded mixed results (montgomery, ryus, dolan, dopson, & scott, 2012; montgomery et al., 2016; oster & thornton, 2011; phillips-howard et al., 2016a). regardless of mixed results on attendance, qualitative research from around the globe consistently finds that when girls face challenges managing their menstruation at school their educational experience is compromised. girls report reducing participation in class and non-class activities, feeling distracted, isolating themselves or being isolated by others, missing class time to manage their needs, or even leaving school for the remainder of the day (haver et al., 2013; long et al., 2013; miiro et al., 2018; van eijk et al., 2016). these findings demonstrate the need to evaluate the impact of girls’ menstruation experiences in school beyond measures of absenteeism alone. indeed, calls have been made to prioritize the development of measures so girls’ experiences can be more fully assessed (phillips-howard et al., 2016b; sommer et al., 2016). this dispatch aims to share lessons learned from the process of developing instruments to measure school participation, stress, and self-efficacy – outcomes that qualitatively link to girls’ experiences managing menstruation in school. currently, valid and reliable tools for measuring these domains do not exist. in response, save the children, through support from its child sponsorship innovation funding, is working to develop new measurement tools to allow its programs to assess the success of menstrual hygiene strategies in schools, signaling a move away from assessment using attendance rosters and a shift in focus to the changes and improvements in girls’ lived experiences. the action research described below ties back to girls’ stories and voices, based on fundamental principles of jackie kirk, whose initial work focused on the practical challenges girls experienced when managing menstruation in an unsupportive school environment. methodology of approach the development of the menstrual related – school participation, stress and self-efficacy (mr-sss) tool has consisted of four phases, including (1) qualitative data collection, (2) qualitative analysis to inform tool development, (3) tool piloting and analysis of pilot results to improve the tool, and (4) a second pilot in the philippines with the updated tool (see figure 1). new directions for assessing mhm in schools studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 372-381, 2018 375 phase i of the study aimed to understand how girls in el salvador and the philippines experienced and described school participation, stress, and selfefficacy, regarding menstruation. in both locations, between may and november of 2016, save the children staff and columbia university fellows utilized qualitative methods, including participatory learning activities, indepth interviews, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews, to investigate the themes of interest. parents, teachers, and girls and boys in grades five through seven were engaged in discussions regarding girls’ typical worries managing their menses in school (stress), how their behavior in class or with peers changed on those days (school participation), and the abilities girls believed they had to solve these challenges (self-efficacy). qualitative tools were initially the same for each country, though they were iteratively adapted in each location (hennink, hutter & bailey, 2011). figure 1. development phases of the mr-sss measurement tool. in phase ii, qualitative data was transcribed verbatim and analyzed using max qda. the domains of interest were coded first, and then each domain was analyzed separately to understand the various facets that defined school participation, stress and self-efficacy for girls. using the findings from each domain, including many direct quotes, tools were separately developed for the philippines and el salvador, including 20-30 close-ended survey questions per domain of interest (see figure 2). we then compared survey questions between el salvador and the philippines to add or subtract items to create one tool for both locations. in phase iii, 86 mr-sss questions were piloted in el salvador in october 2016, among 200 menstruating girls in grades six through eight, from 13 rural schools. multiple exploratory analyses were conducted to assess the jacquelyn haver, jeanne l. long, bethany a. caruso, robert dreibelbis studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 372-381, 2018 376 reliability, validity, and utility of the initial mr-sss scale, including: measures of internal consistency; exploratory principal components analysis; exploratory factor analysis; and exploratory mokken scaling procedures. exploratory analyses were inconclusive; few questions meet final inclusion criteria for any procedure. low interrater reliability measures, however, suggested potential challenges with the administration of the tool and format of the questions. results were used to refine the mr-sss survey questions and format as well as create an intensive enumerator training and survey protocol for subsequent surveys in the philippines. a variation of the refined tool was also tested in kyrgyzstan (april 2017) and ethiopia (june 2017), though methods, translation, survey items, and oversight of data collection varied between contexts. figure 2. development of a qualitative question in el salvador to a mr-sss survey question. phase iv utilized the revised mr-sss tool, protocol, and training to conduct the pilot in the philippines in july-august 2017. the revised mrsss tool included 13 school participation questions, 13 stress questions and 21 self-efficacy questions. the tool was translated from english to tagalog and back-translated to english. based on lessons from testing the tool in other locations and in response to potential issues with administration, we conducted a thorough training and extensive pre-testing before administering the tool. the institutional review board of columbia university and save the children’s ethical review committee approved all research conducted in el salvador and the philippines. save the children obtained written parental new directions for assessing mhm in schools studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 372-381, 2018 377 consent and oral and student assent from all children for each phase of the study. all research followed the principles outlined in the declaration of helsinki. the tool is still in development and preliminary results are promising. the next step for the development of the mr-sss tool involves a follow-up assessment in the philippines. we will update the tool based on this assessment and pilot the refined mr-sss tool in additional countries. below we document lessons learned thus far, to inform other researchers and practitioners about the process. lessons learned: insights for future measurement development related to mhm lessons were learned across the entire spectrum of research activities, from improving the content of enumerator training to analysis of the menstruationrelated domains, and were crucial to the development of the mr-sss tool. first, we found it imperative that those administering the tool in the field not only have a clear understanding of the questions and survey protocol, but also an introduction to the menstrual health field and awareness of the overall objective of the work. in the philippines, the details we added to the training and protocols motivated enumerators to collect high-quality data, as they understood their valued contribution to the innovation and its implications beyond the philippines. second, training and clear understanding of the tool matters. in comparison to countries that could not afford the time, a longer training period in the philippines resulted in greater buy-in and understanding of the mr-sss tool concepts, and therefore improved the administration of the tool. moving forward, we recommend more enumerator engagement and interaction with the tools during the training. third, it was important for our research team to be able to tailor the survey as appropriate. the use of familiar terms that were age and culturally appropriate was important for girls’ understanding of the survey question. however, not all girls use the same words to describe menses or their menstrual materials, which may also vary between disposable and reusable products. to address this issue, our team used electronic data collection tools that could be customized based on emic terminology. early in the assessment girls were asked their preferred term for menstruation. the enumerators then were prompted to enter this term into the tool, and the assessment form was automatically updated to use the girl’s preferred term throughout the survey. this not only made girls feel more comfortable and eased their ability to answer the survey questions, but it also eased the burden of the enumerator to remember their word of choice. fourth, we learned that our mr-sss measurement tool is likely agesensitive. a comparison of basic descriptive statistics across countries that jacquelyn haver, jeanne l. long, bethany a. caruso, robert dreibelbis studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 372-381, 2018 378 collected mr-sss data suggests that the tool and the domains we were attempting to capture may be more relevant for younger girls. older schoolgirls have more experience managing their menses in school, their menstrual periods may be more regular, and more of their friends have reached menarche, potentially creating additional social support. thus, older girls may not experience the same levels of stress or lack of self-efficacy as younger girls just beginning to transition into puberty and dealing with these changes for the first time. our tool will be able to determine if there are in fact differences. future assessments will recruit girls by age and not grade, as age-for-grade varies significantly across contexts. this key finding has corresponding policy and implementation implications, further supporting evidence that mhm programming in schools should target girls by a certain age and not grade, to reach them with pertinent information before menarche (caruso et al., 2013; haver et al., 2013; long et al., 2013). fifth, our experience to date suggests that school participation, stress and self-efficacy are not independent domains, but overlap with one another. for example, when a girl has her period in school, she can be stressed about standing up in the classroom (stress and school participation domains) or she may not feel confident she can perform well on an exam that day because of her period (self-efficacy and school participation domains). attempting to create consistently separate domains was important for the purposes of analysis, though not necessarily representative of the reality of girls’ experiences. reflection save the children’s experiences in the development of the mr-sss tool and mhm programming continues to be informed by the body of research that grew from the foundational work by jackie kirk on mhm. save the children’s work advances her research, by exploring evidence-based programming to address gender gaps and equity issues in schools related to menstruation and girls’ education. in this spirit, girls’ voices were the backbone and foundation of the mrsss tool development. we are confident that the survey tool is an accurate representation of the experiences girls shared with us during in depth interviews and focus group discussions. the survey questions echo similar findings shared in grey literature and journal articles from global mhm research that reflect the experiences of girls. however, it was important to apply a systematic approach to build the evidence that could show us the power of girls’ voices in this process. beyond the girls’ education agenda, discourse on mhm has bolstered gendered water, sanitation and hygiene (wash) in schools’ approaches; and has revealed that mhm is not only a female issue but that there is also a new directions for assessing mhm in schools studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 372-381, 2018 379 necessity to include men and boys in mhm research, programming and staffing on projects. kirk (2005, n.p.) wrote: from a very practical perspective, girls who lack adequate sanitary materials may miss school each month during their period. if girls attend schools which – as many do – lack adequate latrines and water supplies for girls to comfortably change sanitary pads and wash themselves in privacy, they may be unable to remain comfortably in class during their menstrual cycle. menarche signifies the beginning of a new life stage for girls, but there is a growing recognition that women’s wash needs, like their bodies, will change over the life course (caruso et al., 2017; hulland et al., 2015; sahoo et al., 2015; sommer et al., 2017). kirk’s research on menstruation and her recognition of the role that wash plays was perhaps the critical catalyst for encouraging further research on the gendered, biological, and social changes that could be further addressed by the wash sector. in the years since kirk’s pioneering contribution, the global mhm community has expanded to include multiple sectors, and a multitude of actors and stakeholders. researchers, ngo’s, donors, ministries of education, and the private sector continue to delve into the world of mhm, producing research, developing programmatic solutions and policies, and identifying and advancing an agenda for holistic mhm solutions – for girls and women to learn and thrive in a gender equitable community. references alam, m. u., luby, s. p., halder, a. k., islam, k., opel, a., shoab, a. k., ... unicomb, l. (2017). menstrual hygiene management among bangladeshi adolescent schoolgirls and risk factors affecting school absence: results from a cross-sectional survey. bmj open, 7(7), e015508. alexander, k. t., oduor, c., nyothach, e., laserson, k. f., amek, n., eleveld, a., ... ombok, m. (2014). water, sanitation and hygiene conditions in kenyan rural schools: are schools meeting the needs of menstruating girls? water, 6(5), 1453-1466. caruso, b. a., clasen, t. f., hadley, c., yount, k. m., haardörfer, r., rout, m., ... cooper, h. l. (2017). understanding and defining sanitation insecurity: women’s gendered experiences of urination, defecation and menstruation in rural odisha, india. bmj global health, 2(4), e000414. caruso, b.a., fehr, a., inden, k., sahin, m., ellis, a., andes, k. l. & freeman, m. c. (2013). wash in schools empowers girls’ education in freetown, sierra leone: an assessment of menstrual hygiene management in schools. new york: united nations children’s fund. ellis, a., haver, j., villasenor, j., parawan, a., venkatesh, m., freeman, m. c., & caruso, b. a. (2016). wash challenges to girls’ menstrual hygiene management in metro manila, masbate, and south central mindanao, philippines. waterlines, 35(3), 306-323. grant, m., lloyd, c., & mensch, b. (2013). menstruation and school absenteeism: evidence from rural malawi. comparative education review, 57(2), 260-284. haver, j., caruso, b. a., ellis, a., sahin, m., villasenor, j. m., andes, k. l. and freeman, m. c. (2013). wash in schools empowers girls’ education in masbate province and metro manila, philippines: an assessment of menstrual hygiene management in schools. new york: united nations children’s fund. hennink, m., hutter, i., & bailey, a. (2011). qualitative research methods. london: sage. jacquelyn haver, jeanne l. long, bethany a. caruso, robert dreibelbis studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 372-381, 2018 380 hulland, k. r., chase, r. p., caruso, b. a., swain, r., biswal, b., sahoo, k. c., ... dreibelbis, r. (2015). sanitation, stress, and life stage: a systematic data collection study among women in odisha, india. plos one, 10(11), e0141883. kirk. j. (2005). the soeisbep gender equity support program: an early impact assessment. unpublished program document of sudan basic education program. nairobi, ke. kirk, j., & sommer, m. (2006). menstruation and body awareness: linking girls’ health with girls’ education. royal tropical institute (kit), special on gender and health, 1-22. long, j., caruso, b. a., lopez, d., vancraeynes, k., sahin, m., andes, k. l., & freeman, m. c. (2013). wash in schools empowers girls’ education in rural cochabamba, bolivia: an assessment of menstrual hygiene management in schools. new york: united nations children’s fund. mason, l., nyothach, e., alexander, k., odhiambo, f. o., eleveld, a., vulule, j., ... phillipshoward, p. a. (2013). ‘we keep it secret so no one should know’ – a qualitative study to explore young schoolgirls attitudes and experiences with menstruation in rural western kenya. plos one, 8(11), e79132. mcmahon, s. a., winch, p. j., caruso, b. a., obure, a. f., ogutu, e. a., ochari, i. a., & rheingans, r. d. (2011). 'the girl with her period is the one to hang her head': reflections on menstrual management among schoolgirls in rural kenya. bmc international health & human rights, 11(1), 7. miiro, g., rutakumwa, r., nakiyingi-miiro, j., nakuya, k., musoke, s., namakula, j., ... weiss, h. a. (2018). menstrual health and school absenteeism among adolescent girls in uganda (meniscus): a feasibility study. bmc women's health, 18(1), 4. montgomery, p., hennegan, j., dolan, c., wu, m., steinfield, l., & scott, l. (2016). menstruation and the cycle of poverty: a cluster quasi-randomised control trial of sanitary pad and puberty education provision in uganda. plos one, 11(12), e0166122. montgomery, p., ryus, c. r., dolan, c. s., dopson, s., & scott, l. m. (2012). sanitary pad interventions for girls' education in ghana: a pilot study. plos one, 7(10), e48274. oster, e., & thornton, r. (2011). menstruation, sanitary products, and school attendance: evidence from a randomized evaluation. american economic journal: applied economics, 3(1), 91-100. phillips-howard, p. a., caruso, b., torondel, b., zulaika, g., sahin, m., & sommer, m. (2016b). menstrual hygiene management among adolescent schoolgirls in low-and middleincome countries: research priorities. global health action, 9(1), 33032. phillips-howard, p. a., nyothach, e., ter kuile, f. o., omoto, j., wang, d., zeh, c., ... eleveld, a. (2016a). menstrual cups and sanitary pads to reduce school attrition, and sexually transmitted and reproductive tract infections: a cluster randomised controlled feasibility study in rural western kenya. bmj open, 6(11), e013229. sahoo, k. c., hulland, k. r., caruso, b. a., swain, r., freeman, m. c., panigrahi, p., & dreibelbis, r. (2015). sanitation-related psychosocial stress: a grounded theory study of women across the life-course in odisha, india. social science & medicine, 139, 80-89. sommer, m. (2009). ideologies of sexuality, menstruation and risk: girls' experiences of puberty and schooling in northern tanzania. culture, health & sexuality, 11(4), 383-398. sommer, m. (2010). where the education system and women's bodies collide: the social and health impact of girls' experiences of menstruation and schooling in tanzania. journal of adolescence, 33(4), 521-529. sommer, m., ackatia-armah, n., connolly s., & smiles, d. (2014). a comparison of the menstruation and education experiences of girls in tanzania, ghana, cambodia and ethiopia. compare: a journal of comparative and international education, 45(4), 589-609 sommer, m., ackatia-armah, n., connolly, s., & smiles, d. (2015). a comparison of the menstruation and education experiences of girls in tanzania, ghana, cambodia and ethiopia. compare: a journal of comparative and international education, 45(4), 589609. sommer, m., caruso, b. a., sahin, m., calderon, t., cavill, s., mahon, t., & phillips-howard, p. a. (2016). a time for global action: addressing girls’ menstrual hygiene management needs in schools. plos medicine, 13(2), e1001962. new directions for assessing mhm in schools studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 372-381, 2018 381 sommer, m., phillips-howard, p. a., mahon, t., zients, s., jones, m., & caruso, b. a. (2017). beyond menstrual hygiene: addressing vaginal bleeding throughout the life course in low and middle-income countries. bmj global health, 2(2), e000405. sperling, g., & withrop, r. (2015) what works in girls’ education: evidence for the world’s best investment. washington, dc: brookings institution press. sumpter, c., & torondel, b. (2013). a systematic review of the health and social effects of menstrual hygiene management. plos one, 8(4), e62004. trinies, v., caruso, b., sogoré, a., toubkiss, j., & freeman, m. (2015). uncovering the challenges to menstrual hygiene management in schools in mali. waterlines, 34(1), 31-40. van eijk, a. m., sivakami, m., thakkar, m. b., bauman, a., laserson, k. f., coates, s., & phillips-howard, p. a. (2016). menstrual hygiene management among adolescent girls in india: a systematic review and meta-analysis. bmj open, 6(3), e010290. derrida, democracy and violence studies in social justice volume 5, issue 2, 231-240, 2011   correspondence address: nick mansfield, higher degree research, level 3, research hub, c5c east, macquarie university, nsw 2109 australia. tel.: +61 (0)2 9850 8718; email: nick.mansfield@scmp.mq.edu.au issn: 1911-4788 derrida, democracy and violence nick mansfield higher degree research, macquarie university, australia abstract democracy is usually identified with openness, order and pluralism and thus peace. yet, everywhere, from the political convulsions that bring it into being to the wars that aim to extend it, democracy is violent. usually this violence is seen as accidental or forced upon democracy. the aim of this paper is to argue that the violence of democracy springs from its inextricable if denied relationship to revolution, the drive to re-found the political order properly and definitively. through a reading of derrida’s account of the relationship between violence and justice in walter benjamin, violence is identified as the unstable founding moment which democracy must both pass through in order to emerge and also endlessly recall in its drive to both expand and complete its mission. “god is the name of this pure violence.” — jacques derrida (2002, p. 293) introduction we’ll get to democracy, eventually. was it marx of all people, in hampstead in a room full of papers and coffee grounds and the blocked flue and falling damp, and worried about his daughters’ marriages, with his love of duels and shakespeare, and the bitterness, the anger, the anguish; was it marx first of all who saw that the definitive modern problem, the political problem of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be excess? in his case, it was surplus value, the cruel discipline whereby human beings now worked more than they needed to for their own sustenance and survival because at the end of the day, in the last hour of the day, someone would wring out of them an hour’s labour purely for profit, for the money no-one needed to live by— just money for its own sake, excess money? excess unsettles all our politics: civic, parliamentary, corporeal, cultural; the excess of pleasure over law, of pain over subjectivity, of bare over civil life, of exception over rule, of art over identity, of killing over organization, of the other over the same, of race over nation, of apocalypse over war, of economics over society, of the event over knowledge and so on and so on. 232 nick mansfield   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   democracy—we will get to it eventually…. what is the politics of the excess of democracy? isn’t democracy the politics of identity, of representation, of the established preference, the clear voice, the self-identical agent, the volatile plurality of the self-same? is not democracy the politics of logic and logos, of negotiation and compromise, compromise and agreement, agreement and therefore rule? what could be the excess of democracy? the excesses i’ve mentioned: what they all have in common is that what is in excess both allows and threatens the pair concerned. take the excess of race over nation, for example: the thing that makes the nation possible ruins it. what made the nation possible in the first place. race is the name for the very thing out of which the logic of national self-determination sprang. race is both enduring in this logic then, and an event. the enduring race harks back to itself as event, an historical rupture, the recognition and consolidation of a group identity, out of which the nation is formed. yet, of course, race kills the nation by setting up something higher than it, the founding truth to which it must refer, and which it must try to preserve through war and policy, through border control and eventually perhaps—more than perhaps, of course, genocide—we’ve seen it: and more than once. race both forms and constantly tests the limits of the nation. in the end— because the logic of race will always tend towards a mythic, impossible or murderous purity—race will always risk the durability of the nation as a liveable community. what would the comparable situation be with democracy? what would be the thing that both explains democracy and leads it on—the excess of democracy which incites democracy as an event? well, it can only be one thing. revolution, of course. derrida describes democracy as the politics which always puts itself at issue, which always problematizes itself in each and every one of its acts. democracy, therefore, returns to and problematizes its own foundations in each democratic event. in on revolution, hannah arendt (1990) defines revolution as the drive to re-found the political constitution in order “to bring about the formation of a new body politic” (p. 25). democracy, by perpetually putting its foundation in play, perpetually recalls the revolutionary moment—and thus the revolutionary horizon—in every one of its events. we shall return to the relationship between repetition and founding as it pertains to democracy, just as we shall come to democracy eventually, or so we’re always being told—in the end, at the end of the road, the end of history, we’ll come to democracy, but let’s say it now: democracy’s defining event is revolution. democracy is always postrevolutionary (each act of democracy must always—to sound badiou-ian for a moment—recall the revolutions it mightn’t have had, or that maybe didn’t even happen, strictly speaking, but to which it implicitly refers, which it necessarily cites, those of 1649, 1776, 1789, 1917, 1949 and so on). still, we’re also always coming to democracy or democracy is coming to us, because—i don’t know—we apparently always need more of it: as democrats we’re always pre-revolutionary as well, postand preat one and the same time. revolution is the excess which both makes democracy, and—well of course—like all excesses, threatens to ruin it, with the myriad styles of apocalyptic violence and puritanical policing that it requires, apparently, to propose or defend its freedom. and democracy will never lose its ambiguous relationship to this excess, because in that excess lies its derrida, democracy and violence 233 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   history and its hope, but also its danger and the abyss, liberation and horror, the liberation in horror and the very horror of freedom, democracy’s own shameful, much loved but repeatedly indulged, endlessly excused violence. deconstruction is justice among the pairings of excess that i didn’t mention is the one that is most important in the late work of jacques derrida: the excess of justice over law. i want to progress by reading derrida’s canonical statement on this theme, in his paper of 1989, revised in 1990 and revised again in 1994, “force of law: the mystical foundation of authority” (derrida, 2002). put simply, for derrida, justice is the thing that brings the law into existence, in the first place. it is justice that the law sets out to instantiate and exemplify, even to fulfill. there would be no law without this reference to the possibility of justice, yet justice is immeasurable, impossible. no instance of the law will be able fully and finally to enact justice. it will always disappoint justice. justice will always remain that impossible thing that is in excess of the law, that marks and measures law’s failure, but also its interminable mission. every instance of law is then a reduction of justice, a failure of it. law is historically and semantically contingent and therefore deconstructible. justice itself, however, is impossible, excessive, immeasurable and irreducible. it is the thing by which the deconstruction of the law proceeds by showing the fragility, the precarious historicity, of the act of law. justice shows that law is something to be overcome, that needs to be reformed, endlessly and forever. justice, itself, however is un-deconstructible, as undeconstructible as deconstruction itself, derrida says (p. 243)—adding in fact that “deconstruction is justice.” justice then is the thing that provokes the law in the first place, and that the law strives to enact, but can’t. i want to dwell on this idea of “in the first place,” because as with democracy and revolution, and as with race and nation, so the event by which law is instituted is key. as with those other pairs, this event is something that the law always recalls but also always awaits. but what is most important about it is its relationship to violence. justice is violence the relationship between law and justice in derrida is important for our purposes because it is a foreshadowing of the crucial derridean take on democracy. democracy is in a relationship to something derrida calls “democracie-à-venir” (future-democracy or democracy-to-come) something that is analogous to the relationship between law and justice (see especially derrida, 2005). in turn, the law/justice dichotomy involves violence. so unpacking the violence of the law/justice nexus will help us to understand the role of violence in derrida’s democracy. as we have seen, for derrida, law is a human institution that aspires to enact justice. justice always exceeds law, and is ultimately impossible. it cannot be realised in itself, but only through law. yet it remains forever in excess of law. 234 nick mansfield   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   derrida cites kant, to say that there is no law that does not contain within it some necessary relationship to force. there is no law that doesn’t at some point need to be enforced, at least hypothetically. every law must contain within it the possibility of being defended or circumscribed by violence. law is therefore irreducibly violent. we know that, but how does this violence relate to justice? this issue is the crux and the difficulty of derrida’s paper. it’s easy enough to accept that the violence enacted by the law is necessary for pragmatic reasons. the law must act and be defended. yet justice should be the higher calling of the law, the thing that justifies and explains what is good and necessary about it. so how can justice be violent? the discussion of this question revolves around two key issues: the foundation of the law in the first place; and the relationship between the founding of the law and the preservation of the law. both of these relationships involve violence, and derrida’s discussion proceeds by way of a reading of walter benjamin’s influential article, “critique of violence” (benjamin, 1978), and its crucial distinction between mythical and messianic or divine violence. at the end of derrida’s paper on law, this distinction is mapped onto the law/justice relationship. let us start, though, with the relationship between the founding of law and violence. violence without ground “in the beginning [of justice] there will have been force,” runs derrida’s formulation (derrida, 2002, p. 238). justice is impossible, so for it to have a beginning, it must be emerging as law, its only possibility of ontology. the “violent structure of the founding act” (p. 242) is not the result of the interruption by human action of the perfect fabric of justice. it is because justice must be the site of the founding act, and because justice is itself nothing, impossible, that the founding act is violent. justice will always exceed and challenge law. because law is posited, then, only in relation to that which disrupts it, even in its founding, it always rests on that which will always violate it, to infinity. the institution of law in relation to justice—and all law is instituted in relation to justice—orients it to a violation that endlessly recedes as horizon, a violation that law embodies but that always remains ahead of it, as it constitutes itself only in relation to its endless re-constitution; in other words, only in relation to that which proposes its need to be remade. in short, law comes into being only in relation to its own violation, a violation that goes on infinitely. law then is oriented towards an infinite disruption, yet this disruption is not merely abstract. it incites, even demands, the call for political change, for enthusiasm, for apocalyptic styles of political will and political confrontation, the confrontation of the established with the new and thus with the revolutionary horizon of violent change. this is amplified by the fact that the founding of law is a decision. the decision in derrida that founds the law is, like all decisions, not the application of a preexisting formula. it always involves a grasping of the unknowable. if it were merely the application of an already existing incontestable agreed principle, its enactment would not be a decision. it would merely be something automatic, derrida, democracy and violence 235 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   something necessary. it would be what derrida calls merely a calculation. decision always involves some leap in the dark, some albeit miniscule exposure to uncertainty. that is what makes it a decision. when a decision is made in this sense, there is a great taking on of responsibility. you become answerable for your decision. the decision thus involves an opening to that which is greater than you. in broad terms, it’s an opening to otherness and, for derrida (1994, p. 23), the opening to otherness is synonymous with an opening to justice. the founding of the law is a moment of decision eventuating in the impossible exposure to otherness/justice. it is a forcing, an insistence, an arbitrary flexing of agency (even before subjectivity). it is “a violence without ground” (derrida, 2002, p. 242). at the beginning of justice, therefore, at the point where it arrives, as law, it has always already been violent: deconstruction . . . itself operates on the basis of an “idea of justice” that is infinite, infinite because irreducible, irreducible because owed to the other . . . deconstruction is mad about and from such justice, mad about and from this desire for justice. (p. 254) what i want to draw attention to here is the dramatic nature of this statement: the connection between justice, infinity, madness and desire. it is this infinity of justice that makes for the violence of the decision which is the institution of law and thus the “beginning” of justice. what makes the law violent is its taking place in the infinity of justice, as a decision whose violence is made by its exposure to infinity, its attempt to make the impossible real. later, we shall look at the motif of divine or revolutionary violence which both derrida and benjamin discuss to clarify exactly why this decisionism is violent. it is violent because of the irreducible excessiveness of the impossible and the infinite it attempts to make work. but we shall return to this to develop their insight. it is this impossibility and infinity that we will find again in democracy’s relationship to democracy-to-come. we are coming to democracy, i tell you, soon. but there are two more things to say about violence, law and justice: first, the relationship between the founding and the preserving of law, and, second, the relationship between divine and mythical violence and how these in turn fit with the relationship between law and justice. the more we say about justice the less will need to be said about democracy. the less said the better. democracy is justice anyway. recalling the future the founding of the law is an event, but one that is inevitably reiterated. in fact, every moment of the enactment of the law harks back to the founding of law. derrida (2002) writes: “positing is already iterability, a call for self-preserving repetition. preservation in its turn refounds, so that it can preserve what it claims to found” (p. 272). in other words, the establishment of the law always already assumes repetition and endurance. the point of the act of law is that it repeats the logic of the moment of its founding in every one of its iterations. every act of law then repeats the moment of law’s founding. in doing this, it re-opens itself to 236 nick mansfield   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   justice in a repetition of the violence of the founding of law. this has consequences for our understanding of time, because the justice it recalls in this violence is justice-to-come, what derrida calls in a telling prefiguring of what he will say about democracy, justice-à-venir. the justice being recalled is future justice. every act of democracy is also a re-iteration of democracy’s founding moment, its revolutionary moment, but in a way that both knows the past and characterises the future, both in the possibility of a justifiable violence. the founding moment of law, then, is violent because it is an institution within an infinite justice. the violence is not merely the violence of the positing of a contrived self-identity in the middle of a romanticizable undefined and undelimited field. it would not be violent if justice were not itself infinite. the sense that the justice that we reach back into the past in order to make “to-come” is infinite, even absolutely unconditional, means that there will be no limit to the enlargement of the horizons and operations of justice. there is no limit to what justice will demand of us. similarly, there is no horizon beyond which democracy must not go. democracy is for everyone and forever, and its rights cannot be limited. it has the right to intrude everywhere. it is irresistible. this is its license for violence. killing for life but—i hate to say it—we haven’t quite made it to democracy yet. there is another telling argument that needs making and this one is the most dangerous and obscure of all, the one that accounts for most of the problem. derrida (2002) works with walter benjamin’s distinction between two types of violence. first, there is the violence benjamin attributes to the greek tradition, what he calls mythical violence. mythical violence is the violence of the founding of the law “a force, a positing of authority . . . a privilege of kings, of the great or powerful” (p. 287). the mythical foundation of law is one of authority and order. its justice is one of balanced rule. it is not a distributive justice (p. 287). its punishment is expiation, the making of amends, the reconciliation of accounts. benjamin and derrida compare this violence with a second type of violence, this time from the jewish tradition. this violence is also connected with a justice, variously called messianic or divine justice. this justice is excessive and unaccountable: “instead of founding law, it destroys it, instead of setting limits and boundaries, it annihilates them” (derrida, 2002, p. 287). its justice is not the restoration of balance: “instead of leading to fault and expiation, it causes to expiate” (p. 288). in other words, it provokes rather than orders, it throws things out of balance rather than establishing sense. derrida again: “instead of threatening, it strikes” (p. 288). this leads to what derrida calls “the essential issue” (p. 288): instead of killing in the way mythical authoritarian violence kills (with bloodshed) divine violence kills without bloodshed. divine violence is not the oppression of the living, the attacking of mere life in order to demonstrate and exercise authority. if it kills, it kills for life. mythical violence has its own authority as its goal, and is thus careless of life and the living. “divine violence,” on the other hand “sacrifices life to save the living” (p. 288). it is a violence that derrida, democracy and violence 237 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   might kill but always because of its belief in the value of life itself: “it does so in the name of life, of the most living of life. of the value of the life that is worth more than life . . . but that is worth more than life because it is life itself, insofar as life prefers itself. it is life beyond life, life against life, but always in life and for life” (p. 289). there’s no need to remind us how dangerous this might be, and this is of course how the argument gets into trouble over the holocaust. is benjamin pre-justifying the worst atrocity? after all, nazi murder was done in the name of a construction of life, to say the least, a racial vitalism. derrida’s final response is to distance himself from benjamin. the argument is too much for him. benjamin, he says in the end “is still too heideggerian, too messianico-marxist or archeoeschatological for me” (derrida, 2002, p. 298). but of course, it is cruel, given his fate (a jewish political refugee, a bloodless death by overdose, in a hotel on the franco-spanish frontier in september, 1940, an act of auto-divine violence) to too quickly or too easily assimilate benjamin to nazi violence, or even to think of doing so. besides, the distinction between mythic and divine violence is untenable. in the same way that the founding of law and the preserving of law meet in the opening to the justice-to-come that has always already taken place, reaching back to the future, mythic violence and divine violence meet in undecidability. derrida writes, “on one side is the decision without decidable certainty [this is divine violence] on the other the certainty of the undecidable but without decision” (p. 291). what does this mean? in mythic violence, there is the organization of the state, posited, as all law-making is, on the undecidability of infinite justice, but which has instituted itself, and therefore can generate its own programme and certainty, its own predictability and impersonal order. the undecidable provides the context, but undecidability is overcome in the preformulation of regulations that do not require decision. on the side of the divine, we have the recognition of undecidability, but the decision gets made anyway. there is undecidability on both sides, derrida says. in fact, there are not two sides. the mythic denies and overcomes the undecidability within which it is founded, the divine recognises it and defines itself by this very investment in the decision made in the midst of the undecidable. in other words, the two always go together, like the law and the justice to which they can be compared: the decision that founds the law takes place by way of the recognition of the infinite undecidability of justice, which in turn is spurned so that the foundation of law can seem just that, a founding. what is the key point? the act of the founding of the law, and every act based on the law afterwards, is violent not only because of its founding in infinity, but because of its commitment to a service of a life beyond life, to the good of life over and above life. this is the violence that infinite justice cannot abrogate because it is the divine violence of justice. in political terms, its affiliation is with democracy, eventually, when we eventually get to it, but first and foremost it is to revolution, “the purest manifestation of violence among men” (2002, p. 291). divine violence is revolutionary violence. mythical violence, the foundation of the logic of the state, allows for the programmatic and the meaningful, but it is founded always already in relation to divine or revolutionary violence, which it always cites despite itself and repeats and which remains mysterious: “divine violence,” derrida (2002) writes, “is the most just, the most historic, the most 238 nick mansfield   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   revolutionary, the most decidable or the most deciding. yet, as such, it does not lend itself to any human determination, to any knowledge or decidable ‘certainty’ on our part. it is never known in itself ‘as such,’ but only in its ‘effects’ and its effects are incomparable” (derrida, 2002, p. 291). the founding of the law refers to the revolutionary divine violence it cannot bring to ground. it will always reach for, but fail, the revolutionary call. democracy is the same. democracy is violence we shall never come to democracy. everything that needs to be said about it has already been said. yet we can’t pass over it in silence. it is, after all, the endless re-opening of speech on the basis of what has always already been said, and that is of course, everything, or the possibility of the saying of everything, of the free speech always to come. what is democracy-to-come? put simply, democracy-to-come performs the same function in relation to instituted democracy that justice does to law. democracy-to-come is the impossible thing that incites democracy in the first place as the unfulfillable promise of a polis more open to the other, more expansive, more just, more inclusive, ever more free and open. it is not an ideal either in the sense of an absolute regulative principle against which current achievements can be measured; nor is it a fixed “better” or “best” system of political organisation that we could one day hope to put in place. in the same way that law takes from justice its impulse and its orientation, and while never being able to implement justice nor reach it nor even fully grasp what it might be, while at the same time remaining totally vulnerable to justice, pre-defeated by it, always already exceeded by it and thus marked out by it as always a failure, in this same way, democracy-to-come is the thing that real democratic acts and institutions always both look forward to and remember, as the ever higher principle of greater liberalisation and well, yes, justice. every democratic revolution, every democratic critique of democracy or of anything else for that matter, measures democracy not against established institutions or practices, but against this restless thinking of democracy as an ever-opening, ever-liberating, ever-relieving, more humane, more respectful, more equitable, more just, infinite honesty and hope. in the same way that every act of law repeats law’s founding opening on justice-to-come, every act of democracy reiterates the founding orientation to this impossible democracy-to-come. as we have seen, the founding moment of law is violent: it is violent because it is an institution in the middle of the nothingness of an infinite justice, a decisionism in the dark, trying to make that infinity and darkness do something. this wildness in action is violent in the sense of benjamin’s conception of a “divine violence.” justice is a logic of immense disproportion, or rather of something totally beyond proportionality. it rejects all systems while requiring them. it licenses their institution in order to smash against them endlessly. it endlessly announces that their commitment to life is not to a life enough. it demands that the institution be smashed in order to make its commitment to life really to life, to a life beyond life. it will kill for this life. derrida, democracy and violence 239 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   democracy-to-come is comparable. it abominates the very institutions of democracy that are never good enough for it but that it has incited. instituted democracy can always be made better, always more free, more open, more just. the life it makes possible will never be life “itself.” we know that freedom is the thing democracy takes as its pretext but can never fully deliver, that can always be called upon and called for again and again, an ever more free freedom. the life that democracy promises is analogous. it will never be good enough. it will never be the destination it seems to be, a final destination, somewhere we can arrive. freedom, life: in democracy these things beckon us on and we need to know how to enslave ourselves and others for this freedom, and we need to know how to kill ourselves and others for this life. every democratic act looks forward to the re-founding of its past orientation to this futurity. we want a better life for our children, more stuff, higher status, endless growth, all these are our orientations to a life beyond this our current particular living. but it is much more than these, and here we enter democracy’s inevitable ambivalence. it is its recall of its irreducible connection to revolution, which arendt (1990) defined as the will completely to re-found the political order (p. 25). this will is repeated in every democratic act, as the inspiring upswing of its never-tiring optimism, but also as its readiness to make sacrifices, its own and anyone else’s for that matter. historically now, we have to acknowledge the simultaneous romantic gleam and shocking horror of the revolutionary legacy. the revolutionary legacy of democracy—why is democracy so in denial of its revolutionary legacy?— is no exception. though this begs the question: is there any other revolutionary tradition than the democratic, any revolution not laid out in the name of “the people”? i think not, but that’s a whole other discussion. the horror is not just empirical, however. it is constitutional. derrida famously ridiculed francis fukuyama for seeing all the failings of communism as essential to communism, but all the failings of liberal democracy as mere contingencies. to fukuyama, the idea remained untarnished. my point is to develop this idea of derrida’s to show that the violence of democracy is not “collateral damage” or a set of historical accidents, unfortunate but not necessary to democracy. the violence of democracy is part of its incontestable revolutionary legacy, its commitment to a freedom, an openness, a justice—in the end a life—for which this our present life can never be enough, and which demands then that we go beyond it again and forever. this violence is not abstract or hypothetical, but is realised in democracy’s craving for expansion beyond itself and for purification within its domains. no sacrifice is too good for democracy. it must “shock and awe” us. nothing should stand in the way of its expanding its reach into new territories, despite the living people this may affect. after all, what is their life to life? it is also apparent in the determination of democratic governments to intensify the policing within their territories. we can follow a lazy 1960s prejudice to which the violence of policing fits with the rational meanness of repression. according to this argument, crime is social deregulation and rhymes therefore with desire, and the violence of relentless over-policing is the return of the forces opposed to desire and to liberalization. i think this is misguided. the will to the complete purification of the social body of unregulated behaviour is a dream of an heroic model of society as perfectible, purifiable, as still embodying a dream that can be 240 nick mansfield   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   re-made and in the end made finally. expansion, purification: both the result of images of a life beyond this life to which we can be and should be attuned. there is another aspect to the valuation of life in democracy: a democratic life is of more value than another. the life of an american is more valuable than the life of an african; the life of an israeli of more value than the life of a palestinian. the life of a democratic citizen somehow weighs more than anyone else’s. this is not a repetition of but a re-calibration of racism, a new kind of politico-racism, but one that is insistent in our political culture. the fear, of course, is that in an era of increasing global environmental catastrophe and the relentless political consequences this will bring—of population displacement, the insecurity of food supply, resource scarcity and wars—the lives of democratic citizens will remain the life oriented towards the better life and thus worth more, licensing … what am i saying, it already licenses a commitment to this democratic life at the expense of others. for this democratic revolutionary life is oriented towards the ever receding image of a forever better democracy-to-come, the life that prefers itself to the living. democracy, we will never get to it. that’s the problem, not because it is too good for us, nor because it’s an ideal we can never quite reach, but because it is always larger than us and always demands that we strive to enact it in more forcefully effective ways. this is how it licenses the most innocent, excusable, life-affirming killing. references arendt, h. (1990). on revolution. harmondsworth: penguin. benjamin, w. (1978). critique of violence. in e. jephcott (trans.), reflections (pp. 277-300). new york, ny: schocken books. derrida, j. (1994) specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. (p. kamuf, trans.). new york, ny: routledge. derrida, j. (2002). force of law: the mystical foundation of authority. in g. anidjar (ed.) acts of religion (pp. 228-298). new york, ny: routledge. derrida, j. (2005). rogues: two essays on reason. (p.-a. brault & m. naas, trans.). stanford, ca: stanford university press. gomez final correspondence address: bianca gomez, department of sociology, faculty of liberal arts & professional studies, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: bbmgomez@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 research note toward an understanding of international students within canadian settler-colonial capitalism bianca gomez york university, canada introduction i first came to northern turtle island in 2009. back then, i understood this part of the continent as canada, known for its “friendliness,” “safety,” and “multiculturalism.” such are popular tropes that empower the country’s branding for international education (stein, 2018) and were reasons i decided on canada for university. i have since learned how these tropes downplay a violent settler-colonial history and present of indigenous marginalization (stein, 2018). moreover, as an international student i began interrogating how my living, working, and studying on these lands implicate me as a settler and participant in canadian settler-colonial capitalism. however, as a racialized temporary migrant i also recognize my precarity. this paradox befuddles me, thus this inaugural attempt to locate international students within settler-colonial capitalism and articulate a relationship with indigenous communities and sovereignty within the canadian context. i am not an indigenous studies scholar, and because this is also my first dive into settler-colonial literature, i do not end this piece with a clear conclusion. this discussion is merely a starting point, a synthesis of ideas that inform a possible framework for understanding my social location – specifically, how my immediate reality is subsumed within a larger structure of systemic violence. a long-term goal is to eventually imagine an understanding of a “collective international student” location and from there, possible practices of subversion and resistance. for now, i hope readers who share my social position can draw from these thoughts as they build and refine their own praxes. bianca gomez studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 516 international education in canada international students are constituents of canada’s “education-migration nexus” in which immigration policies target our retention as “skilled” immigrants (robertson, 2013, p. 3). the vision of international students as long-term immigrants came about in the late post-war era; up until then, international students were intended as short-term visitors, specifically “aid targets” in canada’s foreign policy of international development and the building of a “multi-racial commonwealth” (kelley & trebilcock, 2010, p. 316; mccartney, 2016). international students from former colonies were invited to study in canada on funding programs (mccartney, 2016; trilokekar & el masri, 2019), initiatives that were imbued with neo-colonial paternalism and cold war goals to counteract the “spread” of communism (see mccartney, 2016). during the post-war economic boom-recession cycle, canada’s usual (and preferred) supply of white european labourers was growing scarce as recovery in europe was skyrocketing labour demands (kelley & trebilcock, 2010; simmons, 2010). canada’s need to find other sources of immigrant labour, together with its mission as a “prominent, middle-power, honestbroker” country in a post-war world (kelley & trebilcock, 2010, p. 18) shifted immigration practices away from its previously “racist and exclusionary orientation” (fleras, 2015, p. 94) and towards admissions of “any qualified person” based on human capital criteria such as education, skills, and language proficiency (p. 91). the 1967 points system further consolidated this approach with statistical measurements, and as the economy increasingly globalized and post-industrialized, an emphasis on admitting and retaining skilled workers was eventually integrated (fleras, 2015; simmons, 2010). by the turn of the 21st century, international students were being looked at not only as potential long-term immigrants, but also as skilled, in fact “ideal,” due to their “made-in-canada” education, language proficiency, assumed knowledge of and acclimatization to canadian society (government of canada, 2017), assumed self-sufficiency in their preparation for and integration into canadian life, and capacity to contribute to canada’s global competitiveness (cox, 2014; gates-gasse, 2012; trilokekar & el masri, 2019). the government set the goal of 450,000 international enrolments by 2022, which was surpassed in 2017 at 494,525, a 119% increase since 2010 (canadian bureau for international education, 2018). in addition to contributing human capital, international students are also appealing for their “dollar contributions to the economy” (trilokekar & el masri, 2019, p. 31). a shift from the aid model described above to a new model based on high international student tuition fees took place in the 1980s, initially to ease pressures of reduced federal funding for the postsecondary sector (trilokekar & el masri, 2019). today, international education has proven more than just a financial solution; it is a top national commodity (trilokekar & el masri, 2019). international tuition alone entails international students within canadian settler-colonial capitalism studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 517 “35% of all fees collected” by colleges and universities, and contributes “9.3% of total revenue” (usher, 2018, p. 3). combining their expenditures on education and living, international students contribute around 15 billion dollars annually to the national economy (government of canada, 2019). canada’s current standing as the fourth most popular study destination (canadian bureau for international education, 2018) suggests that international students seek canada as much as canada seeks us, and for more than an education. it is estimated that 60% of international students wish to immigrate to canada after graduation (canadian bureau for international education, 2018). over 114,000 former international students held work permits in 2018 alone (government of canada, 2019). my concern is how these circumstances situate international students within canada’s settlercolonial project. defining settler-colonialism coulthard (2014) defines settler-colonialism as a “domination” that “continue[s] to facilitate the dispossession of indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority” (pp. 6-7). an operative word is continue, marking settler-colonialism as ongoing and present. further, the central concern is the land, its resources, and implications for indigenous communities. processes of settlement and access to the land, specifically its transformations into capitalist spaces to be owned, occupied, or extracted by the canadian state and private actors, are dispossession and violence. this is because such processes take place on unceded lands. indigenous voices and viewpoints are also often excluded from these processes and the decisions leading up to them, which are ultimately made and enforced by the state and private corporations.1 moreover, indigenous peoples are the land (tuck & yang, 2012). infrastructures of capitalism that extract from the land are an existential destruction, infringing on the “material and spiritual sustenance of indigenous societies” (coulthard, 2014, p. 7). in this understanding, a real right to indigenous life is almost impossible within settler-colonial capitalism. capitalism indeed “must die” in order “for indigenous nations to live” (coulthard, 2014, p. 173). 1 gas and oil developments are notable examples, the most recent being the coastal gaslink pipeline that would run through the traditional territories of the wet’suwete’n nation in northwest british columbia against the nation leaders’ consent. in resistance, camps and blockades were set up in early 2020, which upon the orders of the supreme court were torn down by the rcmp (kestler-d’amours, 2020a, 2020b; hopkins, 2020). infrastructural blockades are common forms of “crucial act[s] of negation” by indigenous sovereignty movements (coulthard, 2014, p. 170). as state economic infrastructures are technologies of natural resource expropriation, indigenous resistance is not a pursuit for “negotiation” with the state but a dismantling of structures like railways and pipelines “that [are] core to the accumulation of capital in settler-political economies like canada” (coulthard, 2014, p. 170). bianca gomez studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 518 tuck & yang (2012) argue that immigration, as a form of non-indigenous settlement and capitalist development, is a “colonial pathway” (p. 17) through which immigrants inevitably become a part of settler-colonialism. although colonial displacement often compels outbound migration (sharma & wright, 2008/2009), in their new domain immigrants nonetheless “occupy and settle stolen indigenous land” (tuck & yang, 2012, p. 7). wolfe (2013) advances a complimentary argument that “colonised natives from one region” can be “settlers in a different region” (p. 263), emphasizing that being a settler has little to do with voluntarism or compulsion: “the fact that enslaved people immigrated against their will… does not alter the structural fact that their presence, however involuntary, was part of the process of native dispossession” (p. 263). in the case of some immigrants of colour, who are positioned in variously racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies that ultimately cast them as “non-white,” “the ability to be a minority citizen” is nevertheless “an option to become a brown settler” (tuck & yang, 2012, p. 18). indeed, the “high degree” of “internal heterogeneity” (wolfe, 2013, p. 263) of social categories and inequalities does not have any bearing on whether one is a settler or not, as settler relations “uniformly require the elimination of native alternatives” (p. 257). standing unwaveringly amidst all the differences is an ultimate binary between “native” and “settler.” within this framework, it seems that being a settler ultimately has much to do with place. also problematic is the space of citizenship itself. the “endpoint” of acquiring “equal legal and cultural entitlements is actually an investment in settler-colonialism” (tuck & yang, 2012, p. 18), because citizenship and residency rights are the terms of the settler-colonial state. this reiterates a key aspect of the wider debate within migration and settler-colonialism literature: the idea that citizenship and settlement, “whether by white people or people of colour,” can ultimately “be used to restrict aboriginal rights” (lawrence & dua, 2005, pp. 135-136), and the lack of engagement with this premise in antiracism discourse can frame immigrants of colour as “innocent” (p. 132). (issues in) complicating the migration-settlement-colonization dynamic international students have been perceived as benefitting canadian nation building since the world wars. today, international students are referred to by the state as ideal immigrants, due to their economic and human capital as students, workers, and eventually long-term residents and citizens. part of our relationship to canada’s national space is thus a relationship to the land, one in which we are settlers. the issue at hand is a tight consolidation of migration, settlement, and colonization, resulting in an ultimate binary between native and non-native, or effectively, native and settler. i find wolfe’s (2013) argument against opposing this binary compelling, in that opposition to the binary means international students within canadian settler-colonial capitalism studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 519 rejecting its historic reality, and ultimately upholding colonial discourse. wolfe argues that post-frontier settler-colonial policy in fact seeks to suppress the divide between native and non-native in the name of assimilation.2 while this binary has gained traction in antiracism literature and solidarity efforts between immigration and indigenous communities, chatterjee (2019) notes that it “cast[s] aside” immigrant and diaspora perspectives and struggles, including that of labour exploitation (p. 647). wolfe insists that settler-colonial policy suppresses the binary, whereas chatterjee highlights how it also thrives upon that very binary. in many contexts, the division between who is native or not is a colonial construction and extension of state rule (mamdani, 2001, as cited in sharma & wright, 2008/2009), and the violent “destruction… of the solidarities among the expropriated and the exploited across space” is a purposeful tool of capitalist expansion (sharma & wright, 2008/2009, p. 127). this paradox brings to mind bhabha’s (1983) conceptualisation of how colonial authority disavows itself from the “other” it defines. colonial authority assumes an external and separate position from the other, hardening and normalizing it as the complete antithesis: as “fixed,” “entirely knowable and visible” (bhabha, 1983, p. 23). the othered is “imprisoned in the circle of interpretation” (bhabha, 1983, p. 35) in which they are an entity in their own respect. disavowal allows colonial discourse to justify its superiority, warranting “discriminatory and authoritarian forms of political control” (bhabha, 1983, p. 35).3 i can understand the wariness in bhabha’s framework about transcending or dissolving the divide between native and non-native, as it upholds the disavowal function of colonial authority; but by the same token “the separation of human subjects” (chatterjee, 2019, p. 650) and their respective projects is also a win for colonial-capitalist discourse. the caveat wolfe (2013) suggests, that the path of deconstructing settler discourse via challenging the binary can “reconstruct it” (p. 274), applies to chatterjee’s (2019) concern as well: critical analyses in which the binary is upheld can in fact reconstruct the logic they aim to subvert. other scholars who challenge the binary model overall insist that the triad of migration-settlement-colonialism must be dismantled. it is a “mistake” to charge “migrants as seeking to colonize,” (walia, 2013) because it empowers the claim that all migrants are settler-colonists and effectively “renders the 2 wolfe describes “assimilation” as “a range of strategies intended to separate individual natives from their collective sovereignties and merge them irrecoverably into the settler mainstream” (wolfe, 2013, p. 258). 3 i suggest here “less overt” forms of control as well, such as assimilation, multiculturalism and politics of recognition. wolfe (2013) discusses the former two in the united states, where “natives have been subjected to a recurrent cycle of inducements [that] present domination as empowerment and thereby assert natives’ consent to their own dispossession” (p. 259). for the latter, coulthard (2014) argues at length that in the canadian context “colonial rule is reproduced through the ability to entice indigenous peoples to identify […] with the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition imposed and/or granted to them by the (settler) state” (p. 39). bianca gomez studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 520 entire process of human migration as a serious problem” (sharma & wright, 2008/2009, p. 123). “the only way not to be a ‘colonizer’ is to remain on the land with which one is associated” (sharma & wright, 2008/2009, p. 123; emphasis in original). this premise challenges the place-based discourse in the views presented earlier. furthermore, there is little space in such views to consider migrants and asylum seekers escaping violence, abuse, or poverty; for whom remaining on one’s native land is neither viable nor safe. understanding migration as a form of colonialism minimizes or even “den[ies] the violence done to people who moved or who move today” (sharma, 2015, p. 176). another issue in the migration-settlement-colonialism triad is the absence of race, or rather, the absence of consideration given to racialized precarity and dispossession. day (2015) challenges wolfe’s binary by integrating the history and afterlife of black slavery, while also rejecting the binary of black/non-black within afro-pessimism frameworks. her reconciliation reframes settler-colonial racial capitalism as an “ecology of power relations” – a dialectical analysis of race (labour) and indigeneity (land) – rather than a “linear chain of events” (day, 2015, p. 113). this interpretation brings to the forefront a “dual logic” of the settler-colonial project, of indigenous elimination and “mix[ing] the land with enslaved black labour” (day, 2015, p. 113). day draws from coulthard to emphasize that “the colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus of ‘base,’” but rather a “background field” where “market, racist, and patriarchal and state relations converge” (2015, p. 113). similarly, chatterjee (2019) describes settlercolonialism as a “project of simultaneous dispossession (of indigenous peoples) and precarious incorporation (of racialized immigrants)” (p. 650). along with her concerns with upholding the binary at the expense of recognizing racialized labour and precarity is the discouragement of engagement between im/migrant and indigenous social movements, which renders their “political goals” as “conflictual, at best irreconcilable” (chatterjee, 2019, p. 645). i find assurance in suggestions to explore interrelations of marginalized experiences. this is not a conflation between the goals and struggles of various groups, as these are differences that must be honoured. quoting viola et al. (2019) who paraphrase marxist thinker samir amin, it is through a “critical specificity” that we can accomplish a type of engagement with one another that balances between acknowledging commonalities and “refus[ing] to circumvent historical differences and alternative visions for the future, overlook[ing] the important tensions that are evident within and across disparate freedom struggles, or gloss[ing] over the barbaric logics of global capitalism as a major impediment in realizing the multiple horizons of justice” (p. 8). imagining settler colonialism as settler-colonial-racial capitalism, or to “bring back racialized labour-capital-nation nexus into the settler-colonial question” (chatterjee, 2019, p. 655), illuminates a matrix in which international students within canadian settler-colonial capitalism studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 521 “nonaligned theoretical frameworks and oppositional movements” (viola et al., 2019, p. 8) are positioned horizontally rather than as rungs of a hierarchy. as day (2015) alludes, the latter pulls us into questions of epistemic privilege, where the focus is on determining who is more oppressed and thus bears the most valid perspective on the world. while these discussions heed our differences, the approach can divide us further and ultimately empower settler-colonial capitalism towards antagonizing the marginalized against one another. the question of labour considering racialized precarious labour allows international students of colour to imagine themselves within the settler-colonial question. we are sought after as profit and as the self-sufficient skilled labourer, a tagline imbued with discourses of exclusion and control particularly of non-white bodies (see gomez, 2017). programs such as work and study permits are marketed as opportunities to develop “canadian experience” and eventually immigrate, but these opportunities are also essentially legally enclosed spaces. for example, international students cannot work full-time during the school year and are ineligible for government and private bank loans (government of ontario, 2019), exacerbating strains caused by steep international student tuition. the deportation order given to jobandeep singh sandhu in 2019 for working more than the legal number of hours focused attention on the “irrationality” of work restrictions, especially as many international students reportedly balance full-time school with intense work hours to “pinch pennies” for tuition (nassar, 2019; ricci, 2019). i had always depended on labour as an analytical category to understand the international student positionality and relationship to the canadian state. however, i have since learned that labour falls short, in at least two ways. the first is as a tool for engaging with difference within international student populations. while it works as a way for “non-black and non-native people of colour [to] interpellat[e] themselves within settler-colonial relations,” king (2014) articulates the framework’s inability to incorporate the black body and experience, as it sidelines the idea that slavery goes beyond “exploitation and alienation” to constitute “accumulation and fungibility”. day (2015) highlights that exploited workers’ demands for “fairness and improved labour conditions” do not fully emancipate the black slave, who requires “all production [to] cease regardless of its democratization” (p. 114). although day does not foreclose the conception of slavery as labour, she recognizes how slavery and labour are “decoupled” by some afro-pessimist scholars, in that the slave’s labour is not as labour is for the proletariat, because the former was more akin to property based on the “accumulation of black bodies regardless of their utility as labourers” (wilderson, 2003, as cited in day, 2015, p. 114). thus, if the exploited worker cannot put forward “any bianca gomez studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 522 demands… that can satisfy or solve the experience of black social death” (day, 2015, p. 115), then labour may fail as an analytic for black international students.4 secondly, according to tuck and yang (2012), “‘labour’ or ‘workers’ as an agential political class fails to activate the decolonizing project” (p. 18). i return to day (2015), who sees the indigenous body, like the black slave, as excluded from the labour paradigm; but instead of accumulation, the settler-colonial logic thrives on the elimination of the indigenous body. subsuming the labour precarities of international students of colour within settler-colonial relations helps emphasize the colonial historicity of racialized precarious labour; but considering king’s (2014) and day’s (2015) insights, it risks alienating black international students from the conversation. as well, addressing racialized migrant labour exploitation and its colonial historicity, and grounding solutions in citizenship and labour rights, may cultivate international student agency and long-term security in canada; but these approaches do not address the goal of honouring indigenous claims to their lands. if a common ground is both possible and just, it seems to me that it can be found through engagement between differently marginalized groups, or nonaligned solidarities (viola et. al, 2019). in closing (for now) as i close this piece, i reflect on contextual specificity when talking about decolonization. throughout this discussion, i have spoken of decolonization as it relates to the original custodians of turtle island, to whom i and others have some relationship as we live, survive or thrive on their lands. however, for those of us who are racialized im/migrants, we are “displaced victims of a global empire and capitalism” (walia, 2013). there seem to be opportunities to speak of decolonization in our “home” contexts as well.5 is it possible to speak about, and eventually practice, decolonization in our respective contexts simultaneously (across space but at the same time, in the same moment)? i ask this question while wondering whether it is even possible for subjects like me to have a role in decolonization in canada alone, nonaligned but in productive solidarity with indigenous peers. i also learned that an understanding of the international student experience as “exploitation as capital” is one epistemological framework among a 4 my present knowledge on this question is limited, signifying an opportunity for future exploration, given the diversities of black experiences of international education and immigration in canada. an additional question is whether the idea of black fungibility holds water for the black or african experience outside the north american context. 5 my case is the philippines. i am struggling navigating this because my surname is that of colonizers and i grew up in cambodia, a land not mine but “home” to me. many others bear similar complexities in their own life journeys, indicating the limits of place-based frameworks. in saying this, i agree with chatterjee’s (2019) call for a vision of a space in between “place” and “space.” international students within canadian settler-colonial capitalism studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 523 potential many. in the canadian context alone, there needs to be a bridge with analytics of black fungibility, as well as with analytics of specific (post-) colonial contexts.6 these necessities mark both the richness and challenges of exploring the topic of international students and education. we leave home to study “here,” but that is where the shared experience ends. home bears different meanings for each of us, and here in canada we are of different backgrounds, upbringings, and legal statuses – and have different aspirations and daily realities. even as we are subjected to the same structures and politics that drive immigration and labour policies and discourses, how they condition our day-to-day and our envisioned futures is not the same. to circle back, beyond our differences and similarities we all need to keep in mind our accountabilities, that as we “engag[e] in the very structures of the state,” we possibly bolster “the project of settlement” (chatterjee, 2019, p. 649). this awareness itself is a responsibility. to do otherwise, as stein (2018) warns, “naturalize[s] the histories and structures of colonial violence” within which we are all, indigenous and non-indigenous, “already unevenly positioned” (p. 472). from this point onwards, i hope to help unpack and untangle this web of intersecting oppressions, resources for which i am privileged to access as a graduate student. but academia itself is a work in progress. while there are efforts of “incorporating the study of settlercolonialism, racism, and imperialism into university contexts and curricula” (stein, 2018, p. 472), more is needed beyond incorporating (including defining what “more” means). a crucial starting point is the matter of indigenous representation in post-secondary education, and if the space of post-secondary education itself offers proper tools for decolonization for indigenous scholars and their communities. in addition, how can nonindigenous communities such as international students support such movements? these issues relate to the question of engagement, and i side with those who regard engagement as an important tool towards the ultimate goal of decolonial justice. there must be a way to honour our diversities without allowing them to divide us. references bhabha, h. k. (1983). the other question. screen, 24(6), 18-36. canadian bureau for international education. (2018, march 16). international students surpass 2022 goal. https://cbie.ca/international-students-surpass-2022-goal/ chatterjee, s. (2019). immigration, anti-racism and indigenous self determination: towards a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary settler colonial. social identities, 25(5), 644661. 6 the current top study destinations are in the global north, and most international students are from the global south (stein & de andreotti, 2016). in canada, most international students are from china, india, and south korea; streams from france, saudi arabia, brazil and mexico have been increasing in recent years (kim & kwak, 2019). bianca gomez studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 524 coulthard, g. s. (2014). red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. university of minnesota press. cox, c. (2014). international students in canada: policies and practices for social inclusion [master’s major research paper, ryerson university]. ryerson university library digital repository. https://digital.library.ryerson.ca/islandora/object/rula%3a3281 day, i. (2015). being or nothingness: indigeneity, antiblackness, and settler colonial critique. critical ethnic studies, 1(2), 102-121. fleras, a. (2015). immigration canada: evolving realities and emerging challenges in a postnational world. ubc press. gates-gasse, e. (2012). international students as immigrants. in h. bauder (ed.), immigration and settlement: challenges, experiences and opportunities (pp. 271-296). canadian scholars’ press. gomez, b. (2017). pursuing permanence: former international students’ trajectories to permanent residency in canada [master’s major research paper, ryerson university]. ryerson university library digital repository. https://digital.library.ryerson.ca/islandora/object/rula%3a6984 government of canada. (2017). 2017 annual report to parliament on immigration. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/publicationsmanuals/annual-report-parliament-immigration-2017.html government of canada. (2019). 2018 annual report to parliament on immigration. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/publicationsmanuals/annual-report-parliament-immigration-2018/report.html government of ontario. (2019). study in ontario: international students. https://www.ontario.ca/page/study-ontario-international-students hopkins, r. h. (2020, march 1). it is not the wet'suwet'en who are hurting canada. al jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/3/1/it-is-not-the-wetsuweten-who-are-hurtingcanada/ kelley, n., & trebilcock, m. (2010). the making of the mosaic: a history of canadian immigration policy. university of toronto press. kestler-d’amours, j. (2020a, february 6). canada police begin clearing wet'suwet'en land defender camps. al jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/2/6/canada-policebegin-clearing-wetsuweten-land-defender-camps kestler-d’amours, j. (2020b, february 14). ‘rcmp off wet'suwet'en land’: solidarity grows for land defenders. al jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/2/14/rcmp-offwetsuweten-land-solidarity-grows-for-land-defenders kim, a. h., & kwak, m.-j. (2019). introduction: education migration, social mobility, and structuring institutions. in a. h. kim & m.-j. kwak (eds.), outward and upward mobilities: international students in canada, their families, and structuring institutions (pp. 3-24). university of toronto press. king, t. (2014, june 10). labor’s aphasia: toward antiblackness as constitutive to settler colonialism. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society. https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/labors-aphasia-toward-antiblackness-asconstitutive-to-settler-colonialism/ lawrence, b., & dua, e. (2005). decolonizing antiracism. social justice, 32(4), 120-143. mccartney, d. m. (2016). inventing international students: exploring discourses in international student policy talk, 1945–75. historical studies in education, 28(2), 1-27. nassar, s. (2019, may 24). thousands join effort to stop international student from being deported for ‘working too hard,’ he says. cbc news. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/international-student-deportation-work-permit1.5149434 ricci, t. (2019, june 10). foreign students say they ‘have no choice’ but to work more hours than their permits allow. cbc news. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/international-students-speak-out-about-why-theywork-more-hours-1.5162316 robertson, s. (2013). transnational student-migrants and the state. palgrave macmillan. international students within canadian settler-colonial capitalism studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 515-525, 2020 525 sharma, n. (2015). strategic anti-essentialism: decolonizing decolonization. in k. mckittrick (ed.), sylvia wynter: on being human as praxis (pp. 164-180). duke university. sharma, n., & wright, c. (2008/2009). decolonizing resistance, challenging colonial states. social justice, 35(3), 120-138. simmons, a. (2010). immigration and canada: global and transnational perspectives. scholar’s press inc. stein, s. (2018). national exceptionalism in the ‘educanada’ brand: unpacking the ethics of internationalization marketing in canada. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 39(3), 461-477. stein, s., & de andreotti, v. o. (2016). cash, competition, or charity: international students and the global imaginary. higher education, 72(2), 225-239. trilokekar, r. d., & el masri, a. (2019). ‘international students are…golden’: canada’s changing policy contexts, approaches, and national peculiarities in attracting international students as future immigrants. in a. h. kim & m.-j. kwak (eds.), outward and upward mobilities: international students in canada, their families, and structuring institutions (pp. 25-55). university of toronto press. tuck, e., & yang, k. w. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 1(1), 1-40. usher, a. (2018). the state of post-secondary education in canada, 2018. higher education strategy associates. https://higheredstrategy.com/wpcontent/uploads/2018/08/hesa_spec_2018_final.pdf viola, m. j., saranillo, d. i., pegues, j. h., & day, i. (2019). introduction to solidarities of nonalignment: abolition, decolonization, and anticapitalism. journal of the critical ethnic studies association, 5(1-2), 5-20. walia, h. (2013). undoing border imperialism. ak press. wolfe, p. (2013). recuperating binarism: a heretical introduction. settler colonial studies, 3(34), 257-279. bannerman final feb 26 19 correspondence address: sara bannerman, department of communication studies & multimedia, mcmaster university, hamilton, on, l8s 4l8; email: banners@mcmaster.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 1, 187-190, 2019 book review chokepoints: global private regulation on the internet tusikov, natasha. (2016). oakland, ca: university of california press. isbn 9780520291218 (cloth) us$85.00; isbn 9780520291225 (paper) us$29.95; isbn 9780520965034 (epub) (us$29.95). 320 pages sara bannerman mcmaster university, canada google, ebay, godaddy and paypal – intermediaries that now control huge swaths of the internet’s search, marketplace, advertising, domain name, and payment activities – have become some of the leading threats to prospects for social justice. there have been significant victories in recent battles over the regulation of the internet, such as the 2012 “internet blackout” that stopped proposed american legislation that would have left web sites carrying intellectual property-infringing content vulnerable to total shutdown. such victories are pyrrhic, as natasha tusikov’s (2016) important book shows; effectively the same measures to shut down web services have been put in place anyway, without legislative oversight, through informal agreements between intellectual property owners, government officials, and internet intermediaries. tusikov reveals that eight such agreements now regulate the internet, having been established privately through back room deals. tusikov (2016) reveals in chokepoints: global private regulation on the internet, that efforts to shut down wikileaks by cutting off payment and domain services to the site launched a new phase in internet regulation; legislation would no longer be the primary tool of enforcement. rather, a new wave of back room deals saw intermediaries agree to act as enforcers for corporate intellectual property owners. through 90 interviews with government officials, corporate actors, and civil society groups in the us, uk, australia, and canada, tusikov traces the establishment of the secret sara bannerman studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 187-190, 2019 188 handshake agreements that would turn internet intermediaries into “chokepoints” that control many of the main functions of the internet globally, and that have the power to disable sites and sites’ revenue streams. following an introduction that gives an overview of the roles of macrointermediaries in anti-counterfeiting efforts, regime theory and the concept of the regulatory state, tusikov walks us through the rise of multinational corporations’ influence on american and global intellectual property policy from the late 1970s to 2012, up to the failure of rights holders’ efforts to expand intellectual property rights enforcement measures under the proposed stop online piracy act and the proposed protect intellectual property act. the three chapters that follow trace the establishment of secret handshake agreements that established similar forms of control over payment, internet access, and marketplace “chokepoints.” the final two chapters of tusikov’s book reveal new trends in relationships established between the state and corporate actors and offer recommendations for ways forward that would strengthen digital rights. renenue chokepoints the uk and us governments, in 1996 and 2006 respectively, formed initiatives with nonprofit partners that would see payment providers like visa, mastercard, and paypal terminate services to websites involved in the distribution of child pornography (pp. 78-79). a similar initiative in 2005 saw payment providers agree to prohibit payment processing for sites violating tobacco sale laws (p. 79). by 2009, as tusikov recounts, the uk had established a similar anti-counterfeiting agreement with payment providers (p. 81). under threat of criminal charges for money laundering by the city of london police (p. 85), payment processers dropped their initial reluctance to police the internet, and began voluntarily to work with police and intellectual property rights holders to choke revenue to sites accused of intellectual property infringement, operating without court oversight or judicial orders (p. 84). agreements with major internet advertising intermediaries saw industrycompiled blacklists of sites (such as sites alleged to sell counterfeit products). blacklisted sites became ineligible to be hosts of ads for major ad intermediaries, choking ad revenue stream. access chokepoints intellectual property rights holders have also pressured search providers to adopt informal agreements governing internet searches. such agreements would demote infringing sites in search results, prioritize certified sites, deindex sites based on court orders, “improve” notice-and-takedown requirements, and limit “suggested” and “related” searches (p. 135). while book reviews studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 187-190, 2019 189 google has been resistant to interference with its search results, it has made significant concessions, beginning to demote infringing sites, streamlining notice-and-takedown, and in 2011 and 2012 adjusting its autocomplete feature to prevent terms associated with piracy (pp. 136-137). such measures, including automated notice-and-takedown measures, result in “wrongful and abusive” enforcement, incorrect takedowns, and the labeling of legitimate site operators as criminals (p. 154), choking access to infringing and legitimate web sites. marketplace chokepoints online marketplaces ebay and taobao also signed enforcement agreements to make enforcement agreements faster, more streamlined, and more proactive (p. 157). the resulting takedowns of sellers and products from their marketplaces are also imperfect, as marketplaces do not have the expertise or knowledge to distinguish with complete accuracy between infringing and legitimate products (p. 186). trends the list of social problems that intermediaries are responsible for regulating is expanding, from child pornography, illegal gambling, and political extremism to intellectual property (p. 189). private enforcement regimes have been established with the facilitation and backing of the uk and us governments. in fact, intermediaries, many initially reluctant to act as internet regulators, have been coerced by threat of legal action to take up the role of regulator (p. 194). rights holders in the north have been able to enroll the uk, us and eu governments to protect intellectual property rights, targeting china in particular, ensuring that the south-to-north flow of royalties and revenues is not disrupted (pp. 190, 199), and shifting the burden of intellectual property enforcement to intermediaries (p. 199). whereas edward snowden’s revelations about american government mass surveillance revealed that governments enroll intermediaries as massive sources of data and information about their customers, tusikov reveals that intermediaries are also tapped because of their ability to restrict the flow of information, to shut down web sites and to remove content (p. 223). by enrolling transnational intermediaries, intellectual property holders have been able to circumvent the limits of national legislation and national borders, establishing an extra-legal transnational enforcement regime (p. 201). tusikov asks, “is this the future we want?” (p. 15). she calls for greater transparency around the establishment, nature, scope, and operation of nonbinding agreements (p. 231). as well, she calls for the establishment of sara bannerman studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 187-190, 2019 190 stronger laws protecting digital rights such as privacy, net neutrality, data protection, and freedom of expression (p. 239). tusikov’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of how the internet is regulated. it shows an important shift towards private informal regulation that is broader and stronger than the legislative regimes that were the focus of previous enforcement campaigns. private and automated regulation will likely produce many wrongs for which there is little accountability or recourse. tusikov’s painstakingly-researched work is illuminating. it is an important and fascinating read – one that paints a disturbing picture of the future of internet regulation – a future in which activists’ tasks in confronting internet injustices will likely be more difficult. gray final before ts feb 22 19 correspondence address: mandi gray, department of sociology, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: graym@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 1, 196-200, 2019 book review sexual violence at canadian universities: activism, institutional responses, and strategies for change quinlan, elizabeth, quinlan, andrea, fogel, curtis, & taylor, gail. (2017). waterloo, on: wilfrid laurier press. isbn 9781771122832 (paper) cdn$44.99; isbn 9781771122856 (kindle) (cdn$13.49). 352 pages mandi gray york university, canada there has been growing interest in sexual assault on university campuses within the last several years as demonstrated by a number of media investigations, research projects, and legislative changes across canada. sexual violence at canadian universities: activism, institutional responses, and strategies for change edited by elizabeth quinlan, andrea quinlan, curtis fogel and gail taylor (2017) is a timely collection examining a number of the key issues from a range of perspectives. the collection includes 15 chapters that are divided into five major themes and written by a combination of scholars, students, activists, student groups, and not-for-profit organizations. the contributors also represent a wide range of geographical locations, lived experiences, and academic disciplines. the collection “takes up the problem of sexual violence as both an individual experience and confluence of structural forces” (p. 4). the objective of the collection is to “link theory and praxis in relation to sexual assault on campuses across subject areas of violent campus spaces in university sports and cyber space, institutional responses to sexual assault, anti-violence activism on and off the campus, and strategies for change” (p. 4). overall, the collection meets this objective stated in the introductory chapter. prior to the publication of this collection, a majority of academic books and reports solely examined sexual violence on american universities and colleges. therefore, the canadian focus of this collection is a timely and book reviews studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 196-200, 2019 197 necessary intervention. there is a lot that canadians can learn about campus sexual assault from what has happened in the united states, as there is more legal infrastructure available to students (see chapter 15 by sheehy & gilbert). however, there are significant differences between american and canadian university cultures; most notably, university sports and fraternity culture are not as deeply embedded into canadian campus culture (see chapter 7 by fogel). the cultural and legal differences between american and canadian post-secondary campuses makes this collection a necessary starting point for those interested in the numerous and complex issues pertaining to preventing, addressing, and responding to sexual assault in the canadian context. the collection is a necessary read for everyone ranging from undergraduate students, activists, administrators, university faculty and staff, not-for-profit front-line workers, policy advisors, and researchers. the first theme of the collection is titled “campus sexual violence: impacts, voids and institutional betrayals.” this section begins with a statistical overview of the consequences of sexual violence on campus, focusing on the educational consequences for canadian women (chapter 1 by stermac, horowitz, & bance). the next chapter speaks to the significant lack of literature examining the experiences of sexual violence against indigenous women on canadian campuses (chapter 2 by bourassa, bendig, oleson, ozog, billan, owl, & ross-hopley). this is an important and necessary contribution as the authors explore what they call the “policy void,” referencing the ongoing institutional failure to address the unique needs of indigenous students and the intergenerational impacts of colonization (chapter 2). the final chapter in this first section, written by quinlan, explores the contradictions of the corporate university wherein the university takes a public stance against sexual violence while also attempting to significantly cut costs (chapter 3). the second thematic section of this book is titled “violent spaces on canadian campuses.” the chapters in this section make systemic linkages through the examination of a number of high profile cases ranging from the rape of two women in the york university dorm rooms (chapter 4 by trusolino), rape chants at st. mary’s university (chapter 5 by haiven) and the university of british columbia (chapter 6 by quinlan), the dalhousie dentistry students using facebook to publish misogynist comments about their classmates (chapter 6 by quinlan), and suspension of the university of ottawa following two hockey players being charged with sexual assault (chapter 7 by fogel). quinlan’s chapter on the use of technology as a means to facilitate sexual violence provides an important analysis of the role of social media and other communicative technologies in perpetuating sexual violence on campus. this section is powerful because it provides numerous examples of the extent of rape culture on canadian campuses and makes a compelling argument that sexual violence on campus is not “about one bad apple” as trusolino argues (p. 79); rather, the university response to sexual violence often relies upon neoliberal logic focusing solely on individuals and mandi gray studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 196-200, 2019 198 the university response to sexual violence and results in the increased securitization of campus and the expectation that those most likely to experience sexual violence self-securitize. as a whole, the chapters in this section challenge individual responses to sexual violence by demonstrating the systemic issues within the university that exist nation-wide. the third thematic section titled “institutional prevention and responses to sexual violence” examines three different initiatives to respond to sexual violence on campus: metropolitan action committee on violence against women and children (metrac) campus safety audit (chapter 8 by gunraj); the bystander initiative at the university of windsor (chapter 9 by forrest & senn); and the student safety in nova scotia report (chapter 10 by profitt & ross). the chapters by gunraj and forrest & senn are reflective pieces on their experiences working to end sexualized violence on campus. in contrast, the chapter by profitt & ross is a feminist critique of the student safety report, which is premised on the position that prevention of and responses to sexual violence must acknowledge patriarchal violence and be grounded upon an intersectional social justice framework (p. 214). this leads into the fourth theme of the book: “fighting back: antiviolence activism on campus.” this section includes two reflective pieces on campus activism at the university of saskatchewan (chapter 11 by quinlan & laiuk) and york university (chapter 12 by mackay, wolfe, & rutherford), which together highlight the reality that the ongoing failure of universities to respond to sexual violence is often illuminated following highprofile incidents. additionally, these chapters are important as they provide readers with a historical overview of sexual assault activism on campus, which has helped to created services like the sexual assault survivors line (sassl) at york and the coalition against sexual assault (casa) at university of saskatchewan, and all too often is both forgotten as students graduate and it is written out of official university history. the final theme of the collection is “strategies for change,” which provides readers with tangible “next steps” for proactive responses to sexual violence policy and programming. this section has three chapters from different perspectives. the first is by community educator julie lalonde on the importance of university partnerships with community-based organizations (chapter 13). a major issue identified in previous chapters is that university administrators often do not want to invest in sexual violence prevention and response until there is a high-profile incident on their campus. in this context, lalonde recommends that universities proactively engage with community partners as opposed to offering reactionary responses to incidents that are reported on in the news. cahill’s chapter argues the need for university administrators to utilize the expertise of feminist faculty who specialize in sexual violence (chapter 14). to those readers unfamiliar with sexual violence policy development on campus, this may seem like an obvious suggestion. however, during the policy development at my own university, i witnessed the exclusion of feminist faculty with expertise in book reviews studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 196-200, 2019 199 sexual violence, resulting in university administrators and student groups with no expertise in sexualized violence dictating the policy (gray, cooper, & pin, forthcoming). indeed, as demonstrated in the chapters by lalonde and cahill, the refusal of university administrators to engage with community organizations and feminist faculty can have detrimental effects on policy development and service provisioning on campus. the final chapter by sheehy and gilbert provides an overview of the unique legal context in canada and provides a thorough analysis of what can be learned by the policy and legal development in the united states, which is far more developed in comparison (chapter 15). overall, this collection captures a wide range of expertise ranging from senior faculty, student activists, community educators, and graduate students. the canadian focus of the collection offers an important contribution to the campus sexual violence literature and fills a significant gap within the current academic landscape. a major strength of the collection is that it provides a historical account vis-à-vis sexual violence activism on campuses across canada. in the midst of the current “me too” movement and as provincial governments begin passing legislation requiring post-secondary campuses to develop sexual assault policy, within public discourse campus sexual assault often is framed as a newly discovered social problem. however, the chapters in this book demonstrate that both sexual assaults on campuses and campus activism have a long history, thereby providing an important institutional history that will be useful for future activists and scholars alike. from my experience as a campus activist, the collection requires a deeper analysis of the impact of neoliberalism and the corporatization of the university. while some of the chapters do touch on the growing neoliberalization of the university (chapter 3 by quinlan; chapter 4 by trusolino), future research needs to further explore linkages between campus sexual assault prevention as a means to enhance the securitization and militarization of the university campus. furthermore, there needs to be acknowledgement that not all student and activist work around sexual assault is actually beneficial to those who experience sexual violence and some of these groups actively contribute to the securitization and militarization of campus (gregory, 2012; gray & pin, 2017). as julie gregory (2012) argues, “future analyses must include explicit criticisms of the ways in which various groups accept, through activities that are overt or covert, militarizationcorporatization as necessary for ensuring student, faculty, and staff safety” (p. 80). indeed, some of the activism highlighted in the reviewed book requires critical reflection, most notably the metrac safety audits discussed by gunraj in chapter 8. the safety audit has been mobilized by canadian administrators to further their own brand by holding it up as a demonstration of their own institutional benevolence while doing very little to actually prevent and respond to sexual assault on campus (gregory, 2012). likewise, at york university (as elsewhere), the safety audit resulted in increasing security patrols, expanding the safe walk program, expanding the mandate of mandi gray studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 196-200, 2019 200 security officers, increasing the number of cctv cameras, improving lighting and enhancing security communications (shoukri, 2013, as cited in gray & pin, 2017). such recommendations further the stranger danger myth of campus sexual assault as opposed to addressing larger structural issues on campus; in other words, such audits have not resulted in any substantive changes to institutional policy or procedure that would actually support those wishing to report sexual violence (gray & pin, 2017). rather, a more critical reading would highlight that, as part of the corporatization of the campus, the growing campus sexual assault industry is associated with the hiring of private security firms, not-for-profit-organizations, and research centres that have “capitalized upon women’s fears by commodifying safety in the forms of gadgets, alarms, and workshops that socialize women to be ever more fearful” (hall, 2004, p. 4). these calls for more critical analyses notwithstanding, the reviewed collection offers an important contribution to the growing study of sexual assault on canadian campuses. the collection references the complexities of issues that coincide with sexual assault, while also highlighting the need for future research on campus sexual assault. that said, the collection seriously lacks substantive engagement or acknowledgement of the campus experiences of the queer and trans community, black community members on campus, or the unique experiences of sexual violence faced by graduate students, university staff and faculty, whose experiences are fundamentally different from those of undergraduate students. future research needs to reflect the multiplicity of experiences on campus and the intersecting barriers that various university community members face beyond the sole focus on presumably heterosexual cis-women undergraduate students. references gray, m., & pin, l. (2017). “i would like it if some of our tuition went to providing pepper spray for students”: university branding, securitization, and campus sexual assault at a canadian university. the annual review of interdisciplinary justice research, 6, 86-110. gray, m., cooper, a. & pin, l. (forthcoming). curated consultation and the illusion of inclusion in york university’s sexual assault policy-making process. in k. a. malinen (ed.), dis/consent: perspectives on sexual violence and consensuality. winnipeg, mb: fernwood publishing. gregory, j. (2012). university branding via securitization. topia: canadian journal of cultural studies, 28, 65-86. hall, r. (2004). “it can happen to you”: rape prevention in the age of risk management. hypatia, 19, 1-19. simpson, walcott & coulthard final june 25 18 correspondence address: rinaldo walcott, women and gender studies institute, university of toronto, toronto, on, m5s 1c6; email: rinaldo.walcott@utoronto.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 panel discussion idle no more and black lives matter: an exchange leanne betasamosake simpson michi saagiig nishnaabeg scholar rinaldo walcott university of toronto, canada glen coulthard university of british columbia, canada in this panel exchange, michi saagiig nishnaabeg scholar leanne betasamosake simpson and black studies scholar rinaldo walcott speak about idle no more (inm) and black lives matter (blm) respectively, with yellowknives dene scholar glen coulthard responding to them both. the speakers were invited to situate indigenous and black resistance in the post2010 global movement assemblage. walcott and simpson situate blm and inm within longer histories of struggle for freedom and being, and address translocal connectivities, but notably without using the language of assemblage. each for their own reasons rejects assemblage thinking in favour of forms of critical thought arising from histories of resistance with which they are identified: the radical black tradition, nissnaabeg intelligence, and indigenous resurgence more generally. simpson offers a compelling alternative to assemblage in the image of “constellations of co-resistance.” see also: “situating indigenous and black resistance in the global movement assemblage” in this issue. - leanne betasamosake simpson, rinaldo walcott & glen coulthard studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 76 on idle no more leanne betasamosake simpson my academic and artistic work is based in anishnaabe thought and intelligence.1 that’s where i turn theoretically and methodologically when i think about social movements and organizing, resistance and resurgence. so, i come from a different theoretical perspective. i have been asked to talk today about the idle no more movement. i first want to start by taking a step back to acknowledge the ongoing history and context in which that movement took place. i get up really early in the morning and i write, because no one else is up. i watch the sun come up. our word in nishnabemowin for dawn is biidaaban. biidaaban means dawn or the light before dawn if you look it up in a dictionary. susan blight, a nishnaabe scholar from treaty 3, told me about her understanding of this word that comes from elder alex mckay of kitchenuhmaykoosib inninuwag. if you split this word apart, it is interesting theoretically and conceptually. to me, it has a lot to do with what we are talking about today. “bii” is a prefix, a future tense; the future is coming towards us, at us, at that moment when the sunlight first comes above the horizon; full anticipation of the future; you can see the whole picture. “daa” is a word for home; the present; the exactly right now. it is a verb for living in a certain place, or in the present. “ban” is a suffix that we add to someone’s name after they have passed; it is used for when something doesn’t exist. so every morning, when that first light appears, biidaaban, dawn, is a collapsing of the future and the past onto the present; the present is a collapsing of the past and the future. thinking about that every morning, i don’t think so much about futures. but i think a lot about what we are doing in the present, as a moment of creation, of collective presence. what does this have to do with mobilization? i am michi saagiig (mississauga) nishnaabeg. my territory is the north shore of lake ontario, just north and east of st. catharines, on, where this symposium is taking place. alongside the black community, my nation has lived through 400 years of settler colonial violence aimed at removing our bodies from our land. our bodies are attacked for the purpose of dispossession and maintaining that dispossession through heteropatriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism. this is an eliminatory violence that asymmetrically targets two-spirit, queer, trans and gender non-conforming indigenous bodies – to the point where in 1724 we had a french jesuit missionary and ethnologist in my territory bragging that after 75 years of missionary work, queer indigenous people were now looked upon with scorn by their own people (see lafitau, 2013). 1 this piece adapts material from simpson, l. b. (2017), as we have always done: indigenous freedom through radical resistance. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. idle no more & black lives matter: an exchange studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 77 so, it’s a miracle that i’m here – not in the magical sense, but because it is a result of centuries of resistance against all odds. and it’s a testament to the resistance and the mobilization of my ancestors, my family, my community, and my nation that i exist at all, and that i can say any words in my language. so, i think a lot about what my ancestors, family, community, and nation did to ensure that i survive, so that i could be here today at all. that seems like a miracle to me. a tremendous amount of brilliance, mobilization, organization, and resistance went into having any brown, black, or red bodies on the land right now at all. there different kinds of indigenous resistance. when canadians think of resistance, they think of protest, of mass mobilization, because that is recognizable to them, often because it means they cannot physically ignore our disruption. the idle no more movement is a movement that was born out of 400 years of resistance that came before. idle no more is only the latest mass mobilization visible to white canada. in the fall of 2012 and the winter of 2013, indigenous disruption was something white canada could no longer ignore. we were in shopping malls, we were in intersections, we were in their social media feeds and we were on the nightly news. i participated in the movement as an organizer and as a writer, and i’ve thought a lot in the aftermath about indigenous mobilization and organizing – what we did well, and what we didn’t. idle no more was a coalition of diverse people within the indigenous community. some people were mobilized and protesting because they wanted the omnibus bills brought in by the harper government changed.2 there were others who were concerned about social conditions on reserves, especially in the north. there were others who wanted their treaty rights recognized and affirmed by the canadian state. there were activists who had been working on missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and two spirit people, and there were lifelong organizers concerned with environmental issues. there was a group of us interested in indigenous resurgence. there were lots of students and youth leaders. there were lots of elders. there were lots of regular people that care very deeply for the land, their families and their communities. from the perspective of my participation in that movement, i want to share some of my thinking, in the form of four interventions, about what i learned and what i think we need to do differently. movement building in the era of internet on one hand, the internet was insanely useful for us. we were able to mobilize vast numbers of people quickly into single points on the ground. it was also extremely useful in terms of self-representation because the 2 stephen harper was canada’s conservative prime minister from 2006-2015. leanne betasamosake simpson, rinaldo walcott & glen coulthard studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 78 canadian media is extremely racist. to get our message out, we were able to write the movement as it was happening on the ground through a series of blogs and indigenous platforms to represent our own issues in our own voices, and to influence the corporate media that way, which was very useful. but there are also problems with internet organizing and it requires critical thought. when nishnaabeg mobilized in the past, we spent a considerable amount of time movement building. we did this for a few reasons, the first of which was that our political system is relational; it is entirely built upon intimate reciprocal relationships with humans and non-humans, with the land, and with other political orders. nishnaabeg life, nishnaabeg worlds are hubs of relationships through time and space. that’s the world we built and that’s the world we live in. in times of political tension, or upheaval, or in times of transformation, we sink increased presence into the relationships that will sustain us individually and collectively through that transformation. in the time of pontiac and tkamse, this meant travelling long distances with delegations and visiting with communities of people – sharing ceremony, food, developing a face-to-face intimacy, and building trust. this wasn’t a unique practice that was reserved for times of transformation or upheaval. this movement, this relationality, was the fabric of life. organizing as a way of life. this movement building step is critical in all movements, but it is particularly crucial to think this through in the age of the internet, when a seemingly easy short cut exists. i say “seemingly,” because on a very basic level i wonder how the internet – as another structure of control whose primary purpose is to make corporations money – is at all helpful in the movement building phase. i wonder if the simulated worlds of the internet, are simulations that serve only to amplify capitalism, misogyny, transphobia, anti-queerness, white supremacy, and create further dependencies on settler colonialism in the physical world. i wonder if this creates further alienation from oneself, from indigenous thought and practices and from the indigenous material world. i wonder if this is a digital dispossession from ourselves, because it further removes us from what my colleague glen coulthard calls grounded normativity (see coulthard & simpson, 2016). the internet is the ultimate cartesian expression of mind, and mind only. there are no bodies on the internet. there is no land on the internet. insertion of indigeneity in cyberspace is not insertion of indigeneity in the physical world. as much as it pains me to admit, grounded normativity does not structurally exist in the cyber world because it is predicated on deep, spiritual, emotional, reciprocal, real world relationships between living beings. dispossessed from our indigenous material worlds, our thought systems and our practices, are we losing the ability to be makers, and to solve problems? or at the very least, are we accelerating this loss because most of our time is spent on screens connected to the internet? how are we generating theory-aspractice on the internet? how are we building a movement that centres idle no more & black lives matter: an exchange studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 79 indigenous makers when internet access is so unevenly distributed across our territories? how is the internet anything more than a house of cards when the next distraction is just one second away? how would my ancestors feel about me being so fully integrated into a system of settler colonial surveillance and control when i have very little knowledge of how any of this technology works? i can’t “fix” my phone. i don’t know how to set up alternative digital communication systems. i don’t know how to protect myself from state surveillance. i do know how to do exactly what large corporations – facebook, apple, twitter and google – want me to do to make them money, and i do it for the most part uncritically. i do know how to engage with apps and software. i can even be a content provider but i have no ability to structurally intervene. yet, almost more than any other structure, the internet has structurally intervened in my life. there is a tremendous asymmetry here. the internet and digital technologies have become a powerful site for reinforcing and amplifying settler colonialism, and i see losing the ability to structurally intervene as highly problematic. code and algorithms are controlling our lives and capitalism is controlling code. for indigenous peoples, this takes place in the wider context of settler colonialism as the controlling structure in indigenous life. every tweet, facebook post, blog post, instagram photo, youtube video and email we sent during idle no more made the largest corporations in the world – corporations controlled by white men with a vested interest in settler colonialism – more money to reinforce the system of settler colonialism. our cyber engagements, whether they were tweets, emails, blogs or facebook posts, were also read, monitored, collected, surveilled and archived by the state. they were also read, monitored, collected, and surveilled by the segment of canadian society that hates us, and they used these to try to hurt us. this worries me. i think we must think critically and strategically about adopting digital technologies as organizing and mobilizing tools. on the one hand, they are very powerful. but what are we gaining? what are we losing? how do we refuse the politics of recognition, engage in generative refusal and operate with opaqueness on the internet? can we operate from a place of grounded normativity on facebook, when the algorithm attacks its very foundations? leadership when i think of the consequences of internet organizing, i return over and over to january 11, 2013, a moment in the idle no more movement when indian act chiefs were in boardrooms in ottawa negotiating with the harper government, and idle no more was on the streets. it was a sucker punch, a co-opting, a creating of divisions within the movement – which states will always do. when we had such a shallow set of relationships, mediated by the leanne betasamosake simpson, rinaldo walcott & glen coulthard studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 80 internet, there was no way we could withstand that. it was at this point that i began to realize that idle no more wasn’t a movement that we could sustain. i had never met most of my comrades in person. while there were small groups of people meeting and strategizing about specific actions and events, we had no mechanism to make decisions as a movement, because at this point social media had replaced organizing. disagreements over analysis or actions occurred online in front of everybody, and because we had shallow cyber relationships, instead of real world ones, the larger structures fell apart quickly. we tried to build a movement online through social media, and when we needed to trust each other, when we needed to give each other the benefit of the doubt, when we needed empathy and a history together that we could trust, we couldn’t. when we were sold out by leaders who didn’t represent us we were not able to regroup and relaunch the movement. this was the first significant push-back from the state and it crushed us, and maybe without the state doing anything at all we would have crushed ourselves. i wonder in hindsight if maybe we didn’t build a movement as much as a social media presence that privileged individuals over community, virtual validation over empathy, leadership without accountability and responsibility, and an unchecked liberalism that has now left us extremely vulnerable to the superficial recognition of the neoliberal state. we cannot allow the internet – whiteness – to decide who our leaders are by likes, shares and how well they conform to corporate media. it matters how change is achieved my ancestors were makers. they got up every day and made their political and legal systems, their food system, their economy and health care systems, their education system, their ethics, and their infrastructure and technology. they didn’t rely on states, institutions, democracy, or banked capital to take care of their families. they relied on each other. they got up every day and collectively built the world they lived in. in a sense, they were always mobilized; they were always in a state of organization, of movement, of creativity. trudeau will not and cannot do this for us.3 electoral politics will not and cannot do this for us. white people will not and cannot do this for us. this takes me back to biidaabin, that first light of dawn. the present gives birth to the future. how you’re living in the present determines what will happen in the future. it matters how change is achieved. the kind of change i’m talking about, the reasons why i was on the streets in idle no more, was not to get trudeau elected. it was to build a radical 3 justin trudeau was canada’s liberal prime minister at the time of the symposium and the publication of this issue. idle no more & black lives matter: an exchange studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 81 alternative present that would give birth to the kind of future in which my ancestors would recognize coming generations as michi saagiig nishnaabeg. the only way to build a radical alternative present is to make it on the ground, in real time, with real people, just like my ancestors did. this means a refusal of colonial recognition, and it means that that refusal must be generative – it must generate the alternative. if i think back to my creation stories, which are a theoretical anchor in my work and in my culture – whether it’s the seven fires story; nanabush and the turtle’s back story; the story for kinomagewapkong, the people that were created from the ocean, those spontaneous humans – the creation of the world within nishnaabeg thought comes from struggle. it was never easy. mistakes were made. prototypes were built. it came from a being or beings, fully engaged in a creative process that was a process of struggle. so, building a new world will not be easy; it will be a process of struggle. sometimes i wonder whether in idle no more we shied away from that, as if we did not want to do that work. it’s easier just to post stuff. the crux of resurgence is that indigenous peoples have to recreate and regenerate our political systems, education systems, and systems of life from within our own intelligence. we have to create indigenous worlds, not on the internet, but in physical reality. our movements must respond to the basic social needs of our communities: relief from crushing poverty; clean drinking water; listening to youth and then doing what they tell us so as to create meaningful existences for them in their communities right now; supporting harm reduction approaches to addictions; dismantling children’s aid; and supporting people recovering from the damage these have caused; setting up alternative accountability structures for gender violence so two-spirit, queer, trans, gender non-conforming people, women and children are safe; and supporting midwifery, breastfeeding and families with children. these “social issues” are not just social. they are political. they are a direct results of state violence in the form of settler colonialism that maintains and accelerates dispossession. these are our first responsibilities. we cannot separate the social conditions of our communities from our political work. we have to be responding to those social issues that are crushing our communities. constellations of co-resistance i am really tired of white rock stars deciding what indigenous issues are important to talk about and organize around. i am really tired of the continual production and amplification of victim narratives to feed white canada’s appetite for trauma porn. i am tired of the state continually gutting indigenous resistance through royal commissions, national inquiries and false consciousness of reconciliation. i am tired of watching us beg the colonizer for political and institutional recognition. i am tired of mobilizations designed only to gain political or institutional recognition. i’m tired of our movements leanne betasamosake simpson, rinaldo walcott & glen coulthard studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 82 replicating heteropatriarchy and anti-blackness. i am tired of asking for change instead of building the change. what happens when we stop centering whiteness in our movements? what happens when we refuse settler colonialism as a starting point in our mobilizations? what happens when, instead of constantly appealing to white allies, we build constellations of co-resistance locally and internationally with those communities actively building ethical, principled and radical futures in the present, by animating and embodying those ethical systems as the intervention?4 freedom breathes a little when this happens, whether it is black lives matter stopping the pride parade in toronto, or the community of resistance in south dakota protesting the dakota access pipeline, or the unist’ot’en camp in british columbia or michi sagiig nishnaabeg families harvesting rice every year in front of angry cottagers. bodies on the land, realizing indigenous political and ethical realities, breathing life into indigenous grounded normativities. biidaabin: the first light of dawn; the past and the future collapsing in on the present; the present giving birth to radical, beautiful futures that generatively refuse heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy and collectively live out the alternatives. - post-blm: the black radical tradition in crisis rinaldo walcott we are firmly in the post-blm moment. by this i do not mean that the activism of the black lives movement is behind us, but rather that its activist energies are now a part of the political landscape thereby making it a prism through which to apprehend our current political moment. this paper grapples with the impact of the blm movement in light of the longue durée of black activism in north america and beyond. i argue that blm is not simply a movement responding to the immediacy of police violence and abuse, but that it sits in a genealogy of black activists’ eruptions meant to transform the state as we presently know it. by turning to the black radical tradition this paper seeks to make present the (re)turn to a politics of the collective, even global, as a counter and a possible future for the organization of human and planetary life. the black radical tradition i am referencing is a tradition that understands knowledge production as intimately tied to the desire for freedom. the black radical tradition that i am referencing takes seriously the enslavement and colonization of black and african peoples as central to the unfolding of world history. in this way, it is a confrontation with capitalism, land theft and 4 i’m using the concept of constellation in a similar way to luam kidane and hawa y. mire (2015). idle no more & black lives matter: an exchange studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 83 systems of knowledge conceived and put in place to render black and african peoples less than human and ultimately non-human. following cedric robinson, the black radical tradition “cast[s] doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture” (1983, p. 178). indeed, for descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, the black radical tradition is not a confrontation with land theft but rather one with subjectivity or regaining our bodies, as frank wilderson (2010) has put it. thus the black radical tradition is a significant confrontation with the human sciences. so, i have been thinking that one way to conceive of black lives matter as both slogan and organizing principle and thus political grassroots movement is to think of it as shock and trauma. behind my claim is a simple assumption. the assumption is that black people both in the usa and elsewhere have been shocked and traumatized by forms of naked racist violence that many had perceived to be behind us. in the post-obama era many wanted to believe his singular achievement meant that more naked forms of racist violence had already receded, but the opposite has been shockingly clear. indeed, the trauma of the moment is one conceived by the central contradiction of how one reconciles that the most powerful man in the world (symbolically) is a black man and that black people everywhere appear to be the scourge of this earth? it is the starkness of the contradiction, one that otherwise might be demobilizing that has been energetically mobilizing. now don't get me wrong, i am not suggesting that blm the movement exists because obama is in the white house,5 as some have claimed, but rather i am suggesting that his presence there bears down heavily on the moment and the movement and how we might think it and think about it. more specifically, because obama’s arrival in the white house has been sold as a culmination and conclusion of a certain civil rights narrative it is necessary to situate the claims made in the blm movement or the movement for black lives in that antagonistic context and beyond. indeed, it is important to note that the network of organizations that make up the movement for black lives in the usa include many that consistently worked on, for example, police violence well before the blm moment. and yet this moment marks some important differences as well that must be gathered around the phrase and the organization blm. anyone who cares to know, knows that three black, queer women coined the term blm in response to the murder of trayvon martin (2012). the still lingering collective trauma of his death, followed by so many others, in what appeared to be a quick succession, added an important and necessary impetus and energy to mobilizing against state violence in this moment. significantly, in the era of social media and its multiple intimacies, noticing those same state practices in other national spaces has been a significant boost for 5 barak obama was us president when the presentation on which this piece is based was read. leanne betasamosake simpson, rinaldo walcott & glen coulthard studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 84 transnational black political identification and action. blm is a significant symbolic rally cry that achieves a certain kind of diasporic intimacy. nonetheless it is fraught with many complications and complexities as it is extended into other national spaces. we might ask, does blm travel and how? of course it does. let me risk a move here that might help us to think about the difference between a particular and specific politics of blm traveling, as opposed to blm traveling as a metaphor. the power of metaphor is both in its elasticity and its contraction – that is, what it allows in and what it cannot allow. blm has practiced a politics of transnational political identification that is both within the black radical tradition (i.e., in relation to indigenous north america and palestine) and simultaneously hampered by empire in black face, as the obama administration, for example, drones east africa and the middle east, and uses kenya and ethiopia as proxies for its resource wars in africa, (the recently announced 100 million dollar base in the horn of africa) among other imperial projects globally. returning to the americas, the present and urgent fate of haitians demands that we see and witness the complicities of empire in our time. my concern here is that haitians must attempt to make a life in the context of a global order that wishes them to disappear – from everywhere. as haitians move within the caribbean region we witness the limits of modernist ideals, the most obvious being that of nation and citizenship. haitian movement calls our attention to the reigning logics of white supremacist organization of all of our lives. indeed, what travels from blm is the emphasis on a life, on what a life might be, on how we might achieve our lives. and it is in this endeavour, the one of achieving a life, that haiti re-joins african most spectacularly. so let me briefly turn our attention to the african refugee crisis, in particular the crossing of the strait of gibraltar as a stretching of the metaphor and the politics of blm (it is worth pointing out that most african refugees remain on the continent). the late stuart hall (2003) has taught us that migration is the “joker in the globalisation pack” and that planned and unplanned migrations threaten to undo and up-end neoliberal regiments of capital moving, while labour is supposed to stand still and often people are discarded when no longer needed. indeed, while blm might have been politically activated by state violence, most spectacularly police violence in the usa, the movement in both its rhetoric and its links and indebtedness to an international black radical tradition demands that we engage the african refugee crisis as central to all of its concerns as well. africans crossing the mediterranean sea in search of a life, a life denied them, both in terms of resources and in terms of the logics of white supremacist world orders, contract and stretch blm simultaneously. the insistence on life, by africans moving, forces us to (re)consider what exactly is a modern life – what exactly does it mean to claim one’s self for a life? it is in fact the insistence on a life, that black movement/travel has continually upturned the fictions of modernist ideals. african migration planned and unplanned continually idle no more & black lives matter: an exchange studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 85 returns us to the demand that we imagine a different world, that we risk putting flesh to ways of being in which a life becomes possible. african migration alerts us to the political demand that we remake the world anew in the aftermath of that other great migratory moment of the post-1492 world. indeed, blm travels because the very idea of black and blackness in the modern world cannot be divorced from movement. and it is in recognizing how fundamental movement and migration is to late modern capital that we might begin to risk navigating intellectually a different present and thus future. africans crossing the strait of gibraltar remind us that movement, actual and otherwise, demands we notice what actually matters – our lives. in the canadian context, the dire conditions of black life makes blm as both slogan and movement a not surprising political identification for black people here. however, black canadians do not have access to the levers of political power in the same way that african americans have political institutions that broker black voters and their concerns into the mainstream political process. indeed, one might argue that black canadian political life and thus political desires, aspirations – and not even policy is far removed from the canadian political process and scene. the liberal party of canada has as one of its star member the former police chief of toronto. the chief has been a stalwart of our stop and frisk policy called carding. none of the federal leaders of the political parties have felt pressure of any kind to speak to a practice like carding that disproportionately affects black canadians. in fact, in the last election, the leader of the new democratic party promised to fund 2,500 more police. so, in some ways, the urgency of blm holds important resonance for black canadians. canadian institutions, all of them, render black life invisible and tangential to the nation as a whole. for 15 days in march 2016, black lives matter toronto (blm_to) occupied the toronto police services headquarters courtyard. they had a number of very simple, yet important, demands. they wanted the two-day afrofest festival to remain a two-day event, after it was reduced to one day by the city due to a few noise complaints; they wanted the “subject officer” to be named and arrested in the shooting of andrew loku, a mentally ill african (sudanese) migrant shot in the hallway of his apartment building, a building that housed the mentally ill; and they wanted an end to carding (stop and frisk) which disproportionately targets black and brown torontonians. those kinds of demands point to how the state shapes black life experience in ways that continually mark the thin line between life and death. importantly for me, the actions of activist groups like blm_to open up an arena for rethinking how forms of black life interact with the state as the very means of a possible survival. a popular refrain of the blm movement is “we will get free.” i am interested in what work the refrain does, as it encounters and lives “within and against” the state, and how the human sciences’ (i.e., humanities and social sciences) inadequate forms of conceptualization might inhibit (re)thinking freedom, again. in short, the human sciences have not allowed leanne betasamosake simpson, rinaldo walcott & glen coulthard studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 86 us to think freedom well in a post-slavery world. instead, post-emancipation has been taken as freedom – as an example of an unfolding and constantly adjusting democratic reorder of “freedoms.” in my view, the actions of blm and other black radical activist groups presently engaged in direct action tactics return us to the languages and ideas of freedom, emancipation and liberty in a manner that requires both a searing and engaged critique of their signifying intentions. in my short time here, i point to those terms’ rethinking as simultaneously a long and enduring project of black life and as a quick and urgent rethinking that is often thwarted by incorporation into the state as neutered policy options rhetoric. indeed, each of those terms, often used interchangeably, carry very distinct meanings – especially when thinking of black life. in my own work i have turned to the legislative and juridical meanings of emancipation to ferret out what its meaning might signify for black unfreedom and a coming and potential black freedom. the importance then of blm as transnational, as diasporic in identification and sensibility, is crucially important. and yet, one gets a strange and uncomfortable feeling that its diasporic desires too will wane. one feels a certain time-sensitive and thinly narrow national desire that limits its political potential. the power of blm has been in its call to notice what is immediately around you and therefore to notice the local and the national simultaneously. it is at the international that its complications reveal themselves. how do we account for the usa imperial project in black face? how do we think about global black dispossession when nation-states remain still sturdy in the face of fluid capital? how might we think of the black global as more than the immediacy of our local and or national condition? such questions find themselves being bitterly debated now, especially on social media, as the complications of blm. the power of blm is the black global conversation it has in part rekindled; how it is resolved remains to be seen. we still, nonetheless, have to pose the question, what might freedom be in this moment? all of the emergencies of black life that produced the movement, energy and the demands of and for blm will remain with us until a concerted effort to think alternatives to global human organization is given serious thought. indeed, we must invent alternative ways of being together and articulate them as possible, and we must be willing to put flesh on the bones of those new ways for living together. in the usa, we are already seeing both liberal incorporation and intra-black political dissent around what the future might look like for the movement. indeed, it is clear that few are willing to begin to articulate alternatives to our present mode of life and instead claim a pragmatic reformist agenda. history teaches us that such a move signals the already-defeated larger political horizons. such a retreat means for me that blm is in many ways a stalled movement now. thus, the refrain of blm that “we will get free” is crucial in so many different ways. anyone who cares to know about the now often rehearsed idle no more & black lives matter: an exchange studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 87 queer foundation of the blm movement would know that it was founded by three black queer women. however, the larger movement’s more liberal arm is encapsulated in the black queer personhood of deray mckesson; nonetheless the politics of intra-community violence on queer and trans peoples is a central rhetoric of the movement. black queer experiences and resistance to violence in multiple communities can be considered the foundational intervention of blm. the “we will get free” can be read as free from such violence and by extension free to self-determine. what blm gets at is a certain kind of temperament. it is a temperament that is both emotional and social, political, cultural – it is a temperament that is an analysis of the present time and its past. but this temperament also exposes the limits of claiming freedom. this temperament reveals that freedom is still beyond us. so what do i mean by freedom then? for me freedom marks a certain kind of sovereignty over the self in relation to collective and communal conditions. in the context of unfreedom, we can glimpse modes of unauthorized being as self-authored acts pointing to or authorizing a potential freedom to come. here i am thinking of the ways in which black people break "rules," authorizing for themselves new ways of being in the world. these ways of being are often violently interdicted. freedom is the gap or space between breaking the law and the re-imposition of the law or its variant – that is violence. the law is violence in this conception i am offering. the law then, always curtails freedom for black personhood in the west. the human sciences have been called half-starved, as sylvia wynter has stated, for numerous good reasons (wynter & mckittrick, 2015). in a post-9-11 world, the humanities and social sciences are attempting to make themselves relevant to the difficult time of our lives, as they rightly should (e.g., affect studies in humanities and academic community partnerships in social sciences). however, the human sciences remain deeply complicit with the regimes of knowledge, power and practice that subtend and produce the material effects and condition of unfreedom. the radical move would be for the contemporary human sciences to produce the necessary sustenance required to both undo the chimera effects of democracy and freedom and instead point us towards a new perspective, one in which grappling with black being might yet produce the routes, intellectual and otherwise, for a freedom yet to come. it is the blm call that “we will be free” in the face of contemporary state violences of all kinds that keeps open the possibility of a freedom yet to come. - leanne betasamosake simpson, rinaldo walcott & glen coulthard studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 88 response glen coulthard something that frequently falls to the wayside when we are thinking about these things in the academy is how similar the long standing traditions are upon which these movements (idle no more and black lives matter) are premised. in the media, these movements tend to be portrayed as temporally shallow, and often reactionary. but when we look at them in light of my colleagues’ comments, we realize there is incredible historical depth, and theoretical acumen in terms of what is being targeted. what is being targeted are the structural violences and effects of capitalism, of anti-blackness, of displacement, of dispossession, and of course, of heteropatriarchy. black lives matter and idle no more have consistently been in a contest with those structures of violence. what we see in the media are just percolating crisis points that bleed over into spectacular displays that a media structure that doesn’t really give a shit about either indigenous peoples or black peoples is then forced to confront so they have long histories that intersect. i also like how both speakers show how there have historically been crossfertilizations between the two. where did those cross-fertilizations go? what happened to that type of coalition-building, that sort of solidarity, between people in africa, the global south, and indigenous peoples of the fourth world? i think that it was a move from the internationalism of that time to the struggle for constitutional recognition for one’s cultural diversity [as happened in canada] in 1981-82. it placed us as indigenous peoples in a silo, thinking only for ourselves, about ourselves, and we forgot about other peoples who are facing similar structural violences in their lives and conditions. i would hope to see these silos break down again. that’s what i love about this panel. references coulthard, g., & simpson, l. b. (2016). grounded normativity/place-based solidarity. american quarterly, 68(2), 249-255. hall, s. (2003). creolization, diaspora, and hybridity in the context of globalization. documenta 11_platform, 3, 185-198. kidane, l., & mire, h. y. (2015). constellations of black radical imagining: black arts and popular education. our schools/our selves, 21(3), 1-9. lafitau, j. f. (1724/2013). the customs of the american indians compared with the customs of primitive times, volume 1. the publications of the champlain society, 48. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442618053_4 robinson, c. (1983). black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. chapel hill, nc: university of north carolina press. simpson, l. b. (2017). as we have always done: indigenous freedom through radical resistance. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. idle no more & black lives matter: an exchange studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 75-89, 2018 89 wilderson, f. (2010). red, white and black: cinema and the structure of u.s. antagonisms. durham, nc: duke university press. wynter, s., & mckittrick, k. (2015). unparalleled catastrophe for our species? or, to give humanities a different future: conversations. in, k. mckittrick (ed.), sylvia wynter: on being human as praxis (pp. 9-89). durham, nc: duke university press. microsoft word 63-75_sumner.docx studies in social justice volume 5, issue 1, 63-75, 2011   correspondence address: jennifer sumner, ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, toronto, ontario, canada m5s 1v6, tel.: +1 416 978 0784, email: jennifer.sumner@utoronto.ca issn: 1911-4788 serving social justice: the role of the commons in sustainable food systems jennifer sumner adult education and community development program, ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto abstract food is a source of sustenance, a cause for celebration, an inducement to temptation, a vehicle for power, an indicator of well-being, a catalyst for change and, above all, a life good. along with other life goods such as potable water, clean air, adequate shelter and protective clothing, food is something we cannot live without. the global corporate food system, however, allows 800 million to go hungry, while an even larger number of people grow obese. based in money-values, this food system promotes accumulation first and foremost, enriching a few while creating economic, social and environmental externalities that are destroying local economies, devastating individuals, families and communities and degrading the planet. what would a food system look like that was based in life-values, centred on the commons and anchored by social justice? this paper will focus on the creation of sustainable food systems, beginning with the crises of the global corporate food system and then moving to the heart of sustainable food systems—the civil commons. introduction while food represents many things to many people, it has always been a life good or a means of life—that which sustains life. for this reason, food has been at the heart of the human endeavour for millennia. over the last 50 years, however, it has undergone enormous changes: food is no longer viewed first and foremost as a sustainer of life. rather, to those who seek to command our food supply, it has become instead a major source of corporate cash flow, economic leverage, a form of currency, a tool of international politics, an instrument of power—a weapon! (krebs cited in millstone & lang, 2003, p. 11) as food has morphed from a means of life to a blunt instrument of corporate control, it has lost any association it may have had with social justice, leaving in its wake hunger and obesity in equal measure around the world. both forms of malnutrition, in combination with a wide range of problems associated with industrial agriculture 64 jennifer sumner   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   and an export-based economy, are the inevitable outcomes of a corporate food system that eschews life values and pursues money values at the cost of environmental, social, and economic sustainability. in the face of the emerging global life-crisis in the realm of food, some argue that the corporate food system is broken (baker, campsie, & rabinowicz, 2010; scharf, levkoe, & saul, 2010), while others see it on the road to collapse (fraser & rimas, 2010). such arguments, in turn, raise questions about an alternative food system. this article will explore the possibilities for a new food system that aims to ensure everyone is fed nutritious food of their choice within the ecological limits of the planet. after discussing social justice and examining the global corporate food system, it will lay out the parameters of an alternative food system based in life values, centred on the civil commons and anchored by social justice. social justice although the term ‘social justice’ was first used in 1840 by a sicilian priest in an appeal to the ruling classes to attend to the needs of the new masses of uprooted peasants who had become urban workers (novak, 2000), it has a much longer history of practice. according to jackson (1995), the human struggle for social justice is timeless and universal, and can be traced back to lao-tzu in china, the slave revolts of ancient rome, and the levellers in england. social justice has been understood by modern scholars as an equitable vision of society, one in which all members are physically and psychologically safe and secure (adams, bell, & griffin, 1997) or as a process of moving toward equality (smith, 2000). power (1999) is more precise when she sees social justice as “a guarantee of an adequate and dignified level of material resources to allow every citizen the stability and security to participate fully in society” (p. 35). more recently, basok, ilcan and noonan (2006) go beyond power to define social justice as: an equitable distribution of fundamental resources and respect for human dignity and diversity, such that no minority group’s life interests and struggles are undermined and that forms of political interaction enable all groups to voice their concerns for change. (p. 267) the obverse of social justice is social injustice, which basok et al. (2006) contend has been growing in the past few decades, as access to resources is increasingly becoming more inequitable and new groups of people have become targets of racism and amplified vigilance due to their identity. following basok et al. (2006), we can understand social injustice as an inequitable distribution of fundamental resources and lack of respect for human dignity and diversity, such that minority groups’ life interests and struggles are undermined and that forms of political interaction do not enable all groups to voice their concerns for change. andre gunder frank (2002) has probed the question of social injustice, arguing that, at the largest social level, global processes, structures, and institutions seem to generate the greatest injustice. he concluded that there is no end to the issue of social injustice, just as there is no end to the quest and struggle for justice. serving social justice 65 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   since social justice presupposes life, and life presupposes satisfaction of our liferequirement for food, the food system is absolutely foundational to any socially just society. it is not surprising, then, that many authors have linked social justice specifically to food. for example, clancy (1994) makes the connection through sustainable agriculture, arguing that “the notion that social justice would be one of the ways in which alternative agriculture would distinguish itself from its conventional counterpart arose in several places, and out of several different sensibilities” (p. 78). wekerle (2004) unites social justice and food via food justice movements, using food justice to “highlight the focus on systemic change and the necessity for engaging in political and policy processes as well as consciously addressing issues of movement mobilization and strategies” (p. 379). for wekerle, such a focus “opens up linkages with a wider range of conceptual frameworks drawn from the literature on democracy, citizenship, social movements, and social and environmental justice” (p. 379). allen (2008) unites social justice and food via the food system, arguing there is a lack of social justice in the american agrifood system, as evidenced by prevalent hunger and obesity in low-income populations and exploitation of farm workers. given that many people seem ready to pay attention to improving the food system, she proposes that, “in a democratic society, the incorporation of social justice priorities and practices must be part of this effort” (p. 157). using basok et al.’s definition of social justice, allen (2008) posits that justice involves three criteria: meeting basic human needs, freedom from exploitation and oppression, and access to opportunity and participation. applying these three criteria to the food system, she argues that basic needs are not met because “more and more people are going hungry” (p. 157). she finds exploitation occurs throughout the agrifood system, as evidenced by farm workers living in poverty, enduring difficult and dangerous working conditions and lacking housing and health care. in terms of opportunity, she contends that “throughout the world, women are poorer, own less property, do more work, hold less power, are less educated, and suffer more hunger than men” (p. 158). for allen, it is clear that “our food system does not meet the fundamental criteria of social justice such as freedom from want, freedom from oppression, and access to equal opportunity” (p. 158). as these authors show, food provides a grounded connection to social justice because “no other public issue is as accessible to people in their daily lives as that of food justice. everyone—regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or social class—eats. we are all involved and we are all implicated” (allen 2008, p. 159). with this in mind, we can explore food systems as vehicles for social justice or social injustice. we will examine the current global corporate food system and its association with social injustice, and propose a food system based on the commons that can serve social justice. food systems according to kaufman (2004), a food system encompasses a chain of activities that begins with the production of food and moves on to include the processing, distribution, wholesaling, retailing and consumption of food and, eventually, to the 66 jennifer sumner   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   disposal of food waste. while this linear configuration covers the main components of a food system, it does not convey the idea of a dynamic, interconnected system. in contrast, hay (2000) defines a system as a group of elements organized such that one is in some way interdependent (either directly or indirectly) with every other element. we can fruitfully combine these two explanations to define a food system as an interdependent web of activities that include the production, processing, distribution, wholesaling, retailing, consumption and disposal of food. this interdependent web can be very local, as in the self-provisioning of small, isolated groups, or huge, as in the global corporate food system. in terms of scale, however, no food system is inherently just or unjust—that depends on the agenda of those who are empowered by the scalar strategy (see born & purcell, 2006). global corporate food system following the definition of a food system, the global corporate food system can be understood as an interdependent web of corporate-controlled activities at the global scale that include the production, processing, distribution, wholesaling, retailing, consumption and disposal of food. in his book, stuffed and starved, raj patel (2007) describes the global corporate food system as “a battlefield” (p. 15), maintaining that it is impossible to think about such a food system without attending to the corporations that have controlled it for centuries, and who crack the supply chain like a whip: today, transnational agricultural corporations control 40 per cent of world trade in food, with twenty companies controlling the world coffee trade, six controlling 70 per cent of wheat trade, and one controlling 98 per cent of packaged tea. (pp. 99-100) this drive for total corporate control of the food system is corroborated by goodall (2005) who claims that ten multinational corporations control over half the world’s food supply. and in the united states, ninety-five percent of the food americans eat is a corporate product (mcmichael, 2000). using allen’s (2008) three criteria developed from basok et al.’s (2006) definition of social justice, we can determine that the global corporate food system denies social justice. first, it does not meet basic human needs. according to mcmurtry (1999a) a need for something exists if and only if, and to the extent that, deprivation of it regularly results in an absolute reduction of its owner’s life-range capability. this means that, among other things, food is a basic human need, and yet, as patel (2007) contends, the central problem in the global corporate food system is hunger. in 2004, there were “842 million people suffering from undernourishment in a world that already grows more than enough food to feed the global population” (ziegler, 2004). by 2010, over 1 billion people are estimated to be undernourished—there are more hungry people than at any time since 1970, the earliest year for which comparable statistics are available (fao, 2010). second, the global corporate food system does not guarantee freedom from exploitation and oppression. for example, the american planning association (2007) has outlined the general effects of the global corporate food system on local and serving social justice 67 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   regional areas. it argues that the global corporate food system contributes not only to the increased incidence of obesity and diet-related disease, but also to the loss and erosion of diverse culinary traditions (e.g., first nations and immigrant cultures). in addition, the apa finds that the global corporate food system is implicated in ecological crises, including extinction of species, declining aquifers and deforestation. and third, the global corporate food system does not provide access to opportunity and participation. according to the american planning association (2007), concentration of ownership in the food system means that decisions affecting communities are increasingly made by absentee business owners. moreover, to complicate matters, the association states that government policies may exacerbate this lack of access due to the increasing political influence of food industry giants. in this way, the global corporate food system does not serve social justice. on the contrary, it is deeply implicated in social injustice and its well-documented “humanspawned social maladies” (baptiste, 2000, p. 27), which are metastasizing into a global life-crisis of unsustainable proportions—part of what mcmurtry (1999a) refers to as the cancer stage of capitalism. indeed, fraser and rimas (2010, p. 164) contend that “cancerous is exactly the state of our twenty-first-century global food empire.” can we envision a more sustainable food system—one that meets all three criteria of social justice? to answer this question we need to turn to the heart of sustainability, the civil commons. sustainability, social justice and the civil commons sustainability is a popular term that has become a household word, and part of its popularity rests with its ambiguity. many have attempted to define it, but none links it to the common life-ground (sumner, 2005). the concept of the civil commons, however, opens up the possibility of a food system that is life-coherent, sustainable, and just. conceptualized by mcmurtry (1999b), the civil commons is “any co-operative human construction that protects and/or enables the universal access to life goods” (p. 1). in this way, the civil commons is co-operative, not competitive. it does not occur naturally, but is built by human agency. the civil commons protects through rules and regulations, and enables by opening up spaces and opportunities. it involves universal access, not paid access, to life goods, such as food, water, shelter, education, and healthcare. the civil commons can be described as “society’s longevolving system of conscious human protection of the larger life-host humanity lives from” (1999a, p. 213). examples of the civil commons are all around us, but have never been collectively named: public education systems, universal health-care programs, building regulations, water and power installations, bridges, social safety protections, laws, libraries, public broadcast media, sewage systems and social assistance. in essence, the nature of the civil commons can be expressed as follows: it is society’s organized and community-funded capacity of universally accessible resources to provide for the life preservation and growth of 68 jennifer sumner   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   society’s members and their environmental life-host. the civil commons is, in other words, what people ensure together as a society to protect and further life, as distinct from money aggregates. (mcmurtry 1998, p. 24) the civil commons is rooted in the life-ground, described by mcmurtry (1999a) as including all three planes of life: organic movement, sentience and feeling, and thought: “grounded life-sequence analysis…keeps its eyes on life and its capabilities to think, feel or do, observing whether there is maintenance, growth or decline in these vital fields of being alive” (p. 155). given its deep connection to the life-ground and means of life, the civil commons can be seen as foundational to social justice. johnston (2003, p. 32) makes this clear when she emphasizes that the key point is to “maximize control over the means of subsistence for the ends of maximizing life and social justice—not profits, nor the pursuit of money as an end in itself.” quoting naomi klein’s argument that what unites those resisting global capitalist encroachment is a radical reclaiming of the commons, johnston concludes that “the pressing question for many social justice and environmental activists seems to be less about how we can achieve sustainable development and more about how we can reclaim the commons” (p. 4). while these social justice and environmental activists do not distinguish between the commons and the civil commons, johnston (2003) confirms that the two are distinct. in the words of mcmurtry (1998): i have introduced the concept of “civil commons” to distinguish it from the traditional “commons”—the shared natural lands upon which an agricultural village economy depends. i mean by the civil commons both the traditional commons and all other universally accessible goods of life that protect or enable the lives of society’s members. ... the concept of the civil commons subsumes both the traditional commons and the built commons of universally accessible social goods evolved by public sectors since the industrial revolution and, in particular, since the end of world war ii. (p. 399) johnston (2003) notes that “the civil commons tradition is differentiated from the natural commons, or biosphere, so as to make clear that these are cooperative, and distinctly human traditions designed to give access to the means of existence provided by the biosphere” (p. 17). as co-operative human constructions that protect and/or enable universal access to life goods, the many forms of the civil commons are thus recognized as central to social justice. the civil commons has also been understood as central to sustainability. succinctly put, sustainability involves a set of structures and processes that build the civil commons (sumner, 2005). the structures can range from universities, governments and corporations to ngos, neighbourhood associations and social businesses, as long as they build the civil commons. the processes can include teaching, learning, decision-making, facilitating, governing and researching, as long as they build the civil commons. these structures and processes interact dynamically to create, support and spread the civil commons. the wider and deeper the civil commons—socially, economically and environmentally—the higher the level of sustainability. the more the civil commons is enclosed, the lower the level of serving social justice 69 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   sustainability. in this way, both sustainability and social justice are deeply connected to the civil commons, and all three concepts are central to sustainable food systems. sustainable food systems if sustainability is tightly tied to the civil commons, then moving from the noun “sustainability” to the adjective “sustainable” carries the same meaning. in this way, sustainable development involves development based on the civil commons, not on entrepreneurship initiatives or programs to bring the poor into the global market. sustainable communities centre on the civil commons, not on economic development or business skills training. sustainable food systems focus on building the civil commons in the area of food, not on promoting our current cheap food policies or creating new value chains in the global market. applying the meaning of sustainability to the definition of a food system results in the following: a sustainable food system involves an interdependent web of activities generated by a set of structures and processes that build the civil commons with respect to the production, processing, distribution, wholesaling, retailing, consumption and disposal of food…. (sumner, 2010, p. 210) in other words, to qualify as sustainable, a food system would have to focus on activities that contribute to co-operative human constructs that protect and/or enable universal access to the life good of food. it follows that a food system in the private sector would preclude sustainability by definition. the fiduciary responsibility of corporations to maximize shareholder return fundamentally conflicts with and even violates the public interest of ensuring that citizens are fed. this incompatibility is emphasized by michele simon (2006), a public health attorney, who argues that “under our current economic system it’s not a corporation’s job to protect public health.” since a corporation’s purview does not include public health, she puts forward the following observations: like water (and unlike most other commodities such as toys or electronics), food is indispensable and a basic human right. why have we turned its production over to private interests? shouldn’t at least some aspects of society remain off-limits to corporate control? (p. 318) in other words, a sustainable food system must reside in the public domain—a public system in public hands for the public good. like the canadian health-care system, a made-in-canada sustainable food system would be supported by four pillars: universality, accessibility, portability and public administration. based on a single payer, we would all contribute so everyone could eat. and following in the image of natural cycles, it would close loops as tightly as possible, so that positive synergies could be achieved. unlike the global corporate food system, a sustainable food system would highlight the role of farmers: they would be recognized for their knowledge and rewarded for their work. processing would not involve large, centralized facilities that skim profits from the value chain, but regional operations organized as worker co-operatives. distributors would connect the nodes of the regional system, not 70 jennifer sumner   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   lobby for global reach. wholesalers would facilitate distribution to everyone, not skim off profits for themselves. retailers would offer wholesome, nutritious food, not profit from obesity by selling “pseudo-foods” (winson, 2004, p. 302) laden with salt, sugar, and oil. consumers would obtain local food or fair-trade global food from social businesses, co-operatives, food clubs, community food centres or food banks (in the true sense of the term—where food surplus is stored), not supermarkets that specialize in faceless, placeless, unfair food. and all participants in the food system would compost waste either for personal use or for municipal depots that would recycle it back to farms. sustainable food systems and social justice in his work on regenerative or sustainable food systems, dahlberg (1993) stressed the “es”—ecology, ethics, and equity: (1) sustainability as long-term food sufficiency, i.e., food systems that are more ecologically based and that do not destroy their natural resource base. (2) sustainability as stewardship, i.e., food systems that are based on a conscious ethic regarding humankind’s relationship to other species and to future generations. (3) sustainability as community, i.e., food systems that are equitable or socially just. (p. 81) however, it is arguable whether any food system has ever promoted social justice. in his study of past civilizations, wright (2004) contends that agriculture has seldom solved the food problem because of two inevitable (or nearly inevitable) consequences: the first is biological: the population grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply. the second is social: all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around. (p. 108) arguable exceptions to food system injustice include plains indian tribes before european conquest or present-day cuba, with its rations of rice and beans and its flourishing urban agriculture providing free or low-cost vegetables. another exception is the city of belo horizonte, brazil, which declared food to be a right and developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food—including offering farmers choice spots of public space from which to sell to urban consumers, low-priced food markets on city property and people’s restaurants that serve meals for the equivalent of less than 50 cents (lappé, 2009). generally speaking, however, food has long been about wealth as well as power (friedmann, 1993) and as such, food systems have not generally been known as vehicles for social justice. the global corporate food system is just the current conveyance on a long road of social injustice with respect to food. hunger, undernutrition, undernourishment, chronic hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity have been the hallmarks of most food systems from the beginnings of agriculture to the present day. serving social justice 71 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   that said, a food system that promotes social justice is not impossible. in the words of albritton (2009), “we would like to see a world in which every woman, man and child could access sufficient nutritious food in an environment that encourages healthy eating and that produces the food in ecologically sustainable ways” (p. 122). following allen’s (2008) criteria developed from basok et al.’s (2006) definition of social justice, we can outline the parameters of a food system that promotes social justice. 1. meeting basic human needs since food is a basic human need, the central focus of a sustainable food system would be the equitable distribution of nutritious food to everyone in the system, within planetary limits. this would mean establishing clear resource and environmental limits (see jackson, 2009) and working within them. it would also mean not only remedying the problem that the minority of the world’s population— the so-called developed world—uses most of the resources, but also dealing with the scale of the global population in general. according to jackson (2009), “the fastest population growth has occurred in the developing world—driven . . . by a lack of education and inadequate access to contraception” (p. 77). a civil-commons approach to development, led by a sustainable food system and backed by free, universal systems of education (including sex education) and healthcare (including widely available birth control) would help to address both of wright’s (2004) arguments about the “inevitable” consequences of agriculture. in a sustainable food system, food would no longer be an opportunity for private enrichment, an instrument of power or a weapon to force compliance. instead, it would be the keystone of a system that ensured everyone was fed. food would be understood as a public resource to be stewarded, renewed and shared. in terms of stewardship, food waste in the system would be reduced and land on which to grow food would be protected as a vital resource. with respect to renewal, food would be grown organically, which builds up soils and eschews harmful synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. on the subject of sharing, food would be distributed equitably. food banks would develop stockpiles in times of plenty and divide up supplies in times of famine. 2. freedom from exploitation and oppression the power of food has long been associated with the accumulation of agricultural surplus—who owns it or controls it. as a public resource, food would lose this association and be understood as a collective good—owned by all and controlled by everyone. as food becomes disassociated with power, the ability to exploit and oppress people diminishes in a number of ways. first, like universal healthcare, a universal food system would relieve people of the fear of lacking one of the basic needs of life. no longer threatened with hunger, people would be freer to make productive choices regarding their future. and in a time of looming scarcity in fossil fuels (the basis of the global corporate food system’s fertilizers, pesticides and long-distance trade), 72 jennifer sumner   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   increasing natural disasters, endless wars for ever-scarcer resources and unstable climate conditions, policies to develop sustainable food systems will address questions of food security. second, cheap food policies as currently conceived would be eliminated. such policies have bankrupted farmers and destroyed farmland, but have been implemented to reduce the need to raise the minimum wage. as pollan (2010) explains, …instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as henry ford proposed to do, companies like wal-mart and mcdonald’s pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. the advent of fast food (and cheap food in general) has in effect, subsidized the decline of family incomes in america. (p. 2) instead of being out of reach of the lowest income earners, nutritious food would be subsidized by taxes on pseudo-foods. in this way, inexpensive pseudo-foods would no longer be the only choice for cash-strapped families, thus reversing the growing obesity epidemic and its related medical problems. third, workers in the food system would no longer be exploited. according to albritton (2009), food is among the most labour-intensive of all commodities. he argues that the final consumer in most instances is unaware of the exploitation of labour that occurs at almost every step in the food chain from field to table. in our technologically sophisticated capitalist economy, “food chain workers are among the most exploited, the most impoverished and the most exposed to hazardous chemicals” (p. 144). instead of such exploitation, he suggests that all those participating in the food chain be well paid as a reward for their important and often very demanding work. and fourth, food deserts would cease to exist. lister (2007) has described a food desert as “large gaps in the city where it is difficult or impossible to find a grocery store or supermarket within walking distance, and where the predominant means to buy food is through fast-food outlets and higher-priced convenience stores” (p. 169). the problem with food deserts is graphically described by a chicago food activist: in my neighbourhood, i can buy designer gym shoes, every kind of fast food, junk food, all kinds of malt liquor, illegal drugs, and maybe even a semiautomatic weapon. but i cannot purchase an organic tomato. (redmond in metcalf foundation, 2008, p. 17) the nodes of a sustainable food system would be arranged in such a way that food deserts would be phased out and all income levels would be able to obtain nutritious food of their choice, within planetary limits. serving social justice 73 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   3. access to opportunity and participation a sustainable food system would open up access to opportunity and participation for producers, workers and consumers. producers would not be tied to artificially low global market prices which force them to mine the soil just to service their debts. instead, they would be paid a living wage for their valuable contributions to vital life needs—food production and ecological services. producers would also develop or join co-operatives—civil commons constructs that would help them become more socially, environmentally and economically sustainable. workers in a sustainable food system would also develop or join unions or co-ops. in this way, they would learn valuable social and economic skills by being part of a horizontal commons structure, instead of remaining voiceless in minimum-wage, dead-end jobs at the bottom of the food hierarchy. for example, workers would democratically participate in the decisions that affected their working conditions. in this way, slave labour, unsafe working conditions and unequal pay—all in the name of food production and provision—would be relegated to the past. in a sustainable food system, consumers would no longer be faced with the illusion of abundance in grocery stores, which masks their lack of opportunity and participation in the global corporate food system. instead of the corporate mantra of “consumer choice” and the reality of little input regarding the range and quality of food offered, they would gain some control through consumer co-ops and neighbourhood social businesses specializing in food. this is in stark contrast to current conditions where high profit margins drive food retailers to dedicate an average of 31% of their shelf space to pseudo-foods and -beverages (winson, 2004). healthier food choices are exiled to the outer perimeters of the store (pollan, 2008) or, in the case of organics, ignored until they become a high-profit market niche shorn of the organic philosophy. in addition, a sustainable food system would provide learning opportunities in the realm of food—healthy food, local food, heritage food and culturally specific food. and like the healthcare system, it would provide a working model to learn from and replicate in other areas of life need, such as water and childcare. conclusion in his article on sustainable development, visvanathan (1991) turned the tables on the brundtland report—published as our common future—which advocated increased economic growth as the way to reduce poverty and did not contest the prediction of fiveto tenfold increase in world industrial output. instead, he proposed that the path to sustainability lay in our future as a commons. this paper has taken up visvanathan’s proposal by exploring our future as the civil commons—the heart of sustainability and the route to social justice. in particular, it has examined the role of the civil commons in sustainable food systems. from this examination it is clear that a sustainable food system would be a commons of commons—an overarching co-operative human construction that protects and/or enables universal access to the life good of food. at its best, a sustainable food system would be synonymous with the civil commons—serving social justice as it provided nourishing food to everyone, within the ecological limits of the planet. 74 jennifer sumner   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   references adams, m., bell, l.-a., & griffin, p. (eds.). (1997). teaching for diversity and social justice: a sourcebook. new york, ny: routledge. albritton, r. (2009). let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity. winnipeg: arbeiter ring publishing. allen, p. (2008). mining for justice in the food system: perceptions, practices and possibilities. agriculture and human values, 25, 157-161. american planning association. (2007). policy guide on community and regional food planning. retrieved from: http://www.planning.org/policyguides/food.htm. baker, l., campsie, p., & rabinowicz, k. (2010). menu 2020: ten good ideas for ontario. toronto: metcalf foundation. retrieved from: www.metcalffoundation.org baptiste, i. (2000). beyond reason and personal integrity: toward a pedagogy of coercive restraint. the canadian journal for the study of adult education, 14(1), 27-50. basok, t., ilcan, s., & noonan, j. (2006). citizenship, human rights, and social justice. citizenship studies, 10(3), 267-273. born, b., & purcell, m. (2006). avoiding the local trap: scale and food systems in planning research. journal of planning education and research, 26(2), 195-207. clancy, k. (1994). commentary. social justice and sustainable agriculture: moving beyond theory. agriculture and human values, 11(4), 77-83. dahlberg, k. a. (1993). regenerative food systems: broadening the scope and agenda of sustainability. in p. allen (ed.), food for the future: conditions and contradictions of sustainability (pp. 75-102). new york, ny: john wiley and sons, inc fao. (2010). hunger. food and agriculture organization of the united nations. retrieved from http://www.fao.org/hunger/en frank, a. g. (2002). a testimonial contribution to the 25th anniversary issue of social justice. social justice, 26(2), 51-55. fraser, e. d. g., & rimas, a. (2010). empires of food: feast, famine, and the rise and fall of civilizations. toronto: free press. friedmann, h. (1993). after midas’s feast: alternative food regimes for the future. in p. allen (ed.), food for the future: conditions and contradictions of sustainability (pp. 213-233). new york, ny: john wiley and sons, inc. goodall, j. (2005). harvest for hope: a guide to mindful eating. new york, ny: warner books inc. hay, a. (2000). system. in r.j. johnston, d. gregory, g. pratt & m. watts (eds.), the dictionary of human geography (4th ed., pp. 818-819). malden, ma: blackwell publishers ltd. jackson, t. (1995). introduction. in david smith, first person plural: a community development approach to social change. montreal: black rose books. jackson, t. (2009). prosperity without growth: economics for a finite planet. london/sterling, va: earthscan. johnston, j. (2003). who cares about the commons? capitalism, nature, socialism, 14(4), 1-41. kaufman, j. l. (2004). introduction. journal of planning education and research, [special issue on planning for community food systems] 23(4), 335-340. lappé, f. m. (2009). a visit to belo horizonte: the city that ended hunger. retrieved from http://www.counterpunch.org/lappe03182009.html. lister, n.-m. (2007). placing food: toronto’s edible landscape. in j. knechtel, (ed.), food (pp. 148-185). cambridge, ma: mit press. mcmichael. p. (2000). the power of food. agriculture and human values, 17, 21-33. mcmurtry, j. (1999a). the cancer stage of capitalism. london: pluto press. mcmurtry, j. (1999b, june). the lifeground, the civil commons and global development paper presented at the annual meeting of the canadian association for studies in international development, congress of the social sciences and humanities, sherbrooke, quebec. mcmurtry, j. (1998). unequal freedoms: the global market as an ethical system. toronto: garamond. metcalf foundation. (2008). food connects us all: sustainable local food in southern ontario. retrieved from: www.metcalffoundation.com millstone, e. & lang, t. (2003). the penguin atlas of food. new york, ny: penguin books. novak, m. (2000). defining social justice. first things, 108, 11-13. patel, r. (2007). stuffed and starved: markets, power and the hidden battle for the world’s food system. toronto: harpercollins publishers ltd. serving social justice 75 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   pollan, m. (2010). the food movement, rising. the new york review of books. retrieved from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/food-movement-rising. pollan, m. (2008). in defense of food: an eater’s manifesto. new york, ny: the penguin press. power, e., m. (1999). combining social justice and sustainability for food security. in m. koc, r. macrae, l. j.a. mougeot, & j. welsh (eds.), for hunger-proof cities: sustainable urban food systems (pp. 30-37). ottawa: international development research centre. scharf, k., levkoe, c. & saul, n. (2010). in every community a place for food: the role of the community food centre in building a local, sustainable, and just food system. toronto: metcalf foundation. retrieved from: http://www.metcalffoundation.org simon, m. (2006). appetite for profit: how the food industry undermines our health and how to fight back. new york, ny: nation books. smith, d. m. (2000). social justice. in r.j. johnston, d. gregory, g. pratt, & m. watts (eds.), the dictionary of human geography (4th ed., pp. 744-759), malden, ma: blackwell publishers ltd. sumner, j. (2010). from land to table: rural planning and development for sustainable food systems. in d. douglas (ed.), rural planning and development in canada (pp. 179-224). toronto: nelson education limited. sumner, j. (2005). sustainability and the civil commons: rural communities in the age of globalization. toronto: university of toronto press. visvanathan, s. (1991). mrs. bruntland’s disenchanted cosmos. alternatives 16, 377-384. wekerle, g. r. (2004). food justice movements: policy, planning and networks. journal of planning education and research, 23, 378-386. winson, a. (2004). bringing political economy into the debate on the obesity epidemic. agriculture and human values, 21, 299-312. wright, r. (2004). a short history of progress. toronto: house of anansi press inc. ziegler, j. (2004). the right to food. report of the special rapporteur of the united nations commission on human rights, submitted to the general assembly, new york. pilling fg june 23 16 correspondence address: merrick daniel pilling, school of social work, york university, 4700 keele st., toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: mpilling@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 177-179, 2016 book review psychiatry and the business of madness: an ethical and epistemological accounting burstow, bonnie. (2015). new york: palgrave macmillan us. isbn 9781137503831 (cloth) us$95.00; isbn 9781137503848 (paper) us$40.00; isbn 9781137503848 (ebook) us$29.99. xi + 302 pages merrick daniel pilling york university, canada psychiatry and the business of madness is a critique of psychiatry and “all that surrounds it, makes it possible” (burstow, 2015, p. 3). following szasz (1961) and others, burstow sees “mental disorders” as “problems in living” that are tragically mismanaged and exacerbated by a system that medicalizes distress and pathologizes human behaviour (p. 227). to be clear, this book is neither an appraisal of the proficiency of individual psychiatrists nor a call for the field as a whole to improve. in fact, burstow’s work suggests that in doing their job “well,” mental health practitioners are actually inflicting harm, rendering the question of competence irrelevant. she asks, “how can we speak of competence when the entire industry is in the business of creating diseases and imbalance? indeed, would anyone even be better off with a technically competent psychiatrist over a technically incompetent one?” (p. 11). burstow uses institutional ethnography and critical discourse analysis to illuminate the function, purpose, and impact of psychiatry as a complex system of social control. burstow’s goal is ambitious; she aims to “map” the institution of psychiatry as a whole in order to provide a “multifaceted” and “holistic” picture (p. 20). her focus is therefore quite broad and covers a wide range of topics including the history of psychiatry, an analysis of the diagnostic and statistic manual of mental disorder (dsm), the role of the state, the inner workings of mental health service provision, and the iatrogenic effects of psychiatric drugs and electroshock. the breadth of burstow’s approach is impressive, and is one of the contributions of her merrick daniel pilling studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 177-179, 2016 178 work. her methodology is another; she presents a thorough and meticulous example of institutional ethnography. primary data sources include institutional texts, professional observations at the ontario consent and capacity board, and qualitative interviews (n=119) she conducted with various stakeholders including psychiatric survivors and psychiatrists. burstow draws on a number of theoretical frameworks, but antipsychiatry and second wave feminism are the most evident. one of the most compelling chapters addresses the interlocking nature of psychiatry and the state in which burstow argues that psychiatry is a “textually mediated regime of ruling” (p. 100). she examines the legislation in ontario that allows people to be hospitalized involuntarily and treated against their will (mental health act and health care consent act), psychiatric charts, police apprehension, hospitalization, community treatment orders, and consent and capacity board hearings. she points to some of the underlying default assumptions that characterize people in distress as a danger to themselves and others as a justification for completely stripping people of all agency. she demonstrates a number of alarming realities including the conflation of decision making capacity with treatment compliance. in other words, being assessed as capable of making one’s own treatment decisions hinges on the acceptance of psychiatric medications. the larger implications regarding the power of psychiatry as an agent of the state capable of denying bodily autonomy are chilling. burstow’s ultimate conclusion is to do away with psychiatry altogether, an abolitionist stance that will not appeal to everyone, but one that makes sense within the context of her overall argument. critiques of any dominant institution are often met with an imperative to provide “the answer,” an alternative that will solve all of the problems with the current system, a daunting task for any one individual. burstow courageously takes this on in her final chapter in which she imagines a radically different society, one that does not include professionalization, the culture of experts, positivism, proceduralism, corporatization, hierarchy, or state power. as she states, “working outside the system offers a greater measure of protection. the hope lies in the movements of people – not states, not any part of the industrial complex” (p. 257). she suggests community-based strategies emphasizing collectivity, agency, and treating people in distress “as subjects, not objects” (p. 243). one powerful example is “mad literacy.” this involves communities becoming more knowledgeable about the meaning of behaviours that currently get dismissed as irrational and incoherent by learning about madness from mad people and becoming aware of “different ways of processing and/or expressing thoughts and feelings” (p. 238). while this final chapter is full of interesting ideas about how things could be done differently, some of them rely on ideas that appropriate indigenous beliefs. indeed, the book as a whole could benefit from a stronger anti-racist analysis. burstow sees one of the contributions of her work as the ways in which her analysis is informed by her positionality as a woman, an activist, book review studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 177-179, 2016 179 and someone who is connected with psychiatric survivors personally and professionally. as she points out, the field is dominated by white men and more perspectives are needed, particularly from those who privilege the expertise of the people most intimately affected by psychiatry and the mental health system. however, burstow perhaps minimizes the extent to which gender binarism and whiteness shape her focus and the assumptions that inform her analysis. there is limited acknowledgement of the racialization of psychiatric violence, the role of psychiatry in colonization, the embeddedness of racism and gender binarism within the foundational concepts of psychiatry, and the current context of violence against trans people and people of colour. burstow also uses some language that could be problematized from an anti-racist perspective including the term “genital mutilation” (p. 239), the colloquial use of “slaving” (p. 235), and the use of “colonized” to refer to psychiatry’s influence on related health disciplines throughout the book. likewise, her use of “transgendered” and decontextualized use of “pre-operative male to female transgender” show a lack of awareness about trans culture and respectful language (p. 239). burstow reveals a binary and sometimes essentialist approach to gender in casual phrases such as “geared at the ‘everyman’ and ‘everywoman’ in all of us” (p. 21), and the use of universal pronouns “she” and “he” throughout, which genders the content in telling ways. her gender analysis is a singular focus on sexism as it pertains to cisgender women, rather than a transinclusive approach acknowledging transmisogyny and the psychiatrization of trans people, queer people, and gender dissidence. overall, psychiatry and the business of madness is engaging and highly readable. given the current overwhelming predominance of the biomedical model of mental illness, critiques of psychiatry and the concept of “mental disorder” are often characterized as unsound, at best. as burstow states, such perspectives are seen by those working within the system as “perplexing, plain wrong, bizarre” (p. 163). for this reason burstow’s work might appeal most to those who already have some grounding in similar critiques, whether through academia, activism, or lived experience. while this work will certainly be interesting and informative for many, it is especially important for those most invested in the current system to seriously consider the value of burstow’s critique. indeed, burstow’s work stands as an important contribution to ongoing challenges to psychiatry and the biomedical model of mental illness. references szasz, t. s. (1961). the myth of mental illness: foundations of a theory of personal conduct. new york: harper & row. inclusion and participation: working with the tensions studies in social justice volume 5, issue 2, 183-196, 2011   correspondence address: gideon calder, faculty of education and social sciences, university of wales, newport, caerleon campus, lodge road, newport np18 3qt, united kingdom. tel.: +44 (0) 1633 432093; im: twitter: @gideoncalder issn: 1911-4788 inclusion and participation: working with the tensions gideon calder school of health & social sciences, university of wales, united kingdom abstract democracy is crucially about inclusion: a theory of democracy must account for who is to be included in the democratic process, how, and on what terms. inclusion, if conceived democratically, is fraught with tensions. this article identifies three such tensions, arising respectively in: (i) the inauguration of the democratic public; (ii) enabling equal participation; and (iii) the relationship between instrumental and non-instrumental accounts of democracy’s value. in each case, i argue, rather than seeking somehow to dissolve or avoid such tensions, theories of democracy should allow us to live with their implications reflexively: to work with them. such tensions are counter-democratic to the extent that they derail what nancy fraser calls “participatory parity,” under which citizens count as “full partners in social interaction.” but the extent to which they do this is not itself dependent on points of paradox in the very idea of inclusion. such parity relies on complex factors, social and economic, which democratic institutions and procedures will not by themselves address. to achieve full democratic inclusion we must already have addressed such factors; no account of democracy itself, however finely-tuned, will do this. introduction any theory of democracy relies, somehow and at some or other point, on a theory of inclusion. we need to know who are to be included as participants in the democratic process, how, and on what terms. this applies wherever the “bar” is set, whether in terms of optimal or of realistic levels of democratic participation. so while the need to think through inclusion may seem especially acute when it comes to theories with a strong participative, deliberative or associative1 flavour—for example, the ever-more detailed articulations of the practical contours of deliberative democracy (see elstub, 2010)—it also applies to those with a more minimalist, schumpeterian “take” on the realistic parameters of democratic involvement. for schumpeter (1942), famously, the “classical” notion wherein democracy entails that the citizenry in general should take a central participatory and decision-making role is misplaced and far-fetched. rather, “the role of the people is to produce a government” (p. 269) and then to be governed by them. in modern democracies the agenda-setting initiative lies, as for schumpeter it should, 184 gideon calder   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   with the candidates competing for leadership (p. 282), rather than with “the people” in some prior way. but even here, in the midst of a model of democracy entailing the very minimum of citizenly input and involvement, questions of inclusion arise. even a not-much-involved citizenry requires that boundaries be drawn, and exclusions made, if it is to be identified or established as such.2 and that is the business of a theory of inclusion. but the stakes are high. if the terms of inclusion are too “thick”—too prescriptive, or too presumptive about what counts as “good enough” participation—then they can be readily contested as prejudicial, bossily essentialist, arbitrary, blind to their own partiality or just plain oppressive. too much thickness can seem, quite specifically, undemocratic, by placing too much decision-making weight on the side of prior criteria. by the time the process gets going, this may have disenfranchised the participants themselves, by trammelling their engagements within overly prescriptive rules about what kinds of contribution might be admissible or reasonable. but if the terms of inclusion are too “thin”—nonprescriptive, and easy-going about what counts as “good enough” participation— then they risk lapsing into self-undermining relativism. if anything goes when it comes to participation, then the case in question ceases to amount to any recommendation of democratic inclusion at all. to be democratic, inclusion will have conditions. participation will have strings attached. the more assertive a democratic theory is about the value of participation, the less neutral it will be about how its participants participate. indeed, on these terms one of the putative purposes of democracy—and for theorists such as john stuart mill, the key one—is to “promote the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves” (mill, 1991, p. 226). naturally, the promotion itself should be carried out in a democratic way. and yet, just placing those last two sentences one after the other highlights how uneasily the two aims sit together, and how freighted with tensions they seem. on the one hand, participation in democratic life offers a means to an end presented as independently good: the development of the citizenry, the “promotion of their virtue and intelligence” or an equivalent goal. on the other hand, participation in democratic life is something the ends of which surely should be decided by the citizens themselves. is their participation somehow inevitably virtue-promoting, however it goes and whatever they decide? how can we know this, if democratic life is open-ended, its course decided by those participating? in this article i want to unpack a cluster of issues surrounding democratic inclusion and participation, each in this general vein, and to suggest that the ambiguities encountered are both highly stubborn (if not inevitable) and yet also productive. rather than seeking somehow to dissolve or avoid them, theories of democracy should help us figure out how to live with such tensions reflexively—to work with them, as one might put it, rather than against them. i shall address each example of a tension with explicitly participative accounts of democracy as a reference point. this is not to suggest that such theories are somehow especially problematic, as models of democracy go: indeed, as may be clear from what follows, participative theories seem to me the strongest available. in fact, the reason for focusing on them is the other way around. because such theories (should) confront questions of inclusion and participation in the fullest, broadest way, it is primarily with them inclusion and participation 185 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   (rather than with more minimalist stances) in mind that this article’s points are made. for my purposes here, deliberative and associative conceptions of democracy come under the general heading of participative theories,—even allowing for the complex, and in many ways separate, conceptual baggage of each term. a participative theory is one committed to a model of democracy requiring the promotion of broader and deeper participation in public decision-making. participative theories address questions around the nuances of inclusion which would otherwise be neglected, but are nonetheless crucial for any theory of democracy. even so, the questions still niggle at and disrupt our understanding of what democratic life amounts to. in participation and democratic theory, carole pateman identifies the distinguishing features of participative theories this way: the theory of participatory democracy is built round the central assertion that individuals and their institutions cannot be considered in isolation from one another… “[p]articipation” refers to (equal) participation in the making of decisions, and ‘political equality’ refers to equality of power in determining the outcome of decisions. … one might characterise the participatory model as one where maximum input (participation) is required and where output includes not just policies (decisions) but also the development of the social and political capacities of each individual, so that there is “feedback” from output to input. (pateman, 1970, pp. 42-43) pateman has in mind particular strains of democratic theory emerging in the work of thinkers such as rousseau, mill and g. d. h. cole. at stake here, though, are not the details of that trajectory but the markers of participative theories of democracy picked out in the quoted passage. we can rephrase them in terms of three focal points: (i) that the nature and degree of individuals’ participation is crucial to what constitutes democracy (and democracy is about the relationship between institutions and individuals); (ii) that democratic participation requires political equality; and (iii) that the outputs of democracy should include not just decisions, but also individual development. the next three sections address tensions attaching to each of these points in turn. the purpose of so doing is not to theorize inclusion itself in any extended way, but to reinforce its centrality and, at the same time, the stubborn and demanding nature of the tensions it brings. some view such tensions in an apocalyptic way. from this point of view, either they must be resolved, or we must accept a certain untenability about democracy both in ideal and real terms. noticeably, this point of view is often shared by those keenest to diagnose this untenability and those keenest to avert it. my argument is that accepting the tensions points, instead, in a different kind of direction. it is not the job of democracy to resolve tensions, but to help us elaborate them. if we expect it somehow to sort out all of the conflicts to which it gives rise, then we will have set it an impossible task. delivering consensus and frictionless consolidation of shared values cannot be part of the project. but on the other hand, for such tensions to be workable with and liveable with, social and economic justice must be tackled first, or at least simultaneously. in other words, the tensions i discuss are pernicious to the extent that society is characterized by structural inequalities and benign to the extent that they are not. in so arguing, i am insisting on a certain priority of political economy over democracy—or at the very least, that the two should be addressed at once. 186 gideon calder   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   tension 1: getting inclusion started one tension about inclusion concerns the way in which the democratic public is inaugurated. the tension can be couched in stronger or more muted ways. stella gaon (2009) presents it as a kind of transcendental instability inherent in the very idea of democracy “both as an idea and as a form of political regime . . . democracy is essentially impossible as a legitimate form of rule, because the very constitution of the ‘people’ that embodies sovereignty cannot itself be democratically or legitimately established” (p. 1). in its more muted sense, this impossibility might be rendered instead as a troublesome lacuna. thus gaon herself cites sophia näsström (2003), who identifies a “gap at the heart of democracy in the sense that ‘the people’—in order to constitute the legitimate source of political authority—would have to be prior to itself” (p. 808). whether or not this makes democracy impossible in any a priori way, it seems to make achieving it difficult. if democracy is—point (i)—about the relationship between individuals and their institutions, rather than just a matter of constructing the institutional machine in the right way, then we will wonder about how the right relationship between individuals and their institutions comes into being, given that both, strictly speaking, must be instituted at once. specifically, we shall wonder how their coming into being can itself be democratic. this is mundanely true in a practical-historical sense: decisions about the terms of any actually existing democracy cannot themselves have stemmed from democratic processes of decision-making. now of course, democracy such as we have it did not emerge fully formed and already democratically accounted for. rather, it has evolved in a messy, impure way. the phrasing of gaon and näsström is chronologically purist, however: it assumes that for democratic processes to be possible, their inauguration must itself be democratic, so that democracy must pre-exist itself. in a way this view is curiously ahistorical, insofar as nothing ever comes into being as some kind of perfect mirror of this or that abstracted political theory. even so the point bites hard at the level of ideal theory, and in particular at the point of legitimacy: just because at this level we find people talking precisely as if the purist model can and should obtain. joshua cohen (2003), for instance, refers to all forms of democracy when specifying that the “fundamental idea of democratic legitimacy is that the authorisation to exercise state power must arise from the collective decisions of the members of a society who are governed by that power” (p. 17). if so, how does legitimacy, or the authorization to exercise state power, get started? as i have put it elsewhere: should we democratically figure out how democratic procedures will work, who is included in “the people,” and so on? if not, democracy seems to begin from somewhere non-democratic, which sounds troubling, and perhaps self-undermining. but if the terms of democracy themselves are to spring from some prior democratic conversation, we confront some hefty paradoxes. who constitutes the “we” who decides the boundaries of the “we”? which people decide who is to be included under the heading of “the people”? which voices pronounce on whose voices are to count? (calder, 2011b, p. 126) inclusion and participation 187 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   it seems too that these questions translate from an ideal register to a more practical one. even if the paradoxes they pick out do not render democracy inevitably irretrievable from its impure origins, they certainly pose it problems. these problems themselves are especially acute when it comes to the extension of participation, especially if along with pateman, we insist on the inseparability of individuals and institutions. both people and processes will “do the work” in extending the range of those included. across a wide range of actually existing democratic contexts, the terms of inclusion will be imposed by the “includers” rather than the “includees,” and will pre-date the transition towards inclusion itself. in other words, to be included is, at least to this extent, to be assimilated (with individuals and institutions) rather than consulted on the terms of inclusion. to demonstrate one’s credentials is to adapt to terms into the formation of which one has had no input. includees, in this sense, may be incomers: migrants, and others new or marginal in the demos. they may also be those to whom participation rights are extended, through for example the lowering of the minimum age for participation. but equally, they might be those living within the demos who are deemed to be insufficiently participative—whose contributions as active citizens are lacking: the socially excluded or those deemed to be under-contributing economically. the uk government’s drive to combat “social exclusion” in the years following the election of the blair government in 1997 is emblematic of such projects of (social, rather than specifically political) inclusion. a hallmark of the various initiatives pursued under this heading—such as “welfare to work,” embodied in the new deal—was a combination of rhetoric about social inclusion through enhanced participation with coercive pre-formed agendas based on “thick” notions of “appropriate behaviour,” typically identifying citizenship with economic contribution (levitas, 2005, especially ch. 8) and stipulating a range of conditions to fit. thus, participation was installed as an independent good, an outcome to be pursued through economic levers of a more or less coercive nature. in other words, it was to be achieved non-participatively— without the includees being party to the process through which the terms of participation were developed. this is hardly an exceptional occurrence; what would be exceptional would be any example of a policy purportedly aimed at widening participation which itself was negotiated and rolled out along the lines of democratic participation. social inclusion in the new labour sense is not, primarily, centred on the promotion of democracy. but as an example it highlights how closely the promotion of participation might sit to induced compliance with a pre-formed agenda. recall cohen, on the fundamentals of democratic legitimacy: “the authorisation to exercise state power must arise from the collective decisions of the members of a society who are governed by that power” (cohen, 2003, p. 17). whoever they are, the non-participative sectors of society have, by definition, not contributed to any collective decision by which they are then directed, and to which they are bound. this point would apply under any model of democracy. if we adopt a participative model, and so are serious about (i) “that the nature and degree of individuals’ participation is crucial to what constitutes democracy”—then the point is reinforced and deepened. is participation in collective decision-making a prerequisite for democratic legitimacy? if so, any project designed to extend inclusion is hit by the kinds of chicken-and-egg problem we have been discussing. 188 gideon calder   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   tension 2: the paradox of enablement point (ii) above states that “democratic participation requires political equality.” in participation and democratic theory, pateman has her own take on the particular significance for democracy of social and economic equality, with workers’ participation in industry taken as a priority. but virtually all theories of democracy side with elizabeth anderson, in claiming that (something like) what she calls “equality of social relations’” is a core value of democratic life: by equality i do not mean that everyone enjoys equal esteem or reputation, or equally good jobs or income, nor that everyone is equal in virtue or merit. democratic equality rather denotes a kind of standing in civil society to make claims on others, that they respect one’s rights, pay due regard to one’s interests, and include one as a full participant in civil society. . . . everyone counts, and everyone counts equally. (anderson, 2009, p. 219) formal acknowledgement that democracy depends upon such equality is one thing. what would be required to attain it is another question. still another question, and equally pressing, is what forms of social norms of democratic interaction might actually serve to reinforce the equal standing of citizens—and whether any society has, in practice, hit upon such norms. on the theory side, of course, we find different ways of thinking through the democracy/equality relation. among the most powerful recent articulations of the tightness of fit between equal standing and democracy is nancy fraser’s account of inclusion, exemplified in turn in her conception of “participatory parity.” this figures not as part of a theory of democracy per se, but as a democratic theory of social justice. fraser (2003) seeks to identify “social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers” (p. 36). parity means “the condition of being a peer, of being on a par with others, of standing on an equal footing” (p. 101 n. 39); it is dependent on institutions according people “the status of full partners in social interaction” (p. 229). the moral requirement is that “members of society be offered the possibility of parity, if and when they choose to participate in a given activity or interaction” (p. 101 n. 39). fraser’s version of a response to tension 1 thus seems to be this: for any decision or event to be truly participative, it must offer the possibility of peerhood to those who sign up. this does not resolve the chronological lacuna: they cannot already have been involved in deciding the terms of whatever it is that they are participating in. but given that lacuna, fraser’s response provides a way of proceeding. we ensure that a realistic offer of the possibility of parity is part and parcel of informed involvement with any activity or interaction: thus the norms of participation are reflexively inclusive. we do not know in advance what substantive shape they will take. this shape will be determined—deliberatively elaborated and thrashed out—by the participants themselves. yet as i have argued at greater length elsewhere (calder, 2010) this very point signals a circularity problem with fraser’s account, and more generally with the relationship between equal standing and participation in decision-making,—one which gives a partial echo of tension 1. kevin olson helps pin it down: participatory parity “presupposes equal agency at the same time that it seeks to inclusion and participation 189 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   promote it” (olson, 2008, p. 261). participation is the means by which claims to justice will be raised, and thus itself is a kind of enabler of parity: it affords citizens not currently treated as peers the scope to argue for context-sensitive policies which will (as fraser puts it above) “represent a step in the direction of parity.” but here an irony emerges. olson sets it out like this: the people who most need to make claims about injustice, those who are politically disadvantaged in a given society, are the ones whose participatory parity is most at risk. they are most in need of parity-promoting policies. by definition, though, people who cannot participate as peers are precisely the ones least capable of making such claims. the problem, in short, is that deliberation presupposes participatory parity at the same time that deliberation is supposed to set the standards for participatory parity. (olson, 2003, pp. 260-261) olson calls this circularity “the paradox of enablement.” it occurs when “equally able citizens are both presupposed by deliberation and are its intended product” (2003, p. xx). hence the echo of tension 1. to sum up the paradox of enablement: standards concerning what it is to participate, to be a peer, to attain fraser’s version of what anderson calls equal standing are themselves something to be produced through the participatory process. for participatory parity to be duly democratic, such norms cannot pre-date the process, but are engendered by it. they emerge out of deliberations among the citizenry, rather than being pre-ordained. but for participatory parity to obtain at the point of deliberation, we must presuppose equal agency in the processes through which it is formulated. inclusion, as it were, needs to be prior to itself for the process to work in the way fraser expects of it. the voices of the marginalized seem thereby to be rendered inadmissible. they will not be heard, simply because they are not already equipped to participate on an equal footing, vis-à-vis (for example) what j.l. austin (1962) called the “illocutionary force” of speech-acts— their capacity to successfully perform an action.3 and such problems are starkest when they serve to prevent people from making claims about their own exclusion. here “marginalization is not simply a violation of parity. it additionally deprives people of the means to demand inclusion” (olson, 2008, p. 262). tension 2 is thus a more specifically located version of tension 1. the latter concerns the apparent impossibility of getting democratic processes started in a democratic way. the former centres on the need to presuppose as a prerequisite of democratic processes something which seems more accurately depicted as one of their possible outcomes: democratic agency. one way of avoiding the tension would be to remove what counts as equal standing, or participatory parity, from the subject-matter of democratic decision-making, and to define these in prior, nonnegotiable terms. but this places an extraordinarily heavy epistemic and normative burden on any such prior definition. it must somehow define equality of standing in such a way that it is definitively non-exclusionary. it must account for in advance— or at least allow space for addressing—all the ways in which citizens might contingently be deprived of equal standing, by dint of social structure, patterns of discrimination or disrespect, disregard for individual or group interests and so on. the history of the politics of inclusion suggests that struggles against oppression— along lines of class, gender, ethnicity, disability and otherwise—depend vitally on the space to challenge preconceptions about what counts as counting equally. when 190 gideon calder   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   such challenges come off, it is not just stances hostile to egalitarian challenges to the status quo which are required to adjust themselves in response, but understandings of equality itself, from among its own strongest proponents. thus versions of equal standing and democratic agency are what are achieved by such struggles. to put it no more subtly than this: if equal standing and democratic agency were already there, the struggles would not be needed. tension 3: instrumental vs. non-instrumental value our third point above—(iii) that the outputs of democracy should include not just decisions, but also individual development—reflects not just the terms of democracy, but its ultimate justification. it invokes a well-worn conflict which comes in different forms, often and problematically elided. one version of the conflict is well characterized by anderson’s (2009) contrast between instrumental and non-instrumental accounts of democracy’s value. for instrumental accounts, the purpose of government, like that of the market, is to satisfy individual preferences. individual preferences are assumed to be formed exogenously to democratic processes. democratic mechanisms of accountability are instituted to ensure that the government tries to satisfy those preferences. (p. 213) and—glossing anderson’s (2009) own rendering of the contrast—for an account to be non-instrumental to any degree, it simply has to insist that there is a value to democracy which is not reducible to the satisfaction of separately formed individual preferences, even if “its non-instrumental value is conditional on its instrumental value” (p. 213). another version of the conflict is captured by the contrast between “outcomebased” and “process-based,” or between “substantive” and “procedural” accounts of value.4 for outcome-based and substantive accounts, value resides in what is delivered by any given system, institution or programme. for process-based and procedural accounts, value resides in how the delivery takes place. combined focus on the “what” and the “how” is not necessarily untenable. fraser, for example, argues that participatory parity is both an “outcome notion” and a “process notion,” insofar as it both makes the achievement of parity of participation a necessary condition of any justifiable social arrangement, but asserts too that norms are legitimate “if and only if they can command the assent of all concerned in fair and open processes of deliberation” (fraser, 2008, p. 29). but the basic contrast holds, and is captured neatly by a slight corruption of herbert simon (though see also ceva and calder, 2009): the substantively valuable is that which “is appropriate to the achievement of given goals within the limits imposed by given conditions and constraints,” and the procedurally valuable is that which “is the outcome of appropriate deliberation” (simon, 1979, pp. 67, 68). point (iii) seems clearly aligned with the outcome-based/substantive sides of these contrastive pairs. if we suggest that the outputs of democracy should include x, then this departs from purely non-instrumental and procedural models. on any account, democracy will have outputs, and these will include decisions. but if one argues, in a “thicker” way, that democracy’s value lies in its capacity to generate inclusion and participation 191 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   “good” decisions (so that if another system generated better decisions, it would to that extent be preferable) then one is subscribing to a justification of democracy which is both instrumental (to the extent that democracy is a means to an end) and substantive (to the extent that the end in question is conceived as valuable in itself). and if, with mill, we regard individual development as one of the ends of democracy, then our commitments become thicker still: not just epistemic (vis-àvis what counts as a good decision) but also ontological (vis-à-vis what, in the way of impacts on the individual, counts as “developmental” rather than regressive). but it’s worth noting that this does not necessarily point in the direction of instrumentality as characterised by anderson. neither good decisions nor individual development equate with the satisfaction of exogenously-formed individual preferences. in fact, a rejection of instrumentalism couched in these terms is perfectly compatible with a substantivist/outcome-based account of democracy’s value. the substantivist is, as such, no more necessarily committed to a market-style understanding of the satisfactions delivered by democracy than the subscriber to the cliché that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” is committed to the promotion of tiramisu. what the substantivist is committed to is the claim that in the end, democracy is justified by its achievement of certain goals. it is perfectly consistent with this to offer an account of those goals in nonor antimarket terms. nonetheless, a tension remains here. i would put it in these terms. democracy’s value is not pure, in the sense of neatly occupying one or other side of these divides. rather, it is ambivalent between them, in ways that mirror fraser’s own depiction of “participatory parity.” even a case—as i myself would favour— arguing that accounts of democracy’s value will inevitably be substantive does not, ipso facto, commit itself to any claim that democracy has no procedural value, or that procedures are not necessary to it or that as long as it delivers substantively valuable outcomes, the procedures have no value in themselves. to put it another way: either to fetishize the pristine value of the process regardless of its results, or to assume that democracy has no value except for its propensity to deliver x, is misplaced. as if to epitomise the latter assumption, shirley letwin (1989) writes: “would we want democracy if we had access to indisputable knowledge of what ought to be done? the answer is, of course, no” (p. 223). the “of course” here is eminently disputable. for to assert it is to assume both that the value of democracy is solely teleological, and that the telos of democracy is, solely, better knowledge. substituting for “indisputable knowledge of what ought to be done” alternatives such as “failsafe conditions for social cohesion,” “policies which would guarantee greater citizenly awareness of the views of others” or, indeed, mill’s “another, better way of promoting the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves” (mill, 1991, p. 226) would be objectionable in just the same way. it is because democracy can tenably have no single telos that its value, inevitably, lies in part in the democratic process itself. to put this point in terms which may seem trite: an identifiable and distinctively democratic process is a necessary condition of the realization of the particular plurality of outcomes associated with democracy. it is because the process itself is not valuable unless it delivers various kinds of beneficial results (a necessary, but not sufficient condition) that convincing justifications of democracy will always be in part substantive. 192 gideon calder   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   working with the tensions much contemporary discussion of democracy’s potentials, limitations and rightful forms is dominated by a concern for difference, especially cultural difference. that is to say, it starts from the presumption that differences in cultural orientation and conceptions of the good will be characteristic of any genuinely democratic system. different responses to this emerge across different areas of the literature, from rawls’s latter take on political liberalism (1993) through the more deliberative models of habermas (e.g., 1995) and benhabib (e.g., 1996) to mouffe’s agonistic alternative (e.g. 2000) and beyond, in subtle gradations and sophistications of these and similar positions. sometimes this stems from more nuanced thinking about citizenship, its nature and its scope. in part it may stem too from what richard rorty (1998) diagnoses as the “culturalization” of progressive politics since the 1960s, so that as it has grown ever more sensitive to questions of cultural difference, and less bothered about money—through a period in which, across the west, “economic inequality and economic insecurity have steadily increased” (rorty, 1998, p. 83). in any case, it is characteristic of such literature to couch tensions in terms of the politics of difference. something striking about the tensions identified above is that none of them are definitively of that register. they operate entirely separately from debates about multiculturalism, for example, and the typical dilemmas taken to arise therein. none of them requires circumstances of cultural diversity in order to “bite.” they would be characteristic of the most culturally homogeneous polity, as much as of the most culturally heterogeneous one. to make this point is not to downplay or sideline the importance of cultural diversity. rather, it is to point out that analytically, these tensions arise elsewhere than in clashes between what rawls (1993) depicts as “comprehensive” values— differently held, metaphysically controversial understandings of the good. they are not, for example, doctrine-relative: they do not require for their emergence any particular bodies of belief, nor clashes between such bodies of belief.5 rather they apply at a different level: the level at which the terms of inclusion and participation in democratic decision-making are to be conceptualised and justified per se. i have been suggesting that we are stuck with each tension; that it is a mistake to think that they can somehow be conceptualised away either in an ideal model or in the practice of democratic life. on the other hand, i have also been suggesting that this stubbornness need not be vicious; that we can work with tensions like these so that they need not jeopardise our seeking more genuinely inclusive and participative democratic practice. to make this case seems to me to require the assistance of two kinds of argument. one needs to show that it is not the purpose of democracy to resolve tensions—so that it is not threatening to democracy per se if it cannot so do. the other needs to acknowledge that these tensions can have unacceptably pernicious implications in practice—but to insist too that this is not a necessary feature, but something contingent on circumstances. in closing, i shall say a little more about each of these points in turn. first: the point that these tensions are not necessarily pernicious. a certain exaggeration of the implications of issues of the type explored here is shared by those, like gaon, who think they make democracy impossible and by those, like inclusion and participation 193 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   rawls and habermas, who think that democracy requires an identifiable dimension of (overlapping) consensus to guard against the potentially disruptive implications of difference. what is held in common is the assumption that such tensions threaten legitimate politics. gaon’s objections are versions of various standard qualms about the very notion of the social contract as the source of political legitimacy. such a contract is, in a literal sense, impossible. it may arguably be impossible for conceptual reasons too—but it is certainly not the case that any conceivable political order will originate in the kind of founding consensual manoeuvre that the social contract would require as a historical event. this, of course, is why social contract theorists tend instead to characterise the contract in hypothetical or counterfactual terms. (if they were to find themselves in such a situation, what would be rational or fair in the terms to which would-be contractees might sign up?) but recourse to a level of consensus or “public reason” either definitively idealised (habermas) or working as a kind of common denominator among ostensibly antagonistic conceptions of the good (rawls) itself betrays an assumption that legitimate politics cannot tolerate tensions at a constitutive level. this assumption, as mouffe and others have sought to show, is eminently questionable.6 if democracy is to amount to a system in which different positions, interests and perspectives find a voice, then to start from a position fearful of the tensions that might emerge is, to precisely this extent, to miss the point. epistemically speaking, to assume that democracy must start with consensus—even at the most abstracted level—is to assume in advance something that only the interplay of arguments might reveal; namely that claims made in respect of a plurality of goods and values might converge. as john o’neill (2007) has put it, the virtue of democracy may lie not its (putatively) resolving conflicts, but in its revealing them (p. 183). o’neill makes this point with reference to participants in deliberative processes, as part of a case designed to disrupt the presumption that consensus will, or should, be the outcome of any such process. it might apply equally at the level at which the very terms on which inclusion and participation are conceived. here too we find tensions. but if we conceive the epistemic benefits of democracy not simply in terms of delivering the truth, or of enhancing the pool of social knowledge, but (also) reflexively, in terms of the shedding of light on the terms of democracy itself, then the revelation of such tensions might itself be of value. in other words: if the process of widening participation, or of addressing the terms of inclusion, exposes tensions inherent in such goals, then so much the better. it is better that we know about them, especially if (for partisan reasons) we are committed to including particular voices hitherto unheard. working with democracy reveals dissonances, both between points of view, and in terms of the circumstances in which they emerge; it is better that we know about these than that we do not. it will not suit political parties, or other established interest groups, that it be widely known that the conditions of democracy itself are more unstable than the dominant ideology might suggest. but this is no reason not to expose the fact. the problem with letwin’s position, discussed earlier, is that it assumes that we already know what a good epistemic result is; a virtue of democracy, however, is that it enhances the scope for reflexivity about what itself counts as a good result. still, if there is always an epistemic value in such exposure, that is not to say that it is always conducive to sustaining a reflexive, engaged democratic life. whether 194 gideon calder   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   this is the case depends not on the terms of democracy itself, but on the way in which it sits vis-à-vis other considerations. throughout this article, i have been working with the assumption that it is within participative conceptions of democracy, broadly construed, that the nuances and complexities of social dynamics are best revealed. but what those dynamics are will be only partially determined by the operations of democracy. democracy works with what is given, by way of structural relations and the operations of power. it does not, by itself, control these or remove their harmful consequences. so if tensions obtain of the kind addressed here, whether or not they are pernicious depends on factors other than the simple terms of democratic engagement. it depends on the backdrop against which this engagement takes place. it is the degree of structural inequality—of economic resources—which is the most crucial aspect of this backdrop. so my case is that while we find stubborn tensions in the very idea of inclusion, it is a piece of philosophical fetishism to insist that these, by themselves, will somehow render impossible the process of inclusion. rather, the degree to which such tensions amount to impediments to something like democracy ensuing will depend on the structural features of the backdrop against which participation takes place. such tensions are counter-democratic to the extent to which they derail what fraser calls participatory parity. but the extent to which they derail this is not itself dependent on points of paradox in the very idea of inclusion. it depends on the socio-economic landscape. if a society is characterised by a long historic legacy of slavery, for example, or chasmic divides between rich and poor, or heavy gender oppression, then it is these factors which will make the tensions pernicious at the point at which there is an attempt to overcome them via democratic processes, rather than the conceptual dissonances inherent in ensuring inclusive participation. the paradox of enablement will not amount to a crisis of democracy in a society somehow, in some unlikely way, already characterised by an absence of relative poverty and a history of profound equality in terms of gender, race and disability. so if we consider this claim by iris young (2000, pp.5-6) —“the normative legitimacy of a democratic decision depends on the degree to which those affected by it have been included in the decision-making processes and have had the opportunity to influence the outcomes”—in terms of what must be the case in order for “those affected” to be genuinely “included,” we shall always be talking about factors lying outside the terms of inclusion themselves. for those terms to work, and for inclusion to run its course, is not something that democracy can by itself ensure, necessary though it may be to this process of fruition. we must already have addressed, somehow, the terms on which individuals and groups are rendered excluded by factors other than the presence or absence of democratic engagement. the case made in this article can be summed up like this. democracy is crucially about inclusion. inclusion, if conceived democratically, is fraught with tensions. these tensions are disruptive to democracy to the extent that inclusion is up against radical inequality and exclusion. the extent to which these characteristics are typical of the modern western polity is a matter for another discussion. inclusion and participation 195 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   notes   1 elstub himself uses the term “associational” in depicting a democratic model in which voluntary associations located in civil society are key (elstub, 2008, p. 101). paul hirst (1994) uses both “associative” and “associationalist” to denote something broadly equivalent. 2 schumpeter himself acknowledges the inevitability of such discrimination, and argues that “disqualifications on grounds of economic status, religion and sex,” or indeed race, are, in principle, no more incompatible with the democratic method than disqualifications on the basis of age (schumpeter, 1942, pp. 244-245). this is not because he approves of such exclusions, but rather because of his view of the nature of democracy itself. democracy is not a way of life (except for the leaders) but a method “for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (p. 269). such a definition is neutral with regard to the composition of the electorate; for it to work, it just requires that there is an electorate, marked out as such by some or other set of rules. 3 i am grateful to keith sutherland for suggesting the austinian phrasing. 4 still another, and also helpful, way of rendering the contrast comes with ronald dworkin’s distinction between “dependent” and “detached” conceptions of the relation between democracy and equality. on the “dependent” view, “the main features of a democracy . . . are justified because [such] a community . . . is more likely to distribute material resources and other opportunities in an egalitarian way.” for the “detached” approach, “we judge the fairness or democratic character of a political process by looking to features of that process alone, asking only whether it distributes political power in an equal way, not what results it promises to produce” (dworkin, 2003, pp. 117118). the “dependent” view broadly corresponds to the “outcome-based,” “substantive” and “instrumental” accounts of democracy’s value sketched here, and the “detached” view to the “process-based,” “procedural” and “non-instrumental” accounts. but the correspondences are loose, and—for reasons which i address below—not to be taken as implying any necessary incompatibility between stances falling in one column or the other. 5 for more on the notion of doctrine-relativity, though in a different context, see calder (2011). 6 see mouffe (2000)—but see also noonan (2006) for a discussion of mouffe’s work on democracy which argues that she herself slips into many of the presumptions of the mainstream liberal and rationalist traditions which she critiques. references anderson, e. (2009). democracy: instrumental vs. non-instrumental value. in t. christiano and j. christman (eds.), contemporary debates in political philosophy (pp. 213-227). oxford: wileyblackwell. austin, j. l. (1962). how to do things with words. oxford: clarendon press. benhabib, s. (1996). the deliberative moment and the problem of difference. in s. benhabib (ed.), democracy and difference (pp. 3-18). princeton: princeton university press. calder, g. (2010). pragmatism, critical theory and democratic inclusion. etica & politica 12(1), 52-67. calder, g. (2011a). climate change and normativity: constructivism versus realism. critical review of international social and political philosophy 14(2), 153-169. calder, g. (2011b). democracy and listening. in m. crumplin (ed.), problems of democracy: language and speaking (pp. 125-135). oxford: inter-disciplinary press. ceva, e., & calder, g. (2009). values, diversity and the justification of eu institutions. political studies 57(4), 828-845. cohen, j. (2003). procedure and substance in deliberative democracy. in t. christiano (ed.), philosophy and democracy (pp. 17-38). oxford: oxford university press. elstub, s. (2008). towards a deliberative and associational democracy. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. elstub, s. (2010). the third generation of deliberative democracy. political studies review 8(3), 291307. fraser, n. (2003). social justice in an age of identity politics. in n. fraser & a. honneth, redistribution or recognition? (pp. 7-109) london: verso. fraser, n. (2008) scales of justice: reimagining political space in a globalising world. cambridge: polity press. 196 gideon calder   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011     gaon, s. (2009). introduction. in s. gaon (ed.), democracy in crisis: violence, alterity, community (pp. 1-25). manchester: manchester university press. habermas, j. (1995). between facts and norms. cambridge: polity press. hirst, p. (1994). associative democracy. cambridge: polity press. letwin, s. (1989). democracy and the rule of law. in g. brennan & l. e. lomasky (eds.), politics and process (pp. 221-234). cambridge: cambridge university press. levitas, r. (2005). the inclusive society? social exclusion and new labour (2nd ed.). houndmills: palgrave. mill, j. s. (1991). on liberty and other essays. ed. j. gray. oxford: oxford university press. mouffe, c. (2000). the democratic paradox. london: verso. näsström, s. (2003). what globalization overshadows. political theory 31(6), 808-34. olson, k. (2008). participatory parity and democratic justice. in n. fraser (ed.), adding insult to injury (pp. 246-272). london: verso. o’neill, j. (2007). markets, deliberation and environment. london: routledge. pateman, c. (1970). participation and democratic theory. oxford: oxford university press. rawls, j. (1993). political liberalism. new york: columbia university press. rorty, r. (1998). achieving our country: leftist thought in twentieth-century america. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. schumpeter, j. (1942). capitalism, socialism and democracy. new york: harper. simon, h. (1979). from substantive to procedural rationality. in f. hahn & m. hollis (eds.), philosophy and economic theory (pp. 65-86). oxford: oxford university press. young, i. m. (2000). inclusion and democracy. oxford: oxford university press. cross final correspondence address: fernanda cross, school of social work, university of michigan, ann arbor, mi, 48109, usa; email: flcross@umich.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 review essay documentation status socialization as an ethnic-racial socialization dimension: incorporating the experience of mixed-status latinx families fernanda lima cross university of michigan, usa abstract ethnic-racial socialization (ers) serves as a protective factor in the development of minority children. however, few studies have focused on mixed-status latinx families to include the broad expression of their ethnic-racial socialization practices centering on their immigration experiences as they teach their children the risks and restrictions of having undocumented status. these parents adapt their ers in accordance with their experiences of stress, fear, and discrimination, all of which shape the type and frequency of their socialization messages. through documentation status socialization, latinx parents forewarn their children of the inequities associated with their ethnic-racial group and undocumented status, including possible family separation. they also teach children about nativity differences and the attendant privilege of having documented status. this manuscript highlights insights to be gained by considering documentation status socialization as an ers dimension within latinx families. learning about the specific ers practices of such an understudied group is a social justice issue with important implications for understanding how these families might adapt and respond to their social context, especially amidst a political environment that engenders fear and isolation throughout their community. including documentation status socialization in the ers literature is a crucial step towards developing a deeper understanding of how the structural and social forces operating within the lives of undocumented immigrants impact normative family processes that ultimately exert an influence on their children’s development. a discussion on implications for practitioners and service providers working with this population is also included. keywords ethnic-racial socialization; undocumented immigrants; documentation status socialization documentation status socialization studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 265 there are about 10.4 million undocumented immigrants residing in the united states, the large majority of whom are of latin american origin (warren, 2021). they are raising an estimated 4.5 million children who, by virtue of birth here, possess american citizenship (zayas & gulbas, 2017). besides citizen children, some of these undocumented parents have undocumented children brought to this country at a very young age, who were raised here and likely feel as american as citizen children do (zayas, 2015). these immigrants face inequalities beyond that of their racial and economic status. their undocumented status overrides other social forces and becomes part of their identity, thereby shaping their daily lives, influencing how they are perceived and treated by others, and limiting their opportunities. most aspects of their lives are negatively impacted by their lack of authorization to be present in this country (gleeson & gonzales, 2012). given the myriad ways undocumented status affects these parents, it is likely to inform what they teach their children about race and ethnicity as well. parents dealing with documentation status issues face the dread of being identified as undocumented and consequently having their families torn apart by deportation. children aware of the undocumented status of their parents live with the ever-present threat of separation due to deportation. these parents may accordingly adapt their socialization practices due to fears of being exposed and to prepare their children for the possible outcomes associated with being undocumented (ayón, 2016). sharing with their children the fragility of the family’s situation often leads to difficult conversations at home, which constitute ethnic-racial socialization (ers) messages peculiar to mixed-status families (suárez-orozco et al., 2011). ers includes the ways in which parents teach their children about their ethnic-racial group with the goals of helping them develop feelings of pride in their culture and connections to their heritage as well as to prepare the youth to face discrimination and navigate an oppressive society (hughes et al., 2006; huguley et al., 2019). examination of these socialization efforts helps us understand how minority parents react to social inequalities, prejudice and discrimination, as well as how they prepare their children to confront these same issues (ayón, 2016; hughes et al., 2006). as a step towards promoting the consideration of a broader spectrum of experiences of latinx immigrant families, this manuscript argues for regarding documentation status socialization as an ers dimension. documentation status socialization not only teaches children the risks and restrictions imposed by undocumented status, but also provides them with some measure of agency over their situation through learning about the plans their parents have laid to ensure the family’s safety and reunification in case of separation. it also teaches children about their own nativity and documentation status, and rights that the youth are entitled to as u.s citizens. these parental teachings might also serve to counteract children’s negative feelings associated with belonging to an immigrant family and foster family union (ayón, 2016; cross et al., 2020). acknowledging documentation status socialization as an important ers fernanda cross studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 266 dimension (especially to latinx immigrant families) will expand the ers literature by improving our understanding of what and how parents have been communicating to their children regarding the impact of undocumented status on their family and community (ayón, 2018; cardoso et al., 2018; garcía, 2019). in this article, i build on the existing ers literature to underscore the ways in which the experiences of undocumented latinx parents could be more fully explored to incorporate the broad expression of their ers practices, including their documentation status socialization. drawing from the integrative model (garcia coll et al., 1996; stein et al., 2016) i explain the impact of parental foreign and undocumented status on their ers. i offer examples of how documentation status socialization has likely always been part of the ers of latinx immigrant families and i discuss some of the sociocultural contextual factors impacting the need for such socialization, especially over the last few decades. finally, i conclude offering potential suggestions for future research and strategies for practice so service providers working with this population can better serve them. the ethnic-racial socialization of latinx families ers has been found to encompass a set of protective and adaptive practices employed by parents to promote their children’s development. however, this process is of particular importance to ethnic minority parents as they share with their children their heritage and cultural history, transmit their views and perceptions about race and ethnicity and prepare them for the world beyond their home (hughes et al., 2006). in contemporary research, the process is no longer viewed as a unidimensional construct, but rather composed of several major themes or dimensions that have emerged from studies regarding ers messages, beliefs, and practices. these themes represent different aspects of socialization that parents engage in as reported by parents themselves or by their adolescent children (hughes et al., 2009). latinx parents transmit cultural values to their children, teaching them history, customs, traditions, and ethnic heritage to promote the development of racial or ethnic pride. such cultural socialization has been identified as one of the principal ers dimensions employed by this group. to accomplish this, parents use native language in the home, celebrate cultural holidays, and teach children about their heritage through books, music, and food (ayón et al., 2018; umaña-taylor et al., 2009). another common socialization method used by latinx parents is preparation for bias, in order to teach their children about discrimination and prepare them to deal with it. these messages regarding intergroup relations are less common than cultural socialization messages, possibly due to parental discomfort with the negative feelings prompted by addressing the topic of discrimination (espinoza et al., 2016; hughes, 2003). parents also hesitate to raise the topic of prejudice with their children for fear that it might negatively influence their self-esteem and ethnic documentation status socialization studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 267 affect (hughes et al., 2006). promotion of mistrust messages focus on lack of trust regarding other ethnic groups and warnings about intergroup interactions (grindal & nieri, 2015; hughes et al., 2006). the difference between preparation for bias and the less common promotion of mistrust is that the latter emphasizes distrust without offering any suggestions on how to handle encounters with discrimination. in a mixed-methods study with latinx immigrant families (cross et al., 2020) undocumented parents were found to employ the varied dimensions of ers differently than documented ones. quantitative analysis indicated that undocumented parents transmitted more cultural socialization messages than those of documented status. the undocumented participants’ inability to visit their native country curtails their children’s option of direct cultural exposure, thus intensifying the importance of and need for cultural transmission at home. these parents were also more likely to teach them to be wary of interactions with law enforcement personnel and non-latinxs. in addition, interview results highlighted the importance placed by both groups in preparing their children for discrimination. however, undocumented parents tended to encourage their children to disregard encounters with discrimination and not engage with the perpetrators, while documented parents instructed their children to stand up for themselves and their families. such results highlight variances in ers according to documentation status and demonstrate the need for continued study of the different aspects of latinx immigrants’ socialization practices, including the reasoning and motivation behind them (author citation). in sum, my work builds upon the widely studied dimensions of ers to better capture the experiences of latinx immigrants, especially those of undocumented status. ers and children’s outcomes children exposed to ers are shown to exhibit numerous beneficial outcomes, including positive ethnic identity development, increased engagement with school, and improved mental health (e.g., constante et al., 2019; mcdermott et al., 2018). in a longitudinal study with 323 latinx youth, douglass and umaña-taylor (2016) demonstrated the positive influence of cultural socialization across adolescence with ethnic identity exploration becoming stronger as the children aged. the protective benefits associated with teaching children about their parents’ native culture have also been associated with improved academic outcomes. in a sample of 321 latinx adolescents, cultural teachings fostered the development of coping strategies against discrimination and were related to higher gpa (mcdermott et al., 2018). similarly, berkel et al. (2010) found that cultural socialization helped children feel positively about their ethnicity by engendering a deep sense of connection to their heritage, which in turn was associated with improved mental health and academic self-efficacy, even in the face of high levels of fernanda cross studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 268 discrimination. parental messages preparing children to face discrimination have also been found to play an important role in their lives as they encounter discrimination. in a study with 175 latinx middle schoolers in an emerging immigrant community, kulish et al. (2019) found that those exposed to preparation for bias messages were more likely to develop greater awareness of discrimination. these messages have also been associated with lower selfesteem among latinx adolescents (espinoza et al., 2016). in addition, espinoza et al. (2016) found that transmitting mistrust of other ethnic-racial groups has been associated with greater internalizing and externalizing problems among the youth. these parental messages aimed at protecting their children by preparing them for future maltreatment have been explored longitudinally using a sample of 251 mexican-origin adolescents. over time, fathers’ promotion of mistrust was found to intensify the deleterious effect of adolescents’ perception of discrimination on their depressive symptoms (park et al., 2019). while this literature has addressed the general experience of latinxs in the united states, there has been a dearth of research focusing on families of undocumented or mixed immigration status (where some or all of the children are american citizens and one or more of the parents are undocumented; ayón et al., 2020). ers messages are shaped by the various social stratification factors that permeate the lives of immigrants, including discrimination, oppression, socioeconomic status, level of education, age, gender, parental attitudes and experiences, generation of immigration, and documentation status. thus, it could be expected that undocumented parents adapt their ers practices to reflect the constrained realities of their status as it exposes them to more pervasive and explicit ethnic discrimination in their everyday lives, a well acknowledged influence on ers (ayón, 2016; hughes et al., 2006). theoretical framework when considering the influence of parents’ documentation status on their ers practices, the integrative model is a useful framework providing links among social position, discrimination, and family processes (garcía coll et al., 1996). social position in the integrative model refers to how society ranks people within a social hierarchy based on their race, ethnicity, gender and economic level. previous work revising the integrative model proposed undocumented status as a relevant social position variable for latinxs living in rural and new immigrant destination areas, along with foreigner status and migrant farmworker status (stein et al., 2016). latinx immigrants occupy a lower position in the social hierarchy due to perceptions of foreignness when compared to immigrants racialized as white (finch et al., 2001). furthermore, undocumented latinx immigrants fall even lower in this hierarchy due to the documentation status socialization studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 269 negative compounding effects of being immigrants, members of an ethnic or racial minority, and undocumented. the high levels of discrimination and oppression these immigrants experience pervade many aspects of their lives, by restricting their work and income prospects, their access to medical care and good schooling for their children, the neighborhoods they can live in, and consequently the people they interact with (suárez-orozco et al., 2011). when considered in the family context, these pervasive factors exert influence on the ers messages transmitted at home. this is especially true for recently arrived immigrant families settling in new immigrant destinations, where the lack of cultural resources and community support to help them navigate their new environments and manage discrimination also impacts the messages parents share with their children regarding race and ethnicity (stein et al., 2016). the socio-political context and ers of undocumented immigrants while it is undeniable that most undocumented immigrants in the us experience fear and stress in their daily lives, latinxs endure even greater levels because of ethnic-racial profiling. latinxs have suffered the brunt of deportations, with almost all of those deported between 1997 and 2012 being latin american (golash-boza & hondagneu-sotelo, 2013). more recently, mexicans represented 70% of those deported in 2015 (transactional records access clearinghouse, 2016). such targeted enforcement demonstrates a historical racialization of undocumented immigration as a latinx issue, portraying scary brown criminals crossing our border and taking over the jobs of american citizens (chavez, 2013). this latinx threat narrative has been accompanied by increases in proposed anti-immigrant legislation, stricter enforcement policies, and heightened negative media portrayal (massey & pren, 2012). arizona and texas, for example, have had long histories of adopting and enforcing laws that rely heavily on ethnic-racial profiling of latinxs aimed at curtailing undocumented immigrants’ access to resources or opportunities. these policies and practices restrict immigrants’ employment and educational prospects and allow law enforcement personnel to be blatantly discriminatory by asking to see the “papers” of those they suspect of being undocumented, all of which contribute to a heightened perception of discrimination among latinxs (ayón & garcia, 2019; fitzgerald et al., 2019). many recent immigrants from latin america are low-skilled hard-working migrant laborers, most of whom are undocumented. their lack of documentation is among the principal reasons they are targets of discrimination and excluded socially (flippen & parrado, 2015). these immigrants who arrive in the us to face critical portrayals of their ethnicracial group and experience negative interactions with others will accordingly adapt their beliefs and parenting practices in response (garcía coll et al., fernanda cross studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 270 1996; suárez-orozco et al., 2011). it is in this hostile environment that undocumented latinxs have been raising their children and preparing them to face the realities associated with belonging to a disenfranchised ethnic-racial group. not surprisingly, conversations regarding documentation status issues and its associated vulnerabilities have been found to take place between undocumented parents and their children. when a parent is deported, children often experience psychological trauma, develop poor physical and mental health, display aggressive behaviors, and endure economic hardship (chaudry et al., 2010). should both parents get deported, in the absence of documented relatives willing to care for the children, they are placed in foster care. in extreme cases, families become permanently separated as parents lose custody of or contact with their children. if reunification does occur, it usually takes years (amuedo-dorantes & arenas-arroyo, 2018; hall, 2011). citizen children of deported or detained undocumented parents have been found to display greater psychological distress and ptsd symptoms than those whose parents have had no contact with immigration authorities (rojasflores et al., 2017). a study of 2,500 latinx children demonstrated that those with undocumented parents exhibited higher levels of internalizing and externalizing behavior issues than latinx children of documented or citizen parents (landale et al., 2015). the children of undocumented immigrants do not need to have actually experienced the deportation of a parent to become aware of its disastrous consequences through classmates, neighbors, and tv (capps et al., 2007). merely knowing someone who has been deported is associated with increased need for mental health support, regardless of one’s own documentation status (vargas et al., 2019). this awareness often causes children of immigrants to perceive their immigrant heritage negatively, to associate “immigrant” with “illegality,” and to want to distance themselves from their background (dreby, 2012). the more the parents are at risk for deportation, the more stressed are the children (brabeck & xu, 2010). for instance, young us citizen children of undocumented immigrants report experiencing higher levels of anxiety when compared to children of documented parents (brabeck & sibley, 2016). this constant threat of deportation affects the large majority of children of undocumented immigrants by pervading their lives with a constant fear of abandonment and family dissolution (de genova, 2010), thereby inhibiting their healthy development (suárez-orozco et al., 2011). the process by which parents share information with their children regarding parental documentation status and its related inequities constitutes an important ers dimension for latinx immigrants. exploring this in mixedstatus families, utilizing culturally relevant measures, may well provide the field with critical information regarding how such socialization impacts children’s development. documentation status socialization studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 271 documentation status socialization in light of the stricter immigration enforcement adopted by the us in the past few years, it might be expected that undocumented latinx parents are engaging in unprecedented levels of documentation status socialization (heinrich, 2018). it is worth noting that while researchers have only recently started considering the varied range of ers among latinxs immigrant families, documentation status socialization has likely always been an essential part of the ers arsenal of these families. through documentation status socialization, latinx parents teach their children about not only the inequities experienced by members of their ethnic group but also the ways in which the family has prepared to handle these challenges (lykes et al., 2013; cross et al., 2021). the desire to shield children from an uncertain future is reflected in these parents’ ers, which differs from that of parents not at risk for deportation. some undocumented parents, wishing to guard their children from the consequences of these uncertainties, may strongly encourage them to assimilate into mainstream society (suárez-orozco et al., 2011). in addition, children are often given explicit rules about not drawing attention to themselves or their family, since such attention could jeopardize their family’s future by way of a parent’s deportation (zayas, 2015). documentation status socialization also encompasses teaching children about the overall vulnerability and injustice associated with having undocumented status, coaching them to behave so as to reduce their chances of being identified as undocumented, and explaining the benefits afforded to the documented, which include the privilege of having documented status or being an american citizen. they also discuss the risk of parental deportation, and, for the undocumented children, the risk of their own deportation, as well as contingency plans in case of detainment or deportation. in a study conducted with latinx immigrants living in the midwest, documentation status socialization was reportedly part of the ers of both documented and undocumented parents. this socialization also included parents helping their children view border crossing as necessary for survival and not always a choice (cross et al., 2021). in addition, in a review of the ers literature of latinx families, ayón et al. (2020) highlighted a study in which latinx immigrant parents reported teaching their children differences in the birthplace and documentation status of members of the same family. not enough studies with this population have been conducted to provide more in-depth information about when and why parents decide to engage in documentation status socialization with their children. many parents choose not to share their contingency plans with their children or initiate these conversations with them. they report not knowing how to talk about the risk of deportation and family separation with their children and not wanting to worry them about it (balderas et al., 2016). in a study with 132 latinx immigrants, less than half of the sample reported engaging in these fernanda cross studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 272 conversations with their children even though they acknowledged the need for these discussions (lykes et al., 2013). similarly, about 25% of the undocumented parents interviewed by cardoso et al. (2018) reported not talking about documentation status issues with their children. garcía (2019) reported that parents consider their children’s age and ability to grasp certain concepts in their decisions to talk to them about documentation status, many opting for silence or for sharing only the most basic information with their younger children. however, oftentimes parents do not have the choice of shielding their youngsters from these difficult and emotional conversations. for example, immigrants interviewed by balderas et al. (2016) reported engaging in documentation status socialization in response to children’s questioning after being exposed to the topic elsewhere. children also have been found to raise these topics with parents in response to their own encounters with discrimination, witnessing raids in their neighborhood, or hearing stories in the media, which indicates their awareness of the prejudice and antiimmigrant sentiments impacting their community. in addition, when faced with the detainment or deportation of a close family member, parents are forced to break the silence and teach their children about these issues. this dimension of ers reflects the overall latinx immigrant experience in the us and is heavily influenced by the socio-context of the families and overall political climate of the country. cognizant of this, ayón (2018) developed a new ers measure drawing from in-depth interviews with latinx immigrants (ayón, 2016) and validated through a survey with 300 latinx parents (ayón, 2018), which indicated that conversations regarding nativity and documentation status were part of their ers repertoire. continued examinations of documentation status socialization have potential implications for the socio-emotional and socio-political development of their children, as they come to comprehend the racialized nature of undocumented immigration, the targeted enforcement of latinxs, and the inherent social inequalities associated with being part of a latinx immigrant family (anyiwo et al., 2018; pinetta et al., 2020; suárez-orozco & yoshikawa, 2013). as these children mature, they become increasingly aware – through stories in the media and conversations at home – of the continuous threat of deportation that many members of their ethnic group face here in the united states. this perception could influence their view of and feelings towards their ethnic group (dreby, 2012). realization of both the vulnerability of their family’s future and of belonging to a marginalized group is known to affect children’s psychosocial development (suárez-orozco et al., 2011). however, most ers studies have not specifically focused on mixed-status families, which has precluded the examination of the possible role of parents’ undocumented status on their socialization processes. consideration of parental documentation status could help disentangle some of the associations between ers and youth outcomes, as well as shed light on additional strategies these parents use to socialize their children. for example, findings documentation status socialization studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 273 from a mixed-method examination comparing and contrasting the experiences and family practices of documented and undocumented latinx immigrants revealed that undocumented parents transmitted more promotion of mistrust messages to their adolescents than parents of documented status. these mistrust messages were, in turn, related to higher levels of depressive symptoms among those adolescents (cross et al., 2020). such higher use of promotion of mistrust among the undocumented reflect their current reality of living with the constant threat of deportation, prompting parents to warn their adolescents of interactions with people of other ethnic groups in order to protect their family. that study, one of the first to focus directly on the ers of mixed-status families, sheds light on the differential impact of parental undocumented status on their family processes and their adolescents’ outcomes. it also argues for a continued focus on the family processes of this population. it is important to note that issues of documentation status are not solely restricted to the undocumented and their children. a recent national survey of almost 1500 latinx adults indicated that 36% of them knew someone who had been detained or deported and almost 80% of them reported feeling an overall anti-immigrant environment in the us (vargas et al., 2019). this demonstrates the relevance of immigration and documentations status issues for latinxs in general. even among native-born and documented latinx, documentation status conversations could be prompted by news reports or incidents involving family members, friends or others in their community, especially among those living in areas of stricter immigration enforcement (ayón, 2016). these discussions, however, are much more prevalent, personal, and urgent for those living in mixed-status households. they address crucial matters faced by undocumented latinx immigrants that extend to their family members, regardless of their documentation status, and are important for understanding how these families socialize their children in reaction to an environment of political adversity that engenders not only fear but isolation from the larger community. examination of these socialization efforts helps us understand how minority parents experience and consider social inequalities, prejudice and discrimination, as well as how they teach their children to manage them. implications for practice service providers working with undocumented latinx immigrant families should be mindful of the impact of parents’ undocumented status on their children’s development and on their ers (cross et al., 2020). assisting parents in devising contingency plans for the care of their children in case of detainment or deportation should be part of the service plan for mixed-status families (salas et al., 2013). these contingency plans provide both parents and children with the reassuring knowledge that they have prepared for fernanda cross studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 274 unwanted events and future family reunification. distributing the plans to extended family members or other trusted adults in their community would help avoid the risk of children being left unattended at home or stranded at school in case both parents are detained. in addition, providers could support parents as they undertake the difficult, but necessary, conversations with their children about their vulnerable status. drawing from a strengths-based approach, these conversations should also emphasize the family’s resilience as they navigate this country’s sociopolitical climate and provide some strategies to further empower them, especially the children, who are more likely to be documented and less afraid. however, parents must have the final word in deciding when and how documentation status issues are to be discussed with their children (balderas et al., 2016). practitioners must also conduct their work with these families through a trauma-informed lens, being aware of the many ways in which migration-related trauma can be expressed as well as watching for other symptoms of loss, family separation and isolation trauma (lovato et al., 2018). furthermore, families impacted by the detainment or deportation of a family member are often thrown into desperate financial crisis. accordingly, providers should aim to facilitate connections to social services agencies and economic assistance resources. counseling services in the wake of deportation or raids in their community are also essential as families rebuild and continue moving forward (suárez-orozco & yoshikawa, 2013). family separation is a life-changing event that affects the entire undocumented immigrant community, far beyond the family directly impacted. community organizations should provide spaces for members to meet safely and talk about their fears, issues facing their community, and ways they can mobilize to reduce fears and tensions. making mental health services available to these families in a variety of different settings (e.g., schools, health clinics, community organizations) would facilitate their access and foster a willingness to utilize these valuable and seriously needed resources to help families cope (zayas et al., 2017). furthermore, practitioners should provide their clients with resources for battling discrimination at the micro and macro levels, ranging from their place of employment, to their children’s schools, to their own neighborhood, to governmental agencies. given the pervasiveness of discrimination experiences among latinx communities, providers should be aware that this is an issue the parents and children have likely faced and are concerned about. families should be instructed that they, too, have rights and that talking openly about their plight would promote awareness of the different advocacy resources available to protect both parents and children from discrimination, regardless of their documentation status. creating awareness of what their rights are during an encounter with immigration agents (at their place of employment, at their home or in their community) would allow these immigrants to protect and defend themselves from ethnic-racial profiling and seek out the necessary support to confront injustices (ayón, 2016). documentation status socialization studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 264-279, 2022 275 implications for research in the integrative model, parental ers has been conceptualized as exerting a protective influence on children’s development, as it helps mitigate their exposure to risks stemming from their minority status (including those experienced indirectly in family contexts) while simultaneously fostering positive feelings about their ethnic group membership (hughes et al., 2006). however, the association of documentation status socialization and children outcome is unclear thus far given the dearth of research in the topic. future studies should explore the documentation status socialization of latinx parents and the impact of these messages on youth academic and mental health outcomes. in addition, examining these associations longitudinally would provide valuable insights on how these messages might change as children age as well as the relationship between parents’ documentation status socialization and the changing sociopolitical climate of this country. past research has highlighted parents’ avoidance of documentation status discussions with younger children based on their desire to shield these youngsters from worrying about family separation until they are older (garcía, 2019; cross et al., 2020). thus, these studies should also aim to tease apart the differential impact of these messages on children of diverse ages. in addition, future studies should rely on multiple informants taking into account the perspectives of diverse members of the family, including mothers, fathers, youth and extended family yielding greater insight on their socialization practices. quantitative studies exploring the ers of latinx families should rely on ers measures that are more culturally relevant, such as the one developed by ayón (2018), which accounts for more dimensions of ers representing the broader range of experiences of latinx immigrant families. lastly, future research exploring documentation status socialization should also focus on the positive coping strategies and adaptations made by immigrant family to diminish the negative impact of the broader sociopolitical environment on their families (cross et al., 2021). examining the ers of these families through a strengths-based lens will allow for a better understanding of how mixed-status communities keep moving forward despite many obstacles imposed by american society and legislation while raising civically minded and engaged children. conclusion ers is a fundamental aspect of raising minority children, as parents prepare their children for life beyond the home (umaña-taylor et al., 2009). as long as our society continues to marginalize and dehumanize immigrants, a better understanding of the ways in which they adapt and respond to their social context is needed. thus, incorporating documentation status socialization into the ers literature will propel the field to broaden its current fernanda 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(2017). processes of belonging for citizen-children of undocumented mexican immigrants. journal of child and family studies, 26(9), 24632474. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0755-z dossa & golubovic final feb 26 19 correspondence address: parin dossa, department of sociology & anthropology, simon fraser university, burnaby, bc, v5a 1s6; email: pdossa@sfu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 reimagining home in the wake of displacement parin dossa simon fraser university, canada jelena golubovic simon fraser university, canada abstract in the wake of displacement, people are tasked with reconstructing a sense of home in a new and unfamiliar location. in this article, we consider how the experience of displacement complicates our understanding of what it means to be at home by exposing the significant labour that goes into its imagination and reimagination. we examine practices of homemaking after displacement through two interrelated themes: (a) narratives of home, where we discuss how displaced persons nurture a sense of home through memory and storytelling; and (b) textures of home, where we emphasize how a sense of home is sustained or re-imagined through material objects. within this discussion, we maintain that there is a continuity between the violence of displacement and the violence of relocation, as the task of reimagining home is often compounded by structural factors including socioeconomic marginalization and racialization in the country of settlement. we conceptualize displacement as an injustice and homemaking as a form of cultural labour that exemplifies the agency, innovation, and resilience of displaced persons. keywords belonging; displacement; home; homemaking; inequality; migrants; narrative introduction salman rushdie (1996) writes that we can only know what a home means to us when we are exiled from it. why is this the case? one reason is that exile makes us feel nostalgic about what we have left behind. what we have left behind is more than a physical territory; home is entrenched within a social milieu and a world of relationships. it is a place where sociality is fostered within a network of kith and kin. it is the site where life rituals of birth, marriage, and death are observed. home is a place that evokes the rhythms, parin dossa & jelena golubovic studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 172 sights and sounds of everyday life that forms part of one’s world. it is a place that enables one to imagine a future, and to advance our goals and aspirations in life. lest this profile sounds idealistic, we must also recognize that home is not devoid of interpersonal conflict, nor is it exempt from the workings of gender, class, politics, and power; home may be a place that hinders one’s life opportunities, not because of exclusively internal dynamics but due to structural constraints. in this respect, home is always in a state of flux and becoming, a consideration that requires close attention as home is often imagined as a discrete entity unaffected by the workings of larger forces. what does it mean to reimagine one’s home elsewhere following displacement? whether in situations of exile or forced migration, the loss of displacement is immeasurable. but displaced persons are not rendered passive; they draw upon a repertoire of experiential and border-crossing knowledge which makes them uniquely positioned to suggest alternative ways of being. home-making practices are not only the domain of migrants and displaced persons; each of us engages in imagining and sustaining a sense of home every day, however passively. but the experience of forced displacement deeply unsettles our received notions of home, exposing the significant labour that goes into cultivating and achieving this most basic sense of security. this task entails struggles as well as accomplishments, continuities as well as discontinuities, dilemmas as well as resolutions. in this article, we explore the complex process of reimagining a home in the wake of forced displacement. we draw on empirical literature on homemaking in diverse contexts of displacement (for example, cyprus, palestine), as well as vignettes from our own ethnographic research with people who have been displaced (iranians in vancouver and bosnian serbs in sarajevo). we begin with a discussion of how forced displacement complicates our understanding of what it means to be at home. then in the following two sections, we attend to two interrelated dimensions of home-making: narratives of home, where we discuss how displaced persons nurture a sense of home through memory and storytelling; and textures of home, where we emphasize how a sense of home is sustained or re-imagined through material objects, sometimes deeply personal (family photographs), sometimes seemingly inconsequential (teacups), and sometimes lost, available only in memory. our perspective of home-making as a form of labour foregrounds the agency and resilience of displaced persons, and it also allows us to draw a line of continuity between the violence of displacement and the violence of relocation. the journey is never as simple as from “there” to “here.” we conclude with a discussion about the struggles that await migrants upon relocation, as they endeavor to rebuild their lives amid structural constraints. reimagining home in the wake of displacement studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 173 forced displacement the term home-making implies a process; it implies that homes are not simply stepped into, ready-made, and nor are they simply stepped out of: they are cultivated and continuously reimagined in the context of everyday life (jansen & löfving, 2009). folded within the desire to reimagine a new home after displacement, there is often a simultaneous aspiration to maintain a connection to what has been lost, to entwine the past and the present, the “there” and the “here.” but the framework of “there” and “here” cannot be accepted uncritically. for example, drawing on wimmer and glick schiller’s (2002) critique of “methodological nationalism,” taylor (2013) problematizes the statecentrism of the here-there dichotomy. forced displacement compels people to move across national borders, but it can also displace people within the boundaries of a nation-state, an experience that is not less disruptive for being “internal.” and, as kreichauf (2018) points out, the recent arrival of refugees in europe is characterized by “campization,” a phenomenon that is already deeply familiar to refugees living in protracted refugee situations across the global south. the “campization” of displaced persons unsettles the here-there dichotomy in two ways. first, it draws our attention to the fact that migrants’ trajectories are rarely as simple as from “there” to “here,” and often involve numerous false starts and detours along the way. these interstitial locations should not be excluded from analyses of home-making simply because they are temporary. as freund (2015) points out, discounting these periods of liminality as a “vacuum in which migrants feel ‘lost’” (p. 62) only serves to pathologize the condition of migrants as rootless (malkki, 1995). furthermore, it neglects the ways in which these locations appear in migrants’ own narratives of their life trajectories as resources for reimagining a home (freund, 2015). second, the here-there dichotomy cannot be applied in its intended sense to the majority of the world’s refugees, who find themselves in protracted refugee situations, not yet arriving at a projected (western?) “here” but living for years and even generations in chronic displacement (adamson, 2006; adelman, 2001; loescher & milner, 2007). instead of the framework of “here” and “there,” these situations would be better understood by considering how a sense of home is cultivated even in locations that are unhospitable, unwelcoming, and purportedly temporary (jegathesan, 2018; taylor, 2013). moving beyond a here-there dichotomy means recognizing the plurality of trajectories that forced displacement creates. but it is important to acknowledge that these categories are inadequate as a binary. outside of a binary framework, they continue to be useful for understanding how people ascribe meaning to their lives, how they remember the past and imagine the future. these categories are not exclusive, nor are they static and immovable parin dossa & jelena golubovic studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 174 (brah, 1996; gedalof, 2009). they are dynamic and relational, shaping and mutually constituting one another. feldman (2006) reminds us that even though displacement can occur in an instant, one’s relationship to home is not severed in that instant. just as homemaking is a process built on repetition (ahmed, 1999; gedalof, 2007; rosales, 2010), displacement too is a process, whereby people “learn to relate to [their homes] from afar” (feldman, 2006, p. 23). this process does not occur freely or without compromise. although migrants offer host societies the possibility for enrichment through the contribution of “border knowledge from two or more countries” (dossa, 2014, p. 32), their value is often underestimated and under-utilized (joseph, 2013). instead, displaced persons often find themselves tasked with cultivating a new sense of home in a context of prejudice and hostility. even so, identities and communities are actively built and sustained despite these conditions of exclusion, limitation, and often, racialization (pasura, 2013; soto, 2012). we now turn to the endeavour of rebuilding a sense of home, assessing this task through the interrelated themes of narrative and materiality. narratives of home the psychologist jeremy bruner notes that narratives are based on a “breach,” on an interruption of a “steady state,” in other words, on an event (1986, p. 16). following this observation, mattingly (1998, p. 1) argues that certain disruptive experiences “seem to demand a narrative shape.” her work refers to breaches such as chronic illness and severe disability, but the experience of displacement can be seen as another such breach, as insecurity compels people to leave their homes, whether due to economic instability, political violence, religious persecution, or other forms of conflict. displacement fragments families and societies at the same time that it fractures personal biographies and life history narratives. but as a breach, it also seems to demand narrative, as people attempt to communicate their suffering and give meaning to it. in the aftermath of displacement, then, there is an imperative to remember, and to tell (see also eastmond, 2007). anthropologists have explored the close relationship between violence, narrative, and subjectivity, noting that violence fundamentally alters the way the subject experiences the world and her place in it (das, jackson, kleinman, & singh, 2014). long after a violent event is over, it remains present in the form of memory. das (2007) refers to this quality as a “poisonous knowledge” (p. 76) that becomes embedded in everyday life and that it is impossible to unlearn. this is a knowledge not only that violence has occurred, but that was, and is, possible – that the social world is not only deceptively fragile but also dangerous. however, while the act of remembering or narrating brings the past into the present, it can also help to create distance from the past. as sugiman (2004) reimagining home in the wake of displacement studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 175 discusses in her analysis of japanese-canadian women’s narratives of internment, remembering “underscores the distinction between past and present” (p. 383), and lets the narrator symbolically demarcate what was then from what is now, even while these categories may be entangled. when analyzing narratives, it is important to remember that they are not simply recollections of memories, or after-the-fact accounts of events. the relationship between an event and the narrative of that event is always problematic and can shift and change over time (allison, 2004; browning, 2010). narratives do not provide unmediated access to the past; rather, narratives are mediations of that past. they take their shape through a process of selection and exclusion, amounting to the construction of a story that gives meaning or coherence to events that may otherwise seem disparate or even senseless. in the wake of displacement, memory becomes politicized. narratives of displacement are not isolated or singular; they speak to and about one another, and they tell a larger story of social suffering and structural violence (das & kleinman, 2001). for this reason, the memory work of individuals carries the potential to shift and enrich historical discourse. it can reveal the intimate workings of violence that might otherwise remain unknown within official top-down iterations of the past, thus “multiplying available perspectives on the past” (waterson, 2007, p. 66; see also antze & lambek, 1996; bourguignon, 2005; daniel, 1996; johnson & leslie, 2002). to this end, waterson (2007) states that the drive to remember trauma and injustice is “a moral drive” (p. 66) for acknowledgement against the injustice of forgetting (see also werbner, 1998). while narratives of displacement are often characterized by an idealization of the past or a romantic desperation to return to one’s homeland, to dismiss such narratives as mere nostalgia would be to overlook the work they perform (bryant, 2010; datta, 2016; jansen, 2009; omata, 2013; sugiman, 2004). tsolidis (2011) reframes nostalgia as an “act of cultural labour” (p. 411) by which displaced people cultivate diasporic identities generationally, thus keeping a cultural connection to place even where physical return may be impossible. similarly, in her work on displaced palestinians, feldman (2006) argues that repeated narrations (“refrains”) of home function to create a sense of security and community in situations of displacement, thereby approximating the comforting function of homeland. these examples demonstrate that while narratives of a lost home may be characterized as idealistic or nostalgic, they are more than this. they are presentand future-oriented, forging lines of continuity between places and temporalities, and allowing displaced communities to assert themselves in multiple sites of belonging. through narrative, “communities of memory” (booth, 2006) are created, and these communities may utilize their collective memories to reimagine a new home in the present. as ahmed (1999) argues, we do not simply reflect on our pasts, on our homes, on our networks of belonging; we produce the very objects of our memory. parin dossa & jelena golubovic studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 176 where nostalgia may seem to signal stasis, a kind of freezing in idyllic time, anthropologists have brought attention to the dynamism of narratives of home, and their capacity to shift or transform in response to political events, or in response to the passage of time, as displacement becomes protracted or permanent. for example, bryant (2010) and loizos (2009) each discuss how the 2003 opening of checkpoints between the greek and turkish halves of cyprus after nearly 30 years of separation affected displaced cypriots’ narrations and understandings of home. without being able to access their former villages, greek cypriots had kept alive the idea that a future return would be both possible and desirable. the opening of checkpoints allowed them the possibility of visiting their former homes with the realization that the villages of their memory no longer existed as they had imagined. homes that had been lost to another place were increasingly recognized as being lost to another time, resulting in a narrative shift as home came to be told as a place of permanent loss, rather than a place of eventual return (see also jansen, 2009). alongside the important function of narrative for displaced communities, we recognize that violence and suffering also take us to the limits of the narratable (goldstein, 2012; langer, 1997). at this limit, anthropologists have considered the constructive role of silence (ross, 2003; mookherjee, 2015; saikia, 2011), appreciating that what remains unspoken may carry as much meaning as what has been spoken. ross (2003) presents silence as multifaceted and varied, describing how silences have different origins and different effects. silence may arise from an inability or unwillingness to “meet the extent of the pain suffered” (p. 3), or it may be respectful, nurturing, or protective. it may signal inability, or it may signal agency. as das (1996) points out, despite the popular correlation of voice with agency, the choice to remain silent may be the last form of agency left after violence and violation (see also helms, 2013; theidon, 2007). crapanzano (2011) points out that while articulated stories are poised to influence our understanding of history, most potential storytellers indeed remain silent, whether for lack of opportunity or by choice. where a listening audience is absent, narrators become reticent. this has been the case for numerous stigmatized groups who could not imagine a sympathetic audience, and whose stories have thus remained largely untold (golubovic, in press; simic, 2016). narratives of home are inevitably bound up with loss and displacement, but also with reconstruction and re-emplacement, which should not be overlooked. as lost homes are remembered (or produced in memory, as ahmed, 1999, reminds us), new forms of belonging are imagined and engendered. in the following section, we consider the endeavor of homemaking through the lens of materiality, which has seen a renewed emphasis in the context of the transnational turn in the anthropology of migration. we see memory and materiality as intertwined (see morton, 2007). as feldman (2006) puts it, displacement involves the loss of “material reimagining home in the wake of displacement studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 177 intimacy” (p. 11) with one’s home, which then initiates a process of seeking other ways to forge a connection. these other ways can be immaterial, as in acts of remembrance or narration, but often they are material: she cites as an example the practice of keeping keys to homes that have been destroyed. memory and materiality thus intersect. they come together as people struggle to retain mental images of photographs that have been lost, as people furnish new dwellings to replace what they could not take with them when they left. physical objects are inevitably located in specific local contexts, but as they fuse with memory they can “speak to places […] and senses of belonging over larger distances” (long, 2013, p. 334). textures of home with the transnational turn, scholars of migration have moved away from the dominance of territorialized and nationalized forms of belonging, and towards cross-border, multi-sited and extra-national affiliations (vertovec, 2007). this turn has provided grounds for the insight that belonging is not confined to geographical sites; home can be decoupled from territory and reconceptualized in terms of movement, shedding light on how identities and communities are forged in the interstices between states, in the movement across borders. however, there is emerging concern that the transnational turn has led to a portrayal of cross-border migration as inherently transgressive or even liberating (long, 2013; rosales, 2010). this critique is particularly relevant in instances of forced displacement, in which boundary crossings are not made by choice. ultimately, migration involves an inevitable tension between movement and stasis, between displacement and resettlement. narratives of displacement are often centered on the “myth” (safran, 1991) of eventually returning to one’s homeland – or, in some cases, centered on the political and moral right to return to one’s homeland (allan, 2014) – yet displacement also involves working to cultivate a newfound sense of home in an unfamiliar and sometimes unwelcoming location. to accommodate the complexities and contradictions of this experience, scholars have sought to retain the important insights made possible by the transnational turn, but to avoid consigning the concept of home to an “abstract and deterritorialized space of interaction” (ní laoire, carpena-méndez, tyrrell, & white, 2010, p. 159). taming the transnational turn, ní laoire et al. (2010) remind us that regardless of the transnational conceptual reach of migration, people’s everyday lives are nevertheless lived and experienced “in and through concrete territorialized local contexts” (p. 157). conlon (2011) echoes this thought, arguing that metanarratives of globalization and mobility need to be grounded within the local material contexts in which “the daily lives of migrants actually unfold” (p. 724). in order to temper the overemphasis on parin dossa & jelena golubovic studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 178 transnationalism, scholars have moved towards a renewed emphasis on concrete and contextualized forms of belonging, particularly through the lens of materiality (ho & hatfield, 2011; rosales, 2010). a renewed emphasis on the material textures of homemaking brings the everyday experiences of migrants into sharper focus (ho & hatfield, 2011); it asks what transnational forms of belonging might look like from the perspective of the everyday, and how the productive tension between being in one place and remembering another is actually experienced. a renewed emphasis on materiality also asserts that a robust conception of home in displacement cannot be fully encapsulated by the transgression of boundaries; it must simultaneously “include but also exceed” those boundaries (long, 2013, p. 342). as long (2013) explains, migrants certainly challenge the boundaries of the nation state, but they also assert more conventional ideas of home, and the importance of these should not become lost in the transnational turn. a material approach to reimagining home in the diaspora involves a negotiation between loss and replacement, that is, between lost items of memory and accumulated items of daily use. the loss of material intimacy with one’s home is followed by the forging of new material intimacies and new daily practices as migrants actively work to embed themselves in a new society while retaining a connection to their past locales. in addition to material loss, then, scholars have explored the replacement or accumulation of material possessions after displacement (conlon, 2011; long, 2013); the sending of remittances (lindley, 2009; vargas-silva, 2017); and the role of objects in sustaining social networks and relationships (frykman, 2009; rosales, 2010). consider the house. scholars have moved well beyond the idea that home is merely a house, appreciating the (material) home as a space of sociality, belonging, and care, while remaining critically aware that it can also be a space of conflict that compromises these very elements. long (2013) argues that it is productive to explore the entanglement of materiality and sociality by approaching “the house as a ‘thing’ in itself” (p. 336), but a thing through which people relate to the social world around them. in the lead up to the war in 1991, in the srijem region that spans croatia and serbia, srijem croats in serbia and srijem serbs in croatia organized to exchange houses and property. each group relocated across the border to their ethnically-designated “homeland,” as they feared that the isolated physical and verbal attacks they were experiencing as ethnic minorities could escalate into full-scale violence. in her ethnography of srijem croats, čapo žmegač (2007) discusses how her interlocutors lamented the irreplaceability of the things they had left behind. although the new houses in which they had settled contained the same types of material objects, they did not carry the same emotional value: “my cabinet is more beautiful because it is mine” (čapo žmegač, 2007, p. 52). living among items that were unfamiliar, one reimagining home in the wake of displacement studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 179 woman explained that she felt “as if she were among stolen things” (čapo žmegač, 2007, p. 58), a state that made her unable to feel properly at home. the 1974 partition of cyprus also involved an exchange of houses as displaced greek and turkish cypriots moved into one another’s abandoned houses and appropriated one another’s belongings (bryant, 2014; loizos, 2009; navaro-yashin, 2012). loizos’ (2009) study of displaced greek cypriots reveals the increased investment in material surroundings that occurred after the opening of checkpoints in 2003, when cypriots displaced from either half of the island were allowed to visit their former homes and villages. in visiting their former villages, many greek cypriots found that the social texture of village life that they had kept alive in their memories had been lost to time. this change in attitude was further reinforced by the revelation that the lives they had reluctantly been building for themselves in exile could actually promise them more, relative to their former villages, in terms of sociality and prospects for the future. loizos writes, “as time went by, people started to treat their lived environments more and more like home in the following quotidian senses: they decorated their dwellings; they cultivated their gardens; they got to know their neighbours…” (2009, p. 68). through the material endeavors of decorating and gardening, displaced greek cypriots forged a deliberate attachment to houses they had until then considered temporary; they allowed themselves to cultivate a deeper sense of home. yet, loizos points out that this material reimagining of home did not dilute their emotional ties to their former villages, nor their political appeals that displacement is a form of injustice. if asked where home was, they would still answer “elsewhere” (2009, p. 69). in our own fieldsites, we have seen the importance placed on material objects in remembering lost homes and re-creating new ones. in her work with bosnian serbs who fled sarajevo during and after the 1992 to 1995 siege, golubovic found that personal items such as family photographs came to stand for a sense of home that included not only material items but also networks of social relationships. for example, returning to sarajevo after the siege, one woman found that her family’s “abandoned” apartment was inhabited by a family of refugees who had come to sarajevo after being displaced from their own home in another part of bosnia. by the time the refugee family moved in, the contents of the apartment had already been emptied, stolen either by neighbours or looters. however, this woman considered herself lucky: one neighbour had gone into her apartment and collected her family photo albums for safekeeping, in case her family ever returned. his gesture allowed her to maintain a sense of continuity in spite of the upheaval of displacement – “because of him, i have photos of my life before the war” – but his gesture also affirmed the social relationships that make up a sense of home. in safekeeping the photos, he was ensuring that the neighbourly relationships they had known would still be intact, that his neighbours would return to a social texture of home even if their apartment was looted and occupied. parin dossa & jelena golubovic studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 180 the above example demonstrates how the material and social dimensions of home are bound up together, the way a social visit may be bound up with the serving of food, or a tea party dependent on teacups. for another bosnian serb women, it was precisely teacups, seemingly inconsequential objects, that enabled her to re-imagine a sense of home. displaced during the war, she took with her four teacups out of a set of six. she understood that this was frivolous, that the teacups were taking up space in her bag that could be filled with something more practical, but she loved them and she wanted to retain some connection to her old life. returning to her home after the war, she found it was looted. everything was ruined or gone, including deeply personal items like souvenirs and photographs. everything except the last two teacups that completed the set. the examples of teacups and family photos draw our attention to how “the seemingly small, everyday can be of political significance” (sugiman, 2004, p. 372). as sugiman points out, official narratives of and responses to displacement often centre on major and calculable losses, such as property loss. meanwhile, personal narratives tend to emphasize “the small personal items that were left behind” (sugiman, 2004, p. 370). these items are critical to forging a sense of continuity in the wake of rupture. their importance is demonstrated by the finding that even when they are lost, they are retained in memory; another bosnian serb interviewee described in great detail a cherished photograph of her parents that was lost when her family was displaced, and that exists now only in her telling. for dossa, the homemaking value of material items came across through the embroidery of one of her interviewees, a 63-year-old woman named noor. in the following passage, noor explains how her embroidery has circulated within her homeland and its diaspora, providing connection among family members dispersed geographically and across generations. using her embroidery threads, noor stitches together strands of her lived life: i was born in the village of masouleh [in iran]. i only studied until grade six. there were no schools after this grade in my village. my father said, “you must have some useful skill.” he asked my aunt to teach me how to do embroidery. i learned different patterns for cushion coverings, tablecloths, dresses, wall hangings, and so many other things. when i got married at the age of sixteen, i moved to shiraz. my husband had a large family. my in-laws liked that i was good at embroidery work. when the prices started going up, my in-laws made me do embroidery work for sale. i was not happy as i had to work for ten hours a day. my eyes would water. only when factory-made embroidery became popular could i slow down. machine-stitched embroidered work is cheaper. after the revolution we had to move to canada. my son worked for the shah. it was not safe for us to stay there. over the years, i had collected all kinds of embroidered pieces. i could bring some. i left other pieces with my sister in iran. i have told her to give these out to our families who now live in the united states and in australia. i have kept a few pieces for my grandchildren. this way my family can remember me. (dossa & coe, 2017, p. 1) reimagining home in the wake of displacement studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 181 noor’s father could not have imagined that the skill that he encouraged his daughter to acquire from her aunt would be used in her old age in a faraway place. noor’s narrative indicates that the fine pieces of embroidered work in iranian homes in canada do not merely constitute part of the decor. they constitute a means through which older women have sustained their families over the years. they illustrate that older women have moved across geographic spaces. noor’s embroidered work is not frozen in time and space; rather, it is activated in the present transnationally, across and between nation-states (dossa & coe, 2017, p. 1). dossa points out that this embroidery stitches together the rupture of displacement, connecting a home that was lost to a home that is being remade. the fabric tells the story of how noor has sustained her family across the years, and across the boundaries of nation-states, as her family came to be dispersed across iran, canada, the united states, and australia. re-imagining a home in the wake of forced displacement also involves accumulating new items of daily use and forging new daily routines. however, the capacity of accumulated items to embed migrants within new societies is sometimes overstated in the literature. for example, conlon (2011) makes a direct connection between the accumulation of material objects and the achievement of a daily rhythm, looking in particular at the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers in ireland, whose arrivals are characterized by a marked absence of material possessions. she gives the example of jackets donated to an asylum seeker from nigeria as an everyday experience of material accumulation that connects the asylum seeker to “local cultural practices and to regional climates that had previously been experienced as jarring” (conlon, 2011, p. 722). for conlon, such material accumulation along with the establishment of contextualized everyday routines (taking children to school, participating in religious services) constitute practices that can “supplant” social alienation with social embeddedness (2011, p. 723). while conlon rightly emphasizes the active work that migrants perform to forge belonging despite experiencing social alienation, we would point out that mere material accumulation or social proximity do not necessarily lead to “meaningful mixing” (cook, dwyer, & waite, 2011). despite the active work performed by displaced persons, a sense of home is not always achieved after displacement, especially when they are racialized or othered in the country of settlement. conclusion attending to homemaking practices through the lens of forced displacement foregrounds the labour of this endeavor. a sense of home cannot be taken for granted, but it is only when we lose our homes that we feel this most poignantly. in this article, we have explored some ways that displaced parin dossa & jelena golubovic studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 182 persons actively work to reimagine a sense of home through the twin labours of narrative and renewed (or salvaged) materiality. through social memory, displaced persons forge a connection between a spatiotemporal “here” and a “there,” and all the places in between. they remember a past that was once concrete and tangible, and draw it into the present in altered, narrative form. and through material objects, whether deeply personal or seemingly inconsequential, memories of a lost home are given texture, embedding the tactile world into a network of social relationships. the labour of re-imagining a home after forced displacement is often compounded by the violence of arrival, whether in a host-state or a refugee camp, what kreichauf (2018) terms “forced arrival.” in this interconnected and unequal world, there is a need for research accountability that recognizes the continuity between the violence of displacement and the violence of exclusion that migrants face upon arrival. western interventionism – both humanitarian and covert – and western imperialism have been responsible for the mass displacement of people around the world (bannerji, 1995; razack, 2007; thobani, 2007). we should not expect gratitude from those who arrive at our door (nayeri, 2017). instead, we should recognize that the task of re-imagining home is taken up in conditions that are often unwelcoming and hostile. in the canadian colonial context, razack (2002) discusses how european settlers position themselves in the desirable category of those who belong to the nation-state while scripting indigenous people as “pre-modern” and racialized immigrants as “late arrivals” (p. 3). this script brings into relief the inequalities between those who purportedly offer hospitality or welcome, and those who must seek belonging in contexts in which they are racialized and systemically disenfranchised – a kind of dislocation that mimics the violence of physical displacement. there is a need to arrive at a formulation of belonging that can encompass rather than assimilate difference (jones & krzyzanowski, 2007). while research on migrants has recognized the work they perform to integrate into a new society, antonsich (2010) points out that the very notion of belonging is often filled with “a rhetoric of sameness” (p. 650), such that being granted belonging requires the “other” to assimilate: to take on the language, culture, and values of the dominant group (see also dahlberg, 2014). similarly, gedalof (2007) describes the assimilatory logic of uk immigration and asylum policy as a first-us-then-them take on multiculturalism: first the host society must establish a stable sense of identity, and only then can it accept difference without threat of destabilization. as she puts it, the operating logic is that the “‘we’ who were here first” (2007, p. 92) must be protected from the “discomfort of strangers” (2007, p. 92). this amounts to an empty, assimilatory, and unreciprocated multiculturalism. it amounts to an unequal relationship of power as one side must always bend to fit the other. the ongoing refugee crisis has seen migrants from the middle east and reimagining home in the wake of displacement studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 171-186, 2019 183 north africa flee towards the european union,1 and it has seen several european states respond to this influx with a spike in xenophobia and a swing towards right-wing political parties. asylum seekers are racialized and cast as burdens in the receiving country. yet the global north is complicit in the production of refugees, in cultivating the very grounds for displacement. we must shift the focus such that what is seen as burdensome is not a person’s arrival across a border, but the interruption of that person’s life, the loss of their home, the fracturing of their family and social relations, and the unsolicited task laid upon them to start over again. foregrounding the labour of migrants in reimagining a home exemplifies the agency and resilience of subjugated people in the face of structural constraints, but it also points to the basic injustice of displacement and the responsibility of receiving countries to partake in the burden of this work. it reminds us that the trajectory of displacement is never as simple as from “there” to “here.” too many migrants never properly arrive at a “here,” contained instead in camps that outlast generations. and for those that do arrive, their work of re-imagination is too often obstructed by systemic marginalization. novelist gaël faye (2018, p. 6) poetically gestures to the inadequacy of here-there frameworks, as well as to the resourcefulness of migrants in re-imagining a sense of home amid hostile conditions. he writes that displacement is not a matter of leaving horror to find paradise. it would be simpler if it were. “what about the country inside them? – nobody ever mentions that.” references adamson, f. b. 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(2011). migration and everyday matters: sociality and materiality. population, space & place, 17, 707-713. jansen, s. (2009). troubled locations: return, the life course and transformations of home in bosnia-herzegovina. in s. jansen & s. löfving (eds.), struggles for home: violence, hope, and the movement of people (pp. 43-64). oxford: berghahn books. jansen, s., & löfving, s. (2009). introduction: towards an anthropology of violence, hope, and the movement of people. in s. jansen & s. löfving (eds.), struggles for home: violence, hope, and the movement of people (pp. 1-24). oxford: berghahn books. jegathesan, m. (2018). claiming ūr: home, investment, and decolonial desires on sri lanka’s tea plantations. anthropological quarterly, 91(2), 635-670. johnson, c., & leslie, j. (2002). afghans have their memories: a reflection on the recent experience of assistance in afghanistan. third world quarterly, 23(5), 861-874. jones, p., & krzyzanowksi, m. (2007). identity, belonging and migration: beyond describing ‘others.’ in g. delanty, r. wodak & p. jones (eds.), identity, belonging and migration (pp. 38-53). liverpool, uk: liverpool university press. joseph, c. (2013). (re)negotiating cultural and work identities preand post-migration: malaysian migrant women in australia. women’s studies international forum, 36(1), 2736. kreichauf, r. (2018). from forced migration to forced arrival: the campization of refugee accommodation in european cities.” comparative migration studies 6(7), 1-22. langer, l. (1997). the alarmed vision: social suffering and holocaust atrocity. in a. kleinman, v. das & m. lock (eds.), social suffering (pp. 47-66). berkeley, ca: university of california press. lindley, a. (2009). the early-morning phonecall: remittances from a refugee diaspora perspective. journal of ethnic & migration studies, 35(8), 1315-1334. loescher, g., & milner, j. (2007). protracted refugee situations and state and regional insecurity. conflict, security & development, 4(1), 3-20. loizos, p. (2009). “the loss of home: from passion to pragmatism in cyprus. in s. jansen & s. löfving (eds.), struggles for home: violence, hope, and the movement of people (pp. 6584). oxford: berghahn books. long, j. c. (2013). diasporic dwelling: the poetics of domestic space. gender, place & culture, 20(3), 329-345. malkki, l. h. (1995). purity and exile: violence, memory, and national cosmology among hutu refugees in tanzania. chicago, il: university of chicago press. morton, c. (2007). remembering the house: memory and materiality in northern botswana. journal of material culture, 12(2), 157-179. mattingly, c. (1998). healing dramas and clinical plots: the narrative structure of experience. cambridge: cambridge university press. mookherjee, n. 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(2002). gendered racial violence and spatialized justice: the murder of pamela george. in s. h. razack (ed.), race, space, and the law: unmapping a white settler society (pp. 121-157). toronto, on: between the lines. razack, s. h. (2007). stealing the pain of others: reflections on canadian humanitarian responses. the review of education, pedagogy & cultural studies, 29(4), 375-394. rosales, m. v. (2010). the domestic work of consumption: materiality, migration and homemaking. etnográfica, 14(3), 507-525. ross, f. (2003). bearing witness: women and the truth and reconciliation commission in south africa. london: pluto press. rushdie, s. (1996). east, west. toronto, on: vintage. saikia, y. (2011). women, war, and the making of bangladesh: remembering 1971. durham: duke university press. safran, w. (1991). diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return. diaspora, 1(1), 83-99. simic, o. (2016). feminist research in transitional justice studies: navigating silence and disruptions in the field. human rights review, 17, 95-113. soto, l. (2012). on becoming mexican in napa: mexican immigrant girls negotiating challenges to transnational identities. social identities, 18(1), 19-37. sugiman, p. (2004). memories of internment: narrating japanese canadian women’s life stories. the canadian journal of sociology, 29(3): 359-388. taylor, h. (2013). refugees, the state, and the concept of home. refugee survey quarterly 32(2), 130-152. theidon, k. (2007). gender in transition: common sense, women, and war. journal of human rights, 6(4), 453-478. thobani, s. (2007). exalted subjects: studies in the making of race and nation in canada. toronto, on: university of toronto press. tsolidis, g. (2011). memories of home: family in the diaspora. journal of comparative family studies, 42(3), 411-420. vargas-silva, c. (2017). remittances sent to and from the forcibly displaced. journal of development studies, 53(11), 5-25. vertovec, s. (2007). introduction: new directions in the anthropology of migration and multiculturalism. ethnic & racial studies, 30(6), 961-978. waterson, r. (2007). trajectories of memory: documentary film and the transmission of testimony. history & anthropology, 18(1), 51-73. werbner, r. (1998). smoke from the barrel of a gun: postwars of the dead, memory and reinscription in zimbabwe. in r. werbner (ed.), memory and the postcolony: african anthropology and the critique of power (pp. 71-102). london: zed. wimmer, a., & glick-schiller, n. (2002). methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences. global networks 2(4), 301-334. yuya final june 8 18 correspondence address: kumsa yuya, graduate program in social justice & equity studies, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: kumsayuya@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 182-187, 2018 book review policing black lives: state violence in canada from slavery to the present maynard, robyn. (2017). black point, ns: fernwood publishing. isbn 9781552669792 (paper) cdn$25.00; isbn 9781552669808 (epub) cdn$24.99. 292 pages kumsa yuya brock university, canada the release of policing black lives: state violence in canada from slavery to the present on october 16th, 2017 occurred between the defunding of the african canadian legal clinic (aclc) following accusations of financial mismanagement, and the province of ontario releasing its first anti-black racism strategy. while the former presents a void to the vulnerable black communities served by the aclc, which legal aid ontario has promised to furnish with similar services to those formerly provided by the aclc, the latter is perhaps a sign of progress that ontario plans to tackle anti-blackness. african descended people in canada are acutely aware, however, that promises to curtail anti-blackness have been aplenty for decades, and yet poor outcomes for african canadians persist. as the title suggests, in policing black lives robyn maynard (2017) aims to elucidate the troubling past of african enslavement in canada and the persistence of anti-blackness in contemporary canada (including ongoing governmental promises to curtail it). unsurprisingly, maynard finds that the relationship between the canadian state and african canadians is tenuous, and that from african enslavement into the contemporary canadian milieu, blackness is mediated by gender and ability. for example, maynard dedicates large portions of policing black lives to discussing how black women and transgender people are subject to state violence with impunity, are hypersexualized, and are presumed to be inadequate mothers. indeed, black women faced a particular form of racism and sexism during african enslavement, which articulated them as un-rapebook review studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 182-187, 2018 183 able and merely a labour producing commodity (both through work and having children). markedly aware of the significance of african enslavement to this historical narrative, it is here where maynard, who is a montreal-based writer and activist, begins her analysis of the persistence of anti-blackness in canada. drawing upon various disciplines and texts such as, inter alia, history, political sociology, gender studies, psychology, newspapers, academic journals, and personal experiences, chapter 1 of policing black lives begins with the transatlantic slave trade to argue that african descended people in canada were marked as targets for various forms of exploitation and violence. here, maynard emphatically rejects the myth that canada either did not have slavery, or that black history in canada began and ended with the underground railroad. rather, maynard provides a historical context for ongoing anti-blackness that includes the use of segregated schools, racist de jure and de facto practices, and deliberate associations of blackness with criminality by social elites. in so doing, maynard problematizes works by scholars that present the subordinate social position of african canadians ahistorically, thereby rejecting the idea that historical and ongoing poor outcomes for african canadians are due to their inherent inferiority rather than the consequences of actions taken by a racist nation, which have subordinated african canadians since their sojourn in the “new world.” in chapter 2, maynard demonstrates how, through the desire for a skilled labour force, it was in the interest of the canadian state to let negatively racialized immigrants into its borders. maynard demonstrates that canada had been “successful” in effectively hermetically sealing its borders from negatively racialized people up until 1961, exemplified by 95% of the country being classified as white at this time (p. 54). maynard argues that although the vetting process for “desirable” immigrants remained racist after 1961, the need for black and brown people for labour production once again became a prerequisite for economic growth. maynard makes a significant contribution here by demonstrating that the begrudging acceptance of negatively racialized immigrants was borne not of a desire to become a socalled multicultural nation, but instead of a desire to serve the interests of the economy. in chapter 3, maynard investigates anti-blackness in the canadian criminal justice system by demonstrating how crime itself has been racialized through pathologizing blackness. troubling police practices, such as police officers being trained to associate criminality with dreadlocks and montreal police in the 1980s using images of young black men as target practice in their shooting ranges in lieu of traditional police targets, are indeed striking (p. 9). specifically, they demonstrate that racist police practices are not confined to the united states, but plague canadian policing as well. indeed, much of policing black lives may be read as a challenge to this notion, and the aforementioned examples compel the reader to think critically about how deeply anti-blackness is embedded in canadian society. throughout this kumsa yuya studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 182-187, 2018 184 chapter, maynard draws on works by american scholars such as angela y. davis (2003) and michelle alexander (2010) to critique drug prohibition, the use of prisons, and the canadian criminal justice system more broadly. this critique allows readers to better apprehend maynard’s subsequent discussion of police violence, and demonstrates her effective use of an intersectional framework. in chapter 4, maynard forces the reader to confront preconceived notions about who is perceived as the quintessential black “other.” in perhaps one of the strongest chapters of the book, maynard dedicates most of the space to a discussion of state law enforcement violence toward black women on a select case-by-case basis, fulfilling a promise made earlier in the book to bring to the fore violence directed toward the bodies of black transgender people and black women. a notable case is that of chevranna abdi, a black transgender woman who was murdered by police under suspicious circumstances. maynard states, “abdi was handcuffed and dragged, facedown, down seven flights of stairs by law enforcement” and by the time the police reached the lobby, abdi had died (p. 124). noting that abdi was described by media sources as an “hiv-positive transsexual,” maynard demonstrates how the media is complicit in the degradation and ultimate erasure of black transgendered people (p. 124). here, maynard is successful in conveying to the reader the extent to which african canadians are considered disposable by the nation. in chapter 5 of policing black lives, maynard broadens her scope to look at other punitive state practices that disproportionately target black women. black women, maynard argues, are presumed prostitutes, drug mules, abusers of welfare, and inferior mothers who thus are subjected to ostensibly justified heightened surveillance and related punitive state practices and institutional violence. for example, maynard informs the reader that the construction of black women as “welfare frauds” was contemporaneous with the retrenchment of the welfare state (p. 132). while illuminating the strategic demonization of african canadian women, maynard also gestures toward significant contradictions in the ostensible pursuit of small government. while welfare is slashed, penal institutions and practices are expanded significantly, as aptly demonstrated by children, landlords, and neighbours being interviewed for the purposes of catching “welfare frauds.” it is through this process that crime becomes racialized, and black women become the scapegoat for poor government policy. maynard’s structuring of the book here is significant, demonstrating how institutional racism is facilitated and reinforced by biased citizenry. in doing so, maynard implicitly urges the reader to consider the variety of ways in which everyday people are complicit in the ostracism of groups deemed an underclass. maynard’s analysis of african migrants in chapter 6 is a significant illustration of how citizenship acts as the basis for rigorous racial discrimination and strips migrants of due process. for example, maynard demonstrates that migrants and refugees are often incarcerated in detention book review studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 182-187, 2018 185 centres, even in cases where they are not formally charged with a criminal offence. maynard explains that in these cases of administrative detainment, only five percent of which involve the detained being viewed as potential security threats, there is no maximum length of immigration detention (pp. 165-168). in this sense, maynard brings to the attention of the reader the often-ignored intersections between this unjust state-sanctioned practice and anti-blackness (qua anti-muslim sentiments) in canada. in the final two chapters of policing black lives, maynard addresses contemporary efforts to destroy the black family and the miseducation of black youth. regarding the first, maynard provides a historical context for organizations such as children’s aid service and the nova scotia home for colored children, detailing their explicit anti-black practices. indigenous children, too, are mentioned briefly, with similar attempts to forcibly assimilate indigenous children manifesting itself in what is referred to as the “60s scoop” (p. 191). it is worth mentioning here that maynard grapples with accurately and sufficiently representing indigenous peoples throughout policing black lives. although the book is primarily an examination of antiblackness in canada, one would be remiss to exclude a discussion of indigenous peoples. maynard quite effectively manages these tensions by incorporating and drawing attention to comparable information about poor outcomes for indigenous peoples where relevant. she includes discussions of african enslavement and indigenous genocide, over-incarceration of indigenous peoples and african canadians, over representation of african canadians and indigenous peoples in “state care,” and racism in schools. through ongoing acknowledgement of indigenous peoples in canada, maynard combats the very erasure of indigenous peoples she critiques throughout the book, while also conveying the striking parallels between the historical and ongoing plights of african canadians and indigenous peoples in canada. in a similar vein, maynard demonstrates that the pathology attached to african descended children centuries ago has proved immutable by reminding us that black youth in toronto are “in care” at five times the rate of their percentage in the population, and that the same demographic constitutes more than 40% of the population in youth care while representing only eight percent of youth in toronto (p. 192). maynard contends that these statistics stem in part from the over-policing of black families, the conflation of neglect and poverty, the retrenchment of the welfare state, and the demonization of black mothers as abusers of welfare and as inferior caregivers. using various statistics (e.g., 70% of homeless youth come from state care; p. 204), maynard demonstrates the bleak outcomes for youth in care and forces the reader to critically evaluate how effectively the canadian state is delivering care to those people who are among its most vulnerable. maynard uses this discussion of african descended children in state care as a bridge to her final chapter, which examines anti-blackness in schools. here, she uses a discussion of canada’s segregated school system as the starting kumsa yuya studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 182-187, 2018 186 point to discuss contemporary racism within schools. she outlines how the right of black children to be presumed innocent has been eviscerated by innocence being “raced white” (p. 210), and she cites research suggesting that black youth are more likely to be perceived as older and as much stronger than they are (p. 211). as maynard explains, these tendencies intersect with informal streaming, low expectations for black youth, erasure from historical texts, and disproportionate punishment of black students – all of which contribute to what maynard refers to as black students being “pushed out” (p. 222). in this chapter, too, maynard consistently stays within the bounds of her remit, addressing how black girls are discouraged from pursuing academic ventures in math and science and are otherwise uniquely disadvantaged. for example, maynard maintains that where contributions of african descended people are acknowledged in canadian schools, those recognized are disproportionately black men, thereby leaving black girls without genderappropriate academic role models (p. 223). moreover, maynard informs the reader that black girls face higher rates of sexual assault than white girls both inside and beyond the school context (p. 224). for all of these reasons, maynard admonishes academics to further pursue how african canadian girls are uniquely discriminated against in school settings (and beyond) and builds a strong case for doing so. in reviewing this ambitious book, it is noteworthy that maynard is forced to contend with limited race-based statistics due to the canadian state’s reluctance to collect them. indeed, this is an unfortunate and all too familiar barrier for scholars and activists researching anti-blackness in canada. nonetheless, maynard presents a cohesive piece of work that makes an important contribution to the canadian literature through linking african enslavement to contemporary anti-blackness with an emphasis on women and non-gender conforming people. what is more, maynard provides an accessible, scholarly work that bridges the divide between works produced in academic institutions and the everyday efforts of activists nationwide. in other words, maynard skilfully crafts a narrative that both contextualizes anti-blackness within canada and acts as a call for action. policing black lives provides readers with the necessary knowledge and tools to better apprehend how the project of european colonialism has been deployed and concealed over centuries in canada. maynard effectively conveys that the issues examined in policing black lives ought not to be interpreted as merely a “black problem,” but rather as a canadian one. indeed, for those of us interested and committed to anti-racism work and to social justice more broadly, this work implicitly poses some poignant questions to the reader. how successful has canada truly been in evading racism within its borders? who reaps the benefits of having african canadian history erased? what do we owe to african canadian people? how might we, as individuals, contribute to the eradication of anti-black racism, and in what ways are we complicit? if we as canadians have any sincere interest in living book review studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 182-187, 2018 187 up to the multicultural/anti-racist values purported to be at the core of canadian identity, in policing black lives maynard provides a solid foundation from which to pursue the self-reflection and critical examination of the past and present socio-historical milieu that are required to meet this task. references alexander, m. (2010). the new jim crow. new york: the new press. davis, a. y. (2003). are prisons obsolete? new york: seven stories press. cahuas & matute final correspondence address: madelaine cahaus, department of geography, environment & society, university of minnesota, minneapolis, mn 55455, usa; email: cahuasmc@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging: latinx community workers’ experiences negotiating identity and citizenship in toronto, canada madelaine cahuas university of minnesota, usa alexandra arraiz matute carleton university, canada abstract this paper explores how women and non-binary latinx community workers (lcws) in toronto, canada, negotiate their identities, citizenship practices and politics in relation to settler colonialism and decolonization. we demonstrate how lcws enact a latinx decolonial politic of belonging, an alternative way of practicing citizenship that strives to simultaneously challenge both canadian and latin american settler colonialism. this can be seen when lcws refuse to be recognized on white settler terms as “proud canadians,” and create community-based learning initiatives that incite conversations among everyday latinx community members around canada’s settler colonial history and present, indigenous worldviews, as well as race and settler colonialism in latin america. we consider how lcws’ enactments of a latinx decolonial politic of belonging serve as small, incomplete, but crucial steps towards decolonization. keywords latinx identities; citizenship; belonging; decolonization; settler colonialism there has been a significant debate unfolding across indigenous studies, race and ethnic studies and settler colonialism studies, over how racialized migrants and people of colour are implicated in settler colonialism in the united states and canada. central to this debate have been questions around whether people of colour are settlers, as seen in lawrence and dua’s (2005) contentious critique of the anti-racism field. in response, scholars and activists have taken up different stances from rejecting the equation of migration to colonization (sharma, 2015; sharma & wright, 2008), to enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 269 recognizing the uneven power relationships between white settlers, racialized migrants and people of colour, and how settler colonialism can be reinforced in claims to citizenship and belonging (chatterjee, 2018; phung, 2011; saranillio, 2013). black studies scholars have made significant interventions into this debate by underscoring the unique experiences of the black diaspora, and how the legacy of transatlantic slavery and anti-blackness are integral to the ongoing settler colonial project (lethabo-king, 2016, 2019; walcott, 2014; wilderson, 2010). there also continue to be calls for analyses that explore how black, indigenous and people of colour can work in solidarity for a decolonial future (dhamoon, 2013; pulido, 2017; simpson et al., 2018). in this paper, we contribute to these debates by exploring how latinx people are grappling with questions of settler colonialism and decolonization in toronto, ontario, canada. by latinx, we refer to people across the gender spectrum, including transgender and gender non-binary people, who trace their origins to latin america – mexico, central america, south america and the caribbean. recently, there has been increasing interest in exploring the unique positionality of latinx migrants in relation to settler colonialism, as they come from settler colonial contexts in latin america (castellanos, 2017; speed, 2017) and embody different racial identities including black/afro-latinx, afro-indigenous, non-black indigenous, mestizo (mixed) and white (see blackwell et al., 2017). while important, this research has predominantly focused on the u.s. context; there is a need to better understand latinxs’ experiences in canada. we address this gap by exploring how a diverse network of women and non-binary black/afro-latinx, indigenous and brown latinx community workers (lcws) in toronto understand and negotiate settler colonialism and decolonization in their everyday life. lcws work within, across and alongside latinx-serving non-profit organizations as paid and unpaid staff, counsellors, community educators, youth workers, advocates, volunteers, artists and activists who seek to promote the wellbeing of latinx and other racialized communities. as such, their perspectives and practices are crucial to understanding how the latinx diaspora in toronto can disrupt settler colonialism and work towards decolonization. drawing on 38 in-depth interviews with lcws and over two years of participant observation across latinx community organizing spaces in toronto, we demonstrate that lcws negotiate their identities and relationships to settler colonialism and decolonization by enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging. cahuas (2020) defines a latinx decolonial politic of belonging as an alternative way of practicing substantive citizenship that strives to simultaneously challenge both canadian settler colonialism, and latin american settler colonialism that continues to haunt the latinx diaspora in toronto. we build on this concept in two ways. first, we explore how lcws invoke a latinx decolonial politic of belonging in the ways they understand and articulate their identities as differently racialized latinxs who madelaine cahuas & alexandra arraiz matute studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 270 live in canada with uneven claims to citizenship and belonging. second, we examine how lcws put into practice a latinx decolonial politic of belonging through a community-based educational initiative called tales from the south: latinx lives on turtle island. we consider how lcws’ enactments of a latinx decolonial politic of belonging, as seen through their identity narratives and initiatives like tales from the south, are entangled with settler colonialism, while also serving as crucial, small, albeit incomplete steps towards decolonization. in the following section, we draw on literature across race and ethnic studies, settler colonial studies, indigenous studies, black studies, latin american and latinx studies to more deeply unpack the tensions around people of colour’s claims to citizenship and belonging within settler colonial contexts, and explicate the unique positionality of latinx migrants. next, we provide a historicized description of latinx politics in toronto, situate ourselves and explain our methods. we then share an in-depth analysis of how lcws enact a latinx decolonial politic of belonging through the ways they construct their identities, make claims to citizenship, and create tales from the south. interrogating claims to citizenship and belonging in white settler colonial contexts and exploring the unique case of latinx migrants wolfe (2006) defines settler colonialism as an ongoing violent process based in a logic of elimination and desire for territory where settlers seek to remove, occupy, dominate and ultimately replace the indigenous population. similarly, lawrence and dua (2005) explain that settler states aim to “disappear indigenous people as peoples” (p. 123, emphasis in original) and relegate them to the past, in order to take their place. they argue that antiracist scholarship has not seriously foregrounded the realities of ongoing colonization that indigenous people experience in settler states, and call nonindigenous people of colour, scholars and activists to understand how they are indeed settlers, who participate in, or are complicit in the dispossession of indigenous people. in response, critical race scholars have taken up lawrence and dua’s (2005) critique in different ways. sharma and wright (2008) reject the notion that people of colour are settlers and argue that migration should not be equated to colonization, as many times it is the only recourse oppressed and colonized people have to survive. sharma (2015) revisits this argument by calling for a rejection of “particularistic” and “essentialist” modes of understanding ourselves, and suggests recognizing our shared humanity and interconnectivity, while still maintaining that mobility is not colonization. other critical race scholars have turned to foregrounding settler colonialism in their analyses, while also engaging with underlying power differences between white settlers, racialized migrants and people of colour (see enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 271 dhamoon, 2013; jafri, 2012; phung, 2011; saranillio, 2013). for example, even as racialized migrants face racism and marginalization, and are excluded from full citizenship within settler contexts, they can still be complicit in settler colonialism in the ways they seek recognition, inclusion and stake claims to belonging as citizens (dhamoon, 2013; phung, 2011; saranillio, 2013). phung (2011) and saranillio (2013) argue that when asian migrants present themselves as good, respectable and hard-working people who deserve to live in canada and the u.s. because of their role in building the nation, they engage in a self-indigenizing narrative that is similar to, but not the same as white settlers’ justifications for occupying indigenous land. this reifies racist notions that settlers have an earned right to land because of their industriousness, and that indigenous people lack this right because they do not productively use the land for profit and are “unfit for modern times” (saranillio, 2013, p. 289; see also phung, 2011). chickasaw scholar jodi byrd (2011) captures this complex positioning of racialized migrants and people of colour in the term “arrivant.” similarly, chatterjee (2018) calls for a rethinking of “immigrant settlerhood” and an understanding of settler colonialism that accounts for how racialized labour is constitutive of settler political economy. chatterjee explains how the exploitation of migrant labour and the dispossession of indigenous people are deeply interconnected processes that allow settler colonial states to thrive. she argues that by trying to separate these issues we risk losing sight of the main power structure that needs to be dismantled – settler colonial nationalism. black studies scholars have made profound contributions in theorizing settlerhood and settler colonialism by foregrounding the making of the human, and demonstrating how transatlantic slavery and settler colonialism are mutually constitutive and must be addressed simultaneously (lethaboking, 2016, 2019; walcott, 2014; wilderson, 2010). lethabo-king (2016, 2019) presents “conquest” as a conceptual frame that recognizes how coloniality in the americas is premised on the dehumanization of black and indigenous people, so that the conquistador-settler can make himself the rightful, dominant human. lethabo-king echoes walcott’s (2014) assertion that in a post-columbus world, being human is founded in anti-blackness that excludes black people from full citizenship and belonging in place. they both powerfully call attention to the ways black people in the americas have had a markedly different relationship to indigenous people and settler colonialism, one that cannot be equated with white settlers or non-black migrants. furthermore, lethabo-king brings into view how relations of conquest shift and continue into the present, requiring new terms to better understand how black and different racialized groups are entangled with settler colonialism, slavery and slavery’s afterlives. so how do migrants from latin america and their descendants fit into theorizations of settler colonialism or conquest? migrants from latin america come from settler colonial contexts themselves (castellanos, 2017; madelaine cahuas & alexandra arraiz matute studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 272 speed, 2017), where white conquistador-settlers subjugated indigenous and black populations through enslavement, genocide, dispossession, sexual violence, imposed heterosexualism and other forms of oppression (lugones, 2007; quijano, 2007). central to settler colonialism across many latin american nation-states was the imposition of mestizaje (miscegenation or racial mixing), an ideology and practice that wynter (1995) historically traces to a system of knowledge that cast africans as idolators, which emerged from the portuguese landing in what is now known as senegal in 1441. wynter describes how this notion of idolator was mapped onto the new world and reworked to place indigenous and black people on the lowest rungs of the racial hierarchy in the americas. wynter writes that “differing degrees of mixtures were designated as more human the more they bred in the european and bred out indio and negro” (p. 36). mestizaje continues to fundamentally shape racial hierarchy in many states across latin america, where whiteness is privileged above all and mestizos occupy a fraught intermediary position that propagates the myth that assimilation is complete (hooker, 2017; saldaña-portillo, 2016). urrieta (2012) explains how, when claimed, mestizaje seems to offer black and indigenous people and even darker-skin mestizos a path to climb the racial, social-economic ladder. in many latin american countries, this is commonly referred to as, “mejorando la raza” (improving the race) whereby black, indigenous and darker-skin mestizos are pressured to “mix” with lighter-skin people and “deculturalize” by not passing down indigenous languages and traditions in order to circumvent the oppression one faces when claiming indigeneity (urrieta, 2012). when migrants from latin america arrive to the u.s. or canada, they bring these understandings of race and racial hierarchy, but also confront reworked understandings of race and mestizaje as newly categorized latinxs (blackwell et al., 2017). for example, chicanx scholars and activists have long reclaimed mestizaje as an identity that celebrates indigeneity and lays claim to belonging in the u.s.-mexico borderlands (hooker, 2017; pulido, 2017). yet, as alberto (2017) and saldaña-portillo (2017) demonstrate, such efforts to recover an indigenous past by mestizos conflicts with the kind of indigeneity that indigenous and black/afro-indigenous people from latin america assert, which places them as speaking, living subjects in the present. therefore, people that become categorized as latinx, including mestizo, indigenous, chicanx, afro-indigenous, black/afro-latinx, hold different relationships to, and ways of negotiating, settler colonialism in latin america and the u.s. so, how can differently racialized latinx migrants enact an alternative politic, or way of being in place as citizens or residents of a settler-colonial state that challenges the legitimacy of that very state? how can latinxs make claims to rights and belonging without reproducing settler colonial logics? and in what ways can latinxs grapple with their complicity and work towards decolonization? although there are no simple answers to these enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 273 questions, indigenous, black and anti-racist scholars have proposed compelling starting points. tuck and yang (2012) argue that decolonization is not a metaphor, but a material reality that indigenous people are working towards that requires the repatriation of land and a recognition of their unique relationships to land. they warn against trying to reconcile settler guilt by making “moves to innocence” like equating social justice and decolonization struggles, and instead propose an “ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes how decolonization distinctly requires a complete transformation of settler systems. hunt and holmes (2015) elaborate that decolonization involves nonindigenous people building relationships with and supporting the struggles of indigenous people, from participating in blockades and protests, to engaging in an everyday decolonial queer politic. this politic works to understand race, sexuality and gender as mutually constituted, and involves exposing and challenging how canada is a white settler nation that continues to dispossess indigenous people (hunt & holmes, 2015). in a recent exchange between simpson, walcott and coulthard (simpson et al., 2018), simpson asserted how decolonization requires not only indigenous resurgence, but connecting with radical black movements and communities of colour to “create constellations of co-resistance” (p. 81). as lethabo-king (2016, 2019) and wynter (1995) demonstrate, the making of the human is central to the project of conquest, and thus must be engaged with in order to work towards another world. or as walcott (2014) explains, a decolonial project will not be possible if movements do not engage with the “deathly production of anti-blackness” (p. 93), and the possibilities of black ontology that demonstrate different ways of being human that do not reproduce the violence of the post-columbus human. audra simpson’s (2014) “politics of refusal,” also illuminates possibilities for alternative, decolonial forms of being and citizenship. simpson demonstrates how mohawks in kahnawà:ke refuse incorporation as u.s. or canadian citizens, and assert their sovereignty as members of indigenous nations in their everyday lives. yet, there are moments when mohawks must call on canadian or u.s. citizenship as a “citizenship of convenience” in order to cross borders even though their “feeling citizenship” – how they live their life, the relationships they’re embedded in – is mohawk (simpson, 2014, p. 171-173). simpson argues for a politics of refusal that “rejects statedriven forms of recognition and sociability” (p. 16), and opts for alternative ways of being understood premised on one’s authority as mohawk, indigenous or haudenosaunee. while latinx people do not have the same relationships to u.s. or canadian states as mohawks or other indigenous nations, and thus do not have recourse to be legally recognized as something other than citizens from their nations of origin or as canadians (albeit not-fully), simpson’s (2014) politics of refusal is still instructive. a politics of refusal interrogates the very foundations of white settler authority, the legitimacy of the state and the madelaine cahuas & alexandra arraiz matute studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 274 benefits of being recognized as a citizen. it also shares characteristics with dhamoon’s (2013) politics of disruption, “a persistent and intentional questioning of the forces of power that produce, reproduce and stabilize calcified meanings and structures of difference” (p. 24) of the settler state and its subjects. cahuas’ (2020) latinx decolonial politic of belonging aligns with (but is not the same as) simpson’s (2014) politics of refusal because it is an alternative way diasporic latinxs can practice citizenship that strives to simultaneously challenge both canadian and latin american settler colonialism. in cahuas’ study, she demonstrates how latinx identities and cultural celebrations can be mobilized towards different political ends that can reinforce or disrupt settler colonialism, anti-indigeneity and antiblackness. she points to a need to better understand how latinxs in canada construct their identities and negotiate their relationships to settler colonialism and decolonization in their everyday narratives and practices. in this paper, we address this gap by focusing on the experiences and practices of a diverse network of women and non-binary black/afro-latinx, indigenous and brown latinx community workers (lcws), and a collaborative project between poder (a latinx feminist non-profit) and the working women community center (wwcc) called tales from the south. by taking this approach, we seek to enrich conversations around migrant politics, citizenship and settler colonialism, by providing a grounded analysis of how one community within the larger latinx diaspora in toronto is contending with these questions in their political organizing. in the following section, we share a brief overview on the latinx diaspora in toronto. latinx toronto toronto is located in southern ontario on the traditional territories of the mississuagas of the credit, the anishnabeg, the chippewa, the haudenosaunee and the wendat peoples. it is commonly known as canada’s largest and most diverse city with a population of 2.79 million, where more than half of residents identify as a visible minority and nearly half were born outside canada (statistics canada, 2016). toronto is also a settler colonial city that was formed in 1793 and incorporated in 1834 through indigenous dispossession, and was a site of black enslavement (freeman, 2010; maynard, 2017). while it is beyond the scope of this paper to fully engage with this legacy of racial-colonial violence, it is important to contextualize the arrival of migrants from latin america within this fraught landscape, where black and indigenous people continue to live, make place and struggle for freedom. latin american migration to canada began in the late 1960s with ecuadorian and peruvian migrants leaving political and economic instability (mata, 1985). during the 1970s, political exiles from chile, argentina and enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 275 uruguay followed, fleeing right-wing dictatorships. in the 1980s, central americans mainly from el salvador and guatemala arrived as refugees, escaping state-sponsored violence and civil war (mata, 1985). with the signing of nafta in the 1990s and increased instability across mexico, colombia and venezuela, there has been increased migration from these countries. it is also important to note that over the last 30 years, canadian immigration policy has steadily become more exclusionary, giving preference to “skilled workers,” university-educated professionals and wealthy investors (veronis, 2010). this makes the latinx population in canada and toronto highly diverse, as people not only trace their origins to over 30 countries, but they also have drastically different reasons for migration and experiences of resettlement that are deeply classed and racialized. these differences significantly shape the different kinds of politics latinx migrants enact once in canada (see landolt & goldring, 2009). currently, the latinx population in canada numbers 674,640, and the majority live in toronto and its surrounding areas, representing almost three percent of the city’s population (statistics canada, 2016). latinxs contend with numerous challenges from discrimination, over-representation in lowwage jobs, higher rates of youth not completing high school, and residence in predominantly in low-income, racialized neighborhods in the northwest of the city (lindsay, 2007). while still a relatively small population and underrepresented in formal municipal politics (veronis, 2010), latinxs are influential in shaping leftist politics in toronto by working across multiple migrant justice, labour, queer, feminist, anti-violence, indigenous and black social movements and organizations. however, as landolt and goldring (2009) demonstrate, not all latinxs agree politically, even those that may consider themselves on the left. for example, early latinx feminist organizing in toronto was largely dominated by class-conscious women from the southern cone who took important stands against gender-based violence, but have been critiqued for excluding queer, racialized, black, indigenous and trans latinx women and youth (landolt & goldring, 2009; lobo-molnar, 2012; san martin, 1998). over the last five years there has been a critical turn in latinx feminist organizing that strives to foreground intersectional feminism and decolonization (cahuas, 2019). this can be seen in the changing politics of mujer, the only latinx feminist incoporated non-profit organization in toronto; it was established in 2003 to support the wellbeing of latin american women and girls. in fall 2014 mujer was not able to secure grant funding; volunteer board members decided to use this as an opportunity to shift the organization’s mandate to better support structurally disadvantaged community members and provide opportunities for black, indigenous, queer and trans latinx women and youth to join the organization. in october 2015, for the first time in mujer’s history, the newly elected board included nonbinary people, and the majority identified as queer latinx people of colour. mujer also began to engage latinx communities around decolonization in madelaine cahuas & alexandra arraiz matute studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 276 solidarity with black and indigenous communities of turtle island, for example by attending the strawberry ceremony to demand justice for missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people, and participating in the black lives matter-toronto shut down of allen road to protest the murders of andrew loku and jermaine carby by police in 2015. in 2016 mujer launched decolonizing latinx feminisms, a free, six-week course open to women and non-binary community members that created a much-needed space for learning about women of colour feminisms, decolonization and social justice. this course laid a critical foundation for conversations about settler colonialism, indigeneity and blackness among latinx feminists, community worker-activists and everyday community members. in 2018 mujer voted to change its name to poder: afro y abya yala fuerza feminista, to disrupt the binary of the singular “woman” and be more reflective of its membership and organizational mandate that “works to create spaces that center trans, queer, afro-latinx and indigenous individuals in the greater latinx community” (poder, n.d.). both authors, madelaine and alexandra, have been deeply involved in these discussions as latinx community workers (lcws) themselves. madelaine was a mujer board member from 2014 to 2016 and had previously been involved in numerous latinx community-based organizations and initiatives across the city since 2006. alexandra has participated in mujer programs and events for several years and has worked with the working women community center (wwcc) for the last four years on initiatives to better support latinx children, youth and families navigate the public school system. our experiences as latinas working in community led us to our research interests in different ways. witnessing the kinds of challenges latinx women and non-binary people face working across a neoliberalized non-profit sector, from sexism, racism and precarious working conditions, madelaine focused her doctoral research project on lcws in toronto. the first half of the findings shared in this paper were collected as part of this larger project carried out between 20152018, involving 38 in-depth interviews with lcws and participant observation in key latinx political organizing spaces. the lcws interviewed all identified as racialized, people of colour and a fifth of them identified as explicitly either black/afro-latinx or indigenous or both; participants were mainly between the ages of 25 to 34. while almost all participants had some form of post-secondary education, the vast majority came from working-class migrant backgrounds and were struggling economically as precarious workers (cahuas, 2019). alexandra focused her doctoral research on a mentoring program for latinx children and youth at wwcc, and has been motivated to push critical conversations around race, settler colonialism and decolonization into everyday conversations among latinx families, tías (aunts) and abuelas (grandmothers). alexandra teamed up with nira elgueta, another lcw at wwcc and poder, to develop tales from the south – a free, eight-week enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 277 program that would inform participants about canada’s settler colonial history and present, and support them in unpacking latin american settler colonialism. the second half of the findings shared in this paper were collected as part of alexandra’s work with nira, wwcc and poder in the summer of 2018, which involved gathering multiple written and spoken reflections from 15 participants at the end of each session, conducting followup phone calls and engaging in participant observation. this information provides a partial glimpse into how everyday latinx community members are grappling with questions of race, settler colonialism and their own identities as migrants. the section below synthesizes our key findings and uses people’s own words where possible to present information. findings lcws enact a latinx decolonial politic of belonging by refusing identity and citizenship on white settler terms to be “canadian” or refuse? when madelaine asked lcws how they identified, many laughed at the enormity of the question and listed identities from ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, place of birth, residence, migration experience, class and political beliefs. what almost none of them did was claim canadian identity. when probed as to whether they would call themselves “canadian” it was clear that there was a palpable aversion to the term. the vast majority of lcws outwardly refused claiming canadian identity for two reccurring reasons. first, lcws did not feel canadian even if they were born, grew up in, or spent most of their life in canada, because of the ongoing exclusion they faced as racialized, gendered, working-class people in canadian society. lcws especially pointed to the overwhelming whiteness of canadian society as what prevented them from feeling they could ever fully belong as “real canadians.” second, lcws explained their refusal of canadian identity as stemming from canada’s ongoing violent settler colonial practices (e.g., dispossession of indigenous people, harmful resource extraction). by claiming canadian identity, they felt they would be re-inscribing a nationalistic pride that was premised on the genocide of indigenous people and oppression of people of colour, which was contradictory to their values and political aspirations as lcws who were trying to challenge intersecting power systems through organizing with latinx communities and various anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-colonial social movements. many lcws also hesitated to proudly claim any latin american nationalistic identity, recognizing that latin american states also function as settler states. these negotiations can be seen in ines’ narrative below: madelaine cahuas & alexandra arraiz matute studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 278 i have a canadian passport and obviously if i’m at a border, if somebody asks me are you canadian? i would probably say i'm canadian. that's the only time i would identify as canadian. i don't identify as canadian because it’s just latina, i feel like it really reflects my, like spirit...but like i don’t share anything ... i don’t even know what canadian culture is, but i don’t identify with it, if it’s hockey or if it’s, i don't know, the maple leaf… i also, you know, obviously don’t agree with the way in which the state has treated aboriginal people, and this is also the same reason why i don’t identify as peruvian, because i don’t think that the peruvian state has ever really addressed the needs or... experience of aboriginal people in peru… if anything, continues to exploit them, remove them from their area, support international mining companies and does not address... the environmental impacts and human rights violations that a lot of these corporations have on aboriginal people. ines refuses to claim any national identity that is premised in colonial violence, but also acknowledges how her identity is still entangled with canada as a passport holding citizen. ines is compelled to say that she is canadian when travelling so she can access the privilege of crossing borders internationally, even though that is not how she feels. ines opts to identify as latina, because it “reflects [her] spirit,” and later elaborates that she is latina and indigenous (quechua). almost all lcws used terms like latina or latinx to describe themselves, while also complicating this identity by explaining its intersection with racial identities like black/afro-latinx, indigenous and mestiza/x. this is part of an effort by lcws to assert their ways of understanding themselves, while also challenging how settler colonial states like canada try to assimilate difference through national identities and imposed ethnic labels like “hispanic,” which privilege european spanish identity and erase black and indigenous identities (see cahuas, 2020). asserting one’s blackness was a key way black/afro-descendant lcws would refuse claiming canadian or hispanic identity. one afro-latina lcw, eva, went even as far as saying she would not pursue getting formal canadian citizenship and would remain with a permanent resident status, rather than pledge allegiance to a queen or god she does not believe in: madelaine: do you identify as a canadian? eva: no (laughs). legally i’m not canadian, i’m just a resident and i do that intentionally and i don’t want to swear for a queen or a god so i just keep it as a resident. i just don’t identify with canadian culture at the same time i question myself because what is canadian culture, what is canadian?... i identify as a torontonian as a latin american, black caribbean woman, mixed-race and human being over everything. eva does not want to obtain recognition from a settler colonial state and monarchy even if that means her lack of formal citizenship would prevent her from being able to vote. what is also telling is that eva identifies herself not by her country of origin, but as a torontonian, latin american, black enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 279 caribbean woman and “human being over everything.” this powerfully signals how black people in the americas are continuously struggling against being cast as less human and unbelonging, while also demonstrating alternative ways of being human in place that are not premised on domination (lethabo-king, 2016, 2019; walcott, 2014). it is also important to note here that because of the racial heterogeneity of lcws there was no consensus on whether they understood themselves as settlers. many brown mestizas did outrightly say they were settlers; other indigenous and/or black lcws more often used terms like indigenous migrant, uninvited guest or byrd’s (2011) arrivant. collectively, lcws are trying to create new terms and language to more accurately reflect their experiences and foreground black and indigenous identities. frida, a brown, self-identified mestiza lcw, says this is an ever-shifting, complicated process as she admits, “i know a lot of people have problems with the word mestiza as well,” pointing to how mestizaje is rooted in a violent history, but has been reappropriated by chicanx activists and scholars to reaffirm indigeneity (alberto, 2017; hooker, 2017). while there is no easy resolution to these discussions on latinx identities, the findings presented here demonstrate that lcws construct their identities in ways that are entangled with settler colonialism in latin america and canada. this can be seen when lcws like ines and eva refuse to identify as canadian in their everyday lives, but at the border are compelled to claim canadian citizenship or proof of residency in order to cross. this kind of refusal, while different from simpson’s (2014) politics of refusal, demonstrates how refusal can be mobilized in a limited way by racialized migrants and people of colour who do not have recourse to other forms of legal recognition. this kind of latinx refusal challenges what chatterjee calls “settler colonial nationalism,” as well as the self-indigenizing narratives phung (2011) and saranillio (2013) critique, which reinforce migrant complicity in settler colonialism. instead, this form of latinx refusal aligns with dhamoon’s (2013) politics of disruption that seeks to question the legitimacy of the settler state and other oppressive power systems. lcws refuse to be recognized as assimilated canadian subjects, but use it as simpson (2014) says, as a “citizenship of convenience” (p. 172-173) in order to cross borders and reside within national borders. nevertheless, refusing to outwardly claim canadian citizenship could be seen as a way of distancing oneself from the canadian state, which could reproduce what tuck and yang (2012) call “a move to innocence.” however, because lcws refuse canadian identity as part of a larger refusal of canadian racial-colonial violence, they can also be seen as enacting what hunt and holmes (2015) call a decolonial queer politic. furthermore, because lcws seek to challenge ongoing settler colonialism in canada and latin america, which is premised on anti-indigeneity and anti-blackness, we read their refusals as a way of enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging (cahuas, 2020). this can clearly be seen with ines’ refusal to define herself madelaine cahuas & alexandra arraiz matute studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 280 on white settler terms as neither canadian or hispanic or even peruvian, and asserting herself as latina and indigenous (quechua). furthermore, eva’s refusal to swear to a queen or god in order to formally gain canadian citizenship, and her insistence on being recognized as “human being over everything” speaks to how dismantling anti-blackness and remaking the human are crucial to an expansive decolonial project (lethabo-king, 2016, 2019; walcott, 2014; wynter, 1995). ines, eva and other black and indigenous lcws complicate brown and white mestizo latinx categories, and show how latinxs have different ways of negotiating citizenship and identity in canada and other settler nations. through a latinx decolonial politic of belonging, lcws grapple with the contradictions that come with living on occupied indigenous lands as differently racialized people with different relationships to settler colonialism in canada and latin america. next, we explore how lcws put into practice a latinx decolonial politic of belonging through a community-based learning initiative called tales from the south. lcws enact a latinx decolonial politic of belonging through communitybased learning tales from the south is a collaborative initiative between poder and the working women community center (wwcc), which seeks to educate latinx community members about settler colonialism in canada and latin america. this program was launched in the aftermath of the 2015 truth and reconciliation commission of canada’s (trcc) final report documenting unspeakable violence committed against indigenous children in residential schools. the ministry of immigration, refugees and citizenship canada made grant funding available to non-profit organizations to engage communities around the calls to action presented in the trcc report that aimed to start a process of reconciliation between the canadian state, the public and indigenous people – a process that has been widely critiqued by indigenous scholars and activists (see simpson, 2014). tales from the south was funded through this ministry, and as such we see this program as an example of how lcws are trying to engage in conversations around identity, race and settler colonialism within everyday community spaces in ways that challenge, but are still entangled with, the settler colonial state. the program ran for eight weeks over the summer of 2018, and was facilitated by two well-known and trusted lcws: maria montejo (deer clan) who is a member of the jakaltec/popti (mayan) community from the xajla territory of guatemala, and janet romero-leiva, queer feminist latinx visual artist and writer. maria, janet, alexandra and nira collectively worked to build the structure of the program, which covered topics like indigenous worldviews and nationhood, settler colonialism, spirituality and healing. fifteen participants were recruited by wwcc and poder who were largely enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 281 immigrants to canada from nine latin american countries. the participants for this program were different from the lcws whose narratives were discussed in the previous section, and the majority were middle-aged mothers with ages ranging from 18 to 80 years of age; almost all were brown, latina or mestiza, immigrant working-class women. during the first three sessions, maria introduced participants to indigenous worldviews and nationhood, explaining how indigenous people have unique relationships to land, which have been undermined by settler colonialism in canada. she encouraged participants to consider how their own worldviews have been shaped by larger social systems and reflect on their role in canada as latinx migrants. one of the questions asked was, “how are we complicit in the displacement of people, through our own displacement?” participants immediately drew on their schooling experiences in latin america as having deeply shaped their worldviews, particularly their understanding of colonization and race. participants made connections between how indigenous people were erased from their curriculum in latin america, with the ways the canadian government erases the realities of indigenous nationhood and ongoing occupation. participants also shared how their families firmly held onto mestizaje as a way to “mejorar la raza” (improve the race) by aligning themselves with whiteness while disparaging blackness, indigeneity and any dark-skinned features. one participant, tanya, divulged that she knew she was indigenous (purepecha), but was not encouraged by her family to identify or connect with any purepecha knowledge or traditions. tanya said because of her light skin it was easier for her to pass as white or mestiza, and that this was what her family and mexican society believed was desirable, so that is why she had not identified as indigenous. in the later three sessions, maria shared mayan cosmology tenets as a way to encourage participants to delve deeper into thinking about social transformation, wellbeing, spirituality and healing from their own positionalities. she invited a local grandmother/kokum and deeply respected knowledge keeper, alita sauve, to lead the sixth session involving a water ceremony. alexandra recalls how this was an especially powerful and emotionally charged moment where participants cried and expressed gratitude to have had this experience. after, tanya said that she could now “reclaim” her indigeneity and not feel ashamed to pass on purepecha traditions to her children. the last two sessions were run by janet who facilitated writing workshops around the theme of memories. this led to the creation of two blankets with pieces of the women’s writing, which were given to the native canadian center of toronto (ncct) by participants who visited with indigenous community organizers, as a first step towards building relationships of solidarity. based on participants’ final reflections, there was a collective desire to learn more about indigenous history, and support ongoing indigenous struggles as a different way to seek belonging in canada. as carolina writes: madelaine cahuas & alexandra arraiz matute studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 282 by knowing more, learning and understanding about the different original cultures not only allows us to strengthen our own sense of belonging … but it also motivates us to create collective bridges between one culture and another, to find more and more points of agreement and collaboration. (translated from spanish by the authors) when carolina explains how by learning about indigenous peoples in canada, she strengthens her own sense of belonging and seeks to create a collective bridge between cultures, she can be understood as turning away from state forms of recognition, as called for by hunt and holmes (2015) and dhamoon (2013). however, this eagerness to find points of commonality and create bridges between latinx and indigenous people could also fail to heed tuck and yang’s (2012) “ethic of incommensurability” and enact the kind of decolonization they define as the restoration of indigenous land. furthermore, participants were predominantly non-black, non-indigenous mestizas who would qualify as racialized women in the canadian context, but could pass as white or mestiza in latin america. this limited the kinds of experiences that could be shared among participants, and risks re-centering mestiza perspectives. there is a need to more deeply interrogate how latinx community spaces can better foreground the voices of black and indigenous people in order to avoid reproducing mestizo dominance as seen in latin america (saldaña-portillo, 2016; urrieta, 2012), and in the u.s. with the chicano movement (alberto, 2017; hooker, 2017; pulido, 2017). for example, when tanya shares she is purepecha, but has been distanced from those cultural traditions because of the persistence of mestizaje, and now feels emboldened to reconnect to her purepecha identity, is she a mestiza who is reclaiming a lost indigeneity or is she a “deculturalized” purepecha person because of the very workings of settler colonialism, as argued by urrieta (2012)? these are difficult questions and ones we cannot simply answer, as we are not the arbiters of indigeneity or purepecha identity. what we do aim to highlight is how learning about and challenging settler colonialism in canada through a community-based setting brings up important tensions among latinx people and their identities, which remain unsettled and unresolved as latin american settler colonialism continues to haunt the diaspora. at the same time, we want to recognize what was significant about tales from the south, which is that it was the first time almost all the participants were given the space to learn about settler colonialism in canada and critically reflect on how latin american settler colonialism had shaped their identities and worldviews. by creating an initiative that strives to simultaneously open up conversations about both canadian and latin american settler colonialism, lcws – alexandra, nira, maria and janet – enacted a latinx decolonial politic of belonging (cahuas, 2020). lcws guided everyday community members through a process of unpacking stories of migration, displacement and relationships to land and place, in a way that foregrounded indigenous worldviews and struggles. enacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 283 however, more work is needed by latinxs to simultaneously foreground the persistence of anti-blackness and the possibilities of black ontologies when grappling with questions of settler colonialism and decolonization, as black decolonial scholars articulate (lethabo-king, 2016, 2019; walcott, 2014). perhaps, carolina’s reflection on finding a stronger sense of belonging by learning about indigenous histories and presents, and wanting to find more “points of agreement and collaboration” can provide an opening here for advancing “constellations of co-resistance,” that take seriously indigenous relationships to land, indigenous resurgence, black freedom and liberation for all (simpson et al., 2018, p. 81). overall, tales from the south is an incomplete project that opened up a space for learning and dialoguing among latinxs about our identities and fraught relationships to land and place in canada and latin america, which can set the groundwork for working in solidarity with indigenous and black social movements across the americas. conclusions this paper explored how latinx people in toronto, canada are grappling with questions of settler colonialism and decolonization. we specifically looked at how a network of differently racialized latinx community workers (lcws) negotiate their roles and relationships to settler colonialism. lcws refuse to be recognized on white settler terms as “proud canadians,” and opt to identify as latinx, while complicating this identity with particular racial identities like black/afro-latinx, and indigenous. lcws do this because by proudly claiming “being canadian,” they would be aligning themselves with a white settler state that not only excludes them from being full citizens, but also continues to enact violence against indigenous, black and other racialized communities. lcws also refuse to identify by latin american nationality or as hispanics, as a way to reject the anti-indigeneity and antiblackness underlying latin american nation-building and the term hispanic. in this way, lcws enact a latinx decolonial politic of belonging, as they construct identities and alternative claims to citizenship that simultaneously challenge both canadian and latin american settler colonialism. at the same time, lcws also practice a latinx decolonial politic of belonging in the ways they engage in community organizing, as seen through the initiative, tales from the south, which created a space where latinxs could learn about canadian settler colonialism and interrogate notions of race they inherited from latin america. together the findings illustrated in this paper contribute to literature exploring racialized people’s relationships to settler colonialism and decolonization, by looking to the unique and multi-faceted experiences of the latinx diaspora in canada. first, this paper contributes to previous analyses that have focused on how racialized migrants reproduce settler colonial logics (dhamoon, 2013; phung, 2011; saranillio, 2013), by providing a grounded madelaine cahuas & alexandra arraiz matute studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 284 example of how a group of latinxs are trying to enact an alternative way of claiming belonging and citizenship in canada that challenges the white settler state. second, this paper builds on previous studies on latinx identities that have been largely focused on the u.s. context and chicanx claims to indigeneity (blackwell et al., 2017; pulido, 2017; saldaña-portillo, 2016), by engaging with the voices of differently racialized, black/afro-latinx, brown/mestiza/x, indigenous latinx women and non-binary people who reside in canada. by taking this approach and grappling with racial differences among latinxs, this paper signals the need to reassert that racialized migrant groups are not cohesive or homogenous, and in fact, within the latinx diaspora, people have radically different experiences of, and relationships to, settler colonialism in the americas. the voices of black/afro-latinx and indigenous latinxs complicate a brown, mestizo, latinx identity and call for more nuanced ways of thinking about and working towards decolonization that account for anti-indigeneity, antiblackness and migration simultaneously. this is precisely what a latinx decolonial politic of belonging strives to do, as it provokes a rethinking of what identity, citizenship, belonging and politics could look like for differently racialized latinxs. at the same time, a latinx decolonial politic of belonging is not an endpoint. it is a beginning to seriously engaging, and bridging conversations across black, indigenous, latin american and latinx ontologies, epistemologies and movements, as black and indigenous scholar-activists have been doing (see lethabo-king, 2016, 2019; simpson et al., 2018). there is still more work to be done to better understand how lcws and everyday latinx community members in toronto will strengthen their relationships with indigenous and black struggles both within and outside latinx communities. since tales from the south ended in 2018, women who participated have continued to build relationships with indigenous women at the ncct by visiting, sharing stories and creating art together. today, lcws continue to negotiate their relationships to settler colonialism and find ways to gather to work towards a decolonial future. acknowledgements we would like to acknowledge nira elgueta, maria montejo and janet romero-leiva for their invaluable contributions to cuentos del sur, as well as the leadership of the working women community center and poder for making this kind of program available to community members. we are deeply grateful to latinx community workers and the mujeres who participated in the program for sharing their stories with us and for all their work in reimagining how we can create and sustain community with cariño. thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and to the special issue editors soma chatterjee and tania das gupta and editor-inenacting a latinx decolonial politic of belonging studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 268-286, 2020 285 chief david butz, for their generous support of this paper and making space for these important conversations. references alberto, l. 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(1995). 1492: a new world view. in v. lawrence hyatt & r. nettleford (eds.), race, discourse, and the origin of the americas: a new world view (pp. 5-57). smithsonian institution press. rutherford final feb 17 20 correspondence address: blair rutherford, department of sociology & anthropology, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: blair.rutherford@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 nervous conditions on the limpopo: gendered insecurities, livelihoods, and zimbabwean migrants in northern south africa blair rutherford carleton university, canada abstract this paper examines some of the gendered insecurities informing some of the livelihood practices of zimbabwean migrants in northern south africa from 20042011, the period in which i carried out almost annual ethnographic research in this region. situating these practices within wider policy shifts and changing migration patterns at the national and local scales, this paper shows the importance of attending to gendered dependencies and insecurities when analysing migrant livelihoods in southern africa. these include those found within humanitarian organizations targeting zimbabwean migrants in their programs and policies in the border area. these gendered insecurities, which are woven into the fabric of travel, work and accommodation for these migrant zimbabwean women in northern south africa, should be examined in struggles for social justice. by drawing on the lens of social critique to engender a wider sense of the social justice needs for zimbabwean women migrants in south africa, this essay aims to broaden the focus of activism on women migrants to also attend to gendered insecurities in their everyday economic and shelter-seeking activities. keywords south africa; zimbabwe; gender; insecurities; migration introduction it was already one of those awkward research moments where my expectations clashed with those who were introducing me to others, which then became much, much more uncomfortable. it was july 3, 2005 and i was spending my first full day on a commercial citrus farm in tshipise in northern south africa to see if it could be a place for me to do some research on zimbabwean migrants, who comprised the majority of the farm labour force. as i have commonly done in my research on issues concerning farm workers blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 170 in southern africa, the day before i had introduced myself to the farm operator to seek his (or, more rarely, her) permission to talk to the workers. this afrikaner senior farm manager was rather indifferent to my research, more worried about potential changing governmental plans for land restitution in south africa than issues concerning his largely foreign workforce. as i have experienced before, he had then handed me over to one of his senior workers, who himself was zimbabwean, whom he trusted would not say or show me anything which could embarrass the farm and who also would faithfully report back to him about what i did. the following day, i met up with this zimbabwean farm supervisor. he decided that the best way for me to be introduced and carry out some initial research was to take me to the part of the workers’ compound where food was being served to the seasonal workers, who all were zimbabwean, after the citrus picking work was done for the day. as dozens of clearly tired men and women were queuing up for a plastic bag of sadza (known more widely in south africa as pap, a thick cornmeal porridge) and beans, the supervisor loudly informed those waiting in chishona that i am a university researcher from canada who would like to speak to them about their experience in south africa and about crossing the border from zimbabwe. when there was a pause in the distribution of the cooked food, i suggested that if any would like to discuss their experiences a bit more, we could talk more privately on the edge of the clearing. a line of about 10 zimbabwean workers formed to meet with me on an individual basis, in a way that made me feel like i was dealing with customers or clients and not to learn about their often grim tales of survival in zimbabwe and south africa. all was going well, as i was gaining some more insight into the travels, travails, and ambitions of these zimbabwean men and women in terms of crossing the border and living and working in northern south africa. but i was not prepared for the young woman from near the end of the queue who came to me and spoke so softly and hesitantly that i initially had trouble understanding her. she would start talking about how hard it was to cross the nearby limpopo river, which forms the international boundary between south africa and zimbabwe, and how there were robbers, colloquially called maguma-guma, prowling on the zimbabwean edge of the border preying on the border-jumpers, and then she would go very quiet and look away. initially, i gently asked for some elaboration, but she would follow the same pattern of talking for a bit of time before trailing off into embarrassed silence. it finally dawned on me what she was referring to, that she was sexually attacked, and my heart sank. i asked her if i could try to help her to see any health professionals in the nearby town of musina, but she declined, as she said she was afraid of being caught as an “illegal migrant” in that urban centre and deported. i urged her to try to find some help, but i also recognized that she had approached me for some assistance and found me sorely lacking. she then left, heading back to the overcrowded part of the nervous conditions on the limpopo studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 171 workers’ compound where seasonal workers stayed, and i awkwardly continued talking with other zimbabweans for some time. hers was a troubling story in and of itself, but also, because sexual attacks were not yet publicly discussed as part of the risks of “jumping the border,” her allusion to this violence was particularly shocking to me. since my first research visit to northern south africa the year before, i had already heard of “maguma-guma,” the name for the typically zimbabwean men who would meet would-be migrants in the zimbabwean border city of beitbridge or in villages or unpopulated areas hugging the northern bank of the limpopo and offer them guidance across the river (for a fee); they also could end up robbing migrants jumping the border. by this research trip in 2005 one person had mentioned to me in passing that women migrants faced the risk of rape. but this was the first time i had heard, albeit indirectly, of the risk of sexual violence from these putative border guides by someone who had experienced it. by a few years later, knowledge of such attacks and risks was much more widespread in various public forms. this was partly a function of the reported rapid increase in the number of zimbabwean women and children crossing the border as the first decade of the twenty-first century moved on (crush, chikanda & tawodzera, 2015, p. 371), but it was due also to a growing number of organizations working to assist undocumented zimbabweans in this region. during my almost annual research trips to the region until 2011, i increasingly heard many such accounts, often quite explicit, not only from victims but increasingly from people who worked for the growing number of organizations who focused on zimbabwean migrants in this border-zone. news stories and ngo reports added to the attention this sexual violence began to receive. the incidence of such attacks seemed to increase, and the predominantly women victims of them had become an object of humanitarian intervention by some ngos in the border region. for example, médecins sans frontières (msf) set up an office in musina in late 2007 in response to the tens of thousands of zimbabweans crossing into south africa, where they provided emergency health services to these initially undocumented migrants fleeing political violence or the crumbling economy at that time in their home country. over the next six years in which they operated their office in the border region msf also developed a focus on survivors of sexual violence through, for example, setting up a clinic in musina for survivors of “sexual and gender based violence” in april 2009. as they reported, more than 75% of clients seen by msf in april were raped while crossing the border, and nearly 60% were raped by more than one perpetrator. seventy percent of the time, rapes were perpetrated with an armed threat (gun, knife, etc.) and almost 50% of clients had injuries due to associated violence. (msf, 2009, p. 14). while such work often provided important and timely support to women (and some men) who otherwise would have had difficulty getting medical blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 172 treatment, as undocumented migrants generally faced obstacles at south african health clinics and hospitals despite constitutional provisions saying otherwise (crush & tawodzera 2014), such efforts also contributed to the sense that sexual violence is principally a risk from illegally crossing the border, making it a function of the illegality of the migrants and thus solely a criminal matter, one which implies that state authorities need to act while humanitarian organizations assist those who were attacked. although those called maguma-guma definitely contributed strongly to the main form of gendered insecurity for border crossers, particularly for those who were new to the task of “jumping” the limpopo, such a concentrated focus of efforts directed towards what most officials called “sgbv” (sexual and gender based violence) at the border obscures wider practices of gendered insecurities, including violence, which many zimbabweans, particularly women, encountered in the first decade of this century while seeking livelihoods and shelter in northern south africa. the humanitarian focus on individual survivors of sexual violence puts into the shadow a whole range of other gendered insecurities, built particularly into the social and power relations through which many sought to forge livelihoods and shelter. as doris buss (2014) has pointed out, such concentrated attention on women survivors of such extraordinary violence can miss out both other forms of quotidian gendered insecurities and ways of seeking to mediate them. this is not a critique of such efforts by activists, humanitarians and others who seek to help the survivors and stop such forms of sexual violence. rather, i provide an alternative perspective that aims to provide insight into the deeper gendered hierarchies woven into everyday life faced by many migrant women, which occur in the penumbra of the glare of such massmediated spotlights. whereas the activism by humanitarian organizations and others brought some help and assistance to women who experienced sexual and gender-based violence,1 it occluded gendered insecurities woven into migrants’ attempts to seek livelihoods and shelter. in this paper, i argue that these insecurities are part and parcel of the gendered dependency relations zimbabwean women migrants need to work through – and with – as they pursue both livelihoods and shelter in northern south africa.2 these gendered insecurities, which are woven into the fabric of travel, work and accommodation for these migrant zimbabwean women in northern south africa should, i suggest, be examined in struggles for social justice for undocumented migrants and refugees in south africa. although in south 1 according to a contact with the msf office in musina, msf also provided assistance to the smaller number of male survivors of sexual violence, though there was limited public discussion of these male victims and survivors. 2 of course, it is important to point out that many south african women face incredible gendered insecurities, particularly in the form of sexual violence directed towards women, girls and lgbtq+ people. this paper only refers to the particular insecurities faced by migrant zimbabwean women in northern south africa, and not, say, migrant women coming from somalia, ethiopia, drc, etc. there may be an overlap with the types of insecurities faced by women from these other migrant communities and south african women, but not necessarily. nervous conditions on the limpopo studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 173 africa’s major urban centres social justice activists have conducted innovative struggles for rights for refugees and against xenophobia drawing on humanitarian logics as well as political activism (robins, 2009), the activism tends to focus on legal and humanitarian issues rather than the economic and housing insecurities faced by undocumented migrants (see shannon morreira’s (2010) research on the role of an activist group working with zimbabweans in cape town in the first decade of this century). as morreira (2016) insightfully shows, zimbabweans seeking asylum in south africa during this period had great troubles translating their claims into the narrow legal language and practice of “human rights violations;” a language and practice that were generally indifferent to the everyday power relations facing the undocumented zimbabwean migrants she studied in cape town. during my research period, there were no social justice activists working with zimbabwean migrants in northern south africa. humanitarian organizations helped to put a spotlight on vulnerabilities of women migrants to sgbv in northern south africa, but this overlooked the insecurities migrant women negotiate in the form of gendered dependency relations shaping access to economic livelihoods and accommodation. didier fassin has suggested such occlusions of quotidian gendered insecurities (buss 2014) are part of the growing hegemony of “humanitarian reason” as organizations and social scientists draw strongly on the lexicon of moral sentiments rather than social critique in both examining and acting upon the wider social world: “[i]nequality is replaced by exclusion, domination is transformed into misfortune, injustice is articulated as suffering, violence is expressed in terms of trauma” (fassin, 2012, p. 6). while tracing some of these gendered work experiences for zimbabwean women in northern south africa in the latter part of the first decade of this century, i will also show how the increasing presence of humanitarian and development organizations in this region after 2007 became incorporated into gendered livelihood strategies for these migrants. an institutional focus on “international migrants” can have consequences for the gendered livelihood strategies of these very migrants. by tracing how some of these humanitarian organizations became involved in zimbabwean migrants’ precarious attempts to find work and accommodation, my aim is to suggest the importance of also drawing upon the lens of social critique, what fassin (2008, p. 339) calls a “critical discourse” that tries to render “the complexity of issues and positions (which can be taken into account by social agents themselves),” to engender a better sense of the wider struggles for social justice in which these zimbabwean women migrants in south africa should be placed. this essay aims to broaden the focus of social activism concerning refugees and undocumented migrants in south africa to also attend to gendered insecurities in their everyday economic and shelter-seeking activities. although there have not been any mobilizations around this issue, i suggest there should be, as another way to “bring about social justice for migrants [is] by disrupting political order that denies them existence, voices, subjectivity, blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 174 and rights” (basok, 2010, p. 99). such a move, i suggest, allows an analysis to move beyond simply a “humanitarian reason” to one seeking social justice. after sketching out the broader political economy and immigration regimes shaping zimbabwean migrants in northern south africa from the 1990s to 2011, i will provide some examples from both the commercial farms and the town of musina of how gendered insecurities are interlaced within particular forms of hierarchical social and power relations shaping livelihood options for zimbabwean women and men. these examples highlight issues of inequality in terms of access to and control over important resources, and those which emerge from relations of dependency involved in livelihood practices. south african immigration policies towards zimbabweans, 1990s-2011 when i began doing ethnographic research in northern south africa in 2004, it was very difficult to find anyone self-identifying as a recent migrant from zimbabwe. in contrast, in 2010 it was easy to meet zimbabwean migrants who had arrived during or after 2000 residing in the northern south african border town of musina and surrounding area. self-identifying zimbabweans were working in the stores, hawking items on the sidewalk, and being paid as domestic servants in the town and townships; labouring in the fields, orange packing sheds, and in the offices of the commercial farms; and staffing a number of the non-governmental organizations operating there. the growing number of zimbabweans entering south africa is connected to post-2000 shifts in zimbabwe that saw growing political persecutions and a politically-induced economic “meltdown” as the zanu (pf) government sought to maintain its grip on power, which led to a massive exodus of zimbabweans (hammar, mcgregor & landau, 2010). an estimated three million plus zimbabweans left since 2000; more than a million are estimated to be living in south africa (crush et al., 2015, p. 366). in their examination of survey data from 1997, 2005 and 2010, crush et al. (2015) show that by 2005 there were some significant shifts in the characteristics of zimbabwean migrants to south africa. compared to those who migrated in the 1990s, these post-2000 migrants tended to be younger, following family members who had preceded them, while they themselves were more likely acting as a network for other family members and friends to follow them into the country. moreover, there was a growing “feminization” of migrants as more women were crossing south over the limpopo, given the worsening economic possibilities in zimbabwe and the deterioration of the various forms of social safety nets. from 2006-2011, a number of national and international organizations and government departments established offices in musina, given the dramatic increase in numbers of zimbabweans crossing the border who often were in a quite vulnerable situation. their mandate was to address or assist the growing nervous conditions on the limpopo studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 175 number of zimbabweans passing through or remaining in the musina area, fleeing political persecution or limited economic opportunities and trying to find a place of potential personal and financial security, at least temporarily (see also morreira, 2016). amongst others, the south african red cross, lawyers for human rights, msf, the international organisation for migration (iom), and the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) all opened offices in this border town. they joined save the children (uk) which already had a small program in musina directed towards “street children” for some years as well as the musina legal advice office, which had been in existence since the late 1980s. both of these organizations also started to develop programs for zimbabweans in northern south africa in the 2000s. a number of faithbased organizations, from established churches like the catholic church to congregations built around born-again evangelical ministers, opened up shelters for the zimbabweans. the department of home affairs built new offices and the department of labour opened up an office in the town. they were joined by peripatetic national and international journalists, officials with international ngos such as human rights watch and refugees international, and academics and graduate students from south african and international universities, all focusing on zimbabweans in musina and the surrounding area. there also were a number of changes in the broader immigration policies and the positioning of zimbabweans in south africa at large.3 over the last 20 years, zimbabweans have become publicly marked as the most numerous migrant group in south africa. they are marked in the sense that they are more likely than members of other nationalities to be subjected to discourses and practices in south africa that view them as “outsiders” and “aliens” – makwerekwere in the national vernacular (muzondidya 2010; rutherford, 2008). this xenophobic sentiment often characterizes zimbabweans and other african “foreigners” as threatening employment possibilities, security of property and of the person, public health, rights to public housing, and sexual relationships, amongst other issues that become identified for public concern and occasional moral panics and violence, particularly in the large urban centres of south africa (worby, hassim & kupe, 2008). although such violence has not been prevalent in northern south africa, such widelyknown and mass-mediated xenophobic violence and sentiments contributed to feelings of insecurity and otherness for many zimbabwean migrants living there during my period of research. there were growing numbers of zimbabweans migrating to south africa by 2005 as its own politics became more violent,4 and its social services and economic possibilities began to collapse for the majority of its population. 3 for greater insight into south african immigration policies more broadly, see crush (1998), peberdy (2009), and landau (2010). 4 see, e.g., hammar, raftopoulos & jensen (2004), sachikonye (2011), and rutherford (2017). blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 176 south africa was the major destination and the number of zimbabweans being deported from south africa increased dramatically: 10,861 in 1993, 21, 643 in 1997, 55,753 in 2003, and 204,827 in 2007 (crush et al., 2015, p. 374). home affairs officials recognized very few zimbabwean asylum seekers as bona fide refugees, leading to growing criticisms by national and international human rights and lawyers associations as potentially legitimate refugees were being deported back to zimbabwe (e.g., hrw, 2006; kriger, 2010; morreira, 2016). in july 2008, the department of home affairs opened a refugee reception office (rro) in musina, allowing asylum-seekers to initiate the process for applying for refugee status to south africa closer to the international border. the number of applicants arriving at the new musina rro soon outpaced the staffing capacities and applicants from zimbabwe (and elsewhere) remained for days, sometimes weeks, waiting for their documents. many observers and journalists began to raise public health and security concerns, particularly after south africa declared a cholera emergency in the district in december 2008 (in part as zimbabweans were fleeing a cholera outbreak in harare), and faith-based organizations began to establish shelters in musina’s townships for those waiting to receive their documents. international and national media sources increasingly ran stories about the humanitarian catastrophe (rutherford, 2011b). on april 3, 2009, in the middle of national election campaigns in south africa, the then minister of home affairs declared that there would be a moratorium on the deportation of zimbabweans, zimbabweans would be able to get 30 day visas to south africa for free; a de facto policy emerged that the asylum-seeker’s permit became the route for (quasi-)regularization. in northern south africa, any zimbabweans detained by authorities for lack of proper permits to be in the country were typically brought to the rro to receive an asylum-seeker’s permit, regardless of whether they fit the criteria for seeking asylum. with that permit, they had freedom of movement and employment while they waited for the slow process of being evaluated to see if they were recognized as legitimate refugees. this became the political subjectivity used by zimbabweans to seek permission to stay in south africa (rutherford, 2011a). then in september 2010 the “special dispensation” for zimbabweans was rescinded and those zimbabweans who were in the country on an asylumseeker’s permit had a short period to regularize their stay in south africa by applying for work, study or business permits. the ensuing “zimbabwean documentation project” was haphazardly applied (segattie, 2011, p. 56), regularizing some 255,000 zimbabweans, and deportations of zimbabweans resumed again on october 7, 2011. nervous conditions on the limpopo studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 177 gendered insecurities and the (inter)dependencies of work and accommodation the livelihood strategies for these zimbabwean migrants were often predicated on dependencies or interdependencies that can lead to conflict, exploitation, and other forms of vulnerabilities. these are particularly marked for women. in this section i examine some of the livelihood activities of zimbabwean women migrants in musina and the surrounding commercial farms, focusing in particular on various forms of dependencies and interdependencies on which they are predicated, and some of the gendered insecurities with which they are associated. some of these are conventional ones associated with workplaces, particularly those between employer or manager and employees, but others are also associated with landlords and humanitarian organizations themselves. by examining them, one recognizes that humanitarian organizations tend to overlook some vulnerabilities, and may themselves be implicated in them. the conceptual assumption here is that agency often appears through relations of dependency and subordination, providing particular forms of “capacity for action” (mahmood, 2001, p. 210). these relations of dependency have long structured livelihoods, relations of solidarity, and polities in southern africa (ferguson, 2015), and often entail various vulnerabilities. these are particularly acute for women. being a zimbabwean woman in musina during my period of research was associated with certain forms of work: washing clothes and doing other domestic labour; buying and selling objects such as fruit, boiled eggs, pens, etc.; and working in retail shops, particularly stores owned by south asian men in the business centre of musina. for example, many zimbabwean women in 2009 walked through the streets of the townships, looking for such piece jobs, whereas others would have regular customers, doing their laundry on certain days of the week. trading was another economic activity many zimbabwean women (and men) pursued. they would draw on linkages to other zimbabweans to get some capital to buy fruit or eggs and then vend them on the streets. others would sell for other zimbabwean women who bought the goods for sale, for a nominal amount of money or even simply for food. sometimes the women were able to exploit interdependencies for their own gain. one woman i call siphiwe explained in 2010 how she gained capital for her own business when she arrived in 2008. she said that shortly after arriving in musina she was asked by two women staying at one of the women’s shelters to buy undergarments for them in town as they had been robbed and raped when they jumped the border. she had used that money to buy a box of biscuits, which she then sold in town for a profit, giving her extra money after buying the undergarments. with that money, she bought a chicken to cook and used the maize meal rations, which she received from a church, to cook sadza and chicken to sell to zimbabweans waiting in the blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 178 queue at the rro to apply for an asylum-seeker’s permit. she was able to borrow the pots and plates from the shelters she was staying at to do the cooking and to serve the meal. after three weeks she had enough money to pay rent for a room and to buy an electric stove to keep her business going. such paths were rare and precarious. for instance, siphiwe ended up entering into a relationship with a man who had initially helped her business, but then, she said, ended up stealing much of her money and physically abusing her. her experience was not unusual. my research gathered numerous accounts of zimbabwean women in northern south africa who were confronted with demands for sex by those who controlled important resources in the workplace, accommodation, and transportation. although i did learn about some cases of violent rape, more commonly men in positions of authority placed demands on women to have sex with them. on the tshipise farm mentioned in the introduction, both female and male zimbabwean workers told me about what they called the “scheme” which occurred there. “if you want a job picking oranges here,” expressed one zimbabwean young man to me in july 2005, “you fall under the manager’s scheme. you have to pay.” the currency, so to speak, depended on the gender of the job-seeker. men had to pay in cash. women had to pay by sleeping with the manager. although zimbabwean men on this farm were more ready than zimbabwean women to talk to me about this “scheme,” a few women did tell that they had to submit to the demands of the manager to get a job. “life is too hard here in south africa for us zimbabweans,” observed one woman in august 2005, “there are too many predators here. wild animals in the bush when jumping the border and human ones on the farms…” i came across similar “schemes” on other farms, albeit not called that way. the term “scheme” reflects the general sentiment about practices whereby senior workers, often black south african or black zimbabwean men, would seek to “profit” from their gate-keeping role in terms of resources – such as a wage-paying job – by demanding sexual services from women job-seekers. in his research on a northern south african farm lincoln addison (2014) calls this the gendered “sexual economy.” demands for sex are just one form of structural violence laced through the raced and gendered economic and authority relations operating on the farms there (bolt, 2015, 2016). i heard similar accounts by young zimbabwean women who worked as shopkeepers in what were colloquially called “indian stores.” there are a number of relatively cheap consumer good wholesale and retail stores in musina, particularly off the main-road, owned and operated by south asian men (either born in south africa or asia). although many young women with whom i spoke saw these low-paying jobs as attractive, because they did not have to work outside in the heat or engage in physical activity and (for some) could try to steal some merchandise for resale after work, many also talked about risks of sexual assault by their proprietors or managers. i met a nervous conditions on the limpopo studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 179 few young women who said they left jobs in “indian shops” because bosses were sexually assaulting or harassing them. there were also risks in seeking accommodation in musina. unless the zimbabwean migrants already knew people with whom they could stay, they often ended up finding their own accommodation. many ended up staying with others they met in mkhukhu, typically one-room shacks built haphazardly in the backyard of houses in musina’s townships. renting out such shelters became one means of income-generation musina residents used since the growing influx of zimbabweans coming into the town. although such accommodations tended to be fraught with uncertainty for both landlords and tenants – over payments, conditions, concerns about theft, etc. – they sometimes also entailed gendered insecurity for some zimbabwean women. this usually took the form of landlords who offered free or subsidized rent if women slept with them, but i also heard examples of other forms of gendered coercion. one zimbabwean woman migrant reported that her landlady required zimbabwean women renting from her also to sell chicken feet at her bar. as this woman reported, because we did not understand venda very well, the landlady would talk to some venda men that she was offering them beautiful zimbabwean ladies from her house. in return she would then ask the men to buy her beer. this was being done without our knowledge; whilst we were selling the chicken feet these men would come to us to ask for sex. for many zimbabwean women who came to musina on their own, the precariousness of their livelihoods often overlapped with uncertainty over their shelter. sometimes the dependencies in one could help in the other; at other times, it could lead to gendered vulnerabilities. let me give the example of a zimbabwean woman i call taurai, who travelled to south africa as her husband had migrated to the country the year before but had stopped sending money back to help cover some of the expenses for her and their children. after leaving her children with her in-laws, taurai arrived in the musina taxi ranks in april 2009. a zimbabwean woman who she met there advised her to stay in town and not travel further as she had no asylum-seeking permit. the woman who advised taurai was selling boiled eggs in the taxi ranks and offered to share her room in a mkhukhu. in taurai’s words, “she told me that she had only stayed at this place for five days.... she herself was under the care of another zimbabwean woman who was renting the mkhukhu as she had no money to rent or pay for her own mkhukhu.” as taurai had money that she gained from selling a cow in zimbabwe from her husband’s herd, she then found another mkhukhu via another zimbabwean woman she met in the queue waiting for her asylum-seeker`s permit. a month later the woman who shared her mkhukhu left to work on the surrounding farms and the following month taurai found a job working in a spaza shop (a small shack selling basic food and household items, commonly found in townships). blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 180 she then gave up her mkhukhu as she was able to sleep in the shop for free and worked as a shopkeeper for two months. as she was paid less than half of her agreed-upon salary, by the second month she left the spaza shop and went to stay at one of the women’s shelters operated by churches in the township. a south african woman then came by the shelter looking for a housekeeper and promised a small stipend and a free room, so taurai moved into a mkhukhu in the backyard of her employer’s house, sharing it with six other zimbabwean women. the employment relationship quickly deteriorated, and the south african woman then told her that she was not going to pay her any form of salary and began charging her rent. when taurai started to complain, the landlady replied, in taurai’s words, “go and look for a boyfriend so that i could get some money. go to the truck stop in town to find a boyfriend.” rather than taking up this proposition taurai said she found piece jobs washing clothes and cleaning houses in a township of musina to pay the rent; a number of the other women staying at this place were engaged in sex work as their main source of income. in short, the livelihood and accommodation possibilities open to, and forged by, these zimbabwean migrant women in northern south africa were defined through various forms of hierarchies, dependencies and interdependencies that were highly gendered. they were also laced through with various forms of gendered and sexual vulnerabilities. whereas some of the growing number of humanitarian organizations focused on such vulnerabilities, as noted in taurai’s account they themselves also provided their own forms of gendered dependencies informing livelihood and accommodation possibilities for zimbabwean migrants. humanitarian organizations and gendered livelihood strategies humanitarian organizations in northern south africa helped zimbabweans in many ways over my research period – providing healthcare, legal advice, trauma care, and food, amongst other important services and support. they also worked with and lobbied different policy-makers on their programs directed towards zimbabweans. however, i will focus on how these organizations played a less obvious but still important role in the changing social and legal circumstances concerning zimbabwean migrants. none of them were involved in any social injustices with zimbabwean migrants (at least as i discovered), but seeing how they themselves were positioned by zimbabwean women and men in their precarious searches for work and housing underscores how their “humanitarian reason” overlooked one of migrants’ key insecurities. as my research assistant and i spent time with the ngos and churchorganized shelters working with zimbabweans in musina we slowly realized that the sites of these organizations were also important places for many of the zimbabwean migrants over and above the specific services that were nervous conditions on the limpopo studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 181 available to them. they offered health care, shelter and legal support, and were also incorporated into a key aim for many of the migrants: strategies to find work. for example, in july 2008 i was sitting inside a small storage room that also served as the office attached to the “i believe in jesus” camp located in one of the townships. this camp was established in early 2008 by zimbabwean and south african pastors to serve as the temporary shelter for the many dozens of zimbabwean men waiting for their applications for asylum-seeker’s permits to be processed. this july morning when i was talking with one of the zimbabwean pastors who opened and operated the camp (with support from the unhcr, msf and south african red cross), a middle aged black south african man entered the room with one of the zimbabwean men who worked at the camp as an “usher,” the term used for the few men whose job was to “maintain order.” the pastor excused himself and went to speak with the south african man. a few minutes later, the pastor sent the usher outside, who then returned with one of the zimbabwean women who helped to cook the evening food for the camp residents. shortly afterward the south african man left the camp with the zimbabwean woman in his truck. the pastor then told me that the south african was a commercial tomato farmer who had approached the pastor a few days earlier inquiring about finding a woman to be a domestic servant. the pastor then approached one of the zimbabwean women cooks and after confirming she was willing to work for the farmer, he contacted the farmer who then came to collect his new employee. as this example shows, the ngos and church groups in their spaces and activities provided locations for humanitarian support as well as for zimbabweans to look for jobs. they did so in three ways. firstly, they became known as places where zimbabweans congregated. a young zimbabwean woman standing outside a shelter for migrant woman in musina told me, “the shelter helps by providing a clean place to stay and some food at night, though it isn’t always filling. but the best part is that it’s a place to find a job as employers always come by here looking for workers.” although acting as a recruiting site for cheap labour was not part of the declared aims of the shelter, it was a typical example of how organizations whose mandate focused on international migrants (particularly from zimbabwe) in this border-zone were also used for other purposes by some of the social actors with whom they interacted. once the asylum-seeker’s permit became treated as a de facto work permit after march 2009, south africans looking for employees would come by these places assisting zimbabweans. such searches were very gendered. by 2009, employers looking for women workers tended to go by the women’s shelter. this would include those looking for domestic servants as well as commercial farmers looking for pickers or women to work in citrus packsheds. occasionally, other zimbabwean migrants would come by looking to employ women to work as a street vendor for them, going to sell fruit or other blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 182 type of food on the town’s sidewalks. in contrast, employers looking for male workers tended to go by the i believe in jesus camp, the el shaddai location (a born-again church which provided a free hot lunch to migrants), or to the department of home affairs’ rro, outside of which many zimbabweans congregated waiting to see if their permit would be issued or renewed. employers looking for men to work in construction jobs, day labour jobs requiring physical strength (such as off-loading delivery trucks) as well as commercial farm jobs would drive by these sites. even though by 2011 these organizations tended to also assist migrants from other african countries, particularly the drc, ethiopia and somalia, it was predominantly zimbabweans who used these locations as places of recruitment for jobs. zimbabwean migrants knew these sites as places employers frequented, and many often stood by these places during the day with the aim of finding work. some would come to these sites hoping to find permanent jobs or, for many others, to find temporary jobs to get enough funds to travel further south into the bigger urban areas of south africa. some zimbabweans whom we met at these places had left most of their money with relatives in zimbabwe or had it stolen as they jumped the border and were attacked by maguma-guma. they desperately needed some funds to travel. the position for many migrants was very precarious, as illustrated by an example of a 35 year-old woman i call chido who had initially arrived in musina in 2003. chido had begun making money in south africa by selling bananas on the sidewalk for a few months and then until 2007 she was a money changer, making decent profits as she changed zimbabwean dollars into south african rand, us dollars, botswana pula and vice versa. she then sunk 6300 rand of her profits into buying 70 boxes of green soap to sell to zimbabwe but was duped by a visiting zimbabwean man who claimed that he would sell them for her and split the profits. he took the soap and she never received any money from him. chido then moved to the women’s shelter in 2008 as she could no longer afford the rent and she was no longer able to send much money or food back to her dependents in zimbabwe. shortly afterwards she returned to zimbabwe and over the next two years she would return occasionally to musina, staying two or so months at the women’s shelter. as chido noted in november 2011, she gets “recruited at this shelter for piece jobs of washing and cleaning… i am paid 50 rand each time that i am recruited to do these jobs. you know, i cannot just sit in zimbabwe. i have to do something as i have five children and my husband has since passed away.” the second way these organizations were entangled in migrants’ jobseeking strategies was that people working for them became recruiters or gobetweens for zimbabweans, as in the example with the pastor at the i believe in jesus shelter, who arranged to find a domestic servant for the south african farmer. in many of the organizations, there were individuals who occasionally sought to arrange employment opportunities for zimbabwean migrants. they either acted as go-betweens for possible employers or offered nervous conditions on the limpopo studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 183 their own employment opportunities. the latter was the case at one church that provided a free lunch. the main person behind the church was an afrikaner man who also was a businessman. he would hire some zimbabwean male migrants for various jobs. third, the various organizations were occasionally sources of employment themselves. some of the ngos hired zimbabwean migrants to carry out projects. both the iom and the musina legal advice office, for example, hired zimbabwean migrants to undertake research or monitoring for them on a contract basis. the church-run shelters often hired zimbabweans to cook, clean and provide security. in these examples, the humanitarian organizations become incorporated into many zimbabweans’ strategies and tactics for seeking shelter, for finding livelihood opportunities for themselves and, often, for generating resources to remit back to dependents in zimbabwe and staying secure and safe. my research shows that most of the zimbabwean migrants who spent some time in northern south africa sought to forge relations, including hierarchical ones, with other zimbabweans or south africans in order to access shelter, food, income, or travel arrangements, or to remit goods and cash back to zimbabwe. these relationships were often precarious, risky and often temporary, as conditions changed. women, in particular, tended to find such relations of dependency and interdependency risky. yet, female migrants often had to rely on these relations as they sought out livelihood activities in south africa. in all of these activities, a crucial logic was the involvement of dependency relations. the humanitarian organizations became entangled in, and occasionally helped to perpetuate, what james ferguson (2013) has called “declarations of dependence.” many zimbabwean migrants staying in or passing through musina from 2008-2011 saw the various humanitarian organizations as not only sources of help and aid but also gendered sites to find possible livelihood practices, even if this was not explicitly part of their programming. indeed, sometimes the programming obscures one from recognizing these other uses zimbabwean migrants made of humanitarian organizations. conclusion borne out of uncertainties over their legal status, where and how they can find food to eat if not ways to earn money and a place to stay, and the reasons that led them to travel to south africa (political violence, marital uncertainties, severe poverty, etc.), zimbabwean migrants in northern south africa were generally in precarious positions. the types of precarity shifted blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 184 as the policies, laws and wider economies changed between 2004 and 2011.5 but generally these types of precarity were amplified for many of these zimbabwean women by the different forms of gendered violence and gendered insecurities they could encounter in seeking a way to make a living or some sort of shelter. as pamela scully (2011, p. 30) has pointed out in her wider historical analysis of human rights initiatives directed towards african women, it “seems more difficult [than expected] to bring discussions of sexual violence within the field of economic and social justice.” shannon morreira (2010, p. 446) argued that the activism by a social justice organization working with zimbabwean asylum seekers in cape town in 2006 downplayed “conditions in which asylum seekers lived in communities in townships in south africa.” with the absence of social justice organizations working with zimbabwean migrants in northern south africa during my research period – and no identifiable social justice initiatives by these zimbabweans themselves – i have examined the actions of humanitarian organizations. whereas media and some humanitarian organizations brought much attention to the risks of sexual violence in terms of crossing the border, there was no public discussion of the quotidian gendered violence and insecurities zimbabwean women faced in the workplaces, shelters, or other areas in which they were operating through relations of dependency. i encountered more women who worried and talked about the insecurities around forging a livelihood and findinga place to stay than who discussed the dangers coming from the maguma-guma. i am not saying it is an either/or situation – either one should focus on the sexual violence risk at the border or the gendered violence and insecurities embedded in many of the livelihoods – but without acknowledging the interrelationships of sexual violence with economic injustices, the humanitarian advocacy around refugees and undocumented migrants in south africa misses out on an important source of gendered insecurity. my title echoes the celebrated novel by tsitsi dangarembga. in nervous conditions dangarembga eloquently and insightfully demonstrates the colonial, racist, patriarchal, and gerontocratic pressures and inequalities which shaped black women’s bodies and lives in colonial zimbabwe in the 1960s and early 1970s during the intensification of the armed liberation struggle. her subtle and critical portrayals include a limning of patrilineal and affinal hierarchies and the gendered dynamics and insecurities involved in them. such a social layering shows that the subject position of being a woman has been shaped by “generations of threat and assault and neglect” (dangarembga, 1988, p. 138). these various forms of dependency shaped by age, gender, and lineage dynamics of kin and affinal relationships all contribute to the nervous conditions of the female characters. 5 some zimbabweans were far from vulnerable but profited in various ways from their time in south africa. nervous conditions on the limpopo studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 185 analogously, highlighting the gendered dependency relations shaping strategies for livelihood and accommodation by zimbabwean women migrants in northern south africa troubles portrayals of zimbabwean women migrants as mainly victims of trauma due to risks of sgbv. it disrupts (basok, 2010) the focus on exceptional traumatic situations by humanitarian logics, by examining the vulnerabilities found in everyday inequalities that social justice perspectives can demonstrate. as the number of zimbabweans crossing the border increased after 2000, there was growing humanitarian and policy attention to their situation in northern south africa (and elsewhere in the country). in terms of women migrants, this attention was mainly directed towards women’s shelters, health care, and attending to victims of sexual violence at the hands of maguma-guma. such blatant attacks are arresting and disturbing, as i experienced in a passing way in 2005. nonetheless, generally unremarked by many of these organizations was the threat of gendered insecurities within the livelihoods and strategies for shelter facing many zimbabwean women living on the commercial farms in northern south africa and in musina. through my “critical discourse” (fassin, 2008, p. 339) trying to better render some of the positions and gendered power relations that many of these women had to address in northern south africa, i have aimed to show the importance of mobilizing wider social justice initiatives rather than (only) focusing on humanitarianism (morreira, 2016). power and dependency relations in which many humanitarian organizations themselves became part and parcel, help to constitute the nervous conditions of the agency of these women. acknowledgements i want to thank the social sciences and humanities research council of canada for generously funding this research and my good friend rinse nyamuda who assisted me with the research. i also want to warmly thank the two anonymous reviewers of my manuscript as well as my co-editors of this special issue, daiva stasiulis and zaheera jinnah for their very helpful comments on a draft of this paper, david butz for his helpful editorial work as well as the audiences at the studies in national and international development seminar at queen’s university in 2013, the african studies association conference in 2014, the carleton university 2016 symposium on “intersectionality and migration” for helpful feedback on my presentations of different aspects of this paper. references addison, l. (2014). the sexual economy, gender relations and narratives of infant death on a tomato farm in northern south africa. journal of agrarian change, 14(1), 74-93. blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 186 basok, t. (2010). opening a iadlogue on migrant (rights) activism. studies in social justice, 4(2), 97-100. bolt, m. (2015). zimbabwe’s migrants and south africa’s border farms: the roots of impermanence. cambridge: cambridge university press. bolt, m. (2016). mediated paternalism and violent incorporation: enforcing farm hierarchies on the zimbabwean-south african border. journal of southern african studies, 42(5), 911927. buss, d. (2014). seeing sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict societies: the limits of visibility. in d. buss, j. lebert, b. rutherford, d. sharkey & o. aginam (eds.), sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict societies: international agendas and african contexts (pp. 3-27). new york & london: routledge. crush, j. 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(2009). selecting immigrants: national identity and south africa’s immigration policies, 1910-2005. johannesburg, sa: wits university press. robins, s. (2009). humanitarian aid beyond “bare survival”: social movement responses to xenophobic violence in south africa. american ethnologist, 36(4), 637-650. rutherford, b. (2008). an unsettled belonging: zimbabwean farm workers in limpopo province, south africa. journal of contemporary african studies, 26(4), 401-415. nervous conditions on the limpopo studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 169-187, 2020 187 rutherford, b. (2011a). stabilizing boundaries: the shifting terrain of belonging for zimbabweans in a south african border-zone. african diaspora, 4(2), 207-229. rutherford, b. (2011b). the uneasy ties of working and belonging: the changing situation for undocumented zimbabwean migrants in northern south africa. ethnic & racial studies, 34(8), 1303-1319. rutherford, b. (2017). farm labor struggles in zimbabwe: the ground of politics. bloomington, in: indiana university press. sachikonye, l. (2011). when a state turns on its citizens: 60 years of institutionalised violence in zimbabwe. harare, zi: weaver press. scully, p. (2011). gender, history, and human rights. in d. hodgson (ed.), gender and culture at the limit of rights (pp. 17-31). philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press. segatti, a. (2011). reforming south african immigration policy in the postapartheid period (1990-2010). in a. segatti & l. landau (eds.), contemporary migration to south africa: a regional development issue (pp. 31-66). washington, dc: the world bank. worby, e., hassim, s., & kupe, t. (eds.) (2008). go home or die here: violence, xenophobia and the reinvention of difference in south africa. johannesburg, sa: wits university press. rights with capabilities: a new paradigm for social justice in migrant activism studies in social justice volume 5, issue 1, 127-143, 2011 correspondence address: leah briones, centre for development studies, flinders university, gpo box 2100, adelaide 5001, south australia, australia. email: leah.briones@optusnet.com.au issn: 1911-4788 rights with capabilities: a new paradigm for social justice in migrant activism leah briones centre for development studies, flinders university abstract the paradigm of rights, established throughout the academic, policy and migrant activism arenas, governs the protection of vulnerable migrant workers against abuse. to what extent this approach has achieved social justice for the migrant worker in the current global political economy climate is, however, uncertain. in analyzing the use of rights in migrant activism in hong kong, this paper shows the limitation of rights in the migrant experience at the same time as it shows how a new paradigm based on the capabilities approach could provide a more appropriate framework from which to achieve social justice for the migrant worker. introduction in the last few decades, the human rights agenda has been instrumental in providing the platform for establishing migrant activism. it has also served as the guiding paradigm for advocacy and policy actions on the empowerment of vulnerable migrant workers. for particular migrant groups such as overseas domestic workers, however, the rights agenda is delivering more on the political and less on the distributive requirements of migrant empowerment. thus, while there has been growing recognition of their plight, less attention has been given to securing their livelihood (briones, 2009a). this is particularly worrisome given that along with the flourishing of a rights agenda, has been the rapid ascendancy of neoliberal policies that exacerbate global economic inequality, particularly in the area of unskilled labour (molyneux & razavi, 2002). this paper argues for an alignment of livelihood security with the rights agenda as a means to achieve not only political but, more fully, social justice for the migrant domestic worker. it draws on the activism of filipina domestic workers in hong kong to demonstrate the livelihood-centred context from which to understand the limitations of a rights approach but also how it can be fortified. the capabilities approach, as developed by martha nussbaum, is then used to theorize a rights-livelihood alignment. in particular, the paper will show how a paradigm based on capabilities, along with rights, can allow for the balance required to more fundamentally and explicitly incorporate distributive needs into migrant worker protection and empowerment. it is hoped that this new paradigm 128 leah briones studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 could guide current approaches to recognize the equal importance of empowerment for what with empowerment for whom. in this way, migrant activism could be more fully supported in achieving outcomes that not only facilitate social justice for, but also serve the more immediate and material needs of, the migrant worker. i start by contextualizing the role of rights in migrant activism within the challenges posed by state controls, namely in migration and development policies. i do so to show the magnitude of constraints to migrant mobility and livelihood options as well as to livelihood security. i then use migrant activism in hong kong to illustrate how these constraints impact on the usefulness of rights in migrants’ fight for social justice. the final section provides an outline of a “capabilities paradigm,” and how in particular it works with rights to provide a framework for social justice in migrant activism. migrant activism, rights and development over two decades of feminist scholarship on domestic work and the global political economy have shown the structural and systemic conditions that create, facilitate and exacerbate the vulnerable situation of women overseas domestic workers. 1 with very limited livelihood options in their home countries, overseas domestic work is chosen often at the expense of their human rights. as migrants, they are outsiders whose rights are superseded by the rights of the sovereign, receiving-state while unenforceable by the sending state (see e.g. stasiulis & bakan, 1997). consequently, transnational activist organizations have emerged as a counterweight to state power and to fill the gap in protection for migrant workers (see e.g. yamanaka and piper 2003). mostly run by migrant domestic workers themselves, these non-governmental organisations have been able to raise public awareness and influence state policies on immigration and labour rules by promoting human rights, sometimes expressed as migrant worker’s rights or women’s rights (anderson, 2001; law, 2002; pratt g. and the philippine women centre, 1999). 2 piper and uhlin (2004, pp. 13-14) draw a correlation between (trans)national activism and democracy, noting that democracy is an issue of not only citizenship but also human rights. human rights is an area which democratic states, like hong kong, 3 find problematic to control; they are more difficult than citizenship to legitimate as a concern of state sovereignty. human rights, therefore, is one area in which migrants can counter state strategies (see especially here, massey, 1999, pp. 313-314) and thus transcend state, regional and international controls (e.g. anderson, 2001; ball & piper, 2002; phizacklea, 1998; stasiulis & bakan, 1997). 4 as i have argued elsewhere, however, there are many limitations to the use of rights for migrant worker empowerment. 5 in particular, i have pointed to the problem in articulating what rights actually constitute in the case of migrant domestic workers as well as to the challenges in their practice in the midst of constraints posed by underdevelopment (see especially, briones, 2009b). at the conceptual level, an overfocus across feminist works and ngo programs on a politics of recognition for migrant domestic workers as “victims” and as “women with agency” has meant a conflation of their agency with rights and power. consequently, migrant rights struggles have remained confined to host country settings, thereby neglecting the rights with capabilities 129 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 importance of the development dimension of the worker’s emigration from a setting of underdevelopment (briones, 2009b). thus despite gaining some recognition as victims and women workers with agency, many migrant workers continue to struggle in precarious employment conditions for fear of losing their livelihood in overseas domestic work. that rights stop short of addressing the root cause of migrants’ needs for sustainable livelihoods is particularly evident in their feasibility in the political arena. because the focus on rights is concerned with the domestic labour laws and related immigration rules within the borders of the receiving states, those who undertake circular migration, or who are yet to enter receiving countries’ borders, or to return to their country of origin, are neglected. as cox (1997) and sim (2002) have identified, the vulnerability of migrant workers extends beyond the workplace destination, and occurs as a process that begins from preparation and recruitment for going abroad, to working abroad, but also to returning home. furthermore, because the focus on rights is based on the demand for overseas domestic work, the supply side, bound in underdevelopment and lack of livelihood access in countries of origin, receives insufficient attention. this leads to a failure in incorporating the role of broader structural contexts that push and facilitate the movements of migrant workers through multiple borders, and in the case of circular migration, multiple times. the applicability of rights in host settings, as well as in the international political arena, also presents some problems. in host settings, the issue of rights is in itself precarious and is received differently. for example, while overseas domestic workers’ (odws’) rights in western european receiving countries are attached to the right to citizenship, odws’ rights in receiving countries in asia are limited to shortterm contracts (battistella, 2002; bell & piper, 2005). internationally, the fight for rights seems futile in the face of a lack of political will, by both sending and receiving states. the 1990 united nations convention on the rights of all migrants and their families (icmr) remains unratified by receiving countries. where it has been ratified by the sending country, limited financial and technical capacity to enforce the rules of the convention, has resulted in a rights-based approach that has met with great difficulty at implementation (pécoud & de guchteneire, 2004, pp. 1217). cross-cutting these limitations of rights are the failure to consider the impact of increased rights on the sustainability of livelihoods, even within borders. more rights could lead to demands for better wages and working conditions, and probably citizenship. in turn, this could lead to receiving states closing off the migrant domestic labour market since pressure on state resources would make it preferable to encourage citizens to undertake the work instead. after all, the reason workers are “imported” (and tolerated, if illegal) is because they are cheap, flexible and expendable. conversely, increased rights can speed up the process of saturation of the overseas domestic work labour market, as supply from the poor and populous countries rapidly expands. in both cases, the issue of livelihood security for migrant workers could become even more precarious as employment opportunities contract. given these formidable limitations of rights, it is little wonder that migrant activism has been found to be too weak to challenge the power of states and capital interests (piper, 2004; uhlin, 2001, 2002, 2003). but given also the importance of migrant activism amidst state indifference and in the case of some sending states like 130 leah briones studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 the philippines, incapacity, it remains a crucial task to ensure that migrant activist efforts be made more effective. as i discuss later in the paper, it is in this regard that the concept of capability may be useful. first, however, it is instructive to analyse the contradictory positions of filipino rights-based migrant organizations in hong kong in their fight for rights, on the one hand, and for safe-guarding their livelihoods in overseas domestic work, on the other. migrant worker activism in hong kong despite its favourable working conditions in comparison to other labour-importing countries in the asian region, the hong kong administration’s migrant domestic worker employment policy has nevertheless come under attack, mainly from migrant worker-based organisations and other associations which have bourgeoned out of the activism of filipino-based organizations in hong kong. 6 in 2000, the asian migrant centre (amc) 7 found that the lack of a government mechanism for monitoring contracts resulted in 15 per cent of workers being underpaid, over 50 per cent of workers being deprived of their mandated one rest day per week or statutory holidays, and around 9000 subjected to sexual abuse, including rape (amc & cmw, 2001). in addition, the amc (2001, p. 3) identified administration policies that promote racial, gender, and class discrimination against migrant workers. alarmingly, over a decade later, little improvement of conditions has occurred while at the same time the number of even more vulnerable domestic workers has increased from sending countries such as indonesia and nepal. 8 it is, however, the administration’s imposition of the new conditions of stay (ncs), which the amc identifies as the major cause of problems for migrant domestic workers in hong kong. the amc (2001) asserts that this immigration rule “generally favours the interests of employers…as employers can dismiss migrants without justification while [migrant workers] need to provide the proof of unfair treatment if they desire to win their case” (p. 2). this stance is supported by the umbrella organization of the united filipinos in hong kong (unifil), which is composed of around twenty five non-governmental organizations (ngos) mainly run by migrant domestic workers (law, 2002). in 1996, unifil’s campaign was joined by groups of domestic workers from other nationalities, forming the asia migrant coordinating body (amcb). 9 this body became particularly vocal on the financial aspect of the abuse, underlining that a migrant domestic worker is forced to contend with abusive employers for fear of greater loss to their livelihood…while the employers can look anytime for a replacement, [migrant domestic workers] have to undergo…a[n] expensive process just to be able to remain in hong kong if a labour or criminal case is pending. [migrant domestic workers] with labour cases are not allowed to work and are forced to borrow money…to pay for visa extension fees and other necessary expenses to survive. (asia pacific mission for migrants [apmm], 2003b, p. 29) although the response from the hong kong administration remains clear in the form of an unamended rule, a sustained campaign for changing the ncs continues, rights with capabilities 131 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 involving the hong kong committee on the elimination of racial discrimination and the united nations commission on human rights (apwld, 2002). moreover, the administration’s unamended rule did not deter the ngos to curb the administration’s effort to cut migrant domestic workers’ minimum wage in 1999. the amcb (1999), this time joined by the hong kong council of trade unions, organized massive campaigns and mobilizations, asserting that migrant domestic workers were already burdened with the lowest [salary] for foreign workers in hong kong…even with the minimum wage for [migrant domestic workers], a large number of indonesians…and other nationalities are…receiving wages below the minimum wage…the decision to lower the minimum wage will further reduce the actual wage of many [migrant domestic workers]. (pp. 14-18) although they were not able to prevent a wage cut, the group forced the hong kong government to reduce the wage cut from the proposed 20 to 25 per cent down to 5 per cent, thus claiming a victory of sorts (amcb, 1999, p. 15). as with other major activist groups such as respect in europe and the philippine women’s centre in canada, 10 the issue of rights has been a central policy consideration for migrant ngos in hong kong. they conceptually draw from, as well as actively contribute to the development of international human rights–based instruments such as the icmr (for the amc’s adoption of this, see amc, 1995b). in 2001, a study of 20 major ngos in hong kong found that almost half of them conducted seminars and training on rights education (amc, aspbae, & mfa, 2001, p. 177). the amc, along with the indonesian migrant workers union in hong kong, later worked with the united nation’s working group on contemporary forms of slavery to submit the case of “forced labour and exploitation of indonesian migrant workers” to the united nations commission on human rights (antislavery international, 2003). 11 alongside their rights advocacy, however, has been the careful protection of their employment, which seems to provide a more appropriate understanding of rights as they matter to the migrant workers. ngos consistently protect their employment in hong kong through strong campaigns on the one hand, and strategic silence, on the other. in a comparative study on the amc and the mission for migrant workers (mfmw), a member of unifil, weekley (2003) found that neither of their contrasting policies—the former based on a rather functionalist view of the “migrant entrepreneur” and the latter on the victimized migrant—were effective in promoting the rights of workers. perhaps, however, the amc and the mfmw have a different understanding from weekley on how to promote rights for migrant domestic workers. indeed those issues on which they have been particularly militant and strategically silent, but which do not seem to have a logical connection with their fight for human rights, gain sense when understood in the context of their interests in sustaining employment in hong kong. the more vocal issues include the campaign against the 1982 philippine government executive order 857, the protest against the aquino government in 1988, and the more recent massive wage-cut campaign led by the amcb. the less vocal issues involve inaction on those that directly affect employment prospects, as well as on reintegration programs that underscore the 132 leah briones studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 primary importance of employment for filipina domestic workers in hong kong. i expand on these in the following section. political versus livelihood security in hong kong in 1982, the marcos government’s executive order 857 required 50 to 70 per cent of filipino domestic workers’ monthly earnings to be compulsorily channelled through philippine banks (mfmw, 2000a, p. 4). the order, deemed to “rob” the workers, became the reason for the formation of the unifil alliance, then called united filipinos against forced remittances (law, 2002, p. 212). although unifil did not succeed in abolishing the order, it succeeded in removing the penalty clause, which meant in effect, that the workers could choose not to follow the order without any penalties (mfmw, 2000b, p. 3). in 1986, unifil joined other groups to protest against the philippine government’s proposal to ban the entry of filipina domestic workers to hong kong. then president aquino imposed this ban as a means to curtail the increased cases of abuse among domestic workers in hong kong. despite this noble intention, filipina domestic workers in hong kong were not willing to let the gates shut on their employment opportunities. campaign approaches thus turned from the right to fair working conditions to the more immediate concern of the right and freedom to have work at all (constable, 1997, p. 207). in 1997, the amcb’s fight against the wage cut proposed by the hong kong administration again underscored the centrality of gainful employment for the migrant worker. as law (2002b) observed of the campaign: [t]hat [the coalition among different nationalities of migrant domestic workers in hong kong, along with the hkctu)] came into being [due to the wage cut imposition,] reflects the important perspective in hong kong of domestic workers as “workers,” and attempts to build solidarity on this basis. it also reflects the financial imperatives of domestic workers themselves, who migrate to hong kong primarily for economic reasons. (p. 216) indeed, law (2002b, p. 219) also found that some migrant domestic workers are now wary of the success of ngos and their loud and visible activities “since they are seen to be jeopardising their future employment.” notwithstanding these fears from individual migrant domestic workers, ngos have nevertheless kept silent on issues that could threaten employment. these issues include those of rights such as citizenship, unspecified working hours, and gross structural inequalities in their employment sector. 12 the issue of citizenship for migrant domestic workers in hong kong is particularly restrictive. as bell and piper (2005) have observed, while “documented” in western liberal democracies includes access to citizenship, in east asian societies, the status remains one of a strictly temporary contract. even if contracts are indefinitely renewable, as in the case of hong kong, the option for permanent residence remains closed. the immigration ordinance 13 excludes migrant domestic workers from qualifying for permanent residence. while this does not mean that the ordinance has gone unchallenged, such as in the case of a filipina domestic worker who took her case for citizenship to the rights with capabilities 133 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 high court (the sun, 2003, p. 3), winning the case would certainly be the exception and not the rule. for the ngos, the key issue seems to be controlling the employment gates to hong kong, which could narrow if issues of citizenship were to be considered seriously by the hong kong government. as bell and piper (2005) put it: for [migrant domestic workers], the fact that the door is closed to [citizenship] does have one practical benefit—it means that there are more doors open to temporary contract workers. the only reason that so many [migrant domestic workers] are allowed to work in hong kong…is that all sides assume they will eventually return home. in canada, by way of comparison, [migrant domestic workers] can become permanent residents after two years, but the government can afford to be relatively “generous” because it only lets in a few thousand such workers every year. (p. 209) similarly, ngo silence on long work hours, despite its obvious centrality as a source of abuse, points to an acknowledgment of market demand for 24 hours on-call service. with the advent of en masse and “cheaper” indonesian labour, it becomes understandable why migrant domestic worker ngos would avoid the issue (bell & piper, 2005, p. 220). arguably the strongest evidence of the central importance given to employment opportunities in hong kong, however, is the disjunction between the major ngos’ fight against structural oppression and its silence on challenging the inherent structural oppression in “domestic work” itself. as constable has observed, “as long as domestic work is viewed as degrading…foreign workers will face little competition from local workers” (constable, 1997, p. 208). indeed, this silence becomes all the more crucial in light of hong kong’s integration with mainland china, which increases the possibility of increased competition from numerous chinese workers. further evidence to the importance of employment are major home-country reintegration projects, such as the migrant worker re-entry program (migrant savings for alternative investments), that depend on migrants’ savings. the reentry program is a long-term project of the amc. the program encourages migrants to save and invest their earnings in the philippines, in order to ensure a financially sustainable future upon their return. the amc points out that one in five filipinos in the philippines depend on the income earned by filipinos working overseas for their own livelihoods (amc, 1995c). the filipino migrant workers union (fmwu), the largest trade union of filipino domestic workers in hong kong, notes how such programs provide “the most empowering experiences as they…enable migrants to return and remain in their home country” (cited in amc et al., 2001, p. 198). what these vocal campaigns, strategic silence, public indifference, and also more long-term focused projects point to, is that employment, and in particular, sufficient income from that employment, is the immediate matter for the migrant domestic worker. concerns of abuse in the workplace, and more generally, the lack of respect for migrant rights in the form of racist and discriminatory policies and practices in hong kong take secondary importance. in other words, employment security for filipina domestic worker in hong kong puts into context the political fight against discriminatory hong kong administration policies as second only to seeing hong kong as an economically desirable environment to earn a living, relative to that of the philippines. 134 leah briones studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 providing support to this observation is a discourse pertaining to the “forced migration” in the hong kong ngo community. that is, the “forced migration” of filipina overseas domestic workers by successive philippine governments through their neoliberal development programs (see here also, chang, 2004; eviota, 1992, 2004; mcculloch & stancich, 1998). in the early 1990s, the amc (1995a, p. 52) had already began to identify the connection between migrant domestic worker oppression and “forced migration”: “there is no subtle pressure to accept difficulties or even “slight” abuses on pain of repatriation… their [workers] alternative is often less appealing—that of being sent home where there is no prospect for work.” the discourse of “forced migration” in hong kong became more clearly articulated when the mfmw released a set of magazine publications in 2000 and 2001, named migrant focus, for the readership of the migrant domestic worker community in hong kong. its titles alone provide a clear and chronological insight into the precarious livelihood issues for migrant domestic workers. when the only option is migration (2000b) highlighted the philippine government’s inadequate national development strategy as the cause of deepening poverty in the country, and consequently of the increasing number of “willing victims” to migrate for precarious employment. in this view, the philippine government is seen as “an adversary rather than a protector of its citizens… peddl[ing] the notion that seeking overseas employment is a ‘choice’” (mfmw, 2001a, p. 5). thus, the abuse and injustices experienced by workers are framed in the individual's lack of luck rather than as a structural responsibility of the government. the lucrative business that is labor export (2000a) discusses the philippine government’s elaborate set up of the state’s labour export industry. this industry consists of the dole, poea, owwa and philippine embassies and consulates worldwide 14 as well as private institutions, such as recruitment agencies. the mfmw argues that this labour-export system is geared to maintain the high numbers of overseas workers and thereby to secure the “remittance business” of the government, which it uses mainly to repay international debts and to continue funding the system. there’s more to migration than money problems (mfmw, 2001b) takes up the social costs of this economic focus on the gains of migration. it highlights the social problems caused by labour migration such as broken marriages, motherless families and vulnerability to trafficking, especially of poor women and children. the mfmw contends that these social costs are beyond the “personal” and are directly connected to the economic and political structures of philippine society as a whole. finally, breaking the cycle of forced migration (2001a) highlights the role of migrant-concerned ngos in bringing about political change not just in hong kong but also in the philippines. this change is anticipated to break the cycle of forced migration through the establishment of labour unions and reintegration programs that guard the rights of workers to financial security. the mfmw argues that economic security will see the end of the need to migrate. 15 the apmm (2003a) later extended the concept of “forced migration” to apply to other migrant domestic workers and their respective countries of origin, and in the particular context of global development (see here also, luan, 2005). 16 rights with capabilities 135 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 beyond rights: livelihood, resources and power the above insights from migrant rights ngos’ political strategies to retain gainful employment in the host state at the cost of other human rights entitlements, such as that of citizenship, revealed a more appropriate understanding of rights as they matter to the migrant worker, both individually and collectively. for the migrant workers, rights seem to be more economic rather than politically oriented, ultimately defined in the context of a transnational livelihood strategy for the purposes of sustaining families and projects back in the philippines. when considering the livelihood of migrant domestic workers, it is important to recognize that their earning power is not only tied to work in the wealthier countries, but also to sustaining life for families back home, including their own upon return. in other words, they make their living in the world within a context of unequal globalization; a practice that olwig and sørensen (2002) call “mobile livelihoods.” in particular, this involves means and strategies for sustaining life transnationally. “means” refers to assets and resources in cash and kind that people can access. “strategies” are connected to social institutions, such as kin, family, village and other social networks facilitating and sustaining diversified livelihoods. pursuing mobile livelihoods can thus be seen as “a poverty-reducing strategy involving refashioning resources dispersed in space into family livelihoods” (sørensen, van hear, & engberg-pedersen, 2002, p. 53). mobile livelihoods is a useful concept that allows an appreciation of resources in the migrant domestic worker context as constituting both means and strategies used to access, as well as remain in, paid overseas domestic work. it further allows identification of the resources specific to a migrant domestic worker’s basic needs; that is as cash in the form of wages from domestic work (means), and as networks in the form of social and political migrant groups (strategies). these resources are in turn used to reduce poverty, or the occurrence of poverty, by being refashioned in terms of savings, capital accumulation and investments and/or for daily livelihood expenditures such as food, shelter, medicine and education for themselves and their families. of central importance to issues of livelihoods and resources for the migrant domestic worker, is the recognition that they are pursued. this means that they simply do not exist for the taking. rather, they exist in a highly political environment of restrictive immigration and host country labour controls that constrain the use of domestic work migration as a livelihood strategy, but also of oppressive development policies that obliterate livelihood access in countries of origin. a focus on migrant worker livelihoods thus enables migrant activism to articulate what constitutes rights for the migrant worker, that is, the rights for livelihood access. that constraints to the migrant workers thus extend to the structural impasse of poverty and unemployment/underemployment in their home country while at the same time their agency (as apparent in their strategies for activism) is ultimately oriented to safeguard against such constraints, tells us that their agency do not readily translate into having rights or to having the power to overcome oppression. evidently, migrant agency in hong kong underscores the efficacy of power as being based less on resistance against political repression and more on the capability to continue earning; to secure “mobile livelihoods.” the ngos show how the success of resistance has been largely ambivalent, and that the way they therefore empower their activism is not so much in their activities of resistance but more in their fight to 136 leah briones studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 remain in employment in the host state. 17 indeed, the issues silenced by ngos in hong kong contextualize the filipina domestic worker’s practice of “self-discipline” (constable, 1997), hidden transcripts (chin, 1998), and multiple subjectivities (momsen et al. 1999; parreñas, 2001) as a “trade-off” strategy to retaining livelihood capabilities. the insights from migrant activism in hong kong then, guards against a conflation of agency with rights and correspondingly, activism with power. as i have argued elsewhere (briones, 2009a), these are conflations of which we must be wary if we are to avoid short-changing analyses on not only the challenges faced by odws but also on how capable they are of responding to them. it is thus in this way, that the insights provide both a theoretical and practical premise from which to appreciate the central role that capability must play in correcting the conflation of agency with rights and power. theoretically, it enables current analyses to more accurately define power in the context of capability rather than resistance; what the migrant domestic worker can actually do and be to overcome oppression, and not merely her reaction against oppression. practically, it provides current policy approaches with the tangible basis of livelihood security from which to acknowledge that effective protection cannot be based on rights advocacy alone but must also be based on measures of material means/resources that enable migrant domestic workers to act, resist, negotiate, and achieve. to employ this framework is to inform a paradigm that ensures support for migrant activism that will necessarily involve an identification of migrant workers’ capability to overcome structural constraints, and the associated issues of livelihood resources and security. how rights, in essence, can be aligned with the livelihood framework is the task of the capabilities approach, discussed in the following section. a capabilities paradigm 18 martha nussbaum’s capabilities approach (csa) provides a theoretical framework within which to directly link issues of human rights with migrant domestic worker agency, and how in turn, they link with mobile livelihoods. originally theorized by amartya sen, the capability approach is a broad and multi-dimensional framework for evaluating individual well-being and the intrinsic experience of development and justice this entails. the approach argues for a concept of human development to challenge the economic growth-centred orthodox model of measuring development within a country, and thus articulates resources qualitatively rather than quantitatively. development is seen in “human” terms; in terms of a quality of life and what people are able to do and be, rather than as a measure of how many resources people have or are given by the state. this departure from treating people as factors of production to seeing them instead as agents of production, foregrounds the immediacy of capability over functionality. as nussbaum (2002) puts it: “…about a variety of functionings...of central importance to a human life, we ask, is the person capable of this or not?” (p. 127). since, in this way, capability is seen as a pre-requisite to what a person can actually do and be, the csa finds both theoretical and practical resonance with human rights. rights with capabilities 137 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 nussbaum (see especially, 2002; 2005) explains the relationship of capability with human rights through what she terms the “basic,” the “internal” and the “combined” aspects of capabilities. basic capabilities refer to capabilities that are innate to the human condition such as that of practical reason and imagination. internal capabilities refer to “states of the person herself that are, so far as the person herself is concerned, sufficient conditions for the exercise of the requisite functions.” combined capabilities are “internal capabilities combined with suitable external conditions for the exercise of the function” (2002, p. 132). through these dimensions of capability, nussbaum shows how human rights can be understood in two distinct yet integral ways. first, rights can be understood in terms of basic capabilities as “prior to and a ground for the securing of a capability” (p. 136). thus to take, for example, a migrant domestic worker’s call for a right to a livelihood even when her circumstances obviously do not secure such a right to her, nussbaum (p. 135) here would argue that, “just in virtue of being human, a [migrant domestic worker] has a justified claim to have the capability secured to her.” second, rights can be understood as equivalent to combined capabilities. in this regard, “to secure a right to a [person] is to put them in a position of capability to go ahead with choosing that function if they should so desire” (p. 134). because people cannot function without basic capabilities, and cannot function freely as they see fit for their own circumstances without combined capabilities, nussbaum (p. 131) argues that “capability, not functioning, is the political goal.” in this way, capabilities can be seen to provide an informational base that allows tangible and achievable outcomes for the highly abstract and highly contentious notion of human rights. not only does a csa define what it means to secure a person’s rights, it also ensures the explicit inclusion of the larger structural context involved in securing a person’s rights or “combined capabilities.” as nussbaum asserts, the csa “makes it clear that securing a right to someone requires making the person really capable of choosing that function…[and also] makes it clear that all human rights have an economic and material aspect” (2005, p. 175). in practical terms, nussbaum has created a working list of capabilities to ensure that certain capabilities essential to a quality of life are constitutionally secured to the individual. nussbaum argues for a capabilities constitution because the rights approach has proven futile both in theoretical, epistemological, and practical/enforceable terms with particular regard to individuals in the developing world vulnerable to unemployment, hunger, and other resource-challenged situations. the existing provisions for livelihood, development, economic and social security in various international human rights declarations and conventions are exclusively state-oriented. the very methodology of setting up such conventions is also state-dependent. in contrast, understanding rights as a person’s capability transcends the traditional distinction between the private realm of the family and the public sphere within human rights approaches. it also transcends the traditional distinction between state action and state inaction in implementing rights since securing capability in a person will necessarily require state action to provide the economic and material resources necessary to secure that capability (ibid.). the articulation of rights in terms of capability importantly allows us to conceptualize the transnational contexts of the pursuit of overseas domestic work livelihood. in incorporating the structural and materialist constraints to rights, a capability perspective enables a richer appreciation of rights and capabilities as 138 leah briones studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 issues of human development and security rather than human agency or human rights i.e. “making the person really capable of choosing that function.” we can begin to see beyond “the victim” and “the agent” as a problem not of structural oppression in migration nor agentic liberation through migration. instead, we can foreground the capability needs and entitlements of the migrant worker beyond her migration to that of her development and socio-economic security. concern for capability transcends, at the same time as it draws together, physical borders such as sovereign states’ borders but also conceptual borders between issues of recognition and distributive justice. 19 as the livelihood strategies of migrant activism in hong kong show, the concern for capability itself is a product of the problems of unequal human development as migrants experience and respond to it; as a problem rooted, but also structured transnationally, by their lives in the host country as well as back in their homeland. having capability is therefore criteria for human development, and as such, can enable us to evaluate how well the migrant worker is doing. if a capability approach, in nussbaum’s words (2002, p. 122) “allows comparisons between individuals and across nations as to how well they are doing,” then it becomes clear that as economically disadvantaged individuals from an economically disadvantaged nation, migrant workers are not doing so well. they remain deprived of distributive justice; of commodities, incomes and other resources, but more specifically of “combined capabilities.” “educated” filipino migrants, for example, share much in common with many educated women in kerala who cannot find jobs other than sex work in delhi (2005, p. 180). given that on the one hand, the csa occupies a position of some significance in the current international development policy agenda, and on the other, the issue of migration is likely to remain at the top of the political agenda of governments, it will be both practically and politically strategic to highlight the intrinsic relationship between migration for domestic work and (under)development. this could have the effect of simultaneously securing and making more pronounced the issue of migrant worker vulnerability as not only an issue of political recognition but also as an issue of redistribution in social justice agendas. in this way, analysis can move the issue of livelihoods and other important developmental needs along with calls for migrant political rights. as well, a csa to migrant activism can override state-centric interests (such as remittance revenue for sending states and border security for receiving states) by campaigning for state responsibility as providers of capabilitiesbased resources and as facilitators of capability. an immediate change in this area is particularly crucial—as ngo activism in hong kong shows, the lack of livelihoods access in the country of origin has been a major cause of both risks and endurance of abuse and enslavement in host locales. conclusion learning from migrant domestic worker activist groups in hong kong, this paper revealed that while campaigns were based on calls for rights to recognize their personhood and status as bona fide workers, the actual basis for activism rested on the priority of retaining employment in overseas domestic work. as the ultimate constraint of underdevelopment in the philippines force them to migrate and to rights with capabilities 139 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 endure hostile immigration policies along with employer and recruiter abuse, their very activism must therefore be oriented to maximizing and retaining opportunities of gainful livelihood in the host locale. in this way, the paper provides a challenge to the paradigm of rights, employed by much of current academic and policy approaches to support the political struggle of migrant activism while sidelining the more immediate, materialist concerns of migrant workers. the paper discussed the value of the csa as the theoretical voice of migrants’ struggle for capabilities in securing their livelihood in overseas domestic work. premised on the holistic concept of “human development,” the notion of capability fluidly fuses physical (i.e. state borders) and conceptual (i.e. recognition and redistribution) borders within the experience of the individual migrant worker. through such a fluid framework, it becomes possible to piece together issues of migrant’s rights but also vulnerability as part and parcel of their transnational experiences across the political and economic spectrum. i argued, therefore, that migrant activism can be more appropriately and fully served by a capabilities paradigm. this is not to say that the fight for rights should be abandoned. only that it is important to consider the fight be defined in terms of capability. fighting for capabilities instead of rights can avoid the inherent difficulties in the lack of political will by some states to implement, let alone consider, migrant workers’ rights. moreover, framing rights in the context of capability can allow the “victims” themselves to reclaim their rights for their own intended and valued quality of life. so far, it is mostly the “rescue industry” (agustín, 2006) that has dominated both the discourse and actions on the reclaiming of these rights, and only then, as mainly an issue of political recognition. indeed, if we are to learn from migrant activism as demonstrated by campaigns in hong kong, then we must align policies based on political recognition with migrants’ fight for a politics of redistribution. the grave abuses which continue after decades of “industry” efforts, and which alarmingly are now widespread across other domestic worker groups in hong kong such as those from indonesia and nepal, is perhaps the most telling sign that “rights” is simply not enough. the practical feasibility of the csa will require exploration. 20 in this way, the paper provides a challenge to the paradigm of rights that is employed by much of current academic and policy approaches to support the political struggle of migrant activism and that sidelines the more immediate, materialist concerns of migrant workers. notes 1 for review of these works, see briones, l. (2009a). empowering migrant women: why agency and rights are not enough. surrey and burlington: ashgate press, 51-70. 2 while human rights refer to claims that transcend the state, rights more generally are often claimed within the context of a legal system in a nation-state. i use the two terms interchangeably; given the transnational context of migrant domestic work, human rights and legal rights make 140 leah briones studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 them inextricably linked. for example, a migrant domestic worker’s right to work refers to a claim both within and across states. 3 hong kong, albeit under the administration of a non-democratic chinese government since 1997, continues to operate under a nation-state and has maintained its liberal administrative systems as inherited from the british colonial administration. it is on this basis, that i classify it as democratic. 4 while there is a significant number of migrant domestic workers in non-democratic states such as those in the middle east, this paper focuses on the experience of migrants and migrant activism in democratic settings. 5 see here also leonore lyons (2006) on the limitations of rights in alliances within transnational activist groups. 6 for a review of these ngos see sim (2002) and swider (2006). 7 an ngo in hong kong that acts as the hub for research on migrant workers in hong kong as well as in the greater asia pacific region. it advocates for rights as well as provides educational activities and support programs for the migrant workers. see http://www.asian-migrants.org, accessed at 29 march 2011. 8 refer ibid. note also that the main concerns outlined in this paper remains very much at the forefront of issues as set out in the website content, even after over a decade of campaigns. 9 namely the association of indonesian migrant workers in hong kong, the friends of thai group, the far east overseas nepalese association, and the association of sri lankans. 10 see my discussions of these migrant groups in briones, 2009a. 11 for the latest coalition and rights-based activities of the amc, see http://www.asianmigrants.org. 12 although the 1990s campaigns on maternity benefits for migrant domestic workers in hong kong were organized around equality of gender rights, it is important to note that the campaign was a response to changes made in the existing legal provisions for paid maternity leave for migrant women workers that would give employers the right to terminate contracts, paying off only a few month’s salary (for details see swider 2006, 125-7). 13 section 2(4)(a)(vi). 14 the department of labor and employment (dole) has jurisdiction over issue pertaining to overseas contract workers. within the department are the philippine overseas administration (poea) and the overseas workers welfare administration (owwa). the poea oversees all issues pertaining to the deployment of workers while owwa works closely with philippine consulates and embassies to administer in-country services for filipino migrant workers. these services include repatriation assistance, legal and counselling assistance, insurance coverage, and loan programs for housing, micro business enterprises, and education. 15 this correlates with my finding on migrant domestic workers across hong kong and paris (briones, 2009a), who said that had they received sufficient wages back in the philippines, also doing domestic work, they would have not resorted to domestic work overseas. 16 indeed, the pwc, which has no official connection with these hong kong based ngos, also ascribe the root cause of filipina domestic workers’ presence in canada to the political and economic crisis of their country of origin (see pratt, g. and the philippine women centre, 1999, pp. 39-40). arguably also, an inverse approach to this concept of ‘forced migration’ is the respect network’s fight for citizenship rights, which point to the importance of remaining in europe for the purposes of retaining their livelihood. 17 supporting this is lan’s (2006) comprehensive study of filipina and indonesian migrant domestic workers in taiwan, and in which she observed that ‘most migrant domestic workers exercise overt resistance only when a contract’s termination is inevitable’ (2006, p. 55). 18 i refer to a capabilities paradigm in the sense used by robeyns (2003). as robeyns (2003, p. 20) observes of the capability approach, ‘while it can be read as a theory of social or distributive justice, it is in fact much broader, and has overtime developed in a sort of paradigm to think about normative issues.’ however, slightly different to robeyns, i particularly consider martha nussbaum’s explicit and tangible adaptation of the capability approach which also deals more directly with issues of human rights and gender justice (see here also briones 2009a, p. 112). 19 for a full theorization of this paradigm through a ‘capable agency’ approach, see briones 2009a, especially pages 165-177. 20 a capabilities paradigm will raise a new set of challenges, one of which will be its plausibility within democratic settings only. at least, however, it takes us on an analytical path that actually addresses livelihoods, security and sustainability for the migrant worker. as this paper has rights with capabilities 141 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 attempted to show, it is a path also that leads to a social justice framework to support their activism. references agustín, l. m. 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(2002). globalization, democratization and civil society in southeast asia: observations from malaysia and thailand. in c. kinnvall & k. jõnsson (eds.), globalization and democratization in asia. london: routledge. uhlin, a. (2003). regionalism from below: transnational civil society links in southeast asia. in e. palmujoki (ed.), southeast asian regionalism from above and from below. tampere: tapri occasional paper no.90. weekley, k. (2003). saving pennies for the state: a new role for filipino migrant workers? southeast asia research centre working paper series (57). kelly & orsini final before ts correspondence address: christine kelly, department of community health sciences, s108-e 750 bannatyne avenue, university of manitoba, winnipeg, mb, r3e 0w3; email: christine.kelly@umanitoba.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 beyond measure? disability art, affect and reimagining visitor experience christine kelly university of manitoba, canada michael orsini university of ottawa, canada abstract disability, mad and d/deaf arts are motivated to transform the arts sector and beyond in ways that foreground differing embodiments. but how do we know if such arts-based interventions are actually disrupting conventional ways of experiencing and consuming art? this article presents three themes from a critical literature review relevant to curating and creating artwork meant to spur social change related to non-normative bodies. we highlight examples that push beyond standard survey measurement techniques, such as talk-back walls and guided tours by people with lived experiences. we also explore the myriad affective outcomes of art and how we might measure emotional reactions, recognizing that disability itself is imbricated in structures of feeling. we argue that such efforts must integrate concepts of access from the field of critical disability studies. ultimately, tools for measuring audience response to politicized art must contribute to challenging and transforming these structures. keywords visitor experience; affect; emotion; evaluation; audience; museums introduction art institutions are increasingly required to justify their existence in light of an emphasis on evidence and measurement in funding opportunities. measuring the worth of art and art institutions, while perhaps strategically necessary in a precarious funding climate, overlooks the idea that art is vital to our societal and personal fulfillment precisely because it defies measurement. while it is common to decry forms of rule that seize on quantifiable measures of success, we suggest there is discursive space for disability art, affect & reimagining visitor experience studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 289 engaging in conversations about the impact of art that can challenge these logics. disability, mad and d/deaf arts have “arrived” on the mainstream arts scene in canada, now formally identified as a “field of practice” by the canada council for the arts (2018a, 2018b). definitions of disability, mad, and d/deaf art practices are varied and contested. following jacobson and mcmurchy (2010), we define disability arts as a field “in which artists with disabilities create work that expresses their identities as disabled people” (p. 1). disability, mad, and d/deaf art is thus inherently political and seeks to transform representations and material responses to non-normative bodies. the narratives that surround disability, mad and d/deaf arts communities are politically charged, and dense with a range of emotions and affects. mainstream culture often “reads” disability – and disability arts – through a lens of pity. alternatively, a central aim of thriving disability art communities is to disrupt and transform the arts sector in ways that foreground differing embodiments. to this end, disability artists see difference as a creative way to explode convention and imagine new futures in which disability flourishes. drawing on affect theory and the broader literature on emotions, we advance a critical perspective here that explores what it means to feel disability and disability art, and how a focus on the emotional contours of disability art can challenge and invigorate attempts to measure the “outcomes” of art. such a perspective compels us to think about how emotions do not exist outside of our capacity to interpret them. emotions and the affective realm should be understood through the cultural, political, economic, and social structures that give them life and imbue them with meaning. we ask: do arts institutions communicate “public feelings” (cvetkovich, 2012) about disability and disability art that are interpreted by visitors or patrons in particular ways? critical disability scholars have pointed out the harmful effects of the feelings attached to disabled people by non-disabled people in an ableist world, yet feelings can be shifted in their intensity depending upon the particular context or space in which they are being expressed. it then becomes difficult to make definitive claims about what constitutes “good” and “bad” emotions.1 in this article, we begin with a brief glimpse of the debates that have animated the study of emotions before engaging with the links between affect, emotion and disability experience. we then review methods of measuring audience responses to art, focusing on whether we can account for the affective outcomes of art, and if so, how. many of the articles we identified on audience responses to art are from the field of visitor studies, which is defined as the “the interdisciplinary study of human experiences within informal learning environments” (visitor studies association, 2020). 1 a good example is the feeling of shame, which was powerfully appropriated by the lgbtqi movement to mark a resistance to dominant ways of understanding lgbtqi identities (hemmings, 2005). christine kelly & michael orsini studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 290 we present three main themes that emerged from a critical review of the scholarship: (1) the contextual turn in the field of visitor studies, (2) ways to describe, encourage and account for visitor and audience engagement, and (3) work that explicitly explores social change through art. our discussion gestures to the creative potential for curators and artists to “measure” audience responses to art. our analysis of the existing literature, however, points to some of the limitations of these approaches, which typically do not account for disability and other forms of embodied difference, nor do they seek to capture the “affective atmospheres” (anderson, 2009) that shape how diversely embodied audiences experience art. while there is growing pressure to measure the social, political, and cultural outcomes of art in ways that might demonstrate the “value” of these organizations, we argue that such efforts must integrate a robust concept of access, perhaps drawing on affect literature as one option. tools for measuring audience responses to politicized art must contribute to challenging and ultimately transforming the social and political structures that define access in art spaces. theoretical orientation: thinking with emotions and affect there are many ways to challenge the seemingly cold, impersonal metrics of measurement. we are guided here by recent theoretical developments in the study of emotion and affect as one way to think about the embodied visitor experience. the hope is that it could “move” researchers, artists, art funders and the art community to embrace the complex ways in which we experience art, not to mention the template of feelings that might structure these interactions between art and its publics. although the terms are commonly interchanged in popular discourse, the relationship between affect, feelings and emotion is admittedly messy. affects can be understood as intensities that are difficult to pin down because they are non-conscious experiences of bodily energy that respond to stimuli (massumi, 1995, 2002). some scholars use the term “feelings” to navigate the conceptual fuzziness of perspectives that pit affects against emotions. as cvetkovich (2012) outlines, the notion of feelings captures affect and emotions – it is “intentionally imprecise, retaining the ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences” (p. 4). a feeling, says shouse (2005), “is a sensation that has been checked against previous experiences and labelled. it is personal and biographical because every person has a distinct set of previous sensations from which to draw when interpreting and labelling their feelings.” “complex moral emotions” such as compassion, disgust, fear and anger may resemble reflex emotions that are more fleeting in nature, but “appear here in more cognitively processed forms: the fear we feel about an automobile suddenly veering toward us is more automatic than the fear we feel about a hazardous waste dump down the road” (jasper, 2006, p. 17). disability art, affect & reimagining visitor experience studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 291 moreover, we have feelings about our feelings: we attach judgments to our ability to express certain emotions and not others (jasper, 2006). we might feel sad, for instance, about our inability to be happy. emotions and affects can defy efforts to study them in conventional ways. they move through worlds and attach themselves to objects, bodies, and environments. community can be forged through the collective sharing of feelings such that felt experience is constituted in and through “affective communities” (hutchison, 2016). as hutchison discusses in her work on the construction of political community in the wake of trauma, it is vital to explore the paradoxical nature of feelings that can at once lead to individual isolation but “also seep out, affecting those who surround and bear witness and, in doing so, shape political communities” (2016, p. 3). in terms of our interest in disrupting conventional ways of measuring art, we can think about how to develop tools to measure feelings as expressed by individuals but also retain the sense in which art holds the potential to spark collectively felt experiences that construct affective communities. thinking with emotion and affect challenges how we might measure the outcomes of art, and how we experience art. this does not mean we need to abandon all forms of evaluation even though emotions or affects might be difficult to capture using conventional metrics. it seems almost natural to assume that visitors’ experiences in art institutions are emotional and affective ones. a starting point for linking an interest in affect and emotions with the visitor experience is to appreciate that bringing emotions into the picture leads us to ask what factors might govern interactions between individuals, among individuals and institutional spaces, and between individuals and art objects such as paintings, art installations, or video/film. thinking about artists as sentient, feeling actors is hardly controversial. after all, art and artistic expression are generally regarded as the communication of feelings. the next step is to imagine art consumers as feeling actors, too. while emotions and affects might not fit neatly into models for evaluating visitor experience, excluding them deprives us of obtaining a more comprehensive picture of the complex intersections of artistic practice and visitor experience. emotions/affects + critical disability studies disability experience is brimming with a range of emotions and affects, many of which have been defined by medicine, charities, and other people and institutions that are disconnected from disability politics. the history of disability movements has been characterized by a demand that disabled people themselves define their agency and personhood on their own terms. a key part of this task has focused on challenging pervasive feelings about disability, and about countering ableism and its promotion of a normative body-mind. as goodley et al. (2018) explain, disability becomes disavowed christine kelly & michael orsini studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 292 by normative culture in two ways: “it is rejected (because it symbolises lack) and adored (because of its association with dependency which is the human condition desired by most of us caught in the terrors of adult autonomy)” (p. 209). critical disability studies perspectives can also help us to think about art and its affects/effects in ways that build on this key insight about the inseparability of body/mind; it can also be useful in cementing links between art and its ability to provoke. as duncombe (2016) reminds us, “activist art that doesn’t move us leaves us standing still” (p. 31). recognizing the ableism in this remark (a wheelchair user or person with a tremor might object to the notion of “standing still”), duncombe nonetheless calls our attention to general expectations about art that have an activist orientation, even if one might extend this to all forms of artistic expression.2 art moves us, it makes us feel something, even if sometimes as visitors we might have difficulty expressing how that happens or in articulating the sensations and feelings that course through our “bodyminds” (clare, 2017; price, 2015). the notion of “bodymind” is critical here in collapsing the distinction between the body and mind. despite a general recognition that the “body” and “mind” constitute one another, there is a stubborn tendency to think about embodiment in primarily physical terms. to quote clare (2017): i settled on body-mind in order to recognize both the inextricable relationships between our bodies and our minds and the ways in which the ideology of cure operates as if the two are distinct – the mind superior to the body, the mind defining personhood, the mind separating humans from nonhumans.” (p. xvi; emphasis in original) picking up this thread and delving deeper into disability studies will help to build our framework for challenging conventional discourses of measurement. emotions and affects are relevant not only for the purposes of understanding the experience of consuming art, but for the art institution itself and how it communicates and enacts access. when disabled, mad and d/deaf visitors frequent an art institution that has limited to no awareness of accessibility, they may experience feelings of shame, anger, and a range of other emotions that reflect the ableism embedded in society. from the perspective of nondisabled visitors who might marvel at the efforts of museums and other cultural institutions to make their spaces “accessible” to young people and children, there might be feelings of relief and joy that the museum or gallery is less daunting for them or their children. but accessibility is more than the existence of craft activities for children. accessibility matters for visitors with disabilities of all ages, adults and children. when accessibility is imagined only in terms of making adjustments 2 see allen (2009) for a discussion of the connection between aids activism and political resistance in post-apartheid south africa. disability art, affect & reimagining visitor experience studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 293 here and there without giving greater thought to questions such as who feels comfortable and welcome in a space, it tends to reproduce the idea that the gallery or museum is primarily interested in appealing to a nondisabled adult consumer or art patron. those with accessibility needs are literally infantilized, an all too familiar (and painful) trope for disabled people, who have long lamented the tendency of nondisabled adults to treat them as children. to illustrate the sense of privilege and entitlement assumed by nondisabled, white visitors, disability artist shannon finnegan explained to an audience recently in ottawa the reception to one of her installations in new york, titled the “anti-stairs club lounge.” she noted that able-bodied visitors were surprised that they could not “access” the space as it was designed exclusively for disabled patrons. as finnegan explained, the experience highlighted how access is virtually invisible and assumed for folks who move through the world with little in the way of barriers (finnegan, 2019). methods we now turn to a critical review of the literature related to measurement, outcomes, and art. a “critical review” provides more than thematic description to “include a degree of analysis and conceptual innovation” (grant & booth, 2009, p. 93). the aim of our review was to explore, in a general way, what the current scholarly and arts practitioner literature says about how to best measure artistic outcomes and visitor experience, and following this review, we sought to bring some of this literature into conversation with ideas from affect literature. as such, we searched art fulltext database using a combination of the following search terms: art; activism; social change; social justice; politics and audience feedback, participation, interaction, visitor studies, and response. we conducted a secondary search focused on disability, deaf, feminism, fat justice, aging, indigenous and art to ensure the literature reflected the scope of the larger project. we identified 38 academic articles published between 2007-2018 to review in-depth. we expected to discover more through this broad search. this dearth points to a gap in available research and commentaries in visitor studies. we do not present a comprehensive summary or exhaustive systematic review of these bodies of literature, but rather a “snapshot” of what is happening in these diverse fields. we summarize the overall content of these articles below before turning to the broader implications for those interested in foregrounding the important connections among affect, art and disability. christine kelly & michael orsini studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 294 theme 1 – the contextual turn: making room for diverse audiences there is an established field of visitor studies that explores peoples’ motivations for visiting museums and galleries and attempts to evaluate their experiences. this literature does not explicitly address street art, folk art, literature and poetry, and other relevant media, but does help orient us to how individuals interact with exhibits in large and small museums and galleries. there is a three-phase evolution in the field of visitor studies beginning with a descriptive approach that focuses on the sociodemographic characteristics of visitors, to an approach that attempts to discern motivations of visitors, to a more recent turn towards multiple aspects of context and identity (lópez sintas et al., 2014). the focus on sociodemographic characteristics helped document the over-representation of privileged groups among museum visitors (lópez sintas et al., 2014). the motivation literature presumes that visitor motivations could be easily documented, enumerated, and analyzed. more recently, the literature has shifted to focus on how social dimensions of the museum exhibit experiences are shaped by the visitor’s identity, personal experiences, and history, termed the “contextual turn” (dawson & jensen, 2011). this turn pushes against what carr (2011) describes as the “rush to classify the immediate outcomes of experience” (p. 6). we focus on examples from this shift in the visitor studies literature as it holds the most potential for considering the feelings of disability, mad and d/deaf art. lópez sintas et al. (2014) analyse the “social dimension of the art museum experience holistically, that is, before, during, and after the visit” (p. 241). using 21 qualitative interviews, they find “unaccompanied or accompanied art museum visits are not universal categories but strategies” (p. 247) and argue that “space-time framework of the museum experience extends beyond the boundaries of the museum” (p. 253). as such they suggest going beyond “measuring … reactions to particular exhibitions” (p. 255). however, something may be lost when reactions to particular exhibits are overlooked as art is inherently personal, audiences are engaging with the art, and furthermore, artists are interested in the affective responses to their work. indeed, despite pressures from funders and a general climate that emphasizes concrete results, this analysis is an example of how the field of visitor studies deemphasizes measurement and decreases room for complexity. importantly, this literature does not explicitly overlap with the literature on emotions and affect, but we suggest the contextual turn in the field of visitor studies makes more room to consider the affective implications of art. in terms of alternatives to measurement, albano (2014) draws on the idea that the visitor is a “body in movement” and suggests using “exhibition narrative” to explore visitor experiences. exhibition narratives rely on visitor narrations situated in specific time and space of the exhibit. this approach represents a more complex way of interpreting visitor experience, allowing for greater nuance. another example comes from dicks (2016), who advocates that pierre bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” is useful for museum disability art, affect & reimagining visitor experience studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 295 and visitor studies. she suggests that habitus reveals value judgments that visitors make in response to the “social identities on display” (2016, p. 52). dicks’ work draws on interviews with visitors to an industrial heritage museum in wales, and comments on how consistently visitors “related” to the exhibit and histories represented despite lack of shared class, gender, age, and so forth. so, while these examples suggest different ways to document the visitor experience, they can benefit from explicit engagement with the themes raised in the affect literature. disability also enters into this literature. moussouri (2007) argues that work related to people with disabilities and visitor research is focused on “products rather than processes” (p. 90), and on “providing special programs and making structural modifications to buildings rather than on developing exhibitions that are accessible to people with diverse abilities” (p. 93). work on relaxed performance and calls to improve theatre accessibility (cira, 2018) also fits in this theme. moussouri argues that adopting the social model of disability can help museums and researchers to fully embrace a social inclusion agenda. moussouri is part of the larger trend that aims to diversify museum audiences; werner et al. (2014) also report on this trend. they advocate for an approach beyond collecting demographics, to incorporating aspects of personal identity. drawing on examples of collecting information on race and ethnicity, they demonstrate the limitations and oversights of inflexible measures of ethnicity as well as the hesitancy of visitors to self-identify. instead, they advocate for supplementing demographic measures with a personal identity approach. this approach centers types of identities that are emotionally significant to the individual’s self-concept (e.g., family history, personal biography, interests and hobbies, national background). the personal identity approach is a possible entryway for exploring the affective implications of disability art. across this set of articles, there is an emphasis on capturing the complex lives of individuals visiting an exhibit. the larger field of visitor studies encapsulates an important shift to the question of measurement, foregrounding complexity and personal experiences. while there are no explicit connections to affect literature, we suggest this evolution in visitor studies may make room for such an analysis. theme 2 – interactions with exhibit material there are a number of articles that explore different ways people interact with exhibit material and how to encourage interaction with exhibits. generally, this work discusses physical interactions (i.e., touching museum objects), digital interactions, and spatial interactions (i.e., moving through a space). some of this literature focuses on how to be inclusive of diverse audiences. the terms “access” and “inclusion,” however, are used quite differently in a number of visitor studies articles as compared to disability studies. in visitor studies, these terms seem to refer to “public access” or “open access” and christine kelly & michael orsini studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 296 inclusivity in a broad way, referring to a general sense of diversity or low socio-economic status rather than implying disabled identities and embodiments (bouder-pailler & urbain, 2015; gibson & turner, 2012). in disability, mad and d/deaf literature, the concept of “access” is an essential orientation that discusses concrete accommodations for people with various impairments, as well as a broader commitment towards transforming the entire infrastructure on which art rests. the focus on space and movement in articles on exhibit interaction has implications for bodies that move in non-normative ways. trondle (2014), for example, used special electronic gloves to track the way visitors move through the st. gallen museum of fine art in switzerland. trondle illuminates that beyond architecture, social space and the artwork itself can influence the way visitors move through a space. he argues that curators can intentionally create what he terms “space-cells,” that is, highlighted artworks that are independent of architectural features and can lead visitors to “stopping moments” where they can pause and reflect. such reflective moments could potentially be connected with discussions of affective experiences. according to trondle, curators and artists can work to focus visitor attention in very specific ways. this study does not consider the ways non-normative bodies may move through a space. for example, someone who might seek a rest spot due to fatigue or might seek quiet in an overwhelming crowd would not necessarily demonstrate a “stopping moment” orchestrated by a curator or artist. on the topic of inclusion, through three case studies in the united states, silverman et al. (2012) suggest that museums should collaborate with occupational therapists to promote exhibit environments that are built around the principles of universal design, which would facilitate the interaction of people with disabilities with exhibitions. the focus on occupational therapists does not align with approaches that centre the lived experience of disabled people, but the article suggests engaging access advisors and people with learning disabilities. the feeling of inclusion and representation is, as disability scholars would suggest, essential to the experience of consuming and generating art. although this article does not engage with affect literature, again, there is a potential opening for recognizing the importance of affect and emotion. patel et al. (2015) enter conversations in the turn towards more engaged, participation-based experiences in museums and galleries. they explore technologies that ask visitors to create their own content and allow engagement by individuals who are not physically present in the museum space. their approach differs greatly from other work that presumes all bodies move through spaces with the same intent. they focus on an interactive installation at the dr. johnson house in central london about the first comprehensive english dictionary. the installation encouraged visitors to generate words and definitions, using a digital tool that displayed the responses both in the museum and online. the focus on sociality and disability art, affect & reimagining visitor experience studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 297 inclusion of those who are neither “spatially nor temporally present at any current moment” (patel et al., 2015, p. 77) may inadvertently allow for inclusion of individuals who experience chronic pain, chemical sensitivity, or overstimulation in public spaces and other barriers to physically entering exhibit spaces. while not mentioned explicitly in the article, this resonates with open concepts of engagement. focusing on large-scale interactive art installations in the national maritime museum of london and in the museum of london, ntalla (2014) uses audience interviews to explore the shift to engaged museum experiences. ntalla finds that “the use of digital installations can lead to a new conceptualization of the museum space that deals with controversial and subjective themes” (p. 113). specifically, it brings visitors to a state of “inbetween-ness” that can lend to emotional engagement and a sense of “play” (p. 113). boerner and jobst (2013) conducted a large-scale quantitative study focusing on theatre audiences in germany. the study included 2,795 visitors to 44 performances in 12 german-speaking theatres, and measured emotional, cognitive and what they term “conative” (thought-provoking impulses) responses to the performance. they found all three responses to be indicators of how audiences evaluate their visits to the theater. there are normative assumptions embedded in this study, notably the presumption that all base emotional and cognitive states are the same, but this work supports efforts at focusing on emotion in arts settings. finally, dudley (2017) explores strategies of emotional disengagement that some visitors may use as an act of self-preservation, drawing on the example of a permanent exhibit installed at the melbourne museum in 2008, titled the mind: enter the labyrinth. this exhibit explores the brain in medical, historical, and biological contexts, including featuring items that represent psychiatric restraint and treatment. the exhibit explicitly “seeks to challenge visitors’ attitudes to normality” and interweaves issues of mental health and psychiatric diagnoses (dudley, 2017, p. 193). through 90 qualitative interviews with 172 visitors to this exhibit, dudley found a high degree of active and subconscious emotional disengagement as many of the visitors themselves live with psychiatric diagnoses. this reveals a presumption the curators held that most audience members would not have lived experience of psychiatric diagnoses. dudley advocates, “there is an ongoing need for sufficient attention to be paid to both the combined cognitive and emotional aspects of museum visiting” (2017, p. 194). this innovative perspective underscores that curators and artists cannot always orchestrate or predict the types of emotional responses exhibits will evoke – an idea we will return to in the discussion. within the field of visitor studies, the subset of literature that focuses on how individuals engage with exhibits highlights unique ways of encouraging engagement yet seems marginally attuned to alternative perspectives of christine kelly & michael orsini studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 298 affective communities of disability, d/deaf and mad art that requires us to assume different bodies and minds in the roles of curators, artists and visitors. theme 3 – social change through art there is recent literature that explicitly explores relationships between art and social change, and how to use art to enact social change related to difference and non-normative embodiment. blanckenberg and mcewen’s (2014) article is particularly relevant; they describe and analyze queer & trans articulations: collaborative art for social change, an exhibit in johannesburg designed to reduce discrimination of lgbtqi individuals, and to consider how “people understand and engage with difference” (p. 62). the article analyzes audience contributions to a “talk-back station” or “comments wall,” as well as highlights the distinctive practice of hiring exhibition facilitators with lived experience to guide experiences and answer questions. using facilitators with lived experience may limit negative emotional responses from audience members unfamiliar with politicized subject matter, and may actually generate an empathic ambiance, yet it may be emotionally draining for the individual facilitator. while the responses at the talk-back station were largely positive, “whether or not visitors who commented on their conscientisation carried this motivation beyond the comments wall cannot be determined” (p. 72). kinsley (2016) writes about increased attention to inclusion within museums and uses the work of nancy fraser to argue that increasing inclusion is a “matter of social justice.” inclusion, in this article, appears to primarily refer to people of colour and people of low socio-economic backgrounds. like disability, mad and d/deaf art commentators, kinsley emphasizes the importance of diversifying not only the audience, but the producers, curators of exhibits, as well as the content of the work and general staff. there are of course, and perhaps most predominantly, contributions about the role of art in social change from within the worlds of disability, mad and d/deaf art. solvang (2018), for example, describes four ways that are typically used to describe the intersections of art and disability: art therapy, outsider art, disability art, and disability aesthetics. solvang argues that the interplay between these definitions is important and suggests using more than one discourse when analyzing disability art practice. in contrast to disruptive political art, solvang suggests the overarching framework of “social practice art,” which is “attuned to creating lasting relations and to imaging [sic] the inter-dependences we are all part of in new ways” (p. 250) as a mechanism for fostering inclusion in the art world as well as generating social change. carmen papalia, a prominent canadian disability artist who identifies as a non-visual learner, talks about “open access” as a way to enact social change without necessarily subscribing to official, bureaucratic visions of what disability art, affect & reimagining visitor experience studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 299 accessibility should look or feel like (2018). papalia’s notion of open access offers a stinging critique of how the term “access” is used in museum, art and visitor studies and practices in ways that erase disability experience. papalia outlines a number of tenets of open access in an essay in canadian art, among them: open access relies on those present, what their needs are and how they can find support with each other and in their communities. it is a perpetual negotiation of trust between those who practice support as a mutual exchange. open access is radically different than a set of policies that is enforced in order to facilitate a common experience for a group with definitive needs. it acknowledges that everyone carries a body of local knowledge and is an expert in their own right. open access is the root system of embodied learning. it cultivates trust among those involved and enables each member to self-identify and occupy a point of orientation that is based in complex embodiment. open access disrupts the disabling conditions that limit one’s agency and potential to thrive. it reimagines normalcy as a continuum of embodiments, identities, realities and learning styles, and operates under the tenet that interdependence is central to a radical restructuring of power. open access is a temporary, collectively held space where participants can find comfort in disclosing their needs and preferences with one another. it is a responsive support network that adapts as needs and available resources change. (papalia, 2018) the conscious shift in language is critical for papalia. the “blind” descriptor, he explains, does not capture how he experiences the world; instead he identifies as a “non visual learner.” even terms such as “accessibility,” he adds, are problematic because they are weighed down by their association with disabled people, when accessibility is an experience that can be shared by a number of people who might not identify as disabled. instead, in an interview with jacqueline bell (2016) papalia suggests, what matters most in thinking about accessibility is agency – our ability to claim it and hold it. papalia discusses his artistic practice, including his hour-long performance, “blind field shuttle,” in which participants are instructed: “close your eyes. place your hands on the shoulders of the person in front of you. now follow their lead.” bell adds, they “form a human chain behind the artist, and are led on an ‘eyes closed’ walk through the city or rural space” (2016). leah sandals (2016) published an interview with eliza chandler, the first artistic director of the reimagined tangled art + disability gallery and arts organization. in this interview, chandler emphasizes that disabled people “aren’t just audiences – they are artists and creators too” (as quoted in sandals, 2016). chandler pushes us to foster artistic development and christine kelly & michael orsini studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 300 excellence among disabled producers rather than only expressing shock and awe that a disabled person is participating in the art world. she emphasizes the links between financial accessibility and access and like many disability, mad, and d/deaf art commentators, calls for broad, systemic change in the arts. meaningful inclusion, mashburn explains, “requires that curators not speak out of turn for those whose own voices can better tell their own story” (as quoted in mashburn & papalia, 2019). curators, she adds, need to: understand access in social rather than physical terms; assess any attitudinal barriers inherent in their own practice and disrupt ableism; listen to, centre and learn from those in the disability community who hold embodied forms of knowledge; and then rebuild their own intellectual rigor to be respectfully and intentionally inclusive... arts leaders need to know what it means to disrupt ableism and be open to a radical reorientation of the field, guided by those at the margins. both mashburn and chandler show expansive approaches to art creation and consumption that set a new framework of values, and represent a unique, affective community. the work from within disability, d/deaf and mad art worlds provides compelling alternative worldviews on how to understand art, access, and how art can change cultural narratives about disability. this is essential “big picture work” that can educate disabled and nondisabled artists, curators and audience members. however, while the most relevant to the subject at hand, this body of scholarship is limited in offering ways of measuring or assessing the implementation of these new frameworks. the most revolutionary ideas cannot always be immediately actualized and the effects seen, but this work is taking place in a context where there are demands to measure the effects of exhibits and projects. discussion the field of visitor studies is moving towards more complex ways of imagining the “visitor” that account for multiple identities and lived experiences. this complexity is reflected in the openness to new ways of measuring audience engagement with exhibits and spaces, such as remote engagement and spatial designs that direct walking flow to certain areas. our literature review also reveals some persistent gaps in places where we might expect visitor studies to overlap with other bodies of scholarship. there was difficulty finding articles, commentaries, and empirical studies that explore relationships between art and social change. the most notable contributions to the subject come from disability, mad and d/deaf perspectives. disability studies works, it seems, are largely unconnected to work on measuring the outcomes of art, visitor studies, and visitor engagement. even the articles in disability art, affect & reimagining visitor experience studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 301 visitor studies that do discuss inclusion or access rarely mention disability. we also observed the field of visitor studies has limited engagement with potentially relevant work on affect and emotions. in stepping back from the literature, we argue for a more explicit engagement among art institutions with the affective dimensions of visitor experience in ways that appreciate the complexity of the emotional worlds we inhabit. rather than seeking to answer whether a painting or sculpture makes you happy or sad, institutions can think about the visitor experience as moving beyond an individual reaction to this or that painting or artwork. quite literally, museums or galleries could start by asking how visitors “feel their way” through these spaces, which can be inhospitable or unwelcome to some, and at times unpleasant. the empathy museum, for instance, initiated a project titled “a mile in my shoes,” which allows visitors to “literally wear someone else’s shoes while listening to their audio diary [as it] gracefully reveals the power of this complicated but crucial emotion” (norris & tisdale, 2017, p. 107). a disability studies perspective might ask crucial questions about the ableism embedded in the grounding frameworks in an otherwise interesting exhibition that seeks to bring visitors to put themselves in someone else’s shoes quite literally. while we naturally gravitate to how visitors experience art – whether visual work or multi-media installations – disability studies scholars and activists have been central in helping us to think about how some individuals – as visitors or as artists – experience the space itself, whether it be a gallery, museum, or artist-run centre. for disabled visitors, for instance, issues related to accessibility can provoke feelings of anger, shame, disgust, and sadness. museums, galleries, and other art institutions are environments that invariably arouse a range of emotional responses that might resonate in different ways to particular groups. for instance, indigenous visitors to canadian galleries and museums were not, until recently, reflected in the images that collectively represented canada. similarly, the stories that together make up narratives about canada failed to represent black, racialized, disabled, or queer canadians. far from being an issue of ensuring that spaces are physically accessible, these cultural spaces communicate in a myriad of ways who belongs and who does not. affective communities can be spaces of exclusion just as they might provide space for collective feelings to emerge. recent attention to the woeful underrepresentation of black artists, for instance, is part of a larger conversation about the disappearance of black life in arts institutions in north america and beyond (ware, 2020). what kinds of emotions are appropriate to express in these artistic environments? is it okay to cry, laugh, or be angry? asking what it is appropriate to feel turns our attention to the “feeling rules” (hochschild, 1979) expressed in these environments, and the impact they have on makers and consumers of art. in order to do so, we need to explore how feelings and emotions can be organizing sites of political agency in their own right. attention to these rules might guide us in uncovering how certain emotions christine kelly & michael orsini studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 302 are privileged in some spaces but discouraged in others. this is particularly so in the example of dudley (2017), where the evaluation unexpectedly discovered emotional disengagement, suggesting that presumptions about visitor identities and attempts to guide their emotional states may be misguided. norris and tisdale (2017) encourage us to “lean into the hard emotions” (p. 107), adding that art should provoke a jumble of emotions that might be difficult to disentangle: our public audiences need us to help them dig into the hard emotions, even if it’s scary. it’s the only way we will grow and improve, together. and it’s even more crucial when race, class, gender, politics, and social views create emotional polarization, where one group’s emotional reaction is favored over another’s. (p. 107) they go as far as to suggest that “an exhibition topic that has little potential to evoke emotional responses in visitors is an exhibition topic that is not worth pursuing” (norris & tisdale, p. 103). there is a vital need to document, reflect, and consider our emotional responses to art, particularly politicized art from marginalized embodiments, and to use this documentation as a new form of institutional and exhibit evaluation. conclusion our critical review revealed that greater effort is necessary to begin to capture the effects/affects of disability, mad, and d/deaf art. we conclude with two recommendations, even if our thoughts might be better framed as affective calls to action, or a plea to take affect and emotions seriously. first, there is a need to carefully integrate emerging tools and concepts from visitor studies to the field of disability, mad, and d/deaf art. further, we should continue to experiment with and pilot creative ways of evaluation in the context of disability, mad, and d/deaf art events and exhibits, which are often places brimming with complexity in emotional, societal and embodied senses. we do not want to dampen this complexity, but make efforts to capture it, and challenge the boundaries of what might be seen as worth measuring. our review found that audience interviews or post-exhibit interviews are a common technique that, if designed carefully, may be useful. there were other measurement tools built into exhibit design, often in ways that complemented the exhibit itself, for example, the remote contributions to the exhibit on the history of the dictionary at the dr. johnson house in london (patel et al., 2015). the talk-back station and the employment of museum guides with lived experience relevant to the subject matter (blanckenberg & mcewen, 2014) are other examples of promising ideas for measuring the tangible and affective outcomes of activist art. norris and tisdale (2017) discuss the notion of developing an “emotional toolkit” for disability art, affect & reimagining visitor experience studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 303 curators and other leaders of art institutions that can help in designing exhibitions that take seriously the affective outcomes of their exhibitions. it should be stressed here that art institutions would be best to avoid a sole focus on “happy” affects, as if the only positive outcome of experiencing art is one of joy. in this first recommendation, we are not advocating for narrowing the expansive goals and worldviews set forth in particular by disability, mad and d/deaf perspectives, but rather for attempts to operationalize these goals. an easy first step, for example, would be to collect demographic information not only about the visitors to exhibits, but on the creators and curators of these exhibits, and further, perhaps using the more complex “personal identity” approach suggested by werner et al. (2014). in doing so, artistic producers and curators can personally evaluate work to transform the art sector while taking control over the tools of measurement. curators and artists themselves should design and use these complex tools in the early stages of exhibit or event planning as doing so would align with the transformative and radical values of disability, mad and d/deaf art worlds. these evaluations may have to take place in addition to requirements of various funders, boards and other structures to whom art institutions are accountable, but we hope that in time, conducting this work will transform dominant modes of measurement. there is reason for optimism, given the gradual shift in visitor studies to encapsulate more complexity. second, we stress the importance of formally writing up and publishing the results of exhibit evaluations in open-access academic journals and practitioner magazines to help further develop a knowledge base about novel types of measurement, and different types of outcomes. oftentimes, when reporting or evaluation does happen at exhibits, the reports are submitted to funders and not made public to other practitioners, artists, curators or scholars. by publishing the results, the curators will again help to maintain influence over what types of measurement are valued in the art world and be more responsible and accountable to broader publics engaged in art. publishing may be beyond the paid duties of many producers and curators, so it may be useful to collaborate with university-affiliated researchers who can support efforts to coordinate and release the findings of evaluations. we are situated at a critical moment in the art world. there is widespread recognition of the importance of diversity in the audience, producers, curators, and content of art; and not just a superficial form of diversity, but a politicized recognition of ongoing systematic harm against marginalized people that can be compounded by elite arts institutions. meaningful inclusion requires a fulsome transformation of education, production, exhibition, and consumption of art. this shift is slow moving, but it is happening against a backdrop that demands that we measure and count the outcomes of individual events and exhibits, which is usually expressed in terms of audience numbers. while there is value in critiquing the world of measurement and the seeming obsession with evidence and outcomes, we christine kelly & michael orsini studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 288-306, 2021 304 hold out hope that there are promising pathways to transform these worlds as we simultaneously transform the greater art industry. indeed, as we work to move towards new, inclusive visions of art for the future, it is imperative that we engage a conversation that brings funders and more mainstream institutions along for the ride. emotions are vital to the world of art and social change, and are, unfortunately, the most difficult to track. documenting the emotional outcomes of art exhibits and events is necessary work that demands creativity. as duncombe (2016) suggests, we should resist the tendency to see measurement as always problematic: metrics is an ugly word in the art world, one that conjures up images of insurance actuaries in grey flannel suits, sitting in cubicles in front of counting machines, busily sucking the color out of the world and burying it in a filing cabinet... this is naive. the art world is already beholden to metrics: measurements of commercial success, gauged in terms of prices fetched for a work of art, gallery representation, and attendance at and length of run for a show… metrics already exist. the question is not yes or no; it is which and whose? (p. 130) in other words, art institutions can disrupt how we measure, in creative ways, leading the conversation rather than being consumed by it. acknowledgements the authors wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on this article, as well as jen hammond sebring for copyediting support. we would like to acknowledge the contributions of kate grisim who helped gather and analyze sources for this article. references albano, c. (2014). narrating place: the sense of visiting. museum & society, 12(1), 1-13. allen, r. (2009). art activism in south africa and the ethics of representation in a time of aids. critical arts, 23(3), 396-415. anderson, b. (2009). affective atmospheres. emotion, space and society, 2(2), 77-81. bell, j. (2016). practicing accessibility: an interview with carmen papalia. field: a journal of socially engaged art criticism, 5. http://field-journal.com/issue-5/an-interview-withcarmen-papalia blanckenberg, l., & mcewen, h. 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(2014). space, movement and attention: affordances of the museum environment. international journal of arts management, 17(1), 4-19. visitor studies association. (2020). glossary of visitor studies terms. https://www.visitorstudies.org/ ware, s. m. (2020, june 24) give us permanence – ending anti-black racism in canada’s art institutions. canadian art. https://canadianart.ca/features/give-us-permanence-ending-antiblack-racism-in-canadas-art-institutions/ werner, b. l., hayward, j., & larouche, c. (2014). measuring and understanding diversity is not so simple: how characteristics of personal identity can improve museum audience studies. visitor studies, 17(2), 191-206. sager final before ts correspondence address: maja sager, genusvetenskapliga institutionen, lund university, box 188, 221 00 lund, sweden; email: maja.sager@genus.lu.se issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 critical legal practices: approaches to law in contemporary anti-racist social justice struggles in sweden maja sager lund university, sweden marta kolankiewicz lund university, sweden abstract based on interviews with legal practitioners working with or within antiracist social justice movements in sweden, we explore some dilemmas and paradoxes that appear when social movements pursue struggles for anti-racist social justice through the legal arena. how do the interviewees understand and critically relate to legal practices in contemporary anti-racist social justice struggles? what are the conditions of engagement of these organisations in the legal arena and how do they impact social justice struggles in sweden? what are the stakes in the legal practices of these movements? rather than a strategically chosen tool for social justice, legal practice could be understood as a kind of self-defence, as resorting to law is often a response to an unjust legal system, oppressive treatment by the state or disadvantage and deprivation. the interviewees’ reflections on their legal practices are informed by a fundamental ambivalence between the ideological commitment in the critique of law and their position from which it is impossible to ignore the legal arena. instead of taking a clear stance for or against the law as a tool for social justice struggles, we have attempted to understand what are the methods and the effects of legal practice that grow from this ambivalence. the accounts of our interviewees indicate that both practical strategies and ways of accounting for these aim at subverting and challenging the law while at the same time using it. throughout the analysis we have conceptualised these strategies as decentring, re-politicising and redistribution. keywords social justice struggles; activism; critical legal practices; legal arena; sweden; movement lawyering critical legal practices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 535 introduction movement lawyering is a practice of law with an engagement in society, a tool for social justice… the interest in movement lawyering is growing in sweden. more movement lawyers are getting educated and engaged with civil society in issues such as anti-discrimination, human rights and the individual’s access to justice. this happens in a political era characterised by growing inequality and social polarising. (akademin för rörelsejuridik [academy for movement lawyering], n.d.)1 over the last decade, an engagement at the crossroads of legal practice and social justice activism has been growing in sweden. in this article, we take a starting point in interviews with legal practitioners and activists who represent this trend. among them are networks around the academy for movement lawyering, quoted above, an initiative bringing together lawyers and law students aiming to work for social justice in sweden. the analysis explores some of the dilemmas and paradoxes that appear when social movements and activists pursue struggles for anti-racist social justice through the legal arena. the inclusion of legal practices in social movements is in itself not a new development in sweden – legal aspects have been central to the work of trade unions, tenants’ interest organisations, consumer organisations and other organisations that stem from the 20th-century workers’ movement and social democracy. the growing engagement that the research participants represent here is, however, a new development in sweden in terms of the kinds of social movements, activism and social issues that increasingly have been addressed through legal practices. our specific focus in this article is on legal practices in relation to issues of racism and anti-racism.2 the legal practitioners who participated in the study are part of contemporary social justice movements in sweden that we broadly understand as anti-racist. the questions guiding the analysis are: how do the interviewees understand and critically relate to legal practices in contemporary anti-racist social justice struggles? what are the conditions of engagement of these organisations in the legal arena and how do they impact social justice struggles in sweden? what are the stakes in the legal practices of these movements? we formulated these questions partly in response to the ways in which the interviewees express that their legal practices are filled with tension and ambivalence. in the interviews, the interviewees are trying to navigate and make sense of their own practices, while situating themselves in relation to different forms of critique of and doubts about law. they have not chosen to 1 throughout the paper translations from swedish to english have been provided by the authors. 2 these interviews were conducted within the broader research project “the court as an emerging arena for struggles against and about racism,” which explores the possibilities and limitations of pursuing anti-racist activism through legal routes and practices. maja sager & marta kolankiewicz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 536 turn away from the institutions and discourses of the law, yet many of them find it important to underscore that their legal practice is hesitant. explicit acknowledgement of the limitations of legal strategies for social change is at the centre of their reflections on their practice. we are particularly interested in how they explain and make sense of their legal practice despite – or in relation to – the ambivalence they express. in the following, we begin with a short methodological note presenting the sampling strategies and the material on which this study is based. here we also explain what we mean by contemporary anti-racist movements. then we situate the interviewees’ discussions about law and activism in the context of juridification in sweden. finally, we analyse – in dialogue with previous research on social movements and law and inspired by critical feminist and anti-racist theoretical explorations of law (butler, 1997; davis, 2005; delgado, 1993; smart, 1989; williams, 1991) – the interviewees’ legal practices as well as their reflections about the potential and the limitations of the legal arena. situating the fieldwork and the material the article is based on interviews with people who engage with legal practices as a part of their commitment to anti-racist social justice issues.3 legal practices are here understood as different forms of engagement with law (mccann, 1998, p. 81), from setting up legal advice points, to popular education on legal matters, to strategic litigation. within this broad definition of legal practices, we additionally differentiate legal strategies – more strategic actions aimed at achieving some political effects beyond the specific case at hand (cf. mathiesen, 2005, as cited in gustafsson & vinthagen, 2010, p. 641). this narrower category of legal practices would most typically be exemplified by strategic litigation.4 our material shows that legal strategies are usually combined with other forms of practices and integrated in the movements’ work for change. we started our fieldwork by identifying central networks and organisations working with anti-racism through legal practices in sweden today. we selected organisations, networks and activists of interest for this study through a combination of snowballing and strategic sampling informed by the literature on juridification and contemporary social movements (e.g., brännström, 2017) and anti-racism in sweden (e.g., groglopo et al., 2015; jämte, 2013; malmsten, 2007). our sample was delimited by three main 3 we conducted 18 interviews with 20 lawyers and activists (two of the interviews were conducted with two people working together). for the sake of anonymity, we have delinked quotes from particular interviewees. 4 “strategic litigation” is a term used to define a legal action that “aims to bring about broad societal changes beyond the scope of the individual case at hand. it aims to use legal means to tackle injustices that have not been adequately addressed in law or politics” (ecchr, n.d.). critical legal practices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 537 criteria: engagement in legal practices of an anti-racist nature and with links to social movements. in addition, we focused on contemporary anti-racist social movements that use legal practices in sweden. these could be inscribed in broader social movements that sometimes are identified as a fourth wave in the social movements literature (peterson et al., 2018, p. 378). our definition of anti-racism, while rooted in the literature, was additionally shaped by our intersectional approach and the knowledge generated during the fieldwork about networking structures of the organisations.5 historically, there have been three sites around which antiracist movements gravitated in sweden (jämte, 2013; peterson et al., 2018). one is international solidarity dating back to the global anti-apartheid and anti-colonial movements. another has been asylum and migration issues that gained increased centrality since the 1980s, as a result of sweden restricting its policies in these areas and of growing racism towards immigrants and racialised people in sweden. the third site has been specific mobilisations against neo-nazi and neo-fascist organisations and activism. while these sites have remained important for mobilisation in the last decade or, as in the case of asylum and migration, even expanded, we also observe significant transformations. the most important one is growth of urban justice mobilisations in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas whose inhabitants are subject to racialisation (sometimes called “urban youth activism,” cf. rosales & ålund, 2017). another transformation has had to do with the increasingly intersectional character of solidarities across different mobilisations, with intersectional feminist, lgbtq and trans movements articulating anti-racist and intersectional power analyses. these considerations, derived both from the literature and the field, allowed us to identify the following anti-racist social justice struggles in sweden today as relevant for our study: migration rights and “no border” networks; urban justice movements located in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas; indigenous and national minority movements; and intersectional feminist, lgbtq and trans movements.6 in terms of the ways of engaging with legal issues, our sample included people involved in a variety of organisations: some are mainly law-centred and have legal activities at their core; for others, legal practices are just one form of mobilisation around a specific issue; still others operate as networks 5 in many respects, our definition has also been reflected in the emerging literature of this new wave of anti-racism (groglopo et al., 2015) or social movements more generally (peterson et al., 2018) that have been active in sweden in the last decade. however, there are still only a few studies that have analysed recent development in the movement. previous studies often cover time up to the first decade of 2000 (jämte, 2013; malmsten, 2007). 6 this research project has also grown out of our participation in some of these movements. one of the authors, sager, has been engaged in migration rights movements for many years. one of the tensions experienced in this work has been between the identification of the legal regulation of mobility as the very source of exclusion from rights, safety and autonomy, and the everyday practices and short-term goals focusing on “making it through” these very regulations (see e.g., nordling et. al., 2017; sager, 2018). maja sager & marta kolankiewicz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 538 bringing together activist lawyers working for and with social movements. most of the interviewees are lawyers or law students; two have no legal education but have dealt with legal issues and legal advice as activists. many of these practitioners have themselves written about their approach to legal practices as well as the significance of the turn towards movement lawyering for struggles for social justice in sweden (e.g., al-khamisi, 2015; alkhamisi & kakaee, 2019; osman & herskovits, 2018). in this sense, their approach to legal practice is often politically vocal. the process of juridification in the swedish context one can say that movement lawyering becomes necessary as a result of the lack of a kind of real grounded presence of welfare institutions and state authorities that actually show their role for disadvantaged groups. (interview transcript) in sweden, an ongoing transformation of the conditions within which new social movements engage in the legal arena has been observed (taxén, 2017). this transformation has been identified as a process of “juridification” and described as a gradual shift towards a legal discourse in the arenas that previously had been dominated by other discourses, such as political or ideological discourses (cf. brännström, 2009, 2017). up to the 1970s, the role of the courts was mainly defined as implementing and interpreting legislation established through the parliamentary process. thereafter, the role of the courts and the law in general started to change, and this change accelerated after sweden’s accession to the european union in the 1990s (brännström, 2017, p. 61; 2019, p. 7). as a result, the role of the courts has shifted slightly towards that of monitoring and regulating the political arena and its compliance with legal regulations. issues that before would have been debated in political, ideological, economic, social or cultural terms started to be guided and dominated by legal language, arguments and rationale (brännström, 2019, p. 9). the juridification coincides and in some ways correlates with the ongoing, gradual dismantling of the swedish welfare state. this development, described as “the end of swedish exceptionalism” (schierup & ålund, 2011, p. 56), has taken place in the last few decades, when sweden transitioned from “the exemplary welfare state” towards “a deepening inequality [that] has been produced through market-driven politics of deregulation, privatisation and changes in the taxation regime favouring the well off and skinning the already disadvantaged on the margins of the social welfare system” producing “precarisation of work, citizenship and livelihoods” (schierup, ålund & neergaard, 2017, pp. 12-13). our interviewees understand activists’ and social movements’ turn to the law as being a result of these transformations: critical legal practices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 539 when the welfare state withdraws, then the result is that one instead has to take singular issues to court as individual cases and appeal to authorities … then one has to use the rights legislation that exists, like claiming ‘i have a right to this’ and make a trial instead of just having these things provided [by the welfare system] as it used to be in sweden before. (interview transcript) in this context, the appeal to the law and the court as an arena for justice struggles can be understood as a result of both the lack of the social security network that traditionally has been provided by the welfare state in sweden and an individualisation of justice claims, which is sometimes described as characteristic of an expansion of rights-based mobilisation of justice struggles (brännström, 2017, pp. 66-73), as expressed in one of the interviews: now, every person is the architect of their own fortune; neoliberalism has individualised everything anyway. so then maybe it feels more reasonable to go to court than to organise collectively? (interview transcript) at the same time, while disadvantaged communities are particularly affected by the withdrawal of the welfare state, they might even in the past have been subjected to a lack of substantial access to social rights and to policing and state repression. for these communities, the state has rarely at any point meant safety and justice. disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods are one example of this, with the experience of racist stigmatisation, and social and economic marginalisation (rosales & ålund, 2017, p. 353). many of the interviewees have roots in these communities. another example is that of asylum-seekers and irregular migrants who are entangled between the constant necessity of proving deservingness of belonging and the vulnerability inherent to the condition of deportability (e.g., sager et al., 2016; söderman, 2019). yet another example is that of roma, sami and trans communities, all of them with different histories of state violence.7 for these communities, the welfare state has represented an ambiguity: on the one hand, a promise of inclusion into the structures of social safety; on the other hand, a history of control, surveillance and stigmatisation. thus, our interviewees are drawing on experiences of social movements whose relations with the state have been characterised by much more ambivalence and less history of cooperation with the welfare state than what has been characteristic of traditional swedish labour movements or the mainstream feminist movement. for these activists the lack of equal access is about a continuous lack – rather than a recent withdrawal of equal access to welfare state functions. 7 for the indigenous sami population, this is the history of centuries of settler colonialism (see lundmark, 2008). for roma and traveller groups, it is a history of policies shifting between exclusion and forced assimilation (see svanberg & tydén, 2005). for trans people, the acknowledgement by the state has meant a recognition that is strongly conditioned by medical terms (see alm, 2000; bremer, 2011). maja sager & marta kolankiewicz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 540 for social movements, the process of juridification has had a range of effects with varying phases and aspects (gustafsson & vinthagen, 2010, p. 645). its impact on the ways in which social movements work towards transformation has been discussed in sweden since the 1970s, initially in what was called “legal strategy debate” (in swedish: legalstrategidebatten) in which marxist activists warned about the risks that the process of legal interpretation would overshadow the ideological core of the political conflict and eliminate its other – cultural, moral, political or economic – aspects. this kind of pessimist approach to law (mathiesen, 2005) has been challenged by postmodern understandings of state and law and the foucauldian definitions of power, which opened up more heterogeneous, complex and nuanced approaches to the practice of law by social movements (gustafsson & vinthagen, 2010, pp. 648-649). although our research participants’ approaches to the potential and risks of the process of juridification vary, there seems to be a consensus about the prevalence of a legal turn and its perceptible effects on social justice struggles. recurring is also the caution with which juridification is approached. such doubts are also prevalent in debates among activists and in social and political movements (e.g., kakaee, 2018; katzin, 2018), something that is also present in our material: i believe that juridification is dangerous, because it becomes very elitist and also it creates strong feelings of powerlessness… [it] might be the biggest ideological scourge of our times, exactly because it shifts ideological issues to seem like a question of interpretation, or like a kind of object for objective assessment – like that ‘it is like this or like that.’ and that in this way underlying conflicts of interest or conflicts of power are concealed. (interview transcript) the issue of social movements engaging in legal strategies tends to be phrased as an either/or question, both by the movements themselves (one example of this is the above-mentioned legal strategy debate in sweden) and in the literature on social movements and the law (see smart, 1989, for a feminist sceptical approach): is it most strategic to turn to legal practices in a social justice struggle – or not? in this article, we are inspired by the legal mobilisation perspective (mccann, 2006, in the us, and gustafsson & vinthagen, 2010, in sweden) and take our point of departure in the realisation that legal practices constitute an important part of social movements’ work. instead of exploring the potential and risks for social movements engaging in legal practices, our focus is on conditions, strategies, (subversive) uses and reflections in relation to law. as a consequence, the article tries to decentre the law, by showing how legal practices need to be understood as one among a range of strategies, often subordinated to others, and always specific to the context. at the same time, we attempt to show that law is an important frame that conditions the subjectivities, existence and struggles for justice (cf. mccann’s discussion on how law is not external to citizens, based on thompson, 1975). we build here on feminist understandings of subjects, critical legal practices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 541 subjectivities and resistance as emerging always in relation to frames that constitute, restrain and condition them (e.g., butler, 1997). turning to legal practices – conditions and ambivalences in the following, we present some examples of legal practices with which our research participants engage. the main aim is to illustrate the complexity of strategic routes and choices involved in social movements’ engagements with law. the examples encapsulate the sometimes messy conditions under which activists and organisations feel compelled or forced to resort to the law. an important point is that it is difficult to separate the aims of the long-term mobilisation at the core of these movements from the situations of immediate urgency they respond to – the immediacy of situations often seems to require acute legal interventions that might even stand in tension with the overarching aims. the first example comes from two interviewees who are engaged in an organisation that offers legal support to social movements and to individuals fighting structural inequalities, and concerns their work against an eviction of a camp set up by eastern european roma people. it was a camp that was located on the outskirts of the city centre; around 150 people lived there. there were lots of complaints to the environmental department [ed] by angry people, so the ed worked hard to get rid of the camp. (interview transcript) the interviewee recounts the different legal ways the city’s environmental department (ed) tried to enable an eviction, and their organisation’s role in advising how to halt the process. the ed… tried to evict the camp by saying that it was an environmental hazard… and then we appealed that decision… [in the appeal], we tried to write a lot about human rights and the roma question and how roma people have been subjected to forced displacement over the years. but, in the end, we won based on formalities. we won because the decision to evict the camp was not sufficiently well communicated to the inhabitants in the camp. so that was a bit of a shame. it would have been better to win based on something else. but, at least, the camp still remained. (interview transcript) the story of the struggle for the roma camp is one of many stories involving appeals to courts or other legal interventions with different state agencies. it is typical to our material in how the issues placed at the centre by the activists (here, roma rights and state violence against roma) have little place in legal practice and tend to be replaced by formal issues (here, the formalities of how decisions were communicated to the camp-dwellers). it is also typical in that legal practice is accompanied by other types of activism. the mobilisation maja sager & marta kolankiewicz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 542 against the eviction was developing among the people who lived in the camp, in cooperation with some local allied activist groups, at the same time as the lawyers were struggling to stop or postpone the eviction. eventually – after months of occupation, protests, demonstrations and appeals – the struggle failed and the camp was evicted (persdotter, 2019). the appeal against the eviction decision illustrates a basic position from which many of the interviewees work: one in which the law becomes a response to events understood as state violence. the legal practices are a sort of self-defence against oppressive and unjust state treatment. such selfdefence can take different forms: direct responses, as in the case above, or legal advice to disadvantaged groups, as in the next example. an interviewee working with lgbtq asylum-seekers describes his practice as follows: i give legal advice to newly arrived lgbtq migrants, mostly asylum-seekers… there can be quite a lot of different issues, but most of it is about the asylum process, like how it works. it might be someone whose asylum application has been refused, or someone who needs support to prepare for the asylum investigation at the migration agency, or wants to prepare before appearing in the migration court of appeal… a very common question is that the person who seeks advice has just applied for asylum, maybe a couple of months before, and wonders what is going to happen. they might feel, already after maybe three months, that the waiting time is very long. they feel anxious about what it is they will have to go through… they might think like ‘my sexuality or my gender identity is not really something i can present evidence of’… so i try to say that of course there is no hard evidence, but the only thing that you have is your own story. i encourage them to structure the story as clearly as possible in their own head, so that they have it prepared when they come to the migration agency. (interview transcript) the interviewee tries to prepare lgbtq asylum-seekers for a process in which the very fundamental recognition of a particular aspect of one’s identity as an lgbtq asylum-seeker is dependent on the capacity to narrate one’s self in the language and frames imposed by the authorities and the law. legal advice is conditioned by these interpretations of the law by the migration agency: my advice is normally to arrange the story about one’s experiences in a chronological way, because that is the structure that the migration agency wants… i think that the migration agency’s way of handling lgbtq cases in general is very dissatisfactory, and far too grounded in stereotypical ideas about gender identities... there is a very narrow idea about what an lgbtq person should have experienced. it is difficult for many case workers to accept that a person has not felt shame or guilt when realising… one’s sexuality or gender identity. so that is something that the investigator often really goes for then, like ‘aha, but how could you not have felt shame? that is remarkable since the society you come from condemns this identity so much!’… it is clear that the investigators expect this kind of very specific process: that one has to have felt a little bit different than other kids, then at some point one should have started to critical legal practices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 543 identify why one has felt different, and connected this to one’s sexuality or gender identity and then also started to question it, felt confused for a period of time, maybe felt guilt or shame, and then finally arrived at a kind of acceptance. and then, one is expected to be able to reflect and describe this whole process. (interview transcript) while staking a claim through legal processes always entails submission to a particular kind of framing (cf. smart, 1989), for asylum-seekers it actually means living up to the migration agency’s understandings of credibility (wikström, 2014; wikström & johansson, 2013). this kind of legal practice is conditioned by another type of vulnerability with regard to the law: for pending or refused asylum-seekers the legal process could be described as the only possible route for being granted legal subject position in the first place. to be admitted to the community of subjects, the condition is to succeed in this process and within its tightly regulated framework of interpretations. another example of legal practice is an action for damages in a case that started with journalists uncovering the fact that a police district in southern sweden had kept a secret register of roma people. while this type of practice is not conditioned in the same way by a situation of emergency as the two above examples, it can still be considered to be an immediate response to oppressive state practices. when it was revealed in 2013, we had already been working with roma issues and roma rights. and we had identified this as a minority group exposed to human rights abuses. we had established contacts within the roma community. so when this was exposed… members of the roma community were very upset and we immediately started having a dialogue with roma representatives. and they also contacted us in regards to this. and we discussed how we should approach it: ‘what is the right way to proceed?’ and together we took the decision to wait and see how the already established system would approach the issue. because official investigations were initiated right away… and then these different investigations presented their decisions and none of them could establish that the register had been based on ethnicity… the police were criticised and damages of 5,000 sek were awarded to all of those who had been registered. but at the same time it was concluded that, despite the fact that basically there were only roma people on the register, the register was not compiled on ethnic grounds. (interview transcript) in this case, the decision to undertake a legal action was a reaction to the state’s failure to recognise and remedy its own oppressive practice. this failure was identified both by the roma community and by the organisation that supported them as a lack of recognition of a specific character of the register – that is, the ethnic grounds for the register. in this sense, the legal practice is a response to the failure of the state to be able to grant recognition in a situation where a minority group theoretically holds rights. these three cases instantiate different legal practices: from appeals to decisions by authorities, through legal advice, to civil action against the maja sager & marta kolankiewicz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 544 police. moreover, they illustrate positions from which people represented by these activists resort to legal practices: that of their extreme disadvantage in front of the state and the law. our understanding of such engagements with the law has a point of departure in one main tension: between a critical approach to the law and the judiciary as a space for social justice struggles and the above-described positions that are already defined by the law and from which the law cannot be ignored.8 critical practices and rearticulations of law we try to show that the politics… that the law is political… and that sometimes maybe we should not use the law. (interview transcript) feminist scholars have questioned the centrality of law to the regulation of social relations and its potential for changing these (lacey, 1998, p. 8). similarly, carol smart does not limit her critique to problems internal to the law and judicial logics, but claims that the role legal knowledge has been given even in critical discussions is itself problematic. she writes that “part of the power that law can exercise resides in the authority we accord it” (smart, 1989, p. 25). this is reflected in our material when interviewees express concerns with centring the law and the court as the main arenas on which social justice struggles should take place. interviewees underline, for instance, that legal work is just one strategy among many and that the practice in itself can have many other results than the strictly legal ones: the legal work is just a strategy. there [in the neighbourhood in which the interviewee has organised socially disadvantaged youth during a period of conflicts with the police] we worked with culture, we worked with popular education, we worked with study support, we organised demonstrations, we worked with the language, with media; we wanted to be our own voice for what was going on and give another image of the events. so, of course, that became a much broader work which could mobilise more people… the legal work is just one more dimension in that work. the danger is when one overestimates the capacity of law to change these issues around unemployment or vulnerability or… ‘well, yes, now this court has said it is not allowed to beg in the streets, so then we can’t do anything about that.’ (interview transcript) 8 we are not addressing here more specific discussions about alternative dispute resolution that in many contexts has been increasingly used as a way of shifting from the court as a main arena in the search for justice. this is partly because these were not mentioned by our participants, and partly because of the traditional central role of administrative arenas in the swedish welfare state (reichel, 2011). it is, however, important to stress that many of these methods, such as ombuds, mediation or arbitration, have traditionally been very important for movements such as trade unions or tenants’ interest organisations. for more discussion on alternative dispute resolution in sweden, see lindblom (2008). critical legal practices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 545 we understand the interviewee’s account of his legal practice as a way to decentre law. another informant describes vividly how her legal advice point, in another neighbourhood in a large city, has become in itself an example of how legal practice might evolve as being productive in unexpected ways: i regularly set up my own legal advice point in a library in a socioeconomically disadvantaged neighbourhood… i thought it would be purely legal issues… but it is just as much a meeting point. people come and say ‘i have a legal issue,’ but… they just want to hang out… so that really confirms my idea that the law is much more than paragraphs… we talk about police violence, about the privatisation of public housing, about gentrification, exclusion – even children’s education, that i don’t know anything about!… it has become a meeting point. (interview transcript) here, the impact of the practice is not limited to its legal effects; instead, its other aspects are stressed. this experience and articulation of legal practice can be understood as another way of decentring law: the meeting space that this lawyer’s practice has established is having consequences and effects in people’s lives, regardless of what happens with the legal case that took them there. the interviewees who define their engagement in terms of movement lawyering are most explicit with placing legal practice on the margin in relation to other tools in social justice struggles. in this approach, lawyers are treated instrumentally and their work is understood as subordinated to the movement and communities that have the priority to define problems at stake. one lawyer argues: i believe that one needs to be very humble as a lawyer and not believe that ‘i am the one who knows best because i know the law’… in this case, we chose to take the point of departure from the movements and the communities and these people’s wishes and to see what is legally possible to do… and i believe that, when it comes to these kinds of questions, those who have been subjected [to the oppressive practice] should be the ones who own the problem. (interview transcript) critical reflections on neutrality and objectivity of the judicial arena another central issue that emerges when social justice struggles take place in the judicial arena has to do with the inherent tendency to depoliticise conflicts when approaching them as matters of objective and ideologically neutral interpretations. this has been analysed in the swedish context by moa bladini (2016) and hanna wikström (2014), who discuss problems with the positivist ideal of objectivity on the epistemological level. they show how the feminist contributions to discussions about knowledge-as-situated (haraway, 1988) are particularly pertinent to law. bladini suggests a form of maja sager & marta kolankiewicz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 546 situated knowledge as an ideal practice of lawyers and judges within which the ideal of objectivity can be kept at the centre while the approach to actually achieving it is more pragmatic. wikström (2014) offers a critical insight into how practices of belief, interpretation and knowledge production are central to power structures produced in and through the legal arena – she applies miranda fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to understand what is at stake in the clash between asylum-seekers’ own accounts of their experiences and the judgements made by the migration authorities. many of the interviewees are engaged in pursuing justice for people who are excluded by invisible structures by the state’s negligence, or by the law itself: undocumented migrants, indigenous people, marginalised eu citizens, and trans people, are groups whose life situations and access to rights have been defined by judicial regulations and by legal categorisations. the experiences of these features of the law – its ability to withdraw, informally but also formally, and its sometimes violent effects of producing vulnerability – are a source of scepticism for several interviewees. this makes them question the dominant picture of the swedish judicial system as characterised by a particularly strong tradition of objectivity, a picture that collides with their experiences of the law as deeply implicated in structural injustices. one of the interviewees interrogates law’s neutrality with specific attention to racist structures: that has probably been the toughest thing for me to see during these years, when i feel like i have to bite my lip not to let it affect me emotionally: the times when it has become very clear to me that there is a racist undertone in all this. or when i have noticed also that, damn it, we are not… equal before the law… it doesn’t always have to be racism that makes us unequal, but often it is. so that means we are not equal before the law! the one thing that is supposed to be the same for everybody, and make us equals, if anything. (interview transcript) several interviewees are also doubtful whether their critique can be articulated through the legal system at all. they do not lack examples of specific cases in which the law has been applied successfully to address issues of sexual violence, racism or discrimination. still, the victories can sometimes be understood as contributing to granting legitimacy to problematic discourses and institutions of the law: the thing, or the problem, when people try to pursue social change through the law… is that they often choose cases that are perfect, like totally clean. cases where the person who is the victim has done everything right, and the perpetrator has done everything wrong, and then they win that case, and the result becomes this feeling that ‘yes, there is justice!’ (interview transcript) this kind of critique of the law and the judicial arena is crucial for understanding the interviewees’ cautiousness with carrying on social justice struggles in courts. critical legal practices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 547 i think one should work with those cases. i don’t say one shouldn’t. i don’t say that organisations that do that are doing anything wrong; but if one does it, i think it is important to also problematise the court as an institution. to have a discussion about the role of the law and its function and how it operates – how it reinforces power structures and how it reinforces an image of these power structures, of itself really, as a guarantee for justice. (interview transcript) yet, when describing the work around court cases, one of the interviewees shows that, since the effective practice of law for social justice is dependent on broad mobilisation and activities in other arenas than the judiciary, legal cases can also have effects beyond the court’s decision. in this sense, legal practices consist in re-politicising the issues at stake, by making visible how individual instances of injustice are symptomatic of broader structural problems and by placing them in a political and social context. such repoliticisation is often an effect of a coordinated work on different arenas: the judicial one, the political one and in the media: i think there was a need to illustrate [the problem] in some way to the public, in order for it to become an important social issue. and it is very effective to use a trial, as it gives dramaturgy that the media easily buys. this is just how it works. and it brings matters to the fore. (interview transcript) thus, court cases might be used strategically to open up a political debate about certain forgotten or marginalised issues. thanks to the rhythm of legal proceedings, it becomes possible to keep them alive by creating a kind of media spectacle around them: this was a strategic litigation, in a way: that the case in the end was not about obtaining redress for those we represented, but to reach the bigger question. to make the discrimination visible, but also to obtain redress for all of those who were affected… things happen [during a trial in national courts]. we come with an indictment, the state responds, there is a trial in court, an appeal, another trial in the court of appeal, etc. so, all the time there are things happening, and because of this we feel that we can keep up the debate and discuss these serious questions. (interview transcript) this kind of legal intervention is consciously used as a strategy that, in order to be effective, needs to be constantly placed in the broader political and social context. what is criticised as a problem with the judicial approach – the focus on an individual victim (brown, 1995; spade, 2015) or individual perpetrator (blee, 2007; freeman, 1995) – might be strategically turned into an advantage, when a particular political and social problem is effectively illustrated with individual cases. thereby, structural problems are translated into stories with faces and names. critical legal practices work here in two directions: on the one hand, they translate and lift up individual cases to make broader social justice struggles more concrete for the public; on the other, they attempt to contextualise concrete legal cases, showing how these need to maja sager & marta kolankiewicz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 548 be understood as parts of a larger social or political problem, like in the following reflection: in my opinion, judges in court are people who pick up on the general political debate, so i believe that the media attention we got influenced the result of the case. this is why we worked hard so that there would be multidirectional action there… and there were demonstrations and campaign films on youtube… it was a huge work, this too. (interview transcript) another way of engaging with entanglements between politics and the law is to disclose the political nature of the judiciary and legal practice and to question the actual neutrality of the legal system or of some laws. one central contribution of the movement lawyering is this kind of work for repoliticising the legal, as expressed in a report written by one of the founders of the network: this is a critical account of the law and the text is grounded in the politics of law as it does not draw a clear distinction between the law and politics… the point of departure of this report is an understanding of the law as highly politicized, in how it is created, applied and how it influences all of us. (al-khamisi, 2015) law as a resource i want to make law accessible. you know, it drives me crazy that it is so… that it belongs to an elite! (interview transcript) moving outside of the inherent tensions within the legal arena, there is another set of concerns present throughout our material. it is an understanding of the law as a resource that is unequally distributed in society and the judiciary as a centre of power that is dominated by an elite. these concerns represent a more materialist approach that treats law similarly to other material resources. interviewees address this inequality with demands or practices that we will describe as a redistribution of access to the legal arena. several interviewees identify the unequally distributed knowledge of law as a central problem in terms of access to justice, equal treatment and more generally in terms of an individual’s or a community’s relationship to the state. hence, many legal practices consist of education and advice for different groups. the most obvious example is legal advice for asylumseekers. but educational activities organised by the interviewees are also directed to people from disadvantaged communities, who despite their formal rights often lack actual access to justice. the case in point is that the law works like this: these are our rights, but these are not equal for all. so, even though the law should formally apply to all the citizens, that is not the case, because your personal capacity to make use of your rights is critical legal practices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 549 almost crucial for whether you will be able to do it or not. and some people live in very difficult situations, where they often really urgently need to be able to use their rights, but they are also often the ones lacking in legal support, while the upper or affluent class of society often has access to very good lawyers. […] this is in a way a painful entry-point to the law. it is something that one can make use of in order to achieve some kind of political change. (interview transcript) moreover, the idea of redistribution of the law goes beyond the notions of access to justice or equality before the law and includes practices of extending the application and interpretation of existing laws. according to such an approach, it is not enough to pass laws that are aimed at eliminating different forms of injustice, like anti-discrimination legislation; case law also needs to be developed for these laws to be effective and not misused: it really is a challenge to create an impact for the legislation that we already have, for example the legislation on discrimination. then someone is needed to work with these cases, and who is going to do that? civil society cannot do it. the discrimination ombudsman says that they mainly work on strategic cases… and then, of course, it will be the most vulnerable who won’t have the capacity. (interview transcript) this approach to law as a resource that needs to be redistributed has often grown from interviewees’ own situated routes towards the practice of law. the interviewees who underscored their backgrounds in disadvantaged or racialised communities as decisive in their choice to become lawyers pointed out that the maldistribution of the law is already visible in law schools: as soon as i entered the classroom at the law school it was very striking how homogenous it was. in my cohort i think i was one of three black people in a class of 300 people. and that is not exactly representative of what society looks like. and i think that is a problem that continues into work life, like who sits in the courts and passes the judgements, et cetera. and i felt that there was a certain language in the law studies programme and an expectation about who we would be as students, expectations of certain shared references… like when a lecturer says: ‘when you are going to inherit’ [laughing], and i am very conscious of the fact that i will not inherit anything. and maybe it is reasonable that it happens, since a certain group is overrepresented in the classroom; but during the first two years i was feeling: what am i doing here? (interview transcript) thus, the issue of redistribution is about who owns the judicial field, who is overrepresented in it and who is excluded from it. this brings us back to the ways in which the interviewees are embedded in new social justice movements in sweden and to the importance of the relation between redistribution and representation for their struggles. maja sager & marta kolankiewicz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 550 concluding discussion: decentring, re-politicising and redistribution in this article, we have traced the interviewees’ conceptualisations of what they “are doing” when they act in the legal arena. our point of departure has been that resorting to law is often a response to subjection to an unjust legal system, to an oppressive treatment by the state or to the situation of disadvantage and deprivation. thus, rather than a strategically chosen tool for social justice, legal practice could be understood as a kind of self-defence. while there is a variation among the interviewees in their views on law and in their commitment to it, all of them engage in a critique of law as a tool for social justice struggles. their reflections on their own legal practices are thus informed by this very fundamental ambivalence between the ideological commitment to the critique of law and the position from which they act, in which it is not possible to ignore the legal arena. rather than taking a stance for or against the law as a tool for social justice struggles, we have attempted to understand the methods and the effects of legal practices that grow from this kind of tension. we have done this by analysing not only practices themselves, but also the ways in which those who engage in them make sense of them as a part of their commitment to broader political issues. while we cannot analyse actual transformative effects of the critical legal practice based on our material only, the accounts of our interviewees indeed indicate that both practical strategies and ways of accounting for these aim at subverting and challenging the law while at the same time using it. throughout the analysis we have conceptualised these strategies for critically engaging with law as decentring, re-politicising and redistribution. decentring takes place when both methods and effects of the legal practice go beyond the legal arena. in this way the interviewees resist centring the law, something that has been identified as one of the core risks for social movements when engaging in the legal arena. such decentring is achieved when legal practices are subordinated to other elements of social struggles through an instrumentalisation of the law whereby it is treated as just one tool among others or as a “necessary evil.” decentred legal practices serve as responses to the needs that appear in activities that are more central to social struggles – such as political debate, protests, and other forms of mobilisation and resistance. re-politicisation has to do with reintroducing the political to the legal arena, which is often criticised as creating a semblance of neutrality and objectivity. it can take the form of a more general critique through which the law and its institutions are treated as reflective of society and inherent power relations. but it also happens when the justice claims made in the legal arena are staked in a way that goes beyond the individual case and make structural injustices visible. finally, everyday practices of legal advice and education are often grounded in an understanding of the law as a resource that is unevenly critical legal practices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 551 distributed in society, and thereby contributes – similarly to other forms of maldistribution – to sustain specific power relations. seen in this way, these legal practices are not only about access to justice, but also about redistribution of resources and power in society. acknowledgements we would like to express our gratitude to the research participants who generously shared their time, thoughts and analysis. we would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback. references akademin för rörelsejuridik [the academy for movement lawyering]. 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(1998). how does law matter for social movements? in b. garth, f. levine & a. sarat (eds.), how does law matter? (pp. 76-108). northwestern university press. mccann, m. (2006). law and social movements: contemporary perspectives. annual review of law and social science, 2(1), 17-38. nordling, v., sager, m., & söderman, e. (2017). from citizenship to mobile commons: reflections on the local struggles of undocumented migrants in the city of malmö, sweden, citizenship studies, 21(6), 710-726. osman, f., & herskovits, j. (2018). vem har rätt [who is/have right]? [audio podcast]. arena idé. https://arenaide.se/vem-har-ratt persdotter, m. (2019). free to move along: on the urbanisation of cross-border mobility controls: a case of roma “eu migrants” in malmö, sweden. malmö universitet, urbana studier. peterson, a., thörn, h., & wahlström, m. (2018). sweden 1950–2015: contentious politics and social movements between confrontation and conditioned cooperation. in f. mikkelsen, k. kjeldstadli & s. nyzell (eds.), popular struggle and democracy in scandinavia (pp. 377-432). palgrave studies in european political sociology. reichel, j. (2011). domstol och/eller förvaltning [court and/or administration]. svensk juristtidning, 4, 440-450. rosales, r. l., & ålund, a. (2017). renaissance from the margins: urban youth activism in sweden. in c.-u. schierup, a. ålund & a. neergaard (eds), reimagineering the nation: essays on twenty-first-century sweden (pp. 351-374). peter lang gmbh, internationaler verlag der wissenschaften. sager, m. (2018). struggles around representation and in/visibility in everyday migrant irregularity in sweden, nordic journal of migration research, 8(3), 175-182. sager, m., holgersson, h., & öberg, k. (eds.), (2016). irreguljär migration i sverige: rättigheter, vardagserfarenheter, motstånd och statliga kategoriseringar [irregular critical legal practices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 2022, 534-553 553 migration in sweden: rights, everyday experiences, resistance and categorisations by the state]. daidalos. schierup, c.-u., & ålund, a. (2011). the end of swedish exceptionalism? citizenship, neoliberalism and the politics of exclusion, race & class, 53(1), 45-64. schierup, c.-u., ålund, a. & neergaard, a. (2017). reimagineering the nation: crisis and social transformation in 21st century sweden. an introduction. in c.-u. schierup, a. ålund & a. neergaard (eds), reimagineering the nation: essays on twenty-first-century sweden (pp. 940). peter lang gmbh, internationaler verlag der wissenschaften. smart, c. (1989). feminism and the power of law. routledge. söderman, e. (2019). resistance through acting: ambivalent practices of the no border musical. faculty of social sciences, lund university. spade, d. (2015). normal life. administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law. duke university press. svanberg, i., & tydén, m. (2005). tusen år av invandring: en svensk kulturhistoria [a thousand years of immigration: a swedish cultural history]. dialogos. taxén, o. (2017). juridifiering. om förskjutningen av makt från politik till juridik [juridification. on the shift of power from politics to law]. arena idé. https://arenaide.se/rapporter/juridifiering-om-forskjutningen-av-makt-fran-politik-tilljuridik thompson, e. p. (1975). whigs and hunters: the origins of the black act. pantheon. wikström, h. (2014). gender, culture and epistemic injustice. nordic journal of migration research, 4(4), 210-218. wikström, h., & johansson, t. (2013). credibility assessments as ‘normative leakage’: asylum applications, gender and class. social inclusion, 1(2), 92-101. williams, p. j. (1991). the alchemy of race and rights. harvard university press. cox final galley nov 18 15 correspondence address: laurence cox, department of sociology, national university of ireland, maynooth, county kildare, ireland; email: laurence.cox@nuim.ie issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015 scholarship and activism: a social movements perspective laurence cox national university of ireland, maynooth ireland abstract this article revisits the debate over barker and cox’s (2011) use of gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals to contrast academic and activist modes of theorizing about social movements. often misread as an attack on personal choices in career and writing, the distinction aimed to highlight the different purposes, audiences, and social relationships entailed by these different forms of theorizing. discourses which take ‘scholarship’ as their starting point position ‘activist’ as a personal choice within an institutional field, and substitute this moral commitment for a political assessment of its effects. by contrast, few academics have undergone the political learning curve represented by social movements. this may explain the widespread persistence – beyond any intellectual or empirical credibility – of a faith in ‘critical scholarship’ isolated from agency, an orientation to policy makers and mainstream media as primary audiences or an unquestioned commitment to existing institutional frameworks as pathways to substantial social change. drawing on over three decades of movement participation and two of academic work, this article explores two processes of activist training within the academy. it also explores the politics of different experiences of theoretical publishing for social movements audiences. this discussion focuses on the control of the “means of mental production” (marx, 1965), and the politics of distribution. the conclusion explores the broader implications of these experiences for the relationship between movements and research. keywords social movements; learning and knowledge production; gramsci; organic intellectuals; activist scholarship introduction: what have the romans ever done for us? when colin barker and i posed this question 15 years ago (barker and cox, 2011; hereafter referred to as “romans”), our point was not that academic social movement theory contributed nothing to understanding social scholarship and activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015   35 movements;1 it was to reflect critically on what its contribution is. we adopted gramsci’s (1971) distinction between “traditional intellectuals” (those in social relationships tied to pre-existing social groups but which have since become mystified or naturalized and appear as standing above society) and “organic intellectuals” (those created by new social groups, including the representatives both of modern capital and of social movements from below). we characterized the social relationships structuring different ways of theorizing social movements as: (a) academic – ultimately shaped by the social relations of academia, such as employment, credentialization, scholarly publication, funding proposals, etc.; and (b) activist – ultimately shaped by the relationships involved in social movements.2 we went on to argue that these social positions were allied to different modes of constructing knowledge for different social purposes, which shape the form of that knowledge. drawing on various concrete cases, in particular the experience of the southern non-violent coordinating committee (sncc),3 we analyzed “movement theorizing” as “an aspect of the work that people do as they try to create institutions (movements) that will enable them (indirectly, through a change in the social order) to meet needs that are not currently being met” (barker and cox, 2011, p. 31). the academic and activist responses to these arguments were revealing.4 on the one hand, it has been my own most-cited piece, despite circulating almost exclusively in samizdat (via the print proceedings of a then-obscure academic/activist conference, my own far more obscure website, and in a compressed catalan translation) for a decade before republication on a finnish non-governmental organization (ngo) website.5 more than anything else i have written, activist researchers have mentioned it to me as expressing something they recognized from their own, often difficult, encounters within academia: social movements are knowledge producers in their own right (eyerman and jamison, 1991; wainwright, 1994), but this is rarely recognized within the everyday social relations of academic knowledge production.                                                                                                                           1 in this article i use the term academia to distinguish the institutionalized social relationships of universities and other third level institutions from other forms of, for example, research, teaching, and theorizing which take place elsewhere, such as in social movement contexts (cox, 2014a). 2 there is by now quite a body of literature on the various meanings of ‘activist’ (e.g., bobel, 2007; cortese, 2015) within movements, where it can be variously a desirable or unwanted designation. as in “romans”, i am using it here to distinguish forms of intellectual practice which have an organic connection to social movements and collective action from those which do not.   3 sncc was a key organization in the us civil rights movement. 4 for recent critical reflections on the piece, see cresswell & spandler, 2013; and mckeown, 2012, p. 25. 5 consistent with this, many responses came in the form of conference discussions, anonymous reviewer comments, etc., rather than conscious theoretical statements. sullivan (2004) is an early example of the latter. an extensive contemporary response, highlighting other work of mine, is jasper (2015).   laurence cox studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015 36 on the other hand, purely academic researchers were often uncomfortable at being asked to apply the sociology of knowledge – the critical exploration of how the social relations within which ‘knowledge’ of any kind, whether beliefs about health, journalistic commonplaces, natural science, or religion is produced – to their own work. like other social actors, challenging taken-forgranted attitudes to routine activities is often unwelcome (garfinkel, 1967). the most common of these defensive responses did not advance a different sociology of knowledge, but rather (a) denied any division between academia and activism, as though planning a direct action was fundamentally the same thing as submitting a grant proposal; or (b) interpreted the distinction as being about the moral legitimacy of personal choices to operate in different modes. when ‘critical’, ‘reflective’ researchers reduce the social relationships within which they work to questions of individual moral justification, this points to the social construction of academic realities (berger and luckmann, 1967). most such responses, in the difficult circumstances of the post-thatcher british university in particular, came from academics unused to active dialogue with other knowledge producers (such as social movements) and thus often generalized their own immersion in the narrow world of the university to a perspective on the social world. one ‘critical theorist’ publicly denied (at an activist/academic workshop on critical pedagogy) that anyone outside his particular tradition could achieve any distance from taking social reality for granted. others simply treated the social relations of the university as natural and normal (although students have to be taught to master the complex rules of academic production). what was revealed was a deeply unreflexive group of social actors turning a blind eye to the complexities of an academic structure (which under other circumstances they grumbled about while struggling to negotiate successfully), and who were flummoxed by the proposition that there are differences, let alone conflicts, between universities and social movements. more reflexive researchers, grounded in social movements, sought to ‘go beyond’ dichotomies or ‘blur’ boundaries, and here i want to suggest that there is a constitutive confusion. individuals may of course engage in multiple sets of relationships, but it is naive to suggest that knowledge is produced outside of such relationships, or that the ways in which knowledge is produced, the audiences who enable and validate its production and distribution, and the purposes for which it is produced, do not affect both its content and its potential political uses. we may certainly ask if knowledge can be produced in ways that work within both sets of relationships, but this does not free us from such relationships. instead, the real question becomes what the politics of doing so are, and which set of relationships tend to win out under which circumstances. far from denying the existence of movementlinked researchers within academia (which was our situation at the time), a substantial chunk of our “romans” piece was given over to discussing the challenges and contradictions posed by this situation. scholarship and activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015   37 this article returns to these questions after more than a decade of attempting to work out the implications of “romans” as an activist in academia. grounded in personal experience and reflection on practice, it opens with a brief discussion of attempts at changing the shape of the academic field of social movement studies; moves to the ways in which individuals may come to inhabit both sets of social relations (academic and activist) simultaneously; and explores the distribution of knowledge as a strategically central aspect of knowledge production. the discussion concludes by noting some wider implications for the encounter between movements and higher education.6 my particular experience is located between two sets of relationships: firstly the immense collective learning embodied in, and transmitted by, the global ‘movement of movements’ and working-class community activism, which are both in very different ways concerned with processes of learning, reflection, and training as key political tasks; and secondly, the very diverse experiences of european academia around the multiple fields involved in researching social movements, and the particular oddities of the irish university system. i am particularly interested in what happens when movement-based forms of knowledge and action encounter the logics of academic institutions. the article uses ‘backstage’ exchanges in university settings to illustrate the practical ‘common sense’ perspective of (mostly social science) academics and the sorts of contradictions which arise in daily practice. theoretically, it draws on the literatures on movements, and learning and knowledge production (lkp), as they have developed within marxism and feminism, in popular education theory, and in social movements research. a social movements perspective on academic and activist relationships it is certainly possible to enter academia from social movements, albeit far easier in some contexts than others. most people i work with regularly are activists first, and students or academics second; we share a critical distance from university institutions and support each other in negotiating them constructively, while attempting to avoid institutional capture. ‘negotiation’ is, however, a polite word for this process. as e. p. thompson wrote, “one must make one’s sensibility all knobbly – all knees and elbows of susceptibility and refusal – if one is not to be pressed through the grid into the universal mish-mash of the received assumptions of the intellectual culture” (1978, pp. 393-394). raymond williams, similarly, commented of the challenge of combining political commitments elsewhere with work in                                                                                                                           6 some of the experiences discussed here are also examined in cox (2014a) from the perspective of sociology as a discipline. here i consider them from the perspective of social movements. laurence cox studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015 38 academia: “i feel a coarse hard bastard beside [his character matthew price], but more able, i think or hope, to work and push through” (1979, p. 295). some people do start from a purely ‘academic’ identity and then move into political activism, but it is relatively rare, at least in the fields and countries i know, for various reasons. if we do not always and everywhere live in a “social movement society” (meyer and tarrow, 1998), it is nonetheless hard to arrive at university in the 21st century without having been exposed to the fact that our societies are contested. collective struggle and individual dissent is frequent; hence, one must respond either through engagement or through actively avoiding such conflict. ‘not being political’, in other words, is a powerful choice, and those who have distanced themselves from their more critical and engaged peers earlier in life are less likely to change their minds later.7 beyond this, contemporary universities in the global north offer options for imagining that one’s own activity is political by definition (cortese, 2015). for example, academics can readily overestimate their political influence on students. furthermore, while the partial colonization of academia by participants in post-1968 social movements brought many new approaches (rojas, 2004), normal generational processes mean that to be radical, critical, marxist, feminist, and so on, are themselves now often valued positions within university discourse. this has led to the strange phenomenon of academic critics of, for instance, austerity and neoliberalism who contradict their theoretical positions in their daily practice as neoliberal managers, engaged (for example) in active opposition to workplace organizing. one academic, now a professor, asked me in all seriousness, “isn’t it possible to be a radical and just be interested in gradual reforms within the system?,” with the implication that it was per se desirable to be ‘a radical’, whatever one’s actions. this rhetoric replays the broader ‘opinion politics’ of neoliberalism, which disconnects holding opinions from practical collective action, while at the same time endowing them with enormous significance for personal identity and moral worth. both generational and, in ireland, geographical distance from the original contexts where the radical theories selectively drawn on in the academy were produced lead to a disembedding,8 which means that the link between ideas and practice (immediately visible, for example, in the italian reception of gramsci) is broken (cf. hadot, 1995 for historical parallels). from the other side of the division between contemplative and praxisoriented approaches, genuinely reflexive ‘critical scholarship’ involves recognizing that becoming aware of a systematic or structural injustice, nailing it in a hard-hitting piece of writing or publishing high-quality research on it, does not in itself change things. it must ask after the interests                                                                                                                           7 conversely, life history exercises i have carried out regularly show that students who tell themselves that they “haven’t been political” have often grown up in families with more resistance to dominant institutions than they imagine. 8 see cox, in press, on decontextualized readings of gramsci in ireland. scholarship and activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015   39 underpinning particular social institutions, and the collective action (of the powerful, the wealthy, and those with high cultural status) that turn interests into institutions (cox and nilsen, 2014). put another way, there are serious questions of intellectual and empirical credibility of any critique which is either disconnected from agency or unreflectingly relies on existing institutions (policy-makers, media, teaching, etc.) as a tool for the change it seeks. this realization was marx’s starting point some 170 years ago. this is a learning curve which social movements have typically gone through collectively, and far more deeply than in most academic training.9 they have discovered that good arguments and empirical research are only as effective as the social agents who deploy them. it is not even a question of those who have an ‘objective interest’ in resolving the problem in question, but rather of those who are willing to act collectively around it, confront the entrenched interests that are keeping things as they are, and develop the necessary organization to win the ensuing conflicts (touraine, 1981). hence my own practice is pragmatic in this sense: the practical, “thisworldly” meaning of critique (marx, 1969a) has to support those social forces that actually embody a challenge to injustice and oppression; in other words, to help generate knowledge which would be useful to social movements from below. this, for me, is the only intellectually serious and politically credible position from which it makes sense for radicals to engage with academia. some core principles: reflecting on practice i came to academia from activism in search of a day job. as an undergraduate i had combined fieldwork in hamburg movements with the discovery of sociology and the field of social movements, which seemed to hold out the possibility of a deeper understanding of our own organizing practice in a range of movements, and i turned to that field as an activist seeking effective knowledge. however, within that field, as i encountered it once back in ireland, there was virtually no recognition that movements create their own knowledge (casas-cortés, osterweil & powell, 2008; marchart, adolphs & hamm, 2010; stromquist and hennessy, 2012). one experienced social movements academic asked why on earth i wanted my literature review to include some of the challenging theorists of the german left, instead of confining myself to ‘the literature’. having read some extraordinarily ill-informed pieces by anglophone academics on the german left, reliant on translations and lacking the practical or political skills to carry out the activities they were discussing, i worked my way toward a different conception of knowledge grounded on respect rather than an automatic assumption of the superiority of university knowledge. in particular, my                                                                                                                           9 on movements as learning processes, see horton & freire,1990; foley, 1999.   laurence cox studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015 40 position grew out of discussions with working-class and mature students at waterford institute of technology, giving public talks to activist groups, and from conversations with two remarkable activist researchers, martin geoghegan and margaret gillan. geoghegan (e.g., 1999) and gillan (e.g., 2010) were both steeped in the culture of working-class community activism (one as a youth worker, the other as a media activist) and committed to combining their own learning paths with positive benefits for their movements. in working with them, i came to understand that the conventional research trajectory, which enables bright young radicals and bright young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to insert themselves into academic careers by learning how to express their outrage at subjects they were already familiar with before starting research, but now using a suitably well-formed academic language, was sufficiently accessible and widely-distributed that supervising this kind of work was not the most useful contribution i could make. in this context i developed a strategy of participatory action research (par) in social movement practice; that is, research which forms an integral part of movements’ reflection and discussion on their activities in order to improve their own effectiveness.10 this put me in a contradictory situation as someone who had not formally adopted these principles for my own phd, although they formed the basis for a community-based oral history project which i directed in the vast working-class estate of ballymun (north dublin), home to a long radical history. for a number of years after my phd and this project, i struggled to re-engage with research, not least because my thesis – which arose out of the experience of networking between irish movements – was completed a few months before the flowering of the anti-capitalist movement of movements from 1999 onwards, and there were other and more urgent things to be done within movements (cox, 2006). i was enough of an activist, perhaps, to do what needed to be done, but enough of an academic to worry about the apparent contradiction of telling others to do something which i did not feel an ‘official’ expert on. writing this article, it has become clearer to me that my own practice has itself been a form of par: as activist, movement educator, and movement publisher, i have committed myself long-term (between 5 and 16 years at time of writing) to a series of collective projects which have been par writ large without being consciously conceived as such. put another way, par is not simply some clever academic idea, but a way of formalizing good organizing practice, translated into research terms. specifically, the phrase ‘learning from each other’s struggles’, which i use to describe these projects, represents a joint learning process between social movement participants, whether expressed in political gatherings, in popular education projects, or in online fora for dialogue between movement participants and researchers (finnegan and cox, 2007). each of these projects                                                                                                                           10 on the varieties of action research in social movements, see fuster morell, 2009. scholarship and activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015   41 has also been a learning experience in itself, in that they have encouraged or forced us to ask “can we do this?” and “if we do this, what happens?” the answers to these questions are, perhaps, worth sharing more widely. in broad terms, they represent a practical confirmation for those of us taking part that ‘learning from each other’s struggles’ is a viable strategy for movement development. activist training in the academy? two pedagogical experiences it is part of the “activist abc” (cox, 2010a, p. 303) that how we construct relationships – our approach to organizing – has crucial effects. this is true not only in social movement politics but also in different kinds of pedagogy:11 in both contexts different kinds of social relationships are consciously constructed in order to enable particular possibilities and exclude others. in other words, making clear distinctions and choices in terms of how we structure our interactions is a fundamental part of good organizing and good teaching practice, as well as being essential to clear thinking about them. objecting on principle to “boundaries” and “dichotomies” (e.g., sullivan, 2004, p. 10), as though such things were bad in themselves, is to leave us unable to clarify, to ourselves or others, what it is we are doing and how it differs from anything else. the grassroots gatherings are a case in point.12 in the early 2000s, the activists who created the gatherings to connect irish movements agreed on two key parameters. firstly, we did not want high-profile sessions aimed at attracting people who were not already active in movements. using a longstanding movement distinction, the gatherings are educational and organizing spaces geared to people who have already become social movement participants, rather than agitational events geared to mobilizing people. this then enables participants to meet as relative equals, while formal presentations are kept to a minimum. secondly, the gatherings are geared to practical organizing and action skills rather than to discussions about the rights and wrongs of particular issues, or theoretical positions: such discussions might attract those interested in the politics of opinion, but are already familiar to most people who actually come to weekend-long activist events. the result was that we managed to create spaces where at least threequarters of participants were already active in social movements; hence, we                                                                                                                           11 recent work on cultural-historical activity theory and social movements (barker & krinsky, 2009; collins, 2013; de smet, 2015) aligns the two in ways which parallel popular education theorizing in the field. 12 between 2001 and 2015, the gatherings have brought together activists from a wide range of different social movements in ireland and provided an important basis for alliance-building and radical organizing (see cox 2007; http://grassroots.pageabode.com/). laurence cox studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015 42 could take each other’s politicization processes and practical commitment as given and get down to the question of taking things further. put another way, to make this kind of practice-oriented conversation between peers possible it is not necessary to get rid of all academics, but rather to create a space where people do not participate as academics – without seminar-length papers or impassioned arguments about the right position to hold. this then enables genuine discussion between people who have already made the jump from outrage to action and want to reflect further. 13 in this context, ‘learning from each other’s struggles’ stands opposed to the kind of patronizing approach that uses possession of theory (thompson, 1978) to assert ownership over other people’s lived realities and practical experience. the process emphasized mutual respect, the partial nature of everyone’s knowledge, but also the possibility of developing forms of understanding which are more adequate to movement purposes (bevington and dixon, 2005), and to do so collectively, recognizing a relationship between our different struggles. there are of course theoretical ways into this perspective via marx’s and gramsci’s theories of knowledge (marx, 1965; gramsci, 1991), but it would be more in keeping with those theories to represent them as derived from reflection and participation in the movement struggles of the day (cox and nilsen, 2014). for the gatherings, we learned this from the wider anti-capitalist movement of movements (pleyers, 2010). the zapatistas, world social forum, and summit protests have shown the value of combining a real diversity of social movements and political languages with practical collaboration in opposition to neoliberal power (marcos, 2002; conway, 2011). an activist phd? i drew on these organizing experiences when developing a phd program ‘from and for’ movements. my political commitments had convinced me that the most useful thing i could be supporting as phd supervisor was activists carrying out par in their own movements,14 and i was delighted to find some extraordinary activists who agreed. together with martin geoghegan and margaret gillan, combined with the ballymun experience, this became a long-term engagement with some remarkable people: a cohort of activists who undertook par focussing on their own movement practice at a phd level. it soon became clear that any kind of fetishization – of par methodology as something to ‘apply’ or of what movements must mean in all situations – had to be jettisoned if the core principle of learning from each other’s                                                                                                                           13 for other experiences of activist learning spaces, see hall, clover, crowther & scandrett, 2012; choudry & kapoor, 2010. 14 on participatory action research more generally, see hall, 2005; cahill, 2007; pain, kindon & kesby, 2007. scholarship and activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015   43 struggles was to be maintained (cf. autonomous geographies collective, 2010; cockburn and mulholland, 2000). the activist researchers enrolled in the phd program certainly found popular agency galore, but it was not always structured in the ways presupposed by more formalized methodologies. this was true for young working-class drug users articulating their own experience and its structural causes in community education; but it was equally true for irish environmental groups who preferred to avoid strategic kinds of education and reflection around the causes of climate change. action research could also run into the problem of an absence of collective subjects, once a given movement had ended or where a movement was divided and facing severe repression. here again it became necessary to ask broader questions about the meaning of action and participation in such contexts. in these situations, the researchers thought like activists in developing appropriate strategies to engage with the realities they encountered. however, the experience of doing a phd was far more costly in personal terms for many of the candidates than i had expected, despite my own struggles with academic power structures and personal sustainability. along with ‘normal’ biographical experiences such as bereavement and depression, some phd researchers found the tensions of movement research very hard to sustain and dropped out or changed topic completely. others found the practical costs invested in doing a phd, and the pressures from the institution meant that their identities faced a constant pressure to shift from ‘thinking activist’ to ‘radical academic’. attempts to counter this academization process by developing a collective orientation within the group were less effective than participants’ own pre-existing or newly-developed connections outside the academy, to their own movements and communities or their peers abroad, which formed the real touchstone of their practice. in the end, however, none lost their engagement and commitment to social change, or ‘went native’ in academia in any simple way. an activist ma? a group of activist scholars at maynooth carried some of the learning from the grassroots gatherings and the phd program over to an initiative to develop an ma in community education, equality and social activism (cox, 2014b). with a background in critical community education work (connolly, 2010), an understanding of social movement practice as inherently linked to knowledge production (conway, 2006), and the experience of comparable courses elsewhere (chase, 2006), the program was grounded in the proposition that if movement participants are knowing agents, by coming together they can learn particularly from those movement experiences that are most different from their own. the program is facilitated using popular education methods and with a constant dialogue with participants’ own laurence cox studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015 44 practice and between their different kinds of practice. we invested strongly in group development and were pleasantly surprised to find student revolts around some of the constraints of academia, as well as over our teaching methods – and for that matter over par as a form of research. the one-year investment of doing an ma two days a week is, of course, far less than that involved in a phd, and few participants have used the course to jump into academia long-term. we had also been clear from the outset that the program was not technical training for pre-existing jobs in funded organizations. after the collapse of irish ‘social partnership’,15 we set out to offer broader, strategic, and organizing skills enabling activists to create new kinds of organizations or bring their existing ones more in line with their core purpose. consistent with this, many have used the program to change gears in their activist career, and some remarkable new projects have developed. a fundamental aspect of the program has been its definition as a practitioner one, with subjects and dissertations defined in practice-oriented terms, and a requirement that academic knowledge account for its origins and show its ‘this-worldliness’ in responding to a critical and experienced audience; theses are adjudicated by an appropriate external examiner. despite government cuts to postgraduate funding, which reduced average numbers in the program by a third, what makes the program a fruitful space is precisely its recognition of differences, and the effective creation of boundaries and use of distinctions. the space of the program is a practitioner one but is set somewhat apart from the daily grind of organizing; participants spend time specifically with their peers from other kinds of movements, and activist and academic forms of knowledge are named, recognized as such, and brought into constructive dialogue. to return to “romans” and to gramsci: is it possible for some degree of ‘activist theorising’ – the organic intellectual activity of movements – to happen within university spaces? my answer would be a cautious yes, but not without making a systematic effort to organize effectively at each level of the process.16 without appropriate definitions of the program, academic staff and external examiners in sympathy with its goals, students whose personal motivation derives from their movement participation, appropriate research                                                                                                                           15 from the late 1980s, ireland developed neo-corporatist relationships between the state, employers’ bodies and trade unions. in the 1990s, these relationships were extended to include, among other things, a ‘community and voluntary sector’ defined so as to include many social movements (community organizing, the women’s movement, gltbq activism, environmental groups, majority world solidarity, etc.), offering limited access to funding and policy but entailing substantial professionalization and demobilization along with a shift to service provision along lines dictated by the state (cox, 2010b). ‘partnership’ also became an important aspect of much local government activity. since the mid-2000s, the state has increasingly turned against partnership with social movements, a shift that has accelerated with the economic crisis and austerity politics. 16 see croteau, hoynes & ryan (2005) and juris & khasnabish (2013) for relevant collections of experiences. scholarship and activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015   45 methodologies, and a supportive collective process, the gravitational pull of ‘traditional intellectual activity’ would certainly have won out. activist theorizing, research, and study are distinct from their academic counterparts as social relationships and modes of action, and the sheer effort involved to carry out activist work within academic contexts underlines this point (szolucha, 2014). the most powerful ‘boundaries’ and ‘dichotomies’ are not our creation but those which the university systematically puts in place to ensure that disciplinary logics win over others: student socialization; teaching in theory, methods, and empirical content; the means by which students are recruited and organized; staff recruitment and training; processes of examination; and curricular development. such facts become particularly visible when trying to operate “in and against the state” (london-edinburgh weekend return group, 1980), where we have both to recognize internalized and implicit routines and to construct alternatives that can work against these and be effectively justified (for a particularly sharp distinction, see cox, 2014b). activist/academic publication: the politics of distribution i move now, more briefly, to the politics of distribution. colleagues have sometimes asked how we recruit such remarkable students for the ma program. the answer is relatively straightforward, whether from the point of view of a ‘public sociology’ (burawoy, 2005) or from an activist one: we identify who has a potential interest in working in this way, approach them as equals, and present what we are doing in their own terms. the alternative, academic, logic is in some ways far stranger: it is clear from repeated discussions with colleagues that academics often start by asking what programs make institutional sense for them to offer and then hope that people will make themselves available to solve this structural problem. with few exceptions, potential students, even postgraduates, are understood as an undifferentiated mass to be recruited through mainstream media: a commonsense picture of the world which most would reject if stated theoretically. from an organizing point of view, the question of distribution is always a key practical one. who do we want to speak to? where do we find them? and how do we make our perspectives available in an appropriate language and format? while the practicalities of this have changed from the days when i used to stand over a gestetner or collect clandestinely printed material that then needed to be mailed out or left in suitable locations for readers, the underlying logic has not: any form of political organizing that goes beyond personal contact is at the same time a politics of distribution (downing, 2000; cf. mattoni, 2012). this is of course equally true of theoretical and political perspectives, and, it sometimes seems, is equally hard to grasp for radically minded academics laurence cox studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015 46 lacking organizing experience. the belief that it is sufficient to argue against dominant perspectives in elite locations – or for that matter in the semiprivate academic space of a thesis or blog – is very widespread and amounts to a lingering belief in elite goodwill, or in the existence of a space of ‘truth and justice’ which can be appealed to without mediation by any mere human interests. in ireland, perhaps, the combination of a post-colonial history of “movement-become-state” (cox 2012), more recent forms of state cooptation of movements, and a growing tendency to require an intellectual justification for political decisions, make such beliefs particularly attractive. why not, one might feel, just say the right thing to the people who count? in practice, whatever the merits of contestation within elite locations – which few have the status to carry off effectively – what matters politically is to speak to those who have a social and political interest in hearing radical perspectives. this also means spending less time explaining how awful things are to those who live them personally, or presenting purely technical or policy solutions that might work if only the powerful had the goodwill to undertake them, and spending more time speaking among ourselves about what we are going to do about the fact that things are bad and this is shored up by entrenched interests: in other words, discussing our own agency. i want to briefly discuss some different strategies i have pursued with my own work, not in order to propose a single right way of doing things, but rather as a political reflection about distribution. to start with a positive case, a paper i presented at a radical summer school (cox, 2001) was taken up by a key activist group who removed the footnotes and circulated photocopies to members, who were central to much movement organizing in that period. an experience like this obviously represents ‘hitting the mark’ in terms of form and content, which in turn came from extensive face-to-face and online communication with other activists. then and later, i have aimed to write for activists who are not afraid of theory and history, following williams’ (1989) arguments about popular knowledge.17 i have paid attention to the existence of radical spaces of reflection where my own kind of work – theorizing social movements in ways that are intended to help their agency – can be used. for many years, however, i overestimated the proportion of activists who were already involved in such spaces, and assumed that my work was done once i had presented a paper to an activist gathering and had photocopies circulated. more recently, the economic crisis has forced me into much greater use of online dissemination, writing for high-distribution websites and commercial book publishing. some of this has definitely fallen on stony ground, in the sense of being read within purely academic contexts for purely academic purposes. it has, however, been interesting to see how far this ‘broadcast’                                                                                                                           17 these have important resonances in ireland, with its long-standing traditions of working-class theory and culture outside the academy. scholarship and activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015   47 approach has enabled connections with other activist intellectual spaces that i had no contact with or awareness of. what becomes clear is that in many different ways successive activist generations have carved out their own spaces within academia, but in ambiguous ways. as thompson wrote of the working class: having failed to overthrow capitalist society, [they] proceeded to warren it from end to end… it was part of the logic of this new direction that each advance within the framework of capitalism simultaneously involved the working class far more deeply in the status quo.” (thompson, 1965, p. 343) something of this is also true for activists within academia. in particular, since 1968, many different kinds of would-be radical spaces have been created in different contexts, but all have had to struggle with the wider logics of the institutions they were embedded within. the different courses of these various struggles (in different countries, disciplines, and institutions) leave participants in these spaces today with greater or lesser capacities to operate as movement participants and not as academics alone. a journal from and for movements since about 2007, a group of well over a dozen activist researchers, organized globally and with far wider circles of collaborators, have been developing the open-access activist/academic journal interface (wood et al., 2013). when founded, this was the only open-access journal in social movement studies; it is no paradox in terms of the argument outlined in “romans” that the three previously existing anglophone journals in the field were all behind paywalls, accessible only to well-resourced first world universities. from any perspective which sees movement participants as intelligent and reflective actors, this situation was a disgrace. it is a very good thing that over the last year or two, one journal has developed an open-access blog (still however an “invited space”), a second makes occasional articles publicly available, and a series of new open-access journals have been created. as with the projects of ‘learning from each other’s struggles’ discussed earlier, interface has had to make several key strategic choices, and continually finds itself struggling with the gravitational pull of the academy. it is open-access, non-profit, and depends only on our time, not on funders (it is, therefore, in conflict with the pressure for ‘productivity’). interface understands itself as a practitioner journal in the sense that each article is reviewed by a practitioner as well as by an academic researcher; of course many people can adopt both roles, but activists doing postgraduate degrees, for example, often have to be actively invited to provide activist reflections rather than reproduce the academic logics they are busy learning. laurence cox studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015 48 beyond this, though, we work hard to explore themes that we think speak to activists across movements – such as repression, movement pedagogy, media creation, social change, gender in movements – and to develop appropriate formats and an open language. with each theme we address a certain proportion of readers involved in particular movements or kinds of activity and try to include them in the wider network, so that over time we have built up quite an extensive network of theoretically minded activists and engaged researchers. some are the same people, in different parts of their lives; a lucky few are in situations where they are able to be both at once without substantial difficulties. along with the politics of distribution, of course, comes a question of the ownership of the intellectual means of production, which is not easy to resolve. important to how interface is organized is that we are strongly diverse in our movement affiliations and political traditions, but also in our relationship to academia. personally, i am conscious of how frequently radical journals have become projects identified with a particular generation of activists-in-academia, and attempt to suggest strategies that might avoid, or stave off, this fate. the fact that interface is neither the property of the university, nor of a particular movement foundation or political tendency, is an important part of the contribution it can make. if it would be grandiose to attempt to speak for “the movement as a whole” (marx, 1969b), it does attempt to make the movement as a whole visible to itself, including in the very diverse forms that movement knowledge production takes (this was the theme of our first issue: cox and flesher fominaya, 2009). in this sense, we attempt to relativize the power of academically centred spaces of theory on movements by bringing them into relationship with the other languages, formats, and spaces within which movements produce knowledge. as with book publishing, we are constructing a space within which some of the various alternative publics defined within particular countries and global regions, movements and organizations, political tendencies, and academic disciplines can encounter one another and at least start to learn from each other. in this, of course, we are drawing on movement logics, specifically the logic of the anti-capitalist movement of movements (cox and nilsen, 2014) initially articulated by groups like the zapatistas, people’s global action, and indymedia, and expressed by de sousa santos (2006, p. 18) as an “ecology of knowledges.” some broader implications this article finishes in media res, with interface and the ma still in progress and taking up most of my time. to that extent, i am still fully committed to these particular approaches and experiences as spaces where a constructive relationship between movements and researchers can unfold. here i have attempted to reflect on what can be learned by relating these experiences to scholarship and activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015   49 research on learning and knowledge production in social movements, and by noting the contrast to the social relations shaping learning and knowledge production in academia. are there broader implications of this personal experience in terms of how movements can assert their own interests in the unequal engagement with academics? as i write this, the greek government and its neoliberal opponents are engaging in a dramatic face-off over the possibility that another way might be possible. without yet knowing the outcome, it is evident that the pressures of neoliberalism are determining in williams’ (2005, p. 32) sense of “setting limits, exerting pressures”. hence whether the greeks win or lose, they would have made no impact had they not nailed their colours to the mast and been clear about the differences between their position and loyalties, and those structuring neoliberalism. the ability to withstand contradictions is made possible in the first instance by having the courage to acknowledge them as contradictions and organize accordingly. the same holds for movement and academic logics. interface co-editor, richard pithouse (2014), has presented some very fine reflections on why poor people’s movements in south africa need to make a radical break with the left academy, as well as with the clientelist state and ngos, in order to assert and develop their own understanding and needs rather than being used for external purposes by these more powerful agents. while our situation in ireland is somewhat different (although with important parallels around working-class community activism), there are again two very different logics and sets of interests at play between social movements and universities, and no worthwhile result is possible without clearly recognizing this distinction (holloway, 2010). put another way, if it is at all possible to operate ‘within and against the state’, this is not by pretending that state logics (here, the structural logics of universities) do not conflict with those of popular agency and the development of movements’ organic intellectual capacity (hamm, 2013). rather, it is by identifying clearly the differences, including the differences in power, interests, and cultural status, that we can articulate serious strategies that are not simply justifications of what we are doing anyway. the process is a difficult and painful one which, as pithouse (2014) notes, requires constant reflexivity and discussion. the underlying pressures are such that concepts, theories, methods, and disciplines can easily be repurposed to mean the opposite of their once-radical intent, and it is only a close attention to substance that can prevent this. the upsurge of movements around the world since 2008 has propelled many people with traditional academic training into well-meaning but fundamentally “contemplative” (gramsci, 1999, p. 535, following marx, 1969a) relationships with social movements. some of these people may well be able to transform this relationship into a more active relationship of solidarity. there are also, of course, many attempts to make a quick killing in laurence cox studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015 50 what is seen to be an expanding market (of publications, research grants, centres, and so on): like social democrats pretending to resist austerity and stand with movements, these have to be named for what they are. one positive side of the upsurge is that there is now greater space for genuinely movement-related initiatives, and new generations of activists are entering academic spaces and trying to turn them to their own purposes. our role in this should not be one of recruiting clients to our own pre-existing projects but of interest in the new experiments and projects, and of solidarity in opening our own academic spaces to them and participating in their spaces. concretely, the criterion for ‘activist scholarship’, following gramsci’s reflections on the southern question (1966), should be the extent to which we manage to reshape the concrete institutional structures of academic life – undergraduate teaching, postgraduate training, research, publication, distribution, and so on – in ways which enable: (a) the further development of robust organic theory rather than teaching ex-activists to say approved things in suitably polished ways; (b) a critical dialogue of solidarity between movement processes of learning and knowledge production and their academic counterparts; and (c) a deepening connection to popular movements visible in processes such as recruitment, texts, action research, personal trajectories, dissemination and – hopefully – victories. our ability to reshape academic structures in these ways will never be general – or accidental – in universities within capitalist societies. it requires collective effort and intention, allied to movements and willing to confront both academic power relations and our own “mind-forg’d manacles,” as blake put it. in other words, we must learn not only through a critical reflection on our social situation and relationships, but also by praxis geared to changing that situation and creating more radical relationships. references autonomous 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(pp. 98-137). moscow: progress publishers. retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communistmanifesto/ch02.htm marx, k., & engels, f. (1845-6/1965). the german ideology, part i. retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm mattoni, a. (2012). media practices and protest politics: how precarious workers mobilise. farnham: ashgate. mckeown, m. (2012). linking the academy and activism (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of central lancashire, preston. meyer, d., & tarrow, s. (eds.). (1998). the social movement society. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. pain, r., kindon, s., & kesby, m. (2007). participatory action research. in s. kindon r. pain, & m. kesby (eds.), participatory action research approaches and methods (pp. 26-32). london: routledge. pithouse, r. (2014, september 17). notes on praxis for the rgs panel on the co-production of urban contestation (web log comment). retrieved from http://readingfanon.blogspot.ie/2014/09/notes-on-praxis-for-rgs-panel-on-co.html pleyers, g. (2010). alter-globalization: becoming actors in a global age. cambridge: polity. rojas, c. (2004). 1968 as a turning-point in historical thinking. história, 23(1-2), 197-208. sousa santos, b. (2006). the rise of the global left. london: zed. sullivan, s. (2004). we are heartbroken and furious! engaging with violence in the (anti)globalisation movement(s) (working paper, centre for the study of globalisation and regionalisation). coventry, uk. retrieved from http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/6070/ scholarship and activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 34-53, 2015   53 szolucha, a. (2014). no stable ground: real democracy in the occupy movement (unpublished doctoral dissertation). national university of ireland, maynooth. thompson, e. p. (1965). the peculiarities of the english. socialist register, 1965, 311-362. thompson, e. p. (1978). the poverty of theory. london: merlin. touraine, a. (1981). the voice and the eye. new york: cambridge university press. wainwright, h. (1994). arguments for a new left. oxford: blackwell. williams, r. (1979). politics and letters. london: verso. williams, r. (1958/1989). culture is ordinary. resources of hope (pp. 3-14). london: verso. williams, r. (1980/2005). base and superstructure in marxist cultural theory. culture and materialism (pp. 31-49). london: verso. wood, l., waterman, p., motta, s., mattoni, a., majavu, m., humphrys, e., . . . cox, l. (2013). interface tenth issue. interface: a journal for and about social movements, 5(2), 1-14. coulthard, simpson & walcott final june 22 18 correspondence address: glen coulthard, department of political science, university of british columbia, vancouver, bc, toronto, on, l2s 3a1; email: v6t 1z1 issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 90-91, 2018 video presentation situating indigenous and black resistance in the global movement assemblage glen coulthard yellowknives dene university of british columbia, canada leanne betasamosake simpson michi saagiig nishnaabeg scholar rinaldo walcott university of toronto, canada “situating indigenous and black resistance in the global movement assemblage” includes glen coulthard’s keynote address at the global movement assemblages symposium along with a panel exchange with renaldo walcott and leanne betasamosake simpson. coulthard presents the idea of a global assemblage of anti-imperialist radicalism, connecting indigenous resistance and resurgence to the radical black tradition. he recounts the 20th century history of political alliance-building between dene leaders and africian anti-colonial movements, informed by “grounded normativity”: ethics based on a relational ontology of deep reciprocity between people and place, and including non-human life forms. this is followed by presentations by michi saagiig nishnaabeg scholar leanne betasamosake simpson and black studies scholar rinaldo walcott speaking about idle no more and black lives matter respectively, with yellowknives dene scholar glen coulthard responding to them both. simpson and walcott each situate these movements within longer histories of struggle for freedom and being, and address translocal connectivities, but notably without using the language of assemblage. each for their own reasons rejects assemblage thinking in favour of forms of critical thought arising from histories of resistance with which they are identified: the radical black tradition for walcott and nissnaabeg intelligence and indigenous resurgence more situating indigenous & black resistance studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 90-91, 2018 91 generally for simpson. simpson offers a compelling alternative to assemblage in the image of “constellations of co-resistance.” the video may be downloaded from: http://hdl.handle.net/10464/13529 or viewed on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfuboa_yqzg no one is illegal between city and nation studies in social justice volume 4, issue 2, 127-143, 2010 correspondence address: peter nyers, department of political science, mcmaster university, hamilton, on l8s 4l8, canada. email: nyersp@mcmaster.ca issn: 1911-4788 no one is illegal between city and nation1 this article investigates acts of citizenship by politicized groups of non-status migrants and refugees, and assesses the normative and political challenges they pose to established norms about citizenship, belonging, and political community. refugees and other migrants with precarious status are emerging as key protagonists in global struggles concerning freedom of movement, social recognition, worker protections, and the right of asylum (mcnevin, 2006). in australia, to take a well known case, widespread resistance has been organized both within and outside a country-wide network of asylum-seeker detention centres. hunger strikes and demonstrations by detainees have been actively supported by citizen movements outside the barbed wire fences, including a 1,000-person convergence on the woomera detention centre in 2001 during which these fences were torn down. in canada, over 1,000 non-status algerians living in montreal launched a public campaign that successfully pressured the canadian and quebec governments to regularize their status (nyers, 2003). in egypt, frustrations with the refugee peter nyers department of political science, mcmaster university abstract by challenging the state’s prerogative to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens, political movements by and in support of migrants and refugees are forcing questions about what criteria, if any, can and should be used to determine who can claim membership in the political community. to illustrate the complexity of this politics this article analyzes the major demand that underscores every campaign undertaken by non-status refugees and migrants in canada: a program that would allow them to “regularize” their status. notably, these campaigns are being directed at both the state and city levels of governance. together, these are two sites in which claims and counter-claims about community, belonging, and citizenship are being made by, for, and against non-status immigrants. in each case, migrant political agency is asserted in places meant to deny, limit, or repress it. the article argues that the significance of these sites is that they allow for nonstatus refugees and migrants themselves to act as mediators or translators between the city and nation, between polis and cosmopolis. “i’m illegal. so what?” — t-shirt slogan, “a day without immigrants,” new york city, may 1, 2006 acts of non-citizenship mailto:nyersp@mcmaster.ca� 128 peter nyers studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 determination system provoked over 3,000 sudanese “closed file” refugees to occupy mustafa mahmoud park and hold a three month sit-in outside the offices of the united nations high commission for refugees in cairo (fmrs, 2006). in europe, migrants have organized several “migrant assemblies” in order to assert their voices and raise their agendas amidst the din of the “citizen groups” that dominate the voices of the european social forum network. examples of political engagement by refugees and non-status migrants could go on and on, but clearly these acts are becoming increasingly important sites of global/local politics (mcnevin, 2006). the vibrancy and scope of refugee and migrants’ rights movements was perhaps demonstrated most dramatically in the spring of 2006, when undocumented migrants organized massive, record-breaking protests in major american cities. the new york times (editorial, 2006) described the events as the result of a “miracle of grassroots mobilization that turned a shadow population into a national movement in less than a month.” the public protests culminated in a national day of action on may 1, 2006—a general strike in all but name, variously called “a day without immigrants,” the “great american boycott,” and “the new civil rights movement.” the sheer scope of the protests is largely without precedent in american history. the number of people—citizens and non-citizens, documented and undocumented—that took to the streets broke records for public demonstrations in many cities. conservative estimates counted 600,000 demonstrators marching in the streets of los angeles; 400,000 in chicago; 50,000 in san francisco and san jose; 15,000 in houston; 30,000 across florida; and so on. perhaps even more dramatic were the protests not covered by the major media. small towns like porterville (california), yakima (washington), el paso (texas), and castroville (california)—towns where citizens rarely, if ever, engage in public protest—were witness to public demonstrations by hundreds of undocumented immigrants. while the protests have been criticized for the overuse of american flags and the appeal to american nationalism (e.g. bauder, 2006), they nonetheless represent an important moment of claim making and rights taking by non-citizens. in this sense, one of the most remarkable elements of the massive protests associated with a day without immigrants is that tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets without any mobilization by established social movement organizations. “people were caught up in the moment,” says one migrant rights activist from new york city. 2 what insights can be gained about citizenship from these “moments” when noncitizens with extremely precarious status assert themselves as political by publicly making claims about rights and membership, freedom and equality? engin isin (2008) contrasts the relatively enduring institutions and dispositions of habitus with the temporally focused perspective offered by “acts” of citizenship. he proposes that investigating acts of citizenship involves a “focus on those moments when, regardless of status and substance, subjects constitute themselves as citizens—or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due” (p. 18). this article will examine acts of citizenship with reference to the growing political movement of nonstatus migrants in canada. while smaller in scope than the campaign in the united states, the movement in canada has been equally significant in raising a number of challenges for how we understand political community and political subjectivity. the article will discuss the significance of a number of “acts” by the action committees of non-status migrants: acts of self-identification as “non-status”; acts of claim no one is illegal between city and nation 129 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 making and rights taking in the form of regularization campaigns at both the state and city levels; acts of protest in street rallies, marches, and detention centres. the aim of focusing on this case is to ask some critical questions about acts of citizenship. what are the conditions under which non-status persons can constitute themselves as being political? does the act of reclaiming the term “non-status” by the political “action committee” of non-status migrants qualify as an act of citizenship? are acts of autonomy and self-representation also acts of citizenship? what kind of acts of citizenship would allow for no one to be illegal? taken together, do these various “acts” signal the emergence of a new subjectivity? to investigate the political movements by non-status migrants means coming to terms with a fundamental disagreement over what counts as political. in canada, self-organized “action committees” of non-status migrants and refugees have emerged and asserted themselves as political by organizing against detentions and deportations, as well as pressuring the government to regularize their status. however, the action committees are regularly confronted with the problem that the identity conferred on them is one that historically has been excluded from the political domain. non-status people not only lack the full range of citizenship rights, but they are also denied the opportunity to express themselves as political beings. their banishment from the political, moreover, is not merely the result of national and international laws that prohibit (or make it risky for) refugees or non-citizens to act politically. the problem is as much conceptual as it is legal: it turns on the fact that historically citizenship has been the identity through which claims to political being are enacted. faced with the myriad ways in which non-status people have been spoken for and silenced, the aim of this article is similar to that of moulier-boutang’s (2001), who has urged us “to seize the silences, the refusals, and the flight as something active” (p. 227). how exactly to accomplish this ambitious task may always remain elusive. however, surely an important part of the answer must include a consideration of the role that “voice” plays in the constitution of political subjectivity. to publicly selfidentify as “non-status” is to engage in a political act, or better—an act of political subjectification. what the action committees of non-status refugees and migrants illuminate is that the claim “i am non-status” is not just a moral plea. it is rather a declaration that is generative of a political subjectivity. in a deeply paradoxical way, to self-identify as a non-status person is to engage in an act of citizenship. vocalizing acts of citizenship to act is to put something into motion, to create something new. but the “problem of beginning,” as said (2004) put it, is always the “beginning of the problem.” at the origin of western political thought is the work of aristotle, the first political scientist, who placed certain vocal acts at the centre of his theory of the political. to be sure, questions about the political seem unavoidably intertwined with questions about voice. aristotle emphasizes the deeply political dimensions of voice, and provides an account of the political that begins with a partitioning of different kinds of voices. in the opening passages of aristotle’s politics, a crucial distinction is drawn between the voice (phone) that can indicate pleasure or pain, and the voice (logos) that can articulate the just and unjust. for aristotle, the former is shared by 130 peter nyers studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 both animals and humans; the latter is the sole domain of humans. it is this latter form of speech that allows one to say “i have been wronged” introducing a standard of judgment that allows for the space of the political to emerge (dolar, 2006, pp. 105-106). thus politics has emerged as a practice in which the use of voice makes it possible to perform certain acts. key among these are acts of citizenship. isin (2008) argues that acts of citizenship can be authored or anonymous, intended or accidental, individual or collective. in this account of citizenship what counts is not the subject’s status (citizen, refugee, non-status migrant) but the act itself. thinking about citizenship in this way makes one attentive to the enactments of citizenship, how it is performed and negotiated. traditionally citizenship has been investigated in terms of rights and responsibilities, their substantive content or depth, and the extent to which that are (and are not) distributed across society. this approach, isin (2008) complains, is unsuitable for interpreting acts of citizenship. “they arrive too late,” he says, “because the actors of extent, content, and depth are already produced” (p. 37). for isin, acts produce actors/subjects: “acts produce actors that do not exist before acts.” acts of citizenship, therefore, produce citizens and their others: strangers, outsiders, aliens. investigating “acts of citizenship” demands a rethinking of many of the assumptions, dispositions, biases, and fascinations of modern social and political thought: the privileging of order over change, action over acts, the enduring over the momentary, certainty over contingency, planned over accidental, and so on. isin’s account of citizenship is part of a growing movement within citizenship studies that criticizes the exclusions rendered by the acceptance of formal citizenship as a precondition for political voice. it is becoming increasingly common to hear arguments that criteria for inclusion should rely less on formal membership than on the principal that “all affected” people should be included in the demos. it follows that the right to vote in elections should be granted to resident non-citizens (beckman, 2006). to be able to vote in democratic elections is an important achievement for non-citizens, as it recognizes their autonomy, personhood, and capacity to assert themselves as political beings. however, acts of voting should not be taken as the end point for acts of citizenship. what other possibilities exist for the enactment of political voice? as dolar (2006, p. 202) points out, etymologically “to vote” draws on the latin words for “wish” and “pledge” and bears no relation to the word vox, voice. the relationship of voice to the political involves a much more complicated set of issues than simply the right to vote. what is at stake is the model by which the political community constitutes its subjects, audiences, and spaces. this raises an important aspect of political community that is often unappreciated and undertheorized—that the political community is also an aesthetic community. constituting the world is always an aesthetic activity, in that it involves a framing of the given, of what can be perceived and seen, heard, and heeded. there is what jacques rancière calls the “partition of the sensible” that orders and polices what is visible, what can be said, who can speak. this partitioning is practiced in a highly uneven fashion, and so it is important to emphasize that this is a politics of aesthetics. non-status migrants are disqualified from sharing the stage with citizens as (political) actors. the equation between citizenship and the political creates an aesthetic order where non-status migrants are variously seen as a threat, a risk, or a victim. they are rarely perceived as agents, actors, participants, or subjects capable of making claims and demanding rights. no one is illegal between city and nation 131 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 rancière’s project is to enact a redistribution of the perceptible, of what can be said and seen. he bases this project on the idea of radical equality. for him, the political involves a miscount of equality. politics occurs during those moments when those who “do not count,” who have “no part” in the recognized social order, make a claim to be counted. these claims appear as an interruption of the established speaking order which elevates citizenship to holding a near monopoly of speech acts. in contrast to the optimism for rational and inclusive dialogue that democratic theorists look for in (global) civil society, rancière’s emphasis on interruption and disagreement as foundational political moments is worth reflecting upon and has important resonances with the dissonant speech acts of non-status migrant politics (mcnevin, 2006; nyers, 2006; panagia, 2006, pp. 119-124; rancière, 1999). rancière rejects kantian aesthetics in favour of the burkean sublime, albeit with a significant change in emphasis. whereas burke saw much danger in all the commotion and furor of the sublime, “rancière treats the sublime as the sine qua non of political action, precisely because of its divisive nature” (panagia, 2006, p. 88). from this perspective, one does not have to be a formal citizen in order to be heard and seen in a political sense. those who are denied the status of citizen can break into the “consensual” system, interrupt this order, and assert themselves as a visible and speaking being. as rancière (2006) says, “politics means precisely this, that you speak at a time and in a place you’re not expected to speak” (p. 5). the task of politics therefore becomes something other than representing the unrepresented. something much more ambitious, difficult, and radical is at work here. the task becomes theorizing the political in relation to the unrepresentable. as panagia (2006) argues, non-status people “are unrecognizable, yet they demand acknowledgement. lacking a proper name, they are unrepresentable, yet they demand equality” (p. 122). border lives who is a non-status migrant? this is a surprisingly complex question. the simple definition provided by advocacy groups working for the rights of non-status people is that “non-status migrants are people who do not have the legal status that would allow them to live permanently in canada” (khandor, mcdonald, nyers, & wright, 2004). however, people can become “non-status” for many reasons. for example, their refugee claim and/or appeal may have been rejected; they may not have official identity documents; their sponsorship relationship may have broken down; their student visa, visitor’s visa, or work permit may have expired; there may be a moratorium on deportations to their country of origin. some scholars have begun using terms such as “uncertain status,” “precarious status,” and “gradations of status” to emphasize that one’s legal position in the country—and hence one’s relationship to rights, entitlements, access to services, obligations, responsibilities, and so on— cannot always be talked about in strictly either/or terms. instead, people often move in and out of status, and between different degrees of legal status. to speak of nonstatus in a legal sense is to consider a number of grey areas (goldring, berinstein, & bernhard, 2007). the point, however, is that all these areas are political, and they need to be examined critically. 132 peter nyers studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 technical definitions aside, in canada, as elsewhere, many words are used to describe people without full legal immigration status. non-status migrants are rarely portrayed in a positive or affirmative light, as fully formed subjects who are capable of autonomy, self-representation, and claim making. critics who are opposed to this type of migration typically employ a pejorative discourse in order to define nonstatus people in terms of criminality (“illegals”), poor moral character (“queue jumpers”), or as a dangerous threat (“terrorists”). others try to employ more neutral or humanitarian language, but here too the connotations are less than positive. in fact, it is extremely difficult to think of words to describe non-status people other than in terms of absence or lack: lack of documents (“undocumented”), lack of established travel arrangements (“irregular migrant”), lack of visibility (“clandestine workers”), lack of social status (“shadow population”), lack of security (“precarious status”), lack of humanity (“alien”). academic writers similarly have been unable to use anything but the language of abjection and exclusion when speaking of nonstatus lives. balibar (2000) describes them as the “excluded among the excluded”; panagia (2006) calls them anomic: literally, “lacking a name”; coutin (2000) says they occupy a “space of nonexistence”; de genova (2002) describes the “space of forced invisibility, exclusion, subjugation, and repression” that non-status people must negotiate in order to survive (cf. nyers, 2003). the theme of lack is similarly echoed in interviews with non-status migrants living in toronto and montreal.3 one non-status person describes the situation facing members of the latin american community in toronto: “there are many people who live like ghosts.” people living this precarious life regularly describe the limited life opportunities afforded to them because of their lack of formal status: “i am a lawyer, but if you don’t have status then you are nobody.” “a lot of employers are delighted to hear that you have no papers, because they can overwork you and exploit you.” “it really drains you that you have to work 12-hour shifts for very little money. i used to be young. now i feel so old.” non-status migrants live in constant fear of detention, deportation, and surveillance by the authorities. an activist in the toronto philippine community tries to be honest about the ultimate absence or lack involved in advocacy work for non-status people: “we’re getting our people ready for deportation.” the experience of lack is produced in large part by the way non-status people experience borders. for non-status people the borderline is not just at physical entry points at ports, airports, and land crossings. clearly, border politics are no longer limited (if they ever were) to the thin lines that separate domestic from foreign, here from there, us from them, the normal from the exceptional (walker, 2006, p. 57). the border is a much thicker, more complicate site of practices; it is not “primarily a place, but a process” (aas, 2005, p. 198), one that gets enacted wherever and whenever non-status people try to access social services provided by public officials. the border is therefore widespread and seemingly ubiquitous. for non-status people the border has literally become a “place where one resides” (balibar, 2002, p. 83). it emerges places such as health care clinics, social housing cooperatives, schools, food banks, welfare offices, police stations, within a ubiquitous elsewhere. for people without status, everyday activities (working, driving, and going to school) are at risk of being transformed into criminal and illicit acts with dire consequences (de no one is illegal between city and nation 133 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 genova, 2002, p. 427). minor transgressions such as jaywalking across a city street can land the non-status migrant in immigration detention. activists that do support work within the toronto immigrant holding centre report that many women are incarcerated there as a result of trying to access social services. there are many documented cases in toronto of non-status women who end up in detention (often with their canadian-born children) after they telephoned “911” and asked for emergency services. women making a claim for police protection from domestic violence and abusive partners are placed in detention and eventually deported once their lack of formal status is discovered (padgham, 2006). here, we can see the highly discretionary—as opposed to law based—aspect of immigration law (pratt, 2005, pp. 53-72), as city police make it a practice (although they are not directed to do so) to pass on details about immigration status the deportation arm of the canadian state, the canadian border services agency. what begins as a rights claim for protection from domestic abuse ends up with the complainant being detained and deported. similar concerns about bordering practices have been directed to school officials, social housing buildings, and health clinics. by trying to access basic social services, non-status migrants end up triggering a deportation apparatus that implicates individuals and agencies well beyond those who directly work for immigration canada or the canada border services agency. for example, as a social worker who intervenes on behalf of a child experiencing abuse one may consider oneself to be acting in the best interests of the child. however, children aid societies are mandated to report abuse to the police. if the parents are without legal status then the police will inform immigration officials, and a deportation order is usually issued. what began as an act of compassion and protection ends up as deprivation of citizenship, as the child (who may well have been born in canada and therefore be a citizen) is sent to the country of origin of his or her parents. intentionally or not, social workers, school administrators, housing workers, and other providers of the benefits of social citizenship become functionaries of the deportation apparatus. acts of bordering are also acts of citizenship in that they are part of the process by which citizens are distinguished from others: visitors, strangers, outsiders, non-status people, and the rest. like acts of citizenship, acts of bordering can be either deliberate or unintentional. sometimes a mere visual cue to a memory of border experience is enough to enact a border once again. i work at an agency where there is a very large citizenship and immigration canada billboard right beside the main reception area. i find that sign to be one of the biggest barriers to providing services for nonstatus people. for people just walking in, even if they know that we offer services to non-status people, they see that billboard from citizenship and immigration canada and just walk away. they remember the billboard as the same one they saw at the passport office and the immigration review board: the places where they were rejected in the first place! this is a huge barrier to people thinking that they would be safe and treated any different from the institutions that had previously rejected them, making them non-status. or as a client support worker at a multicultural healthcare centre that provides services to non-status people complains: “my referrals are embarrassing. i refer 134 peter nyers studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 people to more barriers. they report back to me consistently: ‘i went to that agency you referred me to and the minute they asked me for my documents, i just walked out the door.’” autonomous acts of self-representation while non-status people may experience the border as highly ubiquitous, it should be emphasized that this fact does not necessarily overcode the entirety of their lives. despite the restrictions there still seems to be room for acts of citizenship. many non-status people speak about life in a way that is not only about fear of authorities: “many people live with fear. in one occasion the police got us. and in spite of that we go out. we do not live with fear.” soumya boussouf from the action committee of non-status algerians also emphasizes the multiple possibilities for living as a non-status person: “even though you are a non-status person you do not even realize it. you are working; you have friends; you go out; you try to have a life despite all the barriers, despite everything—which is just normal, just human” (lowry & nyers, 2003, p. 67). in this context, the emergence of self-organized and autonomous action committees of non-status migrants is quite remarkable, not least for how they disrupt our expectations about what kind of action is possible by non-status migrants. in canada, diverse communities of non-status migrants are organizing public campaigns with the aim of reframing the terms of their relationship to the political community. as one activist from the toronto group no one is illegal explains: one of the interesting trends is that so many different community groups are coming together to support themselves and each other. like the philippinos, the bangladeshis, the iranians, the palestinians, the algerians…we’re really seeing a new trend of self-organized committees coming out of different communities. people in these communities are trying to figure out strategies for lobbying, mobilization, and public actions. this is something unique and we are seeing more and more of it. the number of these self-organized and autonomous “action committees” of nonstatus migrants has indeed grown dramatically in canada, especially since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. a partial list of the action committees includes: the solidarity across borders coalition, the coalition against the deportation of palestinian refugees, action committee of pakistani refugees, the action committee of non-status algerians, the human rights action committee, refugees against racial profiling, and many others. the allies of these action committees are also numerous and diverse, but a growing number of them explicitly define themselves as allies in solidarity with, and not leaders of, this movement, and actively support the work of the non-status action committees. again, a partial list of these groups includes the ontario coalition against poverty, justice for migrant workers, the status coalition, the vancouver association of chinese canadians, and the autonomous no one is illegal groups in toronto, montreal, vancouver, and other canadian cities. the emergence of non-status political action committees demonstrates that, like citizenship, migration can be understood as a strategy of becoming political. in a no one is illegal between city and nation 135 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 similar vein, mitropoulos (2006) describes migration as “a strategy . . . undertaken in and against the cramped spaces of the global political economies of work, gender and desire, among other things, but a strategy for all that” (p. 8) thinking about migration as a kind of strategy grants a certain autonomy to a phenomenon that is usually understood in relationship to various structural “push” and “pull” factors. what is sometimes called “autonomous migration” is an extra-legal form of selfdirected migration undertaken by individuals and communities as a survival strategy when states and other institutions no longer provide the conditions for an adequate quality of life (rodriguez, 1996). this perspective sees migration as a complex social force that constitutes a social and political challenge to global controls on freedom of movement, albeit in ways that are only partially intentional and selfconscious (mezzadra, 2004). the idea of the “autonomy of migration” is easily confused with other concepts or processes. for example, autonomy here is not meant to imply a form of migration that is somehow independent of economic or other pressures and forces. nor is it meant to imply that the migrant, in making their choice to move, is somehow the embodiment of a kantian self-identical subject, making claims to cosmopolitan rights of hospitality. instead, as mitropoulos (2006) explains, the autonomy of migration means “that one does not concern oneself with the reasons why an other wishes to move across borders, simply put: it insists that the other is autonomous from oneself, particularly where one’s self is most liable to assume the pose of deciding on such matters for an other, either because one’s own belonging is not in question or as a means to prove that it should not be” (p. 10). the political acts of non-status migrant can therefore destabilize comfortable assumptions regarding political community that equate belonging with citizenship status. perhaps the most radical consequence of this politics is the recasting of the terms, subjects, and spaces of the political itself. as mitropoulos (2006) argues: “the concept of the autonomy of migration is an insistence that politics does not need to be the property of the state and those who—however implicitly and by dint of a claim to belong to it, as the subject that is proper to it (its property)—can claim to reserve for themselves the thought and action that is deemed to be properly political” (p.10). one of the key means by which non-status people in canada have asserted their autonomy as political actors is by reclaiming the discourse that defines their existence. this is an accomplishment that should not be underemphasized as there has been a significant change in the language and terminology used to describe them. there has been an important, albeit partial and contested, change in canadian public discourse over the past decade from common references to “illegal immigrants” to a more regular use of the term “non-status.” the charge of illegality is meant to undermine the moral character of certain types of migrants to canada. the term “illegal” implies a breaking of the legal order, a violation of rule-following norms of behaviour, and an intention to commit a wrong. by contrast the term non-status signifies a set of meanings with a wider range of political possibilities. as we saw above, non-status people may actually have a variety of statuses within the governmental order. the point of the term is not to designate a strict legal status, an either/or situation whereby one is either legal or not. such logic is clearly out-ofstep with the complex way in which states and migrants negotiate residency, the right to work or study, refugee status, and other means through which people come to work, study, and live in canada. the point is that the “non-status” are without any 136 peter nyers studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 standing, rank, or position in a political order that privileges citizenship. the nonstatus migrant is of no consequence; they are “needed but unwelcome” (appadurai, 2006, p. 44). the self-designation of “non-status,” especially when it is articulated in public through words, images, or voice, is an articulation of a wrong. the demand of “status for all” is really a demand for “equality for all.” equality here means equal access to the rights of social citizenship: health care, social welfare, and the rest. but it is also a demand for recognition and respect of the dignity of non-status people as human beings. to self-identify as non-status is to articulate a grievance to a community in which one has no legal or moral standing. in this way, the use of the term “non-status” can signal the emergence of a new political subjectivity. acts of regularization: between city and nation the key means by which the action committees have made claims to equality is through the demand for regularization. as a result of several years of cross-national networking between migrant rights groups and the action committees of non-status people, a series of common demands have emerged. these demands include an end to deportations, an end to the detention of migrants, immigrants, and refugees, and the abolition of “security certificates” (a measure in canadian immigration law that allows non-citizens deemed to be a threat to “national security” to be held in detention indefinitely, without charge, and under secret evidence). the main demand, however, is that the canadian government should introduce a program to regularize the status of all non-status migrants. these are ambitious, even audacious demands—and the political ground is tricky: historically the canadian state has proved quite adept at excluding large numbers of non-status immigrants in its regularization programs. while regularization programs are usually pitched as humanitarian acts of a compassionate government, the political reality is much more complex. governments, for example, often introduce regularization programs when they are planning major changes to canadian immigration law. regularization programs allow people who were still in the clutches of the old system to be dealt with before new—and usually more restrictive and exclusionary—immigration procedures are introduced. in this way, regularization programs can go hand in hand with the imposition of tighter border regimes, more restrictive immigration controls, and harsher punishments on non-status immigrants. moreover, the selection criteria used in regularization programs are part of the complex set of practices that work to produce and stabilize notions of citizenship and belonging. as a method of categorization, these criteria (such as criminality, medical inadmissibility, economic wealth, length of residency, level of “integration,” family connections, or country of origin) separate those “worthy” of legal status, permanent residency, and eventual formal citizenship from those deemed undesirable, unworthy of status, and potentially dangerous to the national body politic. as a result, people with criminal records (however minor) and serious medical conditions (even if the illness originated in canada) are likely excluded from regularization. in the end, the criteria for regularization are implicated in a nationalist production of fear, and reinforce a racialized discourse that constructs the immigrant as dangerous and diseased—to be screened, tested, monitored, and contained. no one is illegal between city and nation 137 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 the problems associated with making a claim for the state to regularize status are well known to the action committees and their allies. increasingly, the demand for regularization is being directed at the level of the city as a way to sidestep many of the exclusions enabled by state level policies. this strategy has found its inspiration in developments in the united states, where many municipalities have developed “local citizenship” policies for non-status migrants. these include issuing driver licenses, providing in-state tuition rates for public colleges and universities, and even non-citizen voting in local elections (varsanyi, 2006). another source of inspiration has been the international parliament of writers’ “cities of refuge” network, which offers hospitality and refuge to persecuted writers. the action committees of nonstatus migrants and their allies have begun to construct such a politics within canadian cities, albeit with an important difference in how to approach sanctuary. the international cities of refuge network inspired by the ipw aims to advance freedom of expression and international solidarity by providing hospitality for persecuted writers. the aims of the city-based non-status campaigns are more ambitious. instead of sanctuary being enjoyed by a single individual, hospitality would be shown to the tens of thousands of non-status people living in major canadian cities. the struggle here is to envision emerging forms of international solidarity that advocate not only global freedom of movement and the right to cross borders, but also the right to stay where one already lives. the action committees of non-status migrants have been active in campaigns to create sanctuary cities. the common tactic is to lobby municipalities to adopt some version of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” (dadt) policy with regard to immigration status. these policies prohibit municipal employees from asking about an individual’s immigration status (“don’t ask”), and also stop them from sharing this information with immigration or other government authorities (“don’t tell”). such a policy would ensure that municipal funds, resources, and workers would not be used to enforce federal or provincial immigration laws. a dadt municipal policy could ensure that city services are available to all city residents on the basis of residency and need, and without discrimination on the basis of immigration status. since many non-status persons have difficulty obtaining official documents, the criteria of residency could act as a border. a more radical approach to realizing a sanctuary city would be to guarantee these services on the basis of one’s presence within the city alone, and without the need to prove one’s residency. membership would be treated as a matter of social fact rather than legal status. in the united states, over fifty municipalities have adopted some kind of dadt policy. in canada, a dadt campaign was launched in toronto in march 2004, with over forty community organizations as active participants. groups in vancouver and montreal are considering similar campaigns. in a short period of time the toronto dadt campaign has built momentum and received serious attention from the media, city counsellors, and the community at large. by 2007, both the police and the public school system in toronto had formally endorsed a dadt policy. a dadt campaign advocates the provision of city services on the basis of residency, not immigration status. if successful, it will constitute a de facto regularization program. this is a canny recognition of the exclusions that are always built into state-level regularization programs. those who were excluded from such a program would continue to be able to access health, education, police, and other city services 138 peter nyers studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 without the fear of having their lack of status exposed and reported to immigration officials and border police. to the extent that the city becomes a site of immigration policy-making—a prerogative reserved for the state—this may be a form of “municipal foreign policy” (hobbs, 1994) that poses a serious challenge to the state as the site of a transformative politics. is there the possibility that, as derrida (2001) hoped with regards to the “cities of refuge” network, dadt cities will “reorient the politics of the state,” “transform and reform the modalities of membership,” and participate in the construction of “solidarities yet to be invented”? (p. 4). mediating acts of citizenship to the extent that the demand for regularization of status is focused on recognition by state and other governmental authorities, is it really all that radical? is this a politics that envisions formal state citizenship as its end goal? to be sure, the connections between status and the state are deep, right down to the level of language. etymologies reveal that the word “status” and “state” share the same latin root: stare—meaning “to stand.” the association of “standing” with immobility, stasis, and lack of change implies a status quo, a conservatism regarding the standards of normality. status, moreover, implies an implicit ranking or standing within society and so assumes a hierarchy of belonging. at the same time, however, a more disruptive reading of the root “to stand” is also possible. to stand also means to be seen, to become public, to be among the counted, to demonstrate one’s existence and presence. hence, standing requires a certain quotient of courage. investigating the moments when non-status people “act” as political allows us to move beyond the conservative elements of campaigns for status and focus on its potential for novel forms of political subjectification. the transformative dimension of acts of (non-)citizenship can be seen in the many public demonstrations and protest marches organized by the action committees and their allies. the presence of non-status people at a protest rally, for example, will have a mediating effect on the acts available to citizens also at the protest. it is quite normal for the rallies and marches organized for non-status rights to define themselves as “child friendly.” as a result, activists with experience of, and perhaps even a preference for, direct action tactics have had to modify their own performances of citizenship. as burman (2006) notes with regards to antideportation actions in montreal: “bold antipoverty activists—whom i have seen in other contexts antagonize the police—here consent to organizers’ insistence that because of the precarious legal status of many of the demonstrators, participants must agree on a peaceful behavioural protocol” (p. 288). out of similar concerns, speech makers at rallies have had to slow down their speeches in order to ensure that all protestors understand their political points. the act of citizens and non-status people raising their voices together in a public space to declare that “no one is illegal” or “status for all” or “so so so! solidarité! avec, avec, avec les refugiés!” can also have the effect of opening new possibilities for collective political engagement. the “nous” in “donnez-nous nos papiers,” when uttered by citizens and noncitizens alike, changes the usual channels of nation-state-based no one is illegal between city and nation 139 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 community building and thus challenges the preexisting conduits of circulation…and makes visible the city as a node of differential temporalities and asymmetric orientations to the nation. (burman, 2006, p. 290) a flyer handed out during a status for all march in montreal in may 2007 underscored this point: “we march to refute the division between ‘citizen’ and ‘noncitizen,’ between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrant, between ‘guest’ and ‘permanent’ workers, between those who deserve rights, and others who don’t.” must the acting subject be present in order for an act of citizenship to have occurred? the answer would seem to be no. between june 16-25, 2005 hundreds of members of the coalition solidarity across borders and their allies walked over 200km from montreal to the parliament in ottawa to demand the regularization of all non-status persons in canada. a flyer handed out during the march, titled why we are marching, declared that protesting non-status migrants “refuse to be invisible and silenced.” the flyer explained that the marchers were on their way to ottawa in order to rectify a wrong that had been committed against them: “we are marching because there is no such thing as an ‘illegal’ human being, only unjust laws and illegitimate governments.” the flyer also invoked the names of dozens of community members who had “been removed, detained, forced underground or forced into sanctuary.” key among these names was shamim akhtar, a pakistani refugee claimant and active member of solidarity across borders and the action committee of pakistani refugees. the march to ottawa was an idea proposed by akhtar in the summer of 2003. the akhtar family was one of the most active families within the action committee, and worked to fight the deportation of hundreds of pakistani non-status refugees from montreal. their asylum claim was rejected by the canadian state, and the akhtar family was deported in the summer of 2004. akhtar, an activist within solidarity across borders, proposed the idea of a march to ottawa in the summer of 2003. her removal from canada notwithstanding, her agency left an impression that could not be erased by her deportation. as burman (2006) explains: “when people are removed, their absence leaves an imprint; the intimates they have left behind restructure their everyday lives around that imprint” (p. 281). burman argues that when the “imprint” of absence is transposed into a presence within the city, all sorts of possibilities emerge for “radical difference and hybridization” to emerge (p. 281). the act of marching is deeply political. etymologies of the verb “march” suggest a connection to frankish word for “to mark out, delimit” and so is related to words such as borderland, boundary, and frontier. surprisingly, one of the meanings of the verb march is “to have status.” to march, therefore, not only implies a progressive and forward moving action; it is also related to the limits of the political, where insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens are drawn. the non-status march is therefore a limit act of citizenship. but is the emphasis on voice and audibility an overemphasis? does it not retain and reproduce a certain liberal paradigm about citizenship which emphasizes audibility as opposed to visibility? is it too much of a burden to have to be able to speak in public in order to be recognized as political? is it not a problematic position to assume that everyone will know what it means to make a claim that can be recognized as such? in december 2003, no one is illegal established the arts in detention group for women and children being held in the toronto immigrant 140 peter nyers studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 holding centre. the purpose of the art group is to “bring the messages of those incarcerated within its walls to the outside world in order to undermine nationalist assumptions of canada as a multicultural, immigrant-welcoming nature.” the group also has as its aim to create “a space to open up discussion on the issues faced by non-status immigrants in canada.”4 while life in detention makes the expression of political voice in any public way very difficult, the arts in detention group enabled expression through visual means. the artwork produced by the detainees was displayed to the broader public in may 2005, when the art produced by the women and children in detention was displayed as part of toronto’s annual mayworks arts festival. this has given women detainees the opportunity to constitute themselves as cultural subjects. and since the artwork has been shown in galleries and reproduced in magazines and books, they are also becoming interlocutors in the debate about their condition. much of their contribution to this debate is raising fundamental political questions about freedom, autonomy, and equality. arts in detention member sima zeheri explains: “a lot of their work is quite political, whether it’s images of their homes and children or families, or explicit political messages and phrases. often their art talks about wanting to stay in canada, wanting to be free, stating that they are not criminals and that they shouldn’t be in detention” (padgham, 2006, p. 180). the art group had a restorative power zeheri had not expected: detention centres are designed to separate nonstatus people not only from the world on the outside, but from people within the facility as well. the art group was a special initiative that allowed detainees to actually engage, dialogue, and interact with one another. as farrah miranda points out: “the art group is the only thing at the detention centre that pulls all these women from different places to the same table, looking at each other, facing each other. it’s really human” (padgham, 2006, p. 181). i thought it would be a lot grimmer, and it is, but there is more, too. there were days when i was working as a volunteer with an ngo that provides basic services at the detention centre and i would see forty people and thirty of them would be in tears. but in the art group, you also see people supporting each other, you see how they survive and keep up their sense of humour and joy of life and optimism. there is almost a forgiveness of everything that was happening to them. i feel awed and humbled by the people inside, their courage and their perseverance. (padgham, 2006, p. 181) conclusions what does investigating the political acts of non-status migrants reveal about acts of citizenship? the focus on acts allows one to think about citizenship in terms other than debates over legal status, the distribution of rights, or identity politics (joppke, 2007). investigating acts of citizenship not only allows for these dimensions to be addressed and discussed, it also insists that the focus be on those moments—those acts—when. regardless of status, subjects constitute themselves as citizens, as those to whom the right to have rights is due. from the perspective of acts, when a group of non-status migrants make a demand for regularization, or protest against an upcoming deportation, or come out in public and shout “status for all” and “no one is no one is illegal between city and nation 141 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 illegal,” we can hear these declarations as more than moral pleas for better, more humanitarian treatment. rather, they can be heard as declarations that are generative of a political subjectivity. the process of subjectification in this context allows nonstatus groups to extract themselves from the hegemonic categories by which political identity is normally understood. it is quite a wonderful paradox to say that publicly self-identifying as a non-status migrant is to engage in an act of citizenship. in his theorization of acts of citizenship, isin (2008) suggests that three principles emerge when investigating citizenship. what can we learn about acts of citizenship from our discussion of the political activism of non-status migrants? the first is that acts of citizenship are not inherently exclusionary or inclusive, but can be interpreted as such through their consequences and effects. what are the effects of the acts of non-citizenship that have been discussed in this article? the key effect is that we are witnessing an interruption and transformation of the political. the lives of non-status people do not fit neatly into the frameworks of inclusion or exclusion, welcomed or rejected, dangerousness or victimage. non-status migrants may be subjected to all of these discourses and practices, but they are also emerging as something more, something else, something other. they are not merely the citizen’s other, but also other claims-making and rights-taking political beings. the second principle of studying acts of citizenship is that because acts produce subjects, finding an explicit motive or rationale for action is not a paramount concern. subjects can enact themselves as political without articulating directly their reasons for acting as citizens. this dimension of acts of citizenship was demonstrated in several ways. organizing street protests where both citizens and non-status people are active participants has the effect of tempering the speech acts of citizens. the arts in detention group allows for non-status detainees to express themselves politically without uttering a word. the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to sanctuary cities does not require any intentionality or even an admission of being non-status. isin’s second principle would seem to be confirmed by these examples. there are, of course, some complex challenges involved in these acts. there is the issue that whereas citizens can speak with an assured voice and assume an audience within civil society, communities of non-status migrants can make no such assumptions. as a result they have had to take the strategy of interruption: they have had to organize their community, mobilize voices, stretch the norms of acceptable behaviour, and, at times, even break the law. there are also some serious limitations and dangers involved in the key demand for regularization. in addition to the problematic criteria, discriminations, and borderings involved in state initiated regularization programs, the sanctuary city approach has limits as well. 5 in the first place, there is the concern that sanctuary cities of this kind operate on the basis of a secret. there is a definite sense of freedom of movement to be gained by the knowledge that interaction with municipal authorities will not inadvertently trip a borderline. however, the whole policy of dadt rests on the assumption of anonymity. does this not reproduce the logic of silence, subterfuge, and secrecy that already determines much of the daily existence of non-status people? nor does the demand for regularization address how the border is a temporal as much as a spatial experience. time is a key factor in the logic of border management and control. like all border experiences, the temporal dimension is experienced differently depending on one’s class, status, race, gender, country of origin, and so on. for some, the border can involve delays, increased wait times, incarceration, and detention. for 142 peter nyers studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 others, it can mean expedited movement and speedy processing for being a “trusted” traveller (bhandar, 2004). border time still affects people past their crossing into legal status. the point is that border times still affect racialized immigrant communities even when they are regularized: secondand third-generation immigrants still get regarded as “immigrants,” citizens who are somehow foreign to the nation. finally, isin asks us to consider the possibility that acts of citizenship can happen without being founded in law or responsibility. the politics of non-status migrants seem to take a paradoxical stance on this question. on the one hand, the most immediate concern is to pressure governments, both local and national, to regularize the legal status of all non-status migrants. while contesting territory within the zone of illegality, the movement nonetheless grounds its key demands within the law. on the other hand, these are clearly acts that call the law into question, and even break it. to become recognized as responsible it would seem that acts of irresponsibility must be undertaken. street protests need to be organized; the offices of bureaucrats with authority to stop a deportation need to be occupied; claims must be made by those without the authority to speak; rights must be taken by those who have no right to have rights. in these ways and many others, politicized groups of non-status migrants are enacting themselves as citizens even when the law does not recognize them as such. notes 1 this article was originally published as a chapter in acts of citizenship, engin f. isin and greg nielsen, eds. london: zed books 2008, pp. 160-181. 2 this point was made by rafael samanez from the group, esperanza del barrio, at the public forum “status for all! reflections on immigrant justice movements in canada and the united states,” citizenship studies media lab, york university, toronto, canada, march 29, 2007. 3 unless otherwise noted, quotations for this article are drawn from extensive focus group discussions and individual qualitative interviews with non-status immigrants, refugee and migrant rights activists, community agency workers, lawyers, and academics. these interviews were conducted in june-august 2004 and june-august 2005 in toronto and montreal. the non-status immigrants interviewed for this study represent a diverse group, and included members from the algerian, argentinean, bangladeshi, brazilian, caribbean, colombian, iranian, palestinian, and philippine non-status communities in toronto and montreal. 4 information on the arts in detention group is available on the no one is illegal–toronto website: http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org 5 for example, a dadt policy does not address the exploitation that non-status people face in areas such as employment. in fact, unscrupulous employers that exploit that labour of nonstatus people through overwork, dangerous conditions, and low pay may actually benefit from such a policy. after all, the physical and mental health of their workforce will likely improve because non-status people would be able access basic healthcare from the city. references aas, k. 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(2006). arts in detention: creating connections with immigrant women detainees. in deborah barndt (ed.), wild fire: art as activism (pp. 177-187). toronto: sumach press. panagia, d. (2006). the poetics of political thinking. durham, nc: duke university press. pratt, a. (2005). securing borders: detention and deportation in canada. vancouver: university of british columbia press. rancière, j. (2006). our police order: what can be said, seen, and done. le monde diplomatique (oslo), august 8, 2006. rancière, j. (1999). dis-agreement: politics and philosophy. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. rodriguez, n. (1996). the battle for the border: notes on autonomous migration, transnational communities, and the state. social justice, 23(3), 21-37. said, e. (2004). beginnings: intention and method. new york: columbia university press. walker, r. b. j. (2006). the double outside of the modern international. ephemera, 6(1), 56-69. varsanyi, m. w. (2006). interrogating “urban citizenship” vis-à-vis undocumented migration. citizenship studies, 10(2), 229-249. skorstengaard final before ts december 11 18 correspondence address: jana skorstengaard, department of criminology, kwantlen polytechnic university, 12666 72 ave., surrey, bc, v3w 2m8; email: jana.skorstengaard@email.kpu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 416-418, 2018 book review coming back to jail: women, trauma and criminalization comack, elizabeth. (2018), black point, ns: fernwood. isbn 9781773630106 (paper) cdn$29.95. 272 pages jana skorstengaard kwantlen polytechnic university, canada coming back to jail: women, trauma and criminalization is a sobering look at how colonialism, gendered violence, and trauma come together to victimize and criminalize indigenous women. with the rates of indigenous women incarcerated in canada continuing to skyrocket, comack’s arguments and explorations into this issue are timely and sorely needed. the book explores a variety of issues: poverty, familial and sexual abuse in indigenous communities, and ongoing intergenerational trauma stemming from residential schools. comack argues that colonial attitudes and ideas (e.g., capitalism and patriarchy) both contribute to these problems and remain so deeply embedded within the canadian penal system that they only further oppress and traumatize criminalized indigenous women. coming back to jail provides a vivid historical account of the criminalization of indigenous peoples in canada. however, the book is not simply an historical text. rather, comack expertly weaves in deeply personal and contemporary stories of trauma and resilience from the women she interviewed at the women’s correctional centre (wcc) in headingley, manitoba. the women’s courage and ability to tell their own stories in their own words is a clear reflection of comack’s decolonial feminist stance. it also is critical in uncovering and understanding the issues that keep them in the ever “revolving door” of the penal system. what comack makes startlingly clear is that the responsibility of keeping these women out of jail does not fall solely on the shoulders of the inmates themselves; from comack’s thoroughly sociological perspective, it is the system that is broken. book review studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 416-418, 2018 417 therefore, healing can only truly occur when that system is restructured to no longer encourage and contribute to colonialism, systemic racism, violence, and the criminalization of women. the book sheds light on how the incarcerated women who shared their stories with her survive intersecting traumas and how, in many cases, it is survival tactics such as drinking and drug use that have landed them in jail. what is fascinating – and offers new insights and perspectives – is how comack ties these women’s stories to theories about trauma as lived sociological experience as opposed to purely psychological fact. comack opts to frame trauma sociologically because, she argues, this “avoids the tendency to construct the women as ‘psychologically damaged’ or as ‘embodying victimization’” (p. 28). a sociological framework enables an understanding of trauma (and hence these women’s criminalization) as resulting from systemic issues such as colonialism, thereby pointing to canada’s history of systemic racism and cultural genocide as key factors in the ongoing criminalization of indigenous women. it is in this context of a deeply critical analysis that comack calls attention to the bail system and related probation conditions that many of the women she interviewed breached. in particular, like the women with whom she spoke, comack highlights that both of these systems set up already criminalized women for failure by demanding that they break crucial connections with family and friends who, while they also may be criminalized, often are these women’s only sources of social support. as a result, many criminalized women feel they do not have a choice but to breach imposed probation conditions, which only exacerbate their underlying traumas and further block their options for healing. stated directly, from this perspective the bail system punishes an already marginalized and impoverished population, and the conditions of probation are just one of the many mechanisms of this broken system that keep women coming back to jail. despite these circumstances and the strikes against them, the women in the wcc display tremendous resiliency in prison. they openly discuss with comack how prison brings with it many complex and confusing relationship dynamics, which are often challenging to navigate. in their interviews, they discuss having to endure boredom, fights with other inmates, aloof or sometimes cruel prison staff, overcrowded prisons, lack of resources, lack of adequate food and exercise, and being cut off from family and friends on the outside. still, they manage to find ways to survive. for example, many spoke of friendships they formed inside the prison walls and the support they give and receive from other criminalized women. this is yet another reflection of the resiliency of indigenous women. it is clear that these women need more support than they are currently getting. comack does not discuss many rehabilitation programs in the wcc, jana skorstengaard studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 416-418, 2018 418 and the ones she does mention are described as being too crowded for many of the women to access. this lack of discussion of rehabilitative programs available to incarcerated women could indicate a lack of programming and, thus, another way that the prison system continues to fail women. throughout the book, comack poses many tough questions, but offers very few explicit answers. this underscores the sociological complexity of how trauma, gendered violence, and colonization come together in ways that punish women for circumstances that are often beyond their control. comack, does however, offer the reader hope for the future by listening to the voices of incarcerated indigenous women. comack highlights decolonization as a way forward, that is ongoing efforts by all of us to hear indigenous women’s voices and understand the pain, intergenerational trauma, and cultural genocide that have occurred and continue to occur in indigenous communities and to indigenous people in canada. to this end, comack clearly seeks to tackle the issue of overrepresentation of indigenous women in prison in a way that does not frame indigenous women as the source of the problem, but rather as victims and survivors of colonization, patriarchal and gendered violence, and a justice system that turns a blind eye to the ways that their trauma is a product of socio-legal and historical structures rather than an expression of individual psychology. for criminologists and anyone involved in social justice, comack’s decolonial feminist perspective is crucial not only to help critically analyze issues like incarceration, but also to help to put an end to the toxic cycle that, if left unaddressed, will simply keep indigenous women coming back to jail. leblanc & kinsella fg august 11 16 correspondence address: stephanie leblanc, health and rehabilitation sciences, western university, london, on, n6g 1h1; email: slebla8@uwo.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 toward epistemic justice: a critically reflexive examination of ‘sanism’ and implications for knowledge generation stephanie leblanc western university, canada elizabeth anne kinsella western university, canada abstract the dominance of medicalized “psy” discourses in the west has marginalized alternative perspectives and analyses of madness, resulting in the underinclusion (or exclusion) from mainstream discourse of the firsthand experiences and perspectives of those who identify as mad. we argue that this marginalization of firsthand knowledge(s) demands closer critical scrutiny, particularly through the use of critical reflexivity. this paper draws on fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, whereby a person is wronged in his or her capacity as a knower, as a useful framework for interrogating the subjugation of mad knowledge(s). also examined is the problem of sanism, a deeply embedded system of discrimination and oppression, as an underlying component of epistemic injustice. sanism assumes a pathological view of madness, which can be attributed to what rimke has termed psychocentrism: the notion that pathologies are rooted in the mind and/or body of the individual, rather than the product of social structures, relations, and problems. the paper examines how sanism marginalizes the knowledge(s) of mad persons and contributes to epistemic injustice, and considers possibilities for advancing social justice using mad epistemological perspectives. keywords mad; mad studies; sanism; epistemic injustice; critical reflexivity; psychocentrism introduction madness as a phenomenon has existed throughout the course of human history, but it was not until the 18th century that the organized field of psychiatry materialized (foucault, 1988; hornstein, 2002; porter, 2002; scull, 1989). in accordance with the growing dominance of medicalization, the stephanie leblanc & elizabeth anne kinsella studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 60 concept of madness was eventually replaced by what is presently referred to as mental illness (foucault, 1988; lefrancois, menzies & reaume, 2013; rimke, 2003; rimke & hunt, 2002; wolframe, 2013b). despite its displacement from modern mental health discourse, we use the term mad to describe all persons who self-identify as such, or who have otherwise been deemed mentally ill or in need of psychiatric services (poole et al., 2012; wolframe, 2013b). contemporary uses of this term may be familiar to those acquainted with critical scholarship on madness, however for many readers this may be new territory. for this reason, we preface this work with a brief discussion of the language and terms used throughout our analysis (wolframe, 2013b). the term mad, when used in politicized and empowering discourses, is perhaps most strongly associated with the mad movement, which materialized in the 1960s and 1970s in protest of the mistreatment and involuntary confinement (or “imprisonment”) of those deemed mentally ill (burstow, lefrancois, & diamond, 2014; chamberlin, 1990; poole et al., 2012; porter, 2002; price, 2011; scull, 1989; wolframe, 2013b). many of those taking part in the movement embraced the term mad and chose to reclaim it as a politicized form of self-identification, much like the term queer has been reclaimed within the context of the lgbtq2s movement (burstow et al., 2014; poole et al., 2012; price, 2011; reid, 2008; rimke & brock, 2012). today, an increasing array of signifiers exist for representing the experiences of those living with mental and emotional diversity or distress, including, but certainly not limited to, ex-patient, mentally ill, consumer, psychiatric survivor, crazy, mad, lunatic, neuro-diverse, disabled or deviant. of these terms, we have purposely chosen to employ the term mad, not only in attempt to reflect the multiple social constructions of mental diversity to date, but also to emphasize the politics of resistance to psy discourses (price, 2011; wolframe, 2013b). psy discourses are taken as problematic, particularly when alternative perspectives – especially those held by mad people – are subjugated (hornstein, 2002; lefrancois et al., 2013). mad people continue to contend with the suppression and dismissal of their knowledge, experiences, and perspectives, as revealed in the frequent absence or discrediting of mad discourses in academic contexts, media portrayals, healthcare practices, research, policy, and everyday conversation (fabris, 2011, reaume, 2006; russo & beresford, 2015; wolframe, 2013a). a broad aim of mad activists and scholars has been to balance the disproportionate emphasis on “official” knowledge with that of those experiencing madness firsthand (chamberlin, 1990; costa et al., 2012; russo & beresford, 2015). the subjugation of mad persons’ experiences raises questions concerning power and knowledge, in particular, what constitutes valid knowledge(s), who are the legitimate knowers, and whose knowledge should count? (fricker, 2007; harding, 1991). the under-inclusion (or exclusion) of the perspectives of mad people from academic, legal, clinical, and everyday toward epistemic justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 61 discourses demands closer critical analysis. this paper draws on fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice, as it provides a useful framework for analyzing and challenging the subjugation of mad knowledge(s), particularly for those who view the political and epistemological struggles championed by the mad movement as inseparable (lewis, 2006; russo & beresford, 2015). we have chosen to foreground this concept as we agree that the marginalization of mad persons’ experiences and resultant knowledges constitutes a form of epistemic injustice, and may be seen as an infringement on (mad) persons’ basic human rights (fricker, 2007; medina, 2012; shotter, 1981). we argue that a failure to recognize the epistemic value of the perspectives of those living with madness is so entrenched in western social practices and discourses (rimke & brock, 2012) that epistemic injustice is often perpetuated without consideration of potential social harm (fricker, 2007; perlin, 2003). this paper provides an overview of sanism, a deeply embedded form of discrimination and oppression affecting those who experience madness, and argues it is a system of thought underpinning the practice of epistemic injustice (fabris, 2011; fricker, 2007; perlin, 2000, 2003; russo & beresford, 2015; spandler & carlton, 2009). this is reflected in what rimke has termed psychocentrism, wherein pathologies are taken to be rooted in the mind and/or body of the individual, rather than the product of social relations, structures and problems (rimke, 2003, 2010, 2011). in this paper we consider how the material and conceptual outcomes of sanism and psychocentrism marginalize the knowledge(s) of mad persons. we further show that such marginalization constitutes a form of epistemic injustice, and argue that engagement with mad epistemological perspectives is a matter of social justice. epistemic injustice and the mad community fricker (2007, p. 1) introduces the concept of epistemic injustice as an injustice concerning “our most basic everyday practices: conveying knowledge to others by telling them, and making sense of our own social experiences,” which occurs when a person is insulted or wronged in their capacity as knower. if it is our ability to know that makes us distinctively human, as has been suggested, it is no wonder that the “powerful” have historically undermined, insulted, or otherwise wronged the “powerless” in this capacity, as a means for denouncing their humanity (fabris, 2011; fricker, 2007; medina, 2012; price, 2011). epistemic injustice is inextricably linked to social injustices, according to medina (2012, p. 27), who suggests that “inequality is the enemy of knowledge,” impairing our ability to know and to gain knowledge from others. social injustice breeds epistemic injustice by weakening epistemic relations between marginalized social groups – unfairly depicted as intellectually inferior and lacking credibility – and their stephanie leblanc & elizabeth anne kinsella studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 62 epistemically privileged counterparts (medina, 2012). epistemic injustice is comprised of two fundamental discriminatory forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice (fricker, 2007, 2010). testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker is undermined in their capacity as a giver of knowledge, owing to an identity prejudice held by the hearer, impacting the hearer’s judgement of the speaker’s credibility (fricker, 2007). alternatively, hermeneutical injustice occurs when groups of people are wronged in their capacities as subjects of social understanding through structural prejudices which impact the production of (and access to) interpretive resources needed to make sense of their social experiences (fricker, 2007; medina, 2012). although fricker’s terminology is seldom used among mad scholars and activists, the experience of testimonial injustice is all too familiar, and is an important concept to consider as it describes a serious threat to the citizenship and humanity of mad persons (callard, 2014; carel & kidd, 2014; russo & beresford, 2015; thachuk, 2011). the mad community has focused even less attention on the notion of hermeneutical injustice, which perhaps suggests that the detection of hermeneutical injustice is more difficult (fricker, 2007; medina, 2012). sanism: the hidden prejudice we argue that sanism, a system of thought deeply embedded in western culture, contributes to the epistemic injustice experienced by mad people (fabris, 2011; fricker, 2007; mills, 2014; spandler & carlton, 2009). sanism involves the systematic subjugation and oppression of people who have received “mental health” diagnoses, or who are otherwise perceived to be “mentally ill” (perlin, 1992, 2003; poole et al., 2012). the term sanism was coined in the 1960s by activist lawyer, mortin birnbaum in conversation with prominent feminist lawyer, florynce kennedy (birnbaum, 2010; fabris, 2011). michael perlin, an activist and disability rights lawyer, later popularized the concept (burstow et al., 2013; fabris, 2011; perlin, 2000). the large majority of literature on sanism is comprised of perlin’s writings and his collaborations with others, developed from nearly 30 years of personal observation (fabris, 2011; wiliams, 2013). perlin focused on unfairness and inequalities in the legal system, but his analysis has applicability to many aspects of structural stigma, prejudice and discrimination (williams, 2014). perlin (2003, p. 536) describes sanism as “an irrational prejudice of the same quality and character of other irrational prejudices that cause (and are reflected in) prevailing social attitudes of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic bigotry,” and every other “ism” society no longer tolerates. sanism may take the form of blatant discrimination and various forms of stigma, however, it is also commonly expressed in a multitude of microaggressions, which consist of “multiple, small, insults and indignities” (kalinowski & toward epistemic justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 63 risser, 2005, as cited in poole et al., 2012, p. 21; burstow et al., 2013; chamberlin, 1990; goffman, 1963). sanism is arguably one of the last socially accepted, government-sanctioned forms of systemic discrimination against a large social group (jones & brown, 2013). although sanism is as troubling as other forms of discrimination, it is especially insidious as it remains largely invisible, and is self-perpetuating, socially acceptable, and practiced regularly (perlin, 1992, 2003; poole et al., 2012; wolframe, 2013b). sanism and psychocentrism: the pathologizing of individuals sanism is conceptually dependant on, and reinforces the notion that mad persons are fundamentally different from their “sane” counterparts (perlin, 2000; 2003; poole et al., 2012). such a dichotomy aligns with what rimke has termed psychocentrism: the view of human problems as pathologies rooted in the mind and/or body of the ‘pathological individual’, rather than the product of social problems (rimke, 2003, 2010, 2011). many contend that this “normal” is a mythical standard and that being labelled as mentally ill can occur as a result of performing, or being at risk of performing, socially unacceptable behaviours (fabris, 2011; rimke, 2011; williams, 2014). the establishment of socially accepted and scientifically constructed norms has afforded psychiatry the authority to make inferences about the epistemic trustworthiness, credibility, or intellect of persons, dependant on their positioning in relation to such conceptions of normal (morrow & weisser, 2012; rimke, 2003, 2010). testimonial injustice communicating mad knowledge(s) through stories or testimonies has been foundational to the mad community as a means of resisting psychiatric oppression and dehumanization (costa et al., 2012). members of the mad community have protested that their perspectives are representative of “real” knowledge, only to have the legitimacy of their accounts questioned or dismissed altogether by virtue of their being mad (costa et al., 2012; hornstein, 2002). as psychiatric survivor and activist erick fabris (2011, p. 31) writes, “we are not even credited with having experience; we are thought to have lost our minds, to be unreasonably emotional, possibly at the worst of times, a kind of philosophical exemplar of inaccessible life.” the discrediting of mad persons in their capacity as legitimate knowers represents what fricker (2007) refers to as testimonial injustice. we argue that in this context, testimonial injustice occurs as a result of negative identity prejudice stemming from sanist thinking, which tacitly distorts judgments of mad people’s credibility as speakers (goffman, 1963; medina, 2012; perlin, 2000). negative identity prejudice finds its way into discursive settings through a stephanie leblanc & elizabeth anne kinsella studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 64 hearer’s use of stereotypes, which he or she engages with as heuristic devices in order to weigh judgments of credibility (fricker, 2007). although stereotypes “oil the wheels of testimonial exchange,” when underscored by negative identity prejudice, these can become troublesome for the speaker (fricker, 2007, p. 32; 2010). this amalgam is referred to as negative identityprejudicial stereotype, which fricker (2007, p. 35) defines as a “widely held disparaging association between a social group and one or more attributes, where this association embodies a generalization that displays some resistance to counter-evidence.” when prejudicial stereotypes distort the credibility judgments of the hearer, an epistemic harm is inflicted, whereby knowledge that may have otherwise been recognized by the hearer is lost (fricker, 2007). in cases of testimonial injustice driven by prejudicial stereotypes that discredit the humanity of a speaker (i.e., the widespread stereotype that mad people are incapable of rational thought), the harm being done to the speaker should be understood as more than simply symbolic (fricker, 2007). denigrating sanist stereotypes are based on, and reinforce, deep-seated social assumptions that mad persons are unable to exercise their full citizenship, and are therefore incapable of fully participating as knowers (fabris, 2011; fricker, 2007; perlin, 2003; williams, 2014). as such, the subjugation of mad persons’ knowledge, perpetuated each time a speaker is prevented from contributing knowledge to the public domain, becomes both justified and necessary (williams, 2014). mad scholarship is replete with examples of testimonial injustice, although they are not often acknowledged or recognized as such (liegghio, 2013; fabris, 2011; saks, 2007; thachuk, 2011; williams, 2014; wolframe, 2013a). perlin has written extensively about sanist stereotypes that cultivate irrational fears, ignorance, and so-called “common-sense” beliefs, which tend to inform how many people in society perceive, understand, and treat mad persons (fabris, 2011; perlin 2003, 2006, 2013; williams, 2014). indeed, the credibility of mad persons’ knowledge is frequently judged through the hearer’s lens of sanist prejudice (fricker, 2007). sanist stereotyping fosters a negative perception of mad persons as delusional, emotionally unstable, unpredictable, untruthful, untrustworthy, lacking all capacity for “rational” thought, and invariably dangerous to oneself or others (fabris, 2011; perlin, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2013; williams, 2014). perhaps the most pervasive sanist stereotype is the misconception that violence to oneself or others is a hallmark of madness (wolframe, 2013a). cultural assumptions surrounding the risk of violence often take precedence over the expressed perspectives of mad persons, justifying the social control of mad persons against their will through forced institutionalization or mandated psychiatric treatment (fabris, 2011; wolframe, 2013a). maria liegghio (2013) shares a moving narrative of her mother’s end-of-life care – which was tainted by her mother’s psychiatric history and diagnosis of bipolar disorder – and of the consequent injustices to her capacity as a toward epistemic justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 65 knower. liegghio (2013) uses the term epistemic violence to describe the injustices experienced by her mother, and by herself, as the daughter of a mad woman. liegghio writes: i am so angry! today on this cold, canadian winter day i am accompanying my mother, dying of cancer, living with physical pain, and struggling with mental confusion to the palliative care unit at the hospital after spending six months caring for her at home. all her in-home nursing and personal care support has been withdrawn and we have no other choice but to consider a hospitalization against my mother’s wishes. and why – because someone in their position as helping authority decided she was a risk of harm to the visiting staff because of her history of ‘mental illness.’ […] what risk of harm could this woman, too physically withered and weak to sit up, possibly pose to herself or others? […] is this really just a misunderstanding about a failing liver versus a mental illness? how is it possible that the knowledge of her impending death no longer exists and instead, the knowledge of ‘mental illness’ and all the prejudices associated with it have taken over and are used to justify such action, as to deny the necessary services and to deny the wishes of a dying woman? (liegghio, 2013, pp. 122-123) liegghio (2013) explains that in her mother’s 20-year history of living with the diagnosis of bipolar disorder she never harmed or threatened to harm herself or others. in accordance with sanist beliefs, however, liegghio’s mother was constructed as dangerous, and as a result, was undermined in her capacity as a legitimate knower. testimonial injustices also routinely occur in healthcare contexts when mad persons’ health concerns – even those entirely distinct from their psychiatric histories – are dismissed (hinshaw, 2007; rimke, 2003; thachuk, 2011). take for example, the report of a 38-year-old mad woman in her dealings with the healthcare system: speaking to the tainting effects that her psychiatric history has had on her interactions with health-care providers, one woman states, ‘i went to my gp with a breast lump . . . [he] sent a referral letter stating ‘over-anxious patient, had nervous breakdown at age 17’ (20 years ago). consequently i was greeted by the specialist with ‘well, you’re a bit of a worrier, aren’t you?’ every physical illness i have had for the last 20 years has first been dismissed as anxiety, depression or stress. (thachuk, 2011, p. 155) similarly, legal scholar and mental health-policy advocate, elyn saks (2007), who has for decades been diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia, writes of what might be characterized as testimonial injustice. in her memoir, the center cannot hold (2007), she writes of seeking medical care for what was eventually determined to be a subarachnoid brain hemorrhage: quickly, they bundled me into the car and took me to the emergency room. where a completely predictable disaster happened: the er discovered i had a psychiatric history. and that was the end of any further diagnostic work. stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a stephanie leblanc & elizabeth anne kinsella studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 66 number of those faces. a psychiatric patient at a program where steve once worked went for weeks with a broken back; none of the medical people the patient saw took the man’s pain seriously – he was a mental patient. so once the er learned i had a mental illness and was on antipsychotic medication, the diagnosis was written in stone: i was ‘just’ having an episode. [...] the er sent me away. (saks, 2007, pp. 232-233) with respect to navigating this sort of epistemic dilemma, otto wahl has suggested that, “the only way to have symptoms accepted as honest and accurate reports is to be dishonest about psychiatric history” (wahl, 1999, cited in thachuk, 2011, p. 155). indeed, in order to be perceived as legitimate knowers, many mad persons opt to conceal their psychiatric histories when speaking about their physical health concerns. as thachuk (2011, p. 155) observes, “ironically, one had best lie in order to avoid being perceived as a liar!” pre-emptive silencing and epistemic objectification discrediting expressed knowledge(s) in the midst of conversation is not the only way that testimonial injustices can occur. fricker (2007) and medina (2012) discuss two additional forms of testimonial injustice. the first of these is pre-emptive testimonial injustice or silencing, enacted through exclusion from participation in communicative exchange, where knowledge, judgments and opinions of marginalized groups are simply not solicited. it is important to clarify that this form of epistemic injustice is highly context dependent, and that our argument is largely limited to the constrained participation of mad persons in the generation of (accepted) knowledge surrounding madness (fricker, 2007; medina, 2012). within this particular context, the pre-emptive silencing of mad persons can be attributed to the dominance of the ‘psy’ disciplines’ widespread social acceptance of ‘psy’ knowledges and discourse as the “official” version of the truth. the second of these forms of testimonial injustice, epistemic objectificiation, “allows” participation in communication for the purpose of knowledge-production and transmission; however, it relegates persons from the role of active epistemic agent (or subject) to that of passive object, to be studied, observed, and in many cases, exploited (ficker, 2007, p. 132). in other words, it shifts the speaker’s epistemic status from informant to source of information. we see evidence of this particular injustice in the production of knowledge surrounding mental health or madness, which consists primarily of work produced about, rather than by, mad persons (jones & brown, 2013; russo & beresford, 2015). according to medina (2012), this too is a context-dependent form of injustice, for it is not inherently “wrong” to be regarded as object in epistemic interactions, as long as speakers are not solely regarded as such, and are also treated as subjects of knowledge within the same context. moreover, not all toward epistemic justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 67 objectifying or silencing is avoided when persons are treated as informants (medina, 2012). informants may still be undermined in their capacities as knowers and constrained or minimized as givers of knowledge “at the service of the inquirer’s epistemic agency (her questions, her assessments, her interpretations)” (medina, 2012, p. 92). as such, epistemic objectification may occur even when there is active participation in knowledge production. costa et al. (2012) have studied what they refer to as “patient porn” or “disability tourism,” involving the personal narratives of mad persons being co-opted by psy organizations to further their own interests, rather than to support mad persons as agents of change. patient porn is exemplified by mental health organizations’ solicitation and subsequent sanitization or distortion of mad persons’ narratives about their “fall into and subsequent recovery from mental illness” owing to their participation within that organization (costa et al., 2012, p. 86). this form of objectification is particularly insidious as it occurs under the guise of welcoming or embracing mad persons’ knowledge (as informants), yet the accounts are sanitized in a way that makes mad knowledge largely invisible. mad activists’ resistance against epistemic objectification was demonstrated at a june 2011 toronto event titled “recovering our stories,” using the slogan “hands off our stories” (costa et al., 2012, p. 92). the goal was to “interrupt the proliferation of this popular type of storytelling within the mental health sector – judging it to be not just problematic but ‘pornographic’,” hoping that this might inspire others to instead, “use [their] stories to change the world” (costa et al., 2012, p. 86, 92). hermeneutical injustice thus far, we have explored the multiple facets of fricker’s testimonial injustice, as a wrong done to a person as a giver of knowledge, whether it be through dismissal and discrediting, pre-emptive silencing, or the objectification of shared mad knowledge(s). closely related to testimonial injustice is hermeneutical injustice. hermeneutical injustice relates to hermeneutics, or the art of interpretation, which affects peoples’ ability to express themselves or to be understood (kinsella, 2006; medina, 2012). through hermeneutical injustice, “some significant area of one’s social experience [is] obscured from collective understanding,” owing to the presence of wrongful interpretive obstacles (fricker, 2007, p.155). according to medina (2012) it is through testimonial interaction that hermeneutical injustices occur (and are maintained): “those who are struggling to make sense are persistently not heard and their inchoate attempts at generating new meanings are blocked or unanswered” (medina, 2012, p. 96). hermeneutical injustices are revealed in the lack of opportunities for mad persons to participate in the generation of interpretive resources for making sense of madness. as a distinct social group, mad persons are often unable to make stephanie leblanc & elizabeth anne kinsella studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 68 intelligible the nature of the harms they experience, owing to a lack of available hermeneutical resources for doing so (fricker, 2007). fricker (2007) asserts that collective forms of social understandings are reflective of the perspectives of various social groups, whereby unequal power relations have the potential to skew shared hermeneutical (interpretive) resources. psychiatrized conceptions of madness – or mental illness – have dominated the west since the 18th century, where the growth of the “psychiatric empire” (beresford, 2013, p.ix) continues to develop on a global scale (lefrancois et al., 2013). oppressed social groups may be hermeneutically marginalized to the extent that they must interpret their social experiences, “through a glass, darkly, with at best ill fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible” to others, and in some cases, to themselves (fricker, 2007, p. 148; medina, 2012). members of the mad community may be particularly vulnerable to this form of epistemic injustice due to the elusive nature of madness (which makes it difficult to understand and communicate), resulting in their marginalization as contributors to the collective hermeneutical resource (carel, 2013; carel & kidd, 2014). the usefulness of the concept of hermeneutical injustice can be seen in wolframe’s (2013a) account of her experience of sanist oppression and sane privilege amid a culture in which the concept of sanism is not yet widely recognized. upon her discovery of the concept of sanism, wolframe was able to find new interpretive resources to communicate her experiences: i did not recognize for some time the fact that people who had never been labeled mentally ill – as i had been – and who were thus sane by default, had access to privileges that i did not. i was aware of the discrimination i had faced as a “mentally ill” person, but i accepted that oppression. i believed, at the time, that i was sick, and i believed that this sickness caused me to hurt myself and others. should i not then, i reasoned, be restrained by the straightjacket of unequal treatment? it was only later when i came to reject the medical model of madness that i questioned my own internalization of an oppression i came to know as saneism [sic]. though i began to think through the idea of saneism at the same time as i got free of psychiatry, in 2005, i only started to recognize sane privilege recently, as i have increasingly gained that privilege myself… since people have not always treated me as though i am reasonable, trustworthy, safe to be around, and capable of taking care of and making decisions for myself, because they knew i had been diagnosed as, or they perceived me to be mentally ill, i very much notice it now that they do treat me as though i am all of these things most of the time. now that i am experiencing it, sane privilege has become obvious to me. it is not necessarily so obvious to those who have never lost that privilege. (wolframe, 2013a, paragraph 6-7) hermeneutical injustice through imposed silence according to foucault (1980), those in positions of power act in ways that toward epistemic justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 69 serve to legitimize their own knowledge, while simultaneously undermining other knowledge that may challenge their dominant ways of knowing (rimke, 2003; geekie, 2004). mad persons have been represented as possessing a “lack of insight” should they not interpret their experiences according to dominant psy discourses (amador & kronengold, 1998; geekie, 2004; kirmayer & corin, 1998; rimke & hunt, 2002). this portrayal serves as a powerful instrument for the hermeneutical marginalization and discrediting of mad persons (fricker, 2007; geekie, 2004). if a lack of insight is to understand one’s experiences in ways alternative to the dominant hermeneutical resources put forth by psy disciplines, then all persons deemed to have insight must invariably espouse dominant hermeneutical resources. this is supported by a dominant collective belief that if it were not for mad persons’ insight-impairing “illness” they would embrace these dominant interpretations, and as such, should be “grateful for the imposition of laws and judicial decision-making that ensure they are protected, controlled, and treated” (williams, 2014, p. 451). williams points out that despite a growing consciousness around injustices affecting other marginalized populations, sanist belief systems continue to provide justification for the unjust treatment of mad persons: no-one believes that a suffragette would have been grateful for being imprisoned and gastric fed; or an african american would have been grateful for being enslaved; or a cancer patient who is refusing treatment will be grateful for being locked up until they agree, or are compelled, to undergo chemotherapy. (williams, 2014, p. 451) despite the presence of mad persons’ perceptive, nuanced and welldeveloped theories surrounding the experience of madness, the collective hermeneutical resource for interpreting the social experience of madness is heavily saturated by psy discourses, such that alternative epistemological perspectives on madness are regularly subjugated and dismissed (geekie, 2004; lefrancois et al., 2013; williams, 2014; wolframe, 2013b). illuminating injustices in the midst of a hermeneutical lacuna the marginalization of mad persons’ knowledges may be due to a hermeneutical lacuna, resulting in a paucity of language or concepts available to discuss experiences of injustice (carel & kidd, 2014; geekie, 2004; fricker, 2007). some persons may find that their experiences of madness, or its related injustices, cannot be communicated in “any direct, propositional manner, and so are only shareable with persons with whom one shares a standpoint or a sense of solidarity” (carel & kidd, 2014, p. 530; geekie, 2004). fricker (2007, p. 160) described hermeneutical lacunae as “absences of proper interpretations, blanks where there should be a name for an experience which it is in the interests of the subject to be able to render stephanie leblanc & elizabeth anne kinsella studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 70 communicatively intelligible.” for mad persons there may well be an extant hermeneutical lacuna hindering the articulation of the experience of sanist aggressions, both systemic and in the form of microaggressions (poole et al., 2012; williams, 2014; wolframe, 2013b). the danger of hermeneutical lacunae is that even those enacting sanist aggressions are often unaware of the implications of their unjust words or actions (wiliams, 2014). in this way, both the harasser and harassee are cognitively handicapped in their ability to make sense of the injustices taking place (fricker, 2007). however, hermeneutical lacunae do not affect each party equally (medina, 2012). the harassee is significantly disadvantaged by this gap in hermeneutical resources, which render her less able to make sense of, and to communicate, ill treatment, and thus perhaps less likely to protest the injustice altogether (fricker, 2007). increasing public awareness of racism, sexism, ageism and homophobia as social problems has decreased hermeneutical lacunae in these domains, and contributed to making such systems socially unacceptable (byrne, 2010; perlin, 2003). conversely, the large majority of mad persons still lack adequate hermeneutic resources for describing the prejudice and discrimination against them (byrne, 2010; williams, 2014). medina (2012) cautions, however, against tying too closely hermeneutical capacities and the repertoire of readily available articulations for describing injustices, as mad persons’ have been expressing their experiences of injustice and oppression since long before coined concepts and terminology emerged. with the proliferation of ex-patient movements in the 1960s and 1970s came a greater realization of the existence of negative prejudices attached to mad persons (williams, 2014). this spurred initial attempts to establish definitive language for resisting judgements of mad persons as invariably incompetent, unpredictable, irrational and violent (rimke, 2010; williams, 2014). judi chamberlin (1990), one of the early leaders of the ex-patient movement, coined the term mentalism (also variously referred to as sane chauvinism, psychophobia and now, sanism), to describe prejudices directed at persons with psychiatric diagnoses or who were otherwise considered mad (byrne, 2000; williams, 2014). williams (2014) argues that a crucial first step in propagating the idea of sanism as a social justice issue for mad persons is universal acceptance of the term. to this end, it is appropriate to briefly discuss the conceptual differences between sanism and mental health stigma as distinct concepts, to deter their interchangeable use in the future. stigma can be viewed as the outward manifestations of “an overarching oppression constructed on a foundation of sanist beliefs, attitudes and practices” (williams, 2014, p. 13). according to poole et al. (2012, p. 21) a focus on mental health stigma is too limiting, in that “it minimizes the jagged reality of widespread rights abuse and oppression (or sanism) experienced by individuals with such mental health histories.” sanism, unlike stigma, also has the expressed “aim to unsettle assumptions about rationality, normality, and madness” (morrow & toward epistemic justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 71 weisser, 2012, p. 29). as such, it is an important concept in matters relating to the rights and wellbeing of mad persons, as it “points to the social, cultural, and material dividing of ‘mentally ill’ bodies from ‘healthy’ reasoned ones, while questioning the idea that such categories are easily established and maintained” (wolframe, 2013b, pp. 9-10). following poole et al. (2012), we argue that the term sanism serves the important cognitive and discursive function of shining light in the hermeneutical darkness that prevents mad persons’ from fully understanding the injustices experienced in the name of healthcare, and public and personal safety (fricker, 2007). perlin’s adoption of the concept of sanism (drawing on birnbaum’s writings) for making sense of his observations of the legal system’s mistreatment of mad persons, is evidence of a hermeneutical triumph (williams, 2014). wolframe too found consolation in discovering the concept: at the age of 16, i was assigned to a new psychiatrist and given a new ‘adult’ diagnosis. i was treated for this supposed disease – on both an inpatient and outpatient basis, using a cocktail of different drugs – for approximately six years. although i questioned my diagnosis before i got clear of psychiatry in my early 20’s, it was not until i became a graduate student that i first read about the mad movement and finally had words to describe my experiences other than those used by psychiatry. i only wish i had heard about the mad movement earlier, and that i could have, as an undergraduate student in english and women's studies, talked about sanism along-side racism, heterosexism, cissexism, ageism, classism and all those other isms (wolframe, 2013a, pp. 1-2). fricker (2007, p. 148) reminds us that “from a hermeneutical position of relative comfort, one can forget quite how astonishing and life-changing a cognitive achievement of this sort can be.” as a mad-identified scholar, the first author of this paper can certainly attest to the liberating potential of the concept of sanism from a place of hermeneutical marginalization and social injustice. exposing the pervasiveness of sanism as a deeply damaging form of systemic oppression should, in theory, render the once invisible, visible, and by extension, the once acceptable, unacceptable (williams, 2014). however, this exposure does not guarantee that mad knowledge will not be marginalized by those dominating the collective hermeneutic resource, predominantly the psy disciplines (fricker, 2007). the possibility for continued hermeneutical marginalization even in light of the exposure of sanism, may be supported by the insights of fellows and razack (1998), who suggest that when people cannot relate to a particular “manifestation of oppression,” or are in some way privileged as a result of it, they may be more likely to discredit others’ claims of injustice (as cited in diamond, 2014, p. 200). stephanie leblanc & elizabeth anne kinsella studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 72 critical reflexivity and epistemic justice within the past decade interest surrounding human rights and “mental illness” has grown considerably among academics, practitioners, activists, and self-advocates (perlin, 2000, 2003, 2013; williams, 2014). as a result, violations of persons’ mental health rights are finally gaining recognition as violations of human rights (perlin, 2013). this being said, many injustices directed at the mad community have yet to be widely acknowledged (fricker, 2007; liegghio, 2013). epistemic injustice, for example, has not been much appreciated as a profoundly damaging ethical wrong. according to fricker (2007, p. 40), with such an appreciation “perhaps we [as a society] would be more ready to voice our resentments and argue them through to some sort of rectification; and perhaps a social shift would occur towards developing a better vocabulary and forum for airing and responding to such complaints.” we have explored the ways in which sanist oppression has contributed to epistemic injustices in the mad community, and we now wish to open a much needed conversation about possibilities for moving toward epistemic justice. williams (2014) suggests that society does not condone prejudice or discrimination being perpetrated against mad persons; rather, it is simply unable to recognize such transgressions when they occur. he argues, however, that “it is essential that society becomes aware of their own assumptions about human behaviours, values, biases, preconceived notions, personal limitations, and that they try to actively understand the different world view of a person experiencing mental illness, without negative judgment” (williams, 2014, pp. 451-452). we support fricker’s (2007) claim that acknowledging the role of negative identity and prejudicial stereotypes in shaping a hearer’s credibility judgment can be a crucial epistemic resource for persons who are to become epistemically just hearers. we have sought to make perlin’s concept of sanism more visible, so that its power and pervasiveness might be better understood and appreciated (williams, 2014). given that “the social imagination can be a powerful positive force for social change” (fricker, 2007, p. 40), we argue that reflexive awareness can be a means of moving toward epistemic justice for mad persons, by altering understandings and beginning to correct identity-prejudiced belief systems. indeed, we are suggesting that most of the work toward eradicating epistemic injustice needs to be achieved through the reflexive efforts of hearers (fricker, 2007). such hearers need not be what medina (2012) refers to as hermeneutical heroes: extremely courageous listeners (and speakers) who disrupt epistemic trends, making room for new meanings and interpretive perspectives. instead, creating awareness of the conditions that support both testimonial and hermeneutical justice demands reflexive awareness on the part of ordinary, but epistemically sensitive, listeners (fricker, 2007). epistemic sensitivity requires engagement in self-criticism and openness to changing negative patterns of credibility judgment and interpretive habits, so that the unprejudiced perception of another human being might transcend toward epistemic justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 73 deeply entrenched negative identity prejudices and stereotypes (fricker, 2007). one must begin to assess not simply the likelihood that the speaker’s utterance is true, but also the truthfulness of the hearer’s interpretation (fricker, 2007; medina, 2012). in doing so, a hearer may begin to recognize that perhaps her understandings are embedded within power imbalances related to the production of given knowledges. while hearers cannot be expected to suddenly develop complete openness in this regard, it is important, as medina (2012) reminds us, to be mindful of the wiggle-room that exists for modifying such problematic habits. in addition to reflexive self awareness, critical reflexivity in a broader social sense may also be used as an approach to question taken-for-granted knowledge claims related to madness, and for recognizing the ways in which unequal power relations may contribute to the available resources for understanding mad experiences (kinsella & whiteford, 2009). critical reflexivity, not to be confused with reflection, is defined by kinsella and whiteford (2009) in accordance with the work of social philosopher barry sandywell (1996), as “the act of interrogating interpretive systems that influence knowledge production,” whereby the “sociality of the process of knowledge production” is acknowledged (kinsella & whiteford, 2009, pp. 250-251). critical reflexivity involves careful interrogation of the grounds upon which taken-for-granted, or normative, claims about knowledge are generated and accepted, along with the situated perspectives from which knowledge claims are produced (harding, 1991; kinsella & whiteford, 2009; kinsella, 2012; mccorquodale & kinsella, 2015; phelan, 2011; sandywell, 1996). a critically reflexive hearer attempts to become aware of how the “relation between [her] social identity and that of the speaker is impacting on the intelligibility to her of what [the speaker] is saying and how she is saying it” (fricker, 2007, p. 169). in this way the hearer is aware that the speaker’s relative unintelligibility to her is perhaps a function of “a collective hermeneutical impoverishment, and [she] can adjust or suspend [her] credibility judgment accordingly” (ficker, 2007, p. 7). furthermore, a critically reflexive hearer can acknowledge that while to her a speaker’s testimony is seemingly unintelligible due to the speaker’s hermeneutically disadvantaged position, to another hearer the speaker may be communicating manifestly important knowledge (carel & kidd, 2014; fricker, 2007). hearers can move toward hermeneutical justice by seeking, including, listening, and being open to speakers’ interpretations, and viewing these as important contributors to knowledge generation (carel & kidd, 2014; fricker, 2007). using an example provided by carel and kidd (2014) to consider what hermeneutical justice might look like, we can suppose that if confronted with a testimonial exchange whereby the speaker’s interpretation seemed relatively unintelligible, the critically reflexive hearer might think to herself: stephanie leblanc & elizabeth anne kinsella studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 74 although i do not quite understand what you are attempting to communicate, i do not see it as a fault of yours, but mine. even your best efforts to make yourself understood are failing, not because of their inarticulacy, but because i am unable to appreciate the sort of articulacy you are using, and this hermeneutical context does not provide me with those resources (carel & kidd, 2014, p. 532). badwall (2016) cautions against the use of reflexivity that does not take into account the multiplicity of subject positions that shape identities or the colonial roots of taken-for-granted approaches to knowledge generation, such as the curriculum offered in professional schools or faculties (e.g., social work or medicine). she argues that particular institutional and colonized sites may create conditions in which critical reflexivity does the opposite of its intentions, for example “when the issues that workers can or cannot discuss are determined by their organizations” (badwall, 2016, p. 16) or are “contingent upon colonial continuities designed to govern the parameters of what can be reflected upon” (p. 17). while deeper engagement with this critique is beyond the scope of the present paper, it is important to acknowledge that sanism is inextricable from other forms of oppression (poole & jivrav, 2015). as such, the problem of epistemic injustice should be explored further within the context of intersecting oppressions and prejudices, such as the racialization or gendering of mad bodies. engagement with alternative epistemological perspectives knowledge(s) that differ from dominant discourses and ideologies are too often deemed “alien” and dismissed or ignored. however, epistemic interactions oriented toward justice require us to make room for, and embrace, plural and diverse knowledge(s) (kinsella & whiteford, 2009; medina, 2012). in this sense, justice carries with it generative epistemic possibilities, as it is often alien knowledge that forces a radical questioning of taken-for-granted assumptions, and calls for a “rearticulation of epistemic norms” (medina, 2012, p. 47). it would be limiting to make sense of madness according to psy discourses alone, in light of the multiplicity of meaning(s) to be made of such realities (fricker, 2007). in order to broaden our epistemic considerations we must first begin to “regard everyone’s self-narrative as central” (fabris, 2011, p. 31). situated stories and firsthand accounts by members of the mad community offer epistemic resources to which we must attend. according to foucault (1980), simply giving voice to and hearing subjugated knowledge provides a means for challenging the hegemony of dominant discourses. this perspective is echoed by fabris (2011, p. 34), who writes that “to contest force in psychiatric arrangements requires more than empathy or technique in the other’s ‘best interest,’ and more than knowledge about us without us.” in order to tap into the subjugated knowledge of mad persons, fabris offers an alternative way of knowing madness that is filled with epistemic possibility: toward epistemic justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 59-78, 2016 75 madness is sound, but not because we live in a mad world (there is nothing mad about it either). we have identity in ‘mad’ experience, in difference, not despite it. i would like to suggest that madness is not only excusable, interesting, or a version of rationality under pressure. madness is an embodied way to know. it is intelligent, searching, and valuable. it is not regression, but a conscious reaching out, as is technical work, healing love, or creative feeling. purpose is not impossible in ‘madness,’ but it is also not easily described in a non-normative relation to the world. (fabris, 2011, pp. 31-32) conclusion throughout this paper we have examined fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice as it relates to the marginalization of mad knowledge(s), linking the concept with that of sanism and psychocentrism. we have also engaged with the concept of critical reflexivity as a means to participate in the pursuit of epistemic justice. it is our hope that this work will serve as a foothold for those seeking to further explore epistemic justice(s) for mad persons, and to engage in critical interrogation of the hegemony of sanism, psychocentrism and psy discourses. epistemic injustices in the mad community “call for epistemic resistance,” and the fight against epistemic injustices belongs to the entire collective social body (medina, 2012, p. 3). each of us has the ability, perhaps even responsibility, to use our epistemic resources toward challenging taken-forgranted ways of knowing madness (fricker, 2007; medina, 2012). we argue for a broadening of epistemological horizons, inclusive of mad knowledges and welcoming of the mad community’s full epistemic participation. references amador, x., & kronengold, h. 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(2002). from sinners to degenerates: the medicalization of morality. history of the human sciences, 15(1), 59-88. russo, j. & beresford, p. (2015). between exclusion and colonisation: seeking a place for mad people’s knowledge in academia. disability and society, 30(1), 153-157. saks, e. r. (2007). the centre cannot hold. new york: hyperion books. sandywell, b. (1996). reflexivity and the crisis of western reason: logological investigations (vol. i). new york: routledge. scull, a. t. (1989). social order/mental disorder: anglo-american psychiatry in historical perspective (vol. 3). oakland, ca: university of california press. shotter, j. (1981). vico, moral worlds, accountability and personhood. in p. heelas, & a. lock (eds.), indigenous psychologies of self (pp. 266-284). london: academic press. spandler, h. & carlton, t. (2009). psychosis and human rights: conflicts in mental health policy and practice. social policy and society, 8(2), 245-256. thachuk, a. k. (2011). stigma and the politics of biomedical models of mental illness. international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics, 4(1), 140-163. wahl, o. f. (1999). mental health consumers' experience of stigma. schizophrenia bulletin, 25(3), 467. williams, v. (2014). 'sanism', a socially acceptable prejudice: addressing the prejudice associated with mental illness in the legal system (unpublished doctoral dissertation) university of tasmania, hobart. wolframe, p. m. (2013a). the madwoman in the academy, or, revealing the invisible straightjacket: theorizing and teaching saneism and sane privilege. disability studies quarterly, 33(1). retrieved from http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3425 wolframe, p. m. (2013b). reading through madness: counter-psychiatric epistemologies and the biopolitics of (in)sanity in post-world war ii anglo-atlantic women’s writing (unpublished doctoral thesis). mcmaster university, hamilton, on. currie final before ts correspondence address: mark currie, faculty of education, university of ottawa, ottawa, on, k1n 6n5; email: mcurr014@uottawa.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 1, 162-165, 2021 book review things that make white people uncomfortable bennett, michael, & zirin, david. (2018). chicago, il: haymarket books. isbn 9781608468935 (cloth) us$24.95; isbn 9781642590234 (paper) us$17.95; isbn 9781608468942 (e-book) us$19.95. 268 pages. mark t. s. currie university of ottawa, canada whether i die tomorrow or in sixty years, if the only things about me that people talk about are the pro bowls and the super bowl appearances, i will have failed. i want my legacy to be what i did in the community and the positive changes this work might have created in people’s lives. (p. 29) as i finished reading michael bennett’s memoir,1 things that make white people uncomfortable, and began writing this review, countries around the world were coming to grips with and developing ongoing responses to the covid-19 pandemic, and protestors were taking to american and canadian streets to demand justice and an end to murdering black and indigenous people at the hands of police. as the coronavirus continues to shape our social, political, and economic lives, and black and indigenous people remain subjected to systemic and targeted racisms, one might suggest that sports are not the priority of the day, and so a memoir written by a professional american football player could seem somewhat unimportant. this notion, however, would be shortsighted, as bennett shares his lived experiences in american football to show that participation in sports can actually provide opportunities for critical discussions around social justice, while the business of sports wields too much power, turning players into property and perpetuating dehumanizing racisms. ultimately, through this book, bennett is calling out the ncaa and professional sports as systems of (black) human 1 dave zirin is an author and editor of sports publications and acted as a supporting author for this book, which is why he is credited as an author. the stories told and reflections offered primarily represent the voice of michael bennett. book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 162-165, 2021 163 exploitation, and he aims to offer readers the lessons he has learned about what is truly important and the tools for disrupting discriminations. bennett’s story is one of determination and perseverance in the face of racist obstacles, all while keeping a critical eye on the path down which he walks. he speaks with passion for both what he believes is being done well and what he thinks needs to change in the worlds of college and professional sports, education, and activism against racism, sexism, food insecurity, and more. through tales and commentary on his journey from rural louisiana to becoming a professional football player, to where he wants to his life to go next, the book is an overall discussion of how and why bennett strives to leave the legacy he describes in the quotation at the start of this review before discussing what messages the book offers, i first want to acknowledge that the book does have one main shortcoming that could detract from a general audience’s engagement with various stories bennett uses to contextualize his points on the discriminations at play: he takes too much for granted about what his readers already know. i approached this book with a variety of personal and academic knowledges that allow me to read and understand the experiences and concepts within the book the way it seems bennett hopes, but this will not be the case for all readers. i am a scholar of racism and antiracism, specifically in and through different forms of education, so when bennett discusses the relationships between racism and academia, i understand his perspective on educational systems. i have been to the american south, including louisiana, which bennett describes as being integral to whom he has become. i grew up playing and watching football, and tend to keep up with american sports and political news, so bennett’s references to different sporting events, team names, playing positions, and activist athletes are not lost on me. finally, i have family members who have competed within the ncaa system, so, i have learned second-hand about how the lives of student-athletes are regulated, and understand the collegiate context in which bennett played college football. i don’t want to suggest that someone without these perspectives would miss bennett’s overall points, or that i didn’t miss certain aspects of bennett’s narrative, but i did find that my experiences and knowledges helped to fill in some gaps in the description that informed bennett’s messages. there are times when bennett seems to assume that readers are simultaneously seasoned sports fans and social justice advocates. he writes as if his audience already knows the names of role model activist athletes he talks about (e.g., muhammad ali, john carlos, colin kaepernick), and are familiar with these people’s actions of protest. if a reader is not a sports news or history person, a few quick internet searches might be helpful while joining bennett on his journey. moving on to thinking about the messages bennett shares, i admit that in reading bennett’s story, i was at first critical of how he positioned himself as facing forms of oppression in football, with coaches, team owners, and even team fans being the oppressors. initially, the answer seemed simple: don’t play. no one is forcing him to participate, so he could choose to leave the mark t. s. currie studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 162-165, 2021 164 million-dollar contract and walk away from the discriminatory environment. the messages that bennett aims to convey, however, go beyond his presence in the league. he is simply using his experiences as a gateway to problematizing the treatment of (particularly black) athletes. the foundational message i read was bennett’s link between sports as a multibillion-dollar industry – at college and professional levels – and historic systems of black enslavement. in both, bennett suggests, black bodies are dehumanized by treating them as property and as a means for financial profit. he makes additional connections between systemic issues, such as the prevalence of food insecurity in racialized neighbourhoods and perceptions that sports, rather than systemic change, is a way out of poverty. the vanishingly small percentage of young athletes who do rise to the professional level of their sport earn money that allows them to care for themselves and their families, but do so by enduring the physical and mental strains of being a tool for creating a product: a winning and therefore financially profitable team, usually headed by a white owner. according to bennett, one main way forward in battling this dehumanization both in sports and everyday life is through what he calls intersectionality. the intersectionality that bennett speaks of, however, reads more like solidarity and relationality than the intersections of identity that have been examined and taken up by critical race theorists and black feminist scholars such as kimberlé crenshaw and bell hooks. i highlight this difference not to squabble over terminology, but to clarify the distinction and then move on to addressing bennett’s actual point. his emphasis is on “understanding of how multiple oppressions can overlap” (p. 196) and recognizing the times when “their oppression sounded like his oppression” (p. 197). in the fight against discriminations of all kinds, bennett says, “we are going to need to connect with each other to bring about these [societal] shifts” (p. 208). sports are often looked at as apolitical (e.g., consider the “shut up and play” attitudes that continuously condemn players “taking a knee” during the national anthem), but bennett points out the strong presence of politics in sports, the parallels we can see between sports and society, and the opportunities to use sports as a forum for connecting with and contributing to anti-oppressive change throughout society. while bennett uses his platform as a professional athlete to call out the racisms and injustices that he sees in the present, he also uses his celebrity voice to bolster efforts for a better future. he works to encourage youth – especially black girls – to embrace education with a focus on steamed (science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics, entrepreneurship, and design). he partners with educational organizations where the goal, it seems, is to prepare youth for creating their own paths, becoming societal leaders, and not chasing after the slim chance of earning millions through the racist business of sports. in bennett’s words, the present generation of black youth “is going to be decisive, and […] they need to get off their behinds and realize the power they have. they are the future” (p. 216). he refuses to book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 162-165, 2021 165 perpetuate the cycle of black boys and girls being told that academics are not an option and that they should pursue sports. if black boys and girls are interested and show potential in sports, bennett believes they should be encouraged not to be a pawn for white owners, and to become leaders themselves, aspiring to be head coaches and team owners where they can change the ways the business of sports operates. as i write this, the nfl team washington football team just named jason wright as the new president of the franchise, making wright the first ever black nfl team president. change is clearly possible, but it requires breaking through a thick wall of whiteness. bennett obviously found success in his journey through football, and became a leader on the field and in the community, but the challenges he faced were not just in making it to the top; he was challenged with not being silenced by racism, not becoming mere property, and not surrendering his humanity along the way. this is not a book that offers – or intends to offer – a new take on antiracist theory. rather, bennett shares his lived experiences and reflections to present contexts in which antiracist activism and practice has been and still needs to be enacted. it is about antiracist and anti-oppressive practices. the book provides a glimpse into the complexities and interconnectivities between the journey of a black athlete and the racisms and antiracisms that occur in wider society. michael bennett is a professional american football player, but that is not all he is, and not all he wants to be remembered as. throughout his narratives and commentary is a message that tells his readers that the path to overcoming racism is an uncomfortable one, but it must be travelled, and it must be travelled together. bennett stands on his beliefs: “you have to be uncomfortable to grow […] if we feel uncomfortable, we are doing something right. that discomfort is just a period of transition” (p. 247). poyntz final before ts correspondence address: stuart r. poyntz, school of communication, simon fraser university, burnaby, bc, v5a 1s6; email: spoyntz@sfu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 producing authenticity: urban youth arts, rogue archives and negotiating a home for social justice stuart r. poyntz simon fraser university, canada abstract social justice needs a home, a place where it can be found, especially for young people growing up in fragmented and increasingly inequitable societies. community youth arts organizations have secured a certain prominence in this context over the past three decades and are now part of the urban infrastructures that shape connected learning networks in highly industrialized nations. in this capacity, youth arts organizations regularly engage a language and aesthetics of authenticity and trust as part of how they call out, represent and make a home for children and youth. this paper examines how authenticity in youth culture and youth cultural expression is negotiated by arts organizations and how organizations locate their own trustworthiness as allies of young people through the curation of online media archives. the analysis draws on the internet media archives of two youth arts organizations in canada’s largest english-speaking cities. the oasis skateboard factory (osf) in toronto, on is an extension program of the toronto district school board that enables participants to create their own brands and learn to run a skateboard or professional design business. reelyouth (vancouver, bc) started in vancouver in 2005 as a community media empowerment project, and now delivers programs across canada and internationally. the claims to youth authenticity articulated in each media archive reveal how authenticity and trust are negotiated ideologically by each organization and how organizations mark their ontological status, as a home from which young people can think and respond to an unjust world. i examine how youth authenticity is produced by analyzing how discourses of youth identity, connection and trust are deployed across each archive. whilst showcasing how authenticity is negotiated by each group, i show how the production of authenticity discourses by osf and reelyouth simultaneously convey a deeper reality: the way youth arts groups operate as care structures (scannell, 2014) that offer ontological security (giddens, 1991), and places of increasing “awareness of previously unnoticed interconnections” (frosh, 2019, p. 16) for youth. in this way, they operate as sites of border work, places of routing from which the work of social justice can be borne. stuart poyntz studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 376 keywords youth arts; non-formal learning; authenticity and trust; urban space introduction social justice needs a home, a place where it can be found. this is especially so for young people growing up in fragmented and increasingly inequitable societies, where the role of traditional sites of learning, including schools has undergone rapid change and where digital media are regularly a source of disruption and transformation, offering new sites of influence and persuasion and the “general broadening of risk-taking and risk-bearing as properties” of children’s and youth’s experiences (appadurai, 2013, p. 3). a home in this context isn’t a domestic space as much as it is a place for youth belonging, a site where “border work” happens, where young people are given opportunities to orient outward, to a larger world, to discover external relationships, negotiate identities and social skills and develop routes toward possible futures (christenson & o’brien, 2003, p. 4). community youth arts organizations have secured a certain prominence in this environment and are now part of the urban infrastructures (amin, 2014) that shape connected learning networks across highly industrialized nations (ito et al., 2018; poyntz et al., 2019). the roots of the youth arts sector go back to community organizing and community arts in the post-war era (bekerman et al., 2005). over the last 30 years, non-formal youth arts organizations have grown in significance as part of the general expansion of third sector, social service organizations under neoliberalism. youth arts groups have developed as intergenerational spaces of trust, care and connection that aid youth transitions through adolescence by creating participatory spaces to negotiate citizenship and address digital divides in highly mediated cultures (cf. poyntz et al., 2019). youth arts augment the semiotic resources and learning available for young people through traditional schooling and are linked to the acquisition of key literacies and networks necessary for work and citizen participation in global capitalist societies. in taking on this role in recent decades, youth arts organizations regularly engage a language and aesthetics of authenticity and trust as part of how they call out, represent and make a home for children and youth. discourses of authenticity matter because they authorize the ground of youth belonging. authenticity is a loose yet persistent signifier in young people’s cultures, one that continues to function as a tool of social orientation and wayfinding for teenagers, while serving as a popular reference point for public debates about credible information sources and the integrity of media representations of young people. in this paper, i examine how authenticity and trust are negotiated by arts organizations in ways that mark their ontological status as a home from which young people can think and respond to an unjust world. producing authenticity studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 377 the analysis draws on the internet media archives of two youth arts organizations in canada’s largest english-speaking cities and is part of youthsites: the non-formal learning sector in creative lives, a five-year sshrc-funded project examining the creative arts sector for socially disadvantaged youth in three global cities (london, toronto and vancouver). the oasis skateboard factory (osf) in toronto, on is an extension program of the toronto district school board that enables participants to create their own brands and learn to run a skateboard or professional design business. reelyouth (vancouver, bc) started in vancouver in 2005 as a community media empowerment project, and now delivers programs across canada and internationally. the osf and reelyouth internet media archives consist of a range of artifacts (more than 100 for each organization) and interfaces that collectively showcase each organization by curating youth-made media, national and regional mainstream news (print and video) coverage, blog posts and related participatory narratives, key research reports and other videos produced by and about the organizations between 2005 and the present. collectively, each online collection functions as a rogue archive (de kosnik, 2016), a non-traditional, non-canonical, specialized pool of media that articulates discourses of youth authenticity that helps to construct trust with key youth communities. to understand how the archives mark youth arts groups as a home for social justice, i draw on pauwels’ (2012) social semiotic framework to examine each organization’s media archive at two levels: (1) the technical and aesthetic interface on the homepage of each website; and (2) the language and aesthetics that dominate in the online searchable media archives of each organization. i examine how youth authenticity is produced by analyzing how discourses of youth identity, connection and trust are deployed across each collection. this deployment highlights how authenticity is ideologically negotiated by each organization; but, it also points to the way youth arts groups function ontologically, as spaces of provision, care and belonging for youth. organizations perform this latter role by presenting persistent, durable and consistent modes of representation, by opening up access to the “real,” by which i mean access to the means for reflective world disclosure (kompridis, 2006) and by staging access to forms of social agility and renewed relationships with official institutions, including schools. in the process, groups like osf and reelyouth operate as care structures (scannell, 2014) that offer ontological security (giddens, 1991) and a place of increasing “awareness of previously unnoticed interconnections” (frosh, 2019, p. 16) for youth. in this way, they operate as sites of border work, places of belonging and routing for the work of social justice. stuart poyntz studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 378 authenticity, trust and the youth arts sector authenticity is a fluid and much debated concept frequently challenged for its utility in cultural analysis (jenss, 2004). notions of cultural authenticity have historically been used by figures like adorno and horkheimer to critique the sullying of culture by consumerism, mass society and capitalist commodification. here, authenticity is associated with the fundamental qualities of a form of experience and inauthenticity is used to mark an adulteration or corruption of a primary mode of life. the problem with such critiques is that they tend to draw on essentialist notions that configure authenticity around the inherent qualities of a privileged form of culture or the “inherent quality of some object, person or process” (vannini & williams, 2009, p. 2). in the wake of seminal texts like peter berger and thomas luckmann’s (1967) the social construction of reality and the influence of various postmodernisms, however, the influence of essentialist or realist conceptions of authenticity has waned and pragmatist or sociallyconstructed notions of authenticity have risen to the fore (vannini & williams, 2009). driving these developments in youth studies and the sociology of childhood is the fact that authenticity remains a potent marker across consumer cultures, a measure of credibility for celebrities, brands and texts, and a wayfinding tool for teenagers in times of rapid socio-cultural and technological change. framing authenticity as a socially situated phenomenon shifts the concept away from associations with purity or singular cultural identities, focusing attention instead on how authenticity operates as a powerful form of social orientation used to locate distinct youth identities, needs and experiences. as a marker of social orientation, authenticity “refers to a set of qualities that people in a particular time and place have come to agree represent an ideal or exemplar” (vannini & williams, 2009, p. 3). authenticity is something that emerges through acts of mutual understanding, collective efforts at identity performance and common perceptions of space, locality and shared “things” (nayak, 2003). authenticity is not an absolute but a conditional phenomenon, a mutable experience that nonetheless continues to function as a marker of community, connection and trust. as emerging crises and risks have proliferated, questions of authenticity have become common in public culture. contemporary debates about information access, the credibility of information sources and the development of online “echo chambers” (bruns, 2019; chun, 2016) have all heightened concerns about what media and cultural forms young people can trust. these worries have extended long-standing anxieties about cyber violence and “stranger danger” (crooks, 2018; poyntz, 2013), which, while often overstated have nonetheless fueled media panics (drotner, 1999) about legitimate and authentic forms of online persuasion. changes in young people’s play cultures, the proliferation of risky online content, including producing authenticity studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 379 pornography, and the advent of data surveillance powered by algorithms that incorporate young people into the global imaginaries of consumer celebrity cultures and the archives of surveillance states, have all amplified the feeling that conditions of authenticity, connection and trust are more precarious and important than ever. even among online instagram “influencers,” authenticity – as opposed to popularity registered by “likes” – has emerged as a crucial element for sustaining relationships between cyber celebrities and their online communities (abidin, 2018; marwick, 2013). concerns about authenticity and trust are compounded by insecurities surrounding changes in young people’s working and learning lives, including the future threat posed by automation and growing skepticism about the fitness of modern institutions like schools to address the needs and hopes of youth (sefton-green & erstad, 2019). perhaps not surprisingly, novel sites of connected learning and media participation, including the youth arts learning sector, have gained prominence in this context. the youth arts sector is not often recognized as such, at least in part because the sector is not typically part of the remit of any one state ministry, secretariat or policy apparatus. it is a liminal space where the boundaries between institutions, policy fields, pedagogies, and subjectivities blur (poyntz et al., 2019). the sector includes a number of institutional forms and kinds of programs, including alternative-to-school and after-school programs, initiatives connected to art galleries and stand-alone institutions and projects that can have a relatively short life-span, but are intended to engage risk conditions related to youth health, job training and skills development, the development of creative voice and identity concerns, and so on. participants in youth arts organizations tend to be between 13 and 25 years of age. funding generally comes from a cross-section of sources, including private and community foundations, government programs, private donations and fee-for-service programming (poyntz et al., 2019; seftongreen, 2013). organizations differ in size and in general, support forms of education that exist outside the mainstream curriculum, aesthetic expression and visions of civic participation that run against the grain and opportunities for socially marginalized young people who are frequently denied them. youth arts organizations are often evaluated and monitored by local authorities at city level or even the nation state; and, projects typically fit within a complex network of routes for young people within learning institutions in the city. the range and impact of youth arts organizations has expanded in recent decades as grassroots and non-governmental organizations have proliferated under neoliberalism and turned civil society into a site of struggle over the role of non-market-based activities and collectivities (harvey, 2005; poyntz, 2018). soo-ah kwon (2013) marks the influence systems of neoliberal governance have had on the sector and our own work (poyntz et al., 2019) has traced a series of paradoxes that continue to shape the sector. among stuart poyntz studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 380 these paradoxes, the challenge of youth representation and recognition is an ongoing concern. in most jurisdictions, the youth arts sector depends on alignment with social policy and funding priorities among a patchwork of government and third sector funding bodies to secure its future; and yet the relationship of the sector with these sources is vexed. organizations are responsive to social policy, funding opportunities and dominant media representations about young people, and yet they’re equally attuned to the differences between state, market and philanthropic interests and the rights and needs of youth. in a recent paper we noted the challenge this poses: youth arts organizations must develop a language to describe who it is they work with that is responsive to the agendas of funders and credible with youth participants. yet, to negotiate this position is to tread paradoxically between the demands of external funders and respect for youth program participants. labelling young people is a profound challenge for the sector, because ‘deficit’ labels that refer to patterns of ‘exclusion’ and ‘vulnerability’ risk pathologizing and ‘othering’ the very youth the sector wishes to support. yet, it is just this language that constitutes the symbolic power of the sector among funders (poyntz et al., 2019, p. 271). using the language of social policy and prominent media narratives to engage external support is hardly surprising. and yet, it is here, within this struggle over the production and representation of youth that questions of authenticity and trustworthiness play out. the media archives produced and maintained by youth arts organizations are an especially robust site of such negotiations, and in what follows, i examine how osf’s and reelyouth’s media archives produce a language and aesthetics of youth authenticity as part of situating their role as allies of young people and “a gathering force” in the social life of communities (amin, 2014, p. 138). reading rogue archives the internet media archives of organizations like osf and reelyouth offer a rich site to examine how authenticity and trustworthiness are curated online because media archives stage a public assemblage of artifacts that enunciate the identity, intentions, impact, allies and key voices tied to organizations over their history. such collections are examples of what abigail de kosnik (2016) calls rogue archives, non-canonical, digital assemblages that are created about, “for and by highly specific communities” (p. 84). rogue archives have proliferated as the affordances built into digital technologies enable more and more people to undertake archival projects. such projects reflect a loosening of linkages between public memory and the state (auslander, 2008), as new networks of public memory have developed, tied to groups and communities wishing to preserve “whatever content they producing authenticity studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 381 [deem] suitable for digital preservation” (de kosnik, 2016, p. 1). internet media archives address the challenge of ephemerality for youth arts organizations, by offering a means and site for preservation of what has been done and what has been said about what has been done. in the process, they provide a rich site to interrogate how organizations like osf and reelyouth cultivate a sense of authenticity, connection and trust with youth. the media archives of both osf and reelyouth are neither exclusive nor ideal representations of the organizations. they are expansive and dedicated to persistent publication, yet they are also selective (i.e., not all media produced by or about an organization is present), subject to breakdown (i.e., broken links) and support mid-term rather than long-term content preservation. they “stabilize and reproduce particular practices and forms of knowledge” (lischer-katz, 2017), and in this way work as counter-canons that don’t represent everyone but recognize specific communities and forms of representation (de kosnik, 2016, p. 75). like most other community archives, osf’s and reelyouth’s archives are freely available, with artifacts that can be downloaded in their entirety and in general are not restricted by copyright. what constitutes an organization’s media archive is not straightforward in a time of incessant technology change and the rise and fall in popularity of specific platforms. facebook pages, instagram stories and twitter flows are now part of the online ecology organizations curate to showcase and promote their work and connect with others. but are they part of an organization’s media archive in the same way as a website sustained over years? the answer would appear to be yes, and yet how those spaces archive and “hold” the work of organizations is different than a proprietorial website. of course, websites have become rather moldy in an era obsessed with technological futurism and fomo (fear of missing out). nonetheless, if we think of websites as spaces or even repositories of artifacts – text, sound, video files, and so on – that allow for minimal forms of interactive connection with users, then they perform a valuable archiving function for organizations that regularly struggle to keep up with persistent transformations in digital architecture. in this paper, the analysis of the media archives of osf and reelyouth is limited to artifacts and experiences present on each organization’s website (http://oasisskateboardfactory.blogspot.com/ and https://www.reelyouth.ca/), with a specific focus on the artifacts curated in the media forum sections of each site. in each instance, there are more than 100 artifacts, including award winning youth-made videos, radio interviews, print and video links to national and regional mainstream news coverage, blog posts, research reports and other visual media produced by and about the organizations between 2005 and the present. in the case of osf, in addition to their home page, a pool of 40 artifacts were used as a representative example of the media archive, with particular focus on artifacts produced over the past seven years. other artifacts were either unavailable because links were broken or were stuart poyntz studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 382 deemed repetitive (i.e., similar programs or genres of news reporting). in addition to reelyouth’s website homepage, a pool of 37 artifacts were selected, again focused on material produced since 2012, and similarly, other artifacts were either unavailable or were deemed repetitive (i.e., similar programs or genres of news reporting). i am most interested in the way the archive of each organization produces aesthetic resources with symbolic power and resources that configure social identities and experiences of belonging. pauwels’ (2012) social semiotic framework for examining websites affords helpful tools to examine these foci at two levels: (1) the technical and aesthetic interface on the home page of each website; and, (2) the visual and audio language and aesthetics that dominate in the online searchable media archives of each organization. pauwel’s framework invites an examination of web objects and artifacts at multiple levels, including the material characteristics of the image (i.e., texture, resolution, sharpness, colour spectrum and so on); the signifiers and codes of static images (i.e., composition, lighting, camera distance, focus, etc.); the signifiers and codes of the shot (i.e., camera movements and shutter speed); editing choices within artifacts; audio signifiers; layout and design signifiers; and, internal absences (i.e., who is in and who is not in shots?, what are their relational positions?). pauwels’ framework is used to examine the design of each site, as a “look” with specific aesthetics, including the ways youth and youthfulness are referenced. within the available media archives, i examined how a sense of youth authenticity is produced by analyzing how the related notions of identity, connection and trust are curated online. i operationalized these categories by treating each as a social figuration produced through particular forms of representation. identity was examined in relation to common patterns of youth representation, including the key roles (who can you be?) proposed for young people. connection was analyzed in relation to how semiotic resources are used to say where youth are (i.e., where do they belong?) and what purpose each organization has for youth (how do they connect with youth?). trustworthiness was investigated by looking at how dominant things, actions and the style or tone of artifacts suggest a sense of sincerity and honesty. together, these foci explore the cultural expressiveness (what is there?) within each media archive. while the intended audience was also explored for each artifact, this research did not include an investigation of audiences’ reading practices vis-à-vis each site, so questions of target audience were only minimally helpful in the analysis presented. oasis skateboard factory, street culture and real worlds oasis skateboard factory is an alternative-to-school design program that operates out of a space in scadding court community centre in the historically low-income, immigrant-centred neighbourhood between producing authenticity studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 383 kensington market and dufferin grove in toronto. the program has been in operation since 2009, participants are 16-18 years old and can earn high school credits over one-to-two semesters by creating their own brands and running a professional skateboard/design studio. the program is an extension of the toronto district school board, but it has all the markings of a youth arts program, operating outside the normal strictures of formal schooling. participation is based on student interest, attendance is essential and in some sense is required and participants (26 per four-month program) come from across the city, including major suburban ring areas around toronto. activities run from 10:30 to 3:30 each day and are led by the program’s founder, craig morrison, and educator, lauren hortie, both of whom trained in community education. when one arrives at the osf website,1 the first thing one encounters is the osf banner, a simple black box with white text that includes the osf name and the, text, “school/sk8 & street art design services, located at scadding court community centre.” beneath that is what might be considered a program motto: “why be bored in school? go to a skateboard school!” there are no menu buttons at the top of the homepage; rather, as a blogspot one scrolls down the page to find material on information sessions, open house dates, a calendar of events for the month(s) ahead and much more. scrolling down the homepage, very quickly the osf logo appears in black and white in a street-graffiti style font. below this there are images of student-made skateboards, images of youth examining materials for board construction with the text, “student designers planning their next skateboard colourways by picking out custom dyed veneers in the @roarockit warehouse today,” and other images of osf clients, including an image from the toronto star, announcing that “justin bieber gets 14 new skateboards created by toronto students,” alongside an enlarged hashtag for #altmfg, that references an alternative design, manufacture and distribution network in toronto, of which osf is a part. there are links to the osf online shop, a series of text links, announcing that osf was selected #1 on the toronto star’s coolest schools list in 2011, hottest on now magazine’s (toronto’s main alternative weekly) “barometer” in 2012 and a series of other awards, including a status of women award in 2012 for lauren hortie and an arts educator of the year award (2012) for craig morrison. scrolling down further, there are a series of images of students, representing a diversity of genders and ethnicities. some students flash gentle gang signs, including the ily sign meaning, “i love you.” other images capture the students in a group, wearing custom-designed, indigenous-inspired hoodies, walking with boards through the streets of toronto. moving down further, there is reference to a thank you for a collaboration with elders from nunavut, the 1 the quotations, notations and references about oasis skateboard factory in this section are taken from blog posts, videos, news reports, public relations documents and other texts contained in the organization’s archive, during the period from august 01-september 30, 2019. the specific source of each reference is typically indicated in the text. stuart poyntz studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 384 innu-dominated territory in canada’s north. there is a movie-like poster under the heading, “class portrait double feature by anomaly 2018.” the poster reads, “they came from the factory” in green gooey horror film-like text. students from the previous year’s class are portrayed in the poster as zombies and other characters from an imaginary horror film. other posters from earlier years appear with the slogan “the youth are revolting.” program partners’ and community collaborators’ logos appear and include the toronto-los angeles creative agency, anomaly, roarocket, concrete wave magazine, evolve skate camp, manic coffee, ridenorth: canadian skate culture and various other skateboard brands and logos. there are at least two images of craig morrison and lauren hortie, neither of whom strike poses as typical educators. craig has a full beard, looking like an aging hipster and both he and lauren strike the looks of indignation common to boarding culture while holding boards and again, throwing mild gang signs. there is an upcoming events and announcements list, and then below that an extensive archive of articles, news reports and so on under the heading, “osf in the media …” collectively, the language and aesthetic of the home page is clean, with ample use of white space, allusions to street graffiti and street culture, reference to a diversity of young people and key allies and program support networks. there is a sense of cool entrepreneurialism about the space that references brands, logos, celebrities and events while underplaying signifiers – like grades, assignments and so on – common to formal schooling. importantly, the blogspot works in the sense that it functions seamlessly in a way that contrasts with the formal and sometimes spotty experience of many public school websites. the media archive on the osf site is a rich trove of artifacts that produce a language and aesthetics of youth authenticity by curating conceptions of identity, connection and trust. among the 40 artifacts examined were: profile videos from daily vice and the ytv show, the zone; a music video for obey clothing, featuring artist shepard fairey; a short documentary made by osf; a documentary on craig morrison; magazine profiles and listings from spacing independent urban magazine; a blog post by international artist, mark tirchner; many advocacy oriented news media articles from mainstream dailies in canada; an osf course listing from the art gallery of ontario; several student videos; student-produced articles from concrete wave magazine; and a single cbc radio interview featuring laurie hortie. to make sense of how youth identity is curated in the collection, it’s helpful to locate the youth we see and learn about, key youth allies and the roles proposed for young people. across the archived media there is a range of youth presented, representing a cross-section of genders, ethnicities and apparently socio-economic classes who come “from across the city”; but, there is also clear recognition of – a calling out to – specific youth identities. those identities include “punk rock types and skater dudes,” but also “girls into skateboarding, … graffiti artists and tattoo artists,” some kids who are producing authenticity studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 385 into writing, youth who “often come from challenging backgrounds and haven’t had a good go of it in school,” teens trying to “break out of the school mode,” “kids that just wouldn’t be in school, they would have dropped out,” and “kids who are anxious to get out in the world and make their mark.” not surprisingly in an alternative-to-school program, osf hails teens who have “fallen through the cracks,” kids who don’t succeed in school and sometimes represent the first in family to graduate from high school. the address to particular youth identities is reinforced through associations with key youth allies, including the aforementioned shepard fairey and mark tirchner, internationally renowned artists who bridge divides between street/public art, graffiti culture and the worlds of contemporary art. while recognizing particular youth identities, the roles proposed for young people in the media archive focus on becoming a young creative, an entrepreneur, artist and designer (“they are designers now”) with a distinct brand or design identity. taking on these roles is in turn presented as a way for young people to be “out in the world,” to discover “talent you didn’t know you had” and to become world-oriented or “engaged in real life.” a particular form of connection is curated in the media archive through semiotic resources that frame a sense of where youth are and the purpose of osf for young people. together, these elements configure a vernacular of belonging for youth. not surprisingly, this syntax is oriented around specific forms of public space – a public skate park, a non-traditional classroom, the “inner-city arts community,” particular “creative” neighbourhoods in toronto, including queen street west and kensington market. but it also includes hidden spaces, like a site, tucked down a dumpster-blocked laneway off of dufferin … [where] the oasis skateboard factory pop-up was a-buzz with participating student entrepreneurs, supportive friends and family, toronto design offsite attendees and maybe one or two lured in with the promise of free glory hole doughnuts. (oasis skateboard factory pops up at the baitshop, 2013) glory hole donuts is an upmarket toronto shop offering traditional and artisanal fare that in many ways sits in the sweet spot of osf’s appeal: as a program for kids who lack social and cultural capital that promises experiences of class uplift. a sense of connection is also constituted through the value proposition osf presents for youth, much of which is tied to a promise of access to the real (world) and to valued subject positions by learning to build skateboards. participants learn to build personal brands to promote self-development and real-world experience: “they are building their own brands, learning how to run a business. we have lots of pop-up shops, we sell everything we make and we get hired by clients to do jobs for them” (craig morrison). they reimagine high school as a skateboard company, treating participants “not as empty vessels but as equal partners who have something to offer” (craig morrison). they disrupt youth stereotypes: “we are reconnecting kids with stuart poyntz studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 386 something that got them in trouble: graffiti and skateboards, things that adults don’t like” (craig morrison). they give students a route forward, providing real world skills, helping student creators to find their market and run a design company. kids learn “to work with clients … doing high quality work, and making sure a job is done in a way that creates the next job” (craig morrison). they awaken untapped creativity, teach professionalism and focus on real life and doing something in the real world, “where things count.” they open networks and value kids as creative workers (e.g., partnering with ad agencies including anomaly in toronto). “no one hands me something that i only mark and put in a folder. everything we do is public: in the street, in a gallery, in pop-up shops, and at product launches” (craig morrison). by providing on-the-job experience, they legitimize kids with adult creatives and open up job placements. they also have a commitment to social justice. “we often talk about who you want to work with … a big corporation that doesn’t pay its workers well or with a small coffee shop that deals in a direct trade model. they are meeting other young people in these jobs and they start to see themselves having a place in the working world” (craig morrison). by “seeing their work acknowledged by the broader community, students begin to see themselves as participants in the city” (craig morrison). in addition to addressing specific youth identities and discourses of connection, the archive produces a sense of youth authenticity by curating a catalogue of dominant things, actions and a style or tone that together signify the trustworthiness or sincerity of osf. the single most important thing used to signify the trustworthiness of the organization is the skateboard, which is referenced across the archive, as the object of work and the site of creative self-expression, innovation and style. the skateboard is an object of transformation and the platform on which youth expression is actualized. in a globe and mail article from december 6, 2013, for instance, we read about “hannah duncan, a soft-spoken 18-year-old with hot pink hair, [who] shows off her design based on salvador dali’s the persistence of memory, with melting skateboards in the place of the painter’s iconic clocks” and “cassidy edwards, 18, [who] gives a report on the progress of her posterized design of michelangelo’s david.” (krashinski, 2013). in the same article, we’re told about “another board with a take on botticelli – except this time, venus is born on a clamshell covered in sweet tattoos.” other things, including the unorthodox learning space, the skatepark outside scadding court community centre, a large mural for obey clothing, are also present. but the skateboard is unquestionably the dominant thing in the archive, a transformative object both common to youth culture and a signifier of new beginnings, new relationships, new opportunities and possibly even a new self. among the many images in the archive, there is an otherwise bland artifact called “dare2create art and film” which includes images of youth producing their own boards. among these there are two images which show representations of the youth creators fashioned on to their boards. in one of these examples, producing authenticity studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 387 there is a before and after shot of a young woman, showing her as she was and as she has become, the board providing platform and inspiration for a reimagination of self. the dominant style and tone evident among the artifacts tend to reinforce the significance of skateboard culture. some of the mainstream news articles and videos tend toward the informational and advocacy for the program, but a series of videos, urban magazine articles and blogs highlight a street culture aesthetic through electronic music, hip hop, urban scenes, shots of skateboard parks, graffiti and massive urban murals. the power of these signifiers is only enhanced by the presence of specific celebrities, including the massively popular toronto artist (and basketball ambassador), drake, who along with shephard fairey, is presented as an ally of youth and if not a representative of osf, at least a testament to the integrity and credibility of the program. collectively, then, the language of youth authenticity assembled within osf’s media archive is anchored around the appeal of creative expression, entrepreneurialism and the power of branding as an exercise in self-creation and commercial development; the power of transformative objects, most especially the skateboard; the power of youth voice and the diversity of youth voices; the democracy of talent; and the credibility of celebrity. the organization offers the prospects of class uplift, as has long been the mandate of public education systems, for a range of kids who have otherwise been failed by the mainstream school system, as well as alternative routes to adulthood and to future education. in this historical moment, when the lure of creative economies, creative careers and even youth voice has become common in learning economies around the world, some of this will not be surprising. yet, how the organization stakes its claim to credibility among youth is not limited to these elements. like reelyouth, the power of organizations like osf has as much to do with the ontological security they afford as it does their ideological calling out to youth. i return to this theme below. reelyouth and youth citizens reelyouth differs from osf in many ways and yet there are important similarities.2 the organization started in 2005 in vancouver, is a youthserving project and is now organized around four program areas: the reelyouth film festival held annually and featuring youth-made films from across canada; an innovative intergenerational program that brings together youth and seniors to produce videos about the experiences of each group; a series of social justice-oriented programs; and, a professional film production 2 the quotations, notations and references about reelyouth in this section are taken from blog posts, videos, news reports, public relations documents and other texts contained in the organization’s archive, during the period from august 1-september 30, 2019. the specific source of each reference is typically indicated in the text. stuart poyntz studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 388 program. of these initiatives, the first three predominate, but interestingly, in the media archive the artifacts most often address reelyouth’s intergenerational and social justice programs. unlike osf, reelyouth operates in urban and rural regions and in recent years has produced programs ranging in length from one-to-four weeks across canada. the annual reel youth film festival screens short films made by young people under 20 and tours in partnership with youth media organizations, high schools, community groups and other film festivals. much of reelyouth’s funding comes from fee-for-service partnerships with community groups, school boards, indigenous nations and community foundations. the founding director, mark vonesch, continues to lead the organization, working with production mentors, some of whom had previous experience as participants in reelyouth projects. youth participation is voluntary and based on interest. the reelyouth website has a very different feel than osf. where the latter is linked to skateboard culture, reelyouth strikes a more grassroots, alternative tone. a drawn graphic of a young women of colour in a loosefitting skirt, holding a camera and looking out at the website user is prominent, while above her is the reelyouth logo, scripted in a slightly childlike font that reminds one of dr. seuss. the same font is used for the menu buttons at the top and side of the page, which link (at the top) to sections on programs/international projects/gallery/media/about us/donate. to the left of the page the menu buttons link to sections for home/submit your film/film festival/tour/resources/sponsors. beneath the top menu links are a series of hyperlinked text blocks of varying sizes that are presented using more conventional fonts, with varying realistic images and colours behind the fonts. these block hyperlinks take users to: the 2019 reelyouth film festival page; the reelyouth twitter feed; and, the reelyouth film festival at the vancouver international film festival. beneath this, another series of hyperlink blocks take users to a series of recent projects, including: prince george claymation programs; the sign-up for a mississauga, ontario film program; the film release for a vernon, b.c. program; the troublemakers 4.0 program, which is framed with rainbow colours; a program for lgbtq indigenous youth; and, the film release for a youth and elders documentary program hosted in the remote northern community of gjoa haven, nunavut. other than these links, white space predominates, creating a clean if grassroots feel across the site. no other logos or brand tie-ins appear on the homepage, except for customary links to facebook, twitter and youtube where visitors are invited to “follow us.” similar to osf, the media archive page for reelyouth is the repository of a range of artifacts, including (in summer 2019) a remarkable documentary placed at the top of the page and pulled from the general collection, called: if teardrops were pennies: julia cockney, an elder of tuktoyatuck. there is a series of videos from the troublemakers 4.0 social justice program that portrays an incredible range of activists, artists and identity switchers in a manner that both locates difference and subsumes difference into the human producing authenticity studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 389 family. there is a feature profile on young reelyouth filmmakers working with homeless seniors originally broadcast on cbc television’s anchor newscast, the national; a series of informational mainstream news stories about reelyouth; a range of news articles from daily and weekly newspapers from across the country; articles from a chinese language press outlet in vancouver; a cbc local radio interview; and, an article from the queer weekly paper, xtra vancouver. to make sense of how youth identity is curated in this collection, again it is helpful to locate how youth are represented and the key youth allies and roles proposed for young people. like osf, among the artifacts there is a range of youth presented, representing a diversity of genders (including non-binary youth), ethnicities and sexualities. but indigenous and refugee or migrant youth are more visibly present here. so too interestingly are the number of visibly white youth, reflecting the fact that the organization often works in rural regions across canada. in general, student filmmakers make up the majority of youth represented and importantly, many are revealed to have experience with the kinds of precarity (e.g., homelessness, isolation within their communities) explored in reelyouth projects. adult allies tend to be less obviously well-known media figures or artists and yet their connection with young people is often represented as quite profound. for instance, in a very simple dialogue, filmed over a black screen backdrop in a troublemakers 3.0 documentary, we meet sekani dalkeith, a native transgender rights activist who engages in a rich dialogue of discovery, memory and hope with jacoby macdonald, a queer/questioning youth. in other documentaries, we meet morgane oger (moving forward), a trans activist and human rights advocate from vancouver and in endurance, we meet jane eaton hamilton, a transgender photographer and artist. the aforementioned julia cockney is a remarkable indigenous elder who among other things, presents the land as a place of respite, imagination and discovery for young people. beyond this, the self-effacing humour and strength of a host of other adult allies – white seniors, indigenous leaders and political activists – hail young people through moments of care and attention, irony and acts of leadership and survival. in this context, the roles proposed for youth focus on becoming change agents, leaders, storytellers and witnesses for marginalized and under-represented communities who reveal specific realities “about living in canada and their vision of canada.” young people are represented as figures of hope, who can learn to be “part of a culture,” including cultures that have otherwise been ignored and abused in the past and remain deeply vulnerable today. in a manner different from osf, a sense of connection is curated in the reelyouth media archive largely through semiotic resources that frame a sense of where youth could be, as opposed to where they are. there are in fact few instances of what might called youth spaces (youth bedrooms, sport facilities, etc.) visible in the archive. rather, a series of videos highlight the land, as conceived and experienced in indigenous cultures as spaces of stuart poyntz studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 390 imagination where youth can be with cultures that are otherwise possibly unknown to them. what otherwise might be considered mundane spaces, including seniors care homes and the homes of indigenous and nonindigenous elders, are likewise presented in ways that hail youth through prospects of discovery. isolated, invisible city spaces, including stairwells, hidden sleeping quarters in city bushes and urban alleys in small communities are portrayed as sites of connection where youth are presented with opportunities to see and experience worlds around them that they might not otherwise know exist. more common sites of learning, including nontraditional classroom learning spaces and community centres are present, but a sense of connection through place is most commonly constructed through the introduction or re-imagination of new spaces and settings where youth are invited to engage and represent the world around them. reelyouth addresses young people through a value proposition that emphasizes the power in disrupting stereotypes and engaging with people and issues that appear under-represented in mainstream news reporting. learning a host of media production and animation skills is clearly part of what is put on offer, but these skills are represented as in the service of something presumed to be larger and more socially and politically significant: the opportunity to develop intergenerational communication. “we can’t build understanding between generations if we don’t have the different generations present in the same room” (mutya macatumpag, reel youth program mentor). media skills are also intended to foster connections across communities, particularly among communities that may otherwise be invisible to youth (e.g., those experiencing housing precarity, indigenous elders, seniors, queer and trans activists) and to develop youth’s voices in ways that help teens to reimagine the significance of the past and to reframe personal and social possibilities for the future. in short, the value proposition presented by reelyouth’s archive addresses the power of inclusion and the conditions needed to ensure a more socially just future. together, the promise of where youth could be, alongside powerful value propositions about the potential impactfulness of young people construct a sense of belonging in reelyouth’s media archive that anchors youth authenticity around the merits of an engaged life. while calling out to youth identities and discourses of connection, the archive sustains a sense of youth authenticity by curating a catalogue of dominant things, actions and a style or tone that together signify the trustworthiness or sincerity of reelyouth. among these, while no single object dominates as does the skateboard in the osf archive, there is a dominant style that seems aimed at conveying the sincerity of the organization. documentary realism is evident in a series of news stories, advocacy videos, video conversations, and portraits of various youth and adult figures across the archive, in ways that suggest a high degree of integrity, honesty and craft. whether in the form of an extended cbc documentary on reelyouth’s homeless senior-youth program, a newspaper producing authenticity studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 391 story about the documentary film, i am hitkoak, that recounts the life, culture and land of elder, alice ayalik hitkoak, or in numerous news stories (video and print), realism and the use of the camera as a window onto new worlds predominates. this style lends a sense of constructed transparency to the archive, as though here we are invited to find myriad efforts to convey faithfully worlds that otherwise lack the attention they deserve. this style suggests a kind of naïve innocence about what documentaries can do to open up the world, especially in an age of misinformation, fake videos and intense visual and audio distraction; but, this style and tone, alongside the playful innocence of reelyouth’s home page, convey a sense of integrity and trust, a hope that with more young people behind the camera, a more authentic and just world may prevail. the language of authenticity produced through reelyouth’s media archive is clearly about young people as citizens, actors in the world who are capable of witnessing and fomenting social change. in a manner, this is different from osf, but only in the sense that reelyouth explicitly interpolates young people as change agents, whereas osf addresses youth as participants in the world, as actors who have a legitimate and deserving place in the city. reelyouth’s claims to credibility, in other words, rest on a more explicit claim: that youth are not merely actors, but leaders of social change, partners with adults who can benefit from media skills in a time when social transformation runs through the screen and systems of media circulation orient our lives. youth arts, continuity and world disclosure the claims to youth authenticity articulated in the media archives of osf and reelyouth are different in style, content and possibly intention; and this is to be expected. each organization has linked their credibility to a language and aesthetics of youth culture in ways that offer promise for young people, including identities around which youth participants can link their experiences and hopes for the future. osf foregrounds the allure of entrepreneurialism, the appeal of the creative artist and work in the creative economy, networks of local businesses and alternative production associations, celebrities tied to toronto and international public art and the allure of city space and the street as public places that in ideal circumstances are open to all. as a discourse of youth authenticity, osf’s ideological appeal runs through the semiotics of consumer cultures, neoliberal subjectivities (i.e., the creative entrepreneur) and the imaginative prospects of youth style; and yet, at the same time, osf hails young people as participants in the city, actors who have a right to be in public and whose culture of graffiti, electronic music and street art is not only fit for the times, but a creative source for future self-realization. stuart poyntz studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 392 reelyouth’s media archive curates a somewhat different aesthetic and symbolic language of youth authenticity. their appeal is linked to citizen learning, to the power of the camera as a truth-sayer and to the appeal of diversity and inclusiveness among young people and within society at large. their credibility rests on the provision of digital skills, the allure of youth voices, especially among and for those marginalized from mainstream publics, access to people and communities woefully under-represented in the mainstream media and the power of documentary realism combined with a semiotics of transparency meant to open up windows onto the world. a spirit of innocence frames the language of youth representation in reelyouth’s media archive, combined with mild irony and the activist’s sense of urgency and earnestness. news media formats dominate, as opposed to the semiotics of youth consumer cultures; and, perhaps more clearly than osf, reelyouth foregrounds the allure of social change in its appeal to young people. while differences are apparent in each media archive, then, both channel ideological representations of young people that are hardly uncommon today. in their own ways, each rogue archive constructs visions of youth authenticity that while specific to canada (especially with references to indigenous cultures), will be familiar in many regions, testifying to the way globalization has inscribed youth cultures everywhere. the place-making or ground each organization offers for social justice struggles is not, however, linked to ideological representations alone. it is also and more significantly linked to the way authenticity discourses in each archive represent the ontological function of community arts groups, as spaces of provision, care and belonging for youth. this ontological ground is apparent in continuities that appear across each archive, continuities that point to how the youth arts sector itself has emerged as a critical provisioning infrastructure in a time when traditional institutions, including schools, have frequently failed young people and the challenge of youth transitions is as uncertain as it has ever been. one of the principle commonalities across the two media archives is the presence of durable, persistent and consistent modes of youth representation. by durable in this instance, i mean to draw attention to the materiality of the archives as technical resources, records of happenings that provide a form of historical memory for each organization. as the preceding research indicates, the degree of durability and permanence within each archive is concerning. some links fail, the visual interface of each site can change and the very significance of website-based archives can become moldy. but whether as website, cloud or a public social media newsfeed record (robards et al., 2018), the medium-term durability of each media archive produces a durable place of being-in-the-world for and about youth that in turn provides a record of permanence. this is a significant value of rogue archives more generally and in the case of osf’s and reelyouth’s collections, they instantiate a technical record that can be found and searched (in some sense) in a way that producing authenticity studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 393 provides a substantive and extended public record of youth cultural production. adding to the significance of these records as objects is the fact that they maintain a degree of stylistic and semiotic consistency directly tied to the organization itself. in this way, they mark a mode of youth being-in-theworld, a social and symbolic space of identity construction and orientation that maintains continuity over time. the media archives of osf and reelyouth are in a sense metonymic of the organizations as a whole: they are durable, persistent spaces of continuity that resist the general ephemerality of media culture, even if they are challenged by the same; they afford sites around which young people and others can gather; and, in this way, they constitute care structures (scannell, 2014) that contribute to a sense of ontological security by affording a valve against the failure of traditional modernist institutions of youth provision and a point of future orientation on the world. in affording sites of ontological refuge, osf’s and reelyouth’s media archives also share a commitment to providing access to the “real” for young people. they stage this commitment in diverse ways, some of which are shared, some of which are specific to each group. osf regularly asserts their commitment to student work oriented to the real world, real creative networks, real design contracts, a real creative practice in the form of a skateboard and design studio and their concern for a visual language of the real street, rather than the classroom. reelyouth’s commitment to the real is implicated in the organization’s name, but the archive stages the organization’s commitment more explicitly through youth-made documentaries about real people and vulnerable communities and a language of documentary realism meant to bring into the light unknown experiences and communities. these commitments matter but i want to make a stronger argument: they matter not simply (or merely) because of their ideological significance, as issues and connections to which young people might attend. rather, they matter because they signal how each archive (and by extension, each organization) orients youth to a horizon of realness, thereby affirming a normatively shared and valued place for youth in struggles over the real. by producing and affirming a felt sense of the real among young people, in their own ways, osf’s and reelyouth’s media archives provide access to the means for reflective world disclosure (kompridis, 2006). i mean that they afford a site where the “palpable materiality,” the real-ationality of the world is made open for attention by youth (frosh, 2019, p. 12). through their attention to the real, each organization renders into significance the conditions and elements of realness itself, the ground or round-about-me-ness of the world, in a manner meant to resonate for youth while demanding a response, action or an address. this is the starting point for social justice, a call and expectation to understand and act on the world. in a time of uncertainty around youth transitions, finding a space that opens up the prospect of such an address, that affords an affective relationship with the stuart poyntz studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 394 round-about-me-ness of the world is a vital contribution for youth and for building social justice infrastructures in community. finally, amidst the normatively framed ontological security constituted within osf’s and reelyouth’s media archives, they also overlap in the way they stage offerings of social agility and forward movement for young people, particularly in regard to the recalibration of relationships with powerful institutions of youth provision like schools, the media and work. both archives (and organizations) stake their credibility with youth at least in part through a recognition of the challenges young people face in a time of constrained and inequitable social resourcing, unstable and shifting work environments, ongoing youth identity crises and so on. this unstable environment is addressed differently by each organization, but across these differences common ground is evident in the way each organization constitutes a space of social transition, a home place for youth to stand in order to reconstitute powerful institutional relationships. this is evident across osf’s appeal to youth as a space for those who have “fallen through the cracks” and in the record of youth transitions to post-secondary school and viable work environments present in the archive. in reelyouth’s archive, social agility is staged through activists’, seniors’ and indigenous leaders’ stories. the significance of these records, however, has less to do with the particular claims any one statement presents, than with the way they collectively help youth orient to the world of power. the range of stories, complex narratives and statements about official institutions matter, but it is the collective contribution they make as a form of routing, a kind of social lineament or configuration oriented toward the future that is very much designed to enable young people to engage and respond to traditional institutions of power. in this way, osf’s and reelyouth’s media archives and the organizations themselves present collective spaces of ontological security, a home for border work to refocus and reimagine the disclosure of the world in a time when crises and rapid social, technical and political change make these kinds of spaces precarious and harder than ever to find. conclusion community media archives hold together forms of public memory that can and often have disappeared into the bottomless depths of the past. they offer a record of curation and cultural production that enables groups, like youth arts organizations to manage their own historicity and showcase their role as urban infrastructures of youth provision. their significance is at least in part in the way they manifest a record of happenings that have both ideological and ontological significance. in the current historical moment, as questions of youth authenticity and trustworthiness have become popular in youth culture and in discourses about youth culture, it is significant that the youth arts sector has emerged as a vital if often invisible space of practices that support producing authenticity studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 375-396, 2021 395 young people to question, critique and engage practices of injustice and opportunity. in this way, the sector affords a kind of home for young people, a durable place of trust and negotiation in fragmented and inequitable societies, where young people’s connectivity with the present is brought into view and routes for addressing the demands of social justice are opened. acknowledgements this research was supported by the sshrc insight grant, networks of nonformal learning: the state, youth as cultural producers and creative life pathways. references abidin, c. 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(2009). authenticity in culture, self and society. ashgate. crampton final before ts feb 22 19 correspondence address: anne e. crampton; email: cram0012@umn.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 a literacy of armed love: confrontation and desire in aesthetic and critical projects anne e. crampton usa abstract the article argues that creative confrontations with damaging discourses as part of a critical literacy curriculum can be viewed as acts of love, for self and community. using data from a multi-sited critical ethnography, the study considers the literacy productions of two focal students in diverse schools, a charter middle school and a large urban high school. mediated discourse analysis of their work explores their aesthetic and critical literacy productions as refusals of oppressive discourses pressing against marginalized identities, and as expressions of desire for imagined, better realities. this research views such performances of multimodal creative resistance as an audacious literacy of desire, valuable as standards-meeting persuasive compositions, but also immeasurably valuable because of the emotional experience of the student producers, who were powerfully affected through the twin pleasures of resisting and imagining. this study illustrates how literacy projects might both inhabit and move forward freire’s concept of armed love. keywords critical pedagogy; mediated discourse analysis; critical ethnography; multimodality; affect; emotion it is indeed necessary, however, that this love be an ‘armed love,’ the fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce. (freire, 2005, p. 74) if we take freire’s suggestion that education involves acts of love that demonstrate a “commitment to … the cause of liberation” (1996, p. 70), what do they look like, and how might they emerge in the everyday moments of a language arts classroom? specifically, how might freire’s idea of “armed love” be part of what teachers do, and importantly, what students do, in the course of a typical day? seeking to recognize freire’s “fighting love … to a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 95 denounce, and to announce” (2005, p. 74, italics added) as part of critical literacy learning, this study uses love as the key conceptual structure to explore social justice education as an enactment of love. while there are many philosophical and theoretical definitions of love, this work more narrowly considers how teachers and students operate out of a radical love for a more just society (dewey, 2011; freire, 1996; hooks, 2006; orellana, 2015) and a desire for better futures for themselves and others (garrison, 2010; greene, 1995). love’s significance to critical classrooms has been explored in some empirical studies (e.g., duncan, 2002; lanas & zembylas, 2015), but there is a need for more research on what this might look like. in the next section, i define radical love before looking carefully at the literacy productions and learning experiences of two students who created and performed what appeared to be a fighting kind of love for self and for community. in addition, i am informed not only by theorizations of radical love, but also by the wealth of recent scholarship on the affective experience of learning (e.g., ahmed, 2004; thrift, 2004; wetherell, 2013), often referred to as the “affective turn” in education research, which finds that affect – with the related concepts of feelings, emotions, and passions – is productively linked to curriculum and learning in tangible classroom moments. for students who have been historically marginalized, made to feel separate, or described in sedimented ways in dominant public discourses (raced, classed, gendered, queered, etc.), thinking of literacy learning as not only critical reading and production, but as possible expressions of love honors both their lived experiences and underscores the meaning of their work. the critical “denouncing” and the creative “announcing” from freire’s idea considers links between love and aesthetic productions, between the affective present and imagined, more socially just, future. theoretical perspectives toward armed love love and critical pedagogy anti-oppressive teaching and learning require not only planning for an inquiry-based (problem-posing) curriculum, but, if we are to believe freire and other critical pedagogues, a radical, revolutionary love. from the poet de melo, freire took the image of “armed love” (2005, p. 74) for educators to forcefully reject or “denounce” the status quo, to overturn whatever continues to lock oppressive systems and practices in place. freire reminded us that oppressions are difficult to budge, and they take a multitude of guises. armed love, according to freire, was not about kindness or the warmth of a nurturing relationship, although these are important. rather, the martial fierceness of armed love communicated freire’s urgency about what it takes to be a critical educator, and the inherent risk in challenging oppression, because it almost certainly threatens people who have something (comfort, anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 96 security, feelings of merit) to lose. in this study, it’s clear that the students themselves functioned as critical educators, sometimes with and sometimes against their peers and teachers, embodying an armed love, not a “liberal, romanticized, or merely feel-good notion of love that is so often is mistakenly attributed to this term, nor the long-suffering and self-effacing variety associated with traditional religious formation” (darder, 2002, p. 34). in a similar vein, sandoval (2000) suggests that love is a method of resistance for “citizen warriors,” who work in coalition to fight oppressions. armed love fights dominance constructed and reinforced along lines of race, economics, language, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, and religion; it is committed to a radical, inclusive democracy (orellana, 2015) with an aim to build a better world. black feminism: self-love and community love as resistance many black feminist theorists (e.g., collins, davis, jordan, lorde, walker) have made arguments, in different ways, for self-love as a political project of resistance, and a way toward transformation. in her discussion of early and later waves of black feminist thought, including hip-hop philosophies, nash (2013) argued that black feminism put forth a theory of justice that could be described as a “love politics,” with love as the vehicle for social change (2013, p. 3). pointing out that such change must begin with self-love as a “practice of freedom,” nash highlighted the idea that self-love, and love for the racialized identity of blackness amounts to an act of revolutionary praxis. in an orientation to the future that is creative, coalitional, and of a kind with freire’s armed love, self-love fights (denounces) and then imagines (announces) what might become for the self and community. in this conceptualization, love – as desire – functions as a mediating technology between the current, actual situation and envisions an inclusive and nonoppressive future. theoretical perspectives on aesthetic experiences since this article makes the case that students can act as citizen warriors (sandoval, 2000) who fight oppressions and imagine new futures through the creation and performance of aesthetic and critical projects, i must describe my understanding of aesthetic experiences in a literacy classroom. aesthetics are not strictly related to art or the arts. instead, i draw on dewey’s description of art as a quality that permeates an experience, emotionally and bodily, an immersive state of being fully engrossed in activity or work (dewey, 2005, p. 339). by this reasoning, even the most humdrum actions can become artistic through what the participants bring to them, infusing them with life, or a “heightened vitality” (dewey, 2005, p. 18). in the a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 97 aesthetic experience, the acts of taking in, responding, and producing “interpenetrate” each other, while the participant persists in a state of “happy absorption” (p. 18). i interpret this happiness as the experience of being absorbed in itself, rather than a demand for pleasant feelings. it’s satisfying to be emotionally, intellectually, and artistically immersed as critical spectator and producer/designer; such immersion has the potential to become transformative when coupled with activist goals of effecting social change out of a commitment and love for self and community. absorption aside, aesthetic/artistic work has implications beyond the self. both dewey and greene viewed artistic participation and production as positions and actions that could lead to social change, since change first emerges in the “climate of the imagination” (dewey, 2005, p. 360). we must be able to imagine significant change in order to enact it, thus, imagination paves the way, predicting and desiring something that is possible, rather than actual. the struggle to sort through and make meaning of what “authoritative others are offering as objectively ‘real’” (greene, 1995, p. 380) is in itself a critical, imaginative, aesthetic response to an overwhelming barrage of defining messages and circumstances. in the classrooms in this study, aesthetic and the critical responses were not binaries. the ability to read and produce texts aesthetically – in the rosenblattian sense – and critically (e.g., lewis, 2000) was crucial to listening and being moved enough by another perspective to desire and enact change. this sense of aesthetics is important to understanding the youth activism highlighted in this article, in which immersive experiences of production, performance, and redesign (janks, 2000) expressed demands for change toward a more socially just world. much has been written about what is afforded through intersections of critical multimodal production, identity, and social action (e.g., haddix, everson, & hodge, 2015; vasudevan, schultz, & bateman, 2010), but here it is the professed and implied love for self and community coupled with the production that defines a literacy of armed love. to summarize, theories of critical love as well as conceptualizations of aesthetic literacy events in these critical classrooms frame the way i look at the data in this study. most of the discussion in this article will highlight the critical and aesthetic productions of two students i focused on as revelatory case studies. their work expressed specific love for both self and community, demanding and performing a more just vision of the future. i am curious about why and how the literacy acts that effectively denounced and announced were intellectually as well as emotionally/affectively significant to the student-producers. anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 98 research design multi-sited ethnographic research for this study, i relied on critical ethnographic methods (foley & valenzuela, 2005; madison, 2005; tuhiwai smith, 2012) in racially, economically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse secondary english classrooms in order to see the multiplicity of experience, rather than as a means of comparison, to see if “being there … and there” (hannerz, 2003) would demonstrate ways that love mobilized actions in all kinds of situations, with all kinds of people, that it was not dependent on a certain bounded locality. while the sites were separate, they were linked by design through some commonalities: both occurred in critical literacy-oriented classrooms in the same midwestern metropolitan area in dual-credit english-social studies courses with critical curricula and pedagogies. this critical context was significant to both sites in the study. both teachers had explicit activist goals for their students, challenging themselves and their students to link learning with the disruption of the status quo. illustrated in this article, there was an intentional progression of activist inquiry in the high school classroom that moved from micro to macro digital explorations of social problems, from self to world. at the middle school level, the critical inquiry tended to remain more closely linked to self and nearby community, although the response to and production of multimodal texts and ensuing discussions on any given day asked students to respond to and act against injustices near and far. in addition to critical classrooms, i used critical methods to conduct the research. leaning on foley and valenzuela’s (2005) self-description as a “cultural critic in search of collaborative methods” (p. 222), this study involved intentional dialogicality in relationships with participants/members of the classroom groups through almost daily conversations with teachers that were often directly related to our common stands “against othering, for social justice” (fine, 1994, p. 81, italics in original). my own standpoint as a former critical english teacher includes affiliations with both students and teachers; a lived experience with the day-to-day challenges of working within and often against both large school systems and small charter schools informs my approach to research as one who is “of” the dilemmas of schooling, instead of hovering outside or above it. both teachers invited me to participate fully in the lives of their classrooms. i did this by getting to know the students over many days, weeks, and months, assisting them in their work, offering critical feedback, joking around, asking questions, listening, and generally trying to support their learning experience without being intrusive. the 42 student participants at the high school were all seniors and the 18 students at the middle school were in grades 7 and 8. they had diverse backgrounds and identities (racially, ethnically, linguistically, spiritually, economically, in their gender expression, and in their histories with a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 99 schooling). in these sites, i was certainly aware of my own racial identity (white) and gender expression (cis-female) and make no claim for an emic perspective with the youth participants; however, in research and teaching i have spent years with secondary and post-secondary students from these same urban communities and i am invested in their stories and lives. in informal conversations and planned interviews, i clarified their opinions, offered my own thoughts and experiences when solicited, and shared my interests and emerging ideas about my project with them. data sources aside from interviews, all data were collected as part of the everyday goingson of the classes, including literacy production and performance, ethnographic fieldnotes from over 125 hours at each site, audio and video data, and selected transcribed observations. data featuring student work included: (1) print productions (e.g., poetry, ‘zine articles, reflections, visual artwork), (2) photographic data, (3) audio (e.g., podcast unit, audio recordings of whole class and small group discussions), and (4) documentary films, recordings of student presentations, whole class and small group interactions. semi-structured interviews were conducted with focal students and teachers toward the end of the semester and school year at each site as a way of checking my understanding and emerging interpretations. focal students from the high school were also interviewed in their first year at a community college as a way to member check my interpretations over time. i wanted to learn about what was important, moving, and meaningful to the participants, and follow themes from key moments of text creation and sharing, and person-to-person interaction. mediated discourse analysis the two classrooms in the study were viewed as sites of engagement, in which both group and individual histories of participation and possible trajectories converged in specific “social occasion[s]” that were “spatially and temporally bounded” (norris & jones, 2005, p. 144, 157). patterns, codes, and themes emerged from the student projects, as well as from the way students reflected on their work and the experience of creating and sharing it. while all members of the full participant group were included in the analysis from both sites, here i elected to look closely at the experiences and productions of one participant from the middle school (casey), and one from the high school (alexander). in focusing on the experience of these two students, i refer to their histories in school, as well as their histories in the class from the study. i looked at their interactions with other students and anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 100 their teachers, their production and performances of texts of resistance, and their reflections on these relationships and texts as conveyed through interviews. the highlighted voices of these case studies were interesting and powerful but also fairly typical; thus, selection of data from these participants was purposeful, but their aesthetic work and experience was consistent with that of the entire roster of students for both of the sites. while their literacy productions were typical of the student work in both settings, their interaction style was more revelatory than representative (yin, 2009). both casey and alexander routinely made themselves available to their peers, their teachers, and to me. they each had an ease in sharing opinions and did this already in somewhat public ways. this externalizing of their experience made my questions feel (rightly or wrongly) less intrusive than they might with those youth who tended to keep their ideas and stories more private. casey and alexander conveyed not only willingness, but pleasure in talking with me both informally and in formal interviews over a period of many months and, in alexander’s case, over a year later. after coding the data, i followed methods from mediated discourse analysis, particularly nexus analysis (scollon & scollon, 2004); i drew, as well, on the significance of timescales, the histories and futures of social actors, and multimodal texts (norris & jones, 2005). i found it most useful to think about what students were building or designing with their compositions and performances, how their work was oriented in time, and how they reflected on the significance of the work, both the creation and the performing of it. in addition, my analysis relied on an understanding of affect as an embodied, felt experience that may not be labeled or even named, while emotion is a more cultural and social effort to make sense of feelings in some way (wetherell, 2013). research on affect (massumi, 2015; sedgewick, 2003; thrift, 2004) notes that intense moments can unsettle and exceed what might be a norm in traditional learning situations, and that in general, embodied experiences, including affective ones, are significant to and inextricable from learning and understanding (e.g., enriquez, johnson, kontovourki, & mallozzi, 2016). beyond the body, research on affect explores how affect and emotion attach to an object, text, or, “stuff” (ahmed, 2004; burnett, merchant, pahl, & rowsell, 2014), so much so that an object becomes sticky and “saturated with affect, [becoming a] site of personal and social tension” (ahmed, 2004, p. 8). in this article, emotion and affect are not conflated, but they are taken as data in similar ways and often together, such as when a student used words to describe and reflect on an affective, somewhat or wholly embodied experience. in both everyday ways and more startling moments of aesthetic provocation, the two classrooms in the study seemed to expect and allow for a broad range of emotional and affective expressions. a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 101 critical inquiry across sites in their goals of disrupting the status quo through developing aesthetic and critical projects, students at both sites followed variations on a theme of inclusion and acceptance for a community that was not understood and not cared for in mainstream (e.g., white, straight) society. students created texts that would educate and move their audiences to see their chosen problem (e.g., unfair treatment, harm, lack of acceptance, lack of opportunity for marginalized identities) and to provoke these viewers or listeners enough that they would want to do something about it, to get them to care, and to enlist them in action. at both sites, students performed their work for wider audiences. for one activist project at the middle school, students distributed their ‘zines at a coffeeshop and on the campus of a nearby college, even making soapbox-style speeches to garner interest in their problem to insist that their audiences listen and learn. at the high school, documentary films had a life outside the classroom, beginning with a screening at a local movie theater for a large audience of school, community, and families. films were also placed on a youtube channel and some were highlighted on a local web-only news site, generating comments from an even broader audience. students expressed wonder about the impact of sharing their activist work, about sparking discussion and awareness. as one student remarked: “people are noticing it, arguing about it. it’s out there in the world.” another student told me excitedly that the following year one of their films was shown in a local college class to offer a short and clear explanation about bias in standardized testing. in practice, even at the high school level, not all students came to class with an awareness of a problem that was significant to them, nor did they possess a burning desire to change the status quo. certainly, some students lived with intense social problems every single day, such as a student of color living in a racist society. some students had relationships to their topic but didn’t highlight their own experiences in their texts. students created podcasts and films that denounced domestic violence, programming in city schools versus wealthier suburban districts, violence against native american women, cultural bias in standardized testing, and that announced immigrant experiences, fights against gentrification, and the experience of african american young men in schools; one denounced efforts to control muslim women’s choices about wearing the hijab while playing sports, and announced local fashion designs for young muslim female athletes. at the middle school level, critical projects were most often directly linked to students’ lives. topics included denouncing research and reflection on being an introvert in a society that favors extroverts, being gay in a heterosexist world, being female in a patriarchal society, being in an abusive foster care setting, being an african american girl who has been suspended and expelled for behavior “violations” since 1st grade. these students researched something that affected them in their daily lives, at the micro anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 102 level, and then extended their vistas to describe bigger, more macro, stories through announcements in the form of manifestos, demands, revisions of their own histories, and ultimately, imaginations of how the named problems might be addressed. in the next section, i offer a description of selected productions and performances of critical and aesthetic texts from casey (8th grade) and alexander (12th grade) followed by analysis and discussion using the ideas related to armed love introduced earlier. casey casey identified herself as white, gay (preferring this description to others), and female. she was the source of ongoing disruptive bursts of laughter, exclamations, and complaints during class, although there were days when she said nothing whatsoever. she often came in late, or left in the middle, again, usually emphatically, accompanied by loud cursing. although she was definitely vocal, casey wasn’t alone in telegraphing her status – good days, rotten days, and in-between days – in this space. many students in this class routinely expressed their moods, thoughts, and desires in a full-throated public performance. casey had a history of mobility in schools and home. prior to her 8th grade year (the time of this study), she had attended six different schools; in her words, she had “a really bad history of schools.” she also had a difficult history with her primary caregivers and housing, having lived in five different households, all of them family: her mom, two grandmothers, an uncle, and her dad. casey was currently living with her dad, who worked as a leather tanner. she attended this school for both her 7th and 8th grade years, and, while quick to point out some things that made her mad about it, she spoke highly of it overall. the english-social studies class was identified as her favorite, because of the teachers and the content. the ease and comfort casey displayed in her relationship with ms. kay was noticeable. she often called her “mom,” demanded individual attention from her during work time, and praised her openly, shouting out to her mid-interview: “we were just saying how great you are. we're not even being sarcastic.” she also liked the class because she had a sense of herself as a writer and enjoyed having other people hear her words, although she professed to dislike standing up to share her work and typically had a teacher read with or for her when she was asked to be at the front of the room. … i'm a writer. i love writing, and, i don't really show, i don't really, i mean, i love writing, like that's my favorite thing, i just don' t like presenting it. i'm pretty sure you caught on to that. ((softly)) [i’m most proud of] my writing . . . ((louder)) but i hate my writing. a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 103 the expressed ambivalence here can be taken at face value, but it was more likely the case that casey didn’t want to assert her writer identity too forcefully, so after averring that it was important to her, she pulled back for protection, and cover. this simultaneous embrace and rejection of herself was a characteristic of casey’s writing about her gay identity, as well. acceptance and love for gay identity casey appreciated ms. kay because she was a queer teacher who was fully out at school. as noted, a number of teachers and students at the school identified as lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. for ms. kay to share her sexual orientation as one of many joyful aspects of her identity was undoubtedly powerful for a student like casey, who had “liked girls [her] whole life” until she officially came out in 7th grade. while she was out in this setting, as well as at home, she desired acceptance and love for her gay identity from her extended family (especially her grandmother), church community, and seemingly, herself. texts related to casey’s emancipatory project included (a) a presentation on gay acceptance through her own experience of coming out, developed as a series of haiku poems against a backdrop of the gay pride flag, and (b) a piece based on jamaica kincaid’s “girl” (1978) that she titled “this is expectation.” also included were (c) a poem written on her own, called “looking forward,” and (d) a ‘zine article on the problem of glbtq suicide and efforts to fight it, presented to an audience that included school, parent, and neighborhood communities. casey’s aesthetic productions: announcing self-love casey’s coming out presentation was a response to the prompt: “we have connections to many cultural groups. tell us about one of your cultural groups. what do you want people to know about it? how might you represent it? where do you fit in?” casey prepared for this project by researching and painstakingly creating a paper version of the rainbow gay pride flag, for her a relatively new “sticky object” (ahmed, 2004) offering tangible evidence of shelter and joy through association with the larger gay community. she then wrote a series of short conversations about coming out to the people in her family, both remembered, and imagined as future events, in the form of haikus. the short poems circled a central coming-out haiku called “my story,” with coming-out conversations or stories involving her dad, church, sister, grandma, mom, and future children. anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 104 my story it was a process everyone had opinions i am who i am. this central haiku (“my story”) was hardly a story, containing little in the way of explanation: “it” referred to coming out; “everyone” was her family and community members. despite the lack of explanation, the meaning is pretty clear. centering her story and calling it a “process” made coming out something she did without changing her position, without capitulating to anyone else’s needs or desires about her identity, although “everyone had” opinions, or expectations about casey as a queer 13-year old girl in what mostly felt like a straight world. coming out to my dad “casey are you gay?” i froze, scared no one else knew “if you are…okay” coming out to my sister i knew she’d be cool. “you always flirted with girls.” she came out for me. coming out to my church gay isn’t okay bible shunned and shamed people it wasn’t god’s words coming out to my grandma “you will go to hell. i will not be a great-grandma” she won’t accept me. coming out to my mom “what’s going on?” “casey’s girlfriend is coming over” “time for dinner now” my kids coming out to me “who’s that girl you’re with?” “aye mom, got a crush on her” “all right. i got ya” and, while the reactions of her grandmother and her church were both negative, these were off-center, orbiting around casey’s story but not defining or defeating it. in voicing conversations that had already happened, and imagining others, even projecting herself into the future to reassure her own child, casey enacted a desire for a different, better future, one in which an adult version of herself responded with love to an imaginary gay child (or alternately, in a rewriting of her own history of coming out, what the adult should have said to her, a sort of “do over”). in this revision, the adult tells the child: “i got ya,” instead of “you will go to hell.” a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 105 on the first day of presentations, the room was set up to create a special performance-space feeling, with dimmed lights, and couches, chairs, and desks arranged in a horseshoe around the speaker’s spot. casey wanted to be first to share her project with the class, shouting out this preference (“i call going first”), and then taping up her poster and moving to claim the stool in front of the class as ms. kay was making opening announcements. while she displayed enthusiasm about going first, the transcription from a video recording of the presentation (below) shows casey’s self-consciousness in introducing this project in front of the audience of her peers. she opened with a big statement about her sexual orientation, and then became tongue-tied, evidenced by some starts and stops, with a bid for support from ms. kay to get through the awkwardness of trying to publicly articulate the significance of the experience of coming out to the people in her life. this is about me being gay. i’m a lesbian, if you didn’t know. it’s important to me, but a lot of them get discriminated against and i don’t like it. it shaped me ((stops, pauses)) ((looks at ms. kay)) i reacted ((stops, pauses again)) ((looks again at ms. kay)) ((groans loudly)) blah blah blah blah ((laughs)) it impacted me. ((deep breath)) [being gay] impacted me in a negative and positive way. negative because of discrimination and positive because i like being gay. i like it. despite the quickly shifting moods of these statements, and the difficulty of moving smoothly forward with the presentation, there was no doubt that casey felt accepted enough at school to share her pride in her gay identity, repeating: “i like it.” as noted, casey was emotionally expressive during class, regardless of the topic of conversation, or the kinds of texts or projects she was working on. she appeared to take pleasure in both the denouncing and the announcing, and these two gestures often emerged at the same time. at the time of her haiku project, casey expressed mostly delight in resisting heteronormative expectations; saying “i like it,” and “i am who i am,” engaging in a display of “affective … resistance” (bae & ivashkevich, 2012, p. 5) in the face of discrimination. in writing and speech, casey performed this affective resistance to the cultural norm that says that middle school girls should look, act, and be straight, and somehow convey apologies for being gay. such strength stands in contrast to an earlier demonstration of affective resistance, from a poem casey had written the previous year, titled “looking forward.” she shared this poem with me during an interview as something significant to her, an expression of herself, and as an accomplishment (“it’s really long”). the 880-word free verse poem contains the word “want” 65 times. it’s hard to ignore the sense of plaintive desire, an incantation of want, culminating in the final lines: anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 106 i want to be able to smile for real and not fake it. i want to be in love with myself. i want more in life then [sic] i've been saying. in this conclusion, casey expressed an intense desire to put sorrow in the past and replace it with self-love and joy. this wanting might be read as a conversation with herself, rather than one with her grandma or other family members. it is an unrelenting litany of loss, of yearning, and as such, it appears as an aesthetic experience that was wrenching to write, perhaps, but also satisfying in its raw emotionality. both casey’s poetry and her haiku presentation occupy the gap between the present time and what she wanted, both right now and in some misty future. in her coming out presentation the tension was under her artistic control. for instance, in the visual lay-out of the haiku series, she chose to place words like “shun,” “shame,” “frozen,” “scared” in less powerful positions, orbiting around the more intractable statement at the center: “i am who i am.” casey set up a similar juxtaposition of anguish and stubborn refusal in “this is expectation,” a story/prose poem inspired by kincaid’s “girl” (1978), which is an often-anthologized dramatic dialogue between mother and daughter about how to be a “good” girl. casey’s version (printed below as it was written, with a few usage errors) features imagined or remembered dialogue between casey and her disapproving grandma, voices she returned to in her subsequent haiku project. ((margin says “grandma” and points to text at right)) this is expectation you are to listen to what your told; […] this is how you don’t be “gay” this is where your going to go if your “gay” this is how you act if you're a young woman; this is how you dress as a girl; […] your going to go to hell; you're a sinner; don’t you believe in god. yes? then obey him; gay isn’t okay; ((margin says “me” and points to text at right)) why can’t i be gay; if god don’t love me then why did he make me; if i’m going to hell; i’m already there; i’m happy being gay. as with the haiku series, casey positioned her pain (in hell) next to an unyielding “i’m happy being gay.” in other words, she got to write the last word, putting her grandma on the wrong side of this argument, highlighting her illogical adherence to the anti-gay ideology of the church (“if god don’t love me …why did he make me”). in repeating her grandmother’s words, casey created a stark portrait of heteronormative expectations about how to a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 107 be a girl, specifically, how to be a straight, gender-conforming girl. rather than “listen[ing] to what your [sic] told” and “obey[ing] him,” casey tried out a script for herself, creating a voiced, and therefore somewhat embodied, rejection of rejection, a girl writing a performance of resistance in the form of love for herself. anticipatory discourses casey’s texts centered quite literally on her own life experiences. she drew on key people and conversations to make her case for gay rights, bringing out illustrative and often painful episodes from the past as springboards toward a better present and future. while she denounced oppressive experiences from the past, and desired a better present, casey’s productions were continually oriented to the future; they announced her desire for a future of unshakeable self-love, as well as the love and acceptance she sought from her grandmother and church, eventually extending outward from herself to include her frustration with discrimination against all gay people, as voiced in her introduction. this future orientation may be viewed as an “anticipatory discourse” that actively engages in making something happen, calling it into existence (de saint-george, 2005, expanding on scollon & scollon, 2004). in addition to the fact that casey’s poem was called “looking forward,” the 65 “wants” exert a force toward achieving her desire, as if the act of announcing (returning to freire’s armed love) or performing a desire might accomplish it. her haiku series also exhibited this future orientation, although in this case it was clearly linked with the past, since all but one of the haikus were short autobiographical sketches of things that had already happened in her life. the imagined future haiku creates an adult casey offering calm, assured support and care for her child. toward the end of her presentation, ms. kay suggested that she read that particular haiku out loud. this became a bit fraught, since casey felt that the poem, as written, wouldn’t be understandable to anyone else. ms. kay: can you read the one about your child? casey: no-ho-ho-ho! ((regrouping)) okay, i said, um, it’s like, i was like role playing as if my child was coming out to me. that like i ask if they…. i don’t know how to read it. it’s weird! ((uses a different voice)) “who’s that girl you’re with?” ((hands stretched out, opening in gesture)) i can’t read it! i want to describe it. ms. kay: just read exactly the words on the page. casey: ((turns to read)) “aye mom, got a crush on her” ((very quietly, almost inaudible)) “all right. i got ya” anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 108 ((returning to regular speaking volume)) it doesn’t even make sense! you probably don’t even know what the fuck it means! ms. kay: it does make sense. and it’s “fudge” ms. kay urged casey to step into this future imagination of herself, perhaps because it offered a view of transformation in how to be a caregiver. casey explained to the group: “if my kids come out to me, i’m gonna teach them that it’s okay. that they don’t have to be scared.” her words suggest that this might be the kind of unconditional love she desired upon coming out. while she did receive this assurance from her sister and dad, it’s clear that the rejections were losses that needed redress. in this way, her future orientation holds hands with an orientation to the past, since casey created an imagined projection in which she got to redo a past experience that had been seemingly botched by key adults in her life. casey’s affective performances of resistance built a revised past, a changed present, and a future of acceptance that she wanted (65 times) and sometimes demanded. over a period of several months, she returned to her topic repeatedly in different ways, in multiple genres (research for the ‘zine, poetry and prose) that embodied a confrontation with the actual, and then rehearsed and performed the possible. casey’s armed love was protective of herself, but hopeful for different and better realities of acceptance and love. alexander alexander identified himself as black and male. both of his parents moved to the united states to go to college: his father was from west africa, and his mother came from northern europe. he speaks some of his father’s first language, and more of his mother’s language because as a child he spent some summers with his maternal grandparents. although his parents were college-educated, alexander made frequent remarks about his own lack of means to attend college. in the first two years following graduation, he attended a local community college, with an intention of focusing on math. in the english-social studies class, alexander was confident and outspoken. he was a frequent contributor to whole-class discussions that piqued his interest, especially those that were either shared inquiry-style, or those that were meant to offer feedback and constructive criticism to his peers. he seemed generally comfortable with, if unmotivated by, his relationships with peers and teachers, although he was well liked, and joked around with both: it’s funny, i joined [the class] as a backup. . . and i was like “i’ll see how it is, and if i don’t like it i’ll just drop it,” cuz i have enough credits to graduate, so i joined and i liked it right away. i liked the teachers, the kids. i’ve known them since freshman year, we’re cool, so i stuck with it . . . a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 109 alexander had a small number of close male friends in the room, but he didn’t limit his interactions to these students. with a charismatic presence, he commanded the attention of the room quite easily; his self-assurance was palpable, and he was often, but not always, generous in paying attention to students who weren’t his friends. after listening to the podcast about sex trafficking created by two classmates, for instance, alexander shared his experience of being moved by their work: you always think it’s happening off somewhere else, out there ((quieter)) so, you guys really brought it home ((pause)) punch to the gut. locating a response in his body was high praise from alexander, both as an audience member, and as a creator of his own critical texts. end of white supremacy alexander identified the problem he wanted to address early in the school year, perhaps on the second day of class. the group was discussing an excerpt from pedagogy of the oppressed (1996), and the talk had turned to a critique of their own experience in school as less about thinking and more about performing for grades. after a white student remarked: “you don’t have to be smart to be good at school,” alexander pointed out that because the system favors white students, students of color have the burden of performing in a white structure, and that perhaps a different standard should be in place until white supremacy is eradicated. alexander’s drive was for an end to white supremacy, his desired reality was for this, and for a valuing of blackness. compositions that alexander created to address the problems of white supremacy and the desire for an ascendant black power included (a) his “this i believe” speech and slide show, (b) a photo series that replicated some of the images created by a black lives matter documentary photographer, (c) a podcast on gentrification in an african american neighborhood, and somewhat related, (d) a documentary film about a school program for students who had only recently arrived in the u.s. the focus for this article is alexander’s this i believe speech and the photographs for his slide show. alexander’s productions: denouncing and announcing for the this i believe (tib) presentations students had to get up in front of a combined group of 42 students, plus invited school administrators, teachers, and friends. there was a great deal of nervousness about the public speaking event as students took turns in the spotlight illuminating the stage of an otherwise dark performance space. further, the teachers actively sought a anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 110 larger audience for this project, as they did for all projects; students were asked to share their work with family and friends, and with the world via email, youtube, sound cloud, and other amplifying platforms. ms. dee was also the toughest and most consistent audience proxy; she urged, cajoled, and otherwise tried to make students nervous enough (at times) to produce their best work. alexander’s this i believe speech was called “i believe in black power.” his production enacted a discourse of resistance, which he expressed as a powerful self and collective love. here it is worth remembering that the repetition of black love and strength is itself a revolutionary act (collins, 2004). such self-love was the cornerstone of alexander’s speech: when you see me with this pick in my hair, you should know that the pick, my pick, is not just there because it doesn’t fit in my pocket, which, it doesn’t fit in my pocket very well, and it would make a hole in my pants and my mom wouldn’t like that, but it says black love, black unity. it says self-love because it’s about natural black hair, black beauty. and the fist is for black liberation, black resilience. you know, black people have been shat on for thousands of years and we are still here, we’re still cool. his words offered a joyful resistance, and they were perfectly suited to the requirements of the assignment and the goals of the class. students were pointedly asked to disrupt the status quo through their critical compositions. as ms. dee said: “there is something different where you become a creator of media, so you can talk back, you can find your own way to make the world. not just to consume the world.” alexander “talked back” in photos and words for his tib presentation. each of his images contained his black power hair pick (figure 1), photographed in positions around the neighborhood as if in conversation with local landmarks and symbols. the pick mediates (norris & jones, 2005) between alexander and his world, quite self-consciously speaking for him from the deep well of the fist’s cultural meaning. alexander’s project announced self-love and demanded black liberation, while denouncing white supremacy in a clear instantiation of freire’s “armed love.” the pick might even be read as a literal reference to freire’s arms, a tiny representation of an arm with a black power fist at the end of it. alexander’s photos for the project, he told me, were inspired by photographer ai wei wei’s images of flipping off iconic landmarks such as the forbidden city, the eiffel tower, and the white house. ai wei wei’s resistance at the macro/global level was taken up by alexander, resisting in his own local contexts. the black power hair pick appeared in front of the american flag (figure 2), the police station, his school, a local central american-themed mural he liked, and a liquor store. each image provoked or engaged in dialogue with alexander’s idea of black power, since the pick is legible mostly as a no, a challenge that denounced institutions associated with white authority. for instance, rather than saluting the flag with hand on a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 111 heart, the pick “saluted” the flag (citing ai wei wei) by being held upsidedown in front of it, subverting the usual reverence or even the respect communicated through a defiant raised hand or fist. alexander’s image is both serious and tongue-in-cheek; the tines of the hair pick appear huge in the foreground, and the flag is miniaturized between the fierce teeth of the comb, almost as if put behind bars. the scale of hair pick makes the gesture at once defiant and deflated; it’s a protest coupled with a dismissal as the juxtaposition of the hair pick against this symbol that has not represented freedom or protection for black bodies brings the “high” flag low. figure 1. alexander and the hair pick. anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 112 figure 2. the pick against the american flag. non-human actant significantly, there is an absence of human figures in alexander’s images, aside from the back of his head and his hand. the pick is a non-human actant, a semiotic artifact that stands in for and extends or exceeds the boundaries of his body, holding within it the “meaning stream” (appadurai, 1996) of the black power movement, of resistance to white supremacy. the fist/pick is a “sticky object” (ahmed, 2004) used as a nonverbal sign evoking the multiple meanings of the black power movement. raised in silent protest, it was witness, and warning. when placed in front of non-oppressive structures, such as the central american mural, the fist signified solidarity. all of these associations connected the symbol of the fist with the stories of people and actions resisting white supremacy across time and space. a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 113 traversal of time and space the placement of the pick allowed for multiple meanings as it moved around the city in what lemke (2005) called a traversal. alexander put his hair pick in symbolic spaces (abstract), such as the flag, or the police precinct station (figure 3) which was most certainly a recognizable local and specific place (lemke, 2005, p. 115). changes in space and place meant that alexander, with the pick as semiotic artifact, staged a one-person protest, disrupting representations of power. alexander’s images were timely, in the climate of a post-ferguson america, with several local cases of police violence, but they were also asynchronous dialogues with authority, initiating and documenting a wordless protest. further, while the demand for justice was happening right now, in the present, the orientation was for the future. like casey, then, alexander’s was a literacy that contained the past, but was steadily reaching toward, and oriented to a different reality, using the juxtaposed symbol of resistance to demand a desired yet-to-come social world. figure 3. the pick at the police station. anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 114 pleasure of armed love: the feeling of critical resistance when alexander looked back on his own projects – tib speech and photographs, podcast, and film – he described a visceral, embodied connection to the production process and the final compositions, saying they were “something i made, with my hands, and i’m not gonna forget that.” he went on to imagine the biggest project, the documentary film, as emerging from his body (as in, laying an egg), an exertion that he recalled with intense pleasure: you gotta crunch it and grind it all out, and then when it’s done, you’ve got this final product, you know, this golden egg, and it feels super good, you feel super good about yourself. (interview) the work he produced for this class was emotionally and intellectually significant to him, something that he stated repeatedly in written and oral reflections. his stance as an activist meant that he was interested in accepting educational experiences that were meaningful, a desire for meaning that was inextricably linked to social transformation on a grand scale. in this regard, alexander might be viewed as an “exile” (bauman, 2005) in the whitestream institution of public schooling, someone who “refus[ed] to be integrated” and who was willing and even enjoyed taking an “autonomous stand” against systems of oppression (bauman, 2005, p. 1093). implications of armed love in the classroom an immersive state of being engrossed – emotionally, critically, politically – infused the work of casey and alexander, and their peers, with a “heightened vitality” (dewey, 2005, p. 18). the emotional and affective qualities of their literacy experiences were inseparable from their activist productions and performance of resistances. these performances of radical, “armed” love for self and community were not accidental occurrences; they were baked into the dialogic critical literacy curriculum at both sites, resulting in powerful literacy learning as students articulated, across multiple modes, their desires for better futures or alternate presents. students in the middle school seemed to find the most satisfaction in the projects that were directly linked to their own lives; this was evident in the research, writing, and public performance of the ‘zine articles, in the chance to talk back in the “girl” poem, and, as an extension of these compositions, in the final cultural sharing presentation. the quality of the projects varied, but all demonstrated creativity, expression, and engagement in a larger political dialogue about social transformation. students were asked to produce, revise, and perform what was most certainly describable as emotional and persuasive multimodal work. similarly, students in the high school class expressed high levels of satisfaction with their a literacy of armed love studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 115 photography, speeches, podcasts, and films. they were very clear about the difficulty and the pressure of performance, but all felt that they could, in the end, deliver, and by both qualitative and quantitative metrics, the success rate for the class was almost 100%. they had the sense that their work mattered to them and to their audiences. thus, affective and emotional involvement in the learning experience, or vitality, even when it might be uncomfortable for the creator and others in the room, hold enormous potential for identity transformation toward creative, collaborative, problem-solving, productive citizens, possibly “citizen warriors” (sandoval, 2000), armed with love for themselves, their communities, and the larger social world. this literacy of confrontation and desire is expressed not as students, but as citizens, in a sort of radical love-fueled collective activism. opportunities to dream and create alternate present realities and desired possible futures are arguably necessary for survival. rejecting damaging narratives and structures, and creating equitable ones reminds us that artists have been and continue to be “forerunners” at the front of resistance movements in many struggles for freedom: dissident artists in music, visual arts, and film in the united states are daily responding to police brutality, or inequities in the criminal justice system, rights for immigrants, and rights for queer and transgender people, to name a few. activists use their art to suggest what is to come: “art is a mode of prediction not found in charts and statistics” (dewey, 2005, p. 363). in this study, citizen-students composed artistic, digital and multimodal texts to advance inclusive values of radical democracy, however out of reach they might appear. through confronting the status quo and imagining different social futures, their aesthetic activism enacted a literacy of armed love as desire for change, and as love for self and community. their artistry and force compelled an audience to listen. the implications for education are clear: if art is the “language children speak” (delpit, 2015), rather than silencing this language through not listening, talking over, and focusing on other voices, we must be willing to be persuaded by their desires. students in these critical classrooms had multiple experiences of profoundly affecting and being affected by others (spinoza, 2002) in literacies of resistance that unsettled and inspired a larger audience. their digital and multimodal composing was achievable, meaningful, and emotional. the work allowed students to act as though things could be otherwise (greene, 1995), that they could make a difference in a forceful and recognizable way, and that they had a right to create an expressive object. further, it suggested that they had a duty to be “wide awake” (greene, 1995) in a public and accessible (digital, multimodal) dialogue, even those previously excluded from this dialogue. the literacy of armed love, for citizen-warriors (sandoval, 2000) “convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce” (freire, 2005, p. 74) in these classrooms was built of multiple communicative modes, informed by critical resistance, and performed as love of self in relation to others. this embodied literacy delivered a “punch to the gut” and a “golden anne e. crampton studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 94-117, 2019 116 egg,” or said differently, it offered an experience of activism fueled by radical love. references ahmed, s. (2004). the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh, sct: edinburgh university press. appadurai, a. (1996). modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. bae, m. s., & ivashkevich, o. (2012). introduction: reimagining girls’ resistance. in m. s. bae & o. ivashkevich (eds.), girls, cultural productions, and resistance (pp. 1-10). new york: peter lang. bauman, z. (2005). afterthought on writing; on writing sociology. in n. k. denizin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.) (pp. 1089-1098). thousand oaks, ca: sage. burnett, c., merchant, g., pahl, k., & rowsell, j. (2014). the (im)materiality of literacy: the significance of subjectivity to new literacies research. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 35(1), 90-103. collins, p. h. (2004). black sexual politics: african americans, gender, and the new racism. new york: routledge. darder, a. 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(2009). case study research: design and methods (4th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. schaefli final dec 10 19 correspondence address: laura schaefli, department of geography & planning, queen’s university, kingston, on, k7l 3n6; email: laura.schaefli@queensu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 unsettling pedagogy: co-designing research in place with indigenous educators laura schaefli queen’s university, canada anne godlewska queen’s university, canada abstract this article argues that decolonizing educational research begins in attention to inherited colonial thinking and ways of being. working with over 250 indigenous educators, staff, students, faculty and administrators associated with 10 partner universities in ontario, canada, we co-designed a questionnaire assessing how ontario post-secondary students are learning to think about colonialism and its relationship to indigenous peoples and canadian society. situating ourselves as researchers and as participants, we theorize the questionnaire’s and our own methodological transformation through the lens of recent literature on epistemologies of ignorance, discussing humour, the relationship between language and imagination, and assumptions we held that presented significant opportunities to shift how we relate. in doing so we argue the social importance of attending to the limits of knowledge and the entrenchment of those limits in historically conditioned and socially sanctioned axes of dominance. we attest both to the depths of colonial misrecognition and to the power of indigenous knowledge and ways of being to shift social worlds. keywords decolonization; education; settler colonialism; indigenous peoples; ignorance; canada; ontario attempting to build non-violent knowledge must, perhaps, inevitably be done along the frontier – between worlds, between cultures and languages, between histories and territories. what tools do we have? many, including the law, history, the archive, the academy, and writing itself, have also been the tools of colonialism. and given the history of our world, could it be any other way? to build non-violent knowledge with tools steeped in violence may be the core of our project. florencia mallon, decolonizing native histories (2011, p. 18) laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 222 the assumption held by dominant cultures and our pedagogies and research programs – that everything is in principle knowable – forms not only the epistemological basis for our being and knowing but also our fantasies and desires for a better, less fragmented world. such progressive desires are important, but they must also be seen as based in fantasy – a redemptive fantasy of unity that attempts to overcome history and ongoing effects of colonization. such fantasy is a necessary but always troubled ingredient in cross-cultural work. alison jones with kuni jenkins, working the indigene-colonizer hyphen (2008, p. 17) this article argues that decolonizing educational research begins with attention to inherited colonial thinking and ways of being. coalescing at the height of european colonial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of the modern disciplines, including geography, anthropology, history and law, have been instrumental in developing and defending systems of thought and practice that serve to legitimate colonial exploitation (chakrabarty, 2009; fabian, 1982; godlewska & smith, 1994; maldonadotorres, 2007). these ways of thinking work to render the dispossession of indigenous bodies and territories as just, certain and inevitable, by portraying indigenous worldviews and practices as moral and intellectual failures, always waiting for and in need of correction and completion, in the name of spiritual, economic and social advancement (fanon, 1967; povinelli, 2011; smith, 2012). as kikuyu novelist and scholar ngũgĩ wa thiong’o argues, achieving, consolidating and justifying control of territory, the foundation of extractive economic and political relations, demands inculcation of systems of thought that frame such relations as not only legitimate, but inevitable. colonization requires ignorance of the beauty of other forms of relation (wa thiong’o, 1994). in this article, we argue the decolonial importance of attending to the limits of knowledge and the entrenchment of those limits in historically conditioned and socially sanctioned axes of dominance. drawing on our experiences developing a research project that seeks to center the knowledge, experiences and ways of being of indigenous people and communities in decolonizing formal education in canada, we suggest the nature and subtleties of colonial ignorance, defined not as a passive or incidental absence of knowledge, but as the outcome of ways of understanding the world and one’s place in it that are socially-sanctioned, cultivated across social realms, and deeply linked to racialized, gendered, classed, anthropocentric and intersecting forms of power (medina, 2013; sullivan & tuana, 2007). situating ourselves as both researchers and participants (bodone, gudónsdóttir & dalmau, 2004; norris, 2008), we engage in critical reflection on the shifts in language and consciousness engendered through working with over 250 first nations, métis and inuit educators and community members to codesign a research tool that expresses their concerns and interests. the aim unsettling pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 223 of the research tool is to investigate how high school graduates in the most populous province in canada are trained to think about colonialism and its relationship to first nations, métis and inuit peoples and canadian society. our focus here is not on the results of that research, which have been published elsewhere (godlewska, rose, schaefli, freake & massey, 2016; godlewska et al., 2017; godlewska, schaefli, massey, freake & rose, 2017; schaefli et al., 2018; schaefli, godlewska & rose, 2018; schaefli, godlewska & lamb, 2019), but on the tensions and points of connection involved in the collaborative work of designing a research tool. we approach our reflections here through the lens of recent scholarship on ignorance (may, 2006; medina, 2013; schaefli & godlewska, 2014; steyn, 2012; sullivan & tuana, 2007). although the study of knowledge and its nature has been the focus of western thought since ancient times, it is only recently that scholars, western and not, are beginning to grapple with ignorance as a social and political phenomenon in its own right. we draw the work of critical indigenous and decolonial theorists on ignorance to suggest the importance of attending to “the force field of colonialism’s conceptual web, in which many more of us than often acknowledged remain entangled” (stoler, 2016, p. 9). thinking otherwise, as michel foucault reminds us, is always the critical challenge. the colonial nature of ignorance indigenous leaders and activists in the settler colonial context of canada emphasize how colonial ignorance functions to maintain exploitative relations between the canadian state and first nations, métis and inuit peoples. this ignorance, they argue, is not a neutral or incidental absence of knowledge, waiting to be filled. rather, it is epistemological, a logic that works to uphold the ontological hierarchies from which racism and colonialism thrive (calderon, 2014; kuokkanen, 2011; manuel & derrickson, 2017). this logic is rooted in historic operational practices that favour particular methods of perception and function to foreclose “otherthan-dominant epistemes and refuse to seriously contemplate their existence” (kuokkanen, 2008, p. 63). ignorance is institutionalized, promoted through law, political structures, popular modes of representation, and especially education, in ways that work to naturalize racialized hierarchies of being and knowing and refuse the systemic and enduring nature of colonial oppression (battiste, 2013; kuokkanen, 2011). understood in this way, ignorance is a powerful social force, because it works at personal and social levels in ways that are constantly reinforcing. an epistemology of ignorance works to justify and maintain extractive political, economic, and social relations, while encouraging unawareness of how subjectivity is shaped by the social positions, power relations and ways of knowing that emerge from colonial, racial and patriarchal oppression laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 224 (fricker, 2007; medina, 2013; sullivan & tuana, 2007). deeply embedded in the everyday, in the national and personal imaginary and in accepted assumptions behind fundamental concepts such as nature, wilderness, science, good governance, order and wellbeing, an epistemology of ignorance is difficult to challenge. at the heart of settler epistemological certainty lies settler self-interest in maintaining the status quo. in 2015, the truth and reconciliation commission of canada (trc) on the history and legacy of the indian residential school system (1870s-1996) called upon ministries of education, school boards, universities, colleges and teachers to commit to remedying mass ignorance. citing the “broad lack of understanding of the unjust and violent circumstances from which modern canada emerged,” the commission made the nation-to-nation relationship enshrined in the 1763 royal proclamation and the 2007 un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples the guiding principle of its work (sinclair, 2015, n.p.; trc, 2015). challenging and altering the imagination of people in canada about this relationship, the trc argued, is fundamental to meaningful social transformation (trc, 2015). indigenous leaders and activists have long fought for greater community input in the design of inclusive, culturally responsive, anti-oppressive education (assembly of first nations, 1972, 1988; battiste, 2013; kirkness, 1999). building on this work, the calls to action of the truth and reconciliation commission have prompted educational institutions across canada to enhance their efforts to identify and confront the systemic prejudice embedded in course content, funding priorities, administrative decisionmaking, and the priorities of teachers, teacher educators, faculty and staff. the research tool and larger project discussed here engages with and works to support efforts to decolonize education, by exploring, in quantitative and qualitative terms, the relationship between formal education and canadians’ “significant lack of understanding and respect for first nations, métis and inuit ways of understanding the world, which translates into a lack of understanding of first nations, métis and inuit rights in canada” (turner, 2006, p. 8). following linda tuhiwai smith’s observation that “real power lies with those who design the tools,” the awareness project involved codesigning a questionnaire with indigenous educators from communities associated with participating universities and colleges, as well as indigenous and non-indigenous staff members, academics, students, and administrators (smith, 1999, p. 38). the questionnaire includes a test of student knowledge and questions about students’ education, attitudes and demographics. such a tool must allow fine-grained analysis of the relationship between knowledge considered by indigenous educators to be vital to responsible citizenship, and post-secondary students’ formal education, attitudes, and experience. as the questionnaire seeks to assess student understanding of colonialism in canada, it is vital that the questions be grounded in the understanding, experiences and wisdom of first nations, unsettling pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 225 métis and inuit people who best understand the implications of canada’s colonial nature. using an established social science tool to help overturn established ways of thinking might seem quixotic. the aim of the research is not only to reveal ignorance, but also to encourage educational institutions and students themselves to address it seriously. thus, the research must use some of the language and techniques of education management, at least to some degree. we designed the co-design process we discuss here to make us responsible primarily to indigenous educators and community leaders and to ground the critical nature of the project in personal experience of oppression. understanding this oppression profoundly is what helped us to frame questions that can break down the congratulatory narratives structuring most canadians’ understanding of their history and society. with indigenous collaborators, this project has sought to challenge the colonial thinking that structures education across canada. there are other ways of challenging this thinking, including publication, films, representational and non-representational art, fiction, protests, lobbying and other strategies by indigenous and non-indigenous people. this project seeks to add to these efforts, by taking an approach directed at the heart of ignorance in canada: its educational institutions. the co-design process required the generous and willing contribution of indigenous people, support – at least minimal of higher-level administration at educational institutions, our displacement to institutions and sometimes communities across ontario, and the willing participation of undergraduate students. the co-design process put the research in a perpetually precarious position with respect to the power relations between indigenous people, university administrations, students, and academic research. valuing the learning and experience of students, indigenous and not, was a major concern for the research team. the distance between indigenous knowledge holders and students created by an online survey risked retrenching colonial modes of relation: reducing experience to consumable facts. for this reason, we have begun to deliver the awareness questionnaire in university classes, in the presence of paid elders, and with the support of university and college administrators and instructors. completing the questionnaire in class signals that the topics are important to the educational institution. the questionnaire reveals the answers to multiple-choice questions as the students complete them and, at the end of the questionnaire, directs students to a resource webpage of works principally by indigenous thinkers. our methodology now combines grassroots co-design with the basic principles of survey design and on the ground delivery to help make visible the deep entrenchment of colonial ignorance in canadian society and the role of formal education in perpetuating it. laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 226 unsettling pedagogy analyzing colonial ignorance from within a colonial society poses significant challenges, foremost amongst which is decolonizing our own ways of thinking and being, as a swiss newcomer and recent permanent resident of canada (laura), and as a canadian citizen and a child of polish and french world war ii refugees (anne). as privileged beneficiaries of a colonial system in which whiteness “enhances one’s life chances as configured through the logic of capital” and as academics trained in the western academy, we bring sets of experiences, relationships, and knowledges shaped profoundly by the power and advantage these embodiments signify and accrue in contemporary dominant political and socio-economic systems (moreton-robinson, 2015, p. xx). we also bring an abiding commitment to use the resources available to us to center and amplify indigenous voices. as critical indigenous and decolonial theorists argue, decolonization is a structure, not an event, requiring on-going critical consciousness of the systemic nature of oppression, its articulation along racialized, gendered, classed, and anthropocentric lines, the distortion of history, our own collaboration, and every day, subtle, tenuous moments of conscious action towards relating otherwise (dhamoon, 2015; redwingsaunders & hill, 2007). in research contexts, this entails undoing the opacity of academic knowledge production, foregrounding the researcher as part of the research, making legible the interests the research serves, being open about difficulties and failures, and orienting the research in ways that support the on-going enactment of indigenous knowledge traditions (denzin, lincoln & smith, 2008; patel, 2014). in this article we lay out our experiences of the methodological and epistemological negotiations embedded in the co-design of the first-year awareness questionnaire, as we carried it out in ontario in 2013-2014 with over 250 first nations, métis and inuit knowledge holders from communities associated with 10 ontario universities, as well as staff, academics, students, and administrators.1 this entailed approximately 60 meetings with sometimes as few as one person and as many as 30 over a period of 10 months and a total travel distance of 16,000 kilometres (about 10,000 miles). to each meeting we brought the survey, as modified by previous co-designers, and reviewed each question, word-for-word, for importance, accuracy, and resonance with co-designers’ experience and understanding. the questionnaire underwent considerable evolution as a result of this process, as did we. we learned because we came informed by reading of critical indigenous theorists and worked faceto-face with knowledge holders in their homes and places of work or community, a process of “falling into embodied awareness of living in indigenous sovereignty” (nicoll, 2004, p. 17). in such places co-designers 1 these universities are: university of windsor, university of guelph, wilfrid laurier university, mcmaster university, university of toronto, trent university, queen’s university, university of ottawa, laurentian university and lakehead university. unsettling pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 227 shared what they felt and we used all of our senses to understand their meaning. some co-designers expressed considerable anger at governmental and settler strategies that so favoured us and others and so denigrated them. in situations where the impact of the loss of land, the undercutting of identity, and the absence of resources was clear, we were “unfixed and uncomfortable” and in that discomfort came to understand (daza, 2008, p. 76; regan, 2010). we trace the questionnaire’s and our own “methodological becoming” through the co-design meetings and offer critical reflections on them, discussing the key role of our institutional partners, the importance of humour, the relationship between language and imagination, and assumptions we held that presented significant opportunities to shift how we relate (mountz, miyares, wright & bailey, 2003, p. 29). there are some dangers to deliberating over this project of co-design and our experiences of it in an academic paper. focusing on changes to the questionnaire and our own consciousness risks reinforcing a liberal pedagogical model that frames consumption of knowledge-about-the-other as the endpoint of justice. such a pedagogical approach is deeply problematic, as it is oriented around desire to secure the goodness and redemption of “those who now know,” rather than around naming and disrupting systemic and organizational structures of racism and colonialism, a dynamic that is itself deeply racialized (ahmed, 2005; jones with jenkins, 2008). we approach the problem of ignorance not in this liberal pedagogical sense of a gap to be filled, but as a social and structuring force linked to material and epistemological inheritance. focusing on ignorance in this sense is important for three reasons. first, it foregrounds the material nature of ignorance: absences, exclusions, and failures to imagine otherwise are present, real, and organize the way the world, shaped by colonialism, functions (de sousa santos, 2005). second, it emphasizes that decolonization is not an endpoint but a demanding and on-going process, requiring constant attention to the limits of understanding or “care of the self” (ettlinger, 2011, p. 551; tuck & yang, 2012). lastly, it suggests the transformative possibilities afforded by humility, generosity, and uncertainty, not in the sense of the “resilience” and “flexibility” celebrated and promoted through neoliberalism, but as an on-going, self-conscious refusal to mobilize the “axiomatic knowledge and action that have emerged from fantasies of colonial entitlement and certainty” (mackey, 2016, p. 132). in this paper and in our co-design research, we attest both to the depths of colonial misrecognition and to the power of indigenous knowledge and ways of being to shift social worlds. laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 228 the indigenous origins of the research at the very earliest conceptual origins of this research in 2007, jackie moore, the director of the aboriginal teachers education project at queen’s, alerted anne to the existence of the walking in beauty study. in 2004 the canadian race relations foundation-funded learning about walking in beauty report suggested that, in spite of significant social change in canada since the 1970s, most young canadians were learning little more about aboriginal life and issues than did their parents’ parents (caas, 2004). the coalition for the advancement of aboriginal studies (caas) offered the questionnaire they developed to describe and address this ignorance to anyone prepared to continue the effort. puzzled by the deep ignorance of students in our classes and the apparent willingness of many to learn, we wanted to explore the nature and causes of colonial ignorance. using the caas questionnaire as a base, we developed our own process, which evolved to an approach much closer to theirs over time. both the caas study and this one involve consultation with indigenous people and academics, are educational, allow qualitative analysis, and release all data and tests upon project completion. with greater resources, we were able to involve more students in more institutions, in more parts of the country and maintain the study over a longer time. study differences walking in beauty (caas study) addressing awareness (our study) population sampled not available 40,000-50,000 sample size 519 5,000-10,000 administrative partners no yes delivery mode in class in class & online statistical analysis no yes regionally specific no (1 test) provincial target college & university university, years 1 & 4 duration 1 year multi-year demographic questions 4 21 table 1. differences between the walking in beauty and addressing awareness studies. for the duration of the ontario study, we were unable to secure funding for the research. the first years of the project coincided with the years of the conservative harper government’s majority in canada. funding cuts to organizations such as canada race relations (which had funded the caas study) and the budgets allotted to federal granting agencies put significant pressure on critical research. in addition, the political atmosphere permitted unsettling pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 229 shutting down socially critical research. consequently, the time consuming and geographically demanding delivery of the survey to classrooms was impossible for research in ontario (survey delivered 2014) or newfoundland and labrador (survey delivered 2013). since, in our research in british columbia and manitoba and for our 4th-year survey in ontario, we have surveyed students in classrooms with the support of indigenous elders wherever possible. indigenous educational leaders at each university are the most critical people to the co-design. the unique position of these leaders, bridging the gap between highly privileged educational institutions and indigenous communities, allowed us to connect with individuals and organizations whose insight formed the questionnaires. we worked most often with directors of the indigenous student centre at each university. off-campus community leaders, friendship centres, and educational institutions on reserves gave generously of their time and insight because of their high regard for the work of these indigenous educators and advocates and their interest in the problem of settler ignorance. the quality of relationships indigenous leaders had built was also evident in the number of people we met with on campus and the range of their experience (indigenous student services staff, faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, members of the university’s aboriginal education council, elders in residence, equity advisors, top level administrators). committed to practical results, at meetings they observed the interactions and gave gentle advice. universities worked with us, facilitated meetings and in some cases shared student data. the questionnaire’s transformation is summarized in table 2. it is clear from this graphic that we modified every question. we eliminated questions from all themes and most of these eliminations occurred early on in the process as co-designers made clear which questions were important and which were less so. we added 13 new questions, only two of which we later eliminated. some environments were especially critical: our earliest meeting with a university was in column 2 and at the university in column 12, co-designers adapted the questionnaire to issues in northern ontario, which resulted in many changes to questions. laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 230 table 2. summary of co-design changes to the ontario awareness questionnaire, 2013-2014.2 learning co-design: the social environments of meetings dedicated to challenging comfortable canadian assumptions, from its earliest days this project sought to build open, self-critical and radically receptive relationships with indigenous people(s) and experiences. traveling to meet co-designers in their cultural and personal homelands put into sharper relief the inherited epistemological baggage we carried with us. as representatives, however reluctant, of an oppressive educational system 2 each column represents a group of co-design meetings of generally two to four days. test questions and themes are on the left. retained questions are in dark green on the right. the remaining colors indicate the following: light green – mentioned in the k-12 curriculum; blue – question eliminated; purple – a new question; red – a major rewrite; orange – a moderate rewrite; yellow – minor rewording. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 final geography closest reserve identify communities on map largest population by province oil sands off reserve reserves vs. traditional territory fnmi population extinguishment traditional territory governance canada's constitution 1876 indian act 1763 royal proclamation land claims powley indian act gender vote we are all treaty people culture people of closest reserve robust languages musicians innovations languages spoken in ontario inuksuk all my relations athletes inuit way of life powwow métis authors positive changes seven grandfather teachings current events obligation to uphold treaties apology ring of fire post-secondary funding idle no more caledonia ipperwash systemic racism northern communities changes in status residential schools consequences history forbidden in residential schools rupert's land administered residential schools three fires confederacy haudenosaunee limiting land claims inuit relocation sir john a. macdonald unsettling pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 231 and society, we often encountered suspicion and from time to time hostility (though always restrained) (on the tensions associated with non-indigenous researchers in indigenous communities, see donald, 2012; kovach, 2010; louis, 2007; smith, 1999; and wilson, 2008). in these early moments (or hours), silence and sometimes pointed questioning tested the authenticity of our co-design approach and our intentions, which made us better perceive our expectations and open ourselves to ways of relating differently (bell, 2008). the ice was broken and we knew we were indeed co-designing when colleagues burst into laughter, teased us or told an amusing story. humour often opened the way to a new level of exchange. as we learned, we became more adept at discerning layers of meaning in criticism of the questions. sometimes humour worked to mark a shift in trust. it was suggested to us by kanonhsyonne (janice hill), then director of the four directions aboriginal centre at queen’s, to offer tobacco at the start of our co-design meetings. we brought small sachets of tobacco to our first meeting in ontario with mohawk educators. after introducing ourselves and the project, we placed a sachet before each of the eight people present (wilson and restoule, 2010). only one person immediately accepted the gift. in these early days we were discomforted by this, unsure whether we could continue with the meeting. after considerable discussion of the questions, more co-designers picked up sachets. after yet more discussion, the comfort level increased and co-designers began suggesting humorous changes to the questionnaire. for example, one question asked: “who is protesting the alberta oil sands?” we were exploring student geographic knowledge about indigenous people near the oil sands. the co-designers self-deprecatingly (but also proudly) proposed teasing students with one of the incorrect answers: “write ‘mohawks.’ ‘they’ll choose that one ‘because mohawks are always protesting everything!’.” participants may have been waiting for our intentions to clarify and to witness deep listening before accepting any gifts. their uncertainty about our intentions and our cultural awkwardness around gift-giving was resolved through discussion, with laughter marking a moment of transition for many. by the end of the meeting everyone had taken the tobacco. we felt the power of humour again in the second co-design meeting, at a friendship centre in southwestern ontario. in this meeting, humour challenged academic authority and restored mutual respect. one woman challenged a test question asking which province is home to the greatest number of status first nations individuals, recommending that we move away from status first nations. anne explained that in that question we concentrated on status first nations because indian status is the focus of government population statistics, and suggested alternative terminology.3 3 under the indian act the federal government in canada retains unilateral authority to define who can be considered legally “indian.” these definitions of indian status privilege the male laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 232 the co-designer repeatedly rejected these alternatives and, one by one, all the words in between, eventually to the extent that silence became the only possible response. during this prolonged exchange the six other group members watched in silence. finally, anne turned and exclaimed “you’re yanking my chain!” she grinned and replied “yes, i am!” there was laughter and the tension eased. the exchange was much less about the question than about the entanglement of academic knowledge and colonial power, that who has the right to define always matters, that silence is often respectful, and that humour works in powerful ways. a few meetings later, we dropped this question entirely as it worked to reinforce colonial definitions of identity. sometimes humour acknowledged challenges and milestones in communicating across experience. in a meeting early on in the process at a southwestern ontario university, a co-designer patiently helped us clarify wording and develop new questions. halfway through review of the questions, during discussion of a question on systemic racism, he suggested that there were other manifestations of systemic racism not included in our answer. through discussion the structure of the question changed to all-ofthe-answers-are-correct. after anne suggested a possible third correct answer, he turned to her and asked “can you lift up your hair?” there was a beat of perplexed silence and he said with a smile “i want to see how many ears you are hiding under there!” there was laughter and the meeting proceeded with renewed energy. challenging colonial epistemological inheritance the critical perspectives of indigenous educators and community members transformed epistemological assumptions underpinning the survey in key ways. while we had initially conceived of the project in fairly static terms – how much do students know, how does that knowledge, or lack thereof, compare across provinces – co-design transformed the questionnaire into a living educational tool, grounded in the experiences, histories, and networks of relationships with and of the people and places we worked with (malpas, 1999; wilson, 2008). co-designers’ critical perspectives revealed entrenched colonial epistemological language in the questionnaire. they also deconstructed assumptions of static knowledge, making clear how notions of fixity work for colonialism. these changes allowed us to refine language that would likewise challenge the thinking of students. lineage, resulting in profound gender inequalities with on-going assimilative effects (lawrence, 2004). unsettling pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 233 the importance of place just as we had experienced with the questionnaire we co-designed in newfoundland and labrador, meetings with co-designers in ontario foregrounded embodied and emplaced experience and enhanced our understanding of the diversity and specificity of indigenous experience in different parts of canada. we had chosen to open the ontario questionnaire with questions about indigenous presence adapted from our work in newfoundland and labrador: what was the reserve closest to the university campus, and could the students identify the locations of three named indigenous communities on a numbered map of communities in the province? in the newfoundland study, through these questions and especially the map we sought to challenge the deeply held prejudice that there are no indigenous peoples on the island, a mythology perpetuated in the newfoundland and labrador curriculum (godlewska, rose, schaefli, freake & massey, 2016; hanrahan, 2003). in ontario, co-designers preferred a question on traditional territory, based in indigenous definitions of belonging. we soon dropped the reserve question as reserve location is much less important to student awareness than traditional territory, and anyway, when there are multiple reserves near campus, as is the case in much of ontario, the question becomes technical, about knowledge of distance rather than awareness of time immemorial presence. with that question gone, the map question seemed to us even more important. we were particularly attached to it because we had devoted resources to the map’s construction and at that time were still preoccupied with maintaining comparability between provinces. but co-designers often thought the map question too difficult (and it was). it took another month and three more sets of meetings before we dropped the map question and understood traditional territory as replacing both it and the reserve question. focusing on reserves risked evacuating traditional and pre-indian act forms of indigenous governance and authority. it also risked perpetuating colonial discourses of authenticity that present reserve culture as the primary and only culture of indigenous peoples. cartesian representational strategies cannot do justice to the diversity of indigenous experience. provincial contexts matter as do local realities. the range of experience we encountered also broadened the scope of the questionnaire, a development that deepened our conceptualization of the issues at hand while making the questions more reflective of the diversity of indigenous experience. we initially phrased a question on changes in legal definitions of indian status as “why might federal government changes in legal definitions of status lead to divisions within and between communities?” this decision was rooted in our experiences in newfoundland and labrador, where we felt co-designers’ anger at often arbitrary, punitive and exclusionary government definitions of identity and belonging. in ontario, a very different rights environment, it became clear laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 234 that changes in status definitions might sometimes also lead to greater community self-determination. the language of the question shifted to account for this: “what happens when there are changes in legal definitions of status?” with an all-of-the-answers-are-correct structure that included community self-determination as an answer. while our initial focus on the violence of status laws emerged out of the affective relations of co-design meetings in newfoundland and labrador, that broadened and deepened through engagements with other co-designers in different contexts (ahmed, 2006). the living and iterative nature of co-design worked to disrupt assumptions of stasis and uniformity embedded in survey methodology. colonial prejudice is systemic and enduring co-designing the questionnaire emphasized the depth and pervasiveness of colonial ignorance. such ignorance is both a social and individual accomplishment. institutionalized and promoted through education, law, political structures, and popular modes of representation, an epistemology of ignorance molds individuals and groups into performers of ignorance, even though they may not intend to exclude or to be excluded, or be aware of playing either part (dotson, 2011; fricker, 2007). it is also in an individual’s self-interest to ignore the sources of privilege and how they shape circumstances for us and for others (bell, 2008). co-designing the questionnaire reinforced the importance of deep collaboration to shifting social worlds. the critical perspectives of people we worked with deepened the language of the questionnaire to better account for the violence of the 19th and 20th century residential school system, a more than 100-year government policy of forced removal of indigenous children from their families for placement in under-resourced schools, dedicated to the assimilation of indigenous children and communities and the clearing of land for euro-canadian settlement (trc, 2015). when we began in ontario, the questionnaire contained three questions on the residential schools: what was allowed in the schools, who ran the schools, and a question on the prime minister’s 2008 apology. co-designers sharpened the connection between the schools and cultural attack, suggesting that the question on what was allowed in the schools shift to focus on what was forbidden, and developing a new question on the contemporary consequences of the residential schools. they also turned these two questions into check-allthat-apply, in order to deepen the education of students about the intent and consequences of the schools, while ensuring that their selections are accurate reflections of their knowledge. co-design similarly broadened and deepened the questionnaire’s treatment of systemic racism. in its first iteration on a pilot survey at our home university (in a town then housing nine prisons), a question focused unsettling pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 235 on the overrepresentation of indigenous people in prisons, with the aim of educating students about some of the systemic inequities in canadian society (rymhs, 2008). we dropped the question in newfoundland and labrador, as co-designers there felt that it would reinforce entrenched prejudices, but brought it back in ontario after sharpening the question to focus on imprisonment as an indicator of systemic racism. through codesign it became clear that it was most important to capture more of the many expressions of systemic racism, including biased policing and high numbers of missing and murdered indigenous women. co-designers’ engagement made explicit the mutual entanglement of racism and on-going colonial violence. co-designers also emphasized continuity between past and present attacks on indigenous land rights, asking that we add two questions: the first comparing when white women and first nations and inuit people were granted the right to vote, and the second focusing on early 20th century government strategies to limit land claims. the aim of both questions was to challenge the prevailing misconception that indigenous political action has emerged from nowhere in the last 50 years, by showing students how the canadian government has consistently undermined indigenous land rights, and until 1951, restricted avenues of resistance to that attack (mathias & yabsley, 1991). co-designers also challenged a question that emphasized the role of the nisga’a nation in setting legal precedent for the recognition of aboriginal title in canada (foster, raven & webber, 2011). for the co-designers, what was most important about the nisga’a settlement was the extinguishment of the nisga’a’s aboriginal title. we initially did not change the correct answer, but through on-going conversations with codesigners on restrictions on indigenous sovereignties imposed through the modern land claims process, we came to understand that the systemic nature of extinguishment policies and their use as a tool for land expropriation was indeed most important for students to know. the failure of the federal government to recognize the systemic and enduring nature of colonialism became especially clear in the development of a question on prime minister stephen harper’s 2008 apology to former students of the indian residential schools. early on in the process, a codesigner told us that the correct answer as written did not capture the narrowness of the apology: the prime minister apologized only for the abuse and assimilative aims of the residential schools, not for the government’s many attempts to eliminate indigenous cultures and values, its failure to uphold treaty agreements, or its culpability in underfunding the schools, creating policies of forced attendance, and allowing widespread disease and abuse to continue despite knowledge of their existence (trc, 2015). this discussion spanned our visit with these co-designers, as, while we were focused on the narrowness of the apology, our wording was not initially skilful enough to achieve the learning opportunity sought by codesigners. they wanted the right and the wrong answers to work together to laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 236 emphasize how narrow the apology had been: there was no acknowledgement of the government’s many attempts to eliminate indigenous cultures and values; there was no recognition of the continuing colonial nature of many canadian institutions (law, education, policing, etc.). the apology recognized only the abuse and the assimilative aims of the schools. this refusal to acknowledge the larger context, policies and ideologies that made the residential schools possible, and that perpetuate their harm, was so important it had to be spelled out with crystal clarity. indigenous peoples are thriving and will continue to thrive co-design foregrounded the importance of imagination to life and emphasized the fundamental link between language and epistemology. questions came to emphasize indigenous cosmologies, community selfdetermination, and language revitalization, decentering colonialism as the only story of indigenous lives. we became more critical of the epistemology underpinning government statistics, and saw the importance of taking every possible opportunity in the questionnaire to challenge discourses of indigenous decline (tuck, 2009; vizenor, 2008). one of the most difficult questions to develop was on the meaning of land to indigenous peoples. the process of developing a question that touches upon issues fundamental to indigenous cosmology illuminated the endurance of euro-colonial conceptions of space-time and the importance of challenging them (cajete, 2000). we began in ontario with a codesigned version of the question that focused on the notion of belonging: people belong to the land more than it belongs to them. ontario codesigners told us early on in the process that indigenous understandings of land were more about relating than belonging, but as at that stage in our thinking we could not find the language to express that, we made no change. a few meetings later, a co-designer again pointed out the centrality of relationships. he suggested that the question focus on what, traditionally, land represented for indigenous peoples, and helped us phrase the correct answer. another co-designer in the next meeting challenged the implication that indigenous cosmology is not of the present. there, the question shifted to focus on what land continues to mean to indigenous peoples. still later on, co-designers suggested that the question avoid the traditional/modern dichotomy altogether, by focusing on the meaning of “all my relations,” a phrasing that emphasizes the relational nature not only of land, but of being. the iterative and prolonged struggle across co-design meetings speaks to the power of the extended conversation that is co-design and the opportunity that such meetings create for bringing into relationship diverse ways of understanding. people we worked with also emphasized community self-determination, which led to the replacement of anything suggestive of decline in unsettling pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 237 indigenous vitality. in a questionnaire about oppression and colonialism, there was a tendency to the negative. co-designers felt that, while necessary, given the depths of colonial ignorance prevailing in canada, it had to be mitigated with a new check-all-that-apply question on the positive changes driven by indigenous people(s). experiences beyond ontario informed this interaction and the insights of co-designers in ontario have informed continued work to focus on indigenous resurgence and power. the process of developing a question on indigenous languages emphasized in particular the importance of not contributing to discourses of indigenous decline, and made us much more critical of the claims to expertise embedded in government-generated statistics. co-designers were very critical of a question on the number of endangered and viable indigenous languages in canada today. the goal of the question was to educate students about one of the most violent aspects of colonialism. in formulating it, we relied on data collected by linguists and statisticians at statistics canada. early on, some co-designers expressed anger at the implication that despite significant community-based language revitalization, some indigenous languages might not survive. it took us some time to hear the essence of their critique and move away from statistics and a focus on loss. in later meetings, when people pointed out that the question, as phrased, was not explicit about the source of its information, nor did it give students a sense of the number of indigenous languages spoken before european contact, the question became more explanatory and shifted to focus on the three most widely spoken indigenous languages. most recently, co-designers’ insights have led us to rewrite the question to focus on language learning. however, this change has not been without controversy, as some co-designers want to celebrate achievements in this regard and others want the gravity of the situation made clear. treaties are living and entail responsibility to engage through co-design the questionnaire also came to emphasize the treaty responsibilities of all governments and people in canada. through words and actions, people we worked with highlighted the living nature of treaty obligations, challenging the historical imagination perpetuated in canadian law, and in provincial curricula and teacher education programs, that treaties are singular events with little contemporary relevance (borrows & coyle, 2017). in discussion of a question on government resettlement of indigenous communities, co-designers pointed out that not all resettlement took place without prior consultation: treaties such as the robinsonsuperior treaty and treaty 3 involved extended negotiation on the part of anishinaabe leaders for reserve land, annuities, and unencumbered hunting and fishing rights, all to ensure long-term cultural and political autonomy laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 238 (long, 2010). co-designers recommended that we focus instead on why treaties were signed in the first place, which led us to replace the resettlement question with a question on the difference between reserves and traditional territory. this is a question that has survived translation into multiple jurisdictions across the country, which would certainly not have been the fate of any question on treaties. the people we worked with also emphasized the living nature of treaty obligations, challenging the “settled expectations” and “fantasies of entitlement” so often mobilized by residents of canada to deny even the possibility of indigenous sovereignty and self-determination (mackey, 2016). we began in ontario with a question on who in canada is affected by treaties, the correct answer to which was “all people living in canada.” co-designers initially recommended focusing on responsibility: “affected by treaties” was replaced with “obligation to uphold treaties.” other people then made the question more explanatory and more precise, arguing that as treaties are nation-to-nation agreements, the correct answer should distinguish between governments and people, and between first nations, métis and inuit governments and the government of canada. co-designers also challenged the widely-held prejudice that first nations and inuit students receive free post-secondary education, by emphasizing treaty obligations in a question on the post-secondary education funding available to first nations and inuit students. treaty language in the questionnaire worked to disrupt narratives of liberal-multicultural equality that omit from visions of justice the centrality of treaties and the on-going relationships of critical historical consciousness, respect and responsibility they entail (borrows & coyle, 2017). balancing social worlds sometimes co-designing the questionnaire involved disagreement over what students should be expected to know. discussing these differences made the questionnaire more reflective of the diversity of co-designers’ knowledge and experiences, and consequently a much better instrument. identity terminology was an important concern. some people preferred using “indian” (in quotation marks) to signal the term’s failure to encompass indigenous forms of identity and value. others saw no need for quotation marks as students should understand that indian continues to be used by the government of canada to define indigenous identity. we followed the majority preference and used quotation marks. disagreement also revolved around whether questions were too easy or too difficult. co-designers were willing to drop a question on whether the first nations, métis and inuit population is increasing or decreasing, as to them the answer was obvious. however, our findings so far suggest the importance of the question: the vanishing indian myth is alive and well unsettling pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 239 amongst first year university students in ontario and newfoundland and labrador and this is linked to the portrayal of indigenous peoples in ministry-approved curricula and texts (godlewska, rose, schaefli, freake & massey, 2016; schaefli, godlewska & rose, 2018; schaefli, godlewska & lamb, 2019). sometimes disagreement centred on what students should be expected to know about indigenous cultures. some co-designers stressed the importance of questions on indigenous cultural practices and teachings. other co-designers were not comfortable with the prospect of exposing traditional knowledge. we chose ultimately to focus culture questions on language, cultural persistence, and indigenous contributions to the arts. recently, through work with st. lawrence college in ontario (anishinaabe and haudenosaunee territories) and with vancouver island university (snuneymuxw territory) and douglas college (kwikwetlem, and sto:lo territories) in british columbia, we have begun to formulate questions that reflect the wisdom of indigenous ways of thinking and being, with the aim of showing students their vitality and importance. we will continue to develop such questions as the project moves to other provinces. disagreements reinforced the importance of mutual autonomy and respect to strong relationships, demonstrating the importance of co-design to the development of richer approaches to social reality. this living process of challenge, discussion, and reframing is why the awareness questionnaire cannot, and should not, be created from book knowledge. while books and academic journals are invaluable sources of learning, they are necessarily limited in their scope, content, and voice. the affects engendered through reading written text are also different from those that emerge from face-toface engagement. as a research tool that is fundamentally about decolonizing knowledge, it is vital that the questionnaire reflect many minds and many different experiences. conclusion this article has traced shifts in language and consciousness generated through co-design of a questionnaire aimed at assessing how canadian post-secondary students have learned to think about colonialism and its relationship to indigenous peoples and canadian society. the questionnaire has challenged student learning in post-secondary institutions during a period of engagement (at various levels) with the work of the truth and reconciliation commission (2009-2015). co-designing the questionnaire in place with indigenous community leaders and educators transformed it into a powerful educational tool that emphasized the systemic nature of colonial violence, the failure of colonial modes of categorization to define indigenous identities and territories, the vitality of indigenous languages and cosmologies, and the living nature and importance of nation-to-nation relations. in on-going negotiation of language with indigenous educators laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 240 and community members our own sensitivities and imaginations shifted, as the questionnaire began to encompass the language and imagination with which to challenge colonial ignorance and convey the diversity, vitality and strength of indigenous peoples in ways that encourage student selfreflection and education. the shifts described here attest to the social importance of research tools grounded in rich conversations and diverse experiences. they also raise important questions about voice and benefit. given the number, duration, and complexity of the meetings, the account given here is necessarily partial and fragmented. while we suggested co-authorship to co-designers, academic publication was not important to most, revealing the limits of an economy of value rooted in academic social worlds. we have since moved to other forms of reciprocity. métis artist and elder maria campbell speaks to the responsibilities of researchers: “reciprocity is a big teaching in our community, that what you take, you have to give back. and there are responsibilities to taking people’s power…whether it’s their stories or their friendship, or just making a place in the community . . . you can’t just go and take that power. you’ll get sick…” (campbell quoted in dewar, gaertner, goto, mathur & mccall, 2013, p. 15). we continue to carry with us the wisdom of careful listening, relinquishing control, and attending to the limits of thinking and being to fostering decolonizing relations. these gifts have shaped the awareness project as well as our on-going efforts to share the project and its findings in ways that support the decolonization of education in canada. the process is necessarily fraught and complex, as intention and goodwill do not in themselves constitute the ground or endpoint of decolonization (ahmed, 2005; de leeuw, greenwood & lindsay, 2013). we have found, though, that the task of finding language to share knowledge in non-violent ways requires the best of everyone involved: humility, openness, generosity, humour, and vision of what we want to move towards. the capacity to learn and change our minds is perhaps the most important tool we all have. references ahmed, s. 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(2017). awareness of indigenous peoples in newfoundland and labrador: memorial’s first year students (2013) speak. the canadian geographer, 61(4), 595-609. laura schaefli & anne godlewska studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 221-243, 2019 242 hanrahan, m. (2003). the lasting breach: the omission of aboriginal people from the terms of union between newfoundland and canada and its ongoing impacts. st. john’s: government of newfoundland & labrador. jones, a., with jenkins, k. (2008). rethinking collaboration: working the indigene-colonizer hyphen. in n. k. denzin, y. lincoln & l. t. smith (eds.), handbook of critical indigenous methodologies (pp. 471-486). thousand oaks, ca: sage. kirkness, v. j. (1999). aboriginal education in canada: a retrospective and a prospective. journal of american indian education, 39(1), 14-30. kovach, m. (2010). indigenous methodologies: characteristics, conversations, and contexts. toronto, on: university of toronto press. kuokkanen, r. (2008). globalization as racialized, sexualized violence. international feminist journal of politics, 10(2), 216-233. kuokkanen, r. (2011). reshaping the university: responsibility, indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift. vancouver, bc: ubc press. lawrence, b. (2004). "real" indians and others: mixed-blood urban native peoples and indigenous nationhood. lincoln, nb: university of nebraska press. long, j. s. (2010). treaty no. 9: making the agreement to share the land in far northern ontario in 1905. montreal, qc: mcgill-queen's university press. louis, r. p. (2007). can you hear us now? voices from the margin: using indigenous methodologies in geographic research. geographical research, 45(2), 130-139. mackey, e. (2016). unsettled expectations: uncertainty, land and settler decolonization. winnipeg, mn: fernwood publishing. maldonado-torres, n. (2007). on the coloniality of being: contributions to the development of a concept. cultural studies, 21(2-3), 240-270. mallon, f. e. 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(2015). the white possessive: property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. mountz, a., miyares, i. m., wright, r., & bailey, a. (2003). methodologically becoming: power, knowledge and team research. gender, place & culture, 10(1), 29-46. nicoll, f. (2004). reconciliation in and out of perspective: white knowing, seeing, curating and being at home in and against indigenous sovereignty. in a. moreton-robinson (ed.), whitening race: essays in social and cultural criticism (pp. 17-31). sydney: aboriginal studies press. norris, j. (2008). duo-ethnography. in e. f. provenzo, jr. (ed.), encyclopedia of the social and cultural foundations of education. thousand oaks, ca: sage. patel, l. (2014). countering coloniality in educational research: from ownership to answerability. educational studies, 50(4), 357-377. povinelli, e. 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(2018). what do first-year university students in ontario, canada, know about first nations, métis, and inuit peoples and topics? canadian journal of education, 41(3), 688-725. schaefli, l., godlewska, a., & rose, j. (2018). coming to know indigeneity: epistemologies of ignorance in the 2003–2015 ontario canadian and world studies curriculum. curriculum inquiry, 48(4), 475-498. schaefli, l., godlewska, a., & lamb, c. (2019). securing indigenous dispossession through education: an analysis of canadian curricula and textbooks. in h. jahnke, c. kramer & p. meusburger (eds.), geographies of schooling (pp. 145-161). berlin: springeropen. sinclair, m. (2015, december 15). justice murray sinclair’s remarks on the truth and reconciliation report. maclean’s. retrieved from http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/justice-murray-sinclairs-remarks-on-the-truth-andreconciliation-report/ smith, a. (2012). indigeneity, settler colonialism, white supremacy. in d. hosang, o. labennett, & l. pulido (eds.), racial formation in the 21st century (pp. 66-90). berkeley, ca: university of california press. smith, l. t. (1999). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. london: zed books. steyn, m. (2012). the ignorance contract: recollections of apartheid childhoods and the construction of epistemologies of ignorance. identities, 19(1), 8-25. stoler, a. l. (2016). duress: imperial durabilities in our times. durham, nc: duke university press. sullivan, s., & tuana, n. (eds.). (2007). race and epistemologies of ignorance. albany, ny: suny press. trc (truth & reconciliation commission of canada). (2015). final report: honouring the truth, reconciling for the future. winnipeg, mn: truth & reconciliation commission of canada. retrieved from http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/final%20reports/executive_summary_english_web.pdf tuck, e. (2009). suspending damage: a letter to communities. harvard educational review, 79(3), 409-427. tuck, e., & yang, k. w. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education, & society, 1(1), 1-40. turner, d. a. (2006). this is not a peace pipe: towards a critical indigenous philosophy. toronto, on: university of toronto press. vizenor, g. (ed.). (2008). survivance: narratives of native presence. lincoln, nb: university of nebraska press. wa thiong'o, n. (1994). decolonising the mind: the politics of language in african literature. nairobi: east african publishers. wilson, d. d., restoule, j. p. (2010). tobacco ties: the relationship of the sacred to research. canadian journal of native education, 33(1), 29-45. wilson, s. (2008) research is ceremony: indigenous research methods. halifax, ns & winnipeg, mn: fernwood publishing. abji final feb 7 20 correspondence address: dr. salina abji, sociologist and community-based research consultant; email: salina@salinaabji.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 punishing survivors and criminalizing survivorship: a feminist intersectional approach to migrant justice in the crimmigration system salina abji canada abstract scholars have identified crimmigration – or the criminalization of “irregular” migration in law – as a key issue affecting migrant access to justice in contemporary immigrant-receiving societies. yet the gendered and racialized implications of crimmigration for diverse migrant populations remains underdeveloped in this literature. this study advances a feminist intersectional approach to crimmigration and migrant justice in canada. i add to recent research showing how punitive immigration controls disproportionately affect racialized men from the global south, constituting what golash-boza and hondagneu-sotelo have called a “gendered racial removal program” (2013). in my study, i shift analytical attention to consider the effects of the contemporary crimmigration system on migrant women survivors of gender-based violence. while such cases constitute a small subgroup within a larger population of migrants in detention, nevertheless scholarly attention to this group can expose the multiple axes along which state power is enacted – an analytical strategy that foundational scholars like crenshaw (1991) used to theorize “structural intersectionality” in the us. in focusing on crimmigration in the canadian context, i draw attention to the growing nexus between migration, security, and gender-based violence that has emerged alongside other processes of crimmigration. i then provide a case analysis of the 2013 death while in custody of lucía dominga vega jiménez, an “undocumented” migrant woman from mexico. my analysis illustrates how migrant women’s strategies to survive gender-based violence are re-cast as grounds for their detention and removal, constituting what i argue is a criminalization of survivorship. the research overall demonstrates the centrality of gendered and racialized structural violence in crimmigration processes by challenging more universalist approaches to migrant justice. keywords crimmigration; migrant justice; intersectionality; gender; race; illegality; gender-based violence; immigration detention; canada salina abji studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 68 on december 1, 2013, lucía dominga vega jiménez – an undocumented migrant woman of colour from mexico – was apprehended by canadian border authorities in vancouver after being pulled aside by transit officers for a fare-enforcement infraction. lucía was subsequently held in immigration detention for 19 days, the majority of which she spent in prison – a controversial practice given that immigration detention is supposed to be administrative in nature and not punitive (global detention project, 2012; amnesty international, 2015; united nations committee on human rights, 2015). on the day before lucía was scheduled to be deported, she attempted suicide in an airport detention facility monitored by a private-security firm with no training in trauma-informed crisis response (burgmann, 2014; dawson, 2016). lucía later died in hospital, although news of her death was not made public until one month after she passed, when a journalist caught wind of the case and began asking questions (dyck, 2015). migration scholars have approached cases like lucía’s as mounting evidence of “crimmigration” (stumpf, 2006), defined as state laws, policies, and practices that work to criminalize a range of irregular and temporary forms of migration. the us crimmigration system is characterized by increasing convergences between criminal law and immigration policy, where unauthorized forms of migration are more likely to be punished as criminal infractions rather than administrative violations as has historically been the case (armenta, 2017; hernández, 2017; menjívar, cervantes & alvord, 2018). in the canadian case, remaining in a country without authorization is still on the books as a civil infraction, yet the tactics used to enforce immigration controls are increasingly punitive – constituting what weber (2002) terms procedural and symbolic criminalization. the tactics of crimmigration in canada range from political discourse and immigration policies that frame (often racialized and poor) refugee claimants and asylumseekers as “bogus” or fraudulent, to the police-style tactics of immigration raids and the housing of detainees in jails without time limits on how long an individual can be held (arbel & brenner, 2013; bosworth & turnbull, 2014; goldring & landolt, 2013; walia, 2013; razack, 2017; silverman, 2014).1,2 while scholarship on crimmigration has provided important insights into the forms of injustice that migrants like lucía increasingly encounter at the border and beyond, the gendered and racialized implications of crimmigration remain largely underdeveloped in this literature (garner, 2015; golash-boza & hondagneu-sotelo, 2013). indeed, a number of feminist and critical race –––––––––––––––––––––––– 1 although estimates suggest between 200,000-500,000 non-status migrants living in major cities across canada, there is no publicly available reliable data on this population (goldring, berinstein & bernhard, 2009). the fact that these numbers have been cited for over a decade remains a major issue. 2 migrants living without legal status in canada may have (often ineffectual) status elsewhere such as their countries of origin, but a small percentage have no status anywhere and are stateless. punishing survivors & criminalizing survivorship studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 69 scholars have intervened in recent years to better unpack how race, gender, and other axes of difference are mobilized in the enactment of punitive immigration controls (armenta, 2017; cervantes, menjívar & staples, 2017; menjívar et al., 2018; moffette, 2018). taken together, these scholars have begun to show the disproportional impacts of mass deportation and detention on racialized men from the global south, who are more likely to be framed as criminals and threats to the social order as a justification for the scaling back of rights (golash-boza, 2016; pratt, 2005). i add to this research by using a feminist intersectional approach to consider the gendered and racialized implications of crimmigration for migrants like lucía. in doing so, i shift analytical attention to lucía’s complex positionality – not only as a migrant woman of colour living without authorization in canada, but also as a survivor of gender-based domestic violence, whose claim for refugee status was denied by the canadian state.3 in doing so, i draw from the foundational work of feminist intersectional scholars like crenshaw (1991) who positioned the issue of gender-based violence against women of colour as central to theorizing structural intersectionality. crenshaw defines structural intersectionality as the co-constitution of gendered, racialized, and classed structures of state power in law (see also bhuyan, osborne, zahraei & tarshis, 2014; maynard, 2017; walia, 2013). i apply this approach to extend crimmigration scholarship, providing a reading of lucía’s case that is informed by my own fieldwork and interviews with service providers working within the anti-violence against women sector in toronto, canada (abji, 2016, 2018; abji, korteweg & williams, 2019; bergen & abji, 2020). i argue that what gets criminalized in such cases is not only irregular migration, but also the strategies of survivorship that racialized and migrant women have developed to address the multiple forms of violence in their lives. the research thus draws important attention to what i argue is a growing nexus between migration, security, and gender-based violence that is largely overlooked by literature on crimmigration, and that extends more recent feminist and critical race critiques of the crimmigration thesis. the article begins by defining crimmigration and its impact on irregular migrants in the canadian detention system. i then return to early work by feminist intersectional scholars to develop my analytical framework, which centres the lived experiences of racialized migrant women survivors of gender-based violence in detention. in applying this analytical framework to my reading of lucía’s tragic death in detention, i trace the gendered and –––––––––––––––––––––––– 3 while it is beyond the scope of this paper, the experiences of (racialized and poor) trans-people in immigration detention is another under-studied sub-group that is likewise important for examining the structural violence of crimmigration (collier & daniel, 2019; lee, 2019). in this paper, i use the category women to refer to women-identified individuals, recognizing the fluidity of gender identity. salina abji studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 70 racialized injustices that survivors experience in a system that not only criminalizes their migration pathways, but also criminalizes the strategies of survivorship developed by migrant women and their advocates to navigate the multiple sources of violence in their lives. crimmigration and migrant justice in canada since the early 2000s, scholars have approached state practices of mass deportation and detention as evidence of a growing crimmigration system (bourbeau, 2018; hernández, 2017; stumpf, 2006). in the us context, which has predominated within crimmigration scholarship, the decision to re-enter a country from which one has been deported is punishable as a criminal offence under regulations introduced in 1996 (stumpf, 2006).4 as crimmigration scholars have argued, the move to treat irregular migration as a crime rather than a civil infraction has played a major factor in the direct criminalization of migrant populations (armenta, 2017; hernández, 2017). importantly, this convergence between criminal and civil law is always partial: that is, it often does not come with the same (albeit limited) protections such as the right to appeal, the right to appointed counsel, protection against self-incrimination, and other constitutional rights (stumpf, 2006, pp. 392-395). as such, the forms of migrant injustice experienced by illegalized migrants in a crimmigration system are often two-fold: consisting both of forms of criminalization for infractions that used to be considered civil infractions, as well as an absence of basic civil liberties afforded at least in theory to citizens who commit crimes. crimmigration in the canadian context has received less attention compared to the us, in part because irregular migration still remains on the books as a civil infraction. likewise, the population of non-status migrants in canada is a smaller percentage of the population compared to the us, and rates of deportation and detention are also much lower in the canadian case.5 yet, as i and others have argued, processes of crimmigration and the related securitization of migration have nevertheless shaped migrant precarity in canada, and certainly shaped the tragic circumstances surrounding lucía’s death (abji, 2016; bergen & abji, 2020; bosworth & turnbull, 2014; goldring & landolt, 2013; molnar & silverman, 2018). there are three interrelated factors that characterize crimmigration in the canadian immigration system: (1) criminalizing and restrictive immigration –––––––––––––––––––––––– 4 under the 1996 illegal immigration reform and immigrant responsibility act (iirira). 5 numbers of deportations in canada have declined steadily in recent years under the liberal government, peaking in 2012 at 18,921 removals under the previous government (cbsa, n.d.). detentions in canada peaked in 2013 with 14,362 detentions that year. rates have since levelled off to between 6,000-8,000 detainees per year at the time of writing (gdp, 2012, 2018). for a more detailed discussion on the factors shaping migrant precarity in canada compared to the us see goldring et al. (2009) and goldring & landolt (2013). punishing survivors & criminalizing survivorship studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 71 regulations, (2) police-style border enforcement tactics, and (3) punitive conditions of detention without independent oversight. for example, a series of changes to refugee determination introduced between 2008 and 2014 introduced symbolic and procedural criminalization in the treatment of refugee claimants and asylum-seekers (atak, hudson & nakache, 2018; béchard & elgersma, 2012; bhuyan et al., 2014; weber, 2002). the rightwing conservative government in power at the time mobilized criminalizing notions of fraudulent or “bogus” refugees to justify restrictions on access to permanent residency, often combined with neoliberal rationalizations of efforts to cut down wait times and the backlog of so-called legitimate claims (silverman, 2014).6 for example, refugee claimants from mexico were reclassified under changes introduced in 2012 under bill c-31 as claimants from “safe” countries or “designated countries of origin” (dco). by classifying mexico as a “safe” country and hence unlikely to produce refugees, legislators justified restrictions on the timelines for making claims (from 60 days to 30-45 days) – a seemingly bureaucratic change that in reality imposed procedural unfairness based on country of origin, given that claimants had less time to secure a lawyer and to prepare necessary testimony for making their claims (atak et al., 2018). claimants under dco also had no right of appeal, although they could ask for a federal court review but would remain deportable during this time (béchard & elgersma, 2012). the federal government was widely criticized for including countries like mexico and hungary on the list of “safe” countries given well-documented human rights abuses and targeting of minority groups such as state impunity in the deaths of women (or femicide/feminicide) in mexico and the political persecution of roma refugees in hungary (garcía-del moral, 2016; jric, 2012).7 these criminalizing restrictions targeting immigration “fraud” and “bogus” refugees were coupled with the expansion of police-style border enforcement tactics in the post-9/11 period. in 2003, the canadian government created the canada border services agency (cbsa) and soon after launched a multipleborder strategy that included inland enforcement by both uniformed and plain-clothed officers seeking out undocumented migrants in workplaces, hospitals, transit, schools, child welfare and women’s shelters (abji, 2016; arbel & brenner, 2013; bhuyan et al., 2014). crimmigration scholars have pointed to the mirroring of police tactics by immigration authorities as a key component of the criminalization of irregular migration, and often buttressed –––––––––––––––––––––––– 6 importantly, the regulatory changes introduced by the federal conservative party were the culmination of decades of both liberal and conservative restructuring of the refugee and immigration system introduced through neo-liberalization of social services such as settlement and migration in the 1990s. these “reforms” were intensified with the rise of more right-wing conservative policies on immigration and security in the post-9/11 period (abji, korteweg & williams, 2019; bhuyan et al., 2014). 7 in may 2019 the liberal party in power removed all countries from the dco list. salina abji studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 72 by cooperation with local police (stumpf, 2006). moreover, critical race scholars have extended this analysis by showing how punitive immigration enforcement often mobilizes dominant notions of racialized communities as more dangerous or as sites of criminal or terror-related activities requiring increased profiling and surveillance (armenta, 2017; moffette, 2018; romero, 2008). a third interrelated factor of crimmigration in canada is punitive conditions of immigration detention. scholars have documented the wide degree of discretion that individual officers have for detaining migrants both prior to deportation, as well as for those attempting entry such as certain classes of asylum-seekers and unauthorized border crossers under legislation introduced in 2012 (moffette, 2018; silverman, 2014).8 critical race scholars have extended these findings to show how dominant ideas of racialized men as security threats or criminals are mobilized in these everyday moments of discretionary power by border officers. this criminalizing discourse obscures the ways in which the detention of these groups facilitates global capitalism by removing those dispossessed by economic restructuring (golash-boza, 2016). indeed, by the cbsa’s own admission, roughly one-third of detainees held in 2009-2010 were failed asylum-seekers considered “low-risk” by officials at the time of their detention (eidn, 2014; gdp, 2012). what this in effect means is that people are being detained in part because their stated fear of returning (where they may face death, harm, or human rights abuses) could easily lead to an officer considering them a flight risk and then detaining them. the discretionary power of officers to detain is exacerbated in canada by the lack of independent oversight of the cbsa coupled with the controversial practice of holding detainees in jails rather than administrative holding centres.9 this gives rise to procedural forms of criminalization, where a lack of clear jurisdiction between provincial jails and the federal border agency leads to punitive treatment. indeed, the global detention project has reported cases where prison guards were not even aware of which prisoners were immigration detainees being held on administrative grounds and which were serving sentences for crimes (gdp, 2018). it is thus unsurprising that the mental health needs of migrant detainees – who may have experienced trauma from war or displacement and who often experience psychological and physical symptoms during the removal process – are often overlooked –––––––––––––––––––––––– 8 the federal conservative government passed anti-smuggling legislation (bill c-31) in 2012, which included provisions for mandatory detention for “irregular arrivals” (see atak et al., 2018). 9 canada routinely detains non-citizens in jails rather than administrative holding centres that are specifically designed for immigration detainees (gdp, 2018; pratt, 2005). roughly 40-60% of detainees are held in correctional facilities on any given day, where they mix with the prison population and have limited access to legal, medical, and social supports (gros & van groll, 2015). punishing survivors & criminalizing survivorship studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 73 and rarely understood in a prison system that is already limited in the availability of health supports (gros & van groll, 2015). these punitive conditions are further exacerbated in the canadian case, where migrants can be held indefinitely as there are no current time limits on detention as in other immigrant-receiving countries (gdp, 2018; track & paterson, 2017). importantly, the indefinite nature of detention has been compared to psychological torture and is widely regarded by the un and international human rights organizations as an arbitrary and unjust deprivation of human liberty (gros & van groll, 2015; track & paterson, 2017). canadian human rights organizations and activist groups have brought to the attention of the un the multiple human rights violations that migrant detainees experience: while the un has reprimanded canada for its use of jails and indefinite detention, at the time of writing there has been no movement on the part of the government to establish an independent armslength body for addressing and investigating non-citizens’ complaints against the cbsa (unhcr, 2012; united nations committee on human rights, 2015).10 the crimmigration thesis thus offers a compelling if harrowing analysis of immigration detention in canada. however, a growing number of feminist and critical race scholars have argued that the crimmigration thesis is not enough – more attention to the intersectional dynamics of crimmigration with other systems of oppression such as gender, race, and class is needed to fully understand the forms of migrant injustice that diverse populations experience (bosworth, fili & pickering, 2016; golash-boza, 2016; golash-boza & hondagneu-sotelo, 2013; maynard, 2017; nobe-ghelani, 2016; razack, 2017; walia, 2013). in what follows, i outline a feminist intersectional approach for analyzing such cases and then apply this approach to a deeper reading of lucía’s story as evidence of the criminalizing of migrant women’s strategies of survivorship at the nexus of migration, security and genderbased violence. advancing feminist intersectional approaches: centering the survivorship of migrant women of colour a feminist intersectional approach to crimmigration extends beyond a singular focus on the convergence between criminalization and immigration –––––––––––––––––––––––– 10 at the time of writing, the liberal government has ear-marked funds for an arms-length monitoring unit for cbsa in its 2019 budget, following decades of activist organizing and at least 16 reported deaths in immigration detention since 2000 (molnar & silverman, 2018; tunney, 2019). however, the implementation of this unit has yet to materialize. activists remain cautiously optimistic. salina abji studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 74 in law, policy and practice. rather, such an approach examines the constitutive role that race, gender, class, and other salient axes of difference play in shaping the processes and effects of crimmigration across diverse migrant populations. in their work on mass deportation and detention in the us, golash-boza & hondagneu-sotelo (2013) use such an approach to analyze the disproportional impacts of punitive immigration controls on racialized men from the global south. they explain how crimmigration processes function as a “gendered racial removal program” where dominant notions of racialized masculinity as threatening (whether by virtue of criminality or security threats) are used to justify the expulsion of a group whose labour power is expendable after decades of neoliberal restructuring and the crisis of global capitalism (golash-boza & hondagneu-sotelo, 2013). dominant notions of racialized masculinity as threats are powerful in part because they draw from tropes that are deeply-embedded in histories of settler-colonialism and racial capitalism that continue to shape and inform national identity (glenn, 2015; maynard, 2017; stasiulis & jhappan, 1995). more recently, cervantes et al. (2017) analyzed the racialized and gendered logics used to justify the detention of latin-american female detainees in the us, as well as a growing for-profit industry providing alternatives to detention. here they show differences in how racialized femininity is mobilized by state authorities, in this case drawing on dominant notions of latina women as threats to the social order in terms of their reproductive power, their sexuality, or as “burdens” on the welfare state. on the surface, these stereotypes seemed to produce less punitive treatment compared to the treatment of racialized men, such as alternatives to detention that position the state as a paternalistic protector of so-called bad mothers whose vulnerabilities must be weighed against punishment. however, as cervantes et al. (2013) show, this “soft punishment” translates into equally punitive treatment in practice within a carceral system. indeed, emerging scholarship on migrant women in detention is buttressed by a burgeoning grey literature documenting the forms of discrimination that migrant women experience in detention (brané & wang, 2013; molnar & silverman, 2018; nijc, 2014; rabin, 2009).11 detained women are more likely to be asylum-seekers compared to men; they are more likely to be single-parents compared to men, with less overall social support in mitigating the effects of incarceration for themselves and their families; and women are more likely than men to report experiencing domestic violence or sexual assault prior to detention (brané & wang, 2013; nijc, 2014; rabin, 2009). –––––––––––––––––––––––– 11 there is also a growing grey literature documenting the detention of children, whether unaccompanied or as part of family units (gros, 2016). in the canadian case, children accompanying single mothers have been counted by cbsa as “visitors” rather than detainees, and until recently have not been included by cbsa in official statistics. punishing survivors & criminalizing survivorship studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 75 in the canadian case, there is a significant lack of publicly available data on the number of men, women, and trans people in detention, let alone on the prevalence of sexual violence.12,13 i thus build upon this growing body of scholarship to begin tracing the racialized and gendered dimensions of migrant justice in the crimmigration system. in doing so, i return to early feminist work on intersectionality, which centred the issue of gender-based violence as central to understanding black women’s experiences (combahee river collective, 1983; crenshaw, 1991; lorde, 1984; see also glenn, 2015; maynard, 2017; walia, 2013; carasthathis, kouri-towe, mahrouse & whitley, 2018). for early-intersectional theorists like crenshaw and others, the issue of violence against women of colour was central to any structural analysis. this was in part because they understood the ways in which state power and the political movements that resist state power could produce multiple forms of violence and erasure in racialized women’s lives over and above the interpersonal forms of violence typically studied. in her widely-cited article, crenshaw (1991) theorizes structural intersectionality as the co-constitution of gendered and racialized structures of state power in law. she argues that by centering the experiences of women of colour, scholars can tease out the ways in which different systems interact to produce particular forms of precarity that are obscured when focusing solely on singular analysis, such as race-based analyses that assume a male subject, or gender-based analyses that assume a white subject. writing at a time when the us crimmigration system was in its infancy, crenshaw’s structural-intersectional analysis of genderbased violence was prescient in calling attention to the role of deportation and immigration policy as one of several key factors shaping access to justice for black women – an aspect of her early work that has been largely overlooked (1991, p. 1245). crenshaw offers two critiques of restrictive immigration controls in theorizing structural intersectionality. first, she challenges the lack of a race and gender-based analysis in legislation targeting immigration “fraud’ which neglects to consider the effects of such policies in increasing racialized women’s risks of gender-based violence (1991, p. 1247). second, she critiques legal changes that take gender into account but assume a white, middle-class female subject. in such cases, the specificities of minority women’s experiences are excluded, thus producing barriers for individual women to access supports. moreover, crenshaw points to how women of colour and their families and communities are perversely criminalized –––––––––––––––––––––––– 12 a recent journalist investigation found five reported allegations of sexual assault within the cbsa between 2016-2018 but no details were available on the outcome or actions taken (swain, wesley & davis, 2019). 13 in terms of demographics, earlier accounts from scholars suggest that roughly 70-75% of detainees are male, and that racialized men from the global south are the dominant group in detention in canada (pratt, 2005). salina abji studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 76 through such efforts to protect white women (crenshaw, 1991, pp. 12481249). crenshaw’s early work on the structural violence of immigration controls for survivors of gender-based violence has been followed by a burgeoning feminist field addressing this issue (abji, 2018; abji et al., 2019; bhuyan et al., 2014; glenn, 2015; maynard, 2017; stasiulis & bakan, 2005; walia, 2013). taken together, feminist critiques of immigration controls in canada illustrate what i have termed a growing nexus between migration, security and gender-based violence. this nexus includes formalized practices of border officials entering women’s shelters or standing around the perimeter as part of the broader crackdown on migrant populations living without status (abji, 2016; villegas, 2015). it also includes legislation targeting genderbased violence introduced by the right-wing conservative government, such as the “zero tolerance for barbaric cultural practices act” introduced in 2014, which combined new restrictions on immigration with changes to criminal and family law, thus mobilizing the issue of gender-based violence to advance a carceral crimmigration agenda (abji et al., 2019; singh, 2016). by bringing attention to this nexus in my re-reading of lucía’s experiences of detention and death, i thus extend crimmigration scholarship as well as recent critiques by feminist and critical race scholars. in what follows, i outline my methodology before turning to lucía’s story. methodology while there have been at least 16 reported deaths in immigration detention in canada since 2000, lucía’s story offers an important – if harrowing – opportunity to analyze the experiences of survivors of gender-based violence in detention (gdp, 2018; molnar & silverman, 2017). because her case received national media attention along with a widely publicized coroner’s inquest and social movement advocacy campaigns, there are more details of her story publicly available for analysis compared to other deaths in detention. this is important for research on immigrant detainees, since researchers must navigate a complex process of protecting migrant vulnerability and privacy while trying to make visible that which state institutions actively try to render invisible (goldring & landolt 2013). my analysis of lucía’s story is thus illustrative rather than representative, offering only those details that are publicly available in order to develop an analytical model for theorizing migrant justice more broadly. my methods were three-fold. first, i conducted discourse analysis of thirtyfour artifacts directly relevant to lucía’s case, including newspaper articles, cbsa memos, the coroner’s inquest report, campaign press releases, and policy reports. in my analysis i coded examples of symbolic, procedural and direct criminalization across three intersecting axes of oppression: immigration status, racialized-gender, and gendered-racialization (glenn, punishing survivors & criminalizing survivorship studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 77 2015). i then triangulated this analysis with findings from my broader research project examining the impacts of immigration policies on survivors of gender-based violence. this included data from my ethnographic fieldwork among migrant rights activists in toronto (2011-2015) and interviews with 30 service providers working with migrant women survivors of gender-based violence. when the story of lucía’s tragic death in detention made national headlines in january 2014, i was in the midst of conducting fieldwork and interviews, and thus had the opportunity to discuss the impacts of detention on survivors with a sub-sample of interviewees. while the interviewees were based in toronto (not vancouver where lucía was detained), they nevertheless were key informants with 15 to 25 years of experience working with refugee and migrant women across a range of organizations such as women’s shelters, settlement agencies, and legal and medical clinics. through active participation in the field, i also co-organized a community forum in toronto on immigration detention, which included a live re-enactment of a detention hearing of a racialized migrant woman detainee, followed by lively discussion among activists and service providers who work with migrant women survivors. my analysis of lucía’s experiences in detention is thus grounded in extensive fieldwork among migrant rights groups, to which i bring added insights from feminist intersectional scholarship on migrant justice and gender-based violence. in what follows, i first offer an account of lucía’s story, focusing on police-style border enforcement practices and punitive conditions of detention that shaped her experience. i then apply an intersectional analysis to trace mutually-constituting factors of gender, race, and immigration status that together produce migrant (in)justice for survivors of gender-based violence. through this unpacking, i argue that migrant women’s strategies of survivorship are criminalized – symbolically and procedurally – leading to a form of migrant injustice not adequately captured in existing scholarship on crimmigration. honouring lucia’s story: crimmigration and migrant (in)justice in canada lucía dominga vega jiménez was a mexican national whose application to remain in canada as a refugee was denied in 2010. while details of her refugee claim are private, the inquest into her death revealed that she feared violence from an abusive ex-boyfriend as well as fear of “torture and death” were she to return to mexico (ministry of justice, 2014). when her refugee claim was rejected in 2010, lucía applied to have her case reviewed by the federal court, but her application was dismissed (woo, 2014). it is believed that the cbsa initially deported lucía to mexico, and that she subsequently re-entered canada without authorization where she lived without status and salina abji studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 78 worked for cash as a cleaner at a vancouver hotel (burgmann, 2014; woo, 2014). under canadian law, lucía’s decision to re-enter canada without authorization was a civil infraction (i.e., not a criminal infraction). yet, as i go on to show, the procedures used to detain her, along with the conditions of her detention, were highly punitive in practice and constituted evidence of crimmigration for non-citizens in canada. lucía was detained on december 1, 2013. at the time, she was travelling on the vancouver skytrain when transit officers pulled her aside after she could not produce proof of payment. instead of issuing her a ticket, transit officials called the cbsa who checked lucía’s name against their database and dispatched an officer to the scene. as legal scholars have pointed out, lucía was not informed of the right, nor given the opportunity, to speak to a lawyer before the cbsa officer questioned her at the skytrain office (gros & van groll, 2015). according to a lawyer from the bc civil liberties association, the cbsa officer “purported to be her friend and introduced herself as a ‘liaison person’” (gros & van groll, 2015). however, she asked lucía questions “that, when answered, resulted in self-incrimination, and the resulting information was eventually used against her in a detention review hearing” (gros & van groll, 2015). when news reports of lucía’s death surfaced, activists in vancouver launched a “transportation not deportation” campaign to protest what they saw as clear and on-going racial profiling of latino, black, and indigenous communities by vancouver transit police (tnd, 2015).14 it was soon revealed that a memorandum of understanding (mou) had been in place between greater vancouver transportation authority and the cbsa at the time that lucía was questioned by transit officers who then notified the cbsa, triggering her detention by authorities (ball, 2014; tnd, 2015). but lucía could just as easily have been apprehended by border officers at her workplace or in going about her daily life – a form of precarity that scholars have shown has negative psychological effects on migrant well-being as well as intensifying the risks of exploitation from abusers threatening to report migrants to authorities such as employers, landlords, intimate partners and family or community members (bhuyan et al., 2014; goldring & landolt, 2013). lucía was subsequently held in immigration detention for 19 days, the majority of which she spent at alouette correctional centre for women (accw), a provincial jail. as noted at the inquest, lucía was issued prison clothes and was held in the high-risk portion of the jail, despite being detained for administrative reasons (ministry of justice, 2014). –––––––––––––––––––––––– 14 according to an internal cbsa memo obtained by the tnd campaign via freedom of information request, in 2013 transit police made 328 referrals to cbsa, of which 62 resulted in investigations for removal (tnd, 2015). punishing survivors & criminalizing survivorship studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 79 the inquest showed how her repeated requests for medical appointments to deal with physical and mental health symptoms were ignored – in one case due to a bureaucratic error where the prison database mistakenly showed that she had already been transferred to another facility leading to a cancelled medical appointment (ministry of justice, 2014). records of her final request for medical care showed that lucía self-identified as needing “crisis” level support, yet without any independent oversight her family had little legal recourse to address potential violations of lucía’s right to basic health supports – a complaint that had a better chance of being addressed if lucía had been incarcerated for a criminal offence rather than a civil violation.15 when lucía was handcuffed and transferred to the vancouver airport detention facility or “immigration holding centre” (ihc) the day before her scheduled deportation, she was held in a facility described by advocates as a “dungeon” with no windows and where even the lawyers of detainees report being unable to access their clients housed there (shantz, 2014; ministry of justice, 2014; walia & hassan, 2014). although the vancouver facility is operated by the cbsa, the government contracts out elements of the operation to private companies, including the private security firm that was responsible for lucía’s safety and security at the time of her detention (gdp, 2018). according to the inquest, the cbsa had failed to adequately monitor and address on-going problematic practices on the part of the private security company: the officers on duty during lucía’s detention had falsified the logs indicating that they had done rounds of the facility whereas they had instead been playing video games in the office (ministry of justice, 2014). on the day before lucía was scheduled to be deported, she attempted suicide in an airport detention facility monitored by a private-security firm with no training in trauma-informed crisis response (burgmann, 2014; dawson, 2016). at the time of lucía’s attempted suicide in the facility, there was also no female officer on duty, and officers had received no training in providing trauma-informed crisis response (outside of basic first aid and training in how to handcuff and detain prisoners). the facility itself was also not equipped with standard harm-prevention protocols used in jails, which might have prevented lucía from being able to attempt suicide by hanging herself in the shared shower facilities. it was only when other detainees alerted the security officers by repeatedly banging on the door of their office that an officer was able to break into the locked bathroom and attempt to resuscitate lucía. lucía never regained consciousness and later died in hospital on december 24, 2013. she was 42 years old. the news of lucía’s –––––––––––––––––––––––– 15 coroners inquests by definition cannot find “fault” but can only make recommendations (molnar & silverman, 2018; paterson, 2014; shantz, 2014). the jury at lucía’s inquest made 23 recommendations including that an independent ombudsman be appointed to mediate any complaints put forward (ministry of justice, 2014). salina abji studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 80 death was not made public until one month after she passed, when a journalist caught wind of the case and began asking questions. punishing survivorship, criminalizing survivors: a feminist intersectional analysis of lucía’s story the regulations targeting immigration “fraud” and “bogus” refugees that shaped lucía’s migration pathway were problematic in lacking a gender and race-based analysis. by declaring mexico a “safe” country, the legislation failed to recognize pressing issues of feminicide and state impunity in addressing the deaths of mexican women, as well as the role that canadian foreign policy may have played in intensifying conditions of poverty and instability that form part of the conditions of violence in mexican women’s lives (aberman, 2014). shortened timelines for making refugee claims also lacked a trauma-informed approach to refugee determination: such an approach would take seriously the uneven process that survivors of genderbased violence often require to make sense of their experiences of violence and the effects of trauma in being able to recount details, as well as the significant barriers that survivors may encounter in collecting the necessary evidence to support claims (bhuyan et al., 2014). while changes to the refugee determination process were thus problematic for all refugee claimants hailing from so-called safe countries, gendered and racialized notions of safety and legitimacy shaped the forms of political and procedural injustice experienced by migrant women seeking to survive gender-based violence in situations where they felt unsafe enough to uproot their lives. most of the service providers i interviewed also described how regulatory changes not only punished women’s attempts to migrate as a survival strategy, but also criminalized the strategies that advocates themselves had developed over decades of anti-violence work. for example, in the early 1990s, feminist activists were successful in pressuring the canadian government to develop the first gender-based policy recognizing genderbased violence and other forms of gendered persecution as legitimate grounds for filing a refugee claim in canada (abji, 2016). this policy helped establish canada’s reputation on the world stage as a leader in addressing the gendered dimensions of refugee determination. however, in the decades that followed, contradictions emerged between policy and practice when claimants filing gender-based refugee claims encountered re-victimization and discrimination in the process – including, for example, dominant myths about sexual violence that positioned racialized women in particular as lying to take advantage of canada’s humanitarian policies (bhuyan et al., 2014; see also mckinnon, 2016). many of the service providers i spoke to described how they developed strategies to help women in crisis navigate a problematic system: one such strategy, for example, involved applying for humanitarian and punishing survivors & criminalizing survivorship studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 81 compassionate (h&c) grounds to remain in the country at the same time that one filed a refugee claim. this double-application allowed migrant women survivors to better negotiate re-victimization and improve their chances of obtaining permanent residency as a key strategy in violence prevention. if a woman’s claim for refugee status based on gender-based violence was rejected, she could remain in the country while her h&c claim was being processed. the lengthy timelines for refugee applications to be processed also allowed applicants to gather the necessary evidence to build their h&c case, such as evidence of strong ties to the community – a factor that many survivors struggled with given the effects of isolation, poverty, and trauma typically associated with domestic violence. however, in 2012, the federal government introduced a one year bar on applying for h&c for failed refugee claimants, during which time migrant women like lucía would have been deportable (mattoo, mann & romano, 2017). the service providers i interviewed highlighted this change in particular as evidence that the strategies of survivorship that they had themselves developed as advocates to help survivors navigate a racist and sexist system, were being systematically criminalized through restrictive regulations (abji, 2018). the lack of an intersectional and trauma-informed analysis in regulations targeting refugee protection was coupled with expanded border enforcement practices at this time. initially, the cbsa’s practice of police-style border enforcement tactics also lacked an intersectional analysis. indeed, there is a large body of feminist scholarship showing the effects of women’s fears of deportation in cases of domestic or interpersonal violence: abusers often use threats of deportation as a tool of power and control, and women’s fears of being deported (or having their family members deported) may prevent them from reporting or leaving abusive situations (bhuyan et al., 2014; carasthathis et al., 2018; crenshaw, 1991; razack, 2002; stasiulis & bakan, 2005; walia, 2013). this is true also for other forms of gender-based violence, such as sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape at the hands of employers, landlords, faith leaders, family or community members, or others in positions of power. the service providers whom i interviewed pointed out, however, that the increased presence of border officers (uniformed and plainclothed) that they witnessed as cbsa expanded its practices, made it much more difficult to mitigate against migrant women’s fears of deportation – particularly for racialized women whose communities were already overpoliced. several described a case in 2006 when a racialized non-status woman was handed over to the cbsa by toronto police after reporting domestic violence to authorities (landolt & goldring, 2013). activists immediately responded to the case and were successful in pressuring the toronto police to adopt a “don’t ask” policy, where police officers were not to ask about immigration status unless they had a bona fide reason to do so (abji, 2018). however, activists were unsuccessful in their attempts to combine this with a “don’t tell” policy, meaning that there is no firewall that salina abji studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 82 prevents toronto police from reporting cases to the cbsa (abji, 2018). at the time of lucía’s detention, vancouver police had no dadt (don’t ask, don’t tell) policy in place, thus affecting the likelihood of non-status witnesses or victims of crime coming forward to report.16 when more reports began to surface of cbsa officers entering or standing around the premises of women’s shelters and agencies offering anti-violence against women programs, activist groups across the country launched a national campaign in 2008 against the practice, called the “shelter sanctuary status” campaign (abji, 2016; villegas, 2015). it was largely in response to pressure from advocates that the cbsa decided to formalize its problematic practices: in 2011, the agency issued a policy directive outlining its justification for entering women’s shelters, which included a series of protocols for how to do so with “sensitivity” (abji, 2016). as i have argued elsewhere, the directive re-framed women’s human rights to protection from gender-based violence as a “lower order” concern – equivalent to that of a special interest group – that did not detract from the state’s sovereign authority to enforce borders across any territory in its jurisdiction, including women’s shelters (abji, 2016, 2018). what this assertion in fact produced, i argue, is a criminalized framing of women’s efforts to survive – through, for instance, seeking shelter or protection from gender-based violence – where the act of living without authorization is decontextualized and rendered a threat to the safety of the canadian population that can only be addressed through removal (abji, 2016). thus, the cbsa’s justification of border enforcement in women’s shelters was implemented despite protests from activist groups, including major state-funded women’s organizations. in this way, the cbsa prioritized discourses of national security and risk to safety for the canadian population over decades of feminist research and activism on the role of deportation as a barrier in the global fight against gender-based violence. this re-casting of migrant women’s efforts to survive as acts requiring expulsion can likewise be seen in the framing of lucía’s expressed fears of returning to mexico as constituting a flight risk requiring her detention. indeed, many of the service providers i interviewed were critical about the discretion of individual cbsa officers to detain as a type of “entrapment” for survivors of gender-based violence, where survivors’ fears of violence and death at the hands of abusive partners were perversely understood as justifications for deprivation of liberty – a particularly egregious practice given international guidelines on the use of administrative detention as “a last resort” (amnesty international, 2015). –––––––––––––––––––––––– 16 at the time of writing, vancouver police have adopted a similar policy as toronto where they will not ask about immigration status “unless there is a legitimate reason” to do so, again leaving the practice itself open to the discretion of individual officers (canadian press, 2018). punishing survivors & criminalizing survivorship studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 83 in lucía’s case, a pre-removal risk assessment (prra) could have acted as a safeguard against deportation to a situation of high risk (i.e., risk of persecution, torture, risk to life, cruel or unusual punishment). the service providers i spoke to who worked with failed refugee claimants like lucía, however, described significant systemic issues in survivors’ access to this mechanism. for example, migrants facing deportation have only 15 days to apply from the point at which a cbsa officer determines that they are eligible to apply for a prra. during this time, the individual is not subject to removal but may be detained. evidence presented at the inquest showed that lucía intended to apply for a prra, however, the process itself proved challenging due to difficulties meeting with legal counsel, language barriers and challenges accessing an interpreter, lack of access to the necessary paperwork which did not travel with detainees, and multiple issues with the phone system that limited the capacity of detainees to access necessary evidence (gros & van groll, 2015; ministry of justice, 2014). one service provider i interviewed described how the process of prra was difficult enough for migrant detainees, but that for survivors in particular, the process was fraught with “procedural unfairness” (interview, toronto, 2014). as she explained: “this is really hard for anyone who has experienced trauma, but especially for women who are survivors of violence, where it takes so long for people to even be able to speak about their experiences, to remember their experiences, to understand what’s relevant, to get evidence, it takes so long” (emphasis in original). in lucía’s case, when the deadline for her prra passed, she contacted a cbsa officer in a panic to let him know that she still wanted to apply. reports showed, however, that the cbsa officer failed to inform lucía of her right to apply regardless of missing the deadline – instead the officer told her it was too late to apply, and she would be deported (ministry of justice, 2014). in addition to the problematic conditions of detention experienced by all detainees, my interviewees pointed out how practices of confinement can also be triggering for survivors of gender-based violence, who may experience additional psycho-social health impacts from being detained (goldring & landolt, 2013). while we cannot know the specific health impacts of detention on lucía, who according to the inquest self-reported as being in “crisis,” many of the service providers i interviewed described how detention exacerbated the effects of gender-based violence and trauma in migrant women’s lives (ministry of justice, 2014). indeed, evidence presented at the inquest described lucía as “withdrawn and uncommunicative” in her final days. one of her detention hearings needed to be cut short because “she was sobbing uncontrollably” (ministry of justice, 2014). as one of my interviewees put it, “detention is the nice immigration word for it, but it’s horrific. it’s jail. it’s not supposed to be punishment, but it is… pretty much every woman i work with has identified the immigration system as another form of trauma” (interview, toronto, 2014). perhaps it is not surprising then, salina abji studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 84 that activists responding to crimmigration in canada often described deportation and detention as forms of state violence against women – a framing that i observed frequently over my four years in the field (abji, 2016). lucía’s tragic suicide and death within that system can thus be seen not as an aberration or exception to the rule, but rather as an outcome of that systemic violence. discussion and conclusion in this research, i showed how current approaches to crimmigration were useful yet limited in teasing out the convergences between criminalization and immigration that shape the experiences of non-citizens. in my case analysis of lucía’s tragic death in detention, i demonstrated how securitized policies against “immigration fraud” shaped the contexts of reception that lucía experienced as a refugee claimant from mexico. the canadian state’s expansion of border enforcement practices in the post-9/11 period not only intensified her experiences of precarity as an undocumented migrant living in vancouver, but also exposed her to punitive practices mirroring criminal prosecutions, such as her housing in a women’s prison. when i centred lucía’s positionality as a survivor of gender-based violence, however, a deeper story emerged not sufficiently addressed in the crimmigration literature. applying crenshaw’s notion of structural intersectionality, i demonstrated how, for survivors of gender-based violence like lucía, immigration is not only a pathway to citizenship, but also a strategy for surviving the multiple sources of violence in their lives. i then argued that the growing nexus between migration, security and gender-based violence effectively punished strategies of survivorship used by oftenracialized migrant women as a key component of crimmigration processes. drawing from my own fieldwork and interviews with advocates, i showed how the strategies that feminist organizations had developed to help migrant women navigate access to citizenship were routinely shut down through antifraud and anti-crime measures. these were often because of the genderedracialized effects of seemingly gender-neutral and race-neutral policies. in lucía’s case, restrictions on access to refugee claims limited the timeframes that she and others like her had access to in order to gather evidence in a system already rife with misogynistic beliefs and practices. her detention in a women’s prison exposed lucía to potential re-traumatization as well as new risks of experiencing sexual violence without independent oversight, in addition to the mental health effects of deportation and detention that come with such punitive measures for all detainees. finally, the lack of independent oversight meant that the series of bureaucratic errors and systemic violations of her rights that lucía encountered failed to offer her the protection from self-harm that she might have otherwise had. overall, my re-reading of lucía’s story showed how crimmigration is not only a form of legal violence punishing survivors & criminalizing survivorship studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 85 affecting migrant access to justice, but also a way in which survivorship – or migrant women’s strategies for surviving gender-based violence – are also being criminalized through these processes. while my case analysis was illustrative rather than representative, the findings have important implications for crimmigration scholarship moving forward. first, the research calls for greater attention to the complex positionality of racialized women survivors of gender-based violence. this would necessitate better access to data ranging from the demographic composition of migrants in detention to the lived experiences of survivors across multiple categories of difference both prior to and in detention. indeed, future research should continue to push the intersectional frame further to consider how gender-based violence intersects with other salient dimensions such as sexuality, gender-identity, ableism, ageism and so on (stasiulis, 1999). finally, attention to the intersectional dimensions of crimmigration have important implications for how migrant justice is theorized and achieved. by illustrating the ways in which crimmigration punishes survivors and criminalizes survivorship, this research calls for a more robust understanding of the links between migrant justice and freedom from genderbased violence as fundamental to the project of reforming and transforming the crimmigration system. acknowledgements with respectful gratitude to lucía dominga vega jiménez: may your story help others. thank you to the research participants who so graciously shared their insights and knowledge with me. i also gratefully acknowledge comments from the editors and anonymous reviewers, as well as from daiva stasiulis, kristie o’neill, paulina garcía-del moral and workshop participants at carleton university and the university of toronto who provided generative feedback on this paper. this research was supported by funding from the social sciences 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(2014, june). indefinite, arbitrary and unfair: the truth about immigration detention in canada. retrieved from https://endimmigrationdetention.com/resources/ garcía-del moral, p. (2016). transforming feminicidio: framing, institutionalization and social change. current sociology, 64(7), 1017-1035. garner, s. (2015). crimmigration: when criminology (nearly) met the sociology of race and ethnicity. sociology of race & ethnicity, 1(1), 198-203. gdp (global detention project). (2012). canada detention profile. retrieved from https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/countries/americas/canada gdp (global detention project). (2018, june). immigration detention in canada: important reforms, ongoing concerns. retrieved from https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/immigration-detention-in-canada-importantreforms-ongoing-concerns glenn, e. n. 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(2016). invisible citizens: canadian children in immigration detention. international human rights program (ihrp),university of toronto faculty of law. retrieved from https://ihrp.law.utoronto.ca/sites/ihrp.law.utoronto.ca/files/publications/reportinvisiblecitizens.pdf gros, h., & van groll, p. (2015). ‘we have no rights’: arbitrary imprisonment and cruel treatment of migrants with mental health issues in canada. international human rights program (ihrp), university of toronto faculty of law. retrieved from http://ihrp.law.utoronto.ca/utfl_file/count/publications/ihrp%20we%20have%20no %20rights%20report%20web%20170615.pdf hernández, c. c. g. (2017). abolishing immigration prisons. boston university law review, 97(1), 245-300. jric (justice for refugees and immigrants coalition). (2012, march). protect refugees from bill c-31: a joint statement. canadian council for refugees. retrieved from https://ccrweb.ca/en/protect-refugees-c31-statement lee, e. o. j. (2019). responses to structural violence: the everyday ways in qhich queer and trans migrants with precarious status respond to and resist the canadian immigration regime. international journal of child, youth & family studies, 10(1), 70-94. salina abji studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 88 lorde, a. (1984). sister outsider: essays and speeches. new york: crossing press. mattoo, d., mann, r., & romano, j. (2017). race, gendered violence, and the rights of women with precarious immigration status. community leadership in justice fellowship of law foundation of ontario, factor-inwentash faculty of social work, university of toronto. retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1807/93696 maynard, r. (2017). policing black lives: state violence in canada from slavery to the present. black point, ns: fernwood. mckinnon, s. l. (2016). gendered asylum: race and violence in us law and politics. indianapolis, il: university of illinois press. menjívar, c., cervantes, a. g., alvord, d. (2018). the expansion of ‘crimmigration’, mass detention, and deportation. sociology compass, 12(4), e12573 ministry of justice, british columbia, canada. (2014). verdict at coroner’s inquest. bc ministry of justice file no: 2013:0380:0004. moffette, d. (2018). the jurisdictional games of immigration policing: barcelona’s fight against unauthorized street vending. theoretical criminology. retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1362480618811693 molnar, p., & silverman, s. j. (2017, november 14). migrants are dying in detention centres: when will canada act? the conversation. retrieved from https://theconversation.com/migrants-are-dying-in-detention-centres-when-will-canada-act87237 molnar, p., & silverman, s. j. 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(2009). unseen prisoners: a report on women in immigration detention facilities in arizona. georgetown immigration law review, 23, 695. razack, s. (ed.). (2002). race, space, and the law: unmapping a white settler society. toronto, on: between the lines. razack, s. (2017). human waste and the border: a vignette. law, culture & the humanities. retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1743872117749524 romero, m. (2008). crossing the immigration and race border: a critical race theory approach to immigration studies. contemporary justice review, 11(1), 23-37. shantz j. (2014, march 14). border security and the neoliberal 'dungeon': a canadian case. border criminologies [blog], retrieved from http://bordercriminologies.law.ox.ac.uk/border-security-and-neoliberal/ silverman, s. j. (2014). in the wake of irregular arrivals: changes to the canadian immigration detention system. refuge, 30(2), 27-34. silverman, s. j., & molnar, p. (2016). everyday injustices: barriers to access to justice for immigration detainees in canada. refugee survey quarterly, 35(1), 109-127. singh, r. (2016). importing feminisms: racialized migrants and antiviolence activism. social politics, 23(4), 508–30. stasiulis, d. (1999). feminist intersectional theorizing. in p. li (ed.), race and ethnic relations in canada (pp. 347-397). toronto, on: oxford university press. stasiulis, d. and bakan, a. b. (2005). negotiating citizenship: migrant women in canada and the global system. toronto: university of toronto press. punishing survivors & criminalizing survivorship studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 67-89, 2020 89 stasiulis, d., & jhappan, r. (1995). the fractious politics of a settler society: canada. in d. stasiulis & n. yuval-davis (eds.), unsettling settler societies: articulations of gender, race, ethnicity and class (pp. 95-131). thousand oaks, ca: sage. stumpf, j. p. (2006). the crimmigration crisis: immigrants, crime, and sovereign power. american university law review, 56, 367. swain, d., wesley, a., & davis, s. (2019. feb 4). harassment, sexual assault among alleged misconduct by border agents investigated by cbsa. cbc news. retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cbsa-files-abuse-atip-1.4999473. track, l., & paterson, j. (2017). oversight at the border: a model for independent accountability at the canada border services agency. british columbia civil liberties association (bccla). retrieved from www.bccla.org tnd (transportation not deportation campaign). (2015). public transit should not be a border checkpoint: key facts. retrieved from https://transportationnotdeportation.wordpress.com/key-facts/ tunney, c. (2019. march 20). budget includes watchdog agency for border officers. cbc news. retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cbsa-independent-watchdog-1.5063543 united nations committee on human rights. (2015). international covenant on civil and political rights. ccpr/c/can/co/6. retrieved from http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/sessiondetails1.aspx?sessionid=89 9&lang=en#sthash.xzzyc1bz.dpuf unhcr (united nations high commissioner for refugees). (2012). detention guidelines: guidelines on the applicable criteria and standards relating to the detention of asylumseekers and alternatives to detention. retrieved from http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/503489533b8.html villegas, p. (2015). fishing for precarious status migrants: surveillant assemblages of migrant illegalization in toronto, canada. journal of law & society, 42(2), 230–252. walia, h. (2013). undoing border imperialism. chico, ca: ak press. walia, h., & hassan, s. (2014, october 2). electronic monitoring not an alternative to immigration detention. province opinion. retrieved from https://theprovince.com/opinion/harsha-walia-and-syed-hussan-electronic-monitoring-notan-alternative-to-immigration-detention weber, l. (2002). the detention of asylum seekers: 20 reasons why criminologists should care. current issues in criminal justice, 14(1), 9-30. women for refugee women. (2015). i am human: refugee women’s experiences of detention in the uk. retrieved from http://www.thebromleytrust.org.uk/files/wrw_iamhuman.pdf woo, a. (2014, january 31). woman who died in cbsa custody feared returning to domestic trouble in mexico. globe & mail. retrieved from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/woman-who-died-in-cbsacustody-feared-returning-to-domestic-trouble-in-mexico/article16644691/ coburn final jan 25 17 correspondence address: elaine coburn, international studies, glendon college, york university, 2275 bayview ave, toronto, on, m4n 3m6; email: ecoburn@glendon.yorku.ca issn : 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 review essay against the grain: socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng elaine coburn york university, canada abstract this contribution seeks to highlight the important scholarship of roxana ng, arguably one of canadian sociology and political economy’s most underappreciated theorists. like her activism, ng’s academic work is both wideranging yet firmly focused on major, unjust inequalities. her research particularly concerns the canadian capitalist political economy but inevitably, given the embeddedness of these social relations within worldwide historical relations, stretches beyond national borders. in particular, ng sought to unpack the everyday, intertwined – exploitative and unjust – relations of class, race, and gender, and the ways these unjust relations are articulated through migration and citizenship. this contribution situates the reception and uneven uptake of ng’s varied work before critically analysing her contributions to understanding (1) immigrant women’s labour in canada, (2) the complex racialized, gendered relations of power in the academy, and (3) the liberatory potential of embodied epistemologies, specifically qi gong meditation. in the conclusions, i consider the overall contributions and some contradictions of her work, in moving from the local to the global, and from the personal to the political. keywords academy; globalization; roxana ng; sociology; traditional chinese medicine roxana ng’s theorising and empirical research, like her activism, is systematically concerned with major, unjust inequalities, how they are produced and reproduced, as well as how they may be challenged. specifically, ng seeks to understand gender, race, and class as these are articulated through contemporary nation-states and capitalist relationships, drawing in part on her own insights as an immigrant woman to canada. at the same time, ng challenges epistemologies rooted in cartesian mind-body dualities. informed by unwarranted assumptions about radical separations between the intellect and the body-spirit, and between human beings and socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 137 other life forces, she argues that these dualities are unhelpful. not least, they obscure embodied ways of knowing that may be critical sources of insights, at once personal and political. as this suggests, ng’s sociology and political economy include strong commitments, simultaneously political, epistemological and with methodological implications. she takes seriously the lived experience of relatively dominated persons, understanding the lives of immigrant women, in particular, as sources of insight into webs of social relations that are both immediate and local, while stretching world wide. she insists on the relevance of ways of knowing that specifically engage the body-spirit as well as the intellect. specifically, she values insights from traditional chinese medicine, usually marginalized in european traditions of knowing. she rejects the positivist premise that political commitments to social justice represent a contaminating bias that warps “objective” knowledge. instead, she maintains that these commitments lend urgency to the search for truths. in this way, political commitments to social justice inform a research approach emphasizing the epistemological value of the lived experiences of relatively dominated, racialized women. underlying this is the premise that all knowledge emerges from researchers and social actors who are inevitably socially situated and who are never neutral but hold political (and moral) values. in keeping with this insight, ng maintains that often, even usually, true descriptions and analyses of social realities are disguised by hegemonic ideologies that misrepresent actual social relationships. typically, she argued, existing social inequalities are understood as inevitable or desirable, so supporting the interests of the powerful who benefit from these inequalities. sociological inquiry may therefore play an important role in unmasking the common-sense of hegemonic ideologies, not least by confronting dominant, ideological claims with the realities of social life as experienced everyday by dominated actors, including immigrant women. in this approach, ng’s work joins other feminist epistemologies and methodologies, as elaborated, for instance, by collins (2009), harding (2004), and smith (2004). with them, she pursues new ways of doing research outside still-dominant, if often critiqued positivist paradigms, by centering subaltern women’s standpoints as a (if not the) privileged starting point into social inquiry. in this review essay, after situating the reception and uneven uptake of ng’s varied work, i offer a detailed account of three major strands of ng’s theorizing and research. in particular, i emphasize commonalities across what might appear to be quite different concerns regarding first, immigrant women’s labour, second, complex relations of power in the academy and third, the liberatory potential of embodied epistemologies, specifically qi gong meditation. in the conclusions, i consider the overall contributions of her work, in moving from the local to the global, and from the personal to the political. yet, i point out that her work is not without tensions. not least, i consider whether it is possible to reconcile ng’s insistence, on the one hand, elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 138 regarding the useful, expert role of the sociologist in unmasking hegemonic ideologies and, on the other, her urgings that researchers take seriously the lived experienced and beliefs of relatively dominated social actors who may accept hegemonic accounts of their own lives. ultimately, i suggest that ng’s research does offer new ways of understanding the intersections between the local and the global and the personal and the political. by privileging a feminist epistemology that takes into account the ways that race, class, gender and nation are produced through everyday interactions, she sheds new light on workplaces that range from the garment industry to the academy. importantly, however, her sociology and political economy is not only descriptive and explanatory. rather, she offers pragmatic insights that inform struggles for social justice, especially if not only those led by and for immigrant women. situating ng’s sociology and political economy in many ways, ng’s sociology and political economy are shaped by the institutional ethnographic approach developed by her mentor, dorothy smith. recalling her decisive encounter with smith, when she was working in the vancouver-based women’s centre where smith was an active presence, ng (2006, p. 96, n. 2) writes: “i was so impressed by the feminist methodology that she (smith) was developing that i left vancouver in 1978 to study with her at the ontario institute for studies in education” (oise), located at the university of toronto. certainly, as goli rezai-rashti (1994) observes, ng’s contributions draw on smith’s emphasis on the importance of beginning theory from social relationships as experienced in everyday life. writing and analysing from her own standpoint as a racialized immigrant woman to canada, however, ng expanded smith’s feminist framework, as originally formulated, to emphasize the ways that race, class and gender are discoverable not as distinct, abstract concepts, but, “in the everyday/everynight world of experience” (smith 2004, p. 42; for a brief discussion of ng’s research as an exemplary application of institutional ethnography, see campbell and gregor (2000, pp. 114-116). as smith (1992, p. 90) observes, ng has usefully explored how, for instance, “the category ‘immigrant women’ is constituted in the social relations of the canadian state and the labour market.” such socially constructed categories are not conceptual abstractions. rather, they profoundly shape and are reproduced by supposedly neutral institutional processes, as well as buttressing stereotypes that inform everyday social interactions. put differently, ng’s work shows how the historically contingent ontological category of “the immigrant woman” has consequences for the actual, lived experiences of chinese women, among others, who have socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 139 migrated to and live and work in canada.1 at the same time, the lived experience of actual immigrant women may be used as evidence to challenge hegemonic, often stereotypical conceptions of “immigrant women.” ng’s work can be understood as contributing to a burgeoning anti-racist feminist theorizing and marxist scholarship, much of it connected with the ontario institute for studies in education (oise) at the university of toronto. alongside daiva stasiulis and abigail bakan (2005) himani bannerji (2000), sherene razack (1998), nandita sharma (2006) and sunera thobani (2007), among others, ng’s theorizing and research is attentive to the simultaneous experience of race and gender as articulated through the state and capitalist class relations. her research may therefore be understood as participating in scholarly conversations that are explicitly informed by political efforts to support migrant workers, including research concerned with: • how a vastly unequal world capitalist system produces mass migration and a gendered, racialized labour force divided between citizens and noncitizens, the latter including “illegal” or undocumented migrant workers (stasiulis & bakan 2005); • the ways that, in the latest iteration of historically changing ideologies of nationalism, the state of canada officially valorizes discourses of cultural difference and diversity, obscuring gendered and racialized class inequalities (bannerji, 2000; • how relations of domination and subordination are organized and sustained in the classroom encounter, which is never a “naïve” interaction between men and women, whites and racialized others, but always informed by diverse histories of radically unequal colonial and neo-colonial power (razack, 1998); • how national immigration policies enable people to enter canada, where they often work without formal legal status and so without formal legal protections granted other workers, functioning as cheap labour profitable to capitalist enterprises (sharma, 2006); • the ways that the law symbolically transforms the raw violence of colonialism into new nationalisms, creating a class of legal citizens who act as “exalted subjects,” enjoying powers denied to racialized, legally demarcated and implicitly inferior others (thobani, 2007). put another way, ng’s research may be understood as part of a broader scholarly conversation, informed by pressing political struggles and led 1 in referring to historical ontologies, i borrow from philosopher ian hacking (2002). through this concept, hacking calls attention to ways of being that are historically possible at particular moments and that subsequently disappear. same-gender sex, for instance, has existed with and without the historical ontology of the queer, gay, lesbian or bisexual person. similarly, women may cross borders but “the immigrant woman,” as an ontological category – and associated stereotypes – comes into being through state institutional procedures, and other means, at a given historical moment and may subsequently disappear. hacking himself develops the concept of historical ontologies from michel foucault’s vocabulary. elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 140 primarily by racialized women scholars, investigating the imbrications among race, gender and labour, law, nation and capitalism. given her scholarly and activist concerns, it is unsurprising that ng’s publications have appeared primarily in feminist, anti-racist and socialist journals. these include, for instance, publications in canadian women’s studies/les cahiers de la femme (2002), canadian ethnic studies (1981), and studies in political economy: a socialist review (2007). in addition, she has published in edited scholarly collections that offer radical critiques of an unjust status quo, including books like the politics of diversity: feminism, marxism and nationalism, edited by roberta hamilton and michèle barrett (ng, 1986), pedagogies of difference: rethinking education for social change, edited by peter pericles trifonas (ng, 2003), and indigenous peoples’ wisdom and power: affirming our knowledge through narratives, edited by julian kunnie and ivy nomalungelo (ng, 2006). these titles are suggestive of ng’s diverse but related interests in anti-racist feminisms and marxist theories, as well as in the social construction of the nation, education systems, and understandings about what does (and does not) constitute knowledge. in many instances, ng’s publications reflect her close ties to political and social activism. thus, some of her writing was published with the support of advocacy and political organizations and was specifically intended to inform struggles, in a pragmatic, immediate way. her early co-authored work, immigrant housewives in canada, for instance, was published by the immigrant women’s centre in toronto (ng & ramirez, 1981). along not dissimilar lines, she was part of a collective that edited race, class, gender: bonds and barriers (vorst et al., 1989), published with the support of the society for socialist studies. as this survey of her writing suggests, ng both participated in and was supported by institutionalized as well as informal networks of radical feminist, anti-racist and socialist scholars, as well as by social justice activists, in and outside the academy. at the same time, this representative (if non-exhaustive) overview of ng’s publications suggests another reality, shared by many radical feminist, antiracist and socialist scholars. that is, her research and theorizing was and remains relatively marginalized within more mainstream academic publications. by way of illustration, despite her consistent concern with the social reproduction of social inequality, a major sociological question, the canadian journal of sociology does not contain a single citation of ng’s work. the canadian review of sociology has just three references to her scholarship (eichler, 1985; li, 1992; sharma, 2001), each limited to a short, parenthetical reference to her research by and for chinese immigrant women. in other words, ng’s theorizing and research have been taken up by politically like-minded colleagues, but much of her work is circulated apart from a (euro-canadian, liberal) “malestream” social scientific tradition. these traditions still understand radical feminisms, anti-racisms and socialisms as secondary and specialized. professional scholarly competency, socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 141 as a sociologist, does not demand familiarity with the approaches developed by ng and other feminists, anti-racists and marxists (for a useful account of how the marginalization of feminisms, anti-racisms and marxisms is routinely accomplished in academia, see smith, 2004, especially chapter 3). perhaps then, it is not surprising that there is no critical accounting of ng’s work taken as a whole. when other scholars have mobilized her work, they tend to pull apart her varied writings about social inequality, considering each empirical domain as a separate matter. typically, for instance, eichler (1985, p. 625) cites ng for her co-authored study of immigrant housewives in the context of a feminist analysis of gendered househould labour. in a separate publication, shahjahan (2014, pp. 2-3) draws upon ng’s rejection of cartesian mind-body dualities to develop ideas about decolonizing pedagogies in the education system. last, mackey (2002) mobilizes ng’s work in her critical analysis of canadian official multicultural policies of “cultural difference and national identity.” such diverse uses of ng’s writing are a testament to the wide-ranging applications of her research. nonetheless, the consequence of this characteristically segmented mobilization of her insights is that there is no single, overall, critical appraisal of her theoretical and empirical research. there are, however, occasional essays explaining the important impact and influence ng had on her students, many of whom she wrote with collaboratively (e.g., mathew, wong, ng, woschuk & patton, 2008). diana gustafson (1998), for instance, recounts her experience in one of ng’s graduate classes. unconventionally, this class featured qi gong meditation, deliberately challenging cartesian dualities of thought and body, mind and practice. as gustafson explains, her initial, deep scepticism about ng’s pedagogical methods cannot be separated from the dominance and hence taken-for-granted authority of western ontologies and epistemologies in the canadian classroom. yet, in the end, gustafson suggests that ng’s traditional chinese medicine-based teaching, as well as ng’s careful construction of a “safe and supportive environment” allowed for “transformative learning” (1998, p. 55), that profoundly altered gustafson’s understandings of knowledge, health, medicine, and ultimately of herself as an embodied being. if such essays offer important insights into ng’s pedagogy, epistemology and her impact as a teacher, nonetheless they do not offer an overview of ng’s theorizing and research. ironically, although ng consistently demonstrated a high degree of reflexivity, situating herself within her research by making explicit the immigrant woman academic’s standpoint from which she researched, taught and wrote, she never produced a critical overview of her own contributions. her professional webpage offers only a short summary of her work, including a radically incomplete résumé of her publications – she lists five co-authored books and just two co-authored articles of the several dozen that she elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 142 published.2 for whatever reason, ng never issued an edited collection of her own essays, with an introduction that might have sought to explain the tensions and commonalities across theorizing and research that she did over more than three decades. this review essay therefore seeks to partially remedy this lacuna by considering, together, three significant theoretical and empirical contributions that ng made in her teaching, writing and activism. specifically, i survey, first, her research on globalization from the standpoint of migrant women workers, second, her writing on academia from her own standpoint as a minoritized, immigrant woman, and third, her insights into challenging opposition-mobilizing insights from traditional chinese medicine. in the conclusion, i consider some of the commonalities and tensions across these three important areas of ng’s theorizing and research. globalization from the standpoint of migrant women workers ng’s research was motivated by questions about the production and reproduction of unjust social inequalities, as well as the possibilities and strategies for creating more socially equal and just relationships. as briefly observed above, in seeking answers, she consistently began from the standpoint of dominated classes and groups. in particular, ng privileged the viewpoint and experiences of migrant women workers in canada. hence, an important preoccupation from about the 1990s onwards was ng’s concern with the latest phase of world capitalism, popularly referred to as globalization. given hegemonic conceptions that celebrate globalization as the harbinger of wealth, but also of human rights, rising ethical standards and even the end of sweatshops and pollution (ng, 2002a, p. 74), ng asked if this characterization of globalization was true and, if so, for whom.3 specifically, she asked, as a concrete empirical question, if this characterization of globalization is accurate from the standpoint of the mostly female, mostly immigrant asian garment workers in canada. in asking questions from such perspectives, she insisted, “abstract, macro processes” (ng, 2002a, p. 7) like globalization are brought back to the realities of everyday social relations, particularly the experiences of those objectively exploited and dominated. abstract theory is made to confront everyday social existence. 2 see her website, now under the authority of the estate of roxana ng: www.oise.utoronto.ca/lhae/faculty_staff/1596/roxana_ng.html 3 i understand “globalization” as the world-wide reach of capitalist social relationships, including through the liberalization of trade and finance. a typically optimistic assessment of globalization, from the popular if specialist economics magazine the economist (2007), is the following assertion: “it’s easy to assume, with globalisation, that a rising tide lifts all boats. and most people do gain, even if the improvements in their way of life can sometimes be hard to discern…” here, failure to appreciate the benefits of globalization are understood as difficulty in “discerning” them, not as evidence that globalization may not be as beneficial for “most people” as is often supposed. socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 143 from the perspectives of migrant women workers in canada, ng argued, it was clear that globalization was not the positive development championed by specialized economics and business media. rather, globalization, characterized by instantaneous world financial exchanges and the ease of capital movements across the globe – enabled by new technologies and facilitated through trade agreements understood as first and foremost political agreements (ng, 2007, pp. 202-205) – was associated with stagnant wages rather than increased wealth and limited respect for workers’ legal rights, never mind wellbeing. specifically, the transformation of the global political economy from the 1970s to 1990s, meant important changes in the world garment industry (ng, 2007). increased global competition and the creation of special export processing zones (epzs), featuring low corporate taxes and few labour rights, were facilitated by free trade agreements that specifically diminished protections for domestic industries. in efforts to compete with lower production costs elsewhere, not least in epzs, most of which are located in asia, garment manufacturers in canada shut down production, entailing massive layoffs as they shifted from sites in canada to lower cost production sites worldwide. clothing was and is then imported back to canada, through internationalized production chains made possible through new transportation and communications technologies. the remaining garment industry in canada shifted from formal labour to casualized homework, often piecework (ng, 2002a, pp. 75-76), in an effort to lower production costs and remain competitive with overseas operations. at the same time, unionization within the garment industry dropped from a high of about 40% in the 1960s and 1970s to 20% in the 1990s (p. 77), in part because of concerted resistance by governments to changing labour legislation that would allow for the unionization of homeworkers, leaving many workers without organized worker advocacy. in describing these processes, ng confronted the myth of globalization and its supposed universal benefits with the realities of the restructuring of the garment industry in canada. she documented the ways this left immigrant women workers engaged in increasingly precarious, isolated, low-paid work. at the same time, ng contrasted chinese garment workers’ situation in canada with stereotypical discourses casting chinese immigrants as successful and wealthy, hence not in need of scholarly investigation nor of solidarity. in the late 1990s and early 2000s, common sense discourse around chinese immigrants in canada stressed their wealth – as ng put it, the idea that “they bring lots of money into canada and build monster homes” (ng, 2002b, p. 2). yet, in reality, many chinese migrant women workers were and are facing terrible working and living conditions. as ng explained, “not only are they not rich. they are the subjects of severe exploitation, and sexism and racism in the labour market” (2002b, p. 2). indeed, ng stressed that nonenglish speaking women garment workers from china serve as a factor of adjustment for capitalist employers. these women’s suppressed wages, nonelaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 144 unionized home working conditions – later transforming into flexible movement between homework and factories (ng, 2002b, p. 8) – and irregular labour, enabled capitalist employers to maintain profits despite intensified, global competition. ng thus laid bare the actual, everyday social relations and realities behind “globalization” for these women workers against mainstream economics’ suggestions that globalization leads to uniform improvements to the livelihoods of all. where mainstream economic news celebrated globalization, she mobilized evidence that describes the realities of everyday, gendered exploitation of a captive labour force. in particular, ng observed that the beneficiaries of chinese immigrant women’s labour were capitalist employers, who preserved profit margins by using these women’s work as a flexible, inexpensive variable in production. at the same time, ng unmasked stereotypes that cast chinese immigrants to canada as a homogenously wealthy community, emphasizing the precarious, hard existence of many chinese migrant women workers. on the strength of such observations, ng argued these women’s position within the world capitalist political economy is that of captive workers, despite their formally free status. that is, she argued that these women are simultaneously “essential to and disposable within a capitalist economy” (ng, 2002a, p. 5). their labour is necessary to allow for the production of cheap clothing and so profits for the owners, yet may be discarded during periods of lower demand. moreover, this captive status, despite the low pay and uncertain hours, is reinforced by multiple factors. these include the fact many do not speak english and lack affordable childcare that might enable them to work outside the home, in a context where women are still responsible for most childcare and unpaid household labour. further, these women’s skills are devalued, since regardless of the substantive content and complexity of the work itself, their women’s work is constructed as less skilled than work done by men within a gendered division of labour (ng, 2002a, p. 5). aggravating this negative assessment of the women’s labour, in canada, western educational certificates are the only accepted proof of skill and competency (ng & shan, 2010, pp. 176-178). in short, a lack of formal, western educational credentials is taken as proof of lack of skill, so justifying lower wages as “unskilled” labour. at the global level, the hardening of immigration and refugee requirements and limitations on migrant worker mobility, combines with human trafficking on a broad scale to create a new category of illegal or undocumented racialized workers. because of their illegal status, these workers have few formal rights (ng, 2002a, p. 77). hence, globalization is characterized by a global division of racialized labour, in which these women’s illegal or undocumented status exacerbates their vulnerability to pressures from capitalist employers, making it difficult to leave even the most badly paid, precarious piece-work. in such ways, ng unpacks the complex constellation of factors contributing to these women as formally free but actually unfree labour, a consequence of a range of variables, from women’s responsibilities socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 145 for unpaid childcare and household labour to the implications of immigration law for ease of worker organization and respect for workers’ rights. although ng does not draw out these insights for more general analyses of the world capitalist system, it is not difficult to imagine these. hence, for instance, if these women’s formally free labour is actually captive labour, this is suggestive of the contradictions of a capitalist system that employs liberal rhetorics of freedom while overlooking the reality that many workers have few alternatives to badly-paid, precarious work for survival. likewise, in emphasizing the ways that undocumented workers, for instance, are created politically through formal immigration, and refugee and migrant work policies limiting their mobility and rights, ng drew attention to these as deliberate political processes rather than economically or technologically determined inevitabilities. ng applied the same critical acuity to the study of programmes that were supposedly meant to help migrant women workers as she did to mainstream economic myths about the supposedly universal benefits of globalization. in practice, she argued, training programmes for these women tend to be motivated by the needs of states and employers, not by the needs of women migrant workers themselves (ng, 2002b, p. 9). hence, such “training” programmes imagine the women to be the problem, their poor working conditions a straightforward consequence of their lack of english language skills and supposedly limited work competencies. this meant that advocacy for these women focussed on improved personal skills. at the same time, such approaches left unchallenged the gendered idea of these women as unskilled workers, therefore deserving of lower pay and incapable of other, supposedly more skilled and better paid kinds of work. moreover, such approaches did not address racism in and outside of the workplace, as factors limiting employment mobility, including across borders. neither did these approaches consider these workers’ precarious legal status and the problems this poses for formal labour organizing and the protection of workers’ rights. finally, these approaches leave unexamined questions of childcare and the gendered division of labour. in short, training leaves unconsidered a host of critical factors that these women face, from legal constraints to discrimination to gendered double days as they seek better paying employment. yet, ironically, ng argued that such state training programmes could fulfil some important, if unintended, functions for migrant women workers (ng, 2002b, pp. 7-9). thus, for instance, english language classes were attended, not necessarily in order to enable job mobility, but rather to enable parents to understand english language correspondence about their children. training classes in new garment-making skills were taken up, not so much with the aim of better pay or employment – workers were very realistic about their limited opportunities, ng observes (p. 7) – but, for instance, to learn how to make affordable, stylish new clothes for themselves and family members. such training sessions were also important in allowing workers to socialize, including the exchange of complaints about working conditions, sometimes elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 146 resulting in coordinated actions against employers, for instance, around unpaid work. in some instances, training coordinators emphasized formal decision-making and organization, creating spaces for debate, decisionmaking and action, so that such sessions became important spaces for learning about how to organize debates and discussions and then to act upon these politically. in short, existing structures – including training programmes that are currently more responsive to the state and employers than workers – have the potential to answer to the multiple needs of women migrant garment workers, including for learning and creating spaces for political advocacy. in such ways, ng emphasized the contradictions within capitalism, between the rhetoric of free labour and the realities of captive labour, between promises of training for better jobs and the realities of limited opportunities in a context of anti-immigrant racism, among other factors. however, ng’s analytical and policy work did not end with descriptions of the world as it is. rather, she considered practically how these women’s lives and work might be bettered through collective agency via institutions existing here and now, for instance, through training centred around workers’ needs rather than state or employer priorities. such action means taking the standpoint of the migrant women workers themselves seriously, as experts about their own experiences and priorities. academia from the standpoint of a minority, immigrant woman although most considerations of ng’s theorizing and research separate her writing about chinese immigrant women from her reflexive analyses about the university and pedagogy, these are not separate concerns. that is, ng did not only study and work in solidarity with minority, immigrant women. rather, she herself was a minoritized, immigrant woman. particularly in the latter part of her career, her own work experiences in the university became a focus of research about the ways that unequal relations of citizenship, gender and race play out in academia. as ng observed, in a typically direct statement, “it is not easy to be a minority, a woman and an immigrant in a society that upholds white male supremacy” (ng, 2011, p. 345). if this is true of canadian society, generally speaking, it is likewise true in the specific institutional configuration that is the university, an institution historically conceived, as with so many institutions within contemporary capitalism, “to preserve the privileges of certain classes of men” (ng, 2011, p. 345). ironically, ng observed, moving up the hierarchy of academy does not make being a woman, an immigrant and a minority easier, but rather more difficult. this is because academic relations of power become more narrowly centered on specific types of bodies, experiences and ways of knowing, so that the minoritized woman scholar is repulsed as a challenge to the previously homogenous upper strata of academia. socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 147 in looking at the how of this marginalization of minority women professors, ng observes that it may be accomplished both directly and indirectly. direct attacks include sexist, racist and other attitudes that tend to dehumanize minority women and rob them of their authority. “sexism, racism, a sense of class privilege and other such biased attitudes” (ng, 2011, p. 345) are shared by many, perhaps most administrators and colleagues. these normalize the disrespect of women, minority, immigrant and working class professors. often, these attitudes are shared by students, too, who may draw upon the (relatively) dominated position of women immigrant minorities in broader society to exercise power within the classroom and undermine professorial authority and even basic human dignity. yet, minority women are not necessarily attacked directly for their persons. rather, more insidiously, they are challenged for the research they choose to pursue, the ways they think about knowing, and relatedly, how they carry out teaching. specifically, ways of knowing and teaching that emerge out of traditions other than those of western enlightenment thinking are devalued. the professor herself is not attacked, but “only” the importance of her research and teaching and the ways that she carries this out, if these are not focussed on standard topics and carried out in standardized ways that recentre upper class white male and western experience (see, for instance, smith, 2004, pp. 15-28). likewise, tenure and promotion depend on writing, publishing and teaching in standardized formats where the standards reflect the interests, pre-occupations, traditions and methods of dominant classes and groups. in such ways is academia made difficult for the immigrant, the minority, the woman and many others. in her essay “woman out of control,” ng (1993) revisits these concerns, through the description and analysis of a particularly painful personal experience as a woman migrant minority professor. ng refuses to separate out race, class and gender, since the social encounter is shaped by the simultaneity of all these relationships. yet, describing this is difficult, since as bannerji might observe (1987, p. 12), language fails to cope with the simultaneous, not separate and sequential experience of ethnicity, class and gender – here, misleadingly separated out by commas. specifically, bannerji (1987) observes that she does not enter a room first as a woman, then as a professor and then as a person of colour – in everyday experience, these social relationships are produced through the simultaneity of race, class and gender. in the same way, ng analyses her experience in an account that challenges analytical distinctions that misrepresent the lived realities of gender, race and class inequalities as somehow separate. as ng recounts, during one of her classes on minority groups and race relations, a self-identified white male immigrant student formally complained about her teaching and threatened legal action, arguing that her course was being used “as a platform for feminism” (see also ng, 1994, p. 41). he observed that half of her readings referred to gender and women’s issues and elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 148 so did not match the course description.4 he further complained that she had marginalized him in the classroom as a white male. and, he suggested that her meditative exercises, about which more in the next section of this paper, were inappropriate in a graduate classroom and that she was pursuing “a particular political agenda” (ng, 1993, p. 192), this last apparently juxtaposed to the possibility of a nonpoliticized academic curriculum. in a meeting about the complaint with ng and the student, a member of the university administration remained carefully “neutral,” later suggesting that ng take seriously the student’s criticisms of her course (ng, 1993, p. 192). in her essay, ng takes apart this incident as an example of much broader processes, to show how racism, sexism and class inequalities unfold in everyday social relationships, including those which are apparently explicitly guided by commitments to fairness, or if not fairness, neutrality. in particular, ng observes that the university administrator’s neutral stance at the meeting with ng and the student who complained about her class, was based on a fiction: that she and the student were equals. that is, the administrator bracketed consideration of race, gender and class, as if they were not present in the classroom and meeting. yet by remaining neutral, even when the student called ng “a woman out of control” on three separate occasions (ng, 1993, p. 197), the administrator de facto sided with the student in undermining ng’s professorial authority, and indeed in questioning her reasonableness. more broadly, the administrator’s neutral stance meant that the assumption that ng’s feminist and anti-racist teaching were the product of an unmanageable personality, went unexamined. in contrast, standard teaching, which leaves patriarchy and racism unanalysed – for instance, under the assumption that feminist and anti-racist scholarship is marginal and outside of the canon hence not central to university learning – was implicitly reaffirmed as normal and reasonable. “but i don’t have problems with any other courses! i only have trouble with yours,” is how the student put it (ng, 1993, p. 192). the fiction of equality, unexamined, leaves sexism and racism intact in such interactions. the administrator’s neutral stance also obscures power within the professor-student relationship and the ways that a professor’s apparently straightforward power over the student is complicated by race, gender and other unequal social relations. as ng observes, the realities of power are inscribed in bodies and they are much more complex than straightforward professorial domination of any student. this is not to say that professors have no power, only that this is complicated by inequalities irreducible to professorial authority. as ng explains: each time i stand in front of the classroom, i embody the historical sexualisation and racialization of the asian female (who is thought to be docile, subservient and 4 note here the apparently exclusive construction of feminism as necessarily separate and distinct from analyses of racism. ng observes, “i was pleased that unwittingly i had achieved a balanced curriculum…” (1994, p. 41). socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 149 sexually compliant) even as my class privilege, formal authority and professional qualification ameliorate some of the effects of this signification. (ng, 2006, p. 98) in other words, gendered, racialized, and classed power is formed through moments of social interaction in the classroom, as well with in interactions with the administration and among colleagues. the racist and sexist stereotypes that shape those interactions are themselves indissociable from larger histories and political economies, including the exercise of white colonial power over asian bodies and associated, gendered fantasies of asian women’s submission to the white male, colonial person. in recounting this, ng’s point is that her experience, repeated in variations over the years, if not always culminating in the threat of legal action, is not unique to her own university career or to the individuals involved. rather, it is illustrative of the ways that the university classroom – like all social spaces – is saturated with relations of power. hence, the apparently personal and idiosyncratic encounter between ng and the student is in fact (also) political. indeed, the encounter reveals the ways that inequalities are institutionalized, for instance governing what is considered standard, acceptable course material and what is not. as ng insists, this has implications for the ways that racism, sexism and more are tackled within and beyond academia. in particular, the insistence on inequality and power as social, not individual, suggests that it is not enough to treat racism and sexism, for instance, as an attitude problem held by an individual. this is the perspective that informs increasingly ubiquitous prejudice awareness workshops (ng, 1993, p. 191-192), which are supposed to sensitize individuals and so create more tolerant and equitable social relations. but such attitudinal shifts are inadequate to dealing with inequalities that are not only in people’s heads, but institutionalized. hence, to truly begin to address the social reproduction of inequality requires “a fundamental re-examination of the structures and relations of universities” (p. 191). such a thorough going re-examination would entail, for instance, a serious re-appraisal of what can be admitted as scholarship and what constitutes competent, useful teaching. this would require an examination of deep assumptions, including ontological assumptions about the nature of being and epistemological assumptions about knowing and learning, that shape expectations of what constitutes not just standard but best-practice university research and teaching. it appears likely, for instance, that the student’s assessment of meditation exercises as inappropriate in the university classroom, for instance, are rooted in unexamined radical cartesian mind/body dualities that imagine actual, physical bodies as more or less irrelevant to learning, as if knowing is a matter of a disembodied intellect. it would also mean, at a minimum, recognizing the sometimes contradictory power relations that come into play among administrators, colleagues and students at the university, all of whom bring race, gender, age, class and various status attributes to the academic setting. it would require recognition elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 150 of the ways that existing unequal social relations are naturalized, hence depoliticized, while ideas and movements that challenge a naturalized, unequal status quo are cast as political or biased and therefore inappropriate in a classroom imagined as a neutral space where politics can – and should – be bracketed. in short, ng insists that inequality and discrimination are not only about attitudes, or what happens inside people’s minds. rather, they are about social relationships, institutionalized rules of neutrality ultimately rooted in fictions of social equality. often, they are legitimated by common sense ideas, for instance, the assumption that it is both possible and desirable to create the classroom as a neutral space devoid of political content. beginning from this observation, it is possible to imagine a thorough going programme for the reevaluation of dominant forms of scholarship and academic relationships, which have become normalized and institutionalized. challenging oppression from the standpoint of traditional chinese medicine if this is true inside the university, it is also true outside of it. again, despite the apparent separateness of ng’s research concerning working class immigrant chinese women, and her own experiences in the classroom and concerns with pedagogy, common social dynamics underlie these seemingly distinct domains. not least is ng’s concern with inequality, how it is produced and reproduced; this critical stance is an entry point into informing transformative struggles that will challenge unjust inequalities. in her own words, ng formulated the central question of her research and teaching practices this way: “how do the oppressor and the oppressed coparticipate in acts of oppression?” (ng, 2009). by co-participation, ng was not suggesting that the oppressor and the oppressed participate as equals in the reproduction of unjust inequalities. clearly they do not. walmart makes profits from the cheap clothing produced by chinese garment workers in canada, for instance, while these women earn very little. walmart is relatively mobile, including internationally, even if such mobility has some costs, while the chinese women migrant workers are formally if not practically limited in their mobility. this is both because of immigration rules specifically limiting (legal) working class movement across borders and because of practical obstacles to both legal and undocumented movement, including racist attitudes and behaviours that make mobility socially difficult. nonetheless, following from gramsci (ng, 1993, p. 194), among others, it was obvious to ng that dominated and oppressed peoples and individuals do incorporate dominant ways of thinking and doing into their everyday lives, often if not always conforming to these even at personal cost. of course, challenging dominant practices imposes other costs, as we have already seen socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 151 with respect to teaching anti-feminism and anti-racism in societies and universities characterized by systemic sexism and racism. increasingly, in answering her own question about the how of reproducing relations of oppression, ng adopted the standpoint of traditional chinese medicine (tcm). in particular, she mobilized the meditative practice of qi gong, against the cartesian privileging of the mind-intellect over the bodyspirit that dominates canadian society, western countries generally and academia as well (ng, 2011, p. 344). instead, ng argued that it is critical to understand both oppression and anti-oppressive politics and teaching as simultaneously about the intellect, body and spirit.5 one insight from this is that confrontations of power are marked in the body (ng, 2011, p. 346). in other words, she wrote, the experience of unequal power does not occur only in the mind: rather, mind, body and spirit are all implicated. but this approach also insists that human liberation is not simply a matter of mindconsciousness, rather, the body and the spirit are likewise inevitably implicated in struggles for social justice. central to tcm is the idea of qi. ng says that qi is commonly translated as “energy flow” (ng, 2011, p. 349), but she suggests that qi is perhaps better understood more simply as “what animates life” (p. 349). qi is simultaneously material and immaterial, a “quality we share with all things” (p.349) so connecting the microcosmos and the macrocosmos. the free flow of qi is important to a healthy mind, spirit and body, with disease understood as a blockage of the free flowing of qi (p. 350). from this perspective, critical reasoning, both learning and teaching, require the free flow of qi. otherwise, as ng experienced as a graduate student, the intense intellectual effort required for research and teaching may inhibit the flow of qi, resulting in physical discomfort and even illness (p. 344). when qi is freely flowing, ng argues, the body-spirit is healthy and mindfulness is possible. in turn, this embodied mindfulness enables the kind of critical reflexivity that is necessary to challenge the routine reproduction of inequalities in the mind-body-spirit among the oppressed.6 5 to be more precise, ng differentiates the intellect, which she says is often confused with the mind in western cultural and medical traditions, from the body-spirit (2006, p. 95). elsewhere in the same chapter, she emphasizes that she knows simultaneously in her “heart, gut and mind” (2006, p. 97), once again refusing the cartesian dichotomy in which only the mind (and ultimately, the mind as guaranteed by a christian god) is the only source of legitimate knowledge. still later, she observes that in traditional chinese medicine, the physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions of bodily organs, where organs are a western concept that has no exact tcm equivalent or meaning, are indissociable (2006, p. 104). 6 for those who think this approach far-fetched, it is worth recalling that even classical theories insist on the human experience as always-also a bodily one. thus, for instance, karl marx was concerned with the physical and psychic toils that working class labour imposed on the worker, as in his 1880 workers’ inquiry (marx, 1997), which included questions on “muscular and nervous strain.” his condemnation of capitalism as unequal, exploitative social relations that reduce too many human to being mere “appendages to the machine” is an observation about the body and mind of the worker, both deformed through the repetitive physical and psychic labour of much factory work. likewise, in his early works he emphasized, in masculinist language, elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 152 by mindfulness, ng means the ability to stand at one remove from takenfor-granted ideas that are embodied in practices and relationships that become automatic. ng (2011, p. 352) observes that the woman or babysitter who looked after her pets when she was away, for instance, gobbled down her food within minutes at mealtimes. when ng asked about this, her babysitter rationalized her behaviour as a consequence of her job in a hospital, where she had very little time to eat (p. 352). yet, the babysitter continued to wolf down her food, decades after retiring. in this way, she continued to embody her earlier status as a worker, when she was considered insufficiently important even to be allowed the time to eat properly. ng argues that mindfulness, encouraged through regular practice of qi gong meditation, is a form of critical reflexivity that allows us to see and feel behaviours – like this woman’s automatic gobbling of food at mealtimes – that are too often unthinkingly repeated. it is not enough to know this intellectually. clearly, ng’s babysitter did know where her mealtime behaviour came from as she was able to explain it. however, this did not enable her to change her behaviour. to allow for this change, ng emphasizes that we require a specific kind of mindfulness that is a mind-body-spirit consciousness. it is only when we are self-consciously aware of our mind-bodies-spirit that we are able to begin to challenge oppressions that are not just in our minds but inscribed in our bodily habits. importantly, in emphasizing the potential liberatory power of qi gong, ng was not arguing that oppressed individuals are responsible for their own liberation, as if liberation from unequal social relations could be resolved through a personal, individual act. but ng never subscribed to the idea that the oppressed are solely victims, a view that arguably comforts the status quo by encouraging paralysis among the oppressed. beginning with the experiences of the oppressed, and then taking a mindful distance from those experiences – since experience never speaks directly but is inevitably filtered through dominant ideologies and unequal social relations that inscribe themselves in bodily habits – oppressed peoples and individuals can learn to critique their own oppression and then begin to undo at least their own implication in that oppression ng quotes a student experiencing significant health concerns, for instance, who was having difficulty maintaining a journal required for ng’s class on embodied learning. eventually, she moved from asking “why can’t i just write?” to the more helpful, more “compassionate” question: “what is this resistance about?” (mathew, wong, ng, woschuk & patton, 2008, p. 358). “real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature…” (marx, 1964, p. 180, emphasis in original). i would venture that this breathing in and out of the “forces of nature” would not be unfamiliar in tcm, with its stress on self conscious awareness of breathing as a way of becoming aware of connections between the microcosmos and the macrocosmos. ng might have argued that a footnote like this repositions a masculinist western theory as canonical, as if tcm can only be accepted against the standards of western theory. socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 153 rather than intellectually dismissing her resistance, she instead took seriously that gut refusal. in other words, the student was able to come to new selfunderstandings by being attentive to her embodied resistance to writing, asking what this resistance revealed and therefore what it might teach her about herself. the stubborn refusal to write, being stuck, became a source of knowledge and “possibilities,” as the student put it. arguably, a more purely intellectual approach might see such resistance as irrational, therefore not worth investigating but only worth mastering. this hinders rather than helps a reflexive, embodied understanding of the self. the broader implication is that through collective and personal selfreflection at once bodily, intellectual and spiritual, “consciousness can be changed” (ng, 2011, p. 354). hegemonic consciousness, that is, consciousness that justifies existing oppression, is not destiny. against dominant actors who maintain that the unjust status quo is necessary, inevitable or desirable (often out of self-interest), the possibilities for social change are reclaimed. such processes of consciousness raising are often, perhaps even usually, uncomfortable (see e.g., mathew, wong, ng, woschuk & patton, 2008), precisely because they often challenge taken-for-granted ways of understanding the world that are widely accepted. they demand new ways of knowing and new ways of seeing. ng maintained that qi gong meditation, in particular, is a useful way of enabling individuals to recognize the construction of knowledge by embodied subjects. this is because qi gong facilitates the sensuous awareness of the mind, body and spirit, in particular moments and particular spaces. given this, ng argued that there is a natural sympathy between the practices of qi gong and critical, feminist theories, which like historical materialism stress the historically and spatially specific nature of dominant ideologies (2011, p. 354). this insistence on the profoundly situated nature of social relations, bodies and ideas, challenges common sense understandings that present existing relationships as natural and eternal, hence impervious to challenge and change. this is not, however, unique to perspectives informed by qi gong and tcm. ng observes that some indigenous feminist approaches emphasize that healing among abused indigenous women requires songs, meditation, ceremonies and other forms of embodied practices (2011, p. 355). oppression is experienced in the mind, body and spirit. it follows that human liberation requires a consciousness that engages not just the mind but the body and the spirit. from the local to the global and from the personal to the political taken together, what do these three aspects of ng’s research suggest? if ng’s research particularly concerns the canadian capitalist political economy, inevitably, given the embeddedness of these social relations within worldwide historical relations, her insights stretch beyond national borders. elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 154 in particular, as i describe above, ng sought to unpack the everyday, intertwined – exploitative and unjust – relations of class, race, and gender within contemporary nations and within world capitalism. she was interested in the how, that is, in the concrete ways that these unjust relations are articulated through migration, nation, citizenship and the workplace, including in the specific workplace that is the university, at any given historical moment. at the same time, ng was concerned, pragmatically and politically, with ways to raise consciousness against taken-for-granted inequalities. at an individual, personal level, ng called for a serious appreciation of traditional chinese medicine as necessary to creating an embodied mindfulness. ng argues that such embodied mindfulness is necessary, if not sufficient, to moving towards an unalienated human agency, which inevitably involves the body-spirit, as well as the intellect. put another way, if oppression is written into the body-spirit and its habit, then liberation must include an appreciation of the body-spirit and mind. in short, ng’s sociological imagination, the linking of biography and history (wright-mills, 1959), is not just an intellectual, imaginative leap, but at the same time one involving consideration of the whole person, as body, mind, and spirit. indeed, as ng insisted, the researcher herself is body, mind and spirit, working best when she is conscious of this unity and seeks to encourage the free flow of the life force against its fragmentation. liberation is never, however, only an individual, personal act. rather, inequality is social, often produced and reproduced among those committed to equality as individual persons. therefore, it takes collective struggle to transform relations of domination. in thinking strategically about how garment workers’ might obtain better working conditions within a more equitable global political economy, for instance, ng refers to ngos, unions, public citizens and researchers as necessary to the creation of alliances worldwide to bring about social change (ng, 2002a, pp. 79-80). embodied individual consciousness may be necessary for social change, but such individual-level enlightenment is not sufficient either. rather combatting unjust inequalities is a concrete, material, that is, social activity. in her theoretical, epistemological and methodological approach, ng builds on smith’s institutional ethnography, with its emphasis on the ways that exploitation and injustices are reproduced in everyday social relations (smith, 2004). this approach firmly sets social relationships at its centre, in contrast with more individualistic and behavioural approaches that emphasize unjust inequalities as (solely or mainly) the consequences of prejudiced or biased individual attitudes and behaviours. in this sense, ng’s work was firmly sociological, rather than psychologising and behavioural, even while – drawing on gramscian definitions of hegemony – she acknowledged the powerful ways that racist and sexist common sense damage human relations (ng, 1993, p. 194). on this latter point, ng followed gramsci in emphasizing that hegemonic ideas frequently arise from dominant classes and groups, in socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 155 their interests. the fiction that chinese immigrants to canada are uniformly wealthy, for instance, obscures the realities of working class chinese men and women, especially undocumented workers. these workers are formally free but actually captive to poorly paid, oppressive workplaces. attending to the lived experiences of these workers unmasks such stereotypes. often, unjust inequalities and oppressions exist systemically or objectively in bureaucratic categories and processes. in other words, in everyday social relations “we are not made equal” (ng, 1993, p. 196), even if many of us – to use a problematically general term – are committed to human equality in our deepest held beliefs. the employer who pays chinese immigrant women less than chinese men for their work may be hewing to standards of “fairness” given that chinese men supposedly do relatively more skilled work, in a garment industry marked by sharp, gendered divisions of labour. such apparently neutral, objective processes mask the ways that definitions of skill are themselves gendered, while taking for granted gendered divisions of labour. similarly, the university administrator who refuses to support either professor or student in charged encounters between a racialized women professor and a white male student may do so in the name of neutrality. yet such understandings of neutrality and, implicitly, fairness depend upon the social fiction that human beings hold equal status in power in the university and in society. likewise, rejecting qi gong in the classroom, to instead privilege learning through texts and oral exchanges alone, may appear to be a matter of providing a good, rigorous and serious learning experience. yet the supposed obviousness of such claims ultimately depends upon privileging euro-centric ways of knowing, themselves dependent on culturally specific mind-body dualities. undoing racism, sexism and other unjust inequalities therefore cannot be accomplished by focussing singularly on personal beliefs and attitudes around racism, sexism, the working class and the unemployed. rather, they will require social scientists and activists to carefully investigate how such inequalities are reproduced objectively through mundane social interactions and seemingly objective institutional processes – not only subjectively, in the minds of social actors. in undertaking such investigations, ng rejected the idea that social science speaks, god-like, from an objective “nowhere” (see also smith, 2004, pp. 4569). too often, objectivity is ideology dressed up as science. thus, ideas supportive of dominant classes and groups seem self-evidently true, while the ideas of dominated classes and groups, who have relatively weaker access to the means of diffusing their ideas, including in the university, appear highly contestable. a graduate course on health citing michel foucault is acceptable, but one centering qi gong meditative practices will be subject to challenge, reflecting the relative power of european versus chinese modes of thinking within the canadian university. certified economists describing globalization are respectable, expert and citable sources, but the lived experiences of workers who circulate across borders are merely anecdotes – by definition elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 156 inexpert and therefore, less credible sources, including in both academic literature and the mass media. in her own work, ng refused to take for granted this social organization of knowledge. instead, she sought to analyse and describe the world and human relations by taking seriously the standpoint and experiences of those who are dominated and oppressed, as we have seen, particularly investigating the lived experiences of migrant women workers in canada (on feminist “standpoint” theory see harding, 2004). hence, ng’s analysis was informed by her commitment to begin with and work from the experiences of those who are often ignored and silenced because of their relatively dominated social positions. of course, taken together, ng’s contributions are not without their tensions. notably, for instance, ng calls for us to centre the experiences and perspectives of the oppressed. the lived experiences of dominated classes and groups are important sources of knowledge about actual social relationships, often challenging common sense ideas about social world. at the same time, ng reminds and cautions us that the oppressed do not necessarily experience their domination in straightforward ways. rather, they may repeat and embody dominant ways of knowing, doing and being, even at a cost to their own wellbeing. in other words, they may not recognize their oppression as such. instead, as marx (1978, pp. 173-175) would have argued, they may accept their own oppression as natural, inevitable, and even, to reference a contemporary mask for much oppression, merited if not desirable. indeed, ng would argue that even those who reject the normalization and legitimation of unjust inequalities cognitively, may not be able to escape the embodied reproduction of their own oppression and domination. hence, social justice minded researchers need to attend to the experiences and perspectives of the oppressed, but this does not mean that we suspend what we know, as researchers, about the reproduction of unjust inequalities and uncritically accept their interpretations of the world – especially insofar as these merely echo dominant ideologies. researchers have time for reflection that many ordinary workers do not, and that reflection and analyses informed by scholarly (as well as practical) learning from prior struggles deserves to be taken seriously. at the same time, researchers might work to create spaces in which subaltern classes and groups may learn from and with each other, so that space and time for reflection – as well as struggle – are not reserved for scholars and the well-off, but made possible for each and all. finally, as briefly observed earlier, ng’s work is motivated by a commitment to socially just change. arguably, this commitment informed her efforts towards analytical rigour and clarity, since the stakes of social change do not allow for sloppy analyses that might mislead solidarity work with and for the exploited and oppressed. this rigour included a reflexive awareness of the personal costs of social change, since struggles with and for dominated actors inevitably face the countervailing powers of dominant actors whose interests are threatened by the possibilities of fundamental social socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 157 transformation. sometimes, ng observed, even forms of civility are dangerous for social change, as when empathetic desires to maintain harmonious relationships with “those close to us” lead us to mute our critiques of social justice (ng, 1993, p. 200). likewise, ng examined the ways that dominated actors – and even we who think of ourselves as working for social justice – may reproduce unjust inequalities and relations of exploitation, despite our best intentions. if ng warned that living and working “against the grain” (ng, 1993, pp. 198-201) entailed personal risks and costs she was, however, never a fatalist. rather, she maintained that political commitments to social justice were possible and necessary. ultimately, her work in the academy and outside of it was premised on the thesis that social justice is potentially achievable through collective struggle, even if the successes of social justice movements are never inevitable and never permanent. acknowledgements i would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for careful readings, monique deveaux for clear editorial advice, and david butz for his useful recommendations throughout the review process. your suggestions have strengthened the paper. finally, i hope that this review encourages those who are not familiar with roxana ng’s contributions to read her work. references bannerji, h. (1987). introducing racism: notes towards an anti-racist feminism. resources for feminist research: a canadian journal for feminist scholarship, 16(1), 10-12. bannerji, h. (2000). the dark side of the nation: essays on multiculturalism, nationalism and gender. toronto: canadian scholars’ press. campbell, m., & gregor, f. m. (2002). mapping social relations: a primer in doing institutional ethnography. toronto: university of toronto press collins, p. h. (2009). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). new york: routledge. eichler, m. (1985). and the work never ends: feminist contributions. canadian review of sociology/revue canadienne de sociologie, 22(5), 619-644. gustafson, d. l. (1998). embodied learning about health and healing: involving the body as content and pedagogy [qi gong]. canadian woman studies, 17(4), 52-55. hacking, i. 2002. historical ontology. cambridge: harvard university press. harding, s. (ed.). 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(2005). negotiating citizenship: migrant women in canada and the global system. toronto: university of toronto press. socially just social science from the standpoint of roxana ng studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 136-159, 2017 159 the economist. (2007, february 8). mutiny in the ranks. retrieved from www.economist.com/node/8679931/print thobani, s. (2007). exalted subjects: studies in the making of race and nation in canada. toronto: university of toronto press. vorst, j. et al. (eds.). (1989). race, class, gender: bonds and barriers. toronto: garamond press. wright-mills, c. (1959). the sociological imagination. oxford: oxford university press. mcelligott -final feb 6 17 correspondence address: greg mcelligott, community & justice services program, humber college, 3199 lake shore blvd. w., toronto, on, m8v 1k8; email: greg.mcelligott@humber.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 invested in prisons: prison expansion and community development in canada greg mcelligott humber college, canada abstract this paper critically examines the claim made by canadian conservative politicians that prison expansion is likely to produce economic gains for canadian prison towns. such claims raise many questions about the actual beneficiaries of prison construction, and the depiction of prisons as “infrastructure” serving some public good or even promoting social justice. after reviewing relevant literature from american debates on this topic, i focus on more specific canadian conditions, and use public tendering data to trace the path of prison spending. the evidence suggests that prison expansion is unlikely to benefit surrounding communities, although interests elsewhere tend to reap major gains. keywords incarceration; prison expansion; community economic development; infrastructure; critical criminology; public policy; canada introduction most activists have heard the argument that “there is just no money” to fund improvements in the social services, especially if it means hiring more staff. such claims raise all sorts of questions about public priorities, taxation policies, the state of the global economy, and so on. at a more basic level, they highlight what economists call the “opportunity cost” of any action: using public resources in one area means they are not available for use elsewhere. this problem is important because some things that governments buy are fantastically expensive, and so displace many other options. for example, according to one estimate, the lifetime cost of a single f-35 fighter aircraft could fund over 45,000 childcare spaces for a year, or house every homeless person in victoria, bc, for 27 years (hyslop, 2012). few items concentrate spending power as intensely as major military purchases. but while canada’s fighter program was eventually delayed, prime minister stephen harper’s conservative government (2006-2015) invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 87 proceeded with prison expansions worth substantially more than an f-35, and boosted spending on correctional services canada (csc) to about 10 times that amount each year. even if one disputes exactly what this means in foregone childcare, homeless shelters, and the like, the sacrifice is clearly significant and persistent. from the perspective of those who struggle for social justice, then, the cost of prisons is usually the cost of opportunities foregone. however, a competing narrative portrays prisons as instruments of a kind of social justice themselves. when government officials claim that prison construction will bring prosperity to local communities, they imply that economic growth will alleviate all sorts of inequities – or at least make them more tolerable. this is also, broadly speaking, the justification for using infrastructure spending as a tool of economic development – a strategy to which the new trudeau government seems deeply wedded. but can prisons really be used in this way? are they really a means of boosting local economies? and if so, are any resulting benefits worth the cost of all those lost opportunities? this paper will consider the impact of construction spending related to the harper government’s prison expansion program, which was unveiled in a series of announcements prior to the 2011 federal election. a later statement by public safety minister vic toews made the government’s position clear. “there will be an increase in terms of construction jobs for the community,” he said, “in addition to new hiring at the facility when the units are ready to be staffed. this is an important part of ensuring tangible economic growth for the communities located around csc’s institutions” (cited in piché, 2015, p. 158). toews and others also repeatedly claimed that “…the cost of a safe and secure society is an investment worth making” (csc, 2010). borrowing arguments used in the united states, harper’s ministers suggested that initiatives of this sort could (a) enhance public safety, while (b) stimulating the economies of host communities with jobs for workers and contracts for local businesses. similar claims have been investigated in the american case, focusing on how prisons affect community development. insights from that research will be used here to trace the impact of harper’s program. the intent is also to expand the range of the us works, which focused mostly on american examples at the expense of prisons in other contexts. after outlining the debate surrounding the previous us prison boom, we will deal briefly with the argument that prisons can enhance public safety, or at least deliver some sort of public good, as infrastructure spending is said to do. these claims are at least questionable, for reasons having to do with the nature of prisons, and the partisan considerations at work in this particular project. evidence drawn from the canadian government’s public tendering process will then be used to show who won the prison contracts here, and how that relates to where the money was actually spent. the evidence suggests that prison towns were very unlikely to receive net gains from prison construction. the paper’s final section considers how that fact might be used greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 88 to decouple private interests from prison expansion, and reclaim public space for better uses than prisons. lessons from the us the idea that prisons could be used as a means of economic development became popular in the us during the 1980s and 1990s. the “conventional wisdom” of the era was that prison building, like other major works projects, would bring construction jobs and related contracts to the communities around the job site, and increase demand for local services at least temporarily (genter, hooks & mosher, 2013). but unlike bridges or roads, prisons employed a fairly large permanent staff in jobs that were seen to be “recession-proof.” these were said to bolster the foundations of local economies when other industries were on the wane (hatcher, 1994). as prisons had to be resupplied on a regular basis with everything necessary to keep prisoners alive and contained, local businesses could expect contracts to serve those needs, and some might find a new clientele among the families and relatives who visited prisoners. prisons would place more demands on local infrastructure (sewers, roads and so on), but the hope was that they would spur upgrades benefitting everyone.1 taxes paid by prisons would boost local government revenues, and prisoners would boost town populations for census purposes, meaning that per-capita grants from higher levels of government would also rise (hatcher, 1994). later research would show that few of those grants were actually affected by local census populations, but prisons did help to distort the political redistricting process – often in favor of conservative rural politicians who openly rejected any obligation to represent disenfranchised inmates (hunter & wagner, 2007). prisoners might never see the community centres their presence helped build, or benefit from the enhanced political strength of surrounding neighbourhoods, but these were counted as important community gains (whiteside, 2002; hunter & wagner, 2007). justified by claims like these – and of course many others related to prison’s alleged crime-fighting role – the american prison boom did not begin to slow down until the second decade of the 21st century. by this time, many studies seemed to show that community benefits were not as likely as prison proponents believed, and the latter were thrown into increasingly defensive positions. much of the newer research suggested that whatever economic effects prisons had, they were more muted or complex than some had initially hoped (glasmeier & farrigan, 2007). in a large urban centre the impacts might be less noticeable, for example, while those in a small rural area might be more 1 similar claims are used to justify the huge expenses involved in hosting “world-class” events like the olympics. but if we want better roads, why do we have to stage the olympics – or build invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 89 evident (besser & hanson, 2005). prison construction would produce few local jobs if outside companies won the contracts, and brought their own specialized workforce in to do most of the work (genter, hooks & mosher, 2013). prison staff might be fewer, more insecure and paid less if a private company ran the prison, and one study suggested that bad conditions on the “inside” could actually help drive down working conditions in the surrounding community (mosher, hooks & wood, 2007). if the prison were publicly run, staff would likely be hired from a state-wide or national list, and locals were often at a disadvantage when competing for those jobs. and however they were hired, prison staff did not necessarily live in the prison town. commuting staff took their “recession-proof” spending elsewhere when they bought a house, or groceries, or entertainment (king, mauer & huling, 2003). local businesses often faced frustrations similar to those of prison town workers. while prisons inevitably buy some of their supplies locally, many of the big contracts are handled centrally, so that bulk purchases are made on behalf of all the prisons in a state, or all those run by the same company. this usually means that local firms are forced to bid against much bigger operators to win contracts for a nearby prison (hooks, mosher, rotolo & lobao, 2004; besser & hanson, 2005; courtright, packard, hannam & brennan, 2010). the prospects for local infrastructure upgrades tended to be undermined by bidding wars as well. in this case the participants were civic officials from various potential prison towns, who used subsidies of various kinds to attract a new prison. often this meant paying for the enhanced infrastructure a prison needed, even at the expense of other local priorities (mosher, hooks & wood, 2007; madoc-jones, 2009). many local governments actually absorbed the cost of building private prisons and so the net benefit to their communities was even less clear (besser & hanson, 2005).2 desperate economic times erode government revenues to begin with, but because many bidders promised tax breaks for private prison companies (most public prisons do not pay taxes in the us), tax revenues were reduced still further (besser & hanson, 2005). it might be argued that the potential benefits of prisons would have been greater if local governments had not been so desperate. but it may be equally true that only economic desperation could make prisons look like the best development opportunity available. in the united states, prisons may have had marginal effects on censusbased grants and they do give small prison towns more political clout than 2 during the only canadian experiment with a privately run adult prison, ontario’s conservative government under premier mike harris (1995-2003) paid for all the upfront construction costs involved. this might be construed as a large public subsidy to the host community of penetanguishene except that, as will be shown below, construction spending and other alleged benefits tend to leave town. in this instance (and others), such upfront spending might be better regarded as a subsidy to the prison management company (management and training corporation), aimed at reducing its costs to make privatization appear more viable (mcelligott, 2008). greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 90 they would otherwise have (hunter & wagner, 2007). however, surveys like the census can cut both ways. as a british observer pointed out, crime rates inside prisons, when added to those of the host community, may suppress local property values (madoc-jones, 2009). perhaps this is why national crime statistics in the us now entirely exclude offences committed in prison, giving an artificial boost to the apparent success of “tough on crime” initiatives (voorhees, 2014). problems such as these led eason (2010) to try to reframe the debate. eason argues that about 70% of the prisons built during the us boom were built in the south, usually in larger, more racially diverse rural towns characterized by “concentrated rural disadvantage,” and often nearby an existing prison (2010, p. 1025). to him this does not suggest that “locally unwanted land uses” are being dumped disproportionally on poor, racialized communities. instead he makes the perhaps reasonable point that if introduced into struggling local economies, prisons can make important contributions by slowing their decline (eason, 2010). so even if prisons have little impact on traditional measures of economic health, things might be worse in their absence. of course, it is very difficult to know what might have been, and arguments like these can be used as a last-ditch defence for practically any policy option. but eason does indirectly highlight the degree to which this entire debate has been waged on the familiar terrain of mainstream economics. some of (the many) limits to this perspective will be noted below. linked closely to the claim that prisons offer “recession-proof” jobs is the assumption, common in many similar booms, that this particular bull market will never end. prisons are easier to defend in economic terms if we expect demand for their services to follow a constantly rising curve. but as lawrence (2013) points out, fifteen states actually closed prisons in 2011-12, giving rise to some ironic debates about how local economies might be stimulated by repurposing the sites of closed prisons. inevitably discussion of such “postcarceral keynesian” strategies gives rise to talk of condos (as they have in kingston after the peninentiary closed – see ferguson, lay, piché & walby, 2014) or penal museums (both the us and canada apparently have more of these than any other country in the world – see ross, 2012; walby & piché, 2015). but the fact that penal conversion strategies are being considered at all is grounds for optimism, and we will return to this topic in the conclusion. a more serious limitation of the “local benefits” debate in the us is that prison town boundaries provide only an arbitrary and changeable way of defining where local benefits should be measured. eason (2010) and hooks et al. (2004) make a point of using county boundaries instead. but why not consider the regional or national implications of prison siting? analysts using this broader perspective would be forced to consider the consequences of prison expansion on other communities – especially on those urban centres from which most american (and canadian) prisoners are drawn – but also on prisoners, on the environment, and so on (frost & gross, 2012; madoc-jones, 2009; lynch, 2007). invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 91 mainstream economic analysis also tends to be vague about how wealth and income are distributed. if local economies receive some spinoffs, but prison building serves primarily as a way to enrich its financiers – as buitenhuis (2013) says is the case with public-private partnership arrangements in ontario – are these truly local benefits? prisons, infrastructure and the public good at this writing, the liberal government that defeated harper’s conservatives is unrolling its signature infrastructure program, promising to invest billions of dollars over the next decade in transit, social and green projects (lpc, 2015, p. 14). the party’s platform justified all of these as efforts to “deliver the services we need, create jobs, and restore economic security to the middle class” (2015, p. 11). the inclusion of items like “early learning and childcare” (2015, p. 13) under the (social) infrastructure label shows how malleable its meaning has now become, but traditionally infrastructure has been associated with more concrete projects that involve construction companies and related trades. harper’s conservatives tended to favor the traditional usage, and their spending priorities were different from those of the liberals, but by treating prison building like an infrastructure program they too pushed toward a more expansive definition. my focus is on prison-related effects in harper’s earlier regime, but because there is at least a rhetorical overlap with the infrastructure initiatives now unfolding, a few words of clarification are needed. contracting scandals in either domain will not be pursued here – although the new liberal program has already sparked warnings about these, and money wasted in this way would amplify the opportunity costs discussed above (curry, 2016; canadian press, 2016). rather, the point is to challenge the common assumption that funds earmarked for projects in a particular location actually benefit the people living there. because the same industry (and often the same company) builds prisons, hospitals, bridges and highways, my conclusions might have wider application as well. there is danger, however, in speaking of all these projects as if they were equivalent. as amy buitenhuis (2013) points out, prisons are not just another form of infrastructure, presumably serving some clear-cut public good. saying “a prison is a hospital is a road” tends to depoliticize important policy choices, she argues (2013, p. 109). considered only as a series of contracts where the goal is “value for money,” the larger implications of prison spending are hidden. on the one hand, choosing prisons means not choosing things like schools that might be better at both suppressing crime and creating jobs (besser & hanson, 2005). on the other hand, the choice of prisons may entail serious social costs and severe collateral damage. from the perspective of a long tradition of critical scholarship, prisons are destructive in their own right, as greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 92 their rehabilitative efforts consistently fall short of their propensity to create crime, and their toxic by-products (racism, gang violence, family trauma and so on) undermine their net contribution to any public good (foucault, 1995; christie, 2000; parenti, 2000; stern, 2006; gilmore, 2007; drucker, 2011).3 by some accounts, the balance here is so skewed that prisons are comparable not to bridges and the like, but to weapons of state like the f-35 (morris, 1995; davis, 2003). at the very least we can say that prisons’ contributions to a public good (like public safety) are not as clear as those of other projects that fall under the infrastructure label. a stronger position might be that prisons are so deeply inscribed with injustice that they can never build social justice, even indirectly. prisons serve many purposes, and some of these are defended by powerful interests even if they do not serve a recognizable public good. one frequently highlighted in the critical literature relates to prison’s role in reinforcing (often highly racialized) labour market discipline (ignatieff, 1978; mancini, 1996; oliver, 1998; rusche & kirchheimer, 2003; alexander, 2010). the 2007 report of the csc review panel (a roadmap to strengthening public safety), which helped to shape the federal prison expansion program, stresses goals related to that purpose, and in turn reflects the influence of the “common sense revolution” attempted by the mike harris conservatives in ontario (19952003). harris’s militantly pro-business government had combined sustained attacks on labour, the poor, and other social groups with legal changes that made it easier to degrade jobs and intensify work. it also undertook ambitious efforts to consolidate bureaucracies and local governments into much bigger, more centralized operations (mcelligott, 2007). everywhere the harris conservatives displayed an extraordinary faith in the capacity of buildings and machines to change people’s character. this “tory high modernism” was particularly evident in the reorganization of the province’s jails (mcelligott, 2008). some of the ontario players were later active at the federal level – on the review panel, and in harper’s conservative cabinet. their harder line on prisoners was embodied in the panel’s call for a rebranded system of “earned parole” (csc rp 2007, pp. 114-18). earned parole would use economic pressure (longer work, lower pay, and more deductions) to make “privileges” like decent housing dependent on prisoners’ attitudes to work, obedience, and self-improvement (csc rp 2007, pp. 47-49). parallel legal changes should reduce prisoners’ charter rights, the panel argued, in order to compel “active” participation in programming, reinforce respect for prison authorities, and curtail “frivolous and vexatious grievances” (csc rp 2007, pp. 6, 16-17, 62, 168). the rationale for this arrangement was that it better reflected the harsh 3 a widely quoted us report concluded in 1973 that “the prison, the reformatory and jail have achieved only a shocking rate of failure. there is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it” (cited in alexander, 2010, p. 8). invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 93 realities of the outside world, where participation in the legitimate labour market purportedly guaranteed self-sufficiency and other rewards (csc rp, 2007). but given the context in ontario and elsewhere, the effect would likely have been to make those realities even harsher – by driving down work expectations among prisoners, former prisoners and other marginalized workers (mcelligott, 2007). these proposals are relevant here not only because they cast further doubt on the idea that prisons can be treated like politically inert infrastructure. they also produced a recommendation that csc’s 58 prisons should be consolidated into a much smaller number of “regional complexes” (csc rp, 2007, p. 157; mcelligott, 2008). each of these would confine 1,500-2,000 prisoners – about the size of ontario’s new “superjails” and about three to four times the size of the biggest csc prison at the time (csc rp 2007, pp. 157-158, app. a). 4 putting minimum, medium, maximum and “special handling” units within the same walls would save on operating costs and make drug interdiction easier, according to the panel (csc rp, 2007, pp. 27, 61-62, 156-157). ranging all the security levels in plain view – from least uncomfortable to exceptionally horrible – was also meant to enhance internal discipline, as prisoners would be given a visible incentive to work and behave, and could be more easily transferred if they did not. as the panel argued, the regional complex design would allow officials “to reinforce an overall correctional management model that stresses offender accountability” (csc rp, 2007, p. 158). the panel offered few suggestions about the internal organization of these complexes, but in ontario and elsewhere the new centralized prisons followed the “tough, no frills” model of the us supermax (hannah-moffat & moore, 2002; mcelligott, 2007, 2008). the huge size of these buildings, and their heavy reliance on walls, automation, and other impersonal forms of control, meant that every prisoner – regardless of their security level – would likely be treated more brutally than in older institutions. prisons of this sort are also consistent with the designs favoured by private prison operators and financiers, but, as will be seen below, private interests have a major stake even in nominally public prisons. 4 provincial prisons, which hold people who are awaiting trial or serving shorter sentences, contain more prisoners and are themselves going through similar reorganizations (see piché, 2014). greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 94 partisan considerations although the conservative government expressed support for the panel’s vision (csc, 2008a), the building boom that followed the 2010-11 announcements seems, at first glance, to have taken a very different form. rather than the mass reorganization implied by the panel’s regional complex plan, which would have involved many prison closings and intensive rebuilding in a few select areas, the government committed itself to expanding about two-thirds of the existing csc prisons. these expansions, however, were arranged in a way that contributed to the creation of a more gradual and less centralized version of the regional complex idea. many csc prisons already shared their grounds with one or more facilities of different security levels. the units that were added (usually 96or 50-bed buildings) tended to bolster such multi-level sites, or to begin others (mcelligott & piché, 2012; csc, 2012). the “mini-regional complex” model that emerged seems to be capped at about 500 beds, which is in line with the advice of an internal csc report issued after the panel’s (csc 2008b, par. 5.1.2). it has the virtues of avoiding the huge and concentrated spending commitments – up to $1 billion for each 2,200-cell complex – that would have been necessary with the larger model (csc rp, 2007, app. f, p. 15). three older prisons were closed in 2012 (including kingston penitentiary) and a new policy has all facilities in one site sharing a single name. so, by 2015, csc’s web page listed only 43 prisons in its jurisdiction – down from 58 when the panel issued their report (csc, 2013; csc rp, 2007, app. a).5 as we were reminded in both the 2011 and 2015 federal elections, spending on prisons and infrastructure items can have important political implications (curry & hannay, 2015; piché, 2015). crucial decisions about the shape of csc prison reform were made while the harper conservatives were an insecure minority government (2006-2011). during this period, their signature punishment bills were being held back (perhaps by design), making estimates of future prison populations even more uncertain and controversial than usual. and, like any minority government, the conservatives were trying to secure and expand their political base. in this context, it probably made more political sense to spread the new spending across many prison sites (and ridings), rather than focusing it on a few super-sized regional complexes. the government certainly tried to gain political traction with the funding announcements, as public safety minister vic toews and other prominent conservatives participated in a carefully orchestrated series of media events in the last few months before the 2011 election (see piché, 2015). 5 the following prisons have now been lost, mostly due to renaming: westmorland; leclerc (closed); montée ste-françois; saint-anne-des-plaines; kingston (closed); frontenac; pittsburgh; fenbrook; riverbend; rockwood; and ferndale. the csc website still lists ontario’s regional treatment centre, but notes it has been closed (csc, 2013). invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 95 table 1. prison funding announcements by csc region, and federal election results, 2008 & 2011 note: “new $” refers to the value of prison expansions, as announced in late 2010 and early 2011. party labels are c=conservative; l=liberal; b=bloc québécois; n=ndp; i=independent. the author would be happy to provide a more detailed breakdown by riding on request. sources: author’s calculations based on canada (2005-13; 2008 & 2011); cbc (2011); csc (n.d.); csc rp, (2007, pp. 171-172); google maps (n.d.); piché (n.d.). some inkling of the political impact made or intended by these announcements can be seen in table 1. in the 2008 election, the conservatives won 20 of the 32 ridings containing federal prisons. three years later, after new money had been announced affecting 24 prison ridings, the conservative score was 21 out of 32. the only major shift among the prison ridings was from the bloc to the ndp in quebec. obviously larger forces were at work here, and it would be difficult to determine what role prison funding played in the election outcome. it is clear, though, that because conservatives dominate most of the prison ridings, spending on prisons made political sense for them, especially if it was distributed widely among existing region federal prison ridings (promised new funding) new $ (million) 2008 results vs. 2011 results c l b n i atlantic 3 (3) $85 1 2 1 1 1 quebec 8 (5) $133 7 8 1 ontario 5 (4) $140.5 4 4 1 1 prairies 12 (8) $150 12 12 pacific 4 (4) $92.5 3 3 1 1 totals: 32 (24) $601 20 21 3 2 7 9 2 greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 96 sites. even in opposition they likely still have an incentive to push for such spending.6 on the other hand, had they followed the panel’s advice and started building the first large regional complex in kingston, they would have pumped all that money into one of the few prison ridings that consistently voted liberal. had they used the money for other purposes entirely, its distribution might not have been so politically useful for conservative candidates. so, partisan considerations likely influenced the shape of csc’s prison expansion, and certainly affected the way it was publicly promoted, even if the tories seem to have made few direct gains from the program in electoral terms. it is possible that the parade of prison announcements served more symbolic ends – reinforcing the conservatives’ image as the “tough on crime” choice for voters – but any effects of this kind would be hard to trace. we do know that prior to the 2015 election – which they lost – the conservatives tried to do something similar with the “canada 150” community infrastructure fund. critics suggested that the program was little more than “a ‘slush fund’ for good news announcements leading up to the election,” and frequent promises of local funding (albeit in smaller amounts) again filled the media (boutilier & davis, 2016, n.p.). a later analysis showed that conservative ridings were much more likely to benefit from these grants, even though they were supposed to be awarded by non-partisan public servants (boutilier & davis, 2016, n.p). it is also possible that the influences here were not so much partisan as ideological. that is, prison–building might have been seen as an essential anchor for the coercive turn in criminal justice policy, to which the conservative government was deeply committed. it is true that conservatives have a long history of relying on new buildings and machines to reinstate older social values. this is the “tory high modernism” mentioned above, and its influence extends at least from the opening of kingston penitentiary in 1835 to the closing of that same institution in 2012 (see mcelligott, 2008). the original “regional complex” idea fits pretty clearly into this tradition. the current version seems to have compromised tory high modernism by embracing more pragmatic political calculations, and by appeasing those within csc who defended smaller prisons (see csc, 2008b). however, table 1 does show how much space still exists for partisan appeals that play up the supposed local benefits of prison construction. the 32 ridings containing federal prisons, if seen as one large “prison constituency,” elected more mps than all but three provinces in 2011. making similar calculations for provincial prisons and legislatures (even allowing for consolidation here) would spread this net even further, and make the penal constituency even bigger. prison spending and incarceration rates in canada still fall far short of american levels – as do those of nearly every other 6 the 2015 federal election took place under new riding boundaries, so comparable data is not yet available. invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 97 country in the world (walmsley, 2015). yet the size of the penal constituency here should serve as a sobering reminder that a large and growing set of interests may believe they have a stake in continued prison expansion. but what effect does prison funding actually have in all these ridings? despite the larger issues raised above, the rest of this paper will assess the claims of the harper government from a narrow, “common sense” perspective. it simply asks whether the prison expansion project is likely to create local jobs, and contribute to local economic growth, as they promised it would. where did the money go? in the canadian case, several things are clear from the outset. first, while the american debate focuses mostly on brand new prisons, the harper conservatives added units to existing prisons. so, a really accurate measure of the latter’s impact would consider only the net effect of the expansions, subtracting the influence of the prior status quo. this is why the data below focus on construction expenses. the canadian additions tended to be large, however. most often a prison would gain a unit with 50 or 96 beds, and in total at least 2,700 beds were added (with double-bunking potentially adding many more; see piché, 2014, par. 73). this is the equivalent of creating four or five large prisons and then distributing them across the country in pieces the size of small ones. csc has not (yet) allowed private prison companies to operate its prisons, or finance their construction, although there were hints that a future wave of expansions might make both possible (tencer, 2012). among other things, this means that public service hiring rules still apply. most new hires will be paid at union rates, selected through national competitions, and placed where need arises – not necessarily in their hometowns. those who come from elsewhere and settle in a prison town might spend money locally, but those who commute from other places would be less likely to do so. and of course, any local benefits from increased staff spending would depend on there being more staff or higher wages. because csc, like other large employers, is committed to labour-saving technology and work intensification, neither of these can be assumed. given staff reallocations due to csc closings in ontario and quebec, there are no guarantees that job competitions will even be open to prison town locals. the fact that csc is projecting absolutely flat staffing levels until 2017-18 is not encouraging in this regard (canada, n.d. b). similarly, csc and other federal departments are obliged to send all major outside purchases through a national bidding process that now happens greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 98 mostly online.7 companies near an expanding prison are forced to bid against other national (and sometimes international) firms in order to win a local contract. there is some evidence that informal quotas exist in tender decisions, as contracts for items such as dairy products are often split between national and local suppliers (merx, n.d.). but the value of even the largest of these pales in comparison to the construction contracts, as will be seen below. overall, csc continues to spend most of its budgets on personnel costs – averaging about 67% from 2009-13 (canada, n.d. a). because these are still mostly governed by collective agreements with unionized staff, there are very few opportunities for local businesses to win contracts in this area. other csc purchases are internal, from government agencies such as public works. but csc has turned to outside suppliers at a dramatically increased pace since the conservatives took power. in fact, the nominal value of csc spending on private providers doubled from $362 million in fiscal year (fy) 2005-6, to $737 million in fy 2012-13 (canada, 2005-13a, b & c). csc tenders contracts for a variety of reasons, and not all are directly related to prisons, but the biggest ones by far are construction-related. public accounts figures show that capital spending as a share of total csc expenses rose 45% from 2009 to 2012 – from 8.6% to 12.5% respectively (canada, 2013), and much of this would have gone to private companies involved in construction projects. so, while csc continues to spend the vast majority of its budget on personnel and other operating costs, opportunities for private profit making have increased dramatically for those who wish to supply, and especially to build, its prisons. the claim that new prisoner populations could boost census counts, and therefore grants and representation for prison towns, has been made at least once to justify prison expansion in canada (drumheller mayor bryce nimmo, in zickefoose, 2010). but in fact the situation here is more complex than it appears to be in the us. the canadian census counts prison as someone’s residence only if they spend at least six months there; otherwise they are counted at their last address (canada, 2009). this means that provincial prisoners would rarely stay long enough to be counted (because most are on remand or serving shorter sentences). federal prisoners (who all serve at least two years) would be counted as long as they had arrived six months before the census date, and as long as census enumeration was adequate. per capita transfers would be based on these numbers. however, municipalities receive only about 20% of their revenues through various federal or provincial transfers, and these transfers are not necessarily calculated on a per capita basis (slack, 2009). federal institutions like prisons do not pay property taxes to municipalities, but they may pay “payments in lieu of taxes” (pilt) which are more discretionary, and fluctuate as priorities change in ottawa (fcm, 2008). pilt statistics are available from 2010 on, 7 first through merx and since june 2013 through buyandsell.ca. some 30,000-50,000 tenders for all federal departments are listed there each year. invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 99 but they are not broken down by federal department (canada, 2015). yet a cursory analysis suggests that pilt growth has little connection with prison expansion. of four prison towns that were some of the biggest prison contract winners, only one (springhill, ns) saw a consistent rise in its pilt payments for all federal buildings between 2010 and 2014. in two others (mission, bc and kingston, on), increases were inconsistent or marginal. and the prison town that won the most valuable contracts (abbotsford, bc) actually experienced a decline in its pilt payments over the same period (canada, 2015). so, the local tax benefits of hosting a prison in canada are less certain than in the us, and the possibility of incremental gains through prison expansion seem to be unpredictable at best. as noted above, the conservative government promised just over $600 million in expansion funds to 24 prison ridings in the run-up to the 2011 federal election. they claimed that construction jobs and permanent hiring, along with new business opportunities, would help stimulate local economies. this section has already cast doubt on many of these claims, but what about all those construction contracts? details regarding tendered contracts can now be found in canada’s public accounts. most federal contracts are multi-year (usually three years), and many change in value as work progresses (or stalls). but taking the last published value of each contract gives some sense of what the government actually paid each contractor, and allows us to compare total commitments here against what was promised. there is uncertainty in the data, because not all contracts are clearly labeled. a csc contract that says something like “96bed living unit, ontario” clearly relates to a prison, but does not specify which one. other labels are more vague, or relate to construction in csc offices (regional or national headquarters, probation and parole, etc.). for purposes of this paper, only contracts with a clear prison connection were considered, and those with a clear connection that did not name a particular prison were categorized as “unspecified” in each province. a more elaborate study might quite reasonably allocate some of these other expenses among the prisons, however. timing is also an issue, as some construction contracts started before the announcements, and some announced construction (especially in quebec) had still not been tendered when the data was gathered in the spring of 2014. to deal with this problem, data were included from all csc construction contracts tendered since the conservatives first won power in fiscal year 2005-6, and extending to 2012-13, the latest available at the time. as can be seen from figure 1, however, the value of csc construction commitments rose dramatically after the 2010-11 announcements, and the vast majority of contracts since 2005-6 seems to be related to them. in any case, considering all the contracts over the longer period should make any local benefits more, not less, visible. greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 100 figure 1. csc prison construction commitments, 2005-2013 note: these figures are in nominal dollar values and only cover identifiable prison contracts in the “acquisition of land, building and works” category. contracts are counted in the year they first appear, and by the total government commitment (not annual expenditures) given the most recent values for each. e = election year. source: author’s calculations based on canada, 200513c. the final total in figure 1 ($729,782,124) provides a conservative estimate of the total value of all csc prison construction contracts (over 200 of them) made public between 2005 and 2013.8 figure 1 also gives some indication of where the money went, but this question is trickier than it seems. on the surface the contracts concern changes to prison spaces, and so the expenses will leave physical traces in each prison that received an upgrade. thus, it may make sense to display the results in something like figure 2, which 8 in addition to the exclusions previously noted, this figure does not include, “smaller contracts” (360 @ $140m in 2012-13), or the services of architects and engineers, which have totaled up to $5 million a year but are listed separately. smaller contracts (“contracts under $250,000 and cost plus contracts under $25,000”) were listed separately in the public accounts data after 2008, but only grand totals were given, with no details on the contracts. thus, it was impossible to consolidate these figures, or locate the contract winners. see canada (2005-13b, 2005-13c). 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 2005-2006 2006-2007 2007-2008 2008-2009 2009-2010 2010-2011 2011-2012 2012-2013 total $ m il li on s csc prison construction commitments, fy 2005-2013 atlantic quebec ontario prairie paci:ic total e e e invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 101 shows how roughly $730 million was distributed among the federal prison towns. figure 2. total prison construction commitments, 2005-2013 note: a few of the contracts list two or three prisons where the work will be performed, without specifying the breakdown. figures in such cases were split evenly between all the prisons involved. source: author’s calculations based on canada, 2005-13c. figure 2 shows that of the 32 towns containing 54 prisons, construction was planned in at least 25 towns, although there are broad disparities in the amounts each town received. these are presumably related to the number of prisons in each town, their degree of need, their significance in csc planning or some partisan political calculus. however, given the doubts noted above about whether prisons are really infrastructure, we cannot assume that expanding them will actually serve a public good (the case might be clearer for hospitals or roads). doubts about prisons’ effectiveness in fighting crime n $0 $40,000,000 $80,000,000 $120,000,000 $160,000,000 dorchester, nb (dorchester, shepody hc, westmorland) renous, nb (atlantic) unspecified nb springhill, ns (springhill) truro, ns (nova ifw) unspecified ns cowansville, pq (cowansville) donnaconna, pq (donnaconna) drummondville, pq (drummond) joliette, pq (joliette ifw) la macaza, pq (la macaza) laval, pq (federal tc, leclerc, msf) port-cartier, pq (port-cartier) saint-anne-des-plaines, pq (archambault, rmhc, rrc, sap) unspecified qc bath, on (bath, millhaven) campbellford, on (warkworth) gravenhurst, on (beaver creek, fenbrook) kingston, on (collins bay, frontenac, joyceville, kp, kitchener, on (grand valley) unspecified on stony mountain, mb (rockwood, stony mountain) unspecified mb duck lake, sk (willow cree hl) maple creek, sk (okimaw ohci hl) prince albert, sk (riverbend, saskatchewan pen.) saskatoon, sk (regional pc) unspecified sk drumheller, ab (drumheller & annex) edmonton, ab (edmonton, edmonton ifw, grierson) grand cache, ab (grand cache) hobbema, ab (pê sâkâstêw centre) innisfail, ab (bowden & annex) unspecified ab abbotsford, bc (fraser valley ifw, matsqui, pacific/rtc) agassiz, bc (kent) harrison mills, bc (kwìkwèxwelhp hv) metchosin, bc (william head) mission, bc (ferndale, mission, mountain) unspecified bc total prison construction commitments, fy 2005-2013 greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 102 could lead to similar conclusions (mathiesen, 1990). so, what about jobs and local contracts, the benefits that were promised? mosher, hooks and wood (2007) observed that when american prisonbuilding was undertaken by “outside” companies, the latter were more likely to bring their own specialized workforce with them, so that local construction hiring would be minimal to non-existent. if we assume that locally owned companies are more likely to hire locally, then the prospects for local hiring would be better in the canadian case if prison contracts were awarded to firms that came from the same prison town. the public accounts data lists the corporate offices of all contract winners, so it is relatively easy to determine their origins.9 table 2. “local benefits” by prison town, 2005-13 note: the percentages represent the value of local company contracts versus the value of all contracts for that town. some can exceed 100% if a company wins contracts in other prison towns. nlc = no local contracts. source: author’s calculations based on canada, 2005-13c. the results, however, are shocking. while 25 prison towns had tenders for work in their area, in only eight did local companies win prison contracts 9 national head offices were used when the data listed regional head offices of national companies. there was also at least one joint venture, and this data tells us little about corporate ownership structures, subsidiaries, and so on. so conceivably this task could get much more elaborate. prison town value of contracts won by local companies as % of local contract dollars available laval qc 122% edmonton ab 107% kingston on 43% abbotsford bc 34% bath on 13% kitchener on 9% drummondville qc nlc saskatoon sk nlc invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 103 (canada, 2005-13c). and even these were not clear-cut success stories. as can be seen from table 2, companies in only two of these towns (laval and edmonton) won more than 43% of the contract dollars available for their town. in fact, these two won contracts worth more than 100% of the local contracts’ value by also winning contracts in other prison towns. drummondville and saskatoon companies won all of their contracts in other towns, but could not bid locally because there were no tenders for local work. and despite all the money being poured into kingston and abbotsford, local firms won relatively small portions of the contract dollars available there. in 17 other prison towns with construction work available (68% of the total), local companies won nothing. it is possible that these statistics would be different if we knew more about those unspecified contracts, but it is unlikely that a very different pattern would emerge. so, if outside construction companies do tend to rely largely on their own permanent workforce (rather than subcontracting or hiring locally), then prison town locals probably had little access to these construction jobs. since we have acknowledged that “local” boundaries are somewhat arbitrary, table 3 makes similar calculations for wins by provincial, if not local companies. so, if an outside company wins a contract for a local prison, what are the chances that the “outsider” is at least from the same province? considering provincial company wins as a percentage of contract values available in the province, it seems the news continues to be bad for those expecting benefits close to home. four provinces and territories (newfoundland, pei, the nwt and nunavut) have no federal prisons and so received no benefits at all from these contracts. manitoba did very badly (6%), new brunswick and bc/yukon broke the 50% barrier, and nova scotia and alberta scored in the 80-90% range. quebec and ontario both managed to score around 125%, indicating that their companies won contracts in other provinces as well. but the real winner in this regard was saskatchewan, whose companies hauled in over two and a half times the contract values available in their province. what the pattern suggests, then, is that contract money is slightly more likely to stay in the home province than in the local town. but the distribution here is very uneven, and clearly not related to the number of csc prisons in each province (see table 3). a closer examination of contract winners by corporate office shows that these tend to be concentrated within a few large centres in each province. the left column of table 4 shows the 10 towns and cities whose companies won the most contract dollars during the period studied. even within this group, there was a big gap between the top town and the bottom one – concord, ontario won nearly four times as much as dartmouth, nova scotia. but as a group, these 10 centres took over 56% of all the contract dollars available. sixty-four other towns had companies win contracts, but those top 10 won more than all of them combined. greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 104 table 3. “local benefits” by province, 2005-2013 note: this list does not include contracts won by corcan, csc’s prisoner work program. corcan is included in the prison town figures because its spending has local effects. it is separated in the corporate office figures because, as an agency (a special operating agency) of the federal government, it is not a direct producer of private profit, and presumably nearly all jobs created would be for prisoners. source: author’s calculations based on canada, 2005-13c. the disparity is even greater if these winning towns are arranged into some common regions or metropolitan areas. as can be seen in the right column of table 4, the greater toronto area is the big winner in this scenario, as companies within its boundaries won over $200 million in contracts – about 28% of all the money available. but altogether, the top 10 regions took nearly 79% of the funds, leaving 31 other regions to split the remainder. clearly many factors come into play to determine a town’s chances to win these contracts. not only must they have relevant construction-related industries, but these firms must also be competitive (usually meaning large),10 the tender process must be fair (without rigged bids or political interference), and so on. the evidence so far suggests that what harold innis (1933) called the traditional “metropoles” of canada’s political economy continue to 10 anecdotal evidence suggests that large government construction contracts tend to come with elaborate paperwork and monitoring requirements that can only be met by larger companies. province csc prisons in the province value of contracts won by provincial companies as % of provincial csc contract dollars available saskatchewan 5 260 quebec 13 127 ontario 12 124 nova scotia 2 88 alberta 7 82 bc/yukon 9 59 new brunswick 4 56 manitoba 2 6 newfoundland 0 n/a pei 0 n/a nwt 0 n/a nunavut 0 n/a invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 105 dominate this field, as they do so many others. consequently, prison towns – unless they are in the metropoles – are unlikely to win the contracts on which those construction jobs depend. table 4. top ten tender winners by location of corporate office, fy 20052013 note: this table excludes corcan, and figures are rounded nominal dollar values. source: author’s calculations based on canada, 2005-13c. table 5. top ten (of 125) corporate winners, 2005-2013 note: figures are in rounded nominal dollars. bondfield also built ontario’s south-west detention centre. source: author’s calculations based on canada, 2005-13c. a complete list of all 125 corporate winners, and the amounts they won, is available on request. this pattern of highly uneven gains continues when considering the companies themselves (table 5). in contrast to purchasing for items such as rank by city (of 74) value ($m) rank by metro area (of 51) value ($m) 1 concord on 85.6 1 gta, on 206.4 2 mississauga on 63.2 2 lower mainland bc 57.9 3 saskatoon sk 36.6 3 greater vancouver bc 47.8 4 edmonton ab 36.0 4 halifax-dart. ns 38.2 5 calgary ab 32.3 5 saskatoon sk 36.6 6 ottawa on* 30.9 6 edmonton ab 36.4 7 abbotsford bc* 30.9 7 montréal/laval qc 33.2 8 chilliwack bc 26.1 8 calgary ab 32.3 9 regina sk 23.7 9 ottawa on 31.0 10 dartmouth ns 22.8 10 regina sk 23.7 rank company & corporate office total won ($m)1 1 bird construction company (mississauga on via winnipeg mb, richmond bc) 63.2 2 bondfield construction co. ltd. (concord on)2 60.9 3 corcan (ottawa on, via kingston on, abbotsford bc & riverview nb) 39.5 4 graham construction & engineering inc.(saskatoon sk) 32.5 5 maple-reinders inc. (edmonton ab) 26.0 6 elite construction inc. (concord on) 24.6 7 pcl construction management inc. (regina sk)* 23.7 8 maxim 2000 inc. (dartmouth ns) 21.4 9 upa concept a joint venture (calgary ab) 20.3 10 pomerleau inc. (st-georges qc) 19.9 greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 106 food, counselling and medical services (which tends to be widely distributed, though in much smaller amounts), prison construction contracts have gravitated in large chunks to a few big firms. thus, bird construction co. of mississauga, the top scorer here, won prison contracts worth about $63 million over eight years. with one exception, all the other firms on this list are high flyers in the construction industry. in fact, to be on this list would probably make any company a high flyer, since it usually involves winning one or more contracts worth about $20 million apiece. names like bondfield, graham, and maple-reinders should be familiar to anyone who has ever passed by a canadian construction site or highway project. pcl was in the news recently because its ceo made a point of telling his employees not to vote ndp in the 2015 alberta election (maki, 2015). most provinces – including alberta until recently – put few restrictions on corporate political donations, and it is easy to imagine that links forged at the provincial level might follow politicians who travel to the federal one (editorial, 2015). these connections point to the need for a broader study of the economic power and political influence of the construction industry in canada. but for now, it can simply be noted that these top 10 companies won 46% of all the prison contract dollars available, leaving the remainder to be split among 115 other companies. corcan – the federal agency that manages prisoner work programs – is the exception noted above, as it is not a private company. but its success in this area is a testament to csc’s continuing attempts to make prisoners into useful workers. corcan’s website highlights the historical precedents for having prisoners build prisons, starting with the construction of kingston penitentiary in 1835 (corcan, 2013). the csc review panel urged ottawa to adopt a more work-focused version of rehabilitation for prisoners – including apprenticeships with construction companies in particular (2007). so, mobilizing a very low-paid workforce to help with the prison expansion, in the guise of enhancing their work ethic, is a strategy that seems entirely consistent with conservative penal policy. but neither the extreme concentrations noted above, nor the plan to have prisoners build their own cages, is likely to improve a prison town’s chances of gaining local construction jobs. conclusion: decoupling and reclamation echoing the logic of the “conventional wisdom” in us prison debates of the 1980s and 1990s, public safety minister vic toews had promised that prison expansion would lead to local jobs and contracts. as has been shown above, later american evidence undercut that wisdom and cast doubt on the economic case for prison building. in canada, the case for local benefits is similarly weakened by the public service’s centralized hiring and purchasing practices, different tax and transfer payment arrangements, commuting prison invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 107 staff, and by the decision to add to existing prisons, rather than building entirely new ones. two elements of the “conventional wisdom” received little coverage above. the prospect that prison building might improve local infrastructure was not really investigated. but it was noted that prisons themselves are not infrastructure, as it is commonly understood. related improvements probably vary from prison to prison, and if inadequate measures are taken they can actually harm the local community by overloading sewers, roads, etc. (mcelligott, 2007). in any case, this kind of work was tallied with the construction contracts considered above, and, like them, was reduced by the decision not to build new prisons from scratch. another neglected source of potential benefits was the surge in prison visitors that might bolster local retailers. again, the incremental nature of canada’s prison construction reduced the new business potentially available from this source. if the system becomes further centralized (making visits more onerous), or if it follows provincial trends in adopting video visitation (possibly online, making travel unnecessary), gains from this source will be further reduced. but fundamentally this issue, like the infrastructure question, requires further study. the construction contracts analyzed above are clearly directly related to prison expansions, and they provide the best data available so far on incremental effects. non-construction tenders, as was mentioned, are much smaller than construction ones. total values for construction tenders were about 12 times higher from 2010-13 (merx, n.d.; mcelligott & piché, 2013). considering only the incremental effects of non-construction expansion (the additional amounts now required for food, clothing, etc.) would have meant dealing with even smaller numbers and much less reliable data. but what do the construction contracts reveal? as has been demonstrated above, construction contracts appeared to flow to about 25 of 32 prison towns, and government spokespeople played up this appearance. but very few of the companies who won the contracts were from the same prison town, and usually they were not even from the same province. in fact, construction contract winners were very concentrated in a few large metropoles and a few large companies. it was assumed on the basis of us experience – and this assumption might well be tested by future research – that outside ownership made local jobs and subcontracts much less likely. but this combination of apparent local benefits and more substantial outside ones has the effect of widening the web of interests with some connection to prison building. rather than just 25 or 32 prison towns, we can now count at least 125 companies with head offices in 74 towns in eight provinces and one territory. each of these can be said to have some sort of connection with prisons. more to the point, we can say that key parts of the construction industry, and many related ones, seem to have bought into prison expansion. the primary beneficiaries of their involvement are likely to be the ceos and greg mcelligott studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 108 owners of those companies, but, as ever, they will focus attention on job creation rather than profit levels. obviously not every contract dollar goes to ceos, but in recent years this group has been very adept at securing for themselves the greatest, and fastest-growing, share of whatever surplus is created (mackenzie, 2015). the fact that so many other towns and jobs appear to benefit only helps to legitimate their position, and that of the conservative politicians who see prison as the answer to so many social problems. it is important to note that all of this has been accomplished without the overt involvement of any private prison company. “public” prisons, it turns out, have always been reliant on the private sector, and construction projects clearly amplify this effect. but because the canadian companies involved are active in other fields, two interesting possibilities arise. first, it is clearly possible to shame corporations that are involved in unsavoury activities, but first they must be identified. in this case the next step would be to re-politicize prisons as “not just another infrastructure project,” so that prison building becomes a recognizably shameful activity. construction companies presumably care little what they build, as long as it is profitable and relatively practical. so why not make prison building uncomfortable, and encourage builders (and related interests) to focus on other projects? groups like end the prison industrial complex (epic) have already done substantial work in this direction, and epic inspired the research for this paper (see epic, n.d.). broadly speaking, the task here is to decouple prison expansion from the private interests that support it. decoupling in the context of something like the current liberal infrastructure program would obviously be easier for the affected companies to accept. if billions of construction dollars are raining down in other areas, there would be much less reason to focus on prison projects. on the other hand, if prison funds were re-routed to building pipelines or military bases, this would not be much of a victory for those concerned with social justice. and in fact, if the results above had turned out differently, and prison funds actually stayed in the local community, this would not have been much of a step forward either. in that case, more communities would have had a deeper stake in the perpetuation of an expensive, unjust and destructive system. yet even asking about alternative uses for prison funds means dealing seriously with the opportunities foregone when billions of public dollars are pumped into prisons. hospitals, schools, recreation centres, roads, sewers, green energy – any of these might conceivably engage a constellation of interests similar to those now supporting prisons, and many would be more effective at preventing crime, reducing victimization, or serving other public goods. a more serious effort at decarceration and sentencing reform might envision reclaiming prisons as socially useful public spaces. conversion and retrofitting could occupy the building trades, and likely direct more traffic to local businesses. a group called yes, in my backyard is cataloguing the wide variety of conversion projects now underway in the us (see yimby, n.d.). these are remaking prisons into drug rehab, training and community centres, invested in prisons studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 86-112, 2017 109 homeless shelters, sports facilities, affordable housing, theatres and so on, but many other possibilities are conceivable. and projects of this sort are likely more amenable to community input, and thus more conducive to creating real local benefits, than any prison initiative. in short, the prospects for social justice in this field depend on decoupling interests and reclaiming existing prison sites. the counter-narrative offered by the harper conservatives, which tried to engage prison towns with stories of local contracts and local benefits, is misleading in both respects. acknowledgements my thanks to david butz and the anonymous reviewers of this paper, who all offered extraordinarily thoughtful and supportive suggestions for improving its earlier drafts. references alexander, m. 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(2010, september 1). two alberta prisons get $50m to expand. calgary herald. retrieved august 2010 from http://calgary420.ca/forum/index.php?topic=2979.0;wap2 villegas et al final correspondence address: paloma e. villegas, department of sociology, california state university san bernardino, san bernardino, ca 92407, usa; email: paloma.villegas@csusb.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 contesting settler colonial accounts: temporality, migration and place-making in scarborough, ontario paloma e. villegas california state university, san bernardino, usa patricia landolt university of toronto, canada victoria freeman independent scholar, toronto, canada joe hermer university of toronto, canada ranu basu york university, canada bojana videkanic university of waterloo, canada abstract the paper considers how the logic of settler colonialism, the active and ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples, shapes scholarship on migration, race and citizenship in canada. it draws on the insights of settler colonial theory and critiques of methodological nationalism to do so. the concept of differential inclusion and assemblages methodology are proposed as a way to understand the relationship between indigeneity and migration in a settler colonial context. the paper develops this conceptual proposal through an analysis of a single place over time: scarborough, ontario. authors present portraits of scarborough, ontario, canada to understand how migration and indigenous sovereignty are narrated and regulated in convergent and divergent ways. together, the portraits examine historical stories, media discourses, photography and map archives, fieldwork and interviews connected to scarborough. they reveal how the differential inclusion of migrant, racialized and indigenous peoples operates through processes of invisibilization and paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 322 hypervisibilization, fixity and erasure, and memorialization. they also illustrate moments of disruption that work to unsettle settler colonial dispossession. keywords differential inclusion; assemblage methodology; migration; indigenous sovereignty; methodological nationalism; knowledge production introduction the truth and reconciliation commission of canada (2015) and canada’s sesquicentennial commemorations of 2017 re-ignited debates about the relationship between indigenous sovereignty, migration and settlerhood. for scholars of migration, racialization and citizenship, the discussions centred two concerns: how does settler colonialism mediate the way our research understands indigenous sovereignty; and, what dialogue and knowledge might help disrupt the influence of settler colonialism on our research field. in 2017, villegas and landolt organized the interdisciplinary workshop crossing scarborough to facilitate a discussion about the presence of settler colonialism in migration scholarship and to contribute to answering these questions. villegas and landolt then led a collaborative writing process to examine the connections across co-authors’ research, and identified the concept of differential inclusion and assemblages methodology as starting points for challenging this mediation. crossing scarborough brought together scholars from sociology, history, geography, law, art, and education to examine indigenous and settler presence, mobilities, and migration relationally, over time and at a single site. our focus was on what is now known as scarborough, ontario; a site that has been actively inhabited by different nations and peoples for the last 15,000 years. we continued and extended our conversations to write this paper and considered reviewer feedback to engage with the contributions of indigenous scholars. in particular, assemblages methodology allows us to juxtapose and interweave threads of social life that occur at different points in time to understand the matrices of power of settler colonialism. the concept of differential inclusion helps theorize how the hierarchies of social relations operate in a settler colonial context (casa cortes et al., 2015). we demonstrate how indigenous, settler and “arrivant” individuals and collectivities are hierarchically classified, sorted and included in canada’s nation-building project in ways that produce variable degrees of inclusion and exclusion, precarity, and subordination. the paper is organized into four sections. the first section reviews relevant literature and presents our theoretical and methodological proposal. the second section describes scarborough, emphasizing its characteristics as a temporally complex and multi-scalar research site (cf. cowen, 2020). it discusses diverse moments, migrations and settlements that have shaped present day scarborough in order to emphasize the layers of social relations contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 323 that constitute the place. this is followed by a presentation of the four portraits that emerged from the workshop. the portraits demonstrate how differential inclusion operates in a settler colonial state. the discussion links the four portraits and the conclusion expands on the conceptual and methodological contributions. settler colonialism and migration scholarship a central challenge for scholars of migration, citizenship, and racialization is to understand and undo the longstanding symbiosis that exists between the temporal and socio-spatial logic of settler colonialism and our fields of study. settler colonial theory specifically its analysis of temporality and sociospatialities, and critiques of methodological nationalism serve as a starting point for this assessment. the concept of differential inclusion and assemblages methodology are proposed as a way to unsettle the temporal and socio-spatial logics of dispossession and erasure that currently informs a lot of research on migration and citizenship. as an invasive structure of power, settler colonialism operates through a distinct temporal and socio-spatial logic to continually and permanently eliminate and replace indigenous societies physically, culturally, and spiritually (coulthard, 2014; wolfe, 2006). scholars argue that settler colonial temporality constructs a foundational timeline that annuls the prior and ongoing presence of indigenous peoples and locates the settler-state in a past that is prior to all (asch, 2002; povinelli, 2011). they point to the colonial-era doctrine of terra nullius or vacant land as the defining sociospatial logic of settler colonialism. the doctrine holds that lands were uninhabited or that indigenous societies were sufficiently inferior to presume vacancy (asch, 2002). this rationale legitimizes continual dispossession, through forced relocations, land seizures, treaties, and other colonial practices to ensure settler access and control over land and resources (wolfe, 2006). as a result, the settler-state narrates nation-state formation as an always forwardlooking process or settler futurity (tuck & gaztambide-fernandez, 2013). in this case, it narrates canada as a nation of immigrants, a place in which new peoples are constantly arriving to settle a land vacant of indigenous peoples. indigenous and anti-racist scholars present important critiques that demonstrate the operation of settler colonialism in different social science disciplines and research fields (byrd, 2011; lawrence & dua, 2005; sharma & wright, 2008; simpson, 2014; tuck & yang, 2012). of particular relevance to our discussions is scholarship that centres the politics of decolonization (lawrence & dua, 2005; tuck & yang, 2012). lawrence and dua (2005) argue that anti-racist scholars are implicated in the maintenance of settler colonialism through a lack of recognition of the complex relationships between indigenous peoples, european settlers, migrants, and racialized peoples. they argue that all migrants have historically been and paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 324 continue to be settler colonizers: intentional or unwitting participants in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. other scholars nuance this argument, pushing for recognition of the global structures of power that organize migration flows. byrd (2011) proposes the term arrivant rather than migrant. these alternative terminologies emphasize that the transatlantic slave trade and other colonial and imperial practices of dispossession and exploitation produce different forms of forced migrations that are not easily collapsed into the singular notion of settler (dhamoon, 2015; sharma & wright, 2008). another research strand rejects settler colonialism as a fait accompli and foregrounds indigenous presence and refusal. scholars examine the politics of indigenous refusal and contestation to illustrate settler colonialism’s failure to eliminate indigenous lives and sovereignties. they centre indigenous survivance (vizenor, 1998), the active process of surviving and working against settler colonialism, and ongoing projects for decolonization (tuck & yang, 2012). they also examine indigenous futurity (macoun & strakosch, 2013; tuck & gaztambide-fernandez, 2013). indigenous scholars challenge liberal nationalism’s ideal of social inclusion as a viable and desirable alternative and call for a refusal of liberal recognition from and inclusion into the settler state (alfred, 2005; coulthard, 2014; simpson, 2014; volpp, 2015). scholars also document the population management strategies of the canadian state (bhatia, 2013; bohaker & iacovetta, 2009; cowen, 2020). bohaker and iacovetta (2009) examine postwar programs of the department of citizenship and immigration that targeted immigrants and indigenous peoples for assimilation into liberal citizenship. they argue that a “we are all immigrants” narrative was used to deny aboriginal rights and manage the presence of indigenous peoples in canada and their pathway to citizenship. similarly, backhouse (1999) traces the legal history of racial categories, such as “eskimo” and “indian,” and their attachment to different populations. bhatia (2013) examines the ways canadian immigration laws breach treaty relations and prevent the exercise of indigenous sovereignties. similarly, critical migration scholars examine their research field’s longstanding attachment to methodological nationalism; a research paradigm that naturalizes the nation-state, equates society with the nation-state and national territory, and conflates the national interest with the purpose of the social sciences (wimmer & glick schiller, 2003, p. 576; see also de genova, 2013; hayden, 2018; meeus, 2012). methodological nationalism dovetails with the temporal and socio-spatial logic of settler colonialism through an investment in a specific version of the nation-state that aligns with settler colonial narratives of place-making and bordering. as a result, it renders movement across westphalian borders as exceptions to the rule of immobility (de genova, 2013). at the same time, pre-colonial migrations and movements across borders of relevance to indigenous peoples and nations, forms of movement that do not cross these international borders, are deemed irrelevant to understanding social dislocation and adaptation (brown, 2018). contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 325 methodological nationalism also imposes a socio-spatial logic of fixed attachments in which particular people are associated with or fixed to specific places and apart from other places and people. echoing the mechanisms of indigenous dispossession tied to settler futurity, migration scholars invested in methodological nationalism conceptualize social life as a linear arrangement in which people move from a place of no-history, through migration to a condition of foreignness and non-citizenship, to citizenship and national membership or lack thereof (landolt et al., forthcoming; meeus, 2012). differential inclusion & assemblages methodology the concept of differential inclusion and assemblages methodology help weaken the links tying scholarship on race, citizenship and migration to the epistemic order of settler colonialism. they specify how matrices of power operate in the liberal settler colonial moment in ways that toggle between inclusion-recognition and exclusion-rejection. first, the concept of differential inclusion reveals how settler colonialism creates interpellated hierarchies of settler-migrations and indigenous dispossession. differential inclusion rejects binary understandings of inclusion/exclusion and emphasizes the underlying violence of both. it understands inclusion as a hierarchical, partial and conditional process that is contingent on the socio-spatial and temporal context. the concept reveals the classificatory systems imposed by nation-building projects that sort individuals and collectivities into different types of populations on the basis of legal status, race, class and other interlocking facets of oppression (casascortes et al., 2015). differential inclusion produces variable degrees of precarity, subordination, disenfranchisement and exploitation, as well as variable degrees of inclusion and recognition. inclusion and erasure occur together through the twin dynamics of invisibilization and hypervisibility in which individuals and communities experience limited representation or heightened negative representation. differential inclusion also constitutes some places as precarious and others as privileged, certain and stable (banki, 2013). it creates conditional spatialities (tazzioli, 2014) and mobility rich and mobility poor individuals and collectivities (wilson & weber, 2008). second, we employ assemblage as a methodological tool (baker & mcguirk, 2017) to analyze how settler colonialism produces a matrix of power characterized by indigenous dispossession, racialization and multicultural recognition. assemblages thinking apprehends social life as constituted dynamically by heterogeneous material and discursive components (ong & collier, 2005, p. 4) that come together to produce complex configurations of power. components have different temporal and spatial scales (de landa, 2006) and operate under constant negotiation (villegas, 2014). as components are assembled, they produce variable and paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 326 indeterminate multi-scalar effects and interactions (delanda, 2006; deleuze & guattari, 2005; ong & collier, 2005). power is conceptualized as a matrix of structured contingencies and indeterminacies, pointing to the need to analyze the intricacies of variable components and their assembling, reroutings and unexpected consequences over time (saldanha, 2012). employing assemblage methodology encourages consideration of diverse material and discursive fragments of social life as constitutive elements in the production of differential inclusion within settler colonialism, and of the constant possibilities by which matrices of power can be substantiated, congealed or unsettled. concretely, it encourages interdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge production, which emerges as a valuable strategy to break the analytical silos of methodological nationalism and its investments in settler colonialism. it also encourages identification of diverse components that may come together to produce settler colonial differential inclusion. in turn, the fragmentary and relational notion of power developed through the concept of differential inclusion connects with the idea of “settlerhood as an object that subjects possess” and to the framing of settlerhood as a matrix of power (dhamoon, 2015, p. 25; see also madokoro, 2019). assemblages methodology erodes the temporality and sociospatialities of settler colonialism that locate populations only in the present or the past, and occurring in orderly sequence and somehow separate and distinct from each other. it permits us to reframe settler colonialism as a web of social relations that connects differently included individuals and collectivities, including indigenous/migrant/settler/arrivant, in complex and dynamic ways. as we illustrate below, the crossing scarborough workshop explored the discursive and material production, policing, and rendering of scarborough and its peoples over time. drawing on the concept of differential inclusion and the analytical possibilities of assemblages methodology, we reveal the workings of settler colonialism and affirm the utility of developing differential inclusion and assemblages methodology as tools for unsettling migration scholarship. crossing scarborough scarborough, now an inner suburb of toronto, ontario, has always been a place of crossing, migration and settlement (gidigaa migizi & simpson, 2018). over thousands of years, different indigenous nations and language groups have lived apart and together, intermarrying and travelling between what is now known as georgian bay and lake ontario. these experiences are part of the oral traditions that inform indigenous presence and relations with the place (methot, 2016). gidigaa migizi & simpson (2018) explain that “the north shore of lake ontario and nearly every river that flowed into lake ontario is the traditional territory of the michi saagiig nishnaabeg... and that the aayadowaad (huron) lived among us with our permission” (p. 29). they contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 327 recount, “we were the shoreline people and they were the agricultural, field, gardening people” (p. 30). indigenous scholars recognize varying interpretations of traditional territorial demarcations and their relevance for contemporary relations among indigenous peoples and between indigenous peoples and the canadian state (marche, 2017; methot, 2016; younging, 2018). settler colonial place-making first named the place glasgow (1793) and later scarborough (1796). there are two particularly important elements to note from the 19th century european settler colonial histories of the region. on the one hand, the area was consistently described as an empty land and a pastoral paradise to be ordered and inhabited (freeman, 2010; hermer, 2002). on the other hand, the area is part of the williams treaties of 1923, widely viewed as one of the worst treaties in canada because of the rapidity and mendacity with which it was imposed (see portrait by hermer below). monuments visibilizing, celebrating, and commemorating the settler colonial account of the land and its taming are present throughout the region. the settler account is woven into the landscape, enshrining the successes of canadian elites as the common national heritage (cowen, 2020). there is also a profound absence of consideration for what the politics of the williams treaties of 1923 signify for peoples and relations on the land. in the post-world war ii period, industrial development transformed scarborough into a modern suburban utopia for middle-class and ascendant working-class white families. yet the suburban landscape and its distance from the downtown core led urbanites to reject its sanitized ethos and rename it scarberia. in subsequent decades, city planners identified scarborough as a site for social housing projects for a growing population of racialized immigrants and refugees. scarborough also faced government disinvestment and limited social services as compared to downtown toronto, leading to depictions of the area as an inner suburb, a coupling of inner city and suburban characterizations (cowen & parlette, 2011). scarborough is often represented in janus-faced terms: as a vibrant multicultural immigrant gateway and a dangerous and impoverished place – a scarlem – that houses the city's racialized working poor (basu & fiedler, 2017; gillmor, 2007; videkanic, 2017; villegas, 2018). this creates a simultaneous hypervisibility of negative representations linking place and race and migration processes (villegas, 2018), and an invisibility and erasure of the social and economic exclusions faced by area residents. in the seventies, global migrations transformed scarborough once again. racialized and migrant families with ties and relations in the caribbean, south asia, east asia, and africa began to make scarborough home. a growing number of indigenous peoples also started to take up residence in the area (abebe et al., 2019). their collective presence and transnational connections shaped the landscape of contemporary scarborough. local residents created political, civic and faith-based organizations (basu, 2017), restaurants and ethnic malls, and organized public events and festivals (e.g., paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 328 taste of lawrence, tamil fest) and community-engaged, resident-led projects (basu, 2017; east scarborough storefront, n.d.). a network of social services designed for indigenous and racialized or migrant residents including community health centres, clinics, service hubs, immigrant settlement services was also established (canadian centre for refugee & immigrant healthcare, n.d.; east scarborough storefront, n.d.; native child & family services of toronto, n.d.; toronto central health line, n.d.; toronto east quadrant local immigration partnership, n.d.). recent fiction situated in scarborough illustrates these rich and diverse experiences (chariandy, 2017; hernandez, 2017). in what follows, we present four portraits that illustrate the development of scarborough through an investment in settler colonial place-making and differential inclusion. this investment involves interlocking practices of erasure, dispossession, historicization, memorialization, and architecture. the four portraits illustrate how indigenous sovereignty and presence, settler colonial presence, and migration flows are interpellated in discursive and material forms. the portraits also offer examples of practices that unsettle and disrupt an investment in settler colonialism and methodological nationalism. the mother of scarboro by victoria freeman in march, 1796, david thomson and his wife found their way hither, apparently having followed the indian trail which was subsequently opened as a highway and known as the danforth road. (boyle, 1896, p. 26) david and mary thomson are memorialized as the founders of scarborough. the presence of david and mary thomson and their descendants is ubiquitous (see figure 1). they are honoured in the naming of david and mary thomson collegiate and thomson memorial park, commemorated on their joint tombstone in the cemetery of st. andrew’s presbyterian church, and in the collections of the scarborough historical museum, all situated on lands that were formerly part of their family property. the story of mary thomson, the “mother of scarboro,” was related in the memorial volume the township of scarboro 1796-1896, published in 1896 to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the city. it was edited by david boyle, the first official archaeologist of ontario and the founder and curator of the provincial museum, a precursor to the royal ontario museum. contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 329 figure 1. photograph of the thomson family 100th anniversary reunion on the thomson property, 1896. (reproduced with permission.) in boyle’s edited collection, mary thomson’s story was written by mary agnes fitzgibbon, founder and secretary of the women’s canadian historical society. incorporated in 1896, the women’s canadian historical society encouraged the collection and preservation of canadian historical records and relics, and “the building up of canadian loyalty and patriotism” (women’s canadian historical society, 1896, p. 2). these aims were similar to those of other historical societies then proliferating across ontario as middle-class women sought to participate in the project of nation-building from their legal position as second-class citizens (gunn, 2016, p. 3). in honouring pioneer women such as mary thomson, women historians established the moral and historical claims of euro-canadians to the land and simultaneously used the stories of “brave and independent female pioneers” to fight for women’s rights (gunn, 2016; morgan, 2001, p. 13). fitzgibbon highlights mary thomson’s bravery as a pioneer woman, alone in her “forest log-house” while her husband worked during the week in the then distant town of york, only returning each saturday night to bring provisions. as fitzgibbon recounts: during these first seven months of their life in the township, mrs. thomson had not seen another of her own sex, until one day an indian woman came into the cottage… the face was strange, the language spoken unintelligible, but mrs. thomson welcomed her gladly. albeit, of an alien race and color, they were women, and they understood one another by the freemasonry of sympathy paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 330 divinely implanted in the breast of woman. (boyle, 1896, p. 34) in this description, the settler woman is named and it is she who welcomes the indigenous woman. the indigenous woman is not named; she is strange and unintelligible – alien on this land. where she lives, what becomes of her, or what she thought about the encounter with mary thomson remains unknown. yet, according to the story, for a moment the two women meet and “understand” each other in a tacit sisterhood – a sympathy divinely implanted. fitzgibbon’s narrative of sisterhood temporarily bridges the divide between indigenous person and settler, further legitimizing the settler’s place on the new land and indigenizing the settler woman. as mary thomson “welcomes the stranger gladly” the settler woman takes the indigenous woman’s place; replacement occurs without the need for violence (johnston & lawson, 2000, p. 364). through the hardships of pioneer life, mary thomson is narrated to produce a sense of indigenous authenticity (johnston & lawson, 2000, p. 369). the encounter of the sisterhood also echoes the longstanding settler colonial narrative of indigenous people welcoming settlers. like the toronto coat of arms that until 1997 portrayed a mississauga warrior on one side of the crest and the female figure of britannia on the other, the assertion of mary thomson and the indigenous woman’s sisterhood portrays them as willing partners in the settling of scarborough. the reality of indigenous-settler relations in the toronto and scarborough areas in the mid-1790s was far more complex than this romanticized view. while there are other documented friendly encounters between settler women and indigenous individuals from the 1790s, smallpox and alcohol were already wreaking havoc in the region. the september 1796 murder of mississauga chief wabakinine on the toronto waterfront after the attempted sexual assault of his sister by an off-duty british soldier sparked widespread mississauga outrage and demands for justice in the very same month as the women’s encounter. fearing that the mississaugas, with the help of a broad alliance of western indigenous nations, could wipe out the british at what was then a remote outpost, colonial administrators called for a considerable shipment of arms, the construction of a blockhouse, military settlement along strategic routes into york, and secret instructions to the first indian agent at york to “foment jealousy” and mistrust between the mississaugas and the haudenosaunee to break up their alliance. the mississaugas were also realizing that their 1787 and 1788 agreements to share land, in which they were promised that the settlers would help them and that they could hunt and fish as before, were viewed by settlers as extinguishing all indigenous rights to the lands in question (johnson, 1990, pp. 234-238). if mary thomson and the indigenous (likely mississauga) woman did indeed share a moment of connection, it was in the context of various forms of colonial violence in which they were both enmeshed. contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 331 figure 2. township of scarborough inscription. (photograph of dedication in boyle, 1896). the encounter was further memorialized in the epitaph on the thomson family tombstone (see figure 2). located in st. andrews bendale, presbyterian church and cemetery in scarborough, the tombstone reads: in memory of mary thomson, the mother of scarboro, who died the 8th november, 1847. aged 80 years. here her remains repose side by side with those of her husband david thomson, whose gravestone tells the land of their nativity and when they settled in scarboro, which was then a wilderness. on the opposite bank of the passing rivulet, a little above this burial-ground, they built their lonely cottage, and there they contended successfully against the hardships paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 332 of a forest life; and there she passed the first seven months after their settlement without seeing a woman and the first was an indian. as her husband, she lived and died respected, leaving behind her 100 descendants. (boyle, 1896, p. 39) in this portrayal, the settler woman is almost biblical in her begetting, populating the new settler nation. the indigenous woman’s descendants are unknown, her presence remains in the past and does not populate the present. mary’s one hundred descendants, in contrast, are woven into the tapestry of the national family. in the rhetoric of maternal imperialism, mary thomson is to be remembered as an iconic “mother of the race.” we do not know where the indigenous woman is buried or if anyone remembers her. this remembrance articulates who is to be included – and who excluded – as legitimate and rightful citizens of canada (gunn, 2016, p. 29). on stolen land: the miller lash estate and the williams treaties of 1923 by joe hermer the miller lash estate, erected in 1913, is an example of colonizing developments that occurred on stolen land (see figure 3). its construction, evolving utility, and the settler accounts of these processes inscribe the land in ways that belie its violent history and present. there are two different and yet intertwined histories that weave together the place-making that occurs on and through this site. figure 3. photograph of the miller lash estate, 1913. (reproduced with permission.) in 1911 toronto bay street lawyer and businessman miller lash bought 375 acres along highland creek and by 1913 built a 17 room mansion. the contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 333 miller lash estate ran as a working farm that included a mill on the creek, a coach house and arboretum. in 1944, after lash’s death, insurance businessman e. l. mcleod bought the estate, installed an olympic-size swimming pool and held the property until 1963 when the university of toronto bought it for their new scarborough campus (university of toronto scarborough, n.d.a). the university of toronto scarborough (utsc) opened three years later. the mansion was used for some time as the residence of utsc principals, and the grounds for athletic events. in the early 1990s scarborough college renovated the house and it is now used for college functions, and is rented out for weddings and a remarkable number of film productions. a perennial memorialization of the settler colonizer’s account of the land occurs through the miller lash estate. presently, there are several historical plaques on the grounds of the estate that celebrate settler activity on the land. most notably, there is a 1977 plaque (see figure 4) erected by the university that tells the story of an inquisitive miller lash out on a placid drive through the countryside. in the account, which may be told as a legend, miller lash is described as a stranger to the landscape. he is struck by its picturesque qualities during his leisurely sunday drive down what is now old kingston road. the result is an origin story, tinged with nostalgia, of a natural place discovered as a contrast to urban life and commerce. and yet despite the fact that the text has the authority and the format of historical memorialization, the story may not even be true. here we see the arrogance and entitlement of settler history, in this case as expressed by the university. while indigenous peoples in the area have, for example, been told that their oral histories of the land will not be accepted in court actions, settler institutions can produce authoritative text through the memorialization of a miller lash legend that may be entirely fictional. the 2019 university of toronto scarborough website echoes the 1977 settler account of the land. in a description meant to introduce virtual visitors (including prospective students) to the campus, it describes “our story” as follows: university of toronto scarborough has modest roots as a turn-of-the-century summer escape from the city heat of muddy york – as toronto was then nicknamed – for local businessman miller lash. from scenic, pastoral paradise to world-renowned centre of innovation and inspired learning, this is the story of this campus. (university of toronto scarborough, n.d.b) again we see the appearance of the legend of the discovery of a pastoral paradise. the legend can erase thousands of years of indigenous physical, spiritual and cultural presence, which is subsumed into a natural wildness and disorder that can be tamed and transformed. the arts and crafts style of miller’s mansion and outbuildings remains today as a profound visual reminder of how the crafted natural landscape (highland creek stones and paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 334 local hewn timbers) is now exclusively understood as a celebration of settler pioneer commerce and leisure. figure 4. 1977 coach house plaque on the miller lash estate (photo: joe hermer). the settler account obscures colonial dispossession and specifically the 90 year long indigenous political battle over the lands that include the miller lash estate. in 1916 r.v. sinclair was appointed by the federal minister of justice to investigate claims and complaints from the mississaugas and chippewas that widespread settlement, resource extraction and harvesting was occurring on traditional lands that had not been legally transferred by indigenous peoples to the government. in his report, sinclair (1916) confirmed that “the indian title to these lands has never been extinguished and i am of the opinion that some arrangements should be made for quieting the title.” in effect, miller lash – who “purchased” the lands in 1913 – had bought land the province had stolen from indigenous people for development. the sinclair file lay dormant for three years, until 1921 when the provincial and federal governments appointed ottawa lawyer a.s. williams to follow up. on october 10th, 1923, williams filed his report confirming sinclair’s account and documenting a tract of approximately 13 million acres of unceded land in southern and central ontario.1 the two levels of government moved with remarkable speed, and within 22 days williams had 1 unceded land refers to traditional indigenous territories that were not signed into treaty. indigenous peoples entered into treaty agreements to share the land and not to relinquish their rights and traditional relationship to the land (younging, 2018). contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 335 personally secured all necessary signatures. the williams treaties were signed in october and november 1923 by the government of canada and ontario, and by seven first nations: the chippewas of beausoleil, georgina island and rama, and the mississaugas of alderville, curve lake, hiawatha (https://williamstreatiesfirstnations.ca/; see also surtees, 1986). there are three features of the williams treaties of 1923 that are particularly important to note. first, the treaty was intentionally rushed with little real care or consideration for overlaps between it and pre-existing rights and treaties, including the treaty 20 area settled in 1818. further, the williams treaties are the only treaties in canada that extinguished all traditional harvesting, fishing and hunting rights. third is its naked financial exploitation. the williams treaties made a one-time payment of $500,000 with no annual payments, and no additional reserve land. of the $500,000 each of the 1,350 members of the seven signatories were to be paid $25, just under $34,000 in total. payment was not made directly to the members. instead, funds were given to indian agents to disperse. the remaining $466,000 was to be split between the seven reserves. the actual funds were sent to the superintendent general of indian affairs to be held in trust for each of the seven signatory nations. no one actually knows what happened to these $466,000. williams and his commissioners on the other hand were paid a stipend of $100 dollars a day when working on treaty business (blair, 2008). at the conclusion of the williams treaties in 1923, ontario premier howard ferguson stated with relief and certainty, “every tribe that could possibly have a claim on the white man’s government has now been taken care of” (surtees, 1986). yet almost as soon as it was signed, the williams treaties became the subject of fierce legal action. the seven signatories have argued for decades that it was an underhanded treaty obtained by mendacity and trickery. the signatories were not allowed lawyers in signing the treaties and there was substantive evidence that williams and indian agents assured indigenous leaders that their harvesting rights in particular would be protected. this was buttressed by the belief that treaty 20, which overlapped with the williams treaties lands, would continue to protect traditional harvesting rights. it took nine years before the seven signatory nations got a copy of the actual treaty agreement. in 1992 the seven signatories sued the federal government in what is known as the alderville action. the case sat in the courts for 24 years until may 2017 when the federal and provincial government along with the seven signatories announced that they would move to a negotiated settlement, ending the lawsuit (government of canada, 2018; williams treaties first nations, 2019). the memorialization of the miller lash estate is a standard practice of erasure of indigenous presence in park settings or emparked landscapes. it echoes the experiences of ipperwash park, banff national park and stanley park. the exclusion and erasure of indigenous histories is both ideological and instrumental. it is ideological in making a pastoral paradise that evokes paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 336 euro-canadian community, unchanging values and national sentiment. it relies on a temporally narrow settler colonial view of nature, predicated on limitless exploitation, serendipity and convenient leisure. it is instrumental in acting as a site from which finely detailed forms of social control and banishment can occur where unwanted bodies, cultures and knowledge are erased. settler colonial erasure and dispossession, however, are continually unsettled through the enduring political demands of the williams treaties nations who continued to press titles and rights up to 2017. scarborough as sub/urban/altern cosmopolitanism by ranu basu as a long-time community member, migrant-settler and urban-scholar living nearly three decades in scarborough, i have observed, studied, and here reflect ethnographically on the changing dynamics of this part of the city. i start from the idea that a city-building movement needs a contested mode of analysis (basu, 2019) that demonstrates and challenges hierarchies of space and their close entanglement with the hierarchies of racialized, exiled, and class divides. i do so in conversation with the insights of saidiya hartman (2019) who writes about the intimate lives of young black women in turn of the century philadelphia and new york city. in wayward lives, hartman (2019) considers the rich landscape of black social life as everyday struggles focused on radical imaginations intoxicated with freedom. hartman considers the ways these multidimensional lives are flattened and dismissed into a social void by neglect and oppression (2019, p. 8). hartman’s observations resonate with the experiences of scarborough as a place that has been planned and neglected, constructed into a social void, and with the complexity of the lives erased and stigmatized through invisibilization and hypervisibilization. at the same time, scarborough has been home to a heterogeneity of racialized migrant/asylum (non-citizen) working class and indigenous communities whose radical imagination constitutes a rich sub/urban/altern cosmopolitan space (i.e., suburban, subaltern, cosmopolitan) (basu et al., 2013; basu & fiedler, 2017). the socio-spatial heterogeneity of scarborough is reflected in the diverse landscape and place-making practices that are interwoven into the informal political infrastructure of the city.2 the ethnocultural landscape is richly diverse both in the range and scale of public spaces and services offered at the grassroots level – from community organizations for the elderly to congregate and socialize; provision of international language classes for children in the basements of social housing complexes; after-school homework clubs and resume-writing workshops in mosques, churches and gurudwaras; medicinal ayurvedic and naturopathic remedies in local grocery 2 in 2016 the population of scarborough was 632,095, 57% were foreign-born and 40% had arrived after 2001; 73% of the population was categorized as “visible minority” (city of toronto strategic initiatives, 2018). contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 337 stores; palmistry-planners and income-tax consultants renting spaces at the back of local corner stores; reggae record shops with rhythmic beats and lyrics spilling into the streetscapes. the socio-cultural and economic infrastructural realities of how migrant spaces have been produced in scarborough and the rhythmic contours of its everyday life provide a counterhegemonic narrative to the logics of a rationally defined settler-neoliberal city. these are spaces of “intoxicated freedom.” this spatial assertion of such institutional practices is often the result of neoliberal state-level exclusionary norms – whether in the domain of education, health, employment or community investment. yet, the urban form, function, and imaginary of contemporary scarborough are under continuous scrutiny and simultaneous oblivion (basu, 2019; basu & fiedler, 2017). in the early 1980s, scarborough was narrated as a quiet, mostly uneventful suburb. in later years the increasing presence of migrants in the area coincided with the idea of scarborough as a place of potential violence and random criminal acts. media coverage, for instance, first described violent crimes – robbery, domestic violence, and other crime – as isolated incidents. these slowly assumed the character of endemic conditions brought on by the area’s residents. scarborough came to be seen as a failure of modernist planning, as unpalatable and “a distasteful, aesthetically bleak, bland and dangerous landscape” with cartographic shadings bordering on “neurotic” (toronto star, 2008; ormsby, 2009). its spatial (and racial) representation continues to be ridiculed with nicknames such as scarberia, scarlem, and scarblackistan, and described as a “zit” and an “urban blandness verging on blight” (dimanno, 2007). these practices of denigration and criminalisation combine with ideas about the everyday as unexceptional to create the dystopian city – a place that is in constant need of repair, fixing and reform. such erasure is strategically achieved through the dismissal of any kind of creative agency, cultural autonomy or conscious appreciation of the complexity of sub/altern cosmopolitanism that links to hartman’s idea of lives lived, radical imaginations and intoxicating freedom. these are active modes of suppression (hartman, 2019). erasure also takes the form of racial violence and hypervisibility as in the example that follows. on october 2nd, 2018 the third floor of scarborough’s radisson hotel that temporarily housed 577 refugee claimants, the majority from nigeria, was torched by a group of white supremacists (huffington post, 2018). anti-refugee sentiment had been circulating for a while including through online videos taken secretly of the residents of the hotel by white nationalists. their media coverage offered derogatory and offensive remarks – casting doubt, maligning the refugee claimants, their safety, and their sense of security (gunn reid, 2018; levy, 2018). emboldened by the recent election of premier doug ford of the progressive conservative party, arsonists attacked the refugees. yet, juxtaposing such violent modes of erasure, scarborough has proven to be a compelling counter-hegemonic force that has challenged the ideations of paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 338 such hate-based movements. scarborough and its residents create complex spaces of encounter, civic engagement, and grounded experiences of a vibrant subaltern cosmopolitan public. as alluded to earlier, residents have developed wide ranging and heterogeneous forms of public spaces, from economic, socio-cultural to political spaces of engagement (see figure 5). figure 5. space of encounter (photo: ranu basu). migrants talk about and understand these spaces as places of refuge and peace, of memory, desire and imagination, civic engagement and fluid resistance (basu et al., 2013). for example, at harmony house community centre, seniors come together to sing in bengali, cantonese and tamil. their multifarious musical practices are filled with joy and pride as they share in the celebration of important cultural events (e.g., new years’ day, independence day, paila baishak (beginning of spring), among others). the unique black presence through the caribbean migrant community (particularly from guyana, jamaica, and trinidad and tobago) is similarly culturally embedded in the landscape and part of the broader spatial imaginary. it is here that first instances of toronto’s international celebrations of caribana (a cultural and political carnival event) are rehearsed and practiced in the streetscapes of local communities. bangladeshi women’s organizations similarly have successfully organized precarious workers for better working conditions and living wages in collaboration with non-status workers, and have rallied in support with other racialized workers and labour unions in dialogue with the state. such collective and diverse spaces of regular community engagement have over the years provided the venue and opportunity for empowerment and consciousness raising, not only within scarborough but beyond. contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 339 a transnational form of solidarity and activist event relates to the tamil protest movement. in 2009, the tamil protest movement gained momentum and support from diverse parties originating in the heartland of scarborough. from local grocery stores to restaurants, messages to the broader public on the violence in sri lanka were made evident on storefronts and other public spaces. as of 2018, a large street festival on one of the main arterial roads of scarborough is organized by the tamil community and attracts over 200,000 attendees from across the gta. the heterogeneity is deeply cosmopolitan in its form and practice, engaging a wider public in these festivities. scarborough is a city of multifariousness, what hartman refers to as a place of intoxicating freedom. through these heterogeneous place-making practices, it forms a city of integrative multiplicity (basu, 2017; basu et al, 2013); a heterotopic space that is complex, diverse and sophisticated in its political realm and public spaces, and finely attuned to the practices of exclusion and dispossession that limit its possibilities. the guild of all the arts: unsettling history by bojana videkanic lee maracle’s (2000) poem “war” offers a way to think about unsettling the stillness of history. “to re-write history with my body” (maracle, 2000, p. 65) is to offer one’s embodiment, one’s being-in-one’s-own-body, as a tool for reconsidering history. in other words, maracle’s presence, her life, her witnessing-by-living as an indigenous woman rewrites settler colonial history. a similar reclaiming and rewriting of history happened in 2017 when cree/saulteaux artist lori blondeau produced a series of performance art interventions at the guild park and gardens in scarborough.3 blondeau’s performance-cum-photographic series is titled pakwâci wâpisk (2017).4 in it blondeau creates powerful gestures of remembering and offering symbols of indigenous sovereignty. each photograph in the series shows the artist following a different conceptual strategy: she places herself at specific sites, donning a long red velvet dress that gives her performance a regal air. the pose is carefully staged; blondeau stands firmly upright and defiant, as she looks into the distance. the artist performs and embodies power. the power of blondeau is amplified in the dialogue with the site she occupies. in pakwâci wâpisk blondeau occupied the guild park in scarborough as a form of performance-for-the-camera that restaged and disrupted scarborough’s settler architecture (see figure 6). the work is 3 the series was produced as part of the (un)settled project, a curated art residency and performance/intervention art series on the grounds of the guild park and gardens in may and june 2017 and curated by bojana videkanic. each of the artists spent a few days creating work on the grounds of the guild to intervene on the site and its history. for more see http://www.unsettledproject.com/. 4 pakwâci wâpisk translates from cree as wild stone. paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 340 juxtaposed to bondeau’s older photographic series asiniy iskwew (2016),5 in which she situated her performance on sites important to indigenous histories and connected to sacred rock formations of the plains peoples (in blondeau’s case, specific cree beliefs).6 the site of the performance for pakwaci wapisk at guild park has deep relevance given the overt celebration of settler colonialism that it signifies. the guild park and gardens stands as a microcosm of settler colonial place-making. the guild was a project of spencer and rosa clark who purchased 40 acres of the bickford estate grounds in 1932 (breithaupt & clark, 1899; lerek, 1992). the clark’s were inspired by william morris, a leading designer, activist and thinker of the british arts & crafts movement. based on morris’s vision of a holistic approach to arts and crafts, the site was named “the guild of all arts,” and contained studio spaces, living quarters, and sales and exhibition galleries for artists (ligold, 2000, p. 25). the clarks worked to tame and manicure the land and buildings of the guild. they added dining rooms, guest quarters and recreational facilities to the bickford estate, and purchased surrounding farms to protect their investment. the guild lands eventually spanned 500 acres, stretching from lake ontario to kingston road, and from livingston road to galloway road. over the years, the clarks transformed the estate into a fantasy landscape. they collected and incorporated discarded architectural facades from toronto building demolitions into the landscape. the park was intentionally littered with bases of statues, crown moldings and columns that were used to erect structures that resembled faux english and french garden follies. historically, these eye-catching and extravagant architectural structures provided visual spectacle for the owners of european palaces. in the clarks’ version, the garden follies were meant to inspire the artists-in-residence and delight the public. the deliberate structuring of the guild mimicked a stately palace; its greek theatre, sculptures and footpaths signaled the site’s antecedents in the british 18th and 19th century imperial model. 5 asiniy iskwew translates from cree as rock woman. 6 the earlier series was produced on sites in saskatchewan. contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 341 figure 6. lori blondeau pakwâci wâpisk (photo: bojana videkanic, 2017; reproduced with permission of the artist). the guild’s settler colonial architecture worked to replace indigenous culture and life by building over it and by placing it in the past. caricatured images and symbols of indigenous life are frozen in different sculptures and architectural fragments. a particularly poignant remnant is part of a threepiece keystones brought from the bank of toronto building that used to stand at the corner of king and bay streets in toronto. the keystone shows the old paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 342 city of toronto coat of arms and contains two figures: one is britannia and the other is an indigenous male warrior (see figure 7).7 there are also standard symbols of canadian national identity such as the beaver and maple leaf. the depiction of the indigenous warrior is stylized and stereotypical. he is placed safely next to the british crown, symbolising their partnership and shared stewardship of the land. made in 1912, the sculpture shows indigenous peoples and the land existing outside of the present, safely relegated to the depths of history. in other words, settler colonial placemaking fixes indigenous life in the past. figure 7. architectural fragment in guild park, the city of toronto coat of arms (photo: bojana videkanic). the point of departure for blondeau’s conceptual framing is the acknowledgement that the space where the work was installed has a particular urban, social, and political indigenous and settler colonial history. it carries with it multiple, complex narratives that exist as deeply buried sediments underneath official language. the artist offers a complicated, messy, alternative history; she unsettles the linear story of canada, and the clean, neatly packaged products of its memorialization. the guild park is the epitome of canadian modernity, a vestige of the imposed colonial order wanting to tame “nature.” the human figures we expect to find on top of the 7 britannia is a female personification of the british empire often found in sculptures, paintings and other visual representation (hewitt, 2017). contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 343 architectural remnants are missing, and this opens up a space of intervention. blondeau placed herself on empty seats of colonial power to disrupt their potential.8 by claiming the space, blondeau unsettles the colonial order. her monumental, life-sized photographs take the form of alternative memorials that replace the linear settler colonial narrative of what belongs in the past and in the present. blondeau offers a form of interjection and witnessing as she occupies the space of the suburban scarborough neighbourhood to offer, through her bodily presence, another story of place. blondeau’s work is an excavation and churning of the sediments of the cultural and political phenomena around us: indigenous politics and dispossession and an announcement of indigenous presence and futures. these alternative narratives create a space to pause and reflect, to think about her – and our own – embodied existence on the land. lori blondeau chose to work with tensions and hostilities that emerge over sites of history, sites in which nature and human intervention clash, and sites of memorialization and public memory. whether in the park or the gallery space, memory and history are questioned. ultimately, the artist asks who decides what we remember; thus, “to erect a statue is to take revenge on reality” (taussig, 1999, p. 21). rather than thinking of monuments as sites where truths might reappear, what is at work in the mechanism of monumental representation is the fact that all monuments are always already toppling. blondeau’s work recognizes this truth of the instability of western monumental representation, and offers a different take on history. the artist offers an alternative history – or deep histories, if you will – of the lands that are currently called scarborough and canada, and in doing that reasserts ongoing indigenous presence on this land. just as blondeau stands on top of the ruins of western modernity we find in scarborough’s strange park, her monumental gesture produces a rupture: history fills the present moment prophetically showing the fault lines in the present. discussion the four portraits capture scarborough as an assemblage of representations and experiences of differential inclusion, co-constituted across time, space, individuals and collectivities. components within this assemblage contribute to and uphold settler colonialism as a simultaneous project of ongoing indigenous dispossession and settler/migrant/arrivant recognition, racialization, and stigmatization that operates through linear temporalities. importantly, components of the assemblage also contest and erode a hegemonic settler colonial narrative, temporality, and socio-spatiality. freeman’s portrait demonstrates how narratives of the thomson family 8 personal communication with the artist during her residency at the guild and as part of the (un)settled art project. paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 344 contribute to the foundational timeline of settler colonialism and to hegemonic knowledge production. as ahmed (2000) notes, during such encounters, the other is recognized as a stranger, as being out of place. in this case, the narrative produces thomson as the one who belongs, while the indigenous woman is marked as the stranger. this official story legitimizes settler mobility and dispossession of indigenous territories, while also contributing to a project of white indigenization, locating settlers as industriously taming the land. given this framing, the encounter between mary thomson and the unnamed indigenous woman presents a linear story of migration and arrival disconnected from privilege, power and indigenous dispossession. however, freeman denaturalizes this linear time and place-making. her analysis connects different moments in calendar time: 1796, 1847, and 1896. she pauses to consider a more fulsome history of who was on the land, challenging the static and flattened depiction of indigenous peoples that is portrayed in the thomson family storyline. we can link her analysis to accounts that complicate our understanding of the various indigenous nations working, living, and moving through scarborough in that period (gidigaa migizi & simpson, 2018). like freeman, hermer denaturalizes the linear and socio-spatial separation and fixity of settler colonialism by moving across and connecting different points in time that demonstrate the process of indigenous dispossession: 1911, 1923, 1944, and 1963. he situates the purchase of land by bay-street investor miller lash in primitive accumulation, pointing to the absence of a treaty agreement and the unceded character of the land. he also juxtaposes the bucolic depiction of investments in land as leisure activity to the political battles led by the seven signatory nations of the williams treaties. this 90 year indigenous struggle over land and sovereignty is woven into the politics of higher education. tensions remain as the university of toronto scarborough’s website and memorialization project continue to celebrate a hegemonic history-making project, at the same time that some of its members (faculty, students, indigenous knowledge keepers) work to produce counter-hegemonic relations and narratives of place. videkanic’s portrait also disrupts the narration of linear time and placemaking in scarborough. built to promote the arts, guild park is another thread woven into the fabric of settler colonial knowledge and creative production. the park has become an archive and cemetery of relocated toronto building remnants and statues. statues that harken to greek and colonial british aesthetics are interwoven with static caricatures of indigenous history and presence. the built environment assembles narrative threads of european and anglo imperial history to produce a presumptively coherent storyline of white-settler supremacy that locates indigenous people in the past. in fact, architecture and memorialization are central themes in the analysis of freeman, hermer, and videkanic. cemeteries, archives, schools, universities, and parks facilitate erasure and memorialize domination: these places and their subduing presence are planned. they are key features of the contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 345 settler colonial city (hugill, 2017). they also expose the investment of historians and artists and other scholars in methodological nationalism, taking for granted both the settler colonial nation as the organizer and container of society and scholars’ work in the telling, archiving, and institutionalizing of that story of nation-state formation. basu’s analysis of scarborough picks up on the effects of settler colonial place-making on contemporary experiences of living and working in scarborough. the land and architecture are no longer presented as a white haven tamed through settler-indigenous encounters like the sisterhood discussed by freeman, or the acumen and sense of industry of a bay street investor and his hired architects discussed by hermer. this scarborough is constituted as both a social void and as a multicultural inner suburb. through this portrayal, we can read scarborough as a complex space of differential inclusion through which migrants, racialized, and indigenous peoples experience the erasures of invisibilization and hypervisibilization. the place and its residents are produced as part of the dangerous and abject inner city, but are also offered spaces of multicultural recognition. indigenous presence and histories are written out of both mainstream accounts. for this reason, basu’s contribution becomes an essential feature of our analytical strategy, because it disrupts the silos and erasures of settler colonial differential inclusion. reading basu’s theorization of sub/urban/altern experiences in scarborough challenges the logic of methodological nationalism, specifically multicultural recognition of migrant and racialized peoples in scarborough within the immigrant-nation narrative. a counter-hegemonic project of recognition entails examining shared alliances, complicities, and responsibilities independent of canadian sovereignty (bhatia, 2013). this project includes examining how differently situated and included subalternized groups (racialized peoples, descendants of enslaved peoples, indigenous migrants from elsewhere) are implicated in or subjected to a settler colonial project in canada. it also reimagines the encounters possible among the differentially included, encounters that do not centre white settlers and erasure. videkanic reminds us that monuments are also programmed with their destruction. we see snippets of such a destruction, and unsettling of hegemonic framings of history, through lori blondeau’s work at guild park as well as the impromptu solidarity practices toward sri lankan tamils in 2009 that basu describes. assemblages methodology focuses on these contingencies and their possible interconnections, encouraging us to think through the different registers or temporal and socio-spatial dimensions of unsettling. while blondeau’s performance involves an intentional staging, it also generates contingent possibilities of encounters with park visitors. encounters between scarborough residents described by basu also demonstrate this contingency. contingencies emerge at times of heightened awareness of injustice and inequality, and gain resonance through festivals or paloma villegas, patricia landolt, victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu & bojana videkanic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 346 the refurbishing of warehouses into places of worship. yet for blondeau and the scarborough residents basu describes, this is not a complete dismantling or unsettling. the possibility of violence and reinsertion of the settler colonial structures remains. conclusion settler colonial studies and the critique of methodological nationalism reveal how research on migration, racialization and citizenship contribute to indigenous dispossession. together, the colonial-era doctrine of terra nullius, and the foundational timeline of the settler colonial state annul the prior and ongoing existence of indigenous peoples on the land and indigenous sovereignty to legitimize dispossession. this logic has echoes in knowledge production. thus, scholars of migration and associated fields often ignore the complexity of relationships among indigenous peoples, european settlers, and migrants and racialized peoples in canada. they underplay migrants’ vexed relationship to indigenous dispossession (lawrence & dua, 2005; sharma & wright, 2008). in failing to account for indigenous dispossession, scholars of migration and citizenship end up treating settler colonialism as a fait accompli and disregard indigenous survivance, refusal, and contestation (tuck & yang, 2012; vizenor, 1998). migration scholars’ long-standing attachment to methodological nationalism, or the naturalization of the nationstate, is a further entrenchment of settler colonialism in knowledge production. methodological nationalism aligns with settler-futurity as it conceptualises social life as a linear arrangement in which people cross an international border, from a place of no-history to a condition of foreignness and non-citizenship, or to that of citizenship, membership and presumed desire for recognition (landolt et al., 2019; meeus, 2012). in order to weaken the links tying scholarship on race, citizenship and migration to the epistemic order of settler colonialism, we have applied the concept of differential inclusion and assemblage methodology to a single site over time, mapping the links and relationships across different moments through which indigenous presence, migration processes, and place-making occur. differential inclusion is a hierarchical, partial and conditional process that is contingent on the socio-spatial and temporal context that produces variable degrees of precarity and stability, subordination, disenfranchisement and exploitation, membership and recognition. the concept centres complex relational dynamics through which violence and inequality are realized. assemblages methodology apprehends social life as constituted by heterogeneous and partial material and discursive components that come together to produce complex configurations of power of variable stability. we find that the concept of differential inclusion, methodological nationalism as a critique of the research enterprise, and assemblages methodology help us to understand the ways the settler colonial state is contesting settler colonial accounts studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 321-351, 2020 347 re/produced. in our analysis, differential inclusion produces a matrix of belonging, rights and, in/visibility that centres white settlers. we recognize that a focus on differential inclusion involves paying attention to how the marginalization and stigmatization that racialized peoples, forced migrants, and descendants of enslaved peoples’ experience do not negate the benefits some can accrue from recognition and inclusion into the settler colonial nation-state. for this reason, methodological nationalism becomes an important contribution to research on settler colonialism. it helps to bridge critical migration studies’ disruption of the nation as the assumed and default container of society and forces us to question which nations are assumed or allowed to be that default (the settler nation) and examine how they are narrated. furthermore, our analysis explores contestations to settler colonialism from those differentially included, what basu refers to as sub/urban/altern cosmopolitanism occurring in heterotopic spaces. these open the door to imagining different futures, those that centre indigenous, racialized, and migrant communities and the relationships among them. as we continue to engage in research on migration, racialization, and nation-building in the settler colonial state it is not feasible or sustainable to explain migrant selection, settlement, and removal systems in isolation from indigenous presence and leadership. it is a conceptually thin reproduction of the foundational timelines of the settler colonial state. this implies the need for scholars to disengage from promoting the settler colonial state’s agenda to produce scholarship that can contribute to a richer and more sustainable conversation about unsettling and decolonization. acknowledgements paloma and patricia wish to thank soma chatterjee and tania das gupta, editors of the special issue, as well as the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback that improved the manuscript significantly. we also thank our co-authors and all of the participants of the crossing scarborough, nation, migration & place-making between the trc and the 150 workshop: ranu basu, amar bhatia, t. l. cowan, victoria freeman, bahar hashemi, joe hermer, suzanne methot, wendy philips, paul pritchard, adrian smith, bojana videkanic, and cynthia wright. references abebe, a., cerda, e., elliott, s., hill, m., iveniuk, j., nurogho, k., quaison, g., sathiyamoorthy, t., & ware, e. 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(2019). about williams treaties first nations. https://williamstreatiesfirstnations.ca/about-williams-treaties-first-nations/ wimmer, a., & glick schiller, n. (2003). methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: an essay in historical epistemology. international migration review, 37(3), 576-610. wolfe, p. (2006). settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387-409. women’s canadian historical society. (1896). “the women’s canadian historical society of toronto: organized november 19th 1805, incorporated february 14, 1896.” toronto, on. younging, g. (2018). elements of indigenous style: a guide for writing by and about indigenous peoples. brush education. yoshizawa final june 21 18 correspondence address: rebecca scott yoshizawa, sociology, kwantlen polytechnic university, 12666 72 avenue, surrey, bc, v3w 2m8; email: rebecca_yoshizawa@kpu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 178-181, 2018 book review without apology: writings on abortion in canada stettner, shannon (ed.). (2016), edmonton, ab: au press. isbn 9781771991599 (paper) cdn$29.95; isbn 9781771991605 (pdf) cdn$29.95; isbn 9781771991612 (epub) cdn$29.95. 355 pages rebecca scott yoshizawa kwantlen polytechnic university, canada in reading without apology: writings on abortion in canada, edited by shannon stettner (2016), it becomes clear that abortion experiences resonate broadly both socially and politically as much as they are also intimate to interpersonal relations and individual subjectivities and embodiments. voices from different stakeholders and communities relay violence, oppression, pain, confusion, resolve, and even joy. such voices are not often spoken loudly, let alone heard. to that end, stettner collected academic and non-academic autoethnographic voices on abortion. this was a challenge, considering the systematic silencing of those who have had abortions. in the introduction, stettner discusses her objectives of destigmatizing and normalizing talk about abortion through foregrounding the voices of those who have experienced them. she identifies the subtle perpetuation of stigma, even among those who identify as pro-choice, hinged on a powerful argument that it is predominantly structural factors, and not personal decisions, that give rise to the conditions of reproduction (see macquarrie’s essay). stettner suggests that we can see the discourse of “choice” as a kind of strategic bargain with a society that would otherwise not be amenable to talking about abortion. however, this discourse can be politicized following, as stettner argues, activists and scholars who have moved instead to talking about reproductive justice. this movement is young in canada and sets the scene for the collection. it is difficult to read this book. it is heartbreaking and enraging. for example, stories in part 1 that impact the reader with force and weight book review studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 178-181, 2018 179 include: being required to cry before a board in order to improve chances of having an abortion approved (hurley); having pamphlets forced upon her against her desire and writing a pro and con list (woolford); filling out a survey question asking if there is any chance of being pregnant while already at the “termination of pregnancy unit” being told that the level of pain during the procedure is relative to the amount of anxiety one feels (hornbeck); bracing an unsupportive and oblivious partner (kirsten); experiencing forcible pregnancy (roberts); and hearing one’s father talk about “irresponsible women” a month after an abortion (mackenzie). in part 2 on activism, we see chapters attending to laws and advocacy. highlights are egan and gardner’s piece on the history of the ontario coalition of abortion clinics, formed in the early 1980s. the coalition “tried to ensure that the demand for abortion access was never seen in isolation but as one of a number of interdependent struggles” (p. 133). early illegal clinics were attended, they write, by “heroines” who proved that these clinics needed to exist. clinics were raided, and criminal charges brought to practitioners. as we know today, anti-abortion laws were ultimately struck down making abortion effectively legal – but this does not mean widely accessible. a legal abortion clinic opened in pei only in 2017. even so, bills are routinely introduced to criminalize the procedure. activists respond; ahmad and “the radical handmaids” write about dressing in costumes referencing margaret atwood’s the handmaid’s tale and bringing knitted uteri to parliament hill to protest a 2012 attempt. read together, most of the chapters in part 3 on opposition are tied by observations of a strong thread of religiosity underpinning the anti-abortion movement. lochwin’s essay details her being forced by her mother to participate in fundamentalist christian anti-choice “activism” during her free time, but later completely embracing socialist and feminist perspectives. anderson questions what it would mean to have been adopted while also being pro-choice. west discusses pregnancies that result from rape. the pieces are deeply critical; it’s worth quoting west’s words here since they are rarely seen in academic collections. relating the violence, oppression, and misery a pregnancy can bring to some, she writes, “and none of that shit is god’s plan. that’s us fucking up god’s plan” (p. 189). in part 4 on practitioners, the reader learns what it is like to provide abortions. it is very evocative to read the phrase “it wasn’t long before abortion became my whole life” from cooke (p. 239). mullan, an abortion counsellor, identifies a contradiction not readily recognized by anti-choice ideologues: “almost all of us make the decision to end a pregnancy because we love and value children; we want to be able to be good mothers. we take a long, hard look at our lives and we realize that we are unable to provide properly… this is a decision made in a profoundly ethical and moral framework, one that is based on valuing children” (p. 248). even as a staunchly pro-choice feminist, i am struck by the anonymous abortion rebecca scott yoshizawa studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 178-181, 2018 180 provider “dr. james”’ sense of self: “i am proud to provide abortions” (p. 262). the section is rich and harrowing and reveals a complex of struggles. in part 5 on sites of struggle, chapters contemplate how pro-choice politics can extend to an embracing of a praxis of reproductive justice. stote writes of the reproductive oppressions indigenous women experience as a result of colonialism. forced sterilization, abortions without anaesthesia, and the tendency to prescribe the dangerous but long-acting depo-provera are examples of the far and insidious reach of a colonizing and – truly –genocidal state. alongside stettner’s concluding calls to shift the discourse to reproductive justice, improve provisions, address the asymmetrical responsibility women have for fertility, meaningfully recognize how privileges and oppressions will differently affect different women, and connect activists of different causes, stote’s piece points also to the need to indigenize reproductive justice. the book offers a fine collection of stories and perspectives, enriching the discourse about abortion and reproductive justice in canada. even so, stettner’s own introduction flags important oversights of the book. she writes of the indigenous, trans, and non-binary voices missing from the book: “at the time i issued the call for papers, i had not yet considered their reproductive experiences. this is an erasure that i regret and would not reproduce if i were to reissue the call today” (p. 14). i appreciate her discussion of limitations in considering the impact and significance of this work. reflecting on the collection as a whole, i am struck by the ways in which the stories and experiences continue on in the real-time, real world struggle for reproductive justice both in canada and globally. when i drive on highway 1 toward chilliwack from the lower mainland of british columbia, anti-choice billboards pepper the landscape. in judith mintz’ chapter, an autoethnography of abortion after emergency contraceptive was ineffective, she writes of calling motherrisk to discuss risks of birth defects from a failed “morning after” pill. we now know that motherrisk is embroiled in its own horrific injustices, perpetuated by its flawed hair-testing laboratory that led to state-sanctioned kidnapping of many children in eastern canada (law, 2018). worldwide, 25.5% of people reside in countries where abortion is completely restricted and about 14% where abortion is only permitted to save the life of the pregnant person.1 as of this writing, ireland is set to hold a referendum on legalizing abortion. in trump’s america, undocumented migrant teens in custody are denied abortions (gresko, 2018). when the reader sets these facts against the horrific experiences described in the book in canada, where abortion is not even illegal, it becomes clear that global reproductive justice 1 approximately 40% of the world’s population lives in countries with permissive abortion laws, where one can legally get an abortion for any reason. for these statistics and how they are measured, see http://worldabortionlaws.com/questions.html. some recent gains have been made; in march of 2018, a historic referendum held in ireland approved an amendment to the constitution to permit legal abortion. book review studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 178-181, 2018 181 will not come easily or quickly. without apology is a commendable survey of abortion in canada that gives space to a wide range of voices while also acknowledging the work still to be done. references gresko, j. (2018, march 30). court: government can’t block immigrant teens from abortion. the national post. retrieved from http://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/court-governmentcant-block-immigrant-teens-from-abortion law, t. (2018, march 5). the motherisk saga is a symptom of a larger problem in child protection work. cbc news. retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/motheriskchild-protection-1.4559905 liew final feb 20 20 correspondence address: jamie liew, faculty of law, university of ottawa, ottawa, on, k1n 6n5; email: jamie.liew@uottawa.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 21 90-116, 2020 the invisible women: migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada jamie chai yun liew university of ottawa, canada abstract this article examines how migrant and immigrant sex workers have been rendered invisible before the courts and parliament in the reform of laws regarding sex work in canada. a discourse analysis of the expansive legal record in the bedford case and the transcripts of parliamentary debates and testimony before standing committees confirm the lack of nuanced discussion on how criminal law reform could impact migrant and immigrant sex workers. as such, while the case of bedford and the resulting change in the law made by parliament have been celebrated as a win for some sex workers as an acknowledgment, recognition and judicial validation of experiences by legal institutions of sex workers, a sub-group of women – migrant and immigrant sex workers – remain in the shadows. this article examines how law excludes migrant and immigrant sex workers; it is a starting point for research on how migrant and immigrant sex workers may participate in future legal reform. keywords migrant; immigration; race; sex worker; prostitution; immigrant; law; bedford introduction “the invisible girl can do it better.” this is a famous catchphrase of one of the fantastic four super heroes, sue storm, “invisible girl” or now “invisible woman” who gained her super powers from cosmic rays on a trip to space. portrayed as a female voice of reason, her powers to turn herself invisible were almost useless on the battlefield and she was frequently portrayed as the helpless female, constantly in need of rescue. the invisible woman, while a fictional character, has parallels in our more corporeal world. being invisible does not garner power in legal discourse. this article is about how migrant and immigrant sex workers were rendered invisible in discourse before the courts and parliament in the reform of laws migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 91 regarding sex work and prostitution in canada, and why their exclusion in the law reform projects is problematic. acknowledgment and recognition of how one experiences law by legal institutions are not benign. as one scholar writes: …by simply acknowledging the complex, creative histories of women like amy leibovitch, valerie scott, and terri-jean bedford, by judicially seeing and so validating the experiences of sex workers in rendering a decision, the case [of bedford] signaled a first step toward undoing the pervasive invisibility of canadian sex workers. (sampson, 2014, p. 171) although this statement may be true, there is a sub-group of women who remain in the shadows – migrant and immigrant sex workers. as one scholar notes, “the erasure of marginalized voices in the public sphere is a problem of particularly grave concern, even though it can be difficult to perceive” (bunch, 2014, p. 41). the erasure of voices is a “form of epistemic violence” which may include “subtle and socially sanctioned methods of undermining that are sometimes couched in the language of ‘helping,’ ‘protecting’ and ‘saving’” (p. 41). in examining the journey of legal reform for sex work in canada, this study continues the work of other scholars who examine how ethnic, migrant and immigrant women, and in particular sex workers, are considered in law (demleitner, 2001; fitzpatrick & kelly, 1998; macklin, 2003; matsuda, 1987; satterthwaite, 2005; stasiulis & bakan, 2003; sullivan, 2003). a discourse analysis of the documents and transcripts of the bedford case and discussions leading to reform of the criminal code at parliament was undertaken. over 26,000 pages of the legal record of bedford and transcripts of the testimony of 77 people in parliament were reviewed to examine whether and how immigrant and migrant sex workers participated in the court or parliament. the aim of this examination is to contribute to scholarly conversation regarding who is represented in legal reform projects that affect sex workers, how different groups of sex workers are participating, if at all, in legal reform, and what judicial decisions and legislative changes include or omit due to the involvement of particular groups of sex workers (or lack thereof). further, this research hopes to generate questions about whether and how to include immigrant and migrant women in future endeavours to change the law. setting the scene: the exclusion of the migrant and immigrant sex worker defining terms in setting the scene for how canada has recently changed the laws surrounding sex work, a number of terms are used. first, i refer to both jamie liew studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90-116, 2020 92 “migrant” and “immigrant” sex workers. “migrant” sex workers are those who may not have immigration status in canada, or have temporary or precarious status in canada. “immigrant” sex workers are those who may be new citizens or those who have permanent residence status in canada, but are also “ethnic.” i use the term “ethnic” to embody persons who are identified by their differences through race, nationality, culture, often in an intersection with other markers of social difference such as gender, class and sexuality. in referencing both migrant and immigrant sex workers, i recognize previous research that indicates that immigrant sex workers, and thus those with status, may also experience differential treatment from the law as a result of their identification as immigrant or ethnic (ham, 2015). secondly, the paper acknowledges that the politics of sex work has largely focused on contestation between those who view it as legitimate work and those who view selling sex as a form of coercive sexual exploitation (outshoorn, 2005, p. 141). of course, politics around sex work are nuanced and complicated; these complexities are beyond of the scope of this paper. efforts by sex workers and those working with sex workers are focused on trying to keep sex workers alive and out of harm’s way, and on advocating for legislative and policy changes to make those objectives more achievable (see pivot legal, n.d.; nswp, 2016; canadian alliance for sex work law reform, 2019). those who view sex work as broadly exploitative see it as a consequence of patriarchy and capitalism that has manifested into the ultimate commodification and exploitation of female bodies (barry, 1996; dworkin, 1993; farley, 2006). women are seen as victims of their labour, with sex work being a product of lack of choice: “women in prostitution are observed to be prostituted through choices precluded, options restricted, possibilities denied” (mackinnon, 2011, p. 274). given that proponents of this view believe that all sex work is coerced, there is a tendency to view sex work and human trafficking as one and the same, while also identifying the sex industry as a driving force behind human trafficking (farley et al., 2004). in contrast, those who view sex work as legitimate work see it as a product of the agency of sex workers (bruckert & hannem, 2013, p. 43). proponents of this view assert that sex work itself is not inherently dangerous nor exploitative, but that potentially harmful work conditions are manifested through law and social stigma (see chu & glass, 2013; craig, 2011; kempadoo & doezema, 1998; krusi, pacey, bird, taylor, chettiar & shannon, 2014). in addition, they critique the view that equating consensual sex work with human trafficking is harmful, as it paints all sex workers as victims. this view renders invisible the anti-sex work and anti-migration laws that make it possible to deny sex workers protections and rights, thus making them vulnerable to exploitation (jeffrey, 2005). finally, there are others who see the value in the interplay of both structure and agency; that sex workers agency is necessarily tied with the structural migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 93 and relational powers that they live with, and that it is not simply a binary experience at all times (bungay, halpin, atchison & johnston, 2011). rather, there is complex interplay of both structure and agency, and also a heterogeneity of perspectives by sex workers and multiplicities of structureagency interrelationships (bungay, halpin, atchison, & johnston, 2011). in this study i am not interested in resolving the dichotomy between choice or no choice that persists in many discussions of the identities of those involved in sex work. the article uses the term “sex worker” to recognize what persons do rather than who the persons are (showden & majic, 2014). in doing so, i recognize that migrants and immigrants involved in sex work have agency (showden & majic, 2014), and assume that recognition of sex workers having agency may not be synonymous with their identity and also that sex workers who may be victimized may also have agency. the “agency” of sex work is not necessarily a “free choice,” but may be a complex, knowing negotiation (showden & majic, 2014). i use the term “prostitution” only when quoting (e.g., from legislation) or referring to others’ statements. bedford: challenging criminal laws regarding sex work in the courts prior to 2014, three provisions of the criminal code in canada criminalized the following activities related to sex work: communicating in public for the “purposes of engaging in prostitution;” living off the “avails of prostitution;” and keeping a “bawdy-house” (criminal code of canada, 1985, s. 213; s. 212; ss. 197 & 210). in 2009, three current and former sex workers, terri jean bedford, amy lebovitch, and valerie scott brought an application seeking declarations that these three provisions in the criminal code related to sex work were unconstitutional (canada (ag) v bedford, 2013, para. 3). these applicants argued that all three provisions infringed section 7 of the canadian charter of rights and freedoms (1982) by preventing them from “implementing certain safety measures – such as hiring security guards or ‘screening’ potential clients – that could protect them from violent clients” (canada (ag) v bedford, 2013, para. 6). the applicants also argued that the provision dealing with communicating in public for the purposes of engaging in prostitution also violated section 2(b) of the charter. the constitutional challenge made its way to the supreme court of canada where chief justice mclachlin stated that the three impugned provisions were “primarily concerned with preventing public nuisance, as well as the exploitation of prostitutes” (canada (ag) v bedford, 2013, para. 4). she acknowledged that “prostitution itself is not illegal” but that parliament had “confined lawful prostitution to two categories: street prostitution and ‘outcalls’ – where the prostitute goes out and meets the client at a designated location, such as the client’s home” (canada (ag) v bedford, 2013, para. 5). the supreme court held that: jamie liew studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90-116, 2020 94 the prohibitions at issue do not merely impose conditions on how prostitutes operate. they go a critical step further, by imposing dangerous conditions on prostitution; they prevent people engaged in a risky – but legal – activity from taking steps to protect themselves from the risks. (canada (ag) v bedford, 2013, para. 60) in examining the constitutionality of the provisions that prohibit keeping a common bawdy-house, the chief justice wrote that the prohibition “prevents prostitutes from working in a fixed indoor location, which would be safer than working on the streets or meeting clients at different locations,” that it interferes with provision of health checks and preventative health measures, and prevents resort to safe houses, all of which would help reduce risks of being exposed to violence (canada (ag) v bedford, 2013, para. 63). with regard to the provision of living off the avails of prostitution, the chief justice stated that the law prevented prostitutes from hiring bodyguards, drivers and receptionists, all measures that would enhance safety (para. 66). finally, with regard to communicating in a public place, the chief justice wrote “face-to-face communication is an ‘essential tool’ in enhancing the street prostitutes’ safety” and that the “effect of displacing prostitutes from familiar areas, where they may be supported by friends and regular customers, to more isolated areas” made them more vulnerable (para 69; para 70). in general, the supreme court held that the “impugned laws make this lawful activity more dangerous” and that the provisions were arbitrary, overbroad, and grossly disproportionate to the objective of the legislation (para 87; paras. 98-100; paras. 101-102; paras. 103-109; para. 123). finally, the court held that while, “parliament has the power to regulate against nuisances” it cannot do so “at the cost of the health, safety and lives of prostitutes” (para. 136). in finding the provisions unconstitutional, the court declared the laws invalid, but suspended the declaration for one year to allow for parliament to change the laws. parliament’s response to bedford the protection of communities and exploited persons act or bill c-36 (2015) received royal assent on november 6, 2014. this bill amends the criminal code and encompasses the government’s response to the bedford case. the preamble to bill c-36 (2015) outlines the shift in legislative objective from treating prostitution as a form of nuisance toward treating it as a form of exploitation, objectification of human bodies, and commodification of sexual activity. the government sees prostitution as being harmful, both physically and psychologically, to women and children, and also to society at large, and migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 95 aims to bring an end to the practice. in particular, the amendments to the criminal code seek to denounce and prohibit “the demand for prostitution” as “[t]he purchase of sexual services creates the demand for prostitution, which maintains and furthers pre-existing power imbalances, and ensures that vulnerable persons remain subjected to it” (bill c-36, 2015, preamble) the criminal code now prohibits: the purchasing of sexual services or communicating for the purpose of obtaining sex for consideration (s. 286.1)1 including in a public place or in public view or next to a school ground, playground or daycare centre (s. 213 (1.1)); receiving financial or material benefit derived from trafficking persons (s. 279.02) or activities that involve obtaining sexual services for consideration (s. 286.2); concealing, removing, withholding or destroying any travel document that belongs to another person or any document that establishes another person’s identity or immigration status (s. 279.03); procuring, recruiting, harbouring, holding, concealing, or exercising control over a person to offer or provide sexual services for consideration (s. 286.3); and knowingly advertising an offer to provide sexual services for consideration (s. 286.4). there are two immunity provisions. no person will be prosecuted if they receive material benefits derived from the provision of their own sexual services (criminal code, 1985, s. 286 (5)1). as well, a person will not be prosecuted as if the advertisement of sexual services is offered by an individual for her own offering of sexual services. further, no person will be prosecuted for aiding, abetting, conspiring or attempting to commit a crime or being an accessory after the fact or counseling if the offence relates to the offering of their own sexual services (s. 285.5(2)). the main difference between the laws pre-bedford and the laws postbedford is the legislative objective. the recent legislation has shifted its objective from preventing nuisance to protecting communities and vulnerable people. a further difference is that the government has criminalized the act of prostitution by targeting “johns” or clients. thus, every time someone is procuring money for sexual acts, a crime is being committed, reinforcing the governmental objective of abolishing prostitution “to the greatest extent possible” (department of justice, 2014). rendering migrant and immigrant sex workers invisible in law reform as sonia lawrence writes, the bedford case and the passage of bill c-36, “offer a window into the identification, mobilization, and reception of ‘experts’ in the courts, the legislative process, and the public sphere” (2015, p. 5). lawrence questions, “how the mobilization of expertise works in legal 1 criminal code, s. 286.1 also provides more severe penalties if a person under the age of 18 is involved. criminal code of canada, revised statutes of canada (1985, c. c-46). s. 268.1. jamie liew studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90-116, 2020 96 arguments and the relative narrowness of a test case ‘win’” suggesting that the “cause”, to decriminalize sex work, may not have been advanced. she points out that the “written word of experts rather than in-court testimony” was deployed, and that a “sizable body of experiential expertise from current and former sex trade workers on both sides of the debate” revealed “a wide range of contexts in which sex work is performed, and a wide range of reactions and conclusions based on that experience” (lawrence, 2015, pp. 56). despite this, as discussed below, much was also excluded. lawrence writes that the narrative created in bedford and in parliament, “obscure and deny structural problems” and “ignores the role of the state in creating or failing to alleviate these problems” (2015, p. 6). as argued below, much more has been ignored in this process. like lawrence (2015, p. 7), in this article i ask for deeper reflection on how litigation and law reform deploy experiential voice. discourse and evidence in bedford the material in the bedford case was vast. by the time the case reached the highest court in the country, this material included a record as well as pleadings provided by a dozen interveners. at the ontario court of appeal, seven interveners joined the case,2 and at the supreme court of canada, the number of interveners grew to 12.3 some interveners were coalitions of multiple organizations.4 the record from the ontario superior court of justice provided the evidentiary basis against which the criminal provisions were scrutinized. it contained 86 volumes and 26,421 pages. these pages do not include the pleadings provided by the parties. the record includes affidavits of the parties 2 at the ontario court of appeal the interveners included: british columbia civil liberties association; canadian hiv/aids legal network/bc centre for excellence on hiv/aids; canadian civil liberties association; christian legal fellowship/the catholic civil rights league/real women of canada; prostitutes of ottawa/gatineau work educate and resist (power)/maggie’s: the toronto sex workers’ action project; providing alternatives counselling education (pace) society/the downtown eastside sex workers united against violence society (swuav)/pivot legal society; women’s coalition for the abolition of prostitution. 3 at the supreme court of canada, the interveners included: procureur general du quebec; aboriginal legal services of toronto; david asper centre for constitutional rights; women’s coalition for the abolition of prostitution; canadian hiv/aids legal network, british columbia centre for excellence in hiv/aids and hiv & aids legal clinic ontario; the evangelical fellowship of canada; asian women coalition ending prostitution; british columbia civil liberties association; christian legal fellowship, catholic civil rights league and real women of canada; downtown eastside sex workers united against violence society, pace society and pivot legal society; joint united nations programme on hiv/aids; and l’institut simone de beauvoir. 4 see for example: the women’s coalition for the abolition of prostitution. migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 97 and of expert witnesses, transcripts of examinations and cross-examinations of the parties and witnesses, and their supporting documents, including academic literature and research. the critical discourse analysis undertaken in this paper focuses on the record produced for the hearing at first instance (the trial) at the ontario superior court of justice because it provides the evidence and therefore the basis upon which the parties grounded their positions. the record is also where we directly hear the voices of sex workers, their advocates, and experts who research in this area. the aim of the analysis is to gauge whether and how migrant and immigrant sex workers engaged in this legal proceeding, and to prompt questions of what was included or missing in the legal record. the 26,421 pages were first searched for the following terms: “migrant,” “immigrant,” “immigrate,” “immigration,” “trafficked,” “trafficker,” “trafficking,” “citizen,” “citizenship,” “status,” “refugee,” “foreign,” “foreigner,” “permanent resident,” “permanent residence,” “visa,” “ethnic,” “race,” “racial,” and “racialized.” these terms were chosen as a starting point to identify possible discussions in the transcripts on migrant and immigrant sex workers. some terms, such as “permanent resident” and “permanent residence” seldom appear. others were present in the record, but did not provide any valuable reference to migrant and immigrant sex workers. for example, the word “citizen” appears frequently, but mainly refers to citizens writ large such as the protection of citizens, or how “ordinary” citizens are affected (see, e.g., bedford record, 2013, vol. 3, pp. 572, 727, 591, 706; vol. 23 pp. 6445, 6447, 6448, 6453, 6454, 6509; vol. 22 pp. 6445, 6447, 6448, 6453, 6454, 6509). the word “status”, similarly, garnered other meanings such as social or economic status or “status of women.” the word “foreign” also made many benign appearances in the record (see, e.g., bedford record, 2013, vol. 3 pp. 310, 352, 407, 409, 433, 461, 465, 469, 484, 297, 306, 365, 544; volume 7 at 1711; vol. 9 pp. 2203, 2214, 2220, 2226, 2230, 2240, 2261, 2279, 2314, 2321, 2444; vol. 3 at 403). other terms, such as “race,” “racial,” and “ethnic” did not point to many discussions on migrant and immigrant sex workers, but to aboriginal persons, and racial background in general.5 the record acknowledges the absence or lack of information regarding migrant and immigrant sex workers. examples of such acknowledgement include statements such as: “we have limited primary empirical research on three groups engaged in the sex trade in particular, and they are minors, new immigrants, and migrant workers”; “we’re very concerned about those kinds of gaps because we do know that policymakers and others are making decisions based on some of the stereotypes of these particular individuals”; and “we also know very little about the experiences of new immigrants, or 5 see, e.g., bedford record, vol. 7 in general; vol. 8 pp. 1957, 2012, 2051, 2120; vol. 9 pp. 2239, 2323, 2329, 2412, 2423, 2446, 2462; vol. 24 p. 6713 where there was a discussion of demographics. jamie liew studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90-116, 2020 98 the congruence, if any, between their personal stories and those in the media concerning sex slaves” (bedford record, 2013, vol. 25, p. 7215; p. 7216; p. 7410).6 further, “there has been little focus on the role of gender, culture, ethnicity and class in understanding the experience of sex work” (bedford record, 2013, vol. 5, p. 1086). many of the references to migrant and immigrant sex workers were embedded in documents, articles or presentations that were exhibits or attachments of affidavits. for example, in a presentation made to a house of commons subcommittee in 2005 that was attached as exhibit f of the affidavit of frances m. shaver, this was provided regarding migrant and immigrant sex workers: finally, criminalization impedes current and former sex workers’ ability to travel and cross borders. it also prevents workers from sponsoring foreign-national partners or family members for permanent residency. for people entering canada for employment in the sex trade, the criminalization of both prostitution establishments and employer-employee relationships renders legitimate work permits impossible. this positions most migrant sex workers as non-status and grossly increases their vulnerability to exploitation, as well as their risk for arrest, detention and deportation. at the level of our most fundamental rights and freedoms, the criminalization of prostitution leads to incarceration and deprivation of liberty, and it is typically the most marginalized workers, specifically those who are migrant or street-based, who are most likely to be deprived of their freedom in this manner. (bedford record, 2013, vol. 24, p. 6967)7 when migrant and immigrant sex workers were mentioned in the record, they were mainly as afterthoughts or as generalizations. for example, valerie scott stated that in dealing with a migrant sex worker, “as it is, we can’t get to her. she’s terrified of the police, of being deported” (bedford record, 2013, vol. 4, pp. 592, 716). another example is a report provided as exhibit a to the affidavit of kara gilles quoting a sex worker participant in a law enforcement survey: despite these low enforcement levels, sex-working participants overwhelmingly expressed continued anxiety about the impact of the law. two women drew comparisons between the criminalization of prostitution and the illegalized status of undocumented workers. as one stated, “it would be like being an illegal immigrant in the country – you never know when they’re going to send you back home. it’s just that shitty, crappy, paranoid feeling that just hangs over your shoulders every day.” (bedford record, 2013, vol. 6, p. 1370) 6 see also vol. 6 p. 1471 where migrant and immigrant sex workers were excluded from a study. 7 see also, e.g., vol. 5 p. 1073 and p. 1226 where exhibit b of susan davis’ affidavit containing a draft action plan called “living in community: balancing perspectives on vancouver’s sex industry” also references migrant sex workers and also volume 6 at p. 1370 or exhibit a of the affidavit of kara gilles. migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 99 with regard to mentions of trafficking, most references were in supplementary material or the exhibits of affidavits that contained research, reports or other academic material. not all references were about international trafficking of women and children. some referred to the link between sex work and the trafficking of drugs (see, e.g., bedford record, 2013, vol.23 p. 6786). the bulk of the discussion related to trafficking related to situations of domestic trafficking (see, e.g., bedford record, vol. 5 p. 1146; vol. 21 p. 6198). the discussion that did talk about international trafficking recognized the gap in knowledge. for example, “as with migration patterns, patterns of trafficking and force and the amount of violation concerned with them, still remain scarcely and very badly documented…” (bedford record, 2013, vol. 20, p. 5655). one exhibit stated, “though there is little accurate information on the extent of trafficking in canada, it’s known that canada is a country of origin, transit and destination for trafficked persons” (bedford record, 2013, vol. 5, p. 1074 ). finally, some discussion turned to the experiences other countries have with migrant and immigrant sex workers (see, e.g., bedford record, vol. 20, pp. 5613 & 5639). discourse and evidence at parliament following the supreme court of canada’s decision in bedford, the government responded with bill c-36, the protection of communities and exploited persons act, which received royal assent on november 6, 2014. bill c-36 was debated in both the house of commons and the senate and was reviewed in the house of commons standing committee on justice and human rights between july 7th and 15th, 2016. seventy-seven people appeared before the committee as individuals or on behalf of an organization. a critical discourse analysis was undertaken of the transcripts of the proceedings to glean how much consideration was given to how the law may impact migrant or immigrant sex workers. the transcripts were searched for the same terms used to examine the bedford record, namely “migrant,” “immigrant,” “immigrate,” “immigration,” “trafficked,” “trafficker,” “trafficking,” “citizen,” “citizenship,” “status,” “refugee,” “foreign,” “foreigner,” “permanent resident,” “permanent residence,” “visa,” “ethnic,” “race,” “racial,” and “racialized,” these terms were chosen as a starting point to identify areas in the transcripts where there might be a discussion on migrant sex workers during the house of commons debates, the words “migrant,” “immigrant,” “immigrate,” “immigration,” “permanent resident,” and “permanent residence” did not make any appearances whatsoever. while the terms “refugee,” “racial,” “racialized,” “ethnic,” “status” and “citizen” made appearances, they were referred to in general and did not speak to the issue of racialized or immigrant sex workers particularly, but made references to jamie liew studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90-116, 2020 100 marginalized (i.e., racialized, ethnic, refugee) communities writ large (see, e.g., easter, dechert, goguen, & galipeau, 2014, september 26). the word “trafficking” made the most appearances of the terms searched. in approximately 200 instances, there are references to victims of trafficking in the sex trade, and how trafficking is linked to prostitution. some point out in the house of commons debates that trafficking is already criminalized and that bill c-36 does not fully address the issue of trafficking. the discussions at the house of commons standing committee did not have the following words: “permanent residence” and “permanent resident,” indicating little discussion of new immigrants. the following words made one appearance throughout the transcripts: “refugee” (in the context of referring to the immigration and refugee protection act), and “visa” (in the context of a sex worker testifying she had a work visa in australia). while other terms make an appearance in the transcript, most of them did not lead to any meaningful discussion about migrant or immigrant sex workers. for example, the term “status” did not refer to immigration status but often referred to social status or “status of women” (see, e.g., beazley, 2014, july 7). the term “ethnic” was found a few times, referring to advertising listing ethnicity of workers, or referring to research that indicated that there was no “over-representation of ethnic minorities, but rather an under-representation” of “ethnic minorities” in the “sex industry” (dechert & phillips, 2014, july 10). two witnesses before the standing committee spoke specifically about migrant and immigrant sex workers: alice lee and suzanne jay of the asian women coalition ending prostitution. they expressed support for bill c-36 on the basis that those who exploit asian women for prostitution use various methods to control them including confiscating immigration documents or passports, and threatening women who do not have regularized status with deportation and arrest. alice lee also stated that they appreciated that the bill recognized that trafficking and prostitution are intimately connected. other than these two witnesses, migrant and immigrant women were referred to as an afterthought. for example, one witness noted that criminalization of clients under bill c-36 will disproportionately affect aboriginal women who rely on proceeds from prostitution to survive and that her testimony applies as well to migrant women (sayers, 2014, july 7). another example came from a witness who spoke about how bill c-36 will affect her ability to post ads online, forcing her to use more dangerous methods to find clients. she noted that the “situation will likely affect migrants with precarious status especially gravely” (laliberté, 2014, july 7). in another example, one witness discussed the difficulty some sex workers have in rebuilding their lives after criminal records are imposed on them. she stated, “this likely has a disproportionately devastating impact on migrant sex workers” (redsky, 2014, july 7). migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 101 bill c-36 was also debated in the senate. the terms “migrant,” “immigrant,” “immigration,” “status,” “refugee,” “foreign,” “foreigner,” “permanent resident,” “permanent residence,” “visa,” “ethnic,” “race,” “racialized” and “racial” were not used in the senate debates. while the words “citizen” and “citizenship” appear a few times, they refer solely to the idea of protecting citizens, and to citizens in general such as “hard working citizens” and “vulnerable citizens” (batters & jaffer, 2014, oct. 21). “trafficking” and “trafficked” made a number of appearances. for example, senator mobina jaffer stated: but this bill has been masquerading as something it is not. it is not there to protect the victims of the sex trade. we already have legislation in place for that. this is not an anti-trafficking bill or sexual assault bill… we need to allocate more resources to protecting these vulnerable members of our society. this bill will not achieve this, because that is not its purpose and those groups are not its primary focus. that is another conversation for another day… (2014, oct. 21). bill c-36 was also the subject of the senate’s standing committee on legal and constitutional affairs on september 9th, 10th, 11th, 17th, 29th and 30th, 2014. the terms “permanent resident,” “permanent residence,” and “visa” were non-existent. some terms, such as “foreign,” “foreigner,” “ethnic,” “race,” “racial,” “racialized” and “status” were used in general ways and did not point to any discussions with regards to migrant or immigrant sex workers. the terms “migrant,” “immigrant,” “immigrate” and “immigration” were almost non-existent and where they did appear, it is alongside the term “trafficked” or “trafficking,” which appeared most frequently amongst all the terms searched. for example, suzanne jay (who also testified in the house of commons standing committee) noted that women working in asian massage parlours are abused and exploited due to their precarious immigration status. she stated, “the bill does not change the balance of power that organized crime and human trafficking operations rely on because current immigration law supports the exploiter” (jay, 2014, sept. 9). ms. jay recommended granting status to women who arrive in canada under exploitative circumstances. valerie scott, one of the litigants in bedford, testified, the debate about bill c-36 has been hijacked by individuals and groups who have focused on the evils of human trafficking and child exploitation. however, none of those laws were challenged and none were affected by the supreme court decision. this deliberate misdirection has taken the focus off what we should be discussing, which is how the proposed law will affect consensual adult sex work. (scott, 2014, sept. 10) the few comments related to migrant and immigrant sex workers, exploitation, abuse and trafficking should have raised red flags for those studying the bill. the provisions amending the criminal code should not be looked at in isolation. it is not just the application or impact of these provisions on sex workers that is important to examine, but how these laws jamie liew studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90-116, 2020 102 also interact with other laws in the criminal code and the immigration and refugee protection act, and also how these laws may be experienced differently by racialized persons who may or may not have precarious immigration status. if migrant and immigrant sex workers were not willing to testify, organizations like swan or butterfly, for example, should have been asked to participate or provide submissions on their research. the invisibility of migrant and immigrant sex workers scholars have examined how women are rendered invisible in a number of different contexts including women in prisons or in conflict with criminal law, women who make allegations of sexual harassment or assault, indigenous women, and racialized women, among others (see belknap, 2014; bullock & jafri, 2000; covington, 1998; dobrowolsky, 2008; gilchrist, 2010; jiwani & young, 2006; randall, 2010; taylor, 1993; worrall, 1990). rendering ethnic, racialized, migrant and newly immigrant women invisible in law is not a new phenomenon. in examining whether the charter of rights and freedoms extends protections to non-citizens, for example, catherine dauvergne states: aside from the refugee convention cases, the supreme court of canada has not made a single ruling in the charter era that directly applies an international human rights norm to a non-citizen in canada…all of these shifts mean that noncitizens in canada are more vulnerable to rights abuses than at any point in the previous thirty years. (2013, pp. 724, 728) tanya basok and emily carasco question the availability of protections available to non-citizens in canada: migrants admitted as residents are automatically protected by most laws that apply to citizens, although in practice, of course, visible minority immigrants in canada, particularly women, often experience discriminatory and abusive treatment. due to the precariousness of their status, temporary migrants, who are also often visible minorities, are even more likely than resident immigrants to experience various forms of exclusion and abuse. when non-citizens experience such abuses, what legal protections are available to them?” (2010, p. 344). they surmise that relative to citizens, “non-citizens are a group lacking in political power and as such vulnerable to having their interests overlooked” (basok & carasco, 2010, p. 342). in the context of immigration or migration, scholarship has looked at the absence of attention paid to the abuse of migrant workers (hennebry, 2012; sharma, 2000; sharma 2002), migrant domestic or health care workers (coloma, mcelhinny tungohan, catungal & davidson, 2012; stasiulis & migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 103 bakan, 2003), and persons in immigration detention (brane & wang, 2013; gros, 2017; kronick & rosseau, 2015), among other topics. scholars have pointed to the invisibility of the migrant sex worker in discussions about sex work in canada (brock, gillies, oliver & sutdhibhasilp, 2000; jeffrey, 2005; macintosh, 2006; oxman-martinez, martinez & hanley, 2001). in her testimony at the standing committee, legal counsel for the asian women coalition ending prostitution discussed intervening in the bedford case: our biggest challenge was the fact that among the many volumes of evidence that was before the court, there was a sum total of one line regarding asian women in prostitution, and that one line was contained in the affidavit of a police officer, not an asian woman, but a police officer, who deposed that women in bawdy houses were often illegal immigrants and residential brothels contained mainly asian women. (allison, 2014, july 10) ndp mp francoise boivin stated at the standing committee of justice and human rights in relation to the intersection of human trafficking and sex workers, “there has not been much focus on the concept of human trafficking in bill c-36” and, “…with such a quick process, not all the provinces were necessarily available or prepared to come speak within such a short timeframe on issues as profoundly complex as human trafficking, sexual exploitation and prostitution” (2014, july 15). any meaningful discussion on migrant and immigrant sex workers did not include the voices of these women. for example, exhibit 3 of the affidavit of deborah brock is an article that recreates a dialogue that sex worker advocates and researchers have about migrant and immigrant sex workers, rather than including testimony of this neglected group of workers (bedford record, 2013, vol. 9, pp. 2328-2336). despite this, some witnesses at the standing committee testified that there was an inseparable link between trafficking and prostitution.8 in making this link, there was very little discussion of how how the law may treat them differently because of their immigration status. in addition to excluding the active participation of migrant sex workers, the record also excluded other kinds of written work that would illuminate their lived experiences. there was a stark absence of reports and other written work by ngos and migrant sex workers from the record despite the fact that there are migrant sex worker organizations that actively provide information on the experiences of migrant sex workers online for example (see, e.g., swan vancouver society; butterfly: asian and migrant sex workers 8 some examples include (a) timea e nagy, who at the standing comimittee on justice and human rights on july 7, 2014 said, “there isn’t a difference between prostitution and human trafficking in our organization’s view”; (b) brian mcconaghy’s comments at the standing committee on justice and human rights on july 10, 2014; and (c) joy smith at the standing committee on justice and human rights, who on july 9, 2014 stated that legalization of prostitution leads to an explosion of human trafficking. jamie liew studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90-116, 2020 104 network). the record for bedford and the material submitted to parliament demonstrates a dearth of migrant sex worker voices and an absence of research or reports provided by civil society on the subject. the inclusion of some “experts” in the judicial and legislative processes raises questions of who experts are and what kind of expert work is deployed in legal reform. inviting immigrant and migrant sex workers to litigation and law reform as with the dichotomous debates about whether there is agency in sex work, and whether prostitution involves exploitation and trafficking, there is a debate about whether migrant or immigrant sex workers are victims of trafficking or if they can hold agency as sex workers. such debate, however may discount the multiplicity of roles or identities migrant and immigration sex workers may have (see, e.g., crenshaw, 1991; harris, 1990; king & willis, 1999). for example, legislation, policy and legal rhetoric simultaneously treat migrant and immigrant sex workers as both exploited victims and agents in control of their own destiny (an irregular migrant who chose to thwart immigration law and is subject to removal from canada). further, it is the precarious immigration status that needs to be understood in order to appreciate how such status can render persons both vulnerable and resilient, thereby affecting the decisions racialized sex workers make – decisions about managing and surviving the precarity of their situation to avoid harm and deportation. in helping to prevent categorization or how a “specific social identity becomes the salient basis” for normative perceptions, this paper proposes more work needs to be done to include voices from the margins (hogg, terry & white, 1995, p. 260).9 future legal reform involving sex work should turn to, “the actual experience, history, culture, and intellectual tradition” of migrant and immigrant sex workers themselves. mary bunch writes that the voices also have to be heard in a meaningful way: full participation in a democratized public sphere depends on more than the right to speak; it depends on being heard. even in civic discourses aimed at realizing the human rights of a population at risk, stigma and dehumanization can undermine the voices of marginalized groups…sex workers cannot presume that their knowledge will be granted the same credibility in discursive processes as people coming from more socially sanctioned speaking positions. indeed, as we 9 as mari matsuda wrote, “[t]he central problem facing critical legal scholars, and indeed all thoughtful legal scholars, is the search for a normative source,” and she advocates that “looking to the bottom – adopting the perspective of those who have seen and felt the falsity of the liberal promise – can assist critical scholars in the task of fathoming the phenomenology of law and defining the elements of justice” (1978, p. 324). migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 105 see in bedford, sex workers are sometimes not even heard by the very allies who would seek to protect them from harm… (2014, p. 41) as lesley anne jeffrey and gayle macdonald also find, “it is the silencing, of their critical consciousness that lies at the base of their greatest oppression. this silencing has denied sex workers full citizenship and full humanity” (jeffrey & macdonald, 2006, p. 1). unlike other sex workers, however, migrant and immigrant sex workers did not have a chance to provide their voices to the reform project of bedford and bill c-36. instead, others filled the void by invoking language such as trafficked, trafficking, exploitation, abuse, victims, and massage parlours. while some may argue that there were advocates participating that illuminated what migrant and immigrant sex workers may have provided themselves, nicole gonzalescautions against delegating such important work to people who sincerely believe they are doing the right thing. in her book, crook county (gonzales, 2016, pp. 72-73), she details how prosecutors justify their actions by stating the myth that they are doing the right thing by punishing extreme criminals when such a myth does not match the reality of “the trenches of justice” where prosecutors are “getting in the way of real cases” and “undermining the heart of what it is to be a prosecutor” as “their presence in the system literally obstructs ‘real justice’.” i am not suggesting that advocates of sex workers are not doing good work to help sex workers, but rather that importance should be placed on acquiring information directly from those affected by the laws subject to reform. in looking at the material before the court and parliament, it is unclear how the criminal code provisions dealing with sex work would impact migrant and immigrant sex workers. in particular, it is unclear what potential protections or harms may come from that intersection, and how this intersection may differ from the experiences of sex workers with more permanent status in canada. there are two narratives that migrant and immigrant sex workers are subject to when discussing their experience with law. the first is that migrant and immigrant sex workers are subject to exploitation and abuse through the trafficking of their labour. the second is that they are subject to harms and exclusion through canada’s immigration system. the following section turns to scholarly work to investigate the potential differences. a trafficking discussion many of the references to migrant and immigrant sex workers in bedford and the discussions at parliament refer to the problem of international trafficking of women and children. the discussion, while scant, is revealing. first, as discussed above, the material i analysed acknowledges the problem with defining and understanding the scope of the problem of jamie liew studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90-116, 2020 106 “trafficking.” for example, the report of the standing committee on justice and human rights and subcommittee on solicitation laws titled, “the challenge of change: a study of canada’s criminal prostitution laws” in exhibit f of the affidavit of libby davies states, “although canada does not yet have the information needed to assess the scope of this problem nationally, there is no doubt that trafficking in persons is at play in prostitution activities, and that trafficked persons are among the most vulnerable in prostitution” (2006). second, the trafficking discussions in the bedford case and before parliament mirror discussions about sex work in general – about whether it is abusive, harmful itself, or whether sex workers have agency and whether it should be considered a form of labour. for example, during the cross examination of dr. john lowman in the bedford case, he states, “we know that in certain circumstances, debt bondage occurs in trafficking situations where a woman might be imprisoned in an off-street location” (bedford record, 2013, vol. 21, p. 6198). however, in an article that was an exhibit of the affidavit of dr. john lowman, one finds, “trafficking legislation does not distinguish between those who have been coerced into sex work and those who are essentially working in the sex industry as economic migrants” (bedford record, 2013, vol. 20, p. 5696). similarly, deborah brock under examination during the bedford case, stated: i assert that we should use [the term migrant sex worker as opposed to trafficking] because the concept of migrant sex workers allows for one to then specify the conditions in which this form of migration takes place, whether it be through agency or lack of agency. so whereas the concept of trafficking already from the outset seems that this is involuntary, that women are moved across borders against their will, that they do not know what they are moving for, and this certainly does not describe all of the movement across borders within the shifting global economy for these women, and so i think it is much more appropriate to not already overlay your assumptions of your way of framing the phenomenon, this particular social phenomenon, with the concept that dates back to the 19th century, that is trafficking. (bedford record, 2013, vol. 9, p. 2274) on the other hand, at the standing committee on justice and human rights, the asian women coalition ending prostitution stated, “we praise bill c-36 because it recognizes that human trafficking and prostitution are closely linked and related. human trafficking is intrinsic to the asian woman’s experience of prostitution, regardless of what country she comes from” (2014). this mirrors the debate in academic literature. for example, kristina day finds there is a link between trafficking and prostitution and writes that the swedish model of prohibiting the purchase of sex has been effective in reducing the number of street prostitutes and the rate of trafficking (day, 2012, p. 149). nandita sharma, on the other hand, writes: migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 107 …far from helping migrants…anti-trafficking and/or anti-smuggling campaigns exacerbate the conditions that cause harm to migrants. they do so because one of the key underlying motives of these campaigns is to restrict the mobility of migrants, particularly undocumented movements of people. indeed, deeply embedded within the anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling discourse and practice are anti-immigrant sentiments expressed best in the idea that migrants are almost (if not) always better off at “home.”…rather than calling for an end to trafficking or smuggling, taking the standpoint of migrants compels us to deal with the reality that such illicit movements are the only ones available to the majority of the world’s displaced people... (2003, p. 54) 10 a nuanced and deep discussion of what exactly is trafficking, and the scope of the trafficking problem was missing in bedford and the debates about bill c-36 in parliament. while some mention of it was made haphazardly by witnesses and litigants, and in some secondary literature attached to various witness affidavits, there was no genuine examination of how the criminal law should be informed by the issue of trafficking, and what impact this may have on migrant and immigrant sex workers. for migrant and immigrant sex workers, two questions may be asked of the bedford case. first, why were migrant and immigrant sex workers not included as the group of litigants to launch the constitutional challenge on criminal laws relating to sex work, and second, why were the provisions dealing with trafficking not included in the challenge. one simple answer is that the issue of trafficking is beyond the scope of the focus of the legal action. in the situation of migrant or immigrant sex workers, the fear of losing immigration status and being deported requires necessary invisibility in order to continue to work and there are specific reasons why some people may not want to be included in a legal challenge or testify before parliament (canadian council for refugees, 2013; lam, 2018, april; lam, 2018, may; macintosh, 2006). 10 dina francesca haynes (2009, pp. 50, 52, 69) said, the line between human trafficking and other types of labor exploitation is often so fine that it took many legal experts many years to pin down exactly what legally differentiates trafficking from other types of exploitative relationships… governments fail to acknowledge that all trafficking is a byproduct of labor and migration. victims of human trafficking are people who determined to improved their lives but had that desire exploited. only the very rare few have been literally snatched or kidnapped by traffickers. migrants suffer more easily and endure more severe forms of exploitation when their immigration status rests in the hands of their employers, regardless of whether the possibility of deportation is real or only feared. the uncertainty about status and deportation works to the advantage of users and exploiters. the more the user has the potential to wield personal control over the worker, and the less access the worker has to a support system, the higher the potential for and degree of exploitation. it is clear that employers understand that migrant and undocumented employees are cheaper, easier to control, and more exploitable, specifically due to their lack of immigrant status. expanding opportunities to immigrate and obtain status, ones that do not tie victims’ statuses to their “employers,” could reduce the propensity of potential users to exploit migrants for domestic or sex work. jamie liew studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90-116, 2020 108 as acknowledged by the supreme court of canada in 2012 in canada v downtown eastside sex workers united against violence society, there are several reasons why persons may not want to bring a legal challenge forward: [71]…however, being a witness and a party are two very different things. in this case, the record shows that there were no sex workers in the downtown eastside neighbourhood of vancouver willing to bring a comprehensive challenge forward. they feared loss of privacy and safety and increased violence by clients. also, their spouses, friends, family members and/or members of their community may not know that they are or were involved in sex work or that they are or were drug users. they have children that they fear will be removed by child protection authorities. finally, bringing such challenge, they fear, may limit their current or future education or employment opportunities (affidavit of jill chettiar, september 26, 2008, at paras. 16-18 (a.r., vol. iv, at pp. 184-85)). as i see it, the willingness of many of these same persons to swear affidavits or to appear to testify does not undercut their evidence to the effect that they would not be willing or able to bring a challenge of this nature in their own names. there are also the practical aspects of running a major constitutional law suit. counsel needs to be able to communicate with his or her clients and the clients must be able to provide timely and appropriate instructions. many difficulties might arise in the context of individual challenges given the evidence about the circumstances of many of the individuals most directly affected by the challenged provisions. in responding to bedford, parliament missed an opportunity to examine reform in a way that includes an examination of how criminal laws regarding sex work may be experienced differently by migrant and immigrant sex workers. for example, katrin roots writes that there is “an unmistakable parallel” between provisions in the criminal code prohibiting human trafficking and procurement for the purpose of sexual exploitation (2013, p. 40). in missing this “unmistakable parallel,” the legal reform that took place rendered migrant and immigrant sex workers invisible. further, discussions in court and at the legislature did not explore the myriad of intersections where immigration and criminal law meet. one example is how criminal charges and convictions can result in the finding of inadmissible for immigration, leading to the eventual removal of a person from canada. the way in which immigration law may be implicated requires different discussions than how to deal with the issue of trafficking. while it is beyond the scope of this article to examine all of the potential issues that criminal law raise for migrant and immigrant sex workers, the foregoing suggests that changes to the law regarding sex work did not contemplate these matters. the next section briefly provides an overview of what was missed in these legal debates. migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 109 what the legal reform project was missing how specifically the changes in the criminal code affect migrant sex workers is beyond the scope of this paper. this section of the article, however, provides a glimpse of the differential impacts the changes in law have on migrant sex workers and a sense of what kinds of evidence were missing in the legal reform processes that took place in bedford and parliament. a glaring omission from the material, discussions and transcripts in both the courts and legislatures is that migrant and immigrant sex workers are subject to a legal regime that other citizen sex workers may not be: immigration law. when it comes to migrant and immigrant sex workers, power imbalances, exploitation, abuse and fear are intertwined and exacerbated by the precarious immigration status some have (daway, 2010). like many migrant workers, “paid work is a primary axis of life for precarious migrants, and a venue through which they become socially and economically connected to canada” and “non-permanent status influences [migrant workers’] decisions in a way that results not only in differential access to legal protections, but also in deskilling, job insecurity and decreased labour mobility” (marsden, 2014, p. 33). it is not just the lack or temporariness of status that is important, but the social identity and the legal consequences attached to that lack of status. indeed, sarah marsden explains that, “framing undocumented migrants as ‘illegal’” allows the government to allocate rights and entitlements differently between persons carrying different kinds of immigration status (marsden, 2012, p. 209). migrant and immigrant sex workers are no strangers to being treated as “illegal” not just because of the work they engage in but also because of their status (cbc news, 2015, may 11; mcintyre, 2015, may 13; cheung, 2007). fay faraday (2012) writes, migrant workers’ insecurity is “an entirely foreseeable outcome” of choices made by legislators and governments. at a minimum, legal reform should investigate, interrogate and critique proposed changes to law by looking at the intersection many migrant and immigrant sex workers find themselves in: where criminal law and immigration law meet and where racialized persons or persons with precarious status intersect with criminal law. discussions during bedford and in parliament did not delve deeply into how criminal code provisions aimed at preventing, deterring and punishing for trafficking of persons would work with the amendments to the criminal code on sex work.11 there was also no discussion on how the amendments work with various provisions in the 11 there was a lack of discussion relating to the following criminal code provisions: s. 279.01 (trafficking of persons); s. 297.011 (trafficking of a person under the age of eighteen years); s. 279.02 (receiving a financial or other material benefit for the purpose of committing or facilitating trafficking in persons); s. 279.03 (withholding or destroying a person’s identity documents); s. 279.04 (definition of exploitation for trafficking offences). jamie liew studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90-116, 2020 110 immigration and refugee protection act. for example, how do the amendments interact with: (a) provisions that prohibit knowingly organizing the coming into canada of one or more persons by means of abduction, fraud, deception, or use or threat of force or coercion; (b) section 196.1(a) which states that a “foreign national must not enter into an employment agreement, or extend the term of an employment agreement, with an employer who, on a regular basis, offers striptease, erotic dance, escort services or erotic massages?”; (c) provisions that point to criminal charges and convictions to make findings that a person is inadmissible and therefore removable from canada; (d) provisions that render children of migrant or immigrant sex workers subject to the same criminal or immigration legal consequences? there is existing literature that looks at these intersections (see, e.g., bellissimo, 2011; butterfly, n.d.; canadian council for refugees, n.d.; citizenship canada 2016.; gallagher & pearson, 2010; haynes, 2009; lam, 2018, april; lam, 2018, may; legal aid ontario, n.d.; macintosh, 2006; oxman-martinez & hanley, 2001; sharma, 2003; swan, 2015; thobani, 2001; unhcr, 2001). when legal reform is undertaken a more concerted effort should be made to provide an intersectional approach and analysis of law’s impact with persons who are racialized and have precarious immigration status. conclusion: building inclusionary evidence this paper points out the invisibility of migrant and immigrant sex workers in the most recent legal reform project in canada involving sex workers. graham hudson and emily van der meulen argue that in looking at the formative questions before bedford, the supreme court of canada “rest[s] on the empirical claim that substantive law as well as processes of lawenforcement contribute to increased risk of violence and exploitation, as well as on the principle that any attempt to regulate sex work must consist with the maxim: “do not harm” (2013, p. 117). further, hudson and van der meulen find that bedford has enhanced the quality of the debates surrounding sex work by making them more inclusive of the perspectives of sex workers (2013, p. 115). if this is the case, it is important to consider whether the increased risk of violence and exploitation manifests in different ways for migrant and immigrant sex workers, and whether it can contribute to the future framing of criminal, immigration and other canadian laws. the discourse analysis conducted shows that not all perspectives of sex workers were included in the record for the litigation in bedford and legislative debates leading to the amendments to the criminal code. the findings pose questions about what is missing from the legal considerations in the courts and in parliament, and how the law regarding sex work potentially poses harms not contemplated that violate the charter of rights migrant and immigrant sex workers and law reform in canada studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 90116, 2020 111 and freedoms. this study provides fruit for discussion about including the differential experiences of sex workers that are racialized and have immigrant or precarious immigration status. further, the paper contributes to wider discussions in a variety of contexts about whether and how legal reform is considering all those in the margins. knowing that the law may be challenged again in the future, what can be done to ensure migrant and immigrant sex worker voices are included? is there a way to give migrant and immigrant sex workers recognition of their multiple identities as members of our communities (whether as citizens or non-citizens), workers, victims, mothers and sisters? this paper encourages future research to think about participant inclusive or subject-to-subject research and legal advocacy. the discussion here points out potential differential experiences that may merit inclusion. acknowledgements the author wants to acknowledge the silent, invisible and unknown but long deported. the author is grateful for all of the research assistance she received from angela he, tae-min (peter) choi, aditya rao, seema shafei as well as support from the law foundation of ontario. special thank you to olivia lee for her patient research assistance. thank you to elizabeth sheehy for bringing her critical eye to this piece and in giving her honest comments. many thanks to frédérique chabot, elene lam and laila demirdache for conversations over many years on this issue. our talks inspired me to take this project on. i also want to thank the reviewers who gave very helpful advice. finally thank you to blair rutherford, daiva stasiulis and zaheera jinnah for organizing this special issue and for 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(1990). offending women: female lawbreakers and the criminal justice system. london: routledge. jacobs final mar 7 19 correspondence address: curran katsi’sorókwas jacobs, department of integrated studies in education, mcgill university, montréal, qc, h3a 1y2 email: curran.jacobs@mail.mcgill.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 two-row wampum reimagined: understanding the hybrid digital lives of contemporary kanien’kehá:ka youth curran katsi’sorókwas jacobs mcgill university, canada abstract this article explores the digital life of one indigenous youth and her experience with multiliteracies. the piece emphasizes the hybrid identity of contemporary indigenous youth who not only reconcile traditional and contemporary identities, but also participate actively in several digital communities and life worlds. through a participatory action research approach, listening to the digital experiences of youth can have fundamental impacts for creating more socially just pedagogical practices for multimodal multiliteracies. keywords multiliteracies; indigenous identity; digital technology; hybridity introduction the two-row wampum, an agreement or document – although not in the western, literary sense – was created by the haudenosaunee during the early days of colonization,1 when europeans came to turtle island and decided that this was to be their new home. the haudenosaunee people were welcoming of their new neighbors to the point of proposing the agreement of the tworow wampum to ensure that peace be maintained in this new reality. depicted on a belt were two rows, one representative of the haudenosaunee canoe and the other of a european ship, the lines ran parallel to one another from beginning to end. the agreement was to be that both ship and canoe, europeans and haudenosaunee, would share the river and each stay in their boats. as the story goes, as my father tells it, the europeans ignored the requests of their neighbors, and there were multiple collisions within that river (calvin jacobs, personal communication). colonial history has turned 1 the haudenosaunee or iroquois confederacy is made up of six nations: cayuga, onondaga, seneca, oneida, mohawk and tuscarora. curran katsi’sorókwas jacobs studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 60 the two-row wampum into just another story we tell; a remnant of ancient literacies that pre-date the contemporary world. however, for the haudenosaunee people, it is a living narrative, passed down through the generations, guiding the lives of the people who are now faced with an alternate existence to what might have played out if the european counterparts maintained their end of the bargain. fast forward to the present. a document without words, a story my father tells me, a history that pervades the identity of kanien’kehá:ka (mohawk) people, the two-row wampum, i admit, is something that i have reclaimed in my own understandings of the world to describe an emergent, contemporary phenomenon: the hybridity of indigenous identities and literacy practices in contemporary society. as an educator, i use the two-row wampum to describe my experience and that of my students, kanien’kehá:ka youth in the greater canadian society. now that colonialism has defined space for us both in the ships and in the canoes, our balancing act, day in and day out, is to ride that river with one foot firmly planted in each boat. this act is tough, but it is what we do in pursuit of the decolonial project: our lives. the experiences of the youth participants i had the chance to learn from during the inquiry leading to this paper, each achieved this balance in their own ways. maren, the youth i spent most of my time with, represents this balancing act both in her digital communities and in real life. she is a prime example of the reimagined two-row wampum. positioning indigenous knowledge it is important to acknowledge that my own worldview and perceptions both personally and academically are embedded in the traditional teachings that i have had access to my whole life. as a kanien’kehá:ka person and member of my community, it is essential to recognize where traditional teachings and stories come from. marie battiste (2005) discusses that the transmission of cultural knowledge through the generations is shared “through modelling, practice and animation, rather than the written word” (p. 2). in discussing her attempt at a literature review of indigenous knowledge, she remarks on how the practice is misidentified as knowledge for most indigenous cultures is not literature but rather “embedded in the cumulative experiences and teachings of indigenous peoples” (battiste, 2005, p. 2). as i explore and expand upon concepts such as the two-row wampum, i acknowledge that this knowledge is not mine to claim alone, but is a part of my upbringing and my collective identity as a kanien’kehá:ka person. as i weave this traditional knowledge with new understandings and theory, i too practice navigating space with a foot in each vessel. i hope to maintain the integrity of my cultural upbringing and community by acknowledging people like my father who are transmitters of knowledge; knowledge that is not confined to one person’s thoughts and understandings, but is a part of the collective identity and world view of a two-row wampum reimagined studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 61 whole nation of people. a levelling of the playing field, in a way, is part of the decolonizing process that is discussed throughout this piece; positioning indigenous knowledge on equal footing with western thought is not unlike the necessity for discussing indigenous literacies as a piece of the multiliteraties conversation. two-row wampum and identity i use the image of the two-row wampum for several reasons. i believe it is essential as the basis of my writing this piece is to discuss multiliteracies as they are emergent in classrooms and society at large. it can be challenging, even as an indigenous academic to include culturally relevant literacies as a part of the larger discourse of multiliteracies. however, reflecting the practices of youth like maren is a reminder that what she is creating and engaging with on a daily basis is the infusion of her identities. the literacy practices that she engages in are created by the colonial history and are influenced and infused with the understandings from each respective community and history she belongs to. the two-row wampum’s origin, a belt, is an example of a non-western epistemology at work. this reinterpretation of its significance acts as a marker for the transformative nature of literacy over time and space (de souza, 2015). but most importantly, it signifies a piece of the multiliteracies conversation that is underrepresented after 20 years: indigenous perspectives and experiences. the initial shift from a single, autonomous view of literacy to an ideological view of multiliteracies has been crucial in unpacking the experience of youth today (alvermann, 2009). to understand the literacy practices of contemporary digital youth, as suggested by the new london group (1996), the education system needed revitalized teaching practices to accommodate and consider diverse experiences and types of literacy. literacy, previously understood as reading and writing, transforms as new media develops; contemporary literacy practices encompass diverse skills and knowledge acquired through engagement with media and the communities that embrace them. curriculum and pedagogy should reflect the various cultures of students while creating fair and inclusive schools (lavoie, sarkar, mark, & jeniss, 2008). acceptance and integration of indigenous literacies, particularly, is necessary in the transformation of schools. essentially, the education system needs to undergo a complete decolonization. decolonization means reconciling diverse histories, and understanding that there are multiple perspectives from these histories that must be accepted to move forward (jacobs, 2016). i assert that to move deeper into the decolonial project of progress and socially just practices, particularly for the case of quebec and canada, the starting point is with youth. the contemporary concern for literacy developments rest on the daily lives of indigenous youth curran katsi’sorókwas jacobs studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 62 who are models of hybridity in practice and in identity. while the education system looks to create learning that is relevant and essential for the 21st century, it is time move away from prescriptive, researcher-driven inquiries (mirra, filipiak, & garcia, 2015). the next move, particularly for the benefit of kanien’kehá:ka youth, is to hear from the youth themselves. creating spaces for reflection of digital self, cultural self and what this means in youths’ communities should be the guides for multiliteracy progression in the 21st century. when teachers are exposed to the real life literacy practices of their students, they are better equipped to create meaningful literacy learning situations (perry, 2012). everything that was suggested about societal shifts in youth literacy has already been happening in the wake of colonialism, and it starts with listening to the experiences of resilient indigenous youth who just want to participate in the world (kovach, 2005). the new london group (1996) emphasized in their work the hybridity of practices: the combination of literacies and contexts is the future. indigenous youth are models of hybridity in their daily-lived experiences as they are silently negotiating two (or more, in some cases) worlds constantly. although there are instances of explicit cultural infusions throughout the work and experience of indigenous individuals who are what ginsburg (2008) considers cultural activists, maren’s work, without being explicitly representative of her kanien’kehá:ka identity, is emergent from her hybrid identity. research background this article follows a youth participatory action research project that took place in an urban kanien’kehá:ka community. the intentions of the project were to engage youth in one of the community’s teen centres in discussing their digital identities and practices, reflecting upon their experiences with digital media and technology in school, and to create digital stories for their teachers from their community school that demonstrate their experiences and interests in the digital worlds. the participants of this project ranged from 13 to 17 years of age and comprised youth who both attended the local high school and youth who attended school in both private and public sectors in surrounding communities. the teen centre is a designated program created by the community with the mandate of developing youth in several capacities to prepare them for the world. maren, 13 years old, attends a private school in a neighbouring community. she is a member of the teen centre who actively participates in the programming, and is equal parts outspoken and informative. while her formal educational experience has not fostered her literacy development effectively, it is her own drive, interests and sense of belonging in her online communities of digital art that have motivated her to be the best at what she does; that is, create, co-create and interact with others in digital art platforms two-row wampum reimagined studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 63 and communities. her understanding of and engagement with the digital art community is her raison d'etre, and when teased out further, is one of the building blocks for informing socially just changes to literacy practices. the youth, including maren, engaged in six two-hour sessions with the research team to discuss, plan and create their digital stories. over the course of the sessions, maren and i engaged in informal working sessions where we discussed her digital practices, perceptions of digital identity, and school. it was through these same six sessions that i mentored her through the creation of a speed paint video, which she decided was representative of her digital skills. the organic process dictated the actions of each session with the overarching guiding question of what each youth thought teachers should know about their digital lives. this project is of particular interest and importance for me as an educator, researcher and community member. in its earlier manifestations, the teen centre was a space where i spent my formative years, and i can attest to the significance of such a structure for the lives of other kanien’kehá:ka who are growing up in this new and complex world. as an educator in this community, i experienced the shifts occurring in the local education system to move towards a 21st century curriculum that is representative of contemporary educational concerns and traditional knowledge. a major component of this is the integration of technology into the curriculum, and so this project is another form of reconciliation for youth to present their aligned concerns with the educational system. engagement with youth like maren may catalyze the necessary transformations of educational institutions and literacy as imagined by the new london group. learning alongside youth about their individual practices offers opportunities to experience and unpack how the reimagined two-row wampum might manifest differently amongst individuals. youth driven action-research is a powerful tool in this instance; the knowledge generated in these scenarios allows for growth amongst participant and researcher, youth and adult. theoretical framework hybridity is not a new concept. the new london group (1996) identified the multiple life worlds that youth occupy, and described the complex relationships between each one. the more diverse worlds youth participate in, the greater likelihood of emergent relationships and new literacies. in indigenous contexts, hybridity by name may be viewed as contentious or radical as there is a desire for authenticity (de souza, 2015). the historical and continued depreciation of indigenous literacies in dominant discourses, alongside fear of assimilation, can make it particularly repugnant to claim contemporary indigenous identity as hybrid. and yet, as de souza (2015) asserts, indigenous identities and literacies are in constant transition, as a curran katsi’sorókwas jacobs studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 64 reconciliation dance is performed between dominant and indigenous cultures. a contemporary indigenous digital youth, in this case, is the amalgamation of all of the spaces they occupy, and it is this hybridity that delineates their interests, literacies and identity. multimodality is another concept that is particularly indigenous, and yet was prioritized by the new london group (1996) in their pursuit to redefine literacies. while indigenous literacies are not limited to visual representations, imagery is a major form of communication in many cultures (de souza, 2015). an image – whether drawn or crafted with other material – might connote narrative or historical significance. art is the opportunity to present messages without oral or written language, and in an early european understanding, meaning in representation was determined through interpretation “of the rational mind” (de souza, 2015, p. 163). for many indigenous contexts, however, representation was less about interpretation, and rooted deeper in culture and community significance. a particular image can only be impactful if it is something known and shared – if it connotes history and cultural knowledge. in its time, the two-row wampum belt was a visual representation of concept, agreement and history that resonates for kanien’kehá:ka people both of the past and of today. this is a valued literacy for community that is not prioritized in greater western contexts. it is a valued literacy that is prioritized for educational progression, as it is a proponent of contemporary indigenous literacies. digital media are multimodal and flexible. they make up a large proportion of contemporary literacies, as they encompass the primary literacies of reading and writing, and extend well beyond to visual and other sorts. digital media is particularly vital in the discussion of contemporary indigenous literacies as its visual and aural nature are aligned with cultural epistemologies (mills, davis-warra, sewell, & anderson, 2016). contemporary indigenous people are continuing the hybrid world with different projects, in various platforms and in development of diverse media (ginsburg, 2008). as kral (2010) asserts for the case of australia, “indigenous youth are now firmly part of digital culture and are playing an increasingly salient role as the mediators of new media” (p. 1). in canadian contexts, indigenous youth are acting as creators and ambassadors in digital communities and doing so autonomously, driven by interest. in some of these instances, youth are acting as agents of cultural activism (ginsburg, 2008), explicitly creating content for the sake of revitalizing relationships to culture and land. these moments of cultural activism are about appropriating western literacies and practices, and infusing them with the cultural undertones of indigenous knowledge and world views. this is an explicit act of hybridization that exists in the practices of youth and other indigenous peoples. however, the nature of hybridity that emerges in nonexplicit digital creations might also be seen as a form of cultural activism. indigenous youth who create mash up videos that are not explicitly about indigenous identity or culture tell a different side of their story. these types two-row wampum reimagined studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 65 of creations are culturally activist because they defy possible notions that being indigenous means something specific; being indigenous means being hybrid. hybridity means participating in the world and occupying multiple spaces. one of the realities about youth, regardless of their formal education, is that they are literate. while school focuses on reading and writing as a primary form of literacy, youth are engaging in activities outside of school where they build additional skills and literacies. interest drives youth culture, and the development of platforms, community and various digital literacies, which emerge simply by youth pursuing something valued (alvermann, 2009). those who are not particularly academic, or who lack in reading and writing abilities, are still capable of participating in their digital communities (alvermann, 2009). the multimodality of literacies in these capacities not only allows space for youth to express themselves in ways other than writing, but also even encourages them to develop writing skills as a means of not being left out. youth are driven by their own reasons for literacy and are unimpressed with the supposed necessity of academic literacy. on the other end of the spectrum, alvermann (2009) asserts that the multitasking nature of some students in school occurs because they have already mastered their expected literacy developments and are bored. these students are the ones who seek meaningful work, and might view schoolwork as mere obstacle. they are the busy bodies, scrolling the websites they are not supposed to and doodling in their agendas because perfecting their shading technique is far more valuable than close reading and sentence structure. the alternatives forms of literacy to reading and writing which youth are partaking can seem challenging to grasp when we are unsure how to describe and discuss them. an understanding of culture or literacy can only be explained with the language that one has, and there can be blocks that go up when presented with something new and different (de souza, 2015). there can be an aversion to multimodal multiliteracies with individual inexperience, but this can be remedied by the development of what de souza (2015) calls critical literacy. this is a concept that explores the how and why of a person’s understanding. that is, individual understanding is a symptom of position, and to be self-aware of your shortcomings and point of entry is to be critically literate. critical literacy in education is essential, particularly with the necessary shift in transformed practice of pedagogy (new london group, 1996), because it is not only expanding the canon of literacy but also carving out space for youth-driven meaning making and effective global citizenship. teachers and schools need to be responsible for listening to their obviously literate youth and provide models for them on how to practice critical literacy with respect to their own community participation. curran katsi’sorókwas jacobs studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 66 two-row wampum reimagined through maren’s multiliteracies maren occupies several spaces, creates and conveys her thoughts through a variety of media, and as a result, navigates her water balancing between boats with ease. she occupies multiple lifeworlds simultaneously (new london group, 1996). the traces of her infused multiliteracies manifest in her engagement with both physical and digital art and in her preference for visual representation and oral communication over writing. this section of the article will present maren’s narrative and present the two major components of this narrative that demonstrate her simultaneous adherence to both traditional and contemporary identities. maren’s experience is a model of cultural activism and 21st century global citizenship. maren’s practices when i first met maren, she was sitting at a table in the teen centre she frequents, listening to music on a cd player. this was an obvious conversation starter, as she was using technology that many other youth in her own generation might never have heard of. my interest in her reasons for still using a cd player started the conversation, which led deeper into her experiences with technology and digital media. immediately following her explanation of her out-dated cd collection she turned my attention to her notebook that was filled with drawings. maren is a self-taught artist who specializes in character drawings and has a repertoire of drawings completed both with traditional pen and paper and with digital media. maren taught herself to draw by using a drawing dictionary that she read and followed along with, picking up technique and developing her own sense of style. she posts her drawings primarily on deviant art, a website devoted to the creation and sharing of artwork. in deviant art, she participates in the community by posting her creations and “watching” others do the same. there is a camaraderie developed in the interactions between users of this platform, as well as an active practice of adoption and sale of characters. maren specifically creates some of her drawings for adoption, so that other users can take ownership over her drawings and use them for a variety of purposes. she also adopts or purchases characters from other users using cryptocurrency, and adds them to her collection of drawings. some of the drawings are pictures of characters she created in her notebook, and others are digital creations she made using digital drawing platforms. one of the platforms she spoke extensively about using was aggie.io. this platform is a collaborative painting application that allows users to produce pixel art using multiple layers, while doubling as a place for artists to work together on drawings through the internet. she has tried many of the free applications available, and for the creation that she made during our time, she used a different platform called frame cast, which has a similar two-row wampum reimagined studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 67 function to aggie.io (see figure 1). along with the 2-d characters she creates in these platforms, maren has also begun to experiment with small animations, creating moving gif characters. she posts those on her deviant art account as well, and put one up for adoption by a prominent user in the deviant art world. when maren described how exciting it was for this user to choose her character as her avatar, it was clear that this user had made an impact on maren’s experience in the community. figure 1. character drawing created by maren using the frame cast application. maren uses instagram and youtube to display her art and as a way to find and follow other artists, music and other forms of popular culture (like memes). she also has a server in the discord application, which is a prominent tool for online gaming and communities. in this platform, she engages directly with other people who share her interests by creating thematic threads to organize and maintain conversations. she engages in conversation with her friends through all of the platforms she uses. she has curran katsi’sorókwas jacobs studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 68 developed relationships with people she has met in real life and online, and engages daily with her drawing. maren discussed her of understanding of the social constructs at play across communities. she occupies multiple spaces simultaneously, and is aware of the hierarchies in each place. on a digital level, social status is gained by the number of watchers one has in deviant art: the more you interact with others, produce new pieces and develop your skills, the more mobility and popularity you have. an example of this is the user who adopted maren’s animated character. this user is prominent in both the deviant art and youtube communities, and has developed skills to create full-length animated videos with characters that are digitally drawn. maren looks up to this user, admires the work that they create and aspires to develop her own skills to match those of this user. maren discusses not only the implicit camaraderie but also emphasizes the explicit encouragement and sense of community that exists among users in her platforms. almost everyone she encounters is supportive and wants to help one another to develop their drawing skills. maren acknowledges that the dynamics of her online worlds also exist in the real world. as noted by the new london group (1996), what maren is describing in her experience with the online art community is the shift in hierarchy of command to one of “postfordism” (p. 65); where workplace, or in this case community dynamics and hierarchy, are created within community rather than imposed upon community. mentorship is the key to mobility in this space and as maren engages with more users, she learns how to access this mobility. balancing physical and digital art the progression of maren’s art from using pencil and paper to engaging in digital platforms is reflective of the transformative nature of digital engagement. drawings take on a new life when they are posted to online forums, as they become part of the discourse in the communities with which they are shared. maren’s move from drawing on paper to engaging with new platforms and creating digitally manifests the transformation and development of her literacies driven by interest and necessity (alvermann 2009). simultaneously, maren is developing skills that are valued (or emerging as valuable) in the workplace. similar to the changes in hierarchy, a shift is being made in the communication of workspaces to reflect a more informal and digital format (new london group 1996). her interest comes with the desire to create new drawings, and to improve skills, while the learning and development of skill involved (i.e., navigating new applications or layering colours and line work) evolves from the interest to be a part of the community and create at the same level as others. maren is simultaneously participating in and extending discourse with her contributions to the digital two-row wampum reimagined studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 69 art world. she is also obtaining skills and developing literacies independently that might support her future career (whatever that may be) by engaging with these new ways of communicating. the art that maren creates is not explicitly representative of her indigenous identity. throughout our conversations, she never mentioned the fact that she was indigenous; she did not make any connections of this part of her identity to her artwork. this exclusion is essential despite any of the parallels and assumptions that might be made between traditional and cultural literacies and maren’s current practices. the only certainty about the indigeneity of her artwork is that she identifies as kanien’kehá:ka. this is crucial in the discussion of her hybrid practices and identities. she is creating art and participating in digital worlds and is also indigenous. these facts are distinct and at the same time are parts of the whole: maren. her cultural activism (ginsburg, 2008) is neither implicit nor explicit in her art; she is a cultural activist by occupying space in multiple lifeworlds simultaneously. trading in writing for showing maren’s digital identity and literacy practices are diverse. one of the primary things she brings up is that she is not interested in writing, and is far more comfortable with conveying meaning through visual representation. she described a character whose name and colour choices were based on a sunset. she acknowledged that this particular manifestation of a sunset was her perception and realized that other people and creatures might see the colors differently. however, she would rather present messages in a drawing than in writing. several things are happening when she describes her decisions for the character above. maren is first engaging in the perpetuation of artistic styles, symbols, archetypes without prompt. she is engaging in knowledge creation independent of her education, which can be perceived as far more valuable than simply writing about something. she is also using conventions of her craft and drawing literacy to convey specific meaning that she knows other artists who engage in the same kind of work will understand. she is communicating in a sophisticated, non-verbal, non-written fashion that defies the expectations and importance of writing because this literacy allows her to participate in her community. she is also applying conventions of writing to visual representation when she talks about symbolism, which aligns with the new london groups’ (1996) assertion that “text is also related to the visual” (p. 64). not only are new forms of communication being created with the introduction of new media, these new literacies also impact the ways in which language is used (new london group, 1996). although maren explicitly rejects writing as her preferred means of communicating, she is using language and literary conventions to discuss her work; this is indicative of her autonomous education, which takes place as she navigates her digital worlds. curran katsi’sorókwas jacobs studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 70 maren’s experience is particularly fruitful to the conversation of literacy practices because of her cultural activism. her development of digital art started from her understandings of visual art as something you create with pen and paper, and yet, her introduction to the digital world and the platforms provided allowed for her self-discovery of a new literacy: pixel art. everything that she creates is created in tension with her multiple lifeworlds, as she draws on inspiration from her surroundings (community, family, etc.) and what she is exposed to online. she is unapologetically adding to the pixel art discourses, and occupying space as a kanien’kehá:ka person in different communities. this is her hybridity. her ability to occupy space seamlessly in various communities, including her indigenous community is what maintains her balance with a foot in each boat through the water. implications for decolonizing theories of multiliteracies reconciling identity day in and day out is a task that is done so quietly, and sometimes without even knowing it. maren is representative of hybridity in action as she occupies multiple spaces, and participates in literacy practices that are representative of all of these spaces that she occupies. her willingness to share this story with me speaks of the untapped potential that is brewing within. moreover, maren’s engagement in these digital communities has demonstrated that although her creations are not explicitly indigenous or representative of this part of her identity, her participation is a blend of the life worlds she occupies. she is a living incarnation of the contemporary tworow wampum. the authenticity of her indigenous identity while engaging in other communities will always be maintained because contemporary indigenous identity is about balancing. what her story seeks to catalyze is the integration of multimodal, multiliteracies in the education system that are not prescriptive of what curriculum writers perceive as important for development and success, but rather which are youth-driven and rooted in diverse literacies. uprooting the ways in which we prioritize literacies will lead to the hybridity that the new london group presented, and that exists in the lives of each kanien’kehá:ka youth. there is a responsibility now for students and educators to take on the role of change makers who have power (new london group, 1996). teachers need to begin teaching students skills that are reflective of the new workplaces as well as fostering student capacity to be vocal, critical and to share their already abundant knowledge of their multiple lifeworlds and the skills that come with them (new london group, 1996). the need for inclusive classrooms and pedagogy is key. understanding the hybridity of individuals is necessary for developing a culture of hybridity in classroom and learning. while youth are continuing to partake in different communities and creating new forms of literacy in their daily lives, it is two-row wampum reimagined studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 71 crucial that the education they receive emphasize these individual differences. creating the space for youth to decide what platforms and skills are necessary for their own interest and self-development is crucial, but more importantly, the openness to multimodal practices will add to the environment. more importantly, youth need to take on their more than deserved role as knowledge creators. simply asking youth what they do and how they do it can lead to deeper conversations into how they navigate time and space and what they perceive of as essential in the changing world. asking them to teach teachers and other adults is a far more fruitful exercise, because ultimately they are much better at keeping up with the times. in these dialogues and collaborations, not only are student and teacher creating dialogue around already existing practices, they are creating new practices and relationships; they are creating knowledge together. decolonization began as a land-based pursuit, with the intention of actually dismantling colonial impacts on the land and the original people who occupy those lands. while contemporary colonized countries are well past the point of decolonizing land per se, there has been a shift beyond physical reclamation and into emotional, mental and social revitalization. beyond this, with the development of digital platforms, the pursuit of decolonization has also moved into occupying space and contributing to the discourses in ways that might not have been intended. while youth like maren are participating extensively in decolonizing digital spaces and dismantling stereotypes of what contemporary indigeneity entails, it is time now for educational institutions to hold up their end of the deal. but how do they do this? rather than maintaining focus on the inclusion or proper representation of indigenous literacies in the educational infrastructure, the focus must shift to the indigenous youth who are living this hybridity, to ask them to guide us through what indigenous literacies might look like in this ever changing world. creating forums for their voices to tell the stories of navigating digital space as an indigenous person is the next step necessary for creating socially just pedagogy and ensuring that the multimodal multiliteracies that youth are engaging with in their formal education are not only culturally relevant but useful in the pursuit of leading successful and meaningful lives. collaboration is how the best ideas come to fruition. teachers and schools need to develop their own literacy: a critical literacy of exercising listening and learning from their cultural location, and engage in the challenging work of making sense of someone else’s experiences (de souza, 2015). this is the collaborative learning for the future. acknowledgements i wish to acknowledge the funding to this project provided by the ncte research foundation grant. i also wish to acknowledge the youth in my community who continue to teach me new things, each and every day. your curran katsi’sorókwas jacobs studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 59-72, 2019 72 voices are important; don’t ever stop speaking. references alvermann, d. e. (2009). sociocultural constructions of adolescence and young people’s literacies. in r. christenbury, r. bomer & p. smagorinsky (eds.), handbook of adolescent literacy research (pp. 14-28). new york: guilford press. battiste, m. (2002). indigenous knowledge and pedagogy in first nations education: a literature review with recommendations. ottawa: national working group on education. de souza, l. m. t. m. (2015). indigenous literacies in literacy studies. in j. rowsell & k. pahl (eds.), the routledge handbook of literacy studies (pp. 157-168). london: routledge. ginsburg, f. (2008). rethinking the digital age. in p. wilson & m. stewart (eds.), global indigenous media: cultures, poetics, & politics (pp. 287-305). durham, nc: duke university press. jacobs, calvin. personal communication. jacobs, c. (2016). finding your voice: cultural resurgence and power in political movement. in d. reder & l. m. morra (eds.), learn, teach, challenge: approaching indigenous literatures (pp. 423-428). waterloo: wilfrid laurier university press. kovach, m. (2005). emerging from the margins: indigenous methodologies. in l. brown & s. strega (eds.), research as resistance: critical, indigenous, and anti-oppressive approaches (pp. 19-36). toronto: canadian scholars press. kral, i. (2010). plugged in: remote australian indigenous youth and digital culture. canberra, act: centre for aboriginal economic policy research, working paper number 69/2010. pp. 1-17. lavoie, c., sarak, m., mark, m., & jeniss, b. (2012). multiliteracies pedagogy in language teaching: an example from an innu community in quebec. canadian journal of native education, 35(1), 194-224. mills, k. a., davis-warra, j., sewell, m., & anderson, m. (2016). indigenous ways with literacies: transgenerational, multimodal, placed, and collective. language & education, 30(1), 1-21. mirra, n., filipiak, d., & garcia, a. (2015). revolutionizing inquiry in urban english classrooms: pursuing voice and justice through youth participatory action research. english journal, 105(2), 49-57. perry, k. h. (2012). what is literacy? a critical overview of sociocultural perspectives. journal of language & literacy education, 8(1), 50-71. the new london group. (1996). a pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures. harvard educational review, 66(1), 60-93. microsoft word 1-10_noonan.docx studies in social justice volume 5, issue 1, 1-10, 2011   correspondence address: jeffrey noonan, department of philosophy, university of windsor, windsor, on n9b 3p4, canada. tel.: +1 519 253-3000 x 2396; email: jnoonan@uwindsor.ca issn: 1911-4788 life value and social justice jeffrey noonan department of philosophy, university of windsor since its publication in 1971, john rawls’ a theory of justice has defined the terrain of political philosophical debate concerning the principles, scope, and material implications of social justice. social justice for rawls concerns the principles that govern the operation of major social institutions. major social institutions structure the lives of citizens by regulating access to the resources and opportunities that the formulation and realization of human projects require. rawls’ theory of social justice regards major institutions as just when they distribute what he calls “primary goods” in a manner that he regards as egalitarian. hence, the subsequent social justice debate has been shaped by and large as a debate about the meaning and implications of egalitarianism. while on the surface a debate about egalitarianism as a distributional principle seems to uncover the core problem of social justice—how much of what everyone should get as a matter of right—the entire history of the debate has been conducted in abstraction from what matters most to people’s lives. it is as a corrective to such abstractions that the life-value approach to social justice has been developed. in this introduction i have three aims. first, i will substantiate the claim that the debate over social justice that has dominated political philosophy from rawls until the present is abstracted from what ultimately matters. second, i will provide a concise conceptual history of the development of life-value onto-axiology, defining its key terms and providing an overview of its importance for social justice. finally, i will provide a brief discussion of the unifying principle of this special issue and each of the four papers that make it up. primary goods, equality, and life-value i claimed above that the mainstream philosophical debate concerning social justice initiated by rawls is abstracted from what matters most to humanity. in order to substantiate this claim it is necessary to begin with a discussion of rawls’ theory itself. for rawls social justice concerns the principles that regulate the way in which major social institutions distribute what he calls “primary goods.” primary goods are “things that every rational man is presumed to want. these goods normally have a 2 jeffrey noonan   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   use whatever a person’s plan of life. for simplicity’s sake, assume that the chief primary goods at the disposition of society are rights, liberties and opportunities, and wealth and income” (rawls, 1999, p. 54). these are to be distributed according to two principles of social justice, and the principles interpreted according to the “difference principle.” the two principles of justice are: “each person is to have equal rights to the most extensive share of equal liberties compatible with a similar scheme for others. second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and b) attached to positions and offices open to all” (rawls, 1999, p. 53). the difference principle decisively affects the concrete application of these principles to the distributions of primary goods. it maintains that inequalities are permissible as incentives to the wealthy to act so as to ensure that the “economic process is more efficient, [and] innovation proceeds at a faster pace,” and, in general, becomes more productive, creating more wealth overall, and therefore a larger pool of resources for the poorer members of society (rawls, 1999, p. 68). widely assumed to be a depth critique of american capitalist society upon its publication, with some going so far as to believe it socialist, rawls argument is still a touchstone of egalitarian critiques of the prevailing socio-economic system (gutman, 1999, p. 17). nevertheless, a close investigation of its key terms reveals that it is neither critical nor egalitarian in a way that would make a material difference to the goodness of the lives of the least well off members of society. the crucial problem is that neither rawls nor his most famous interlocutors in the debate ever question, or even define, the ruling money-value system of the global capitalist market. instead, the legitimacy of this value system is presupposed, and debate confined to arguments over what amount of money should be redistributed from rich to poor, while the deeper problem of control over and use of life-sustaining and life-developing resources is never even broached. in illustration of this problem consider rawls’ definition of primary goods. the problem with this definition encapsulates the problem of the subsequent debate. quite simply, the problem with the definition is that it confuses goods that are primary values within the capitalist market system with goods that are primary values to human life. in liberal-capitalist society rights, liberties, and income appear primary, because they are the means by which the system reproduces and legitimates itself. human life, by contrast, reproduces itself through collective labour in the natural field of life-support through which the resources our lives require are appropriated or produced. different systems of collective labour are legitimate or not according to whether they enable everyone to satisfy their life requirements. real primary goods are the resources, practices, institutions, and relationships that support and enable life-activity. contra rawls, therefore, primary goods are not relative to particular social systems, and it is not rational to want them in unlimited amounts, but only in those amounts sufficient for purposes of life-maintenance and development. unlimited demand for life-requirements is materially irrational because appropriation of scarce life-goods at unsustainable levels undermines the very possibility of on-going life. rather than capture that which is fundamental to social justice, rawls confuses the system-values of a liberal-capitalist society with primary life-values, and normalizes the pathological demand for endless accumulation as “rational” regardless of the life value and social justice 3 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   actual extent of one’s own or others’ need. instead of defining and explicating what is actually primary to embodied rational life—the resources, relationships, institutions, and practices which support life and enable the development of its vital capacities—rawls assumes as primary the prevailing system-values, even though these are demonstrably destructive of the natural system of life-support and billions of peoples’ lives within different human societies. people’s lives are destroyed because the ecosystems they depend upon are destroyed or because they cannot afford to pay the money-price attached to commodified life-requirements. yet, as his invocation of the difference principle proves, rawls premises the possibility of social justice not on the spread of a commitment to egalitarianism in society, but to the unfettered growth of money-value—precisely the cause of the problem his theory is supposed to address. as i have noted, rawls’ theory has not been uncontroversial and it has given rise to a host of sympathetic critiques. the best of those critiques, by sen, pogge, and cohen focus on the ways in which rawls ignores the question of what people are actually able to do and achieve, his failure to consider the problems of the global distribution of wealth, and the contradiction between his professed egalitarianism and the difference principle (cohen, 1989, 2008; pogge, 1989, 2008; sen, 1992, 1999, 2009). as important as these argument have been in exposing the complexity of the philosophical and political problems posed by the goal of equality, they too all fail to supply the key principle missing from the entire debate: precise specification of a criterion by which to distinguish the resources, relationships, institutions, and practices that justice demands people have access to, from the values that liberalcapitalist society depends upon for its reproduction. this criterion can only be discovered if philosophy understands people not as atomic, self-maximizing consumers, as in classical liberalism and neo-classical economics, but as organically and socially interdependent members of natural fields of life-support and social fields of life-development. all are silent on this key issue because all begin from unquestioned acceptance of the prevailing value system as ultimate rather than the universal value system grounded in the natural and social systems of life-support and development. lifevalue onto-axiology, in contrast, distinguishes itself from existing value theories and social and political philosophies by uncovering and systematically explicating this real life-ground of value. it is from this life-ground of value, that the life-value theory of social justice derives, and its systematic explanation and application is the focus of this special issue of the journal. the life-ground of value, in the most general terms, is everything that is required for the survival and development of human and ecological life and their life-support systems. subjectively, it is “the connection of life to life’s requirements as a felt bond of being” (mcmurtry, 1998, p. 23). as is evident, the life-ground of value is deeper than the ruling value system of any society since it underlies the possibility and value of all life, not just human. it becomes relevant for theories of social justice as the objective basis by which goods which are of ultimate value because they are required for the maintenance and development of this life—as distinguished from system-values which allow a given social system to replicate and grow at the cumulative cost of human and planetary existence. that which the life-ground of value distinguishes as of ultimate value are life-requirements, or needs. liferequirements may be distinguished from consumer demands according to what 4 jeffrey noonan   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   mcmurtry has called the n-criterion: those resources, relationships, practices and institutions whose deprivation causes harm in the form of loss of organic lifecapacity. (mcmurtry, 1998, p. 164). from this life-grounded standpoint social justice requires that the ruling value system of any society ensure the universal lifenecessities for all. while other attempts have been made to define needs and posit their satisfaction as the basis of social justice, none of them have formulated a precise criterion of need, nor, in the case of human needs, successfully integrated the natural and social dimensions of human existence, nor, most importantly, uncovered the deeper lifeground within which human needs are anchored (see for example, braybrooke, 1987; doyal & gough, 1991; hamilton, 2006; lebowitz, 2010). the exemplary significance of life-value onto-axiology is thus not just that it supplies a criterion of need missing in other theories of social justice, but that it grounds social justice in universal life-needs and the capacities that they and only they enable. the comprehensive value theory undergirding the life-value understanding of social justice further supersedes the antitheses of nature and society, individual and community, life-requirements and life-capacities. this comprehensive value theory attains its fullest explication and defence in mcmurtry’s “what is good, what is evil: the value of all values across times, places, and theories” in the encyclopaedia of life-support systems. (eolss) (mcmurtry, 2010). the eolss is the world’s most comprehensive encyclopaedia of disciplinary and technical knowledges and has evolved to provide all that is required for the maintenance and development of life across divisions. what mcmurtry’s farreaching work shows inter alia is a blindness within philosophy to what is selfevident once it has been uncovered: that life is both a presupposition of value (in the sense that creatures must be alive to experience or accomplish anything) and valuable in itself in the ranges of life enjoyed which can be more or less comprehensive. there are two essential forms of life-value: the instrumental or ultimate value of that which sustains and enables life, and the intrinsic value of the enjoyed expressions of the life-capacities of feeling, thought, and action (mcmurtry, 2010, p.74). both are comprehended under the primary value axiom: x is of value if and only if and to the extent that x consists in or enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought/experience/action (2010, p.73). the qualifier “more coherently inclusive range” is essential to the success of life-value onto-axiology in overcoming the antitheses into which other theories fall. theories of social justice which are not anchored in consciousness of the lifeground of value tend to set the natural and social dimensions of human being at odds with each other, or see the relationship between human individuals and social organization as one of opposition and threat, or fail to properly explicate the organic relationship between life-requirement satisfaction and life-capacity development. productivist interpretations of marxism which link the achievement of social justice to the creation of a socialist society, and understand socialist society as removing the “fetters” on the growth of the productive forces are paradigm examples of the first problem. all social life depends upon the natural field of life-support, a fact ignored by marxist theory to the extent that it treats nature and other life as nothing but raw material for the satisfaction of human needs understood as culturally appropriate levels of demand satisfaction. this problem has its roots in marx’s own inability to life value and social justice 5 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   rigorously distinguish life-requirements from ever-growing consumer demands (marx, 1973, p. 163). in life-value axiology, by contrast, life-valuable levels of social productivity are determined by the concrete principle of life-sufficiency: a just society does not seek unlimited material abundance but sufficiency of resources to the purpose of universal and comprehensive satisfaction of life-requirements. the second problem is exemplified in liberal theories of social justice which, because they assume individuals are atomic abstractions arrayed in competitive relations with others, cannot coherently reconcile individual goals and social institutions and regulating principles. nussbaum’s version of the “capabilities approach” to social justice is a paradigm case. nussbaum correctly understands human beings as both “capable and needy” and understands need satisfaction as instrumental to the expression and enjoyment of human capacities in a “flourishing life.” (nussbaum, 1995, p. 75). she nevertheless maintains that human beings are essentially separate from each other such that their primary concern is maintaining their “liberty.” from this doctrine of the separateness of persons she infers the practical conclusion that “economic needs should not be met by denying liberty” (2000, p. 12). for life-value onto-axiology the opposition between satisfying economic needs and denying liberties does not arise, because human beings are not considered as essentially separate from each other, but interrelated and interdependent within the natural and social fields of life-support and lifedevelopment. socially produced wealth is a collective creation of human beings labouring in a natural world they did not create. as a collective product, social wealth is properly understood as common wealth to be used for the sake of universal and comprehensive satisfaction of life-requirements. individuality is enabled by each persons access to the universal life means and goods. in this view life-valuable liberty grows out of or emerges from this shared commitment to universal and comprehensive need-satisfaction. liberty of a life-valuable form is thus never threatened by collective efforts to ensure life-requirements are satisfied, because liberty in any meaningful sense presupposes such satisfaction. the real threat to liberty in the life-valuable sense comes from the opposite direction: the private accumulation of money-wealth not serving anyone’s life-need and attained through life-blind economic processes. the final opposition which life-value onto-axiology resolves is between liferequirement satisfaction and life-capacity development. both liberal and socialist theories of social justice which concern themselves with life-requirement satisfaction do so in the name of some undefined conception of human flourishing or the realization of human potential. but neither liberal nor socialist theories have any means coherent with their premises of specifying limits to capacity realization. liberals, fearful of charges of tyrannical limits to individual liberty, leave the direction of capacity realization entirely up to the arbitrary preferences of private individuals, or more deeply, the life-value indifferent system which leaves little choice for most people. sen for example thus feels that social justice is an institutional arrangement which enables people to live in the ways they have “reason to value” without saying anything further about what those reasons are or the content of the values those reasons support (sen, 1999, p. 87). his position is thus left open to the objection that not all lives that people have reason to value are good lives, either because the life contributes nothing good to the world or because it actively makes things worse for 6 jeffrey noonan   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   others. marxists too fall into a similar trap with loose and ungrounded talk about unlimited realization of potential. michael lebowitz, who has done much to defend a non-dogmatic humanist marxism defends socialism on the basis of the claim that it enables the all-round development of human capacities, without noting that the allround development of human capacities does not coherently exclude their development in life-destructive ways (lebowitz, 2010, p. 43). while it might seem obvious once disclosed, the point must nevertheless be explicitly made, that lifevaluable modes of capacity expression and enjoyment is distinct from full capacity realization, because the life-valuable forms are limited by considerations of the lifeinterests of other creatures and human beings. individual modes of capacity expression which worsen the natural and social fields without which no capacities at all can be expressed are objectively self-undermining. life-grounded social justice therefore requires what mcmurtry calls the life-coherence principle to establish the materially rational limits to individual and system demands. hence social justice does not create the conditions for unlimited capacity expression, but capacity expression which enables planetary and human life as a whole (mcmurtry, 2010, p. 97). this “life-coherence principle” as the ultimate ruling value of a socially just society has not been easily won. it is the outcome of a philosophical struggle that mcmurtry began 40 years ago through overland travels across over 80 countries in africa, the middle east and asia. he was progressively moved to understand the depth reasons behind the impoverishment and deprivation of people’s lives that he observed in his journey. initially, mcmurtry sought for an understanding of those causes in marxism. yet, as he systematically worked through marx’s texts, he became struck by the way in which considerations of life-need and life-capacity were increasingly displaced in favour of so-called “laws of motion” of capitalist society and the growth of the forces of production as the mechanical, and morally meaningless, driving force of historical development (mcmurtry, 1978). the limitations of marxism prompted mcmurtry to reflect upon the broader history of philosophy, a history which he discovered was marked by silence about the ultimate problem of human life-organization: what serves life, what destroys life, and what the systemic social blockages to understanding this difference are (mcmurtry, 1979, 1981, 1988, 1989). the actual turn towards an explicit theorization of the life-ground of value, the real origin of life-value onto-axiology, did not occur until 1998 and the publication of unequal freedoms. from that point on he has elaborated it in two subsequent books, numerous journal articles, and, most comprehensively and importantly, in the theme essay for unesco’s encyclopaedia of life-support systems, “what is good: what is evil: the value of all values across times, places, and theories” (mcmurtry, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2010). the articles collected in this special issue of studies in social justice, including mcmurtry’s comprehensive contribution, continue the process of elaborating and spelling out life-value ontoaxiology’s central importance to the solution of the most pressing theoretical and practical social and political problems in the contemporary world. life value and social justice 7 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   the papers the collection begins with the lead essay by mcmurtry. this lead essay provides a brief historical account of the development of life-value onto-axiology for readers unfamiliar with it, develops clear explanations of its core concepts, and, most importantly, extends his previous work on human rights into constructing a systematic life-value understanding of social justice (mcmurtry, 2011). unlike the competing theories discussed above, the life-value theory of social justice begins from that which truly is primary: the natural and social requirements without which human life can neither survive nor develop. mcmurtry’s article patiently works through the limitations of so-called “pro-life” advocacy both liberal theory and classical marxism, but it reserves its most formidable critical energies to expose and combat the real enemy of social justice: the underlying money-value regime of the “global corporate rights system.” internalized as the unquestioned and unquestionable value paradigm governing public and private behaviour, it mandates as “good” the instrumentalization of all that exists as means for the maximal production and accumulation of money-value for corporate entities (with a definitive criterial account of what a “corporation” exactly is in law and practice). richly illustrated with real-world examples, mcmurtry’s contribution lays bare the systematic threat absolutist corporate rights pose to the world, but also, and more importantly, the underlying life-value alternative of society’s organizing rights. this alternative is not based on theoretical abstraction but on our real life-ground that includes the air we breathe, the water and land we live from and the public, civil commons institutions we have built. the subsequent three essays apply the key concepts of life-value onto-axiology to important practical dimensions of social justice—the food system, education, and human rights in international law. three of the authors: jennifer sumner, howard woodhouse, and giorgio baruchello, are leading figures in the development and explication of the theory and practice of life-grounded social justice. the fourth author, rachael lorna johnstone lends her expertise in international law in a collaborative effort to bring life-value onto-axiology to bear on the legal side of human rights theory and practice. all, with the exception of johnstone, have published widely on core aspects of life-value philosophy previously (baruchello, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010; sumner, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010; woodhouse, 2001, 2001a, 2003, 2003a, 2005, 2009, forthcoming). the first two papers argue that advancing the cause of social justice requires that the food system and the educational system become civil commons institutions. as civil commons institutions they would be governed by the goal of universal provision and protection of life-requirements and life-standards. in each case their life-value as civil commons institutions is threatened by privatization and instrumentalization by the ruling money-value system. in the third paper, baruchello works for the first time with international human rights expert rachael lorna johnstone in a first foray to link together the concepts of (life) value and (human) rights, demonstrating that international law already has a language for life-value and that a nuanced appreciation of the latter concept amongst human rights specialists can bring about a more effective interpretation and implementation of the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (icescr). 8 jeffrey noonan   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   sumner’s essay continues her important work on the global food system. her paper asks what a socially just food system would look like. as she demonstrates, the present global food system treats food as a commodity and its value as the money-profit returns it generates, primarily for large corporate agribusinesses. this corporate food system is indifferent to the nutritional value of the food it produces, to whether people can afford to pay for its food-commodities, and the life-conditions of farmers and farm workers which produce for it. since all who require nutritious food cannot access it under the ruling corporate food-commodity system, it cannot be socially just. social justice from the life-value perspective demands the comprehensive satisfaction of universal life-requirements for the sake of people’s wider and deeper expression and enjoyment of their life-capacities. hence, a socially just food system, sumner concludes, must be grounded in local control over arable lands, crops, and distribution systems and be governed by the overriding goal of sustainable provision of nutritious and healthy food as what each and all of their lives require. in other words, social justice demands that the food system function as a civil commons institution in which people are brought together in a spirit of cooperation and organized, shared commitment to the goal of ensuring the universal satisfaction of our basic need for healthy food. as essential as our need for healthy food is, our human nature is not realized by its provision alone. human nature is integrally natural and social. as food and water are to our body, so is education to our mind: the fundamental condition of its health and development. education is the most fundamental socio-cultural institutional requirement for the development of the cognitive and imaginative capacities that are the foundation for all humanly creative activity. in his paper woodhouse defends the life-value of education as a civil commons institution, exposing the threat posed to it by the subjugation of higher education to corporate-market values. woodhouse does not simply defend philosophical claims in the abstract, but makes his case through a discussion of an attempt to realize life-value principles of social justice by higher education outside of administration control. woodhouse’s essay examines the efforts of academics and community members to build the “people’s free university of saskatchewan” as an alternative to the increasingly corporatized agenda of the university of saskatchewan. his paper illustrates the ways in which civil commons institutions bind people together in pursuit of their shared life-interests, but also the difficulties the attempt to extend the logic of the civil commons—unpriced provision of necessary life-goods and services—faces in the concrete social conditions which currently prevail. one fundamental reason why it is so difficult to extend the logic of civil commons provision, even when it is clear to everyone that this logic is not only morally sound, but practically superior to market models of production and distribution, is because the typical interpretation of rights upon which the public morality of liberalcapitalism rests assumes that all collective action, from above or below, compromises individual freedom. nevertheless, picking up on a theme from mcmurtry, baruchello and johnstone examine the nature and implications of international human rights law, in particular the icescr and interpret it from a lifevalue perspective. this binding treaty includes, amongst others, clearly defined rights to “adequate food” (substantively more than a right “not to be hungry”) and “education… directed to the full development of the human personality” (icescr, life value and social justice 9 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   articles 11 and 13), the themes addressed by sumner and woodhouse. what the authors find is a comprehensive set of life-necessities recognized in international law and endorsed by no less than 160 of 192 united nations member states, including the liberal economies of the entire european area and canada. nonetheless, the authors recognize that these rights are not universally enjoyed in practice and examine the competing conceptions of value that hinder their fulfilment, not least the political ambivalence towards any substantial redistribution of resources, which shields itself behind a competing “right” to private property, a right that is not itself protected in either of the principal international human rights treaties, the icecsr or the international covenant on civil and political rights. the paper, written in light of the austerity packages sweeping the developed world, thus emphasizes the potential for protection of the life-ground that is offered by international human rights law, even as conceived of as consisting of individual entitlements. moreover, they argue that mcmurtry’s life-value framework provides a coherent model to evaluate state performance under the treaty. together these four papers provide a systematic account of social justice from the life-grounded standpoint. the importance of the life-value perspective grows in proportion to the severity of life-crises our world faces. these life-crises affect the natural conditions of planetary life in general, and the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions of good human lives in particular. the papers printed herein provide the theoretical and conceptual resources needed to understand the depth causes of these crises, and the practical tools which any efficacious solutions will require. references baruchello, g. (2006). death and life support systems: a novel cultural exploration. in c. tandy (ed.), death and anti-death volume 3 (pp. 31-58). palo alto: ria university press. baruchello, g. (2007). western philosophy and the life-ground. in encyclopaedia of life support systems. retrieved from http://www.eolss.net. baruchello, g. (2008). deadly economics: reflections on the neoclassical paradigm. in c. tandy (ed.) death and anti-death volume 5 (pp. 65-132). palo alto: ria university press. baruchello, g. (2009). good and bad capitalism. re-thinking value, human needs, and the aims of economic activity. economics, management, and financial markets, 4(3), 125-69. baruchello, g. (2010). your money or your life. john mcmurtry and martha c. nussbaum on the forprofit assault on life-capabilities. journal of philosophy of life, 1(1), 13-48. braybrooke, d. (1987). meeting needs. princeton, nj: princeton university press. cohen, g. a. (1989). on the currency of egalitarian justice. ethics, 99, 906-944. cohen, g. a. (2008). rescuing justice and equality. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. doyal, i., & gough, l. (1991). a theory of human needs. new york, ny: guilford. gutman, amy. (1999). the central role of rawls theory. in h.s. richardson & p.j. weithman (eds.) the philosophy of john rawls, volume 1: development and main outlines of rawls theory of justice (pp. 16-21). new york: garland publishing. hamilton, l. (2006). a philosophy of human needs. cambridge: cambridge university press. lebowitz, m. (2010). the socialist alternative: real human development. new york: monthly review press. marx, k. (1973). wage labour and capital. marx and engels collected works volume 1 (pp. 124-174). moscow: progress publishers. mcmurtry, j. (1978). the structure of marx’s worldview. princeton, nj: princeton university press. mcmurtry, j. (1979). how to tell left from right. canadian journal of philosophy, 9(3), 387-412. mcmurtry, j. (1981). philosophical method and the rise of social philosophy. eidos, 11(2), 139-176. 10 jeffrey noonan   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   mcmurtry, j. (1988). the unspeakable: understanding the system of fallacy in the media. informal logic, 10(3), 133-150. mcmurtry, j. (1989). understanding war: a philosophical inquiry. toronto: science for peace and samuel stevens. mcmurtry, j. (1998). unequal freedoms. toronto: garamond. mcmurtry, j. (1999). the cancer stage of capitalism. london: pluto. mcmurtry, j. (2002). value wars. london: pluto. mcmurtry, j. (2009). rationality and scientific method: paradigm shift in an age of collapse. interchange, 40(1), 69-91. mcmurtry, j. (2010). what is good, what is evil: the value of all values across times, places, and theories. in encyclopaedia of life support systems. oxford: eolss publishers. retrieved from http://www.eolss.net mcmurtry, j. (2011). economic globalization and ethico-political rights. encyclopaedia of applied ethics. elsevier, 1-8. nussbaum, m. (1995). human capabilities, female human beings. in m. nussbaum & j. glover (eds.) women, culture, and development (pp. 61-104). oxford: oxford university press. nussbaum, m. (2000). women and human development. cambridge: cambridge university press. pogge, t. (1989). realizing rawls. ithaca: cornell university press. pogge, t. (2008). world poverty and human rights. cambridge: polity press. rawls, j. (1999). a theory of justice, revised edition. cambridge ma: harvard university press. sen, a. (1992). inequality re-examined. cambridge ma: harvard university press. sen, a. (1999). development as freedom. new york: knopf. sen, a. (2009). the idea of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. sumner, j. (2003). learning our way in: sustainable learning and the civil commons. convergence, 36(1), 21-30. sumner, j. (2005). value wars in the new periphery: sustainability, rural communities and agriculture. agriculture and human values, 22(3), 303-312. sumner, j. (2007). sustainability and the civil commons: rural communities in the age of globalization. toronto: university of toronto press. sumner, j. (2008). keeping the commons in academic culture: protecting the knowledge commons from the enclosure of the knowledge economy. in a.s. chan & d. fisher (eds.), the exchange university: corporatization of academic culture (pp. 188-202). vancouver: ubc press. sumner, j. (2009). sustainable horticulture and community development: more than just organic production. journal of sustainable agriculture, 33(4), 461-483. sumner, j. (2010). from land to table: rural planning and development for sustainable food systems. in d. douglas (ed.), rural planning and development in canada (pp. 179-224). toronto: nelson education limited. woodhouse, h. (2001). the market model of education and the threat to canadian universities. encounters on education, 2, 104-122. woodhouse, h. (2001a). ultimately, life is not for sale. interchange, 32(3), 217-232. woodhouse, h. (2003). learning the value of life. process papers, 7, 6-11. woodhouse, h. (2003a). strengthening saskatchewan communities through education. saskatchewan notes: canadian centre for policy alternatives, 2(3), 1-4. woodhouse, h. (2005). a process approach to community-based education: the people's free university of saskatchewan. interchange, 36(1-2), 121-138. woodhouse, h. (2009). selling out: academic freedom and the corporate market. montreal: mcgillqueen’s university press. woodhouse, h. (forthcoming). your money or your life! a critical canadian perspective on the world bank's "reform agenda" for higher education. international education. ingersoll final dec 5 19 correspondence address: marcea ingersoll, school of education, st. thomas university, fredericton, nb, e3b 5g3; email: marcea@stu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 347-351, 2019 book review miseducation: inequality, education and the working classes reay, d. (2017). bristol, uk: policy press. isbn 9781447330653 (paper) £13.99; isbn 9781447330660 (epub) £12.99. 248 pages marcea ingersoll st. thomas university, canada at a recent scholarly conference, dinner conversation among a group of academics turned to tara westover’s educated (2018), a title that generated much book buzz and made the new york times book review’s top 10 best books of 2018. the memoir traces the author’s journey from her rural survivalist family roots to the halls of harvard and cambridge. it is a story that fascinates and compels, with part of its appeal perhaps due to its fairy tale element for smart girls, where elite higher education is the corollary to meeting prince charming, and the pinnacle of success and social mobility. it is a sentiment that is alluded to in educated, and overtly countered in the work of diane reay. in miseducation: inequality, education and the working classes, british sociologist diane reay (2017) traces her own educational journey from the working class to cambridge. and as a smart working-class girl turned academic myself, i found reay’s dismantling of the fairy tale much more compelling. reay integrates a robust scholarly review of research, her own extensive empirical work, and case study narratives from a wide range of learners and stakeholders. by weaving multiple studies over many years alongside her own experiences as a smart working-class girl journeying through school, reay exposes the insider-outsider status she experienced firsthand and supports her argument empirically. miseducation is a highly readable account that is well-organized, clearly articulate, and methodicallysupported. reay notes that her motivation for writing the book came from a place of sadness and diminished hope, amplified by recent policy shifts and increased marcea ingersoll studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 347-351, 2019 348 competition that further complicate education’s ongoing inability to compensate for wide social and economic inequalities. in the first two chapters, reay explores the relationship between education and the wider economy and society. tracing the workings of the education system historically and in contemporary english society, with particular attention to class, she posits deference as an educational outcome: deference always has been and still is expected of the working-class. in fact what is surprising is that some of the working-class still make enormous efforts to succeed educationally in an educational system that holds little prospect of a positive academic outcome. the working-class continue to have access to relatively low levels of the kind of material, cultural, and psychological resources that aid educational success. most cannot afford the private tuition and the enriching cultural activities that many upperand middle-class parents routinely invest in for their children. (p. 15) reay highlights how working-class underachievement is frequently blamed not on the structural inequality that reproduces poverty and keeps people from accessing resources, but on the parents themselves – their attitudes and failures. the sense of belonging that middle-class children are afforded in schools is sharply contrasted with the legacy of negative representations and othering that working-class children inherit from multiple generations of family history, where schooling is associated with failure and class derision. lack of respect for the working class in wider society translates into class condescension in the classroom, with students and schools being judged negatively by their location in working class neighbourhoods or the prevalence of a working-class student population. reay paints a portrait of schooling under neoliberal assault and with working-classes caught in the web. the increasing casualization of labour, as well as a widening income gap and wealth distribution in the uk and globally, means issues of inequality in schooling and society are persistent, if not worsening. reay draws on statistics and social policy to demonstrate how workingclass experiences in the labour market are inextricably linked to inequality in schools, and how education is implicated in larger processes: education cannot compensate for society because our educational system was never set up to do that, any more than it was established to realise working-class educational potential. instead it operates as an enormous academic sieve, sorting out the educational winners from the losers in a crude and often brutal process that prioritises and rewards upperand middle-class qualities and resources. (p. 26) she examines educational policies that have exacerbated educational and social inequality, focusing on the historical processes that have legitimized and institutionalized working-class educational failure. arguing that the provision of education for working-class children within the late 19th century english state schooling system was intended as a mechanism for the book review studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 347-351, 2019 349 dominant classes to maintain their status, while policing and controlling, rather than educating the working classes, reay returns to deference as an educational goal, and anchors this argument in the reality of a divisive class environment where high achieving students are called cheetahs and put in the top set and lower-performing students are grouped together in the bottom set and called monkeys. reay makes it clear that management strategies such as this type of ability grouping reproduce societal divides, working “to reinforce and entrench the low esteem in which the working classes are held, rather than to modify and alleviate class prejudices and discriminations” (p. 25). as a former teacher at a british curriculum school, i can attest that this chapter should be required reading for those who might argue that grouping their students according to hares and tortoises is innocuous. reay provides an overview of working-class education over the 20th century. tracing the elimination of school fees for secondary schooling in the uk in 1944 and the establishment of a tripartite system of schools from that point on, reay draws on studies that reveal how ineffectual the system was at increasing educational opportunities. weaving anecdotal references regarding her own place as the sole or one of only two working-class girls in the top set of her classes at grammar school, she highlights how middle-class children still dominated the top sets at institutions that were supposed to provide opportunity for all children. the line between the personal and the scholarly overlaps as she incorporates a poem from her uncle, whose observations of how working-class boys were treated in school highlight the disjuncture between the educational aspirations of working-class children and their alienation, as they lost a sense of belonging amongst the middle-class mores of grammar schools. from there, reay moves to the establishment of comprehensives in the 1960s, noting that although this was meant to address inequities, social class selection in comprehensive schools remained in the “systems of setting and streaming” (p. 41) and the residential catchment areas that determined patterns of comprehensive school intake and demographics, again mirroring larger social inequality. the incorporation of parental choice policies in the 1990s is implicated in the persistence of inequality. pointing to a widening attainment gap between low-income and middle-class students since 2015, reay next moves to the private school sector and demonstrates how power and privilege in that arena continues to ensure that elitism and exclusivity are guarded by the wealthy. similarly, reay notes that the introduction and growth of an academy system perpetuates the differences cleaved by class because it is grounded in principles of competition not social justice, and privatization not educational improvement. parental choice policies that have supported the proliferation of charter schools in the united states and academies in the united kingdom have been part of educational discourse in recent decades. reay disrupts the political hype around the achievement of academies by drawing on research that reveals a system that is not living up to the political rhetoric. reay notes from marcea ingersoll studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 347-351, 2019 350 her research into the educational experiences of young people that workingclass knowledge – both relevant and rewarding for them – is absent or devalued in their school curriculum, a finding that resonates with my own experience (ingersoll, 2012). the “damaged learner identities” (p. 63) that schooling creates and imposes is comingled with the stigmatization of vocational education. reay notes that “failure within education to respect and value working-class knowledge has resulted in the invidious divide between vocational and academic knowledge” (p. 65) and “any sort of equality between vocational and academic education would require a transformation in both what vocational education constitutes and who engages in it” (p. 65). choice policies do little toward such transformation; rather they reinforce class divides by providing middle-class parents with venues for removing their children from working-class classrooms. reay’s work spans more than 25 years of research on class in the classroom, and she shares a grim portrait of students whose well-being is jeopardized by a competitive culture of test attainment. sharing stories from focus groups in both primary and secondary schools, reay reveals how children have taken up the neoliberal discourses of individual competition and choice as a determinant of success in a market-driven educational context. tying these stories to recent statistics on the social-emotional health of students, reay makes the case that working-class learners are the ultimate losers in a schooling culture that emphasizes competition over the civic values of care and collaboration. in this work, the fairy tale of competitive social mobility is exposed. reay tackles the topic of social mobility as it relates to isolation for working-class learners, whose educational attainment means distancing from their communities of comfort, and proximity to those who have been warned against associating with them. so many of us from working-class backgrounds invest heavily in the fantasy that our relentless efforts will bring us love, care, intimacy, success, security and wellbeing, even when they are highly unlikely to do so because, in doing so, we are forming optimistic attachments to the very power structures that have oppressed us, and our families before us. (p. 102) entrance into the higher status universities is rare for working-class youth, and sustaining performance within an essentially alien culture while accruing a significant debt load makes it a difficult prospect. few get through, and the impact is individual mobility, not wider social mobility; access has not widened overall. using empirical research, personal anecdote, and examples from public discourse, reay crafts a compelling argument for understanding social mobility through educational attainment alone as a fallacy. she notes, “the troubling paradox of widening access and the democratization of higher education is that, despite the democratic intentions, widening access has brought an intensification of class and racial inequalities between different levels of higher education” (p. 121). at the collective level, greater numbers book review studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 347-351, 2019 351 of working-class students at universities has, reay concludes, resulted in asset stripping. at the individual level, there is loss of connection and increased isolation described as disjuncture by bell hooks (2009), who notes that academics who come from working-class backgrounds frequently encounter a chasm between the scholarly lives they craft and those of their home communities. although this work focuses on england, and largely on the experiences of white working-class students, reay also acknowledges how working-class identities are mediated by other factors such as gender and race. this text sits alongside other powerful accounts of working-class experiences in schools and higher education in other locales (dews & law, 1995) and recent research that challenges the notion that private school enrolment improves outcomes for low-income students (pianta & ansari, 2018). the sense of struggle is clear throughout this book, and the compelling leaning toward social justice that is characteristic of reay’s previous work lifts each page. at the end of this book, i wondered if it would also resonate with other working-class teachers. this was confirmed when i slipped the title into a twitter conversation with mr. pink, a working-class teacher on twitter, who characterized the book as “brilliant.” indeed, the insights reay shares are robust, informed, articulate, and greatly needed in the realm of research in the sociology of education. references dews, c. l. b., & law, c. l. (eds). (1995). this fine place so far from home: voices of academics from the working class. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. hooks, b. (2009). belonging: a culture of place. new york, ny: routledge ingersoll, m. (2012). narrative insights: a creative space for learning. learning landscapes, 6(1), 215-221. pianta, r. c., & ansari, a. (2018). does attendance in private schools predict student outcomes at age 15? evidence from a longitudinal study. educational researcher, 47(7), 419-434. westover, t. (2018). educated. toronto, on: harpercollins. introduction: opening a dialogue on migrant (rights) activism studies in social justice volume 4, issue 2, 97-100, 2010 correspondence address: tanya basok, department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology, university of windsor, windsor, on, n9b 3p4, canada. email: basok@uwindsor.ca issn: 1911-4788 introduction: opening a dialogue on migrant (rights) activism tanya basok centre for studies in social justice and department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology, university of windsor while the number of people on the move throughout the globe continues to increase, northern countries have erected and fortified barriers to prevent migrants from crossing over their borders. unable to migrate legally, many migrants seeking jobs, safety, and/or family reunification have been forced to find alternative ways of entering and remaining in a new country. as researchers (dauvergne, 2005; de genova, 2002; inda, 2005; mcnevin 2011; ngai, 2004) have pointed out, restrictive immigration laws have rendered people “illegal.” without authorization, these migrants are deprived of the “right to have rights.” as such, they are policed, harassed, exploited by their employers, denied political voices and access to social protections and benefits, and excluded from the social fabric. in addition to being “illegalized,” many migrants have been rendered “precarious.” they are often admitted under conditions that restrict their mobility and choices, force them to stay in abusive marriages and/or jobs, and deny them full access to such social goods as education, training, and health services (goldring, berinstein, & bernhard, 2009). guest worker programs have become very popular throughout the globe, and policy makers—both in sending and receiving countries—see them as a way to alleviate labour shortages in receiving countries and direct remittances towards meeting the daily needs of the poor in the global south. yet, such programs reinforce migrant workers’ vulnerability. the precarious conditions experienced by many migrants—with or without legal status—have triggered responses not only from the migrants themselves, but also from their supporters. demanding regularization of their status, a right to remain in the country, a right to claim asylum, improved protections in the labour force, the right to bargain collectively, and access to social benefits or other socially valued rights (such as the right to have a driver’s licence), migrants and their supporters have organized to protect and improve their living conditions. here are some examples. in september, 2003, about 1,000 migrant workers from ten u.s. cities travelled more than 20,000 miles, stopping in 100 cities on their way to washington and, eventually, new york. the aim was to protest the “unfair treatment” of undocumented immigrants and to pressure congress to pass immigration reform 98 tanya basok studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 legislation that would improve the plight of the millions of undocumented immigrants. in 2006, millions of people participated in protests staged in chicago, los angeles, dallas, and other u.s. cities over a proposed change to u.s. immigration policy that would raise penalties for “illegal” immigration and classify “illegal” immigrants and anyone who helped them enter or remain in the us as felons. the protesters also called for a comprehensive reform of the country's immigration laws that would create a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants. in france, in 2008 the sans-papiers started staging strikes to demand regularization of their status. after meetings between the sans-papiers, the largest union in france, confédération générale du travail (cgt—the general confederation of labor), and the ministry of immigration, the government agreed in 2010 to certain “adjustments” to harmonize the status of undocumented workers. a grassroots organization, “no one is illegal” has been organizing rallies in the canadian cities of toronto, montreal, vancouver, and ottawa to demand an end to all deportations and detentions, the implementation of a full and inclusive regularization program for all non-status people, access without fear to essential services for all undocumented people, and an end to the exploitation of temporary workers. at the global scale, migrants rights international (mri), a nongovernmental organization and federation of migrants and migrants’ rights organizations, trade unions and faith-based groups located in regions across the globe, has committed itself to promoting and defending the human rights of migrants. for the past four years, mri has been one of the organizers of the people’s global action on migration, development and human rights, a forum which runs parallel to the global forum on migration and development and offers an opportunity to migrant rights activists to exchange ideas and debate strategies. compared to other social movements, such as environmental, feminist, gay and lesbian liberation, labour, migrant (rights) activism has not received much attention among social movement scholars. migration scholars have also insufficiently dealt with this topic. furthermore, those scholars who do analyze various migrant and migrant rights mobilizations 1 the discussion of migrant rights started on the pages of studies in social justice, with the publication of doris marie provine’s article in volume 3 issue 2. the current issue highlights this theme: it features four articles and a book review on migrant (rights) mobilizations. we hope that this issue will spark a conversation among migrant rights scholars to which we can return in future volumes. do not always dialogue with each other. all four articles in this volume discuss activism by or on behalf of migrants whose presence in the country is unauthorized (also known as “undocumented” or “nonstatus” migrants or sans-papiers). both de genova and nyers question what makes migrant mobilizations political. nicholas de genova provides an analysis of the mobilization of migrants throughout the united states in 2006 in opposition to the border protection, antiterrorism and illegal immigration control act. to de genova this was a political act, but not because the participants demanded some “civil” or “human” rights. following rancière, de genova argues that it was political because it constituted a radical disruption of the game of order by actors who, from the standpoint of order, do not exist. as such it was a politics of incorrigibility and anti-identity. in addition to being a “political” fact, de genova illustrates that the assertion of migrant presence was also an “economic” fact that introduction 99 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 enunciated (transnational) labour as constitutive of (global) capital as rightless but insubordinate at the same time. peter nyers explores mobilizations of non-status migrants in canada. although not as significant in scope, the canadian movement of non-status migrants is equally important in raising questions about how political acts are to be understood. he analyzes a number of acts staged by the action committees of non-status migrants: acts of self-identification as “non-status,” claims for regularization at the state and city levels, and acts of protest at street rallies, marches, and in detention centres. for nyers, by publicly identifying themselves as “non-status,” migrants, who are generally denied the right to express themselves as political beings, engage in a political act or an assertion of political subjectivity. through these acts, non-status migrants demand not only equal access to social services, such as health care and social welfare, but also recognition and respect of the dignity of non-status people as human beings. although the demands for regularization seem to reaffirm the sovereignty of the nation-state, for nyers, the acts staged by non-status people disrupt this order by underscoring their potential for novel forms of political subjectification. both cook and ansley examine advocacy by migrant supporters in the u.s. both expose the dilemma faced by migrant advocates, namely how to pursue demands for migrant rights—broadly understood—in a political and social climate which is resilient to such claims. maria lorena cook analyzes the framing of migrant rights claims. she demonstrates how human rights arguments generally fall on deaf ears. at the same time, she contends that when migrants’ rights activists respond to the antimigrant rhetoric of the nativist movement, out of necessity, they engage the nationstate framework. she further contents that this framework is self-limiting (a point also recognized by peter nyers in his analysis of canadian non-status migrant activism). similar to de genova, who feels that the notion of “human rights” is unsustainable, cook does not seem to see much future for “human rights” discourses in u.s. migrant politics. fran ansley discusses how participants in a campaign to allow undocumented migrants to obtain driver’s licences in tennessee faced a dilemma: whether to frame this claim as a demand for equal rights or in terms of u.s. citizens’ preferences, desires, and interests in safety. she illustrates that it was the latter position that prevailed although she feels that the campaign also created space for public debate and dialogue on migrants’ rights. more optimistic than cook, ansley feels that campaigns, such as the one she describes in her article, incubate novel rights claims that are based on broad notions of social justice: the full right to international mobility of human beings, the right to identity, and the duties of “global solidarity”. although seemingly different, the four articles included in this volume examine how migrant and migrants’ rights mobilizations can bring about social justice for migrants by disrupting political order that denies them existence, voices, subjectivity, and rights. some of them also identify obstacles and difficulties faced by such endeavours. these four articles, along with the book reviewed by carlos sandoval, open the forum for discussion on migrant rights and migrant (rights) activism on the pages of our journal. it is our hope that these contributions would stimulate further debates. 100 tanya basok studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 notes 1 among important exceptions are: mcnevin (2011), das gupta (2006), chavez (2008), hondagneu-sotelo (2008), hanley (forthcoming), piper (2005), basok (2008 and 2009), choudry et.al. (2009), lyons (2004), elias (2008), gordon (2005), chun (2009) and provine (2009). scholarly literature that deals specifically with the mobilization of migrants throughout u.s. cities in 2006 is reviewed in de genova in this volume. references choudry, a., hanley, j., jordan, s., shragge, e., & stiegman, m. (2009). fight back: workplace justice for immigrants. halifax, ns: fernwood books. basok, t. (2009). counter-hegemonic human rights discourses and migrant rights activism in the us and canada. international journal of comparative sociology, 50(2), 179-201. basok, t. (2008). the intersections of the economic and cultural in u.s. labor’s pro-migrant politics. social justice, 35(4), 12-32. chavez, l. (2008). the latino threat: constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation. stanford, ca: stanford university press. chun, j. (2009). organizing at the margins: the symbolic politics of labor in south korea and the united states. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. das gupta, m. (2006). unruly immigrants: rights, activism, and transnational south asian politics in the united states. durham, nc: duke university press. dauverne, c. (2008). making people illegal: what globalization means for migration and law. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. de genova, n. (2004). the legal production of mexican/migrant “illegality”. latino studies, 2, 160–185. elias, j. (2008). struggles over the rights of foreign domestic workers in malaysia: the possibilities and limitations of “rights talk”. economy and society, 37(2), 282-303. goldring, l., berinstein, c. & bernhard j. (2009). institutionalizing precarious migratory status in canada. citizenship studies, 13(3), 239-265. gordon, j. (2005). suburban sweatshops: the fight for immigrant rights. cambridge, ma: belknap/ harvard university press. hanley, j. (forthcoming). la gauche militante dans les luttes pour les droits des sans-papiers : incontournable et contestée au québec. in j. gotovitch, a. morelli & s. jaumain (eds.), contester dans un pays prospère. brussels: pie-peter lang. hondagneu-sotelo, p. (2008). god’s heart has no borders: religious activism for immigrant rights. berkeley, ca: university of california press. inda, j. x. (2005). targeting immigrants: government, technology, and ethics. malden, ma: wileyblackwell. lyons, l. t. (2004). organizing for domestic worker rights in singapore: the limits of transnationalism. in l. ricciutelli, a.miles & m. mcfadden (eds), feminist politics, activism and vision: local and global challenges. (pp. 149-168). zed publications, london, inanna publications & education, toronto. mcnevin, a. (2011). contesting citizenship: irregular migrants and new frontiers of the political. new york, ny: columbia university press. ngai, m. (2004) impossible subjects: illegal aliens and the making of modern america. princeton, nj: princeton university press. piper, n. (2005). transnational politics and the organising of migrant labour in southeast asia—ngo and trade union perspectives. asia-pacific population journal, 20(3), 87-110. provine, d. m. (2009). justice as told by judges: the case of litigation over local anti-immigration legislation. studies in social justice, 3(2), 231-245. untitled mendez final dec 3 19 correspondence address: pablo mendez, department of geography & environmental studies, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: pablo.mendez@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 335-337, 2019 book review from conflict to inclusion in housing: interaction of communities, residents and activists cairns, g., artopoulos, g., & day, k. (eds.) (2017). london: ucl press. isbn 9781787350342 (paper) £22.99; isbn 9781787350359 (cloth) £40; isbn 9781787350335 (open access pdf). £0. 288 pages pablo mendez carleton university, canada from conflict to inclusion in housing: interaction of communities, residents, and activists presents a fascinating – if highly eclectic – collection of 12 articles about the contested geographies of dwelling in different parts of the world. most of the interventions focus on the global north, but there is a chapter on brazil, one on indonesia, and one on vietnam. the contributions were written by educators, design and architecture practitioners, and academics (commendably, a number of them are doctoral students or postdoctoral fellows) who specialize in the fields of planning, architecture, design, sociology, human geography, public policy, and the arts. in the brief introductory chapter as well as in an absorbing editorial commentary, the editors seek to craft a sense of coherence around the book's wide-ranging set of topics by describing the volume as both a compilation of diverse perspectives on "the role of communities in project developments" (p. 1) – where project developments refers broadly to "successful and failed housing initiatives" (p. 2) – and a multi-disciplinary examination of "the causes and results of the production, occupation and adaptation of housing estates and residential blocks from the users’ point of view" (p.19). however, the book productively touches on much more than these two broad themes. in fact, not all the chapters deal strictly with the development of housing estates or residential blocks, and despite the collection's title, not all chapters are pablo mendez studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 335-337, 2019 336 directly oriented to the examination of notions of conflict and inclusion or the analysis of interactions between communities, residents, and activists. in the first section of the book, titled "socially engaged practices of housing and contested environments (participatory practices and negotiation policies/sharing and relation with place)", jerome stevens examines the organized squatting of abandoned buildings in downtown são paulo, with particular attention to the famed occupation of hotel cambridge; jo richardson discusses the tribulations of managing and planning for gypsy and traveller sites in the uk; and yenny rahmayati focuses on the shortcomings of large-scale housing reconstruction efforts in banda aceh, indonesia, following the tsunami disaster of 2004. in the second section, titled "spatial politics of housing (affordable housing, self-build, re-building and the economics/policies of housing)", sandra karina löschke and hazel easthope review cases of adaptive redesign and participatory approaches to transforming aging housing in the cities of sydney, toronto, ommoord (in the netherlands), and paris; may east provides an account of three different approaches to the regeneration of abandoned towns in southern italy; johanna brugman examines the use of community-oriented housing microfinance in the vietnamese city of vinh; and kane pham focuses on brownfield residential development geared to the private market in sydney, critiquing the ways in which it ignores the dire need for affordable housing in the city. in the final section of the book, titled "non-standard practices of housing (art practice and alternative forms of engagement with housing)", keely macarow discusses examples of housing providers, architects and artists combining their respective expertise to develop housing in melbourne, stockholm, and houston; lee azus provides an analysis of mike kelley's mobile homestead art installation, which consists of "a full-scale sculptural replica of the artist’s childhood home in [suburban] detroit" (p. 149); michael darcy and dallas rogers examine how stigmatized public housing residents "speak back" (p. 171) to common stereotypes in sydney; jonathan orlek discusses how a series of artistic performances in new york, vienna, manchester, and sheffield help re-imagine alternative ways of inhabiting domestic space; and matthew thompson looks at the issue of dilapidated housing rehabilitation in liverpool, focusing in particular on the role of community land trusts and the local co-op movement. in my opinion, the book's main strength derives from its extensive reach in terms of the variety of sites, topics, processes and types of agents with which it engages. ironically, this wide scope could also be seen as the collection's principal weakness. while from conflict to inclusion in housing provides an enthralling wealth of diverse material to learn from, its multifaceted contents do not lend themselves to the elaboration of a synthetic understanding of dwelling and power relations in the contemporary global context. to its main intended audience of socially conscious architecture and design scholars, the book certainly delivers the expansive thematic field that the editors promise. readers of this journal may however be left pining for a tighter set of book review studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 335-337, 2019 337 interventions that investigate housing-related struggles in a more systematic fashion and approach much more critically the goal of inclusion as a response to structural social conflict. that being said, i must add that any reader wishing to learn about the present-day complexity of the politics of dwelling will encounter in this rich volume an excellent opportunity to appreciate the wide range of contexts and formats in which these politics manifest themselves around the world today. it is worth noting in closing that the book was published by ucl press in open access format, which enables readers to download a pdf copy free of cost. this choice of publishing format is highly appropriate and laudable, and will no doubt be appreciated by english-speaking housing activists and community organizations wishing to learn about the politics of dwelling in locations other than their own. scott final before ts december 18 18 correspondence address: xavier scott, department of philosophy, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: xavscott@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 repairing broken relations by repairing broken treaties: theorizing post-colonial states in settler colonies xavier scott york university, canada abstract this article examines the british colonial theft of indigenous sovereignty and the particular obstacles that it presents to establishing just social relations between the colonizer and the colonized in settler states. in the first half, i argue that the particular nature of the crime of sovereign theft makes apologies and reparations unsuitable policy tools for reconciliation because settler societies owe their very existence to the abrogation of indigenous sovereignties. instead, settler states ought to return sovereignty to the land’s indigenous peoples. in the second half of this paper, i take up some of the practical questions of how this might be done and anticipate a number of objections. giving up sovereignty would not mean dispossessing the millions of colonists who currently reside in these countries of their homes and property – but it does mean rethinking the constitutional makeup of a country and how that serves to benefit the different peoples who make their homes there. keywords indigenous sovereignty; reconciliation; settler colonialism; democracy; social justice contemporary settler-colonial states consider themselves some of the freest and most democratic societies in the world and yet their foundations are illegitimate. this illegitimacy haunts them in the form of history books that begin in the sixteenth century, a reservation system that dots nations of incredible wealth with communities that are subject to some of the worst social problems in the world, and ongoing lawsuits against the state over broken treaties and genocidal policies of assimilation. in order to repair these broken relationships, reparations programs, truth and reconciliation proceedings, and formal apologies have been undertaken by the colonial states. however, glen sean coulthard challenges the idea that relations repairing broken relations by repairing broken treaties studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 389 between settlers and indigenous peoples can be transformed through the politics of recognition,1 because “this orientation to the reconciliation of indigenous nationhood with state sovereignty is still colonial insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of indigenous peoples of our lands and self-determining authority” (coulthard, 2014, p. 151; emphasis in original). indeed, a number of indigenous academics and activists have argued that the state cannot be an effective institution to achieve reconciliation between settlers and indigenous peoples because the very existence of these settler states is predicated on the cultural destruction of indigenous peoples. as andrea smith (2005, p. 185) points out, “it is consistent practice among progressives to bemoan the genocide of native peoples, but in the interests of political expediency, implicitly sanction it by refusing to question the legitimacy of the settler nation responsible for this genocide.” in this spirit, i want to look at what the legal ramifications might be of asserting indigenous sovereignty over and above the illegitimately acquired sovereignty of the settler colonial states. i will argue that both legal and moral justice require that we reassert indigenous sovereignty and that doing this requires a commitment to return colonized territory to indigenous peoples. my goal in this paper is to argue, on ethical grounds, that justice will only be found in the full recognition of the sovereign rights of various indigenous peoples, which extend over the entire territory that is currently occupied by settler-colonial states. i take this approach not because i think international law is an avenue that can be expected to achieve justice for indigenous people but because there is something distinct about the sovereign nature of the colonial relationship. i begin by outlining the history of sovereignty doctrine as it emerged in discourses surrounding international jurisprudence. i argue that the way in which sovereignty was articulated was designed to 1 my focus in this article are the legal relationships between “settler state sovereignty” and “indigenous sovereignty.” i am not talking about “settlers” as caucasian, anglo-saxons, necessarily, as settlers have come from around the world to make their homes in colonial states. nor am i talking about indigenous peoples as an ethnic, linguistic or cultural group. in canada alone, indigenous peoples speak over 50 languages, from 12 distinct language families that contain as much variation as european and asian languages (borrows, 2002, p. 3). as duane champagne notes, the only generalization one can make about indigenous communities “is that they have persisted” (champagne, 2005, p. 9). i am most familiar with examples from within what is now canada but, for reasons discussed below, contesting colonial borders as illegitimately established precludes confining my argument to contemporary canadian geography. the term “settlers” will refer to those who see the colonial state as the highest political authority in north america. the term “indigenous peoples” will refer to the many peoples who have had their sovereignty stolen from them. when i am talking about a specific ethnic or cultural group, however, i will adopt the more specific term to avoid conflating the specific characteristics of the group with the colonial identity that has been forced upon them. thus, settlers have consistently denied the sovereignty of indigenous peoples, to which many of them, such as the cherokee, have responded with resistance. xavier scott studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 390 create a form of quasi-sovereignty for indigenous peoples that justified their displacement and allowed the formation of colonial governments that predicated their existence on the abrogation of indigenous sovereignty. moreover, the quasi-form of sovereignty currently granted to indigenous peoples in these countries is the legacy of the form it originally took, and continues to justify policies of assimilation and cultural destruction. i propose a shift, whereby settlers use international law and transitional justice studies to think about reconciliation with indigenous peoples, rather than approaches that aim to achieve justice for indigenous peoples within the confines of the colonial state.2 international law provides tools to recognize the illegal nature of the original “theft of sovereignty” (as i am calling it), while transitional justice studies provide a number of precedents for how states with genocidal policies can move out of their violent pasts into post-colonial futures. the idea of disbanding the settler states that currently exist in these colonial territories might seem extreme, but extreme action is what is required by the enormity of the crimes that have been committed against indigenous peoples. it may also strike many that calling for the dissolution of the colonial states is neither practical nor likely. moreover, as indigenous legal scholars like douglas sanderson (2014) of the opaskwayak cree nation argue, it is sometimes better to work within an imperfect system of law such as the indian act, than it is to hold out for a perfect system of justice because even small changes can make meaningful differences in people’s lives. this is in stark contrast to scholars such as taiaiake alfred (2005) and glen coulthard (2014), who argue that engaging with colonial structures on their own terms is a self-defeating exercise. as a white colonial outsider, my aim is not to enter into debates about strategy amongst indigenous scholars, leaders, and activists. they can and are making their own choices about how to pursue freedom and flourishing for themselves and their peoples. my goal here is to show settlers that by their own legal and ethical standards – used to applaud the de-nazification of germany, the end of apartheid in south africa, or the recognition of the post-yugoslavian states – we have an ethical duty to protect the communal rights of indigenous peoples, even if this means abandoning our attachment to the colonial state. while the implementation of such a change will no doubt face a large number of obstacles, such obstacles are by no means impossible to overcome and would constitute an important step in reconciliation between indigenous 2 i say settlers here, because the target audience for this article are settler colonists. indigenous scholars and activists have a far greater understanding of the colonial obstacles confronting them and the best tactics to pursue freedom under colonial conditions than i could hope to present. yet indigenous peoples are already doing most of the work of reconciliation – and they are the victims of the colonial relationship! at the canadian philosophical association’s (2018) plenary session on reconciliation in the academy, douglas sanderson noted the burden that testifying in panels on reconciliation places on indigenous peoples. settlers are the ones who broke their relationships with indigenous peoples and, while it is important to listen to indigenous elders and activists to plot the path towards reconciliation, settlers must begin sharing the burden of reconciliation. repairing broken relations by repairing broken treaties studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 391 peoples and their colonial occupiers. anyone seeking a quick and easy solution to half a millennia of policies of genocide and cultural assimilation ought to look elsewhere, as my goal in writing this is to disrupt the typical narrative of “these harms happened in the past and there is nothing that can be done now that would not be unfair towards the settler populations that now live in these countries,” which colonial societies have used to justify the continuation of policies of assimilation and dispossession. sovereign theft this section of the paper will outline a particular form of sovereign violence that was done to indigenous societies. while indigenous societies have been the victims of a number of types of violence,3 the form of sovereign violence that is the focus here is noteworthy in three respects: first, it placed colonial sovereignty at the heart of the international legal system; second, it simultaneously served as the basis for delegitimizing indigenous sovereignty; and finally, it later served as the justification for numerous other forms of violence. sovereignty can be defined as: the concept of a nation, whose people invest a supreme authority with a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, which has absolute legal jurisdiction over a given territory, and is recognized by other sovereign states.4 both the philosophical concept of sovereignty and its formalization as a key principle in international law have been linked to europe’s invasion of the americas (anghie, 1996; moloney, 2011). much of the theory of sovereignty, as it emerged in early-modern europe, was designed to distinguish european, imperial violence from indigenous violence, which takes place in the “state of nature.” this contrast was designed to promote peace through the rule of law in europe, even as it created a frontier mentality that encouraged colonization and genocide in the “new world.” 3 andrea smith (2005) documents the use of sexual violence as a means of carrying out indigenous genocide. bonita lawrence (2004) documents the use of racist notions of indigeneity as inscribed in canada’s indian act to deny indigenous people membership in their own communities. coulthard (2014) argues that attempts to reconcile with indigenous peoples in canada using a politics of recognition are in fact the most recent attempt at indigenous assimilation. 4 this definition combines legal notions of sovereignty doctrine with the concept’s political foundations. the “nations” of early-modern europe were just beginning to imagine themselves and political philosophers such as bodin and hobbes were attempting to develop political theories capable of forestalling conflict by investing absolute authority (previously reserved for god) in the sovereign. while sovereigns never exercised this degree of control in practice, the theories did lay the ground for legal theorists such as vitoria and grotius to establish sovereignty as the basis for international law. xavier scott studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 392 francisco de vitoria was shocked at the depredations of the conquistadores in the new world and sought to create a system of international law adapted to the different cultural contexts of europe and the (still indigenous) americas (anghie, 1996). this meant that he had to find a basis for international law that was not religious. vitoria attributes the right to property and rationality to indigenous peoples – the two means that had hitherto justified colonization. edward keene comments: vitoria, however, left europeans in the situation where they had to show such a degree of respect for other peoples’ sovereignty and property that, if taken seriously, it would imply handing back the lands the spanish had conquered in the americas and would have put a halt to earlier colonialism. (keene, 2002, p. 55) spain and the other colonial powers would not accept this and, while the concept of sovereignty was maintained in international law, it increasingly took on a eurocentric form. rather than representing a means by which different cultures could interact peacefully, sovereignty entrenched a hierarchy between european sovereigns and indigenous peoples in the rule of law. regardless of vitoria’s intent, antony anghie’s (1996) study of his work finds that it actually laid the groundwork for the eventual conquest of indigenous peoples. eschewing the traditional justification for colonization (the universal jurisdiction of the pope), vitoria sets out to construct a model of international law based on principles of natural law administered by a secular sovereign in accordance with the principles of reason – a jus gentium (law of nations). vitoria ascribes two characteristics to the indigenous personality. first, because they possess reason, they belong to the same universal realm of jus gentium as the spanish; second, they are notably distinct from the spanish because their social and cultural practices are at variance with the universal (christian) norms practiced by the spanish. for vitoria: “the discrepancy between the ontologically ‘universal’ indian and the socially, historically ‘particular’ indian must be remedied by the imposition of sanctions which effect the necessary transformation” (anghie, 1996, p. 327). vitoria used just war theory to transform the particular indian into one obeying christian (european) norms. in a shocking reversal of his attempt to construct a theory of international law that was free of religious interpretation, vitoria comes to the conclusion that only christian sovereigns can wage a just war – otherwise the wars of the saracens against the christians might also appear just. thus, vitoria’s insistence, in his analysis on just war, that only christian subjectivity is recognized by the laws of war, ensures that the indians are excluded from the realm of sovereignty and exist only as the objects against which christian sovereignty may exercise its power to wage war. (anghie, 1996, p. 330) repairing broken relations by repairing broken treaties studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 393 indigenous sovereignty is established only for the sake of justifying their conquest and assimilation into the universal order of jus gentium. it is necessary to grant a quasi-form of sovereignty to them because if they retained full sovereignty, then the conquest of their lands would be illegitimate, while if they were granted no sovereignty at all then subsequent generations could point to the arbitrary injustice of this fact. they have just enough sovereignty to enter into treaties that legitimate the occupation of their land and establish the sovereign authority of the colonial powers, but not enough to meaningfully exercise their sovereign right to territorial control. moreover, whenever there is a dispute between the colonial power and the indigenous community, it is the legal system of the colonial power that prevails. hugo grotius further developed sovereignty as a principle of international law in his work on war and peace (2012) which is credited with helping to end the “wars of religion” in europe with the peace of westphalia (taylor, 1998). keene notes two themes in grotius’s work that enabled and promoted colonialism – the right of individuals to appropriate “unoccupied” land and the divisibility of sovereign power (keene, 2002, p. 3). by the 19th century, unoccupied territory included anywhere that lacked a colonial european government. as the prominent 19th century jurist lorimer put it: he [the international jurist] is not bound to apply the positive law of nations to savages, or even to barbarians, as such; but he is bound to ascertain the points at which, and the directions in which, barbarians or savages come within the scope of partial recognition. (lorimer, 1883, quoted in anghie, 1999, p. 39) the divisibility of sovereignty in the case of non-europeans allowed colonial states to grant them partial recognition in the form of quasi-sovereignty, thereby enabling the local people to enter into treaties that they could be punished for violating (through just war doctrine) but which could be unilaterally broken by the colonial power once they were no longer politically expedient. since all the nations of the world are part of a single international community, no country has the right to invade any other. yet that community was not founded on universal principles, but was based on a european consensus. since recognition was the basis for membership in the “international community” and the original members of the jus gentium were all european (in practice, if not in theory), the westphalian system would seem to promote conquest and colonialism abroad, even as it promoted mutual recognition within europe. the legacy of the westphalian peace has been a system that simultaneously maintains the historical legality of colonialism, while rejecting it as a principle of justice. the origins of international law were inherently unjust and based on a racist refusal to acknowledge indigenous sovereignty in its entirety. xavier scott studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 394 however, in recognizing the moral and legal chicanery that was required to deny indigenous sovereignty, we can lay the groundwork for understanding the sovereign violence that european powers committed and how that was then tied to the numerous forms of injustice committed afterwards. not only did indigenous peoples have political societies, but european sovereigns and jurists regularly recognized their sovereignty by signing over 800 treaties with different indigenous communities (kickingbird, 1995). siegfried wiessner (1995) divides the treaty-making conventions between the united states and indigenous communities into two time periods – prior to and following the end of the war of 1812. prior to this date, treaties were concluded on a relatively equal basis. they fully recognized the indigenous governance structures and were ratified by the u.s. senate using the language of international law. once the threat of other colonial powers was over, treaties became increasingly used “to regularize and channel the removal of indians from their traditional vast hunting and fishing grounds to ever smaller, ever more barren areas of land” (wiessner, 1995, p. 577). the war of 1812 marks a switch from the nation-to-nation relationships that characterized earlier agreements, to a new species of treaty which deprived indigenous communities of nationhood. i call the means by which colonial states appropriated indigenous sovereignty “theft,” since it deprived indigenous peoples of their right to selfdetermination and full use of their traditional territories. moreover, the quasisovereignty that was granted to indigenous peoples made the destruction of their communities a requirement to establish the legitimacy of the colonial power’s occupation. taiaiake alfred and jeff corntassel argue that contemporary settlers are no longer trying to eradicate indigenous peoples as bodies, but rather “as peoples through the erasure of the histories and geographies that provide the foundation for indigenous cultural identities and sense of self” (2005, p. 598; emphasis in original). this is both a continuation of the desire to appropriate indigenous land and an attempt to foreclose the possibility that land that has already been annexed by colonists be returned. indigenous sovereignty in its current form in the british colonial states continues to act as a form of “quasi-sovereignty” the goal and legacy of which are the assimilation and destruction of indigenous peoples. the truth and reconciliation commission of canada (2015) has outlined the crimes the canadian government committed against indigenous peoples. while the summary of their findings focuses on the cultural genocide the canadian state engaged in through residential schools, it acknowledges the physical and biological genocides engaged in by the state as well. it states: canada asserted control over aboriginal land. in some locations, canada negotiated treaties with first nations; in others, the land was simply occupied or seized. the negotiation of treaties, while seemingly honourable and legal, was often marked by fraud and coercion, and canada was, and remains, slow to implement their provisions and intent. (truth & reconciliation commission of canada, 2015, p. 1) repairing broken relations by repairing broken treaties studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 395 australian prime minister kevin rudd (2008) issued an apology for the “stolen generation,” which took aboriginal and torres strait islander children from their families. the u.s. issued its apology to indigenous peoples, hidden in section 8113 of a 2010 defense appropriations act. it acknowledges “that there have been years of official depredations, illconceived policies, and the breaking of covenants by the federal government regarding indian tribes” and also “many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on native peoples by citizens of the united states” (111th congress, 2009, s.8113). all three of these apologies profess a desire to “remove a stain from its past” (truth & reconciliation commission of canada, 2015, p. 237), for “the nation to turn a new page” (rudd, 2008), and look towards a future “where all the people of this land live reconciled as brothers and sisters” (111th congress, 2009, s.8113). yet the australian apology made no reference to reparations, the american apology contains a disclaimer that nothing in it is meant to “serve as any settlement against the united states” (111th congress, 2009, s.8113), and while canada has attached its apology to court mandated reparations payments, it has failed to reform its relationship with indigenous peoples by (for example) reforming the 1876 indian act. the existence of sovereignty in a colonial context is predicated on the nonsovereignty of indigenous peoples. at best, they are granted a form of “quasisovereignty” that is not taken seriously by the international state system and is generally considered to be a temporary stage in the integration of indigenous peoples into the colonial state.5 the quasi-status of their sovereignty is not a step on the path towards full sovereignty, but towards destruction and the seamless transfer of sovereignty from them to the colonial state. in their critique of the literature on post-colonial theory and antiracist work, bonita lawrence and enakshi dua ask, “what does it mean to look at canada as colonized space?” (2005, p. 123). because settler states are founded on policies that combine extermination and assimilation, the continued existence of indigenous peoples as peoples depends on the full recognition of their inherent sovereignty. for this reason: to speak of indigenous nationhood is to speak of land as indigenous, in ways that are neither rhetorical nor metaphorical. neither canada, nor the united states – or the settler states of “latin” america for that matter – which claim sovereignty 5 one example of how the international system refuses to recognize indigenous sovereignty occurred when the iroquois lacrosse team attempted to travel to england to participate in the lacrosse world championship in 2010. the uk refused to admit them because the british government does not recognize passports issued by the iroquois confederacy – despite recognizing them in the 1758 treaty of easton. xavier scott studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 396 over the territory they occupy, have a legitimate basis to anchor their absorption of huge portions of that territory. (lawrence & dua, 2005, p. 124) to claim respect for indigenous sovereignty, therefore, is to deny the legal legitimacy of settler colonies. this is because of the territoriality and legal supremacy claims of sovereign states. while the development of international law has served to strip indigenous peoples of their traditional lands, it also contains a number of mechanisms that have been used in other contexts of occupation, violence, and genocide. first, the principle of pacta sunt servanda is the cornerstone of international law (uribe, 2010; wiessner 1995) – states are required to abide by their word. the fact that colonial powers broke their treaties with indigenous governments ought not to mean that it is thereby nullified, but rather that “there may be legal consequences” (kickingbird, 1995, p. 603). furthermore, the principle of sovereignty contains a right to reassert authority when territory is unjustly annexed. when a state’s sovereignty is violated, international law calls for its restoration. following kirke kickingbird, i believe that “treaties form the backdrop of the past, confirm rights in the present and provide the basic definition for the evolving future” (1995, p. 605). only by respecting the traditional rights of indigenous peoples – including rights to their territories – can colonial states repair the sovereign wrong done in the abrogation of their duty to stand by their treaties. transitional justice i believe that a transitional justice lens can offer insight into how to approach reconciliation between settlers and indigenous peoples. there are a number of ways in which the harm caused to the relationship is similar to other contexts in which injustice has been practiced, such as post-genocide rwanda, post-war germany, and post-apartheid south africa. however, i will also note some of the differences between settler-colonialism and some of these other contexts – specifically, that liberal democracies were perpetrators of the wrongs done to indigenous peoples and therefore a “transition” to a liberal-democracy (without attending to the communal rights of indigenous peoples) will not accomplish what the history of sovereign theft and treaty abrogation call for. transitional justice studies can help with the process of reconciliation between settlers and indigenous peoples because its objects of study are histories of extreme, even genocidal, levels of violence. the primary question it seeks to answer is: “how should societies deal with their evil pasts?” (teitel, 2000, p. 3). post-war germany, former soviet states in eastern europe, dictatorships in latin america, and post-apartheid south africa are some of the most famous examples of such transitions (maclachlan, 2012; teitel, 2000). apologies, reparations programs, criminal prosecutions, and repairing broken relations by repairing broken treaties studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 397 truth commissions are the means to accomplish reconciliation (gray, 2010). however, typical in the literature on transitional justice is the assumption that the offending government was not a liberal democracy and that some sort of major shift has taken place between the old regime and the new (teitel, 2000; verdeja, 2007). in the case of colonial settler states, however, many of the injustices (particularly that of sovereign theft) were perpetrated by liberaldemocracies. while transitional justice studies have developed a number of the moral and political principles useful in assessing the prospects of reconciliation between settlers and indigenous peoples, the assumption that liberal-democratic regimes are the solution to, rather than the cause of, such abuses must be critically re-examined. liberal theorists of transitional justice have a tendency to focus on individual perpetrators and victims and yet “there are some situations in which it is simply the case that entire groups have either participated in wrongdoing or passively acquiesced, while benefitting from the results” (maclachlan, 2012, p. 51). attending to the communal harms perpetrated against a community is often as important as seeking justice by prosecuting individual perpetrators. in his review of reconciliation through truth, mahmood mamdani (1996) critiques the comparison of the holocaust to apartheid. the best way to understand the legacy of apartheid, mamdani argues, is not in terms of the perpetrator/victim relationship, as in the case of the holocaust, but in terms of the beneficiary/victim relationship. in the case of apartheid, as in the case of the occupation of indigenous land, it is important to focus not only on the individuals who exercised violence against victims, but the violence inherent in a system that was established for the benefit of whites at the expense of non-whites. similarly, democratic structures in contemporary settler-states offer little hope for justice to indigenous peoples. democracy is the great transformer in the literature on transitional justice. for example, ruti teitel’s (2000) work assumes that the injustices that took place in the transitional society occurred in a context of authoritarianism and that the transition to democracy will involve a particular set of policy tools designed to hold the leaders of the previous regime responsible (without being draconian). in colonial contexts, however, many of the injustices that took place happened once democracy had been established by the colonial government. furthermore, time and numbers are both on the side of the colonial power. the more people who immigrate to a settler colony, the more disempowered the indigenous population are in a democratic forum.6 unlike south africa, more democracy 6 guthrie valaskakis examines the complex obstacles to understanding questions of identity and indigeneity. drawing on david foster, she notes “that the number of people who identity [sic] themselves as indian on us census records has nearly tripled since 1970, but indian bloodlines are thinning. ‘one federal study estimated that the percentage of indians who are full-bloods – sixty percent in 1980 – will fall to thirty-four percent in 2000 and to three-tenths of one percent xavier scott studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 398 will not result in the implementation of policies that will redress either the original theft of sovereignty, or the slew of genocidal policies enacted in order to solidify that original theft. since 1996 canada has tried to develop a transitional justice framework to promote reconciliation with indigenous communities by focusing on “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” (coulthard, 2014). coulthard notes that the difference between the canadian context and the transitional contexts popular in the literature (e.g., south africa) is that a “formal transition” has occurred in the other contexts but not in canada. he argues that “where there is no formal period marking an explicit transition from an authoritarian past to a democratic present – state-sanctioned approaches to reconciliation tend to ideologically fabricate such a transition by narrowly situating the abuses of settler colonization firmly in the past” (p. 22; emphasis in original). this was a distinctive feature of the american, canadian, and australian apologies noted above. drawing on the anti-colonial work of franz fanon, coulthard argues that the ongoing resentment felt by many indigenous peoples is an important sign of “moral protest and political outrage” (2014, p. 22). this is because settler-states refuse to dismantle the ongoing institutions of colonization, even as they express regret about the “past-effects” of such institutions. apologies are excellent ways of making up for past wrongs; however, in this instance neither really addresses the nature of the ongoing dispossession of indigenous sovereignties. the sovereign power that owes its existence to the theft of indigenous sovereignties cannot apologize for an injustice it continues to practice by virtue of its very existence. particular abuses that no sovereign power ought to engage in can be apologized for, but this fails to address the particular wrong that afflicts indigenous peoples as collectives. how can a canadian court (representing canada’s sovereign power) objectively and in accordance with our notions of justice determine the value of the dispossession of indigenous sovereignty? there are many other forms of injustice that similarly cannot be atoned for in a way that is symmetrical with the original wrong. however, in other cases of injustice that involve the illegal exercise of sovereign power our sense of justice is such that it always involves a restoration of sovereign power to the dispossessed group (e.g., kuwait, or south korea) and where such restoration is impossible, the designation of “occupied territory” status maintains the illegitimacy of the occupation (e.g., western sahara and the occupied territories around israel). democracy, in 2080’” (foster, 1997, cited in valaskakis, 2000, p. 393). combine this with the fact that indigenous peoples have been forced to conceptualize their identity primarily in terms of their legal status with the government in ways that collapse race, culture, and character leads genetic assimilation to cultural assimilation and, hence, destruction as a people. “the evolutionary theories and racially based notions that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century to qualify, and classify, indians reflect the concepts of purity and authenticity that are entrenched in the legal systems of the united states and canada, where they not only frame indian political and territorial dependence, but define indians themselves” (foster 1997, cited in valaskakis, 2000, p. 393). repairing broken relations by repairing broken treaties studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 399 apologies, and reparations are all excellent responses to histories of injustice, but are not suited to addressing the theft of sovereignty from indigenous peoples. what we are missing in the set of policy tools we are currently using to restore right relations with indigenous peoples is a transition. since settlerstates only exist as the result of broken treaties and the promise of and then unilateral withdrawal of sovereign recognition, attending to that particular feature of the wrongs done to indigenous peoples will be required for reconciliation. to leave the legal identity and constitutional basis of the state untouched, even as we seek reconciliation is to say: “yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important – it should weigh very little in our final judgements; it should affect very little what we do in the world” (zinn, 2003, p. 8). one of the factors that marks a transition out of a violent past is the rewriting of a constitution and the founding of a new set of norms and institutional practices (teitel, 2000). according to teitel, “transitional constitution making comprehends the codifying, entrenching purposes associated with constitutionalism and also the transformative, disentrenching purposes peculiar to transitions” (2000, p. 219). when the oppressive policies of a state reach a certain level of violence, we expect a formal transformation of the government in order to provide a fresh basis for the establishment of right relations. that the liberal-democratic constitutions of canada or the united states ought to provide settler-states with an exception to the need for a transition seems bizarre and predicated solely on a desire to ignore the wrongs of the past. reconciliation will require settlers to challenge their assumptions that the colonial state can find a legitimate path towards reconciliation and that there is no way to give sovereignty back to the people from whom it was taken. the colonial states have had 500 years to work out a program of reconciliation. it is now time for a different government to have the opportunity. what better government than one made up of those dispossessed by the colonial regime? post-colonial states i anticipate a number of objections to my proposal and will attempt to assuage some of the misgivings that people have about the need for a transfer of sovereignty. some of the ideas for the re-founding of the state that i put forward will appear programmatic. however, the intention is not that they be taken as a road-map for what a post-colonial state will look like. rather, my goal is to demonstrate ways in which these colonial states already recognize the collective rights of settler communities in ways that are undemocratic, eurocentric, and deny the same recognition to indigenous peoples. xavier scott studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 400 first, it may be objected that the notion of territory and borders implies the adoption of a colonial mentality, which is precisely what indigenous activists are trying to combat. this is a valid objection, but i don’t believe it is insurmountable. as post-colonial theorists have demonstrated in their studies of the decolonization of africa and asia, the nation-state form is a european “derivative discourse” that has maintained many of the power relations of colonial society (chatterjee, 1993). however, a post-colonial situation seems preferable to one of ongoing colonialism. moreover, while the concepts of territory and borders have distinctly colonial histories, they also contain within them the possibility to rethink the ways in which they are understood. for example, while colonial notions of property and borders have been exercised in ways promoting the exploitation of the land (coulthard, 2014), it is possible that they be reapplied to promote responsible stewardship. while such borders have traditionally been used to keep indigenous people divided, it is possible to redraw them and reimagine their relations with one another. for example, borders between the provinces of canada are regulated differently from how the us manages the borders between their states and the border between canada and the us is treated differently from the border between spain and france. post-colonial states may agree to federate (or not) on the basis of what they believe will create the best post-colonial situation for them. it may be that north america is broken up into hundreds of states. it may be that indigenous societies elect not to take constitutional responsibility for settlers and establish states for settlers that rely on their existing constitutions – though in territories now criss-crossed by hundreds of independent indigenous states. it may be that post-colonial indigenous societies agree to some sort of federation that creates conditions for interdependence and cooperation at the same time as they protect autonomy and self-management. transitional justice is complex and transformative, balancing normative considerations of justice with political pragmatism.7 a frequent argument against acknowledging indigenous sovereignty admits that the original theft was wrong, but argues that does not justify the expulsion of settlers and the confiscation of their homes and property. similar to the arguments based on “ethical individualism” launched against those seeking reparations for slavery (gray, 2010, p. 59), this would involve an unjust notion of intergenerational guilt that does not fit with liberal notions of justice. but this assumes that indigenous people would be as violent and uncompromising as settlers were in the exercise of their sovereign powers. 7 it is useful to draw on darrel moellendorf’s (2007) political understanding of reconciliation as a social goal that can be pursued through public policy options. “this approach,” he explains, “takes reconciliation to be a normative political ideal that is less than the whole of social justice, but that offers a basis for reasonable hope that further justice is within the reach of those pursuing it by constitutional means” (p. 206). moellendorf’s political understanding of reconciliation is useful because it manages our expectations about what the end result of the transfer of sovereignty will be. transferring sovereignty will not be a magic wand solution that restores right relations between the colonizer and the colonized; however, it can create the postcolonial conditions that are necessary to move in that direction. repairing broken relations by repairing broken treaties studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 401 “it is interesting to me,” andrea smith opines, “how non-indians often presume that if native people regained their landbases, that non-indians would be exiled from those land bases. yet a much more inclusive vision of sovereignty is articulated by native women activists” (2005, p. 186). a just transfer of sovereignty will not involve the forced relocation of settlers. it may involve land redistribution policies and it may involve a different constitutional relationship with the land that precludes destructive resource extraction projects. neither of these constitute the horrors of dispossession and relocation experienced by (for example) the cherokee during the trail of tears. moreover, it is important to note the difference between sovereign territory and personal property. sovereign territory can be transferred without the transfer of private property. when south africa rewrote their constitution, it protected the property of the white colonists, despite the fact that it was largely acquired illegitimately. this was done both to avoid the pitfalls of attributing individual guilt for collective crimes and to guarantee economic stability after the transition. however, this is not to say that property relations remain the same in a post-colonial state. south africa’s post-apartheid government began with land reform efforts that even now, more than two decades later, are a continued source of frustration for landless black south africans (harding, 2018). typically, a change in sovereignty will involve a change in the laws governing taxation and other legal notions surrounding private property. this is a far cry from forcing the settlers to leave and claiming their property for indigenous people; however, settlers should be prepared for a major restructuring of their previous rights over the land. family cottages on the traditional lands of indigenous peoples may be appropriated under legal doctrines similar to eminent domain and resource extraction projects near indigenous communities may undergo increased scrutiny. another objection contends that it would be undemocratic to place political power into the hands of a minority of the population. yet the transfer of sovereignty does not mean an end to democracy. were sovereignty to be transferred to the indigenous peoples living in settler countries, it is nearly impossible to imagine that they would not choose to implement a democracy – simply because the majority of people currently living inside their borders would not accept anything else. in fact, part of the reason for a transfer of sovereignty is to found states that are more democratic, by virtue of their responsiveness to indigenous legal traditions. john borrows discusses how canada’s representative democracy marginalizes indigenous participation in politics, by placing them between provincial and federal jurisdictions (borrows, 2002, p. 44). civic equality is the goal, but in the wake of such a long history of dispossession sometimes corrective measures are needed to arrive there (moellendorf, 2007). there are a number of ways to accomplish xavier scott studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 402 this. one possibility is the implementation of a quota system that ensures a minimum number of indigenous peoples are represented in government. new zealand already has a system of dedicated electoral seats to the maori population. in 1986 the royal commission on the electoral system found that “the maori seats have come to be regarded by maori as an important concession to, and the principle expression of, their status as the indigenous people of new zealand” (new zealand parliamentary library, 2009). another option to increase indigenous representation in government is to redraw political boundaries in a way that grants more legislative representation to indigenous peoples and grants them greater autonomy over their communities. while this allows smaller numbers of people a greater share of representatives, it is not inherently undemocratic. new jersey gets to elect as many senators as california to the us senate and a number of the eastern provinces in canada receive a greater allotment of parliamentary seats in government than their populations account for. these examples show that democratic states frequently distribute representatives on a regional basis rather than in proportion to their population. the final consideration i would like to advance, and arguably the most important, is related to the reduction of social and economic differences between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. most of the specific policies designed to do this will be legislative in nature, rather than constitutional, and ought to be worked out by experts, civil society groups, and the democratic process. however, constitutionally increasing economic rights, particularly rights associated with access to services (health, education, and infrastructure), is one possible option for a post-colonial society attempting to set the stage for the elimination of the social and economic disparities that currently exist. an economic benefit of redrafting the political boundaries of a state is that it might give more control over the extractive industries to indigenous communities. in his talk “the economics of reconciliation,” shawn a-in-chut atleo notes that, “almost every resource development activity currently operating or planned [in canada] is occurring within 200 kilometres of a first nation community and in the middle of our traditional territories” (2012, p. 4). given the role that natural resource extraction has played in the displacement of indigenous peoples, greater control over these industries seems like a particularly appropriate means of redress. moreover, the elimination of the social and economic gaps between settlers and indigenous peoples might actually lead to tax savings relative to the current state of affairs. in canada, for example, there has been research that shows that “closing the skills and education gap between first nations and the rest of the population will generate $400 billion within a generation and save canada $150 billion in social costs” (atleo, 2012, p. 4). reconciliation has pragmatic as well as moral dimensions when approached properly. repairing broken relations by repairing broken treaties studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 403 conclusion there is a certain sadness that would accompany the death of the colonial sovereign and it is understandable that this is the case; however, there is a certain exuberance that ought to be associated with it as well. national communities might be imagined (anderson, 2006), but they are communities nonetheless and the reticence that many settlers might feel about the solution to the problem of sovereign theft outlined herein is entirely understandable. however, i hope that the case has been made that the obstacles confronting the establishment of fully sovereign indigenous states are not insurmountable. furthermore, it seems apparent that the current relationship between the governments of the english colonial states and the indigenous peoples that live within their borders are not likely to be rectified using the policy options currently being employed. the reservation model that has been adopted by colonial governments belies a desire for the eventual assimilation of indigenous peoples. such assimilation would tragically complete the destruction of indigenous communities that began in the 15th century and we have a moral duty to keep that from happening. exuberance over the possibilities inherent in the founding of a new state is the attitude i would most like to cultivate with this paper. the establishment of right political relationships with indigenous peoples ought to be seen as an incredible opportunity – the scale of which is akin to the fall of the berlin wall in its moral and pragmatic dimensions. as taiaiake alfred (2005, p. 35) notes: if non-indigenous readers are capable of listening, they will learn from these shared words, and they will discover that while we are envisioning a new relationship between onkwehonwe and the land, we are at the same time offering a decolonized alternative to the settler society by inviting them to share our vision of respect and peaceful coexistence. the symbolic importance of re-establishing the state along the lines offered above cannot be overemphasized. settlers in these states would only enrich their sense of identity and history through the transfer of sovereignty and it is unlikely that they would lose their sense of self in the bargain. the death of the colonial sovereign will grant life to a new sovereign power that will be able to move along the path of reconciliation towards civic equality, which is sadly lacking in the current context. the death of the colonial sovereign might seem extreme, but balanced against completing the destruction of indigenous peoples, it is an acceptable loss. such a transformation has a xavier scott studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 388-405, 2018 404 much greater likelihood of producing right political relations than reformatory measures conducted by the colonial state. acknowledgements i would like to thank alice maclachlan and michael giudice for their helpful comments on early drafts of this paper. i would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers at studies in social 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(2007). a normative theory of reparations in transitional justice. in c. card & a.t. marsoobian (eds.), genocide’s aftermath: responsibility and repair. malden, ma: blackwell. wiessner, s. (1995). american indian treaties and modern international law. st. thomas law review, 7, 567-602. zinn, h. (2003). a people’s history of the united states. new york: perennial classics. gabriel final before ts correspondence address: christina gabriel, department of political science, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: christina.gabriel@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 1, 158-161, 2021 book review mobilities, mobility justice and social justice cook, nancy, & butz, david (eds.). (2019). new york: routledge. isbn 9780815377030 (cloth) us$160.00; isbn 9780367585532 (paper) us$48.95; isbn 9780429434587 (e-book) us$48.95. 284 pages. christina gabriel carleton university, canada the 2006 launch of the journal mobilities prompted its editors to reflect on the “mobility turn” and the impact of this development within social sciences (hannam et al., 2006). since then “the field of mobilities research has grown by connecting different epistemological frames, and offering new postdisciplinary approaches to complex interconnected phenomena” (buscher et al., 2016, p. 485). the edited volume mobilities, mobility justice and social justice is one such effort. its editors, nancy cook and david butz, seek to problematize the intersection of the mobilities paradigm and social justice theory in an effort to advance a new conceptual frame – mobility justice (p. 3). to engage in this effort cook and butz bring together scholars from a variety of fields, including sociology, geography, anthropology, social welfare, transport studies and public administration. what emerges is an ambitious and somewhat wide ranging collection of 17 chapters, organized into two key sections, covering a broad array of topics. part i of the volume, “introducing mobility justice,” orientates the collection. in the introduction cook and butz set the stage by succinctly highlighting key dynamics within both mobilities research and social justice theorizing to argue that each has much to offer the other. they explicitly reject imposing a singular definition of mobility justice to drive the volume in favour of providing an interdisciplinary forum where conceptualizations of mobility justice – framed by mobile ontology across various scales and contexts, and attendant to intersectional analysis – can be explored (p. 14). this resonates with mimi sheller’s call in the second chapter for an expansive and robust understanding of mobility justice. for sheller “mobility justice is an overarching concept for thinking about how power and book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 158-161, 2021 159 inequality inform the governance and control of movement, shaping the patterns of unequal mobility and immobility in the circulation of people, resources and information.” (p. 23). importantly, as sheller points out, the development of this approach holds the promise of bringing together movements and groups that have been previously separated, such as “embodied movements for social justice… struggles for transport justice and accessibility… movements for migrants and indigenous rights, de-colonial movements, climate justice and global equity all under one common framework” (p. 33). these two chapters provide an effective contextual framing for the rest of the volume. the remaining 15 short chapters in part ii are loosely organized into four sub-sections: justice and mobility governance; justice and mobility infrastructures; justice and biomobilities; and justice and more-than-human mobilities. taken together the chapters cover a lot of ground ranging from familiar themes such as migration and transport justice to newer areas such as the implications of mobility justice for non-human agents. while it is not possible in the scope of this review to address each of these contributions in turn, some observations can be made. some chapters in the opening two sub-sections of the second section are particularly noteworthy for their effort to speak to the mobility justice theme by drawing together conceptual frames and empirical examples. wieqiang lin’s contribution focuses on mobility justice and aeromobility. he underscores the importance of thinking how forms of global governance, such as air rights, aeronautical expertise and aviation security, are implicated in the production of unequal structures of mobility between nation states. as he puts it “injustices also arise in the systematic way ‘global rules’ splinter the mobility rights of whole populations in different nation-states” (p. 50). also noteworthy is ole b. jensen’s chapter, which draws our attention to how design choices and design forms are implicated in the production of social injustice insofar as they promote or hinder movement. he writes, “much of the dark design of mobilities is as much about blocking and restricting movement as it is about channeling and directing it through designed systems and infrastructures” (p. 119). jensen illustrates the importance of what he terms the “borderland between mobilities design and mobilities justice” (p. 126) by presenting two empirical examples of dark design: the holocaust (an extreme of dark design), and the “war against homeless people.” in this latter instantiation, mobility injustice is materialized in acts of exclusion. the volume also invites us to think more carefully about method and methodology. for example, in an excellent intervention susan ilcan draws on extensive field interviews to chart how syrian refugees navigate bordering practices (e.g., military checkpoints and territorial borders) during their journeys out of syria. in doing so, she documents refugees’ active engagement in struggles for migrant justice. she calls for more ethnographicbased migration and border research that examines migrant narratives and advocacy through the frame of mobility justice. similarly, denver nixon and tim schwanens’ chapter, which focuses on community-based initiatives christina gabriel studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 158-161, 2021 160 targeted at walking and cycling infrastructures in london and sao paolo, makes a persuasive argument for developing an expanded conceptualization of mobility justice that captures the shifting complexities of everyday urban mobility and the differing voices and needs of community members. butz and cook’s contribution pushes the mobility justice conceptualization further by addressing the “mobile methods” approach used by many mobilities researchers. they carefully interrogate how tendencies associated with mobile methods can themselves be implicated in what butz and cook term “epistemic injustice” (p. 81). in these instances injustice takes place in the research process and production of knowledge when “people whose mobility experiences and representations are prejudicially discredited, misunderstood or received as unintelligible are unlikely to be served by infrastructure planning, or by mobilities theorizing” (p. 82). consequently, butz and cook draw attention to how research design and research decisions have consequences for justice and ethics. a number of interventions in the volume are attentive to social exclusion, marginalization and difference, and the way these dynamics shape and are shaped by issues of mobility and justice. this is especially true of the contributions grouped under the sub-title “justice and biomobilities.” georgine clarsen’s chapter provides an analysis of an australian television series black as, which documents the exploits of a group of indigenous men on a hunting trip. she characterizes their movements and activities as “an enactment of mobility justice” (p. 160) insofar as the men’s actions are simultaneously an assertion of sovereignty and a refusal of a colonial project. amy ritterbusch’s contribution turns to a case of enforced mobility, where homeless people in bogota were violently evicted from public spaces and forcibly relocated by state authorities. as a scholar activist she not only bears witness to the state’s actions, but invites a reflection on what a just mobility outcome for homeless citizens might look like. catherine nash and her coauthors examine how lgbtq groups negotiate and renegotiate neighbourhood spaces in toronto and sydney, raising the broader issue of what mobility justice means in relation to sexuality and gender identity. gender is also central to andres benz’s chapter. drawing on a case study of the gojal region of northern pakistan he highlights how differential access to mobility plays a role in opportunities, social well-being and livelihoods. in doing so he discuss both intraand inter-household relations and reveals how gender norms and differential positioning play a role in these relations. lastly, it should be noted that the chapters in the volume’s final subsection, “justice and more-than-human mobilities,” take concerns of inequality and justice into newer areas of food and animals. for example, anna davies examines food mobility and justice in her analysis of a project that seeks to redistribute surplus food by pairing businesses and charities. her analysis leads her to conclude that redistribution on its own falls short of food mobility justice, because at best it is a “band aid” response. for davies, the development of food mobility justice entails a concerted conversation book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 158-161, 2021 161 about the nature of the global food system and its connections with food waste and poverty. she writes, “mobility justice provides a useful way to talk about different relations that structure the movement of surplus food, highlighting power differentials that shape that practice and provide a context within which current food waste and food injustice collide” (p. 260). the volume’s strength and weakness is located in the wide scope of its contributions. indeed its origins lie in sessions at the 2016 american association of geographers conference, and there may be some drawbacks in trying to knit together these papers into an edited collection. on the one hand, this ambitious volume speaks to the conceptual potential of mobility justice and puts many new issues onto the agenda. but on the other hand, the range of disparate topics means the links between the chapters and sections are somewhat uneven as is the depth of their direct engagement with the editors’ concern to expand conceptualizations of mobility justice. in this respect, the coherence of the collection would have benefited perhaps from the addition of a concluding chapter. here the editors could have synthesized the connections between the chapters by considering how well the contributions responded to questions posed in the introduction, such as “what does theorizing about ‘mobility justice’ achieve for both bodies of scholarship” (p. 4). a concluding chapter could have also sketched the possibilities for future research agendas. references buscher, m., sheller, m., & tyfield, d. (2016). mobility intersections: social research, social futures.” mobilities 11(4), 485-497. hannam, k., sheller, m., & urry, j. (2006). editorial: mobilities, immobilities and moorings. mobilities 1(1), 1-22. hawthorne-steele final galley mar 8 16 correspondence address: isobel hawthorne-steele, school of sociology & applied social studies, ulster university, shore road, newtownabbey, bt37 oqb, northern ireland; email: i.hawthorne@ulster.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 transforming communities through academic activism: an emancipatory, praxis-led approach isobel hawthorne-steele ulster university, northern ireland rosemary moreland ulster university, northern ireland eilish rooney ulster university, northern ireland abstract this article tracks the engagement of university faculty in academic and community activism during thirty years in conflict-affected northern ireland. over time, the team of three academics who wrote the article developed programs to help tackle educational disadvantage in a deeply divided society riven with violent conflict. our pedagogical approach was driven by social justice principles in practice. in the process, students became what ledwith & springett (2010) describe as participative activists in the academy and in their own communities. the aim of this collective activism was to foster transformative change in a society that is now in transition from conflict. key examples of critical practice are described. we use a case study approach to describe challenges faced by faculty and participants. we argue that academic activism and community partnership can play a positive role in community transformation in the most difficult circumstances. keywords transformational education; emancipatory praxis; critical reflection; community-academy engagement isobel hawthorne-steele, rosemary moreland, eilish rooney studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 198 introduction the links between educational underachievement and poverty in the uk are widely known and evidenced (e.g., house of commons, 2014; department for education, 2009; machin, 2006; willis, 1977). in the north of ireland,1 these links persist despite the northern ireland assembly’s commitments to tackle poverty and inequality (ofmdfm, 2006; ofmdfm, 2010). this article argues that academic activism can play a significant role in transforming marginalized and disadvantaged communities by creating innovative educational opportunities that seek to challenge norms, question inequalities and discrimination, and develop the social capital of disadvantaged communities. set in the deeply divided context of the north of ireland, where communities of identity are often tightly interwoven into the fabric of geographical areas, the case study presented in this article examines the impacts of activism undertaken by the authors, who comprise a community development team in the faculty of social science at ulster university (formerly university of ulster). recruitment of students from marginalized backgrounds has been a key feature of the university’s strategy for widening access (university of ulster, 2012/13). a primary focus of our activism has been to work directly with disadvantaged communities, in order to provide educational opportunities to those who would not normally gain access to higher education. this enhances quality of life and positively impacts on the life-chances of individuals in those communities. founded on the radical community education approaches of professor tom lovett, a key figure in adult and community education in northern ireland, the cornerstone of this work for the past 10 years has been the delivery of a part-time bsc hons community development exclusively to adults working or volunteering in community or voluntary organizations (e.g., a neighbourhood community centre, a women’s group) or public bodies (e.g., department for social development, department of health, social care & public safety). although the degree was established primarily to develop a professionally accredited higher education qualification for those working in community and voluntary organizations, public bodies increasingly have a community development remit, which has led more employees from the public sector also to seek places in the program. as partnership is central to community development work, the synergy developed by students across public and community/voluntary sectors is one of the program’s key strengths. the majority of students recruited to the program are the first members of their families to access third-level education. they usually live or work in areas of deep-rooted socio-economic disadvantage (hawthorne-steele & 1 we use the terms ‘north of ireland’ and ‘northern ireland’ alternately in the text in recognition of the contentious nature of sovereignty and of naming the jurisdiction. transforming communities through academic activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 199 moreland, 2014), and a significant number are ex-political prisoners and excombatants. over the last five years, the program has been particularly successful in recruiting protestant working-class males, which is among the hardest groups to re-engage in education (harland & mccready, 2012). in gramsci’s (1971, p. 9) terminology, the program’s students are in fact “organic intellectuals,” in that their learning in the program about structural causes of poverty and disadvantage resonates strongly with their lived experiences. having experienced the transformative learning process for themselves within the community development program, they are well placed to be the forerunners of transformative learning within their local communities in a post-conflict north of ireland. over the course of three years of part time study, student cohorts develop communities of learning with their peers, sharing information, learning, and providing support to each other through a challenging but rewarding journey. taking this journey while also living and working in a society emerging from conflict provides additional challenges and opportunities for students and faculty. the curriculum is embedded in the local context, encouraging students to critically reflect on their community’s long-held beliefs and values, and to develop critical models of practice. in this article we argue that university-based programs such as this can provide a neutral and critical space where students from varied and often diametrically opposed political positions are able to engage in difficult social justice conversations, and create a dialogical space in which transformational learning can take place. recently, there has been renewed interest by uk government bodies to tackle the educational underachievement of marginalized groups. the higher education funding council for england, which is also the regulatory body for higher education in northern ireland, is committed to widening access and improving participation in higher education for hard-to-reach groups who are traditionally under-represented. the current strategy of the statutory body responsible for delivering on this commitment across the north of ireland – the department of education and learning – aims to encourage and support those “…who are most able but least likely to participate... to achieve the necessary qualifications to apply to and to benefit from, the higher education that is right for them” (delni, 2012, p. 2; emphasis in original). whilst in the past our activist effort to engage mainly nontraditional students from communities that experience high levels of poverty, inequality, and disadvantage has largely gone unnoticed, this new policy context, and especially the current northern ireland government policy on widening access and increasing participation, has placed greater value on this important area of our work. the community development team’s success in attracting and retaining ‘hard to reach’ students, many of whom graduate with a first-class or upper second-class honours degree, is clear testimony to the role of academic activism in bridging the huge gulf between universities and working-class communities. this case study illustrates how we, the community isobel hawthorne-steele, rosemary moreland, eilish rooney studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 200 development team, continue to contribute to lovett, clarke & kilmurray’s (1983, p. 159) vision for creating “an alternative adult education system or institution, committed to the twin processes of uniting the working-class and resolving the deep social, economic and political inequalities and injustices inherent in this society, through collective action bridging the sectarian divide.” part one of the article briefly outlines the historical and social context for our academic activism, which builds on the previous commitment of faculty members and is being continued by long-standing and newer members of the team. part two provides examples of this praxis, in order to argue that engendering transformational learning that extends beyond the individual, to impact upon wider geographical communities and communities of interest, is central to our academic activism. part three describes how academic activism such as ours has the potential to create synergies between local communities and the university, and can result in the creation of models of best practice (e.g., the transitional justice toolkit program). the article’s conclusion argues that academic activism has an important role to play in the transformation of communities, especially those who find themselves in the most difficult circumstances, and that the commitment of faculty members to developing and engaging in this practice can make a difference to the lives of the individuals and wider communities experiencing injustice, inequality and marginalization. historical and social context of academic activism ulster university currently has four campuses across the north of ireland in coleraine, jordanstown, derry/londonderry,2 and belfast. in the early 1970s, the university of ulster established an institute of continuing education at the magee campus in derry/londonderry, the main focus of which was to reengage adults with education, particularly those who had left school with few or no qualifications. a key figure in developing the institute was professor tom lovett, whose own experience of leaving school at a young age without qualifications and obtaining a scholarship as a trade union activist to study at ruskin college, oxford, fuelled his vision to provide education that would connect with the issues affecting working-class communities. his objective was to ignite a movement for social change that focused on broader critical engagement with inequality (lovett, clarke & kilmurray, 1983). people who were living in disadvantaged areas during the outbreak of civil disturbance in 2 we use this terminology – derry/londonderry – because the name of the city is contested, and each term has different political/religious/cultural connotations. whilst the legal name for the city and county is londonderry, the legal name for the district council is derry and strabane. the name londonderry is mostly favoured by those with protestant/loyalist/unionist identities whilst derry is mostly used by those with catholic/republican/nationalist identities. transforming communities through academic activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 201 northern ireland during the 1960s experienced its worst impacts; over 80 percent of violent trauma during the conflict occurred in the most povertystricken urban areas of belfast and derry/londonderry (fey, morrissey & smith, 1999). given that this educational process was taking place in a deeply divided area devastated by conflict, lovett, clarke & kilmurray (1983) emphasised that the key challenge for faculty was to provide a neutral space for students from opposite sides of the conflict (i.e., predominantly catholic nationalists and predominantly protestant unionists) to engage in dialogue, particularly on common issues such as poverty and inequality, which affect working class people on both sides of the political/religious/cultural divide. in this neutral space students could begin critically to analyze structural causes of poverty and inequality in order to understand alternative perspectives and build solidarity around collective issues. in addition to working with nationalist and unionist communities in derry/londonderry, the institute of continuing education engaged with local communities on either side of the nearby border between the north of ireland and the republic of ireland to develop programs that responded to their selfidentified needs, including workshops on human and welfare rights, poverty, and housing. by developing innovative learning programs, the institute fostered community-university relationships that helped transform these communities and dismantle the ‘ivory tower’ image of the academy. this commitment was maintained when the institute moved in the late 1970s to the jordanstown campus (10 kilometers north of belfast). for over 20 years, a small group of faculty delivered accredited and non-accredited programs on this campus and in a range of community venues across the greater belfast area, including in the innovative ulster people’s college, founded in 1982 by community activists and academics led by lovett. taking inspiration from myles horton’s highlander centre (horton & freire, 1990), the ulster people’s college was established as a non-formal education center to provide opportunities for cross-community dialogue around social, cultural, and economic realities in an educational space that was accessible and safe for both nationalists/catholics and unionists/protestants (lovett, gillespie & gunn, 1995). the institute of continuing education closed in the late 1990s; however, faculty sustained their commitment to academic activism, largely by establishing the community development program in the faculty of social science at ulster university. the need for a professionally accredited higher education program in community development gained impetus from the historic and transformative development in political relations between britain and ireland, manifested in the belfast/good friday agreement (northern ireland office, 1998). in the agreement section on rights, safeguards and equality of opportunity, the british government made a distinct commitment to promote “social inclusion, including in particular community development” in the north of ireland (northern ireland office, 1998, p. 20). this reference to isobel hawthorne-steele, rosemary moreland, eilish rooney studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 202 community development formally recognizes the critical role played by local neighbourhood groups and community networks in northern ireland in sustaining the work of peace building over the course of a long conflict. this recognition was subsequently built upon in the publication of documents such as the compact between the voluntary & community sector and government (department for social development, 1998) and, later, the concordat between the voluntary & community sector and the northern ireland government (department for social development, 2011).3 the importance placed on community development as an approach to working with disadvantaged and disaffected communities is further reflected in other government policy documents (department of health, social services & public safety, 2010; department for social development, 2012, 2013; ofmdfm, 2013), all of which represent working in partnership with local communities as pivotal to creating a lasting peace and sustainable future for the north of ireland. these key documents, which legitimize and support the work of the community and voluntary sector, have been developed largely as a result of three interconnecting features, which continue to dominate the context of community development in northern ireland. firstly, the legacy of historical division between the nationalist/catholic and unionist/protestant communities continue to shape and impact community development programs. virtually no program within the community or voluntary sector, whether it be a parenting course or return to work skills program, can afford to ignore segregation, which continues to impact where people live and work and their sense of safety in accessing areas perceived to be of the ‘other’ side. the second feature links to this, in that substantial european and us funding has been provided to the community and voluntary sector to promote peace and reconciliation. the third feature is that those who played a part in the conflict (i.e., excombatants and ex-paramilitaries) have been actively supported by the state to work in their communities, and in doing so to contribute to building a peaceful and stable society (rooney & swaine, 2012). shirlow and mcevoy’s (2008) research identified the community and voluntary sector as one of the few areas of employment open to those previously involved in the conflict and indeed many ex-prisoners/ex-combatants are keen to work in their communities, to help build reconciliation, and to act as positive role models to young people to prevent them from engaging in anti-social behavior and joining paramilitary organizations. in addition, shirlow and mcevoy (2008) argue that whilst some political parties have had difficulty 3 the compact (1998) and concordat (2011) are policy documents drawn up by the department for social development, which is the northern ireland government department charged to oversee the community and voluntary sector. a number of key organizations in this sector contributed to writing these agreements, which have provided the foundation for the development of partnership approaches between statutory and community/voluntary organizations to tackle social problems. transforming communities through academic activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 203 accepting this, it is largely recognized that building a peaceful and stable society requires the re-integration into society of people who previously played a part in the conflict.. these three features impelled an increased demand among community workers and activists for professional qualifications in community work, which the part-time bsc hons community development was designed to meet. in this context, our academic activism is centred on the principle that community education and learning are key to community development (logue, 1990). by providing space for engagement to those who might otherwise not be heard, the community of learning that developed around the program is evidence that in situations of conflict, community development can be a means of empowerment (lovett, clarke & kilmurray, 1983). whilst craig, mayo, popple, shaw & taylor (2011, p. 7) suggest that “the broad church nature of community development” can include anything “from statesponsored, well-resourced programs to small-scale, poorly resourced, but independent community action,” the academic activism undertaken by faculty members in the community development program has always sought to situate “educational purpose in a wider social and political analysis that entailed critical engagement with the policy context as it related to the reality of people’s lives” (shaw & crowther, 2014, p. 4). thus the underlying ethos of the program is premised on creating space and opportunities for critical exploration of poverty, social exclusion, alienation and resilience in local, national and international contexts. in order to prepare community workers who have been engaging in practice for many years – without any qualifications – to have the academic capacity to study at university, the community development team developed the accreditation for prior learning (apel) community development pathway, which recognizes and builds on the experiential learning this constituency has gained through their community work and activism. we describe this apel community development pathway, and the community development program itself, in the next section. transforming communities through university education the fundamental principle of promoting social change is at the core of the community development program. the program operates according to the premise that opportunities for grassroots inclusion and collective action can be realized through educating local community development workers to become “organic intellectuals” (gramsci, 1971, p. 9) who promote effective social transformation initiatives that inform policy and social and economic investment, particularly within disenfranchized and marginalized communities. in this section we shall explore some of the innovative academic activism that we have developed over the last decade. these practices are rooted in an ethos of community engagement and inclusivity. isobel hawthorne-steele, rosemary moreland, eilish rooney studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 204 one of the most successful innovations to date has been our apel pathway, which has recently gained recognition at a national level through the star award conferred by aontas (the irish national adult learning organisation). the star awards are presented to outstanding, learningcentred adult education projects. the apel pathway this initiative originated in response to requests from community activists and from paid community development workers for easier access to degree level qualification. in recognition of the tremendous experiential learning and informal education gained by these individuals, rosemary moreland (2009a; 2009b; 2007) established the apel pathway to the bsc hons community development. this pathway accords validity and formal credit-bearing recognition to students’ community-based experiential learning, thus enabling community activists and paid community workers to reflect on their knowledge, understanding, and grassroots experience of community practice. experienced community workers and activists are invited to attend a short course on apel, in which they are introduced to models of experiential learning, critical reflection, non-formal and informal learning. in addition, they are introduced to the national occupational standards in community development work that provide the basis for a reflective portfolio,4 which they are required to submit for entry into the community development program. this has the benefit of alerting faculty to those students who may require additional support, whose academic writing may not yet be sufficient for entry to the degree, and who may be advised to take preliminary qualifications first. the reflective portfolios submitted by applicants to the program are assessed by faculty members according to university guidelines on accreditation of prior learning. if the evidence presented in the portfolio is deemed sufficient, applicants can gain direct entry to year two of the community development degree. where this is not the case, applicants have one further opportunity to resubmit their portfolio, and if they are unsuccessful on their second attempt they are guided towards other more appropriate levels or areas of study. the apel pathway is founded on freire's (2001) pedagogy of hope, which views education as a learning process for all involved. it is thus deeply embedded in the concept of making a difference by enhancing community and social justice through developing consciousness that “has the power to transform reality” (taylor, 1993, p. 52). moreover, freire’s (1996) maxim 4 the national occupational standards in community development work act as a guiding framework for this emerging professional area (see http://www.fcdl.org.uk/learningqualifications/community-development-national-occupational-standards/). transforming communities through academic activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 205 that, ‘we must start where people are’ is taken seriously by faculty members who guide the learning process. in this vein, gramsci's (1971) concept of the “organic intellectual” affirms the capacity of those who have not previously benefited from formal education to critically analyze and challenge the status quo, and to articulate alternative paradigms. it is also a reminder that frameworks of understanding are critical sites of power that are produced, practiced, and critiqued within the academy (knapp, 2005; cleary, 2003). bsc hons community development building upon the ethos established in the apel pathway, the community development program is firmly rooted in a pedagogical framework that supports innovative and learner-led creative spaces that foster collaborative working and learning for both faculty and students. the primary aim of the program is to infuse academic commitments with freirean (friere, 1996) praxis in order to provide a platform for faculty and students to engage in a shared learning space. this aims to raise levels of conscientization through critical reflection, which is essential to emancipatory learning. the role of the faculty is to facilitate critical reflection and learning as a democratic process of dialogical interaction between participants and educators. this is consistent with biggs’ (1996) focus on the centrality of student learning as a process of constructional alignment, where the students are equipped with the necessary skills to construct meaning from their learning. faculty provide the scaffolding to support this process by aligning the learning activities with the learning outcomes. we do this by creating a safe space where students can engage and practise these tools for reflection. faculty members are cognizant of the physical environment and recognize the importance of creating a growth-promoting climate that is conducive to shared learning. we agree to a contract with students, establishing rights and responsibilities within the class that typically includes things like actively listening to one another, having respect for others’ opinions, values, and beliefs, and having respectful regard of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, cultural traditions, religion, and political perspectives. an important basis of the contract is that each participant refrain from aggressive or oppressive language and behaviour. this also allows for students to call ‘time-out’ if they feel unable to continue with a discussion at any time, or if they believe that the contract has been breached. these practices are embedded in the core values of the national occupational standards for community development (e.g., equality, anti-discrimination and empowerment) (federation for community development learning, 2015). our goal, in equipping students with the tools for transformational learning, is to enable them to utilize these tools within their communities so as to create local learning spaces that foster inquiry, dialogue, reflection and action. students practise active listening that develops authentic relationships where each individual enters the internal isobel hawthorne-steele, rosemary moreland, eilish rooney studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 206 frame of reference of the other, and that has the propensity to promote unconditional positive regard. based upon a person-centered approach (rogers, kirschbaum & land, 1990), these transformational learning tools enable individuals to see the world through the other person’s lens and to challenge their own constructs. the vast majority of students find this an illuminating process, whereby they can name their practices (e.g., campaigning for or lobbying against the current contentious issue of flying flags) and recognize other practices akin to their own. they gain a conceptual language to describe the processes in which they are involved, and more importantly, they develop tools to analyze at a deeper level the broader structural causes of inequality and injustice, which they tackle on a daily basis. this process alerts students to how frameworks of understanding can aid the post-conflict transformation of communities where they live and work. one of the ways in which this happens is through the pedagogy of post-conflict peacebuilding. by using rooney’s (2014) grassroots transitional justice toolkit, students and faculty engage in critical discourse that explores and challenges produced by deeply rooted cultural perspectives. using the conceptual framework of the toolkit has helped students to map some of the momentous milestones in the journey towards a peaceful society in the north of ireland. students are challenged to reflect on and articulate their practice and apply newly learned skills to practice situations as employees or volunteers in community organizations, and as such they participate in the world as effective and creative decision-makers. schugurensky (2002, p. 64) argues that when this transformation takes place, adult learners can then “move towards becoming socially responsible citizens and will have acquired the skills of helping others to move, from oppositional dialogue, to collaborative discourse.” the program’s aim, therefore, is to help develop active, socially responsible, democratic, and compassionate community development workers and activists. this form of pedagogy is a means by which students can move towards questioning the limitations of familiar knowledge based on local culture, family structure, and mainstream societal systems and institutions. the value of critical questioning is also supported by freire’s (1970/1996) model of conscientization, whereby learners move from a state of naivety, or apathetic acceptance, to a point where they begin to question the mainstream frameworks of understanding within the wider constructs of society. according to mezirow (1991, p. 155), the onus is on educators to democratize the educational environment, by adopting a more “inclusive, differentiated, permeable, and integrated perspective.” this is a seismic shift away from the traditional power base of the educator as sole owner of curriculum knowledge, and toward shared learning in which the relationship between learner and educator is one of equal and mutual engagement. trying to encourage students to engage in this form of self-reflection can be very challenging and it does not always work. for example, one male student stated in class that he had absolutely no desire or intention to engage transforming communities through academic activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 207 in self-reflection. he was vociferous in his protests and responded with either anger or humour when challenged by peers or faculty. although this student was required to complete reflective learning logs as part of his assessment for a work placement, he engaged minimally with the task and demonstrated little movement on the transformative learning trajectory. however, there have been many other students who initially resisted self-reflection but having engaged in the process, found it to be valuable. these examples are captured in comments made in the ten year course evaluation (cownie, hawthorne-steele & moreland, 2014, pp. 9-16) as follows: reflective practice! i used to shudder…but when you get your head around it, when you apply it…you completely see it as core to your work. …well, all the modules were good but reflective practice was probably the one i got most out of. mind you, i was not saying that at the start…i just could not get it…i know now why…i just listened and went ‘no, i don’t get it’... reflective practice took a long time to sink in…it’s about continuous improvement …i see it now and i use it now. another challenge for faculty employing a transformative learning approach is bringing students together from polarized ends of the political spectrum. the student group often comprises high profile ex-combatants who are currently striving to bring their respective communities into a peacebuilding process in northern ireland. this can be a difficult journey for both students and faculty as many of the opinions expressed are diametrically opposed, and it can be extremely challenging to gain an appreciation of alternative perspectives on the conflict. we appreciate that transformational learning cannot occur unless students desire to engage in the reflective process, and this is not something that can be forced. thus, whilst faculty strive to create a growth-promoting climate (rogers, kirschbaum & land, 1990), we recognize this does not always work and there have been times when we have had to be extremely sensitive to live issues, such as disputes over territorial boundaries in contested spaces, that permeate the learning environment. furthermore, faculty recognize the difficulty that some students have in grasping the essential tenets of the subjects being taught. meyers & land (2006, p. 22) describe such gaps in understanding as “liminal spots.” to address these gaps, the team introduced a reflective journal template that challenged students to reflect on their learning, and in particular, to address their emotional experiences throughout the course of the program (hawthorne-steele, moreland & o’donnell, 2009). in piloting the reflective journal template, we identified an important limitation: students did not explicitly articulate the concepts they did not understand (i.e., the template was a ‘reflecting on’ model, which only enabled students to identify gaps in their learning toward the end of the course). in order to address this problem, isobel hawthorne-steele, rosemary moreland, eilish rooney studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 208 isobel hawthorne-steele introduced a critical reflection of learning (crol) pro forma. the crol is a two-page document with question and answer boxes for students to fill in. students are asked to first reflect on the taught class, and specifically to think about what concepts and language they found particularly difficult to understand. they are then asked to describe what measures, if any, they took to rectify the problem. prompts such as “write your own ‘to do’ task list for this module (reading, sourcing materials, critiques, essay plans, meetings, etc.)” and “what source/s did you use to help overcome this liminal spot (peers/tutor/articles/texts/professional practice teacher/internet resource),” are used to encourage students to engage in selfhelp and peer-support mechanisms. having undertaken this process of selfhelp, they are then asked to describe their level of understanding regarding difficult concepts and terminology. after engaging in this process, students are given an opportunity to comment on other aspects of their learning and to indicate whether they would benefit from attending further group or individual tutorials. from this information, core liminal spots are identified, which in turn inform what further teaching and tutorials are required for the module. students using this crol model have thus been able to identify what perkins (2006, p. 137) describes as “troublesome knowledge,” and have expressed appreciation for being given a non-threatening method of asking questions about theoretical concepts and academic or professional language. in practice, this often results in students engaging in peer group social media fora (e.g., facebook groups), exchanging sourced materials and sharing learning. some of this learning is evidenced in reflections from past students, elicited from the program’s ten year evaluation noted above (cownie, hawthorne-steele & moreland, 2014, p. 9-17): you can get bogged down [stuck] in your own community….in a mixed group you are likely to be challenged and this makes you question your biases and prejudices. i must admit, i had not sat down and heard the ‘other’ perspective. i am a lot more confident now in dealing with different views. to say that the course broadened my reading is an understatement ... i really never thought i would get the chance, or have the ability to understand writers such as gramsci ... deprived communities need to know about hegemony! there is definitely a perception in the sector that that [sic] many community posts are ‘boxed off’... now i can say ‘i have a degree and i deserved this position.’ cranton (1994, p. 22) describes this process of reflection as “a comprehensive and complex description of how learners construe, validate, and reformulate the meaning of their experience.” however, the outcomes are unpredictable and in some instances unintentional. educators engaged in this process must therefore reflect on the ethical and professional aspects of providing safe spaces, in which individuals engaged in problem-posing are transforming communities through academic activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 209 able to question the status quo and challenge paradigms are afforded the support they need to reconstruct their meaning schema. community-university synergy we have emphasized the wider implications of our teaching praxis in the local context of deeply divided neighbourhoods in a society emerging from conflict. we each continue to engage in community activism alongside teaching and research. this engagement is central to the community development program’s emancipatory principles. on occasion, initiatives that have their origins in the community can lead to remarkable community-university synergies. eilish rooney’s voluntary work with bridge of hope in north belfast, for instance, has involved conversations about dealing with the past and the local impacts of post conflict transition.5 this led her to develop a community based transitional justice grassroots program to facilitate these conversations (rooney, 2012a). at the university this resulted in major curriculum changes to the community development program with the introduction of a module entitled, grassroots transitional justice. this module is based on the community initiative and is taken by all community development students in the second year of degree studies. the community based initiative led to community/academy engagement in a partnership between the bridge of hope and ulster university’s leading law research institute, the transitional justice institute. the partnership originated when bridge of hope contacted rooney and asked her to join with them and former political prisoners from local nationalist and unionist districts in a conversation about transitional justice (rooney, 2012a).6 the exchange between people with opposed political positions was made possible by bridge of hope’s long-term therapeutic work and positive relations with victims and survivors of the conflict in north belfast. the working-class areas of north belfast are amongst the most disadvantaged districts in ireland and britain and have suffered disproportionate conflictrelated trauma. local protests, from the holy cross blockade in 2001 to recent ‘flags and parades’ protests at twaddell avenue, regularly turn the 5 bridge of hope is a department of ashton community trust that provides services to victims and survivors of the conflict across the north (see http://www.thebridgeofhope.org/). dealing with the past involves creating ‘safe’ spaces where those from different perspectives can talk about their experiences of the conflict and the hurt that has been inflicted on them or that they have inflicted on others. the main purpose of this work is to gain an understanding of other perspectives in the conflict, in order to acknowledge the hurt that has happened on all sides, and to begin to move forward to building a more peaceful, shared society. 6 the term ‘transitional justice’ refers to a range of legal and non-legal ways a society moving out of violent conflict deals with past human rights abuses. the strong focus on the past is matched by a concern with the future. it is also an area of academic research and civil society advocacy. isobel hawthorne-steele, rosemary moreland, eilish rooney studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 210 area into a battleground that disrupts local life and threatens the peace. north belfast seems the unlikeliest of places for the learning exchange that originated in bridge of hope over five years ago (rooney & swaine, 2012; rooney, 2014). at the heart of this initiative was local people’s willingness to engage with each other and with rooney about their diverse experiences of conflict and transition. faculty members in the transitional justice institute joined others from leading community and voluntary organisations in seminars to share research and advocacy experience with local people. louise mallinder, professor of human rights and international law, for instance, contributed her expertise on how amnesty is deployed in diverse transitional justice circumstances (mallinder, 2014a; mallinder, 2014b; mallinder and hadden, 2013). the local enthusiasm for this learning exchange led rooney to design a community based toolkit program, and to author the transitional justice grassroots toolkit (rooney, 2012b) and transitional justice grassroots guide (2014) to accompany the program. 7 the program is designed to empower, equip, and encourage people in disadvantaged areas to use the toolkit and guide as a way to engage in critical conversations about the impact of conflict and transition in daily life in their community. these two resources are also now key texts in the community development degree’s grassroots transitional justice module. thus, an initiative that began life as a local, community-based conversation inspired the community development team to integrate grassroots praxis into the degree curriculum. on the research side, this community program was included among the research impact case studies the transitional justice institute submitted to the uk research excellence framework (ref) in 2014. the transitional justice institute’s submission achieved the number one ranking for research impact in law among uk universities. the submission made the case that this grassroots transitional justice program, based in one of the most divided and volatile communities in the north of ireland, produced an internationally recognized participatory program for former political prisoners and combatants, for local women and members of advocacy organizations. the transitional justice institute’s scholarly inputs on truth, institutional reform, reparations, reconciliation, and amnesty have led to direct engagement with community activists at the coal face of transitional processes. the submission also cited feedback from participants that indicated an eagerness to investigate transitional justice in local and international contexts. the bridge of hope/transitional justice institute’s partnership has now delivered a university accredited toolkit training program for community and civil society organization activists who plan to provide the transitional justice grassroots toolkit to local groups and within their organizations. 7 the toolkit and guide are available online at www.thebridgeofhope.org and at www.transitionaljustice.ulster.ac.uk transforming communities through academic activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 211 this will allow others to join in and broaden the critical conversation about transitional justice started in bridge of hope in 2011. the university accreditation for trainees also means that anyone completing the toolkit training program will be eligible to gain admission to ulster university’s community development degree program. conclusion we believe that committed and persistent academic activism can make a difference when lives are changed by conflict, and people proactively engage in building a more peaceful society. the academic activism outlined in this paper is evidence of academy-community engagement that makes transformative differences, which, when added to the multitude of efforts made elsewhere in northern irish society, helps to change the script of community empowerment and peace building. it arguably helps to reinterpret the narrative of past political hostility and violent conflict. individual and collective meaning systems are thereby altered in ways that can positively influence wider social relations and ways of life (martín-baró, 1996). the community development degree program and its allied toolkit program do not, however, alter concrete, coercive inequalities. these programs do not change the deepening levels of deprivation or the failures of political progress in northern ireland today. yet, in the spirit of the grassroots transition work, these efforts are about believing and acting as though “we can always do something” (rooney, 2014, p. 10). this involves those of us in the academy accepting the responsibility to create and respond to opportunities for alliances with community activists. the benefits are mutual and radical. acknowledgements: eilish rooney acknowledges support from the political settlements research programme. references cleary, j. 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(2012). the “long grass” of agreements: promise, theory and practice. international criminal law review, 12(3), 519-548. rooney, e. (2014). transitional justice grassroots toolkit: users' guide. belfast: ashton community trust. schugurensky, d. (2002). transformative learning and transformative politics: the pedagogical isobel hawthorne-steele, rosemary moreland, eilish rooney studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 197-214, 2015 214 dimension of participatory democracy and social action. in e. o’sullivan, a. morell & m.a. o'connor (eds.), expanding the boundaries of transformative learning: essays on theory and praxis (pp. 59-76). new york: palgrave. shaw, m. & crowther, j. (2014) adult education, community development and democracy: renegotiating the terms of engagement, community development journal, 49(3), 390-406. shirlow, p., & mcevoy, k. (2008) beyond the wire: former prisoners and conflict transformation in northern ireland. london: pluto press. taylor, p. (1993) the texts of paulo freire. buckingham: open university press. willis, p. (1977). learning to labour: how working-class kids get working-class jobs. farnborough: saxon house. university of ulster (2012/13) widening access and participation strategy 2011/12-2015/16. retrieved from http://www.ulster.ac.uk/secretary/policyimplementation/policies/wap_strategy.pdf farr et al final dec 29 18 correspondence address: vanessa farr, research fellow, centre for gender & africa studies, university of the free state, po box 339, bloemfontein, 9300, south africa; email: vee@vfarr.org issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 188-194, 2018 remembering jackie, ten years on – guest editors’ introduction vanessa farr university of the free state, south africa claudia mitchell mcgill university, canada marni sommer columbia university, usa it was with some astonishment that the three of us began the conversation last year about ways in which to commemorate the 10th anniversary of jackie kirk’s untimely death in afghanistan: where had the time gone? and where had her work taken us since we lost her? and how fresh and insightful jackie’s work still feels to us, a decade after her brilliant mind was lost! as we talked about these things – what has changed since 2008; what, regrettably, has stayed the same, or worsened – we realised that revisiting jackie’s work in an issue specifically devoted to exploring the strong social justice thrust in all she did would offer several opportunities for reflection, both on the theories she developed and the praxis she modelled up to the time of her death. the first and most obvious of our reasons for inviting this special issue of studies in social justice is that we still miss jackie so much: not only her formidable mind, but her humour, her cheer, her energy. we miss what she brought to our collective feminist work with some of the most marginalised people in the world – girls, including displaced and refugee girls, and their female teachers. jackie modelled, for us and all who met her, what a social justice activist can do. she was a dedicated mover, not only in her wide geographical outreach, but of emphasis and focus: out from the centres of power into the peripheries, where she delved carefully into the challenges facing young women’s educational access and illuminated how teachers manage in emergency situations, including some that drag on for years. for her, feminism was praxis; policy was for the humblest and least-represented remembering jackie, ten years on studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 188-194, 2018 189 people in a community; and academia was a site from which to give politically-informed recommendations for action by governments and the international community. ten years on, we find ourselves indelibly shaped by her example; her capacity to position herself in the work she did, to focus creatively and innovatively on producing praxis-based research theories as a means to contribute to an anti-oppression activist agenda (potts & brown, 2005). she continues to show us how to be the feminist-in-the-field. secondly, we wanted to honour jackie’s devotion to putting her feet on the ground – a commitment so great it put her in mortal danger – and to her commitment to working critically with institutions that both shape and replicate practices that result in social exclusion. jackie was an academic “of a committed practical sort, eyes always on the material conditions of real women, writing always in a way that acknowledges those real bodies and those real struggles” (nussbaum, 1999, p. 37). her contribution to social justice research came from her commitment to working out how research methods themselves shape the world. to do this, jackie immersed herself in parts of the world – and ideas about this world – that were hardly visible at the time. her feminist impetus was to see the girl behind the woman in the refugee classroom; to explore the political and social motivations of teachers in emergencies, including in situations where women are tightly constrained, their values and responses so highly-policed they disappear from view. her recognition that such teachers would be burdened not only with the public gender expectations of their society and a generalised lack of interest in the education of girls, but also with the additional, private stresses of loss, war trauma, displacement, poor and precarious living conditions, and other microtraumas, led her directly to the innovative method of the “healing classroom,” still in use today, which is founded on her observation that a well-supported teacher has a greater ability not only to sustain herself in difficult circumstances, but to support and nurture the girls in her care.1 jackie’s practical social justice impetus also led to her embeddedness in under-resourced classrooms where she formed the intimate bonds that are crucial for anyone working below the radar, especially to amplify the most marginal voices. she excelled at finding ways to reveal the unseeable. in the intimate spaces she inhabited alongside students and learners, jackie’s eyes were opened to the parlous state of girls’ reproductive health and knowledge, an insight which led her, along with marni, to pioneer new thinking about adolescence and the challenges girls face in managing their menstruation. she made the important links between girls’ menstrual hygiene management and their ability to stay in school, and she also thought about how women teachers could be supported not to miss precious teaching days; and now, there is a global campaign in more than seventy countries to destigmatize menstruation and free girls to learn, and to be taught by women teachers who 1 this resource continues to be used in emergency situations and is available at http://healingclassrooms.org/1/4/1.html vanessa farr, claudia mitchell & marni sommer studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 188-194, 2018 190 understand their needs.2 from being a justification for attitudes that girls are not fit to learn in a classroom, the fact of their normal bodily function and their need for specific material support, including suitable toilets, is now so established as to be unremarkable in most places. even in afghanistan, a country with a century-old history of hostility to girls’ education, slow progress is being made to teach girls about their bodies, self-care, sexual and reproductive health, and the ministries of education and public health are gradually accepting girls’ right to know themselves. we can think of few finer examples of social justice in action than this trajectory. we also want to honour her commitment to academic activism through scholarship. jackie, with claudia (and jacqueline reid-walsh), co-founded the journal girlhood studies: an interdisciplinary journal, as a way to advance work in the field of girls and young women. jackie never saw the first issue, which was “in press” at the time of her death, but clearly it is part of her legacy. this special issue of studies in social justice is a further recognition of her dedication to nurturing scholarly networks. girlhood studies continues to recognize jackie’s contributions through, for example, a special issue devoted to jackie’s work (volume 3, issue 2) guest edited by fiona leach (with claudia), and a commemorative essay on her work on the 10th anniversary of her death (khan, mitchell, & sommer, 2018). finally, there is the lingering pain of afghanistan and other seemingly intractable military-political crises behind this special issue. when we heard the news of the attack that killed jackie and her colleagues, we remember trying to console ourselves with arguments that their murder at the hands of the taliban – a political organisation that not only forbade any form of education for girls or women, but violently enforced this ban – might prove, one day, not to be in vain. someday we might make sense of it as contributing to an impetus to challenge and overcome the legacies of this ban, and perhaps to usher in a new era of peace in this ravaged country. the link between the education of females and the probability of social peace is well established (davies & true, 2019; farr, 2009), and feminist peace activists working in a world of declining peace and security for women hold steadily onto the belief that the continued struggle for girls’ education is a cornerstone of peacebuilding, and must be diligently pursued even in the direst circumstances. for us, as for jackie, the pursuit of social justice is not an abstraction but a daily commitment to hold fast even under fire, to build community, praxis, theory and effective social policy as the cornerstones of women’s resilience to the attritions of patriarchal militarisation – even as the bombs and suicide vests explode around us. how do jackie’s words weigh in the place that took her life, a decade later? this question was often in vanessa’s mind when she spent close to a year in afghanistan (2017-18), and indeed, jackie is well-remembered in kabul. the faces of afghan women educators still light up at the mention of her name: but they soon close again, 2 see http://menstrualhygieneday.org/ remembering jackie, ten years on studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 188-194, 2018 191 and it was a wrench to discover that their fear of being recognised as commentators on her legacy was still too great for anyone to agree to write – or even be interviewed for this special issue – about what her life and work continues to mean for afghan women educators. it is a particularly bitter pill that afghanistan is once more considered officially to be at war, that the taliban is on the ascent again, and that small gains made in girls’ enrolment in formal education are once more reversing (duncanson & farr, 2019) while the political appetite for girls’ education declines. overview of the special issue to honour the many aspects of her large legacy, this special issue includes two regular sections of an issue of studies in social justice, with the first edited by marni and claudia focusing on peer-reviewed academic articles. the second section is more strongly shaped than usual by dispatches, of which vanessa is the editor. jackie’s life testifies to the power of social justice in action, and our decision to invite a larger-than-usual number of reports from the field, from practitioners who agreed to reflect on the continuing helpfulness of jackie’s academic writing to their field praxis, is testimony to our commitment to amplifying this aspect of her approach. articles jackie was committed to the rigorous conduct of research that could lead to policy change. she was also committed to research that engaged with participants at the centre, as evidenced by articles included in this special issue that make use of participatory methodologies. the section starts with karen monkman’s article, which tells the story of a girls’ education program in southeast asia, highlighting how the research team started with the views of villagers on educating girls and the ways in which these perspectives ultimately shaped local policy and practice. jackie’s deep interest in teachers and curriculum is highlighted in emily anderson and kelly grace’s work in cambodia. in their article, they examine the historical text of chbab srey as a cultural artifact to deepen an understanding of the cultural and contextual conditions of teachers’ lives and girls’ schooling experiences. jackie carried out fieldwork in south africa early in 2000. her passion for “doing” is wellrepresented in relebohile moletsane’s article “‘stop the war on women’s bodies’: facilitating a girl-led march against sexual violence in a rural community in south africa.” moletsane’s piece draws attention to the complexity of the work on girls’ activism and what it means to be an adult ally in this work. vanessa farr, claudia mitchell & marni sommer studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 188-194, 2018 192 the intersection of menstruation and girls’ education was a particular focus of jackie’s pioneering work, and morrison and colleagues build on this foundation by examining girls’ experiences with menstruation and schooling, along with community life, in nepal, highlighting how community-focused interventions along with school-based approaches are needed to truly impact on the range of social, physical and mental barriers facing menstruating girls in nepal. also in line with jackie’s focus on the factors impacting girls’ education, landis and colleagues explore the relationship between child marriage, schooling and experiences of sexual violence in the democratic republic of congo. their findings indicate the substantial negative impact of child marriage on a girl’s participation in education, and increased vulnerability to sexual violence. similarly, jackie was very committed to engaging with girls’ education in pakistan, and the article by ann emerson explores girls’ notions of citizenship as learned within the pakistan education system, using participatory and qualitative methodologies. the methodologies highlight the problematic nature of citizen education in reinforcing gender inequalities in the larger society. we end this section with an article that expands on jackie’s strong interest in the visual, and ways that girls and young women can participate at the centre of policy change. the article by milka nyariro, a doctoral candidate from the same department at mcgill university from which jackie graduated, explores a photovoice project with girls and young women who were forced to leave school when they became pregnant. nyariro highlights the critical role played by the photographs in facilitating dialogue with community and stakeholders. dispatches one of jackie’s strong commitments was to doing what she called “over there and over here” work with girls in families that had recently immigrated to quebec. the local focus of her work is echoed in three of the dispatches in this special issue, all of which look at a canada that has slowly moved forward in the long process of reconciling harms committed against the indigenous population since the arrival of european settlers. we find strong echoes of her activist-academic work in “planting a healing forest: community engagement,” in which lee anne block offers an account of efforts in her local community to design and execute an appropriate response to the call to action in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission, which finished its first stage of work in december 2015.3 similarly, elizabeth brulé’s intervention, “the redress project: casting an indigenous feminist worldview on sexual violence prevention and education programs in ontario’s universities,” discusses a national feminist-led artistic intervention 3 see http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=905 remembering jackie, ten years on studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 188-194, 2018 193 to commemorate the more than one thousand aboriginal women who are murdered and missing across the nation.4 sheryl smith-gilman, the 2010 recipient of the jackie kirk fieldwork fellowship award, offers a reflection on “developing a pedagogy of listening: experiences in an indigenous preschool,” in which she describes how jackie’s focus on marginalised communities became a cornerstone of her own doctoral fieldwork in a first nations community in kahnawake, mohawk territory. three of this issue’s dispatches reflect on how jackie’s work inside classrooms continues to be helpful today. in her discussion, “teachers for teachers: advocating for stronger programs and policies for and with refugee teachers in kakuma refugee camp, kenya,” mary mendenhall reflects on the kinds of “spontaneous” and “tentative” teachers first observed by jackie kirk and her colleague rebecca winthrop in situations of upheaval, when adults come to the aid of displaced and refugee children in camps. s. m. hani sadati offers an account of his steep fieldwork learning curve in “cellphilming in four atvet colleges; a mirror, reflecting gender issues in ethiopia.” the pioneering work done by jackie and marni sommer to highlight some of the hidden reasons that prevent girls from succeeding at school are brought up to date in a field reflection on “new directions for assessing menstrual hygiene management (mhm) in schools: a bottomup approach to measuring program success,” by jacquelyn haver and colleagues. the final of this issue’s dispatches offers a dialogue between heather switzer and kim foulds, who commemorate jackie as the spark for their “feminist friendship” in a reflection on how their own friendship was formed as they discovered the sub-field of girlhood studies through engagement with her work in the months after her death. *** we dedicate this special issue to all who continue on the path trod by jackie, in her courageous pursuit of a world in which each girl would have her eyes and her mind opened by learning, and the fellowship that comes from learning in a safe community led, devised and protected by capable and confident women. acknowledgements we are very grateful to fatima khan, a doctoral candidate at mcgill university and samantha khandakji, a former masters in public health student, for their excellent support in the production of this issue of studies in social justice. 4 see http://www.theredressproject.org/ vanessa farr, claudia mitchell & marni sommer studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 188-194, 2018 194 references duncanson, c., & farr, v. (2019). where pillars intersect (or fail): the case of wps in afghanistan. in s. e. davies & j. true (eds.), the oxford handbook of women, peace, and security (pp. 553-568). oxford: oxford university press. farr, v., myrttinen, h., & schnabel, a. (eds.) (2009). sexed pistols: the gendered impacts of small arms and light weapons. tokyo & new york: united nations university press. khan, f., mitchell, c., & sommer, m. (2018). honoring the legacy of jackie kirk. girlhood studies: an interdisciplinary journal, 11(2), 1-12. nussbaum, m. (1999). the professor of parody: the hip defeatism of judith butler. the new republic, 220(8), 37-45. potts, k., & brown, l. (2005). becoming an anti-oppressive researcher. in l. brown & s. strega (eds.), research as resistance: critical, indigenous and anti-oppressive approaches (pp. 255-286). toronto: canadian scholars’ press, toronto. downey final correspondence address: adrian m. downey, faculty of education, mount saint vincent university, halifax, ns, b3m 2j6; email: adrian.downey@msvu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 486-495, 2020 dispatch reflections on conversations and dialogues with recent settlers adrian m. downey mount saint vincent university, canada if you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. attributed to lila watson, gangulu elder, but generated through the collective resistance of australian indigenes (quoted in patel, 2012) in the summer of 2012, i worked at an international summer language camp. it was my first professional teaching experience, and when i introduced myself to the roughly 150 students, i did so as i normally do: “my name is adrian; i am mi’kmaq.” i didn’t expect many students to know what being mi’kmaq meant, but i considered it important to share that piece of myself. one day, i started chatting with a few students from germany. one told me that she had learned about the mi’kmaq in her history class, and that she had done her final project for that year on what she called “american indians.” i asked her what she had learned about my people, and she proceeded to paint a vivid picture of mi’kmaw life before and after contact. it has been too long for me to remember the exact image held in her words, but suffice it to say that i was not the indian she had in mind. the mi’kmaq were history for her – they certainly weren’t english teachers working at prestigious international private schools like i was. as the conversation went on, i became more and more uncomfortable with the image this student held of the mi’kmaq and, by extension, me. i soon realized that she was tacitly comparing me to the mi’kmaw people about whom she had learned. everything i did inevitably became part of her existing understanding of what the mi’kmaq were. i don’t remember how our conversation ended, but i do remember the lingering feeling of being observed. after this incident, i began to wrestle with how i both reify and complicate the messages presented in other countries about north american indigenous reflections on conversations & dialogues with recent settlers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 486-495, 2020 487 people through my presence as a teacher of international students. questions ran through my head: does the fact that i didn’t grow up on a reservation take away from my perceived authenticity? do i complicate damage-centered narratives through my privilege? when i speak the words i know in mi’kmaw language or talk about mi’kmaw culture, how do students see me? how do their perceptions of mi’kmaw people change or stay the same based on our interactions? when i am not recognized as mi’kmaw because of my white skin, do i tacitly continue the erasure of indigenous peoples upon which settler colonialism is built? many of those questions still linger today. this was one of my first conversations with a recent settler,1 but it certainly hasn’t been my last. in the last decade, there have been two constants in my life: conversations with recent settlers and a journey to understand what it means for me to be mi’kmaq in the modern world. in this dispatch, i reflect on the intersection of those two constants. in particular, i draw on two significant relationships in my life with recent settlers in order to discuss coresistance, solidarity between marginalized peoples, and the common quest for self-understanding i consider to be at the core of reconciliation and social justice. more specifically, the purpose of this piece is to showcase the potential of solidarity not just to produce material, on the ground changes through networks of resistance, but also to open us up to new possibilities and understandings of ourselves and others through relationships. before addressing solidarity and self-understanding explicitly, however, i will provide some insight into the geopolitical context in which i am writing – the canadian nation-state in the age of reconciliation. reconciliation in canada in 2015, the truth and reconciliation commission (trc) of canada released its final report (trc, 2015). the trc was a nation-wide inquiry into the abuses and traumas suffered by indigenous people through the federally run residential school system. for over 100 years between the 19th and 20th centuries, indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families and made to attend poorly funded, church-run “schools,” which operated under the explicit mandate of “killing the indian in the child” (young, 2015, p. 63). apart from the cultural genocide associated with being punished for speaking indigenous languages or practicing culture, physical, sexual, and emotional 1 “recent settler” is a term sometimes used to refer to people new to a traditional indigenous territory; not everyone is comfortable with this terminology, but some prefer it to the term “immigrant,” which has taken on pejorative connotations. here, i use recent settler to refer to people born in countries other than canada who now live in wabanaki territory. i use this term to emphasise the way global mobility and globalization perpetuate forms of settler colonialism that, despite individual reasons for resettlement, have a continued negative impact on the right and ability of indigenous peoples to manage and benefit from the land. i remain respectfully open to discussion and suggestions on the use of this term. adrian m. downey studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 486-495, 2020 488 abuse were commonplace in these institutions. the trc has started the process of raising awareness about this often purposefully overlooked portion of canadian history. indeed, in the four years since the trc report was released, institutions, governments, and the public have become increasingly aware of the indigenous nations in canada and the ways in which indigenous people have been and continue to be marginalized, disenfranchised, and dispossessed of land. over the last few years, i have noticed an increased fluency with the discourse of reconciliation – a discourse dene scholar glen coulthard (2014) might call a marker of the politics of recognition. it has become a discourse of righting past wrongs concerned with much more than just residential schools, but the entire history of colonization, genocide, abduction, and paternalism that indigenous people in canada have endured. within this discourse, many settlers choose to focus on the pathways forward. educators and researchers speak about the need to form a bridge between two worldviews, the indigenous and the western. administrators speak of indigenizing the academy, welcoming indigenous knowledges into the dominant model of academia. politicians say that we are all treaty people – a statement of their belief that they have an obligation to renew the relationships codified in the treaties between the british crown and the sovereign indigenous nations of the territory now labeled canada. in my home territory of the wabanaki confederacy,2 or what is today thought of as atlantic canada, those treaties were named the peace and friendship treaties. through the peace and friendship treaties, the wabanaki peoples never surrendered, ceded, or sold land. instead, those treaties guaranteed indigenous rights to land – all land not occupied by settlers at the time the treaties were signed around 1763 (paul, 2006). needless to say, much territory has been lost since then, but it was never given up by legal means; it was stolen (see bear nicholas, 2011). some indigenous people see the path forward as one of honouring those treaties in the spirit of reconciliation, where reconciliation is about building sustainable relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people (trc, 2015). some indigenous people also look at the reconciliation movement as an opportunity for resurgence – a chance for indigenous people to assert their sovereignty over their territory and reclaim the spaces that have been taken from them through settler colonial patterns of dispossession (simpson, 2017). these resurgent efforts occasionally result in conflict. in recent memory, one thinks of the anti-pipeline land defenders in british colombia and the anti-fracking movement in new brunswick. for indigenous people, it is a sacred obligation to defend the land, and there is a long history of fighting the government over land (e.g., hill, 2009). it has only been recently, however, with the interrelated reconciliation, resurgence, and #idlenomore movements 2 the wabanaki confederacy is a union between five groups of indigenous people on the east coast of canada and the united states. reflections on conversations & dialogues with recent settlers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 486-495, 2020 489 reaching public consciousness, that it seems as though some settlers understand why indigenous people are demonstrating – not to be needlessly dissident, but because land was taken, land with which intimate relationships still exist. in his 2003 massey lectures, thomas king alluded to the notion that repeating the history of colonization, residential schools, and indigenous dispossession is a way of saying “once upon a time” for indigenous storytellers. it is a history shared among the indigenous peoples of turtle island, a common experience with unique manifestations in every territory and every lived reality. it is a complex, nuanced, traumatic, and difficult story that for many generations, primarily indigenous people understood and spoke about. but today, many non-indigenous people are starting to understand elements of that story and, more importantly, that the traumatic history of settler colonialism isn’t the whole story, just the introduction. the ongoing history of settler colonialism in canada is complex and multifaceted, and when someone comes to this territory from another part of the world, they are dropped into that ongoing history with little, if any, contextualization – and more often than not stereotypical misunderstandings fueled by colonial education systems and ubiquitous media misrepresentations. often, they come from a place with its own history of colonization and, as they (re)build their lives in canada, they begin to experience forms of marginalization to which they may not be accustomed. it is, thus, completely understandable that many recent settlers in canada have little relationship with or knowledge of indigenous people (chung, 2012; sivaneswaralingam et al., 2017; see also clark & de costa, 2011). this is, of course, not universally the case as evidenced by intercultural dialogue programs in winnipeg (gyepi-garbrah et al., 2014) and vancouver (zand, 2018), but the norm continues to be isolation between indigenous and recent settler communities, particularly in less densely populated urban settings such as those in atlantic canada. in this essay, i add my voice to the long line of those concerned with disrupting the norm of isolation between indigenous and recent settler communities (e.g., kuropatwa, 2015; sivaneswaralingam et al., 2017; see also lawrence & dua, 2005). here i share my experiences of building relationships across culture and gesture toward the potential in diasporic and indigenous communities of coming together in resistance. conversations and co-resistance gonen sagy is originally from israel. he completed his phd there in multicultural aspects of environmental education and went on to run a peace education program which brought together palestinian and israeli students in conversations and activities around sustainability and their shared environment. when i first met gonen, he had just come to canada and was my instructor in a course on critical thinking. in that context, we had many adrian m. downey studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 486-495, 2020 490 conversations about education, philosophy, life, and peace. one persistent topic in our conversations was the movement toward reconciliation. after the course ended, gonen and i co-authored a conversational chapter on education and social justice (downey & sagy, 2018). in the process of writing that chapter, we continued to connect over reconciliation. perhaps because of his experience in peace education or his previous existence as occupier within occupied palestine, gonen was eager to understand the reconciliation movement, the history of this territory, and to build relationships with indigenous people. today, gonen teaches hebrew to middle school and high school students. he lives in ottawa, but we continue to speak on the phone a few times a month. my relationship with gonen has taught me the spirit of co-resistance and the power of networks of resistance. i borrow the term co-resistance from leanne betasamosake simpson (2017), for whom the concept is a way of decentering whiteness in solidarity and building meaningful relationships between marginalized people, particularly black canadians, people of colour, and indigenous people. co-resistance as a term subverts the competitive language of diasporic space and indigenous place (coleman, 2016), inviting diasporic and indigenous communities to share physical sp(l)ace toward the disruption of the systemic structures which facilitate mutual oppression. the spirit of co-resistance, for me, is elucidated in the lila watson quote referenced at the beginning of this piece (see patel, 2012). the various marginalizations endemic to the fabric of modern society (racism, ableism, gender discrimination, settler colonialism, etc.) are intertwined in complex socio-economic, historical, and political webs. within those webs, hierarchies are created (mitchell, 2018). through the comparative, competitive ideologies of militarised capitalism, we are conditioned to find inadequacies in others in order to raise ourselves up. lived co-resistance, perhaps in the spirit of intersectional feminism, asks us to put aside those imposed hierarchies in order to work together as a community toward our mutual liberation and toward the overthrow of hegemonic settler-colonial patriarchy. theoretical description aside, when i think of co-resistance i think of networks. in the small city in which i live, fredericton, new brunswick, groups of committed activists organize and take part in a variety of activities – lectures, prayer vigils, protests, marches, and publications (e.g., nb media co-op). since moving to fredericton three years ago, i have been invited to these events through e-mail, social media, word of mouth, text-message, and (my personal favorite) colourful notes stuck to my office door. this, to me, is being a part of a network built on co-resistance. simpson (2017) articulates the organization of co-resistance using the idea of constellations or “small collectives of people coming together to organize a particular event, or to create or hold indigenous presence that in some way [is] disruptive to settler colonialism” (p. 216). further, constellations of people can come together, disband, and re-form as needed (simpson, 2017 p. 217). my experience with networks supports this: i might not see the people in these networks every reflections on conversations & dialogues with recent settlers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 486-495, 2020 491 day or at every event, but we know how to reach each other when something important is happening. the people who form the activist networks in fredericton come from all walks of life, diverse countries of origin, and a variety of identity positions. at first, i thought the success of these networks was because the size of fredericton (pop. 58,000) doesn’t allow us the luxury of working in isolation. in 2018, however, gonen invited me to the empowering sustainability gathering at university of california irvine. there, i met with sustainability activists from all over the world and became a part of a global network of committed environmentalists. gonen was one of the first members of the group and has attended the gathering almost every year since its inception. over the years, the group has collaborated on a number of projects in areas such as healthcare, alternative economic technologies (i.e., cryptocurrency), and education, but most importantly every year they come together to share stories, receive critical feedback from one another on their current projects, and build and sustain personal relationships. the people in the empowering sustainability community are what make it a resistant space, and it is personal relationships that are at the center of co-resistance. when we are connected to each other personally, we can help each other and hold each other to account regardless of the cultural or physical space between us. when we are personally connected to each other, we also have the opportunity to understand each other. the aim of gonen’s work in peace education was bringing together people from groups in conflict. as they sat in each other’s presence and spoke to one another directly, they were able to see that the myths and stereotypes they held about each other as individuals within conflicted collectives were not true. they were able to build personal relationships, and those relationships became a new, perhaps counter-cultural, reality. social justice is rightfully concerned with shifting material reality – the physical circumstance of oppression. for me, the first step in making structural change is establishing and deepening real, human relationships. in simpson’s (2017) discussion of networks, she is skeptical of the internet and social media because of the ways in which they are interwoven with settler colonial, capitalist power structures. for simpson, constellations of coresistance need to be built on real, in-the-world relations. in my experience, activist networks can bring us into contact with people with whom we might not normally engage. that opportunity is a gift and a privilege. in those relationships, we are called on to grow and encompass what we learn from others. that growth can be painful at times, but it is always worth it. my relationship with another recent settler, ashwani kumar, further demonstrates the potential for this kind of growth in relationships between indigenous folk and recent settlers. adrian m. downey studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 486-495, 2020 492 dialogue and self-understanding when i came across ashwani’s work (kumar, 2011, 2013),3 i was totally enthralled by the way it brought together the intellectual rigour of critical theory and the evocative nature of spiritual philosophy. when we sat down to speak with one another later that year, it was clear that we shared a common desire to explore the internal and external complexities of oppression. since that initial meeting, ashwani and i have engaged in a number of serious dialogues, many of which were a part of a dialogic research project focused on ashwani’s concept of meditative inquiry in a variety of contexts including education and music. i served as a graduate research assistant and collaborator for the project, and several of these dialogues have now been published (kumar & downey, 2018, 2019). ashwani and i are both concerned with social justice in education. as educators, we often see injustice in a myriad of forms revealed within our classrooms and in the lives of the students we teach. when i encountered ashwani’s work, i began to open up to the idea that social justice in education starts with individual change. this sentiment was later echoed for me through the wolastoqiyik word piluwitahasuwawsuwakon,4 which is often used to talk about reconciliation and directly translates as “allowing your thinking to change so that action will follow in a good way toward truth” (pye, 2019). the teaching of piluwitahasuwawsuwakon acknowledges the role of internal work in the movement toward social change. while this internal emphasis doesn’t replace the structural changes we need to see, it does provide a tangible starting place – through self-understanding. for ashwani, deep understanding of who we are is a counter-cultural act and a necessary first step in moving toward social justice. in other words, before we can move toward decolonization and reconciliation as a society, we must start within ourselves. ashwani’s work helps in that process by analyzing the competitiveness of dominant ideologies (i.e., the hierarchies of patriarchal capitalism). hierarchical and competitive thinking facilitates the construction of societal ideals, and those ideals distance us from understanding ourselves. the problem with these ideals is that they are not obtainable, and when we inevitably fall short of them we see our actual selves as inadequate, thus resulting in complex internal conflicts. take fear as an example. i am taught that to be a “good man,” i must be brave (ideal); however, i often find myself in situations that make me fearful (my actual self). in order to attempt to fulfill the ideal, i hide my fear from others and from myself (internal conflict). ashwani asks us to accept what is rather than trying to become other than what we are in the pursuit of external ideals. this 3 a full treatment of ashwani kumar’s work is beyond the scope of this essay. for further reference, see kumar (2013, 2019) and kumar and downey (2018, 2019). 4 piluwitahasuwawsuwakon was brought forward to the university of new brunswick as an alternative to the term reconciliation by elder opolahsomuwehs (imelda perley) (d. perley, personal communication, april 15, 2019). reflections on conversations & dialogues with recent settlers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 486-495, 2020 493 self-acceptance alleviates the tensions of striving to become, thereby cultivating an internal landscape at peace with itself. from that position we can begin to understand who we are, where we come from, why we are here, and where we are going.5 in more practical terminology, sitting with ashwani in mutual, authentic dialogue helped me understand myself apart from what society tells me i should be – like getting an outside perspective on my own colonization. here, i think back to my conversation with the german student. whether she knew it or not, she had an idea of who i should be according to her perception of my mi’kmaw label – an image she had formed through her studies on “american indians.” her communication of that image to me in turn triggered my thinking on what it meant to be mi’kmaq and how i compared to my own ideal. the lingering discomfort i felt was both that of being compared to her abstract and that of comparing myself to my ideal. in dialogue, the ideals and expectations we have about others break down just as readily as do the myths and stereotypes. the complexity of another human life is undeniable and calls on us to rethink the simplistic narratives woven for us about other people and about ourselves. that rethinking, for me, is the starting point of social justice. my activism mostly happens in the classroom. while i am also involved in other forms of resistance, including critiques of the very education system in which i work, the bulk of my time is spent engaging the critical spirits of students and building allies, alliances, and solidarity. in this work, my own self-understanding and personal decolonization provides me a strong base from which to move forward. because i understand more fully who i am and where i come from, i can often help students understand their own biases. in moments similar to the ones described above, i am able to work with students in deconstructing the images they hold of others. in education, these small, personal changes can make tangible, structural impacts. the students with whom i work go on to become teachers, principals, education directors, and curriculum consultants – people who make decisions that affect the lives of thousands of marginalized students. i don’t just want those people to be indigenous allies; i want them to understand the interconnected and intersectional nature of marginalization. i want them to see the ways they are implicated in that marginalization and the ways they carry their biases around with them. for me, those changes have to start on the inside. the point of this section has been to articulate the internal, psychological, and spiritual benefits of solidarity and co-resistance between indigenous people and recent settlers. simply put, the process of dialogue brings us closer to understanding who we are and why we are here. from that position of understanding, we are better equipped to deal with the competitive and 5 “there are four questions every indigenous person must answer in order to understand who they are” (talaga, 2018, pp. 17-18). the versions of the questions posed above are often asked by mi’kmaw elder albert marshall to help us understand our role in reconciliation and life more broadly. adrian m. downey studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 486-495, 2020 494 comparative ideologies of capitalism thrust upon us and those with whom we engage in the classroom and beyond. finding self, finding voice the purpose of this piece is to showcase the potential of solidarity between indigenous peoples and recent settlers in two interconnected and interwoven areas: (a) collaborative activism through networks of co-resistance, and (b) mutual and self-understanding through intercultural dialogue and building of sustainable relationships. i have felt the deep connections between these two areas continually throughout my life. a quick conversation with a student from germany left me struggling with who i am and what my identity represents. a longer and ongoing conversation with a colleague and friend created avenues for co-resistance and solidarity and allowed me to develop an appreciation for the value of activist networks. finally, deep dialogues with a mentor and friend helped me understand who i am and the ways in which i, and the colonial society in which i live, have distanced myself from myself. through all of these relationships, i learned a great deal about the world and about my place in it. i also hope that i brought something unique to these relationships and, indeed, to the many other conversations i have had with recent settlers as a teacher, an activist, and a human being. i hope that i was able to welcome my friends, colleagues, and students to wabanaki territory, as has been the tradition of the mi’kmaw people for generations. i hope that i was able to demonstrate and exemplify balanced ways of living with the land, a right for which many indigenous people have fought. most of all, i hope that i was able to heal some misconceptions about indigenous people, many of which are as thoroughly engrained in our own internal landscapes as those of settler society. i may never know the effect of my words or of my relationships, but i hold to the hope that in solidarity and co-resistance we can help each other find our voices and speak back to diverse forms of power, both externally and internally. references bear nicholas, a. 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(2019). curriculum in international contexts: understanding colonial, ideological and neoliberal influences. palgrave macmillan. kumar, a., & downey, a. (2018). teaching as meditative inquiry: a dialogic exploration. journal of the canadian association of curriculum studies, 16(2), 52-75. kumar, a., & downey, a. (2019). music as meditative inquiry: a dialogical exploration of learning indian classical music. artizein, 4(1), 98-121. kuropatwa, r. (2015, december 16). the connection between immigrants and aboriginal people in canada's mosaic. canadian immigrant. http://canadianimmigrant.ca/community/theconnection-between-immigrants-and-aboriginal-people-in-canadas-mosaic lawrence, b., & dua, e. (2005). decolonizing antiracism. social justice, 32(4), 120-143. mitchell, s. (2018). sacred instructions: indigenous wisdom for living spirit-based change. north atlantic books. patel, s. (2012, august 1). defining muslim feminist politics through indigenous solidarity activism. the feminist wire. https://thefeministwire.com/2012/08/defining-muslimfeminist-politics-through-indigenous-solidarity-activism/#_edn12 paul, d. (2006). we were not the savages: collision between european and native american civilizations (3rd ed.). fernwood publishing. pye, k. (2019, february 22). forging a new path: amanda reid rogers installed as unb’s first piluwitahasuwin. unb newsroom. https://blogs.unb.ca/newsroom/2019/02/forging-a-newpath-amanda-reid-rogers-installed-as-unbs-first-piluwitahasuwin.php simpson, l. (2017). as we have always done: indigenous freedom through radical resistance. university of minnesota press. sivaneswaralingam, m., bhatty, h. s., & lam, a. (2017). factors that affect scarborough immigrant women’s knowledge of indigenous contexts [unpublished manuscript]. department of sociology, university of toronto scarborough. https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/immigrantscarborough/sites/utsc.utoronto.ca.immigrantscarbo rough/files/docs/socd15%20final%20report%20meena%2c%20sonia%2c%20anita_0 .docx talaga, t. (2018). all our relations: finding the path forward. house of anansi press. truth and reconciliation commission of canada. (2015). final report of the truth and reconciliation commission of canada, volume one: summary. honouring the truth, reconciling for the future. james lorimer & company. young, b. (2015). “killing the indian in the child”: death, cruelty, and subject-formation in the canadian indian residential school system. mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, 48(4), 63-76. zand, a. (2018). decolonizing capacity building and leadership development for indigenous and newcomer youth through intercultural dialogue: a case study of surrey, british columbia [master’s capstone report]. school of community and regional planning, university of british columbia. https://scarp.ubc.ca/sites/scarp.ubc.ca/files/zand%20%28amitai%29%20capstone%20rep ort.pdf zeffiro final before ts correspondence address: andrea zeffiro, department of communication studies & multimedia, mcmaster university, hamilton, on, l8s 4m4; email: zeffiroa@mcmaster.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 450-457, 2021 dispatch from data ethics to data justice in/as pedagogy andrea zeffiro mcmaster university, canada this dispatch charts my trajectory from thinking about the ethics of social media research to a rearticulation of the same concerns through a data justice framework. by outlining the movement from ethics to justice, i consider how such a paradigm shift could register with the ways in which we seek to empower students through literacies for data justice. research context one of my research threads over the last few years has focused on social media research ethics. a project on this issue grew out of a particular context in which i observed how, short of clear guidelines, certain forms of social media research were required to undergo institutional review while others were not, which is not to say that all social media research should be exempt from institutional review, but rather that such inconsistencies designated exempted research as ethical by virtue of exemption (zeffiro, 2019). this permissiveness for research norms is unsurprising given how conventional understandings of human research ethics are strained by the complexity of interactions between individuals, networks and technical systems in social media research (zeffiro, 2019). the first part of the project analyzed research ethics documents from all universities in canada in order to identify the trends, standards and norms for working with social media data in a canadian academic context. in 2017, there was not a single canadian institution that had public facing ethics guidelines that applied specifically to social media research (zeffiro, 2019). documents that referred to digital data collection did so in terms of internet research and redirected readers to the requirements of the tcps 2 (canadian institutes of health research et al., 2014). increasingly more common in from data ethics to data justice in/as pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 450-457, 2021 451 canada are research data management (rdm) plans that outline protocols for data management and stewardship (canadian institutes of health research et al., 2016, 2018), which are by no means interchangeable with research ethics (zeffiro, 2019). the thrust of the project was to make an argument for the importance of having research communities develop ethical approaches for social media research, rather than allowing corporate entities that collect and grant access (or not) to public data establish the terms for research. research ethics is a domain through which we can assess our responsibilities as researchers by parsing our approaches for creating new knowledge from public social media data, and by making transparent the strengths and limitations of emerging forms of research (see also lee, 2017; shilton, 2016; taylor & pagliari, 2017; townsend & wallace, 2015; university of sheffield, 2016) from ethics to justice in the time between completing the pilot study and reflecting on the findings in scholarly venues, i have started to think profoundly about the limitations of research ethics as a domain for intervention beyond academic contexts. because ethics is such a charged term, it can provoke an individualized response aimed at substantiating the ways in which our actions and practices abide by ethical codes and protocols. in certain instances, ethics is a box to tick in the research process. at other times, we might find ourselves relying on research ethics as a kind of moral ignition that absolves us from further deliberation. however, if “ethical purity” is an end goal of research ethics, then we are merely cementing “moral institutional self-concepts” that serve as a continuation of the collective myth about research as an antidote to conditions of injustice (sabati, 2018; simpson, 2017; smith, 2012). the need for research communities to confront ethics is all the more urgent given how big tech is shaping ethics in its own image. in the last few years, the establishment of corporate ethics charters and ethics boards have come to signal self-regulation as a policy response to calls for industry oversight. ben wagner (2018) explains how this amounts to an “ethics washing”; ethics are operationalized through public facing initiatives as a means to resist regulation. we are provided with the sense of an investment in questions and concerns of ethics, while little or nothing is done to achieve them. if an ethics framework constrains how we come to understand the contradictions and challenges in social media research by regulating the purview of our engagement with ethics, then what is needed is a framework that invites a range of stakeholders and entry points (metcalfe & dencik, 2019) and that links social media to broader critiques of datafication (van dijck, 2014). in their introduction to the special issue of information, communication & society on data justice, lina dencik, arne hintz, joanna redden and emiliano treré write how, “we should use data justice as a form andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 450-457, 2021 452 of critique, a framework for shifting the entry-point and debate on datarelated developments in a way that foregrounds social justice concerns and ongoing historical struggles against inequality, oppression and domination” (dencik et al., 2019, p. 876). the work of scholars who are situating data within existing social justice agendas by cultivating a data justice framework are effectively reorienting ethical concerns about datafication from purely moral, technocratic or technological purviews, and advocating instead for collaborations between different movements and groups that bring together technological, social, economic, cultural and ecological dimensions in defining both problems and solutions (dencik et al., 2018). data justice emphasizes an understanding of data technologies and datadriven decision-making in relation to structural conditions that continue to create new inequalities and injustices (dencik et al., 2019; metcalfe & dencik, 2019; redden & brand, 2018). however, rather than locate injustices in data systems as errors or biases that can be fixed with more data, data justice seeks to understand the interests driving the processes of datafication by decentering data in the examination of these processes (dencik, 2019; metcalfe & dencik, 2019; taylor, 2017). thus, data justice is symptomatic of the complex ways in which data-driven processes permeate all facets of contemporary life and emphasizes how these technologies and processes reproduce, are reproduced by, and provoke a “matrix of domination” (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism) (costanzachock, 2018a, 2018b). literacies for data justice in/as pedagogy inspired by data justice scholarship, i am motivated to consider additional ways in which we can enact data justice in academic work. more specifically, how can we integrate data justice in teaching and learning? i ask this question having taught two iterations of a graduate course called data cultures. as i write this dispatch, i am preparing to teach it for a third time. the course explores the ways in which contemporary life and the environments we inhabit are mediated through data-driven technologies and practices. rather than emphasize the technical processes that enable datafication, the material considers instead the consequences of these processes and engages with intersecting issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity, ability, indigenous sovereignty, and climate crisis. for the upcoming term (winter 2020), i am revamping the assignments in order to reorient learning outcomes to data justice literacies. taking a cue from leslie shade’s work on digital policy literacy, which foregrounds digital policy as a key attribute of media and digital literacy (shade, 2012; shade & shepherd, 2013), i use “data justice literacy” as an intervention to broaden the principles of social media literacy to encircle data justice as a crucial element (shade, 2012). in this respect, in order for us to be from data ethics to data justice in/as pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 450-457, 2021 453 able to engage critically and effectively in personal, professional and social contexts through social media platforms, we need to understand how data is a key asset in our exchanges. data literacy is applied elsewhere to advocate for the development of data analysis and statistical literacy. however, when couched in a data justice framework data literacy is decoupled from technical systems and engages instead with how data practices correspond to other social practices within social and political constellations (metcalfe & dencik, 2019). in what follows, i explore design speculations for two assignments aimed at advancing data justice literacies. these include: (a) an autoethnography of a data analysis tool; and, (b) authoring the terms of service for a fictional social media platform. autoethnography of a data tool the first assignment will require students to conduct an autoethnography as they learn a data analysis tool. following carolyn ellis and arthur bochner (2000), autoethnography is a form of autobiographical writing and research that “displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (p. 739). autobiographical reflection can empower students to delve into their own learning processes as they acquire a new technical skill and connect the process of learning to broader assumptions about what it means to do data analytics. for instance, a few years ago a student in the course proposed a research project predicated on scraping five years’ worth of data from the twitter account of a canadian political party. without any prior experience with social media analysis, the student was surprised to learn that they would need to go through the twitter api to access data and that they would be limited to accessing a few weeks of data. the student was unable to complete the project as originally intended, but it was the process of debunking the myth of social media analysis that was invaluable. leveraging this myth busting impulse, this assignment aims to have students dabble in the technical side of data analytics while having them reflect on data-driven research processes through a data justice framework. as i write this, i have yet to select the specific tool, but as i detail below, the tool itself is secondary to the learning process. the assignment will be organized as a semester-long exercise in which students teach themselves and each other a data analysis tool. some class time will be devoted to instruction, but otherwise the bulk of learning will happen independently. to assist students with organizing their time, i will provide a timeline with milestones and dates of completion. the learning objective for the exercise is to have students move from “data literacy” to “data justice literacy.” indeed, an anticipated take-away of the assignment is for students to refine a technical skill, but the implicit aim is to have them engage deeply with data justice. for example, students will be asked to andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 450-457, 2021 454 investigate the origins of the tool’s development and to seek out other research projects that have been supported through its application. questions guiding the written component will engage with data analysis broadly, and ask students to reflect on the neocolonial impulses of data analysis and extractivism (vera et al., 2019), and how data analysis tools and approaches that support research and teaching can also reinforce digital redlining (gilliard, 2017). in this respect, students will be prompted to consider the asymmetrical relationships of power, but they will also be asked to imagine how they could apply the tool towards a data justice initiative. thus, the objective of the assignment is not to have students “master” a tool, but rather to encourage them through autoethnography to bring to the surface the tacit assumptions about data analytics and to imagine a more equitable distribution of the tool’s benefits and burdens (costanza-chock, 2018a, 2018b). speculative terms of service the second assignment will have students work in groups to author terms of service for an imaginary social media platform committed to data justice. more specifically, students will employ “speculative design” as a methodology to assess (data) governance through a data justice lens. why focus on data governance? linnet taylor and hellen mukiri-smith (2019) encourage us to recognize data justice as connected also to thinking about how the governance of data technologies should be based on social justice principles. disentangling the ways in which data governance perpetuates and opposes a matrix of oppression is pivotal to data justice. in turn, how can we encourage students to intervene in processes of data governance? and how can we encourage them to not only imagine alternatives, but to script alternate possibilities? (dunne & raby, 2013, p. 90). the first part of the assignment will have groups select a social media platform and begin by reading its terms of service. students will keep a reading journal and reflect on their immediate thoughts, surprising discoveries, and contemplate their affective responses to the terms of service. after a few weeks, students will regroup and share their reflections. leveraging their individual responses as a starting point for collaboration, students will then work in their groups to rewrite the terms of service. the emphasis for this portion of the project is to translate the terms of service into non-technical language in order to make the document accessible to a general audience. throughout the translation stage, each student will continue to keep a journal to record their observations and experience. a set of questions will guide students to reflect on the process of translating the document, including the practicalities that went into deciphering the text and rendering it legible. students will be prompted to interrogate the discursive function of the terms of service, and the ways in which these documents are in effect governance from data ethics to data justice in/as pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 450-457, 2021 455 structures that promote and constrain opportunities for participation. finally, students will be asked to consider how the terms of service reflect (or not) broader social, economic and political values. having worked through existing terms of service to understand not only the text itself, but also the ways in which these governance documents sustain (in)equities and (in)justices, students will then spend the second half of the semester rescripting the terms of service for an imaginary platform. this portion of the project will have two parts: (a) authoring terms of service for a fictional social media platform with data justice as its undergird; and, (b) a written reflection about the platform that will detail how its social justice ideology is sustained and affirmed by its terms of service. the written component will draw from appropriate academic literature (i.e., data justice, critical data studies) to support the analysis, and students will be asked to consider the differences and similarities between their fictional terms of service and the official document they translated. through the written piece, students will have an opportunity to bridge their individual observations and experiences with collaborative work, and in turn, consider processes for encouraging and sustaining equitable and meaningful participation in governance decisions. finally, speculative design is key to this assignment because as a methodology, it will encourage students to step away from merely assessing how a social media platform exists now to focusing on authoring terms of service that envision how and what these platforms could be (dunne & raby, 2013, p. 69). the fictional terms of service provide an opportunity for students to engineer not only a social media platform that reproduces and is reproduced by data justice, but also reflect on the kind of society whose values and preoccupations would engender the conditions for such a platform to thrive. postscript the origins of this dispatch began with a rather vague but charged question: what would it mean to prioritize (data) justice over (data) ethics in academic contexts? in reframing my thinking of data to be a matter of social justice, i have been motivated to integrate data justice literacies in teaching and learning. my hope is that the integration of creative and collaborative research-based assignments will encourage students to engage deeply with data justice, as both a framework and social movement, and empower them to continue to find ways to respond to prescriptive data paradigms. andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 450-457, 2021 456 acknowledgements the author wishes to thank drs. leslie regan shade and karen louise smith for their invitation to submit to the special section. additional thanks to dispatches editor vanessa farr and editor-in-chief david butz for their helpful suggestions. finally, the author would like to express gratitude to the graduate students enrolled in data cultures (2017-2021) for the enthusiasm, creativity, and care that they all brought into the learning space. references canadian institutes of health research, natural sciences and engineering research council of canada, & social sciences and humanities research council. (2014). tri-council policy statement: ethical conduct for research involving humans. https://ethics.gc.ca/eng/policy-politique_tcps2-eptc2_initiatives.html canadian institutes of health research, natural sciences and engineering research council of canada, & social sciences and humanities research council. (2016). tri-agency statement of principles on digital data management. http://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_83f7624e.html canadian institutes of health research, natural sciences and engineering research council of canada, & social sciences and humanities research council. (2018). draft: tri-agency research data management policy for consultation. http://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_97610.html costanza-chock, s. (2018a, june 3). design justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. proceedings of the design research society 2018. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3189696 costanza-chock, s. (2018b). design justice, a.i., and escape from the matrix of domination. journal of design and science, 3(5). http://dx.doi.org/10.21428/96c8d426 dencik, l., hintz, a., redden, j., & treré, e. (2019). exploring data justice: conceptions, applications and directions. information, communication & society, 22(7), 873-881. dencik, l., jansen, f., & metcalfe, p. (2018, august 30). a conceptual framework for approaching social justice in an age of dataficaton. datajustice project. https://datajusticeproject.net/2018/08/30/a-conceptual-framework-for-approaching-socialjustice-in-an-age-of-datafication/ dunne, a., & raby, f. (2013). speculative everything: design, fiction and social dreaming. mit press. ellis, c., & bochner, a. p. (2000). autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity. in n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.) (pp. 733-768). sage. gilliard, c. (2017, july 3). pedagogy and the logic of platforms. educause review, 52(4), 64-65. lee, s. (2017). ‘studying friends’: the ethics of using social media as research platforms. the american journal of bioethics, 17(3), 1-2. metcalfe, p., & dencik, l. (2019). the politics of big borders: data (in)justice and the governance of refugees. first monday, 24(4). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/9934/7749 redden, j., & brand, j. (2018). data harm record. https://datajusticelab.org/data-harm-record/ sabati, s. (2019). upholding “colonial unknowing” through the irb: reframing institutional research ethics. qualitative inquiry, 25(9–10), 1056–1064. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418787214 shade, l. (2012). toward a model of digital policy literacy. iconference ’12: proceedings of the 2012 iconference (pp. 459-461). http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2132176.2132247 from data ethics to data justice in/as pedagogy studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 450-457, 2021 457 shade, l., & shepherd, t. (2013). viewing youth and mobile privacy through a digital policy literacy framework. first monday, 12(2). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4807/3798 shilton, k. (2016). emerging ethics norms in social media research. big data ethics. https://bigdata.fpf.org/papers/emerging-ethics-norms-in-social-media-research/ simpson, l. b. (2017). as we have always done: indigenous freedom through radical resistance. university of minnesota press. smith, l. t. (2012). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. zed books. taylor, j., & pagliari, c. (2017). mining social media data: how are research sponsors and researchers addressing the ethical challenges? research ethics, 14(2), 1-39. taylor, l. (2017). what is data justice? the case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally. big data & society, 4(2), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717736335 taylor, l., & mukiri-smith, h. (2019, february 14). global data justice: framing the (mis)fit between statelessness and technology. european network on statelessness. https://www.statelessness.eu/blog/global-data-justice-framing-misfit-between-statelessnessand-technology townsend, l., & wallace, c. (2015). social media research: a guide to ethics. university of aberdeen. https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_487729_en.pdf university of sheffield. (2016). the ethics of internet-based and social media research. https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.644904!/file/report_ethics_of_social_media_r esearch_jul16.pdf. van dijck, j. (2014) datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance & society, 12(2): 197-208. vera, l. a., walker, d., murphy, m., mansfield, b., siad, l., ogden, j., & edgi. (2019). when data justice and environmental justice meet: formulating a response to extractive logic through environmental data justice. information, communication & society, 22(7), 10121028. wagner, b. (2018). ethics as an escape from regulation: from ‘ethics washing’ to ethicsshopping? in e. bayamlioglu, i. baraliuc, l. janssens & m. hildebrandt (eds.), being profiled: cogitas ergo sum – 10 years of profiling the european citizen (pp. 84-89). amsterdam university press. zeffiro, a. (2019). provocations for social media research: toward good data ethics. in a. daly, k. devitt & m. mann (eds.), good data (pp. 216-243). inc theory on demand series. microsoft word 77-90_woodhouse.docx studies in social justice volume 5, issue 1, 77-90, 2011   correspondence address: howard woodhouse, educational foundations, college of education, university of saskatchewan, 28 campus dr., saskatoon, sk s7n 0x1, canada. tel.: +1 306 966-7522; email: howard.woodhouse@usask.ca issn: 1911-4788 learning for life: the people’s free university and the civil commons howard woodhouse college of education, university of saskatchewan abstract this article stems from the author’s experience as one of the organizers of an alternative form of higher education, which drew its inspiration from the civil commons. in the early years of the new millennium, the people’s free university of saskatchewan (pfu) offered a wide variety of courses to members of the public without charge, adopting as its founding principle the belief that “anyone can learn, anyone can teach.” as a form of community-based education, the pfu accommodated the needs and aspirations of a diversity of individuals and groups too often denied by “research-intensive” universities. the civil commons itself is a web of interlocking institutions based on the life-code of value, which strengthens the public interest and enhances the growth of organic life. unlike the money-code of value, whose goods are only available to those who can pay, the goods of the civil commons are accessible to all. this inner logic enables a full realization of life value as exemplified in the living tradition of popular university education. the civil commons is the organized, unified, and community-funded capacity of universally accessible resources of society to protect and to enable the lives of its members as an end in itself. (mcmurtry, 1998, p. 376) introduction the market model currently undermining universities in canada threatens education at its core. the opposition between education’s logic of value and that of the corporate market is clearly defined by professor john mcmurtry (1991) as follows: “the aims and processes of education and the market are not only distinct, but contradictory” (p. 38). the contradiction is between education as a public process whose goal is to share knowledge among those seeking it and the market's goal of making ever more money for private individuals and companies. professor janice newson (1992) explains this oppositional character in the following terms: “the principles that benefit markets undermine the objectives of education and conversely, education that achieves its intended purposes cannot serve well as a marketable commodity” (p. 234). whereas private money profits are acquired by “a structure of acquisition that excludes others from their appropriation ... knowledge … is acquired 78 howard woodhouse   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   by a structure of appropriation that … is maximized the more its accumulation is shared by others” (mcmurtry, 1991, p. 38).1 the struggle against the market model by faculty, students, and staff striving to sustain a learning process in which knowledge is shared rather than privatized has taken several forms. egregious violations of academic freedom and integrity of research have been resisted, as in the case of dr. nancy olivieri; there have been national campaigns against government cuts to higher education; and alternative kinds of university education have been established to counter the market model (woodhouse, 2009). this article draws upon my own experience as someone who has written about and has been actively involved in such developments. in particular, i consider the market model in relation to the university of saskatchewan (u of s), and analyze the people’s free university of saskatchewan (pfu) that established a community of learners as a process of “friends educating friends” (collins, 1994). in both theory and practice i have felt the power of the civil commons as a social agency capable of animating alternative possibilities to the market model. understanding the civil commons is “the required act of social comprehension from which awakening out of the thrall of the global market value program follows” (mcmurtry, 2001, p. 265). while a full realization of how the closed value system of the corporate market is opposed to all those institutions offering unpriced goods has yet to occur, there are signs of a growing understanding of its life-threatening character. the article reflects a commitment to “the emerging international struggle for life” and the ways in which the civil commons can sustain the necessary “will to act” (woodhouse, 2001a, p. 231). the emergence of the people's free university in the year 2000, a report of the research committee of council of the u of s declared that the goal of the university was to become “one of canada's leading research universities in the next decade.” the need “to increase research productivity … [and enhance] our profile as a research-intensive university” was central to this program. the phrases “research intensiveness,” and “research competitiveness” were repeated mantra-like as part of becoming “fully committed to the research enterprise” (research committee of council, 2000, pp. 2, 4, 7). in a subsequent report, the corporate administration of the university made clear what this meant: “the university is knowledge … [and] we need to ask ourselves if we should be marketing ourselves and this knowledge and not providing it for free” (corporate administration, 2005, p. 5). knowledge created at the university of saskatchewan was no longer to be publicly shared and disseminated, but bought and sold for private monetary gain. the valorization of the “research-intensive” university represents a clear departure from the institution's past when the “excellent reputation … [which] the university did and does have” was built primarily on its claim to be “the people's university” (hayden, 1983, p. 305) this founding ideal was articulated by the first president, walter murray, in 1909: “there should be ever present the consciousness that this is the university of the people, established by the people, and devoted by the people to the advancement of learning and the promotion of happiness and virtue” (hayden, learning for life 79 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   1983, p. 295). the advancement of learning had as its goal at that time the common good of the people of saskatchewan. murray's unequivocal message is that all knowledge advanced at the u of s was to be shared with all the people of the province. the paradigm shift away from “the people’s university” can be gauged in at least three ways. the quality of undergraduate education declined as a result of budget cuts and the loss of 130 faculty positions. this resulted in larger classes, fewer professors to teach them, and little opportunity for dialogue or critical thought (findlay, 2003; 2010). second, a greater emphasis was placed on research conducted for the market as a direct result of federal funding agencies requiring “partners” from industry to provide matching funds, thereby exerting leverage over the nature and goals of research (mcmurtry, 2010; 2011)—an injunction consistent with the “innovation agenda” requiring universities to “bring new goods and services to market” (report of the expert panel on the commercialization of university research, 1999, p. vi). third, the centralization of university governance was advanced through the mechanisms of integrated planning and systematic program review, which pit academic departments one against another in the zero-sum game of resource allocation (quigley, 2003). it was in this context that the pfu was founded. a series of public meetings organized on campus in the department of educational foundations, entitled “u of s ltd: w(h)ither the corporate university?”, was the first real opposition to research intensiveness and the innovation agenda and was supported by the u of s faculty association. the series was surprisingly well attended, including faculty from the applied sciences, who had “concerns about the over-determination of an innovation agenda which, otherwise is widely viewed as favoring their particular research interests” (collins, 2003a, p. 49). coupled with these forums on corporatization were student rallies opposed to the rise in tuition fees, as well as meetings which took place off campus about the need for an alternative form of higher education, including a panel discussion at the public library which attracted one hundred and fifty people (collins, 2003b). the pfu first opened its doors in the fall of 2002. two hundred students between the ages of 12 and 82 from different social classes and ethnic backgrounds enrolled in six courses. content varied from aboriginal spirituality to music and politics, canadian legal and political systems, psychology, human rights, and literature for personal growth. so successful was this initial semester that winter courses ranging in length from four to twelve weeks started in march of 2003 on such topics as globalization, human ecology, health care ethics, music, psychology, and community building, drawing fewer students in what was a bitterly cold season. in the fall term, three courses were offered on scientists questioning science, building global consciousness, and public law in canada, as well as a series of café discussions on such topics as alternative budgets, politics in the city, factory farming, the criminalization of dissent, and agriculture in the global marketplace. in the winter of 2004, courses on astronomy and canadian law were given in addition to café discussions on music, poetry, and civic politics. the pfu provided learning experiences to anyone regardless of their ability to pay. not only were courses offered free of charge, but a philosophy of inclusiveness stated that “anyone can learn, anyone can teach,” an approach first adopted in slightly different form by the free university movement in the united states 80 howard woodhouse   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   (draves, 1980). in practice, this meant that qualified people from the community as well as recognized university teachers provided learning opportunities to many adults who could not otherwise afford higher education. in the words of one such student, this experience was “informal, informative, enjoyable, and educational.” courses took place in a variety of accessible locations, and those offered at st. thomas wesley united church in one of the poorest core neighbourhoods of saskatoon attracted the largest number of students during the first semester. public lectures and forums as well as hands-on workshops on gardening, composting, success in the workplace, and putting together a resumé and learning portfolio were scheduled in the spring and fall of 2003. a conscious effort to balance practical and theoretical subjects in ways that appeal to the interests of students was a cornerstone of the pfu. social justice, the pfu, the civil commons, and the money-code of value the tradition of social justice to which the pfu belongs is that of a prairie socialism, whose goal is the development of an “activated citizen” capable of understanding the forces driving capitalism by dialoguing with others and taking action to create a society which enhances the capacities of all its members (welton, 1987). the philosophical framework articulated by mcmurtry, based on the civil commons and an increase in life-value, enables an inclusive understanding of the pedagogical practices of the pfu. i explicate the meaning and implications of these core concepts below. the civil commons is an interlocking set of institutions supporting and promoting life by providing universally accessible life goods such as publicly funded education, health care, and clean air and water. the regulating principle of the civil commons is that money is used to increase life-value by sustaining or enhancing the capacities of “society’s members and their environmental life-host” (mcmurtry, 1998, p. 24). an increase in life-value “consists in or enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought/feeling/action” (2008, p. 2). in order to realize growth in life-value, certain basic requirements to each of these dimensions of human life must be met. as professor jeff noonan (2010) puts it: we cannot live if our organic requirements are not met, we cannot think, reflect, evaluate and act as agents if certain socio-cultural requirements like caring mutualistic relationships, education, and meaningful work are denied us, and we cannot do anything freely if our lifetime is nothing but imposed routines; we need an experience of time as an open matrix of possibilities if we are to develop our capacities freely. (p. 7) hence the criterion of life-value is the extent to which the range and depth of each person’s capacities are realized. the goal of the pfu was to enable anyone to enhance their capacity to learn regardless of their ability to pay. in contrast, the money-code of value, which has characterized the global market since the 19th century can be expressed as follows: money --------commodity for sale ---------more money learning for life 81 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   here, “more money, not more life, is the regulating objective of thought and action” (mcmurtry, 1998, p. 299). whereas the goods of the civil commons are accessible to all, the private goods of the money-code are available only to those who can afford to pay. a second “lethal mutation” (p. 301) has now come to dominate the corporate market and the formula for “this decoupled money-sequence” is: money -------more money ------more money the transformation of money inputs into increased money outputs, which has “no productive contribution required in between” (p. 301), takes the form of currency and derivatives speculation, arbitrages, and leveraged takeovers to liquidate assets, traded for trillions of dollars that “daily destabilize or deplete public and private sectors, with interest rates on their speculations written off” (pp. 301-302). a community of adult learners advocates of the pfu were determined to establish an institution grounded in the history of both “the people's university” and the province itself—a history characterized by social democracy, the cooperative movement, and the struggle for social justice. the power of adult education to promote dialogue and enliven critical awareness among the general populace has been a central feature of all these movements. although its goals have been ambiguous at times, adult education has been a distinctive feature of saskatchewan's history. farmers who formed the wheat pool in the 1930s went on to educate themselves about economics, politics, current affairs, literature, and philosophy, while many listened regularly to the farm radio forum during the 1940s, discussing ideas and reading books so as to improve their education. in the mid-1940s, the newly elected cooperative commonwealth federation government of tommy douglas launched a grass roots, radical, adult education program which, according to professor michael welton, was “a massive campaign of study-action throughout the province—to begin the building of a new society.” this society would be built on the concept of an “activated citizen,” one who understood scientific and technological change, was aware of the causes of fascism and war, and “committed to playing an intelligent role in the constructive life of the community.” although the goal envisaged by the campaign's leader, watson thomson, to create a province that could “boast it is truly possessed by its people” (welton, 1987, pp. 154-159) was not fulfilled, a legacy of community based education was firmly established. participants at an organizational meeting of the pfu in february 2002 drew upon this historical experience to articulate a distinctive value system which they believed should guide the new institution: 1. the pfu should be a place for all citizens to have access to knowledge, education, and research with classes located throughout the community. 2. university education should be a universal right, and should be of the people and for the people, offering opportunities for self-directed learning. 82 howard woodhouse   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   3. the pfu should bring educators to work in the community together with citizens, meeting their needs, sharing knowledge, and enabling them to better understand their relationship with the world. it should be understood that a need is that without which life’s capacity is always reduced (mcmurtry, 1998, p. 164). 4. the principles of open access, equity, and participation must be respected; such practicalities as daycare and transportation costs should be covered in order for low income women, in particular, to participate. 5. the pfu should be an institution respectful of the marginalized and inclusive of aboriginal peoples; anti-racist education and sensitivity to issues of class, race, gender, disability, and inner city communities should be stressed. 6. the curriculum should be both academic, stressing critical thought, and practical, enabling skills development in such areas as organic farming, traditional healing, indigenous arts and culture etc. 7. the curriculum should also be interdisciplinary in nature with an emphasis on people's economics, sense of place, community living, peace, environmental sustainability, people's history, and cooperative philosophy, using community resources and participatory research in an effort to include multiple perspectives. 8. the organizational structure should be an autonomous and “bottom-up” organizational structure, with decisions made democratically through consensus; concerted efforts should be made to build links with labour, rural communities, and community groups engaged in broad approaches to education. 9. the pfu should provide an education for empowerment, an avenue for people to overcome their oppression by providing services designed to narrow the gap between rich and poor (people’s free university, 2002, pp. 1-5). at the core of this ambitious program is the idea that education is an integral part of the community. in practice, this suggests a relationship between students' life experience and their learning in which each is deeply affected by the other. the institutions of family, church, labour unions, women's organizations, aboriginal bands, métis groups, and professional associations all play a role in the educative activities of the pfu (woodhouse, 2003). lifelong learning, “as a process of man's [sic] growth toward fulfillment as an individual as well as a member of many groups in societies” (faure, 1973), is a cornerstone of this approach, according to which students learn through a process of growth that is fully integrated with their lives. relationships with others are important because they nurture their potential for learning, not simply as future employees but as citizens who participate in a variety of social contexts. by providing lifelong learning in this inclusive sense, the pfu set itself apart from the market model of education, whose goal is to produce a workforce that will retrain whenever new skills are required “to compete in the global market” (woodhouse, 2009). sharing community-based knowledge in an effective manner requires educators to be aware of the limitations of their own value learning for life 83 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   systems as well those of their students. a frank recognition of the ways in which teachers at the pfu were privileged by virtue of their own education and social status was necessary, since this might separate them from some of their students. a process of questioning emerged in which teacher and student used their experience to critically examine collaborative ways in which to understand and interpret reality (freire, 2006). dissatisfaction with current modes of education and training, as well as valuable suggestions for reform were brought to light. one of the dangers in this process was dichotomous thinking; namely, the tendency to divide reality into a simplistic us/them form in which the pfu was by definition good and the regular university system bad. the ambiguities and complexities of community basededucation had to be acknowledged in order for the process of knowing to have real worth. the goal throughout was to provide participants with opportunities to express their full range of thought, feeling, and action in order for learning to flourish (mcmurtry, 2005). this process involves the enhancement of thought through the use of both the imagination and conceptual abilities; of feeling as the growth of sentience and the emotional life; and action as animate movement through time and space (mcmurtry, 1998, p. 298). this was precisely the ideal of the original system of free universities in the united states, as articulated by bill draves (1980), one of its historians and founders. a diverse model of higher education provided “a new vision of what it means to learn” supported by “a ‘community of scholars,’” in which “a feeling of learning with others” was sustained by “a new concept of learning—as a process that anyone can tackle at any point.” by unlocking barriers to knowledge traditionally regarded as the domain of the privileged, free universities promoted “a deluge of possibilities for people to learn and act” (p. 21). it was in this same spirit that faculty at the pfu offered their services free of charge to students who themselves chose to attend courses out of a desire to learn. together they shared knowledge in ways that strengthened a sense of what education might become. at the pfu, this approach led to an imaginative conception of learning grounded in a sense of community outside of the money-code of value. in the words of professor michael collins (2003b), education was conceived as “very much a public good in contrast to calculating market-driven 'knowledge economy' imperatives.” the idea of “friends learning from friends … prefigures a radical restructuring of educational systems for ordinary men, women, and children.” (pp. 1, 3). a community in which knowledge was shared as a public good among colleagues and friends served the needs of ordinary people by providing an alternative model of education from that of the market. according to one instructor, freedom from an exclusive emphasis on job training enabled students at the pfu to engage in the pursuit of knowledge in imaginative and critical ways. nor is this surprising, since the imagination may be the most potent force in the construction of any community. the imagination enables students and citizens alike to create alternative possibilities that challenge the status quo by considering ideas and practices that have not already been considered. it provides opportunities for freely engaging in constructive thought about ways to enrich the human condition and fortify those communities which make such flourishing possible. adult learners at the pfu came to understand their need for knowledge as a process connecting them to one another as a band of imaginative scholars. learning shared as a public good strengthened students' capacity to understand their many connections with 84 howard woodhouse   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   reality—the local, the global, and the biotic community upon which we all depend. at its base, the value system of the pfu, like all cooperative and collaborative institutions, was based on life-value as whatever enables a more inclusive range of thought, feeling, and action. the pfu provided access for every member of the community “to grow and express themselves as human” (sumner, 2005, p. 12). the life-code of value and the civil commons the pfu, then, grew into a community in which the imagination and needs of learners were enhanced in a reflective space outside the imperatives of the “calculating market-driven ‘knowledge economy’” (collins, 2003b, p. 3). a value system which does not reduce knowledge to a commodity to be bought and sold is at work beyond money exchange for private profit which cannot in principle ever generate free exchange of knowledge as a good in itself. consciously or not, the pfu presupposed a different code of value from the normative framework of the corporate market. the money-code of value, “which uses money to make more money for money managers and possessors,” (mcmurtry, 2011, p. 6) moulds every activity to what brings higher returns on investment. it is worth emphasizing, therefore, that the life-code of value is directly lifeenhancing in a way that the money-code can never be. life has value quite apart from its instrumentalization in maximizing private money profits. recognition of life's intrinsic value makes possible an understanding which transcends the limitations of the money-code in which life is simply a means to making more money for private money possessors. two different sequences express how life is sustained by this value system, the first of which shows how life reproduces itself by holding its “capacities at their established scope” (mcmurtry, 1998, p. 298): life ------means of life ------life (survival) (e.g. food) here, someone who eats one square meal a day, for example, manages to survive, avoiding starvation and disease but has no vital energy left to engage in other “civilizing” activities that distinguish humankind. from a renewed perspective based on life, mcmurtry (1998) argues, it makes little sense to ask “whether unpolluted water to drink or freedom from hunger or having a place to sleep is of value or disvalue,” since these are preconditions for “the preservation and growth of our embodied being,” and are recognized as “universal values” by cultures which differ in many other ways. to question whether freedom from hunger is good or bad is to disregard the human condition in which food (as well as clean air, water, and shelter) makes life possible. at its base, life as “organic movement, sentience and feeling, and thought” (pp. 19, 298) requires sustenance in order to reproduce itself. only where basic survival needs are satisfied can questions about how to enhance life's range be addressed. in the second, higher form of the life-code, in contrast, more life-value is the end term of the sequence (p. 298): learning for life 85 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   life ---means of life ---more comprehensive life (i.e. growth of life’s range) (e.g. education) in this case, the life-code has evolved socially from the original one, since the process of education, which is one of the institutions constituting the means of life, provides “accessible learning conditions … increas[ing] life value … [so as] to widen or deepen them [human capacities] to a more comprehensive range” (1998, p. 298). one of the ways in which this range can be maximized is by enhancing humanity's capacity for learning. universal access to formal and informal education with the goal of sharing knowledge among participants makes possible a more comprehensive understanding of subject matter and the world. this potentiality can only be realized where institutions are in place capable of creating the conditions for human learning as a good for all participants. mcmurtry (1998) argues that an institutional nexus of this kind is immanent in all human societies despite the ravages of the corporate market in this era. the civil commons comprise the most civilizing aspects of human achievement and are distinguished by an ability to offer universal access to services which ensure the survival and growth of all organic life. public education and health care are two examples, but clean water supply systems, public transit structures, housing for the poor and resources for the handicapped, public libraries, public arts and broadcasting, parks and wilderness areas, and public spaces for interaction and enjoyment of shared life are part of this same network. this intricate web of institutions is, in other words, “what people ensure together as a society to protect and further life, as distinct from money aggregates” (p. 24). this inner logic to provide services enabling a more comprehensive range of life is in direct contradiction to the global market and a threat by its independence from knowledge growth as a mere means to money capital expansion. this is why global market agencies like the world bank, demand that formally life goods are bought and sold in a privatized market order. a prime example is the bank’s advocacy of increased “tuition and full cost-recovery fees,” limiting access to higher education to those who can pay, coupled with the need for universities to adopt “cost-effective, market-responsive learning” (johnstone et al., 1998, p. 25). the overriding need to reduce unit costs means that the process of learning must, so the bank claims, be accountable to the market and exclude all those unable to pay.2 nevertheless, the civil commons extends beyond the lives of human beings to the preservation of nature in general. since the earth is the source of all life, and human beings are dependent upon her for their well-being, she is to be valued as “the lifeground” for our very existence. human responsibilities in this regard stem from our inter-relationship with all living organisms and from a preconscious recognition that they too constitute the future of the planet. this is expressed spontaneously as “a felt bond of being that crosses boundaries of membranes, classes, peoples, and even species” (mcmurtry, 1998, p. 23) when we experience other humans, animals, forests, or different life forms torn apart, wasted, and threatened with extinction by life-blind corporate appropriation to maximize private money profits. 86 howard woodhouse   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   the pfu and the civil commons in this section, i argue that while the pfu was grounded in the life-code of value and its “instituted bearer” the “civil commons,” the difficulties in sustaining it as an alternative learning community show that the civil commons was not well understood by its advocates. this is for two reasons: first, participants failed to grasp the strength of the civil commons in combating the money-code of value; second, they did not fully comprehend the significance of learning as a unified process in which the internal and external aspects of human beings are actively engaged. i go on to argue that this latter conception of learning, which mcmurtry advocates, is consistent with the account given by alfred north whitehead. the relationship between the civil commons and the pfu is an especially close one. as the creative link between mere survival and the full expression of human capacities in learning, the civil commons enables such life-enhancing activity in principle. the potentiality for teaching and learning capable of enhancing life's range was actualized through a network of people working together at the pfu in concrete ways. united by a vision of an alternative form of higher education serving the needs of people independently of their ability to pay, a web of students, community members, faculty, and staff made this a reality. a distinctive form of education came into being based on structures and processes which, in professor jennifer sumner’s (2005) words, “contribute to the civil commons … [through] teaching, learning, collaborating, and researching” (pp. 113-114). the concept of universal accessibility enabling a fuller realization of life through education is a defining characteristic of both the civil commons and the pfu. without this ideal and the educational praxis flowing from it as guide, the pfu's existence might not have been possible. the logic of value of the civil commons takes hold, mcmurtry argues, in the form of “concepts and realities which are both material and spiritual in nature as humans themselves are.” by striving to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of teachers and learners, the pfu enabled both partners to share knowledge of use to the community. while avoiding the reduction of education to job training, it also sustained the many living connections between knowing and its social context. a balance was constantly sought between “the internal and external as an integral unity of process in which their division breeds inertia” (2001, pp. 264, 265). learning as a dynamic process integrating the internal and external lives of participants constituted both the ideal and the baseline for the pfu's educational practice. why, then, is it so difficult to achieve and sustain a participatory learning community of this kind? two reasons suggest themselves. first, the strength of the civil commons to counter the money-code of value and offer universally accessible, unpriced goods is still largely unrecognized. as mcmurtry (2001) puts it: the lifeground and its civil commons agency are so blinkered out by the ruling market mind set of our time, now becoming a totalitarian metaphysic in its imperialisation, that these grounds of human being are still unfamiliar even when named, defined, and connected in their meaning and presence across global societies. (pp. 264-265) learning for life 87 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   even when the power of publicly funded health care, education, libraries, wilderness areas, and radio etc. is fully analyzed, and its international significance and presence demonstrated, people are blinded by the money-code of value “inculcated in the mind as a ruling syntax of value and meaning” (mcmurtry, 2008). “there is no alternative” (tina) runs the mantra first chanted by margaret thatcher, which perfectly explains this reigning value code and syntax. this determinist position contradicts rational and critical debate as well as the idea of universities as seats of learning, leaving little room for the articulation of alternative ways of understanding or being in the world (sumner, 2005, p. 5). in a materialistic global society, it is increasingly difficult to imagine, let alone achieve, the “integral unity of process” in which “the external and internal” aspects of one’s life are unified in the manner proposed by mcmurtry. and here lies a second problem for an educational community like the pfu: how to conceive of learning as a process integrating the conscious and material sides of human beings? in order to make sense of this question and remain “open to argument that seeks just this comprehension,” it is necessary to step beyond the bounds of much modern western philosophical thought, which too easily accepts the “soul-vs-matter divide” as fact (mcmurtry, 2001, pp. 265, 264). whitehead is among those philosophers who attempt to bridge this gap. he conceives of learning as a “process of self-creation,” which involves an awareness of our internal life as “a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions” through which we shape a “welter of material into a consistent pattern of feelings” as the basis for understanding the world. at the same time, we can “shape the activities of the environment into a new creation” in the form of projects, which are part of “a continuation of the antecedent world” and of our participation in a community of learners. as individuals in such a community, we entertain “the conceptual anticipation of the future” in the form of an “ideal,” or “teleological aim,” which is also “an enjoyment in the present” because it is part of what we become in “the immediate self-creation of the new creature” (1966, p. 166). put differently, we achieve an internal unity by integrating our experience in order to understand the world; and we can then act to change it on the basis of ideals enjoyed both in the present and as projections into the future. throughout this process we are transformed by what whitehead (1961) calls, “a wider sweep of conscious interest” in which “the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul's preoccupation with itself” makes possible the “deep metaphysical insight” that organic life itself is the founding principle for the “coordination of values” (p. 285). life-value, not the acquisition of money aggregates, becomes the goal of learning. once emancipated from the demands of self-interest, this deep metaphysical insight becomes clear. on this central point, the pfu stands shoulder to shoulder with the organizing idea of the civil commons’ evolution in which “whiteheadian[s] [too] cannot support the marketization of the whole of society including education that is now so far advanced” (cobb, 1998, p. 106). a living tradition the ideals concretized at the pfu enhanced life in ways currently frustrated by the corporate market model of education and the money-code of value which underlies 88 howard woodhouse   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   it. rather, the pfu subscribed to the life-code of value and to the interlocking institutions of the civil commons, which are “its historically instituted but unrecognized bearer and social agency” (mcmurtry, 2001, p. 265). the pfu strove for an integral unity of process capable of satisfying the material and spiritual needs of ordinary people engaged in seeking and sharing knowledge among a community of learners—just as at another level the civil commons provides its members with their life needs though public health care, libraries, and wilderness areas. the internal impulse to pursue knowledge in conjunction with others was connected to a learning environment in which this potentiality became a reality. moreover, the ongoing relationship with the u of s, which was sustained through the participation of faculty and graduate students in both institutions was a considerable source of strength: “community-based initiatives that stay connected with our public institutions and boldly demand educational and other services in accord with the needs of ordinary men and women over corporate interests, can inspire the growth of a counter-hegemonic consciousness and the link between lifelong learning and participatory democracy” (collins, 2003a, p. 53). the subsequent adoption of “university outreach” as an official criterion for assessing the value of research and teaching in terms of its relevance to the broader community, coupled with monthly sessions of “philosophy in the community” undertaken by the philosophy department and supported by the vice-president research, are just two examples of the ongoing influence exerted by the pfu on the u of s. nor do civil commons projects like the pfu and life-value over money-value growth end in unfunded isolation. in france several popular universities have sprung up in recent years. the université populaire de caen (upc) in normandy has offered courses, seminars, workshops, and art shows without charge since 2002. the program for the academic year 2010-11included seminars and workshops on biomedical ethics, politics, philosophy for children, film, contemporary literature, jazz, mathematics, architecture, psychology and music, women and society, and economics. the founder of the upc, michel onfray, a philosopher who took early retirement in order to teach the “counter history” of philosophy, offered a course critical of the “left freudianism” of otto gross, wilhelm reich, herbert marcuse, and erich fromm. the author of more than fifty publications3 also created the université populaire d’argentan in 2006, and wrote the following in the manifesto for both institutions: d’où l’université populaire de caen qui propose une douzaine de séminaires pour analyser et comprendre le fonctionnement du monde, puis avancer des alternatives à la négativité contemporaine. nul ne l’ignore plus, notre époque se définit par la mondialisation sous sa forme libérale : l’argent fait la loi, le marché guide l’économie, certes, mais aussi la plupart des productions culturelles, les consciences, les relations entre les hommes – dans le cadre national, certes, mais aussi international. (onfray, 2006) [italics mine] the upc, then, provides an education for ordinary people to understand the world by offering alternative visions to further global market totalization, which now controls the economy, culture, the relationships between human beings, the planet, and the very ways in which we think. clearly opposed to the money-code of value, and in accordance with life-value and civil commons’ principles, the upc continues learning for life 89 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   to flourish after nine years. could it be that a civil commons formation in rural normandy offers greater support to its educational functions than did saskatoon? in fact, the vision of an open university beyond fees and bureaucracies is observable here in a borderless “concrescence” of resistance to and supercession of the moneycode of value in higher education as well as in common public infrastructures of clean water systems, air quality regulation, public life spaces, and integrated electrical grids. yet, education holds a special place here. as mcmurtry (1998) observes: “the world now moves for the first time in history to a global struggle between knowledge and misrepresentation as the finally contending forces” (p. 395). notes   1 in addition to education’s opposing goals, its opposing motivations, methods, and standards of excellence to those of the market are analyzed in mcmurtry, 1991, pp. 38-41; 1998, pp. 188-190; woodhouse, 2001b, pp. 107-118; 2009, pp. 22-37. 2 in the face of mounting criticism the world bank proposed a new form of social wealth calculation that went beyond money transactions “by integrating economic, social and environmental factors … including education, nutrition and health care” (1995). this apparent respect for the goods of the civil commons is undermined by the bank’s conceptual inability to recognize structural conflicts with the money-code of value as conflicts (mcmurtry, 1999, pp. 195-196). 3 onfray’s most recent book published in april 2010 is a critique of freud, titled le crépuscule d’une illusion: la fabulation freudienne. paris. grasset. references cobb, j. 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[press release]. office of the president. washington, dc, 1-9. sanga & reynolds final before ts correspondence address: kabini sanga, faculty of education, victoria university of wellington, wellington, aotearoa new zealand; email: kabini.sanga@vuw.ac.nz issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 496-504, 2020 dispatch pacific academic migrants: re-shaping spaces in dynamic times kabini sanga victoria university of wellington, aotearoa new zealand martyn reynolds victoria university of wellington, aotearoa new zealand introduction the ocean connects pacific peoples in complex ways. māori arrived on the shores of aotearoa (new zealand) in waka (canoes) from across te moana nui a kiwa, the pacific ocean. their migration was part of a more general movement of skilled voyagers who stopped at various times in diverse places. moana (or pacific) people remain related through bloodlines, language and intersecting stories. many connections can be seen. some tongans, samoans and fijians share genealogies (hau'ofa, 1994). people of ancestry now called polynesian inhabit areas of the solomon islands in modern melanesia (kinaston et al., 2013). in addition, trade historically crisscrossed the east and west of the ocean (hau'ofa, 1994) as it does today. cosmologically, links also abound: maui who fished up te ika a maui, the north island of aotearoa new zealand, left his mark behind in places such as ‘eua in tonga; tangaroa, the māori deity of the ocean, corresponds in many ways to tagaloa of the samoans (nunn, 2003). any simplifying focus on the separation of people in this regional space reinforces cartographic lines constructed by european settlers when describing the movement of individuals at the expense of the expanding relational connections that matter more. that space is not a simple idea in this region can be illustrated by two examples. the first is from malaita in the solomon islands, from where david gegeo (2001) describes the kwara‘ae perspective of place as a matter of indigeneity which involves inhabiting a kwara‘ae ontology and epistemology, and space as “the location a kwara‘ae person occupies while in motion or circulation” (pp. 494-495). by shifting in space, migrating pacific academic migrants studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 496-504, 2020 497 malaitans understand movement as an act that expands place through its portability. gegeo continues, “because of the possibility of space, a person can be anywhere and still be inextricably tied to place” (2001, p. 495). grounded in samoan thought, sa’iliemanu lilomaiava-doktor (2009) discusses the intersections between the concepts of malaga (movement back and forth; migration) and va (relational space between) to point to “the importance of thinking about migration more socially than territorially” (p. 22). seen through this lens, migration is creative and circular. movement creates an expanded relational space to be maintained through actions that express an ethic of care. by undertaking relational obligations, samoans remain firmly linked to the social network and physical place of origin. academic migrants are those scholars who move to another “world of ideas” (mason & rawlings-sanaei, 2014, p. 3). the way space is understood by various groups in the pacific region is salient when considering academic migration, the movement around the region (and beyond) of emerging (and established) scholars. through complex, contextual understandings of place, space and movement, academic migration in the pacific region deserves to be thought of in more than physical ways. individual samoans, tongans, papua new guineans, solomon islanders and so on, do relocate temporarily or permanently to universities such as ours in wellington, aotearoa new zealand, to further their education and sometimes their careers. many are selected for further education because they are leaders or because of their potential in this area. for them and others, education brings expectations of, and opportunities for leadership. however, particularly in the context of leadership, what are the relational implications of academic migration? in some cases, pacific academic migration to educational spaces overwhelmingly populated with western ideas can result in less than optimal social outcomes. for example, some academic migrants may return to their place with colonial worldviews, leverage their qualifications and experiences to accede to leadership positions, and localize rather than dehegemonize leadership in their pacific nations (gegeo, 2001): the portability of place is not one-way. in aotearoa new zealand, a bicultural mandate places even more importance on relationality, the state and experience of being related, as an aspect of academic migration. many educational institutions here seem to still be struggling to equitably articulate the implications of bi-culturalism in education, adding nuance to any discussion of tension in academic space. even in pacific located and focused academic institutions, academic leaders may fail to resolve tensions between cultural democracy, which values students’ home-based understandings and experiences, and cultural blindness, which fails to value diversity (helu-thaman, 2014). in such cases, academics may be faced with a migration to an unfamiliar world of ideas in their own land. unresolved tensions between world views can be costly. the personal pain involved is depicted by konai helu-thaman in her poem “our way” (helu-thaman, 2003, pp. 3-4): a belittling personal discomfort likely replicated in the lives of those who travel similar paths. kabini sanga & martyn reynolds studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 496-504, 2020 498 questions and opportunity in a situation where academic migration is a given but is not always clearly articulated, appreciated or critiqued, it is pertinent to ask a number of questions: what qualities of pedagogical environments can be imagined to better reflect nuanced regional understandings of space and movement? how might such understandings be enacted? what kinds of pedagogies and interactions best reflect the various implications of relational thought in the region? how can an academic space of value to academic migrants be capable of honoring an indigenous group or groups and act in anti-hegemonic ways? while answers may be hard to find, it is clear that newly configured spaces and new understandings are required within the academy to foster deeper respect for academic migrants by re-valuing their contributions, in this way, the “rightful place of alternative cultures of knowledge and learning” (mason & rawlings-sanaei, 2014, p. 1) as both challenging and complementary to hegemonic knowledge is fortified. movement toward this ideal situation is contingent on appropriate configurations of relationships. the potential of open dialogic relational spaces not pre-structured by judgements of superiority or inferiority has been articulated in a number of contexts in the region. for example, biotechnology has been equitably and revealingly articulated with māori theorizations of the world through the deliberate employment of a “negotiating space’ (hudson et al., 2010; hudson et al., 2012). this model has been extended to the relationships between western clinical models and pacific health in aotearoa new zealand (mila-schaaf & hudson, 2009a, 2009b). this kind of thinking has also been applied to pasifika education, the education of students of pacific origin in aotearoa new zealand, where success involves negotiating in a space between ideas of european and pacific origin (reynolds, 2016). in the case of academic migration, spatial, relational thinking can support pacific peoples through practices that are ontologically grounded. here, the negotiation involves neither ignoring nor being dominated by the academic context that brings academic migrants together, but rather foregrounding relationality in ways that are creative, antihegemonic and communally beneficial. leadership pacific (lp) what follows is an account of one such deliberately constructed negotiating space: leadership pacific (lp). lp involves a pacific understanding of movement and space applied in the leadership field. a deliberate construction of this kind provides a challenge to hegemonic responses to pacific academic migration by focusing on the distinctive qualities of space inhabited by pacific-origin people as they move in time and space. lp is a movement of leadership development, which configures space by embracing storying as a pacific academic migrants studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 496-504, 2020 499 pedagogy consistent with pacific relational, dialogic and connected understandings of the world. storying is a pedagogy with deep roots in the pacific region. tok stori, for example, is a melanesian form of communication, whereby a shared reality is created through storying (sanga & reynolds, 2019; sanga et al., 2018). those who contribute to a storying session are understood to be experts in their own experiences. the sharing of stories allows emotional as well as other forms of knowledge to remain as integrated as they are in life. another example, talanoa, is a form of communication at home in places such as tonga and samoa (fa‘avae et al., 2016; suaalii‐sauni & fulu‐aiolupotea, 2014; vaioleti, 2006). like tok stori, talanoa involves storied expression; perspectives and knowledge are presented in a space where enhanced understanding of others is facilitated by increased relational closeness. as in tok stori, in talanoa contextual elements dictate the exact form of encounter. both tok stori and talanoa are ontological, relational ways of being in the world, which are useful in, but exist beyond, research and learning. lp was begun in response to academic migration. academic migrants from across the region needed friendship, and a leadership cluster offered this possibility. in 2005, in the face of a “university campus… cold in more ways than one,” five student members met with two academic staff to “negotiate an unfamiliar learning environment” (sanga, 2017, p. 102), using the relational resources and understandings they brought with them. seeking a space with village-like qualities, these original members started a tradition of relatively short gatherings for storying over coffee or lunch, generally on a monthly basis. as a pan-pacific group, augmented by those from other regions who wish to experience, understand and positively contribute to the lifeways of moana people, lp clusters continue to operate to provide a space for storying, deliberate listening and learning on leadership and other matters. members come when they can, bring their friends and colleagues, and spread the word that those who travel to other worlds of ideas can continue to value, learn and live in their own. within lp, storying “presents leadership in relational terms rather than as a strategy to learn or a style to master” (sanga, 2017, p. 105). through this medium, lp proposes an understanding of leadership based on a dual philosophical platform: finding one’s purpose as greater-than-life and acknowledging the privilege one has in life (sanga, 2008). these philosophical tenets are unashamedly relational, affirming and enabling, embodying pacific-sourced relationality understood through a strengthsbased lens. this understanding is supported by three underlying principles: the ownership and assumption of responsibility for oneself on individual and societal levels; appreciating what one has (and not looking primarily for what one has not); and starting with the here and now in leadership – heritages, cultures and resources, in our contexts (sanga, 2008). through these philosophical tenets and operating principles, lp is a practical response to the kinds of leadership theorization that permeate the kabini sanga & martyn reynolds studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 496-504, 2020 500 academic world. these often separate ideas about leadership from experiential knowledge, valuing the former at the expense of the latter. in addition, lp defies the kinds of cartographic separations that dominate western thinking about the pacific region, by providing a space for recognition of the kinds of connections that have long existed and been valued. a focus on connection fits with thinking that sees leadership as influence, and influence as relational: when leadership is named in such terms, relationships are nurtured at the expense of the development of individual power, and self-protection gives way to a genuine commitment to those to whom one is related (sanga, 2008). if members see an lp cluster as a kind of village, this implies relational responsibilities and obligations. these stretch beyond the professional to mutual acceptance as a ground for deep interaction, trust and care, so that hegemonic segmentation is resisted. lp can be appreciated as a movement in a particular space and time. aligned with the rethinking pacific education initiative by pacific for pacific (rpeipp) (e.g., nabobo-baba, 2012; pene et al., 2002; thaman, 2009), lp thought comes from a perspective which recognizes that one effect of the academic worlds to which pacific scholars migrate is the erosion of relational embeddedness, subsumed and potentially neglected in other traditions. this, however, is not a backward-looking stance. as sanga (2008) says, “the times of your grandmothers and grandfathers are over” (p. 2). as a consequence, lp understands its role in supporting academic migrants as being to appreciate and celebrate time-tested leadership institutions and frameworks, while encouraging migrants to accept themselves for who they are – neither defined by the academic worlds of the present, nor captivated by an image of the past, however rendered. instead, lp invites academic migrants to “look inside” as leaders and dig deeper into personal resources informed by context, experience and relationships, to deal with the here and now. the leadership pacific (lp) application the portability, flexibility and creativity of the lp space can be demonstrated by the inaugural lp conference, which took place at the university of the south pacific in suva, fiji, in 2018. despite issues of cost and the vagaries of transport in the region, over 60 delegates from a number of pacific regional nation states – including vanuatu, solomon islands, samoa, tonga, aotearoa new zealand, australia and fiji – met to support and develop understandings of ethical leadership through mutual contact and storying. storying as pedagogy was evident in sessions that were run as tok stori, through panel discussions where a tok stori was staged by speakers and then opened to observers, and in informal settings in which participants responded through story to the stories of presenters. pacific academic migrants studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 496-504, 2020 501 there were several distinctive features of the conference. one feature was the deliberate foregrounding of storied intersections achieved through inviting presentations on a number of different stories on a related theme. for instance, leadership was storied in the context of moana families from the positions of a daughter, of parents relating to children, and through the experiences of a widowed father reflecting on families in times of social change. the intersections of these stories revealed theory embedded in experience. deliberate listeners were able to appreciate variations and commonalities in the intertwined nature of emotion, responsibility, faith and strategy in family life in various pacific-context circumstances. a second important aspect of the lp conference space was deliberate valuing of the dignity of participants. this involved downplaying position or rank. thus, undergraduate students, villagers, village leaders and spokespeople, school teachers, administrators, policy makers and senior university academics were encouraged to reflect on, and learn from, each other’s stories. for example, the hereditary nature of wisdom indicated by one’s name in certain parts of the solomon islands was recounted in adjacent time and space, both to a story of school-based educational leadership in aotearoa new zealand, and to personal experiences of leadership, land, law and tradition in modern day fiji. in this way, conference participants were invited to use their skills in connection and empathy to make sense of the lives of others by appreciating the strengths revealed in the stories. third, emotional and intimate connections can be a consequence of a storying pedagogy, as can tangential learning, especially when deliberate juxtaposition of stories is a feature of the learning space. two examples from the lp conference space are the remarks of a participating mentorship practitioner from the solomon islands on the novelty and usefulness of the idea of leadership as creating space for others, understood and collected from a story of school-based leadership in aotearoa; and the self-reflection evident in an informal storying session which followed a panel storied discussion on leadership and the i-taukei (indigenous fijian) mind. in this tok stori session, those present, indigenous and otherwise, were able to reflect on the ontological nature of understandings of leadership in their own contextual stories. in these and other ways, the lp conference became a space in which learning took place and leadership was demonstrated in the respectful coexistence of the many pacific places brought to fiji by participants, facilitated by the deliberate relational qualities of the gathering. this approach to academic conference space was further realized in the second lp conference, in honiara, solomon islands in 2019. looking ahead for us, moana (or pacific) peoples whose relational worldviews deeply influence our understandings of space and movement, the future is likely to kabini sanga & martyn reynolds studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 496-504, 2020 502 demand the following of us. first, we will need to continue assuming primary responsibility for thinking through our moana conceptualizations of movement and space and their creative and adaptive applications in an everchanging pacific context. this is by no means easy, as the tasks require clarity of vision and coordination of action. this leadership task is critical given that the common trend in academia is to borrow hegemonic ideas, which are often from outside of local contexts. lp is at the forefront of providing leadership, and must continue doing so diligently. second, for moana academic migrants, there is always a values mismatch in our academic encounters. this is because our communitarian worldviews often clash with the predominant individualized values of conventional academia. as a result, the need is constantly for village-like caring and reciprocal relationships. while the lp experience has pointed to a way of responding adaptively to the tensions between values faced by academic pacific migrants, the lp response needs to be fully researched. only when researched well will the lp as a local-regional response be understood better, enabling the movement to fulfil its potential to contribute to the knowledge base on academic migrants. third, the people-centered storying pedagogy of lp has provided an alternative indigenous creative space for moana and other academic migrants. this alternative space needs to be nurtured and explored. through research and exploratory applications along the lines of the emerging scholarship on tongan talanoa (fa‘avae et al., 2016) and solomon islands tok stori (sanga et al., 2018), we can deepen our understanding of the storying pedagogy and improve its portability for the varied pacific academic contexts (sanga et al., 2020) and elsewhere. this is a fusion of methodology and experience aiming to build on the cultural strengths of the past in order to find relevance in the here and now. fourth, the lp experience, while offering an alternative approach, is a welcoming and inviting space, which is created by and for moana academic migrants and others. so far, this approach appears promising and ethical. as a long-term project, however, the lp experience needs to be seriously studied. research questions must be identified. case studies need to be undertaken in different pacific islands nation states, including in aotearoa new zealand and australian universities. quantitative surveys need to be done. by undertaking a serious study, the knowledge base on lp as a local-regional counter story can be built logically and sequentially, thereby increasing the potential value and relevance of this strategy for dealing with academic migration in the pacific region. conclusion in this dispatch, we discussed ways of understanding the intersections of movement and space derived from the worldviews of moana peoples, and pacific academic migrants studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 496-504, 2020 503 explored these via the experiences of pacific academic migrants through leadership pacific. we recognize that considerable applied research is needed for us to understand the value and relevance of pacific thought on this subject matter. in looking ahead, we have therefore suggested a future lp, which includes this task of identifying and building a knowledge base on pacific academic migrants. in the short-term, given our familiarity with pacific worldviews and thought, and through this piece, we suggest that a contextualized creative and adaptive approach has potential to be responsive to and supportive of the needs of academic migrants. long-term, we suggest that the necessary knowledge base for such contextual approaches is developed in order to further inform global scholarship on finding antihegemonic, anti-racist and ethical forms of response to the needs of academic migrants. references fa‘avae, d., jones, a., & manu‘atu, l. (2016). talanoa ‘i ‘ae talanoa – talking about talanoa: some dilemmas of a novice researcher. alternative: an international journal of indigenous peoples, 12(2), 138-150. gegeo, d. w. (2001). cultural rupture and indigeneity: the challenge of (re) visioning "place" in the pacific. the contemporary pacific, 13(2), 491-507. hau'ofa, e. (1994). our sea of islands. the contemporary pacific, 6(1), 148-161. helu-thaman, k. (2003). decolonizing pacific studies: indigenous perspectives, knowledge, and wisdom in higher education. the contemporary pacific, 15(1), 1-17. helu-thaman, k. (2014). towards cultural democracy in university teaching and research with special reference to the pacific island region. in c. mason & f. rawlings-sanaei (eds.), academic migration, discipline, knowledge and pedagogical practice (pp. 53-62). springer. hudson, m., roberts, m., smith, l. t., hemi, m., & tiakiwai, s.-j. (2010). perspectives on the use of embryos in research. alternative: an international journal of indigenous peoples, 6(1), 54-65. hudson, m., roberts, m., smith, l., tiakiwai, s.-j., & hemi, m. (2012). the art of dialogue with indigenous communities in the new biotechnology world. new genetics and society, 31(1), 11-24. kinaston, r. l., buckley, h. r., & gray, a. (2013). diet and social status on taumako, a polynesian outlier in the southeastern solomon islands. american journal of physical anthropology, 151(4), 589-603. lilomaiava-doktor, s. (2009). beyond "migration": samoan population movement (malaga) and the geography of social space (vā). the contemporary pacific, 21(1), 1-32. mason, c., & rawlings-sanaei, f. (2014). introduction: where is the narrative around academic migration? in c. mason & f. rawlings-sanaei (eds.), academic migration, discipline, knowledge and pedagogical practice: voices from the asia-pacific (pp. 1-9). springer. mila-schaaf, k., & hudson, m. 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(2016). relating to va: re-viewing the concept of relationships in pasifika education in aotearoa new zealand. alternative: an international journal of indigenous peoples, 12(2), 190-202. doi:10.20507/alternative.2016.12.2.7 sanga, k. (2008). ideals and ideas underlying the leadership development framework of leadership pacific. paper presented at the wellington pacific leadership symposium, victoria university of wellington, new zealand. sanga, k. (2017). leadership development through friendship and storying. in u. l. va'ai & a. casimira (eds.), relational hermeneutics: decolonising the mindset and the pacific itulagi (pp. 101-113). university of the south pacific press/pacific theological college. sanga, k., johannson-fua, s., nabobo-baba, u., & reynolds, m. (2020). the keynote-asstoried-discussion: a pacific departure. international education journal: comparative perspectives, 19(2), 8-19. sanga, k., & reynolds, m. (2019). melanesian tok stori in leadership development: ontological and relational implications for donor-funded programmes in the western pacific. international education journal: comparative perspectives, 17(4), 11-26. sanga, k., reynolds, m., paulsen, i., spratt, r., & maneipuri, j. (2018). a tok stori about tok stori: melanesian relationality in action as research, leadership and scholarship. global comparative education, 2(1), 3-19. suaalii‐sauni, t., & fulu‐aiolupotea, s. m. (2014). decolonising pacific research, building pacific research communities and developing pacific research tools: the case of the talanoa and the faafaletui in samoa. asia pacific viewpoint, 55(3), 331-344. doi:10.1111/apv.12061 thaman, k. h. (2009). towards cultural democracy in teaching and learning with specific references to pacific island nations (pins). international journal for the scholarship of teaching and learning, 3(2), 6. vaioleti, t. (2006). talanoa research methodology: a developing position on pacific research. waikato journal of education, 12, 21-34. burkell & regan final before ts correspondence address: jaquelyn burkell, faculty of information & media studies, western university, london, on, n6a 5b9; email: jburkell@uwo.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 expression in the virtual public: social justice considerations in harvesting youth online discussions for research purposes jacquelyn burkell western university, canada priscilla regan george mason university, usa abstract information posted by youth in online social media contexts is regularly accessed, downloaded, integrated, and analyzed by academic researchers. the practice raises significant social justice considerations for researchers including issues of representation and equitable distribution of risks and benefits. use of this type of data for research purposes helps to ensure representation in research of the voices of (sometimes marginalized) youth who participate in these online contexts, at times discussing issues that are also under-represented. at the same time, youth whose data are harvested are subject (often without notice or consent) to the risks associated with this research, while receiving little if any direct benefit from the work. these risks include the potential loss of online social community as well as threats to participant rights and wellbeing. this paper explores the tension between the social justice benefit of representation and considerations that would suggest caution, the latter including inequitable distribution of research-related costs and benefits, and the traditional ethics concerns of participant autonomy and privacy in the context of youth participation in online discussions. in the final section, we propose guidelines and considerations for the conduct of online social media research to assist researchers to balance and respect representational and participant rights or wellbeing considerations, especially with youth. keywords youth; social media; social justice; research introduction online discussion groups, especially those involving youth, provide a rich source of naturalistic data for research (jowett, 2015). research use of these data raises social justice considerations including issues of representation and jacquelyn burkell & priscilla regan studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 398 equitable distribution of risks, benefits, and harms. research ethics addresses some of these issues, albeit with particular emphasis on the protection of individual research participants; other social justice considerations fall outside of research ethics issues or are in tension with them. in this paper, we consider the social justice implications of research that uses data harvested from youth social media. we begin by analyzing the risks and benefits of this type of research from a social justice perspective, highlighting the tension between representation and respect for participant rights and wellbeing. in the next section of the paper, we discuss the guidance provided in research ethics guidelines for researchers considering the harvesting of social media data for research purposes, focusing on the ethical considerations that are raised in these guidelines. we follow this analysis with discussion of specific examples of research that has used harvested social media data, with specific attention to the social justice issues that are raised by these studies. finally, we outline best practices and considerations that support ethical decisions about research involving the harvesting of social media information that are informed by social justice principles. a quick google search for discussion or support groups reveals support groups for transgender teens, pro-anorexia discussion groups, and support groups for those living with depression. there are also myriad online social spaces for group discussions of a more prosaic nature, such as reactions to and recommendations for books. some groups require registration and sign-in to access conversations, while others do not. some groups are moderated, while in other cases content and interactions are not moderated. some discussion group interactions are archived and potentially searchable on the open web, while in other cases content is accessible only in real time. participants in online discussion groups typically use nicknames or usernames and do not provide other personal (particularly identifying) information; however, in the case of groups that require registration, profile information may be available. online discussion groups are a valuable social resource, particularly for individuals who are members of marginalized populations. these groups provide venues for personal expression, exploration, and support that may not otherwise be available. they often involve discussions among individuals who lack support from those immediately present in their lives as they deal with sensitive issues that often lead to shame or bullying. in these discussions, narratives of personal stories provide not only a means of personal recovery but also a route to social and political change (costa et al., 2012). often referred to as support groups, these venues for online discussion empower members through sharing similar experiences, fears, and hopes and potentially revealing the social and structural factors that constrain their lives and the inequities that need to be addressed. for example, morrow and weiser (2012) point out that “the social and structural aspects of mental health continue to be marginalized as do the voices of people with lived experiences of mental distress” (p. 30). online social spaces are also expression in the virtual public studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 399 important venues for political organization and exploration of political attitudes (middaugh et al., 2017), enabling quick organization and real-world political action (yang, 2007). these spaces, and the interactions within them, are particularly important for youth who live under conditions of political oppression (bowe & blom, 2010, 2011; tufekci & wilson, 2012) and for whom exposure could entail significant risk. research that engages with the voices and stories (costa et al., 2012; de ridder & van bauwel, 2015; trevisan & reilly, 2014) of members of marginalized groups is important as a means of achieving social justice for these groups, but the research methods used also need to respect and protect both the group as a communal unit and the individuals within it. it is also important to note that the goal of representation cannot effectively be reached if researchers do not fully understand the content they are analyzing or the context in which it is produced. thus, researchers must guard against engaging in “helicopter research” (minasny & fiantis, 2018) in which researchers “come in to small communities, take their samples, and leave” (evans, 2018), with little understanding of the communities they study and without intention or action to ensure that the results of the research benefit the community members under observation (evans, 2018). although the term helicopter research is typically applied to international research with vulnerable communities, the same principles are relevant to outsider academic researchers who harvest data from online communities without benefit of extended engagement, negotiation, and deep attention to community values and rights. although concerns about helicopter research are increasingly present in the research ethics context, the question that more commonly determines the acceptability of harvesting social media discussions is whether the group discussions are public or private in nature. research ethics guidelines typically allow observation of behaviour in public spaces, so long as those being observed are not identified, and have no reasonable expectation of privacy. if these conditions are not met, research may be allowed under stricter conditions that include notice to participants and securing of consent. the question of whether online spaces are public or private is often contested, and online discussions occupy an apparently liminal position between public and private exchange. as a result it is often unclear whether participants hold an expectation of privacy in their group communications. from a social justice perspective, the implications for the conduct of research are complex. representation is a key social justice principle, and from that perspective participation in research, and therefore representation in the results of research and the knowledge that flows from these results, is of significant positive value. allowing covert research undermines the autonomy of participants, but may increase participation, and thus representation. by contrast, when research is acknowledged and participant consent is required, autonomy is supported but research participation, and thus representation, may suffer. moreover, requiring notice and consent jacquelyn burkell & priscilla regan studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 400 (which by definition makes research overt) can undermine the perceived safety of online social spaces, thus reducing the social value of these spaces that these individuals and groups have developed for their own purposes. the ethical issues regarding research using online discussion groups are even more problematic when youth may be participants in the groups. one issue is that minors are in many cases deemed unable to consent for themselves (e.g., health canada, 2019), in some cases because they are presumed to lack capacity (canadian institutes of health research et al., 2018, article 3.3), and research ethics guidelines typically require parental consent for participation, often in conjunction with youth assent for data collection (canadian institutes of health research et al., 2018, article 3.3). seeking parental consent for participation, however, may raise privacy issues for youth, especially as online groups offer a venue to discuss topics about which youth may not be comfortable speaking with parents or teachers (see e.g., taylor, 2008). if data collection is publicly acknowledged and thus could require consent, that may have the effect of limiting youth participation in these important discussions. a second issue is that youth are very sensitive to the perceived privateness of seemingly public spaces (boyd & marwick, 2011), and as participants in those spaces may have different conceptions of their interactions, and different standards and practices with respect to appropriate practices within those spaces, compared to adults (berriman & thompson, 2015). de ridder and van bauwel (2015) refer to social network sites as “extended places… strongly connected to particular offline local places of which they are often an extension” (p. 782). relatedly, youth often employ online discussions as a forum for trying on personas, presenting different selves, and discovering the self with which they are most comfortable (regan & steeves, 2010; steeves & regan, 2014), and observation within those spaces could compromise this important developmental exploration. for example, selfridge and mitchell (2020) found that youth living on or close to the street experimented on social media in expressing responses to the death of a friend of family member, particularly in terms of demonstrating grief or hope, with navigating difficult relationships, and with supporting each other. a third issue involves youth’s somewhat limited understanding of the role of researchers and the implications of being observed, especially in settings such as online discussions where researchers somewhat disappear into the background. in analyzing three co-research settings with youth, collier (2019) found that the presence of researchers became normalized, that “children did not appear to imagine audiences beyond me,” (p. 48), and “negotiating ongoing consent was tricky, primarily because they did not see the need for it” (p. 51). this process of normalization is also likely in studies such as hung’s (2020), in which the author was invited to join a group of 1618 year old boys on xbox’s live’s party chat as they discussed a range of issues, such as abortion rights, as well as “intimate and personal issues, such as romantic relationships, quarrels with parents, and expectations for the expression in the virtual public studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 401 future” (p. 600).1 finally, there is the risk of compromised anonymity and confidentiality for individuals whose online information is harvested, with or without explicit consent. if there is the possibility that youth can be reidentified, then that digital record could affect psychological and social development, future life options (burkell & regan, 2018; regan & steeves, 2010), and even personal safety. these traditional research ethics concerns address some but not all of the relevant social justice issues, and there are some differences between the two sets of concerns. hoffman and jonas (2017) argue that “justice occupies a precarious position in the history of research policy and ethics …[and] has received comparatively less explicit attention than other values, especially informed consent and beneficence” (p. 4). they point out that, oftentimes, social justice concerns in the research context are framed in terms of the selection of subjects, distribution of risks and benefits, and inclusion of vulnerable or marginal groups (p. 5). research accessing online discussions broadens representation and inclusion of hard to reach or otherwise invisible subjects, and may be able partially to correct for a “lack of attention to the needs and issues of populations currently marginalized in society” (fassinger & morrow, 2013, p. 69). in analyzing research involving online disability group interactions, trevisan and reilly (2014) found that the analysis of facebook content was instrumental in providing “disabled users with a lens to interpret the effects of policy measures and participate in relevant conversations,” that sharing experiences was “a fundamental step in the creation of group identity and collective agency” (p. 1135), and that the omission of discussions on semi-public facebook pages from the research record “would have in fact equated to the ‘silencing’ of disabled people’s voices” (p. 1137). lyons et al. (2013), borrowing from earlier work by crethar et al. (2008), argue that research can contribute to social justice when it promotes the principles of equity, access, participation, and harmony for culturally diverse populations, and the use of online social media data for research purposes can meet these considerations. to some extent, online discussion groups may select populations “because they are available, are in compromised positions or are manipulable.” but at the same time selection is “for reasons directly related to the problem being studied” (pieper & thomson, 2013, p. 102). research ethics requirements for notice and consent support participant choice with respect to data harvesting. at the same time, however, if participants are aware that data are being harvested this can have the impact of limiting participation in the research or in the online contexts from which discussions are harvested. researchers must pay careful attention to the autonomy of the participants whose data they wish to access so that they do 1 hung (2020) became acquainted with members of the group while working on a curriculum project at their high school (p. 599). he notes, “i received irb approval from my research institution and was given the participants’ consent to record their xbl chats” (p. 600) but does not provide further details. jacquelyn burkell & priscilla regan studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 402 not become “willing participants – even instigators – in reinforcing posthumanist systems of surveillance on populations we wish to support or observe” (luka et al., 2017, pp. 4-5). in order that research using social media data can contribute to the social justice aim of representation while at the same time protecting participant rights, researchers should not engage in helicopter science, but instead be sensitive to the culture of the community, enter the community with an open and inquiring attitude, and allow the research direction to emerge from the concerns of participants (fassinger & morrow, 2013, pp. 72-74). this requires a reflexive perspective that flexibly responds to the situation with attention to both research questions and the larger cultural context (luka et al, 2017, p. 30). again, however, this prolonged and more intense engagement with research participants will increase the intrusiveness of the research and thus its impact on the social ecology of the online environment. from a social justice position, an ethical framing of online research is not simply a private matter between the researcher and the subject monitored by a research ethics board, but necessitates a nuanced understanding of the users’ expectations of the online site and their experiences on the site, as well as the broader social and political context of the site and its purpose. research ethics guidance as research began to incorporate data from online discussion groups, research ethics boards (reb) were confronted with the questions of whether these projects required ethical review, and if so whether they should receive ethics approval. not surprisingly, rebs at different institutions came to varying conclusions for seemingly similar projects. national policy bodies responsible for ethical research standards began to review and revise their guidelines and requirements to account for internet research generally and particularly research involving online discussion groups. other guidelines emerged directly from the research community. the association of internet researchers (aoir), for example, issued guidelines in 2002 (ess & association of internet researchers ethics working committee, 2002), and provided updates and expansions in 2012 (markham & buchanan, 2012), and 2019 (franzke et al., 2019). the aoir guidelines identify the following six fundamental ethical guidelines: • the greater the vulnerability of the community and participants, the greater the obligation of the researcher to protect the community and participants; • because harm is determined based on the context, ethical decision making requires practical judgment attentive to the specific context; • all digital information involves individual persons even if that is not immediately apparent; expression in the virtual public studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 403 • the rights of subjects must be balanced with the social benefits of the research; • ethical issues arise in all stages of the research process; and • ethical decision-making is a deliberative process requiring consultation with many people and resources. (paraphrased from markham & buchanan, 2012, pp. 3-4). these guidelines raise key questions that researchers and ethics boards should consider when determining the ethicality of online research. they also address broader social justice considerations. rebs are informed by ethical guidelines in making their decisions; these guidelines, however, are not prescriptive but instead provide an interpretive framework for temporally and geographically situated individual ethical decisions. social justice considerations, especially those informed by virtue ethics and feminist ethics of care, “stress context and situation rather than abstract principles, and dialogue and negotiation rather than rules and autonomy” (edwards & mauthner, 2002, p. 20). thus, different rebs can reach different decisions regarding the ethicality of research when they are working under different ethics guidelines, and even when working under the same guidelines if local interpretations of the guidelines differ. despite the possibilities for different interpretations, all ethics guidelines recognize that vulnerable populations should be approached with special care. our current focus on online discussion groups involves a number of generally recognized vulnerabilities including those related to minors, politically or socially sensitive subjects, women, groups with special needs, illnesses, or emotional states (franzke et al., 2019, p. 17), which heightens the importance of social justice considerations during all stages of the research process. as luka et al. (2017) point out, with an ethics of care perspective, “being deeply aware of our own identity and agency is critical to being able to understand marginalized subjects without romanticizing or appropriating their experiences” (p. 31). a similar concern, discussed above as a concern about helicopter research, is the responsibility of researchers to avoid “inserting themselves into vulnerable communities to collect data, and abruptly leaving without returning findings to, or meaningfully impacting the lives of intended and unintended participants” (guishard et al., 2018, p. 9) research ethics guidelines such as those put forward by the association of internet researchers (franzke et al., 2019) offer insight into specific characteristics that signal a private, rather than public, online discussion. these include: • a closed discussion group that requires membership requirement for joining the discussion; • a sensitive topic of discussion; • terms of reference or privacy policies that limit research use of the data, or that specifically state the content will not be used for purposes beyond the immediate interaction or discussion. jacquelyn burkell & priscilla regan studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 404 circumstances that are seen to mitigate against an expectation of privacy include: • terms of reference or privacy policies that explicitly allow the use of the data for research purposes; • open discussion groups that do not require membership to join; • searchable archives of the discussions, particularly if these are available on the open web. the nature of public and private contexts is increasingly contested in a number of domains and questions arising in online discussion groups are not unique. spicker (2011) points out that disputes about ethics and social justice of covert research (i.e., research that is not declared to participants) focus on whether the circumstances are truly public, questioning the assumption that “doing things in a public place is public because it is visible” (p. 125). instead, spicker argues, “what defines something as public is not the geographical location where it happens, but the nature of the act” (2011, p. 125). one important research ethics consideration is participant anonymity. ethics guidelines highlight the need to ensure that participants cannot be identified. in the context of research use of online social media data, these guidelines are often interpreted to require anonymization of pseudonyms, in recognition of the facts that enduring pseudonyms can be meaningful identities in their own right and where attached to a significant amount of personal information including extended communications, have the potential to lead to real-world identification. another concern, less often addressed in research ethics considerations, is that online searches could locate material quoted from online discussion groups, and thus identify the source (both where the material appeared, and who produced the material), thereby compromising participant anonymity. in order to provide a more concrete understanding of how these ethical issues and social justice considerations arise in different research projects and how researchers account for these issues, in the next section we explore several examples. we selected these as illustrative of the types of research that rely on harvested social media data, and we focused on similar examples that provide contrasting approaches to research ethics and social justice considerations. all studies, by virtue of their publication, offer voice to participants, and thus meet at least minimally the social justice goal of representation. the studies differ, however, in how other social justice and research ethics considerations were addressed. all received ethics approval, although the details of such approval are vague given article length restrictions. this discussion is not intended to reflect on the validity of that approval or the ethical conduct of the research or researchers. our goal here is to highlight the types of research using online discussion groups as data that have been considered to satisfy ethical and social justice guidelines (often at different points in time), and to review these decisions in light of current guidelines and practices. expression in the virtual public studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 405 examples siriaraya et al. (2011) examined empathetic communication in one online discussion group: teenhelp.org. their study is in many ways typical of research involving online discussion group interactions. they analyzed posts to the public and anonymous moderated discussion group, accessible without a login requirement. posts were archived in a searchable database, and researchers downloaded for analysis messages from the earliest threads in the archived discussion. although they do not identify the dates for these interactions, this suggests that these posts occurred in the relatively distant past, since archiving would generally be reserved for older and inactive discussions. in order to protect the anonymity of those whose postings were analyzed, usernames were not reported. moreover, the published research did not use direct quotes from individual posts, but instead reported the frequency of various coded characteristics (e.g., empathetic communication) in the downloaded posts. subrahmanyam et al. (2004) conducted research involving online discussion groups taking place much earlier than those examined by siriaraya et al. (2011). it is also possible that subrahmanyam et al. (2004) collected their data before the aoir released their 2002 guidelines, and as a result their work could not have been informed by those guidelines. these researchers analyzed a 30-minute transcript from a moderated teen chat room to gain insight into the processes through which sexuality and identity are constructed. the researchers used a participant-observer approach to record chat room interactions. one researcher gained access to the group through an internet provider, following a process identical to that recommended to parents who were providing access to the group for their children; thus, it appears that some type of membership or sign-on was required to access the group. the group was moderated. no mention is made of seeking consent from the participants, nor did the researchers approach the moderator(s) to obtain approval for data collection. as required by the local reb, the researcher collecting the data did not contribute to the online discussion, nor did she respond to any messages directed to her. also, as required by the reb, user names were replaced by pseudonyms in the transcript used for analysis, and in reports of the data. the analysis was qualitative, and the published results reproduced individual statements and extended interactions between two or more discussion group participants. in neither example were participants informed about the research, thus there was no risk that the research disturbed the value of the online communities for participants. in terms of public versus private space, the research conducted by siriaraya et al. (2011) presents fewer concerns, as the data analyzed were drawn from a publicly available historical archive. subrahmanyam et al. (2004), by contrast, had much better opportunity to gain a contextualized understanding of the participant discussions by virtue of the researcher’s extended engagement in the discussion group, and the collection jacquelyn burkell & priscilla regan studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 406 of data in real-time as opposed to being downloaded from archives. at the same time, these advantages with respect to a fuller understanding seem to be disadvantages from the perspective of participant autonomy, because the research process involved greater (albeit covert) incursion into the online social environment. this is especially concerning given that access to the group required a sign-on of some description, which would tend to increase participant privacy expectations. both studies protected participants from the risk of re-identification through substitution of user names with pseudonyms. the analysis conducted by siriaraya et al. (2011) offers further protection in this respect because no direct quotes were included in the report. the direct quotes reported by subrahmanyam et al. (2004) seem to present a greater risk of re-identification, and thus a greater threat to participant anonymity and confidentiality; however, if the discussions were not archived (as the research report suggests, but does not confirm), then this risk can be discounted. covert observation of online interaction without participant consent or even notice to participants would seem in many cases to undermine autonomy. as indicated above, the practice is allowed under research ethics guidelines if it is deemed that the venue is public in nature and the observation and report do not present any threat to participant anonymity. conducting research under these conditions potentially increases the value of the research by minimizing artificiality and reactivity (calvey, 2008). if participants are not aware that they are being observed, such observation cannot disturb the value of online social interactions, nor restrict participation or speech, unless the covert researcher participates in those interaction, a practice which raises other ethical issues (see e.g., brotsky & giles, 2007). some data suggest that young people may easily become accustomed to observation by researchers, and express limited interest in negotiation ongoing consent once they have agreed to being observed (see e.g., collier, 2019). if such accommodation is easily achieved, then even overt research observation might only minimally disturb the social environment. however, there are practical difficulties with obtaining consent. in online discussion groups, users are typically identified by pseudonym and no other identifying information is available. in these circumstances it is difficult to contact participants off-discussion for consent. if the analysis uses archived discussion records, the individuals included in the discussion may not be participants at the time the research is conducted, so the researchers might not be able to reach them for consent. additionally, the nature of discussion is interactive, and participants often quote one another in responses, making it difficult or impossible to collect data if consent was received from some but not all participants. as a result of these considerations, researchers using online discussion groups as data rarely seek consent from participants. a study by høybye et al. (2005) demonstrates just how intrusive the process of seeking informed consent can be. their research involved participant observation of a small online cancer support group. existing and incoming members were approached for consent to collect data, and expression in the virtual public studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 407 participation in the group was restricted to those who consented. fewer than half of the original members consented to the research, and many potential new members were also unable to participate because they would not consent to the research. in this case, participants had full autonomy with respect to the research use of their online discussions. there are downsides to this approach, however, including the concern that participants may change their behaviour in response to the knowledge that they are being observed, the potential for coercion affecting participants who wanted to join the group after the research was started, and the reality that the nature and conduct of the research effectively limited participation in the group during the duration of the research to those who consented, thus excluding others from any benefits associated with participation in a group that had, until the research began, imposed no consent requirements on participants. a potentially less intrusive approach is to seek consent from group moderators rather than individual participants. evans et al. (2012) used this approach in a study examining social support available from archived online discussion groups. various moderated discussion groups were considered as sites of data collection. written permission to collect the data was sought from group moderators. in this case, moderators were viewed as community gatekeepers, and by gaining their consent the researcher achieved a measure of access to and participation from the community consistent with social justice claims (lyons et al., 2013). while this approach goes some way to respecting the autonomy of participants with respect to the research use of their data, it effectively substitutes one decision proxy (the moderator) for another (the researcher/reb; although see pullman, 2002, for an argument in support of reb proxy consent). another approach is to establish whether participants similar to those being observed would in theory consent to the use of their data for research purposes. stevens et al. (2015) consulted about their planned research with members of a different group focused on similar issues rather than seeking consent from the group they were studying. seeking input on research use of data from a similarly situated community (lyons et al., 2013) is a creative way of ensuring a measure of autonomy while also allowing research participation from a potentially marginalized community, assuming the parallel community endorses it. another approach is to seek consent only for the use of potentially identifiable data in publications arising from the research (e.g., quotations), rather than seeking consent for data collection (see e.g., mulveen & hepworth, 2006). whether or not consent is sought from participants for the harvesting of data, it is important from a research ethics and social justice perspective that participant anonymity and confidentiality be protected. a variety of strategies should be used to protect data sources (i.e., individuals and the groups in which they are participating). these include providing pseudonyms for participant user names, and not providing specific information that identifies the group from which the data were harvested. further protection for jacquelyn burkell & priscilla regan studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 408 individual participants can be offered by eliminating all attributions for quotes, including pseudonyms (brotsky & giles, 2007). these measures may be sufficient if interactions are not available in online archives, but additional protection can be provided through a process of “fabrication, involving creative, bricolage-style transfiguration of original data into composite accounts or representational interactions” (markham, 2012, p. 334). where data are collected directly from online archives, researchers should consider conducting searches for quoted material to ensure that quotations cannot be traced back to the website and from there to individual participants. mulveen and hepworth (2006) employed this technique by entering random phrases taken from discussion on the site into standard search queries, ensuring that the website was not among the returned results (see also stevens et al., 2015). best practices and further considerations a scan of published studies that use online discussion groups as sources of data reveals a range of practices designed to preserve participant autonomy in the absence of full informed consent, and also allow representation of often marginalized voices. these include: • examination of the group terms and conditions, and any privacy policy associated with the group, to ensure that these do not suggest that research use of data is restricted or precluded; • limiting observation to those groups that do not require membership (i.e., groups that are open to the public); • removal of identifying information, including usernames and user ids, from published reports; • seeking approval from discussion group moderators for data collection; • canvassing participants in other online discussion groups addressing the same issue to determine if they would be comfortable having their own discussions mined for research purposes; • seeking post-hoc consent from participants who would be directly quoted in research reports; • conducting searches to ensure that quoted material cannot be linked back to a specific discussion group through search results. the social justice consideration of representing more groups and authentic voices in research and doing so with respect for the value of the group is a legitimate argument for undertaking research involving youth in online discussion groups, if the research actually benefits the group being studied. researchers should understand that there are costs to this type of research, and that the individuals and groups, who are often marginalized, bear these costs. these costs include undermining the social ecosystem and value of the online communities to individuals and communities as a whole, loss of autonomy for group members, and risk of compromised privacy. these costs expression in the virtual public studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 409 must be mitigated to the greatest extent possible, and weighed against benefits to determine whether research should be carried out. our analysis of the literature on research ethics and social justice, as well as of research involving online discussion groups, indicates that several aspects of using data from online discussion groups, especially those involving youth, need more thoughtful discussion and guidance. we discuss four of these below. first, researchers should respect the communities they are researching. there should be no helicopter research but instead engagement with the community and attention to the value of the research for the community. the research should not merely add to knowledge about the group researched, or to understanding online communities more generally, but should contribute to the greater good of the community being studied or the interests of that community – and these interests should be explicitly noted on an ethics application. additionally, researchers should take active responsibility for protecting the integrity of the community by minimizing intrusiveness. researchers should not participate in community discussions unless they are actually a member of the community and the community is cognizant of the research activities. covert research should only be considered if the research is contributing to the community in an explicit way and if an ethics board is convinced that both individual privacy and the integrity of the community will not be compromised. if research is overt, then the researcher must anticipate and minimize the impact on the community. for example, if the researcher seeks consent, what happens to those who do not consent? are they precluded from participating in the online discussion? if that is the case, the value of the research results is diminished and the costs to the individuals and groups are increased. the questions of consent and protection of autonomy as respects access to online discussions is a second issue in need of more thoughtful discussion and guidance. researchers should first examine the online group’s terms of service or any other expressions of community values that might indicate the space or interactions are private, and respect these. however, these are often silent on academic research or vague and confusing. as we discuss above, securing direct and a priori consent from all participants is difficult, especially as some members may be hard to find, which may undermine community and participation. the appropriateness of moderator approval also needs to be clarified. in some cases, moderators may indeed know group members well enough to speak on their behalf, but in other cases, especially where participation in the group is fluid, moderators may not have sufficient insight to give what might approximate informed consent. consent from moderators should not be a one-time action, but should involve moderators as active members of the research team with an ongoing responsibility to revoke approval of the research or to point out the limits of this form of approval. a third issue in need of clarification in using data from online discussion groups involves determining participants’ likely expectation of privacy. in jacquelyn burkell & priscilla regan studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 410 making this determination, intuitions and reasoning based on the understanding of public versus private in the offline world do not always translate well or directly to the online environment. in the offline world, people traditionally retain a degree of anonymity or at least a degree of practical obscurity as they traverse and interact in public spaces. in the online environment, the public/private distinction is blurred. we know that participants can have an impression of privacy online which would likely apply to online discussion groups in which participants assume they are opening themselves to a sympathetic community. this would certainly seem to indicate that they did not expect that their comments and interactions would be used for research purposes. protecting privacy in an online research environment is more difficult because of the increasing ease of reidentifiability, since an internet search could turn up the source of a specific quote if the discussion group is archived and searchable on the web. with the amount of available data and the analytical tools associated with big data, it is increasingly difficult to de-identify data in any meaningful way. four steps seem to mitigate the risks to privacy and reidentification: use data in aggregate, don’t use quotes; provide pseudonyms for user names; if quotes are to be used, especially if harvesting from an online archive, carry out searches to ensure that the source cannot be identified; and, consider a bricolage-style qualitative report that brings together multiple quotes in an overall picture (markham, 2012). finally, the use of archived group materials needs clarification. if researchers seek to download and analyze the archived content of membersonly online discussion groups then it is feasible to ask for consent from members for use of the data. members can see what they have said, evaluate whether they are willing to have that information used for research purposes, and give meaningful informed consent. if some members refuse, the removal of their data would change the nature of the sample but still allow the research to be conducted as long as direct statements of those who refuse, and references to those statements, are removed. if many members refuse, then it is obvious that the research should not proceed. if researchers seek to download and analyze archived content of open online discussion groups that are searchable on the open web then there may be a general perception that the discussion is public, and as a result participant anonymity and confidentiality are moot. in this case, rebs will often allow the research to go forward or require moderator approval. however, we believe that these practices may not be ethically appropriate, as the individuals in the group likely do not have an expectation that the discussions have been archived and are searchable. the current discussions about the right to be forgotten would come into play here, and to be consistent with the spirit of that right rebs should look at these cases more critically than they have in the past, and require additional protections so that members of the group are not easily identified, that pseudonyms are used, and that other measures are taken consistent with respect for persons and beneficence. expression in the virtual public studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 397-413, 2021 411 conclusion the use of online social media data produced by youth offers tremendous potential for insight, and researchers must be careful to attend to social justice issues as well as research ethics considerations in using these data for research purposes. in examining the research use of such data, two social justice issues arise, often in tension: the issue of representation, and the issue of respect for participant rights and wellbeing. researchers must be careful to balance these considerations in designing and conducting online research. when all is said, our final impressions are threefold: first, the use of these data can offer voice, in the research context, to populations that are typically not represented, and about issues that are not typically discussed in the research context; second, the use of data from online discussion groups without consent can undercut the respect for participant autonomy that is fundamental to research ethics; and third, for many participants, online discussion groups are important spaces for protected and valuable social interaction that may be disturbed by the presence of outsiders, including researchers. it is the responsibility of researchers to balance these considerations, working both to offer voice to marginalized communities while at the same time ensuring respect for participant communities, so that no harm comes to those communities, and that the cultural integrity of the communities are preserved. with respect to the issue of harm to the community, researchers must balance the push toward engagement and overtness in research (including securing informed consent) that is implicit in research ethics guidelines with the social justice consideration of the cost of interfering with the social ecosystem of the online community under study. in navigating online research where boundaries between public and private may seem to be blurred, we agree with guishard et al. 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(2014). young people and the social value of privacy. journal of information, communication and ethics in society, 12(4), 298-313. stevens, g., o’donnell, v. l., & williams, l. (2015). public domain or private data? developing an ethical approach to social media research in an inter-disciplinary project. educational research and evaluation, 21(2), 154-167. subrahmanyam, k., greenfield, p. m., & tynes, b. (2004). constructing sexuality and identity in an online teen chat room. journal of applied developmental psychology, 25(6), 651-666. taylor, c. g. (2008). counterproductive effects of parental consent in research involving lgbttiq youth: international research ethics and a study of a transgender and two-spirit community in canada. journal of lgbt youth, 5(3), 34-56. trevisan, f., & reilly, p. (2014). ethical dilemmas in researching sensitive issues online: lessons from the study of british disability dissent networks. information, communication & society, 17(9), 1131-1146. tufekci, z., & wilson, c. (2012). social media and the decision to participate in political protest: observations from tahrir square. journal of communication, 62(2), 363-379. yang, k. w. (2007). organizing myspace: youth walkouts, pleasure, politics, and new media. educational foundations, 21, 9-28. pannett fg june 30 16 correspondence address: lorraine pannett, lothlorien, collas simon, torteval, guernsey, gy8 0lg; email: lorpannett@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 180-184, 2016 book review rightlessness in an age of rights: hannah arendt and the contemporary struggles of migrants gündoğdu, ayten. (2015). new york: oxford university press. isbn 9780199370412 (cloth) cdn$99.00; isbn 9780199370429 (paper) cdn$29.95. 314 pages. lorraine pannett independent researcher, guernsey ayten gündoğdu’s book addresses two highly-topical, complex and contested fields of study: human rights and migration. these fields intersect with other problematic areas and struggles, for example between universality and national sovereignty. gündoğdu’s angle of vision lends the work particular interest, as she analyses the problems of statelessness through the lens of hannah arendt’s political theory and arendt’s conception of human being. although arendt is a familiar figure in discussions of statelessness, gündoğdu’s approach is to read arendt both with and against the grain to rethink some of the dilemmas of human rights. she treats arendt’s work as a living document, reinterpreting and reapplying it by bringing it into dialogue with work by other scholars as well as historical and recent events (but not including the current refugee settlement calamities in the mediterranean, european union and elsewhere). gündoğdu engages with the work of arendt to analyse and go beyond “the perplexing persistence of rightlessness in an age of rights” (gündoğdu, 2015, p. 11, emphasis in original). she treats these perplexities as genuine dilemmas, not aberrations or symptoms of bad faith: for example, the dilemma inherent in universal declarations of human rights is that these rights rely on nation states for implementation. human rights become frustrated because they are unenforceable. gündoğdu’s aporetic, socratic, approach book review studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 180-184, 2016 181 does not offer an absolute resolution to the perplexities of human rights, but seeks ways of thinking and questioning that take us beyond the divide between rights on paper and rights in practice. she proposes that the way to go beyond this impasse is via arendt’s “right to have rights” (p. 21). this shifts the question from asking “what grounds human rights to…what guarantees, and reinvents them” (p. 22), and emphasizes “the political practices of founding human rights” (p. 22, emphasis in original). arendt analysed the way that statelessness challenged the absolutes of the rights of man: their universality and enforceability were lost when people became stateless. this convinced her that rights were not inalienable, “natural” rights. consequently, we are left searching for a new authority for laws, rights, and institutions. for gündoğdu, this new authority cannot be divine or an endowment of nature. she suggests that, for arendt, “human rights do not precede and ground politics and citizenship” (gündoğdu, 2015, p. 40). it is the other way round: human beings and human rights come into existence only within a political community. for arendt, personhood is a legal artefact, which is at risk in the context of asylum and migration. this is a challenging proposition. i understand social construction as rarely total – otherwise there would be none of the reinvention that arendt suggests is indispensible for safeguarding and expanding human rights. community is necessary for human beings to flourish, but conceiving of political community as a condition of human being seems limited and limiting. understanding others as always already human is important because it shapes our interpersonal relations with those we encounter and our solidarity with people both close and at a distance. importantly, many of the asylum seekers and refugees i met during my own phd research and work with refugee organizations did not wait for others to deem them human (pannett, 2011). for elizabeth, one of my participants, “an asylum seeker is a human being. an asylum seeker is a person. an asylum seeker has got feelings, emotions, and i feel that even if we are asylum seekers we have the right to be treated humanely, humanely.” the asylum seekers i encountered already recognize themselves as human. for this reason, it is difficult to accept without argument arendt’s view, as emphasized by gündoğdu, that human beings are made by their public political practice. it may be that a different human being is made through public acts and utterances, through being part of a political community, but if we are concerned with human rights and we do not recognize migrants as human, how do we recognize them? gündoğdu rethinks arendt’s arguments about the social and the political, reading arendt against arendt. according to gündoğdu’s reading, politics denotes practices of enacting freedom and equality, beginning something new and interrupting practices taken for granted. it is about new practices rather than about issues or actors perceived as political or private. the political is contrasted with compassion, which seals people into victimhood, damaging their political agency and hindering practices “necessary for the continuous lorraine pannett studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 180-184, 2016 182 reinvention of human rights in response to new forms of injustice” (p. 57). stateless people are often dependent on “compassionate humanitarian” (p. 78) to provide subsistence needs. yet, while acts of compassion proliferate, there are many who are concerned that pity reproduces privilege and is the opposite of transversal solidarity. moreover, pity focuses on the suffering of the many; it does not recognize the singularity of migrants. even so, i believe that there must be a place for compassion: giving migrants warm coats, food or shelter so that they survive the winter and live to fight for their rights. of course, it is not enough, and here arendt’s emphasis on the importance of public debate and innovative ways of turning issues into matters of common concern is important. gündoğdu uses arendt’s reflections on statelessness to think through the perplexities of detention. detention deprives people of a political community that upholds their rights; it strips them of legal personhood and rights to action, opinion and speech. gündoğdu argues that, despite human rights conventions, legal personhood is of human construction and not an “inherent essence” (p. 92), hence its precarity when migrants lose the community that guarantees it. the notion of a “human person” (p. 92), entitled to rights, may be overridden by the fact of territorial sovereignty – border controls categorize and divide the universal into the entitled and unentitled. the unentitled then become dependent on the “charity or goodwill” (p. 94) of those in a position to bestow rights. another way in which legal personhood, equality and rights can be stripped away, demonstrating that they are not inherent, is through deportation. while the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits the return of refugees to countries where they may be in danger, is sometimes thought to be absolute, gündoğdu points out that, according to article 33(2) of the refugee convention, non-refoulement may not be followed in cases where the refugee is deemed to be a security risk or a danger to the community. gündoğdu considers in detail two legal cases heard by the european court of human rights against deportation from the uk. both claimants had aids, but the cases had very different outcomes. she analyses these cases to demonstrate arendt’s view that the rights of the stateless are “dependent on a capricious moral sentiment” (gündoğdu, 2015, p. 113), with any prolongation of their lives reliant on compassion rather than right. thus, attention to “suffering bodies” replaces discussions of equality and rights (p. 114). this gives rise to arbitrariness and produces the stateless as speechless, their voices replaced by those of “experts.” this is a pertinent observation, but it ignores the ethical perspective that fosters care for others: understanding that all human bodies have vulnerability in common. what difference might it make if, instead of compassion, we thought in terms of care: sentient activity in solidarity with those deprived of the right to have rights? book review studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 180-184, 2016 183 reflecting on the example of roma immigrants expelled from italy in 2007, gündoğdu foregrounds arendt’s argument that “the unmaking of legal personhood often goes hand in hand with the destruction of political and human understanding” (gündoğdu, 2015, p. 126-127). stateless people lose the context that gives them a place in the world and makes their actions and speech meaningful. arendt makes what gündoğdu acknowledges is a “controversial” analogy between statelessness in terms of the loss of a stable context for living and the condition of “savage tribes” who “live and die without leaving any trace, without having contributed anything to a common world” (p. 148). this raises the ethical question of whether a life lived without trace should be denied recognition as human. it ignores also the insights of disciplines such as anthropology, which have given glimpses of the density and meaning in lives that are distant from our own. we might say that lives in camps are thwarted in numerous ways, but many refugees make the best of their sensibilities and capacities even in such hostile surroundings. gündoğdu gives an example of this in describing the demolition of homes and businesses in and dispersal of refugees from ogujebe transit centre in 1998 (pp. 151-152) gündoğdu undertakes a detailed discussion of the demand for “papers for all” (p. 21), looking in particular at the french sans-papiers movement. she takes this as an example of an approach to human rights that relies for its validity on practical political interventions, and the way migrants position themselves as entitled to rights, rather than by reference to foundations. people declare their right to rights that have no prior authorization. she argues that modern revolutionaries have tended to invoke some form of extrapolitical absolute in order to validate the laws and rights that they introduce. arendt, on the other hand, suggests that acts of political founding derive their legitimacy from the political practices that they inspire. gündoğdu draws from the work of etienne balibar to propose that the principle at stake in arendt’s call for the right to have rights is “equaliberty,” the term which “foregrounds the inextricable link between equality and freedom in modern democracy” (gündoğdu, 2015, p. 167). human rights are authorized and universalized through practices that lead to new understandings of the connections between equality and freedom, and their dependence on each other. arendt’s concern is not with philosophical arguments that serve to found human rights, but with political foundings. freedom is understood as a political practice that brings into being the right it invokes. there is no external authority to whom we can appeal; it is only through public utterances that human beings can “reciprocally recognize each other as subjects entitled to human rights” (gündoğdu, 2015, p. 172). consequently, arendt gives a key role to action, including speech, in the ongoing (re)creation of human rights, bringing to the foreground not only new subjects and objects of rights, lorraine pannett studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 180-184, 2016 184 “new beginnings that break with the existing order”, but also new perplexities (p. 173). thus, gündoğdu heads her conclusion “the struggle remains undecided.” she demonstrates that we cannot take rights for granted – they have to be fought for, and fought for again, if they are to be kept and extended. many of gündoğdu’s case studies will be familiar to those who work on migration and human rights. what contribution is made by arendt’s perspective (with and against the grain) and especially her argument for the right to have rights? while the right to have rights resonates with an ethical concept of personhood, it is thin in comparison. being recognized as a person carries with it recognition as a person entitled to human rights. but being recognized as rights-bearing does not exhaust the attributes of personhood. the migrants i encountered in the course of my research want recognition of their sentience – their capacity for feeling, thought and meaningful action – which can be expressed and validated only through full inclusion in society. many of gündoğdu’s examples focus on struggles for specific rights rather than on people as the bearers of rights in general. working through gündoğdu’s detailed research helps to question assumptions and generates reflection on rights and the right to have rights. but, given the millions of people in camps, on the move, or with their free movement blocked, i wonder whether the right to have rights can become a matter of public concern and mobilize people as effectively as actually-existing movements around specific rights. references pannett, m. l. (2011). making a livable life in manchester: doing justice to people seeking asylum. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of manchester, manchester, uk. blithe & lanterman final feb 6 17 correspondence address: sarah jane blithe, department of communication studies, university of nevada – reno, 1664 n. virginia st., mail stop 0229, reno, nv, 89557; email: sblithe@unr.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 camouflaged collectives: managing stigma and identity at gun events sarah jane blithe university of nevada, usa jennifer l. lanterman university of nevada, usa abstract gun violence persists in the united states, claiming lives and escalating healthcare costs. this article seeks to contribute to social justice work on the “gun problem” by studying gun collectives. to understand gun culture and to identify gun violence reduction strategies, we study places where gun owners organize – legal (and sometimes illegal) settings that facilitate dialogue about gun issues. based on participant observation and collaborative event ethnography at gun shows and a private shooting party, this analysis presents findings about the practices gun collective members use to manage stigma. we conclude that when participants in gun events attempt to subvert core stigma through everyday stigma management practices, they effectively facilitate the unfettered exchange of potentially dangerous goods, promote the invisibility of oppressive structures, and normalize violence. keywords gun culture; social justice; gun violence; stigma; identity; firearms; collaborative event ethnography gun violence is a persistent social problem in the united states, yet national dialogue about gun violence frequently results in dichotomized, political debates about gun ownership (melzer, 2009). in this paper, we argue that reducing gun violence is a social justice issue, and that social justice scholars must engage in national discourses about guns in order to ultimately reduce gun violence. for this analysis, we turn our gaze to the organization of gun collectives, places where gun owners and gun culture are accessible, to begin to understand how “gun culture” and “gun owner identities” unfold. understanding gun collectives is an essential first step in untangling the divisive, life-and-death conflict currently taking place in the united states about guns. sarah jane blithe, jennifer l. lanterman studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 114 gun collectives are frequently stigmatized and membership and activities within gun collectives can be considered “dirty work” (ashforth & kreiner, 1999). tangling legal, illegal, controversial, and stigmatized actions together with political advocacy, gun collectives and gun collective members must grapple with a myriad of techniques to manage their identities. much of this identity work occurs through macro discourses about gun ownership; thus, studying gun collectives and the discourses that both permeate from and influence gun owners through a social justice lens is critical (dempsey et al., 2011). vendors, attendees, and other individuals related to gun events, such as people who rent space to gun shows, or people who provide advertising services, engage in similar discursive practices, which mutually reinforce one another in efforts to manage stigma. the co-constructed discourse serves to bond gun collective members together, even as many individuals view guns, gun laws and rights, and gun culture in different ways. taking a social justice approach to academic scholarship suggests a particular focus on creating transformative social change, “helping to build a better world” (dempsey et al., 2011, p. 257). social justice work “assumes that there is an urgent and immediate need to transform social and material relations. social justice scholarship brings with it a diagnosis and a call to action” (dempsey et al., 2011, p. 258). further, as social justice scholar larry frey described, social justice scholars try to make interventions in contexts in which racism, conflict, oppression, and cultural struggle occur (frey, in dempsey et al., 2011; see also broome, carey, de la garza, martin & morris, 2005). certainly, gun violence is an issue wrapped in racism, conflict, and cultural struggle. scholarship from a social justice perspective takes a transformative approach: intervening in discourse and, as mohan dutta argues, offering “entry points for engaging with the truths that are hidden or erased” (dutta, in dempsey et al., 2011, p. 259).1 our analysis is an attempt to uncover some hidden and erased discourses within gun collectives, in an effort to contribute to the larger social justice agenda of reducing gun violence. politicians, public health advocates, and outraged citizens have lobbied for and endorsed efforts to curb gun violence in the united states. to date, success has been limited for many reasons. one reason is that the relationship between “firearms and their use in homicide… is complex and obviously involves cultural factors” (editorial, 2007, p. 1403). cultural understandings about firearms and firearm use are necessary to better understand why firearms are used to effect violence. however, gun culture and socialization are very difficult to study because the issue of gun ownership is tangled up in discourses of individual rights, laws, and stigma. further, members of gun collectives are vastly different in their relationships to guns, in their opinions about gun control, and particularly in their gun use habits (melzer, 2009). 1 bud goodall, a communication social justice scholar claims “intervention in discourse is our job” (dempsey et al., 2011, p. 264). camouflaged collectives studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 115 one approach to studying gun culture and socialization is through gun organizations, where individual members collectively identify with some shared values and practices. this paper is part of a larger project aimed at understanding gun culture in an effort to identify effective gun violence reduction strategies. a first step in this effort was to identify places where gun owners organize – legal (and sometimes illegal) settings that facilitate dialogue about gun issues. to situate this study, we first provide background information on gun collectives and firearm violence. next, we examine scholarship on stigmatized organizations and the practices organizational members used to manage core stigma, including privacy, secrecy, and false transparency. then, we discuss our use of collaborative event ethnography as a method of data collection, and present our findings about the practices gun collective members used to manage stigma. we conclude that when participants in gun events (i.e., vendors and attendees) attempt to subvert core stigma through discursive stigma management practices, they effectively facilitate the unfettered exchange of potentially dangerous goods, promote the invisibility or oppressive structures, and normalize violence. gun collectives and stigma gun collectives, firearm events, and even dialogue about gun ownership are rife with stigma. particularly because of the association of guns with violence, gun collectives must manage the stigma that is often attached to guns. gun shows, in particular, are often considered as a problematic area in debates about firearms and violence. associations between firearms and violence are not unwarranted: the united states has the highest rates of homicide and firearm homicide rates of all industrialized democracies (editorial, 2007). mass shootings are far more common in the united states than in any other high-income country, and are often committed with legally acquired firearms (brent, miller, loeber, mulvey & birmaher, 2013). for example, the shooters in the columbine high school mass shooting had a friend legally purchase some of their firearms from a gun show without a background check, taking advantage of what is known as the “gun show loophole” (kirk, gilmore & wiser, 2015); the shooter in the aurora, colorado, movie theater attack purchased his guns legally at three different gun stores (castillo, 2012). in addition to the cost of human life, gun violence in the united states is expensive. the annual cost of medical care for firearm-related injuries exceeds $2.3 billion (corlin, 2002) and more than $27.3 billion when both medical costs and loss of productivity are calculated (max & rice, 1993). of critical concern is the strong link between firearm violence and high rates of firearm ownership. while we do not wish to imply that all gun ownership results in violence, the connection between firearm ownership and firearm violence is important to flesh out (ott, aoki & dickinson, 2011), sarah jane blithe, jennifer l. lanterman studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 116 particularly because only nine percent of privately owned firearms are registered around the world (karp, 2007). the united states has a very high rate of private firearm ownership, and also extremely high rates of gun violence. the link between gun ownership and gun violence suggests that studying gun ownership is an important step in studying gun violence. gun-oriented organizations are sometimes forced to engage in hidden practices (scott, 2013) because their businesses face frequent opposition. guns shows often attract protesters and must deal with petitions to shut down their businesses, particularly in locations with high-profile shootings (parker, 2012; yee, 2013). recently, for example, florida’s new orlando gun show scheduled george zimmerman, former neighborhood watchman who was acquitted of murdering 17-year-old treyvon martin, to sign autographs at the show. the scheduled appearance drew intense community criticism and the host facility, the majestic, denied the new orlando gun show the space, forcing the organization to find another location for the show (buchanon, brown & murphy, 2014; ober, 2014). in another example, the saratoga arms fair, a new york gun collective, drew immense pressure to postpone their gun show after the nearby newtown, connecticut elementary school shooting. the owner opened the show to protesters, counter protesters, and intense media scrutiny. one attendee applauded the organizer for “not giving into the pressure” (yee, 2013. p. 1). another explained, “i feel we’re kind of persecuted…gun owners are blamed for certain things. we’ve been under attack for a long time, and we’ve been framed for things” (yee, 2013. p. 1). although the show hosted a record number of attendees, the collective must renew its license and permit annually, and is subject to ever-present legislation which would make the entire show, or the sale of specific items in the show, illegal (yee, 2013). the national rifle association (nra), the largest and most visible gun organization in the united states, has received intense media exposure and is considered highly contentious (elsbach & bhattacharya, 2001). as melzer (2009) describes it, the nra is a “four-million-member conservative social movement organization (smo) and political lightning rod” (p. 1). although it originally organized primarily to provide gun safety training, it has evolved into the highly public face of opposition to any restriction on firearms. the nra’s uncompromising stance on gun and ammunition control is the defining characteristic of its identity, which can cause controversy for nra members and nonmembers (elsbach & bhattacharya, 2001). in recent years, the nra has been engaged in a heavily covered battle about legislation to ban assault weapons, which are sold at most gun shows and used in many shooting ranges. because the national debate about gun ownership is so contentious, gun organizations face different constraints than other organizations. the assumption that gun events can be dangerous adds to the pressure sponsoring organizations experience. recent tragedies at gun events, such as the case of an eight-year-old boy who accidentally shot and killed himself with an uzi at camouflaged collectives studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 117 a gun show in 2008, a nine-year-old girl who accidentally shot and killed her gun range instructor with an uzi in august of 2014, and the death of american sniper author chris kyle, who was shot to death at a gun range in 2013, are reflective of the potentially dangerous conditions that exist at events involving firearms and ammunition (berman, 2014; lavietes, 2011). for these reasons, although gun events are typically highly publicized, organizers must also manage aspects of their business in relation to controversy. the notion of organizational stigma stems from goffman’s (1963) work on individual stigma, and describes negative judgments that are applied to an organization. hudson (2008) describes core stigma to describe the unshakable taint some organizations experience by their very existence. for core stigmatized organizations, routines, attributes, outputs, customers, or purpose carry enough stigma to make legitimacy impossible. for these organizations, complete social acceptance is an impossibility. examples of core stigmatized organizations identified in the academic literature include men’s bathhouses (hudson, 2008; elwood, greene & carter, 2003), brothels (blithe & wolfe, 2016; wolfe & blithe, 2015), or white power organizations (dobratz, 2001; futrell & simi, 2004; simi & futrell, 2009). the very nature of these organizations induces outside stigma. hudson (2008) also describes event stigma, to explain the stigma attached to organizations as the result of a specific event, such as the 1989 exxon valdez or the 2010 bp oil spills. in cases of event stigma, organizations suffer a spoiled image as a result of the event (hudson, 2008). organizations that experience event stigma engage in practices to address the stigma associated with that event, such as a public relations campaign, in order to survive. gun collectives experience both core stigma and event stigma. they are core stigmatized, rife with political controversy, illegal activities, and extensive legislation to set boundaries around their operations. however, gun collectives are also subject to repeated event stigma. individual or mass shootings – particularly shootings in surprising or public places – carry event stigma that attaches to gun collectives. because these events are so frequent, the event stigma attached to gun collectives constantly reinforces the core stigma. gun collectives become further entrenched in stigma, polarization about gun issues is reified, and, as a result, these organizations retreat into a shadowy existence. managing identity hughes (1958) describes dirty work as tasks that contain taint in a physical, social, or moral sense. while many occupations are partially or wholly “dirty,” people engaged in dirty work challenge their stigmatized identities in order to construct a positive self-concept (ashforth & kreiner, 1999). in general, people like to think of themselves in a positive way, and consider their actions as socially important. social identity theory suggests that sarah jane blithe, jennifer l. lanterman studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 118 individuals enhance their self-esteem through social identities and thus work hard to improve their self-definitions (ashforth & kreiner, 1999; tajfel & turner, 1986; hogg & abrams, 1990). of particular interest to this study is a technique that ashforth and kreiner (1999) call reframing. reframing allows individuals to transform the meaning attached to their identities by either infusing stigmatized aspects of work with positive outcomes, justifying the societal need for their work, neutralizing or negating stigmatized aspects of work tasks, or normalizing the stigma of dirty work by rendering stigmatized aspects of work as normal, everyday, non-stigmatized tasks (ashforth & kreiner, 1999; ashforth, kreiner, clark & fugate, 2007). studying the practices of people engaged in dirty work provides a rich context for understanding how positive meanings arise from identity construction in stigmatized places (ashforth & kreiner, 1999). participants at gun shows – vendors, attendees, and other related individuals, such as people who rent space to gun shows – experience moral taint because they engage in activities that are sometimes considered sinful or dubious, illegal, or require deception or confrontation. they also experience physical taint stigma, which arises from potentially dangerous conditions (ashforth & kreiner, 1999). people manage stigma and taint as collectives and as individuals. the members of gun collectives engage in both group and individual attempts to subvert the stigmatized aspects of their individual and collective identities. the endeavor to manage stigma is placed on all gun owners to some extent, in or out of events, even those who do not engage in illegal practices, because the stigma attached to gun culture is so pervasive. managing privacy one common way organizations deal with stigma is to engage in privacy practices. stigmatized organizations, which may or may not be at risk of exposure, take privacy seriously and regularly hide aspects of the organization deemed to be private. in a general sense, the concept of identifiable attributes, which can be linked to individuals, sets privacy parameters. davis (2006) explains, “the privacy of individuals, groups, or institutions is their ability to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about themselves is communicated to others” (p. 117). for a variety of reasons, individuals desire to remain unidentifiable (adams, 2006), and in many western countries most people consider privacy to be a legal and moral right (davis, 2006; hollander, 2001; petronio, 2010). specific aspects of personal identity, such as age, gender, name, location, political affiliation, health, wealth, and bank account number are determined to be aspects of an individual’s life that require protection (adams, 2006). when organizations take privacy measures, individual members’, customers’, and partners’ information is not considered public. organizations and collectives become co-owners of private information and are enlisted together camouflaged collectives studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 119 to protect it (petronio, 2010). further, specific organizational information might be kept private as well, such as profits, location, names, political affiliations, profits, and bank account numbers. for hidden or stigmatized organizations, the need for privacy is inherently important. when privacy is threatened, individuals and organizational members may go to great lengths to protect sensitive information. the threat of exposure – i.e., the intended or unintended release of information about the discreet operations of an organization – can result in greater stigmatization or dismantling of the organization. to address the threat of exposure, organizational members engage in privacy management techniques (adams, 2006) to ensure privacy. petronio (2010) developed communication privacy management theory to describe the ways in which people manage privacy. she argues that managing privacy is rife with tensions that underpin the interplay between individuals and collectives. among these techniques are secrecy, anonymity, reframing, forced invisibility, and false transparency. communication in this sense does not necessarily equate with spoken words, but can include artifacts, gestures, symbols, and emblems, all of which are visible in the activities of gun collectives. for example, a background check is a communicative artifact. it signifies a particular type of sale, that there will be a record of the sale, and it identifies some relational boundaries between buyer and seller. thus, even if no words are exchanged, conducting a background check is highly communicative. secrecy is one tactic to preserve privacy (hollander, 2001). protecting secrets may require lying and solitude, for sharing private secrets with other individuals compromises privacy. because privacy is considered a right, secret holders take up power positions in the restriction or flow of private information. other ways individuals protect the privacy of stigmatized collectives is through anonymity and invisibility (marx, 2006). by removing names (lucock & yeo, 2006) and visibility (burkell, 2006) members of stigmatized collectives gain more control over their privacy. as rawlins (2009) points out, transparency does not equate with visibility. rather transparency is the opposite of secrecy. thus, transparent organizations are those which disclose as much information as possible – good or bad. in a time when expectations for organizational transparency have increased, stigmatized organizations may engage in false transparency, that is, the pretense of transparency, which draws attention away from stigmatized activities. taking what we know about stigmatized organizations from research on privacy and its theoretical neighbors, secrecy, transparency, and visibility, we asked the following research questions: how do members of gun collectives manage stigma?; and what (if any) techniques do members of gun collectives use to manage their identities? sarah jane blithe, jennifer l. lanterman studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 120 methods to address our research questions, we used qualitative, interpretive methods. specifically, we employed collaborative event ethnography (cee) to guide observations at seven gun shows across the country and one shooting party at a private shooting range. details about the data collection procedures, the sites, analysis, and verification are included below. researcher positionality over the course of our study, people have asked us how we, as individuals, feel about guns, gun violence, and gun control. of course, our analysis is not separate from our experiences, so presenting our personal relationships to our research topics is important. however, our relationship to guns is complicated. neither of us supports taking away all guns from civilians, and neither of us supports unfettered rights to firearm ownership. we are both concerned with gun violence, and throughout the research were sometimes shocked to see extremely violent images and slogans. we are both frustrated with attempts to shut down positive communication or decision making on the grounds that talking about guns is too polarizing. the first author is from littleton, colorado, two miles (3.2 km) from columbine high school, the site of the 1999 mass school shooting, 17.5 miles (28 km) from aurora, the site of the 2012 mass theater shooting, and seven miles (11 km) from arapahoe high school, the site of a 2013 deadly school shooting. she also grew up in a hunting family with several guns in her home. the second author is married to a united states marine. she has spent time in an environment supportive of responsible firearm use and possession throughout her marriage. she first learned to use firearms on her uncle's farm at age 12 and has used various firearms at shooting ranges as an adult. these personal relationships to guns undoubtedly shaped our research motivations, observations, and analysis. data collection procedures our first step in collecting data was to gain access to our desired sites. our initial research design included interviews with participants at gun shows and gun ranges. after gaining institutional review board approval, we contacted the organizers of three gun shows. all three show owners denied us access. one of the organizers explained that “asking questions about gun violence or safety might make show attendees aggressive or violent.” the show owners explained that for our own safety, we could not have a booth in the show with our cards and questions, nor could we formally interview attendees. we also pre-purchased time in an indoor gun range. however, before we had a chance camouflaged collectives studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 121 to enter the site, police shut the range down, arrested, and indicted the owner for selling illegal firearms – some without serial numbers – to undercover police (bellisle, 2014). in light of these events, we decided to begin with observations of public gun shows. we soon realized that our observations of gun collective events would prove a rich source of data, and decided to conduct a collaborative event ethnography at multiple sites. collaborative event ethnography (cee). cee helped us to study large events in action (büscher, 2014; brosius & campbell, 2010; ganesh & stohl, 2013). designed to help researchers engage with numerous participants and a large geographic space in the moment, cee allowed us to take in some overall observations about gun collectives, large amounts of visual communication and texts, as well as detailed information from individual members we spoke to at events. more traditional ethnographies emphasize local, individual, organizational, or smaller group experiences, and tend to draw data from deep immersion in a culture. cee takes the concept of “studying up,” or taking on massive scale sites while also “studying down,” or drilling into individual stories and experiences of people within the site (brosius & campbell, 2010, p. 248). this dual approach helped us build what robbins (2002) calls “ethnographic symmetry” (p. 1511) and what büscher (2014) describes as “empirical nuance” (p. 133). the logistical constraints of conducting research in such conditions are substantial. to overcome these difficulties, we used a multi-sited ethnographic approach (hannerz, 2003), and looked for themes and striking differences across shows. we also used a team approach when conducting the observations, and attended most events together, sometimes with the additional eyes of research assistants. the cee technique also allowed us to handle multiple subcultures within the larger umbrella of “gun culture.” at each show, we observed some prevalent subgroups (such as hunters, veterans, survivalists, conceal and carry advocates, the nra, historical artifact collectors, women, and machine gun enthusiasts). cee allowed us to gather data from all of these groups while also observing the culture of the event as a whole. we cannot emphasize enough the importance of the team aspect of our observations (büscher, 2014). the two researchers and the research assistants all came to the shows with vastly different backgrounds. our relationship to, thoughts about, and experience with guns, differed greatly. our different theoretical, methodological, and content expertise framed our observations such that our observations were sometimes overlapping, but also quite different. for example, the first author, a communication scholar, included information about evident discourse, while the second author, a criminal justice scholar, frequently made note of particular illegal weapons; some of these observations might have gone unnoticed without the diversity in our expertise and interest. we debriefed every event together, and conducted all coding and analysis together in order to make sense of these differences. our interdisciplinary collaboration marked an essential component of the cee. sarah jane blithe, jennifer l. lanterman studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 122 we wrote scratch notes and headnotes (lindlof & taylor, 2002) during the shows. our scratch notes included brief handwritten notes. headnotes included mental recordings of important, interesting, or shocking conversations, our feelings, and impressions. we each wrote detailed field notes after the events, which resulted in over 50 single-spaced pages of notes and nearly 200 artifacts (flyers, business cards, pamphlets, booklets, stickers, etc.). sites. we observed seven gun shows in three states (nevada, ohio, and virginia). observations lasted between one hour and fifteen minutes to over two and a half hours. the two biggest shows each boasted over 1,000 displays, and one and a half acres (0.61 ha) of exhibits. at the shows, we walked around, listened to conversations, observed visual displays, collected texts, and interacted with other participants. vendors eagerly engaged in conversations with us in efforts to sell their products or to have us sign up to support their causes or specific organizations (such as the nra). sometimes our roles as researchers were part of the conversation, other times we simply listened to others’ conversations as we walked through the show. during the course of our research, one of our research assistants was provided a contact for an organization that took people to a secret gun range to shoot “big guns.” she arranged for us to observe an event. after securing permission from the owners, we received oral directions to the meeting spot, which was marked with a temporary flag, and we followed the company owner to the range. there, we met the range owner and four range masters. on the day we observed, a bachelor party had booked the range and requested to shoot an ar-15 slide fire, an ak-47 slide fire, a mac-11, and an mp5. they also had the option of shooting the 50 caliber browning machine gun (bmg) for an additional fee.2 the prospective groom got additional rounds, and all of the participants had the option to shoot other guns, for an extra charge, if they decided to on site. the shoot lasted four hours. before the bachelor party arrived, we had the opportunity to converse with the owner and range masters about our research. data analysis and verification. consistent with our data collection, data analysis proceeded as a team effort. we analyzed the field notes together and developed themes inductively, grounded in the data. we assigned every piece of data a rough categorization, achieved through our joint observation and understanding of the notes. next, we refined, reduced, expanded, and collapsed categories as some themes featured more prominently and others faded into the background. we reread the data in the categories to see if we 2 the ar-15 slide fire and ak-47 slide fire are semi-automatic rifles with bump-fire stocks. these stocks reduce recoil and cause the shooter to discharge rounds at a higher rate. the mac-11 is a sub-compact machine pistol. the mp5 is a sub-machine gun. the bmg is a heavy machine gun. this is a crew-served weapon, which means it requires more than one person to operate it. camouflaged collectives studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 123 reached a clear pattern in the data. we present representative observations in the analysis. data verification included triangulation (lindlof & taylor, 2002) of the themes between both researchers’ individual field notes across events and the artifacts. how gun collectives manage stigma and identity the data revealed that members of gun collectives engage in a number of practices to avoid or reduce stigma associated with gun culture and with instances of gun violence. specifically, gun collectives managed identities through the use of privacy or secrecy tactics, drawing a historical narrative, and through normalizing activities. privacy and secrecy the use of privacy and secrecy is one practice that allowed members of the gun collectives to manage stigma associated with the illegal or legal but stigmatized aspects of gun collectives. as previously discussed, illegal activity sometimes occurs at gun shows. the sale of illegal guns, hollowpoint bullets or teflon-coated bullets (otherwise known as “cop killers”), which are illegal in some states and controversial in others, occur at some gun shows. however, the organizational values and practices of privacy and secrecy allow members to de-identify with this stigmatized aspect of the collective, so they can still maintain a positive identity. the specific methods used to secure privacy and secrecy varied between gun shows and the shooting party. generally, these methods revolved around concealment and limiting access to information. the gun events featured several practices with either the intent or effect of securing privacy or secrecy regarding the purchase or possession of firearms and ammunition. these practices revolved around rendering it difficult to track transactions and firearms. specifically, we observed cash only transactions, few background check requirements or enforcement, methods to conceal firearms, instructions and materials to build firearms, covert transactions, and secret locations. cash only practices featured prominently at the gun shows. some gun show organizers deal exclusively in cash. vendors inside the shows also dealt predominantly in cash. booths often included signs that read, “cash only” or “credit cards not accepted.” cash only transactions may serve several purposes. while cash is certainly convenient and helps vendors avoid additional fees, it also helps vendors and customers avoid credit card transactions, which produce searchable records. gun collective members may wish to avoid searchable records of gun transactions for a couple of reasons. first, searchable records of transactions create tax obligations. second, cash sarah jane blithe, jennifer l. lanterman studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 124 only transactions allow vendors and customers to avoid background checks. we witnessed only one transaction during which a vendor called for a background check. in all other transactions we witnessed, vendors did not ask customers for their state of residence or documentation of a background check. requirements to purchase firearms vary by state, but pre-sale screenings for criminal history, restraining orders issued for domestic violence, and severe mental disorder are one of the most common gun regulations. failing to complete these screenings is another way the gun collectives ensured privacy. in all three states we visited, all licensed firearm dealers are required to conduct background checks on buyers. dealers in nevada may also accept a concealed carry permit issued after july 1, 2011, which obviates the need for a background check. however, gun shows are temporary sale sites and are often loosely regulated (law center to prevent gun violence, 2013). we only saw a background check booth at one show. the booth was strategically positioned away from traffic, tucked in a corner far from the entrance and exit. when we asked the woman working at the booth if background checks are required for firearm purchases, she shrugged her shoulders and winked. neglecting to conduct background checks works well to ensure privacy. without documentation, there is really no way to know who purchased firearms, how many firearms were purchased, and which firearms were purchased at the shows. the concealment of weapons was a popular theme at the gun shows, and also served as a privacy strategy. a diverse array of products to aid the legal and illegal concealment of weapons was available for purchase. weapon concealment goods included items such as holsters, concealed carry clothing, and purses with compartments to conceal handguns. the gun shows we observed usually included several vendors advertising courses for people wishing to obtain concealed carry permits. weapon concealment facilitates impression management. the possession or carrying of firearms is a divisive issue in the united states, and may result in stigmatization and considerable difficulty moving through the business of daily life. hiding their weapons permits owners to be selective about with whom they share their gun ownership. gun owners can conceal their weapons when surrounded by people who are not supportive of gun ownership. this type of situational negotiation and impression management has been documented in people who participate in sub-cultures or groups that involve core stigma, such as white supremacy activists (simi & futrell, 2009) and women who have had abortions (astbury-ward, parry & carnwell, 2012). being careful to conceal an aspect of one’s identity or life that may trigger stigma is also a tactic that reduces scrutiny of one’s activities (kanuha, 1999). one extreme method we observed to ensure firearm ownership privacy was the build-your-own guns. at these booths, multiple gun parts are available for purchase, so that individuals can customize their weapons. these booths also sold instructions for building handguns, rifles, and machine guns. building firearms rather than purchasing serialized weapons from a legitimate dealer camouflaged collectives studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 125 makes it difficult to track weapons. not all gun parts are serialized, and savvy customers can purchase a receiver that is 80% or less complete, build the remaining firearm, and never be required to engrave a serial number on the completed weapon (bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms & explosives, n.d.). as one gun collective member noted, people can buy barrels and other non-serialized firearm components “with reckless abandon.” homemade weapons can be very difficult to identify in gun crime cases, because the parts can be modified, thereby complicating ballistics analysis. covert transactions were observed at several shows. private sales are not highly regulated. the gun control act of 1968 includes no federal requirement of documentation of firearm sales between private parties. however, some state statutes regulate private transactions. at the ohio and virginia gun shows, we observed secret transactions. a gun collective member alerted us to the practice of engaging in illegal sales by walking the perimeter of the show and listening for people to say “selling.” once aware of this practice, it was fairly easy to observe this type of sale. if the person in possession of the firearm was willing to sell it, then both parties walked over to a less obvious location, engaged in a brief discussion, and exchanged cash for the firearm. there was no exchange of documentation. this may be legal in some states, but it is illegal in others, and generally inadvisable in case the firearm is used in a future crime and the serial number is still associated with the original buyer. in either case, these covert transactions prevent the tracking of the firearms in question. stigmatized organizations regularly convene in secret locations. in our observations, the gun shows were public, but the shooting party was held at a secret location. the owner of the company running the party indicated that he would meet us at the turn-off for the range. it was a non-descript turn-off with no markings that would indicate to what the unpaved road led. upon his arrival, the company owner got out of his truck and posted temporary flags to mark the turn-off and path for the shooting party participants to follow through the mountains to the range. we met the land owner after we reached the range. he indicated that the location is secret, and both the company owner and land owner repeatedly requested that we not divulge the location of the shooting range. the privacy practices used by gun collective members helped the collectives and individual members avoid stigma. however, these practices also generated loopholes through which illegal activity was possible. people who are legally prohibited from possessing firearms (e.g., individuals convicted of felonies) or people conducting straw purchases (e.g., purchasing firearms for other people) would easily have been able to purchase multiple weapons. the combined privacy techniques used by gun collectives maintains vendor and customer privacy from government surveillance, facilitates the violation of laws, and helps members manage stigma. sarah jane blithe, jennifer l. lanterman studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 126 historical narratives we estimate that over 75% of the booths at the gun shows sold items which could be considered controversial, racist, or anti-semitic. however, vendors selling these items drew upon a common historical narrative to justify their products. the practice of framing racist or anti-semitic items as historical preservation allowed gun collective members to maintain a positive selfconcept and identification with the collective, while tactically deidentifying with the racist, colonialist, and anti-semitic aspects of the organization. by reframing their sale and display of highly racist artifacts as historical preservation, rather than acknowledging their racist implications, the vendors (and buyers) avoided the stigma attached to the sale of controversial items. through this practice, gun collective members deidentified with the racist implications of their artifacts. for example, one vendor had a 24 by 18 inch (61 x 46 cm) framed certificate which read “jap hunting license.” beneath the certificate, the vendor’s sign read, “largest collection of rare wwii documents.” the racist implications of displaying such a sign in modern times were reframed in terms of historical interest. in other examples, we witnessed a man walking around in a confederate civil war costume near a confederacy canon, and saw a metal sign that read “colored people” with an arrow below it. other offensive historical artifacts included a number of figurines and other trinkets (tea sets, lunch boxes, drawings etched on hides, etc.) depicting american indians as savages, or as the captives of white men. at most booths with these kinds of historical items were also a plethora of antique guns. by far the most common stigmatized artifacts were nazi paraphernalia. at some booths, small nazi medals were mixed in with other war medals. in one extreme case, an entire corner space (the largest exhibit space at the show) featured a 10 by 18 foot (3 x 5.5 m) nazi flag, a full uniform, nazi firearms, a plethora of medals, anti-semitic signs (such as “no jews”), and jewish identification armbands. field notes from every gun show included references to the abundance of nazi items. a few booths had signs saying “hitler was right” and “mein kampf,” the title of hitler’s autobiographical manifesto. the prevalence of these booths was perhaps the most consistent thread across the gun shows, and historical knowledge seemed to be a high point of pride. we overheard this exchange at one show: buyer: wow, man, this is amazing (leafing through civil war documents). vendor: thanks. yep. it’s pretty great. i get to sell history here. the pride with which the vendor spoke of “selling history” was evident in his smile and vast collection of war artifacts. some booths even had pamphlets with information for joining historical or collector societies, some of which required a sponsor or private invitation. camouflaged collectives studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 127 in many cases, the connections to history seemed to imply life was better in the past, particularly with respect to owning guns. for example, the nra was giving away betsy ross flags, with the 13 stars in a circle, for people who registered at the event. one woman explained her connection to history and her interest in historical flags. she said, “we need to remember just who america is supposed to represent.” the women in this example wanted people passing by her booth to rewind the clock to a time in history that she perceived to be better than the present. one of the researchers noted this sentiment in her field notes. she wrote, there are lots of civil war materials. they seem to be nostalgic for a “better time” when they could possess firearms without regulation. this was also a time when a large percentage of the population didn’t have many rights. how do they feel about equal rights for women and people of color? of course, much of u.s. history is rife with inequality, oppression, and racism. the sheer number of artifacts which now symbolize hate and oppression on open display likely created tension for some people at the shows. however, by reframing the sale of offensive items as the sale of historical artifacts, the vendors and people purchasing the items avoided some stigma and kept non-racist identities intact. in an interesting twist, the historic narrative was also used for new items. for example, a bumper sticker read, “governments support gun control” with the nazi swastika next to it. in another example, one vendor featured a john wilkes booth bobble-head figurine. john wilkes booth is clearly a historical figure (he assassinated president lincoln), but the bobble head is a new product. another vendor had a collection of purses with hand painted scenes of american indians in captivity. the purses are new, but they are depicting scenes of historical genocide. the image of former president obama was frequently placed alongside other historical figures. for example, we observed bumper stickers and t-shirts featuring obama’s picture beside adolf hitler and mao zedong with phrases beneath, including “we’ve seen this before” and “brothers in tyranny.” comparing a recent u.s. president to historical leaders who promoted genocide drew on a historical discourse, even though the items themselves were recently produced. while clearly political, these items were set in a historical context, which was prominent and seemingly valued at every gun show. normalizing activities at gun events as discussed earlier, gun events are potentially dangerous sites. however, the members of the gun collectives we observed managed the potential stigma attached to the dangerous aspects of the events by normalizing them. they did this using three primary practices: (a) adopting a casual attitude to their actions and the events as everyday activities; (b) juxtaposing innocuous items sarah jane blithe, jennifer l. lanterman studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 128 next to potentially dangerous weapons; and (c) making these events “family friendly.” we describe each below. the people attending gun events performed a highly casual attitude toward the events, and often acted as if they were not, in fact, handling potentially dangerous weapons. for example, in the parking lots of gun shows, people often walked to and from their cars carrying multiple weapons and ammunition. in one example, a man carried four transparent trash bags (two in each hand) full of ammunition through a casino, with three rifles slung around his shoulder. in a similar example, a man carried two rifles and a large axe. another man walked through the parking lot with a bulletproof vest, a machine gun over his shoulder, and a bucketful of ammunition. a final example from the parking lot featured a father rather carelessly swinging an assault rifle in his right hand, holding the hand of a young girl with his left hand. these examples show how the weapons at gun events – guns, knives, ammunition, etc. – were treated as everyday objects. there were no provisions to wrap the guns separately from the ammunition, for example, or any measure at all to prevent possible violence that could have occurred as a result of procuring weapons and ammunition. inside the show, framing weapons as ordinary was also common. at every show, we witnessed people handling, aiming, and what could only be called “carelessly swinging” weapons as they explored the show. on one occasion, the show became very crowded. after feeling a nudge, one author noticed the barrel of a handgun on her side. another time, one researcher noticed a handgun incidentally aimed at the other researcher’s back. yet another time, a young boy, aged around ten perhaps, aimed a black polymer rifle with a high capacity magazine at another passersby. a final example involves an approximately four-year-old girl handling a machete while her father purchased magazine clips for an assault rifle. although the weapons in these examples were presumably unloaded, the ho-hum nature with which people at the shows engaged with the items suggested an air of casualness. nobody seemed to be concerned by or even notice these behaviors, which were evident at every gun show we attended. this is similar to what ott, aoki and dickinson (2011) describe as “converting weapons of violent conquering into ordinary, everyday objects. to domesticate means to make familiar, normal, and acceptable something that was formerly wild, dangerous, or uncontrollable” (p. 219). the weapons at the shows we attended were made ordinary through the casual nature with which the show participants interacted with them. a final aspect of the casual atmosphere at gun collective events was the prevalent presence of alcohol. many shows had multiple stands for purchasing alcohol, and individuals frequently walked around with bottles of beer or mixed drinks during the shows. although mixing alcohol with guns and ammunition could heighten the potential danger of an event (parker & mccaffree, 2012), the presence of alcohol also served to solidify the casual, everyday atmosphere of gun events. the casual handling of weapons and camouflaged collectives studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 129 alcohol for purchase normalized the experience of gun shows, turning gun events into social events, which overshadowed the potential for danger and stigma inherent in the items for sale. a second way members of gun collectives normalized their activities was by juxtaposing innocuous items beside potentially violent or dangerous items. at every show, there were booths with jewelry and novelty pieces made of bullets, for example, a bottle opener made from a spent 50-caliber browning machine gun (bmg) cartridge. this round could “split a body in half” as one show attendee claimed, yet it was for sale as a campy trinket. similar items included a plastic ice cube tray in which each ice cube was shaped like a grenade and a wwii grenade hand painted and fashioned as a christmas tree ornament. at a few shows, a booth with water meditation beads, was situated next to a table full of assault rifles. dog toys, geodes and other rocks, guitars, scented candles, jerky, hot sauces and jams, jewelry, toys, and blankets were also sold, mixed in with the weapons, violent political t-shirts, and historical items for sale at the gun shows. these items seemed to make the gun show feel similar to a craft show in some places, which normalized the otherwise shocking items (such as the wall of magazine clips) at the events. a final way the gun collective members normalized the event experience was to make it a “family affair.” children were present at every show, and every show had at least one booth that specialized in children’s toys, including toy guns. many participants attended the show together as a family, and at least four vendors at every show were children, selling goods alongside their parents. one show featured a rubber band gun shooting gallery for kids, and another had a marshmallow shooting range for children. one booth sold remote control helicopters which appeared to have two to three children watching throughout the show. at another show, a boy scout troop had a table at the entrance, and scouts were all over the inside of the show selling boxes of popcorn. at that same show, a balloon artist made balloon animals for kids. another show had an ice cream cart with a line of families waiting to get a sweet treat. the gun events were clearly marketed as “child-friendly,” and collective members brought children to the event. discussion and implications the data from this study reveal that members of gun collectives subvert stigma through the use of privacy and secrecy, by mobilizing a historical narrative, and by normalizing the experience of gun events. although these techniques aid individuals in avoiding some of the core stigma attached to gun events, subverting stigma using these practices leads to a number of social justice difficulties. first, it allows for the exchange of potentially dangerous and illegal items to go on unfettered. safety regulations can be ignored, and individual accountability does not exist because so many practices work to secure the privacy of members’ identities. part of the sarah jane blithe, jennifer l. lanterman studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 130 difficulty in reducing gun violence is that laws and rules are easy to subvert. because privacy and secrecy are so engrained in the gun cultures we observed, it is difficult to promote an open and honest dialogue about gun ownership, laws, safety, and violence. historically, our mutual inability as a society to talk about gun ownership has allowed gun violence to continue. there has simply not been enough social action to resolve gun violence, partly because of stunted dialogue about this contentious issue. a second problem that arises through the use of stigma avoidance techniques is the invisibility of oppressive structures. by ignoring racism, anti-semitism, and the power imbued in the invisibility of whiteness, such oppressive structures can persist. selling the symbols of oppressive regimes and creating new products which evoke hatred and persecution makes discursive space for the continuance of oppression. the historical narrative nourished at events, in particular, allows members of gun collectives to harken back and celebrate a time when many people in the united states were more oppressed (ott et al., 2011). revering a time of oppression, because it allowed for unfettered “rights” of individuals in power, is harmful to everyone, particularly people from historically oppressed groups. as mcmurtry (2011) described, “rights” have slowly become absolute in recent years, “yet any deeper value principle to determine whether these increasingly totalitarian rights are valid has remained unconceived” (p. 11). the historical narrative of unfettered rights euphemizes the racist and anti-semitist themes at gun events. because members of gun collectives are actively involved in shaping laws, making structural and power inequalities at these events visible is a critical need. it is necessary to reduce racist, anti-semitic and sexist discourse to promote social justice. finally, when members of gun collectives normalize their activities and weapons, they also normalize violence. by making it appear that gun events are safe, or “family friendly,” awareness of the potential for violence at these shows is subverted. further, when guns become everyday items which even children can aim, handle, and sell, people can more easily overlook the possibility for violence outside the confines of the show. normalizing the potential for danger and violence might benefit stigmatized organizations and their members, but it can cause problems at the larger societal level. gun violence is a social justice issue which requires intervention. normalizing the violence and potential for danger inherent in gun events makes the need for intervention less visible. through this research on gun collectives, we contribute to knowledge about identity management strategies and stigma avoidance strategies, revealing some dark or unsavory techniques people sometimes engage in to manage hidden aspects of their identities. we have also shed some light on stigmatized collectives, which have been overlooked in research. sykes and matza’s (1957) description of neutralization techniques among juvenile delinquents is useful for thinking through how members of gun collectives manage stigmatized identities. they describe how members of a stigmatized camouflaged collectives studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 131 (sub)culture deflect disapproval by denying responsibility for deviant actions, denying injuries which result from deviant actions, denying victims, condemning condemners, and appealing to higher loyalties. although not all gun owners or gun collective members are “delinquent,” the stigma and illegal activities observed in gun collectives create conditions which allow them to operate like a subculture which experiences disapproval from a large cultural group. as the data presented here reveal, the participants of gun events engaged in all of these techniques. additional implications for social justice scholars perhaps the most striking implication that emerged from this research is the desperate need for social justice scholars to engage in gun violence research. discussions about gun violence are so polarizing that they are usually reduced to discourses of rights, laws, and control, rather than focusing on solving the issue of gun violence itself. as more scholars engage in social justice projects, this research provides an example of how to conduct interdisciplinary research about “wicked problems” (caron & serrell, 2009). some social issues require interdisciplinary knowledge, and social justice scholars are uniquely positioned to be part of sticky conversations about big problems. the intersections of gun culture with other social identities requires the sophistication of a social justice lens. most of the participants in gun collectives are conservative white men (melzer, 2009) engaging in what gibson (1994) describes as a hyper masculine culture of warriors. further, media coverage of gun violence is almost exclusively focused on mass shootings and white victims, when gun violence perpetrated against people of color rarely gains national media attention. in addition, at gun events, women are characterized almost exclusively as victims, in need of protection from men and guns. how social identity intersects with various gun cultures is a necessary next step in gun violence research which would be best facilitated through a social justice lens. we began collecting data for this project just after the sandy hook elementary school shooting – a horriffic event which choked the united states with grief. at the time, it seemed as if the nation was ready to do something about gun violence. however, as the months wore on, the promised activism and passion expressed to end gun violence faded into familiar complacency. in the end, no new gun control laws emerged after sandy hook. since then, at least 1,274 mass shootings have occurred in the united states,3 including the 2016 orlando nightclub shooting, the san bernadino community center shooting, the oregon community college 3 mass shootings are events in which four or more people are killed, not including the shooter (lopez & oh, 2017). sarah jane blithe, jennifer l. lanterman studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 113-135, 2017 132 shooting, and the south carolina mass shooting at a historically black church, to name a few. the resulting loss of life is at least 1,409 since, as a nation, we said “never again.” to clearly understand the problem of gun violence, we emphasize that mass shootings make up only a small portion of firearm deaths each year in the united states (lopez & oh, 2017). our country has become a “rampage nation” (klarevas, 2016). different groups try to frame gun violence to suit political positions. many try to silence discourse about gun violence, moving instead to talk about dichotomized positions regarding gun ownership. overcoming these discursive difficulties in order to understand gun culture and to reduce gun violence is one of the most pressing social problems in the united states today. we call for more research to approach gun violence in different ways to generate a more nuanced understanding of gun culture and identity. to conclude, in this study we identified three practices members of gun collectives used to manage their potentially stigmatized identities. these strategies included purposeful privacy and secrecy, drawing on a historical narrative, and normalizing their activities. we discussed how these stigma avoidance tactics ultimately allow laws and safety rules to be avoided, mask racist and patriarchal ideologies, and serve to normalize gun violence. such practices allow gun culture members to remain camouflaged, hiding stigmatized and unsavory aspects of their collectives. identifying these kinds of social practices of gun collectives is one step in achieving greater social justice through the reduction of gun violence. references adams, c. 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(2013, january 12). despite protests, gun show in upstate new york goes on. the new york times. retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/nyregion/despite-protestsupstate-new-york-gun-show-goes-on.html?_r=0 the two sides of the representative coin studies in social justice volume 5, issue 2, 197-211, 2011   correspondence address: keith sutherland, department of politics, university of exeter, amory building, rennes drive, exeter, devon ex4 4rj, united kingdom. email: jkbs201@exeter.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 the two sides of the representative coin keith sutherland1 department of politics, university of exeter, united kingdom abstract in federalist 10 james madison drew a functional distinction between “parties” (advocates for factional interests) and “judgment” (decision-making for the public good) and warned of the corrupting effect of combining both functions in a “single body of men.” this paper argues that one way of overcoming “madisonian corruption” would be by restricting political parties to an advocacy role, reserving the judgment function to an allotted (randomly-selected) microcosm of the whole citizenry, who would determine the outcome of parliamentary debates by secret ballot—a division of labour suggested by james fishkin’s experiments in deliberative polling. the paper then defends this radical constitutional proposal against bernard manin’s (1997) claim that an allotted microcosm could not possibly fulfil the “consent” requirement of natural right theory. not only does the proposal challenge manin’s thesis, but a 28th amendment implementing it would finally reconcile the competing visions that have bedevilled representative democracy since the constitutional convention of 1787. introduction this paper follows the example of hanna pitkin (1967), bernard manin (1997) and james fishkin (2009) in adopting a hybrid approach to the study of political representation. the reader will thus be taken on a roller-coaster ride, involving a combination of the history of political thought and analytical political philosophy alongside a consideration of some recent social science experiments in the practice of deliberative democracy. although the focus is a practical proposal for constitutional change, the paper starts by attempting to clarify the concepts involved. all good sermons begin with a quotation from canonical scripture, and my chosen text is the epistle of st. james [madison] to the new yorkers, in the tenth chapter, beginning at the eighth verse: [a] body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time . . . yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail (federalist papers, vol. 10, para. 8).2 198 keith sutherland   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   in this important passage “publius” (james madison) outlines two opposing aspects of political representation—“judgment” (disinterested decision-making) and “parties” (interests)—that, when combined in a single “body of men,” have a tendency to corrupt each other: for legislative decision-makers are also “advocates and parties to the causes which they determine” (federalist, 10, para. 8). madison’s view on political judgment appears to be that of a classical republican who believed in the possibility of virtue in human affairs (banning, 1988, pp. 194-195); but from the point of view of parties (interests) he is a proto-liberal, “concerned with men who are pursuing their own interests, sometimes rationally calculated, in a system that is more amoral than immoral” (howe, 1988, p. 108). liberal, that is, until one considers the passions that underlie those interests, at which point madison’s pessimism regarding the need to impose controls on the evil inclinations of man is close to thomas hobbes or even john calvin. but how can one writer be all these three creatures—republican, liberal and calvinist/hobbesian—at one and the same time? madison, like many of his eighteenth-century peers, was steeped in “faculty” psychology,3 which posited an ascending hierarchy of human nature: from the “mechanical” through the “animal” to the “rational” (howe, p. 109). according to this school of thought, the passions were part of man’s animal nature but “interest” inhabited a precarious half-way house—“passionate” when parties are motivated by short-term self-interest, “prudential” when motivated by long-term and general considerations. at the top of the pinnacle stood reason and conscience: collective, dispassionate, wise and virtuous. unfortunately, as alexander pope realized, “the ruling passion conquers reason still,” leading madison to the calvinist conclusion that the “stern virtue [reason] is the growth of few soils” (federalist, 73, para. 1). this is one reason why he advocated the enlarged republic, as it would provide a deeper pool from which to elect “a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations” (federalist, 10, para. 16), thereby ensuring that judgment was exercised by “the elect”—representatives of “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments” (federalist, 10, para. 21). madison deplored the formation of parties or “factions”4 because they seduced interests away from long-term and general considerations (federalist, 50, para. 6); furthermore he acknowledged that parties were likely to predominate, owing to the strength of the passions, and would thus tend to corrupt the constitution. hence the second role of the extended republic, over and above that of ensuring the judgment of a virtuous elite: “extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests” (federalist, 10, para. 20). in an extended republic, with large constituencies, the multiplicity of interests balances out as “ambition counteracts ambition” (federalist, 51, para. 4). divede et impera: divide interests and reason will—given sufficient time—conquer all. while publius was advocating the positive benefits of the enlarged republic, his antifederalist opponents argued that the preservation of republican virtù required small political units and a primarily agrarian economy.5 they rejected the aristocratic hierarchy of merit assumed by faculty psychology, arguing instead the democratic case that the legislature should represent all “classes” (occupations) “descriptively”: “the farmer, merchant, mecanick and other various orders of the two sides of the representative coin 199 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   people, ought to be represented according to their respective weight and numbers” (dry, 1985, p. 125). unfortunately events such as shays’s rebellion6 meant that the delegates at the us constitutional convention were more than a little nervous about antifederalist plans for the legislature accurately to reflect the weight and numbers of the demos, so publius won the ratification battle. however he lost the war. all the calamities that madison predicted through combining judges and parties in a “single body of men” quickly came to pass. partisan interests and the corrupting influence of money, media and celebrity quickly put paid to his hope that an enlarged republic would produce enlightened and virtuous representatives. the unanticipated seizure of power by political parties during madison’s own lifetime meant that his hopes that the enlarged republic would balance out interests by allowing “ambition to be made to counteract ambition” (federalist, 51, para. 4) were dashed by the forces of factionalism. interests and judges became well and truly fused in an electoral system dominated by factional political parties. madison’s “republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government” (federalist, 10, para. 23) turned out be more akin to a dose of quack medicine. a binary solution to the representative conundrum it would appear then that the combination of judgment and interests in one legislative body inevitably leads to factionalism and corruption: one of the reasons why [the legislature] is so prone to the evils of factionalism, publius argues, is that legislators are constantly being cast in the dual role of advocates and judges in the causes before them (federalist, 10, para. 8). their self-interest corrupts what should ideally be a disinterested pursuit of the common good (howe, 1988, p. 124). but if madison is right—judgment and the advocacy of interests are impossible to combine in one “body of [fallen] men”—then why not have two bodies (judges and advocates) created by two entirely different systems of representation?7 according to hanna pitkin (1967), the primary duty of a representative is active advocacy—looking after the interests of her constituents. active representation does not require that an elected representative should resemble her constituents in any respect, only that she should act as a trustee or advocate for their interests, in a similar manner to a lawyer representing the beneficiaries of a trust fund. competitive elections are the time-honoured way to choose advocates to act on behalf of voters’ interests. in politics, however, we expect our advocates also to be judge and jury (and, in the case of fused parliamentary systems like the uk, executioner as well). but how can a member of the tiny elite of “natural” aristocrats returned by the elective process overcome her own self-interest and that of the faction she represents, so as to judge impartially on behalf of the whole nation? 8 according to the antifederalist view, this would require an aggregate solution: the legislative assembly should be “an exact portrait, in miniature” of the whole citizenry (adams, 1988, para. 13), one that represents the nation “descriptively”: the “farmer, merchant and mecanick” (dry, 1985, p. 125), rather than predominately white, male lawyers (and oxbridge ppe graduates). where better to 200 keith sutherland   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   look for a descriptively-democratic mechanism than fourth-century athens, the birthplace of democracy? ancient remedies for a modern disease the legal process is indifferent to who the advocates are (they are chosen purely on their competence and rhetorical ability) but we insist that final judgment be reserved to a randomly-selected lay group (the jury) whose verdict represents the considered judgment of the whole community. but if this works for the law courts, then why not the high court of parliament? most readers will share antifederalist scepticism about the dispassionate, rational judgment of a “natural aristocracy of wisdom and virtue” (howe, 1988, p. 117) magically transcending partisan interests.9 modern sensibilities are better represented by james surowiecki’s (2004) and philip tetlock’s (2005) arguments that the aggregate “wisdom of crowds” is a more reliable and democratic way of judging most issues than reliance on experts and aristocrats, natural or otherwise. if there is such a thing as the “general will,” then the best way to capture it is via the mechanical principle of condorcet’s “jury theorem” regarding the probability of a group of individuals arriving at a correct decision, rather than by privileging the “god’s eye” view of an aristocratic elite (grofman & feld, 1988; urbanati, 2006, ch.6). this principle of the “wisdom of crowds” has its origins in aristotle’s politics: the many, of whom each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively, just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse. for each individual among the many has a share of virtue and prudence, and when they meet together, they become in a manner one man, who has many feet, and hands, and senses; that is a figure of their mind and disposition. hence the many are better judges than a single man. (aristotle, 2008, iii.11.1281b) the only way of harnessing the wisdom of crowds in a large nation state is via descriptive representation and, as the polling industry has demonstrated, the best way of ensuring accurate descriptive representation of large populations is through probability sampling using a randomly-selected microcosm (levy, 2008) a process known, when applied to political representation, as sortition. although the mechanism has its origins in fourth-century athens (they even invented a sortition engine, the kleroterion) it has not fallen entirely out of use: in addition to the anglo-american jury, the deliberative polling (dp) experiments of james fishkin (2009) and his colleagues have shown that a randomly-selected group of ordinary citizens conforms to condorcet’s jury theorem: it can judge an issue just as rationally as any elite body—at least when supplied with balanced expert advocacy. on the other hand election is the best—or perhaps the only—way of ensuring the active representation of interests. as bernard manin (1997) has argued, elections produce elites: “it is no accident that the terms ‘election’ and ‘elite’ have the same etymology and that in a number of languages the same adjective denotes a person of distinction and a person who has been chosen.” (manin, 1997, p. 140) this is because elections are designed to select the best candidate (hoi aristoi). manin’s the two sides of the representative coin 201 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   observation on the elite nature of the electoral process applies universally, irrespective of the extent of the franchise and the opportunity for everyone to stand as a candidate, so the term “elective democracy” is oxymoronic. as we have argued above, the crucial question is how to combine the two distinct aspects of representation—judgment and parties—without incurring the factional evils that madison deplored. a radical answer would be a binary division of roles within the legislature, as james harrington proposed in his commonwealth of oceana (1656). harrington’s proposal was based on the venetian ballot, which involved a combination of election and sortition. harrington presupposed the complete separation of executive10 and legislative powers and advocated a further separation within the legislature—responsibility for policy proposals being allocated to the “aristocratic” (elected) element in the legislature and voting rights restricted to the democratic (randomly-selected) element: “an equal commonwealth is a government founded upon balance . . . a senate debating and proposing, a representative of the people resolving, and a magistracy executing” (harrington, 1992, p. 25). according to j.g.a. pocock, the editor of the cambridge edition of harrington’s oceana, there is to be a “natural aristocracy,” constituted by the people themselves in the act of recognizing [via elections] and deferring to those of superior talent; it will possess its own “virtue,” the capacity to reflect, and will exercise its own function, that of proposing alternatives [italics added] between which the many’s “virtue,” the capacity to decide [italics added], entitles them to choose. the difference between aristocracy and democracy is moral, numerical and functional but has no necessary connection with the existence of estates, orders or classes. (pocock, 1988, p. 63) harrington’s functional distinction between the role of the few and the role of the many resonates with athenian political practice, for example pericles’ funeral oration: “although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it” (quoted in popper, 1950, p. 181). harrington illustrates the natural justice of his binary constitution with the example of two girls dividing a cake equally: two of them have a cake yet undivided, which was given between them: that each of them therefore might have that which is due, “divide,” says one to the other, “and i will choose; or let me divide, and you shall choose.” if this be but once agreed upon, it is enough; for the divident, dividing unequally, loses, in regard that the other takes the better half. wherefore she divides equally, and so both have right. (harrington, 1992, p. 22) in my own reworking of harrington’s proposal (sutherland, 2008) both elements— hoi aristoi and hoi polloi—sit within the same house: the elective element proposes and debates legislative alternatives and the sortive element decides the outcome by voting, in a similar manner to a trial jury. the right of elected politicians (hoi aristoi) to introduce legislative proposals are restricted to the manifesto commitments of the political party or parties that won the most votes in the general election.11 given that the winners of the election are not forming a government but only putting forward policy proposals, a nationwide system of proportional representation would most accurately mirror the raw preferences of the electorate. 202 keith sutherland   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   allotted members have the monopoly of the vote but cannot propose legislative alternatives, as descriptive-democratic legitimacy applies only in aggregate, rather than to individual members. in this respect elected members correspond to harrington’s cake divider, whereas the allotted members correspond to the girl who chooses which slice of cake to eat. a constitution along broadly similar lines has been proposed by marcus schmidt, who runs the largest danish opinion poll organization (hansen, 2005, pp. 54-55). schmidt’s proposal is for a 70,000-strong electronic second chamber, selected annually by lot. as denmark has only four million electors, this means that most citizens would serve for one year during their life, thereby emulating the rotation effect of athenian-style sortition—“rule and be ruled in turn” (aristotle, 2008, vi.1.1217b). the first chamber of parliament, elected on a party-political basis, continues to prepare all bills. working members of the second chamber have a paid day off every week to study and debate the proposals and then vote by pincodeactivated telephone (every vote is rewarded by a tax credit). in schmidt’s bicameral constitution, if the votes in the elected and allotted chambers fail to reach unanimity, then the proposal is put to a general referendum. however, the functional distinction within harrington’s legislature—between debating/proposing and resolving (known as “parties” and “judges” in madison’s terminology)—does not require a bicameral solution. indeed the trial jury analogy suggests that both elements would need to meet in plenary as it is hard to understand how a jury could adequately judge a case without first hearing the evidence.12 the vote in the general election—the “raw preferences”—would inevitably be unreflective, as anthony downs’s principle of “rational ignorance” still applies: an elector in a mass democracy has no reason to study the issues in depth because her individual vote has in effect no causal power. the power of the individual elector to change the outcome of elections is infinitesimally small: in modern democracies the extension of the suffrage cannot in the end empower individuals because once the democratic “cake” has grown past a critical size each voter’s slice becomes so small as to be causally irrelevant. this is because, unlike other public goods such as street lighting, the causal efficacy of the vote suffers from diminishing returns as the franchise is extended. however, the democratic mythology hides this fact so that democracy is not believed to suffer from diminishing returns. when people see through the myth, and discover voting is causally irrelevant, apathy results (graham, 2002) a result accurately predicted by hegel (2010, para. 311). however, the victorious party or parties in the election (hoi aristoi) would still need to convince the legislature through the force of their arguments, as voting rights would be restricted to the randomly-selected members (hoi polloi). it would no longer be possible for a victorious party to steamroller through a policy that was buried in an election manifesto that few had bothered to read or that was deliberately concealed before the election. but given it is the same electorate that is being balloted13 in two complementary ways (preference elections and sortition) one would anticipate that the party/parties that won the election would also have a reasonable probability of winning the parliamentary vote. however—and this is the point—the victorious political parties would need to ensure that their policies won both the electoral (unconsidered) vote and the considered verdict of the same population, sampled descriptively—populism checked by deliberative rationality.14 the two sides of the representative coin 203 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   the problem of consent and the triumph of election a constitutional proposal along harringtonian lines would inoculate the body politic against madisonian corruption and would honour in full the distinction between “descriptive” and “active” representation. a randomly-selected legislature is a “portrait in miniature” (adams, 1988, para. 13), one that mirrors the whole population “descriptively”—like one of fishkin’s deliberative polls; however, because the democratic legitimacy of such an assembly only applies in aggregate, it would be impossible for it to perform the active function of individual political representation, such as the initiation of legislative proposals, advocacy, and remonstration. but there is no reason why a descriptively-representative assembly should not determine the outcome of a debate, as the aggregate vote would reflect the considered views of the whole population. fishkin points out that the etymological root of “deliberation” is the latin libra (weighing) (2009, p. 35) so when a randomly-selected assembly member “like me” weighs up the arguments and judges accordingly then i am descriptively represented. but is it possible to take this further and argue that i thereby consent to the judgment of a randomlyselected assembly? the argument for this further claim would need to take the following lines (paraphrasing fishkin, 2009, p. 194): 1. someone “like me” would, ex hypothesi, exercise judgment in the same way that i would myself. the argument does not require a definition of the likeness criteria (age, gender, occupation, political preferences etc.), as the randomization process in principle reflects the incidence of any quality in the general population. 2. the number of representatives “like me” in an allotted assembly would be proportionate to the number in the general population. if the sample were not sufficiently fine-grained to reflect accurately the distribution of any quality deemed to be salient to the exercise of political judgment then the sample numbers would need to be increased accordingly. only a relatively small sample would be needed to provide an accurate gender balance, whereas the proportional representation of, say, albinos or molecular microbiologists would require a larger sample. the rapid growth of the polling industry is a testimonial to the accuracy and validity of the probability sampling principle. 3. therefore the aggregate judgment of the allotted assembly would represent the considered judgment of the whole population.15 4. all electors are currently deemed to consent to the results of a general election, whether or not “their” candidate was victorious; so the same principle should apply to the result of a vote in an allotted assembly, the only difference being the employment of one or other of the two mechanisms—election or sortition—that constitute a ballot. although one might argue that the consent involved is at best tacit or hypothetical, the same is true in both instances of the ballot. but according to bernard manin, this argument is false: “however lot is interpreted, whatever its other properties, it cannot possibly [italics added] be perceived as an expression of consent” (manin, 1997, pp. 84-85). the only way of 204 keith sutherland   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   establishing consent is via the mechanism of the preference election. this is on account of the natural right theory that was dominant at the time of the birth of representative government. but are preference elections really an effective way of demonstrating consent, given that the aggregated outcome can only approximate the views of the average voter? how can one be deemed to have consented to an outcome that one did not personally vote for? an investigation of the strength of manin’s argument requires a digression into the development of natural right theory. if in the end the notion of electoral consent has shaky foundations, then the fishkinian alternative merits serious consideration, especially as the canonical narrative of electoral consent will be seen to rely on an archaic corporatist perspective of the social orders which is of little relevance in an age that emphasizes the sovereignty of the atomized individual. natural right theory john locke (1632-1704) is the best-known advocate of the principle that all legitimate government rests upon the consent of the governed. just about the only thing that locke had in common with his intellectual predecessor thomas hobbes was the shared belief that the commonwealth (civic society) was the result of a social contract between subjects and their government. both writers are vague as to when and where this contract was signed. hobbes—who did not have a high regard for historians other than thucydides, whose work he harnessed for rhetorical purposes—argued, following grotius and selden, that the social contract was a logical deduction from observations on human psychology: given man’s innate combination of fearfulness, egoism and pride, the only rational (prudential) course is for all men to exchange their natural freedom for the order and protection of the sovereign. since each man’s imperative is the preservation of his own life, it matters little what form the resultant government takes so long as its sovereignty is unchallenged and peace is preserved. the context for hobbes’s work was the english civil war, hence his wish for peace at any cost: it is unsurprising that the war-weary should consent to any form of government that will ensure that the pikes can safely be returned to the thatch or, better still, melted down and turned into ploughshares. what a difference forty years makes. with the turmoil and bloodshed of the civil war behind them, locke and his friends and patrons could afford the luxury of desiring not just the protection of their lives, but also their liberty and property. the latter meant that all (property-owning) citizens should themselves consent to the tax-raising requirements of the executive.16 but this is where it all gets a little tricky, as locke slips, without justification, from insisting on the individual’s consent to taxation, to assuming the consent of only a majority, or even a majority of representatives. the slippage at [locke, 1967] para, 140, p. 380 takes place within a single phrase: however fair or necessary taxation is, “still it must be with his own consent, i.e. the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves, or their representatives chosen by them.” (hampsher-monk, 1992, p. 104) the two sides of the representative coin 205 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   what makes the problem even worse is the historical fact that the parliamentary consent mechanism that locke was describing had its origins not in the “bottomup” theorizing of the social contract, but in the “top-down” requirement of medieval kings for the towns and counties of the realm to send knights and burgesses to meet with the king’s council. parliament was created for the convenience of the executive. attendance was a “chore and a duty, reluctantly performed” (pitkin, 1967, p. 3) and was in no sense considered a representative function. however “[t]he authorities who thus called for the election of representatives usually insisted that they be invested with full powers (plenipotentiarii)—that is to say, that the electors should consider themselves bound by the decisions of the elected, whatever those decisions may be” (manin, 1997, p. 87). thus electoral representation started out for the convenience of the executive, in order to establish the “consent” of the ruled: once the delegates had given their consent to a particular measure or tax, the king, pope, or emperor could then turn to the people and say: “you consented to have representatives speak on your behalf; you must now obey what they have approved.” (manin, 1997, pp. 87-88) very often the elected representatives of the people were merely asked to give their seal of approval to what the authorities had proposed. there were usually no policy choices involved and the process was often limited to a mere “acclamation” (manin, 1997, p. 88). philosophers were then recruited to justify this political imperative, resulting in the theory of natural rights: [m]ost strong rights theories have in fact been explicitly authoritarian rather than liberal. hobbes is representative, not exceptional. . . it is true that more liberal rights theories grew out of this conservative and authoritarian tradition . . . but the grotian origins of these liberal theories cannot be ignored, for they were always uneasily close to their authoritarian counterparts. (tuck, 1979, p. 3) given the tiny franchise of the late seventeenth century, and the domination of the commons by the patronage of landed interests, mps might very well have been unanimous in their opposition to levels of taxation that constituted an assault on their “natural right” to hold property. locke was no democrat: “he stands on the whole for the whig grandees, entrenched in the house of commons” (barker, 1971, p. xxvi) and for him, “by clear implication the test of membership is roughly equivalent to the forty shilling freehold” (franklin, 1981, p. 125). perhaps this is the reason that he appears not even to notice the conflation in his phrase: “his own consent, i.e. the consent of the majority” (locke, 1967, para. 140, p. 380). to a modern reader it is clear that one’s own consent may or may not coincide with the majority position; but with a small, relatively homogeneous property-owning franchise, it may well have been that parliamentary representation was simply a case of “chaps like us” whom one could rely on to protect the family silver. the construction of lockean-style government-by-consent in a mass democracy of atomized individuals with disparate views and interests is a much more serious challenge. hegel (like burke) adopted the pre-modern perspective that political representation was conducted through the corporations of civil society: “[deputies] are representatives not of individuals or a conglomeration of them, but of one of the 206 keith sutherland   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   essential spheres of society and its large-scale interests” (hegel, 2010, p. 160). however, a representative assembly in a greatly expanded franchise becomes a congress of individual particular interests, so the distinction between the majority and minority positions becomes a very real one. how is it possible to maintain the principle that everyone should give their own consent under universal franchise with the inevitable conflict between the interests of a “multitude of the particular men” (hobbes, 1969, p. 85). consent by proxy consent by the mechanism of preference elections is at best partial, tacit and approximate as it reflects only the consent of the majority (or at least its corporate representatives) and there is no obvious way for parliamentary representatives accurately to divine what the actual views of their constituents might be.17 but an alternative approach to electoral approximation, and one better suited to a mass individualist society, is sortive representation by proxy—i may not attend (and consent or dissent) in person but, if the sampling process is accurate, there would be people like me present who could participate on my behalf, and their presence would be directly proportionate to how many people “like me” there are in the wider population: a representative microcosm offers a picture of what everyone would think under good conditions. in theory if everyone deliberated, the conclusions would not be much different [italics added]. so the microcosm offers a proxy for the much more ambitious scenario of what would happen if everyone discussed the issues and weighed competing arguments under similarly favourable conditions. (fishkin, 2009, p. 194) but could representation by proxy ever be considered a form of consent? can i be a party to a contract that i did not sign myself? admittedly this is a difficulty. but it is no greater than that of mythical social contracts that are either the result, in hobbes’s case, of logical deduction of how a rational person would choose to act or, in locke’s case, “speculative economic history” (hampsher-monk, 1992, p. 90). and, as demonstrated above, the notion that consent is somehow embodied in electoral representation is true only under the near-unanimous conditions of the tiny property-based franchise of locke’s time. so consent by proxy would have to do very little work to improve on the dubious claims of consent by electoral approximation. fishkin’s rome healthcare dp enabled elected officials to argue that the “perceived legitimacy” of the dp results gave them the “cover to do the right thing” (fishkin, 2009, p. 151): the implication is that electoral success and legitimacy are anything other than synonymous. the crucial issue here is that of perceived legitimacy. a sophisticated knowledge of probability theory is required in order to understand how a sample can truly be representative of a target population. probability theory was unknown in classical times, casting doubt on the claim that the lot was used as a method of random sampling: dowlen (2008) argues that sortition was primarily a mechanism to inhibit factionalism and corruption.18 but that does not rule out probability sampling as a way of representing public the two sides of the representative coin 207 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   opinion in modern times (otherwise the opinion pollsters would all go bankrupt). all that is needed is to educate the wider public about the perceived legitimacy of the lot. participants in a symposium on fishkin’s book noted that careful experiments in deliberative polling are the best way of establishing the perceived legitimacy of majoritarian decision-making by a randomly-selected deliberative forum. jane mansbridge describes fishkin’s work as the “gold standard of attempts to sample what a considered public opinion might be on issues of political importance” (mansbridge, 2010, p. 55). focussing on the issue of consent, she describes the consent afforded by citizens to electoral representation as “somewhat tacit” and based on “incomplete information, incorrect premises, or manipulated loyalties” (mansbridge, 2010, p. 57). her hope is that lot will “make a significant comeback” but that would require both “a nuanced theoretical discussion of its [normative] legitimacy” as a form of representation and “sufficient citizen experience with the institution to make an informed judgment” (mansbridge, 2010, p. 57). we are only just beginning on this path, mansbridge concludes, and fishkin’s book is a milestone along the way, although “it will take a while for the public and for the deliberative system as a whole to give deliberative polls the credibility and the respect that they deserve” (mansbridge, p. 60). the jurist sanford levinson, another participant in the symposium, also focused on how a random sample might be seen as a legitimate form of representation: the legitimacy arises from both the equal probability that any given person (discounting for minimal baseline qualifications) might have been chosen and the perception by those not chosen that the system of lottery selection assures the relative “representativeness” of the sample chosen. to adopt the language of bill clinton, the deliberative assembly will look sufficiently “like america” to provide necessary reassurance that one’s own views are not absent from the assembly. (levinson, 2010, p. 66) although levinson acknowledges that the necessary grasp of probability theory (“representativeness”) will require a great deal of sophistication on the part of ordinary citizens, the biggest obstacle is the vested interests of elected legislators. fishkin’s 2007 dp in zeguo, china, did not suffer from this as the results were eagerly implemented by the local party leaders and people’s congress, thus suggesting that liberal democracy may actually impede the institutionalization of the deliberative process. the success of the zeguo dp has given rise to further projects in china which provide a judicious mix of élite and deliberative democracy, providing the “first glimmerings of another model” which “may set an example for public consultation in many settings around the world” (fishkin, 2009, pp. 155-156). the response from the political class in liberal democracies has been less enthusiastic: turkeys are unlikely to vote for christmas because, in the (possibly apocryphal) saying of john roche (paraphrasing acton): “power corrupts, and the possibility of losing power corrupts absolutely”. as a consequence fishkin appears to be cautiously promoting the dp as an informed focus group. this paper, however, has argued that deliberation by an allotted microcosm is a more legitimate way of indicating democratic consent than its electoral equivalent. as fishkin puts it, “consulting the public’s considered judgments is a bit like seeking its collective informed consent [italics added]” (2009, p. 195). one might 208 keith sutherland   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   counter that perceived legitimacy is not the same thing as consent, but the legitimating narrative of electoral democracy fares no better on this score: few governments have the electoral majority’s vote. if a hypothetical contract (social or otherwise) is not worth the paper that it’s not written on, then perhaps we need a new discourse for the age of universal suffrage rather than the notion of consent, which was more appropriate to a corporatist age and a comparatively narrow and homogeneous franchise. conclusion this paper has attempted to refute bernard manin’s claim that the inexorable “triumph of election” is predicated on the natural right consent principle, and to provide an outline sketch of how the sortive alternative of what might be termed consent by proxy would be more relevant for the atomized individualism of modern multicultural societies. several other sortive proposals have featured in the recent literature (burnheim, 1989; callenbach & phillips, 2008; lieb, 2004; o’leary, 2006) but they are all potentially open to corruption on account of their failure to acknowledge and implement madison’s fundamental distinction between “judgment” and “parties.” the federalists won the ratification debate at the constitutional convention; a compromise solution would have included the antifederalist proposal for descriptive representation by proxy. perhaps now is the time for a 28th amendment to reconcile the federalist and antifederalist viewpoints by implementing the proposal for a binary legislature outlined in this paper. notes   1 i am grateful to conall boyle, bob brecher, jan-willem burgers, john burnheim, gideon calder, lyn carson, oliver dowlen, yoram gat, gordon graham, mogens herman hansen, daniel howe, ivo mosley, jason maloy and peter stone for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2 in view of the numerous editions of the federalist papers and other works of canonical scripture, all references are to volume and paragraph rather than to a specific edition. 3 madison’s tutor at princeton was the scottish presbyterian cleric and moral philosopher john witherspoon. faculty psychology was in some respects a secularized version of the calvinist doctrine of original sin and madison’s famous “if men were angels, no government would be necessary” (federalist, 51, para. 4) was lifted straight from john calvin’s sermon on galatians 3:19-20, “the many functions of god’s law” (1558). 4 the reason madison and the other founding fathers disliked democracy and always connected it with factional evils is that they learned about it from plato, aristotle and plutarch, who were all critical of democracy (m.h. hansen, personal communication). 5 antifederalists preferred the simple and heroic spartan virtues to the corrupting influence of commerce and trade in unnecessary luxury goods: “frugality, industry, temperance and simplicity—the rustic traits of the sturdy yeoman—were the stuff that made society strong” (wood, 1969, p. 52). 6 an armed uprising in central and western massachusetts (mainly springfield) from 1786 to 1787. 7 the generic use throughout this essay of the words advocate and judge should not be confused with their specific judicial meaning; also parties, interests and advocates are treated as synonyms. also, although howe (1988) associates advocacy with self-interest, one can also be an advocate for a cause on the basis of ideological conviction—the motivating claim of many political activists. the two sides of the representative coin 209 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011     8 nadia urbanati also acknowledges the conceptual distinction between advocacy and judgment (“deliberation” in the sense of weighing alternatives) along with madison’s dilemma that “the actors who advocate their cause in the assembly are the same ones who pass judgment” (urbanati, 2006, p. 47). however her response is purely normative: “impartiality is at most a prescriptive maxim and a moral duty,” and relies on aristotelian and ciceronian notions of the norms of deliberative rhetoric: “advocates must ‘feel’ the force of others’ arguments in order to envision the path toward the best possible outcome” (urbanati, 2006, p. 47). that glosses over three obvious problems. first, classical rhetoricians assumed moral virtue as a prerequisite in debate, whereas their modern equivalents presuppose knavery (remer, 1995); second, the term advocate is drawn from jurisprudence, where the judging is performed by a supposedly dispassionate jury; and third, modern uk and similar parliaments are characterized by an almost total absence of deliberation (the outcome of the debate being predetermined by the parliamentary arithmetic) whereas in us-style constitutions, pork trading has more influence on judgment than deliberative rhetoric. compare also pettit, 2010, p. 65, drawing on skinner, 2005. 9 the early-modern republican theorist james harrington anticipated the modern view that élites were simply better at dressing up their own interests in discursive form. in fact by wisdom harrington does not mean a “platonic capacity to know metaphysical truths,” but simply an ability of the élite to calculate its own interests (remer, 1995, p. 552): “reason is nothing but interest, there be divers interests, and so divers reasons” (harrington, 1992, p. 171). 10 although this paper does not address how the executive should be constituted, harrington’s analysis would suggest that it is not a political office. if competence is the foremost requirement then there is no reason in principle for the appointment of government ministers to be any different from the recruitment process for any other senior organisational role. the general argument of this paper— that the distinction between the three aspects of political power (advocacy, judgment and execution) should be maintained by a unique selection mechanism for each role—would rule out using one process (election) for the selection of advocates and executives. the founders of the american republic deplored the corruption of the legislature by the executive and would have been equally dismayed by modern presidents acting “politically.” 11 in addition, government ministers would be entitled to introduce bills of a housekeeping nature as secondary legislation is normally viewed as an executive function. 12 for details of how to ensure balanced expert advocacy to enable a well-informed decision, an essential part of the deliberative polling experiments, see sutherland, 2008, pp. 133-8. 13 according to the oed, the word ballot incorporates both meanings—elections and selection by lot. 14 the time delay between the original elections and the debate in the allotted chamber would also greatly improve the quality of legislation by allowing space for extended deliberation in the media and the general public, an essential part of condorcet’s constitutional proposal (urbanati, 2006, ch. 6). 15 this was the principle behind the nomothetai (legislative courts) introduced in fourth-century athens. the nomothetai were selected by lot from among the jurors who were over thirty and who had taken the dikastic oath. “it was the wisdom of advanced age combined with the importance of the oath that distinguished the nomothetai from the assembly” (m.h. hansen, personal communication; c.f. hansen, 1990, pp. 222-226). 16 “[m]en must themselves consent (they cannot be bound . . . by the consent of their predecessors)” (tuck, 1979, p. 172). 17 “today, a person is deemed to be politically ‘represented’ no matter what, i.e., regardless of his own will and actions or that of his representative. a person is considered represented if he votes, but also if he does not vote. he is considered represented if the candidate he has voted for is elected, but also if another candidate is elected. he is represented, whether the candidate he voted or did not vote for does or does not do what he wished him to do. and he is considered politically represented, whether ‘his’ representative will find majority support among all elected representatives or not” (hoppe, 2001, pp. 283-284). 18 manin, however, argues that “thinking about the political use of lot may have led the greeks to an intuition not unlike the notion of mathematically equal chances. it was true, in any case, that lot had the effect of distributing something equal in terms of number (to ison kat’arithmon), even if its precise nature eluded rigorous theorization” (manin, 1997, p. 39). tuck notes that the estimation of probabilities predates leibniz and huygens’s mathematical studies—appearing, for example, in the writings of grotius and the members of the tew circle, thereby casting doubt on ian hacking’s account of the context in which the concept of probability emerged (tuck, 1979, pp. 104-5). 210 keith sutherland   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011     whenever a medieval cook stirred the chunks in a cauldron of soup and then sampled it with a ladle she was expressing a confidence that the ingredients sampled in the spoon would be proportionate to the whole cauldron (the variables being the size of the spoon, the size of the chunks and how vigorously the cauldron is stirred). this may also help explain why many mathematicallychallenged writers working in this field (including fishkin and the present author) thought they had dreamed up the idea of sortition through their own sheer intellectual brilliance, only to find out later that they were reinventing a very worn wheel. references aristotle (1988). the politics. cambridge: cambridge university press. adams, j. (1988). thoughts on government (1776). in c. adams (ed.), the works of john adams, second president of the united states, with a life of the author. ams pr inc; available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/adams/filmmore/ps_thoughts.html banning, l. (1988). some second thoughts on virtue and the course of revolutionary thinking. in t. ball & j. g. a. pocock (eds.), conceptual change and the constitution (pp. 194-212). lawrence, ks: university press of kansas. barker, e. (1971). introduction to social contract: essays by locke, hume, rousseau. oxford: oxford university press. burnheim, j. (1989). is democracy possible? university of california press. callenbach, e., & phillips, m. (2008). a citizen legislature. exeter: imprint academic. dowlen, o. (2008). the political potential of sortition: a study of the random selection of citizens for public office. exeter: imprint academic. dry, m. (1985). the complete anti-federalist. h. j. storing (ed.). chicago: university of chicago press. fishkin, j. a. (2009). when the people speak: deliberative democracy & public consultation. oxford: oxford university press. franklin, j. (1981). john locke and the theory of sovereignty. cambridge: cambridge university press. graham, g. (2002). the case against the democratic state. exeter: imprint academic. grofman, b., & feld, s. l. (1988). rousseau’s general will: a condorcetian perspective. american political science review, 82(2), 567-576). hamilton, a., madison, j., & jay, j. (1948). the federalist. max beloff, (ed.). oxford: blackwell. hampsher-monk, i. (1992). a history of modern political thought. oxford: basil blackwell. hansen, m. h. (1990). the political powers of the people’s court in fourth-century athens. in o. murray & s. price (eds.), the greek city from homer to alexander (215-243). oxford: oxford university press. hansen, m. h. (2005). the tradition of greek democracy and its importance for modern democracy. copenhagen: the royal danish academy of science and letters. harrington, j. (1992), the commonwealth of oceana. j. g. a. pocock (ed.). cambridge: cambridge university press. hegel, g. w. f. (2010). philosophy of right. (t. m. knox, trans.). retrieved from http://www.digireads.com. hobbes, t. (1969). elements of law, natural and politic. london: routledge. hoppe, h.-h. (2001). democracy—the god that failed. new brunswick: transaction publishers. howe, d. w. (1988). the language of faculty psychology in the federalist papers. in t. ball & j.g.a. pocock (eds.), conceptual change and the constitution. (university press of kansas), pp. 107-136. levinson, s. (2010). democracy and the extended republic: reflections on the fishkinian project. the good society, 19, 63-67. levy, p. s. (2008). sampling of populations: methods and applications. chichester: wiley. lieb, e. (2004). deliberative democracy in america: a proposal for a popular branch of government. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press. locke, j. (1967). two treatises of government. in p. laslett (ed.). cambridge: cambridge university press. manin, b. (1997). the principles of representative government. cambridge: cambridge university press. mansbridge, j. (2010). deliberative polling as the gold standard. the good society, 19, 55-62. the two sides of the representative coin 211 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011     o’leary, k. (2006). saving democracy: a plan for real representation in america. stanford, ca: stanford university press. pettit, p. (2010). varieties of public representation. in i. shapiro, s. stokes, e.j.wood & a. kirshner (eds.), political representation (pp. 61-89). cambridge university press. pitkin, h. (1967). the concept of representation. berkeley, ca: university of california press. pocock, j. g. a. (1988). the american founding in early modern perspective. in t. ball & j.g.a. pocock (eds.), conceptual change and the constitution (pp. 55-77). lawrence, ks: university press of kansas. popper, k. r. (1950). the open society and its enemies. princeton: princeton university press. remer, g. (1985). james harrington’s new deliberative rhetoric: reflection of an anticlassical republican. history of political thought, xvi(4), 532-557. scott, j. (1993). the rapture of motion: james harrington’s republicanism. in n. phillipson & q. skinner, (eds.), political discourse in early modern europe (pp. 139-163). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. skinner, q. (2005). hobbes on representation. european journal of philosophy, 13, 155-184. surowiecki, j. (2004). the wisdom of crowds: why the many are smarter than the few. london: abacus. sutherland, k. (2008). a people’s parliament. exeter: imprint academic. tetlock, p. e. (2005). expert political judgment: how good is it? how could we know? princeton, nj: princeton university press. tuck, r. (1979). natural rights theories: their origin and development. cambridge: cambridge university press. urbanati, n. (2006). representative democracy: principles and genealogy. chicago, chicago university press. wood, g. s. (1969). the creation of the american republic, 1776-1787. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. lamarre et al final before ts correspondence address: andrea lamarre, school of psychology, massey university, albany, new zealand; email: a.lamarre@massey.ac.nz issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 letting bodies be bodies: exploring relaxed performance in the canadian performance landscape andrea lamarre massey university, albany campus, new zealand carla rice university of guelph, canada kayla besse university of guelph, canada abstract there is an increasing movement toward accessibility in arts spaces, including recent legislative changes and commitments at individual, organizational, and systemic levels to integrating access into the arts across canada. in this article, we explore relaxed performance (rp) in the context of this movement. we present the results of a reflexive thematic analysis of interviews conducted with participants who completed rp training offered by the british council to understand the training’s effectiveness and impact. we explore the significance of the training, and of rp in general, and in relation to disability studies and cultural and political activism. we undertake this exploration against a backdrop of interrogating who rp is for and by. the themes we describe are: committed to access, training is critical, inviting bodies to be bodies, and imagining audiences. these themes tell a story of how rp relates to broader access work, the importance of training grounded in and led by disability/difference, the need to consider the relationships between bodies and spaces, and the tensions inherent to billing rp as “for all.” we conclude with an exploration of possible modifications, enhancements, or theoretical imaginings that could help rp to become more radically open to difference as it emerges, shifts, and changes. keywords relaxed performance; theatre; access; accessibility; legislation letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 185 in 2015, the british council canada began to train interested members of the canadian arts sector in relaxed performance (rp).1 drawing on and refining training developed in the united kingdom, they have trained upwards of 200 people in canada to date. in this article, we discuss findings from our pilot research into the effectiveness and impact of this training, as well as what the existence of the training means – or can mean – for the integration of disability-inclusive performance programming that aims to honour and lead with difference. we explore qualitative research results, thickening the findings presented in our report for the british council canada, and share reflections on the training’s usefulness and the critical questions that its existence and expansion raises for disability and non-normative arts in canada. our exploration foregrounds central questions about who rp is for and who it is by and highlights the importance of taking a critical lens on the implementation of rp training, design, and delivery. actualizing accessibility in the canadian arts sector movement toward actualizing accessibility in the arts sector runs alongside interest expressed by many canadian theatre companies, festivals, and other performing arts organizations. recent years have seen the emergence of alternative theatre-going experiences, especially in urban centres. disability arts organizations have also proliferated – for instance, tangled art + disability, creative users projects, and deaf spectrum in ontario; the deaf, disability & mad arts alliance of canada, and the collaborative radically integrated performers society in alberta; kickstart disability arts and culture in british columbia; and quebec’s spill.propagation, among others.2 there is growing recognition of the cultural contributions of disability, d/deaf, mad, aging, and fat activist-artists, and of the vital importance of improving access to the arts for all; this recognition has led to innovation and the advancement of social justice in the canadian arts sector (chandler et al., 2018; rice et al., 2021; rice & mündel, 2019). recognition of these contributions is critical, given the historical exclusion of disabled people from arts and culture, including theatre spaces. historically, disabled people have been made spectacles in “freak shows” and otherwise put on display (garland-thomson, 1997). disability has been present in theater, but often in the form of a particularized, pitied, heroic, or cured human, serving as a plot device within performative storytelling 1 we conducted this work in collaboration with the british council canada. 2 websites for these disability arts organizations may be accessed as follows: tangled art + disability (tangledarts.org); creative users projects (creativeusers.net); deaf spectrum (deafspectrum.com); deaf, disability & mad arts alliance of canada (ddmaac.weebly.com); collaborative radically integrated performers society (www.cripsie.ca); kickstart disability arts and culture (www.kickstartdisability.ca); spill.propagation (https://spillpropagation.com/). andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 186 (lipkin & fox, 2001). attempts to transform theatre’s framing of disability have included work that shifts away from reliance on “disability as a metaphor for non-disabled people’s sense of outsiderness” (sandahl, 2008, p. 226) and toward exploring “the always complex process of living life with a disability” (p. 240). however, even in the context of growing recognition of the need for diversity in theatre, disability remains marginalized (e.g., gardner, 2016; handler, 2016; mitchell et al., 2018). disabled audiences, too, have not always had access to theatre; requirements of embodying theatre spaces in particularized ways have limited the participation of disabled people (fletcher-watson & may, 2018). the importance of creating access in the arts is not a frivolous or insubstantial issue – it is one rooted in a desire and demand for social justice. art itself is political (toni morrison in taylor-guthrie, 1994); it carries possibilities for imagining what is and can be (rancière, 2006). access to the arts and to full participation in this process of imagining, then, is a substantial part of being involved in social life, or of imagining what is and what can be – differently (rice et al., 2017; rice et al., 2018b). from legislation to action with the advent of disability legislation at provincial and federal levels, for instance the accessibility for ontarians with disabilities act (aoda) (accessibility for ontarians with disabilities act, so 2005, c. 11), nova scotia’s accessibility act (bill 59 accessibility act, the acts of 2017, ns, c. 2), the accessibility for manitobans act (the accessibility for manitobans act, c.c.s.m. c. a1.7) and bill c-81: the accessible canada act (bill c-81, an act to ensure a barrier-free canada, 1st session, 42nd parliament, sc 2019, c. 10), arts organizations and venues, especially those that receive public funding, are now required to consider how their programming and spaces enable – or exclude – disabled patrons and creators. these legislative acts do not, in themselves, speak to access to and within the arts and culture sector; instead, they tend to speak to the “full participation in all aspects of society” for disabled persons. clauses across legislative acts lay out, in general language, the sectors in which and the kinds of spaces, goods, and services to which access should be guaranteed. how arts and culture organizations should take up the requirements laid out in these acts (and by regulated funders) is largely unspecified. it is our belief that the arts and culture sector, given its commitment to grappling with difficult truths and imagining better worlds, would want to aim for a higher standard than compliance. this sector offers exciting opportunities to explore how accessibility can become more than an exercise of “ticking boxes” in response to legislation by fully and artistically engaging with the idea of access. letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 187 the recent wave of legislation encoding accessibility in law and policy reflects the hard work of the disability rights movement in canada (and beyond) to make public spaces more accessible to bodies and minds of difference (rice et al., 2016; rice & chandler, 2020). the emergence and enforcement of legislation provides some assurance that spaces will become more open to at least some of the people who have been, and continue to be, excluded (e.g., through providing physical access or accessible documents). however, legislation in western democracies is grounded in a philosophy of liberal individualism, as feminist and intersectionality scholars have long pointed out (crenshaw, 1989; fineman, 2008). rights frameworks rooted in this philosophy falsely assume prior equality among people and generally can contend only with one axis of discrimination at a time (race or gender for instance); thus, a liberal rights framework can account neither for pre-existing systemic inequalities (fineman, 2008, 2017; crenshaw, 1989) nor for the imbricating ways that mind-body differences are “kept out of spaces through systemic racism, sexism, queer and transphobia” (rice et al., 2016, pp. 6970). ableism and humanist ideals as critical disability studies scholars have noted, ableism itself is deeply entangled in our very definition of the human. since the birth of humanist thought during the enlightenment, “the human” has been imagined as a particular kind of bodily self – a species-typical, corporeal standard that has become a stand-in for the human (st. pierre, 2015; rice, 2020). against this humanist ideal, disability “is cast as a diminished state of being human” (kumari-campbell, 2001, p. 44). together, enlightenment humanism and liberal individualism have come to define “the contours of the liberal humanist subject” – that rational, autonomous, self-restrained and selfcontained being who reflects the normative human (viscardis et al., 2019, p. 1288). the problem of equality (and access) is then situated in the bodyminds of disabled people whose differences become logistical problems to be fixed, rather than in social spaces and relations built with the normative standard of the human in mind. at this moment in history, the aforementioned legislative changes have meant that policymakers have begun to encode standards for accessibility. in the wake of this movement, it is important to remember that constructions of disability have fixated on the need for cure, rather than on the fulsome participation of disabled people in all spheres of life. after all, in government policy, “disability has been dealt with by governments as a welfare issue competing with other social issues for increasingly scarce public resources” (pinto, 2011, p. 453). there is a need to consider the frameworks within which standards for access are developed, and to push at the boundaries of andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 188 these frameworks to work toward belonging and flourishing, not simply “fixing,” cure, or overcoming. under the conditions of “fictitious equality” (fineman, 2017, p. 3) around which legislation is built, policy shifts do little to (a) challenge dominant constructions of disabled creators and audiences, or (b) instruct arts organizations and venues on how to transform spaces and programming to enable not only access but belonging. there is an urgent need to explore and create modes of opening doors once closed to a significant portion of the canadian population. we must interrogate access beyond making changes in spaces, policies, and procedures to meet legislative requirements. we might additionally consider how we can creatively reimagine the role of disability and of mind-body differences in enlivening public spaces. while legislation including the aforementioned acts has provisions for enforcement, the onus largely remains on the impacted person to lodge complaints (gillespie et al., 2016). it is here that organizations interested or invested in supporting access and disability rights, and the much more expansive aims of disability justice, begin their work.3 fineman (2008) argues that “bodily needs and the messy dependency they carry cannot be ignored in life, nor should they be absent in our theories about society, politics, and law” (p. 12). we agree with this statement, and are curious about the ways in which bodies, policies, and practices entwine to generate possibilities for the arts in particular. we enter our exploration of relaxed performance (rp) at the interstice of accessible policy and creative practice and begin to explore the tensions therein. “creating access” in the arts the broad question of “creating access” in arts organizations and venues, and in particular theatre venues and festivals, is expansive and far-reaching. different approaches are being piloted across the country as venues and organizations in and beyond the theatre sector attempt to meet (and hopefully exceed) accessibility standards. approaches to enacting access include, but are not limited to, audio described performances (e.g., naraine et al., 2018; whitfield & fels, 2015), live captioning, and rp (fletcher-watson, 2015; fletcher-watson & may, 2018; kempe, 2014, 2015; simpson, 2018). at its heart, inclusive or accessible theatre “requires the space to be thoughtfully designed to support all of the abilities of the people who work in and visit it” (watkin, 2017, p. 103). this can include negotiating and designing spaces that allow for difference to be not an afterthought but a central – and artful – part of the equation; in enacting accessible theatre, 3 disability justice is “a multi issue political understanding of disability and ableism, moving away from a rights based equality model and beyond just access, to a framework that centers justice and wholeness for all disabled people and communities” (mia mingus, cited in taorminaweiss, 2013, p. 279). letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 189 relationships between those delivering and those receiving theatre take centre stage (watkin, 2017). importantly, this is about more than simply altering the modes of access employed by disabled audiences or creators; too often, the remit of “inclusive theatre” becomes about “seek[ing] ways to integrate; to assist those ‘afflicted’ to be enabled to join ‘us’” (wooster, 2009, p. 81). in order to support truly accessible spaces for artists and audiences alike, there is a need for deep engagement with difference, such that the fabric of theatre settings is transformed to value and foreground different ways of being and creating (wooster, 2009). over the past decade or so, rp has come to the fore as one method of exploring what changes might be made to theatre spaces to better serve disabled artists and audiences (fletcher-watson, 2015; fletcher-watson & may, 2018). these performances are designed to open theatregoing experiences to a wider swath of the population by “relaxing” the “rules” around audience conduct. as simpson (2018) notes, rps can challenge “the cult of the quiet audience” which “presents a sometimes insurmountable challenge to the neurodivergent spectator” (p. 227). rps change the ways that theatre is delivered by permitting more movement and sound amongst audiences, adjustments to sound, lighting, and other effects, introductions to the show and to actors, provision of space outside of the main house for audience members to go to if they wish to have a break (“chill space”), and information about the venue and the show, including accessibility considerations, provided to patrons before their visit (chandler et al., 2020; rice et al, 2019; rice et al., 2021; simpson, 2018). rps began with a focus on providing accessible cinema and live theatre experiences for people with autism (fletcher-watson, 2015; fletcher-watson & may, 2018; simpson, 2018) and tourette’s syndrome (thom, 2015).4 the scope of those to whom rps might cater has since expanded to include a wider group of people for whom the “traditional rules of theatregoing” may be unappealing or inaccessible, including children and families, people with chronic pain, and more (fletcher-watson & may, 2018). increasingly, rp is being envisioned beyond being simply “for” disabled people, enacted as cultural practice by disabled people as part of disability/crip cultural creation. this expansion in imagined audiences introduces a layer of complexity, with the critical question of whether it is possible – or desirable – to accommodate multiple sets of accessibility needs at once within a single space. questions about the possible othering or infantilization of disabled audiences also arise when considering that much of rp literature explores the utility of the approach for those with autism and/or children. simpson (2018), reflecting on the limited availability of rps in the uk, shared 4 we use the terminology “people with autism” or “those with autism” when describing the roots of rp because these are the terms that authors, activists, and participants have used. however, we recognize the historical and present violence associated with this term (runswickcole et al., 2016), and use “neuro-diverse people” or “people who have attracted the label of autism” (douglas et al., 2019) when possible. andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 190 comments from theatre consultants who raised questions about what kinds of rps might be mounted to challenge the dominant perception that only youthoriented programming needs to be “relaxed.” other critical considerations for rp expansion include the extent to which disabled and non-normatively embodied folks are generally integrated into rp as only audiences, or also as actors, directors, producers, and others on the production side. further, without a clear roadmap around how to plan and deliver rps, there is a risk of the technique being adopted wholesale without thorough consideration of how to undertake not just any rp, but rather a thoughtful, well-prepared performance that meets the needs of multiple different stakeholders (from audiences to performers to producers and beyond). accessible theatre and relaxed performance the literature on rp has thus far primarily focused on the provision of rps for audiences of people who have attracted the label of austim and, occasionally, children’s performances (e.g., fletcher-watson, 2015; kempe, 2014). this literature reveals a desire for rps amongst various audiences (fletcher-watson & may, 2018). there is also reflection in this literature on how rp adaptations primarily target the normative expectations of theatregoing audiences, rather than making alterations to performances themselves (fletcher-watson, 2015), or inviting disabled people to set the terms of engagement for more accessible theatre. rp has been explored in relation to other accessible theatre practices; for instance, koltsida and lenakakis (2017) reflected on the value of increasing access to performances in greece, including the promise of rp for more varied audiences than greek venues currently welcome in. they highlighted the critical importance of state policies to support theatre access, without which “theatre companies have not yet methodically prepared and organised such performances” (p. 343). others have explored rp as a modality, seeking to understand the value and importance of rp in relation to other theatre practices and for disabled and non-normatively embodied audiences. fletcher-watson (2015) and fletcher-watson and may (2018) consider the access needs of audiences including but not limited to autistic individuals and acknowledging the benefits of rp’s flexibility and limitations when it comes to balancing multiple accessibility needs. recently, simpson (2018) reflected on the value of rp in moving away from ingrained notions about silent, static audiences and toward a reclaiming of an “unruly” and copresenced, embodied audience that engages with the work and with each other. this literature paints a picture of a field on the precipice of practical enactment and theorization; rp presents an opportunity to explore issues of voice, enactment, involvement, co-presencing, and tailoring in performance spaces. letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 191 exploring disability and non-normative arts brings to light long-considered tensions around terminology, definitions, and practice – the plurivocality of disability and mind-body difference has led to ongoing and sometimes seemingly-repetitious debates (conroy, 2009). people working in performance spaces vary in their familiarity with disability and nonnormative arts, and even with the social model of disability – the idea that disability does not inhere within the person, but rather results from a disabling society (oliver, 1996). this varied awareness surfaces in our analyses, and reflects, in part, the nature of doing work that is at once targeted toward policy change and radical transformation (conroy, 2009; wooster, 2009). we situate ourselves more on the “radical” end of the spectrum, calling for a revisioning of disability and difference (rice et al., 2009; rice et al., 2015; rice et al., forthcoming 2021). we wonder about the extent to which legislative reform can promote social justice for disabled people when such reforms are scaffolded in fundamentally individualizing approaches to “equality” (fineman, 2008, 2017) that do not attend to the complex and intersecting ways in which exclusion operates even within categories of difference (crenshaw, 1991). at the same time, we recognize that people come into this work with varied levels of familiarity with and different orientations to disability/non-normativity. we use the terms “disabled people” or “disabled folks” throughout, recognizing that some have been taught that “person-first” language is preferable (sauder, 2017). in disability activism, many prefer not to use person-first language, arguing that it decentres the wholeness of the person through framing the disability as something to be forgotten, brushed off, and ignored (e.g., sequenzia, n.d.). identity-first language (such as “disabled person” or “autistic person”) is then adopted; this is not universally preferred, and ultimately the choice of which language to use belongs to the person being discussed (brown, 2011). we have chosen identity-first language, and participants have not always used this language in their quotes. methods we focus on one aspect of a mixed methods study of rp and rp training in canada. we draw on 24 interviews conducted with people who took the british council canada rp training. these participants occupied various roles in arts organizations primarily but not exclusively in the theatre sector. we received ethics approval for the project through the university of guelph research ethics board. interviews averaged approximately 45 minutes, were conducted over the phone or zoom, and were professionally transcribed. interviews focused on understanding the value of rp, whether trainings equipped trainees to deliver rp, and how rp related to disability arts and accessible theatre in canada. we used a reflexive thematic approach (braun andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 192 & clarke, 2006, 2019) to analyze the data at the semantic level using a constructivist frame and inductive coding (i.e., generating codes and themes “from the data up”). to expand theoretical and practical insights on rp, we revisited our analysis after publication of the primary report (lamarre et al., 2019) in order to more fully integrate disability theory and explore participants’ responses in relation to broader power structures. as a result, the themes explored in this article differ slightly from the thematic structure originally proposed in our report and offer more thoroughly theorized findings that contribute to academic and practical aspects of designing, training for, and delivering accessible theatre. we employ a constructivist epistemology; as such, findings reflect not some existing reality of what rp is, does, and means, but rather a constructed reality that people constitute when they talk about and use the technique (raskin, 2002). this has implications for what the results might mean for expanding rp even further to open to more inclusive ways of being in and with art together across difference. underlying the thematic structure presented below are vital questions grounded in the guiding principles of the sshrc-funded partnership project, bodies in translation: activist art, technology, and access to life (rice et al., 2018a), the grant that supported this research in collaboration with the british council canada (lamarre et al., 2019).5 these include whether it is possible or desirable to balance multiple accessibility needs with one intervention, where policy and creativity intersect to generate new possibilities for access, and how disability justice might be aspired to and realized in arts contexts. such questions hold implications for how we understand, package, and market rp. understanding that people in different bodies with different life experiences will encounter rp differently also has implications for training, as it is important to consider who is involved in planning training, the content of the training, and how those involved orient to non-normativity. while it would be appealing from a liberal humanist perspective to claim that “rp is for everyone,” this neither reflects the impetus for or impacts of rp, and nor does it challenge normative notions of the human that underlie such an assertion; further, this stance does a disservice to the need for all involved in a production to thoughtfully consider and collaboratively design accessible theatre experiences as part of their creative process (e.g., see watkin, 2017; rice et al., 2021). results the four themes we present here work to tell the story of what rp means for the “rules of the game” for theatre audiences, the role that individuals and 5 view bodies in translation’s guiding principles here: https://vimeo.com/429459496; document: https://bodiesintranslation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/bit-principles-ofgovernance-and-engagement.pdf letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 193 organizations play in supporting the success of rp, the physical, ideological, and emotional conditions necessary for the rollout of rp, and critical considerations and problematics of rp in relation to tensions around disability art, as well as disabled creators, producers, and audiences. the first theme, committed to access, encapsulates how interviewees considered their work relative to the values of accessible theatre in general and rp in particular. training is critical highlights participants’ perspectives on the value of and challenges for training designed to enhance the delivery of rp. the theme inviting bodies to be bodies, focuses on relationships between bodies and spaces, and how rp can shift ways we might view and honour this relationship. this theme speaks to the specific challenge to rp – and to accessible theatre in general – of billing rp as “for all,” and whether this is either possible or desirable. finally, imagining audiences builds on the problematic of rp being “for all” to contend with the question of who rp is imagined to be for, and how this intersects with the way training is designed and rps are delivered. committed to access the degree to which participants’ organizational and personal commitments aligned with the form, content, and purpose of rp training mediated their overall experience of it. many participants worked for organizations that either held existing commitments to accessibility or were committing to greater accessibility; some were employed specifically in a role of working toward access. participating in training therefore meant living up to jobspecific and organization-wide commitments. this impacted participants’ engagement, fueling their desires to make personal and organizational values congruent with practice. when i was hired for the position, i knew that we were going to be doing access work, so, try to have asl interpreters and audio describers. and when i heard there was sort of a third prong [to the organization’s access strategy], my supervisor had told me about it [rp training]. it made sense that we would attach another element…to try to make access for the theatre. so, i would say we sort of had it in the works before i was hired for it, but as soon as i heard that the training was coming up, that's what made me want to do it. i knew it had to be done. (participant 7) this quote frames accessible theatre as necessity (“it had to be done”) and reflects the logic of moving toward rp (“it made sense that we would attach another element”). importantly, although participants often framed rp as a necessary next step, this does not mean that that they perceived it as a burden. instead, they described how the training led them to adopt a greater sense of personal responsibility for accessibility in their work; participant p1 noted, andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 194 for example, after taking rp training, “working more in inclusive arts practices became a big priority for me, professionally and personally.” the training also capitalized on commitments that participants already held to increasing access, by asking them to make a specific rp-related commitment in the weeks and months following training, something participants reflected on as a helpful part of the process. participant p4 shared: what i enjoyed the most is that at the end of the training the participants would leave with a number of commitments. so, 'i will commit to doing a visual story.' 'i will commit to talk to my board.' 'i will commit to talking to my director'… because, very often, when we do trainings, people go back to their daily routine. and they feel they're not a hundred percent ready to do something. accessibility is ongoing, rather than something that takes place one time. by building this acknowledgment into rp training, trainers increased the likelihood that the lessons learned did not end once participants left the training space. participants’ reflections on the relationship between rp and their organization’s commitments to accessibility underscore the importance of having strong grounding in accessibility prior to embarking on rp; organizational buy-in and commitment can help to spark interest and investment in doing things differently to enable access. in order to continue delivering rps, participants talked about the need to sustain communities built during the training. for example, participant p22 noted that talking to those who had “been there” was key in avoiding a feeling of being overwhelmed: i would say that if they’re…feeling overwhelmed by it, about implementing it, is to talk to somebody who’s done it first. because just looking at kind of the paperwork and all the various steps can be a little overwhelming. in line with this, some participants had already begun building rp communities following their training, which they noted would help them to carry out personal and professional commitments to rp in a way that is true to the modality – collaborative and creative, as opposed to prescribed and static. training is critical overall, participants found the training they received to be helpful to them in their practice or prospective practice of rp. their responses followed a pattern of being constructively critical, highlighting the value of relating to others, working through the practical aspects of designing and delivering an rp, and learning about the social model of disability, while also noting that there was room in the training to integrate a greater awareness of disability letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 195 justice, to enact access within the training context, and to build on experiential exercises to “learn by doing.” the relationship between rp and disability justice bears deeper exploration in its own right but warrants at least brief mention in the context of participants’ responses. disability justice calls for a centring of the voices of disabled folks, especially bipoc disabled people, in everything related to accessibility (mingus, 2013) and with this, an expansion of notions of accessibility to incorporate and address intersectional barriers to spatial inclusion (hamraie, 2017; rice et al., 2021). some participants called for a more explicit disability justice framing for the trainings and for rp itself, and noted that steps were being taken toward this in the adaptation of training from the original uk model. however, training participants differed markedly in their awareness of concepts related to disability theory, accessible practice, and disability justice. exploring their responses, patterns around orienting to disability varied depending on the self-positioning and level of political awareness of the participant. for some, the introduction of the social model was itself new and exciting: the main thing that really struck me was the very first day … was the definition of disability – [the] medical definition versus the social definition. and it just kind of rocked my world, to think that really, the only thing that's causing disability in our culture is the fact that we don't allow for it. it's our structures, our social construct, our buildings, those are the things that are disabling people. (participant 11) recognizing that it takes time to understand disability differently, the fact that the training led to this insight is a decidedly positive move toward this understanding. those who had greater experiential and political understandings of the various lenses through which disability might be viewed – including the limits of liberal humanist perspectives detailed above, as well as the possibilities of the social model and of disability justice – desired more from the training. some suggested that it might be helpful to tailor training to different levels of understanding, to avoid either jumping into paradigm-challenging material without the appropriate scaffolding or being perceived as wasting time for those already living and practicing access: the training had to adapt itself to be very general… so i really did enjoy it, but the only thing i do remember is feeling, like oh, i know that. and so, i wanted to get more specific about… because i was about to put on a show and really wanted to ask all sorts of questions about, like the ins and outs of putting on this performance. (participant 16) another pattern we noted in the data was a desire to move toward the training being led by disability or difference and some participants noted that they appreciated the moments when disabled folks were at least “in the room”: andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 196 it was very good effort to have some people in the room who have firsthand experience with people with disabilities or people with autism or people with various barriers in their lives and i thought that was so important because i find some meetings you go to are about others that are not in the room. (participant 17) by participants’ accounts, the rp training was a great first step toward working for a more thoroughly considered theatre praxis that attends to difference in a meaningful way. and indeed, the training got people thinking about how to start and plan from this awareness. on a meta-level, the training itself could be made more accessible; moments when trainings failed to take access into account revealed assumptions about who is imagined to be delivering and who is understood as receiving the training, shoring up boundaries between cultural producers and consumers. inaccessible “moments” included small type on printed handouts, lack of microphone use, not having an asl interpreter available, inaccessible physical spaces, and non-described slides, among other things. inviting bodies to be bodies a key area of consideration for rp and the future of rp training, design, delivery, and marketing, is the contention that “rp is for everyone” – or every body. on the one hand, participants noted the value of opening up theatre spaces to be less exclusionary. on the other, it is likely overly simplistic, as many participants reflected, to expect that one space will work for everyone, at the same time. creative solutions and critical reflection might, therefore, encourage clarity around what rp can and cannot deliver, and straightforward communication about the possibilities and boundaries of rp praxis. as participants reflected, rp can certainly make theatre feel like a less intimidating and more free space, for disabled folks and those who do not identify (or have been identified) as disabled. bodily (and mind) difference is made welcome, no matter the label it has attracted. i think the broadness that we use it as, so even if you have no one with autism in the audience… i like going to them [rps] because i like the little pre-show speech, gives me a bit more information. i like knowing that i can go to the washroom whenever i want (laugh) even though, i don't have any reasoning behind that, other than i like knowing that i can [laugh]. (participant 3) this sense of openness led several participants to reconsider how they market rp, in part responding to a problematic of accessible theatre: that rps may not appeal to non-disabled audiences. participant 8 reflected on a previous descriptor on their website: it’s from last year's website. it says: 'relaxed performances are designed to welcome audience members who might benefit from a more relaxed environment, letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 197 including those on the autism spectrum.’ it's not even the right word. 'these performances have less intense sound and lighting events, low light in the audience, the ability to come and go and a visual story delivered in advance, to prepare for the show.' … i would just cut out the part about including those on the autism spectrum. of course, rp is for people who have attracted the label of autism, but it is not exclusively for this group. however, the way that participants described access and rp reflects some social tensions around who is “in” and “outside of” the category of disability that are worth considering in greater depth in light of the contention that “rp is for everyone”: i think it's the most radically inclusive form of accessibility that we have now. when we talk about accessibility, we often think about physical barriers and including not having vision and including, being d/deaf and not understanding the language on the stage. but there's so many more. i guess people are often concerned about the visible barriers, that people can identify easily, and what i love about rp is that it addresses such a wide variety of people and with so many different potential reasons. (participant p2) when exploring which bodies are made welcome in the theatre space, it is necessary to understand how multiple access needs do not necessarily mesh together to create a space that invites all bodies to be bodies, at the same time. in fact, “one person’s idea of a relaxed space may be another’s accessibility nightmare” (watkin, personal communication). most participants did not endorse the idea that it was possible or even desirable to have rp meeting all access needs at once. the vitality of communication came into relief against this reality; in other words, the recommendation that it is important to be clear about what you can and cannot deliver, both amongst staff and for audiences. alongside the importance of communication, some gestured toward the idea that rp may not, in fact, be for all bodies at once or appropriate for every show, as participant p12 articulated: one of the big pieces for me is to have a conversation about the kinds of rp experiences that you think are going to be a good match in terms of the work that you do at your particular venue, and what might be a good match… i think we kind of get ahead of ourselves a little bit, where we start talking about rps and 'we'll do this for everybody and we'll do it for everything.' and i just don't think that's a reality. in the same way that rps cannot make audience spaces accessible to all bodies simultaneously, it may not be possible for the stage, and the creative process, to be accessible to all non-normative (or normative) artists simultaneously, either. in fact, no artwork can include every difference and speak to everyone; accessibility in the arts, when practiced in an iterative and creative way embodies “trust, safety, gentleness and tenderness; of enacting andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 198 and maintaining an accessible physical and emotional space as part of disability art practice” (mitchell et al., 2018, p. 572) and aims at adaptive specificity, rather than a homogenizing approach to access. some participants noted a tendency they observed amongst those exposed to rp to immediately want to make everything “relaxed”; this was tempered by those who had carried out rps and knew that delivering a quality rp requires advanced planning, forethought, and communication. participants noted that, in addition to being “a good match,” as participant p12 noted, above, there is a need to not deliver a sub-par rp. if rp was to be delivered, it would need to be done well in order to be worth it for both creators and audiences. imagining audiences most research participants did not disclose whether they identified as disabled or as non-normatively embodied/enminded. as previously noted, they had varied familiarity with models of disability, experience working with disability, and different orientations to the category. the way that they spoke about rp, who rp might appeal to, and who could deliver rp, raises questions about “next steps” for rp and rp training. one interesting way that participants conjured up their imagined audience for rp occurred when they spoke about marketing rps, and who might be interested in attending an rp. as participant p1 noted: i would say a challenge is the perception [of what rp means, from neurotypical audience members] who don't want to book that show, because they're like 'oh well, it's not for my students.' … and i think that's too bad, because we like to think it's an opportunity for audiences, on the spectrum or who are neurotypical to come together. so i think there's a lot of missed opportunity there. we're trying to find a way, we just reworded what we have described rps to be as inclusive as possible. this quote surfaces tensions around how accessible theatre may, likely inadvertently, shore up divisions between disabled and non-disabled audiences. vanessa brooks has commented on this tendency in her critique of rps, noting that they may segregate disabled audiences (romer, 2017). another tension that surfaces here is around the stigma that disability may still carry in the “normate” mindset and the struggle to reach out to audience members who may not feel welcome in rp, something that several participants commented on as something they’d like to see addressed in trainings. some people here were really gung-ho to start doing rps for every production that we do… and just to find an audience for each of those particular plays, that would be going to rp, the numbers would be so very minuscule, that you kind of letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 199 have to go, ‘okay, maybe it's more worthwhile that we kind of focus on one a season, as opposed to four a season.’ … and you know, that’s me, looking at it from a marketing point of view. (participant 12) here again, we see the issue raised about who rp is for and who it appeals to, with this participant reflecting on how rps might be “hard to market.” the perception that rp audiences are “difficult to recruit” represents a doubleedge: on the one hand, we do not wish to suggest that theatres are “off the hook” in terms of opening up their spaces to difference. on the other, we recognize the need for further exploration around the best ways to challenge disability stigma among non-disabled theatre goers and create performances that welcome in different audience members, and how to build meaningful, ongoing relationships between theatres and audiences that may never had been considered in marketing before. this necessarily means “changing the game” of theatre, such as by balancing multiple accessibility needs, providing shows in different formats, and not generating exclusion through shoring up boundaries and segregating out audience types. here is where we might build case for co-design with those with various disabilities;6 consultations, as advocated by watkin (2017), may be one approach to integrating co-design. other suggestions for deepening the critical conversations about audiences, creators, and design of spaces emerges from participants’ ideas about exploring rp advisory boards and foregrounding disability-led training. this last item was identified as an important consideration when planning future trainings, as participant p5 noted: we thought that it was important that the training be ideally, led by disability educators, but right now, that's not happening. but at least we could try to make the content sort of come from the knowledge and legacy of disability justice. some participants discussed how they sometimes struggled to work with artists and audience members to endorse modifications that align with rp; for instance, participant p8 reflected on resistance they had received, and the need to educate artists and audiences when technologies are made available to enhance access: some [artists] are just really resistant. and others are really open. some artists are like, ‘you can't have screens in the space at all.’ like, that's completely unacceptable. and yet, for some people, the screen is part of how they are able to engage – it might be how they hear; it might be how they receive the information of the show…. it requires a different kind of focus for performers, this does not apply across the board, but performers who are used to working in that secret dark space on the stage, where they can't see the audience. 6 co-design involves working with various stakeholders to build workable solutions. this can be and has been undertaken through an inclusive design lens, with a specific aim to build solutions that work for different people with different access needs (e.g., treviranus, 2011). andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 200 this participant explained that there is a need to educate performers and audiences alike about the new “rules of the game,” and the way that disability might surface – or, as conroy (2009) put it, “the way disability does us” (p.1) – in the performance space. this is not something audiences and artists are used to. however, from a disability justice vantage, it is critical that the specific conditions are put into place to make access possible; namely, training, funding, resources, and education. discussion the themes we explored in this article might be thought of as a loop around rp; they circulate across ideological and practical elements necessary to train for and enact rp and relate to broader discourses of disability and artistic praxis. by and large, participants’ organizations supported access, at least to the level of desiring to meet (and sometimes exceed) legal accessibility standards. this afforded participants the opportunity to get involved in rp training, which gave them the baseline level of knowledge and skills necessary to carry out rp, and in providing answers, also raised many questions. these include queries about whether rp can truly, at once, let all bodies be bodies and balance multiple accessibility needs. questions such as these feed into debates about how to enhance accessibility without segregating disabled audiences; to centre disabled artists and producers in the work of designing and delivering rp; and finally, to find sufficient resources to enable rp to thrive. moving beyond a checklist approach to access our results surface more tensions than resolutions. they raise the necessity of deeply considering who is imagined to be an rp consumer, and how to move beyond creating a static accessibility checklist as we aim to deliver thoughtful disability-led theatre. the findings also reflect the need for ongoing support for rp, and thoughtful support at that. in the australian context, hadley (2017) reflects on the “theatre ecosystem” where theatre producers, creators, and consumers are interrelated in a non-linear way; theatre infrastructure is interwoven with layers of funding, resources, policies, advocacy, markets, audiences, performances, media, and more. shifts in layers of the ecology destabilize other elements and tend to be “driven by downstream distribution preferences in australian media, culture, and society” (p. 309). movement, then, is slow and perhaps more likely to happen on the margins, for instance in community theatre (hadley, 2017). importantly, when thinking about ongoing funding to support disability arts, the question of who accessible theatre is for and who it is by takes on new significance: letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 201 the impact of a government discourse reading us only as inspirations and/or charity cases, and a funding agenda reading us only as clients, has the potential to work against as much as towards the increasingly disability-led models of arts practice disabled people and their allies have been spent decades fighting for (hadley, 2017, p. 321) the shared performer-venue-audience responsibility for access has also been demonstrated in the uk, for instance in a 2019 report on the state of theatre access (cock et al., 2019). this shared responsibility to expect the unexpected recognizes that dynamic, ongoing community support is a key component of what makes rps “work.” the critical importance of involving disabled people in the design of training, delivery, and funding for rp thus becomes even more urgent. harkening back to the long legacy of “nothing about us without us” (charlton, 1998), participants’ reflections on training might be overlaid against a backdrop of the imperative to move forward not on behalf of but by and with disabled audiences, producers, and creators. future work on rp might explore the linkages between disabled audiences and creators, and scaffold open conversations and a fluid, dynamic perspective on disability that further destabilizes the “rules of the game” in theatre. co-designing access and policy it is vitally important to include disabled people in the design and delivery of rp training and rps themselves, and this inclusion must be meaningful and centre difference. hamraie (2017) makes the case for critical access, arguing that we must imagine disability to be already present as we design. to actualize critical access, there is a need to engage with and across difference, recognizing the heterogeneity of access needs and the fact that “disability is not monolithic” but rather entwined with other aspects of being (mingus, 2012). inspiration for disability-led training might be taken from re•vision, a project that works to re-imagine disability from the perspectives of those with embodied difference. in this project, leadership is taken from people living at various intersections, allowing art-making workshops to embody their aims of “advance[ing] new understandings of disabled people as agentive, creative, and effective leaders” (rice et al., 2016, p. 57). by explicitly discussing what is required in creative spaces to facilitate generative disruption to status quo ways of being often required in “workshop” settings, re•vision’s workshops enable transgressive and radical ways of being together that may not yet be surfacing in rp trainings. the kind of centering of difference present in re•vision workshops should not be a major leap for a kind of rp that truly desires a revisioning of disability as welcome. re-orienting to disability as andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 202 welcome presents the possibility of “think[ing] about the generative work of disabilities and people with disabilities” (garland-thompson, 2017, p. 54). the question of which bodies are invited into rp spaces might also be taken up in relation to the “participatory politics of the theatre medium” (simpson, 2018, p. 231). while it is important to recognize the likely impossibility of accommodating multiple accessibility needs simultaneously, participants in our study reflected on how audience communities are built during rps; as simpson (2018) reflects, there is opportunity for the creation of communities in spaces where audiences are not expected to remain selfcontained, static and silent. each rp audience brings into contact people who may not otherwise spend time together; their unique constellation of embodied intricacies impacts each others’ experiences as well as their own. here is a true invitation not just for “bodies to be bodies,” but indeed for copresencing (simpson, 2018). the collaborative nature of rp does not end at the audience, as our participants made clear in reflecting on the training. indeed, participants were hungry for more training opportunities, for more insights on enacting strong rps, and for collaborative communities of practice for rp. moving forward, we hope that the findings presented here will help to scaffold such communities and guidelines in a way that does not fix difference, but rather opens to fluidity and collaboration. centring difference we identified the need for funding and policy change to scaffold access to the arts in our introduction, and participants lucidly reflected on the idea that rp requires thoughtful consideration, time, and resources. we have also gestured at how despite major forward movements in disability legislation, policy change itself may not centre difference in a way that promotes the flourishing of various ways of being and creating. in the absence of over-arching changes in governance, policy to promote compliance to disability legislation can only go so far to support a radical politics that centres mind-body difference. fineman (2017) describes the importance of a responsive state to move beyond putting in place “fictitious equality” (p. 3) where power differences remain firmly in place. because disability is emergent and not able to be completely anticipated (rice et al., 2015), putting in place legislation can never fully let bodies be bodies in ways that work for every body. an approach like rp might allow for a creative re-imagining of responsiveness to disability legislation if it avoids inscribing new norms of being and does not simply section out disabled people as audiences for specific types of performances. “getting” the multiple needs of people involved in the entire process of rp from training to delivery to witnessing has the potential to activate what mia mingus (2011, 2017) describes as “access intimacy.” engaging with access intimacy involves “not running from disability – but moving towards it. it letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 203 asserts that there is value in disabled people’s lived experiences” (mingus, 2017). mingus suggests that it is challenging, but not impossible, for disabled and non-disabled people to build access intimacy together. actualizing access intimacy in the rp context involves capitalizing on the desire for community and commitment to access articulated by those involved in rps. in order to do this in a way that centres disability, we might engage with critiques of rp such as those leveraged by the deaf, disability, and mad arts alliance of canada (ddmstca), which invite us to consider what kinds of access are being enabled, and to what kinds of worlds. rather than using rp, the alliance specifies that “the point of ddmstca culture is to give you access to our worlds, not vice versa” (ddmaac, n.d.). in so doing, they re-orient the question of access, moving away from ways in which spaces might be altered such that non-normatively embodied and enminded people may access “normative arts” and toward normative (and non-normative) audiences being introduced to the “aesthetics of access.” an aesthetics of access has been explored in theatrical and other artistic contexts involving disabled people as creators, not only passive or disinterested subjects (e.g., lipkin & fox, 2001). it invites exploration of “the complexity of life with a disability and disability culture” (lipkin & fox, 2001, p. 135). an “aesthetics of disability,” has been used to explain how and why legislative change may not translate into behavioural or attitudinal change around disability, which may continue to be experienced as confronting (e.g., harris, 2019); “disability aesthetics” has alternately sought “to emphasize the presence of different bodies and minds in the tradition of aesthetic representation [… that] refuses to recognize the representation of the healthy body and this body’s definition of harmony, integrity, and beauty as the sole determination of the aesthetic” (siebers, 2005, pp. 542-543). engaging with an “aesthetics of access” throughout the process of planning and delivering rp and rp trainings presents an opportunity to, once again, privilege, rather than sideline, disability and difference. while participants did, at times, gesture at the importance of disability-led training and performance, there was still a tacit articulation of an audience/performer divide wherein the performers – and performances – themselves remained largely unchanged. the fact that the performances were not “diminished” itself might be read as a reassurance that disability does not “disturb” a presumed norm or professionalism in the art. shifting to a codesigned and disability-led approach to rp offers up the opportunity to shift these norms and re-invent arts spaces. despite critiques of rp and an acknowledgment of the ways in which rp might stretch into a more disability-led form, we might consider how at least some rps already transgress norms. in at least one instance, the rp participants involved in this study staged a performance that centred disability, and some participants clearly acknowledged the need for a deeper interrogation of imagined norms around audiences and performers. similarly, jess thom’s work, at the forefront of the rp movement, offers a disabilityandrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 204 centring read on previously normatively articulated work (simpson, 2017). thom and others centre disability in performing samuel beckett’s not i in a way that “reclaims the stage itself as an accessible space” (simpson, 2017, para 4). for thom, the stage space was an important space for experiencing theatre, as existing normative spaces did not allow for the “disruption” of disability; thom thus speaks to the importance of disability welcoming spaces at both stage and audience levels. when rps are planned and implemented by and for disabled people, they welcome audiences into experiences of non-normative embodiment, and to the “aesthetics of access.” disability-led rps materialize spaces of disabled performance and belonging for actors, consumers, and audiences alike – aligning with a prefigurative politics. implications and moving forward rp represents an exciting intervention into the normative politics of theatregoing. it may provide theatre venues with a concrete method for opening up their offerings to a broader audience and for helping them meet accessibility legislation. participant responses indicate that training in rp has helped them not only to develop skills in accessible practice, but also to envision disability differently. at the same time, the existence and uptake of rp raises critical questions about whether access can be manualized, and whether “all bodies” are truly welcome in not merely the consumption but more transformationally, the delivery of rp. participants were clear about the challenges in enacting rp; equally, they were enthusiastic about its potential. moving forward, we suggest that those invested in rp training and rps themselves explore disability justice and disability-led frameworks as a way of bringing the critical questions raised in rp into conversation with the important work of feminist, disability, and legal scholars who interrogate the frameworks that undergird responses to questions of “access.” taking a playful, improvisational, and flexible approach to rp and rp training may not be a “simple” response to the question of “how to make theatre more accessible,” but it will help to avoid an approach to rp that reifies boundaries between arts producers and consumers, fixes difference, or promises more than it can deliver in terms of meeting multiple accessibility needs at once. the promise of rp relies on its uptake as a well-thought-out and adaptive modality that is supported by adequate resources and led by those who it aims to serve. acknowledgments we wish to thank our participants for being a part of this research. we also wish to thank our two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful engagement letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 205 with this piece helped enormously. this work emerged from a collaboration between bodies in translation: activist art, technology, and access to life and british council canada. references accessibility act, bill 59, chapter 2 of the acts (2017). https://nslegislature.ca/sites/default/files/legc/statutes/accessibility.pdf the accessibility for manitobans act, c.c.s.m. c. a1.7 (2018). https://web2.gov.mb.ca/laws/statutes/ccsm/a001-7e.php# accessibility for ontarians with disabilities act, so c. 11 (2005). https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/05a11 an act to ensure a barrier-free canada, bill c-81, sc c. 10, 1st session, 42nd parliament (2019). https://www.parl.ca/content/bills/421/government/c-81/c-81_4/c-81_4.pdf braun, v., & clarke, v. 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(2017). building a world with disability in it. culture-theory-disability: encounters between disability studies and cultural studies, 10, 51-62. andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 206 gardner, l. (2016, february 16). diversity in theatre: why is disability being left out? the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2016/feb/16/disability-theatrediversity-arena-wolverhampton gillespie, e., rioux, m., severino, s. m., moore, m., bell, s., williams, l., simmons, r., lipscombe, d., carpenter, s., mcfarlane, c., vuckson, l., & hostland, e. (2016). expanding the circle: monitoring the human rights of indigenous, first nations, aboriginal, inuit and métis people with disabilities in canada. disability rights promotion international canada (drpi-canada). hadley, b. (2017). disability theatre in australia: a survey and a sector ecology. research in drama education: the journal of applied theatre and performance, 22(3), 305-324. hamraie, a. (2017). building access: universal design and the politics of disability. minnesota university press. handler, r. (2016, february 10). stop excluding actors with disabilities. backstage. https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/stop-excluding-actors-disabilities-7387/ harris, j. (2019). the aesthetics of disability. columbia law review, 119(4), 895-972. kempe, a. (2014). developing social skills in autistic children through ‘relaxed performances’. support for learning, 29(3), 261-274. kempe, a. (2015). widening participation in theatre through ‘relaxed performances’. new theatre quarterly, 31(1), 59-69. koltsida, m., & lenakakis, a. (2017). contemporary performance by and for those with disabilities: the case of greece. research in drama education: the journal of applied theatre and performance, 22(3), 339-344. kumari-campbell, f. (2001). inciting legal fictions: “disability’s” date with ontology and the ableist body of law. griffith university review, 10(1), 42-62. lamarre, a., rice, c., & besse, k. (2019). relaxed performance: exploring accessibility in the canadian theatre landscape. report prepared for british council canada. lipkin, j. & fox, a. (2001). the disability project: toward an aesthetic of access. contemporary theatre review, 11(3+4), 119-136. mingus, m. (2011, may 5). access intimacy: the missing link. leaving evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/ mingus, m. (2012, february 12). changing the framework: disability justice. leaving evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/changing-the-framework-disabilityjustice mingus, m. (2013, november 30). interview by g. macdougall [video]. equitable education. https://equitableeducation.ca/2013/mia-mingus-disability-justice mingus, m. (2017, april 12). access intimacy, interdependence and disability justice. [remarks]. paul k. longmore lecture on disability studies, san francisco state university. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacyinterdependence-and-disability-justice/ mitchell, g., rice c., & pileggi, v. (2018). co-emergence: an art-full dance of inquiry into artists’ experiences of making art. research in drama education: the journal of applied theatre and performance, 23(4), 563-581. naraine, m. d., whitfield, m. r., & fels, d. (2018). who’s devising your theatre experience? a director’s approach to inclusive theatre for blind and low vision theatregoers. visual communication, 17(1), 113-133. oliver, m. (1996). understanding disability: from theory to practice. st martin's press. pinto, p.c. (2011). monitoring human rights: a holistic approach. in m. h. rioux, l.a. basser & m. jones (eds.), critical perspectives on human rights and disability law (pp. 451-469). martinus nijhoff publishers. rancière, j. (2004/2006). the politics of aesthetics. (g. rockhill, trans.). bloomsbury academic. raskin, j. d. (2002). constructivism in psychology: personal construct psychology, radical constructivism, and social constructivism. american communication journal, 5(3), 1-25. rice, c. (2020). digital/multi-media storytelling. in p. crawford, b. brown & a. charise, (eds.), companion for health humanities (pp. 341-346). taylor & francis. letting bodies be bodies studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 207 rice, c., & chandler, e. (2020). representing difference: disability, digital storytelling, and public pedagogy. in k. ellis, g. goggin, b. haller & r. curtis (eds.), routledge companion to disability and media (pp. 1-10). routledge. rice, c., chandler, e., & changfoot, n. (2016). imagining otherwise: the ephemeral spaces of envisioning new meanings. in c. kelly & m. orsini (eds.). mobilizing metaphor: art, culture and disability activism in canada (pp. 54-75). ubc press. rice, c. chandler, e., fisher, l., tidgwell, t., changfoot, n., mündel, i. & dion, s. (2018a). guiding principles for bodies in translation: activist art, technology, and access to life. re•vision: the centre for art and social justice, university of guelph, ontario, canada. rice, c., chandler, e., fisher, l., tidgwell, t., changfoot, n., mündel, i., & dion, s. (2019). principles of governance and engagement. bodies in translation. activist art, technology, and access to life, university of guelph. rice, c., chandler, e., harrison, e., liddiard, k., & ferrari, m. (2015). project re•vision: disability at the edges of representation. disability & society, 30(4), 513-527. rice, c., chandler, e., liddiard, k., rinaldi, j., & harrison, e. (2018b). the pedagogical possibilities for unruly bodies. gender & education, 30(5), 663-682. rice, c., chandler, e., rinaldi, j., changfoot, n., liddiard, k., mykitiuk, r., & mündel, i. (2017). imagining disability futurities. hypatia, 32(2), 213-229. rice, c., dion, s., & chandler, e. (forthcoming 2021). decolonizing disability and activist arts. disability studies quarterly. rice, c., jones, c., watkin, j., & besse, k. (2021). relaxed performance: an ethnography of pedagogy in praxis. critical stages/scènes critiques, (22), 1-19. http://www.criticalstages.org/22/relaxed-performance-an-ethnography-of-pedagogy-in-praxis/ rice, c. & mündel, i. (2019). multimedia storytelling methodology: notes on access and inclusion in neoliberal times. canadian journal of disability studies, 8(2), 118-146. rice, c., zitzelsberger, h., porch, w., & ignagni, e. (2009). creating community across disability and difference. in t. titchkovsky & r. michalko (eds.), disability studies reader (pp. 318-329). canadian scholars’ press. romer, c. (2017, june 21). relaxed performances slammed for segregating audiences. arts professionals. https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/relaxed-performances-slammedsegregating-audiences runswick-cole, k., mallett, r., & timimi, s. (eds). (2016). re-thinking autism: diagnosis, identity and equality. jessica kingsley publishers. sandahl, c. (2008). why disability identity matters: from dramaturgy to casting in john belluso's pyretown. text and performance quarterly, 28(1-2), 225-241. sauder, k. (2017, november 12). euphemisms for disability are infantilizing. crippledscholar. https://crippledscholar.com/2017/11/12/euphemisms-for-disability-are-infantalizing/ sequenzia, a. (n.d.) person first language and ableism. olliebean.com. https://ollibean.com/person-first-language-and-ableism/ siebers, t. (2005). disability aesthetics. pmla. 120(2), 542-546. simpson, h. (2017, august 24)). jess thom’s not i: the relaxed performance and tourette’s syndrome. the beckett circle: theatre review, autumn 2017. simpson, h. (2018). tics in the theatre: the quiet audience, the relaxed performance, and the neurodivergent spectator. theatre topics, 28(3), 227-238. st. pierre, j. (2015). cripping communication: speech, disability, and exclusion in liberal humanist and posthumanist discourse. communication theory, 25(3), 330-348. taormina-weiss, w. (2013). in pursuit of disability justice. in g. henderson & w. c. long, (eds.), introduction to human relations studies: academic foundations and selected social justice issues (pp. 279-283). charles c. thomas publishers. taylor-guthrie, d. k. (ed.) (1994). conversations with toni morrison. university of mississippi press. thom, j. (2015, february 21). ‘relaxed’ vs. ‘extra live’. touretteshero. https://www.touretteshero.com/2015/02/21/%e2%80%98relaxed%e2%80%99-vs%e2%80%98extra-live%e2%80%99/ treviranus, j. (2011). master’s program: inclusive design: building the brain trust needed to support an accessible digital future. inclusive design research centre forum. spring, 54. andrea lamarre, carla rice & kayla besse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 184-208, 2021 208 viscardis, k., rice, c., pileggi, v., underhill, a., chandler, e., changfoot, n., ... & mykitiuk, r. (2019). difference within and without: health care providers’ engagement with disability arts. qualitative health research, 29(9), 1287-1298. watkin, j. (2017). inclusive theatre space: bursting through boundaries of spatial restrictions, one project at a time. canadian theatre review, 170, 103-107. watkin, j. (2017, june). personal communication, from conversation with jess thom. whitfield, m. & fels, d. i. (2015). inclusive design, audio description and diversity of theatre experiences. the design journal: an international journal for all aspects of design, 16(2), 219-238. wooster, r. (2009). creative inclusion in community theatre: a journey with odyssey theatre. research in drama education: the journal of applied theatre and performance, 14(1), 79-90 skinner et al final galley nov 23 15 correspondence address: david skinner, department of communication studies, york university, 700 keele street, ross building s900, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: skinnerd@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 media activism and the academy, three cases: media democracy day, open media, and newswatch canada david skinner york university, canada robert hackett simon fraser university, canada stuart r. poyntz simon fraser university, canada abstract in canada, there is a relatively strong tradition of activist scholarship in media and communication studies. however, very little research has been undertaken on how working in the university may contextualize the ways in which academic workers participate in activist media projects. focusing on three such projects – media democracy day, open media, and newswatch canada – this article draws upon elements of political economy and bourdieu’s field theory to consider how the different characters of the academic and activist fields work to enable and constrain the abilities of faculty to engage with them. keywords media activism; academy and activism; academic work and media activism while there is a strong tradition of activist scholarship in the field of media and communication studies in canada, little has been written about the ways in which working within the university system enables and constrains participation in activist media projects. drawing from elements of bourdieu’s field theory and critical political economy, this article examines the ways in which the different imperatives of academic institutions and activist organizations have worked to contextualize academic participation in three such projects: media democracy day, openmedia, and newswatch canada. this article draws from the direct experience of the authors with these media activism and the academy, three cases studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 87 projects. david skinner was a co-founder of both media democracy day (vancouver) and openmedia, as well as a member of the openmedia board of directors until 2011. robert hackett was a co-founder of both media democracy day (vancouver) and openmedia, as well as co-director of newswatch canada. and stuart poyntz has been one of the lead organizers of media democracy day (vancouver) since 2009. media democracy day is an annual public event that brings together academics, students, media activists, media professionals, and members of the general public to consider various issues around media reform. openmedia is a public interest advocacy group, focusing on the policy conditions that would sustain affordable and accessible internet and telecommunications services. and based on a research seminar held at simon fraser university (sfu), newswatch canada is a news media monitoring project that undertakes content analyses of news coverage in the country and generates and publicizes lists of under-reported issues and stories. all three projects are activist initiatives informed by concern that canada’s communication system fairly represents the interests of all social groups, and not be overwhelmed by the logic and power of capital and state (cf. hackett & carroll, 2006, pp. 14-15). the projects also straddle academic and activist fields of activity in that they: (a) share a concern to involve students and faculty in making a difference in the public domain; (b) engage relevant academic knowledge with the public domain and, reciprocally, enable activism to inform the development of scholarship; (c) strive to build positive relations with and between allied social movements; and (d) contribute to building a movement for media democratization. framing the analysis attempting to draw some rigorous conclusions about the relationship between the academy and activism requires a theoretical framework for comparing the character of each type of activity, and the overlaps and points of engagement between them. combining elements of bourdieu’s field theory with elements of political economy offers an entry point in this regard. for bourdieu, a social field is a “network, or configuration of objective relations between positions. these positions are objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents, or institutions…” (bourdieu and waquant, 1992, p. 97). from this perspective, social fields are variously comprised of institutions, organizations, social practices, values, and ideas. while complex and dynamic in nature, such fields position social actors in particular ways to the different elements operating within them, as well as to other actors and circumstances both within and outside of that field. such fields are not deterministic in nature, but work to condition relationships, action, and outcomes. employing concepts from critical political economy, these social david skinner, robert hackett, stuart r. poyntz studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 88 fields can be seen to both enable and constrain the actions of actors operating within them such that, on the one hand, they provide resources and opportunities for action not available to subjects outside the field while, on the other hand, a subject’s particular position in one field may tend to limit their access to opportunities and resources in other fields (mosco, 2009, p. 186; cf. giddens, 1984). of course, both the academic and media activist fields are highly complex, having many different possible modes of overlap and differentiation between them (napoli & aslama, 2011). for instance, a tenured position at a university entails different knowledge and responsibilities than working in an activist organization (borgman-aboleda, 2011). at the same time, the ways in which tenured faculty might be positioned in relation to activist activities situated outside the university might be quite different compared to that of non-tenured or part-time faculty. similarly, academic research, underpinned by a seemingly objective stance, can vary dramatically from activist research, which is often designed to further specific political ends (borgman-aboleda, 2011; langlois & dubois, 2005, p. 11). at the same time, given the varying composition of different institutions and organizations, the specific structure and character of any particular field is an empirical question. despite these variations, three broad dimensions of comparison between the academic and activist fields might be posited. these include: (a) temporal dimension: this point of comparison focuses on the temporal rhythms and imperatives that frame and underlie the academy and activism. for instance, the academic year is dominated by a teaching schedule and administrative tasks related to that schedule (menzies & newson, 2007). activist events and campaigns have different temporal logics, often determined by the ebb and flow of political circumstances and organizationbuilding imperatives. how the two meet can impact the abilities of academics to participate in activist activities and organizations, particularly for those with junior or part-time academic positions that leave little time to devote to other kinds of work. (b) political dimension: here the fields can be seen as informed by particular sets of ideas, values, and professional codes (cf. foucault, 1971). from this perspective, shared values and ideas might enable academics to work in the activist field or with activists to meet common goals and ambitions. at the same time, however, the professional codes and practices governing one field might make it difficult for different types of ‘work’ (e.g., research or activist organizing) to be valued professionally in another (aslama & napoli, 2011, pp. 334-335). similarly, in this context, the ethics of striking alliances with particular interests or accepting money from particular sources may vary between fields. (c) economic dimension: at this level the focus is on resources and the ways in which they may or may not be shared between the different fields. examples might include everything from office space, to labour power, to cash grants. for instance, student volunteers, internships, and experiential media activism and the academy, three cases studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 89 learning might contribute to activist activities. at the same time, however, such activities may not be eligible for funding from academic granting agencies. distinctions between these three dimensions – the temporal, political, and economic – may not always be clearly drawn. for example, academic research used to further specific activist ends might be classified as either a political or economic resource for activist organizations. similarly, academics serving on the boards of activist organizations or performing other tasks for those organizations that they can then credit to their own professional practice as ‘community service’ or ‘research’ might be seen as crossing these dimensions as well. however, these dimensions do provide a starting point for exploring how the different imperatives of the academic and activist social fields can both enable and constrain academic participation in the development, activities, and administration of our three case study projects. the cases throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, neoliberal public policies, combined with government inaction regarding concentration of media ownership in canada, helped spur a range of media activism both on and off campus (hackett & carroll, 2006, pp. 164-169, 177-179; skinner & gasher, 2005, p. 67). all three of the projects examined in this article took form in this environment. while at one point or another they all entailed a high degree of academic participation, in their initial founding they were, however, quite different in their juxtapositions vis-à-vis the academic and activist fields: media democracy day was founded largely outside of the academy and brought increasingly into the fold; openmedia began on more middle ground and, as it developed organizational capacity, moved to the activist field; and newswatch canada was a creature of the academy from the outset. media democracy day media democracy day (mdd) is an event intended to bring together community activists, academics, independent media producers, researchers, and students, to promote networking and a sense of community around the project of media democracy. it has two specific goals: (a) democratization of the media – changing media practices and structures to make them more representative, diverse, and accountable; and (b) democratization through the media – using media to enhance popular political engagement and social justice issues (hackett, 2014). catalyzed by the rapid expansion of right-wing press owner conrad black’s newspaper holdings in 1996, a “common front” of canadian journalists, researchers, scholars, and advocacy groups formed the campaign david skinner, robert hackett, stuart r. poyntz studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 90 for press and broadcasting freedom (cpbf), modeled after the british group by the same name (skinner & gasher, 2005, p. 67). led by an unemployed graduate of sfu’s school of communication studies, people associated with the cpbf laid plans in 2001 to establish a centre in vancouver to support alternative media, to research media policy, and to lobby municipal, provincial, and federal governments on media issues. in the face of unexpected disinterest in that plan from some local unions, at the suggestion of an sfu faculty member, the vancouver activists decided instead to hold a local mdd – an idea that had been forwarded by toronto supporters of the cpbf. the initial organizing committee was comprised largely of alumni of sfu’s school of communication, an employee of the local canadian centre for policy alternatives, and an editor from the magazine adbusters. the first vancouver event attracted close to 350 people and comprised a public talk by well-known social activist and feminist judy rebick, a series of workshops about media production and media activism, and an exhibition of local independent media. varying in scope and with shifting volunteer-based organizing teams, mdd has been held every october or november in vancouver since 2001, with the 2014 event attracting 2,500-3,000 people. often sponsored by communication students and departments, similar events have sporadically taken place across the country and beyond, riding waves of critical concern about media-related issues (cf. media democracy days ottawa, 2013; media co-op, 2012; viva la feminista, 2009).1 over the years, mdd has helped to sustain and build networks among allied alternative media and social justice groups. in vancouver in particular, mdd has become a gateway project through which students and local community members learn about and stay abreast of current debates about media democratization and the organizations and initiatives that support media reform. in mdd’s first decade, local units of national organizations such as the communication, energy & paperworkers union (now part of unifor) and the canadian centre for policy alternatives played important supporting roles. other key sponsors have included openmedia.ca, the vancouver public library (which supplies the main venue), and more recently, vancity credit union. throughout mdd’s history, however, sfu’s school of communication has been key to animating the event, providing space, funding, and an essential point of co-ordination with the aid of alumni, students, and faculty who have taken lead roles in organizing and participating in the event. vancouver’s longstanding position as one of the most concentrated media markets in canada has also helped spur public concern and involvement in the project.                                                                                                                           1 for instance, toronto saw a number of mdd events in the early 2000’s, with those in 2005 and 2006 in part animated by faculty and students from york and ryerson universities. media activism and the academy, three cases studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 91 while the academy has played a strong role in helping carry mdd forward, the relationship clearly has its limits. in vancouver, for instance, even with part-time assistants financed by sfu and an expanded fundraising base, accessing adequate resources for mdd remains a challenge. more generally, as with so many other fields, academic practice has been impacted by new forms of managerialism that have intensified the role of scholastic surveillance, publishing infometrics, and labour precarity across university life (brophy & tucker-abramson, 2012; hall, 2007). sustaining alliances between research and activist communities is thus challenging and has often been discouraged by measurements that weigh on faculty evaluation and career futures. as a consequence, recognition of the work done by faculty to build mdd into one of sfu’s signature community engagement projects has not always been forthcoming, and allocating the time necessary to sustain partnerships and coordinate future programs has been difficult. at a more granular level, as mdd vancouver has expanded in recent years, the growth of the project has challenged the managerial skills of faculty whose time and expertise are otherwise focused on teaching and research. moreover, the number of faculty members able and willing to oversee and supervise the project remains limited. one limited-term faculty member, whose work with mdd extended well beyond her academic duties, left the academy to find less precarious employment. similarly, finding faculty willing to take on the project as a regular annual event outside of vancouver has also been challenging. while it is clear from the success of mdd vancouver that the fields of activism and the academy can be woven together in ways that produce key resources and energies to enable media activism, the case also illustrates some of the challenges in this regard. similar political perspectives and ambitions unite faculty, students, and members of the larger community in an activist cause and, both directly and indirectly, the university provides a wide range of resources that are essential to mounting a successful event. but mustering the resources to maintain an event that produces marginal returns in terms of faculty members’ institutionally defined professional responsibilities has been difficult. similarly, while holding the event in the middle of the fall term helps ensure the availability of students to assist with and attend the event, the timing also places further strain on faculty who, in addition to their other regular duties, are preparing lectures and developing and grading mid-terms at that time of year. openmedia.ca openmedia was first incarnated as canadians for democratic media (cdm) in the summer of 2007 in vancouver by steve anderson, a graduate student at sfu’s school of communication (cf. cross & skinner, in press; hackett, 2014). building on concerns expressed at a conference organized by the david skinner, robert hackett, stuart r. poyntz studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 92 department of communication studies at the university of windsor to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the publication of edward s. herman and noam chomsky’s book manufacturing consent (2010) some conference participants wanted to establish a network to engender more public participation in canadian media policy development.2 working with a number of academics, unions, and activist organizations, small grants and donations were raised to provide a basic salary and expenses for anderson, the nascent organization’s first coordinator. in-kind donations supplied internet services, legal advice, media relations, and publicity, and several academics and activists worked with anderson to craft a mandate and policy positions for the young organization. cdm’s initial mandate was broadly drawn: “to create a common front among groups promoting reform of print, broadcast, and web-based media and to engage individuals and organizations traditionally absent from, and underrepresented in, media policy-making and media activism” (canadians for democratic media, 2008, p. 2). the organization’s first campaign – stop the big media takeover – focused on the canadian radio-television and telecommunications commission (crtc) diversity of voices hearing, a public consultation examining rising concentration of media ownership. cdm’s website was the focal point for providing information and signing members to a mailing list, as well as a page where citizens could directly respond to the commission’s call for public comments. more than 2,000 people wrote in and a cdm delegation that included both activists and academics made the trip to ottawa to appear at the hearing. over the next two years, cdm was involved with a range of campaigns broadly focused on issues surrounding community media, journalism, and the internet. around the same time, big media companies in canada were intensifying their vertical integration of content and carriage (krashinsky, 2010; ladurantaye, 2010). control of the internet and related wireless markets was at the heart of these corporate plays, setting the stage for a series of struggles over the dimensions of public policy in this emerging field. cdm began to engage with the challenges this shift presented. working with a number of partners, the organization helped organize a net neutrality rally on parliament hill in ottawa in may 2008 (nowak, 2008), and leading up to a crtc hearing on the issue in july 2009, helped organize the saveournet campaign, a coalition that brought together interested citizens, businesses, and activist groups. in the face of these actions, the crtc adopted new traffic management guidelines, some resembling those put forward by saveournet.ca (crtc, 2009). still, cdm’s financial position remained precarious. in 2010, cdm was rebranded as openmedia.ca (om) to reflect the growing strength of parallel movements for ‘openness.’ later that year, om                                                                                                                           2 this summary of openmedia draws in part from cross & skinner (in press). media activism and the academy, three cases studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 93 launched the stop the meter campaign (openmedia.ca/meter) to intervene in a crtc decision to allow wholesale internet providers the power to impose ‘usage-based billing’ (pay-per-byte) on independent internet service providers, and thus on many canadian internet users (crtc, 2011). this campaign marked a major turning point for both the organization and on-line organizing in canada. deploying social media, and particularly facebook, to accelerate the message, over the course of several months the campaign garnered more than 300,000 signatures to its on-line petition and flooded the crtc offices with over 100,000 comments – an unprecedented level of public engagement with telecommunications policy. this pressure played a critical role in leading the crtc to change what had been seen as a fait accompli decision favouring the large telecommunications companies to one seen as much more friendly to other stakeholders in the system. the success of the stop the meter campaign illustrated that issues concerning internet access and affordability strongly resonated with canadians, particularly younger people, and ensuing campaigns generally centred on impending legislation or regulatory decisions directly related to the internet. social media are particularly important in this work and, drawing from the mailing list generated by the stop the meter campaign, om has been able to develop a steady stream of income (open media, 2011). in 2015, the organization lists more than 10 fulland part-time employees on its website. one of the keys to om’s success has been framing complex issues in simple populist language that resonates with the everyday experience of young canadians in particular. for instance, stop the meter represents a complex regulatory process dealing with the technicalities of internet traffic management, as putting a meter – like a parking meter – on individual internet accounts. other campaigns have also found pithy ways to portray complex issues such as copyright (e.g., no internet lockdown) and trade disputes (e.g., internet censorship) (cf. open media, n.d.). at the same time, campaign narratives employ a recognizable set of villains – like ‘big media’ or ‘big telecom’ – and preferred outcomes are framed in generalized populist terms such as the need for more choice, affordability, openness, transparency, or accountability. to promote political inclusivity, om identifies itself as a ‘post-partisan’ organization, and carefully scrutinizes campaign framing and language to avoid alienating supporters who identify as coming from across the political spectrum (cf. open media, n.d.). over the course of om’s development, academic involvement with the organization has shifted considerably. born out of an academic conference, faculty and graduate students helped establish contacts and relationships with people and organizations that supplied resources and expertise. they provided policy expertise, prepared regulatory submissions, and appeared at regulatory hearings on behalf of the organization. they also provided governance expertise, and several served on the board of directors. however, as om developed both capacity and a constituency, it became increasingly difficult for academic advisors and board members to keep abreast of operations. the david skinner, robert hackett, stuart r. poyntz studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 94 rhythms and responsibilities of academic life – such as fixed teaching schedules and research and administrative responsibilities – were not conducive to the fast-paced and ever-shifting responsibilities associated with an activist enterprise, particularly one so closely engaged in constructing a large and diverse community of concerned citizens. in this context, misunderstandings over relationships and responsibilities began to arise between the organization and the board. at another level, the organization’s increasing focus on broad civic engagement, and the kind of messaging this entailed, bumped up against the nuanced language of academic analysis and discourse. moreover, while there was never any question that donors might influence the organization’s operations, some tension arose over accepting corporate donations. further complicating the relationship was the geographic distance between om’s base in vancouver and the fact that the academic board members lived in ontario, which amplified the difficulties those members experienced with staying in touch with operations. consequently, while in the early stages of the organization’s development, affinities between the academic and activist fields were critical to its successful establishment, as om grew tensions developed across all three of the analytic dimensions outlined above – the temporal, political, and economic. under these pressures, om and its academic board members amicably agreed to part ways in 2011. still, numerous ties between the academy and the organization remain. a survey of canadian media activists co-authored by anderson and hackett, and funded by a program explicitly mandated to foster academic/activist collaboration, was a model serving both purposes: it generated an academic publication, as well as helped om to develop its network, identity, and framing (hackett and anderson, 2010). additionally, academic research continues to play an important role in developing and executing campaigns. similarly, communication and media studies departments are important sites for recruiting employees and interns for om, and student clubs at two major universities are an important component of the organization’s public outreach. newswatch newswatch canada (nwc) brings into play three fields: the academy, media advocacy, and journalism. here, the relationship between the academic and activist communities has been mediated through both hegemonic and alternative forms of journalism. unlike mdd and om, nwc was mainly a creature of the academy, although its original impetus derived from bill doskoch, a member of the board of the canadian association of journalists who was concerned about the impact of growing media concentration and newsroom cutbacks on the quality and diversity of news that canadians receive. doskoch wrote to media activism and the academy, three cases studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 95 several canadian journalism and communication departments urging the creation of a canadian version of project censored, an initiative founded in 1976 by carl jensen, a communication studies professor at sonoma state university in california. baffled by the mainstream media’s lack of interest in the watergate crimes prior to richard nixon’s landslide re-election in 1972, jensen devised a method of scouring the non-corporate alternative media for stories and topics that were under-reported in the corporate press as a way of publicizing the latter’s democratic shortcomings (jensen & project censored, 1997, pp. 13-14). he enlisted the help of a seminar class at sonoma state to winnow the stories, which were then ranked by a national panel to produce a final ‘top 25’ list that was distributed nationally. along with early participation from the university of windsor, the school of communication at sfu accepted doskoch’s invitation. originally called project censored canada, nwc followed jensen’s procedure to produce a ‘top 10’ list of under-reported canadian stories for the years 1994, 1995, and 1996. the project had several academic purposes. first, it aimed to contribute to media research by identifying ‘blind spots’ in the news agenda that would be relevant to assessing ideological biases or favouritism in news content. second, the project helped communication students to concretize otherwise abstract critiques of ‘mainstream’ media through their own discovery of gaps and double standards in the news agenda; it raised awareness of the role of ‘alternative’ journalism in canada’s media ecology; and was used to teach research methods, including statistical and content analysis. the project succeeded in all these respects, yielding research publications and providing students with a range of media-related research experience. on a more activist note, nwc and the research it generated were also intended to provide a political counterbalance to ongoing monthly media monitoring undertaken by the fraser institute, a vancouver-based neoliberal policy think tank (hackett, gisldorf, & savage, 1992). back-channel anecdotal evidence acquired by nwc’s founders indicated that the fraser institute’s relentless critique of the canadian broadcasting corporation (cbc) was rendering management anxious about charges that there was a ‘left-liberal bias’ in their news programming (cooper, 1994). nwc’s research promoted a different theme in public discourse – the influence of corporate power on canada’s news agenda. moreover, nwc used this research to help conscientize social justice movements regarding the media field as a potential terrain for struggle and change. the project fit well with the university’s institutional routines. the bulk of the research was undertaken by a seminar of senior undergraduate students at sfu who acquired research skills, greater media literacy, and academic credit. modest funding from the university’s work/study program supported part-time research assistants to help prepare reports. consequently, the project had some overlap across the academic and activist fields on all three analytic dimensions. david skinner, robert hackett, stuart r. poyntz studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 96 however, early in nwc’s trajectory, the activist goal of directly confronting corporate control of the media was blunted in favour of adopting a well-established academic methodology and hypothesis-testing approach which, the co-directors decided, was more likely to attract research funding than a ‘top ten’ list. that assumption paid off and the project received a $63,000 (cdn) grant from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc) for 1994-97. that outcome, however, entailed a trade-off: more academic credibility and publications, but less media attention. this more conventional academic research, reflected in the change of the project’s name to newswatch canada, generated several articles in refereed scholarly journals (uzelman, hackett & stewart, 2005; hackett & uzelman, 2003; karlberg & hackett, 1996), as well as a book titled the missing news, which was published as a research report by the canadian centre for policy alternatives (hackett & gruneau, 2000). the academic positioning of the project also limited its direct contacts with activist communities. nwc did receive occasional and modest, but highly useful, funding from organized labour, such as the union local representing media workers at vancouver’s two major daily papers. however, according to a senior nwc associate, insufficiently fulsome acknowledgement of one labour organization's funding apparently contributed to a lack of future support. one nwc report, critical of the major local daily, also revealed limits to the university’s support for faculty engaging in social critique. initially, the sfu media relations department circulated the nwc ‘top 10’ lists to its media contacts; an invaluable form of outreach. but following a shake-up in that department’s personnel, which saw an influx of staff with corporate communications rather than journalism backgrounds, the unit declined to publicize the report. although the reason for this decision was not made public, it was purportedly partly out of concern to maintain its relationship with the local press. firmly ensconced in the academy, as the project progressed nwc’s relationship with activist interests continued to be indirect, mediated through parallel interests in obtaining more and better representation of social justice issues in the hegemonic news media. at the same time, nwc’s success in directly influencing canadian journalism has been modest at best. journalists’ longstanding skepticism of criticism that questions or challenges professional norms, like objectivity, plays a role in this regard, as evidenced by some journalists dismissing the project on the grounds that the concept of censorship should not be applied to what was, in their view, simply editorial judgment (hackett & carroll, 2006, pp. 137-139). however, partly through contacts with supportive journalists, nwc received a respectable, though intermittent, amount of press attention, and the missing news report was deployed as intellectual ammunition by journalists and journalism educators arguing for more diversity and less ownership concentration in canada’s press (hackett & gruneau, 2000). media activism and the academy, three cases studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 97 nwc probably had more impact with respect to its relationship with canada’s alternative media. the project often drew stories from independent periodicals like this magazine, canadian dimension, and briarpatch, as well as from urban weeklies with a counter-cultural pedigree, such as vancouver’s georgia straight. although these publications also often reported nwc’s ‘top 10’ list, suspicion of the project’s purpose, territorial rivalries within the alternative media field, and arguably a culture of self-marginalization sometimes played a role in blunting the project’s impact. for instance, some freelancers and alternative media disdained the project on grounds that it was a creature of the canadian association of journalists and thus, in their view, the reactionary corporate media. on the whole, however, nwc introduced students and news consumers to perspectives and alternative media they would not otherwise have encountered. although pressure to exact traditional academic outputs, such as scholarly publications and credentialized students, influenced the form and direction of the project, nwc’s base in a university was far more a resource than a constraint. after all, the project was dedicated to the disciplined production and dissemination of publicly relevant knowledge, ostensibly a primary raison d’etre of academia. once the sshrc funding ended though, the project was dependent on the availability of professors to teach the seminar, and on small-scale grants for the analysis and dissemination of research. consequently, it has only been taught sporadically since 2006 and while several cohorts have produced some excellent reports – including a revival of the top under-reported story list (newswatch canada, 2011) – those reports have had little public circulation. finally, it is of note that a significant factor in the project’s fading profile is unrelated to either its academic or activist character and, instead, lies in the trend in canadian communication scholarship and research funding away from the critical analysis of corporate news media, too glibly dismissed as yesterday’s news in the era of facebook and twitter (edge, 2014). the experience of nwc, however, indicates the potential for university-based projects to re-engage on this still-important front. media activism and the academy: limits and pressures in each of the cases described in this article, the academy provided different forms and degrees of support to activist media projects. in vancouver, media democracy day had its origins in an opportunistic moment, as resources and momentum developed for a failed project were repurposed into something else. since its inception, common media reform ambitions have motivated alumni, students, and faculty from sfu’s school of communication to participate in this activist project, bringing much needed economic resources with them. although the circumstances that characterize the academic field continue to pose threats and challenges to academic participation, as david skinner, robert hackett, stuart r. poyntz studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 98 demonstrated by the sporadic mounting of the event in other jurisdictions, without ongoing support from sfu it is doubtful that the vancouver event would have enjoyed the success it has. rising out of the academy, open media struggled to find a niche in the activist ecology and develop sustainable sources of funding. academic support for the organization during its formative period was important and perhaps key to its survival. yet, as the organization honed its mandate, and developed capacities and income to support that vision, new temporal and political imperatives at the organizational level clashed with those of the academic field. although this led to a weakening of ties between the organization and the academy, given om’s continued growth and success, this case illustrates how the academic field was able to incubate and support the development of a new and innovative activist organization. in the case of newswatch canada, the project was wholly developed and sustained in an academic context, as academic resources were purposed to critically examine dominant media performance. early on, some of the activist character of the project was blunted in favour of pursuing academic funding. how this might have affected the impact of the project in the larger public sphere is difficult to know. despite these limitations, however, given the limited opportunities for funding a project of this nature in either the activist or journalistic fields, and the suspicion that journalists sometimes hold for academic research focused on their profession, it is doubtful whether resources to mount the project might have been mustered outside of the academy. in any event, nwc fit well with the pedagogical purposes and professional practices of the institution, and for a number of years it successfully straddled the academic and activist fields. however, in recent years, shifting pedagogical priorities have combined with diminishing resources to reduce the seminar’s frequency and the project’s future is in question. in sum, these examples illustrate that despite limits and pressures, the academic environment can be used to support media activism. such support is especially important in the case of progressive media activism for at least two reasons. first, unlike the united states where philanthropic foundations have been key in helping finance media activist organizations, there is very little of this kind of support in canada (skinner, 2012). second, previous research suggests that media activists have a relatively low sense of collective identity, and a particularly strong ‘free rider’ problem. in other words, since the benefits of better media would accrue to all progressive movements, there is less incentive for particular groups to focus on media reform (hackett & carroll, 2006, pp. 186-189, 202). given these realities, it is all the more important for media activists to find ways to lower the costs of mobilization. with their access to institutional resources, social justice-oriented academics can assist with that problem. to be sure, there are forces militating against academic involvement in media activism. shifting institutional imperatives, such as shrinking media activism and the academy, three cases studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 99 departmental budgets, cuts to support staff, the growth of precarious labour, and the downloading of administrative responsibilities work against the abilities of faculty to engage in activism in general (brophy & tuckerabramson, 2012; menzies & newson, 2007). the professional pressure on academics to accumulate research grants and peer-reviewed publications pushes in the same direction. at the same time, some forms of activism might be tailored into two of the self-proclaimed mandates of the increasingly market-oriented university: ‘experiential learning’ (associated with the competitive pressure to attract students-as-customers, and to provide employment-related credentials), and ‘community engagement’ (a response to political pressure to demonstrate social relevance and public support). but these mandates fit better with some forms of activism (e.g., non-governmental organizations pursuing moderate reformist goals, projects with dedicated funding, and supervised internships) than others (e.g., grassroots, militant, or unwaged projects). nonetheless, what is clear from these three cases is that the fields of activism and the academy can still be woven together in ways that produce key resources and energies to promote media reform. and this legacy is not insubstantial when so many other contemporary forces and interests pull in opposite directions. references aslama, m., and napoli, p. 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(eds.), communications research in action (pp. 28-44). new york: fordham university press. media activism and the academy, three cases studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 86-101, 2015 101 skinner, d. (2012). sustaining independent and alternative media. in k. kozolanka, p. mazepa & d. skinner (eds.), alternative media in canada (pp. 25-45). vancouver: ubc press. skinner, d., & m. gasher. (2005). so much by so few: media policy and ownership in canada. in d. skinner, m. gasher & j. compton (eds.), converging media, diverging politics (pp. 51-76). lanham, maryland: lexington books. uzelman, s., hackett, r. a., & stewart, j. (2005). covering democracy’s forum: canadian press treatment of public and private broadcasting. critical studies in media communication, 22(2), 156-169. viva la feminista. (2009). event: media democracy day chicago –2009. viva la feminista. retrieved from http://www.vivalafeminista.com/2009/10/event-media-democracy-daychicago-2009.html conway et al final june 22 18 correspondence address: janet m. conway, department of sociology, brock university, st. catharines, on l2s 3a1; email: jconway@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 theorizing power, difference and the politics of social change: problems and possibilities in assemblage thinking janet m. conway brock university, canada michal osterweil university of north carolina at chapel hill, usa elise thorburn brock university, canada keywords assemblage; social movements; occupy; deleuze introduction this special issue of studies in social justice explores the potential of assemblage thinking for apprehending contemporary social movements and the relations among them across global time and space. it grows out of a 2016 symposium sponsored by brock university’s social justice research institute, entitled, global movement assemblages: continuities, differences, and connectivities. the symposium’s aim was to deploy assemblage thinking to make better sense of the wave of popular democratic uprisings since 2010, while also considering its risks, limitations and possibilities.1 derived from the work of gilles deleuze and felix guattari, “assemblage” names the coming together of heterogenous social, biological, technological and other elements that co-function in provisional wholes in which the behavior of the constituent parts is conditioned but not determined by the 1 many of the symposium’s presentations and discussions are available in video format in the social justice research institute folder of the brock university digital repository, at https://dr.library.brocku.ca/handle/10464/13525. they may also be viewed on the social justice research institute youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/ucxft54ov8cvqsbewcvf3p7w. janet m. conway, michal osterweil & elise thorburn studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 2 whole and whereby the parts never lose their own integrity, their own difference. the assemblage acts through the emergent and distributed agency of its parts, human and non-human, through the composition of forces and the relationality they enact. we propose that the concept of assemblage aptly describes the post-2010 movements as they are, that is empirically. in addition to appreciating the dispersed character of these movements, the notion of assemblage affords the possibility of theorizing the agency of other, non-human elements in their constitution, including digital technologies, local ecologies, and the built environment. as such, assemblage thinking can help effect a break with mainstream approaches in social movement studies and their onto-epistemic commitments to unity, which inhibit their making sense of such emergent or spatially and temporally dispersed actions. moreover, as a form of “postpoststructuralist thought” (a. escobar, personal communication, february, 2017), assemblage thinking also breaks with the latent positivism of dominant approaches in acknowledging that the choice of interpretive lenses and concepts conditions the kind of sense we make of these movements and of their political potentialities. the ongoing wave of popular democratic uprisings, beginning in 2011 with the arab spring, the indignados, and occupy, have been conceptualized in various ways as related phenomena and as signifying newness. they are commonly understood as having emerged in the context of the 2008 financial crisis, resisting deepening neoliberalization, reflecting a generalized crisis of representative democracy, and demanding social justice, democracy and dignity (e.g., glasius & pleyers, 2013; castells, 2015). we are not satisfied that these understandings, nor the current theoretical and conceptual vocabulary that we have for speaking about movements, are adequate. we contend that the dominant frameworks fail to capture the political force of contemporary movements while also perpetuating several problematic assumptions. these include a eurocentric conception of the global and a state-centric definition of politics and movement outcomes. they are oriented by unacknowledged teleologies, such as the inexorability of modernization or democratization. they remain trapped within the terms of eurocentric modernity in the subjects, discourses and utopias that they privilege. middle east scholar mojtaba mahdavi, for example, has critiqued the neoorientalism of much commentary on the arab spring. in the same vein, hamid dabashi has contended that the term “arab spring” reinforced a categorial distinction between “europe” and “non-europe” on one hand, and between arab and african on the other. the term effaces commonalities among uprisings in southern europe and the mena region, and between the arab world and sub-saharan africa, where the fact that numerous similar events took place in the same period is continually obscured.2 2 we are referring to remarks presented by mojtaba mahdavi and hamid dabashi at the global movement assemblages symposium, brock university, 13-15 october 2016. a video of theorizing power, difference & the politics of social change studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 3 however, even as these frameworks produce “otherness” in certain ways, in other ways they flatten global difference. indeed, we contend that they struggle to deal productively with difference of any kind, whether gender, racial, colonial, or as some would argue, ontological (see blaser, 2010). in posing these critiques, we are thinking of major traditions that define the field: marxian and neo-marxian approaches, world systems theory, the contentious politics tradition, “new social movement theory” as well as more recent theories of network society (conway, 2017; osterweil, 2014). this seeming inability to engage politically or theoretically with multiple kinds of difference is very consequential for scholars of social justice and social change as these movements are the most highly visible, globally dispersed and culturally diverse, and seemingly liberatory concatenations of resistance in the context of multiple crises of the present. we recognize that “social movement” itself is a problematic concept and is modernist in its origins and underpinnings. we use it in an open and provisional way to name a wide range of collective action that is coproducing the world(s) we inhabit, and contesting human (and nonhuman) futures. social movement is a category without moral status or political content before its concrete instantiation, and even then any social movement is internally heterogeneous and contradictory. in this special issue, we are assembling a particular set of contemporary social movements, all of them internally complex, differentiated and contested, which are carriers of ethical questions and projects which, however contradictorily, remain central to struggles over the future with which we are invested. in exploring assemblage as an alternative onto-epistemic proposal with which to apprehend contemporary movements, we aim to be attentive to deep difference, and alert to risks of generalization and abstraction (especially at the global scale). we work to actively counter eurocentrism in scholarship and politics, including in the discourses and practices of putatively progressive social movements. but at the same time, we continue to search for resonance and connection across social location and place-based difference, and thus the possibility of alliance and solidarity, the possibility of politics. in this, we are informed, on the one hand, by critical humanisms, including anticolonial, feminist, antiracist and indigenous thought, and on the other, by the potential of complexity theories, particularly what we have come to call assemblage thinking. we recognize that there are significant tensions, arguably incommensurabilities, between these two intellectual poles and, indeed, this emerged as a fault line in the symposium. in the spirit of ––––––––––––––––––––––––– mahdavi’s presentation (including dabashi’s response) may be downloaded at http://hdl.handle.net/10464/13540 (or viewed on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-lkytrh0lm&index=8&list=pltxsasrc2jemswfzkwuduvpg7vai7puf&t=0s). dabashi’s presentation may be downloaded at http://hdl.handle.net/10464/13536 (or viewed on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv0zrbu8rxg&index=4&list=pltxsasrc2jemswfzkwuduvpg7vai7puf&t=0s). janet m. conway, michal osterweil & elise thorburn studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 4 puar’s (2012, p. 51) discussion of the relationship between intersectionality and assemblage, we have worked to highlight the possibility of convivial conversation between traditions of thought that are not normally thought together. that being said, while we believe assemblage thinking does help us confront endemic limitations of social movement studies, there also appear to be some intractable problems – or at least inherent tensions – in assemblage thinking as it is brought to bear on the politics of social movements and social change. the first involves the very limited (or non-existent) ways in which power and the political are addressed. while assemblage thinking valorizes the ephemeral, emergent, and molecular, and thus permanently keeps open space for new “possibles,” critics see this avoidance of closure as an evasion of politics. on the other hand, what critics see as the absence of politics and thus of any strategic orientation for movement organizing, proponents theorize as a safeguard against the hegemony of a kind of top-down, molar politics that leaves no room for real difference, and thus no room for what has not yet been imagined as possible. in the latter view, assemblage thinking is a response and alternative to the known failures of more traditional and “robust” visions of the political. a second and related problem lies in assemblage thinking’s very unsatisfactory (or non-existent) treatment of social difference, the historical inequities that arise from intersecting structural oppressions, notably colonialism, racism and patriarchy, and the projects for alternative worlds arising from struggles against such oppression. in fact, the indigenous, antiracist and feminist scholars we invited were extremely skeptical about the utility of assemblage thinking. some critiqued its erasure of black and indigenous histories and knowledges – of non-“western” traditions generally. others noted its seeming eschewal of history in favour of theory. many problematized its abstract thinking about power – particularly of state violence – and were troubled by the fact that assemblage thinking seems to offer little in terms of substantive avenues or alternatives for concrete struggles for resistance and survival. its very abstraction appears to be the source both of its theoretical force and its inherent problems. in this fraught intersection of different political, theoretical and ontoepistemic traditions, in what follows, we outline different versions and deployments of assemblage thinking and explore its possibilities and limitations. in particular, we describe the work of deleuze and guattari, who are the preeminent source for much assemblage thinking, including for the authors appearing in this special issue. because we cannot simply extract a single notion from their opus without distorting its meaning, we situate their notion of assemblage historically and within deleuze and guattari’s theoretical universe. in particular, we seek to better understand the problems of power and difference that persistently arise from their work and from associated appropriations of assemblage thinking. beyond deleuzian appropriations, we also introduce other ways that theorizing power, difference & the politics of social change studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 5 assemblage thinking has been taken up, both as an ontology and as a midlevel concept, and consider its possible utility for both conceptualizing and making larger sense of the social eruptions of the post-2010s. some scholars use the term merely as a useful concept while others seek to rebuild social theory and or advance a wholly new ontology (acuto & curtis, 2014a; anderson & mcfarlane, 2011). numerous scholars combine assemblage thinking with other theoretical resources and ontological (and political) commitments, as with puar’s (2012) frictional relationship between assemblage and intersectionality. the concept of assemblage is being taken up by scholars across the natural and social sciences in a wide variety of ways, not all of which are commensurable. there is no single way to think about assemblages and we do not insist on a particular tradition. “assemblage” in deleuze and guattari deleuze and guattari (1987) use the metaphor of the orchid and the wasp to explain how assemblages are collections of temporary relations between autonomous entities.3 the wasp enters the orchid, becoming a piece of the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. they conjoin and detach. when in contact, they constitute a set of possibilities – the orchid becomes a tracing of the wasp in order to connect with the wasp as carrier of its pollen. reproduction becomes possible. as they detach, new sets of possibilities arise. their connection and detachment is not mimicry or imitation but rather “a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid, a becoming-orchid of the wasp” (deleuze & guattari, 1987, p. 10).4 in this metaphoric visualization, the assemblage is the product of relations between autonomous parts. the relations between these parts are external to the parts themselves, insisting upon the autonomy of both the parts and the relations. because they are constituted by connections between things, assemblages rely on a distinction between relations of interiority (those between components within the assemblage), and relations of exteriority (those with components external to the assemblage, and also with other assemblages). in this sense, assemblages are always finite. but they exist in a world composed entirely of assemblages, constantly composing and recomposing. in thinking of movements as assemblages, relations of interiority can be seen in the internal dynamics and connections among the diverse elements that constitute what we think of as occupy. for example, we can think of the assembly model of decision making, the built encampments, digital media platforms, and so on, as elements within the occupy assemblage. relations of 3 we have relied heavily on thorburn (2015) for the following discussion of the orchid-wasp assemblage in deleuze and guattari. 4 for a queer reading of the orchid-wasp assemblage focused on desire and problematizing the productivity of reproduction, see roach (2012, p. 121). janet m. conway, michal osterweil & elise thorburn studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 6 exteriority can be seen in the interactions any localized occupy has with its urban environment, the municipal government, the police force, health and safety by-laws, and so on. relations of interiority and exteriority are constantly re-drawn, as various assemblages are activated through practices of relationality. the connections between external and internal components create temporary wholes and permit new assemblages to emerge, highlighting the importance of relationality. neither an assemblage nor any component part can be considered in isolation: individuals, institutions, devices, material objects, images, discourses, etc. when deploying assemblage thinking, all manner of materialized “things” are considered as in relation to each other and with regard to the immanent possibilities that their interminglings create. this emphasizes the living (though not necessarily organic), active nature of the assemblage; an assemblage’s provisional unity is found in its convergence and co-functioning with other assemblages and heterogeneous components: a relationality between entities and affects (deleuze & parnet, 2007). assemblage is a generative interaction, which can be neither reduced to its parts nor expanded to an infinite totality. in this way, assemblage thinking is also always and already ontological. that is to say, it offers a vision of reality as itself constituted by emergent entities none of which are fully sutured or complete, and all of which which are in a constant state of transformation. in a thousand plateaus, the idea of relations of exteriority indicates that component parts of an assemblage can detach and plug into another assemblage where the interactions of this part will be different (deleuze & guattari, 1987). this means that the component parts of an assemblage are conditioned, but not determined, by the relations they have (deleuze & parnet, 2007). for example, the use of the “people’s mic” in the assemblage of occupy was conditioned by the assemblage of the local state and its amplification bylaws in new york city. a particular assemblage emerged – the echoing human amplification of the people’s mic – that spread from the particularity of the new york city occupy encampment to many other encampments across north america and europe, and attendant critiques emerged within encampments as to the utility of this embodied technology. in this way, the liaisons and relations established by multiplicities in an assemblage only create unity through co-functioning; they are only ever symbiotic, or “a sympathy” (deleuze & parnet, 2007, p. 69). as an assemblage lacks an inherent organization, it can draw into its body disparate elements; it can contain other assemblages and create other assemblages by entering into relations with other entities. as assemblages are created through the relations between parts, they instantiate a constituent power. this constituent power emerges from the capacity of things within an assemblage to “exceed their relations” (ruddick, 2012, p. 208) and to establish something new, as one constituent element disappears and is replaced by new properties of the assemblage. this is not mimicry or analogy but, rather, the generation of a new way of being. these theorizing power, difference & the politics of social change studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 7 are “becomings” and they hold a political potential. grounded in a vitalist materialism, this endless capacity for newness cannot be contained, predicted or directed. this quality of assemblage is the source of its attraction as an anti-authoritarian theory of the political in which power is omnipresent and generative, but always dispersed and dispersing. through its very nature, it is considered resistant to centralization and totalization. moreover, according to deleuze and guattari, all becomings are “minoritarian,” meaning that they inherently resist incorporation into dominant norms (deleuze & guattari, 1987, p. 106). to the extent that there is a theory of power in relation to difference in assemblage thinking, it is here – as difference is manifested in endless becomings, the incessant appearance of newness. as such, becoming is an omnipresent challenge to “molar” or totalizing power, exemplified in the power of the modern state. furthermore, deleuze and guattari (1987, p. 277) claim, “[a]lthough all becomings are already molecular, including becoming-woman, it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. it is the key to all other becomings.” although potentially resonant with anti-colonial, indigenous, anti-racist and feminist theory and politics, there is also a fundamental disconnect here. although deleuze and guattari posit a philosophical or analytical assertion of being with women and other subjugated peoples, they ultimately fail to move beyond an abstracted privileging of minoritarian subjects. as rosi braidotti writes in response to deleuze and guattari’s statement above: whereas deleuze situates his project of becoming within philosophy – albeit against the grain of the dominant canon – feminists think about their becoming outside the beaten tracks of academic life, as a project that reunites life and thought into a far-reaching project of transformation. feminism is a philosophy of change and of becoming: it functions through creative mimesis, that is to say by activating counter-memories. (braidotti, 1996, p. 312) the incessant flux of assemblage thinking, and of deleuzian thought more generally, has the effect of reducing all historical struggles to abstract becomings. this move to abstraction empties them of their historical specificities, evacuates their meaning and their political force. because it is also a universalizing move, it undermines any possibility of alliance because it effaces difference in its specificity and therefore any capacity to negotiate it. furthermore, in flattening difference, it effectively equalizes all minoritarian subject positions and so fails to provide any critical resources to read struggles in relation to each other, or to any political ethic beyond that of dispersion of power. we will return to the problems of power in relation to difference and in relation to the political identified above. at this point though, in recognizing the overriding influence of deleuze and guattari in the articles collected here, we want to both situate their work more fully while also acknowledging other genealogies and deployments of assemblage thinking. janet m. conway, michal osterweil & elise thorburn studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 8 other genealogies of “assemblage thinking” a thousand plateaus, in which the concept of assemblage appears most prominently, is largely a product of its time and place. written in europe in the aftermath of the revolutionary struggles of 1968, a thousand plateaus offered a sombre appraisal of those events. deleuze and guattari (1987, p. 238) write, “those who evaluated things in macropolitical terms” at the time “understood nothing of the event because something unaccountable was happening.” that unaccountable something was a “micropolitics” that left politicians, parties, unions, and many leftists “ultimately vexed” (deleuze & guattari, 1987, p. 238). micropolitics concerns transformations in sensibility and modes of relating; macropolitics concerns conscious positions, demands and open struggles (nunes & trott, 2008). as such, according to deleuze and guattari, the events of 1968 are significant not on the basis of demands met, goals attained, or victories achieved (macropolitics), but rather for the conceptual shifts, relational modes, and affective or psychic transformations inaugurated (micropolitics). these micropolitics can inform and infect a macropolitics. activists and scholars alike tend to translate macro (or molar) versus micro (or molecular) as referring to a neat distinction between, on the one hand, modern institutionalizations of power, preeminently the state (the macro), and, on the other, the more quotidian, cultural, and “micro” or small. however, as deleuze and guattari themselves put it, “everything is political and every politics is simultaneously both” (1987, p. 213). said differently, macro and micro are simultaneously present in any instance of politics. the macro and the micro of politics are not scalar concepts; they do not refer to the size or site of struggle. rather they are about different aspects or registers of the political. in 1968, deleuze and guattari write, a “molecular flow was escaping, minuscule at first, then swelling” (1987, p. 238). it was an unfolding of forces which marked changes in political relations, structures of thinking, and compositions of struggle that were both concrete and ephemeral, pragmatic and affective. it is these political legacies permeating a thousand plateaus that inform the concept of the assemblage (see thorburn, 2015). the concept of assemblage represents a reaching for the conceptual shifts, relational modes, and affective transformations inaugurated in the micropolitical upheavals of 1968. regular miscontrual of these terms (macro/micro; molar/molecular), as well as substantive disagreements about the relative political import attributed to each register (macropolitical/micropolitical), and the putative relation of each to the other, are the source of vexing problems in any political application of assemblage thinking, and of the work of deleuze and guattari more broadly. the constellation of protests of the 2010s is similarly vexing. in this context, deleuzian theory of assemblage invites us to consider the register of the micropolitical in these movements, its operations, its potentialities and its limitations. a failure to perceive the micropolitical and theorizing power, difference & the politics of social change studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 9 its significance has led, on the one hand, to an uncritical celebration of these rebellions, and, on the other, to their dismissal as dismal failures – often in the same breath by the same commentator. power operating in assemblages is, in a foucauldian vein, omnipresent, amoral and productive. assemblage thinking can thus produce more complex, post-human(ist) accounts of power in movement, that, in its attention to the micropolitical, can be more generative in creative, agentic responses, and permanently open-ended in their political horizons. there also exist tensions and contradictions in how deleuze and guattari, and assemblage thinking more generally, have been taken up: put simply, a division exists between the more marxist/autonomist influenced reading (best identified in the work of hardt and negri (2000) and other postoperaismo theorists), and alternatively a body of work based more on complexity theory in biology, neuroscience, ecology, and other fields (see escobar, 2018; delanda, 2006; protevi, 2013.) in non-deleuzian social theory, the concept of assemblage in particular is picked up and developed as an ontology by manuel delanda, especially in his text a new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social complexity (2006). assemblage theory or thinking can also be found in fields such as science and technology studies (sts) and feminist sts in particular, complexity and systems theories, feminist and political ecology. it has also informed an emerging body of work on autonomy and social movements, largely from latin america , where it is in conversation with a wider diversity of sources including latin american indigenous and decolonial thought. some recent works engage a range of indigenous sources with and through the lens of sts, complexity theory as well as other nondualist concepts, what they term theories of relationality. in so doing, they consider the possibility that assemblage thinking – or something very homologous – could be found in indigenous worldviews, as well as the political visions of some place-based and autonomist movements (see escobar, 2018; ingold, 2011). in a recent conversation with janet conway and michal osterweil, arturo escobar offered a self-described “idiosyncratic” genealogy of assemblage thinking, in which he situates “assemblage” as belonging to a family of concepts that can be considered “post-poststructural” (post-constructivist), post-dualist, and neo-realist – what he terms most broadly as relational (which he in turn sees as ontological). these distinct theoretical developments share a critique of foundationalism, essentialism and universalism. moreover, they seek to address the pitfalls or shortcoming of poststructuralism as having “deconstructed too much,” leaving us with no capacity to envision any politics beyond deconstruction itself, and thus no basis for any substantive alternative horizon. assemblage theories seek to address the realm of the non-human – everything ranging from objects or things – organic and inorganic, to spirituality, affect, emotion, etc. in short, they recognize the force of multiple materialities that social theory in general janet m. conway, michal osterweil & elise thorburn studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 10 – including poststructuralism, liberalism and marxism – had rendered nonexistent (a. escobar, personal communication, february, 2017). for us, then, a necessary place to start in our consideration of assemblage thinking is to recognize that theory is always situated, and always has a relationship to particular bodies, times and places. we therefore advocate locating the concept of assemblage, and diverse deployments of it, in their own historical and political contexts, including as a way of revealing its politics. doing so not only provincializes a theory widely perceived as placeless and universal; it can also mobilize those politics to more directly engage the problems of power, difference and the political attributed to assemblage thinking. we, as members of this authorial collective, inhabit different parts of this spectrum of assemblage thinking: one more in line with the autonomist reading of deleuze and guattari; another more convinced by delanda and the complexity-influenced genealogy; another more swayed by the feminist, antiracist and indigenous critiques of assemblage. rather than resolve these differences or render an ultimate judgment of assemblage theory, we think it more useful to recognize that much ambivalence surrounding assemblage thinking stems from a failure to acknowledge the diverse sources of thought and, behind these, quite different problems – methodological, political, epistemological and ontological – that have provoked their emergence. “assemblage” as a mid-level concept: what does the term “assemblage” enable us to think and do? we conclude our theoretical exploration by considering the merits of a midlevel appropriation of assemblage thinking; that is, as a concept, an analytic, or as an approach to empirical study. the utility of a mid-level appropriation of assemblage thinking has been explored and debated in geography, anthropology, and international relations, and within these domains, there are several works considering its application to social movements.5 however, we are aware that these aspects of inquiry cannot be thought of as separable from the ontological considerations explored above, insofar as our understandings of the “real” impinge on what and how we approach its study. politically “realist” narratives of occupy, for example, demand that the movement produces demands; that it organize itself in ways that it can be represented 5 in geography, see special issues in area, 43(2) and city, 15(2, 3, 5, 6). in anthropology, see ong & collier (2005). for international relations, see acuto & curtis (2014a). for assemblage thinking in these disciplines as relevant to the study of social movements, see, e.g., mcfarlane (2009); escobar (2008); and deuchars (2010), respectively. note though that assemblage thinking is by its very nature (sic!) a transdisciplinary undertaking. these sources exemplify the range of ways assemblage thinking is being taken up. it is worth noting that a scholar like sassen (2006) uses assemblage as a simple concept in a very fruitful way without feeling any need to weigh in on or even engage the larger theoretical debates about assemblage thinking. theorizing power, difference & the politics of social change studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 11 intelligibly to governments, the media, the public. in the process, this “real” effaces the way different worlds were coming into being in that assemblage. this is not to make a judgment about these other worlds, their possibility or desirability, but rather to suggest that opening spaces and strengthening capacities to see the in-breaking of other emergent/actual/possible worlds is a critical epistemological and political task in the present moment. the ontological turn represented by relational thinking, of which assemblage thinking is one variant, reflects this sensibility.6 as an approach, assemblage thinking invites consideration of the arbitrariness of social scientific practices of bounding phenomena for study. it is not that we can do without (provisionally) bounding things, but assemblage thinking provokes us to consider how phenomena might be analytically bound in multiple ways, with diverse temporalities, spatialities, and mash-ups of human and non-human matter; how different assemblages interpolate, converge and dissipate from different angles of vision. for neorealists who embrace assemblage as ontology, this describes processes of being and becoming that exist regardless of any particular way of seeing them. for delanda, the study of the social is the study of actually-existing (although always emergent) assemblages (escobar, 2008, p. 287.) whether one agrees with delanda or not, what cannot be negated is how conceptions of what counts as “real” have a way of affecting both our political and analytical interventions. in the case of movements, activists and analysts alike are often dealing with efforts at producing new realities, with little awareness of what conception of the real they start out with. as latour writes, “if sociology of the social” – his term for our current frameworks of empirical study – “works fine with what has already been assembled, it does not work so well to collect anew the participants in what is not – not yet – a sort of social realm” (latour, 2005. p. 12). this is a core problem for both researchers and practitioners of movement. as a method or an empirical approach, a problem or phenomenon is proposed by the researcher and studied as an assemblage. the boundaries of any assemblage are those established by the researcher. it is not necessary to embrace assemblage as an ontology or as a wholesale remaking of social theory in order to use assemblage thinking to make more complex our thinking about social processes and possibilities (i.e., to engage in assemblage analytics). as noted above, assemblage thinking has some obvious similarities to post-structuralism (see escobar, 2008, pp. 120-128). it is an anti-totalizing and deconstructionist form of thought. its distinctiveness from post-structuralism resides in its (neo)realist ontology and its stress on the agency of all manner of matter: human, non-human, and other. however, discourses can themselves be studied as assemblages or as elements of 6 we note further that indigenous and other forms of non-eurocentric thought demonstrated awareness of ontological difference before the ontological turn in western social theory (see blaser, 2010). the western modern/postmodern genealogies of assemblage thinking surveyed above grant it a wider reception than pre-existing but more marginal forms of thought. janet m. conway, michal osterweil & elise thorburn studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 12 assemblages. in using assemblage as a way to conceptualize social movements, it is akin to the idea of network or coalition, but with two important differences. first, assemblage thinking invites consideration of the agency of non-human elements, such as those in/of the built environment, landscapes, ecologies, animal or earth beings, technologies, machines, etc. it is a nonanthropomorphic or post-humanist way of understanding and studying the social. second, assemblage thinking pushes beyond modernist modes of social thought that rely on taken-for-granted unities, for example, of organization, polity, state, economy, culture, and social movement as fixed and discrete entities. assemblage thinking invites reconsideration of such seemingly stable entities as more fluid and contingent concatenations of people and things whose seeming permanency is produced through repetition of behaviors in a constant process of assembling and reassembling, but which is also, therefore, subject to disruption and dispersion. assemblage thinking thus provokes us to think differently about agency, power and possibility. it can help us reconceive agency, as produced in and through the assemblage, through the relationality of its elements. agency is a relational effect, not an attribute either of individual humans or movements as collective subjects. assemblage thinking seeks to replace reifications with “concrete histories of the processes by which entities are formed and made to endure” (acuto & curtis, 2014b, p. 7). it stresses emergence, multiplicity and indeterminacy, and is open with regard to the form and durability of the unity, the types of relations and human and non-human elements involved (anderson & mcfarlane, 2011, p. 124). again this works against some of the latent positivism, macro-structuralism and cartesian habitus in much of the social scientific literature on social movements (osterweil, 2010, pp. 6-7). in exploring assemblage thinking vis-à-vis the spatiality of social movements, mcfarlane suggests that its utility lies in perceiving three interrelated sets of processes: (1) the gathering, coherence and dispersion of (2) groups or collectives of elements and their distributed agency as (3) emergent formations. he uses the concept of translocal assemblage to describe composites of place-based social movements in relations of exchange and involved in “co-eval becoming” (mcfarlane, 2009, pp. 562, 564): “assemblage places emphasis on agency, on the bringing together or forging alignments (li, 2007) between the social and material, and between different sites,” but which exceed the connections between sites (mcfarlane, 2009, p. 563). this last point differentiates assemblage from network, in that the former emphasizes history, labour, materiality and performance in processes of assembling – not merely connections between sites (mcfarlane, 2009, p. 567). for mcfarlane, assemblage offers the possibility of moving away from spatial master concepts such as scale or network, or better, allowing for multiplicity of spatial imaginaries and practices as operating within an assemblage. he uses the descriptor “translocal” to mitigate against the theorizing power, difference & the politics of social change studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 13 assumptions of hierarchy and power built into global-local or larger-smaller designations. the notion of assemblage can be used to help think about the emergence, unfolding, and dissolution of the occupy movement, for example, as a diverse set of localized practices, each with its distinctiveness, but all recognizably in relation to each other in a translocal assemblage and taking shape, together and apart, in and against a larger field of forces. assemblage thinking can help us appreciate the self-organized, emergent and contingent character of any place-based occupy as a singularity, the diversity of human and non-human agencies that composed it, as well as its constitutive relation with occupy as a transnational networked phenomenon and as a virtual reality digitally constituted across the global spaces of the internet. assemblage thinking could also assist in situating any particular occupy, or the transnational occupy ensemble, in relation to north american urban spaces, unemployed white youth, homeless people, policing, municipal public health bylaws, private/public land, housing foreclosures, sexual violence, hand-lettered signs, mass media representations, activist contestations, digital and social media, discourses of direct democracy, american histories of the public meeting, histories of white settlement and occupation, the global financial crisis, etc. these note different trajectories that engage with different intensities and which themselves exceed the occupy assemblage, but are, for the period of engagement, also “components” in the occupy assemblage or in one or more larger assemblages which conditioned the emergence and possibilities of occupy. assemblage thinking provokes the researcher to ask: what is the “thing” “occupy”? how did it materialize? what is its topology (the way its parts are organized and connected; i.e., its interiority) and what are the larger topologies in which it is situated, which condition (not determine) its possibilities (i.e., its exteriority)? moreover, such a distributed topology might help disinvest us from our bounded/delimited understandings of movement outcomes and successes. russell, pusey and chatterton (2011, p. 580) make the important point that “assemblages are not political in and of themselves; it is what puts them in movement, what composes them or decomposes them that is the object of the political.” this is particularly so when we are talking about movement assemblages. there is always a conceptual politics behind choices in assemblage thinking, informed by practical political and normative questions (acuto & curtis, 2014b, p. 12) there is no inherent normativity; this is injected by the theorist’s choice of what to assemble for what purposes. which are the relevant elements: bodies, technologies, politics, affects? (thorburn, 2015). janet m. conway, michal osterweil & elise thorburn studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 14 contributions to the special issue this special issue seeks to open new paths for inquiry about contemporary social movements. this is in response to the extraordinary events and aftermaths of the post-2010 uprisings and their evident resonance across contexts, on the one hand, and on the other, the inadequacy of most social science to make sense of them. in exploring the potential of assemblage thinking, we are not searching for a new grand theory, but to see relationships anew, to assemble new aspects, and therefore, perhaps, to discover new potentialities, political and otherwise, arising from them. our interest is in inquiring into the possible meaning of these events and their agency at scales beyond their immediate contexts and beyond the sum of individual episodes, without losing sight of the contextual specificity and the internal heterogeneity of each, and examining their convergences and divergences, inclusions and exclusions. furthermore, while movement struggles are ineluctably conducted in place-based ways, they are powerfully constituted, enabled and constrained by relations and forces beyond the immediate and the proximate. in addition to this introduction, the special issue consists of three peerreviewed papers, a music video montage, two video compilations, and the transcript of a panel exchange. we begin with “global movement assemblages: a post-2011 social movements montage”, a nine-minute music video that provides an engaging visual and aural survey of the post-2010 movements, highlighting the protagonism of women, and beginning and ending with indigenous resistance on turtle island. in between, creator kushan azadah takes us from tahrir square in cairo, to black lives matter in north america, to occupy wall street, the gezi park protests in istanbul, to puerta del sol in madrid, to the umbrella movement in hong kong.7 a second video compilation, “assemblage thinking and transnational/translocal social movements of the 2010s,” presents keynote addresses by feminist social movement scholars, janet conway and sonia alvarez.8 conway introduces assemblage thinking as an alternative approach to making sense of the post-2010 global movement ensemble. using the example of occupy wall street, she proposes combining assemblage thinking with decolonial critique to re-read occupy through its indigenous interlocutors as occupying indigenous land. alvarez considers the utility of assemblage to think about activism, protest, and participation in contemporary forms of transnational and translocal feminism. she proposes the concept “discursive fields of action” as an alternative to “social movement” in light of afro-brazilian feminism and the brazilian slutwalk. 7 download video montage at http://hdl.handle.net/10464/13526 (or view it on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slaninelnxm). 8 download video compilation at http://hdl.handle.net/10464/13528 (or view it on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ukptiivvga). theorizing power, difference & the politics of social change studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 15 this video compilation concludes with a series of short interventions by alvarez, rinaldo walcott, öznur karakaş , lee cormie and glen coulthard assessing the utility of assemblage thinking. the peer-reviewed papers in this special issue consider assemblage with other deleuzo-guattarian concepts in interrogating and unfolding some of the deepest held assumptions about political contestations in recent years. we bring together theorists working on the palestinian resistance, the gezi movement in turkey, and the montreal edition of the world social forum. mark ayyash, in his paper “an assemblage of decoloniality? palestinian fellahin resistance and the space-place relation” seeks to understand how fellahin resistance has interacted with the settler-colonial project of zionism. employing deleuze and guattari’s theory of assemblage and their conception of space as smooth and striated, ayyash’s work demonstrates ways in which assemblage thinking can be brought to bear on anticolonial resistance deeply rooted in territory and history to illuminate decolonial alternatives. assemblage assists theoretically in recognizing the autonomy of land from ethno-national projects – a disposition long enacted by the fellahin. ayyash also helps us see temporal and spatial dimensions of assemblage thinking beyond the immediate and the proximate. most importantly, ayyash’s work combines thinking on assemblages with other forms of theorizing that centre decolonial modes of thought and politics. in operationalizing insights generated from assemblage thinking, critical analytics of colonial occupation and dispossession, and the everyday theorizing emerging in resistance, his paper works to generate a different perspective through which we can examine the decoloniality of resistance. in “gezi assemblages: embodied encounters in the making of an alternative space,” öznur karakaş reflects on the events in gezi park during the summer of 2011. she aims to get at the political significance of the “lived multiplicity” of “bodies marked by difference” in the creation of alternative space, new relationality, and dissident community, and argues for the importance of analytically understanding the emergent diverse communities that occupied gezi park as assemblages. she focuses on the embodied and affective aspects of the events in istanbul, arguing that the concept of assemblage allows for an attention beyond the political understood as instrumental effect, to the impacts on and by bodies and affects to become other than they are. for karakaş, the material, embodied and affective aspect of the activism in occupy movements, in which she includes gezi, are crucial and correspond to the homology between body and assemblage in deleuze and guattari. in “acknowledging strength in plurality: the world social forum 2016 through the prism of assemblage thinking,” carminda mac lorin and nikolas schall approach the world social forum (wsf) as an assemblage, as a way to overcome the impasse in conceptualizing and theorizing the forum as either an open space characterized by heterogeneity or as a coherent and unified political actor. they employ assemblage as an analytical tool to better janet m. conway, michal osterweil & elise thorburn studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 16 apprehend the forum as a constantly mutating phenomenon, and to conceptualize the relation of its heterogenous parts to the forum as a provisional whole. grounded in participant-observation at the 2016 edition in montreal, they pay particular attention to the global and local indigenous assemblage(s) at the forum, and how these intersected with organizers’ intentionalities: how mohawk claims to the territory co-existed with the corporate urbanity of downtown montreal and with organizers’ attempts to resignify urban space; and how government policies governing visas created absences in the wsf, which organizers sought to make visible, and thus present. they demonstrate that conceiving the wsf as an assemblage permits a more complex reading of the diverse range of materialities at work in its composition at any particular point in time and space. this allows a complex re-appraisal of the wsf and its potentialities, in particular, a way of holding the plurality of the wsf in a dynamic unity that transcends the terms of the space-actor polemic that has heretofore dominated the debate. also included in the special issue are a textual and audio-visual record of an exchange between black studies scholar, rinaldo walcott, and michi saagiig nishnaabeg scholar leanne betasamosake simpson speaking about black lives matter and idle no more respectively, with yellowknives dene scholar glen coulthard responding to them both. in the textual piece, entitled “idle no more and black lives matter: an exchange,” walcott and simpson each situate these movements within longer histories of struggle for freedom and being, and address translocal connectivities, but notably without using the language of assemblage. each for their own reasons rejects assemblage thinking in favour of forms of critical thought arising from histories of resistance with which they are identified: the radical black tradition, nissnaabeg intelligence, and indigenous resurgence more generally. simpson offers a compelling alternative to assemblage in the image of “constellations of co-resistance.” the video piece, called “situating indigenous and black resistance in the global movement assemblage,” includes coulthard’s keynote address at the global movement assemblages symposium along with the panel exchange with walcott and simpson. coulthard presents the idea of a global assemblage of anti-imperialist radicalism, connecting indigenous resistance and resurgence to the radical black tradition. he recounts the 20th century history of political alliance-building between dene leaders and african anti-colonial movements, informed by “grounded normativity”: ethics based on a relational ontology of deep reciprocity between people and place, and including non-human life forms.9 9 download video compilation at http://hdl.handle.net/10464/13529 (or view it on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfuboa_yqzg). theorizing power, difference & the politics of social change studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 17 acknowledgments the editors of this special issue extend their sincere thanks to the contributors and reviewers who made this issue possible. we deeply appreciate carolyn watson’s administrative support and david butz’s editorial guidance. this issue is the fruit of the exceedingly productive discussions that took place at the 2016 global movement assemblages symposium. we extend our sincere thanks to all the participants. we acknowledge the dedicated work by kushan azadah, karolina walczyk, and md firoz alam in documenting the symposium and producing the videos. we especially appreciate the leadership by margot francis in conceiving and organizing the symposium and the logistical support and financial administration provided by maria callaghan. finally, we acknowledge with gratitude the financial support provided by brock university’s social justice research institute and the canada research chair in social justice in making this project possible. references acuto, m., & curtis, s. (eds.). (2014a). reassembling international theory: assemblage thinking and international relations. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan acuto, m., & curtis, s. (2014b). assemblage thinking and international relations. in m. acuto & s. curtis (eds.), reassembling international theory: assemblage thinking and international relations (pp. 1-15). basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. anderson, b., & mcfarlane, c. (2011). assemblage and geography. area, 43(2), 124-127. blaser, m. 2010. storytelling globalization from the chaco and beyond. durham, nc: duke university press. braidotti, r. 1996. “nomadism with a difference: deleuze’s legacy in a feminist perspective” man & world, 29, 305-314. castells, m. (2015) networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age. cambridge: polity. collier, s. j., & ong, a. (2005). global assemblages, anthropological problems. in a. ong & s. j. collier (eds.), global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 3-21). malden, ma: blackwell. conway, j. m. (2017). modernity and the study of social movements: do we need a paradigm shift? in j. smith, m. goodhart, p. manning & j. markoff (eds.), social movements and worldsystem transformation (pp. 17-34). boulder, co: paradigm. delanda, m. (2006). a new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social complexity. london: continuum. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus. london: athlone press. deleuze, g., & parnet, c. (2007). dialogues ii. new york: columbia university press. deuchars, r. (2010). deleuze, delanda and social complexity: implications for the “international”. journal of international political theory, 6(2), 161-187. escobar, a. (2018). designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy and the making of worlds. durham, nc: duke university press. escobar, a. (2008). territories of difference: place, movements, life, redes. durham, nc: duke university press. glasius, m., & pleyers, g. (2013). the global moment of 2011: democracy, social justice and dignity. development & change, 44(3), 547-567. hardt, m., & negri, a. (2000). empire. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ingold, t. 2011. being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. london: routledge janet m. conway, michal osterweil & elise thorburn studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 1-18, 2018 18 latour, b. (2005) reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. oxford: oxford university press. li, t. m. (2007). practices of assemblage and community forest management. economy and society, 36(2), 263-293. mcfarlane, c. (2009). translocal assemblages: space, power and social movements. geoforum, 40, 561-567. nunes, r. & trott, b. (2008). “there is no scope for futurology; history will decide”: feliz guattari on molecular revolution. turbulence: ideas for movement, 4, 38-47. ong, a., & collier, s. j. (eds.). (2005). global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. malden, ma: blackwell. osterweil, m. (2014). social movements. in d. nononi (ed.), companion to urban anthropology (pp. 470-484). chichester, uk: wiley-blackwell. osterweil, m. (2010). in search of movement: italy’s movimento dei movimenti, theoreticalpractice and re-making the political (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of north carolina at chapel hill, chapel hill, nc. protevi, j. (2013). life, war, earth: deleuze and the sciences. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. puar, j. k. (2012). “i would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory. philsophia, 2(1), 49-66. roach, t. (2012) friendship as a way of life: foucault, aids, and the politics of shared estrangement. albany, ny: suny press. ruddick, s. (2012). power and the problem of composition. dialogues in human geography, 2(2), 207-211. russell, b., pusey, a., & chatterton, p. (2011). what can an assemblage do? seven propositions for a more strategic and politicized assemblage thinking. city, 15(5), 577-583. sassen, s. (2006). territory, authority, rights: from medieval to global assemblages. princeton, nj: princeton university press. thorburn, e. (2015). human-machinic assemblages: technologies, bodies, and the recuperation of social reproduction in the crisis era (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of western ontario, london, on. dej fg aug 2 16 correspondence address: erin dej, canadian observatory on homelessness, york university, 4700 keele st., toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: erindej@edu.yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 psychocentrism and homelessness: the pathologization/responsibilization paradox erin dej york university, canada abstract psychocentrism is a governing neoliberal rationality that pathologizes human problems and frames individuals as responsible for socially structured inequalities. the homeless community provides an important case study to examine the ways psychocentrism manifests among an excluded population. this paper explores the paradox whereby homeless individuals are simultaneously pathologized and responsibilized through psychocentric discourses in which their status as economically poor becomes individualized as a symptom of mental illness and/or addiction. although medicalized understandings of mental and emotional distress pervade the homeless industry, the obligations of freedom in the neoliberal era mean that individuals alone are held responsible for their failures. the paper examines the ways individuals experiencing homelessness are compelled to embark on an entrepreneurial project of the self that requires them to accept blame for their social precariousness. further, it deconstructs the narratives that regard social explanations as an excuse and a failure of individual accountability. i argue that the “shamed poor” adopt empowerment discourses touted by the homeless industry, which paradoxically encourage individuals to find strength in their personal failures and to work toward self-governance, devoid of historical, social, and cultural context. keywords homelessness; mental and emotional distress; mental illness; psychocentrism; neoliberalism; shamed poor; empowerment discourses introduction a paradox exists in how mental distress is framed in the homeless population.1 distress is often pathologized by “psy” experts, service providers, and in turn by homeless people themselves. the illness narrative suggests little hope of a “cure” and so individuals are advised to manage their 1 i use the term “distress” to recognize the difficult physical and emotional situations people find themselves in while de-privileging medicalized discourses (tew, 2005). 2 the observation that distress is pathologized and managed through techniques of social control erin dej studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 118 symptoms,2 usually with psychotropic medication.3 enigmatically, individuals are also encouraged to take responsibility for their circumstances through various types of self-help programming, such as alcoholics anonymous/narcotics anonymous (aa/na), anger management, and groupbased cognitive behavioural therapy and treatment programs (rimke, 2000). this paper relies upon heidi rimke’s (2003, 2010, 2016) critical concept of psychocentrism to analyze the extent to which pathologization and responsibilization occur in the homeless community. psychocentrism refers to “the outlook that all human problems are innate pathologies of the individual mind and/or body, with the individual held responsible for health and illness, success and failure” (rimke & brock, 2012, p. 183). inspired by foucault’s (1977, 1988) work on normalization, psychocentrism describes how human emotion and ways of being are framed exclusively as artifacts of individuals’ bodies and minds, and are thereby stripped of social, historical, political, economic, and cultural context. i concentrate on two of the 10 characteristics that make up psychocentrism, namely determinism and reductionism. determinism refers to the physiological body (i.e., genetic code, neurochemistry, etc.) as the primary (and sometimes sole) vehicle for explaining individual action and behaviours. reductionism refers to the ways that human experiences and problems are understood in the explanatory vacuum of the medical model (rimke, 2010). these factors provide a unique contemporary theoretical lens through which to examine the dominant assumptions about the connection between distress and homelessness in canada. in this paper, i consider the complex relationship many homeless individuals have with their mentally ill identity in an environment that perpetuates the medical model while simultaneously holding individuals personally responsible for their varied experiences of social inequality. in particular, i focus on the ways homeless individuals frame their personal narrative as a series of poor choices and condemn those peers who position their marginality within social, structural, and historical frameworks as making excuses. additionally, i argue that empowerment strategies propagated by service providers, psy experts, and self-help programs in the 2 the observation that distress is pathologized and managed through techniques of social control emerged from the anti-psychiatry movement (laing, 1960; szasz, 1974) and the contemporary mad movement (burstow, lefrançois & diamond, 2014; burstow & weitz, 1988; shamrat, 1997). 3 an abundance of research demonstrates the widespread use psychotropic medication in the prison system, particularly among women prisoners (kilty, 2012; maidment, 2006). although there is scant literature on the number of homeless individuals with a prescription for antipsychotic medication, the overlap between the homeless and prison populations (fischer, shinn, shrout & tsemberis, 2008), the plethora of research on the subject of medication noncompliance among the homeless (bradford, gaynes, kim, kaufman & weinberger, 2005; muircochrane, fereday, jureidini, drummond & darbyshire, 2006), and results from this research on the number of homeless individuals using psychotropic medication suggest a high proportion of psychotropic medication prescriptions in the homeless community. psychocentrism & homelessness studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 119 homeless community encourage men and women experiencing homelessness to engage in self-governance and “fix” themselves independently from the structural barriers associated with homelessness. this analysis stems from a broader research project investigating how homeless individuals are managed through their mental health status and how they negotiate these management strategies as a social group that is excluded and widely perceived as deviant. this study adds to the predominantly american scholarship on homelessness, individualization, shame, and “freedom” (desjarlais, 1997; feldman, 2004; lyon-callo, 2004; wasserman & clair, 2010) by using the concept of psychocentrism to uncover how social and cultural context is stripped away through medical logics of pathologization as well as the juxtaposition between medicalized discourses and personal responsibility. the analysis presented in this research is especially pertinent as policy-makers across canada and internationally look to innovative models of service provision (including, but not limited to, housing first) to reduce and ultimately end homelessness, which take varying positions on how mental health status and treatment are managed (see goering et al., 2014; shamrat, 2013).4 the paper begins with an overview of the scholarship on mental illness and homelessness and the need for more critical perspectives to properly assess the complexity of the homelessness crisis, followed by a description of the conceptual framework. using psychocentrism as the theoretical foundation for the analysis, the paper also explores the obligations of freedom, the notion of the “shamed poor,” and empowerment. next, i provide a summary of the methodological approach. the remainder of the paper presents some of the findings of the research. i first explore how responsibilization discourses coexist with deterministic understandings of illness to explain why homeless men and women blame themselves for their precarious circumstances. to do otherwise would amount to “making excuses.” second, i demonstrate that empowerment strategies employed predominantly in mental health and treatment programs buttress the psychocentric lens by positioning an individual’s self-esteem and rational choice making skills as the key to escaping homelessness with little recognition of how social and structural inequalities negatively impact these efforts. 4 the housing first model is built on the premise that individuals should receive immediate access to housing of their choice with supports without having to meet housing readiness requirements (such as sobriety or medication compliance). housing first recognizes that in order for people to work through trauma, mental illness, and/or substance abuse, it is imperative that they feel safe and secure in a stable home (goering et al., 2014). erin dej studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 120 problematizing the homeless as a mentally ill type in academic writing, the relationship between mental illness and homelessness is often presented as innate. even before the contemporary homelessness crisis swept north america in the 1980s, research on urban ecology and “skid row” attributed deviancy and degeneracy in part to mental illness, weak character, and addiction (bahr, 1967; olin, 1966; rimke & hunt, 2002). today, approximately 35,000 canadians are homeless on any given night and between 150,000 and 300,000 individuals experience homelessness annually (gaetz, donaldson, richeter & gulliver, 2013). the individualization of homelessness continues to pervade contemporary research, in particular through the essentialist discursive assemblage of deviancy, mental illness, and addiction (greenberg & rosenhack, 2008; mcnaughton, 2008). much of the social scientific research portrays marginalized people as essentially disordered and disorderly, dangerous, and innately different from the housed community (o’grady, gaetz & buccieri, 2011). the high rate of mental illness diagnoses is another sign of the pathologization of homelessness (christensen, 2009). estimates suggest that one third of homeless individuals suffer from mental illness (based on the medical model framework of distress), although rates range from 10% to almost 70% (allen, 2000; cphi, 2009). the majority of this research comes from the psy disciplines and is made up primarily of survey data on the epidemiology of mental illness and service evaluations (barreira, macias, rodican & gold, 2008; insel, 2008). the psy disciplines’ approach presents medicalized truths via psychocentric discourses. some psy research acknowledges the impact structural factors such as class, race, gender, heteronormativity, colonialism, and disability have on homelessness and how distress may contribute to exclusion (paradis & stermac, 2001; cphi, 2009), but this research still largely relies upon medicalized understandings of individual deficit (see lyon-callo, 2000). people experiencing homelessness are characterized as abnormal because they have no choice but to perform common human behaviours in public spaces (e.g., drinking alcohol; engaging in sexual activity; urinating; sleeping). these activities are subject to targeted surveillance and overpolicing (sylvestre, 2010), which demonstrates the double standard between those who possess the privilege of privacy in their homes and those who do not. rarely are the realities of living in public spaces fully considered when diagnosing a homeless individual with a mental illness (mosher, 2002). bresson (2003) provides a critical perspective on mental illness diagnoses among the homeless, suggesting that they act as techniques of social control. borrowing from foucault’s (1988) analysis of the rise of madness, bresson (2003, 312; see also desjarlais, 1997; mathieu, 1993) argues that it is politically beneficial to correlate mental illness and homelessness because it responsibilizes individuals for being “fragile” and “vulnerable,” thus shifting psychocentrism & homelessness studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 121 responsibility away from governmental institutions and broader social structural problems and policies. snow, baker, leon and martin (1986) find that the very nature of homelessness and its adaptive responses (e.g., inappropriate dress and appearance, depression, agitation, unresponsiveness) are pathologized as individual rather than systemic failures. reducing the state of homelessness to a mental pathology does a disservice to those who must navigate an unpredictable, insecure, and sometimes-dangerous social environment. meanwhile, those diagnosed with mental illness are not exempt from the obligations of freedom; instead, through mental health resources homeless men and women are called upon to take responsibility for their own social exclusion. the next section examines the formulation and application of this presumed freedom among homeless people. homelessness and the obligations of freedom true to neoliberal ideology, the entrepreneurial subject (rose, 1999; rimke, 2000) uses technologies of the self to assess, work on, and shape subjectivity. neoliberal subjects are expected to use appropriate psy tools and strategies to shape their best self, such as yoga retreats, self-help books, counselling, or taking medication. however, just because one is free to self-govern does not mean that one does so well (cruikshank, 1999). modes of self-improvement are intimately connected with consumer culture, and economic inequalities make it difficult for those living in poverty to participate. neoliberal freedom means that modern individuals are not merely “free to choose” self-regulation but are obliged to be free (rose, 1999; rimke, 2000). the obligations of freedom come from a perception that as normal, healthy, and active neoliberal citizens we must self-govern to limit reliance on the state (cruikshank, 1999; rimke, 2000). the convergence of the private and the public realms partially explains the general public’s hostility towards those on social assistance, and the individualization and criminalization of poverty (mosher, 2002). those who do not live up to normalized expectations are held personally responsible for their social failures. borrowing from critical poverty scholarship (allen, 2000; chunn & gavigan, 2004; katz, 2013), i argue that homeless men and women feel compelled to exhibit “shame” in order to demonstrate their sincerity and worthiness to receive assistance and to access scarce services, including mental health, treatment, and housing resources. participating in these services demonstrates their commitment to becoming economically and socially self-sufficient (elias, 1978). shame is “...a painful emotion responding to a sense of failure to attain some ideal state… in shame, one feels inadequate, lacking some desired type of completeness or perfection” (nussbaum, 2006, p. 184). homeless individuals are expected to display gratitude and deference to staff in the homeless industry, express self-criticism rather than social criticism, erin dej studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 122 and accept accountability by blaming themselves for their experiences as homeless, distressed, addicted, and criminalized (rimke, 2011). the “otherness” of exclusion (rimke, 2003) and degradation experienced by homeless individuals reproduce the psychocentric view that negative social experiences are the result of individual inadequacies. rarely is consideration given to the ways that homelessness may cause or magnify the difficult experiences of mental and emotional distress, difference, and exclusion. failure to live up to the neoliberal obligations of personal freedom is viewed as socially unacceptable. this is especially the case for those calls for self-responsibilization that occur in populations with few resources to live up to normative ideals (cruikshank, 1999), and where the distinction between freedom and coercion in governing strategies becomes blurred. the notion of empowerment is vital to understanding psychocentrism because it captures the notion that happiness, success, health, and vitality are achieved through individualized subjectivities and practices derived from experts. cruikshank observes that turning attention to self-discovery and self-management does not remove power dynamics from the tactics of governing: the will to empower may be well intentioned, but it is a strategy for constituting and regulating the political subjectivities of the ‘empowered’. whether inspired by the market or by the promise of self-government and autonomy, the object of empowerment is to act upon another’s interests and desires in order to conduct their actions toward an appropriate end; thus ‘empowerment’ is itself a power relationship and one deserving of careful scrutiny (cruikshank, 1999, pp. 68-69). cruikshank suggests that empowerment is part of a broader political rationality that persuades people to seek out socially acceptable goals and to look to themselves to realize these ambitions. empowerment strategies use concepts like poor self-esteem to individualize social issues as problems that should be worked upon by reinvigorating the desire for normality (cruikshank, 1999). rimke (2000) discusses the empowerment practices used in self-help discourses that promise happier, more fulfilling lives while concomitantly encouraging individuals to never feel satisfied with their current state; in short, individuals must constantly search for ways to modify and improve themselves. rimke (2000, p. 62) observes that the self-help model is built on the “principle of individuality” which, “… assume[s] the social world to be the sum aggregation of atomized, autonomous and selfgoverning individual persons” rather than members of broader groups and communities, thereby negating the historical, social, and economic bases of life and living. a note on methodology i triangulated among three main methods in order to capture the nuance and contradictions in the practices and subjectivities represented in the homeless psychocentrism & homelessness studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 123 community. i entered the field by volunteering in two emergency shelters and a soup kitchen in ottawa, canada for a year leading up to recruitment. in that time i gained insight into the environment and built rapport with individuals experiencing homelessness. i began conducting fieldwork in june 2011. the methodological design consisted of participant observation, interviews with individuals experiencing homelessness, and a focus group made up of key informants. i held a variety of roles as volunteer, including but not limited to leading activity nights, serving food, providing assistance using the computer, and spending time in the lounge. through my capacity as volunteer i conducted over 296 hours of participant observation. the shelters, both of which provide numerous health and social services, act as hubs in ottawa’s homeless community and draw many more people than strictly their shelter residents. in these settings i was able to gain knowledge of how people across the homelessness continuum negotiate their mental health status and experience. the themes that emerged from the data describe individuals’ positions on identity and social control; they do not evaluate specific shelters or treatment programs. my participant observation took the form of unstructured observations, noting the physical characteristics, behaviours, body language, verbal behaviours, and actions of staff and homeless individuals i encountered (wolfinger, 2002; rimke, 2003). conducting participant observation allowed me to witness how shelter staff and professionals engage with homeless people through mental health interventions. it also provided insider knowledge with regard to how the shelters function, the routines and rules imposed upon homeless men and women, and how social relationships are formed and maintained among homeless individuals, and between homeless people and staff. i conducted 38 semi-structured interviews with 27 homeless men and 11 women, which corresponds roughly to the gender ratio among homeless people in canada (gaetz et al., 2013). participants ranged in age from 29 to 63 with an average of 37 years of age, which is representative of the average age of homeless people in canada. seventy-three percent (28) of respondents were white, approximately 16% (6) identified as indigenous, and 8% (3) identified as black or bi-racial. seventy-five percent (28) of respondents identified as heterosexual and 24% (9) identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or asexual. not all participants were living in a shelter at the time of the interview (eight lived in social or subsidized housing), but they had all experienced homelessness or precarious housing at some point, the average length of time being four years. all but six (32) respondents identified as suffering with distress in their lifetime and 73% (28) were currently prescribed psychotropic medication or had been in the past. eighty-nine percent (34) identified as having an addiction and 84% (32) had experienced negative interaction with police or the criminal justice system more broadly. erin dej studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 124 my third source of primary information came from a focus group i held with professionals who work in the homelessness industry (frontline workers, case managers, chaplain, social worker, nurse) to gain information on how mental health/distress is produced and managed in shelters and in the community, the types of diagnoses and medication prescribed to homeless men and women, and a breakdown of available mental health services. in this way, the focus group supplemented and contextualized the narratives provided by homeless men and women; it was not designed to test the truth claims made in the interviews (lofland, snow, anderson & lofland, 2006). participant observation field notes, interviews, and the focus group were transcribed and coded using qda miner software. i conducted a critical discourse analysis to situate individual narratives within broader systematic and institutional social relations of power (fairclough, 1985; van dijk, 1993). this methodological design allowed me to analyze mental health experiences in the homeless community. the next section explores homeless men’s and women’s narratives on their perceptions of mental illness, the discursive roadblocks to acknowledging the social and structural components to exclusion, and how mental health services seek to empower them by adopting a psychocentric framework as key to solving homelessness. “that gets me off too easy”: responsibilizing the distressed homeless many of the mental health and addiction services offered in the homeless community rely on a psychocentric perspective that targets individual deficit as the source of, and solution to, homelessness.5 the call for marginalized people to be accountable for their homeless status is counterintuitive given that the same system promotes the pathologization of common problems facing people experiencing homelessness (e.g., sadness, aggression, trouble sleeping, lack of motivation). if mental illness, its symptoms, and potentially deviant behaviour are destined through bodily make-up, then blame is diverted and the pathologized character is guilt-free but hopeless (bauman, 1988; feldman, 2004). a poignant example was the sustained pressure in the 1990s and 2000s to find a “gay gene” that would supposedly reduce the stigmatization of homosexuality, but instead created the conditions to further pathologize sexuality (hamer & copeland, 1994). several focus group members equated distress with physical illness, as a way to reduce stigma and legitimize a medicalized approach to the issues facing those experiencing homelessness. a member of shelter management noted that no one feels embarrassed seeking medical care for a broken arm, and the same should be true when accessing mental health care. in contrast, 5 the challenges of using the homelessness industry to tackle social inequality are expertly analyzed by lyon-callo (2000, 2004). psychocentrism & homelessness studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 125 schnittker (2008) found that biological explanations of distress do not necessarily reduce stigma, and in fact can have the opposite effect, where the public is more fearful of the potential dangerousness and unpredictability of those diagnosed with a mental illness (in particular schizophrenia). the fatalism of the medical model suggests that it is difficult or impossible to fully manage or treat the pathological individual (rimke, 2011, 2016). conversely, literature that problematizes the disease model of mental illness is often uncritical of the construction of a physical illness as a “true” illness (sedgwick, 1982). physical illnesses are not immune to blameworthiness despite obvious biological foundations. individuals are often blamed for their physical ailments because they do not manage their risks, take preventative measures, or adhere to suggestions offered by health promotion discourses (lupton, 1995; rose, 2007). as per goffman (1963, p. 5) a “tainted” or “spoiled” identity renders individuals as “not quite human” and subject to negative consequences on account of stigmatization. the responsibilization of patients occurs through medicalized moral judgments that individuals make bad choices and are thus at least somewhat deserving of their illness (rimke & hunt, 2002; rimke, 2003). therefore, if a biological explanation of illness does not ipso facto eliminate blame we can consider how responsibilization techniques exist in concert with the medical framework of distress, and how psychocentric discourses are disseminated by those in authority and internalized by homeless men and women. with a few exceptions, most research participants claimed that distress was biologically derived, either through heredity or a neurochemical imbalance. much of this perspective came from gabor maté (1999, 2008),6 whose books are used as teaching tools to explain mental distress and addiction in some of the out-patient addiction treatment programs. a number of respondents suggested that their brain functioning was impaired in childhood and affects how the neuro-psychological circuits process self-regulation. mustang, for example, espoused his view of the etiology of mental illness in this way: [it] is brought on, from my understanding, is brought on from the environment that’s exposed to me from birth to… however long. so however i gone through stressors, trauma, whatnot, yeah, i believe something got interrupted, uh, while the brain was being formed or as it’s aging or whatever. mustang, a 38 year-old indigenous man, experienced severe abuse as a child and connects that trauma to his bi-polar diagnosis. for those who believe the cause of their mental illness is neurochemical rather than genetic, a space 6 briefly, maté argues that a variety of biological and environmental factors influence mental illness and addiction, but at its core they are a manifestation of an abnormality in the brain caused by undeveloped or impeded dopamine receptors in the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain responsible for rational decision making and emotional control. maté uses this logic to account for the symptoms of both attention deficit disorder (add) and addiction. erin dej studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 126 opens up to think about distress as at least somewhat socially produced, such as recognizing the impact of victimization in early childhood on future experiences of mental and emotional distress. this moves beyond the strictly naturalistic, essentialist, reductionist, and determinist qualities of psychocentrism that view humans as naturally rather than socially produced (rimke, 2010). nevertheless, the site of intervention remains contained within the pathological individual body/mind model. the common refrain from participants was that, notwithstanding the biological nature of their condition(s) or the social context in which they lived, they must assume responsibility for the state of their lives should they wish to escape homelessness, manage their mental illness, and/or achieve sobriety. for example, christine takes full ownership of her depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder diagnoses, as well as her addiction to crack cocaine. christine had experienced homelessness for eight months prior to a month long jail sentence. when asked how living in a shelter affects her mental health, she responded: “uh, no matter where i am, i can’t blame the environment because that would be me being in denial.” other scholars (lyon-callo, 2000; wasserman & clair, 2010) similarly point to instances where homeless individuals feel compelled to reject structural explanations of homelessness. unique to this analysis is the way mental health discourses are used to reinforce the psychocentric logic of victimblaming discourses. christine uses pop psy language like “being in denial” (a classic aa trope) to explain why she will not acknowledge the negative impact living in a homeless shelter has on her mental well-being. christine spoke at length about how she abstained from illicit drug use for six years until she entered the shelter system (despite managing to stay clean in jail), as well as about experiences of violence in the shelter, and her feelings of infantilization and low self-esteem from having to ask staff permission for minor activities such as accessing the kitchen to make breakfast. despite these problems stemming directly from her status as a homeless person, christine engages in reductionism and determinism (rimke, 2010) by judging herself and internalizing external distress factors as part of her responsibilization narrative. christine is ashamed of her drug use, criminal record, and precarious living, admitting that she’s embarrassed that she has been unable to quit using crack and escape homelessness. she adopts the shamed poor discourse by focusing on the perceived faults that she believes led her to homelessness, including her issues with co-dependency and lack of motivation, both psy problems (rimke, 2000). when i asked christine how she copes with the chaos of the homeless shelter, she replied: “i put myself here so i have to do it.” for christine, and many like her, the shame that comes with being homeless is articulated through neoliberal discourses of normalizing judgement and self-responsibilization. those participants who accepted responsibility for their distress claimed that to couch their precarious situation within a framework of social inequality would be to deflect blame from their personal choices and thus fail psychocentrism & homelessness studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 127 to embrace the norms of self-governance. one such participant was max, a 52 year old white man who was diagnosed with depression, struggles with cocaine and alcohol addictions, and was previously incarcerated. at the time of the interview he was living in subsidized housing, but then he lost his apartment and relocated to the shelter soon after. max recognizes his past trauma as contributing to his mental illness and addiction, but feels he cannot let that mediate his level of accountability: i was raped by, uh, by men, you know. it wasn’t in prison, this was when i was younger and uh, several times. and i’ve a really hard time blaming my life and my addiction on something that happened forty years ago, but everybody says, that’s what people say, no it’s, that’s what you need help with, but to me that’s too much of an excuse, that gets me off too easy... you know ’cause we all, you know, i don’t think there’s anybody without problems. some, you know… i think it’s a factor but i don’t, i don’t think i can let myself off that way. max, who has participated in dozens of mental health and addiction programs over the years, adopts maté’s understanding of the impact of trauma on brain development using the disease metaphor of mental illness and addiction; however, he feels his past victimization cannot excuse the daily decisions he makes to drink and use drugs. he attributes his sometimes crippling depression to his inability to be assertive, stay motivated, and be content with everyday life. like other respondents, max frames distress as biologically informed. by reducing their struggles to the individual mind, devoid of social context, homeless men and women’s bodies remain the site for surveillance and intervention by psy authorities. any previous or current victimization, although understood as acting as a causal feature in abnormal brain development, does not diminish the felt responsibility to make rational decisions according to socially accepted norms and to live with the consequences of those choices (bauman, 1988; rose, 1999). in order to simultaneously perform the roles of the shamed poor and responsibilized citizen, individuals must hold themselves accountable for their status as homeless. as maruna (2001, p. 132) notes, those seeking redemption are expected to assume “complete and unmediated blame” for their marginalization. the effect of the psychocentric framework is tautological: the homeless person must accept the individualization of poverty and precariousness in order to be accepted into the programs offered in the homeless community, and these same services promote the reductionist perspective that the intersectional inequalities facing many in the homeless community can be managed through self-governance. research participants who took personal ownership for their homelessness accused those who referenced social, historical, and cultural factors to explain their marginalized status of “making excuses.” self-governance is a coveted trait in the neoliberal era and is emphasized by empowerment programming in the homeless community and other institutions of social control (maruna, erin dej studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 128 2001). this normative value stands in opposition to a nuanced explanation of the multifaceted ways our lives take shape. as the participants claimed, making excuses does not allow you to perform the shamed poor role, one that calls for uncompromising responsibilization. seamus, a 42 year-old white man who was new to the shelter at the time of the interview, was frustrated by those who use mental illness as an excuse for their marginality: i think a lot more of it is done by choice or by decision. sorry, not by choice by decision. they make a bad decision at one point and it maybe snowballs, and they make…then they end up making more bad decisions. and that, those decisions may very well be based on a mental illness… it’s, ’cause i always thought, growing up, always, even though i was mid-20s, i’m like, these guys are just weak. they could have got help before if they needed [it], they’re not that bad, they were just lazy and blah blah blah. this discourse harkens back to the 19th century vagabond typology (castel, 2003), which presented the homeless as manipulative and lazy. upon further probing, seamus remarked that despite recently becoming homeless himself, he maintains his opinion that homeless people are weak, and their position as homeless is at least in part deserved because of a failure to take action to solve their mental and emotional distress when it first appeared. significantly, however, seamus did not identify as having a mental illness or addiction, although he recognized his drinking as a factor in losing his wife, children, and home, and that he lost several bartending jobs because he drank too much while working. seamus has trouble identifying himself as “lazy” and “weak,” but acknowledges his increased social exclusion as coming from his poor decisions. regardless, he is adamant that citing any mitigating socio-political and structural factors detracts from the autonomy of the individual to make decisions, which to him amounts to excuse-making for poor decisions and inappropriate behaviour. this rhetoric was echoed by many study participants who characterized other homeless individuals as failing to live up to the modern neoliberal project of the self that accepts personal responsibility and factors such as social inequalities as counterproductive to the goal of selfgovernance. “breaking myself down to nothing”: empowerment through psychocentrism as i have demonstrated, although many members of the homeless community take up the biomedical model of distress, they simultaneously responsibilize and pathologize themselves as homeless, mentally ill, and/or addicted. further complicating this paradox is that many homeless men and women embrace mental health services, which are based on a determinist rationale, in an attempt to embrace entrepreneurial subjectivity. many interview psychocentrism & homelessness studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 129 participants received counselling, were prescribed psychotropic medication, and participated in group-based programming. wasserman, clair and platt (2012) explain that individuals experiencing homelessness will accept their own repression because they internalize the rhetoric that they are a “problem” and adopt solutions that perpetuate the status quo, in this case the stereotype that homeless people must be mentally ill and/or addicted to have become homeless in the first place. the politics of empowerment play out in distinctive ways when the target population is marginalized and oppressed. empowerment strategies within canadian women’s prisons provide a useful example to think through how empowerment exists within disciplinary techniques meant to manage “risky” and “dangerous” populations (castel, 1991). critical criminologists (dell, fillmore, & kilty, 2009; hannah-moffat, 2000) argue that correctional services canada (csc) appropriates the term empowerment from feminist vocabularies that use it to highlight structural inequality and patriarchy, and instead apply it to penal policy that blames deviancy on criminalized women’s low self-esteem and irresponsibility. empowerment strategies directed toward women in prison target the prisoner as a rational decision maker who can make virtuous choices if she wants to be a contributing member of society (hannah-moffat, 2000). such psychocentric attitudes, programs, and practices do little to account for the structural impediments to living a “responsible lifestyle,” such as poverty, sexism, racism, addiction, or single parenthood (kendall, 2000). for example, if a woman is unable to secure employment after receiving workplace training, she is blamed rather than the strained labour market, the lack of affordable child care, or the repercussions of stigma due to a criminal record. although women’s correctional policy may call for women to reformulate their lives through their own free will (hannah-moffat, 2000; pollack, 2009), the reality of achieving this kind of transformation when their social circumstances have not improved is little more than empty psychocentric rhetoric. like women’s prisons, mental health and treatment programs offered in the homeless community profess a sense of empowerment without the material conditions to facilitate change, thus fueling the notion that remaining homeless is a personal failure. a number of participants stated that their homeless peers waste time trying to find excuses for their marginalization. instead, they argue that time is better spent transforming and improving the self, hallmarks of the psychocentric approach (rimke, 2000). for example, milan, a 38 year-old white man who has experienced homelessness for nine years, lamented that the men he lives with at the shelter complain too much: well instead of complaining all day long, make steps to improve your life, you know? all there is, is complain, complain, complain i hear. just go and change erin dej studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 130 your life, do something about it. if you want to be here, or if you don’t want to be here, just don’t complain about it. for milan, people who blame factors external to themselves are missing key opportunities to work on the project of the self-reformation. change is found at the site of individual action, and homeless men and women must find ways to “do something about” their personal deficits rather than “complain” about structural inequality that seems insurmountable, especially for those struggling to meet their basic daily needs. milan attempts to be a “prudent subject” (hannah-moffat, 2000, p. 31), by taking psychotropic medication for his bi-polar diagnosis and participating in out-patient addictions treatment in order to pursue his education. his sense of empowerment comes from focusing on what resources he can use to achieve personal success. he believes that striving for a socially acceptable form of self-improvement (cruikshank, 1999), such as obtaining a university degree, will allow him to escape marginality. acknowledging the structural barriers that come with his decade of homelessness would minimize, if not eradicate, this sense of freedom and hope for a promising future, and so milan accepts the reductionist quality of the psychocentric model of empowerment.7 given the prominence of self-blaming discourses revealed above, it is not surprising that participants found that the psychocentric approaches advanced by mental health and treatment programs in the homeless community worked to boost their self-esteem and encourage a responsibilized lifestyle (cruikshank, 1999; rimke, 2000), regardless of the programs’ poor success rate in moving people out of homelessness. daniel offered compelling insights into how his therapy with a life coach and participation in an outpatient addiction treatment program reinvigorated a sense of responsibility that he lost before he “stepped out of the machine”: i’m breaking myself down to nothing and i was really given the opportunity to assess who am i? you know and without any pressure, no, no inner fear or persuasion. it’s all up to me... so i can say ah those guys aren’t doing this and this but, really it’s all a choice. life is all choice. every day, you know as soon as you open your eyes you make a choice… that empowers you when you realize that everybody is in life exactly where they’ve chosen to be…but you constantly have to take responsibility, take ownership over your choices and realize that nobody did this, nobody caused that. it was the way i reacted. instead of responding, you know and on and on and on. then it becomes empowering because you click, i’ll choose different next time. daniel echoes seamus’ sentiment that personal problems derive from bad individual choices. his narrative brings together the notions of self-blame and responsibilization as well as empowerment discourses that are reinforced 7 the importance of hope in encouraging marginalized individuals to be managed by mental health and treatment programs regardless of the outcomes is noteworthy. in an environment characterized by many as hopeless, the optimism these programs provide is powerful. psychocentrism & homelessness studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 131 through a psychocentric logic. for daniel, empowerment comes from having the personal power to escape homelessness and distress. notably, in the past daniel had a seemingly typical life with a house, wife, children, and a successful career in the public service, until he “broke” himself and has since experienced homelessness for 10 years. however, if he broke himself, then arguably he can “fix” himself too. daniel’s comment that he is “breaking myself down to nothing” exemplifies the reflexive self-objectification of selfhelp programs (cruikshank, 1999; rimke, 2000). the responsible, objective, fearless daniel will mould and build a new and improved self. in keeping with the goal of empowerment strategies, he engages in self-scrutiny in the hope that eventually he will be able to take on the project of self-governance, and will no longer have to rely on professional surveillance and the disciplinary strategies of the homeless sector to manage him. empowerment strategies reinforce double standards and the shamed poor subjectivity by distinguishing between those who are and are not deserving of assistance (chunn & gavigan, 2004; katz, 2013). only those individuals who adhere to dominant norms (including the individualization of social problems) are permitted to access the few community resources available. empowerment strategies require active participation on the individual’s part, as exemplified in daniel’s claim that “it’s all up to me,” thus reinforcing the idea that people experiencing homelessness are “exactly where they’ve chosen to be.” empowerment strategies use the psychocentric notion that homelessness is caused by personal deficits and failures and only those who take ownership for their precariousness will benefit from the programs used to manage the homeless population. conclusion the individualization and pathologization of social problems is fundamental to the neoliberal rationality that social subjects are governed through obligated freedom. the psychocentric paradigm plays out in a distinctive way among individuals experiencing homelessness, who must constantly negotiate the discourses that diagnose distress as biologically derived, but simultaneously call for them to be accountable for their social situation. the shamed poor subjectivity requires that homeless people strive to be good, neoliberal citizens by regarding the self as the site for reformation and normalization. those who reject the reductionist model by contextualizing their homeless and distressed status within social, cultural, political, economic, and historical factors are negatively judged by their homeless peers for making excuses and failing to take ownership over their lives. homeless men and women are expected to be empowered by the psy resources offered in the community. unfortunately, many of the programs focus on psychocentric projects such as self-esteem building and erin dej studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 117-135, 2016 132 responsibilization strategies with the aim of achieving a normalized self without the material changes necessary to escape homelessness. psychocentricity is problematic for individualizing and pathologizing homelessness because it decontextualizes the structural and systematic bases of social inequality and the related social injustices faced by those trying to survive poverty in contemporary society, and limits broader discussions and policies looking for solutions to homelessness. acknowledgements the author would like to thank the guest editors for their dedication to critical psy studies and in particular to heidi rimke for her support in seeing this paper to publication. thanks to the anonymous reviewers and david butz for their helpful feedback, and to jennifer kilty for her guidance in earlier drafts. finally, the author wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the social sciences and humanities research council. references allen, t. c. 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(2002). on writing fieldnotes: collection strategies and background expectancies. qualitative research, 2(1), 85-95. lenon final correspondence address: suzanne lenon, departments of sociology and women & gender studies, arts & science, university of lethbridge, lethbridge, ab, t1k 3m4; email: suzanne.lenon@uleth.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 143-161, 2022 polygamy, state racism, and the return of barbarism: the coloniality of evolutionary psychology suzanne lenon university of lethbridge, canada abstract this article examines the race-thinking and colonial reasoning circulating in two recent developments in canadian law with respect to polygamous marriage: the polygamy reference (2011) that upheld the criminal code provision on polygamy and the zero tolerance for barbaric cultural practices act (2015). this legislation introduced changes to canada’s immigration regulations, which include the practice of polygamy as a basis for refusing foreign applicants and deporting foreign nationals. i address how insights from the field of evolutionary psychology were applied in the polygamy reference and what discursive and material resonances they had in the zero tolerance act. drawing on the work of sylvia wynter, i situate these judicial and legal developments in relation to violence, within colonial formations of state power, and as forces supporting white supremacy through the continuing valorization of monogamy as a foundational aspect of social and sexual citizenship in canada. keywords polygamy; canada; immigration; evolutionary psychology; coloniality; racism you see and feel modernity, it is announced, it is promoted, it is celebrated, it is full of promises. coloniality is more difficult to see. modernity’s storytelling hides it. but it is felt, it is felt by people who do not fit the celebratory frames and expectations of modernity. (mignolo, 2016, p. vii) to mark canada’s 150th year of confederation, canada post issued a “marriage equality” stamp, the fourth in a set of 10 that were unveiled throughout 2017 and showcased select moments of white settler nationsuzanne lenon studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-161, 2022 144 making over the past 50 years.1 this particular stamp commemorates the passage of the civil marriage act, which legalized same-sex marriage across canada in 2005. stylized in the shape of a maple leaf, its visual centre consists of a rainbow flag with the words “canada 150” to its right and “marriage equality” in both french and english directly below. celebrating this specific legal reform, the stamp exemplifies a particular kind of canadian (homo)nationalism that prides itself on its tolerance of sexual and gender diversity and imagines canada (and canadians) as inclusive, benevolent, and modern. as a commodity that enables the cross-border travel of paper and packages, this stamp is a metonym for canada as a safe haven in the face of homophobia elsewhere, not here, and so participates in “modernity’s storytelling” (mignolo, 2016, p. vii). yet the stamp does more than this; it also captures, in its negative space, the penalization and subjugation of difference and the suppression of resistance that have made monogamy the only “lawful” union and form of conjugal relations worthy of recognition by the state. attending to this context, and particularly to the state repudiation of nonmonogamous unions, this article examines two developments in canadian law that are coextensive with same-sex marriage equality and continue to set limits on the types of conjugal unions that can be recognized and legally tolerated in canada. the 2011 decision of the supreme court of british columbia (reference, 2011; hereinafter the polygamy reference) upheld 19th century criminal code provisions on polygamy, while bill s-7 (zero tolerance for barbaric cultural practices act, 2015; hereinafter the zero tolerance act) introduced changes to canada’s immigration regulations to include the practice of polygamy as a basis for refusing foreign applicants and deporting foreign nationals. this article highlights what sylvia wynter (2003) calls the “coloniality of being, of power” that circulates in both judicial and legislative formations of polygamy to double down on the primacy accorded to monogamous marriage as a marker of a nation’s cultural and political identity as white and civilized. my particular interest here is how historically intractable racist sentiments are engaged to demonize polygamy through the colonial logic of “barbarism,” so as to mark its fundamental difference from monogamy and its incompatibility with national identity. i begin by discussing the role played by the relatively new field of evolutionary psychology in the polygamy reference. its insights were employed to dismiss feminist expert evidence; to vault over the histories of racial animus that undergird anti-polygamy law in canada while 1 other commemorative stamps include depictions of expo 67, the charter of rights & freedoms, the canadarm, the trans-canada highway, and terry fox’s marathon of hope (canada post, n.d.). polygamy, state racism, and the return of barbarism studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-162, 2022 145 simultaneously reinvesting in racism to do so; and, concomitantly, to usher in a “coloniality of power” that seeks to racially stratify for the purpose of domination. evolutionary psychology is a knowledge-for-domination project that is sourced from colonial logics and marks racial difference as a signifier of cultural difference. that evolutionary psychology appeared as common sense in a 21st century canadian courtroom is disconcerting and should give those of us dreaming of and working towards social justice tremendous pause: what knowledge formations were galvanized in the name of gender equality and women’s rights? three years after the criminal code provisions on polygamy were upheld as constitutional in the polygamy reference, the federal government introduced legislation that ostensibly protected canadians from “barbaric cultural practices.” the second part of the article, then, provides an overview of the zero tolerance act and some of its material effects. i contend that the lexicon and colonial grammar of evolutionary psychology mediates both the intent and materiality of this act, even while it is not clearly identified as an operating frame. to accomplish these goals, i draw on two key concepts from sylvia wynter’s (2003) work: the “coloniality of being” and the “coloniality of power.” she describes the “coloniality of being” as the overrepresentation of a western bourgeois conception of man, an exclusionary mode of being human that denies others the ontological status of “human” (2003, p. 282). the “coloniality of power” refers to western and colonial knowledge systems that produce social stratifications for the purposes of domination, replete as they are “with an imperial bend, a will to objectivity and truth” (mignolo, 2014, p. 110; wynter, 2003). in short, i argue throughout this paper that the state’s use of evolutionary psychology structurally embeds the violence of racism into law by reviving a racial taxonomy of human populations and perpetuating a 19th century understanding of racial-cum-cultural difference. it becomes knowledge in the service of colonial formations of state power and a force supporting white supremacy in the continual valorization of monogamy as a foundational aspect of social and sexual citizenship in canada. in offering an analysis of the work evolutionary psychology does in the polygamy reference and its discursive traces in the zero tolerance act, this paper contributes to scholarly literature in canada that demonstrates the imbrication of colonial race-thinking in the legal treatment of polygamy (e.g., carter, 2008; denike, 2010, 2014; lenon, 2015; rambukkana, 2015) and contributes a race-critical analysis of the regulation of polygamous marriage to socio-legal and political science literatures (calder & beaman, 2014; campbell, 2013; campbell et al., 2005; gaucher, 2016, 2018). this paper’s analysis of canadian juridical and legislative (re)positionings on polygamy’s harms brings mignolo’s (2016) opening epigraph to life: through the celebration of monogamous marriage, against the necessary foil of the “barbaric practice” of polygamy, modernity is made visible; it is announced, it is promoted, it is celebrated. what remains critical is unmasking the suzanne lenon studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-161, 2022 146 enduring structures of white supremacy on which the modernity of the prohibition of polygamy is built and experienced by those whose different marriage relations are targeted under the banner of equality and security. to all these literatures, then, this paper offers a meditation on the polysemous term “social justice” as racial justice, one that has not liberal humanism as its horizon but rather the abolition of the very conceptual frames of european/canadian modernity that legitimize relations of dominance so as to imagine otherwise worlds, refashion new modes of relational logics, and reimagine a society without a colour line as arbiter of differentiated wellbeing. mesmerizing the court: evolutionary psychology and the criminalization of polygamy the residents of the community of bountiful, british columbia follow fundamentalist mormon teachings of the church of latter day saints (lds), including plural marriage as a central tenet of faith. bountiful has long been the subject of police investigation. in the mid 2000s, the attorney general of b.c. had actively sought advice from three different special prosecutors to determine whether the community’s two competing leaders, winston blackmore and james oler, could be charged for violating the criminal code’s prohibition on polygamy (section 293) without such a charge being interpreted as violating their freedom of religion as guaranteed by the charter of rights and freedoms (hereinafter, the charter). criminal charges were finally pressed against the two men in 2008 but these were subsequently dismissed in 2009 by the bc supreme court. it ruled that the attorney general had been overly aggressive in its pursuit of a prosecution against blackmore and oler. 2 instead of appealing this decision, the attorney general tasked the supreme court of british columbia with assessing the constitutional validity of section 293 through a reference case.3 the specific questions referred to the court were (i) is section 293 of the criminal code of canada consistent with the canadian charter of rights and freedoms? if not, in what particular or particulars and to what extent?; and (ii) what are the necessary elements of the offence in section 293 of the criminal code of canada? without limiting this question, does section 293 require that the polygamy or conjugal union in question involved a minor, or occurred in a context of dependence, exploitation, abuse of authority, a gross imbalance of power, or undue influence?4 several weeks of hearings in late 2010 and early 2011 featured arguments from a number of interested parties: the attorney general of b.c. who 2 see blackmore v. british columbia (attorney general), 2009. 3 see criminal code of canada, section 293, 2011. 4 see criminal code of canada, section 293, 2011, para 16. polygamy, state racism, and the return of barbarism studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-162, 2022 147 defended the polygamy provision; the court-appointed amicus curiae’s challenge to the law; bountiful residents’ testimonies about life in polygamous families; social scientists’ and legal scholars’ expert evidence; and 11 third-party interveners’ testimonies and submissions.5 chief justice bauman, in a 300-plus page decision that was released in november 2011, found that, while section 293 did not infringe on freedom of expression, association, or equality rights, it did violate freedom of religion under section 2(a) of the charter, and affected the section 7 liberty interests of children between 12 and 17 years of age who were married into polygamy. the court, however, found these violations justifiable under section 1 of the charter because of the intrinsic harms it understood polygamy to pose to women, children, society at large, and, perhaps most importantly, to the institution of monogamous marriage itself. with one small revision, namely that section 293 cannot criminalize minors who engage in plural marriage, chief justice bauman held that canada’s anti-polygamy provision was valid and enforceable. one particularly striking feature of the decision is its reliance on evolutionary science, specifically the field of evolutionary psychology, as the theoretical and methodological framework through which the harms of polygamy could be objectively identified and even quantified. chief justice bauman began his review of the evidence of polygamy’s harms “at the macro level of evolutionary psychology (simplistically, understanding current human behaviour by appreciating our evolutionary past)” (polygamy reference, 2011, par. 487). the expert evidence he draws on “posits that based on human mating psychology, certain harms are a predictable consequence of polygyny” (polygamy reference, 2011, par. 487). 6 evolutionary psychology is a darwinian approach to thinking about human inclinations in terms of historically evolved tendencies and adaptations (tooby & cosmides, 2005). drawing from 19th century horizons of understanding and taking the past several millennia as its temporal field, this approach returns to the scene of reproduction, to sexual difference, sex selection, and reproductive success that have long been used to explain the evolved characteristics and behavioral traits of animals. consequently, its proponents focus especially on “mating preferences” that ostensibly provide “reproductive advantage” through enhanced chances of genetic survival and proliferation in a competitive, hostile world. an approach to biological and 5 the list included the b.c. teachers federation, canadian coalition for the rights of the child, christian legal fellowship, david asper centre for constitutional rights, real women canada, stop polygamy in canada, and west coast leaf. for the amicus curiae, interveners included the b.c. civil liberties association, canadian association for free expression, canadian polyamory advocacy association, and the fundamentalist church of jesus christ of latter day saints. 6 polygamy is a kinship-family structure that contains both polygynous (one man, multiple women) and polyandrous (one woman, multiple men) forms. it is polygynous polygamy that is of central concern in this legal case. suzanne lenon studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-161, 2022 148 physiological variation is brought to bear on social and political relations, historical contexts, cultural practices, and the individual and collective decisions through which we constitute norms. underpinning this is a scaffolding that hierarchically and normatively organizes differences between cultures and behavioural tendencies that is concerned with their “fitness,” survival, and advancement. as i argue below, evolutionary psychology is a knowledge project sourced from colonial logics that racially stratifies populations under the sign of “barbarism,” and in so doing (re)institutes contemporary relations of colonial difference on which modernity is established. craig jones, the lead counsel for the attorney general of b.c., enthusiastically embraced evolutionary psychology as the justificatory framework for upholding a criminal prohibition of polygamy in canada. reflecting on this strategy in a cruel arithmetic, jones (2012) constructs polygamy in a way that resonates with 19th century political theory, that is, in the context of the nasty and brutish battle for survival that is typically described as “human nature.” polygamy is something to be feared and reckoned with: it is “a powerful, primitive force; it is always there; it breathes, it waits and when it is released, it grows and consumes” (jones, 2012, p. 49). it is the force of “the primitive” – that is, of the (colonial) idea of “the primitive” as that which is within us and that drives our lesser natures, as that which is both “hardwired” into humans and that we rise above culturally, politically, and legally – that seemed to mesmerize the court. against the “power of polygamy, uncorked” (jones, 2012, p. 58), as jones describes what he wants us all to imagine and to dread as the inevitable consequence of decriminalizing polygamous marriage in canada, is the law, and, in this case, the time-honoured criminal laws by which we prevent such a descent. by this account, the legal imposition and preservation of monogamy is society’s salvation, an adaptive survival mechanism through which we protect the future of civil society and by which we establish our social, political, and cultural sophistication against the force of nature. the social good of imposing monogamy is that it will manage and curtail what jones’ leading expert, dr. joseph henrich, characterized as the likely “non-trivial” increase in the incidence of polygyny were it to be decriminalized (henrich, 2010, p. 21). for henrich, jones, and ultimately the court, evolutionary principles suggest that there is an “arithmetic” to polygamy’s harms: no matter how you cut it, “polygamy uncorked” increases demand for younger women as marriage partners; the phenomenon of “lost boys”;7 an increase in men’s violence and criminality; a decrease in parental investment in children (by men in particular); and a decrease in gender 7 “lost boys” is a collective label for fundamentalist church of jesus christ of latter-day saints (flds) boys who are pushed out of their communities to increase the ratio of women to men for older, more powerful, male members (rambukkana, 2015, p. 188). polygamy, state racism, and the return of barbarism studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-162, 2022 149 equality that is intrinsic to western democratic values. as chief justice bauman argues, “s. 293 was, and indeed still is, intended to address the harms viewed as arising from polygamy; harms to women, to children, to society and, importantly, to the institution of monogamous marriage” (polygamy reference, 2011, par. 881). polygamy’s harms, he adds tautologically, “directly threaten the benefits felt to be associated with the institution of monogamous marriage” and they have done so since “the advent of socially imposed universal monogamy in greco-roman society” (polygamy reference, 2011, par. 883). by incorporating a prohibition on polygamy in canada’s original criminal code, chief justice bauman concludes that parliament was enacting its duty to safeguard the institution of monogamous marriage by actively suppressing “the evil reasonably apprehended to be associated with the practice of polygamy” (polygamy reference, 2011, par. 888). following the lexicon of evolutionary psychology, imposing monogamy is an adaptive strategy that keeps polygamy’s harms in check, and “may have helped to create the conditions for the emergence of democracy and political equality at all levels of government” (henrich, 2010, p. 60). western civilized societies, as this suggests, adhere to a social contract that favours and “imposes” monogamy. it is at the heart of this creative application of evolutionary principles, invoked here to keep ourselves civilized, that we find the structures of tautological colonial reasoning and the burden of white man’s laws. the concern here is less with the merits of evolutionary psychology as a conceptual framework to explain human behaviour and more with the work that its role as evidence was made to do in this critical ruling on the constitutionality and social necessity of canada’s criminal prohibition on polygamy. following sylvia wynter, katherine mckittrick (2014) remarks that science is “produced as an objective system of knowledge that enumerates and classifies ‘difference’ – botanical, racial-sexual, spatial, linguistic, and so forth” (p. 145). in wynter’s estimation, the scientific expressions of modernity – rational man, the cartographies of the plantation, the metrics of non-white/enslaved/gendered bodies, the mathematics of nature, the biological sorting – “disclose the ways in which the question of human life is mapped out by scientific imperatives that increasingly profit from positing that we, humans, are fundamentally biocentric and natural beings” (mckittrick, 2014, p. 145). three examples tie wynter’s insights to the work evolutionary psychology does in the reference decision. first, evolutionary psychology was given primacy of place in conceptualizing polygamy’s harms and thereby it helped justify a 19th century prohibition against polygamy. in fact, chief justice bauman dismissed as “somewhat naïve” (polygamy reference, 2011, par. 752) feminist expert evidence for the amicus curiae, evidence that highlighted more nuanced understandings of women’s experiences in polygamous families outside the discourse of harm. as lori beaman (2014), one of these expert witnesses writes, “reasoned discussion about whether suzanne lenon studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-161, 2022 150 polygamy is inherently harmful to women was, in my experience at least, almost impossible” (p. 132). second, adopting the reasoning of evolutionary psychology provided a new gloss to old biopolitical social contracts that tether marriage formations to political and cultural progress. often analogized to slavery as a “relic of barbarism” (gordon, 2002), characterizations of polygamy as barbaric, despotic, and degenerate, and white mormons as “race traitors” (ertman, 2010) were sensationalized through popular fiction and newsprint, circulated through political theory and philosophy, materialized in a series of draconian anti-polygamy laws, and applied in the jurisprudence of polygamy-related cases in the late 19th century u.s. that sought to curtail fears of a mormon theocracy taking hold in some states.8 in its seminal legal decision, reynolds v. the united states (1878), the u.s. supreme court (in)famously reasoned that polygamy was “odious among the northern and western nations of europe, and, until the establishment of the mormon church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of asiatic and of african people.” the court further argued that polygamy ultimately “fetters the people in stationary despotism” (pp. 164, 165-166). these same sentiments were articulated in a later supreme court ruling, late corporation v. u.s. (1890) that upheld both the dissolution of the church corporation and the forfeiture of its assets. the supreme court posited that “mormons were degrading the morals of the country through their religious practices” and that organizing “a community for the spread and practice of polygamy” constituted “a return to barbarism” (harrison, 2015, p. 106). such a community, the court declared, “is contrary to the spirit of christianity, and of the civilization which christianity has produced in the western world” (harrison, 2015, p. 106). in the face of such legal, political, and social persecution, the president of the lds church issued the first manifesto in 1890, in which he advised followers to “refrain 8 these laws included the morrill anti-bigamy act (1862), which criminalized polygamy, disincorporated the lds church, and prohibited religious organizations from owning property in excess of $50,000. in 1878, the u.s. supreme court upheld the constitutionality of the morrill act in reynolds v. united states. such legal initiatives failed to curtail the practice of polygamy. thus, congress passed the edmunds act (1882), which, in addition to banning cohabitation, disenfranchised both practicing polygamists and their wives. the supreme court again upheld the edmunds act in murphy v. ramsay, praising the legislature’s choice of monogamy as “the best guaranty” of morality (see eichenberger, 2012, p. 1077). in an effort to legislate an even harsher stance against polygamy, congress passed the edmunds-tucker act (1887), which criminalized male adultery and repealed the incorporation of the lds church. church property in excess of that proscribed by the morrill act was forfeited to the us government for the use and benefit of public schools in the territory. it annulled illegitimate children’s succession rights and disenfranchised female voters. as eichenberger (2012) notes, in recognizing that mormon women were not passive victims of plural marriage, the edmunds-tucker act signaled a turning point in the anti-polygamy campaign where mormon women, once the subjects of pity, had morphed into objects of public derision. see also gordon (2002) and harrison (2015). polygamy, state racism, and the return of barbarism studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-162, 2022 151 from contracting any marriages forbidden by the law of the land” (harrison, 2015, p. 102). it is against this backdrop that mormon settlers arrived in southern alberta in 1887 with the hope of finding refuge from the discrimination and persecution that targeted them in the u.s. (carter, 2008; embry, 1989; palmer, 1990). as recounted by carter (2008), canada, however, was hardly obliging and specified that the condition of their sanctuary was that mormon settlers cease to practice polygamy. canada had inherited a common law definition of marriage in hyde v. hyde and woodmansee (1866) that explicitly defined marriage “as understood in christendom [as] the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others” (at 134). this definition of marriage was a civil prohibition on the recognition of polygamous marriage. criminalizing polygamy occurred with the incorporation of an anti-polygamy provision into canada’s first comprehensive criminal code of 1892. this provision included a reference to mormons, which remained in place until minor amendments were made in 1954. while canadian officials were comparatively less hostile than their american counterparts of the time, the archives reveal similar racial anxieties. polygamy was described by politicians as “a serious moral and national ulcer” (house of commons, 1890, p. 3177), that “once gets a footing in canada will be very hard to stamp out” (bolderson, 1899). they further described mormons as “a self-satisfying sect” that “is a danger and a shame to every christian people” (royal, 1889). it is important to also consider how such discursive rhetoric used sexuality, gender, and kinship to draw not only transnational lines of civilization versus barbarism but internal, national ones as well. what scott morgensen (2011) calls “settler sexuality” and kim tallbear (2018) calls “settler sex and family,” that is, heterosexual, biologically reproductive monogamous white marriage and family, were made central to the project of white settler nationbuilding. settler sexuality and family took shape through violent legislative, educational, economic, and religious targeting of indigenous kinship formations. in this context, anti-polygamy law was materially and discursively put in the service of “settlement’s labour” (simpson, 2014, p. 21). for example, it was used by the department of indian affairs in the 19th century to target indigenous customary marriage law that allowed for more than one wife (carter, 2008). yet as carter (2008) argues, such efforts at criminalization were not entirely successful as (what were understood as) polygamous marriages continued. while efforts to eradicate the “evils” of polygamy were caught up in transnational fears of a barbarous “there” having made its way to a civilized “here,” rifkin (2011) suggests that the symbolic and cultural force that has been brought through law to the imposition of monogamy on indigenous communities might also signal lurking insecurity over assertions of indigenous sovereignty. adopting the reasoning of evolutionary psychology allowed the court in the polygamy reference to vault over these racialized histories. evolutionary suzanne lenon studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-161, 2022 152 psychology was deployed to map marriage tendencies across cultures in terms of a hierarchy of development measured by proximity to (western) “civilization” (as progressive, democratic) or remove from “barbarism” (as stagnant, despotic regimes). it recast the orientalist narrative of hierarchically ordered cultural difference as something empirically verifiable, biologically and genetically hard-wired, however much such verification was not furnished in this case, or at least beyond the statistical projections of polygamy’s “cruel arithmetic.” such statistical projections were primarily based on a seemingly timeless application of primate sex reproduction and mating strategies onto humans, as well as profoundly ahistorical, big data, quantitative surveys on the nature and variation in human mating and marriage patterns (henrich, 2010). while humans and other primates share a range of similarities due to our shared phylogeny, critical interventions into evolutionary biology and psychology caution that evolution is as much about discontinuity as it is about continuity (fuentes, 2021). the vast array of human ecological, social, and historical contexts offers better explanatory frameworks for male and female reproductive relationships, physiologies, and behaviour than differences in their reproductive classifications or patterns (fuentes, 2021). concepts such as mating strategies and marriage patterns, for example, are not stable sets of relations in biological, social, or political terms; they are neither inevitable outcomes of nature nor are they apolitical formations whose durability over time and space remain unchanged (smith, 2021). yet it was the broad, flat application of evolutionary analyses across time and across space that seems to capture the court and breathe new life into consolidating an imagined west as a set of morally and politically advanced yet vulnerable christian nations. vulnerable because, by its “cruel arithmetic” over deep evolutionary time, “human beings will have a tendency to adopt the practice [of polygamy] when the environment permits” (polygamy reference, 2011, par. 575). aberrations from monogamy, as a pinnacle of human evolution, come to be understood as reversions to more primitive states (smith, 2021). anti-polygamy law becomes, then, not a measure of the workings of racial and religious animus as much as a reflection of the evolution of social strategies that reflect the repudiation and management of humanity’s baser impulses. the “imposition” of monogamy, so formative to western civilization, reflects the advanced cultural “evolution” that those societies who practice polygamy lack. here, then, is the third, related example of the work that evolutionary psychology accomplished in the polygamy reference: by ushering in the race-thinking of coloniality, it made seemingly self-evident the superiority of monogamous marriage norms over the “cultural” practices of polygamy affiliated with “eastern,” and particularly muslim, states. it is with the prospect of biopolitical vulnerability that the court returns to the specter of the immigrant and the importance of taking steps to prevent polygamy, state racism, and the return of barbarism studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-162, 2022 153 polygamy from slipping past the national border. even though it is not their cultural practices but rather those of home-grown ‘celestial marriages’ of the fundamentalist church of jesus christ of latter-day saints (flds) that prompted this reference case, racialized populations figure as a looming presence. chief justice bauman calls attention to the role that immigration law already plays and might even further play in curtailing what he is convinced would be the likely spread of polygamy by permitting its entry into canada. the evidence furnished by evolutionary psychology regarding the population demographics of polygynous communities “suggest that in the event these immigrant communities were to become stable, their populations would expand comparatively rapidly” (polygamy reference, 2011, par. 560). even more at issue in dictating the need for a criminal ban on polygamy is “the possibility of an increase in the incidence of polygamy among those who are here” (polygamy reference, 2011, par. 574). rather tellingly, these are invariably not among “canadians,” but what he calls “people from cultures and faiths which practice polygyny who are already resident in canada who might take it up were it not prohibited” (polygamy reference, 2011, par. 575). it is from within and beyond the border, yet always invariably in sight of it, that the imagined return of barbarism underpins the regulation of polygamous marriage in canada. the task then, as this court sees it, is to make sure the environment remains hostile to polygamy, what the canadian government, three years after the reference decision, would call “protecting canadians from barbaric cultural practices” (government of canada, 2014). as i discuss in the next section, evolutionary psychology haunts such legislative hostility. as toni morrison (1988, p. 136) reminds us, invisible things are not necessarily not there. tracking the appearance and repetition of the continuities that have persisted in the juridical and legislative imposition of monogamy helps lay bare the enduring forms of race-thinking and colonial logic that insistently make the regulation of marriage a function of national identity. it is to this more recent manifestation in the zero tolerance act and the racist reforms that it makes to the immigration and refugee act of canada that i now turn. border racism in 2014, the (then) federal conservative government introduced bill s-7, the zero tolerance for barbaric cultural practices act. this legislative initiative was touted as protecting “canadian values,” described as the antithesis to barbarism. with the canadian border plainly in sight, it amends sections of the civil marriage act, the criminal code, and the immigration and refugee protection act (irpa) ostensibly to “prevent barbaric cultural practices from suzanne lenon studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-161, 2022 154 happening on canadian soil” (government of canada, 2014), defined as forced marriages, polygamy, and honour killings.9 “canadian soil,” or as katherine mckittrick (2014) suggests, the “sociospatial expression of western modernity” (p. 143), conceals the violences it requires as much as it reveals them. the “soil” of this territory currently called canada can only be ontologically claimed as such because of the ongoing structure of settler colonialism that has dispossession as its aim and “settler sex and family” as its ideal. despite its inflammatory title and leveraging of islamophobic stereotypes, or perhaps in part because of them, bill s-7 was passed by a majority in the house of commons across party lines. this conceptualizing of particular practices of violence against women as “barbaric” was shared terrain between political parties. if the consensus across the political spectrum is that polygamy is immoral and therefore rightfully illegal, then monogamous marriage too comes to stand as an evolved canadian value in need of protection, in discursive continuity with the polygamy reference. the discourse of barbaric cultural practices from elsewhere (over there, not here) coming to “canadian soil” obfuscates the gendered violence required to “make” canada in the first place. far from violence against women being a contradiction of canadian values, canada’s existence is a product of and indeed relies on ongoing violence against indigenous women and girls (see in particular simpson, 2016). what and who, then, is barbaric? this “coloniality of power” (wynter, 2003) is part of what evolutionary psychology allowed the court in the polygamy reference to vault over in its biopolitical aim to protect the institution of monogamous marriage. the amendments made to the irpa with respect to polygamy pertain to valid foreign polygamous marriages and not the plural unions of bountiful as these are legal nullities (bailey et al., 2005). to enter or remain in canada, foreign nationals and permanent residents must meet the eligibility requirements for the applicable visa (if required) and must not be inadmissible under sections 33-43 of the irpa, which include engaging in espionage, terrorism, criminality, or misrepresenting the material facts in the course of an immigration application (béchard & elgersma, 2015). turning on the understanding of the general and specific harms interpreted in the polygamy reference, the zero tolerance act introduces a new section 41.1 that explicitly ties family class migration to a securitization project. specifically, the act states, “a permanent resident or a foreign national is inadmissible on grounds of practising polygamy if they are or will be 9 bill s-7 is divided into three parts. part 1 modifies the immigration and refugee protection act (irpa) in order to amend the inadmissibility provisions. part 2 amends the civil marriage act (2005, c. 33) with respect to consent to contract a marriage, the age of marriage and when a new marriage can be contracted. part 3 amends the criminal code (r.s., c. c-46) and makes consequential amendments to other acts, changing the defence of provocation and introducing new offences and procedures related to forced marriages or marriages in which spouses are underage (béchard & elgersma, 2015, p. 4). polygamy, state racism, and the return of barbarism studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-162, 2022 155 practising polygamy with a person who is or will be physically present in canada at the same time as the permanent resident or foreign national.” prior to these reforms, a foreign national seeking temporary residence who practises polygamy in their country of origin was generally allowed entry, though with only one designated spouse; s.41.1 now bars their admission altogether, including were this person to seek to join one of their spouses in canada. additionally, an application for permanent residence can now be denied to someone not only on the basis of the relations they are currently in, but on the prospect that they may do so (i.e., that they “will be practicing polygamy with a person who is or will be physically present in canada at the same time” as the applicant; metrac, n.d.). even for permanent residents who already have status in canada, a finding of their practice of polygamy could result in their deportation on this basis alone. prior to these reforms, a permanent resident could face deportation if they were convicted under s.293 of the criminal code, or if they had misrepresented the facts about their status on their application. now, s.41.1 authorizes immigration officers to deport permanent residents and non-citizens suspected of engaging in polygamy even in the absence of a criminal conviction or a finding of misrepresentation. it must be noted that the irpa already imposed restrictions on family class immigration that effectively prohibited multiple spouses from being recognized. in other words, polygamy is not a form of marriage recognized for immigration purposes by canada.10 of course, this does not mean that these relationships do not exist or that they are not lived, felt, solemnized, and celebrated. the state’s refusal to recognize them, however, means that they are lacking the social and institutional support and public resources and services that are provided by law to those in monogamous unions. as noted by community advocates (south asian legal clinic of ontario, 2014) and feminist scholars (bailey et al., 2005; campbell, 2005; gaucher, 2016) alike, this lack of recognition heightens the vulnerability and increases the isolation of women and children and restricts their access to important support services. far from protecting them from polygamy’s harms, the reinforcement of anti-polygamy provisions would necessitate concealment, secrecy, and isolation, deterring women who are subject to abuse in such relations to seek health and social service supports so as not to jeopardize their immigration status and that of their children, thereby exposing them to greater risks of violence (metrac, n.d.). these consequences are the material effects of law’s violence: the affective lived realities of the micro and macro aggressions of state prohibitions and regulations that not only 10 some provinces and territories such as ontario, yukon, prince edward island and the northwest territories have extended recognition to polygamous marriages for the purposes of legal protections for polygamous spouses, including succession rights, spousal support, and division of marital property. parties to a polygamous marriage, however, may not obtain a divorce under canada’s divorce act (see bailey et al., 2005, pp. 10-12). suzanne lenon studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-161, 2022 156 deny recognition of such diverse family forms and erase them from view through their criminalization but that justify discrimination against them. so, whither evolutionary psychology? while its framework is not made explicit in debates over bill s-7 nor in the legislation itself, its language and racist tropes are acutely present, “cajoling us to reconsider the very distinctions between there and not there, past and present, force and shape” (gordon, 1997, p. 6). i return to toni morrison’s (1988) exhortation that “certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose” (p. 136). where, she asks, “is the shadow of the presence from which the text has fled?” (p. 137). it is clear from the foregoing description of the legislation, including its name, that the lexicon and colonial grammar of evolutionary psychology mediates both the intent and materiality of the zero tolerance act. it does not need to be made explicit in order to ascertain its presence. the framework of “barbaric cultural practices” that so profoundly underpins the legislation does not make sense without the work that evolutionary psychology did to double down on monogamous marriage as civilized and evolved in the polygamy reference. evolutionary psychology, as a western/colonial knowledge formation, is the constitutive logic of the zero tolerance act. it is part of the western/european “cosmo-political, religiosocial worldview” (walcott, 2020, p. 347) that characterizes itself as evolved and normal relative to its own experienced “norm of being human” (wynter, 2003, p. 292); it is part of the western/european worldview that constitutes itself as the apex of civilization and draws a socio-ontological line between rational, political (and i would add, monogamous) man (the settler of european descent) and its irrational human others (subordinated indians and enslaved negroes) (wynter, 2003, p. 314); and, lastly, a worldview that conceives itself therefore as always under threat. the absence of evolutionary psychology in the zero tolerance act is a presence that gives shape to the body politic through the irpa amendments. these amendments provide immigration officials, as the front line of state administration of immigration policy, with the renewed means to draw what w.e.b. dubois (1903) identified as the colour line. the seeming absence of evolutionary psychology is nonetheless a presence that is felt through the tragic irony of colonial benevolence that plagues the legislation in its desire to provide “more protection and support for vulnerable immigrants, primarily women and girls” (government of canada, 2014). this is a benevolence that understands itself as saving imperilled muslim women from dangerous muslim men, one that masks its own violence by locating its source in the “barbarism” of backwards, less evolved cultural practices (razack, 2004). the work, then, of evolutionary psychology, evinced by the juridical and legislative interventions on polygamous marriage, is inseparable from white supremacy’s violences. the temporality of both the polygamy reference and polygamy, state racism, and the return of barbarism studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-162, 2022 157 the zero tolerance act is palimpsestic, where the fears of barbarism are imperfectly erased, remaining visible across time – historically continuous – to still haunt and give formation to modern (hence racial) nation-states. conclusion the formations of race-thinking that imbue anti-polygamy provisions add further nuance to the significance of monogamous marriage to national identity, and to its role in marking the literal boundaries of the nation and the racial formations of its national character. in tracking the alignments between marriage and nationhood and attending to the work that has been put into securing in place the convention of monogamy, we come up against the colonial logic that keeps the structures of racial hierarchy in place, the very structures that organize the patterns of representation that have ensured that entire cultures and peoples can be rendered erasable, inadmissible, and deportable. in both the polygamy reference and the zero tolerance act, coloniality seeps out of modernity’s legal and evolutionary storytelling about why the universal imposition of monogamy is something that speaks to our moral superiority and ability to keep barbaric impulses in check. yet it is worth entertaining, however ironically, another variation of the common sense that evolutionary psychology makes out of human behavioural tendencies. this is to consider what must also be the behavioral product of evolution: the social formations and biopolitical practices of marking distinctions between groups, of fostering and protecting some to the exclusion and at the expense of others. that is to say, we need to consider also as an adaptation the tendencies of race-thinking and racism that seize upon marriage, not because it cares to “protect women” but because it facilitates the adaptive persistence of racial domination (denike, 2017). that is, it is worth asking how forms of race thinking and racism themselves have evolved and indeed are adapted so effectively, yet work spectrally including through law and policy so as to mask them as the works of hero-ism against violence and not as expressions and mechanisms of violence that they are. but i want more than this. yes, race and racism were created as an organizing logic of humanity, of the arbiter of differentiated humanness. and racism shapeshifts across time and space. but if we want to imagine otherwise possibilities, otherwise worlds, then we must abolish the very conceptual frames and modality of thought that produce categorical distinctions between populations, cultures, cosmologies, and worldviews that make such categorical distinctions desirable and understand them as maintainable (crawley, 2020). as evolutionary psychology is a western knowledge formation sourced from colonial logics and thus invested in and predicated on racial-cum-cultural difference, then the social justice, that is, the racial justice project that i orient to is what sylvia wynter (2003) calls suzanne lenon studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-161, 2022 158 “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom.” this is a project of social and racial justice whose task is to unsettle the foundations of what we have inherited from imperialism and colonialism: the white, patriarchal, hetero-monogamous concept of man, produced by modern philosophical and scientific thought (including evolutionary psychology) so as to disavow other cosmologies, worldviews, forms of life, and “modes of being human” (wynter, 2003, p. 300). man overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, the “final frontier/normal way of life” (mckittrick, 2014, p. 153; wynter, 2003). one cannot “unsettle” the “coloniality of power,” wynter writes, without a “redescription of the human outside the terms of our present descriptive statement of the human, man, and its overrepresentation… in the question of the who and the what we are” (p. 268) in all our relational possibilities so that we can secure “the well-being of the human species itself/ourselves” (p. 260). one small part of this, of re-imagining an otherwise, is a racial justice project that wants to unhook from the logics and conditions of european/western/settler intimacies that organize monogamy as a category of racial differentiation. in short, “the difficult labor of thinking the world anew” (mckittrick, 2014, p. 6). acknowledgements many thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their sharp comments and feedback. in addition, this paper’s argument about racism’s own adaptive and evolutionary tendencies has been strengthened through my conversations with margaret denike about the 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(2004). imperiled muslim women, dangerous muslim men, and civilized europeans: legal and social responses to forced marriages. feminist legal studies, 12(2), 129-174. reference re: section 293 of the criminal code of canada, 2011 bcsc 1558 reynolds v. united states, 98 u.s. (8 otto.) 145 (1878) rifkin, m. (2011). when did indians become straight? kinship, the history of sexuality, and native sovereignty. oxford university press. royal, j. (1889). rg 18, file 68610, library & archives canada, february 7. simpson, a. (2014). mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. duke university press. simpson, a. (2016). the state is a man: theresa spence, loretta saunders, and the gender of settler sovereignty. theory & event, 19(4), 1-16. smith, r. w. a. (2021). imperial terroir: toward a queer molecular ecology of colonial masculinities. current anthropology, 62(23), 155-168. south asian legal clinic of ontario. (2014). perpetuating myths, denying justice: zero tolerance for barbaric cultural practices act. http://www.salc.on.ca/finalbills7statement%20updated%20nov%2018.pdf tallbear, k. (2018). making love and relations beyond settler sex and family. in a. e. clarke & d. haraway (eds.), making kin not population (pp. 145-164). prickly paradigm press. tooby, j., & cosmides, l. (2005). conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology. in d. m. buss (ed.), the handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 5-67). wiley. polygamy, state racism, and the return of barbarism studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 143-162, 2022 161 walcott, r. (2020). diaspora, transnationalism, and the decolonial project. in t. lethabo king, j. navarro, & a. smith (eds.), otherwise worlds: against settler colonialism and antiblackness (pp. 342-361). duke university press. wynter, s. (2003). unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument. the new centennial review, 3(3), 257337. zero tolerance for barbaric cultural practices act, sc 2015, c 29. switzer & foulds final before ts november 29 19 correspondence address: heather switzer, women and gender studies, arizona state university, tempe, az, 85281; email: heather.switzer@asu.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 382-387, 2018 dispatch feminist friendship heather switzer arizona state university, usa kim foulds sesame workshop, usa the call for dispatches from the field of feminist scholarship and advocacy reflecting on jackie kirk’s legacy has given us the wonderful opportunity to think about her inspiration and impact on our individual lives as feminist scholars. it has also afforded us the rare opportunity to think in an intentional way about our friendship, which started 10 years ago when we were both graduate students. to tell our story and share our reflections, we’ve structured our dispatch as an intertwined monologue with our readers as our audience. as we wrote this piece we were at times overwhelmed with emotion, both from our enduring sadness at the loss of jackie’s brilliant mind, and out of gratitude that her work created such a rich, sustaining and nurturing feminist friendship for us. feminist friendship at first sight kim: heather and i met in 2008 while i was a doctoral student in comparative education at the university of california, los angeles (ucla). katrina daly thompson, who was my swahili professor at the time, emailed me explaining that heather was from virginia tech and had just moved to the la area upon her return to the united states from dissertation fieldwork in kenya. she reached out to katrina to make connections with others working on east africa in the los angeles area. katrina thought i would enjoy meeting her and put us in touch. heather and i clicked instantly, in no small part because of a shared interest in kenya and a shared anxiety that comes with doctoral candidacy. the african studies community at ucla was shrinking; i was grateful to meet a new friend and colleague who shared similar research interests. feminist friendship studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 382-387, 2018 383 heather: meeting kim was a godsend for me. after living all of my adult life in a small, rural university town in the mountains of virginia and then moving to a relatively remote village of scattered-yet-connected maasai homesteads in southern kenya for my dissertation fieldwork, navigating the vast and maddening sea of humanity that is los angeles was, for me, disconcerting to say the least. kim was welcoming and generous, and i looked forward to our friday meetings at a coffee shop on the ucla campus. our burgeoning friendship was grounding for me personally as well as intellectually and professionally. kim invited me to review manuscripts for the graduate student-run scholarly journal she co-edited, ufahamu: a journal of african studies, and the sense of isolation i’d felt upon my return from kenya was replaced with connection. this mooring of feminist friendship returned me to my research and galvanized my desire to make sense of the experiences and perceptions of over 100 maasai primary schoolgirls i interviewed in kenya along with some of their mothers and teachers. i eventually moved back to virginia to be closer to my doctoral home (library, faculty advisors) and the familiarity of family, but my friendship with kim endured despite the distance. kim: around this time, i applied for an open short-term consultancy with the international rescue committee. the position was to finish writing a paper that analyzed issues of financing for gender equality in and through education in emergency, post-emergency and fragile contexts. as i learned during the interview, jackie kirk had been working on the paper, along with another irc colleague, when she was killed in afghanistan. a few months had passed, and the irc team wanted to make sure the project was completed. once the work picked up, i realized i was in-over-my-head, not just in trying to fill jackie’s footsteps, even on this relatively minor project, but also because this was my first foray into the world of development consulting. although comparative education is my home discipline, i was not aware of jackie at the time. the further the project went along, the more i learned about her work as a feminist academic-practitioner. as heather mentioned, in our weekly meetups at ucla we talked about our research and professional efforts, and we also talked about our lives. i told her about the project i was starting with irc and my fear of completing a project in a way that would not honor jackie’s legacy, the weight of which i was starting to truly understand and appreciate. heather: it’s rather amazing to reflect on now, after all these years, but i distinctly recall talking with kim on the phone as she explained the irc consultancy she’d started. we were both saddened and shocked to learn of jackie’s death and deeply moved by the realization that feminist scholarpractitioners lost their lives working for marginalized children and young people. continuing the work jackie and her colleagues had started quickly felt more poignant than professional. i was impressed with kim’s heather switzer, kim foulds studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 382-387, 2018 384 wherewithal in the face of her first consultancy, particularly given the tragic circumstances surrounding the project, and gratified to know that she would gather her consummate care and skill to complete the job. like kim, i learned about jackie and her work for the first time when we talked about the consultancy. moved to learn more, i stumbled upon the girlhood studies journal call for papers commemorating her legacy (which resulted in volume 3, issue 1, summer of 2010). i was delighted and amazed to learn of the vibrant scholarly, activist and advocacy community called girlhood studies, and more than slightly dismayed that in all my research on girls’ education and development in preparation for my fieldwork in kenya i had never come across this sub-field. to add to the intensity of this discovery, at that point in my graduate career i had never submitted a paper to a peer-reviewed journal, and yet it seemed critical that i take a risk and step through the threshold toward the bright light of possibility girlhood studies offered. after all, jackie was only two years older than me when she was killed, yet she had built a career that, to me, represented the best of feminist scholar-activism. i was dumbstruck when my manuscript, adapted from a chapter in my dissertation, was accepted for publication and honored to be a part of the first commemorative issue. pathways of possibility heather: in the past ten years, i’ve been fortunate to become a tenured professor, return to kenya a few more times for research with girls, write a book on maasai “schoolgirlhood,” develop and teach courses on girlhood and adolescence, develop the girls and girls’ studies caucus for the national women’s studies association, attend the inaugural international girls’ studies conference in the uk, join my esteemed colleagues claudia mitchell, ann smith, and bodil formark as co-editor for the new book series, transnational girlhoods, and generally find an intellectual home in girlhood studies. the winding path to this moment has had much to do with key elements of jackie’s work that have formed the bedrock of my own. jackie kirk and stephanie garrow’s (2003) cogent analysis of girls’ participation as policy presented insights that resonated deeply with my own sense that understanding girls’ lives in the context of development required working across disciplinary boundaries. when they argued for bridges between education and psychology, sociology, and importantly for my work, cultural studies and feminist analysis of visual and textual representations, i felt a kinship i had struggled to feel with much of the more disciplinary-bound social science scholarship i had been reading in education and development literatures. jackie and stephanie were speaking my language; the seamless way jackie and her colleagues brought together cultural studies of girlhood with empirical studies of girls’ lives made the kind of work i wanted to do seem possible. jackie’s ability to move among and between academic and feminist friendship studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 382-387, 2018 385 advocacy frameworks and settings with grace and acumen is, for me, an aspirational horizon for feminist work. perhaps most provocatively and poignantly, jackie’s insistence on girls as experts on their own lives – without romanticizing or overdetermining the notion of “voice” – has been key to my work. her insistence that “girls are not merely ‘women in waiting’ but members of our communities today… citizens with a full set of rights and expectations right now” (kirk & garrow, 2003, p. 6) remains a profound insight elemental to girlhood studies and vitally important for framing development interventions in girls’ lives. in jackie’s work, focusing on the lived experience of education by centering girls as knowledge subjects reverses the image of the passive and silent girlchild and privileges a complex definition of girlhood. these presuppositions provide the conceptual and ethical foundation of my work on girls in development, particularly my recent book, when the light is fire: maasai schoolgirls in contemporary kenya (switzer, 2018). like poor racialized girls elsewhere, maasai schoolgirls have conventionally been regarded as the objects of expert knowledge rather than the subjects of their own stories. in the book, i weave together an account of maasai girls and shifting notions of maasai girlhood that directly engages the victimized girl-child/empowered schoolgirl dichotomy and attempts to illuminate the complex, everyday dynamic experience of girls who go to school. as i hope i show, schoolgirls’ aggressive faith in the promise of schooling troubles reductive notions of the abject maasai girl struggling within an inherently oppressive culture. their collective insistence on the possibilities of schooling to change key aspects of their lives likewise reveals the possibilities, and as i discuss, the paradoxes, of gendered social change in maasai communities – as elsewhere. the emergence of the schoolgirl as a normative social category and what i call “schoolgirlhood” as an increasingly common cultural space, are effects of, as well as producers of, a new common sense about the crucial role school(ing) girls plays in development. jackie was also deeply concerned about how visual and textual representations of girls’ images and voices were easily instrumentalized, a concern i share and also attempt to address in the book as well as in my teaching and scholarship about girls’ lives. of all the important facets of her work that i could highlight, jackie’s insistence that we take girls seriously is perhaps her most enduring gift. kim: when hearing heather talk about all she’s accomplished in the years we’ve known each other, i’m so inspired and in awe of her. i admire the work she’s done and continues to do, even as our professional paths have diverged. after completing the consultancy with irc in 2008, i went on to finish my dissertation. my research included an analysis of kenyan primary school textbooks accompanied by child interviews to explore the ways primary school students define gender relative to the international discourses around gender equality. grounded in harding’s (2004) work on feminist standpoint theory and smith’s (2005) concept of institutional ethnography, i used heather switzer, kim foulds studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 382-387, 2018 386 jackie’s looking at textbooks from a gender perspective: a framework for analysis (kirk, n.d.) to collect textbook data. gender analyses of textbooks typically focus on simply counting the number of girls, boys, women, and men named and pictured. jackie, however, created a feminist tool that further explores the dynamics of the relationships of those named and pictured, providing a more nuanced analysis of gendered representation. as i transitioned into post-doctoral professional pathways, i have strived to straddle the lines of academic-practitioner as a means of connecting the two worlds, as jackie did. in the almost 10 years that have passed since i first encountered her work, i have served as an academic, and i have also worked as a development consultant with usaid, unesco, unicef, ministries of education and women’s affairs, and international ngos in afghanistan, democratic republic of congo, ethiopia, kenya, pakistan, uganda, and yemen, focusing particularly on issues of gender and education in fragile settings. jackie’s spirit as a feminist academic-practitioner isn’t the only motivating factor that has carried me through these experiences; i have also continued to use and adapt jackie’s data collection framework. i used her framework in the classroom in a textbook methods course, during which students adapted it to analyze textbooks from 12 african countries. students used the notion of analyzing gendered relationship dynamics as a jumping off point to further analyze intersecting power structures represented in textbooks, including issues around the politics of language, race, religious, ethnic, and national identity. i have also applied her methods as a development consultant focused on education in fragile settings, including a usaid consultancy analyzing afghan textbooks published by the ministry of education. while the ministry of education felt that they had made strides in including more images of girls in primary school textbooks, when we looked at the textbooks through a gendered lens, findings showed that boys are represented as active, going to school and earning money, while girls are constructed as passive, not going to school, and rarely earning money or leaving the home. these varied roads have led me to sesame workshop, the non-profit behind sesame street and its international co-productions. in overseeing research related to sesame’s international outreach projects, i bring jackie with me. at sesame, we carry out research at all stages of an intervention, inviting children to express their needs and wants so that they are the drivers of the process and their wishes are reflected in the outcome. heather: i am secretly envious of the paths down which kim’s interests and expertise have taken her, not only all over the world in the service of creating inclusive, generative, and life affirming educational experiences for all children and young people, but for the opportunities she has for transforming how knowledge is created for children globally. i don’t consider myself an activist, yet as jackie’s work on women’s teaching lives has made clear, my feminist friendship studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 382-387, 2018 387 activities as a professor and student advocate provide a way for me to embody the change i want to see in the world. with gratitude when we shared a bit of our story with marni, claudia and vanessa (the guest editors of this special issue commemorating jackie kirk) and asked about submitting our reflection as a dispatch, vanessa responded with delight by invoking international relations scholar cynthia enloe’s notion of “feminist curiosity” – a particular intellectual force and audacious faith that takes all women and their experiences seriously, challenges taken for granted assumptions and normative expectations, and welcomes surprises. the energy created by feminist curiosity brought us together as friends in los angeles 10 years ago, and even though neither of us ever met jackie, her work has serendipitously led us to new possibilities – possibilities that, before the moment of coming to know about jackie, were simply unknown to us. in reflecting on the role of jackie in our personal and professional lives, we are reminded of girlhood studies scholar marnina gonick’s observation in the acknowledgments of her first book, between femininities: ambivalence, identity and the education of girls (2003) in which she references anthropologist paul rabinow’s insistence that friendship is a “primary site of thinking.” through trusted friendships we have the space to risk personal growth by putting ourselves into our work (as research scholars, as activists, and practitioners) without knowing in advance what we will find, see, encounter, or engage. as friends, feminists, and confidantes, we value jackie’s invaluable contribution to the foundation of our primary site of thinking and her role in stoking the flames of our own feminist curiosities. references gonick, m. (2003). between femininities: ambivalence, identity and the education of girls. albany, ny: suny press. harding, s. (ed). (2004). feminist standpoint reader: intellectual and political controversies. new york: routledge. kirk, j. (n.d.). looking at textbooks from a gender perspective: a framework for analysis. new york: international rescue committee. retrieved from http://toolkit.ineesite.org/toolkit/ineecms/uploads/1043/looking_at_textbooks_from_ge nder_perspective.pdf kirk, j., & garrow, s. (2003). “girls in policy”: challenges for the education sector. agenda: empowering women for gender equality, 56, 4-15. smith, d. (2005). institutional ethnography: a sociology for people. new york: altamira press. switzer, h. (2018). when the light is fire: maasai schoolgirls in contemporary kenya. urbana, il: university of illinois press. murphy final correspondence address: wendy wiedenhoft murphy, department of sociology, john carroll university, university heights, oh, 44118, usa; email: wwiedenhoft@jcu.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 accounting for justice: citizen public debt audits and the case of puerto rico wendy wiedenhoft murphy john carroll university, usa abstract a citizen public debt audit (cpda) is an emancipatory praxis that can mobilize citizens to make legible public debt that has been accrued in their name. ideally, it should hold creditors accountable for debt that is determined to be odious. this study examines the public debt crisis in puerto rico to illustrate the historically unjust circumstances under which public debt was accumulated on the island in the context of us federal taxation and economic policies. it explains how citizens are mobilizing via a cpda to make these circumstances legible and argues that citizens should not be obliged to service debt that was accrued contrary to their own welfare, especially if conditions of repayment threaten their current and future well-being. keywords citizen public debt audit; puerto rico’s debt crisis; odious debt; social accounting introduction historically, public debt has been a central way that states have financed wars, funded public works, and if managed properly, reinforced political stability (di muzio & robbins, 2016; wright, 2008). however, not all political leaders accrue public debt in the interests of their citizens. corrupt leaders borrow money to finance personal expenditures and secure patronage for elites. international lending institutions, like the world bank and international monetary fund (imf), offer financially (and often politically) unstable governments loans to fund economic development, but compel them to pay their debts at the expense of the current and future welfare of their citizens. if citizens are not the beneficiaries of public debt and lack the power to determine the conditions of this debt, including what it should be used for and how it should be repaid, then should they be obliged to pay it back? if citizen public debt audits and the case of puerto rico studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 183 not, how can citizens make legible or account for what they consider unjust public debt? this article argues that a citizen public debt audit (cpda) is a valuable tactic to make public debt transparent. as an emancipatory praxis a cpda empowers citizens with the knowledge of “what and whom is driving debt that is in their name” (peden, 2019, p. 569). subsequently, they can use this knowledge to hold political leaders and creditors accountable for public debt that is exposed as unjust and perhaps even odious, demanding that it either be canceled or significantly restructured. the current $73 billion public debt crisis in puerto rico will be used as a case study to illustrate the unjust circumstances under which public debt can be accumulated and explain how citizens are mobilizing via a cpda to make these circumstances legible in an attempt to demonstrate why they should not be obliged to service debt that was accrued contrary to their own welfare (morales, 2019b; pradosrodríguez, 2019; walsh, 2019).1 the peculiar nature of puerto rico’s public debt puerto rico’s public debt is complicated due to its past and present colonial status. one of the world’s oldest colonies, puerto rico was subjected to spanish rule from 1508 until 1898 when it was acquired by the united states after the spanish-american war. puerto rico officially became an “unincorporated territory” of the united states after the 1901 insular cases were decided by the supreme court. while the 1900 foraker act allowed puerto rico to establish its own civilian government, its status as an unincorporated territory meant that full us constitutional rights were not extended to residents on the island. this status also curtailed the ability of self-governance in puerto rico because the us government possessed the power to determine internal affairs, creating “insular colonial subalterns” under a system of “political tutelage” (fusté, 2017, p. 95). the denial of full constitutional rights and limited self-governance continued after puerto ricans were granted us citizenship in 1917 (yet were not permitted representation in congress) and when the island became a us commonwealth in 1952 (smith, 2001). today, puerto rico remains a territory of the us, which constrains the ability of the puerto rican government to raise revenue from other means than the sale of government bonds. since it is not an independent nation-state it cannot obtain loans from the imf or world bank or bilateral loans from other countries. the origin of puerto rico’s public debt is from the sale of municipal bonds, mostly to private creditors from the us mainland (bannan, 2016). these bonds were declared “triple tax exempt” when puerto rico 1 approximately $50 billion is also owed to pensioners. wendy wiedenhoft murphy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 184 became a us territory in 1917; therefore, bond holders do not have to pay federal, state, or local taxes on interest. they also do not have to reside in puerto rico to take advantage of this exemption. congress “touted” the triple tax exemption “as a powerful instrument” for permitting its territorial governments, like puerto rico, with a way to borrow to fund infrastructure instead of creating a sustainable budget (fusté, 2017, p. 104). this shaped the island’s dependency on borrowing almost from puerto rico’s inception and set a precedent for the government to sell bonds in order to balance its budget and finance public works and services. additionally, a stipulation in puerto rico’s constitution that requires general obligation (go) debt be paid before any other debt (and by any means necessary) was a nod to creditors that their welfare would receive priority over ordinary citizens (ho, 2018).2 the triple tax exemption and constitutional prioritization of go debt payment has made puerto rican bonds enticing to investors and encouraged puerto rico to keep borrowing money instead of discovering other ways to raise revenue, such as imposing higher corporate taxes or income and property taxes on the island’s elite (ko, 2018). puerto rico’s public debt is further complicated by the fact that it is not a us state, so it cannot permit its municipalities to file for chapter 9 bankruptcy. a 1984 law passed by congress (and upheld by the us supreme court in 2016) prohibits puerto rico from claiming the status of a state “for the purposes of defining who may be a debtor” (ko, 2018, p. 3191; emphasis in original). this bankruptcy exclusion restricts puerto rico from attempting to restructure or possibly eliminate its debt and favors the power of its bond holders to sue to recoup their investments in district courts (ko, 2018). confronted with a shrinking tax base due to deindustrialization and outmigration and lacking the agency to file for chapter 9 bankruptcy or obtain loans from any other source than selling municipal bonds, the governor of puerto rico announced in 2015 that the island’s debt was “not payable” and puerto rico defaulted on some of its $73 billion public debt shortly thereafter. this prompted congress to pass the puerto rico oversight, management, and economic stability act (promesa) in september 2016, which placed a temporary “stay” on any potential default litigation by puerto rico’s creditors and suspended debt payments. promesa established the financial oversight and management board (fomb) to restructure puerto rico’s debt and manage its budget; it has the power to implement a variety of austerity measures, such as selling state assets and requiring hiring freezes in the public sector. locally referred to as la junta, fomb consists of seven members appointed by the us president and congress. only one member is required to have primary residency or a principal business in puerto rico. in 2 puerto rico has two types of debt: go and corporación del fondo de interés apremiante (cofina) debt. cofina debt consists of revenue bonds that are paid from the island’s 11.5% sales tax (ho, 2018). confina debt is owned primarily by hedge and vulture funds (morales, 2016). both types of bonds were deemed relatively risk free by investors because their repayments could be secured by the puerto rican government via taxation or selling state assets. citizen public debt audits and the case of puerto rico studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 185 short, fomb is “immune from review by the government of puerto rico, including its courts,” which is one reason its critics argue that it is “a stark reminder of the island’s colonial status” (weiss & setser, 2019, p. 163) if not a manifestation of neocolonialism (selbst, 2016). indeed, puerto rico’s ascendency into a “debt state” (streeck, 2014) certainly exemplifies di muzio and robbins’ (2016) definition of neocolonialism as a “system of indirect domination that cedes political independence in order to preserve economic dependence and exploitation” (p. 77). less than 20% of the island’s debt is owned by puerto ricans and only $67 million of $100 million in taxed corporate earnings remain on the island, creating a loss of wealth and accompanying need for more government borrowing (morales, 2016). over the years us economic and tax policies have served economic interests on the mainland from agricultural products (especially sugar), to inexpensive labor for the textile industry, to the capitalintensive pharmaceutical industry (grosfoguel, 2003). congress passed the 1947 industrial incentives act (commonly referred to as “operation bootstrap”) that successfully attracted us owned factories, but most finished goods and capital accumulation moved from the island to the mainland, benefiting offshore companies and consumers. paradoxically, operation bootstrap necessitated the puerto rican government to borrow funds to invest in power, transport, and water-and-sewer infrastructure, education, and healthcare – all necessary “supplies” needed to support the building, maintenance, and workforce of the factories (caraballo-cueto & lara, 2018, p. 2; grosfoguel, 2003). while the residents of puerto rico became dependent on precarious manufacturing jobs that began to evaporate once deindustrialization started to occur in the 1990s, the government became further indebted (caraballo-cueto & lara, 2018). deindustrialization in puerto rico was prompted by changes in us tax policy and trade liberalization (caraballo-cueto & lara, 2018; greenberg & ekins, 2015). in 1976 congress approved us internal revenue code section 936, which exempted us companies in puerto rico from paying federal income taxes and allowed them to repatriate these untaxed profits to the us mainland. however, once section 936 was repealed in 1996 and phased out entirely in 2006 many of these companies left puerto rico and the deindustrialization that followed resulted in unemployment and stagnant economic growth. the island’s economic output dropped 14% between 2004 and 2014 and its cumulative bond debt reached over 100% of its gnp in 2015. growing unemployment and soaring debt resulted in massive outmigration: 80,000 people left puerto rico between 2014 and 2015. in addition, the devastation wrought by hurricane maria in 2017 forced many to leave. astoundingly, the island’s population decreased from 3.8 million in 2008 to less than 3.2 million in 2019. equally troublesome is that 45% of the island’s residents that remain live below the federal poverty line (fusté, 2017; ko, 2018; weiss & setser, 2019). wendy wiedenhoft murphy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 186 outmigration from the island contracted puerto rico’s tax base even further and compelled the government to sell bonds “to anyone who would buy them” (ko, 2018 p. 316). this resulted in a surge in sales, especially after they were downgraded to junk status in 2014, when $3.5 in billion go bonds were sold (ko, 2018; morales, 2016). predatory vulture funds circled to purchase these deeply discounted bonds – some for as little as 30 cents on the dollar – with the expectation that even if puerto rico defaulted on its debt these funds could likely recoup repayment at a substantially marked up (if not full) value (lumina, 2018; morales, 2016).3 not only are hedge funds trying to profit from puerto rico’s debt crisis, so are other members of the financial elite from the mainland. with an extremely low corporate tax rate of four percent (compared to 21% on the mainland), puerto rico has become a tax haven for many us firms and entrepreneurs (klein, 2018; weiss & setser, 2019). if they base their business in puerto rico, then they do not have to pay taxes on any corporate dividends they earn (klein, 2018, p. 17). in addition if they move their permanent residency (at least 183 days per year) to puerto rico they can also avoid paying personal federal income taxes. these (neo)liberal tax policies have attracted the attention of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs who are hailing puerto rico as an experimental utopia for creating their own money – and gated communities (klein, 2018). while they may pay to use the island’s troubled power grid to generate blockchains, they are unlikely to contribute any significant job growth on the island. past and present tax policies that favor corporate interests are not a judicious solution to puerto rico’s public debt crisis. it places an unfair if not impractical burden on lifelong residents to service this debt at the same time they are forced to cope with cuts in public services, especially those due to privatization, and pay higher sales taxes as described below. this raises the issue of whether or not some (if not all) of this public debt should be repaid. odious and unjust debt clearly, the public debt owed by puerto rico is unsustainable. the question of whether this debt and its corresponding rate of interest were fairly and legally accrued is the first step in determining if it should be repaid. public debt is governed by the legal doctrine of pacta sunt servanda (pacts must be repaid). there is no bankruptcy mechanism for public debt, so future generations are responsible to service the debt of past regimes, even those that were despotic or corrupt (wong, 2012). while lenders may feel secure that public debt can be “serviced by the ever-growing regressive taxation of 3 the vulture fund, aurelius capital management lp, bought a portion of argentina’s defaulted public debt in 2010 and successfully sued the country for full repayment in us courts. this lawsuit obstructed argentina from finalizing its debt restructuring plan until it was settled in 2016 (gluzmann et al., 2018) currently, aurelius owns a portion of puerto rico’s debt and is suing the puerto rican government for prioritization of its debt repayment (walsh, 2019). citizen public debt audits and the case of puerto rico studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 187 the public” (di muzio & robbins, 2016, p. 31), governments are using tax revenue to service debt at the expense of funding public services and paying pensions that benefit citizens. in the case of puerto rico fomb has authorized austerity measures that have privileged debt and interest repayments to bond holders over the basic human rights of puerto ricans. residents are now being forced to endure significant reductions in public services, like education and healthcare, to pay the island’s debt. among other austerity measures fomb increased the sales tax from seven percent to 11.5% and lowered the minimum wage from $7.25 to $4.25 for workers under 25 years old (bannan, 2016; morales, 2019b). even before congress passed promesa 150 schools were closed and public sector jobs were cut in an effort to manage the economic fallout associated with deindustrialization and the corresponding growth of public debt. unlike us states, the medicaid program in puerto rico is funded via fixed block grants instead of the federal government matching at least one dollar in federal funds for every dollar that states spend, which has left impoverished residents with less funding for healthcare and has encouraged doctors to leave the island for better pay (torres, 2019). this unequal funding has contributed to the public debt crisis as the puerto rican government has had to finance additional healthcare costs with go and conifa revenue at the cost of $25 billion (haddad, 2019; torres, 2019). opponents have had some success contesting pacta sunt servanda with the doctrine of odious debt. odious debt is defined as debt that is received without the consent of the people and spent in ways contrary to the wellbeing of the people with the further stipulation that creditors are cognizant of these practices (boyce & ndikumana, 2012; wong, 2012). using the doctrine of odious debt can allow states that accrued debt under a dictatorship, for example, to make the claim that the debt was not contracted in good faith and is therefore not transferable to “the people.” the first application of the odious debt doctrine occurred after the spanish-american war in 1898 when the united states declared that the debt owed to spain by the territories it acquired, including cuba, the philippines, and puerto rico, should not be paid because it was not accrued by their consent nor did it benefit them (bannan, 2016; brown, 2015). more recently, ecuador invoked the doctrine in 2008 to repudiate external debt that it found to be illegitimate due to “unfair gains to private interests, oppressive terms in the bond contracts, and the fact that the country’s debt burden was crowding out provision of basic public goods and services” (feibelman, 2017, p. 48).4 though the doctrine gained popularity after the bush administration considered applying it to 4 intentionally defaulting on two bonds even though it had the cash reserves to service them, the ecuadoran government forced a restructuring of its public debt and successful debt relief. due to the global financial crisis at the time it was able to repurchase these bonds a discounted rate and by 2014 was issuing bonds again (feibelman, 2017, p. 48). wendy wiedenhoft murphy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 188 relieve the over $130 billion debt that saddled iraq after the defeat of saddam hussein, few countries, including iraq, have resorted to the doctrine due to fear that it will damage their reputations and therefore prevent them from securing future loans (brown, 2015; wong, 2012). in addition creditors have been willing to find alternative paths to debt relief that they can control and that do not hold them legally accountable for their lending practices, such as significant restructuring programs that guarantee they will be at least partially compensated. challenging the authority of creditors is precisely why odious debt deserves fuller consideration. rather than solely blaming debtors for their insolvency, the doctrine of odious debt demands a deliberate interrogation of the motives and practices of lenders and should force international law to recognize that lenders have responsibilities. the actions of creditors often escape scrutiny, which is hardly surprising given their power and wealth. the neoliberal lending policies of international organizations like the imf and corporate financial institutions frequently protect the interests of creditors at the expense of debtors (graeber, 2014). this has positioned debtors with the burden of responsibility for paying back loans even if lenders have acted unscrupulously or if debtors had inadequate knowledge of repayment conditions. critics argue that these policies have diverted public debt from funding social investments, like education, healthcare and public sector jobs, and turned it into a “subsidy program to increase the power of the private sector” (dienst, 2011, p. 59). taxpayers are obliged to pay the costs of repayment at the expense of state services that should benefit them. perhaps most indicative of the power of creditors is that even the poor “must pay interest to creditors through the reimbursement of public debt” (lazzarato, 2012, p. 32). of course, borrowers can act imprudently as well and should be held accountable for debt they accrue from reckless spending or risky financial decision-making. but, given their lack of power in relation to creditors, the onus of due diligence should be shouldered by creditors as the doctrine of odious debt implies (chasaide, 2012). this standard especially should apply to cases like puerto rico where citizens face austerity measures and higher taxes to pay back debt that was accumulated in their name without their direct consent or knowledge. undoubtedly, offshore lenders – particularly predatory hedge funds – were cognizant of the dire financial situation on the island when they purchased portions of puerto rico’s public debt, especially after bonds were downgraded to junk status (klein, 2018). according to pradosrodríguez (2019) “many of the investors who own puerto rico’s debt, including vulture hedge funds, never expected the island to be able to repay all of it because it had already been written down as bad debt – which is what allowed these investors to buy it at steep discounts on the secondary market” (p. 252). hedge fund speculators were aware that puerto rico could not declare bankruptcy, betting that this “would yield a higher return once it defaulted” (morales, 2019b, p. 220). citizen public debt audits and the case of puerto rico studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 189 bannan (2016) and dimitriu (2015) argue that odious debt is not just a legal issue, but a moral issue and a matter of justice if people who do not benefit from public debt are required to pay it back at the expense of their own wellbeing or if it violates their human rights. according to bannan, this means that the odious debt doctrine should apply to the case of puerto rico: various principles in international law contribute to the formation of the notion of odious debt, all of which are applicable in the context of puerto rico. strict interpretation and compliance with traditional contract law and creditor/debtor lending principles shifts to more equitable considerations under the doctrine of odious debt. such considerations include promoting equitable and fair dealing, protecting human rights, establishing and supporting democracy and democratic movements, and creating processes for true civic participation. (bannan, 2016, p. 291) bannan (2019) further explains that predatory lending practices should be taken into account when determining if (and how much) public debt be deemed odious, including unfair interest rates and failure of lenders to restructure or adjust loan conditions when borrowers face unanticipated circumstances, such as hurricane maria in the case of puerto rico (p. 229). federal government policies that have favored the interests of the political and financial elite – and ignored the wellbeing of residents – should also be considered when determining if (and how much of) puerto rico’s public debt is odious. this should include the history of puerto rico’s status as a colony and unequal territory of the us mainland. morales (2019b) argues that puerto rico’s debt was caused “primarily by its colonial relationship with the united states,” which “used it as a laboratory for unfettered capitalism” (p. 212). bannan (2019) concurs, asserting that “there is nothing more odious than being a colony” (p. 231). federal tax policies that caused deindustrialization and a resultant increase in unemployment and public debt need to be taken into account (caraballo-cueto & lara, 2018). so too should legislation, like the 1917 jones act, that has forced puerto ricans to endure higher prices for food and other goods due to protectionist us maritime regulations (grabow, 2019).5 by treating puerto ricans as separate and unequal citizens and supporting economic policies that have trapped the island as a periphery of the mainland, the us federal government should be held at least partially 5 the jones act stipulates that domestic water transport must be conducted by vessels made in the us, manned by us crews, and owned by a us entity. two recent studies have demonstrated that the jones act increases the price of goods in puerto rico. advantage business consulting (2019) found that it added a cost of $367 million for food and beverages, or what amounts to a tax of 7.2% on these goods. john dunham & associates (2019) examined the shipping costs of 260 commodities and found that the jones act increased the cost of shipping to puerto rico by almost $569 million and increased prices by $1.1 billion (grabow, 2019). this study also found that it has prevented the creation of 13,250 jobs and accounted for $337 in million in lost wages and $106 million in lost tax revenue (helton, 2019). wendy wiedenhoft murphy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 190 responsible for its public debt. but, how can puerto ricans “establish objective grounds for selective repudiation of odious debt” (boyce & ndikumana, 2012, p. 36)? one answer may be by conducting a cpda. accounting for justice via citizen public debt audits if citizens of indebted states are subjected to repaying what they consider odious debt, they can attempt to prove it and hold lenders and/or other parties responsible for this debt via a citizen public debt audit (cpda) (bannan, 2019; fattorelli, 2013). a cpda is a key tactic that can be used to make public debt legible to lenders and borrowers, creditors and debtors. compared to campaigns that aim for debt forgiveness, which typically situate debtors – not creditors – as the primary actors at fault, a cpda frames debt as a matter of justice and aims to hold creditors accountable for their lending practices. it also requires the direct participation of debtors, which past efforts of debt forgiveness or cancelation, such as jubilee 2000, failed to do.6 thus, as a matter of justice a cpda aims to determine not just “who picks up the tab” but constitutes a “struggle for democracy” (dearden, 2011, p. 8). a cpda requires the extensive participation of those who bear the burden of debt obligations even if they have not been the main beneficiaries of debt accrual. fattorelli (2018) argues that since the “general population pays a country’s public debt – through heavy tax burdens and the inadequacy of public service – citizen participation in debt audits is essential” (p. 478). therefore, a cpda operates not just an as instrument of legibility, but of mobilization as well. as an instrument of legibility a cpda is an analytic strategy that subalterns can appropriate to reconstruct governance and accountability structures, such as the case of ceylon tea (alawattage & wickramasinghe, 2008). a cpda adopts a professional accounting tool – the audit – and exercises the quantitative language of numbers that creditors and governments understand and venerate as a legitimate form of knowledge. gray et al. (2014) explain that, broadly understood, accounting is a “practice of control and surveillance,” but that it has an emancipatory potential if it can be used to control and survey “the powerful on behalf of the oppressed and dispossessed” (p. 282). historically, debtors – and other subjects with little or no leverage – have been victimized by this language and knowledge via the threat or use of violence. accounting practices (and practitioners) have been employed by repressive governments to annihilate, subjugate, exploit, and exclude populations, including jewish people during the holocaust and canada’s first nations communities (funnell & walker, 2013; lippman & 6 jubilee 2000 was a global campaign organized by faith-based groups, celebrities, academics, and other activists in the global north to pressure western countries to cancel the debt of heavily indebted poor countries in the global south (mayo, 2005; pettifor, 2006). in exchange for debt relief these countries were obliged to allocate money that would have been used to service their public debt on domestic poverty reduction programs. citizen public debt audits and the case of puerto rico studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 191 wilson, 2013; walker, 2013). a cpda offers debtors (and accountants that represent their interests) a means to use the language and therefore power of creditors to their advantage by specifically recording “who really owes what to whom” (graeber, 2014, pp. 13-14). unlike a conventional audit, an ideal cpda aims “to calculate the human effects of debt” (graeber, 2014, p. 13) and therefore accounts for not only financial debt, but social, environmental, and other types of debt as well. as such a cpda constitutes a form of social accounting. financial accounting makes only certain kinds of transactions legible, while social accounting attempts to make transparent the costs of inequality, such as the lived experiences of citizens who endure austerity or suffer from human rights violations and the costs of environmental degradation (gray et al., 2014; han, 2012). spence (2009) explains that “the basic argument underlying the social accounting project is that organisations have a duty to discharge information pertaining to their social and environmental interactions to a wider group of constituents than simply financial stakeholders” (p. 206). while early efforts of social accounting primarily pressured corporations to voluntarily provide this information in the spirit of transparency, more radical practices emerged from city governments and civil society organizations that hoped to develop its emancipatory potential, including social audits (owen et al., 2000; spence, 2009). while many of these continue to focus on corporate responsibility (or the lack thereof), others are scrutinizing the behavior of governments. for example, city councils in newcastle and sheffield initiated social audits in the mid-1980s to account for how government policies were worsening local living conditions (owen et al., 2000, p. 83). employing a marxist framework, cooper et al. (2005) produced a social audit on the parttime working experiences of full-time students at three glasgow universities to expose the hidden costs of raising tuition fees, such as increased psychological stress, insensitive employers, missed lectures, and poor grades. their findings were submitted to and included in the cubie report, a document produced by a governmental enquiry into student financing and cited in several scottish newspapers. using a social audit to try to change public policy exemplifies how social accounting can “go beyond a narrow instrumentalism towards an appreciation, informed by critical reflection, of ‘what really matters’ to people, including the governance of social relations” (gallhofer & haslam, 2002, p. 105). cooper et al. (2005) stress that change is most likely to be realized if social accounting is “articulated to social movements” (p. 955; emphasis in original). this is precisely what a cpda entails, in addition to actually mobilizing ordinary individuals to help conduct the audit. cpda extends the logic of social accounting and the tactic of a social audit from an instrument of legibility conducted by professionals into an instrument of mobilization. as a mobilizing tactic a cpda should be recognized as an “emancipatory praxis” that empowers citizens (peden, 2019) and a potential “tool of social wendy wiedenhoft murphy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 192 transformation” (malinen, 2015). hughes (2019, p. 487) describes a cpda as a type of a-legal strategy because it occupies “an alternative legal space” that helps “to illuminate… not only what we ought to do, but what we can do: what we are empowered through the law to make happened.” fundamentally, a cpda means questioning the morality – and the official “austerity narrative” (malinen, 2015) – that debts must always be repaid (graeber, 2014; toussaint & millet, 2012). this questioning requires engaging citizens who are being held responsible for public debt in a participatory process that makes the origins and effects of this debt transparent. critically, this process necessitates the gathering and dissemination of information about public debt from the government, private creditors, and any other actors that have a record of how it was accrued and spent. in addition raising awareness about the purpose of a cpda and collecting funds to conduct the audit are required to make a cpda a successful mobilizing tactic (fattorelli, 2018). fattorelli (2018) describes how this worked in brazil with its cpda, including staging public events, holding seminars, recovering historical documents, creating a distance learning course, maintaining a social media presence, and publishing documents. the citizens of spain engaged many of these ideas and actions to initiate a public debt audit.7 on 15 may 2011 millions of citizens staged protests to fight austerity measures that were enacted by the government to pay down debt it had incurred as a consequence of the 2008 recession. this aptly named 15m movement provided the impetus for the citizen debt audit platform (pacd) in 2012 to continue the struggle against illegitimate debt and realize the precedent of “we don’t owe, we don’t pay.” notably, pacd provided the impetus for anti-debt activists and the tactic of the cpda to enter mainstream politics, especially in municipalities where social progressives won council seats in the 2015 elections. municipal citizen observation groups were organized to monitor city expenditures, fight neoliberal budget cuts that aimed to privatize more social services, and check the power of financial institutions. though this so-called “municipalist” movement lost some cities in later elections and ceded to a centralized economic plan that prioritized debt repayments over public investment and expenditure, it helped to popularize public debt audits and provide lessons for future organizers, such as maintaining stronger collaboration across municipalities (álvarez balba, 2020; fresnillo, 2019; malinen, 2016). similar lessons can be learned from the strengths and shortcomings of the 2011 greek debt audit campaign and the truth commission on greek debt, such as the difficulties working with newly elected politicians and political parties, like alexis tsipras and syriza, which promise to repudiate debt and reject austerity but fail to deliver (kouvaras, 2018; laskaridis et al., 2020). 7 citizens have initiated public debt audits in many different countries. for more information see the committee for the abolition of illegitimate debt at https://www.cadtm.org/. citizen public debt audits and the case of puerto rico studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 193 it is important to note that cpdas may be initiated by or involve the support of governments. this was the case of one of the most successful public debt audits, which occurred in ecuador in 2007. the ecuadorian government established a national debt audit commission to examine debt that it incurred from 1976 to 2006, noting not just economic costs, but also social and environmental damages. commercial loans from private banks, bilateral loans from other nations, and multilateral loans from the imf and world bank were all scrutinized from the perspective of holding creditors accountable for unjust and even illegal debt that hurt rather than helped the people of ecuador. the final audit report outlined a number of questionable loans, including two global bonds worth approximately $3 billion that the ecuadorian government deemed illegitimate and repudiated via a default. commercial banks that held these bonds agreed to allow the ecuadorian government to repurchase these bonds at approximately 35% of their face value, or $900 million, saving the government about $300 million in future annual interest payments (economist, 2009). what makes this case of debt resistance most remarkable is that ecuador had enough capital to service its foreign debt; however it used its audit findings to document how doing so would not be in the best interests of its people (feibelman, 2017). as stated in the executive summary of this report: “the public debt… undoubtedly has resulted in the brake imposed on the development and the disillusionment of ecuadorians, whose reality is far from the basic conditions of the good life” (integral auditing commission for public credit of ecuador, 2008). while ecuador’s debt audit did not justify eradicating all of its external debt, it did succeed in holding its creditors accountable for about one-third of it (“ecuador’s winning strategy”, 2009). puerto rico’s cpda similar to the case of ecuador the puerto rican government authorized a public debt audit commission in 2015 to investigate over 40 years of government bond transactions. the commission consisted of 17 members representing a variety of civil society sectors, including labor, education, public health, public housing and the environment. its initial findings discovered that many of the bonds sold to investors since 2006 violated puerto rico’s constitutional debt ceiling and public disclosure requirements. however, the commission was legally repealed in 2017 by puerto rico’s governor ricardo roselló, who argued it was an “unnecessary expense” and that any debt deemed illegal would need to be decided in the courts, not by a commission (ortiz, 2017). many puerto ricans were displeased about this commission being disbanded, so they created their own organization to continue the work of auditing the island’s public debt. currently the citizen commission for the wendy wiedenhoft murphy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 194 comprehensive audit of the public debt (comisión ciudadana para la auditoría integral del crédito público) created by a coalition of citizens called the citizen front for the debt audit (frente ciudadano por la auditoría de la deuda), is planning to conduct a comprehensive, integral audit of puerto rico’s public debt over the past 50 years (prados-rodríguez, 2019; its key audit standards include: (1) legality: to verify public debt is in compliance with the law; (2) quantity: verify the total sum of public debt; and (3) guarantees: to discover mechanisms to prevent excessive debt in the future. the audit is planned to include four “investigative processes,” including a financial audit that will determine how much is owed, a forensic audit that will determine the legality of bonds that were issued, a compliance audit that will evaluate the behavior of all actors involved, in particular the government and financial institutions, and a performance audit that will evaluate how the money from bond sales was spent. additionally, it has outlined six distinct phases of the entire audit process: (1) planning, recruitment, and monitoring; (2) initial evaluation and risk assessment; (3) implementation; (4) writing and presenting results; (5) ongoing work; (6) post-audit (una auditoría ciudadana, n.d.). of course, financial resources are needed in order to accomplish this audit. the citizen commission for the comprehensive audit of the public debt estimates it will need $500,000 for phase one and $5.6 million to complete the entire audit process. auditoría ya is attempting to procure some of this money via crowdfunding on its webpage (una auditoría ciudadana, n.d.), and has raised just over $44,700 so far. the citizen front to audit the debt in puerto rico has pursued a variety of actions to raise awareness about public debt and the puerto rican cpda, including teach-ins, street protests, open data sources, online message boards, and painting murals in public spaces. it is also trying to persuade the puerto rican government to share its knowledge of public debt with its citizens, including releasing public records. while the government has provided this information to its bondholders and fomb, it has not been so forthcoming with the citizen commission. currently, the citizen commission is suing the government to obtain access to the public records it needs to conduct its cpda (prados-rodríguez, 2019, p. 254). in the words of toussaint and millet (2012) “real transparency is the ruling classes’ worst nightmare.” which is likely the reason these records and other documentation are being withheld. remarkably, fomb has become an unlikely ally in the effort to annul a portion of puerto rico’s public debt. in 2019 the board asked the courts to invalidate $6 billion worth of go bonds issued in 2012 and 2014 (mostly to hedge funds) because they violated puerto rico’s constitutional debt ceiling (acevedo & associated press, 2019). the board is also working with puerto rico electric power authority bondholders and assured guaranty corp. to reduce the utility’s debt up to 32.5%; however, a stipulation of this arrangement will require customers to pay more per kilowatt hour (a maximum rate of 4.552 cents) at the same time the utility is being privatized (ortiz, 2019). most recently, fomb reached a tentative citizen public debt audits and the case of puerto rico studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 195 agreement with puerto rico creditors to settle $35 billion in public debt. bondholders, including aurelius capital management and other hedge funds, that threaten to sue puerto rico in court for full repayment of all bonds, have agreed to partial reimbursement at 74.9 cents, 69.9 cents and 65.4 cents on the dollar depending on the vintage of the bonds they hold (walsh, 2020).8 though these efforts by fomb to reduce the public debt in puerto rico are a step forward, they are neither democratically participatory nor comprehensive like a cpda. citizens are being compelled, not asked, to pay higher electricity rates and higher taxes to fund a portion of the conifa debt restructuring plans, the terms of which remain questionable until the courts give final approval. furthermore, creditors are retaining much of their leverage and recouping a substantial share of their investments without admitting any culpability for the public debt crisis. unlike a comprehensive cpda, fomb debt restructuring has yet to entail the transcription of social and ecological debt, and its investigation of financial debt lacks historical insight. according to morales (2019b) the island’s “dubious territorial status” has situated it as a “captive for decades of austerity and severe exploitation” (p. 221). among the many debts that creditors and the federal government could be held accountable for include policies and legislation that have favored the profits of us corporations over the wellbeing of puerto ricans and their environment, like: • the 1917 jones act, which has resulted in a loss of tax revenue on the sale of government bonds, higher consumer prices, increased unemployment, and lower wages (advantage business consulting, 2019; john dunham & associates, 2019); • taxation policies during the early 1900s that resulted in the loss of land ownership and access to arable land for middle and lower-income residents in addition to tariff exemptions from sugar imports that “facilitated the dominance of us sugar trusts” (fusté, 2017, p. 100); • test subjects for dangerous drugs for the us pharmaceutical industry (klein, 2018, p. 25); • unemployment and mass outmigration caused by the repeal of section 936; • poor health caused by an underfunded medicaid program; • mental health problems caused by the inadequate emergency response and recovery initiatives from hurricanes irma and maria, including lack of electricity, clean water, food, and housing; • environmental contamination caused by the us military testing chemicals, like napalm, and agribusinesses testing genetically modified seeds (klein, 2018, p. 26). 8 these dollar amounts are substantially higher than initial restructuring terms, which were at 64 cents, 45 cents, and 35 cents on the dollar (walsh, 2020). wendy wiedenhoft murphy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 182-199, 2022 196 undoubtedly, it will be a challenge to frame many if not all of these issues as “objective grounds” for debt repudiation under the doctrine of odious debt (boyce & ndikumana, 2012, p. 36). however, they capture the history of the social and environmental costs that constitute the peculiar nature of puerto ricans public debt, and the legacy of colonialism that residents continue to endure (morales, 2019a). conclusion accounting for social and environmental debt is but one of many challenges associated with a citizen public debt audit that puerto ricans will likely encounter. as mentioned earlier raising funds to pay for the audit is necessary, yet may be difficult given the financial insecurity of many who would be most likely to support it. dealing with corrupt political leaders and an unstable government poses a myriad of problems as well, especially guaranteeing long-term commitments in regards debt repudiation or even restructuring. other obstacles include access to public records, which governments may try to block by rescinding freedom of information protocols and finding experts to help decode intentionally “opaque” financial instruments designed to protect creditors (malinen, 2015). however, as an emancipatory praxis a cpda has the potential to generate social change by educating puerto ricans about the causes and consequence of public debt and including them in economic and public policy decision-making. attending teach-ins, organizing street protests, networking via social media, and fundraising online can provide a foundation for a participatory form of democracy that, in the case of puerto rico, could conceivably determine the future territorial status of the island. whether or not puerto ricans vote to become an independent country, the fifty-first state of the us, or remain an unincorporated territory, their involvement with a cpda can enable them to build connections with each other and provide the proficiencies for them to help oversee and manage the island’s budget when fomb is eventually dissolved. indeed, the knowledge and experience gained from participation in a citizen public debt audit has the potential to “deepen democracy” and encourage “empowered participatory governance” in puerto rico and other sites of indebtedness (fung & wright, 2001, p. 5). references acevedo, n., & associated press. 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(2012). sovereign finance and the poverty of nations: odious debt in international law. edward elgar. mellifont final jan 27 20 correspondence address: damian mellifont, centre for disability research & policy, the university of sydney, new south wales 2006, australia; email: damian.mellifont@sydney.edu.au issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 last bastion nevermore! a qualitative exploration of the australian government’s fifth national mental health and suicide prevention plan from the perspective of lessening mental stigma and sanism in the workplace damian mellifont university of sydney, australia abstract the need to advance mental health through greater levels of social and economic inclusion represents a pressing policy issue. within australia, this policy focus has been progressed at a national level. this exploratory study aims to critically investigate the fifth national mental health and suicide prevention plan in terms of its potential to help reduce mental stigma and discrimination within australian workplaces. qualitative content analysis was applied to the national policy document as well as to 12 academic texts retrieved from a google scholar search and meeting inclusion criteria. stage one of the content analysis process revealed themes of representation, education, research, and activism, while stage two added those of language, legal, and media. this study posits that workplace anti-mental stigma and sanism measures as identified within the plan are limited in the sense that they represent only a subset of those currently available. this research also supports the prospect of these measures operating in a collaborative manner. finally, it is proposed that potential exists throughout australian workplaces to implement stigma and sanism reduction measures that specifically target the health and peer workforce. keywords neurodiversity; sanism; stigma; mental health policy; australian government damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 284 sanism overview, social prevalence and ideological influence sanism has been defined as “the irrational prejudice associated with mental illness, rooted in stereotypes, myths, superstition, and deindividualisation” (perlin, 2003, cited in williams, 2014, p. 12). the term was devised by dr. morton birnbaum who is known for advancing treatment rights for mental health patients (perlin, 2003). it is prudent to recognise that sanism varies in terms of its forms, oppressions and impacts. while sanism might involve obvious discrimination, it will tend to be reflected in microaggressions (i.e., numerous small-scale slights and humiliations) (kalinowski & risser, 2005, cited in poole et al., 2012). sanism normalises labelling and banishment as well as the practices that enable a removal of identity (poole, 2013, cited in meerai, abdillahi & poole, 2016,). according to lefrancois and coppock (2014), sanism might involve lived experiences of hostility, stereotyping and prejudice. leblanc and kinsella (2016) depict sanism in terms of marginalising the understandings of neurodiverse individuals and adding to epistemic injustice. epistemic injustice constricts those persons considered as deficient in credibility (carver, morley & taylor, 2017). pertaining to human rights and the law, perlin (1999) too cautions that sanism can contaminate legal practices. intersectionality as it relates to sanism involves further kinds of social discrimination including racism and colonialism (burstow, lefrancois & diamond, 2014, cited in nicki, 2015). referring to the intersection of racism and sanism, meerai, abdillahi and poole (2016, p. 23) position anti-black sanism in terms of how identity can be “stripped away” and confronted by white interests. moreover, colonialism, “as a breeding ground for the fundamental discourses of differences,” has spawned concepts of national identity, madness and sanism (joseph, 2016, p. 40). the rise, expansion and dominance of sanist biomedical ideology owes much to colonialism. to this end, kurchina-tyson (2017) recognises that the authoritarian practice of psychiatry, as established upon colonialism, frames its ideological underpinnings as normal and indispensable. sanism survives via society’s patience for it (procknow, 2017). with sanism now socially entrenched (large & ryan, 2012), morrow and weisser (2012, p. 40) describe discrimination towards the mentally unwell as “systemic.” the medical model of disability reinforces this undesirable status quo. kriegler (2015) cautions that medicalisation inspires clinical answers while overlooking or toning down the social background of complex struggles. furthermore, clinicians, philosophers and bioethicists exist who see disability as being fundamentally negative states that people endure (guidry-grimes, 2017). in the words of williams (2014, p. 3), “sanism, it seems, offers the last bastion of acceptable prejudice.” nevertheless, sanism cannot lay claim to be without ideological opposition. in addition to the need to address prejudices of racism, ageism and sexism, large and ryan (2012) also call for efforts to battle sanism. mad studies represent one form of this resistance. castrodale (2017) note that mad last bastion nevermore! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 285 studies signify a progressing field where mad academics frequently strive to unsettle prevailing mental health discourses. emerging from canadian critical disability scholarly work, mad studies offer persuasive and uniting opposition to biomedical ideology (lefrancois, beresford & russo, 2016). furthermore, poole et al. (2012) recognise that the social model of disability offers possibilities for anti-sanism communication. this model thus represents an ideological alternative to the traditional medical model. stigma, sanism and australian workplaces the term “neurodiversity” offers a progressive alternative to medical model endorsed labelling of people as “mentally ill”. neurodiversity is defined as, “the range of differences in individual brain function and behavioural traits” (oxford university press, 2018). this contrasts with the term “neurotypical” which is defined in relation to “having normal brain activity” (collins english dictionary, 2018). having originally appeared in an article written in the late 1990s concerning autism prevalence within silicon valley, the term of neurodiversity was to become a flag for the autistic self-advocacy movement (blume, 1998, cited in liu, 2017). however, the evolving nature of this term should be recognised. graby (2015) advises that recently, the neurodiversity movement has enlarged its representation of persons with mental conditions. it is appropriate that citizens who identify as neurodiverse are socially and economically included within australian society. however, attaining this inclusion is not straightforward. armstrong and dorsett (2015) caution that a route to accomplishing a confident future for individuals who are undergoing mental health difficulties can on occasions appear to be unattainable. stigma should be considered among the factors which can hinder the prospects of neurodiverse persons. williams (2014) adds that it is broadly recognised that stigma provides a foundation for discrimination, separation and social rejection. oakley (2017) describes stigma about mental ill health as a major concern that should be attended to throughout australian workplaces and industries. evidence supports this position. in an australian mental illness survey, 53% of participants reported having experienced stigma in the workplace (sane australia, 2011, cited in sane australia 2013, p. 9). furthermore, a study of australian employees involving 1,126 interviews revealed that around one-third of respondents had issues related to working with someone who has anxiety or depression, with the same percentage of respondents also perceiving that these persons could not satisfactorily undertake their roles (tns social research, 2014, p. 5). reporting on an australian study that was informed by in-depth damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 286 interviews with 13 lived experience practitioners,1 byrne, roper, happell and reid-searl (2016) reveal that participants, especially those within government establishments, reported professional seclusion as well as being treated differently. moreover, bennetts, pinches, paluch and fossey (2013) recognise that consumers seldom hold powerful positions within the area of mental health. stigma can also influence plans to seek help (wynaden, chapman, orb, mcgowan, yeak, & zeeman, 2005, cited in wynaden et al., 2014). research involving 201 students and 270 staff members from two australian universities reveals a theme of “silence” around mental health challenges (wynaden et al., 2014, p. 341). such silence may work to undermine the efforts of policymakers and practitioners to make australian workplaces more inclusive of neurodiversity. positioning sanism in relation to stigma, poole et al. (2012, p. 25) state, “the over-arching, prevalent, and often ignored oppression known as sanism is to blame for ‘breeding’ stigma and our continued interest in it as educators, researchers, and practitioners.” complicating matters, as sanism yields stigma and stigma brings about sanism, it has been argued that discriminatory behaviour and prejudicial viewpoints are components of stigma as well as sanism (parry, 2009, cited in williams, 2014). further, thornicroft, rose, kassam and sartorius (2007, p. 192) contend that stigma encompasses three connected components of prejudice, ignorance, and discrimination. nevertheless, while agreeing that stigma might bring about discrimination, large and ryan (2012) also posit that discrimination via prejudice (i.e., through the “isms”) is more common and identifiable. intersecting with colonialism, poole et al. (2012, p. 21; sayce, 1998), reinforce the need to look beyond stigma, as this concept preserves medical discourse about “mental health” while also minimising the oppression (i.e., sanism) as experienced by persons with histories of mental conditions. furthermore, it is appropriate to recognise that sanism is being redressed through expanding legal protections. to this end, perlin (2013a) reports that law reform is demanded by the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities on an international scale. the fifth national mental health and suicide prevention plan the need to advance mental health through a greater social and economic inclusion of neurodiverse citizens is a pressing policy issue. within australia, this mental health policy focus has been advanced at a national level. the national mental health commission (2017) suggests that once finalised, the fifth national mental health plan will form a foundation for continued national tracking of mental health results and reform advancement. however, instances exist of public commentary in relation to 1 “lived experience practitioner” is a broad term that captures the range of mental health service work roles as conducted by persons with lived experience (byrne et al., 2016). last bastion nevermore! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 287 the draft plan that is critical of early policy direction. rosenberg (2016) suggests that the plan, while succeeding at “buzzword bingo,” does not elaborate on how national tactics transform into regional, community and personal action. baxendale (2016) also reports, john mendoza said the plan, which is a collaboration between state, territory and federal governments, was the work of bureaucrats with no institutional knowledge and sought to continue a flawed scheme of funding costly late-term intervention at the expense of prevention and early intervention. being cognisant of these criticisms, the australian government has recently released the finalised policy document entitled, the fifth national mental health and suicide prevention plan (subsequently to be referred to as “the plan”), with the stated aim to “reduce the impact of mental health problems and mental illness, including the effects of stigma on individuals, families and the community” (commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 2). the purpose of this paper is to critically investigate the potential for this new national policy to help reduce instances of mental stigma and sanism within australian workplaces. methods this study has been guided by the approach to conducting qualitative content analysis as espoused by zhang and wildemuth (2009). such analysis was completed over two stages. these two levels of analysis enabled a comparison of the plan to the associated scholarly literature in order to: (a) assess the adequacy of the plan; (b) suggest additional themes from the literature that should be addressed in the plan; and (c) suggest ways for themes mentioned in the plan to be better implemented. stage one focused analysis on the plan itself. steps included: (a) setting the unit of analysis as sentences or paragraphs; (b) creating a coding system encompassing themes and their coding rules; (c) testing the coding system against a sample of text; (d) coding the remaining text; (e) testing for coding consistency; (f) drawing implications from the coded text; and (g) reporting findings. themes representing various measures with potential to reduce mental stigma and/or sanism in australian workplaces, their coding rules and supporting quotes were recorded in an analytical table. such themes were identified under the plan’s priority area 6: reducing stigma and discrimination section (commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). in order to meet the study’s aim of undertaking a critical policy investigation, anti-mental stigma and discrimination in the workplace themes as identified in the plan were compared against those identified from scholarly literature. stage two of the analysis process thus involved the content analysis of these scholarly texts with results (i.e., themes, coding rules and supporting quotes) recorded in a second analytical table. enabling this comparison of the plan damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 288 to the associated literature in order to critically assess its adequacy and to inform improvements, a purposive sample of academic texts was constructed. these publications were identified via a google scholar search of recently published documents (i.e., since 2013) and applying the search term: “sanism” and workplace.” this time period and search term were deemed appropriate in establishing a sample which could offer contemporary and insightful findings. document inclusion criteria were applied as follows: document type = journal article or thesis; and text contains measures(s) with potential to reduce mental stigma and/or sanism in the workplace; and text is accessible; and no duplicates. results stage one of the content analysis process produced four anti-mental stigma and/or anti-sanism in the workplace themes. promoting research transparency and reliability, themes including those of “representation,” “education,” “research,” and “activism,” along with their coding rules and supporting quotes are provided in table 1. the google scholar search produced a total of 77 possibly relevant texts. of these texts, 12 were identified as relevant after applying the inclusion criteria. themes, coding rules and supporting quotes as recorded in stage two of the content analysis process are provided in table 2. this second table, which includes each of the four themes identified in table 1, adds those of “language,” “legal,” and “media.” last bastion nevermore! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 289 theme & coding rule supporting quotations representation aims to reduce mental stigma via workplace representation. “developing and implementing training programs that build awareness of and knowledge about the impact of stigma and discrimination” (commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). “the mental health first aid training has been shown to decrease negative attitudes and increase supportive behaviours towards people living with mental illness” (hadlaczky, hökby, mkrtchian, carli & wasserman, 2014, cited in commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). education aims to reduce mental stigma and discrimination via workplace education. “developing and implementing training programs that build awareness of and knowledge about the impact of stigma and discrimination” (commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). “the mental health first aid training has been shown to decrease negative attitudes and increase supportive behaviours towards people living with mental illness” (hadlaczky et al., 2014, cited in commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). activism aims to reduce mental stigma and discrimination via various forms of resistance and alliances. “responding proactively and providing leadership when stigma or discrimination is seen” (commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). “empowering consumers and carers to speak about the impacts of stigma and discrimination” (commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). “involve consumers and carers, community groups and other key organisations” (commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). research aims to reduce mental stigma and discrimination via research initiatives. “build on existing initiatives, including the evidence base of what works in relation to reducing stigma and discrimination” (commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). “identify effective anti-stigma interventions with the health workforce” (commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). table 1. anti-mental stigma/sanism workplace themes derived through content analysis of the fifth national mental health & suicide prevention plan. damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 290 theme & coding rule supporting quotations representation aims to reduce mental stigma and sanism through greater representation of employees with neurodiversity. “the suggestion by participants that more lived experience roles are needed to counter isolation and challenge ‘stigma thinking’ within organisations, is supported by studies emphasising the benefits of networking and of having more than one lived experience practitioner within services” (bennetts, pinches, paluch, & fossey, 2013, cited in byrne et al., 2016, p. 5; moran, russinova, gidugu, yim, & sprague, 2012). “lived experience practitioners can potentially play a vital role in lessening stigma and discrimination” (byrne et al. 2016, p. 6). “indeed, it is presumably much easier to be out and comfortable when one is not isolated or tokenized in the workplace” (pilling, 2014, p. 259). language aims to reduce sanism through discourse. “these authors argue for the need to highlight prejudice inherent in attitudes: demonstrated by terms like mentalism (chamberlain, 1978) and sanism (perlin, 2013)” (byrne et al., 2016, p. 4). “use of such terms may result in greater awareness and sensitisation to presently taken for granted prejudicial attitudes against people experiencing mental distress” (byrne et al., 2016, p. 4). “neurotypicals tap our ‘mad’ lexicon e.g., ‘that was crazy’ or ‘insane,’ without reflecting on the pathological connotations of these words” (ingram, 2011, cited in procknow, 2017, p. 6). legal aims to reduce sanism through legal reforms. “nonhumiliation means that equitable courts should take american workers’ mental suffering seriously enough to credit the documentation of their suffering, that courts should hear such workers’ stories, and that such workers should not be treated as malingerers” (rudolf, 2017, p. 134). “according to brohan et al. (2012), the concern of being stigmatized as a result of disclosure specifically involves several key fears, including not being hired, unfair treatment in the workplace, or being unprotected by existing legislation” (suleiman, 2017, p. 48). “legal decision-makers commonly base their decisions on stereotypical presumptions, heuristic reasoning and a process of balancing and weighing moral values and principles” (williams, 2014, pp. 254-255). “persons should also have access to complaints mechanisms in cases of human rights violations” (aytenew, 2012, p. 123). last bastion nevermore! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 291 media aims to reduce mental stigma and sanism via media. “the government should work to change attitudes and raise awareness towards mental disabilities though print and broadcast media and different forms of public mobilization” (aytenew, 2012, p. 122). “the i got better campaign ‘aims to challenge the dominant narrative of hopelessness in mental health care by making stories of hope and mental wellness widely available through a variety of media’” (mindfreedom international, n.d., cited in guidrygrimes, 2017, p. 14). education aims to reduce mental stigma and sanism through workplace education. “participants also talked at length about different conceptualizations of mental health, challenging those informed by the dominant narrative, and sharing and developing alternative knowledge” (martin-calero medrano, 2016, p. 192). “hr’s embodied, exalted ignorance on depression within eight australian it firms was found to have tacitly endorsed the disenfranchisement of depressed employees” (davies, 2006, cited in procknow, 2017, p. 16). “an opportunity exists within social work education to stop stigma and sanism, while promoting mental health and well-being across our profession” (singh, 2016, p. 96). activism aims to reduce sanism through various forms of resistance and alliances. “she went on to emphasize the importance of employers who are invested in ‘putting people over making a profit’ and encouraging employees to ‘talk candidly’ about mental health and respond with understanding’” (pilling, 2014, p. 260). “a narrative of resistance involves regaining voice, constructing an alternative body of knowledge, and finding and connecting with likeminded others” (martin-calero medrano, 2016, p. 191). “silence begets sanism” (procknow, 2017, p. 18). “progressive changes in law and policy over the past century have relied critically on identity-based social movements, and they will likely continue to do so” (wendell, 2013, p. 49). damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 292 research aims to reduce mental stigma and sanism through research initiatives. “there is a need to develop an alternative body of knowledge and making it accessible for mhwhs, so that we are not on our own in questioning and challenging dominant mental health conceptualizations” (martin-calero medrano, 2016, p. 193). “qualitative research could explore how employees with mental, physical, and cognitive disabilities cope with stigma and discrimination differently, how coworkers treat them differently based on the disability, and how workplaces can be more productive when people with different disabilities are accommodated correctly” (procknow & rocco, 2016, p. 396). “it is important that public understanding and social policies regarding stigma are informed by the research” (williams, 2014, p. 139). table 2. anti-stigma/sanism workplace themes derived from content analysis of journal articles searched via google scholar. discussion: anti-sanism in the workplace themes this section critically discusses each of the themes derived from the two stages of content analysis. based on evidence derived from the plan as well as the scholarly literature, measures will be described in terms of their capacity to redress mental stigma, sanism (or both) in the workplace. gaps in measure potential will also be highlighted, while possible collaborations between measures will be emphasised. topics of intersectionality as related to sanism will also be addressed. representation specifically targeting mental stigma, the plan includes a measure supporting purposeful contact between peer workers and mental health stakeholders (commonwealth of australia, 2017). such policy direction is supported by research. more generally, contact has been identified as a useful anti-stigma strategy (corrigan & penn, 1999, cited in williams, 2014). consideration should therefore be given to expanding the scope of this measure with the goal of encouraging greater interaction among neurodiverse and neurotypical employees across australian workplaces. it should, however, be realised that policy efforts to encourage this closer contact can face significant barriers. one notable obstacle is that of negative stereotypes. as williams (2014) points out, misunderstandings and anxieties offer rich ground for spreading stigma. in this way, “normal” persons tend to see people with disabilities as being less intelligent and last bastion nevermore! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 293 conscientious (lengnick-hall, gaunt & kulkarni, 2008, cited in procknow & rocco, 2016). crucially, the stereotyping of disability need not go unchallenged. to this end, byrne et al. (2016, p. 1) citing ahmed, hunter, mabe, tucker & buckley (2015) and warner (2010) state: within mental health settings, people are employed to work specifically from their lived experience of mental health challenges to help improve service quality, challenge discriminatory attitudes, advocate and be an inspiration for those currently accessing services. the plan limits the role of a greater representation of neurodiverse persons to that of fighting mental stigma. however, scholarly literature supports a broader application of this measure. in addition to challenging stigma, byrne et al. (2016) position more lived experience practitioners as helpful to countering discrimination (i.e., oppression through isolation). it is thus conceivable that having greater numbers of neurodiverse individuals participating in the mental health workforce as well as across australian workplaces more widely might help to resist both stigma and sanism. nonetheless, australians who are employed on the basis of their work experience and qualifications, as well as their lived experience with neurodiversity, should not feel that they have to be a source of motivation to service users or to anyone else. language recognising an intersection between the “isms” of sanism and colonialism, it is important that national mental health policy does not overlook language as a contributor to workplace sanism. the potential of language to assist in lessening sanism is recognised within the scholarly literature. according to williams (2014) there is a drought of public discussion concerning the indecency of sanist discourse. procknow (2017, p. 6) citing ingram (2011) also warns, “neurotypicals tap our ‘mad’ lexicon e.g., ‘that was crazy’ or ‘insane’, without reflecting on the pathological connotations of these words.” a hegemonic state may thus be envisaged whereby discourse acts to cement the disempowerment of neurodiverse employees. crucially, this oppressive state is not inevitable. government officers, through their mental health policy development and implementation activities, should endeavour to disrupt sanist discourse within organisational and other settings. moving away from the sanist influences of colonialism, these officers should instead endorse language that is compatible with principles of diversity and inclusion. however, in the interests of practically reducing sanism in australian workplaces, a broad dissemination of inclusive discourse is not enough. williams (2014) describes the situation whereby politically appropriate discourse can create a sense that prejudice is being addressed when really there tends to be not damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 294 much in the way of positive transformation experienced. it is therefore appropriate for national mental health policy to also support the widespread monitoring of workplace behaviours with the goal of encouraging these to be compatible with progressive discourse that values and respects mental diversity. through recognising potential synergies that might exist between themes, the prospect of a legal policy instrument encouraging this desired shift towards more respectful and socially inclusive discourse throughout australian workplaces is discussed as follows. legal the plan in its current state overlooks the legal policy instrument in the fight against sanism. this oversight is significant as workplace sanism is conceivably encouraged through: (a) gaps in legislation; (b) failure to protect employees under current laws following their disclosure of neurodiversity; and (c) ideological resistance attempting to deny neurodiverse staff access to the reasonable accommodations to which they are legally entitled (where these adjustments are required and sought). starting with gaps in disability legislation and linking back to the previous theme, williams (2014, p. 180) cautions “racist language is considered legally offensive language while sanist language is socially, and therefore, legally acceptable language.” hence, mental health policymakers should widely consult with disability stakeholders and investigate the level of support available for a juxtaposition of sanist language alongside other forms of lawfully offensive discourse. still, it should be remembered that the legislative policy instrument once implemented is not a panacea for sanism. anxiety about becoming stigmatised following disclosure of disability can include the fear of missing out on protection under current laws (brohan et al., 2012, cited in sulieman, 2017). intersectionality, in the form of oppression and epistemic injustice, is thus not easily severed. moreover, having disclosed neurodiversity, traditional ideology can attempt to restrict employee access to reasonable adjustments in the workplace. under the persisting influence of colonialism, guidry-grimes (2017) notes that biomedical models position disability as always threatening functional capacity despite the accommodations availed. potential implications of such ideological resistance towards advancing inclusive workplaces should not be understated. citing rocco (1999), procknow and rocco (2016, p. 389) comment, “participants with invisible disabilities recalled losing a job due to their disability by unlawful termination, being denied accommodations, and/or having to withdraw from the workplace to deal with disabilityrelated depression.” a need exists to better advance the legal rights of existing and prospective employees who identify as neurodiverse. this includes the right to disclose neurodiversity without experiencing discrimination and to be reasonably accommodated wherever needed. this last bastion nevermore! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 295 legal dimension warrants particular attention by the australian government in future mental health policy development efforts. media the plan fails to explicitly mention media reform among its suite of actionable measures to reduce mental stigma and discrimination. this topic is important as the media frequently applies excessive interest to the uncommon occasions where people with mental disabilities perform a violent offence (smith, 1997, cited in aytenew, 2012, p. 29). moreover, media influence in strengthening the intersectionality between sanism and racism should not be discounted. hence, a requirement exists for future research to investigate the possible level to which unethical reporting is feeding anti-black sanism. scholarly attention is also required to identify less obvious media cases through which colonialism-sanctioned oppression is promoted. for example, guidry grimes (2017, p. 14) citing mindfreedom international (n.d.) states, “the i got better campaign ‘aims to challenge the dominant narrative of hopelessness in mental health care by making stories of hope and mental wellness widely available through a variety of media’.” on the surface, this message about achieving mental health might appear to be empowering and uplifting. however, one does not have to dig too deep to uncover traditional ideological constructions of disability. pilling (2014) explains that the biomedical model is the prevailing way of visualising mental difficulties within the media. however, medical model endorsed meanings overlook the possibility of individuals not wanting to be cured or relieved from their lived experiences with neurodiversity. the media is instead challenged to construct messages that promote the benefits and inclusion of neurodiversity in the workplace as well as elsewhere across australian society. such a progressive shift in policy direction endeavours to advance ethical media coverage of mental diversity by identifying and challenging those clinically endorsed messages which hold potential to stigmatise, disempower and exclude. education the plan sees training as assisting to lower stigma and discrimination within the health workforce (commonwealth of australia, 2017). such education is vital, as guidry-grimes (2017) notes that fear along with separation are often faced by persons who are experiencing psychiatric disabilities. literature too supports the application of education as a valuable tool for redressing both mental stigma and sanism (singh, 2016). to this end, diversity education that encompasses material about disability can progress acceptance, reduce prejudice and diminish “toxic” stereotypes damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 296 (boyle, 1997, cited in procknow & rocco, 2016, p. 392; rocco, 1999). noting this potential, it would nevertheless be premature to celebrate education as an easy solution to attaining a greater inclusion of neurodiverse employees. in this regard, supervisors and human resource personnel have reported uneasiness on the subject of mental ill health (procknow, 2017 referencing davies, 2008). research is thus needed to examine the possible extent to which workplaces might be failing neurodiverse employees by either: (a) not providing human resource professionals, managers and others in the workplace with mandatory mental diversity awareness training; or (b) providing such training only to have this education be ineffective. it should also be remembered that while education as an anti-stigma measure can deliver positive outcomes, connection with a person who is experiencing mental health challenges can provide even better results (corrigan et al., 2002, cited in williams, 2014). linking back to the representation theme, consideration should therefore be given to having neurodiverse employees take a lead role in delivering mental diversity awareness sessions. it is within these sessions where mentally diverse individuals can be given opportunities to share their stories with colleagues and to also challenge the oppression and discrimination that is steeped in colonialism. importantly, neurodiverse employees should not feel obliged or pressured in any way to take on a role of mental awareness educator. in line with valuing and respecting individual mental health needs, lived experience employees should only perform this educational function if they desire to do so. activism there is no shortage of areas where lived experience employees might experience discrimination. procknow and rocco (2016, p. 390) recognise that barriers to equitable salary, training opportunities and career development can consign people with disabilities to “second-class status” in the workplace. disturbingly, this discrimination can seem natural. to this end, byrne et al. (2016) notes that a number of participants had become so familiar with biased treatment that they perceived this to be a routine element of their employment experience. hence, while sanism within australian workplaces warrants firm policy responses, the normalisation of oppression attempts to squash resistance. linking back to the topic of epistemic injustice, prejudice against persons with lived experience can even be found within the disability rights movement (drm) itself. for example, drm members have conveyed misgivings about people with “invisible disabilities” who pursue participation (davis, 2005, cited in wendell, 2013, p. 37). these kinds of dismissive positions ignore the potential of lived experience-led political action against sanism. conversely, guidry-grimes (2017, p. 113) states, “recognition must include removing last bastion nevermore! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 297 the stigma associated with neurodiverse conditions and seeing these individuals as political agents who can form their own culture.” while the plan talks about showing leadership on occasions where discrimination or stigma is witnessed (commonwealth of australia, 2017), possibilities for neurodiverse leaders to be politically engaged across the australian workforce should not be underestimated. however, according to scholarly advice, the general usefulness of activism as a tool against mental stigma has been brought into question. citing corrigan and penn (1999), williams (2014) cautions that contact and education (rather than protest) were identified as effective anti-stigma measures. being cognisant of this warning and aligning with the ensuing theme, additional research is also needed to explore how activism, while remaining constructive, targeted and lawful, might also be designed to be more effective in reducing mental stigma. research it is appropriate that research informs social policy in relation to stigma (williams, 2014). byrne et al. (2016) suggests that further research into the occurrence of stigma concerning lived experience will deliver added understandings and guidance for future practice. also endorsed by the literature is exploratory research into the different ways in which employees with mental health conditions deal with discrimination (i.e., sanism) (procknow & rocco, 2016). crucially, the scope of these investigations should be expanded so as to examine the measures that are effective in reducing instances of colonialism-endorsed sanism in the first place. this evidence-based direction is evident in the plan. specifically, this national policy includes a measure to “build on existing initiatives, including the evidence base of what works in relation to reducing stigma and discrimination” (commonwealth of australia, 2017, p. 40). in terms of movement toward a broader set of measures with capacity to reduce mental stigma, sanism (or both) within australian organisations, figure 1 depicts four incremental levels of research-supported progress. the “level 0 preliminary set” represents the four measures identified via content analysis of the plan. reflecting the study objective to suggest additional themes from the literature that should be addressed in the plan, the “level 1 exploratory set” contains all of the level 0 measures plus an additional three measures identified through the google scholar enquiry.2 moving onto the “level 2 published set,” it is here where future literature reviews utilising wide ranging search terms and databases may reveal a comprehensive list of currently available measures that are suitable for 2 each measure is depicted as targeting sanism, mental stigma, or both (as based on the scholarly evidence). damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 298 workplace application. finally, the “level 3 discovery set” encompasses a dynamic collection (pending funding availability and primary research breakthroughs) of newly constructed treatments. hence, research conducted at levels 2 and 3 may identify additional themes to those that have been critically discussed within this exploratory study. figure 1. anti-stigma/sanism levels of research support. last bastion nevermore! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 299 limitations findings of this work are limited to the text results attained from the google scholar source and search term applied. additional studies are therefore needed, which utilise other scholarly sources and expanded search criteria in attempts to identify other measures with capacity to lessen mental stigma and sanism in australian workplaces and elsewhere. this exploratory research supports the potential of the plan’s measures (along with the three further themes as identified by this study). however, future research is also required to test the effectiveness of these measures when applied either individually or within various suite configurations across different organisational settings. conclusion this exploratory research reveals three primary messages that policymakers who are responsible for promoting mental health through greater levels of social and economic inclusion should find engaging. first, the workplace mental stigma and sanism reduction measures as identified within the fifth national mental health & suicide prevention plan are limited in the sense that they represent only a subset of those currently available. this investigative study recognises additional themes of media, language and legal. further research activity in the form of literature reviews and discovery projects are needed to maximise the identification of evidencebased strategies to advance more inclusive workplaces. second, potential exists for measures to operate collaboratively. possible connections among particular themes suggest a need for careful thought and planning to be given to national mental health policy coordination activities. finally, potential exists for anti-mental stigma and discrimination actions that specifically target the health and peer workforce to be implemented more broadly throughout australian workplaces. it is appropriate for national mental health policy to enthusiastically examine this potential in efforts to reduce lived experiences of social and economic exclusion. references ahmed, a. o., hunter, k. m., mabe, a. p., tucker, s. j., & buckley, p. f. 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(2013). replication and purification in identity-based social movements. retrieved from http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.instrepos:10985169 williams, v. (2014). ‘sanism’, a socially acceptable prejudice: addressing the prejudice associated with mental illness in the legal system (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of tasmania, hobart, tas. hobart: wynaden, d., chapman, r., orb, a., mcgowan, s., yeak, s., & zeeman, z. (2005). factors that influence people from asian communities access to and delivery of mental health care. international journal of mental health nursing, 14(2), 88-95. wynaden, d., mcallister, m., tohotoa, j., al omari, o., heslop, k., duggan, r., murray, s., happell, b., & byrne, l. (2014). the silence of mental health issues within university environments: a quantitative study. archives of psychiatric nursing, 28(5), 339-344. last bastion nevermore! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 283-303, 2019 303 zhang, y., & wildemuth, b. m. (2009). qualitative analysis of content. applications of social research methods to questions in information and library science, 308, 319. liu final feb 7 20 correspondence address: ying-ying tiffany liu, department of sociology & anthropology, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: yingyingliu@cmail.carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 unequal interdependency: chinese petty entrepreneurs and zimbabwean migrant labourers ying-ying tiffany liu carleton university, canada abstract exploring the cultural politics of diasporic entrepreneurs and migrant labourers through an examination of chinese restaurants in johannesburg, this article presents what i call the “intra-migrant economy” amid everyday racialized insecurities in urban south africa. i use the term “intra-migrant economy” to refer to the employment of one group of migrants (zimbabwean migrant workers) by another group of migrants (chinese petty capitalists) as an economic strategy outside the mainstream labour market. these two groups of migrants work in the same industry, live in the same city, and have established a sort of unequal employment relation that can be hierarchical and interdependent at once. chinese migrants are socially marginalized but not economically underprivileged, which stands in contrast to zimbabwean migrants, who remain economically underprivileged even though they speak local languages. their different socioeconomic positions in south africa are profoundly influenced by their nationality and racialization. this analysis of their interdependency focuses on the economic and political structures that shaped the underlying conditions that brought chinese and zimbabwean migrants to work together in south africa. keywords migrant entrepreneurship; labour migration; petty capitalism; chinese diaspora; zimbabwean diaspora; south africa alice was late when i went to pick her up in hillbrow, located in the inner city of johannesburg, for our first interview.1 i first met her at the silver city chinese restaurant in one of johannesburg’s upper-middle-class 1 all names of people and restaurants are pseudonyms. detailed locations of the restaurants and participants’ hometowns are not provided to protect their privacy; instead, i use broad markers such as “an upper-middle-class neighbourhood in johannesburg” or “a rural town in guangdong,” with the exception of certain areas in johannesburg such as hillbrow and cyrildene. chinese petty entrepreneurs & zimbabwean migrant labourers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 147 suburbs, where i was conducting fieldwork in 2015. as i sat inside my car waiting for alice, i looked at my surroundings. hillbrow is not a neighbourhood that i – or anyone who is not part of certain segments of the migrant working class –would usually go to in johannesburg at that time. an endless stream of cars and minibus taxis made non-stop honking noises in the background. high-rise buildings in ruins gave the appearance of abandonment, but the busy crowd and washed clothes hanging outside of the broken windows suggested residency. countless street hawkers were selling inexpensive goods, and food items were scattered around crowded and cluttered sidewalks. most pedestrians did not look like they were from south africa, but i was probably the only non-black person there. hillbrow, once called the new york of africa, was a glorious symbol of the apartheid regime’s prosperity and success (smith, 2015). through interviews with chinese chefs, i learned that two top-of-the-line chinese restaurants used to be in this formerly whites-only area during the heyday of apartheid. apartheid is an afrikaans term that means separateness. it was an institutionalized legal system of racial segregation where the whole population was racially divided in every sphere of life (yap & leong man, 1996). the system distributed economic wealth and reinforced social privilege along racial lines (van der berg, 2011). after the official collapse of apartheid in 1994, blacks who had been segregated in townships and homelands were free to move into inner-city areas.2 black people came, and white inhabitants left. local businesses closed down or relocated to the affluent and predominately white suburbs such as hyde park and sandton in the north, leaving behind a high-rise landscape notorious for its high rates of drugs, theft, violent crimes, prostitution, and poverty. murder in south africa has steadily increased as violent crime rates remain high in the country, and hillbrow is one of the top neighbourhoods for reports of serious crimes (gous, 2017). gang members have “occupied” or “hijacked” buildings and then collected income by renting out space to foreign-born african residents who cannot afford a self-contained unit (silverman & zack, 2008). as such, hillbrow has been considered a “migrant space” because of its high percentage of african migrant residents, including zimbabweans (moyo, 2017). there have been property and commercial investments to revitalize parts of the downtown over the past ten years (smith, 2015). most chinese migrants do not know about these new developments and changes because they have been warned by other chinese to not go near “black areas” such as hillbrow.3 but the chinese are not the only ones with such geopolitical 2 during apartheid (1948–1994), residents were segregated based on racial classifications (gradin, 2013). homelands and townships were established for non-white populations. nowadays, townships are usually underdeveloped urban living areas in south africa. 3 i noticed that throughout conference presentations or numerous discussions of my research with scholars from various backgrounds whether in north america, south africa, or china, different audiences tend to have different reactions towards the term “black” when it is ying-ying tiffany liu studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 148 ideas. on the one hand, to some south africans, hillbrow is a shameful reminder of “a first world country turned into third world,” as a white south african said to me when expressing his anger and disappointment with the post-apartheid government. on the other hand, hillbrow represents a “land of hope” for someone like alice, a migrant worker from a rural town in matabeleland north province, zimbabwe, a country with a high rate of unemployment.4 what is interesting is that most chinese migrants do not share the same vision as african migrants and instead view hillbrow as a remnant of the “good old days of south africa” – even though most of them were not on the continent during the apartheid era (1948-1994), and they are not even sure what apartheid was about. based on original ethnographic research in johannesburg’s chinese restaurants, this article explores the complex realities of, and relations between, chinese and zimbabwean migrants who rely on the restaurant sector in south africa to economically survive in their new country of residence. generally speaking, chinese restaurants in johannesburg share three striking features. first, it is common to find one chinese chef managing three to five black helpers, the majority of whom are not from south africa. second, chinese employees’ wages are at least three times higher than those of black employees, and the number of black employees usually exceeds the number of chinese ones. third, this form of restaurant entrepreneurship operates without legal contracts to bond employers and employees. i met kitchen staff, shelf stockers, shopkeepers (who worked at chinese-owned shops or restaurants) from lesotho, malawi, and mozambique, but zimbabweans constituted the greatest number of workers from an african country. this is not surprising considering that zimbabwean migrants make up the largest foreign national group in south africa (moyo, 2017). another interesting point is that before coming to south africa, most of the chinese restaurant owners had no experience operating a business, and none of the zimbabwean employees had ever worked for chinese people. in addition, for more than half of the zimbabwean interviewees i spoke with, working in the chinese restaurants was their first employment. these features made chinese restaurants in johannesburg a natural space in which to understand the relationship between chinese and zimbabweans in south africa – two groups of migrants who are linguistically and culturally different but bound to work together in order to make ends meet. i call their binding “interdependency,” although it is not always a happy one. associated with people’s skin colour. as one of the anonymous reviewers suggested, the term “black” needs to be unpacked and requires more elaboration. while the phenomenon of different reactions is interesting in itself, due to space limitations, i will only elaborate on the usage of “black” to reflect my chinese interlocutors’ perspectives in this paper. 4 estimates of zimbabwe’s unemployment rate range wildly. according to zimstat, zimbabwe’s national statistics agency, the country’s national unemployment rate was 6.6% in 2017 (makichi, 2018). others argue that it is as high as 95% (bbc reality check team, 2017). chinese petty entrepreneurs & zimbabwean migrant labourers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 149 in this article, i present the idea of “intra-migrant economy,” a term i use to refer to the employment of one or more groups of migrants by another group of migrants as an economic strategy outside the mainstream labour market. the terms “immigrant economy” (siu, 1987) and “ethnic entrepreneurs” (smart, 2003) refer to a minority ethnic group in a host country that tends to occupy certain types of sectors. building on these concepts, which have been developed in order to understand the relationship between diaspora and entrepreneurship, i introduce the intramigrant economy to explore deeper questions beyond who has moved and why. what were the economic and political structures in the host country that shaped the underlying conditions that created economic differentiation between, in this case, zimbabweans who make significantly less than chinese migrants even though their education levels and local language skills are higher than those of their chinese co-workers? by examining how chinese and zimbabwean migrants have been positioned in south africa’s racialized market, i explain the persistence of the current racial wage gap despite some progress since the end of apartheid over two decades ago. although i use the term “interdependency” to describe a mutual dependence between chinese employers and zimbabwean employees – where chinese can avoid hiring south africans and maximize profits from cheap zimbabwean labourers, while zimbabweans can easily obtain jobs without following proper procedure or having already developed employment skills – i do not suggest it is a fair or equal one. to explore the chinese and zimbabwean employment relationship further, i draw on the argument of anthropologist hannah appel (2018) who suggests that instead of focusing on how the current capital market operates as a structure that enlarged inequality, we should first understand that the market is in fact made by that inequality, and nationality and race can be often be the essential form of labour organization. while i point out that the social reality of south africa’s racialized income inequality created the economic differentiation that leads zimbabweans to earn significantly less than the chinese, i also suggest that we should pay attention to what leads two groups of migrants to work together. often this occurs through different precarious circumstances but equally uneven economic globalization. although there are often social justice initiatives to promote the rights of immigrants and end their labour exploitation, my analysis of the intra-migrant economy suggests such initiatives need to better understand the circumstances of different immigrant communities and what they really need, in order to respond appropriately to their situations. ying-ying tiffany liu studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 150 people involved in south africa’s chinese restaurant entrepreneurship the exact number of chinese in south africa is impossible to verify due to a large number of non-registered chinese migrants; moreover, south africa’s home affairs officials keep poor records (park & chen, 2009; harrison, moyo, & yang, 2012). we can only estimate that there are about 350,000 to 450,000 chinese migrants, most of whom arrived in south africa after 1990 (park, 2009; chen, 2013). of the newly arrived chinese migrants, about one-third (around 100,000) are from fujian province. migrants from guangdong are the second-most numerous (chen, 2013). as i have pointed out elsewhere (liu, 2017), guanxi – often understood as chinese social networking – is particularly essential in shaping chinese migrants’ economic activities and opportunities in south africa. as a result, cantonese-speaking people tend to dominate the chinese restaurant sector due to migrant networks, as a large number of chef and server positions at chinese restaurants are filled by cantonese-speaking employees. the size of the zimbabwean population in south africa, like the chinese one, is impossible to pin down. there has been much debate about the number of zimbabwean migrants in south africa, and estimates have ranged from 1.5 to 4 million (crush & tevera, 2010). nevertheless, it is generally agreed that zimbabwean migrants constitute the largest foreign national group in south africa (moyo, 2017). similar to my findings on chinese migrant networks, khangelani moyo’s (2017) data based on 150 zimbabweans living in johannesburg also demonstrates the importance of the zimbabwean migrant networking system. moyo argues that social networks play an important role in shaping zimbabwean migrants’ access to accommodation and employment opportunities, especially upon their initial arrival. my observations aligned with moyo’s argument, as the majority of zimbabweans (23 out of 26) i interviewed, including alice, were ndebelespeaking people from the southwestern part of zimbabwe. among them, 20 had received help from family members or friends when they first moved to johannesburg. my data also shows that 15 of them got their jobs in chinese restaurants through a family member or friend who had worked there. the remainder followed others’ advice in seeking employment opportunities with the chinese. describing how she found her first job, one zimbabwean interviewee said, “people told me to just go to chinatown or any chinese restaurant and ask every chinese person if they are hiring. if they need people, they hire you right away.” most importantly, she noted, “chinese don’t check id.” chinese petty entrepreneurs & zimbabwean migrant labourers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 151 research methods, ethics, and some reflections this original ethnographic research was conducted in johannesburg over 14 months, from november 2014 to november 2015 and from july 2016 to september 2016. a mixed-methods research approach was deployed. first, i used participant observation: i worked part-time voluntarily at five chinese restaurants in different neighbourhoods across johannesburg.5 i made sure the restaurant owners and employees were clear that i was there as a learner and observer. in order to minimize my impact on other staff by never reaching a point where i would take over someone’s job, i did not work at the same restaurant for more than two months. this level of engagement allowed me to gain first-hand insight into their restaurant life. i call it “restaurant life” because of the long working hours (at least nine hours a day, six days a week, and even longer for restaurant owners) and because many chinese employees also live with their employers. second, i engaged in archival research: i collected restaurant menus, photographs, advertising posts, online and hardcopy chineseand englishlanguage news articles, and news from social media (e.g., wechat) to gain access to the discursive context of relevant social practices and relations. third, i conducted unstructured and semi-structured interviews: i interviewed 40 chinese employers and employees (22 men and 18 women) in person during 2015. i also interviewed 26 zimbabwean employees (21 women and five men), some in 2015 during my first round of fieldwork but most in 2016 during my second round of fieldwork. the working relationship between chinese and zimbabwean migrants can be tense.6 in addition, some restaurant owners did not want me to interview their employees, either chinese or zimbabwean, because they worried i would disturb their workflow and productivity. due to research ethics, i did not actively recruit zimbabwean participants while doing research inside the restaurant where they worked. when i returned to south africa in 2016 for three months, i revisited some chinese participants, but i primarily spent my time recruiting and interviewing zimbabwean employees. i hired tichaona makambwa, who is fluent in isindebele, chishona, and english, to assist me in recruiting zimbabwean restaurant workers. tichaona joined a few interviews and helped to translate them afterwards. most of the zimbabwean workers in chinese restaurants were women due to the gendered division of labour. i interviewed (or re-interviewed) more than half of the zimbabwean women participants alone in order to pay closer attention to gender dynamics. i conducted all of the interviews with 5 three restaurant owners cooked good meals to show their appreciation of my voluntary work, and two other owners paid me afterwards. 6 this is not meant to indicate that chinese employers and employees had a smooth working relationship. in a previous article (liu, 2018), i argue that there is always conflict due to the nature of the employer-employee relationship; however, it is even more evident between two groups of people who are linguistically and culturally different. ying-ying tiffany liu studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 152 chinese participants in mandarin or cantonese and translated them myself. the transcribed interview data with both chinese and zimbabwean participants have been edited for the purpose of confidentiality. it is also worth mentioning that translation is not easy, especially between two languages that have very distinctive grammatical and sentence structures. another difficulty is in translating slang related to race, such as the word “black” (黑 hei). chinese people like to add “black” in front of terms that are associated with black people – for instance, black worker (黑 工 heigong), black woman (黑婆 heipo), black area (黑人区 heirenqu), and black bus (黑巴 heiba).7 during the early stage of my fieldwork, i found these terms offensive because they were generally associated with places or things with negative connotations in the south african context, such as unsafe areas or dirty and crowded buses. later, when i began to interview chinese participants individually, i realized they did not know any other term to describe black african workers, and they were not aware of the negative implications of their words. when i used more neutral terms (e.g., “zimbabwean migrant workers” or “kitchen helpers”) in my questions, many chinese interviewees had no idea who i was referring to. even when they were describing zimbabwean people positively, they still used “black woman” or “black worker.” when i asked the chinese interviewees where these terms came from, they simply replied, “i don’t know. i just follow what other chinese people call them.” after having been called “oriental” by south africans of european descent (who meant it in a positive way) several times, i began to reflect on my experiences in north america, where the word “black” is often substituted with “african american” or “african canadian” and, similarly, the term “asian” is used instead of “oriental.” these replacements are considered to be less offensive and more politically correct. people in other parts of the world might not understand the discriminatory meanings behind what we in north america perceive as inappropriate racial terms. as such, where chinese interviewees used the word “black,” i have translated it literally without negative connotations. inside the restaurants alice knocked on the window of the car. i almost did not recognize her because she was in a different style of outfit. she was thrilled that i had noticed her new jeans and said, “i bought this pair three months ago. finally, a chance to wear them out!” alice spent eleven hours a day, six days a week, at her workplace and one and a half hours per day commuting between work and home. she rarely had time to go out. “we should go 7 “black bus” or heiba, is a term for a minibus taxi, which is the most popular and affordable form of transportation for working-class people in south africa. chinese petty entrepreneurs & zimbabwean migrant labourers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 153 somewhere else, you know, like where the silver city is, or the place near the indian family’s house,” alice suggested. before being employed at silver city, she was a domestic worker for an indian family in an uppermiddle-class suburb of johannesburg. it was her first job after moving to south africa in 2013. the indian family paid her r25 a day for working five hours and provided one meal, but she had to spend r23 a day on transportation.8 “it was a joke,” alice said with a dry laugh. “i earned nothing, but that was the only thing i could get. two months later silver city needed more people so my sister took me to see madam.”9 alice was in her mid-20s and had not found any job after graduating from her gce ordinary level in secondary school in zimbabwe (roughly equivalent to grade 11 in canada). she left her two-year-old son to be raised by her sister at home, and joined her two other sisters – who had left zimbabwe for the same reason – in johannesburg. another sister of alice’s sister was the first one in the family who had come to johannesburg, and she worked at silver city. that sister helped alice’s sister to get work there. knowing that her employers, mr. and mrs. hong, preferred to hire migrants, the first sister introduced the second sister to them, as the second sister introduced alice later on. ever since, alice had worked at silver city from 10:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., with a two-hour lunch break, six days a week. her starting salary was r85 a day and paid in cash once a month. no tips. no benefits. no contract. no insurance. on alice’s recommendation, i drove us to a coffee shop in a predominately white neighbourhood, where a coffee and cookie plus tip would cost more than half of her daily wage (raised to r90 after one year of work, then r100 after three years). alice began the conversation about her job by talking about communication problems, as mr. and mrs. hong had bad tempers and lacked proficiency in english: “boss and madam always say that we [zimbabweans] don’t listen to them or we don’t understand english. but they are the ones with bad english. not us!” alice continued to talk about employment issues: boss and madam are too cheap. when it gets too busy, madam tells us to help the chinese to deliver food to customers, clean tables, and bring dishes into the kitchen. madam also warns us not to talk to customers because she thinks that we will ask for tips. she always says she will share tips with us at the end of the month, but never once has! boss and madam don’t allow us to eat restaurant food, even customers’ leftovers. i’m at work all day long. when i get home it’s almost 10:30 every night. i’m too tired to cook. 8 the exchange rate from the canadian dollar to south african rand is usually around 1 cad to 10 zar. the currency symbol of the rand is r. 9 alice and other zimbabwean staff addressed the female owner of the silver city restaurant as “madam,” and the male owner as “boss.” other zimbabwean staff usually called female owners “lady boss” or just their names. ying-ying tiffany liu studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 154 it is important to note that mrs. hong was probably the least generous chinese employer – to both chinese and african staff – i met throughout my fieldwork in johannesburg. two former chinese employees also told me that mrs. hong cheated them out of tips. at the five chinese restaurants where i did research, two provided meals for african staff, two did not (including silver city), and in the fifth one, the african employees usually cooked their own meals and were also free to use some food products from the restaurant. in fact, alice was the highest paid kitchen helper i met. the monthly income of the zimbabwean workers i interviewed was in the range of r1,700 to r2,200; alice made r3,000. some of the zimbabwean newcomers had even accepted a starting salary as low as r1,400, just as alice had done with her first low-paying domestic worker job. this was not the case for the chinese migrant workers. both chinese and african employees work nine to 11 hours a day, six days a week, but chinese employees’ wages are at least three times higher than those of black employees. before continuing the discussion on wages, it is important to understand the division of labour inside the chinese restaurants. almost all chinese take-away restaurants in johannesburg serve westernized versions of chinese food and sushi (and sometimes thai-style cuisine). as such, they usually offer two sets of menus: one for warm chinese food and one for freshly made sushi. the jobs that require more specialized skills, like cooking chinese cuisine and making sushi, are performed by chinese men. service and cashier jobs are mostly performed by chinese women. many medium-sized restaurants that cater to south african clientele have a combination of chinese waiters (usually in manager positions), chinese waitresses, and black african waiters and waitresses. african servers usually serve non-chinese customers, while chinese servers are for chinese customers. regardless of the size of the restaurant, the total number of black employees usually exceeds the number of chinese ones. lower-skilled jobs – including but not limited to washing dishes, chopping vegetables, cutting meats, cleaning pots and floors, preparing ingredients (e.g., wrapping dumplings), and making simple items (e.g., sauces) – are all performed by black employees. in a typical chinese take-away restaurant run by a chinese couple, the wife works at the front counter to take orders, answer phone calls, and process payments, while the husband works as the cook chef or sushi chef. the black employees do everything else from cleaning to packing. the take-away restaurants i visited all employed at least four african kitchen workers but no more than one cooking or sushi chef, because it would be too costly to hire another. as the chef’s salary usually took up a large percentage of operating costs, every smallto medium-sized restaurant owner that i interviewed was the chef of their own restaurants in order to reduce payroll costs and avoid the problem of shortages of trained chefs. more and more chinese owners/chefs have been training, or starting chinese petty entrepreneurs & zimbabwean migrant labourers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 155 to train, african employees to cook simple items (e.g., spring rolls) in order to reduce their own working time. this strategy is a result, in part, of the weakening south african currency, which has affected the recruitment of chinese employees in south africa and from china. by the end of my fieldwork (september 2016), as the value of the rand continued to fall, fewer chinese migrants were coming to south africa, and more and more chinese immigrants were talking about leaving south africa (also see kuo, 2017). most restaurant owners i interviewed had worked at other restaurants for a few years until they had saved up some capital to open their own restaurants. mrs. hong was no exception. it is worth examining mrs. hong’s story in order to understand the challenges most smalland medium-sized chinese restaurant owners face as petty capitalists in south africa. anthropologists alan smart and josephine smart (2005, p. 3) define petty capitalists as “individuals or households who employ a small number of workers but are themselves actively involved in the labor process.” they argue there is a need to distinguish between “entrepreneur” and “petty capitalist,” and there is a difference between multinational corporation entrepreneurship and small-scale entrepreneurship with little capital, like the restaurant owners in this research. mrs. hong and her husband moved to south africa in the mid-1990s. after having worked at other chinese restaurants for some years they had some savings. combined with money borrowed from family, they finally had enough capital to open their own restaurant. the most common way of owning a restaurant is buying an existing business, since the equipment, name, and menu are already there. the hongs took over a restaurant from another chinese couple. like any typical family-run chinese restaurant, mrs. hong works on the floor as a server and cashier, and mr. hong cooks in the kitchen along with three south african helpers. one day mrs. hong found out that one of the employees was stealing food products. she gave a warning. the employee reported this conflict to the union. later, mrs. hong caught the other two employees stealing kitchen equipment. she phoned the police. the police came to the restaurant, asked for information, wrote a report, and arrested the two employees. when mr. and mrs. hong went home the next night, they found these two employees and police inside their house. they were assaulted and had their cash taken by them. mrs. hong was still very angry about this incident when she described it to me, even though it had happened almost 15 years earlier: not only we were mugged, we also lost two employees. that’s when i realized chinese cannot trust black south africans, especially those dirty cops! i was an optimistic person, i still said to my husband, “that’s okay, we can always make more money as long as we’re safe. no problem. we can eat bitterness (endure this hardship).” … just when i thought things couldn’t get any worse, the labour union threatened to shut our business down if we didn’t accept the ying-ying tiffany liu studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 156 demand from the employee who stole food. everything was so absurd! we paid a lot of money for the employee to go away. subsequent to this disturbing experience, mrs. hong has not hired south africans in order to avoid union disputes. she hired alice’s sister and continued to hire people from alice’s extended family. i asked mrs. hong about the risk of hiring undocumented workers, as alice and her sisters did not have proper documentations to work in south africa. she laughed and said, “cops only come after the chinese if they want bribes, not because they are serious about crimes. every chinese person in this country has to learn how to protect themselves. the police will rob you if the opportunity comes.” not only did she feel that it was safer to have foreign workers around, she thought it was easier to manage them. “migrant workers are more innocent and obedient,” mrs. hong explained. “and they are willing to work harder for less money. but they also steal. all blacks steal. it’s only a matter of different degrees of values. at least migrants appreciate that i provide them stable jobs.” two points are worth noting here. first, mrs. hong caught alice eating rice and leftover food several times. but to alice, not only did the long work hours and commute time take away from her time to shop and cook,10 but also she was just eating something she felt was not valuable. alice did not see the “theft” that mrs. hong claimed she had committed. i also interpret alice’s eating of leftovers as a form of resistance against exploitation and mrs. hong, who had failed to share tips as promised.11 mrs. hong is not the only chinese employer who believes that “all blacks steal,” even though there are often contradictions and misconceptions in this message. for instance, there have been cases of theft committed by chinese employees, but those were less likely to be publicly discussed within the chinese community. however, if anything went missing, as several zimbabwean employees complained during interviews, their chinese employers often accused them of stealing without giving them a chance to prove their innocence. second, mrs. hong was not alone in not being concerned about the legal consequences of hiring migrant workers without proper documents and procedures. quite the contrary, many chinese employers i met suggested the legal risk of hiring south africans was higher because then they had to deal with south africa’s labour laws. furthermore, employers can also avoid taxes when paying their employees under the table; it’s an all-cash economy. there are several reasons why many chinese people prefer not to 10 as noted, alice lived in hillbrow because she simply could not afford to live in the neighbourhood where silver city is located. every working day, alice spends one and a half hours on a minibus (share) taxi. 11 my inspiration for this interpretation comes from aihwa ong’s first ethnography, spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: factory women in malaysia (1987), where she argues that malay women workers were periodically seized by spirit possession as a way of rebelling against the exploitative working conditions without being punished by the management. chinese petty entrepreneurs & zimbabwean migrant labourers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 157 use official banks: language barriers, questionable immigration status, or a desire to avoid state financial regulation. because it is well-known that chinese people do business in cash, carry cash around and store large amounts of money at home, they are targeted for violent crime (see chen, 2013). when i asked mrs. hong about the benefits of employing migrant workers, the first thing she explained, before she talked about wages, was that “migrant workers are more innocent and obedient.” even though mrs. hong did not really trust any black person, she had to employ some african workers in order to make the business profitable. in her view, south africans were more difficult to deal with since they had more resources (e.g., labour unions) and stronger local contacts (e.g., police). she preferred to hire migrants as she could have more control over them, because she knew that her zimbabwean employees needed the work desperately. in this section i have outlined why small and medium-sized chinese restaurants prefer to hire migrant workers and how zimbabwean migrants find jobs in this sector. the preference for hiring migrants over local workers should not be taken to mean that no chinese employers hire locals in south africa. there is no denying that the likelihood of african migrant workers accepting lower pay and longer working hours is an attractive factor for chinese businesspeople, particularly for petty entrepreneurs who struggle with little capital and limited resources. lowering costs is certainly an important business strategy, but it is not the sole determining factor in the case of south africa. the next section explores the relationship between migration and the local market – what i call the intra-migrant economy in the case of chinese restaurant entrepreneurship in south africa. the intra-migrant economy as a result of economic crisis and social collapse, the flow of out-migration from zimbabwe increased massively during the 1990s and has risen again sharply since 2000 (crush & tevera, 2010). zimbabweans, from all kinds of social and educational backgrounds, skilled professionals and unskilled workers, have left. for instance, more than half of trained medical doctors went abroad in 2000 (chikanda & dodson, 2013). it is estimated that over two million zimbabweans have left for various destinations (makina, 2010). as the largest city in south africa, as well as the one with the most employment opportunities, johannesburg has become a major destination for zimbabwean migrants (moyo, 2017). semi-skilled and unskilled zimbabwean migrants from rural areas – e.g., alice and her sisters – often end up working in the restaurants in johannesburg, as this is a low-wage, low-skill, and low-barrier-to-entry sector. my data on chinese restaurant workers indicate that the majority of them are from rural areas of china, particularly the province of guangdong, ying-ying tiffany liu studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 158 where most of them had a limited chance to continue to higher education, as their families could not afford it. in order to contribute to the family earnings, some of them worked on family farms at a young age, or they left their villages and worked in minimum wage jobs in a city. due to limited social and economic mobility in rural areas of china, their best option for economic improvement is to go abroad, and the best chance to find an overseas job is through their overseas network, including hiring migration agencies (chu 2010; xiang 2017).12 the majority of chinese newcomers i spoke to during my research already had at least one relative or close friend living in south africa prior to their arrival; their lack of english skills or an understanding of the visa application process would have prevented them from applying for south african work permits on their own. consequently, most chinese newcomers utilized services provided by chinese migration agencies to get into south africa and, in some cases, to find jobs. as chris alden notes, many chinese migrants in south africa “are pursuing opportunities and have used migrant brokers, both legal and illegal, to obtain the necessary paperwork to immigrate” (in xu, 2007, p. 52). liang xu suggests that in cyrildene, which is the second chinatown located in johannesburg’s suburbs, it is possible to find questionable activities anywhere. for instance, “an unassuming photocopy shop can [be] where illegal paperwork such as fraud visas, passports, and driver’s licences get traded. a regular travel agency may in fact be an underground money-laundering service provider” (xu, 2017, p. 88). the topic of illegality was in the air among the chinese communities in johannesburg but not something that was openly discussed in public. under such uncertain conditions, anyone can be a victim or a participant. some chinese interlocutors i talked to admitted that they knew about fraudulent paperwork or did not follow regulations such as those about overstaying in the country on a visiting visa. many said it was possible they had been the victim of forged documents. in some cases, chinese migrants did not know that they had paid for invalid work permits until they passed through airport immigration checkpoints and were arrested. the condition of illegality, whether in relation to chinese or zimbabwean migrants, plays an interesting and yet contradictory role. on the one hand, many chinese migrants, especially those who were not sure if they held a legitimate visa, worried about police asking for identity 12 due to space limitations, i am unable to provide an in-depth discussion and analysis on migration brokers here. anthropologist biao xiang (2017), who has conducted extensive research among the chinese rural workers who go work abroad, argues that migration brokers play an important role in facilitating and maintaining migratory flows between china’s rural areas and other parts of the world. anthropologist julie chu’s ethnography (2010) provides a detailed account showing how people from rural areas of fuzhou came to the united states with the assistance of migration agencies. in south africa, i met many chinese restaurant workers who regularly sent remittances back to china while still paying off loans to the migration agency. chinese petty entrepreneurs & zimbabwean migrant labourers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 159 verification. the chinese embassy in south africa and several chinese organizations have publicly advised overseas chinese not to break local laws, including laws against hiring undocumented migrant workers.13 on the other hand, although people are aware of illegal activity, it is somehow acceptable as it speeds up the migration and recruitment processes. a fast and convenient way of hiring employees, whether from china or zimbabwe, is particularly important for chinese restaurant owners, because restaurants in general are labour-intensive. xu (2017) sees this sort of uncertainty within cyrildene chinatown, and in chinese people’s relationship with non-chinese, as a response to the economic and geopolitical restructuring of post-apartheid south africa. he writes: on the one hand, it defies the commonly held neo-liberal predications that once the apartheid is abolished, class lines are supposed to replace racial/ethnic lines in social integration. apartheid obviously has a resilient afterlife. as wealthy middle class relocate to the northern suburbs, ethnicities do not simply disappear but are reorganising themselves in different forms. on the other hand, cyrildene chinatown is also a natural expression of post-apartheid south africa’s trade and immigration policies. under such policies, large-scale immigration is tolerated. (xu, 2017, p .91) i agree with xu’s argument that this double process of formality and informality happening in cyrildene chinatown is a response to the postapartheid restructuring, and want to further point out that it is also a response to apartheid itself, as racial inequality is still very much a structural problem in south africa. although pay may vary depending on various factors, generally speaking, zimbabwean kitchen helpers earn r1,500 to r2,700 per month and zimbabwean chefs earn r3,000 to 5,000, both without any accommodation or transportation. in south africa, it is common to find chinese employees living with their employer’s family or at a rental flat provided by their employers, along with other employees; likewise, is it common for them to get a ride to work from their employers. there are some exceptions, such as those who prefer to live with their own family or have access to their own vehicles; chinese employees in these circumstances get their accommodation costs reimbursed. chinese cooks make r12,000 to 20,000 per month depending on qualification, and chinese servers make r9,000 to 11,000 or more depending on tips, with both accommodation and transportation provided or subsidized. a chinese sushi chef’s salary is less than a chinese chef’s (a starting salary is r9,000 to 10,000 per month), because making sushi is a relatively easy skill to learn (though not by japanese standards) compared to cooking chinese cuisine. the chinese 13 see, for example a chinese news article (song, 2015) that warns chinese employers that undocumented migrant workers are a potential threat to their safety. ying-ying tiffany liu studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 160 sushi chefs working at non-chinese-owned sushi bars earn r10,000 to 12,000 a month without any additional benefits. this issue of large racialized wage inequalities is deeply rooted in south africa’s colonial and apartheid history (van der berg, 2011; gradin, 2013). as carlos gradin (2013) argues, “south africa stands out as a country with one of the largest racial divisions in the world due to european colonisation and the apartheid regime that followed independence, which officially ended in 1994… this racial divide has remarkable implications in terms of poverty and deprivation by population group” (p. 187). in order to understand what gradin means about poverty and racial divisions, we need first to see the most recent data on average incomes from statistics south africa (table 1). census group (percentage of national population) income source white (8.9%) indian/asia (2.5%) coloured (8.9%) black (79.2%) income from work 300,498 215,784 131,699 69,094 income from capital 16,184 2,173 1,364 842 pensions, social insurance, family allowances 30,739 10,028 12,260 8,921 income from individuals 5,232 3,309 2,430 2,194 other income 6,520 2,323 2,265 1,261 imputed rent on owned dwelling 85,271 38,005 22,747 10,671 total r444,446 r271,621 r172,765 r92,983 monthly r37, 037 r22,635 r14,397 r7,749 table 1. average annual income of household head by racial group in south africa (source: statistics south africa, 2017, p. 14) this table is based on data collected from 23,380 households across south africa over a period of 12 months (2014 to 2015). the data shows that white south africans earn the highest average incomes at r444,446 per year, which is over one and a half times greater than indians/asians at chinese petty entrepreneurs & zimbabwean migrant labourers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 161 r271,621, and almost five times more than black south africans at r92,893 per year. according to gradin, white south africans earned about ten times the average per capita income of blacks in 1993, and about eight times in 2008. since apartheid ended over 20 years ago, the black upper and middle classes have grown, and “the black share of the richest quintile of the population rose substantially, from 22 per cent in 1993 to 42 per cent in 2008 (though this remains far below their population share)” (van der berg 2011, p. 128). but as shown in table 1, the average white south african still earns at least five times more than the average black south african, and the majority of blacks are still economically disadvantaged and relatively insecure because they have fewer assets. despite the progress made after apartheid, black people face higher poverty and deprivation rates than any other population group. in addition, as gradin points out, high unemployment rates and high racial segregation across occupations also challenge south africa’s wage economy. in terms of chinese migrant workers, as noted, chinese chefs make r12,000 to 20,000 per month with accommodation and transportation provided. chinese servers make around r9,000 to 11,000 depending on tips. they are not considered rich, and they have to work more than nine hours a day for six days a week. but in contrast to black south africans, the majority population in the country, chinese migrants working at restaurants are definitely not poor. they might even be considered middle class, although they continue to be outside the social mainstream. thus, i suggest, many chinese newcomers in south africa are socially marginalized but not economically underprivileged, which stands in contrast to zimbabwean migrant workers, who can look or sound like black south africans (moyo, 2017) but remain economically underprivileged. this is where differences in chinese and zimbabwean racial and economic positions become apparent, embedded as they are in the framework of (post-)apartheid south africa. due to linguistic and cultural barriers as well as business and job opportunities that are largely structured around guanxi relations, chinese migrants can avoid integration into south african society, but this does not prevent them from getting an average monthly income that is higher than that of black south africans. if chinese restaurants owners are able to hire black south african workers for less than r4,000 a month, zimbabwean migrant workers then have to accept even lower salaries. as noted, many chinese restaurant owners find benefits to hiring migrants over local workers. zimbabwean migrants who work under such unfair conditions do so not because of threat of physical force but due to lack of options: they are already in an alternative intramigrant labour market. in other words, despite the often tense and conflictual working relationship between chinese and zimbabweans, the zimbabweans need the chinese for jobs, and the chinese need the zimbabweans for labour. i use the term “interdependency,” rather than ying-ying tiffany liu studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 162 dependence, in order to emphasize that chinese employers also need zimbabwean employees in order to survive. racialized interdependency the term “interdependency” is used here to describe a mutual dependence between chinese employers and zimbabwean employees. even though mutual benefits flow between chinese and zimbabwean actors who are involved in restaurant entrepreneurship in south africa, this is not an equal or free interdependency. urban and rural inequality in china is the reason a large number of migrants left rural areas to go abroad and seek economic betterment (chu 2010; xiang 2017). lack of work opportunities in rural areas of zimbabwe also led migrants to come to south africa. these two groups were equally vulnerable in their home countries, but through their support networks and cross-border mobility, they were “free” to go abroad in search of better opportunities. both came to feel equally “unfree” when they found that their best (or only) option in south africa was to work in the chinese restaurant sector, which largely operates outside of the legal framework. as they enter south africa’s racialized labour market, the chinese eventually find themselves able to climb the ladder to the middle class, while the zimbabweans continue to struggle with being paid below minimum wage. for instance, any full-time trained zimbabwean chef still earns less than any part-time or semi-trained chinese chef; this wage differentiation is embedded in south africa’s racialized labour market, regardless of the amount of time a person has worked or their qualifications. according to hannah appel (2012; 2018), this is how the market works. in an online article, “race makes markets: subcontracting in the transnational oil industry,” appel (2018) points out that nationality is the main way that us oil companies in equatorial guinea organize labourers. for instance, us and uk employees usually have the best schedules, while filipino workers have the least desirable schedules. in contrast, overqualified equatoguineans have difficulties obtaining a promotion even if they have gained an engineering degree from france and performed well in their jobs. as appel (2018, n.p.) explains, “in other words, unequal education opportunities aside, even when two workers do the same job, subcontracting arrangements licitly categorize, schedule, and pay workers according to their nationality, a categorization that often maps too neatly onto race.” when salary is determined by nationality, not qualifications or capability, we need to examine more carefully and deeply the connection between race and inequality. as appel notes (2018, n.p.; emphasis in original), chinese petty entrepreneurs & zimbabwean migrant labourers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 163 critical approaches to capitalism often argue that markets exacerbate inequality. by contrast, my research with us oil companies in equatorial guinea shows that markets are in fact made by that inequality. global markets, the oil market chief among them, do not merely deepen racialized and gendered postcolonial disparities, they are constituted by them. wage inequality along racial lines has little to do with racial differentiation or cultural differences; rather, it is a direct result of racialized inequality originating in colonialism. “the market is not taking advantage of these circumstances; it is constituted by them,” appel writes. what constitutes the intra-migrant economy in the case of chinese restaurants in south africa is the ability of chinese owners to avoid hiring south africans and to maximize profits from cheap labourers, and the ability of zimbabweans to easily obtain jobs without proper documentation or skills. in other words, although the precarity they face might be different, inequality and insecurity are the reasons an intra-migrant economy exists in the first place. the intra-migrant economy is not new, especially in countries of immigrants such as the us and canada. in today’s era of migration and globalization, perhaps more than ever we need more ethnographic projects to explore relations between migration and the intersections of race, gender, and class. my hope is that this ethnographic study case in south africa, along with appel’s argument, will help us to move beyond racial differentiation and to shine the light on hidden social inequalities, as this kind of interdependence is often built on exploitation and precarity. the lens of the intra-migrant economy offers ways to understand how certain diasporic groups have been positioned in a host country, including what their racial/ethnic and national relationships with the host society are, and what economic and political structures in the host country shape the underlying conditions that create economic differentiation between different migrant groups. the intra-migrant economy speaks of class differences, the world economic hierarchy that exists along racial lines, and how that has affected migration and livelihoods. it is precisely through reflection on migrants’ political and economic relations to the host country that we can help build on existing theories and shed new light on the dynamics of social inequality. acknowledgements i would like to thank the department of sociology and anthropology and the institute of african studies at carleton university, as well as the department of anthropology and development studies at the university of johannesburg, for their faculty support. carleton’s migration and diaspora studies and the social sciences and humanities research council of canada were both generous with funding. gratitude is also extended to dr. ying-ying tiffany liu studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 164 blair rutherford and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, criticisms, and suggestions. references appel, h. (2012). walls and white elephants: oil extraction, responsibility, and infrastructural violence in equatorial guinea. ethnography, 13(4), 439-465. appel, h. (2018, december 18). race makes markets: subcontracting in the transnational oil industry. items: insights from the social sciences. social science research council. retrieved from https://items.ssrc.org/race-capitalism/race-makes-marketssubcontracting-in-the-transnational-oil-industry/ bbc reality check team. (2017, december 3). reality check: are 90% of zimbabweans unemployed? bbc news. retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42116932 chen, f. l. (2013). nánfēi zhōngguó xīn yímín yánjiū [new chinese immigrants in south africa] (unpublished doctoral dissertation). xiamen university, china. chikanda, a., & dodson, b. (2013). bandaid transnationalism: remittance practices of emigrant zimbabwean medical doctors. migration & development, 2(1), 57-73. crush, j., & tevera, d. 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(2017, april 30). chinese migrants have changed the face of south africa. now they’re leaving. quartz africa. retrieved from https://qz.com/940619/chinese-traderschanged-south-africa-now-theyre-leaving/ liu, y. y. t. (2017). exploring guanxi in a cross-cultural context: the case of cantonesespeaking chinese in johannesburg. journal of chinese overseas, 13(2), 263-286. liu, y. y. t. (2018). (mis)communicating through conflicts: chinese restaurant owners and zimbabwean employees in johannesburg. africa journal of management, 4(4), 426-446. makichi, t. (2018, may 23). unemployment rate at 6,6 percent – zimstat survey. business times. retrieved from https://businesstimes.co.zw/unemployment-rate-at-66-percentzimstat-survey/ makina, d. (2010). zimbabwe in johannesburg. in j. crush & d. tevera (eds.), zimbabwe’s exodus: crisis, migration, survival (pp. 225-243). cape town, sa: unity press. moyo, k. (2017). zimbabweans in johannesburg, south africa: space, movement and spatial identity (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of the witwatersrand, johannesburg, south africa. ong, a. (1987). spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: factory women in malaysia. new york: state university of new york press. park, y. j. (2009). recent chinese migrations to south africa: new intersections of race, class and ethnicity. in t. rahimy (ed.), representation, expression and identity: interdisciplinary insights on multiculturalism, conflict and belonging (pp. 153-168). oxford: inter-disciplinary press. park, y. j., & chen, a. y. (2009). recent chinese migrants in small ttwns of post-apartheid south africa. revue européenne des migrations internationales, 25(1), 25-44. silverman, m., & zack, t. (2008). house delivery, the urban crisis and xenophobia. in s. hassim, t. kupe & e. worby (eds.), go odme or die here: violence, xenophobia and chinese petty entrepreneurs & zimbabwean migrant labourers studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 146-165, 2020 165 the reinvention of difference in south africa (pp. 147-160). johannesburg, sa: wits university press. siu, p. (1987). the chinese laundryman: a study of social isolation. new york: new york university press. smart, a., & smart, j. (2005). introduction. in a. smart & j. smart (eds.), petty capitalists and globalization: flexibility, entrepreneurship, and economic development (pp. 1-22). albany, ny: state university of new york press. smart, j. (2003). ethnic entrepreneurship, transmigration, and social integration: an ethnographic study of chinese restaurant owners in rural western canada.” urban anthropology, 32(3-4), 311-342. smith, d. (2015, may 11). johannesburg’s ponte city: ‘the tallest and grandest urban slum in the world’. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/11/johannesburgs-ponte-city-the-tallestand-grandest-urban-slum-in-the-world-a-history-of-cities-in-50-buildings-day-33 statistics south africa. (2017). living conditions of households in south africa: an analysis of household expenditure and income data using the lcs 2014/2015 [data file]. retrieved from http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/p0310/p03102014.pdf song, f. (2015 may 6). 非法劳工渐成南非华商的‘不定时炸弹’和‘负资产 (illegal workers gradually become ‘time bombs’ and ‘negative assets’ of chinese businessmen in south africa). people’s daily online. retrieved from http://world.people.com.cn/n/2015/0506/c157278-26954005.html xiang, b. (2017, april 30). 專訪人類學家項飆（上）：我們應該「認命」但不能「認輸」 (interview with anthropologist xiang biao (part one): we should ‘accept fate’ but we cannot ‘concede’) 端傳媒 initium media. retrieved from https://theinitium.com/article/20170430-opinion-xiangbiao/ xu, l. (2017). cyrildene chinatown, suburban settlement, and ethnic economy in postapartheid johannesburg. in young-chan kim (ed.), china and africa: a new paradigm of global business (pp. 81-104). cham, ch: palgrave macmillan. van der berg, s. (2011). current poverty and income distribution in the context of south african history.” economic history of developing regions, 26(1), 120-140. yap, m., & leong man, d. (1996). colour, confusion and concessions: the history of the chinese in south africa. hong kong: hong kong university press. schroeter final mar 7 19 correspondence address: sara schroeter, faculty of education, university of regina, regina, sk, s4s 0a2; email: sara.schroeter@uregina.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 embodying difference: a case for antiracist and decolonizing approaches to multiliteracies sara schroeter university of regina, canada abstract this paper asks what pedagogies are needed as canadians are invited to reconcile colonial pasts with contemporary forms of racism and enduring colonial structures. sharing discourses of race from youth who participated in a year-long ethnography, and moments from a drama-based pedagogical collaboration, this paper suggests ways of updating multiliteracies frameworks so as to better account for the networks of power that circulate in classrooms. this project had the dual aims of exploring discourses of difference used by students, as well as drama as a multimodal, embodied, and (post)critical pedagogy for unpacking differences embedded in the grade 9 social studies curriculum. drawing on feminist pedagogies, critical race studies, and indigenous critiques of education, the author argues that embodiment and subjectivity are central to teaching and learning, and illustrates through excerpts from interviews and fieldnotes, how race, intersectionality, and white supremacy influence interactions in the classroom. the paper concludes by proposing that multiliteracies and multimodal pedagogies would benefit from centralizing anti-racist and decolonizing approaches to learning, in addition to the networks in which literacy practices occur and through which meaning is made. keywords multiliteracies; race; decolonization; drama; social studies introduction as canadians engage with the findings of the truth and reconciliation commission (2015), what pedagogies might enable students and teachers to reconcile colonial pasts with contemporary forms of racism and enduring colonial structures? how might we move toward a future where indigenous claims and other marginalized voices are respected and responded to? this paper shares what was learned about youth discourses of race as students participated in a multimodal, embodied pedagogical collaboration. in so embodying difference studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 143 doing, it proposes ways that multimodal frameworks might be updated as we examine whether pedagogies of multiliteracies have accomplished the aims of inclusion and social justice laid out by the new london group (nlg, 1996). the year-long ethnography and teacher-researcher collaboration from which this paper emerges had the dual aims of exploring discourses of difference used by students in a francophone minority language school, and exploring how drama might work as a multimodal, embodied, and (post)critical pedagogy (lather, 1992) to unpack differences embedded in british columbia’s (bc) social studies 9 curriculum. a foucauldian (foucault, 1969) understanding of discourse as a series of utterances that are spread through language, signs, actions, beliefs, processes, and social structures grounded this study. focusing on student interviews, a moment of “pedagogical failure,” and ethnographic fieldnotes, this paper examines how youth named themselves in relation to the world around them and how these acts of naming were mediated by representational practices in popular culture and school curriculum. while multimodality is useful for broadening understandings of knowledge production, this paper suggests that it is insufficient for making classrooms equitable and just. literacy pedagogies that explicitly address colonization, race, and white supremacy are needed for moving forward in the quest for greater justice in the classroom. drama as multimodal, (post)critical, and embodied pedagogy multimodality, as conceived by members of the nlg (1996), views literacy as socially situated, rather than as the development of independent skills that aid in decoding and encoding neutral texts. multimodality describes the process through which meaning is made by the interaction between multiple semiotic modes (jewitt & kress, 2008; kalantzis, cope, chan, & dalleytrim, 2016). understood as a way of pedagogically responding to changing literacy practices including digital, image-based modalities and increasingly diverse and multilingual student populations, the nlg’s (1996) project of multiliteracies endeavoured to make literacy instruction more just by recognizing the validity of multiple languages and means of expression. exploring drama as a multimodal form of meaning making aligns with scholars who study how drama supports literacy development in students of all ages (booth, 1994; gallagher & ntelioglou, 2011; medina, 2004, 2010; perry, 2010; rowsell & mcqueen-fuentes, 2017; winters, rogers, & schofield, 2006). furthermore, considering multimodality as a part of the nlg’s multiliteracies project acknowledges that embodied interactions are also mediated or “networked.” comunello (2012) explains: “networked space accounts for all sites both physical and digital in which interactions occur” (p. 27). accordingly, analyses of social interactions should consider the ways sara schroeter studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 144 that embodied face-to-face and digital interactions impact and influence one another. in this project, drama was also understood as a (post)critical (lather, 1992) and embodied pedagogy (ellsworth, 2005; perry, 2010; perry & medina, 2013). (post)critical pedagogies (lather, 1992; perry, 2010) were conceived by feminist scholars who take the limitations of freirean (freire, 1970) critical pedagogy as their point of departure. influenced by the call to ground education in the lives and experiences of students and sharing a commitment to social justice, these scholars are wary of patriarchal practices within critical pedagogies and underlying ideas about rationality, dialogue, and empowerment (ellsworth, 1989; lather, 1992, 1998). building on ellsworth’s (1989) critique of the ways that critical pedagogies can problematically reassert dominant power structures in the classroom, lather (1998) argues that they are impossible to implement in schools. (post)critical pedagogy engages this impossibility by exploring the places where critical pedagogy gets stuck. lather (1998) notes that feminist pedagogies interrogate pedagogical encounters that “go wrong” in order to expand ideas of what socially just education looks like. ellsworth (2005) writes that learning is influenced by what can be absorbed by minds/brains as they exist within the sensate body moving through time and space, and interacting with social discourses. drama re-centers the body in learning (perry & medina, 2013), which requires acknowledgement of the affordances and limitations that bodies offer. bodies impose limitations that constrain our abilities to perform certain physical tasks, as well as to have our bodies read in ways consistent with our subjectivities. yet, bodies also amaze and inspire, proving highly adaptable and often expanding our ideas of what, at times, appears impossible. race and racialization consideration of embodiment necessitates looking at how bodies are read and already present in the spaces they move in and, thus, articulating an understanding of race and racialization. following hall (1996), race is understood as a “floating signifier;” it is but one discursive category that emerged during the modern era to classify people according to a system of difference that placed white europeans on top. hence, although race is understood as a floating signifier, it is also “a constructed category that justifies dominance and privilege and other forms of oppression” (battiste, 2013, p. 125). the establishment of race as a category of difference was an exercise in positive power (foucault, 1976) that created ideas about racial differences that europeans internalized and exploited to justify the use of negative, disciplinary power against those they colonized. as a signifier, race has no predetermined meaning. rather, sense emerges through the meaning-making function of language and other modes of embodying difference studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 145 expression, which are largely dependent on history and culture and are never “finally fixed” (hall, 1997). winant (2004) elaborates: race is a concept that signifies and symbolizes sociopolitical conflicts and interests in reference to different types of human bodies. although the concept of race appeals to biologically based human characteristics (so-called phenotypes), selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process. (emphasis in original, p. x) james (2007) adds that racial identities are forever evolving amid changing cultural and structural circumstances. these understandings inform the perspective brought to this study. acknowledging the instability of race is not meant to deny its persistence and the material impact that ideas about race have on individuals, and for how societies organize (hall in jhally, 1997). in fact, concepts of race are deeply ingrained and integral to the ways that individuals interact with one another and with institutions. racialization describes the practices through which individuals and institutions come to be associated with racial groups based on physical characteristics, social practices, and identifications. while the interplay between discursive practices and material structures is generally acknowledged as the process of racialization (omi & winant, 1994), the way this concept is taken up varies significantly across different contexts. in canada, recent theorizations emphasize the ways in which all people are racialized (rogers, 2014) by and through procedures set-up under the country’s colonial regime in order to subordinate indigenous peoples and maintain the white settler image of the nation (battiste, 2013; razack, 2002; simpson, james, & mack, 2011). this conceptualization of racialization highlights how the social processes involved in racialization work on everyone and render visible those whose race is constructed as the invisible norm in canada’s white settler society. the concept of intersectionality (crenshaw, 1991; davis, 1981), developed by black feminists, describes how multiple categories of difference like gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, religion, etc., work in interlocking ways to impact life experiences and subjectivities of marginalized people. originally, intersectionality referred specifically to ways that black women had been marginalized in both anti-racist and feminist discourses and political actions; more broadly, intersectionality describes experiences of being simultaneously marginalized along various axes of difference. for loutzenheiser (2005), “contingent primacy” explains how one category of difference may take precedence in one situation, whereas under other circumstances, another category of difference will be more significant. in this paper, the categories of difference that participating youth identified as important to their subjectivities are analyzed to explore the complex ways that ideas about race intersect with other categories of differences and how these influenced the networked interactions the youth had in class. sara schroeter 1 all names are pseudonyms selected by participants. studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 146 studying discourse in francophone schools a feminist ethnography (buch & staller, 2007; gallagher, 2007) was undertaken to examine youth discourses of difference and whether drama could provide the means for deconstructing these categories in social studies classrooms, where fixed notions of difference have long been maintained. although gender was not the primary focus of this project, my research questions reflect feminist interests in “the ways difference is organized across lines of gender, race, class, and sexuality" (buch & staller, 2007, p. 194). furthermore, the analysis examines the circulation of power and discourse, and how discourses of race intersect ones of gender ethnicity, indigeneity, and class. in a previous study (schroeter, 2013), students used theatre of the oppressed to present experiences of racism within francophone minority language schools. following the findings of that study and research suggesting that race is rarely addressed in francophone schools (carlsonberg, 2011; jacquet, 2009), this study sought to explore youth ideas about difference in a francophone secondary school, and was conducted over the course of a school-year at école gustave-flaubert in bc. the grade 9 social studies curriculum presented many opportunities for examining the discourses of differences circulating in the school, and in canadian society, because it stipulates that students learn how identities – the term used by the ministry of education – are formed based on multiple factors such as family, gender, belief systems, ethnic origin, and nationality (bc ministry of education, 1997). a guidance counsellor at gustave-flaubert with whom i had worked previously suggested that i approach rose,1 one of the social studies teachers at the school. she believed that my research interests and rose’s emphasis on indigenization and education for social justice would be compatible. rose and i had not met previously; however, we became friends as a result of our collaboration. rose worked to ensure that current events and multiple cultures, ethnicities, and races were represented in her classroom and in the school. while the school’s administration benefitted from this work, celebrating and expecting it, rose received little institutional support for her endeavours. the students in rose’s grade 9 classes were between 13-16 years of age and of canadian, indigenous, immigrant, and refugee backgrounds. they came from different provinces like british columbia, quebec, ontario, and other countries such as algeria, brazil, the democratic republic of congo, kenya, mauritius, saudi arabia, south africa, and tahiti. the youth participating in this study were at minimum bilingual, if not multilingual, and represented a wide range of racial, ethnic, linguistic, national, and religious embodying difference studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 147 origins within each class. nine youth claimed “canadian” heritage, and three declared first nations, métis, or inuit (fnmi) heritage.2 multiple methods of data collection – participant observation, fieldnotes, video footage, artefacts, individual interviews, focus groups – were used to gain an in-depth understanding of the ways discourses of difference circulated in rose’s social studies classroom, and the significance of these discourses for the participating youth. interview transcripts, fieldnotes, video footage of focus group interviews and classroom activities during a unit on first contact between indigenous and european peoples were most useful to my analysis of discourses of difference, because they best captured the ways i observed grade 9 students interacting and some of their thoughts about race. the pedagogical approach that rose and i adopted made use of multimodal drama techniques: tableau, improvisation, role play, spatial analyses, reenactments, interviewing, writing-in-role, drawing, reading, and viewing videos. we often planned a large drama activity each month, and each week two of three social studies classes integrated one or more drama strategies. as the students worked, i observed their interactions and produced fieldnotes, audio and video recordings. a “typical white girl”: intersections of gender, race, and class the youth often used categories like “girl,” “boy,” “black,” or “white” to describe themselves and refer to each other in and out of class. curious to learn what these categories meant to them, i asked the youth to explain the meaning of social categories during interviews. my questions were often met with laughter and answers like: “i don’t know, a girl!” however, at times they stimulated fruitful discussions that provided insight into the ways the youth use categories and how their meanings are entangled in complex webs of relations, as in the following interview excerpt. tournesol: j’suis un enfant, un « teenager » tournesol: i’m a kid, a teenager sara: ok, adolescente sara: ok, teenager tournesol: adolescent, um, j’sais pas, fille typicale? « typical. » tournesol: teenager, um, i dunno, typical girl? typical. sara: ok, typique… … … ‘pis qu’estce que ce serait une fille typique? sara: ok, typical… … … and what would a typical girl be? tournesol: y’a comme une expression, « typical white girl », comme tu aimes starbucks, tu aimes le maquillage, tu aimes les cheveux, t’as un iphone… tournesol: there’s like an expression, “typical white girl,” like you like starbucks, you like makeup, you like hair, you have an iphone… sara: ok, je l’ai jamais entendue cellelà. sara: ok, i’ve never heard that one. tournesol: uh, ça va, ben, pour tournesol: uh, it, well, it goes like that 2 in this paper, "indigenous" is used interchangeably with fnmi. sara schroeter studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 148 beaucoup de gens ça va comme ça. comme, si tu aimes starbucks, les iphones, les macbooks, t’as une chambre comme, toute belle, ‘pis tu mets pas le linge de l’année passée, c’est comme… for a lot of people. like, if you like starbucks, iphones, macbooks, you have a room that’s all pretty, and you don’t wear clothes from last year, it’s like… sara: ok. sara: ok. tournesol: …ils t’identifient comme ça tournesol: …they identify you that way. sara. ok, hmm! tu m’apprends quelque chose, c’est bon, c’est très bon. euhm, est-ce qu’il t’arrive de t’identifier, euuuhm… ben en fait, si tu t’identifies comme « typical white girl » ton identité ce serait, tu te vois en tant que fille blanche? sara: ok, hmm! you’re teaching me something, that’s good, that’s really good. um, does it happen for you to identify… uuum… well, in fact, if you identify as a “typical white girl” your identity would be, you see yourself as a white girl? tournesol: wwwwwelll… well, c’est pas vraiment, comme, à propos de la race. tournesol: wwwwwelll… well, it’s not really about race. sara: ok. sara: ok. tournesol: ils disent plutôt que si tu as la peau noir tu vas pas être comme, starbucks et iphone, cléo des fois elle dit comme « argh! you’re so white! » c’est juste les gens blancs ils font ça apparemment, j’sais pas pourquoi. c’est comme, t’sais quand tu vois dans les films, y’a comme la belle blonde… tournesol: they mostly say that if you have black skin you wouldn’t be like starbucks and iphones, cléo sometimes she says, like, “argh! you’re so white!” it’s just that white people do that, apparently, i don’t know why. it’s like, you know when you see in a movie, there’s like the pretty blond… sara: ouais. sara: yeah. tournesol: …elle est souvent blanche, ‘pis comme ça, ça c’est un peu où ça vient de. tournesol: …often she’s white, and it’s like that’s, that’s kinda where that comes from. tournesol : façon de vivre, j’sais pas. comme parfois, cléo, elle veut comme un iphone ‘pis elle a [incompréhensible]… ‘pis elle veut aller à starbucks, ‘pis elle est comme… moi parfois j’suis plus comme « tough », ‘pis comme, black, comme elle est, parfois… tournesol: a way of life, i dunno. like sometimes, cléo, she wants like an iphone and she has [incomprehensible]… and she wants to go to starbucks and she’s… sometimes i’m more like tough, and like, black, like her, sometimes… tournesol’s answer of what it means to identify as a “typical white girl” reflects how “knowledge is linked to power by the microprocesses through which individuals construct their sense of self and their relations to others” (popkewitz, 2000, p. 17). tournesol drew on social practices to answer my question, suggesting that she understood foucault’s proposal that “subjectivity is not a state we occupy, but an activity we perform” (taylor, 2014, p. 173). her practices – buying drinks from starbucks and wearing the embodying difference studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 149 latest fashions – where construed by various institutions and social actors as expressions of “typical white girlhood;” therefore, tournesol identified in these terms. this identification was entangled in powerful discourses about heteronormative sexuality, gender binaries, whiteness, and social class. while tournesol was not obliged to identify in this way, her knowledge of these norms and values was an effect of power (foucault, 1990; popkewitz, 2000) that worked with her desires and influenced her relations with peers, enabling her to discern who was and who was not white. tournesol said she drew her ideas about whiteness and girlhood from popular culture, particularly movies featuring “the pretty blond.” in film, “typical white girls” are often portrayed as spoiled, materialistic, helpless, ignorant, and petty (kelly & pomerantz, 2009). this is echoed in tournesol’s comment that “white girls” like “starbucks, iphones, macbooks,” products known for being over-priced, top-of-the-line, and inaccessible to many. according to her, white girls also “have a room that’s all pretty, and you don’t wear clothes from last year.” therefore, not only is gender racialized in tournesol’s definition of “typical white girls,” wealth is as well. disposable income is associated with whiteness, specifically white girlhood. notions of girlhood thus intersect ideas about class and material wealth and were intricately entangled in tournesol’s subjectivity, which she claimed was “not really about race.” for tournesol, identifying as a “typical white girl” appeared to signify identification with dominant gender and class norms more than racial ones. however, race, class, and gender intersect in tournesol’s definition of “typical” girlhood. in a society where whiteness dominates (gillborn, 2005; leonardo, 2004), to be “typical” is to be white. this idea surfaced in other student interviews, where youth identified as: “average,” “normal,” and “not mainstream.” fleur and anna, who identified as white, also identified as “average.” mike’s upper socio-economic status and fair skin enabled him to benefit from some privileges associated with whiteness, and identify as “normal;” yet, he felt distanced from whiteness ethnically and linguistically (his mother was ecuadorean and he spoke spanish at home). mia did not identify as white; therefore, when she said she was “not mainstream,” her statement also implies “not white.” in spite of her disavowal of the significance of race, tournesol’s awareness of and preoccupation with racial markers were evident in the comparisons she made between herself and cléo, another mixed-race student. according to tournesol, cléo was more frequently racialized as black and associated with black culture. tournesol actively participated in this racialization, claiming that, at times, she also identified with stereotypical ideas of blackness: “sometimes i’m more, like, tough, and like, black, like her.” in contrast to the delicate femininity inscribed in tournesol’s description of “typical white girls,” “black girls” were characterized as “tough,” thus, distant from the dominant norm. although these sentiments were not expressed during drama activities, the interviews were conducted in the middle of the school year when the students sara schroeter studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 150 had routinely been engaged in embodied drama work. moreover, tournesol’s comment names the multimodal, networked texts that also influenced the way she perceived herself and others. tournesol’s answer indicates that the youth were aware of racial signifiers and circulating logics about racial categories, and that these signifiers were never absent from interactions. embodying difference the following fieldnote presents a moment (also recorded on video) when the social justice orientation of the embodied multimodal drama pedagogy that rose and i adopted got stuck, failing to achieve our objective of deconstructing difference. i share this moment to illustrate how (post)critical pedagogies engage moments when dominance is reasserted in the classroom (lather, 1992). in this excerpt, rose was filling time after a drama activity i facilitated proved ineffective. tableau work intended as a unit review unexpectedly led to competition, othering, and possibly the solidification of ideas about indigenous cultures as static relics of the past. i cut the activity short and rose showed heritage minute videos produced by the government to teach canadian history. while unpacking these videos, the following exchange occurred. rose tells the students that aboriginal groups have the highest birth rate in canada, and are the fastest growing group. the teacher’s assistant asks: “so they are reproducing?” “yes,” rose answers. sherlock says: “oh, i thought you meant that they are the biggest group (motions with her hands to indicate height).” rose says, “oh, no! no, i mean they are reproducing.” while everyone is laughing, bob turns and calls: “brook!” r. k. is sitting behind bob. he perks-up exclaiming: “yeah brook is, like, pregnant right now.” he laughs and looks at brook expectantly. is he searching to get a rise out of her? rose either doesn’t hear his comment or chooses to ignore it. brook appears to laugh off r. k.’s comment. she rolls her eyes and replies something i can’t hear. rose clarifies her meaning. during this time, samantha turns to the back of the room and says: “brook, you’re gonna have four kids!” brook appears to say that she doesn’t want to have any children. it looks like this statement is made for samantha and r. k.’s benefit, even though she is addressing cléo, who is sitting in front of her. samantha retorts: “yes you do, you’re gonna have, like, eight!” rose isn’t paying attention to this exchange. she is focused on ensuring that the students understand that the indigenous peoples of canada are different from the depiction presented in the “heritage minute” video. (excerpt from fieldnotes) this exchange illustrates how various social discourses overlap and how the intersection of multiple categories of difference resulted in the marginalization of one student. elsewhere (schroeter, 2017), i explore how this excerpt also reveals that white educators are complicit in reasserting dominant power structures in the classroom. i also acknowledge that in a context where indigenous peoples and their stories have been exploited by embodying difference studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 151 white settlers and researchers, analyzing this particular moment risks exoticizing brook. my aim is to illustrate how intersecting discourses worked on this student, exacerbated by multimodal texts, and how discourses of white supremacy were taken up by others. brook was academically successful, athletic, and appeared to be well-liked. she was one of the few grade 9 girls who crossed the division between “boy” and “girl” ways of socializing. using the youth’s terms, brook’s style could be described as “girly-sporty,” as she often wore dresses on top of shorts, paired with sneakers; a style choice that may have facilitated her boundary crossing. her tendency to challenge her teachers and ability to joke with her peers made her valued and respected. brook was also vocal about her indigenous heritage, regularly providing anecdotal information about the tsimshian people and practices carried out by her family. she was quick to point out times when students expressed stereotypical ideas about indigenous peoples. yet, she resisted attempts to turn her into an “authentic native” (buddle, 2004; king, 2003), explaining that she could not speak for all indigenous peoples and that she had never lived on reserve. on the one hand, other students were likely to explore their burgeoning understandings of indigenous cultures with brook because she was their friend. paradoxically, this proximity made her an easy target for racist “jokes,” as captured by the fieldnote above. brook’s fluency in english and french, her skin tone – she identified as white – and canadian roots enabled her to pass as an insider to dominant nationalist discourses of canadianness circulating in the school; discourses actively constructed as part of the social studies curriculum (rogers, 2014; schick & st. denis, 2005; willinsky, 1998). however, throughout the year she increasingly disrupted this perception by naming her indigeneity. ironically, brook’s rootedness in the land constructed as “canadian” uprooted her from nationalist discourses invested in a white settler framework (battiste, 2013; razack, 2002). brook’s ancestral ties to the land and practice of naming stereotypes were dissonant with a popular imaginary that constructs canadian land as justly obtained (truth & reconciliation commission of canada, 2015) and canadians as tolerant settlers who turned “wild” land into something productive and profitable (simpson, james, & mack, 2011). in this instance, the students discursively policed the borders of the nation by othering brook and placing her outside its metaphoric borders. king (1991) explains dysconscious racism as “an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs) that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as a given” (p. 135). by emphasizing brook’s indigeneity, the youth dysconsciously reaffirmed the dominant white norm. highlighting brook’s indigeneity was fed by multiple discourses that position white people as the rightful owners and occupants of academic spaces, “in groups,” and legitimate boundary crossers. i do not mean to suggest that the students intentionally tried to strip brook of her sara schroeter studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 152 achievements and privilege. however, analyzing this class from the perspective of discourses of difference necessitates a consideration of how discourse circulates and the relations of power produced. while r. k. and samantha were not trying to be racist, their actions repeated the historical process of policing and silencing indigenous bodies. both r. k. and samantha took up positions that reified whiteness, though only samantha presented as white. this illustrates that whiteness is reinforced and brought into being not only through the privileges that people with white skin enjoy, but also through discursive, symbolic, and social practices that can be taken up by non-white people (kuoch, 2005; leonardo 2004). through “technologies of the self” (foucault, 1976), social practices through which individuals constitute their subjectivity and are constituted by others (kelly, 2013), r. k. accessed whiteness through the performance of heteronormative masculinity. r. k. and samantha’s comments can be seen as microaggressions (delgado & stefancic, cited in hayes & juarez, 2009), ways that dominance and racist sentiments are expressed through means that are “innocent, subtle, and transparent, but harmful nonetheless” (howard, 2008, p. 973). this incident can be read as perpetuating the symbolic violence of colonization and re-establishing racial differences developed to create and reinforce colonial order. brook’s indigeneity racialized her in a way that made her the other in the classroom, which was compounded by her identification as a girl. her intelligibility as a cisgender heterosexual “girl” intensified the attention she received from her peers. the students made assumptions and drew on stereotypes about who brook was as a girl and as a partly indigenous person, both of which are entangled in patriarchal and colonial discourses and practices surrounding the reproductive capacities of indigenous female bodies (ralston-lewis, 2005; truth & reconciliation commission of canada, 2015). brook actively contested this representation, asserting that she did not want to have children, introducing the possibility of diversity within the “indigenous” category being constructed in the classroom; however, her objections were not acknowledged. furthermore, the use of heritage minute videos as a multimodal text visually reinforced stereotypical ideas about the collaboration between subservient indigenous people and naïve, but wellintentioned colonizers. the drama activity that preceded this discussion had heightened the students’ awareness of their physical bodies, possibly setting the stage for the scrutiny brook faced. although rose attempted to critically deconstruct representations in the videos, the discussion was hijacked by racist and sexist stereotypes, as the youth drew on multiple semiotic modes and circulating discourses to synthesize rose’s meaning (jewitt & kress, 2008; kalantzis et al., 2016) and relate the subject matter to the people in their class. embodying difference studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 153 questioning representational practices the following fieldnote exemplifies how drama worked as an embodied, multimodal, and liminal and pedagogy that created spaces in which youth questioned representational practices in class. this moment occurred during a field trip on the traditional and unceded territory of the musqueam nation. there, i facilitated a process drama on first contact between indigenous peoples and european colonizers that involved guided visualizations, writing, map drawing, role-play, tableau, and oral debate, among other strategies. the kids are spread out on the grass, sitting or lying in groups of four, and developing arguments in favour or against letting the rabbits enter their village. rose, a teaching assistant, and i are circulating among the groups. we don’t have to intervene much; the students are engaged in playful conversations about whether or not to let these ‘foreign rabbits’ into the village. some students are not taking the possible threat posed by the rabbits seriously, while others are trying to get into character as villagers and making compelling arguments within their groups. as i am walking around, brook calls me over and tells me that she doesn’t understand. thinking that she’s referring to the process drama, i ask her what she doesn’t understand. we are speaking in french, and she says that it’s hard to explain, but she doesn’t understand the way that indigenous people are portrayed. part way through her explanation she asks: “can i just say it in english?” i say yes, of course, and she switches languages and asks: “why are natives always portrayed as having dark skin? because i don’t.” i don’t have a chance to respond before brook goes on to ask: “how come we all have different skin colours if we all live in the same place and we’re all acclimated?” while she is speaking, brook motions with her hands to indicate the students sprawled across the lawn. (excerpt from fieldnotes) working in an informal space, where brook could easily observe the bodies of her peers on the lawn, engaged in the embodied dramatic work she was doing, brook raised questions about inaccurate representational practices. drawing on all the interactions she had had throughout the year, and multiple semiotic texts, brook engaged me in a discussion about race, racialization, representation, signifying practices, and evolutionary biology. this interaction illustrates how youth often ask important questions when involved in the liminal space of play created by drama and supported by the use of multiple modes of meaning making (gallagher & ntelioglou, 2011). by demanding answers from me, brook revealed her knowledge of the misrepresentation of indigenous peoples and suggested that the curriculum, and our teaching of it, failed to address her and the youths’ complex subjectivities. in the informal and social environment created by the field trip and the creative work of process drama, brook was able to point this out. brook’s meditation on representational practices had begun earlier and did not necessarily come from the process drama. however, the embodied inquiry she did that afternoon propelled her to solicit the help of an adult in seeking sara schroeter studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 154 answers to her questions. drawing on massumi’s (1995) work, ellsworth (2005) writes that thoughts are activated by the body’s movement, which “challenge(s) educators to shift how we make bodies matter in pedagogy” (emphasis in original, p. 17). echoing ellsworth, massumi, and perry and medina (2013), i argue that this is precisely what drama compels educators and students to consider. as an embodied medium, drama necessitates attention to the bodies and subjectivities involved in learning, as well as a reimagining of learning spaces in order to create curricular engagements that elicit creativity (nicholson, 2005), and a deep engagement with the topics under investigation. brook’s questions point to the ways drama can bring deep inquiries to the surface and how embodied dramatic practice can provide entry points to conversations about racial and ethnic representational tropes. even as they interact in the “as if” (heathcote & bolton, 1995) world of drama, students engage the imaginary from perspectives drawn from their situated subjectivities and the networked relationships they have with other students, teachers, and the objects in their classrooms or informal learning spaces. epistemology and multimodality rose’s classroom was a complex site where multiple, competing, and networked discourses about race, class, and gender circulated and shaped social interactions, bringing particular relations into existence (foucault, 1969). tournesol’s comments reveal that popular culture mediated her subjective positioning as a “typical white girl.” her thoughts expose the ways that discourses of race are intricately intersected by discourses of gender and class (crenshaw, 1991). these intersections were represented in popular culture and the social media sites the youth accessed for entertainment, socializing, and as creative outlets. furthermore, the interaction between brook, samantha, and r. k. illustrates how intersectionality impacts student interactions and classroom experiences. as exemplified in the fieldnote from the process drama, the youth began to question representational practices during and immediately following drama activities. the insights and interactions presented in this paper resulted from a context in which drama was consistently adopted as a multimodal and embodied pedagogy (gallagher & ntelioglou, 2011; perry & medina, 2013; rowsell & mcqueen-fuentes, 2017). with its focus on embodiment, drama asks us to pay attention to the bodies in which teaching and learning occur and how they interact with circulating discourses. how racialized bodies interact in the classroom can be as important as the modalities used. although rose and i consistently used multiple modes of meaning making, we were constituted by whiteness and eurocentric teaching methods that value competition and are more engrained in our practice than we realized. this was true in spite of our commitments to decolonization and anti-racism, and embodying difference studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 155 our desire to trouble white supremacy in the curriculum. the way brook was othered reveals that our conscious and dysconscious decisions, as well as those of the youth, led to the reification of whiteness in the classroom. embodied work can, therefore, highlight racial markers in ways that are not easy to manage, and the opportunities for informal group work that drama affords creates conditions in which youth take less care to edit their discourses, as illustrated by samantha and r. k.’s comments. while problematic, this may be necessary in a context where youth have questions about race and racialization, yet few curricular opportunities to ask them. it is important to find ways of openly discussing racialization and prejudice in social studies classes, which are also primary sites for teaching about truth and reconciliation. without honest discourse, reconciliation is impossible. therefore, problematic though stereotypes are, educators must seek ways to unpack them with youth and help them identify and navigate those found in online spaces and popular media. the multiple modes used in drama may bring about new insights that help youth find answers to troubling questions; however, ample space and time must be set aside for these processes. in this study, drama was approached in a way largely consistent with the nlg’s (1996) pedagogy of mulitliteracies. it endeavoured to engage youth in an exploration of the social studies 9 curriculum, rooted in critical practices that made use of many modalities. rose and i believed that this would create rich learning experiences for the youth and hoped that it would allow us to deconstruct the differences embedded in the curriculum. however, we learned that the pedagogical tools we used – drama/multimodality – were not as significant for achieving our goals. the students did engage with the course in meaningful ways; however, our commitment to social justice and equity proved more significant. the times when rose and i felt we met our objectives were ones when our political commitments guided our practice, and we took the time and care necessary in lesson planning. finally, i propose that classrooms may not be ideal sites for reconciliation. given canada’s history of cultural genocide and the integral role education played in it, institutional spaces, with their historic significance and discipline, are poorly suited to the task. perhaps what is needed is the creation of more liminal spaces like those created by drama and field trips, where youth and adults feel more able to express their thoughts and learn about the connections between us. better yet, perhaps we need to focus on embodied land-based approaches, rooted in indigenous ways of knowing and highlighting the relations between all living beings. rose and i emerged from this study with a renewed sense that race matters in education and that the social studies curriculum and our teaching practices need to change. approaches to multimodality that explicitly focus on decolonization and antiracism might be what is needed as we continue to strive for greater equity in education. sara schroeter studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 142-158, 2019 156 acknowledgements i would like to thank rose and the students at école secondaire gustaveflaubert, without whom this work would not be possible. i am also grateful to my doctoral committee, drs. annette henry, theresa rogers, lisa loutzenheiser, as well as dr. stacey crooks and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. references battiste, m. 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(1998). learning to divide the world: education at empire’s end. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. constantine final dec 4 19 correspondence address: moe constantine, graduate program in critical sociology, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: mconstantine@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 341-346, 2019 book review the cow with the ear tag #1389 gillespie, k. (2018). chicago il: the university of chicago press. isbn 9780226582856 (paper) us$22.50; isbn 9780226582719 (cloth) us$70; isbn 9780226582993 (e-book) us$22.50. 272 pages moe constantine brock university, canada in what began as a phd dissertation, kathryn gillespie documents the practices of the dairy industry in the united states, taking readers from automated milking factories to auction yards and animal sanctuaries in an attempt to understand the hidden production practices of america’s staple drink. the cow with the ear tag #1389 offers an overview of america’s dairy industry, just one part of the animal agriculture industry that annually slaughters over 56 billion land animals worldwide (koneswaran & nierenberg, 2008). gillespie’s book contributes to the growing number of books and films devoted to exposing the cruelty of raising animals for food and how this practice contributes to the normalization of violence. like others who choose to write on this topic, gillespie encountered difficulties when researching the dairy industry, which over the last few decades has lobbied for decreased transparency and the criminalization of animal liberationists. she outlines her struggle to find a farmer willing to let her tour their facilities, sometimes despite the companies to which she reached out having stated commitments to transparency (p. 33). when doing this type of research, there is also the added difficulty of not being able effectively to communicate with the research subjects (dairy cows), leading to some assumptions and guesswork. gillespie also discusses the ethical dilemmas she grappled with as a witness to violence, explaining that “there is a certain level of complicity in this violence that occurs through standing by and watching animals die or be killed while doing nothing” (p. 102). however, her difficulties gaining access to “spaces of animal commodification” (p. 2012) encouraged her to discover alternative ways of conducting research, therefore moe constantine studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 341-346, 2019 342 minimizing the (masculinist anthropocentric) value of witnessing this violence in the first place. gillespie's work is a great example of stepping outside of and resisting the dominant framework of both research methods in general and the conceptualization of animals in research specifically. such an ethically complicated and inaccessible research topic requires creativity in research methods. when animals are included in research, they usually serve as a means to an end, a commodified and disposable thing to be used by humans. gillespie documents with some humour the process of getting her research application approved by the institutional animal care and use committee (iacuc) at the university of washington, which all researchers who indicate animal involvement have to do. it was surprising to the iacuc when she stated that she would simply be observing animals, not using them (p. 30). accordingly, a central research question for this book addressed the normalization of animal use for research and consumption and understanding the process whereby nonhuman animals’ bodies are commodified (pp. 143, 88). gillespie’s focus on the dairy industry is significant both within the field of critical animal studies and outside of it. the dairy industry is often overlooked in critiques of the animal agriculture industry, both because of dairy’s ability to masquerade as a harmless byproduct, and because of its association with uncomfortable topics of reproductive exploitation, sexual violence, and mass suffering. while not consuming dairy products is seen in many communities as bizarre and even un-american (p. 183), the way dairy is obtained for human use is not something with which most wish to be associated. therefore, “the details of how dairy is produced (and everything implicated in that production) are obscured from public knowledge” (p. 14), and we are free to continue with our eating habits. to tell the story of the cows who produce the dairy we consume, gillespie begins with a visit to a relatively small dairy in western washington – the first dairy whose managers responded positively when she asked for a tour. the dairy has about 500 cows who are milked ten months out of the year (p. 55). after the 10th month they are moved to a new pen where they are artificially inseminated again, a process which usually involves using an electric probe to cause involuntary ejaculation from a bull and then inserting a hand into the vagina of a cow to deposit the sperm. artificial insemination is more widely used than mating because it is more efficient and effective. the gestation period for cows is about the same length as for humans and once the calf is born, they are taken from their mother within the first day. at the small farm in western washington, female calves are kept at the farm or sold to nearby dairy operations and male calves are sold to the meat industry. after about six pregnancies, when the cows are six or seven years old (cows’ normal lifespan is 18-22 years), they are sent to slaughter and turned into hamburger meat for fast food restaurants (p. 59). book review studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 341-346, 2019 343 gillespie uses the small western washington dairy to provide an overview of the “best” type of dairy production – that which takes place on a small, family-owned and operated farm – and to open discussion on the various steps involved in producing milk. her next visit is to an auction yard where dairy cows and male calves are sold to farmers, sometimes for continued use and sometimes for slaughter. gillespie describes the surreal experience of witnessing, in action, the commodification of a living body at the auction yard (p. 88), and explores what it takes to turn a living, breathing, feeling being into a commodity that has only instrumental value. she uses george orwell’s concept of “doublethink” to explain how this can happen: quoting from 1984 (orwell, 1949, p. 146), gillespie explains that to doublethink is to “know and not to know, to be conscious of the complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies...to forget whatever it was necessary to forget.” the 4-h program designed for school children that gillespie explores in her book is a great example of learning to doublethink. in 4-h, students are responsible for raising and caring for farmed animals in order to learn how to be a farmer. at the end of the season, the biggest and best animals win prizes at the fair and are then sold or slaughtered. since many first-time 4-h members grow attached to their animals and have difficulty letting them be killed, 4-h is really a “lesson in the proper emotional relationship between humans and animals” (p. 151). students are taught to distance themselves from the animals emotionally, to not see them as a friend or a living being, but as livestock, literally “stock” that is alive (p. 8). the emotional distance that is learned early on by young farmers is accompanied by physical, cultural, and linguistic distance that is constructed by the animal agriculture industry and felt by both farmers and consumers. large-scale farms, called concentrated animal feeding operations (cafos), and the accompanying slaughterhouses, have been removed from the public eye, shielded by walls, barbed-wire fences, and laws that make it illegal to document what occurs within them. the physical distance reinforces our capitalist culture which views dairy and meat – but not their production – as a symbol of america. carefully chosen terms like “livestock,” “cattle,” and even “veal” and “beef” further obscure the reality of what they represent. even at the small dairy in western washington, gillespie describes how “the cows themselves were abstracted” (p. 71) in the mechanistic labour flow of each day, which involves their constant commodification into gallons of milk and pounds of mcdonald’s burgers. one of gillespie’s central assertions is that these spaces of commodification are in fact places of violence. she writes that “what i’ve become most interested in, and what i hope to illuminate in this book, is the way violence against certain lives and bodies can become so normalized that it is not viewed as violence at all” (p. 21). she refers to the occurrence of this type of normalized violence against nonhuman animals as “mundane violence” (p. 91); it has become so routine as to be boring, even for those tasked with committing the acts of violence. gillespie describes how she moe constantine studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 341-346, 2019 344 attempted to learn the features of the cows she witnessed being auctioned so that somebody who cared would remember them, but there were simply too many of them, and in the end only the most obviously sick and tortured remained vivid in her memory. cows who have been forcibly impregnated since before they were one year old, calves who were ripped away from their mothers within the first hour of their lives, cows in the auction ring who had been electrically prodded so much that they could hardly stand: none of them were memorable enough because the violence they had experienced was normal and expected, even industry standard. “the category of the animal...is a site of violence and subjugation” (p. 134) gillespie writes, reflecting on how even humans who have acts of violence committed against them are “degraded” to the rank of (nonhuman) animals in order to justify their mistreatment. the oppression and suffering of human and nonhuman animals has always been entangled, with the violence committed against one used to justify and motivate violence committed against the other. gillespie briefly discusses the history of dairy farming in the united states, which began with the colonization of the americas by europeans. she explains how “the cow was integral to the colonial project. cows were physically used to occupy land and change the prairie ecosystems, displacing [i]ndigenous humans and native animal species from their homes” (p. 180). the colonial mindset is still apparent in the dairy industry, made obvious by advertisements and company names; gillespie notes one specifically, the superior settler, which is a bull semen collection company (p. 180). today, land is still being stolen and ecosystems are still being destroyed by white settlers with the justification that it is necessary for cattle ranching. since the 1980s, 40% of forest area in central america has been destroyed, with the majority of cleared land being turned over to cattle ranchers (fao, n.d.). gillespie’s work touches on a number of both emotionally and intellectually difficult topics, utilizing critical animal theory without being overwhelming for non-academic readers. she makes her arguments accessible to readers for whom this is their first introduction to viewing animals and the meat industry in this light, yet still interesting for the seasoned animal liberationist. this was done intentionally by gillespie, who describes how after witnessing one of the auctions, her “commitment solidified to write articles and a book that would be read both within and outside of the academy, with the hope of making an impact on the way people think about, and practice, our relationships with farmed animals” (p. 98). it is essential for work that discusses important yet hidden truths about prominent features of american society to be accessible outside of the academy. writers must find ways to explore complex ideas and theories without losing the interest of readers, and in gillespie’s case and for other authors who write about animals in this manner, they must also ensure that their work is approachable to an audience that may not be keen to learn that they are contributing to large-scale suffering every day. gillespie book review studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 341-346, 2019 345 accomplishes these tasks well and i would recommend this book to anybody interested in the animal agriculture industry in america, whether already engaged in animal liberation activism or new to the field. in order to offer readers a way to view and treat farmed animals that does not see them as having only instrumental value, gillespie weaves in stories from two californian animal sanctuaries. hearing the stories of some of the animals who live there, as well as the perspectives of the staff members and founders of the sanctuaries, offers moments of clarity throughout the book in which readers can see not only the terrible truths of our actions, but also the significant impact that a small amount of compassion can have. in an interview with marji beach, the education director at animal place farmed animal sanctuary, beach explains how she went vegan after witnessing a calf being separated from their mother. while hearing the screaming of the mother, beach said she had the realization that “there was my glass of milk right there” (p. 165). while not the same vivid experience that beach had, after reading gillespie’s book readers can no longer claim ignorance: we know, in horrific detail, what goes into each glass of milk. we have read about the living conditions of cows used for their milk, the slaughter process, and the perpetuation of rape culture in the milk industry, and we have accompanied gillespie on her trips to auction yards and so-called “humane” dairies. gillespie writes that “coming face-to-face with a singular animal can disrupt routine ideas about the place of animals in society as well as the routine market activities in which consumers are involved” (p. 10). in absence of the ability to tour a farm ourselves, gillespie gives readers the opportunity to come face-to-face with these animals, like the cow with the ear tag #1389. perhaps the only weakness in gillespie’s work stemmed from her lack of access to more than one dairy farm. however, this difficulty is to be expected and gillespie uses it as an opportunity to explain how the industry attempts to shield itself from the public eye and how this in itself speaks to the nature of its activities. the book explains how the word “commodity” stems from the latin word meaning “convenient” (p. 82). just as it is convenient to consume commodities, with their production subsidized by the government, it is convenient to not examine how our food is produced. it is inconvenient to realize the reality of the dairy industry and to avoid dairy. yet, as it becomes clear throughout the book, it is the job of those who consume commercially produced products to think about who is being inconvenienced for our convenience, and if this convenience is truly worth the price we’re paying for it. gillespie writes that at points throughout her research she “felt deeply ashamed to be human” (p. 96). allowing oneself to feel this shame, to have any sort of emotional response in the face of industry standards, is a “political act of resistance to violence” (p. 203). additionally, i would argue, viewing nonhuman animals as a subject of a life, as gillespie does in her book, is a political act of resistance to violence. she writes “the isolation of mourning for the routinely unmourned is significant” (p. 212), yet doing so is what moe constantine studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 341-346, 2019 346 gillespie is asking of her readers. her book is not a scientific study filled with facts and figures, or an animal liberationist philosophy book trying to persuade readers to change their eating habits; it is a story of the life of the cow with the ear tag #1389. upon finishing the book, there is a lingering question not directly asked by gillespie, but asked of readers by the cows whose suffering she documents: what are we going to do about it? references fao (food & agriculture organization, united nations). (n.d.). livestock policy brief 03: cattle ranching and deforestation. retrieved from http://www.fao.org/3/a-a0262e.pdf koneswaran, g., & nierenberg, d. (2008). global farm animal production and global warming: impacting and mitigating climate change. environmental health perspectives, 116(5), 578582. orwell, g. (1949). 1984. london: secker & warburg. defehr fg aug 08 16 correspondence address: jan nadine defehr, faculty of education, university of winnipeg, 515 portage avenue, winnipeg, mb, r3b 2e9; email: jn.defehr@uwinnipeg.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 inventing mental health first aid: the problem of psychocentrism jan nadine defehr university of winnipeg, canada abstract this article provides a sociopolitical critique of contemporary mental health first aid (mhfa) discourses. the concept of psychocentrism, adopted as an analytical tool, critiques the problematic nature of mhfa premises and practices that automate, expedite, enforce, and normalize the global movement to psychiatrize human distress. contesting mhfa’s international image as a benevolent, individual crisis intervention model, this essay discusses mhfa as a technique of neoliberal governance, moral surveillance, and social control, responsible for reinvigorating the psychiatric profession while dividing and demoting the populace. keywords mental health; mental health literacy; mental health first aid; psychocentrism; neoliberalism; critical psychiatry; psychiatrization more than one decade of evaluative scholarly literature acknowledges the international mental health first aid (mhfa) movement as an extraordinary humanitarian success (hadiaczky, hokby, mkrtchian, carli, & wasserman, 2015; kitchener & jorm, 2002). mhfa training seminars, central to this global movement, prepare lay citizens to provide immediate mhfa to persons perceived as distressed and presumed to be experiencing “a mental health problem” (kitchener & jorm, 2008). as one mhfa website explains: one in three canadians will experience a mental health problem at some point in their life. the earlier a problem is detected and treated, the better the outcome. mental health first aid canada gives people the skills to provide that help that is so important in recovery. mhfa is the help provided to a person developing a mental health problem or experiencing a mental health crisis. just as physical first aid is administered to an injured person before medical treatment can be obtained, mhfa is given until appropriate treatment is found or until the crisis is resolved. the mhfa canada program aims to improve mental health literacy, and provide the skills and knowledge to help people better manage potential or developing mental health problems in themselves, a family member, a friend or a colleague. (mental health commission of canada, 2015) inventing mental health first aid studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 19 mhfa emerges from the australian mental health literacy goal of early detection and treatment of mental disorders (jorm, 2000). mhfa training seminars coach trainees to first recognize human distress as psychiatric pathology, and second, to act on that recognition by providing “the five basic actions of mhfa” (mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 1, p. 4): (1) assess risk; (2) listen non-judgmentally; (3) give reassurance and information; (4) encourage professional help; and (5) encourage informal support (kitchener & jorm, 2002; mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 1, p. 4). specifically, action 3 directs mhfa practitioners to “help the [distressed] person feel hope and optimism and realize that they have a real medical condition and there are effective treatments” (mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 1, p. 4). mhfa medicalizes and psychiatrizes human distress (conrad & schneider, 1980), not only through its third core action which frames distress as a medical phenomenon, but also through mhfa’s use of psychiatric terms and psychiatric frameworks to define, describe, understand, and address human distress (conrad, 1992, p. 211; 2007; wright et al., 2007). the objective of the mhfa movement is to prepare members of the public to seamlessly integrate psychiatric discourses and mhfa directives into informal conversational disclosures of distress wherever and whenever such expressions might occur (kitchener & jorm, 2008). mhfa is now practiced in remote, rural, and urban locations in more than 20 countries around the world (byrne, mcgowan, & cousins, 2015; mental health commission of canada, 2015). aligned with the “global mental health for all” mission of the world health organization (collins et al., 2011), the mhfa movement continues its steady growth around the globe (hadiaczky et al., 2015; jorm & kitchener, 2011). white and pike (2013, p. 240) assert, “the making and marketing of mhl [mental health literacy] programs ought to be scrutinized.” mhfa, perhaps the flagship of international mental health literacy, should be no exception. despite psychiatry’s longstanding crisis of legitimacy (e.g., cooper, 1967; foucault, 2011; frances, 2013), mhfa intensifies the well-documented psychiatrization of everyday life (conrad & schneider, 1980) by training and authorizing citizens worldwide to conduct uninvited, continuous psychiatric assessment and intervention in every formal and informal domain of community life. mhfa advises, “there are effective treatments” (mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 1, p. 4), however psychiatric diagnosing and drugging is fraught with evidence and allegations of harm (breggin, 1994, 2014; moncrieff, 2013, 2014b; whitaker, 2010). as part of the “relations of ruling” (smith, 1987, p. 3), mhfa strengthens the social and institutional identification and management (white & pike, 2013, p. 250) of persons assessed as distressed, deficient, or different (american psychiatric association, 2013). recipients of mhfa assessment and intervention must both occupy and “be occupied by” (mills, 2014, p. 77) inferiorized terms (rimke, 2010, p. 99) denoting their mental deficits and pathologies (mental health commission of canada, 2010). operating under jan nadine defehr studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 20 the marketing smokescreen of emergency first aid, mhfa exercises naming rights over the emotions, experiences, identities, and knowledges of distressed persons (liegghio, 2013). mhfa translates struggle and discontent into psychiatric pathology as though human suffering is a terra nullius available for psychiatric acquisition. mhfa contributes to psychiatric imperialism while providing neoliberal governance (rimke, 2000, p. 71) and “uninterrupted social and moral surveillance” (foucault, 2011, p. 118, 1994, pp. 107-123), functioning as a mechanism for social control – therapeutic social control (conrad, 1992, p. 216; conrad & schneider, 1980, pp. 178179). just as mhfa augments psychiatric reach throughout the populace, mhfa simultaneously adds to the individualization and depoliticization of distress, dispelling perhaps more than ever the possibility of meaningful and just social reform (mills, 2014). mhfa is thus more than a crisis intervention model, and more than a mental health literacy campaign. to provide a critical examination of mhfa, the paper adopts and applies the sociological concept of psychocentrism, which critiques the dominant model of pathological individualism produced by the hegemony of the psy complex in western society (rimke, 2010; rimke & brock, 2012). applied to mhfa discourse, psychocentrism provides a way of understanding how the mhfa literacy campaign automates, accelerates, enforces, and normalizes the global psychiatrization of human distress. application of the concept of psychocentrism both elicits and analyzes a series of linguistic techniques and practices used to legitimize and naturalize the mhfa movement, a critique that until now has not been forthcoming. the notion of psychocentrism opens a space to understand distress as an appropriate response to the loss and pain implicit in human experiences; it also makes room for understanding distress as an “action guiding” (shotter, 2010, p. 140) necessity for human survival. moreover, the concept of psychocentrism highlights distress as a collective matter, an issue of social injustice requiring social remedies and reform rather than individual “mental illness” requiring personalized and private psychiatric treatment above all else (rimke & hunt, 2002). inventing mental health first aid: the problem of psychocentrism social scientist heidi rimke coined the term psychocentrism to study and critique the dominant western rationality that all human problems result from individual pathologies rather than deficits in society. psychocentrism is defined as the governing premise of neoliberal, advanced capitalist populations (rimke, 2012, p. 32). the effect of psychocentrism is a growing range of “psy” technologies and assemblages that de-politicize, pathologize, individualize, and police the social fragmentation, inequality, and suffering neoliberal policies produce (esposito & perez, 2014; moncrieff, 2014a). generated through the psy complex, psychocentric sensibilities divide inventing mental health first aid studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 21 populations into the morally loaded categories of normal and abnormal, healthy and ill, good and bad (rimke & brock, 2012, p. 198), classifications that determine important matters such as identity, survival, and “life chances” (goffman, 1963, p. 5). normalizing neoliberal ideals such as individual autonomy, freedom of choice, and personal accountability, psychocentrism holds the individual responsible for both successes and failures while diminishing the responsibility of authorities (rimke, 2010). indeed, the “compulsory ontology of pathology” (marsh, 2010, p. 31) characterizes the industrialized west. our largest, most powerful institutions intricately depend on the ever-expanding psychiatric classification of individuals (rimke & brock, 2012; rose, 2013). mhfa research programs, training seminars, interventions, and communities of practice, produce, consume, and disseminate psychocentrism. rooted in psychiatry, mhfa trains citizens to pathologize human suffering rather than critique the consequences of unjust social structures and power relations. rimke (2010) provides six basic characteristics of psychocentrism: reductionism, determinism, essentialism, presentism or ahistoricism, naturalism, and ethnocentrism. the following sub-sections critically examine each characteristic as a pivotal discursive force (gergen, 1999; marsh, 2010; potter, 1996) for naturalizing and normalizing mhfa’s global psychiatrization of distress.1 reductionism mhfa ensures psychiatrization of distress through its practice of reductionism (rimke, 2010, p. 97). collapsing the social, political, cultural, and economic complexity of human distress into one single aspect – the flawed mental interiority of the individual (rimke, 2003) – mhfa exonerates contextual, socio-political factors while maximizing attention to individual pathology. although mhfa lists traumatic experiences (mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 5, p. 8), as well as “losses,” “setbacks,” and “tragedies” (mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 3, p. 1) as contributors to “mental illness,” mhfa training seminars coach trainees to see distressed persons as people who “have a real medical condition” (mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 1, p. 4). mhfa thus reduces the diverse breadth and particularity of human struggle to the uniform, decontextualized psy discourse. a study of the mental health literacy of citizens in an economically strained, rural area of maharashtra, india, provides a specific example of reductionism (kermode, bowen, arole, joag, & jorm, 2009). the study 1 as articulated in her introduction to this special issue, rimke has further developed the notion of psychocentrism to include four additional characteristics: victim-blaming, double standards, positivism and pathological individualism. my analysis here does not consider these additional characteristics. jan nadine defehr studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 22 evaluates indian participant responses to vignettes portraying indian citizen distress (kermode et al., p. 477). mhfa researchers rejected the participants’ understandings of distress as “stress” (p. 478). instead, the mhfa researchers regarded the vignettes’ depiction of distress as “the presence of a mental disorder” (p. 479). the indian participants suggested that distressed persons needed “love and affection” (p. 478), “family as a source of help” (p. 482), and “financial support,” (p. 478) coherent with “local views regarding the causes of mental distress, which are largely thought to be social and economic” (pp. 479-480). in contrast, the mhfa proponents reduced indian distress to mental pathology that requires healthcare and “selective referral to professional psychiatric services” (p. 482) along with “appropriately administered psychotropic medication” (p. 480). significantly, the indian study participants understood their distress as a debilitating and lifethreatening relational and economic matter, whereas the mhfa experts reduced the complexity of indian distress to symptoms of mental pathology. another mhfa study involving 176 participants (massey, brooks, burrow, & sutherland, 2010, p. 9) further illustrates how mhfa utilizes reductionism to automate and normalize psychiatrization of human distress. set within a canadian university campus, this study evaluates the effectiveness of mhfa training seminars to increase staff knowledge about mental health (massey et al., 2010). the term “mental health” directly frames distress as a mental phenomenon, a health subject interchangeable with “general mental health conditions (e.g., depression, anxiety, inability to concentrate…)” (p. 12). the study also aims to “enhance sensitivity” (p. 9) and “raise confidence” (p. 9) in staff response to distressed students. study participants are shown vignettes featuring emotional turmoil, and each vignette is “written to satisfy the diagnostic criteria for [a] particular illness…” (p. 11), demonstrating mhfa’s automatic conflation of distress with psychiatric illness. analyzing their data, the investigators conclude the following: …that the [mhfa] trained group of participants was more certain of when they were in contact with a person with a mental health condition than the untrained group and, in fact, recognized more individuals as experiencing a mental health condition. (massey et al., 2010, p. 16) this study downplays the role of contextual factors producing student distress, such as continual evaluation, or financial strain. mhfa proponents, pleased with their study findings, recommended mhfa training for all canadian university staff (massey et al., 2010, p. 22). certain versions of mhfa are less reductive than others, however, mhfa never strays from its psychiatric disciplinary underpinnings (kitchener & jorm, 2002). according to hart, jorm, kanowski, kelly, and langlands, (2009, para. 6), “the amhfa [aboriginal mhfa] course differs from the general mhfa course in recognizing the historical, cultural and political forces that have affected aboriginal mental health.” indeed, amhfa inventing mental health first aid studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 23 recognizes sociopolitical forces but ultimately maintains its foundational psychopolitical understanding of aboriginal suffering. the mhfa training seminar for aboriginal and torres strait islander people reduces aboriginal distress to mental pathology (hart et al., 2009), instead of presenting aboriginal distress as an inevitable human response to colonization, ecological devastation and genocide (barta, 2008). instead of questioning mhfa psychiatrization of aboriginal distress, the mhfa seminar for aboriginal and torres strait islanders merely advises trainees to recognize “symptoms of mental illness within their aboriginal cultural context;” the same mhfa training seminar teaches citizens to “be aware of relevant cultural factors in mental illness” (hart et al., 2009, conclusion, para. 2). critical analysis of the mhfa scholarship thus suggests mhfa founders jorm and kitchener (2011) permit superficial and strategic adaptation of mhfa course training, as “this tailoring to various national needs has contributed to the acceptability of the mhfa program in diverse countries” (jorm & kitchener, 2011, p. 809). however, jorm and kitchener (2011, p. 809) require “fidelity to the course curriculum,” ensuring psychiatry’s dominance over alternative understandings of distress. mhfa’s practice of reductionism excludes non-psy voices from participation in the production of knowledge regarding human distress (liegghio, 2013). the practice of reductionism promotes psy literacy while disregarding other literacies and narratives (costa et al., 2012). in their critique of reductionist mental health discourses, white and pike suggest: …a unified, or worse, a universal language around mental health and illness may make things appear simpler, more governable, pragmatic, and transferable, but when examined as a state-authorized regulatory practice, mhl [mental health literacy] also has the implied legitimacy to perform the social role of hegemonic training. (white & pike, 2013, p. 244) hegemonic psy training and dogmatic certainty precludes dialogue and justice (anderson, 1997; arnkil & seikkula, 2015). reductionism encourages mhfa trainees to dispense quick, confident, and standardized formulations (jensen et al., 2015) instead of supportive relationships based on shared dialogic inquiry, responsivity, reciprocity, and compassionate collaboration (anderson, 1997; shotter, 2012). determinism demonstrating a second aspect of psychocentrism, mhfa enforces psychiatrization of distress through the discursive practice of determinism (rimke, 2010, p. 97). through claims that mental illness is like any other illness – like diabetes, cancer, or kidney disease – mhfa discourses ignore the interdisciplinary critique pointing to psychiatry’s absence of bio-marker evidence and objective laboratory tests (frances, 2013; rose, 2016). instead jan nadine defehr studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 24 of acknowledging that in fact, “‘mental illness’ is an illness like no other, or indeed better not conceptualized as an illness at all” (mills, 2014, p. 27, emphasis in original), mhfa utilizes determinism to help construct mental illness as inevitable, random, and socially and politically meaningless (albee & joffe, 2004). mhfa founders, jorm and kitchener (2011, p. 808) stress the pervasiveness of mental disorder, warning that “contact with people who are affected” is inescapable: “national surveys have shown that mental illnesses are very common, so that it is inevitable that members of the public will more often have contact with people who are affected.” mental health literacy often uses simplistic numerical language to inevitabalize and scientize mental illness. the canadian mhfa training manual for adults who interact with youth (mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 1, p. 5) claim that “one person in three will experience a mental health problem at some point in their life time.” elsewhere, mhfa co-founders report, “contact with people developing a mental disorder or in a mental health crisis is almost universal” (kitchener & jorm, 2008, p. 60), and that “virtually everyone will either develop a mental disorder or have close contact with someone who does” (jorm, 2000, p. 396). determinism persuades the populace that their problems are psychiatric, and therefore their solutions must be also. determinism is particularly operative in youth mental health discourses. reproducing the deterministic conclusion that the first onset of mental illness typically occurs in childhood or adolescence – as though there cannot be any other cause of adolescent distress – mhfa echoes the central messages of other mental health literacy campaigns targeting children, adolescents, youth, young adults, and their caregivers, parents, and educators (kutcher, bagnell, & wei, 2015; mcissac, read, veugelers, & kirk, 2013; the mental health commission of canada, 2010; whitley, smith, & vaillancourt, 2013). mental health literacy campaigns, such as the jack project, mindwise campaign, mindmatters, and the school-based pathways to care (wei, kutcher, & szumilas, 2011), consume, produce, and disseminate deterministic advisements regarding the inevitability of youth mental disorder: “adolescence is the peak age of onset for mental illness, with half of all people who will ever have a mental illness experiencing their first episode prior to 18 years of age” (kelly et al., 2011, p. 2). in addition to emphasizing childhood and youth as the beginning of most mental illness, mhfa practices determinism in its assertion that mental illness diagnosis in young persons predicts future mental illness: mhfa proponents frequently warn, “early onset of mental illness is a significant predictor for future episodes ” (kelly et al., 2011, p. 2). determinism is embedded in psychiatric diagnostic manuals (dsm) because the best-case scenario in the psychiatric dsm is remission, never cure (american psychiatric association, 2013). additionally, the well-established psychiatric co-morbidity discourse further demonstrates determinism; persons diagnosed with one mental illness are inventing mental health first aid studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 25 deemed likely to meet diagnostic criteria for additional psychiatric labels (hamdi & iacono, 2014). essentialism mhfa automates psychiatrization of distress through essentialism (rimke, 2010, p. 97), a third aspect of psychocentrism. training members of the public to function as “spotters” (goffman, 1959, p. 147) of mental illness typifications essentializes others as identifiable kinds of people (hacking, 2007) with stable “entity characteristics” consisting of “this or that” (mcnamee & hosking, 2012, pp. 25-26), as inferior (mills, 2014, pp. 75-76; rimke, 2003) and as “less than ideal” (gergen, 1994, p. 149). mhfa seminars instruct trainees to match specific psychiatric labels to persons exhibiting various manifestations of distress (jorm et al., 1997; wright, jorm, harris, & mcgorry, 2007). the mhfa training question, “… what, if anything is wrong with mary/john?” (jorm et al., 1997), encourages trainees to typify distressed persons according to the classifications provided by the psychiatric dsm nosology (american psychiatry association, 2013). while mhfa training does not equip trainees to provide official diagnosis, mhfa training furthers the psychiatrization of distress by promoting psychiatrybased ways of “seeing and saying” (foucault, 1994, p. xi; mills, 2014), diagnostic “styles of thought” (marsh, 2010, p. 31; rose, 2000), and diagnostic styles of listening (anderson, 1997, p. 135), thus fostering diagnostic “sensibilities and sensitivities” (shotter, 2010, p. v). despite the stark absence of scientific bio-marker evidence for mental illness (moncrieff, 2013; rose, 2016), mental illness diagnoses apply not only to the mind but the whole person; psychiatric diagnoses are totalizing, “fully general,” (gergen, 1994, p. 150), thereby producing a deviant social identity (goffman, 1963). oblivious to the social significance of socio-political factors, the dsm classification system dismisses non-psychiatric understandings (american psychiatric association, 2013). ironically, although mhfa adopts deficitoriented, essentializing, “us-them” categorization – species talk (hacking, 2007) – mhfa paradoxically calls on citizens to accept defamatory psychiatric classifications and stop the stigma accompanying psychiatric labeling (chalmers et al., 2014). the logic of mhfa is essentialist as seen in training seminars, research programs, interventions, and scholarly articles. presentism or ahistoricism mhfa discourses also rely upon presentism or ahistoricism (rimke, 2010, p. 97), a fourth aspect of psychocentrism. bound to psychiatry’s general disregard of historical factors contributing to collective and individual distress (american psychiatric association, 2013), mhfa de-contextualizes knowledge, saying little about historical aspects of human distress. the jan nadine defehr studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 26 mhfa northern peoples webpage (mental health commission of canada, 2011) utilizes presentism, for example, by framing aboriginal despair and substance as a “mental disorder,” specifically, as “mood disorder” and “substance use disorder,” without offering any historical information for aboriginal distress. this omission is particularly poignant as canada’s colonial past is far from over (comack, deane, morrissette, & silver, 2013). similarly, in india, mhfa proponents practice ahistorism in their construction of human distress as individual mental problems instead of social problems rooted in a lethal dehumanizing history of colonization and genocide. mhfa proponents claim that indian distress is due to the lack of mental health literacy, lamenting that mental health is “a neglected issue in most developing countries” (kermode et al., 2009, p. 476). one particular mental health training program conducted by mhfa proponents in the bangalore rural district, karnataka, india, utilized a vignette describing a character named ram in order to illustrate what mental illness “looks like.” describing ram’s debilitating distress, the vignette’s narrative reports, “he used to regularly help his father work on the farm but for the past 10-15 days he has not been going to work” (armstrong et al., 2011, p. 4). the vignette describes ram’s recent isolation, his tendency to talk with himself, his suspicion of others’ malicious behavior, the time he hit his father, his refusal to eat food, and so on (p. 4). the indian seminar participants were coaxed to “name the problem” (p. 4), and “only ‘depression,’ ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘psychosis’ were considered correct responses” (p. 4). the vignette offers no acknowledgement of the personal or collective historical context of ram’s distress. the same problematic representation of ram was utilized by mhfa proponents at a training seminar in a poverty-stricken rural area of maharashtra, india (kermode et al., 2009, p. 477). once again, the mhfa discourses frame ram’s distress as psychiatric, unrelated to historical, political, and economic forces producing widespread indian farmer despair and dis-ease (kermode et al., 2009). the mhfa study evaluates indian participant understandings of distress as “limited” (kermode et al., 2009, p. 479) because “the majority of participants did not consider the problems in either of the [training] vignettes to be a ‘real illness’” (kermode et al., 2009, p. 479). mhfa’s ahistoricism complements and strengthens the psychiatrization of human distress. opposing the tenets of the global mental health movement, mills (2014, p. 36) articulates historical events as critical factors embedded in contemporary indian farmers’ distress in maharashtra, india. she points to the privatization of seed since the 1970’s, describing how new, imported hybrid varieties and more expensive, genetically modified seed replaced low-cost indigenous seed. mills (2014, p. 36) states these innovations drove up seed prices, requiring farmers to either present cash “up front” or borrow it, typically from private moneylenders. reliance on credit and debt began to drastically increase food insecurity and economic and social instability. within this inventing mental health first aid studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 27 historical economic context, suicide rates began to rise; “in 2007, more than 4000 farmers committed suicide in the state of maharashtra” (das, 2011, p. 23, cited in mills, 2014, p. 36). mills (2014, p. 38) reports that “one note from a young male farmer said: ‘[t]he cotton price has fallen to rs. 1,999 a quintal. we cannot manage with that. which is why i am giving up on my life’ (perspectives, 2009: 2).” while mills’ scholarship draws attention to lethal conditions produced by historical global power imbalances and volatile markets, mhfa proponents – considering the same farmer distress in the same region of india – by-pass long-standing historical injustices, and instead renew their commitment to improve the mental health literacy of whole indian communities, enhance awareness of the need to “access appropriate professional help when someone has a mental health problem,” and promote “knowledge about the effectiveness and affordability of evidence-based psychotropic medications” (kermode et al., 2009, p. 482). the mhfa movement also exercises ahistoricism by avoiding acknowledgement of the long history of anti-psychiatry, critical psychiatry, and critical psychology movements interrogating psychiatry (e.g., fernando, 1988; foucault, 2011; goffman, 1961; linklater, 2014; merecek & gavey, 2013; moncrieff, 2013; parker, 2014). erasing psychiatry’s historical legitimation crisis thus also strengthens global psychiatrization of distress. naturalism mhfa promotes the compulsory psychiatrization of distress through its use of naturalism (rimke, 2010, p. 97), a fifth aspect of psychocentrism. distinguishing itself from literature discussing the social construction of mental illness (gergen, 1994), mhfa naturalizes mental illness by using biomedical vocabulary such as “chemical” and “brain” (mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 3, p. 4), “symptoms,” (jorm, 2000, p. 396) and “scientific evidence” (jorm 2000, p. 398), thus creating the appearance of an illness “decided by nature” (garfinkel, 1967, p. 124; emphasis in original). drawing upon the cultural capital of science, mhfa discourses are presented as a privileged knowledge, a specialty of physical medicine where mental illness is viewed as part of the universal “natural facts of life” (garfinkel, 1967, p. 124), as though epistemological consensus prevails. the “first aid” metaphor helps naturalize mhfa while simultaneously conveying urgent need for mhfa, emphasizing the necessity of the “recognition” of mental pathology (jorm & kitchener, 2011). additionally, the rhetorical and repetitive use of the term “five basic actions” (mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 1, p. 4) gives the sense that mhfa intervention is elemental and indispensable, much like the periodic table. the rhetoric conceals the powerful psychiatric discourse implicit in mhfa. the emphasis on five basic actions also masks the complex, problematic, and potentially profound – if not harmful – jan nadine defehr studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 28 consequences and life-long implications of engaging with psychiatric expertise during a time of personal crisis (frances, 2013; moncrieff, 2013). mhfa training seminars prepare trainees to adopt roles involving “close observation” (lofland, 1967, p. 46) of people – not in the context of professional office spaces – but rather “in their natural settings” (p. 46), where mhfa providers have social access to the details of distressed persons’ lives. mhfa trainings offer vignette examples of people exhibiting human distress. each vignette offers a close account of information that would be regarded as intimate or confidential in real life; “to be close in these senses implies for the naturalist an observational methodology much after the manner of geologists, scholarly flower and bird watchers… ” (p. 47). classifying what they see up-close, mhfa practitioners appear to practice naturalism “in the tradition of darwin” (p. 45), thereby persuasively normalizing the psychiatrization of distress as “natural” and “scientific” rather than social and historical. ethnocentrism ethnocentrism (rimke, 2010, p. 97), the sixth characteristic of psychocentrism, serves to ensure mhfa’s psychiatrization of human distress. mhfa’s utilization of ethnocentrism is evident in its automated mass “rollout” (jha, kitchener, pradhan, shyangwa, & nakarmi, 2012; kitchener & jorm, 2008) of mhfa in cultures around the globe. mhfa proponents have modified some versions of mhfa (kitchener & jorm, 2008, p. 57) to suit groups deemed culturally and linguistically diverse; however, changes made can be seen as superficial since mhfa always remains faithful to psychiatric culture over any other cultural practices. rejection or poor uptake of mhfa is usually attributed to a deficiency in the so-called diverse host country. for example, mhfa practitioners discredit nepalese disinterest in mhfa by explaining, “people are hesitant…. because of ignorance … even at places where services are available, people are hesitant to access and benefit from them because of ignorance and stigma of mental illness in nepalese society” (jha et al., 2012, p. 258). mhfa proponents explain further: “local residents do not understand the benefit of seeking mental health service in time” (p. 258). additionally, and tautologically, mhfa adherents blame “poor mental health literacy” for failed reception of mhfa in nepal: “it is a known fact that if the public’s mental health literacy is poor, this hinders their acceptance of mental health care” (p. 258). similarly, mhfa proponents argue that aboriginal resistance to mhfa is due in part to errors made within aboriginal cultures, specifically, “inadequate measures to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness” (chalmers et al., 2014, p. 3). mhfa frames aboriginal peoples as inherently mentally disordered, indicating that “data” shows “inequality” between aboriginal and non-aboriginal australians’ mental health from early ages. inventing mental health first aid studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 29 aboriginal “shame” and “lack of trust” are listed as deficient cultural features impeding the uptake of mhfa (p. 2). terms such as “genocide” and “colonization” (barta, 2008) are absent in the report describing “culturally appropriate” mhfa for aboriginal or torres straight islander adolescents (chalmers et al., 2014), and instead the report uses vague, de-politicized words, such as “risk factors” (chalmers et al., 2014, p. 3), “separations in past generations” (p. 3), and “loss of land” (p.3), and claims that “young aboriginal australians are disproportionately exposed to risk factors, such as grief, trauma, loss” (p. 3). ambiguous “at-risk” and “trauma” discourses conceal why it is that some groups are more exposed to risk than others, thus diminishing the culpability of authorities and dominant settler groups. similarly, reports of aboriginal youth suicide and self-harm (chalmers et al., 2014) without specific identification of the injustices killing and harming youth make a denigrating spectacle of aboriginal anguish while bolstering the heroism of mhfa (marsh, 2010). mhfa proponents suggest aboriginal people understand mental health “within a unique cultural framework that is not necessarily complimentary to the biopsychosocial model of western medicine” (chalmers et al., 2014, pp. 2-3), implying a harmonious, “complimentary” relationship between the field of mental health and western medicine. mhfa scholarship illustrates anishinaabe scholar, rene linklater’s (2014, p. 20), assertion that western non-indigenous psy frameworks pathologize indigenous peoples’ distress. eroding indigenous approaches to distress and well-being that emphasize qualities such as relationships, spirituality, and interdependence (gergen, 1994, pp. 149-150; watters, 2010; baskin, 2011; hart, 2002), mhfa ethnocentrism psychiatrizes distress, contributing to what dutro & bien (2014, p. 26) – drawing on forter’s (2007) work – call the “mundanely catastrophic marginalization” at the root of the suffering of inferiorized social groups (rimke, 2003): there is reason to believe that in their very effort to furnish effective means of alleviating human suffering, mental health professionals simultaneously generate a network of increasing entanglements for the culture at large. such entanglements are not only self-serving for the professions, they also add exponentially to the sense of human misery. (gergen, 1994, p. 143) mhfa psychocentrism as governance in the previous sections, the concept of psychocentrism was utilized as a conceptual tool to analyze mhfa’s international psychiatrization of human distress. drawing on rimke’s (2010) conceptualization of psychocentrism, i have discussed the problems of reductionism, determinism, essentialism, presentism or ahistoricism, naturalism, and ethnocentrism as key mechanisms responsible for automating, expediting, and enforcing mhfa’s steady promotion of mental illness, “both as medical condition and social identity, as jan nadine defehr studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 30 a disease, like diabetes or heart disease” (white & pike, 2013, p. 240). more than perpetuating psychiatric imperialism, psychocentrism produced, consumed, and disseminated through mhfa discourses and practices provides a form of neoliberal governance and “uninterrupted social and moral supervision” (foucault, 2011, p. 118). considered through a sociopolitical lens, mhfa is an apparatus of neoliberal governance and social control (conrad, 1992, p. 216; conrad & schneider, 1980, pp. 178-179; moncrieff, 2008). mhfa instructs citizens to notice, manage, and direct emotional distress and disturbance to the attention of psy authorities, thereby implementing a form of governance that cannot be achieved by laws alone (moncrieff, 2008; redden, 2000; rimke, 2003). mhfa practitioners assure distressed citizens that they have real medical conditions and there are effective treatments (mental health commission of canada, 2010). psy experts diagnose, stimulate, and sedate the anguish and unrest of the masses as deemed necessary (moncrieff, 2013), thereby ensuring minimal threat to the inequitable status quo. mhfa reminds citizens of their duties to recognize their neighbours’ distress as psychiatric sickness and turn their neighbours in (moncrieff, 2008; redden, 2000). mhfa continues to reflect its original political and economic birthplace. jorm and kitchener developed and launched mhfa in australia in 2001 (jorm & kitchener, 2011). only one year previous to the emergence of australian mental health literacy (the ideological springboard for mhfa), thousands of trade union members and others invaded the australian parliament protesting the newly elected coalition government’s work place relations bill, widely regarded as an attack against persons living on subsistence incomes (fairbrother, svensen, & teicher, 1997). led by the australian council of trade unions, and propelled by australia’s reeling working class, the mass protest of august 19, 1996, signaled cumulative and widespread anger and fear (fairbrother et al., 1997; kuhn, 1993). at this time of economic reform, insecurity, and increasing economic disparity (fairbrother et al., 1997; kuhn, 1993), mhfa absorbed social problems with the aim of teaching australian citizens to read outcries of human distress as individual mental health problems requiring on-the-spot, trained-citizen assessment and intervention, followed by expert psychiatric treatment (kitchener & jorm, 2002). the institution of psychiatry emerged at the start of the industrial revolution’s massive reorganization of society according to market-driven premises and human scientific discourses (moncrieff, 2008, p. 235; rimke 2003; rimke & hunt, 2002). mhfa emerged in the late 1990s (jorm, 2000) amidst an economic context of extreme national wealth and extremely restrained public expenditure (hindness, 1998, p. 210), a context described as an australian version of “economic rationalism” otherwise recognized as “thatcherism, reaganomics, and neoliberalism” (hindness, 1998, p. 210; pusey, 1991). more than an individual intervention and referral model, and more than a manifestation of psychiatric conquest, mhfa continues to inventing mental health first aid studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 31 provide medical social control – therapeutic social control – one of the most powerful forms of social control available in modern society (conrad & schneider, 1980, pp. 178-179). conclusion this article examined mhfa’s production, consumption, and dissemination of psychocentrism as intrinsic to the global psychiatrization of human distress. emblematizing the inescapable, “compulsory ontology of pathology” articulated by marsh (2010, p. 31), the force of mhfa psychocentricity extends well beyond the benevolent offer of emergency assistance to distressed individuals. mhfa augments psychiatry’s diagnostic powers by commissioning unprecedented, citizen-led, psychiatric assessment and intervention throughout communities worldwide. recruiting members of the public to participate in psychiatrization, mhfa authorizes new, vague diagnostic practices intended to help distressed persons realize “they have a real medical condition” (mental health commission of canada, 2010, section 1, p. 4). mhfa invents new psychiatric diagnosticians – citizendiagnosticians – the thousands of international mhfa seminar graduates, each equipped to provide informal psychiatric observation, evaluation, and advice as they see fit. mhfa produces new, more reachable psychiatric patients, presuming and thereby increasing citizen availability to psychiatric contact and life-long patienthood. mhfa transforms and radically extends the psychiatric “office,” as mhfa adherents disseminate ongoing, uninvited psychiatric opinion, intervention, and referral into the “everywhere” of community life (mills, 2014; rimke & brock, 2012). with the global implementation of mhfa, no domain of society can be presumed free of psychiatric assessment; trained “eyes … circulate without being seen” (mills, 2014, p. 85). instead of turning one another into psychiatric subjects according to the mechanistic directives of mhfa, more might be gained from radically addressing the everyday social, economic, political, and historical atrocities debilitating and demeaning persons and communities. more might be gained from adopting a learner stance and “walking alongside” one another, listening and hearing, coming together to mutually determine – through genuine relationship and compassionate dialogic social inquiry – how to best live our brief and sometimes bewildering, excruciating human lives (anderson, 1997; arnkil & seikkula, 2015). as rimke suggests: when emotions are taken seriously as a form of human experience and communication, rather than as an expression of abnormality, disorder or uncivil conduct, a practical dialogue about the social effects of the dominant social and political order becomes possible. (rimke, 2010, p. 105) jan nadine defehr studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 18-35, 2016 32 the mhfa literacy campaign has spread rapidly since its inception in the early 21st century, but the analysis articulated in this essay calls for “other readings and writings of the world,” separate from the psychocentricity and “false generosity” (lankshear, 1993, pp. 102, 107; freire, 2014) of the global psychiatric aid industry. acknowledgments the author extends her gratitude to the guest editors, studies in social justice editors, and anonymous referees who offered constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. references albee, g. w., & joff, j. m. (2004). mental illness is not “an illness like any other.” the journal of primary prevention, 24(4), 419-436. american psychiatric association. (2013). diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th edition). arlington, vz: american psychiatric association. anderson, h. 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(2007). what’s in a name? is accurate recognition and labeling of mental disorders by young people associated with better helpseeking and treatment preferences? social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 42, 244-250. choi et al final before ts correspondence information: elizabeth sweeney; email: emsweeneymail@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 334-343, 2021 dispatch disability and deaf futures taeyoon choi taeyoon studios, south korea aaron labbe lucid, canada annie segarra independent artist, usa elizabeth sweeney independent artist, canada syrus marcus ware mcmaster university, canada this dispatch recounts a panel conversation on disability and d/deaf futurity that took place at the cripping the arts symposium. the artists on this panel discuss how they assert disability and d/deaf futurity in the midst of the anthropocene through their artistic activist practices. by discussing topics such as interdependence, the internet as increasing both community and the privatization of ideas, and how the arts can transform understandings of difference, these artists share their visions for the future. elizabeth sweeney: i’m going to start this panel with the words of stephen fakiyesi,1 a black visual artist based here in toronto: i think there will always be a need for individuals, groups, and most certainly artists, to imagine the world, not as it is, but as it can be. i do not lament the present order of things, rather, one of the privileges of being an artist on the peripherals, as it were, is that you have the distance to more readily perceive the status quo, and possibly challenge it. i have a pretty active imagination and faith in something greater than myself to think that even now, all things are possible. 1 see https://stephenfakiyesi.com disability & deaf futures studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 334-343, 2021 335 as we think about our futures, i am going to start off by engaging some of our active imaginations and ask you about the ways that disability arts discourse and practice often imagines or re-premises our reality – a reality that doesn’t exist yet. what are some of your visions for the future? what are some of your utopias that you’re thinking about? syrus marcus ware: when i imagine the future, a lot of different possibilities come to mind and they may not sound utopic but i’ll explain why they are. in one version of the future, we’re facing the dreaded effects of the anthropocene, we’re living off grid in small interdependent communities, and we’re figuring out how to survive on the changed – radically changed – landscape together. in other versions of the future, we’ve somehow figured out how to live in harmony with the planet. we’re living in communities that are also interdependent and interconnected. in both visions of the future, we’re free: we’re free from some of the effects of capitalism and how that impacts our lives; we are free from working and working and working and working for money and instead we’re able to make art and make love and be with each other in radical and new ways. in both versions of the future, deaf, disabled, and mad people are leading our societies. we are experts in what we will need to survive – interdependence. we know how to do it, we know how to rely on each other, we know how to show up for each other, and we end up being examples and leaders in showing the rest of the community how to live that life. in both of these futures – and perhaps one prefigures the other – i hope that we get to the place where we can all live on this planet with dignity and love. even if we have to go through a sort of post-apocalyptic bunker to get to that future where we all get to make it: racialized, disabled, mad, and deaf people are surviving and thriving. elizabeth sweeney: thank you. that’s a good way to start us off here. annie, you had mentioned to me that the future of disability activism cannot flourish without intersectionality. could take a moment to expand on that? perhaps this is a question for everyone. annie segarra: a good way to start this conversation is actually where “the future is accessible” campaign came from.2 it came directly as a reaction to the lack of accessibility and visibility for disabled activists at the first women’s march on washington. it was a direct reaction to not seeing the many disabled activists who i know were actually there. they were not visible in the media at all. a lot of disabled activists talked to me about being at the march and it not being an accessible space for them. and i thought that it was really disappointing that in a feminist space, disabled people, disabled women, non-binary – everyone – were neglected. we were not considered in 2 see “the future is accessible” campaign at https://annieelainey.tumblr.com/merch taeyoon choi, aaron labbe, annie segarra, elizabeth sweeney & syrus marcus ware studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 334-343, 2021 336 that space. so, that is why i made my own internet protest sign with “the future is accessible” on it and that sparked the t-shirts. my disability is ehlers-danlos syndrome, which is a degenerative condition that has declined my health over time and in multiple ways. so, i have the perspective of living with able-bodied privilege for most of my young life and then learning through experience about the lack of privilege that disabled people have. i also kind of had this disappointment in myself because i was a feminist and an activist as a young able-bodied person and i never considered accessibility, or anything like that. so, everything i’m working towards now is using what i’ve learned, not just from my personal experience. i’m also using my experience to open a door to everyone else and listen to my community. and i’m creating a world where being disabled doesn’t mean being treated like we’re of a lower social status. i’m creating a world where we see disabled people uplifted in media; where we’re authentically and respectfully represented in media whether in magazines and fashion, film, in the arts, in mainstream arts, in places where we’re often not represented with respect. it’s great that we have claimed our own space, but we deserve to be within mainstream spaces as well. i envision a world where the inclusion of disability in mainstream culture is not a big deal anymore. elizabeth sweeney: i like that idea as well. sometimes when we think about the future, we talk about a distant future, but i also like the idea of thinking about the futures of our bodies in our own lifetime. i think that’s a really interesting play on that notion of “the future of this body,” which is going to change and transform and move through the world and all kinds of different ways. anyone else want to jump in? aaron labbe: yeah, i can add a little bit. in a distant future, adding to what annie was saying, i imagine a space in a world where empowering knowledge is available to the people who need it. so, i remember from my personal experience, the term “mad” wasn’t available to me when i was hospitalized and incarcerated and was dealing with various challenges. i remember taking a course at ryerson university’s school of disability studies that really empowered me with this knowledge of madness narratives and disability studies in general. i thought it was a real shame that i spent the entire period of being hospitalized being labeled and defined by other people. and i think disability arts has a great opportunity to change the way disabled and mad people are defined through labels by providing people with this empowering knowledge for themselves. and i imagine a future where children and adults have the knowledge that i was given through education. elizabeth sweeney: i was recently reflecting my own experience with learning disabilities going through high school. i remember thinking: how long do we have to endure ableism? disability & deaf futures studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 334-343, 2021 337 increasingly, we see politicians talk about taxpayers instead citizens. when we premise citizens as taxpayers, emphasizing their role in the taxation process, it shifts our entitlement to rights. i wonder how this shift relates to the ways we increasingly experience culture and art through our devices, through our screens and our phones. this brings me to thinking about how technology is moving us into the digital future and impacting the way we see ourselves as artists but also our practice. taeyoon, i wonder if we could maybe start with talking a bit about your work? taeyoon choi: thank you. i wanted to start off by answering the initial question about the futures: what types of futures do we want? i’ve been thinking about non-binary futures and what does that mean. and to think about that we have to start with the binary futures and look at what binary actually means in the context of art, technology, and society at large.3 if we think about the notion of binary [see slide 1] it’s essentially zeros and ones. it’s a numbering system. it’s a form of containment, of identities and states, into two distinguished finite states. if we think about the digital, which is a term that is oftentimes used and conflated with technology, digital signals are either on or they’re off. that’s the fundamentals of computation. and we can even stretch this notion to the dialectical or the foundations of western thinking at large and the binary of true or false. i can even stretch it to the religious notions of heaven or hell. and these are all finite states to which we have subscribed. so, you’re either a man or a woman, abled or disabled. i’m interested in an unknowable future [see slide 2]. in other words, ungovernable or undescribable futures which could potentially be uncomputable as well. because if we’re thinking just within computation or digital thinking, everything is predictable. and it’s not very fun. [laughs]. it comes to the notion of a speculation rather than imagination. i’m inspired by this because a friend of mine has invited me to the wonderful world of disability studies and disability and deaf culture. this is christine sun kim [see slide 3], a sound artist based in berlin. she was born profoundly deaf and she has encouraged me to be part of deaf culture in new york city. i’ve been learning sign language and also about deaf culture. we’ve collaborated on a performance called “seven futures: imagining different types of deaf and disabled futures.” i want to show a quick video. the title of this video is “future proof.”4 there are about 100 audience members who are interacting with us. we are connecting strings that are activating wind chimes that are motorized. in this performance there are about four different languages coexisting: american sign language, 3 choi’s comments here reference slides from the slideshow he gave during this panel presentation, which can be viewed here: http://taeyoonchoi.com/writing/disability-and-deaffutures/ 4 “future proof” may be accessed at https://vimeo.com/220148573 taeyoon choi, aaron labbe, annie segarra, elizabeth sweeney & syrus marcus ware studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 334-343, 2021 338 korean sign language, english, korean, as well as computer code. this plurality of languages is one thing we think about as the future. i have been continuing this work [see slide 4] at the school for poetic computation, which is an artist-run school based in new york city that i cofounded. we work with students from around the world [see slide 5] – artists, engineers, and designers – to explore what is poetic about computing. some of the student projects are like this [see slide 6], where ishac bertran, a designer from barcelona, wanted to slow down time. he created a game that operates one clock cycle per day. here is another project [see slide 7], a collaboration between the artist and educator zach lieberman and his students: “the drawing robot exercise for signing coders.” iterations of this project have been shown in art and music venues, such as sónar festival in barcelona. central to this project was our idea to think about code itself as an artistic language. i’ve been teaching deaf and hard of hearing communities in new york and seoul how to code [see slide 8]. it’s really important to think about the accessibility of technology and i think this comes to your question about capitalism, because on the one hand, i don’t want capitalism, but i also want students to do well in capitalism and have well-paying jobs and find a language with which they can communicate. so how do we get to the future? this workshop is from korea where we were thinking about languages in code as a form of language. i worked with deaf and hard of hearing communities, people on the autism spectrum, and other parts of disability communities in korea, and their families, caretakers, and museum professionals, to run a summer school where we taught code. it was a really good experience to think about languages as common resources because a lot of participants were not able to verbalize their emotions, but they were able to communicate through code and other forms of expression. i think access to code is very much like access to physical spaces. in this image [see slide 9] we have sara hendren, who is a designer and disability scholar, interacting with wheelchair and powerchair users in korea and i’m translating between them. this is an image [see slide 10] of a museum educator in korea holding hands with hayun chung, an autism spectrum cartoon artist. 정도운 [jeong dowoon] is fantastic – super prolific – but he does not verbalize in the way that we do. and the museum educator was very empathetic and excited for them to work together but they just couldn’t find a way to engage. but through coding and performance art we can find a language that is shared and i think that is almost like a future that is present and a present that is the future as well. elizabeth sweeney: that’s so interesting because it’s like we’re thinking about artists as content creators. and also because, for many of us, there are technological devices that move our bodies or move, or verbalize, our ideas disability & deaf futures studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 334-343, 2021 339 out into the world. it’s like finding this hybrid space in which we can also engage in an artistic capacity. it’s fascinating. aaron, do you want to maybe describe or talk to us a little bit about the “lucid project”? aaron labbe: yeah, sure. the “lucid project,” like most works in my practice, involves pushing the boundaries of giving people agency to have control over their own psyche and wellbeing.5 “lucid” started out as an art installation that i built for my thesis project. it was designed to read a user’s biometric signals and create a personalized music therapy mix to help them de-escalate some sort of distress. it has now turned into a project that has grown into a company. now that it’s turned into this amazing research hub of engineers and scientists, we still describe ourselves as a company that works at the intersection of art, science and technology. art was, and is still today, a major part of “lucid.” i’m a firm believer that art moves beyond just pushing social constructs; it can also change the world in a variety of ways. the whole thing started as just a piece of art that was in a gallery and we’re now working on tools for people to use at home, to provide safety and wellbeing to people wherever they find themselves. we’re working on mobile applications – prototypes that we can bring to different spaces, maybe even therapy centers and places like that. these are the different kinds of environments that we’re working on bringing this artwork to. elizabeth sweeney: your description of your project leads me to think about it within the context of disability studies and disability arts in particular. we have this long legacy of our work being situated only within the therapeutic. and i think it’s worthwhile for us, as artists, to say, “actually i want to dig into this notion of therapy from an artistic lens.” as disability artists, we’re not defined only as “the therapized.” it’s interesting to be playing with that history. aaron labbe: yeah, for sure. it’s actually funny too. i did a kind of a test when i presented the work. at first, with my thesis presentation, i decided not to disclose my mad identity. and people saw the innovation of the work and were very inspired by it. then i did a follow up show where i presented myself as a mad artist and people were like, “wow, this must have been therapeutic for you to create,” which i thought was funny because by simply adding ‘madness’ to my name and identity, people responded by understanding my work as therapeutic. elizabeth sweeney: anyone else want to talk about art and technology? 5 to read about the “lucid project,” see https://www.thelucidproject.ca taeyoon choi, aaron labbe, annie segarra, elizabeth sweeney & syrus marcus ware studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 334-343, 2021 340 annie segarra: sure. i wanted to mention how i’m filled with gratitude for the internet every single day of my life. without the internet i wouldn’t have found my diagnosis; i would have continued to be gaslit by my doctors telling me that nothing was wrong because they didn’t know that my disease existed. it was through the internet and through community – spoonie community and chronically ill communities – talking about symptoms and exchanging that information through people on the internet, that eventually led me to finding out the name of the thing that i have, which, again, is ehlers-danlos syndrome. and being able to take that knowledge and advocate for myself in medical spaces, was so helpful. just to get that diagnosis on a piece of paper... honestly, we can’t do a lot to help me in medical spaces but having that diagnosis and not having doctors tell me, “there’s nothing wrong with you,” and acting like i’m a hypochondriac and my mobility aids are not necessary. i experience medical ableism, like, “do you really want to be using that wheelchair?” i don’t know what they wanted me to do. just pretend that i was able bodied, i guess! elizabeth sweeney: endure. annie segarra: yeah, i don’t know – it wouldn’t have worked. elizabeth sweeney: no, exactly. annie segarra: i would have just disappeared from the world because without mobility aids, i’m stuck in my bed. so, that’s essentially what they were asking of me was to just disappear because, “we don’t know what to do with you.” the community that helped me find my diagnosis was also liberating in terms of self-love and self-respect. previously, starting from 2010 to 2014, my focus and activism was in body positivity because i had recovered from an eating disorder and found a hardcore passion for body peace. i was trying to provide online content that helps other people find body peace within themselves. but because my inspiration for that work was from an eating disorder, it was very weight-focused. eventually, i found intersectionality in body positive activism in regard to, obviously, racism and ableism and how those impact how we are both oppressed and discriminated against based on our appearances. that all goes under the umbrella of how we feel in our bodies and of body activism, period. in that work, i found a movement called “cripple punk” by (rest in peace) tyler cruella.6 it was through that movement that i found a radical selfconfidence with my mobility aids, feeling totally badass using my cane and 6 to read more about “cripple punk” see https://twitter.com/annieelainey/status/933004772537438210?lang=en disability & deaf futures studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 334-343, 2021 341 my wheelchair. i found incredible friends too. we could laugh at able-bodied people who do not possibly relate to us; we could use this humour to make ourselves feel better. so, the community that i found, the diagnosis that i found, and the fact that we can use the internet to uplift our narratives and ourselves in a way that has never been done before, shapes my appreciation of the internet. we are continuously misrepresented by mainstream media and through the internet we can tell our own stories, which means that more people are getting to experience our stories and that helps to start to remove the pieces of prejudice that have been thrust upon us. elizabeth sweeney: that’s a good reminder that in the utopia of the internet, which was meant to be a democratization of content and voices. and although capitalism was like, “i need to get in on that!,” we have this potential to reclaim the internet. syrus and taeyoon, do you want to follow up on that? syrus marcus ware: yeah, as an activist, the internet has been invaluable. i’m an organizer with black lives matter toronto,7 and we are a disability justice, art-based, radical, challenging anti-black racism group that has done a lot of organizing around the killings of black mad people.8 for example, in 2016 we organized “tent city,” where we took over the police headquarters specifically to call attention to the killing of a black mad person, andrew loku. in a very performative way, we took over the 2016 pride parade.9 in particular to try to get the instruments of our torturers – the police – out of the parade. but, also to specifically demand an increase in accessible content at pride, including increasing the number of black and racialized deaf interpreters in the space. our organizing was largely fueled by social media. in “tent city” when things went really rough – the police attacked the encampment – people knew about it within seconds, which allowed people to come down and bring reinforcements. the pride actions were broadcast internationally as everybody had their phones out to watch what was happening because nobody knew how it was going to turn out. in terms of organizing around black mad people and the premature deaths that we often experience, social media has been essential. as an artist, i’ve met collaborators online. i’ve met people through sick and disabled queer and trans people of colour; that’s just been such a valuable space. i’m able to collaborate with other disabled artists in the united kingdom and south africa in ways that we would never have otherwise been able to do because of travel, because of what it means to be crip bodied and have to do a lot of travel. if i do get to travel at all it has to be infrequent 7 to read more about black lives matter toronto see https://blacklivesmatter.ca 8 see “disability justice network of ontario” at www.djno.ca 9 in 2016, black lives matter were the honoured guests at toronto’s pride march. they used this platform to make a number of demands of toronto pride to make their festival more accessible for, representative of, and safe for black queer people. taeyoon choi, aaron labbe, annie segarra, elizabeth sweeney & syrus marcus ware studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 334-343, 2021 342 because it’s just too much for me. so, you know, being able to meet as often as we can because of skype has been amazing. so, i’m also all in favour of the internet revolution. elizabeth sweeney: thank you. taeyoon? taeyoon choi: i’m gonna ruin the “internet party” for a minute. [laughter] elizabeth sweeney: we like disruption here. taeyoon choi: so, okay. the internet was initially a network of computers and databases that were hosted in academic institutions, people’s garages, or by the military. it’s been commercialized in the past 20 years to the point where it’s a feudal relationship which we have with the landlords. we’re renting servers from these massive five companies that own the internet infrastructures and our access to them. they’re the gatekeepers to our platforms; we’re never really free from their controls and terms of services. who actually reads facebook’s terms of services? not a lot of people. they are really hard to read because they’re designed so that we cannot understand them, and we don’t have authorship and ownership of these platforms. we have ownership of our content, but we can’t actually do anything if they censor us. and they’re always surveilling us to increase profits. so, what is the media or technology that we actually own and use? there are options. there are options for decentralized networks that are peer-topeer. these are open-source projects where social networks could be used to access certain communities directly. imagine more like a community radio. there’s distributed networks that are – and these are still in early phases – but there are non-commercial applications that a lot of engineers are creating because people are sincerely concerned about the privatization of the internet. and i just want to make a note that it’s privately-owned public spaces that we are using. we are always a user and a content creator, not the owner of the space. so, we can’t actually take care of it and we can’t change how codes of conduct are created for these spaces. i agree that the internet is great for mobilizing large groups of people and connecting but i think we have to know the price that we are paying for it. and i feel like the disabled community is always the last to be considered by tech companies. codes and designs are embedded with ableism and severely exclude a lot of people. i have friends who are in the engineering sector as advisors to make these products more accessible. i support their work, but i also think we need to look at the plan – plans that are not part of consuming these services. elizabeth sweeney: when we were talking about access, this really shitty thing happens when we think, “if we do this, it’ll be good for everybody.” and i think that’s super problematic because it is actually good enough if it’s disability & deaf futures studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 334-343, 2021 343 just good enough for us – you know, like it doesn’t have to be good for everybody. i remember catherine frazee, who lives in wolfville, nova scotia some of the time, and she really wanted to access this store and they refused to put a ramp in. and the shop owner’s response was, “well, it’ll be inconvenient for other people.” and she said, “but it’s inconvenient for me.” it’s actually already happening but you don’t seem to think that i matter, right? and i think that shift to, it doesn’t have to be good for everybody. it’s okay if it’s just good for us. the advocate’s dilemma: framing migrant rights in national settings studies in social justice volume 4, issue 2, 145-164, 2010 correspondence address: maria lorena cook, department of international and comparative labor, school of industrial and labor relations, cornell university, ithaca, ny 14853-3901, usa. email: mlc13@cornell.edu issn: 1911-4788 the advocate’s dilemma: framing migrant rights in national settings maria lorena cook department of international and comparative labor, school of industrial and labor relations, cornell university abstract this article identifies and explores the dilemma of migrant advocacy in advanced industrial democracies, focusing specifically on the contemporary united states. on the one hand, universal norms such as human rights, which are theoretically well suited to advancing migrants’ claims, may have little resonance within national settings. on the other hand, the debates around which immigration arguments typically turn, and the terrain on which advocates must fight, derive their values and assumptions from a nation-state framework that is self-limiting. the article analyzes the limits of human rights arguments, discusses the pitfalls of engaging in national policy debates, and details the challenges for advocates of advancing the cause of policy reform and shifting the frame for thinking about migration over the long term. introduction1 at the same time, most nations have moved toward an increasingly restrictive set of immigration policies. immigration policy has become conjoined with national and regional (in the case of the eu) security, taking its place alongside efforts to combat drug trafficking and terrorism. the securitization of immigration has bolstered national governments’ efforts to reinforce and redefine their borders just as globalization is expanding (andreas, 2009). rather than constrain nation-states’ efforts to control their border and immigration policies (hollifield, 2004; sassen, human migration today is a core feature of globalization. yet perhaps more than any other phenomenon, it also underscores the conflict and tensions between sovereignty of the nation-state and the cross-border flows characteristic of a global economy. people cross borders to escape violence and persecution, but they also move toward work, education, family, and better economic opportunities. global communications technologies—television, movies, the internet, and cell phones—facilitate the transmission of information about migration destinations and help maintain transnational social networks. richer nations with growing economies and aging populations increasingly rely on migrants to do the “dirty, dangerous, and difficult” jobs (ilo, 2002). mailto:mlc13@cornell.edu� 146 maria lorena cook studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 1999), globalization has rendered borders even more salient as barriers to the ingress and movement of non-citizens (andreas, 2003; guiraudon & lahav, 2000). in this context, the question of how to counter or reverse restrictive national policies toward migrants becomes especially difficult for migrant advocates and for migrants themselves. one approach is to draw on international human rights law and principles to underscore the notion that migrants have rights that states are obligated to uphold. framing the treatment of migrants as a human rights issue has several advantages: 1) most countries have signed on to the main conventions on human rights;2 but how effective are universal human rights framings of migration in persuading citizens to alter their support for restrictive border and immigration policies? there are political, legal, and discursive limits on the use of human rights frames, particularly in the united states. moreover, much of the contemporary debate on immigration in the us and other advanced industrial democracies revolves around arguments about security, economics, and law—arguments that are rooted in the nation-state. this gives rise to the advocate’s dilemma: on the one hand, universal norms such as human rights, which are theoretically well suited to advancing immigrants’ claims, may have little resonance within national settings; on the other hand, the debates around which immigration arguments typically turn, and the terrain on which advocates must fight, derive their values and assumptions from a nationstate framework that is self-limiting, for reasons i explain below. 2) a human rights frame supposes equal entitlement and thus equal treatment and access to basic rights protections, thereby undermining efforts to exclude migrants or to categorize non-citizens as a less deserving class of people; 3) a human rights framing implies a universalist approach, and is therefore more consistent with global migration, in which rights-bearing individuals move back and forth across national borders. international human rights law, then, would appear to be a logical structure upon which to construct an alternative justification for promoting and defending the rights of migrants within national boundaries. how does this dilemma play out for migrant advocates? what are the pitfalls of engaging in national policy debates? why are human rights approaches less effective in these debates? how do advocates navigate the discursive terrain in ways that would enable them to advance the cause of policy reform and shift the frame for thinking about migration over the long term? how to overcome the advocate’s dilemma? this article considers these questions in the context of the contemporary united states. i first review debates on the effectiveness of human rights arguments for public advocacy around immigrants’ rights and point out ways in which human rights frames are limited instruments. i look next at advocacy groups’ use of rights frames that are based on national laws, institutions, and traditions, and indicate their limitations in campaigns for unauthorized migrants. i then identify the ways in which debates over immigration have unfolded in the united states and argue that immigrant advocates are drawn into national policy debates that are largely framed by immigration opponents. i also show how states pose additional challenges for advocates through the securitized framing of migration. i conclude with a discussion of the challenges advocates must overcome if we are to advance toward a radically different way of thinking about the place of migration in our times. the advocate’s dilemma 147 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 assumptions, definitions, and normative concerns several clarifications about my focus and the assumptions i make in this paper are in order here. first, my primary focus is on advocacy on behalf of unauthorized migrants. advocates face greater framing challenges in this case, as i show below. i also look at advocacy on behalf of, rather than by, unauthorized migrants. in most cases this advocacy consists of citizens or legal residents working to change policy and secure rights and protections for non-citizens, a form of claims-making that can be considered altruistic or solidary, in contrast with migrants organizing to represent themselves (passy, 2001). i assume that the frames and strategies that each group adopts will differ (schwenken, 2005). while migrants themselves seek ways of framing that advance particular self-perceptions and identities, for which a human rights approach might be well suited, advocacy groups are primarily externally directed and seek approaches that will be effective in influencing policy and public opinion. second, i use the terms “frames” and “framing” to mean a system of values and beliefs (i.e. of meaning) and the construction thereof, that resonates with members or constituents and motivates them to action (benford & snow, 2000). the contentious politics surrounding immigration renders a focus on frames and framing processes especially relevant (tarrow, 1998, pp. 106-122). third, i look at public advocacy rather than litigation strategies. litigation strategies are aimed at persuading courts, whereas public advocacy tries to influence public opinion, politicians, and policymakers. litigation strategies are not divorced from public opinion, of course, but they are constrained (and enabled) by laws and judicial interpretation. in this way, “rights arguments” may be effective in the courts, but not yet resonate in the court of public opinion. fourth, i assume that immigration policy largely reflects public opinion, and that vocal constituents communicate these preferences to their representatives in the u.s. congress, where most immigration legislation is made. here i side with those authors who identify domestic politics as the primary determinant of immigration policy in the united states (freeman, 1995; money, 1999), rather than international factors, such as human rights norms and international trade, acting as significant constraints on states’ elaboration of immigration controls (hollifield, 2004; sassen, 1999; soysal, 1994). this is not to deny that foreign policy concerns have long played a central role in constituting immigration policy. for example, cold war influences shaped immigration policies toward central americans in the 1980s and continue to define the differences in policies aimed at cuban and haitian migrants today, and the u.s. government has stepped up its scrutiny of muslim immigrants as part of its “war on terror” in the wake of 9/ll (fernandes, 2007; koulish, 2010). however, my argument is that domestic public attitudes may also influence immigration policies in ways that often contradict market and foreign policy logics. 3 finally, i take a normative position on the ultimate goal of international migrant advocacy, which is that the right to free movement should be recognized and protected. this “ideal” is clearly not practical in the foreseeable future, nor does it necessarily represent the ideal endpoint for many advocates, who may not want to jettison immigration controls. yet in making this normative claim i am also posing the question of what it would take to move toward public acceptance of this ideal over the long term. i argue that the most commonly used discourses among 148 maria lorena cook studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 advocates are limited precisely because they do not break with the premise that states have a “right” to exclude people from their territories. i recognize that advocates will have more pragmatic goals that, if achieved, can improve the situation of unauthorized migrants significantly. however, my point is that anything short of free movement will eventually reproduce the exclusions that diminish human dignity. there is considerable discussion among political theorists about how to construct a morally defensible position on immigration and whether the exclusions of immigration policies are consistent with liberalism (carens, 1987; p. cole, 2000; walzer, 1983). similarly, theorists have shown how concepts of nation and national belonging must be rethought or even purged to begin to construct a philosophy of movement (sharma, 2006; stevens, 2009). these discussions are essential, but widespread acceptance (even by theorists) of the “need” for national borders illustrates how far we have to go in crafting an alternative vision (p. cole, 2000). my aim here is more limited: it is to highlight the tensions between advocacy discourses and this goal of free movement, and to identify the counter-framing challenges that pro-migrant advocates face. promise and limits of international human rights migrants, whether or not they are authorized by states that they enter, are entitled to recognition and protection of their basic human rights as stated in numerous international human rights documents and conventions. 4 many scholars and advocates see in international human rights frameworks the means through which to secure and protect rights for non-citizens who may otherwise find themselves excluded or adversely affected by national laws. despite his acknowledgment of significant impediments to the effective use of human rights arguments, david cole (2006) states that human rights discourse “offers tremendous normative power and potential for advancing social justice on behalf of foreign nationals in the united states” (p. 629). beth lyon (2008) shows how immigrant worker advocates in the us have begun to appeal to international law forums to seek favourable judgments and to broaden awareness of the conditions immigrant workers face. she states that “the language of international human rights can be unifying and meaningful” for immigrants. these principles, laws, and conventions enable migrant advocates to construct a universal or “global frame” for migrant rights that essentially renders borders and national immigration laws immaterial to the goal of upholding the fundamental rights of migrants as human beings and as migrants. in this way the human rights frame cuts through the nationally bounded frameworks within which most public discourse about migrants takes place. yet despite recognition of its potential, many scholars also agree that international human rights arguments still face considerable obstacles. in the united states, immigrant advocates rarely use international human rights arguments in their domestic work or in the courts (lyon, 2008, p. 40). this is due in part to scepticism about human rights and to constraints on the courts’ interpretation of the constitutionality of immigration laws (d. cole, 2006, p. 629).5 in the international arena, states generally remain impervious to human rights violation charges, especially in the area of unauthorized migration. this is so for several reasons. the advocate’s dilemma 149 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 international human rights law with regard to migration remains relatively weak and cedes to states’ sovereign power to restrict access to their territory. although international covenants stipulate humane treatment of persons regardless of citizenship status, they do not impose obligations on states to accept non-citizens or to provide them with access to basic rights (dauvergne, 2005). legal systems are also still rooted in national institutions, law, and politics, which are normally oriented around rights of citizens. as catherine dauvergne (2008) notes in making people illegal, “human rights arguments have worked poorly for those without a legal right to be present. it has proven remarkably difficult to separate a legal right to be present within a state from a right to simply ‘be’” (2008). advanced industrial democracies that violate rights are also less vulnerable to international pressure or condemnation than are poorer nations. no rich country has ratified the international convention on the rights of migrant workers and their families, whereas most developing (and migrant-sending) countries have (yau, 2005). in the realm of unauthorized migration, moreover, wealthier countries have converged in their more restrictive policies, leaving few outside of this group able to criticize them on human rights grounds. another difficulty with human rights discourses is that they often appear abstract, especially in the absence of effective enforcement in international forums (d. cole, 2006, p. 632; dauvergne, 2008). they also tend to be highly legalistic and technical (elias, 2008, p. 296), and fail to elicit responses from mass publics in ways that could be politically effective. social movement scholars (benford & snow, 2000), cultural sociologists (lamont & thevenot, 2000) and linguists (lakoff, hazen, & dean, 2004; lakoff & ferguson, 2006) all note the importance of “resonance” with constituents’ cultural context to enable mobilization around an issue. despite the global advance of human rights norms, however, international human rights discourses still lack resonance in many advanced liberal democracies, especially in the united states. finally, some scholars have noted the problematic character of “mainstream” human rights discourses because they tend to ignore inequalities in access to rights that derive from economics and power relations, which have gendered implications, among other consequences (basok, 2009; elias, 2008, p. 285). these reservations about human rights discourses have led some scholars to distinguish between juridical and sociological notions of rights, in which the former represents a more traditional, legalistic view and the latter stresses the political process of identifying and claiming rights within specific social struggles rather than through law and legal institutions (grugel & piper, 2007, pp. 18 & 32; merry, 2003). while this may be a promising way to think about the liberating possibilities of “rights talk” for migrants themselves, i argue that human rights discourses in general are less effective today in persuading publics of the rights of undocumented or irregular migrants to move or remain in a country where they lack status. human rights discourses fall short on legalistic grounds, because of the weakness of international law protections for non-status migrants, and in generating cultural resonance with citizens, because of the emotional power of competing, national frames for viewing migration. 150 maria lorena cook studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 national rights frames in u.s. immigrant advocacy in his report to the human rights council of the un general assembly, dr. jorge bustamante, the special rapporteur for migration, concluded that “the united states has failed to adhere to its international obligations to make the human rights of the 37.5 million migrants living in the country…a national priority, using a comprehensive and coordinated national policy based on clear international obligations” (bustamante, 2008). the report argued that the us was violating international law and standards as found in the international covenant on civil and political rights (iccpr), 6 was this a missed opportunity, the result of inefficient dissemination by advocacy groups? or did this omission reflect the general weakness of human rights arguments in the united states? a review of the websites of eight national immigrant advocacy organizations in the united states showed that most of these advocacy groups employed a rights-based discourse in at least some part of their public communications. the universal declaration of human rights, and the convention and the protocol relating to the status of refugees. despite the report’s source and its hard-hitting criticism, it garnered only limited headlines in the united states. although two national advocacy organizations, the american civil liberties union (aclu) and the national network for immigrant and refugee rights (nirr), coordinated the special rapporteur’s visit (lyon, 2008, p. 38), most advocacy groups did not highlight the document in their campaigns. indeed, many immigrant advocates seemed unaware of its existence. 7 references to human rights, however, tended to be vague and disconnected from specific international conventions. 8 more often rights were defined in national-legal terms. groups framed their advocacy in terms of workers’ rights, civil rights, “legal rights,” and constitutional rights. 9 such national rights frames arguably resonate more in the united states than do international rights claims. for example, civil rights constitutes a powerful “master frame” for social movements in the us, since it draws upon the civil rights struggles among african americans and other minority groups in the united states (snow & benford, 1992, p. 145). moreover, the power of national rights approaches resides in the implicit claim that immigrants are entitled to the same rights and protections as u.s. citizens, and that the violation of these rights in the case of immigrants may redound upon citizens. but civil and constitutional rights frames may not always work for noncitizens, since the law does not entitle them to equal treatment and equal protection in all cases. the extension of these rights claims to the undocumented is even more difficult. as bosniak (2000) notes, citizenship is typically defined in opposition to alienage. in this way, frames that advance rights based on national laws are limited in that they ultimately rely on insider/outsider, citizen/alien distinctions. civil rights were stressed by five of the eight groups reviewed, whereas legal advocacy groups, such as the american civil liberties union and the national immigration law center, emphasized constitutional rights. this is not to say that there are no areas in which citizenship or immigration status do not matter. some legal rights, protections, and entitlements in the us today apply equally to citizens and non-citizens, legal or otherwise. this is the case with some constitutional rights, access to public k-12 education, and labour rights to the extent that these are protected in u.s. labour law (d. cole, 2006; lyon, 2008). advocacy the advocate’s dilemma 151 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 groups can focus on realizing those rights to which even the undocumented are entitled by law by virtue of their presence in the territory or their status as a worker. nonetheless, even here legal protections for immigrants have been eroded as the enforcement climate in the us has hardened. the best example of this in the area of workers’ rights is the u.s. supreme court’s 2002 decision in the case of hoffman plastic compounds v. national labor relations board, in which the court determined that workers’ undocumented immigration status precluded them from receiving back pay as a remedy in cases of violations of their right to engage in union activity or in cases of workplace discrimination. the argument of the majority of justices was that lending full protection to undocumented workers would encourage illegal immigration (lyon, 2008, p. 29). federal and state governments have passed laws in recent years that further circumscribe non-citizens’ rights by limiting their access to welfare programs, employment rights, and procedural rights such as due process. the shortcomings of rights framings for migrants have been further noted by a number of scholars, both in the united states and in other countries. statham and mynott (2002) show that framing issues in terms of racial politics and anti-racism resonated better in britain than did using migrant rights frames. fujiwara (2005) argues that humanitarian reasoning provided an effective counter-framing strategy to combat laws that made non-citizens ineligible for public benefits in oregon, despite an initial effort to campaign under the banner of “immigrant rights are human rights.” schwenken (2005) examines how european advocates framed migrant domestic workers’ issues in terms of combating human trafficking in order to gain access to policymakers, even while migrant domestic workers themselves preferred to push the “workers’ rights” frame. in each of these cases, “rights talk” did not resonate with media, officials, and the broader public as much as did other rationales, such as racism, aid to the elderly and the disabled, and domestic slavery. rightsbased discourses, while perhaps consistent with long-term goals of advocates (and migrants), were often insufficient for achieving specific gains in real campaigns. the evolution of u.s. immigration policies in the 2000s the history of immigration in the united states is replete with examples of restrictive policies and nativist reactions against newcomers (nevins, 2002; ngai, 2006). the present wave of anti-immigrant sentiment and immigration restriction emerged in california with the 1994 passage of proposition 187, a restrictive measure that would have, among other things, required teachers and health care workers to report undocumented immigrants using their services. although proposition 187 did not survive a court challenge, other state and local initiatives would later multiply across the country, especially in the first decade of the new century (moser, 2006). at the same time that u.s., mexican, and canadian authorities celebrated the cross-border flow of trade and capital with the signing of the north american free trade agreement, the u.s. government redoubled its efforts at boundary enforcement on the us-mexico border (nevins, 2002). in 1994 the u.s. attorney general announced an enforcement initiative designed to “shut down the traditional corridors for the flow of illegal immigration along the southwest border” (u.s. gao, 152 maria lorena cook studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 2006, pp. 6-7). the strategy called for increasing control of the border through the addition of personnel and technology in order to make border crossings more costly and difficult. as urban areas came under control, migrants would be diverted to more remote areas where they could be detected and apprehended by border patrol more easily and where the difficult terrain of mountains, rivers, and deserts would act as a deterrent. the result of this initiative, called the southwest border strategy, was a redirection of the migrant flow toward eastern california and the sonora desert in arizona, continued crossing attempts, and an increase in border-crossing deaths due to exposure (cornelius & lewis, 2007; nevins, 2008). in the wake of the september 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the united states, immigration became increasingly tied to national security (koulish, 2010; nguyen, 2005). the reorganization of border enforcement and immigration under the department of homeland security in 2003; the stepped-up enforcement at the border in the form of a greater number of border patrol agents, national guard deployment, proposed construction of a 700-mile border fence, and use of virtual technology (andreas, 2009, pp. 156-158; koulish, 2010; u.s. gao, 2009); vigilante initiatives such as the minutemen; and media attention, as in cnn’s lou dobbs’ “broken borders” series (chavez, 2008), all reinforced the notion that borders needed to be “secured.” working through the department of homeland security, the administrations of george w. bush (2001-2009) and barack obama (2009-2013) concentrated on enforcing existing laws and increased the financial and human resources that made it possible for immigration and customs enforcement (ice) to expand its apprehension of immigrants slated for deportation. in 2006, ice began a series of strategically targeted workplace raids. several thousand immigrants were arrested, detained, and deported in these raids. deportations increased each year: from 288,663 individuals in fy 2007 to a record 387,790 in fy 2009, a five percent increase over the fy 2008 total of 369,221 deportations (hsu & aizenman, 2010; park, 2008). under its national fugitive operations program, ice began in 2003 to round up “criminal” and “fugitive aliens. 10 the scale and speed with which these enforcement measures were enacted in a relatively short period made it difficult to counter them with any large or effective campaign. despite polls indicating that most americans supported immigration reform (doherty, 2007), politicians from both parties continued to resist legalization for undocumented immigrants. the u.s. congress repeatedly failed to pass immigration reform, leaving unaddressed the question of what to do about 12 million undocumented immigrants. immigration reform remained on the back burner well into the second year of president obama’s administration. moreover, the obama administration retained, and in some cases, escalated many of the enforcement initiatives begun in the bush administration, such as the 287(g) program of collaboration between local law enforcement and immigration authorities, detention and deportation policies, and border security, including the deployment of 1,200 national guard troops (archibold, 2010b; preston, 2009). this included individuals whose actions ranged from serving out a jail term for homicide or armed robbery to failure to obey a deportation order; many “non-fugitive” immigrants were also apprehended at home, at parking lots, at train and bus stations, and at traffic stops (mendelson, strom, & wishnie, 2009). nearly 380,000 immigrants were held in administrative detention in 2009, another record (detention watch network, 2010). the advocate’s dilemma 153 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 states and municipalities continued to forge immigration-related initiatives despite the federal government’s jurisdiction over immigration matters. the most contentious example to date of a state initiative on this matter was sb 1070, a bill approved by the arizona legislature and signed into law by the governor in april, 2010.11 among other immigration-related measures, the bill called on law enforcement to check immigration status (archibold, 2010a). polls taken shortly after the passage of arizona’s controversial immigration law showed that a majority of americans supported it (pew research center, 2010). within months of the law’s passage, at least twenty states were preparing their own versions of the arizona initiative (miller, 2010). nativist framings of immigration as this brief overview of recent immigration policy indicates, nativists have largely defined the debate and agenda for immigration in the us in the last few years (barry, 2008b; lakoff & ferguson, 2006, p. 6). nativism as used here refers to the expression and exhibition of a preference for u.s. citizens solely because they are “native” (de genova, 2005, pp. 60-61). according to de genova (2005), nativism is not a preoccupation with the foreignness of migrants or of internal minorities as much as it is a promotion of the priority of u.s. citizens. in this way there can be nativists of the right and of the left, with the latter often adopting racial justice positions favouring native minorities (p. 61). indeed, racist attitudes and expressions against immigrants may be a manifestation of nationalist practices, of the desire to maintain an “imagined privileged relation” between an equally imagined race, ethnicity, or culture and a particular national space (hage, 1998, pp. 28 & 38; stevens, 2009). in this way, “pro-immigrant” expressions of tolerance for ethnic or racial “diversity,” as in official discourses of multiculturalism, can also constitute racialized ways of managing national space by those who see themselves as its rightful inhabitants (hage, 1998). nativists have framed the debate in the us through a combination of website appeals by lobby groups (numbers usa), 12 what made the nativists’ voice on the immigration issue so powerful, especially in the face of similar resolve on the part of immigrants and immigrant rights advocates, popular radio talk shows (e.g., rush limbaugh), and television “news” (lou dobbs on cnn; fox news). nativists’ domination of local media outlets and their ability to organize at the grassroots have shifted the national debate in an increasingly conservative direction. republicans and democrats who initially supported immigration reform have become more cautious or have become restrictionists themselves, as in the case of republican senator john mccain, a former co-sponsor of a comprehensive immigration reform bill with democratic senator edward kennedy (goldman, 2010). those who were earlier marginalized as extreme have moved to the mainstream, as former u.s. republican representative tom tancredo’s case shows (anti-defamation league, 2007). reflecting this rightward shift, the tenor of the 2007-08 presidential primary campaign debates was conservative on immigration. even when democrats (and obama) talked about the legalization of 12 million undocumented immigrants, they were careful to avoid the term “amnesty,” stressed the need to “get in line,” and affirmed their strong support for “securing our borders” as a first step. 154 maria lorena cook studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 as shown in the 2006 immigrant rights marches (bada, fox, & selee 2006)? immigration restrictionists drew upon a combination of economic, security, and legal arguments to stir anxiety and build on insecurities in sectors of the population (lakoff & ferguson, 2006; de genova, 2005). economic arguments are not new and have long been tied to concerns over the impact of trade and the restructuring of industry and work in the us. many economic arguments also reflect a class division between those who see their work or wages affected by the presence of immigrants and those who see advantages to employers and consumers because of the ability to rely on cheap labour. even though the latest wave of nativism began during a period of relative economic prosperity, the recent economic crisis and unemployment in the us have lent even more force to these arguments. for example, two of the largest immigration-restrictionist groups, federation for american immigration reform (fair) and numbers usa, have positioned themselves on the side of “citizen workers” during the economic crisis, arguing that high immigration undermines american workers (barry, 2008b). although security issues have long been entangled with immigration debates, in the first decade of the 21st century security discourse came to occupy an especially important place in these debates. in the post-9/ll environment, nativists and others seized upon border security as a symbol of the government’s failure to protect the nation. politicians used security arguments to rationalize both the buildup of national border security and the extension of immigration enforcement throughout the country (koulish, 2010). this concern with national security overlapped with a growing insecurity about the changes wrought by immigration, especially in “new destination” areas of the country, such as southern states that had previously seen little immigration from mexico and central america (zúñiga & hernández-león, 2005). this insecurity was expressed as a problem of costs to communities (in the form of taxes, use of education and health services, and overcrowded housing), but it was also seen as a cultural threat. the presence of ethnically different people in communities that had long been black and/or white; the encroachment of spanish in stores, signs, radio and television; and the fear that “assimilation” was unlikely to occur all contributed to this sense of threat (chavez, 2008; huntington, 2004). in this way, national security became the means by which to legitimize concerns about cultural threat that might otherwise invite accusations of racism. focusing on illegality played a similar legitimating role. “what part of illegal don’t you understand?” and “illegal is illegal, period!” were popular retorts to any discussion of immigration reform or of humane treatment for unauthorized immigrants. as lakoff and ferguson (2006) note, “‘illegal alien’ not only stresses criminality, but stresses otherness” (p. 4). stressing the illegality of immigrants led to calls for punishment via their detention and deportation; denial of access to services, benefits, or assistance of any kind; and rejection of policies that would “forgive” past transgressions through legalization of status. as nevins (2002, p. 121) points out, “the law” in the united states serves as a powerful ideological construct dividing good from evil. in this context, framing anti-immigration sentiments as opposition to illegality and support for rule of law makes such sentiments seem more legitimate. the advocate’s dilemma 155 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 securitization of immigration: framing by states this discussion of framing has so far focused on the role of nativist groups in the us. but a growing literature on securitization suggests that states also engage in framings around immigration. indeed, immigration is one area where states can reassert their national sovereignty under globalization. the state’s authority and power are most clearly manifested in, and symbolized by, its border control policies. securitizing migration leads states to adopt certain policy tools. in particular, states expand their use of “techniques of policing” applied to border security (andreas, 2003). this can take the form of high-tech surveillance systems, increases in funding and personnel destined to border security, and related policies such as expanded detention, expedited removal, and the externalization of borders. states also securitize migration through discursive means, by engaging in “insecurity framing” (huysmans, 2006, p. 4). according to huysmans (2006): securitizing immigration and asylum constructs political trust, loyalty and identity through the distribution of fear and an intensification of alienation. it is a peculiar process of constitution of a political community of the established that seeks to secure unity and identity by instituting existential insecurity (emphasis mine). (p. 47) this mobilization of fear and institution of insecurity are key components of the securitization of migration. both are accomplished by “instituting credible claims” that migrants are a “danger, risk, or threat” to the survival of political units, and by conveying a sense of urgency or crisis (huysmans, 2006, pp. 4 & 47). as hage (1998) notes, this process plays on a “trauma resulting from a fear of losing...one’s anchorage in the nation” (pp. 23-24). this framing of migration also draws a boundary around the political community and privileges this community over migrants, outsiders, and foreigners in the allocation of protection and rights. likewise, it creates distance between members of the community and those migrants, outsiders, and foreigners. securitizing migration therefore makes ample political sense for states in terms of symbolic political value, the assertion of national sovereignty, and the political payoff of fear, such as votes for those who advocate border security. while the material dimensions of border security—the border militarization and surveillance technology—may primarily affect non-citizens, the discursive elements can create fear and so generate acceptance of these policies among citizens. citizens who are immigrant advocates, however, may find themselves confronting both material and discursive dimensions of securitization head on. border security policies, heightened surveillance, and laws that criminalize aid to migrants can make advocates the target of surveillance and prosecution and restrict the resources they need to continue their advocacy. the state’s insecurity framing of migration can make it even harder for advocates to influence public opinion and to devise effective counter-framing strategies. in particular, securitization presents advocates with the difficult challenge of reframing migration out of the security discourse of the state, a task that requires advocates to effectively displace the fear and insecurity that has settled around immigration. 156 maria lorena cook studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 advocates fight back? engaging national policy frames as noted above, most immigration debates in the us in the 2000s are centered on three dominant discourses: economics, security, and law. all three begin and end with the nation as the primary reference point, and all three are employed by opponents of unauthorized migration. migrant advocates are drawn into these dominant ways of framing migration in their efforts to correct, counter, or challenge opponents’ arguments. this has the advantage of using language that is intelligible to the majority of citizens, but it also poses several fundamental disadvantages for advocates. first, all three discourses limit one’s ability to draw on universal (not national citizenship-based) frames, including human rights. engaging with these discourses, even when positing an inclusive national frame against the exclusionary framing of nativists, weakens advocates’ ability to pose more lasting and far-reaching alternatives to contemporary approaches to illegal migration, because these would require breaking with the “nationalist commonsense” (de genova, 2005). second, the source of power in nativist arguments lies in their ability to stir citizens’ feelings of fear and insecurity (lakoff & ferguson, 2006). when advocates diminish those concerns or set them aside, they are less likely to succeed in re-framing the way the public views the issues. this presents a dilemma for migrant advocates: they either talk past the majority of citizens, or else they are forced to accept the nationally bounded terms of the debates, putting them in a weaker position vis-à-vis their critics. advocates’ message needs to resonate: it needs to speak to the values, concerns, and fears of the majority without succumbing to the same terms of reference as the dominant anti-migration frames. the difficulties of this task can be seen in the following examples. much of the debate in the united states has focused on costs that undocumented migrants impose on public services, or on their impact on wage levels in low-skilled jobs. migrant advocates may take on these arguments via myth-combating or truth strategies, in which they point to studies and facts that counter the claims of immigration opponents. for instance, the mexican-american legal defense and educational fund, maldef, has set up a website called “truth in immigration,” whose mission is to rebut legal and factual inaccuracies about immigrants and latinos. 13 another difficulty is that assertions that “immigrants take american jobs” or that they lower wages often require complex economic counter-arguments. these may focus on macro-economic or industry studies that show a limited cost burden or impact on wages, or a dynamic effect on employment. yet such studies are frequently posed against anecdotal “evidence,” intuitive “folk economics,” and oft to rebut myths with facts is an essential task. however, advocates risk getting pulled into point-by-point disputations of restrictionists’ claims or “cost arguments” (bosniak, 1997), where the relative merits of the pro-migrant position hinge on the costs “balancing out.” if it then turns out that undocumented immigrants “cost” more than they “contribute,” advocates are forced to abandon their main line of defence. moreover, a disbelief of facts or “fact resistance” tends to operate in the securitized setting of immigration. dauvergne notes (2008, pp. 99-100), “[f]act resistance is important because there is no obvious way to counter it ...”. an advocacy based on correcting the facts, she continues, “cannot be the entire strategy” (dauvergne, 2008, p. 100). the advocate’s dilemma 157 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 repeated claims in the media, which prove powerful despite their limited reliance on facts. moreover, existing economic studies lend support to different sides of the immigration debate (lowenstein, 2006). indeed, immigration opponents mobilize their own reports, studies, polls, and “facts” to sustain their positions (barry, 2008b). for example, in 2007 a report written by staffers at the conservative heritage foundation made headlines and was widely cited for stating that the total “tax burden” for the u.s. taxpayer of “low-skilled” immigrant households was a whopping us$2.2 trillion over the lifetime of those households (rector, kim, & watkins, 2007). countering these claims often means that advocates risk coming off as elitist. they can appear to condone cheap labour and, in this way, share the pro-business or proemployer position (barry, 2005). to be sure, many labour union advocates present a more sophisticated position that both supports working immigrants and calls for better enforcement of labour laws, including the right to join unions, to the benefit of all workers. but this is not a simple argument that lends itself to sound bites, nor is it widely understood or accepted, especially as labour rights claims face their own obstacles in gaining broader acceptance in u.s. society and politics (compa, 2010). one common response to the problem of appearing to side with employers has been to assert that employers should be punished for hiring undocumented immigrant workers. this position also serves to highlight the hypocrisy of u.s. policy, where employers continue to hire undocumented workers while little is done to enforce this component of u.s. immigration law. the problem with this position for immigrant advocates, however, is that once worksite enforcement is adopted more systematically (as in recent years), advocates are left with little grounds on which to claim that undocumented migrants still deserve to migrate for work, regardless of whether or not reasonable and practical legal pathways have yet been adopted. in other words, this is not a position that allows one to make a broader claim based on the rights of migrants to mobility in search of work. tom barry writes incisively about the difficult position that immigrant advocates find themselves in because their support for immigrants in the labour market reads as hostile to the american worker. he urges advocates to engage the economics debate: …[a]dvocates will need to start explaining how [a pathway to citizenship] will serve the common good. whenever they call for reform, they must tell us how immigrants boost the economy, don’t lower the net number of jobs available to citizens, and will increase their contributions to economy and society once legalized. (barry, 2008a) similarly, lakoff and ferguson (2006) argue that a “frame not taken” by progressives in the immigration debate is to highlight the benefits of immigrants. but they are referring to a u.s. consumer lifestyle that has come to rely on low-wage labour: “cheap labour increases ‘productivity’ and profits for employers, and it permits a cheap lifestyle for consumers who get low prices because of cheap labour. but these are not seen as ‘problems.’ they are benefits” (lakoff & ferguson, 2006, p. 6). these two positions, both held out by analysts who are sympathetic to immigration advocates, illustrate the divergent views within this camp and signal the counterframing challenges posed by the economic arguments of immigration restrictionists. moreover, they also highlight another shortcoming of many national-frame debates, 158 maria lorena cook studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 which is that advocates are often compelled to show immigrants’ “contributions” and “worthiness” to the national economy or society. this discourse of worth and deservedness is a long way from a universal human rights framing, which presumably would not distinguish among immigrants to determine whether some were more or less deserving of human rights. immigration reform proposals in the u.s. congress are full of just such distinctions. for instance, the development, relief, and education for alien minors act (dream act) that would provide legalization and a conditional path toward citizenship for a subset of young people, states as one of its conditions that eligible minors show “good moral character” and worthiness either through attendance at an institution of higher education or military service. most advocates and immigrant groups support the dream act and many work to ensure its passage. however, few discuss how the act would fail to help those unauthorized youth who satisfy the threshold requirement of entering the us as minors but commit crimes or minor offenses, drop out of school, refuse to join the military, or simply go to work after graduating from high school (batalova & mchugh, 2010). this example highlights the problem of national frames that are built on conditions and exclusions. immigrants’ basic rights –to security, education, and work—are recognized based on national assessments of value, worthiness, and contributions, not on the basis of their condition as human beings. immigrant advocates are at a similar disadvantage in taking on the securitymigration nexus. in the years following september 11, 2001, it has become more difficult to dismiss security as a rationale for policies aimed at hardening and thickening borders or at monitoring and restricting movement of non-citizens (fernandes, 2007; nguyen, 2005). there is broad acceptance of the idea that “border security” is a useful way to monitor terrorist threats, even as scepticism about the effectiveness of a border fence is also widespread. this concern with security permits advocates to argue in favour of legalization programs for the undocumented that would provide security checks and move people “out of the shadows.” what is striking, however, is how unpersuasive those arguments have been in the national public debate and in the recent immigration reform discussions in congress. this is due in large part to a third powerful way of framing the undocumented immigration issue in the us, which is to focus on its illegality. proposals to legalize undocumented immigrants are often met with the argument that legalization rewards illegal behaviour and will only beget more illegal activity by encouraging unauthorized migration. advocates who wish to respond to this point must diminish, if not dismiss, the importance of the illegality claim. for instance, advocates can point out that unauthorized border crossing is a misdemeanour and that unlawful presence is a civil violation (garcia, 2006). in other words, these are not the serious crimes that restrictionists claim are perpetuated by migrants. alternatively, advocates can highlight the hypocrisy of the immigration policy, pointing to the lack of enforcement on the demand side, as noted above. or they can stress the contingency of the law and especially, of borders, and discuss how u.s. policies themselves have “manufactured illegality” (de genova, 2005; nevins, 2002). but these are complex and difficult arguments, hard to make and harder to diffuse as a popular message. appealing to pragmatism while conceding the unlawful means of entry or overstay of immigrants–addressing the “reality” of 12 million undocumented people in our midst—has also failed so far in the us. this appeal comes off as a cynical and the advocate’s dilemma 159 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 morally inferior argument against the “principled” stance of restrictionists pushing the legality claim. even proponents of an immigration reform that includes legalization qualify this process in conditional and cautionary terms. they seldom raise the point that legal immigration is not an option for most poor workers who wish to come to the us to work. rather, proposals have called for immigrants to undergo “criminal background checks,” pay a “fine,” and “get at the end of the line” behind all of those who have applied legally and are waiting “patiently” (indeed, many for over a decade) to get their green cards. this conditionality only reinforces opponents’ illegality frame. another difficulty is that advocates may also find themselves divided on many of the claims they advance. for example, groups that have long been critical of free trade because of the presumed loss of jobs for “american workers” may find it especially difficult to make economic arguments in support of immigrant workers (and especially, undocumented workers) taking up employment in the us. this is one reason why so much is made of the idea that immigrants take work that no americans want to do, or why “safeguards” are often built into foreign worker hiring programs (as in the h-2a visa program) to ensure that american workers are given the chance to apply first. 14 as nicholas de genova (2005) points out: in spite of the fact that capitalism has been a thoroughly global affair since its inception and although there is effectively only one world economy, liberal nativist arguments consistently, stubbornly assess the case within a narrowly nationalist conceptual framework premised upon the coherence of a self-contained “national economy.” (p. 74) another potent if debatable position holds that immigrant workers have affected the job opportunities and lowered the wages of working-class african americans, a claim supported by some economic studies (de genova, 2005; lakoff & ferguson, 2006). although other economists have disputed these studies, the issue remains a difficult one for immigrant advocates to address head on. this is because of the risk of appearing to dismiss what is a historically sensitive and racially charged theme in the us (pulido, 2007), but also because many “left nativists” share the thesis that migrants displace african americans in the labour market and that this issue should command priority (de genova, 2005, pp. 74 & 77). divisions among advocates occur not only in the arena of economic arguments but in debates over legality as well. one reason why the new sanctuary movement15 in sum, advocates may counter restrictionists’ assertions, but these counter-claims often force them onto slippery terrain. advocates may be drawn into point-by-point disputations of restrictionist claims or “cost arguments”, or they may try to diminish has seen limited support on the left is because many people are ambivalent about protecting someone who has broken the law through illegal entry and unlawful presence. an article in the nation reflected this ambivalence toward supporting sanctuary for “economic migrants” as opposed to political refugees (abramsky, 2008). similarly, faith-based communities are divided on what to do about the undocumented. whereas many see a moral imperative in criticizing u.s. policy and in helping the undocumented, others point to biblical passages signalling the importance of obeying the “laws of man” on earth and condemn actions that circumvent or ignore these laws (bobo, 2007). 160 maria lorena cook studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 or dismiss issues that are emotionally resonant and therefore powerful, such as notions of legality, security, as well as cultural and economic threat. conclusion i have argued here that given the global occurrence of migration and its links to globalization, it makes sense for migrant advocates to base their campaigns and actions on a “global frame”: human rights and international law and standards applied to migrants. yet because national legislation, national judicial systems, and national sovereignty still play a central role in determining immigration policy, international human rights law is a limited instrument for use in seeking rights for unauthorized migrants. in most restrictive immigration policy environments, moreover, arguments about economics, security, and law articulated within a national framework tend to prevail. advocates employing a global frame may find themselves talking past the mass publics they want to influence and unable to counter their opponents effectively. yet the advocates’ dilemma is that those who tackle these arguments head on may find themselves trapped within a national paradigm and unable to lay the discursive groundwork for a significant shift in the way the public views unauthorized migrants. how have advocacy groups handled this dilemma? in the united states international human rights as a basis for policy-making has had little resonance either among policymakers or the public. advocates have mostly tried to argue within nationally bounded frames to pursue rights claims and to address restrictive arguments about migration based on economics, security, and legality. however, these approaches have failed to produce the kind of mobilization and political pressure that change policy and move public opinion. more importantly, they are based upon notions of national community that rely on distinctions that invariably exclude (some) migrants and support immigration controls. in this way, these nationally based approaches fall short of what is needed to advance toward widespread acceptance of migration itself as a right. those writing from a securitization perspective argue that states gain from mobilizing fear and insecurity, which suggests that as long as nation-states persist, the “politics of fear” are likely to remain important in constituting the nation, hardly a hospitable scenario for immigrants (huysmans, 2006). yet the securitization perspective also offers insights for a strategy on advancing migrants’ rights. it suggests that the main obstacle to overcome for migrant advocates is not the absence of information or poor dissemination of facts regarding immigrants’ circumstances and contributions to the nation. rather, the main challenge for advocates is to displace the sources of fear and anxiety about non-citizens. in elaborating this strategy, countering myths with facts or truth is important. yet advocates have mostly been unable to place these facts within a new frame or revisioning of societies that both builds on universal values and resonates with the broader public. the work of re-framing needs to pay attention to the emotional power generated by opponents’ frames that stir and explain anxieties. at the same time, it must lay the groundwork for a transformative vision of migration, one that is ultimately at odds with our nationalist common sense. the advocate’s dilemma 161 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 notes 1 this is a revised version of a paper originally prepared for the global studies association meetings in new york city in june 2008. i thank tanya basok, jane berger, marya besharov, ileen devault, gallya lahav, risa lieberwitz, verónica martínez-matsuda, michele williams, and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. raymond hedaya provided research assistance. 2 a notable exception is the international convention on the protection of the rights of all migrant workers and members of their families. this convention has not been ratified by any of the migrant-receiving states in the global north, yet all major migrant-producing states have ratified it. 3 for instance, in recent years the number of worksite raids has increased in the us, including those taking place in agriculture at harvest time, and most employers’ organizations have supported the passage of comprehensive immigration reform that would legalize undocumented immigrant populations in the us and facilitate legal hiring of foreign workers. the u.s. department of justice also recently cited foreign policy concerns in its challenge of the arizona law, sb 1070, which has generated diplomatic tensions with mexico and other latin american countries (mckinley, 2010). 4 these include the international covenant on civil and political rights (iccpr); the international covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights; the universal declaration of human rights; the 1951 refugee convention; the united nations international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination and the international convention on the protection of the rights of all migrant workers and members of their families; and the international labour organization’s convention concerning migrations in abusive conditions and the promotion of equality of opportunity and treatment of migrant workers (ilo no. 143). 5 this constraint is posed by the plenary power doctrine in the united states, which holds that the executive and legislative branches of government have broad powers to regulate immigration and make policy free from judicial review. 6 the united states ratified the iccpr in 1992. 7 the organizations are the american civil liberties union (aclu), american friends service committee (afsc), national network for immigrant and refugee rights (nnirr), national immigration law center (nilc), coalition for humane immigrant rights of los angeles (chirla), mexican american legal defense and education fund (maldef), national council of la raza, and detention watch network. 8 one case, the detention watch network, makes explicit mention of the universal declaration of human rights. 9 in contrast, the two major immigration-restrictionist organizations, the federation for american immigration reform (fair) and the center for immigration studies (cis), make no mention of rights but do stress that immigration policies should serve the “national interest.” 10 the national fugitive operations budget increased 23-fold between fy 2003 and fy 2008, from $9 million to $218 million (mendelson, strom, & wishnie, 2009, p. 1). 11 the u.s. department of justice filed a lawsuit asking for an injunction against these laws on the grounds that they were unconstitutional. in july, 2010, a judge granted a partial injunction; the arizona governor appealed and at this writing the case awaits a decision from the 9th u.s. circuit court of appeals. 12 numbers usa was founded in 1997 and boasts a membership of 450,000. it led an effective grassroots opposition to a proposed bill for comprehensive immigration reform in mid-2007 (barry, 2008b). 13 see http://maldef.org/truthinimmigration/. 14 the h-2a program permits u.s. employers to bring temporary foreign workers into the united states for seasonal agricultural work. employers must certify that u.s. workers are not available to perform the work before they may hire a temporary foreign worker under this program. see http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1202308216365.shtm. 15 the new sanctuary movement is a network of faith communities around the united states that emerged in 2007 to protect immigrants and their families from unjust deportations and to change the public debate around immigration. see http://www.newsanctuarymovement.org/index.html. 162 maria lorena cook studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 references abramsky, s. 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media’s response valentina capurri ryerson university, canada abstract in this paper, i examine canadian mainstream media’s response to black lives matter toronto, focusing in particular on two events that occurred in the city in the summer of 2016 and winter of 2017. by relying on critical race theory, i argue that a white-dominated press has been unwilling to engage with the message presented by black activists under the excuse that the tone of the message is overly harsh and threatening to white audiences. after analysing the historical roots of such a claim, i conclude that, in the current climate, there is no space for any dialogue in what remains an oppressor-oppressed relationship across the country, including in toronto, canada’s most multicultural city. keywords racism; white supremacy; critical race theory; canada the quote in the title is from a keynote presentation delivered by audre lorde at the national women’s studies association conference in storrs, connecticut, in june 1981 (lorde, 2007). in the presentation, lorde examines how anger is one of black women’s responses to racism despite the inability and unwillingness of white women, including many female-identified academics attending the conference, to bear witness to that anger. lorde was pinpointing white women’s refusal to listen under the cover that the tone used to convey the message was excessively harsh and was therefore perceived as threatening. thirty-nine years later, black individuals, and black women in particular, are still faced with similar challenges and with white society’s unwillingness to listen to the message conveyed by their anger, and the excuse is the same: the tone is too loud and intimidating. in this paper i investigate how the discourse developed in canadian mainstream media around the actions and speeches of black lives matter toronto (blmto) has operated to silence the concerns raised by the group. the constant attention to the tone rather than content of the message is used to invalidate valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 129-144, 2021 130 the latter while repudiating the former. my goal is to demonstrate that mainstream media act to uphold white power by silencing and marginalizing insurgent voices critical of white supremacist logic and its legitimacy in canadian society. those voices critical of the status quo are portrayed as threatening, unreasonable, and lacking civility, thus making them subject to dismissal. black women’s voice in particular is not only dismissed but also ridiculed and trashed. here i use the words of rinaldo walcott (2018) to refer to “voice” as “something more than orality: voice is about listening and hearing in new intimate ways, and voice is even about unlearning” (p. 151). the methodology adopted applies critical race theory to discourse analysis of major canadian mainstream media’s reports and articles, in order to highlight how discourse remains a powerful tool to perpetuate the subjugation of black individuals across the country, including in canada’s most multicultural city, toronto. as i will illustrate, critical race theory is an important tool for understanding how black lives are positioned and operate in a white-dominated settler society. as a white female academic, it is not my goal in this paper to convey the message of blmto: the group is comprised of individuals who have clearly articulated that message on several occasions and do not need a white filter to explain their concerns. rather, i want to examine the approach taken by mainstream media outlets, that to this day remain white-dominated, when reporting on the group. the paper begins with a succinct overview of critical race theory (crt) and its contribution to analyzing north american media’s failure to give a platform to black voices. the paper also benefits from the brilliant analysis of whiteness as property developed by cheryl harris (1993). if, as harris maintains, whiteness is a property that confers societal and psychological privileges and benefits, and includes the exclusive right of possession, we can understand why black individuals and groups are prevented from sharing such benefits, including the right to expression. harris argues that “although the substance of race definitions has changed, what persists is the expectation of white-controlled institutions to determine meaning – the reified privilege of power” (p. 1762). it therefore becomes clear why mainstream journalism intentionally excludes black voices and reproduces a white narrative that claims the exclusive right to give meaning to the world around us. to validate this point, i examine canadian media’s treatment of blmto, with specific reference to two events: blmto participation at the 2016 pride parade and the speech delivered by yusra khogali, one of the co-founders of blmto, at the rally in front of the us consulate in toronto during the national day of action against islamophobia in february 2017. in both instances, mainstream media response was negative, and focused on the tone rather than engaging with the message. i conclude by asserting that in the current situation there can be no dialogue within canadian society as insurgent voices are systematically silenced while only the dominant white narrative is given legitimacy. who “i cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt” studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, x-xx, 2021 131 can speak and be heard is decided within a colonial framework that renders the colonized invisible and inaudible. critical race theory (crt) developed in the 1970s in the united states as a result of the efforts of a group of civil rights activists and legal scholars (among them derrick bell, kimberlé crenshaw, and richard delgado) to challenge the belief that the law is neutral; these scholars argued that the law is instead another instrument in the hands of white america to racially discriminate against persons of colour. although crt initially focused exclusively on the legal system, through time it has been applied to a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities (bracey ii, 2015; crichlow, 2015). the reach of crt extends beyond the united states, and canadian scholars have often applied it to the canadian context. one of the main goals of crt is to contest the dominant assumption that racism is only an occasional occurrence in a society that is portrayed largely as open and accepting of diversity. scholars in crt argue that racism and white superiority are instead the norm and are embedded in american (and canadian?) political and legal structures at all levels (taylor, 1998). according to crt, race is a social construction devoid of any biological significance that is “endemic and ordinary permeating all aspects of society” (rocco et al., 2014, p. 460). as a result of this, racism is normalized and pervasive across society and often goes unrecognized. glenn e. bracey ii (2015) maintains that although crt mostly tackles issues concerning the law and its institutions, it is possible to uncover an implicit theory of state, one that differs from the racial state theory (rst) proposed by omi and winant in the early 1990s. while both crt and rst agree that racism is a fundamental element of american culture and society, rst fails to unequivocally recognize the state as a tool for maintaining white dominance. critical race theory, on the other hand, insists that “whites have enjoyed instrumental control of the state since its founding” and such control is “permanent and absolute” (bracey ii, 2015, p. 558). as a white institutional space, the us – but the same can be said for canada – has been built on racist foundations and “reproduces white dominance by design” in the educational, cultural, legal, and economic spheres. even the occasional incorporation of a few individuals of colour into state institutions does not significantly alter the situation, as these individuals are largely token figures who either do not represent their communities or lack the power to contest the status quo (bracey ii, 2015). a perfect example is the election of barack obama to the presidency of the united states in 2009: while initially the election of a black person to the highest office in the country was heralded as a cataclysmic change, by the time he left his position in 2017 it was evident that little if anything at all had changed for black persons across the country. a local example is represented by toronto police chief mark saunders who, on 17 april 2015, was chosen as the first black police chief of the largest city in canada and who has been an outspoken supporter of the practice of carding as a tool necessary to increase community safety (“toronto police valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 129-144, 2021 132 chief”, 2015) despite widespread evidence that it results in the excessive and unjustified targeting of male black youth.1 critical race theory understands race as a social construction and sees it as an instrument to render certain people more valuable than others, with whites always ending up at the top of the scale. accordingly, not all groups are devalued in the same way; for instance, some ethnic groups from ireland, southern and eastern european countries, asian and spanish speaking countries whose skin colour is white have been racialized and marginalized at some point in time but have been eventually able to assimilate into the dominant white majority, usually in the span of a few generations. nonwhite skinned individuals are instead systematically excluded and portrayed as “others” who do not and cannot belong (rocco et al., 2014). as haunanikay trask (2004) notes, “racism is also the psychology of subjugation. the inferior must be made to feel inferior every day, to suffer their subjugation, to be dehumanized” (p. 13). antiblack racism highlights how across north america, black people have been the target of a systemic and structural racism that has positioned them as “outside the category of the human” (crichlow, 2015, p. 190). délice mugabo (2016) explains that afropessimism, the idea that “western society is inherently antagonistic to africanity and black people,” concludes that “the characteristics ascribed to humanness were . . . those denied to black people” and that “to be human is thus to be anything but black” (p. 163). the work of cheryl harris (1993) reminds us that among the characteristics of the human is the ability to own property; it is not unexpected then that black persons across north america were initially denied the right to own property (they were instead objects of property), and that whiteness has been framed “as treasured property in a society structured on racial caste” (p. 1713). whiteness as property has become an asset that white people are determined to defend and that can only survive as long as it is denied to non-whites. the law is structured to protect such property as the exclusive preserve of whites. harris argues that whiteness is far more than just colour or race, and has in fact evolved into property in order to uphold white supremacy and retain economic dominance over black and indigenous peoples, who are considered non-human and therefore unable to partake in the benefits accruing from property rights. in fact, whiteness as property “reproduces black subordination” (harris, 1993, p. 1731) and dehumanization. this process of de-humanization also denies black people of a voice to tell their stories, because it rests on the presumption that only humans (whites) retain power and control over meaning. critical race theory contends that the way to oppose the suppression and oppression of black groups and individuals is to pay attention to the voices coming from 1 carding refers to the police practice of documenting the personal details of citizens who are stopped, and it usually does not result in charges. statistical evidence indicates that the overwhelming majority of individuals stopped by the police in toronto are black males. “i cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt” studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, x-xx, 2021 133 those who have experienced discrimination (crichlow, 2015; rocco et al., 2014). in fact, there can be no meaningful dialogue around racism as long as the only voice heard is the oppressor’s. i argue here that north america remains a white supremacist society where only white voices are accepted as legitimate, while the voices of people of colour are discounted, vilified and framed as expressions of excessive anger, irrationality and an innate tendency to violence. north american thought results from centuries of colonialism and remains eurocentric at its core; within such a framework, whiteness is assumed as the norm while blackness is nothing more than a disturbance that must be isolated and removed (mckittrick, 2011). this is evident when analysing mainstream media across the united states and canada, both of which remain to this day quite racist (simpson et al., 2018). as robert redding jr. (2017) notes for the us context, the biggest problem is that media ownership “follows the pattern of white domination in society” with little representation from black journalists and very few chances for the latter to “make it to the level of management” (pp. 146-147). even those few black journalists who are hired are seldom permitted to communicate to – and in the language of – their communities, and are instead told by their white employers what to report and how to frame their stories (redding jr., 2017). the attention given in recent years to diversity in the newsroom has failed to consider that adding a few black faces in front of the cameras or behind the desk does not alter the fact that white people are still running the show, with the result that black voices are still purged from the news cycle, or when they appear, are presented as unreliable and unreasonable. black voices expressing anger at the past and current situation of blacks across the north american continent are especially susceptible to denigration and dismissal by a white society unable to grasp that rage, far from being a negative emotion, “is a means to decolonizing our minds” and “can serve as a tool of empowerment” by allowing black people to define themselves rather than being defined by their colonizers (rodriguez, 2011, p. 590). in the canadian context, andray domise (2017) reminds readers in macleans that the presence of black opinion columnists in daily publications is extremely tenuous; in fact, the only three black columnists he was able to identify when scouting daily print publications were royson james and desmond cole for the toronto star,2 and vicky mochama for metronews (same owner as the star). a similar conclusion is reached by mike sholars (2017), blog editor for huffpost canada; sholars adds that the “diversity problem” across canadian media is not simply a question of numbers solvable by hiring a couple of additional black journalists, but of the latitude those hired are given to provide their opinion rather than being reduced to token figures who have to parrot a line consistently defined by white 2 cole, however, has now left the paper after being asked to refrain from focusing on activism in his columns, a request not made to other well-known white opinion columnists. valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 129-144, 2021 134 interests. if, as harris (1993) maintains, whiteness is property and confers its holders the exclusive right to give meaning, then we can understand why the press as an institution remains committed to preventing black voices from asserting themselves and contesting the accepted framework. canada presents itself as different from the united states because of its federal policy of multiculturalism that aims at embracing and celebrating all races, ethnicities and cultures. however, as noted by dominique rivière (2004), there is a general understanding that multiculturalism is largely limited to the private sphere, and that in public we are all expected to be canadians, where “‘canadian’ is still implicitly white, and (often) implicitly male” (p. 224). according to rinaldo walcott (2019), multiculturalism in canada rests on the celebration of diversity, whose soothing rhetoric and practice have done nothing to address structural injustices and widespread racial inequality. multiculturalism and diversity cannot erase the reality that canada, a settler colonial state, has been built and continues to prosper out of the genocide of indigenous people and the subordination as well as exploitation of black people. the rhetoric of diversity fails to seriously challenge the power of whiteness, and therefore fails to provide any significant benefit to those who are not white. further, multiculturalism in canada operates to present the country as a haven for racialized people, in so doing preventing any engagement with the discourse of race and racism (gomes & khan, 2016). in “sexism, racism, and canadian nationalism,” roxana ng (1989) explains how racism and sexism are both at the core of canadian nationhood and work in conjunction to allow the dominant group to retain its hegemony. the same argument is advanced by jacqueline bennjohn (2016) in her discussion of the oppression indigenous and black women in canada face as a result of colonialism, systemic racism and patriarchy. in the last few years, in the canadian context, blmto has been one of the most recognizable voices expressing black anger, and because of this, it has also been one of the most vilified in mainstream media discourse. according to their webpage, blmto offers a platform to black communities in the city to “dismantle all forms of anti-black racism, liberate blackness, support black healing, affirm black existence, and create freedom to love and selfdetermine” (black lives matter canada, n.d.). the movement started in 2015 as a canadian chapter of the larger black lives matter protest movement, which originated in the united states in response to several cases of police brutality, the most notorious of which was the killing of michael brown in ferguson. it was at that point that a group of black activists in toronto decided to organize in order to protest not only those cases of police brutality in the us but also police killings of black men across the greater toronto area, for example the murder of 33-year-old jermaine carby at the hand of a peel police officer, and of 45-year-old andrew loku who was shot dead by toronto police. if protesting against police violence was the spark that started blmto, i agree with rinaldo walcott that the movement is not merely an ad hoc response to instances of police violence, “but that it sits in a genealogy of “i cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt” studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, x-xx, 2021 135 black activists’ eruptions meant to transform the state as we presently know it” (simpson et al., 2018, p. 82) in so far as their actions have contributed to pinpoint and denounce the white supremacist logic that is central to the canadian settler colonial reality. in the remainder of this paper, i analyze the response to blmto across a sample of mainstream media articles and opinion pieces, and argue that this response, far from invalidating blmto claims, illustrates how the group is one of the most important current black prophetic voices in the north american continent. in the introduction to mumia abu-jamal’s writing on the wall, editor johanna fernandez (2015) refers to cornel west’s examination of black prophetic voices as those voices “committed to illuminating the truth about black oppression and its systemic causes” (p. xxi). these are the voices that “because they speak uncomfortable truths . . . are vilified or swept under the rug” (fernandez, 2015, p. xxi) by a white supremacist discourse that will not tolerate dissent. within canada, blmto is among the most recent examples of these prophetic voices, and it is for this reason that their message has systematically been vilified. in fact, as the following two examples will illustrate, blmto has a history of refusing to play nice with white-dominated state institutions, and of denouncing in words as well as actions those same institutions for their commitment to white supremacy. the two episodes i investigate are blmto participation and action at the 2016 pride parade in toronto, and yusra khogali’s speech in front of the us consulate in the city on 4 february 2017. in the summer of 2016, blmto was invited to participate as guest of honour at the annual toronto pride parade. during the parade, blmto put a stop to the event and refused to let it continue until pride organizers agreed to a list of nine demands, which included “continued funding for black involvement; removal of police floats in future pride days; prioritizing the hiring of black trans women, indigenous people, and others from vulnerable communities at pride; and the funding for and protection for lgbtq2siaa youth of colour” (burstow, 2016). the parade resumed 30 minutes later, after pride toronto executive director mathieu chantelois signed a document agreeing to these demands. while some non-mainstream publications such as rabble.ca, now, and torontoist praised the group, mainstream media was overwhelmingly critical and presented the group as “an outsider to an imagined canadian queer community” (greey, 2018, p. 662). the criticism concerned the fact that blmto was perceived as taking over a space that was meant for lgbtq members without asking permission. however, as explained by scholar and activist omisoore dryden (2016), the lgbtq community includes black individuals who have for years denounced the racial discrimination and harassment experienced within the city at large and within the lgbtq community in particular. blaming blmto for hijacking the parade is an accusation with little to no substance, as this is their space too. in the documentary film, track two (sutherland, 1982), about the 1981 valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 129-144, 2021 136 bathhouse raids in the city, fran endicott, public school trustee at the time, comments that “we have to be very careful when we start talking about communities, in terms of gay community or black community. it is quite obvious that the gay community will also have a number of blacks as part of that community.” homogenizing the gay community in the image of the white portion of that community is inaccurate and misleading. another accusation directed at blmto was that by demanding the removal of police floats from future pride parades, the movement was bringing an aggressive and divisive attitude to a community that has been trying to bridge the separation and build cooperation with toronto police after years of tensions which culminated in the 1981 bathhouse raids and the arrest of over 280 men. but what blmto has done is not revive old grudges, because for blacks in the city, and especially black queer persons, the police force today is no less threatening than it was in the 1980s. as desmond cole (2015) notes in a piece for toronto life, to this day areas with a significant black population are “heavy policed in the name of crime prevention” and toronto police continues to card large numbers of young black men to monitor their activities, despite the individuals not having been accused of any crime. wesley crichlow (2014) comments that “blacks are constructed as a dangerous class by the state” (p. 123), in line with a canadian history characterized by “a legacy of legalized slavery, state racism and authorized racial discrimination” (p. 124). for some members of the queer community as well, interactions with toronto police are still marred by danger and distrust; in 2000, a women’s bathhouse in the city was raided by six male officers, and in january 2017 cellphone footage emerged of police kicking, tasering, and directing homophobic remarks at a black man (tyszkiewcz, 2017). in november 2016, a toronto police operation in etobicoke targeting gay men resulted in the arrest of 72 individuals (khandaker, 2017). inviting the police as an institution into a space aimed at celebrating a community whose members are constantly harassed by police officers is an oddity indeed, and creates an unsafe environment for those individuals. among the journalists attacking blmto for their action at pride was margaret wente of the globe and mail, arguably canada’s major national paper; on 4 july 2016, she defined blmto as “the new bully on the block… a tiny group of noisy activists” who “are firmly convinced that they are at the very top of the pyramid of oppression.” while dismissing most blmto requests as “harmless,” she takes aim at the demand to remove police floats from future pride parades and labels it as “wrong, and sad, and bad” (wente, 2016). ignoring the overrepresentation of black inmates in ontario youth and adult jails and the disproportionate number of black persons stopped and carded by police in toronto when compared to their white counterparts (crichlow, 2014), wente goes on to ridicule blmto’s claim that the police force is a threatening institution for blacks across the city and reminds the group that, far from being ferguson, toronto is for blacks the safest place on earth. she concludes by warning readers about the dangers inherent in “i cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt” studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, x-xx, 2021 137 conceding to blmto demands: “when bullies get their way, they just keep on bullying.” another voice critical of blmto was sue-ann levy (2016) who, from the pages of the toronto sun, accused the group of being disrespectful and forcing participants at the parade, including the elderly and disabled people, to stand for 30 minutes under the scorching sun only to make the news. she claimed that blmto hijacked the parade and transformed it into a political event rather than a celebration. levy ignores the fact that pride was born as a political event in direct response to police brutality and has only recently transformed into a consumption extravaganza (grundy, 2004). if anything, blmto has brought the parade back to its origins. by taking control of the space (for a short time), blmto reasserted ownership over “black bodies, our relation to the land, and the spaces in which we exist” (diverlus, 2018, p. 64), something the white dominant society has historically worked hard to prevent. here again, we can use harris’ (1993) analysis of whiteness as property to make sense of mainstream media reluctance to let black bodies take control over what remains a colonized space. not to be left too far behind, on 11 july 2016, the toronto star published an opinion piece by mark jamieson, a self-employed businessman in downtown toronto, branding blmto as a group that disrupted pride to further its own agenda. jamieson (2016) states that blmto “has absolutely nothing to do with the gay, lesbian, transgendered community,” and that it was a mistake of pride organizers to break with its tradition of distancing itself “from political issues not pertaining to members of the lgbt community.” similar concerns were raised by ray lam (2017), former member of the board of directors for the vancouver pride society, who in the georgia straight, a free weekly news and entertainment newspaper published in vancouver, accused blmto of using pride to publicize a platform that had nothing to do with queer rights, in so doing “holding the queer community hostage.” as indicated above, such claims fail to consider that the queer community is internally diverse and includes black persons. insofar as blmto is an expression of the black community’s concerns, it does have a place at pride. as sherene razack (1998) points out in looking white people in the eye, our reality is characterized by “interlocking systems of oppression” that support and feed on each other; what black queer individuals experience is not simply the sum of racism and sexism but the interlocking of such systems to produce a distinctive form of oppression. the action of blmto was meant to reassert that white queer persons are not the spokespersons for the entire community, and their priorities are not necessarily the priorities of other community members. furthermore, trying to diminish the oppression faced by black persons across the country by arguing that queers the world over have it worse, as lam repeatedly points out in his intervention, is a disservice to all those committed to fighting inequality and discrimination on multiple fronts. accusing blmto of adopting tactics that “create headlines, not change” by stealing the voice and valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 129-144, 2021 138 power of the queer community implies that anti-blackness is not relevant to queer communities, and erases the lived experiences of blacks who make up a significant portion of those communities. writing for cbc news, mark gollom (2016) recognizes that the blmto disruption at pride raised awareness of the group, yet concludes that this was achieved at the expense of black and gay police officers who have now become a target for discrimination; this despite the fact that blmto has made abundantly clear that police officers are welcome to participate in the parade in civilian clothes. the issue has never been individual participation, but the presence of the police as an institution with a substantial history of harassing and criminalizing black members of the queer community (khandaker, 2017). according to several experts surveyed by gollom (2016), the demand to ban police floats and booths also risks derailing “some of the productive relationship-building between police and the gay community that has developed over the years.” in the words of randi rahamim, principal of the public strategy and communications firm navigator ltd. and one of the people contacted by gollom, the group’s tactics might backfire as the public will recognize them as unreasonable, since “what some people perceive as radical moves, don’t win over public opinion.” rahamim fails to understand cornell west’s observation, which i referred to above and that is quoted in the anthology edited by fernandez (2015), that “prophetic voices” are never popular, nor do they seek popularity. accusations of unreasonableness and radicalism were repeated all over mainstream media just few months later after a speech yusra khogali, one of the co-founders of blmto, gave at a rally organized in front of the us consulate in toronto to protest the travel restrictions placed by the trump administration on citizens of a number of middle eastern countries. during her speech, khogali referred to the prime minister of canada, justin trudeau, as a “white supremacist terrorist,” which resulted in a flood of accusations directed at khogali. unsurprisngly, first in line to condemn the young black activist was the toronto sun, with a piece written by joe warmington (2017), who defined the reference to trudeau as “the height of ugly fiction” coming out of “yusra khogali’s sometimes loud and offensive mouth.” warmington also condemned as “pathetic” khogali’s reference to quebec city as “a white supremacist settler colony” and blasted blmto for using “vile tactics” and attacking those same people (i.e., the police force) who are working to help address the issue of “black people murdered by black people.” again in the toronto sun, anthony furey (2017) characterized yusra khogali as someone with “a track record of inflammatory, divisive rhetoric,” and criticized her speech during the national day of action against islamophobia as well as a series of tweets and facebook messages she had posted on her accounts since 2015. the toronto sun was not alone in taking a critical stance against the cofounder of blmto. in a blog on the huffington post, james di fiore (2017) called on khogali to resign for her “habit of directing violent, hateful “i cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt” studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, x-xx, 2021 139 language towards people with white skin” and “inserting hate speech into the ether of toronto activism,” thus compromising the credibility of the movement she helped create. according to di fiore (2017), there is a trend detectable in society whereby activists who live in a system affected by racial problems, feel entitled to “make violent, absurd statements, especially against whites,” such as khogali did when labelling the prime minister of canada a white supremacist terrorist, a comment di fiore considers “asinine and evidence of a sloppy intellect.” while he admits that black individuals do indeed face a number of challenges in canadian society, di fiore (2017) believes that khogali has become a liability to the movement, because “if you continuously isolate and vilify white folks – without crafting your language in a way that separates actual racists from white allies – how can you ever expect to grow the movement to a size where the system would have no choice but change for the better?” he advises khogali to resign “if she really believes black lives matter” because her continued presence at the helm of the movement would only “distract the public with hate” (di fiore, 2017). unsurprisingly, most of the support khogali received came from nonmainstream media such as now, where shantal otchere (2017) published a piece defending the veracity of the comments khogali had made in her speech (including the reference to trudeau), and rabble.ca, which on 20 february 2017 published a commentary by john baglow not only defending the activist’s comments as factually correct, but noting that the attacks directed at khogali are revealing of how white folks “would prefer that oppressed people remain polite and respectful,” in order not to make the rest of us feel “uncomfortable.” any rhetoric that is perceived as stemming from a place of anger is systematically categorized as threatening and therefore illegitimate. in fact, in all the media articles, commentaries, and editorials discussed above, recurring terms used to define blmto are “bullies,” “radicals,” and “unreasonable” activists prone to “holding hostages” and “hijacking” events they have no place in; khogali herself is defined as “loud,” “offensive,” as well as using a language that is “inflammatory,” “divisive,” “violent,” and “hateful,” by employing these characterizations, the content of blmto message is dismissed while attention focuses on the way that message is communicated. in the reminder of the paper, i am going to examine how white supremacy embedded in north american society sustains itself by systematically criticizing “black prophetic voices” for their tone rather than engaging with the substance of the message these voices are trying to convey. the claim that canada is a white settler state built on the dispossession and genocide of indigenous people is not something new or even contested in the academy and society at large. also generally accepted is the fact that antiblack racism does exist in canada, although it is by and large portrayed as a phenomenon peculiar to a few individuals rather than inherent in the structural foundation of canadian society. even mainstream media such as the toronto star have in the past published editorials and investigations on valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 129-144, 2021 140 the subject. those who disagree with such claims have largely defended canada as better and more accepting of diversity than the united states, but have often refrained from vilifying the messenger. in the case of blmto, we instead witness a situation where the main focus of attack is the person speaking and the organization they represent, rather than the validity of the argument they are making. i maintain that the reason for this is that those who are speaking are members of the black community, and khogali herself is a black woman. as dalia rodriguez (2011) writes, we live in a society where “white words simply carry more legitimacy” (p. 592). while white words are valued, black words are questioned, and when perceived as offensive to whites, are “easily dismissed” (rodriguez, 2011, p. 593) and silenced. evelynn hammonds (2001) notes that “the imposed production of silence and the removal of any alternative to the production of silence reflect the deployment of power against racialized subjects” (p. 385). it is the power of whiteness as property (harris, 1993) that will not tolerate any challenge to its narrative. it is fairly common across mainstream media to read condemnations of black reactions to constant and documented violence against black bodies and communities. such reactions “are consistently characterized as inappropriate, exorbitant, and themselves gratuitous” (palmer, 2017, p. 33), hence invalid. white scholars, journalists, and public figures are allowed to speak about white privilege and white supremacy in canada, even if their claims are occasionally contested, while blacks, and black women in particular, are not extended the same privilege. whereas the speech of the former might be subject to criticism, the messenger of said speech is perceived as having an inherent right to speak, whereas the speech of the latter is systematically discounted because the messenger is perceived as lacking that same right, and this is justified by emphasizing the aggressive and unpolite tone adopted. as tyrone s. palmer (2017) notes, “the black is always already unduly, irrationally ‘angry’” (p. 43) and therefore whatever is said is of little consequence, similarly to how adults ignore spoiled children throwing a tantrum. unless the message is phrased in a reasonable and polite way that is not offensive to white listeners, “black anger, in response to the psychic (and physical) violence of anti-blackness, has no audience – instead, it is received as irrational, a sign of ‘craziness’ and black infrahumanity” (palmer, 2017, p. 43). by associating rage and irrationality with blackness as its inherent characteristic, black persons are presented as lacking any humanity since “the human is always already a racial project” (ferreira da silva, as quoted in latty et al., 2016, p. 132). the result is that movements such as blmto, which dare to speak back to violence against black persons and black communities (patel & price, 2016), are increasingly targeted as threatening and violent to society, and therefore rendered marginal and inconsequential. faced with these accusations and with the continued violence exercised by the state and its institutions on their bodies and souls, black individuals and groups such as blmto have chosen to resist through their voice and have “i cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt” studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, x-xx, 2021 141 refused to be silenced. such resistance, far from being a new phenomenon, is rooted in a tradition of black survival embraced by black social movements over the last two centuries, and captured in the speeches of black giants of the calibre of frederick douglass and w.e.b. du bois. aldon morris (2017) recounts du bois’ response to the student protests at his alma mater, fisk university, when in the early 1920s the institution’s white president, fayette mckenzie, was accused by black students of catering to the white prejudices widespread across the south. on that occasion, du bois unconditionally supported the black students who had “the guts to yell and fight” (as quoted in morris, 2017, p. 13) and speak truth to power. it is not surprising then to see that a large portion of the founders and members of blmto are themselves students who carry forward the same spirit of defiance in front of oppression. in breaking the silence and conveying their rage through language, blmto has been able to transform individual frustration into group action. what white society finds intolerable is that black persons and communities are using their voice to challenge white definitions of who they are. by moving from object to subject of discourse, groups such as blmto use their spoken rage as a liberating tool against white dominance and supremacy (rodriguez, 2011). in the case of yusra khogali, what white society found unacceptable was criticism coming from someone who was black and a woman, two major faults according to the current white supremacist patriarchal system. dominique rivière (2004) writes that: “it is the union of ‘blackness’ and ‘femaleness’ that results in multiple cycles of oppression” (p. 223). here i see khogali as advancing and embodying the tradition of canadian black feminism. following wane (2004), i argue that black feminism is not merely a set of abstract ideas but is based on action and struggle against oppression, empowering black women “to survive in a world that seeks to exploit, denigrate, and dehumanize their very existence” (p. 154). black canadian women have a history of resisting white racism and patriarchy by rallying, marching, speaking and challenging stereotypes (benn-john, 2016). as noted by leanne betasamosake simpson, “a tremendous amount of brilliance, mobilization, organization, and resistance went into having any brown, black or red bodies on the land right now at all” (simpson et al., 2018, p. 77). in recent times, nobody has shown such brilliance in organizing, mobilizing and resisting as yusra khogali, who has refused to be silenced and succumb to the incessant vitriolic attacks against her. to conclude, i return to the quote i used as the title of this article. in her presentation to the national women’s studies association conference held in connecticut in june 1981, audre lorde (2007) addressed the white female academics in the audience with unapologetic words: “i cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt.” she rejected the accusation that anger was counterproductive because it conveyed the message so harshly and loudly that the recipient could not even hear it. lorde questioned whether it was really her manner and tone that prevented white audiences from hearing, or valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 129-144, 2021 142 the threat of a message that structures deeply embedded in society might change as a result of black people’s choice to fight back and resist their oppression. i believe the latter to have been the case. the reason white persons refuse to engage with the message of groups such as blmto is not because we feel endangered by the angry tone adopted but because we cannot tolerate the challenge to our structured world of white privilege. it is the message we find threatening, not the manner. but admitting that much would require engaging with the message and that is a confrontation we are going to lose. taking aim at the harshness of the words is an easy escape route that allows us not to listen. and yet, listen we must. black people are not going to be silenced. there comes a moment when oppression becomes intolerable. for blacks across north america, that moment is now. unless white society starts listening to black voices, there can be no meaningful dialogue but just a deafening obtuse white monologue and that is, simply put, intolerable. dr. lorde, i am listening. references baglow, j. 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(2016, july 4). the bullies of black lives matter. the globe and mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-bullies-of-black-livesmatter/article30746157/ mackinnon final bfore ts correspondence address: katie mackinnon, faculty of information, university of toronto, toronto, on, m5s 3g6; email: katherine.mackinnon@mail.utoronto.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 442-449, 2021 dispatch ethical approaches to youth data in historical web archives katie mackinnon university of toronto, canada my doctoral research focuses on the experiences of young people learning about and exploring the world wide web from canadian homes, schools, libraries and community centres between 1994-2004. while there are many intersecting facets of my research that include federal policy interventions, public discourse in canadian media, and oral interviews, i engage significantly with web archives in order to provide perspectives from young and marginalized people who were creating websites and community on the early web. my research has focused on geocities, one of the most popular web hosting platforms between 1996-1999. geocities users, called homesteaders, could build websites for free in different neighbourhoods that reflected interests and hobbies, like the westhollywood (lgbtq+) or enchantedforest (youth) neighbourhoods. when the platform was removed from the web in 2009, there were significant archival efforts to preserve the once-thriving online community in the internet archive. for researchers, this archive poses significant ethical, methodological and epistemological issues. although it is a valuable resource for researching a history of the online communities on the early web, it also creates opportunities for harmful data practices while also calling into question individuals’ “right to be forgotten” (eu, 2016b). this dispatch explores some ethical questions that have emerged through my research on digital experiences of young people throughout the 1990-2000s and the use of archived web materials created at that time by young people who were under the age of 18. ethical approaches to youth data in historical web archives studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 442-449, 2021 443 background debates over best practices relating to internet research ethics have been ongoing for the past two decades amongst scholars from a variety of fields, with numerous professional organizations developing guidelines (nesh, 2016; shelley-egan, 2015; utrecht data school, 2019). ethics protocols, in general, are modelled after human rights and protection principles that emerged from medical science and were consolidated in the un declaration of human rights (united nations, 1948), the nuremberg code (1949) and the belmont report (office of the secretary, 1979). the focus is typically on minimizing harm and maximizing benefits, with overall principles of respect and justice, resulting in general research practices around informed consent, confidentiality, privacy and anonymity. digital research has renewed debates over the implications of these concepts because “[the concept of] harm can be difficult to operationalize in a socio-technical context [in a way] that is persistent, replicable, scalable, and searchable” (boyd, 2010). it is generally agreed by internet researchers (ess, et al., 2002; franzke, et al., 2019; markham & buchanan, 2012) that there should be no fixed rules for ethically sound research with digital media because it is impossible to establish protocols that can be applied across all contexts, cultures and research fields. instead, a case-by-case approach that follows similar questioning and reflection – around procedure, tools, collection, storage, processing and documentation – has been encouraged (crossen-white, 2015; ess, et al., 2002; franzke, et al., 2019; leurs, 2017; lomborg, 2018; markham & buchanan, 2012). as ordinary individuals and their public activities, as well as their personal lives, are less well-represented in historical records before the age of the internet (lin et al., 2020; lomborg, 2018), web archives hold the potential to shift the types of history that can be written, where terabytes of information are collected, stored and preserved from lay people and sources so that history can be written from below. this opens up radical potential for history on the margins of society, giving voice and power to communities and subcultures typically absent or erased from the records. however, this potential creates a pressing need for stronger, more robust ethical frameworks, guidelines and protocols to ensure that histories of the early web do not deploy systems of data exploitation and oppression. it is imperative for researchers to consider whose stories are being told, who is equipped to tell them, and what kinds of vulnerability and harm one might encounter and create when doing so. if we consider how throughout the past 15 years young peoples’ data have been subject to commodification, surveillance, and archiving without consent (grimes & chung, 2005; steeves, 2015; van dijck et al., 2018), researchers who engage with archived web material have a responsibility to develop better practices of care for web materials created by young people in the past. the overview below demonstrates the trajectory of web ethics discussions katie mackinnon studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 442-449, 2021 444 and debates that i have explored in my approach to web archival research, and points to sensitizing concepts applicable to developing an ethics of care. while defining the contours of historical web research ethics and bringing together pieces in conversation with each other, i also demonstrate some of the gaps and oversights that are addressed later in critical feminist scholarship. ethics protocols and frameworks overview holly crossen-white (2015) describes this as a “new era” in historical research, where “the use of technology to explore the lives of individuals from the past in greater detail is really part of an ongoing wider global debate on the use of technology” (p. 110). for example, in 2014 the court of justice of the european union ruled that in accordance with the eu’s 1995 data protection directive, individuals have the “right to be forgotten” (art. 17) in online search engines like google. this language was seen again in the european union’s general data protection regulation (eu, 2016a), which applied the “right to erasure” to prevent “the indefinite storage and trade in electronic data, placing limits on the duration and purpose” of the data (tsesis, 2014, p. 433). it also states that individuals may request that data be deleted should it become irrelevant, inaccurate, or cause harm that is not outweighed by a public benefit in retaining the data. this directive has become relevant to internet researchers for many reasons, but particularly applies to my use of web archives for historical research. an early response to concerns over a lack of ethical protocols for internet research brought scholars together in 2002 in a working group to create the association of internet researchers (aoir) ethical guidelines, which have since been updated in 2012 and 2019 (ess, et al., 2002; franzke, et al., 2019; markham & buchanan, 2012). the guiding principles declare that researchers must weigh harms to research communities, balance the rights of subjects with the social benefits of the research and consider the possibility of increasing the vulnerability of the researched communities. concepts explored in the guidelines include informed consent, methods of accessing data, analyses, potential findings that can create harms, context and social vulnerability, responding to many of the gaps from previous ethical standards adopted by universities and research communities. taking up the aoir guidelines in exploring ethical issues associated with providing access to web archives, lin et al. (2020) survey different ethical frameworks that scholars and systems builders have been engaging with to discuss what types of analysis can and should be conducted. they grapple with the notion that while researchers have the computational tools to scrape web data for many types of analyses, a more pertinent question is whether it is ethical to pursue these types of academic avenues of inquiry. they focus on content-based retrieval, large-scale distant reading and user re-identification ethical approaches to youth data in historical web archives studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 442-449, 2021 445 for research engaged with digital history. lin et al. (2020) determine two significant guiding principles relevant for developing better practices of care: context (what the original creators expected of their materials) and scale (the conceptual and experiential distance between the researcher and the content creator). stine lomborg (2018) also references these concepts, and asks, “how can we ensure that the voluntary sharing of personal data at one point in time does not come to negatively impact the research subject at a later point in time?” (p. 204). she also states that “researching children, social or politically marginalized groups and physically or mentally vulnerable individuals entails a great ethical responsibility to protect participants from being bullied or put on undesirable public display, regardless of whether the online activities we study revolve around their vulnerability” (p. 205). these questions highlight some of the most prominent concerns with the use of web archives for my research on youth cultures online, and reflect some of the issues with archives like the internet archive. in proposing an answer to these questions, lomborg highlights helen nissenbaum’s (2010) “contextual integrity,” an expectations-based framework for ethical reasoning about privacy and the protection of human subjects from harm in digital contexts. instead of thinking of privacy as a matter of universal principles about who should have access to what information in which contexts, nissenbaum suggests a lens of privacy as contextual integrity to consider whether something must be treated as private or not by looking at the specific context, data and actors involved. the principle of contextual integrity invites researchers to dwell on the possible ethical consequences of repurposing historical web data, from the original context, to the archive and on to the context of web history. in this framework, the relationship between actors, content and contexts are bound together, and also invoke “the distance principle” (markham & buchanan, 2015), which measures the conceptual and experiential distance between the object of study and the person who produced it (p. 611). katrin tiidenberg (2018) explores how the applications of digital research ethics – such as seeking informed consent and manipulating data for confidentiality, privacy and anonymity – is an on-going issue in digitally saturated contexts. they explain that since sharing has become a default relationship between the self and technological infrastructures, which is both manipulated by the infrastructure to create and collect more valuable data and through the very nature of digital communication, a lack of privacy has been normalized. privacy is instead constituted as an individual burden, where individuals are responsible for modulating their platform settings in relation to their awareness of privacy needs, which removes responsibility from corporations and platforms, as well as from researchers. katie mackinnon studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 442-449, 2021 446 critical feminist frameworks a feminist ethics of care approach to web archives responds to many of the shortcomings in earlier ethical frameworks and practices. in the aoir 3.0 guidelines, aline franzke (2019) presents an overview of feminist ethics of care to demonstrate how the intersections of power relationships produce inequalities that are relevant in the study of internet ethics. some key principles highlighted call for the assessment of relationships between the researchers, the researched, and the wider research community. these guidelines are integral to the development of ethical commitments in research practices, however their application to specific research contexts is not yet widely accepted. koen leurs (2017), in his research with the digital practices of young londoners, created a roadmap to alternative data-analysis practices that explores what a social-justice oriented, feminist data study could look like. his framework allows for “attention to human meaning-making, contextspecificity, inter/dependencies, temptations, as well as benefits and harm” with a moral focus on “relationality, responsibility, inter-subjectivity and the autonomy of the research participants” (leurs, 2017, p. 140). leurs’ roadmap highlights five statements about data-related research practices, asserting that people are more than digital data (i.e., data are limited, ahistorical, decontextualized), data is context-specific and performative, data is dependent and relational to the platform it was created on, we are tempted to over-invest in digital representations of people rather than individuals themselves, and we benefit in various ways from our studies that do not always benefit research participants. leurs’ roadmap demonstrates one of the most robust approaches available and was paired with qualitative interviews with the young people whose data he was engaging. my approach to studying digital practices of canadian youth 20 years ago borrows from this roadmap, but there are additional challenges to researching older web materials. in the same vein as leurs, the feminist data manifest-no (2019), a project led by marika cifor and patricia garcia and supported by numerous techno-feminist scholars, pulls at the intricacies of data-based research practices and suggests new pathways for considering our ethical responsibility to the human-centric web data. it declares that data is “always and variously attached to bodies” and vows to “interrogate the biopolitical implications of data with a keen eye to gender, race, sexuality, class, disability, nationality, and other forms of embodied difference.” data feminism (d’ignazio & klein, 2020) echoes these sentiments, calling for changes to oppressive data collection, storage and manipulation tactics in academic research. they reaffirm that, despite the apparent ubiquity and novelty of data harvesting, the act of collecting and recording data about people is not new at all. in fact, it has long been employed as a technique of power and control over the lives of the people whose data are collected. the relationship between data and power is clear historically, whether it is ethical approaches to youth data in historical web archives studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 442-449, 2021 447 through the logs of people captured and sold into slavery or the biometric technologies that are deployed to surveil black people (browne, 2015). with this in mind, the question of data ethics requires a framework of data justice rather than ethics alone, so that inequalities of the past and research and archive practices are not replicated into the future. gaps & conclusions one of my main challenges to researching historical web archives is grappling with conceptual and experiential distance between researchers and the researched; websites become defunct, users have grown up and changed names, and communities have splintered and dispersed. while deploying contextual integrity tactics and evaluating the scale of archived web materials are significant ethical developments, getting in contact with those whose data is stored in archives is still an important ethical dimension for many internet researchers. recent scholarship on “growing up online” (adair, 2019; eichhorn, 2019; robards & lincoln, 2020), has rejected or interrogated the archive as a site of study because of its inherently exploitative relationship with online communities. cass adair has written about the ethical difficulties in researching and writing about queer and trans young people online in the 2000s in their own doctoral research. in “delete yr account,” they write that while archives of queer and trans life and survival are scarce and therefore valuable, “there is a significant anti-archival trans politics… [that] have emerged not out of desire for self-annihilation, but out of resistance to being siphoned up, pinned down, by state or corporate collection” (adair, 2019). as i begin the collection phase of my doctoral research this means critically assessing my use of web archives and building from feminist frameworks for engaging with these materials, while developing an ethics of care that can be applied to studying online communities in the past. references adair, c. (2019). “delete yr account: speculations on trans digital lives and the antiarchival.” digital research ethics collaboratory. retrieved april 23, 2021 from http://www.drecollab.org/delete-yr-account-part-i/ boyd, d. (2010). social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications. in z. papacharissi (ed.), networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39-58). routledge. browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. duke university press. cifor, m., garcia, p., cowan, t. l., rault, j., sutherland, t., chan, a., rode, j., hoffmann, a.l., salehi, n., & nakamura, l. (2019). feminist data manifest-no. https://www.manifestno.com/ crossen-white, h. l. (2015). using digital archives in historical research: what are the ethical concerns for a ‘forgotten’ individual? research ethics, 11, 108-119. d’ignazio, c., & klein, l. (2020). data feminism. mit press. katie mackinnon studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 442-449, 2021 448 eichhorn, k. (2019). the end of forgetting: growing up with social media. harvard university press. ess, c., & association of internet researchers ethics working committee. (2002). ethical decision-making and internet research: recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee. http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf franzke, a. s., bechmann, a., zimmer, m., ess, c. and the association of internet researchers. (2019). internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf eu (european union). (2016a). regulation (eu) 2016/679 of the european parliament and of the council on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing directive 95/46/ec (general data protection regulation). retrieved april 23, 2021 from https://gdpr-info.eu/ eu (european union). (2016b). general data protection regulation (gdpr) article 17: right to be forgotten. retrieved april 23, 2021 from: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/ grimes, s., & chung, g. (2005). data mining the kids: surveillance and market research strategies in children’s online games.” canadian journal of communication, 30(4), 527548. leurs, k. (2017). feminist data studies. using digital methods for ethical, reflexive and situated socio-cultural research. feminist review, 115(1), 130-154. lin, j., milligan, i., oard, d. w., ruest, n., & shilton, k. (2020, march 14-18). we could, but should we? ethical considerations for providing access to geocities and other historical digital collections [conference presentation]. chiir ’20, vancouver, bc, canada. lomborg, s. (2018). ethical considerations for web archives and web history research. in n. brügger & i. milligan (eds.), sage handbook of web history (pp. 199-219). sage. markham, a., & buchanan, e. (2012). ethical decision-making and internet research: recommendations from the aoir ethics research committee (version 2.0). retrieved april 23, 2021 from: http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf markham, a. n., & buchanan, e. (2015). ethical considerations in digital research contexts. in j. wright (ed.), encyclopedia for social & behavioral sciences (pp. 606-613). elsevier. nesh (national committees for research ethics in norway). (2016). guidelines for research ethics in social sciences, law and the humanities. retrieved april 23, 2021 from https://www.etikkom.no/aktuelt/publikasjoner/guidelines-for-research-ethics-in-thesocial-sciences-law-and-the-humanities/ nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. stanford university press. nuremberg code.(1949). trials of war criminals before the nuremberg military tribunals under control council law. no. 10, vol. 2. (pp. 181-182). u.s. government printing office. retrieved april 23, 2021 from: https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/military_law/pdf/nt_warcriminals_vol-ii.pdf office of the secretary of the national commission for the protection of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research. (1979). the belmont report: ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. technical report. department of health, education, and welfare. retrieved april 23, 2021 from https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/index.html robards, b., & lincoln, s. (2020). growing up on facebook. peter lang. shelley-egan, c. (2015). satori ethics assessment in internet research ethics. retrieved april 23, 2021 from https://satoriproject.eu/media/2.d.2-internet-research-ethics.pdf steeves, v. (2015). now you see me: privacy, technology, and autonomy in the digital age. in g. digiacomo (ed.), current issues and controversies in human rights (pp. 1-31). university of toronto press. tiidenberg, k. (2018). research ethics, vulnerability, and trust on the internet. in j. hunsinger, l. klastrup & m. allen (eds.), second international handbook of internet research (pp. 115). springer. tsesis, a., (2014). the right to be forgotten and erasure: privacy, data brokers, and the indefinite retention of data. wake forest law review, 49(2), 433-484. united nations. (1948). declaration of human rights. retrieved april 23, 2021 from https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights ethical approaches to youth data in historical web archives studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 442-449, 2021 449 utrecht data school. (2019). data ethics decision aid (deda). utrecht university. retrieved april 23, 2021 from https://dataschool.nl/en/deda/ van dijck, j., poell, t., & de waal, m. (2018). the platform society: public values in a connective world. oxford scholarship online. gruson-wood fg aug 2 16 correspondence address: julia f. gruson-wood, department of science & technology studies, york university, 4700 keele st., toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: juliagrusonwood@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 autism, expert discourses, and subjectification: a critical examination of applied behavioural therapies julia f. gruson-wood york university, canada abstract applied behavioural therapies are widely adopted interventions that have become the standard of healthcare and expert knowledge for autistic people in canada. these therapies are methods of individualized behavioural modification whereby skills are taught, and socially “undesirable” or “inappropriate” behaviour is regulated according to expert claims that focus on correction, imitation, repetition, reinforcements, and environmental modification. despite their prevalence, these therapies are highly controversial methods within autism communities, with mostly non-autistic parents and clinicians as their main proponents, and autistic self-activists as their critics. the ethnographic research presented will examine the culture, training, and knowledge practices of behavioural therapy providers in ontario, to study disciplinary techniques that are used to create expert subjects. in order to operate as a technology for producing optimal results in the autistic subject, working as a behavioural therapist involves multiple techniques such as completing intensive exercises consisting of audible and textual surveillance, recorded sessions, and intratherapeutic replicability. these techniques and exercises often work to discipline expressions of care in accordance with a “psychocentric” framework for understanding autism and supporting autistic people. keywords applied behavioural therapies; critical autism studies; ethnography; foucault; psychocentrism; healthcare applied behavioural analysis (aba) and early intensive behavioural intervention (eibi) have become widely adopted therapies in the healthcare for young (18 months to seven years of age) autistic people (orsini, 2009).1 this age range is considered the optimal window for eibi (gordon, 2012; 1 i refer to those with autism as “autistic people” as this is the term favoured by many autistic activists who consider autism a political identity. 2 “neurodiversity” is a term used by many in autistic communities, and refers to the existence of autism, expert discourses & subjectification studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 39 perry, 2002), although aba methods may be applied throughout the lifespan of autistic people in north america. based predominately on b. f. skinner’s (1938) theory of operant conditioning, aba and eibi are referred to by expert proponents as evidence-based methods. aba and eibi are individualized behavioural modification techniques that focus on improving cognitive, communication, and life skills. correcting behaviour deemed inappropriate or socially undesirable is a large component of many applied behavioural therapy programs (lovaas, 1987; ontario ministry of education, 2007). individualized behavioural programs use techniques such as imitation, repetition, reinforcements, and environmental modification to improve communication and cognitive skills (lovaas, 1987; ontario ministry of children and youth services, 2016). behaviour modification techniques are an important area of study as they exemplify psychocentrism (rimke, 2010a, 2010b), the view that all human problems are individually rooted rather than socially constituted. the normative liberal democratic ideal of the self-governing modern subject has been imposed and enforced on autistic people (eyal et al., 2010), and especially on autistic children who by virtue of their age are incapable of providing informed consent. intelligence, autonomy, and functioning are dominant values that undergird behavioural analysis. aba and eibi are thus often forms of social and moral evaluation based on socially derived value judgments rather than objective or neutral science (turner & edgley, 2005). as examined primarily in the scholarship of michael orsini (2009, 2012; orsini & smith, 2010) there are two major clashing health social movements relating to autism: the dominant autism movement (primarily non-autistic clinicians and parents), which views autism as a deficit to be fixed, cured or prevented through clinical, genetic, or biomedical intervention; and the marginalized autistic movement (primarily autistic people and allies), which views autism as a form of difference and autistic acceptance as a civil rights issue. this paper provides a critical analysis of the dominant “psy” framework imposed on autistic people by the autism movement. the analysis that follows examines the disciplinary procedures and exercises required to work as a behavioural therapist or parent parapractitioner. this research is strongly influenced by the scholarly contributions of michael orsini (2009, 2012), who examines autism advocacy as its own social movement, and michelle dawson (2004, 2005, 2008), who analyses the ethics, science, politics and history of aba and eibi. theoretically, the paper draws on michel foucault’s work on discipline (1995), byron good’s (1994) ethnographic examination of the training of medical students, and heidi rimke’s (2010a, 2010b) critical sociological theory of psychocentrism. the growing voices of resistance to – and proliferation of – behaviour modification therapies, highlights the importance of critical scholarly attention to these therapies. situated within the fields of science studies, medical anthropology, and critical autism studies (see davidson & orsini, julia f. gruson-wood studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 40 2013), this research study seeks to analyze the aba/eibi-dominated culture of autism services in ontario. following foucauldian scholarship, this study also analyzes the power and knowledge practices of experts and providers working within autism services. it is important to study service providers, because until now they have not been the focus of critical social scientific studies within the field of autism. this is a significant gap, as science studies scholars have demonstrated how scientific methods, disciplines, and those working within them, are situated in specific “epistemic cultures”: “machineries of knowing” comprised of specific social, political, and economic contexts that shape expert knowledge and evidence production (knorr-cetina, 1999, p. 364). institutional resources, employee relationships, and bureaucratic processes are also fundamental to the creation of scientific theories (traweek, 1992). hence, scientific knowledge is not absolute or value-neutral, because scientific work operates in the context of culture and power. the epistemic culture of a scientific field can begin to be revealed through empirical analyses of the everyday work conducted therein (latour, 1988). this study relies on an ethnographic methodology for the intimate and extended opportunity it provides for multi-sited empirical observation (marcus, 1995). theoretically informed analysis of detailed empirical data is central to ethnography (clifford, 1986), as is researching from a positionality within the culture being examined (abu-lughod, 1991; fabian, 1990). my fieldwork, conducted over the course of 15 months, included observation research at autism conferences, exhibits, and events, and interviews with 29 providers and recipients of applied behavioural therapies. working as an educator for an autistic youth, and being the sibling of an autistic person, contributed to my knowledge of and experience with the practices, policies and infrastructure of ontario autism healthcare delivery. with the exception of one informant who chose not to be recorded, all confidential interviews have been transcribed in full, and all participants are referred to using a pseudonym. contested knowledge claims as the only funded services that are guaranteed for autistic children and youth in ontario, applied behavioural therapies govern autism healthcare delivery provincially (and nationwide). it is also mandatory for public school teachers to provide aba to their autistic students (see ontario ministry of education, 2007). further, most aba/eibi centers offer funded parent training programs (ontario ministry of children and youth services, 2016; perry, 2002), so that family members can be drawn in as unpaid parapractitioners who maintain this approach at home (donzelot, 1997; eyal et al., 2010; silverman, 2012; solish & perry, 2008). behavioural therapy services are also used to improve life skills and correct behavioural autism, expert discourses & subjectification studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 41 “problems” of autistic adults residing in in-patient units or group homes, or who attend day programs (see behaviourprise consulting inc., 2015). hence, aba and eibi are ubiquitous in many autistic people’s everyday lives. despite the prevalence of aba and eibi, they are highly controversial methods within autism communities (bagatell, 2010; vermey, 2004). although parents and clinicians are often strong proponents, having even launched human rights cases for aba and eibi to be classified as medical necessities (autism society of canada, 2012; auton vs. british columbia, 2002-2003; c.r. vs. alberta, 1996; hammer, 2008; f.e.a.t, 1996-2014), autistic self-advocates (some having received aba and eibi) are often very critical of these methods. this is evident from the legal and social media testimony provided by autistic people who have criticized these interventions as non-consensual and scientifically unethical (bagatell, 2010; dawson, 2005; solomon, 2008). critics have also denounced aba and eibi as oppressive, normalizing, corrective methods with the intention to eradicate autism (anxiousadvocate, 2015; dawson, 2004; schaber, 2014; sequenzia, 2016; unstrange mind, 2014). meanwhile, the dominant discourse of many of the parent and clinician-run autism organizations has excluded anti-aba autistic critics, arguing that their ability to speak for themselves means they are not autistic enough to speak for so-called lower functioning autistic children (bagatell, 2010; baggs, 2007; jager, 2010; orsini & smith, 2010; orsini, 2012). defining autism as a deficit to be fixed masks the social effects of categorization that takes the non-autistic person as the standard of normality. the disputes about aba and eibi have been intense, with the stakes being both the welfare of autistic people and the legitimacy of behavioural modification therapies as the dominant expert research enterprise for supporting autistic people and their families. psychocentrism nikolas rose (1998) argues that the modern liberal subject knows itself through various truth techniques invented by the psy disciplines, and defines itself as autonomous yet obligated to make ethical self-reflective choices. it is through the psy disciplines that behaviour became calculable, measurable, and open to intervention, and that normality became an enforced ideal. this proliferation of, and subjection to, psy truths and subjectivity, has resulted in what heidi rimke has termed, “psychocentrism”: “the cultural domination by, and consumption of, psy discourse that simultaneously depoliticize the political while capitalizing on the emotional through the hegemony of political practices of power” (2010a, p. 95). psychocentrism, as a form of ableism, characterizes “all human problems” as “innate pathologies of the individual mind/body” (rimke, 2010a, p. 96). some of these so-called pathologies, like autism, are considered evil and tragic epidemics constituting julia f. gruson-wood studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 42 states of emergency that require expert treatment and prevention (broderick & ne’eman, 2008; thierry, 2006; wright, 2013). perceptions and classifications of normality and pathology are shaped by neoliberalism (rimke, 2010a, 2010b). as articulated by catherine runswick-cole (2014, p. 1126), “autism has been subjected to, produced by and exchanged within neoliberal market systems.” a psychocentric view hyper-responsibilizes the so-called pathological individual (or with autism, primarily the parents) to seek clinical/psy guidance to “get well,” above all else (rimke, 2010a). in psychocentric discourse the forces of power and socially structured injustices are erased by reductively placing all responsibility on the individual (rimke, 2010a, 2010b). as many autistic self-activists have been asserting (autistic self advocacy network, 2015; baggs, 2007; ne’eman, 2011; sequenzia, 2014; sinclair, 2002), and as perpetuated by most mainstream autism organizations (see defeat autism now, 2007; autism speaks/cure autism now, 2006; robinson, 2013), psychocentric attitudes toward neurodiversity govern the dominant cultural response to autistic people and their healthcare. 2 mainstream autism culture capitalizes on “emotional practices of power” (rimke, 2010a, p. 95) – especially pity, fear, sadness, blame, anger, hope, inspiration, and despair – to increase the symbolic, political and economic capital of clinical, charity and recovery based approaches to autism care. the depoliticization of autism as a tragic health epidemic over-responsibilizes parents and clinicians to “light it up blue” for donations for research: to spread autism acceptance while simultaneously “walking for the cure.” autism thus presents a strong example of the hegemony of the “disease model of autism” (broderick & ne’eman, 2008, p. 459) that negatively affects the lives of autistic people. behavioural technologies and constituting subjects building upon b. f. skinner’s technology of behaviour (1938, 1971), ole ivar lovaas, a clinical psychologist based at ucla, was the pioneer for autism-specific aba in the 1960s, and later for eibi (lovaas, 1987; rutherford, 2009; silverman, 2012). eibi is an intensive aba program, consisting of about 40 weekly hours of one-on-one aba work. individual intervention plans are devised that use positive and negative reinforcements – and sometimes aversives – to target skills and behaviours requiring improvement and replacement (lovaas, 1987; ontario ministry of children 2 “neurodiversity” is a term used by many in autistic communities, and refers to the existence of neurological variegation in a social system that privileges or oppresses people based on their relation to neurological norms. for an important critique of neurodiversity as reinforcing neoliberal identity politics, see runswick-cole (2014). autism, expert discourses & subjectification studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 43 and youth services, 2016).3 targeted behaviour could include learning to speak and communicate needs, use the toilet, count, build social skills, make eye contact, stop tantrums, or reduce stimming (self-stimulation). interventions may take the form of quick, short proscriptive sessions that are repeated until mastered – this is one of the most popular methods, called discrete trial training (smith, 2001). other common therapeutic interventions include natural environment or incidental training, and pivotal response therapy. lovaas described autism as a collection of dysfunctional behaviours that may be cured through intense behavioural work (dawson, 2004; the lovaas center, 2016; lovaas, 1987). according to lovaas, when he began applying aba and eibi, the primary goal of behavioural therapy was to free people enslaved by autism (the lovaas center, 2016). to be free from autism, lovaas asserted that the autistic person must engage with behavioural therapy work “during every waking hour” (zucker & donovan, 2016, p. 216), thus effectively clinicalizing their everyday life. to pervasively engage in behavioural therapies, lovaas responsibilized parents to conduct aba in the home. thus, family and parental styles were reshaped to conform to the goals and exercises of the clinic (zucker & donovan, 2016). lovaas’ approach was clearly psychocentric given that the therapeutic focus of behavioural therapy was premised on individual – not social – change. this formulation of individualized social control reinforced existing social structures of essentialist neurological inequality, putting the onus on the autistic person to conform to constructions of neurotypicality.4 the science of behavioural therapy is based on the notion that all behaviours have a function that is measurable and changeable through scheduled reinforcements and environmental control (lovaas, 1987; rutherford, 2009; skinner, 1938, 1971). in behavioural analysis, there is no mind or psyche, only thoughts, behaviour, and environment. behavioural analysis brings the self to the surface (see novas & rose, 2000), as an object that is exterior and visible, and therefore more available for acting upon. hence, “skinner’s most enduring achievement was to treat human behaviour change like any other technological problem” (rutherford, 2009, p. 10). this technology of behaviour is applied to make the technology of the self function better. 3 a basic definition of an aversive is a punishing or unpleasant stimulus (i.e., slapping, hitting, taste aversives, electric shocks) applied primarily to stop a harmful or negative behaviour. aversives are widely considered unethical and out-dated, although five of my informants – as well as colleagues in the autism field – witnessed providers who apply them. one informant discussed using them. 4 importantly, not all behavioural therapists and behavioural science methods are psychocentric. while space prohibits more analysis, some behavioural therapy providers work against a psychocentric framework of supporting autistic people (see shyman, 2014). julia f. gruson-wood studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 44 disciplinary power as a population subjected to intensive governing modes of expert power and knowledge, autistic people are subjected to a “micro-physics” and “machinery” of power (foucault, 1995, p. 139, 26) when receiving aba or eibi. by viewing behaviour as a technology to be tracked, replicated, calculated and modified through highly controlled environmental manipulations (rutherford, 2009, p. 7, 10), behavioural analysis treats the autistic body like a machine as it “breaks it down and rearranges it” to operate more effectively (foucault, 1995, pp. 138-139). of course, all people are subjected to disciplinary power (foucault, 1991; foucault, 2008). what autistic self-advocates and allies have exposed is that autistic people – in often being categorized as abnormal – are likely to be subjected to hyperintensive disciplinary procedures. what requires further analysis is how the subjectivity of the behavioural therapist must be disassembled and reconstructed; it is “calculated, organized, technically thought out” (foucault, 1995, p. 26), so that it can operate as a technology for producing “effective” results in autistic subjects. behavioural therapists are subjected to disciplinary techniques that mirror the ones they apply to their autistic subjects. thus, the behavioural therapist is trained and disciplined to function as a “productive” “subjected,” “practised,” “effective” and “obedient” docile body (foucault, 1995, p. 138). the testimony of a behavioural therapist informant called natalie illustrates this. natalie explained how she was trained in the intensive “gold standard” model of “errorless teaching,” involving instruction, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback exercises. in training, natalie was shadowed and shaped by senior therapists, had monthly “maintenance checks” testing her performance abilities, and had to pass “mastery criteria” assessments. natalie described using the same techniques to shape the conduct of her autistic subjects, thus demonstrating the relationship between the governance of the self and others. natalie succinctly articulated the co-production (see jasanoff, 2006) of the disciplining of the therapist with the autistic subject: “when it’s intensive it’s not just intensive for the kids, it’s intensive for the staff. you would do 300 something... teaching trials, and that’s in addition to behavioural intervention.” through disciplinary practices and technologies of surveillance such as recorded assessments, cross-therapist replicability and textual compliance, many behavioural therapists learn to “inhabit a new world” (good, 1994, p. 70), a behavioural world. in this behavioural world, behavioural therapists learn to relate to themselves as malleable instruments, who through objective, authoritative and compliant conduct, are able to engineer targeted therapeutic outcomes. it is common in the applied behavioural therapy field to consider autism as a collection of individual deficits that require improvement. thus, to ethically care for an autistic person means working to increase their functionality. as a result, both the “good” autistic person and the “good” autism, expert discourses & subjectification studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 45 behavioural therapist emerge through training exercises of discipline and compliance. juggling robots and identities: the making of a behavioural therapist margot, a former aba therapist in her mid-30s, recounted her experience of being trained as an instructor therapist at a public eibi centre while in her mid-20s, describing her cohort as young and energetic, all of them eager to get their autistic subjects to respond to therapy work. she stated: my friends... they could hear each other over their partitions with their kids and we would talk about how crazy we would get to try and get the kids... socially reinforced... and one of them heard the other one being like ‘i’m a juggling robot!’ [loudly and clownish] and then the child would laugh and then perform... like ‘match the cards!’ or whatever. the kid would do it. but we were all like: ‘what are we doing? like with ourselves?’ in describing attempts to get their “kids” to perform, margot painted a frenetic picture of a therapist’s desire to incite specific responses. margot’s story also vividly captures the intensive bodywork involved in being a behavioural therapist. when speaking to me, margot had a low voice and calm demeanour, but when imitating her friends’ tone in speaking to her kid, she raised her voice an octave to a cartoonish, almost shrill tone, startling me so that my body moved back. the tone and wild actions involved in becoming a juggling robot indicate the extent to which behavioural therapists modify themselves to work as instruments for accomplishing targeted responses in their “individuals.” 5 this process of identity rupturing and formation was succinctly captured in the stunned reflection margot and her friends shared: “what are we doing? like with ourselves?” medical anthropologist byron good (1994) examined the disciplinary practices involved in becoming a physician, and detailed how these practices reshaped the emotional life and worldview of medical students. like erving goffman’s (1961) work on the “total institution,” good (1994) argues that training to be a doctor is a total process – like training for the army – that requires an unmaking and reconstructing of the medical students’ worldview. as good (1994, p. 72) observes, “within the lifeworld of medicine, the body is newly constituted as a medical body, quite distinct from the bodies we interact with in everyday life.” good (1994, p. 72) continues to explain how an “organized set of perceptions and emotional responses” arise with the “emergence of the body as a site of medical knowledge.” as with medical training, becoming a behavioural therapist often involves breaking down and rebuilding the therapists’ way of perceiving the world, themselves and others. 5 i use the term “individual” to refer to the autistic people the behavioural therapists work with, as this is the language the behavioural therapists being interviewed most commonly used. julia f. gruson-wood studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 46 in the process, the therapist’s body becomes an object of subjectification and a subject of objectification. as exemplified by the evocative figure of the juggling robot, there are complex gendered dynamics at play with female behavioural therapists’ selfgovernance and training. this is especially significant because behavioural therapy is a feminized profession. juggling is commonly associated with the double-day of contemporary heteronormative motherhood involving both public and private labour. a robot is a hyper-masculinized technological and mechanical object, devoid of emotion and personality, and created to serve functional purposes. skinner’s technology of behaviour (a fundamental principle of lovaas’ aba/eibi), could be interpreted as figuratively robotic. many of the female behavioural therapists interviewed juggled masculine ideals of objective scientific rationality (in becoming a technical instrument for producing behavioural change), and socialized ideals of feminization (nurturing, empathy, kindness). chloe silverman (2012) claims that parents and clinicians use love as a technical tool to push for resources and funding for clinical treatments and interventions for autism. my study demonstrates that behavioural therapists also cite feelings of affection as an important reason why they choose to conduct behavioural therapy work. that applied behavioural therapy is a feminized field elucidates how the affective topography of aba and eibi is situated within a “gendered economy of care” (silverman, 2012, p. 6). the panopticon: audible and textual surveillance margot described the clinic as divided by partitions, where one-on-one work was audible – but not visible – to other behavioural therapy providers and recipients. as anyone in the room could hear a therapy session, including supervisors who write behavioural plans, the partitions prevented participants from knowing who, or whether, anyone was listening. this arrangement recalls foucault’s architectural metaphor of the panopticon, which he used to describe social relations of surveillance and regulation (foucault, 1995). the panopticon was designed so that a single overseer could watch all the inmates of an institution, but where inmates could not see each other or the overseer, thus knowing there was always the possibility of being surveilled (foucault, 1995). foucault writes: he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (foucault, 1995, pp. 202-203) margot, her colleagues, and the kids, were subjected to a similar form of regulatory power. surveillance created a collectivizing bond amongst autism, expert discourses & subjectification studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 47 therapist-colleagues about the “crazy” extent of their attempts to discipline their own conduct to produce responses in their autistic subjects. added to this is the strong desire of the therapists to succeed in modifying their kid’s performance, which is rooted in a desire to be judged a good behavioural therapist. the criterion to be a good therapist is the ability to elicit the correct responses in an individual by conducting their conduct through the selfgovernance of the self and others (foucault, 1991; foucault, 2008). with the juggling robot technique, the intended correct response was social engagement (hence, laughter), which the therapist achieved by transforming herself into a comical subject. thus, the sound of her kid’s laughter communicated to the other therapists – and perhaps to the clinical supervisor who might be listening – that she was doing a good job. texts, in the form of behavioural plans or stemming from data collection exercises, are another instrument of panoptic surveillance. as many of the behavioural therapists interviewed indicated, in order to understand the function of a behaviour and intervene for betterment, data collection exercises are often completed before, during, and after each behavioural therapy session. the purposes of data collection include empirical observation, behavioural tracking, behavioural therapy research production and surveillance. the governing text for one-on-one aba and eibi work is the behaviour plan. this document disciplines the micro-conduct of a therapist’s body and actions when applying behavioural therapy. it is a detailed document that includes all the interventions to be carried out by the therapist. it is created by the clinical supervisor after an individual has completed an array of assessment procedures that reveal the skills and behaviours requiring replacement, modification, and improvement. the importance of the behaviour plan in governing all actors involved in applying behavioural therapies cannot be underestimated. leon (a former assistant behavioural therapist at a public eibi clinic who is now a phd student) referred to the plan as “the bible” for behavioural therapists as it is treated like “the word of god” and “dictates everything you do.” as leon explained, there are negative consequences for not following the word of god, including routine check-ups conducted by clinical supervisors who regularly monitor the data collection documents completed by the therapist. supervisors reprimand or praise the therapist for compliantly completing the procedures outlined in the behaviour plan. while the supervisor is not always watching a behavioural therapist’s work, the use of texts ensures that therapists operate as if there is always the possibility of being watched. in turn, they learn to conduct themselves in compliance with the managerial authority of their behaviour plan, which enables supervisors to govern when absent. a story told to me by becky – a therapist working in a private eibi clinic – of what happened when she accidentally failed to follow one of the procedures written in her individual’s plan illustrates how behavioural therapists internalize the expert authority of the clinical supervisor (via this julia f. gruson-wood studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 48 document), and how they invoke and impose such textual authority on other therapists. becky’s description of her noncompliance is expressed in the following quote: it’s all written in their program. it’s very specific…there were times i remember still to this day, one of the boys i was supporting… was actually not on task, and i didn’t read it [the plan]. silly me, i didn’t respond properly…the other instructor, she came up and she said ‘he’s stimming!’ and the stimming looked very normal. his hands were in his pocket... but i didn’t know… [they] were fiddling with the string that was stitched into the seam... and that was written in his book but i didn’t know... i just came in and i “shewwww!” – i looked over the book very fast... but i should have known... and then there was a correctionary procedure that has to be done. by voicing regret and anxiety about missing a very subtle bodily cue that was written into the individual’s plan, becky demonstrated the important surveillance function of the document. becky’s description of her own sense of aba as an empowering technique for autistic people, coupled with her eagerness to contribute to this study, compelled her to undertake aba as a “vocation”: an ethical calling, rather than a practical or economic one. becky stated that for her, the job of behavioural therapist “has nothing to do with money,” and that the pay was modest. thus, becky’s hyperbolized feelings of humiliation about missing a stimm by skimming through “the book,” are revealing of the training she has received to align being a good therapist with compliance to the behaviour plan. further, as a document available for any behavioural therapist to read, the behaviour plan regulates the therapist to conduct herself as if always being monitored. video technologies: recording subjection the routine and panoptic video recordings of aba sessions were discussed by many behavioural therapist informants, and by parent para-practitioners who had been trained to apply behavioural therapies to their child. often informants would mention the recordings in passing, thus indicating the significance of this method of surveillance as a naturalized part of aba work. some clinicians i interviewed described recorded sessions as a key technology for assessing the performance and skills of both practitioner and recipient. alternately, parents would watch their child’s recorded therapy sessions as part of their parent-training program, for the purpose of learning to model the techniques used by the behavioural therapist. parents would also watch videos of their own behavioural therapy work with their children to receive clinician feedback on their conduct and skills. while many therapists and parent para-practitioners in this study were grateful for opportunities to receive supervision and feedback, some felt stressed when a recorded session was not going well. one therapist, laurie, autism, expert discourses & subjectification studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 49 lost a job due to a negative parent assessment of her recorded session with their child. laurie, herself autistic, was providing aba in the home of the individual she was working with. the individual’s parents were insistent that their child learn to make eye contact, and they wanted laurie to use hands-on strategies to enforce this lesson. laurie felt uncomfortable with this and resisted implementing these strategies. after reviewing the video of laurie’s work, the parents decided to terminate her employment. laurie’s story elucidates how the video recording is a form of surveillance that tacitly compels compliance. further, it demonstrates both the stakes of the recording and its different uses by the multiple actors involved in providing or paying for aba. many behavioural therapists work in home-based programs, or for private clinics that are paid for by parents, meaning that they are sometimes governed both by parents and clinical supervisors. the therapists who work privately described how tricky it can be to manage the expectations of both types of employers. these therapists discussed the difficulties of negotiating their conduct so that it pleases both stakeholders (especially if their priorities clash), while also meeting their own ethical code. the pressure to shape conduct to satisfy conflicting expectations is heightened by the financial uncertainty of many non-unionized private behavioural therapy jobs. laurie failed to perform this delicate dance, and after being fired, decided to leave the field. another function of the video recording is as a testing mechanism for behavioural therapy qualification. the grading scheme relating to recorded performances works to co-produce the success of the autistic subject with that of the therapist. for example, tajman, a clinical supervisor who described her own training process, stated that she had to receive a passing mark on her performance – an 80% “mastery” score – in multiple recorded sessions to become a behavioural therapist. tajman explained that therapists need their autistic individual also to master the session in order to be assessed as mastering the session themselves. this disciplinary technique teaches student behavioural therapists that they need their autistic individuals to provide the correct responses in order to be a good therapist. this enmeshment can compel an almost desperate desire for the autistic individual to master the correct performance, as evidenced with the story of the juggling robot. performance and replicability in addition to video surveillance, behavioural therapists’ conduct is shaped through exercises of cross-therapist replicability. as mentioned, an autistic individual is often required to respond correctly to 80% of the session instructions in order to master it and move on. many therapist informants explained that the mastered session has to be repeated three times with the same results, but by different therapists. to engineer replicable results, many informants described having to learn to operate as a technical instrument for julia f. gruson-wood studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 50 generating objective behavioural change. to complicate things, many therapists discussed the importance of building rapport – friendliness and trust – with their individual. yet rapport has to be carefully managed as to not slide into a “relationship.” hence, rapport is used to advance behavioural therapists’ ability to generate replicable effective behavioural performances, while a relationship contaminates this ability. to examine this form of discipline, i asked leon to expand on the role of objectivity and emotional connection in aba and eibi practice, and whether these topics were included in his behavioural therapy training. leon responded: there was no specific training around it but... this is how it was explained: ‘if you develop a relationship with a child it will excuse your ability to make further progress because your purview of their abilities is skewed, therefore you shouldn’t do it.’ it was almost like... a scare tactic. ‘so by doing this, you’re hurting more kids in the long run.’ so... it was brought up, reinforced again, by the senior therapist. the issue of relationships was mentioned during training and reinforced by leon’s supervisor as both a technical and ethical problem: a bond that would impede a child’s progress, skew the therapist’s understanding of the child’s abilities, and thus hurt the child in the future. leon describes these interventions as scare tactics meant to discipline his conduct. this sense of being disciplined is evident in leon’s description of his senior therapist as “reinforcing” and thus regulating him to keep a professional social distance. authority, compliance, and care maya, a 19 year-old assistant therapist, began working with an autistic teenager who she met when she was a camp counsellor. to maya, becoming a behavioural therapist was both a vocation and a job. as a psychology major, aba/eibi was her most practical career prospect, but she also considered applied behavioural therapy methods as vital for helping autistic people. maya described her struggle with providing aba. when asked to explain the source of her discomfort, maya described having to actively temper her compulsion to “be nice” to provide effective aba. if nice gets in the way of progress, being nice can actually be unkind, maya explained. thus, in training to become a therapist, maya re-signifies niceness as harmful to her individuals’ progress (this is similar to the logic presented to leon regarding forming a relationship). throughout the interview, maya laughed nervously, spoke quietly, and smiled often. she appeared shy and warm, and spoke of her affection for the individuals with whom she works. it was evident that acting in a way that did not feel nice was challenging for maya. the following interview excerpt provides context for maya’s rationale, and autism, expert discourses & subjectification studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 51 elucidates how her process of becoming a behavioural therapist involved breaking down and reconstructing her identity. m: i still have a lot more to learn because there will be situations where i feel like i’m not being effective. someone else who’s been working with her [the individual] will be doing the exact same thing as me but will be effective... it’s just about how you portray yourself... it’s a lot about implicit authority... the way you stand, the voice you use, the tone... it’s funny because i was... a very... diplomatic type of person to begin with. when i started this i felt like: ‘am i becoming rude? am i being authoritative?’ j: do you remember the growing pains when you first started implementing [intensive behavioural therapy]? m: still sometimes making her do things that she doesn’t want to do. i think it’s actually still the same thing: following through. i tend to... adapt to her, which i guess people would do in general... the thing you have to remember about aba is that you’re trying to help them be functional, so if you adapt to when they’re being dysfunctional... you’re not really helping them, right? if they’re going to keep... throwing a tantrum and you’re trying to adapt to that, that won’t be right. an important part of this excerpt is maya’s sense that her ability to become a good therapist is premised on her ability to produce the same level of effectiveness as other behavioural therapists. this indicates that maya has been disciplined to view the merit of her work in terms of its cross-therapist replicability. maya also discusses having to change how she portrays herself. she “began” as a diplomatic person, but in applying aba, she questions whether she has become a different kind of person – a rude and authoritative one. maya embodied these two kinds of people while she was explaining this to me. when referring to her diplomatic self, maya was bubbly and animated, her back slouched, body leaning toward mine, and her hands expressive. when describing her therapist self, she shifted her posture dramatically; her back was rigidly straight, face blank, tone commanding and terse, and arms tucked under the table. these two identities were very different. when maya explained behavioural therapy work as requiring her to refrain from doing what “people generally do” (i.e., adapt to the autistic person) she articulated how the process of becoming a therapist is constitutive of a new lifeworld, which involves unfamiliar perceptions, knowledge-practices, and ways of interacting. maya still struggles to “follow through” with the practices required in this new behavioural lifeworld, and actively works to obey and make sense of them. maya’s motivation for following through is linked to her newly-adopted behavioural orientation toward kindness, as well as to her practical hope for employment after graduation. assistant behavioural therapists make a modest salary and often have little job security; senior therapists, behavioural consultants, and clinical supervisors usually have greater job security and higher salaries. leon described a “chain of command” in aba and eibi julia f. gruson-wood studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 52 work, descending from clinicians to supervisors, to behavioural therapists, with instructor and assistant therapists at the bottom. when i asked him how he felt about this chain, leon responded: i never had... any issues with them [his senior therapists] taking authority... i did what i was told to do... but that was my goal eventually, to keep moving up. so kind of the classic foucauldian idea of being a good citizen, does good work, does what they want them to do, will have more success than the one that resists, right? maya’s incentive to conduct herself to be as “effective” as other therapists working with her individual resonates with leon’s analysis of compliance as related to moving up the chain, where being a good citizen corresponds with conforming to organizational rules and norms of professional conduct. in the second part of my exchange with maya quoted above, she works to settle an uncomfortable discord between how she likes to act versus how she is being trained, citing “effective” forms of conduct as central to reducing her clients “dysfunctionality.” maya thus draws on behavioural language to organize her perception of autism as an innate individual deficit requiring behavioural intervention. she further uses behavioural science terminology to legitimize her new authoritative role. in transitioning from nice to authoritative, maya’s perception of how to express empathy shifted in sync with her new ethical framework. maya still wants to be good, but she now sees good through the lens of behavioural analysis. in rejecting niceness, maya understands her new authoritative conduct as a form of kindness, in which kindness (“helping”) has been psychocentrically reduced to behavioural effectiveness. the relationship between kindness and effectiveness was also explored in my interview with anita, who lives with her parents, husband, and three children, two of whom are diagnosed autistic. she works as an unpaid aba para-practitioner to her autistic children. anita explained her knowledge of aba as informed by the government-funded parent training programs she was encouraged to take after her children were diagnosed. she described applying severe interventions to her autistic children. most parents use strategies to compel children to express themselves in relation to social norms of capacity, so it is important to note the particular ways that anita was trained to parent as an authoritative, compliant behavioural therapist. it was clear that she loved her autistic children and thought aba was the best thing she could do to help them. to understand the logic behind this understanding, i asked anita about her knowledge of autism and aba. i also invited her to describe how her kids reacted to aba, and how those reactions made her feel. this is an excerpt from her response: lots of tantrums... that was challenging, being a mother. the challenging part is to withhold your emotions and... keep that child crying until he realizes that, ‘okay she’s not going to give me milk, she’s not going to give me my favourite toy unless... i use my words.’ that was a very challenging issue i faced. and it’s autism, expert discourses & subjectification studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 53 still challenging sometimes... where sometimes they don’t want to speak or if they’re in a bad mood... ‘ma, you should know what i want’... if they’re not telling me what they want, they’re not getting it... for a normal child this is our cultural thing that we do, that... we have to change the diapers before the [child asks for it] – when we know the diaper is wet... and the milk should come right before the child builds up time for milk... we just learned about this whole spectrum thing, that, okay, we have to wait until the child demands for it... but... being a mother, it’s hard to see all of that crying and like you are not giving milk to your own child... being a mother – it’s painful to see. but, we know that it’s the only thing that we can do to conquer that spectrum stuff. so that’s why we did that. in this excerpt, anita portrays a home that has been reorganized to operate as a behavioural therapy clinic, where her parental conduct complies with the goals of aba work, and where she ensures that other family members also comply. anita’s rationale for not doing the “normal cultural things” like giving her children milk and toys, or changing their diapers, is for them to perform the exercises required to “conquer” the “spectrum thing.” like maya, anita separates her ethical framework from mainstream culture’s, by adopting a behavioural paradigm of personhood and care. anita does not like taking on an authoritative role, which she experiences as painful, hard, and damaging to her identity as a mother. in stating that she just “learned about the whole spectrum thing” and was told that it is the “best thing she can do” for her children, anita indicates how she has been trained by clinical experts to align being a good mother with being a good aba practitioner. the jobs of good mother and good practitioner converge into the obligation to actively help conquer autism through completing aba work. although anita and her family speak english as a second language, they speak only english around the autistic boys, on the advice of a behavioural therapy expert. anita only learned about the spectrum through her children’s diagnosis, so this ethnocentric orientation toward understanding and intervening on autism was taught to her by experts, and was formative in shaping her perception about how to care for her autistic children. anita found it ethically necessary to responsibilize herself and her family to apply these “effective” yet painful interventions, because she is a good mother, because she does love her children. conclusion although applied behavioural therapies are sometimes practised outside of a psychocentric framework, as a field of discourse and practice, behavioural therapy reproduces psychocentrism, because it draws all actors involved into understanding autism through an individual deficit model. to be optimized, the autistic subject is subjected to normalizing disciplinary techniques and practices. parents and providers are trained to view and accept clinical julia f. gruson-wood studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 54 interventions as necessarily intense, and to consider the meaning of the lives of autistic people according to ideals of behavioural functionality, neurological capacity, and socialization. self-discipline is the prime subjectification technique used in aba, where each subject involved must self-govern in order to govern others. my fieldwork indicates that the lifeworld of behavioural therapist informants was constituted through intensive training exercises, consisting of panoptic forms of audible, textual and video surveillance, and intra-therapeutic replicability. exercises of compliance and reliability, aimed at creating the docile therapist, work to objectify her body and soul (i.e., use them as technical objects), so that she identifies her professional and personal worth through the ability to incite specific responses in her therapeutic subjects. the goal of effectiveness regulates expressions of care, training behavioural therapists and parapractitioners to define care for autistic people through a psychocentric framework. from a behavioural worldview, the good therapist is docile, and being a good person means being a good therapist. another implication of behavioural therapy work is the complex gendered expectations that impact the work many therapists do. as particularly evident with margot, maya, and anita, masculine ideals of objectivity, the self-disciplined body as technology, and the use of intensive methods, were considered essential to being empathetic toward autistic people. aba and eibi professionals have not been the topic of much critical social scientific analysis, which problematically narrows discourse to a discussion of the ethics and effectiveness of applied behavioural therapies for autistic people. the research described in this paper thus draws upon the rich, culturally significant professional lifeworld encompassed in training for and practising behavioural therapy. examining this lifeworld helps to understand the distinct epistemic culture that comprises this relatively new and increasingly popular expert field, which affects the everyday lives of most autistic people in ontario and internationally. in addition, moving the discussion from the disciplining of the autistic person to the disciplining of the therapist allows an important analysis of expert knowledge and power: it is not just autistic people who are disciplined and monitored through governmental and pastoral forces (foucault, 2008), which compel conduct toward collective norms. the complex network of power draws upon numerous subjects and technologies, such as clinical supervisors, training curricula, government policy, textual protocol, and video documentation. these technologies merge to shepherd the conduct of the behavioural therapist for the purpose of shaping the conduct of both autistic people and the experts themselves. intensive disciplining is both conceptual and material; autism is considered a problem of behavioural dysfunction, and care is understood as increasing functionality. however, through their entanglement and co-production with autistic people, behavioural therapists can reproduce or resist psychocentric aspects of their training. whether therapists leave the field (as with laurie or autism, expert discourses & subjectification studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 38-58, 2016 55 leon), or choose a practice based on accommodation and social agency (as expressed by some of the other therapists i interviewed), closeness may provide openings for providing an aba practice that is grounded in a social justice approach to autism care, where relationality, time-off, empowered support, inclusion, and enjoyment (for both therapists and autistic people) override psychocentric projects centred on repetition, replicability, intensiveness, dys/function, and assimilation. social justice requires wider awareness and systemic recognition of the problem of psychocentrism when implementing social policies that aim to serve the interests of those involved. acknowledgements thank you greatly to the informants for this study, the editors of this issue and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. thank you to thea lim, emery potter, colin hastings, matthu strang, and eric mykhalovskiy, for providing helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. references abu-lughod, l. 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(2016). in a different key: the story of autism. new york: penguin/random house. jinnah final feb 23 20 correspondence address: zaheera jinnah, school of social work, university of victoria, victoria, bc, canada, v8w 2y2; email: zjinnah@uvic.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 negotiated precarity in the global south: a case study of migration and domestic work in south africa zaheera jinnah university of victoria, canada1 abstract this article explores precarity as a conceptual framework to understand the intersection of migration and low-waged work in the global south. using a case study of cross-border migrant domestic workers in south africa, i discuss current debates on framing and understanding precarity, especially in the global south, and test its use as a conceptual framework to understand the everyday lived experiences and strategies of a group that face multiple forms of exclusion and vulnerability. i argue that a form of negotiated precarity, defined as transactions which provide opportunities for survival but also render people vulnerable, can be a useful way to make sense of questions around (il)legality and (in)formality in the context of poorly protected work, insecure citizenship and social exclusion. precarity as a negotiated strategy shows the ways in which people interact with systems and institutions and foregrounds their agency. but it also illustrates that the negative outcomes inherent in more traditional notions of precarity, expressed in physical and economic vulnerability, and discrimination in employment relations, mostly hurt the poor. this suggests the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding precarity in labour migration studies. keywords: domestic work; gender; migrant labour; precarity; race; south africa introduction precarity is widely used and studied in the applied and academic literature, and across disciplines (millar, 2017; neilsen & rossiter, 2008; standing, 2014). at its core it refers to a condition of chronic insecurity and weak 1 the author is also affiliated with the african centre for migration & society, university of the witwatersrand, johannesburg, south africa. negotiated precarity in the global south studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 211 citizenship rights (standing, 2011, 2014). in the labour literature, precarity refers to a class of workers, known as the precariat, who are in insecure and unstable jobs. sociologists trace precarity to a consequence of neo-liberal systems of capital accumulation which erode labour protections such as job security, benefits and protection on the one hand, and to the parallel decline of welfare states which offer socials security protection on the other. the precariat therefore are workers whose everyday existence is characterised by a sense of instability and vulnerability. for migrant workers, an insecure citizenship status compounds this vulnerability by narrowing their choices in the labour market and making them more at risk of exploitation. despite this rich body of work, there have been fierce critiques of precarity structured along two lines: first, questioning its relevance as a new and political concept; and second, testing its applicability in the global south (barchiesi 2011; pang, 2018; paret, 2016; rogan, roever, chen & carré, 2017; scully, 2016). it is within this framework that i attempt to further explore what precarity means in the global south under conditions of international migration and low waged work, and conversely how using precarity as a conceptual framework can serve as a bridge between the relatively unexplored connections between international migration and labour studies in southern africa. in this broader context, i use a case study of cross-border migrant domestic workers in south africa to explore further what precarity in the global south looks like under conditions of migration and low waged work. how do we describe and theorise it? and how does it resonate with the lived experiences, both the “positive” and the “negative” of this group? the outline of this article is as follows the next section provides some background on domestic work and migration in south africa, and the broader global scholarship in this field. it serves as a context and rationale for the selection of this sector as a case study in the global south. i then summarise the key developments in precarity as a concept, showing how a deeper and broader understanding that uses evidence from multiple locations is needed. the bulk of the article attempts to do this by developing a case for “negotiated precarity.” using empirical material on domestic work in south africa i show how negotiated precarity can serve as a conceptual framing of the insecurity and strategies of a group of vulnerable workers. i end with some thoughts on the limitations of and opportunities for a deeper study of the concept with a social justice approach context: domestic work and migration in south africa in south africa, there are 1.2 million domestic workers representing 11% of the labour force (statistics south africa, 2013). three quarters of all domestic workers are women with low levels of education (only 12% have completed high school); almost all are black. the sector is a considerable zaheera jinnah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 212 source of employment for black women in south africa (statistics south africa, 2012b). domestic work is poorly paid with 71% of workers reporting a monthly income of less than cad $320 a month.2 about half of all domestic workers, regardless of migration status, have a household income less than the prescribed minimum wage level for the sector (statistics south africa, 2012a). access to working benefits is low among all domestic workers with the exception of a regular wage increase. only one percent of all workers regardless of country of birth have access to medical schemes or paid maternity leave. only 19% have a written contract (statistics south africa, 2012a). domestic work is therefore a sector in which enforcement is problematic leading workers to experience a number of vulnerable conditions, including limited labour protection, low wages and little recourse to protect against exploitation international migrants are disproportionately represented in south africa’s domestic work sector. despite accounting for just four percent of the overall labour force, migrant workers constitute 13% of all domestic workers (statistics south africa, 2012a). the majority of migrant domestic workers come from the southern africa development community (sadc) region,3 and about 20% of all sadc migrants work in the sector. disaggregating further, workers from zimbabwe account for over half (52%) of the private household workers from the sadc region, followed by more than a fifth (22%) from mozambique, and 10% each from lesotho and malawi (statistics south africa, 2013). methods this article is based on four months of ethnographic fieldwork in three south africa cities: the largest economic and migration hub, johannesburg; the capital, pretoria; and emalahleni, a smaller mining city on the mozambicansouth african corridor. this produced 59 semi-structured interviews, conducted in 2014 and 2015, with the following groups of participants: • three directors or managers from three different employment agencies which specialise in placing domestic workers with private household employers; • 25 employers of domestic workers. employers were all female, and selected from two sources: 12 were recruited using random sampling from a data base of 1500 employers kept by a recruiting agency, and 13 were 2 statistics south africa (2012b)the census 2011 included a question (paragraph16) asking for the income category that best described the gross income (including all sources of income) of each individual before deductions. the responses to this question are not necessarily equivalent to income earned as a private household worker, as individuals might also have other sources of income. the responses should, however, provide some approximation of earned income. 3 the southern african development community (sadc) is a regional economic bloc of 15 member states. negotiated precarity in the global south studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 213 selected using convenience sampling from social networks; • 34 domestic workers, including 10 south africans, eight from lesotho and 16 from zimbabwe. workers were selected from multiple sources: 12 from random sampling from the data base of an employment agency, 12 through snowballing, and 10 from community level sampling in neighbourhoods where migrants live, to ensure representation from this group. in addition, a research assistant undertook participant observation, focus group discussions and informal discussion with a group of eight migrant domestic workers on their journey home to leostho from johannesburg on public minibus, as well as on their return journey to johannesburg two days later. this includes observations of crossing the international border between the two countries. all fieldwork was done by the author and a research assistant, who was an ma student under the supervision of the author. the research was carried out under the approval of an ethics certificate from the author’s home institution. care work and vulnerability the global literature on domestic work provides an opportunity to examine the points at which migration and labour studies overlap. given the overwhelming and complex forms of vulnerability and exclusions in this sector, which i summarise below, the domestic work sector provides a helpful case study to examine the construction of precarity. care work is a core sector of employment for female migrant workers. current estimates (with limitation on counting a difficult to access population group in mind) suggest that there are 67.1 million domestic workers in the world, of which 11.5 million are international migrants. amongst the latter, almost 80% are migrants from the global south working in the domestic work sector in high income countries, and 73.4 % are women (international labour organization, 2015). feminist scholars initially understood care work as unpaid housework and child-care by middle class women. since the 1970s there has been a healthy interrogation of the globalised and transnational aspects of reproductive labour (arat-koc, 1989; crenshaw, 1991; parreñas, 2000; and sassen, 2000). this scholarship explores the multiple and interconnected ways in which social relations and identities converge, especially among women of colour working in the global north (crenshaw, 1991; duffy, 2011 glenn, 1992). later studies include a focus on migrant women (bakan & stasiulis, 1995, 1997; parreñas, 2000; stasiulis & bakan, 2005), arguing that migration is used to meet household demands created by labour market needs. this literature theorises a globalised care chain of racialised and gendered exploitation from the global south to the north (anderson, 2010; yeates, 2009) where low wages, long hours and minimum access to rights are a reality (budlender, 2010; parreñas, 2000). in migration studies, the zaheera jinnah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 214 feminisation of migration explores race, mothering, transnational families, gender roles and norms, and violence in the context of citizenship rights (see e.g., andall, 2017; piper, 2005). despite this research, there is limited scholarship on migrant domestic work circulating in the global south, under conditions of irregular migration. this is important because as kofman and raguram (2012, p. 410) point out, “levels of growth, migratory systems, gender regimes, and welfare arrangements all vary across countries.” how then do conditions in the sector differ from the rest of the world, if at all, if we take a feminist, political economy approach? how do we best theorise these conditions? how do we better understand the heterogeneity of global care chains, the perspectives of employers and workers, and the dynamics and patterns in one part of the global south? and, can we use evidence from this case study to raise broader questions on, and (re) construct precarity as a concept? cross border migrant domestic work in south africa presents interesting dimensions to the study of global care chains. building on a historical tradition of internal migration work in the sector, and of gendered and racialised employment patterns, domestic work in its current form straddles formality and informality. more recently, an international migration regime that is strewn with informality, corruption, and xenophobia adds further complexity to this context (jinnah, 2017; landau, 2010, 2018). ally (2009), bystrom and nuttall (2013), and gaitskell, kimble, maconachie and unterhalter (1983) show the gendered and racialised history of the sector. until the 1990s, domestic work in south africa was not considered a legal category of employment under labour legislation developed in the colonial and apartheid periods. workers held no rights under labour law, and the employment relationship was governed by few standards. in policy and practice, domestic workers were seen as little more than (black) servants to (white) households, who held few human rights. they faced dehumanising practices of eating using separate utensils, working long hours, having limited contact with their families, and facing severe mobility restrictions in urban areas, unless they held a permit allowing them to work (ally, 2009; budlender, 2010; peberdy & dinat, 2005). this conditioned an employment relationship marked by an imbalance of racialised power. after 1994, south africa developed and implemented a series of policy reforms aimed at recognising, regulating and better protecting workers in the sector. these were a result of strong advocacy from within the trade union sector and with support from civil society and the governing party. all of these by extension include migrant domestic workers, due to the referencing of “residents” rather than “citizens” in the constitution. key reforms have consisted of the introduction of regulations such as the basic conditions of employment act of 1997, which for the first time stipulated hours of work, leave and rest periods, mandatory obligations on the part of the employer in terms of providing notice and job tasks, and in 2002, minimum wages for the sector through a sectoral determination for domestic workers. in 2013, negotiated precarity in the global south studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 215 south africa also ratified the first international convention on domestic work, the international labour organization (ilo) convention on domestic workers, 2011 (no. 189). consequently, in policy, domestic workers, both local and foreign-born in south africa, are legally recognised as employees and can rely on a wide spectrum of national policies and international standards to protect their rights. in practice over the last two decades, however, outcomes have only slightly improved. the literature on domestic work shows that non-compliance is common in the sector as household work is difficult to regulate, given challenges in accessing the worksite and employees. in south africa, the response to low compliance has been to tighten the regulatory space, introducing new laws on minimum wages, for example, and to increase awareness campaigns for workers to demand their rights. however, there have been few successful attempts to increase the enforcement mechanisms by, for example, beefing up inspectorates or instituting punitive action such as issuing fines to non-compliant employers. there is also an assumption that compliance will increase with awareness. consequently, little attention has been paid to how workers and employers understand and rationalise the law and the working relationship. since the 1990s, migration patterns have also shifted. economic and migration polices during apartheid separated the productive and reproductive costs of labour through a temporary and circular labour migration regime servicing the core sectors of the economy (buroway, 1976; moodie and ndatshe 1994; wolpe, 1972). this enabled access to a cheap supply of labour and the maintenance of a political project. in the post-apartheid period, this system of influx control has given way to what i describe in this article as a regime of formal-informal migration and labour control which criminalises low skilled migrants and puts them at risk of exploitative labour practices (see also jinnah, 2017). on the migration side, a restrictive immigration policy framework effectively makes it impossible for low skilled workers to obtain a work permit, pushing many into undocumented status and poor paying jobs (polzerand segatti 2012). migrant workers from the southern african sub-region are currently disproportionately represented in low skilled sectors, especially domestic work in the south african labour market. finally, in parallel with the scholarship in migration studies, there is ongoing work in labour (bolt, 2015; kiwanuka, jinnah & hartmann-pickerill, 2015), which shows that low skilled workers and black women bear the brunt of neoliberal capitalist policies and practices which leave them economically poor and socially vulnerable. some of these analyses use the conceptual framing of precarity, demonstrating the contribution and challenges of evidence from the global south (bolt, 2015; griffin, 2011; scully, 2012) zaheera jinnah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 216 deconstructing precarity precarity has been traditionally understood as a bounded historical condition of labour transformation under conditions of globalisation coupled with a declining welfare state. extensively used in europe as a force for organising a study of everyday experiences and a tool to question the state’s role in politics and society, it has extended to sociological constructions of labour studies, migration, political science, and anthropology (neilson & rossiter, 2008; standing, 2011). more recent work focuses on understanding and critiquing precarity beyond this initial scope, by exploring its plurality and diversity to question its rigour and basis as a theoretical construct. this critique has largely been constructed along two lines. first is the validity of the concept given a very limited inclusion of evidence beyond the global north. munck questions if the term is, “novel or even relevant, for the millions of workers and urban poor in the global south for whom precariousness has always been a seemingly natural condition?” (2013, p. 747). he likens precarity to older concepts of marginality, social exclusion and informality. scully’s (2012, 2016) work on labour precarity in south africa has taken a more historical and structural approach, embedding the drivers of precarity in longer trajectories of exclusion that characterise the developing state. he argues that some of the inherent characteristics of the concept (such as conditions of poorly protected labour and minimal state assistance) are part of a longer history and reality for citizens of low and middle income countries. as he says, “treating precarity around the world as a single phenomenon, produced by globalisation, the work of standing and others obscures the different and much longer history of precarious work in the global south” (scully, 2016, p. 162). second, the concept of precarity itself as something “new” has been questioned. munck and others such as banki (2013) have shown that other conceptual tools such as informality and exclusion have been used to define and discuss the same characteristics that we associate with precarity. for instance, the informal economy marks “not only the reorganization of labour but also the accompanying ways in which the uncertainty of securing a livelihood bleeds into other aspects of life” (parry & hann, 2018, p. 334). moving beyond labour, i nonetheless argue that precarity can serve as a useful frame to analyse the everyday struggles of the marginalised and the transactional nature of survival as schierup, munck, likic-brboric and neergaard (2015) state, by exploring “varieties of precarity” we could arrive at new ways to understand and address older issues of vulnerability and exclusion, especially in the context of the politics, economies and societies of the global south. here they emphasise migration and labour transformation as characteristic of a “duality of flexibility.” however jørgenssen and schierup (2016), like standing (2011), warn of an insurgency by migrant workers in response, when this flexibility becomes untenable. by situating precarity as negotiated precarity in the global south studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 217 representing “both a condition and a possible rallying point for resistance” (waite, 2009, p. 412), there is a risk of implying some sense of danger that threatens the status quo associated with being poor and vulnerable. writing on south africa, they state (jørgenssen & schierup, 2016, p. 1057): a composite precarious labour pool is overwhelmingly black, to a considerable degree migrant, and increasingly female. the spaces it occupies become, in turn, sites for active reproduction of … where the poor employ inventive livelihood strategies which are beyond the reach of formal regulatory frameworks. so how do we understand precarity and what use, if any, does it have for studies of migration and labour in the global south? i identify three ways in which it can add value: first, a plurality of evidence especially from the global south is needed to (re)construct what precarity means. this study shows how precarity can be understood as multiple forms of exclusion and vulnerability at the intersection of migration and labour and rooted in racialised and gendered experiences. second, it is useful to understand how legality and informality cross in complex ways. the concept of precarity challenges what we understand as legal by using language that begins with lived realities rather than norms. third, i retain the sense of precarity as a concept to explain the multiple forms of vulnerability that people experience as labour migrants; its conceptualisation needs to be reframed and broadened, deconstructing aspects of danger and emphasising the various strategies for survival that people develop. throughout this, a process of negotiating safety, certainty and survival is inherent. precarity in the global south: diverse and different? legal exclusion in much of the literature on precarity, weak citizenship status is identified as a contributing factor to conditions of precarity. in global care chains migrant domestic workers face a legal regime in which they are temporary workers who move away from their families and enjoy limited rights as sojourners. using goldring, and landolt’s (2011, p. 328) articulation, precarious migratory status is defined as “the multiple and variable forms of ‘less than full status’, and is defined by the absence of key rights or entitlements usually associated with the full or nearly full status of citizenship and permanent residence.” in the case of migrant domestic workers in south africa, legal insecurity goes further: it stems from restrictive immigration policies (the institutionally rooted precarity) coupled with corrupt institutions and social marginality. this is indicative of south-south migration regimes in general and points to a different way in which weak citizenship status can be defined. the precarious in the global south do not only have weak citizenship status, but their everyday existence is an attempt to circumvent detection and survive zaheera jinnah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 218 as undocumented migrants, often at risk to themselves. they do so through a process of navigating and negotiating rights and safety. for cross border migrants, the lack of a consistent and comprehensive labour migration policy that facilitates the entry and work of lower skilled regional migrants results in limited access to rights. from 1994 to 2009, low skilled migrant workers could not obtain a work or work seekers permit in south africa. in 2009, the first of three temporary measures known as special dispensations came into law. these mechanisms were introduced following the political crisis in zimbabwe after the 2008 election in that country and subsequent legal advocacy from human rights groups campaigning for the resulting hundreds of thousands of undocumented zimbabweans living in south africa at the time. there were three special dispensations between 2009-2018, two for zimbabweans and one for nationals from the landlocked kingdom of lesotho. all allowed for temporary regulation of undocumented migrants provided that certain obligations were met. several studies point to the low efficacy of these dispensations. some of the sharper criticisms included the practical difficulties of accessing an online system, corruption in the ministry, and very narrow eligibility requirements (amit & kriger, 2014; hopstock & de jaager, 2011; nshimbi & firiamonti, 2014). consequently, low skilled worker seekers used a range of informal measures to enter or work in south africa. these include using the relatively generous asylum seeker route which allowed for freedom of movement, access to work or study, but with very limited time frames; entering as a visitor under the sub region’s visa free entry, which did not authorise work; or entering irregularly as a “border jumper.” some of the respondents explained their status and strategies as follows: the first thing is that we are never steady, the police are always after us because we don’t have ids. (interview with n) you only survive when your passport is valid. (focus group discussion, oct. 24, 2015) when you go and apply for a south african work permit they don’t give you, they only give students study permits. i went and asked for it and they told me that they only give [it to] people working for the government. (interview with r) in the qualitative sample, 42% of women were undocumented migrants, 31% had entered under the regional tourist visa and did not have a work permit, and 27% had a temporary asylum permit, which needed to be renewed every month or 90 days. most of the participants had valid passports but none had a work permit. ethnographic observations at the lesotho border show some tactics of survival. when getting off public transport at the lesotho border, young men who loiter about, ask if your passport is “okay.” by this they want to know if your visitor visa is still valid, or if you have overstayed it or have no passport negotiated precarity in the global south studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 219 at all. for a fee they can help you cross the border without valid documents (field notes, oct. 2015): they check the passport, they see that we have broken the law, we give them a few sweets to pay for those exceeded days. otherwise if you don’t pay they destroy that passport. (interview with b) these days it’s r200 (cad $20) i think. they charge whatever they want. if you don’t want your passport to be destroyed you are going to pay that amount. (interview with b) most of the zimbabwean domestic workers said they use an informal system known as malaesha (omalayitsha). these are long distance trucks and other vehicles that come from zimbabwe to johannesburg who smuggle in women. two of the respondents stated that they performed sexual favours to the drivers as a payment for smuggling. others cross the limpopo river that divides the two countries: i was a border jumper, i don’t have a passport. [i came with] my aunt, she is blind but now she passed away. we came to beitbridge [border]. when we were in beitbridge, we find some other people; they said “we gonna help you.” they went with us inside the limpopo [river, and helped us to] cross the river…on the other side we were in south africa. (interview with m) informal work a second form of negotiated precarity is in the informal employment patterns and relations in a formal (regulated) sector. this is not due to erosion of labour standards as in the north, but rather to a weak institutional structure that fails to support compliance to norms and to poor attitudes amongst employers that hinder compliance. working conditions amongst the respondents were poor with long hours stretching to 12 hours a day, no written contracts, no paid leave, minimal time off, unclear job descriptions, and no job security being the most cited amongst all the domestic workers. this highlights the strong sense of informality and lack of compliance to the law in the sector. the quotations below highlight some of the experiences of workers regarding conditions. they speak to the ingrained racialised and subjective perceptions of rights and social orders. one respondent, who is a migrant domestic worker from zimbabwe says: i start working at 5am and leave when the lady comes home. i can’t leave unless they are home or unless if they have a day off then i can leave early. (interview with k) zaheera jinnah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 220 another respondent talks about the lack of legal protection she faces as an undocumented migrant worker: i don’t have a contract, i don’t even have a working permit. (interviewer: does your employer know that you don’t have a work permit?) she knows, she knows. (interview with n) when asked if she has a fixed schedule of work, this woman replied: i worked all day, in the morning, until at night when i have to wash the dishes, i cannot go to bed while the dishes are dirty so i have to wait for them to finish eating. (interview with t) a concern amongst respondents were low wages, with all women stating that a salary of between r1000 and r2000 a month (cad $100-200) was not sufficient to live on. as one respondent said: it’s little. i can’t do anything with that much money. because that amount that my employer pays me, she can buy one pair of shoes with that money. she buys a pair of shoes with that money but she expects me to support my family with it, transport to work, everything. (interview with b) the informality of work suggests more than a lack of awareness among workers and employers on rights and obligations. in general, the employers and employment agencies knew and understood the legal framework governing the sector. employers were aware of regulations pertaining to wages, contracts, working hours, and benefits. however, they reported mixed and vague responses in terms of compliance. many of the agencies noted that at the initial stage of the recruitment process when they worked with employers to identify their needs and find a suitable worker, employers said that they paid less than minimum wage and did not recognise the need to ensure that employees have a written contract. employers themselves admitted that they were not fully compliant, especially when it came to contracts, and hours of work. at other times, workers reported that employers agreed to a higher wage but later paid less than what was agreed. the reason for the differences in compliance was based on a flexible understanding of their obligations as employers and their perceptions of what constituted “fairness.” for instance, a number of employers highlighted that in lieu of paying minimum wages, employees got access to meals and accommodation, or that employers would pay for private doctor consultations for employees and their families. in other instances, employers stated they would pay what they could afford, and that low wages were better for the employee than unemployment. although domestic work is covered by legislation, in the lived experiences of domestic workers and employers in this study it is regarded as informal labour, a type of private practice occurring between the employer and worker, governed by the needs and values of employers. inherent to this is a great negotiated precarity in the global south studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 221 deal of uncertainty on the core aspects that are meant to be regulated: wage levels, benefits, working hours, etc. a personal relationship is of course common in many service-related and care-oriented sectors of work, but here i trace the power and dynamics of such a relationship further, to explain the prevailing social relations between employers and employees which are characterised by inequities in gender, class and race that continue to be relevant in a post-democratic period. this imbalance of power skews social relations and allows for the persistence of flexible practices despite clear labour regulations. as one respondent said: if they don’t pay me (my salary on time), i can just keep quiet because i didn’t sign any contract with them. what if i lose my job? who is there to help? (interview with l) in general all the employers and agencies who represent employers reported a healthy sense of awareness of their obligations, but reported mixed responses in terms of compliance. agencies noted that far too many employers in their data bases (in total amongst four agencies 1500 employers were recorded) offered less than minimum wages and did not recognise the need to ensure that employees have a written contract. employers themselves admitted that they were not fully compliant, especially when it came to contracts and hours of work. employers noted in interviews that they had a good relationship with their employees, stating that they considered them to be part of their families, that they shared mealtimes together, and that the relationship was personal. in many instances employers said that they gave their workers clothes, helped with workers’ children’s school fees, and provided loans to them at times. but their narratives are laced with veiled notions of racism and stereotypes. an employer who is white and helps her friends finds domestic workers, commented as follows on employment relations: it’s only until you start hearing from the maids how your friend actually treats them, it is actually quite horrific. and i placed aya with berta, she was a helper. so berta had a full-time maid, south african, called maria [who] could cook like a dream and she could look after babies and clean house, but they built up so their house became too big; it was like a seven bedroom house. so aya would go in there three days a week and help maria clean. when i say, and berta was quite well off to pay a decent salary, so aya asked for r150 (cad 15) a day, which is actually like sort of the going rate, berta then said to her, ‘fine, but you bring your own lunch, you drink your own water.’ how can you say that to someone? (interview with a) another employer said: growing up, i had a maid or we had a nanny my entire life. she was with my family for 47 years. the sad thing is i don’t know where she is today. matilda came up from durban after my gran passed, and then my mom and her exzaheera jinnah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 222 husband lost their house and everything and matilda disappeared with the house and everything else like that. so for 47 years she looked after my family and i don’t even know to this day if she’s dead or alive. that’s sad. very sad. i don’t even know her surname, you know what i mean? (interview with g) that’s the perception that people have that hire zimbabweans, that they are replacable in five seconds because there’s so many. or it’s also the perception that they’ll stay because they can be treated like shit because they’ll accept it and that’s terrible in itself. (interview with a) a respondent who acts as an informal placement agent for domestic workers said: with regards to pay, the wage is dependent on what area the employer is located in – so if someone in a nice area with a house with many rooms is asking for little pay, then something is wrong – i will run away from people who wish to exploit people like this. people know about the minimum wage, but they don’t think about others and are used to getting their way, so they only want to pay little – and the domestic workers because they’re poor so employers think they’re stupid. (interview with d) a respondent, who is a manager at an employment agency that recruits domestic workers, spoke about the perceptions of difference between local and migrant workers: foreigners and south africans come with a bit of a different mindset. the foreigner has come far to try and look for employment, she doesn’t really have a home in south africa, she’s coming here to work and to earn a living. so she doesn’t really have a home so she’s a little bit more comfortable to seek live-in employment. and it also benefits them most of the time, because they don’t have to pay rent because it comes as part of the package. they don’t have a home in south africa, they’ve come to south africa to work. so it’s easier for them to go and like i said, it benefits them as well. so they’re getting a place to live, a lot of times there’s a dinner included and the money you get at the end of the month you’re able to save. (interview with v). the sentiment that migrant workers have an advantage in the labour market was shared by many employers in the sample. one respondent stated: they (migrants) want to work. they want to come here and they want to set up a life and they want to work hard. and they don’t mind doing domestic chores. you’ll get ladies who come here and they’ve got teaching qualifications, and they come here and they’ll happily be a nanny because they see it as their earning an income that they can send home to their kids and they’re still working with children, which is what they want to do. and we just find that they’re more service oriented, if i can put it that way. they want to, they acknowledge that they’re being paid for a service and they’re happy to deliver that service. (interview with s) negotiated precarity in the global south studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 223 another recruiter in the sample said that migrants are less likely to negotiate employment conditions compared to locals: i think also with the foreigners, they are easy to communicate with, you know. they are very open, they are easy to communicate with. they will never say, ‘no, but why are you doing this like this, why can’t you do this like this, why is she paying me this amount of money?’ they never complain. (interview with w) an employer in the sample discussed these views in more detail: there’s a big difference, culturally and everything, emotionally. the way they are, the personality. you just see it here – and i say this in complete confidence, because i love the people that i work with here – the south africans, yes apartheid was harsh, by all means, i wasn’t part of it, i was too young, i was born in 1976. i grew up, yes, with it, but didn’t understand it. the problem i find now is the younger generation are still harbouring that hatred and we never gonna get past that, it’s gonna take a long time, more than 100 years i think. everyone’s got to stop living in the past and actually start moving on, you know, stop demanding. yes our country is… you battle, everyone’s battling, but it’s – how to say it – zimbabweans are happy to get on with life, no matter what they’ve got or what they haven’t got. they always got a smile on their face. i can give you five zimbabweans here and compare them to five south africans and i’ll put them in a room and you tell me who are the zimbabweans and who are the south africans. you’ll tell instantaneously who they are, they’re just happy people. (interview with gl) yet workers stay in these employment relations, preferring them over other low waged work such as street trading, or retail assistants, using them as a means to earn a livelihood, or save money. they tolerate the negative experiences as it allows them to migrate, to work and to survive. some quotations from interviews with domestic workers illustrate this attitude. a migrant worker from zimbabwe spoke about why she works in this sector: i took a job as a domestic because i heard the lady gives us clothes, and helps with my passport and even takes me to the doctor. everyone wants a zimbabwean lady to work for them because we work hard and we don’t complain. (interview with b) another zimbabwean migrant worker discusses how any employment is better than none: my family’s life it’s better now because, they now have food, clothes, blankets to put over unlike before. (interview with y) a respondent from lesotho was in agreement that migrant work allowed her to escape poverty: when i was in lesotho i was so poor! for me to cook pap [thick maize porridge] i would have to go to the neighbours. they would say oh here comes the zaheera jinnah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 224 lunchbox carrier do you hear me? i would then have to go to another one, they would get irritated. and when i worked on these contract jobs, i would spend the whole month in debt. (interview with n) for this respondent, who is undocumented, working in a private household provides some protection from being detected by the authorities: we are safe here. we have work, we have a place to stay. police don’t come to the suburbs asking for our passports. so we act like we don’t care when the boss shouts, because inside we are the ones laughing. (interview with m) finally, many respondents, including this woman from zimbabwe, spoke about how they are able to save and improve their lives even by holding poorly paid jobs: every month i put something away as a saving and i can build my own house at home with it. r100 (cad $10) is not much here but in zimbabwe it buys a lot. (interview with gm) these narratives show both how racialised and gendered employment extends and persists in south africa under conditions of progressive labour legislation, yet how precarity is negotiated by workers themselves, suggesting a form of agency. it is this agency, exercised in the choices workers make to migrate without secure legal status, and to work under conditions of informal labour, that informs the concept of negotiated precarity that i develop here. new dynamics of cross border migration add additional layers of stereotypes that the literature in south africa on domestic workers has not yet considered. many of the interviews with employers included reference to stereotypes as “the honest, hardworking or happy foreign worker.” given the likelihood of ongoing regional migration, in the context of insecure citizenship rights and weak institutional capacity to enforce regulations, these dynamics are important factors that will shape this sector in the country and region. equally, qualitative research that shows the nuanced dynamics of employment relations from both the employers and workers side, is important. using this approach it is possible to discern the ways in which workers make sense of their status and they ways in which they respond to it. conclusion this study thus brings us back to precarity as a conceptual framework. the findings here show multiple forms of vulnerability and exclusion, including low wages, poor compliance, irregular migration status and discriminatory employment practices. in order to understand the everyday realities and responses of migrant domestic workers in south africa, a form of negotiated negotiated precarity in the global south studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 210-227, 2020 225 precarity rooted in the realities of the global south is a conceptual lens that help make sense of how formality and legality intersect and produce informal negotiated conditions. deconstructing precarity from its focus on a northern context of eroding labour rights and weak state protection, which give rise to a “dangerous class,” is a first step in critiquing precarity. by broadening precarity beyond labour to everyday strategies and survival, it is possible to reconstruct the concept and pay attention to how laws and behaviour intersect, and how people use their own agency through these power dynamics. in this example, navigating legality in migration status and negotiating security through informal employment relations are ways in which migrant domestic workers secure livelihoods and take care of their families. the danger of the poor remaining outside of the protection of labour or citizenship rights continues, especially in the global south, but the brunt of this danger, expressed in poverty, exclusion, discrimination and vulnerability, is likely to be faced by workers themselves, rather than presenting any threat to the order or hegemony maintained by the state, and in the current status quo. references ally, s. 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(2009). globalizing care economies and migrant workers: explorations in global care chains. new york: palgrave macmillan. bhatia final before ts correspondence address: amar bhatia, osgoode hall law school, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: abhatia@osgoode.yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 505-514, 2020 dispatch reflections on teaching critical migration law in a settler-colonial context amar bhatia york university, canada situating self: “i’ll show you mine, if you show me yours” this dispatch looks back at some of my attempts to teach migration and refugee law in a critical way that accounts for settler-colonialism in courses where this topic is not traditionally included in the subject matter. in terms of briefly situating the reflections below, i am a canadian citizen born in ottawa to parents who immigrated to canada from india and the philippines. i only learned much, much later that i was also born on unceded algonquin land. i am neither indigenous nor do i live with precarious immigration status. i have been privileged with opportunities to read, talk, and learn about indigenous laws and legal traditions on and off the land. however, i am only beginning to understand these laws in conjunction with my greater familiarity with the canadian state’s aboriginal, immigration, refugee, labour, employment, and property laws. i live in toronto and have been learning that tkaronto and the surrounding territories are also the traditional, treaty and current homes of the wendat people, the seneca nation, the anishinaabe people, and the metis nation. in particular, i know that the six nations confederacy, the mississaugas of credit and the williams treaty first nations continue to hold and assert their laws, rights, title, and treaty relations here to this day. these laws include inter-indigenous treaties like the one dish treaty between the haudenosaunee and anishnaabe to share and care for these lands and waters, as well as settlerindigenous treaties like the two row wampum and the wampum at niagara (voices from the gathering place, 2017; koleszar-green, 2018). through my family history, my personal work and learning experiences, and my research and advocacy interests, i have been focused for some time on critical approaches to migration law and their relationship to colonialism and postcolonial theory (e.g., citizenship, immigration, refugee, migrant amar bhatia studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 505-514, 2020 506 worker, and non-status laws). after returning to graduate school in law, i became increasingly engaged in academic and activist conversations around the intersection of migration law and policy with settler colonialism and indigenous laws in what is currently called canada. by settler colonialism, i mean the removal of indigenous peoples from their lands, the taking of those lands, and the replacement of these peoples with non-indigenous settlers who keep and benefit from those lands (wolfe, 2006, as cited in bhatia, 2013). i have tried to convey these interests and intersecting questions through my class materials, teaching and presentations both in and outside of the law school. i teach courses on globalization and the law (focused on migrant worker programs and commodification), property law, refugee law, and i codirect an intensive program in indigenous lands, resources, and governments. my teaching is informed by my own teachers, who have been kind, inspiring, and critical (maracle, 2017). these attributes were not always found in the same people at the same time, but one of my best teachers in this regard is law and history scholar professor darlene johnston (anishnaabe-kwe/chippewas of nawash). when asked once whether she was considered too close to aboriginal law and history issues to be objective, darlene emphasized that there was no objective place from which to teach or learn about law or history. she said that everyone had bias and could choose to adopt a situated approach of “i’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.” i’ve tried to heed this lesson in my teaching, but have noticed more generally that indigenous speakers and scholars (and some racialized, critical race, and anti-racist scholars and speakers) are required to situate themselves much more than non-indigenous speakers. while there is no space to elaborate here, one explanation for this difference emerges from how indigenous and racialized people can be marked out as more or less “visible” and visibly different from the white norm of canadian society (i.e., “race,” skin colour or family name situate us in others’ eyes and minds without saying a word). another explanation for this disparity would be indigenous and critical race norms of situating oneself to announce and recognize political, kinship, migrant, and territorial relations. these norms compete with a generalized assumption of who belongs and can speak with naturalized authority in the absence of any context, including the past policy and ongoing legacy of keeping a “white canada forever.” situating students: a writing and speaking exercise in teaching these courses, i find and make opportunities to share the colonial and settler-colonial context of canadian laws and how these contexts are relevant to our current and future relations with one another. these relations span the spectrum from indigenous lands and resources, to immigration and refugee law, to international and transnational law, to the law and policy of migrant work. while the courses that i teach may appear disconnected from teaching critical migration law in a settler-colonial context studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 505-514, 2020 507 one another, the experience and theory of colonialism serves to tie them together in ways that i hope students find interesting and challenging. as already noted, it is important for me to situate myself, my scholarship, and the place where our collective task of learning unfolds. i also encourage students to situate themselves in relation to what we are studying through their own lived experiences (whether individual, familial, or advocacy) and prior expertise in the areas of migration and indigeneity. i’ve found that some of the best exchanges have taken place when students know where their colleagues are coming from, literally and metaphorically, and understand how these social locations relate to the theories and wider contexts that we are studying. this shared knowledge more closely approximates the complex, holistic lived experiences of the law that students will encounter through their clients and their clients’ communities (imai, 2002; zuni cruz, 1999). in order to help students “break the ice” with each other and me i usually ask them to do a few writing, speaking, and sharing exercises (except for my property law course, although good examples do exist in larger lecture classes) (curran et al., 2019, p. 135). on the first day of class, i ask students to break into partners and interview each other with a set questionnaire in order to get a sense of their fellow students’ academic and work experiences, their interests in the course, and ideal methods for teaching, learning, and evaluation. after the interviews, they present their partner’s answers to the class (with the chance to correct any mistakes). although this exercise is useful for information sharing, it does not usually lead to much discussion about systemic racism, settler colonialism, indigenous peoples, or canada’s treaties with them. on the second or third day of class, i usually ask students to do a specific writing and speaking exercise meant to strike a balance between drawing relations between students’ lived experiences and expertise, and questions of settler colonialism and treaty relations. borrowing from indigenous law scholar and an inspirational mentor and friend, dawnis minnawanigogiizhigok kennedy (anishnaabe-kwe/roseau river first nation), i ask students how the immigration and indian acts, or their predecessor statutes, have impacted them or their families. dawnis shared with me how she would ask her classes at the shingwauk institute and algoma university how the indian act affected them; these classes were largely comprised of indigenous and international students. i modified this question to include the immigration act, and to emphasize that students could talk about their wider families too. my law classes are mostly comprised of canadian law students from various backgrounds in ontario, although classes like refugee law regularly include exchange students. putting this question to the class can serve a variety of purposes: • it helps me to see if they are familiar with the actual legislation (current or historical) or choose to answer more broadly, as most students do; • it situates students within the present or past of their individual or familial immigration or migration stories (e.g., from those whose amar bhatia studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 505-514, 2020 508 families settled here hundreds of years ago to exchange students who arrived by themselves just days before); • it gives me a sense of their expressed awareness – or usually lack thereof – of the connection between immigration laws and indigenous peoples (e.g., via mention of the indian act or treaties); • it helps to draw students together in expected and unexpected ways (e.g., more and less superficial versions of “we are all immigrants here,” “we are all settlers here” and “we are all racialized refugees or displaced persons here”); and • it gives students a chance to think, write, speak and share their stories in a way that feels genuine and does not require an “oppression olympics” or “race to innocence,” which can immediately and unproductively narrow what’s meant to be a semester-long conversation and discussion (fellows & razack, 1998; xavier, 2018). for example, in refugee law, there are numerous occasions later in the term where other aspects of social location like racialization emerge, both in line with and separately from the recognized grounds of persecution (e.g., race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group). i usually require students to answer this question quickly and briefly in order to encourage some editing and direction, and also for the practical reason that we need to be able to “go-around” and hear each person’s answer. the instructions are brief and usually go like this: how has the irpa (immigration and refugee protection act) or predecessor immigration legislation or the indian act affected you or your family? please write down your answer to this question in the next five minutes using (max.) five sentences; when the time is up, we will go around the room and share our responses with each other. please only share what you’re comfortable sharing with the whole class. in addition to what i’ve outlined above, students sometimes respond with typical law student questions or caveats, including the desire to do background research on the spot, to use more than five sentences (there are creative uses of semi-colons), and to have more time to edit or research their work. the majority of responses do not touch on the indian act (or treaties). some responses relate familial immigration histories that are not tied to immigration law, because they predate what students consider to be the first statute. these stories of long settlement also do not usually mention aboriginal law, because students do not always see the connection between treaties, the indian act, and settlement in canada. however, some students do make these connections between immigration, the indian act, the numbered treaties, homesteading, and the granting of “free lands” to white settlers. in the only course i teach that sometimes has a majority of indigenous students, the reaction is, understandably, reversed; the connections students draw between themselves and immigration law is much teaching critical migration law in a settler-colonial context studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 505-514, 2020 509 more ambiguous than what they express about the indian act or treaties. although i have not constructed formal polls, students generally seem keen to share their stories in this way, especially in classes with predominantly racialized students, both in the law school and also in non-law departments where i’ve been invited to do guest lectures or cover a colleague’s class. in classes like refugee law, i’ve noticed that students often have direct experiences with forced migration and displacement, or very immediate indirect experiences through their parents and other family members. it is worth emphasizing that this exercise is structurally skewed by the fact that i’m asking these questions of law students who are usually citizens, sometimes permanent residents or permanent residents-in-waiting, or international students, and more rarely exchange students from the global north and sometimes the global south. unlike undergraduate programs at york, or law schools in the united states, these law classes do not yet comprise those with precarious immigration status (fernandes, 2017; villegas & aberman, 2018). this exercise also emerges early in the class and at a time when i hope students can hear and understand the experiences that they and their colleagues’ families have lived through (and still live with), while also being open to hearing about how we have all found refuge and somewhat better or more stable lives on indigenous lands. hopefully, this discussion also works against the depersonalization that can, for example, occur through reading large volumes of refugee case law for the particular elements of the 1951 refugee convention (imai, 2002; united nations high commissioner for refugees, n.d.). extending the exercise: revisions, decolonization lecture, and responsibilities after doing this exercise and going around to share these partial stories, i follow up on this work in a few ways. in some classes and years, students have chosen to pursue their full research papers on themes raised from their immigration or indian act paragraphs. in one iteration of the refugee law course, i gave students the option of extending their initial paragraphs into take-home assignments with a slightly higher word count and the chance to do further research and revision. the resources i highlighted in this context expanded from the individual immigration stories that were shared, into ethnocultural group histories of immigration (canadian historical association, n.d.; canadian museum of immigration at pier 21, n.d.). i think this “situating” work is important in these particular classes for multiple reasons. first, this exercise coincides with earlier calls by scholars, government inquiries, and treaty commissioners for canadian citizens to recognize that they, too, are treaty people and have been the main beneficiaries of treaties to date (e.g., government of ontario, 2007; sákéj henderson, 2002; office of the treaty commissioner, n.d.). this call to amar bhatia studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 505-514, 2020 510 acknowledge that we are all treaty people has since expanded to include the contexts of naturalization (through the truth and reconciliation commission’s call for amending the citizenship oath) (bill c-8, 2020; bill c6, 2020; bill c-99, 2019; trc, 2015), permanent residents, and even refugees (canadian council for refugees, 2013). however, these calls to recognize that “we are all treaty people” also led me to ask whether acknowledgment of the treaty right to be here would serve as merely metaphorical decolonization and superficial “newcomer integration” (tuck & yang, 2012). instead, it might be possible to actually “decolonize” the treaty right to be here if it led to indigenous self-determination including fulsome powers to incorporate others, up to and including those with precarious or no immigration status in canada (bhatia, 2018). this decolonial authority would re-center indigenous legal systems for making and maintaining relations and thus help to decolonize law and status determination from the current indian act system (lawrence, 2004; palmater, 2011). it would also give more than metaphorical meaning to the phrase “we are all treaty people” by making room for those who are not authorized by the canadian state to enter or stay (cf. asch, 2014; miller, 2009). i also give a lecture connected with this writing exercise on the wider topic of settler colonialism and the relationship between attempts to “domesticate” indigenous lands and peoples and the construction and maintenance of the canadian state and society. this lecture tracks how indigenous peoples were displaced from indigenous lands, which then become “clear” for european populations to take after they are recruited to immigrate here. i describe the elements of statehood in international law (i.e., defined territory, permanent population, government, and capacity to enter international relations), and how these elements were taken from indigenous nations at the same time as they were garnered for canada at domestic and international levels (bhatia, forthcoming). the settler-colonial role of immigration and its tight relationship to treaties is often ignored in this context, especially in mainstream and even critical immigration and refugee law scholarship and pedagogy. the additional aspect of revitalized indigenous laws and legal orders is even more absent, but these gaps and absences are slowly changing. i believe these gaps and absences relate to some of the reasons why most students do not mention, let alone relate, indigenous laws with canadian immigration and refugee laws. these reasons include absences in legal and pre-law education, the methodological nationalism of immigration law, and the limits of curricular changes that do not center indigenous authorities (e.g., indigenous legal systems being reduced to post-conviction aboriginal sentencing principles). as encapsulated in the debate published in social justice between leading indigenous, critical race, and no borders scholars, there are other, non-state authorities that must be brought to bear on these questions (amadahy & lawrence, 2009; lawrence & dua, 2005; sharma & wright, 2008/2009). more specifically, i have argued that indigenous laws, legal systems, and treaty relations should serve as sources of authority in teaching critical migration law in a settler-colonial context studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 505-514, 2020 511 immigration law, policy, and discourse going forward (bhatia et al., 2017; borrows, 2010). as seen in my own classes, all of these interventions are entirely ad hoc within my discretion as the course instructor. they are structured by the selectivity of who applies and gets admitted to law school, as well as who signs up or is accepted into a particular course. and they also run up against the tensions that critical teachers have in every context: how to convey the conventional, longer-standing course content in combination with materials and voices that have not been included before? at a general level, this issue has been encapsulated by debates on reconciliation and indigenization, including mandatory courses or universalized content (gaudry, 2016). my own place of work (osgoode hall law school) has struck a balance through the introduction of an indigenous and aboriginal law degree requirement chosen from a suite of courses, while also emphasizing the need for all courses to incorporate indigenous content (york university, 2018). these efforts echo those in other law schools, including the mandatory indigenous legal orders course at windsor law, and the university of victoria, which has introduced an entire joint degree in indigenous law (university of victoria law, n.d.), while still offering numerous opportunities for students outside the joint program. whichever approach is taken, i think that changing the surrounding educational ecosystem and structure is imperative, including the recruitment, retention, and promotion of indigenous students and indigenous professors. additionally, curricular content changes should not be divorced from indigenous pedagogies and modes of evaluation, which may not yet be legible to the job markets that students enter upon graduation. in migration-focused courses, these tensions arise where the subject matter is already divided between refugee law, immigration law, and globalization and the law (migrant work). in theory, immigration law does not include refugee law topics, but this theory does not always hold up depending on the approach or the teacher in a given year. similarly, globalization and the law did not focus on migrant workers until i chose to take that particular perspective when i first had the chance to teach the course. all of these separate topics can fill year-long courses, but they are offered in semesterlong formats and there are always difficult decisions about what to include and what to leave out. one particular struggle that i have had is how to take the relatively stronger focus on indigeneity and settler-colonialism that i bring to the beginnings of migration-focused courses, and maintain that focus throughout the semester (cf. scott & smith, 2017). the necessity and benefit of taking students through the elements of the convention refugee definition, or the consolidated grounds for persons in need of protection, does not always overlap well with delving deeper into issues of aboriginal or indigenous law. however, immigrant and migrant rights scholars and advocates (including critical race scholars) should not solely be focused on recognition by the state at the cost of erasing treaty relations (bhatia, 2013). while it is amar bhatia studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 505-514, 2020 512 necessary to pursue immigration status through rights and recognition, this quest for status does not undo structures of settler colonialism in canada. if anything, the pursuit of permanent status in a capitalist system at least formally predicated on a “human capital” approach to immigration only serves to shore up settler colonial canada. given reconciliation projects from both above and below, however, it seems likely that critical race approaches to reconciliation will complete the loop from activism and academic publishing to post-secondary classrooms and even “black letter” law classes (lawrence & dua, 2005). there will undoubtedly be a certain violence to this translation and transplanting process, seen for example in the adoption and appropriation of community terms by the government, its ministries, and extractive industries (e.g., government of canada, 2019; government of british columbia, n.d.; scott, 2013). while approaches characterized by respect and good allyship or guest relations will, i hope, balance out some of these translation costs (koleszargreen, 2018), it is clear that state and corporate interests actively and cooperatively work against this solidarity movement to maintain canada’s current settler-colonial, capitalist order. however, it is also clear that failing to try to bring these insights to teaching and activism on migration or migration law will merely serve to replicate the structures of thinking that continue to underpin settler colonialism in canada (borrows, 1997l; dehm, forthcoming). either indigenous nations and their laws and treaties underpin canada’s constitution and right to exist or they do not (sákéj henderson, 2002, p. 417). if they do, then they necessarily relate to past and present canadian immigration and should speak with authority here, too. as critical race scholars, practitioners, teachers, and critics of canadian migration and canadian law, we should emphasize this relationship between treaties and migration for the sake of migrants, refugees, immigrants, the descendants of enslaved peoples, and ourselves, as much as for the sake of indigenous peoples. leaving these responsibilities to the point of an amended citizenship oath alone will remain both too little (as it excludes all long-time settlers and birthright citizens) and too late (as it only applies to those migrants who make it to the point of naturalization) (government of canada, 2019; bill c8, 2020; bill c-6, 2020; bill c-99, 2019). references amadahy, z., & lawrence, b. (2009). indigenous peoples and black people in canada: settlers or allies? in a. kempf (ed.), breaching the colonial contract: anti-colonialism in the us and canada (pp. 105-136). springer. asch, m. (2014). on being here to stay: treaties and aboriginal rights in canada. university of toronto press. bhatia, a. (2013). we are all here to stay? indigeneity, migration, and ‘decolonizing’ the treaty right to be here. the windsor yearbook of access to justice, 31(2), 39-64. https://doi.org/10.22329/wyaj.v31i2.4411 bhatia, a. (2018). re-peopling in a settler-colonial context: the intersection of indigenous laws teaching critical migration law in a settler-colonial context studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 505-514, 2020 513 of adoption with canadian immigration law. alternative: an international journal of indigenous peoples, 14(4), 343-353. https://doi.org/10.1177/1177180118809274 bhatia, a. 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(2018, april 6). osgoode hall law school adopts new indigenous and aboriginal law requirement. york media relations. https://news.yorku.ca/2018/04/06/osgoode-hall-law-school-adopts-new-indigenous-andaboriginal-law-requirement/ zuni cruz, c. (1999). [on the] road back in: community lawyering in indigenous communities. american indian law review, 24(2), 229-272. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2798328-lawrequirement/ anonymous1 final dec 3 19 correspondence address: david butz, editor-in-chief, studies in social justice, c/o sjri, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: dbutz@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 322-331, 2019 dispatch is it resolved? one story of academic contrapower harassment and cyberbullying anonymous1 i am a professor at a canadian university who recently experienced more than a year of harassment by an undergraduate student in an upper year class. during this period, i tried to connect with professors who had similar experiences, but i could not find anyone. nor could i find more than a handful of detailed online personal accounts or academic articles relating to student-on-faculty harassment, despite clear evidence that it is not uncommon. in a study of 524 professors across 100 american colleges and universities, lampman (2012, p. 184) found that “91% reported at least one act of student incivility/bullying, 25% experienced at least one sexual behavior from a student, and one to two percent said a student had used or threatened them with violence in the past year.” although lampman’s study, like several others, incorporates quotations from faculty interviews about their experiences, longer and more detailed experiential accounts are rare. yet, learning how other faculty members experience and deal with student harassment might have helped me navigate my situation. in this dispatch i offer the sort of narrative i was searching for during and after this difficult period of my life, in hopes that it will be useful to others in similar or analogous circumstances. beyond a simple recounting of the details of my experience, i aim to provide insight into what others in comparable circumstances might feel, to identify some challenges that may be avoided, and to add texture to understandings of student-on-faculty harassment. student-on-faculty harassment is a form “academic contrapower harassment” (acph), which “occurs when someone with seemingly less power in an educational setting [e.g., a student] harasses someone more powerful [e.g., a professor]” (lampman, crew, lowery, & tompkins, 2016, 1 editor’s note: in this case, studies in social justice respects the author’s preference to remain anonymous. any correspondence may be sent to the address below, from where it will be redirected to the author. academic contrapower harassment & cyberbullying studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 322-331, 2019 323 p. 169). studies demonstrate that faculty members across genders are harassed by students, through a variety of means, and for a variety of reasons (blizard, 2016; lampman, 2012; lampman et al., 2016; maclennan, 2002). for example, blizard’s (2016) study of one canadian university found that student-on-faculty cyberbullying mainly, but not exclusively, stems from students’ dissatisfaction with their grades. although some research explores contrapower harassment and bullying, including its negative impacts on faculty members, public attention and university resources largely address noncontrapower forms of harassment, such as faculty-on-student harassment and faculty-on faculty harassment. this focus overlooks how feminized, racialized, young and less experienced and credentialed faculty are especially vulnerable to harassment by students (lampman, 2012), thereby neglecting the multiple ways that power operates within the university. claudia lampman, acph expert and psychology professor, commented in a recent interview that women and minority professors are “more likely to be threatened and challenged by students – usually white males” (lampman, quoted in flaherty, 2018). failure to confront such forms of harassment reproduces a dualistic and unnuanced understanding of power, in which the categories of “students” and “professors” are homogenized, and power is thought to operate only in traditionally imagined, top-down ways within the institutional hierarchy. as maclennan (2002, p. 10) argues, as professionals, of institutional cultures, we must recognize the complex nature of human relations in the workplace and establish more humane approaches to resolving the very real problem of harassment; to do this, we must recognize that harassment is not a simple, one-way behavior perpetrated only by those who are recognized to hold institutional power. many canadian universities have begun to reflect on and refashion their formal harassment policies and support services, especially in the era of “me too.” survivors are publicly telling their stories of harassment on campus, which affects universities’ reputations. in the same moment, we have also witnessed institutional attempts to deflect accusations of harassment and silence students who disclose their experiences. within this political farrago, harassment is usually imagined to only involve particular university members; we hear little about students’ harassment of professors (flaherty, 2018). only a few first-hand published accounts exist, and even fewer from canadian professors (e.g., anonymous, 2017; maclennan, 2000). i would argue that ignorance of any form of harassment is antithetical to the values of critical thinking and social justice, values that are aspirational to many within the university. from my vantage, efforts to tackle student-on-faculty harassment are therefore extensions, rather than diminishments, of social justice. here i add to the growing conversation about university-based harassment by demonstrating some of the complexity of acph from an insider’s perspective. i also try to disrupt some conventional assumptions about how power can operate within student-professor relations, especially in anonymous studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 322-331, 2019 324 the age of social media. finally, i offer some broad stroke suggestions about moving forward. in the account that follows, i have excluded numerous identifying details, weighing their importance against the need to protect myself from further provocation by the student. i am a tenured faculty member and a woman. as research demonstrates, gender, race, ethnicity, age, and university rank inform student-on-faculty harassment (see lampman et al., 2016). to maintain my anonymity, i do not comment at length on how these aspects of my social positionality shaped my experience, and i have kept certain details intentionally vague. while my social location influenced my experience of the harassment, the student’s social location also affected my response to their behaviour. they struggle with mental health issues and are socially marginalized in multiple ways. i wanted to be cognizant of these dynamics when handling the situation. as such, i was hesitant to approach the security office, and i was reluctant to involve the police. early in the harassment i turned down one administrator’s offer to have a security officer monitor the classroom. i felt that pursuing the more formal and institutionalized routes for harassment management, such as security offices and police, can gloss over complex issues of power, including the marginalization of those involved. while marginalization does not excuse inappropriate behaviour, it figures into how i experienced and handled the unwanted interactions. although the effects of the harassment on me were manifold, they can be distilled into two main concerns: my physical safety and my career. like most academics, i devoted many years to research specialization with the hope of becoming a professor. i feared that my time and labour commitment, and my professional reputation, would be jeopardized or, at the very least, damaged by the student’s libelous and delusional online messages. i worried that these messages would eventually metastasize into an all-out smear campaign. undoubtedly, the harassment was frightening, but my concern that it could turn into something far worse – a physical assault or public slander – exacerbated my fear. in the first period of the harassment, about midway through the term, when the student began following me on social media, then sporadically unfollowed and refollowed me, i convinced myself that their behaviour was inconsequential. but some time later, i noticed the student had searched through years of old social media photos, and “liked” those that included me. i showed the department chair the string of “likes” and asked, “this is creepy, right?” they agreed, so we made an appointment with the dean to formally document the behaviour and discuss my options should the situation get worse. unfortunately, as the weeks progressed, the student began messaging me over social media, sending progressively more angry and distressing tirades while simultaneously disclosing romantic feelings for me. they expressed indignation that i refused to engage with them beyond institutional email, and academic contrapower harassment & cyberbullying studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 322-331, 2019 325 abnegation that they regarded as a personal affront, stifling the kinds of things we might discuss. i blocked their accounts, only for them to create “decoy” ones from which to send more agitated and acidic messages. they wrote about how hurt they were, how awful i was for ignoring them, and how shocked they were at my ostensible disregard for their feelings. the student interpreted my continued lack of response, which was recommended by my chair, as action through non-action; they read it as hostility. by this time, the term was not yet complete, and final exams were imminent. although my chair cancelled my last lecture, navigating the exam spurred fresh anxieties as i struggled with what to tell my teaching assistants and how to manage my fear of further contact with the student. it seemed futile to press charges or even go to the police when the messages did not contain direct threats and framed the student as a victim of unrequited attention and affection. social media messages would arrive and then be erased; some platforms allow users to delete messages if the recipient has not clicked “accept” on a message from an unknown user. however, given that the recipient can read the message without “accepting” it, i saw these notes pop up and then vanish either immediately or within a few hours. fortunately, i was able to take screenshots (i.e., photos of the screen content) before the student had a chance to delete their messages, which allowed me to compile a comprehensive dossier that i would later submit to my chair, dean, faculty association, and human rights and security offices. the student’s social media messages were coupled with increasing institutional contact, in which they frequently requested meetings to review assignments and course material, with numerous additional reminders of these upcoming “by appointment” meetings and follow up emails after we met. additionally, the student attended all my office hours. indeed, the student sought out any available opportunity to spend time with me: from cornering me after lecture to talk, to loitering near my office, to unexpectedly popping by for impromptu meetings when my door was open. while these behaviours do not constitute harassment, when paired with their ongoing vitriolic social media messages, these other engagements took on a decidedly more sinister tone. my first approach was to try to bypass all unnecessary contact, keeping my door shut and staying off campus as much as possible. in the case of lectures, i ensured a friend would be waiting for me after class. a university administrator noted that the student was “holding me hostage” as i contorted myself to avoid the student. the chair, dean, and i hoped the student would stop contacting me once the class finished. as the student’s online messages grew more caustic and accusatory, and continued past the end of the term, my chair and i met with the security office. prior to meeting, we were unclear what help the office could offer, especially as the student was no longer registered with the university. to our surprise, my chair and i learned that security personnel regularly deal with cases of contrapower harassment, which, although disheartening, anonymous studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 322-331, 2019 326 left me feeling relieved not to be alone. the office presented us with a set of protocols they typically offer to harassed professors, such as a panic button for my office and a direct emergency line. alongside these resources that ensured my physical safety on campus, security officers suggested i ask colleagues near my office to alert me if they spotted the student in the department. perhaps most importantly, they urged me to send the student a “no contact” letter through their office, which they maintained would close the case. although i feared the letter might actually worsen the harassment, i took their advice. breaking the no contact request, the student sent the security office and me a furious response. they only vaguely acknowledged that they had sent inappropriate messages through official means, which represented a small portion of the harassment. security officers responded to the no contact violation, but, contrary to my wishes, they neglected to indicate they had screenshots of the social media messages. they argued that mentioning these images would invite the student to engage further, by giving them more information to challenge or deny. yet, by not explicitly mentioning the screenshots, which captured the bulk of alarming messages, the security office left the student’s specific transgressions open to interpretation. this omission allowed the student to believe that the no contact request was simply a result of their institutional emails. they disregarded what i felt was necessary to increase my sense of safety, with only a cursory rationale. i wanted the student to know that their communications were fully documented and submitted to university authorities, with the hope that this knowledge would deter them from sending further messages. unequivocally, social media provided an essential part of the student’s access to me, which profoundly shaped how the harassment progressed; yet, the security office faltered, as these sorts of online engagements fell outside their knowledge. i did not anticipate the struggle i would have to explain how social media platforms function to the people tasked with addressing harassment at the university. despite their unfamiliarity with online harassment, once i handed over my file every action was vetted through the security office’s formal processes and human resources, and my requests were largely discounted. after we sent the no contact letter, security told me to “let it go” and stop worrying. i was told they would mediate the conflict. a process that was meant to protect me, and had initially provided some assurance, now added to my unease. in what turned out to be the end of the harassment, security called me to communicate their increased awareness regarding the malleable dimensions of cyber-harassment. they finally understood that the student could continue to create decoy social media accounts to maintain contact with me. flabbergasted by the plasticity of social media to serve nefarious ends, the head staff member exclaimed, “what do you think will happen?” such lack of familiarity with online harassment and social media activity illuminated the need for my institution to develop policies and procedures for regulating, academic contrapower harassment & cyberbullying studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 322-331, 2019 327 investigating, and managing student-on-faculty cyber-bullying. in my experience, the university’s paucity of up-to-date information about how online modalities can shape students’ malevolent access to each other and to professors made an already onerous situation even more challenging (see blizard, 2016). without such information, i was mostly left to address the social media dynamics on my own. in addition to blocking the student over social media, i also deployed a series of other tactics to diffuse and deescalate the situation. after each of these efforts, friends and colleagues would ask, “do you think it is resolved?” when checking in about how i was doing, people asked, “is the case resolved?” the issue of resolution was raised so frequently that i learned to brace for it. while such questions are undoubtedly rooted in concern and a wish for the harassment to end, answering them proved difficult because of the ongoing nature of the harassment. as i managed my own anxieties, i also felt obligated to reassure others that i was optimistic that the harassment was over, even when i knew resolution was remarkably uncertain. each time i thought the harassment had finished, i was surprised by a new message, email, or maneuver used by the student to keep in contact. when i felt renewed optimism that the harassment had stopped, i was startled out of a relative calm. i learned to be vigilant and prepare for more, as allowing myself to relax intensified the extreme emotional juxtaposition. that is, i felt mentally and emotionally jolted – caught unawares – if my guard was down. the stress gnawed at me. according to lampman et al. (2016, p. 4), professors who experience contrapower harassment linked the harassment to significant tolls on their work and well-being: lampman and colleagues (2009) found that faculty experiencing acph reported anxiety, difficulty sleeping and concentrating, depression, fear of the student perpetrator, and stress-related illness; they also found that women faculty reported significantly more negative consequences than men faculty. desouza (2011) also found that faculty who had experienced acph reported worse job-related outcomes (including job stress, satisfaction, and turnover intent) than nonharassed faculty, although he did not find gender to be a predictor of such negative outcomes. blizard (2016) speculates that, given its documented long-term negative effects, student-on-faculty cyberbullying can be harmful enough to precipitate post-traumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder. while i hope professors’ mental health is a sufficient reason to put acph on any university’s or college’s radar, another impact of such behaviour is the compromised functioning of the institution itself. given documented stress arising from acph, including a reported desire to leave their jobs (lampman, phelps, bancroft, & beneke, 2009; lampman et al., 2016), faculty’s job-related outcomes are negatively affected (desouza, 2011). this was certainly true in my case. anonymous studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 322-331, 2019 328 as i worked to handle the harassment, i commented to friends that i had launched an ambitious new research program called, “my harassment project.” exasperated and scared, i remarked to another friend that i simply did not know how to be harassed (of course, nobody does). i understood harassment primarily within the framework of students harming other students, professors harming students, and faculty harming each other. i was conceptually and analytically upended by this unexpected reversal of power. i felt entangled in a briar patch of fear and trauma, which encumbered my ability to clearly judge the best ways forward. well meaning administrators, staff, colleagues, and friends, looked to me for guidance about how i wanted to proceed, and left me to evaluate myriad options, all in an effort (i would imagine) to be as “victim” or “survivor-centred” as possible. without experience of such cases and the ability to parse my emotional reactions from the practical matters of strategy (what is the best next step?), i felt ill equipped to assess the multitude of choices before me. from the beginning, i did not know what resources to access, with whom to speak, or the order in which to speak to them (the faculty association first? or the chair? the campus security office or the dean?). i did not know what strategies to employ in addressing the problem, or how to deescalate the harassing behaviour, let alone which actions might make it worse. for example, every time i asserted a boundary, the harassment would intensify, as the student would inevitably retaliate against my attempts at self-protection. both administrators’ and the faculty association’s responses to the “unwanted contact” demonstrated that no one could identify an appropriate course of action. for example, when i approached the faculty association early in the harassment, they kindly offered sympathy, but acknowledged there were no precedents on file beyond a couple of professors who had been bullied by an entire class. while i was fortunate that my chair and dean took my experience seriously, even when things just felt “off,” the more distinctly troubling events did not initiate a set of university protocols for handling student-on-faculty harassment. granted, i realize the particularity of each situation will inevitably shape the appropriate path to resolution. no single protocol can address all the specificities of each circumstance; the fluid nature of ongoing harassment requires flexible responses that are tailored to the idiosyncrasies of the circumstances. still, there was also the unavoidable strangeness of the imbroglio that left many of my university contacts at a loss; they supported me in principle, but how that support might translate into action was sometimes nebulous, and in certain instances it became apparent that the support was related to optics and the protection of the university rather than to myself. as a result, i often felt isolated in the free fall of the harassment as my anxiety mounted. the experience was exhausting. it set back my research agenda for months, and consumed valuable time as i sought counseling and attempted to regain my intellectual focus. recovery is not immediate. echoing the advice of academic contrapower harassment & cyberbullying studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 322-331, 2019 329 anonymous (2017), i encourage faculty who have struggled with acph to seek mental health supports. i also encourage academic institutions to develop widely communicated protocols that specifically name faculty as possible victims of harassment. lampman et al. (2016, p. 12) provide further recommendations: given that women faculty in this study reported significantly more challenging and disrespectful behaviours from their students, more complex experiences of acph, and more associated negative consequences than men faculty, it seems important for new faculty members – especially young women – to be instructed about how common acph is, what to expect, how to respond, and how to report it. i strongly believe that faculty across seniority could greatly benefit from education concerning acph resources and paths to resolution. my experience left me feeling frustrated as i navigated both my internal processing and the ecosystem of university administrators, the human rights office, the security office, human resources, the president’s office, and the faculty association. i worked to organize an ongoing dialogue and agenda for action among these actors, which was emotionally draining and time consuming. the process involved creating detailed documentation, writing out the minutiae of the student’s actions (i.e., time, place, type of communication), cataloguing emails/screenshots of messages, retelling the story (to keep everyone abreast of new developments, as well as others’ efforts to mitigate the situation), and coordinating about a dozen or more individuals who were eventually involved. considered together, informing and coordinating the relevant university bodies significantly compounded the stress of the harassment itself. if i had not directly experienced it, i would not have imagined the latticework of relationships and network of bureaucratic bodies i would need to mobilize to address the situation, nor the labour of synthesizing them into a coherent effort. by the harassment’s denouement, i was emotionally frayed, and had lost faith in my institution’s ability to adequately respond. as such, i hope to see my institution create policies and protocols that directly address student-on-faculty harassment (including cyberbulling). as i was completing this article, colleagues suggested that i provide a checklist of steps to take if readers find themselves in similar situations. i am hesitant to offer prescriptive advice about how to adeptly handle similar acph situations, because each case is particular, and canadian universities develop policies independently. regardless of circumstance, though, i think it is paramount to keep a detailed record of the harassment, including timelines of incidents, descriptions of encounters, email trails, and screenshots. as i have noted, i was continually grateful for my detailed file, especially as each relevant university office was mobilized in the case and required such information. fastidious documentation also made it easier to prove the harassment, and to demonstrate its severity and persistence. i am reluctant to anonymous studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 322-331, 2019 330 say i should have gone to the security office sooner, as the efforts by the dean and chair likely mediated conflict with the student, and offered temporary buffers against some of the potential interactions between us. further, as discussed, the security office lacked understanding of social media. another complicating factor was that the harassment continued after the student was no longer registered at the university. thus, the security office lacked jurisdiction, which limited their ability to intervene, beyond sending and then re-sending the no contact letter. as mentioned, once the student breached the terms of the letter, which clearly stated they were not to contact me through any means, the security office and then the human rights office reissued the no-contact missive. although i did not know it at the time, these interventions would end the harassment. if they had not, i would have gone to the police to open a file and possibly apply for a peace bond. within canada, a peace bond is “…used where an individual (the defendant) appears likely to commit a criminal offence, but there are no reasonable grounds to believe that an offence has actually been committed” (government of canada, department of justice, 2015). a recent discussion with a friend informed me about such a possibility. had i known earlier, i would have considered the option. despite the protections such bonds can afford, they may take several weeks or months to obtain, which reduces their usefulness in cases like mine. undoubtedly, dealing with the police would have been stressful and increased my concern about escalation, but that intervention might have provided me a greater sense of safety and agency. instead, the heightened vulnerability wore on me. in the final month of the harassment, i sat on a friend’s couch with my head in my hands, feeling wrung out as i recounted the student’s latest actions. i asked for reassurance that it would be okay, that my career would not be ruined, and that this situation would eventually register as a bad but not defining experience in my life. she told me that the crisis was temporary. it was not my fault that the student was harassing me. i recalled her words as the student’s behaviour persisted, and i searched for ways to resist and reclaim the experience. i made a commitment to write about it, and add further depth to public accounts of student-on-faculty harassment. i wanted to offer something valuable to professors dealing with acph and to encourage administrators to develop policies that explicitly address it, particularly attending to how social media broadens students’ access to professors. fortunately, i have not heard from the student in some time. it has only been within the last couple of months that i have felt some calm return to my daily life. i sincerely hope the potential isolation and stigmatization of acph are lessened for others through the recollection of experiences like mine. academic contrapower harassment & cyberbullying studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 322-331, 2019 331 references anonymous. (2017, may 5). when a professor is sexually harassed by a student. inside higher ed. retrieved from www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/05/05/advice-faculty-memberswho-are-sexually-harassed-their-students-essay blizard, l. m. (2016). faculty members’ experiences of cyberbullying by students at one canadian university: impact and recommendations. international research in higher education. 1(1), 107-124. desouza, e. (2011). frequency rates and correlates of contrapower harassment in higher education. journal of interpersonal violence, 26(1), 158-188. flaherty, c. (2018, march 15). when students harass professors. inside higher ed. retrieved from www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/05/contra-power-harassment-professorsstudents-isnt-common-its-real government of canada, department of justice. (2015). victims’ rights in canada: peace bonds fact sheet. retrieved from www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/victims-victimes/factsheetsfiches/peace-paix.html lampman, c. (2012). women faculty at risk: u.s. professors report on their experiences with student incivility, bullying, aggression, and sexual attention. naspa journal about women in higher education, 5(2), 184-208. lampman, c., crew, e., lowery, s., & tompkins, k. (2016). women faculty distressed: descriptions and consequences of academic contrapower harassment. naspa journal about women in higher education, 9(2), 169-189. lampman, c., phelps, a., bancroft, s., & beneke, m. (2009). contrapower harassment in academia: a survey of faculty experience with student incivility, bullying, and sexual attention. sex roles, 60, 331-346. maclennan, j. (2002). “contra-power” harassment in the blackboard jungle. sexuality & culture. 4(1), 75-84. jürgen habermas and bush’s neoconservatives: studies in social justice volume 5, issue 2, 167-182, 2011   correspondence address: vivienne matthies-boon, department of international relations and international organisation, university of groningen, oude kijk in 't jatstraat 26, 9712 ek groningen, the netherlands. tel.: +31 (0) 50 363 7254; email: e.a.v.matthies-boon@rug.nl issn: 1911-4788 jürgen habermas and bush’s neoconservatives: too close for comfort? vivienne matthies-boon department of international relations and international organisation, university of groningen, the netherlands abstract in his recent political writings, habermas has opposed his cosmopolitan project to that of the bushite neoconservatives. however, this article argues that in some respects habermas's works come closer to the neoconservative agenda than he realises and that this poses a potential danger of its being appropriated by precisely the camp he opposes. these problems particularly come to the fore in his analysis of islamic fundamentalism, democracy and the middle east, but also in his recommendations concerning un-based internationalism and his appeals to woodrow wilson. by tracking these problematic areas in habermas's work, this article argues that habermas needs to engage in a more carefully articulated, concrete and empirical analysis if he is to avoid these problems. introduction1 in his recent political writings, habermas has fervently opposed the neoliberal and neoconservative policies of the bush administration. in opposition to this unilateral hegemon, which hides its power interests behind the ethical façade of spreading democracy and human rights abroad, habermas argues, that we should instead embrace a cosmopolitan political order. such a cosmopolitan order would be characterized by a multi-levelled system of governance and a further institutionalization of international law, as well as by the promotion of procedural opinionand will-formation (habermas, 2001, 2003, 2006a, 2006b). in advancing such a model, habermas hopes to follow in the footsteps of immanuel kant, with a view to implementing a truly cosmopolitan world order devoid of illegal war (habermas, 1997). on first sight, this project seems admirable. after all, the invasion of iraq by the “coalition of the willing,” the institutionalization of torture and human rights abuses, the bending of international and national law, as well as the ideological rhetoric of the western “us” versus the terrorist “them” is surely only to be deplored. yet, as i shall argue, the relation between habermas's work and the neoconservative outlook is more complex than his political utterances suggest. the 168 vivienne matthies-boon   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   problem is that on closer inspection there appears to be a hitherto unremarked affinity between habermas's proposals and those of the neoconservatives. this raises the question of whether habermas's work might not run the risk of being appropriated by the those he opposes—namely, by bushite neoconservatives such as paul wolfowitz, dick cheney, william kristol, david frum and daniel pipes (among others)—in order to support their own ideological agenda rather than habermas's cosmopolitan project2. indeed, john yoo and robert delahunty (2010) have already done just this. for the irony is that, despite the fact that habermas clearly opposes his approach to that of the neoconservatives, he in the end affirms at least some of the core ideological values and perceptions of the bush administration. three central instances are these. first, like the neoconservatives, habermas (2003) espouses a belief in the universal value of democracy; like them (and of course like many others) he believes that a spread of democracy to the middle east will lead to a peaceful and prosperous future, as well as the demise of islamic fundamentalism. second, just like the neoconservatives and their allies, whether explicit or implicit, habermas fails to look into the important influence of colonialism and postcolonialism in the region and believes that the mere imposition of proper formal democratic processes would lead to a resolution of political violence. like the neoconservatives, he fails to analyse the historical, political, social, cultural and economic role of the west and other occupying forces have placed in the middle east. rather, he sees the region and the problems of fundamentalism that emanate from it through the lens of his largely western-based theory of modernity, with all the problems that brings. third, in his opposition to the neoconservatives, habermas (2008) frequently appeals to the internationalist stance of woodrow wilson and posits this as an alternative approach to the bush administration (p. 94, pp. 155-158). yet, what is interesting here is that the bush administration itself frequently referred to the wilsonian legacy in order to legitimate its own imperialist projects (p. 94, pp. 155-158). moreover, in his appeals to wilsonianism, habermas overlooks the extent to which wilson himself was engaged in the imperialist spread of democracy to latin america and other parts of the world (encarnación, 2005). while this does not necessarily imply that habermas's own project has imperialist tendencies, it does indicate that habermas has failed sufficiently to reflect on the affinity between some aspects of his own work and the core imperialist ideological beliefs of neoconservatism. my worry is hence that habermas might all too easily be coming close to what he criticizes— and thus might run the danger of being systematically appropriated by neoconservative ideologues. of course, habermas differs from the neoconservatives in his analysis of the free market and its putative benefits, arguing that, against the neoconservatives, the market needs to be brought under control by democratic institutions on a global level. the difficulty here, however, is that, practically at least, habermas's accounts rely on a rather naïve analysis of the concrete workings of international institutions such as the un. he argues that these kinds of institution will be able to open up the way for a truly cosmopolitan future, but fails to see the extent to which these institutions have themselves become informed, even dominated, by neoliberal values. this oversight is, i believe, due not only to the abstract nature of habermas and bush’s neoconservatives 169 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   habermas's account but also his own implicit endorsement—and however much that goes against his explicit position—of the apparent benefits of the free market. the intention of this article is thus neither to repudiate cosmopolitan political philosophy nor to strengthen the visions of the neoconservative camp. rather, my aim is much more modest than that: i seek merely to put out a warning sign, to point out that habermas—and habermasians—need to reflect more carefully and closely on the possible affinity between his work and the positions and commitments of the neoconservatives. not least because, as i have said, neoconservatives have already incorporated insights from the progressive left in order to advance their own program, such a task is as politically urgent as it is intellectually salutary. in order to relay this warning sign, i shall first outline habermas’s proposals for a cosmopolitan world order, in the course of which he opposes his own work to that of the neoconservatives. i shall then proceed to his political commentary on islamic fundamentalism where some affinities between his approach and that of the neoconservatives come to light particularly sharply. following this, i shall analyze the extent to which his proposed cosmopolitan resolution to the problems of the middle east offers a viable alternative to the imperialist project of the neoconservatives, questioning especially the extent to which international institutions such as the un offer a practical alternative to the neoliberal ideology of the neoconservatives. finally, i shall go on to point out the oddity of habermas's appeals to the internationalist wilsonian legacy, a legacy explicitly exploited by the bush administration in the development of its “freedom agenda.” habermas's multilateral cosmopolitan governance vs. neoconservative unilateral imperialism in his recent political writings3 habermas (2009) argues against the neoliberal and neoconservative actions and outlook of the bush administration, and while he endorses the obama administration (p. 185) the latter hardly signals anything very different (khan, 2011, p. 21). the trigger for habermas was the invasion of iraq, where the coalition of the willing commenced the “shock and awe” strategy without a resolution from the security council. what angered him was not only the illegitimacy of the war itself, but also that the united states plainly ignored, sidelined and even sought to modify international law as it pressed its own interests upon the international community (habermas, 2006a, p. 182). this, he insists, is a dangerous precedent: one that could potentially lead to a crumbling of the cosmopolitan order. for habermas (2006a) believes that, with the formation of the un, the establishment of international courts, and the enforcement of human rights, the international community has slowly but surely moved beyond classical international law—which merely governed inter-state relations—towards a cosmopolitan legal order. hence, by bypassing the un, the bush administration went directly against the evolving cosmopolitan world order that habermas advocates. since 2003, habermas has thus been more active in his condemnation of the neoconservative outlook and also stepped up his own campaign for a normative cosmopolitan alternative. in this campaign, he posits an alternative cosmopolitan 170 vivienne matthies-boon   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   project that would be free of any despotic or imperialist traits, owing to the fact that it would bring democracy into being across the globe, ensuring that “no one could unilaterally determine the boundaries of what is tolerated” (habermas, 2003, p. 40). there is, hence, no one agent who can impose their will on others. rather, the world is offered a rational model where opinions and will-formations are discursively created and multilateral, rather than unilateral, actions are undertaken. central to this cosmopolitan framework are international organizations such as the united nations. by this model, it would function as a global police force, regulating and inspecting the behaviour of nation states so as to ensure that they adhere to human rights and to international law (habermas, 2004). in order to ensure that such a global order led by the un would not begin to take on the characteristics of a despotic world state, habermas proposes a multileveled model of governance. in such a model of governance, supranational institutions spanning the entire globe would be supported, informed and influenced by the discursive features of a broad range of actors: from social movements to nation states to regional blocks. within this order, transnational regional institutions such as the eu would play an important role as they would be able to bring the interests of an entire region to the attention of the un and solve many of their problems transnationally. here, habermas clearly builds further on his earlier proposals for a stronger integrated european union based on the idea of a constitutional patriotism,4 which he posited as another necessary tool to counter american neoconservativism (habermas, 2001). a stronger, integrated europe was necessary, he argued, both to counter american imperialism on a world stage, as well as to deal with problems caused by global economic forces that could no longer be contained at the level of individual nation states.5 europe would be the prime actor fighting the corner of cosmopolitanism against the unilateralist neoconservative policies of the bush administration and its followers as it pushes for international multilateralism and the further institutionalization of democracy. moreover, referring to historical instances such as the second world war and postcolonialism, habermas insists that europeans are particularly well suited to play this civilizing role. for, in contrast to the united states of america, europe has a stricter division between church and state, a greater sensitivity towards human rights as a result of decolonization and, most of all, europe has been on a cosmopolitan learning curve as a result of the painful experiences of the second world war (habermas, 2005, p. 11; see also boon, 2007, p. 297; 2009, pp. 31-34). in these works, he argued passionately against any actors, such as the heads of state in central and eastern europe, as well as the united kingdom, who favoured a weaker rather than a stronger european union (boon, 2007, p. 293; habermas, 2005, p. 5). for him, the threats posed by american neoconservativism are so serious that there is no other choice: either europe takes on this civilizing role or cosmopolitanism will fail and the usa’s imperialist unilateralism will triumph (habermas, 2006a, p. 52). it is imperative to note here that, for habermas, this cosmopolitan struggle against the imperialist tendencies of the united states is not a fight against the idea of the west as such: rather, he positions his work firmly within the western political tradition (habermas, 2006a, p. 50). moreover, he fears that any general arguments habermas and bush’s neoconservatives 171 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   against the idea of the west could end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater, that is to say, they could lead to an outright rejection of the communicative rationality which for him clearly developed on the western side of the berlin wall (habermas, 2005, p. 9). instead, by positioning communicative rationality (that of the social realm, the lifeworld) in direct opposition to instrumental rationality (that of the economic system) he argues that the tragedy of modernity is a one-sided development of reason (habermas, 1984, 1985, 1987b). this one-sided development of reason means that instrumental rationality (which is focused merely on achieving strategic ends) has encroached on the lifeworld (characterized by reaching understanding) (habermas, 1987a, 1987b). thus what needs to happen is an opening up of communicative channels so that the system can be brought under the control of the lifeworld once again. habermas on islamic fundamentalism: the desired end of western democracy it is also on the basis of this perspective of his western-based theory of a one-sided rationality that habermas interprets the phenomenon of islamic fundamentalism.6 in his interview with borradori, habermas perceives islamic global terrorism as a thoroughly modern phenomenon bound up with modernizing processes and the alienation caused by economic misery. he explains that the same globalizing and modernizing processes that swept through europe are now sweeping through the middle east.7 yet, in europe these modernizing processes were at least compensated for by significant benefits, whilst the middle east has only seen a widening gap between the economic winners and losers (habermas, 2003, p. 32). the upshot is that in the middle east “a process of productive destruction does not hold the same promise of compensation for the pain of the disintegration of customary ways of life” (p. 32). hence, rather than perceiving islamic fundamentalism in light of huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilizations, habermas (2003) points towards its economic causes. given these economic origins, he does not deem it surprising that the terrorists chose to strike at the heart of the capital enterprise of the usa, the country regarded in the arab world as the driving force of capitalist modernization. he remarks that “the west in its entirety serves as a scapegoat for the arab world’s own, very real experience of loss suffered by populations torn out of their cultural traditions during processes of accelerated modernization.” nevertheless, “with its unapproachable lead in development and with its overwhelming technological and economic, political and military superiority, the usa appears as an insult to their self-confidence whilst simultaneously providing a secretly admired model” (p. 32). it is this level of frustration caused by economic deprivation, he argues, that has led religious fundamentalists to have recourse to pre-modern beliefs and traditional notions of identity. for the alienation caused by the uprooting of a way of life makes people yearn for a return to a shared, pre-modern, meaning-endowing identity (rosenfeld, 2007, p. 159). this yearning is unrealistic, however, in that in modern complex societies an exclusive claim to truth by one faith can no longer be maintained. so, if middle eastern societies want to renounce such dogmatic attitudes, they would need to embark upon a path of self-reflexivity akin to the one 172 vivienne matthies-boon   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   undertaken in europe. for “in europe, the confessional schism and the secularization of society have compelled religious belief to reflect on its nonexclusive place within a universal discourse shared with other religions and limited by scientifically generated secular knowledge” (habermas, 2003, p. 31). as long as “fundamentalists—and states like iran—strive for the reestablishment of an islamic form of theocracy, they repress any cognitive dissonances and thus remain tied within a fundamentalist framework” (pp. 31-32). in order to embark on this journey of enlightenment and be able to grapple with cognitive dissonances, what needs to be improved is—rather unsurprisingly—communication. for, while it is economic problems that underlie islamic fundamentalism, the issue can be solved by rectifying patterns of distorted communication. after all, these conflicts primarily “arise from distorted communication, from misunderstanding and incomprehension, from insincerity and deception.” (habermas, 2003:35) it is here that the spiral of distorted communication begins, which then leads to mutual mistrust, eventually resulting in a complete breakdown of communication. this spiral of distorted communication is further strengthened by the fact that both the islamists and the bush administration are geared towards strategic action rather than communicative action, in that they both seek to achieve their particular ends rather than reach understanding. yet habermas (2003) does not lose his optimism for “if violence . . . begins with a distortion in communication, after it has erupted it is possible to know what has gone wrong and what needs to be repaired” (p. 35); namely, communication. however, in terms of repairing communication, his proposals remain rather abstract and vague. first, he puts forward a general argument for a stronger legal international order and a particular reinforcement of the un. at the moment, the un is reduced to the proverbial paper tiger, but with some further encouragement the cosmopolitan seeds within the un can grow and can begin to flourish on a world stage (p. 39). second, he argues that a model of democratic constitutionalism can be seen as a solution to the problems pestering the middle east: for he insists that only such a deliberative political order would enhance reflexivity so as to be capable of incorporating civil disobedience, even beyond its own boundaries of tolerance (p. 41). a constitutional democracy is reliant on an active civil society, and will be able to incorporate islamic resistance. as he explains, “the democratic project of the realization of equal rights actually feeds off the resistance of minorities, which, although appearing as enemies of democracy to the majority today, could actually turn out to be their authentic friends tomorrow.” not only that, but a constitutional order would also ensure that a universalistic liberal legal order is established, characterized by an “egalitarian individualism of a morality that demands mutual recognition, in the sense of equal respect and reciprocal consideration for everybody” (p. 42). as michel rosenfeld (2007) nicely points out, the gist of habermas's story thus seems to be that from the standpoint of muslim societies . . . communicative action would lead to the abandonment of authoritarianism, and the use of islam to inflame masses. muslim politics could willingly embrace the material gains of a globalization fine-tuned to promote equal opportunities and social justice. moreover, muslim societies would adjust their own lifeworld and legal and political institutions in order to reconcile islam, modernism and fair and responsible globalisation. the resulting islam would habermas and bush’s neoconservatives 173 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   not be fundamentalist but accepting of pluralism, like other great religions that have adjusted to the conditions of modern multiculturalism. (p. 168) however, such a conception is highly problematic. the first notable difficulty is that habermas nowhere directly engages with islamicist political thought or even with middle eastern politics. as a result of this, habermas, like the bushite neoconservatives, directly equates the problem of islamic fundamentalism with the turbulence of middle eastern politics and society. and as middle east expert olivier roy (2008) explains, this is a mistake commonly made by western commentators, and serves to allow them to project familiar problems that exist in europe (caused by migration) onto the quite different area of the middle east. yet that this projection is ambiguous comes to the fore when one realizes that al qaeda’s recruitment map [does not necessarily] mirror conflicts in the middle east, since there is a predominance of young second generation european muslims and converts, but there are no palestinians or afghans and very few recruits from the middle east. the islamists, like the arab muslim brotherhood, are not involved in international terrorism. nor do neofundamentalists [within the middle east] recruit in traditional milieus, but instead among migrants, refugees, the second generation, the new social classes, or among tribes undergoing change. (p. 52) hence the move from the problem of islamic fundamentalism directly to middle eastern politics is rather too quick in habermas's account, just as it is too quick in the neoconservative’s worldview, where “9/11” was the directly invoked reason to invade iraq in 2003. of course, i am not claiming here that habermas's model would lead to, or even directly encourage, such direct invasions, but rather i am making the more modest claim that both strands of thought are engaged in the same mistake of projection and that a more careful, sensitive and differentiated empirical analysis is needed. worse even than this, however, is the fact that habermas’s perception of islamic fundamentalism and the middle east is not only inaccurate, but also extremely offensive. it is offensive in that he completely ignores the complex colonial history of the middle east and merely interprets these issues in light of his western theory of modernity (habermas, 1979a, 1987a). this theory of modernity is anyway problematic, in that it is based on his account of social evolution which (despite his own assertions) leads him to interpret historical events in an evolutionary line that culminates in a cosmopolitan post-conventional order. this evolutionary line is modelled explicitly on western developments (boon, 2009, chapter 2). the upshot of this is that when he looks at middle eastern affairs, it becomes a case of these “middle easterners” needing to become more like “us.” they are simply lagging behind on the evolutionary scale, and need to become more reflexive, as well as to implement a constitutional democracy. only when they discover the fruits of liberal democracy will they find peace and security. the complexity of islamic fundamentalism as well as middle eastern politics is reduced and their alterity changed into familiar western concepts which, of course, ensures that the west gets off extremely lightly. for example, while at one point he remarks that disappointment with an autocratic regime might boost islamic fundamentalism, he nowhere reflects on the active role of the west in keeping these regimes in power. at no point does habermas refer to the legacy of colonialism or to the unfair 174 vivienne matthies-boon   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   policies inflicted upon the middle east by the western powers both in the present and in the past. he does not even mention western meddling, interference and cheating in middle eastern affairs—let alone the three biggest traumas inflicted upon the middle east in recent history, namely the sykes picot agreement in 1916, the establishment of the state of israel in 1948 and the overthrow of the sunni political primacy in the middle east as a result of the 2003 iraq invasion (e.g. roy, 2008, pp. 76-79). but given this colonial history, it is simply outrageous to argue that the very same processes of rationalization that occurred in europe are now taking place in the middle east. for a start, we might point out that europe has not been recently colonized.8 hence, rather than seeing the middle east’s alterity, he insists that it is simply the economy that is to blame, rather than western political order itself having any role. but this is simply untenable. his blindness to the colonial past also stops him from questioning the values of a liberal constitutional democratic order, values which are not automatically shared by many actors in the middle east. in fact, much of the islamist ideology that habermas criticizes developed in direct response to western developments and western concepts of individualism, liberty and freedom. he completely overlooks this relation between islamicism and western ideologies, such as nationalism, liberalism and socialism, none of which were seen by the islamists as viable and authentic alternatives to the autocratic regimes in the middle east. the reason why these strands of thought were deemed unsuitable by the islamists was precisely because they were tainted by western (conceptions of) reason and thus lacked the requisite authenticity when transferred to a different context (roy, 1998, passim). this kind of objection can be properly acknowledged only if one takes into account the impact of colonialism and post-colonialism which habermas simply ignores. to offer liberal democracy as a response to problems arising at least in part out of that democracy and from responses to it is neither realistic nor respectful of those formerly colonized. in this matter in particular, the issue is that habermas comes closer to the neoconservatives than he realizes. for they too looked for the root causes of islamic terrorism and they too ruled out any direct western responsibility for radical islamic violence (roy, 2008, p. 29). rather, in their view, the source of this violence is the arab societies’ institutional structures which are hindering human, political and economic development. . . . for the neoconservative lobby, the structural explanation of terrorism argues that it is spawned by poor “governance” of the muslim countries in general, and of arab ones in particular. (p. 29) it is the lack of such governmental structures that keeps “them” from becoming like “us.” hence, like, habermas, they “are diametrically opposed to huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ theory” (roy, 2008, p. 30) and, again like habermas, they seek to resolve the problem of islamic fundamentalism through the development and export of formal democratic political institutions. hence, like habermas, they are in favour of the development of active civil societies, which for them too are positioned in-between the state and the individual and can hold a potentially authoritarian state to account (roy, 2008, p. 34). they too believe that encouraging a vibrant civil society will resolve and incorporate the difficulties of islamic terror. habermas and bush’s neoconservatives 175 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   hence, both habermas and the neoconservatives take the ends of democracy, individualism and an active civil society for granted and see the creation and strengthening of democratic political institutions as a viable—indeed as the only— response to the problems of the middle east. but neither habermas nor the neoconservatives engage with concrete processes on the ground. their theoretical and/or ideological preferences leads them both to posit as desirable the goal of formal democratic processes based on the western democratic model, without any empirical analysis, without allowing the people on the ground any voice. international institutionalism vs. neoliberalism? however, where the neoconservatives and habermas differ is in their respective analyses of the benefits of the free market.9 the former’s neoliberalism demands that the primary role of the state or international institutions is not to counter the negative effects of the market, but rather to encourage its growth. or rather, as roy puts it, “for the neoconservatives democracy implies the full acceptance of the market economy, and therefore of privatization” (roy, 2008, p. 31). hence, in contrast to habermas, the neoconservatives have a very limited conception of politics, namely as one the primary aim of which is not to interfere with market forces (e.g. hassan, 2009, p. 25). in contrast, for habermas the market should not be entirely “free,” on account of its negative effects on processes of rationalization and its unequal distribution of wealth and resources. rather, he insists, the market needs to be brought under the control of international regulation and deliberation through multilateral organizations such as the un. yet there is a practical difficulty here: namely, that the un, given in habermas’s work the task of bringing the market under control, has in fact become one of the prime agents for the promotion of market values across the world. so how exactly can this institution further his cosmopolitan approach? without a more detailed, empirically informed and concrete analysis, habermas's appeals to the un as the harbinger of cosmopolitanism are at best empty and at worst stand to lend legitimacy to the very neoliberal order that he opposes. for since the former secretary-general kofi annan reformed its institutions and redesigned the rationale and conduct of many of its programs at the end of the 1990s, the un has embraced the free market and sought to spread “democracy” and “good governance” across the world. the perceived benefits of the market were notably lauded in a speech given by kofi annan to the world economic forum in davos in 1997, where he stated that the un should from now on promote “economic and political liberalization and the development of dynamic private sectors as the best strategy for effective peace-keeping across the world” (cammack, 2006, p. 6). he even went so far as to argue that first, there is a universal understanding that market forces are essential for sustainable development. second, the role of the state is changing in most of the developing world, from one that seeks to dominate economic life to one which creates the conditions through which sustainable development is possible. third, there is growing and compelling evidence that the poor can solve their own problems if they only are given fair access to business and development services. (annan, 1997) 176 vivienne matthies-boon   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   this announcement set the tone for the transformation of the un’s developmental policies, which held that a growth in global trade was advantageous and mostly that the poor should by no means be excluded from the benefits unleashed by the global market. not only that, but private market forces were perceived as the primary and lasting solution to instability and insecurity. hence, annan even insisted that in today's world the private sector is the dominant engine of growth; the principal creator of value and wealth; the source of the largest financial, technological, and managerial resources. if the private sector does not deliver economic [sic] and economic opportunity—equitably and sustainably—around the world, then peace will remain fragile and social justice a distant dream. (annan, 1997) this view, naïve in its analysis of market forces as it may be, has since continued to set the tone for the un’s institutional structure and content of its development programs. basically, the un now merely ensures that the right infrastructures for the flow of capitalism are put in place, after which it leaves it up to the people in a particular country or area to grab their opportunity and buy into market logic in order to help themselves. in other words, rather than providing structural development money for the state or state-sponsored institutions, the un has now cultivated a kind of do-it-yourself model of development entirely in line with the neoliberal agenda (berger, 2001). the role of the state is thus reduced to that of facilitating capitalist market forces, and is actually held accountable by the international institution if insufficient progress has been made on this front. this progress has been further developed and monitored by a competitive model of peer review since the brussels declaration and program of action in 2001. here, “model” apprentices10 are accorded the honour of reviewing their less performing peers, i.e. ones that had not made as much progress in economic liberalization in order to help spread “good practice” (cammack, 2006, p. 16). this belief in competition and the logic of free market has been further entrenched in the united nations through its institutional reforms, for example the closer collaboration between the economic and social council, the un commission on trade and development the bretton woods organisations (the imf and world bank) and the world trade organisation11 (cammack, 2006, p. 11). it is clear that the secretary-general believed in the poverty reduction programs led by the bretton woods institutions and carved out a special role for the un in further facilitating these neoliberal programs. an active link in this closer cooperation and the further development of the neoliberal agenda within the un was mark malloch brown, a “completely self-confessed free-trader,” who had previously served as the world bank’s “chief propagandist (vice-president and director of external relations)” before becoming the united nations development program administrator (cammack, 2006, p. 11; see also un, 2011). he pushed forward an interventionist agenda where the un institutions, in close collaboration with the imf, would act to open up markets in developing countries. it is for instance this kind of vision that is at the heart of the millennium development goals, adopted in september 2000, which sought to eradicate poverty, enhance rights and protect the environment through the standard panacea of so-called transparency and good governance. habermas and bush’s neoconservatives 177 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   the point of this brief discussion of the united nations reforms and its embracing of neoliberalism is to show how hard it is to regard the un as one of the leading agents in a cosmopolitan model such as that proposed by habermas. for in habermas’s account, the international institution would not only counter the neoconservative unilateralist point of view, but also correct market forces communicatively. in practice, however, it seems that the un is doing precisely the opposite: it is opening up markets under the banners of democracy, good governance and human rights. so when the un states that “good governance at the national and international level; the rule of law, respect for all internationally, human rights […and] the promotion of democracy […] are all essential in order to realize the vast and untapped human and economic potential in ldcs [least developed countries] [emphasis mine]”(un general assembly, in cammack, 2006, p. 14) what might be habermas’s response? after all, this kind of reasoning is precisely what he opposes, when he argues, against the bush administration, that “the west presents itself in a form deprived of any normative kernel so long as its concern for human rights only concerns the attempt at opening up new free markets” (habermas, 2003, p. 33). this in turn leads one to wonder how habermas could possibly have just overlooked the neoliberal ideology underpinning these international institutions. admittedly, his is a highly abstract and idealized account, and one which perhaps inevitably leads him to cherry-pick those instances that suit his own theoretical framework and to see actual developments through social evolutionary-tainted lenses.12 nevertheless, the oversight is in the circumstances remarkable. how might it be explained? might the explanation lie simply in habermas's own implicit belief in and endorsement of capitalist market forces? while he of course criticizes the one-sided rationality of market forces, his very distinction between the communicative realm and the realm of the system seems to posit the capitalist system as a necessary ingredient for modernization (boon, 2010, p. 159). for the structural problems caused by the economic system lead to developments in the social realm as it seeks new solutions: in other words, the market is a necessary condition of evolutionary development. but even if that were too harsh a reading of habermas, it would make no difference to the present problem. for habermas agrees with kofi annan that “today, market capitalism has no major ideological rival.” (annan, 1997) when he claims that “since 1989-1990 it has become impossible to break out of the universe of capitalism; the only option is to civilise and tame the capitalist dynamic from within” (habermas, 2009, p. 187) through communicative processes. but given his “realism” about capitalism, one might have expected habermas at least to offer an explanation of how the facts of “actually existing capitalism” do not render his communicative idealism redundant just as they render redundant other ideals; and to show how his own approach is compatible with capitalist realities, in particular, how the un can serve in the way he envisages to ensure that capitalism “promote(s) both prosperity and justice” as annan hopes it might (annan, 1997). but he does not. nowhere in his work does habermas offer even a minimal account of how capitalism might be open to “communicative adjustment.” 178 vivienne matthies-boon   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   wilsonian internationalism vs neoconservativism? the final element of affinity between habermas and bush’s neoconservative project is their common appeal to the internationalist legacy of woodrow wilson. when countering bush’s unilateralism, habermas appeals to the american wilsonian legacy in order to remind the neoconservatives of what he perceives as america’s multilateral and cosmopolitan traditions (habermas, 2006a, p. 156), hoping in so doing that the neoconservatives will see the light and embrace a more cosmopolitan future: for he firmly believes that wilsonian internationalism will lead to a spread of liberal democracy and the international rule of law across the globe. yet, as i will show, this appeal to wilsonian internationalism in fact again indicates a somewhat uncomfortable closeness between habermas and the neoconservatives. after all, the neoconservatives could not themselves agree more with habermas's appeal to wilson. they remember wilson very well. wilson believed: (1) that the spread of democracy across the world would bring peace and prosperity (a thesis now known as democratic peace theory13); (2) that democracy was a universal value; (3) and that no one was incapable of self-government (including those people in latin america deemed by many as unsuited for self-governance at the time); and (4) that, most importantly, the united states was the bearer of the moral project of spreading democracy across the world (encarnación, 2005). on the basis of these beliefs, wilson himself had actively and unilaterally intervened in latin america, where he sought to install democracy with the aim of leading people to democratic enlightenment under america’s specific patronage. now, in the bush administration such a wilsonian streak became most pronounced after “9/11,” when the ideologically loaded freedom agenda was explicitly developed by the white house to spread both democracy and the benefits of the free market to the middle east, starting with iraq (see hassan, 2009, p. 194). thus, wilson’s interventionist and internationalist philosophy was at the heart of bush’s intervention in iraq (dueck, 2003; hassan, 2009).14 crucial for this idealist agenda was the wilson-inspired interventionist belief that democracy should be spread across the middle east, that everyone (including arab islamic believers) was capable of engaging in democratic processes and that the usa had a special duty to fulfill in this respect (see hassan, 2009). the white house thereby broke with american policy that had been fearful the spread of democracy would result in the election of an anti-american islamist government (encarnación, 2005, p. 4715) and instead insisted that only the imposition of a democratic order in iraq would install peace and security in the region. as bush stated at the time, the world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. they encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. and there are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the middle east. arab intellectuals have called on arab governments to address the "freedom gap" so their peoples can fully share in the progress of our times. leaders in the region speak of a new arab charter that champions internal reform, greater politics participation, economic openness, and free trade. and from morocco to bahrain and beyond, nations are taking genuine steps toward politics reform. a new regime in iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region. (bush, 2003) habermas and bush’s neoconservatives 179 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   bush clearly believed that, in terms of middle eastern politics, “democracies would not fight each other, they would all recognise israel, whose security would be guaranteed by the democratization of the arab countries. terrorism would no longer be an option. the domino theory would operate for the benefit of the west” (roy, 2008, p. 40). and so the neoconservatives carved out a special role for the united states of america, just as wilson had believed that “as the definite example of democracy, the united states had a special obligation to extend its benefits and to instruct backward peoples in its uses” (wilson cited in encarnación, 2005, p. 49). the difficulties that arise from the above is that habermas's own appeals to the wilsonian legacy are insufficiently informed by a critical analysis of what this wilsonian legacy might entail. had he undertaken a critical, historical and more empirical analysis of wilson’s thoughts and actions, he might have realized that wilson was a dubious basis for an internationalist cosmopolitan project. indeed, given this rather ambiguous legacy it is questionable as to what extent reference to wilson would do anything but affirm a belief in spreading democracy abroad. of course habermas insists on a multilateral variant of the institutionalization of global democracy through international multi-levelled governance: but the point remains that wilson undertook an active policy in exporting and imposing democracy abroad. by appealing to this legacy habermas all too easily positions himself closer to this agenda. my point is not that habermas himself favours the forceful imposition of democracy from above by a third party, but rather that he has to be far more careful in his choice of historical ally if he is to avoid seeming to propose something all too easily compatible with, and even uncomfortably close to, the neoconservative agenda. for his close association with the wilsonian legacy leaves him vulnerable to being appropriated by those he seeks to oppose. habermas opens the way for the neoconservatives to employ his own citation of wilson to advance their own agenda, particularly in respect of habermas’s arguments that a constitutional democracy would solve problems of islamic fundamentalism. of course, every theorist and every philosopher could be appropriated, twisted and used for ends they oppose. but this risk of appropriation needs surely to be anticipated, especially in an instance such as this, where the neoconservatives incorporate insights originating in the political left: principled interventionism, an insistence on human rights and freedom, the advancement of civil society and the promotion of democracy. is habermas really unaware that, as roy has it, the neoconservatives “are closer to a left-wing progressivism that rejects cultural relativism of any kind rather than to a colonialism anxious above all to maintain the prevailing order” (roy, 2008, p. 4)? conclusion habermas’s commitment to cosmopolitanism stands in danger of being appropriated by a very different form of cosmopolitanism than his own: a neoconservative cosmopolitanism. for what else is the project for the new american century (1997) if not one sort of cosmopolitanism, however partial, self180 vivienne matthies-boon   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   interested and ruthless? to avoid such misappropriation, habermas needs explicitly to differentiate his cosmopolitanism from theirs and to anticipate the contours of how such misappropriation might occur. otherwise not only can his own arguments come inadvertently to be invoked to buttress a neoliberal agenda, just as have other arguments from the left over the last twenty or more years, but the very idea of a left-wing cosmopolitanism might all too easily be lost in consequence. though the responsibility is an onerous one, it cannot be shirked. notes   1 this paper has significantly benefitted from conversations with andrej zwitter, jaap de wilde and my husband tim matthies. thanks also to bob brecher for his patience. 2 neoconservativism of course has a longer history of thought development as well as political action than the bush administration and is by no means limited to the united states of america. however, since i am preoccupied here with a perceived problem in habermas, i am restricting the term neoconservative to that of the bushite ideologues, the primary target of habermas's own recent political critiques. for more information on neoconservativism prior to bush, please see gerson, 1996. 3 some commentators on habermas would make a distinction between his political and theoretical works: however, as i have shown (see boon, 2009) habermas himself muddles these two distinct analytical categories in his work. for this reason i will not pose an analytical distinction between these two modes of writing and instead take them as a whole. 4 “constitutional patriotism” was originally a term developed by dolf sternberger for a particularly german situation (namely unification). habermas adopted it to suit his european project, and argued that this would open the possibility for a model of european integration not based on thicker cultural notions of identity, but on thin legal principles (habermas, 1996). the irony is that habermas nevertheless searches for thicker notions of european identity to counter american imperialism and as a means of endorsing his european project of constitutional patriotism (boon, 2009, chapter 1; müller, 2000, p. 94). 5 as i shall note in more detail in section 3, habermas's analysis of the benefits of the free market is hence somewhat different from that of the neoconservatives, who regard the advancement of the market as one of their primary aims on account of its being, for them, a primary good. 6 for an earlier critical reading of habermas's comments on islamic fundamentalism, see boon, 2010. 7 habermas' comments on islamic fundamentalism occur prior to the arab spring in 2011—for a critical analysis of the relation between habermas' comments on islamic fundamentalism and the arab spring. see matthies-boon, forthcoming 2012. 8 apart from the eastern and central european states which were of course part of the soviet empire for several decades: but habermas has an ambiguous relation to the central and eastern european legacy and does not count these states as genuinely european. “europe” for habermas is definitely on the western side of the wall. 9 it is in fact also on this point that habermas launched a public campaign against the neoconservative outlook in the 1980s (habermas, 1989). apart from their dubious relation to german history, one of his main criticisms was the neoconservatives’ return to heavily freighted notions such as tradition, while upholding a blind belief in the free market. in habermas’s eyes, while they sought to compensate for the one-sided instrumental rationality of the market in their stated reliance on, for example, tradition, instrumental rationality can be compensated for only by communicative processes. he thus insisted that we should not revert to pre-modern notions of tradition or to irrational concepts of culture, but rather move forward and look to establish a deliberative social order (see habermas, 1985, 1987a). 10 states that have in place the necessary governmental support for the growth of free enterprise. 11 they have held annual meetings since 1998 and have provided a forum for this increasingly close cooperation behind the scenes (cammack, 2006, p. 11). 12 see boon (2009) for a more detailed analysis of this problem in habermas’s work. also see honneth and joas (1988). habermas and bush’s neoconservatives 181 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011     13 democratic peace theory ,while popular not only among politicians but also among international relations scholars, is problematic in that it looks primarily at the conflict between states rather than between states and non-state actors, which is one of the most common forms of conflict in our time. it also fails to account for the amount of violence that occurs once a state makes a transition towards democracy and thus only takes the end result, a fully-fledged established democracy, as its unit of analysis. when imposed by force, of course, it entangles itself in contradiction. 14 within american political science the debate on the wilsonian legacy and the bush administration is too extensive to do justice to here: see, among others, ambrosius, 2006; fleming, 2003a, 2003b; hoff, 2007; kennedy, 2005; levine, 2006. 15 this fear is also largely based on the algerian case in the 1990s where a military coup supported by western forces took aim to prevent the election into government of the islamic salvation front. since the failures of the invasion in iraq and the entanglements the american administration got itself into, this fear has returned and a more pragmatic approach based on realist rather than idealist concerns returned to the white house (see roy, 2008). references ambrosius, l. e. 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(2008). the politics of chaos in the middle east. new york, ny: columbia university press. un senior management group. (2011). mark malloch brown. retrieved from http://www.un.org/news/ossg/sg/stories/dsgbio.asp yoo, j. c., & delahunty, r. j. (2010). kant, habermas and democratic peace. chicago journal of international law, 11, pp.1-37. retrieved from http://works.bepress.com/johnyoo/51 elkchirid et al final before ts correspondence address: abdelfettah elkchirid, faculty of social work, wilfrid laurier university, waterloo, on, n2l 3c5; email: aelkchirid@wlu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 narrating colonial silences: racialized social work educators unsettling our settlerhood abdelfettah elkchirid wilfrid laurier university, canada anh phung ngo wilfrid laurier university, canada martha kuwee kumsa wilfrid laurier university, canada abstract in this paper, three racialized social work educators unsettle our settled colonial silences as acts of self-decolonization and as a way of responding to the call to action by the truth and reconciliation commission of canada (trc). hailing from the uneven manifestations of global capitalism and coloniality in morocco, vietnam, and ethiopia, we draw on various critical theories to interrogate our unique entanglements with the imperial project of entwined settler colonialism and white supremacy. we narrate our embodied coloniality and how the virulent materiality of global processes of displacement and dispossession plays out in each of our personal stories, everyday encounters, and practices as educators. with the aim of teaching for social justice by modeling, we share the processes of unsettling our colonial settlerhood and puncturing our racialized innocence. each story addresses three themes: contact and colonial relations with indigenous peoples of canada, complicity in global coloniality, and responsibility in responding to the trc call to action. the first story provides a broad outline of our struggles with the indigenous/settler binary created to perpetuate the various forms of displacement and dispossession in settler colonialism. the second story probes the complexities in the settler category by engaging difference-making as a central technology of dispossession. the third story probes the complexities in the indigenous category through interrogating the perils and promises of recognition and reconciliation in the context of global hierarchies of nation-states and global indigenous resistance. we conclude by moving beyond our divergent trajectories and offering shared critical remarks on the human rights framework, the nation-state framework, and the coloniality of social work. abdelfettah elkchirid, anh phung ngo & martha kuwee kumsa studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 288 keywords decolonization; indigenous; model minority; settler colonialism; recognition; reconciliation; social work education introduction we acknowledge that we live and work in ontario on the traditional territories of the neutral, anishinaabeg, haudenosaunee, and mississauga peoples of canada. we are thankful for generations of indigenous peoples who have cared for this land. we are three racialized social work educators whose pedagogy, research, and practice are primarily informed by various critical and antiracist frameworks. we came to canada as migrants and refugees, which makes us de facto settlers within the grand scheme of the displacement and dispossession of global capitalism. yet, it has been a long and difficult journey for us to identify as settlers, as the global geopolitical processes of settler colonialism are insidious and often veiled. while claims of social justice and equity sit at the heart of our scholarship, indigenous self-determination has been conspicuously absent from our critical antiracist analyses. if this was 15 years ago when lawrence and dua (2005) were just beginning to expose the colonial complicity of antiracist struggles, we might claim unawareness. there is no dearth of scholarship on the issue now. scholars have produced significant bodies of literature (e.g., amadahy & lawrence, 2009; chatterjee, 2018a, 2018b; kennedy-kish & carniol, 2017; murad, 2011; simpson et al., 2018; walia, 2015; wane et al., 2013; wilson et al., 2015). also, settler colonial studies has been established as a new field since (veracini, 2011), and settler scholars are producing critical scholarship (e.g., davis et al., 2017). and we have scholarship on critical indigenous studies (e.g., absolon, 2011; alfred, 2005, 2018; blackstock, 2017; coulthard, 2007; daschuk, 2013; kennedy-kish, 2017; sfu’s vancity office of community engagement [sfu], 2017). today we have no excuse because we are aware of the racialized colonial displacement and dispossession of indigenous peoples in canada (coulthard, 2007; daschuk, 2013; sfu, 2017) and around the world (mignolo, 2011; wolfe, 2006, 2016) as part of the imperial project establishing global capitalism and white supremacy. we are aware of the ongoing colonial violence and genocide against indigenous peoples and the mounting indigenous resistance. despite awareness, however, colonial violence continues in many forms, including broken treaties, nonrecognition of land rights and sovereignty, stigmatization of treaty-protected hunting for livelihood, overrepresentation of indigenous people in child welfare and prisons, nonattention to severe health and income disparities, denial of basic services, desecration of sacred grounds and ceremonies, pollution of the environment, poisoning of air, earth and water, and drilling of pipelines through the two percent of indigenous territories that remain in indigenous racialized social work educators unsettling our settlerhood studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 289 hands. indeed, we know of the horrors of residential schools and the ongoing transgenerational trauma. we understand these as specific strategies in the broader schemes of settler colonial elimination of indigenous peoples (daschuk, 2013; wolfe, 2006). in this paper, we weave together our critical analysis by drawing on critical antiracism, settler colonial studies, and critical indigenous studies. from critical antiracism (e.g., badwall, 2015; bakan & dua, 2014; razack, 2004; tuck & yang, 2012) we draw on both the macro processes of material political economy of white supremacy structured by global capitalism and neoliberalism, and the micro processes of how individuals embody white supremacy where it becomes a woven fabric of self-understanding enacted or resisted in everyday life. similarly, from settler colonial studies (e.g., davis et al., 2017; rifkin, 2013; wolfe, 2006, 2016), we draw on both the macro processes of displacement and dispossession by which indigenous peoples are torn off their lands and livelihoods for the possession and inhabitation of settlers, and the micro processes by which indigenous and settler individuals embody a self-understanding they enact or resist in everyday life. finally, from critical indigenous studies (e.g., coulthard, 2007; daschuk, 2013; sfu, 2017; trc, 2015), we draw from both sides of the debate, where one side views decolonization and reconciliation as possible within the settler colonial nation-state, and the other side views these as impossible short of returning indigenous land to its rightful stewards. we appreciate works that are already interweaving antiracism, indigenous self-determination and settler colonial studies (e.g., chatterjee, 2018a, 2018b; murad, 2011; tuck & yang, 2012). these theories play out through the uniqueness of our individual stories narrated from our shared field of practice as social work educators. in a powerful satirical question, cindy blackstock (2017) asks if social work has the guts for social justice and reconciliation. while honoring the longstanding indigenous struggles for justice (coulthard, 2007; sfu, 2017) and acknowledging the many recommendations of the royal commission on aboriginal peoples (1996) left unaddressed, in this paper, we focus on the trc’s call to action, particularly the articles on the education of social workers (chatterjee, 2018b; trc, 2015). although both the trc’s call to action and social work are couched within the human rights framework (united nations, 1994, 2007), as disillusioned scholars, we seek to critically engage the human rights framework as a mechanism of global coloniality. we narrate our stories here as acts of self-decolonization and to educate by modeling as we wrestle with our innocence and unveil our colonial complicity. each story engages three themes: our colonial relations with indigenous peoples of canada, our complicity in global coloniality, and our response to trc’s (2015) call to action. we position abdel’s story to provide a broad outline of our struggles with the indigenous/settler binary, anh’s story to probe the complexities of the settler category, and martha kuwee’s story to probe the complexities of the indigenous category. abdelfettah elkchirid, anh phung ngo & martha kuwee kumsa studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 290 abdel’s story: complexifying the indigenous/settler binary i am an immigrant to canada. i am muslim and originally from morocco. i migrated to the us, became an ethnic graduate social work student, and moved to canada for work. i was never trained to work with indigenous clients. nor did i ever take initiatives to educate myself on the struggles between settlers and indigenous peoples of this land. i didn’t need to, because i was firmly ensconced in my ethnic space; or shall i say trapped in my ethnic space? i am displaced from my own people’s place and thrown into the placeless space of the perpetual migrant. i am a placeless migrant whether in the us or canada. i feel placelessness deep in my soul and deep in my body. i cannot relate to indigenous/settler struggles over place. that is not my struggle; it is theirs. i am neither indigenous nor settler. i am placeless. no, i am not a settler. settlers are europeans; i am not european. settlers are colonizers; i am not. i know colonizers distinctly. they are french and spanish in morocco. they are primarily english and french in canada, but they are all white; i am not. i am innocent of colonizers’ guilt. i am colonized; my communities are colonized. i am not a settler, period! i am not born here, so i’m not indigenous either; that goes without saying. this indigenous/settler binary is a daunting rigid structure (wolfe, 2013). i teach trauma-informed social work practice but the key issues of trauma (sullivan & simonson, 2016) that cut across the indigenous/settler binary remain silent in my work (e.g., elkchirid, 2012). this indigenous/settler binary traps me into placelessness and undermines my social justice work. it blinds me to the profound interconnectedness of community struggles from across the divide (chatterjee, 2018a) so, am i being insincere in claiming innocence? in case you wondered, no, i’m not faking my innocence. i feel it profoundly. this innocence is my reality, my truth. i know i do not commit injustice intentionally. in fact, injustice is committed against me and my various communities. i fight injustice passionately wherever it rears its ugly head. my solid commitment to social justice is unshakable. but i also know that my claim to such innocence masks my complicity in the settler colonial project. this is also my truth, my reality. by positioning myself as innocent, i know i am disconnecting from my responsibility for indigenous justice and undermining my own struggle (davis et al., 2017). this is the everyday contradiction i wrestle with (chatterjee, 2018a). until i puncture my innocence, my silence will continue to perpetuate injustice even as i struggle to end it. after years of reflecting, i find that my position within the indigenous/settler binary is politically illusive and intellectually restrictive. i now realize that this binary tension between immigrant and indigenous communities is integral to settler colonial nationalism (chatterjee, 2018a, 2018b; murad, 2011; tuck & yang, 2012; wolfe, 2013). it is designed to keep me away from indigenous struggles and prevent solidarity. i need to racialized social work educators unsettling our settlerhood studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 291 acknowledge the depth of my embodied colonialism. for example, i often teach students how to work with “hard to reach” ethnic communities without questioning the concept of “hard to reach” and how it signifies colonial concepts of less civilized or non-developed countries or communities. my embodied colonization is much deeper and broader than i can imagine (rifkin, 2013). it is as much local as it is global, and it sets me apart from the indigenous peoples of my homeland too. *** i remember growing up in morocco. my homeland thinks of itself in many ways as african, amazigh/berber, arab, european, islamic, maghrebian, mediterranean, etc., but the rich diversity of its peoples is seen through a singular homogenizing colonial lens. its history is colonial even long after independence and morocco’s achievement of sovereignty. colonial legacy continues in subtle but utterly devastating ways (zakhir & o’brien, 2017). at school, my peers and i used to value moroccan scholars who studied in france, and we saw those who didn’t as having a lower quality education. so, even long after french colonizers left, we continued to value their language and culture and frown upon our indigenous languages and cultural values. i remember taking pride in speaking french and teasing those who weren’t fluent in it. to me, speaking french was an expression of social status; it was being civilized (fanon, 1967; zakhir & o’brien, 2017). i didn't even consider that neither of my parents spoke french! looking back now and reflecting on my indigeneity, i realize how being born in my homeland doesn’t automatically make me indigenous there. even in my homeland, colonial epistemic violence had already displaced me from my indigeneity and integrated me into the global colonial system (wolfe, 2016). my movement out of my homeland continues the displacement of my indigeneity and ushers in new colonial reintegration through the colonial and neoliberal structuring that places white supremacy as the dominant global system (wolfe, 2016). i am a displaced person even in my own birthplace, a colonizer even as indigenous. i realize how the human rights framework, which indigenous peoples of my homeland claimed to fight for national selfdetermination, is itself a mechanism of incorporating nations into global colonial hierarchy of economic, social, and political power. as tascón and ife (2008) argue, it is a mechanism of maintaining white supremacy and trapping everyone else in a hierarchy of subordinate positions. migrating to north america, i bring these subtle embodiments of colonization. the colonizer’s language follows me into my social work practice (elkchirid, 2012). in my cross-cultural work with clients from north african countries, we must speak french to overcome the differences in our local dialects. at the same time, enacting my embodied colonizer through speaking french aligns me with the bilingual canadian state and sets me abdelfettah elkchirid, anh phung ngo & martha kuwee kumsa studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 292 apart from the indigenous peoples of this land yet again. the ugliest face of the colonial game is that it centers itself among marginalized groups and becomes the glue holding us together, as it also simultaneously centers itself between migrants and indigenous peoples, binding us together through colonial relations. this separation of indigenous people from immigrants and immigrants from other precariously positioned immigrants is a testament to the sheer materiality of global processes of displacement and dispossession perpetuating the settler colonial project (chatterjee, 2018b; wolfe, 2016). *** moving forward, how do i engage my ethical responsibility towards the trc (2015) call to action as a social work educator? following others (chatterjee, 2018b; murad, 2011), i seek to move my teaching beyond simplistic notions that the barrier to reconciliation is ignorance and can be resolved through education. instead, i engage colonial structures of separation to decolonize my pedagogy without reducing decolonization to a metaphor (see tuck & yang, 2012). i draw from across the colonizing structures of national boundaries to link global and local colonial practices. i teach how social work itself is a colonial project designed to keep down racialized populations within the hierarchies of global coloniality and white supremacy (badwall, 2015). i resist how eurocentric models of social work (mental health, elder care, child welfare) are implemented in indigenous communities and nonwestern countries. indigenous knowledge transmission across generations was interrupted by colonialism and dismissed from curricula. i counter this systemic dismissal both by advocating for institutional decolonization and by including indigenous content from canada and from around the world to indigenize the courses i teach. as a further personal responsibility for my own decolonization, i follow my african role models like ngũgĩ wa thiong’o (1986) to decolonize my mind. i take the risk of publishing my works in african journals. for dissemination of knowledge and career advancement, the aim is to publish in western journals. while this gives more credibility and visibility to my work, i feel uneasy that it reinforces colonial structures and perpetuates the perceived notion of western academic superiority. i have also started to unsettle my colonization by publishing my works in arabic. this is a return to who i am, as suggested by indigenous scholars (absolon, 2011; alfred, 2018; wa thiong’o, 1986). it took me two decades to connect to my moroccan roots and write articles in my mother tongue. although i can easily write in english or french, writing in arabic is my attempt to inspire future moroccan generations to decolonize. i choose arabic because it is the only language i can truly call mine. however, i cannot escape the coloniality of it, as arabic came to my homeland through the arab conquest of morocco. i cannot escape that morocco’s arabization policy is a colonial nation-building project closely racialized social work educators unsettling our settlerhood studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 293 related to broader pan-arab nationalism (daoudi, 2018; loutfi, 2017). although i embrace my local arabic mother tongue to resist the global colonization of french, i cannot deny the local colonization of arabization that marginalizes other indigenous mother tongues, especially the mother tongue of indigenous berber/amazigh (cma, 2016). these are the silences i am starting to unravel at the depth of my disconnection from indigeneity in morocco, canada, and beyond. these are the complexities of decolonization i wrestle with every day. anh’s story: probing the complexity of the settler i was born in vietnam and came to canada at an early age. i don’t consider myself indigenous to vietnam nor a settler to canada. i am one of the inbetweens that fall right through the cracks of the indigenous/settler binary. unlike other racialized people, however, i don’t fall on jagged concrete. i fall on the illusive comfort of the discursive cushion of the model minority, the vietnamese canadians. i am a “vietnamese boat person,” one of many internationally displaced persons who beat the odds and survived, “resilient exiles” who thrived and made it in canada, “hard-working refugees” who turned adversity into opportunity – or so the discourse goes. this praise extracts me from my humanness, my flesh and bones, and reduces me to a discourse – a productive discourse that holds me up as an example of the good refugee. in the colonial order, there is a use for me, a subjugated belonging as a good refugee turned model minority. i could even be proof of the state’s goodness and morality in refugee rescue. critical scholars (bauder, 2008; dauvergne, 2005; hyndman, 2000; nyers, 2006) argue that the refugee protection enterprise serves both material and discursive functions required to support canada’s humanitarian discourse as the land of refuge. this humanitarianism is a core facet of the canadian imperial project at home and abroad. domestic and international actions in refugee rescue and support – such as the ideological construction of desirable refugees (krishnamurti, 2013; madokoro, 2016; mountz, 2011), canada’s proud role as a peacekeeping nation (razack, 2004; regan, 2010), and the prominence of liberal humanitarianism as a tenet of national identity (tascón & ife, 2008; wayland, 1997) – operate to secure the hegemony of both white settler society within canada and canada’s place as a global humanitarian leader. humanitarianism abroad remains central to national identity which veils the state’s continued oppression of indigenous peoples and precariously situated migrants at home (chatterjee, 2018a; hyndman, 2003; mountz, 2004; sharma, 2006; zine, 2009). as a vietnamese canadian, i continue to be known through my “refugeeness” and canada’s continued national identity building project is active in sustaining this flattened subjectivity (bauder, 2008; ngo, 2016a, abdelfettah elkchirid, anh phung ngo & martha kuwee kumsa studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 294 2016b). for canada to be a refugee haven, there must be authentic refugees to rescue and shelter. i see a troubling ugliness of global coloniality in which i am inescapably entangled. the term “vietnamese boat people” still circulates to serve canadian national and international identity. the concept was recently evoked and reiterated to bolster canada’s identity as a safe and peaceful haven for refugees in the syrian refugee crisis. in an incredible colonial fantasy of reversal (hage, 2016; ngo, 2016a), canada becomes the liberator and rescuer, when in practice it is the persecutor and oppressor. canada discursively emerges as the rescuer and the peacekeeper, thus erasing its intimate complicity in global warfare, specifically, in my case, the war in vietnam (cbc, 1975; price, 2011; ziedenberg, 1995). this misrecognition is an orchestrated technology of the state to further isolate and invalidate the belonging of indigenous peoples to this land. *** i grew up next to the largest first nation reserve in canada. i had classmates who are indigenous. they received similar poor treatment to me: the neglect, the derisive attitudes, and the racism from teachers and peers alike. how did i not see my struggles in solidarity with theirs? the answer is not as straightforward as the question, and i am careful in drawing similarities here. my move to draw connections between my experiences of oppression and my sense of indigenous peoples’ oppression is a move to innocence. i want to think we are more similar than different. but this need for sameness is dangerous. when i seek commonality through shared hardships, i make a move to innocence (razack, 2004; tuck & yang, 2012). i decontextualize indigenous hardships from the web of colonial power relations that position me favorably in relation to them, thus concealing our complex positioning in relation to the state. contrary to the oppression of my indigenous classmates, in a convoluted way, my oppression seems to have a way out, a redemption. it instils the false hope that i could elude colonial oppression by enacting the model minority (pon, 2000) and playing the grateful refugee (nguyen, 2013, 2019). such operations of misrecognition by the state are purposeful technologies of colonial division and dispossession. indeed, the system is set up to set us apart (american university of beirut, 2013; chatterjee, 2018a, 2018b; coleman, 2016; coulthard, 2007; sfu, 2017). the closer i came into belonging to the state as the good refugee, the further my indigenous classmates were alienated from it. by flaunting the good, integrated, multicultural subject, i was allowing myself to be co-opted and sucked into the settler colonial system of dispossession whereas many indigenous communities had to hide their origins and cultural practices, or be particularly targeted like my classmates if they dared to identify as indigenous. indeed, the system is also arranged to set immigrants apart from other immigrants and refugees as well (chatterjee, 2018a; snelgrove et al., 2014). racialized social work educators unsettling our settlerhood studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 295 as if to resist this separation, i feel the burning desire to draw similarities from across hardships here too. if my desire for sameness with indigenous peoples feeds my complicity in colonial dispossession, my desire for sameness with all those i see as settlers is no less harmful. there are many who reject the settler label, a label particularly traumatic for the descendants of africans who were brought to turtle island in shackles (king, 2014; morgan, 2019; thomas, 2019). collapsing differences and lumping together all non-indigenous communities as settlers is as dangerous as separating them. indeed, the complexities within the settler category also complexify decolonization and the building of solidarity among the various struggles (tuck, & yang, 2012). however contradictory and messy, the need for solidarity among colonized communities locally and globally cannot be emphasized enough (sfu, 2017; simpson et al., 2018; snelgrove et al., 2014). and so, i find myself complicit in this cacophony of local and global colonial material and discursive practices. my struggles have a discursive narrative globally, a colonial progress narrative that people from the “third world” should expect hardships, but with western education and hard work, they will eventually do well in canada (bauder, 2008). this is also the integration narrative of immigration and multiculturalism: that hardship is expected in being new to the host country, but it will get better. my father worked long hours of hard physical labor at local warehouses producing toxic housing materials, and weekend jobs at nearby farms extracting ginseng from the land for international export, just to earn several dollars an hour. he engaged in activities that deplete and pollute the soil, air, and waters traditionally protected and cared for by indigenous peoples of this land. i remember how my father fished in the local, now polluted river to feed us. by the time i was ten, i knew how to gut, descale, and cook fish. these are not knowledges i shared growing up; my yearning to belong among my friends did not allow it. this has been my silence, the ugly underbelly of “hard-working resilient refugees” who survive through their inescapable entanglement in canada’s colonial appropriation of indigenous land and its devastation of the environment. i feel like a walking contradiction. while the strong intergenerational mark of the grateful rescued refugee feels deeply inscribed in my body and subjectivity, the various struggles within me to shed this and other colonized subjectivities are equally strong. my challenge is to steer these wrestling colonial narratives toward various struggles for justice. *** in my social work teaching, i respond to the trc call to action by working to multiply my points of reference, and seeking out the voices of marginalized communities to disrupt and contest the discursive power of state policies and abdelfettah elkchirid, anh phung ngo & martha kuwee kumsa studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 296 practices (chen, 2010; ngo, 2016a, 2016b). i remind students that canada’s immigration policy and system, its lauded multiculturalism and humanitarianism, are part and parcel of an imperial project of colonization and dominance. i show students that the model minority discourse is part of the broader policy of multiculturalism designed to create a maligned relation among peoples and communities. however, pointing out external colonial structures in my pedagogy and critique is one thing; unveiling my own internalized colonial structures is more difficult. i demonstrate that even in my zest to critique canadian multiculturalism for subgrouping indigenous communities as just another cultural group, i participate in maintaining colonial hierarchy by paying singular attention to the colonizer rather than multiplying my points of reference (chen, 2010). now, where do i go with this troubling awareness? moving forward, in response to the trc (2015) call to action, i challenge myself to do the work of decolonizing myself and my work. when i catch myself critiquing the racialization of minority communities as if racialization does not affect indigenous peoples, i stop right there and take responsibility for my exclusion. i make sure that we collectively learn how to build inclusion and solidarity without collapsing differences. teaching by example, i invite learners to think through contemporary policies and practices, and how crucial the consideration of indigenous treaty rights and relations is to our reflective process (burke, 2004; tuck & yang, 2012; walia, 2012). i start decolonizing myself by returning to who i am, as indigenous scholars suggest (absolon, 2011; alfred, 2018; wa thiong’o, 1986). when i suppress my worldviews and my teachings from my ancestors, i allow and even expect the suppression of indigenous worldviews and teachings. when i say, “i am ok with being treated this way, it’s not as bad as how i was treated before somewhere else; it could be worse,” i am complicit. by standing up and saying, “i am not ok with being treated this way and i am not ok with indigenous peoples being treated this way,” i’m standing up for justice. it is from this point that we, refugees, subjugated and subjugating guests, colonizers and colonized, can start our work. martha kuwee’s story: probing the complexity of indigeneity i came to canada as a refugee, fleeing from political violence in my homeland, ethiopia. like my colleagues, i critically engage the colonial fantasy of reversal (hage, 2016) through which canada becomes the rescuer of refugees. like many, i wrestle with being named a settler (king, 2014; morgan, 2019; thomas, 2019). i too fall through the cracks of the indigenous/settler binary. i didn’t even choose to settle here. i certainly didn’t come looking for the land of milk and honey; i was violently thrown out of one. how can i be a settler when i am myself brutalized by ethiopia’s violent settler colonial displacement? racialized social work educators unsettling our settlerhood studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 297 arriving in canada in the aftermath of the oka crisis,1 i saw another face of the colonial violence that threw me out of my homeland. i strongly identified with the struggle of indigenous peoples here. their struggle echoed my own oromo people’s anticolonial struggle for self-determination, a struggle for national liberation in which i was deeply enmeshed. with oka, i saw my struggle against colonial violence starting all over again – in a different face on a different land. i was already at war with canada’s white settler colonial state. i see the displacement and dispossession of indigenous peoples around the world as a racializing global capitalist colonial project of land grabbing and resource extraction, now continuing through neoliberal restructuring of the world (dominelli, 2010; razack, 2004; wolfe, 2006). i’m not a settler! i asserted. i am indigenous, just not indigenous to this land. and i joined the fray on the indigenous side, to steer clear from the settler pole of the binary as my “race to innocence” took the whole of me (tuck & yang, 2012). after all, reclaiming my indigeneity is something i paid a hefty price for. my indigeneity was not simply a question of birth; it was and still is an active political process of reconstructing indigenous subjecthood. but my relationship with indigenous peoples of canada remains ambivalent at best if i continue to claim innocent indigeneity. to many of my indigenous friends, i am a settler on the land stolen from them by the colonial state. there is another place i belong to and call my homeland; they have only this one. that’s the bottom line. i’m a settler alas! but a different kind of settler from, say, the wealthy, able-bodied, heterosexual white male colonialist settler. what remains invisible is that this troubling sense of belonging to bounded homelands and sovereign nation-states is a highly emotionally charged and deeply embodied modernist discursive practice of global coloniality (chatterjee, 2018b; mignolo, 2011; wolfe, 2016). much like other boundaries of difference making, national boundaries present as natural and get deeply embodied. indeed, we enact and resist them everyday. i remember having a strong visceral reaction to how migrants were constructed as wanting inclusion into canada as opposed to indigenous peoples’ wanting out (monture-angus, 1995). i want out too, i wanted to scream, out not only of canada but out of the entire global family of nation-states! indigenous sovereignty in canada and elsewhere is couched in this framework of selfdetermination within the global family of nation-states, thus reproducing instead of subverting hierarchies of racialized global capitalism and colonialism. this ambivalence is why i simultaneously resist and embrace the 1 the oka crisis was a showdown between indigenous people, the provincial police, and the canadian army in the small town of oka, quebec, in the summer of 1990. it was a crisis over a land dispute that drew worldwide attention to indigenous land rights. for details, see cbc digital archives at https://www.cbc.ca/archives/topic/the-oka-crisis. abdelfettah elkchirid, anh phung ngo & martha kuwee kumsa studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 298 notion of self-determination in my engagement with indigenous peoples’ struggles here and elsewhere. *** this ambivalence has its roots in my entanglement with global coloniality. i was only 17 and in my first year of university when i found fanon’s (1963, 1967) works. i was just 19 when i translated the communist manifesto into my indigenous oromo language. to the utter chagrin of my devout protestant parents, i embraced the social gospel and turned away from their christian gospel because i found it stigmatizes indigenous peoples as heathen/pagan and their spiritual ceremonies as devil worship. although protestant christianity offered oromos some relief from the land grabbing dispossession of the ethiopian settler-colonial state, it also had a devastating effect on their indigenous religion and their entire way of life economically and politically, socially and psychologically, materially and spiritually. forging its own consolidation, the ethiopian settler-colonial state pursued assimilationist policies assaulting indigenous history, culture, and language. the civilizing mission of global coloniality is fiercely at work here. although unique in its own context, the ethiopian colonizing process of displacement and dispossession of indigenous peoples echoes the political economy of land grabbing and indigenous elimination in other settler colonial nation-states. although there were no white settlers, a racial hierarchy of colonial domination echoes other nation-states like rwanda (wolfe, 2006) where one ethnic group is instated at the apex of the colonial state for its religious and historical ties to the west (sorenson, 1993). indeed, global capitalism and colonialism are deeply implicated in the invention and consolidation of ethiopia as a dependent colonial state (holcomb & ibssa, 1990). ethiopia is an invention of european colonialism, an empire of struggles and contestations, and a prison house of many indigenous nations. as a fired-up young revolutionary, i embraced marxism passionately. when marxist globality was put to praxis in my locality, however, indigeneity was viewed as backward and uncivilized. alas! my coveted worldview came with its own tag of the civilizing mission. fanon’s passionate plea grabbed me as he urged anti-colonial strugglers not to seek salvation from the west (capitalism) or the east (socialism/communism), but to look deep into our own indigeneity (absolon, 2011; coulthard, 2007; fanon, 1963, 1967; sfu, 2017). here i see the complexity of fanon’s piercing insights. no, decolonization is not a metaphor; i agree with tuck and yang (2012). decolonization must cut deep into the social, cultural, economic, political, psychological, emotional, material and spiritual realms. it must simultaneously be personal and political, local and global. the parallel between indigenous peoples’ struggles for self-determination in canada and ethiopia and the response of the settler-colonial states is overwhelming. for every step forward there have been several steps back, racialized social work educators unsettling our settlerhood studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 299 raising the question whether recognition and reconciliation are at all possible within the settler-colonial nation-state. as coulthard (2007; sfu, 2017) ardently argues, recognition doled out by the canadian state cannot lead to indigenous self-determination because true recognition requires reciprocity but there is no reciprocity when the playing field is steeply inclined. in ethiopia, despite going through rounds of revolutions and gaining some grounds in indigenous self-determination, currently indigenous folks are painfully experiencing the skewed power of the settler-colonial state. state machination to perpetually defer self-determination is pushing more and more indigenous movements toward radical alternatives. moderate spaces are increasingly shrinking, although some continue the fight from within the state (absolon, 2011; blackstock, 2017; trc, 2005). i see both perils and promises in recognition in the context of global hierarchies of nation-states and global indigenous resistance. racialized hierarchies of colonial systems perpetuate themselves by using both brute force and the subtle power of internalized racism and colonialism (bakan & dua, 2014; coulthard, 2007; fanon, 1963, 1967; sfu, 2017; wolfe, 2006, 2016). to me, strategies that attend to both objective structural and subjective psychological layers of colonialism promise to inch towards the recognition of indigenous self-determination. like my colleague anh, i particularly appreciate fanon’s advice to take our eyes off colonial powers and focus on nurturing anti-colonial solidarity among indigenous struggles (chen, 2010; fanon, 1963). the perils are many. one is the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t catch-22 like possibility of self-determination. struggles within the state must reckon with skewed power of the colonial nation-state, and struggles outside the state must reckon with skewed power of the global family of nationstates. can we imagine a different formation of indigenous nationhood and sovereignty? internalized colonialism is another peril where indigenous people turn colonial violence inward in lateral violence at the expense of indigenous solidarity. as a disillusioned revolutionary, i have learned to look for salvation within indigenous grassroots. as a disillusioned indigenous activist also, i have learned to question indigenous purity and homogeneity even at the grassroots. in the end, i take comfort that recognition is not an event, but a process constantly negotiated in multiple ways. *** picking up my ethical responsibility in response to the trc (2015) call to action in my social work teaching, i seek to engage students at all levels and complexities of colonization, from the deeply personal and emotional to the broadly political and global. i am astonished by how little we know about the connection between global and local colonialities, by how effective colonization has been in masking and naturalizing its devastating dividing abdelfettah elkchirid, anh phung ngo & martha kuwee kumsa studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 300 practices as benevolence. cutting through centuries of discursive materiality, sedimented in history and in each of our bodies, requires the hardest work of excavation, often accompanied by high emotionality, anger, shame, guilt, and distancing from the learning. no, decolonization is not a metaphor. it is complex, excruciatingly painful, deeply transformative and arduous work of excavating, unlearning, and relearning that is ongoing. i am also astonished by how little we know about social work’s own history of “helping” indigenous nations, communities, families, and individuals. social work is regarded as a highly esteemed helping profession and students seek training on how to help effectively and improve the lives of vulnerable groups and individuals. puncturing the innocence of such highly regarded notion of helping and connecting it to its colonialist function is a huge challenge. how social work helping scooped indigenous children from their families and cultures and herded them into residential schools is out of reach to many even when it is so obvious. many do not connect the dots between the residential schools and the over representation of indigenous people in child protection and prisons. how colonization here and around the world happened behind the smokescreen of ‘helping’ to civilize the savage for their own good is another hidden colonial silence we attempt to narrate in our classrooms. the embodied experiences we each bring to our classrooms are invaluable learning resources, and we begin with our bodies in the classroom to make visible the stories, narratives, histories and historicities we embody. closing remarks in an act of self-decolonization, each of us has unsettled our settler subjectivities in very personal ways that we hope social work students will find meaningful and beneficial. beyond our divergent stories of homeland, trajectories to canada, approaches to analysis, and strategies of responding to the trc’s call to action, here we conclude by weaving together three interrelated themes of our shared critique. we offer brief critical remarks on the human rights framework, the nation-state framework, and the coloniality of social work. the human rights framework is important for us to critically engage primarily because the trc’s call to action is framed by human rights, grounded in the united nations (2007) declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, and affirmed by the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco, 2018) policy on engaging indigenous peoples. we focus on the human rights framework also because it is the only international legal instrument, and because our own profession of social work is deeply rooted in it (united nations, 1994). however, as disillusioned scholars coming from communities that embraced human rights and waged anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles for self-determination racialized social work educators unsettling our settlerhood studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 301 and sovereignty, we seek briefly to critically engage its glaring limitations. the notion of human rights is the product of the european enlightenment project where the reference point for what is human is the white man. it is designed to create and maintain global coloniality and white supremacy (tascón & ife, 2008). human rights served as a smokescreen behind which colonial violence and indigenous genocide happened around the world. the human rights framework is but an instrument of the broader nationstate framework of capitalist liberal modernist organization of the global space. it creates racialized hierarchical power relations of colonial capitalist system locally, nationally and internationally. as disillusioned scholars coming from backgrounds rooted in the anti-colonial struggles of our various communities, we are profoundly skeptical of eurocentric frameworks. therefore, we align ourselves with aspects of decolonial scholarship (e.g., fanon, 1963; mignolo, 2011) to promote epistemic disobedience and shift the geopolitics of knowing. from this angle, we see the nation-state framework as a difference making project designed to curb people’s mobility, pigeonhole populations within bounded nation-states, and naturalize these structures. it carries out the heinous acts of simultaneous dispossession in our homelands and our precarious positioning in our adopted lands (chatterjee, 2018a; ngo, 2016a). indeed, it creates and regulates our deepest desires for homeland and belonging. it is within this critique that we position the questions of land rights and indigenous sovereignty as issues of justice, although we see the implications as subverting itself and reinforcing capitalist colonial nationstate structure. within canada, the nation-state evolves from white settlement to settled whiteness where the racialization of both indigenous and migrant settlers intensifies at the same time as these groups are pitted against each other. we need to interrogate canada’s multiculturalism to understand the ways in which we can disrupt colonial relations, divisions, and separations. we need to make visible canada’s ongoing violence against indigenous peoples and racialized persons as a colonial continuity (heron, 2007; razack, 2004; regan, 2010) which now folds groups, such as vietnamese-canadians, into its project of national and global hegemony. when the hegemonic processes that veil our understanding of ourselves in entanglement with canada and with one another are interrogated, there may be space made for mutual understanding, empathy, and ultimately mobilization for change. it is within this space of mobilizing for change that social work can redeem itself from being a regulatory arm of the settler colonial nation-state to opening paths into relational solidarity among racialized communities. chen (2010) urges us (racialized, marginalized people) to multiply our points of references, our objects of desire. our views are obscured when we do not see one another in our struggles – when our frames of reference and with it, our objects of desire, are only directed back at the colonizer. he argues we have consistently looked to the center of power – the colonizer – for recognition abdelfettah elkchirid, anh phung ngo & martha kuwee kumsa studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 287-305, 2020 302 and affirmation. instead, we should be multiplying our gaze. rather than looking up, we must be looking over and across at one another, for strength and affirmation. this is a decolonial act social work can facilitate. by multiplying our gaze, we also follow others (amadahy & lawrence, 2009; kennedy-kish & carniol, 2017; simpson et al., 2018; walia, 2012, 2015; wane et al., 2013; wilson et al., 2015) in seeking decolonial collaborations between our various racialized communities and the indigenous communities of this land. references absolon, k. 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(2009). unsettling the nation: gender, race and muslim cultural politics in canada. studies in ethnicity and nationalism, 9(1), 146-157. franz -final correspondence address: baden gaeke franz, women & gender studies, university of winnipeg, winnipeg, mb, r3b 2e9; email: bgaekefranz@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 rejection or celebration? autistic representation in sitcom television baden gaeke-franz university of winnipeg, canada abstract in recent years, autistic-coded characters have become a common staple in sitcoms. this paper will examine depictions of autistic-coded characters in two such sitcoms: cbs’s the big bang theory (big bang), and nbc’s community. sheldon on big bang is stereotyped and mistreated by his friends, while abed on community challenges stereotypes and is beloved. the different treatment of autistic characters stems from the responses of the shows’ writers to the fear of accidentally misrepresenting autism, with the crew of big bang choosing to avoid the label of autism, while community embraced it and did research to better represent autistic people. this difference has a huge impact on audiences watching the shows. seeing sheldon’s friends belittling him because of his autistic-coded traits triggers shame in autistic viewers, while also validating ableist thought patterns in neurotypical viewers. in community, however, seeing abed’s confidence in his autistic embodiment serves to boost the confidence of autistic viewers, while his friends’ and classmates’ love and support of him serves as a model for neurotypical viewers of how to best interact with autistic people in the real world. the case of these two shows illustrates two important facts about autistic representation in media: failing to diagnose a character does not exempt a writer from ableist representations, and to avoid this ableism it is important to listen to audience feedback and do research to properly understand the characters from the perspective of the communities they stand for. keywords autistic characters; ableism; autistic stereotypes; autistic representation; representation politics rejection or celebration? autistic representation in sitcom television television in the past few decades has featured an increasing number of autistic and autistic-coded characters. in comedies they are the socially awkward nerds whose lack of social awareness leads to hilarious misunderstandings. in dramas they are either the scientist prodigy or the autistic representation in sitcom television studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 309 pitiable child-like person who serves to inspire the neurotypical characters around them. very few stories depict autistic characters as realistic people, and even fewer are guided by the input of real autistic people rather than just testimony of parents or doctors. this essay will focus on two shows: cbs’s the big bang theory (lorre & prady, 2007-2019), and nbc’s community (harmon, 2009-2014). in many ways, these two shows are very similar. both are half-hour sitcoms featuring an ensemble cast, and both largely take place at american colleges. the big bang theory premiered in 2007, and community in 2009, putting them in the same time period. and, importantly to this piece, both feature an autisticcoded character. despite these similarities, the shows deal with their autisticcoded characters very differently, with big bang ridiculing him, while community shows him love and respect. by considering both the text of the shows and comments made by writers and producers, this essay will examine the positive and negative portrayals of autism on these two shows and the impacts they have on both autistic and neurotypical viewers. the shows the big bang theory is about four physicist friends, two of whom are roommates, and their somewhat “ditsy” neighbour across the hall. the main cast of big bang represent a wide range of religious backgrounds, though the four physicists are all male and all but one is white. what diversity exists within the main cast is rarely explored beyond the occasional one-line joke, and seldom has any influence on the plot of an episode. the autistic-coded character in the big bang theory is sheldon cooper, played by jim parsons. sheldon is a white man from a conservative christian family, though sheldon himself is atheist. throughout the show, sheldon is depicted as a brilliant physicist but socially inept. he uses charts and contracts to navigate social situations, indicates sarcasm with the word “bazinga,” follows a strict routine, refuses to let anybody sit in his spot on the couch, and shows special interest in science and science fiction. while sheldon has never been confirmed as autistic on the show, many viewers see him as autistic, to the point where slate.com reported that sheldon is “poised to become a pop-culture emblem of the aspie” (collins, 2009).1 as will be demonstrated later, this autistic coding without confirming sheldon as autistic has a strong negative impact on the lives of real autistic people. community follows a group of seven community college students who form a study group and quickly grow into a found family. the characters represent a wide range of ages, races, genders and religions. unlike big bang, 1 the term “aspie,” short for “asperger syndrome,” refers to a person on the “high-functioning end” of the autism spectrum. baden gaeke franz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 310 the diversity of the main cast of community is fundamental to the show, and many episodes’ plots revolve around navigating those differences and learning to accept one another, an attitude which extends to accepting neurodivergence. in community, the autistic character is abed nadir, played by danny pudi. abed is an arab-polish muslim man – though his actor is polish-indian – who often has difficulty in social situations, finding it hard to read emotion or know how to react to things. he has a special interest in film and television, and over the course of the series he becomes a filmmaker himself. abed displays face blindness, sensory issues, shutdowns, and has a hard time with change, all common autistic traits. though abed’s autism is not discussed in depth in the show, it is addressed both in the show itself and by the show’s creators. the word “asperger’s” is used to describe abed in the first episode, showing an early intention to make it part of his character (harmon et al., 2009), and in later seasons abed refers to himself as “on the spectrum” (basilone & mebane, 2011) and compares himself to the trope of the “mildly autistic super-detective” (sommers & shapeero, 2014). by confirming abed as autistic and representing a wide range of autistic traits, community has a positive influence on the lives of autistic people. good and bad depictions while both sheldon and abed fill the “nerdy outsider” niche in their respective stories, the narrative roles they play are very different. in general, sheldon replicates stereotypes of autistic people, while abed challenges them. these differences begin with the demographic categories into which the characters fall. like most autistic-coded characters in media, sheldon is a white atheist man, a scientific prodigy, with a strong interest in comic books and trains. abed, by contrast, is a biracial muslim man, and his interests and talents lie primarily in the creative field of filmmaking rather than scientific fact. while abed, like sheldon, shows interest in comic book characters, especially batman, he explores these interests through costumes and roleplay, as opposed to sheldon’s engagement mostly with the media itself. the interests expressed by abed, as well as the demographic categories he falls into, challenge the stereotype of autistic people as lacking imagination as well as them only being white men. another common stereotype often found in media about autistic people is the trope of the “idiot savant.” this trope, popularized by the 1988 film rain man, refers to an autistic or autistic-coded character who is socially inept but displays superhuman abilities in a specific subject, often science or math. this trope is both problematic and inaccurate: only one in 10 autistic people demonstrate any savant skills, and among those even fewer have traits to the extent often depicted in media (gambacurta, 2020). in big bang, this trope autistic representation in sitcom television studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 311 goes unchallenged. sheldon’s talents in math and science go far beyond the average, and this is largely shown to be his main redeeming quality and the reason that both the university and his friends tolerate him. by playing into this trope, big bang reinforces commonly held stereotypes about autistic people. unlike sheldon, although abed has a strong memory for the things he cares about, these talents do not approach the superhuman levels common in savant characters. furthermore, not only does community avoid playing into this trope, it actively challenges it. in the episode “basic intergluteal numismatics” (sommers & shapeero, 2014), the dean asks for abed’s help solving a crime because he’s “special” and should therefore be able to “just stand at the scene of the crime and see what happened.” abed responds to this by mocking him for “using a social disorder as a procedural device” before giving him an unimpressed look and leaving the room. this short scene explicitly refuses to engage with the savant trope and also calls out every other show that uses it as a plot device. one trait that sheldon and abed share is a difficulty in social situations. both characters at times do or say things that other characters find inappropriate or insensitive without realizing they are doing so. however, the nature of these transgressions, as well as the ways they are handled narratively, are very different. sheldon’s social missteps are often acts of outright bigotry played off for a laugh. for example, in “the egg salad equivalency” (molaro, prady, et al., 2013), an hr administrator at the university where he works has a meeting with him to discuss a complaint of sexual harassment. sheldon not only stands by the sexist comments that got him called for a meeting in the first place, he doubles down, calling the hr administrator and all other women “slaves to their desires,” especially at certain times of their menstrual cycle. while the administrator is shown looking offended by these comments, they are not explicitly acknowledged as inappropriate and there are no lasting consequences for his actions. having the autistic-coded character make these comments has two major implications: first, the very real impacts of sexism are downplayed as a funny social misstep from a quirky character, thus naturalizing a gender hierarchy; and second, autistic traits are associated with inappropriate and violent behaviour, reinforcing the idea of autistic people as inherently unpleasant. abed also has moments of social ineptitude where he inadvertently offends people, but unlike sheldon these missteps are very rarely bigoted or cruel. in the rare cases where abed does something truly offensive or hurtful, the consequences of his actions are shown in the narrative and he shows remorse and makes amends with the people he harmed. for example, in the episode “aerodynamics of gender” (countee, 2010), abed’s friends encourage him to be rude to people whom they perceive as “bad girls.” his insulting comments escalate to the point where nobody wants to be around him, and he is left alone and friendless. upon realizing the consequences of his actions, abed allows himself to be publicly humiliated by the people he hurt so that baden gaeke franz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 312 the rest of the school can understand that he doesn’t think of himself as better than them, and he apologizes to his friends. by showing consequences for abed’s offensive actions, and his remorse upon realizing he made a mistake, the writers of community illustrate that bigotry is not acceptable, and that autistic people are not inherently bigoted or cruel and are capable of remorse and change. another major difference between the two shows’ attitudes toward the autistic neurotype is illustrated by a phrase commonly used on big bang: “i’m not crazy, my mother had me tested.” sheldon says this often enough to have become a catchphrase, depicted on merchandise such as shirts and mugs (e.g., tv doodles, n.d.). there are many implications to this phrase. the first is an association of sheldon’s autistic-coded traits with the negatively charged term “crazy” rather than a value-neutral difference in neurology as advocated by many autistic people. second, the phrase implies that “craziness” and neurodivergence are inherently bad things that are offensive to imply about somebody. third, the statement denies that sheldon is in any way neurologically different from the other characters, the impacts of which will be explored later in this essay. finally, the implication that sheldon can’t be “crazy” because a doctor said he wasn’t embodies a medical model of disability, in which mental wellness or unwellness is defined by doctors rather than by the impacts of an individual’s neurology on their life. community also deals with the idea of abed being “crazy,” but does so in a very different way. in a reversal of big bang’s implication that sheldon may be crazy, the community episode “horror fiction in seven spooky steps” (harmon & shapeero, 2011) features the study group taking psychological tests, which reveal that most of them are “deeply disturbed” and abed is the only sane one among them. this does two important things: first, it shows that abed’s autism is not something that inherently makes him dangerous or disturbed. far from the trope of neurologically disabled people being unfeeling and dangerous, abed is explicitly the least dangerous and most well-adjusted one of the group. second, the fact that every other member of the study group tested positive for “an extreme personality disorder” effectively destigmatizes those issues and shows that they are a normal part of human diversity. another episode in which community deals with the idea of mental health issues or “craziness” is “introduction to film” (hobert et al., 2009), in which abed makes an autobiographical film about his relationship with his parents. the film features scenes of his parents fighting about abed being “not normal,” images of brain scans over audio of a crying baby, and an internalized belief that his differences were the reason for his parents’ divorce. the implication of the film is that his parents misunderstood him and that these misunderstandings led to stress for both them and him. the distress and history of trauma abed expresses in this film are not inherent to his disability. he is not wishing he weren’t autistic, but rather that his parents had been more accepting of him as he was. this is in line with the social autistic representation in sitcom television studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 313 model of disability, under which disability is conceived as not inherent to divergent bodies but rather constructed by an inaccessible or unaccepting society (shakespeare, 2013). upon seeing the film, abed’s father cries and expresses regret about not understanding his son, and agrees to pay for a filmmaking class so abed can learn to express himself. while sheldon’s flippant reminders that he is “not crazy, my mother had me tested” show a reliance on the medical system to define disability, abed’s film illustrates the traumas that such systems can cause and the transformative power of accommodating rather than repressing autistic traits. perhaps the biggest difference between the way the two characters are written, however, comes not from any inherent quality of the characters themselves, but how other characters interact with them. sheldon, like many other autistic characters, is portrayed as annoying. his friends complain about being around him, call him weird, and deliberately do things to bother him for their own amusement. while he does have a romantic relationship in the later seasons of the show, that relationship is often mocked, with other characters implying it is not romantic or wondering why his female partner is attracted to him. abed, by contrast, is beloved by his friends and by everybody else in the school. he is very popular, is shown having a mutually fulfilling romantic relationship, is very rarely bullied, and on the rare occasions where he is being treated poorly his friends defend him against anyone who tries to make him feel inferior. this is unfortunately very unusual for an autistic or autisticcoded character. as autistic writer and activist julia bascom puts it: “abed said ‘i just like liking things,’ and it wasn’t just not-punished, it wasn’t just okay – either of which would have been remarkable and unbelievable – no. it was good” (2012; emphasis in original). abed is not only celebrated as an autistic character, but his autistic traits such as his special interests and love of loving things are explicitly included in that celebration. this is unheard of in most mainstream depictions of autism, where, as with sheldon, these traits are often mocked. learning to change: a case study this difference in attitude is apparent in a trope to which both big bang and community dedicate an episode: the autistic person’s friends attempt to help them learn to become more “normal” to improve their life. in big bang, this episode is “the closure alternative” (molaro, reynolds, et al., 2013). in it, sheldon’s friends attempt to help him get over his discomfort with not having closure by asking his neuroscientist girlfriend amy to do exposure therapy with him. throughout the episode she is shown erasing tic tac toe games before the last move, playing all but the last line of a song, and other such incomplete things, all while an increasingly stressed sheldon tries hard not to react. the episode ends with sheldon, very tense with repressed stress, baden gaeke franz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 314 bidding goodbye to amy, then quickly running around the apartment completing everything she wouldn’t let him finish. her attempts to help him did not improve his quality of life. he still has just as much difficulty with closure as he did at the start of the episode. all that their exercise accomplished was to make sheldon more stressed than he already was. and since he hid that stress from her, she has no way of knowing that this is what happened, and the narrative leaves her unpunished for hurting him and implies that what she did was right and that it was sheldon’s fault that he didn’t improve. in community, a similar plotline is treated very differently. in the episode “physical education” (miller & russo, 2010), abed’s friends find out that another student may have a crush on abed and conspire to help him win her heart by learning to flirt in a socially acceptable way. much like in big bang, by the end of the episode abed has not changed in any significant way, but unlike sheldon, the process of being coached caused him no distress. throughout the episode, abed is shown apparently having fun playing at being different from how he usually is. when it becomes clear that nothing his friends have done has changed him, abed explains that he didn’t feel the need to change to get a girlfriend but he let his friends teach him because he wanted them to feel like they could help him. he went along with the plans to change himself not because he felt he needed to change to be loved, but because he made a conscious choice to follow his friends’ lead to make them feel better about themselves. when asked if the process hurt his self-esteem, he says “i’ve got self-esteem falling out of my butt. that’s why i was willing to change for you guys. because when you really know who you are and what you like about yourself, changing for other people isn’t such a big deal” (miller & russo, 2010). unlike sheldon, abed is shown to have full agency over who he is and what aspects of himself he does and does not change. his personality, including his autistic traits, are shown to be desirable and not something that needs to change for him to be happy or to live a full life. ultimately, abed doesn’t succeed in attracting the woman he was flirting with, but he takes it in stride saying he doesn’t mind and that plenty of women find him attractive because “let’s face it, i’m pretty adorable” (miller & russo, 2010). this is then shown to be true as the last scenes of the episode depict an attractive woman approaching abed to introduce herself, choosing him over jeff, the conventionally handsome leading man. while both of these episodes have similar themes of the friends of an autistic-coded character teaching them to hide their neurodivergent traits, the narrative treats the themes very differently. in the big bang theory, the story is framed to be sympathetic to sheldon’s friends for having to put up with him. it implies that they were justified in trying to force him to change, even when that change causes him distress, and that sheldon’s not changing is a failure on his part. in community, however, the sympathetic character in the episode is decidedly abed. far from needing to change to earn respect, abed autistic representation in sitcom television studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 315 is loved by his friends and everybody around him. in fact, his self-confidence is depicted as inspiring to his neurotypical friends, who learn from him to be less self-conscious. not only does the autistic person not need to learn to be neurotypical to have a good life, a neurotypical character is able to improve their own life by learning lessons from an autistic character. these episodes illustrate a fundamental difference in how the two shows understand autism and disability. big bang advocates a deficit model of disability in which autistic people can earn respect by learning the proper things to do and say to fit in with mainstream society and eliminate the differences between themselves and others. meanwhile, community depicts disability as not inherently negative, saying disabled people need acceptance and accommodation rather than to be changed or cured, and that abed’s autistic traits can in fact have a positive impact on his life. while he may be different from some of the other characters, this fact alone does not make abed any lesser, and he has a lot to offer in his relationship with his friends. writing autism the differences between these depictions of autism begin in the writers’ room. despite autistic and neurotypical viewers of the show alike agreeing that sheldon cooper clearly displays autistic traits, the writers on the big bang theory have repeatedly denied that was ever their intention. when big bang co-creator bill prady was asked if sheldon was meant to be autistic, he said that the writing team members “don't think his mom ever took him in for a diagnosis” (rice, 2008). this statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how autism exists in the mind. saying that sheldon is not autistic because he never received a diagnosis shows a conception of autism as a thing that exists only when doctors say it does, rather than a way of being that people can embody with or without a formal diagnosis. autistic people are autistic even before a doctor officially gives them the label. this statement gives the power to determine who qualifies as autistic and what the label “autism” signifies to doctors, taking agency away from the autistic community to define itself. there is a clear disconnect between the writers of the big bang theory and the autistic community, who are largely in favour of self-diagnosis, especially since formal diagnosis can be expensive, time-consuming, and often inaccessible, especially to working class people, women, people of colour, and those diagnosed later in life (autistictic, 2020). the fact that the big bang writers equate sheldon’s neurotype with whether his parents took him to a doctor as a child indicates that it is unlikely the writers have ever deliberately researched autism or sought out autistic voices to influence the direction they take in their writing. despite the complaints about sheldon’s characterization from the autistic community, the cast and crew of big bang have repeatedly defended their decision not to confirm sheldon’s status as autistic. when asked about it, baden gaeke franz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 316 mayim bialik, who plays sheldon’s girlfriend amy on the show, said “what should not be lost on people is we don’t pathologise our characters. we don’t talk about medicating them or even really changing them” (crippledscholar, 2015). however, as has been shown above, this assessment of the show is incorrect. sheldon is repeatedly expected to change by the people around him. not providing a character with a specific diagnosis is not the same as not othering or pathologizing them. as the autistic blogger and phd candidate known as crippledscholar (2015) explains, the show really does pathologize sheldon, it just doesn’t give him the explanation or defense of a label. in so doing tacitly making the judgement and the laughter at his expense acceptable because if he were acknowledged as autistic, this treatment would be considered cruel. by not naming sheldon as autistic, the writers of the show normalize the idea that sheldon’s autistic traits are strange, inexplicable, and acceptable to mock. the writers’ seeming choice not to research autism leaves a gap between sheldon’s character and the true autistic experience. if sheldon is only generically eccentric rather than autistic, the writers have no reason to work to better understand and represent the lives of real autistic people. instead, sheldon is based on an archetype of the nerdy autistic-coded scientist, an archetype that historically has been filled with socially awkward/anti-social/socially maladapted, eccentric geniuses free of any serious adaptive functioning limitations, motor issues, sensory sensitivities, or language differences, able to manage independently in all major areas of daily living, with a bonus side of savant skills and the empathic range of a rock. (bascom, 2012) in other words, sheldon represents a set of autistic stereotypes that have been perpetuated through media rather than an actual autistic person. since the writers seem to have used sheldon’s lack of diagnosis as an excuse to avoid the obligation to research autism, they miss many of the experiences common to many autistic people that have been underrepresented in media. these include the impacts of ableism, sensory processing disorder, shutdowns, and the ways autistic people move and talk differently from neurotypical people. in short, sheldon is autistic enough to laugh at, but not autistic enough to represent the autistic community. while the writers on big bang reacted to fans’ questions about sheldon’s neurotype by deliberately choosing not to acknowledge him as autistic for fear it would be a “burden to get the details right” (sepinwall, 2019), community’s head writer, dan harmon, went the opposite direction. when he learned that abed was being embraced by the autistic community, he decided that he “[didn’t] want to let these people down ever. they don’t get a lot of role models on tv ever, and [he knows] how important that is” autistic representation in sitcom television studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 317 (pollack, 2012). to ensure he wouldn’t get anything wrong with abed’s character, harmon did extensive research on autism. and importantly, part of this research was to read forums where autistic people talked about their own experiences, rather than only getting the outsider perspective from doctors or parents. through this research, harmon discovered that many of the autistic traits he was reading about applied to him as well. once he realized that he was autistic himself, his process for writing abed changed and he started to write the character’s storylines by looking to his own memories (pollack, 2012). because he can draw on first-hand experience as an autistic person himself, as well as the lived stories of people he encountered in autism forums, he was able to write abed in a much more accurate and nuanced way than the big bang theory writers were able to write sheldon. while sheldon’s autistic traits are largely based in stereotypes and mocking jokes, abed is a representation of the experiences of actual autistic people. he has shutdowns and meltdowns, experiences discrimination, has sensitive hearing, filters experiences through the lens of his special interest in tv and movies, and even his posture and way of moving are representative of how autistic people move. because he took the time to research the experiences of real autistic people, and because he is autistic himself, harmon understands that for many autistic people, autism is not an affliction or an inhibition to rise above, but in fact “the inhibition is on the part of the other people” (pollack, 2012). community avoids defining the autistic experience by a set of medically defined symptoms, focusing instead on the isolation caused by a society not built for autistic neurotypes. abed thrives when he has a support system in place that loves him as he is, and the times he struggles most are when those supports are threatened or taken away. harmon isn’t the only writer on the show to be invested in writing abed in a way that is nuanced and authentic to the autistic experience. at a convention panel in 2012, executive producer russ krasnoff answered a fan question about the show’s positive representation of autism by saying “these characters… are all flawed, and all have these issues that they’re dealing with, but [we want] to write up to all of them, to respect all of them, and to give them all something to be proud of” (greendaleseven, 2012). the creative team behind the show understand that while abed’s disability means his struggles are different from those of his peers, ultimately all their characters are flawed in their own ways and all those differences deserve to be treated with equal respect and dignity. this positioning of autism as a facet of human experience no different from the issues faced by neurotypical characters is an attitude that few people writing autistic characters have had before or since, and it largely contributes to the show’s popularity among autistic viewers. baden gaeke franz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 318 impact the way that autism is represented in media has an impact on the audience, both autistic and neurotypical. representations that rely on stereotypes and that mock autistic traits have a negative impact on autistic people and can lead neurotypical people to have misconceptions about what autism is. by contrast, positive representations that depict autistic people as full humans treated well by their peers contribute to acceptance of autism and boost the self-esteem of autistic people. on the big bang theory, for instance, sheldon’s difficulty with social situations often manifests as him being cruel to other characters, insulting them, insisting he knows better than them, even being sexist and racist at times. since sheldon is the only autistic-coded character on the show, when sheldon does something rude or bigoted, a neurotypical viewer might be led to assume that autism inherently makes people rude and bigoted. furthermore, because sheldon’s autism isn’t named, “characters can’t clarify: ‘that’s not his autism, that’s just sheldon.’ and so autism and assholery become merged” (hanson, 2017). this assumption can easily lead to autistic people being excluded or rejected by their neurotypical peers, who assume they will be unpleasant because of their diagnosis, before getting to know them. this mistreatment of real autistic people because of how autism is portrayed in media is further reinforced by the way sheldon is treated by his friends and colleagues on the show. throughout the series, sheldon’s friends are shown insulting him, deliberately antagonizing him, and complaining about having to be around him. this normalizes the idea that autistic people are hard to be around, and that it is socially acceptable to mock and exclude them. as jacqueline koyanagi (2015) puts it, when autistically coded characters are dismissed as eccentric and worthy of disdain, it reinforces the idea that we are just being difficult. when the people around autistically coded characters are portrayed as atlas-like martyrs for enduring such a burden, that is doing real harm to real autistic people. when autistic-coded characters like sheldon are shown being victims of abuse by people who supposedly care about them, and this abuse is rarely or never challenged within the show, neurotypical viewers receive the message that it is okay for them to insult or abuse the autistic people in their lives, and that they are heroes for even doing that much to be around them. autistic viewers, too, are impacted by negative depictions of autistic characters like sheldon. when sheldon’s friends mock his behaviours that mimic autistic traits, autistic people can internalize the idea that those same behaviours are worthy of being mocked in them as well. this can lead to them masking these traits, even in situations in which doing so causes them distress. furthermore, when sheldon’s friends and colleagues are depicted as autistic representation in sitcom television studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 319 martyrs for simply continuing to exist in his presence, real autistic people can be made to feel like they are a burden on their own friends and family, regardless of whether the people in their lives actually perceive them that way. big bang co-creator bill prady has reportedly stated that were sheldon’s autism confirmed in the show, there would be a “danger that the other characters’ insults about sheldon’s behaviour – in other words, 90% of the show’s comedy – would seem mean if they were mocking a medical condition as opposed to generic eccentricity” (sepinwall, 2019). however, what prady and the rest of the big bang writing team fail to understand is that the traits that are being mocked on the show are autistic traits, regardless of if they are acknowledged as such on the show. real autistic people, as well as people who are not autistic but who share some of the traits that prady labels as “generic eccentricity,” perceive the characters’ insults as cruel and linked to their own neurodivergence, with or without the word “autism” having been used on the show. this leads to internalized shame in autistic viewers. where sheldon inspires shame, many autistic viewers have named abed as a source of pride and joy. autistic writer and activist julia bascom (2012) describes the experience of first discovering community in an essay titled “someone who moves like you,” saying that “how someone moves is the first thing telling you whether or not they might be able to be you, and you them. and for the first time in [her] life, she looked at a character on television and saw a yes” (emphasis in original). bascom describes the experience as transformative, changing the way she thought about herself and the world because for the first time she felt represented by a character on television. abed represented a celebration of the autistic traits that so many other shows like the big bang theory had taught her were shameful. abed was a symbol that she as an autistic person deserved love, respect and happiness just as much as her neurotypical peers. another way that shows like community where autism is celebrated can have a positive influence on the lives of autistic people is by denaturalizing the abuse of autistic people. by depicting an autistic character who is loved and accepted by the people around him, community provides a framework for neurotypical viewers to rethink their own privilege and the ways in which they interact with autistic people in their own lives, and for autistic people to understand that they deserve respect. community challenges the idea that ableism is natural or correct, instead suggesting that there is another way to look at disability: one of acceptance and celebration. the impact of the autism positivity expressed in community extends beyond just autistic viewers. many traits often associated with autism such as liking routine, having difficulty in social situations, or expressing enthusiasm for favourite topics in ways that are deemed socially inappropriate are far from limited to autistic people. since many autistic-coded characters, like sheldon cooper, are not diagnosed within the texts they belong to, jokes at the expense of these traits hurt not just autistic viewers, but anybody who baden gaeke franz studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 320 might express those traits. and on the flip side of that same coin, when a show like community celebrates these traits, it can have a positive impact on a wide range of people, not just autistic people. for instance, podcaster bryn monroe has said that while he doesn’t have a formal autism diagnosis, he “[does] not believe [himself] to be neurotypical” and that “abed was the first time [he] felt like [he] saw a nerd exactly like [him] on tv” (gould, 2020). the destigmatization of autistic traits does not just improve the lives of autistic people, but of anybody who resonates with those eccentricities that are so often ridiculed. conclusion the case of these two shows illustrates two important facts about autistic representation in media: failing to diagnose a character does not exempt a writer from ableist representations, and to avoid this ableism it is important to listen to audience feedback and do research to properly understand the characters from the perspective of the communities they stand for. these are lessons that media creators would do well to keep in mind going forward. in the years since community and the big bang theory first aired, there have been many other autistic and autistic-coded characters in both film and television. it is encouraging to see that many of these stories increasingly depict autistic characters in a positive, or at least a neutral light. unfortunately, too many have gone the same route as the big bang theory: creating characters based in stereotypes who are treated poorly by the other characters. these depictions have a negative impact on real autistic people, both by reinforcing internalized shame and by normalizing the abuse of autistic people. what few stories there are that depict autism in a sympathetic light still fall into many of the same tropes that make big bang harmful. autistic characters are very often treated poorly by their peers, are expected to change themselves to gain acceptance from others, and the research that goes into the writing – if there is any at all – is most often done by reading accounts of doctors or parents. very few shows featuring autistic characters are made in consultation with autistic people themselves, much less with an autistic executive producer and head writer like community had. this is what makes community so special to autistic people. by listening to the voices of real autistic people, they were able to represent the reality of the autistic experience, rather than just a trope or stereotype. as bascom (2012) explains, “you must understand that one story is infinitely bigger than zero, and it may still be very small and nowhere near enough, but it’s something” (emphasis in original). it is time for more stories created by and about autistic people. the audience is here. it’s time to give them the stories they need to see. autistic representation in sitcom television studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 308-322, 2022 321 references autistictic. 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(2014, january 9). basic intergluteal numismatics (season 5, episode 3) [tv series episode]. in d. harmon (executive producer), community. sony pictures television inc.; open 4 business productions llc. tv doodles. (n.d.). sheldon cooper funny quote i’m not crazy t-shirt. teepublic. retrieved december 18, 2020, from https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/15355097-sheldon-cooperfunny-quote-im-not-crazy ali final before ts december 11 18 correspondence address: nosheen ali, institute for educational development, aga khan university, karachi, sindh, pakistan, 75950; email: nosheen.ali@aku.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 406-412, 2018 dispatch on being an activist: silence, technology and feminist solidarity in south asia nosheen ali aga khan university, pakistan a letter to irom sharmila the indian poet-activist irom sharmila is globally renowned for her 16-year fast against the armed forces special powers act (afspa), a brutal law which gives the indian military shoot-at-sight powers as well as legal immunity, a law that has become a license for arbitrary military violence in several parts of northeastern india as well as in indian-controlled kashmir. in the manipur election of march 2017, after “sacrificing a major part of her life” to the cause of undoing this law and engaging in the “world’s longest hunger strike,” this incredible activist suffered a shocking defeat as the people for whom she had starved herself for a decade and a half gave her only 90 votes (irom sharmila loses in manipur, 2017; samon & parashar, 2017). sharmila reportedly broke down, decided to quit politics, and registering her sorrow, said: “thanks for 90 votes” (kant, 2017). a few feminist activists, including myself, were reading about her defeat in karachi and feeling her pain. sharmila’s struggle against militarization and for regional rights seemed to mirror only too well the landscape of activist struggle in pakistan, and her helplessness in the face of her defeat likewise resonated with our own sense of despair. oddly, sadly, and yet perhaps beautifully, we could relate with her. we felt that a solidarity letter should be written to express our support, to say to her that her struggle speaks to us and inspires us irrespective of electoral results, that she continues to hold meaning for us and to people the world over. the letter was to be authored anonymously and published in an indian newspaper. but when the draft was ready, our doubts started emerging. it was a strong letter in which our own military-state was sharply criticized. is it really wise for us to publish such a letter in an indian newspaper – at a time when indo-pak relations are already on being an activist studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 406-412, 2018 407 so heated, at a time when surveillance in pakistan is already so severe, at a time when pakistani activists are going missing? will we really remain anonymous, given that we were passionately discussing the whole plan on whatsapp instead of the safer signal?1 is it really a risk worth taking? we tried to be courageous but the fears had set in, and a harmless solidarity letter was sounding like a death warrant. we could be traced and invite attention – we should be careful as we need to do long-term work. many activists in pakistan today find themselves in this conundrum, which leads us to suppress our activist instincts before our actions, to silence our own voices before they are silenced. the eighteenth-century punjabi sufi poet bulleh shah wrote: chup kareke kareen guzaare nu2 sach sunke lok na sehnde ne, sach aakhiye te gal painde ne phir sache paas na behnde ne, sach mitha aashiq pyaare nu chup kareke kareen guzaare nu chup aashiq to na hundi ai, jis aayi sach sugandhi ai jis maahl suhaag di gundi ai, chadd duniya kood pasaare nu chup kareke kareen guzaare nu - stay silent to survive people cannot stand to hear the truth they are at your throat if you speak it they keep away from those who speak it but truth is sweet to its lovers! those lovers cannot remain silent who have inhaled the fragrance of truth those who have plaited love into their lives, leave this world of falsehood stay silent to survive my usual preference is for poems with an optimistic and progressive bent. i am surprised that at this moment in pakistan, it is a poem like chup – silence – that resonates with my heart, perhaps because of the deep affliction it bears and enables us to bear. the poem captures well contemporary activist sentiment, and feels like an unusual anthem of resistance for today’s pakistan. ironically, it is the mirror image of the famous anthem by the 1 whatsapp is a mobile communications system (see https://www.whatsapp.com/). signal is an encrypted communications software (see https://signal.org/). 2 “stay silent to survive.” the translation is by sana saleem; the detailed text and translation is available at https://parchanve.wordpress.com/2015/05/30/chup-kareke-kareen-guzaare-nu/ nosheen ali studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 406-412, 2018 408 pakistani poet faiz ahmed faiz (1911-1984), bol ke lab azad hain tere – speak, for your lips are free – which for long has been a popular, progressive ballad in south asia. our lips are not free, and it is hard to pretend otherwise. as part of my academic research, i study the poetic thought of south asia and its significance in understanding history, society and emotionality in our part of the world. i want to write about this poetic history – about sufi revolutionary thought, about music and madness, and about radical social love across islamic, hindu and sikh devotional traditions. instead, i find myself writing about matters that afflict my daily existence, matters that must be acknowledged and witnessed before academic writing can find its voice again. on technology and fear in the matter of irom sharmila’s solidarity letter, our group of activists was not over-reacting, nor were we paranoid. we live in a state where the extreme nature of surveillance, intimidation, and extra-judicial killings has reached a new level in recent years. people have received intimidatory phone calls, emails, visits and threats for organizing dialogues in small bookstores, performing plays, writing academic articles, singing songs and organizing poetry festivals. around the time of irom sharmila’s electoral defeat, five pakistani bloggers had gone missing for writing satire against the state on social media, pro-establishment media figures had launched a vicious campaign accusing the missing bloggers of blasphemy, and one blogger, after his release, had said that he was tortured “for pleasure.” the blasphemy charges against the bloggers were supported by fabricated facebook posts, making pakistani activists acutely aware of new ways in which their victimization could happen in the digital realm, quite literally through technologies of rule. in 3d things: devices, technologies and women’s organizing in sri lanka, shermal and kumudini (2015) make an important contribution to feminist scholarship by highlighting activists’ relationship with electronic devices and social media, and illuminating the ways in which women’s organizing has changed with technology. an important new aspect of such technological orientations in pakistan is a heightened fear, self-consciousness and self-regulation around devices, as a result of state surveillance and violence. far from seeing them as empowering tools, we have come to be intimidated by our own devices. with increased trolling and state monitoring, it was not uncommon for me to hear, last year, a number of female activists say, “i think i should go off facebook and twitter for a while,” in response to, and as a clear testament to, an atmosphere of anxiety and self-regulation. this atmosphere has worsened in the wake of laws such as the prevention of electronic crimes act (peca) in 2016, which severely curtails freedom of online speech and has already rendered activists vulnerable to being declared on being an activist studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 406-412, 2018 409 “anti-state” and “against the ideology of pakistan.”3 the demand for trainings in online security has seen a steep rise, involving the learning of new tools, understanding the surveillance potential of different platforms, and guidance on managing phones, computers, accounts, and online identities. i find it striking that when i reflect back on 2017, so much discussion in my activist circle has been on riseup email accounts, pgp keys, safe browsers like tor, vpns, and safe messaging services such as signal.4 actual protests, too, now pose dilemmas of documentation – which also has the effect of curtailing our organizing capacities. if we are at a human rights meeting for organizing a protest, should we tweet about it to spread awareness or keep it secret to avoid elements that would foil the protest? if we tweet at the protest, will we ourselves come under the ire of the state? if we do not tweet, or there is no media, will anyone notice? should any pictures or videos be released for real-time reporting and attention, or do we wait until all the images are post-processed and blurred to ensure anonymity? if there are videos and images of protests, from whose account should we release them to avoid state surveillance? it is an absurd state of resistance when we are trying to make a visible difference by constantly trying to remain invisible. we must “remain apparently undetected and still do what is needful,” as ather zia (2016, p. 6) says of the performance of agency by kashmiri half-widows. we try to unwrite our identities, authorship and traces, before we try to write new stories for our besieged nation. how will we stand up and be counted, if anonymity is deemed crucial? there can be no consistent approach, and ultimately, people act in the ways that make sense to them, given their perceptions of the situation. technological preparation can only go so far in addressing fear. ultimately when we talk on the regular mobile phone, we are being careful, watching ourselves, censoring our conversations, and taming our authentic voices. we have not just come to fear our devices but also our own voices, so we tend to speak in isharas (signs) even when we are talking on signal. it is enormously taxing to be constantly worrying about surveillance before uttering anything, to be focused more on safe technology than on the political or social issues at hand. gratefully, fear often goes away as quickly as it comes, as life’s desire to live reasserts its power. the urge to use ultra-secure platforms goes up and down, and some like myself have descended back to gmail and whatsapp just because it is convenient and – even if foolishly – feels like an act of subversion in an imposed state of worry. but stories of unknown calls, tracked calls, calls that seem to know what is being discussed on whatsapp, and disappearing smses keep us in a condition of consternation and disquiet. the self-surveillance continues and we are forever telling ourselves and 3 see https://digitalrightsfoundation.pk/year-in-review-peca/ 4 these technologies are used to protect our identities and dignity online. good overall guidelines to online security for women have been prepared by awid. see www.awid.org/resources/diy-online-security-guide-every-woman. nosheen ali studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 406-412, 2018 410 others to be careful on facebook and twitter, and not be “too political.” on silence the biggest closure is on the subject of militarized violence in balochistan, a region of pakistan devastated by state-sponsored disappearances and insurgencies. there has been a media blackout on the particular subject of “missing people” for many years now, but one could raise it on alternative platforms, and in universities and activist circles. now, even this space is crushed, especially after the murder of activist sabeen mahmud who was shot dead on april 24, 2015, minutes after she hosted a dialogue on human rights abuses in balochistan at her bookstore-café in karachi, the second floor.5 while brave activists, social movements and resistance groups in the country courageously continue to engage with and fight back against multiple forms of state oppression, a culture of political censorship and silencing has overall deepened in pakistan in the last three years. amongst metropolitan journalists, activists and progressive academics, silence is being performed as part of a carefully expressed, bordered and contained sense of agency. chup – silence – has in fact become a state of being and doing for many, as a strategy for survival in a state where arbitrary detention, torture and disappearances have become entirely commonplace. chup is when you attend a protest in support of families protesting against state-led disappearances, but then make sure you are sitting in the back somewhere and not visible on any camera. chup is when your students say to you that they are scared to even read your academic article on citizenship struggles in gilgit-baltistan, simply because it discusses citizenship rights. chup is when your friends think you are too political, even when you are not speaking. it is customary that when someone dies, we observe a moment of silence. in a state of chup in pakistan, we now observe moments of speech. this moment in pakistan – july 2018 – is a crucial one. people are tired of being chup, and many are choosing speech over silence, fighting for peace against violence. the pashtun tahafuz movement (ptm) in particular has inspired tens of thousands to take to the streets this year in all provinces, demanding an end to disappearances and arbitrary state rule. in this spirit, i now share the unfinished, feminist solidarity letter from last year. it is a small act, perhaps meaningless now. but it is better than silence. 5 for more on the issue of missing people and sabeen mahmud’s murder, see ali (2015). on being an activist studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 406-412, 2018 411 a letter to irom sharmila beloved sister irom, we are pakistani feminists watching your struggle from afar, and it has moved us to write this message. the brutality of military power and the apathy of militarized societies, we understand only too well. do you know what the popular protest slogan in pakistan is? yeh jo dehshatgardi hai, is ke peechay wardi hai this terror you see, it is caused by the military similar story there, right? arbitrary power, exploitation, and violence trample over the right to dignity and equality. but the people know, and future generations will also know. your valor is bigger than the gloating chests of generals. if we believed in awards, we would give you a nishan-e-haider or the param vir chakra.6 but what good would they do? we would rather meld these awards with the fire of our being, and make beautiful earrings for you. we wish to celebrate you, because your moral victory is far more significant than your electoral defeat. your struggle speaks to us deeply, thousands of miles of territory and borders of barbed wires cannot obstruct our connection. look how hard they try. look how miserably they fail. we continue to share your pain, and feel your agony as our own. we draw inspiration from your revolutionary struggle of 16 years, because when you stand up for the people and especially the women of the north-east, you stand up for us all in south asia fighting the oppression of militarism. when we look at your singleminded devotion to the cause of anti-militarism, we feel stronger in our own resolve to continue. you give us strength and courage, for which we offer our deepest gratitude. please don’t lose heart. your local vote-bank may not be with you. but feminists, activists, all who oppose the government of the gun, stand with you globally. references ali, n. (2015, november 13). commentary: mourning, memory and resistance in pakistan. himal southasian. retrieved from http://himalmag.com/sabeen-mahmud-mourningmemory-resistance-pakistan/ irom sharmila loses in manipur: mass movements, not sacrifice needed to win elections. (2017, march 11). deccan chronicle. retrieved from www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/currentaffairs/110317/irom-sharmila-loses-in-manipur-mass-movements-not-sacrifice-needed-towin-elections.html 6 these are, respectively, pakistan’s and india’s highest military awards. nosheen ali studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 406-412, 2018 412 kant, k. (2017, march 13). “thanks for ninety votes”: in four words, an elegy for indian democracy. the wire (india). retrieved from https://thewire.in/politics/manipur-iromsharmila-afspa-election-democracy\ samon, s., & parashar, u. (2017, march 15). manipur polls: emotional irom sharmilla quits politics after debut debacle. hindustan times. retrieved from www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/manipur-assembly-polls-irom-sharmila-routed-onpolitical-debut-vs-cm-ibobi-singh/story-arxfynia8k2bdyqanadcxn.html wijawardene, s., & kumudini, s. (2015). 3d things: devices, technologies and women’s organizing in sri lanka. batticaloa, sl: suriya women’s development centre & international centre for ethnic studies. zia, a. (2016). the spectacle of a good-half widow: women in search of their disappeared men in the kashmir valley.” political and legal anthropology review, 39(2), 164-175. smeltzer & cantillon final layout dec 10 15 correspondence address: sandra smeltzer, faculty of information & media studies, the university of western ontario, london, on, n6a 5b7; email: ssmeltze@uwo.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 1, 7-17, 2015 guest editors’ introduction: scholar-activist terrain in canada and ireland sandra smeltzer university of western ontario, canada sara cantillon university college dublin, ireland introduction post-2008 economic crisis, academics are enduring and combatting greater corporatization on their campuses, the casualization of scholarly labour, more fervent pressure by administrations to demonstrate teaching ‘outputs’ and monetizable research ‘inputs’, and, in some cases, threats to their academic freedom (e.g., bailey & freedman, 2011; côté & allahar, 2011; hanke & hearn, 2012; lynch, crean & moran, 2010; mercille & murphy, 2015; nussbaum, 2010; slaughter & rhoades, 2004; tuchman, 2011; turk, 2014). moreover, when combined with family and other personal obligations, the publish or perish ethic of the profession means that a commitment to activist-oriented endeavours which promote social justice is often difficult to sustain (e.g., few, piercy & stremmel, 2007; hooks, 1994; napoli & aslama, 2011; rodino-colocino, 2012; smeltzer, 2012; ward, 2005). nevertheless, scholars at all levels of the tiered academic system continue to engage in myriad forms of activism on campus and within their respective local, regional, and international communities (flood, martin & dreher, 2013). indeed, given the conditions of neoliberalism and the educational and societal repercussions of a deteriorating welfare state, many scholars feel a stronger pull than ever to engage in activism that aims to make a difference in the lives of others (baker, lynch, cantillon & walsh, 2004; holborow, 2012, pp. 32-33; smeltzer & hearn, 2015). the overarching objective of this special double issue of studies in social justice (ssj) was to bring together scholar-activists from different disciplinary backgrounds to explore and discuss the relationship between sandra smeltzer, sara cantillon studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 7-17, 2015 8 scholarship and activism within this shifting landscape.1as the guest editors of these back-to-back issues, we asked authors to critically consider the rewards and challenges, successes and drawbacks of pursuing activist endeavours inside and/or outside their home institutions. specifically, the articles examine the ways in which canadian and irish academics negotiate their pedagogical, research, and service obligations with a commitment to social justice. the impetus for this collection grew out of a series of semistructured interviews conducted by sandra smeltzer with 19 scholar-activists from five irish universities in 2014, which in turn were based on similar interviews she conducted in 2013 with six academics from three universities in ontario, canada. we distributed a call for papers exclusively to canadian and irish academics, requesting that submissions be theoretically driven and selfreflexive. the response was overwhelming: we received abstracts from 127 scholars, representing 19 universities in canada and ireland, which speaks to the salience of this subject matter in both countries. as would be expected, we found it extremely difficult to winnow down the submissions to the pieces that appear in these issues. our decisions were, in large part, informed by our strong desire to facilitate a wide spectrum of perspectives regarding how scholars negotiate the tricky terrain of contemporary activism in both locales from a range of institutions, disciplines, viewpoints, linguistic backgrounds, and topics, and to represent voices from across the academic system’s hierarchical labour system. canada and ireland canada and ireland are not a common choice for comparative scholarship; they are more often compared to their neighbouring superpowers, the us and uk respectively. there are, however, grounds to explore the similarities and differences between canada and ireland in relation to scholar activism, thereby bringing into focus trends shared by the two countries and the potentially distinctive circumstances in each locale. to begin, there is a long history of irish migration to canada, with roughly 14 per cent of canada’s population claiming irish ancestry (statistics canada, 2006). this has helped foster positive working relations between the two countries based on key cultural affinities. english, for example, is the first and dominant language for the majority of the population, with both countries 1 in their articles, many of these authors use the terms ‘academic’, ‘researcher’, and ‘scholar’ interchangeably. for present purposes, the difference for us is the institutional setting. an academic is usually based at a university or other higher education or research institution, whereas a researcher or scholar, while often equally qualified in terms of academic qualifications or experiential knowledge in a research discipline, may be institutionally independent. scholar-activist terrain in canada and ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 7-17, 2015 9 boasting another strong, state-supported official language (french and irish). they also have a shared history and a unique relationship with the uk, which is intimately intertwined with colonization and varying degrees of decolonization. as well, canada and ireland share the historical impact that religion has played in the development of their respective educational systems with catholicism being the majority religion in both countries. despite the vast differences in size, canada and ireland have a similar level of gdp per capita and identical un human development and education index rankings of 0.96 and literacy rates of 99 per cent (undp, 2012). of particular relevance to our discussion, canada’s and ireland’s tenured university systems are comparable with faculty members possessing relative, if increasingly jeopardized, academic and pedagogical freedom in comparison to many regions of the world. finally, at the macroeconomic level, canada and ireland, in line with global trends led by american industry, are witnessing diminishing welfare states under unfettered global capitalism; a trajectory that may encourage more academics to engage in social justice-oriented activism to help fill the gaps left behind. there are also some key differences between canada and ireland, particularly in terms of geographical size and population. of particular note is the discrepancy in terms of the number of educational institutions in each country and the overall size of their domestic academic communities: ireland has seven universities, compared to 98 in canada (universities canada, 2014). perhaps the most significant manifestation of this disparity can be found in inter-personal academic relationships. to a large extent, and especially within disciplinary areas, irish academics all know – or know of – each other in this relatively small community; this in turn impacts how much, in what ways, and with whom they engage in activism. as well, from the interviews smeltzer conducted in 2013 and 2014, it was clear that on campus activism appears to be more prominent in canada than it is ireland, which may be related to the fact that canadian universities tend to have more active unions of academics. irish academics who identify as scholar-activists instead tend to focus their energies on engaging almost exclusively in activist endeavours outside the academy. a final comparative issue to bear in mind is the impact of the global financial crisis and recession on academic labour and university resources. both countries are facing greater neoliberalization in higher education with the result being that, as noted above, they are struggling with deepening budget cutbacks, swelling numbers of precarious labour, and a stronger emphasis on market imperatives, including pressure to adhere to publishing and funding metrics. the austerity measures pursued in ireland by the coalition government in the aftermath of the bailout by the european central bank, the international monetary fund, and others, combined with the utilitarian, pro-market national strategy for higher education to 2030 (commonly referred to as the hunt report), have had a particularly negative impact on university funding, academic salaries, job and promotion freezes, sandra smeltzer, sara cantillon studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 7-17, 2015 10 student-faculty ratios, and the increase in casual and precarious labour within universities (hunt, 2011; labi, 2012; mercille & murphy, 2015; shattock, 2010; walsh & loxley, 2014). we are thus witnessing: the desire on the part of employers and the state to use the recession to implement a double-pronged strategy: to tie higher education more closely to the needs of capital and, also to entrench neoliberal ideology in what is taught and thought and in the way higher education work is done. (holborow, 2012, p. 12) the (recently ousted) conservative government under stephen harper in canada actively pursued similar austerity economics, including closing libraries, muzzling government scientists, discontinuing important services provided by library and archives canada, and harassing non-governmental organizations both legally and financially (especially those critical of the government). although canadian post-secondary education has certainly felt the painful brunt of such austerity politics, which have also served to compromise academic freedom, the damage has not (yet) been as extensive as that experienced in ireland (de peuter, cohen & brophy, 2015; hanke & hearn, 2012; turk, 2014; wyile, 2013). key themes and fault lines: the ‘double shift’ of scholarship and activism notwithstanding a number of differences between the two countries, several themes related to scholarship and activism emerged over and over again during the canadian and irish interviews, which are also very clearly reflected in the articles that follow in these issues. we found general agreement across the board that engaging in activist pursuits is usually a liability in terms of employment, promotion, funding, and, for some, intellectual freedom. not surprisingly, individuals in a precarious labour situation were particularly concerned that the time and energy they dedicate to their activist commitments would prove detrimental to landing a full-time academic position or securing tenure (see in this issue, o’flynn & panayiotopoulos, and manning, holmes, pullen sansfaçon, temple newhook & travers; see also flood, martin & dreher, 2013; kezar & sam, 2013; madeloni, 2014; smeltzer & hearn, 2015). relatedly, there was strong agreement that their home institutions preferred more sanitized forms of ‘community engagement’ over activism that might disrupt the political and economic status quo on campus (and presumably put at risk the institution’s ‘brand’) and off campus (jeopardizing funding from some of the institution’s sponsors and alumni donors) (flood, martin & dreher, 2013; hanke & hearn, 2012; smeltzer, 2015; vogelgesang & rhoads, 2003). many interviewees also discussed issues related to the feasibility, legitimacy, and/or difficulty of publishing academic material related to one’s scholar-activist terrain in canada and ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 7-17, 2015 11 activism (see khasnabish & haiven, and manning, holmes, pullen sansfaçon, temple newhook & travers, in this issue). some commented on the struggle of trying to produce material that is useful to their respective communities, which requires different skill sets and consumes significantly more time to generate than most academics or activists recognize, as well as to fulfil their scholarly responsibilities of publishing peer-reviewed material (see cox, and petrick, in this issue; see also napoli & aslama, 2011; rodinocolocino, 2012). of particular concern for some individuals is how academics might ‘use’ their activist experiences for their own benefit in terms of scholarly publishing, conference presentations, and grant applications, and the ethics related to appropriating others’ voices (e.g., carapico, 2006; dickson-swift et al., 2007; rodino-colocino, 2012; routledge, 2004; smeltzer, 2012). constant reflexivity is therefore of paramount importance even when one’s research is explicitly collaborative, participatory, and in solidarity (autonomous geographies collective, 2010; dempsey et al., 2011). fabio rojas (2013) contends that “activism and academia don’t mix”, arguing that the former is about promoting social change, whereas the latter focuses on knowledge generation. with the exception of two individuals, none of our interviewees or authors have agreed with this perspective (which is also championed by the likes of stanley fish, jim a. kuypers, and richard vatz). instead they operate from the premise that the primary aim of scholar activism is to disrupt dominant discourses and challenge economic, political, and cultural power relations (e.g., fuller & kitchin, 2004; speed, 2006). this position, with which the guest editors concur, is embedded in a “social justice sensibility [that] entails a moral imperative to act as effectively as we can to do something about structurally sustained inequalities” (frey, pearce, pollock, artz & murphy, 1996, p. 111, emphasis in original). however, we did find notable discrepancy in terms of how much time and energy interviewees thought academics should dedicate to being an activist. certainly, as kamilla petrick discusses in her article for this issue, the availability of time, as well as intellectual and emotional space, to engage in academic or activist work is often determined by the ebbs and flows of one’s personal life. moreover, for some individuals, being an activist is their foremost objective, and an academic position provides the tools and resources that can help advance social justice. others see more of a balance between their scholarly and activist worlds, as one informs and supports the other. still others argue that although they are committed to their respective activist endeavours, being an academic remains their priority and obligation. despite this discrepancy, most interviewees relayed a very similar message, which did not come through as strongly in the majority of the written articles (which may speak to a reluctance to discuss one’s limitations in print): on one hand, they often felt overwhelmed by the time and emotional energy they were investing in both their scholarship and activist realms, while simultaneously often feeling guilty that they were unable to dedicate more of sandra smeltzer, sara cantillon studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 7-17, 2015 12 themselves to their chosen social justice pursuits. on the other hand, they clearly felt that their interventions were meaningful, that they were making a positive difference, and that this was, quite simply, their life’s work. perhaps more contentiously, interviewees and authors often diverged regarding their preferred approach to engaging in activist endeavours. for some, the most effective methods of advancing social justice are the ones that challenge and modify, but do not necessarily attempt to upend, ‘the system’ (e.g., pain & francis, 2003; shade, 2011; smeltzer, 2012), whereas others have chosen to engage in activities that actively seek to abolish the dominant political and economic framework (e.g., cloud, 2011; hale, 2008 james & gordon, 2008; piven, 2010). these positions represent familiar reformist versus revolutionary/radical approaches to fomenting change (e.g., croteau, 2005; luxemburg, 2007; panitch, 2008; young & schwartz, 2012); however, many individuals occupy viewpoints in the middle of the spectrum (e.g., rowe & carroll, 2014) and they alter their approach depending on myriad factors, including the issue at hand, personal obligations, and professional commitments. these differentiations are also intimately intertwined with expressed opinions about what constitutes meaningful and strategic activism. much of the tension resides in the distinction made between what we might call ‘back office’ activism that operates more behind the scenes and is thus less overtly public in nature, versus ‘front-line’ activism that is very public in its orientation. for us, although we believe that academics have a responsibility to act as engaged intellectuals within and beyond their university borders (e.g., coté, day & de peuter, 2007; giroux, 1991, 2015; fuller & kitchin, 2004; smeltzer & grzyb, 2009), how this plays out on the ground must be contextualized and is based on the individual, their capabilities, and on the specific issue of concern. concomitantly, we recognize the value in a multipronged approach to advancing social justice (see flood, martin & dreher, 2013), as demonstrated by the range of tactics described in the following articles. overview of articles the seven provocative articles that appear in the present issue cover a diverse gamut of issues, including concerns about the working relationship between progressive academics, students, and left activists; academics and social movements; time as a limited resource for scholar-activists; activist media projects; and lgbt activism in relation to both refugees and the parents of trans* children. given the range of personal and professional challenges inherent in negotiating the relationship between scholarship and activism, we asked these authors to openly and critically discuss their practices (bremwilson, 2014; dempsey et al., 2011; hale, 2008), which produced a broad spectrum of results in terms of how personal they chose to be in telling their scholar-activist terrain in canada and ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 7-17, 2015 13 stories. learning from experience is the basis of alex khasnabish and max haiven’s article, which explores the possibilities for leveraging the complex and fraught privileges afforded to academics in order to create resources for activist movements. it focuses on lessons learned from the radical imagination project, an experiment in politically engaged, ethnographically grounded social movement research the authors have sustained in halifax since 2010. through this project khasnabish and haiven developed a practice of working alongside the small but energetic and diverse activist movements in the city. in their conclusion they argue that the value and success of social movements cannot be ascertained only by their ability to achieve concrete social change; rather, we need to learn from how movements operate themselves and how they can offer (sometimes unintentionally) alternative forms of social reproduction. laurence cox also looks at scholar activism from the perspective of social movements in his article, particularly within the irish context. he begins by arguing that many progressive academics have not embarked on the political learning curve necessary to effectively participate in social movements. cox contends that this isolation from transformative agency translates into a belief that existing institutional frameworks can be pathways to meaningful social change. based on his extensive involvement in a range of movements, combined with the various facets of his academic position, he concludes that the criterion for activist scholarship should be the extent to which scholars manage to reshape institutional structures on and off campus. moreover, cox argues that critical reflection is insufficient without praxis geared to changing that situation and creating more radical relationships that actively challenge the political and economic status quo. micheal o’flynn and aggelos panayiotopoulos also focus their attention on academia and activism in ireland, especially the complex relationship between scholars and practitioners. specifically, the authors examine their own efforts to draw together different strands of the left, reflecting on the reciprocal relationships that have developed between progressive academics and students, trade unionists, and activists. evaluating these initiatives, which have included reading groups, educational seminars, the publication of a quarterly paper, and the organization of precarious workers in higher education, o’flynn and panayiotopoulos conclude that there is indeed space for activism in academia and space for academia in activism. similar to petrick and manning et al., the authors also highlight the difficulties precarious academics face in trying to engage in activist endeavours both on and off campus. the pertinent issue of time is the focus of kamilla petrick’s article, which looks at the capacity of scholar-activists to engage in collective action under the tightening constraints of the neoliberal university. petrick explores this issue through semi-structured interviews with canadian scholar-activists and finds that academics across disciplines face increasingly severe time sandra smeltzer, sara cantillon studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 7-17, 2015 14 pressures. while dispelling the argument that lack of time excuses academics from activist involvement, she argues persuasively that the changing political economic paradigm of the university negatively affects one’s capacity to engage in reflective thought, and can dampen the extent to which ‘public intellectuals’ are able to fully participate in social movements. petrick concludes, like khasnabish and haiven, by stressing the importance of balance and self-care in one’s chosen avenue of activism. in their article, david skinner, robert hackett, and stuart poyntz explore the ways in which the different imperatives of academic institutions and activist organizations incorporate scholarly participation into progressive media projects. discussion focuses on the authors’ direct experiences with three particular projects: media democracy day, open media, and newswatch canada. in reflecting on what enables and constrains participation in these activist media projects, they argue that despite limits and pressures the case studies demonstrate that the fields of activism and the academy can be woven together in ways that produce key resources and energies to promote progressive media reform. the last two articles in this issue are concerned with the relationship between academia and lgbt activism. katherine fobear’s article looks at storytelling as a resource for speaking about social injustice and how it can be deployed by lgbt refugees to validate their truths and bring their voices to the fore in confronting state and public violence. she focuses her attention on three contexts where justice and injustice intersect in refugees’ storytelling: the canadian immigration and refugee board, public advocacy around antiqueer violence and refugee rights, and oral history research. drawing on her own experience of working as an oral historian and a vancouver-based volunteer and advocate, fobear argues that by being able to share their stories in a range of venues, lgbt refugees contribute to critical policy issues around inequality and immigration, which is an important step toward their protection and settlement in canada. in their deeply personal article, kimberley ens manning, cindy holmes, annie pullen sansfaçon, julia temple newhook, and ann travers explore the particular affective and ethical issues they face as parents, scholars, and activists seeking to understand and undo structural transphobia within the broader contexts of ageism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism in canadian society. the authors argue that allyship with their respective children does not imply that they have become ‘courtesy members’ of a marginalized group; rather, they occupy a position of liminality in which they live a commitment to their trans* children regardless of the discrimination they face in advocating for their loved ones. the article examines how their scholar activism assumes complex configurations of privilege and vulnerability, contending that without the institutional security that academic tenure affords, their capacity to continue to engage in activism remains in flux. these articles have begun a conversation, which will be continued in the forthcoming second part of this special double issue that addresses an even scholar-activist terrain in canada and ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 7-17, 2015 15 wider range of topics and perspectives. we wish to sincerely thank david butz, the journal’s editor-in-chief, for encouraging this idea for publication in studies in social justice, and for his editing work to bring these issues to fruition. references autonomous geographies collective (2010). beyond scholar activism: making strategic interventions inside and outside the neoliberal university. acme: international e-journal for critical 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(2005). rethinking faculty roles and rewards for the public good. in a. j. kezar, t. c. chambers, & j. c. burkhardt (eds.), higher education for the public good: emerging voices from a national movement (pp. 217-233). san francisco: jossey-bass. wyile, h. (2013). neoliberalism, austerity, and the academy. esc: english studies in canada, 39(4), 29-31. young, k., & schwartz, m. (2012). can prefigurative politics prevail? the implications for movement strategy in john holloway’s crack capitalism. journal of classical sociology, 12(2), 220-239. rouse final before ts correspondence address: jenelle rouse; email: multi.lens.existence@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 259-264, 2021 dispatch reflexive sketches during the cripping the arts symposium jenelle rouse independent scholar, canada figure 1. the future is accessible (“the future is accessible” is a t-shirt and social media campaign by annie segarra, an american youtuber, artist, and activist for lgbt and disability rights). image description: a collage of four line-drawings from cripping the arts. the first sketch pictures a pencil with the word “journalism” written across it, a person’s torso, their arms jenelle rouse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 259-264, 2021 260 holding a device, two faces looking at a screen and clouds above their heads and the word “media” written among the clouds in capital letters. one cloud is broken in two sections; one side says “dis” and the other side says “ability.” the second sketch pictures line drawings of a row of six stick-like figures, each with a raised fist. below this are the words, “new revolution” in cursive writing. the third sketch pictures a landscape with water, land, and a tree. in the foreground, in the lower left corner, are two people’s heads. the fourth sketch pictures a person and a large thought bubble that says, “future is accessibility.” below the thought bubble is the word “dream” written in capital letters. introduction in this dispatch, i share a combined form of written text and sketches reflecting my thoughts as a culturally deaf attendee at the cripping the arts symposium.1 first, i discuss the layout of a panel with an audience. second, i reflect on how the layout enables me to understand the meaning of “cripping” as an act aligned with social justice in relation to the arts, which in turn influences my perspective on the following themes: future, leadership, and representation. finally, i conclude by considering the necessity of openness towards accessibility and social change and the full inclusivity of deaf, disabled, and mad artists and artworks in the canadian arts. as a culturally deaf artist with an interpretive dance background, i was honoured to participate in the cripping the arts symposium as an audience member. i got to meet various arts researchers, artists, advocates, and others. i could not help but smile because of the sense of belonging i felt. not only was there a crowd of culturally deaf artists and artists with disabilities, including those who experience madness,2 but symposium attendees included people who thrive in new revolutionary thinking around the arts. together, we were people who practice social justice with a sense of intersectionality regardless of our walks of life. the symposium offered artful programming and ways to bring society’s attention to disability and intersecting issues that have been long ignored or forgotten – be it cultural difference (e.g., deaf, language), race, or economic or social status. upon entering a large room filled with round tables and chairs, i chose to sit in the first row in clear view of the stage where i could see the panel of presenters, as well as the american sign language (asl)) interpreters. i looked around and noticed the way the tables were laid out: set a few steps apart, yet so close and chairs were placed next to each other. this made me feel close to people, literally and figuratively, as if they were visually 1cripping the arts symposium is a place where individuals who are part of the deaf and disability art and activism community come together for three days. during these days, we collaborate and explore how our individual and collective contributions affect changes in our society in terms of social justice using a political arts lens: rights, language, culture and power. 2 “mad” is a term of self-identity used by some people “who have experienced mental distress and/or use the mental health system” (cripping the arts access guide, 2019, p. 22; https://tangledarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cta-access-guide-spreads-digital.pdf). reflective sketches during the cripping the arts symposium studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 259-264, 2021 261 accessible to me to reach out to. as allies. the scenario was remarkable: we were allies at round tables, and the many seats represented people offering different but shared perspectives on cripping. artists, researchers, contributors, and other types of attendees were in the room, at the table, discussing the meanings of cripping the arts. incredible. we were all being asked: “what does cripping the arts really mean to you? what is “cripping?” figure 2. allies and intimacy. image description: a collage of two-line drawings from cripping the arts. the first sketch pictures the same drawing as above: a pencil with the word “journalism” written across it, a person’s torso, their arms holding a device, two faces looking at a screen and clouds above their heads and the word “media” written among the clouds in capital letters. one cloud is broken in two sections; one side says “dis” and the other side says “ability.” the second sketch pictures 14 small circles across the page and the words “allies + intimate” on top of the circles. some of us were familiar with “cripping” and could easily describe it in relation to arts and culture. some of us needed to take a pause and quietly ponder. i took in a lot of information from panelists and people i met at cta and had to take a long pause to analyze what it means to me. jenelle rouse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 259-264, 2021 262 i am a dance artist, and whenever i stand before a person or an audience, i know i experience and embody an intersection of identities that i cannot and will not let go of. i stand firmly and commend: yes, i am black. i am visually coloured. i choose to see this as a privilege. yes, i am woman. i identify with woman and i choose to hold my head up knowing how strong i am and can be. and yes, i am deaf. i use american sign language and choose not to speak. through my art practice, i voice through body movements that tell stories however people wish to perceive them. i often break audio-centric audiences’ expectations by not including music, offering them eerie silence, and forcing them to actually use their eyes to critically observe and interpret my body-movement stories. like others, i seek to educate my community about invisible and visible oppressions including audism,3 racism, and sexism. rather than withering away as many oppressed people are expected to do, i dance radically so that people from all walks of life see what i see and feel what i feel – to give that perspective. cripping the arts means to me a new revolution. it promotes action and creativity that in turn reclaims space in the arts in order to be seen (and heard). everyone in the room agrees that arts can change the world. the future, leadership & representation cripping does not necessary mean rebelling against society. cripping intends to shake society awake from a creative and social justice slumber and recognize our individual abilities and how we can contribute fresh knowledge, experience and compassion to our futures. not theirs, ours. we are society’s leaders because we experience all kinds of barriers that nondeaf and non-disabled people often do not experience. the “future” panel from the symposium argued that our rights and our sense of ownership over our lives and our creative practices gives us an important place in our society. we are all part of an interdependent and interconnected community. like the room in my drawing and reflection above: we all deserve a seat at the table. we are allies. we all have our own perspectives, and we represent a diverse collective of people who are culturally deaf, disabled, and mad, regardless of our gender, sexual orientation, and so forth. diversity = intersectionality. our differences challenge us to think deeply about how to shift away from normative perspectives, and at the same time build upon our relationships with our allies to move towards embracing social justice. 3 audism refers to “discrimination against d/deaf or hard of hearing people” (cripping the arts: access guide, 2019, p. 20; https://tangledarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cta-access-guidespreads-digital.pdf) reflective sketches during the cripping the arts symposium studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 259-264, 2021 263 figure 3. publish one’s own. image description: a collage of two-line drawings from cripping the arts. the first sketch pictures a group of ghost-like figures and features the words “forgotten” and “invisibility to society.” the second sketch pictures a person and the words “publish one’s own.” in the centre of the sketch there are two dollar sign symbols, a screen featuring the words “blog vlog,” and “or other.” on the right side of the sketch are several small circles grouped in vertical pattern. in doing so, we need to take a lead in embracing, defining, and redefining our identity. one way i do this is by reclaiming labels that have been ascribed or imposed upon me. for example, while i strongly resist misrepresentative descriptions like “hearing impaired,” “handicapped,” or “disabled,” i also negotiate and re-negotiate these terms with society through writing, dancing, or simply through conversation. i am deaf. period. no socio-political correctness necessary. figure 4. moving forward. image description: a line drawing from cripping the arts. this sketch pictures an arrow pointing right towards a stick figure drawing of a person moving right towards anther arrow pointing right towards another stick figure person moving right. below the drawing, written in cursive, are the words “moving forward.” we need to move forward by reflecting on social justice, our purpose and goals, on how we represent ourselves in society, especially in the arts. making art is our right; it is inspirational and powerful. we crip normative notions of what it means to be human and what it means to be an artist. the world cannot leave us behind because we are the future. jenelle rouse studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 259-264, 2021 264 figure 5. crip time. image description: a line drawing from cripping the arts. this sketch pictures an analog clock. the hour and minute hands point downward and reach beyond the clock face. across the top of the clock are the words “crip time” in capital letters. above the clock and moving upward across the page are waves and a series of figures growing bigger from seed to sprout to human figure to a person with an arm raised in the air. under the person with their arm raised is the word “strong,” written in all caps. making a change deaf, disabled, and mad artists are the future. we are not “problems.” cripping the arts reiterated to me that social change begins with us. we are working towards making crystal-clear our message of diversity, fairness, and inclusion in the arts. we collaborate and bring forward our definitions of and visions for a socially just world. we explore our individual and collective talents. body movement and dance help me express to the world that being different is okay and honourable. indeed, we can show the world our delicate beauty. as we evolve, we continue to change society by making the arts fully accessible. we crip the arts for the sake of social justice! acknowledgements i am grateful to the bodies in translation team and hosts of the cripping the arts symposium for making this invaluable event happened. the experience i had in there still holds a piece in my mind and heart. i thank studies in social justice for accepting and sharing my reflexive sketch work. chatterjee & das gupta final correspondence address: soma chatterjee, school of social work, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: schat@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 editors’ introduction on migration and indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world soma chatterjee york university tania das gupta york university introduction these are strange times to write about migration, anti-racism and indigenous sovereignty. the world has long swung to an authoritarianism of disturbing proportions. as this special issue goes to press, we are swimming in and against a virus that has robbed more than one million lives globally, infected more than 82 million (johns hopkins university & medicine, n.d.), and thrown countless into painstaking and enduring uncertainties, largely in authoritarian regimes, but generally as well. populist nativism and antiimmigrant xenophobia casting othered bodies and cultures as diseased threats to nations are unapologetic and rampant (chatterjee, 2020; paradkar, 2020; ccnc-sj, 2020). infections, hospitalizations and deaths are disproportionately affecting racialized and black populations – especially those who are poor – the working class and the elderly, and risking indigenous peoples by adding to existing conditions of food insecurity, lack of sanitation and essential services (gordon et al., 2020; united nations, 2020). nevertheless, grossly obscene profiteering off of alienation, immobility and illnesses envelop us instead of visions and concrete actions for a socially just recovery (de genova, 2020; hemingway & rozworski, 2020; barnea, 2020). in the 30th year of oka crisis, military aggression on indigenous communities for the pursuit of land, resources and profits remains relentless (see ahmed, 2020; robinson & shaker, 2020; unist’ot’en, 2020; yellowhead institute, 2020), as does police violence against black and indigenous peoples. as deaths, degradation and deprivation daily assault our sense of justice we indeed are grappling with “cruelty fatigue” even as the migration & indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 247 media, mental health and wellness industries insist on it being pandemic fatigue (bannerji, 2020). and yet, neither the threats of xenophobic authoritarianism or the shadows of a once in a century public health crisis could diminish the burst of vibrant popular movements re-igniting streets in north america, for black lives, indigenous land rights, justice for migrant workers, and non-status peoples and detainees criminalized by carceral states (grattan, 2020; migrant rights network, 2020; see also, abolition, n.d.; paradakar, 2020; scholar strike canada, 2020a). globally, from the new constitutional referendum in chile to farmers protesting neoliberal policies deepening poverty, hunger and rising farmer suicides in india, boundary pushing critiques of state machineries of exploitation, along with carefully thought-out acts of care and solidarity, send an urgent message that for those desiring a justice rich society, the stakes are really high. this is not meant to celebrate a romantic narrative of triumph of humankind over a virus and capital, especially as we witness the fierce return of the social and economic status quo. after all, “the way we respond to the crisis,” bayo akomolafe (2020) writes, “is part of the crisis.” clearly however, these circumstances also make it just the right times to be writing about migrant, anti-racist and indigenous justice. this special issue invited anti-racist scholars, educators, and activists to share how they conceptualize indigenous justice and freedom in a world that is also “chronically mobile and routinely displaced” (malkii, 1992, p. 24). what, we ask, are the theoretical, epistemological and methodological concerns in anti-racism with regards to the political citizenship of migrants, refugees and other displaced populations on occupied lands? do their conceptualizations of justice explicitly engage indigenous rights? which questions are urgent and how is that urgency articulated? which are relegated to the background? what are the discomforts and disagreements? it’s been more than a decade since, in the canadian context, bonita lawrence and enakshi dua (2005) signaled the necessity for more research on conflicts and collaborations between indigenous and anti-racist justice. anti-racist and progressive struggles, they contended, are predicated on indigenous erasure; indeed, “critical race and postcolonial theory… posit people of colour as innocent… [and not] settlers on stolen lands” (lawrence & dua, 2005, p. 126), and to correct this “antiracist complicity,” “theorists must begin to think about their personal stake in this struggle, and about where they are going to situate themselves” (p. 126).1 in a similar vein, but 1 for subsequent nuancing of this argument, see amadahy & lawrence, 2009; lawrence, et al., 2020; dhamoon, 2014; jafri, 2012; mathur et al., 2011; phung, 2011, sehdev, 2011; and more recently, jean kim, 2020; nhu le, 2019; patel, 2016; upadhyay, 2019, for conversations within and between racialized scholars about complicity and differential subject positions. on the other hand, see sharma & wright, 2008; sharma, 2020, for consistent challenges to the framework of complicity and complicit racialized subjects. the literature we engage and refer to largely comes from usa and canada. however, as a number of contributions suggest, similar conversations are happening across various sites. soma chatterjee & tania das gupta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 248 with an exemplary engagement with postcolonial and subaltern studies, chickasaw scholar jodi byrd (2011, p. xix) asked whether “arrivants and other people forced to move through empire” can exercise their democratic justice claims without pushing indigenous dispossession “toward a vanishing point” (p. 3).2 in critical black studies on the other hand, tiffany king (2014, 2016), tiya miles and sharon holland (2006), christina sharpe (2016), rachel zellars (this issue) and other scholars have complicated black lives in the americas away from histories and discourses of colonization, conquest and settlement, specifically focusing on the “abjection” of black bodies from “the realm of the human” (sharpe, 2016, p. 14), and thereby also exploding the category of the laboring subject as the harbinger of freedom and justice. the incommensurabilities of anti-racist and indigenous justice and politics are many. jodi byrd (2011, p. xvii) offers an expansive account. while written in the context of the us empire, byrd’s concern is “much larger”: american studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, american indian studies, and area studies have all attempted to apprehend injury and redress, melancholy and grief that exist in the distances and sutures of state recognitions and belongings… as liberal multicultural settler colonialism attempts to flex the exceptions and exclusions that first constituted the united states to now provisionally include those people othered and objected from the nation-state’s origins, it instead creates a cacophony of moral claims that help to deflect progressive and transformative activism from dismantling the ongoing conditions of colonialism that continue to make the united states a desired state formation within which to be included. that cacophony of competing struggles for hegemony within and outside of institutions of power, no matter how those struggles might challenge the state through loci of race, class, gender, and sexuality, serves to misdirect and cloud attention from the underlying structures of settler colonialism that made the united states possible as oppressor in the first place. as a result, the cacophony produced through us colonialism and imperialism domestically and abroad often coerces struggles for social justice for queers, racial minorities, and immigrants into complicity with settler colonialism. (byrd, 2011, p. xxxviii) albeit emerging in the wake of liberal democratic nation states, byrd’s concern that a “cacophony of competing struggles” “misdirects” from the primary violence of settlement can only be brushed aside by anti-racist scholars of migration and mobility at our own peril; even more so, as byrd also acknowledges that, it is all too easy … to accuse diasporic migrants, queers and people of color for participating in and benefiting from indigenous loss of lands, cultures and lives and subsequently to position indigenous otherness as abject and all other others 2 drawing on camau brathwaite’s arrivant trilogy, byrd uses this term “to signify those people forced into the americas through the violence of european and anglo-american colonization of the “new world” (2011, p. xix). all references to the notion of “arrival” in this piece are credited to byrd. migration & indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 249 as part of the problem, as if they could always consent to or refuse such positions or consequences of history. (byrd, 2011, p. xxxix). along this line of thought, byrd’s recent work articulates the indivisibility of anti-blackness and settler colonialism in the formation of the american empire (byrd, 2019). to make various arrivals legible within the framework of settler colonialism, they bring indigenous phenomenologies and epistemologies into conversation with critical theory, and remain, along with glen coulthard (2013, 2014a, 2014b; podur, 2015; walia, 2015), roxanne dunbar-ortiz (2016; dixon, 2006), eve tuck & wayne yang (2012), and a growing body of critical anti-racist scholarship (some of which we cite above and others we continue to come back to throughout this essay), a major influence on how we envision the relationship between anti-racist and indigenous justice. we start the following section by placing ourselves and this work at the intersections of anti-racist and indigenous justice. we understand the way we formulate the special issue activates a number of broad categories, most notably, anti-racism, migration and mobility, and indigeneity on the one hand, and the respective subject positions, such as indigenous, immigrant, racialized, black, etc., on the other. we also mobilize notions such as antiracist, migrant (we tend to use these two interchangeably) and indigenous justice and politics. each of these encapsulates multiple meanings and conceptual trajectories. as such, this section also offers clarity and addresses concerns over some necessary generalizations, either by placing them within relevant social and political phenomena and literature, or by offering explanations or definitions we chose to work with. we follow this with an outline of the thematic organization of the special issue. we conclude with a sense of appreciation and wonder about where anti-racist scholarship currently stands, and what needs to shift or re-orient in anti-racist engagement with indigenous justice. we also propose further and deepened conversations across theoretical and epistemological frameworks. floating in the diaspora: situating ourselves and this work soma i envisioned this special issue as a freshly minted assistant professor, coming out of a doctoral project exploring the devaluation of skilled immigrants’ labour in relation to post-liberalization canadian nationalism. during the six years of my doctoral study, i was asked many times about how my project on immigration, labour and nation building sits in relation to indigenous selfdetermination. indeed, this question was an absent presence in my political and intellectual horizon, a problem of epistemology as i now understand. as such, examining the constitutive relations between immigrants’ economic soma chatterjee & tania das gupta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 250 integration – the cornerstone of my doctoral work – and indigenous colonization became “a core political and ethical task” for me (chatterjee, 2018a, pp. 1-2).3 being an immigrant researcher and educator of migration and nationalism in an era of recognition and reconciliation, i also came to appreciate, is a politically charged position. i was alerted to the troubling separation between anti-racist studies of migration, indigenous and settler colonial studies while teaching in canada, and in social work where instrumental concerns of reconciliation and indigenization outshone a necessary focus on the largest ethico-political project of decolonial freedom that was historically conceptualized as international and anti-empire (see getachew, 2020).4 as such, teaching, discussing and thinking about migrant and indigenous justice relationally were hard (see chatterjee, 2018b). in sync with the operations of the neoliberal academic industry, conversations were also taking place in closed circles of scholars, communities, activist and disciplinary networks, not always mutually accessible. this special issue for me was an effort to partake in and also encourage intersectional conversations, contestations and movements that were emerging across multiple disciplinary and theoretical homes, embarked on with the realization, particularly following my own problematic generalization of racialized labour in an article i wrote, that this is work i could not or should not do on my own. i was thankful when tania agreed to join me. tania as a marxist, i had a theoretical understanding of the connections between my struggles and those of indigenous, black and other minoritized and oppressed peoples. what i had an incomplete understanding of was how divided we are and how unequal we are amongst ourselves. this recognition has deepened through my engagement in feminist debates and my participation in anti-racist activism in toronto, a city i have lived in for most of my life. pulling together a coalition among south asians to fight “paki bashing” in the mid-70s was an accomplishment, although contested in a post-9/11 islamophobic world. in the mid 1980s, i was part of a coalition which brought together indigenous, black and asian women in fighting racism and sexism in ontario. looking back today, some might acknowledge 3 all the while during this time of reckoning, decades of aggressive neoliberalization of economic and social spheres in india (where i come from) was providing an ever-fertile ground for what is currently a deeply fascist government, socially and politically evicting all but caste hindus from the geopolitical territory and the idea of india. having witnessed postcolonial india’s spiraling down into anti-muslim xenophobia and venomous hatred against anything and anyone deemed “foreign” made me thoughtful about our conceptualization of nation state decolonization. 4 for example, education for reconciliation appeared much more compelling for a profession anxious to reconcile its long history of structural violence against indigenous communities. migration & indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 251 the coalition as a nascent recognition of our common struggles and a call to action, but also a failure to question what “equity” meant to indigenous peoples and thus an assumption of sameness and of innocence.5 i was part of interesting debates in the pages of feminist journals around “whose canada is it?” (das gupta & iacovetta, 2000), whether we (immigrant women) should claim our rights as “nation-builders” (ng & das gupta, 1981), and activist discourses around claiming our rights as “canadians” or as “immigrant women.” while we were busy pointing out racism and racial difference among women, we were incognizant of our own anti-black racism and our role within settler colonialism. later, at york university, colleagues were avid proponents of a degree program that brought together indigenous studies along with race, ethnicity, migration and diaspora studies, albeit with mixed success. when soma presented an opportunity to delve into these and other related questions in this special issue, i was eager to participate and thankful for the invitation to do so. this is the personal, professional and intellectual climate within which this special issue was conceived. as mentioned above, we were thoughtful of the weight of the subject and the rich conceptual register it invokes. some of these concepts, for example, sovereignty, migration and mobility, antiracism/anti-racist and racialized subject and black, indigenous, carry marks of long and violent histories and complicated debates. as anti-racist scholars with diasporic ethos, we struggle for example with the limits of sovereignty, or territorial decolonization (getachew, 2020; scott, 2004; sharma, 2020). and yet, in a project such as this where scholars were specifically invited to reflect on their engagement with indigenous justice, sovereignty – especially in its clash with migration and mobility – demands careful attention. we looked toward thomas king (2012) who sees no way around talking about sovereignty when it comes to indigenous issues in north america, a range of scholarship on the varied conceptualizations of sovereignty (see brown, 2018, for a useful review; see also lyons, 2015), and also (again) jodi byrd (2011, p. xvi) who, building on the chickasaw migration story, opens up the notion of sovereignty beyond its western canonical conceptualization, proposing that sovereignty “is found in diplomacy and disagreement, through relation, kinship, and intimacy... [and] in an act of interpretation.” in this spirit, we carried our focus on migration and mobility with a commitment to placing it in a dynamic relation with indigenous sovereignty. similarly, it is insincere to talk about migration or migrants without nuances. after all, we live in a world where thousands perish trying to cross borders (the migrant files, n.d.); a world where “borders never leave [some] alone” while others “traverse them practically at will and with very little thought” (sharma, 2006, p. 4). this dynamic of ceremonious welcome and 5 decades later, nicole penak, then indigenous caucus chair at york university, speaking on a panel organized by the race equity caucus of yufa clarified that indigenous peoples are not an equity seeking group in the way that racialized groups, women and people with disabilities are. i thank her for that simple truth. soma chatterjee & tania das gupta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 252 precarious incorporation is a key technology for maintaining racialized class relations within the borders of major western jurisdictions.6 as such, we consider migration both as state engineered formal pathways, typically (but not always) leading to less precarious immigrant subjects, and the informal paths to sealed doors, fortress like nation states, “illegal”izing and endangering migrant subjects, and further cheapening their labour. nothing underscored migration and migrant labour as key planks of settler nation building with more clarity than the covid-19 pandemic. while global migration indeed came to a standstill, the reliance of real estate and construction boom on transnational mobility, and the absolutely crucial role of migrant workers in food production, supply and delivery, meat packing, retail services, warehouses, transportation, child and elder care, etc., lay exposed (agopsowicz, 2020; das gupta, 2020). thus, even as the pandemic challenged a fundamental assumption we started this work with – that the world is chronically mobile – questions of mobility and the legislative power of the nation state over movement, we suggest, remain more pressing than ever.7 similar clarity, we understand, is needed with regard to our references to indigeneity and indigenous. there are risks in working with a category as broad as indigenous, given there are hundreds of indigenous nations in the continent of north america alone, with vastly different treaty relationships, and historic and ongoing negotiations for sovereign access over land and resources. however, in a project such as this indigeneity was conceptualized in relation to migration and mobility. this is not to cast indigenous peoples as essentially spatially rooted but to pay heed to the central significance of land and land-based relations in indigenous epistemologies, more so in the context of migration and settlement being key building blocks of settler colonial state structures of legitimation. a number of contributors, as we discuss below, focused on this relational dynamic as being at the centre of their critical inquiries. finally, we were conscious also about how we understand and define antiracist and indigenous scholarship, both in their unique focus on immigrants’ 6 a number of observations from canada (where we work) are instructive here. for example, the federal government announced a record high immigration level as crucial for economic recovery (keung, 2020). in the early days of the pandemic, there was an outcry from growers (employers of the migrants who come under the seasonal agricultural worker program, farm worker program and the low skilled agricultural worker program), who considered border closure a threat to food security, indeed a threat to the nation, even while the workers’ exploitations exacerbated under the pandemic (scholar strike canada, 2020b). while ordinary people’s mobility was drastically restricted or threatened, elite migrants (including some postsecondary international students whose revenue generating potential canada is increasingly dependent on), continue to travel and move their capital around for investment purposes (springer, 2020), including into oil pipelines on unceded lands. 7 alex aleinikoff, the director of new york-based zolberg institute for migration and mobility, wrote: “with the ability to move about freely sharply curtailed in nearly every country in the world, immigration scholars will need to think hard about a fundamental assumption of the field: that we are living in an ‘age of mobility’” (aleinikoff, 2020). migration & indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 253 civil rights and sovereignty respectively, and their distinction from and intersections with anti-capitalist (marxist) scholarship, especially in the earlier years of anti-colonial movements. we understand each body of scholarship to have been committed to vastly different political projects, and are aware also of recent critiques of racism being conflated with colonialism.8 following from these deliberations, our references to racialized, diasporic, black, and indigenous subjects at various points in this editorial are purposely non-specific, but never unthought. “terminology,” thomas king (2012, p. xiii) writes with his usual and piercing precision, “is always a rascal.” we also believe that terms come to be through elisions, erasures and essentialisms. this project aimed to continue and strengthen the work of thinking through the relations between indigenous and various arrivant subjectivities. we take responsibility for any confusion and acknowledge multiple specificities that remain unaddressed in this work. we bring you a collection of 10 articles, five dispatches, one book review and a creative intervention, most from self-identified racialized and indigenous scholars, all engaged in thinking about relational dynamics of migration and indigenous sovereignty. disciplined readers looking to deepen their understanding of one clear theme could be disappointed. although rooted in the conversations in canadian anti-racist scholarship (another limitation we are working with and in), contributors come from and engage with various sites where similar questions are being asked, and similar dynamics are underway, namely but not exclusively australia, new zealand, the pacific islands and parts of the postcolonial south, including latin america. we also fostered a resolutely interdisciplinary stance, so the works presented are from widely diverse disciplines, and social, political and epistemic locations. archives are drawn from local institutional and transnational histories, personal narratives and reflections, existing literature, disciplinary discourses, state policy and non-profit initiatives, teaching practices and international humanitarian crises. the writings as well are distinct – including in regard to language, semantics, style, etc. – as vehicles for ethics and politics. as such, various conventions are applied to naming places, identifying scholars, and acknowledging authors’ own social locations on the lands or countries they are working from. as editors, we did not make any conscious effort to smooth over or standardize this unevenness, but rather let contributors attend to the demands of the subject as per their own political convictions and ethical compass. the following section walks through this rich and varied array of works, organized according to the themes of “space, place, the nation and the postcolonial,” “internationalizing and indigenizing in settler nation building,” and “being in just relations or solidarity.” 8 see jodi byrd (2011 & 2019) on this; see cheryl harris (2019) for an insightful discussion of and challenge to the analytical separation between racism, colonialism and sovereignty. we gesture toward this as literature we have come across in the process of working on this collection, although its intricacies remain outside of the scope of this introductory essay. soma chatterjee & tania das gupta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 254 indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world: critical perspectives from anti-racist scholars of migration and mobility in the parlance of knowledge economy, close to two years dedicated to a special issue seems sacrilegious, but we carried on with the faith that anything worthwhile takes time. little did we know that 2020 would further derail and delay editorial work. the time it took to summarize works we read and discussed so many times also came as an interesting surprise, teaching us how the labour of selecting, reading and editing works is vastly different than that of placing them within an overarching vision (see tuck & yang, 2018, for beautiful discussion of the rewards and challenges of such work). this is not to say that we were keen to categorize the contributions. such an act, instead, goes against our commitment to break the silos between theoretical, political and epistemic orientations, an issue we come back to at the end. the themes that follow are porous also, making the works fall under multiple themes. in brief, while we do present a thematic organization below this is not a reflection of our understanding of the respective contribution made by each author. theorizing space, place, nation and the postcolonial we invited anti-racist scholars of migration and mobility to think through how they are grappling with indigenous self-determination in their respective areas of research, practice, scholarship. not surprisingly, the dynamics of place and space, commitment to understanding one’s place on indigenous lands, and the allied questions of place or nation, space, and nation state freedom were actively and conscientiously engaged. madelaine cahuas and alexandra matute engage women and non-binary black/afro-latinx, indigenous and brown latinx community workers in the city of toronto who practice a “way of being in place” (in the absence of any other mode of legal recognition than from the canadian state) that nevertheless refuses the standard citizenship label of “proud canadians.” theirs is an important challenge to the deeply entrenched desires for economic settlement and multicultural citizenship that circumscribe justice and politics for many racialized immigrants, bringing migrant and anti-racist justice into deep and disturbing tensions with indigenous sovereignty. this politics of refusal involves actively creating spaces for decolonial conversations (e.g., tales from the south, an initiative of poder & working women’s community centre), both on the everyday manifestations of and contestations to settler colonialism in canada, and the racial, colonial hierarchies imposed by “mejorando la raza” (notion of improving the race) that “haunts” the latinx diaspora. abdelfettah elkchirid, anh ngo and martha kuwee kumsa speak from varied locations within the circuits of empire, namely ethiopia, morocco & vietnam. their placelessness, which migration & indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 255 elkchirid articulates as “deep in my soul and deep in my body” is at the centre of diasporic experience, allowing critical empathy with the project of indigenous decolonization, while also troubling belonging, especially from within a liberal, eurocentric, inclusionary framework based on human rights. while inflected with the practices and pedagogical concerns in social work (particularly following the recommendations of the truth and reconciliation commission of canada, 2015), they highlight a spatial dynamic frequently neglected in the deeply nationally-demarcated discipline. working from within the established analytic of settler colonialism as a regime that destroys to replace, karen soldatic articulates how indigenous and migrant population management in australia is a biopolitical exercise. forefronting apparently disparate sites – governing of indigenous peoples via statistical and income management regimes, migrant detention practices, and migrant labour employed in disability care work with indigenous peoples – that are entangled by processes of “deep colonization” (deborah bird rose, 1999, in soldatic, this issue), their article is a necessary step toward bringing migration and critical disability studies into conversation with indigenous sovereignty. paloma villegas, patricia landolt and their co-authors bring us close to “home” to scarborough (a racially and ethnically diverse neighbourhood in ontario) to demonstrate convergent and divergent narration of migrant and indigenous presence. informed by the interdisciplinary workshop “crossing scarborough,” their article engages assemblage methodology and archival portraits by victoria freeman, joe hermer, ranu basu and bojana vidakenic to demonstrate the dynamic of invisibilization and hypervisibilization regulating migrant and indigenous presence in scarborough. their work is productively read alongside soldatic who mobilizes the notion of “circularity” to underscore how the australian settler colony reproduces itself through strategic presence (e.g., presentation of statistical data), absence (e.g., placing disability out of sight, banishing) and erasure (e.g., practices of eugenics and other forms of reproductive control) of the category of disability, and creating impairment in the process of eliminating it. both offer crucial reminders that settler colonialism is not an abstraction; rather the state and its institutions of legitimation are its arbiters. jaspreet ranauta draws on the modernity/coloniality framework to think through the transnational imperial linkages informing migration from indian british canal colonies in punjab to british columbia, canada, and the possibilities of telling these migration stories without silencing indigenous histories and presence. sedef arat-koc expands our understanding of why refugee protection and broader international relations should be brought into conversation with indigenous decolonization as they propose that the development of a critical refugee studies requires conversations with indigenous studies, especially in regard to place-based politics, land loss and planetary alternatives. in a vastly different challenge to place and land-based politics, nandita sharma locates the very notion of indigeneity as an imperial construct rooted in autochthony. drawing on examples from disparate sites soma chatterjee & tania das gupta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 256 and asynchronous times – e.g., the british imperial rule in india, the rwandan genocide, and the more recent crisis facing the rohingya peoples in myanmar – sharma investigates “the intersection of claims of autochthony with the hegemonic global system of national sovereignty” that have and continue to fuel deadly conflicts. these are grounds on which they question “the hegemonic association of national territorial sovereignty with decolonization.” internationalizing and indigenizing in settler nation building a smaller cluster of articles and dispatches draws attention to the growing nexus between migration and internationalization of higher education in settler colonies. internationalization, currently a key source of revenue for resource-strapped higher education, sits in curious but productive contradiction to indigenizing higher education (something we are witnessing in canada as we write). from aotearoa new zealand, vivienne anderson and maori scholar zoe bristowe posit internationalization of higher education as a key instrument of settler colonial nation building in aotearoa, new zealand. critiquing internationalization’s foci on trade relations and human capital, they support a place-based ethic of care reaching back to mātauranga māori and oceanic epistemologies that predate colonialism. at the same time however, internationalization creates opportunities for indigenous and diasporic subjects to be in conversation. moana (pacific islander) writer kabini sanga and martyn reynolds transmit a dispatch about one such example, leadership pacific, a space in which moana academic migrants recreate “tok stori” (a melanesian form of communication) or “storying” sessions inculcating alternative pedagogies of relationality and dialogic leadership. adrian downey, a mi’kmaw scholar from nova scotia, canada, in a related vein, reflects on what they call “two constants” in their life: conversations with “recent settlers” and “a journey to understand what it means to be mi’kmaq in the modern world.” bianca gomez, an international doctoral student in toronto, canada, contributes a dispatch about being an aspiring permanent resident, and simultaneously a precarious and deportable racialized temporary worker-student whose labour conditions are stringently monitored by the state. problematizing the settler-indigenous binary, gomez wonders about their agency in movements for decolonization. being in just relations or solidarity as this project was unfolding there was a groundswell of solidarity in the form of collective action against intense police brutality directed at indigenous and black communities, a litany of black deaths in police encounters, and in defense of indigenous land rights. we feel a sense of deep migration & indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 257 gratitude for the fantastic and honest actions and conversations on solidarity between black, indigenous and other racialized populations. indeed, the tensions and contradictions within various projects of justice, which black studies scholar andrea davis (lawrence et al., 2020) calls “competitive citizenship,” in which justice becomes a zero-sum game so “one can gain only when another loses,” was foundational to the special issue. it was heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time to witness the urgency and challenges of solidarity becoming the political conversation of our times and also a theme occupying a number of contributions. the question of theorizing one’s place as anti-racist feminist on an occupied land, elaine coburn argues, invites engagement with the rich body of indigenous women’s scholarship. in a rigorous review of indigenous feminist thought from 1985 to date, coburn identifies the themes of “resilience”, “resistance” and “resurgence”, each of which brings indigenous feminists into complicated relationships of solidarity with anti-racist feminists. such acts of engagement, the author attests, should “aim to build relationships with anti-racist feminisms on lands that sustain us all” and comes with the responsibility to not “flatten out a wide range of voices… into a monolithic pan-indigenous bloc.” indigenous solidarity for detained refugees has served as a powerful interrogation of whose lands refugees are excluded from. centering on “the logics and histories of settler colonial statism” in such diverse places as brazil, palestine, kashmir, usa and canada, harshita yalamarty’s dispatch points out the utility of borders, walls, identity documents and travel bans in land appropriation. they discuss how “asserting the sovereignty of indigenous nations as opposed to colonial borders” in such slogans as “no ban on stolen land” (i.e., denouncing the ban against muslim majority countries under donald trump), and the indigenous passports issued for refugees detained by the australian state in papua, new guinea, ground migrant and refugee justice in indigenous sovereignty. similarly, scaffolding their article with “taike” – a punjabi term denoting kinship – ranauta writes to forge critical kinship pathways based on “shared and interwoven colonial histories of oppression and power,” highlighting in particular how the punjabi diasporic presence and economic activities in the pacific northwest have been entangled with british colonial projects in india and canada. different locales within the web of empire (see elkchirid, ngo & kumsa, who are also grappling with this) are threaded together, an analytical stance crucial in understanding the challenges and promises of solidarity. cahuas and matute suggest that solidarity could emerge through a “de-colonial politic of belonging” evident among working class latinx community members, refugees and exiles, who subscribe to a “citizenship of convenience” or a refusal (see simpson, 2014) of what davis in a 2020 conversation with bonita lawrence called “the terms offered to us by the nation,” indicating a disruption (see dhamoon, 2013) to the politics of incorporation into settler-colonial logic. amar bhatia, a professor of law, builds on their experience of bringing indigenous legal systems and treaties soma chatterjee & tania das gupta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 258 into courses on immigration and refugee law. their dispatch focuses on the need to “translate” ideas about indigenous legal systems into activism and teaching, while cautioning about the “violence” of superficial incorporation. a key pillar of solidarity thinking is confronting uncomfortable truths (see lawrence & davis, 2020; lawrence et al., 2020), or as jodi byrd (2019, p. 207) suggests in the context of analytically centering blackness and indigeneity, to not glance away, to not make “too easy gestures of presumed affiliation and equivalency.” following that route and building on tiffany king’s call to think through the place of black discourse of conquest in contemporary discussions of genocide and settler colonialism, rachel zellars explores the “unthought”: the well-rooted “‘bare life’ of anti-blackness in our relations.” positioning black struggles on turtle island within an abolitionist framework, zellars invites us to grapple with “antagonisms of history,” akin to robert warrior’s invitation to “pick up the trail” of the shared history of “black people and indian people” (2006, pp. 322-323), as crucial to imagine a way of living “otherwise.”9 sedef arat-koc also engages liberatory indigenous scholarship on place-based sovereignty in their visioning for critical refugee studies, while also cautioning readers against any guarantee of solidarity between refugee and indigenous struggles. in their untitled creative intervention, andile gosine “stitches together” the exploitation of the caribbean diaspora and first people’s systematic displacement since the onset of colonization through a seamless network of images invoking shipwreck, the south asian cultural practice of lighting deeyas, and first nations beadwork. the “shared wreckage” of colonization, they say, entwines the “past, present and futures” of these communities. in their review of manu karuka’s book empire’s tracks, asmita bhutani, a doctoral student from toronto offers an example of one such historic entanglement: between chinese railroad workers and the cheyanne, pawnee & lakota peoples on whose lands parts of the central pacific railroads were built. the book is an impressive work not only on railroad colonialism, financialization of land and frontier logics, but also, as bhutani writes, “a remarkable piece of scholarship that harbors the potential for informing activist agenda for anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist struggles not just in the us but also other colonized indigenous nations as canada, new zealand and hawaii among others.” in the following, concluding section we transition to a series of summary observations, largely informed by our experience as editors of this project, our exciting, challenging, thoughtful and humbling conversations with the contributors and our very generous reviewers who pushed the boundaries of our thinking, but not least by our experience of being scholars and educators 9 elaine coburn in this issue also gestures via dua and amadahy towards the “often-occluded black indigeneity.” see also robyn maynard (2017), the recent conversation between andrea davis & bonita lawrence (lawrence et al., 2020), and leanne simpson, shama rangwala & robyn maynard in conversation with andrea davis (davis et al., 2020) on how to consciously and systematically engage in acts of solidarity between black, indigenous and other racialized subjects. migration & indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 259 of anti-racism and migration committed to decolonial solidarity. we offer these as “visioning,” for us and our students, and also as invitations to colleagues with similar commitment and inquiries. within and away from anti-racist scholarship on migration and indigenous sovereignty migrant and indigenous justice are structurally congruent but frequently appear to be nearly mutually exclusive and stripped off of mutual social relational entanglements in state policy realms, popular political discourses and non-profit governance. until recently, this was true in academic research and scholarship as well. this disconnect, as we have made clear, was one of the key curiosities informing this project. and yet, following byrd’s (2011, p. xxiv) caution about a liberal democratic apparatus shaping “freedom at the expense of another,” and andrea davis’ (lawrence et al., 2020) invitation to think about “tak[ing] up space that does not deny other possibilities of life,” we were careful not to collapse issues that require specific attention, nuances of articulation and careful execution even as we remained critical of how identities and subjectivities have been harnessed in the service of colonial capitalism. as we say this, our social locations, political affiliations and commitments, and historic entanglements raise crucial questions. asian diasporic subjectivity is increasingly an important site of inquiry. the subject positions we each embody have been typically understood as aspirational, positioned between enslaved, indentured and other precarious labour as the “model minority,” with a steadfast mantra of what philosopher lewis gordon has identified as “be white; above all, don’t be black” (see jean kim, 2020). more recently, asian subjects have come to be referred to as non-black, nonindigenous persons of colour. if the former, aspirational subject has been weaponized for the purpose of the liberal multicultural nations of the west (jean kim, 2020; davis et al., 2020), the latter two categories acquire meaning by important dis-affiliations. it was no surprise that questions were raised about the ethics and politics of us co-leading a project full of “cacophonies” (byrd, 2011, p. xxvii) and contradictions. to put it plainly, while humbling, and opening up expansive horizons of anti-racist, diasporic and indigenous social and political thought (that we remain committed to engaging further), this work also raised thorny questions, deep emotions and politics of identities. it is not an overstatement to say that the editors who started this project are not the ones who are bringing it to an end. nevertheless, we noticed important themes (some reinforcing existing scholarly trends), exciting promises, and disturbing polarizations in anti-racist scholarship on migration and indigeneity, which we outline below. first and foremost, we noticed a stable commitment to solidarity, both in thinking about research, teaching and theorizing, reflections on subject soma chatterjee & tania das gupta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 260 positions, and the responsibilities that come with it. most contributors worked with keen awareness of anti-racism’s epistemological disregard of indigenous sovereignty, and offered some tangible pathways toward what is now understood as “a twofold commitment”; that is, to “considering how diasporic populations remain implicated in the ongoing violences of settler colonialism,” and to “practicing an intersectional politics of decolonial solidarity” (attewell et al., 2018, p. 192). in one way or another, all invested emotional and intellectual energies in conceptualizing their place in a land in which “the avenues laid out for immigrants’ success and empowerment are paved over native lands and sovereignty” (saranillio, 2013, p. 286). we remain excited about the ways divergent worlds – those of indigenous, black and racialized peoples, with all their diversities, and mutual knowns and unknowns – are coming together and making efforts to present a decolonial front. we worry, however, about a relative inattention to the totality of the colonial project. instead, a concern over complicity directs theorizing of one’s place & place making, eclipsing, in the process what nicholas de genova (2020) simply but powerfully articulates as “the relations between human life and state power,” manifest in this context in the tangible dynamics of land and labour in reproducing settler colonial property (see day, 2016). in contrast, we remember, among others, glen coulthard’s (2013, 2014a; podur, 2015; walia, 2015) unambiguous call for the death of capitalism, eve tuck & wayne yang’s (2012) caution not to metaphorize decolonization, and roxanne dunbar-ortiz’s (2016; dixon, 2006) reminder to not forget the importance of class & capital analysis as fundamental to opening up a meaningful horizon of anticolonial justice for indigenous peoples.10 on a related note, we also draw attention to an overall slippage of antiimperialist analytic from discussions of solidarity. growing and crucial conversations around indigenous and black relations show how far these communities have come in terms of understanding their deep relationality as part of the settler colonial frameworks in the americas. as our understanding of abolition and sovereignty as different but entangled frameworks of liberation deepen via these conversations, the diminishing role of racialized 10 while a detailed discussion of these concerns is beyond our scope, dunbar-ortiz’s following response to a question about her politics in an interview with chris dixon (2006) could be instructive: “well, i don’t know any more in terms of coherent descriptions. i continue – mainly out of stubbornness – to call myself a marxist. i still think it’s very important to keep focused on capitalism and the importance of class analysis. it’s in that sense that i still pay tribute to marxism. it’s sort of like if i was a physicist. all physicists are newtonians. they are newtonians plus everything that came after, but they wouldn’t feel ashamed of that. that’s the kind of debt i feel toward marx, who clarified the role of capital. we have to build upon that, not forget it. i think it’s forgotten too much in our social movements, or not even considered in the first place.” migration & indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 261 labour exploitation within the settler colonial edifice of destruction and replacement is troubling.11 this is not to say all labour or labouring conditions are equal. we don’t intend to homogenize the diverse ways in which land and natural resources are extracted, nor how our labours are deployed, but simply to indicate that they are all positioned relationally for the singular production of surplus and eventually capital. we write with careful observations of how the social reproduction of these extractive systems is ensured through heterosexist patriarchy, and by keeping aspirations divided (bannerji, 2015; smith, 2006; smith et al., 2010).12 in the context of the liberal canadian nation state’s enthusiastic embrace of discourses of recognition and reconciliation (coulthard, 2014a), ceremonial acknowledgements of indigenous land while continuing to aggressively protect extractive political economic relations, often via migration that sustains the racial regime of property relations (bhander, 2018), this analytical slippage remains a major concern. moving forward, we propose that anti-racist scholarship on relationality and complicity should develop an analysis that does not lose sight of the capitalist colonial project of simultaneous dispossession and precarious incorporation, a dynamic in which competing and cacophonous civil rights claims continue to take shape, and therefore, should be not only gestured toward, rather actively and concretely engaged with. secondly (and related to the above), we share concerns about anti-racist thought developing in vastly different trajectories. the one we discuss above embraces the urgency of decolonizing relations and articulates decolonization with recognition of indigenous difference and sovereignty. the second trajectory, on the other hand, operates from within an anti-imperialist framework, one in which freedom means freedom from a world of ongoing dispossession of the poor and working class and those on the move, and postcolonialism is a new mode of global governance. contrary to the first, it firmly places decolonization outside the rubric of sovereignty and launches a critique of indigenous nationhood on grounds of its contradictory, arguably deadly, and possessive logic (sharma, 2020; see desai, in byrd, 2011). an observation grounded in the deep and ongoing disappointments of the 11 on this note, we draw attention to iyko day’s conceptualization of settler colonial triangulation and yet the importance of place-based solidarity in anticapitalism. see also attewell et al. (2018), an excellent book review forum on how day’s book alien capital has been taken up across disciplines in humanities and social sciences, including in indigenous studies. 12 we remember june jordan’s writing in the context of feminist organizing: “i know i am not alone. there must be hundreds of other women, maybe thousands, who feel as i do. there may be hundreds of men who want the same drastic things to happen. but how do you hook up with them? how can you interlink your own struggle and goals with these myriad, hypothetical people who are hidden entirely or else concealed by stereotypes and/or generalities of "platform" such as any movement seems to spawn? 1 don't know. i don't like it, this being alone when it is clear that there will have to be multitudes working together, around the world, if radical and positive change can be forced upon the heinous status quo i despise in all its overwhelming power” (jordan, 1989; the quotation above is cited from the epigraph in bannerji, 2005, p. 144). soma chatterjee & tania das gupta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 262 postcolonial world, this line of thinking is in generative tensions with byrd’s concerns about “trap[ping] indigenous peoples within the dialectics of genocide where the only conditions of possibility imagined are either that indigenous peoples will die through genocidal policies of colonial settler states (thus making room for more open and liberatory societies) or that they will commit heinous genocides in defense of lands and nations” (2011, p. xxxiv). one also remembers robert nichols’ (2020, p. 8) theorization (partially in response to the critique of possessive logic above) of “recursive dispossession” in which the dispossessed “are figured as ‘original owners,’ but only retroactively, a reflection of the peculiarity of the dispossessive process itself,” as in “possession is the effect of dispossession” (see also brenna bhandar’s 2018 discussion of dispossession as both a prerequisite and a consequence). and yet in a global order in which immigrants, migrants and refugees continue to meet indigenous nations in contested geopolitical territories, and thereby face the complex responsibility of carving out a workable and just coexistence, recognition and complicity which seem the dominant foci of anti-racist scholarship fall short as analytics. we should strive, rather, to envision justice and freedom in a world in which mobility is an always already condition – an aftermath of colonial and imperial displacement, a desire to move from the “zone of nonbeing” (fanon, 1952, p. xii), a key pathway to freedom – that is, admittedly, accessed unequally by dominant and subaltern actors. following adrian smith (scholar strike canada, 2020b), we do not mean movement to be a mere act of crossing borders, rather, it is an act of “stealing back life against unfreedom, carcerality, against racism which lubricates capitalist profiteering.” workers, smith compellingly says, “must continue to nestle everywhere, settle everywhere and establish connections everywhere.” however, we also remember byrd’s (2011, xiii) cogent critique of the poststructural challenge to the originary, of definitive appeal to anti-racist and postcolonial critiques: “in a world growing increasingly enamored with faster, flatter, smooth, where positionality doesn’t matter so much as how it is that we travel there, indigeneity matters.” it is in this context of world-wide migratory movements, colonial injuries, and contradictions of redress that we situate this special issue; to seek out, appreciate, and as needed, struggle over various conceptualizations of migrant-indigenous relations in all its cacophonies and possibilities. bringing different analytical pathways and scholarly commitments closer without losing their distinct foci, we attest, is of particular urgency at our current political moment.13 there is a need not 13 jodi byrd, for example, has shown us the potential of indigenous and postcolonial theories and epistemologies in conversation. their engagement with postcolonial, poststructural and subaltern theories, we note with respect, is against the grain in the context of indigenous resistance to critical theory (see byrd, 2011, pp. xxxi-xxxv for a discussion of this). similar engagement is found in the works of robert nichols cited here. conversations, as this discussion and others clearly show, are not easy to start, let alone sustain. however, they need to be committed to. migration & indigenous sovereignty in a chronically mobile world studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 246-267, 2020 263 only to understand how we all find ourselves together, but also, as simpson (davis et al., 2020) has conceptualized, to forge a “constellation of coresistances” to colonial sexual racial capitalism. we end with remembering robert warrior (2006, p. 325) writing about the future of black and indigenous relations in north america (an invitation that, we note, applies across times and spaces to various historic and contemporary relationships): what seems clear is that, on the streets of this continent’s inner cities and on the roads and pathways that cross indigenous enclaves around the world, the black people and red people will keep unfolding a history that criss crosses, zigs, zags, and doubles back. such acts of caring and critical engagement, allowing us to embrace what is unthought or difficult, imagine living otherwise, appreciate shared past, present and futures, and informing a justice rich future, are what we continue to wish for and strive toward. when so much remains to be done this end can only be a new beginning … acknowledgments we sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their time and keen insights. this collection is better because reviewers went above and beyond their peer review commitments and provided rigorous yet generous suggestions. thanks to the contributors, not only for their thoughtful works but for their patience, as this publication was delayed due to a number of challenges, including the global pandemic. this project unfolded along with much unravelling of our world, but thankfully also with vibrant social and political movements and conversations that restore faith in humanity. finally, sincere gratitude to david butz for trusting this project and generous copyediting support, and to vanessa farr for editorial support with the dispatches. references abolition: a journal of insurgent politics. 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(2015). truth and reconciliation commission of canada: executive summary. http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/honouring_the_truth_reconciling_for_the_future_july_23_2 015.pdf tuck, e., & yang, k. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization. indigeneity, education & society, 1(1), 1-40. tuck, e., & yang, k. (2018). building things not to last forever. critical ethnic studies, 4(2), 1-12. unist’ot’en. (2020) news archive. https://unistoten.camp/media/news/# united nations. (2020). covid-19 and indigenous peoples. https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/covid-19.html upadhyay, n. (2019). making of “model” south asians on the tar sands: intersections of race, caste, and indigeneity. critical ethnic studies, 5(1-2), 152-173. walia, h. (2015, january 21). interview with glen coulthard. rabble. http://rabble.ca/columnists/2015/01/land-relationship-conversation-glen-coulthard-onindigenous-nationhood warrior, r. (2006) afterword. in t. miles & s. holland (eds.), crossing waters, crossing worlds: the african diaspora in indian country (p. 321-326). duke university press. wu, c., qian, y., & wilkes, r. (2020). anti-asian discrimination and the asian-white mental health gap during covid-19. ethnic & racial studies. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2020.1851739 yellowhead institute. (2020, april 30). democracy dialogues: first nations’ crisis response before, during, and beyond covid-19 [video]. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020/04/30/democracy-dialogues-first-nations-crisisresponse-before-during-and-beyond-covid-19/ bleakley final before ts correspondence address: paul bleakley, school of law, middlesex university, london, uk, nw4 4bt; email: pj.bleakley@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 unconventional labour: environmental justice and working-class ecology in the new south wales green bans paul bleakley middlesex university, uk abstract the new south wales union movement embraced the principles of heritage and conservationism in the 1970s through the imposing of “green bans” – a strategy wherein union members refused to work on construction projects that were a threat to the state’s natural or built environment. led by radicals like builders labourers’ federation leader jack mundey, the green bans were seen in several sectors as a departure from the traditional “old left” priorities of securing workers’ wages and conditions. rather than a hard shift towards radicalism, this article proposes that the green bans were instead reflective of an already existing conservationist tradition in the new south wales union movement. this reinterpretation is predicated on a content analysis of extant historical material such as contemporaneous news articles, personal memoirs, transcripts of political speeches and archival documents related to the policing of left-wing activism in the 1960s and 1970s. the results show that an existing tradition of engagement with a broad spectrum of social issues in the new south wales union movement predates the emergence of the new left, including the commitment to environmental justice principles that underpinned the green bans. keywords working-class ecology; environmental justice; trade union; green ban; gentrification; new left; australia introduction the late 1960s and early 1970s were a transformative time in australian politics, as they were around the world. the predominantly conservative social values of the post-war era began to give way to a new model for political engagement, predicated on more existential concepts related to antiimperialism and new social movements instead of the established binaries of marxism and bourgeois capitalism. while responsible for energising a new generation of social activists, this shift in the ideological landscape caused a unconventional labour studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 459 profound schism in the australian left. on one end of this divide was the old left, made up largely of trade unions which remained acutely focused on the conventional socialist mission to improve conditions for workers. on the other was the new left, a broader church of leftist activists campaigning on a diverse cross-section of areas from environmental conservation to civil rights for all (hamilton, 2016; marcuse, 2014). the green bans reflect a moment of convergence in which the old and new left in new south wales found common ground in their activist agendas. an action popularised by the builders labourers’ federation (blf) under communist party leaders bob pringle and jack mundey, the green bans were a policy in which trade unions like the blf could order its members to stop work on building projects that threatened the natural environment or, importantly, the historical built environment in areas of sydney like the rocks and hunters hill (burgmann & burgmann, 1998). the willingness to go on strike in protest of such issues seemingly signalled a shift to the new left from the trade unions that, historically, had focused more on matters of wages and conditions than social justice issues like heritage and conservation. while the departure from an exclusive focus on traditional labour issues seemed like a divisive point for the old and new left, this article shows that in new south wales the green bans were in keeping with a tendency towards radicalism that long existed in the city’s leftist community – long predating the emergence of the new left on the global stage (see lockwood, 1982; wreckers again, 1957). as this article outlines, the new left was less a “new” concept than a continuation of a proud tradition of activism that extended beyond traditional union-led campaigning, and focused more on galvanising the strength of the trade unions in support of various ancillary social justice concerns. this article describes how, in new south wales, a broader social justice agenda (notably environmental justice and conservation) was driven by proponents of social justice causes working from within old left organisations such as the trade unions and the local communist party (barca, 2014; coombes, 1996; soja, 2010). this article sets out to problematise the traditional conflation of the trade union movement with an old left that is only concerned with labour rights, to the exclusion of other, intersectional social justice issues (barca, 2014; stevis et al., 2018). the green bans have often been explained as a product of new left influence on the unions (including in hagiographic work by those at the forefront of the movement) (see burgmann, 2000, 2008). however, historical evidence suggests a different reality: new south wales unions were already steeped in a radical tradition of social justice campaigning. the reframing of activism in the new south wales old left is informed by a range of existing material outlining its campaign strategy, before and during the green bans era. the case for the new south wales unions being as concerned with wider social justice issues before the new left’s arrival as after is informed here by a content analysis of source material such as paul bleakley studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 460 contemporaneous news accounts, political speeches and materials, personal memoirs of those involved in the leftist movement and, in some cases, archival documentation related to the policing of the unions and other leftist groups during the period in question. eric monkkonen (2002) describes the study of such source material as inherently “opaque” and subject to the innumerable variables associated with the context in which it was produced (p. 45). as such, the historical material used in this article has been periodised and contextualised using what theda skocpol (1984) notably characterises as “sociology’s historical imagination” – an interpretive process that seeks to examine social phenomena in the sociocultural environment in which it occurred, rather than undertaking an evaluation that is effectively anachronistic. paradoxically, it is this historical analysis that offers the greatest opportunity for contemporary social justice campaigners to draw on the lessons of the green bans by providing a context-sensitive assessment of the tradition of social (and environmental) justice activism that predates the arrival of the new left. i do this by first turning to the existing literature on the new south wales green bans, then moving into a broader discussion of the intersection between trade unionism and political activism in australia. from here, i adopt a historical perspective to show that social justice (including environmental justice) was firmly on the unions’ agenda prior to the arrival of the new left in the mid-to-late 1960s. further, i examine the new left’s arrival as connected to the existing tradition of social justice campaigning in new south wales, embodied in the prominent green bans movement that took centre stage in the early 1970s. green bans in new south wales that the 1970s new south wales union movement participated in green bans was a significant moment for australian left-wing activism and, as such, prompted extensive analysis in the years that followed. consequently, there is a diversity of academic and popular literature on the subject that documents this period. most of this material, however, is concerned more with recounting the narrative of activism in the green bans era than explaining its emergence in the context of the old/new left divisions in the australian left, or as an extension of existing patterns of social justice campaigning in new south wales. it is this gap that my analysis addresses. my intention is not to revisit the details of the green bans, which are already well understood, but rather to take a wider perspective on the campaign and position it in its appropriate historical context. in doing so, the paper reframes our understanding of the extent to which the new left influenced the conservation campaign carried out by the trade unions, and also emphasises potential opportunities for collaboration with trade unions on environmental justice issues (burgmann, 2000; sparrow, 2004). even so, the existing unconventional labour studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 461 literature on the campaign (and the period around it) provides useful information essential to constructing a more complete appreciation of the events in question. perhaps the most comprehensive coverage of this era comes from meredith and verity burgmann in green bans, red union: environmental activism and the new south wales builders labourers’ federation (1998). with unprecedented access to the blf archives, burgmann and burgmann were able to construct the most comprehensive account of the green bans to date. their research suggests that, “the interaction between new left ideology and nswblf practice was, in the context of sydney in the early 1970s, a twoway process since the sydney new left was affected by its experience with the union” (burgmann & burgmann, 1998, p. 126). as the book explains, this two-way process operated such that sydney’s new left demonstrated to organisations like the blf that its belief in egalitarianism coexisted soundly with union values, whereas the trade unions showed far-left comrades how their resources and experience with collective action could assist the new left in conducting effective protest campaigns. the burgmanns’ position on the influential role played by the blf in incorporating shared new left values is further discussed in james colman’s biography of blf leader jack mundey (2016). in an endnote, meredith burgmann writes that, “to those of us involved in resident action groups and blf support groups at the time, jack [mundey] and the other blf leaders inspired in us a sense of hope, an absolute belief that we could change the world … or at least our community” (2016, p. 300). burgmann goes on to note that, “the rise of the new left and the de-stalinisation of the australian communist party” in the green bans era was responsible for liberating the left-wing activist community in sydney and, ultimately, changed the nature of union activism in australia (burgmann in colman, 2016, p. 300-301). in this respect, the green bans reflected a leftist movement that was once again free to acknowledge that environmentalism and conservation had always been central to marxism (soja, 2010; stevis et al., 2018). indeed, friedrich engels himself wrote as early as 1876 that, “after the mighty advances … in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-today production activities” (engels, 1951, p. 83). jeff sparrow supports engels’ view on workers’ potential to address issues beyond the traditional paradigm of economic conflict, asserting that “the most important aspect of a class analysis is identifying the working-class as not simply a victim of environmental problems but a force capable of overcoming them” (2004, p. 5). this realisation of labour’s ability to influence issues usually reserved for the new left is highly apparent in the green bans, which kay anderson and jane jacobs (1999) construct as “the birth of modern environmental politics in australia” and note “have been canonised as examples of class-based urban social movements” (p. 1018). as paul bleakley studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 462 they rightly point out, the green bans are an interesting focus for analysis of how left-wing activism evolved in australia in this period, a profound moment when “the uniquely australian ‘larrikin left’ flexed its political muscle in nonworkplace arenas” (anderson & jacobs, 1999, p. 1018). trade unionism, politics and activism: an australian context the trade union movement in australia has been the subject of much commentary in the socio-political movements literature. in their study of the country’s unions, mark bray and jacques rouillard categorise the australian trade union movement as “autonomous … unlike the vast majority of union movements around the world, autonomous unions [like those in australia] are dominated by neither the state nor political parties” (1996, p. 198). stephen deery and helen de cieri identify a range of variables influencing union membership in australia, including gender, industry, family history and the mobility of the workforce (1991, pp. 60-61). notably for this study, their research found that, “employees who favoured the redistribution of income and wealth in society had a significantly higher probability of union membership” (deery & de cieri, 1991, p. 69). what emerges is a scenario in which workers supportive of social collectivism (in this case, social welfare) are more likely to join a union and, thus, are already primed to become subscribers to the organisation’s broader position on other collectivist social justice issues like environmental protection, which are removed from the economic issues that led them to join in the first place. despite sharing similar socio-political aims, not all australian unions have historically engaged in activism in the same way. although all trade unions campaign for workers’ rights in some capacity, the extent of political mobilisation in any particular union is often down to the historical and sociocultural conditions that affect it. maurizio atzeni (2009) argues that labour mobilisation is the product of workers “becom[ing] conscious of how ‘unjust’ a certain situation is … once collectively they can share and strengthen the same perceptions” (p. 12). in atzeni’s view, mobilisation is not the result of a stalwart union membership being ordered to take action by an activist leadership, but instead the result of shared grievances that provide the groundwork for collective action. atzeni’s position is somewhat at odds with john kelly’s theory of mobilisation (1998), which argues for the centrality of directive guidance to collective action. the competing premises of kelly and atzeni’s theories on mobilisation are important to the story of the green bans in new south wales. whereas the influence of charismatic leaders like jack mundey and mick fowler cannot be denied, leadership alone cannot account for the willingness of union members to participate in actions like green bans, through which they fought for causes like heritage and conservation rather than typical union concerns like working conditions or pay rises. there were direct benefits to the green bans for workers: many unconventional labour studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 463 of the heritage areas targeted for “protection” in sydney were traditional working-class areas, where the possibility of gentrification and development posed a tangible threat to “price out” existing residents, a large proportion of whom were affiliated with trade unions (barca, 2014; marcuse, 2009). the green bans thus reflected an urgent call to action for local union workers, predicated on the very real risk that unrestrained development would eventually leave them homeless. further, the scale of gentrification threatened to deprive all urban residents (including union members) of access to (a) heritage sites and (b) green space, already in limited supply in a city like sydney. the “right to the city” is central to spatial (and environmental) justice in the urban environment and, as peter marcuse (2009) and edward soja (2010) assert, can act as a “glue that binds” radical thinkers and campaigners, in spite of ideological differences that may exist in other areas. here, the common cause binding unions and new left oriented activists is manifested in the forces of gentrification, a process that soja characterises “as a force behind the displacement of preexisting poor populations” (p. 216) and “another form of spatial colonization, less overtly dominated by the state but not entirely different from the blunt institutional expressions of territorial power” in apartheid south africa or occupied palestine (p. 43). the conceptualisation of gentrification as a form of colonisation and territorial control goes some way toward explaining new left interest in “the cause.” whereas working-class union members fought for environmental justice for primarily practical reasons, for the new left gentrification represented yet another case of the elite contributing to the oppression of a subaltern population – in this instance, working-class urban residents. environmentalism is not solely the philosophical domain of the new left, however. in their introduction to a special issue of globalizations on environmental labour studies, stevis et al. (2018) assert that ecological conservation is, in fact, central to the marxist concepts that guide the trade union movement. this centrality is particularly true in relation to gentrification. as stevis et al. contend, “while nature is privately appropriated and exploited by capital, workers’ organisations tend to construct nature as labour’s other, a place to enjoy or a place to be protected from destruction” (2018, p. 439). in the same special issue, barca and leonardi (2018) build on this foundation to conceptualise a “working-class ecology … the place where working-class communities live and work, being typically affected by environmental injustice” (p. 487; emphasis in original). barca and leonardi go on to develop a topology of labour organisations (including, but not limited to, rank-and-file unions) in relation to their position on environmental justice and commitment to combatting environmental injustices that negatively impact the working-class ecology of local regions and memberships. importantly, barca and leonardi’s concept of working-class ecology is not inherently linked to the macro-issues of climate change, but instead the immediate physical environment workers inhabit. it is paul bleakley studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 464 this element that makes their construction of working-class ecology most relevant to the green bans, carried out in a period before these macroenvironmental issues came to the fore, and in pursuit of immediate defence of their environment from gentrification. a later article by barca (2014) refers to this as the “intersection of work and nature” and argues in favour of an interpretive framework that “incorporates analysis of the landscape as evidence of past human labour” (p. 3). doing so blurs the lines between the natural world and the built environment, allowing for greater incorporation of heritage protection actions into the broader discussion of environmental labour activism. i adopt barca’s conceptualisation of environmental labour in my analysis: here, labour and environmental activism are treated as ideologically-aligned movements that are “socially engaged … with utopian aims to expose unequal power relations, and promote new social or environmental orders” (bailey & gwyther, 2010, p. 1). in this sense, while seemingly motivated by distinct driving factors, the “utopian aims” of equity (and opposition to destructive capital) are shared by both trade unionists and environmental activists, offering a broad conceptual foundation for trade union green bans in 1970s new south wales. setting the scene for green bans in new south wales, before 1968 even before world war ii, the new south wales trade union movement reflected on the experience of campaigning on the type of broad social justice issues that, later, were central to the green bans of the 1970s. key members of the communist party and union movement were openly advocating for social change outside of the conventional wheelhouse of labour rights. the “new social movements” ushered in by the new left in the 1960s were (in reality) already a focus for many activists in new south wales, where there was a lengthy history of using organised labour to pursue causes outside its conventional remit. wright was not the only unionist in this era who saw great potential in using the apparatus of the trade unions to influence government policy outside of labour rights. in the period immediately after world war ii, the japanese withdrawal from indonesia resulted in a territorial dispute in which indonesia sought to assert its independence from previous colonial rulers, the netherlands. in solidarity with the indonesian campaign for self-governance, the sydney branch of the waterside workers’ federation (wwf) announced a “black ban” on dutch ships from 23 september 1945, refusing to work on dutch vessels until indonesian independence was recognised (sydney boycott, 1945). the labour council confirmed the boycott and it soon extended to other unions like the seaman’s union of australia and the federated ship painters and dockers union (lockwood, 1982). the ban on dutch ships lasted four years until 1949, when the dutch forfeited their claim to indonesia. the so-called “black armada boycott” was not an aberrant example of union political activism in the era: at a “peace unconventional labour studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 465 conference” held in sydney on 12 june 1950, representatives from the largest new south wales unions agreed to industrial action designed to combat a range of issues from nuclear proliferation to imperialist policy in south-east asia. jim healy, federal secretary of the wwf, noted at the conference that it was the unions’ position that, “peace is today, war is tomorrow, unless we stop it” (peace council, 1950). the post-war union movement was highly concerned with political acts that were seen as a threat to peace and, more importantly, saw an opportunity for union members to be active in disrupting the ability of governments to pursue these policies, both at home and abroad. although the concept of the new left was still in its infancy in europe and had yet to truly arrive in australia, the foundational, anti-imperialist principles of this philosophy were already being established in the australian left on the docks and worksites of new south wales. although the idea of formal green bans has been popularly credited to jack mundey and his colleagues in the blf in the early 1970s, union action to prevent developments similar to the green bans had been taking place in sydney for more than 10 years before properly entering the cultural and political zeitgeist with the struggle to protect the rocks. in may 1957, car sales company auto auctions sought to demolish a block of flats in the innercity suburb woolloomooloo and put in its place a car yard (homes before profits, 1957). the efforts to protect the building were led by alderman thomas wright, who campaigned for council to acquire the building in an effort to prevent auto auctions demolishing it and displacing residents (wreckers again, 1957). demolition began at the st. kilda apartments before the council could take possession of the property, but was stopped when the building workers’ industrial union (bwiu) agreed not to participate in “dwellings being demolished in a time of great housing shortage” (city council moves, 1957, p. 12). even so, auto auctions persisted in its attempts to demolish the building, continuing to send a non-union crew to destroy the property. in one instance in november 1957, 30 members of the building unions working on a nearby property were forced to chase a demolition crew employed by auto auctions away from the property, saying that “if the wreckers return, so will they [the union workers]” to prevent the destruction of the building (new policy needed, 1957, p. 10). though the unions managed to prevent the demolition of the st. kilda apartments, the combined efforts of the state alp, labour council, trade unions and residents’ action groups failed to pressure the state government to give discretionary powers to prevent demolitions to city councils in new south wales (demolitions are still on, 1957). the bwiu decision to stand against redevelopment is an important precursor to the local focus of the green bans more than a decade later. in their respective analyses, both nugent (2011) and uzzell and rathzel (2013) note that the history of environmentalism in the union movement is one that has evolved over time from a reactive, local focus on micro-issues (such as paul bleakley studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 466 redevelopment plans, as in the auto auctions case) to more global, proactive campaigning on macro-issues (like climate change). as nugent (2011) makes clear, it is often the localisation of environmental and conservation issues that prompts trade union members – not natural environmental idealogues – to participate in industrial action. in the auto auctions case, the conservation campaign was constructed as an effort to prevent the destruction of housing during a time of shortage, something that unquestionably impacted members. a similar argument would later be made in regard to the gentrification issue that lay at the centre of the 1970s green bans, albeit with a new left influence that allowed that campaign to be seen as both a reactive, local and proactive, ideological affair (barca & leonardi, 2018; soja, 2010). the new left arrives – radicalism reignited in the post-war era, a rift began to form in the global leftist movement between traditional labour-oriented marxists and a new breed of progressive who believed the left needed to turn its focus to a broader range of social issues affecting the proletariat, from feminism and civil rights to disarmament and an end to global imperialism. proponents of this new left like herbert marcuse believed that stabilisation in the economic system meant that the working classes were no longer incited to revolt in the way marx described and, thus, the next stage of human liberation was to overcome the “onedimensional” state of spiritual and intellectual poverty brought on by the triumph of capitalism (marcuse, 1964). like marcuse, economic prosperity was cited by other new left theorists like john saville as the root cause of the stagnation of socialism, and “the most important single reason for the miserable performance of the left … [and] its intellectual collapse in the face of full employment and the welfare state” (1959, p. 10). by the dawn of the 1960s, even eminent sociologist c. wright mills was calling for a reconstruction of leftist opposition: in his “letter to the new left” (1960), mills argued for a political left that continued to fight against oppression in all its forms, regardless of the fact that the old left marxist movement had essentially “won” its fight for improved wages and conditions in most industrialised countries by this point. despite mills’ call to arms, the arguments made by new left philosophers about the need for the left to expand the scope of its struggle to other oppressed groups had already taken hold in the old left of new south wales politics, notably reflected in the decades-long tradition of taking industrial action to support various social and political causes in the state’s trade union movement. the new left’s influence on the australian protest movement began in earnest with the elevation of laurie aarons as general secretary of the communist party of australia (cpa) after the retirement of old left traditionalist lance sharkey in 1965 (symon, 2005). the cpa had experienced a split in its membership the year before, driven by overseas unconventional labour studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 467 tensions between the soviet union and china. when the cpa threw its support behind the soviet union, prominent australian communists like the blf’s norm gallagher and wwf’s ted bull broke away to form the communist party of australia (marxist-leninist), arguing that in supporting the soviets the cpa had abandoned the basic tenets of marxism-leninism that united all communist movements around the world (knight, 1998). sharkey was a veteran leader of the cpa, installed in the role by the soviet government in 1930, and, as such, remained stalwartly committed to the soviet union. at the time, aarons led the pro-soviet faction and, in turn, he was well-placed to replace sharkey the following year. aarons’ initial support for the soviet union changed significantly after he became leader of the cpa: while initially an ardent advocate of nikita khrushchev’s liberalisation policies, he ultimately became a vocal critic of brezhnevian imperialism in the late 1960s (wells, 1970). aarons’s leadership of the cpa coincided with the election of cpa member jack mundey as secretary of the new south wales branch of the blf in 1968, around the same time that aarons began to adopt a more progressive, new left position on the cpa’s role in modern political advocacy (burgmann & burgmann, 1998; wells, 1970). mundey, a former professional rugby league player, was a long-time member of the cpa with a history of demonstrating on new left issues like nuclear disarmament and the vietnam war. he was arrested for defying police orders at an anti-war protest in 1964, only two years before becoming the sydney district president of aarons’ cpa, with his rise providing further indication of the ideological shift taking place in the party (at least in sydney) during this period (colman, 2016). the 1968 rebellion against soviet occupation in czechoslovakia has often been cited as a turning point in aarons’ ideological evolution, marking his final rejection of soviet imperialism. however, there is archival evidence to suggest that aarons was closely involved with some of australia’s most radical new left protesters even before coming out in favour of the cpa shifting further away from old left, pro-soviet principles. surveillance conducted by the special branch in queensland, a neighbouring state, identified aarons as having attended a meeting of the society for democratic action (sda) at the group’s headquarters on 27 march 1967. led by radical student organisers like brian laver and mitch thompson, the sda modelled itself on the new left contingent of the american students for a democratic society (sds), which later evolved into “the weathermen” or “weather underground” and became notorious for militant, often violent, activism (miller, 1994). at the time of aarons’ visit to sda house, the protest group was in the midst of a campaign against the queensland government’s restrictions on public protest. in a report to police commissioner frank bischof several months later on 6 july 1967, special branch chief leo de lange wrote that, “there appears to be little doubt, that all this has emanated as a result of the actions of aarons and gifford [charles evan gifford, paul bleakley studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 468 queensland cpa president]” (leo de lange to frank bischof, report, 6 july, 1967). although laver denied that “laurie aarons gave [the sda] our instructions early this year,” there is little doubt that laver’s radicals provided a model that aarons and his allies in the cpa sought to emulate (john herse & les hogan to frank bischof, report, 9 july, 1967). the shift toward new left ideology in the cpa did not occur in a vacuum: shaking off the authoritarian control of the pro-soviet faction in the late 1960s, aarons and his supporters (including mundey) only sought to reassert a tradition of campaigning on a social justice platform that had, only a decade earlier, been a central aspect of old left activism in new south wales. the green bans as an embodiment of new left politics in the sydney unions the cpa’s adoption of new left ideas in the late 1960s preceded the decision of the blf and other unions to begin participating in green bans in mid-1970. the origins of the sydney green bans lie in a decision made at a meeting of the blf executive on 12 may 1970, at which a committee including mundey and state president bob pringle agreed to “a new concept of unionism” that recognised the right of workers to ensure their labour was not used in ways to which they were ideologically opposed (burgmann & burgmann, 1999, p. 48). since the early 1960s, the blf had become increasingly concerned with town planning issues, particularly the boom in office block development that resulted in residential neighbourhoods being demolished and local populations being displaced. akin to union activists like thomas wright who sought to prevent the demolition of the st. kilda apartment block in 1957, mundey saw it as his union’s responsibility to “not just become robots directed by developer-builders who value the dollar at the expense of the environment” (thomas, 1973, p. 56). despite this characterisation of mundey’s position, the green bans were (as noted) not just an ideological response to the intellectualised prospect of ecological destruction or loss of urban heritage. as nugent (2011) notes, blue-collar workers are often in a position in which they are the first to feel the impacts of poor environmental management. while nugent was speaking here in a contemporary context about the loss of jobs due to climate change, his observation was true during the gentrification period of 1970s sydney: the same inner-city neighbourhoods targeted for “renewal” were home to working-class union members who would be forced out or “priced out” as a result of development (barca & leonardi, 2018). as such, the ideological rhetoric underpinning the blf’s commitment to green bans was intrinsically intertwined with a key concern of its proletariat membership: prime real estate in central sydney that was being targeted for development was largely home to working-class families who would be priced out of the area under a policy of gentrification (soja, 2010). unconventional labour studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 469 the first formal green ban was issued by the blf in 1971, after a residents’ action group from hunters hill approach the union for its aid in protecting a patch of bushland on the sydney harbour foreshore that was set to be developed into luxury housing (burgmann & burgmann, 1998). when the developers announced it would use non-union labour instead, like auto auctions had more than a decade before, a group of blf workers on another of the company’s building projects declared they would walk off the job “even if there is the loss of one tree” at the hunters hill site (mundey, 1988, p. 177). backed into a corner by the blf, the developers relented, and the bushland was successfully saved. the green bans continued for much of the early 1970s, focusing on protecting both the natural environment (as in hunters hill) and the built environment, particularly the inner-city neighbourhoods occupied by the working classes. famously, mundey’s blf is credited with having prevented the destruction of sydney’s historic district the rocks through a ban lasting from november 1971 until the end of the green bans era in 1975 (burgmann & burgmann, 1998; colman, 2016). the blf announced the ban would not be lifted until a development plan was agreed to by residents, and when such a plan was eventually agreed to after years of negotiation, it included provisions preventing high-rise buildings being constructed in the area. nowhere was the collaboration between organised labour and the new left intelligentsia more evident, however, than in the fight to save victoria street. from the late 1960s on, property in kings cross was being bought by developers like frank theeman, who sought to capitalise on the growing popularity of the city’s entertainment district (burgmann, 2000; rees, 2004). kings cross, an area both demographically working-class and characteristically bohemian, was home to many in sydney’s activist community, including prominent intellectuals and activists roelof smilde and wendy bacon (rees, 2004). while this group was dominated by libertarians more closely associated with the new left, in the green bans this group found an easy point of convergence with the old left unions, and the two worked together to enforce a green ban on victoria street. members of both groups were active in the victoria street action group (vsag), including seaman’s union and cpa activist mick fowler, who upon finding his rental property on victoria street sold to theeman’s developers in april 1973, staged a sit-in with the support of both the residents’ group and his fellow unionists (the fight to prevent, 1973). fowler’s sit-in lasted three years, and was a rallying point for anti-developer activism in victoria street. ultimately, theeman employed a collective of hired standover men and police officers to forcibly evict as many as 80 squatters (but not fowler) from the properties he owned in victoria street. as part of the evictions of 3 january 1974, theeman’s squad also destroyed residents’ houses and made them unhabitable, removing wiring and other living essentials to prevent squatters from returning (burgmann, 2008; rees, 2004). theeman’s act paul bleakley studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 470 triggered even stronger opposition from the blf and other unions adhering to the ban, who committed to continuing the fight to prevent “the human costs of the alliance of political power and profiteers … [despite] the use of thugs as scab labour” (burgmann & burgmann, 1998, p. 212). even after the disappearance and presumed murder of vsag organiser juanita nielsen in july 1975, residents’ action groups and several unions continued to frustrate theeman’s efforts to redevelop victoria street (burgmann, 2008; rees, 2004). however, they did so without the support of mundey and the blf. the green ban on victoria street was, ultimately, the driving factor in the blf national committee’s move to remove mundey and the rest of the new south wales blf executive from their leadership positions in october 1974. norm gallagher, the federal secretary of the blf, was a founding member of cpa breakaway group the communist party of australia (marxist-leninist) in 1964, and thus was already at odds with the aarons faction to which mundey was associated (moore, 2013). beyond this, gallagher was also grappling with the deregistration of the federal blf due to political and financial challenges the union was facing on a national level. the deregistration of the federal union was used by the developer-friendly master builders’ association (mba) to pressure gallagher to stop mundey and the green bans. the mba offered gallagher its support for re-registration on the proviso that the federal executive took control of the new south wales branch from mundey, who was costing developers significant money through his green bans (cook & goodall, 2013; moore, 2013). gallagher agreed, denying union tickets to mundey, pringle and their allies and fundamentally forcing them from the blf. in their absence, gallagher took control of the new south wales branch and almost immediately lifted the green ban on victoria street. members of the vsag assert that gallagher was seen in kings cross meeting with developer frank theeman around the time the ban was lifted, suggesting that theeman himself was behind the mba’s corrupt overture to gallagher and the federal executive (rees, 2004). in any case, gallagher’s takeover of the new south wales blf effectively brought an end to the green ban era in sydney. shortly thereafter in 1976, aarons resigned as national secretary of the cpa, loosening the new left’s grip on yet another old left institution (aarons, 2010). conclusion after his death in may 2020, jack mundey was (rightly) lauded as an urban leader who led campaigns that fundamentally saved sydney’s natural and built environment. his pursuit of the green bans in the early 1970s was revolutionary, using the structures of organised labour to mobilise active support for typically new left causes. mundey and the nswblf were not without their detractors in the old left trade union movement, however, unconventional labour studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 471 ultimately resulting in the blf federal executive intervening to strip them of their positions in the mid-1970s and bring an end to the green bans. on the surface, these actions seem to be a recalibration of australian unionism, returning it to its foundational values: giving a voice to working-class labour and campaigning to improve wages and working conditions. usually, the old and new left are constructed in binary terms. this conceptualisation promotes a narrative common in international contexts (yet not entirely relevant to the australian context) that casts trade unions as archetypal agents of a normative marxist labour movement. from this perspective, the green bans represent an aberration in which unions were influenced by (among other factors) a new left ideology then popular around the world. my analysis demonstrates that this representation is misleading. while the green bans were unquestionably driven by influential advocates of the new left like aarons and mundey, these men derived much of their influence from participating in ordinarily old left bastions like trade unions and the cpa. their participation in old left political movements predates the rise of the new left and so, as i have argued, the new left was less an influence on aarons and mundey than a useful framework for furthering their existing social justice agenda centred around a working-class ecology (barca & leonardi, 2018) that was typified by public campaigns grounded in environmentalism and conserving the built environment. rather than being influenced by a new left school of thought emanating from international thinkers like marcuse and mills in the 1960s, aarons and mundey were instead continuing an existing local tradition of social justice campaigning in the new south wales labour movement (barca & leonardi, 2018; burgmann & burgmann, 1998). union campaigning on a social justice platform, which would later become intrinsically connected to new leftism, was evident even before world war ii. unions’ anti-imperial boycott of dutch vessels in the late 1940s offers evidence that new left influence on unions in the late 1960s and early 1970s was not simply a case of locals taking up an international political trend, but instead continued a pre-existing strain of activism in the new south wales old left that had a history of supporting social justice causes of all kinds. even the green bans themselves were not an entirely new concept: from at least 1957 the state’s unions had been advocating for the protection of the natural and built environment, employing industrial action as a tool to pressure developers and the state to review its urban planning policies. this is not to say that mundey, aarons and their allies do not deserve credit for the innovative green bans policy. instead, my analysis reframes their actions as reflecting (or even celebrating) the unique character of social justice campaigning within the old left in mid-century new south wales, rather than as a subversion of that activism. the success of the green bans as a proactive environmental campaign by the unions was, at least in part, the result of the personal stakes trade union members had in the gentrification of paul bleakley studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 472 inner-city sydney. mundey and his allies were able to sell the green bans as not just part of an abstract ideological agenda, as the new left constructed it, but also as a necessary action to combat the impact of rampant neoliberalism on union members who risked being forced out by developers like frank theeman (nugent, 2011; soja, 2010). environmental labour theorists typically acknowledge that environmentalism in the union movement is a response to neoliberalism and macro-environmental threats to working-class jobs like climate change (nugent, 2011; uzzell & rathzel, 2013). my analysis suggests that environmentalism existed long before the global implications of macro-issues like climate change became apparent – and even before the ideological influence of the new left on unions in the late 1960s. instead, environmental activism in the 20th century new south wales labour movement occurred largely as a response to local issues, a reaction both to the potential displacement of workers and (somewhat presciently) a proactive strike against the neoliberal threat posed by a gentrified inner-city (burgmann, 2000; nugent, 2011; soja, 2010). the blf green bans represent what uzzell and rathzel (2013) assert is the case of “a local union … [being] much more tied to the immediate, everyday interests of their members” (p. 10). in the current struggle to achieve a balance between a trade union’s mandate to protect workers’ rights (and jobs) and support intersectional social justice causes like environmental and heritage protection, the green bans stand as a prime example of how campaigns for environmental justice in the union movement can be characterised (and, importantly, pitched to members) in local terms, rather than in a more ambiguous, mediated way. while the blf’s green bans were influenced by mundey’s affiliation with the new left-inspired, aarons-led cpa, the green bans were successful because of two primary factors: the direct impact on workers and, further, the existing tradition of localised heritage protection and campaigning for social justice causes in the state’s labour community. for contemporary practitioners, this insight reasserts the importance of framing environmental justice causes as local concerns to obtain the collective support of union members, rather than solely focusing on the common tendency in the modern neoliberal world to pitch such campaigns as global issues with critical macroeconomic implications. the case of the new south wales unions and the green bans shows that local resonance and tradition is far more persuasive to obtaining workers’ investment in environmental justice campaigns than crafting an ideological call to arms in the style of the new left or, indeed, many ecocampaigners operating in the current era of global activism. acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge the support of the editorial team and anonymous reviewers from studies in social justice who offered suggestions that provided an important theoretical dimension to this article. many thanks also unconventional labour studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 458-474, 2021 473 to the staff of the queensland state archives 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(1957, may 29). tribune, 11. bobier & ignani final before ts correspondence address: esther ignani, school of disability studies, ryerson university, toronto, on, m5b 2k3; email: eignagni@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 282-287, 2021 dispatch interview with david bobier david bobier vibrafusionlab, canada esther ignagni ryerson university, canada esther ignagni, a researcher with the cripping the arts project, interviewed disability artist and cultural producer david bobier about his many years of experience with “cripping the arts.” this is an excerpt from their interview. bobier subsequently added a few comments to the interview transcript to contextualize his thoughts within the current moment of the pandemic. esther ignagni: how does the theme of “cripping the arts” intersect with your identity as an artist? david bobier: i’ve always worked in the realm of sound but over the last 10 years i’ve started to consider the multi-sensory experience of art as more important. i’ve recently become aware of what i am doing as a kind of “cripping process.” i think to some extent cripping drives my work. but there’s a balance; the way i work is intuitive and instinctive. i’ve always been – even as a child i remember being – very sensitive to my environment, specifically outdoors, in the natural environment and to the taste and smell of things. that’s always sort of been my way of experiencing the world. as my work has progressed recently, i’m certainly more aware of sound and vibration. i’m also considering things like smell as having some sort of a resonance that you can share with people in some way or another. esther ignagni: how do you see that as “cripping the arts?” david bobier: i think that’s a valid question and i probably need to think about that for my own interest. i think that when we’re cripping the arts, we are taking the obvious or taking what we experience “normally,” or what a interview with david bobier studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 282-287, 2021 283 normative body might experience, and emphasizing, or re-emphasizing, or reexamining it in some way or another. i think the whole thing for me – because i work with the vibrotactile a lot – is that i really think of vibration as a language, as a way of communicating, beyond its relationship to sound. so, it’s about a different language for me. i think about questions such as how do i make that language, how do i communicate through that language? questioning the elements of what i think of as language is the basis of what i am trying to explore. i mean, you can talk about music and yes, it is a language, it’s a very rich and emotional kind of language. so, for me, it’s going that one step further to that very fundamental source of language and exploring how people respond to it. and because we experience language physically, i also ask: what parts of the body are more responsive? who is more responsive than others? you know, all those sorts of interactive things. i rely very heavily on my audience to activate the work, to control the work to some extent, or to participate in it, but also to get some sense of how they’re experiencing the process and what they’re getting out of it. esther ignagni: when did you first encounter disability and deaf arts? david bobier: well, i came to encounter deaf art because both of my children are deaf. so, i’m going to say 28 years ago, when we adopted my son. at that point, we approached our children’s deafness following the cultural route and not the mainstream route, which was challenging. we wanted our kids to be part of the cultural deaf community. that meant we had to adapt to them and learn the language, american sign language (asl), as well as be present in deaf social events and activities. this was a very foreign and uncomfortable and awkward experience initially because i wanted it to work right away. but it doesn’t work that way. you know, at that point, i didn’t identify as hard-of-hearing although i did have some hearing issues. but i certainly wasn’t recognized as being part of the deaf community. it was through an exhibition that i did way back in the mid-90s that really helped me connect, and people from the deaf community responded to what i was doing. prior to that, i was really just seen as a hearing parent trying to raise two deaf children. and within deaf culture, that poses problems and challenges. so, i put on this exhibition about understanding deaf culture and language. it was called signing on: adopting a cultural perspective, and it travelled. it was, hm, let me see who sponsored it... oh! macintosh gallery at western university in london and then it went to chatham, where else did it go? chatham, kitchener (pause) (laughs) oh! brantford! so, it travelled, and was able to get some deaf attendance. we had interpreters of course for the opening, but it was still very early in the development of what we now recognize as deaf/disability arts. we actually have a catalogue and a video from that exhibition. dale barret, a toronto-based artist at the time, was cognisant of the material that i was david bobier & esther ignagni studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 282-287, 2021 284 trying to present, and he wrote a great essay. heather gibson and anita small added an essay on deaf culture and then we did an interview with two deaf teachers, debbie friesen and odette screpnek, around the educational perspective. so, i look back now, and i think it’s a pretty important exhibition and project, it certainly predates a lot of what is going on now. yeah, so out of that experience i became more involved. i worked as the director of development for toronto international deaf film and arts festival with catherine mckinnon. and i was doing a bit of work with the deaf culture centre in toronto, and then ... i think i’ve forgotten your question (laughs). esther ignagni: when you first encountered disability and deaf art? david bobier: oh, yeah. so, my kids attended robarts school for the deaf in london. we were living in new brunswick at the time and i was teaching at mount allison. esther ignagni: oh! i didn’t know that. david bobier: yeah, and i had to break my tenure and leave the position because there were no services for deaf people in the area. well, there was a school for the deaf in amherst, which is just across in nova scotia, so we thought we were fine ... and then they decided to close the school. i was on sabbatical when that happened. so, the alternative was for the kids to go to school in halifax in a residential program, which we weren’t necessarily poised for. the distance from where we were in sackville, new brunswick was not possible. so, i resigned, and we moved back to ontario during the ndp era. that’s when gary malkowski was the first deaf member of parliament and schools were recognizing asl as a language of education. so that was beginning to take place in provincial schools. so, the kids went to the robarts school for the deaf in london, ontario. and of course, there were kids with all ranges of disabilities. i volunteered there incessantly... i was practically there every day! (laughs) at one point, they gave me a classroom to set up a studio space. so, i interacted with the staff and kids all the time. at that time there was a festival in chicago, a deaf children’s festival, and we would always send the students’ works and they would do well. we would take the students to this festival and that’s when i became more familiar with the scene and de’via [deaf view/image arts] was just coming out. i was also going to deaf congresses in montreal and stuff like that, just trying to grab as much information and experiences as i could (laughs). in my art practice at this time, i was often taking things apart. i did an exhibition when i was out east that was based on connecting with machines, i guess you’d say, but mostly domestic things – vacuum cleaners, fans, and stuff like that. i actually created work using those objects. in one piece i think interview with david bobier studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 282-287, 2021 285 i had eight industrial fans which i put on steel pedestals so that they became almost like a tuning fork in a sense. there was an arrangement of eight of them, tiered, sort of like a chorus. in front of the fans there was a podium that the audience could go up to and switch the fans on and off and so you could create your own sort of sound composition by whichever fans you had turned on or off. this also provided the tactile experience of the cool air on your body created by the movement of the fans, thus adding to my investigation of the multi-sensory. i would record the interior sounds of the fans. it’s an interest, i guess, in what sound is and to what extreme you can take it, without annoying people too much. more recently i was commissioned to do an installation for the panam games in hamilton with centre[3] for artistic and social practice. i researched demographics of deaf athletes and then i had phrases like, “what percentage of people with disabilities actually have access to sports” and things like that translated into braille. then, the braille became my sound composition through the use of music box devices: i punched out a negative version of the braille on the paper strips that fed through the music boxes. so, when you play it, the braille becomes sound. esther ignagni: i love it! david bobier: so, these are strips, like a film, that rotate through the music box as the audience turns a small crank. this object with the music box on top is facing a wall or a projection screen and there is a light shining out of the object onto the wall. the perforated strip passes down in front of the shining light, so the braille becomes a moving light image. and then all of this comes back through into a vibrotactile system. in some versions of the installation, you might experience this while sitting in a school desk that is being activated by the vibrotactile system. braille sound is actually becoming vibrotactile again. i’ve installed this in floors, too. so, you’re standing on the floor and the braille becomes a tactile experience in your feet. i’ve just finished two more of these pieces using wooden hands – you know, you get them from artist stores. i’ve placed transducers on each fingertip so that they’re gesturing, and the vibration is coming out of the fingertips. so, you can put your hand on the wooden hand and actually feel the braille back on your fingertips. esther ignagni: who are your audiences for your work? david bobier: typically, art gallery or museum audiences, which is a very white, anglo-saxon, colonial-influenced audience. i think that’s changing a little bit, because of funding and because of the recognition that the deafdisability arts movement is starting to get. i think there’s a will to disrupt the homogeneity of canadian arts, but i think you’re working with institutions and systems that are resistant to change. i would guess this is the case even david bobier & esther ignagni studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 282-287, 2021 286 within the academic community. so, that’s the audience for the most part. but i’m finding that to be shifting. for instance, with the vibrafusionlab exhibition we had in montreal, as part of the vibe: challenging ableism and audism through the arts symposium, which had 150-200 audience members from across the deaf … deaf and disabled community. this was brilliant because that’s the audience we want to bring in and make comfortable. i tend to consider who is missing in our audiences and who is missing as artists and really address this in how my work evolves and in its presentation. this is challenging but that’s the challenge we need to address. when i am working in the studio on new works, i am always conscious of how many different ways the work can be experienced: by sight, by sound, touch, by smell. to me, the more sensorial ways you can communicate through the work, the more enriching the audience experience and the more potential the work has for reaching out to a more diverse audience. communication in my work is the key; the more modalities a work encompasses the more opportunities there are to engage with the work by people of all abilities. everyone benefits, of course, but it is really my concern that i can connect with those from the deaf and disability communities. in my work through vibrafusionlab, i devote a great deal of energy toward access to the arts as well as creating support and resources for deaf and disabled artists in their own artistic production. i also think a lot about kids in my work. you know, most artwork, unless it’s specifically designed for children, doesn’t really consider children as an audience because they might touch it, first of all, and damage it or something, right? so, i like to break down those kinds of barriers around art experience. i’m also wary of my body and how to try and keep it as healthy as possible. certainly, i don’t have the range of physical (laughs) um, strength i guess, or ability that i used to have. but i’m a fairly high-energy person so, you know, i keep active. i think, maybe this is a circuitous route to answering the question but access to other people is important for generating and instilling excitement for each other, to support each other. there’s the old myth that artists are antisocial and (laughs) and i think we all go through that periodically but coming together has given me a lot of personal strength. esther ignagni: what do you think we could do to make the arts more accessible in canada? david bobier: when i think of “we,” i think about our community. i think about the enormous amount of passion and work that is being done. the passion is incredible. i’ve spent a fair bit of time in the uk in the last three or four years, just talking to people about what it was like when the deaf and disability arts movement was starting there, 30 years ago. it was a very different beginning because it was politically based. it was not just art focused; it was a full disability rights movement. interview with david bobier studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 282-287, 2021 287 we are seeing enormous growth in deaf and disability arts here in canada now, too. we are seeing a much more unified movement with projects stretching across the country. politically, we are seeing a surge of activism in and through the arts. this is supported, of course, by targeted funding from the canada council for the arts, ontario arts council, and the british council canada and this is starting to filter down to available funding through some of the larger municipalities. marginalized voices in general are gaining some recognition under the dark clouds of the pandemic, but will these voices be allowed to prevail as we move forward. i feel there is a door of great opportunity open to us right now. my hope is that this movement of deaf and disability arts will also find a unique and valued place of its own. i think we are generating visibility from our art, whether it’s through theatre, performance, the visual arts or through critical writing, academic publishing, curatorial practice, as well as through journals and smaller publications, which circulate disability arts in the public. there’s also this whole conversation around “do we want to be part of the mainstream arts culture?” personally, i don’t think we want to be mainstream. we want our identity to be what it is. we are struggling to find our place within the mainstream conversation, but i think there is more openness. i’m optimistic we will find our place. some of the symposiums have been just amazing, like cripping the arts. what i like about them is that you’re in a room where everybody’s on the same page. there’s no hierarchical stuff going on. everybody has an understanding of what we’re experiencing as a starting point for the conversation. i’ve spent years trying to explain, what is deaf culture or that asl is a language and in these spaces, that’s already a given for everyone. i feel very close to the community. i have never felt that as strongly before in the arts. so, let’s keep those symposiums going and other opportunities for gatherings too. we need to be together again post-covid! anderson & bristowe final before ts correspondence address: vivienne anderson, college of education, university of otago, po box 56, dunedin 9054, aotearoa new zealand; email: vivienne.anderson@otago.ac.nz issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 re-placing “place” in internationalised higher education: reflections from aotearoa new zealand vivienne anderson university of otago, aotearoa new zealand zoë bristowe university of otago, aotearoa new zealand abstract aotearoa new zealand is a small, island nation located on the rim of oceania. since colonisation by british settlers in the mid-1800s, the internationalisation of higher education (he) in aotearoa new zealand has reflected shifting notions of nationhood – from an extension of great britain, to a (separate) bicultural nation, to a player in the global knowledge economy. since the late 1980s, internationalisation policy has reflected the primacy of market concerns; the internationalisation of he has been imagined primarily as a means to attract export revenue and human capital to aotearoa new zealand, and to increase brand recognition. however, internationalisation, as the movement of people and knowledge between places, can also be seen as pre-dating the development of nations, particularly in the oceania context. within mātauranga māori, or māori (indigenous) epistemological traditions, place is central to identity. to be human is to be part of something bigger than oneself; care for the land is care both for ancestors and the wellbeing of future generations. in this paper, we (re)consider internationalised he in light of three questions that are central to mātauranga māori: “who am i? what is this world that i exist in? what am i to do?” (royal, 2012, p. 35). after tracing the connections between internationalisation, colonisation, and nationhood in aotearoa new zealand, we consider how attention to māori place-based epistemologies and values drawn from mātauranga māori might challenge, stretch and ground contemporary internationalisation policies and practices in aotearoa new zealand. keywords internationalisation; higher education; aotearoa new zealand; policy; māori epistemologies replacing “place” in internationalised higher education studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 411 introduction within mātauranga māori (māori epistemological traditions), place is central to identity. explanations for the origins of life involve connections between atua (“ancestor[s] of ongoing influence, spirit being, creative power”; reilly, 2018, p. 12) and the natural world. whakapapa or geneologies recognise the spiritual and natural world – past, present, and future – as interconnected. to be human is to be part of something bigger than oneself; care for the land is care both for ancestors and the wellbeing of “future generations of living things” (reilly, 2018, p. 29). the link between place and identity is captured in the word whenua, which carries a range of meanings, including both land and placenta (mead, 2016). according to tikanga (correct māori cultural practices), a newborn baby’s placenta is buried on a site which has ancestral importance to their whānau (family). the return of whenua (placenta) to whenua (land) grounds the baby as a new member of “the group [that] are tied to the land. the group so bonded are called tangata whenua” (mead, 2016, p. 286). the connection between people and land within mātauranga māori is also evident in the names for larger social units; groups of whānau who share a common ancestor make up hapū (a word that also means pregnant), and hapū make up iwi or tribal groups (a word that refers to both relatives and bones). as mead explains, “pregnancy, birth, the placenta, the umbilical cord and bones (hapū, whenua, pito, iwi) become enmeshed in the concept of whenua, as land” (p. 286). in this paper, we consider how values drawn from mātauranga māori might challenge extractive, western supremacist understandings of higher education (he) internationalisation (stein & andreotti, 2016). our understanding of mātauranga māori is informed by royal (2012) and hikuroa (2017). hikuroa describes mātauranga māori as “incorporating evidence, culture, values and world view” (p. 5). royal (2012) argues that, as such, it addresses three “great questions of life: who am i? what is this world that i exist in? what am i to do?” (p. 35). in this paper, we consider royal’s questions in relation to the “world” of internationalised he, in light of three values drawn from mātauranga māori : kaitiakitanga, whanaungatanga, and manaakitanga. the paper is structured as follows. first, we draw on taylor’s (2002) notion of social imaginaries to consider how understandings of internationalisation in aotearoa new zealand have shifted over time, alongside changing notions of nationhood and education, in a context marked by enduring colonial relationships. next, we consider three values that are intrinsic to the ways in which place and personhood are understood in mātauranga māori – kaitiakitanga, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga – reflecting on the possible implications of each for policy and practice in internationalised he. although, in this paper, we primarily draw on epistemic resources from aotearoa new zealand, we also consider how the ideas we discuss connect with wider scholarship from the oceania region and beyond, vivienne anderson & zoë bristowe studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 412 and whether they might raise questions for internationalised he more broadly. imagining internationalised higher education (he) in the aotearoa new zealand context in this paper, we use the term “imagine” after charles taylor (2002), who describes as a “social imaginary” the “way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings” (p. 106). he notes that social imaginaries are always “complex” – incorporating “a sense of the normal expectations that we have of one another, [and] the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life” (p. 106). other scholars have applied his ideas to the internationalisation of he, including andreotti, stein, pashby and nicolson (2016), and stein and andreotti (2016). stein and andreotti argue that contemporary internationalisation imaginaries are “rooted in western supremacy,” where “the west” is considered to be “at the top of a global hierarchy of humanity with the rest of the world trailing behind” (2016, p. 226). “western” education is seen as “a desirable product in the global higher education market” (p. 226), and international students, as a source of revenue and human capital; as “inferior participants in the contest for social mobility through educational and employment opportunities”; and as “objects of development” or recipients of “western knowledge” (p. 226). in settler colonial contexts, such as aotearoa new zealand, western supremacist ways of imagining (and enacting) internationalisation can be seen as a continuation of colonial histories and understandings of the nation (larner, 1998a). however, internationalisation as the movement of people and knowledge between places, can also be seen as pre-dating the development of nations (see hau’ofa, 1994). takayama (2016) cautions against essentialising the west, calling for attention to other contexts as “epistemic resource[s]” and sites of knowledge production (p. 15). similarly, santos (2012) calls for attention to “epistemologies of the south” (p, 43), in order to find “an alternative thinking of alternatives” (p. 52). this paper responds to these calls in relation to internationalised he, with a focus on the aotearoa new zealand context. aotearoa new zealand is an island nation of approximately five million people, located on the south-west edge of oceania. archeological evidence suggests that aotearoa new zealand has been inhabited by iwi māori (māori tribal groups) for around 800 years (walter & reilly, 2018). in aotearoa new zealand, as in other contexts, internationalisation can be seen as both an historical and contemporary phenomenon (reisberg & rumbley, 2014); the islands of oceania (including aotearoa new zealand) have been shaped by the movement of people and ideas between places since human habitation began (hau’ofa, 1994). according to māori oral tradition, māori came to replacing “place” in internationalised higher education studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 413 aotearoa new zealand from hawaiki via waka, or ocean-going canoes (walter & reilly, 2018), continuing to traverse the pacific ocean, or moananui-a-kiwa, over multiple generations (evans, 2009; walter & reilly, 2018). for māori, as for other oceanic peoples, the ocean served as a means of connection, rather than separation, between places and peoples (hau'ofa, 1994). however, nationhood (and therefore, notions of inter-nationalisation based on bounded understandings of nationhood) can also be seen as a colonial construct (hau'ofa, 1994; stein, 2017). aotearoa new zealand offers a striking example. constructions of nationhood (and related understandings of internationalisation) reveal both shifts over time (larner, 1998b), and the enduring force of white supremacy (bishop, 2005; kidman et al., 2017). tauiwi (or people from abroad) first arrived in the early 1800s – initially, whalers, sealers, traders and missionaries, followed by (other) settlers (reilly & olssen, 2018). following the 1840 signing of te tiriti o waitangi (the treaty of waitangi), aotearoa new zealand was established as a british colony, and nation of two peoples: māori and pākehā (bishop, 1998; spoonley, 1993).1 the treaty – signed by governor hobson as representative of the british crown, and iwi representatives – can be seen as “charter for power sharing in the decision-making processes of [the] country,” and for māori, self-determination as indigenous people (bishop, 1998, p. 216). however, the treaty’s signing was followed by more than a century of land confiscation, discriminatory social policy, and overt institutional denigration of te reo māori, the māori language (belgrave, 2018; bishop, 2005). larner (1998a) describes three ways in which internationalisation was imagined and enacted in aotearoa new zealand following the signing of the treaty. each can be seen as grounded in colonial understandings of the nation. prior to world war ii, internationalisation in trade and education reflected a view of aotearoa new zealand as “britain’s farm” (larner, 1998a, p. 602). universities were charged with producing “loyal colonial subjects” who would willingly serve “the empire… anywhere in the world” (rizvi, 2004, p. 34). indigenous knowledges and perspectives were discounted in school curricula and academic scholarship (bishop, 2005; simon & smith, 2001), and protestant anglo-celts were the preferred migrant population (brooking & rabel, 1995). indigenous people and nonanglo-celt migrants experienced varying degrees of overt and institutionallysanctioned discrimination, or racism (spoonley, 1993). following world war ii, the ways in which internationalisation and nationhood were imagined began to reflect a view of aotearoa new zealand as a separate nation-state, and education, as crucial for “social coherence” and “national economic security” (larner, 1998a, p. 603). an outcome was the 1950s colombo plan, a programme aimed at promoting “cooperative 1 pākehā is a term that is contested, but generally associated with whiteness (bell, 2009; mohanram, 1998). vivienne anderson & zoë bristowe studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 414 economic and social development in asia and the pacific” (ministry of foreign affairs & trade, 2001, p. 5). under the colombo plan, a select group of predominantly asian international students were funded to study in new zealand in the hope that they would promote stability in their respective countries during a period of cold war politics and regional decolonisation (see rizvi, 2004).2 concurrent shifts in immigration policy reflected the growing labour needs of the country’s industrial sector. an increased need for semi or un-skilled labour in urban centres from the 1950s onwards was filled largely by māori who moved from rural areas to cities, and migrants from the pacific region (spoonley, 1993). despite their importance in terms of the labour market, māori and pacific peoples remained racialised in public discourse – positioned as an economic and social threat or problem (schwimmer, 1968; spoonley & macpherson, 2004). by the 1970s, māori reassertion of indigenous rights was challenging dominant anglocentric notions of nationhood and derogatory representations of māori in social policy, education, and research (see awatere, 1982; jackson, 1987; walker, 1987, 1990). as a result of māori political and social action (for example, land marches and land occupations) by the mid-1980s, policy in aotearoa new zealand began to reflect an espoused commitment to biculturalism, or partnership between māori and pākehā (walker, 1990). the emergence of biculturalism as a way of imagining nationhood can be seen as a significant response to “a glaring historical disregard” for māori indigenous rights (barclay, 2005, p. 120). however, it also highlights how notions of nationhood change over time. since the arrival of tauiwi in the early 1800s, aotearoa new zealand has never been a simple mix of indigenous and british (or even white) new zealanders, and lip-service to biculturalism at policy level has not translated into biculturalism in practice. some scholars have noted how a bicultural understanding of nationhood effectively excludes some people even as it includes others (mohanram, 1998; zodgekar, 2005), due to the association of pākehā with whiteness (see bell, 2009). larner (1998a) describes as a third phase of internationalisation the reimagining of aotearoa new zealand “as a node in the flows and networks of the pacific rim,” and internationalisation as “globalisation” (p. 607). this phase must be understood in relation to changes occurring at a wider scale, including the increased movement of people, capital and goods between countries, facilitated by increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies; the increasingly global dominance of western capitalism and consumerism; the rise of supra-national forms of governance; and the ascendance of neoliberalism as an ideology shaping economic and social policy in many countries (castles, 1998; grierson & engelsschwarzpaul, 2004; harvey, 2001, 2003; rizvi, 2006). grierson and engelsshwarzpaul (2004) associate neoliberalism with the introduction of 2 rizvi writes about the australian context but his ideas are applicable to aotearoa new zealand. replacing “place” in internationalised higher education studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 415 “monetarist policies” and the application of a “market-driven agenda” across the policy spectrum (p. 2). in aotearoa new zealand, following a national election in 1984, neoliberal principles were applied to social and economic policy – not as some kind of coherent programme, but as a series of responses to existing political problems at the time (larner, 1998a). however, following a change in government in the early 1990s, neoliberal principles served a more coherent “political rationality” for social and economic policy changes (larner, 1988a, p. 604) – a full account of which is beyond the scope of this paper and available elsewhere (see butcher, 2003, 2004a, 2004b; larner, 1998a, 2003). in brief, key government reports precipitated state sector reforms aimed at reducing state regulation and increasing competition in order to promote economic gain (butcher, 2003). education was re-imagined as a “private commodity,” and students, as consumers in an education marketplace (butcher, 2003, p. 160). outcomes for the he sector included the corporatisation of universities, the introduction of competition, and a reduction in government funding for local students, making them increasingly responsible for funding their own (public) education. as universities became increasingly reliant on non-governmental funding, legislative changes in 1989 and 1990 allowed public educational institutions for the first time to market their courses to enrol, and keep the profit from full fee-paying overseas students (collins, 2006). this precipitated the birth and subsequent explosion of the “export education industry” (ministry of education, 2001, p. 8), and a shift from “aid to trade” in how internationalisation was imagined (p. 24). full fee-paying international students quickly became “a crucial source of funding” for public he institutions, effectively subsidising domestic education in an era of reduced state expenditure (butcher, 2004b, p. 259). within a neoliberal imaginary, internationalised education is fundamental to the development of a knowledge economy rather than to national social cohesion (information technology advisory group, 1999). through internationalisation, education can meet the needs of both local and international consumers, and thereby, the purposes of the global marketplace. while all students are simultaneously consumers of educational products and tradable commodities within the knowledge economy, international students in general and full fee-paying international students in particular are especially “big business” (haigh, 2002, p. 50). significant changes in education policy and provision in aotearoa new zealand during the 1980s and 90s occurred alongside concurrent shifts in immigration policy and flows. a major immigration policy review in 1986 culminated in the 1987 immigration act, which for the first time emphasised migrant selection based on skills rather than cultural background and countryof-origin (brooking & rabel, 1995). to some extent, this shift can be seen as undermining the anglocentrism evident in previous immigration policies and practices, while also reflecting the dominance of neoliberal politico-economic vivienne anderson & zoë bristowe studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 416 concerns, namely, a desire to attract skilled migrants and those bringing with them investment capital (zodgekar, 2005). although immigration criteria have fluctuated since that time, an outcome of the shifts in both immigration and education policy was a dramatic increase in both migrants and full feepaying international students from asian regions (butcher, 2004b; collins, 2006; zodgekar, 2005). scholars have noted the complex human impacts of immigration and education policy aimed primarily at fostering economic growth (anderson, 2012; butcher, 2003; stein & andreotti, 2016). more recent education policy developments in aotearoa new zealand can be read as mitigating the worst effects of an export education focus, by fostering institutional accountability in relation to student wellbeing. in 2002, a mandatory code of practice for the pastoral care of international students was introduced, which was updated in 2016 (new zealand qualifications authority, 2016). the code sets out the responsibilities of enrolling institutions in relation to professional standards, recruitment processes, information provision, students’ specific needs, accommodation, and student grievances (new zealand qualifications authority, 2016), and only signatories to the code can recruit and enrol international students. in 2017, an international student wellbeing strategy was also released (new zealand government, 2017), providing “an outcomes framework for government agencies to coordinate efforts” in relation to international students’ wellbeing in four areas: economic wellbeing, education, health and wellbeing, and inclusion (p. 4). in 2018, a new strategic document was published that is underpinned by the wellbeing strategy, aimed at guiding internationalisation developments across the education sector. the international education strategy 2018-2030 (new zealand government, 2018) articulates three overarching goals: delivering an excellent education and student experience, achieving sustainable growth, and developing global citizens. the code of practice, wellbeing strategy and international education strategy may be seen as reflecting a step forward for aotearoa new zealand, since they acknowledge international students’ rights, emphasise institutional accountability for accurate information provision, and stress the need for institutional practices that protect students’ welfare. however, the code can also be seen as a regulatory tool that leaves educational institutions with the burden of responsibility with respect to international students (lewis, 2005). further, institutional responsibility under the code continues to reflect an understanding of internationalisation as export education, since it is tagged to students’ fee-paying status. students with refugee status, permanent residency, and australian or new zealand citizenship are excluded, as are international doctoral students, who pay domestic fees. similarly, although the wellbeing strategy claims to take a broader focus, its foreword reveals an ongoing focus on revenue generation; it names “export education” as the country’s “fourth largest export industry,” and the strategy, as aligned with the government’s trade and business growth agendas (new zealand replacing “place” in internationalised higher education studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 417 government, 2017, p. 4). the wellbeing strategy articulates the aim of ensuring that students “feel welcomed,” that their “voices are heard,” and that they receive “culturally responsive services,” however, it positions information-provision as the key means through which students will be enabled to “support themselves” to achieve, and stay safe and well (p. 7). in this sense, the strategy can be read as an example of “responsibilisation” – its focus is on information-provision that allows individuals to “assume greater and greater responsibility for their own destinies” (mcleod, 2015, p. 45). the international education strategy (new zealand government, 2018) makes reference to safety and sustainability concerns, to the oceania (“pacific”) region as “our own neighbourhood” (p. 3), and to the importance of past and future relationships for international education. however, sustainability is couched in terms of “growth” and the diversification of “markets” (new zealand government, 2018, pp. 17-18), and relationships resulting from internationalisation, as “help[ing] us to understand our key trading partners and develop opportunities for growth in many other sectors” (p. 24). although the strategy reveals values that are not solely about revenue generation, market concerns nevertheless remain primary in its articulation of other values-based concerns. the way internationalised he is currently imagined and enacted in aotearoa new zealand arguably reflects both the primacy of market concerns, and the ongoing legacy of white settler colonialism (kidman et al., 2017). students from aotearoa new zealand who travel abroad largely attend other universities in english-speaking countries or countries with whom we share colonial relationships, while (mainly full fee-paying) international students come to new zealand mostly from asian regions (see ministry of education, personal communication).3 “northern/western knowledge” is often represented as the only source of “valid, universally applicable… knowledge claims” (kidman et al., 2017, p. 3). māori scholars are grossly under-represented in institutional decision-making positions, although relied upon for cultural leadership at public events (kidman & chu, 2017; mcallister et al., 2019). kukutai and rata (2017) note that in the area of immigration, māori perspectives have been disregarded in policy development, although māori vocabulary and images are used to “window dress” policy material. similarly, the current international education strategy (new zealand government, 2018) features a title and subheadings in māori and english, and an image of a carved wharenui or meeting house on its cover. however, beyond claiming that “many students choose to come to new zealand to experience our unique culture which recognises te reo māori as one of our official languages” (p. 10), it shows no evidence of meaningful engagement with iwi māori, and māori-led organisations are not listed as key stakeholders (see appendix 1, pp. 26-27). kukutai and rata (2017) argue that (immigration) policy 3 see also http://uis.unesco.org/en/uis-student-flow vivienne anderson & zoë bristowe studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 418 grounded in real engagement with indigenous peoples and perspectives would raise important questions regarding who benefits from, and who is disadvantaged by, specific policy positions. we contend that their argument is relevant to the internationalisation of he. to kukutai and rata, immigration policy that takes seriously the treaty of waitangi (arguably, aotearoa new zealand’s first immigration policy document) would recognise mana whenua – local māori collectives – as “genuine authorities” on and “important contributors” to the development of contemporary society (p. 42). such policy would also recognise manaakitanga as a value that guides interactions with tauiwi, or newcomers from elsewhere (kukutai & rata, 2017). in the remainder of this paper, we consider these ideas in relation to the internationalisation of he. place, kaitiakitanga, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga within mātauranga māori, place and identity are interconnected, as is the past, present and future (jackson et al., 2018; hikuroa, 2017). these relationships are reflected in specific values (hikuroa, 2017), including kaitiakitanga, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga. in this section, we apply these values to internationalised he, before returning to royal’s (2012, p. 35) “great questions of life” in the final section of the paper. first, kaitiakitanga. the root word of kaitiakitanga is tiaki – to “care for, guard, protect, keep watch over and shelter” (kawharu, 2018, p. 88). this idea is encapsulated within whakapapa, the “geneologically ordered knowledge ... that connects people to each other, to other living things, and to the environment” (jackson et al., 2018, p. 328). through whakapapa, people are understood as “belong[ing] to the earth,” rather than the other way around (p. 329). therefore, people have kaitiakitanga (“custodianship and guardianship”) status, in relation to both “the environment and people” (kawharu, 2018, p. 86). kaitiakitanga recognises “land... as a source of economy and identity” (kawharu, 2018, pp. 86-87), and encapsulates both rights – to exercise trusteeship over land with which a person has ancestral connection – and responsibilities – to care for the land, and those within it (kawharu, 2018). attention to kaitiakitanga in internationalised he raises questions about he benefits and outcomes at a range of scales. since kaitiakitanga is linked with whakapapa, or ancestral connection to place, attention to kaitiakitanga at a local level requires that policy is grounded in the aspirations of tangata whenua (indigneous people). māori scholars note a lack of attention to māori aspirations, knowledge and values in education (bishop & glynn, 1999), research (smith, 1999), and immigration (kukutai & rata, 2017). bishop & glynn (1999, p. 131) suggest that, in order to contest “structural issues of power and control” in education, we must ask who initiates, benefits from, is represented in, and legitimises policy, and how relations of accountability replacing “place” in internationalised higher education studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 419 recognise the unique position of tangata whenua or indigenous people. in aotearoa new zealand, attention to kaitiakitanga would mean that internationalised he processes and practices reflected māori aspirations and values. similarly, mcallister et al. (2019, p. 245) call for the development of “plural-” rather than uni-versities, in which indigenous bodies, ontologies and epistemologies are “understood as equal partners” at all levels. notably, they acknowledge that re-imagining education in this way would require thinking “outside of our current economic system” (p. 245, also see naepi, 2019). kaitiakitanga might also inform our thinking about internationalised he at a larger scale. for example, tongan scholar epeli hau’ofa (2008) considers locality in relation to home, conceptualising home as places where people share histories, geographies and languages; and a way of thinking about the world. in terms of locality, hau’ofa stresses the importance of education that recognises histories, geographies, problems and realities other than “those of the large landmasses, in which hegemonic views and agendas are hatched” (hau’ofa, 2019, p. 71). in terms of ways of thinking about the world, hau’ofa distinguishes between a view of “world as property” and a view of the “world as lasting home – home as heritage, a shrine for those who have cared for it and pass it on to us” (pp. 74-75). hau’ofa calls for attention to “histories, storehouses of knowledge, skills, [and] ideals for social relationships” that are often marginalised in educational settings (p. 71). konai helu thaman (2014), another tongan scholar, makes a similar point, calling for “cultural democracy” in education, marked by recognition of all learning and teaching as “cultural,” and rejection of deficit assumptions where students do not “fit the institutional culture” (p. 56). kaitiakitanga-based relationships would drive teaching practices that value and affirm diverse languages and epistemologies (see thaman, 2014). we consider some practical examples below. attention to kaitiakitanga also requires attention to the past and the future; or critical interrogation of educational institutions’ role in promoting “discourses on progress” that erode or facilitate “whatever is caring and generous in our existence” (hau'ofa, 2008, p. 71). in this sense, kaitiakitanga suggests a need to interrogate the asymmetries inherent in contemporary internationalisation arrangements, and to consider the long-term implications of educational arrangements, rather than focusing on short-term revenue generation (kukutai & rata, 2017) or brand recognition (altbach & knight, 2007). internationalised education that reflects kaitiakitanga recognises the complex kinship ties (and associated violations) that led to contemporary educational relationships, and considers the outcomes of contemporary relationships on future generations (madge et al., 2009). this leads to whanaungatanga. whanaungatanga is often associated with the word whānau, which refers to kinship ties, in either a whakapapa (geneological) or metaphorical sense (durie, 1997). in terms of geneology, whanaungatanga can be understood in terms of the ways in which “whānau ties and responsibilities are vivienne anderson & zoë bristowe studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 420 strengthened” (durie, 1997, p. 2). metaphorically, whanaungatanga can be seen as reflecting attention to historically-grounded relationships, and a commitment to strengthening relationships that sustain life, moving forward (durie, 1997). mcnatty & roa (2002) identify an alternative explanation of whanaungatanga as related to whanau, or “leaning together” (p. 90). practice guidelines for teachers in the aotearoa new zealand schools sector have described whanaungatanga as enacted through relational teaching, where teachers demonstrate engagement with students’ ideas and perspectives, and respect for students’ wider kinship commitments and networks (ministry of education & new zealand teachers council, 2011). durie (1997) explains that, when applied to educational settings, whanaungatanga also involves the establishment of tuakana/teina (older sibling/younger sibling) relationships – ways of learning that nurture belonging, connection, and cooperation between people. spiller (2013) suggests that in business settings, whanaungatanga is reflected in a care ethic, rather than in “dissassociation and unfettered selfinterest, which generates an individualistic or instrumentalist view of relationships” that is ultimately unsustainable (p. 179). as with kaitiakitanga, when understood in a literal sense, whanaungatanga is grounded in whakapapa relationships. whānau, or the family unit, provides grounds for broader expressions of kinship. if applied to internationalised he, whanaungatanga requires attention to relationships within educational institutions that seek to internationalise. institutional practices and processes that marginalise māori (or indigenous) staff and students provide shaky grounds for the development of internationalisation processes and practices that reflect a genuine care ethic (kidman & chu, 2017; kidman et al., 2017). at the same time, in settler colonial contexts, alliances between “ethnicised” international, indigenous and “indigenous-friendly” scholars and students can generate spaces of resistance within “predominantly white institutions” (kidman et al., 2017, p. 1209). some work by indigenous scholars outside aotearoa new zealand reflect similar ideas to whanaungatanga. as noted, hau’ofa (1994, p. 148) conceptualises oceania as a “sea of islands” – an island region that is connected (not divided) by the pacific ocean. similarly, sanga (2016) acknowledges the diversity of oceania, but conceptualises its villages, islands, and nation states in terms of “woven lives” (p. 12). in his work on aid giving and receiving in pacific contexts, sanga calls for “a new oceania wantok system – an animation of neighbourliness which involves living beyond private interests, positions, and passions” (p. 13). when applied to the internationalisation of he, whanaungatanga (or a neighbourly stance) might call into question concerns with competitive advantage, aligning instead with relational commitments, generosity and hospitality (sanga, 2016). for example, sanga’s questions about foreign aid provision might be applied to internationalised he: “are we willing to be truly changed by our encounters? or are we merely recruiting more people to our ways of seeing the world (so we can feel secure in a larger population of people like us)?” (p. 13). replacing “place” in internationalised higher education studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 421 finally, manaakitanga. as discussed, within mātauranga māori, relationships are integral to understandings of people, place and human activity (duncan & rewi, 2018; royal, 2012). both whanaungatanga and manaakitanga reflect this understanding. the root of the word manaakitanga is manaaki, a word that is usually understood as referring to care or support (duncan & rewi, 2018). the word can be broken down further to mana, which refers to notions of “prestige and authority” (duncan & rewi, 2018, p. 37). manaakitanga can therefore be understood in terms of upholding, or attending to, the mana of another person; it is “the nurturing and fostering of relationships by the care and support shown to groups or individuals” (duncan & rewi, 2018, p. 36). actions grounded in manaakitanga are aimed at recognising, strengthening and preserving relationships (duncan & rewi, 2018). whanaungatanga and manaakitanga are closely connected (kawharu & newman, 2018); since whanaungatanga is inclusive (grounded in recognition of connection between self, other, the past and the future), it “invokes responsibilities and duties to care for kin, in its literal and figurative sense” (kawharu & newman, 2018, p. 54). he literature reveals contrasting perspectives of care, for example, as pandering to students-as-consumers, or as an ethical stance for institutions that recruit and enrol students (anderson et al., 2020). however, attention to manaakitanga would centre care at all levels in internationalised he: including at the level of policy formulation, in the enactment of inter-national relationships, and in everyday classroom relationships. kukutai and rata’s (2017) discussion of manaakitanga and immigration are helpful here. they argue, inherent in a manaakitanga system would be the recognition of mana whenua, not simply as a historical footnote, but as genuine authorities with ongoing rights to self-determination and important contributors to the contemporary cultural fabric of aotearoa ... there can be no manaakitanga without mana. (p. 42) to kukutai and rata, policies and practices grounded in manaakitanga that recognises mana whenua (the right to self-determination of local indigenous people) would demonstrate “care and respect” along with a deep commitment to “take hosting responsibilities seriously” (p. 42). such policies and practices would not require the suppression of “other” languages and cultures, or their “integration into a eurocentric mainstream” (p. 43). instead, they would reflect a balance between care “for existing communities within aotearoa,” the environment, “our neighbours,” and wider “international communities” faced with shifting needs, such as forced migration, and impending climate catastrophe (p. 42). attention to manaakitanga would problematise economic growth as a driving ethic for internationalisation or the recruitment of international students. manaakitanga is grounded in geneological understandings that valorise relationships, between people, between generations, and between the human and non-human world (kawharu & newman, 2018). similar ideas are vivienne anderson & zoë bristowe studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 422 expressed in other oceanic scholarship. thaman (2002) considers how attention to past and future kinship ties requires attention to time. she argues that oceanic understandings of time recognise “the past, present and future [as] combined within an all embracing ‘now’ in which the living and the dead (the past) are linked in a presence that is the future” (pp. 134-135). similarly, sanga and reynolds (2017) argue that “in the face of the power of colonisation in the present, we benefit from walking forward by looking back carefully” (p. 200, my emphasis). a manaakitanga-informed understanding of time requires attention to the impact of past inter-national relationships on contemporary educational settings, and current inter-national arrangements on our collective futures. in practical terms, these ideas align with calls by madge et al. (2009) in the uk context to consider questions of “responsibility and care” in relation to international students through attention to relationships both inside and outside the classroom (p. 42). these relationships include colonial entanglements that have facilitated current internationalisation arrangements, international students’ role in actively shaping global knowledge production, and future outcomes of contemporary educational relationships. kidman et al. (2017) note that in settler colonial contexts such as aotearoa new zealand, questions of care are interwoven with (contested) questions of belonging: in higher education contexts, this may... translate into confusion about who is responsible for welcoming new arrivals and how best to create ongoing markers of belonging for international students in a context where the very notion of belonging is contested between indigenous and settler groups. (p. 1211) at a classroom level, manaakitanga-based teaching would refuse to represent western knowledge as drawing on a monolithic, unified tradition that is inherently superior to others (doherty & singh, 2005; mcallister et al., 2019; naepi, 2019; takayama, 2016). this is challenging, given the dominance of the english language in academic publishing and communication internationally. however, recent scholarship on post-monolingual pedagogies offers practical insights into small steps he teachers might take in this regard. for example, singh and han (2016) and singh and meng (2011) suggest ways of affirming multilingualism and multiple epistemic resources in higher degree research pedagogies, and ollerhead and baker (2020), in undergraduate university classrooms. concluding thoughts: re-placing “place” through attention to indigenous perspectives in this section, we return to royal’s (2012) questions, “who am i? what is this world that i exist in? what am i to do?” (p. 35), in light of the values discussed in this paper: kaitiakitanga, whanaungatanga, and manaakitanga. royal’s questions can be applied to internationalisation of he at a range of replacing “place” in internationalised higher education studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 423 scales. the questions “who am i?,” or “who are we?,” are questions of identity and positionality. at an institutional and personal level, they might prompt reflection on the ways in which colonial relations play out in our institutional leadership structures, student recruitment processes, and teaching interactions, for example, by affirming/dismissing particular linguistic and knowledge traditions (kidman et al., 2017). the question “who am i?” (or “who are you?”) can also be seen as problematising neocolonial discourses and static hierarchies, for example, a view of some countries as needing development or as markets to be exploited, and so-called western knowledge as a source of salvation or a product to be sold (kidman et al., 2017; sanga, 2016). in light of the value, kaitiakitanga, “who am i?” raises questions about who is involved in policy development in the area of internationalised he – whether indigenous people’s aspirations and values are reflected in policy development, and in policy outcomes. royal’s (2012) second question, “what is this world that i exist in?” might prompt a critical appraisal of existing he relationships, both within and beyond individual he institutions. with whanaungatanga in mind, we might begin by acknowledging (and working to address) the asymmetries evident in institutional staffing, particularly at leadership levels (kidman & chu, 2017; mcallister et al., 2019; naepi, 2019). any efforts to address or minimise neocolonial practices in internationalised he must start by addressing colonial practices that pay lip-service to indigenous peoples, but actively or indirectly exclude them from decision-making roles (kidman & chu, 2017). at a broader scale, this question might also prompt critical reflection on the economic context in which internationalised he occurs. with mcallister et al. (2019) and naepi (2019), we acknowledge both the difficulty of imagining internationalised he beyond our current economic system, and the need to do so, however, the publication of this article coincides with a global pandemic that is fundamentally changing both education provision and how internationalisation is enacted in many contexts. this rupture seems likely to necessitate new ways of imagining our economic system, and with it, the purpose of he, at least in the medium term. royal’s (2012, p. 35) final question is “what am i to do?”. we suggest that the values discussed in this paper, drawn from mātauranga māori, provide a productive framework for reflection and action. kaitiakitanga and whanaungatanga highlight the need for policy development that starts with the aspirations of indigneous people and attention to relational commitments, rather than a preoccupation with revenue generation or international rankings. manaakitanga highlights the need for “responsibility and care” in our development of both international relationships, and our day-to-day interactions with students (madge et al., 2009, p. 42). at the level of the classroom, teaching that reflected kaitiakitanga, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga would refuse to represent western knowledge as drawing on a unified tradition that is inherently superior to others (doherty & singh, 2005; takayama, 2016), instead, affirming students’ multilingual and multivivienne anderson & zoë bristowe studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 410-428, 2020 424 epistemic expertise (for example, see ollerhead & baker, 2020; singh & han, 2016; singh & meng, 2011). in exploring how mātauranga māori might inform our thinking in internationalised he, we are mindful of the risk of representing māori perspectives as monolithic and unchanging, or māori people as sharing one view on the world, and by implication, how internationalised he should be (leoni et al., 2018). we are also mindful of the risk that we may be seen as simplifying or appropriating terms that are grounded in te reo māori and māori cultural understandings, or in deeper webs of meaning than can be done justice in a journal article, or when translated into english (mcnatty & roa, 2002). however, with these caveats in mind, we offer this paper as a counter to “the ethnocentric and normative claims” associated with (“place-less”) representations of internationalised he, and its “dominating commodity paradigm” (forstorp & mellström, 2013, p. 336). in focusing on the aotearoa new zealand context, we have considered how internationalisation imaginaries reflect broader understandings of the nation. while we do not presume to suggest that the ideas discussed here are necessarily translatable to other peoples and contexts, we hope that our efforts to re-imagine internationalised he in light of values drawn from mātauranga māori offer one “alternative thinking of alternatives” with respect to internationalised he (santos, 2012, p. 52). this alternative thinking is grounded in a specific historical and sociological context, which may have parallels, particularly in other white settler colonies, but is nevertheless unique. we hope that our paper inspires readers to consider how, by re-placing place in their own localities, they might ask new questions of past and present internationalisation policies and practices, and re-imagine internationalised he in ways that inform more equitable, sustainable futures. references altbach, p. g., & knight, j. 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(2016). cash, competition, or charity: international students and the global imaginary. higher education, 72(2), 225-239. doi:10.1007/s10734-015-9949-8 takayama, k. (2016). deploying the post-colonial predicaments of researching on/with ‘asia’ in education: a standpoint from a rich peripheral country. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 37(1), 70-88. doi:10.1080/01596306.2014.927114 taylor, c. (2002). modern social imaginaries. public culture, 14(1), 91-124. doi:10.1215/08992363-14-1-91 thaman, k. h. (2002). shifting sights: the cultural challenge of sustainability. higher education policy, 15(2), 133-142. thaman, k. h. (2014). towards cultural democracy in university teaching and research with special reference to the pacific island region. in c. mason & f. rawlings-sanaei (eds.), academic migration, discipline knowledge and pedagogical practice: voices from the asiapacific (pp. 53-62). springer. walker, r. (1987). nga tau tohetohe: years of anger. penguin. walker, r. (1990). ka whawhai tonu matou: struggle without end. penguin. walter, r., & reilly, m. ngā hekenga mai: migration and early settlement. in m. reilly, s. duncan, g. leoni, l. paterson, l. carter, m. rātima, & p. rewi (eds.), te kōparapara (pp. 65-85). auckland university press. zodgekar, a. (2005). the changing face of new zealand's population and national identity. in j. h. liu, t. mccreanor, t. mcintosh, & t. teaiwa (eds.), new zealand identities: departures and destinations (pp. 140-154). victoria university press. smith & shade final before ts correspondence address: karen louise smith, department of communication, popular culture & film, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: karen.louise.smith@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 344-354, 2021 editors’ introduction youth and social media: from vulnerability to empowerment and equality karen louise smith brock university, canada leslie regan shade university of toronto, canada imagine you are turning 12 years old today. just as you are blowing out a dozen candles on your birthday cake, your 16 year-old sister snaps a photo with her iphone. your sister wants to share her #bestbirthdaywishes and she posts the snapshot to instagram. at age 12, you are not (officially) old enough to create an instagram account (instagram, n.d.). your older sister, however, is deemed capable and responsible, by both the platform and your parents, to manage her online presence. today on your 12th birthday, you are both datafied and featured on her feed. this special edited section of studies in social justice is inspired in part by the vulnerabilities that are implicit in the age restrictions that are commonplace on social media sites and apps to restrict data collection and processing, and to protect the privacy of young people. although a birthday snapshot may seem harmless, young people under the age of 13 have been deemed more vulnerable than adults and mature teens. children may inappropriately share personal information on the internet, not understanding what they are revealing or to whom. policies that reflect this concern include the children’s online privacy protection act (coppa) in the united states, which “prevents the collection, use, or disclosure of personal information from visitors who identify themselves as under age 13 without first complying with the notice and parental consent provisions of this part” (federal trade commission, 1998). similarly, article 8 of the european union’s general data protection regulation (gdpr), “conditions applicable to child's consent in relation to information society services,” allows member states to set the age of consent between 13 and 16. recital 38, special protection of children's personal youth & social media: from vulnerability to empowerment & equality studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 344-354, 2021 345 data, highlights that, “children merit specific protection with regard to their personal data, as they may be less aware of the risks, consequences and safeguards concerned and their rights in relation to the processing of personal data” (on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, regulation 2016/679). as researchers interested in youth and digital culture, we have also frequently encountered another boundary line associated with age. in canada, the tri-council policy statement: ethical conduct for research involving humans (tcps2) recognizes that “as is the case with women, the inclusion of children in research advances the commitment to justice in research by improving our knowledge of, and ability to respond to, the unique needs of children throughout their development” (canadian institutes of health research et al., 2018, p. 51). however, since children, “may lack the capacity to decide whether to participate in particular research initiatives” (p. 53) the tri-council policy statement urges researchers and research ethics boards (rebs) to ascertain the level of risk for such participants along with the direct benefits that may accrue to participants, with participation generally limited to research of “minimal risk” (p. 53). the tcps2 also states that “some people may be incapable of exercising autonomy [to participate in research] because of [their] youth” (p. 7, article 1.1). researchers who want to involve youth as research participants are thus often required to frame youth as vulnerable through a risk matrix when completing ethics review paperwork (e.g., see university of toronto, research & innovation, n.d.). a risk matrix can be helpful in channeling researchers towards productive strategies like assent and consent protocols involving both young people and their parents/guardians. a risk matrix, however, can also box youth into a category of vulnerability, which produces challenges for researchers who wish to utilize empowerment-oriented research epistemologies with young people. categorizing youth as vulnerable can thus create a conundrum for scholars who study young people, the internet and social media. many of the contributors to this edited section have experienced that digital technologies, including social media, may be part of the toolkit diverse young people leverage to achieve greater equality, including the realization of their human rights. this special edited section explores the tension between vulnerability and empowerment, which young people encounter through their use of social media, and again, which researchers must grapple with to conduct research on and with youth. like papacharissi (2015), we identify that there is “a social character of the internet” and indeed it can even be said that “all media are social” (p. 1). recognizing this broad definition of social media, this introduction briefly reviews how the united nations (un) has positioned the internet in relation to human rights and emerging developments related to the rights of the child. we proceed to outline how the equality project, a sevenyear research partnership grant, funded by the social sciences and humanities research council (sshrc) in canada, has fostered opportunities karen louise smith & leslie shade studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 344-354, 2021 346 for the contributions to this thematic edited section. finally, we consider these contributions against the 3ps – protection of children, provision of technology, and participation – identified in the un’s convention on the rights of the child (crc), as detailed by livingstone and o’neill (2014) and livingstone and bulger (2016). our consideration of the contributions of the 3ps will assist us to illustrate the ongoing negotiations between vulnerability and empowerment which are pervasive within research involving youth and social media. the contributions to this section offer insights about how contemporary theoretical perspectives like a feminist ethics of care and data justice, as well as empirical contexts such as archives and art resistance workshops, may contribute to empowerment involving youth and social media through research and outreach. background context in 2016, the united nations general assembly passed a resolution on “the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the internet.” various news outlets and media summarized this resolution to mean that the “un thinks internet access is a human right” (sandle, 2016) or that “internet access is now a basic human right” (shore & caitlin, 2016), but more accurately, the text of the resolution identified that our human rights are interlinked with access to the internet and other digital technologies. while the un’s resolution positions the internet as a hopefully positive force to potentially empower individuals to experience their human rights and enact social justice, they also identified risks and vulnerabilities. these included potential security issues that may threaten privacy (united nations general assembly, 2016, p. 4), possible “intimidation and harassment” related to gender (p. 4), “incitement to discrimination or violence on the internet” (p. 4) and the potential for the sexual exploitation of children (p. 1). the 2016 resolution from the un concerning rights and the internet expresses the importance of closing the digital divide for boys and girls. the practicalities for young people to experience their rights in a digital age, with non-universal access to the internet, remains challenging. livingstone et al. (2016) state that “an estimated one in three of all internet users in the world today is below the age 18” and yet “internet governance has barely recognized the distinctive rights and needs of children as a substantial group of internet users” (p. 7). the convention on the rights of the child (crc) is an international treaty which recognizes that all children have universal human rights. written in 1989, the crc was “the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the history of the un” (livingstone & third, 2017, p. 658). thirty years later, the un committee for the rights of the child developed a general comment on children and the digital environment to support states and ngos to interpret the crc for the digital age and to account for children’s digital youth & social media: from vulnerability to empowerment & equality studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 344-354, 2021 347 rights including free expression, privacy, intellectual property rights, and access. in march 2021 the crc (office of the united nations high commissioner for human rights, 1989) was updated with a general comment on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment (united nations committee on the rights of the child, 2020). specifically, general comment 25 was addended, which delineates children’s rights in relation to the digital environment, and which explicitly states that children’s rights apply to the digital world (un convention on the rights of the child, general comment no. 25, 2021). once the comment is adopted, all 196 state signatories to the crc will need to report formally on its provisions, which “clarifies what the digital environment means for children’s civil rights and freedoms, their rights to privacy, non-discrimination, protection, education, play and more” (livingstone, 2021). from the convention on the rights of the child (crc), the 3ps of protection of children against abuse and online predators, the provision of technology for education and leisure, and participation through their freedom of expression or consultation online are each applicable to the digital milieu (livingstone & bulger, 2016; livingstone & o’neill, 2014). the 3ps related to children’s rights can easily be inhibited or come into conflict through everyday scenarios involving technology use. for example, an internet shutdown in an authoritarian country can interrupt the provision of access to learning resources or vital health information. young people who have their parents, school or nation state monitoring their internet access, may or may not feel free to express themselves politically. additionally, young people may circumvent the rules associated with internet and social media use which are established to keep them safe. data from mediasmarts in canada in 2013 showed that “one third of students in grades 4-6 have facebook accounts even though the site’s terms of use forbid anyone under the age of 13 from joining the network” (steeves, 2014, p. 3). the equality project conducted focus groups in 2018 and 2019 with young canadians, exploring their experiences of online privacy and equality, with few admitting to reading the privacy policies on the social media sites they use (shade et al., 2020). events building to the edited section this edited section grows out of two events convened by the equality project, a partnership grant co-led by valerie steeves and jane bailey at the university of ottawa. the equality project seeks to contribute to digital economy policies through an examination of young people’s experiences of privacy and equality in networked environments, with a particular focus on youth from marginalized communities. the potential vulnerability of youth to having their data exploited, or to experience online harassment or karen louise smith & leslie shade studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 344-354, 2021 348 mistreatment, which may relate to their intersectional identities, informs the project (see the equality project, n.d.). as scholars working with, and studying children and young people, we noted frequent dilemmas and challenges with navigating the research ethics review process, guided by tcps2, at our academic home institutions. notably, ethics protocols compel the categorization of youth as vulnerable participants, which can lead to enhanced scrutiny of the research protocol, resulting in a protracted review process. beyond administrative challenges, however, describing youth as vulnerable may be contradictory or counterproductive when empowerment-oriented epistemologies concerning youth and digital technologies underpin the research (regan & steeves, 2010). to further explore this issue, in year 3 of the project (2017), affiliated project researchers, including the co-leads and the co-editors of this edited section, organized a roundtable at the canadian communication association (cca) annual conference in toronto focused on vulnerability, empowerment, youth and research ethics. the cca roundtable brought together scholars and community partners to consider the ethical challenges, conundrums and opportunities in conducting research on and with children and youth related to their digitally mediated lives. the following year (may 2018) a workshop held at the university of toronto brought together project researchers and scholars working in digital youth studies and social media ethics to further consider these issues. a key social justice value all workshop participants agreed upon is that it is important to always maintain that youth have agency and control in relation to social media and research. the workshop participants were also interested in research approaches which contribute to social justice, including data justice, amidst the dominant, advertising-driven models for profit generation, which underpin the internet. description of the contributions this special themed section draws from the work of several workshop participants. consisting of four articles and two dispatches, the articles span the terrain of arts-based research and organizations in young peoples’ lives, online discussion forums, and pandemic connectivity, while the dispatches explore critical data studies and the implications of digital archiving of social media in youths’ lives. our contributors specifically provide a range of examples of the digitally mediated lives of young people from approximately age four (junior kindergarten) to age 30 (graduate students). through these contributions, we seek to build on children’s rights-oriented scholarship for a digital age (e.g., livingston & bulger, 2014; livingstone & o’neill, 2014; livingstone & third, 2017; lupton & williamson, 2017) as well as the previous literature where themes of empowerment and vulnerability in youths’ digitally youth & social media: from vulnerability to empowerment & equality studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 344-354, 2021 349 mediated lives are addressed (e.g., livingstone, 2008; regan & steeves, 2010; smith et al., 2017; smith & shade, 2018), as well as youth and research ethics (kiidenberg, 2020). the contributions engage with the reality that although social media and digital technologies remain a hopeful tool to instantiate human rights, significant challenges persist. the dominant economic model of the internet involves the disclosure of personal information in exchange for content and services. this dynamic may sometimes allow for youth empowerment, but it can also place young people in situations of vulnerability and accentuate inequalities based on gender, race, ability, sexual orientation or other intersectional dimensions. additionally, research activities related to young people or their data online are also complicated in their efforts to instantiate rights and simultaneously uphold ethical standards by researchers. this was noted in general comment 25, which highlights the importance of data collection and research for understanding the nuanced implications of children’s digital lives, and emphasizing that “research conducted with and by children, should inform regulation, policy and practice and should be in the public domain” (united nations committee on the rights of the child, 2021, p. 5). each of the contributions to this special edited section, addresses issues raised in the recent draft in diverse ways. the general comment identifies the ubiquity of technology for young people who are “growing up in a digital environment with growing levels of usage of mobile technology, with social/digital media increasingly the primary means through which they communicate and receive, create and disseminate information” (united nations committee on the rights of the child, 2021, p. 10). breaches of privacy and violence as discussed in the general comment 25 (united nations committee on the rights of the child, 2020, p. 10; 2021, pp. 11-14) are two of the issues raised which pertain to chloe georas, jane bailey and valerie steeves’ article, “ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth.” in this piece the authors share insights derived from the facilitation of transnational resistance art workshops with youth held in both canada and puerto rico. the workshops were designed to empower young people, but especially marginalized youth, to create art that pushed back against surveillance and technology-facilitated violence. the research explicitly acknowledges the tensions and contradictions in the technological milieu that young people encounter in their daily lives and asks them to reflect critically on it. the authors identify three tensions: how best to facilitate workshops that are sensitive to intersectional issues of access and digital literacy; how to invoke critical engagement of youth’s experiences of violence, discrimination, or sexually explicit material; and how to protect youth participants from liability for their artistic appropriation and possible illegality of their creative work where copyright, trademarks, defamation, or privacy may be contested. karen louise smith & leslie shade studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 344-354, 2021 350 building upon the importance of “access to the digital environment” to connect to “culture and the arts” as described in the recent draft of the general comment (united nations committee on the rights of the child, 2020, p.10; 2021, pp. 18-19), stuart poyntz’s article, “producing authenticity and negotiating trust: urban youth arts, rogue archives and semiotic negotiation,” highlights the internet archives of two youth oriented arts organizations: reelyouth (in british columbia) and the oasis skateboard factory (osf) (in ontario). poyntz characterizes both organizations, as well as their online archives, as durable and persistent spaces where young people can gather to express themselves creatively. he notes that paradoxically, while the project goals contribute to their empowerment, youth arts organizations must typically depict young people as vulnerable in order to receive external funding from government and foundations. jacquelyn burkell and priscilla regan’s article, “expression in the virtual public: social justice considerations in harvesting youth online discussions for research purposes,” examines the social justice implications of collecting youths’ social media discussion data for research purposes. the article closely pertains to the issue raised in the general comment that “the internet provides opportunities for accessing, for example, online health information, protective support, and sources of advice and counselling” (united nations committee on the rights of the child, 2021, p. 16). as burkell and regan describe, the slippery nature of what can be considered public, versus private, information, and what constitutes consent in online forums, is treated differently across various research ethics boards (reb). providing an analysis of research the methodologies of which use online discussion forums, and an overview of literature on research ethics and social justice, they note interrelated social justice tensions where more guidance is needed; notably, the issue of representation and respect for youth participant rights and wellbeing. this includes avoidance of covert research, facilitating robust consent and reasonable expectations of privacy, and protection of autonomy and consideration of a “right to be forgotten” for youth content in internet archives. karen smith’s article,” ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights: refractions from a universal access model during the pandemic,” provides a critical analysis of internet access for ontario k-12 remote learners during the pandemic. the article grapples with the increasing centrality of the internet to learning (united nations committee on the rights of the child, 2020, p. 10; 2021, p. 17-18). expanding upon “the access rainbow” a socio-technical model of internet access (clement & shade, 2000), smith unpacks the government’s provision of free ipads and data plans for students through the interlocking lens of community informatics, privatization and disaster capitalism. she describes how the distributive paradigm, coupled with private interests, structured domestic access. while rendering invisible the key role of crucial community intermediaries such as public libraries, the ontario government’s actions valorized the role of private big tech and youth & social media: from vulnerability to empowerment & equality studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 344-354, 2021 351 telecom providers. smith concludes by calling for a robust expansion of tech equity and advocacy efforts to recognize the social justice imperative of providing universal connectivity to the internet as an intrinsic element of children and young people’s rights. this special edited section also includes two dispatches, which orient us towards data justice as a potential response to the realities of digital environments young people encounter. katie mackinnon’s dispatch, “ethical approaches to youth data in historical web archives,” provides a reflection on the research ethics of her doctoral research, which examines the experiences of young and marginalized people who created websites and online communities on the early web (1994-2004). as she notes, web historiography and web history are an emerging interdisciplinary field, with an aligned attention to the ethical considerations about use of digital archives. mackinnon highlights how a feminist ethics of care approach is particularly apt for web archives research on young people’s creations, and situates this within frameworks of data justice. andrea zeffiro’s dispatch, “from data ethics to data justice in/as pedagogy,” considers how social justice can be better instantiated with internet access, data, and governance of social media. in referring to data justice, zeffiro draws upon scholarship that considers how societal concerns regarding data can be embedded with ongoing social justice struggles against oppression (dencik et al., 2019; taylor, 2017). identifying a lack of public facing guidance from research ethics boards in canada regarding the use of social media data in research, zeffiro contemplates how students can be challenged to develop critical data literacy skills, while also contributing to data justice. some of the pedagogical strategies that zeffiro outlines include student reflections through autoethnography as they learn a data analysis tool and the use of speculative design to create terms of service for an alternative social media platform committed to data justice. synthesis of contributions and conclusion each of the contributions to this special edited section point towards the tension between vulnerability and empowerment that is created as youth engage online and through social media. if society strives to support young people to realize their human rights through the 3ps: protection, provision, and participation, drawn from the convention on the rights of the child (crc), the digital context must be considered. general comment 25 recognizes that similar to adults, young people rely on digital technologies to experience and realize their human rights. as outlined in the articles and dispatches in this edited section, being online can make youth potentially vulnerable, but digital tools are also critical to youth empowerment and the instantiation of their rights. karen louise smith & leslie shade studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 344-354, 2021 352 identifying and resisting the vulnerabilities that young people may encounter through the internet and social media can be framed as a kind of feminist ethics of care (leurs, 2017; luka & millette, 2018). in this manner, the articles and dispatches included in this edited section begin to grapple with the long term ethical implications of datafication and research that is relevant to youth, digital culture and their human rights. a number of the pieces included in this edited section, demonstrate how scholars may act as allies of empowered young people when they critically question what internet access and social media are providing for young people, and work towards a better future in collaboration with young people. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank the equality project team and sshrc for their support (grant # 895-2015-1002). we would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers whose impeccable and generous comments strengthened the papers. thanks as well to dispatches editor vanessa farr for her sharp feedback, and to editor david butz for assisting us to pull together this special edited section for studies in social justice. references canadian institutes of health research, natural sciences and engineering research council of canada, & social sciences and humanities research council. 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(2014). young canadians in a wired world: trends and recommendations. mediasmart. https://mediasmarts.ca/sites/mediasmarts/files/publicationreport/full/ycwwiii_trends_recommendations_fullreport.pdf taylor, l. (2017). what is data justice? the case for connecting digital rights and freedoms globally. big data & society, 4(2), 1-14. united nations general assembly. (2016). the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the internet. https://www.article19.org/data/files/internet_statement_adopted.pdf united nations committee on the rights of the child. (2020). draft general comment no. 25, children’s rights in relation to the digital environment, 13 august 2020. https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/download.aspx?symbolno=cr c/c/gc/25&lang=en united nations committee on the rights of the child. (2021). general comment no. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. karen louise smith & leslie shade studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 344-354, 2021 354 https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/crc/pages/gcchildrensrightsrelationdigitalenvir onment.aspx university of toronto, research & innovation. (n.d.). determine if a protocol calls for delegated review. https://research.utoronto.ca/ethics-human-research/determine-if-protocol-qualifiesdelegated-review smeltzer & cantillon final galley mar 17 16 correspondence address: sandra smeltzer, faculty of information & media studies, the university of western ontario, london, on, n6a 5b7; email: ssmeltze@uwo.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 2, 136-141, 2015 guest editors’ introduction ii: reflections on scholarship and activism in canada and ireland sandra smeltzer the university of western ontario, canada sara cantillon glasgow caledonian university, ireland this second of two back-to-back special issues for studies in social justice (ssj) features articles that offer a spectrum of case studies addressing the relationship between scholarship and activism in canada and ireland. as the guest editors of these two issues, we requested that the authors, who represent a range of disciplines and positions in their respective institutions of higher education, employ a critical and self-reflexive lens to examine the challenges and rewards associated with negotiating their roles as scholars and activists. in collaboration with myriad organizations and networks, these authors strive for greater social justice within their local communities. their efforts are, however, hampered by the unrelenting encroachment of neoliberalism within and beyond the ‘ivory tower.’ consequently, many focus their discussion on the rising levels of managerialism and corporatization within higher education, highlighting the metrics-oriented response to austerity measures that forefronts monetizable ‘deliverables’ and, in the process, negatively impacts the ability of academics to engage in activist endeavours (see in this issue brulé; giroux, karmis & rouillard; hawthorne-steele, moreland & rooney; luka, harvey, hogan, shepherd & zeffiro; murphy; and visser; see also, e.g., mercille & murphy, 2015; walsh & loxley, 2014; washburn, 2005). the shift toward greater neoliberalism – both within higher education and society writ large – has also led to a growing contingency of precarious academic labour, a prominent theme in contemporary scholarship that has animated both special issues. in this collection, giroux, karmis & rouillard; luka, harvey, hogan, shepherd & zeffiro; and murphy all note in their reflections on scholarship and activism in canada and ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 136-141, 2015 137 concluding remarks that being in a tenured, or at least a tenure-track, position provides the job security and the work flexibility necessary to pursue activism, as well as (for many) the confidence to articulate potentially controversial opinions without fear of reprisal. these capacities are, however, under threat at all levels of the scholarly hierarchical system by the internal and external pressures that are placed on academics to align their teaching and research with market principles, and to remain politically benign in both their professional and private lives. as giroux, karmis, and rouillard argue quite emphatically in their article, all academics must have the freedom to express themselves and to speak openly without interference or sanction (see also, e.g., caut, 2011; hanke & hearn, 2012; turk, 2014; woodhouse, 2009). collectively, then, the most prominent theme underpinning the articles in this issue is the ramifications of neoliberal policies and practices on precarious labour, institutional governance, academic freedom, and research ‘outputs’ or ‘deliverables.’ notwithstanding these very legitimate concerns, many of the authors also conveyed optimism – albeit with some caveats – that scholars can indeed make a positive difference through advancing social justice. for most of the contributors, though, this is their first foray into writing for a peer-reviewed publication about their lived experience negotiating the terrain of scholarship and activism. these authors conveyed to us that the process of writing and editing their manuscript provided greater insight into their own practices and perspectives. as a result, the experience was quite (if unexpectedly) personal, which is reflected in the more intimate tone of their pieces. other authors struggled with our request for self-reflexivity. their reluctance could, in part, be attributed to concerns about the potentially lessthan-perfect outcomes of a specific experience, feeling that personal reflections of this nature do not belong in an academic venue, or that they risk jeopardizing scholarly or activist relationships if they are too honest about the challenges of their work (e.g., ellis & bochner, 2000). lastly, in comparison to the first special issue, there are fewer tensions between the authors’ opinions regarding what constitutes legitimate or strategic methods of furthering social justice. most lean toward a reformist approach or hover somewhere in the middle of the reformist versus revolutionary/radical spectrum, as their primary objective is not to abolish dominant political and economic frameworks. the articles written by brulé, and by giroux, karmis, and rouillard, both of which challenge institutional governance on campus, are notable exceptions (for context, see croteau, 2005; james & gordon, 2008; young & schwartz, 2012). we now turn our attention to an overview of each of the articles, starting with on campus forms of activism and working our way outward to activism undertaken by authors within their respective off campus communities. these synopses illuminate the similarities that exist between the experiences of sandra smeltzer & sara cantillon studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 136-141, 2015 138 canadian and irish scholar-activists with respect to promoting and supporting social justice. overview of articles in the opening article, dalie giroux, dimitrios karmis, and christian rouillard focus their discussion on governance at the university of ottawa. through a close reading of their home institution’s administration-heavy and market-oriented governance structure, the authors illustrate how the university’s core mission of contributing to democratic life is being eroded by the rise of managerialism. in particular, this assault on the democratic university and its collegial governance has negatively impacted scholars’ academic freedom. in the second half of their article, giroux, karmis, and rouillard broaden the scope of their analysis to compare how academic freedom is framed by the canadian association of university teachers versus the more narrowly focused version advanced by universities canada (formerly the association of universities and colleges of canada). the authors conclude by calling on “unions, associations, departments, and individuals” to stymie the shift toward the latter’s managerial version of a university, starting with demanding change in governance structures to more appropriately reflect the university community (i.e., faculty, students, and staff) rather than business interests. in a similar vein, elizabeth brulé’s article offers an in-depth look into the governance structure of another canadian institution – york university in toronto. drawing on an institutional ethnography framework, brulé examines how her administration’s discourse on rights and responsibilities has been concretized into policy documents aimed at minimizing political conflict on campus, especially among the student population. problematically, these text-based forms of regulation have served to limit all forms of student advocacy and activism and, in the process, have often violated rights that should be protected under the canadian charter of rights and freedoms. brulé also describes the range of complementary coercive mechanisms and risk management techniques used by the administration to control physical and discursive spaces on campus to ensure that both align with corporate values. she concludes the article with recent examples that demonstrate, again in like manner to giroux, karmis, and rouillard, that this trend can be reversed if we collectively work together to support and protect academic freedom, the rights of students, and the democratic role of the university. the issue of precarious academic labour is a key theme in the article by luka, harvey, hogan, shepherd, and zeffiro, which examines the idea of scholarly work as cultural production. on the one hand, the concept of scholarship as cultural production within the corporatized university is articulated through economically productive deliverables, including a reflections on scholarship and activism in canada and ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 136-141, 2015 139 narrowly defined set of public engagement and outreach activities, such as public talks and media appearances designed primarily to promote university products and personalities to the general public and to funders who seek ‘impact.’ on the other hand, the authors contend that scholarship as cultural production should include participation in work, research, and creative endeavours both inside and outside the academic sphere, including the roles played by public intellectuals and community activists. the article draws on a sampling of online discussions, combined with concerns raised at two academic conference roundtables (in 2013 and 2014), about how the neoliberal environment produces academic precarity. their findings suggest that by engaging in a sustained interrogation of the conditions under which academic labour is performed, critical knowledge is produced that needs to be transmitted to university administrators, as well as through public dialogue. the authors conclude by stressing the importance of job security to such freedom of expression. isobel hawthorne-steele, rosemary moreland, and eilish rooney also straddle the line between on and off campus activism. the authors describe and examine the pedagogical practices they undertake to help ameliorate educational disadvantage in areas affected by conflict in northern ireland. they focus their discussion specifically on ulster university’s community development program, which they developed to provide individuals from disadvantaged communities with an opportunity to participate in higher education. drawing on paulo freire’s pedagogy of hope, this learner-led program strives to critically marry theory and praxis, to incorporate critical reflection, and to foment conscientization among students who live and work in their respective communities. hawthorne-steele, moreland, and rooney also acknowledge some of the challenges associated with this type of pedagogical activism, especially in a politically charged environment in which students may hold deeply ingrained, polarized positions or may avoid the demanding process of self-reflection. mary murphy’s article offers readers insight into the professional and personal difficulties she faces in trying to balance her position as a tenured faculty member with her long-standing involvement in ireland’s civil society. describing herself as a ‘pracademic,’ murphy has consciously chosen to take more of a reformist approach to her activism with various government entities and social justice-oriented organizations, while also negotiating a neoliberal system of higher education that tries to stifle socio-political activism. she addresses the challenges associated with having her efforts dismissed as being “biased” by voices in both spheres, and the risk that her work will be co-opted by special interests (especially by state actors). similar to other authors in this issue, murphy concludes her article by emphasizing the importance of job security for scholar-activists, especially given the strains of also fulfilling familial commitments, and makes the case that critical scholarship does indeed play a central role in fostering the collective solidarities necessary to foment social change. sandra smeltzer & sara cantillon studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 136-141, 2015 140 as a counterpart to murphy’s discussion, anna visser’s article explores the relationship between scholar-activists and civil society activists in ireland, focusing on what each group can learn from the other regarding the advantages and drawbacks of receiving state funding. drawing on her own extensive background working in ireland’s civil society, visser outlines the obstacles domestic organizations face if they choose to accept state funding. while she appreciates the serious concerns expressed in some quarters regarding the negative ramifications of accepting such financial support, she maintains its importance for buttressing the democratic role civil society organizations play in the country, and contends that most of these organizations are in fact aware of their precarious position and thus capable of the self-reflexivity necessary to manage potential risks. under the rubric of austerity, activists based in the academy face similar challenges, which should, visser argues, lead to greater cooperation with civil society activists in order to productively utilize government funding. in the concluding article for this issue, author sarah wiebe provides an interesting case study that takes place entirely off campus. wiebe examines her experience collaborating on the production of the film indian givers, which tells the story of indigenous youth growing up in a polluted environment in southwestern ontario. the film’s primary objectives are to raise awareness about the socio-political issues affecting these youth, to promote social change in the local community, and to challenge western models of knowledge. informed by intersectionality theory, wiebe explores the benefits of co-creating this visual medium, as well as some of the key challenges of such community engaged scholarship within a colonial context. drawing on chantal mouffe’s theory of agonism, she underscores the importance of respecting differences in knowledge, perspectives, and expertise, which eschew hierarchical relationships, especially between the ‘researcher’ and the ‘researched.’ finally, as the guest co-editors, we want to thank david butz for the generous amount of time and energy he has dedicated to bringing this second issue to fruition. he has, once again, gone above and beyond in his capacity as editor-in-chief of studies in social justice. references caut (canadian association of university teachers). (2011). caut policy statements: academic freedom. retrieved from www.caut.ca/about-us/caut-policy/lists/caut-policystatements/policy-statement-on-academic-freedom croteau, d. (2005). which side are you on? the tension between movement scholarship and activism. in d. croteau, w. hoynes & c. ryan (eds.), rhyming hope and history: activists, academics, and social movement scholarship (pp. 20-40). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ellis, c.s., & bochner, a. (2000). autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: researcher as dubject. in n. denzin & y. lincoln (eds.), the handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.) (pp. 733-768). thousand oaks, california: sage. reflections on scholarship and activism in canada and ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 136-141, 2015 141 hanke, b., & hearn, a. (2012). introduction: out of the ruins, the university to come. topia: canadian journal of cultural studies, 28, 11-20. james, j., & gordon, e.t. (2008). activist scholars or radical subjects? in c.r. hale (ed.), engaging contradictions: theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship (pp. 367 373). berkeley: university of california press. mercille, j., & murphy, e. (2015). the neoliberalization of irish higher education under austerity. critical sociology (doi: 10.1177/0896920515607074). retrieved from http://crs.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/07/0896920515607074.full.pdf turk, j.l. (ed.). (2014). academic freedom in conflict: the struggle over free speech rights in the university. toronto: james lorimer & company. walsh, j., & loxley, a. (2014). the hunt report and higher education policy in the republic of ireland: ‘an international solution to an irish problem?’ studies in higher education, 40(6), 1128-1146. washburn, j. (2005). university, inc.: the corporate corruption of american higher education. new york: basic books. woodhouse, h. (2009). selling out: academic freedom and the corporate market. montreal & kingston: mcgill-queen's university press. young, k., & schwartz, m. (2012). can prefigurative politics prevail? the implications for movement strategy in john holloway’s crack capitalism. journal of classical sociology, 12(2), 220-239. dodman final correspondence address: elsbeth dodman; email: elsbeth.dodman@hotmail.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 474-477, 2022 creative intervention an autistic letter to a neurotypical friend elsbeth dodman dear david,1 i’m sorry i haven’t written to you in a while; springtime came and before i could turn around the trees were green again, the sun high and hot, and it was august. i wonder if time knows its own flow or if it’s just as surprised to be here as we are. i got a chance to watch that tv show you recommended – the one with the autistic doctor. you know i don’t really watch that much tv. i usually just watch the same old movie for those first five minutes over and over again. i can barely sit still for a full episode, but i tried really hard this time because people kept recommending it to me. because you kept asking me to. it still feels novel to see an autistic character on tv. i remember when i first started educating, nobody had heard of autism, now we have our own caricatures on prime-time television. i must admit, most of the books on autism i read when i was younger were written by doctors or people with letters after their names. strange to read about myself in a cold, pathological way – to see my life broken down into case studies and diagrams and clinical-speak. i think after a while you get used to hearing your story spun out as pathology; your pieces broken down into “behaviors,” “skills to work on,” and “deficits.” after a while i left the textbooks alone. there’s only so much you can take, david. only so many hours you can sit with a book and see the parts your parents highlighted as they found you somewhere in between the pages of medical-speak. i left them and found the books that parents wrote. their journeys “through” autism, their “struggling” to “overcome” their child’s diagnosis, them “reclaiming” their child, all with rave reviews from other non-autistic writers about how brave and honest they were to talk about their child’s life in such intimate detail – my life and all its intimate details – and what their child’s diagnosis meant for them. i left those books behind after a 1 guest editors’ note: elsbeth has been writing short essays as letters addressed to a man named david as a way to start a conversation about autism issues and the experiences she’s had. in real life david was one of elsbeth’s drawing teachers. none of her letters have ever been sent to him. an autistic letter to a neurotypical friend studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 474-477, 2022 475 mother recounted her story of therapy where she and other parents held their autistic children tightly while screaming, “don’t you understand what you’ve done to us? don’t you understand you’re tearing this family apart?” i didn’t want to find myself in between those pages even though i held the story in my heart. stories live with you, david. once you read them, they become a part of you forever. i watched the doctor tv show. i saw parts of my story, but in stilted glimpses through the lens of someone else. it was like an outsider who has never been to your country telling you very confidently what it’s like to live there in bold stereotypes without any of the nuances. you’d forgive yourself for being a little cynical. humans are storytellers. we share our history, our traditions, and our experiences. all in a shape with a beginning, middle and end. stories are important, david, and narrative has power. “the horse kicked the man” or “the man allowed the horse to kick him” – each creates a reality, and the speaker gets to shape it. we create truth. we build worlds on words and expect people to live in them. i live in them. autism is all about stories, david, and who gets to tell them. it’s about voice with a capital v and who has one, physically and metaphorically, and it’s all about whose voice gets to be heard. here it comes, david, the greatest irony of autism. they want you to communicate – preferably to speak if you can manage – it’s a parent’s fondest dream to hear your voice but you still don’t get a seat at the table to talk about autism. you don’t get to be the narrator of your story because you’re still autistic. voice or not. unreliable, disabled, stupid. you don’t get to have a say in autism policy. you don’t get to have a voice in what autism best practice looks like. you don’t even get see people like you on boards or committees. your participation is almost an afterthought, david. autistic people are optional in autism issues and in autism stories. you worked hard for your voice, but you don’t get to use it. someone else gets paid to play you in the story of your life while you and your friends face high unemployment rates and crippling poverty – and that depiction is how everyone sees you. it might even be how you grow to see yourself. “you have autism? just like sheldon from that show!” all your hard work – that hard-won voice – and it amounts to precious little. the same people who beg for their child to say “mama” will sit on a committee or in an online group and tell you that because you can talk you aren’t autistic enough to talk about autism. you’re only one person. “you cannot possibly speak for the whole,” they’ll say, without tasting the irony that they do it every single day. they’ll turn away from you and away from their own hypocrisy. the high bar they set is one that they themselves can’t live up to! what difference does it make if i can talk? what does it matter if i can’t be a part of the conversation? why did i work so hard? what was it for? oh no, david – you do not get to give us language and then ask us to only give you comfortable words. you do not get to give me a voice and then tell elsbeth dodman studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 474-477, 2022 476 me to listen quietly. there’s a reckoning of words waiting if you think that’s the way this story will play out. i’m not interested in sitting with my hands out waiting for the promised trickle down of awareness and services. i want to build that future with my own hands. autism in the media isn’t for autistic people. it’s for you, david. autistic people do not get to tell their stories or shape their truth – be it on tv, or in politics, or on committees. the truth we wear – the truth we are made to shoulder – is shaped by parents, by service providers, by people with letters after their names, and sometimes by a non-autistic man on tv who gets paid very well to wear my skin without ever having to live a day in it. governments will create plans and sign your name, famous people will star in shows about your life, and caregivers will make agencies under your banner – claiming space in your community before shutting the door behind themselves. they will speak for autism and disregard that autism is already speaking. we live and die by their choices. it’s not just about stories, david. this isn’t a game for you to tune in next week. it’s shaping a truth that will determine my life. will accessible housing be available? will we hire more educational assistants in schools? what about supports for autistic adults? are we addressing the lack of mental health supports in our country? will we tackle the unemployment rate faced by autistic people? will we acknowledge the ableism that informs our society? the ableism that informs our services? will we change the narrative we keep telling ourselves about disabled persons so that disabled persons can have the audacity to live and celebrate our lives? i found my individual education plan in a binder in the basement. it read like every other clinical report about a girl named elsbeth – someone i’d come to find in highlighted textbooks and in memoirs. the report dictated my education and the supports i was supposed to get in school, and i’d never even seen it before. i didn’t even know what it said, but my name was on it. the individual was divorced from the individual education plan. it all goes back to that story we tell ourselves about how developmentally disabled people are too stupid to have anything to say – about anything – and that the people who speak for them are heroes for doing it. disabled people don’t have a thought in their heads. they’re retarded and we can’t expect anything from them. elsbeth is slow. it’s faster if we make choices for her. so, they do. they still do. they still are! if you’re not in the room, a government, an agency, a decision maker can shortchange you and say it was for your own good. they can write a blank check, sign your name and call it fair. they still do! so, if you paint me as suffering, i will spend my life suffering and hating myself for a diagnosis i cannot change. if you call me retarded, then i must be too retarded to be considered reasonable – even when i’m right. if you say you grieved for the “normal” child, you could have had then my life is a funeral procession towards the empty grave of a girl that never existed. if you colour me unskilled then how can i get someone to give me a job? if your an autistic letter to a neurotypical friend studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 474-477, 2022 477 book says you overcame autism then i am to be overcome – something wild with claws and teeth to be conquered and tamed. you cannot pretend to be surprised when i start to see myself as that wild thing instead of a real girl. if you say you reclaimed me, brought me back from autism’s grasp, then i have no agency in my own body or in my life. i will be a shell of a person waiting for a savior instead of recognizing my effort and my personhood. and if my savior never comes, am i condemned? what kind of life is that? what kind of hope do i have if you paint being disabled as the worst-case scenario? if all you can see in me are “deficits” then i grow to love myself in spite of you – claws and teeth and all. if you tell my story for me then that will be the truth i must wear – and it will fall to me to disprove it, to work every damn day, david, to be even more! or else i drown in it. and if the people you say you speak for have to clean up after you, then really, what good are you to them? i’m not saying that actors can’t ever pretend to be disabled or that the tv show i watched was no good. sometimes it’s those first few shaky steps that ease society’s bend towards moral justice. change rarely happens all at once or is born perfect from the forehead of the gods. you’re trying, and that’s important. and an actor’s whole job description is pretending to be something they’re not – spies and doctors and superheroes – but in a world where voice matters, where your stories have real life consequences, where your voice comes with a privilege and mine does not… is it ethical? do you not owe me more, especially when you’re profiting from my existence? would it not be better to hire autistic actors? autistic writers? to give autistic people the chance to tell our stories and be visible, to show our truth, to shape our realities? to be authentic and have the audacity to be happy in our autistic lives? who would it hurt to show disabled people as empowered? who is injured by disabled people being seen as credible enough, competent enough, to have truth – and to be worthy of telling it? what do we stand to lose by having autistic people seeing themselves as champions of their own stories, as authentically themselves, as capable? happy with ourselves? would it wound you to see our lives as something more than a voyeuristic spectacle – as inspiration porn for you to jerk off to in prime time and feel better about yourself? or are you afraid that our real stories will uncover some uncomfortable truths about your comfortable society? are you afraid you might come face to face with yourself in our stories and that you won’t like what you see staring back at you? that you might have to get up, turn off the tv, and help us tear down the barriers that keep us from fully participating in society. are you scared about the amount of work there is to be done? it is a lot of work. but it’s still worth doing. sincerely, elsbeth. bhutani final before ts correspondence address: asmita bhutani, ontariuo institute for studies in education, university of toronto, toronto, on, m5s 1v6; email: asmita.bhutani@mail.utoronto.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 528-531, 2020 book review empire’s tracks: indigenous nations, chinese workers, and the transcontinental railroad karuka, manu. (2019). oakland, ca: university of california press. isbn 9780520296640 (paper) us$29.95; isbn 9780520296626 (cloth) us$85.00; isbn 9780520969056 (e-book) us$29.95. 320 pages asmita bhutani university of toronto, canada in empire’s tracks: indigenous nations, chinese workers, and the transcontinental railroad, manu karuka uses an anti-colonial, feminist and indigenous framework to critique imperialism in the us and explain the racial and colonial state’s entanglement with the modern corporation. mapping the historical trajectory and ongoing tendencies of this entanglement, the book begins with denaturalizing the existence of the us nation-state as exceptional or permanent. it argues that the us is neither a product of the great intellectual foundations of democracy and liberty, nor the land of trade and discovery. instead, it is an empire built on reactionary opposition to indigenous sovereignty and worker struggles, a process that began with the construction and expansion of the first transcontinental railroad in the mid-nineteenth century. the book aptly begins with some pertinent questions posed by a cheyenne man to the new york cooper union in 1871, “what use have we for railroads in our country? what have we to transport to other nation? nothing” (p. xi). these questions foreshadow a critique of the colonialist alibi of economic progress offered later in the book. “railway building,” karuka writes, “augured the introduction of new, hierarchical systems of management tying wages and skills to racial distinctions… investors on colonial railroads invested in more than the futures of railway corporations. they invested in the futures of colonialism” (p. 42). he tracks this journey of colonization by situating the apparatus of central pacific railroads in relation book review studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 528-531, 2020 529 to the colonized indigenous peoples along the path of the railroad, the exploitation of chinese workers, the legal provisions in the chinese exclusion act of 1882, and the war finance nexus (e.g., as manifest in the spanish-american war). three interconnected concepts undergird the book’s arguments: countersovereignty, modes of relationship, and continental imperialism. karuka argues that the us should be understood as a countersovereign entity that has always existed in reaction to the sovereignty of indigenous peoples and the struggles of workers around wages, technology and labour time. this reactivity took the form of catastrophic violence against indigenous peoples whose lands these railroad projects were supposed to destroy, and against the racialized chinese workers who build the railways. empire’s tracks’ first chapter builds an understanding of the concept of countersovereignty, and karuka returns frequently throughout the book to explain the dependence of us imperialism on countersovereignty, for extraction and financialization of lakota people’s lands (p. 70), for chinese exclusion (p.100), for the military occupation of cheyenne territory (p. 138), and overall to exert power and raise capital needed for the railroad project (p. 154). karuka uses the concept of mode of relations (i.e., the production and reproduction of relationships) to move past the mainstream literature, which associates imperialism with the economic order of territories and posits it as an externality. a significant portion of the book closely examines four case studies of indigenous modes of relationship amongst lakota, pawnee, and cheyenne people. relating the intimacies of land, people and animals among indigenous peoples with the lives of chinese railroad workers, chapters four to seven highlight the often-erased historical connections between the struggles of migrant workers against labour exploitation and selfdetermination struggles of indigenous peoples. karuka consistently asks us to “reconsider what we mean by capitalism by focusing less on modes of production and more on modes of relationship” (p. 184, emphasis added) suggesting a departure from traditional marxist scholarship. however, in doing so, the book attributes a quantitative dimension to the modes and assumes these modes as two separate processes. it then raises questions for the readers, especially those interested in contemporary marxist scholarship about whether these modes are quantifiable at all. further, what implications does such a quantitative separation of modes have on the dialectical relationship between these modes in a capitalist/colonial political economy? drawing upon lenin’s theory of imperialism and dubois’s arguments about colonialism in africa, karuka uses the concept of continental imperialism to provide a detailed account of how “the frontier dynamic is at the heart of us political economy” (p. 168). continental imperialism, according to karuka, proceeds through dislocation, deterritorialization, the colonial relationship of the liberal individual to the space of the putative nation, and active production of ignorance. the railroad corporation was a “core vehicle” (p. 157) for all these processes. to examine the global asmita bhutani studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 528-531, 2020 530 character of imperialism, karuka presents in chapter three a broad literature review on railroad colonialism, which traces the history of railroads across latin america, australia, africa and asia. this chapter serves to critique us exceptionalism, but it falls short of a much needed in-depth investigation of the interconnected past, present and futures of these regions especially given the spatial and temporal transcendence of racial and colonial logics within global imperialism. karuka devotes much attention to defining the state’s multiplicity, focusing on the intimate relations between its legal and political functions, and the finance capital orchestrated by corporations, which shaped the invasion of america. this relationship between state and corporation is critical for understanding the corporatized origins of today’s military and policing systems and their connection with finance capital (i.e., the war-finance nexus). it also helps with understanding racism and colonization as a complex web of processes within finance capital, including “shareholder whiteness” (p. 167), monopolization, and overaccumulation of capital. karuka’s methodology has useful epistemological insights for using archives as a source of data. the book debunks colonial sources (e.g., the census, policy reports) as conjectural rather than factual. instead, using a historical materialist approach, the book investigates rumours, oral histories, indigenous art, novels, individual and collective memories as sources of knowledge. examining the social relations of collectivity, struggles, and violence against people, animals and land provides a robust foundation for understanding capitalist structures as modes of relationship, rather than as modes of production, which indeed marks an important shift in scholarship on imperialism. in a very detailed epilogue, karuka solidifies the bridges between the apparatus of the transcontinental railroad of the past, and the contemporary struggles of indigenous nations, migrant workers and peasants, in order to offer an agenda for anti-imperialist struggles. it reflects on the violent yet free flow of international finance capital today, and grapples with questions of the contemporary urban infrastructures that function as instruments of finance capital, and by extension imperialism. concepts and strategies important for anti-imperialist struggles, such as “delinking from growth” (p. 36), the relationship between finance capital and fictitious capital (p.150), are briefly mentioned over the course of the book, and arouse interest for further examination. empire’s tracks is a remarkable piece of scholarship, which has potential to inform activist agendas for anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles in the us and other colonized indigenous nations such as canada and new zealand. the book comes at a peculiar time, when the world sinks into a global pandemic, worker struggles peak globally, and blockades of railroads and pipelines are tools of resistance against colonization of racialized, black and indigenous lands and bodies. it provides a relevant understanding of the book review studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 528-531, 2020 531 historical processes that must shape our current analysis and strategies of resistance against predatory capitalist and imperialist political economies. eaton final before ts correspondence address: emily eaton, department of geography & environmental studies, university of regina, regina, sk, s4s 0a2 ; email: emily.eaton@uregina.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 1, 155-157, 2021 book review more powerful together: conversations with climate activists and indigenous land defenders gobby, jen. (2020). fernwood press. isbn 9781773632261 (paper) cdn$26.00; isbn 9781773632513 (e-book) cdn$25.99; isbn 9781773633596 (pdf) cdn$25.99. 250 pages. emily eaton university of regina, canada in 2015, the truth and reconciliation commission’s (trc) final report issued 94 calls to action to institutions of the canadian state and to the broader civil society. for so many sectors (health, education, justice and journalism among others) the trc has been crucial for advancing the project of “reconciliation” and “decolonization” in so-called “canada.” yet the trc report and its 94 calls to action are eerily silent on the topic of the environment and climate change. enter jen gobby’s more powerful together, an essential starting place for considering how the climate and environmental movements can advance the work of decolonization and forge the right relationships for a better world. in this book, gobby argues that colonialism and capitalism are the underlying causes of both climate change and social injustice, and as such, our movements and organizing around climate change must also dismantle the colonial structures that continue to dispossess indigenous peoples of their lands and “modes of life” (as glen coulthard, 2014, has called it). this, of course, is no small task. gobby outlines how the indigenous land defense movement, the mainstream environmental movement, and the climate justice movement have converged around pipeline protests. but she also shows that this convergence is not (yet) a true alliance capable of mounting a united challenge to the causes of climate change and social injustice. in fact, gobby’s conversations and surveys with movement activists suggest that climate movements have been unwelcoming and hostile places for indigenous people and that ngoization has deprioritized land defense and decolonization and depoliticized climate action. emily eaton studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 155-157, 2021 156 like many settlers, when the trc published its final report in 2015 i eagerly looked over the 94 calls to action hoping to find suggestions for my work. but the calls to action don’t address the environment or climate change head on. at first i was perplexed by this, because the purpose of residential schools was to break indigenous children’s links to their cultures and identities. this is clearly articulated in the summary report and there are many calls to action related to language and culture and others that suggest incorporating indigenous knowledge into teaching methods, classrooms and other institutional practices. but the report doesn’t explicitly call attention to the fact that residential schools were also designed to remove children from their lands. as a settler, i am learning how a sense of responsibility to vast kin networks that include humans and non-humans is integral to many indigenous cultures and cosmologies. residential schools were an attempt to break these relationships with and responsibilities to the land and to networks of kinship that included not only indigenous children’s human families, but also the more-than-human world. thus, i believe the trc’s recommendations ought to have called us to renew these reciprocal relationships to our non-human others. if i could turn the results of gobby’s research into a few key trc calls to action around climate change i would suggest the following as the main takeaways: 1. we call upon environmental organizations and movements, ngos, and environmental departments at all levels of government to expand their approaches to the problem of climate change. climate change should be seen not only as a problem of rising greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions, but also as a problem of broken relationships to the non-human world. these broken relationships are the result of capitalist-colonial systems that rip apart reciprocal relationships between humans and between humans and non-humans. the same systems that produce unchecked global warming dispossess indigenous peoples from their lands and modes of life. thus, any strategy to reduce ghgs must also re-build reciprocal relationships by engaging indigenous knowledges and indigenous approaches to governance and diplomacy. 2. we call upon those working in environmental movements and sectors to support indigenous struggles for self-determination. as gobby suggests, “when indigenous peoples enact their own governance systems, lifeways and culture, colonial structures begin to lose power” (p. 109). as the intergovernmental panel on climate change made clear in their 2019 special report on climate change and land secure land tenure for indigenous and traditional landholders is key to slowing the climate crisis. climate movements and environmental sectors must work the world over to return land to indigenous nations and to recognize indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction over the full extent of their traditional territories. book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 155-157, 2021 157 in conducting her research, gobby also provides an example of how to centre indigenous voices and how to ensure that research with indigenous people is not “extractive” (p. 10). i found gobby’s approach to “raise up and disproportionately report on the views and theories of the indigenous people” (p. 12) that she interviewed a useful way forward. in this way, indigenous perspectives and experiences can be centred even if indigenous participants do not make up a majority of participants in a given study. not only did gobby disproportionately report on the views of indigenous participants in her study, she also made central the words of indigenous authors and scholars and the public statements and writing of indigenous movements and organizations. while i believe scholars should be striving to include as many indigenous people as possible in their samples, it is also vitally important to make good use of the existing public statements and writing of indigenous people and organizations. and where a sample suffers from overrepresentation of settlers, gobby offers a practical way forward for a researcher: to prioritize and disproportionately report on the contributions from indigenous people. more powerful together is a starting place for groups that want to build effective movements to combat climate change and inequality. the book does not provide a roadmap for accomplishing this, but it does insist that effective movements against climate change must not be myopic. we can continue to have oppositional politics converge around issues like pipelines, where local (often settler) communities are attempting to protect their local environments, climate change groups are motivated out of concern for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and indigenous land defenders are asserting their jurisdiction and self-determination as a means of carrying out their responsibilities to the land and each other. but these will only remain flashpoints until environmental and settler-dominated movements can understand decolonization as central to a more ecologically and socially just world. as gobby suggests, we are more powerful when we can propose solutions that are intersectional, when we can propose “alternatives that help address as many forms of injustice as possible” (p. 193). this will also help us to “scale up” our solutions and “render them more powerfully transformative” (p. 193). after all, now is not the time for half-measures, for movements that only improve the lives of some of us, for reforms that are not at the scale and the scope of the crises in front of us. now is the time to radically remake the structures and right our relationships with each other and with the non-human world. references coulthard, g. s. (2014). red skin white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. university of minnesota press. springgay final before ts correspondence address: stephanie springgay, school of the arts, mcmaster university, hamilton, on, l8s 4m2; email: springgs@mcmaster.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 stitching language: sounding voice in the art practice of vanessa dion fletcher stephanie springgay mcmaster university, canada abstract this paper engages with the artistic practice and work of vanessa dion fletcher (potawatomi and lenapé) from my perspective as a non-indigenous academic and curator. dion fletcher and i have worked together over the past several years through discussions about her work, studio visits, and various events. in her art practice, dion fletcher uses porcupine quills and menstrual blood to inquire into a range of issues and concepts including indigenous language revitalization, feminist indigenous corporeality, land as pedagogy, decolonization, and neurodiversity. in particular her work confronts the ways that indigeneity, the queer and gendered body, and disability are rendered expendable. in this paper i engage with dylan robinson’s “sovereign sense”: a transcorporeal mode of perception that is affective, land-based, and formed through relations between human and nonhumans. dion fletcher’s work makes palpable this sense of sovereignty through its unruly and mutating feltness. further, her work makes visible feminist indigenous artistic acts of resurgence alongside the frictions at the intersections of settler colonialism and disability. following karyn recollet, i contend that dion fletcher’s work activates an indigenous affective experience of futurity and creative intimacy that in turn imagines disability and indigeneity as sites through which new pedagogical relations can be formed. keywords indigenous art; affect; disability; healthism; futurity introduction this paper engages with the artistic practice and work of vanessa dion fletcher (potawatomi and lenapé) from my perspective as a non-indigenous academic and curator who has engaged with dion fletcher and her artwork and practice over the past number of years. following leah decter and carla taunton (2013), my approach takes up settler responsibility in decolonization. decter and taunton contend that non-indigenous artists and scholars have a role to play in forging settler and indigenous relations, stephanie springgay studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 266 including artistic actions. as a white settler academic my position and privilege are inseparable from my methods and perspectives. i acknowledge that my entanglement with dion fletcher’s work is entrenched in, and fraught with, complex relations of colonial power, including academic and curatorial language, representation, and interpretation. in order to be attentive to such tensions, i approach dion fletcher’s work, and my writing here, through what emily johnson and karyn recollet (2020) name as radical relationality. radical relationality is composed of relations of care, kinship, and intimacy. radical relationality, which i experience and identify elsewhere as a touching encounter (springgay, 2018), asks questions about consent and is grounded in generativity and love. in placing radical relationality at the heart of my curatorial work with dion fletcher, i recognize the limits of my writing about this work from a white settler perspective. at the same time radical relationality allows me to foreground the intimate care and respect i have for the artist, her work, and the role they play in decolonization. in coming to know dion fletcher and her practice i experienced the affective forces and bodily entanglements of her work. we spent time over tea holding the porcupine quills that are central to her work and inhaling their musty fragrance. i engaged dion fletcher’s various performances, installations, and video works sensorily, allowing them to enter my body and senses. these experiences helped me counter conventional academic readings of the work and i have attempted to include this affective texture into the writing in this paper alongside academic language. this hybrid writing practice and style is meant to point to the tensions of settler writing and scholarship on indigenous artists. many of dion fletcher’s art works incorporate porcupine quills, a traditional textile used in indigenous art and design. dion fletcher uses quills “to reveal the complexities of what defines a body physically and culturally” (dion fletcher, n.d.). one still image from dion fletcher’s video work, “testing,” reaches beyond the screen. it pictures her mouth, lips sealed tightly around the ends of seven porcupine quills, quills slightly obscured by fingers in the foreground of the photograph. the fingers on the left side of the image hold another quill and inch slowly toward or away from the tip of her index finger on the right side of the image, the fingertip already speckled with blood. the image quivers with both violence and intimacy. it conjures in me thought, memory, and feeling: the pain of a pin prick endured while sewing or embroidering; the fleshiness and porosity of a leaking body; self-harm; legacies of settler colonialism; a dead animal carcass; the obliteration of indigenous languages – a mouth that cannot speak. yet, there is a simultaneous tenderness to the image. the closeness of the mouth and fingers suggest that we are witnessing something private – a touching encounter of kinship between human and nonhuman. the image pulses with contradiction. these contradictory vibrations are further explored in dion fletcher’s performance “offensive/defensive.” here, again with quills in her mouth, she approaches audience members and offers them a quill. this gesture of sounding voice in the art practice of vanessa dion fletcher studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 267 “contact,” of reaching out and connecting, suggests both force and affection, themes that quiver and course throughout dion fletcher’s work. in both “testing” and “offensive/defensive,” the mouth becomes the conduit through which the encounter of touch is extended. it is an orifice that ingests, spits-out, desires, is silenced, and speaks. the quill mouth is an assemblage of corporeal gestures, one of many that dion fletcher makes in her oeuvre, an inquiry into a range of questions, concepts, and experiences including indigenous language revitalization, feminist indigenous corporeality, land as pedagogy (styres, 2019), decolonization, and neurodiversity. her work confronts the ways that indigeneity, the queer and gendered body, and disability are rendered expendable. in this paper, i suggest that dion fletcher’s art practice resists “settler legibility” through its affect and feltness (robinson, 2017, p. 98). settler legibility, according to dylan robinson (stó:lō) (2017) occurs when settlers read/interpret/understand indigenous artwork through settler ways of knowing, or through settler perception and aesthetics. figure 1. still image from vanessa dion fletcher’s video performance, testing, 2015 (photo: vanessa dion fletcher). image description: close up image of a mouth, lips sealed tightly around the ends of seven porcupine quills. the quills are slightly obscured by fingers in the foreground of the photograph. the fingers on the left side of the image hold another quill and inch slowly toward or away from the tip of the index finger on the right side of the image, the fingertip already speckled with blood. dion fletcher’s resistance to settler legibility is framed well by what leanne betasamosake simpson (michi saagiig nishnaabeg) (2016) names as acts of resurgence. simpson identifies practices that re-invest indigenous ways of being and regenerate knowledge traditions as important parts of stephanie springgay studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 268 decolonization (2016). similarly, jolene rickard (tuscarora) (2017) understands indigenous art as a sovereign act. dion fletcher’s performative works are thus direct acts of sovereignty. dylan robinson (2017), however, cautions against settler ways of being and understanding indigenous art. he argues that settler modes of perception are driven by hunger and knowability that can further colonize indigenous artistic practices. what is needed, he contends, are transcorporeal modes of perception that are affective, land-based, and formed through relations between human and non-humans. robinson describes a sense of sovereignty. it is this sovereign sensation that dion fletcher’s work makes palpable through its unruly and mutating feltness. further, her work makes visible feminist indigenous artistic acts of resurgence alongside the frictions at the intersections of settler colonialism and disability, where both indigeneity and disability are expendable. following karyn recollet (cree) (2018), i contend that dion fletcher’s work activates an indigenous affective experience of futurity and creative intimacy that in turn imagines disability and indigeneity as sites through which new relations can be formed. the first section of this paper considers the materiality of language and opens up the conception of words to include sound. i consider how dion fletcher’s performance of “finding language: a word scavenger hunt” operates affectively, beyond modes of conventional settler legibility. i suggest the performances, which entangle the revitalization of indigenous textile art with indigenous languages, are gestures of learning words or texts, and furthermore about sounding voice and agency. in the later section of the paper i take up the biopolitics of purity and healthism and the ways that indigeneity and disability are framed as matters of contamination within this discourse. i think-with dion fletcher as i discuss her cervical works (i.e., the many different performances she’s created and performed with and about the cervix). i consider in particular her use of menstrual blood to challenge the logics of boundaries. her work, in its viscous porosity, enacts an indigenous futurity that is affective and intimate. to conclude the paper, i consider the ways dion fletcher’s work ruptures and mends pedagogical relations. in addition to the interventions in how indigeneity and disability are taken up in education, i suggest that her work attunes us to a pedagogy that is intimate, porous, vulnerable, and felt. with dion fletcher, i imagine what pedagogy might be if it was conceived as an encounter between bodies, mouths, quills, and blood. stitching language, sounding voice i’m sitting in dion fletcher’s studio at the ontario college of arts and design university where she is artist-in-residence. she is explaining the process of doing quillwork. as i understand it, there is a steadfastness to it: collecting quills from a porcupine carcass, soaking the quills in water to sounding voice in the art practice of vanessa dion fletcher studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 269 soften, dying them, flattening them to prepare them to be used with a needle and thread. quillwork, like other textile practices, is a method of knowing and being that is spatial and temporal, and which emphasizes the tactility of becoming (springgay, 2018). dion fletcher takes her time describing the process. handmade objects are neither uniform nor reproducible. even if an artist creates a series of handmade objects, each one contains different compositions; no two are the same. in our conversation, vanessa speaks of quillwork as a language. in its corporeality of stitching and labour, the tactility of holding and bending the quills, and also in the visual designs created, quillwork has cadence and meaning. she opens a jar of plucked quills, passes the jar, and invites me to inhale the warm, musky scent of a porcupine. this language, sensory, embodied, and transcorporeal vibrates between the porcupine, the quills, the hands that pluck, soak, dye, and stitch, the patterns stitched on the cards, and the bodies and elements that compose the room. the studio walls are covered in quillwork – on 6 x 9 inch cards,1 jars full, and crates ready for shipping to an exhibition. it is a carpet of quills – cautioning me on where i might step. quills, dion fletcher tells me, are all different. unlike beads that were introduced through contact with european settlers, quills are of varying diameters and lengths. quills, she says, are evocative of land, where porcupine becomes teacher and/or co-learner. land, writes sandra styres (mohawk) (2019), is more than simply a geographical place for indigenous peoples. it is “spiritual, emotional, and relational; land is experiential, (re)membered, and storied; land is consciousness – land is sentient” (p. 27). this is what styres names land as pedagogy. as a practice of honoring land, quillwork, then, is about reciprocity and relations between humans and more-than humans where language is sentient and felt, not merely coded and transcribed. quillwork counters dominant settler understandings of language as external to the body, modeled on mastery and codes. tania willard (secwepemc) (2018) locates land art as an art form typically attributed to white male artists and often described as “pioneering” or avant-garde. settler art histories replace indigenous art practices. indigenous peoples, she writes “have been making ‘land art’ since time immemorial” (p. 189). extending from both willard’s analysis and dion fletcher’s self-reflection, dion fletcher’s use of quills indexes her relationship to land. willard writes: art is one of these great forces, imagining impossible futures for disappeared bodies, languages, and generations. in my own practice of land art, land is art: an interconnected power to create, imagine, and make real connections to the world, as well as to those who fly and those who swim, in an ever-expanding stitch that coils us all together. (2018, p. 190) 1 approximately 15 x 23 cm. stephanie springgay studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 270 dion fletcher uses quills across a number of artistic modes and projects. in her interactive performance, “finding language: a word scavenger hunt,” presented at the 10-day event indelible refusal: bodies, performances and walking resistance (walkinglab, 2018a) at the ontario institute for studies in education (oise) in 2018, and in 2019 in a different iteration at the cripping the arts symposium at the harbourfront centre for the arts, dion fletcher’s quill designs appear on 6 x 9-inch cards juxtaposed with text prompts (in english). for “indelible refusal,” dion fletcher gathered participants in the oise library and led us on a tour through the library showing us words on books, games, and other objects that resonated with the prompts she offered such as “a word that makes you remember.” as participants wandered the library, we were asked to question and consider the indeterminacy of language, its falterings, and hesitations. this performance resonates with the work of julietta singh (2018), who reminds us of the colonial project of “mastery,” in which libraries and educational institutions play a significant role. singh proposes that in order to “unthink mastery” we must embrace discomfort and “forms of queer dispossession” that enable different ways of inhabitation and illegibility (p. 8). the colonial master is convinced of their superiority through material conquest and an insistence on the supremacy of their worldviews that render the master as legitimate. singh writes: as a pursuit, mastery invariably and relentlessly reaches toward the indiscriminate control over something – whether human or inhuman, animate or inanimate. it aims for the full submission of an object – or something objectified – whether it be external or internal to oneself. (2018, p. 10) dion fletcher’s library tour and quill-stitched cards resist this “masterful” approach to language. in “finding language,” language is emotive, sensory, and hand made. following the library tour, dion fletcher invited participants to search for our own words and phrases in the library and write them down on the hand stitched cards. the quills, dyed in bright hues of yellow, orange, green, and red, rupture the linear text with their colour and zig zag patterns. the prompts on the cards read: a word that makes you feel good. a word that makes you remember. a noun you identify with. a word to whisper. a word just for you. these prompts are propositional, open-ended invitations. they incite a form of intimacy and render attempts at mastery vulnerable and fragile. they impress the materiality of language, its feltness and vibrancy. the prompts sounding voice in the art practice of vanessa dion fletcher studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 271 are a reminder that language is not static or stable but mutating, evolving, and deeply personal. figure 2. vanessa dion fletcher, finding language: a word scavenger hunt at oise, 2018 (photo: stephanie springgay). image description: a group of seven people gather closely in a semi-circle in a narrow library aisle. surrounded by books they gaze at artist vanessa dion fletcher, centre, who kneels and pulls a book off of a shelf. everyone else is holding notecards and pencils. a number of contemporary indigenous artists are revitalizing the use of traditional materials including amy malbeuf (métis) in her use of tufted caribou hair in her sculptural and performative work, nadia myer’s (kitigan zibi anishinaabeg) beading of canada’s indian act, and ursula johnson’s stephanie springgay studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 272 (mi’kmaq) use of basket-type woven installations. this revitalization works to hold and guide tradition. sherry ferrell racette writes, “the simple act of retaining and protecting knowledge was political – the materials themselves often believed to be living and potent, and the gestures of weaving and stitching deeply personal and meditative” (2017, p. 115). in “finding language,” dion fletcher’s performative tour vacillates between revitalization of indigenous language and material traditions and the ways in which language is materially elusive and invasive. dion fletcher’s neurodiversity, a learning disability that includes challenges with short-term memory, subtly bends its way through “finding language”. yet, though quillwork and the lenepé language, she remembers and moves tradition. in this work, dion fletcher mobilizes bodily forms of knowing and the ephemerality and hapticality of language in order to confront the traumas and violence of the loss of language and culture, of ways of knowing and being, while affirming the ongoing vitality of indigenous life and futurity. at cripping the arts, dion fletcher performed an adapted iteration of “finding language.” this performance begins as she lays on her back on stage, a sound piece playing in the background. the sounds of ice crackling, geese calls, and her grandmother's voice intensify as text appears on a screen. a transcript forms as the stenographer types out the sounds from the soundtrack. the artist rises and removes hearing aids from a small basket, cups her hands to her ears and asks, “can you hear me?” she notices a tiny spider as she sits on the floor. she kneels in front of the audience, fingers tracing the lenapé dictionary in her hands. the room is silent except for dion fletcher turning the pages. as the performance continues, she moves around the space. the room is a large meeting space at harbourfront centre in toronto, filled with small round tables, around which are placed conference style chairs, about two hundred people sit in the audience. as she moves through the room, she reads aloud words and symbols from various signs – a wheelchair symbol, the heating control unit – she repeats the english words and reads the lenapé words (in lenapé) and meanings (in english) from the dictionary. using her cell phone, she transmits what she sees onto a large screen on the stage. she turns over a chair and repeats, “chair, chair, chair,” and then speaks the lenapé words for different kinds of chairs. she reflects on how there’s more to words than the mundanity they take on: “i used to think that ‘chair’ was a banal word. but then i thought about all the times i was stuck in a chair with the teacher or my mom. somebody told me i had to sit down and stay still… ‘chair’ as a word is a lot less boring.” the performance is interactive – she moves through the room and reads out loud found words, her focus seemingly on text. but i encounter her performance as one also steeped in auditory sensation, where speech becomes sound and sound becomes haptic or bodily. dominant forms of language are understood as speech which is legible through spoken language and written language (on the page or projected on the screen) and can be mastered. feeling language is rendered as sounding voice in the art practice of vanessa dion fletcher studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 273 noise, something to be commodified and controlled and made into speech or silenced. “chair, chair, chair lehëlëmatahpink.” bifurcating speech and noise determines who and what belongs. yet, dion fletcher’s performance ruptures this bifurcation through affective modulations of sound, making the words do something other than making legible sense. in sounding and feeling language, she allows the visceral body to interrupt the primacy of the visual and textual representations. lisa stevenson (2017) describes the force of saying something as an absent present. she developed this framework in her study of the messages inuit in artic canada sent to their relatives who had been forcibly removed from their homes and placed in a tuberculosis sanitorium in hamilton ontario. the separation was detrimental. the messages were recorded by the department of northern affairs, but inuit had no direct communication with their relatives. in analyzing the tapes, stevenson is struck by the repetition of the phrase “i don’t know what to say” (p. 65). she writes, “it seems to me as if speakers ran up against, on the one hand, the impossibility of saying something and, on the other hand, the importance of saying something — the importance of speaking itself” (p. 66). it is the utterance, not the words themselves, wherein lies the potential of an absent present, or in other words a kind of futurity. she states, “my thinking also depends on the way words are not only vehicles of information or labels that fix the labeled in place but also gestures or even songs that allow a crooked, painful world, peopled by the living and the dead, to come into being” (p. 66). stevenson suggests that in the act of speaking, multiple worlds are imagined and made possible. relating to stevenson’s analysis, while on one hand dion fletcher’s performance is about finding and learning language and resisting the ways that language codes and commodifies particular bodies, so too it is about saying something; sound is about a calling, where a body seeks another body. this calling, stevenson insists, asks us to listen and hear differently. voice, then, contrasts the mastery of language and speech. she suggests that we think of voice beyond intelligibility: [consider] voice because its primary function is not intelligibility but sound as it communicates, as it moves between and ties people together. and part of what i am suggesting is that, in moving between us, voice can also animate us, or allow us the space to be whatever it is that we are. (p. 2017, p. 75) in “finding language,” dion fletcher’s voice and the ambient sounds of the performance ask the audience to listen to the absent present, to more than what is present in the room. to return to robinson’s framework, dion fletcher’s voice embodies a sovereign sense (p. 98). he writes, indigenous resurgence is based not only on the forms our works take, but on the ways we perceive form in general. decolonizing settler perception similarly involves reckoning with the ways in which looking and listening take place in stephanie springgay studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 274 order to move beyond forms of hungry, starving, and extractive perception. (2017, p. 99) i take this to mean that a sovereign sense is not, for example, about dion fletcher learning lenapé through the accumulation of independent words and syntax or an ever-expanding lexicon and vocabulary; both robinson and dion fletcher refuse the mastery of language here. instead, we might think about sovereign sensing as a shift from the revitalization of art and language, which implies recovery and as such loss, to a collective way of being, a seeping between the quills and words and bodies like a spider casting a web. creative intimacy dion fletcher uses menstrual blood and the cervix to challenge the logics of boundaries and in doing so brings together disability and colonialism. in the immersive installation and performance of “own your cervix” at tangled art + disability in 2017,2 audience members were invited into a small room enclosed by white curtains and a deep red-painted wall for a guided cervical self-examination. participants were invited to sit on an examination table and use a plastic speculum, flashlight, and mirror, to see a seldom seen part of their bodies. dion fletcher reflects: i’m interested in the act of looking and describing in contrast to a medical or anthropological definition of a body to create a space where i or others can create their own definitions and descriptions of their physical bodies. there’s a kind of agency and ownership in that process, individually, and then collectively when the stories are brought together or people come together in the space. (robertson, 2017, para. 4). the “own your cervix” installation at tangled (dion fletcher, 2017) included an examination room, video of previous participants’ cervical sightings, and wallpaper patterned with a pelvis and legs, blood dripping to the ground.3 nearby sits a victorian settee, intricately embellished with patches of sharp, raw porcupine quills, and on the wall hangs a series of embellished textile pieces that feature red splotches. 2 i have not experienced “own your cervix” live but have accessed it through digital images and conversations with dion fletcher. 3 this image, pelvis, legs and blood, is repeated throughout dion fletcher’s work, produced in various materials including paint and quills. sounding voice in the art practice of vanessa dion fletcher studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 275 figure 3. from vanessa dion fletcher’s, own your cervix, immersive installation at tanged art + disability gallery, 2017 (photo: kristina mcmullin). image description: white curtains part to reveal an examination room with a deep-red painted wall. in the middle of the room is a white examination table. behind the table, on the red wall, is a white shelf with white towels, lubricant, and bright examination light. below the shelf hangs a round magnifying mirror. dion fletcher introduced cervical sightings performance again for “toxic love” (walkinglab, 2018b), a project i co-curated for walkinglab. against the backdrop of hamilton, ontario’s industrial smokestacks and toxic waterways, dion fletcher sat on an inflatable camping mat and used a speculum and mirror to examine her cervix. participants at toxic love were given plastic speculums and invited to view their own cervix. framed by the industrial landscape and gallery walls, symbols of global capitalism and settler colonialism, her performance became a stark reminder of the ways that indigenous bodies and toxic water are co-imbricated. colonialism is conditioned on able bodyminds. as such, indigenous bodies are rendered disabled through colonial capitalist practices and the resulting environmental destruction. following this, indigenous bodies are always already figured as disabled. disability then becomes a useful means of domination and control through incarceration, elimination, and the removal of unfit others. stephanie springgay studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 276 figure 4. vanessa dion fletcher, toxic love, performance at walkinglab, 2018 (photo: anise truman). image description: vanessa dion fletcher sits on a camping mat on the weedy, gravely ground. the background is water and industrial smokestacks. three people, pictured from the waist down, gather around dion fletcher, who is positioned in side profile. she wears a white lab coat over a grey dress, black boots, and a headset with microphone. she pulls back the skirt of her dress with one hand and holds a mirror between her legs with the other. legs extended, she looks down towards the mirror at her cervix. another of dion fletcher’s cervical works is “inside voices,” a video installation of her menstruating cervix. the installation is set nestled within a room of soft folded brown fabric. the video gazes into a cervix close up, through the speculum. blood seeps and flows on the video monitor, like a pulsating heartbeat, a rhythmic spatiotemporal counter-presence to the medicalization, pathology, and sanitation of menstrual blood. i experienced this work in 2018 at say my name, a group exhibition curated by syrus marcus ware at the gladstone hotel in toronto. i stepped inside the small cozy room and was surrounded by the brown flowing curtains as if diving into the cervical canal. it was as if my body had replaced the speculum. sounding voice in the art practice of vanessa dion fletcher studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 277 figure 5. still image from vanessa dion fletcher’s, inside voices, 2016, 06:00 minutes. image description: soft, pink, and flowing blood, this image looks through a speculum, close up and tunnel visioned, at the inside of a menstruating cervix. when i visit dion fletcher in her toronto studio, she shows me images of porcupine blood and quills taken through a microscopic lens. this, is yet another reminder of how her artwork and practice sees and visualizes the body differently. a compelling aspect of dion fletcher’s projects is their refusal to essentialize the body, gender, and women’s experiences. rather, they question the ways that indigeneity, race, and disability are framed by “regimes of health and hygiene” (kafer, 2013, p. 32). whiteness, settler colonialism, and ableism maintain what alexis shotwell (2016) calls “purity politics,” which enforce rigid boundaries to ward off contamination. colonial and racist logics also operationalize the elimination of dirt, blood, disease, and illness. shotwell writes, “markers of racial purity are in turn entangled and co-constituted with biopolitical practices aiming to reduce or eliminate disability, poverty, and queerness at the population level” (2016, p. 15). shotwell names the tendency to consider health as an individual and moral obligation as “healthism,” wherein “individuals are held responsible for their bodies, and obesity, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic conditions are rendered as moral failings” (2016, p. 29). healthism points to how disability biopolitics are racialized in material and affective ways (chen, 2012; mitchell et al., 2019). this is all too evident in dion fletcher’s performance as part of “toxic love” in hamilton’s windermere basin in the shadow of petro-capitalism. here colonial blood spills into the ground and water. while menstruation and speculums may seem to point to cisgendered embodiment, dion fletcher’s work confronts the ways that indigenous bodies exist both within and outside of colonial conceptions of gender and gender stephanie springgay studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 278 binaries. the title, “own your cervix,” shifts the narrative towards bodies that menstruate and arguably toward all bodies that shed blood, and claims bodily and gender sovereignty. while colonial violence haunts the spectre of these various cervical projects, as it does many of her works, they simultaneously enact a sovereign sensation. as dion fletcher herself points out, when she looks at, touches, and cares for her body these acts unsettle colonial medical models that have always been framed through compulsory heteronomativity. there is something intimately queer in performing one’s own self-exam. in dion fletcher’s work surfaces become porous, prickly, and wet, things ooze. this permeability questions individualism, boundedness and containment, defending itself from pollutants. eased open (with a lubricated speculum), the individual is released, the body seen from one’s own personal and cultural perspective through a magnifying mirror. the victorian settee, with its barbed patterns of quills, points at a vulnerability that need not be defended against. it invites touch and threatens borders and boundaries. it foregrounds interdependence between humans and nonhumans. blood stains intricately patterned from glass beads disturb white damask colonial fabrics. mel chen (2012) considers the affections of toxicity and questions the ways that some toxins, cleaning products and perfumes, for example, are encountered as benign or pleasurable, while others like vaccines and lead become threats. dion fletcher’s use of menstrual blood (literally and figuratively) and porcupine quills materializes this threat while also complicating it, rendering it beautiful and simultaneously horrific. the plastic speculum that dion fletcher uses in her performative works owes its history to the sims’ speculum, invented by marion sims from south carolina in 1845. sims’ medical expertise was in repairing vaginal fistulas caused by childbirth (eveleth, 2014). while his medical technology significantly advanced women’s health science, it came at a violent cost. sims used enslaved black women to test his surgeries and operated on these women without anesthesia and for hours. dion fletcher’s performances work with the affective trauma of this violent colonial history. it conjures rebecca belmore’s (ojibwe) “fringe,” a life-sized photograph of a female body, back sutured with a beaded fringe. in both dion fletcher’s works and belmore’s “fringe,” “the female body [is] the site on which colonialism’s traumas are borne” (morris, 2017, p. 74). “own your cervix” (dion fletcher, 2017) and dion fletcher’s other menstrual performances underscore repeated medical and sexual violence and also suggest agency and embodied futurity. it embraces what gerald vizenor (chippewa) (1999) calls indigenous survivance: “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (p. vii). survivance and resurgence emphasize action and agency. rather than the affective dimensions of trauma, as locked into a past and present, survivance is an active mode of sovereign sensation that resists victimhood through iterative, sounding voice in the art practice of vanessa dion fletcher studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 279 resistant, and affective gestures. by inviting audiences to witness publicly her “owning her cervix” and to view their own, dion fletcher shifts the narrative from private trauma to collective intimacy and care. she creates a shared space to experience agency and care for ourselves and others as part of radical relationality. dion fletcher cultivates alternative relations with colonial technologies. alison kafer (2019) contends that disabled artists are “activating, interrogating, refusing, and repurposing medicalized aesthetics and technologies, finding within them inspiration and resources for their art practice” (p. 4). dion fletcher invites audiences and participants to feel language, to look at and inside their bodies, to accept an offering of a quill from her mouth she creates spaces for loving kin. challenging the ways that health and hygiene capacitate some bodies and debilitate others (shotwell, 2016; puar, 2017), dion fletcher’s art practices question the ways that various technologies and the mastery associated with them condition bodies to be productive, efficient, and speedy. in other words, if colonialism is conditioned through able bodyminds, then dion fletcher’s work disturbs and embraces spectrums of abilities, reproduction, and kin. she exercises her sovereign senses to create openings that foster different relations that interrogate and rupture normalcy and mastery. karyn recollet (2018) calls this kind of indigenous survivance, “kinstillatory gatherings.” kinstillatory gatherings are ethics and modes of being “defined as urban spaces that mirror the ways constellations gather in radical relationality” (2018, p. 26). the creative intimacy of dion fletcher’s practice as a form of radical relationality – gatherings of blood, quills, porcupine, mouths, sounds, voices, bodies – becomes spatiotemporal, “where past, future, and present are remixed in generative ways” (hudson et. al., 2019, p. 3). perhaps in the slipstream (dillon, 2012; recollet, 2018) everyone – human and otherwise – is sliding through a plastic speculum to listen to and hear what’s inside: the sounds of kin that open out to a world of indigenous futurity. intimate pedagogies of the quill in this final section of the paper, i bring my encounters and thinking with dion fletcher and her practice to the work of education. as an artist, curator and scholar interested in the entanglements of contemporary art and pedagogy, i am drawn to dion fletcher’s work and artistic practice because of the pedagogical gestures they make. her work informs, instructs, and reveals various complexities about disability, gender, the body, and indigeneity. but further, her practice does something to the pedagogical encounter. it enacts a pedagogy of intimacy, one that is leaky, prickly, and fleshy. it counters the ongoing violence of education and its insistence on mastery and proficiency. it disrupts a colonial pedagogical model of docility and containment. pedagogy and intimacy. these two words combined make stephanie springgay studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 280 people quiver. together they are entangled and relational, a threat to conventional pedagogical order. what if we imagined the pedagogical relation as one in which a quill pressed firmly between the lips is offered to another? a bodily encounter always already imbricated in that encounter. a quill pedagogy. in the fall of 2019, dion fletcher was an artist-in-residence at ontario institute for studies in education. she held open studios, gave a public lecture, and facilitated workshops within a variety of classes; her work on display for settler modes of consumption and perception inside an educational institution. following sandra styres (2019), i want to complicate settler consumption and perception of indigenous art and think about art’s relationship to reconciliation. as a white settler academic i want to be responsible to my relationship with dion fletcher and her artwork and practice. i want to think about how dion fletcher’s work inside an institution like oise activates sovereign sensations. conversations about her work, the materials, forms, and content, are necessary, but even more are considerations of the pedagogical encounter. my desire is not to include vanessa dion fletcher on a syllabus as an inclusionary gesture, but rather to identify what we, teachers and students, might learn from her practice about how and who we are. what i learn from my encounters with her work is generosity, reciprocity and bodily. i learn that we need to create spaces for messy, leaky, vulnerable bodies. i have learned so much from sandra styres, my colleague, and vanessa dion fletcher about land relations and pedagogy. dion fletcher’s work presses on me the need to also think about intimacy and how it is always imbricated in networks of vulnerability, harm, and violence and networks of generative care, love and ethics (springgay, 2008, 2017, 2018). i keep dreaming of the poster in the oise elevators that announces indigenous intimacy. it reminds me of the invitation to enter the folded, porous, warm, and intimate spaces of learning. this is the slipstream. the kinstillatory gatherings. let’s make this happen. references chen, m.y. (2012). animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. duke university press. dion fletcher, v. (n.d.). about. vanessa dion fletcher. https://www.dionfletcher.com dion fletcher, v. (2017). own your cervix [exhibition]. tangled art + disability gallery, toronto, canada. https://tangledarts.org/exhibits/own-your-cervix-2/ decter, l., & taunton, c. (2013). addressing the settler problem: strategies of settler responsibility and decolonization. fuse, 36(4), 32-38. dillon, g. (2012). walking in the clouds: an anthology of indigenous science fiction. university of british columbia press. eveleth, r. (2014, november 17). why no one can design a better speculum. the atlantic. retrieved august 2020 from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/why-noone-can-design-a-better-speculum/382534/ hudson, a., ibrahim, a., & recollect, k. (2019). in this together: blackness, indigeneity, and hip-hop. dio press. sounding voice in the art practice of vanessa dion fletcher studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 265-281, 2021 281 johnson, e., & recollet, k. (2020). kind-ling and other radical relationalities. artlink, 40(2), 8289. kafer, a. (2013). feminist, queer, crip. indiana university press. kafer, a. (2019). crip kin, manifesting. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-37. mitchell, d. t., antebi, s., & snyder, s. l. (2019). the matter of disability: materiality, biopolitics, crip affect. university of michigan press. morris, k. (2017). crash: specters of colonialism in contemporary indigenous art. art journal, spring, 70-80. puar, j. (2017). the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. duke university press. racette, s. f. (2017). tuft life: stitching sovereignty in contemporary indigenous art. art journal spring, 114-123. recollet, k. (2018). steel trees, fish skins, and futurity cyphers. canadian theatre review, 76, 26-30. rickard, j. (2017). diversifying sovereignty and the reception of indigenous art. art journal, spring, 81-84. robertson, k. (2017, january 8). vanessa dion fletcher’s own your cervix invites you to look within-literally. now magazine. retrieved august 2019 from https://nowtoronto.com/artand-books/art/vanessa-dion-fletcher-own-your-cervix-self-exam/ robinson, d. (2017). public writing, sovereign reading: indigenous language art in public space. art journal, spring, 85-99. shotwell, a. (2016). against purity: living ethically in compromised times. university of minnesota press. simpson, l. (2016). indigenous resurgence and co-resistance. critical ethnic studies, 2(2), 1934. singh, j. (2018). unthinking mastery: dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. duke university press. springgay, s. (2008). body knowledge and curriculum: pedagogies of touch in youth and visual culture. peter lang. springgay, s. (2018). how to write as felt: touching transmaterialities and more-than-human intimacies. studies in educational philosophy, 38(1), 57-69. springgay, s. & truman, s. e. (2017). stone walks: inhuman animacies and queer archives of feeling. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 38(6), 851-863 stevenson, l. (2017). sounding death, saying something. social text, 35(1), 59-78. styres, s. (2019). literacies of land: decolonizing narratives, storying, and literacies. in l. t. smith, e. tuck & k. w. yang (eds.), indigenous decolonizing studies in education (pp. 24-37). routledge. vizenor, g. (1999). manifest manners: narratives on postindian survivance. university of nebraska press. walkinglab. (2018a, june 5). indelible refusal. https://walkinglab.org/indelible-refusal/ walkinglab. (2018b, september 17). toxic love/making-with-windermere basin. https://walkinglab.org/portfolio/toxic-love-making-with-windermere-basin/ willard, t. (2018). 6 strong breeze. in c. shaw & e. turpin (eds.), the work of wind: land (pp. 189-206). k. verlag. schott, spring & langan fg july 8 16 correspondence address: nicole d. schott, ontario institute for studies in education (oise), university of toronto, 252 bloor st. w., toronto, on, m5s 1v6; email: nicole.schott@mail.utoronto.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 neoliberalism, pro-ana/mia websites, and pathologizing women: using performance ethnography to challenge psychocentrism nicole d. schott university of toronto, canada lauren spring university of toronto, canada debra langan wilfrid laurier university, canada abstract key terms such as “pro-ana,” “pro-anorexia,” and “pro-ed” are searched for on the internet over 13 million times annually. these searches lead to web pages and social media sites where pro-anorexia and “pro-bulimia” (proana/mia) contributors share weight-loss and exercise tips, “thinspiration” slogans, images and videos, and speak openly about their problems with eating and body image. in this article, we outline our initial research on online responses to proana/mia, and describe how we used the data and analyses from this research to create a piece of research-informed theatre, or performance ethnography. the initial research identified a range of responses to pro-ana/mia that were aligned with either dominant or critical discourses on the causes of, and solutions for, proana/mia. our findings and analyses challenge media portrayals and medical approaches to pro-ana/mia phenomena, and support an alternative, critical analysis of how psychocentrism and neoliberalism foster social injustices for women and girls. our work nurtures collective efforts to displace dominant ideologies and practices that have serious implications for the socio-cultural, economic, physical and mental health of women and their communities. keywords arts-based research; eating disorders; performance ethnography; proana/mia; psychocentrism; social injustice, pathologization nicole d. schott, lauren spring, debra langan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 96 introduction hundreds of online fora provide opportunities and spaces for communities of individuals, particularly girls and women, to discuss and communicate about their challenges and problems with eating and body image. many creators and users refer to these sites, and themselves, as “pro-ana” and/or “pro-mia” (short forms for pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia) (brotsky & giles, 2007). on these fora, contributors share weight-loss and exercise tips, “thinspiration” slogans, images and videos, and speak openly about their successes and their problems. in recent years, pro-ana and pro-mia (hereafter referred to as “pro-ana/mia”) have moved from private and public website spaces to social networking sites such as tumblr, instagram, facebook, pinterest and twitter, resulting in easier access and more public exposure. key terms such as “pro-ana,” “pro-anorexia,” “pro-ed,” “prothinspo” and “pro-acceptance” are searched for more than 13 million times annually through the search engine, google (lewis & arbuthnott, 2012). the growth of pro-ana/mia and its movement to more public spaces online have fueled the perception of a dangerous and out-of-control social problem. in fact, some have argued that pro-ana/mia is one of the new psychopathologies of the 21st century (starcevic & aboujaoude, 2015). this claim conveys the idea that pro-ana/mia websites are the cause, or “trigger” for disordered eating problems (christodoulou, 2015; custers, 2015; pollack, 2003). the media’s messaging supports this claim, which is evident in canadian newspaper article headlines, such as “online anorexia: popular ‘predatory’ websites support perceptions” (windsor star, 2006). the media both sensationalizes and oversimplifies women’s experiences with eating disorders, most often painting those involved with pro-ana/mia as dangerous, disgusting, abnormal, mentally ill, and in need of expert intervention. over the past 15 years, pro-ana/mia has been targeted with censorship (ferreday, 2003) and these calls have been strongly supported and promoted by medical and mental health professionals across north america, the uk, italy and france (schott & langan, 2015). social media sites such as tumblr, instagram and pinterest have been monitoring, banning and deleting pro-ana/mia related interactions and targeting proana/mia individuals with public service announcements that recommend seeking “expert help” (duca, 2013; schott & langan, 2015). furthermore, countries such as france and italy have been proposing restrictive legislation that, if passed, would criminalize individuals within the proana/mia community by imposing huge fines and/or imprisonment (arnold, 2014; lichfield, 2008). the media reinforces this direction through headlines like “eating disorder websites are ‘killing people,’ experts say” (bignell, 2007). this article describes our ongoing sociologically-informed research on pro-ana/mia and responses to it in online pro-ana/mia communities. guided neoliberalism, pro-ana/mia websites, & pathologizing women studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 97 by charmaz’s (2006) grounded theorizing, hine’s (2005) virtual ethnography approach, and poststructural feminism, our initial research revealed the complex voices of pro-ana/mia individuals and myriad responses to these. these data and the historical and critical scholarly literature informed our analysis of how medical and media approaches to pro-ana/mia promote psychocentrism – the idea that all human abnormality is a result of individualized mind or body pathologies (rimke, 2003; terry & urla, 1995). we developed an alternative interpretation of pro-ana/mia phenomena by interrogating and exposing the psychocentricity of neoliberal conceptions and practices that ignore the social contexts of eating and body image struggles. guided by the tenets of feminist actionoriented research to highlight the role of social injustices and our commitment to nurturing critical consciousness around eating and body image struggles, we extend the research by using the methodology of performance ethnography to communicate our research findings and analyses. as a continuing project, at each performance we gather audience feedback data that shape our unfolding analyses and subsequent iterations of the performances used to disrupt dominant discourses. this article contributes to the critical literature on eating and body image issues. specifically, we share an alternative way of responding to eating and body image issues through using theatre to stage critical analyses. as researchers, artists and women who have struggled with eating and body image, our objective is to ignite social activism that draws attention to, disrupts, and changes the dominant and problematic characterizations of pro-ana/mia and the social contexts that contribute to struggles around eating and body image. literature review dominant analyses toronto’s national eating disorder information centre (nedic), the canadian mental health association (cmha), canada’s center for addiction and mental health (camh), and other medical authorities define “anorexia nervosa,” “bulimia nervosa,” “binge eating disorder” and “eating disorders otherwise not specified” as “clinical” eating disorders. from a medical perspective, a diagnosis of a clinical eating disorder is a recognized medical condition that typically is understood and responded to as a “mental illness.” people with eating disorders are frequently cited as having the highest mortality rate of anyone with a diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm) diagnosis (canadian mental health association, 2015). cmha (2016) explains that people with anorexia may “refuse to keep their weight at a normal weight” through food restriction or “exercising nicole d. schott, lauren spring, debra langan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 98 much more than usual.” further, both cmha and camh explain that anorexia nervosa is characterized by a distorted body image, an intense and irrational fear of becoming or being fat, and a strong determination to lose weight. similarly, both cmha and camh characterize someone with bulimia as having episodes of binge eating, followed by purging. nedic’s website describes people who have a clinical eating disorder as being obsessed with controlling their eating to the point of starvation, as a way to achieve a sense of control over their lives. it provides extensive information about anorexia, bulimia, and treatment options. like cmha and camh, the overarching theme in nedic’s information is that eating disorders are psychiatric illnesses as seen in individual abnormalities that require treatment by experts. historical analyses historical analyses of eating problems trace how understandings of this topic have changed over time, depending on social and cultural contexts. for example, brumberg (2000, 46-47) has chronicled how the meaning of the anorexic has evolved “from sainthood to patienthood.” for medieval women, anorexic fasting – even to the point of death – reflected female holiness. later, in the 19th century, victorian anorexia was seen as a manifestation of female hysteria, an individual pathology, attentionseeking, and moral and family failings (brumberg, 2000). during that century, some medical professionals began to blame anorexia on women's new involvement in higher education, linking anorexia to intellectual activity (brumberg, 2000), and reflecting the broader power of male psychiatry (see smith, 1990, for a more detailed analysis). the rise of psychoanalysis brought an appreciation for women’s language, thoughts, and dreams, seen as codes to be interpreted. according to burstow (2015, p. 85), “talk and insight – not oversight – was the order of the day. however sexist and scripted the interpretations... the patient was being listened to.” while psychoanalysis spawned the move away from the medical model and towards talk-therapy, it also introduced the idea that “virtually everyone could be ‘legitimately’ viewed as ‘having’ a ‘mental illness’” (burstow, 2015, p. 121). in an effort to retain their professional turf, psychiatrists, big business and pharmaceutical companies reacted against the rise of psychoanalysis by funding research into the brain, and developing (largely unproven) theories that focused on “chemical imbalances” as the cause of mental illness – a disorder that required “professionalized” treatment (burstow, 2015). brumberg (2000, p. 245) traces how, starting in the 19th century, the medical concern for obesity grew and “many internalized the notion that the size and shape of the body was a measure of self-worth.” the body became “an instrument of competition, a way to demonstrate one’s mettle” (brumberg, 2000, p. 252), neoliberalism, pro-ana/mia websites, & pathologizing women studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 99 spawning an explosion of the diet industry that continues today. within this context, anorexia has come to be understood as a “condition involving the control of appetite rather than loss of it” (brumberg, 2000, p. 228). critical analyses the critical scholarly literature rejects the dominant approach based on the individualization of eating disorders, and attends to the broader social contexts in which these occur. blaming pro-ana/mia websites is seen to deflect accountability from the mainstream messages of socially acceptable media and advertising outlets (boero & pascoe, 2012) that promulgate “western beliefs that thinness is a desirable, beneficial and value enhancing attribute for women” (knapton, 2013, p. 467). as walters, adams, broer and bal (2015, p. 10) note, eating disorders represent a self-care “tool” for furthering self-actualization and self-surveillance, laudable goals within a “self-improvement culture.” some critical analyses have examined the complex and contradictory positioning of pro-ana/mia contributors. for example, while some see their eating disorder as a “skill” that makes them superior, talented, hardworking, determined, disciplined, powerful and in control (walters et al., 2015), others voice self-loathing comments about being “an imperfect person” (bates, 2014, p. 194). gailey (2009) has argued that an eating disorder is a voluntary and skilled risk-taking activity that is akin to the predominantly male risk-taking involved in extreme motorcycle racing; the only difference is how society responds to the anorexic versus the motorcycle racer when the risk-taking is lifethreatening: “the man will be treated and released; the woman will be sent to the psychiatric ward or the hospital until she gains ‘enough’ weight and has shown that she is ‘recovered’” (gailey, 2009, p. 105). this highlights one important characteristic of psychocentrism: it uses a double standard to deal with high-risk behavior privileging one gender over another and thus contributing to sexist medical practices. some critical feminist analyses have conceptualized eating disorders as indicative of a rejection of imposed markers of good femininity. grey (2011) argues that “eating disorders became a projected site for the enactment of women’s struggle for independence.” some analyses have underscored the inherent contradictions in medical interpretations of anorexia. for example, rimke (2000) highlights how in neoliberalism the construction of hyper-responsibility is a population management technique that produces the illusion of autonomy, while actually decreasing autonomy by promoting expert intervention. others have made the case that this diagnosis has paternalistic and disabling outcomes. as kendall (2014) noted, even though anorexia arguably represents the most “successful” control over one’s appetite, women with anorexia are portrayed as having lost control, and told they need expert intervention and force-feeding to nicole d. schott, lauren spring, debra langan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 100 gain control over their lives. some feminist critiques highlight the potentially positive functions that pro-ana/mia websites serve, such as providing multiple forms of support, catharsis and coping mechanisms, reducing feelings of isolation, encouraging recovery, and offering a safe space to promote or challenge disordered eating ideologies and behaviours (casilli, tubaro, & araya, 2012; gailey, 2009; schott & langan, 2015; tubaro & mounier, 2014; wooldridge, 2014). from this perspective, the censoring of pro-ana/mia websites is seen as an extension of the patriarchal control of women (schott & langan, 2015). initial methodology the research methodology has been informed by a combination of constructivist grounded theory (charmaz, 2006), virtual ethnography (hine, 2005), and liquid ethnography (ferrell, hayward, & young, 2008). we use an inductive approach that begins with an immersion in the data and moves toward a theoretical analysis “to work from the ground up…” (charmaz, 2006, p. 21). by combining these methodologies into what nicole schott refers to as “a grounded virtual liquid ethnography,” a researcher can take into account the transitory and destabilizing characteristics that appear when the line between online and offline interactions are blurred (see schott & langan, 2015, for a detailed description of the method). over the past three years, guided by poststructural feminism, nicole has been immersed the online pro-ana/mia data, her initial focus being on social media sites tumblr and youtube. her immersion was non-intrusive in that she did not interact with those who were posting online; rather, she observed what was taking place online. further, her immersion moved between and often occurred simultaneously in both online and offline public spaces. as a woman living in toronto, she was unwittingly bombarded with everyday media representations and narratives about women’s bodies, at home, on the street, on public transit, etc. she came to appreciate the connections between the pro-ana/mia interactions she was observing online and the broader socio-political contexts in which she and pro-ana/mia girls and women exist. picking up on these cultural messages and images, she continually struggled with what experts refer to as “disordered” eating and body image issues. she became painfully aware that there are very few days when she is not exposed to weight loss advertisements and models who have been airbrushed to “desirable,” yet unachievable, body sizes and proportions. nicole came to understand that, like her, pro-ana/mia members are enveloped in thin-privileging and fatphobic environments in their day-to-day experiences. throughout her immersion in the data, nicole produced analytic memos that identified concepts and analyses that emerged through becoming deeply or “intimately” familiar with the data (lofland, 1971, p. 87). in neoliberalism, pro-ana/mia websites, & pathologizing women studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 101 addition, nicole made field notes on observations and critical selfreflections of those observations, thereby generating additional data on her own experiences with eating and body image phenomena. the memos and field notes provided an important thought-process road map that was central to the conceptualization and articulation of the emergent analyses. responses to censorship the initial findings of this research project illustrate the complex nature of online interactions around pro-ana/mia and the various responses that aim to “deal” with these (schott, 2014). for the purposes of this article, we focus on one dimension of those research findings: the ways in which online participants responded to tumblr’s decision to shut down and/or censor the pro-ana/mia websites. tumblr is a popular social media blog site that is frequented by many pro-ana/mia girls and women, although we cannot state the gender of individual users with certainty. in 2012, under pressure from eating disorder associations, “recovered” anorexics, their family members and others, tumblr announced that it was going to shut down all pro-ana/mia and other “self-harm” websites. this decision sparked impassioned and diverse responses online, and our analysis revealed respondents’ investments, to varying degrees, in either critical or dominant analyses of the censoring. critical analyses many who spent a great deal of time on these sites reacted with desperation, and their responses suggest an alignment with critical analyses in that they saw the sites as a venue that was helpful to those struggling with eating and body image issues. for example, one blogger said: please!!!!!! don’t activate the new policy against self-injury blogs! i literally beg you not to because there have been some amazing blogs, that may contain self-harm in them, but give amazing advice and have been helping me find alternatives and helping me… and i’ve been able to understand tons of people, and give advice, and get help, and know that i’m not the only one struggling with problems. please please pleeeeeeeeeeeeease! don’t delete/ban/trash/block any self-harm, ana/mia, suicide or similar blogs. please. others who were aligned with critical analyses declared tumblr’s actions to be unjust and sexist: it’s not a secret that this new rule will target primarily women. sick women that have finally found a community where they don’t feel alone…this is nicole d. schott, lauren spring, debra langan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 102 shutting down a community where people can talk openly without addressing the [actually evil] blogs that may have caused them to be where they are. in a similar vein, another person stated, “it is strange how shit that female people are more likely to do needs this sort of action, but racism, sexism, homophobia, or pornbots… well… hrm.” dominant analyses other on-line persons who responded to the threat of shut-down, many of whom claim never to have had eating disorders themselves, supported the eradication of pro-ana/mia sites, and saw these sites as disgusting, promoting a perspective that aligns with popular cultural discourses on women’s thinness. as one individual said: “couldn’t agree more proanorexia is absolutely disgusting and shouldn't be endorsed by anyone, one of the things that really gets me angry. :/ x.” also in keeping with dominant discourses, many responders stressed the dangerous, harmful and “triggering” effects of pro-ana/mia. according to one person: “the whole ‘reblog’ feature of tumblr makes self-harm/pro-ana/etc. blogs particularly insidious, because it provides that community/social encouragement towards harming yourself.” many people describe the numerous physical consequences of eating disorders, including death, such as the person who expressed: “…so disappointed in what tumblr has become, you’re basically supporting suicide, honestly…” other similar, passionate reactions that were in keeping with dominant discourses came from girls and women who considered themselves in the process of “recovering” from eating disorders (nicole dubbed them “pissed-off ranters” in her original research). many statements that supported tumblr’s censoring were like the following: there’s way too much celebration and acceptance of disordered eating here. personally, i went through a period in college when i threw up all my food. so, when i see blogs with bulimia tips and tricks, i know how much they would have messed me up if they were available back then. sure, they’ll be available elsewhere, but it’s nice to see tumblr confront the fact that they have been inadvertently fostering a community of sickness. grounded theorizing using combined methodologies demonstrated the significance of the online environments for pro-ana/mia individuals, thus highlighting the importance of social contexts that also required analysis. specifically, nicole’s immersion in the online data, in concert with her everyday life experiences, brought her to the realization that she needed to theorize features of the neoliberalism, pro-ana/mia websites, & pathologizing women studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 103 broader culture in which pro-ana/mia was taking place in order to make sense of the individuals, and their interactions, that she was seeing online. she was struck by the juxtapositioning of images that she would see on the pro-ana/mia websites (e.g., pictures of extremely thin girls and the “thigh gap”) and the same kinds of images on public billboards (e.g., pictures of emaciated models and the thigh gap). these observations inspired her to become well-versed in contemporary scholarly analyses of culture in order to theorize what was going on. consequently, the concepts of psychocentrism, neoliberalism, and social injustice came to inform our analysis. psychocentrism rimke (2003, 2011) has defined psychocentrism as the view that all human “abnormality” is a result of individual mind or body pathologies, noting the “pathological approach” to making sense of human beings as either biologically and/or psychologically “normal” or “abnormal” is a recent phenomenon that is specific to western culture, perpetuated by the powerful authority of human sciences and the subsequent adoption of “psy” discourses in everyday life (rimke & hunt, 2002; rimke & brock, 2012). terry and urla (1995, p. 3) make the case that “scientific and popular modes of representing bodies are never innocent but always tie bodies to larger social systems of knowledge production and, indeed, to social and material inequality.” psychocentrism renders all areas of human life “knowable,” “medicalizable” and “categorizable,” and therefore treatable or at least able to be “improved.” rimke and brock (2012, p. 195) argue that we take for granted “the notion of ‘the self’ as knowable and as a work in progress.” human scientific authorities are seen as the established psy experts (rimke & hunt, 2002), and the scope of what constitutes a clinical eating disorder is now more broadly medicalized than ever before. for example, additional types of diagnoses have been added to the dsm such as “eating disorders not otherwise specified” and “binge eating disorder” (american psychiatric association, 2013). neoliberalism david harvey defines neoliberalism as a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills (2007, p. 2). neoliberalism’s emphasis on the significance of the individual is legitimated and reinforced by psychocentrism. psychocentric discourses posit that humans can achieve “true happiness” through learning about themselves through “hard work,” nicole d. schott, lauren spring, debra langan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 104 “moral goodness” and “self-government” (binkley, 2015; rimke & brock, 2012); the emphasis is on neoliberal citizens becoming “hyperresponsibilized” subjects, who are to be accountable for all of their successes and failures (rimke, 2000). neoliberal discourses are advanced, for example, through marketing strategies that promote control over one’s body, conflate thin bodies with positive personality traits and late-modern definitions of what it means to be a successful woman or a “good citizen” (bordo, 2003; schott, 2015). often in pro-ana/mia interactions, as in popular culture, skinny is articulated as “perfection” which is achieved through “choice,” “selfcontrol,” “strength” and “hard work.” it follows that within neoliberal culture, people will go to extremes to control their appetite, often with the “help” of consumer goods such as weight loss, anti-aging and cosmetic products. but, as rimke and brock (2012) argue, the pursuit of perfection always leads ultimately to failure because the psychocentric regime of modern capitalism does not allow anyone to ever become “good enough.” capitalist enterprise has benefited handsomely from supporting people’s failed attempts to, ironically, gain “self-control,” attain the “right” body, and eat and exercise “responsibly” (rimke, 2000; rimke & brock, 2012). according to global news and the vancouver sun (ellis, 2013a, 2013b), canada’s weight loss industry is worth seven billion dollars and each year, and since the 1980s weight loss sales have been increasing six percent across north america. thus, the popularized feminine body image and widespread dissatisfaction with it, is reinforced through marketing practices that benefit the hierarchies, victim-blaming, and double standards of capitalism and patriarchy. social injustice by understanding how psychocentrism goes hand in hand with neoliberal ideologies that fuel the unachievable quest for individual perfection, we can understand how eating disorders are driven by the cultural contexts in which they develop and are sustained. when dominant analyses attribute eating disorders to the individual failings of women and girls, they become positioned as “crazy,” “hysterical,” “emotional” and “irrational.” even for women and girls who have not been diagnosed with an eating disorder, these dominant ideologies perpetuate their struggle to achieve the perfect bod, again an unattainable goal. as a result, subjectivities of insecurity are fostered among women and girls, a situation that contributes to unequal gender power relations; not only do women and girls – with or without eating disorders – devalue themselves, but they are also socially devalued when they fall short of perfection. these outcomes combine with other social factors to exacerbate social inequalities between women and men, and thus hinder the goals of gendered social justice. neoliberalism, pro-ana/mia websites, & pathologizing women studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 105 research outcome: performance ethnography as methodology the lack of recognition of, and accountability for, the social and gendered contributors to eating problems have inspired us to work toward progressive social change through a research-informed theatre project or performance ethnography. many researchers, over the past few decades, have come to view theatre as a powerful tool to analyze data and share research findings (rossiter et al., 2008). this approach is seen as an engaging and potentially more “meaningful, accessible, and challenging” way of sharing qualitative and quantitative data (gray, 2011, p. 64). norman denzin (2003, p. 111), who has published widely on qualitative and ethnographic research, argues that performance ethnography has the potential to “intervene and interrupt public life,” and that “such interruptions are meant to unsettle and challenge taken-for-granted assumptions concerning problematic issues in public life. they create a space for dialogue and questions, giving voice to positions previously silenced or ignored.” as goldstein (2012) points out, performance ethnography as a method is inextricably linked to the literary turn in american anthropology that began in the 1980s. with the realization that “ethnographers invent rather than represent ethnographic truths” came the added responsibility on the part of researchers to become self-reflexive, and conscious of their own positionality and the inherent limitations of research that seeks to represent others (goldstein, 2012, p. 3). as researchers have become more aware of their own power, biases and privileges (goldstein, 2012), questions have arisen about who benefits from the research (madison, 2012, p. 8). because performance ethnographies strive to offer a multiplicity of perspectives that can lead to radical transformations in thinking, playwrights tend to ask “really good questions” rather than provide “right answers” with their work (snyder-young, 2010, p. 891). in our performance ethnography, we use our data and analyses as source materials for the purpose of bringing academic research to life by creating what madison (2012, p.10) refers to as a “dialogic performance” or a “meeting of multiple sides.” we want to provide audience members with an opportunity to engage with the research questions and findings on both intellectual and emotional levels, more viscerally than if they were to simply read about the research in an academic journal. as noted by rossiter et al. (2008), the “embodiment” of data holds “particular potential” for health research that deals with complicated issues related to individual subjectivity. our performance ethnography incorporates insights from our abovenoted findings and our critical analyses. public presentations of our play create a visual, interactive, social space to emphasize and engage with others about critical social problems and analyses that explore the ways in which society valorizes thinness, is marked by race, class and gender nicole d. schott, lauren spring, debra langan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 106 inequalities, and fails to provide helpful options for girls and women who live with the struggles of eating and body image issues. researcher positionality committed to the social justice principles of action-research, as our project developed we chose performance ethnography to work toward ideals of progressive social change. the second author of this paper, a playwright and researcher lauren spring, began collaborating with first author nicole schott after the above-described initial analyses had been completed. at age 16, lauren was diagnosed with anorexia and – against her will – spent several months as an inpatient at a treatment facility in ontario. the treatment lauren received as an inpatient, like many others still receive today, is strikingly similar to what girls and women experienced throughout the 1800s. according to lauren’s experience, the ultimate objective remains steady weight gain through often violent force feeding. release dates from eating disorder wards of public hospitals are based primarily on weight targets being met. individual reasons for self-starvation are rarely explored in institutional settings, which likely contributes to dramatic weight loss once released, leading individuals to repeatedly return to the clinical programs as sick patients. developing the performance the focus of lauren’s and nicole’s collaboration has been on transforming nicole's research on pro-ana/mia into a performance ethnography. currently, the first 20 minutes of the play have been developed, and it has been workshopped twice in public settings, once as a course presentation at the university of toronto, and again at a critical disability conference. to begin, lauren immersed herself in numerous pages of empirical material collected by nicole, her master’s thesis and other papers on pro-ana/mia. after lauren had become completely saturated in nicole's work, she began transforming nicole’s original material into a play script, using the research findings to create composite characters that consisted of both verbatim and “imagined” lines of dialogue. although some performance ethnographers create “verbatim” plays (i.e., the script only consists of words actually spoken during interviews), many opt to stray somewhat from verbatim data while remaining true to the information and themes gathered during the research process (e.g., denzin, 1997; gray & sinding, 2002; rossiter et al., 2008; saldana, 2005). they create instead a fictional character that is a composite of several interviewees, for example, or use metaphor, symbolism and physical expression to “stay true to the essence” of the research data – in an effort to neoliberalism, pro-ana/mia websites, & pathologizing women studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 107 create more “authentic” communication (gray, 2009, p. 3-4). denzin (1997, p. 100) argues that this approach is in keeping with the critical ethnographic objective to contest singular truth and linear narratives, display a multiplicity of perspectives, and inspire cultural critique. once the first two scenes were produced, nicole reviewed the script and provided feedback. we named our main pro-ana/mia character “ana” because pro-ana/mia community members often personify their eating disorder by referring to “her” as ana. in the original version, lauren had opted to open the play with the character of ana sitting at a computer recording a video about her exercise tips for her pro-ana youtube channel and its followers. while very powerful, aesthetically speaking, nicole suggested that since a primary objective of the play is to disrupt the current narrative that eating disorders are a result of individual pathology, it made more sense to open the play in a more social context, to reveal the normalization of equating weight loss with ideas of control, willpower and success for women and girls, not to mention beauty and sex appeal. additionally, she recommended scripting-in popular media culture, such as the britney spears music video “work bitch” that conflates high social status with a “hot body” and an ardent work ethic. it was decided to contextualize pro-ana/mia in these ways in order to produce provocative juxtapositions throughout the performance. nicole's suggestions, and the subsequent script re-writes they inspired, revealed that staging the descriptive findings was not enough; it was also vital that nicole’s critical theorizing be represented in the play, wherever possible. as our research continues, we will present the play to specific groups of stakeholders (e.g., girls and women living with troubled eating; physicians, doctors, counselors and nurses involved in their care; family members of individuals diagnosed with eating disorders; public school teachers). our research project will continue to solicit informal audience feedback to inform future drafts of the script, through question and answer discussions, written questionnaires, and one-on-one conversations with audience members who approach us to share their feedback. some open-ended questions we ask audience members include: how do you feel after watching this play?; was it realistic?; which part of the play was most memorable for you?; why?; what, if anything, is missing from this play? the feedback to date confirms the important role that the performance plays in transformative learning, an outcome that is ultimately connected to social justice and change (kokkos, 2010). staging stories for the purposes of this article, we attend to how we stage the story of the women’s responses to tumblr’s censorship policy. lauren opted not to explicitly address tumblr’s policy in the play, but rather to represent its nicole d. schott, lauren spring, debra langan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 108 attempts at muzzling expression symbolically. the main character, ana, who has recently been discharged from inpatient treatment, has been made to promise that she will no longer visit or post on pro-ana websites because the authority figures in her life (her doctor, mother and brother) view them as dangerous. ana, however, continues to post on these sites because they represent an important community for her. when it is discovered she is doing this, a passionate argument ensues where three characters on stage engage in a debate using both critical and dominant perspectives. for example, ana’s brother jeff, who finds her exercising in her room and posting on youtube at 5 a.m., embodies the disgust many online commenters express. jeff: ana, it’s not normal to be doing sit-ups on your bedroom floor in the dark while the rest of the world is still asleep. ana: it’s not my fault if the rest of the world is lazy. jeff: that’s right ana. it’s the rest of the world that’s crazy. you’re the normal one. you are sick. you know that? you are sick and i’m going to tell mom and she’ll put you in the hospital again because that’s where you belong. i don’t know why they let you out. later in the scene he says: jeff: and look, mom. she’s on her stupid tumblr again. posting stupid videos of her stupid puny face trying to convince other girls to make themselves as sick as she is. it’s disgusting. this whole thing is just so sick. it’s so sick. ana herself insists that she knows what she is doing, and is very critical of why she continues to be blamed, and her behaviour pathologized. ana: you know what’s fucked up? you both treat me like i’m some sort of criminal. i’m not. why don’t you go after the racists out there? there are horrible people. there are racist and homophobic and misogynistic people out there, and they’re allowed to express themselves however they want online. why do you let them off the hook? you think i’m the problem? above, ana emphasizes the double standards of social control, its result, social inequalities and the effects, social harm. ana also expresses later in the scene how unhelpful “treatment” was for her. in the second scene of the play, ana’s mother (cathy) shares the “pissed-off ranters” faith in traditional biomedical treatment, reprimands ana for not following the doctor’s orders, and threatens to send her back to the hospital. cathy loves her daughter deeply, and as a woman understands her body image suffering in a way that gender-privileged jeff does not. cathy reacts emotionally to finding her daughter engaging in pro-ana behavior. many audience members following our two performances have said that they identified neoliberalism, pro-ana/mia websites, & pathologizing women studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 109 with cathy’s feelings of helplessness: that she does not want ana’s suffering to continue, but has nowhere else to turn and nothing else to offer except what the doctor says is best. mother: if you fall under 75% of your ideal bodyweight again, you’re not going to have a choice. you know that. doctor blume will make you an inpatient again. is that what you want? are you trying to get yourself admitted to the hospital again? ana: of course not! mother: it might not be the worst thing, ana… they can help you. ana: oh yah? how? by sticking a tube down my throat to force feed me? by restraining me in a bed? by making me stand on the scale at 6 a.m. every morning just to torture me as i see the numbers go up and up and up? by making me pee into a plastic measuring cup so they can keep track of every last ounce of liquid that enters into and exits my body? because that’s what they do there. you think that’s helpful? they don’t help anything. they don’t do shit! aesthetics during the writing and staging process, lauren had to make a number of important aesthetic choices to ensure the play captured not only words spoken and written online, but also the “extralinguistic” aspects of collected data: tone of voice, actions, etc. (conquergood, 2002, p. 147). it was also important to find a way through movement, lighting, and other technological conventions, to show the blurring of online and offline spaces in order to capture nicole's virtual liquid methodology. we demonstrate this complexity in numerous ways, including having “pop-up” ads spoken by recorded off-stage voices about weight loss commodities interrupt conversations taking place between characters. for example, as ana is raging with her mother and brother, the pop-up ad on her computer is given a voice: “do you want to lose 16 kilograms in four weeks? this miracle pill burns fat fast.” aesthetically, this reveals how disruptive and inescapable pop-up ads can be. also, as ana goes through her intense 5 a.m. workout on centre stage, projected on to her body and the screen behind her is an actual thinspiration video from a pro-ana site. simultaneously, contradicting comments from doctors, weight loss advertisers, pro-ana/mia supporters, thin idealizers and pissed-off ranters are called out by different actors off stage to represent ana’s conflicting thoughts as she tries to lose herself in her workout. the intention of this technique is to make it unclear which messages are from online or offline, which are in internal to her own mind or represent external advice given to her by others, and which are socially acceptable or unacceptable. nicole d. schott, lauren spring, debra langan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 110 the second scene of the play opens with ana recording a video for her youtube channel. aesthetically speaking, this monologue reflects not only what girls and young women say in such videos on pro-ana/mia sites in real life, but also how they say it. they have rambling speech patterns, repeated and accentuated words, and they go on for an uncomfortably long time. although in some ways the two page monologue that is ana’s video recording could be edited down, lauren thought it was more true to the research data and also important for audience members to experience the uneasiness: on the one hand to feel badly for ana, clearly caught in a difficult and vulnerable situation, while on the other being slightly annoyed by her and her seemingly narcissistic behaviour. as researchers and artists we have made the decision to give ana the stage, even though her perspective may be somewhat fragmented and contradictory. conclusion our theoretical approach “interrogates the assumptions and certainties embedded in our culture’s attitudes, beliefs, desires and practices concerning the normal and the pathological” (rimke & brock, 2012, p. 186). we argue that taken-for-granted designations of “abnormal” are a feature of our psychocentric and neoliberal landscape that positions individuals as both the cause and the solution for any suffering that they experience (rimke, 2000). our work actively contextualizes pro-ana/mia as a feature of a society that privileges thinness, discriminates against “fat” bodies, and celebrates neoliberal values which promote the individual control over, and improvement of, body weight, size and shape. like rimke and brock (2012, p. 184), our analysis examines “the historical relationship between forms of knowledge, the exercise of power, and the creation of subjects.” we argue that online pro-ana/mia spaces need to be retained – not eradicated or censored – as they represent meaningful opportunities for women and girls to share their experiences, confront the issues that they face, and find ways to support one another. these spaces also allow those outside pro-ana/mia communities a unique glimpse into contributors’ diverse views and opinions – perspectives that are rarely represented in medical literature or by the mainstream media. to disregard how women make sense of their situations is socially unjust; they become constructed as simpletons who are incapable of producing a valid view or decision. dominant western culture promotes feminine subjectivities of insecurity, and produces hyper responsibilization of women and girls, in regards to body image and self-worth. these outcomes, in combination, contribute to the maintenance of social inequality in gender relations. we have demonstrated how performance ethnography can be used as a social justice tool by bringing these injustices to light. in order to break down psychocentric ideologies, members of the public must be able to hear neoliberalism, pro-ana/mia websites, & pathologizing women studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 111 the words and perspectives of others. as chinyowa (2013) suggests, socially constructed “truths” must be un-performed (making reference to banks, 2006), or deconstructed to allow for the re-imagining of identities that have been artificially, yet powerfully, fixed. we un-perform through showcasing the multiplicity of pro-ana/mia interactions and embedding these within the broader neoliberal landscape. our performance stages the narratives of these girls and women in a way that suggests they matter and have something to teach us about how social injustices profoundly impact their lives. we contend that a psychocentric presentation of these data would not have recognized the importance of the passion and injustice pro-ana/mia girls express, and would have “written off” their passion as “hysterics,” symptomatic of mental illness. we also demonstrate that the pro-ana/mia community is a very diverse and complicated group of people: the play portrays both desires for recovery and resistance to recovery; the painful struggle that eating disorders cause as well as the pride that comes with pushing an extreme; the self-hatred involved in disordered eating but also the hard work, determination and will-power it takes; the positive coping and expressive outlet pro-ana/mia websites provide alongside the troubling tips, tricks and messages found on those pages. as our process continues, we are working hard to be as loyal as possible to our research data and analyses while also making bold aesthetic choices to ensure authenticity in the performance. still, we are also always mindful of our ethical responsibilities as researchers to not engender harm. this position means that we must carefully manage where, when, and how to best depict truths aesthetically on stage. we strive to do this in a way that does not alienate audience members, but helps them better understand the issues, and feel more deeply so that the questions raised by the playwatching experience resonate more meaningfully over time. we are committed to never losing sight of our pedagogical objectives: to challenge the dominance of the medical model and other societal discourses that pathologize pro-ana/mia supporters, and to provide access to alternative, critical analyses that explore the broader socio-cultural ideologies and practices that underlie pro-ana/mia phenomena. we recognize that we have a responsibility to audience members, many of whom have first-hand knowledge of, and experience with, eating disorders. although we want our play to have a powerful emotional impact, we are wary of “triggering” vulnerable audience members. where other events or performances of this nature might have “experts” on site (nurses, psychiatrists) to talk after the show with those who might be troubled by what they have seen represented on stage, this would be inappropriate in our case. given our critique of the medical model, it would be disingenuous for us to have heath care professionals be the “experts in the room.” instead, to move conversations into a social analysis and education framework, each of our performances will be followed up by a guided nicole d. schott, lauren spring, debra langan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 95-115, 2016 112 discussion, facilitated by researchers, feminist psychotherapists, participants, and playwrights where audience members will be given the space to share what they learned from the presentation, what they found beneficial or worrisome, and what they would change or expand, knowing that their responses will have a profound impact on future drafts of the script. our experiences to date confirm that our performance ethnography is inspiring thoughtful and critical dialogue around difficult questions. our research contributes to the literature on, and approaches to, eating and body image issues. our goal as researchers, artists and women who have struggled with eating and body image, is to ignite activism that draws attention to, challenges, and changes the dominant and problematic characterizations of pro-ana/mia and the social contexts that contribute to struggles around eating and body image. through staging our critical analyses and orchestrating shared conversations on eating and body image issues, we seek to nurture collective efforts to displace dominant ideologies and practices that have serious implications for the socio-cultural, economic, physical and mental health of women and their communities (schott & langan, 2015). through performance work, our research can serve as a form of “radical democratic practice” (denzin, 2001) to foster social change by using performance ethnography to challenge how dominant understandings of, and responses to, these issues perpetuate social injustice. acknowledgements we want to sincerely thank the online contributors and the audience members at our performances for so generously sharing their insights on eating and body image issues. the first author, nicole schott, would like to recognize the support she received through a lupina doctoral fellowship from the munk school of global affairs, university of toronto. references american psychiatric association (2013). feeding and eating disorders. retrieved from http://www.dsm5.org/documents/eating%20disorders%20fact%20sheet.pdf arnold, c. 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(2014). the enigma of ana: a psychoanalytic exploration of pro-anorexia internet forums. journal of infant, child, and adolescent psychotherapy, 13(3), 202-216. khasnabish & haiven final galley nov 23 15 correspondence address: alex khasnabish, department of sociology and anthropology, mount saint vincent university, halifax, ns, b3m 2j6; email: alex.khasnabish@msvu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 outside but along-side: stumbling with social movements as academic activists alex khasnabish mount saint vincent university, canada max haiven nova scotia college of art and design, canada abstract in this article, we critically reflect on the production and measurement of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ both in social movements and social movement research. we do so by focusing on the radical imagination project, an experiment in politically engaged, ethnographically grounded social movement research we have sustained in halifax, nova scotia since 2010. we discuss our methodological strategy of ‘convocation,’ distinguishing it from other social movement research approaches, and reflect on the difficulties inherent in practicing these methods within the austere realities and pressures of the neoliberal university. we explore the ways in which the particular complexities of the fraught field and habitus of the would-be academic-activist might be critically assessed and best mobilized to assist in the reproduction of movements, without also unduly reproducing the neoliberal university or its architectures of privilege and power. keywords social movements; social movement research; solidarity research; radical imagination; social change; social reproduction; neoliberalism; academic activism in this article, we reflect on the successes and failures (and, indeed, the discursive production of ‘success’ and ‘failure’) in social movements and social movement research. in particular, we focus on the radical imagination project, an experiment in politically engaged, ethnographically grounded social movement research we have sustained in halifax, nova scotia since 2010. the project, which combines intensive interviews, community focus groups, educational events, and participant observation, has been guided by the principle that we, as researchers, want to do more than merely observe social movements at work. we want to instead explicitly and intentionally create new atmospheres and processes to ‘convoke’ the radical imagination. outside but along-side studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 19 thus, we have developed a practice of working outside but alongside the small but energetic and diverse activist movements in the city. in response to the question of the potentials, pleasures, and perils of ‘academic activism’, we wish to explore the possibilities for leveraging the complex and fraught privileges and opportunities provided to academics in order to create resources for movements that they might not otherwise possess or create. we distinguish our methodological strategy of ‘convocation’ from both ‘invocation’ (where researchers observe and report on movements) and ‘avocation’ (where researchers are called away by movements to submit their skills to movement-led projects). we reflect on the difficulties inherent in practicing these methods within the austere realities and pressures of the neoliberal university. theoretically, we approach the problem through materialist feminist conceptions of social reproduction and the potentiality of the commons, asking how both movements and researchers ‘reproduce’ themselves (or fail to do so). we are interested in the ways in which the particular complexities of the fraught field and habitus of the would-be academic-activist might be critically assessed and best mobilized to assist in the reproduction of movements, without also unduly reproducing the neoliberal university or its architectures of privilege and power. this is all the more important in an age of political-economic crisis, which has included the repression of social movements (wood, 2014) and in which fragmentation, diffusion, segmentation, and diversity are the norm in movement cultures. three models of reproduction this essay builds on a three-part theory of reproduction which integrates marxist, cultural studies, and materialist feminist approaches to offer a framework for understanding how individuals, institutions, and systems interact amidst complex crises. from a marxist perspective, reproduction refers the questions of the reproduction of capital as sketched initially by karl marx (1981) and developed more fully by theorists such as rosa luxemburg (2003) and louis althusser (2014). marx, famously, focused his analysis of capitalism on the production of wealth and the extraction of surplus value, but only elliptically and in fits and starts described the ways in which the crisis-prone system was reproduced as a whole. for marx and subsequent thinkers, capitalism is driven, ultimately, by contradictions which, if unmet, lead to systemic crises (see harvey, 2006). for instance, industrial capitalism requires the aggregation of proletarians in factories, but affords them the opportunity to organize and rebel. likewise, competition drives individual capitalists to constrain wages and mechanize production to create commodities more cheaply, but this leads to depressed wages and unemployment and, hence, lowers demand for commodities and heightens the possibility of revolt. alex khasnabish, max haiven studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 20 capital develops an array of techniques to temporarily ‘fix’ these contradictions, usually by ‘externalizing’ them onto vulnerable and marginalized populations (de angelis, 2007; harvey, 2006). such ‘fixes’ include: the expansion of markets through colonialism; the use of fascism and other repressive regimes to take more authoritarian control over the economy and workers’ lives; the destruction of social surplus through military expenditure and war; the use of advertising and marketing to expand the field of desires and demands; and the growth of the prison-industrial and educational-industrial complexes as a means to warehouse surplus workers without endangering the inherent logic of the system (davis, 2005). the second valence of reproduction draws on the work of post-war cultural studies scholars and refers to the ways in which class and other power relations are reproduced between individuals, institutions, and systems (bourdieu, 1993; hall, 1986, 1997; hoggart, 1998). for instance, ruling class cultural institutions, from private schools to the opera, from dinner clubs to professional associations, all provide a venue in which class relations and sensibilities can be reified, reinscribed, and reproduced through social interactions. likewise, popular cultural spaces and practices can offer the means to awaken dwindling class consciousness among the working class and offer the potential to subvert and transform the status quo and the ruling class interests it embodies. several generations of feminist and queer scholars (e.g., butler, 2006; eisenstein, 2004; haraway, 1991; hooks, 2000; mohanty, 2003) have investigated the ways in which gender is socially constructed and reproduced through social institutions, cultural norms, popular media, social interaction, and structures of power. anti-racist scholars have mapped how the meaning of skin colour, accented speech, (presumed) ancestral origins, and socioeconomic status all fold into the reproduction of race (e.g., fanon, 1982; gilroy, 1993; hall, 1993; mills, 1997). the final valence of reproduction draws on the materialist feminist tradition of maria mies (1986), vandana shiva (1988), silvia federici (2003, 2012), and mariarosa dalla costa and selma james (1975), among others, who argue that attention to reproductive labour is central to an understanding of both capitalist and patriarchal power dynamics. while marx based his analysis of capital and struggle on the productive apparatus of society – the means of production – these authors note that the largely unwaged, feminized work of reproducing social life, which ranges from bearing and raising children to maintaining the family and community, is the actual bedrock of material social relations. without the production of new workers, and the reproduction of workers’ bodies and souls within the unpaid workshop of the family, there could be no ‘production’. today, with the rise of the so-called service sector as a key economic realm, we have seen this reproductive labour move into the formal waged economy and become more directly subjected to capitalist labour discipline. moreover, the sector remains largely ‘feminized’: women are overrepresented and, due to persistent and evolving patriarchal outside but along-side studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 21 conditions, work remains highly exploitative, precarious, and poorly paid (see federici, 2012). recognizing capitalism’s parasitical appropriation of the work of social reproduction allows us to see it for what it is: secondarily, a system of production; primarily, a society-spanning system in which the reproduction of social life itself is always and everywhere at stake. this recognition helps us overcome the tenacious tendency to posit an artificial break between a ‘real’ economic base and a contingent cultural or institutional ‘superstructure’. this insight has been central to other radical theorists and practitioners, particularly those belonging to, or influenced by, the italian autonomia movement and its legacies. these have frequently focussed on the biopolitical nature of capitalism, the reorientation of capitalism away from an exclusive focus on the exploitation of labour and the production of commodities and toward the production or harnessing of social life and subjectivity (caffentzis, 2013; cleaver, 2000; dyer-witheford, 1999; federici, 2012; hardt & negri, 2000; holloway, 2002, 2010). further, we can identify that capitalism functions only by conscripting and being conscripted to patriarchy, white-supremacy, colonialism, and other systems of power in order to reorient the reproduction of social life toward its own endless, limitless reproduction. as john holloway (2010) so perceptively notes, the pre-condition for capitalism is the enclosure of our life-affirming, useful, concrete doing in the form of exchangeable, quantifiable, alienated, and abstracted labour. this means that we are, ultimately, the creators of the very social world that exploits us and reduces us to objects. in this context, as marxist-feminists such as federici (2003) and mies (1986) have so incisively argued, primitive accumulation is not merely a historical phase of capitalist development. rather, it refers to the constant drive of capital to colonize, marketize, and commodify the lifeworld and the sphere of social relationships. capitalism is defined by struggle: on the one hand, individuals and communities constantly seek to develop resistant forms of autonomy, solidarity, and value within, against, and beyond capitalism; on the other, capital is constantly seeking to enclose, co-opt, and harness these spaces and processes so as to endlessly reproduce itself. thus, capitalism names a struggle over the fabric of life itself and, as holloway (2010) asserts, in this sense we are the crisis of capitalism both as we reproduce it as a system and as we struggle to reclaim our doing from it. the crisis of academic reproduction as we have elaborated elsewhere (haiven & khasnabish, 2014), we understand all crises to be, at some level, crises of capitalist reproduction, whether it is the global ecological crisis; the ongoing financial crisis; the crisis of the nation-state, which has given rise to all manner of demonic reactions (fundamentalism, ethnic nationalism, imperialism); or the crises of alex khasnabish, max haiven studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 22 debt, anxiety, or alienation at the level of everyday life. all such crises result from the tension and friction between forces and movements at all three aforementioned levels of capitalist reproduction. such an approach can offer us important insights into the contradictions within capitalism and, therefore, the sites and opportunities for leveraging social transformation. we see the university as one such site and the crises germane to the neoliberal academy as not merely a baleful curse, but an important set of structural transformations that can inform strategic interventions. other contributions to these special journal issues speak voluminously to the crisis of academe, whether it is the crisis of the liberal university’s core mission (scholarly independence and values sacrificed on the altar of austerity), the crisis of academic labour (the rendering precarious of teaching and research staffing), the crisis of corporatization (industry partnerships, advertising), or the pedagogical crisis (the liquidation of critical thinking and radical thought in favour of streamlined curricula aimed at credentialization). for our part, we simply wish to map these overlapping crises onto the threefold theory of reproduction elaborated above. they each stem from conflicts between, on the one hand, the university’s role as an institution built and maintained to reproduce capitalist economic and social relations and, on the other hand, the university as a site of struggle over the way social life will be reproduced for its inhabitants and for society at large (edu-factory collective, 2009; haworth, 2012). those of us who survive, fitfully and precariously, within the university have become virtuosic at locating and cultivating spaces of abundance within and between its crisis tectonics. because of this, we should not default to shamefaced hand-wringing over the relative luxury and privilege enjoyed by academic researchers when they interact with social movements and other actors. while no doubt partially true (though only for those of us fortunate enough to have tenure-track positions), we should also recognize our special competencies and opportunities as survivors within a hostile ecosystem, a virtuosity of survival that can inform the sorts of research we do, not primarily in order to generate data, but to catalyze radical social change. in suggesting this we are not simply reifying the prowess of the academic as the consummate example of the neoliberal subject, deftly navigating and leveraging precarity toward the actualization of their own value. following moten and harney (2013), we affirm that all knowledge is produced collectively and collaboratively, and that the university, in its hegemonic role, is an engine of theft whereby that common knowledge is enclosed, sorted, and revalued in the interests of the reproduction of capital and capitalism, with sometimes the side-effect of reproducing the academic as an elite worker-subject, with all the material and immaterial privileges that accrue. we are suggesting that academics need to pay careful attention to, and cultivate the particular latitudes of, freedom and potential they possess and put them to work in the interests of other forms of reproduction that strive toward the revolutionary transformation of social life and institutions. we are outside but along-side studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 23 calling for a thorough examination of the differential, problematic, unequal, and highly contingent forms of virtuosity we have necessarily developed, not as a result of research or professionalization, but by virtue of survival within the increasingly hostile and austere academic workplace. this is a workplace that has, according to the edu-factory collective (2009) and andrew ross (2009), come to prefigure and model new capitalist techniques and circuits for the extraction of value and intellectual and affective labour through the harnessing of subjectivity, the leveraging of precarity, and the flexible distribution of institutional risks and rewards. our value to movements cannot be based only on our ability to redirect toward them the material and intellectual privileges of the university; instead, it must be based on a recognition of the particular forms of subjugation, subjectivity, and potential we encounter as academic subjects and the lateral, negotiated, difficult solidarity we can form with others encountering the same or other forms of subjugation. the crisis of movement reproduction one of the most important insights offered by social movement scholarship, and one well-known by anyone who has spent any time working collectively with others in a struggle for social change, is that movements are not merely vehicles for contentious politics but laboratories for experiments in living and being in ways other than we are now (day, 2005; dixon, 2014; j. juris, 2008; maeckelbergh, 2009; polletta, 2002; sitrin, 2012; sitrin & azzellini, 2014; walia, 2013). commonly referred to as prefigurative politics, at their most intentional and elaborate, such experiments seek explicitly to model the world movement participants want. in a more anarchistic vernacular, we might say that in this political vein the means of struggle must be commensurate with the desired ends. from this perspective, we can understand movement cultures and politics as intertwined around the question of reproduction. the way movements reproduce themselves – that is, how they, in a day-to-day and organizational fashion, sustain themselves and their participants – has dramatic consequences for the kind of social reality they prefigure. many movement participant-observers have noted that in the context of an increasingly austere and militarized state, the prospects for a politics that seeks to exert pressure on decision-makers through the spectacle of protest seem increasingly dim (day, 2005; dixon, 2014; holloway, 2002; sitrin & azzellini, 2014). this suggests that both movement participants and those researchers who seek to work with them ought to think differently about movements themselves. more than extra-institutional vehicles for contentious politics, movements are also the spaces for alternative forms of, and experiments in, social reproduction. for better or worse, they are spaces where people find and reproduce community. movements are not only places where friendships and alex khasnabish, max haiven studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 24 other relationships blossom, they are also undergirded by networks of sociality, care, and shared purpose. the activists we interviewed as part of our research on the radical imagination (discussed in greater detail below) often shared houses or practiced other forms of collective or communal living, they provided emotional and sometimes professional support for one another, and they often formed and based their activism on the strength and creativity of these social bonds. movements thus become spaces where activists reproduce their bodies, their minds, and their souls. how do we do research with social movements at a moment marked by a profound crisis of their reproduction? it is always a mistake to measure social movements’ successes and failures only by the achievement of their stated objectives (e.g., particular policy changes, electoral victories, or fruitful campaigns) because it ignores the ways in which they create and sustain platforms for counter-hegemonic forms of social relationality and reproduction. in periods of social movement downturn, the costs of such narrow focus are magnified and lead to overly cynical and pessimistic assessments of the potential for social change. in such times, how might those of us who enjoy the conflicted, double-edged, and perhaps inherently unjust privileges of the (securely employed, funded) academic best put our powers to work not on, not for, but with social movements? with these questions in mind we undertook a study of what we called the ‘radical imagination’. we wanted to know what it was that animated the spirit of refusal, revolt, and reinvention that allowed social movements to sustain themselves even in the darkest of times. we wanted to understand how those who have a radical vision for changing the world in unlikely ways sustain and spread hope, courage, and conviction amidst what might appear, to an outside observer, like failure. so what do we mean by the ‘radical imagination’? the hegemonic notion of imagination comprehends it as an almost transcendental feature of the individual human brain. for us (see haiven & khasnabish, 2011) it is, rather, a collective practice. the radical imagination is not something individuals possess; instead, it emerges from sparks between people as they work together to confront the inequalities and injustices of the dominant social order. in this sense, ‘radical’ does not refer to any particular political orientation but, rather, following the word’s etymology, denotes an ability to trace social problems to their systemic roots. following the work of cornelius castoriadis (1997), we understand the imagination as constantly at work in social life – indeed, the imagination is the magma-like substance out of which social institutions of all sorts are formed, from schools to prisons, the conventions of heteronormative love and marriage, to the stock market. in addition to physical and legal infrastructure, all social institutions are held in place and gain force through the shaping of social imaginaries (see also appadurai, 1996; taylor, 2004). the radical imagination, then, is generated in the tension between social actors and the ‘imaginary’ institutions and systems that surround them and to which they are conscripted. outside but along-side studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 25 as such, studying the radical imagination requires unconventional tools. it cannot be observed and measured in a static form; it must be stimulated and experienced in struggle, debate, and contestation. further, for those who wish to study in solidarity with movements (rather than perform research on movements), the objective cannot be mere observation but transformation. we sought to design a research agenda that took the crisis of social reproduction seriously, and that allowed us to better understand the ways in which movements both contest the disastrous reproduction of neoliberal capitalism and also provide spheres for experimenting with other modes and formations of care, sociality, and social reproduction. elsewhere, we (khasnabish & haiven, 2012) have identified three key categories of research strategies that are explicitly ‘in solidarity’ with social movements: invocation, avocation, and convocation. invocation could be said to represent the dominant voice of social movement studies in the academy. in this approach researchers make use of their academic status and standing both to legitimate and examine movements as vehicles for contentious politics. this stance has yielded important insights in terms of the dynamics of social movement activity and has also helped lend legitimacy in the eyes of some sceptics to non-institutional forms of political activity. invocation also maintains the division between movements and those who study them and, in so doing, primarily produces knowledge about movements for a specialist academic audience. the second strategy is that of avocation: a calling away from. this posture describes researchers who, in a variety of ways, renounce the unjust autonomy and privilege of their academic status and seek to go to work within movements, putting their skills and whatever resources they may possess at the disposal of the movement itself. forms of feminist action research and participatory action research often follow this path and have contributed vitally both to movements and community-based struggles, as well as to grounded knowledge about social change struggles from within. but avocation can only be a successful strategy when there are fully formed movements and organizations prepared to host and make use of engaged researchers. what about when movements are in states of fragmentation or reconsolidation? this leads us to our third strategy of convocation: to call or summon something into being collectively. in this strategy, researchers seek to work dialogically with movements while retaining and seeking to make productive use of the unjust, unearned, but potentially fruitful autonomy and resources that accompany academic-based research. what kinds of possibilities open up to all of those who participate in a research process when the end goal is not the generation of units of academic knowledge to be converted into capital, but when the process itself becomes the goal; a way of making time and space for an open-ended grassroots inquiry guided by the collective? in this way, research becomes a way not merely of documenting or cataloguing movements, or any other social phenomenon for that matter, but of rigorously exploring the terrain of the possible. thus, in the fall of alex khasnabish, max haiven studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 26 2010, we initiated an ethnographically grounded, politically engaged social movement research project with self-identified radical social justice activists in halifax, nova scotia. with a research team composed of the two of us as the project’s co-directors and two research assistants recruited from the local social justice community, this project was configured as an experiment in research with rather than for or about social movements, with research as a catalyst for ‘convoking’ – collectively calling into being – the radical imagination. the project was funded initially by a two-year standard research grant from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc) and thereafter through collaboration with a variety of academic programs and social justice organizations, as well as by grant money provided by mount saint vincent university. from fall 2010 until the conclusion of our active research phase two years later, our research team interviewed more than 30 self-identified ‘radical’ social justice activists in halifax. in semi-structured, open-ended, and indepth one-on-one interviews, we asked our participants about their political biographies, assessments of the status quo and the potential for social change, the best pathways for social change, experiences within social justice organizations, what it would mean to ‘win’, and what the future looked like. drawing out emergent themes from our interviews, in the second year of the project we hosted a series of three ‘dialogue’ sessions in a public, accessible venue in halifax, which was open and free to the public and to which our participants were invited. the three sessions were framed around issues and themes that had stood out to the research team in the interview stage: fighting back collectively in the age of austerity; the relationship between struggles against capitalism and struggles against oppressions; and the form and strategy of organizing today. the latter is essentially a question about more autonomous, grassroots, and horizontal forms of organizing versus more hierarchical, centralized, and disciplined ones like traditional leftist parties. while this concluded the active research phase of the project, we later began to curate an ongoing speakers series through which we have brought researchers and activists from outside of halifax’s radical milieu to the city to give academic and public talks about their work and its relationship to struggles for radical social change in order to continue to stimulate dialogue about a variety of issues bearing upon social justice today. in addition to publishing in academic venues about our work, we have disseminated our research in a variety of ways including: our project website (see http://radicalimagination.org); numerous presentations in public, activist, and academic contexts; shorter and more accessible pieces written for wider audiences and published on-line; media appearances, especially those in community and social justice venues; a two-day ‘festival’ of the radical imagination featuring eight local and visiting radical scholar-activists; and an audio documentary about the project featuring the voices of many of our participants that is, at the time of this writing, in the very final stages of production. outside but along-side studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 27 like other engaged researchers, both within and outside of the academy, our research-based engagement with social movements and the diverse individuals and collectives who constitute them draws from a methodological toolbox that prioritizes grounded experiences and the lived reality of social life and struggles for social change (conway, 2004; dixon, 2014; frampton, kinsmen, thompson, & tillezek, 2006; j. juris, 2008; j. s. juris & khasnabish, 2013; khasnabish, 2008; maeckelbergh, 2009; sitrin, 2012; sitrin & azzellini, 2014; wood, 2012). open-ended interviews, focus groups, public forums, and participant observation in the social justice milieu in halifax made up the broadly ethnographic bedrock of our research. by ethnography we mean not only a research methodology including participant observation and in-depth interviews, but also a mode of writing and analysis that seeks to convey the subjective experience of being ‘in the field’. politically engaged, ethnographically grounded research with social movements also must adopt a somewhat different posture than ethnographic methodologies situated inside more conventional, objectivist paradigms. when the aim of research is not the generation of ‘better data’, but rather the facilitation of a dialogic process of grassroots, critical, and collective inquiry, its approach and outcomes become less descriptive and more catalytic. as academically positioned researchers working in a spirit of solidarity with those struggling for social justice and change in the radical milieu in halifax, we came increasingly to see our role less as scribes for, and interpreters of, movement activity and more as curators of critical, dialogic processes and encounters. in adopting this orientation to our research, we do so aware of and inspired by the ethnographically informed work of other politically committed scholar activists (see e.g., conway, 2004; frampton, kinsmen, thompson, & tilleczek, 2006; j. juris, 2008; j. s. juris & khasnabish, 2013; khasnabish, 2008; kinsman & gentile, 2010; maeckelbergh, 2009; sitrin, 2012). we are also very much aware that our own approach to scholarly activism (or activist scholarship) is only one point in a much wider constellation of attempts, both within and outside of the university, to carry out rigorous, critical inquiry with those engaged in struggles for radical social change and social justice (e.g., colectivo situaciones, 2011; dixon, 2014; frampton, kinsmen, thompson, & tilleczek, 2006; harney & moten, 2013; shukaitis, graeber, & biddle, 2007; sitrin & azzellini, 2014). it is worth noting here that our research methodology and approaches to knowledge production have remained in the hands of the research team and, most specifically, in our hands as project co-directors. unlike other approaches to community-engaged research we have not submitted the project as a whole to the control of the activist milieu in halifax, though we would argue that when we began the project in 2010 the fragmentation and cleavages that marked the radical milieu in halifax would have made this fraught, if not impossible. while other engaged researchers have gone to work with and within social movements in ways that have put the research alex khasnabish, max haiven studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 28 process and its outcomes much more directly in the hands of their constituencies of concern than our own approach, we felt strongly about the value of our orientation and the need for the maintenance of a certain distance between the project and the community it sought to engage. moreover, although we have not strayed far from fairly conventional models in terms of our written work emerging from the project, the diversity of our public educational initiatives (website, audio documentary, film and speakers series, the festival of the radical imagination and other popular events) have been much more collaborative, democratic, and accessible in form, organization, and content. essentially, our goal was to craft a research methodology that understands the radical imagination as emerging within and between social movements as they engage with the three-fold crisis of capitalist reproduction at the level of political economy, at the level of society and subjectivity, and at the level of community and care. movements, we found, imagine, develop, demand, and fight for both alternative models of social life (ways of living otherwise) and alternative orders of social reproduction (the way we organize the reproduction of social life itself) within, against, and beyond the capitalist order. at the same time, movements also operate as micro-communities: zones of alternative social reproduction that allow participants to form new social bonds based on their principles and aspirations. yet, crucially, we found that these two goals – levelling a militant critique of social reproduction and modelling an alternative – were never quite in alignment. there was always tension and friction, conflict and experimentation occurring within and between movements and movement actors as they struggled through resisting the predations of the dominant order, advancing alternatives to it, and maintaining themselves as communities of care capable of nurturing and prefiguring ways of living otherwise. through our research we found that these differences, tensions, and contradictions usually remained tacit, unspoken, and unacknowledged. our convocatory approach, then, was an attempt to leverage the unique (but also unfair and problematic) privileges and opportunities held by (tenuretrack) academics to create spaces and times for social movements to more explicitly and efficaciously address these contradictions. in this sense, we were influenced by the work of fraco ‘bifo’ berardi (2009) when he suggests that in an age of neoliberal capitalist acceleration, when nearly all spheres of life, subjectivity, and sociality are ‘enclosed’ by the market and when social movements in many countries seem defeated, activism must comprehend itself on some level as a form of radical collective therapy. translated into our terms, this would be a therapy to help individuals and movements understand and heal from being caught between the multiple contradictions of capitalist reproduction, as well as the contradictions germane to social movements as they seek to contest that order of reproduction and invent and practice new models of it. outside but along-side studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 29 between success and failure over the course of our active research phase, from 2010 to 2012, our research team noticed three distinct patterns emerge out of our one-on-one interviews with activists. the first was that some of the richest, most reflexive, and nuanced insights collaborators offered were in response to our interview question asking them to narrate their personal political biographies. here, ideological beliefs and orientations corresponded to changes in individuals’ life circumstances and relationships, further convincing us of the intertwined nature of the radical imagination and the conditions of social reproduction. the second was the almost uniformly bleak and dystopian way most activists spoke of their visions of the future, usually with explicit reference to the catastrophic consequences of anthropogenic climate change and the rise of totalitarian governments. the third pattern that emerged from our interviews was that, when asked to describe what it would look like to ‘win’ (a question we borrowed from the turbulence collective, 2013), almost all our collaborators responded, after an uncomfortable pause, with brief, taciturn, and sometimes meekly apologetic or wryly sardonic answers. these answers were either extremely broad and abstract negations of the present order (e.g., “the end of capitalism”) or highly particular (e.g., the passage of an all-too-often modest legislative reform). these responses confused us, expecting as we did that the tireless activism we were witnessing must be motivated by broad, rich, bold, and comprehensive visions of other possible worlds of social justice. we came to take a keen interest in the pregnant, uncomfortable pause that frequently preceded the answer. we named this significant gap ‘the hiatus’ (haiven & khasnabish 2013) and came to see it as symptomatic of the double bind we have outlined above: on the one hand, movements must contest and confront the crisis of capitalist reproduction and, on the other, function as alternative models of social reproduction. the hiatus stems from a debilitating sense of inertia and failure in the face of the meagre or nonexistent pace of systemic change, often producing either activist burnout and movement dissolution or causing movements to turn inward and devolve into subcultures of solace in a heartbreaking world. compounding this is the fact that, in halifax and many other smallto medium-sized urban centres, much important social justice work often gets done by a fairly small number of engaged people. in environments characterized by seemingly endless attacks on existing rights, much social justice activism becomes a defensive battle. with resources, time, and energy stretched thin, activists often face burn-out and its attendant negative consequences for physical, mental, and emotional health. all too often, activist spaces are sites of frenzied activity, self-exploitation, and sometimes toxic patterns of behaviour directed against self and others. the recognition of this has led to a protracted and important discussion about selfand community-care and how that might be considered within the larger alex khasnabish, max haiven studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 30 framework of organizing. such sensations and frustrations were all too familiar to us as academics bound up in and with an institution which, torqued by the force of neoliberal commodification, produces chronic fruitless overwork and destructive interpersonal and institutional drama. these insights taught us a great deal about the realities of movement success and failure. as with individuals, movements do not spend their existence soaring in the airy heights of victory or mired in the depths of defeat. indeed, the quotidian experience of social reproduction – of caring for ourselves and others and so renewing our capacity to labour – is the most common state for individual and collective entities in the world. as we have noted, in a very real sense this means that movements, as well as the individuals who make them up, dwell most commonly in the hiatus between success and failure. the significance of this recognition is that rather than focusing only or primarily on the most spectacular moments of movement activity, it is worth thinking about the tremendous amount of movementrelated work that goes on outside of these moments of high drama and how it relates to the nature and direction of the movement in question. hence, we discovered that our project was not primarily aimed at enabling movements to succeed, and indeed that our measurements and notions of success and failure were often misleading. if we attempt to ascertain the value and success of social movements purely by their ability to achieve concrete social changes, we miss a great deal about how they actually work. we miss the way they offer (intentionally or unintentionally) alternate forms of social reproduction. we also miss the role they often play as way-stations in the biography of individuals or the genealogy of ideas; the way movements, in spite of their objective victories or defeats, act as watersheds of the imagination, collecting, recycling, and redistributing ideas, techniques, visions, and people. we discovered that the role of our project was to hold space open for slower, more intentional critical conversations, to probe and question the often unspoken or unacknowledged tensions and possibilities within and between movements and within and between movement actors. as a consequence of this, we were forced to re-examine our own notions of success and failure as academic-activists. we were not conventionally successful at collecting formally reliable data. nor were we successful at stimulating some sort of revolutionary epiphany or energizing transformation in the movements we worked with. yet we also did not fail. we experimented with a process which began with a critical and self-reflexive assessment of our own subject positions and virtuosity as subjects existing within, against, and beyond the neoliberal, crisis-wracked academy. based on this, we devised and experimented with an investigation of the radical imagination based on meeting movements not as monolithic political actors but fragmented, fractured, and contradictory entities, made up of fragmented, fractured, and contradictory actors. for us, ‘working alongside’ movements means devising research that convokes the fabric of social contestation and outside but along-side studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 31 the radical imagination. to do so, we need to complicate our notions of what success and failure might mean, both for movements and for research itself. we are wagering this strategy of convocation on the belief that activistacademics working with social movements can envision themselves as more than either trusted insiders or privileged outsiders, but can instead imagine forms of solidarity research occurring along-side the movements they work with. such an approach depends on an honest and forthright assessment of the opportunities and dangers the academic brings to table. but it also depends on a consideration of how the academic habitus produces us (and exploits us) as subjects and compels us to cultivate a virtuosity of resilience and persistence within an increasingly austere and hostile environment. all too typically this virtuosity is applied to the reproduction of the neoliberal university, which, evolving as a key institution within the high-pressure environment of the three-fold crisis of capitalist reproduction, adapts a system of rewards and punishments to elicit from us the virtuosic production of academic capital in the form of publications, service, teaching, and credentialization. of course, in spite of the university’s mythology, it is far from a meritocracy and the rewards and punishments, as well as the opportunities for resistance, are unevenly distributed along axes of race, class, gender, citizenship status, ethnicity, employment status, and other vectors of oppression. yet we are keen to experiment with how academic virtuosity might be redirected, reappropriated, and repurposed in the interests of working with movements that are contending with the same tri-fold crisis of reproduction that gave rise to that virtuosity in the first place. here we are attempting to summon and channel what might be called the ‘university after the university’. today, the university is the site of the harnessing and leveraging of its denizens’ virtuosity toward the reproduction of the hegemonic institution and the form of neoliberal capitalism it has been made to serve. it is an institution adept at displacing or externalizing its own crises onto its inhabitants (students, teachers, staff) in the form of student debt, chronic over-work, and precariousness. in the world we might seek to build beyond the crisis and beyond capitalist reproduction, the university will have to become something radically different. how might the university become a fulcrum for the production and facilitation of new forms of social reproduction? how might academics grasp this potential and put it to work in the present? how can we envision our work as academic-activists, not as saviours or as bystanders of social movements, but as partners, accomplices, and co-conspirators? more importantly, how can we, today, take up the mantle of the scholars we might yet become in the world we might build together? that is, how can we, borrowing the language of prefigurative politics, imagine prefigurative methodologies? these would be methodologies borrowed from what seems like an impossible future; one where our role might be facilitating healthy, honest, and robust forms of social reproduction. alex khasnabish, max haiven studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 18-33, 2015 32 references althusser, l. 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(2014). crisis and control: the militarization of protest policing. london: pluto. hauge & rowsell final mar 6 19 correspondence address: jennifer rowsell, faculty of education, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: jrowsell@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 1, 1-9, 2019 why the politics of literacy? – guest editors’ introduction chelsey hauge independent scholar, usa jennifer rowsell brock university, canada the history of this special issue takes us back to the richness of conversations and the feelings of solidarity that we experienced during a symposium held at brock university in october 2017.1 what stood out during the event was not so much ideas, although there were many good ones, but an esprit de corps felt by the group about the future of literacy research in politically charged, media-driven times. there were papers on the politics of literacy and inclusion, collaborative partnerships and spaces, feminist and participatory youth cultures, affect, and arts methods. there were artists, indigenous prayers accompanied by movement, and a range of maker activities. it was a memorable event filled with conversations inspired by varied histories and epistemologies, and many of the above themes are present in articles featured in this special issue. the rationale behind foregrounding the politics of literacy in the special issue resides in our desire to maintain an overall sense of activism and political action around and within notions of literacy. the phenomenon of being moved by change unites all of the articles and visual essays within the journal issue. a core text guiding all of the papers, implicitly or explicitly, is sara ahmed’s (2017) living a feminist life. it is our ambitious hope that this special issue contributes to larger movements for change (campbell, pahl, pente, & rasool, 2018; facer & pahl, 2017; ranciere, 2010; tuhiwai smith, tuck, & wang, 2019). thinking about ahmed’s (2017) affirmation of the 20th century feminist mantra that “the personal is political” (p. 3), as editors 1 we are grateful to the social justice research institute for funding the child and youth engagement, civic literacies, and digital ecologies symposium held on october 10th and 11th, 2017. chelsey hauge & jennifer rowsell studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 1-9, 2019 2 of this special issue, we hope that it creates a more textured sense of how people express political convictions through literacy in their everyday lives. like ahmed (2017), who says “feminism is wherever feminism needs to be. feminism needs to be everywhere” (p. 3), we have witnessed the politics of literacy in environments that tend to be bracketed off from the political, such as domestic spaces, community hubs, remote classrooms, and higher education policies. in this sense, feminism is not gender-specific or even human-specific (i.e., it can be posthuman and more-than-human as seen in the work of braidotti, 2013, and barad, 2007). feminism is a lived practice that everyone can engage in; it is about retracing and rewriting histories, being aware, informed, and engaged, and supporting people on the margins. ahmed (2017) speaks of reorienting worlds and putting different slants on things. one example is watching who we cite and being mindful about decentralizing historically privileged knowledge in our citations in order to highlight scholarly practice that is explicitly decolonial. in other words, citational politics is one medium or avenue through which we can accomplish such reorientations; we must vigilantly watch who we cite. living a feminist life is about how we challenge, question, and contest the ordinary. literacy studies has a history of spearheading such efforts of contestation (luke & woods, 2009), and the research spotlighted in this special issue pushes forcefully for this conviction and for more politically charged literacy work. confronting changes and sweaty concepts confronting changes seems like a relatively clear call to action. considering the massive shifts that have occurred over the last decade in both political climates and the ways in which global and digital networks shape our lives, this special issue explores how these changes affect young people and how young people respond creatively to and engage with issues of social justice and politics. young people are engaging in creative conversations and actions at the local and global levels which significantly impact politics, social environments, and ways of living, and in this issue authors explore these concerns from an interdisciplinary vantage point. but what about sweaty concepts? ahmed (2017) applies the term “sweaty concepts” to concepts that are identified within situations. for instance, key terms and concepts in literacy such as brian v. street’s theory of literacy as a social practice emerged from sweaty concepts such as maktab literacy practices or autonomous literacy practices as he observed people across contexts in iran (street, 1995). it is the figurative apple falling on your head that hits researchers in the midst of fieldwork (ahmed, 2017). these are beautiful and generative moments that take place all too seldom. sweaty concepts emerge, according to ahmed, when we are pulled or stretched out of our comfort zone: “a sweaty concept might come out of a bodily experience that is trying” (2017, p. 13). there are some sweaty moments within this why the politics of literacy? studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 1-9, 2019 3 special issue, when researchers describe and theorize moments that feel different, out of their realms of experience, maybe even uncomfortable; these moments can elicit broader implications about the nature and properties of literacy. young people today appear relatively comfortable and at ease with confronting change and navigating sweaty concepts – generally speaking, that is. media and digital worlds sometimes make change easier because people become more opaque and less visible behind screens. certainly, many young people have come together in various formations to produce arts-based knowledge and share in collaborative social justice efforts; others looking at literacies have pointed to the capacities to critically consume, produce, disseminate, and intervene with information as constitutive of literacies (mirra, morrell, & filipiak, 2018). at the same time, young people are increasingly leveraging hybrid strategies including but not limited to writing, art-making, speaking, and using social media to intervene in diverse political challenges (e.g., globalization, politics, education, gun safety). their actions urge us to consider how ever-more diverse groups of young people are pushing the boundaries of literacy, equity, and civic engagement to effect positive change. materiality, we argue alongside the scholars in this special issue, is distinctly woven through young people’s activism in ways that evidence entrenchment in contemporary global networks and the knowledge and capacity to intervene in dynamics of inequity. in particular, gender, race, and indigeneity show up as framing the conversations and lives of young people invested in change. this special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reconsider how we might frame theories of literacy to examine social justice issues in young people’s lives, especially inequalities arising from race, gender, sexuality, class, and other aspects of identity and experience in the context of global digital networks. central questions asked in the issue are: what new concerns regarding globalization, power, and equity have emerged for scholars working in the traditions of young people’s activism, and artsbased production, given the intensive prominence of global networks, flows, and relationships in shaping the lives of young people? what kind of updated framework for multiliteracies and youth-led social justice can account for the relations of power along lines of race, sex, gender, class, and location that have historically structured knowledge? how might scholars reframe the debate around youth organizing as a response to injustice to one that more carefully attends to creative forms of engagement and global relationality? these questions inform the structure and content of this issue as indeed they guided our conversations in october 2017. ahmed talks about feminism as sensational and pushing against injustices; questioning power and privilege brings agency and life to research and these ideas are threaded throughout the issue. in the issue, we respond to the tumultuous political moment that defines our world. significantly, we wish to highlight the ways in which young chelsey hauge & jennifer rowsell studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 1-9, 2019 4 people engage creatively and aesthetically with counter-narratives and in the production of what might be termed equity or justice. we respond to the calls of queer and feminist theorists of color (i.e., muñoz, 2009) to locate a hopefulness in persistent engagement outside of dominant tropes of engagement. beginning in the early 2000s with the occupy movement and expanding through a multiplicity of organizing efforts and activist engagements led chiefly by young people, this special issue traces a set of responses to dominant political norms. the people and research in this special issue we were very fortunate to have wendy ewald attend the two-day symposium and share part of her exhibition on a revisit to labrador, canada entitled pekupatikut innuat akunikana/pictures woke the people up. by way of history, wendy ewald visited sheshatshiu, labrador in 1969 as a young woman, and took a series of photographs. she revisited decades later in 2007. at the symposium, she shared contrastive photographs alongside the photographic philosophies that have made her famous. in the special issue, ewald concentrated on the notion of “politics” and designed a visual essay based on another research study entitled, an immigrant alphabet. building on the trope of learning words and written language through alphabet primers, ewald recognized that the alphabet could be an allusive medium for immigrants to explore experiences that they had over the course of their immigration. working with teenagers at al-bustan seeds of culture, which is an arts and education program in philadelphia, ewald divided the alphabet into parts and placed students in groups to choose words that represent the letters their group was assigned, after which students drew out their ideas visually. for instance, a young woman named malika from uzbekistan chose “a for amerika: a country where everything starts first.” the three female teenagers presented in ewald’s photo essay personify the imperative outlined in ahmed’s feminist manifesto to reorient the world and put issues on a slant. ewald was a key figure at our symposium and her international work pushed us to think about literacy in more political ways. after ewald’s photo essay, we move on to an article by kate pahl whose scholarship on co-researching with youth has strongly impacted the field of literacy studies. in the article, pahl argues that it is essential to see literacy through young people’s communicative practices. what makes the article forceful is both the research data from her fieldwork in rotherham and sheffield, and the wide breadth of her knowledge of the field and the diversity evident in her citations. rather than seeing literacy as static, and connected to specific writing and reading practices, pahl ascribes to a “what if” quality, that sees literacy as expansive and located in the realm of the “not yet.” pahl beautifully focuses on moments of recognition (her italics) by youth when they are seen and heard. to do this, she draws on more processwhy the politics of literacy? studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 1-9, 2019 5 oriented theory such as the work of brian massumi (2011) to elicit moments of becoming and research with young people as opposed to on young people. she consistently grounds her work in young people’s activities across a range of spaces and presents them as crucial processes of engagement, and this tendency is certainly apparent within the article. as a fitting transition from pahl’s article on co-research with young people is diane collier’s article, which spans across three different research studies across ages and spaces and walks readers through her journey into coresearch and participatory methods. there is an openness, honesty, and rawness to collier’s work, in that she does not tie things up neatly with a bow. rather, collier isolates the knots in her thinking and takes the reader through how she worked out participatory methods. in her research and writing, collier tries as much as possible to tell the story that children most want to tell (rather than a story that matches research questions or aligns with an objective). she does so with an ethical stance, in that she is miraculously able to tell the story that children and youth want to tell while at the same time protecting them in the telling of it. as she says, “in my research, i have tried to work with an openness to how others – often children – might understand research processes and how they might direct what is happening as well as provide interpretations and direction.” as she moves through her early research and subsequently elucidates two more recent studies, collier illustrates how she moved into co-research. drawing from ahmed again, collier show us the sweaty concepts that are etched within her fieldwork and data. building on collier’s co-research, curran katsi’sorókwas jacobs places us within a participatory research study with youth engaging in digital experiences. building on her own story and memories of her father telling stories about her heritage as a part of the kanien’kehá:ka (mohawk) people, jacobs moves to her present-day work as a scholar and educator, and reflects upon a learner named maren, whom she values greatly. this young woman reminds jacobs of her own infusion of identities. further, the literacy practices in which maren engages are influenced by colonial history and infused with the understandings from each respective community and history to which she belongs. lifting out maren’s story, jacobs elucidates how the multimodal nature of contemporary literacy allows space for youth to express themselves in ways other than writing, but also encourages them to develop writing skills as a means of not being left out. like all authors in the issue, jacobs powerfully shows that young people develop their own terms for literacy based on their interests, passions, and backgrounds and so often these influences do not align with traditional notions of academic literacy. reflecting on maren’s art, jacobs alerts us that the art is not explicitly representative of her indigenous identity. one aspect of her identity that maren makes clear to jacobs and others is that she identifies as kanien’kehá:ka. chelsey hauge & jennifer rowsell studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 1-9, 2019 6 mining the connotative and allusive nature of art, michelle honeyford, timothy beyak, and felix sylvester hardman move into higher education and their educator inquiry group to push against normed beliefs and convictions about categories through material engagements. working from a core text, namely a drawing by a participant named felix, honeyford and beyak draw out the power of inquiry by unraveling issues of power, privilege, and normative values. applying jocson’s (2018) framework of youth media texts as pedagogy, as assemblage, as place-making, and as critical solidarity, the authors examine artifactual data (felix’s drawing) to illustrate how they operationalize jocson’s framework. using heuristics like a triangle diagram, the inquiry group thinks about big ideas, engages in recursive meaning-making, and recognizes the complex, contentious, and challenging aspects of questioning their own knowledge and assumptions. as the article nears its end, the author team starts to forge some sweaty concepts dealing with text as place-making which draws attention to place and reorienting colonialist histories. through creative and critical literacy practices, critical solidarity involves youth not only confronting change, but challenging indoctrinated worldviews. from this critical gaze, we move into the force of an activist article titled armed with love. to be sure, anne crampton’s article arms us with love as a quality that permeates an experience (both emotionally and bodily) as an immersive state of being fully engrossed in activity or work (dewey, 2005, p. 339). crampton’s detailed ethnography in two high schools in the united states paints a vivid picture of young people’s efforts to be agentive in formal schooling. as crampton notes, artistic responses often result from feelings and passion – sometimes to make or enact a change. both of the teachers crampton spotlights had explicitly stated activist goals in their classrooms and their teaching, and their pedagogical planning revolved around disrupting the status quo. there are resonant phrases in crampton’s beautifully written article. one phrase in particular sticks out to us: “armed with love these students produced ‘documentaries that have a life outside of the classroom’.” strongly influenced by the affective turn in literacy, crampton illustrates how the emotional and affective qualities of their literacy experiences are inseparable from their activist productions and performance of resistances. the article by chelsey hauge and kate reid uses performance and arts methods to work through cancer treatment, and more broadly, find a voice that reorients practices of representation. in the article, the authors examine how hauge works with her friend reid to multimodally represent chelsey’s journey through breast cancer. the purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of artistic practice to counter dominant narratives and amplify unheard voices. it profiles an arts-based project which enabled both authors to tell stories in multimodal ways – to illustrate how creative practice can serve as a site for counter normative storytelling. breast cancer pink is both an artistic artifact (a song with an accompanying music video) and an artsbased project that narrates the story of chelsey’s experience of queer, young why the politics of literacy? studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 1-9, 2019 7 adult breast cancer and her reaction to certain elements of “pink culture.” reid applies goodson’s (1998) notion of “storying of self” where constructing and making sense of one’s identity is an emergent process, that is, an “ongoing process of self-building and self-negotiation... an ongoing project of storying and narrative” (p. 6) in relation to a particular culture. engaging in collaborative ethnographic songwriting, the authors compose narratives that reflect and archive particular life experiences of the individual(s) in song, allowing them to story “a contemporary snapshot of an ongoing process” (goodson, 1998, p. 10) of identity-building and sensemaking within a given culture. connecting strongly with ahmed (2017), the authors transact with the idea of making a feminist survival kit. they wanted to queer cancer, relying on a feminist conception of literacy as the capacity to identify and articulate a feminist account of one’s own experience, and to share that experience in the community with others. breast cancer pink is a queer, feminist project of survival. it is a project that exemplifies multimodal literacy engagement that moves across mediums, evidences intentional engagement with the world, and queers breast cancer normativity. there is no question that this article aligns strongly with ahmed’s efforts to put a different slant on the other, thereby reorienting our gazes. sara schroeter’s article, the final article in the issue, moves expressively into disruptive pedagogies to unsettle colonialist paradigms embedded in curricula for a century. her year-long ethnographic study in a high school in british columbia offers a framework for understanding disruption as productive movement in literacy. drawing on theories of the body and embodiment, schroeter illustrates how youth of color are read in various places and space, and how race creates a spatial quality of difference which she relates to hall’s (1996) notion of the floating signifier. applying drama techniques in a grade nine classroom, schroeter closely examined categories assigned to individuals such as “girl,” “boy,” “black,” and “white.” she says, “the way tournesol [one of schroeter’s participants] and others answered my question indicates that the youth were aware of racial signifiers and discourses during their interactions; circulating logics about racial categories never disappeared.” there is such a democratic feel to what schroeter describes in her article – young people in this classroom have what ahmed describes as “snap” (ahmed, 2017, p. 189). racially diverse youth like tournesol are painfully aware of racial signifiers, and their reactions embody ahmed’s claim about the nature and origins of snap: “if a snap seems sharp or sudden, it might be because we do not experience the slower time of bearing or of holding up; the time in which we can bear the pressure, the time it has taken for things not to break” (ahmed, 2017, p. 189). when young people push back at stereotypes, they begin to enact evolutions that should be encouraged, and relatedly, the snap constitutes a sign a freedom and agency. as a coda to the special issue, we have included an evocative and deeply meaningful visual essay by peter vietgen. vietgen’s visual essay, entitled “soaring eagles,” looks at a research study with indigenous youth at a chelsey hauge & jennifer rowsell studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 1-9, 2019 8 historic location known as soaring eagles in the niagara area. kelsey dick, herself an aboriginal teacher, worked with vietgen and a group of indigenous youths over the course of the project to take a critical look at truth and reconciliation in canada’s history and to address the question, “what is truth? what is reconciliation?” the visual essay is a personal look at what we know, what we don’t know, and what we must do to move forward while respecting the past. within the essay, vietgen demonstrates how students used a variety of materials to explore and express their interpretations of the calls to action stated in the truth and reconciliation report. conclusion: feminist living and working alongside youth as we have discussed, this collection of papers contributes to what we might call hopeful, participatory and youth-led movement for change (campbell et al., 2018; facer & pahl, 2017; ranciere, 2010; tuhiwai smith, tuck, & wang, 2019). taken together these pieces re-present personal knowledge as political engagement in the world. the pieces dive deeply into the literacy practices that enable us to witness political sensibilities in our everyday lives – especially in spaces that typically are voided from the political. in this special issue, we observe multiple ways in which literacy practices enable the remediation of knowledge – and therefore power – in classrooms, healthcare spaces, and multigenerational communities. it is the potential for multimodal literacies to enable the remediation of knowledge and power in which we locate a sense of hopefulness for young people, change, and scholarship on a politics of literacies. one thing that emerged from our many discussions and interactions over the two-day event about the politics of literacies was the creative, disruptive, and ultimately hopeful ways that young people make meaning. whether it is adults in an inquiry group or children working with family photos or indigenous high school students combining different media and materials to represent their feelings about the calls to action stated in the truth and reconciliation report, the special issue works across studies with a common goal of dismantling power and inciting political awareness. across the papers and projects, we identify a unifying strand around engagement with the material practices that enable us to hear and witness young people in their political engagement, whether that engagement manifests as the production of creative literacies or the refusal to participate in everday schooling or other practices that feel constraining. it is here, in the intentional intervention into the world – be it through creative production or research methodologies and practices – that we locate what we have termed a politics of literacies aimed at nurturing scholarly ideas that demand deep engagement with creative practice and political sensibilities in the quotidian lives of young people. why the politics of literacy? studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 1, 1-9, 2019 9 references ahmed, s. (2017). living a feminist life. durham, nc: duke university press. barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. braidotti, r. (2013). the posthuman. cambridge: polity press. campbell, e., pahl, k., pente, e., & rasool, z. (2018). re-imagining contested communities: connecting rotherham through research. bristol, uk: policy press. dewey, j. (1934/2005). art as experience. new york: perigee. facer, k., & pahl, k. (eds.). (2017). valuing collaborative interdisciplinary research: beyond impact. bristol, uk: policy press. goodson, i. (1998). storying the self: life politics and the study of the teacher’s life and work. in w. pinar (ed.), curriculum: toward new identities (pp. 3-20). new york: garland. hall, s. (1996). new ethnicities. in d. morley & k. chen (eds.), stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies (pp. 441-449). new york: routledge. jocson, k. (2018). youth media matters: participatory cultures and literacies in education. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. luke, a. & woods, a. (2009). critical literacies in schools: a primer. voices from the middle, 4, 1-14. massumi. b. (2011). semblance and event. cambridge, ma: mit press. mirra, n., morrell, e., & filipiak, d. (2018). from digital consumption to digital invention: toward a new critical theory and practice of multiliteracies. theory into practice, 57(1), 12-19. muñoz, j. (2009). cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: new york university press. ranciere, j. (2010). dissensus: on politics and eesthetics. (s. corcoran, ed., trans.). london: continuum. street, b. (1995). social literacies. london: longman. tuhiwai smith, l., tuck, e., & wang, w. k. (2019). indigenous and decolonizing studies in education: mapping the long view. new york: routledge. the dilemma of democracy: collusion and the state of exception studies in social justice volume 5, issue 2, 213-230, 2011   correspondence address: mark mcgovern, department of social sciences, edge hill university, ormskirk, lancashire l39 4qp, united kingdom. tel.: +44 (0) 1695 584621; email: mcgoverm@edgehill.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 the dilemma of democracy: collusion and the state of exception mark mcgovern department of social sciences, edge hill university, united kingdom abstract in what sense might the authoritarian practices and suspension of legal norms as means to combat the supposed threat of “terrorism,” within and by contemporary western democratic states, be understood as a problem of and not for democracy? that question lies at the heart of this article. it will be explored through the theoretical frame offered in the work of giorgio agamben on the state of exception and the example of british state collusion in non-state violence in the north of ireland. the north of ireland provides a particularly illuminating case study to explore how the state of exception—the suspension of law and of legal norms and the exercise of arbitrary decision—has increasingly become a paradigm of contemporary governance. in so doing it brings into question not only the traditional conceptualization of the “democratic dilemma” of liberal democratic states “confronting terrorism” but also challenge dominant paradigms of transitional justice that generally fail to problematize the liberal democratic order. after outlining agamben’s understanding of the state of exception the article will chart the development of “exceptional measures” and the creation of a permanent state of emergency in the north, before critically exploring the role of collusion as an aspect of counter-insurgency during the recent conflict. the paper will argue that the normalization of exceptional measures, combined with the need to delimit the explicitness of constitutional provision for the same, provided a context for the emergence of collusion as a paradigm case for the increasing replication of colonial practices into the core activity of the contemporary democratic state. introduction: the dilemma of democracy in terrorism and the liberal state (1986) renowned british counter-insurgency theorist paul wilkinson provides a classic description of what mainstream “terrorist experts” construe as the fundamental democratic dilemma facing the modern “liberal state” confronting “terrorism”: the primary objective of counter-terrorist strategy must be the protection and maintenance of liberal democracy and the rule of law. it cannot be sufficiently stressed that this aim overrides in importance even the objective of eliminating terrorism and political violence as such. any bloody tyrant can “solve” the problem of political violence if he is prepared to sacrifice all considerations of humanity, and to trample down all constitutional and judicial rights. (p. 125) when such “counter-terrorist” strategies are enacted within the context of “emergency powers,” debate tends to focus on one of two options; either upholding 214 mark mcgovern studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   “constitutional provisions” or prioritizing “the democratic principles underpinning the constitution rather than the strict letter of the constitution itself” (campbell & connolly, 2003, p. 345-346). in either case, as connolly and campbell, suggest, the “end-goal [of] preserving democracy” provides the un-problematized ultimate justification for the policies pursued (p. 346). there is a convenient circularity to such arguments, founded on the a-priori acceptance of the self-legitimating theories of the liberal democratic state itself. modern liberal democracy and the “rule of law,” seen as essentially synonymous and mutually re-enforcing, are presented in supposedly “objective” terms, as a mode of governance and judicial order that need to be maintained and protected. however, there may be an alternative way of conceptualizing this “dilemma” (if that is how it should be understood) as one not for but of contemporary democracy. rather than being located as a problem whose origin lies in the threat of violence posed to the state, this dilemma might rather be sited as one inherent in the character of modern democracy itself, the idea of the rule of law and the relationship of both to the state’s use of organized violence. it is such an alternative conception of a democratic dilemma that this paper seeks to explore. it will do so by looking at british state collusion in non-state violence during the conflict in the north of ireland. this record of collusion, it will be argued, casts light on a deeply embedded and dark dimension of the character and practice of the modern democratic state; namely the increasingly normalized role of the state of exception. the italian philosopher giorgio agamben (1998, 2005) has provided telling insights into the significance of the state of exception for understanding the workings of modern liberal democracies. this analysis of the meaning of collusion for the contemporary democratic order will therefore be informed by the work of agamben as it will at the same time provide a means of exploring the central tenets of his argument through the case of british state collusion during the northern ireland conflict. the paper will be divided into 5 parts. part 1 will set out what is meant by collusion and why the study of these “death squads” operating in a democratic state is important. part 2 will explore what agamben means by the state of exception and why he argues that it is of such significance for understanding the modern democratic state as a juridical order. section 3 will examine the role of the state of exception in the development of the northern irish state from its inception through to the 30 years of conflict (1968-1998) and beyond. part 4 will examine the interaction of the state of exception, british state counter-insurgency theory and practice and the strategy of collusion. finally, the character of collusion as a practice precisely shaped by a “void of law” (agamben, 2005, p. 26) will be explored further through the lens of the paradigmatic example put forward by agamben, the iustitium of ancient roman law. collusion, transition and democracy death squads, democracy and transition linked to the need to deconstruct wilkinson’s democratic dilemma, two key academic concerns have informed this analysis of the meaning of collusion for the dilemma of democracy 215 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   liberal democracies. first, the general absence of such analyses in the academic study of death squads and (second) the tendency to conflate post-conflict transition with a shift toward democracy. death squads are understood as “paramilitary groups involved in state-sponsored or state-tolerated terror against political opponents” (rolston, 2006, p. 181) and as bill rolston has argued, the involvement of democratic states in the operation of such groups is conspicuous by its virtual absence from academic literature on the subject (see also; campbell & brenner, 2002; sluka, 2000, woodworth, 2002). this is all the more surprising given the “deniability” such covert organized violence offers regimes for whom there may be a greater political cost to pay for public knowledge of their actions. nor is it coincidental that this parallels the virtual absence of the study of western democracies’ involvement in “state terrorism” (chomsky, 2004; george, 1991; jackson, 2008; stohl, 1984, 2006). even critics of democratic states that have employed death squads tend to argue that democracy is a necessary, if insufficient condition to prevent such mass human rights violations (green & ward, 2004). the issue of death squads and collusion needs therefore to be more fully explored precisely for what it reveals about the nature of the modern democratic state and its relationship to “terror” and “terrorism.” in similar vein, the conceptualisation of post-conflict transition, and the means to address the legacies of past political violence and mass human rights abuses, particularly as it is understood within the field of transitional justice, tends to be shaped by what has been called a “paradigm of transition” (ní aoláin & campbell, 2005). such a paradigm constructs a series of antinomies (the transition from “peace to war,” from “denial to acknowledgement”) as if they were synonymous with that from “authoritarianism to democracy.” western-style democracy emerges, as a result, as the pre-ordained end-goal of transition. apart from anything else, as ní aoláin and campbell (2005) have suggested, this tends to preclude the analysis of what they refer to as “conflicted democracies”; states that have witnessed mass human rights violations (including those perpetrated by the state) where the very institutions and practices promoted as the means to prevent such state violence singularly failed to do so. the problem of contemporary western democracies engaging in mass human rights abuses is similarly understood solely as an aberration of their character, rather than something that may be of their essence. in this sense, the “paradigm of transition” shares the same conceptual terrain as the logic of the “liberal peace” and “military humanism” that have come so much to the fore as the means to justify western intervention and military expansion in the “war on terror” during the last decade. it is therefore unsurprising that this mainstream “transitional justice” agenda has emerged as a cornerstone of contemporary global governance and “state-building” (chandler, 2006; duffield, 2007). collusion and conflict in the north of ireland what then is collusion? collusion here is understood as the involvement of state agents, directly or indirectly, through commission, collaboration or connivance, in 216 mark mcgovern studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   non-state political violence. such collusion can take a variety of forms. the report of the stevens inquiry1 understood collusion to include the “wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, through to the extreme of agents being involved in murder” (stevens, 2003, p. 16). retired canadian judge peter cory, who conducted a series of inquiries into allegations of collusion, adopted a deliberately broad definition of collusion because: army and police officers must not act collusively by ignoring or turning a blind eye to the wrongful acts of their servants or supplying information to assist them in their wrongful acts or encouraging them to commit wrongful acts. any lesser definition would have the effect of condoning, or even encouraging, state involvement in crimes, thereby shattering all public confidence in these important agencies (cory, 2004, pp. 21-22). both stevens and cory concluded that collusion was “widespread and systematic” (stevens, 2003). taken alongside other official and non-official inquiries (see for example, cassels, 2006; o’loan, 2007) and belying the “rotten apple” theory so often proffered by those defending the role of the british state in the north, these findings suggest collusion took place throughout the 30 years of conflict, over a wide geographical area and potentially involved hundreds of victims. while some hold that such public inquiries demonstrate the efficacy of democratic institutions to uphold accountability and end impunity there is a need to treat such claims with caution (ignatieff, 2005). rather we might see such a process as one where there is a move from literal and interpretive to implicatory forms of denial (cohen, 2001, pp. 7-8). public inquiries (and the limitations within which they operate) themselves play an important role in continuing to obfuscate the fundamental character of state violence undertaken by contemporary democracies, just as they are held up as a post-hoc legitimization of the democratic state itself (burton & carlen, 1979; rolston & scraton, 2005) there is, in other words, a need to deconstruct the polar opposition of “authoritarianism” and “democracy” and to explore the issue of collusion more thoroughly by subjecting to scrutiny and critique the very nature of the modern liberal democratic state. it is within this context that the work of giorgio agamben on the role of the state of exception in contemporary democratic state practice can be useful. the state of exception the significance of the state of exception for agamben the state of exception is crucial for understanding the paradigm of modern governance and fundamental to the western political and legal tradition upon which the character and practice of contemporary “so-called democracies” are based (agamben, 2005, p. 3). indeed, agamben’s argument is specifically designed to challenge liberal conceptions of the origins and nature of the legitimacy of contemporary democratic states in late capitalism; namely that such legitimacy derives from a tradition of adherence to a set of legal norms that are certain, predictable and guarantee a range of minimal freedoms in opposition to the the dilemma of democracy 217 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   arbitrary exercise of governmental power. rather than a genealogy of the contemporary liberal democratic state that foregrounds the role of the social contract and of rights, agamben sets out to explore what (following carl schmitt) is understood as the basis of sovereignty, “the sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” (carl schmitt, 1922, quoted in agamben, 2005, p. 1). for agamben the state of exception is one that involves the suspension of law and of legal norms and the exercise of arbitrary decision. he argues that it is pivotal for understanding the nature of contemporary state practice and of “lifting the veil” on the “ambiguous zone… [the] no-man’s land between public law and political fact” (agamben, 2005, pp. 1-2) for two main reasons. first, agamben (2005) argues that the state of exception is the “original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension” (p. 3). for agamben this is deeply historically embedded in the western political tradition. following foucault, agamben suggests this represents a form of bio-political power but, unlike foucault, he finds its origin predates the modern. rather, “the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—if concealed— nucleus of sovereign power… the production of a bio-political body is the original activity of sovereign power” (agamben, 1998, p. 6). what is distinctive about the modern state is that it places the regulation of biopolitical life as explicit to its purpose and in so doing “bring[s] to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life” (agamben, 1998, p. 6). in many ways identifying this lineage from the ancient to the modern is one of the key genealogical tasks of agamben’s work. it also provides the logic for his exploration of apparently obscure figures and archetypes (such as homo sacer and the iustitium) found in ancient (particularly roman) law as a means to explore the contemporary. second, agamben holds that the state of exception as the “voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including socalled democratic ones” (agamben, 2005, p. 3). writing against the backdrop of the “global war on terror” agamben contends that the state of exception is increasingly the “dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics” (agamben, 2005, p. 3). crucially too, while he is at pains not simply to conflate the two, the increasing reliance on the state of exception as a technique of governance calls into question the (all too politically and ideologically significant) juxtaposition of totalitarianism and democracy as distinct constitutional forms. the space between “public law and political fact” opened up, for example, by the status of the detainee in guantanamo bay, and his reduction to the condition of “bare life,” is one in which the “state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism” (agamben, 2005, p. 3). the “state of exception,” the “state of necessity” and the intensification of state power the state of exception is also significant because it is the limit of the juridical order. rather than being identified as either “inside” or “outside” the juridical order (as different legal traditions would have it) agamben wants to deconstruct this 218 mark mcgovern studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   “simple topographical opposition” and to argue instead that the state of exception should be conceived as a “threshold, or a zone of indifference… where inside and outside… blur with each other. the suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition and the zone of anomie that it establishes is not… unrelated to the juridical order” (agamben, 2005, p. 23). this characterization of the state of exception as a “zone of indistinction,” an “anomic space” and a “void of law” can provide a language through which to capture and represent state practices (such as that of collusion) that lie at one and the same time apparently beyond and yet inextricably bound up with the juridical order. as well as providing an evocative conceptualization of the fluid and indistinct character of the anomic space that is the state of exception, agamben’s analysis of two strands within western legal traditions, and their interaction with the changing character of the state through the twentieth century, also provides important insights. one tradition (prevalent in france and germany) makes specific constitutional or legal provision for the regulation of the state of exception. the other (evident in “england” and the usa) consists of states “that prefer not to regulate the problem explicitly” (agamben, 2005, p. 10). that said, agamben (2005, p. 10) contends that the distinction between the two, “clear in principle but hazier in fact” has done little or nothing to prevent “something like a state of exception” developing in all of the identified western state orders since the early twentieth century. indeed, the term state of exception, readily found in french and german legal traditions has its direct equivalent in the “english tradition”; “martial law” or “emergency powers.” justification for the state of exception and the suspension of legal norms is invariably founded on arguments of necessity; that exceptional powers must be introduced, and rights suspended, so that the democratic order may be preserved. indeed such an argument can be seen to lie at the heart of the terrorist experts’ democratic dilemma in posing the question what aspects of democracy must we give up in order to preserve democracy? legal concepts of necessity (that “necessity creates its own law”) can be subject to a range of critiques. perhaps the most persuasive is that, while claims of necessity tend to be couched in objective terms they are always founded on a subjective decision. as balladore-pallieri notes (as cited in agamben, 2005) the concept of necessity is: an entirely subjective one, relative to the aim one wants to achieve. it may be said that necessity dictates the issuance of a given norm, because otherwise the existing juridical order is threatened with ruin; but there must be agreement on the point that the existing order must be preserved. (p. 30) necessity was presented as the underlying logic justifying the intensification of state power through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. this involved powers previously evident only in a “real state of siege” (for example, an actual condition of war) becoming a paradigm of governance in peacetime where a “fictitious state of siege” has been enacted (agamben, 2005, p. 17). agamben sees the great conflagrations of the twentieth century, particularly the two world wars, as pivotal in this build up of state power. based on the needs of wartime economies and characterized by the ever-encroaching power of the state over civilian life, the the dilemma of democracy 219 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   transference of wartime conditions to peacetime governance results in the normalization of the state of exception (agamben, 2005, p. 18). to illustrate the crucial role of wartime conditions in generating this move toward the permanence of “exceptional measures” in the british case agamben specifically cites the defence of the realm act (dora). the dora was introduced in august 1914 and did indeed massively expand the direct power of the state over the lives of citizens. it also provided the template for the emergence of such “exceptional measures” as a norm in peacetime britain. this was even more obviously the case in ireland. ireland and “exceptional powers” colonialism and the state of exception agamben’s (inevitably constrained) reading of the factors involved in the emergence of the state of exception becoming a paradigm of modern governance can be critiqued for the virtual absence of the influence of colonialism. of course, the impact of colonialism on the colonized, and on the subsequent development of the ‘post-colonial’ state, is crucial for understanding the experience of the contemporary in large parts of the world. indeed, it could be argued that the reduction of the experience of the colonised to ‘bare life’ was part and parcel of an imperial juridical order and fundamental to shaping modern bio-politics. the experience of empire also had a transformative effect on the imperial polity itself, most obviously perhaps in terms of culture and representation (said, 1993), but also in the transposing of colonial forms of governance and practice into the institutionalized order of the modern state. a recent analysis of the development of the foundational doctrines of international law, and particularly the sovereignty doctrine itself, argues that colonialism (rather than being a peripheral factor, as conventional analyses suggest) were “forged out of an attempt to create a legal system that could account for relations between the european and non-european worlds in the colonial confrontation” (anghie, 2005, p. 3). that non-european societies could be conceived by european jurists as being void of sovereignty, a consequence of their imagined incivility and barbarism, could allow for the state of exception to become a norm of imperial governance. it may also have inured the apparatchiks of empire to techniques of government that, with some modification, could be translated into practices within the modern mass democratic state itself. in this context ireland may provide a crucial case study. in many ways ireland lay at another, territorial and jurisdictional threshold, as a colonised society that was also (from the act of union onward) subject to incorporation into the body and boundaries of the colonising state. indeed the condition and place of ireland, as both inside and beyond the bounds of the british state, might be conceived as a jurisdictional space of indeterminacy parallel to the juridical space and “zone of indistinction” that is the state of exception itself. this borderland, threshold irish experience of british governance and use of force is one that may therefore have significant implications. 220 mark mcgovern studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   from “special powers” to “emergency powers” to chart the process whereby the “voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency” became an “essential practice” of the british state it is necessary to look to ireland. as adrian guelke (2007) recently argued, “for more than a century the irish question played a central role in the justification of emergency security measures in the united kingdom outside actual periods of inter-state war [italics added]” (p. 273). taking agamben’s example as a starting point, the dora provided a direct template for legislation introduced in ireland in the period of the irish revolution (1916-1921), most obviously in the restoration of order in ireland act (roia) of 1920. however, both the dora and the roia need to be seen against the backdrop of the 105 coercion acts introduced in ireland by the british state between the introduction of the act of union in 1801 and partition in 1922 (see ainsworth, 2001; campbell, 1994; townsend, 1983). coercion acts were measures introduced by the british state to suppress political and agrarian unrest in ireland and, as charles townsend (1983) notes, the dora “gave the executive the sort of powers previously heralded by emergency legislation like the protection of person and property act [of 1881]” (p. 280). ireland was also the only part of the union in which martial law had been in force, following the 1798 rebellion and the first years after the act of union and, again, in various parts of ireland between 1916 and 1922. indeed the period of the irish revolution was crucial for the development of the modern british state’s amalgamation of mass democracy with the state of exception. as the then chancellor austen chamberlain privately mused on the question “can modern democracies handle such problems successfully?” (as cited in townsend, 1983, p. 353), in an ominous forerunner of things to come, his cabinet colleague winston churchill argued that the way to defeat sinn fein was to introduce a policy of “gunning” rather than “burning” and to “let the police get at the gunmen whom they knew but could not legally convict [italics added]” (townsend, 1983, p. 352). the militarization of policing was evidenced in the creation of auxiliary units of the royal irish constabulary (the infamous “black and tans”) and subsequently, following the creation of the northern ireland state by the government of ireland act (1920), in the form of the special constabulary (or “b” specials) (see farrell, 1983). the formation of the “b” specials (whose structure, personnel and ethos were all framed by the pre-existing loyalist paramilitary ulster volunteer force) was one part of the establishment of a permanent state of exception as the norm for the new state. in legislative terms this was exemplified by the civil authorities (special powers) act of 1922. the special powers act (as it became known, spa) was again closely modelled on the dora and the roia and would remain in force throughout the period from 1922 to 1973. the spa symbolises what laura donohue (2007) recently described as the “temporary permanence” of emergency legislation in the north, or what (more accurately) paddy hillyard (1993) termed the “normalization of special powers.” the direct antecedent (as we shall see) of later exceptional measures and the foundation of the “architecture” of contemporary special (“anti-terror”) powers, the the dilemma of democracy 221 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   spa is also remarkable in representing perhaps the most explicit instance of constitutional provision for the state of exception in the “english” legal tradition. in this context, some of the expansive and exceptional powers given over to the executive (in this case the unionist northern ireland government) by the spa are worth noting. the spa made permanent (certainly after 1933) wide ranging powers of detention (including internment, or arrest without charge and imprisonment without trial); entry, search and seizure; the prohibition of meetings and processions and censorship and banning of publications and organizations. they were also powers that, contrary to received academic wisdom, were widely and regularly used (donohue, 2007). in addition to these specific draconian powers the spa also gave the executive two, apparently all-encompassing, general provisions. first, that the civil authority could take “all such steps and issue all such orders as may be necessary for preserving the peace and maintaining order” (as cited in donohue, 2007, p. xix). second (notable for its kafka-esque quality, instrumental vagueness and potentially retrospective application) that: if any person does any act of such a nature as to be calculated to be prejudicial to the preservation of the peace or maintenance of order in northern ireland and not specifically provided for in the regulations, he shall be deemed guilty of an offence against the regulations. (donohue, 2007, p. 23) it is difficult to imagine a clearer example of the legal provision of a state of exception. significantly too as the undoubtedly turbulent and violent circumstances that accompanied the north’s establishment receded, the “state of necessity” arguments advanced by the north’s permanent unionist regime to justify its exceptional powers shifted from being notionally “necessary in order to establish order” to “necessary in order to maintain peace” (donohue, 2007, p. 23). the spa was a prime target for the civil rights agitation of the late 1960s that ultimately (given the state’s reaction) led to the conflict that lasted from 1968-1998 and cost some 3,600 lives. the spa itself was ended in 1973, following the introduction of direct british government control of the north. however, far from an end of “special measures,” the spa was immediately replaced by the northern ireland (emergency provisions) act (epa). rather than abnegating the authoritarian powers contained in the spa (for example, internment) the epa enshrined and further embedded them. indeed, in certain key areas (such as rules governing the eligibility of evidence and the creation of no-jury courts) the legal due process was substantially subverted to counter-insurgency ends (greer & white, 1986; hadden & hillyard, 1973; jennings, 1990; walsh, 2000). along with the introduction in 1974 of the first prevention of terrorism (temporary provisions) act (pta) and a series of additional measures this would ensure the incorporation of the state of exception as an “essential practice” of british governance. as paddy hillyard has suggested (see mcgovern, 2010) with the epa and the pta the ‘architecture’ of contemporary counter-insurgency law and policy was put in place. 222 mark mcgovern studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   emergency powers, counter-insurgency and the problem of the explicit exception colonialism and counter-insurgency theory the explicitness of the “special powers” evident in the north of ireland presented the british state with a conundrum that was reflected in the counter-insurgency theories and practices employed following the outbreak of the conflict. the loose body of writings that made up british counterinsurgency theory at that time had been developed within the context of its various “end of empire” struggles waged against national liberation movements in places like malaya, palestine, aden, yemen and kenya (dixon, 2009; newsinger, 2002. see also, clutterbuck, 1967; kitson, 1960, 1971; paget, 1967; thompson, 1967). in many ways the application of such theories to part of the jurisdiction of the metropolitan state itself evidenced the impact of the colonial on the operation of the modern liberal democratic juridical order. yet to openly adopt the (in fact highly coercive) “hearts and minds” strategies employed elsewhere in the colonized world revealed a central paradox for the british state. such a step made explicit not only the state of exception but also the colonial condition of the north of ireland that its inclusion in the jurisdiction and constitutional order of the union, and the rhetoric of the government, was specifically designed to deny. indeed, it was precisely the suggestion that a supposed colonial condition existed that the struggle against irish republicanism, the state’s principle enemy, was specifically intended to negate. the problem, in other words, might be understood as one that was far less with the practice of the state of exception than with its potentially becoming all too apparent. it was this problem, the preservation of the self-projected legitimacy of the liberal democratic state, with which the adaption of counter-insurgency policy and practice was designed to deal. the explicitness of a constitutional or legal provision for the state of exception (as agamben noted) runs contrary to the english legal tradition. however, as he also argues, that has had little material impact on the exception becoming the norm. in similar vein the development of alternative counter-insurgency models need to be explored in this context. contemporary counter-insurgency (or “counter-terrorism”) theorists make analytical distinctions between three main approaches to “tackling terrorism”; a “war model,” a “criminal-justice” model and a “reconciliatory” model (pedahzur, 2010). the first identifies terrorism as a form of warfare and places the emphasis on a military response. the second presents terrorism as a criminal problem and emphasises the role of the police and criminal justice system while a reconciliatory model considers terrorism as a political problem and sees a solution through political negotiation. yet as even ardent advocates of counter-terrorism suggest, these models are more distinct in theory than in practice, are far from mutually exclusive and often operate in tandem. revealingly ami pedahzur (2010) also notes that “if the struggle against terrorism takes place beyond the borders of the democratic state, policymakers are apt to worry less about limiting their methods to constitutionally approved ones and tend to favour the war model” (p. 1). the dilemma of democracy 223 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   an analogous three-part typology has recently been proposed, ostensibly to describe different phases of the conflict in the north of ireland and their significance for the “war on terror” (guelke, 2007). for guelke, british counterinsurgency can be understood in terms of an initial “militarization” (late-1960s to mid-1970s, followed by “criminalization” (mid-1970s to early 1990s) and “accommodation” (the peace process of the 1990s and after). that said, though these strategies are “rarely pursued simultaneously” guelke (2007) also argues that they are not “entirely watertight compartments” and that “while proclaiming a stance of criminalization, a government may covertly pursue policies that are consistent with suppression, such as a policy of targeted assassinations or a ‘shootto-kill’ policy” (pp. 275-276). counter-insurgency strategies in the north in the early 1970s, symbolized by events such as the falls curfew (1970) the introduction of internment (1971) and bloody sunday (1972) certainly looked very much like a “war model” (campbell & connolly, 2003). this period was also marked by the highest levels of direct deaths (particularly of civilians, disproportionately from the catholic/nationalist community) for which the british army and state forces were responsible (mckitterick, kelters, feeney, thornton, c., & mcvea, 1999; ní aoláin, 2000). it is also true to say that the onset of a “criminalization” strategy, signalled by the introduction of the epa, the pta and other measures, did represent a shift in counter-insurgency thinking. however, as we have already seen, far from adapting to the conventions of the criminal justice order, this strategic shift rather involved the subversion of legal norms to counter-insurgency ends. if the adoption of a criminal justice model meant anything it was far less to ensure counter-insurgency actions “were restrained by the state legal system” (pedahzur, 2010, p. 1) than that the criminal justice system was reshaped to render counter-insurgency practices “legal.” or as the oft-quoted dictum of the counter-insurgency theorist frank kitson (who served in a key role in the north in the early 1970s) expressed it, one alternative for counter-insurgency practice is that: the law should be used as just another weapon in the government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public. for this to happen efficiently, the activities of the legal services have to be tied into the war effort in as discreet a way as possible. (kitson, 1971, p. 69) the other alternative kitson offers, echoed in the interpretations of the “criminal justice” model favoured by defenders of british policy in the north, is that, even if draconian measures are introduced (which might in any case constitute a normalization of the state of exception) the law remains “impartial… the officers of the law will recognise no difference between the forces of the government, the enemy or the uncommitted part of the population…anyone violating the law will be treated in the same way” (kitson, 1971, p. 69). the question must then be posed, is this what happened? and if not, how might we best understand and conceptualise this dimension of contemporary liberal democratic juridical order and practice? 224 mark mcgovern studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   counterinsurgency, collusion and the iustitium counter-insurgency, criminalization and collusion frank kitson was himself instrumental in creating covert british military units in the north in the early 1970s that were alleged to be involved in a number of shootings and killings. the military reaction force (mrf) was created under his command in 1971, though it was soon reorganized and replaced by the special reconnaissance unit (sru) in 1972, which operated under the cover name of the 14th intelligence company (dillon, 1991, p. 29-32). these were forerunners of a series of covert units within the british army, military intelligence, police force and special branch that would conduct the state’s “dirty war” in the north through the following decades. far from becoming less significant with the shift to “criminalization” in the mid-1970s such covert operations became the defining feature of state practice. this involved a number of inter-related developments. the police force itself was increasingly militarized. always an armed force the royal ulster constabulary (ruc) also created a number of special counterinsurgency units, some of which were involved in the “shoot-to-kill” policies of the 1980s. in line with the strategy of “ulsterization,” there was a growing reliance on locally recruited forces, most obviously in the form of the ulster defence regiment (udr). almost exclusively drawn from the protestant community, a significant number of udr members would be deeply implicated in allegations of collusion, particularly in rural border areas. the special air service (sas) was deployed from the mid-1970s onward and was also allegedly involved in a number of covert killings (murray, 1990; urban, 1992). in addition further covert military intelligence units were created that, alongside elements of the police special branch, were at the forefront of developing collusion as state practice. collusion came in a range of guises, from the relatively ad hoc efforts of individual members of state agencies passing information and weapons on to (primarily loyalist) paramilitary groups, to forming part of an overall counterinsurgency strategy directed by key personnel within the state security apparatus. it also came more to the fore in the latter stages of the conflict, particularly from the mid-1980s onward, as allegations of a shoot-to-kill policy undertaken directly by state covert agencies in the police and army became increasingly public. certainly from the mid-1980s onwards loyalist violence increased significantly which meant that, by the early 1990s, they were responsible for more conflict victims annually than anyone else (ní aoláin, 2000). allegations that state agencies were deeply implicated in this rise in loyalist violence have centred on the activities of both ruc special branch and a covert british military intelligence unit known as the force research unit (fru) (larkin, 2003; o’brien, 2005; relatives for justice, 1995; rolston, 2006). the activities of the fru (particularly their alleged involvement in the killing by loyalists of human rights lawyer pat finucane in 1989) have been the subject of a great deal of scrutiny (cory, 2004; o’brien, 2005; rolston, 2006). the fru was formed in 1980/1981 and was the primary military intelligence body responsible for handling british agents in paramilitary organizations. it is alleged to have been involved in a number of murders as well as providing intelligence files and the dilemma of democracy 225 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   facilitating the importation of a large cache of weapons from south africa used by loyalists in over 200 killings (rfj, 1995). the collusion activities of fru came to light following the inadvertent arrest in 1992 of their agent, brian nelson, who doubled as the intelligence officer of the loyalist ulster defence association in west belfast. during his trial nelson’s record (which included involvement in several murders) was defended by the head of fru, who it later emerged was colonel gordon kerr. kerr has since gone on to serve as a commander of covert units as part of the british forces occupying iraq and afghanistan. while the various inquiries into collusion have led to several arrests and convictions the vast majority of these have been of loyalist paramilitaries rather than members of the state forces. certainly none have been of any of significant rank, command or influence. this reflects the pattern of non-arrest and nonconviction that typified cases where state agents were directly responsible for conflict-related killings (caj, 1983, 1990, 1992). between 1969 and 1998 there were a total of 376 deaths caused directly by members of the british army and the ruc. however, only four soldiers have been convicted of murder and one for manslaughter while no member of the ruc has ever been convicted for using lethal force (walsh, 2000, p. 266-7). understanding collusion: the meaning of the “iustitium” within the narrative of the democratic dilemma, the sort of covert state violence described above is understood as either the consequence of a state of necessity or (if being found to have too obviously transgressed constitutional norms) an aberration of, and exception to, democratic state practice. however, if understood through the lens of the state of exception, we might see this rather as an exemplar of the authoritarian capacity of contemporary governance where the need to render the exceptional state inexplicit and deniable requires its covert operation. to grasp the sense and substance of such practices we might also turn to agamben’s “paradigmatic form” and the “miniature model” he puts forward to lift the veil on the “ambiguous zone” that is the contemporary state of exception; the archetype of the iustitium within roman law (agamben, 2005, p. 41). one of agamben’s key arguments, contrary to that of schmitt and other jurists and legal theorists, is to oppose the conflation of the state of exception with dictatorship. the adoption of full powers is, he suggests, one possible outcome of the state of exception but the two are not necessarily synonymous. rather, the defining character of the state of exception is to be found in the indeterminacy and the void of law. in order to illustrate this point agamben uses the paradigm example of the iustitium. the iustitium, meaning literally “standstill” or “suspension of the law” (agamben, 2005, p. 41), was a decree declared by the roman senate calling on magistrates (and citizens) to “take whatever measures they considered necessary for the salvation of the state.” such a proclamation followed the declaration of a “tumultus,” an emergency caused by a “tumult that created a particular form of disorder” (agamben, 2005, p. 42). such a tumult was not defined either as a state of war or its absence, or in terms of the severity of a threat, but rather in terms of 226 mark mcgovern studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   the consequent state of affairs to which it led; a condition of profound destabilization to the existent order. in agamben’s (2005) analysis the declaration of an iustitium precisely did not lead to the creation of a dictatorship (understood as a newly established magistracy specifically designated with sweeping or full powers) but rather resulted in the “production of a juridical void” (pp. 41-42). that void was one that involved the suspension of the laws and legal norms that limited the powers and actions of the agents of the state (magistrates). the specific character of the iustitium was thus not in creating new powers that might justify new actions but in removing the constraints of the normative juridico-institutional order to permit actions that would otherwise be impermissible. this included the protection of the life of the citizen: [the iustitium was] a matter of, under exceptional circumstances, putting aside the restrictions that the law imposes on the actions of the magistrates… in particular the prohibition… against putting a roman citizen to death [without orders from the people]. (p. 45) in these conditions of anomie, agamben (2005) suggests, the actions taken by the unconstrained magistracy lie in a plane of the “un-decidable” as far as the sphere of law is concerned because ‘‘he who acts during the iustitium neither executes nor transgresses the law but inexecutes it… the appraisal of which, once the iustitium is expired, will depend on the circumstances” (p. 50). if we look at collusion through the lens of the iustitium it emerges not as aberration or the consequence of a “rotten apple,” still less as an affirmation of the efficacy of democratic accountability, but rather as an aspect of the suspension of legal norms that marks the state of exception of the modern state. collusion happens precisely in this “space devoid of law” or “zone of anomie,” not through the potentially politically problematic assumption of full powers, precisely because this would make explicit an absolutist condition of the modern liberal democratic state that its own theoretical self-representation seeks to mystify. rather, called in the context of a particular kind of “tumult” (signified today by the term terrorism), dependent in turn on the state’s subjective decision of necessity, this modern-day equivalent of the iustitium, the covert suspension of the norms and restrictions placed upon the actions of certain state agents, allows for the object of their actions, in this instance the victims of collusion, to emerge as homo sacer, “he who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (agamben, 1998, p. 8). conclusion: collusion as a dilemma of democracy when confronted with the evidence of torture perpetrated by us forces at abu ghraib prison, the journalist and broadcaster christopher hitchens (an avowed proponent of the war in iraq) argued that there could only be two interpretations of how it happened (as cited in žižek, 2008, p. 148). either those involved in the torture of detainees were acting of their own volition or they had been specifically authorized to do so. however, as slavoj žižek (2008) has insisted, this is to miss the point and entirely misunderstand the context within which such acts come to receive a form of social and institutional legitimation. for žižek the horrors of abu the dilemma of democracy 227 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   ghraib were an example of a “code red,” an “unwritten rule of a military community that… condones an act of transgression, it is ‘illegal’ yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group” (p. 148). as žižek notes (citing agamben) such a military culture takes shape within the context of a state of exception where the suspension of legal norms reduces those subject to such torture as homo sacer. it also does so in the context of a mythology of the bureaucratized state. the contemporary bureaucratized institutional order presents itself as rigorous, regulated, regularized and rational. yet as anyone working in such institutional settings know (the contemporary university springs to mind) this hardly adequately captures the social reality of how such institutions work, and how lives are constrained, framed, directed by and lived within them. the capacity for the creation of zones of in-distinction in contemporary institutions, where the formal normative order is adapted, misshaped, subverted and/or suspended, as illustrated by the abu ghraib example, describes a condition closer to that reality. as agamben points out, when this happens in relation to the juridical order it should neither be understood as occurring simply within or beyond the bounds of that order, but rather in a threshold zone. in the north of ireland this was the space in which collusion became possible and practiced by agents of the state. the exemplar of the iustitium helps us conceptualize this space of a void of law as the blurred defining limit of the juridical order. collusion was shaped by the state of exception becoming the dominant paradigm of governance combined with the british state’s need to develop counterinsurgency practice that made that condition inexplicit. rendering the state of exception deniable and un-representable is central to the legitimating order of contemporary liberal democracy. the long term normalization of the state of exception in the north of ireland, evident in the genealogy of “emergency” measures, became a more critical issue for britain when it returned to direct rather than indirect control. as a result the state was more obviously confronted with the pressing need to preserve the appearance of ‘constitutional normalcy’ (ignatieff, 2005). the evident incorporation of colonial practice into the juridico-institutional order of the british state presented it with a dilemma of legitimacy rather than of democracy. paul wilkinson (1986) argues that “anti-terrorist policy” must always be under the overall control of the democratically elected government and that “the government and its security forces must at all times act within the law” (p. 128). significantly the main reasons he proposes for doing so are that the government must be “seen [italics added] to be doing all in its power” to defend citizens and that “flouting the law” undermines state legitimacy because it allows “terrorists and their fellow-travellers [to make] enormous propaganda capital” out of such illegal acts (p. 128). yet two other options are available to the state to counter such potential and (for the state) undesirable effects. first, change the law to make what would otherwise be illicit licit, or what would be illegal not seen as such. second, ensure that illegal acts are not seen at all. when the state of exception becomes a standard form of governance, for the democratic order to regularly resort to such alternatives become a very real dilemma for those subject to such a form of so-called democracy. in this 228 mark mcgovern studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   sense the real democratic dilemma derives, not from the threat posed to it, but from the nature of the contemporary democratic state itself. notes   1 this was the third official british government inquiry headed by sir john stevens (former head of the metropolitan police) into allegations of collusion in a number of high profile killings. stevens issued a summary of his findings in 2003, though the full report has never been published. references agamben, g. 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(1984). the state as terrorist: the dynamics of governmental violence and repression. westport ct: greenwood. thompson, r. (1967). defeating community insurgency. london: chatto & windus. townsend, c. (1983). political violence in ireland: government and resistance since 1848. oxford: clarendon press. urban, m. (1992). big boy’s rules: the sas and the secret struggle against the ira. london: faber & faber. walsh, d.p. j. (2000). bloody sunday and the rule of law in northern ireland, dublin: gill & macmillan. 230 mark mcgovern studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011     wilkinson, p. (1986). terrorism and the liberal state (2nd ed.). new york, ny: new york university press. woodworth, p. (2002) dirty war, clean hands: eta, the gal and spanish democracy. new york, ny: yale university press. žižek, s. (2008) violence: six sideways reflections. london: profile books. pratt et al final jan 9 20 correspondence address: geraldine pratt, department of geography, university of british columbia, vancouver, bc, v6t 1z2; email: gerry.pratt@geog.ubc.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 creative intervention performing nanay in winnipeg: filipino labour migration to canada geraldine pratt university of british columbia, canada sarah zell university of winnipeg, canada caleb johnston newcastle university, uk hazel venzon prairie theatre exchange, canada nanay is a testimonial play that we (johnston and pratt) co-created in 20072009 in collaboration with the philippine women centre of bc and alex ferguson, a vancouver theatre artist. our script is composed as scenes – mostly monologues – edited verbatim from interview transcripts with filipino domestic workers, their children, nanny agents, government officials and canadian employers. much of this research material was gathered during a decade-long research collaboration with the philippine women centre. we designed nanay in such a way that small audiences of 15 move from room to room to hear actors speak real-life testimony in intimate spaces, and the intention has been to bring audiences close to the experiences of domestic workers, their children, and canadian families in need of care. the preoccupations of the first productions – presented at the vancouver push festival and the hebbel am ufer theatre in berlin in 2009 – were with gender, race, class and geographies of uneven development, and with how these intersecting relations produced the exploitation and deskilling of filipina workers, deep trauma among separated filipino migrant families, and a crisis of care for canadian families (for this script see pratt & johnston, 2014). geraldine pratt, sarah zell, caleb johnston, hazel venzon studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 56 the play has travelled since 2009, to the philippines twice and to two other cities in canada: whitehorse and winnipeg. it is now a site-responsive script. as it moves and is performed, we do more research, typically in collaboration with local migrant organisations, to gather new local stories of filipino migration, and these experiences are built into the script. filipino migration to different cities and provinces in canada takes place under different temporary worker and province-specific migration programs, and different relations of intersectionality, power, marginalisation and solidarity have emerged at each site. that is, there are specific geographies of the intersectionalities of filipino migration to canada. this process of working has deepened our understanding of the complexity of relations of privilege and disadvantage lived by filipino migrants in canada, in particular by bringing layers of colonialism and settler colonialism more fully into view (for details see johnston & pratt, 2019). we share here three new scenes developed from interview transcripts for a script reading in winnipeg at the prairie theatre exchange festival of new works, presented may 31st 2019, in collaboration with sarah zell (migrant worker solidarity network), diwa marcelino (migrante manitoba), and hazel venzon (director). as was the case in whitehorse, much filipino labour migration to manitoba in recent years has taken place through a provincial nominee program that has allowed many professional migrants to bring their children with them at the time of migrating (rather than years later as is the case for domestic workers). nonetheless, the familiar story of family separation is once again replayed, in a new way. echoing the experiences in whitehorse, the intersections of colonialism and settler colonialism came to the fore in winnipeg, inviting a deeper engagement between migration and indigenous studies. we include a scene that presents the perspectives of three state representatives, which offers a window into the complicities across federal and provincial canadian state policies and the philippine government's vast infrastructure of migration policy and programs. the scripts are edited verbatim from interviews, with additions marked by square brackets. performing nanay in winnipeg studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 57 figure 1. reading in winnipeg, may 2019. names of actors (above, left to right): les sediles, glen odero, primrose magdayag knazan, hera nalam photos courtesy of diwa marcelino (migrante manitoba). geraldine pratt, sarah zell, caleb johnston, hazel venzon studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 58 scene 4: needing labour guide: i’d like to introduce you to judy, an employer in the hotel and fast food industry. judy: okay. i’m the human resources manager here. [this is a smaller community in manitoba, but] we are one of the largest employers in town. 50 percent of the people [in our town] are retired. young people don’t stay here. they graduate and they leave. your typical high school student that would have worked part-time or on the weekends doesn’t need a job. needing somewhere between 300 and 400 workers annually – some seasonally, some year-round – is sort of a challenge. staffing is an issue all the time. so, temporary foreign workers, um, sort of came into the radar, and we started recruiting [them] in 2007. the first approvals that we got, one was a plumber and one was a cook, both from germany. and their applications went through faster because they’re skilled professions. both of those turned out badly. these particular people wanted to be in winnipeg. not here. and they thought that we were in a conspiracy to, um, not be fair. and, i mean, we had done everything for these people. like we had rented them a house and furnished the house and tried to find their stuff when it got stuck overseas. and there was endless amounts of what we did for these people, and they just, yeah, they just left us [high and dry]. and then one of our shareholders knew [some girls from the ukraine] and put me in contact with them. and they had a cousin in the ukraine that wanted to come to canada. at this time we had government approvals to hire foreign workers for housekeepers and cooks. he ended up here working as a cook. after he pretty much begged me and said he would do anything. he hated it. he didn’t want to integrate into the community. and then we had a cook from india here who also did not work out. about two months in he took off. like i don’t know how much money we’ve poured into this: $4000 per worker at least. it’s crazy. [and then we started hiring from] the philippines. the first two girls that we brought are single girls. both very good. the third girl is very good as well. the difference with her is she is married with a small child in the philippines. and i questioned it at the beginning, that that would be an issue. just yesterday, she phoned me and told me that she wants to leave, because her performing nanay in winnipeg studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 59 husband is promising her all these things if she goes home. it’s her dream to stay here, but it’s not his. he doesn’t want to go through the work and the wait of becoming a canadian citizen. like one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that you have to match your source country to what is good for your business. our first recruiters were recruiting out of germany because it was the easiest place to get people out of. but for the hospitality and tourism industry, recruiting out of germany is just about ridiculous because they’re not service-oriented people. we’ve figured out that the philippines is where we need to draw people from. [listing off the virtues – even on their fingers – with periodic explanatory asides] they’re service people. they work hard. they have a good work ethic. they’re nice. they’re eager to learn. they fit in well with the community. they don’t expect to come here and get paid $20 an hour to do nothing. $10.50 for someone from mexico is not the same as $10.50 to someone from the philippines. yeah, filipinos are wonderful. our best english has been from the philippines. i never thought we’d hire somebody [from the philippines] for the front desk because your english has to be really good. like you have to be able to spell and type and understand. your comprehension has to be high. and we have one at the front desk and we’ve recruited two more. i’ve offered to sponsor them and do whatever they need. we’ve offered to give their families jobs. the one with a child, we’re letting her fly home in december to see her family for a visit. because we realize she’s so far away from them. i mean, there’s nothing we won’t do for something successful. our company [even] pays the rent. (and then it’s deducted from their paycheck.) i think if you can get any message out there it's that there needs to be a protection for employers. we need a longer working contract, for one. there should be a clause that if they do not complete their contract that you do not have to pay for them to fly home. there should be some kind of [clause that] geraldine pratt, sarah zell, caleb johnston, hazel venzon studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 60 if they don’t fulfil their contract they should owe you something. like there should be some kind of reimbursement on that. scene 5 stories of employment guide: we now invite you to listen to vanessa's story of coming to manitoba, where she is working as a teacher on a first nation reserve about two hours outside of winnipeg. vanessa: i have two daughters – one is 20 years old and my youngest is in grade 9: 14 turning 15. we landed here in november 1st in 2015. i came through the points system, the nominee program. and my kids came with me. i came to winnipeg because i have cousins here. originally my ex-husband was part of the plan but something happened in the states and he wasn’t able to join us here. and so i was a solo parent when i landed here. it was a struggle for the three of us because i was only earning a minimum wage and i had to pay the rent. i had to pay for everything. it’s a good thing that there’s – what’s it called? – social assistance for the kids. it helped. it helped us a lot. i was a teacher back home in the philippines. i was a public school teacher for 10 years. [but] i wasn’t certified to teach in manitoba. i had to work in a call center and i was only earning a minimum wage. so i was doing a double job. i was a call center agent at night and then i was [subbing as] an education assistant in the morning. i don’t have any benefits because i was doing part-time jobs. and so i decided to get myself certified as a teacher in 2017 and i applied for jobs. i got a job in a reserve. it’s about a two-hour drive from winnipeg. and so i had to leave my daughters in the city. just to get a decent pay. if i can say it’s decent. working in the reserve, working with uh, first nations is [... searching for words] you are all familiar with how it is, right? we are underfunded. you know the usual stuff. i'm [required to] teach everything, even if it’s not my specialization. i majored in biochem[istry] in the philippines. but when i came here i teach everything: [science, social science, two electives]. the stressor really is the workload. because i feel like i’m being overloaded. plus the fact that i do lots of extra work that’s unpaid. it’s three filipinos who work in that school. three plus one: our principal is also a filipino. he has been working there for 11 years already. the guidance performing nanay in winnipeg studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 61 counselor [only] visits the school, like, twice a month. because 50 or 60 percent of our students are at risk, it’s really taking a toll on my... on our mental health. the students in the environment that i teach have been affected by colonialism. of course i relate, because i myself am a victim. and so, i was trying to tell my students. the cycle continues. the system does not end. [but] they are very disconnected. because of their environment, they are still impressed with white people. they have a high regard for white people. and i feel like they treat me differently because i'm an outsider. i experience that. how will i say it? because i’m brown, they think of me differently compared to the white people. feeling nila superior. the teachers teaching them right now are filipinos, are brown. there’s not a lot of white teachers accepting jobs in the reserves. i was a bit prepared [to teach on the reserve]. but it’s different if you are just reading about it and when you are there, actually experiencing the result. these kids, every day they are really very rude. not to me. some of my students are violent with each other. i have students who bully each other. in the classroom, i feel like a nanny. some filipinas, some filipina teachers are working in other reserves, even farther away from winnipeg. the pay is higher but i wouldn’t want to go there because i want to go home every week and see my kids. i leave my kids on their own [in winnipeg]. it’s really a struggle: the fact that we have to leave our kids just to get a decent pay. it really took a toll on us. my 14-year-old has been distressed. when was that? march? i guess it was march when she .... [trails off] but anyway, we’re going through therapy. and she was saying that the counsellor at the school was saying that some of the pain she was feeling is because she was longing for her dad. all of those stuff. but anyway, i’m also thankful that i was given the opportunity to migrate here in canada. because my kids are... like my eldest daughter is getting into a nursing program. i hope she'll get in the program this year. it’s easy for my kids. but for a 50-year-old it’s not so easy. my hope is that my daughters be able to establish themselves here. and raise their kids. i mean as a family. that there’s no separation anymore. and they won’t undergo this anymore. they won’t undergo the same trauma we had. guide: vanessa continues to live in winnipeg, commuting each weekend back from the reserve where she works. geraldine pratt, sarah zell, caleb johnston, hazel venzon studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 62 figure 2. reading in winnipeg, may 2019. photos courtesy of diwa marcelino (migrante manitoba). performing nanay in winnipeg studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 63 scene 6: government perspectives immigration, refugees and citizenship canada agent (ircc): hi everyone. my name is ari gunnarson and i am here to say a few words on behalf of the canadian federal government, along with my colleagues, aileene gayabos from the philippine department of foreign affairs (aileene nods / waves) and brenda armstrong from manitoba labour and immigration (brenda nods / waves). we know it’s easy to criticize the government. activists and academics love to hate temporary foreign worker and even provincial nominee programs. but before you judge us or the programs, we’d like to present you with some basic facts. the temporary foreign worker and provincial nominee programs are designed to help canadian employers and families. whether we’re talking about the care of our elders or children or servers at tim horton’s, there’s a great need in our country. and loving, caring, compassionate, well-trained filipinas deliver. the canadian government recognizes that there were difficulties associated with some of the programs and continually improves them. it’s also important to recognize the benefits of these programs to filipinos. consider how much money is remitted to the philippines each year from filipinos working overseas. canada is the fourth largest source of remittances to the philippines, after the united states, united arab emirates and saudi arabia. about $2.3 billion dollars were remitted from canada to the philippines in 2017, about a tenth of all remittances received in the philippines. these remittances to the philippines surpass all other forms of development aid combined. the world bank and many academics now believe that the money sent home as remittances is a more effective means of stimulating the philippines economy than more traditional forms of development aid. philippine foreign affairs rep (pr): if i may... hello, my name is aileene gayabos i am the philippine foreign affairs representative, it is a privilege to be here with you today. (pauses and continues) i would like to clarify something. it has never been the policy of the philippine government to send workers abroad. it is perhaps a consequence of the fact that they would like to look for so-called greener pastures. what we have always been trying to do is to keep people home where they belong. now if they choose to go out of the country to work we need to cope with this. so institutions have been put in place to protect the interests of migrant workers. of course the philippines doesn’t have all the resources to cover everything and attend to all the needs of these people. but if we compare the philippines’ performance with its neighbours, we are doing a lot more. in migration circles, our government is a model for other labour-sending countries. geraldine pratt, sarah zell, caleb johnston, hazel venzon studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 64 but it is not the policy to send workers abroad. it is a personal choice to leave the country. ircc: exactly! in 2018, just last year, about 13 filipinos came to canada each and every day as temporary foreign workers. lots more would come if they could. shouldn’t individual filipinos have the opportunity to decide for themselves whether these are good or bad programs? pr: if i may add, it just shows that people are free to leave if they want to leave. the official migration policy started roughly in the 70s. it was the brainchild of the late secretary blas ople. before that we never heard of filipinos going abroad en masse to work. it was just a temporary measure at the time when there was an oil crisis. somehow it seemed to gain some roots. but for the past 15 years it has not been the official policy of the philippines to send labour abroad. because the social costs far outweigh the remittances. we know that the separation of parents from their children and spouses from each other bring up drug abuse, early teenage pregnancy, and other social problems. these problems far outweigh the monetary benefits that we get from the remittances abroad. i would also like to add that compared to other countries, conditions in canada appear to be good. listening to the stories in this play, you can really feel for these women, but they are in programs that after a few years they can bring their families and they can immigrate. if they work in other countries – in korea, in taiwan, japan – they never have this opportunity to be reunited with their families one day. so they are really better off in canada. ircc: agreed! our temporary foreign worker programs are not perfect but they are the most generous programs of their sort in the entire world. canada is the only country in the world to offer citizenship after a short period of time. manitoba representative: perhaps i could add a few words about the manitoba provincial nominee program. or the pnp as we call it. it has undoubtedly been one of the most successful public policy decisions in decades! the biggest issue we have here is the culture of canadians not wanting to take jobs that they see as beneath them. the pnp is a tool to get workers to consider manitoba. we created the first nominee program in the country, and arguably the most successful. it has recruited more than 130,000 nominees to the province – 65 percent of immigrants coming here come through the pnp. performing nanay in winnipeg studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 65 thousands of filipinos arrive each year through the program. many settle in rural communities. they come to fill labour market needs, and then they bring their families, who fill secondary needs. i would say that, beside mennonites, filipinos integrate really well into our communities. the biggest criticism of the program is that nominees may be accepted through the pnp here in manitoba only to move elsewhere. we want them to settle here. and they seem to be staying. filipinos are a source of pride for all in the province. filipino nurses are one of our biggest successes! their success rate at getting accredited through testing is very high. of course, in the philippines they teach to that level, with the expectation that they will go abroad. pr: if i may interject, at the same time, we in the philippines need to think carefully about the benefits and costs of permanent migration to canada. we educate our people using philippine government money. for what? for them to go abroad? that is a loss of capital even if you count all of the remittances coming in. so from the point of view of the philippine state we spend money to raise children to make them doctors. and then they are de-skilled. they apply as nurses and become nannies [or servers at tim horton’s]. they will be doing a very good job because they are highly qualified – over qualified – in canada. but it will be a loss to the philippines. we have a very low doctor to patient ratio. how many percent of the population can see a doctor before they die? this is a massive loss of capital. but these are things we are already working towards solving. it is unfortunate that countries like ours still have nationals who leave to work abroad. but our government is working towards making their protection the most important thing in their agenda. as for the specific problems raised in this play about temporary foreign worker programs, this seems to be a canadian problem. ircc: well! we won’t take any more of your time. thank you once again for allowing me to explain some essential facts about canada’s migration programs and lay out some of their important benefits. [end of excerpt] references johnston, c., & pratt, g. (2019). migration in performance: crossing the colonial present. london: routledge. geraldine pratt, sarah zell, caleb johnston, hazel venzon studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 55-66, 2020 66 pratt, g., & johnston, c., in collaboration with the philippine women centre of bc. (2014). nanay (mother): a testimonial play. in e. hurley (ed.), theatres of affect (pp. 49-90). toronto, on: university of toronto press. gray fg august 4 16 correspondence address: mandi gray, department of sociology, york university, 4700 keele st., toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: graym@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 pathologizing indigenous suicide: examining the inquest into the deaths of c.j. and c.b. at the manitoba youth centre mandi gray york university, canada abstract this paper examines the inquest into the deaths by suicide of two manitoba indigenous female youth while imprisoned in the manitoba youth centre in winnipeg, canada. the purpose of this paper is to analyze the inquest as a discursive space that relies primarily on expert knowledge from law and psychiatry. it studies the inquest’s recommendations for preventing future deaths under similar circumstances. utilizing heidi rimke’s conceptualization of psychocentrism, this analysis examines how suicide discourse in this inquest reduces various manifestations of violence to racial defects and places responsibility on the deceased girls for their inability to have coped with the tortuous conditions of imprisonment. i argue that contemporary understandings of indigenous suicide in custody systematically erase histories of colonial violence and erroneously reduce suicide to an issue of individual pathology that can be identified and treated through medicalization, psychiatrization and criminalization. keywords: psychocentrism; racism; incarceration; youth justice; suicide; anticolonialism; inequality what was my crime, why 5 years in prison? less than $2,000 of welfare fraud what was my crime? being a survivor of molestation and rape what was my crime? being addicted to alcohol and drugs what was my crime? being a survivor of domestic violence what was my crime? being an american indian woman. stormy ogden (yokutus and pomo) (2005) pathologizing indigenous suicide studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 81 in 2010, two indigenous adolescent girls, c.j. and c.b., died by hanging within six months of one another at the manitoba youth centre (myc), a provincial jail for youth charged or sentenced under the youth criminal justice act. similarities between the two deaths, which happened only a short time apart, contributed to the decision to hold a joint inquest.1 the inquest provided recommendations to myc for preventing future deaths under similar circumstances. the purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the inquest as a discursive space that relies on expert knowledge from law and the psy sciences (including psychology, psychiatry, social work and other “helping” disciplines), focusing on the recommendations made in the inquest report. there are three major arguments within the analysis: (a) the inquest is a legal tool used to legitimize settler-colonialism and racism; (b) owing to the narrow psychocentric scope of the inquest, the official discourses fail to address social structural effects of colonialism; and (c) the inquest recommendations serve to reinforce stigma, myths, and stereotypes of indigenous bodies through the deterministic and fatalistic psychocentric language of “mental illness.” using a critical sociological analysis, i argue that the recommendations in the inquest rely on the notion that indigenous suicide is a result of individual pathology, and that it can be prevented through strengthening both surveillance and the medical model employed within myc. by drawing exclusively upon the psy sciences, the recommendations perpetuate the myth that the state is benevolent and has a vested interest in the preservation of indigenous life. utilizing heidi rimke’s conceptualization of psychocentrism (2010a, 2010b), the analysis challenges the hegemonic discourses of mental illness that are mobilized within the inquest’s recommendations. psychocentrism diagnoses social problems and human struggles as innate pathologies of the “individual,” who is held responsible for health and illness and for success and failure in the world (rimke & brock, 2012, p. 183). the psy sciences are deployed to govern behavior and thinking that are viewed in neoliberal societies as dangerous or risky. rimke (2011, p. 88) states that the rise of psychocentrism in western societies can be regarded as the compulsory ontology of pathology: “culturally, we are expected to view human existence through the lens of the psycomplex rather than alternative frameworks for understanding and acting.” psychocentrism “thrives upon a human deficit model while simultaneously obscuring societal deficits and social relations of power that frame, underlie and create human struggles, difficulties and resistance at the root of so-called individual pathology” (rimke, 2010b, p. 97). this paper will examine how psychocentrism limits 1 on october 2, 2013, a 16 year old indigenous girl died in hospital after attempting suicide by hanging four days earlier at the brandon correctional centre in manitoba. she had a history of suicide attempts and was a ward of child and family services. on august 22, 2014 the provincial chief medical examiner dr. thambirajah balachandra called a joint inquest into her death along with two other adult men who hanged themselves while imprisoned in manitoba (winnipeg free press, 2014). mandi gray studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 82 the inquest recommendations by strategically constructing indigeneity as a suicide risk, ignoring the social realities of the victims of suicide, and presenting suicide as a mental health risk and the result of an individual’s failure to transcend their illness and circumstances, rather than as a rational response to the conditions of imprisonment. further, psychocentrism within the inquest recommendations reproduces settler-colonial relations between the criminal justice and health care systems on the one hand and indigenous persons on the other, resulting in recommendations that fail to acknowledge the social, historical and political context of indigenous suicide in custody. the sociology of suicide and suicidology suicide refers to intentionally taking one’s own life in a manner that is voluntary and self-inflicted (brown, 2001; jaworski, 2014; marsh, 2010). ian marsh (2010) provides an in-depth genealogy of suicide that unravels the historical construction of suicide as a moral act based in theology, through its framing as a criminal act, to more contemporary conceptualizations of suicide as mental illness, as evident in the theories of psychopathology and discourses of mental illness (marsh, 2010, p. 27). the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders iv (dsm) plays a significant role in the psy sciences’ interpretation of suicide (jaworski, 2014). within the dsm, suicide itself is not a category of mental illness; instead, it is regarded as the most serious symptom of depression (jaworski, 2014). the study of suicide has a long history within the discipline of sociology. one of the first works to examine the social factors of suicide was émile durkheim’s seminal methodological and theoretical text le suicide, first published in 1897 (marsh, 2010, p. 182). durkheim challenged previous medicalized understandings of suicide and argued that suicide is the result of complex social factors (marsh, 2010). since durkheim (1979), sociologists have continued to identify social factors and their relationship to suicide without ever seriously challenging the dominance of psychiatric practice in relation to suicide and to the regulation of suicidal persons (marsh, 2010, p. 184). suicidology has also emerged as its own discipline. mainstream suicidology draws primarily upon psychiatry and psychology and examines suicide in pathological terms (marsh, 2015). as a discipline, mainstream suicidology is guided by the assumption that people who die by suicide are mentally ill, and this assumption drives research, policy and practice (marsh, 2010, 2015). critical suicidology has also emerged as a direct critique challenging the dominant authority of the psy sciences to explain suicide. to better understand suicide as a social phenomenon, critical suicidologists examine social structures within a social justice framework drawing upon numerous forms of knowledge including experiential knowledge from survivors of suicide attempts (jaworski, 2014; marsh, 2010, 2015). pathologizing indigenous suicide studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 83 the elevated rates of suicide and self-harm within indigenous communities have resulted in a significant investment by provincial and federal governments into studies and reports examining the social causes of suicide (chrisjohn & mckay, forthcoming; murdocca, 2013). these studies have examined the impact of numerous social factors, such as housing conditions, lack of services on reserves, unor underemployment, and lack of education, on indigenous people’s likelihood of suicide. while acknowledging social factors of suicide, the findings of these studies “often obscure connections between histories of colonial governance in indigenous communities and everyday violence” (murdocca, 2013, p. 98). thus, even efforts to understand high rates of indigenous suicides in light of social factors fall short of telling a complete, historically informed story. the lives and deaths of c.j. and c.b: inquest recommendations an inquest is mandatory under section 19 (3) of the manitoba fatality inquiries act (2013), when there are reasons to believe: that a person while a resident in a correctional institution, jail or prison or while an involuntary resident in a psychiatric facility as defined in the mental health act, or while a resident in a developmental centre as defined in the vulnerable persons living with a mental disability act, died as a result of a violent act, undue means or negligence or in an unexpected or unexplained manner or sudden of unknown cause; or, that a person died as a result of an act or omission of a peace officer in the course of duty. a provincial judge directs the inquest, and legal counsel represents the witnesses. inquests use legal procedures to uncover factors leading to the death of the individual through expert opinions from medical professionals and testimony from those who witnessed the death. once the judge hears testimony from all parties involved in the inquest, the judge is responsible for writing a report on the hearing to present to the facts of the case, namely, where and by what means the deceased person(s) died, the cause of death, the name of the deceased person if known, and the material circumstances of the death (fatality inquiries act, 2013). the judge may recommend changes to specific correctional programs or governmental policies that are found to have contributed to in-custody suicide. the judge also has the judicial power to recommend changes to the relevant public agencies or institutions, or to provincial laws and policies. if the judge thinks that such changes would reduce the likelihood of future deaths in similar circumstances to those that resulted in the death in the inquest, then those changes must be made (fatality inquiries act, 2013, s.33 (1)). c.j. was 15 years old at the time of her death. she came from a northern manitoba cree community, god’s lake narrows, a remote community approximately 1,000 km away from winnipeg, accessible only by boat or mandi gray studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 84 plane. the inquest report does not disclose why c.j. was incarcerated at myc. the report contains brief notes about some of the circumstances and context prior to her coming into custody, such as the high number of deaths of family members within a short period of time, including the accidental drowning of her sister, for which c.j. felt responsible. despite the obvious impact of pain owing to grief and mourning, the inquest recommendations minimize structural and social factors affecting c.j.’s emotional state. the deaths of c.j.’s family members, coupled with her incarceration and isolation in winnipeg, far from her community, are not seen as contributing to the circumstances leading to her death. rather, the inquest recommendations focus on c.j.’s history of self-harm and suicidal ideation, as though her pain was purely self-induced. this view of self-harm and suicidal ideation both draws from and perpetuates psychocentric ideology, because it reduces selfharm and suicidal ideation to a symptom of mental illness, a result of a neurochemical imbalance, and an individual’s inability to deal with stress and pain. prior to her death, staff identified c.j. as having suicidal thoughts, and in response, they removed everything from her cell that might be used to attempt suicide, effectively punishing her for voicing suffering. to make matters dramatically worse, c.j. was searched and placed in shackles in response to her suicidal ideation. myc staff employed a punitive approach, removing c.j.’s agency and dignity in order to ensure that she was physically incapable of suicide. the inquest states, “as her behaviour improved due to staff intervention the shackles were removed and improvements were seen” (guy, 2012, p. 8). shortly after, c.j. was found hanging in her cell from the door hinge by a piece of cloth that she had obtained from a pillowcase. c.j. was transported to a local hospital and three days later she was removed from life support and pronounced dead (guy, 2012). at the time of her death, c.b. was 17 years old. c.b., who came from the anishinaabe community of little grand rapid, had been charged with the second-degree murder of her sister’s partner. it was reported at the inquest that c.b. had been feeling very guilty about this charge. she was medicated for panic attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder (guy, 2012, p. 13). jail staff deemed her a “medium-suicide risk,” warranting 10-minute checks by correctional staff. c.b. was found hanging in her cell from a band she obtained from a pillowcase and was transported to the children’s hospital. she was later declared brain dead and taken off life-support. the inquest reports that c.b. was punished by the jail staff: she was given a “time-out” for her behavior and searched prior to her hanging (guy, 2012, p. 13). the inquest report states that shortly before c.b was found hanging, she had asked myc staff to be placed in the “observation unit,” but her request was denied. c.b.’s own assessment of her needs was not sufficient to get her help that she deemed necessary, even though such help was within myc’s ability to provide. pathologizing indigenous suicide studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 85 the inquest recommendations focus primarily on institutional remedies, such as increasing mental health services, developing treatment plans, and increasing surveillance of youth imprisoned at the myc. foremost among his recommendations, judge guy states that the current suicide risk assessment tool must be replaced with a new assessment tool that has been empirically tested to detect suicidality amongst imprisoned youth. the report also recommends that myc hire more qualified health professionals to develop treatment plans for youth in custody, particularly for those who are at risk of suicide or who present with a “mental illness” (guy, 2012). only one recommendation acknowledges the indigeneity of the young women: judge guy advises myc to “exercise its best efforts to hire a kookum [anishinaabe word for grandmother] as an additional resource for the female aboriginal population” (guy, 2012, p. 28). a majority of the inquest recommendations seek to increase surveillance, specifically through psy-based practices such as mandatory mental health risk assessments and increasing the number of cells equipped with video cameras as a means of preventing suicide. these recommendations demonstrate the hegemony of the conception of suicide as mental illness, furthering the notion that suicide results from a lack of medical intervention, assessment, and technologies to identify and monitor “at risk” youth. the fact that young indigenous people in custody are forced to live in cages, hundreds of miles from their homes and communities, is disregarded entirely. rather, the report refers to the young women’s failure to make use of the resources for them, as well as to the need for better surveillance and identification of at-risk youth. in reference to c.j., judge guy (2012, p. 27) states: c.j. was not a young person who died because no one was aware of her desperate situation. she was receiving a great deal of attention and resources available to the manitoba youth centre. staff was vigilant, caring and constantly trying to support c.j. as a whole, the inquest’s recommendations reinforce the psychocentric conclusion that c.j.’s and c.b.’s deaths were the result of their own individual deficiencies, not of social structural failures. strategically constructing indigeneity as suicide risk while the inquest’s recommendations depend heavily on an individualistic and psychocentric conception of suicide, they also demonstrate the constitution of transgressive subjects via the construct of the defective indigenous body (chrisjohn & mckay, forthcoming; razack, 2015; rimke, 2003). such constructions of the defective indigenous body are not an uncommon occurrence in inquests and inquiries into the deaths and suicides of indigenous people (murdocca, 2013; razack, 2015). inquiries and inquests mandi gray studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 86 often frame the deceased indigenous person in question as someone who was incapable of coping with modern life, and thus as a victim of their own pathologies, such as addiction, homelessness or mental illness. sherene razack (2015) argues that even the most progressive inquiries and inquests often fail to account for the historical and contemporary manifestations of violence inflicted by state actors on indigenous bodies. this serves to legitimize the colonial view that indigeneous people are inferior, inept at adapting to civilized, modern life, and always seen as a dying or disappearing race (razack, 2015). the objective of a legal inquest is not to hold individuals or institutions accountable, nor is it to situate the actors and institutions involved within their larger social, economic, historical and political contexts. rather, the inquest seeks to make recommendations for the prevention of future deaths under similar institutional circumstances. the stated intention of the inquest is the preservation of life regardless of the conditions imposed to enforce living. inquest recommendations legitimize the regulation of indigenous subjects through the psychocentric language of health, illness, trauma and treatment. alternatively, suicide could be seen as a rational response to colonial violence. sherene razack (2015, p. 9) states: in their staging of indigenous pathology and dysfunction, inquests and inquiries also install white settler superiority through the expert evidence of men and women of science. if these experts establish that indigenous people are hard to care for, or beyond care, they also confirm that settler society tries hard to save the dying race. a settler society defines itself as benevolent, a quality that inquests and inquiries seek to showcase. settler-colonial inquests and inquiries affirm the mentality that at every opportunity state actors attempt to assist indigenous people to adjust to modern society. the deaths of indigenous people, then, demonstrate their peculiar and particular inability to cope with modern life (razack, 2015, p. 53). the inquest recommendations provided by judge guy similarly construct c.j. and c.b. as incapable of recognizing the help they were being offered. within the recommendations, myc is presented as a site of modernity, a space of best practice governed by medicine and social services that could save indigenous youth from the pre-modern practices on reserve. throughout the inquest the myc staff are praised for their dedicated service to these young women. the judge states that, in fact, the suicides are “doubly tragic because of the efforts of juvenile counselors, mental health workers and psychiatric staff” on site (guy, 2012, p. 10). throughout the inquest, c.j. and c.b. are portrayed as disobedient and difficult to care for. judge guy claims that jail staff, mental health professionals and the psychiatrist were “fervently and constantly dealing with c.j. to assist with her mental health” (guy, 2012, p. 7, emphasis added). judge guy (2012, p. 8) uses the analogy of a “roller coaster of tension depending on the mental state of c.j.,” and further, states pathologizing indigenous suicide studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 87 that the staff were required to attend to c.j. “with a [metaphorical] fire extinguisher trying to determine whether the behavior warranted the usage of the fire extinguisher or not.” judge guy’s analogies, portraying c.j.’s incarceration as a “roller coaster” (for myc staff), and myc’s staff’s intervention as a “fire extinguisher” (and c.j., by extension, as an unpredictable blaze), construct the youth as existing solely within the broken indian model proposed by chrisjohn and mckay (forthcoming). they present the indigenous psyche as something in need of repair, and settlercolonial society as both the standard of normalcy and health, and the exemplar of how these young women should learn to behave, despite the challenges posed by their backgrounds. for example, the epigraph to the inquest recommendations is a quote from a psychiatric nurse at the myc: they’ve come from such trauma and abuse and i mean, there’s a reason that they get there. they’re not just rotten little kids that end up at myc one day. it’s like, you know, they don’t, they don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. they don’t see that if they work harder, that, you know they might enjoy the fruits of their labour. they just see, like, it doesn’t matter which way i turn, i’m screwed kind of thing. so it’s, you know, they learn to sort of, you know, kids learn with what they’re given growing up. so it’s kind of a sad state, really. (guy, 2012, p. 1, emphasis added). this quote, which was used by judge guy, highlights the presence of the broken indian model in the inquest recommendations. the psychiatric nurse’s words tell us that children in the care of myc simply need to try harder because of their broken backgrounds, offloading all responsibility onto the youth imprisoned at myc. this official judicial narrative applauds the carceral staff for their impressive care, while blaming the female youth for not working harder to overcome their traumatic life experiences – life experiences that stem directly from the young women’s indigeneity. suicide, in this context, is diagnosed as a result of the pathologized individual’s inability to improve the self. the psychocentricity of this narrative also implies that medical and security interventions are the only way to understand suicide. there is no discussion of suicide as a form of resistance, or as a rational response to inhumane conditions of youth imprisonment. furthermore, psychocentrism perpetuates the assumption that cycles of abuse are a natural dimension of indigenous communities. the inquest report demonstrates the victim-blaming nature of psychocentric discourse. the inquest recommendations blame individuals for not assimilating into modernity. growing up in such a “sad state,” (as indigenous communities are often described by white-settler society), indigenous people are often labeled as beyond help within settler-colonial inquests and inquiries (razack, 2015). mandi gray studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 88 suicide as a mental health risk risk is a fundamental priority for decision-making within the canadian criminal justice system (hannah-moffat, 2005). it is assumed that individual risk can be objectively identified and managed through surveillance and treatment (hannah-moffat, 2005). it is thus no surprise that the inquest recommendations identify risk-based decision-making as a good practice for all psy experts, from social workers to psychiatric staff, and call for corrections actors to employ appropriate assessment tools to adequately assess at-risk youth. the failure to do so can be interpreted as professionally negligent. according to hannah-moffat (2005), the use of actuarial risk assessment tools within the justice system is viewed as “common sense,” and is essential for defining professional standards and evaluating the degree to which clinical settings meet them. according to critical sociologists and criminologists, the actuarial construction of risk is highly problematic. the dominant understanding of risk is based on assumptions and subjectivities that present themselves as objective tools of risk management (beck, 1992; ericson & haggerty, 1997; rimke, 2010b). risk discourses are future oriented, and are based upon probabilities, not actualities. as important tools of neoliberal governmentality, risk rationalities and technologies are employed to counteract or diminish the risks embedded within imagined futures in the present (ericson & haggerty, 1997). critical scholars thus question the neoliberal claims to objectivity, and demonstrate that risk assessment and management are value-laden social constructions (rigakos & law, 2009). risk assessment approaches to suicide frame suicide as an object of scientific inquiry (marsh, 2010, 2015). medical-scientific studies have been productive in generating theories of suicide, but this theoretical landscape also restricts what “can be authoritatively said and done in relation to suicide” (marsh, 2015, p. 26). the field of scientific-medical studies of suicide is “enmeshed in practices of categorizing, measuring, and counting,” which are poorly suited to understanding and engaging with the complexities and contexts in which suicides occur (marsh, 2015, p. 26). ian marsh (2010) challenges dominant psy discourses that take the view that suicide is a medical symptom of an individual pathology. marsh (2010) argues that within the biopolitical economy of power, suicide represents a serious challenge to human scientific techniques and strategies that aim to ensure life. in contemporary society, the culture of therapy normalizes psy knowledge as the only rational approach to regulating those at risk of suicide (rimke & brock, 2012, p. 183). the hegemony of the psy discourses provides no space for alternative understandings or explanations of suicide, and the risk of its occurrence can be responded to only within a narrow medicalized understanding (marsh, 2010). this psychocentric understanding of suicide is apolitical and ahistorical. it diminishes the social, historical, political and economic circumstances that may contribute to the decision to pathologizing indigenous suicide studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 89 end one’s life. the medicalization and psychiatrization of suicide includes actuarial tools to identify the risk of and prevent suicide. however, the positivist measurement of suicide risk has a number of methodological flaws, such as value-laden assumptions within the research design designating suicide solely as a symptom of mental illness. marsh (2015) argues that the identification of those at risk of suicide remains highly problematic owing to the absence of observable clinical signs or objective tests to identify individuals at risk of suicide. despite these serious epistemological problems, psy discourses continue to claim that suicide is caused by mental illness while failing to examine social and political inequalities and oppression. as demonstrated by the inquest into the deaths of c.j. and c.b., prevention strategies, especially within the carceral context, are limited to surveillance technologies (camera cells, documentation, risk-assessment tools), the physical space (ensuring that it is nearly impossible to die by suicide), and mental health intervention (in the form of medication and talk therapy). the observation and classification process informs what is referred to as a treatment plan. the treatment plan is often multifaceted, but typically it relies heavily upon surveillance (both physical and through documentation), and psychopharmaceutical techniques such as prescribing anti-depressants and anti-psychotic medication. within the carceral system, medicalization is often the only form of “treatment” offered to prisoners identified as mentally ill or at risk of suicide (canadian association of elizabeth fry societies, 2013; pollack, 2006). carceral surveillance through a psychocentric lens includes an increase in examinations, assessments and documentation (i.e., written reports and video), which aid the psychiatrist (the highest ranking expert in the confines of the jail) in promoting normalizing judgments to determine who is, or is not, at risk of suicide. in the correctional setting, extensive documentation by jail staff creates a panoptic environment. the jail staff act as gatekeepers between the subjects (incarcerated individuals) and the “experts” (psychiatrists and judges) whose decisions affect them the most. the observations of corrections staff play heavily into decisions made by these authority figures. the expert actions of the myc staff result in technologies and processes that qualify, classify and punish (foucault, 1978). the psychiatrist is often regarded as the highest authority at the inquest; however, as foucault (2008) points out, experts of various sorts exercise power in social institutions and systems. thus, it was not the psychiatrist, but rather myc staff, who made the decision to put c.j. into shackles because she presented as at risk of suicide; once she was deemed at lesser risk of suicide, myc staff removed the shackles (guy, 2012, pp. 8-9). frontline jail staff bear the greatest responsibility for monitoring and documenting the conduct of youth. this responsibility affords frontline staff the authority to decide what is and is not recorded as truth. the observations that frontline jail staff make and document furnish the grounds upon which psy experts make judgments about the youth. the culture of therapy in western society anoints psy experts as the ultimate experts on mandi gray studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 90 suicide. psychiatrists extend their medical gaze to suicidal subjects and thus objectify suicide as an individual pathology that can be identified and treated; however, these “expert” assessments are limited and compromised by biases in the documentation and information they receive. joel paris argues that there is little evidence that psychiatrists actually know how to predict or prevent suicide (2008, p. 109). one of the great challenges of preventing suicide is that suicidal thoughts are so common that a direct causal link between thought and action cannot be made. paris (2008) reports that only three percent of people with suicidal thoughts (or ideations, in strict psy terminology) eventually die by suicide. there is no way to distinguish them from the 97% of people experiencing suicidal ideation who continue living. once a person identified as being at risk of suicide comes into contact with mental-health institutions, either in a care situation or in a corrections environment, they become the object of the medical gaze. people at risk of suicide are often subjected to psychiatric care in the form of psychopharmaceutical medication or physical restraints (such as shackles or placement in a camera cell intended for prisoners at risk of suicide) in attempts to eliminate the possibility of suicide. when a prisoner is identified as at risk of suicide, corrections staff implement security measures. physical restraints, increased surveillance and psychopharmaceuticals are employed as ways to regulate the prisoner’s well-being; however, the prisoner continues to experience loss of freedom, community, and agency. in the neoliberal social and political climate, regarding suicide as an individual pathology justifies and legitimizes examination, documentation and surveillance by medical and legal experts. the inquest recommendations reiterate that the risk of suicide can be detected and prevented through documentation, surveillance and physical restrictions. thus, according to the view that informs the inquest recommendations, suicide at myc occurs due to a lack of policy and procedure – there is no acknowledgement of the effect of imprisonment itself on adolescent girls. it is clear that the goal of the recommendations is to prevent suicide when individuals are in custody of the state, even as these individuals are coerced to continue living in inhumane conditions. far from treating these lives as inherently valuable, the state acts to maintain life in order to ensure that these psychiatrized (and “misbehaving”) bodies continue to live, and thus experience punishment and pain. the panoptic practices of state agents are deployed to strengthen the disciplinary apparatus that blames, rather than helps, pathologized subjects. although prisoners can attempt to reject forced medication, there is little room for discussion and negotiation of the physical design of carceral regimes. the changes recommended by the inquest ultimately strengthen the psy complex by ensuring that all inmates’ movements and actions are monitored and recorded to determine individual rather than social bases of suicide. recommendations include strengthening the assessment tools used to detect suicide risk, particularly amongst adolescent girls, increased use of camera cells to further surveillance and detect suicide attempts, and further pathologizing indigenous suicide studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 91 documentation of the daily activities of each youth for review by medical experts. conclusion in the inquest’s recommendations, suicide is regarded solely as a symptom of individual illness. utilizing rimke’s (2010a, 2010b) conceptualization of psychocentrism as an analytical framework to examine the inquest recommendations demonstrates that the settler-colonial inquest further legitimizes suicide as individual pathology. the inquest recommendations fail to account for the historical and material inequalities experienced by indigenous people across canada as a result of settler-colonialism. the analysis illustrates how psychocentrism blames the individual, deploys double standards, and ignores the social bases of suicide, thus contributing to the reproduction of what chrisjohn and mckay (forthcoming) have termed the broken indian model. the psychocentric view of suicide fails to see the historical and social conditions that contribute to youth suicide, particularly among young, indigenous females (guy, 2012). the inquest recommendations reduce the human experience of imprisonment and death to individual defects, psychiatrized as anxiety or depression by expert witnesses and jail staff alike. the psychocentricity inherent in these recommendations reduces young prisoners to psychiatric categories and labels. suicide is thus seen as a symptom of depression rather than as an act of resistance to intolerably oppressive conditions. claims that “natural bodily make up” (genetics, personality, hormones, neurochemistry) determine human conduct erase the effects of colonialism by ignoring the ways in which human experience is historical and social (rimke, 2010b, p. 97). this psychocentric narrative presented in the inquest recommendations reinforces settler-colonialism by reproducing the notion of an inherent essence to racial inferiority that predisposes indigenous people to die by suicide (chrisjohn & mckay, forthcoming). the narrow scope of the inquest as required by the legal framework in which it is undertaken is ahistorical and ethnocentric, and strategically disregards the history of settler-colonialism and its ongoing manifestations. the inquest recommendations failed to acknowledge that systemic oppression has affected the communities the young women come from. the inquest as a tool of inquiry does not seek to disrupt colonialism and eurocentric institutions, nor does it interrogate the mechanisms of psychiatric intervention. rather the inquest is a method of colonial governance resulting in the further extension of state regulation of indigenous bodies. as razack notes “in a more sinister way, we also learn that when death comes to indigenous people, no one is to blame and thus no one can be called into account” (2015, p. 9), except for themselves. mandi gray studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 92 the inquest can be understood at best as a legal tool for fact finding. it does not hold institutions or individuals accountable. as razack (2015) has argued, even the most progressive inquests into the deaths of indigenous men in custody regard the state and social service organizations as providing the best possible care. systemic oppressions and state violence are disregarded as faultless, and the responsibility falls upon the individual subject who is viewed as the source of personal failure. the carceral institution is always presented as helpful and therapeutic, providing opportunities to the imprisoned. the case study into the deaths of c.j. and c.b. demonstrates that the colonial state will not provide meaningful insight or accountability for indigenous prisoners who die while in state custody. the preservation of indigenous life within the carceral context is a myth when seen in the context of the brutal conditions of detention, security, surveillance and psychiatric restraints. suicide in the context of carceral settings could also be regarded as an act of protest to an oppressive and unjust social system. inquests and inquest recommendations legitimize the settler-colonial state by reproducing and reinforcing white supremacy, particularly over suicidal and imprisoned indigenous bodies. as long as indigenous people continue to be over-represented in the prison population and the correspondingly high rates of indigenous suicide continue, the dominance of the settler-colonial state will continue and inquest recommendations will be limited. there is a vested interest in maintaining the broken indian model as discussed by chrisjohn and mckay (forthcoming), or that of the disappearing indians (razack, 2015). such an outlook legitimizes settler-colonialism and furthers the regulatory apparatus by individualizing discourses of risk, security and discipline through a psychocentric approach to examining indigenous deaths by suicide while in custody. an inquest to examine the deaths of c.j. and c.b. from a social justice perspective would have investigated suicide beyond the narrow scope of mental health and illness, and included an analysis of the effects of colonialism, criminalization and imprisonment on the young indigenous women who were residing on reserve prior to their imprisonment. future discussions surrounding indigenous suicide, criminalization and imprisonment must include a social justice analysis by including community leaders and organizations, activists, suicide survivors, former prisoners and indigenous elders to incorporate the role of ongoing colonial projects into the understanding of and recommendations to address indigenous suicide. acknowledgements the paper was developed while working at the elizabeth fry society of manitoba from 2008 to 2014, an aboriginal organization that provides advocacy and support for women and girls involved in conflict with the law. on a weekly basis, i met with young, indigenous women and girls who were pathologizing indigenous suicide studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 93 violently strip-searched, removed from their cells, and placed in segregation with nothing but a smock to wear and a mat to sleep on because they were deemed at risk of suicide by correctional staff. i dedicate this paper to all the criminalized women and girls struggling to survive while imprisoned and to those who died by suicide in lock-up. references beck, u. (1992). risk society: towards a new modernity. california: sage publications. brown, r. (2001). suicide. in g. howarth & o. leaman (eds.), encyclopedia of death and dying (pp. 432-438). london: routledge. canadian association of elizabeth fry societies. (2013). health and mental health. retrieved may 20, 2014 from http://www.caefs.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/health-and-mentalhealth.pdf chrisjohn, r. & mckay, s. (forthcoming). dying to please you: indigenous suicide in contemporary canada. bc: theytus books. durkheim, e. (1897/1979). suicide: a study in sociology. new york: the free press. ericson, r., & haggerty, k. (1997). policing the risk society. new york: oxford university press. fatality inquiries act (2013 – c-52). winnipeg: province of manitoba. retrieved from http://web2.gov.mb.ca/laws/statutes/ccsm/f052e.php foucault, m. (1978). the history of sexuality, volume 1: an introduction. new york: vintage. foucault, m. (2008). psychiatric power: lectures at the college de france, 1973-1974. new york: picador. guy, j. (2012). the fatality inquiries act report by provincial judge on inquest respecting the deaths of: c.j. and c.b. winnipeg: province of manitoba. retrieved june 2016 from: http://www.manitobacourts.mb.ca/site/assets/files/1051/cb_cj_july3-2012-1.pdf hannah-moffat, k. (2005). criminogenic needs and the transformative risk subject: hybridizations of risk/need in penality. punishment and society, 7(1), 29-51. jaworski, k. (2014). the gender of suicide: knowledge production, theory and suicidology. surrey: ashgate. marsh, i. (2010). suicide: foucault, history and truth. cambridge: cambridge university press. marsh, i. (2015). critiquing contemporary suicidology. in j. white, i. marsh, m. kral & j. morris (eds.). critical suicidology: transforming suicide research and prevention for 21st century (pp. 15-30). vancouver: ubc press. murdocca, c. (2013). persistence and memorialization: self-harm and suicide reparation politics in canada. the australian feminist law journal, 38, 93-107. paris, j. (2008). prescriptions for the mind: a critical view of contemporary psychiatry. new york: oxford university press. ogden, s. (2005). the prison-industrial complex in indigenous california. in j. sudbury (eds.), global lockdown: race, gender and the prison industrial complex (pp. 57-66). new york: routledge. pollack, s. (2006). therapeutic programming as regulatory practice in women's prisons. in g. balfour & e. comack (eds.), criminalizing women: gender and (in) justice in neoliberal times (pp. 236-248). winnipeg: fernwood publishing. razack, s. h. (2015). dying from improvement: inquests and inquiries into indigenous deaths in custody. toronto: university of toronto press. rigakos, g., & law, a. (2009). risk, realism and the politics of resistance. critical sociology, 35, 79-103. rimke, h. (2003). constituting transgressive interiorities: 19th century psychiatric readings of morally mad bodies. in a. arturo (ed.), violence and the body: race, gender and the state (pp. 403-428). bloomington, in: indiana university press. mandi gray studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 80-94, 2016 94 rimke, h. (2010a). beheading aboard a greyhound bus: security politics, bloodlust justice, and the mass consumption of criminalized cannibalism. the annual review of interdisciplinary justice research, 1, 172-192. rimke, h. (2010b). consuming fears: neoliberal in/securities, cannibalization, and psychopolitics. in j. shantz (ed.), racism and borders: representation, repression, resistance (pp. 95-113). new york: algora publishing. rimke, h. (2011). the pathological approach to crime: individually based theories. in k. kramar (ed.), criminology: critical canadian perspectives (pp. 78-92). toronto: pearson education canada. rimke, h., & brock, d. (2012). the culture of therapy: psychocentrism in everyday life. in m. thomas, r. raby and d. brock (eds.), power and everyday practices (pp. 182202). toronto: nelson. winnipeg free press. (2014, august 22). medical examiner calls inquests into three suicides. winnipeg free press. retrieved from: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/medicalexaminer-calls-inquests-into-three-suicides-272310151.html dion fletcher & ferguson final before ts correspondence address: max ferguson, gender, feminist & women’s studies, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: maxferguson03@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 180-183, 2021 dispatch finding language: a word scavenger hunt vanessa dion fletcher independent artist, canada max ferguson york university, canada working in a variety of media, including performance, video, and textiles, vanessa dion fletcher’s (lenape and potawatomi) art practice is “a process of investigating the influence of culture and politics on the relationships between our bodies and the land” (dion fletcher, 2019a). she is interested in the connections that exist between fluency, communication, and understanding within the context of her lenape and potawatomi culture. dion fletcher’s work considers how systemic colonial oppression intersects with her relationship to text as a learning disabled person, and how this results in a lack of access to her ancestral languages (dion fletcher, 2019a). during an artist talk for ryerson university’s “cripping the arts in canada” class, she describes her relationship with language: the lenape community i come from has very few [lenape language] speakers – a handful of people who still speak fluently. i learned my family does not speak our language but has the memory of it. my grandmother remembered songs sung in the night while the children slept. i knew there was another world, a world with indigenous languages. i knew that world had existed but did not exist for me. i was told our languages are oral, filled with languages not written down. this world became my utopia, and i imagined it as a fictional place because colonialism had made it unreal and unattainable. like utopia, i have glimpses of this world, moments where i can almost find it. (2019a) dion fletcher’s interactive performance, finding language: a word scavenger hunt, enacts a journey to connect to her lenape language (rice et al., forthcoming 2021). dion fletcher performed finding language in several different iterations and for different audiences, including at the ontario institute for studies in education in 2018 and the textile museum of canada finding language studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 180-183, 2021 181 in 2019. she performed the final performance of finding language in 2019 at the cripping the arts symposium, concluding her artist residency with the research project bodies in translation: activist art, technology, and access to life. finding language is a space in which dion fletcher continues to explore “how [her] relationship with language is fractured and politicized” (2019a). using an english-lenape dictionary, a colonial tool through which she is forced to access her oral language, dion fletcher “searches for language and words that she has a relationship with” (2019a).1 at cripping the arts dion fletcher began her performance of finding language onstage by lying on her back while listening to an audio piece composed of her grandmother telling stories and her nephew singing. when the tape ends, dion fletcher sits up holding her grandmother’s hearing aid, which chirps and buzzes next to her ear. she calls into the hearing aid, “hello, can you hear me?” she puts down the hearing aid, picks up her english-lenape dictionary, and projects the opened pages of the dictionary onto a large screen using the cellphone that hangs around her neck. emerging from the stage and into the audience, dion fletcher sets out around the large room on a “word scavenger hunt.” she uses prompts she has written on small cards digitally printed with images of quill work. in one instance, she finds the word “chair” written in raised text on the underside of a seat. she finds “chair” in the dictionary and reads out the lenape words. dion fletcher then reflects aloud: i kind of thought chair was a banal word, maybe a boring word. but then i thought about all the times that i was stuck in a chair, that the teacher, or my mom – somebody – told me that i had to sit down and stay still. or all the times that i’d been running around and really wanted a rest and there wasn’t a chair. then i thought, it’s a lot less boring. a chair is a word that i thought was boring, but it isn’t. (2019) after finding and reflecting on various words, dion fletcher offers up her prompts to the audience members so that they too can find words and reflect on language, fluency, and understanding. her prompts include: “a word that changes,” “a word that makes you feel good,” “a word with so many meanings,” and the prompt which led her to the chair, “a word you thought was boring, but is not” (2019b). she hands pencils and paper marked with colourful fragments of quillwork photocopied onto the page to the audience for taking notes. in august 2020, dion fletcher sat down via zoom with artist and curator max ferguson to discuss finding language and how experiences of colonialism and disability affect the way they access and relate to language. they engaged the question, “what is language?” and spoke about their shared 1 watch or listen to dion fletcher’s performance of finding language: a word scavenger hunt here: https://bodiesintranslation.ca/finding-language-a-word-scavenger-hunt-by-vanessa-dionfletcher/ vanessa dion fletcher & max ferguson studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 180-183, 2021 182 experiences of language influenced by colonialism and disability. “i see language as a fence, as something that traps us, and traps our perceptions,” ferguson described (2020). they spoke about using performance art as a means to engage in conversations about subjects, especially uncomfortable ones, through interactive methods that, as ferguson put it, “move beyond traditional language and words.” dion fletcher (2020) described how she experienced language during her performance of finding language at cripping the arts: this is what i loved about the performance: i would find words around the room. i think the first word i found was “chair,” a word that was printed as a raised text under the chairs in the room. so, you could feel this text… and i did. i was also using my phone to cast the images of the words i was finding onto a projected screen. i would also speak the word “chair,” and an interpreter would sign the word “chair” in asl [american sign language]. at the same time, somebody else would be typing the word “chair” onto the projected live captioning. and what all of this access was doing was allowing people to understand that there are actually at least five or six different ways – and many more ways – to communicate the word “chair” and understand the word on a semiotic level. a chair is an object, the name is written on the object, the text is raised so we can feel the word, we can sign it, and we can write it, and we can speak it. and then, to add to all of that, i would look it up in my lenape dictionary, which is really hard… to pronounce [the words] correctly without, at that time, really having any training in how to read [lenape words], which are written in this made-up way of writing. and that’s a whole other thing! lenape is an oral language, so to create this dictionary somebody just made up a vowel and consonant chart and made-up roman lettering for all of these words. and then i try and read it out loud.2 by ruminating further on the word “chair,” “a word [she] thought was boring, but is not,” dion fletcher considers how the multivocal experience of language is activated by the various accessibility practices at cripping the arts and offers another layer to the complexity of language. dion fletcher situates her ongoing search for “another world, a world with indigenous languages” (2019), and in the context of crip culture making arrives at the sense that language does not guarantee smooth and effortless communication and understanding, but rather language is an entry into conversations about “how we feel about and relate to language” (2020). how language shapes our worlds, leads us and returns us to the worlds, is what we hope to find. acknowledgments max ferguson would like to acknowledge his curatorial residency through tangled art + disability and the sshrc partnership grant [#895-20161024] for supporting this work. 2 the dictionary dion fletcher is referencing is: o’meara, j. (1996). delaware-english englishdelaware dictionary. toronto: university of toronto press. finding language studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 180-183, 2021 183 references dion fletcher, v. (2019a, november 20). language, fluency, and understanding [artist talk]. cripping the arts artist panel, ryerson university, toronto, on, canada. dion fletcher, v. (2019b, january 26). finding language: a word scavenger hunt [live performance]. cripping the arts symposium, toronto, on, canada. ferguson, m., & dion fletcher, v. (2020). a conversation between vanessa dion fletcher and max ferguson on finding language [unpublished manuscript]. o’meara, j. (1996). delaware-english english-delaware dictionary. university of toronto press. rice, c., dion, s., & chandler, e. (forthcoming 2021). decolonizing disability and activist arts. disability studies quarterly. the queer politics of migration: reflections on “illegality” and incorrigibility studies in social justice volume 4, issue 2, 101-126, 2010 correspondence address: nicholas de genova, center for the study of race, politics, and culture; university of chicago, 5733 s. university ave. chicago, il 60637 usa. tel: +1 773 702-8063; email: n.degenova@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 the queer politics of migration: reflections on “illegality” and incorrigibility nicholas de genova1 the most resounding—and indeed, for me, the most resplendent—expression of the truly unprecedented mobilizations of migrants throughout the united states in 2006 was a mass proclamation of collective defiance: ¡aquí estamos, y no nos vamos! [here we are, and we’re not leaving!]. this same slogan was commonly accompanied by a still more forcefully incorrigible rejoinder: ¡y si nos sacan, nos regresamos! [… and if they throw us out, we’ll come right back!]. the chant itself was not new; it has been a potent and enduring articulation of migrant struggles in the united states for many years. center for the study of race, politics, and culture, university of chicago abstract the most resounding expression of the truly unprecedented mobilizations of migrants throughout the united states in 2006 was a mass proclamation of collective defiance: ¡aquí estamos, y no nos vamos! [here we are, and we're not leaving!]. this same slogan was commonly accompanied by a still more forcefully incorrigible rejoinder: ¡y si nos sacan, nos regresamos! [... and if they throw us out, we'll come right back!]. it is quite striking and, as this essay contends, not merely provocative but genuinely productive to note the affinity between the crucial articulation of this radically open-ended politics of migrant presence with the similarly abject and profoundly destabilizing politics of queer presence. in a manner remarkably analogous to the slogan, "we're here, we're queer, get used to it!", the dynamic enunciation of these phrases in the context of the mass mobilizations of migrants asserted an irreducible spirit of irreverence and disaffection for state power. both gestures unreservedly and unapologetically assert not only their irreversible presence, furthermore, but also uphold the intractable challenge of their own intrinsic incorrigibility. ¡aquí estamos, y no nos vamos! [here we are, and we’re not leaving!]. —migrant mobilization slogan we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it! —queer mobilization slogan “this is an anti-assimilationist narrative about an anti-assimilationist movement.” —lauren berlant and elizabeth freeman, “queer nationality” (1992, p. 154) 2 but the dynamic enunciation of these phrases in 102 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 the context of the mass mobilizations reinvigorated their irreducible spirit of irreverence and disaffection for state power. it is well-known, and needs no rehearsing here, that the 2006 mobilizations were instigated by the passage in the u.s. house of representatives of the now-infamous border protection, antiterrorism and illegal immigration control act (hr4437, passed on december 16, 2005, also known as the sensenbrenner bill), which would unquestionably have been the most punitive immigration legislation in u.s. history. this particularly repressive attempted legislative ambush explicitly conjoined its proposed criminalization of “illegal immigration” with the dominant metaphysics of antiterrorism, and overtly signalled its own condition of possibility under the aegis of what i have designated the homeland security state (de genova, 2007a). in response, millions of migrants (“illegal” and “legal” alike), along with their often u.s.-citizen children, rallied and marched in protests across the united states, taking the country by storm repeatedly over a period of nearly two months (baker-cristales, 2009; bloemraad & trost, 2008; de genova, 2009; gonzales, 2009; heiskanen, 2009; hincapié, 2009; johnson and hing, 2007; pulido, 2007; robinson, 2006; lazos vargas, 2007; voss & bloemraad, n.d.).3 an utterly unforeseen insurgency4 it is not the claim of this essay that the politics of the 2006 mobilizations in the united states were in any sense a “pure” or “pristine” outburst of counter-hegemonic energies and radical critique—uncontaminated, as it were, by the hegemonic assimilationist compulsions and nationalist conceits of dominant u.s. immigration discourse (de genova, 2005, pp. 56-94). on the contrary, what is at stake in this essay is precisely to deepen and clarify the critique of those epistemological and methodological dilemmas and political conundrums. nor is it the pretence of this essay to superimpose any semblance of ready-made dogmatic coherence upon a mass movement which was plainly heterogeneous and riddled with its own contradictions. such efforts would seem to be fanciful in the extreme, naively romanticizing a sociopolitical field that deserves rather more sober and exacting scrutiny. but the tremendous extent to which the “aquí estamos” chant has been acknowledged as the preeminent crystallization of a persistent and urgent collective sensibility of the protests is undeniable and noteworthy (see, e.g., hincapié, 2009; robinson, 2006). inasmuch as this slogan, arguably more than any other, evidently had a profound resonance on an immense scale for migrants engaged in this struggle, it is imperative that we take its substance to be an organic expression of one of the determinate of overwhelmingly working-class (or working poor), racially subordinate (non-white), and often legally vulnerable (deportable) people created a political crisis for the u.s. state—destabilizing the antiterrorist complacencies and nativist commonsense of the dominant discourse, disorienting and paralyzing the political establishment’s official “immigration reform” debate, and finally de-railing the proposed law. indeed, in this regard, one need not quibble about whether these mobilizations truly constituted a “movement,” as such, or merely a kind of “event” which seemed to evaporate as abruptly as it had appeared: unlike many other more prolonged and entrenched social or political movements, this one actually exerted so much force that it very quickly achieved its premier and defining goal—it summarily defeated the menacing and abhorrent legislation. the sovereign power of the national state and its asphyxiating politics of citizenship were abruptly short-circuited by the abject agency of global capital’s transnational denizens (de genova, 2009; cf. 2010b). the queer politics of migration 103 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 impulses—which, of course, is not to say the only one—that animated the mobilizations and energized their political imagination. thus, if the movement had a clear and concise immediate task (the defeat of hr4437), which it achieved with stunning rapidity, it also articulated itself in a variety of broader terms. here we are, and we’re not leaving! so rang out the movement’s most elementary message, its most elemental expression of political prerogative. notably, this was not a “demand”: it petitioned no legislators, pleaded no legal case, pandered to no politicians, deferred to no law enforcement authorities. instead, this recurrent chant exuberantly affirmed the theme of presence—the profound and inextricable presence of migrants, and especially that of the undocumented, within the u.s. social formation and within the space of the state. indeed, the question of migrants’ “unlawful presence” (precisely the target objectified for criminalization by the proposed law) signalled a crucial flashpoint for both sides in the political struggle over immigration in the united states. as will be seen, this assertion of migrant presence as a “political” fact, enunciated in relation to the state, was simultaneously and inseparably an “economic” fact based upon the inextricable presence of the (labour-)power of migrants, as workers. for many of the migrants who thus engaged in the so-called “immigration debate” through their participation in these mass mobilizations, their “unauthorized” presence ultimately figured as the definitive social and political “objective” fact: its audacious affirmation—its reinscription as sheer insubordination—seemed to signify an end in itself (de genova, 2009). the bold and fearless character of this posture, furthermore, was only surpassed by its uncompromising intransigence and incorrigibility: this was a profoundly antiassimilationist gesture. we are here, they proclaimed, and by implication, they insisted: we are who we are, and what we are. the millions who literally put their deportable bodies on the line in this struggle—at least, when they chanted this slogan—were not begging anyone for their putative civil or human “rights,” were not asking any authorities for permission or pardon, and did not seek anyone’s approval or acceptance.5 it is quite striking and, as i contend in this essay, not merely provocative but genuinely productive to note the affinity between the crucial articulation of this radically open-ended politics of migrant presence with the similarly abject and profoundly destabilizing politics of queer presence. through the insolent promise that even in spite of deportation, they would inexorably return, moreover, these migrants likewise taunted the smug and sanctimonious superintendents of the deportation regime: there’s nothing you can do about it—your repressive power is nothing compared to the power of our vitality and our indomitable will to persevere and prevail. 6 the two slogans, juxtaposed as epigraphs to this essay, in effect, make exactly the same declaration: we are here, we refuse to leave, and we cannot be excised. in a manner remarkably analogous to the slogan, “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”—originally associated with the militants of queer nation7 (especially gay men with aids and their allies)—the “aquí estamos” chant of the migrant mobilizations “stages the shift from silent absence into present speech, from nothingness to collectivity, from a politics of embodiment to one of space, whose power erupts from the ambiguity of ‘here’” (berlant & freeman, 1992, p. 156). both gestures unreservedly and unapologetically assert not only their irreversible presence, therefore, but also uphold the intractable challenge of their own intrinsic incorrigibility. 104 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 migrant abjection / queer politics as the objects of an unprecedented and escalating climate of securitization, migrants have been increasingly depicted over the last several years as possessing a dubious agency that is unsavoury at best, if not plainly dangerous (de genova, 2007a). abjection is an especially apt interpretive frame through which to appreciate the complexities of the migrant condition, precisely because migrants are always-already within the space of the state and can never really be entirely expelled. julia kristeva has memorably depicted the specificity of the concept of the abject as “something rejected from which one does not part.” although she depicts it in terms of “the jettisoned object,” the abject is not in fact a properly external object. it becomes difficult to fully differentiate the self from the abject which it seeks to expunge. thus, because it cannot ever be truly extricated, the abject “from its place of banishment … does not cease challenging its master,” and its ostensible “exclusion” only draws the subject “toward the place where meaning collapses.” the distinctly disruptive force of the abject involves that which “disturbs identity, system, order. what does not respect borders, positions, rules. the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1980/1982, pp. 1-4; cf. chow 2001; de genova 2008). the political mobilization of migrants in 2006 entailed the sort of abject irruption to which kristeva refers—exposing an abject subjectivity that, as peter nyers (2003) has insightfully suggested, presents “a troubling anomaly to the sovereign order” (p. 1090). by articulating political demands and making claims, and thereby producing or reconfiguring the spaces of the political (pp. 1070-1071), migrant protesters moved “the question of the speaking subject front and centre” to “provoke fundamental questions about politics [and] … who can be political” (p. 1089). such critical ruptures confront (and affront) political regimes premised upon the supposed “impossibility” that officially rightless non-citizens could assume the mantle of quasi-citizenship, authorizing themselves to speak, reconfiguring the space of the public, and making claims of entitlement (mcnevin, 2006, 2009; varsanyi, 2006). we have been witnessing an unprecedented proliferation of these sorts of new, asyet “unnamed,” and fundamentally “inarticulable” figures of political agency. as engin isin (2009) suggests, these figures may be variously described as “migrants,” “refugees,” “foreigners,” etc., but they fundamentally resist categorization because they unsettle the very attempt to fix that agency within such given categories, and in so doing, also unsettle the very premises of citizenship (pp. 367-68). isin seeks to discern “a new vocabulary of citizenship” in these figures of “activist citizenship” and the corresponding “emergence of new ‘sites’, ‘scales’ and ‘acts’ through which ‘actors’ claim to transform themselves (and others) from subjects into citizens as claimants of rights” (pp. 368). by emphasizing the constituent character of “citizenship understood as political subjectivity” and “acts of citizenship” as the acts by which such subjects make themselves (pp. 383; cf. isin, 2008), isin posits a notion of citizenship which is always incipient, a kind of citizenship-to-come, which might serve indeed to describe some of the stakes of the migrant activism with which i am concerned. yet, it is equally crucial to recognize, at least in the potent example of these “illegal” migrants’ mobilizations in 2006, that this particular explosion of activist energies was unapologetically premised nonetheless upon the hard juridical fact of these migrants’ statutory non-citizenship and the consequent social fact of their more general abjection within the spaces of “the political” as sanctioned by the the queer politics of migration 105 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 state. there was, in short, a question of politics at stake in the 2006 movement which exceeded the purview of the political as designated by the u.s. state. the putatively “national” territory of the united states was transposed into a mere site where the global social relation of labour and capital revealed its inherently transnational spatial scale and scope. although the u.s. state’s regime of migrant “illegality” was the immediate referent and supplied the material and practical occasion for the struggle, this was a politics that extravagantly parochialized the u.s. “national” state as such. by destabilizing the “national” space of the u.s. state’s jurisdiction and coaxing state power into a confrontation on a terrain that was differently configured through the migrant mobilizations of 2006, therefore, even citizenship itself was arguably dispensed with. indeed, i would submit that these mobilizations have much to teach us about a politics that refuses to be a politics of citizenship (“alien,” “illegal,” “activist,” “insurgent,” or otherwise). the state’s abjection of migrants was met with a politics of incorrigibility that truly rendered unintelligible the state’s very categories of distinction and discrimination. thus, at least temporarily, within the context of these mass mobilizations, migrant “illegality” and even deportability were likewise nullified. this of course is not to pretend that the authorities of the state could not have assailed one or another individual on these grounds. nor is it to suggest that any of the migrants engaged in the struggle ever imagined, even for a moment, that the brute consequentiality of their immigration statuses could be so wistfully transcended. rather, it is to say that the serial insurgencies of tens and hundreds of thousands, and finally, of literally millions, abruptly altered the balance of forces, and migrants emerged as a force that could assert: we are here—in spite of our “illegality”; we are here, we do not apologize, and we do not plead for clemency; we are here, we do not hide—in spite of our deportability; you can try to deport us—but you will never get rid of us! this politics of incorrigibility, i want to insist, articulated a queer politics of migration. that is to say, it was a politics that defied and rejected all of the normative categories of state sovereignty and its immigration regime: we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it! here, it is useful to clarify and specify what epistemological and political work the analytical category queer is intended to do in the argument of this essay. i follow the instructive lead of samuel chambers, who only half-ironically declares the importance of being “old-fashioned” about the term queer (2009, pp. 1-2). as chambers clarifies, there has been “a continuing tendency to falsely equate lesbian and gay with queer” and moreover, an increasing trend toward reducing queer to a mere term of inclusivity, “a rather monstrous construction” whereby it becomes “a catch-all to describe the identity of any and every individual who somehow is not now, or someday will not be, heterosexual.” instead, chambers announces the need to “depart fundamentally” from “the notion that ‘queer’ is a term of inclusivity,” and insists that queer politics is “a politics that both identifies and remains committed to the impossibility of inclusivity” (p. 2; emphasis in original; cf. gamson, 1995; phillips, 2009). chambers follows david halperin, who stipulates that the term queer is precisely not “rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice” and instead “acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm”; halperin (1995) continues: 106 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. there is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. it is an identity without an essence. “queer,” then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practices.… “queer” …describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance. (pp. 62; emphases in original) whereas lgbt politics—signalling lesbian, gay (male), bisexual, and transgender categories of sexual identity—is a politics directed toward the inclusion of diverse (positive) categories of gender and sexuality, in other words, the negative relationality of queer politics supplies a recalcitrant challenge to, and subversive resistance against, dominant and debilitating normative categories of gender and sexuality. queer politics, simply put, is a counter-normative (sexual) politics of unapologetic and anti-assimilationist non-conformity. queer politics seeks not to be integrated within an existing economy of normative and normalizing distinctions, but rather to sabotage and corrode that hierarchical order as such. as siobhan somerville crucially explains, “anchoring queer approaches exclusively or primarily to sexual orientation does not do justice to the potential reach of queer critique, which would destabilize the ground upon which any particular claim to identity can be made” (2002, p. 787). precisely for this reason, queer politics may be understood to signal what chas. phillips has aptly depicted as “a turbulent creativity,” which “does not yield to … cries for tolerance, recognition, and inclusion” (2009, p. 2). rather than a form of (sexual) identity politics, then, queer theory aspires to repudiate altogether identity-based liberal political theory, generally (chambers, 2009), and queer politics presents an incorrigible and intractable reply to neoliberal identity politics, in particular (phillips, 2009). without wanting to dissipate the sexual specificity of queer critique as such, but nonetheless following the instructive lead of these queer theorists, i aspire here to borrow the destabilizing force of queer politics for the purposes of exploring a politics of migration that exceeds the normative confinements of citizenship altogether and subverts the fetishized fixities of identity outright. put somewhat differently, i want to ask a question about the politics of human mobility, generally, that foregrounds a practice of freedom that can never be recuperated to the constituted status (or even the dynamic practices) of citizenship, which emphasizes freedom as an exercise that is never reducible to something so objectified and delimited as “rights,” and which likewise refuses to attach itself to any positive, thing-like (naturalized) “identity” as such. in this spirit, and in a manner very much akin to what i am seeking to accomplish in this essay for the “aquí estamos” chant, chambers (2009) seeks to elaborate a rigorously “queer” interpretation of the slogan, “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” as in chambers’ parallel endeavour, i seek to theorize the “aquí estamos” chant as an articulation of struggle, to ask what the best-known slogan associated with the migrants’ mobilizations of 2006 might illuminate about the actuality of these real struggles of migration. it is urgently necessary to discover what this organic expression of the movement may have to teach those of us who would presume to supply it with an adequate theoretical formulation, indeed, to reveal how our critical the queer politics of migration 107 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 aspirations themselves must follow the theoretical lead of these practical struggles. as i have already suggested, neither the migrant nor the queer chant articulates itself as a demand or a plea; neither makes any claim for inclusion. indeed, as chambers makes explicit, it is not even properly apprehensible in terms of a negative dialectics of recognition, which would “run the risk of reducing it to the standard formula of minority identity politics” (p. 17n5). queer sexual practices and pleasures manifest a kind of non-conformist and non-compliant freedom that, within the socio-political order of heteronormative patriarchy, can only be classed as an abject excess generated systemically by that order’s naturalized hierarchy of distinctions and discriminations. they are not even properly objectified “sexualities,” as such, which might thereby be “incorporated.” the queer injunction, “get used to it,” chambers contends, “is not a call for recognition as normal, but rather an insistence that deviation from the normal will persist. after all, what ‘we,’ as those who hear the chant, are supposed to ‘get used to’ is precisely the fact that ‘they’ are queer—not that they are like us but that they never will be” (p. 12). the incorrigibly radical stakes here are plainly not simply a “progressive” transformation of what is deemed “normal” but instead a conclusive abolition of all normativity, as such. analogously, in the migrant mobilization chant, the assertion “we’re not leaving” and, furthermore, the promise to return in the event of expulsion, is tantamount to a declaration that short of an utter and universal abolition of state borders, “illegality” cannot be expunged under any circumstances. alongside other demands (most notably, the always-contingent and inherently partial demand for “legalization”), here, then, was a cacophonous and incongruent assurance that the “illegality” of undocumented migrants is endemic and, within the socio-political order of “national” state sovereignty and border enforcement, will indubitably persist. thus, many migrants, especially the undocumented, could adopt a disconcertingly candid, sober, and above all realistic assessment of the sociopolitical fact of their unforgiving abjection. they thereby defiantly rejected the implausibly utopian mandates of assimilationism in favour of an irredeemably queer (non-normative) politics. that is to say, rather than seeking recognition or exoneration, this aspect of the movement boldly affirmed: we’re here, we’re illegal, get used to it! rather than a politics of citizenship and inclusion, then, this migrant mobilization chant revealed the intrinsic parochialism of any formulation of citizenship. incorrigibility: the politics of anti-identity recent attempts to reinvigorate the ongoing theorization of queer politics—notably, the essays by chambers and phillips which i have cited—have taken an instructive cue from the philosophical work of jacques rancière (1992, 1995, 2004, 2006). for rancière, the very category “politics” is guarded as something comparatively rare and extraordinary. it does not merely refer to those arenas in which subjects pursue their competing interests, negotiate disputes over resources, and otherwise engage one another within the given parameters of a dominant system of distribution in order to obtain more power, wealth, recognition, or prestige. this sphere is what rancière variously calls “the order,” “the count,” or most tellingly, “the police.” politics, on the other hand, rather than participation in this game of order, instead 108 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 refers to the radical disruption of such an order, precisely by the unwelcome and unseemly interventions of those who literally have no place within it—those who, from the standpoint of order, truly do not exist—those who comprise “a part that has no part.” rancière summarizes his understanding as follows: you can count the community as the sum of its parts—of its groups and of the qualifications that each of them bears. i call this way of counting police. you can count a supplement to the sum, a part of those who have no part, which separates the community from its parts, places, functions, and qualifications. this is politics…. (2004, p. 305; emphasis in original) “political subjects,” therefore, are only truly political for rancière insofar as they are “surplus subjects.” as he explains, “they inscribe the count of the uncounted as a supplement” (2004, p. 305). the “supplement” is a kind of excess: it exceeds the limits and constraints of the existing order. from this standpoint, then, genuine politics tends to be exceptional, extraordinary, and intrinsically unsettling. politics, then, can only be about the queer and incorrigible incoherence that produces a crisis within the presumed normative “order” of normal “existence.” as phillips adds, in his elaboration of rancière’s distinction: a political moment is witnessed only when a discrepancy arises between, on the one hand, the counting of different parts in the order and, on the other hand, the existence of those parts. this discrepancy results in a confrontation between a party or order that exists, and one that does not exist. the discrepancy built into the order escapes the ordinary measurement of things and comes to a head at a particular moment, exposing this miscalculation of parts equaling a whole…. order is the background from which politics emerges, reconstituting the ruptured arrangement of parts. (2009, p. 3) importantly, politics for rancière is therefore about the disruption that transpires when “those who have no part” become paradoxically manifest as the un-counted part that produces a crisis of order by exposing a fissure within its fabric (1995/1999, pp. 14-15). indeed, this formulation has striking resonances with kristeva’s formulation of the abject as that part which is “rejected [but] from which one does not part,” thereby throwing system and order into disarray, and threatening identity and meaning itself. likewise, the theme of nonexistence in rancière clearly articulates as well with susan coutin’s instructive elaboration of migrant “illegality” as entailing a space of juridical “nonexistence,” whereby undocumented migrants’ substantive physical and social presence (or, existence) is contradicted and riddled by their official legal negation and the systemic erasure of their legal personhood (2000, pp. 27-47, 2003). the insurgencies of those with no part name the miscount and enunciate it as a wrong, and in so doing, according to this schema, those of no-count literally conjure themselves into existence by making an unseemly appearance within the now disrupted and newly unstable order. this is what i am contending was at stake in the migrant mobilizations of 2006, wherein those who were presumed to have no apprehensible existence of any consequence to the existing order of things asserted the queer politics of migration 109 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 an uncanny existence (aquí estamos!), which exposed a glaring discrepancy in the police order of state sovereignty, citizenship, and business-as-usual. however, it is crucial here to appreciate that, for rancière, the uncounted do not thereby simply ask to be counted (included). indeed, the very ability to make such an appeal would indicate that they have already been incorporated as part of the count, albeit in some plainly disadvantaged or subordinate fashion: this is the routine stuff of ordinary disputes over inequality. as phillips explains: making such a request would require not only mutual acknowledgement of the existence of parts without a part, but also a shared language between those non-parts and the dominant order…. the count is everyone who exists, not everyone who is included…. both the have’s and have-not’s are within the count; the type of disagreement between them is of a different nature… in fact, inequality within the count is a result of a more fundamental equality: everyone who is in the order is equally existent. (2009, p. 4) queerness, then, derives its precisely queer/political force from a kind of unintelligibility within the order (chambers, 2009), and is specifically grounded in “the incommensurable conflict over the count. policing is the attempt to eliminate this conflict” (phillips, 2009, p. 3). this is why queerness cannot be reduced to a mere catch-all category that aspires toward an inclusivity otherwise beleaguered by the proliferation of positive sexual identities, such as “gay” or “transgender.” what makes queer politics both specifically queer and distinctly political, in these rancièrean readings, is its negativity. this, moreover, is why the awkwardly liberal notion of “queering the state” (duggan, 1994) is deeply misguided (see, e.g. puar, 2007; puar & rai, 2002).8 queerness (unlike “homosexuality,” for instance) audaciously asserts the existence of something fundamentally unintelligible, incommensurable, incompatible, and finally inassimilable. and indeed, what makes it political is the irreducible fact that it is incorrigible. as i have sought to demonstrate, this is exactly the same bold and unabashed position that the migrant mobilizations adopted as their single most characteristic gesture: we’re here, we’re illegal, get used to it! or, to put it in rancière’s terms: we are the part that has no part; yet, we are here, we exist—and we’re not going anywhere! indeed, another migrant mobilization chant invokes the ambiguities and ambivalences that are suggested by the rancièrean problematic of “the count,” explicitly: no somos uno, no somos cien; somos millones; ¡cuéntanos bien! [we’re not one, we’re not a hundred—we’re millions; take a good count of us!]. 9 one could detect here the workings of a more prosaic and predictable notion of the “democratic” desire to be counted, and thus, something like a prefigurative politics of incipient citizenship (perhaps insurgent, but nonetheless strictly intelligible according to the normative logic of the dominant political order). taken this way, this indeed would be an analogous gesture to the sorely vexed slogan, “today we march, tomorrow we vote.” nevertheless, there is also a kind of menacing gambit, which dares the order of the police: count us—if you can! according to this more incorrigible logic, the migrant multitude acknowledges the political rationality of “the count,” only to underscore its flagrant and flamboyant disregard for it. here, migrants effectively proclaim (and demonstrate) their own uncountability, their “countless”-ness. to announce “we’re millions” is in fact not to 110 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 stipulate a real (literal) count so much as to incite the collapse of the official count. it affirms the impossibility of counting this disruptive but unmistakably enormous part that has no part within the count. such a challenge accompanies the parallel assertion that the ever-deportable mass of undocumented migrants is so innumerable that they truly could never be expelled (deported), under any circumstances. more fundamentally, however, this assertion inflames a real situation in which countability has become unintelligibility, and in which migrants can audaciously proclaim: we’re not going anywhere; you can’t get rid of us. the “we” that is posited in this queer politics of migration, however, does not affirm the existence of a positive constituency. in spite of agonistic slogans, such as “today we march, tomorrow we vote”—which for the vast majority of undocumented migrants is utterly implausible, and thus readily recognizable as fanciful and vacuous—most of those who took to the streets in protest were not going to be easily marshalled as any sort of electoral bloc within the existing order of the u.s. state. nor does the “we” that migrants asserted uphold the existence of an “identity,” as such. certainly, within the migrant multitudes, there was ample evidence of a remarkable heterogeneity, predictably enough comprised of a vast array of specific racialized and national-origin categories and sub-categories of “foreign” identity (albeit with latinos—and more specifically, mexicans—playing an indubitably preeminent role). there is no denying, moreover, that particular organizing efforts sought precisely to assert that these migrants’ insurgent energies could and would be domesticated for the purposes of various more predictable minoritarian political projects. but to be migrants—and to be “illegal” migrants, in particular—is a strictly relational, and in this sense, negative, identity (constituted in and through a social relation that is finally contingent). there is nothing positive, essential, or cohesive about it which could coalesce around any sort of distinct “group” or “population,” and it is crucial to rigorously avoid the trap of endorsing culturalist notions of a generic “immigrant experience” (what i have elsewhere designated as “immigrant essentialism”; see de genova, 2005, pp. 56-94). instead, migrant status (“authorized” or “illegal”) entails a spectrum of juridical and sociopolitical relations to the state, and must be actively and more or less deliberately produced through the law and its enforcement. thus, a queer and sundry assortment of different identities came to be bundled together through the mere commonality of belonging, however haphazardly, to that category that is the part of no account—the disposable, ever-deportable mass of migrants with debased, negligible, or no legal personhood whatsoever, who from the standpoint of the dominant order of citizenship, simply do not exist. these migrants’ exuberant and outspoken proclamations of their existence—their presence, their “here”-ness, indeed, their “we”-ness—and the incorrigibility they celebrated in their defiant refusal to be silenced, suppressed, or expelled, therefore, can only be apprehensible as a politics of anti-identity. this more contingent “we” had nothing positive in common—within the u.s. political order—except their negative relation to the machinery of the state, which reduced them all to rightless denizens and de facto “suspects.” like halperin’s depiction of the meaning of “queer,” this was “an identity without an essence ... not a positivity but a positionality.” on the other hand, if there was nonetheless an alternative sort of positivity at stake here, albeit only an incipient one, it congealed around the “we” that was apprehensible only within the global social relation of labour and capital— the queer politics of migration 111 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 the positive “we” of labouring humanity, as yet unnamed and finally reducible to no “identity” as such (de genova, 2010b). this negative space of relationality, in contradistinction with the positivity of identitarian positions and attachments, can be affiliated to another concept in rancière. “political subjects,” he argues, “… are always defined by an interval between identities, whether these identities are determined by social relations or juridical categories.… political subjects exist in the interval between different names of subjects” (2006, p. 301; emphasis added). in other words, subjects may be activated as genuinely political subjects, according to rancière, only when they operate from a position that is not reducible to the given terms and coordinates of already cognizable and thus, actually existing identities. in this sense, as dimitris papadopoulos and his colleagues (2008) have argued, these politics often involve a long incubation during which they remain relatively imperceptible. accordingly, politics erupts from that incipient and often elusive space of non-identity, the interval defined by non-existence: its eruption is radically new, hitherto un-accounted for, unpredictable and unanticipated, and it interrupts the order of things with an odd (queer) supplement, an excess that, strictly speaking, does not belong and has no place. politics, then, is indeed not a matter of accommodating and integrating otherwise aggrieved identities, not a matter of “inclusion” at all. instead, it is about the crisis that ensues from the abrupt and troublesome appearance of that which officially does not exist, cannot be counted or recognized, and makes unruly claims that are essentially unintelligible within the order of the police: here we are, we’re illegal—come and get us … but if you do, we’ll come right back! nationalist compulsions and the global politics of transnational mobility a genuinely critical scholarship of migration must in fact be addressed to the task not merely of describing but also theorizing—and critiquing—actual struggles, the real social relations of unresolved antagonism and open-ended struggle that continuously constitute social life. here, it is crucial to specify that the very notion of “society”—the reified and fetishized “thing” that tends to be casually called “society”—involves an uncritical presupposition whereby the presumed “object” of social analysis is objectified on precisely a “national” spatial scale (hindess 2000; holloway 1994). this is symptomatic of what john agnew (1994) has depicted as one of the enduring effects of “the territorial trap” of contemporary political thought. as neil brenner and his collaborators note, “this establishes the national scale as the ontologically necessary foundation of modern political life” (2003, p. 2).10 these epistemological and methodological problems are especially pertinent to migration studies (de genova, 1998, 2002, 2005; wimmer & glick-schiller, 2003). indeed, as willem schinkel (2010) has argued, the very notion of “integration” operates more generally as a decisive and routine short-circuit through which a (territoriallydefined, “national”) “society” may be produced and stabilized as a delimited object with determinate boundaries demarcating its putative inside from its constitutive outside (cf. de genova, 2007b). the very processes of state formation and their compulsive nationalization must consequently be seen as part of what is in fact generated through the social struggles surrounding transnational human mobility and 112 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 the political conflicts of “immigration,” whereby the figure of “the immigrant” is produced as an object of u.s. nationalism (de genova, 2005, pp. 56-94). nonetheless, these struggles operate within the fetishized (apparently fixed and durable) parameters of already-constituted (reified) state formations and their regimes of “legality” and “illegality.” all migrations, after all, are composed as historically specific products of the intersections of particular formations of human mobility (migratory movements) with the distinct political and legislative histories of particular states and their consequent legal economies of meaning and differentiation (de genova, 2002). part of what is at stake in these struggles, however, is no less than the state itself. for, the subordination of (deportable) migrant labour is a decisive and perennial task in the expressly “political” mediation (by territorially-defined, “national” states) of the global capital-labour relation (de genova, 2010a, 2010b; cf. holloway, 1994). hence, this essay has hitherto referred in a relatively unproblematized way to the 2006 mobilizations as having taken place and been substantively located “in the united states.” but it is quite relevant to note that this movement, much as it was centrally preoccupied by the legislative horizon affecting the juridical status of migrants within the space of the u.s. nation-state, had transnational repercussions and ramifications, as it inspired parallel mobilizations in a variety of other sites across latin america (robinson, 2006). still more important, the struggle of these transnational migrants radically intervened in the ongoing (re-) composition of the tempos and tenor of the u.s. state’s politics of “immigration” and law-making. thus, what is at stake here is not simply the analysis of socio-political processes “in” the united states (as if they could be apprehensible as effectively contained within a durable receptacle known as u.s. “society”), but rather the critical theorization of a transnational social relation of labour and capital and the global politics of migrant mobility as constitutive of the contemporary united states as such (de genova, 2007b). the critical analysis of the 2006 migrant struggles, then, can illuminate a more encompassing interrogation of the historical specificity—in the present—of the united states as a state formation, of the particular manifestations of its politics of immigration, of u.s. nationalism and nativism, and the full gamut of its nationalist compulsions. furthermore, what manifests itself here as an eminently “political” struggle between migrants and the u.s. state, in particular, must therefore always be apprehensible as simultaneously an insubordinate mobilization of (transnational) migrant labour against the more generalized terms of its subordination to (global) capital. it is not tenable to imagine that this overtly “political” insurgency of migrants “in” the united states is somehow a matter of no consequence to capital. the nationalist compulsions through which politics tends to be fought out in actual struggles, especially with regard to “immigration” within the space of a specific “national” state, must always be critically conceptualized in terms of the global politics of the capital–labour relation. in this respect, the transnational mobility of labour—like all labour under capitalism— necessarily has a double character, as (effectively subordinated) labour-for-capital while always also potentially labour-against-capital, which is never pre-determined and remains ever unpredictable and volatile. the queer politics of migration 113 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 “illegality” and incorrigibility the ultimately abortive border protection, antiterrorism and illegal immigration control act plainly made a central target of undocumented migration and “illegal aliens.” predictably, therefore, the positive demands of the movement commonly included various formulations of “legalization” for undocumented migrants. however, the proposed law notably included abundant provisions not only for the outright and summary criminalization of the undocumented but also for the manipulation of myriad technicalities in the corpus of immigration law as pretexts for the illegalization of otherwise “legal” (and generally law-abiding) non-citizens. it actively and aggressively sought to blur the bright lines between “legality” and “illegality,” in other words, in favour of a massive degradation of the social and political condition of all migrant denizens, as such. thus, the bill’s bluntly punitive and repressive features served to instigate an otherwise improbable coalescence and cohesion among juridically divergent categories of migrants, which might previously have been effectively disabled by the invidious and divisive dimensions of immigration law’s economy of distinctions and discriminations. thus, a kind of improbable “we” crystallized precisely through the negativity of this common act of refusal. nevertheless, the premier focus of all the protests, as a consequence, was to simply but audaciously denounce the purportedly “antiterrorist” immigration law. this means that much of the actual content of the protests acquired a distinctly plaintive tone. the predominantly defensive character of the struggle was amply evident in the abundance of slogans that tellingly revealed the movement’s more generally beleaguered sensibility, such as the agonistic and preemptively compromised proclamations, we are not terrorists, and we are not criminals. these sorts of migrant complaint are inherently compromised, i contend, because by responding in kind to the offending allegations of the dominant nativist metaphysics of suspicion, they are induced to inhabit the same discursive terrain. their strictly defensive posture within this arena of discourse inevitably compels them to verify its premises and uphold its conceits: in short, they seem to reply, there really are “suspect” migrants, the affinities between “crime,” “terrorism,” and “immigration” are genuine, palpable, and legitimate concerns—it’s just that … “we are innocent!” thus, these migrant respondents asserted that the conjuncture of the homeland security state’s metaphysics of antiterrorism with “illegal immigration” was simply misguided and misplaced. these were the sorts of reply that seemed to say, “we may be ‘illegal,’ but otherwise we are truly innocent, good, deserving, and in effect, legitimate ‘immigrants’.” in the worst scenario, some (latino) migrants during the 2006 mobilizations even volunteered themselves as accomplices, in effect, of the security state’s ostensible “war against terrorism”: they fashioned themselves as its would-be advisors, waving placards that only half-ironically declared, the 9/11 hijackers did not speak spanish. thus, alongside and against the politics that promoted an expansive, negative (anti-identitarian) “we” encompassing the full spectrum of the deportable, here was a positive, specifically latino (and in this instance, reactionary) identity politics of denouncing “terrorists” (the proverbial “9/11 hijackers”) as non-citizens who “did not speak spanish.” the transparent sarcasm notwithstanding, these sorts of gestures could only uphold anew the presumed sanctity of the tasks of counter-terrorism that had by now become the 114 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 paramount mandate of the immigration authorities. and they reaffirmed the dominant insinuation of a racialized logic of suspicion and culpability which figured arab and other muslim non-citizens as de facto enemy aliens (de genova, 2007a; cf. ahmad, 2002, 2004; bayoumi, 2008; cainkar, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005; chon & arzt 2005; cole, 2003, pp. 47-56; daulatzai, 2007; fernandes, 2007; human rights watch, 2002; maira, 2004, 2009, 2010; puar, 2007; puar & rai, 2002; saito, 2001; volpp, 2002). in the same spirit of conformity with the dominant ethos of a besieged but reanimated u.s. nationalism, there was likewise an extraordinarily vociferous and emphatic effort by the more conservative elements in the 2006 struggles to insist that protesters should carry u.s. flags, as a sign of “loyalty” and as a testament of the assimilationist desire to truly “become americans.” in these debates within the movement, the explicit referent was the customary profusion of flags representing the migrants’ diverse countries of origin, which would purportedly have served to merely verify the worst nativist suspicions of the anti-immigrant lobbies (cf. bakercristales, 2009; pulido, 2007). more controversial but similarly compromised by u.s. nationalist prerogatives was the release on april 28, 2006 of “nuestro himno” [“our anthem”], a spanish-language rendition of “the star-spangled banner” (the u.s. national anthem). distributed to spanish-language radio stations on the eve of the may 1 demonstrations, the song was intended to serve as an anthem of solidarity for the movement, and was quickly disparaged as verifying an anti-assimilationist repudiation of genuine “americanness.” anti-immigrant columnist michelle malkin, for instance, decried it as “the illegal alien anthem.” 11 the migrant struggle of 2006 was thus pressed to respond to the enduring and ever more fanatical fetishization of “illegality” as a presumptively obnoxious affront to, and unpardonable transgression of, the sanctity of the space of the state. yet, for precisely this reason, the other politics of the movement, with its robust, repeated, and insistent declaration—here we are, and we’re not leaving! and if they throw us out, we’ll come right back!—commands serious reflection. for, this other politics was the indeed the (anti-assimilationist) politics of the migrant struggle’s irreducible and incorrigible otherness. this slogan is readily apprehensible within the u.s. “national” context, of course, and may even be recuperable for various more conventional assimilationist projects; in effect: we’re here, our inclusion is already an irreversible fact, so our integration and assimilation must be embraced; in any case, they are inevitable. but there is a radical open-endedness operative here, which defers and effectively silences the question of assimilation altogether—as finally irrelevant: whatever we may become, we’re not going anywhere—here we are, here and now. migrant “illegality,” then, remained the hard kernel around which circulated all these competing and conflicting projects of negotiating the boundaries of u.s. national identity, either surveilling and superintending the high premiums of nativist intolerance and hostility, or magnanimously seeking to “assimilate” the iconic “bad immigrant” (the undocumented) into the hallowed xenophilic aura of the proverbial “good” one, which serves to verify for u.s. nationalism the resilient choice-worthiness of an “immigrant america” (honig, 1998, 2001, pp. 73-106; cf. de genova, 2005, pp. 5694). it is useful, furthermore, to reframe this affirmation of migrant presence—both literally physical and socially substantive presence within the space of the u.s. nationstate—as also the enunciation of a global mobility. it overtly proclaims itself to be the queer politics of migration 115 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 unapologetically “here,” but the promise to return in spite of deportation also boldly signals, by implication, a kind of ubiquity, which is accomplished in and through mobility—in effect, declaring: we are everywhere. indeed, the defiance that migrants in the united states asserted and the resilience that they celebrated were tantamount to announcing: we are free in our movement and through our movement—and by means of our mobility, we elude your efforts to control our movement and contain our freedom. here, in short, was a politics of migration that exceeded the prescribed “politics” of “immigration,” a global politics of transnational mobility, an excess that could not be domesticated and refused to be incarcerated within the space of the u.s. nation-state. actual migrant presence within the space of the u.s. state was thereby coupled with the omnipresent potentiality of more migration, signalling the global horizon of a migrant “presence” beyond the borders of the state, which remains always possible and merely awaits its own mobilization as migration-in-fact (de genova, 2010b). here, in other words, was a vibrant expression of the autonomy of migration.12 alongside the variety of other more conventional efforts to deflect the allegations of “undeservingness” affiliated to their “illegality,” therefore, here was an enthusiastic and recalcitrant affirmation of migrant mobility, as such, and a veritable embrace of de facto “illegality” itself. this slogan thereby suspended the compulsory nationalist question of “assimilation” altogether, negating its pertinence and repudiating its validity: we are who we are, and what we are; we’re here, and there’s nothing you can do about it. furthermore, they seemed to assure the authorities: we’re here today, may be there tomorrow, but will be back here again thereafter—catch us if you can! simply put, it was an exuberant proclamation of incorrigibility. as some migrants made explicit, we’re illegal—so what? (mcnevin, 2009, p. 74; for analogous examples from the 1990s, see de genova, 2005, pp. 238-239). “immigrants’ rights” … and migrant rightlessness at the outset of this essay, i deliberately depicted the two chants—aquí estamos…and we’re here, we’re queer…—not as “immigrants’ rights” or “gay rights” (much less, “queer rights”) slogans, but rather as the respective expressions of migrant and queer mobilization. that is to say, they erupt from mobilities which cannot be fixed into place, categorized, and regimented. they refer us to practices and processes of open-ended becoming that actively produce and transform space, not fixed identities or knowable “objects” to be put in their place. furthermore, i have emphasized the significance and salience, for interpretive and analytical purposes, of the fact that neither chant advances anything on the order of a demand. neither slogan is a claim for “rights,” and neither appeals in any simple or straightforward sense for “recognition” (much less, for “representation”). to follow further the logic of the earlier discussion of rancière, these are political enunciations precisely because they do not seek inclusion within the existing order of rights, privileges, and entitlements, and do not even seek to be intelligible within that framework of assumptions. inasmuch as, by means of these slogans, “illegal aliens” and queers are satisfied to simply announce their existence and boldly affirm their abject presence—come what may, all conceivable recriminations and repercussions notwithstanding—they operate according to an altogether different, antiassimilationist logic of struggle, for which and through which freedom is a practice 116 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 consummated by its own exercise. rather than making claims for rights, these interventions complement irreconcilable antagonisms with incorrigible alterity. they make no pretence of the possibility of reconciliation. they are the irruption from within of an irreducible “outside,” an inassimilable excess, which seeks no integration within the system of their own loathsome abjection. thus, they menace that system with the collapse of its own normative meanings and coherence. if they make claims, moreover—even if only by implication—they are tantamount to the sorts of claims that ultimately demand the utter collapse of the whole normative order. in a socio-political context of legislative assault against the residual semblances of migrant legal personhood, escalating border militarization, and intense securitization, the very notion of “immigrants’ rights” is really rather peculiar, if not completely oxymoronic. indeed, the very idea of “immigrants’ rights” instructively exposes some of the constitutive contradictions of the regime of citizenship itself and of “rights,” more generally (de genova, 2007a, 2009, 2010a, 2010b). as i would like to explicate in this concluding section, what i have designated to be the queer politics of migration is articulated alongside of—but fundamentally at odds with—this vexed concept of “immigrants’ rights.” if the migrant mobilizations of 2006 verified anything, it was plainly that deportable non-citizens, those migrant denizens officially relegated to a juridical status and social condition of ever more brazen and abject rightlessness, could never thereby be so casually dispossessed of their political prerogatives and their resilient resources for struggle. their potential power and creative capacities as a genuinely political force was in no way reducible to their official (juridical) position of disability, as explicitly and sanctimoniously stipulated within the order of the police. it is predictably symptomatic of political struggle in the united states, in particular, that the migrant mobilizations seemed to be almost exclusively focused on these legalistic questions of “rights,” “illegality,” “amnesty,” and “legalization,” and citizenship, more generally (but only in its narrowly juridical register). that is to say, the migrant mobilizations were quickly celebrated—perhaps prematurely, and in any case without much critical reflection—as a “new civil rights movement” (see, e.g. chacón & davis, 2006, p. 7; johnson & hing, 2007), in spite of the flagrant and preemptive ineligibility of migrants for any of the putative rights of citizens. yet, there was virtually never any dispute over the substantive social conditions of migrants’ marginalization, their material deprivation and real misery. poverty was a relatively subdued if not completely silenced theme in these debates. notably, the sorts of disputes over migrants’ widespread impoverishment as racially subjugated “minorities,” which might be pertinent to classic “civil rights” controversies concerning “second-class” citizenship, tended to be simply disregarded as irrelevant. here, one recalls the preemptive terminology of the dominant anti-immigrant nativism: “what part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” thus, against the hostile contention that migrant “illegality” renders any claim to “justice” effectively groundless, pro-immigrant advocates have tended to side-step these social questions in favour of a straightforward faith in “legalization.” it is as if some sort of merely juridical remedy to migrants’ “illegal” (deportable and rightless) condition would presumptively remove an onerous barrier and instantaneously make available to them the mythic upward social mobility ladder of canonical u.s. nationalist narratives about the “land of opportunity” (chock, 1991). in this respect, the the queer politics of migration 117 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 legalistic preoccupations of these struggles remained recuperable to the hegemonic xenophilia, in bonnie honig’s insightful phrase (1998, 2001), which animates liberal u.s. nationalist discourses of “immigration” (cf. de genova, 2005, pp. 56-94). thus, liberal advocates for migrant “legalization” and “immigrants’ rights” could remain dutifully (if perhaps often unwittingly) faithful to the u.s. nationalist conceits and presuppositions regarding the promise of “immigrant america” as a refuge of liberty and a haven of boundless opportunity. in contrast to the statist and nationalist recuperation of migrant insurgency as a matter of “civil rights,” others have discerned in the mobilization of transnational migrants an occasion for the reinvigoration of the sense and substance of “human rights.” indeed, the quite pervasive slogan no human being is illegal would seem to suspend the pertinence of “the law”—specifically, the worldly and parochial preoccupations of the immigration laws of nation-states—in favour of a “higher” (moral) imperative, grounded in the universalism of a presumably irreducible substantive fact of humanity, as such (agamben, 2003).13 the agonistic plea of this slogan effectively responds to the socio-political reality of one or another state’s illegalization of migrant non-citizens with the recuperation of these particular persons (and their specific relations to state power, sovereignty, and borders) as putatively “rightful” members of a universal (human) constituency. such a slogan thereby invokes the spectre of a “law” that is greater than any particular state’s immigration law—by implication, at least, a (“natural”) “law” that finally must be grounded in the pure “nature” of human birth, or nativity, as such (cf. de genova, 2010b). yet, what is perhaps even more problematic for the purposes of this essay is that this slogan can also be read to proclaim, in effect: all human beings are legal. the gesture toward “human rights,” then, entails a veritable desire for the law. 14 one could read rancière in support of such contentions about “human rights,” but only in a distinctly queer, paradoxical manner. as i have briefly outlined, rancière conceives of politics as the content of “specific scenes of dissensus” in which subjects who are officially deemed to not exist, paradoxically, nonetheless enact a “supplement” to the official “count” of the dominant order (2004, p. 305). he goes on to assert that the rights of man (or “human rights,” so to speak) are indeed nothing less than the rights of these political subjects, those of no-count, who do not exist until they activate this dissensus and unsettle the order of the police. rancière argues that this is why … in this sense, these wistful invocations of undocumented (officially rightless) migrants’ putative “human rights,” insofar as they operate as a grand affirmation of an ethereal ideal of “legality,” remain trapped within the logic of sovereign state power. thus, the project of configuring the struggles of migration as an iconic paradigm for “human rights” advocacy is finally one that is deeply ensnared within the rather more pernicious and ordinarily unexamined horizon of a global (supra-national, imperial) sovereignty. even the clandestine immigrants in the zones of transit of our countries or the populations in the camps of refugees, can invoke [the rights of man]. these rights are theirs when they can do something with them to construct a dissensus against the denial of rights they suffer. and there are always people among them who do it. (2004, pp. 305-306) 118 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 in answer to the question “who is the subject of the rights of man?”, then, rancière declares, in effect, that it is this hitherto un-counted subject, non-existent and of no account. accordingly, the ostensible subject of human rights is the “surplus subject” who produces a dissensus, the supplemental miscount in which the part that has no part inserts itself and disrupts the order. politics therefore ends up being largely a polemic about the verification of the rights of man. as rancière explains: ultimately, those rights appear actually empty. they seem to be of no use. and when they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. you give them to the poor. those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights. it is in this way, as the result of this process, that the rights of man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman conditions of existence. they become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of right. for all this, they are not void. … the void is filled by somebody or something else. the rights of man do not become void by becoming the rights of those who cannot actualize them. (2004, p. 307) thus, acknowledging the apparent emptiness of “human rights,” rancière suggests that it is precisely this emptiness that makes them viable for those who activate politics from a space of non-existence. from his critical vantage (and explicitly critiquing hannah arendt’s classic account [1951/1966, pp. 267-302]), “rights” that are substantively empty are not in fact void—because their specifically political substance paradoxically derives from their activation of a dissensus that erupts precisely from a void, a condition of nonexistence. human rights are activated, for rancière, as the besieged rights of those political subjects whose very nonexistence within the dominant order verifies the contentious polemic that they initiate. from within this paradox, however, the otherwise vacuous and beleaguered notion of “human rights” might assume an enigmatic meaningfulness, but one which can be posited only negatively, relationally—in effect, as the “rights” that matter exactly because, and only because, they are the rights of the rightless. a deeper and far more pernicious paradox, however, resides in the utter impossibility of such a polemic over “human rights” to ever produce a material and practical grounding that is not haunted by its dependence upon some form of supranational, “universal,” quasi-imperial sovereignty. at least by implication, the dissensus that provokes a new conjuncture of politics—inasmuch as it is articulated in terms of “rights”—also refers inevitably to a sort of adjudication. “by becoming the rights of those who cannot actualize them,” to re-phrase rancière’s formulation, the rights of man operate in a void which never fails in fact to be “filled by somebody or something else.” like the more metaphorical notions of (“global,” “transnational”) “citizenship” which are finally inextricable from these various formulations of “rights,” any attempt to capture (transnational) migrants’ insurgent energies and veritable practices of freedom within the rubric of rightfulness or entitlement is doomed to exalt anew some sort of juridical order of constituted sovereign (state) power. the more virtual the latter appears, the more certain it is to be that of a global power that eludes definition according to the more conventional, the queer politics of migration 119 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 territorially-defined “national” form. if the true subject of “human rights” is one deemed to erupt from a space of non-existence within the order of the police, there are likewise those constituted police powers that similarly have no sanctioned juridical place from which to activate or enforce “human rights”—except as the would-be (global) sovereign that confirms its own putative legitimacy only by deciding in fact upon what does or does not count as a “state of exception” (agamben, 2003). “imperial states,” argues ann stoler, “by definition operate as states of exception” (2006, p. 139; emphasis in original). thus, efforts (such as rancière’s) to recuperate the notion of “human rights”—precisely with recourse to the abject figure of sovereign power’s definitively rightless denizens—are ultimately unsustainable. 15 here, we must return to the question of a global politics of labour and capital which stubbornly resists its own foreclosure within any politics of “citizenship,” howsoever construed. entangled with this matrix of “rights” and rightlessness, the themes of (transnational) migrant labour (and thus exploitation, even if only in a somewhat inchoate way), were abundantly manifest in the 2006 mobilizations— above all, in the culminating designation of may 1 as a national one-day general strike and consumer boycott, to be known as “a day without immigrants” (cf. de genova, 2009; pulido, 2007; robinson, 2006). the significance of the migrant movement as precisely a labour struggle was clearly signalled by this deliberate revitalization of may day as international workers’ day. may 1, of course, is a holiday of the global working class. in spite of the date’s historical genesis in chicago in 1886, however, may day has been generally stigmatized and suppressed historically by the mandates of u.s. anticommunism and has, in effect, never been honoured in the united states except by radical left-labour movements. in this respect, too—exactly because an explicit politics of class struggle has been rendered virtually unspeakable in the united states—the overt and unabashed labour politics of the migrants’ mobilizations entailed, likewise, a queer politics. with recourse to a diverse spectrum of proclamations of the dignity and entitlements of labour, the 2006 movement advanced a stalwart reminder of u.s. employers’ and consumers’ broad dependency on migrants—as workers. nevertheless, these agonistic assertions of migrants’ entitlements and “rights” on the basis of their laborious (and by implication, docile, dutiful, and law-abiding) servitude were also plagued by their own contradictions. in particular, one very pervasive strain of migrant discourse concerning “hard work” and “deservingness” was deeply ensconced in a torturously contradictory set of allegations with regard to the “laziness,” “welfare dependency” and “criminality” that many migrants commonly attribute to their most proximate competitors at the bottom echelons of the u.s. labour market, namely, impoverished u.s.-citizen racial “minorities”— above all, african americans (de genova, 2005, pp. 167-209, 2008; de genova & ramos-zayas, 2003, pp. 57-82). hence, a corollary to the presumably self-evident declarations we are not terrorists and we are not criminals presented itself in another couplet: we are workers, not criminals and the still more revealing we are not on welfare. when jennifer gordon and r. a. lenhardt rightly demand, in response to these slogans, “as opposed to whom?” they very appropriately note that “the seemingly positive rhetoric of the signs that many carried … had a painful double meaning” (2006, p. 2496; emphasis in original). here one may detect the transposition of a politics of labour as negativity, relationally ensnared within and yet 120 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 irreconcilably against capital, into an identitarian politics of class and race, a politics of class as positive identity. in this context, “work” itself operates ideologically as an “american” value within a moral economy of citizenship, whereby the capacity for labour is affiliated to a competence for self control, self-government, and rightful citizenship through a kind of labour-republican politics of virtue (cf. almaguer, 1994; roediger, 1991; takaki, 1979). still, alongside these positive identitarian gestures, there was the articulation of another politics—an incorrigible politics of migrant labour that took the form of a robust politics of anti-identity. avowing their position as labour, migrants boldly upheld their “illegal” (and rightless) presence—aquí estamos!—and their mobilizations presented the sovereign power of the state with an unthinkable aberration. migrants answered normative allegations of “illegality” with an alternative framework for making claims—one premised upon the (global) prerogatives of labour—which thus abnegated unreservedly the pertinence of immigration law altogether. speaking in a political idiom that was apparently addressed to the state, then, the migrant mobilizations shifted the register to address capital directly, as transnational labour. the movement seemed to simply declare: here we are, “illegal” and without rights—but because you depend upon our labour, you are powerless to expel us; thus, we defy your power, and we’re not going anywhere.16 here was an enunciation of (transnational) labour as constitutive of (global) capital, inextricably within capital, but also against capital—rightless, “illegal,” but insubordinate all the same. as marx famously noted, in the “antinomy, of right against right … force decides” (1867/1976, p. 344). thus, the answer to migrants’ real predicament of objective rightlessness was not recourse to some alternate rubric for the restoration of rights. in this sense, migrant rightlessness was merely a “fact,” and the anomalous and inimical character of this fact made the law itself an abhorrent nemesis. this aspect of the movement’s unapologetic politics of (transnational) migrant labour therefore facilitated an implicit rejection of the very notion of “immigrants’ rights,” which was bedevilled with its own inherent inconsistencies and so compromised by this incoherence. such gestures effectively responded to the fetishistic language of “legality” and “illegality” with another idiom that was strictly unintelligible to the law’s abstract formalisms and its economy of categorical distinctions. this politics of migrant labour was a queer politics, furthermore, because it was unabashed and unreserved about this unintelligibility: it denounced the abjection and rightlessness of migrants by altogether repudiating the law and the state itself, defiantly and incorrigibly. notes 1 i am truly grateful to tanya basok for inviting me to contribute to this special issue; without her editorial initiative, i may not have had the occasion to develop the thoughts presented in this essay. earlier drafts were presented to scholarly and activist audiences in rome, bologna, and amsterdam, and i owe a note of appreciation to nina trige andersen, sébastien chauvin, ayça çubukçu, paul mepschen, sandro mezzadra, enrica rigo, maria vittoria tessitore, and bertil videt for their various roles on these occasions. i received very engaged critical responses to the text from ayça çubukçu, ramón gutiérrez, engin isin, naledi nomalanga mkhize, and nathalie peutz, which have challenged and enriched my thinking about this essay. i also owe a note of gratitude to various colleagues and students whose theory and practice have helped me, in various ways over the years, to arrive at the the queer politics of migration 121 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 ideas here, especially: alejandro amezcua, rutvica andrijasevic, adriana garriga-lópez, amanda gilliam, marcial godoy, maría lugones, sofian merabet, sandro mezzadra, dimitris papadopoulos, joshua price, and marie varghese. 2 for instances of this chant from migrant protests during the 1990s, see, e.g., coutin (2000, p. 42; cf. 1999; 2003); crawford (2007); lipsitz (2006, p. 312). indeed, raúl villa (2000) posits that the distinctly spatial sensibility of this declaration is “barriological” (pp. 52, 109) and reinscribes its genealogy within the history of chicano-identified socio-cultural formations; if not necessarily referring to the phrase itself, verbatim, villa nonetheless traces this sensibility back at least to the los angeles barrio writers workshop / los angeles latino writers’ association of the late 1970s and early 1980s (pp. 107-109). 3 for a compilation of estimated totals for virtually all documented demonstrations, based upon the relatively more conservative reports of the official news media, which nonetheless arrives at a total participation ranging from 3.5 million to more than 5 million for all known events during the spring of 2006, see the database available at: <http://www.wilsoncenter.org/migrantparticipation>. 4 in spite of the genuine depth of the organizing that contributed everywhere to the success of the movement (see, e.g., gonzales, 2009; voss & bloemraad, n.d.), it is nonetheless undeniable that the 2006 struggles achieved their remarkable force and scope rather abruptly, with the rapid spread of an acute awareness of the particularly offensive and menacing ramifications of the new legislation. 5 in a related but revealingly discrepant context, susan coutin (1999) has also noted the salience for undocumented migrants of the theme of presence at stake in this slogan (p. 63). coutin (2000) discusses this slogan in the particular case of (undocumented) salvadoran asylum-seekers’ struggles for legal recognition, insightfully likening it to the memorable passage in dr. seuss’s children’s classic horton hears a who, where “in order to prevent the destruction of their world by those who doubted its existence, all of the whos in whoville had to shout, ‘we are here! we are here!’” (p. 42). under these circumstances, where salvadorans were indeed seeking legal redress from the state, coutin (2003) goes on to suggest that “the assertion ‘aquí estamos’ begins to seem more important than the defiant ‘y no nos vamos’” (p. 186). in contrast to what i am depicting as the exuberant defiance of the 2006 mass mobilizations, coutin (1999) explains: “by asserting their presence, these unauthorized immigrants claimed both legitimacy and formal membership in the polity” (p. 60). 6 it is not the proposition of this essay to discuss the intersections of migration, queer identities, and immigration politics. there is of course a robust and burgeoning field of excellent scholarship that does precisely that; see, e.g., cantú (2009); luibhéid (2002; 2008); luibhéid and cantú, eds. (2005); puar (2007); puar and rai (2002); somerville (2005). for another attempt to bring the insights of gender and sexuality studies to bear upon migration scholarship, more generally, see andrijasevic (2009). notably, unknown to me upon first writing this essay, the activist campaign of undocumented students, generally raised and educated in the united states as the undocumented children of migrant parents, advocating for their own “legalization” through the dream act (development, relief and education for alien minors act), inaugurated march 10, 2010 as “national coming out day”, and initiated a series of “coming out party” rallies throughout the united states, in which they openly declared themselves to be “undocumented but unafraid.” the overtly lgbt/ queer theme of “coming out” (of “the closet”) was tellingly coupled with the immigration discourse of “coming out of the shadows,” and on one activist website, was accompanied with a quote from gay liberation icon, harvey milk; see: <www.dreamactivist.org/blog/2010/03/05/comeout/>; see also: <www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/us/politics/12immig.html?th&emc=th>; for various activist sites within the broader campaign, more generally, see: <www.dreamact.com>; <www.dreamactivist.org>;and <www.thedreamiscoming.com> (all sites accessed 30 june 2010). 7 for critical examinations of the equivocal and vexed figures of queer “nationhood” and “nationality,” see berlant and freeman (1992) and bérubé and escoffier (1991); for a discussion of the problematic relation of this figure of queer nationhood to migrant “illegality” and undocumented migrant queers, see fernández (1991). 122 nicholas de genova studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 8 indeed, queer politics is challenged as never before to subvert the neoliberal commodification of “queerness” itself as an identity, and furthermore, to stringently repudiate the precisely normalizing enlistment of a domesticated “queerness” into the service of neonationalist projects that aspire above all to “queer” migrants (especially muslims, as “intolerant,” inadequately “enlightened,” insufficiently “modern” and “secular,” and so forth). 9 i am very grateful to ayça çubukçu for calling this analogy to my attention. 10 for key texts in the elaboration of an explicit critique of methodological nationalism, see giddens (1973; 1985); martins (1974); for a retrospective assessment and a critique of contemporary versions of these arguments, particularly those associated with the explicitly “cosmopolitan” work of ulrich beck (2000; 2002), as a new sociological “orthodoxy” on globalization, see chernilo (2006; 2007); see also beck and sznaider (2006). 11 george w. bush responded to a reporter’s query with the remark, “i think the national anthem ought to be sung in english. and i think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn english, and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in english” (montgomery, 2006). however, subsequent reporting disclosed that bush himself may have participated in singing along with other spanish-language versions of the anthem, and in any case, had apparently condoned their use, during his campaign overtures toward latino electoral constituencies (baker, 2006). 12 these reflections are indebted to theoretical insights and critical perspectives associated with scholars of the “autonomy of migration”; see, e.g., mezzadra (2001, 2004, 2006, 2010); mezzadra and nielson (2003); moulier boutang (1998, 2001); moulier boutang and garson (1984); cf. de genova (2009; 2010b); karakayali and rigo (2010); papadopoulos, stephenson, and tsianos (2008). 13 notably, the slogan no human being is illegal (especially associated with anti-border movements in europe, including the well-established german initiative kein mensch ist illegal) is sometimes (as in canada, for instance) more commonly enunciated as no one is illegal. as insightfully suggested by an anonymous reviewer of this essay, this latter formulation potentially introduces some additional ambiguity, such that the slogan has come to be deployed on behalf of “animal rights” and other concerns of deep ecology movements, dedicated to transcending a human-centric politics altogether. 14 for a related discussion, specifically regarding deportees’ equivocal desire for the law, see peutz (2007). 15 i am indebted to ayça çubukçu and engin isin for pushing me, in their respective and discrepant ways, to address this problem more fully. for a related critique of “human rights” in relation to the problem of sovereign power, see çubukçu (2008). 16 notably, beginning in october 2009, a wave of strikes by several thousand undocumented migrant workers demanding legal residence in france, articulated the themes of migrant presence and labour in remarkably similar terms; 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(2003). methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: an essay in historical epistemology. international migration review, 37(3), 576-610. hamto final correspondence address: maileen dumelod hamto, leadership in educational equity, university of colorado, denver, co 80204, usa; email: maileen.hamto@ucdenver.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 dispatch reflections on advancing racial justice in diversity and inclusion maileen dumelod hamto university of colorado denver, usa introduction in late may 2020, a viral video showed a white police officer kneeling on the neck of the handcuffed george floyd while he was in the custody of the minneapolis police department, until he lost consciousness and eventually died. the video sparked outrage and a protest movement from a vast multicultural coalition demanding accountability to uphold the value and dignity of black lives. this spilled beyond the usa and influenced global protests in support of the black lives matter movement. i found myself, already a diversity, equity and inclusion practitioner, joining americans of all ages and backgrounds on the streets, and raising my voice against the killing of floyd. long-standing demands for accountability and justice were reignited in these protests, and the sense of urgency and specific demands from organizers and activists was even able to capture the attention of corporate america, presenting an opportune, if not unprecedented, moment among diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners and leaders, and enabling chief diversity officers to champion a racial justice mandate, through which to offer a pragmatic and actionable approach while avoiding performative allyship. i concentrate the lens of my inquiry on the experiences of black americans in us workplaces, rather than taking a broader view that includes non-black people of color. centering the black experience is crucial because the current conversation on racial justice was prompted by demands for greater accountability for black lives and futures. i explore the dynamics of systemic anti-black racism and performative white allyship in the discourse about the struggle for racial equity from my personal vantage point and professional experiences in advancing equity, inclusion and diversity in large, complex and matrixed organizations in reflections on advancing racial justice in diversity and inclusion studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 281 government, philanthropy, technology, healthcare and higher education. throughout my career, i’ve observed how performative white allyship or “optical allyship” manifests in “bold gestures” decrying racism in the workplace culture, when practices and policies continue to uphold oppressive systems (yuan, 2020). i’ve consulted with and coached leaders on developing inclusive work cultures to ensure that publicly-facing diversity statements reflect the reality of employees, clients and other key stakeholders. for many proponents of diversity, inclusion and equity, the litmus test of racial equity is how people from marginalized social identities – especially black employees – are treated, promoted and compensated in the workplace (bonilla-silva, 2009; newkirk, 2019). corporations take a stand on racial equity companies from different sectors and industries issued internal and public statements showing support for the black lives matter protests, including, quite predictably, organizations that have been vocal and transparent about their support of racial justice, such as nike, ben & jerry’s, and coca-cola. however, the array of corporate voices also included organizations that have not previously aired their stance on the rising racial equity movement, such as technology and financial institutions. statements are only a starting point, and corporations responded to criticism by pledging financial resources to combating racism. money alone cannot help organizations escape the cynicism expressed by those who have been following the evolution of diversity, equity and inclusion work for many years, seeing only incremental changes. businesses exist to produce profitability, and “profit-seeking organizations will do whatever is necessary to maximize their profit” (hillard, 2020). what will these new investments in diversity work mean for corporate america? diversity and inclusion is not new to the for-profit sector: companies in the s&p 500 have been investing considerable resources – more than $1 billion a year – to address myriad diversity challenges and opportunities (newkirk, 2019). the diversity function has traditionally delivered return on investment via quantifiable value proposition, known as the business case for diversity. this business case is buoyed by changing demographics that result in growing numbers of diverse customers and business partners. by 2045, it is estimated that the us population will be majority-minority (frey, 2018). by 2027, people of color aged 18-29 years old will outnumber whites in the same age group, essentially transforming the future of the us workforce (frey, 2018). competitive forces in a capitalistic system mean that consumers, suppliers, distributors and other stakeholders have choices in how they spend their resources of time and money. maileen dumelod hamto studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 282 despite the emphasis on competitive advantage, a clear and straight line toward social equity and racial justice has not been present in many organizations. in more than 10 years of working as an in-house diversity, equity and inclusion (dei) practitioner, i’ve observed that organizations often find it difficult to develop and implement concrete strategies to uphold diversity work. diversity leaders face fierce resistance within their organizations in their attempts to foreground racial justice in leading change within predominantly white institutions. conducting diversity work under the auspices of human resources in a multinational corporation, i’ve observed how recruitment, hiring, retention and promotion practices take center stage in organizational efforts to drive diversity measures. i’ve seen first-hand the tragedy of high-potential professionals of color who are recruited to join organizations whose cultures are not inclusive or welcoming of diverse identities. in many organizations, efforts to recruit diverse candidates fall short of goals to retain and promote top diverse talent. psychologist derald wing sue’s groundbreaking research on microaggressions has prompted conversations about psychological safety and lived experiences of black, brown, indigenous, and immigrant people of color in academia, the workplace and other institutions. racial microaggressions are “daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental slights and indignities directed toward black americans, often automatically and unintentionally” (sue et al., 2008, p. 329). everyday experiences of microaggressions exact an “emotional tax” on black employees, causing them to feel they have to be “on guard” and diminishing their sense of psychological safety in interacting with superiors and peers (travis et al., 2016). i’ve mourned alongside black and brown colleagues who suffered the impacts of the emotional tax of being othered at work, causing them to withdraw from taking risks and sharing honest and useful feedback about business operations and organizational culture. in work environments that cannot guarantee psychological safety, employees disengage, tune out, and worse, decide to leave the organization. high rates of voluntary employee turnovers are costly, involving significant administrative, hiring, orientation and onboarding costs, as well as lost productivity (nishii & mayer, 2009). counter-stories of solidarity with racial justice before diving deeper into critical analysis, i offer key lessons from social justice thought leaders who challenge the concept of bystander or optical allyship practiced by those who stand on the sidelines, touting alignment with racial justice movements, but refusing to do the hard work of taking action and measured risks. to dismantle white supremacy and advance social justice, i’ve found that it’s more effective to be a “co-conspirator”: someone who is willing to endure the physical and emotional tolls of anti-racist action because they “recognize that they have a personal and collective stake in reflections on advancing racial justice in diversity and inclusion studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 283 taking on the cause of racial injustice” (iyer, 2018). what does it mean to be a co-conspirator or accomplice in the struggle toward creating workplaces that are committed to racial justice? leading equity work has allowed me to gain more understanding about the mechanics of whiteness, and ways to disrupt them. this requires continuous learning, practice, grace and selfcompassion. for example, my positionality as an asian woman doing diversity work in the us offers an invitation to asian and white colleagues to share their misgivings about how organizations are placing “too much focus” on recruitment and retention of black, indigenous and latino/x employees. implied in this rhetoric is the fear of exclusion from diversity initiatives that are rooted in dismantling anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity in workplaces. as a leader advocating for racial equity, i cannot be neutral in my stance to take risks and action to stand with and for those marginalized racial and ethnic identities that are invisible in the workplace. to make meaningful difference and to sustain the momentum toward racial justice, i realized that i must be unapologetic and single-minded in focusing on how black, brown, indigenous and immigrant people of color are kept out of hiring, retention and promotion opportunities. this is a difficult conversation to have with people who have not had a chance to reflectively critique how they benefit from their racial identity i offer my own personal journey in cultural self-awareness to demonstrate the requisite personal work involved in harnessing ethics and values to lead social justice-oriented work. relaying counter-narratives that uplift the stories and voices of people from minoritized and marginalized racial and ethnic groups is a methodological and analytical approach centered in critical race theory (crt), one that confronts systems and hierarchies of racial power (baszile, 2015; bell, 1995; yosso & solorzano, 2002). i share my lifelong process of decolonization in the context of furthering cultural self-discovery and interrogating one’s place in the service of dismantling white supremacy. as a foreign-born woman of filipino descent with professional and academic interests in advancing equity and justice, i’ve focused my work on developing and implementing programs that highlight the values of equity, diversity and inclusion to create and provide opportunities and access for underserved and underrepresented communities. in both academic and professional pursuits, my racialized experiences as an immigrant woman of color provide a critical approach to dynamics and realities that are perpetuated in academic and workplace environments where leadership ranks are predominantly white and male. as a non-black person of color navigating us racial hierarchies, i am aware of my people’s history and legacy of the struggle against colonialism. i acknowledge that the filipino context of us imperialism and colonization is distinct from the sordid history of chattel slavery in the american south, the land grab and genocide of indigenous tribes, and exploitation of impoverished immigrant labor. i acknowledge that i benefit from racial hierarchies supported by white supremacy in a number of ways. in the us, asians are held up as the model maileen dumelod hamto studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 284 minority, touting unrealistic standards of economic and academic success among newcomers from asia in an effort to underline the narrative that meritocracy in the us works as designed (hsu, 2015). the myth of meritocracy upholds the concept of “us opportunity structure” that is built upon “rugged individualism … hard work and sacrifice… and the conflation of democracy and capitalism” (gorski, 2011, p. 160). following this thread, the asian american model minority myth asserts that racism and classism no longer exist, because recently arrived communities gain educational and economic advantages in an egalitarian society. while trump is no longer in office, the poison of othering that was unleashed during his tenure continues to suffocate the sociopolitical climate with racist and xenophobic narratives against black, brown, indigenous and immigrant people of color. in established settler-colonial asian communities, particularly in the filipino-american (fil-am) community, robust conversations are happening to confront anti-blackness and complicity with white supremacy. since the start of the 2020 black lives matter protests, numerous virtual meetings and webinars have engaged thousands of fil-ams from across the us, canada, the philippines and beyond. these conversations brought to the fore crucial issues such as the philippines’ colonial past and resulting colonial mentality, colorism, and white worship. undoubtedly, these are difficult conversations for the community, especially in the context of filipinos’ propensity for avoiding conflict, maintaining group harmony and benefiting from proximity to whiteness. filipino-american academics – children of the global diaspora, such as professors e.j.r. david, zeus leonardo, cheryl matias, lily mendoza, kevin nadal, anthony ocampo, leny strobel, and allyson tintiangco cubales – are leading scholarly inquiries and nurturing activist spaces in an effort to unshackle the colonized filipino psyche from white supremacy. these scholars are accomplishing this through analyzing the fil-am racialization experience through critical race theory, decoloniality and re-indigenization, and critical whiteness studies, among other liberatory pedagogies. their collective efforts are planting seeds of hope for the next generation of diasporic – often multiracial and multicultural – filipino/a/x to grow and nourish into sustainable antiracist solidarity movements alongside diverse communities of color. in this context, i share my reflections on the implicit anti-blackness embedded in emphasizing “global” in diversity, equity and inclusion strategies. when a company states that they’re enacting a global dei strategy, it almost always means that they focus primarily on (dis)ability and neurodiversity, gender or sexual orientation, while sidestepping racial and ethnic issues altogether. i also want to note a self-congratulatory element among proponents of global dei approaches, suggesting perhaps that they’ve already solved race and ethnic issues, and are now ready to move on to “real” dei challenges. i’ve observed that in emphasizing a global focus, business leaders and dei practitioners become complicit in minimizing the insidious impacts of racism, reflections on advancing racial justice in diversity and inclusion studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 285 ethnocentrism, exploitation of foreign labor and other systems of inequity in global workplaces. i was once in conversation with a white hr executive who declared her joy about the growing diversity of a particular business unit, led by white us-born male director and associate director. many of the staff were foreign-born south asian men who speak the same language (in addition to english, of course). these south asian engineers always gathered in the cafeteria together to eat lunches brought from home, perhaps one of the few moments during the workday that they felt truly supported by and enveloped in community. having grown up in manila, many of my contemporaries are permanent guest workers in white-collar jobs all over the world. rarely do they ascend to management ranks, despite educational attainment and work tenure. diversity is increasingly our reality. the global workforce is increasingly diverse, because the global majority hails from asian, african, arab and latin american and indigenous origins. however, racial and ethnic power dynamics borne out of centuries of colonization, white supremacy and cultural theft in wealthy nations and in the global south don’t miraculously disappear in diversifying workplaces situated in the us, australia, dubai (uae), brazil, the uk, and everywhere in between. the work of global diversity is conducted most effectively when partnered simultaneously with a lens of inclusion, equity, justice and belonging. everywhere this work is done, one must not discount racial and ethnic considerations, especially in the presence of power differentials. diversity and critical race theory capitalism and racism are intertwined in the american story of economic progress and empire building. there is ample documentation of the ravages of colonization on indigenous people, chattel slavery practiced in the american south, and persistent institutional racism that continues to this day (anderson, 2017). despite volumes of supporting evidence to uphold these truths, it is challenging to gain traction – and a willing audience – in corporate environments to lift up narratives of historical and current manifestations of white supremacy, privilege and dominant institutional power. cultivating a critical perspective to developing and deploying systems-changing actions in advancing racial equity may be bolstered by an intentional approach to how crt may inform strategies for diversity management. crt posits that race is a social construct without basis in biology (ladson-billings, 1998). however, the mechanisms of race and ethnicity in us society – how racial hierarchies are embedded in institutions and systems – have real impacts on people’s everyday lives (ladson-billings, 1998; milner, 2008; yosso, 2005). how people move through the world as cultural and racial beings impacts their lived experiences and life outcomes. crt is an important tool for deconstructing systemic and institutional equity maileen dumelod hamto studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 286 issues by asking important questions: who has access to opportunities, and why? who benefits from racial stratification? in crt, the concept of interest convergence was introduced by the late harvard university professor derrick bell. interest convergence refers to the idea that “significant progress for african americans is achieved only when the goals of blacks are consistent with the needs of whites” (milner, 2008). an example of interest convergence is the so-called business case for diversity and inclusion, touted as an important lever in managing diversity in the workplace (butler, 2018). as demographic shifts continue in the us, american consumers with increasing buying power are becoming more diverse. it makes good business sense for a company to invest in hiring and retaining diverse talent who can provide business intelligence on diverse racial and ethnic communities (bendick et al., 2010). despite its popularity among diversity practitioners, the business case for diversity has not yielded the desired outcomes for workforce diversity management. disparities in hiring and retention rates of black, brown, indigenous and immigrant people of color in us corporate workplaces have been the focus of multiple studies and programs, yet gaps continue to persist. the chief diversity officer: accountability to justice diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in large, matrixed and complex forprofit organizations are typically led by the chief diversity officer, a position that is becoming more integrated in corporate leadership structures. the 1964 civil rights act necessitated the establishment of compliance officer positions during the 1970s and 1980s in highly visible institutions to establish standards of engagement among affirmative action policies and processes in higher education admission and federal hiring practices (kelly & dobbin, 1998). beginning in the 1990s, diversity management transformed from its initial thrust in affirmative action and equal employment opportunity to align with organizational development goals. chief among these is maximizing worker productivity in the age of globalization, which leverages both a “multidomestic and global approach” to respond accordingly to “economic, social, political, legal and cultural differences across countries” (nishii & özbilgin, 2007, p. 1884). recognition of the business community’s social and ethical responsibilities to various stakeholders has also helped to cement the value-add of diversity management in the corporate arena (stewart et al., 2011). how should the chief diversity officer leverage their position to advance racial justice? i’ve had the privilege of working for cdos of color in various work environments, observing how institutional dynamics necessitated the application of different modalities to systems change. chief among these approaches are multiculturalism and cultural competency, bringing a deluge of training consultants who specialize in unconscious or implicit bias. while reflections on advancing racial justice in diversity and inclusion studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 287 progress in advancing diversity work has been incremental, the black lives matter movement has ignited a sense of urgency for organizations to speed up the pace of change toward anti-racism. after the murder of george floyd, many organizations are no longer satisfied with applying isolated or “checkthe-box” interventions, such as mandatory diversity training on recognizing one’s biases. to seize the moment and advance racial equity, diversity practitioners have the opportunity to further galvanize their focus on championing racial justice by mastering the skills and tactics of change management. research on transformational leadership has illustrated the importance of cultivating one’s own values in order to effectively model the way. diversity leaders must be prepared not only to impact leadership to influence equitable policies, procedures and distribution of resources, but also work on the parallel stream of reinforcing the values of racial justice and equity. in reviewing job descriptions of chief diversity officer (cdo) position openings in large, matrixed organizations, the leadership role is responsible for designing and overseeing implementation of diversity and inclusion strategies that include management and leadership development, strategic communications, talent development and employee engagement programs related to performance management, succession, learning and internship programs. working in global work environments that are focused first and foremost on profitability, chief diversity officers serve as the subject matter expert on organizational efforts related to inclusion, equity and diversity. the function is also responsible for internal communication efforts around inclusion and diversity programs designed for employees and external stakeholders. cdos champion training tools to support the deployment of the talent programs and processes, where they are ultimately responsible for evaluating best practices to ensure consistency in sharing global knowledge. advancing the work of diversity and inclusion in the current social environment requires comfort and familiarity with grounding the conversation in the long-term application of justice and equity, with specific lenses on anti-racism, critique of whiteness and intersecting systems of oppression. evaluating how dominant-power dynamics are embedded in procedures and policies in various business processes such as talent management, supplier diversity, and communications can help the organization achieve clarity about change that needs to occur (ferdman & deane, 2014). to advance racial equity initiatives, the chief diversity officer must be empowered to model the transformative work necessary for leaders to lean in to their cultural backgrounds and understand the dynamics of race, ethnicity, and other dimensions of identity. in order to highlight the harms caused by the invisibility of whiteness in workplaces, there is growing urgency for the need to incorporate critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, critical diversity studies, and antiracist education into organizational development literature and resulting practices in the human resources field (bohonos, 2019; swan, 2017). creating space for meaning-making and maileen dumelod hamto studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 288 exploring the mechanics of whiteness on everyday business operations and decision-making mechanisms – how it manifests in decision-making at all levels of the organization – is necessary to develop and implement programs that have direct effects on people’s lives. working at community mental health centers during the trump presidency, i had the enviable opportunity to develop in-person workshop curricula for our clinical staff, many of whom are young white women in social work and counseling positions. in the large and diverse metro area, many patients come from diverse communities of color, including indigenous, immigrant, asylee and refugee communities. while it was heartening to know that the clinical staff were interested in learning more about cultural considerations in healing and counseling, what was missing was desire and readiness to engage in cultural self-awareness. i identified this as a development opportunity, because therapists must understand how their cultural lenses impact how they show up as healers. i led discussions that centered around what it means to be white and the unearned benefits of whiteness. despite my efforts to model what cultural self-scrutiny looks like – for example, naming my own racial biases – these conversations were difficult and emotionally straining. on more than one occasion, participants cried while sharing authentically from their experiences. it’s apparent that this work requires humble inquiries into the impact of power dynamics that dictate how people from diverse identities show up for each other in institutions that uphold racial power and privilege. conclusion in my experience working in various types of work environments, i learned that even mission-driven organizations can develop toxic cultures that are resistant to change and oppressive of marginalized identities, stalling advancement of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. critical to promoting diversity and inclusion in any organization is defining an effective and achievable path forward for chief diversity officers to accomplish impactful work that produces inclusive and racially just practices, grounding diversity and inclusion practices in critical lenses that interrogate how power dynamics perpetuate systems of oppression that permeate institutions. cdos and diversity practitioners are responsible for fostering a culture and environment where employees are valued for their unique ideas and varied backgrounds, where different perspectives are heard and honored in diverse and inclusive teams that elevate the power of differences to create and nurture inclusive teams working toward shared business goals. further research into the role of diversity officers is needed to shed light on how organizations can create structures of support to bolster racial equity in organizations that exist primarily to produce and maximize profits. the historical pace and rate of change in diversity work indicate that the chief diversity’s officer’s mandate to lead toward racial equity may be reflections on advancing racial justice in diversity and inclusion studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 289 difficult to achieve. in organizations that are invested in protecting the status quo, “lasting change will require constant vigilance” (newkirk, 2019, p. 215). research that examines dynamics of change leadership in institutions and systems will uncloak barriers that must be overcome to ensure that the cdo role is empowered to lead meaningful change in the organizational culture to champion racial justice. in order to build racially equitable and just workplace cultures, it’s important to approach change through critical lenses that incorporate awareness of anti-black racism and the “prevailing narrative of racial preeminence” (newkirk, 2019, p. 217). in addition to developing personal resilience rooted in core values, the diversity leader must have unwavering institutional support and financial resources to withstand ongoing resistance to the work of diversity and inclusion. references anderson, c. (2017). white rage: the unspoken truth of our racial divide. bloomsbury usa. bendick, m., lou egan, m., & lanier, l. (2010). the business case for diversity and the perverse practice of matching employees to customers. personnel review, 39(4), 468-486. baszile, d. (2015). critical race/feminist currere. the sage guide to curriculum in education (pp. 119-126). sage. bell, d. a. (1995). who's afraid of critical race theory? university of illinois law review, 1995(4), 893. bohonos, j. w. (2019). including critical whiteness studies in the critical human resource development family: a proposed theoretical framework. adult education quarterly, 69(4), 315-337. bonilla-silva, e. (2009). racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in america (3rd ed.). rowman and littlefield. butler, c. (2018). the business case for diversity and inclusion. directors & boards, 43(1), 58. ferdman, b. m., & deane, b. r. (2014). diversity at work: the practice of inclusion. wiley. frey, w. (2018). the us will become ‘minority white’ in 2045, census projects. brookings institute. retrieved july 20, 2020 from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/theavenue/2018/03/14/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/ gorski, p. (2011). unlearning deficit ideology and the scornful gaze: thoughts on authenticating the class discourse in education. in r. ahlquist, p. gorski & t. montaño (eds.), assault on kids: how hyper-accountability, corporatization, deficit ideology, and ruby payne are destroying our schools (pp. 152-175). peter lang. hillard, g. (2020, june 18). corporate anti-racism statements aren’t worth the cyberspace they’re tweeted through. national review. https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/06/corporate-anti-racism-statementsarent-worth-the-cyberspace-theyre-tweeted-through/ hsu, m. y., & proquest (firm). (2015). the good immigrants: how the yellow peril became the model minority. princeton university press. iyer, d. (2018, august 12). a year after charlottesville, are white people co-conspirators in confronting white supremacy? medium. retrieved july 14, 2020 from https://medium.com/@dviyer/a-year-after-charlottesville-are-white-people-co-conspiratorsin-confronting-white-supremacy-1effac96276b kelly, e., & dobbin, f. (1998). how affirmative action became diversity management: employer response to antidiscrimination law, 1961 to 1996. american behavioral scientist, 41(7), 960-984. ladson-billings, g. (1998). just what is critical race theory and what's it doing in a nice field like education? international journal of qualitative studies in education, 11(1), 7-24. maileen dumelod hamto studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 280-290, 2022 290 milner, h. r. 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(2008). racial microaggressions in the life experience of black americans. professional psychology: research and practice, 39(3), 329-336. swan, e. (2017). what are white people to do? listening, challenging ignorance,generous encounters and the ‘not yet’ as diversity research praxis. gender, work & organization, 24(5), 547-563. travis, d., thorpe-moscon, j., & mccluney, c. (2016, october 11). emotional tax: how black women and men pay more at work and how leaders can take action. catalyst: workplaces the work for women. https://www.catalyst.org/research/emotional-tax-how-black-womenand-men-pay-more-at-work-and-how-leaders-can-take-action/ yosso, t. j. (2005). whose culture has capital? a critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. race, ethnicity and education, 8(1), 69-91. solórzano, d. g., & yosso, t. j. (2002). a critical race counterstory of race, racism, and affirmative action. equity & excellence in education, 35(2), 155-168. yuan, k. (2020, june 19). black employees say ‘performative allyship’ is an unchecked problem in the office. fortune. retrieved july 6, 2020 from https://fortune.com/2020/06/19/performative-allyship-working-while-black-white-alliescorporate-diversity-racism/ chandler et al (disatch) final before ts correspondence address: eliza chandler, school of disability studies, ryerson university, toronto, on, m5b 2k3; email: eliza.chandler@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 230-238, 2021 dispatch communicating access, accessing communication eliza chandler ryerson university, canada esther ignagni ryerson university, canada kimberlee collins university of toronto, canada in january 2019, the school of disability studies at ryerson university cohosted the cripping the arts symposium, which brought together artists, activists, and academics from across canada to share in discussions and performances directed at surfacing dialogue and debate critical to the development of disability, deaf, and mad arts. along with co-curating the symposium program, our school designed and put into action the accessibility plan for these events. this access plan built on established accessibility practices, such as partnering with a deaf-led organization to assemble a skilled asl interpreter team, as well as emerging access practices, such as working with a graphic recorder who responded to keynotes and panel discussions through live drawings. as is our practice (ignagni et al., 2019), we approached the design of this plan through an iterative and co-designed process, acknowledging that we can never know access completely, nor enact it perfectly and without friction. disability artist and curator carmen papalia (2018) articulates his approach to access through what he calls an “open access” framework. open access, papalia writes, approaches access as “an assemblage co-designed by people who will be in the room, who might be in the room, who have been in the room, and who we hope will feel invited to come into the room” (para. 1). adopting papalia’s call to take up access through a co-designed practice, we created an access guide through which we communicated our plan. we distributed this guide to participants ahead of the symposium in the hopes communicating access, accessing communication studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 230-238, 2021 231 that it would establish expectations and allow participants to plan accordingly. in doing so, the access guide aimed to eliminate the guesswork and labour of checking and planning for accessibility requirements that so many disabled people take on prior to attending an event or cultural experience. we wanted to signal that we anticipated and desired all participants, particularly those who are often excluded from events because of intersecting systemic, structural, and attitudinal barriers. the final version of the access guide was given out with the program for the symposium.1 in this short paper, we critically reflect on our shared work of creating the access guide for the cripping the arts symposium. we begin our dispatch by sketching the process through which we created the access plan and “access documents” for this event, which include the access guide and the symposium program. in this section, we highlight how we attempted to centre disability experiences and ideas about how to enhance access. following this, we critically reflect on how the access documents were taken up by participants, drawing attention to the dynamics and modes of engagement that this plan both disrupted and consolidated. in the final section of this dispatch, we think through the dissonance that occurred between our intentions for these documents, and the kind of participation they mobilized. here, we consider the necessary and also fraught process of communicating access along with tanya titchkosky’s (2011) assertion that when we take up access as a political issue, “we gain the possibility of learning something new about the culture from which [disability and access] spring and to which these issues return for rejoinder” (p. 18). in this final reflection, we also think with elwood jimmy’s (2020) meditation on the relationship between how accessibility and decoloniality are expressed in institutions where “we very seldom question what this accessibility gives access to” (para. 1). developing the access guide documents when we were developing our access plan and, correspondingly, the access guide, we recalled critical feedback we had received after the first iteration of the symposium in 2016 from members of sol express, a local theatre group made up of people labelled or who identify as developmentally disabled (sol express, n.d.). while participating in the first symposium, members of sol express found that, although they were familiar with many of the ideas that were discussed, they were unfamiliar with some of the discipline-specific and cultural-specific words that were attached to those ideas. in order to better access the conversations that were had at the 2016 symposium, members of sol express met as a group after each day to look 1 cripping the arts in canada access guide. (2019). https://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/images/festivals/2019/cripping/cta%20access%20guide. pdf eliza chandler, esther ignagni & kimberlee collins studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 230-238, 2021 232 up and discuss the meanings of the unfamiliar words they encountered. after this symposium, cheryl zinyk, a director at sol express, suggested on behalf of the company that it would be helpful to have a glossary of terms written in plain language to help them become acquainted with relevant new words and ways of communicating in advance of the event. this suggestion referenced the plain language glossary that ignagni, collins, and other researchers had provided in advance of making space for intimate citizenship,2 a previous community research event in which sol express were involved as coresearchers. the cross-disability, intersectional, and intersectoral interests of symposium participants, along with sol express’s important recommendations to elaborate our access practices, gave us occasion to develop accessible ways of communicating. autistic disability studies scholar elizabeth (ibby) grace (2013) speaks to the importance of accessible communication within projects of disability rights and justice when she writes, “[plain language] is needed to allow the widest variety of people with disabilities to participate in conversations about themselves” (para 1). our response to sol express led us to work with our partners at creative user projects and bodies in translation to first develop a glossary of terms using plain language and pictorial exchange communication systems (pecs).3 then we workshopped this document, finalized the words it would include, and gathered feedback on plain language definitions with members of sol express. we decided to write the entire program, produced by creative users, using plain language, pecs (pictorial exchange communication system), and photographs. ultimately the glossary became an entry point to reflexivity about what and how to communicate within the symposium as a whole. second, within the process of creating these documents, we carefully explained terms and practices that might be unfamiliar to people for whom attending a symposium was a new experience. for example, we described what a panel was and how to ask questions afterwards. additionally, we explained what was meant when someone asked what your pronouns are. we also specified that there would be a buffet lunch that would be free and available to everyone at the symposium. again, these were not necessarily new practices to members of sol express or developmentally disabled and neurodivergent communities more broadly, but by providing descriptions in 2 making space for intimate citizenship, a sshrc-funded research project, was led by esther ignagni and ann fudge-schormans (ignagni et al., 2016; see https://makingspaceforintimatecitizenship.wordpress.com/home/). this research project has a dictionary of terms written in plain language by kim collins. 3 bodies in translation: activist art, technology, and access to life, a sshrc-funded research project, along with creative users projects and ryerson’s school of disability studies, supported the development of this glossary of terms. we thank tracy tidgwell, lindsay fisher, and kayle besse for their work on this glossary. see https://creativeusers.net/; https://bodiesintranslation.ca communicating access, accessing communication studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 230-238, 2021 233 advance, we were attempting to ensure that everyone had access to the same information regardless of their familiarity with symposia and other academic events. our approach to developing the access documents for this symposium was rooted in our understanding of access as a political project (hamraie, 2017; ignagni et al., 2019; titchkosky, 2011). through its development, the program – which held the access guide, the plain language document, and which was itself an access document – became a textual technology born from the active exclusion and subjugation of disabled, mad, d/deaf, and other oppressed people that occurred during previous knowledge mobilization events, including the first cripping the arts symposium. the program was also shaped by our reading of and reflections on how academic and research spaces are inhospitable to those who are not the desired normative student, scholar, or in this case, symposium participant (ahmed, 2019; smith et al., 2018). the program was a deliberate attempt to disrupt normative presumptions about the lived experience and knowledge base of our symposium participants, and centre the experiences of d/deaf, mad, and disabled people (johnson & mcruer, 2014) within them. such disruptions are often part of carrying out research and research mobilization work that engages community members through a disability, or “crip” politics. the program was designed using an anti-assimilationist politic (hamraie, 2017) that attempts to acknowledge and resist academic ableism, and the intersectional eugenic afterlife of the education system (dolmage, 2017; hartman, 2019). put differently, we created this program to centre disability, and more particularly, to centre different ways of communicating, exchanging, delivering, and receiving knowledge within spaces (symposia) that traditionally expect and desire normative ways of exchanging knowledge. in doing so, this program became an occasion to rethink research-oriented spaces and practices (fritsch, 2019). missed intentions we hoped the accessibility features of the cripping the arts program could invite a negotiation with the event that would enable a wider audience to situate themselves in relation to the symposium and other participants. and of course, we could identify moments when the program appeared to fulfill its intentions. for instance, one symposium participant reviewed the program pages regularly, perusing its text and images to identify and “place” other panelists and artists, a practice ignagni and collins also witnessed in the making space for intimate citizenship event. at making space, labelled participants leveraged the glossary and access instructions throughout the proceedings. for instance, local self-advocates used the photos and biographies to open conversations with international visitors, particularly those from people speak up uk, crafting relationships that were sustained eliza chandler, esther ignagni & kimberlee collins studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 230-238, 2021 234 for some time via social media. within the making space meetings, participants materially engaged the glossary, holding up pecs to reference the dimensions of love, belonging, and labour that constitute intimate citizenship. however, when we compare our experience at making space with cripping the arts, we struggle to come up with similar examples of how the program was used as it was intended. each of us was preoccupied with the many instrumental tasks of mobilizing the symposium itself, so likely missed these moments. in our interactions with symposium participants, we did witness the program in use by academics and established artists. also, nondevelopmentally disabled symposium participants emailed to tell us how useful they found the program. one of us was directly credited with creating a “gorgeous,” “helpful,” and “important” document, one that was “actually helpful to everyone.” in the months following the symposium, one of our copy editors asked if she could send the program to her sister who was completing her doctorate in special education at a british university and her sister passed on the document to her supervisor. the praise and eager uptake of the program was always reflexive, acknowledging its intentions to widen the parameters of meaningful participation for all. we were struck that these comments almost exclusively came from participants who, like us, were already familiar with academic events and comfortable within these spaces and with their processes. these comments signaled that the program inadvertently reinstated the normative (nondisabled) user as the “intended user” (ahmed, 2019). the documents were intended for the developmentally disabled and neurodivergent community who motivated and co-created them, widening who should be anticipated and welcomed at the symposium. instead, the “usefulness” (ahmed, 2019) of the program was attributed to its being “better for everyone.” while heartened that others appreciated the program, we realize that we did not fully anticipate how it could be used to reinforce ableist structures. we noted that developmentally disabled attendees’ participation also seemed dictated by key gatekeepers, such as non-disabled service workers and family members. for instance, developmental service users arrived for a single presentation in which a supervising worker was involved. at the close of the session, the developmental service users would leave en masse with their worker. this unexpectedly reflected the well-documented systemic relations of dependency and protection that can circumscribe developmentally disabled people’s movements and participation in everyday life (erevelles, 2002; goodley & runswick-cole, 2016; martino & schormans, 2018). in a more mundane register, those who left the symposium after one session may simply not have found the program of interest. the program was created with the assumption that all attendees were able to get to the symposium and stay long enough to feel its hospitality but that simply may not have materialized for some. communicating access, accessing communication studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 230-238, 2021 235 we now recognize that after our initial, pre-symposium consultations with sol express, we could have done more to follow up with and solicit feedback from all disabled attendees about if and how they found the program to be useful. feedback would have given us more stories and information about how the program was used in unexpected and subversive ways. we do imagine that members of sol express might have been able to feel their agency in shaping the symposium as they manipulated the material output of their contribution in the program itself. we also hope that the members of joe, jack et john, a predominantly francophone organization with a membership that paralleled sol express, found the time and space to explore the images and pecs through their many hours of attendance over the symposium event. the embrace of this program was not surprising; we, as organizers, certainly found that using the program made it easier for us, as disabled academics, to navigate and participate in the event. but in this promise of seamless access, did the program smooth over the disruption that disability makes? as bess williamson (2019) notes in her history of accessible design, practices and products directed to redress disability exclusion can inadvertently become a “silent contributor” to normative, privilege culture (p. 150). following williamson, the request and proposal from sol express for better access became a device by which to make a better program for all. moreover, as the praise from academics and artists indicate, sol express’s ideas for how their and others from their community could have their access needs met were mobilized in a way that created a more effective knowledge exchange within the normative academic disability community. but this raises questions about whether centreing sol express’s access needs actually disrupted neoliberal processes (williamson, 2019). as we will explore in our next section, upon reflection it seems to us that this program signaled a commitment towards different ways of being (jimmy, 2020) that was not followed through with structural and practical changes to how we came together and exchanged ideas in the symposium. reflection access documents, such as our program, and the access guide and glossary therein, serve as a commitment to accountability, one that is responsive to the diverse requirements and engagements of “communities of concern” (bulmer, 2019). at a minimum, once access documents are released and made public, they become statements of accountability that communicate and oblige us to carry through on the access commitments we make. they express a commitment to creating spaces of equitable participation, and practical possibility. in the case of this example, the program committed to changing the practices of the symposium itself in order to mitigate the disjuncture eliza chandler, esther ignagni & kimberlee collins studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 230-238, 2021 236 disabled and deaf people often experience in academic contexts (smith, 1999). throughout his reflection on “acces(sen)sibility,” jimmy (2020, para. 4) points to the failings of trying to create social change, particularly within institutions, by mobilizing projects such as decoloniality and accessibility. speaking specifically to decolonizing and indigenizing work, jimmy suggests that such projects “often address methodological and epistemological issues (i.e., ways of doing and knowing) without really tackling ontological issues (i.e., related to habits of being), where the issue of separability lies” (para. 4). as the access documents expressed a commitment to “know and do differently,” considering jimmy’s words in relation to our project causes us to consider how well we followed through on this promise; perhaps we could have committed to “be differently” by attending to “what access gives us access to” within the symposium itself (para.1). or could it be that the symposium’s access documents carried their inherent paradox? in “what’s the use? on the uses of use,” sara ahmed (2019) advances the argument that instructions for use are generally made when the correct use of an object or process is impossible, as may have been the case here. our access documents expressed a commitment to create access for a non-academic audience to an academic event without following through on our commitment to “be differently” (jimmy, 2020) within the symposium. in doing so, these documents worked as a form of “use instruction” and, by extension, indicated who could reside within the category of culture-maker, and who had the capacity to have a culture (ahmed, 2019). however, the generous and hospitable intentions of the program were not fully realized as it became a normalizing tool, most usefully taken up by those of us who enter these academic spaces with ease. as ahmed elaborates, we can make things function in ways that are estranged from their form. with repeated use, things take on the character of their users, like a chair or a shoe occupied by a specific owner. the object molds to the intentions, needs, and uses of those who use it most, losing its plasticity, flexibility, and hospitality to other users. having become easy and comfortable to some, the object becomes less so to those for whom it may have been initially intended. the program, in its glossy, appealing, and rigorous form, was used in many anticipated and unexpected ways: a guide to decipher and decode the symposium’s discourse, to communicate the organizers’ analysis of access, to facilitate introductions and connections between symposium attendees, and to critically intervene in the elite relations that often pervade cultural and academic spaces. it was, however, also used as a research project output, a form of knowledge mobilization that satisfied the requirements of the funder, a cultural form in its own right praised for its innovation, and a pedagogical tool. it is in these latter, less disruptive uses that we may have found our greatest comfort. the access documents for the cripping the arts symposium were created through a desire to enact an access plan that centralized disability experiences communicating access, accessing communication studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 230-238, 2021 237 and ideas for access practices. reflecting on the use of these access documents throughout this dispatch has caused us to wonder how the “usefulness” of these documents might have changed had we also committed to changing ways of being within the symposium (jimmy, 2020). conversely, we wonder how these documents were rendered “useful” given that the ontological possibilities for the symposium did not change in a way that centered neuro-divergent experiences (ahmed, 2019; jimmy, 2020). jimmy writes: acces(sen)sibility is not a performative self-congratulatory exercise, it should not become currency in economies of virtue, and it does not happen overnight. it demands that we interrupt the satisfaction we have with the securities and the rewards in the dominant system, so we can clear the way to engage with and relate to what is unknown and unknowable” (2020, para. 4). and so, we will take from this learning as we build access in the future, attempting to “fail better” next time (beckett, 1983). acknowledgements we wish to acknowledge and thank our partners in developing the “cripping the arts access guide”: creative users projects and bodies in translation: activist art, technology, and access to life, and tangled art + disability. we also wish to acknowledge and thank our funding partners for the development of this guide: faculty of community services, ryerson university, revision centre for art and social justice, and social sciences and humanities research council’s partnership fund [#134673]. references ahmed, s. (2019). what's the use?: on the uses of use. duke university press. beckett, s. (1983). worstward ho. grove press. bodies in translation: activist arts, technology, and access to life. (n.d.). https://bodiesintranslation.ca bulmer, a. (2019, november 19). blind imaginings. address presented at cripping the arts in canada, ryerson university, toronto. creative users projects, bodies in translation, and ryerson’s school of disability studies. (2019, january 20). cripping the arts in canada access guide. harbourfront centre. https://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/images/festivals/2019/cripping/cta%20access%20g uide.pdf creative users projects. (n.d). home. https://creativeusers.net/ dolmage, j. (2017). academic ableism: disability and higher education. university of michigan press. erevelles, n. (2002). (im)material citizens: cognitive disabilities, race, and the politics of citizenship. disability, culture, & education, 1(1), 5-25. eliza chandler, esther ignagni & kimberlee collins studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 230-238, 2021 238 fritsch, k. (2019, january). introducing cripping the arts. in cripping the arts in canada. toronto: british council, creative user projects, harbourfront centre, and tangled art + disability. goodley, d., & runswick-cole, k. (2016). becoming dishuman: thinking about the human through dis/ability. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 37(1), 1-15. grace, e. (2013, november 22). cognitively accessible language (why we should care). the feminist wire. retrieved november 16, 2020 from https://thefeministwire.com/2013/11/cognitively-accessible-language-why-we-should-care hamraie, a. (2017). building access: universal design and the politics of disability. university of minnesota press. hartman, s. (2019). wayward lives, beautiful experiments: intimate histories of riotous black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals. norton. ignagni, e., chandler, e., collins, k., darby, a., & liddiard, k. (2019). designing access together: surviving the demand for resilience. canadian journal of disability studies, 8(4), 293-320. ignagni, e., & collins, k. (2016, january 18). intimate citizenship. making space for intimate citizenship. https://makingspaceforintimatecitizenship.wordpress.com/home/ ignagni, e., fudge schormans, a., liddiard, k., & runswick-cole, k. (2016). ‘some people are not allowed to love’’: intimate citizenship in the lives of people labelled with intellectual disabilities. disability & society, 31(1), 131-135. jimmy, e. (2020, september 29). acces(sens)ibility. retrieved november 15, 2020 from https://artseverywhere.ca/roundtables/translation/ johnson, m. l., & mcruer, r. (2014). cripistemologies: introduction. journal of literary & cultural disability studies, 8(2), 127-147. martino, a. s., & schormans, a. f. (2018). when good intentions backfire: university research ethics review and the intimate lives of people labelled with intellectual disabilities. in forum qualitative sozialforschung/forum: qualitative social research, 19(3). https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/3090/4264 papalia, c. (2018, january 2). an accessibility manifesto for the arts. canadian art. https://canadianart.ca/essays/access-revived/ smith, d. (1999). writing the social: critique, theory, and investigations. university of toronto press. smith, l. t., tuck, e., & yang, k. w. (2018). introduction. in l. t. smith, e. tuck & k. w. yang (eds.) indigenous and decolonizing studies in education (pp. 1-23). routledge. sol express (n.d.). about. retrieved november 16, 2020, from https://www.larchetoronto.org/sol-express titchkosky, t. (2011). the question of access: disability, space, meaning. university of toronto press. williamson, b. (2019). accessible america: a history of disability and design. new york university press. studies in social justice volume 4, issue 1, 93-95, 2010 correspondence address: david m. rosen, department of social sciences and history, fairleigh dickinson university, madison, nj 07940, usa. tel.: +1 973 443-8724, email: rosen@fdu.edu issn: 1911-4788 review of child soldiers: from violence to protection david m. rosen department of social sciences and history, fairleigh dickinson university, madison, new jersey, usa child soldiers: from violence to protection by michael wessells cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2006, (pb) isbn 978-0-674-03255-2 child soldiers have been with us for a very long time, perhaps since the beginning of warfare. the armies of the west were filled with boy soldiers for centuries. if they were not noticed earlier, it was only because nobody was looking. to give just one example, andrew jackson, the 7th president of the united states, joined the armed forces of the american revolution at age 13, approximately the same age as ishmael beah, whose 2008 memoir, a long way gone, became one of the most popular accounts of being a modern day child soldier. what is really interesting about child soldiers is not their empirical novelty but that they have been discovered as an issue only over the last two or three decades. accordingly, one of the first things i liked about michael wessells' book child soldiers: from violence to protection is that the cover photograph is not of an african child soldier. since one of wessells’ stated goals for the book is to break stereotypes, this is certainly one stereotype that has to go. wessells rightly argues for the need to contextualize our understanding of child soldiers, to understand that childhoods outside of the west may be shaped by different values, to avoid either infantilizing child soldiers or sensationalizing their brutality, to get away from the idea that children who serve in armies are somehow damaged for life, and to pay serious attention to the presence of girl soldiers. wessells’ point is that in order to effectively integrate child soldiers back into society we must work from an empirical rather than an ideological analysis of the formidable problems they face, including the persistence of extreme forms of poverty and continued conflict in so-called postconflict countries. notwithstanding his convincing argument, wessells’ book is a good example of the difficulties scholars have in sorting out hard research from advocacy claims. given the long history of children serving as soldiers, it’s hard to fully accept the 94 david m. rosen studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 idea that the use of child soldiers is a new form of barbarism or exploitation. equally problematic is his claim that the attainment of human rights is indivisible from peace building. even though the “right to revolution” may be marginalized in current human rights thinking, there is a long history of revolutionary struggle for human rights that cannot be ignored—including the american and french revolutions. so, what are we to make of wessel’s argument that children may be victimized and exploited if they “see violence as an acceptable way of replacing a social order with one offering social justice and positive economic opportunities” (p. 3). what if their assessment is indeed correct and the only way to achieve justice is through violence? are peace and the protection of children supposed to trump the attainment of fundamental human rights? i say this merely to show that the idea of protecting children from all risk, an idea which permeates much humanitarian thinking about child soldiers, has not really been fully explored logically or philosophically. wessells interviewed more than 400 former child soldiers in afghanistan, angola, kosovo, sierra leone, south africa, and uganda. the first half of the book focuses on recruitment and the experiences of children in various armed forces and will be familiar terrain to people who have read reports from human rights watch, amnesty international, and other humanitarian and human rights advocacy groups. indeed, much of the interview data here seems to be drawn from these sources rather than from wessells’ own research. the second portion of the book deals with the problem of integrating former child soldiers into society and this section draws on the real strengths of wessells’ research wessells correctly points out that most children who are recruited as child soldiers are quite resilient and that their identities as soldiers should not be essentialized as key way of defining them as persons. moreover, just as wars are different so are the ways in which children are incorporated into them. wessells correctly warns us that the experiences of girl soldiers are frequently sensationalized and portray the girls as the victims of mass rape or sexual exploitation, when in fact, girls and boys experience a diversity of roles as soldiers. indeed, even when girls are exploited, many of the tasks they perform may not be very different from the peacetime roles they would assume in their own societies. clearly there are some situations in which children are brutally exploited, such as in the cases of the palestinian child suicide bombers of islamic jihad and the kidnapped recruits of the revolutionary united front in sierra leone or the lord’s resistance army in uganda. but even in uganda data from the survey of war affected youth suggests that the picture is more nuanced than sensationalized reporting in the media would suggest. the real strength of this book is wessells’ examination of the disarmament processes and the transition to civil life. the difficulties of helping children make the transition from soldiers to civilians can be quite daunting when families are broken by war, communities are overwhelmed by poverty, and job opportunities are absent. sometimes family reintegration is a component of the solution, but sometimes it is not, especially where children have long assumed adult roles and are no longer regarded as children by their families and communities or even by themselves. insisting that they be treated as children is a pointless exercise of western hubris. wessells advocates a much more fact-based approach based upon local knowledge of the kinds of solutions that will work. he also argues that a great deal of advance review of ‘child soldiers: from violence to protection 95 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 preparation is needed, as well as extensive follow-up with families trying to adapt to the return of child soldiers. wessells is critical of counselling approaches to reintegration, especially in situations where people are struggling to meet basic needs. in his view, counselling should be less about “healing wounds” or mental illness than helping young people socially integrate into the practical rhythms of civil life. various forms of counselling and help, whether psychological counselling, traditional healing or exercises in non-violent conflict resolution, need to be harnessed in support of the key goal, which is to enable former child soldiers to make decent lives for themselves in situations plagued by chronic poverty. finally, wessells says there is a real need for agencies to help former child soldiers to acknowledge the abilities of children to take charge of their own lives. children return from war, but humanitarian groups rarely respect children’s ability to participate in decision making processes, even though they routinely make pro forma declarations in support of children’s agency and empowerment. wessells’ rigorous analysis of these factors shows him to be an experienced, humane, and wise advocate for children who are trying to build new lives under extremely difficult circumstances. lee-an final feb 7 20 correspondence address: jiyoung lee-an, department of sociology & anthropology, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: jiyoung.an@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 “fake” or “real” marriage? gender, age, “race” and class in the construction of un/desirability of marriage migrants in south korea jiyoung lee-an carleton university, canada abstract this paper examines the link between the regulation of marriage migration and national boundary-making processes in south korea through the analysis of “fraudulent marriage” discourses. corresponding to the goals of the korean government based on the gendered and racialized construction of the korean nation, populations of marriage migrants are hierarchized according to various intersecting axes of gender, age, class, and “race.” based on a critical race and intersectional feminist framework and critical security studies, i examine multiple intersections of the social relations, which hierarchize marriage migrants. while certain marriage migrants are constructed as desirable because they embody particular sets of characteristics (namely childbearing female marriage migrants from developing countries), other marriage migrants outside these parameters are actively constructed as undesirable and suspected of fraudulent marriage. the discriminatory distinctions drawn among differentially racialized and gendered marriage migrants raise significant social justice concerns. the article concludes with a brief discussion of strategies pursued by marriage migrants and their korean spouses to undermine discourses of fraudulent marriages. keywords marriage migration; nation-building; korean ethnic nationalism; racialization; gender; nation; intersectionality; securitization; fraudulent marriage introduction the south korean government began to turn its attention to the issue of migration when the number of foreigners, in particular, female marriage migrants, rapidly increased after the mid-1990s (h.-k. lee, 2008). until the 2000s, the korean government did not have comprehensive im/migration jiyoung lee-an studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 126 laws and policies apart from fragmented temporary labour migration policies to control migrant workers based on the rotation principle, which permits migrant workers into the country only if they pledge to return to their home countries after a certain period of time (k.-s. han & k.-s. han, 2007). in response to the rapid increase of female marriage migrants, roh moo-hyun’s government (2003-2008) announced the transition to a multicultural society as a pressing task of the government in 2006 and presented initial governmental plans to develop comprehensive im/migration laws and policies (h.-j. kim, 2007). following this announcement, the government put in place new policies and laws that disproportionately focus on marriage migrants and their families. in 2006, the grand plans to support social integration of female marriage immigrant families was devised to address issues faced by female marriage migrants (ministry of public health & welfare, 2006). in the following year, the framework act on treatment of foreigners residing in the republic of korea (2007) was legislated to provide legal grounds to construct comprehensive im/migration policies that extended to include all immigrants, migrants, and refugees living in korea (framework act on treatment of foreigners residing in the republic of korea, 2007). however, as myeong-duk kang, director in the ministry of justice that drafted the act clearly mentioned, the act was devised “substantially for marriage migrants” (legislation & judiciary committee, 2007, p. 5). soon after, the multicultural families support act was legislated separately in 2008 and singled out marriage immigrants and their families as beneficiaries of the act (multicultural families support act, 2008). the 2008 act officially referred to marriage immigrants and their families as “multicultural families,” instead of “female marriage immigrant families” as referred to in the first 2006 plan. in the same year, the ministry of health, welfare and family affairs announced a plan titled supporting multicultural families based on family life cycle policy (ministry of health, welfare & family affairs, 2008). in 2009, comprehensive plans for improving supports for multicultural families was announced (prime minister’s secretariat, 2009). since 2010, the 1st basic plan for multicultural families support policies (2010-2012) and the 2nd basic plan for multicultural families support policies (2013-2017) subsequently followed as a requirement of the multicultural families support act (ministry of gender equality & family, 2016a).1 as suggested by the series of laws and policies targeting female marriage migrants mentioned above, the korean government – which faces a care deficit resulting from a low-fertility rate and an aging population – encourages marriage migrants to enter korea to fulfil the care and reproductive labour required to maintain korean families and reproduce the korean nation (h.-j. kim, 2007). this is in contrast to the government’s attitude towards temporary low-skilled migrants (who are structurally 1 see an (2019) for a detailed content analysis of how these laws and policies are specifically developed to fulfil the korean government’s demographic and nationalistic goals. un/desirability of marriage migrants in south korea studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 127 restricted from immigrating to korea through the rotation principle) and refugee populations, 2 who are discouraged from becoming permanent immigrants. as a result, marriage migration has become the main source of permanent immigration in korea. between 2007 and 2015, marriage migrants comprised 56-72% of the total number of naturalized immigrants (danuri, 2016). however, not all marriage migrants have been constructed as desirable sources of permanent immigration. corresponding to the korean government’s demographic imperative to solve the low-birth rate problem by reproducing the patrilineal korean nation, the desirability or undesirability of marriage migrants is determined according to their positioning in varying intersections among age, gender, class, and “race.” while certain marriage migrants are constructed as desirable because they embody particular sets of characteristics (namely young female marriage migrants from developing countries), other marriage migrants outside these parameters are actively constructed as undesirable and subject to suspicion of being agents of fraudulent marriage. this paper examines the development of “fraudulent marriage” discourses targeting certain marriage migrants and analyzes the roles of these discourses in regulating marriage migration. i focus on how marriage migrants’ intersecting social relations shape the experiences of marriage migrants and their korean spouses in the process of acquiring spousal visas and subsequently citizenship in korea. theoretical frameworks critical race and intersectional feminist framework: theorizing intersections of the nation, gender and race the question of who belongs and who does not belong to the nation is integral to understanding the process of nation-state building. the boundary of the nation has historically been contested by various marginalized groups’ political and social struggles, seeking to be included in the nation. in “malestream” literature on the nation and nationalism, the nation is understood as a socially constructed abstract notion of an “imagined community.” benedict anderson (2006) illustrates this construction through the development of print capitalism. alternatively, anthony smith sees nations as based upon pre-existing ethnic origins built on geographical or cultural foundations (smith, 1986). however, in these two popular bodies of scholarship on the nation, women are hidden in the theorizations of the nation and nationalism, even though gender and gender relations function as an integral element in the ways in which the nation is imagined and reproduced 2 the korean government adopted the 1951 refugee convention in 1992 and legislated the refugee act in 2012. however, the acceptance rate of refugees has been remarkably low. in 2018, only 3.7% of refugee claimants were accepted (ministry of justice, 2019). jiyoung lee-an studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 128 (kim & choi, 1998; mcclintock, 1997; yuval-davis, 1997). feminist scholars emphasize the crucial roles played by women as biological, cultural and political reproducers of national identities in shaping the boundary of the nation. emphasizing the gendered aspects of the construction of the nation is integral to examining how female and male marriage migrants are understood differently in korea with respect to reproducing the nation both biologically and culturally. in addition to addressing the gendered aspects of the construction of the nation, critical race scholars emphasize racialized processes of nationbuilding. they examine how the inclusion and exclusion of certain racialized groups both inside the nation and at the nation-state border play a constitutive role in formulating an ideal of the nation (e.g., “white” in western countries) (balibar, 1991; dhamoon & abu-laban, 2009; thobani, 2007). the nationbuilding project is premised on discourses of race and the accompanying exclusion of racialized others; such discourses are an intrinsic feature of nationalism. in particular, the control and regulation of migration plays a key role in the modern state’s nation-building process and contributes to the social, cultural, and symbolic boundary-making of the nation (chung & kim, 2012; li, 2003). determining who is allowed or not allowed to enter destination countries is the question that defines the population along the un/desirability divide. paying attention to the un/desirability divide based on diverse intersections of social relations, this paper uses an intersectionality lens both as a theoretical approach and a method of analysis to examine structural inequalities that marriage migrants face in korea (choo & ferree, 2010). an intersectional lens is utilized to analyze both the “system-level complexity” of social inequalities and microlevel experiences of marriage migrants, in order to examine “the connections among power relations, institutional contexts and lived experience” (choo & ferree, 2010, p. 136). adopting an intersectionality framework by no means suggests that the axes of race, gender, class and other types of power relations are weighted equally for all social groups and social issues. instead of examining the different axes of social relations separately or simply treating them as additive or cumulative categories, i focus on their relationality and simultaneity in order to unravel the complex configuration of those relations (choo & ferree, 2010; crenshaw, 1989; stasiulis, 1999; yuval-davis, 2006). i see such relations as being socially constructed and continuously shaped by different social forces, practices, contexts, and histories. critical security studies: racialized and gendered construction of security threats to the nation in order to understand how discourses of fraudulent marriage operate as a discursive tool to regulate marriage migration, i draw upon critical security un/desirability of marriage migrants in south korea studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 129 studies, which focus on the political and social processes whereby migrants are constructed as threats to destination countries (bigo, 2002; buzan, wæver, & de wilde, 1998). i adopt security not as a noun that describes certain conditions of imminent threats, but a verb (“securitization”) that captures the processes of transforming other issues into ones of security (nyers, 2009, p. 3). securitization is conducted through the double movement of security: while acts of security aim to provide protection from danger, acts of security themselves also “encourage fear, foster apprehension, and feed off of nervousness in the population” (nyers, 2009, p. 3). the nexus of migration and security has intensified since 9/11: in particular, the racialized discourse on arabs and muslims creates a climate of suspicion, intimidation and fear in immigration destination countries (arat-koc, 2006, p. 220). discourses representing migrants as threats to the host society have become an important source for mobilizing security rhetoric and institutions. as dhamoon (2010, p. 257) argues, security is not a primary threat, but “a discourse of meaningmaking” with respect to the nation and belonging. criminalization is an essential part of securitization discourses. the criminalization of migrants transforms unwanted migrants into “deviants” who must be controlled and regulated (vezovnik, 2018). rather than being treated as individuals, undesirable migrants are grouped as potential criminals and security threats who need to be managed collectively (bosworth & guild, 2008). criminalization works to “vindicate the restriction of transnational mobility” (bosworth & guild, 2008, p. 707-8). by constructing migrants as potential criminals and security threats, punitive measures are easily implemented. it was not a coincidence that fraudulent marriage came to be the object of the securitization of migration in many destination countries (bhuyan, korteweg, & baqi, 2018; d’aoust, 2014; gaucher, 2014): fraudulent marriage is stipulated as a venue for “unqualified” immigrants to enter destination countries. certain gendered and racialized marriage migrants are grouped and portrayed as potential criminals, rather than individual marriage fraudsters. in the south korean context, given the history of military tensions with north korea since the korean war (1950-1953), traditional geopolitical and military issues have been at the forefront of security concerns (s.-w. lee, 2017). only with the increase in migrant populations since the 1990s has the securitization discourse relative to migration become widespread. securitization discourses centre mainly on temporary migrant workers, who are portrayed as potential threats to the economic, public and national security of korean society or as potential criminals who threaten the safety of koreans and create social unease (s.-k. kim 2015; s.-w. lee 2017). in addition, migrant workers’ different religions and cultures, in particular, muslim migrant workers, are considered a source of cultural and religious conflicts, which threatens the cultural security of korean society (s.-w. lee, 2017). the remark of conservative congress member yong-kyun kim demonstrates jiyoung lee-an studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 130 how the increase of migrant workers is discursively translated as a security threat in korea. he stated, if migrants exercise their collective right, endanger public security, or disturb social order, social turmoil would take place … if the number of migrant workers exceeds the number of korean soldiers and if they exercise their collective power, … it would be more chaotic than we imagine. (legislation & judiciary committee, 2003, p. 5, my translation) by unfavourably comparing migrant workers to korean soldiers, he interprets the increasing numbers of migrant workers as a security threat to korea. the securitization of male migrant workers is expanded to those who marry korean women and settle down in korea. compared to female marriage migrants, male marriage migrants, in particular, those from muslim countries (who come to korea as temporary migrant workers and marry korean women), have been the main target of securitization discourses. the securitization of marriage migration entails strong governmental intervention in border controls including the scrutiny of marriage migrants’ intimate relations with their korean spouses. methodology this research is based on a qualitative methodological research design devised as part of my phd research including critical discourse analysis and in-depth semi-structured interviews (an, 2019). critical discourse analysis is an analytical methodology to investigate language in relation to social relations of dominance and power (wodak, 2001). critical discourse analysis in public policy is particularly important because discourse is used by political actors “as a vehicle to harness power and assert their ideology over others while at the same time jousting with other competing discourses” (bhuyan, korteweg, & baqi, 2018, p. 351). i reviewed a variety of government-published texts, which address the issue of fraudulent marriage, and collected government policy documents that had mentioned fraudulent marriage from relevant ministries’ websites. in addition, i reviewed newspaper articles that mentioned policy changes related to marriage migration. i primarily used the comprehensive newspaper database of korea, kinds (http://www.kinds.or.kr/) with the keyword fraudulent marriage between 1990 and 2015. in order to grasp the grounded experiences of marriage migrants and their spouses and partners, who are often suspected of fraudulent marriage, as well as to hear the perspectives of state and non-state actors including visa officers, marriage brokers, migrant rights advocates, and anti-fraudulent marriage campaigners, i conducted 22 in-depth semi-structured, open-ended qualitative interviews in korea and vietnam from july to october 2014 and from may to august 2015. interviews were conducted in the korean language with the un/desirability of marriage migrants in south korea studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 131 exception of one interview with a chinese immigrant to korea who required an interpreter. i took on the responsibility of translating korean transcripts into english. in order to protect the confidentiality of interview participants, i use pseudonyms throughout. an overview of marriage migration in korea the current form of marriage migration in korea began as an initiative of local governments in rural areas in the early 1990s. confronting the social problems related to the dearth of eligible wives for aging bachelors and depopulation in rural areas, local governments and related agricultural associations assisted in arranging international marriages between elderly korean bachelors and chinese women of korean-descent by providing funding (h.-k. lee, 2008). most notably, as the marriage broker business became liberalized in 1998, commercial marriage brokers (who already anticipated profits in the international marriage market through arranging marriages between korean men and chinese women of korean-descent) rapidly jumped in and expanded the business. in particular, they arranged international marriages between korean men and women from neighbouring countries such as vietnam, the philippines, cambodia, and mongolia (goh, kim, soh, kim, & kim, 2005). the total number of marriage migrants was 3,992 between 1990 and 1994, however, this number has rapidly increased since the mid-1990s (ministry of health, welfare & family affairs, 2010). as of 2016, the total accumulative number of marriage migrants was 317,118 (korean statistical information service, 2017). the phenomenon of marriage migration is strongly gendered. between 2007 and 2016, female marriage migrants comprised about 85%-87% of marriage migrants (danuri, 2016). among female marriage migrants, including those who attained korean citizenship, korean-chinese female marriage migrants comprise the largest number, representing 31% of the total, with vietnamese and chinese female marriage migrants following at 25% and 21% respectively (korean statistical information service, 2017). other groups of marriage migrants include filipino (7%), japanese (4%), and cambodian women (3%) (korean statistical information service, 2017). in the case of male marriage migrants, korean-chinese male marriage migrants comprise the largest number of marriage migrants, representing 50% of the total, with chinese men, american men and taiwanese men following at 20%, 7% and 4 % respectively of the total male marriage migrants (korean statistical information service, 2017). among the population of male marriage migrants, pakistanis have received a considerable amount of negative attention from the korean government and public as suspected of fraudulent marriage, even though their marriages represented less than three percent of the total population of male marriage migrants as of 2016 (korean statistical information center, 2017). jiyoung lee-an studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 132 unpacking fraudulent marriage discourses “run-away” joseonjok 3 women versus “never run-away” vietnamese female migrants the fraudulent marriage discourse first came to the attention of the korean public in the mid-1990s, in relation to joseonjok women who began to marry older korean bachelors in rural parts of the country (h.-k. lee, 2008). joseonjok women were the first choice of local governments in rural areas. under the strong myth of ethnic homogeneity and korean bloodline, these women were initially considered to be part of the same ethnic group as korean nationals rather than foreign marriage migrants. local governments used a rhetoric of “reunifying nations” to encourage international marriages between korean bachelors and joseonjok women (freeman, 2011, p. 44). this marital union was considered to strengthen the long-standing myth of ethnic homogeneity of the korean nation (h.-k. lee, 2005). joseonjok were initially celebrated in mass media as innocent, sacrificing, young women who left china to escape poverty and support their family (freeman, 2011). they were described as women who would willingly marry rural korean farmers and form a family, in contrast to korean women who “betrayed their ancestral roots and deserted their male counterparts” to go to urban cities (freeman, 2011, p. 41). behind these comparisons, there were essentializing virtues, “particularly traditional feminine virtues of chastity, purity, and obedience” imposed on these women (42). however, the positive image of innocent, sacrificing joseonjok women did not last long. as different cases of fraudulent marriage began to be reported in the media, these women were soon nicknamed “runaway brides,” and their innocent image quickly faded away: in mass media, joseonjok women were equated with marriage fraudsters, and portrayed as “cold-blooded opportunists” who deceived and left their korean husbands while korean men were described as the ones devastated by their wives’ betrayal (h.-k. lee, 2005, p. 100; mbc news, 1997; park, 1993). these fraudulent marriage discourses served as an official justification for the korean government to change the nationality act in 1997, which created a new two-year wait period for marriage migrants to apply for korean citizenship (nationality act, 1998). as the fraudulent marriage discourse centered on joseonjok women, female marriage migrants from other asian countries (such as vietnam, the philippines, and cambodia) began to emerge as alternatives to joseonjok women. widespread discourses of fraudulent marriage focusing on koreandescent chinese women served to legitimize the influx of non-korean descent 3 while other overseas koreans are referred to as korean-descent americans or korean-descent japanese, korean-descent chinese are given the specific term, joseonjok, which carries socially discriminatory undertones. at the risk of reproducing the derogatory meanings associated with the term joseonjok, i use it here to emphasize the particular discrimination directed towards korean-descent chinese women with respect to discourses of fraudulent marriage. un/desirability of marriage migrants in south korea studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 133 female marriage migrants from developing countries. most of all, the rapid increase of commercialized marriage brokers after 1998 made it possible to explore “new” markets for international marriage. while joseonjok women are presumed to run away more frequently because they have language resources and cultural affinities that may provide better options for them not to be dependent on korean families, women from other sending countries who did not have the korean language skills and cultural background were depicted by marriage brokers as vulnerable and therefore, presumed to run away less. the most prevalent and problematic catchphrase for vietnamese marriage migrants, which increased their “desirability” among potential fearful korean husbands, was that “vietnamese marriage migrants do not run away” (yim, 2006). beginning in the early 2000s, this message quickly spread across the country. feminist activists and vietnamese students (who were studying in korea at that time) actively mobilized public actions to criticize the commercialized nature of marriage brokerages which commodified women as an exchangeable commodity, and the gendered and racialized stereotyping embedded in the matchmaking process (goh et al., 2005; h.-m. kim, 2006). as a result, the marriage brokers business management act was legislated in 2007 in order to prevent discriminatory practices involved in international marriage processes (marriage brokers business management act, 2007). while i acknowledge these problems of the commercialization of vietnamese marriage migrants and discriminatory practices embedded in international marriage processes, this paper focuses more on examining the discursive constitution of vulnerable female vietnamese marriage migrants as a desirable group who serves the interest of a demographically-challenged korean state and potential korean husbands. i also note that this discursive construction of vietnamese marriage migrants as a desirable group is in stark contrast to the discursive construction of nonchildbearing marriage migrants and pakistani male migrants as undesirable groups as examined below. female marriage migrants’ desirability is constructed from gendered and racialized stereotyping processes that treat these women as traditional, docile and vulnerable, and therefore desirable marriage partners. such stereotyping has also affected the choice of foreign wives among korean men. according to a survey commissioned by the ministry of health and welfare in 2005, korean husbands stated that “the most important reason for choosing vietnamese and filipino wives is because they deem them to be more submissive, obedient to their parents, and [more] traditional than other nationalities” (h.-k. lee, 2007, pp. 24-25 cited in freeman, 2011, p. 49). the gendered and racialized stereotyping of vietnamese women as docile, feminine, traditional, and family care takers is still currently prevalent on many international marriage brokers’ websites, which advertise the advantages of marrying vietnamese women (vietnam international marriage, n.d.; wedding club, n.d.). jiyoung lee-an studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 134 age is another factor in the construction of desirability of marriage migrants from developing countries. younger (implying childbearing) age is considered a desirable characteristic in female marriage migrants from developing countries, who are expected to serve the demographic and patriarchal interests of the korean state. younger female marriage migrants from developing countries are expected to be matched with older korean men. according to the 2009 national study of multicultural families, about 88.9 % of female vietnamese marriage migrants were under 29 years of age and the average age difference between them and their korean husbands was 17 years (ministry of health, welfare & family affairs, 2010). the racialized hierarchies of countries of origin, and accompanying racism, 4 create a discursive justification for international marriage between younger foreign women (who are deemed not to have many economic alternatives other than marriage) and older korean men. younger marriage migrants from developing countries are considered ideal immigrants for their potential of being reproducers of the korean family and nation. the desirability of female marriage migrants, originating from the intersection of gender, age and race, is presumed through the much smoother spousal marriage migration process. the remarks of min, a korean immigration officer, reflect on the korean government’s relatively “lenient” attitude towards marriage migrant women from developing countries (personal communication, july 21, 2015). he showed a favourable attitude to the current form of international marriage, saying that it is similar to the traditional form of arranged marriage. i do not think their intention is not genuine because they got married within a day or two after meeting. it might sound a bit old-fashioned, but, until the early 1900 in joseon dynasty, our parents just got married with someone arranged by their family and lived well. nowadays, they at least arrange a meeting before they decide to get married. even though it’s too short, but they still meet a few people and compare them. of course, some might fall in love with each other at first sight, or they love after meeting only a few times. … nowadays, korean men themselves visit women’s family and meet their parents. if they say those things, i see that they are genuine about getting married. (min, personal communication, july 21, 2015) the way min evaluates the real intention of a marriage is to confirm whether the family members of each spouse are aware of the marriage and whether all relevant information has been provided to each spouse based on 4 the lower economic status of the countries of origin in the global economic hierarchy has a racial connotation in korea that differs from countries that were colonized by western european powers, or from white-settler colonial societies. korea was colonized by japan, a non-western, neighbouring asian country, for 36 years between 1910 and 1945. j.-i. lee (2011) traces the formation of racial prejudice in korea, and identifies the economic prosperity achieved in korea over the last 60 years through a rapid process of industrialization as an important cause of racism and racial prejudice against nationals from developing countries. un/desirability of marriage migrants in south korea studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 135 factual documentation. he does not seem to expect intimate or personalized narratives of “love” in their application, which is somewhat different from the expectations placed on pakistani marriage migrants as examined below. in sum, the binary discourses around korean-descent chinese women and vietnamese women demonstrate that korean ethnic nationalism has deployed specific intersections of gender, race, and age in novel ways. they illustrate an unexpected flexibility in the value allocated to specific gendered migrant subjects where, on the face of it, a tradition of “blood purity” embedded in ethnic nationalism takes a back seat to fulfilment of the state’s role of reproducing the korean nation. the patriarchal control of female marriage migrants makes it possible for non-korean bodies to reproduce and perpetuate korean ethnic nationhood. however, the discursive construction of desirability of marriage migrant women is fragile in the event that they do not fulfil the nationalist goals of reproducing the patrilineal korean nation as demonstrated in the case of older and non-childbearing marriage migrants below. also, the discursive construction of desirability does not guarantee any better treatment of marriage migrants in korean society itself: many female marriage migrants face domestic violence and diverse forms of discrimination and stigma in their daily lives (ministry of gender equality & family, 2016b). “older” and “non-childbearing” female marriage migrants the second discourse i examine relates to older and non-childbearing female marriage migrants. the lenient approach to younger female marriage migrants by the korean visa officer mentioned above is not extended to older female marriage migrants beyond child-bearing age. non-childbearing female marriage migrants (who, in many cases, are entering into their second marriage) are subject to more scrutiny as potential fraudulent marriage migrants when applying for a spousal visa and later acquiring korean citizenship. this discourse repeatedly came up in my interviews with different marriage migrants and korean migrant justice activists as one of the most suspicious targets of fraudulent marriage by the korean government. zhang (a marriage migrant from china and the head of a local marriage migrant support organization) and her organization support female marriage migrants who are suspected of fraudulent marriage and have difficulty proving that their relationships are genuine. she believes that unless marriage migrant women prove the sincerity of the relationship by producing the 2nd generation of korean nation, they are under suspicion of fraudulent marriage throughout their application for visa extension and korean citizenship (personal communication, september 4, 2014). zhang said: what is on earth the sincere intention of marriage? in korea, it means only delivering a baby. … if you do not have a baby, after one year and two years, nobody knows… you should have babies to show your sincere intention of the marriage (zhang, personal communication, september 4, 2014). jiyoung lee-an studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 136 older female marriage migrants who do not have a child are constructed as undesirable, because they do not serve the demographic imperative behind the korean state’s spousal immigration policies. another interviewee, xuan, shares a similar story (personal communication, august 28, 2015). xuan first came to korea in 2007 to visit her 20-year-old daughter, who got married to a korean man and became pregnant. while xuan was staying in korea visiting her daughter, her daughter’s mother-in-law introduced her to a korean man with a physical disability, and they soon decided to get married. she went back to china and applied for her spousal visa. compared to her daughter’s process, which was done smoothly, xuan’s visa process was much more difficult at every step, as she was asked for additional documents and interviews to prove the relationship. the suspicion of fraudulent marriage by korean immigration officers finally thwarted her plan to acquire korean citizenship. after she passed a written naturalization test and did an interview, she and her husband were called in for a second interview, which was rare for most applicants. they were separated into two rooms, and got interviewed separately about their marital relationship, including their intimate sexual relationship. xuan said that she felt like she was a criminal in a prison. the atmosphere created anxieties for her and her korean husband. she felt that her husband was not cooperating enough because he was shamed by the process, and she thought he was humiliated due to his disability. in the end, after going through intrusive personal questions with suspicion of fraudulent marriage, her application for korean citizenship was declined on the grounds of not fulfilling economic self-sufficiency. the korean nationality act requires marriage migrants to prove their basic economic abilities by bank balance, lease contract or estate registry equivalent to more than krw 30 million or with a certificate for employment, or a copy of business registration certificate (hi korea: e-government for foreigners, 2016). this condition gives immigration officers much discretionary power as they consider the diverse economic life contexts that marriage migrants face. neither xuan nor her husband was regularly employed. she worked irregularly for a factory, and her husband worked for a junk shop. however, they owned a freight car worth krw 30 million and some land, and they provided a record which showed regular payments of private medical insurance equivalent to krw 500,000. the immigration officer was not “lenient” on them. xuan’s relatively older age (40-year old at the time of applying for korean citizenship), her economic status, and presumably her husband’s disability together provided immigration officers with grounds for suspicion of a fraudulent marriage. her “real” dedication to the marriage – working for a living and taking care of her disabled husband – were not appreciated. without korean citizenship, xuan became further marginalized and faced institutional discrimination imposed on foreigners. after her citizenship application was denied, xuan continued to appeal her case. she collected neighbours’ signatures that recognized her dedication to the marriage and un/desirability of marriage migrants in south korea studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 137 hard work to support the family, and submitted them to the immigration office even though the prospect that the decision would be rescinded seemed very remote. xuan’s case indicates how characteristics that are understood to be undesirable in marriage migrants – such as an older age – are easily translated into the language of fraudulent marriage, leading these migrants to face further bureaucratic barriers. by being denied korean citizenship, migrants are pressured to remain at the margins of society, without full rights. when i shared xuan’s story with hyunjoo, the head of a local migrant support organization, she also emphasized the importance of having a child in order to not be suspected of fraudulent marriage (hyunjoo, personal communication, september 15, 2015). she learned through her support work experience that “having a child or not is a basis of checking the sincerity of the relationship for the government.” these anecdotes are consistent with the remarks of an immigration officer cited in h.-m. kim’s (2011, p. 9) research: a child means it’s not a fake marriage. if their marriage is real, it also goes to show how well the woman has adapted to the korean lifestyle. in that case, she can receive korean citizenship within a year. kim’s (2011) research demonstrates that the citizenship applications of marriage migrants who do not have a child are easily put on indefinite hold even in the case that these women fulfil all the requirements for citizenship. the immigration officer’s remarks establish the intersection of gender and reproductive age in constructing the un/desirability of marriage migrants. when marriage migrants serve the government’s purpose of reproducing the patrilineal korean nation, they can easily escape suspicion of fraudulent marriage. fraudulent marriage discourses centre on marriage migrants who are older and who do not perform gendered roles as biological reproducers of the korean nation. “dangerous” pakistani male migrants while older and non-childbearing female marriage migrants stand on one side of the spectrum of undesirable marriage migrants, pakistani male marriage migrants, the majority of whom come to korea as low-skilled migrant workers and marry korean women, are positioned on another spectrum of undesirability. they are constructed as undesirable marriage migrants and stereotyped as potential security threats through an intersection of race, gender and class vis à vis the process of gendered and racialized boundarymaking of the korean nation. fraudulent marriage discourses around pakistani male marriage migrants have been disseminated by the korean government. in july 2003, the korean embassy in pakistan posted an announcement titled “be careful of fraudulent marriages” (embassy of the republic of korea to the islamic republic of pakistan, 2003). this announcement demonized pakistani men as jiyoung lee-an studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 138 intentionally approaching korean women for the purposes of fraudulent marriage. pakistani men were described as men of a foreign appearance who approached korean women with “poor english skills” and who “fabricated their marriage documents to deceive korean women.” as of this writing, a similar warning remains on the ministry of foreign affairs’ webpage, which provides basic information about each country to the general public under “a safe trip to foreign countries” section (ministry of foreign affairs, n.d.). this page warns of fraudulent marriage as an example of the type of risk that korean people may face in pakistan, and portrays korean women as potential victims, who are “deceived” and even “locked up” by their pakistani husbands. the terms used in the announcement such as “remaining illegally,” “deceiving,” and “locking up” all denote a discourse of criminalization and securitization targeting pakistani men: pakistani men are constructed both as “illegally staying criminals” (i.e., social threats to public order) and as posing a threat to the safety of korean women. the spread of fraudulent marriage discourses about pakistani male migrant workers demonstrates cultural racism against muslims, mainly with respect to polygamy, and reflects the global trend of criminalizing “illegal” migrants and racializing muslims as a security threat, particularly since 9/11 (arat-koc, 2006; thobani, 2014). none of the pages providing information about other countries on the ministry of foreign affairs website reports fraudulent marriage as a potential risk for korean people. both the announcement of the korean embassy in pakistan and the ministry of foreign affairs’ webpage warning feed into discourses of fraudulent marriage associated with pakistani men, and accentuate the connection between securitization and criminalization by linking pakistani men’s “illegal overstaying” with a supposed propensity to become marriage fraudsters. the discourse of fraudulent marriage associated with pakistani men shapes the experiences of pakistani male marriage migrants and their korean spouses during the process of immigration, and at the later stages of acquiring korean citizenship. throughout these processes they face suspicion surrounding their marriage, and often encounter arbitrary screening and suspicion. for example, hyojin, and her pakistani husband, ahmad, got married in 2008, and he received a spousal visa without much trouble. however, when they wanted to renew ahmad’s spousal visa in 2011, they were suddenly asked to prove that ahmad had not engaged in polygamy in pakistan, because he was accused by a visa officer of having a wife and children in pakistan according to “rumor.” they had to stop their business and go to pakistan to acquire proper documents. although these difficulties caused her and her husband to panic, they were not surprised because they very often faced diverse forms of racism in their everyday lives. hyojin points out the prevalent discriminatory attitudes of korean immigration officers toward pakistani male migrants as follows: un/desirability of marriage migrants in south korea studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 139 they [immigration officers] don’t do this to american or british men. if an american man says something with their arrogant gesture, they can get everything easily. for our case, they [immigration officers] continuously ask for more documents. (hyojin, personal communication, sept. 16, 2014) when hyojin refers to american or british men, she means “white” men who are treated differently in korean society given the colour of their skin and the power of their western passports. the racialization of migrants from developing asian countries takes place on a continuum, where “white” migrants from western countries are considered most desirable (s.-b. ha, 2012). discriminatory attitudes towards pakistani male marriage migrants demonstrate the intersection of race and class that pakistani male marriage migrants embody. such migrants face hostility not only as low-skilled migrant workers, but also as pakistani nationals because pakistan as a country is located on a lower rung of the global economy. hussain is a pakistani man who was married to a korean woman for 14 years before divorcing her, and subsequently marrying a pakistani woman. he expressed his frustration that pakistani migrants are accused of being marriage fraudsters (hussain, personal communication, august 13, 2015). he has worked as a translator for an immigration lawyer whose main customers are pakistani migrant workers who marry korean women. he felt that every marriage between korean women and pakistani men was subject to a meticulous screening process based on the suspicion of fraudulent marriage. “why are we treated like a thief without stealing anything?,” he spoke with great frustration. his remark reveals the devastating impact of the fraudulent marriage discourse, which is the outcome of ideological interests, rather than originating from empirical evidence. chayoung and her pakistani husband, noor, offer a similar story of surveillance and suspicion in the process of acquiring citizenship (chayoung, personal communication, october 10, 2014; noor, personal communication, august 10, 2015). after fulfilling the two-year marital status requirement for simplified naturalization for marriage migrants, noor decided to apply for korean citizenship. his application was rejected twice. at the end of his first citizenship interview, the interviewer told him that he did not “sing” the korean national anthem “sincerely” and said, “be prepared and see you in 6 months.” given there seemed to be no other reason to fail, he believed that singing the korean anthem poorly was the reason why he failed to acquire the korean citizenship. for his second try a year later, he worked at perfecting his singing of the anthem. he received help from his korean wife and a korean social worker in a nearby immigrant support center. in his second interview he did not get a chance to sing the anthem. during this interview he was asked whether he had a car. he believes that his citizenship was denied a second time because of a fine he had paid for illegally driving his car with a pakistani driver’s license. without any other means of knowing the official reason for refusing his application, he believed that it was the sole reason he was denied citizenship. he thus decided not to apply again for the time being jiyoung lee-an studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 140 because he did not know how to solve the issue. at the same time, he took his failure in stride because he believed that all pakistani men around him failed the naturalization test at least once based on his knowledge of other pakistani friends’ cases. he internalized the unfair nature of the racialized process in immigration as a part of being a pakistani man in korea where racism against pakistani men is prevalent. experiencing structural discrimination against their marriage and being faced with demonized images of fraudulent marriage led some marriage migrants and their korean spouses strategically to use the concept of “romantic love” during the immigration process as a way to prove the legitimacy of their relationship. these couples think that exceptional stories of love can constitute a legitimate rationale to replace undesirable images and conditions with which pakistani male migrants are associated, even though pakistani men sometimes face cultural dilemmas when they process their spousal applications. hussain says, “as a pakistani man, we do not have a culture of dating before marriage” (personal communication, august 13, 2015). ironically, the strategy employed by pakistani men and their korean spouses to legitimize their relationship is to emphasize their romantic love towards korean women, a strategy which may contravene what they called “traditional” pakistani cultural norms. their narratives about their relationship are negotiated and readjusted in order to increase their chances to successfully process their spousal application. this strategy places male pakistani marriage migrants in stark contrast to most female marriage migrants who are not expected to prove their romantic love to offset presumed economic interests behind the marriage. chayoung, hyojin, and sunhee, who all married pakistani men, emphasized how much their marriages are based on romantic love. all three of these korean women met their husbands on the street, and emphasized the “destiny” of their encounter, saying that they fell in love at first sight. these stories function as a means to offset the presumed economic motivations of pakistani male marriage. while the presumed economic motivations of female marriage migrants through marriage are taken for granted, thereby offsetting big age differences, the economic motivations of male marriage migrants conversely become a signal of fraudulent marriage. sunhee problematizes the suspicion cast on their marriage and argues that such suspicions are discriminatory (personal communication, august 27, 2014). she questions why south asian men are more closely scrutinized by the korean government: suspicious eyes are cast on those of us who got married through “love marriage” more so than on marriage migrant women who married through commercial brokers. the frame of fraudulent marriage is imposed on men from south asia, pakistan, bangladesh, etc. and they analyze our story with distorted perspective. (sunhee, personal communication, august 27, 2014). sunhee is aware that her romantically-framed relationship with her husband was partly motivated by his desire to marry a korean woman and reside in un/desirability of marriage migrants in south korea studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 141 korea, but also feels that they have a loving marriage. she argues that the way to reduce fraudulent marriage is for the korean government to open its doors to migrant workers and to allow them to bring their family members, rather than being suspicious of couples who are engaged in “real” marriages, thereby reinforcing a social stigma surrounding marriages between korean women and pakistani men. sunhee criticizes the construction of fraudulent marriage discourses that is tied to structural dissuasion of male marriage migrants through the restrictive immigration policy. as sunhee remarks, fraudulent marriage discourses are tied to the institutional motivations of korean immigration policies that construct male migrant workers from developing countries as undesirable immigrants. for low-skilled temporary migrant workers, who are institutionally discouraged from applying for korean citizenship through the rotation principle, marriage with a korean woman becomes the only institutional tool for them to permanently stay in korea. given the discrepancy between the demand of low-skilled migrant workers to acquire korean citizenship and the actual availability of opportunities to do so, restrictive immigration policies that block low-skilled migrant workers from being permanent immigrants have become a source of discourses of fraudulent marriage to regulate the flows of undesirable marriage migration. conclusion in this paper, i examined how the desirability and undesirability of marriage migrants are constructed along the varying and intersecting axes of gender, age, race, and class, and how discourses of fraudulent marriage manifest the gendered and racialized interests of the korean state. the demographic and patriarchal interests of the korean state result in the encouragement of younger female marriage migrants from developing countries, whereas older and non-childbearing female marriage migrants and muslim male marriage migrants from developing countries are constructed as undesirable. discourses of fraudulent marriage work as a tool to regulate flows of marriage migration and serve to reinforce racialized and gendered boundarymaking of the korean nation. in the face of discourses of fraudulent marriage, marriage migrants and their korean spouses utilize diverse strategies to demonstrate their genuine relationships including collecting neighbors’ signatures and emphasizing romantic love narratives as a strategy to avoid fraudulent marriage charges. the discriminatory distinctions drawn among differentially racialized and gendered marriage migrants raise significant social justice concerns and require major changes in korean immigration and migration policies. to rectify injustices imposed on them, it is necessary to implement more open and inclusive immigration policies towards marriage migrants and migrant workers. i suggest opening up labour markets completely to both male and jiyoung lee-an studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 125-145, 2020 142 female migrants alongside guaranteeing their family reunification rights and providing them with a feasible path to acquiring korean citizenship. these policies would provide temporary migrant workers with a pathway to permanent immigrant status. in addition, an increase in the currently low refugee acceptance would assist in solving the low-birth rate problems that korean society faces. these polices could reduce the potential for the stigmatization surrounding fraudulent marriage by making it possible for marriage to remain a choice between two individuals, rather than being the only potential means for a migrant to enter korea. acknowledgements i would like to thank my research participants who shared their time, energy and stories. i would also like to thank three guest editors, daiva stasiulis, blair rutherford, and zaheera jinnah, and editor-in-chief, david butz. lastly, i am very grateful for the insightful comments and suggestions provided by daiva stasiulis, palak dhiman and two anonymous reviewers. references an, j.-y. 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(2006). intersectionality and feminist politics. european journal of women's studies. 13(3), 193-209. hurl & klostermann final feb 21 20 correspondence address: janna klostermann, department of sociology & anthropology, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: jannaklostermann@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 remembering george w. smith’s “life work”: from politico-administrative regimes to living otherwise chris hurl1 concordia university, canada janna klostermann carleton university, canada abstract this article revisits activist ethnographer george w. smith’s intellectual and political legacy, with a focus on his engagement with and conception of “life work.” in the context of the aids crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, smith contributed to reframing the way in which aids was problematized and confronted. rather than treating people living with hiv/aids as “disease vectors” to be isolated from the general population, as had been the case under the prevailing public health regime, he started his research and organizing from the standpoint of people living with hiv/aids – investigating the everyday work that they did in accessing the services that they needed in order to survive. drawing from archival research, activist interviews and his published works, this article traces how smith deployed the concept of life work in his research as part of the “hooking up” project, in his public writing in the gay and lesbian press, and in his organizing with aids action now! in toronto. beyond the reproductive labour of individuals in accessing particular politico-administrative regimes, which smith focused on in his research, we explore how life work can be theorized more broadly to include collective efforts to confront social, biomedical and institutional barriers to living. hence, in considering smith’s aids activism, we argue that his theorizing and political organizing, taken together, should themselves be seen as forms of life work. keywords activism; knowledge; life work; political activist ethnography; sociology 1 both authors contributed equally to this paper. remembering george w. smith’s “life work” studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 263 introduction political activist george w. smith was a novel social theorist who contributed to the growing focus in canadian sociology on embodied and social justice driven research through the 1980s and 1990s (d. e. smith, 2005; frampton, kinsman, thompson & tilleczek, 2006). creatively blending ethnographic research with his activism in movements challenging the police repression of gay men and demanding support and treatment for people living with hiv/aids, he is often credited with founding political activist ethnography as a distinctive strand of institutional ethnography that takes a movement-embedded approach, beginning from the standpoint of people on the ground to uncover and collectively transform how everyday ruling relations are socially organized (hussey, 2012; mykhalovskiy & church, 2006). his contributions have laid the groundwork for activistresearchers working within and alongside social movements in generating knowledge that galvanizes social change. as smith’s long-time partner and collaborator sean hosein (2014, p. 14) put it, his work was “like fire from the gods” insofar as it helped to develop and refine social movement strategies, directing social research to the challenges faced in struggles and drawing from struggles in generating movement-relevant knowledge. there is a growing body of literature recognizing smith’s political, theoretical and methodological insights and exploring how his ideas can be deployed in social struggles (bisaillon, 2012; choudry, 2015; hussey, 2012; smith, 2006; teghtsoonian, 2016). while aspects of his biography have been periodically touched upon (for instance, see mykhalovskiy & church, 2006), there has not yet been a study that comprehensively investigates how smith’s ideas were embedded in his day-to-day work as a social activist. this article builds on existing literature by exploring the contributions of smith as an aids activist through the late-1980s until his death from an aids relatedillness in 1994. drawing from his conception of “life work,” we look at how smith fused together research, social movement organizing and public interventions with the aim of systematically identifying and confronting institutional barriers to treatment, challenging government inaction, and extending the capacities of people to live with hiv and aids. we begin by exploring how smith developed the concept in his efforts to reframe aids as a problem through his research with eric mykhalovskiy as part of the “hooking up” project. making what he referred to as an “ontological shift,” smith (1990) argued that social movement approaches to aids were hampered to the extent that they were motivated by “speculative” understandings that attributed “agency to concepts such as ‘homophobia’ or … ‘red tape’” (p. 634). rather than targeting misguided attitudes or opinions, smith advanced a materialist approach, engaging in interviews and fieldwork to systematically document the institutional barriers facing people living with hiv and aids and preventing them from accessing basic social services. beginning from the everyday work that people do in order to survive, he was chris hurl & janna klostermann studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 264 then able to explicate how this work was coordinated through a politicoadministrative regime that presented various biomedical, social, and institutional barriers, differently encountered based on one’s classed, gendered and racialized social location (mykhalovsky & smith, 1994). in shifting focus to the work that people do in accessing treatment, we argue that smith was able to reframe aids, from a biomedical status possessed by individuals, to a politico-administrative problem to be confronted through direct action and collective mobilizations. however, beyond focusing on the work of individuals, we argue that the concept of life work can be expanded to also include the work that smith himself did in collaboration with other social activists to uncover and confront the institutional barriers to living with hiv/aids. in this sense, we argue that life work involves not only the actual everyday work of individuals living with hiv/aids under a particular politico-administrative regime, but also the work of generating collective capacities to live differently. to illustrate this, we explore how smith worked to expose and confront the institutional barriers to living with hiv/aids through public interventions. this involved regularly publishing his diaries in the gay and lesbian press, which not only shed light on everyday challenges of living with aids, but also contributed to changing the public register through which aids was understood and talked about. finally, we look at how smith drew from his research and publishing in developing strategies to collectively confront government inaction and get access to new treatments. as a founding member of aids action now! (aan!),2 a toronto-based direct-action group influenced by the politics of the aids coalition to unleash power (act-up), smith merged ethnographic investigations with direct action in radically extending capacities to live with hiv and aids. centrally premised on what he described as “documents and demonstrations,” his strategic orientation involved both drawing from research to identify institutional barriers that could be targeted through direct action, and using political interventions to gain more knowledge about the politico-administrative regime through which treatments were brokered. in this sense, life work – the work of people getting access to what they need in order to survive – was also enabled through collective mobilizations. as the aan! slogan goes: “action=life.” our analysis draws on empirical material from our previous work with the aids activist history project, a research project exploring the history of 2 aan! is a toronto-based community group well-known for transforming the social organization of aids treatment in ontario. aan! successfully advocated for reworking (and releasing hiv treatments through) the emergency drug release program, a program centered on releasing drugs on compassionate grounds, and for introducing ontario’s trillium drug program, a program providing funding for drugs in catastrophic situations that continues to operate today (shotwell, 2016). aan! was also involved in opposing calls for quarantine legislation and advocating for the aids treatment registry and the national aids strategy. remembering george w. smith’s “life work” studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 265 aids activism in the canadian context. spearheaded by alexis shotwell and gary kinsman, the project has been archiving and exploring the experiences of social movement activists who participated in aids activism in canada between the late 1980s and mid-1990s. drawing on oral history interviews conducted by shotwell and kinsman, on smith’s scholarly and popular publications, and on other primary source materials from the canadian lesbian and gay archives and from the aids activist history project collection, we examine how smith’s notion of life work can be taken up in identifying both the everyday challenges of people face in living under a specific politico-administrative regime, as well as well as how capacities to live differently can be generated collaboratively and extra-institutionally through struggle. putting life work in perspective: george w. smith and political activist ethnography smith is often identified as a key figure in the formation of institutional ethnography (ie), as well as political activist ethnography more specifically (frampton et al., 2006; hussey, 2012; mykhalovskiy & church, 2006; d. e. smith, 2005). working as a student and social activist with dorothy e. smith (no relation), he contributed from early on to developing a sociology for people, rather than about them (d. e. smith, 2005). his materialist understanding of social organization was well expressed, not to mention screen-printed, on his unforgettable “i have made the ontological shift” tshirt (mykhalovskiy & church, 2006). rather than taking a bird’s eye view, presuming to explain social practices from above, smith’s (1990) ontological shift was about recognizing himself within the social organization he was seeking to understand – knowing the world from inside its institutions and knowing that people produce their social worlds through their everyday practices and relations. by beginning from the standpoint of people, smith was then able to render existing institutional arrangements problematic, exposing how institutional practices marginalize and negate the everyday experiences of those that they target. smith is often credited with infusing institutional ethnographic methods with social activism, generating a distinctive approach to ie known today as political activist ethnography, which aims to map and transform “the social organization of ruling regimes” through, and in support of, activism (hussey, 2012, p. 2). in the literature, smith’s (1990) notion of politico-administrative regimes has often been taken up in understanding “how ruling is organized and managed by political and administrative forms of organization” (p. 637). the emphasis here is how work across various “institutional sites of regulation and control” is orchestrated (smith, 1990, p. 637). this work is understood as accomplished through “[t]he joining together of the sites of these diverse organizations by various systems of communication, but chris hurl & janna klostermann studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 266 especially through the use of documents” (smith, 1990, p. 637). following d. e. smith (1987), the goal is to examine how lived experiences become codified and articulated beyond the realm of the everyday through the deployment of texts. by mapping out the politico-administrative channels through which ruling relations are coordinated, smith aimed to help orient the work of social movement activists. as kinsman (2014, p. 23) put it, smith’s “theorizing … was related to the questions that were posed by the activism that [he was] involved in.” smith extended ethnographic approaches by using research to inform social organizing, and activism as a form of knowledge production to inform and contribute to empirical investigations. for instance, in his work as part of the right to privacy committee (rtpc) through the early 1980s, defending gay men from police raids on toronto’s public bathhouses, smith (1988a) argued that it was insufficient to simply focus on the homophobic attitudes of individual police officers. rather, the focus should be on how police campaigns against bathhouses and against gay sex were socially organized through the official work of the police department, which were authorized through bawdy house laws and municipal regulations and actively endorsed and implemented across state agencies. by making visible how police interventions were authorized and coordinated across institutional settings, smith supported members of the rtpc in confronting the infrastructure enabling police repression of the gay community. along the way, he also contributed to developing a method through which social scientists could work within social movement organizations to actively transform public institutions. rather than positioning himself as a neutral observer of existing social forms, smith made clear that his active engagement from inside and through constant and collective political confrontation made the politico-administrative regime of which he was a part visible to him, facilitating new forms of critical intervention. while recent literature has focused on how researchers can generate knowledge about politico-administrative regimes through social activism (hussey, 2012; kinsman, 2006), not as much attention has been given to how people generate capacities to live in, against and beyond such regimes. we draw from smith’s concept of life work in exploring his later political and intellectual orientation as an aids activist through the late-1980s until his death from an aids-related illness in 1994. through this time, smith developed the concept of life work as a way of making an ontological shift – reconceptualizing problems of living with hiv/aids and making public and collaborative interventions to actively extend the lives of people living with hiv/aids. aids was organized and imagined as a death sentence. by 1989, more than 2,500 canadians had been diagnosed with aids, and experts estimated that up to 50,000 were infected with hiv, and yet the federal government had done very little (silversides 2003, p. 190). under jake epp, the federal health minister until 1989, the government focused its energies on prioritizing remembering george w. smith’s “life work” studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 267 palliative care for the infected – helping them die and preventative measures for the uninfected. aan! activist renee du plessis (2014, p. 3), who worked alongside smith, recalled that the medical establishment “responded to [a person living with aids] not as a person but as a contamination.” however, very little was being done to help extend the lives of people living with hiv and aids. rayside and lindquist (1992, p. 41) note that epp “was consistently reluctant to even say ‘aids’ out loud, and retained officials, in strategic bureaucratic locations, who adamantly resisted pressure to alter established procedures for responding to the disease.” while government programs, such as the emergency drug release program had the mandate and managerial infrastructure needed to manage the delivery of experimental aids treatments, the government was not actively utilizing them, nor were they actively pursuing clinical trials for new drugs. consequently, people living with aids were often forced to illegally procure drugs from other countries, where they had already been approved (mccaskell, 2016). moreover, services for people living with aids were fractured and, outside of hospitals, not many family doctors or specialists were willing or able to provide treatment. in this context, smith and other activists worked to reframe aids. as shotwell (2016, p. 5) notes, “[c]hanging the social imaginary in which hiv meant aids and aids meant death was necessary to produce the policy, institutional, practical, and medical conditions that would make it possible to live.” this involved multiple forms of aids activism. and, for smith, it centrally involved attending to the complex ways people radically revise and remake their lives and expectations in relation to social life. it was from this starting place that he and other activists shifted, and helped others shift, from seeing aids as a fatal disease to seeing aids as what he called a “chronic manageable infection” (mccaskell, 2006). as we will show, he moved beyond the prevailing public health discourse at the time – which viewed aids as a status possessed by individuals (the aids “victim”) and presumed that death was inevitable – to uncover, confront and transform the multiple biomedical, social, and institutional barriers to living with hiv/aids. rather than beginning by challenging aids stigma, smith started by examining the capacities of people to live with hiv/aids, as a way of understanding and confronting how aids services were coordinated. drawing inspiration from the institutional ethnographic work of dorothy smith, the socialist feminist “wages for housework” movement (dalla costa & james, 1972), and the radical research agenda of act-up, smith advanced an understanding of work that went beyond wage labour, exploring how people must expend time and energy on a day-to-day basis in getting access to the things that they need in order to live. beginning from the standpoint of those seeking access to treatment, and examining their ordinary work, smith was able to uncover through his research numerous biomedical, social and politico-administrative barriers people faced. chris hurl & janna klostermann studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 268 in the following sections, we explore how smith’s efforts to transform the social organization of aids treatment involved engaging with life work – systematically exposing barriers to living with hiv/aids, rendering them problematic, making them public, and organizing concrete material changes for people to live differently. seeking to understand life work as problematic, we start by exploring smith’s community-based research with eric mykhalovskiy as a part of the hooking up project. we then examine how smith made public the day-to-day challenges of living with hiv/aids via his “talking politics” column in rites magazine. from there, we highlight how smith collectively confronted the politico-administrative barriers to treatment through social organizing and direct action. reviving the notion of life work, we then consider how the concept might be extended in understanding the relationship between the individual work that people do under ruling regimes and the collective work that is undertaken by social movements in expanding the capacities to live. hooking up: life work and politico-administrative regimes these kinds of problems of knowing – of being told one thing but in fact knowing otherwise on the basis of personal experience – provided a starting point for the research that went on to explicate how a regime works. (smith, 1990, p. 632) smith’s research involved starting with people’s encounters with social institutions. the work of “starting with” involved listening in, attending to, and beginning from the standpoint of people most affected. it involved learning about people’s embodied, situated experiences, knowledges and doings as a way to understand the problems they were facing (mykhalovskiy, 2014, p. 19). smith (1990) worked with people to identify problems of “knowing otherwise;” problems of being told one thing, but in fact knowing differently on the basis of personal experience. his interest was in how people, when they learn they have contracted hiv or aids, must radically revise their lives and expectations and, thus, are “forced to live differently” (smith, mitchell [mykhalovskiy] & weatherbee, 2006, p. 167). life work, in this sense, refers to all the time, thought and energy that people with hiv/aids put into “the daily living that they depend on.” (p. 168). the notion of life work was developed in the hooking up project, a project conducted by smith and mykhalovskiy, with support from douglas weatherbee who was involved in writing the proposal. starting from the standpoint of people living with hiv/aids, the study investigated the everyday work that people with hiv/aids do to “hook up” with health and social services. the research centered on making visible how people’s life work was coordinated through “institutional course[s] of action over which they have limited control” (smith, mitchell [mykhalovskiy] & weatherbee remembering george w. smith’s “life work” studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 269 2006, p. 177). smith said that it was “a sociology for people living with hiv/aids” (mykhalovskiy & church, 2006, p. 80) – for people who were exhausted from running around, trying to survive. as aan! activist chuck grochmal put it, “i spend about a week every month running around from institution to institution. … aids isn’t the only thing that’s making me feel like shit … i’m exhausted just running around” (cited in silversides, 2003, p. 146). between 1990 and 1994, smith and mykhalovskiy trekked around the city to conduct 120 interviews with people living with hiv/aids, service providers and government administrators (mykhalovskiy, 2014). they set out to understand the everyday, embodied, situated work people do to look after themselves (and others), opening up how that work is connected to the work of others, such as family, friends, significant others, doctors, social service workers or public officials. mykhalovskiy (2018, personal communication) recalls that they used the notion of life work to methodologically orient their research. initially, they framed it as a means of gathering open narratives from those they interviewed about the work involved in living with hiv. they asked people about the life work they did around the house – caring for themselves, preparing food and looking after their apartments. however, mykhalovskiy (2018, personal communication) also notes that these kinds of questions didn’t do the “methodological work they were hoping for.” consequently, they shifted to focusing more on institutional access to treatment as those questions “got people to talk rather generously about the state of their health, what they were doing with their doctors, which then moved our interviews into other institutional spheres” (mykhalovskiy, 2018, personal communication). focusing on questions of access, the research then centered on making visible how people’s everyday social experiences were coordinated through “institutional course[s] of action over which they have limited control” (smith, mitchell [mykhalovskiy] & weatherbee, 2006, p. 177). investigating the institutional relationships through which access to treatment was brokered, the project revealed social relations of class. mykhalovskiy (2014) – who assumed responsibility for the research after smith passed away – recalled the project made visible how “people who were most marginalized, and who in fact needed most of these services the most, were actually excluded as a feature of how the system operated and functioned” (p. 20). the research opened up a visceral contrast between those with differing social circumstances, resources and supports, making visible how “what they were able to do or not able to do” depended a great deal on the “fine grained” as well as on the “real texture of people’s lives” (mykhalovskiy, 2014). the hooking up project made clear that social organization manifests locally, intimately, relationally and quite differently for people in different social locations. from this perspective, living with hiv/aids was reconceptualized as a complex organizational problem, in which class-based exclusions were chris hurl & janna klostermann studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 270 reproduced through mundane professional practices and institutional procedures. mykhalovskiy (2014, pp. 20-21) provides an example: …to get family benefits you had to be designated ‘permanently unemployable’ and hiv was a categorical eligibility for that, but you needed to have a doctor… first of all, you needed to know that you could do it. you needed to disclose your hiv to somebody in the caseworker system, which lots of folks wouldn’t do because they were scared. and you needed to have a physician fill out a form that said that you were permanently unemployable. so, you needed to have a physician, right. or you needed to have a physician you had a relationship with, who you could approach to ask that. and if you could do that when you had an aids service organization behind you in a network, it happened much more easily than if you tried to do it alone. and you needed to have a file. you needed to have a medical file so the doctor could justify the claim through medical language and medical discourse – because i can say, ‘yes, you can’t work anymore.’ or you needed to find a doctor who would just do it and there were many who would. but you could see how those possibilities were all structured in terms of social class, in terms of social location, and they produced class relations themselves. through their research, smith and mykhalovskiy called attention to the agency and activity of people living with aids and hiv who were active in producing the social relations of which they were a part (frampton et al., 2006; kinsman, 2018). they rendered visible the skills and knowledge involved in producing one’s health or doing health work (kinsman, 2018; mykhalovskiy & mccoy, 2002; mykhalovskiy, 2008). they also clarified how this work was mediated by state agencies and social institutions. by mapping out these institutional channels, and identifying the points of blockage and exclusion, smith and mykhalovskiy argued that activists could at the same time establish a much more precise roadmap for social organizing. taking life work as a starting place, they were then able to uncover the biomedical, social, and institutional barriers to living with hiv/aids taken in plural, rather than reducing them to a single identity or status. as mykhalovskiy (2014, p. 7) notes: … it wasn’t as though the concerns were just about treatment narrowly defined as this little box. it was their whole lives that were entering into these conversations, and it was never just simply about a particular issue … it was more about – my life is falling apart and i don’t have a house; i don’t have a place to live. and all these things were intersecting. beginning from these everyday issues taken together provided a means of reframing aids. it shifted focus from an ideological understanding of aids as an identity or stigma to the multifaceted material problems of living with aids. further, smith’s political project not only involved uncovering how social relations of treatment were actually organized, but also involved identifying remembering george w. smith’s “life work” studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 271 absences and oversights, gaps in service delivery that needed to be filled. kinsman (2014, pp. 9-10) shared: there was nothing that actually allowed for people in catastrophic situations to actually get access to drugs and treatments. it just wasn’t how it was organized. … in a certain sense, what george thought aids action now! should be about was – we need to put that in place. we need to get that organized so that drugs and treatments could actually get into people’s bodies in terms of the social relations of treatment, not simply the social relations of research. so, that became a really profound way of orienting what aids action now! was doing, especially in this early period. smith wasn’t simply describing rhythms and materiality of everyday life, nor was he simply explicating the social organization of hiv/aids treatment as it is. his project centrally involved engaging with and remaking the social relations of which people living with hiv/aids are a part. as we will explore, smith was concerned with developing the capacity to actively reimagine and reorganize social relations of care. talking politics: diary of an aids activist a central component of smith’s work involved publishing everyday accounts in the gay press, fostering counter-publics through which the “problem” of aids could be differently imagined and engaged with (warner, 2002). in making life work public, he reframed the way in which aids was problematized, shifting from an identity or stigma carried by individuals to exposing the biomedical, social, interpersonal and institutional barriers to living with hiv/aids. smith wrote newsletter and magazine articles in the body politic, rites magazine and in aids action news!;3 his rites feature known as “talking politics” or “talking politics: diary of an aids activist” is of particular interest to this inquiry, as it offered a medium through which ordinary experiences of living with aids could be presented, rendered problematic and collectively transformed. rather than making himself an object of study, smith used the diary form to locate himself within the social, while also problematizing how people’s experiences are constituted socially. while a few of his articles are in essay form, other “diary entries” give a glimpse of particular days in his life, describing his oft-mundane work as an aids activist. from making phone calls to designing buttons, riding trains and bumping into others, smith expressed his own standpoint and captured some of the ways he brought the social into existence through his work. he 3 rites magazine was a leftist, feminist publication produced in canada from 1984 to 1992. it promoted lesbian and gay liberation, while addressing bisexual and trans questions. aids action news! was a newsletter published by members of aan! smith published several columns between 1987 and 1988 that do important work to contextualize and make public the experiences and struggles of people with hiv/aids. chris hurl & janna klostermann studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 272 carefully documented his experiences and struggles along with the experiences and struggles of other people living with hiv/aids: dear diary: / april 22nd, 1988 / a chance encounter with a friend on yonge street today. he looked thinner than the last time i bumped into him. he told me they had just diagnosed lymphoma of the liver. he’s going to start going in for treatments next week. when he told me about the diagnosis, i really didn’t know what to say. what can anyone say? he’s dying of aids. (smith, 1988d, p. 7) describing a chance encounter, he expanded possibilities of interpretation beyond exaggerated, sensational, spectacular accounts of aids wreaking havoc and beyond accounts of “willfully promiscuous activists” (smith, 1988e, p. 8) or “diseased, violent and dangerous” (smith, 1987, p. 4) people with aids. smith rejected the “heterosexual view of aids as a disease caused by reckless gay men, bent on an immoral lifestyle, who pose a serious threat to public health” (smith, 1988e, p. 8). instead, he framed aids as a problem of social and material organization – highlighting how it arises in the situated practices of people as they interact with others and with social institutions. significantly, smith extended others’ work – drawing inspiration from act-up and the 1983 “denver principles” – to both reconceptualize aids as a manageable chronic condition as opposed to a fatal illness and to portray people with aids as “survivors” as opposed to “victims” (people with aids coalition, 1983, p. 8). while representing aids as a fatal disease invited palliative care, hospice care and psychosocial support for the dying victims, reimagining aids as a chronic manageable condition invited aggressive treatment for survivors. here’s a relevant example from one of his diary entries: sent a copy of “aids treatment news” to john this week. it had an article on people surviving with aids. he’s had ks [kaposi sarcoma] for about four years now, but still goes to work every day. lately he’s been on chemotherapy which is helping. he’s coming to think of himself as a “survivor.” there is increasing evidence from the us that some people are living a lot longer with aids than expected. the canadian medical establishment doesn’t appear to be very interested in these developments, however. aids doesn’t seem to be a disease doctors are interested in getting out and fighting. (smith, 1988d, p. 19) recognizing that language invites social action and has real material and social consequences for people’s lives, smith underscored that aids isn’t necessarily fatal and that people living with it can survive (smith, 1988c, p. 11; smith, 1988b, p. 9; smith, 1988d). he made clear that surviving is a matter of social organization; it hinges on the canadian medical establishment, on new developments and on the interests of doctors. surviving involves concrete, practical work – ordinary activity and collective action to make and remake the social relations of which we are a part. remembering george w. smith’s “life work” studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 273 underscoring the principle, borrowed from act-up new york city, that “action=life,” smith’s writing modeled a radical way of orienting to social organization that grasped that life is socially mediated and, in turn, political. rather than abstracting people’s experiences, importing foreign concepts or speculating about how people are set up, smith attended to how the social is produced in the activities of people – how society is an outcome of the work of organizing relationships with other people. these social relationships of course include the canadian medical establishment, yet smith (1983) also attended to informal lived relations and to the “actual social organization of life.” for example, smith (1988d) described the difficulties of renting space for aids organizations, noting, “[a]s soon as the landlord knows aids is involved, it is impossible to get a lease” (p. 19). he also problematized relations between people living with hiv/aids and medical professionals, underscoring the need for “proper hospital care” (1988d, p. 7) that ensures people have the right “to treatment they and their physicians think might be useful” (1988d, p. 19). speaking of his friend jack, smith (1988b, p. 9) wrote: his former doctor seems to be more interested in a professional lifestyle than in dealing with patients with hiv illness. as a rule this gay doctor only spends 7 minutes per patient – the lowest limit ohip can be billed for. it seems he wants the most from the medical insurance system. it seems even some gay doctors have difficulty putting the health of their patients first. … do patients with life threatening illnesses have an automatic right to treatments they and their physician believe to be beneficial, especially if these treatments have been shown to be effective? … in the case of pcp, for example, do doctors have to tell a patient that the anti-leprosy drug, dapsone, is equally as effective as aerosolized pentamidine in controlling pcp, or, for toronto patients, that pentamidine is available in buffalo? making visible the unregulated and unaccountable practices and career relations of medical professionals, smith made clear that people could end up with a doctor who is “more interested in a professional lifestyle” or one who is withholding treatment information. what is striking to us is that smith offered a more expansive understanding of the relationship between everyday life and the political – rendering problematic interpersonal relations and tensions that arise in practice and deeply shape people’s lives. smith (1990) wrote that we should read texts “not for their meaning as such – although this is important – but for how they organize people’s lives” (p. 642). with two dashes bookending the phrase “although this is important,” smith noted that understanding social organization hinges on understanding what texts do, as well as what they mean. grasping the importance of social meanings and of language in use, smith didn’t write simply to educate, inform or provide evidence. the diary entries are socially significant in that they popularize alternative epistemological frameworks – shifting from hiv/aids as a stigma to living chris hurl & janna klostermann studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 274 with hiv/aids as an everyday problem, while also inviting aggressive treatment, proper care and opportunities to survive, live longer and live well. attending to life work helps us to appreciate how smith offered a different register for speaking about and living with aids, while expanding our understanding of social organization. smith used an informal mode of writing to depict people’s ordinary, yet vital, life work, to render lived social relations problematic, and to challenge the fundamental categories upon which the social order relied. he produced new forms to get people in sync for the possibility of transformation – pulling people in, establishing solidarity for political action, and clearing space for direct action and social organizing centered on extending people’s lives. documents and demonstrations: from research to mobilization and back again uncovering the everyday institutional barriers to living with hiv/aids through the hooking up project and making them public through his diaries published in the lgbtq press, then generated new targets for political organizing. life work, for smith, expanded beyond the individual challenges in surviving day-by-day, to cultivating collective capacities to live differently. working with aan!, treatment information exchange (tie), and community aids treatment information exchange (catie), organizations which he helped to found in the late 1980s and early 1990s, smith fostered infrastructure that could confront and transform the dominant politico-administrative regime. over the span of three years, from 1988 to 1991, aan!’s organizing efforts moved from a three-point list of demands, primarily focused on drug approval and treatment access, to generating and mobilizing around a complex set of demands that targeted federal, provincial, and municipal agencies on a wide array of issues, including increased access to social services, housing and drugs for low income people, standards of care for hospitals, prison and immigration reform, public programming specific for women, and support for people living with hiv/aids in developing countries (among other issues identified in the montreal manifesto, 1989). broadening and diversifying their focus, smith and other members of aan! generated the capacity to mobilize around life work and around diverse barriers to living. through a diversity of tactics, including “demonstrations, street theatre and guerilla press conferences,” the group confronted these issues, “garnering sympathetic media attention and, ultimately, public support” (hosein, 2010, p. 11). aan!’s approach to mobilizing was informed by smith’s materialist orientation which identified institutional barriers to living with hiv/aids by beginning from everyday practices. in fostering collective capacities to live with hiv and aids, the approach brought research and activism together, remembering george w. smith’s “life work” studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 275 cultivating a symbiotic relationship which involved both “documents and demonstrations.” hosein (2014, p. 9) notes: …george smith came up with the phrase … “documents and demonstrations.” it’s not just good enough to have a demonstration for rage or anger that you’re feeling, but you’ve got to ask, what is your demonstration going to accomplish? how is it going to help us move forward? yes, you demonstrate because you’re angry. that’s fine. but what are your aims for the demonstration? is it to get media attention? is it to educate key stakeholders? is it to do something else? is it…” you know, da-da-da. and so we always had to have a policy document to go with our demonstration. now, that policy document might just be a page with key issues, but our demonstrations became eventually guided by our policy documents so they worked together. like hosein, other members of aan! elaborated on the significance of documents and demonstrations. brown (2014) emphasized it was about more than “making noise” (p. 17), while kinsman (2014) highlighted the importance of cultivating collective agency. as he put it, “you could write the best documents in the world, but without the agency or the force to bring them about or to get people to hear them or listen to them this was not going to go anywhere” (kinsman, 2014, pp. 14-15). mccaskell (2014) also reflected on smith’s conceptualization of documents and demonstrations, saying, “[y]ou had to have the capacity to frame things and shape it in a way that bureaucrats could understand it and figure how it could become actionable, as well as providing the political pressure on the street to make sure that they didn’t forget about the whole thing” (p. 16). activists highlighted the importance of generating the capacity to confront an increasingly diverse array of political, institutional and professional barriers that were hindering people living with hiv/aids from getting what they needed to survive. the approach centrally involved using research to develop more effective forms of activism and organizing, while also using activism and organizing to learn about and deepen understandings of social organization (kinsman, 2014, p. 9). as smith (1990, p. 664) noted: the constant political confrontation between aids action now! and its respective, politico-administrative regime, often designed on the basis of the analysis as it had so far developed, continued to orient my collection and examination of data. the ongoing analysis of the data was intended to extend my working knowledge of a regime. in every instance, this involved the acquisition of the knowledge people working in the setting had, with the kind of reflexivity that entailed. my ethnographic work, in this respect, was intent on describing, from inside, the social organization of a world that was constantly emerging, and one of which i, too, was a member. through research, smith identified a growing number of issues to mobilize around, generating an increasingly precise roadmap of the barriers and chris hurl & janna klostermann studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 276 blockages that prevented people from living with hiv/aids. the research undertaken by smith and members of aan! – from the hooking up project to medical research on the latest treatments (hosein, 2014) – informed their increasingly comprehensive list of demands, and framed collective action, including street protests and public actions. the relationship can be thought of as reflexive; demonstrations generate knowledge for analyses and documents, just as analyses inform demonstrations (kinsman, 2014). aan! was well-known for transforming aids treatment and service access, for example, by protesting against inhumane practices (such as clinical trials, quarantine camps), advocating for the release of drugs, and demanding changes to ontario’s drug benefit program (barnett, 2014; shotwell, 2016b). their demonstration at toronto’s city hall in may 1988, which involved burning an effigy of the federal health minister, is one fitting example that helps us to think about the political possibilities and limits of using life work as an analytic. the aim of the demonstration was to push for treatment access and for the use of the emergency drug release program (mccaskell, 2016), and to mobilize people from the canadian aids conference, which was in town, to show opposition to the inaction of the federal health minister, jake epp. drawing from a range of tactics, including a die-in, banner unfurling, march and effigy burning, the demonstration was a way to reframe aids as a problem, shifting focus from aids as a “death sentence” to collectively identify and confront the politico-administrative barriers to living with hiv/aids as exemplified by the health minister’s inaction. activists underscored “epp=death” and “action=life.” it was a remarkably effective action as activists were later told that prime minister brian mulroney had asked epp into his office to ask why people were angry enough to burn an effigy of him in toronto (kinsman, 2018). in framing this action, smith understood that social transformation involved “captur[ing] the zeitgeist of the moment” (mccaskell, 2014, p. 7) – using collective forms of activism to ready people for change and cultivate alternative social relations (such as the formation of catie). yet, while the 1988 demonstration shows the political utility of organizing around life work, it also highlights a tension between exposing the range of institutional barriers that people confronted in living with hiv/aids and mobilizing around particular, concrete issues. while smith’s investigations contributed to understanding the multitudinous material, interpersonal, institutional, cultural barriers to living with aids, there was the lingering question politically in terms of how to make these barriers legible and actionable. in interviews with the aids activist history project, smith is often identified as a figure that focused more on a narrow and targeted approach to political organizing, and this was certainly evident in his response to the effigy burning. mccaskell (2014, p. 12) recalled how the demonstration was “one of the precursors to later tensions” in aan!. he described how, while smith endorsed the effigy burning that was part of the demonstration, smith was critical of the inclusion of a “kkkanada” sign on remembering george w. smith’s “life work” studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 277 the front of the effigy. in smith’s view, the sign “confuse[d] people,” “wasn’t up to the standards of design,” and lacked a clear focus (mccaskell, 2014, p. 12). it critiqued the state at the ideological level, without exposing how racism and settler colonialism operated through specific institutional practices that could themselves be identified and confronted. so, while smith’s engagement with life work was relatively open, on the one hand – aiming to uncover multiple, complex problems to living with hiv/aids – in developing collective capacities to actively overcome these barriers, he emphasized the need for focus, discipline, and a degree of restraint, when it came to confronting particular social problems. this was contentious, because by seeking to achieve focus, aan!’s work centered some people, perspectives and social problems and not others. at times this came at a cost; it meant narrowing the focus, foreclosing on some forms of expression, and decentering some social or political issues (barnett, 2014; du plessis, 2014; mccaskell, 2014). this was also an enduring object of debate, as the organization moved from its narrow three-point agenda for access to treatment to account for the varied challenges to living under the politicoadministrative regime. the ability to identify and confront different barriers to living with hiv and aids was itself conditioned by collective capacities. and, in fact, many of the tensions faced by smith and aan! through the late-1980s and early1990s involved strategic questions in determining which problems the organization had the capacity to effectively confront and transform through the fusion of documents and demonstrations. starting from the capacity to live with hiv/aids as an open and politico-administrative problem meant that as certain obstacles were overcome, new challenges became apparent. the challenges of life work continually open up new vistas for thinking about what it means to live and flourish. conclusion revisiting the notion of life work, we have touched on smith’s contributions as an ethnographer, writer and activist, who contributed to radically and methodically transforming social movement activism, feminist social research, and the social organization of living with hiv/aids in canada (brown, 2014; hosein, 2010; hosein, 2014; kinsman, 2014; mccaskell, 2014; mykhalovskiy, 2014). we surveyed smith’s work to extend the lives of people living with hiv/aids – investigating people’s everyday life challenges through his research, reframing the way in which these problems are discussed in public writing, and actively confronting the barriers that he identified through direct action. speaking to how life work can be extended to these different areas, our analysis has much to offer activists and researchers committed to investigating and transforming the social organization of everyday life (brulé, 2015; butz, 2015; chewinski, 2017; chris hurl & janna klostermann studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 278 frampton et al., 2006; hampton, 2016; rudrum, 2016; smeltzer & cantillon, 2015; williams & rankin, 2015). at a time when aids was framed as a death sentence or a disease vector to be isolated from the general population, smith moved beyond focusing on aids as a biomedical identity or condition to generate a different way of seeing and engaging with aids as a social problem. making an ontological shift, he began his research and organizing from the standpoint of people living with hiv/aids – examining the ordinary work they did and identifying the professional, institutional and political barriers to treatments necessary for survival. in this sense, he should be viewed as a fellow traveller of act-up, as well as an early pioneer of patient-centred, embodied health movements and research focusing on the social determinants of health (brown, 1997; epstein, 2008; gould, 2009). attending to life work, or to the ordinary work people do, provides an important contribution to feminist explorations of reproductive labour, and the theoretical toolbox of institutional ethnography. as many researchers are aware, examining people’s intimate or everyday practices, and framing them as work, provides a powerful starting point for explicating how the social is produced (diamond, 1992; doucet, lee, cattapan & mccay, 2016; mykhalovskiy & mccoy, 2002; mykhalovskiy, 2008; nichols, fridman, ramadan, ford jones & mistry, 2016; sevigny, 2012; watson, 2016). smith’s project aligns well with the work of feminist scholars who are committed to making intimate or reproductive work public, and clarifying how that work is central to social production or to projects of social justice (coulter, 2016; doucet, lee, cattapan & mccay, 2016; hall, 2016; watson, 2016). understanding how the capacity to live is, in part, mediated by all the work that people do engaging with public institutions helps to extend the notion of reproductive labour to state-society relationships. in this sense, engaging with the politico-administrative regime, and the web of material practices that make it up, is itself constitutive of the capacity to live. that said, our study also invites a fuller understanding of life work. considering smith’s research, public writing and activism as forms of life work illuminates how the concept can be extended – directing attention to the ongoing, living, day-to-day activity of individuals, as well as to the role of social actions and movements in cultivating both individual and collective capacities to live. smith was committed to remaking the “actual social organization of life” (smith, 1983, emphasis added). part of what is interesting here is that life work is not just about institutional relations or individual endeavours. rather, it also involves the collective capacities to identify, confront and overcome biomedical, social and politic-administrative barriers to living with hiv/aids. ultimately, life work reflects not only the actual everyday work of living under a particular politico-administrative regime, but also generating capacities to organize things differently. thus, smith’s project can also serve as a useful political intervention in reframing our understanding of social activism. through his strategy of remembering george w. smith’s “life work” studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 279 documents and demonstrations, he has been able to make a forceful interjection in social activism, arguing that activists should aim to be more materialist in their approach to social problems. beyond ideological orientations towards activism that target the ideas or beliefs of public officials, the notion of life work provides a method for how activists can systematically expose and target the mundane, everyday practices underpinning oppressive relationships and collectively imagine and develop new avenues for survival and flourishing. rather than just using demonstrations as a means of blaming public officials, then, life work provides a means of fostering alternative ways of living in, against, and beyond the politico-administrative regime. as our study makes clear, smith’s life is testament to how life work can also generate capacities to live differently – meaningfully and collectively imagining and developing new avenues for survival and flourishing. acknowledgements we would like to express our gratitude to gary kinsman, eric mykhalovskiy and anonymous reviewers for their generative feedback, and to both alexis shotwell and gary kinsman for their mentorship and work with the aids activist history project. thanks also to sarah rodimon for feedback on an earlier draft. references barnett, j. 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(1988d, june). talking politics by george smith – diary of an aids activist. rites, 5(2), 7, 19. smith, g. w. (1988e, may). talking politics by george smith – socreds make strange bedfellows. rites, 5(1), 8. smith, g. w. (1990). political activist as ethnographer. social problems, 37(4), 629-648. smith, g. w., mitchell [mykhalovskiy], e., weatherbee, d. (1990/2006). getting hooked up: an organizational study of the problems people with hiv/aids have accessing social services. in d. e. smith (ed.), institutional ethnography as practice (pp. 165-180). lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. chris hurl & janna klostermann studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 262-282, 2019 282 teghtsoonian, k. (2016). methods, discourse, activism: comparing institutional ethnography and governmentality. critical policy studies, 10(3), 330-347. warner, m. (2002). publics and counterpublics. new york: zone books. watson, a. (2016). quelling anxiety as intimate work: maternal responsibility to alleviate bad feelings emerging from precarity. studies in social justice, 10(2), 261-283. williams, a., & rankin, j. m. (2015). interrogating the ruling relations of thailand’s posttsunami reconstruction: tracking social relations in the absence of conventional texts. journal of sociology & social welfare, 42, 79-102. masoumi final before ts correspondence address: azar masoumi, department of sociology & anthropology, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: azar.masoumi@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 contagious terror: violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection azar masoumi carleton university, canada abstract this article argues that contrary to its humanitarian semblance, statecontrolled refugee protection is a project of substantial violence, and that the violence of refugee protection is continuously disseminated through and across a wide range of unlikely actors and institutions. drawing on avery gordon (2008) and franz fanon (1965), i show that the violence of refugee protection makes itself known in its haunting effects on those who come in contact with it in various capacities: those who carry through the work of refugee protection, such as refugee claim decision makers, lawyers and support workers, are plagued by psychological ailments that manifest in periodical burnouts, anxiety, melancholy, alcohol abuse, and unrelenting moral and emotional dilemmas. these ailments reveal the violence of refugee protection not just in relation to refugees, who are often construed as the exclusive subjects of violence, but also towards non-refugees who come into contact with “protection” work. keywords refugee protection; haunting; fanon; state violence; migration control introduction: the polarized geographies of refugee protection in common imaginaries, canada is a model of refugee protection: a country with a strong record and reputation of protection recognized by a nansen medal in 1986, among other things (abella & molnar, 2006). as such, canada is distinguished spatially from geographies of violence and persecution that are thought to create the desperate need for refuge. to be sure, the need for asylum is unquestionable; according to the unhcr (2020), at the end of 2019, 79.5 million people were forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of conflict or persecution. the vast majority of the displaced live in immense precarity in economically struggling neighbouring regions and countries. twenty-six million of the world’s displaced population meet the legal definition of a refugee. unsurprisingly given this state of affairs, many (try to) come here to find safety from the violence there. in the geographically polarized imaginary of refugee protection, “here” is envisaged azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 476 as safe and free from the violence that taints places far away. of course, this dichotomous geography acknowledges the violence that is transported here through the refugee, for instance, in the form of ptsd.1 however, even in this formulation, violence is presented as an alien after-effect, produced only by the harm elsewhere. in short, “here” remains largely free from charges of serious and original violence. in this article, i challenge the common spatial dichotomization of violence and refugee protection. i take canada as the site of my analysis to argue that contrary to its humanitarian semblance, state-controlled refugee protection is a project of substantial original violence. i show that this violence can be traced in the continuous dissemination of harm through and across a wide range of unlikely actors and institutions. thus, i suggest that violence is not an aberration from “protection,” but a regular feature of the way the work of refugee protection is organized and conducted. wenona giles and jennifer hyndman (2004) have helpfully critiqued the assumed distinction between here and there in the context of militarized conflict. along with cynthia cockburn (2004), they conceptualize violence as a continuum that far transcends any clear distinction between polarities of war (or persecution) and peace (or protection). as cockburn (2004) notes, the waves of political, economic, and civil instability that follow militarized conflict reproduce structural violence on a continuum, and fuse times and spaces of war and postwar; hence, it is meaningless to hold any “sharp distinction between peace and war” (p. 43). conceptualizing violence as a continuum allows questioning polarized geographies of persecution and protection; the two supposedly disparate spaces may be marked by a “connectedness between kinds and occasions of violence” (cockburn, 2004, p. 42). although state-controlled refugee protection takes effect in the chronological aftermath of the persecution that sends refugees fleeing, its violence is not simply an after-effect of what has already transpired there. to the contrary, violence transpires here and now, and, in fact, during the very process of protection. i suggest that the original violence of refugee protection can be traced in specters of harm that haunt regimes of protection from within. avery gordon (2008) has suggested, haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied (as in free labor or national security). (p. xvi) as an operation whose oppressive nature is not only denied but also transformulated into an antithesis of oppression, refugee protection is haunted by specters of deeply buried violence. the violence of refugee protection makes 1 for a few examples, see mpofu et al. (2001), beiser et al. (2015), raevell and fazil (2016), li et al. (2016), and nakeyar et al. (2016). violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 477 itself known in its haunting effects on those who come into contact with it in various capacities: those who carry through the work of refugee protection (refugee status adjudicators, lawyers and support workers) are plagued by psychological ailments that manifest in periodical burnouts, anxiety, melancholy, alcohol abuse, and unrelenting moral and emotional dilemmas. these ailments reveal the violence of refugee protection not just in relation to refugees, who are often construed as the exclusive subjects of violence, but also towards non-refugees who come into contact with protection work. it is not that refugee protection is understandably and excusably imperfect, but that, as the specters that come to haunt these non-refugees insist, this work is productive of original and devastating effects in its own right. tracing the haunting violence of refugee protection requires re-scaling analysis of state operations to the level of the individual (mountz, 2004). such re-scaling allows an “embodied account of statecraft” (hiemstra, 2012, p. 306): a close and intimate view of the experiences and implications of state policies and practices for those who conduct or receive them. much of the work of the state, for instance in regulating borders and migration, is embodied and operates at the “bodily scale” (coleman, 2008, p. 1097); borders move “with the bodily movements of [state] authorities” (mountz & hiemstra, 2012, p. 465) as well as migrants (khosravi, 2010). for the purposes of this study, the embodied account of statecraft needs to be extended beyond the literal corporeality of the body to also capture the movements on, in and by its associated psyche. tracing the haunting violence of protection calls not only for an ethnographic view of the state, but also a sketching of what follows emotionally, morally, mentally and psychologically from undertaking the work of protection. in short, we require a psychic account of statecraft. frantz fanon (1965, 2008) has capably made the psyche a relevant site of analysis for examining the enduring injuries of regimes of structural violence. fanon speaks, for instance, of the psychic development of the colonized child under colonial rule (2008) and the production of the “colonized personality” (1965, p. 203) under the dehumanizing conditions of colonization. while much of fanon’s work is focused on understanding and undoing the injuries inflicted on the colonized, the psychological universe of the colonizer has not escaped his analysis. in the section titled “colonial war and mental disorders,” fanon (1965) extensively discusses an array of mental disorders that arise in both the colonized and colonizers as the result of colonial war. his psychiatric case reports reveal that structural violence is productive of systemic psychiatric disorders, at times in unlikely people and places, such as colonial interrogators and their families. needless to say, the injuries experienced by the colonizer, unlike those inflicted on the colonized, are unplanned and unintended. nonetheless, azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 478 fanon’s psychiatric notes suggest, these injuries are a common feature of regimes of racial and colonial violence. in other words, the structural violence of colonization can be traced even in those who are not meant to be its direct targets. indeed, the fact that even non-targets, including benefactors and perpetuators, become trapped in webs of violence is perhaps a clear indication of the injustice of oppressive systems. thus, looking for violence in unlikely and unintended times and places can be particularly revealing; in the context of this paper, if violence is to be found here at home, within the psyches of those who undertake the work of protection and have, in fact, never been there, violence may be declared squarely and originally homegrown. of course, haunting is not simply a state of injury or pain, or as gordon suggests “the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed, although it usually involves these experiences or is produced by them” (2008, p. xvi). rather, haunting is a force, albeit an unplanned and unintended one, that reminds one of what is wished to be erased or forgotten. “what’s distinctive about haunting,” gordon writes, “is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely” (p. xvi). in other words, although painful, haunting is not just a state of perpetual woundedness (snyder, 2013). rather, haunting is transformative and even reparative. haunting is not simply devastation, but an unruly and queer quest for redress, even at the cost of pain and destruction. in its disruptively reparative effects, haunting is particularly apt at undoing dichotomies of bodies, psyches and geographies; trauma, kate coddington and jacque micieli-voutsinas (2017, p. 52) write, “has a productively complex relationship to space” and spatial dichotomies, however stringently imposed. and in being productively disruptive, trauma is of formidable force. as alison mountz (2017) notes, trauma shows little regard for state-enforced protocols and boundaries; for instance, the spread of trauma from those detained to those who enforce immigration detention undermines states’ aspirations for insular containment of unwanted and unauthorized migrants. as it appears, trauma moves even when people are held enclosed. the psychic movement of trauma through haunting extends embodied containment. fanon’s accounts of the unintended injuries of colonial violence are similarly reparative and disruptive. in fanon’s account, too, injury becomes a source of unexpected disruption that turns the familiar unfamiliar, the home strange, and the common uncommon. fanon’s psychic/psychological injuries may, hence, be read as forms of haunting that make the planned and rationalized operations of colonial rule disorderly and, at times, simply impossible to carry through. similarly, in the context of this study, by exhausting those involved in the work of refugee protection into periodical cycles of burnout, haunting interrupts the traumatic, exploitative and oppressive operations of refugee protection. by making folks literally unable violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 479 to carry on their professional duties, haunting disrupts the orderly process of refugee protection and stops a violent, albeit well-intentioned, project from being carried through seamlessly. in delineating haunting, i engage closely with psychological phenomena that in the fields of counselling and social work are named vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue and post-stress disorder. in many ways, this article contends with and substantiates these literatures’ emphasis on the contagious and devastating impact of systemic exposure to second-hand accounts of trauma, a common feature of the work of those involved in refugee protection. however, i depart from these literatures’ objective in exploring the contagious nature of these psychological experiences. unlike much of these literatures, i am minimally invested in producing incentives for “selfcare” (figley, 2002; stamm, 1995; trippany et al., 2004) or networks of institutional support to provide “help for the helpers” (bell et al., 2003; bride, 2007; rothschild & rand, 2006). rather, i hope to show that refugee protection is productive of substantial and systemic psychological harm, and as such is worthy not only of revision, but fundamental reconsideration. above all, we need to reconsider the presumed necessity to administer protection through the exclusivist and restrictionist mechanics of statecontrolled migration. the subject of this article also shares resemblance with the topic of investigation in the scholarship on street-level bureaucracy, particularly the work of michael lipsky (1980). like lipsky, i document and examine the morally and emotionally challenging work of front-line workers in operationalizing state services. indeed, refugee protection, like many other seemingly routinized and orderly state projects, is carried out by real individuals in real, and often unforeseen, circumstances. like other front-line bureaucrats, those in direct and regular contact with refugees shoulder much of the messy work of the state. by examining the work of front-line workers in the high-stakes context of refugee protection, i extend lipsky’s analysis beyond the topical focus of “dilemma”: i show that operationalizing the messy work of refugee protection comes with significant after-effects that haunt front-line workers across years and at times decades. in short, i suggest that the bureaucratized work of refugee protection is not only discretionary and challenging but productive of considerable multi-lateral harm and violence. this article traces specters that haunt canadian refugee protection and its various conduits, including refugee status adjudicators, lawyers and support workers. in canada, refugee claims that are made at or from within national borders are processed by a quasi-judicial, politically independent administrative tribunal. in this system, claims are adjudicated by trained civil servants based on examinations of written statements (procured through azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 480 official application forms) and oral testimonies (delivered during in-person hearings). most refugee claimants in canada have the advantage of accessing legal counsel during their claim making process. counsel is most commonly secured through government-funded legal aid systems across canadian provinces. in addition, several community-based and non-governmental organizations are actively involved in refugee support work. these organizations complement the work of the state (for instance by organizing orientation sessions for claimants) as well as aid lawyers in preparing claims (for instance by arranging medical and psychiatric reports). hence, refugee status adjudicators, lawyers and support workers are intimately linked and common features of the refugee protection system in canada. the narratives of haunting that will be presented in this paper emerged during recorded interviews with protection workers in 2016 and 2017. the interviews were part of a larger study on the bureaucratic administration of refugee protection in canada. interviewees were located through connections with refugee law offices, support organizations, and the associated networks that developed over the course of the study. accounts of specters that haunted front-line workers surfaced in interviews organically during conversations that were not intentionally focused on the psychological experience of working within the refugee protection regime. while clearly a consequence of state-controlled refugee protection, full analysis of these specters could not be contained within that larger study, and hence appears here as an independent piece. of course, these organic accounts reveal only the peak of an arguably much larger iceberg that forms the background of statecontrolled refugee protection. nonetheless, these accounts point to the contagious terror, the violence and the haunting that is enmeshed with the work of “protection.” mistakes that kill: the anxious and emotional work of refugee protection the violence of refugee protection emerges, in the first instance, from the risk of harm, terror and death that looms in the background of most refugee cases. the work of support workers, lawyers and adjudicators is to identify and protect refugees from these horrifying risks. as these workers are keenly aware, even their most benign errors and shortcomings may result in tragedy. hence, anxiety over rigour, completeness and evidence are routine components of refugee protection work (interview with refugee support worker, november 1, 2016). “good” lawyers and support workers are expected, and have every incentive, to strive for producing carefully composed, well-supported, detailed, complete and believable claims. yet, the near impossibility of discerning and establishing “facts,” achieving “completeness” or collecting “evidence” keeps claim preparations a perpetual and unsettling compromise. violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 481 difficult and legally intricate cases are particular sources of anxiety for those who support claimants. the difficult terrain of refugee protection cannot be simply travelled by the force of diligence and detail. maximizing claimants’ chances of approval often requires careful and risky calculations. for instance, it may be in claimants’ best interest to provide “enough but not too much” detail in written statements. as one seasoned refugee lawyer stated: too much detail can make it really difficult for the person [claimant] in the hearing. because they are not, because they're under stress they often can't remember all, a whole bunch of details. and variation in details can result in credibility issues. (interview on september 6, 2016) in other words, over-diligence on the part of lawyers in producing excessively detailed written statements may inadvertently harm claimants’ chances of success: the more detail claimants are required to recall and reproduce under the stressful conditions of the hearing, the larger the risks of error and inconsistency. inconsistency in recall of details, in turn, may distort the overall credibility of claimants and provide reasons for easy rejection of their claims. thus, lawyers have to find a fine balance between “enough” but “not too much” detail, in part based on their estimations of claimants’ ability to perform under the conditions of the hearing. managing claimants’ mental state throughout the claim-making process is at once necessary and highly labourious. the weight of emotional labour is particularly felt by support workers who spend substantial amounts of time with claimants and become highly invested in their lives and prospects. yet, support workers do not always feel able to properly support clients or even gain their trust. it is, for example, not uncommon for claimants to distrust support workers’ independence from the canadian state (interview with support worker, november 25, 2016). in addition, claimants may not feel entitled to receiving support (expressed, for instance, in apologies for “wasting” support workers’ time), or fear being charged for the services provided to them despite assurances to the contrary (interview with support worker, january 30, 2017). interpersonal dynamics of trust become particularly involved when support workers and claimants share cultural backgrounds but differ considerably in life experience, worldview or even attire. one young female support worker reflected on her surprisingly ineffective rapport with some of the women she supports: a lot of women that come to me, even though this is the field i’m in, they always say to me ‘you don’t know what it’s like.’ [author: yeah] and i understand that. i probably don’t know what it’s like [author: yeah] because i left back home when i was very, very young … so i do get that a lot, saying ‘well, you don’t understand that this is what happened, and this is normal.’ and you know, me azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 482 trying to explain to them ‘oh no, it’s not normal’ right? [author: yeah] … then they kind of get taken aback too that ‘oh maybe she’s too modern.’ [author: right] or maybe ‘she is not understanding’… a lot of my clients come here and they see me … representing them but i’m not wearing a scarf [author: yeah] i’m wearing pants or a skirt [author: yeah] … but then i’m speaking their language… so sometimes they are more open when it’s [the support worker] a woman not from their culture… i do get that a lot. (interview on january 30, 2017) refugee lawyers also provide substantial amounts of emotional labour in addition to legal counsel. providing the “best” legal representation often requires navigating complex emotional relations with adjudicators. for instance, during hearings lawyers may weigh the potential benefits of intervening to flag minor mistakes against the possibility of interrupting a productive flow of questioning or annoying and alienating decision makers (interview with counsel, december 5, 2016). unfortunately, even the most careful of these calculations may prove faulty. in one instance, a lawyer’s decision not to point out a minor interpretation mistake, to her great regret, resulted in the rejection of the claim (interview on november 30, 2016). indeed, while lawyers feel responsible for making the “right” decisions, they are ultimately powerless in controlling the outcome of adjudications (interview on september 6, 2016). furthermore, providing “good” legal representation at times requires lawyers to conceal their true sentiments, for instance when the adjudicators’ questioning appears irrelevant, unfair or insensitive. as one lawyer stated jokingly, “there are situations where you want to [laughs] shake [the decision maker]” (interview on january 20, 2017). of course, getting into altercations with decision makers is rarely in the best interest of claimants. hence, lawyers often try to “bite their tongue” and avoid hostility and confrontation. despite these efforts, open hostility at times erupts during hearings.2 managing the emotional connection between clients and decision makers is a particularly important aspect of lawyers’ emotional labour in preparation for and during hearings. as one support worker put it candidly, the “successful” claim is one that makes the adjudicator cry (interview on december 5, 2016). while crying is perhaps too high of a threshold for most, lawyers ideally want decision makers to be moved by, relate to or bond with clients. hence, lawyers often manage the image of the client, including their emotional expressions,3 for example by instructing them in “appropriate” and “respectful” dress code and conduct for the hearings.4 achieving appropriate 2 several lawyers and refugee support workers described having been shouted at or insulted by adjudicators, some of which led to formal complaints (interview on september 6, 2016 and january 30, 2017). 3 for instance, lawyers may manage the emotional portrait of the client through soliciting psychiatric reports from medical experts that explain their emotional expressions. 4 some lawyers, for instance, advise claimants to sit upright, make eye contact, avoid taking on an aggressive tone, and not look “shifty” or “miserable” (interviews on 6 september and 17 october 2017). violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 483 dress in itself is a complex cultural and emotional matter, as the projected image of the claimant needs to reflect the constricted class-status of a “true” refugee: not too expensive as to undermine the claim to disadvantage,5 nor too cheap to make the claimant appear wholly motivated by economic, as opposed to political and civil, reasons (interview on december 5, 2016).6 while decision makers are often the primary source of anxiety for lawyers and support workers, these street-level bureaucrats (lipsky, 1980) shoulder much of the anxious responsibility of making the “right” decisions on claims. decision makers are cognizant of the fact that their mistakes can jeopardize claimants’ lives (interview on december 1, 2016). their regular encounters with claimants’ desperation and distress are somber reminders of the gravity of their work: twice i had people who i seriously, seriously thought was [sic] having a heart attack in my hearing room, you know? one who had to be rushed out to the hospital. he was just, he was just having a panic attack. (interview on october 6, 2016) adjudicating claims requires significant emotional and imaginative labour on the part of decision makers; claimants’ circumstances and choices often have to be assessed across large socio-economic, national and cultural divides. for adjudicators who are sympathetic to refugee issues, rejecting even the “unfounded” claims can feel like “crushing someone’s dreams” (interview on october 6, 2016).7 adjudicators also need to attune to the institutional needs and priorities of the bureaucracy in which they operate. the bureaucratic infrastructure of refugee protection makes its presence known through regular performance reports on every aspect of adjudicators’ work (interview on october 6, 2016). decision makers are closely watched and heavily pressured to move through caseloads at a swift pace. balancing swiftness with rigour, however, is a hefty challenge (interview on october 17, 2017). the anxiety about workloads is exacerbated by the reality that mistakes can easily result in the loss of or serious harm to innocent lives. 5 for instance, most experienced lawyers do not advise that claimants purchase suits for hearings. 6 in its definition of “persecution,” refugee law systematically privileges violation of political and civil rights over economic rights. as a result, poverty does not count as a legitimate ground for receiving protection. 7 adjudicators avoid taxing moments by, for instance, concealing their doubts or not issuing negative oral decisions at the conclusion of hearings when they are immediately exposed to the reactions of claimants and lawyers. azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 484 suffocating with doubt: moral dilemmas and haunting specters despite, or perhaps because, refugee status adjudications are a process of fact-finding (plaut, 1985), skepticism is a major component of this work. establishing “truths” requires sifting through the possibility that (some) claimants may fabricate or exaggerate (parts) of their claims to secure asylum. indeed, the troublingly narrow focus of refugee law routinely makes “lying” necessary for accessing much-needed protection: refugee law only recognizes individualized, targeted persecution as a legitimate ground for protection.8 yet, the majority of those in need of resettlement are displaced as a result of generalized violence under conditions of, for instance, (civil) war, famine, and political unrest.9 in this desperation-inducing legal context, little room is left for maneuvering systems of protection. claimants have no choice but to produce individualized stories of violence in order to fit the bill of the refugee and avail themselves of protection. in short, “lies,” and the ensuing disbelief they engender, are the outcome of the epistemic lapses (and violence) of the existing protection frameworks. yet, of course, even necessary “lies” produce a host of moral dilemmas for those who are tasked with upholding the integrity of the adjudication process. doubts about credibility of claims are morally and emotionally challenging for refugee support workers, who are expected to help claimants receive protection. as one support worker wondered, “how do you live with yourself as an advocate when you know they are lying?” (interview on november 1, 2016). support workers often resolve their dilemmas by focusing on the humanitarian, rather than adjudicative, nature of their roles: their role is to support claimants, not to question them or “dig dirt” on them (interview on november 1, 2016). support workers often try to take clients’ claims at face value. in the words of one support worker, “i believe them [claimants] because they are my clients” (interview january 30, 2017). of course, withholding judgment is not always possible or practical. even the most dedicated support workers at times seriously grapple with doubts about credibility of claims (interviews on september 15, 2016 and november 1, 2016). support workers also struggle with choosing the best course of action when they have reason to disbelieve clients.10 discovering fabrications forces 8 the 1951 convention relating to the status of refugees defines the refugee as a person who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of nationality or habitual residence due to a wellfounded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and membership in a particular social group. note that generalized violence, such as that of war, is not enumerated as a convention ground. 9 for a comparison between the numbers of convention refugees and other displaced persons who do not fit the existing legal definition see unhcr (2020). 10 the circumstances of and reasons for claimants’ dishonesty make a difference to support workers and lawyers’ moral assessments. for example, when support workers and lawyers suspect that clients have fabricated claims out of desperation or as a result of bad advice (interviews on september 15 and november 30 2016 and january 30, 2017), they are likely to violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 485 support workers into an agonizing choice between their belief in the humanitarian nature of their roles and upholding the “truth.” one experienced support worker, for instance, expressed ongoing dilemma about his decision not to expose a “fabricated” case decades earlier: “i could have ruined her claim. i don’t know whether i did a good thing or a bad thing. but i chose not to do that” (interview on september 15, 2016). doubts about the moral ramifications of their choices follow support workers across years. support workers often pass the morally challenging work of handling doubt and credibility to lawyers,11 who need to engage with “facts” of claims to create strong cases (interview on september 6, 2016). lawyers develop intricate moral reasoning for handling doubt. for instance, they may hold the error of believing a “false” claim less morally consequential than disbelieving a “true” case. like support workers, lawyers take relief in distinguishing their role from that of adjudicators: it is not “their place” to judge the truthfulness of claims.12 rather, their role is to assist claimants in telling their stories in the most effective way (interview on november 30, 2016). as one lawyer put it: “[you] can never judge ‘you are not telling the truth.’ you can’t, or you would go crazy so… and that’s not our role as lawyers, i think” (interview on january 20, 2017). while lawyers and support workers may take partial relief from the weight of doubt in their humanitarian role, exerting skepticism is central to the work of refugee status adjudicators. despite their prerogative and responsibility to judge, adjudicators rarely have irrefutable proof for or against claims. in effect, adjudicators routinely make potentially life-altering decisions for claimants without full confidence in the “facts” of cases (interview on november 11, 2017).13 decision makers at times feel compelled to prioritize their own sense of morality over established institutional practices, even at the risk of provoking hostility. as one highly conscientious former decision maker put it: “when i first [got the job] i said to myself ‘if you’re gonna do this, you got to be prepared that you may not have any friends there, right?’” (interview on october 6, 2017). of course, “friends” are key to making the work of refugee status determination emotionally and morally sustainable. instruct them to “come clean” and pursue their “real” claims. unfortunately, “coming clean” may, in some instances, result in the rejection of otherwise legitimate claims (november 30, 2016). 11 for instance, support workers may flag their concerns to lawyers with whom they work closely and leave it to lawyers to decide how to proceed with these concerns (november 1, 2016). 12 lawyers often form nuanced understandings of credibility that account for their level of rapport with clients, the disruptive impact of trauma on memory, or cultural differences or misunderstandings (interviews on september 6, october 17 and november 30, 2016). 13 thus, the more cautious tend to err on the side of accepting claims when in doubt (interview on november 11, 2017). azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 486 for instance, the same former decision maker emphasized the importance of finding and maintaining a support network at work: [i tell anybody now who gets the job] find somebody who’s a kindred spirit. like you have to have, like, one, at most two, cause you don’t want too big of group [chuckles] but you have to have somebody that, who you can, like, really debrief with… and really who will understand you and that you’ll, like, be able to say ‘this is driving me crazy’…you need [a kindred spirit] for your own sanity. (interview on october 6, 2017) but even “kindred spirits” and diligent legal reasoning do not resolve the moral dilemmas of refugee claim adjudication. adjudicators can be plagued by doubt about whether they made the “right” decisions for decades. one decision maker recounted being “haunted” by a seemingly legally straightforward case he rejected two decades earlier:14 i am to this date haunted by one decision i made… there was this couple. he was an architect… he designed prisons. and there is mistreatment in prisons in [his country]. and so the question for me was whether he aided and abetted [in crimes against humanity], and i, i excluded him [from refugee protection] based on the fact that he aided and abetted permission of… crimes against humanity, and, um, it’s amazing that it still bother me…. because at the end of the case the wife kept saying to me… kept saying to me ‘you don’t understand, you don’t understand.’… and so for some reason after all this time, that’s the only case that bothers me… legally it seemed straightforward to me … so i don’t know why that bothers me. (interview on november 11, 2016) the stubbornly recurring specter of a woman long removed from the protection of refugee law continued to declare the decision maker’s failure to understand the circumstances of the case. a “perfect” legal reasoning had gone awry and the decision maker was haunted by the moral implications of his dedication to upholding the law. he lived, decades after he had left the field of refugee protection entirely, with the painful inclination that he might have wrongfully deprived the couple from a protection they dearly needed. those involved in refugee protection struggle with the meaning and morality of their work. lawyers and support workers frequently feel powerless to undo the serious mistakes and injustices they encounter daily (interview on november 30, 2016). support workers sometimes struggle with how their seemingly humanitarian work, for instance in supporting detained migrants, contributes to maintaining a morally dubious system of migration regulation by diluting its many cruelties (interview on november 25, 2016). even adjudicators and administrators struggle with the realization that their best efforts in producing thoughtful decisions and institutional policies make little difference to the state of refugee protection (interview on november 11, 14 some details have been removed to protect the identity of the decision maker and the claimants. violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 487 2016). the unrelenting moral and emotional dilemmas of refugee protection haunt and exhaust those who undertake it. contagious terror: the (vicarious) trauma of protection work the work of refugee protection re-circulates trauma and violence through a large number of actors. folks who work in this field are regularly exposed to vivid descriptions of gruesome violence and are required to ask for, gather and assess evidence of brutality. those vicariously exposed are vicariously scarred. yet, as kate coddington (2017, p. 66) suggests, trauma moves not only vicariously but contagiously, “compounding and binding together sometimes unrelated life traumas”: the exposed do not simply take on the trauma of the other, but incorporate it along with traumas from diverse and disparate sources, creating an expansive body of psychic injuries. as a result, contagious trauma expands the reach of violence in unexpected forms and unlikely persons and places. it is not surprising, then, that many of those involved in the work of refugee protection carry harsh memories that affect their emotional, psychological and relational wellbeing. the psychological cost of refugee protection work is multiplied by the workload pressures that stretch support workers, lawyers and decision makers to their physical and emotional limits (interviews on october 17 and november 29, 2016). it is not uncommon for people involved in the refugee protection process to be affected by the emotional charge of cases. the contagious nature of terror in refugee cases at times takes workers by surprise and makes continuing the work of refugee protection untenable, at least momentarily. terror manifests itself in physical and psychological symptoms. one language interpreter, for instance, described how she suddenly noticed a lump in her throat while interpreting for a domestic abuse case. within minutes, she broke down while the claimant described a graphic scene of abuse: “i could not, [laughs] i simply could not to interpret” (interview november 1, 2016). the hearing needed to be stopped.15 emotional breakdowns are daily occurrences in lawyers’ offices. as one lawyer stated, punctuated by a dark laughter, “that’s why we have boxes of kleenex in every room [laughs]” (interview on january 20, 2017). while lawyers are affected by the emotional weight of claims, they are under great pressure to control their own emotions in order to deliver effective legal 15 in this case, the interpreter’s breakdown led to approval of the claim. the decision maker ruled that if the claimant had moved an interpreter who consistently maintained professional composure, no further questioning was necessary and the claim could be accepted. in effect, the case was resolved the moment trauma became contagious. azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 488 counsel. providing professional support despite and through pain comes at an emotional cost, such as nightmares and insomnia: no matter how long you have done this, there are always going to be cases that get to you… a little bit and then affect you more … emotionally, like for [chuckles] um, [long pause] yeah. like [pause] last, you know, last night i discovered that a client’s child had been stabbed by her husband, her abusive husband [sighs] so, that definitely keeps you up at night. (interview on january 20, 2017) the contagious reach of trauma in refugee protection work is reflected in the sudden eruption of pauses, nervous laughter and space fillers (such as “um” and “like”) in the speech of otherwise highly articulate lawyers. note the many interruptions and my numerous supporting interjections to maintain the flow of speech in the following statement by a young lawyer: [sometimes] my eyes sting a little bit during many meetings… you’re always emotionally affected [author: yeah]. um, i have learned over the years how to deal with that and how to, you know [pause], how to best direct that [author: yeah]. um, it’s not in the best interest of the client usually to break down [author: yeah] and to be with them in, in a completely [author: yeah] um, you know, the compassion versus empathy [author: yeah] debate, um. [pause] whereas a calm presence may be a better [author: yeah], um, [pause] or is [stops herself], may be better for them [ends on a high intonation as if forming a question] [author: yeah] as opposed to [laughs nervously, begins in a much faster pace] breaking down with them even though sometimes you want to [laughs] [author: yeah]. so yeah. that’s it. [laughs]. (interview on january 20, 2017) most lawyers are familiar with the concept of vicarious trauma and develop their individual strategies for coping with the emotional severity of their work. while some lawyers reported seemingly “healthy” coping strategies, such as doing “a lot of yoga” (interview on january 20, 2017), coping at times takes dark and self-destructive tones:16 to be perfectly blunt… i think a lot of us, … i think we are chronic alcoholics [laughs], like, all of us [laughs]. i think our [refugee] bar drinks a lot [laughs]… most of us, that’s how we process. … i know for me …it was a blur of a lot of drinking [during my ten years of practice] and i think, i think, i think it’s posttraumatic stress, i think it’s vicarious trauma … i think the refugee bar is a traumatized bar, it’s a vicariously traumatized bar. (november 30, 2016) decision makers are also not immune from the contagion of terror. when trauma circulates in the space of hearing rooms, it touches all those within its reach. as one former decision maker put it: 16 for similar patterns of coping among workers involved in migration detention on islands see mountz (2017). violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 489 yeah, i mean sometimes, [pause] you know, [pause] like sometimes the counsel, me, the client and the interpreter would all be crying [chuckles]… in the hearing room. and it’s, like, [humorous tone] time to take a break [laughs]. (interview on october 6, 2016) acknowledging the pain experienced by claimants and taking breaks is often all decision makers can do to manage their own or others’ emotional breakdowns. in an institutional context that necessitates soulful circulation of stories of trauma for the purposes of determining deservingness for protection, decision makers have no other option but to poorly bandage wounds of trauma by instructing claimants to get a glass of water or take a walk in the hallways (interview on october 6, 2016). when water coolers were removed from hearing rooms to lower the costs of refugee protection, even the offer of a glass of water became a distant luxury no longer available to decision makers or claimants (interview on december 1, 2016). repeated exposure to accounts of trauma and the gravity of decision makers’ responsibility affect their emotional wellbeing. the effects are particularly gruelling when compounded with personal, even if unrelated, traumas (coddington, 2017). for instance, one former decision maker recounted his deteriorating mental health after the death of his father: i started seeing a shrink right after, actually shortly after, partly because my father died when i started work there. so, i had some anxiety problems. i think some of the anxiety was the work. it wasn’t just my father’s death… my anxiety levels were higher definitely when i was there. (interview on december 1, 2016) for decision makers, coping with the terror of refugee protection may lead to strategies that are productive of violence in their own right. even sympathetic decision makers may become highly desensitized and skeptical over time. doubting the credibility of claims lightens the emotional load on decision makers; they need not suffer if what they hear is potentially untrue (interview on november 11, 2016). decision makers sometimes uncover the troubling implications of their own unconscious psychological defense mechanisms only years after they leave their jobs. a former decision maker recalled a well-publicized scandal in the early 1990s when two adjudicators were discovered to have been mocking a torture victim in the notes that they passed to one another during a hearing (small & vincent, 1992; vincent, 1993): i’ve always thought about that [scandal], because i remember, too, joking, not necessarily at someone’s mistreatment. but just having this sense of humour which is a bit dark. … like i talk to you now and i’m thinking something, something was awful… it’s so awful that it’s, it’s 20 years later, it still bothers me. (interview on november 11, 2016) azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 490 the contagious terror of refugee protection work has an uneven impact on decision makers’ memory.17 on the one hand, decision makers are incessantly haunted by harsh memories or specters of their own or their colleague’s inhumanity. on the other hand, remembering simple details of their work can become a challenge. one former decision maker, for example, noted: i think there’s a psychological thing that happens… and you forget about the decisions very quickly [author: really?] yeah, you’re hearing, hearing a lot of cases, i sometimes, when i was taking the subway home and i couldn’t remember what the case was that day. yeah, you just tune out. (interview on november 11, 2016) with growing knowledge of the impact of vicarious trauma in the refugee protection system, self-care has emerged as a topic of attention for support workers, lawyers and decision makers. yet, in a system centrally geared towards producing and circulating accounts of terror, self-care becomes, at best, a meaningless slogan. at worst, talk of self-care makes individual workers responsible for their own well-being, without recognizing the systemic sources of trauma or the substantial resources required to handle any level of mental stability. as one former decision maker put it, what the refugee protection system offers in the way of self-care is a well-publicized and general message to the effect of “don’t get sick, take care of yourself.” (interview on october 6, 2016). promoting the recirculation of violence and remaining uncontaminated by its contagious force proves unachievable for most. the contagious terror of refugee protection is perhaps most evident in the emotional and psychological unsustainability of this work for many of those involved. at some of the longest-standing refugee support organizations, most support workers remain at their jobs for an average of only five years (interview on november 29, 2016). in fact, the career of many refugee support workers is either short-lived or marked by periodical extended leaves. those involved in refugee protection in volunteer capacities have the luxury of withdrawing when the taxing weight of vicarious trauma takes its toll. this makes the work of volunteer recruitment at some organizations a neverending and vicious cycle. it is also often not emotionally sustainable for refugee lawyers to stay on their jobs for prolonged periods. lawyers, too, make career changes or go on cyclical leaves: “[in our office, lawyers] do go on leaves. um, it seems to be, um, you know, every four years or something” (interview on january 20, 2017). long-term and uninterrupted practice of refugee law is rare. in fact, refugee lawyers tend to be a relatively young and constantly transitioning complement (interview on november 30, 2016). young, fresh and 17 for a fuller discussion of trauma and memory in the context of refugee protection, see cameron (2010). violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 491 enthusiastic cohorts of lawyers continuously enter the field of refugee protection, are exhausted by its violence, and replaced by even newer arrivals. the unrelenting specters of terror and violence that haunt refugee protection make this work unsustainable for most. harm, suffering and “protection” those working within the refugee protection regime are perhaps most relentlessly haunted by specters that remind them of the (unintended) harm they cause through their seemingly humanitarian work. although the refugee adjudication process supposedly only reviews the violence inflicted on refugees in sites and times prior to those of protection, the process of rehearing this violence for the purposes of determining deservingness produces new and original harm. much of the harm of refugee protection stems from systemic imposition of suffering as the central motif of the character, past experience and ongoing existence of refugees. the centrality of this motif to protection work is a consequence of the depoliticization of asylum as a matter of humanitarianism rather than political right (fassin, 2005). with the growing rise of immigration restrictionism, suffering has emerged as the condition for humanitarian exception awarded to otherwise unwanted migrants (ticktin, 2011). in the moralized economy of humanitarianism, the affective language of suffering yields “high political return” (fassin, 2012, p. 3). hence, humanitarianism fuels an animated search for unadulterated innocence and suffering, the necessary ingredients for compassion and care (ticktin, 2016). in other words, migrants need to suffer, and need to do so in substantial and substantiated ways. thus, asylum becomes not about migrant’s right to political justice, but “the physical and psychic distress they can demonstrate” (fassin, 2005, p. 371). this, of course, makes for a peculiar state of being for refugee claimants: suffering and pain become “strangely desirable conditions” (tacktin, 2011, p. 4). claimants need to convincingly demonstrate lack of (dignified and pleasurable) life to survive. as a result, the very conditions of protection are intimately mired with violence. the canadian system of refugee protection is not an exception to the rule of humanitarian suffering. in canada, too, securing protection heavily depends on claimants’ ability to relay convincing and effective stories of suffering. as one support worker put it, in order to qualify as a refugee, one has to be a sufferer (interview on november 29, 2016). those involved in the refugee protection system are largely unwilling and unprepared to hear any other story. in a system saturated by and grossly desensitized to human pain, anything but overwhelming devastation weakens a claim to protection. the azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 492 thirst for suffering anchors much of the larger refugee protection apparatus. for instance, refugee support organizations often rely on stories of suffering to raise funds (interview on november 29, 2016). of course, presenting and evaluating claimants exclusively through the lens of suffering is both dehumanizing and dishonest. the persona of the sufferer narrows the range of acceptable emotional expressions for claimants. despite its moralized emotionality, humanitarian care relies on a highly constrained repertoire of emotions (ticktin, 2016). the role of the deserving sufferer requires demonstrations of humble passivity, over and beyond expressions of agency in ending or escaping suffering (boltanski, 1999). hence, emotions that express any form of power and control, such as arrogance, anger or frustration, are often disliked by decision makers and are, therefore, considered a source of trouble (interviews on october 17, 2016 and january 30, 2017). preparations for hearings involve training claimants in being meek, patient,18 polite and non-confrontational. in short, claimants are encouraged to take a “subordinate” role in relation to adjudicators (interview on january 30, 2017). protection is achieved through trained subordination. disenfranchisement of claimants is central to refugee protection; the most disenfranchised are arguably the most compatible with the culture of refugee protection. the “easiest” claimants to support are those with the least sense of entitlement (interview on january 30, 2017). the least entitled are the most grateful. in the emotional economy of refugee protection, gratitude is a key form of exchange. for underpaid, overburdened, and emotionally strained support workers, expressions of appreciation from claimants are expected and necessary compensation (interview on november 29, 2016). in effect, refugee protection in part runs on the non-monetary and compulsory exchange of gratitude. of course, the exchange economy of gratitude is highly unequal and disempowering. determining refugee status requires not only the (re)circulation of stories of trauma, but also enactments of ceremonies of scrutiny. well-meaning decision makers are haunted by the realization that they regularly trigger traumatized refugees simply by performing the basic components of their job (interview on october 6, 2016). those in supportive and advocacy roles are similarly implicated. to create “full-proof” claims, lawyers have to assess clients’ testimonies from the perspective of rigorous, heavy-handed and skeptical decision makers. to properly prepare claimants for difficult hearings, lawyers at times “do it not nice” (interview on december 5, 2016). thus, even the process of preparing for hearings replicates the scrutinizing violence of the determination process. 18 waiting gracefully is a significant part of refugee claim making. although wait times often harm claimants’ psychological and material wellbeing by impeding access to rights, security, education and work, claimants have no choice but to accept them as part of the process of seeking protection (interviews on december 5, 2016 and january 30, 2017). violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 493 claim preparations at times require gambling with the emotional wellbeing of claimants. the need for plentiful and detailed information in refugee cases means that lawyers and support workers have to risk re-traumatizing their clients in order to produce strong legal cases. rehashing graphic details of violent experiences are often emotionally costly to claimants, yet the only way of establishing their credibility. hence, lawyers have to weigh whether the troubling means of rigorous interrogation justify the goal of securing protection. moreover, producing strong cases at times requires undermining claimants’ control of what is included in their claims. support workers and lawyers are intimately familiar with the requirements of the determination procedure and are much better equipped than claimants to decide what and how much detail need to be included in cases. thus, when claimants are not forthcoming in their narratives, support workers may feel compelled to press them to share more that they originally intended.19 as one support worker put it, “sometimes you just have to pull it [the information] out” (interview on january 30, 2017). ironically, to ensure claimants have any chance of receiving protection, support workers have to undermine their control and autonomy. once again, protection is achieved through disempowerment. the realization that their seemingly benevolent work inflicts much original harm on claimants is deeply unsettling to lawyers and support workers. when lawyers become disillusioned with the implications of their own work, continuing to practice refugee law becomes nearly impossible. as one lawyer who had left the field reflected: if you talk to a psychologist or psychiatrist or a social worker, they are appalled profoundly at what we do in our meetings with these clients. like, ‘come in at 4, talk about your rape until 5, and then leave and go back to work.’ like, it’s just horrible what we do to these people [laughs]… once you start to realize that, that’s when it becomes really hard… it’s hard at the beginning because you don’t know what you’re doing. and then by the time you figure out what you are doing legally, you realize what you’re doing personally, you know. and then i think it’s really hard to ever feel like you win a case. because, right, at the end of the day if you win and you get this person status, it’s terrific, but you hurt them so much in the process, you know. (november 30, 2016) specters of the unintentional yet routine harm inflicted during the claim making process interrupt the orderly function of refugee protection and its associated meanings. the familiar work becomes a strange practice. humanitarian support begins to seem appalling. even winning loses its joy. 19 for instance, when claimants refuse to “name names” out of fear of reprisal or due to cultural sensibilities, support workers feel the need to pressure them for these details (interview on january 30, 2017). azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 494 nothing about this work becomes justifiable, as the specters that come to haunt refugee protection remind workers that a protection acquired through harm is hardly protection at all. conclusion: the stories we like state-controlled refugee protection is a violent undertaking haunted by the specters of its many casualties. as refugee “protection” fails to protect, geographical distinctions become unconvincing in their claim to spaces of safety and innocence. specters of those exposed to unnecessary harm return to undo the meaning of protection. these specters unearth the disguised and repressed accounts of violence, in the seemingly excusable and routinized practices of offering protection in and through harm. in the refugee protection regime, haunting emerges as a violent quest for redress and an incessant reminder of the irony of protection. the specters that haunt this regime make the work of protection questionable, if not completely untenable: through the force of anxiety, melancholy, agony, insomnia and burnout, these specters interrupt the orderly and bureaucratized operations of refugee protection. those involved in this work regularly stop being capable of carrying through their seemingly benevolent and well-practiced professional duties. haunting reveals the traumatizing, oppressive and exploitative nature of refugee protection systems. it ensures that we cannot forget that instead of being about wellbeing and safety, state-controlled refugee protection is primarily about violence and suffering. as a support worker who had left the field summized, with dark tones marking her words: sw: everyone has, everyone has a different story, you know? author: yeah. sw: we like particular stories and not the others. author: yeah. what kind of stories do you think we like? sw: suffering. acknowledgements heartfelt thanks to the participants whose honesty and courage in sharing difficult and painful experiences made this paper possible. thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive feedback, and the intellectual community of the social and political thought program at acadia university for their engagement and input on an early draft of this paper. this paper is dedicated to two lives lost but not forgotten: grise, a young mexican woman whom i never met, deported to an untimely death in 2009 despite having attempted twice to secure protection in canada. and faraz falsafi, a dear friend, lost in the crashing of the ukrainian flight 752 on january 8, 2020. violence, haunting and the work of refugee protection studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 495 this work was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada and an ontario graduate scholarship. references abella, i., & molnar, p. (2006). refugees to canada [last edited oct. 26, 2020]. in the canadian encyclopedia. historica canada. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/refugees beiser, g., goodwill, a. m., albanese, p., mcshane, k., & kanthasamy, p. (2015). predictors of the integration of sri lankan tamil refugees in canada: pre-migration adversity, mental health, personal attributes, and post-migration experience. international journal of migration, health and social care, 11(1), 29-44. bell, h., kulkarni, s., & dalton, l. (2003). organizational prevention of vicarious trauma. families in society, 84(4), 463-470. boltanski, l. (1999). distant suffering: morality, media and politics (g. burchell, trans.). cambridge university press. bride, b. e. (2007). prevalence of secondary traumatic stress among social workers. social work, 52(1), 63-70. cameron, h. e. (2010). refugee status determinations and the limits of memory. international journal of refugee law, 22(4), 469-511. cockburn, c. (2004). the continuum of violence: a gender perspective on war and peace. in w. giles & j. hyndman (eds), sites of violence: gender and conflict zones (pp. 24-44). university of california press. coddington, k. (2017). contagious trauma: reframing the spatial mobility of trauma within advocacy work. emotion, space and society, 24, 66-73. coddington, k., & micieli-voutsinas, j. (2017). on trauma, geography, and mobility: towards geographies of trauma. emotion, space and society, 24, 52-56. coleman, m. (2008). us immigration law and its geographies of social control: lessons from homosexual exclusion during the cold war. environment and planning d: society and space, 26(6), 1096-1114. fanon, f. (1952/2008). black skin, white masks (r. philcox, trans.). pluto. fanon, f. (1961/1965). the wretched of the earth (c. farrington, trans.). macgibbon & kee. fassin, d. (2005). compassion and repression: the moral economy of immigration policies in france. cultural anthropology, 20(3), 362-387. fassin, d. (2012). humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present. university of california press. figley, c. r. (2002). compassion fatigue: psychotherapists' chronic lack of self care. journal of clinical psychology, 58(11), 1433-1441. giles, w., & hyndman, j. (2004). introduction: gender and conflict in a global context. in w. giles & j. hyndman (eds.), sites of violence: gender and conflict zones (pp. 3-23). university of california press. gordon, a. f. (2008). ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination. university of minnesota press. hiemstra, n. (2012). geopolitical reverberations of us migrant detention and deportation: the view from ecuador. geopolitics, 17(2), 293-311. khosravi, s. (2010). “illegal” traveller: an auto-ethnography of borders. palgrave macmillan. li, l., liddell, b. j., & nickerson, a. (2016). the relationship between post-migration stress and psychological disorders in refugees and asylum seekers. current psychiatry reports, 18(9), 1-9. lipsky, m. (1980). street-level bureaucracy: dilemmas of the individual in public services. russel sage foundation. azar masoumi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 475-496, 2021 496 nakeyar, c., frewen, p. a., & drapeau, m. (2016). evidence-based care for iraqi, kurdish, and syrian asylum seekers and refugees of the syrian civil war: a systematic review. canadian psychology, 57(4), 233-245. mountz, a. (2004). embodying the nation-state: canada’s response to human smuggling. political geography, 23(3), 323-345. mountz, a. (2017). island detention: affective eruption as trauma’s disruption. emotion, space and society, 24, 74-82. mountz, a., & hiemstra, n. (2012). spatial strategies for rebordering human migration at sea. in t. m. wilson & h. donnan (eds), a companion to border studies (pp. 455-472). wiley. mpofu, d., cancino, e., & white, j. (2001). post traumatic stress disorder: the lived experience of immigrant, refugee and visible minority women. prairie women’s health centre of excellence. plaut, w. g. (1985). refugee determination in canada: proposals for a new system – a report to the honourable flora macdonald, minister of employment and immigration. minister of supply and services canada. reavell, j., & fazil, q. (2016). the epidemiology of ptsd and depression in refugee minors who have resettled in developed countries. journal of mental health, 26(1), 74-83. rothschild, b., & rand, m. (2006). help for the helper: the psychophysiology of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. w.w. norton & co. small, p., & vincent, d. (1992, nov. 20). lawyers back demand for immigration probe. the toronto star. snyder, k. v. (2013). gatsby ’s ghost: post-traumatic memory and national literary tradition in joseph o’neill’s netherland. contemporary literature, 54(3), 459-490. stamm, b. (1995). secondary traumatic stress: self-care issues for clinicians, researchers, and educators. the sidran press. ticktin, m. i. (2011). casualties of care: immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in france. university of california press. ticktin, m. i. (2016). thinking beyond humanitarian borders. social research, 83(2), 255-271. trippany, r. l., kress, v. e. w., & wilcoxon s. a. (2004). preventing vicarious trauma: what counselors should know when working with trauma survivors. journal of counseling & development, 82(1), 31-37. unhcr. (2020). figures at a glance. unhcr. https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html vincent, d. (1993, feb. 16). refugee board head rejects racism claim. the toronto star. studies in social justice volume 4, issue 1, 1-6, 2010 correspondence addresses: catherine e. hundleby, department of philosophy, university of windsor, windsor, on n9b 3p4 canada. tel: +1 519 253-3000 x 3947, email: hundleby@uwindsor.ca phyllis rooney, department of philosophy, oakland university, rochester, mi, 48309-4401, usa. tel: +1 248 370-3390, email: rooney@oakland.edu issn: 1911-4788 just reason catherine e. hundleby department of philosophy, and women’s studies program, university of windsor, windsor, ontario, canada phyllis rooney department of philosophy, oakland university, rochester, michigan, usa during significant periods of the history of western philosophy, the pursuit of epistemic goods such as reason, truth, and knowledge was considered quite distinct from the pursuit of moral and political values such as goodness, rightness, and justice. knowledge was often theorized as the product of universal norms of reason and unbiased observation, that is, untainted by individual interests or by cultural or political values. during these past centuries (since the scientific revolution especially) epistemologists and philosophers of science have regularly taken scientific knowledge as their model of epistemic achievement in theorizing conceptions and ideals of reason and knowledge. at the beginning of the twentieth century, logical empiricists distinguished meaningful scientific knowledge from value claims, and yet in the early years of the vienna circle some of its members emphasized the role of science in the political project of making the world a better place (okruhlik, 2004). in the latter decades of the twentieth century the traditional distinctions between science and values and between reason and justice came under more thorough critical scrutiny. in particular, thomas kuhn's (1962) structure of scientific revolutions provided the catalyst for significant philosophical work examining the role of historical, social, cultural, and political values in the development of scientific knowledge. two decades later, genevieve lloyd's (1984) man of reason set the stage for feminist examinations of the ways in which philosophical ideals of reason encompassed male norms and associations, often through the explicit devaluation of female or “feminine” traits or experiences (cited in rooney, 1994). as work in feminist or, as it is now sometimes called, liberatory epistemology has continued to show, traditional ideals of reason and knowledge regularly accommodate, if not reinforce, unjust social divisions, particularly those relating to gender, race, and class (alcoff & potter, 1993; sullivan & tuana, 2007). in 2 catherine e. hundleby, phyllis rooney studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 consequence, feminist and liberatory epistemological work is centrally concerned with motivating accounts of reason and knowledge (including scientific knowledge) that make visible social inequities among reasoners and knowers, something that traditional accounts of a universal, transhistorical, disembodied reason fail to do. this visibility and critical attention is considered necessary to the development of accounts of “just reason.” such accounts of reason and reasoning underwrite concepts and theories of social justice that explicitly aim toward meaningful social progress in a world still significantly constrained by unequal access to social and political goods. in challenging the traditional philosophical segregation of reason and knowledge from politics, feminist and liberatory epistemologists are not suggesting that knowledge reduces to a political contest. they argue, instead, that understandings of reason and knowledge need to engage more constructively with the ethical and social specificities that frame scientific and other knowledge projects, including social and political knowledge projects that explicitly seek to advance social justice. in particular, such understandings draw attention to the fact that the ways in which theorists conceptualize, think, or reason about social and political issues have regularly given voice to specific perspectives over others, thus limiting opportunities for insight and resolution. all of the papers and the book review in this volume advance “just reason” in this way: they give reason and voice to concepts, views, or perspectives that have usually not been included in standard debates about particular social and political issues. these issues include identity politics in multicultural societies (mason), discourses about war and violence (stone-mediatore), debates about same-sex marriage (jaarsma), the role of consciousness-raising in meaningful social change (fischer), and the recognition of indigenous knowledges and epistemes in the academic institutions of the global north (lange on kuokkanen). new or previously disregarded concepts and voices show us ways to provide more adequate reasoning about social justice. in “reorienting deliberation: identity politics in multicultural societies,” rebecca mason argues that in debates about identity politics rights discourse is not sufficient to address the concerns of nondominant cultures. the perspective that shari stone-mediatore urges we consider is the anti-war perspective of many families of slain and wounded soldiers. in “epistemologies of discomfort: what military-family anti-war activists can teach us about knowledge of violence,” she reveals the inadequacy of standard but distant political expertise that claims neutrality. the perspective that ada jaarsma challenges in “rethinking the secular in feminist marriage debates” is shared by feminists and liberatory thinkers on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate, as well as right-wing opponents to same-sex marriage. that perspective rests on the uncritical assumption of a divide between the secular and the religious, and it thus fails to recognize that the religious-secular divide is a politically loaded distinction that requires contextualized critical appraisal. the development of progressive forms of understanding at the level of the knowing individual or self is the subject of clara fischer's “consciousness and conscience: feminism, pragmatism, and the potential for radical change.” fischer views consciousnessraising as significant in the development of new cognitive practices that are necessary for sustained social change, something that many accounts of social change overlook. just reason 3 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 mason's apologia for identity politics employs the notion of “horizons of intelligibility” borrowed from linda alcoff. horizons of intelligibility are contexts for reasoning in which one can situate oneself relative to social identities, and this approach demonstrates an alternative to the rights-based view of what it means to appeal to a social identity. mason maintains that attention to identity, understood as rational placement regarding a horizon of intelligibility, aids the recognition of each other’s guiding reasons and values and thus provides a basis for communication across sociocultural differences. she argues that such an understanding of identity challenges jeremy waldron's account of identity politics understood largely in terms of rights claims or demands. identity politics “ground both claims for redistribution and recognition” (p. 8), mason acknowledges, but they need not be the obstacle to deliberation that waldron claims, but rather can be a resource for understanding and deliberation. waldron's formulation of identity politics as a rights claim obscures the relationship between cultural identity and reasoning that alcoff's view illuminates because it treats identity as a starting point for reasoning. stone-mediatore argues that “responsible thinking about institutionalized violence, including war, demands a distinctive kind of thinking-within-discomfort for which conventionally trained public-affairs experts are ill-suited and for which undervalued epistemic traits play a crucial role” (p. 26). academic and professional expertise, along with the epistemic authority that expertise garners and on which it depends, shields reasoners from fully understanding the causes and effects of routine social violence. the institutionalized violence that concerns stone-mediatore is severe and systemic and “results . . . from established social and political institutions that systematically offend human dignity, or systematically deprive certain people of the conditions necessary for physical and mental integrity” (p. 30). she maintains that contemporary north american understandings of war reveal deep problems with the ideal of rationality as detachment. “although typical of political discourse, their construction-project and law-and-order metaphors have little relation to the insecure and chaotic reality of war” (p. 35). the expertise of michael ignatieff and fouad ajami, in particular, “demonstrate[s] greater commitment to neoliberal and neocolonialist discourses than to the complexity of the situation on the ground” (p. 35). current feminist disagreements in the u.s. over same-sex marriage can be traced to two strands in feminist theory, jaarsma argues. on the one hand, discourse theory supports a version of liberal feminism that seeks access to marriage for gays and lesbians and promotes other types of marriage reform. seeking legal reform makes sense given that discourse ethics employs communicative rationality as the means to democratic justice. the results of reform are less promising from the perspective of queer theory feminists who suspect the exclusionary nature of marriage, citing its sexist and racist heritage; they suggest instead that we need deeper rethinking of the nature of larger legal structures relating to citizenship. establishing clear targets for discourse reform is difficult because of the problem of distinguishing the rational from the patriarchal elements of discourse, and that entails, in the united states especially, a need to question the divide between religious culture and the secular state. marriage itself has religious origins and is not morally neutral. jaarsma argues that we must embrace cognitive dissonance as a general virtue of liberatory reasoning. the feminist debates over same-sex marriage reveal a pernicious assumption that the religious and the secular have clear mutual boundaries, whereas in fact negotiating this divide involves self-creation. not only 4 catherine e. hundleby, phyllis rooney studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 religion but secularism too has a specific history with its own paradoxes. instead of appealing to secularism, she advocates a post-secular turn in which liberatory thinkers accept the dissonance among our various ethical commitments. whereas jaarsma treats political commitments as existential leaps, clara fischer views our ability to transform ourselves as a gradual matter of acquiring deweyan habits: “for dewey, we are constantly faced with a choice between acting in accordance with the old, static self, or with the new, dynamic self” (p. 71). fischer applies the pragmatist framework of john dewey to understand how personal moral change that provides the basis for political change is possible because of the selfreflexive aspects of human reasoning. knowledge depends on an engagement with the world that is motivated by uncertainty, yet having knowledge remains dynamic because “uncertainty results from the conversion process and characterizes one's existence as a feminist” (p. 79). emphasizing the dynamic aspect of the self implies not simply change but moral progress. this deweyan morality of ongoing personal transformation complements jaarsma's prescription of dynamic embodied engagement. however, fischer’s attention to the individual reveals problems with sudden epiphanic accounts of coming to feminist consciousness, and she argues that such personal, political, and moral changes accrete slowly. it is the longstanding strength of gradually engrained deweyan habits that provides for ongoing feminist resolve, although feminists also rely on feminist communities of approvers and reprimanders to establish those habits. social justice relates to reason in specific ways in each article. mason's move away from the language of rights allows individual understanding and reasoning a role in identity politics, and thus in addressing social injustice. she acknowledges the importance of waldron's concern with human rights, which is part of the terminology of the established dialogue for addressing social justice issues. however, mason argues that the language of rights only provides a starting place for civic reasoning based in identity politics. civic deliberation is an open-ended process rather than a matter of compromise among pre-defined rights. for stone-mediatore, attention to those who directly suffer from its social injustice aids reasoning about institutionalized violence. “personal ties to war, when combined with a concern for honesty about the world that homes loved ones, can help [people] to face vexing realities, even when this exposes them to intellectual uncertainty and social ostracization” (p. 38). understanding the phenomena of war for stone-mediatore depends on recognizing the limits of abstract thinking and its tendency to distract us from the concrete human historical details of war. creating social justice is entwined with a changing self according to both jaarsma and fischer. for jaarsma, the sorts of rational and political conflicts that emerge in anyone's life can be seen writ large in the feminist debates over same-sex marriage. the lesson to be learned is that our personal compromises among forms of justice and demands of rationality constitute ourselves as particular moral and rational beings. for fischer, personal transformation is a layered and recursive process moving with and against past habits and surrounding communities. thus, achieving social justice in our communities requires pressing ourselves to change, but personal transformation and progress also depend on engagement with communities of likeminded people. just reason 5 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 reasoning that is socially just but also evolving is the issue in rebecca kuokkanen's book, reshaping the university: responsibility, indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift, reviewed in this issue by lynda lange. kuokkanen argues that the university suffers from viewing knowledge in terms of exchange rather than giving. this view of reasoning must change if the academy is to cease marginalizing and silencing indigenous peoples. kuokkanen proposes that universities adopt an alternative “gift logic” that is notable in indigenous cultures and that draws on virtues of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. “the marginalization of indigenous peoples is not (only) a question of racism or ethnic minority rights, but it is a marginalization of peoples with rights to self-determination” (p. 89), as lange explains. kuokkanen does not idealize indigenous cultures for being more virtuous, but she argues that they offer valuable alternative conceptions that will continue to develop. only one of the benefits of an academy with a “gift logic” is greater inclusion of indigenous reasoners themselves. in sum, just reason shows us social justice as a process of reasoning (among other things). it is a way of positioning ourselves for democratic engagement (mason); it motivates reasoning about the changing material details of institutionalized violence (stone-mediatore), or about the contingencies of the very concepts we employ (jaarsma); it requires self-transformation as we aim to reason justly (fischer); and it draws attention to considerations of the cognitive resources that can be found in indigenous cultures, which will encourage the fuller participation of indigenous peoples in academic and political institutions (kuokkanen, lange). as all of these papers show, bringing about the changes in ourselves and the world that genuinely support greater social justice depends on just reason in the form of flexible and strategic reasoning from a variety of perspectives. acknowledgements this issue of studies in social justice on the topic of “just reason” was developed with the support of the canadian society for women in philosophy and the social sciences and humanities research council of canada who sponsored the conference “reason, activism & change: philosophical considerations,” october 3-5, 2008 in windsor, ontario. the conference discourse led to three of the four articles in this volume. sshrc also provided financial support for the work of lauri daitchman and candace nast as editorial assistants on this issue, and we are grateful to lauri and candace for their dedication, care, and reliability. the conference also received financial support from carol reader and the following sources at the university of windsor: department of philosophy; office of the president; faculty of arts and social sciences; centre for studies in social justice; “excellence in engineering (3-e); faculty of law; martha lee, stephen jarislowsky chair in religion and conflict (university of windsor and assumption university); stephen pender, research leadership chair; women’s studies program; political science department; environmental studies program; psychology department; centre for research in reasoning, argumentation and rhetoric; and the windsor university faculty association. references alcoff, l., & potter, e. (eds.). (1993). feminist epistemologies. new york, ny: routledge. kuhn, t. (1962). the structure of scientific revolutions. chicago, il: the university of chicago press. lloyd, g. (1984). the man of reason: “male” and “female” in western philosophy. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. 6 catherine e. hundleby, phyllis rooney studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 okruhlik, k. (2004). logical empiricism, feminism, and neurath's auxiliary motive. hypatia, 19(1), 4872. rooney, p. (1994). recent work in feminist discussions of reason. american philosophical quarterly, 31(1), 1-21. sullivan, s. & tuana, n. (eds.). (2007). race and epistemologies of ignorance. albany, ny: state university of new york press. gonalez balyk final before ts correspondence address: lana gonzalez balyk, balsillie school of international affairs, university of waterloo, waterloo, on, n2l 3g1; email: lgonzalezbalyk@balsillieschool.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 la solidaridad o la soledad? cooperation and tensions in the regional state response to the venezuelan migration crisis lana gonzalez balyk university of waterloo, canada abstract the venezuelan migration crisis has displaced over six million people and is the americas’ largest forced migration. nearby countries have received the majority of the displaced and initially showed an impressive welcome to venezuelans, regardless of whether they may be considered migrants, asylum seekers, or refugees. however, host country responses have mainly been uncoordinated, siloed, and impromptu. this paper examines the solidarities and tensions within the individual country responses of venezuela’s closest latin american and andean neighbors: colombia, ecuador, peru, chile, and brazil. the number of displaced people leaving venezuela has steadily increased since 2015 yet limited long term-planning and inclusion of migrants in host communities has led to a growth in xenophobia. additionally, many latin american host nations have erected new barriers that make legal entry or residency forms more difficult for migrants to obtain. the covid-19 pandemic has compounded these issues as host countries grapple with supporting and offering resources to their citizens in addition to migrants. however, some promising regional solutions could be applied in a more coordinated regional approach to help ensure that host countries and ios supporting them can better extend enduring solidarity and inclusion to venezuelans. these solutions include longer-term visa options, such as the new colombian 10-year visa, that can help regularize and include venezuelans over a prolonged period. a particularly recommended approach would be the regional application of an inventive latin america humanitarian-orientated accord, the cartagena declaration, a forwardthinking concept with a potential that has never been realized. the cartagena declaration could offer more comprehensive protection and fairer access to rights beyond temporary measures. keywords migration; displacement; asylum seekers; refugees; mixed migration; irregular migration the venezuelan migration crisis is the americas’ largest forced migration in recent times; the united nations (un) estimates that by the end of 2021 over six million venezuelans had left the country, with most being hosted in latin la solidaridad o la soledad? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 613 america and the caribbean (rv4, 2022). regional host countries have shown solidarity to venezuelan migrants, welcoming them with various residency policies and showing accommodation to the displaced regardless of whether they would be classified formally as refugees or migrants. however, this response takes place on an improvised per-country basis rather than a coherent and systematic long-term regional strategy. as such, the initial welcome has increasingly become mired with tension; new and more stringent and exclusionary visa and residency requirements have become the new policy in some host countries, and xenophobia is escalating. the arrival of the covid19 pandemic has further aggravated tensions and led to more precarious living conditions for forced migrants (rv4, 2022). this paper argues that a coordinated regional state application of the cartagena declaration is a more inclusive approach to protection that can allow host countries to continue extending solidarity to venezuelans displaced by the socio-political crisis. however, this requires ongoing regional dialogue and increased international support to reduce tensions and increase effectiveness. this research draws on a combination of secondary literature on recent events and policies related to venezuelan forced migration, scholarly literature on regional hosting of venezuelan migrants, and literature on migration theory and categorization of forced migrants. it examines the complexities of the venezuelan migration movements, explores the evolving responses of regional states, and ultimately advances the argument of how and why migrant protection could be better coordinated, enhanced, and supported. background to the crisis during the 20th century, oil-rich venezuela was among the wealthiest countries in latin america and was an attractive destination for migrants and asylum seekers; the current venezuelan migration crisis marks the stark reversal of these trends. the first wave of outgoing venezuelan migrants was primarily of more affluent classes who expressed their reactions to the hugo chavez regime and his socialist-inspired “bolivarian revolution” through migrating to north america or europe (freier & parent, 2019). however, under president nicolas maduro the country has been steered into a profound economic, political, social and humanitarian crisis. years of corruption and grossly mismanaged socialist policies dating back to chavez have ushered in state failure and triggered a newer, more significant wave of migration since 2015 (freier & parent, 2019). the oil industry and the economy have deteriorated to the point where fuel shortages have become commonplace, along with longstanding shortages of electricity, medicine, water, and essential goods (economist intelligence, 2021). since 2018 there has been a political standoff between the maduro government and juan guido, an opposition national assembly leader recognized as the legitimate interim president by much of the international lana gonzalez balyk studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 614 community. the outcome of these crises has been a mass exodus of venezuelans from all classes of society fleeing the recurrent shortages, breakdown of public services, political repression, widespread and profound corruption, appalling crimes rates, shocking levels of hyperinflation and pervasive hopelessness. the covid-19 pandemic has worsened the crisis inside venezuela and has also had adverse consequences for displaced venezuelans. by august 2020, more than 100,000 venezuelan migrants hazarded the overland return to venezuela, having been among the first to lose their livelihoods when the covid pandemic struck their host countries. however, some of those returnees have since left venezuela again, having found the conditions far more dire (wolfe, 2021). the covid-19 pandemic has also made journeys to and from venezuela more hazardous and irregular due to increased border closures and mobility controls that affect migration and circular migration back to venezuela (rv4, 2022). in response to the escalating situation, president maduro has recently made some limited changes in venezuela, such as accepting the use of the dollar, allowing some foreign investment in oil, opening import restrictions, and attempting to attract tourism again. venezuela is also experimenting with moving toward using cryptocurrency, which has become very popular given the instability of the bolivar currency (economist intelligence, 2021). the effects these new measures will have on the economy and on venezuelans inside and outside the country are still uncertain. outside of venezuela, the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) and the international organization for migration (iom) actively support migrants displaced by the crisis. they have opened several temporary reception centers in colombia, ecuador, peru, and brazil to address basic needs and assist migrants with access to essential services. they try to maintain a presence in some central areas of the borders in those regions to offer protection from various risks like trafficking and exploitation. they also support government registration efforts throughout the region. the unhcr and iom coordinate with host governments, other ngos, and volunteer organizations to assist migrants and collect data to understand migrant needs. the main form of coordinated io response comes from the r4v coordination platform for refugees and migrants from venezuela (r4v): to ensure a comprehensive un-wide response, and to support the efforts of main receiving governments, the regional inter-agency coordination platform for the venezuela situation – led by unhcr and iom – launched the regional response plan for refugees and migrants (rmrp) from venezuela on 13 november 2019. the plan, developed with some 137 partners, aims to support refugees and migrants from venezuela as well as its host communities. it is the first of its kind in the americas: a strategic and operational blueprint, a coordination template, and a funding mechanism for responding to the needs of venezuelans on the move. (unhcr, n.d.a, para. 13) la solidaridad o la soledad? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 615 many of the statistics in this paper come from the rmrp 2022 report (rv4, 2022) and the coordination platform for refugees and migrants from venezuela (r4v) data tracking platform (unhcr, n.d.b). the rmrp also highlights a consistent issue underlying the response to the venezuelan migration crisis: insufficient international response. in 2021, 45% of the 1.44 billion dollars the r4v called for was met. the number of those displaced by the venezuelan crisis comes second only to the syrian crisis (unhcr, n.d.b). however, it has received less international reaction (freier et al., 2021). contributing factors may be that the direct impact of venezuelan forced migration is experienced to a much lesser extent in north america and europe, and that venezuelans are not displaced by war or traditional conflict, making it complex to comprehend and classify their situation. complexities of classifying displaced venezuelans based on their individual and shared circumstances, venezuelans have been forced to migrate in search of security, opportunity, or both. regular migration refers to movement linked to some form of temporary or long-term legal residency status in their country of resettlement. conversely, irregular migration broadly refers to the “movement of persons that takes place outside the laws, regulations, or international agreements governing the entry into or exit from the state of origin, transit or destination” (iom, n.d.). a convention refugee is defined as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” (un general assembly, 1951, p. 3). in her research on migration management, mcnevin (2017) explores how migration arises through an uneven distribution of security and opportunity, factors not unique to the venezuelan crisis. she argues that many northern countries manage migration through what she terms the “threshold” position, a sort of middle ground using international law that limits who meets this threshold, and therefore who will receive official status in their host country. currently, refugees in need of security are more likely to meet that threshold than migrants looking for economic opportunities. consequently, asylum or refugee status in northern countries and the protections and societal benefits that it confers may be more limited to venezuelans fleeing political persecution as opposed to those forced to migrate due to the general dire conditions in the country. the mass migration of venezuelans during the maduro regime has primarily taken the form of south-south migration to neighboring andean countries and other parts of latin america and the caribbean through a mixture of regular and irregular migration channels. irregular migrants may be excluded from traditional labor markets, social and public services, and legal protections available to citizens and to regular residents. the relationship between social lana gonzalez balyk studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 616 justice and citizenship has been described as “tendentious” by scholars, which can be inclusive to citizens or members of nation-state and at the same time exclusionary to non-citizens; irregular migrants might suffer the exclusionary effects of this relationship more than other non-citizens (stasiulis, 2013). irregular migration status also increases vulnerability to various types of abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and fear of deportation. some venezuelans have sought asylum or obtained registered refugee status in their host countries. however, not all venezuelan migrants meet the requirements specified by the 1951 refugee convention, nor do all venezuelans necessarily consider themselves refugees or asylum seekers. in his study on “survival migration,” betts (2013) argues that categorizing migrants solely as refugees or economic migrants is limiting and arbitrary. he stated, “if one cannot survive or maintain the fundamental conditions of human dignity without leaving a country, then distinguishing between persecution and other causes is meaningless” (betts, 2013, para 7). a more encompassing view of the movement of displaced people from venezuela can be through the lens of “mixed migration.” according to the iom: the principal characteristics of mixed migration flows include the irregular nature of and the multiplicity of factors driving such movements, and the differentiated needs and profiles of the persons involved. mixed flows have been defined as ‘complex population movements including refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and other migrants.’ unaccompanied minors, environmental migrants, smuggled persons, victims of trafficking and stranded migrants, among others, may also form part of a mixed flow. (iom, 2008, p. 2) regional unilateral state responses to venezuelan migration regional host countries have displayed neighborly solidarity with the displaced by granting some temporary residency or protected status to venezuelans arriving at their borders, accommodating the mixed flow of migrants without the limits of the “threshold position” (mcnevin, 2017). this remarkable response accommodates the complexity and interconnectedness of security and opportunity factors required for survival and maintaining the basics of human dignity that impel venezuelan displacement (betts, 2013; betts, 2019; mcnevin, 2017). furthermore, the quito process formed as south american migrant hosting countries (most of whom are also part of these regional organizations) began meeting in 2018 to communicate and coordinate responses to venezuelan migrants (rv4, 2022). the quito process shows promise as a forum committed to coordinating for the specific purpose of responding to displaced venezuelans. the solidarity of regional host countries is especially noteworthy considering that most host countries in the region have economic, political, and social issues of their own, as they have traditionally struggled with inequality, insecurity, and high levels of unemployment, la solidaridad o la soledad? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 617 notwithstanding the challenges of the covid-19 pandemic (blouin et al., 2020). regarding their hosting of migrants on a sudden and large scale: there is widespread lack of experience and technical capacity. the main host countries of venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers have little or no experience in receiving migrants and refugees. although they have benevolent laws on asylum and migration, they had never had to apply them to a large number of people. (blouin et al., 2020, para 8) regrettably, as the longer-term nature of the venezuelan crisis has become demonstrably apparent, the initial solidarity extended to migrants is now replete with tension and obstacles threatening to leave migrants increasingly restricted and solitary. more countries have begun requiring passports and criminal record checks for venezuelan migrants rather than just accepting national identification cards as they had before. although that requirement does not seem unreasonable, it can impede the process for years or entirely for some displaced people. obtaining a passport in venezuela is costly and nearly impossible for some due to the logistical requirements of dealing with bureaucratic backlogs, corruption and inefficiencies, the frequent lack of official paper for printing passports, and repeated electrical outages (van praag, 2019). in fact, the oas has spoken out against the maduro government’s violation of migrants’ rights by not issuing passports and official documentation (oas, 2020). overall, host countries have continued accepting expired documents, recognizing that renewing documents is next to impossible in venezuela. obtaining a police check from inside venezuela is a highly onerous process that can be very inhibitive for migrants. these new obstacles may deter some migrants, but may induce others towards irregular migration movements if applying for residency status becomes unfeasible. this section will shift focus to the reception of five of the closest major migrant-receiving countries in the region around venezuela to venezuelan migrants, colombia, ecuador, peru, chile, and brazil, highlighting initiatives to provide regular status and inclusion and issues that have arisen in their response efforts. the numbers below are based on registered migrants as of march 2022, including up-to-date information in the r4v database, but when taking unregistered migrants into account, the actual numbers may be much larger (rv4, 2022). colombia colombia shares a border with venezuela and has rapidly transformed into a significant migrant hosting country after only recently emerging from a decades-long civil war that resulted in mass internal and external displacement of colombians. colombia hosts the largest venezuelan migrant population, lana gonzalez balyk studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 618 currently 2.45 million people (rv4, 2022). in addition to hosting venezuelans, colombia also integrates returnees who had moved from colombia to venezuela over the previous decades. returnees include colombians displaced from the civil war, or who sought economic opportunities in venezuela and were forced to return to colombia and need support services. the number of colombian returnees is estimated to be 980,000 (rv4, 2022). furthermore, most venezuelan covid-19 lockdown returnees have returned from their host countries by transiting through colombia. many arrive in colombia in dire need; some have already re-entered colombia after finding conditions in venezuela to be still worse. it is estimated that more venezuelan returnees from other host countries will ultimately end up in colombia (wolfe, 2021). at the outset, colombia had responded to venezuelan migrants by issuing a special stay permit (pep), which typically is valid for two years and grants access to employment, education, and health care. this permit was issued to regular migrants at entry points and was also issued afterward for irregular migrants who later registered under the regularization initiative, the administrative registry of venezuelan migrants (ramv). the ramv did not require a passport (selee et al., 2019). colombia also issues border mobility cards, which are for venezuelans who cross into colombia to purchase goods or access health services and then return to venezuela (rv4, 2021), as well as transit visas for those passing through to ensure their journeys are regularized. in 2019 colombia enacted measures intended to last two years to grant citizenship to over 24,000 babies born inside colombia to venezuelan mothers without residency, applying retroactively to 2015. unlike many andean countries where citizenship is automatic when born inside the country, colombia usually requires at least one parent to be a resident (barchfield, 2019). this new policy prevents statelessness due to the complications and frequent inability to obtain venezuelan documentation abroad and prevents the potential exclusion of children from public services. in another encouraging policy development, colombia announced in february 2021 that it would offer temporary 10-year visas to venezuelan migrants. venezuelans in colombia with irregular status will thus be eligible for status, and those who already have temporary status will be able to extend their residency. un high commissioner for refugees filippo grandi welcomed the announcement by president ivan duque as a humanitarian example for the region (grandi, 2021). research has shown that venezuelans who are recognized in colombia have been able to find a degree of inclusion in colombia and some level of access to services (selee & bolter, 2021). it may be possible that extending the residency period to 10 years could help support inclusion by reducing liminal factors that impede venezuelans. selee and bolter (2021) argued, for example, that employers are not sure what to think about short-term special stay permits. la solidaridad o la soledad? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 619 ecuador ecuador is located south of colombia, so venezuelans arriving overland must transit colombia first. ecuador is hosting 551,000 venezuelans (rv4, 2022); additionally, for decades, ecuador has been hosting displaced colombians fleeing civil war or violence. the country continues to host the most significant number of colombian refugees globally; resources, therefore, must still be allocated to colombians seeking protection in ecuador. hence, the large numbers of venezuelans arriving in ecuador add additional strain. initially, ecuador had granted venezuelans residency through regular migration channels and offered the opportunity to apply for a resident visa when their tourist visa ran out after 180 days. in 2018 ecuador started to require passports for legal entry of venezuelans, as opposed to just their national identification card (selee et al., 2019). in 2019 ecuador implemented new requirements for venezuelans to receive a temporary visa to enter the country for humanitarian purposes. as a result, venezuelans must apply at a consulate beforehand with a criminal record check and passport (malo, 2021). such changes tend to limit protection to those in need and result in more irregular migration. in addition, migrants in ecuador are legally entitled to access social services yet face challenges in doing so (van praag, 2019). peru peru is located south of colombia, and migrants arriving overland have to cross first through colombia and, in some cases, will cross through colombia and ecuador before arriving in peru. currently, peru hosts the second largest number of venezuelan migrants, at 1.45 million people (rv4, 2022). in addition, peru now has the highest number of venezuelan asylum claims in the region. at the beginning of the venezuelan crisis, it was viewed as the most accommodating country for migrants (wolfe, 2021). peru initially offered venezuelan migrants a temporary stay permit (ptp), which requires legal entrance to apply and does offer the right to employment. originally, it could be obtained without a passport, but that changed in 2018 (rv4, 2021). the ptp permit lasts for one year but is renewable and offers a path to permanent residency following a series of steps, such as having interpol certify a lack of criminal record (selee et al., 2019). the other issue with the ptp is that it does not offer full access to public services, which may be linked to a higher number of asylum claims (selee et al., 2019). however, while waiting for asylum claims to be processed, migrants have difficulty accessing public and social services (rv4, 2021). similar to ecuador, in 2019, peru implemented new requirements for migrants to receive a temporary visa to enter the country for humanitarian purposes. as a result, venezuelans must apply beforehand at a consulate with a criminal record check and passport (van lana gonzalez balyk studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 620 praag, 2019), which creates barriers and limits protection. in addition, venezuelans struggle to have their credentials recognized through onerous processes, which often compels them to work in the informal economy (wolfe, 2021). chile as chile is the furthest south of the andean host countries, venezuelans must first transit colombia and then peru to arrive, which is a significant journey if overtaken by land or a pricier flight for those with the resources. chile hosts 562,000 venezuelans, making it the third-largest host country after overtaking ecuador (rv4, 2022). initially, venezuelans could enter chile on tourist visas and apply for work visas inside chile. education and health care are generally accessible to migrants (wolfe, 2021). in 2018 chile began offering democratic responsibility visas from consulates inside venezuela for those from caracas or puerto ordaz, and in 2019 consular tourists visas for other venezuelans (wolfe, 2021). these visas entail a more onerous application process, increasing the likelihood of irregular undocumented migration, although with the visa migrants can access the labor market and services. chile ultimately underwent a drive to regularize migrants and offer a one-year temporary residency permit to those who applied, with or without documents; however, this process requires a criminal record check from venezuela (selee et al., 2019). it is estimated that over 100,000 or nearly one-quarter of venezuelans in chile have entirely lost their jobs due to the covid pandemic (rv4, 2021). brazil brazil shares a border with venezuela in the amazon region and hosts 336,000 venezuelan migrants (rv4, 2022). many venezuelans have also moved from brazil to other host countries; over 454,800 have crossed through brazil from 2017 to 2020 (unhcr, 2020). brazil initially offered a temporary residency permit of two years; if venezuelans apply before its expiration, they could follow the required steps and apply for permanent residency (selee et al., 2019). brazilian residency and asylum options for venezuelans have been quite favorable, and the government has also initiated an assistance program to internally relocate venezuelans to other parts of the country (wolfe, 2021). brazil has been unique in the region with its wider recognition of venezuelan refugees based on their country of origin through its recent operação acolhida (operation welcome) initiative. it began in 2019 and is in line with the values of the cartagena declaration, which will be addressed later in this paper (rv4, 2022). despite the rather accommodating residency policies for migrants, venezuelans in brazil often struggle and some have since left. while refugees la solidaridad o la soledad? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 621 and migrants with permits can access services and employment, the more remote amazonian areas that border venezuela are the poorest in brazil and tend to lack access to health and other public and social services for citizens, let alone migrants. while brazil is a vast country with a large population, the language and cultural differences also impact settlement and employment options in brazil (wolfe, 2021). analysis of unilateral regional state responses the section above demonstrates the substantial number of venezuelan migrants that regional countries are hosting as of march 2022 and how they are responding to migration as it continues. their response shows solidarity in accommodating all displaced venezuelans, not just those displaced for political reasons that could qualify as convention refugees. however, these regional countries also show increased weariness with the unceasing flow of migrants, and the tension has become evident. it has created strain on host societies and resources, creating a social backlash against venezuelans and the growth of xenophobia, which can also be observed socially and politically through residency arrangements. these countries suffer from social, political, and economic issues. they also struggle to provide their citizens with employment opportunities and access to adequate public services, let alone to ensure fair access to such for their growing migrant populations. the covid-19 pandemic has intensified the issue of migrant access to social services, as host countries’ health care systems have become progressively more strained or overwhelmed. latin american countries have some of the world's highest covid death tolls due to fragile health systems, inequality, corruption, and insufficient social protection (romero, 2020). public access to covid screening, health care, and vaccinations has been challenging for host countries. informal workers can be at a higher risk for covid due to their limited access to potential social protections and their limited ability to social distance or protect themselves from covid while being forced to remain working (romero, 2020). however, migrants must not be excluded from covid screening and care efforts; in addition to increasing migrant vulnerability, excluding migrants from covid care and vaccines could fuel xenophobia towards venezuelans if they are perceived as harboring the virus (rv4, 2021). in addition, many forced migrants have suffered the loss of their employment or livelihood due to covid lockdowns and the economic downturn. while some venezuelan migrants have returned to their country due to the precarity that the covid-19 pandemic produced in their host countries, the conditions in venezuela are certainly not yet conducive to widespread return. national development plans should include a clear vision for venezuelan migrants, as betts advocates (2019). while many venezuelans wish to return lana gonzalez balyk studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 622 to their country as soon as political and economic conditions are favorable, it will likely take time for their devastated economy and public service sector to recover enough to permit large-scale returns. having a longer-term approach to residency is crucial because short-term or temporary residency permits those andean host states might favor are quite costly and often prevent integration into local communities and labor markets (llosa, 2018). migrants can benefit their host countries’ economies over the longer term and contribute to social security payments when integrated into the formal labor markets and given access to public services. access to the formal job sector also prevents the displacement of the local workforce by removing the incentives to pay migrants lower wages than locals (selee et al., 2019). in-line with principles of social justice, proper longer-term planning to include migrant communities promotes more inclusion and participation in host economies and societies, which can simultaneously reduce the factors that give rise to xenophobia. a potential longer-term protection solution: coordinated regional application of the cartagena declaration latin america is home to an instrument that could be utilized to provide more comprehensive and longer-term security to displaced venezuelans: the cartagena declaration. an inventive regional notion that goes further than the 1951 refugee convention, the cartagena declaration of 1984 defines refugees as “persons who have fled their country because their lives, security or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order” (declaración de cartagena, 1984, p. 16). formal refugee recognition under this aegis could confer indefinite protection and improved social equality within host societies. scholars and major organizations such as unhcr, iom, amnesty international and the oas have widely emphasized its applicability in the case of venezuelans (e.g., betts, 2019; blouin, 2020; freier & parent, 2019; van praag, 2019). a coming together of latin american nation-states, regional actors, and international actors in a coordinated application of this “updated” interpretation of refugees could help advance regional norms and potentially global norms regarding legal frameworks for people displaced from non-traditional conflicts such as the venezuelan crisis. unfortunately, the potential of this tool has never fully been realized by countries that have signed the agreement (acosta et al., 2019). interestingly, mexico is one country that has undertaken to apply the cartagena declaration to displaced venezuelans claiming asylum. in 2017, 99.5% or 907 out of 912 venezuelan asylum claims that mexico processed met the refugee definition in the cartagena declaration and were accepted (irb, 2018). conversely, in canada, a northern country that adheres more closely to the “threshold position” that mcnevin discussed (2017), the acceptance rate of venezuelans la solidaridad o la soledad? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 623 during a similar period was not relatively as high: in 2018, 73.8 % or 525 out of 711 finalized claims were accepted (irb, 2019). this data is certainly not intended to proclaim the mexican asylum system an ideal model nor to suggest that all migrant groups in mexico receive similar treatment. mexico tends not to recognize migrants from central america at similar rates (sánchez & freier, 2021), particularly in the wake of pressure the donald trump administration had applied in the u.s and the increase in detainment and overall poor treatment of migrants in mexico that followed. however, it does indicate that this is one instrument that can successfully offer protection to venezuelan migrants. brazil is the first of venezuela's immediate neighbors to have opted to apply the declaration and expand protection to more displaced venezuelans, reflecting the higher rate of accepted asylum claims than other countries in the region (r4v, 2022). brazil’s application of this instrument began in 2019 as part of operation welcome. the rmrp report anticipates that brazil will continue to use this expanded definition of refugees and explore other residency options (rv4, 2022). however, some researchers have cast doubts on the optimism of brazil’s application of the declaration, arguing that its application only applied to a limited number of venezuelans and after ad hoc temporary visas had already limited access to asylum (zapata & wenderoth, 2021). despite some promising applications in mexico and brazil, the cartagena declaration has been underutilized. countries might be reluctant to formally apply the declaration due to fears that they could receive a further influx of displaced venezuelans if they extended full protection rights, which the continued development of ad hoc responses indicates (freier & parent, 2019). for example, while colombia’s new 10-year visa is certainly worthy of praise and is more in the spirit of the cartagena declaration, it is still a temporary policy. as selee and bolter argue (2021), temporary instruments still tend to provide fewer rights and less sense of permanence. furthermore, there is also criticism that colombia’s portrayal of itself as a partner to the global north that cannot do it all alone ties into “rent-seeking behavior,” which has become more common in refugee-hosting countries worldwide (freier et al., 2021). in a later paper, freir and gauci argue that “if policy harmonization across latin america led to the increased adoption and implementation of lgps, the region could indeed become a global leader in refugee protection. unfortunately, the current political context of increasingly restrictive shifts in immigration and refugee policy will likely hinder such policy harmonization” (2020, para 115). regional harmonization of more humanitarian minded initiatives such as colombia’s 10-year visa would certainly be a progressive step that this paper would not discourage. however, if the countries that had signed the cartagena declaration were to internalize it within their own policies and systematically apply it to venezuelans, they would be on a leading path to extending solidarity with long-term protections that could build towards fuller inclusion. lana gonzalez balyk studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 624 the role of the global north comparatively few venezuelans have protection in northern countries due to constrictions presented by visa regimes, distance, finances, etc., and those who do arrive primarily through regular channels on tourist, study, or work visas (wolfe, 2021). moreover, the covid-19 pandemic further impeded travel to northern countries. however, there has been a significant increase in venezuelans applying for asylum after arriving in northern countries (r4v, 2021). nevertheless, most northern countries continue to adhere to the “threshold position” that mcnevin outlined (2017), and have not expanded the definition of refugee that they use or engaged in formal long-term resettlement programs for venezuelans refugees. by way of illustration, in 2021 the us recognized 15,706 venezuelan asylum claims with a pending 104,979 (r4v, 2021). during the trump administration, venezuelans arriving at the border without pre-existing visas were made to wait in mexico for the asylum claim process (wolfe, 2021). with the government of president joseph biden, it is conceivable that asylum request access and rates will change. in march 2021, president biden did grant temporary protected status (tps) to venezuelans already living in the us for 18 months (bbc news, 2021). as previously observed through discussion on the cartagena declaration, canada also has received a smaller number of venezuelan asylum claims and currently has recognized 3,067 claims with 1,388 pending (r4v, 2021). spain also hosts refugees and migrants from venezuela and has recognized 57,481 asylum claims (r4v, 2021). northern countries such as the us, canada, and spain have offered protection to some venezuelan refugee claimants; however, most of the support for displaced venezuelans coming from north america and the european union has been through financial aid rather than hosting large number of migrants (wolfe, 2021). the trend of preferring financial aid as opposed to receiving or hosting migrants and refugees can be plainly demonstrated by the somewhat controversial 2016 eu and turkey deal, in which the eu offered to pay turkey 6 billion euros to gatekeep and prevent irregular migration. this deal has essentially closed that migration route to europe and confined migrants and refugees to turkey, currently the host of the world’s most significant number of displaced peoples (e.g., mandiraci, 2020; rygiel et al., 2016). in the case of venezuela, regional governments have already stepped up to accommodate the majority of displaced venezuelan mixed migrants, and do not need to be induced to hinder mobility. increased northern support for a regional coordinated response would simply encourage regional host governments to continue to offer the solidarity that they extended, reduce tensions and improve their capacity for providing improved long-term, inclusive protection under the auspices of social justice. la solidaridad o la soledad? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 625 conclusion the venezuelan migration crisis affects the surrounding region most, and regional host countries have responded by accommodating displaced venezuelans regardless of how they would be classified. however, individual countries’ long-term planning and inclusion strategies have been inadequate for the large numbers of displaced venezuelans, thereby placing limits on the initial solidarity displayed. as a result, rising fatigue and xenophobia have led some states towards policies that are more restrictive in application, resulting in furthered exclusion and irregular migration, yet not resolving the migration crisis. the covid-19 pandemic also increased conditions of precarity for venezuelans in the region. despite the growing numbers and increased tensions, some of venezuela’s neighbors have begun responding to displacement in more generous, practical, and inventive ways. brazil’s application of the cartagena declaration and colombia’s new 10-year visa reflect a more inclusive, humanitarian, and longer-term response to the venezuelan migration crisis in the americas that is more in tune with fairness and social justice. colombia’s new 10-year visa is exemplary in the region and offers a more expansive outreach. the cartagena declaration further offers more durable protection, which would help guarantee that displaced venezuelans have access to more equal economic, political, and social rights and opportunities in their host countries, by a shared recognition of being deserving of such status owing to the general conditions in venezuela. however, all efforts are required to encourage and support a fuller and broader regional response to displaced venezuelans so that they can access regular status and rights in the societies where they are currently living. increased regional coordination and international support of such efforts can help individual host countries improve their response to the displaced venezuelans they host, allowing them to continue and even improve upon their initial solidarity while reducing tensions and conditions of precarity. host countries can achieve this by guaranteeing access to basic social benefits and allowing displaced people to be included as more equal participants in their host societies. acknowledgements i would like to express my appreciation to my supervisor, dr suzan ilcan, for encouraging my writing and publication efforts and being supportive of my research work. i am also thankful to classmates, professors, and colleagues for the discussions that helped inspire and inform my topic. special thanks should go to the studies in social justice reviewers and editors whose patience and feedback guided me in developing my earlier work into its lana gonzalez balyk studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 612-627, 2022 626 current and bettered version. i would also like to thank those whose feedback and editing support that i sought during this process. finally, i would like to express my gratitude to my loved ones for being with me through my academic journey. references acosta, d., blouin, c., & freier, l. 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(2020, february). the spirit of cartagena? applying the extended refugee definition to venezuelans in latin america. forced migration review, 63. https://www.fmreview.org/cities/blouin-berganza-freier economist intelligence. (2021). country report venezuela may 2021.the economist intelligence unit. declaración de cartagena sobre los refugiados adoptada por el coloquio sobre la protección internacional de los refugiados en américa central, méxico y panamá. (1984). https://www.acnur.org/5b076ef14.pdf freier, l., & gauci, j. (2020). refugee rights across regions: a comparative overview of legislative good practices in latin america and the e.u. refugee survey quarterly, 39(3), 321-362. freier, l., & parent, n. (2019). the regional response to the venezuelan exodus. current history, 118(805), 56-61. freier, l., micinski, n., & tsourapas, g. (2021). refugee commodification: the diffusion of refugee rent-seeking in the global south. third world quarterly, 42(11), 2747-2766. grandi, f. 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(2020). covid-19 in latin america: a humanitarian crisis. the lancet, 396, 1463. oas (association of american states). (2020). venezuela migration and refugee crisis: situation report november 2020. office of the oas general secretariat. http://www.oas.org/documents/eng/press/oas_nov20-crisis-of-venezuelan-migrants-andrefugees-situation-report.pdf rv4. (2021). rmrp for refugees and migrants from venezuela: a regional refugee and migrant response plan, january december 2021. https://www.r4v.info/en/document/rmrp-2021 rv4. (2022). rmrp 2022: regional refugee and migrant response plan january december 2022. https://rmrp.r4v.info/ rygiel, k., baban, f., & ilcan, s. (2016). the syrian refugee crisis: the eu-turkey ‘deal’ and temporary protection. global social policy, 16(3), 315-320. sánchez, n., & freier, l. (2021). the cartagena refugee definition and nationality‐based discrimination in mexican refugee status determination. international migration, 60(1), 3756. selee, a., & bolter, j. (2021). colombia’s open‐door policy: an innovative approach to displacement? international migration, 60(1), 113-131. selee, a., bolter, j., munoz-pogossian, b., & hazam, m. (2019). creativity amid crisis: legal pathways for venezuelan migrants in latin america. migration policy institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/legal-pathways-venezuelan-migrants-latinamerica stasiulis, d. (2013). contending frames of ‘security’ and ‘citizenship’: lebanese dual nationals during the 2006 lebanon war. in s. ilcan (ed.), mobilities, knowledge and social justice (pp. 25-58). mcgill-queen’s university press. un general assembly. (1951, july 25). final act of the united nations conference of plenipotentiaries on the status of refugees and stateless persons. unhcr. https://www.unhcr.org/protection/travaux/40a8a7394/final-act-united-nations-conferenceplenipotentiaries-status-refugees-stateless.html unhcr. (n.d.a) venezuela situation. https://www.unhcr.org/venezuela-emergency.html unhcr. (n.d.b). refugee data finder. https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/ unhcr. (2019, may). guidance note on international protection considerations for venezuelans – update 1. https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/5cd1950f4.pdf unhcr. (2020). rmrp 2020 dashboard. https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations van praag, o. (2019, september 13). understanding the venezuelan refugee crisis. wilson centre: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/understanding-the-venezuelan-refugee-crisis wolfe, g. (2021, january 4). where are venezuelan migrants and refugees going? an analysis of legal and social contexts in receiving countries . center for migration studies. https://cmsny.org/publications/venezuelan-migrants-legal-contexts-wolfe-010421/ zapata, g., & wenderoth, v. (2021). progressive legislation but lukewarm policies: the brazilian response to venezuelan displacement. international migration, 60(1), 132-151. georas et al final before ts correspondence address: jane bailey, faculty of law, university of ottawa, ottawa, on, k1n 6n5; email: jbailey@uottawa.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth chloé s. georas university of puerto rico, puerto rico jane bailey university of ottawa, canada valerie steeves university of ottawa, canada abstract in 2017 and 2018 the equality project organized two transnational youth resistance art workshops with young people aged 15-22 who were interested in social justice activism. these educational and outreach workshops provided participants with background information about online social justice issues and explored ways to use art to push back against technology-facilitated violence and surveillance in networked spaces. both during the design phase and the implemention of the workshops themselves, we were confronted by three dilemmas associated with these sorts of resistive social justice art projects. this article explores these dilemmas, which include how facilitators of youth art workshops can enable the production of digital art in a manner that is attentive to intersectional issues of digital literacy and access; respond to artistic appropriations of sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful speech and their relation to cultural appropriation; and protect youth participants from liability for contravening defamation, privacy, copyright or trademark laws as part of their artistic appropriations. throughout, we present examples of how the legal frameworks in our two jurisdctions (canada and puerto rico) shaped the resistance and social justice opportunities available to our youth participants. we also discuss the decisions we made in consultation with our youth participants about how to navigate the law, and provide a list of suggestions for addressing these dilemmas for those who may wish to facilitate or engage in youth resistance art workshops in future. keywords privacy; inequality; technology; art; self-expression; digital; social justice; art activism; copyright chloé s. georas, jane bailey & valerie steeves studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 356 the equality project is a seven-year partnership of academic reseachers, educators, civil society groups, policymakers and youth funded by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada.1 together, we are working to develop new knowledge about young people’s experiences of privacy and equality in networked spaces. we also collaborate with youth on educational and outreach initiatives designed to help young people participate fully in the networked environment and develop their capacity to promote online social justice. accordingly, our work is an example of social justice youth development practices as defined by ginwright and james (2002): it is grounded in research co-conducted with youth to understand how power plays out in online social relationships; our intersectional focus gives identity a central role; our outreach initatives seek to dismantle systemic barriers to online equality (which we define as the ability to participate fully in networked spaces without discrimination or harassment); and we work to encourage collective action that is consonant with youth culture and values (p. 35). as part of our educational and outreach initiatives, the authors conceptualized, organized, and facilitated two transnational workshops in 2017-2018, on artistic responses to online issues (the equality project, 2019).2 the workshops placed particular emphasis on artistic interventions to help push back against technology-facilitated violence and surveillance in networked spaces. the first workshop was held on february 24-25, 2018, at st. stephen’s community house youth arcade studio in toronto, canada, which organizes art activism programs for youth and provides multi-media tools for self-expression. the second workshop was held on april 23-24, 2018, at diagonal in san juan, puerto rico, a space for exploring and exhibiting contemporary practices in art alongside the use of technology and digital mediums (diagonal, n.d.). the workshop in canada was a two-day standalone event. the workshop in puerto rico was preceded by four sessions of artistic mentorship provided by artists carola cintrón moscoso and migdalia luz barens-vera to a pre-selected group of participants who then participated in the workshop directed by the forementioned artists and the authors. in order to stimulate the creative process of the participants in the workshops, we worked with two youth research assistants, grace foran and dillon black, to created five “imagination primers” that introduced the issues and highlighted particular projects where young people had used art to respond to tech-facilitated violence, discrimination, and surveillance: (1) “what are online harassment & tech facilitated violence anyway?”; (2) “resisting online harassment: #gamergate”; (3) “what is surveillance anyway?”; (4) “resisting surveillance with theatre: surveillance camera 1 the project is co-led by valerie steeves and jane bailey. 2 the workshops were an educational and outreach initiative and not a research initiative. accordingly, no data was collected. we made the decision not to collect data to ensure that the art participants produced was not coopted into adult frames of reference. ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 357 players”; and (5) “resisting racism with art.” the equality project later incorporated these primers into a lesson plan for use in classrooms.3 following completion of the workshops, carola cintrón moscoso, migdalia luz barens-vera and georas organized an art exhibition entitled equality project. it took place in espacio diagonal on june 1, 2018 and included works by participants of the canadian and puerto rican workshops. in addition, bailey, georas and steeves developed a train the trainer workshop called youth, art & resistance: facilitating workshops for change based on our experience of organizing and facilitating these transnational resistance art workshops, and presented the workshop at the human rights research and education centre (hrrec) at the university of ottawa faculty of law on march 2, 2018. this article addresses three dilemmas related to questions of social justice that we confronted as part of organizing the transnational resistance art workshops, which were of particular concern to us given the fact all three of us trained as lawyers and georas completed graduate studies in art history and cultural studies. the first dilemma relates to the fact that enabling the production of activist digital art is necessarily connected with the question of digital literacy in ways that require transcending the narrative that universal access to technology will bring about equality. the second dilemma concerns the social justice implications of artistic appropriations of sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful imagery and speech, and the related concern of cultural appropriation, all of which could arise as part of engaging in activist artistic resistance projects. the third dilemma is that workshop participants may create works that raise legal and ethical questions relating to defamation, privacy, copyrights, and trademarks, requiring organizers and youth participants to directly address the ways in which law can be used to repress artistic expression intended to promote social justice. here we focus on the three dilemmas to develop a deeper understanding of the social justice implications of our workshops. although legal issues are obviously of concern in our art workshops and are addressed in this article, the ethical and social justice issues take centre stage. furthermore, when we do address legal matters specifically, it is because legal questions arose in the design process for both workshops, invoking various jurisdictionally-specific doctrines and laws that shaped the opportunities for resistance in each location. although we refer to the laws of canada, the united states, and puerto rico as the united states’ colonial territory, our main interest is to identify ways in which arts-based social justice initiatives such as ours are shaped by the regulatory frameworks that establish and protect the status quo, and not to conduct a comparative legal study of how the legal questions play out in each jurisdiction. for instance, when the workshop organizers 3 the primers, the lesson plan and videos and still photos of the art our participants produced are available on the the equality project website at http://www.equalityproject.ca/resources/artexchange/ chloé s. georas, jane bailey & valerie steeves studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 358 discussed how to inform the participants of the potential legal risks associated with creation of their resistance artworks, we struggled between our desire not to chill their artistic expression, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the need to inform them about the risks, particularly as the risk of criminalization is higher for members of marginalized groups, especially if they are engaged in particularly transgressive forms of expression. central to our social justice concerns regarding the workshops was how to enable the participants to understand the social, economic, and cultural systems of repression nested in the very process of digital content production. creative agency itself is ambiguously enabled and compromised by the architectures of power materialized in the networked tools through which activist artistic content can be produced and distributed. the stakes for transgressive digital artworks are thus high in the hostile digital ecosystems that sustain the daily lives of youth, particularly when youth seek to undermine the power relations of the platforms where they create their art. digital art and digital literacy: questions of access and social justice the first dilemma we considered as we designed the workshops concerns enabling the production of digital art and its relationship to digital literacy. in part, this dilemma is grounded in important debates occurring within the field of digital art that raise questions about the workshop and possible future redefinitions of its scope and strategy. but it also reflects debates in the field of digital literacy that require a deeper enquiry into the relationship between art, technology, and social justice. many terms have been deployed to name art forms using digital technologies, such as digital art, multimedia art, cyberarts, new media art, social media art, tactical media art, hacktivist art, and even post-internet art. contrary to the traditional notion of an artwork that is seen as a linear and finished work, digital art is “time‐based, dynamic, and non‐linear” (paul, 2016). a digital artwork might not be repeatable or could reconfigure itself continuously. this makes the contextual understanding of a digital artwork more layered to the extent that it relates to the materiality of the artwork and the computational processes that transcend the work itself. digital art, in this way, does not refer to an essentialist, ontological or phenomenological understanding of the digital, but instead refers to “social forms that involve electronic and digital communication technologies … such as different types of collaboration [that transcend] specific pieces of hard‐ and software” (medosch, 2016, p. 357). digital art is an umbrella term to name art that is “predominantly understood as digital‐born, computable art that is created, stored, and distributed via digital technologies and uses the features of these technologies as a medium” (paul, 2016, p. 2). a critical distinction in this field is between works that make an instrumental use of digital technologies, merely as a tool of production, and ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 359 works that engage self-reflexively with digital technologies. the instrumentalist approach is limited for our purposes in two ways. first, it does not unravel the traditional conception of an artwork as a finite object (e.g., sculpture, print, painting or photograph). second, it fails to interrogate the relations of domination that are embedded within the current market design of – and legal framework governing – networked tools (toews, 2008, pp. 6778). as zuboff (2019) notes, the surveillance capitalism upon which these technologies are based approaches human experience, including artistic expression, as “free raw materials for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales” (p. vii). whether an artist uses commercial software to create an artwork or simply displays it over the internet, the art itself will be captured in the data stream and used to fuel the information economy. the act of creating with networked tools is accordingly coopted into a system of wealth production that privileges the few at the expense of the many. david toews (2008) warns that, unless social justice proponents unpack how the ongoing commodification of digitally produced content is “blurring the line between consumers and producers in order to extract labour from our most ordinary ways of interacting” (p. 68), then we risk using these tools in ways in which, “creative cultural agency becomes an imposition rather than a liberation” (p. 67). self-consciously digital artwork can help us unpack these dynamics precisely because it “employs these technologies as a tool for the creation of a less material, software‐based form that utilizes the digital medium’s inherent characteristics, such as its participatory and generative features” (paul, 2016, p. 2). this affordance of participatory creation opens up a space for artists to make collectivist and cooperative works that can deconstruct the existing distribution of social goods and explicitly trouble the power relations embedded in the technological tools and platforms they use to create their art (rizvi, 1998). in spite of the fact that the tools themselves are part of the infrastructure of commodification, artists can “build social justice from the ground up” by appropriating the tools “in a way that allows [the artist] to create something unique to him or her” that “bridges the gap between ‘what is and what could be’ in internet practices” (toews, 2008, p. 70). digital art, however, poses the question of the technological and media literacy required to produce this kind of art. at first blush, social justice would seem to require that all members of society have access to the tools and skills they need to create digital content. because of this, the majority of social justice interventions around online literacy to date have focused on redressing the digital divide between technology haves and have-nots (toews, 2008, p. 71). the digital divide debate can be helpful because it enables us to question “all the social stratifications, political conflicts, economic inequalities, and infrastructural development delays that have prevented the internet from reaching vast numbers of users” to better “understand the disparities in current global systems” (toews, 2008, pp. 70-71). certainly, women and chloé s. georas, jane bailey & valerie steeves studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 360 girls throughout history have been systematically excluded and dissuaded from understanding and studying technology-related fields and languages (vitores & gil-juarez, 2016). this exclusion is further compounded by intersectional forms of inequality for racialized and other minorities, which resonates with one of the reasons why the st. stephen’s youth arcade studio in toronto was initially founded. among other things, the studio helps to support young people from bipoc (black, indigenous, and people of colour) and other marginalized communities to develop the portfolios necessary to gain admission to art schools by offering access to resources such as space and art supplies. in so doing, it helps to place them on a more even playing field with applicants from privileged communities for whom access to these resources is not a barrier. according to maría fernández (1999), artists who work in media arts must struggle to keep abreast of the latest technological developments, putting artists “who cannot afford to join the race ... at a disadvantage,” (p. 66) especially given the scarcity of funding for the arts. despite the innovative forms of activism put forward by media art, fernández (1999) is concerned with how the “technological imperative in the arts is creating a new and exclusionary universalism” (p. 69). if we combine the problem of access to art schools experienced by those at marginalized social locations with the systemic exclusion of girls and women from an understanding of the digital languages of technological and media platforms and software design, we can appreciate the stakes involved for them to produce digital art. however, the notion of the digital divide may also restrict more meaningful social justice action by positioning equality-seeking groups as somehow “information or technology poor” (eubanks, 2011, p. xviii), and therefore not able to articulate the myriad ways in which they experience and actively resist the technological domination that shapes their lives (eubanks, 2011, p. 35). as eubanks (2011) writes of poor and working class women, our participants’ artistic interventions: directly contradict the widespread belief that [they] lack access to technology. in fact, they describe their lives as characterized by technological ubiquity – technology shapes their workplaces, community institutions, and political experiences. but, unlike many of their middle-class counterparts, their encounters with it and the high-tech economy tend to be exploitative and limiting, increasing their economic vulnerability and political marginalization. (p. xix) this lived experience underlines the need to challenge the narrative that universal access to technology will bring about equality (toews, 2008, p. 72); it also suggests that social justice can perhaps best be advanced by helping young artists acquire a critical understanding of the ways in which digital content production is nested in social, economic and cultural systems of repression (buckingham, 2008, pp. 73-90). our workshops were designed to enable an artistic process of resistance to surveillance and technology-facilitated violence that was informed by this ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 361 critical understanding. when we started the workshops, we explicitly addressed the possibility that our participants could choose to use digital or non-digital media to engage with the issues that concerned them; in the end, all of our participants created non-digital visual artworks. however, to make this a real choice, we also committed enough funding after the workshops to ensure that participants could access a variety of media – both digital and non-digital – to complete their artwork using whatever medium they choose. with participant permission, we also created digital works to exhibit their art online. interestingly, as some of the participants of the workshops insightfully suggested when they were planning their projects, they felt that art-asresistance may be more effective if artists use technologies subversively in order to unravel them from within. we believe that this raises important questions for reconceptualizing future incarnations of the workshop to further empower young people (particularly those at marginalized social locations) to produce digital and media artworks that critically engage with surveillance and technology-facilitated violence. artistic appropriation of sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful speech and its relation to cultural appropriation the second dilemma concerns the ways in which laws governing speech and images may constrain artistic appropriation of sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful imagery and speech, and the related concern of cultural appropriation, both of which could arise as part of engaging in activist artistic resistance projects (georas, 2021). our workshop participants talked about their experiences of encountering sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful imagery and speech and some were interested in repeating that imagery and speech as a means of resisting and criticizing technology-facilitated violence, discrimination and surveillance through their art. for example, some of the artworks our participants produced included the intentionally transgressive use of discriminatory terms such as “slut” to challenge imagery of sexual violence, sexually explicit slut-shaming, and racist hate speech. similarly, in other contexts youth artists may choose to reproduce the “n” word or incorporate profanity into their works. while these kinds of images or speech may be offensive (and in some cases illegal) in one context, our youth participants felt that their repetition in the workshop could form part of an artistic project of activist recontextualization to confront audiences with these experiences. although it did not arise in the context of our workshops, youth artists may similarly choose to express themselves by employing words and images specific to particular cultures in order to respond, raising issues around cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation. both of these actions could be affected by the legal frameworks in place to govern speech. chloé s. georas, jane bailey & valerie steeves studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 362 the following summarizes the legal concerns that we, as facilitators, considered before we conducted the workshops, and the approach that we took to mitigate constraints on our participants’ participation and selfexpression during the workshops. appropriation of sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful imagery and speech historic examples: dworkin, langer and ringley. as we designed the workshop, we were aware of the fact that artists who have chosen in the past to resist systems of repression by appropriating sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful imagery and speech have been subjected to legal action when their works have not been clearly distinguishable from the material that their work was intended to criticize or challenge (adler, 1996; matsuda, 1989). anti-sexual violence and women’s rights activist andrea dworkin, for example, wrote several works of fiction describing graphic acts of sexual violence against women in order to critique sexual violence as a tool of misogyny. some of these works were later detained at the canadian border on the basis that they constituted obscenity, although canadian customs agents ultimately released them (mackinnon & dworkin, 1994). similarly, sketches and paintings that depicted children involved in sexually explicit activity which were created by canadian artist eli langer and exhibited at a toronto art gallery in 1994 were subject to a forfeiture application under the canadian criminal code’s child pornography provision (ryder, 2003, p. 128). ultimately the court concluded that the artistic materials did not constitute child pornography because, rather than posing a realistic risk of harm to children, these works were meant to “lament the reality” of child sexual abuse (ryder, 2003, p. 128). the dworkin and langer cases represent just two of many examples of potential legal implications arising from artistic appropriation of sexually violent, discriminatory and hateful content that long pre-date the internet. these are not issues, therefore, that are new to the digital era. that said, the digital technologies that are the subject of our art workshops introduce certain additional complexity to the situation. for example, online display of artworks produced during the workshops expands opportunities for more interactive public engagement with art. at the same time, however, digital technologies allow for easy copying, modification, and redistribution of works that could, among other things, change the original artist’s intended meaning by removing the work from its original context. in this way, art originally intended to appropriate discriminatory, obscene or hateful content in order to criticize it could be modified or relocated into a different context that valorizes it.4 4 we discuss how our participants resolved this issue in the section on copyright issues below. ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 363 artworks actually created online can raise similar issues. for example, in 1996 us college student jennifer ringley set up a 24/7 webcam in her apartment as a “social experiment” with numerous objectives including challenging mainstream media representations of stereotypically “perfect” women (bailey, 2009). one of the outcomes of ringley’s experiment, however, involved viewers searching through hours of relatively mundane video in order to cut out sexually explicit excerpts that were then used to “recreate material that shares many of the features of voyeuristic mainstream pornography” (bailey, 2009). overall, the dworkin, langer, and ringley examples help to illustrate the possibility of legal, ethical and social justice frictions that could arise in workshops designed to engage youth participants in artistic resistance against technology-facilitated violence, discrimination, and surveillance. not only might these works attract unwanted legal attention, they could also be appropriated by others to convey meanings contrary to those intended by the original artist. legal limits on expression: hate speech, obscenity, child pornography. as facilitators, we also struggled with the possibility that workshop participants’ art could potentially violate hate speech, obscenity or child pornography laws. the imposition of legal constraints on artistic and other forms of expression is the subject of a long-standing debate, the parameters of which are too vast to fully articulate in this piece. instead, our goal here is to loosely sketch two of the perspectives we considered as we sought to design a workshop to help youth participants advance social justice. the first perspective asserts that legal restrictions on sexually violent pornography (mackinnon, 1987), and on racist hate propaganda (matsuda, 1989) can be understood as equality-affirming acts. catharine mackinnon (1987), for example, argued that mainstream pornography both involves sexual violence against women and children in its creation and also undermines the humanity and equality of women and children more generally through representations of their degradation and dehumanization (pp. 210211). similarly, mari matsuda (1989) argued that racist hate propaganda not only wounds targeted individuals and groups, but also paves the way to other acts of violence against targeted groups by stereotyping them as less than human. viewed from these perspectives, legal restraints on these types of expression can be understood as equality-affirming social justice initiatives. in contrast, the second social justice perspective we considered argues that words and images cannot be understood as having static meaning – their meanings are multiple and determined in context. as a result, postmodern scholars such as judith butler (1997) have argued that the artistic reappropriation and deployment of racist or sexist commentaries in new contexts can serve as an effective social justice tool for defusing hatred and discrimination. from this perspective, legal restraints on pornography and hate speech undermine social justice objectives by exposing to criminal chloé s. georas, jane bailey & valerie steeves studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 364 sanction those who seek to criticize violent pornography (or hate speech) by appropriating it into artistic expression (adler, 1996). seen in this way, legal restraints serve to chill transgressive expressive resistance. in canada, exposure to criminal sanction and the associated risk of chilling resistive expression, however, is constrained at least in part by relevant defences, such as: (a) the “public good” defence to obscenity charges (canadian criminal code, s 163(3)); (b) child pornography charge defences of no undue risk of harm (canadian criminal code, s 163.1(6)(b)), and legitimate purpose (canadian criminal code, s 163.1(6)(a)); and (c) numerous defences to willful promotion of hatred charges (including truth, good faith opinion, public interest or benefit and intention to remove materials promoting hatred; canadian criminal code, s 319(3)). that said, it is important to recognize that the risk of criminalization may be higher for our participants as they are members of marginalized groups, especially if they chose to engage in particularly transgressive forms of expression (cossman, 2002). further, the child pornography offence is particularly broad, prohibiting 12 different actions including accessing such content (canadian criminal code, s 163.1(2) and (3)), and sets a relatively low threshold for violation. because of this, we knew that the provision could, subject to available defences (canadian criminal code, s 163.1(3)(a); r v sharpe, 2001), expose our youth participants seeking to address social injustices to criminal intervention in relation to issues that may be of most expressive importance to them. ethical and social justice issues. in addition to considering how the law could impact our participants, we also considered the possibility that raising these issues with our participants before they began to work could risk chilling artistic expression. such risk could be compounded in situations where power differentials based on race, age, gender, and other factors mean that discussions around these issues are likely to be understood more as warnings than as attempts at informed dialogue – especially where the issues are introduced by adult facilitators in sessions involving youth participants. however, we concluded that failing to discuss legal limits, as well as risks to participants such as others taking the content they have created in the wrong way or misusing it to support the very positions the participant seeks to critique through their art, seems unfair – particularly if (as discussed below) participants are asked to sign liability waivers relating to content they have consented to being posted online. we also struggled with the possibility that the context in which the workshops take place may also impose limits with social justice implications. here we draw on our own experiences with respect to educational modules created for use in schools. school boards censor modules that directly address many of the issues young people face online (e.g., hateful misogyny) and the language they use to express their experiences (e.g., profanity). thus, educational modules intended to help them navigate online pitfalls tend to be ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 365 anemic and reinforce the impression that adults do not have a good understanding of what actually happens online. such contextual constraints, by definition, threaten to limit the efficacy of exercises such as resistance art workshops by imposing ex ante restrictions on what kind of expression is considered acceptable. moreover, these constraints may discourage participants from investing themselves in a process that appears so out of touch with their lived realities and experiences. in the end, we decided that it was best to raise these issues with our participants so that they could make informed decisions about their own selfexpression. we felt that a strict legal approach that laid down “ground rules” about what could and could not be said at the beginning of the workshop was inconsistent with the social justice aims of the initiative. instead, we chose to facilitate the approaches our participants took so we could help them explore ways to amplify their own voices in ways that made sense to them. cultural appropriation another ethical/social justice issue that we considered as we designed our resistance art workshop is cultural appropriation. we knew from previous work with youth that some participants might, for example, choose to address in their art attacks on marginalized communities of which they are not members, employing language or images from those communities in order to do so. there is some debate in the literature around what cultural appropriation is and whether, by definition, it entails a moral wrong (matthes, 2016). however, it is well-accepted that a member of a dominant culture’s use of an image, history or language specific to a marginalized cultural group is morally problematic because it interferes with the cultural autonomy of the marginalized group. loretta todd (1990) puts it this way: for me, the definition of appropriation originates in its inversion, cultural autonomy. cultural autonomy signifies a right to cultural specificity, a right to one’s origins and histories as told from within the culture and not as mediated from without. (p. 24) among the harms of cultural appropriation are the potential for misrepresenting the marginalized culture, exposing its members to discrimination, and potential loss of economic opportunity for members of marginalized groups (matthes, 2016, pp. 348-349). current discussions around cultural appropriation sometimes attempt to distinguish it from cultural appreciation, such that appropriation involves “the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture” (cambridge dictionary, as cited in brucculieri, 2018), while cultural appreciation involves acknowledging cultural sources, paying marginalized communities for use of their cultural chloé s. georas, jane bailey & valerie steeves studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 366 capital, or collaborating with those communities from the outset (brucculieri, 2018). although this issue did not arise during either workshop, we planned to bring it to the group’s attention if it did and discuss it more generally as a form of “cultural plagiarism.” we felt that this would pair reasonably well with the discussions of plagiarism (adoption and presentation of another’s work as if it were one’s own) that they would be familiar with as students. however, resistance art that “plagiarizes” from empowered sources in order to critique them (much like the process of using trademarks and other copyrighted material discussed below) is obviously distinguishable in social justice terms from members of dominant cultural groups’ appropriation of culture from marginalized communities. defamation, privacy, copyright and trademark considerations of artistic appropriations the third challenge we addressed as we planned the workshop was that participants may produce works that raise legal and ethical questions relating to defamation, privacy, copyright and trademarks. in other words, there could be a conflict between the resistance artwork method and the potential illegality of the works themselves, with important implications for the social justice potential of our workshops. defamation and privacy considerations since claims can also arise concerning the alleged defamation of a third party resulting from the publication of artworks produced by workshop participants, it is important to consider defamation and invasion of privacy as possible causes of action in addition to hate speech and obscenity. when considering defamation and privacy issues, the risks faced by schools in the us when publishing the works of students may be instructive. irrespective of whether or not our workshops actually take place in a school setting, we concluded that the normative criteria developed in the case law on this matter can be helpful in understanding some of the risks our workshops may raise and the related level of care we should exercise to both protect the participants and organizers of workshops like ours from legal liability. in the us school context, for example, negligence and defamation are common claims of liability that arise in relation to publication of student works. in order to avoid being found negligent, us school districts and teachers have an affirmative duty to take all reasonable steps to protect their students from foreseeable harm (dorlac v clairmont academy, 2007). this affirmative duty entails taking precautions to avoid harm and offering proper instructions to students (pirkle v oakdale union grammar school dist., ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 367 1953; station v travelers ins., 1974). for the purposes of our workshops, if the publication of an artwork made by a participant could cause damage to the author, this doctrine suggests that there may be an affirmative legal duty to explain the risks of publication to the participants. in one us case, warner v lompoc (2002), two families sued a school district and a newspaper advisor claiming that comments in the student newspaper on the effects of divorce that were attributed to their daughters were defamatory and an invasion of privacy. while the court ultimately rejected the claims it commented that school officials had engaged in poor judgment by using the students’ names in the publication. these kinds of legal precedents could be relevant to workshops like ours in situations where participants seek to address technology-facilitated violence or surveillance by drawing on the experiences of others in ways that identify them. copyright considerations since the participants in our workshops were minors, the questions of capacity to hold copyright and to licence use and publication of one’s work by others arose. this issue was important to us because we hosted two exhibits of participants’ artwork, one online and one offline. copyright legislation in both the us and canada draws no distinction between minors and adults relative to copyright ownership (copyright act, 17 usc § 101 et seq; copyright act, rsc, 1985; copyrightlaws.com, 2019). the us copyright office's website, moreover, specifically states that “minors may claim copyright, and the copyright office issues registrations to minors, but state laws may regulate the business dealings involving copyrights owned by minors” (us copyright office, n.d.). similarly, us case law concerning this topic has operated under the assumption that minors can hold copyrights (mason v jamie music pub. co., 2009; a.v. ex rel. vanderhye v. iparadigms, llc, 2009; a.v. v iparadigms, llc, 2008). overall, the absence of an adult/minor distinction in us and canadian copyright legislation, existing us case law, and the guidance of the us copyright office's website support a minor's claim of copyright ownership in the works of authorship they create. subject to legislation that limits the enforceability of contracts entered into by minors, minors themselves (or through their legal guardians) may enter into agreements with other parties for the use of their copyrighted works, including exclusive or non-exclusive licensing agreements. the question of ownership is an important one from the perspective of social justice advocacy because it determines the extent to which the intellectual property of the artist seeking to trouble existing frameworks of oppression will be recognized and protected in law. it also governs the extent to which artists can re-appropriate the intellectual property of others (as discussed above) in order to deconstruct the power relationships that play out in networked spaces. further, participants’ copyright and their ability to chloé s. georas, jane bailey & valerie steeves studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 368 license others to use or publish their works must be taken into account by workshop facilitators who wish to exhibit, post or republish the works in other digital and non-digital fora. copyright law also raises important social justice concerns where workshop participants wish to incorporate pre-existing copyrighted works of others into their creations. the us copyright act of 1976, for example, establishes a series of exclusive rights or copyrights for authors, adult or minor, of original works. copyrights only exist if a work has two essential characteristics, namely, originality and that it be fixed in some tangible form (copyright act, 17 usc § 106). the exclusive rights to control the use and distribution of a copyrighted work established by copyright law include the exclusive power to reproduce or make copies of the work; create derivative works based on the work (namely, to alter, remix, or build upon the work); distribute copies of the work; publicly display the work; perform the work; and, in the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission. derivative works are of particular relevance to our art workshops. a derivative work is: a work based upon one or more pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. a work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ‘derivative work.’ (copyright act, 17 usc § 101) a derivative work is subject to protection irrespective of whether the underlying pre-existing work is still subject to copyright. however, the protection for the author of a derivative work is only in relation to the creative expression in the derivative rather than over the original underlying work. in other words, a derivative work can have simultaneous copyrights related to the derivative expression and relative to the original work upon which the derivative was inspired (copyright act, 17 usc § 103(b)). thus, if a participant in our workshops creatively appropriates a pre-existing work (such as an artistic representation used by a social media site) without requesting permission, they may violate the exclusive rights of the author of the original work. also, if a participant appropriates a derivative work (such as a translation of a pre-existing work), they may violate the copyrights of the authors of both the derivative and the underlying original work of art. doctrines of fair use in the us and fair dealing in canada counter the rigidity of the copyright regime (schechter & thomas, 2003, p. 213), which undermines the process of creative exchange. in the us, for example, in order to “promote the progress of science and useful arts,” (us const. art. i, § 8, cl. 8) the doctrine of fair use was adopted to permit uses of copyrighted materials without having to request permission when considered beneficial to ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 369 society. the doctrine includes uses such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research (copyright act, 17 usc § 107), but is subject to a number of conditions that can make it difficult to predict whether any given use will be considered by a court to be a “fair use.” similar sorts of concerns have been raised with respect to “fair dealing” in s. 29 of the canadian copyright act (1985). thus, using protected contents without requesting permission necessarily entails some level of risk. in this way, the inherent ambiguity of these doctrines can undermine the free exchange of ideas at the heart of cultural and artistic production. in order to avoid copyright infringement claims, legal advisors often prefer to rely on the negotiation of contractual and licensing agreements, rather than on fair use or fair dealing. however, these agreements are highly complex, expensive, and generally inaccessible to young and struggling artists. moreover, lawrence lessig (2014) has called the incentives to licence a “permission culture,” whereby people feel pressured to request permission to use or modify protected works rather than rely on fair use. permission culture is an expression of entrenched economic and class interests of, for instance, the entertainment industry's increasing proprietary claims over cultural production, which unravels the capacity to freely share artistic production and generate flourishing cultural spaces. according to lessig (2014), “there has never been a time in our history when more of our ‘culture’ was as ‘owned’ as it is now. and yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now” (p. 12). the great irony is that the concentration of power associated with the increase in proprietary copyright claims occurs precisely alongside the emergence of the internet and digital technologies, which were initially celebrated for democratizing the access of cultural processes of production beyond traditional gatekeepers such as publishing houses and music companies. this dramatizes the disjuncture between the potentialities of new technologies and the ways in which the copyright regime works to protect the vested interests of the powerful. the vulnerability of workshop participants to legal claims of copyright violations in the context of fair use in the us or fair dealing in canada should not be underestimated. the main question is how to deal with this dilemma in terms of the workshop itself. the concern is whether to pre-censor the creative process with legal prescriptions, which we concluded would be counterproductive relative to the purpose of the workshop to enable forms of activist and critical expression. as already mentioned, this is complicated by the age and socio-economic status of our participants, who may feel doubly disadvantaged by the imposition of legal constraints that function to repress them or their expression at an event that is explicitly intended to give them voice. the integration of legal waivers of responsibility into the licensing scheme of the workshops posed difficult ethical questions given that the workshop is designed to be a critical engagement with technology-facilitated violence and chloé s. georas, jane bailey & valerie steeves studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 370 surveillance in ways that could implicate its participants. on the one hand, workshops are intended to encourage participants to explore activist artistic engagements, but on the other (through legal waivers of responsibility) we as workshop facilitators would be distancing themselves from works that could pose controversial legal questions and which could be precisely a symptom of the transgressive and critical depth of their artistic proposal. furthermore, the legally borderline nature of the work could be read as part of its performative deployment. whereas most of the artworks of the participants of the canada workshop stayed within the realm of original visual works given time constraints, the participants of the puerto rico workshop were engaged in a more long-term process of artistic mentorship prior to the workshop in order to assist them in the conceptualization and materialization of their projects. in both workshops, we worked to give our youth participants a visual vocabulary to deconstruct the seemingly monolithic popular cultural representations that shape their lives without inhibiting their creative explorations with legal prescriptions. however, when we developed a lesson plan so teachers could conduct the workshop in a school setting, we kept the cases about school liability in mind and included precautions and background information about the level of care that should be practiced in the undertaking of workshops addressing social justice issues such as technology-facilitated violence and surveillance in schools. we did this because our prior work suggests that, if schools and other organizations are not offered insight on how to minimize exposure to liability for themselves and for participants, they may shy away from engaging with projects like our workshops, which are aimed at addressing social justice issues that are often, by definition, controversial. in terms of the actual license we used to enable us to reproduce our participants’ art, we discussed our desire to hold the exhibits with our participants and provided them with model documents using various legal appropraches. after a collective discussion, both workshop groups opted for the creative commons attribution – noncommercial – sharealike 4.0 international license (creative commons, n.d) because it explicitly seeks to provide a community-based response to balance the strictures of intellectual property with online creativity and speech. trademark considerations similar to the copyright debate, the appropriation or transformation of trademarks in artworks is central to enabling a semiotic space for critical dialogue in relation to the companies whose pervasive cultural presence marks the technologically-mediated daily communications and habits of youth. however, once again, the space for resistive deconstruction will be shaped by domestic laws. ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 371 for example, us courts have extended first amendment protections for parody and satire in trademark infringement lawsuits. trademark rights, while providing protection for the integrity of trademarks, “do not entitle the owner to quash an unauthorized use of the mark by another who is communicating ideas or expressing points of view” (l.l. bean, inc. v drake publishers, 1987). moreover, the us federal dilution statute establishes an exemption for criticizing and commenting on the “famous mark owner or the goods or services of the famous mark owner” (false designations of origin, false descriptions, and dilution forbidden, 15 usc § 1125(c)(3)(a)(ii)). artistic expression, as well as criticism, commentary and reporting, therefore cannot be censored through the deployment of trademark law to the extent that important cultural dialogue and commentary of the trademark of a company, product or person “would be all but impossible if speakers were under” the constant “threat of an infringement lawsuit” (the new kids on the block v news america publ'g, 1992). however, such protections do not exist in every jurisdiction. in canada, for example, “parody and satire are not defences to trademark infringement” (united airlines, inc. v jeremy cooperstock, 2017, para 83). the absence of such a defence in canada raises a potentially important limit on the subversive use of trademarks by participants in workshops like ours given the pervasive presence of trademarks in the lives of young people and on the social media platforms they inhabit. given these realities, artistic appropriations of corporate trademarks and copyrighted works could be an important part of young people’s critical engagement with institutional complicity in the technological facilitation of violence and discrimination. for example, one artist discussed the possibility of incorporating into her art work material in which the government asserted copyright. the assertion of copyright itself was interesting because it related to traditional patterns that had been created by indigenous peoples, so that including it in the artistic work would make an important statement about colonialism and repression. satiric, parodic and appropriative uses of trademarks and copyrighted materials can thus be seen as a crucial artistic strategy to publicly engage with the symbolic deployment of these digital architectures in young people’s lives, but their use can be complicated by the legal rules that are in place to protect intellectual property. conclusion: recommendations for addressing legal, ethical and social justice issues this article has addressed questions concerning social justice that arose as we designed and held our transnational resistance art workshops, including dilemmas about how to enable the production of digital art in a manner that is attentive to intersectional issues of digital literacy and access; issues of artistic appropriation of sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful speech chloé s. georas, jane bailey & valerie steeves studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 372 and their relation to cultural appropriation; and, lastly, concerns relating to defamation, privacy, copyright and trademark considerations of artistic appropriations. as discussed, none of these issues is new to art workshops designed to support youth resistance to technology-facilitated violence and surveillance. instead, and as demonstrated above, they represent matters of long-standing debate and controversy within the art world and more generally among the public at large. we do not purport within the confines of this paper, therefore, to resolve them. our aim here is twofold: to raise awareness of the issues; and to offer the following modest suggestions for addressing them with workshop participants: • those wishing to facilitate resistance art workshops should understand the risks the workshops may entail and the related level of care that should be exercised to protect workshop participants and minimize exposure to liability; • workshop facilitators should specifically familiarize themselves with relevant legal issues in their respective jurisdiction; • workshop facilitators should engage in ex ante discussions of legal, ethical, and social justice issues with workshop participants, while working to minimize the potential chilling effect of such discussions by, for example, engaging young people as facilitators to lead discussions in order to avoid the power imbalance arising between adult facilitators and young participants; and • workshop facilitators and participants should make ex post decisions about which, if any, art produced at the workshop will be posted online or posted without identifying information relating to the artist, in light of associated legal, ethical, and social justice risks, with particular regard for potentially negative consequences to the young artist. acknowledgements thanks to the social sciences and humanities research council of canada for funding the equality project. thanks also to all of the participants in our workshops, to carola cintrón moscoso and migdalia barens vera for their mentorship in puerto rico, to bridget sinclair and all the staff at st stephen’s community house for their support in toronto, to dillon black, grace foran, andy villanueva and lorraine acevedo franqui for assisting with preparations for the workshops, and to vanessa ford for her research assistance on this paper. finally, thanks to the shirley greenberg chair of women and the legal profession, and to the university of ottawa for funding professor georas as visiting researcher at uottawa in 2018. ethical dilemmas in resistance art workshops with youth studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 355-374, 2021 373 references adler, a. 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(2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. profile books. janse van rensburg final correspondence address: margaret g. janse van rensburg, school of social work, carleton university, ottawa on k1s 5b6; email: margaretjansevanrens@cmail.carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 representations of autism in ontario newsroom: a critical content analysis of online government press releases, media advisories, and bulletins margaret g. janse van rensburg carleton university, canada abstract in ontario, canada, autism has become widely politicized. in the last 20 years, instances of personal and organizational advocacy developed into wider-scale policy and programs. government press releases indicate ontario’s developing response to autism as a social policy issue, while reflecting societal perceptions and priorities surrounding autism. informed by critical disability studies and critical autism studies, this article uses a content analysis to explore the manifest and latent priorities of ontario’s provincial government displayed in press releases between 2001-2019 accessed through the ontario newsroom, an online repository of press releases and media advisories that features different initiatives published by the government of ontario. press releases were selected based on the search term “autism” and analyzed in two steps. first, this article presents the most frequently used words in press release headlines. second, key themes within press releases are explored. press releases emphasize the stories of non-autistic people, altruists, positivists, treatment-seekers, autistic children, and normative families. what is left out is a social representation of autism. prominent themes display ableist perceptions of autism, reproducing power imbalances and inequity based on disability and family status. these findings reveal government objectives and priorities, reflecting broader societal perceptions of autism. keywords autism; social justice; autism policy autism has been widely discussed in ontario, canada. increases in rates of diagnosis, advocacy activity, and autism professionalization have all made autism a public issue. this has led to several provincial government initiatives in ontario (casada, 2019; motiwala et al., 2006; perry, 2002; shepherd & waddell, 2015). ontario began to develop an ongoing policy response to autism beginning in 1999 with the intensive early intervention margaret g. janse van rensburg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 408 program for autistic children aged two to five years old. this program evolved into the autism intervention program (aip) in 2006, which focused on behavioural services for autistic children under age six. in 2017 the aip was replaced by the ontario autism program (oap), which was subsequently revised in 2018 (perry, 2002; turan, 2014; weir, 2006). in 2019, announcements were made regarding the reformation of the oap into a new program which decentralized the government’s role in the delivery. a common thread in ontario’s response to autism has been the provision of behavioural-based services for those with autism diagnoses under the age of 18 (janse van rensburg, 2020).1 recent scholarship in critical disability studies (cds) and critical autism studies (cas) has drawn attention to the role of representation (i.e., how disabled and autistic people are portrayed within public spaces) in promoting inequity (milton, 2014; o’dell et al., 2016; woods et al., 2018). within academic literature and critical disability studies more broadly, disabled persons are seeking to challenge the idea of disability being used as a vehicle to inspire the non-disabled (young, 2014; zames & fleisher, 2011), and autistic persons are writing against pathologizing and medicalized perspectives of autism (mcguire, 2011a; milton, 2014). advertisements in the media have been shown to influence societal perceptions of disability (barnett & hammond, 1999) and autism-centered advertisements have been critiqued for their perpetuation of ableism (mcguire, 2011a). these discourses of disability and autism are largely organized by “limited cultural scripts” (mcguire, 2011a, p. 18), which encourage aggressive and misguided approaches to “curing” autism or waging a “war on autism” (mcguire, 2011a, p. 19). media studies related to autism range from those that focus on the use of the internet by the autism and autistic communities (chowdhury et al., 2002; gillespie-lynch et al., 2017; jordan, 2010), representation of autistic people in the media (belcher & maich, 2014; dowdy, 2013), the use of media in aiding differing advocacy efforts surrounding autism (hersinta, 2021; leadbitter et al., 2021; mckeever, 2013; ne’eman, 2010), and investigating the framing of autism by news sources (pesonen, et al., 2020; wendorf muhamad & yang, 2017). while previous research identifies the role of media in promoting disability as a personal loss in need of change, fixing, or cure to adapt to societal expectations (hanes, 2016), research is needed to dissect how government discourse around autism determines how autism is societally perceived, questioning whether government and societal framings of autism are congruent with a social understanding of autism. 1 behavioural-based services refer to psychologically-based behaviour change therapies, most notably, but not limited to, applied behaviour analysis and intensive behaviour intervention. however, behavioural-based approaches may include other forms of behaviour therapy, including cognitive-based approaches. representations of autism in “ontario newsroom” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 409 informed by cds and cas, i use a content analysis to analyze press releases created by the government from 2001-2019 and archived in the ontario newsroom. borrowing a social model of disability (crow, 1996; oliver, 1990, 1996; thomas, 1999, 2007), which identifies disability as constructed by environments and attitudes that fail to meet the needs of people with disabilities, i frame autism using a social lens. a social understanding of autism recognizes autistic people as a unique social group who would benefit from broader social, political, and economic changes, rather than individual change requiring conforming to societal norms (hanes, 2016). therefore, the goals of this article are (a) to understand the priorities of the government with respect to autism as reflected in government press releases, and (b) to critically investigate whether government and societal framings of autism are congruent with a social understanding of autism. conceptual framework critical disability studies (cds) frames disability as a structural and social issue. as a conceptual framework it questions power relations, socioeconomic environments, social oppression, and discrimination (mollow, 2017). as a response to medicalized discourses surrounding disability which utilize a deficit approach to disability, a social model of disability was promoted by disability advocates to understand disability as socially and culturally constructed (krcek, 2013; oliver, 1990). the social model distinguishes between the terms “impairment” and “disability” (krcek, 2013, p. 5), and as haney (2018, p. 67) states, “while impairment is a physical characteristic, [it is] societies’ lack of accommodations for impaired persons that creates disability.” a criticism of this model is that it does not adequately represent the lived experiences of disabled people (hanes, 2016). therefore, the incorporation of other ways of knowing has been essential in adequately capturing the diversity of experiences, environments, and impairments that disabled people live with. critical disability studies builds on the social model of disability, incorporating feminist, critical race, and other contemporary critical scholarship (goodly et al., 2019). it offers an intersectional critique of ableism, which is described as “a network of beliefs, processes, and practices that cast disability as a diminished state of being human” (hodge, 2013, p. 108). stemming from shifting understandings of diversity, and inspired through other disability movements, an autistic rights movement began in the 1990s. the birth of this movement is credited to jim sinclair who wrote don’t mourn for us (sinclair, 1993), advocating for acceptance of autistic people, and portraying autism as identity (krcek, 2013). critical autism studies (cas) is a scholarly perspective which progressed from this movement. cas identifies autism as a socially constructed phenomenon (o’dell et al., 2016), margaret g. janse van rensburg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 410 and centers autistic persons as experts in autism (milton, 2014). davidson & orsini (2013, cited in woods et al., 2018) identify that cas (a) explores power relationships in the construction of autism; (b) produces narratives that push back against negative medical autism representations; and (c) uses theoretical and methodological techniques that emancipate and value the heterogeneity of autism and its culture. autism is thus being re-storied (douglas et al., 2019). the content analysis offered in this article relies on the keyword “autism” found in ontario newsroom press releases published between 2001 and 2019. the word autism has been defined in different ways. autism can be defined biomedically and socially. privileging certain definitions of autism can lead to differential representation of autism and different governmental priorities. unpacking the history of the medicalization of disability and autism is beyond the scope of this paper (see waltz, 2013, for more information). however, a biomedical approach to autism describes autism as a pathology, depicting autism as “a biological problem needing a biomedical solution, needing to be stopped, cured, fixed, eliminated” (mcguire, 2011a, p. 18). medicalized discourses of autism exist in past and current editions of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, or the “dsm-5” (american psychiatric association, 2013), describing autism using symptomology and functioning levels, which may perpetuate perceptions that autistic people are deviant, “non-valuable,” and “non-viable” (mcguire, 2011b, p. 66). an alternative approach to understanding autism is found in the social model of disability, which understands disability as constructed by societies that do not consider or value the bodies and minds of disabled individuals (hanes, 2016). in contrast, autistic self-advocates and allies have defined autism in ways that reflect and celebrate their lived experiences. in the context of ontario, policies and programs have typically privileged a biomedical definition of autism, requiring a dsm-5 diagnosis for the provision of the limited supports and services that are available (ministry of children & youth services, 2018). press releases have the potential to display smaller shifts in government priorities, and therefore are useful for investigating whether government and societal framings display a social understanding of autism. by seeking to understand how the ontario newsroom frames autism, and exploring the priorities found within press releases, this analysis takes an approach that seeks to uncover power relationships or adverse representations of autism, offering an intersectional critique of ableism. context of research autism services and supports in ontario have been provincially sponsored since 1999 (perry, 2002). services provided have typically been limited to behavioural services for preschool aged children, beginning with the early representations of autism in “ontario newsroom” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 411 intervention program (perry, 2002), moving to the autism intervention program in 2006 (turan, 2014). in 2017 a new program called the ontario autism program was announced (ministry of children & youth services, 2018). in this family-centered program, much of the funding prioritized applied behavioural analysis for children under 18 years of age (aba) (ministry of children & youth services, 2018). following the election of the progressive conservative party in ontario in 2018, changes were announced to how services for autistic children would be accessed and funded. it was proposed to replace service-based benefits with cash-based benefits, contingent on diagnoses of autism for children under 18 years of age (janse van rensburg, 2020). the 2019 budget-based program allows for more options to be explored in terms of autism supports and services outside of aba, however, this downloaded the responsibility of navigating supports and services onto the individual family unit. applied behavioural analysis (aba) is technically defined as “the science in which tactics derived from the principles of behaviour are applied to improve socially significant behavior and experimentation is used to identify the variables responsible for the improvement in behaviour” (cooper et al., 2014, p. 2). it is a popular therapy in ontario for autistic youth because it is considered to be empirically supported. the evidence that aba is based on is from the ucla young autism program by ole ivar lovaas (lovaas, 1987; wong et al., 2014) and single-subject methodological research (dillenburger & keenan, 2009). while researchers have claimed that aba can allow autistic individuals to enter “remission” (greschwind, 2009, p. 374; lovaas, 1987, p. 8), especially when applied intensively (called intensive behaviour intervention or ibi) (reichow & wolery, 2009), exploring why remission is a goal, and the repercussions of aba, have been the bases of critique raised by autistic scholars and allies (baker, 2006; gibson & douglas, 2018). applied behavioural analysis interventions exist against a social background in which pressures to conform can cause autistic persons to feel alienated or pressured to hide their autistic characteristics (meyerding, 2014). such interventions have been understood by some to deny autistic people their autistic individuality (haney, 2018). associating autism with behaviour change therapy connects autism with deviance (gibson & douglas, 2018), identifying so-called autistic deficits for behavioural change. therefore, autistic diversity is regarded “as flaws or imperfections that require fixing” (muskat, 2017, p. 81). the government of ontario’s autism programs represent aba as a leading approach to autism (ministry of children & youth services, 2018), disregarding conflicting societal views for and against such a therapy. furthermore, by emphasizing a behavioural approach, which seeks to augment and limit autistic behaviour, the province places responsibility on caregivers and autistic individuals to change, rather than promoting an accepting and inclusive society (gibson & douglas, 2018). a key concern is that aba, and the idea that individual autistic traits must be restricted, margaret g. janse van rensburg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 412 reduces the need for society to accommodate disabled people, because it promotes the impression that recovery from autism is something to be sought and obtained (yergeau, 2017). in this research context a content analysis was conducted, informed by cds and cas, to understand the priorities of the government with respect to autism as reflected in government press releases, and to determine whether government and societal framings of autism are congruent with a social understanding of autism. context of researcher it is appropriate to disclose how i, as a researcher, fit into an analysis which seeks to understand priorities and framings of autism. i conducted this analysis due to my previous work with autistic children in an aba setting, and my current work with autistic self-advocates. in previous work i noticed that that a biomedical framing of autism was prioritized in autism policies and programming documents, and that there was an absence of governmental documentation reflecting the priorities of autistic adults (janse van rensburg, 2020, 2021). as a social worker and non-autistic scholar, i am particularly interested in advocacy, empowerment and promoting self-determination of the autistic people with whom i work. bringing awareness to the intersections of social and political thought around autism provides opportunities for identifying future advocacy work. methodology and method in line with the conceptual frameworks of cds and cas, this content analysis sought to study the priorities of the government with respect to autism as reflected in government press releases, asking what kinds of societal framings of autism are reflected by the government. to systematically gain an understanding of the dominant priorities of the government of ontario in its representation of autism this study utilized drisko and maschi’s (2015) framework of conducting a qualitative content analysis, “a research method that uses a set of procedures to make valid inferences from text. these inferences are about the sender(s) of the message, the message itself, or the audience of the message” (weber, 1990, p. 2). content analysis is useful in raising awareness and consciousness about social problems to “address language, content meaning, techniques of communication, specific events, or all of these simultaneously” and “to determine if content is not present in situations where one might expect it to be” (drisko & maschi, 2015, p. 5). a benefit of this technique is that it can provide a systematic approach to organizing, refining, and understanding a large amount of data. representations of autism in “ontario newsroom” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 413 i undertook a content analysis because i am interested in raising awareness and consciousness about autism-related social injustices. while other methods like a critical discourse analysis could assist with a deeper analysis of fewer texts (toolan, 2002), a content analysis allowed for a broader sample of texts to be thematically analyzed and organized. the sample was drawn from the ontario newsroom website, a repository of strategic press releases reported by the government of ontario, because these press releases often inform future news items. the keyword “autism” was chosen to identify articles that pertained to content related to the subject matter of interest. one hundred and seventy-four texts pertaining to autism released by the government were organized into five-year intervals over the last 20 years in order to organize this large amount of data. the organization of the texts was further refined by their headlines, and qualitatively coded for themes. this qualitative, non-frequency approach systematically looked for manifest and latent content, organized themes that appeared, and situated the findings in relation to context of the content (drisko & maschi, 2015). there have been many significant changes over the last 20 years in terms of programming and supports for autism in ontario, however predominant themes remained consistent (janse van rensburg, 2020). content for analysis was drawn from the ontario newsroom website using a search term “autism” on june 27, 2020. the data included 174 press releases dating from may 31, 2001 (the most recent article available online) to march 23, 2020 (the final date published before analysis began). the investigation was conducted in two phases. first, a longitudinal design analyzed all 174 titles of press releases for word frequency in five-year blocks (i.e., january 1, 2000 to december 31, 2004; january 1, 2005 to december 31, 2009; january 1, 2010 to december 31, 2014; january 1, 2015 to december 31, 2019) (drisko & maschi, 2015, p. 25). a keyword analysis therefore allowed for a broader scope of representations and framings of autism developed in ontario. the titles were examined in five-year blocks in order to manage the 174 press releases. through grouping data, the five-year blocks assisted me in examining priorities on a broader scale. analyses were conducted using nvivo 12 to identify the 10 most frequently used words. i focused on titles because press headings have been a means of presenting priority information (serdalia et al., 2016). the second phase of research included a full-text analysis of all articles (n = 174) using thematic analysis. in this stage, “keyword-in-context” lists were created (weber, 1990, p. 4) and sensitizing concepts were drawn from my previously existing theoretical understandings (drisko & maschi, 2015) of autism in ontario (see janse van rensburg, 2020, 2021). these predetermined sensitizing concepts were used to develop initial codes, including the terms “medical,” “treatment,” “choice,” “individual,” “sustainable,” “help,” “consultation,” “advocacy,” “evidence-based,” “technology,” “child,” “family,” “charity,” “professionalism,” “cure,” “applied behaviour analysis,” “school,” and “inclusion.” all analyses were margaret g. janse van rensburg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 414 conducted using nvivo 12 (qsr, 2018) to create broad categories of “adults,” “advocacy,” “autism treatment,” “behavioural services,” “charity,” “children and families,” “choice,” “evidence-based,” “political committees,” and “science and medicine.” see table 1 for the definitions of these concepts. “children and families” had the most numerous coding references, and “advocacy” had the least. coded categories were useful for providing a first step in my thematic analysis. the broader themes that developed out of these coded categories, which overlapped, include “autism as charity,” “charity and normalization,” “normalization and the normative family,” and “normalization and treatment.” concept definition adults any reference to youth transitioning out of child services, 18+ services, or mention of programs and services that were not named exclusively for children. may include codes of absence of adults. advocacy any reference to or naming of advocates, or references to the results of advocacy activity. autism treatment any reference to the word “treatment,” or references that perpetuate the notion of curing autism. behavioural services any reference to psychologically-based behaviour change therapies, most notably, but not limited to, applied behaviour analysis and intensive behaviour intervention (however, may include other behaviour-based services, such as cognitive based approaches). charity any reference to governments, persons, or organizations being displayed as acting in philanthropic ways to benefit autistic people; may or may not have external agendas. children and families any references to the normative family (the status quo, twoparent employed, family) unit being displayed as a targeted group for autism programs or policies. choice any mention of the word choice, or description that selfdetermination is a priority. evidence-based any description of best practices, evidence-based services or treatment, or mention of scientific literature relating to autism, within texts. political committees any announcements of persons, committees, or government changes, and the results of such, which impact autism research, policy, and program development. science and medicine any references to scientific literature, science, or medicine found within texts table 1. definitions of final codes for full-text analysis representations of autism in “ontario newsroom” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 415 findings and critique keywords in headlines: manifest priorities manifest content analysis relies on low-interference events that are manifest or literal in-text as a descriptive research technique, often applied in order to understand trends over time (drisko & maschi, 2015). frequently appearing words can be assumed to express concerns of the government and the broader society during the related time frames. keywords reflect the priorities and content of provincial government policies and messages, and those found within headlines ensure strategic messaging is found and circulated to news outlets and audiences. the manifest priorities, identified through the most frequent words in headlines, therefore expose the priorities of the government with respect to autism, on a surface level. in searching the term “autism” in the ontario newsroom online database, 19 press releases appeared between january 1, 2000 and december 31, 2005, 63 press releases appeared between january 1, 2005 and december 31, 2010, 18 press releases appeared between 2010 and 2015, and 73 press releases appeared between january 1, 2015 and december 31, 2019. most of these press releases were from a ministry now known as the ministry of children, community and social services. most of the content analyzed was produced between the years of 2005 to 2010 and 2015 to 2019. perhaps this was due to increased autism awareness or times of heightened advocacy activities. over the 20-year time span analyzed, the 10 most frequently used words in titles were identified (table 2). the terms “autism” and “ontario” are unsurprisingly dominant in titles. there is an emphasis on children, followed by youth, in representing autism in these titles, reflecting that most publications were related to autistic children. furthermore, the name of a former premier of ontario for just short of 10 years, “mcguinty” is also present, indicating that many developments surrounding autism displayed in newsroom press releases may have been attributed to premier mcguinty. a longitudinal analysis of the keywords in five-year blocks reveals differing priorities of the government. between 2000 and 2005 the terms “government” and “autism” are the two most frequent terms, together with “children” and the terms “developmental” and “disabilities” (which are cited together in text). “children” is the most prevalent word cited in titles between 2005 and 2010. “helping” is a new term introduced during this time, which was not seen as frequently in titles in prior date ranges. many of the most frequent terms remain in analyzed titles between 2010 and 2015, and a focus on children is not displayed in titles during this date range. however, this does not mean that autism funding and programs were not specific to children, or that adults were now being offered services. during this period, the terms “new,” “action,” “brain,” and “improve” were introduced into these release headlines. here, the term “new” is not deployed in frequent reference to margaret g. janse van rensburg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 416 autism in headlines but in reference to new funding and investments in brain research in relation to autism. “action” is frequently used by the government to identify that it is taking steps to reduce wait times and to “improve autism services for kids.” (e.g., ministry of children, community and social services, 2012). word count percentage2 ontario 95 5.84% children 90 5.54% autism 84 5.17% government 58 3.57% youth 51 3.14% services 43 2.64% mcguinty 35 2.15% new 29 1.78% program 23 1.41% families 21 1.29% table 2. ten most frequently used words in titles of ontario newsroom releases between 2000 and 2020. the spotlight returns to “children” in the headlines in ontario newsroom releases between 2015 and 2020, and there is also an ongoing focus on “families” and “youth.” the term “needs” appears for the first time in this analysis – only four of these references are implicated in the “needs-based” programming advocated as a response to the childhood budgets program. other references to “needs” appear alongside the term “special needs,” associating autism with services for other disabilities and mental health needs. the title analyses show that on the surface the priorities of the government appear to be giving premiers credit for their leadership in developing autism programs and giving support to families by creating programs. while the five-year blocks were used as an organizational tool for conducting the initial analysis, which aimed to identify shifts in political and 2 percentage was calculated as count of words in comparison to total of all words present in titles. overall, the 10 most frequently used words in titles account for 32.53% of all words used in titles. representations of autism in “ontario newsroom” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 417 societal perceptions of autism, there was no substantial evidence in the manifest findings that the priorities of the ontario government shifted significantly over the 20-year span. keywords show that the priorities over time favour representing the needs of children, youth, and families. thematic synthesis: latent priorities to unpack manifest priorities that associate autism with youthfulness and programs that medicalize autism, and to understand how reports may perpetuate inequities, a latent content analysis was conducted. this approach uses an interpretive, non-frequency approach in order to describe major themes found within ontario newsroom reports, with the ultimate goal of understanding how framings of autism are displayed. the following themes were identified. autism as charity. cultural imagery surrounding disability has been called into question. an example of this exists in a critique of imagery from disability charity campaigns, which hold potential for perpetuating “the perception of disabled people as objects of charity” (hevey, 1992, 1993, cited in barnett & hammond, 1999, p. 310). mcguire (2011a) similarly questions organizations that seek to make autism a charitable cause. in full-text analysis of the press releases, there were references to autism as a charitable cause, containing descriptions of honourable deeds of ostensibly non-autistic persons supporting causes for autism, often in reports of these non-autistic persons receiving honours for their actions. some of the charitable acts depicted in press releases might deserve recognition, such as awareness campaigns and programs promoting solidarity (see examples such as ministry of education, 2008; ministry of government and consumer services, 2008). these press releases may serve to encourage persons, groups, and policies to be more accepting and accommodating to the needs of autistic persons. however, in many of these press releases autism as a charitable cause seemed to be used as a way in which politicians could access power and prestige. in 2007, paula ball, vice president of the kingston foundation for autism spectrum disorders (kingston foundation for autism spectrum disorders, n.d.), received the medal for good citizenship for her “supports to children and to the families of children with autism in the kingston and surrounding area” (ministry of citizenship and immigration, 2007, para. 1). in 2012, in a report about appointments to the judicial bench, new justice of the peace catherine mary shoniker was praised for her work as “a volunteer youth worker helping children with autism” (ministry of the attorney general, 2012, para. 11). in these examples, volunteerism in relation to autism is used to promote powerful non-autistic persons, and to make autism a worthy charitable cause. autism is thus a method for non-autistic persons to gain prestige, using autistic children margaret g. janse van rensburg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 418 as “children with disabilities… paraded across the stage as objects of pity” (zames & fleisher, 2011, p. 11). at its extremes, this can be an example of “inspiration porn” (young, 2014, n.p.). charity and normalization. depicting autistic individuals as charity cases comes with the depiction of non-autistic persons as honourable for working with an abnormal population. without consideration for a social understanding of autism, the works of non-autistic experts working in “special needs and autism” (office of the premier, 2015, para. 15) and volunteers are celebrated. while experts are featured in their development of political strategies – such as advisory group development (office of the premier, 2015) – volunteers are individually presented with medals and awards for their work with autistic people (ministry of citizenship and immigration, 2016a; ministry for seniors and accessibility, 2017; ministry of citizenship and immigration, 2016b). the perspectives of autistic people in deciding who to celebrate does not appear to have been considered. rather autistic people are depicted as the recipients of charity. an example is found in jake’s house legends mentoring program. a press release states that this program received renewed funding to match “volunteer mentors 18 years or older, many from university and high school hockey teams, with children or youth with autism and their families for three-to-ninemonth periods” in 2019 (ministry of children, community and social services, 2019d, para. 3). the celebration of volunteers, and the recognition of volunteer programs promote the conception that autism is an individual problem that can be addressed through private initiatives. another concern is that labour is offloaded to private organizations, individuals, and volunteers rather than supplied by the government (van aswegen, 2020). non-autistic persons can gain merit and recognition, and be recognized as community leaders and experts. rather than their autistic counterparts, nonautistic people are praised for their efforts to normalize the autistic individual. they are often awarded for their initiatives, which seek to normalize autistic persons. honours, awards, and funding are given for efforts for autism treatment (ministry of colleges and universities, 2006), investigating the genetic factors underlying autism (ministry of economic development, job creation and trade, 2008ab), and “working to develop more effective therapies for autistic children by studying what goes wrong in early childhood brain development, and specifically targeting the role of genes and environmental factors such as toxic substances, which may trigger autism in susceptible individuals” (ministry of economic development, job creation and trade, 2008b, para. 4). these depictions show autism as “a biological problem needing a biomedical solution, needing to be stopped, cured, fixed, eliminated” (mcguire, 2011a, p. 18). it is apparent in these press releases that non-autistic persons are rewarded for seeking to normalize autistic persons and populations, or to prevent autism, rather than viewing the issue of autism as one that is socially-constructed – something requiring social and representations of autism in “ontario newsroom” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 419 environmental changes to meet autistic persons’ needs (hanes, 2016; haney, 2018; mcguire, 2011b). normalization and the normative family. the narrative of “normal” was inscribed by prioritizing a normative family, promoting evidence-based treatment, and paternalizing autistic adults. the normative family as priority was made clear in discussions of autism services within the content analyzed. this normative family is the “status quo”: a two-parent, employed family is valorized through government programs and policies. since 2007, there has been “an improved and expanded continuum of services to help ontario families meet the challenges of autism” (ministry of children, community and social services, 2007, para. 1). ontario’s autism program continued to focus on the normative family in 2016, seeking to develop “resources for families, including comprehensive one-on-one supports to help them navigate the transition to the new program” (ministry of children, community and social services, 2016c, para. 6). in 2019 the new childhood budgets program continued to be focused on a normative family. in these reports, children are not positioned as benefitting from autism services. rather, the programs focus on family satisfaction (ministry of children, community and social services, 2019a). the narrative of families as a priority is maintained throughout government statements made over several years’ time. normalization and treatment. narratives surrounding evidence-based, effective treatment services are discursively elevated alongside the prioritization of the family unit. autism treatment is a way to “control, punish and push students and families out who do not fit normalising imperatives” (douglas, 2010, p. 119), exercising power over autistic children and their families to produce a productive workforce (douglas, 2010; sherfinski, 2018). consistently, treatment is framed as serving the family unit as a whole. the idea of autism treatment is perpetuated in the press releases’ depictions of autism. autism is defined in press releases as “a complex neurological condition with no known cause or cure” (ministry of children, community and social services, 2008, para. 1) and services for autism are provided in “children’s treatment centres” (ministry of education, 2006, para. 1; ministry of children, community and social services, 2006a, para. 1; ministry of children, community and social services, 2006b, para. 2, office of the premier, 2007, para. 1). the ontario research fund provided $203,494 in funding for dr. dorota crawford to study “what goes wrong in early childhood brain development and specifically targeting the role of genes and environmental factors such as toxic substances, which may trigger autism in susceptible individuals” (ministry of economic development, job creation and trade, 2008b, para. 4). in 2013, the government also supported the research of drs. stephen scherer and peter szatmari to help to identify “the margaret g. janse van rensburg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 420 remaining genetic risk factors associated with this illness” (ministry of economic development, job creation and trade, 2013, para. 5). in 2015, the ontario brain institute was supported by provincial funds to “foster breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of cerebral palsy, epilepsy and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and adhd” (ministry of economic development, job creation and trade, 2015, para. 4), and funds were also allotted for the building of “erinoakkids children’s treatment centre” which will provide services for children with autism amongst other disabilities (ministry of children, community and social services, 2015, para. 1). in 2016, the children’s hospital of eastern ontario was supported in building “treatment rooms” which would service autistic children with other children and youth with disabilities (ministry of children, community and social services, 2016d, para. 4) and the new ontario autism program was announced as being developed to “allow for earlier diagnosis and treatment” and to “increase the number of treatment spaces available” (ministry of children, community and social services, 2016b, para. 5). a focus on discovering scientific causes, treatments, cures, and risk-factors fails to display autism as a neutral or positive difference (mcguire, 2011a), demonstrating an attitude which controls or others autistic bodies and minds. the treatment which is referred to in press releases is labelled as scientific and ground-breaking. this treatment seeks to find genetic and environmental causes, cures, and preventable factors; or is comprised of behavioural services themselves promoted as best practices and evidence-based. earlier on, newsroom reports were proud to tout ontario as “a leader in autism services for children” (ministry of community and social services, 2002b, para. 1) and a “national leader in providing intensive behavioural intervention (ibi) services” (ministry of community and social services, 2002b, para. 1). the government of ontario is depicted as supporting behavioural services through developing programs which promote the use of this therapy, and also as supporting college programs to “increase the number of trained behavioural therapists” (ministry of children, community and social services, 2004, para. 2) and as seeking to recruit therapists (ministry of community and social services, 2002b). the reports of ibi and aba center around its evidence-based nature: “providing early, evidence-based intervention, when it matters most, will set children with autism on the best path forward” (ministry of children, community and social services, 2016a, para. 12). there is a focus on the need to expand the program to allow more children to receive its services, and for longer periods of times. the description of aba promises an autistic child that conforms to what is typically expected of school-aged children (gibson & douglas, 2018), and the “evidence” base on which the programs are recommended is weak and cherry-picked. only one population-level experimental design study about aba exists (see lovaas, 1987), while the rest of the evidence depends on single-subject methodology, a research design where a participant is used as representations of autism in “ontario newsroom” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 421 their own control (cooper et al., 2014). certain evidence is selected; other evidence that has been written by autistic authors and allies about the negative impacts of aba (see a4a, 2018; gibson & douglas, 2018; haney, 2018; yergeau, 2017) is missing in ontario newsroom reports. adults left unrepresented. discourse around treatment of autistic children might make discussions of autistic adults unfeasible. the flawed logic being that if treated as a child, there will be no autistic adult; most of the coded references to adults centered on a narrative of children. in 2002 there was a funding commitment for “young adults” (ministry of community and social services, 2002a, para. 3), in 2012 aiding the transition to adulthood was identified as a priority of one of the members of the clinical expert committee to advise government on autism (ministry of children, community and social services, 2012), and in 2014 programs for transitioning students from high school into university were funded as pilot programs (ministry of colleges and universities, 2014). when programs that appear to be applicable to adults also appear to be targeted for children, this calls into question who the programs and services were meant to serve. when autistic adults are discussed in ontario newsroom reports, the discussion centers around children, and adults are portrayed with a lens of paternalism. one example of this paternalism appears in a 2002 discussion of “community participation supports for adults” which identifies a support of respite care: a variety of supports are provided to assist an individual to participate in community life as much as possible. these include employment supports, life skills training, volunteering opportunities, and recreational activities. respite is provided both in-home and out-of-home to provide relief to the primary caregiver. for example, a parent may need some time to do the grocery shopping or to spend some time with their other children. (ministry of community and social services, 2002a, para. 2) the example given in the article references that the program is not necessarily for the benefit of the autistic adult, but rather for the primary caregiver. while supports for primary caregivers are important, messaging should directly show the benefits for the autistic adult: how these “employment supports, life skills training, volunteering opportunities, and recreational activities” (ministry of community and social services, 2002a, para. 2) are more than just for the respite of a primary caregiver and also provide meaningful opportunities for autistic adults. without identifying the strengths in these programs for autistic adults, the latent message displays that the support is not intended for autistic people themselves, but for nonautistic people. furthermore, autistic adults are conceptualized as childlike, non-autonomous even if they need supports, without recognition of their own wants and needs. margaret g. janse van rensburg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 422 another example of autistic adults being portrayed as childlike can be found within a 2019 announcement about the childhood budgets program, where a quote from a parent is used to represent the perspective of adults on the spectrum: ‘as a parent with an adult child on the autism spectrum, i know that early engagement and understanding of my child’s needs was essential. i think having certified services would have avoided so much wasted energy used to pursue and find appropriate services.’ carolyn morrison, parent. (ministry of children, community and social services, 2019b, para. 7) seeking out non-autistic persons to represent autistic adults, rather than accessing information from autistic adults themselves, patronizes autistic adults and depicts them as children. child-like depictions of autistic adults and persons with other developmental disabilities can be attributed to mental age theory, the postulation that the bodies of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities age quicker than their minds, and thus, that they will never have the capacity to enjoy the adult rights of independence and autonomy (smith, 2017). after autistic adults and allies disputed their insufficient representation, autistic adults were more overtly involved in discussions surrounding autism policy in the childhood budgets program (ministry of children, community and social services, 2019c). outnumbered by non-autistic advocates of biomedical approaches to autism, two of the 20 members of a panel set to revise the ontario autism program were autistic. in this analysis, this was the most representative presentation of autistic adults involved in press releases surrounding autism provided by the ontario newsroom. discussion and conclusions it is critical to consider how autism is constructed by ontario newsroom (government of ontario, n.d.). it is necessary to be critical of government press releases and their framings of social problems, as they hold power to influence societal perceptions, while also displaying common social beliefs that must be challenged. there are a number of limitations that should be noted in this research. first, the content was divided into five-year blocks to manage data. alternative ways to manage the data temporally, such as through provincial government leadership or through dsm categorization of autism, could have exposed shifts in societal attitudes and representations about autism in ontario. furthermore, this analysis did not include the keyword “aspergers.” including this term could have uncovered missed stories. another limitation was the method of analysis. it was assumed that the most frequently used words could expose manifest priorities, and that a thematic analysis could representations of autism in “ontario newsroom” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 423 expose latent priorities. there may be alternative ways of uncovering social and political perceptions of autism. however, using this analysis provides an opportunity to learn from historic and current framings of autism. there are a variety of considerations when identifying governmental priorities as reflected in press releases, including historic, economic, and political context, as well as socio-political shifts in understandings of disability and autism. programs in ontario have centered on autism funding, supports, and services for children (janse van rensburg, 2020). the key results of this analysis however identified that in the past 20 years, the biomedical framing of autism as well as representations which prioritize the needs of normative families, and not the naturalization of autistic persons, have been widely accepted by government and society. representations in the media play a role in maintaining power imbalances, and a critical content analysis provides an opportunity to bring awareness to the reflections of social thought found in government discourse. over the past 20 years in ontario, there have been multiple programs and policies that have brought autism into the social and political landscape. press releases by the government have framed autism as a medical and biological problem for children, families, programs, services, and the government to fix, cure, and normalize. rather than centering the perspectives of autistic people themselves, non-autistic people are celebrated for their work in reforming autism, and autism is framed as an object of charity, and something to be fixed and treated. throughout, autistic adults are skipped in favour of autistic children more susceptible to reform, and a social understanding of autism is missing. while non-autistic people, altruists, positivists, treatment-seekers, autistic children, and normative families have historically dominated ontario press releases surrounding autism, there is hope that in adopting a social understandings of autism, future press releases on government policies, and indeed the policies themselves, will prioritize the autonomy, selfdetermination, and priorities of autistic persons as experts in their experiences of autism. acknowledgements i sincerely thank christine jenkins of ausome consulting in ottawa, canada for her valued contributions to this manuscript. i also thank the anonymous peer reviewers, dr. miranda brady, and dr. kelly fritsch, whose comments and suggestions improved this manuscript. margaret g. janse van rensburg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 407-428, 2022 424 references a4a ontario. 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(2014). evidence-based practices for children, youth and young adults with autism spectrum disorder. fpg child development institute. https://fpg.unc.edu/sites/fpg.unc.edu/files/resource-files/2014-ebp-report.pdf woods, r., milton, d., arnold, l., & graby, s. (2018). redefining critical autism studies: a more inclusive interpretation. disability & society, 33(6). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599.2018.1454380 yergeau, m. (2017). authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. duke university press young, s. (2014, june 9). i’m not your inspiration, thank you very much [address]. tedxsydney, sydney, australia. https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much ?language=en zames, f., & fleischer, d. (2011). the disability rights movement: from charity to confrontation (2nd ed.). temple university press. smith final before ts correspondence address: karen louise smith, department of communication, popular culture & film, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: karen.louise.smith@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights: refractions from a universal access model during the pandemic karen louise smith brock university, canada abstract the united nations deemed internet access to be of critical importance for human rights in 2016. in 2020, schools around the world closed during the covid-19 pandemic. as schools were closed, inequities in internet access gained widespread public attention as many educational opportunities shifted online. amidst this shift, this paper analyzes an ontario provincial announcement to provide 21,000 ipads and free data for young people (ages 4-18), during the pandemic. the closure of schools in ontario, canada, meant that young people and families who faced technological challenges, such as a lack of devices, stable and affordable internet connections, or sufficient data allowances, could experience barriers to their right to an education. this paper revisits a community informatics (ci) model of internet access, the access rainbow, to analyze attempts to operationalize the right to an education through technology in ontario. in parallel to rights, however, the field of ci faces the ongoing presence of profit-oriented corporations within universal access efforts. this paper argues that socio-technical infrastructural elements of access to the internet became visible through the breakdown of the pandemic. furthermore, it considers the multistakeholder efforts required to implement useful and effective access, where school boards responded in varied ways locally. the paper contributes the concept of refraction to offer continued theorization of a distributive paradigm and a rightsinformed approach in community informatics against the backdrop of the pandemic, which could also act as an opening for privatization and disaster capitalism. keywords digital divide; internet; youth; rights; community informatics introduction many school-aged children have asked the question, how do you make a rainbow? the probable answer to this question is to take a prism – a triangular piece of glass that bends light – to show the child that they can refract a ray of light to make a rainbow. the term refraction was used in the ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 415 title of this paper because the covid-19 pandemic functions like a prism. school closures make visible the socio-technical bands required for young people (ages 4-18) to leverage the internet to more fully experience their human rights in ontario, canada. the idea of internet access as a human right coincides with the imagery of a rainbow through the access rainbow model for universal access, which was developed in the late 1990s by clement and shade (1996, 2000). as the canadian government was connecting its citizens, clement and shade (1996; 2000) identified that the internet could support human rights, but that infrastructure development was often left to market forces, with major government sponsored connectivity programs for communities at risk of defunding (clement et al., 2012; shade, 2010). within this milieu, the access rainbow model includes socio-technical bands, such as carriage, devices, content, literacy/facilitation and governance, which are required to make universal access to the internet empowering in communities. clement and shade’s model can be considered alongside infrastructure scholars like star (1999), who question “computers as information highways” and suggest we turn to examine issues like “justice, and change” (p. 379). star (1999) also argues that breakdowns can create a moment of visibility for infrastructure; when “the server is down, [or] the bridge washes out” we can see the “relational nature” of infrastructure (p. 382). the pandemic revealed that the infrastructures for healthcare are interlinked with the education system, and the internet. in ontario in early 2020, there was a fear amongst policy-makers that ventilators and other critical equipment would run short (ontario, 2020a). physical distancing was implemented, and ontario mandated province-wide school closures for junior kindergarten to grade 12 (k-12) learners to contain the spread of covid-19 (ontario, 2020b). young people were compelled to learn at home and continue their education online (ontario, 2020g). the digital divide,1 however, meant that some students lacked devices, internet connections, or sufficient data allowances. to address this inequity, doug ford, premier of ontario, and stephen lecce, minister of education, announced that 21,000 apple ipads and free, longterm evolution (lte) data plans from the rogers telecommunications company would assist students to learn at home (ontario, 2020f). while the ipads and free data announcement in ontario sounded positive for learners, the plan had some shortcomings. first, not all school boards in ontario participated in providing new ipads with data plans, and there were no common criteria for student eligibility (stiles, 2020; wcdsb, 2020). second, the quantity of the device and data plan provisions announced by the province were sparse. during the pandemic, ontario had over two million 1 in this paper, the digital divide refers to unequal access to information and communications technologies (icts) as well as inequities in using them. see eubanks (2007) for a fuller discussion. karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 416 learners enrolled (ontario, 2019a). the 21,000 ipads and data plans could therefore only be deployed to one percent of learners. reaching one percent of learners was projected to be inadequate because 14.4% of ontario households are known to have no or slow (five megabits (mbps) per second) broadband services available for purchase, and affordability is also a barrier to access (crtc, 2019). some aspects of how ontario’s progressive conservative government announced 21,000 ipads and free data plans during the pandemic pointed towards the celebration of private corporate partners, while the role of the public partners, ontario’s school boards, was also noted (ontario, 2020f). the combination of public and private partners in the announcement opens up the opportunity to explore the nexus of community informatics with young peoples’ rights, while also considering the opportunities for privatization and disaster capitalism. community informatics (ci) is a scholarly approach, which recognizes that as an information society developed from the 1990s onwards, corporations have prioritized “profit maximization,” while a potential pathway towards social justice goals remains (gurstein, 2003). gurstein (2003) suggests that through ci there can be an “active participation on the part of the local community to ‘animate’ the process of technology acquisition and implementation” and to orient it towards achieving a community’s own objectives or well-being (eubanks, 2007; gurstein, 2000, 2003; stillman & denison, 2014). the access rainbow model reviewed and applied in this paper, is situated within ci (see clement et al., 2012; gurstein, 2000), and provides a framework with which to explore the ipads, free data plans, and related access initiatives in ontario. young people’s rights are also integral to explore. in this paper young people refer to individuals who typically fall between ages 4 to 18 in the k12 education system in ontario (ontario, 2007; ontario, n.d.b). while k-12 learners were the target recipients of ipads and free data, this initiative can be understood within the policy trajectories of human rights and universal access both internationally and in canada. in ontario, many of the pandemic related efforts to connect students were undertaken by school boards and educators across the province (e.g., see teotonio & rushowy, 2020). this paper will analyze the provincial ipads and free data announcement (ontario, 2020f), but also explore how 12 school boards, including educators and families, grappled with the complexities of universal access for learners during the pandemic. applying the access rainbow in ontario contributes to continued theorization of the distributive paradigm and a rights-informed approach in ci during the moment of refraction created by the pandemic. while the pandemic makes visible the socio-technical elements of universal access associated with youth rights, private interests are also revealed. in their announcement of 21,000 ipads and free data, the province emphasized a partnership with apple and rogers. corporate partnerships potentially link to privatization and disaster capitalism during the pandemic. ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 417 disaster capitalism is a term that klein (2007) used to refer to “raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events” and also “the treatment of disasters as exciting marketing opportunities” to impose or expand upon capitalist logic (p. 6). one example was the displacement of public schools, with privatized charter schools in new orleans, following hurricane katrina. having briefly introduced ci, young people’s rights, privatization and disaster capitalism, this paper continues with five major sections. the first section grapples with how privatization and disaster capitalism serve as a backdrop for the ipads and free data announcement (ontario, 2020f), as well as providing a policy timeline leading up to it. second, the question “is internet access a human right for youth in ontario?” will be explored. the distributive paradigm for access will be shared to highlight the challenges to realize human rights. a range of policy ideas from the international, federal and provincial level will also be examined to consider how internet access is positioned in relation to human rights. third, the access rainbow model will be reviewed, before it is applied to the ipads and free data announcement (ontario, 2020f). the model will be applied using a purposive sample of data from 12 school boards that offered ipads, free data or other connectivity initiatives during the pandemic, between approximately march to june 2020. application of the access rainbow reveals some distributive aspects of connecting students through data plans, ipads and other devices at the bottom layers of the model. at the middle of the access rainbow, how virtual learning environment (vle) software is already embedded in school boards and was utilized as part of the pandemic response will be examined. finally, the application of the upper layers of the access rainbow, will show how school boards’ and educators’ concerns for well-being and a broad spectrum of youth rights shaped their implementation of universal access during the pandemic. this paper culminates by considering how universal access continues to be enmeshed in a distributive paradigm where the role of big technology (big tech) corporations and disaster capitalism need to be considered. the pandemic may create opportunities for profit in public education, but also more hopefully the expansion of the tech equity agenda and greater recognition of children’s rights within the digital age. are privatization and disaster capitalism the backdrop for the ipads and free data announcement in ontario? to better understand the ipads and free data announcement in ontario (2020f), it is important to be aware that the pandemic occurred amidst ongoing tensions between the provincial government and teachers’ unions in the province. this section of the paper establishes a policy timeline (see table 1) leading up to ontario’s ipads and free data announcement (ontario, 2020f), but also interweaves a discussion of issues of privatization and disaster capitalism. karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 418 united nations ontario january 25th, 2020 first presumptive case of covid-19 in ontario and canada march 3rd, 2020 minister lecce announces opt-out options, but a plan to move ahead with elearning for high school students march 11th, 2020 who declares the covid19 pandemic march 12th, 2020 ontario announces initial closure of schools (k-12) between march 14april 5th; later extended march 20th, 2020 learn at home announced with website in english and french march 31st, 2020 teacher-led learning announced to extend learn at home; school closures extended april 17th, 2020 ipads and free wireless data to support learn at home for students during the pandemic announced may 19th, 2020 school closures extended until the end of the school year in june 2020 table 1. timeline of events relevant to the shift to online education in ontario during the pandemic. canada had its first presumptive case of covid-19 in ontario on january 25th (nasser & blum, 2020; see table 1). in the months before the pandemic, there were rotating teacher strikes in ontario. a government plan to implement four (later reduced to two) mandatory online learning credits for high school students was one of the major reasons for the strikes (paiken, 2020; parker, 2020). on march 3rd, just one week before the pandemic was declared, the minister of education announced that parents would be able to opt-out of online learning for their children, but that “a made-in-ontario online learning program” would go ahead (ontario, 2020a). after the minister’s announcement, a scholarly blog post posited that online learning in ontario could be a “trojan horse for cost-cutting and privatization” (parker, 2020). in an article published before the pandemic, sears and cairns (2019) identified that neoliberal logic has been present in ontario’s educational policies since the 1990s, and the ideology crosses party lines. sears and cairns (2019) anticipated a continued neoliberal, “lean education” model under the progressive conservative leadership of premier ford (p. 395). they describe that the model “prepare[s] students for the conditions of lean production in workplaces and a narrower conception of citizenship without a social safety net” (p. 395). ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 419 part of a lean education approach during a pandemic could include the expanded use of private technology services or datafication. klein (2020) extended the idea of disaster capitalism during the pandemic to note that a smart agenda for a “screen new deal” was being pushed to transform public institutions, in ways that are “far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters.” years prior to the pandemic, watters (2013) already argued that “student data is the new oil” for companies that provide learning management software, email, cloud computing, search functionality, e-books and other educational services. according to watters (2013), “companies are starting to push for the aggregation of student data into analytics tools that can be sold in turn back to the school.” the shift to online education during the pandemic could entrench or accelerate the commodification of student data. recognizing the potential privatization and disaster capitalism opportunities occurring both before and during the pandemic, table 1 displays how online learning and the ipads and free data announcement emerged gradually in ontario. once the world health organization (who) declared a global pandemic on march 11th (who, 2020), the ontario government announced the decision to close k-12 schools from march 14th to april 5th (ontario, 2020b). the first week of the closures coincided with the march break holiday. on march 20th, the province announced the first phase of a program called learn at home, with a supporting website available in english and french (ontario 2020c; ontario, n.d.c). on march 31st, an announcement extended school closures, outlined teacher-led learning and the continuation of the learn at home program (ontario, 2020d). the idea that teachers should be “leveraging digital resources and identifying alternative forms of teacher-student connectivity, such as phone and mail” was announced, as well as the need to distribute laptops and devices from schools (ontario, 2020d). on april 17th, the premier of ontario, along with the minister of education announced the partnership to provide 21,000 ipads and free data (ontario, 2020f; premier of ontario, 2020). during an address to the public, premier doug ford described the program in the following terms: for our children education is everything, and no matter what, their education must continue. and that means having the educational tools to facilitate online learning. that’s why we worked out a new partnership between apple and rogers with our ontario school boards. we're purchasing ipads at discounted prices for students in need. these ipads will have free wireless data and will help students from low income families continue their learning safely at home during this pandemic. (premier of ontario, 2020) the minister of education, stephen lecce, stressed that government needed to make sure learning was “universal, accessible, and engaging for our students” (premier of ontario, 2020). minister lecce thanked apple, rogers, and school boards (ontario, 2020f; premier of ontario, 2020). tim cook, karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 420 chief executive officer of apple inc., retweeted a tweet from minister lecce announcing the partnership (cook, 2020). online learning was ultimately extended to the end of the school year in june 2020 (ontario, 2020h). having contextualized the ipads and free data announcement (ontario, 2020f) against the backdrop of privatization and disaster capitalism, the next section of the paper explores the role of internet access in relation to instantiating human rights for ontario youth. is internet access a human right for youth in ontario? although ontario attempted to enhance access to education through the internet during the pandemic, there is a much longer history of policies that inform internet access, education and children’s rights. to trace this trajectory, this paper draws upon eubanks (2007) who encouraged ci scholars to consider how the distributive paradigm for access can limit equity and social justice. the distributive paradigm frames “social justice as the morally proper distribution of social benefits and burdens among society’s members” (young, 1990 p. 18, quoted in eubanks, 2007). a distributive paradigm can be thought to involve the distribution of goods, services, or commodities to help individuals achieve their rights and thereby social justice. eubanks (2007) cautions however, that a distributive paradigm also constrains the technology equity agenda, because it does not account for all rights or social justice concerns. when considering technology and equity in relation to ontario students, the united nations declaration of human rights (undhr), proclaimed in the un general assembly in 1948, is one important starting point. table 2 begins with the undhr, and also displays international, canadian and ontario based policy ideas, relevant to youth rights, education and internet access. consistent with a distributive paradigm some goods or services that are fundamental for human rights are mentioned in the undhr, such as food and education. commodities involved in internet access are not explicitly outlined in the undhr, but article 19 is relevant. it states that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes…to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (un, 1948). article 19 is pivotal to position internet access as significant for human rights, including access to education under article 26 of the undhr (un, 2011, 2016). in addition to the undhr, the 1989 convention on the rights of the child (crc) is significant in relation to youth rights, which are now also positioned to intersect with the internet (livingstone & bulger, 2013; un, 1989). while internet access does not appear in the undhr or crc, well-known human rights scholar sen’s (2005) work on a capabilities approach to rights is helpful. he stated, “it is possible to argue that human rights are best seen as rights to certain specific freedoms” and “duties” are required, “which are ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 421 centred around what others can do to safeguard and expand these freedoms” (p. 152). expanding article 19 will be considered next. united nations canada ontario 1940s united nations declaration of human rights (1948) 1950s 1960s 1970s instant world report released (1971) 1980s convention on the rights of the child (1989) canadian charter of rights and freedoms established with the constitution act (1982) 1990s information highway strategy established and community access points in schools initiated (1994) 2000s 2010s internet access positioned to facilitate rights (2011 and 2016) crtc established uso of 50 mbps for download and 10 mbps for upload; a supporting broadband fund is announced (2016; 2018) up to speed: ontario’s broadband and cellular action plan is established (2019) 2020s who declares the covid-19 pandemic (2020) ontario closes its k-12 schools and later announces ipads and fee data for students in need (2020b, 2020f) table 2. declarations, policies and ideas relevant to young peoples’ rights and internet access during covid-19 in ontario, canada. expanding article 19 was attempted with the idea of a right to communicate (hamelink, 2004). the right to communicate idea gained traction in canada, through instant world: a report on telecommunications in canada (canada, 1971; see also raboy & shtern, 2010), which anticipated the pivotal role of networked communications. the right was never formally established by the un or canada, but universality and equity were promoted through it. in the decade after instant world, the canadian constitution was updated (canada, 1982). the charter of rights and freedoms established freedom of karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 422 expression, “including freedom of the press and other media of communication” (section 2b). the aforementioned policy initiatives illustrate some conceptual foundations for internet access as a facilitator of human rights. in the 1990s and beyond, an array of policies and programs directly relevant to internet access and education have emerged in canada, which further illustrate tensions between the distributive paradigm and the realization of rights. for example, canada established an information highway strategy in 1994 (middleton, 2007), in the same year that the schoolnet and the community access program (cap) were initiated to create community-based internet access points in locations like schools across canada (see kpmg, 2000; shade, 2010). social justice goals were implicit in many aspects of the community connectivity programs. an evaluation of schoolnet identified that it “helped improve social equity through provision of computers, internet access, and technical advice to all canadian communities, no matter how remote” (kpmg, 2000, p. iv). while the ideal of greater equity is interwoven with many access programs, middleton (2007) characterized that canada’s approach to developing broadband internet infrastructures has been market-driven.2 she advised the province of ontario of the ongoing need for “provinces… or regional areas” to “develop… their own infrastructure in order to extend the benefits of broadband to their local citizens” (p. 15). middleton identified that the unavailable, unaffordable, or lower quality access in rural or remote areas, including indigenous communities, remain persistent challenges. in the 2010s, a number of developments relevant to the internet and human rights emerged globally (livingstone & bulger, 2013; un, 2011, 2016). in 2011, special rapporteur, frank la rue highlighted the “key role that the internet can play in mobilizing the population to call for… better respect for human rights” (un, 2011, p. 4). in 2013, livingstone and bulger (2013) recommended that the united nations children's fund (unicef) recognize information and communication technologies (icts) “as a cross cutting theme in all its work” and develop a global agenda on children’s rights in the digital age that was rooted in the crc (p. 5).3 finally, in 2016, an important statement that the un adopted addresses the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the internet for people of all age groups, and it made multiple references to the right to freedom of opinion and expression (un, 2016, p. 1), but also to a range of other rights, such as “access to 2 broadband refers to fixed internet connections, that are generally delivered through cable or phone lines, with increasing desirable speed targets emerging over time (e.g., 1.5 mbps, 5 mbps, 50/10 mbps). see crtc (2019). 3 at the time of writing this paper, the un committee on the rights of the child was drafting a statement on children’s rights in the digital environment as discussed here: https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/crc/pages/gcchildrensrightsrelationdigitalenvironme nt.aspx ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 423 information on the internet” facilitating “the promotion of the right to education” (p. 2). returning to the canadian context, many aspects of a market-driven strategy and what eubanks (2007) refers to as a distributive paradigm for facilitating internet access are evident in recent policy. in december 2016, a regulatory decision was made to establish universal service objectives (usos) by the crtc for canadian telecommunications services (crtc, 2016). the usos established that canadian residences and businesses should be able to purchase “fixed broadband internet access” at “speeds of at least 50 megabits per second (mbps) download and 10 mbps upload, and to subscribe to a service offering with an unlimited data allowance.” additionally, “the latest generally deployed mobile wireless technology should be available.” a broadband fund was established to encourage partners, including companies, to develop infrastructure (crtc, 2016, 2018). scaffolding upon the crtc’s usos and broadband fund, the province of ontario announced a $315 million dollar fund through the up to speed plan (ontario 2019b). a recent crtc report revealed that 1.6% of households in ontario have no broadband access available to purchase, while 12.8% of households had access available only at a basic speed of 5 mbps (crtc, 2019, p. 278). both the establishment of the usos in canada and ontario’s plan reveal that infrastructure can be procured and access related products and services can be made available for purchase (see eubanks, 2007), but this does not fully address equity or social justice considerations involved in facilitating connectivity with consideration of youth rights, which we will explore with the access rainbow and its application to the 21,000 ipads and free data case in ontario (ontario, 2020f). applying the access rainbow to the ipads and free data announcement whether households had robust internet connections that met the usos was significant in ontario during the pandemic. the lte data plans from rogers could be expected to provide a comparable quality of service to the 50/10 mbps uso necessary for youth to participate in online learning.4 universal access, however, is about more than just network speed. the access rainbow model (see figure 1) aims to provide a seven layer socio-technical model for universal access to empower canadians and other users (clement & shade 1996, 2000). clement and shade (2000) emphasize that the middle of the rainbow, where services and content, like online learning are delivered, acts as the most critical part of the system. 4 rizzatto, fenwick and fogg (2020) noted canadian 4g download speeds during a nine-week period near or during the pandemic ranged from 61.6-63.8 mbps. karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 424 figure 1. the access rainbow model (created by the author to replicate ideas from a diagram in clement & shade, 2000). while the government of ontario announced a major partnership between apple, rogers and the school boards, local experiences to provide access for learners was nuanced, varied and involved extensive labour by school boards, frequently reflecting equity issues, and thereby a concern for human rights. this section of the paper explores how the access rainbow can be applied to understand the decision to distribute ipads, other devices, and to ensure internet access was available for ontario learners during the pandemic. the analysis, which commences in table 3, will reveal how application of the access rainbow to the case refracts and makes visible the various bands of universal access that are relevant to ontario learners, as well as some of the limitations of a distributive paradigm for access.5 to understand ontario’s access initiatives, it is important to note that the ontario education system serves 2,020,245 learners,6 and is home to 72 school boards (31 english public, 29 english catholic, four french public, eight french catholic) (ontario 2019a, ontario, n.d.a). to build on table 3 and to illustrate the application of the access rainbow, examples will be drawn from a purposive selection of 12 school boards in ontario, for which data could be located from newspapers, newsletters, and websites on the data plan and device distribution that occurred during the pandemic. the purposive sample of the 12 ontario school boards selected for analysis serve students in the cities illustrated on the map in figure 2 and the surrounding areas. in describing the purposive sampling undertaken for this paper, it is important to note that while the children’s commissioner’s office in the 5 table 3 draws upon an example in shade and dechief (2005). 6 the most current open data set from ontario (2019a) with enrolment data for each school board was for the 2017-2018 school year. ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 425 united kingdom released a dataset from the department for education outlining the devices and hotspots distributed nationally (vilbert, 2020), no comparable data is currently available in ontario, and an ad hoc approach was taken to allow for an expedient analysis.7 access rainbow layer overview of the layer in relation to ipads and free data key actors or implementation examples policy questions 7. governance the decision to make ipads and free data available to ontario learners ministry of education in ontario and the 72 school boards how is an emergency plan for connectivity during a crisis formed? who participates? 6. literacy/social facilitation the support work required to assist students to learn using digital tools, or alternatives school boards, educators, and parents what kind of technology support is available for educators and families? 5. service/access providers the organizations providing access rogers, internet service providers (isps) and school boards what special measures provide access during a pandemic? are companies and school boards involved? 4. content/services learn at home website and linked materials, board or teacher created resources ministry of education, school boards, educators, etc. is the provided content appropriate for learners? does it reflect well-being, equity or rights? 3. software tools web browsers, virtual learning environments (vles) or cloud computing software google, microsoft, d2l, edsby, apple, etc. what programs or apps do students need to connect with their teachers and classmates and complete their schoolwork? 2. devices 21,00 ipads announced by the province of ontario ipads or other devices such chromebooks provided by boards what are the appropriate and available devices for learners? 1. carriage long term evolution (lte) wireless data rogers, other providers can a data plan or access to carriage be procured? what does free (or affordable) data mean? table 3. the access rainbow applied in ontario during the pandemic. 7 freedom of information requests could have been submitted to school boards for data on devices and data plans, but it would likely have taken a year or two to collect the information. karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 426 figure 2. ontario: selected school board locations.8 building out from the cities displayed in figure 2, appendix a provides an overview of information pertinent to 12 school boards located in the selected cities (six english public boards, five english catholic boards, and one french catholic board) including the number of learners enrolled and data relevant to the access rainbow. in relation to the access rainbow, the number of data plans procured (layer 1 carriage), the number of devices distributed (layer 2 devices) and the virtual learning environments (vles) used by the school boards (layer 3 software) are listed in appendix a. appendix a also shows that the 12 school boards are responsible for educating 704,712 learners, or just over a third (34.9%) of the province’s enrolled learners. the layer 1 carriage section of the access rainbow refers to the “facilities that store, serve or carry information” (clement & shade, 2000, p 37). drawing from table 3, one critical issue concerning carriage is, can a data plan or access to carriage even be procured? as per the provincial announcement 21,000 ipads with lte data plans were being deployed (ontario, 2020f). consistent with the announcement, the toronto district school board (tdsb) deployed 6,5000 “internet-enabled ipads” (teotonio & rushowy, 2020), which represent approximately 31% of the total announced by the province (ontario, 2020f). the tdsb ipads could be expected to draw upon the rogers’ network to facilitate access to carriage. although the premier described the data plans as free for learners until the end of june (ontario, 2020f), it is unclear if data plans were paid for by the school boards. rogers statement about the partnerships was that “we have worked with our 8 the original map image displays electoral districts and was obtained from wikimedia commons under cc-by-sa by rishiyur1 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:ontario_electoral_districts_map.svg, therefore the additions of cities and labels in figure 2 are also shared under cc-by-sa. ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 427 school boards, in collaboration with apple, to help meet the educational needs of families and to provide affordable remote learning solutions” (rogers, 2020, emphasis added), which suggests a payment of some kind was rendered. in addition to tdsb’s use of internet enabled ipads to facilitate access to carriage, in ottawa the ottawa-carleton district school board (ocdsb) was noted to be deploying 1,700 internet hotspots. in their description of the hotspots, the board did not mention the brands of distributed devices, but they explained that they were “tablets with data plans” (ocdsb, 2020a). they described that “demand for internet hotspots… [was] high” with the purchased hotspots expected in three waves, with the last devices arriving by the end of april. although the tdsb and ocdsb use of ipads and tablets revealed some information about data plans that were distributed in the province, information on how the school boards facilitated access to carriage was sparse in the many news stories and the other materials that were analyzed as part of this research across the 12 boards. the ocdsb’s waves of distribution for their hotspots is consistent with a report that hotspot products were in short supply from manufacturers during the pandemic (mcgill, 2020). it is probable that some school boards in ontario where lte coverage was available were unable to procure the desired devices to pair with data plans for learners. of additional relevance to carriage issues, the usos established make obvious that the latest wireless lte data options are not accessible across canada. for example, in the thunder bay area, conseil scolaire de district catholique des aurores boréales (csdcab), a french catholic board that serves learners in a variety of locations in northern ontario did not make mention of lte or cellular data plans but instead stated, “we are in communication with the various internet service providers in each of our regions and are trying to find solutions. thank you for your patience” (csdcab, n.d.a). while lte data coverage was available from rogers in locations where some of the csdcab schools were located, it was not available in the town of nakina.9 the comparative experiences of boards in toronto, ottawa and thunder bay show a range of challenges to facilitate access at the carriage level. layer 2 of the access rainbow deals with devices. from the data presented in appendix a, an estimated 12.7% of learners may have received a device (e.g., ipad, chromebook) from their school board, which was their primary interface to access educational content and services during the pandemic. while 21,000 new ipads were a major focus in the provincial announcement (ontario, 2020f), discussion of the deployment of at least 6,640 new or existing ipads was uncovered for the 12 school boards that were explored. most of the ipads (6,500) were deployed in toronto by the tdsb, with 9 to substantiate this statement the author searched rogers lte coverage on april 30th, 2020 at https://www.rogers.com/consumer/wireless/network-coverage-map karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 428 additional numbers of devices shared in the guelph area. the upper grand district school board (ugdsb) deployed 65 ipads and the wellington catholic district school board (wcdsb) 75 ipads (khan 2020). additionally, the toronto catholic district school board “purchased about 6,000 chromebooks and internet-enabled ipads” without the numbers of each type of device being clearly specified (teotonio & rushowy, 2020). it is also clearly evident from appendix a that ipads were not the only devices distributed by schoolboards locally. netbooks and in particular chromebooks were also frequently distributed by schoolboards in the local contexts that were examined. a tally of 31,200 chromebooks were explicitly listed, including newly purchased devices and hardware already owned by five boards (ugdsb, york region district school (yrdsb), ottawacarleton district school board (ocdsb), ottawa catholic school board (ocsb), bruce-grey district school board (bgdsb)) (al-shibeeb, 2020; bgdsb, 2020; khan, 2020; ocdsb, 2020a; pringle, 2020). an undetermined number of additional chromebooks were also distributed by three other boards (wellington-catholic district school board (wcdsb), tdsb, and toronto catholic school board (tcdsb)) (khan, 2020; teotonio & rushowy, 2020). the distribution of chromebooks is perhaps unsurprising, because the device integrates well with google classroom, and google’s cloud based educational software applications are noted for their popular adoption in regions across canada (see desson, 2018). software represents the third layer in the access rainbow, and the possible integration of hardware with software led me to explore the virtual learning environment (vles) software used by school boards on an ongoing basis, but also during the pandemic. a vle refers to cloud-based software that enables students and educators to access “digital resources, explore tools, and experience technology-enabled learning” (yrdsb, n.d.b). as listed in appendix a, eight of the school boards examined were found to be using a vle from google, but sometimes non-exclusively. the desire 2 learn (d2l) vle was located in use in four school boards and it is important to note that this software is licensed by the ministry of education in ontario for all k-12 publicly-funded school boards in ontario (d2l, n.d.). noted as a d2l product feature it “integrates with third-party tools including google drive” (d2l, n.d.). while all boards may have access to d2l and make some use of it, their usage appears to vary greatly. some school boards may use d2l minimally, while others appear to integrate d2l with microsoft, such as the bluewater district school board (bwdsb), while another vle, edsby, was determined to be in use in the thunder bay area by the lpsb. while information about the distribution of data plans (level 1 carriage), ipads and other devices (level 2 devices), and access to vles (level 3 software) are outlined in appendix a, application of layers 4-6 of the access rainbow will be continue to be described to render visible the equity and justice oriented labour enacted by school boards and educators to facilitate ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 429 access, and to make it useful for learners. level 4 of the access rainbow is the content/services and in the case of online learning during the pandemic, school boards and educators took a large range of approaches to delivering educational content and services. in a number of instances, students’ overall well-being was emphasized in the board produced materials. for example, in toronto a webpage titled “remote learning and well-being in the tdsb” was compiled to serve families during the pandemic (tdsb, n.d.). the tdsb outlined that “ensuring our students and community were supported with the basics in the beginning was critical” and they explain their efforts related to food, personal protective equipment, and computing together (tdsb, n.d., emphasis added). similarly, in the newmarket area, the yrdsb (n.d.a) created a webpage called “our learning and caring plan” in response to the pandemic. the yrdsb page outlines that the board is committed to online learning that “support student and family well-being” and “is inclusive, caring, safe and accessible.” the yrdsb page specifies varied supports that were available for diverse learners. some possible accommodations for students with special needs were listed to include “providing real-time learning for students who cannot access online learning using electronic learning platforms.” for learners from indigenous communities, opportunities for online sessions with elders and knowledge keepers on topics including traditional medicines and stories were offered. level 5 of the access rainbow addresses service/access provision, and organizations relevant to this layer include the organizations that provide connectivity and services. these include, for example, rogers and school boards. when rogers was announced as a partner by the province (ontario 2020f), the minister of education touted that with the ipads “students and families will not have to call into rogers to have their devices set up” (premier of ontario, 2020). while the minister emphasized the simplicity of set up, the actual steps taken by boards to make service and access possible were often far more complex. it should also be noted that school boards and teachers needed to make huge efforts to ensure they understood service/access needs and could meet them appropriately during a pandemic. in the guelph area, the public school board, ugdsb, had teachers who “called every single family… to determine if they needed a computer at home” (khan, 2020). the ugdsb also “disinfected their [3,200] chromebooks, packaged them and had them couriered to students’ homes” (khan, 2020). taking a different approach, the wcsds noted steps taken related to protecting privacy and the special needs learners in the board. the wcsds noted “devices were wiped to ensure that there were no photographs, documents or other personal information on them,” and that they delivered “200 special education devices comprised of ipads and chromebooks with vision and audio support devices based on student needs” (khan, 2020). after devices were ready, parents picked them karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 430 up from schools in a drive-through process where equipment was loaded into their trunks (khan, 2020). level 6 of the access rainbow touches upon the literacy/social facilitation aspects of access. the pandemic situation created a unique situation for school boards, educators, parents and learners and our analysis here will focus on the technological help and support that was made available. the original announcement by the province about the ipads and free data outlined how apple was providing technology support to “help teachers build engaging lessons for students at home” and “one-to-one virtual coaching” (ontario, 2020f). from the data gleaned from the 12 school boards reported in appendix a, apple products were not the sole devices distributed. analysis of materials from the news and school boards revealed numerous other forms of technology support for literacy/social facilitation of digital technologies during the pandemic to navigate a range of hardware and vles. in the ottawa area, the ocdsb’s webpage to support the provincial learn at home program was extensive and demonstrates the importance of mastering google provided tools for diverse learners. the board provided links to a video titled, “signing into google and getting into google classroom” and a link with further instructions for google translate (ocdsb, 2020c). to begin, users were prompted to “open your chrome web browser” or instructed to download it (ocdsb, 2020b). english, french and arabic help resources were prominently featured for google tools, and ocdsb stated that part of their approach to learn at home was to be “culturally relevant and responsive” where “students have access to learning resources where they see themselves and their families represented and reflected” (obdsb, 2020c). the idea that parents may be required to provide technology supports at home was also demonstrated in the materials provided by other school boards. in the newmarket area, the ycdsb (n.d., slide 5) provided their community with links and information about how to access the google classroom or d2l vle. additionally, they made available a technology support ticketing system for students or parents to file their issues. it was noted that “someone in curriculum and/or it will assist” (ycdsb, n.d., slide 7). the csdcab board based in thunder bay and serving learners in french, offered some tutorial links but also referred parents to moneureka.ca and a phone line for live technological support (csdcab, n.d.b). the final layer of the access rainbow is governance, where the idea of who makes the decision about how connectivity should be enacted for students during a global health crisis is a key issue. young peoples’ participation in decision-making concerning the governance of their internet access could be advocated for under article 12 of the crc, which supports that young people express their views on “all matters affecting the child” (un, 1989). however, it is the long term decision-making by federal and provincial governments, the crtc and school boards, which have largely shaped what connectivity options are feasible for learners during the ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 431 pandemic. although the province announced the 21,000 ipads and free data (ontario, 2020f) only some school boards participated, while other boards, such as the wcdsb in the guelph area repurposed existing equipment (wcdsb, 2020), or in the case of the bwdsb in the owen sound area, waiting for the government to contact them (wawa news, 2020). according to member of provincial parliament, marit stiles, the ontario government’s announcement about ipads and free data was “misleading” and parents flooded school boards with requests for ipads (wawa news, 2020). some level of confusion and uncertainty about how to provide access for students during the pandemic is not surprising. school boards have not historically provided internet access for their learners at home. additionally, the auditor general of ontario noted in 2017-2018 that 50 out of 69 school boards who were surveyed, were discovered to have “no approved plans, policies, tools and procedures… [for] vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster” (office of the auditor general of ontario, 2018, p. 564). the varied responses by school boards to facilitate access demonstrate an enhanced role for vles and devices distributed to students at home. these efforts were by no means perfect and problems such as delays in procuring or delivering equipment were amongst the difficulties. application of the access rainbow, particularly in the upper levels, reveals that school boards and educator were considering equity and social justice issues as they attempted to facilitate connectivity, often with a recognition of a spectrum of rights. discussion and conclusion: access issues made visible through the refraction event of the pandemic this paper argued that the pandemic has acted like a prism, to make visible the various bands of the rainbow that are associated with implementing universal access in ontario, canada. examining refractions from the access rainbow made visible during the pandemic revealed how a distributive paradigm and private interests are present amidst a province wide effort to strive towards universal access for learners. simultaneously, much labour by school boards and educators was associated with facilitating access for young people, in ways that demonstrated equity considerations and a broad spectrum of youth rights. three final key issues concerning human rights and universal access, big technology and disaster capitalism, and expanding the tech equity agenda and recognizing children’s right within the digital age, will be discussed in this concluding section. karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 432 universal access continues to be enmeshed in a distributive paradigm although the internet was conceptualized to potentially contribute to canadians’ human rights decades ago (clement & shade, 1996, 2000), recent policy developments have strengthened this idea internationally (un, 2011, 2016) and also in relation to children’s rights (livingstone & bulger, 2013). analysis of the case of ipads, other devices, and free data during the pandemic in ontario with the bottom two layers of the access rainbow revealed how the distributive paradigm continues to be enmeshed with access initiatives in ontario. moreover, the allocation of data plans and devices is set against the backdrop of what middleton (2007) described as a market-drive broadband strategy. the recent federal telecommunications regulation to establish usos (crtc, 2016), ontario infrastructure (ontario, 2019b), and 21,000 ipads and free data (ontario, 2020f), continue to emphasize policy decision-makers’ participation in parts of access, which are procured as infrastructure, or sold as commodities. the closure of schools during the pandemic in ontario also renders visible the problematic implications of shutting off community access sites, like schools, as providers of internet services. under programs like cap and schoolnet in canada, equity and right-oriented visions for internet access gained a foothold, which has not been relinquished, even when private interests remain prominent within the socio-technical infrastructures for access in public education. big tech and disaster capitalism some degree of leveraging market opportunities during an emergency, which klein (2007) calls disaster capitalism, is evident in the announcement to purchase 21,000 ipads with lte data plans for deployment to learners during the pandemic (ontario, 2020f). analysis from the level 3 software layer of the access rainbow, however, more strongly revealed the existing presence of big tech in the public education system through vles and other software like browsers (ocdsb, 2020c), rather than a new push for privatization. a broader question for after the pandemic however, is if and how big tech interests have become further entrenched into public education? in the rush to connect all young people during the pandemic, it appears unlikely that youth will be able to participate in decision-making about their digital connectivity as the crc would encourage (bailey et al., 2020). additionally, it appears unlikely that students, parents or even educators, will have the meaningful opportunity to opt out of the privacy relevant terms and conditions established through technology procurement or account creation (bailey et al., 2020). without the meaningful ability to opt out of technology, corporations may gain new volumes of data from users who have few options but to provide their data to stay connected. the widespread usage of devices, ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 433 vles and cloud computing software during the pandemic, may also ultimately become tied to ontario’s vision to implement two mandatory elearning courses for high school students. concerns about privatization visà-vis elearning and big technology corporations remain a concern as elearning technology becomes more intensely deployed and utilized in the future to generate profits from data created in educational contexts (bailey et al., 2020; klein, 2020; parker, 2020; watters, 2013). potential conflicts between rights (e.g., education and privacy) may also emerge more prominently in the future. expanding the tech equity agenda and recognizing children’s rights within the digital age while the pandemic may create an opportunity for disaster capitalism, it may also more optimistically provide an opening to expand the tech equity agenda and advocacy efforts for children’s rights. the involvement of school boards and educators in facilitating access for learners during the pandemic, rendered visible the strong efforts to infuse it with equity and a respect for a broad spectrum of youth or children’s rights. when analyzing layers 4 to 6 of the access rainbow – content/services, service/access providers, and literacy/social facilitation – efforts to support the health, mental health, food security, and well-being of diverse and indigenous learners were each noted through the websites and the access services, which were facilitated by school boards and educators. layer 7, the governance level of the access rainbow, was examined to consider how school boards and the province grappled with partnerships to facilitate access. with a note of hopefulness, the breakdowns, or lack of connectivity for school children during the pandemic, highlight the importance of achieving the usos as soon as possible. campaigns that developed during the pandemic such as #getcanadaconnected are supported by an intersectional coalition of organizations that serve communities in canada that are lowincome, rural and indigenous (openmedia, n.d). a coalition that cares about internet access and a broader spectrum of human rights for the residents of ontario and canada may seize the opportunity provided by the pandemic to expand the tech equity agenda, and perhaps youth advocates may also become involved in the future. rather than positioning youth as merely agents to support the tech equity agenda, however, advocates for children’s rights in ontario must also recognize the role that internet access plays in facilitating a spectrum of rights for youth. karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 434 acknowledgements thank you to the equality project team and sshrc for their support (grant # 895-2015-1002). additional thanks to brittany melton for editorial assistance on this manuscript. references al-shibeeb, d. 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(2020b, april 7). signing into google and getting into google classroom [video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pclcjztgi1c&feature=emb_logo ocdsb (ottawa-carleton district school board). (2020c). ottawa-carleton district school board [web page]. https://ocdsb.ca/cms/one.aspx?portalid=55478&pageid=32163119 openmedia, (n.d.). #getcanadaconnected coalition [web page]. https://action.openmedia.org/page/60429/petition/1?locale=en-us paiken, s. (2020, april 23). why stephen lecce is the luckiest politician in ontario today. tvo. https://www.tvo.org/article/why-stephen-lecce-is-the-luckiest-politician-inontario-today parker, l. (2020, march 9). mandatory e-learning is a problem in ontario high schools. the conversation. https://theconversation.com/mandatory-e-learning-is-a-problem-inontario-high-schools-133041 pringle, j. (2020, march 31). ottawa's public and catholic school boards prepare learning plans with schools closed until may. ctv news. https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/ottawa-spublic-and-catholic-school-boards-prepare-learning-plans-with-schools-closed-untilmay-1.4875782 premier of ontario. (2020, march 20). premier ford delivers remarks and participates in media availability, queen's park [video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iee5txashc raboy, m., & shtern, j. (2010). media divides: communication rights and the right to communicate in canada. ubc press. ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 437 rizzato, f., fenwick, s., & fogg, i. (2020, april 8). mobile experience during the pandemic: 4g download speed. open signal. https://www.opensignal.com/2020/04/08/mobile-experience-during-the-covid-19pandemic-4g-download-speed rogers. (2020, april 17). helping ontario students in need access online learning during covid-19 pandemic [post]. https://about.rogers.com/news-ideas/helping-ontariostudents-in-need-access-online-learning-during-covid-19-pandemic/ sears, a. & cairns, j. (2019). schooling goes to market: the consolidation of lean education in ontario. in g. albo & b. m. evans (eds.), divided province: ontario politics in the age of neoliberalism. (pp. 394-420). mcgill-queens university press. sen, a. (2005). human rights and capabilities. journal of human development, 6(2), 151166. shade, l. r. (2010). access. in m. raboy & j. shtern (eds.), media divides: communication rights and the right to communicate in canada (pp. 120-144). ubc press. shade, l. r., & dechief, d. y. (2005). canada’s schoolnet: wiring up schools. in a. a. carr-chellman (ed.), global perspectives on e-learning: rhetoric and reality (pp. 131144). sage. star, s. l. (1999). the ethnography of infrastructure. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 377-391. stillman, l., & denison, t. (2014). the capability approach community informatics. the information society, 30(3), 200-211. stiles, m. (2020, april 23). misleading government announcement leaves kids, teachers and parents disappointed and without ipads. https://www.maritstiles.ca/misleading_ipads_announcement teotonio, i., & rushowy, k. (2020, april 17). school boards work around clock to get laptops, ipads, devices to students. toronto star. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/04/17/school-boards-work-around-theclock-to-get-laptops-ipads-and-other-devices-to-students.html tdsb (toronto district school board). (n.d.). remote learning and well-being in the tdsb. [web page archive captured june 25, 2020] https://web.archive.org/web/20200625054425/https://www.tdsb.on.ca/remote-learning un (united nations). (1948). universal declaration of human rights. retrieved april 26, 2021 from https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights un (united nations). (1989). convention on the rights of the child. retrieved april 11, 2020 from https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx un (united nations). (2011). report of the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, frank la rue. retrieved april 11, 2020 from https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/a.hrc.17.27_en.pdf un (united nations). (2016). the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the internet. https://www.article19.org/data/files/internet_statement_adopted.pdf vilbert, s. (2020). children without internet access during lockdown. children’s commissioner [uk]. retrieved august 18, 2020 from https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/2020/08/18/children-without-internetaccess-during-lockdown/ watters, a. (2013, october 17). student data is the new oil: moocs, metaphor and money. retrieved august 23, 2020 from http://hackeducation.com/2013/10/17/student-data-is-thenew-oil wawa news. (2020, march 24). misleading government announcement leaves kids, teachers and parents disappointed and without ipads. wawa news. retrieved april 11, 2020 from https://wawa-news.com/index.php/2020/04/24/misleading-governmentannouncement-leaves-kids-teachers-and-parents-disappointed-and-without-ipads/ wcdsb (wellington catholic district school board). (2020, april 21). school closures as a result of covid-19 frequently asked questions and answers for parents [faqs karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 438 pdf]. https://22.files.edl.io/596e/04/21/20/165247-16701111-7b8a-4f05-a52383485f318dbf.pdf who (world health organization). (2020, march 11). who director-general's opening remarks at the media briefing on covid-19 11 march 2020. retrieved april 10, 2020 from https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-openingremarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020 ycdsb (york catholic district school board). (n.d.). family guide to distance learning [presentation deck]. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2pacx1vtvuofb8dhepd6yfwuncqvska4ca1j9_bzcr6uagtdajvfilgqfmuskvzfygwrhlhleyozhi7q4_fg/pub?start=false &loop=false&delayms=10000&slide=id.g82790d1696_0_474 yrdsb (york region school board). (n.d.a). our learning and caring plan [web page archive captured june 3, 2020]. https://web.archive.org/web/20200603173258/http://www.yrdsb.ca/schools/repository /newsevents/pages/boardnews/learning-and-caring-plan.aspx yrdsb (york region school board). (n.d.b). welcome to the york region district school board virtual learning environment (vle) [login web page]. https://yrdsb.elearningontario.ca/d2l/login young, i. m. (1990). justice and the politics of difference. princeton university press. ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 439 appendix a: application of the lower bands of the access rainbow to 12 school boards in ontario karen louise smith studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 440 appendix a: application of the lower bands of the access rainbow to 12 school boards in ontario (cont.) ipads, free data and young peoples’ rights studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 414-441, 2021 441 appendix a: application of the lower bands of the access rainbow to 12 school boards in ontario (cont.) 3 area board numbe r of studen tsi number of data plans or carriag e concern s number of devices (e.g. laptops or tablets)ii percentag e of devices for students virtual learning environme ntiii school board (tcdsb) internet include d in total 6,000 total device sum 704,712 learner s 89,265 devices 12.7% of learners received a device i number of students obtained from the ontario (2019a) open data set with 2017-2018 enrollment. ii sources of data for the carriage and devices columns are listed here. guelph area numbers were obtained from khan (2020) for both school boards. newmarket area data eres obtained from alshibeeb (2020) for yrdsb, and ycdsb discussed one device per family on april 9th update (2020). ottawa numbers for ocdsb were obtained from the board (ocdsb 2020a) and from the news for ocsb (pringle, 2020). in owen sound the bwdsb status as waiting for information on ipads was sourced (wawa news.com, 2020) and numbers for bgcdsb were obtained from the board (bgcdsb, 2020). thunder bay numbers for lpsb were reported by diaczuk (2020) and csdcab’s communication with isps was reported in an faq (csdcab, n.d.a). toronto area numbers were obtained from the news (teotonio & rushowy, 2020). iii virtual learning environments (vles) in use in the boards were obtained from a variety of websites, originally accessed between april-may 2020. the guelph area ugdsb has extensive google classroom resources listed at https://sites.google.com/ugcloud.ca/parenthelp/ and there was a d2l link off the homepage at wcdsb https://www.wellingtoncdsb.ca/. in the newmarket area, a google login page was found for yrdsb at https://google.yrdsb.ca/ and a ycdsb site https://www.ycdsb.ca/covid-19/ lists google classroom and d2l. in the ottawa area, ocdsb has google repeatedly mentioned at https://ocdsb.ca/news/ocdsb_learn_at_home_parent_information and the ocsb has logins to the student portal https://sites.google.com/a/ocsbstudent.ca/k-6/ that are google hosted. in the owen sound area bwdsb provides links to d2l and microsoft products here https://www.bwdsb.on.ca/parents/continuous_learning and bgcdsb google links were available through links in individual schools off of this google sites page https://sites.google.com/bgcdsb.org/bgcdsbblog/home and d2l and google https://sites.google.com/bgcdsb.org/st-marys-high-school-distance-/home are listed here. in the thunder bay area lpsb, edsby is linked off of the board homepage https://www.lakeheadschools.ca/. the french language catholic board csdcab provided information about microsoft teams here csdcab here https://www.csdcab.on.ca/nouvelles/apprendre-la-maison/appui-technologique/. in the toronto area the tdsb has a google page here https://sites.google.com/a/tdsb.on.ca/tdsbtechnology/student-email and the tcdsb describes logging into your board google account here https://sites.google.com/tcdsb.ca/tcdsbcurriculumdept/home iv at the time of publication, the link https://www.bwdsb.on.ca/parents/continuous_learning was no longer active, but an internet archive link was located, with the may 8th, 2020 version available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20200508045915/https://www.bwdsb.on.ca/parents/continuous_lea rning trowbridge final correspondence address: terry trowbridge, socio-legal studies, york university, on, m3j 1p3; email: trowbridgeterry@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 294-299, 2022 book review american nightmare: facing the challenge of fascism giroux, henri. (2018). city lights publishers. isbn 9780872867796 (paper) us$17.95; 384 pages. terry trowbridge york university, canada henry giroux’s scholarly polemic american nightmare: facing the challenge of fascism is the sequel to his book about the recent history of poverty and populism in the usa, america at war with itself (2018). both were published in 2018, which might make them more companion pieces than sequential, but america at war with itself both sets the socioeconomic stage that describes the moment in nightmare, and explains the purpose of both books, rooted in giroux’s ongoing contributions to critical pedagogy. in war, he writes: america is at war with itself, and pedagogy has an essential role to play in fighting back creatively and non-violently. the challenges we face are immense, and the civil rights, resources, community spaces, and political processes required to struggle are under direct and relentless assault. the very notions of the public and the special are being reconstructed under circumstances… which help consolidate authoritarian modes of governance, a warfare state, and a predatory economy by and for the interests of the wealthiest few. (2018, p. 255) war is the recent history of the usa. in it, giroux traces the history of the elements that mobilized voters in the 2016 presidential election. the usa was divided by geography, gerrymandering, and ecological disaster. in the regions dominated by the republican party, the themes of 2016 seamlessly joined the security state. war examines the consolidation of gop power in the ideologies of voters. for that reason, nightmare seems more like a sequel than a parallel text. it is hastily written in the present tense, disorganized, and making appeals for book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 294-299, 2022 295 future research and postsecondary teaching goals. the pedagogy is subtle, though. if a reader is not familiar with the rigours of critical pedagogy and its forms of community engagement, then nightmare seems like a scatterbrained plea for rights mobilization and a surge in activism that protects the social safety net. these are important and consequential choices for political actions that are being considered by the entire critical pedagogy community, which in its north american and european niches is currently facing a stark choice between life in the shrinking underfunded academic institution, or a plunge into movement-based community organizing. nevertheless, nightmare is still a follow-up to war. war describes how america arrived at its present state, and nightmare is about the american mid-trump administration present in which it is written and published. we should look at nightmare as an example of what happens to academic writing in a moment of profound and irreversible social change. giroux writes about an apocalyptic moment, from the point of view of someone undergoing the psychological speed stresses of rapid totalizing social change. america at war with itself stands out in giroux’s corpus as his most unorthodox book. the prose is repetitive, disorganized. his argument switches between descriptions of the current situation, to appeals for future actions, peppered with polemics. giroux’s cogent synthesis of journalism is inflected with adjectives that belie societal stress. his (albeit sound) claims about fascism developing in the alt right contexts of donald trump’s posttruth digital media are distracted by insertions about misery, violent alienation, and other genuine reasons for moral panic. this is a book written by an elder scholar-statesman who has no time to edit and whose publisher is under an unusually morally infused pressure to publish right away. all of which is to say, there are better books about the history of the alt right. it is as though giroux felt unable to write in his usual cogent style of self-reflection and analysis. the reason that american nightmare is necessary for professors and graduate students to read is to understand the rhetoric of academic writing during ongoing apocalyptic crises. one of the components of the current authoritarian movement is to rapidly change direction. leaders contradict themselves in the same answer to a question. they legislate by press release, instead of by legal instrument. personnel are appointed and fired so quickly that their incumbency is measured in a new unit of time, scaramuccis. as a result, we who are in academia are suffering. we must read peer reviewed, trustworthy secondary sources that synthesize primary sources. on the other hand, we have no time to edit, redact, plan surveys of literature, and post preprints for comment. whatever it is that separates academic conferences from open mic polemics, it is not very helpful to us now. when the next semester comes, we will want to know what to have on our syllabi for contemporary north american politics. american nightmare belongs on the syllabus as an expression of academic stress and ethical necessity. american nightmare is premised on the idea that our scholarly terry trowbridge studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 294-299, 2022 296 question is not if america is at war with itself, but what does that war look like and how can its damage be mitigated. academics must ask, if giroux is correct, then is this the voice in which we must do our work? is nightmare an example of the only style that our resistance writing can take: doomscrolling infovore scholarship parked in front of the internet since the day donald trump rode a down-escalator to the presidency? and if so, is scholarship only possible as gestalt logic? does giroux only make sense as a mirror of how the reader feels? is that reliable scholarship during a crisis? is there a reliable scholarly voice during our ongoing crisis? giroux’s style is shaped by trumpism’s totalized present tense, as are our own stressed minds. should scholars internalize the new forms of totalitarianism that exert “paralyzing impact on society” (p. 140); that is, a social and technological pressure to “privatize communication by shifting the site where information is produced… [writing for] the immediate present [instead of referring to] the future, as the time of the political” (p. 141)? chapter one is an insightful description of how george orwell’s writing (emphasis on 1984), and aldous huxley’s brave new world contain lessons for effective resistance to trump’s government and the post-truth media. furthermore, giroux argues that the two novels will probably inspire incompatible approaches to opposition. while they are valid depictions of the reality we are now experiencing, we will have to choose one or the other to shape our mode of resistance. giroux concludes, orwell believed in the power of people to resist the seduction of authoritarian propaganda with spirited forms of broad-based resistance willing to grasp the reins of political emancipation. for huxley, there was only hope to be found in pessimism that had exhausted itself, leaving people to reflect on the implications of a totalitarian power that controls pleasure as well as pain, and the utterly disintegrated social fabric that would be its consequence. (p. 107) giroux himself takes the side of orwell’s optimism, but not at the expense of dismissing huxley’s equally probable prophecy. he encourages anti-fascist scholars not to question, “am i with orwell or with huxley?” but rather to ask: “are the people around me with orwell or with huxley?” (p. 107). so, there is in giroux’s first chapter, an essay that sets up a syllabus in which we read 1984 and brave new world. the challenge for us is to follow-up by analyzing our local communities and deciding which novel most helps our local resistance. chapter two, “authoritarianism and the legacy of fascist collaboration,” deals with the question of whether donald trump’s command over the american government and society ought to be named as “fascist” using a pattern from the past, despite an uneven fit. giroux’s answer is that he believes scholars risk “overplaying” the differences between trump and fascism of the past. the problem is not whether trump is a neo-nazi. the problem is that his administration facilitates neo-nazi legal theory and book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 294-299, 2022 297 realizes their fascist, regionalized, antagonizing political agendas. giroux takes a rhetorical position, in that one of the strengths of the alt right’s political rhetoric is to manifest endless differences without distinctions, which delays reasoned opposition. giroux instructs us to pay attention to the similarities because it is the similarities that advance trump’s agenda. giroux knows fascism not by its historically parallel components, but instead by its parallel social impacts (p. 140). giroux proposes an equally capacious room for broad resistance. he proposes that the resistance is about social impacts, by bringing together “various isolated movements to struggle for a democracy appropriate for the twenty-first century, based on participatory democracy and a massive redistribution of wealth and power” (p. 135). ideological agreement is unproductive wherever pragmatism can justify the means to resist. theoretical rigour runs up against the pragmatic challenges of oppositional research. explaining the difficulty that extends beyond activism and into academic discourse that is both rigorous and oppositional, both obligated to tenure and accountable to private research funding, giroux states, “we cannot let anger and resentment distort our organizing and political work. it is time to… repudiate the notion that the interests of corporations and those of citizens are… the same” (p. 135). a statement that is simple on its face but has time-sensitive considerations for methodology and peer review. in chapter three, titled “beyond the politics of incivility” (pp. 137-156), giroux examines rapidly accelerating political and corporate processes that isolated americans from each other in 2018. according to giroux, the 21st century form of american fascism has a “paralyzing effect on society” (p. 140), the paralysis of which is neither hyperbole nor metaphor, but a design feature of neoliberal policies that strategically create social isolation wherever there used to be personal agency to reach out to government support services and interpersonal support (p. 141). giroux, citing koreangerman philosopher byung-chul han, argues donald trump’s election campaign was successful not necessarily because of social media’s enabling of fake news, but because digital media “privatizes communication by shifting the site where information is produced… in the immediate present” (p. 141), therefore politics happen in the now instead of being planned for in the future. digital political life is not premised on our experiences now that inform our future interactions with the state, the media, and people. politics is reduced to instantaneous reactionary responses. giroux cites guy debord’s image of social media as a “perpetual motion machine of fear” (p. 146), as a neoliberal form of governing isolated people, combined with tom englehart’s analysis that “the national security state [has become] a fourth branch of [american] government” (p. 147), which made it available to trump to tweet himself into control with rapid fascist rhetoric. therefore, trump was co-opting a system of policy messaging that already reduced politics to “the realm of the personal and affective” while “cancelling out [discourse about] the underlying condition that might produce anger, or terry trowbridge studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 294-299, 2022 298 misguided resentment, or a passion grounded in the capacity to reason” (pp. 147-148). giroux confronts educators and researchers with the problem that, isolated, americans are streamed into the “politics of unchecked personal resentment” while anti-fascist power is “legitimate politics of indignation rooted in solidarity” (p. 148). solidarity, in 2018, seemed to giroux no longer existent in a practical way that could make use of trained critical thinking, nor generate social justice activism from experience. isolated, “critical reflection no longer challenges [trump’s bigoted] appeal to ‘common sense’ or casts light on the shadows of racism, hatred, and bigotry” (p. 149). giroux points out that at a moment when a federal government is fascist, citizens can use “incivility as righteous anger [to engender] emotional connection” instead of isolation, “a renewed sense of community, compassion and collective resistance” (p. 156). therefore, chapter three offers a theoretical framework with which to study the emergence of the american failed pandemic responses, their synergy with american neo-fascism, as well as empirical questions about the solidarity seen in black lives matter protests, the new abolitionism, and public challenges to police violence, jury trials, and the 2020 electoral map. in writing chapter three as a stand-alone essay giroux was prescient, informed, or lucky in his analysis; whichever way he succeeded in his critical claims, the style of american nightmare indicates he had access to appropriate methodology for researching rapid, chauvinistic social change operating as part of an attempted coup of the usa. but post-pandemic, the most important question of all might be whether we north americans are returning to social life or returning to the most isolated society we have ever known. in chapter four, giroux concludes, “incivility as righteous anger can fuel an emotional connection not to hatred and bigotry, but to a renewed sense of community, compassion and collective resistance” (p. 156). the american public has been intellectually and ideologically primed for trump’s policies by 20 years of arguments for neoliberal government, and decades of popular culture that glorifies the predatory power of individualism over the welfare of the many. the resolution that giroux proposes is that resistance entails interrogating the corporate cruelty critically. academics must develop “a political and moral lens for thinking through the present convergence of power, politics, and everyday life. ...unveiling the way in which a nation demoralizes itself [and] highlights… structures of domination” (pp. 165-166). giroux wants to oppose the “politics of unchecked resentment” with a “legitimate politics of indignation rooted in solidarity” (p. 148). the topic of the fifth, sixth and seventh chapters concentrate on the victorious white supremacist movement and the resurgence of the international neo-nazi movement. in those chapters giroux offers secondary source confirmation of other research rather than original interpretations. in these chapters, as elsewhere, giroux does not explicitly say that empirical book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 294-299, 2022 299 research approaches are required, but often he makes moral declarations that would imply empirically guided solutions. trump’s politics of incivility create an atmosphere where “critical reflection no longer challenges a poisonous appeal to ‘common sense’ or casts light on the shadows of racism, hatred, and bigotry” (p. 149). what, then, can generate solidarity when social networks have already been undone by a state of social isolation? what can inform access to justice, when the rule of law is explicitly deemed inconsequential by the government? this focus on empirically guided solutions is thread throughout the book. giroux spatters his pages with occasional ranting lists of empirically verifiable predictions. in the first chapter he predicts that, “a culture of civic illiteracy will likely become more widespread and legitimated, along with a culture of fear that will enable an increasingly harsh law-and-order regime” (p. 103), a project for empirical political science and sociolegal research. in the second chapter, he says “it is against the historical backdrop of collaboration that trump’s association with various dictators should be analyzed” (p. 126), a project that might drive academic priorities. also, in the third chapter, there is a description of the breakdown of society and access to justice, a description that is well within the bounds of critical empirical research: the not-so-subtle signs of the seething culture of resentment are everywhere… young children, especially those whose parents are being targeted by trump’s rhetoric, are being bullied more. state-sanctioned violence is accelerating against native americans, black youth, latinos, and others now deemed inferior… hate crimes are on the rise, seeping into public spaces and institutions once largely protected from such assaults. (p. 151) for how long are the predictions offered in american nightmare going to be relevant? the answer is unclear. some readers will take on giroux’s most tumultuous book as a genre milestone for a catastrophic writing style during a genuine global moral panic. be careful, though, not to overplay the artistic looseness of a brainstorm in a post-truth panic. references giroux, h. (2018). america at war with itself. city lights publishers. sempertegui final correspondence address: andrea sempértegui, department of politics, whitman college, walla walla, wa, 99362, usa; email: semperta@whitman.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 weaving the spiderweb: mujeres amazónicas and the design of anti-extractive politics in ecuador andrea sempértegui whitman college, usa abstract this article examines the strategic politics of an indigenous network called las mujeres amazónicas (the amazonian women) that is resisting the expansion of extractive projects in ecuador’s amazon rainforest. it asks, what are the mujeres amazónicas’ political strategies to resist extractive occupation and how do they develop and deploy these strategies in their territorial struggle? to answer this question, i analyze how their organizing is characterized by a political design that merges public expressions of resistance – such as mobilizations, protest marches, and other public actions – with communitarian practices that reproduce human and morethan-human life in the amazon. to illustrate this strategic fusion, the article turns to an image that the kichwa leader elvia dagua wove into an artesanía (handicraft) called la araña tejedora (the weaving spider). by analyzing dagua’s artesanía and other self-descriptions of the mujeres amazónicas, the article shows how practices of communitarian reproduction are used and transformed by the amazonian women, thus enabling their political work and sustaining their lives at the same time. the strategic deployment of reproductive practices reveals how indigenous women’s cultural and social identities are neither static nor unchangeable. it also illustrates that the mujeres amazónicas’ organizing should not be interpreted as a simple example of local politics responding to extractive occupation. by contrast, the article shows how the mujeres amazónicas are historical and political subjects with the power to shape the lines of political confrontation vis-à-vis the state and extractive capital, and to build global connections between indigenous and non-indigenous ways of living. keywords amazon; indigenous women; extractivism; resistance; environmental movements introduction on october 12, 2013, indigenous peoples’ day, a group of approximately 200 indigenous women from the ecuadorian amazon who call themselves mujeres amazónicas (amazonian women) walked 219 kilometers from the amazonian weaving the spiderweb studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 205 city of puyo to the capital city of quito, ecuador.1 this mobilization, called the “march for life,” was organized by a coalition of female leaders from seven indigenous nationalities – achuar, shuar, sapara, kichwa, shiwiar, andoa, and waorani – to present their proposal to declare the rainforest kawsak sacha (living forest) (mujeres amazónicas del centro sur, 2013a) to the government and the general public. as the proposal states, kawsak sacha is “a new category of preservation that takes into account amazonian peoples’ philosophy” and “recognizes the interrelationship between human beings and nature” (mujeres amazónicas del centro sur, 2013a; see also coba & bayón, 2020). the march was also a powerful collective act to challenge the complete exclusion of indigenous women’s voices and of the communities they represented from the governments’ plans to expand oil projects in their territories. more specifically, mujeres amazónicas marched to protest the government’s decision to open the licensing process for the 11th oil round and to start oil extraction in the yasuní national park without properly consulting their communities.2 while the 11th oil round divided approximately two-thirds of the amazon into 16 oil blocks (secretaría de hidrocarburos, 2013), oil extraction in the biodiverse yasuní park negatively impacts waorani communities and the tagaeri-taromenane peoples living in voluntary isolation. the march for life launched mujeres amazónicas as visible political actors in the struggle against oil extraction in ecuador, drawing the support and attention of many environmental activists and academics from the region. their collective act of bringing their communities’ voices to the capital, by filling its streets with their chants and children, also forced the state to meet them in congress and to receive their proposal for the living forest. most importantly, their visible and potent march was an effective strategy to scare international investors away and temporarily halt the 11th oil round. even though oil extraction has already started in the yasuní national park, the resistance of mujeres amazónicas’ and their communities was able to stop the government’s ambitious plan to massively expand oil extraction, historically concentrated in the northern amazon, to the center-south.3 1 the activists have called themselves mujeres amazónicas in their declarations and public announcements (see mujeres amazónicas del centro sur, 2013a, 2016). 2 in august 2012, the subsecretary of hydrocarbons conducted an accelerated and dubious process of prior consultation in indigenous territories living in the southern-central amazon region, and signed agreements with some leaders of indigenous organizations and local governments – predominantly men – in exchange for developmental projects in their communities. indigenous organizations like the confederation of indigenous nationalities of ecuador (conaie) pointed out that this process of prior consultation was unconstitutional and did not comply with international indigenous rights standards (bravo & vallejo, 2019). 3 from the 16 oil blocks, the government only received four offers from private corporations for oil blocks 79, 83, 29, and 28 (efe economía, 2013). in november 2019, the chinese company andes petroleum and the government terminated the contract for oil blocks 79 and 89 due to the “radical opposition of the local communities” (mazabanda & koenig, 2019). the consortium andrea sempértegui studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 206 the political organizing of indigenous women in ecuador is not a recent phenomenon. indigenous leaders like dolores cacuango and tránsito amaguaña and collective initiatives like the consejo nacional de las mujeres indígenas del ecuador (conmie) have shaped ecuador’s history (lavinas picq, 2018, p. 4) and social movements’ politics in the region (méndez torres, 2009, pp. 46ff.). furthermore, indigenous women’s active participation in the nationwide indigenous uprisings in 1990 and 1992 demonstrates their crucial historical role in ecuador’s indigenous movement (see coba & bayón, 2020; garcía-torres, 2017; sempértegui, 2022). for these reasons, indigenous women’s effective and strategic politics against the recent expansion of extractive projects is worthy of careful critical attention. mujeres amazónicas organized during a unique period of latin american reintegration into the capitalist global energy market. between 2000 and 2014, the price of commodities like oil was on the rise, incentivizing countries like ecuador to intensify their extractive economic model (burchardt & dietz, 2013). this period of commodities boom also coincided with the rise to power of many left-wing governments in the region (riofrancos, 2020), like the government of the citizen’s revolution in ecuador, which legitimized the advancement of the extractive frontier by allocating some revenues to social spending and developmental programs (acosta, 2012; gudynas, 2010; svampa, 2013). even though the funding for developmental projects was cut due to the fall of oil prices in 2014, and a neoliberal governmentality of the extractive industry has been reinstated since 2017, the ecuadorian economy relies heavily on the continuous expansion of oil and mining projects. the expansion of extractive projects, despite some latin american governments’ promise of social spending and development in affected communities, also generated an explosion of anti-extractive struggles. many of these protest movements have seen significant participation by women from indigenous, black, peasant, and popular organizations (see svampa & viale, 2014). this shows that the mujeres amazónicas’ organizing is not an isolated case of indigenous women leading the fight against extractive occupation. in fact, their march and subsequent political actions have taken place in the context of the intensification of communitarian struggles resisting capitalism’s restructuring and renewed forms of land dispossession in latin america. in this article, i thus analyze mujeres amazónicas’ organizing in the context of the necessity to deepen our understanding about this regional phenomenon. concretely, this article asks, what are the mujeres amazónicas’ political strategies to resist extractive occupation and how do they develop and deploy these strategies in their territorial struggle? to answer this question, i analyze formed by the state-owned petroamazonas, enap (chile) and belorusneft (belarus) also encountered fierce opposition by kichwa communities against oil extraction in block 28, halting the start of oil operations in the area (tapia, 2021). both sapara and kichwa women, members of mujeres amazónicas, had a strong leadership position in the communitarian resistance against blocks 79, 83, and 28. weaving the spiderweb studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 207 some examples of these leaders’ strategic politics, or what i call their political design. their political effectiveness in making their proposals visible and their voices heard reveals that these women’s organizing cannot be understood as a mere act of reactive or spontaneous resistance against the developmental state’s and extractive companies’ interventions in their territories. rather, i show that mujeres amazónicas’ political design is characterized by how these indigenous female leaders strategically connect practices of communitarian reproduction to their public resistance. inspired by an image that the kichwa leader elvia dagua wove into one of her artesanías (handicrafts),4 the araña tejedora (weaving spider), i demonstrate how these indigenous female leaders’ design merges public expressions of resistance – such as mobilizations, protest marches, and other public actions – with those communitarian practices that reproduce human and more-than-human life in their communities. my goal is to avoid examining mujeres amazónicas’ public acts of resistance as an isolated object of inquiry. drawing from the maya k’iche’ sociologist gladys tzul tzul, i illuminate how their politics cannot be separated from those practices that “make life possible” (2018a, p. 43). on the contrary, everyday practices of communitarian reproduction are themselves used, strategized, and transformed by the amazonian women, thereby enabling their political work and lives simultaneously. this analytical focus would not have been possible without the relationship of “co-labor” i have with five political leaders and members from mujeres amazónicas: zoila castillo, nancy santi, elvia dagua, rosa gualinga, and salomé aranda.5 most of the ethnographic material i have gathered since 2016 – which includes over 50 recorded conversations and semi-structured interviews with members from the mujeres amazónicas and their allies, and extensive field notes from the different trips with my co-laborers – is a product of the activities these amazonian female leaders and i conducted together. colabor, a term i adopt from the anthropologist marisol de la cadena (2015, p. 12), refers to the ethnographic relationship some members from mujeres amazónicas and i have built, defined by their and my interests in working with each other. co-labor comprised concrete activities such as co-organizing workshops on artesanías and territorial defense that allowed me to visit their communities of origin and learn about their political work, launching crowdfunding campaigns to support their mobilizations in 2018 and 2019, and co-organizing discussion panels during two conferences at the universidad andina simón bolívar in 4 my co-laborers use the word artesanía to refer to the different types of artisan works like clay pottery and handicrafts such as bracelets, necklaces, and earrings made out of feathers or natural and synthetic seeds produced by members from mujeres amazónicas. 5 with my co-laborers’ consent, i use their real and complete names in this article. all of these leaders are official representatives of their indigenous organizations and public figures. they regularly appear in public and international forums, in newspapers, on social media, and, at times, on television. andrea sempértegui studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 208 2018 and 2020. nevertheless, it was primarily an ethnographic relation of political allyship. in fact, it is this ethnographic and political relationship that allowed my co-laborers and i to engage in a continuous negotiation about my contribution to their territorial struggle and their contribution to my research project. while this negotiation was certainly complicated by asymmetrical relations of power between the mujeres amazónicas and myself – a mestiza researcher born and raised in quito – with deep roots in ecuador’s colonial history, it allowed us to be in constant conversation about our laboring together. most importantly, co-labor made space to build a dialogue with the ways in which mujeres amazónicas themselves describe their struggle as epistemic and political subjects (cabnal, 2010), and transformed my analysis about their territorial struggle. shared moments of intimacy, long and sustained conversations, and my own involvement in their struggle forced me to shift my initial focus on their visible and public struggle to the practices that sustain the amazonian female leaders’ political work and lives. i begin the following pages by explaining that mujeres amazónicas identify themselves as both a collective and historical subject. in this first section, i also develop the concept of political design, offer an overview of the different accounts that have examined mujeres amazónicas’ political organizing, and describe my own contribution to those accounts. second, i analyze the araña tejedora as an example of the mujeres amazónicas’ political design. third, i examine two examples of practices of communitarian reproduction, preparing chicha (manioc beer) and chanting, which are central in mujeres amazónicas’ political struggle. by analyzing how these amazonian female leaders connect these practices to their anti-extractive resistance, i show the concrete ways in which they carefully weave their political design. in the concluding section, i summarize the article’s main intervention and explain how mujeres amazónicas’ political design is a rooted and global one at the same time. this ability to generate both a situated politics and global connections is what makes mujeres amazónicas’ political organizing so highly relevant to the global environmental justice movement. mujeres amazónicas’ subjectivity and political design as a conceptual framework since their initial 2013 march, mujeres amazónicas have continued to organize further protest actions and mobilizations against the government’s extractive agenda. on march 8, 2016, international women’s day, mujeres amazónicas organized their second big march in the city of puyo with the support of their environmental and ecofeminist allies, the ecuadorian organization acción ecológica and the us-based organizations amazon watch and the women’s earth and climate action network (wecan). exactly two years later, mujeres amazónicas organized another massive weaving the spiderweb studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 209 mobilization in puyo, following the minister of hydrocarbons’ announcement reactivating the 11th oil round license. marching on international women’s day, a very important date for latin american feminists, is not intended to imply that mujeres amazónicas consider themselves feminists. many of their most active leaders reject identifying their collective struggle as feminist, given the problematic role that non-governmental organizations with a “gender agenda” have had in their communities. during different exchanges with zoila castillo, rosa gualinga, elvia dagua, salomé aranda, and nancy santi, they shared with me their criticisms against a colonial and western type of feminism that silences their voices and victimizes their position as indigenous women. for example, elvia dagua told me that she stopped considering herself a feminist after “participating at a feminist event” where she felt misrepresented and minimized in her own ways of negotiating her leadership with her family, community, and indigenous organization (interview, august 23, 2017, puyo). this criticism against a colonial and western feminist agenda has been widely shared and developed by indigenous and decolonial thinkers, including lorena cabnal (2010), julieta paredes (2010), and aura cumes (2012). these thinkers advocate for a situated feminism that uncovers the historic conditions of women’s oppressions in indigenous communities and acknowledges how communitarian and territorial relations can be a source of political power for indigenous women. in the case of mujeres amazónicas, their rejection of a western feminist position has not meant that they have not collaborated with feminist organizations more in tune with their political organizing or adopted elements from the feminist agenda (see sempértegui, 2019). however, their rejection of the feminist label forces us to ask exactly what kind of political subjects are mujeres amazónicas? in their public statements, mujeres amazónicas have reaffirmed a collective and historical identity connected to the broader indigenous movement and its historical territorial struggle (see sempértegui, 2022). even though these leaders’ relationships to their indigenous organizations have not been absent of internal tensions and disputes, mujeres amazónicas organized the march for life with the organizational support of the confederation of indigenous nationalities of ecuador (conaie) and the confederation of indigenous nationalities of the ecuadorian amazon (confeniae) (mujeres amazónicas del centro sur, 2013a). the support of these national and regional organizations also accompanied their 2016 and 2018 marches. furthermore, it is important to note that many members of mujeres amazónicas took part in the indigenous uprising in 1992 and organized other important political actions throughout the 1990s, challenging interpretations that saw the 2013 march for life as their first attempt to organize as indigenous women. in fact, in one of their first public statements after arriving in quito in 2013, mujeres amazónicas called on the government to “respect and recognize women’s lucha histórica in defense of their people’s lives and territories free of oil, andrea sempértegui studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 210 contamination, and exploitation; as well as their political participation and organizational politics” (mujeres amazónicas del centro sur, 2013b). departing from this collective and historical self-identification, i analyze mujeres amazónicas’ political design. i adopt the concept of political design to refer to a model of political organizing that is intentionally, purposely and strategically woven together. at the same time, following arturo escobar’s redefinition and use of the concept of design, i understand political design not as abstract planning. rather it involves diverse forms of making that contribute to people’s different struggles (escobar, 2018, p. 76). these forms of making are “self-organized and other-organized,” meaning that practices that constitute a political design are never isolated from past forms of political organizing and never independent from collective forms of reproducing life that “enable the self-organizing dynamic to take off and do its thing” (escobar, 2018, p. xv). this latter quality of political design connects to gladys tzul tzul’s (2018a) analysis of “communal entanglements.” according to tzul tzul, communal entanglements have historically organized and structured everyday life in indigenous communities (2018a, pp. 26ff.). they are exemplified, for instance, in practices of self-government like minkas, an ancestral practice of collective work that facilitates communal life and constitutes territorial relations of belonging, and by other activities that require collective action like organizing food for community celebrations (tzul tzul, 2018a, p. 24). these activities are not separated from indigenous politics, according to the author. on the contrary, it is the same vitality and ability that characterize the organization of everyday communal life that are intentionally and strategically translated into political rebellions (tzul tzul, 2018a), letting those rebellions take their course. inspired by escobar and tzul tzul, my use of the concept of political design is intended to show how mujeres amazónicas intentionally connect everyday practices of communitarian reproduction to their public resistance. by examining the araña tejedora, i argue that the merging of public resistance and communitarian reproduction is not a mere product of indigenous women’s static cultural identity. instead, it is a product of how mujeres amazónicas purposely design their strategic politics, and revelatory of where they locate their collective power as indigenous women – namely, in the communal entanglements that “make life possible” (tzul tzul, 2018b, p. 404). my analysis thus goes beyond a reaffirmation of the important role that practices of communitarian reproduction play in mujeres amazónicas’ politics. i intend to concretely show how these indigenous female leaders use, strategize, and transform these practices in their political organizing. it is in fact these strategic politics that center the reproduction of life that mujeres amazónicas have deliberately deployed to challenge a “conservative essentialism,” a stereotype that naturalizes indigenous women’s identities as bearers of life and serves to marginalize their political voices in public depictions about their actions (muratorio, 2000, p. 240). furthermore, an inweaving the spiderweb studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 211 depth analysis of their strategic politics can reveal how indigenous women like mujeres amazónicas build political authority within their communities, organizations, and the anti-extractive struggle as a whole. my analysis is intended to contribute to the important work that scholaractivists like miriam garcía-torres (2017), ivette vallejo and garcía-torres (2017), lisset coba (2019), andrea bravo and vallejo (2019), vallejo and corinne duhalde ruiz (2019), cristina cielo and nancy carrión (2019), and coba and manuel bayón (2020), and collectives like the colectivo miradas críticas del territorio desde el feminismo (cmctf, 2014, 2018) and the colectivo de geografía crítica del ecuador (cgce, 2019), have elaborated on and in collaboration with mujeres amazónicas. these analyses have been crucial not only for examining amazonian female leaders’ political organizing, but also for broadcasting their voices and political proposals. i thus consider this article in connection to and in dialogue with the work from these scholaractivists and collectives. while many of these analyses have drawn from feminist political ecology to examine the broader structural motivations for mujeres amazónicas to politically organize against extractivism – such as the transformation of indigenous women’s work of care, the intensification of patriarchal relations in indigenous communities, and the loss of legitimacy of historical male leaders due to their co-optation by the extractive state (see bravo & vallejo, 2019; cgce, 2019; cielo & carrión, 2019; cmctf, 2014, 2018; vallejo & duhalde, 2019) – other analyses have focused on the political proposals and languages of valorization of human and more-than-human life that mujeres amazónicas offer (coba, 2019; coba & bayón, 2020; garcía-torres, 2017; vallejo & garcía-torres, 2017). this article is mostly connected to the second set of analyses, which do not ignore the structural dimensions for mujeres amazónicas’ organizing, but take a closer look at the specific ways in which these indigenous female leaders produce their politics. by examining three practices present in the mujeres amazónicas’ organizing that have not been analyzed in depth by the aforementioned articles – weaving artesanías, producing chicha, and chanting – i offer an analysis of how these leaders strategize their practices of communitarian reproduction and design their politics. weaving the struggle, weaving the spider web after a week-long trip with elvia dagua in the amazonian region of cordillera del condor in 2017, she invited me to stay at her house in the community of madre tierra. at that time, dagua was the elected spokeswoman for women and family issues at the amazonian regional organization confeniae. this was not the first time that she held a political position in an indigenous organization. dagua started her political work in the 1990s, when she was just 17-years-old. at this young age, she and other amazonian women from the andrea sempértegui studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 212 san jacinto commune founded the women’s organization amaru warmi, which means “boa woman” in kichwa. after this, she became spokeswoman for women and family issues for the organization of indigenous peoples from pastaza (opip) and for the national indigenous organization conaie. besides being an indigenous leader, dagua is also an experienced maestra de artesanías, a handicraft master. she has taught her techniques and designs to her daughters and to other indigenous women at different workshops. she has also been able to economically support her children by selling clay pottery, bracelets, necklaces, and earrings. one evening during my stay, dagua organized a small gathering with her daughters and another anthropologist working with her, and showed us some of her artesanías. in one of our conversations she commented on one bracelet that she sold that evening, which she called the araña tejedora, the weaving spider. this tells the story of a spider that works diligently and constantly to build her web. most important about the araña tejedora for dagua, however, is that it also tells the story of mujeres amazónicas: [the araña tejedora] does not rest during the day or at night. we [mujeres amazónicas] are like her, working women... it is a spider that weaves 24 hours of the day. (interview, august 27, 2017, madre tierra) at that moment, i was not able to fully understand how the story of the araña tejedora relates to mujeres amazónicas, but dagua’s description stayed with me. after spending more time with her and other indigenous female leaders, the araña tejedora became a lens through which to better comprehend mujeres amazónicas’ political design against extractivism. understood in this way, the araña tejedora offers a material and intellectual account of how mujeres amazónicas’ political organizing works. at the material level, the practice of weaving and selling artesanías is an important example of how the amazonian female leaders’ labor supports their families and facilitates their territorial struggle at the same time. besides dagua, amazonian leaders like rosa gualinga, nancy santi, and zoila castillo have found in the production of artesanías a source of income to provide for their families while they are away from their communities, to cover the transportation costs related to their protest actions, or to gain economic independence from their partners who have easier access to remunerated jobs but do not support their political work. castillo even described her artesanías as “the sustenance of our organization, the sustenance of our struggle.” she added: this sustains me during the day, as you could see. i’m at events, workshops, meetings, visits, but at night, i get to work, i weave my artesanías until 11 at night, 12 at night. sometimes my husband gets angry, ‘why don’t you sleep?!’ he says. and i reply: ‘are you giving me enough to eat, to walk with my organization, where i have been elected?’ sometimes, during the marches, i sell my artesanías. that’s how i sustain my life, how i feed my children... we are the mujeres amazónicas weaving the spiderweb studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 213 who fight for our forest, against extractivism, against mining. so, we are sustaining with that. (statement at the international congress “bodies, territories and dispossession: life under threat,” october 16, 2018, universidad andina simón bolívar in quito) as castillo’s words reveal, the story of the araña tejedora tells her own story as well. in addition to weaving her artesanías in the evenings at her home, it is common to see castillo and other members from mujeres amazónicas crafting and selling their artesanías during their political mobilizations. they often weave on the bus on their way from the amazon to quito or while marching during their protest actions. when they arrive at their protest locations, they wear their necklaces, earrings, and bracelets as a way to exhibit their artesanías to their comrades and allies. castillo’s statement demonstrates how the araña tejedora works as an artesanía intelectual (intellectual handicraft), a concept i adopt and adapt from the bolivian sociologist silvia rivera cusicanqui to show how artesanías are intellectual artifacts that communicate lived experience and offer a situated analysis of the political (2015).6 furthermore, as previously mentioned, the story woven together in this artesanía serves as a lens which allows better comprehension of the mujeres amazónicas’ political design against extractivism. in fact, the araña tejedora captures in imagistic form how mujeres amazónicas, as a political subject, design and weave their strategic politics like a web that interlinks public expressions of resistance to those practices that make life possible. as previously mentioned, this goes along with gladys tzul tzul’s analysis of communitarian entanglements, according to which mujeres amazónicas’ political design is not separated from those practices that have facilitated life in indigenous communities and that are strategically used and transformed by these leaders into political practices for defending their territories against extractivism. in the next sections, i analyze two concrete examples of mujeres amazónicas’ political design. i focus on the practices of preparing chicha and chanting. by analyzing how both practices are used, strategized, and transformed by mujeres amazónicas, i illustrate how these indigenous female leaders make human and more-than-human life possible in the amazon, increase their communities’ support in their leadership, and take over platforms of visibility for advancing their anti-extractive agenda. 6 in her book, sociología de la imagen. miradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina (2015), rivera cusicanqui deploys the term “artesanía intelectual” to refer to a form of knowledge production that connects intellectual practice to the political and creative vocation (p. 233). while rivera cusicanqui does not use this term to refer to concrete artesanías in her book, i adopt and transform this term to refer to artesanías as objects that also connect creative crafting to intellectual and political practice. andrea sempértegui studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 214 serving chicha and building communitarian support chicha is a mildly fermented manioc beer, which constitutes the most important element of amazonian communities’ nutrition. the ones who are mostly in charge of preparing and serving chicha are indigenous women, who learn to prepare this beverage at a very young age by cultivating manioc. significantly, this plant is considered indigenous women’s “little children,” a moniker that alludes to the special bond between the manioc, the cultivator on whom its life depends, and the female goddess of nunkuli.7 after indigenous women cultivate the manioc, they cook it, chew it, and spit it into a big bowl, where it ferments with their saliva. when the chicha is mildly fermented, the woman who prepared the beverage serves it to her family, visitors, or members of her community during celebrations. this intimate and important practice involves human and more-than-human dynamics of care between the manioc plant, the woman who cared for and cultivated it, and the people who consume the chicha. it also shows that in the process of preparing chicha there are practices of care with the forest as a living entity, exemplifying that mujeres amazónicas’ kawsak sacha declaration is not an abstraction but a proposal rooted in material practices and ways of conceiving of the world. there is another important political element in the preparation of chicha. my co-labor with the kichwa leader nancy santi taught me that this practice of communitarian reproduction plays a crucial role in her own anti-extractive organizing. santi is the first female elected president of her kichwa pueblo, which comprises six indigenous communities located on the curaray river basin. during my stay in 2018, santi convoked a communitarian assembly to write a declaration of resistance against the government’s renewed attempt to license two large oil blocks that completely covered her kichwa territory. while santi presided over the four-day communitarian assembly, she continued to prepare and serve chicha to her community. i asked her why she kept preparing chicha like other women, even though her responsibility as president of her entire pueblo was already very demanding. santi told me that she has to show how she is able to “politically represent my community at the same time that i perform the same duties as any other indigenous woman from my pueblo” (fieldnotes, november 3, 2018). this statement can easily be interpreted as an example of the immense amount of work required from indigenous women to carry the same political responsibilities as their male counterparts. during our conversations, santi and other leaders frequently complained about the excessive expectations that their families and compañeros from their indigenous organizations have of them as 7 according to anthropological interpretations of kichwa and achuar practices (descola, 1989; guzmán-gallegos, 1997), the manioc plants are related to the female being called nunghui or nunkuli (in amazonian kichwa). nunkuli, the goddess of the soil, is also source of cultivation knowledge. taking care of the manioc plant is thus an act of acknowledging the presence of nunkuli and of establishing a positive relationship with her. weaving the spiderweb studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 215 political representatives. however, without negating the challenges that indigenous female leaders face, we should not interpret santi’s decision to keep preparing and serving chicha during her communitarian assembly as a simple surrender to these expectations. in contrast, as santi also explained, these kinds of practices are what gives her “communitarian support and legitimation” as a leader in contrast to former male leaders who actually signed agreements with oil companies (interview, september 10, 2018, puyo). by preparing and serving chicha during a communitarian assembly, santi was not necessarily fulfilling her “duty” as an indigenous woman, but showing her community that, as an elected leader, she works “for her pueblo” and experiences “the same responsibilities, necessities, and worries” as her people (interview, september 10, 2018, puyo). in other words, santi strategized this practice of communitarian reproduction at a very crucial moment for her community when the state and oil industries were threatening her territory. by re-establishing a political pedagogy that links communitarian legitimation to indigenous leaders’ capacity to be close to the people who have elected them, santi was strengthening her communities’ trust in her anti-extractive position. to sum this up, preparing and serving chicha while performing political responsibilities reveals where leaders like santi locate their power: namely in communitarian entanglements that increase their community’s support and legitimation. this self-positioning close to their community bases is also something other members from mujeres amazónicas have used to increase their community’s trust in their anti-extractive positions. many of the most prominent faces of mujeres amazónicas share a history of ascending to higher political posts within their indigenous organizations by gaining the trust of their communities and by sustaining an anti-extractive position over time. this is not only the case for nancy santi, but also for other indigenous leaders like rosa gualinga, josefina tunki, and alicia cahuilla who recently became the first female presidents or vice-presidents of their entire pueblos. chanting in la plaza de la independencia during my ethnographic study, i stayed and travelled with the shiwiar indigenous leader rosa gualinga. she is the first elected vice-president of her entire shiwiar nation, which comprises 10 indigenous communities. gualinga is also widely respected and admired for her ability to chant, a practice she has cultivated to build political authority in her community.8 in the amazon, this practice should not be confused with merely intonating a melody. as gualinga 8 for an excellent analysis on how amazonian women build political authority by mastering the practice of interpreting dreams, see lisset coba (2019). andrea sempértegui studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 216 told me, the act of chanting, or anent in shiwiar,9 is considered a secret power that some members from indigenous communities inherit from their parents or grandparents, and that they master by performing certain sacrifices like fasting (interview, august 9, 2018, puyo). the power of the anent resides in how, when done right, the chant works like a magic spell or an enchantment on human and more-than-human entities and can influence the course of events. gualinga and other shuar leaders like maría taant and dominga antún have often publicly reproduced their chants during their political mobilizations against extractivism. this was the case when mujeres amazónicas organized their third mobilization in 2018. in march of that year, a delegation of amazonian women travelled to quito to meet ecuador’s president at that time lenin moreno. moreno did not receive them right away, and the amazonian female leaders organized a five-day plantón (a picket) in front of the presidential palace (agencia tegantai, 2018). during this plantón, rosa gualinga publicly sang her chants in the plaza de la independencia as a way to pressure the government and to “change the course of things” (interview, august 9, 2018, puyo). finally, moreno met with the delegation from mujeres amazónicas in the presidential palace on march 23, 2018, and received their mandate, mandato de las mujeres amazónicas defensoras de la selva de las bases frente al extractivismo (grassroot mandate of the amazonian women defenders of the rainforest against extractivism). during this meeting, which lasted for about two hours, rosa gualinga and other leaders kept sharing their chants in front of governmental representatives and ecuadorians connected via facebook live.10 they also called for an end to extractive concessions, denounced the death threats and attacks that amazonian female leaders had received due to their anti-extractive activism, and denounced moreno’s claim that affected communities were properly consulted on current and future oil and mining projects. this moment illustrates how a secret practice that is normally reserved for the intimacy of the forest was “brought” by mujeres amazónicas to their public meetings and mobilizations. for gualinga, it is clear that singing in the forest, surrounded by its powerful beings, has a different effect than singing in public spaces like the plaza de la independencia, surrounded by the chaos of the city (interview, august 9, 2018, puyo). nevertheless, the recurrent appearance of mujeres amazónicas’ chants during their public interventions indicates how indigenous female leaders strategize and transform this secret and intimate practice into a political one with the purpose of “changing the course of 9 phillip descola describes in his ethnographic work with the achuar – closely related to the shiwiar and shuar peoples –that the word anent comes from the same root as inintai, the heart, the organ where thought, memory, and emotions reside (1989, p. 273). the anent are “discourses of the heart” adapted to different circumstances in achuar’s public and domestic life, like cultivating crops, hunting, or settling a dispute with relatives. 10 the meeting with president moreno was live-streamed by the facebook account comunicación sapara. the video is no longer available. weaving the spiderweb studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 217 things.” with this act, they also take over public platforms of visibility to make their demands heard, thus advancing their political agenda. mujeres amazónicas’ politics: a rooted and global design the defense of our territory, of our pachamama, is not only for us, but for the whole world. only mujeres amazónicas are the solution so that oil exploitation [sic] remains under the ground... we, indigenous women, are defending the whole world from climate change. this is the only solution. (nancy santi, public intervention, march 8, 2016, puyo) the amazon that exists is thanks to the struggle and blood of indigenous peoples. because if it were up to the governments and companies, they would have already destroyed the entire amazon. for us the pandemic is a direct result of all this depredation… if they destroy the amazon, the life of humankind is destroyed as well. the amazon’s eco-systemic balance maintains the balance in the arctic, in the sahara, in congo. this connection cannot be dissociated. (patricia gualinga, statement during the webinar “covid y la guerra contra la amazonía,” june 3, 2020) throughout this article, i have analyzed mujeres amazónicas’ political strategies and showed how they develop and deploy these strategies by using practices of communitarian reproduction in their territorial struggle. their strategic deployment of these practices reveals how public mobilizations do not happen suddenly, or in a void, but are actually facilitated by practices that sustain mujeres amazónicas’ lives and their capacity to act as leaders. most importantly, the strategic merging of public expressions of resistance with those practices that make communitarian life possible evince that mujeres amazónicas’ political actions are part of a carefully woven political design against extractivism. inspired by the artesanía of the araña tejedora and gladys tzul tzul’s analysis of tramas comunales, i have examined the concrete ways in which these amazonian female leaders produce their political design. by looking at the role that the practices of preparing chicha and chanting play in mujeres amazónicas’ organizing, i have shown how these leaders weave their strategic politics by increasing their communities’ support in their leadership and taking over platforms of visibility for advancing their anti-extractive agenda. with this analysis, i have also illustrated how amazonian women’s cultural and social identities are neither static nor unchangeable. rather, practices of communitarian reproduction become political, as they are used, strategized, and transformed in their territorial struggle, demonstrating that indigenous women are not emblems of cultural authenticity. they are historical and collective subjects with the power to shape the lines of political confrontation vis-à-vis the state and extractive capital. andrea sempértegui studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 218 in the last paragraphs of this article, i would like to explain why mujeres amazónicas’ political design should not be interpreted as an example of local politics. instead, their politics, while rooted in concrete practices of communitarian reproduction in the amazon, extend beyond indigenous peoples’ concerns in ecuador and connect to global environmental justice concerns. as nancy santi’s words at the beginning of this section indicate, the mujeres amazónicas’ territorial defense is not only for themselves but also “for the whole world.” santi’s message also presents mujeres amazónicas’ struggle as part of “the solution” for climate change through their efforts to keep oil reserves under the ground. additionally, patricia gualinga, leader from the kichwa pueblo of sarayaku and founding member of mujeres amazónicas, links the broader indigenous territorial struggle with the current pandemic and reminds us that if the amazon rainforest is destroyed, “the life of humankind is destroyed as well” (luchadoras, 2020). beyond this being just a strategy to profile themselves as the true guardians of the forest, these statements give us important clues about the global dimension of mujeres amazónicas’ political design. this design is characterized by their ability to express interdependence between indigenous and non-indigenous ways of living and to universalize their demands by linking them to current problems in terms used by the global environmental justice movement, like climate change. when describing mujeres amazónicas’ capacity to universalize their demands, i am referring to their capacity to build what the anthropologist anna l. tsing calls “global connections.” in her book friction: an ethnography of global connection (2005), tsing does an ethnography of global connections in the rainforests of indonesia, with the particular interest of overcoming the academic division between universality, or what she calls “the universal as an aspiration,”11 and the local formation of culture. she criticizes the fact that scholars, especially anthropologists, have failed to acknowledge how “universals are indeed local knowledge” (2005, p. 7). as an alternative, she defines universals as knowledge that “moves across localities and cultures” helping “to form bridges, roads and channels of circulation” in the process (tsing, 2005, p. 7). this mobility does not happen outside the practice of power; universals are implicated in both “imperial schemes to control the world and liberatory mobilizations for justice and empowerment” (tsing, 2005, p. 9). indeed, they are shaped by strange interactions across difference, in which local knowledge percolates into universals’ channels of circulation, “charging and changing their travels;” and universals need the shape of historically specific cultural assumptions to work in a practical sense (tsing, 2005, 8ff.). this, in turn, implies that universal dreams – shared by the powerful and powerless alike – can never fully accomplish their promises of universality. these interactions across difference are what tsing calls “friction.” 11 for tsing, the universal as an aspiration does not only include western universal dreams and schemes. these are only one “particular kind of universality” (2005, p. 1). weaving the spiderweb studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 204-221, 2023 219 in the case of mujeres amazónicas, santi’s and gualinga’s statements make clear that they are committed to creating a web of global connections with other environmental struggles that are not necessarily articulated in territorial or communitarian terms. furthermore, by framing their struggle as interconnected with other struggles around the world and vital for humanity’s existence, these amazonian female leaders remind their interlocutors that they are not outside “the global stream of humanity” even as it often excludes them (spivak, 1999, in tsing, 2005, p. 1). this is why their political design should not be interpreted as constituted by local, cultural, or particular demands only. despite the modern, colonial, and patriarchal ways in which indigenous women’s voices, lives, and territories have been historically rendered invisible for the majority of society, mujeres amazónicas’ proposals are unquestionably global, and their political design has universal aspirations. references acosta, a. 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(2013). neo-desarrollistischer extraktivismus und soziale bewegungen: eine ökoterritoriale wende in richtung neuer altenrativen? in h-j. burchardt, r. öhlschläger & k. dietz (eds.), umwelt und entwicklung im 21. jahrhundert. impulse und analysen aus lateinamerika (pp. 79-91). nomos. svampa, m., & viale, e. (2014). maldesarrollo. la argentina del extractivismo y el despojo. katz editores. tapia, a. (2021, april 15). bloque 28: la explotación petrolera que amenaza la selva ecuatoriana, y el planeta. open democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/es/bloque28-explotacion-petrolera-amenaza-selva-ecuatoriana-planeta/ tsing, a. (2005). friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton university press. tzul tzul, g. (2018a). sistemas de gobierno comunal indígena. mujeres y tramas de parentesco enchuimeq’ena. traficantes de sueños. tzul tzul, g. (2018b). rebuilding communal life. ixil women and the desire for life in guatemala. nacla report on the americas, 50(4), 404-406. vallejo, i., & garcía-torres, m. (2017). mujeres indígenas y neoextractivismo petrolero en la amazonía centro del ecuador: reflexiones sobre ecologías y ontologías políticas en articulación. brújula (enfoques), 11(1), 1-43. vallejo, i., & duhalde ruiz, c. (2019). las mujeres indígenas amazónicas: actoras emergentes en las relaciones estado organizaciones indígenas amazónicas durante el gobierno de alianza país en el ecuador. polis, 18(52), 30-44. studies in social justice volume 3, issue 1, 1-7, 2009 correspondence address: willem de lint, department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology, university of windsor, 401 sunset avenue, windsor, on n9b 3p4 canada. tel: +1 519 253-3000, email: delint@uwindsor.ca issn: 1911-4788 introduction: security, exclusion, and social justice willem de lint1 department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology, university of windsor two concepts animate this special issue of studies in social justice: exclusion and security. exclusion and exclusivity are often understood as inimical to social justice in-so-far as one broad category of wrongs results in the denial of access to goods, services, and rights to some people. in a very popular book, jock young (1999) captures this understanding and makes the case that we are becoming the “exclusive society.” he argues that a welfarist model of social protection that absorbed and accommodated diverse populations is being displaced with a neoliberal one that limits the distributive function of government by reference to a (false) claim to market efficiencies. in the “exclusive society,” identities and lifestyles are marginalized, scapegoated, fragmented, and stigmatized. security is, perhaps, the first claim on government, and it is a revivified concept in a vast number of disciplinary traditions because it is connotative and resonant: it connects the personal and political, the quotidian and existential, hopes and fears; it is also a bridge concept between the needs of individuals or subjects and the organization of social and political bodies. in much scholarly literature and in a growing body of official policy, the call for a more inclusive concept of security is made so that security is not primarily or ultimately a commodity of geopolitics, but is inclusive of human rights and, indeed, the necessities of life (food, water, shelter) for those who are most disadvantaged. consequently, it is suggested, security must encompass those who are commonly the object rather than the subject of security talk. indeed, the relation between inclusion and security is tantalizing for those concerned with social justice because it is suggestive of community, oneness, solidarity, peace. who but an elitist would champion exclusion and exclusivity? the trajectory of modernism and liberal politics is not merely an iterative or reflexive process of absorption, it is also a projection of justified exclusions. the idea that exclusivity and injustice are interchangeable or mutually reinforcing has an immediate but temporary appeal. to provide a concrete illustration, advocates of social justice are correct to assert that the principles at back of a rule of law that empower institutions such as the international criminal court or organizations like 2 willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 human rights watch are meaningless if they cannot be employed to subordinate powerful outlaws. it is at this point that international relations realism and idealism meet head-on because it is here that champions of justice seek the coercive powers of enforcement that authorize banishments, punishments, and deprivations, that is to say, where the application of a remedy against a transgression is maintained by a legitimate coercive power yet the power to resist that coercive capacity is not reduced. at the same time, many scholars and practitioners have been searching for and experimenting on the means to insert at the quotidian register a kind of empowerment that does not imply reactionary populism or mob tyranny. how to launch justice and rights (how even to conceive that there is something of value in these terms) without a “grand narrative” is a question that animates much recent debate (o’malley, 2008). in diagram 1 presented below i have depicted security and justice across two dimensions: the exclusivity of subjects (elite versus common) and the exclusivity of jurisdictional resources (global versus local). as i have noted, critical thinking about the relation between justice and security often begins with the assumption that their confluence is least likely in the upper median. the traditional critical view is launched from subjectivities and jurisdictions (not states or regions but villages or disenfranchised peoples) that appear to seek a redistribution of resources and a reintegration of subjects. this is a scalar and vector oppositional to the (realist) view that launches security as geopolitical and makes justice derivative—the legitimation/ delegitimation of elite global economic rapprochements. diagram 1. security and justice across subject and jurisdiction exclusions introduction: security, exclusion, and social justice 3 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 advocates of “justice in security” who value a republican ideal may favour growing local or “community peaces” by building capacity (and interaction) at the scalar of a village.2 those who place greater value on universality may instead insist on “security in justice” or standards that apply with equal weight and result no matter the local interaction dynamics. the presumption is generally that, where the emphasis is on the local and common, subjects are more likely to be capacitated for reintegrative justice and jurisdictional resources are more likely to be redistributive,3 in many conceptual puzzles it is the missing piece that often holds the key. here, this is at the juncture where the relationship between distributive and penal justice comes back into play. if justice refers to a process to distribute valued resources along the axes of social norms, and security is the precondition of this process, to be “just and secure” is an ideal whose expression will regularly depend upon the review of exceptions and exclusions by intrinsic and extrinsic forces. subjects may be reintegrated (restorative justice) or neutralized (incapacitated, punished, deprived), and jurisdictional resources may be offered to lower jurisdictional denominations or withheld (as a function of legitimating an extant security order). but as has been noted (e.g., zedner, 2009), this is not necessarily borne out in practice. elites can be local as well as global and the parochialism of everyday security and the local administration of justice is often moderated by values or meanings that are exogenous or even transcendent. perhaps this is resolved, as per derrida (2001), where political action is taken between “a moment of universality” and “pragmatic demands” of politics in a specific context. following a thread also explored by arendt (1967) and mouffe (2005), it is not that the unforgivable must always be forgiven or that those who most threaten us must be embraced, but that there is sufficient political space that this remains a possibility. contrary to young, it is not with a nostalgic turn to modernism, but with an agonistic view of politics (as always open to revision and provocation) that the problem of exclusive security may most fruitfully be attacked. it is in this spirit that we undertook to canvass scholarly views on the problem. these views range from those who offer critique or interrogation of current iterations of the relation between these concepts to those who make a stab at the hard work of proposing the contours of that political space. the first paper is david mutimer’s critique of critical security studies. mutimer begins by noting how security in traditional international relations studies has derived its subject-matter through discursive elisions, including most notably the production of an excluded (non-citizen, non-state) other. however, far from correcting the exclusionary character of security thinking, critical security studies produce their own set of subjects that are not granted status. here, one of the most peculiar exclusions reviewed is that of the case (critical approaches to security in europe) collective, which while encompassing a wide range of critical security scholars is also confounded by its self-imposed european identity and its exclusion of postmodernists and feminists. as mutimer summarizes, this overt attempt at an inclusive network-building exercise has received the sharpest criticism from those whose voices appear not to be invited into the collective’s ambit. however, in speaking on security as on many issues of social policy, it is inevitable that there will be some that we will include and speak in favour of and some we will place beyond a margin and ignore or speak ill of. security, of course, is a way of talking about and justifying the inevitably unequal distribution of precious resources. 4 willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 in his critique of security, neocleous suggests that the logic of security, rather than liberty, is foundational in liberal democratic societies. within this logic of security, liberal democracies replicate fascist and authoritarian political dimensions in the use of values and identity to frame the security problem. when security comes to be understood as a threat to national identity or a “way of life” generally, distinctions between liberal and authoritarian politics, as well as distinctions between internal and external threats, are obliterated—and internal enemies are seen as integral to external enemies and vice versa. national security, loyalty, and political unity are values mobilized as much by authoritarian as liberal regimes, and comprise the authoritarian dimensions at the foundation of liberalism. in their examination of canada-us border security, o’connor and de lint argue that frontier government is an expansionist move that links an invigorated sovereign capacity with strategies of control, surveillance, and risk management to create a new governance assemblage. frontier expansion enlists various agents and agencies, public and private, as well as numerous “petty sovereigns” seeking to apply a new “governance normal” in novel sites, marking outposts farther from the traditional land border. the new governance normal makes use of intelligence and intelligence gathering strategies to secure the expanded borderlands, where new “information tolls” make arriving at the border unannounced a thing of the past and where private partners are enlisted to do more of the governing in a frontier that reaches deep into the global supply chain. ostensibly for the immunization against risks or harms, frontier government also serves to augment sovereign capacity. with new exclusive knowledge resources and technological means at its disposal, as well as an expanded registry of known and unknown risks to secure against, this invigorated sovereignty is mobilized by quotidian decision-makers to roll back laws/rights and roll out “counter-law” in the normalization of exception or the diffusion of border agency everywhere. muller argues that the events of 9/11 have resulted in a virulent spread of exclusionary practices at the border in terms of a risk management logic and biometric technologies focused on identity management and therefore on exclusion. this re-articulation of security, danger and identity, has lead to a proliferation of border practices, both at and beyond the physical land border. the borderland is now governed through risk, where risk management and the securitization of identity visà-vis biometric technologies are held up as the answer to the dilemmas of border security. risk management, in its four-fold articulation of responses (acceptance, mitigation, avoidance, or transfer of risk), discloses a tension and reveals an ambiguity among the many authorities responsible for securing the border. this ambiguous authority structure results in potentially dire consequences. echoing donais' concern about “who” these security schemes actually serve, who enjoys or is denied the ability to “speak” and to “do” security, muller argues that the current border security regime is aligned with a limited and narrow set of political objectives associated with us homeland security. the limited goals of the current border security regime excludes various long standing collaborative and cooperative cultural, political, and market voices that (used to) inform practices in the borderland. canada is known as a longstanding advocate of widening understanding of “security” from the realism of international relations that has traditionally structured introduction: security, exclusion, and social justice 5 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 much state-to-state interaction. however, as shown by a number of authors in this issue (essex, hills, neocleous, mutimer) there are many reasons to find that the concept of security remains a blunt instrument even where it is widened to include human needs such as food and medicine. as essex demonstrates, food-for-work (ffw) programs are a disciplinary mechanism that links hunger to poverty and food insecurity to geopolitical insecurity. access to u.s. food aid, for example, is dependent on compliance with donor interests for showing a return on investment, particularly as an entry point for advancing “geopolitical and geoeconomic objectives in recipient countries.” such programs can “crowd out” and displace local political and economic practices that contribute to a dependent or client state status at the same time that they draw on existing local systems for their administration, exacerbating faulty or corrupt systems and practices. it is particularly the suppression of local political demands that essex explores in his case study of the jakarta ffw program. in everyday usage, the term “security” connotes a common and connective function and this is why it is so attractive. in this respect, it performs much in the way the term “community” to win converts to policies or initiatives (for example, “community policing”). such usage, however, is open to the exclusions of subjects and identities, and much as community policing is morphologically prone to militaristic properties, forces of elitism and elite or special forces also share common terrain in dual policing export experiments. in her study of u.s. led efforts to set down “security” in baghdad and basra in post-invasion iraq, hills argues that the experience of security is often neither common nor connecting. on the contrary, it is “rarely for all.” for whom and for what, of course, are the key questions when a post-wilsonian military adventurism stands tall in the shadows and efforts to impose an internal order are by force of an occupying army (which understands its own security as paramount). when paul bremmer, as head of the cpa, dissolved the ba’ath party (and with it institutional structure of iraqi policing) in order to create a new iraqi police service mandated to assist coalition forces in addition to crime control and order maintenance, the “for whom” question of iraqi security could not have been made more jarringly clear: security is produced as a “selective project” and understood and expressed by personalities according to strategic or political contingencies. offering her examination partly as a corrective to its adaptation by elite sensibilities, the meaning of security in a post-conflict city refers to “something more physical, territorial, and exclusionary.” it does not, and given how easily it is sutured to the agendas of those imposing from without perhaps should not, extend too far from the question of who is “forcibly displaced, raped, robbed, kidnapped, mutilated, tortured, or killed.” the expansionist moves that promote security through the spread of national (identity) values and the concern about security as an export commodity are also reflected in donais argument that security sector reform (ssr) in so-called “transition” countries is an externally-driven social engineering project in which “donor” countries aim to make over the security sector in the image of western priorities. ssr efforts typically require the security sector to be reformed along the axis of western values and institutions, reflecting the belief that these values and institutions are universally valid, the only legitimate basis for good security governance, and are necessary elements in the “democratic transition” in countries emerging from war and/or authoritarianism. in this case, “local ownership” of the 6 willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 ssr process is reduced to the responsibility to adopt western-style security norms, values, and institutional frameworks (often linked to donor country security pursuits such as the war on terror) and local ownership becomes an end rather than a means of security sector reform. without substantive local ownership, however, security sector reforms tend to be thinly institutionalized and norms weakly internalized. local ownership can also be used by local governments as a means of suppressing dissent or undermining political opponents. these aspects of ssr reveal basic tensions at the heart of such strategies. the way to address the lived insecurities of people in transition countries is to consider ssr as a negotiated partnership between donors and local elites, including discussions about whether and how international security sector norms can be reconciled, not only with local traditions, practices, and values, but also with the more parochial interests of local elites. this summary of the contributions to this issue invites a closing observation. the distribution of access to valued resources such as security (including debate about its representation or delimitation) is indeed a measure of political space as suggested by derrida. that space is almost limitless where it is conceived between the “moment of universality” and “pragmatic demands.” one may read each of the papers in this issue with an eye to this: at stake is not only the occupation of the space between these terms, but also the position at which the decision is made: who gets to determine, when, and under what conditions that something should register as pragmatic or universal? in this way, the comment by derrida also returns us to our point of departure. security is so important a term because it is often the bluntest weapon, uttered to cut off debate. even when it is reloaded to encompass universality (as with “human security” or “green security”), the process of division begins anew, as elites redefine both the universal and pragmatic to maintain the selective distribution of valued resources. this is why security is so pivotal: long perceived as antecedent to law, the space of the political, and the distributive work of government (as bentham pointed out), it holds equal promise as an instrument of retrenchment and renewal. notes 1 willem de lint would like to thank the social sciences and humanities research council for a grant award under its aid to research workshops program that contributed funds to this issue of studies in social justice and tanya basok and the centre for studies in social justice for generous contributions to the grant proposal. thanks also to daniel o’connor for helpful comments on this piece. 2 taking food security as an example, in line with the work of essex in this volume, vandana shiva has written how the so-called green revolution has devastated india’s capacity as a food supplier to its own people because it supports the displacement of long-standing traditional farming methods that rely on plurality with a policy that serves elite global agribusiness (transnational) through monoculture. if the value here is access to food by local and common folk, then the displacement of global elites with common local production is the obvious solution, producing greater justice and security. 3 however, the means and ends of justice and security appear to be at loggerheads even within local spaces. as noted by brodeur and shearing (2005, p. 382), the administration of the court system often resides with departments of justice whereas policing agencies often fall under departments of (homeland) security or safety. this means that policing agencies are associated with security provision and the courts with the pursuit of justice. citing polls that introduction: security, exclusion, and social justice 7 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 find that the canadian public blame the courts more than the police for a lack of public safety, brodeur and shearing argue that security and justice are “more intertwined at the grass-roots level [of common perception] than is usually recognized.” (385) references arendt, h. (1967). the origins of totalitarianism. london: george allen and unwin. brodeur, j-p. and shearing, c. (2005). configuring justice and security. european journal of criminology, 2(4), 379-406. derrida, j. (2001). cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. london: routledge. mouffe, c. (2004). the political. london: verso. o’malley, p. (2008). experiments in risk and criminal justice. theoretical criminology, 12(4), 451-469. young, j. (1999). the exclusive society. london: sage. zedner, l. (2009). security. london: routledge. correspondence address: carlo fanelli, ryerson university, 350 victoria street, toronto, ontario, canada m5b 2k3. email: carlo.fanelli@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 2, 113-117, 2014 introduction austerity, labour and social mobilizations: rebuilding trade union and working class politics carlo fanelli department of politics & public administration at ryerson university peter brogan department of geography at york university since 2008, austerity has dominated the public policy agenda across the political spectrum. across north america and europe this has meant an emboldened radicalism from conservatives as new pressures to privatize public services, in particular health care, pensions and public education, coalesce with efforts to implement so-called right-to-work laws and the removal of public sector collective bargaining rights. furthermore, the right to demonstrate and protest—the most basic of fundamental freedoms—has been severely constrained amidst hardening disciplinary and repressive state apparatuses. this remaking of social relations and institutional structures, however, has not been solely a matter of conservative class war, but has also been deepened and extended by liberals and social democrats with the backing of ruling class circles. work for welfare initiatives, the weakening of employment standards legislation, attacks against social assistance minimums and the erosion of progressive taxation, once deemed central to the “new deal,” are now deemed extravagant entitlements allegedly unaffordable in a new age of global capitalism (pantich & gindin, 2012). the public sector, especially unionized workers, have become a prime target of restructuring as capital and the state seek to create new spaces for accumulation. these new pressures have traversed scales of public administration, ushering in what can otherwise be termed an era of “permanent austerity.” despite capitalist class and state militancy, however, studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 114 carlo fanelli & peter brogan unions and progressive social movements have been unable to stop, let alone reverse, decades of combined and uneven retrenchment (fanelli, 2013; lichtenstein, 2012; panitch & swartz, 2003; ross & savage, 2013). the effects of these policies, of course, have not been class neutral. rather, those who caused the crisis in the first place—the capitalist class and states which enable them—continue to shift the costs of the crisis onto working class communities. the politics of austerity exacerbate racialized and gendered oppressions in the form of wage and benefit concessions, reductions to social services and increases in unpaid labour, further reinforcing ethno-racial and gendered hierarchies. oftentimes for labour, successes have now been reduced to limiting the extent of concessions in their various forms, while social movements generally struggle with finding new ways of mobilizing against the upsurge in authoritarian populism. this special issue of studies in social justice reveals that regardless of the political party or coalition in power there has been a common tendency to further discipline workers to the imperatives of capital amidst a hardening of neoliberalism. with evermore authoritarianism and coercion, the state has come to lead in narrowing the field of free collective bargaining, suspending trade union rights and implementing an aggressive program of dispossession. without the collective capacities to successfully challenge these measures, unions have reached an impasse; unable to translate militancy (where it is enacted) into an alternative ideological perspective and political and economic program, they desperately continue to hang onto previous gains that look increasingly insecure and fragile in an age of austerity. how, then, might workers in north america and europe rebuild trade union capacities and working class politics? what lessons can be learned from municipal workers’ struggles? what new forms of trade union organizing have been effective in contesting the austerity agenda? how have social movements and progressive forces adapted and responded to these new conditions? the articles which follow begin to address precisely these questions. in a thorough reappraisal of us labour and social movement literature, keith mann analyzes the current state of international protest and trade union confrontation. he argues that a closer look at labour mobilizations over the last five years reveals a new form of emergent activism. from the arab spring to anti-austerity protests in greece and spain, the occupy wall street movement and labour struggles in wisconsin and chicago, mann challenges common assumptions about so-called old and new social movements. he suggests that a new labour movement is emerging that shares many common features with new social movements, such as a universalistic emphasis on deeper democracy, social justice, an end to racial and gender oppressions, and good jobs for all. in this sense, the old demarcation between labour on the one hand and social movements on the other is increasingly blurred as the two coalesce around common struggles. next, peter brogan analyzes the chicago teachers union (ctu) transformation from business to radical unionism. he shows how the ctu effectively challenged austerity measures by building a broad-based, rankstudies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 introduction. austerity, labour and social mobilizations 115 and-file-led activist union that places social justice at the forefront of their demands. brogan discusses the political and economic pressures that preceded the 2012 round of negotiations between the chicago board of education and the teachers’ union, and explores the uniqueness of the 2012 strike and its aftermath, with particular attention on its implications for broader social justice struggles across chicago and beyond. he shows how an amalgam of socialist and progressive activists was able to build unity across the union, effectively challenge the entrenched leadership, and build an empowering working class unionism by developing a long-term strategy and vision for change. in a similar vein, carlo fanelli explores attacks against trade union rights and freedoms for municipal workers in the city of toronto. fanelli contends that, like in the chicago case, the municipal state propagated a false trade-off between wage restraint on the one hand and the protection of public services on the other, using it as a divisive wedge strategy to separate the users from the producers of public services. as part of this strategy, this meant structurally shifting the burden of recession onto workers and the users of public services by further marketizing and commodifying the public sphere. fanelli explores the concession-filled 2012 round of collective bargaining between the canadian union of public employees (cupe) locals 79/416 and the city of toronto. he makes the case for an alternative political strategy for municipal public sector unions while stressing the importance of a radicalized labour movement rooted in demands for workplace democracy and social justice. the experiences of the ctu and cupe locals 79 and 416 paint a vivid picture of resurgent neoliberalism in the wake of the great recession. while each case study has its own specificity, together they provide fruitful terrain for developing an understanding of how long-term neoliberal policies are expanded and intensified in moments of crisis, while at the same time illustrating how global cities continue to be critical spaces of both neoliberal policy experimentation and contestation. the concluding article by jiří navrátil, explores the evolution of the czech social justice movement over the last decade. he discusses how progressive movements have evolved over time and what transformative factors have impacted their potency. navrátil shows how the scale and focus of social mobilization and activism have vacillated over time, traversing transnational, domestic and localized scales. examining the splits amongst social justice groups, he discusses how an emphasis on anti-war mobilizations, antiglobalization protests, police repression, demands for deeper democracy, and socio-economic dislocations has shifted over time. navrátil concludes by discussing the reasons for the recent domestication of czech social justice activism, with a particular emphasis on recent mobilizations against hardright populist governments pushing a program of austerity and privatization. while each of the unions and social justice movements involved in these struggles have had very different historical trajectories, relationships with the state and political cultures, collectively mann, brogan, fanelli and navrátil illustrate the variety of forms of resistance and mixed successes of those struggling for democracy and social justice in the twenty-first century. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 116 carlo fanelli & peter brogan resisting austerity: the case for a radical politics if trade unions and working class communities are to resist austerity, rebuilding the capacities of organized labour to fight back against concessionary demands must seek to build community-labour coalitions from the bottom up (brogan, 2013; tattersall, 2010). as long argued by scholar-activists like sam gindin (1995; 2006; 2012), kim moody (1988; 2007), bill fletcher jr. and fernando gapasin (2009), in order for unions to live up to their potential as transformative workers’ organizations, they will need to be reinvented. as part of this strategy of reinvention, a revived emphasis on working class politics must seek to transcend what are often insulated labour and activist subcultures. considering the weak state of anti-capitalist/progressive forces and organized labour in north america and europe and their inability to translate support for their political positions into broader political influence, new political organizations and sustained mobilizations that challenge the rule of capital are gravely needed. if unions are to reappear as a movement and not simply hang on as a relic of the past, they will need to move beyond the limited defence of their own members’ interests and fight for the interests of the working class as a whole. as the articles collected here suggest, doing so requires having feet both inside and outside the trade union movement— that is to say, rooted in an organizational form explicitly intent on building a broader working class movement across the many cleavages among workers and grounded in a critical analysis of (neoliberal) capitalism. in light of historical and contemporary attacks against free collective bargaining, it is becoming increasingly clear that unions and oppressed persons generally can no longer, if they ever could, put their faith in the courts, laws or governments to enforce the postwar class compromise. this postwar “consensus” has been thoroughly eroded in the face of trade union and social justice activists’ inability to adequately counteract cumulative decades of concerted attacks. despite four decades of neoliberalism and the intensified attacks following the great recession, there has yet to be a commensurate rejuvenation of socialistand anti-capitalistinspired mobilizations. examining the reasons for these failings is important since the shapes taken (or not taken) by struggles over austerity and social justice will determine whether neoliberalism continues uninterrupted or whether something new and historically unique can capture the public’s imagination. considering what the working class is facing collectively, organizing solely around specific issues, workplaces and particular constituencies cannot add up to the kind of strength, organization and structure that is needed to bring about wide-ranging change. although labour unions often remain the largest, most organized, resourced and stable institutions fighting against the rule of capital, they cannot themselves beat back the consolidated attacks by the state and capital. while trade unions must be a central part of any radical political renewal, their rebirth is equally dependent upon a broader revitalization of the left outside of organized labour and working class politics as a whole—what marx identified as a social and political formation united in difference. the course of neoliberalism has thoroughly eroded what vestiges remain of trade union militancy, while studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 introduction. austerity, labour and social mobilizations 117 social movements generally remain isolated in small-scale and resource-poor coalitions. given the ongoing onslaught against public services, private and public sector unions and progressive movements, trade unionists and social justice activists must come to the bitter realization that the existing ways of doing things are not working. this, in our view, is the only realistic starting point from which to move forward. the inability of both organized labour and activists to confront this impasse belies the need for a new kind of radical, anti-capitalist political project suited to the current historical and social conjuncture, one that interrogates both its own historical failures as well as the transformations in the political, economic, socio-spatial and cultural changes under which we are struggling today. the challenge before trade union and social justice activists is to move left of social democracy or risk increasingly becoming an impediment to rather than an instrument of a renewed working class politics. in other words, labour and social justice activists must lead left if austerity is to be challenged. the failure to do so may regrettably amount to an historic class defeat. despite the setbacks to trade unionists and social justice activists over the period of neoliberalism, it is necessary to learn victory from defeats. revitalizing the theoretical and political promise of a radical working class politics remains a crucial step in resisting austerity and potentially realizing a better world that gets to the root of the problem—capitalism. references brogan, p. (2013). in struggle together: reflections on labor-community alliances in the fight for education justice. progressive planning magazine, 197, 40-44. fanelli, c. (2013). fragile future: the attack against public services and public sector unions in an era of austerity. unpublished doctoral dissertation. carleton university, ottawa. fletcher, b. jr. & gapasin, f. (2007). solidarity divided: the crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice. berkeley: uc press. gindin, s. (1995). the canadian auto workers: the birth and transformation of a union. toronto: lorimer. gindin, s. (2012). rethinking unions, registering socialism. in l. panitch, g. albo, & v. chibber, (eds.), the question of strategy, socialist register 2013 (pp. 26-51). london: merlin press. gindin, s. & stanford, j. (2006). canadian labour and the political economy of transformation. in v. shalla, (ed.), working in a global era: critical perspectives (pp. 379-394). toronto: canadian scholars press index. jordus-lier, d. (2012). public sector labour geographies and the contradictions of state employment. geography compass 6/7, 423–438. lichtenstein, n. (2012). state of the union: a century of american labor. princeton: princeton university press. moody, k. (1988). an injury to all: the decline of american unionism. new york: verso. moody, k. (2008). us labor in trouble and transition. the failure of reform from above, the promise of revival from below. london: verso panitch, l., & swartz, d. (2003). from consent to coercion: the assault on trade union freedoms. aurora, on: garamond press. panitch, l., & gindin, s. (2012). the making of global capitalism: the political economy of american empire. london: verso. ross, s., & savage, l. (eds.). (2013). public sector unions in the age of austerity. halifax: fernwood. tattersall, a. (2010). power in coalition: strategies for strong unions and social change. ithaca: cornell university press. banerjee final before ts correspondence address: pallavi banerjee, department of sociology, university of calgary, calgary, ab, t2n 1n4; email: pallavi.banerjee@ucalgary.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 toll of the covid-19 pandemic on the primary caregiver in yazidi refugee families in canada: a feminist refugee epistemological analysis pallavi banerjee university of calgary, canada soulit chacko indiana university purdue university indiana, usa souzan korsha university of calgary, canada abstract existing discourse on refugee resettlement in the west is rife with imperialist and neoliberal allusions. materially, this discourse assumes refugees as passive recipients of resettlement programs in the host country, thereby denying them their subjectivities. given the amplification of all social and economic inequities during the pandemic, our paper explores how canada's response to the pandemic visa-vis refugees impacted the everyday of yazidis in calgary – a recently arrived refugee group who survived the most horrific genocidal atrocities of our times. based on interviews with yazidi families in calgary and with resettlement staff we unpack canada's paternalistic response towards refugees during the covid-19 pandemic. we show how resettlement provisions and social isolation along with pre-migration histories have furthered the conditions of social, economic, and affective inequities for yazidis. we also show how yazidi women who were most impacted by the genocide and the subsequent pandemic find ways of asserting their personhood and engage in healing through a land-based resettlement initiative. adopting a feminist refugee epistemology and a southern moral imaginary as our discursive lenses, we highlight the need to dismantle the existing paternalistic structures and re(orient) resettlement practices and praxis to a social justice framework centering the voices of refugee women and families in their resettlement process. keywords refugee settlement; gender; decolonial analysis; yazidis; rohingya; covid-19 pallavi banerjee, soulit chacko & souzan korsha studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 34 introduction the covid-19 outbreak, declared a global pandemic by the world health organization in march 2020, upended systems of mobility, halting migration across the world (kluge et al., 2020). it also amplified existing systems of inequalities as shown through research and numerous reports (goldin & muggah, 2020). resettled refugees in countries of the global north experienced disparate effects of the pandemic given the disproportionately negative impact it has had on the most vulnerable globally (watson et al., 2020). for instance, in canada, the pandemic is heavily impacting job sectors that rely on resettled refugees (center for global development 2020; gelatt, 2020). resettled refugees also tend to live in inner-city neighborhoods already experiencing urban decline (carter & osborne, 2009) and in multigenerational homes, which increased the likelihood of the virus spreading (krogstad, 2019). this paper explores the impact of covid-19 on yazidis – a recently resettled refugee group in canada. given the underlying inequities that already exist in the canadian immigration and refugee intake systems, we unpack how yazidi men and women are disparately impacted by the covid-19 pandemic. we adopted espiritu and duong’s (2018) feminist refugee epistemology (fre) as our analytical framework because we were are committed to illuminating the everyday lives of yazidi refugee newcomers to calgary, the majority of whom are women, underscoring how they simultaneously navigated and resisted the ascribed status of “vulnerable refugees” during the pandemic. the yazidis are an ethno-religious group – a non-muslim and language minority in a muslim-majority and arabic-speaking region who have lived primarily in sinjar in northern iraq. they were deeply scarred by the genocide that began in 2014, perpetrated by the islamic state of iraq and the levant (isil), or daesh (its arabic acronym) (basci, 2016). since 2016, the canadian government has accepted approximately 1,400 isis victims, under the survivors of daesh program, most of whom are yazidi (maclean, 2019; wilkinson et al., 2019). all yazidis came to canada as government-assisted refugees (gar) (wilkinson et al., 2019). many of the yazidi refugees were single-parenting mothers with children. of those, around 265 yazidi refugees (53 family units) were resettled in calgary. the majority of these yazidis were from a farming community in iraq, and arrived in canada with no formal education (banerjee, coakley et al., 2020; oliphant, 2018). they speak kurmanji, a rare kurdish dialect (oliphant, 2018). our ongoing research shows that because the resettlement of yazidis in canada is marked by a deep gendered trauma due to the recent history of genocide, there is a need for gender-specific resettlement services for the community (banerjee, coakley et al., 2020; kizilhan & noll-hussong, 2017). in this paper we examine the covid-19 response toward yazidi refugees in canada, keeping in context the gender-specific resettlement services they need. we are specifically interested in unraveling how the social, economic, covid-19 pandemic & yazidi refugee families in canada studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 35 and political context of canada along with canada’s pandemic response to the refugee resettlement process, social isolation of refugees, and their premigration histories, produced conditions of oppression and inequity for yazidis in calgary. while our goal is to point to conditions that amplified inequities, given our epistemological commitment we centered the agential stories of yazidi women and men during the pandemic. our research is based on in-depth interviews with 23 yazidi men and women in calgary and with four resettlement staff – a total of 27 individuals. while on the surface canadian resettlement services are well-organized to facilitate the integration of newcomers (esses et al., 2021; moreno et al., 2018), we find that strong gendered impacts of the pandemic threw a wrench into the resettlement goals that settlement agencies had for the yazidis. the pandemic also laid bare to the resettled yazidis the gendered precarities of their existence and life in the new society. we contend that full integration of refugees, especially for recently persecuted groups such as yazidis, should not be premised on the economic concerns of the resettlement country. through our findings, we argue that we must adopt a southern moral imaginary when formulating policy and programming for resettled refugees, especially during crisis like a pandemic. our assertion is based on theorization by banerjee and connell (2018), and parekh (2020), who divergently argue for a decolonial and moral framework towards those who have been historically persecuted. coloniality, neoliberalism and paternalism and feminist refugee epistemology in the essay “we refugees” hannah arendt wrote about the loss of dignity and alienation that is inherently embedded in the refugee experience. she argues that the pain associated with these feelings is most strongly experienced by those who have been forcibly displaced from their homes and thrust into a new hostlands where they must contend with the presumed fragility of their humanity as those relegated to being less than human even in the migration process (arendt, 1994, p. 115). arendt (1994) centered dignity in the refugee experience, calling refugees the “vanguard of their people” (p. 117) and advocated for receiving states to create conditions where refugees can preserve their dignity by holding on to the self that was undone as the condition of displacement. arendt’s work has become the foundation of critical refugee studies. along the same lines, seyla benhabib (2004) argues for global justice, such that nation-states redefine their political memberships to be inclusive of asylum seekers, tear down border protectionism, and do away with labels of illegal migrants to uphold the dignity of the displaced. this radical call to the nation-state is necessary because the state assumes a paternalistic stance toward refugees (banerjee, chacko et al., 2020; mama, 1998; owen, 2009). owen (2009) criticises “the three principal solutions to refugees – repatriation, integration into the society to which they have fled, or pallavi banerjee, soulit chacko & souzan korsha studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 36 resettlement in a third country” (p. 571), because these principles are based in the discourse of citizenship and statist rights, designed to manage, and control refugee lives to fit the ideals of the receiving society. parekh (2020) alludes to arendt’s call for centering dignity when receiving refugees, and calls for the adoption of a moral framework that challenges the political structures denying refugees the dignity they deserve in seeking refuge and having sought refuge. this framing is important to reconceptualize who refugees are: not people who need to be rescued or passive recipients of charitable offerings but people who are a “site of social and political critiques of militarized empires” (espiritu, 2014, p. 174) and other forms of violence and oppression. these principles take on ideologies of settler-colonialism in states like canada. indigenous feminist scholars and activists have long argued that settler-colonial nations like canada are steeped in (hetero)paternalism that organizes its citizenry to fit and uphold western, christian, heterosexual nuclear family relationalities while dis-appearing and disinvesting in any other type of citizenry (arvin et al., 2013; smith, 2007; stasiulis & yuvaldavis, 1995). along similar lines, scholars of critical refugee studies claim that canadian exceptionalism is predicated on its image as a benevolent state, which necessitates the construction of refugees as victims and vulnerable, imperatively dependent on (paternalistic) institutions of the state, and cast as the non-contributing other (chuong, 2015; hardy & phillips, 1999; lacroix, 2004). for instance, in assessing which yazidis could be admitted as refugees, the canadian state required them to be “the most vulnerable” of the yazidis itself a misnomer for a population subjected to multiple genocides throughout history and the most horrific recorded atrocities in recent times, which resulted in their displacement. this paternalistic perspective leads to the construction of refugees from the global south as universal dependents (mohanty, 1998), and the making of a single story through which their resettlement in the host country is structured and portrayed, undoing any possibility of refugee subjectivity. another characteristic of settler-colonial western states like canada in late capitalism is the reliance and deployment of neoliberal logics toward their populous, especially those considered dependent on the nation, like refugees and migrants (adamson & tsourapas, 2020). the neoliberal state introduces mechanisms of categorizations among migrants. for instance, canada’s humanitarian migration policy for refugees thrusts them into an economic and political system where they are expected to fend for themselves after a certain period of basic resettlement support (adamson & tsourapas, 2020). additionally, the state frees itself of responsibilities for refugee claimants, differentially leaving them vulnerable to symbolic and material violence and discrimination (álvarez, 2020). in canada, owing to the already existing intersectional oppressive matrix of race, class, gender, legal status, nontransferability of human capital and heteropaternalism, refugee women are covid-19 pandemic & yazidi refugee families in canada studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 37 relegated to the margins of both economic and social futures (collins & bilge, 2020; hamilton et al., 2020). despite the simultaneous interplay of colonialism, paternalism, racism and gender marginalization that encumbers refugee and immigrant subjectivities, refugees and immigrants often reclaim their subjectivities by standing in moral protest against imperial and oppressive immigration regimes (banerjee, 2019; espiritu, 2014; guru, 2019, menjivar, 2006). moral protest, as argued by guru (2019), is a form of resistance led by minoritized groups who leave their home for another geography, defying the state’s unwillingness to protect them from oppression. moral protest makes migration an act of agentic defiance. given this, we deploy what espiritu and duong (2018) call “feminist refugee epistemology” (fre) as our analytical framework. they say, “fre relies on a feminist refugee analysis that in nadera shalhoubkevorkian’s (2015) words, ‘draws our awareness to routine, intimate and private sites where power is both reproduced and contested’ (2015, p. 2)” (espiritu & duong, 2018, p. 588). fre allows space for analyzing both the intimate everyday lives of refugees, while also reckoning with the public grief that refugees embody by centering their rich and complex lives. fre also considers the broader transnational context, and the conditions and structures in the receiving country, when situating refugee subjectivities. as explained earlier, yazidi refugees in canada are largely women, framed as vulnerable by the state and placed involuntarily in the vortex of the neoliberal logics and intersectional oppressive structures. not long after this community was resettled, yazidis found themselves in the eyes of the storm that the covid-19 pandemic became over the last year. drawing on the premises laid out in the fre, in this paper, we explore two related questions: (a) how has the global crisis of the covid-19 pandemic and the canadian state’s response to it affected the yazidi refugees, especially the main caregivers of the families?; and (b) how has the pandemic added to the complexities of the lives of yazidi women and men differently, and what have been the affective impacts on their lives? in attempting to discuss these questions, we argue that the pandemic has emphasized the need to move away from a paternalistic and neoliberal orientation to adopting a southern imaginary when settling refugees, as posited by banerjee and connell (2018). banerjee and connell (2018) argue for a world-centered approach (focused on the majority world or the global south) when discursively engaging in issues of gender, ensconced in a southern realm and centering coloniality in the analysis. in our case, the yazidis are ensconced in a framing of gender and kinship fostered in the global south even as they are thrust into two unfamiliar and insecure spaces: a new country with embedded intersectional inequalities that other them even before they arrive; and a global pandemic that has upended all lives and exacerbated existing inequities (watson et al., 2020). any attempt to respond to the impact of covid-19 on the gendered experiences of this group needs to be framed through a southern orientation embedded in a moral framework pallavi banerjee, soulit chacko & souzan korsha studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 38 if we are to move towards more social justice-focused solutions to the inequities experienced by refugees during the pandemic. refugee resettlement in canada canadian refugee policy asserts that to apply for refugee status a person must have faced or feared persecution in their home country and needs protection from experiencing harm including risk to their life (ircc, 2017). canada has a well-oiled, bureaucratic system for resettling refugees under the gar program, which involves a host of local and provincial institutions including local immigration partnerships, resettlement assistance program (rap) holders, and government-supported community-based initiatives (waltonroberts et al., 2019). this resettlement network was utilised in full force during the resettlement of syrian refugees between 2015 and 2017 (waltonroberts et al., 2019), while also laying bare the gaps in the system that threw syrian refugees in a vortex of poverty, racism, intolerance, stress, social isolation, and housing instability (oudshoom et al., 2019). refugee resettlement is largely framed within the ideals of economic or cultural integration, measured through labor participation. since the adoption of multiculturalism as a policy in 1971, canadian public institutions have been officially committed to preserving ethnic customs and identities (kymlicka, 2014). to a certain extent, this has supported the idea of cultural pluralism in canada. but this pluralism has not necessarily meant that groups like newly arrived refugees automatically experience a sense of belonging, as measured through their economic well-being (hyndman, 2013). economic well-being correlates with integration, and is ascertained through human capital factors such as language skills and economic participation (devoretz et al., 2004; goldlust & richmond, 1974; kaida, et al., 2020; wilkinson & garcea, 2017). this phenomenon includes three components, namely the ability to get a job, have a job and keep the job (lam, 1996; li, 2001), and eventually to acquire financial autonomy (renaud et al., 2003). much debate surrounds the economic integration of marginalized groups such as refugees for whom having access to jobs is as challenging as having the resources to maintain them. one of the challenges in this economic integration focus is “blocked mobility” (lam, 1996; li, 2001), which many marginalized groups, especially ethnic and religious refugee groups, experience. limited language skills, specifically english language proficiency, is identified as one reason constraining refugees from accessing well-paid jobs. while the academic literature acknowledges the structural barriers to economic integration that refugees experience, the governmental and societal rhetoric of economic integration remains largely neoliberal. the onus for economic integration still falls squarely on individual refugee subjects after what refugees claim is an inadequately short period of governmental support (saheb javaher, 2020). covid-19 pandemic & yazidi refugee families in canada studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 39 within larger academic discourse, acknowledging structural barriers creates a dominant framing that refugees, particularly groups from the global south, possess lower post-secondary education, which results in lower economic mobility (samuel, 1987). while this disadvantage may influence economic integration in predominantly english-speaking countries, studies also show how resources or the lack thereof in the host country are a stronger predictor for why refugees from the global south struggle to integrate. for instance, in a survey-based study krahn et al. (2000) found that a majority of refugees from non-english speaking countries were eager to learn english and french in canada so they could participate in the job market. however, they lacked access to adequate language and job training. additionally, the study found institutional barriers preventing refugees from transferring skills from their former countries. employment-related discrimination, including non-transferability of credentials, further pushes refugees, including those who had professional jobs in their old countries, into low-wage service jobs (also, see beiser & hou, 2000; devortez et al., 2004; renaud et al., 2003). this has been true for recently arrived syrian refugees in canada (hamilton et al., 2020). housing is another area that creates precarity for refugees. modeling housing stress in vancouver, canada, mendez et al. (2006) discuss the affordability crisis that pushes refugees to accept substandard housing with unstable conditions (see also francis & hiebert, 2014). additionally, the lack of affordable housing makes refugees dependent on public housing characterised by crowded residential conditions (sherrell et al., 2007). studies suggest that lack of secure suitable housing creates an additional layer of precarity for refugees in their goal of economic mobility (carter & osborne, 2009). chronic poverty among refugees is well documented. in canada, newly arrived refugees often struggle to save money because a major share of their income is spent on accommodation (rose, 2001). a report by canadian council for refugees (2011) pointed to housing as one of the top concerns for refugee integration. housing vulnerability was found to be acute among refugee claimants who arrived alone and were socially isolated. the report highlights that aside from rising cost and affordability, 37% of refugees experienced unsanitary housing conditions, which worsened their integration experience in canada. this housing stress is further exacerbated by mental health and trauma-related issues that refugees suffer. a recent study on syrians and yazidis in alberta, saskatchewan, manitoba, and ontario found that pre-migration trauma, family composition, and cost of housing contributed to stress related to finding affordable housing (bhattacharya et al., 2020; durbin et al., 2015). additionally, segregation, group poverty rates, and housing conditions collectively create concentrated poverty for groups who already experience marginalization in the larger canadian society (francis, 2010; logan et al., 2004; massey & denton, 1993; murdie, 2008). such unstable conditions add to the precarity that refugees in canada experience, and also result in a life of stigmatization and pallavi banerjee, soulit chacko & souzan korsha studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 40 isolation (galabuzi, 2006, as cited in francis, 2010, p.1), which is often exacerbated in periods of global crisis such as the covid-19 pandemic. it is important to note that we use the terminology of “marginalized” despite employing a feminist refugee epistemology approach, because marginalization does not necessarily imply lacking agency or being voiceless. marginalized refers to intersectional structures that become oppressive for members of historically disadvantaged groups. previous research on intersectionality has shown that marginalized groups are not necessarily devoid of agency. they access and mobilize agency in creative ways (banerjee, 2019; collins & bilge, 2020). refugees marshal their sociocultural, economic, and political resources based on a southern orientation to retool the otherness they experience in host society when responding to and pushing against the construction of refugeeness (kyriakides et al., 2018; kyriakides et al., 2019). this is underscored by veena das (2015) when she explicates the ethics of gift-giving in the global south, showing how palestinian women, labelled as refugees, would politely decline charitable gifts of old clothes, food, and even money from those they consider outside of their close kin circles, to reclaim the dignity they perceived to have lost in their relegation to the imposed status of being a refugee. refugees and the covid-19 pandemic from march 2020 to march 2021, confirmed infection rates related to covid-19 had been rising worldwide. at the same time, globally, countries were experiencing displacement due to war and conflicts. according to a unhcr report (2020b), in 2019 itself, there were 79.5 million people displaced worldwide. of these, 26 million were categorized as refugees, the rest as asylum seekers. canada, recognized by unhcr as the world leader in refugee resettlement among the 26 selected nations, took nearly 30,082 refugees. however, since 2019 and the onset of the pandemic, canada has seen a decline in the number of refugees it has resettled. in march 2020, as countries started drafting their response to covid-19, canada issued an order in council describing the pandemic as posing “an imminent and severe risk to public health in canada,” and recommended prohibiting entry of any person from a foreign country who may “introduce or spread the disease” (canada order in council, p.c. 2020-0185). human rights officials and activists were quick to assess such a sweeping decision, arguing that such measures “violated the fundamental principle of nonderogable human rights” (the canadian press, 2020). refugee international argued that for refugees covid-19 was a health crisis, a socio-economic crisis, as well as a protection crisis (dempster et al., 2020). for instance, a november 2020 article in cbc, which, relied on the voices of immigration and refugee activists to advocate that the government resume resettlement programs, mentioned: “janet dench, executive director of the canadian covid-19 pandemic & yazidi refugee families in canada studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 41 council for refugees, said canada's continued efforts to resettle refugees are critical because many have recently lost the modest incomes they needed to survive and feed their families” (harris, 2020). a few other news articles in canada during the pandemic centered on issues of family separation. a toronto star article by alhmidi (2021) highlighting the grief of family separation during the pandemic quotes various immigration officials. in positing the government position, they cite alexander cohen from the office of the immigration minister, who stated, “global migration has been upended by the covid-19 pandemic and the entire processing system has been operating at reduced capacity.” the same article (alhmidi, 2021) presents a counterpoint, by jennifer wan, a toronto immigration lawyer, who is cited as saying, “the government should prioritize family reunification cases that involve children, especially when the young people are in danger or don't have anyone to care for them.” there were a couple of news stories during the pandemic that portrayed the strength of refugee voices, and both were about yazidis in canada. a march 2021 cbc article reporting on ottawa’s decision to reunite families of yazidi newcomers with their families waiting in refugee camps in iraq highlighted, “last december, the yazidi community in canada and more than a dozen community groups wrote a letter to mendicino [immigration minister], asking for humanitarian aid for those in the refugee camps, and to fast-track applications that would reunite families” (pauls, 2021). another article published by the national public radio (arraf, 2020) on the story of a yazidi mother from canada who travelled to iraq during the pandemic to identify her missing daughter through a dna test, featured the fights a mother took to make the journey. these two stories point at the complexities of refugee lives during the pandemic, and the fights they took on despite the bleakness caused by the pandemic. the stance taken by canada during the pandemic is emblematic of a neoliberal perspective that is pro-immigration and seemingly advocating for refugee rights. and yet a finer grained analysis from an fre perspective reveals that the underlying ideology in these pieces weaves a victim narrative about refugees, positioning them in need of rescue. an alternative to this would be to center a southern moral imaginary that contextualizes the circumstances of the refugeeness as caused by western colonialization which makes resettling refugees a moral imperative for western democracies. this is where our research contributes to show how the underlying neoliberal ideologies embedded in the resettlement process have played out in the gendered lives of yazidi refugees in calgary during the pandemic. methods the study is based on in-depth interviews with 23 yazidi women and men (18 women and five men) in calgary to explore the economic, social, pallavi banerjee, soulit chacko & souzan korsha studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 42 financial, mental health, and governmental policy impact of covid-19 on their lives. we also conducted interviews with four key resettlement agency staff in calgary regarding the impact of covid-19 on their yazidi clients. these interviews were conducted between april 2020 and december 2020, after the pandemic began. the interviews with the yazidis women and men were conducted by the first author, banerjee, as the principal investigator, and the third author, korsha, as part of the research team. korsha interpreted all the interviews, translating between english and kurmanji, the kurdish dialect spoken by yazidis. the interviews were transcribed in english based on korsha’s interpretation, and the translated interviews were entered in nvivo as text for analysis. one of the limitations of our study has been to base our analysis entirely on the interpreted transcripts instead of the kurmanji dialogue between the participants and interpreter in the original. seven of the interviews were conducted face-to-face, outdoors, and the rest were either conducted over the phone or via zoom, and were 60 to 90 minutes in length. the interviews with the two groups are part of an ongoing comparative study that began in the fall of 2018. the interviews with the four key resettlement agency staff were conducted by banerjee, who. continued to conduct follow-up interviews with the staff during the course of the pandemic. the larger research project includes the entire population of yazidi refugees in calgary (canada),1 which consists of 53 yazidi families (approximately 265 individuals). the families were recruited through a local resettlement agency (lra) that is solely responsible for the resettlement of all the yazidi refugee families in calgary. when the pandemic began, there was a growing concern about how the lockdown associated with the pandemic would affect the yazidis in calgary (especially women) beyond its socio-economic impact, given that most of them were in isis captivity for years before being resettled in canada. therefore, to understand the impact of the pandemic, the first and the third author conducted follow-up interviews with 13 women (mostly single mothers) and four men to assess the impact of covid-19 on the community in calgary. we used the constant comparative method (charmaz, 2006; glaser & strauss, 1967) to analyze the interview data. what this entailed was iteratively analyzing the data in relation to the past research, our theoretical frameworks, and the narratives of our participants. the literature review provided us with the first level of theoretical sampling to help define tentative analytical categories. the fre and the southern moral imaginary framework further provided nuances for comparison within the data to produce the 1 seven families refused to take part in our study for various reasons, including hopelessness that positive change will occur as result of the study and damaged relationships with some lra staff. also, there was one family that was deemed unsuitable for interviewing, due to their extreme traumatic experience. covid-19 pandemic & yazidi refugee families in canada studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 43 analytic frames and themes detailed below. the data were analyzed using open and selective coding (strauss & corbin, 1990) in nvivo, which led us to the analytic themes that offer a comprehensive understanding of the impact of covid-19 on yazidi refugees in calgary. findings “back to square one”: gendered economic and social impacts of covid19 our interviews with the 23 yazidi individuals, 14 of whom were single mothers, some with multiple disabled children, about how the pandemic affected their resettlement, reveal specific gendered economic and social impacts that feature differentially among men and women. one of the refrains we heard from a majority of our yazidi women participants was, “we are back to square one.” what they meant is that since they arrived in canada in 2017, they had made some gains in their english language skills and some younger single women had found jobs in fish and meatpacking industries, jobs considered essential during the pandemic. however, over the first phase of the pandemic lockdown, many of the women who were previously working either lost their jobs or quit because they feared getting infected. the three-month lockdown also had a negative impact on their english levels because a majority of the yazidis participants said that they were not able to attend english language classes provided by the lra even after it went online given the carework responsibilities many had toward their children. gulroz, 32, a mother of three young children, the primary caregiver for her disabled sister, and the head of her household, explained her situation as follows: i had found this job in an ngo cooking there and i was also learning english fast because i was meeting people who don’t speak kurmanji and only speak english. but i have now been home for three months and i quit my job because i am afraid of giving the virus to my sister and now i can barely speak any english also. it’s like i am back to square one. it’s like i am in my first month in canada. it took me almost three years to make all the progress and now i lost it again. it makes me very scared for my family’s future. how will this work? gulroz talks about the difficult decision she had to take due to the pandemic and how that jeopardized her family’s economic future, because she had to quit her job and also lost much of her english skills. similar economic insecurities were found among many of the other yazidi women we talked with. strikingly, none of the men we spoke with discussed these insecurities or fears about their economic futures, even though two of the men had lost their jobs in the meatpacking industry. instead, they were concerned with the isolation they were facing and about their children’s pallavi banerjee, soulit chacko & souzan korsha studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 44 futures. they did not talk about economic insecurity. for instance, binav, a father of two whose sister lived with his family, says, i did lose my job, but we are getting government money and the lra people gave us money and bought us food and if we need anything, we ask them. i am sure i will find something after the pandemic is over. the only problem is i can’t meet my yazidi friends. when we asked binav if he was worried about losing his english skills, he added, “i anyway did not have time to go the english classes and now we are on alberta works so we don’t have to take the english classes, so who cares.” binav and the other men seemed calmer talking about their economic and language losses compared to the yazidi women. we think this was because the women shouldered the responsibility of resettlement as silent partners of the lra by taking on caregiving and breadwinning roles for their families. their care and breadwinning work was an active part of the resettlement trajectory, as it filled gaps in the resettlement process that the government or lra could not fill (saheb javaher, 2020). the men did not take on resettlement-oriented care work responsibilities. the use of gendered labour to fill the care gap is symptomatic of a neoliberal state (banerjee, 2019; guevarra, 2011). additionally, given that the yazidi family formations in canada did not align with the canadian nuclear family structure, the women in these families were forced into gendered labour. they experienced yazidi gendered cultural expectations while also being the breadwinner of the family due to their situations, but also because that was expected of them as part of their integration process. the yazidi women we interviewed were also vocal about what they needed from the lra and were clear on the support they were getting from the government and the lra, as well as the support they were not receiving but deserved. for instance, rahat, a 25-year-old yazidi woman told us: the lra people brought us groceries a few times and arranged for my mother’s medical appointments but that is not enough, they should help us with money because we don’t have enough money to buy food and or other essentials. how are we to live? another mother, samah, told us that she had asked the lra for a laptop so that both her children can have a laptop (at the time of the interview only one of her children was given a tablet from school for online classes). she says: they bring us here and then treat us like children. they tell us you need this, and you need that but do not listen to what we need. i never went to school, but i have the brains to know that if my two children are in school, they need two laptops for online classes. the government allotted us only one – that is why i say that they think we are children and won’t question about anything and just listen to them and be grateful just because we are refugees. covid-19 pandemic & yazidi refugee families in canada studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 45 samah’s frustration about not receiving laptops for each of her children is more than just a complaint about poor access to appropriate educational resources for her children. she unequivocally articulates how the state makes her feel like a child, alluding to the paternalism that fre assigns to the state’s treatment of refugees. she also talks about gratefulness as a construct imposed on them. the way samah speaks and asks for what her family and children need is agentic and brave, which is unsurprising given the upheavals she overcame before coming to canada. her strong expression of dissent not only makes her an advocate for her family but also for her community. mothers like samah became champions for their communities and families, subverting the statist definitions of who a refugee woman is. these examples show that refugee women often use their everyday, domestic life to make crucial political interventions even during the pandemic. the rhetoric of personal responsibility that is often associated with refugee resettlement (dykstra-devette, 2018) haunted the yazidi participants during the pandemic in gendered ways. jamilah, a single mother of five children with disabilities tearfully relayed that she feels there is an expectation that she will manage her family life on her own, but she does not know how especially during the pandemic. jamilah said: i never depended on anyone to take care of children – being a mother is not that hard. but it is hard in this country. and it is hard during covid-19. i hate it but i have to ask for help for everything that is outside of the house. with no english and no one to take care of the kids, when i am doing errands outside – like going to grocery, taking the kids to the doctors, going to the bank. before the pandemic, i was managing because there were more people to help with interpretation but now it is harder. who likes to beg for help all the time? it is tiring. and when i call agencies, i keep hearing, ‘you need to be independent.’ i say to them give me an independent medicine along with the vaccine and i will never call you to ask anything. if i could be independent, no one would be happier. i want to tell them, ‘let’s see you becoming independent in a completely different country in two years.’ it’s easy to say it to another person. most of the women spoke about how the rhetoric of independence and personal responsibility is oppressive and insensitive. they also talked about how the pandemic has made the personal responsibility rhetoric more exasperating. the few men we interviewed processed this rhetoric with what we call masculine nonchalance. most said, “we just ignore them when they say be independent,” and some said, “we do what we can, what else can we do?” adil, a husband and father says: they say you need to take responsibility. i say we are. i make sure that my family and my people, we wear masks and take precaution – so many here don’t do that. we can’t do what we can’t do – so i don’t even bother thinking about it. pallavi banerjee, soulit chacko & souzan korsha studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 46 this masculine nonchalance is possible because most men in these families are exempt from caregiving responsibilities and none of the men we interviewed were primary caregivers of their family. we did not have enough men in the sample to make any broad claims, yet it is noteworthy that the same rhetoric was processed differently by men and women in the context of the pandemic, depending on their role in their families. it is also important to note points of convergence. the neoliberal rhetoric of personal responsibility was completely untenable for the yazidis to even entertain during the pandemic given the constraints they were encountering. and more importantly, even without having the academic language of paternalism or neoliberalism, the narratives of their experiences with the resettlement system made it amply clear how these constructs profoundly affected yazidis in their everyday lives. the canadian government provided support for the yazidi families during the pandemic, but the emphasis on the rhetoric of integration and personal responsibilities, which is predicated on a neoliberalized resettlement plan (that after a year, refugees would not need government support), put additional pressure on the yazidi women. they felt they had to not only care for their families’ well-being but also worry about their economic futures given the setback. all along, the men shunned this worry and often put it on the women. gender, therefore, intersected with refugee status, as well as neoliberal and paternalistic ideologies of the state, to produce differential social and economic outcomes for yazidi women and men during the pandemic. “it's like the first day of landing here”: gendered affective impact of covid-19 the lockdown also had a detrimental impact on the emotional life and affective expressions in the yazidi families, and the way these concerns were expressed was predicated on how mental health was constructed within the resettlement program. the yazidi women talked with us at length about how the lockdown was triggering them by taking them back to the days when they were captured by isis and locked-up for weeks and months by their captors. peri, in conveying this says: it’s like i am back in that little room where the monster who took me kept me, locked in chains. sometimes i can’t breathe. all the progress i made in my head to feel better is gone now. i feel like it’s the first day of landing here when i kept having visions of my captivity. almost all yazidi women we spoke with expressed similar concerns. they felt the intense loss of their loved ones to the genocide, and were impatiently covid-19 pandemic & yazidi refugee families in canada studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 47 waiting to reunify with family members still in iraq, who had been hoping to join them since before the pandemic. when asked how they coped with these feelings, they said that “they called their lra counsellor and received sporadic mental health support through the lra.” however, the lra staff interviewed by the first author were quite concerned about the mental health of the yazidi women. one of the staff said, “we don’t know how much damage this is doing to them and if we will be able to reverse it. it’s really like being back to zero with them in terms of mental health.” the situation worsened as yazidi mass graves were found in iraq, and bodies of missing yazidis were being exhumed during april and may of 2020. this incident sent many of the yazidi women and men over the edge. they pleaded with the lra staff to make arrangements for them to go back to iraq, identify the remains of their loved ones and pay homage. this request was denied due to concerns about health, safety and travel restrictions, which soured the relationship yazidis had with the lra. for the yazidis we interviewed, lra became the face of the restriction. they saw the denials by the lra as callous and lacking compassion, which caused severe anxiety among both the participants and the lra staff. the mental health impact of covid was a serious issue for the yazidi women. notably many of the women had rejected the mental health services provided by the lra when they first arrived, because they did not see any value in those services. but during covid, the yazidi women themselves reached out to lra staff asking for mental health support. we are not sure if this was a positive step forward for the yazidi women, but it did move them closer to canada’s stated integration goals of making resettlement services such as mental health resources accessible to newcomers. southern moral imaginary: healing through land the affective impact of covid-19 on yazidis has been quite severe, but one thing that helped them was their participation in an urban farming project set up by the lra, named land of dreams. this urban farming project brought various communities, including indigenous groups, immigrants and refugees, together in one initiative, and became a place for healing and forming community through sharing food and social connections. however, in the yazidi community, only the yazidi women participated in this land-based project. many women told us that they feel healed and happy when they work on the land. however, this is ongoing research and the findings are still preliminary. six women of whom four are single mothers with multiple children have a plot of land they share. when asked what made them go to the farm during the pandemic, one of the women said: pallavi banerjee, soulit chacko & souzan korsha studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 48 we were feeling like prisoners at home during the pandemic. and even though it is hard for us to get to the farm because it’s so far, we still wanted to… i go there to forget my past and also to fill in my time as it is really boring, we have nothing important to do throughout the day. i also like to go there because we came from a small village where we used to wake up very early in the morning, go to the farm, plant our vegetables, water them, and feed our animals. it was a very beautiful and simple life and i liked it so much. when i go land of dreams, i remember those days and feel like i still am living in those moments and nothing bad happened to us. in this quotation, we see the unfurling of fre and a southern moral imaginary in nuanced ways. as espiritu (2014) astutely articulates, the “act of forging a past together across time and space constitutes a feminist refugee practice of ‘critical juxtaposing’” (p. 21). here, the yazidi women are offering two key acts of subversion, which become visible when interpreted through an fre lens. first, they are dismantling their trauma-ridden past by agentially remembering, as well as interlacing parts of their past into the present. they extended canada into the home they left behind, which was intrinsically tied to their connection with the land. second, while the lra created this space, the women “owned” it by creatively connecting the past with their present, to subvert the trauma of the pandemic that was taking them back to a past which displaced them. this intentional amassing of disparate memories and stories is an act of subversion embedded in a southern imaginary that yazidi women performed to navigate multiple structural barriers including the pandemic. while the study of the urban farming community is a more recent project, we can surmise through the preliminary analysis that this is perhaps the most non-neoliberal, decolonial initiative built, perhaps inadvertently, in a southern imagination in alignment within a moral-framework that does not bullishly push refugee integration, but attempts to build intentional spaces fostering a sense of intrinsic and not imposed belongingness. conclusion in this paper we deploy a feminist refugee epistemological framework to make two key arguments: (1) the underlying colonial and paternalistic ideologies embedded in the canadian statist institutions toward refugees became more visible during the pandemic, as shown through the case of the yazidis; (2) in terms of impacts of covid-19, the yazidi refugee women bore the brunt of the social, economic and affective outcomes given that women often take on the invisible work of caring for their families and communities, which translates to filling the resettlement gaps left by institutions and governments making resettlement a neoliberal project (chacko, 2020; saheb javaher, 2020). covid-19 pandemic & yazidi refugee families in canada studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 33-53, 2022 49 our study is limited by having to conduct interviews over zoom during the pandemic, and by the small number of participants we were able to recruit. nevertheless, our findings suggest that if we are to dismantle the structures that have created inequitable outcomes for refugees like the yazidis during the pandemic, the state and its ancillaries should stop treating refugees like victims. instead, they should meet them at their concerns, co-design a resettlement agenda with them, recognizing their agency in the resettlement process, and making them partners in the fight against the material and emotional impact of the pandemic. other initiatives like the urban farming project enable refugee women to own their subjectivities through resettlement programming threaded with southern moral imaginary. such projects align with yazidi women’s values and skills, especially during the pandemic, helping create decolonial, solidarity-based and agentic futures for refugee women beyond the pandemic. fundamentally reorienting our lens toward refugee resettlement might pre-empt our societies from committing the same injustices in the future that were committed during this current pandemic. acknowledgements this research was funded by the university of calgary, university research grants committee, seed grant (2017-2018) and the insight development grant (2018-2021) by social science and humanities research council of canada. we also would like to thank the participants in our research for entrusting us with their stories, acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and recognise the wonderful editors of this special issue for shepherding our paper in the most constructive ways. references adamson, f. b., & tsourapas, g. 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(2019). yazidi resettlement in canada – final report 2018. university of manitoba. https://mansomanitoba.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2019/03/yazidi-final-feb14.pdf brunner final correspondence address: lisa ruth brunner, department of educational studies, university of british columbia, vancouver, bc, v6t 1z2; email: lisa.brunner@ubc.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 towards a more just canadian educationmigration system: international student mobility in crisis lisa ruth brunner university of british columbia, canada abstract education-migration, or the multi-step recruitment and retention of international students as immigrants, is an increasingly important component of both higher education and so-called highly-skilled migration. this is particularly true in canada, a country portrayed as a model for highly-skilled migration and supportive of international student mobility. however, education-migration remains underanalyzed from a social justice perspective. using a mobility justice framework, this paper considers covid-19’s impact on canada’s education-migration system at four scales: individuals, education institutions, state immigration regimes, and planetary geoecologies. it identifies ethical tensions inherent to canada’s education-migration from a systems-level and suggests that a multi-scalar approach to social justice can both usefully complexify discussions and introduce unsettling paradoxes. it also stresses that the covid-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to reimagine rather than return. keywords internationalization; international students; higher education; mobility justice; skilled migration; international student mobility when announcing canada’s 2021-2023 immigration levels plan, immigration, refugees and citizenship canada (ircc) minister marco mendicino described parts of canada as “starved for people” (cpac, 2020, 21:53). referring to immigrants as something for a state to consume was both disturbing (in its dehumanization) and fitting (in its extension of canada’s capitalist settler-colonial project) (chatterjee, 2019). for a country in which immigration policy is population policy (ley & hiebert, 2001), the covid19 pandemic’s reduction of international human mobility had major repercussions. in just one year, canada’s population growth swung from a record high to a record low (statscan, 2020f). economic recovery, the government signaled, depended on immigration recovery (ircc, 2020a). towards a more just canadian education-migration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 79 but to claim canada hungered for people was not precise enough. it was canada’s “domestic immigration pool” that would be a focus, mendicino went on, highlighting international students as “a very attractive pool… to look very closely at” (hagan & bolongaro, 2020, para. 12). he offered a “simple” message for international students: “we don’t just want you to study here, we want you to stay here” (ircc, 2021a, para. 6). viewing international students as an immigrant source is just one element of what has become a distinct education-migration, or “edugration,” filtering system: those who (1) gain admission to, and graduate from, a canadian higher education (he) institution may (2) compete in the canadian labour market for a limited time, during which those who gain sufficient work experience may (3) remain in canada permanently (brunner, in press). in contrast to the united nations’ (2006) supposed triple win – where migration simultaneously benefits migrants, countries of origin, and destination countries – education-migration is painted as a different triple win: (1) students gain a valuable education and desirable citizenship; (2) he gains revenue, labour, and diversity; and (3) canada gains human capital, tax revenue, population growth, and soft power. like much in immigration and he today, individual and nationalist economic utility are the system’s driving forces (mccartney, 2020). this problematic framing ignores the system’s larger replications of privilege and power, invisiblizing externalized losses (such as brain drain) and problematic enablements (such as the dominance of a hierarchical global imaginary rooted in western supremacy which dictates the desirability of canadian education) (stein & andreotti, 2016). in any large-scale disruption, patterns of privilege and power persist, “but the narratives that justify them seem increasingly implausible” (apostolidis & mcbride, 2020, p. s-82). some see recent disruptions such as covid-19 and the climate crisis as opportunities to finally reimagine a more sustainable, reciprocal model of both international education (el masri & sabzalieva, 2020; stein, 2019b; yang, 2020) and international migration (bender & arrocha, 2017; sharma, 2020). in considering the ethics of canada’s education-migration system at this critical junction, this paper makes two contributions. first, it details canadian education-migration policies before, during, and potentially after the covid19 pandemic. second, taking a mobility justice approach, it explores their implications at multiple scales. constrained by the space of a single paper, the latter offers merely a taste of deeper conversations to be had. however, in attending to overlapping systemic vulnerabilities, it recognizes that mobility injustices occur not only after a migrant enters a country, but are, in fact, “the process through which unequal spatial conditions and differential subjects are made” (sheller, 2019, p. 26). in an effort to more fully grapple with the system’s complexities, it includes, yet also goes beyond, injustices faced by international students themselves. lisa ruth brunner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 80 i begin by summarizing mobility justice and showing how its multi-scalar faming helps situate education-migration’s ethical issues. i then describe canada’s education-migration system specifically and contribute to its needed contextualization (riaño et al., 2018) by providing a pre-covid-19 snapshot, followed by an outline of key covid-19 policy responses. i outline examples of ethical issues revealed at each scale and conclude by discussing why this approach might complexify our collective inquiry around the ethics of education-migration in today’s uncertain times. mobility justice mobility justice was only recently developed as a framework (e.g., sheller, 2011, 2018, 2019) and is used in disparate ways (cook & butz, 2019). the term emerged from the mobilities paradigm, which critiqued the moral and ideological privileging of “sedentarist” perspectives – i.e., those which uphold prevailing “understandings of ‘society’, ‘social structures’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘governance’ in which static social relations are ostensibly produced, governed and bounded by the nation-state” (cook & butz, 2019, p. 10; sheller & urry, 2006; urry, 2007). instead, mobility was seen as foundational to social relations, necessitating a focus on how power is organized (at various scales) around the governance of mobility (in various forms) – not just movement but also immobility, stillness, and stuckness (cresswell, 2011, 2012). because modernity has increased and restricted mobility in uneven ways, concepts such as the kinetic elite/underclass (cresswell, 2006) and the potential capacity of mobility (described as motility) help us understand mobility capital (kaufmann et al., 2004) as both an outcome of, and mechanism of reproducing, systemic inequalities (benz, 2019). mobility justice builds on this paradigm with a mobility-focused take on social justice theory. following contemporary activist movements, it seeks a common framework to link social justice struggles (sheller, 2019). such struggles range from embodied, micro-level differential (im)mobilities (e.g., racialized and gendered spatial relations) to macro-level patterns of global (im)mobilities (e.g., decolonialism and climate justice). this is a tall order, requiring a practice which itself is mobile as it jumps across scales and ways of thinking about justice; indeed, its quest for “one common framework” (sheller, 2019, p. 33) risks grand theorizing. however, in compliment to more fine-grained analyses, it offers a systems-levels approach while also showing how justice itself “is a process of emergent relationships” based on the “interplay of diverse (im)mobilities” (sheller, 2018, p. 20). a key feature of mobility justice is its intersectional, multi-scalar approach. scale’s full theoretical history is beyond the scope of this paper; briefly, as a socially-constructed concept (marston, 2000), scale does risk oversimplification, overgeneralization, arbitrary delineation, and legitimizing towards a more just canadian education-migration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 81 the exclusion of actors and ideas (glick schiller & çaglar, 2011; van lieshout et al., 2011). the conventional reliance on micro, meso, and macro levels also has limitations. however, scales are ideally not used as “fixed nested sociospatial units of territory or governance,” but rather dynamic and relative “repositionings of territorially based forms of organization” operating in the context of global power hierarchies (glick schiller & çaglar, 2011, p. 72). the intention is not to separate scales (e.g., the local from the global), but to highlight their mutual constitution (glick schiller & çaglar, 2011) and allow for examinations of uneven applications of power (lan, 2015). multi-scalar analysis of international mobility grew in the past 20 years as researchers acknowledged the limitations of macro-level, quantitative, and methodologically-nationalistic approaches (xiang, 2013; glick schiller, 2015; williamson, 2015). a specifically intersectional multi-scalar lens of mobility (e.g., tungohan, 2020) highlights the simultaneous interactions of multiple vectors of differentiation (e.g., gender, race, and class) across scales (mahler et al., 2015). because exclusionary and inclusionary structures vary from state to state, people may, for example, “be relatively privileged – and actively seek privilege – in one country to balance the marginalisation in another” (purkayastha, 2010, p. 40). intersectional multi-scalar approaches tease out the implications of these concurrent, interlocking systems of power. while mobility justice is just one possible approach for analyzing education-migration, it is useful for two reasons. first, it helps rescale questions of ethics when analyzing (im)migration policies and laws. mobilities-focused approaches have already helped focus on “the movement involved in migration, rather than privileging the sending and receiving localities and their perspectives” (king & raghuram, 2013, p. 129). however, (im)migration policy and law are still typically viewed “as a relatively insulated and domestic-centered arena” (shachar, 2006, p. 153). states are undoubtedly key players in governing international student mobility regimes (brooks & waters, 2011), but their policies and laws do not govern only those within their borders. positing that society as a fixed territory bound by the nation-state no longer exists (urry, 2000), mobility justice pushes social justice theory “into the ‘post-societal’ present” – a necessary move for it to “remain theoretically, empirically and politically relevant” (cook & butz, 2019, p. 9). second, issues of highly uneven (im)mobility came to light at every scale of the covid-19 pandemic, from cellular virus transmission to global vaccine distribution. the pandemic reinforced existing disparities in who is denied or required to physically work (e.g., dobusch & kreissl, 2020) and who or what is permitted to travel (sheller, 2020b), with lockdowns and border restrictions applied strategically and unevenly (sheller, 2020a). it also brought major changes through mass demobilizations (e.g., workplaces, schools, airplanes) and new or renewed mobilizations (e.g., repatriations, telemedicine, online learning) (sheller, 2020a). mobility justice’s approach is lisa ruth brunner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 82 well-suited to draw out the significance of covid-19’s impact on migration systems. in this paper i loosely adopt sheller’s (2018) use of four scales: individuals, education institutions, state immigration regimes, and planetary geoecologies. i offer this organizational rubric as just one initial, partial effort, remembering that scales are “always entangled, intersectional, performative, and constantly being remade” (sheller, 2018, p. 44). different or additional scales other than the four proposed could be useful for future work (e.g. the land). what i seek to highlight here is (1) the need to identify the scale at which a social justice claim is made (to interrogate its inevitable limitations), and (2) that by viewing multiple scales together – as multi-scalar approaches, such as mobility justice, urge us to do – their collective contradictions become clearer. this process can both interrupt the desire for universality and enable a layered way of holding paradoxes in view, making “what is invisible noticeably absent” (ahenakew, 2016, p. 333). in the next section, i offer a review of the education-migration literature structured by these four scales, to situate this paper, before turning to the canadian context specifically. the ethics of education-migration education-migration is an example of the talent for citizenship exchange spurred by the global race for so-called highly-skilled, or high-wage, migrants. in this exchange, knowledge and work are exchanged for the acquisition of citizenship in “a stable, democratic, affluent polity” (shachar, 2006, pp. 158-159; geddie, 2014). in this way, international student mobility has become a form of social mobility (kim & kwak, 2019; maldonadomaldonado, 2014) and commodity, influencing not only individual he enrolment decisions but he’s structure itself (baas, 2019). he institutions and immigrant-dependent countries alike now function as recruiters (rather than gatekeepers) (shachar, 2006) facilitated by a global education-migration industry (beech, 2018). as a result, education-migration encompasses several areas, including international student/education mobility, the internationalization of he, temporary foreign worker mobility, migrant “integration,” settler-colonialism, and the global knowledge economy. this involves a complex array of entangled ethical issues. imagining a just education-migration system is additionally challenging due to its basis on two meritocratic forms of institutionalized discrimination. just as baglay (2017) asked, “can immigration law, whose key function is to screen, differentiate, select, and exclude, meaningfully incorporate social justice values?” (p. 210), we may ask a similar question of he (stein, 2019a). selective he institutions are by definition exclusionary, and the global expansion of he perpetuates, if not exacerbates, societal stratifications (marginson, 2016). he may contribute to a common good, but as an towards a more just canadian education-migration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 83 increasingly globalized commodified good (locatelli, 2019), its admissions process bears some conceptual resemblance to immigrant selection (brunner, 2017). despite “requir[ing] serious reflection” (geddie, 2014, p. 245; kim & kwak, 2019), considerations of education-migration’s unique, systems-level ethical implications remain limited. scattered across multiple disciplines, most relevant critiques focus on only one step in the process (e.g., the study period) and one scale (e.g., that of international students). table 1 maps some key critiques of education-migration (at any step) made with academic anglophone global north literature. scale social justice issues individuals • racism, othering, violence, and exclusion • conflicting desirability discourses • deficit and lack of agency discourses • differential tuition • inadequate support services • legal temporality and limited rights • difficulty obtaining and maintaining (im)migration status (both temporary and permanent) educational institutions • academic/linguistic imperialism • neoliberalism • fragmented educational quality • institutions as immigration actors state immigration regimes • (settler) colonialism, in relation to (im)migration • meritocratic nationalism • brain waste/overeducation planetary geoecologies • brain drain/abuse and inequitable flows between global north and global south • global meritocracy and academic mobility as reproduction of privilege • unsustainability table 1. social justice issues related to education-migration, by scale. the scale of individuals is the predominant scale within educationmigration research. this literature focuses on experiences of international students (and in some cases, recent graduates working as temporary foreign lisa ruth brunner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 84 workers, referred to as tfws).1 their legal status and relative voluntariness of movement generally affords them a relatively privileged position compared to, say, undocumented workers or asylum seekers (walia, 2013), although such categories occasionally overlap. still, this scale highlights uneven and conditional inclusion, both material and at the level of discourse. justice is generally positioned as being for individuals (i.e., international students, through inclusion in more robust institutions and state supports, or more facilitative immigration policies). the scales of educational institutions and state immigration regimes have commonalities; the literature positions them as both (1) sites of control and governance, while also (2) vulnerable in their systemic external dependency (e.g., on population/enrolment growth, capital, and labour). in the case of he institutions, justice is often positioned as being for the public (i.e., those who benefit from education as public good), although the public is defined in different ways (e.g., sometimes bound by a state, sometimes globally). in the case of state immigration regimes, justice is sometimes positioned as being for citizens (or permanent residents) bound within the state; in other cases (such as those found in critiques of state role in settler-colonialism), justice is for indigenous peoples and nations. proposed responses at both scales include more robust (or more fairly distributed) supports at the level of the state or nation. at the scale of planetary geoecologies, the focus shifts to the experience of all humans, and, occasionally, non/more-than-humans. here, systematic unsustainability is positioned as a vulnerability faced by everyone and everything (albeit unevenly), with justice sought for all humans globally (and sometimes non/more-than-humans). generally, more robust or more fairly distributed supports at a global level are offered as responses. as table 1 shows, there are many social justice issues to be addressed within education-migration, some of which are contradictory or incompatible. for the remainder of the paper, i use the canadian education-migration crisis point of covid-19 as an illustration. for context, i first provide a description of canadian education-migration just before covid-19 was detected in canada in 2020. education-migration in pre-covid-19 canada by imploring international students to stay, minister mendicino offered an explicit public acknowledgement that canadian international student policy had become “synonymous with immigration policy” (trilokekar & el masri, 2019, p. 47). for decades, ircc viewed the two arenas separately, refusing the entry of would-be international students who expressed dual intent (i.e., a 1 ircc distinguishes between its temporary foreign worker program and international mobility program. in this paper i refer to workers in both categories as tfws. towards a more just canadian education-migration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 85 desire to remain in canada permanently after their studies). but over the past 20 years, canada gradually developed its own dual intent, coming to view post-secondary international students as a source of not only temporary workers (ircc, 2018), but also of highly desirable immigrants (brunner, 2017; tremblay, 2005; trilokekar & el masri, 2019; williams et al., 2015).2 by 2019, education-migration played a major role in both temporary and permanent migration flows. contemporary canadian immigration has long been viewed by the government as an essential tool for population and economic growth. despite a record-low fertility rate (statscan, 2020a), canada’s 2018/2019 population growth rate was the highest in roughly 30 years, driven primarily by relatively high levels of immigration (statscan, 2019) which placed canada’s net migration rate among the highest globally (un desa, 2019). immigration was expected to account for 100% of workforce net growth in the near future (gac, 2019). in the eyes of the organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd, 2019), canada’s economic immigration system was “widely seen as a role model for successful migration management” (p. 13) in its ability to solve a so-called problem faced by immigrant-dependent countries: how to select the most desirable immigrants who will efficiently integrate into their labour markets. canada succeeded in two ways. first, the 2015 introduction of express entry promoted a more flexible, demand-driven approach, shifting from a backlogged first come, first served mandate to a nimbler, just-in-time selection process. by ranking applicants and then extending rolling invitations to those meeting an adjustable cut-off number, the government could, theoretically, fine-tune its selection criteria and respond to immediate labour market demands. second, canada followed global immigration trends (akbari & macdonald, 2014; boucher & cerna, 2014) by relying on a two-step approach in which permanent residents (prs) were selected not from abroad but from among tfws already in canada. through the introduction of provincial nominee programs (pnps) in 1998 and the federal canadian experience class (cec) in 2008, canada benefitted from more reliable evidence of labour market success based on actual participation in canada (hou et al., 2020; sweetman & warman, 2010). this was a supposed antidote to the known “brain waste” or “overeducation” among those immigrants (selected from abroad) unable to leverage their human capital in canada (crossman et al., 2020; hou et al., 2020; lo et al., 2019). these changes had a notable impact. the number of new two-step economic immigrants with canadian work experience rose dramatically (from eight percent in 2000 to 46% in 2018) as did the number of tfws in 2 that said, some study permit applications are still refused for dual intent (e.g. pisarevic v. canada [citizenship and immigration], 2019), especially those from the global south (tao & arib, 2020). lisa ruth brunner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 86 canada (roughly 60,000 in 2000 to 429,300 in 2018) (crossman et al., 2020). instead of selecting immigrants and supporting their integration, canada increasingly selected workers, affording the labour market more direct influence over who proceeded to the second step. some tfws such as seasonal agricultural workers were permanently temporary, while others, generally higher-skilled, were temporarily temporary – that is, on a pr pathway (rajkumar et al., 2012). regardless, a period of provisional admittance and conditional inclusion had become a prominent feature of canadian immigration. concurrently, another temporary resident selection process with direct impact on the pool of tfws expanded dramatically: the recruitment of international students (oecd, 2019). by 2019, canada ranked among the highest in the world both in its proportion and total number of international students (iie, 2019; unesco uis, 2022). canadian public postsecondary enrolment’s modest 2018/19 rise (1.8%) was driven entirely by international students, whose enrolment increased while domestic enrolment fell; the proportion of international students rose from 6.4% to 16.2% in a decade (statscan, 2020b). international students have been considered economically important since the 1980s (mccartney, 2020). since then, the canadian economy grew dependent on their tens of billions of dollars in annual expenditures, which, by 2019, had a greater impact “than exports of auto parts, lumber or aircraft” (gac, 2019, p. 2). in canada, public he is funded through a combination of low to medium public expenditures and relatively high tuition fees in comparison to other oecd countries, and it responded to budget shortfalls and enforced domestic tuition caps with hikes in largely unregulated international student fees (pechar & andres, 2011; williams et al., 2015). by 2019, international undergraduate tuition was roughly five times the average domestic university tuition rate, with approximately 40% of all tuition fees in canada paid by international students (statscan, 2020e). international students are a heterogeneous category (king & raghuram, 2013; o'connor, 2018), and not all are recruited for, or pay, tuition. in general, however, international student policies are uniquely located “at the confluence of migration policies and policies affecting the services industry, but where the services are sold to the migrant rather than provided by them” (riaño et al., 2018, p. 291). due in part to constant public reminders of their economic importance (e.g., ircc, 2021a) and a neoliberal climate positioning he as a commodity, they are often read as unproblematic, transient consumers (contributing to the economy) as opposed to tfws (competing in the economy). although international students are indeed framed by racialized tropes in which they are sometimes positioned as competitors (stein & andreotti, 2016), they remain relatively acceptable to the public in comparison to other migrant categories (o'connor, 2018). in reality, their work authorization – whether during or after studies – has also been permitted, and used as a recruitment tool, since the 1980s (ircc, towards a more just canadian education-migration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 87 2018). the typical international student transition entails three steps as part of a unique three-step immigration process (brunner, in press): (1) as a study permit holder, which allows part-time work, (2) as a post-graduation work permit (pgwp) holder, and (3) if certain criteria are met (e.g., one year of skilled canadian work experience), as a pr (see figure 1). figure 1. canadian three-step education-migration process. designed to “(1) attract international students to canada; (2) increase [their] participation in the canadian labour market; and (3) provide [them] with a pathway to [pr]” (cic, 2015, p. 5), the government considers the pgwp “generous” (cic, 2015, p. 6; ircc, 2018), as it is among the longest and least restricted of its type in the world (oecd, 2019). the pgwp is thus a selling point over competitor countries, leading canada to be described as among the most welcoming so-called host countries for international students (e.g., gopal, 2016; lo et al., 2019). while not directly responsible, there is a correlation between the 2008 expansion of canada’s pgwp program and increasing international student numbers (cic, 2015). in combination, international students’ economic importance, relatively benign political position, existing work pathways, and the fact that most are “young, have canadian educational qualifications and in-demand labour skills, and are proficient in one of [canada’s] official languages” led them to be seen as “ideal” immigrant candidates (gac, 2019, introduction), despite ongoing questions regarding their actual labour market outcomes (cic, 2015; hou & lu, 2017; ircc, 2019). largely self-funded, international students were also cost-effective immigrants for the government; their human capital was pre-vetted by academic application systems, and their subsequently limited integration needs (trilokekar & el masri, 2019, p. 45; hawthorne, 2012; oecd, 2019) were largely provided by education institutions. with immigration positioned (whether implicitly or explicitly) as a possibility, student and immigrant recruitment merged. 1: student •  study permit issued for duration of incanada portion of academic program •  authorized to work part-time off-campus and full-time oncampus •  time studying in canada counts towards pgwp length calculation •  work does not count towards pr 2: temporary foreign worker (tfw) •  post-graduation work permit issued for 8 months to 3 years, depending on program length and time in canada •  authorized to work in any job, anywhere in canada •  'skilled' work counts towards pr 3: permanent resident (pr) •  must meet certain (e.g. residency) conditions unless canadian citizenship is aquired •  can count portion of time as an international student towards citizenship lisa ruth brunner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 88 however, canada struggled to meet international student retention goals. among those who arrived in the 1990s and early 2000s, roughly a quarter transitioned within 10 years (lu & hou, 2015), and more recent numbers have been lower than anticipated (tao & arib, 2020). not all international students aspire to immigrate, but informal polling shows widespread intentions to immigrate (canadian bureau for international education, 2018; esses et al., 2018), leaving significant capacity for systemic growth from a government perspective. it is here, having described a system viewed as integral to the future of canada, that i shift to covid-19. key education-migration related covid-19 policy responses on march 12, 2020, ircc tabled its 2020-2022 immigration levels plan; four days later, canada’s unprecedented covid-19 related travel restrictions reduced foreign entry to canada to a trickle as education institutions scrambled to transition to virtual learning. these changes led to three key impacts on canadian education-migration: (1) a (partially) lost cohort of international students physically present in canada, (2) the subsequent loosening of pgwp eligibility requirements, and (3) indications of a heavier future reliance on international students as immigrants. lost cohort: once instruction was fully virtual, many enrolled international students left canada. ircc quickly included study permit holders on their list of foreign nationals permitted to enter canada – if their travel was essential. determining the essential threshold was left to individual officers upon students’ arrival; for example, if courses were entirely online, travel generally did not qualify. many remained abroad. the travel restrictions had a bigger impact on incoming students. the forum of ministers responsible for immigration “reaffirmed the importance of newcomers, particularly international students, in keeping the economy and canada’s communities moving forward” in july 2020 (ircc, 2020b, para. 4). yet it was not until october 2020, after the start of the academic term, that ircc amended its travel restrictions to allow new incoming international students to enter canada. even then, service interruptions and application difficulties continued to present obstacles (cyr & landry, 2020; hiebert, 2020). combined with a reluctance to pay high tuition fees for online education, some students deferred. roughly half of those expected arrived by the fall of 2020 (hiebert, 2020). loosened pgwp eligibility: the pgwp is a high-stakes document for students wishing to immigrate; it can be held only once in a lifetime and is often the culmination of significant financial and educational investment. to be eligible, students must continuously maintain full-time student status in canada, of which distance learning may compose up to 50%. the permit towards a more just canadian education-migration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 89 length is determined by the length of the program. in essence, the factors in determining pgwp eligibility are the length of time spent physically in canada while maintaining continuous, full-time, and in-person studies. covid-19 disrupted all this: many students were physically outside canada, studying virtually, unable to maintain a full-time course load, and/or facing study interruptions. normally, this would render many ineligible for the pgwp, impacting not only international students’ long-term plans but also institutional recruitment and national immigration targets. in response, canada tweaked its pgwp policies multiple times: (1) students already in canada remained eligible for the pgwp even if they failed to meet the continuous, full-time, or in-person requirements due to covid-19, and (2) students outside canada remained eligible even if they failed to meet the inperson or physical presence in canada requirements (cyr & landry, 2020). later, in january 2021, ircc recognized that high unemployment prevented many pgwp-holders from meeting pr eligibility and announced that pgwpholders could apply for an additional 18-month open work permit. increased focus on international students as prs: overall, canada saw a dramatic decline in not just international students but all non-citizen/pr 2020 entries (statscan, 2020d), and the travel restrictions’ impact on canada’s population growth was “profound” (statscan, 2020c). the federal government subsequently announced relatively high immigration targets for the next three years to make up for 2020’s shortfall (ircc, 2020a). yet with travel restrictions still in place and applicants outside of canada facing processing delays, two-step immigration became the primary source of prs (statscan, 2020d). ircc’s pgwp quasi-extension indicated its hopes of retaining as many international students as possible. similarly, a historic express entry draw in february 2021 inviting 27,332 canadian experience class (cec) applicants to apply (close to six times the previous largest draw) at a comprehensive ranking system cut-off score of just 75 (less than half the previous record cut-off score) (ircc, 2021) indicated the government’s willingness to accept virtually any applicant meeting the minimum cec requirements. many were former international students. finally, in may 2021, the government opened 40,000 pr spots specifically for recent english-speaking graduates from canadian institutions; the quota was filled just a day later (ircc, 2021c). globally, canada’s covid-19 response was considered relatively supportive for international students (e.g., bilecen, 2020), and industry analysists predicted canada would be “the big winner” in future international student enrolments (ross, 2020, para. 13). yet these policy decisions also point to important questions of “who and what can move (or stay put), when, where, how, under what conditions, and with what meanings” – that is, questions of mobility justice (sheller, 2018, p. 11). in what follows, i return to the four previously mentioned scales (individuals, education institutions, state lisa ruth brunner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 90 immigration regimes, and planetary geoecologies) to highlight four new issues that arose due to covid-19. once again, i stress that these scales are non-exhaustive, and this paper only gestures towards the full complexities; i outline them here as an articulation of what future research may more deeply explore. individuals: those who are absent or unseeable there is no doubt that individual international students and recent graduates were heavily impacted by covid-19. initial global research and media accounts pointed to the exacerbation of existing vulnerabilities, including deteriorated mental health, threats of (or actualized) status loss, fears of academic interruption, lack of adequate accommodation and food, job loss and financial concerns, loneliness, and concerns about family wellbeing (bilecen, 2020; coulton, 2020; firang, 2020), while chinese and other asian students experienced particular social exclusion and racism (newbold, 2020; zhai & du, 2020). canada’s policies largely underscored the country’s paradoxical reliance on, yet conditional inclusion of, temporary residents in canada. allowing international students deemed essential to temporarily work more than 20 hours per week (ircc, 2020c, para. 1) signaled not only their importance to the labour market but also the expectation that they not rely on public support. there is some evidence that employed study permit holders were concentrated in the service sector; while this disproportionally exposed them to covid-19, international students were also more likely than temporary foreign workers and permanent residents to lose a job due to covid-19 (wes, 2020). although technically eligible for the emergency response benefit, its minimum earnings requirement rendered it elusive for many international students, and they were ineligible for the canada emergency student benefit and canada student service grant. pgwp holders faced additional covid-induced challenges as tfws, such as job loss and worker exploitation (crossman et al., 2020). a mobility justice approach, however, also reminds us of those who are absent from, or unseeable in, the education-migration literature. mobility capital (kaufmann et al, 2004) is an unevenly distributed resource. if we consider international students as kinetically elite in that they disproportionally benefit from education-migration – even as they experience injustice – then mobility justice also asks us to consider the kinetic underclass or motility poor. attending to this scale means noting the absence of wouldbe international students who were immobile due to increased study permit refusals (tao & arib, 2020) or decimated family savings; future would-be international students who face the likelihood of increased class stratification within he as a response to expected periods of austerity (bilecen, 2020); and other potential migrants who are rendered less desirable through the towards a more just canadian education-migration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 91 reinforcement of international students’ desirability (trilokekar & el masri, 2017). we may also consider precarious low-wage canadian workers whose skill development is neglected in favour of a reliance on tfws (crossman et al., 2020). this reliance may implicate pgwp-holders, whose median employment earnings are less than half those among recent canadian graduates; they have been identified by the government as a “large low-wage workforce,” (cic, 2015, p. 9) unprepared for “long-term success” (ircc, 2019, p. 5). finally, we might reflect on the implications of canada’s ongoing settler-colonialism for individual indigenous people. education institutions: tightening of he and immigration covid-19’s impacts on canadian he were highly uneven. the for-profit short-term language program sector took an immediate hit due to halted enrolment. while public universities and colleges, who receive just under a third of their revenue from tuition fees (statscan, 2020e), were able to retain some international enrolment, economic impacts varied based on institution type and region. overall, canadian he’s vulnerability in terms of its reliance on international student inflows had never been clearer (el masri & sabzalieva, 2020; esses et al., 2021). from a mobility perspective, this points to an even further tightening of he and immigration in three key ways. first, the importance of the pgwp as a recruitment tool became undeniable (e.g., keung, 2020). both he and politicians lobbied the government to ensure virtual learning would not impact pgwp eligibility; one member of parliament said pgwp flexibility would “continue to make northern institutions a viable option for international students,” implying that without the pgwp, international students would not consider such institutions (the daily press, 2020). when one such institution declared insolvency in 2021 after a string of complex financial and governing challenges, a prominent he consultant blamed the university for not recruiting more international students (buse, 2021). second, institutions positioned themselves as critical to immigration. he formally requested from parliament looser travel restrictions on international students and increased financial support to make up for their losses. of significance was their justification for these requests: universities canada (2020) highlighted the role of international graduates in “revitalizing regions… struggling with outmigration and population decline” (p. 4), colleges and institutes canada (2020) highlighted their importance in “meet[ing] immigration targets” (p. 3), and languages canada (n.d.) noted its role as “an essential part of the equation for meeting canada’s labour force and immigration goals” (para. 2). in this way, he’s role as a source of immigrants became justification for its funding. third, as admission letters paved an even clearer path towards pr, covid-19 intensified the role of institutions as immigrant selection actors. lisa ruth brunner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 92 we know the impacts of an employer-driven two-step canadian immigration process: it becomes driven by corporate interests (chatterjee, 2019), and top source countries skew anglophone (hiebert, 2019), reflecting not only employer concerns around language, but more significantly, racism and discrimination against foreign experience (e.g., bhuyan et al., 2017; lo et al., 2019; oreopoulos, 2011). this is not to say that immigration systems preceding the current two-step model were not also racist. however, as public education institutions emerge as more significant immigrant selection actors, their short-term interests will increasingly shape the long-term make-up of canada. he itself is undergoing marketization and fiscal pressure due to the pandemic’s economic recession. we have yet to fully see the impacts of a three-step immigration process driven increasingly by a neoliberal education system. this tightening of he and immigration raises larger questions around jurisdictional power. in canada, responsibility for he falls on the provinces, while immigration is controlled by a shared federal-provincial jurisdiction. however, the federal government is becoming more involved in he by way of international education (e.g., its 2014 and 2019 national strategies), and provinces and territories are intensifying their regional immigrant recruitment activities (e.g., the relatively recent growth of provincial nominee programs, many targeting international graduates). in the meantime, canada’s he’s funding model shifts more acutely from “publicly-financed” to “publiclyaided” (usher, 2020). although this paper lacks space to sufficiently discuss the changing landscape, a growing area of scholarship is recognizing its complexities (tamtik et al., 2020). state immigration regime: virtual versus physical tensions the government has long walked a difficult line with the pgwp: as mentioned, it is both a potential source of competition for low-wage work and a powerful recruitment tool for he. this has led to internal scrutiny of the pgwp and the international student program more generally to ensure international students are not using study permits “to gain full access to the canadian labour market” (regulations amending the irpr 2012, para. 12) and academic programs are not “visa mills” (para. 10). both are discourses of control, attempting to ensure migrants use education-migration only as the government intends (merrick, 2013). notably, these pre-covid-19 fears focused on virtual learning as an area of potential fraud (tao & arib, 2020), something covid-19 quickly changed. while online education was increasing in canadian he before covid-19 (johnson, 2019), covid-19 accelerated the sector’s interest. ontario invested $50 million in virtual learning (government of ontario, 2020), while some called for its use towards more ethical “international partnership models that enable canadian he to be delivered away from the traditional campus towards a more just canadian education-migration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 93 base” to reduce the reliance “on recruiting international students to canada” (el masri & sabzalieva, 2020, p. 326). however, study permits and their associated entitlements were predicated on students physically entering canada for in-person study. covid-19’s sudden push towards online education bifurcated mobility. for those international students stuck outside canada, some entitlements were barred; those scheduled as teaching or research assistants, for example, were unable to get social insurance numbers (and thus canadian work). yet tuition (despite drastic currency fluctuations), learning (despite major time zone differences), and motility (thanks to conditional study permit approvals and promises that distance learning would count towards a pgwp) continued to flow, although canadian educational credentials earned virtually during the pandemic do not appear to count towards points in express entry’s comprehensive ranking system. still, for the first time, international students could accumulate mobility capital before entering canada – that is, without physical international mobility. a lack of physical presence in canada was a loss to some (e.g., canadian communities who relied on international students as renters and consumers). yet it was a gain to others (e.g., students who preferred to remain outside canada yet still accumulate the capital afforded by international education and migration). some students avoided social injustices associated with canadian presence, such as racism or limited rights as a temporary resident. while border restrictions were surely felt as a mobility limitation for many, the allowances also meant a freedom to return or remain, speaking to supplementation of “the question of who can travel… by the question of who can stay at home” (ahmed et al., 2003, p. 7). ircc will soon have data on covid-19-era pgwp-holders. if the longterm integration data is favourable for canadian immigration objectives, the pgwp may shift to accommodate certain virtual programs, opening up new marketing opportunities for institutions. if not, virtual he programs, which are likely to increase regardless, may find the strength of canadian education tested if they are not connected to pgwp eligibility, especially at non-elite institutions. planetary geoecologies: denials of the past, present, and future as governments responded to covid-19, two dominant yet contradictory narratives were revealed: “‘we are all in it together’ and ‘close the borders’” (sharma, 2020, p. s-19). social distancing was enforced on a global scale through travel restrictions (sharma, 2020), with states like canada trying to mitigate risk and externalize harms to “sacrifice zones” outside their borders (sheller, 2020a), even while global financial systems and virtual technologies enabled the northward flow of economic benefits. lisa ruth brunner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 94 the idea that physical movement should stop in response to covid-19 threats – only now, after state sovereignty has been established – is itself “a postcolonial fantasy of domination” (sharma, 2020, p. s-26). at this scale, we see denials of the past, present and future on a global level. there is a failure to recognize, for example, that “there is no mobility without the history of colonialism” (kaplan, 2015, pp. 124-125); in other words, the movement of people across the globe today is intimately (though not exclusively) shaped by the colonial past and present in both direct and indirect ways. many education-migration patterns are fueled by colonial histories and disparities, such as the predominant (but shifting) global south to global north movements, or the fact that the lower an international student’s home country gdp, the more likely they will transition to pr status (lu & hou, 2015; prokopenko & hou, 2018). there is also a failure to recognize that canadian education-migration is bound up in an ongoing settler-colonial system in which “dreaming, even in inclusive and multicultural tones, of developing an ideal settled state implicitly supports the elimination of indigenous peoples from this place" (chatterjee, 2019, p. 24). viewing international students as ideal immigrants who benefit canada over others may ultimately be environmentally, economically, and emotionally unsustainable (tallbear, 2019). similarly, dreaming that this is the last pandemic, or that the state or he will survive indefinitely, or that climate change is a distant event, may be a denial of the future when seen from this scale. canada’s education-migration system is not only embedded in such denials but actively reproduces them to the extent that the ethics of its very continuation comes into question. the planetary geoecologies scale is where the interlocking structural forces behind education-migration (e.g., neoliberal capitalism, colonialism, meritocracy, imperialism) are most visible. it highlights frequently overlooked impacts, such as the way mobility contributes to environmental privilege and the effects of the climate crisis through both literal and figurative borders (park & pellow, 2019). but it is also at this scale where one most keenly – and perhaps painfully, overwhelmingly, or fearfully – feels the magnitude and pervasiveness of the system’s ethical complexities. it dares us to face more difficult questions. here, we do not ask how educationmigration fails students, or how he’s role has changed, or if a state’s selection criteria deliver on its promises – but whether such a system can be just to begin with. addressing the desire to return to “normal” as this paper seeks to illustrate, a mobility justice lens can help tease out paradoxes of not just international student mobility in times of crisis, but even theories of justice. partial views of the system’s injustices (e.g., focusing on implications only for international students) may foreclose towards a more just canadian education-migration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 95 impacts on others bound up in the same system. in this way we might see that modernity’s shine is possible only through the denial of its shadow (mignolo, 2000); that is, the aspects of modernity “which we often cherish as sacred grounds for our interpretations of social justice, paradoxically create the conditions of injustice we are trying to address” (andreotti, 2012, p. 19). even when strategically necessary, it is important to recognize the inherent trade-offs of limited social justice analyses to avoid, if possible, reproducing different harms in the process (stein, 2019b). here i have shown, in a limited way, how articulating justice at varying scales may complexify existing conversations. mobility justice helps us begin to conceptualize the problems, but like all frames it is limited. articulation is of course not a solution, and highlighting relationships between (differently) vulnerable groups can exacerbate divisions in its own way. sheller (2018) outlines normative “principles of mobility justice” (pp. 173-174) seeking “more collective, non-individualistic and commons-based understandings of mobility” (sheller, 2019, p. 29). from this perspective, we might try to reimagine international student mobility beyond individualistic social mobility; if we continue to deny our collective entanglement (stein et al., 2020), we are always limited by costs and benefits based on separability. yet within our current meritocratic systems bound by the state, moving beyond an individualistic lens is a challenging task. one response is to ask what we learn from reframing our attention “towards the practices, regulations, infrastructures, moorings, systems, discourses or regimes that allow for differential movements and forms of mobile and immobile existences among all kinds of people” (raithelhuber et al., 2018, p. 12; emphasis added), a process which, in the case of (im)migration, requires questioning the state as a distributor of entitlements. while sheller’s (2018) set of principles include “fairness and equity in determining the freedom of movement across borders” (p. 174), she stops short of questioning borders altogether. moving forward, education-migration may benefit from engagements with the ethics of states and borders more generally (carens, 2013; shachar, 2009; walia, 2013). another response is “resisting the temptation for certainty, totality, and instrumentalization in western reasoning by keeping our claims contingent, contextual, tentative, and incomplete” (ahenakew, 2016, p. 333) – that is, not deferring a solution, but rather humbly letting go of the fantasy that there can be an easy solution and interrogating the (colonial) desire for purity and innocence in many social justice claims. looking at justice from a multiscalar vantage point reminds us that all solutions are partial and bring problems of their own. we in he especially (stein, 2019c) need to reckon with the depth of our own complicity in education-migration injustices. an attentive awareness and visibilization of such paradoxes may help us stay with the trouble (haraway, 2016) while moving the conversation in different directions. lisa ruth brunner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 78-102, 2022 96 acknowledgements thanks to bill reimer, sharon stein, and vanessa andreotti for generative feedback on earlier versions of this paper; margaret walton-roberts and two anonymous reviewers for insightful suggestions; david butz for astute editing support; and the guest editors for bringing this special issue together. references ahenakew, c. 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(2020a, september 25). mobility justice, climate migration and the lessons of pandemic (im)mobilities [webinar]. ubc migration speaker series, vancouver, canada. https://youtu.be/pvx5jz41oao sheller, m. (2020b). reconstructing tourism in the caribbean: connecting pandemic recovery, climate resilience and sustainable tourism through mobility justice. journal of sustainable tourism, 29(9), 1436-1449. sheller, m., & urry, j. (2006). the new mobilities paradigm. environment and planning a: economy and space, 38(2), 207-226. statscan (statistics canada). (2019). canada posts the largest annual population increase in numbers. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190930/dq190930a-eng.htm statscan (statistics canada). (2020a). births, 2019. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/dailyquotidien/200929/dq200929e-eng.htm statscan (statistics canada). 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(2020). mental health care for international chinese students affected by the covid-19 outbreak. lancet psychiatry, 7(4), e22. https://doi.org/10.1016/s22150366(20)30089-4 rauchberg final correspondence address: jessica sage rauchberg, department of communication studies & media arts, mcmaster university, hamilton, on, l8s 4l8; email: jess.rauchberg@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 imagining a neuroqueer technoscience jessica sage rauchberg mcmaster university, canada abstract the rise of mobile communication applications and technologies presents promising therapeutic and accessibility-related interventions for neurodivergent users. however, top-down approaches in human-computer interaction (hci) research often prioritize the needs and goals of allistic and neurotypical researchers and secondary stakeholders in media creation. furthermore, media technologies are created with a one-size-fits-all approach, with the intent of rehabilitating or curing neurodivergent ways of being. this article imagines neuroqueer technoscience as an extension of crip technoscience that amplifies new styles of relationality, selfexpression, and communication practices within the development of information and communication technologies (icts). using an interdisciplinary framework informed by crip technoscience and human-computer interaction research, the author presents three tenets for mediating neuroqueer subjectivities. keywords crip technoscience; human-computer interaction; neuroqueer studies; science and technology studies; disability justice introduction: locating a neuroqueer technoscience i am not an ideal user. by this, i mean bodyminds like mine are not the ones designers have in mind when prototyping new technologies.1 all of my electronic devices use dark mode. my left ear can hear, but processes sound within a defective range, or so a neuropsychologist once gleefully told me. this difference in audio-processing makes videos, vlogs, and other multimedia texts challenging to follow. closed captions or communication access real-time transcriptions (cart) transformed my relationship with 1 here, i am referring to eli clare’s (2017) terminology to determine the “inextricable relationship between our bodies and our minds” (p. xvi). the term “bodymind” is used to counter cartesian conceptualizations of the body/mind divide, which lead to ideologies of curing or erasing disability. thinking about the body and mind as separate from one another and better than the other entity (re)produces ideas about ableism. imagining a neuroqueer technoscience studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 371 media texts. i stim between website clicks and phone pickups. i rely on alt text and image descriptions when a website or post does not use high contrast color combinations. often i will use my laptop’s accessibility feature to read a page aloud to me. these retrofitted accessibility features make use of information and communication technology (ict) for neurodivergent and disabled users.2 cyberspace is a site of possibility. it may not be the option that everyone desires, but it presents many directions for world-making – if we want them. bodyminds like mine are not thought of as using the internet or other forms of new media technology. several human-computer interaction (hci) and feminist science and technology studies (sts) scholars have rightfully remarked on the pervasive imagining of a white cisgender male living in the global north as the consummate target group for the latest phone or tablet (see chun, 2011; nakamura, 2013; noble, 2018; wacjman, 1991). a growing market of neurodivergent-related new media technologies, such as speech/language supports, artificial intelligence, and gamified physical therapy, is intended to advance physical, cognitive, and social wellness (alper, 2017; gardner et al., 2021). however, despite the influx of media creation for disabled communities, many technologists design icts with a “solutions-based” method (ymous et al., 2020). these top-down commitments champion the needs of neurotypical designers, caregivers, and other stakeholders over neurodivergent users. such icts, marketed under the guise of therapeutic support, enforce aspects of cure and rehabilitation, reinstating centuries of the medical and psychiatric-industrial complex’s violence and harm against disabled people (ymous et al., 2020), which are now redistributed for the digital age. these practices typically position neurodivergent people as docile, passive subjects who veer outside the confines of humanity, and are rarely shown as researchers, designers, and experts in their own lived experiences (spiel et al., 2020; williams & gilbert, 2020; yergeau, 2018). however, what if we were always already experts? what if deficit was never part of the design process, but collective justice and liberation were? perhaps one way past rehabilitative and curative technoscience is through neuroqueerness, which positions autism and other forms of neurodivergency as “a neurologically queer motioning” that “defies and desires… toward disabled futures” (yergeau, 2018, pp. 18-19). what does the addition of neuroqueer provide for media creation? to pursue these questions, this essay extends recent conversations about crip design, language, and world-making. more specifically, i derive my analytical stance from aimi hamraie and kelly fritsch’s (2019) working 2 i use neurodivergent as a descriptor for individuals whose cognitive functioning differs from neurologically typical people (hughes, 2016). my inclusion use of neurodivergent centers autism, but also prioritizes learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, adhd, tourette’s syndrome, dementia disorders, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and other identities. jessica sage rauchberg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 372 definition of crip technoscience. this practice brings feminist science and technology studies into conversation with disability justice to name “practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention” that transform social relations and harness frictive political action (hamraie & fritsch, 2019, p. 1). my thinking is also informed through articulations of crip hci (williams et al., 2021), which draws from disability justice and critical disability scholarship to acknowledge a more pluralistic conceptualization of cripistemological design, computing, and creation. finally, i present neuroqueer technoscience as an expansion of crip technoscience that reveals how frictive material and structural change can facilitate new possibilities for political-cultural neuroqueer subjectivity in mediated spaces. building on crip technoscience’s anti-assimilationist commitments to material and structural transformation, i imagine neuroqueer technoscience working within these fluid boundaries to facilitate new possibilities for relationality, self-expression, and communication practices in technology creation. my argument is not that neuroqueer technoscience opposes crip technoscience or that neurodivergent people can only practice neuroqueer technoscience. instead, i suggest that both crip and neuroqueer technoscience are interconnected by potential nodes of world-(re)making. following these sticky and frictive threads, i propose here an idea of neuroqueer technoscience, addressing the ways neurodivergent people were always already creating, making, and engaging with technology. to do this, i amplify the previous work of neurodivergent scholars, cultural workers, and self-advocates (as well as accomplices) who note the exclusion of neurodivergent people from various forms of disability rights activism and organizing (indigenous action media, 2014; sins invalid, 2019). by neuroqueer, i am referring to a collective disidentification by neurodivergent communities from conceptualizations and heteronormative ideas of assimilation to neurotypicality and heteronormativity (egner, 2018). furthermore, i use neuroqueer to demarcate neurodivergent-led movements of cultural and media production within crip technoscience that disidentify with mainstream and neurotypical epistemologies for developing icts that center the needs and leadership of neurodivergent users. thus, my notion of neuroqueer technoscience aims to compliment crip technoscience (hamraie & fritsch, 2019) with its direct dissent from compulsory able-mindedness (kafer, 2013), and amplify neurodivergent-led expertise and creation. my conceptualization of neuroqueer technoscience is also strongly influenced by my own experiences as a multiply neurodivergent queer femme.3 as neuroqueer blogger ibby grace (2013) notes, the term neuroqueer is not exclusive. while neuroqueer originates from autistic self-advocacy circles, 3 i have “formal” diagnoses of non-verbal learning disability (nvld), visuo-spatial impairment, dyscalculia, and adhd. like many autistics, i too think of nvld as an autism misdiagnosis. i prefer to use “neurodivergent” or “neuroqueer” as a way of embracing the embodied disruption to neurotypicality. imagining a neuroqueer technoscience studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 373 any neurodivergent person who feels seen or liberated by the term may use it. neuroqueer is fluid in its tangibility and meanings, its connections to individuals, cultural texts, and communities. nick walker (2015) argues that neuroqueerness intends to unsettle “one’s cultural conditioning toward conformity and compliance with dominant norms… working to transform social and cultural environments” where a full expression of neurodivergence is “permitted, accepted, and encouraged.” here, i am interested in how neuroqueer logics can be used in conversation with crip technoscience to reassess and collectively transform what kinds of disability-related icts are designed and who is centered in the design process. like crip technoscience’s commitment to anti-assimilationist politics, i envision neuroqueer technoscience to disrupt networks of oppression beyond ableism and sanism.4 for instance, if racism, ableism, and classism are dominant norms in mainstream technoscientific creation, how does neuroqueer technoscience work with crip technoscience to disrupt such networks? how does neuroqueerness transform our relationships with media, power, and culture? finally, i am interested in the knowledge production and futures to which a neuroqueer technoscience may lead us. what happens when we take the other path? what happens when we create using stimming, augmentative and alternative communication (aac),5 and other neuroqueer communication styles? this essay imagines one possibility for what a neuroqueer technoscience could be, inviting readers to engage and dialogue. i outline three potential working guidelines for establishing neuroqueer technoscientific practices. in doing so, i hope to carve out a pathway for thinking beyond ableist and sanist discrimination in technology research. i draw primarily from critical/cultural studies, which are concerned with “investigat[ing] discourses of power and knowledge… cultural dominance and resistance in media… and social institutions” (ono, 2009, p. 2). my framing for neuroqueer technoscience challenges technoableism and neurotypicality in accessible and assistive technology research while extending critique to imagine a pathway to possibilities beyond. the essay is organised as follows. i first address common issues of ableism in technology research and interventions from crip and disability justice perspectives in technoscience. i then outline three working tenets of neuroqueer technoscience, drawing from previous projects, conversations, and concepts that embody each guideline. these tenets are certainly not the 4 i follow talila “tl” lewis’ working definition of ableism. they currently define ableism as: “a system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, desirability, and productivity. these constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-blackness, misogyny, and colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism… leading to… society determining who is valuable and worthy” (lewis, 2021). 5 used by nonand semi-speaking people, aac technologies augment already existing communication styles (e.g., gesturing) and offer an alternative to verbal speech (alper, 2017, p. 12). aac technologies can range from low-tech activity mats to apps utilized through a tablet computer that create synthesized oral speech (alper, 2017, p. 14). jessica sage rauchberg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 374 only possibilities for scholars, self-advocates, technologists, or other communities who may benefit from crip and neuroqueer technoscience. however, these ideas may present transformative opportunities that place neurodivergent people at the center of the creation, design, and user processes. in conclusion, i address neuroqueer technoscience’s potentialities in theoretical and applied contexts, noting its significant contributions to the study, creation, and use of icts. my understanding of neuroqueer technoscience is deeply informed by the critical lessons that i have learned from autistic and neurodivergent elders, teachers, friends, colleagues, thinkers, scholars, and community members. thank you. this work is for you and us. beyond technoableism in ict design icts provide new possibilities for accessible and assistive media technologies. for example, the introduction of the tablet computer in the early 2010s presented opportunities for new mobile applications to support learning, communication, and social accessibility needs for many disabled users, especially neurodivergent people (alper, 2017; ellcessor, 2016). however, many of these devices and applications center on the needs and research goals of neurotypical design teams who prioritize rehabilitation and assimilation to guide technoscientific practice (hamraie & fritsch, 2019). additionally, design teams often take a “top-down” approach to develop technology, and non-disabled researchers become the agentic experts, while neurodivergent people are treated as passive users whose only role is to test out proofs of concept (gardner et al., 2021). ashley shew (2020) designates these practices as forms of technoableism, “a specific type of ableism around hyped and emerging technologies” (p. 41). technoableism presents disability as unnatural, unruly, and needing intervention via assimilation; this constrains the agency of disabled people.6 shew (2020) explains that technoableist rhetoric presents curative technology as good for disabled people while recycling ableist tropes (p. 43). technoableism is not an isolated issue: meryl alper (2021) notes that oppressions like technoableism are exacerbated by racism and classism, which determine who is a user and how access is (not) granted. akin to the boundary hamraie and fritsch (2019) draw between disability technoscience and crip technoscience, alper makes the vital distinction between mediated autism-friendly spaces and autistic-led cultural spaces, moving away from the idea of accessibility as something universally experienced and practiced (2021, p. 843). such issues echo throughout hci and aging studies (e.g., by prioritizing assistive devices for neurodivergent older adults), where 6 technoableism is not necessarily only an issue of representation; lack of disabled and neurodivergent programmers, technologists, and designers is also a significant issue. imagining a neuroqueer technoscience studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 375 neurodivergent users are rarely imagined as experts (see lazar et al., 2017). akin to autism research on technology, agency, and power, technoableism in this area of ict creation positions neurodivergent older adults as passive users whose neurotypes can be “cured” by using an app. technoableist rhetorics are not accidental: they intentionally reveal interlocking white supremacist networks of power and control in ict design, demonstrating (techno)ableism’s sticky relations to racism, classism, transphobia, homophobia, and other structures of marginalization (see benjamin, 2019). what is the next step if most icts designed to support and assist neurodivergent users discriminate against us? i think neuroqueer technoscience has much to learn from the practices and tactics developed by black and african american programmers and technologists in the late 20th century. in black software, charlton mcilwain (2019) offers essential considerations about diversity and representation in the tech industry. mcilwain asks: will our current or future technological tools ever enable us to outrun white supremacy… after all, [white supremacy] is not just our country’s founding principle. it is also the core programming that preceded and animated the birth, development and… computational systems. (2019, p. 8) noting pushes for tokenizing diversity practices in the 1960s and 1970s, mcilwain (2019) amplifies the work of organizations like afronet, as a virtual table where black technologists and programmers could work away from networks and institutions of white supremacy (pp. 96-97). networks like afronet serve as essential alternatives to mainstream diversity and inclusion efforts that continue to place marginalized communities in structurally dangerous situations. i am not saying that marginalized people cannot do important work to disrupt racist (and ableist) institutions or that diversity and inclusion are unnecessary. instead, i use mcilwain’s (2019) proposition to create community-led technoscience as a strategy to interrupt the continued public relations campaigns of “diversity and inclusion” that large social institutions (e. g., tech companies or universities) rely on to obfuscate the continuation of racist and ableist design practices. lelia marie hampton (2021) cautions against merely “diversifying” ict design teams. in their research about black feminist approaches to studying algorithmic oppression, hampton notes that merely bringing members from marginalized groups into the tech industry without changing the industry itself does little to remedy how oppressions are distributed amongst sociotechnical networks. hampton (2021) addresses how the use of diversification in the technology sector as a strategy to address anti-blackness in the creation and programming of icts “shifts responsibility [away] from ‘our technologies are harming people’… [and are] built into the power structures of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy” (pp. 2-3). jessica sage rauchberg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 376 placing disabled people on ict design teams that do not lead to institutions disrupting networks of oppression merely encourages tokenization. furthermore, assimilationist media practices fail to challenge the emergence of white supremacy and lead to the (re)production of technoableist rhetorics in assistive tech for neurodivergent people (shew, 2020; ymous et al., 2020). occupying space in an industry sustained by settler-colonial, capitalist, and eugenicist beliefs does not do the work of unsettling and world-remaking. neuroqueer approaches to technoscience ask: how do we move beyond these structures? what comes next? although my particular conceptualization centers on digital technologies, i think neuroqueer technoscience also embraces ideas about cross-movement activist practices as strategies for collective liberation as a form of design justice. sasha costanza-chock (2020, p. 23) defines this as a “framework for analysis of how design distributes benefits and burdens between various groups of people… explicitly focusing on the ways that design reproduces and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy…).” as i articulate further on in this essay, neuroqueer technoscience works in conjunction with design justice and crip technoscience to center anti-assimilationist leadership practices, expertise, and goals among neurodivergent users. neuroqueer and crip technoscience: connections and departures a call for a neuroqueer technoscience radically reimagines relational power and agency in determining the creation, development, and eventual use of media technologies. a neuroqueer approach amplifies the leadership of neurodivergent people and articulates access as an ongoing, relational, and political practice within crip technoscientific pursuits (chandler et al., 2021). to reimagine technology with a neuroqueer approach, technologists and ict designers may benefit from the crucial contributions of disability justice, which emphasizes the leadership of black, brown, and indigenous queer and trans disabled people, especially neurodivergent, intellectually/developmentally disabled (i/dd), and mad people (sins invalid, 2019). disability justice emphasizes that disability cannot be analyzed without understanding how it intersects with other political identities or forms of systemic oppression, such as settler-colonialism, racism, classism, fatphobia, homophobia, and transphobia (sins invalid, 2019, p. 25). cross-movement building is key to disability justice as an engaged theory-practice. unlike mainstream disability rights movements, which primarily center the needs and goals of white, physically disabled cisgender heterosexual men, disability justice names ableism and other facets of white supremacist logics (e.g., anti-blackness, racism, colonialism, homophobia, classism, transphobia). disability justice’s commitments to intersectionality help to understand the complex interworkings of these systems and facilitate the creation of collective alternatives that allow imagining a neuroqueer technoscience studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 377 disability communities to work towards structures of liberation and transformation (sins invalid, 2019, p. 13). finally, disability justice must always be in conversation with other liberation movements because world(re)making is not a single, but rather a coalitional, struggle. neuroqueer technoscience continues necessary interventions in crip technoscience, amplifying the polysemous ways disabled people create, hack, code, tinker, and experiment with technology as access, activism, and survival practices. crip technoscience draws from feminist science and technology studies and disability justice art and activism to “describe politicized practices of non-compliant knowing-making: world-building and world-dismantling practices by and with disabled people and communities that respond to intersectional systems of power, privilege, and oppression by working within and around them” (hamraie & fritsch, 2019, pp. 4-5; emphasis in original). instead of asking, “how can we fix or cure neurodivergence and disability?” a neuroqueer technoscientific approach offers an alternative query: by centering the polysemous lived experiences of neurodivergent users, how can we disrupt static hierarchies of ableist and sanist institutional power? one potential intervention is embedding ongoing accessibility practices into all forms of creative media engagement and relational supports. for example, arseli dokumaci (2019) offers micro-activist affordances as performative tactics disabled people rely on to reconfigure their environments. dokumaci’s (2019) inquiry focuses on physical disability, but i extend her original use here to consider the ways neuroqueer users coengage with icts to reconfigure neuroqueer subjectivities. for example, research teams can help support neuroqueer styles of media use. instead of forcing collaborators and stakeholders to assimilate to a device, designers can use their resources to support media reconfiguration with neurodivergent stakeholders, providing low-stim and scent-free environments, allowing for multiple types of communication (e.g., verbal, aac, text-only, sign language), creating plain-language guides, having breaks in focus groups, and honoring neurodivergent stakeholder goals with the use of the media technology and research dissemination (such as including stakeholders as coauthors) (see gardner et al., 2021; lazar et al., 2017; piepzna-samarasinha, 2018; spiel et al., 2019). in the following sections, i present three working tenets to demonstrate how neuroqueer technoscience engages with crip technoscience-informed practices to present anti-assimilationist technology as tools for relational world-making: neuroqueer technoscience extends crip technoscience to resist curative violence in technology use; neuroqueer technoscience prioritizes technological interdependence; and neuroqueer technoscience reconfigures who can be a creator and user. jessica sage rauchberg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 378 neuroqueer technoscience rejects curative violence i offer neuroqueer technoscience as an intervention in crip technoscience’s tendency to privilege neurotypicality. sins invalid (2019) emphasizes the importance of cross-solidarity movement building between different members of disability communities, including “psych survivors, people with mental health disabilities, neurodiverse people… [and] people with intellectual or developmental disabilities” (p. 25). however, how are these commitments honored for neurodivergent, mad, and intellectually and developmentally disabled (i/dd) people? the 2020 documentary crip camp presents an idyllic retelling of the u.s.-based independent living movement (ilm), where white physically disabled people were (and still are) placed at the top of the disability hierarchy (lebrecht & newham, 2020). yet crip camp does not show i/dd, mad, neurodivergent, and racialized disabled people (especially black disabled people) in a similar perspective; for instance, the film presents the leadership of black panther member and disability advocate bradley lomax as a mere anecdote instead of a significant cross-movement leader whose expertise was crucial to the 504 sit-in’s success (sedgwick, 2021, para. 13). the tremendous segregation i/dd people face – especially black, brown, and indigenous i/dd people – reinforces carceral boundaries at the conjunctures of racism, intellectual ableism, and sanism (see erevelles & minear, 2010; sedgwick, 2021). the digitization of applied behavioral analysis (aba) demonstrates the legacies of racism and (techno)ableism.7 aba often entails panoptic and violent pathologic approaches, especially targeting nonand semi-speaking people as a way to force verbal language (bascomb, 2011; williams, 2018; yergeau, 2018). robin roscigno (2019) suggests aba actively harms and even maims autistic and neurodivergent people through its intent to erase and contain neurodivergence. in some cases, such as the u.s.-based judge rotenberg center, allistic administrators force autistic, neurodivergent, and intellectually disabled residents to wear electric shock devices, called a graduated electronic decelerator, which “modify” behaviors by delivering shocks up to 41 milliamps (roscigno, 2019). since the center’s opening in 1971, at least six residents have died from the pervasive levels of shock present in the ged (brown, 2020; yergeau, 2018). autistic self-advocates, cultural workers, and researchers continue to challenge aba’s pathologization. in this way, icts are used to “solve” aspects of disability through curative violence. by using the term curative violence i am referring to eunjung kim’s (2017) theorization that rehabilitative technology is used to practice 7 applied behavioural analysis (aba) refers to a series of therapies intended to “improve” socially significant behaviours such as speech and embodiment. many autistic and neurodivergent self-advocates have criticized aba’s punitive and rehabilitative approaches (see bascomb, 2011; brown, 2020; sequenzia, 2015; williams, 2019; yergeau, 2018). imagining a neuroqueer technoscience studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 379 cure, rehabilitation, and progress, while presenting disability as an obstacle to national identity building. for instance, many autism-related ict supports focus on artificial enhacements for verbal/spoken speech through augmentative and alternative communication devices (aac). neuroqueer technoscience asks, is the reasoning behind “giving voice” to nonand semispeaking neurodivergent people rooted in ableism? here, i suggest that icts developed with eugenicist or rehabilitative mindsets positioning users as “better” than disabled people who do not use them (alper, 2017). my thinking follows joseph stramondo’s (2019) theory of curative versus assistive technology: the orientation of how a device is situated around disability delineates its use as “assistive” or “curative,” further substantiating categories like “disabled” versus “non-disabled.” the programming of curative violence in technology is not always readily apparent: curative violence is often taken up by obfuscating eugenics, ableism, and neurotypicality with technoableist rhetorics of “enhancement” and “innovation,” as if disabled – and in particular, neurodivergent people – are not worthy of life unless they pursue the assimilative alterations of curative technology (see kim, 2017). rua m. williams (2019) proposes a similar critique through their concept of metaeugenics in so-called “assistive” technology for autistic children. they explain that metaeugenics are a subtle yet violent network of power that are deployed in the justification of curative, normalizing therapies for… deviance. once overt eugenics have failed, or have been deemed unpalatable, metaeugenics take over to ensure purity… [while] racialized, queer, disabled, or otherwise unsightly, unruly…. bodies are cataloged, captured, quarantined, incarcerated, sanitized, and rehabilitated (or not). (williams, 2019, pp. 65-66) stramondo (2019) also offers alternative, resistive, and refusal-based connections to such technology as a strategy to dispel the prominence of curative violence. like dokumaci’s (2019) offering of micro-resistive affordances, such reconfigurations of assistive technology redefine not only who is a user but what it means to be in relation with technology beyond metaeugenics and curative violence (as i articulate in the final tenet). through these reconfigurations, neuroqueer technoscience rejects the use of icts for rehabilitation or erasure of disability. note that my critique is not an outright rejection of assistive technology – many icts, like aac, can provide necessary support for neurodivergent people with varying access needs (stramondo, 2019). nor am i saying that all crip technoscience excludes or privileges neurotypicality. however, i offer neuroqueer technoscience as extending crip technoscience in this realm, reaffirming anti-assimilationist and coalitional transformation by troubling the representation of neurodivergent as deficit (ymous et al., 2020). universities and medical institutions are sites of violences like medical jessica sage rauchberg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 380 racism and (techno)ableism, placing disabled and neurodivergent racialized people, and queer and trans people, in concentrated harm (dolmage, 2017; piepzna-samarasinha, 2018). i argue that neuroqueer technoscience leads us to new possibilities that sustain the wholeness of neurodivergent people and their goals, accessibility needs, and experiences. instead of designing for a cure, rehabilitation, or enhancement, a neuroqueer technoscientific approach might work to ensure that the lived experiences, goals, and skills of neuroqueer users are always already centered. neuroqueer technoscience builds upon crip technoscience’s liberatory and anti-assimilationist approaches to reimagine disability as a “set of innovative… skills” (piepzna-samarasinha, 2018, p. 216). for instance, lazar et al.’s (2017) moments, a digital art sharing project co-designed with older adults with dementia, demonstrates the potential of non-curative neuroqueer relational practices in crip technoscience. moments’ design team used their resources to facilitate a creative experience that allowed alternative ways of social engagement and non-verbal communication (e.g., artistic creation such as drawing, painting, collaging). most importantly, moments met users where they were, allowing diverse gameplay for creating the digital art, and bending towards the user’s skill set (instead of the user assimilating to the technology). imagining art as a non-verbal communication practice, the design team centered options that would appeal widely to the user group, such as scrapbooking or postcard decorating, which could be engaged with by several participants (lazar et al., 2017, p. 2150). the project’s success demonstrates the tenacious overlap between crip technoscience (i.e., centering skills, working through friction arising from clashing accessibility needs, designing for multiple modes of accessibility) and neuroqueer technoscience (i.e., alternative modes of self-expression, amplifying agentic production, centering non-neurotypical styles of social interaction and community building). while disability-centric technoscience may focus on enhancement or rehabilitation for disabled people, neuroqueer technoscience echoes crip technoscience’s disruption of progressive attempts at “overcoming” or “curing” disability (hamraie & fritsch, 2019). moreover, these movements hold other allegiances to care work and mutual aid, positioning icts as technologies to facilitate (often live-saving) community support. neuroqueer technoscience emphasizes technological interdependence, not independence noting the excessive prevalence of eugenics in north american health research, neuroqueer technoscience calls for ways of knowing, doing, and making that do not rely on allistic, harmful technologies to stylize neuroqueer communication supports. why must the “most optimal” forms of communication be rooted in spoken word and eye contact? what possibilities imagining a neuroqueer technoscience studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 381 emerge from imagining stimming as a vital part of the communication process or using multiple communication styles (i.e., a mix of both spoken and non-verbal communication)? is neurodivergent agency contingent on an individual’s ability to toilet, speak, or move in ways that conform to neurotypicality and independence (see williams, 2018)? cal montgomery (2001) names this violent privileging of independence over interdependency as an “assumption [to] speak for people with cognitive impairments… [which] assumes the ‘care’ families provide is always oppressive” (para. 19). montgomery’s powerful theorizing disrupts the distinctions between which forms of dependency are valued in mainstream disability communities and which are discarded. perhaps a better question to ask is: what happens when allistic and neurotypical research teams bend toward the communication needs and goals of neurodivergent bodyminds? a neuroqueer technoscience calls on bringing such communicative practices to interdependent creation and use of media. departing from the mainstream prominence of designing media supports as a “solution” to neurodivergency (alper, 2021; williams & gilbert, 2020; ymous et al., 2020), neuroqueer technoscience instead positions neurodivergent communication styles as valid and worthy in mediated spaces, regardless of individual access needs. neuroqueer technoscience extends crip technoscience by considering technology to support neuroqueer communication and relational practices. for instance, the critical design lab’s remote access party guide reconfigures technology to support interdependent neuroqueer and crip relational practices in a digital world (gotkin et al., 2020). the remote access party, derived from earlier work on crip technoscientific practices for facilitating accessible nightlife (see gotkin, 2019), moves beyond curative modes for digital social engagement. for instance, the open-source facilitation guide provides a detailed explanation of how participants can set up a remote access event, what to expect before, during, and after the party, options for participation, and opportunities for engagement, including roles to support accessibility, such as captioners, audio descriptors, and access doulas (gotkin et al., 2020, p. 6). here, each participant is essential to the success of creating a digital space of access, love, and community: a remote access party is incomplete without the work and needs of each individual, whether they are a partygoer or are providing access supports. by establishing thorough guidelines – with room for working through imperfect technology – the remote access party guide demonstrates how neuroqueer technoscience builds on crip technoscience’s anti-assimilationist and collaborative shifting of (digital) social spaces to co-create new ways of being, communication, and relationality. party attendees are invited to engage in ways that feel right for them: agency to turn on or off one’s computer camera or microphone, nonspeaking ways to participate in the space, and control over their participation in the web conferencing call. gotkin et al’s (2020) guide does not present itself as a universal solution for technoableism. however, it offers some crucial possibilities for using icts to collectively practice neuroqueer jessica sage rauchberg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 382 relationalities in anti-assimilationist spaces. here, technology use does not amplify independence: instead, it shows the various ways neuroqueer (and crip) technoscience reconfigures technologies toward relational interdependence. i turn to interdependence as a micro-resistive turn (see dokumaci, 2019) for neuroqueer technoscience to program, code, or co-create new forms of subjectivities that depart from concepts of cognitive hierarchies and white supremacist conceptualizations of the ideal user. in a state of interconnected dependence (sins invalid, 2019), interdependence challenges western and neoliberal prioritizations of individuality and self-reliance. instead, interdependence “sees the liberation of all living systems and the land as integral to the liberation of our communities… we work to meet each other’s needs as we build toward liberation” (sins invalid, 2019, p. 25). noting that many western social institutions position disability and disabled people as passive and apolitical, disability justice always already uses interdependence as a “site of politicized resistance” through technoscientific measures of hacking, tinkering, and making within disability communities and beyond (hamraie & fritsch, 2019). hacking constitutes how disability organizers reimagine through realtering existing material and political arrangements (hamraie & fritsch, 2019, p. 4). through centering disabled expertise, activist hacking highlights crip technoscience’s commitments to political change and transformation. neuroqueer technoscience’s commitments to relational interdependence in digital worlds is revealed in the success of disability hashtag activism. in the midst of the 2019 u.s. wildfire season, disability justice activist stacey park milbern and the disability justice culture club partnered to support the #powertolive campaign against discriminatory power shut-offs (disability visiblity project, 2019). additionally, johanna hedva’s (2015) “sick woman theory” draws from their experiences with chronic illness and neurodivergence to affirm the validity of digital activism through embodiment and radical existance in a world invisibilizng racialized and disabled people. although hedva (2015) does not clearly position their theorization as a manifesto, the practice of sick woman theory as a technology of radical survival and digital world-making is significant to the formation of neuroqueer subjectivities. thus, neuroqueer technoscience does not position disability and ableism as single issues; instead, it addresses and disrupts how ableism is always in conversation with racism, settlercolonialism, classism, and other oppressive nodes that render multiplymarginalized people as invisible, and emphasizes the need for digital technology as a way to create interdependence (hedva, 2015; piepznasamarasinha, 2018). where crip technoscience may reconfigure disabled people’s relationships with social and cultural structures, i position neuroqueer technoscience as a co-collaborative reconfiguration of subjectivity. imagining a neuroqueer technoscience studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 383 neuroqueer technoscience reimagines who is a creator and user what does it mean to design neuroqueer futures? perhaps it begins with troubling the prospects of design(ers). sasha costanza-chock’s (2020) design justice offers to counter (techno)ableism and metaeugenics in design research towards new neuroqueer subjectivities. partially deriving their conceptualization from disability (justice) activism, costanza-chock (2020) notes that including the expertise of the most directly-impacted people facilitates new possibilities for experiential innovations that can transform lived experience. costanza-chock’s (2020) design justice may counter the limitations of universal design, a disability-centered practice emerging in the late 20th century to create environments accessible to any users (hamraie, 2017). universal design guidelines have since been adapted as an ethos for technology and ict design (bennett & rosner, 2019). however, as aimi hamraie (2017) importantly asks, who is everyone? namely, are neurodivergent people included within the definitions of everyone (see goodley et al., 2014)? are some neurodivergent considered more worthy and exceptional than others (i.e., is a speaking neurodivergent person considered more worthy of support than a nonor semi-speaking person)? similarly, ruha benjamin (2019) cautions against claims for a generic “design justice,” noting that well-intentioned ideas about designing solutions can sanitize and smooth over systemic oppression through one-size-fits-all approaches. instead, benjamin (2019) asks, what happens when the focus is on “plain old… liberation” (p. 177)? hamraie (2017) similarly presents their idea of collective access as a necessary intervention, which presents accessibility practices as a material-discursive understanding of relationality and interdependence as a means of social justice. one way we might create a neuroqueer future is by supporting the work of disabled and neurodivergent design teams in hci and mobile communication to meet the user goals and access needs of neurodivergent stakeholders or by stepping away from designing curative solutions (ymous et al., 2020). if technoableism promotes rehabilitation and curative violence, then neuroqueer (and crip) technoscience presents neurodivergence as essential for computing and user-experience practices. for instance, loren britton and isabel paehr’s (2021) work as melt adopts this approach through media arts practice. in particular, melt’s project, “rituals against barriers,” is informed by black feminist thought, feminist hci, and crip technoscientific practices to embrace a series of neuroqueer rituals as design paradigms. instead of pathologizing, curing, or rehabilitating, melt presents neuroqueer design methods such as bad listening (see smilges, 2020), questioning institutions, and tending to the “not perceivable” as generative sites for inquiry and technological creation (britton & paehr, 2021). through various stop-motion video entries and digital archives, melt’s politic of refusal simultaneously “resists” (techno)ableist barriers and generatively “connects” across differences (britton & paehr, 2021, p. 79). such (re)fusals extend crip technoscientific jessica sage rauchberg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 384 paradigms for anti-assimilationist technological and digital artistic practice towards neuroqueer technoscientific creation. by fusing crip technoscientific paradigms for anti-assimilationist commitments to access and removal of structural barriers, melt’s use of digital artistic practice reveals the neuroqueer potentialities of leaning-in to so-called “deviant” relationalities. i think that neuroqueer technoscience provides the desired intervention of “what’s next” in both the creation and cultural understandings of icts. however, i want to be clear in what neuroqueer technoscience is and what it is not. neuroqueer technoscience argues that technoableism is tied to larger systems of white supremacy: we cannot talk about algorithmic ableism or designing around neurotypicality without addressing ableism’s complex networking around anti-blackness and other racisms, settler-colonialism and data colonialism (see couldry & mejias, 2019), digital (trans)misogynoir (bailey, 2021), shadowbanning of disabled content creators, and other forms of political violence emerging within the realm of the digital. nevertheless, neuroqueer technoscience is also a practice of optimism. it is the poetic prose of writing out alt-text for a kick-ass selfie so our friends with screen readers can partake in slivers of neuroqueer joy. it is imagining neurodivergent people programming, coding, and developing icts that support our access needs without humiliating us. it is allowing nonand semi-speaking autistic people to lead conversations on aac. it is imagining the coalitional collaboration towards something better. conclusion: what does a neuroqueer technoscience feel/move/stim like? last year, i posted the following questions on my personal twitter account: “what would a neurodivergent/neuroqueer social networking be like? what would this collaborative process entail? many neurodivergent people have conflicting access needs. how do we design for this without assuming that all access needs are universal?” my questions catalyzed a passionate, collaborative conversation.8 one suggestion called for a user-driven interface with different options that met the needs of individual users. one idea proposed different modes that would allow users to determine how much content they want to see on their page and the importance of customizable color contrast combinations. many commenters addressed strategies for organizing the network, including tagging systems designed around neurodivergent thinking styles and organization, and options for determining which pages users would want to feature on their accounts. for instance, some accounts mentioned tagging written text with tone indicators to help other users access a conveyed meaning more readily (e.g., this tweet is 8 the tweet responses are anonymized and summarized in order to protect the identities of the account holders participating in the conversation. imagining a neuroqueer technoscience studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 385 sarcastic or genuine) or set more explicit boundaries around availability to talk with other users. the tweet was by no means viral. however, it demonstrated the strong potential of a neuroqueer-driven world-(re)making via technology, one where neurodivergent people were always already imagined at its center and would be the driving force behind the expansion and generation of media creation. moreover, and perhaps most importantly, this single conversation revealed that neuroqueer technoscience is already happening. neuroqueer technoscience presents the possibility for innovative icts that facilitate threads of liberation for neurodivergent users. mainstream new media technologies are designed and framed around technoableism. social media algorithms program technoableist rhetorics into their codes, determining who gets to truly “belong” on a platform that can provide disabled people with significant social connections. additionally, technoableist icts generate an intent to emphasize dominant allistic and neurotypical styles of communication. rejecting the notion of creation-ascure, neuroqueer technoscience takes cues from disability justice and crip technoscience to reroute design leadership to neurodivergent communities, with the intent of supporting neuroqueer styles of communication, leadership, and lived experiences. by promoting these ideals, new media technologies, like mobile applications and smart devices, can embrace neurodivergent users where we are and imagine worlds where we were always already whole. i want to caution that there is a difference between designing for access and support and designing for enhancement and erasure. technology should not cure or erase neurodivergency, as rua m. williams (2019) importantly notes. neurodivergent people are tenaciously brilliant thinkers and tinkerers who are engineering our survival through activist technoscience and other forms of interdependent world-making (hamraie & fritsch, 2019). thus, a neuroqueer technoscience is not a fixed and static one-time practice. although i anticipate there are many ways neurodivergent people can practice (and already incorporate) neuroqueer technoscience, i imagine that neuroqueer technoscientific engagement amplifies access as a sticky, ongoing relational practice – one that is fluid and conceptualizes many neurodivergent bodyminds coming together to program, hack, and create better (digital) worlds. neuroqueer technoscience breaks past the tensions and complexities of technoableism and other forms of (digital) discrimination. by positioning neurodivergent people as experts and leaders, a neuroqueer technoscientific approach to digital creation and activism generates new ways of thinking, creating, and making survival possible, all with the click of a “share” button. i urge us to follow the many pathways collectively forged by neurodivergent and neuroqueer activists, artists, self-advocates, artists, and cultural workers. neurodivergent people may not be “the ideal user” in a technoableist world; however, as i discuss in this essay, neuroqueer technoscience rejects the idea of a singular, fixed user who must endure curative violence to be seen as jessica sage rauchberg studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 370-388, 2022 386 valid. instead, neuroqueer technoscience presents polysemous and collective ways of creating and engaging media. allistic and neurotypical researchers may imagine us as flawed, broken, and needing a fix. nevertheless, new media and mobile communication technologies can be transformative and liberatory – neuroqueer technoscience may be one potentiality that can help us reach there. join us. acknowledgments the author would like to thank miranda brady, kelly fritsch, kennedy ryan, and margaret janse van rensburg for their continued, enthusiastic support of this essay throughout the submission and review process. references alper, m. 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(2020). perservations of the academy: a survey of wearable technologies applied to autism intervention. international journal of human-computer studies, 143, 1-20. williams, r. m., ringland, k., gibson, a., mandala, m., maibaum, a., & guerreiro, t. (2021). articulations toward a crip hci. interactions, 28(3), 28-37. yergeau, m. r. (2018). authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. duke university press. ymous, a., spiel, k., keyes, o., williams, r. m., good, j., hornecker, e., & bennett, c. l. (2020). “i am just terrified for my future” – epistemic violence in disability related technology research. chi ‘20 extended abstracts, 1-16. doi: 10.1145/3334480.3381828. aspler final before ts correspondence address: john aspler, pragmatic health ethics research unit, institut de recherches cliniques de montréal, 110 avenue des pins ouest, montreal, qc, h3w 1r7; email: john.aspler@mail.mcgill.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 representation matters: race, gender, class, and intersectional representations of autistic and disabled characters on television john aspler institut de recherches cliniques de montréal, canada mcgill university, canada kelly d. harding canada fasd research network, canada laurentian university, canada m. ariel cascio central michigan university, usa abstract media reflect and affect social understandings, beliefs, and values on many topics, including the lives of autistic and disabled people. media analysis has garnered attention in the field of disability studies, which some scholars and activists consider a promising approach to discussing the experiences of – and for promoting social justice for – autistic people, who remain underrepresented on scripted television. additionally, existing portrayals often rely on stereotyped representations of disabled individuals as objects of pity, objects of inspiration, or villains. television may also serve as a primary source of public knowledge about disabled people and the concept of disability. it is therefore essential that such portrayals avoid stigma and stereotyping. we take a disability studies lens to critically analyze and compare representations of diverse people, who may sometimes be conflated in the popular imaginary, across television series about autistic characters (atypical, the good doctor), those with cerebral palsy (speechless, special), and a character with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (shameless). we employ an intersectional analytic framework to problematize representations of autistic and disabled people, using television, feminist, and critical disability studies literatures. we analyze how the formal structure of television storytelling can either enable or disable its characters, as well as how portrayals of disability that display a sensitivity to concerns raised by critical disability discourse do not necessarily display the same sensitivity when they intersect with marginalized experiences of gender, sexuality, race, and class. john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 324 keywords autism; cerebral palsy; fasd; disablement; representation; intersectionality; television media reflect and affect public beliefs, attitudes, and values. over the last few decades, scholars across numerous disciplines have explored media content to better understand how different groups of people have been represented, including what stories are told about which people, and which stereotypes are reinforced or contested (dahl, 1993; hacking, 2009; haller et al., 2012; henry, 2013; orchard, 2013). scholars studying media representations of disablement have identified problematic narrative tropes and stereotypes associated with disability, including the victim, villain, hero, and fool (barnes, 1992; darke, 1998; worrell, 2018). disabled individuals (i.e., those systematically excluded from full participation in society through the social and environmental disablement of different or stigmatized bodies and minds) are not always the subjects of their own stories, but objects of pity, inspiration, and burden (goffman, 1963; oliver, 1990). disabled people remain underrepresented on scripted broadcast, cable, and streaming television (glaad, 2020), where existing portrayals may continue to rely on problematic tropes (worrell, 2018). in this paper, we focus on scripted television in anglophone north america, connecting intersecting marginalized concerns about representations of disablement, gender, sex, sexuality, race, and class using crenshaw’s (1989) conception of intersectionality as a starting point. beyond content, we connect structure and features of scripted television (e.g., rules of a storyworld, genre norms, episodic or serialized mechanisms of storytelling) to the enablement and disablement of characters. we argue that television conventions provide a powerful opportunity for positive and inclusive representation, that intersectional approaches are neglected in television representations of disability partially because of these storytelling conventions, and that future texts can apply the strengths of television to further stories about a diversity of characters underrepresented or marginalized in ways that under realize their intersectional potential. researcher positionality statement and theoretical assumptions we approach this topic from various personal and interdisciplinary perspectives. john has a background in neuroscience and bioethics, studies fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (fasd) in canadian news stories, and works with people with fasd to understand their reactions to news coverage. kelly is an expert in fasd, specifically, with a background in developmental disabilities, human development across the lifecourse, and health service delivery. ariel is an anthropologist who studies social and ethical issues around autism and has worked with autistic youth and adults in a variety of representation matters studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 325 research contexts. we share social science methodological approaches and we take up a critical disability studies lens, which some scholars and activists consider a promising approach to discussing the experiences of – and promoting social justice for – autistic and disabled people (woods et al., 2018), while recognizing that the applicability of a disability perspective to autistic experiences has sometimes been contested (see e.g., participants in chamak & bonniau, 2013; kenny et al., 2016; lester et al., 2014). none of the authors identify as autistic or disabled; in this sense, we bring outsider perspectives to the issue of autistic and disabled representation. we contextualize this representation within broader discursive and cultural trends observed through engagement with various disability communities – who may or may not share similar experiences of stigmatization and barriers to social inclusion – and through our synthesis of a range of scholarly and advocacy writings. ultimately, we aim to bring different voices into the conversation while asserting our own arguments. this paper brings together scripted television shows about characters with diverse neuroatypical or disabling experiences,1 comparing representations of autistic characters with representations of characters with cerebral palsy (cp) and a character with fasd. we bring these representations into conversation both to problematize their connection and to consider how stigma and access barriers may impact these different groups of people who are popularly understood to be related through the language of the brain. in teasing apart and reconstructing similarities and differences through the lens of critical disability studies – pointing to opportunities for solidarity and justice among groups of neuroatypical or disabled people – we also open the space to investigate boundary work in these representations (i.e., the ways these representations outline similarities, differences, and groupings of people). our approach to disability studies frames concerns about people in the category of “disabled” as a minority in need of legislative interventions and civil rights protections. although the needs of different groups may not always align, the political action of the disability rights movement is one area of activism that can help advance intersectional approaches to social justice. this approach turns the critical lens back on society, ensuring that diverse groups can articulate the ways in which they are disabled, while also pointing to structural issues that can affect all marginalized people. that is to say, 1 while medical literature often groups these diverse experiences together as “neurodevelopmental disabilities,” we struggled to find an appropriate umbrella term. we have chosen to use “neuroatypical or disabling” to encompass people who do and do not identify as disabled. we chose neuroatypical to encompass people with a range of differences currently conceptualized as neurological, including both cognitive and motor differences, as others have also done (horn et al., 2019). the concept of atypicality describes this difference, implicitly contrasting with neurotypical individuals whose cognitive and motor styles are considered common and dominant in society (mueller, 2020). the term neuroatypical is similar to “neurodivergent,” a term closely associated with neurodiversity theory and the movement (kapp, 2020; milton et al., 2020), though not limited to this context (gold, 2021). john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 326 disabled people share political experiences of marginalization and can agitate in solidarity for shared emancipatory projects. we also wish to emphasize that given the diversity of language preferences, which vary generationally, interpersonally, regionally, and between communities, we use both person-first (i.e., “with disabilities”) and identity-first (i.e., disabled) language. while many autistic people and scholars prefer identity-first language (robertson & ne’eman, 2008), this is not the case for all disability communities (e.g., people with intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, fasd), wherein a lack of person-first language may perpetuate stereotyping and the marginalization of these populations (canfasd, 2021). finally, while there has been some scholarly discussion of the shows we analyzed (e.g., brady & cardin, 2021; cambra-badii et al., 2021; stern & barnes, 2019), it has been limited. much of the intellectual work exists outside hegemonic spaces of academic publishing, including blogs, news, and social media communities. we cite these sources, where appropriate, to provide insight into perspectives from autistic and disabled communities. while representation of autistic characters has received some attention, interrogations of representations of other neuroatypical or disabled people, particularly people with fasd or cp, remain lacking in comparison (schormans et al., 2013; will, 2019).2 representations of autistic people autistic characters have been increasingly represented on screen in recent decades, with the 1988 film rain main serving as a launching point for popular culture representations in anglophone north america (silberman, 2015). rain man drew on the trope of the autistic savant, an autistic person with extraordinary skills in a specific, limited area, often corresponding with significant difficulties in other areas of life. reliance on the savant trope carries the same risks as similar “supercrip” narratives, valuing autistic people only for their savant abilities – which most autistic people do not have – which devalues autistic life overall (loftis, 2014). since rain man, several television shows have prominently featured characters coded or identified as autistic. in the early 2000s, many of these representations were coded and largely conformed to the autistic savant trope, reflected through an understanding of autism as asperger’s syndrome and asperger’s syndrome as savantism (e.g., jerry espenson on boston legal, sheldon cooper on the big bang theory, abed nadir on community, zack 2 fetal alcohol spectrum disorder or fasd is a diagnosis given when an individual with cognitive, physical, and behavioural difficulties is known to have been exposed to alcohol prenatally (cook et al., 2016). cerebral palsy or cp refers to a heterogeneous set of motor difficulties (blair & cans, 2018). representation matters studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 327 addy and temperance brennan on bones). most of these characters were portrayed as highly logical, successful, and socially inept, with atypical and quirky behaviours played for laughs. they also often embodied a particular white masculinity that matthews (2019) calls “autistic techno-savant[ism]” (p. 58). later, in the 2010s, shows emerged that told more serious stories about explicitly autistic people, like max braverman on parenthood (holton, 2013). in these cases, a character’s autistic identity was often legitimized through a diagnosis. however, parenthood was not primarily about autistic characters or even autism communities.3 notably, both popular and professional representations often associate autism with whiteness, high socioeconomic status, and masculinity (jack, 2014; matthews, 2019). autistic scholars, artists, and self-advocates have called for greater diversity in the portrayal of autistic experiences, including the perspectives of autistic people of colour, women, and non-binary folk (brown et al., 2017). such portrayals are seen occasionally in representations of autistic boys of colour (e.g., connor on degrassi: the next generation), white autistic girls (e.g., isadora smackel on girl meets world) and women (e.g., dr. dixon on grey’s anatomy), and occasionally autistic women of colour (e.g., amber on atypical). disability media representation and intersectionality: tropes, stereotypes, and narratives on television several distinctive features of scripted television lend themselves to certain kinds of stories. more than most artforms, television (tv) is constrained by market and industry forces, such as actor contracts and ratings (mittell, 2015). tv has historically needed to appeal to broad audiences, which has likely contributed to a lack of diversity favouring protagonists in “unmarked” categories: white, straight, able-bodied, and male. however, recent shifts toward digital streaming platforms and the increased fragmentation of the tv landscape – sometimes described as “peak tv” (gray & lotz, 2019) – have also contributed to an increase in shows by diverse showrunners on diverse topics and identities. notably, tv storytelling takes place over long periods of time, allowing viewers to build possibly meaningful parasocial relationships with characters that do and do not represent them, and to engage with and consume metatext and paratexts that influence understandings of 3 we use the term “autism communities” here and in similar ways throughout this paper to distinguish representations that centre the views of certain parents and professionals rather than the views of autistic self-advocates. as explained by orsini (2009, p. 115), “autism advocacy” represents those “more interested in pressing for policy change around the treatment for autism and concern with its causes” while a term like “autistic advocates” reflects “the efforts of activists to create a positive identity for autistic people using, albeit not exclusively, a disability rights frame... members of the autistic or autistic rights movement decry the focus on and language of ‘curing’ autistics.” john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 328 authorial intent and real-world constraints on storytelling choices. tv is also structured by extrinsic genre norms and storyworld-intrinsic narrative rules (mittell, 2015). beyond questions of representation, the unique structure of tv also directly enables and disables characters. for example, extrinsic genre conventions of the episodic 21-minute american situational comedy (sitcom) often cause a return to status quo at the end of an episode (austerlitz, 2014), which can lead storytellers to take shortcuts around what might otherwise be a serious barrier to a disabled character; a barrier in one episode (e.g., difficulty socializing, lack of funds for specialized equipment) might be ignored entirely in another. at the same time, while these choices of convenience can provide examples of unrealistically accessible worlds, they can also help us imagine a world without (or with fewer) barriers. current study in this paper, we aim to combine work from television studies and disability studies, but it is also important to note emerging work in an area of research called “media disability studies,” which aims to address the complexities of media and disability together (ellcessor et al., 2017). while our insights are primarily focused on those from critical disability studies and related analyses about the representation of disability in media, we also aim to reflect concerns from television (and media studies) broadly, including the economic forces at play in media production (e.g., the choice of whether to hire disabled or neuroatypical actors; brady & cardin, 2021) and audience engagement and reception. specifically, we address representations of disability in shows featuring autistic characters, characters with cp, and a character with fasd. we have selected these three specific experiences to highlight the dominance of autism representation, the boundary work and limited engagement with intellectual disability in representations of autism and cp, the common erasure of non-white experiences despite racialized differences in diagnosis and access to services, and the ambiguous and inconsistent role money and socioeconomic status can play in these stories. methods informed by intersectionality as a guiding framework (crenshaw, 1989; hankivsky et al., 2014), we critically explored representations of characters on five american television shows (see table 1): atypical (rashid et al., 2017-present; autism), the good doctor (shore et al., 2017-present; autism), special (dokoza et al., 2019-present; cp), speechless (gernon et al., 20162019; cp), and shameless u.s. (wells et al., 2011-present; fasd). we focused on gender, sex, sexuality, race, and class, how characters’ representation matters studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 329 experiences of these social categories intersected with their experiences of disability, and how the metatext of the show furthered (or failed to further) nuanced representation. these shows were chosen by the researchers as recent examples that included a neuroatypical or disabled series regular character, with neuroatypicality and disability as structuring features of the storytelling and characterization. shameless u.s. was chosen as it is, to our knowledge, the only show featuring a series regular character with fasd, despite the character and diagnosis being peripheral. we employed two key approaches to data collection and analysis: critical discourse analysis (cda) and critical friend discussions. we chose cda (fairclough, 1989; titscher et al., 2000) as an interdisciplinary method, given our diverse backgrounds and shared attention to power dynamics, as well as the relationship between society, culture, and television discourse. our analysis attended to how intersecting social experiences were represented in a commonly consumed medium (i.e., popular broadcast, cable, and streaming television programming), reflective of the assumption that (like cultural studies) “society and culture are shaped by discourse, and… constitute discourse” (titscher et al., 2000, p. 146). as cda assumes that texts cannot be divorced from social and cultural contexts, we centrally employ intersectionality (crenshaw, 1989) as a theoretical framework elaborating on how experiences of disability cannot be separated from experiences of sex, gender, sexuality, race, and class, while referring to tv production and reception practices. as hankivsky et al. (2014) note, a central tenet of intersectionality is that human lives cannot be reduced to single characteristics (i.e., disability status). while our understandings and interpretations of intersectionality are informed by our readings of the shows’ constructions of disability and the characters’ social locations, it is important to bear in mind our readings of the show as scholars (and how those may differ from other audiences), our lived experiences and social locations, and how audiences make sense of, and engage with, the media they consume. we watched shows independently and together. independent viewing involved note-taking with an emphasis on identifying common themes, disability media stereotypes, and understanding the representation of disability intersecting with other categories of social experience. we met virtually to discuss episodes viewed alone or in pairs, our evolving understanding of each show, and to watch specific episodes together. in doing so, we engaged in collaborative data analysis. all levels of analysis were done by all authors. during these meetings, we engaged in critical friend discussions (smith & mcgannon, 2018) to challenge each other’s observations and interpretations of a show’s content, meanings, and narratives. these conversations ensured that we were able to explore and construct multiple interpretations of the data, with consideration for each researcher’s experiences and areas of expertise. these meetings enabled us to both watch and analyze individual episodes of a show, while also placing that episode within the broader context john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 330 of a show itself, the other shows watched, and social trends tied to media narratives and intersectional representations. these reflexive discussions were thus used to refine our analysis to ensure it fit well with our theoretical positioning and larger research aims. results and discussion in this paper, we combine our results and discussion in one section divided into two parts: (1) a description of each show and its core concerns; and (2) a comparison across these shows and their structures, employing an intersectional analytic framework that connects disablement to gender, sex, sexuality, race, and class. notably, extrinsic genre norms associated with certain kinds of shows (e.g., dramas, comedies) are constantly evolving. while the broadcast shows we analyzed can more clearly be described as traditional dramas or sitcoms, the shows on cable or streaming platforms belong to newly emerging structures (i.e., shows marketed or classified as comedies that nonetheless reflect dramatic topics and storytelling choices). here, we refer to such shows as “comedies.” show disability genre character diagnosis status air dates atypical autism 30-minute streaming “comedy” sam gardner explicit series regular / protagonist 2017 to present; 3 seasons the good doctor autism 42-minute broadcast drama shaun murphy explicit series regular / protagonist 2017 to present; 4 seasons speechless cerebral palsy 21-minute broadcast sitcom jj dimeo explicit series regular / protagonist 2016 to 2019; 3 seasons special cerebral palsy 15-minute streaming “comedy” ryan hayes explicit series regular / protagonist 2019 to present; 1 season shameless (u.s.) fasd 60-minute cable “comedy” carl gallagher coded / retrospective series regular / peripheral 2011 present; 11 seasons table 1. description of television shows analyzed. representation matters studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 331 autism atypical the coming-of-age netflix “comedy” atypical (rashid et al., 2017-present) was initially advertised around main character, autistic 18-year-old sam, questing for sex and (secondarily) romance. sam attends a mainstream high school and later college, sees a therapist and eventually works with a peer group and college disability services office, works in an electronics store, and has a passion for penguins. the series heavily features sam’s mother (elsa), father (doug), sister (casey), best friend (zahid), and girlfriend (paige). the lead actor, keir gilchrist, is not autistic, and the original team did not seem to include autistic consultants; both moves were criticized in the reception of season one, especially by autistic reviewers (e.g., luterman, 2018). season two addressed these criticisms by hiring autistic consultants and casting autistic actors for sam’s peer group, only a few of whom get much development. atypical focuses primarily on the heterosexual romance plot of a straight, white, academically-achieving artistic young man, and on the family drama surrounding his coming of age. it focuses heavily on sam’s parents’ relationship(s) and how sam’s parents reflect on sam and autism. much attention is given to autism mom tropes that are beyond the scope of this paper (see jack, 2014). disability justice issues sometimes appear against this backdrop: paige convinces the school to hold a “silent dance” (season 1, episode 8, “the silencing properties of snow”) to help sam avoid sensory overload; doug becomes involved in first-responder training after an officer misreads sam’s behaviour as criminally suspicious and arrests him. while both plots feature advocacy on behalf of sam (whether he wants it or not), season three implicitly critiques this advocacy when sam misses his appointment with college disability services. elsa attempts to navigate the services for him but finds that the office will only talk to students directly. when sam later engages with disability services, it is his own choice. it is difficult to say that atypical comes from an autistic point of view. sam is the main character and narratively bookends most episodes. sound and camera angles do often create an insider view to sam’s experiences of sensory overload. however, while the humour sometimes reflects sam’s sense of humour, jokes also seem to be at his expense. sam is not always given a say in key events in his own life, especially early in the series. the good doctor the good doctor (shore et al., 2017-present), an american medical drama, focuses on shaun murphy, a surgical resident recruited to work in a major metropolitan hospital. shaun – played by freddie highmore, who is not john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 332 autistic (finn, 2020) – is both autistic and a savant. the show navigates his capacity to be a “good doctor” despite the challenges he faces (e.g., difficulty communicating). the show has received both praise and criticism from autistic audiences, as well as researchers. sometimes heralded for its accuracy in depicting an autistic man (baños et al., 2018; nguyen, 2017) and perceived positive representation (moore, 2019), criticisms of the show include its “alleged commodification of people with autism” (stark, 2020, p. 2), with shaun’s character being an easy to accept and consume marketfriendly portrayal of an autistic person (duan et al., 2018; skudra, 2018). the central drama of the good doctor, beyond weekly medical cases, reflects tension between shaun’s surgical competence and his perceived poor coping mechanisms, social skills, decision-making, and bedside manner. given the interplay between autistic representation and representations of savantism, shaun often outshines his colleagues. however, despite his strengths, his excellence is often positioned in contrast to perceived deficits, including difficulty grasping the intricacies of doctor-patient relationships and hospital politics (baños et al., 2018). like sam in atypical, shaun is a straight white male protagonist. unlike sam, shaun conforms more to the savant trope in terms of difficulties and exceptionalities. his surgical skills and medical knowledge are foregrounded and externalized as imagined three-dimensional anatomical imagery, demonstrating shaun’s neuroatypicality and his application of that neuroatypicality to accomplish amazing feats. however, this element of the show has been criticized for reinforcing the notion that autistic people are always savants with a special skill or talent (baños et al., 2018; draaisma, 2009; nordahl-hansen et al., 2018). the good doctor explores many sources of discriminatory and prejudicial attitudes, including how hospital managers may find it difficult to accept that an autistic person can be a good professional (baños et al., 2018) and can succeed with ongoing positive support from mentors and friends. in season one, shaun often faces disrespect from patients, their families, and colleagues. these attitudes are critiqued when hunter, a man with quadriplegia, argues in season 1, episode 16 (“pain”) that “other doctor[s] started with a basic level of respect. it’s implied: they’re competent.” cerebral palsy speechless speechless (gernon et al., 2016-2019),4 an american sitcom, starred micah fowler (an actor with cp) as jimmy “jj” dimeo jr., the eldest of three 4 some of our discussion about speechless is derived from earlier work (see aspler & cascio, 2018). representation matters studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 333 children in a nuclear working-class family. the cast also includes his mother (maya), father (jimmy), brother (ray), sister (dylan), and speech aide (kenneth). although jj is ostensibly the protagonist, in its first season, jj’s younger brother ray served as an occasional audience surrogate, watching and supporting jj. speechless effectively addresses complex topics associated with disability across its entire run, ranging from an episode about “inspiration porn” (young, 2012) to reflections on ableist slurs, financial planning and support needs, disability and sexual activity, and accessible spaces. given its episodic format, many such topics are addressed within the confines of a single episode, which is how speechless can sometimes avoid addressing those same topics in every situation. for example, in season 1, episode 15 (“t-h- the c-l--club”), an unrealistically effective electronic communication board serves as a launching point for jj to consider dismissing kenneth as his speech aide – something the audience knows would be unlikely given typical tv acting contracts. this board exists to create and resolve narrative tension between jj and kenneth. when jj reveals that he feels like a burden, and kenneth assures jj that he is not, the board disappears from the world of the show forever, despite being such a useful tool. in reality, the board might be a financially inaccessible piece of equipment, or else could compliment jj’s use of an aide rather than be seen as supplanting him. special special (dokoza et al., 2019-present) is a semi-autobiographical show written, produced by, and starring ryan o’connell, a young gay white man with self-described “mild” cp, as a heightened version of himself seeking independence. ryan is about to start a new job as an unpaid intern at a feminist magazine (eggwoke) when he is hit by a car. he then uses this experience to explain his mobility challenges, rather than tell others about his cp. even before the accident, ryan feared telling people he is “gay and disabled.”5 ryan also has a codependent relationship with his mother, karen, echoing some of the tropes explored in atypical and embraced comedically by speechless. rounding out the cast are ryan’s only friend and ally at work (kim, a plus-sized indian-american woman and the most successful writer at eggwoke), ryan’s offensive boss (olivia, who runs eggwoke to exploit feminist discourse for profit), ryan’s love interest (carey), and his mother’s love interest (phil). overall, special explores the intersection of queer 5 in some ways, special seems to embrace a common misperception that frames intersectionality as additive, rather than constitutive (yuval-davis, 2006); as in, difficult experiences of being gay and disabled are added together, rather than seen as inextricable or constitutive of ableist homophobia or homophobic ableism. john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 334 identity and disability, internalized ableism, codependence, and falling through the cracks with a mild disability. fetal alcohol spectrum disorder shameless u.s. adapted from the british series of the same name, shameless u.s. (wells et al., 2011-present) is a “comedy” on showtime. shameless centres around the gallaghers, portrayed as poor, working class, and dysfunctional. frank gallagher, a single father of six (fiona, phillip, ian, debbie, carl, and liam), often spends his time drunk or scheming for money to get drunk. the show explores the diverse and often unhealthy relationships among the gallaghers via their interactions with frank as family patriarch and fiona as a stand-in parent. over its extended run, the show has explored many complex intersecting social determinants of health, including substance use, mental illness, poverty, crime, and adverse childhood experiences. shameless establishes early that each of the gallagher children were conceived while their parents were under the influence of several substances, including alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy, and acid. fans of the show have long speculated that the gallagher children could potentially all have developmental challenges because of these diverse prenatal substance exposures (secrecykilled, 2017). in shameless’ seventh season, one of the youngest gallagher children, carl, is indicated (perhaps jokingly) to have fasd. in an argument between carl and frank in season 7, episode 6 (“the defenestration of frank”), frank sarcastically congratulates carl for putting “...three words together! i told the doctors that fetal alcohol syndrome wouldn’t wreck your brain.” as the only known example of a series regular with fasd on tv, it is clear that fasd is the least commonly represented of the experiences considered in this paper. while carl’s disability is never explicitly addressed on shameless, this one-off line allows the audience to read (and reread) the story of carl as being about a person with fasd. when the narrative does focus on him, his stories are mostly about a troubled, impulsive, and violent child who does not comprehend the consequences of his actions and who performs poorly in school. his early behaviours include sociopathic tendencies framed as humorous representations of carl’s “dark future” and “budding psychosis” (season 1, episode 6, “killer carl”), including burning toys, abusing animals, and assembling an electric chair for a barbie doll. in later seasons, carl’s behaviours escalate to further violence, selling drugs, and eventually being sentenced to juvenile detention. interestingly, the show does not always frame these behaviours as a problem. given its dark comedic tone, carl’s apparent sociopathy sometimes enables him to be the hero, such as in season 1, episode 5 (“three boys”) representation matters studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 335 when he violently defeats bullies with a baseball bat or knocks out a predatory priest. however, while fasd stakeholders were happy about the introduction of a character with fasd (fetal alcohol spectrum disorder ottawa, 2016), the show’s reliance on carl’s destructive behaviours plays into common stereotypes of adults, particularly men, with fasd as violent, dangerous, and irredeemable villains or criminals (aspler et al., 2018). behaviours like hyperactivity or difficulties with emotional regulation and attention, as well as the assumption that individuals with fasd will have a poor life trajectory, can contribute to ongoing negative attitudes, perceptions, and stigma toward individuals with fasd (bell et al., 2016). therefore, while the inclusion of a character with fasd on tv is an important step forward, reliance on these stereotyped representations remains significantly problematic. structure of the television shows analyzed each show has a very different storytelling structure and style. both speechless and the good doctor have more traditional episodic formats, with the good doctor featuring standalone medical cases of the week that thematically connect to the doctors’ personal lives, and speechless resetting to the status quo at the start of most episodes. these shows reflect the expected extrinsic norms of traditional broadcast dramas and sitcoms, even as they develop their own intrinsic storytelling norms. in contrast, atypical, shameless, and special represent different versions of serialized “comedy” blending dramatic and comedic storytelling norms, on streaming platforms or cable networks, with stories that often continue seamlessly across episodes in contrast to more self-contained episodic cases or situations. atypical was produced for a streaming platform (netflix), so its structure is not defined by advertisement breaks, has a fairly linear storytelling style, and all episodes in a season appear online simultaneously. shameless is a 60-minute semisatirical “comedy” airing weekly on cable, where the characters swear excessively and the show explores more mature themes. special has the most unique structure (like atypical, produced for netflix), acting more as a series of vignettes given its short 15-minute runtime, almost entirely focused on – and told from – ryan’s point of view. intersectional analysis of television shows about autistic and disabled characters discussions of autism, social justice, and media are incomplete without an intersectional analysis of the ways different identities are represented. a commitment to social justice is key both to intersectional approaches (crenshaw, 1989; hankivsky et al., 2014) and the neurodiversity paradigm john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 336 used in the autistic rights movement (strand, 2017). intersectional framing includes an understanding of who benefits and who is excluded from the stories we choose to tell, and the upholding of long-standing assumptions or stereotypes about their social locations and challenges (e.g., the autistic savant narrative of the good doctor). despite the relevance of intersectional approaches within social justice movements, the shows analyzed in this paper display notable silences. media portrayals of disability commonly rely on stereotypes that frame people as pitiable, exceptional, burdensome, or villainous (barnes, 1992; darke, 1998; worrell, 2018). while each show conforms to some of these stereotypes sometimes, some also centre disablement and disabled characters in ways that challenge stereotypes and inject nuance into disability representation. however, even as portrayals of disability have grown in complexity, those same portrayals often fail to contend with intersecting experiences. specifically, these shows emphasize intersections of disability with whiteness and masculinity, without attending to the particularity of these experiences – potentially inappropriately universalizing them. while human lives cannot be reduced to single characteristics (hankivsky et al., 2014), most shows included here emphasize a characters’ neuroatypicality or disability as their central or defining characteristic. all five shows feature white male protagonists, mostly framed as straight, high achieving, and relatively financially well off. their identities inform their experiences in relation to neuroatypicality or disablement, but a presumption of whiteness and maleness enables these shows to remain silent on issues tied to race, sex, and gender. it is their atypicality that is marked and reflected explicitly in storytelling, despite the kinds of stories actually told being inextricably linked to, and constitutive of, their gender, sex, and race. although we do not aim to imply an additive approach to antioppression work or representation (yuval-davis, 2006), some of what is reflected in the media we analyzed implicitly embraces an additive model. disability, sex, gender, and sexuality both atypical and the good doctor centre young, white, academically successful, heterosexual men, reinforcing stereotyped imagery of an autistic person as white and male (matthews, 2019), while challenging stereotypical images of autistic people as non-sexual and uninterested in relationships (bennett et al., 2019). although the good doctor plays into the savant trope, atypical resists this trope by showing sam facing academic and artistic challenges. these challenges, especially in season three, parallel those of his non-autistic friends and family. both shows balance the protagonists’ strengths with a heavy reliance on burden tropes that instead centre the voices of family, employers, and friends. representation matters studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 337 similarly, both speechless and special initially focus on sexuality and disability, an important topic given that disabled people broadly are sometimes viewed as non-sexual. notably, special features a gay protagonist, which provides another lens on the same topic. in both shows, the burden trope is somewhat challenged by the protagonists seeking independence, especially from their overbearing mothers, a theme shared by atypical. while these shows emphasize overbearing mother stereotypes, shameless explores the contrasting selfish mother stereotype for individuals with fasd (aspler et al., 2018). monica, a largely absent mother who struggles with her own ongoing substance use and mental illness, is often vilified by her children, which reinforces misconceptions that women who use substances during pregnancy just do not love their children enough and that there is a certain type of woman who uses substances during pregnancy. shameless contrasts with the other representations of neuroatypical or disabled protagonists we analyzed in important ways. for example, most of carl’s story focuses on violence and criminality in poor socioeconomic circumstances. while autism is generally associated with whiteness and high socioeconomic status (jack, 2014; matthews, 2019), fasd is often constructed as a diagnosis for the marginalized (flannigan et al., 2018) with emphasis on the prevalence of fasd among special populations, including children in care, justice-involved individuals, and indigenous communities. these shows raise questions about the inclusivity of their production practices and their audiences. these shows do not all include people with disabilities as stars, consultants, writers, directors, or producers. whether a show centres either the voices of autistic and disabled people or the voices of their families can imply that, while a show may be about autism or disability, it might not be intended or understood as primarily for autistic or disabled people. this concern additionally permeates their handling of intersectionality both within disability communities and society in general. the concept of disability reflects an extraordinary breadth of experience. both special and speechless tackle these differences by raising questions about pan-disability solidarity, stigma, boundary work, and privilege. in both cases, categories of disability are carved up and set above and below each other – at times on purpose, directly exploring and critiquing boundaries, and at others, uncritically and implicitly endorsing those boundaries. for example, ryan tells his physiotherapist in season 1, episode 1 (“cerebral lolzy”): “i’m so fucking jealous of bob... it must be freeing to be so disabled... i’m not able-bodied enough to be hanging in the mainstream world, but i’m not disabled enough to be hanging around with the cool [physiotherapy] crowd.” this discussion, while framed as dark humour, ties ryan’s genuine and complex concerns about different experiences of disability to his self-loathing, internalized ableism, and decision to pretend he was hit by a car. his physiotherapist pushes back by arguing that ryan is “lucky” and “privileged” and that his comment was “offensive.” in contrast, after a blind date with michael, a d/deaf man, ryan reflects that he “can still john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 338 do better than a deaf guy” (season 1, episode 7, “blind deaf date”). although ryan is critiqued and learns from this experience, michael never returns. he exists solely as a punchline and so ryan can reflect on his internalized ableism. similarly, speechless creates a boundary between physical and intellectual disabilities when jj’s mother explains to a rude stranger in the pilot that “he’s all there upstairs,” a comment that shifts stigma away from one kind of disabled person onto another. speechless later returns to this topic with nuance when one of ray’s crushes uses the “r-word” in season 1, episode 21 (“p-r--prom”). ray concludes, it’s not about jj and [the r-word] not being an accurate description of him. what about people who do think a different way or at a different pace? should we reference them in a nasty way when we do something dumb because we think it’s cute? although “dumb” is also an ableist slur, speechless aims to demonstrate solidarity between different experiences of neuroatypicality and disability. boundary work is not explored in either autism-focused show, but the focus on high-achieving protagonists supports similar boundaries, with the good doctor endorsing the savant trope, and both the good doctor and atypical representing experiences of autism without intellectual disability. this trend in representation implicitly reinforces misconceptions that social justice movements such as the neurodiversity movement do not include people with intellectual disabilities, whereas in practice, neurodiversity advocates repeatedly challenge such misconceptions (vivian et al., n.d.). moreover, neurodiversity advocates have long asserted the relevance of neurodiversity not just as an autistic activism movement, but a broader disability rights movement inclusive of all people (vivian et al., n.d.). discussion of boundary work and possibilities for pan-disability solidarity in some shows introduce the possibility for engagement with these ideas, a possibility currently underexplored in television featuring autistic characters. each show engages with sex, gender, and sexuality through the lens of male protagonists. at times, they lean toward toxic masculinity; jj and sam were both initially portrayed as sex-driven teens. this portrayal may serve to normalize jj and sam as just like other teenage boys. however, the shows demonstrate their interest through scenes of boundary-violating behaviours, such as when jj becomes the cheerleaders’ manager (a non-existent position), secretively using his laser pointer to indicate his interest in parts of their bodies, or when sam breaks into his therapist’s house to leave her a romantic gift. these portrayals contend with an assumption that paradoxically co-exists with the idea of disabled people as non-sexual (i.e., that neuroatypical people are inherently sexually inappropriate or dangerous). shameless may also reinforce this trope. carl is portrayed as over-sexed, frequently masturbating, and obsessed with women’s body parts, although this is not explicitly representation matters studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 339 described as disability-related and may instead reflect adolescent development coupled with adverse childhood experiences and a lack of parental supervision. in contrast, the good doctor challenges these assumptions by demonstrating shaun’s caring and supportive attitude toward his partner, and her respect for his challenges, as they become more intimate. speechless and atypical also challenge these assumptions. despite early examples of inappropriate overtures, both sam and jj are later shown to be good, caring, and safe partners. in season 3, episode 21 (“the s-t-a- staircase”), when jj meets his girlfriend izzy’s parents, they assume he could never have or act on sexual desires. after jj and izzy conspire to prove them wrong by getting caught in bed, her father arrives home and angrily yells at them while helping jj down the stairs. though speechless leans on problematic gendered (and racialized) tropes in the angry, overprotective latino father, it also problematizes common assumptions about people with disabilities as unthreatening, cute, or non-sexual (medina-rico et al., 2017). similarly, in atypical, sam’s character arc later rests heavily on developing a mutually caring relationship with his girlfriend paige. special also focuses heavily on sexuality and romance, with the notable distinction that the protagonist is gay. while jj and sam are awkward teenagers excited and scared to find love and have sex for the first time, ryan is in his 20s and sexually inexperienced, which distresses him. in season 1, episode 2 (“the deep end”), when ryan attempts to engage in intimacy, his inexperience and discomfort become clear. his would-be partner ends their alone time, leaving ryan feeling hurt. the show is ambiguous as to whether ryan is hurt because he thinks that his inexperience or his (undisclosed) cp was at the root of the rejection. certainly, ryan thinks that his inexperience is at least in part tied to his disability. ultimately, ryan loses his virginity to a sex worker. the framing of the experience is extremely supportive of sex work and the act enables ryan, going forward, to have more confidence in himself. while the shows about cp and autism challenge various sex-negative stereotypes about disabled people, they also sometimes reinforce negative attitudes and stereotypes about women. in speechless, jj’s brother ray’s poor behaviour toward women receives encouragement from their father, who suggests he should hide how much scheming is involved in his interactions with girls, rather than change his attitude. sam receives similar encouragement from his father. the metatext seems, initially, oblivious to how ray’s possessive and entitled attitude toward women conforms to the nice guy trope – that some men (perhaps via geek masculinity) understand relationships as an exchange in which they pay the currency of niceness (through words, acts, and gifts) to win the goods of a kiss, a relationship, or a hookup (salter & blodgett, 2017). however, the writing does evolve as ray’s worst qualities become heightened, and he shifts from audience surrogate to mockable know-it-all in season two. later, in the series finale (season 3, episode 22, “u-n-r--unrealistic”), speechless explicitly interrogates john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 340 ray’s sexism. as the only boy on a school trip, he assumes he can choose any girl he wants, but after several rejections, he asks: “am i really that bad?” he then conducts an elaborate focus group with the girls in his grade that serves as a metatextual reflection on the reasons why ray is so unlikeable. in atypical, doug only changes his advice when he realizes the object of sam’s affection is his therapist. while speechless rarely challenges ray’s attitude toward women, it does feature complex female characters in maya and dylan. atypical, on the other hand, frequently portrays women as disruptive, dangerous, and corrupting forces. paige’s stress often acts as comic relief, with little exploration of the idea that paige’s reactions could be indicative of neuroatypicality and, regardless, should be worthy of empathy and support. similarly, women’s sexuality is framed as especially dangerous: elsa cheats and disrupts the family; zahid’s relationship leads him to break off his friendship with sam; and in season 3, episode 1 (“best laid plans”), sam misses a deadline and blames paige for “distract[ing him] with the promise of sex.” while there is some narrative pushback, sexuality – especially women’s sexuality – is nevertheless often portrayed as a corrupting influence. atypical also often reproduces essentialist understandings of gender roles, including overbearing mothers and uninvolved fathers among other hidden conservative tropes (see romero, 2017). however, sam’s tomboy-coded sister, casey, is one exception to these framings. when casey develops feelings for a female friend in the third season, sam models acceptance by reassuring her that it would not be “a problem” (in casey’s words) if she dated a girl (season 3, episode 9, “sam takes a walk”). while casey’s sexuality does lead to a breakup with her boyfriend, it is not treated as threatening in the same way as paige, elsa, zahid’s toxic girlfriend, or even sam’s sexuality. moreover, sam’s explicit support of casey seems to suggest a link between sam’s autistic perspective and queer acceptance. disability, race, and class these shows also engage with race through the lens of white protagonists. atypical features strong supporting characters of colour, including best friend zahid and members of sam’s peer group like jasper and amber; however, the show has also been criticized for portraying many characters of colour as villains (romero, 2017). similarly, while almost all of shaun’s colleagues or superiors on the good doctor are people of colour, few initially believe in him save for his white father figure and mentor. these shows nonetheless remain largely silent on race, especially compared to shows like speechless and special, despite clear opportunities to reflect on racialized experiences of disability. the clearest example of this silence in atypical surfaces in season 2, episode 6 (“in the dragon’s lair”) when sam faces police harassment while overwhelmed. sam provides a white face for this issue, but in doing so, representation matters studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 341 allows the show to be silent about police mistreatment of autistic people of colour. since sam is white, the narrative can choose to ignore the possibility of police brutality; an officer (himself a person of colour) interprets sam’s atypical behaviour as “tweaking” and only escalates the situation when sam’s friend zahid (also a person of colour) “charge[s]” in to help. the officer never frames sam as a danger to be beaten or killed, but as simply atypical enough to be arrested. the resolution to the situation is even more telling; doug and zahid frame the officer's actions as a problem to correct, not an expected outcome or daily occurrence to manage. this silence is especially notable considering intersectional approaches to police violence in autistic self-advocacy spaces such as the u.s. autistic self-advocacy network (strand, 2017). speechless most explicitly engages with race through jj’s speech aide, kenneth. jj replaces his first aide, a white woman who refuses to voice jj’s colourful word choices, with kenneth after hearing his “cooler” and, for jj, more authentic voice. black masculinity is often configured as cool, which speechless both explores with nuance and casually exploits. speechless also directly explores the overlap between the marginalization experienced by jj and kenneth, for example in season 1, episode 12 (“h-e-r---hero”), when kenneth points out the similarity between inspiration porn and the “magical negro” trope, “where the black character is just there to help the white guy on his journey and he mainly speaks in folksy sayings” (in kenneth’s words; see also hughey, 2009). on shameless, race is portrayed with complexity across the show’s long run. however, in relation to carl, race is explored through his appropriation of black culture as he begins to perform negative stereotypes associated with male blackness, particularly his language use, clothing style, and friend choices, as he joins a gang and starts selling drugs. while kenneth’s blackness is configured as cool on speechless, black masculinity on shameless is portrayed as toxic and aligns with the worst stereotypes about black men and communities of colour, especially in light of the show’s emphasis on poverty and the experiences of working-class individuals (adopted from its predecessor’s narrative of the “underclass” after thatcherism in the united kingdom; nunn & biressi, 2010). special more implicitly explores these issues. in season 1, episode 4 (“housechilling party”), ryan’s co-worker kim describes her experience of being marginalized as “a non-skinny, non-white girl” who has to “work overtime. it’s like ‘hey, i’m a voluptuous brown girl, but i'm wearing a $448 dress and i got a blowout, so i'm safe! accept me!’ it’s exhausting. and expensive. i’m in so much debt.” in this way, kim reflects on how her marginalization at the intersection of race and class are inextricable. special explores this intersection further by criticizing the exploitation of marginalization at eggwoke, where kim’s pieces about her lived experiences drive a huge amount of eggwoke’s traffic and reader consumption. john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 342 economic exploitation of marginalized identities is not the only important way class figures into these narratives. in many instances class is often only discussed when necessary for plot or character motivation; financial concerns are otherwise ignored. on speechless, the dimeos argue with insurance companies, their bathroom has no door, and their roof is covered by a tarp. however, the family does not appear concerned by certain other expenses. like in the previously discussed electronic communication board example, we can understand these inconsistencies within the structure of a sitcom, which removes barriers or presents challenges when narratively convenient (mittell, 2004). ray especially struggles with pressure to be or appear wealthy. while often framed as a joke, ray’s desires are nuanced when he explains that it has all been “for jj” (season 1, episode 19, “c-h— cheater!”). while class issues feature centrally in speechless and shameless, class figures ambiguously in special and atypical. certainly, kim’s concerns about appearing respectable reflect racialized class concerns. however, it is unclear how well ryan relates to kim’s dilemma. ryan is attempting to establish himself professionally in an unpaid internship and a new apartment. while ryan’s mother criticizes the unpaid nature of the internship, he works more for respect than out of financial necessity, as he has the support of his (single) mother and the money his mom won in suing the hospital that ryan calls his “cp money” (season 1, episode 3, “free scones”). this description might allude to an unexplored aspect of ryan’s struggle with identity and selfloathing, by constructing cp as primarily an injury to be compensated for. atypical also presents a picture of a middle-class white family living in the suburbs, although sam’s family does face financial limitations. casey is admitted to private school on an athletic scholarship and frequently feels out of place and judged. however, like in speechless, other massive expenses pass without comment, like sam buying a canoe. on the good doctor, shaun is shown to have grown up in poverty, before running away from home and being taken in by dr. glassman. shaun’s story is one of upward mobility where he has struggled to overcome early adversity to excel in a stable profession with a high income ceiling. while shaun initially lives in somewhat lower socioeconomic circumstances (e.g., sparsely furnished apartment, difficulty paying rent without a roommate), he quickly seems to succeed both personally and financially as a resident at a major metropolitan hospital. conclusion the results of our analysis demonstrate that while more portrayals of neuroatypical and disabled characters on television are emerging, representations exploring the nuanced intersections of disability in society are clearly needed to promote social justice inclusive of neuroatypical and representation matters studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 343 disabled people. positive representation includes highlighting the agency of disabled people, centring their strengths, and representing solutions to access barriers, all of which promote social justice by imagining inclusive fictional worlds that can inspire change in the real world. while the shows described here do include some of these representations, they also reproduce negative tropes (some more than others). autism-focused shows reproduce tropes of the autistic person as a savant, a burden, and at times as creepy, dangerous, or rude. comparison with shows featuring fasd and cp suggest that fasd is underrepresented (and deficit-focused), but that representations of cp have more successfully included actors and consultants with the featured disability. this difference may be related, at least in part, to visibility; while autism and fasd are sometimes described and understood as invisible; cp (being motor-related) is harder to “hide.” casting decisions might also reflect implicit biases about whose stories are worthy of being told and by whom. attention to intersectionality also reveals the limited range of stories being told about disability and their emphasis on disability as the central social location of the characters. they maintain the “unmarkedness” or default assumption of white, male, non-disabled heterosexuality. this focus on white male protagonists serves to bracket disability as the only part of social identity that matters for them, despite the sometimes-explicit ways heterosexuality, masculinity, and whiteness very much matter in, and are constitutive of, their narratives. while individual stories of white autistic and disabled men are indeed important, the collective focus on white men’s experiences misses an opportunity to represent the diverse experiences of disabled people of any sexuality, gender, race, or class. notably, while these shows do represent a range of experiences with class, the tendency to consider money only when convenient for the plot of a single episode may minimize the financial barriers facing many autistic and disabled people, portraying these barriers as easily resolved and not worth the long-term attention (e.g., in policy) that they warrant. tv storytelling choices, at least among the shows we identified, are often a matter of convenience. in these instances, disability is neither convenient nor the norm in terms of representation (for characters, actors, writers, or directors). that same idea of storytelling convenience can extend into other areas of social experience tied to race, gender, sexuality, and class, where we see predominantly white straight men as default protagonists. introducing other intersecting concerns as fundamental to a show’s storyworld could complicate narratives beyond what a show about disability, structured in less complex formats like episodic medical dramas or family sitcoms or even simpler serialized dramas, could support. yet these shows, while often tackling complex issues tied to disability well, may not be structured to support intersecting stories. however, in its best form, tv can help us actively imagine a world with fewer barriers. given the results of our analysis, we support recommendations for more diverse stories about autistic people as well as people with other john aspler, kelly d. harding & m. ariel cascio studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 323-348, 2022 344 neuroatypical or disabling experiences, including representations of strengths and successes, inclusion of disabled actors, and input from disabled individuals in storyline creation, writing, directing, and production. we also recommend that shows not bracket disability as the one thing a show addresses by reflecting on how presumed white maleness informs the stories being told and by including the stories of other kinds of people. this recommendation is in line with the way television is often structured, where shows aiming for longevity and renewal must often move beyond their original premise to maintain interest. increasing diversity, especially diversity of autistic and disabled characters, would serve this purpose. finally, we recommend more research on representation, disability, social justice, and television structure that critically explores these representations and their role in society, including the advancement of media disability studies to understand how diverse audiences receive, engage with, and construct understandings of neuroatypicality and disability as part of their larger communities. despite the concerns we raise in this paper about existing portrayals of autistic and disabled people on scripted television, we have seen an overall trend toward increasingly complex representations. what was once described and coded as quirky has become explicit, with recent shows being centrally about autism, autistic experiences, or disability broadly – as in the new show, everything’s gonna be okay (2020), which features an autistic teenage girl as a series regular portrayed by an autistic actor. we hope this trend continues and call for more attention to 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(2018). disability in the media: examining stigma and identity. lexington books. young, s. (2012, july 2). we’re not here for your inspiration. abc news. https://www.abc.net.au/rampup/articles/2012/07/02/3537035.htm yuval-davis, n. (2006). intersectionality and feminist politics. european journal of women's studies, 13(3), 193-209. canaras final correspondence address: alison canaras, mary frances early college of education, university of georgia, athens, ga 30602, usa; email: alison.canaras@uga.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 291-293, 2022 book review cultivating genius: an equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy gholdy muhammad. (2020). scholastic. isbn 9781338594898 (paper/ebook) cdn$33.01; 176 pages. alison canaras university of georgia, usa cultivating genius introduces a new educational framework, one that is “written by people of color and designed for children of color” (p. 11, emphasis added). muhammad coins this framework as historically responsive literacy, or hrl. historically responsive literacy is sensitive to and appreciative of black history, rejects watered-down skills-based scripted curriculums and re-centers student voice and literacy as an act of power while also fostering a space of love, resistance, deep intellect, and criticality. when practiced, muhammad’s hrl is likely to positively reshape and reframe entire educational experiences for black and brown students and educators. the book opens with a foreword by bettina love, advocate and author on behalf of abolitionist teaching practices, who compares muhammad’s work to that of resistors like ella baker and angela davis, amongst others (p. 7). love rightfully describes cultivating genius as a significant contribution in the struggle and solidarity for justice. to me, the genius of this book lies in the way muhammad finds the illusive sweet spot between offering guidance to teachers and avoiding scripted, teacher-proof curricula. muhammad’s authorship mirrors what she urges teachers to provide students, as she creates a space for professional growth that simultaneously allows teachers to reexamine their practices through a critical lens and gives them the skills to rebuild their learning spaces in their own, creative fashion. teachers are left with both a scathing critique of a system that prioritizes standardized testing and corporate interest, as well as the tools to resist that system and uplift students. alison canaras studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 291-293, 2022 292 in the first section of the book, muhammad providers readers with some of the historical context that informs hrl. here, she points out that during a time when reading and writing was illegal for many black people in the united states, members of black literacy societies of the 19th century, such as “reading room for men of color,” risked their lives both to be heard and to affect change. muhammad calls on educators to return this historically rooted power of literary presence to students. she then builds upon that history to suggest teachers make space in schools for students to have similar experiences of sharing their literacies with one another, a practice that black literacy societies cultivated so well (p. 28). muhammad’s proposal of student literacy as an artful performance, a tool for resistance, and a means for students to have their voices genuinely heard, is also a call to re-center students’ power in classrooms. this suggestion promotes schools as more equitable spaces for black and brown students, and draws upon the important histories to which those students are connected and from which we all can learn. throughout this first section, muhammad acknowledges that this understanding of literacy as resistance and power is not something that she or any other contemporary educator is inventing anew. on the contrary, she maintains that the best educators are those who learn and build from historical and cultural contexts and examples, including and not limited to the group of black high school students who published demands for better conditions in schools in 1969, and the black elementary school students who were arrested for protesting segregation in 1963 (pp. 43-46). here, muhammad celebrates the prioritization and power of intellectual collectivism practiced in black literacy societies and beyond, and criticizes its sharp contrast to what she deems as the more contemporary state of individualist, capitalist-driven classrooms premised on “keep[ing] education to one’s self” (p. 26). in this first section muhmmad also points to some concrete tactics that educators can use to explicitly celebrate students’ histories, such as having students write autobiographies or interview family members of students with different cultural backgrounds to be shared within the class (p. 52); these tactics are developed more fully later in the book, in the book’s second section, muhammad outlines the components of the hrl framework, which are focused on cultivating identity, skills, intellect, and criticality. in developing identity, muhammad argues that students deserve “opportunities in school to explore multiple facets of selfhood, but also to learn about the identities of others who may differ” (p. 67). in terms of cultivating skills, muhammad recommends authentic, meaningful texts for educators as they teach explicit reading skills, rather than solely focusing on leveled texts, which reduce students’ academic identities down to an assigned skill level (p. 95). she exemplifies this by offering various writing rubrics that may be used, which evaluate writing skills without enforcing formulaic, restrictive writing guidelines (pp. 92-94). in cultivating the last two components of hrl, intellect and criticality, muhammad suggests engaging book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 291-293, 2022 293 students in topics related to their worlds, including but not limited to “politics, human rights and justice, economics, sociology, and business” (p. 102). in this way, students’ formulation of understanding and engagement with relevant, authentic topics allows them to take charge of their own meaning-making and to use their literacy as a means of power. muhammad argues that this makes for a more compassionate, human approach to literacy education (p. 117). in the third and final section of cultivating genius, muhammad synthesizes guidelines for how to implement hrl into classrooms, offering lesson suggestions and guidance for how to select, connect, and layer various texts to make them meaningful, historically responsive backdrops to any unit. in this way, teachers can utilize meaningful literacy, and students will be exposed to intellectually engaging works that make direct connections to their lives. muhammad suggests teaching a myriad of meaningful texts to accomplish this, such as laws, news articles, resistance writings, photography, and black newspapers. doing so, she argues, will help to challenge and cultivate students’ identity, skills, intellect, and critical capacities. in each of these lesson frameworks, as well as in the succinct interdisciplinary unit plan examples provided, muhammad provides explicit, applicable, and compelling advice and strategies for teachers to try, without scripting entire day-to-day unit and lesson plans for them to follow aimlessly. in this way, muhammad distinguishes herself as a leader in curriculum and instructional design. there is no universal, step-by-step guide to creating equitable and just classroom spaces. however, muhammad is clear that when texts are carefully and critically selected by teachers who are committed to practicing hrl, the avenues and possibilities for teaching and learning are limitless. she also is clear that while teachers are educated professionals and experts in their fields, we are surely not the only sources of knowledge and creation in classrooms. following this logic, muhammad consistently centers students in her hrl guidelines, reframing literacy instruction as one of love, power, and resistance, rooted in black history, and providing a theoretical framework that just might be the connection many teachers and students need between anti-racist pedagogical theory and practice. for teachers, muhammad’s framework is clear, digestible, and gives explicit guidance, all while allowing endless room for creativity and innovation in curriculum design. for students, historically responsive literacy might be one of the most effective entry points at bridging the gap between theory and their everyday lives. in other words, the hrl framework put forth in cultivating genius provides a transformative view of education, one which can be applied immediately in ways that allow for room – not large gaps – in interpretation and reinvention by teachers and learners alike. arrieta hernandez final before ts correspondence address: tania arrieta hernandez, school of business, university of leicester, leicester, uk, le1 7rh; email: tah32@leicester.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 the consequences of the austerity policies for public services in the uk tania arrieta hernandez university of leicester, uk abstract this article examines the changing landscape of public service provision in the uk during austerity. austerity is presented through the notions of retrenchment, decentralisation and shifts in governance. the analysis shows that retrenchment and decentralisation eroded the capacity of public institutions to protect the provision of vital public services. this is revealed through the reduced provision of non-statutory services and the reinforcement of inequalities in service provision. shifts in governance have led to mixed outcomes in the quality of services. this article also addresses how austerity influenced many of the problems observed in service provision during the covid-19 pandemic. vital public services in the uk faced the pandemic with a diminished resource base, heightened inequalities and significant fragmentation in service provision. keywords austerity; public services; retrenchment; decentralisation; governance; pandemic introduction in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2007-2009, the conservative-led coalition government in power in the uk between 2010 and 2015, implemented contractionary fiscal policies, better known as austerity policies. the government’s discourse focused on the need to reduce the public deficit caused by the alleged irresponsibility of the new labour government that was in power between 1997 and 2010. the fiscal consolidation was achieved through cuts in public expenditure rather than through increases in taxation. the coalition government stated that despite the budget cuts, public expenditure would be around 41% of nominal gdp, representing the same level of expenditure as in 2006-2007 (hm treasury, 2010). the forecast was not achieved and expenditure on public services in fact decreased from 44.7% in 2010-2011 to 37.9% in 2018-2019 as a proportion of gdp (hm treasury, 2019). boris johnson from the conservative party became the uk prime the consequences of the austerity policies for public services in the uk studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 519 minister in mid-2019 and released public expenditure above inflation for all public services after a decade of austerity. he released further expenditure during the covid-19 pandemic in 2020-2021 as a way to protect private firms, the nhs and communities in need. but public services had already been significantly impacted by a decade of budgetary constraints, inhibiting their capacity to overcome the increases in demand during the pandemic. this article examines the changing landscape of service provision in the uk during austerity through the lens of three lines of research: the retrenchment of the public sector, the decentralisation of power and shifts in governance. retrenchment relates to the reduction of the public sector through budgetary cuts that restricted the capacity of public institutions to protect statutory and non-statutory services. the decentralisation of power relates to the shift in responsibility from central to local government to fund and deliver local services despite authorities’ ability or willingness to accept it. shifts in governance relate to the public sector sharing responsibility for service delivery with other sectors (e.g., the private sector). the period of analysis of the austerity programme covered in this article is between 20102011 and 2018-2019. trends in six public services are analysed to provide an understanding of the changing landscape in service provision. the services analysed are the nhs, adult social care, children’s social care, education, housing and the police. only one study in the uk has analysed changes in service provision through the lens of these three lines of research and at the level of service provision (pownall, 2013). pownall analysed the impact that different policies under the austerity programme had on the nhs. this article extends the previous research by examining contemporary trends in service provision for a larger number of public services. the relevance of bringing together these three lines of research is that it provides a more complete picture of how austerity affected the delivery of vital public services in the uk. by carrying out the analysis at the level of public service it is possible to identify the different policies implemented by the uk government and their outcomes. this article also argues that austerity, conceptualised as the retrenchment of the public sector, decentralisation and shifts in governance, influenced many of the problems with regard to service provision that were visible during the covid-19 pandemic. only one study in the uk has explored this issue so far (daly, 2020). daly’s research shows that austerity fractured the social care sector and hampered its ability to overcome the struggles faced during the pandemic. this article extends the limited research available in this area by showing that budgetary constraints, variations in organisations’ spending capacity and fragmentation in service delivery fractured public institutions and affected their ability to overcome the social difficulties of 2020-2021. the period of analysis of the pandemic crisis covered in this article is from march 2020 (when the conservative government announced the first national lockdown) to march 2021. tania arrieta hernandez studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 520 this article makes three contributions to the austerity literature. first, it extends the understanding of how the provision of crucial services in the uk was affected by austerity. while the analysis reveals that the retrenchment of the public sector and the decentralisation of local government eroded the delivery of services, increased inequalities, and negatively impacted the vulnerable, the evidence on governance reveals a mixed picture regarding how the participation of the private and third sectors affected public services. second, the article provides an understanding of the challenges different public services faced during the pandemic as a result of a decade of austerity. finally, it provides a contemporary picture of the issues facing service provision in the uk due to the political choice to pursue austerity policies for a decade. understanding austerity scholars have provided an understanding of austerity through narratives on the retrenchment of the public sector (bach, 2016; lobao et al., 2018). the retrenchment of the public sector has been achieved through lower tax bases and decreases in public expenditure. in countries such as the uk and the usa, the governments have reduced the tax bases as a way to attract foreign investment and increase people’s participation in the labour market (arestis & pelagidis, 2010; mcgahey, 2013). as taxation is reduced, the main source of funding for the public sector is also reduced. governments have also pursued austerity through budgetary reductions and have presented these reductions as indispensable to reduce public deficits in order to regain the confidence of investors (kelton, 2015). such policies have been linked to a neoliberal project to continue discrediting the capacity of the public sector and to allow more involvement of the private sector in public affairs (grimshaw & rubery, 2012; levitas, 2012).1 budgetary reductions and the increased participation of private providers have eroded public institutions and their capacity to secure social reproduction (bach, 2012). this line of research is not only interested in assessing the scale of the reduction in public sector funding; it also provides an understanding of the implications of budgetary reductions (i.e., which societal groups the shrinking of the public sector affects the most) (grimshaw & rubery, 2012). the state is presented as a redistributive agent capable of balancing resources between wealthier and less wealthy communities (gray & barford, 2018) and as a guarantor of the rights needed to avoid the social exclusion of groups who face barriers to participation in the labour market (ottmann, 2010). in this regard, it is argued that cuts in public sector funding have a 1 the relation between neoliberal policies and austerity is that both have aimed to reduce the public sector as a way to develop the market. these policies share the notion that the public sector crowds out the private sector’s competitiveness and investment, leading to a decline in growth, high inflation and elevated unemployment. the consequences of the austerity policies for public services in the uk studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 521 disproportionately negative impact on the vulnerable (taylor-gooby & stoker, 2011). these arguments have been challenged by assessments of national budgets showing that public expenditure continues to represent a significant proportion of gdp in countries that have autonomously pursued austerity programmes (lenzi & zoppe, 2020). it is also challenged by the neoclassical proposition that argues in favour of reducing the public sector as a way to increase the private sector’s competitiveness and revenues (alesina & ardagna, 2010). the latter is said to have an equally positive impact on every household in the income distribution. the neoclassical argument is that the public sector crowds out the private sector's competitiveness, because the public sector offers wage premiums that force private firms to offer competitive wages, reducing the profitability of the latter sector. a second neoclassical argument is that releases of public expenditure can lead to public deficits, which affect investors’ confidence due to fear that government will default on its debt payments. authors have also provided an understanding of austerity through the rescaling literature that relates to decentralisation policies and the shift in responsibility for the delivery of services from central governments to local governments and municipalities (gray & barford, 2018). although decentralisation started long before austerity, it has been reinforced by budgetary reductions and the need for local states to offset cuts in grants through other revenue sources. authors who have opposed the reinforcement of decentralisation during a period of sustained spending reductions argue that these political strategies, which aim to support economic growth, do not consider differences in the collection revenue capacity of individual authorities (clelland, 2020). lowndes & gardner (2016) argue that these practices allow central governments to hold onto political power whilst decentralising operational responsibilities. in this regard, it becomes authorities’ responsibility to develop their local economies and to support the market if they want to deliver public services to their constituents. evidence of the negative implications of decentralisation, in particular of the inequalities that this political strategy creates, is presented by gray & barford (2018), who found that austerity reshaped the relationship between central and local government in britain, shrinking the capacity of local government and exacerbating territorial injustice. on the other hand, decentralisation has been perceived as an opportunity for local governments to have more autonomy in decision-making. governments have eschewed a one-size fits all approach and developed strategies that acknowledge and celebrate local variation (lowndes & gardner, 2016). decentralisation is perceived as a remedy for budgetary reductions as it allows local governments to increase and diversify their revenue sources to offset cuts in grants. it is through decentralisation that authorities get the opportunity to retain local resources to identify and address local needs (hlepas, 2016). bruch & white (2018) found, for example, that decentralisation in the usa in the last two decades, which was reinforced after the financial crisis, led to higher local spending tania arrieta hernandez studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 522 for some social programmes (e.g., childcare) and better identification of local needs. austerity has also been studied through narratives on the shift in the governance of public services. by shifts in governance researchers typically refer to new forms of relationship between the state and non-state, private and voluntary sector actors (lobao et al., 2018). the private and the third sectors become extensions of the public sector (myers, 2017). as the capacity of the public sector is diminished due to budgetary constraints, new actors are required to step in and provide services where the public sector is unable to continue doing so. although governments have not equated austerity with privatisation, they have implemented policies to increase the participation of private actors in public domains (adisson & artioli 2020; bach, 2012). in similar terms, humphris & sigona (2019) have pointed to the negative implications of allowing more involvement of the private sector in the provision of services, particularly in terms of quality deterioration. as vulnerable communities are more likely to be in need of public services (lowndes & pratchett, 2012), erosion of the quality of services is likely to affect these communities the most. hudson (2016) suggests that private firms tend to deliver lower quality services, in relation to the public and voluntary organisations, due to their need to reduce costs and maximize profits, which is done at the expense of sacrificing service quality. on the other hand, arguments in favour of an increased participation of private actors are grounded in public choice theory, which presents the public sector as an inefficient agent in terms of the allocation of public resources. they are also grounded in neoclassical economic theory, which presents public servants as selfish agents that are only interested in maximizing their personal budgets even though this means neglecting the communities they serve (wright, 1993). by exposing previously in-house services to a new environment characterised by market discipline and competition, the overall costs are reduced whilst the quality and efficiency of the services are improved (alonso & andrews, 2016). retrenchment of the public sector as shown in table 1, out of the six services analysed, only the expenditure on the nhs and children’s social care were protected in real terms during the austerity years. expenditure on the nhs increased in real terms by 10.6% from £100.4 billion to £111 billion between 2010-2011 and 2018-2019.2 this growth, however, was smaller in comparison to the years prior to the policies. the average annual expenditure growth in the nhs was 6.4% in real terms 2 nominal expenditure figures were collected from the house of commons (2019). the figures have been adjusted for inflation using the inflation index of q4 2010 and q4 2018 (91.1 and 106.9 respectively). here and elsewhere, these are the inflation indices used (ons 2019a). the consequences of the austerity policies for public services in the uk studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 523 between 2000-2001 and 2009-2010, but only 1.4% between 2010-2011 and 2018-2019 (house of commons, 2019). as a result of a growing demand for health services measured by the number of episodes, health spending per head declined by 8.5% from £5,837 to £5,339 in real terms.3 funding pressures in the nhs have also been the result of funding cuts to adult social care services. on average, the nhs spends £820 million annually treating older patients in hospitals who should be treated in local care home services (nao, 2016a). the decline in health spending has affected the oldest population more in relation to other age groups as spending per head increases with age. while people aged 80 years old and above represented only 4.95% of the total population in england in 2018-2019, they accounted for approximately 16.29% of the health spending.4 children’s social care is the only service on which authorities have consistently overspent since 20102011. in 2017-2018 alone, the total national overspend in children’s social care was £872m (nao, 2019a). even though local governments increased the funding for children’s social care in real terms by 20.1% from £6.6 billion to £7.9 billion between 2010-2011 and 2018-2019,5 many authorities were unable to cope with the increasing demand for children’s services (more detail below). the relative funding protection that the health and the children’s social care services received led to significant real cuts in other services, including adult social care services. adult social care spending per head, measured as adults in need (e.g., older people requiring support for daily activities), fell in real terms by 20.8% from £4,803 to £3,806 between 2010-2011 and 2018-2019.6 the government announced in the 2015 spending review that the spending for police forces would be protected in real terms (hm treasury, 2015). however, the budget for police forces fell by 18.7% in real terms between 2010-2011 and 2018-2019, and spending per head in the police service fell in real terms by 23.6% from £216 to £165.7 in education, spending per pupil also fell in real terms by 21.4% from £5,600 to £4,402 between 2010-2011 3 real expenditure figures of 2010 and 2018 were divided by the number of finished consultant episodes (17.2 million in 2010 and 20.8 million in 2018) (nhs england, 2019). 4 this estimation used data from the hospital episodes statistics (hes) regarding outpatient and inpatient episodes in 2018-2019 (nhs digital, 2019a). the national tariffs of 2018-2019 were also used to calculate an approximate expenditure by age group (nhs improvement, 2019). 5 nominal figures are from the mhclg (2013; 2019a) and were adjusted for inflation. 6 nominal figures are from the mhclg (2013; 2019a) and were adjusted for inflation. real expenditure figures for 2010 and 2018 were divided by an estimation of the number of adults in need. nao estimates that 28% of people aged between 65 and 80 years old are being limited with their day-to-day activities. this estimate doubles for people aged 80+ years old. these estimations were represented in the population of england for 2010 and for 2018. according to these estimates, there were three million adults in need in 2010 and 3.6 million in 2018. 7 nominal figures are from the mhclg (2013; 2019a) and were adjusted for inflation. expenditure figures for 2010 and 2018 were divided by the population in england and wales for 2010 and 2018 (55.6 million and 59.1 million respectively) (ons, 2019b). tania arrieta hernandez studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 524 and 2018-2019.8 school spending is an area that was relatively protected during austerity. yet, reductions in school spending and an increase in pupil numbers led to funding pressures in the delivery of education. there is evidence of a deterioration in the quality of the six public services due to budgetary reductions and insufficient public sector employee numbers. for example, some schools faced funding challenges, which resulted in compromising teaching quality, by relying on more unqualified staff and encouraging staff to teach outside of their specialism (nao, 2016b). in the police service this was evidenced by the increase in the number of days to charge criminal offences (nao, 2018a). expenditure changes in real terms for the six public services, between 201011 and 2018-19 figures in million service expenditure in 2010-11 (£) expenditure in 2018-19 (£) figures of 2018-19 adjusted for inflation (£) expenditure change in real terms (%) nhs 100,400 130,300 111,041 10.6 adult social care 14,408 16,076 13,700 -4.9 children social care 6,654 9,375 7,989 20.1 police service 11,982 11,425 9,736 -18.7 education service (schools) 45,362 45,150 38,477 -15.2 housing service 2,482 1,672 1,425 -42.6 table 1. expenditure changes in real terms for some services between 20102011 and 2018-2019 (sources: house of commons, 2019; mhclg, 2013, 2019a; nao, 2019b; ons; 2019a). in local government, authorities faced budgetary constraints, and whilst the budget for statutory services was protected, the provision of non-statutory services was significantly reduced. even in those relatively protected statutory services, funding for preventive services was significantly reduced reflecting the scale of the reduction in the public sector. the decline in the provision of preventive services has had negative implications for people who 8 the nominal figure of 2010 is from the mhclg (2013) and the nominal figure for 2018 is from nao (2019b) to account for funding variations given the conversion of schools to academies. nominal figures for 2010 and 2018 were adjusted for inflation and were divided by the number of pupils in primary and secondary schools in 2010 and 2018 (8.1 million and 8.74 million respectively). the consequences of the austerity policies for public services in the uk studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 525 benefit from short-term programmes to enhance their well-being. as suggested by the national children’s bureau (ncb, 2017), for every £4 spent on later intervention in children’s services only £1 is spent on early intervention services. although authorities recognise the negative consequences of restricting services focused on early intervention, many have prioritised services focused on later intervention (e.g., children’s protection plans). for instance, families of children with disabilities are likely to benefit more from intervention plans in the form of therapy and programmes that promote children’s development (e.g., the enhancement of specific skills). according to the rainbow trust, as cited in the ncb’s report (2017), for some children early intervention means that their families are better able to support them so they do not have to be taken into care. in adult social care services, authorities have also prioritised the budget for long-term support services (e.g., care homes) over the budget for preventive short-term services. short-term services aim to provide support for people to regain their skills, confidence and independence when these are lost as a result of illness. in 2018-2019, the budget for short-term services was £0.6 billion in comparison to the budget for long-term support, which was £15.0 billion (nhs digital, 2019b). preventive care services are also becoming restricted for ethnic minorities. for example, black british people have higher rates of mental health hospital admissions and readmissions, and longer stays compared with other ethnic groups. despite this, black adults are the least likely group to report receiving preventive treatments (cqc, 2018). decentralisation of power the uk government pursued the decentralisation of local government by reducing central grants and by allowing authorities to collect additional revenue from different sources (e.g., property taxes, fees and investment). in 2018-2019, cuts in grants still outweighed authorities’ revenues from other sources (mhclg, 2019a). according to lowndes & gardner (2016), the decentralisation of local government has been a political strategy to stimulate economic growth based on greater sub-regional autonomy and increased competitiveness across and between regions. authorities in deprived areas have been significantly affected due to their dependency on grants and their restricted capacity to raise additional revenues from taxes, fees and investment (given their households’ and businesses’ composition). deprived areas have also been affected by the restrictions faced by other sectors, such as voluntary organisations, which step in and provide services where the public sector is unable to do so; due to austerity, these other sectors have faced challenges as a result of their dependency on statutory funding (jones et al., 2016). in children’s social care services, there is an important variation in tania arrieta hernandez studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 526 authorities’ intervention rates (nao, 2019a).9 this variation is the result of authorities’ discretionary responses in terms of how to allocate funding and their interpretation of local policy. children in deprived areas face more inequality in accessing services, because deprived authorities have less spending power and larger numbers of children in need, which affects their intervention rates. according to a study by bywaters et al. (2017), children in the most deprived decile are around 13 times more likely to be under a child protection plan (e.g., the promotion of the child’s welfare) and 11 times more likely to be under a looked-after children plan (children in the care of authorities) than a child in the least deprived decile. the same study shows that ethnic minority status is strongly associated with a greater chance of deprivation. only 21% of white children live in the most deprived neighbourhoods, compared with a third of children belonging to ethnic minorities. as suggested by bywaters et al. (2017) areas with few services, where services are not accessible or appropriate to families’ needs, are likely to have lower rates of intervention in comparison to areas where services are accessible and plentiful. inequality is also evident in health and adult social care services. according to the cqc (2018), there has been an improvement in the overall quality of health and social care services despite continuing challenges related to demand and funding. however, as suggested by the commission, people still face inequality when accessing these services. the commission argues that access to these services varies depending on where people live and the type of services accessed. in addition, people’s experiences are often determined by how well the different parts of the local system work altogether. as a result of this unequal access, the number of older people with unmet needs is now estimated to be 1.4 million. the cqc (2018) estimates that the cost of informal care amounts to more than £57 billion annually. this is three times more than the expenditure on adult social care of £16 billion incurred by local governments in 2018-2019 (mhclg, 2019a). inequalities in health and adult social care services may also be driven by differences in the funding allocated per person. for instance, the average weekly funding for a person with a learning disability aged under 65 is £1,436 compared to £550 for older people with dementia (cqc, 2018). furthermore, spending cuts in the health service have led to a gap in the provision of services between deprived and less deprived areas. for example, in 2019 the percentage of patients who waited up to 18 weeks to receive treatment varied from 83.7% in the south west of england (a less deprived region) to 88.1% in northern regions (nhs england, 2019). spending cuts in the police service and housing have also affected more deprived areas to a greater extent than less deprived areas. regarding the 9 intervention rates are authorities’ assessments of children in need. authorities may use their statutory powers to place children in need in protection plans or take them into care (e.g., foster care or residential care). the consequences of the austerity policies for public services in the uk studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 527 police service, the authority most affected by spending cuts between 20102011 and 2018-2019 was northumbria,10 while the least affected was surrey (nao, 2018a). data from the ons (2019c) show that areas that have seen important cuts in their police service funding have also experienced rises in crime rates. for instance, the rate of crime (i.e., excluding fraud) per 1,000 people was 110.7 in northumbria in 2018, while in surrey it was 63.1. furthermore, crimes using sharp instruments (e.g., knives) more than doubled from 393 offences to 887 in northumbria between 2010 and 2018, while in surrey these offences slightly decreased from 65 to 60 over the same period. in the housing sector, spending cuts led to unequal dwelling development. according to the ons (2019d), the three regions with the lowest number of social housing dwellings between 2010-2011 and 2018-2019 were the north east with 10,080, yorkshire and the humber with 10,860, and the north west with 17,080.11 these three northern regions face more deprivation in comparison to southern regions. despite the low number of dwelling developments, these three regions represented 27.5% of the total population in england in 2018 (ons, 2019b). in contrast, the region with the highest number of social housing developments was london, with 56,780. although some boroughs in london also face deprivation, london is also a region that concentrates wealthier populations and higher paid jobs. shifts in governance the government promoted greater involvement of the private and third sectors in public services since the early years of the austerity programme through policies such as open public services.12 private actors have been the real winners of these policies, since voluntary organisations have encountered more barriers due to their dependency on statutory funding and limitations to raising funding from other sources (e.g., donations). concerns have emerged regarding the increasing involvement of the private sector in public services, such as the erosion of service quality and the tendency towards market concentration and the dominance of a few private providers at the national and regional levels (nao, 2016c). despite these concerns, budgetary constraints and the need for local authorities to achieve savings have led to authorities continuing to rely on private actors for service delivery. as suggested by rubery (2015), the traditional model of service provision, where public actors had most of the responsibility for delivering public services, has shifted to one of heightened fragmentation and complex 10 this authority is located in the north east of england. according to the 2019 index of deprivation, this region had a concentration of neighbourhoods in the most deprived decile in that year (mhclg, 2019b). 11 this is measured as started dwellings instead of completed dwellings. the number of dwellings represents housebuilding by housing associations and local authorities. 12 implemented in 2011, it invited competitive and willing providers to deliver public services. tania arrieta hernandez studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 528 multifaceted relationships. the participation of private providers in service provision is now visible in most services. in the health service, this was reinforced through the health and social care act 2012, which established a market structure where private organisations have been able to compete alongside nhs departments for the delivery of health services. although there were concerns about how the act could influence the marketization of the health service (pownall, 2013), it did not lead to a significant increase in the share of spending on services delivered by private organisations. as shown by the think tank the king’s fund (2019), in 2019-2020, the nhs spent £9.7 billion on services delivered by the private sector, which represented less than 11% of the total revenue spent by the nhs. yet, as pointed out by the think tank, this estimate is likely to underrepresent the real spending on private providers, given that central bodies do not hold detailed information on individual contracts with service providers. moreover, since 2015 there has been a trend towards the concentration of high value contracts with a few private providers. some of these contracts have proved unsuccessful, such as the £330 millon contract that the nhs signed with the private firm capita to provide primary care services, which capita then failed to deliver. local services have experienced a more pronounced shift in governance due to their limited resources. in the adult social care sector, 84% of the services are delivered by private providers (daly, 2020). studies have shown that the quality of private care homes tends to be generally lower in relation to the services provided by local authorities and voluntary organisations (hudson 2016). this has been related to the need for private organisations to generate a profit; they therefore implement strategies to reduce costs such as reducing the staff-patient ratio and paying lower wages for less experienced and qualified staff (hudson, 2016; sasse et al., 2019). the participation of private actors in the children’s social care service has also increased significantly in the last decade. of the 11,000 more children in care in 2019 in comparison to 2011, 73% were cared for by private organisations (children’s commissioner, 2020). there is little available evidence on how the commissioning of children’s social care has affected the quality of the service, but as suggested by the children’s commissioner (2020), the quality has been generally “good” or “outstanding” except for smaller private organisations that have received lower quality ratings from osfted. many schools have converted to academies in the last decade, driven by the presumption under the education act 2011 that all new schools would be academies and the compulsion of underperforming schools to convert to academy status. as of 2018, nearly a third of all schools in england were registered as academies (west & wolfe, 2018). although academies are funded by central government, they are entitled to receive grants and additional funding from other organisations or businesses. concerns have been raised about the involvement of other funders in the decision-making of academies in relation to relying on more unqualified and inexperienced the consequences of the austerity policies for public services in the uk studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 529 teaching staff, the appointment of senior personnel and the procurement of services (house of commons, n.d). the government promoted the conversion of schools to academies by arguing that the latter would lead to higher attainment and improved educational outcomes. however, evidence presented by eyles et al. (2016) showed that the creation of academies during the new labour government led to higher educational attainment, but the bulk of conversions after 2010 did not lead to improved outcomes. in the housing sector, private new housing continues to be the largest contributor to the housing sector. since 2013 housing output has increased by 58.9%, of which over three-quarters has been accounted for by private new housing (ons, 2020). shifts in governance are also revealed by the recent commodification of the housing stock in the housing association sector. after 2010, housing associations came under increased pressure to diversify and generate funds through the sale of older properties and by providing housing with rents well above social housing levels (murie, 2018). more involvement of private actors in housing development has not equated to higher quality. the nao (2017) argues that there has been a significant improvement in the quality of housing since the government set out a definition of decent homes in 2001. yet, there continues to be a higher proportion of non-decent homes in the private sector in relation to the social rented sector (75% vs. 14%). discussion: austerity and its implications for the pandemic austerity has eroded the capacity of the nhs and local authorities to overcome the challenges brought by the pandemic. these challenges are related to the increase in demand for health services as the virus continued to spread and a higher demand for local services as people experienced unemployment, reductions in working hours and losses in disposable income due to lockdowns. although expenditure on the six public services analysed here continues to represent a significant proportion of gdp, the analysis above points to the insufficiency of the latter and the reduced capacity of the state to protect people at vulnerable life stages. public organisations have faced a decade of spending reductions and have had to protect statutory services over non-statutory services despite the negative implications that this has for groups in need of preventive services. austerity did not lead to a “whole-state retrenchment,” but the gradations of state change were sufficient to erode public institutions’ capacity to protect communities in need (lobao et al., 2018). budget reductions inhibited the capacity of public organisations to protect services during the pandemic and this is visible in all of the services analysed. for the nhs, retrenchment in the form of budgetary reductions meant disinvestment in infrastructure and medical equipment, restrictions in the expansion of bed capacity and insufficient staff numbers. prime minister boris johnson allocated significant amounts of funding to the nhs throughout 2020 to deliver urgent priorities such as acquiring tests and tania arrieta hernandez studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 530 ventilators. the funding allocated revealed the government’s commitment to supporting the nhs. on the less positive side, it also revealed the underfunding of the health sector experienced during austerity. the consequences of insufficient investment in infrastructure and medical equipment were soon evidenced in 2020, when the lack of protective equipment (ppe) put at risk the lives of many healthcare workers (dyer, 2020). although the nhs experienced increases in employment during austerity, these were not enough to address the recruitment and retention problems in the sector. in 2020, nhs england addressed the insufficiency of staff by inviting retired doctors to support the nhs in the fight against the pandemic, and by allowing final year medical students to graduate earlier to support the nhs (harvey, 2020). thousands of volunteers also helped to address the shortfalls in the nhs by delivering medicines to people in need. in the housing sector, budgetary constraints meant insufficient housebuilding by local authorities and social housing associations. the combination of increases in private rents, the freeze in housing benefit, and spending reductions in preventive housing services influenced a homelessness crisis in england. data from mhclg (2019c) show that 4,677 rough sleepers were estimated on a single night in 2018, an increase of 164% since 2010. the number of vulnerable people such as children and older groups facing homelessness also rose significantly. homeless people were recognised as one of the most vulnerable groups during the pandemic due to their living conditions and poorer health in comparison to the rest of the population. in response to this, the government introduced the “everyone in” campaign, which provided free accommodation to rough sleepers and those at risk of rough sleeping. it is estimated that more than 20,000 infections and 266 deaths among homelessness people were avoided due to this campaign in the first half of 2020 (nao, 2021). by the end of 2020, more than 33,000 people had been placed in temporary accommodation (nao, 2021). although the government aims to move homeless people into more settled long-term accommodation by mid-2021, due to the insufficiency of housebuilding this is likely to prove challenging. although the budgets for children’s social care and education were relatively protected during austerity, they were not enough to protect every child in need. even prior to the pandemic, child poverty in the uk increased driven by budgetary constraints in public services and the freeze in welfare benefits between 2016 and 2020, which affected families with children.13 relative child poverty increased to 4.2 million in 2018-2019 from 3.6 million in 2010-2011 (dwp, 2020). the pandemic worsened the situation for many lowand middle-income families with children. according to the trussell trust, the largest foodbank in the uk, it delivered approximately 2,600 food parcels to children every day during the first six months of the pandemic (the 13 the child element does not apply for a third and subsequent child born after april 2017 and the family element has been abolished for families with an eldest child born after april 2017. the consequences of the austerity policies for public services in the uk studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 531 trussell trust, 2020). during austerity, local authorities overspent on children’s social care services by reducing their spending on other services. this seems unlikely to happen again in the near future, as authorities will have to support the many needs that have emerged in their communities as a result of the pandemic. this may put more strain on low-income families with children. there is no evidence from the analysis above that decentralisation led to better identification of local needs and to more equipped authorities capable of supporting their communities. the government’s political strategy to push decentralisation at a time of constrained resources led to an unequal provision of services and greater needs in deprived areas (gray & barford, 2018). the pandemic revealed the polarization between richer and poorer regions and the many inequalities that were reinforced during austerity, whilst also highlighting the variations in the spending power of authorities. most of the high covid-19 infection rates happened in major urban cities and areas that have more neighbourhoods in deprivation, such as london, birmingham, manchester and liverpool (kulu & dorey, 2021). covid-19 deaths were higher among ethnic minorities (kulu & dorey, 2021), who are more likely to live in deprived areas compared to the white population. the geographical spread of infections and deaths is not unrelated to what happened during austerity. budgetary constraints in the nhs led to a deterioration in the quality of the service and consequently to a rising number of unmet health needs. fewer resources in deprived areas and a higher number of people in need of public services in these areas served to reinforce health, housing and income inequalities. as a result of school closures to avoid the spread of the virus, the educational gap is likely to increase further. this is likely to considerably affect more deprived areas where there are larger numbers of children in need and with lower educational attainment. attainment is influenced by children’s nutrition, and children living in poorer areas are more likely to be in need of free schools’ meals. the inadequate quality and quantity of school meals has been exposed during the pandemic. as suggested by power et al. (2020), the pandemic created the “perfect storm” for families with children from poorer backgrounds, given the combination of school closures, shortages of food due to losses in household income and the compromised availability of support from emergency food provision. inequalities have also been exposed given the funding cuts in the police service. although crime fell overall during the pandemic, areas with higher numbers of state benefit claimants and higher unemployment rates have continued to experience crime rates above prepandemic levels for some violent types of crimes (kirchmaier & villa-llera, 2020). this reflects the unequal experiences between poorer and richer groups regarding social protection. the analysis of governance revealed that market competitiveness has been reinforced by the increased participation of private actors in public affairs. the development of the market has been made possible by sacrificing the tania arrieta hernandez studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 532 quality of some services where the private sector has not been able to deliver quality at a reduced cost. a possible explanation for the underperformance of the private sector is given by daly (2020), who argues that the fragmentation in service delivery has imposed difficulties for public organisations to regulate the performance of private providers whose main interest is to retain a profit. nonetheless, the analysis of governance revealed the complex picture behind the involvement of the private sector in service delivery, since it showed that for some services, such as children’s social care, it has been beneficial. this complexity was also revealed in the mixed outcomes in quality across and within services. yet, the evidence shows that service fragmentation influenced some of the problems that public organisations faced during the pandemic. the fragmentation in adult social care led to the inability of the government and public organisations to regulate the implementation of ppe and tests, which has been associated with the deaths of staff and care home residents (daly, 2020). fragmentation also made it difficult to monitor mortality rates in care homes associated with covid-19. during austerity, local authorities achieved savings by reducing the fee they paid to their care commissioners, causing financial instability for many of them. many of these private organisations faced the first wave of the pandemic with limited resources, which may have influenced their responses, or lack of them, during the pandemic. yet, some of the problems that care homes faced seemed to have been beyond the provider’s control. for instance, care homes were pressured to accept patients from the nhs without certainty that they were free of covid-19. shifts in the governance of the nhs also influenced many of the struggles the service experienced during the pandemic. these struggles were related to the insufficiency of ppe, problems with the quality of tests and issues with it systems that delayed information on test results to inform central government and local authorities about the rates of local infections (bma, 2020). in 2018, the responsibility for managing ppe supplies and stockpiles was spread across multiple public bodies and private sector contractors with the objective of prioritising financial savings (nao, 2020). although nhs procurement is responsible for monitoring the supply-chain logistics in the nhs, the complexity of the contracts makes it difficult to do this in practice (bma, 2020). problems with the quality of tests were revealed in july 2020 when the government withdrew testing kits from the private contractor randox that did not comply with the quality standards. co-governance, however, proved to be beneficial for some services during the pandemic, such as the housing sector. the campaign “everyone in,” which helped over 33,000 rough sleepers (or at risk to become one) to find temporary accommodation during the pandemic, revealed the partnership and cooperation between central government, local authorities, and voluntary and private organisations. central government allocated £4.6 billion to support local authorities to cover expenditure related to the campaign (nao, 2021). this funding allowed authorities and voluntary organisations to identify homeless people across the uk and to the consequences of the austerity policies for public services in the uk studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 533 move them into temporary private accommodation based on a triage system (e.g., prioritisation of needs). conclusions austerity in the uk was pursued by the conservative government between 2010-2011 and 2018-2019 as a political strategy to increase competitiveness and revenues in the private sector, hidden behind a political narrative on the need to reduce the public deficit. this political strategy led to the shrinking of the welfare state through budgetary reductions, the decentralisation of local government and increased fragmentation in service delivery. despite the early evidence of the negative consequences that austerity was having for the poorest and most vulnerable groups (taylor-gooby & stoker, 2011), the government continued to pursue austerity, making clear its priorities and preference for supporting the development of the market over the welfare state. the analysis revealed the consequences of this political strategy by presenting an understanding of the changing landscape of service provision through the notions of retrenchment, decentralisation and shifts in governance. the analysis revealed the reduced capacity of public institutions to protect crucial public services and the communities in need of those services. decentralisation allowed authorities to have more autonomy over their revenue collection, but the revenue from different sources has been insufficient to offset the reductions in grants. as a result, authorities have seen divergences between the revenues collected and their actual spending needs, and the inequality in service provision between wealthier and less wealthier areas has been reinforced. the increased participation of private actors in service delivery has led to mixed outcomes in the quality of services, reflecting the complexity of private organisations’ incentives to deliver quality services (alonso & andrews, 2016). this article also presented an understanding of how austerity fractured public institutions and eroded their capacity to protect vital public services during the pandemic. the analysis revealed that public institutions faced the pandemic with constrained resources in relation to funding, infrastructure and staff. the many inequalities that were reinforced during austerity became clear during the pandemic. deprived areas have seen higher rates of covid19 infections and deaths, higher numbers of children needing support from foodbanks, and more challenges related to social protection. in addition, fragmentation in service delivery meant that the government and public organisations faced limitations in terms of regulating the compliance of private commissioners during the pandemic, which has been associated with shortages of resources and difficulties in monitoring infection rates and deaths. the outcomes of the pandemic have had a disproportionately negative impact on the most vulnerable and poorer groups. a decade of austerity placed lower-income households and poorer communities in an unfavourable tania arrieta hernandez studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 518-537, 2021 534 position in terms of overcoming the struggles caused by the pandemic. as levitas (2012) pointed out, austerity was punitive towards the low-income class in britain, and this became evident in 2020. perhaps one of the most important lessons of 2020 is that, as long as governments implement policies that prioritise wealth accumulation over social development, the neediest communities will continue to suffer the most. the conservative government will play an important role in setting out the course for britain. the government will be judged not only by its capacity to restore economic growth, but also in relation to the restoration of the welfare state. some of the policies introduced in 2020-2021, such as the limited weekly increase in benefits and the proposed pay cap for health employees, have already triggered controversy by showing the government’s interest in continuing to support the development of the market at the expense of reducing the welfare state. acknowledgements i would like to thank my phd supervisors, professor peter jackson and professor peter nolan, for their invaluable support, feedback and guidance throughout my research. references adisson, f., & artioli, f. 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(1993). a critique of the public choice theory case for privatization: rhetoric and reality. ottawa law review, 25(1), 1-38. dyer final dec 3 19 correspondence address: hannah dyer, department of child & youth studies, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: hdyer@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 338-340, 2019 book review researching sex and sexualities morris, c., boyce, p., cornwall, a., frith, h., harvey, l., & huang, y. (eds.). (2018). london: zed books. isbn 9781786993199 (paper); £18.99; isbn 9781786993205 (cloth) £70; isbn 9781786993229 (epub) £18.99. 392 pages hannah dyer brock university, canada researching sex and sexualities is an enormous contribution to sexuality studies and its affiliates. a large collection, it builds on and archives work delivered at an international conference held at the university of sussex in 2015. in the introduction, boyce, morris and cornwall beautifully state that “sexualities research…has come to speak of wider life and death worlds, and the contemporary fragilities and futurities that might be born or foreclosed amidst divergent globalisms” (p. 5). a sexual encounter, they point out, can “bring life or hasten death” (p. 5). positioning the collection here, between pessimism and optimism, they continue to ask, “how might sensation and desire, for instance, reside within sexualities research at different scales of analysis and effects” (p. 5)? as if to answer this question, the editors have compiled essays that are not exactly in tension with each other, but offer a varied appeal to readers and other researchers to consider their own definition of what counts as sex, as sexuality, and as research. the book is divided into four parts: knowability; creative methodologies; negotiating research contexts; and, researcher bodies, identities, experiences. there is not a unified theory of sex or sexuality offered here, or an enshrined, exemplary model of research, but a wide-ranging collection of perspectives on what and who counts as subject, object, participant and researcher in the study and act of sex and sexuality. the book produces the field of sexuality as much as reflects on it. underlying the text’s production are considerations of the erotic encounter present in research and writing, the ongoing consent needed from research book review studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 338-340, 2019 339 participants, and what it means to be seduced by theory. researching sex and sexualities offers a way forward for academics, policy makers, health care providers and other interested readers who are sure sexuality is worthy of study, but would like guidance or demonstration for how to do so. the difficulties and pleasures of crafting methodology for studying sexuality, an arena of intimacy that finds its pulse in the enigmatic spaces between subject and object, takes centre stage here. the authors put it this way: “for research informed by such concerns we need methodologies that are sensitive to the importance of the indecipherable, to the conceiving of sexualities as out of reach even as we study them” (p. 13). while seemingly impossible, the collection shows us that there are still ways forward despite sexuality’s resistance to being known and completely understood. ensnared in neo-liberal models of “diversity” and their individualizing ethos, categories of sexual identification often elide the creative and unconscious drives towards pleasure that cannot be solidified because of its affective surge beyond knowability. the coercive nature with which sexuality becomes registered under the confines of identity means that its enigmatic contours must often be shaved off so that identities can be built and protected. sourced differently, outside of such classificatory impulses, methodologies for researching sex and sexuality might be transformed. this edited collection shows, for example, some of the ways that sex and sexuality are not easily domesticated or isolated from their specific geographic or social locations. they cannot exist independently from formations of race, class, gender and disability, for example. the authors make this clear: “the sexual is a symbolically interactive site – a field of intimacy at the interface of cultural, social and bodily infractions” (p. 12). interdisciplinary by nature, the field of sexuality studies draws theory and method from assorted canons and traditions. relatedly, when taken together, the essays in researching sex and sexualities provide ideas for how to leverage the tools of, for example, sociology, sound and performance studies, anthropology, sexual health, and epidemiology. there is something very physical about this collection, which has not only to do with its large size (reaching over 350 pages). it is constantly moving towards the material and bio-political stakes of research on sex and sexuality. it thinks and feels through the imperative to use ethical models of care when studying sexuality, all the while knowing it is a field of study resistant to knowledge. that is, sexuality cannot be contained within our questions about its origin or practice, and yet its consequences for people are severe and potentially life altering. part one of the collection, “knowability,” asks, for example, “how sexualities might become knowable” (p. 19). part three and four, then, return us to questions of how the knowability of sexuality is tied to the contexts and experiences of the researchers themselves. part two of the book, “creative methodologies,” studies the creativity needed to ensnare (and then potentially release) sexuality in order to research it. barrett’s study of how to “build empathy and momentum” (p. 117) for hannah dyer studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 338-340, 2019 340 “older people’s sexual lives” (p. 113) stands out as an example of creative method. barrett describes the use of body mapping as research method that can move beyond the regulatory nature of biomedical models of analysis. as barrett explains, “a body map is usually a life-size body image created by storytellers who trace the outline of their body and then use drawing, painting or other art-based techniques within the outline to visually represent their lives, their bodies and their world.” for the researcher, “it offers the opportunity to explore the rich stories held in older people’s bodies” (p. 113), and can assert the need for their “sexual wellbeing and safety” (p. 116). mcgeeney, robinson, thompson and thurschwell make a contribution to creative methods by asking how karaoke and other acts of what they term “ventriloquism” can provide young people with an innovative space to work out new renditions of old scripts (i.e., performing cover songs). barrett, as well as mcgeeney et al., take methodological instruction from their research participants, re-routing the centre of mastery so that a more collective form of wisdom is produced. the interview conducted with ken plummer, printed at the back of the collection, provides genealogical succession and historical memory. plummer is the founder of the research journal sexualities, was its editor for 16 years, and is a widely published sociologist in the field of sexuality studies. in his interview with charlotte morris he provokes us to reevaluate the line between theory and method when he proclaims: “i don’t really ‘do’ methods, though i have been tagged as such. i did theory all the way and actually that’s what i’ve done for most of my life” (p. 344). plummer elicits attention to the usefulness of theory as method, that is, the ways that queer theory, for example, is a mode not only for thinking but also for archiving, collecting, witnessing, and responding. earlier in the text, eva cheuk-yin li hints toward queer theory’s shortcomings when she asks, with a tone of soft indictment, what queer theory offers in the realm of empirical analysis, which it both tries to work against and make claims of doing (p. 48). when placed within the same book, plummer and li, along with other authors here anthologized, produce a negotiation concerning what queer theory is and can offer to the study of sexuality. from both within and outside of communities often subject to the professional advice of medical doctors, clinics, researchers and service providers, researching sex and sexualities asks who research about intimacy and embodiment is actually for. the inclusion of graduate students in the collection is noteworthy. indeed, many of their projects are cutting edge and sit with authority beside more established scholars. the impact this book will have on sexuality studies and its related affiliations will be widely felt. between acceleration and occupation: palestine and the struggle for global justice studies in social justice volume 4, issue 2, 199-215, 2010 correspondence address: john collins, department of global studies, st. lawrence university, 82 park street, canton, ny, 13617, usa. tel: 315.229.5661, email: collins@stlawu.edu issn: 1911-4788 between acceleration and occupation: palestine and the struggle for global justice john collins department of global studies, st. lawrence university abstract this article explores the contemporary politics of global violence through an examination of the particular challenges and possibilities facing palestinians who seek to defend their communities against an ongoing settler-colonial project (zionism) that is approaching a crisis point. as the colonial dynamic in israel/palestine returns to its most elemental level—land, trees, homes—it also continues to be a laboratory for new forms of accelerated violence whose global impact is hard to overestimate. in such a context, palestinians and international solidarity activists find themselves confronting a quintessential 21st-century activist dilemma: how to craft a strategy of what paul virilio calls “popular defense” at a time when everyone seems to be implicated in the machinery of global violence? i argue that while this dilemma represents a formidable challenge for palestinians, it also helps explain why the palestinian struggle is increasingly able to build bridges with wider struggles for global justice, ecological sustainability, and indigenous rights. much like the ubiquitous and misleading phrase “israeli-palestinian conflict,” the conventional usage of the term “occupation” to describe israel’s post-1967 control of the west bank and gaza serves to deflect attention from the settler-colonial structures that continue to shape the contours of social reality at all levels in israel/palestine. 1 the palestinian occupation, sometimes expressed via the concept of sumud (steadfastness), is an integral part of a much larger story of anticolonial struggle that also includes militant resistance, street-level popular actions, and a range of efforts in the cultural arena. attempts to divide palestinian resistance into “violent” and “nonviolent” streams, often for the purposes of condemning the former, have always the dominant discourse of “occupation” is built on an unstated assumption that it is the presence of soldiers, whether that presence is viewed as oppressive or defensive, that makes the territories “occupied.” in fact, contemporary palestine is the site of not one, but two occupations, both of which are occluded by this assumption. the first is the settler-colonial occupation of palestine by the zionist project, an occupation that predates 1967. the second, which i will call the palestinian occupation, is the stubborn, everyday habitation of the land by palestinians, a human occupation that has always represented zionism’s most fundamental obstacle. 200 john collins studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 been somewhat artificial; most palestinians, after all, view opposition to zionism as a long and complex process requiring a flexible toolbox of strategies and tactics that must be adjusted periodically in response to changing local and global conditions of possibility. analyzing these conditions can help bring into sharper relief the particular challenges facing all those, palestinians and internationals alike, who seek to resist the structural impact of zionist colonization. a useful way of framing these issues is found in paul virilio’s concept of popular defense. “the principle aim of any truly popular [defense],” writes virilio (1978/1990, p. 54), “is…to oppose the establishment of a social situation based solely on the illegality of armed force, which reduces a population to the status of a movable slave, a commodity.” in this view, popular defense is a venerable human tradition connected with the attempt to resist the particular kinds of exploitation that come with the centralization of political authority (e.g., in the form of the state).2 in contrast, today’s palestinian revolutionaries operate in a context where the struggle has literally returned to its roots: land, trees, rocks, and homes. it is no accident that israeli state violence in recent years has increasingly taken place in and around these basic elements of palestinian habitation, nor is it accidental that palestinian popular defense has drawn many international activists to the west bank and gaza. the palestinian occupation is thus closely connected with what arturo it is also an especially useful way to frame settler colonialism’s politics of violence. after all, when not seeking to eliminate indigenous people directly through mass killing, settler projects seek to turn them into “movable slaves” by displacing, confining, and disenfranchising them through a diverse array of violent measures. the conditions within which a popular defense can be mounted, however, have changed significantly. state repression and popular mobilization alike are now enmeshed in circuits of accelerated global violence. these circuits, in turn, are directly connected with the widespread securitization of politics, with governance increasingly taking the form of “real-time security” in relation to a series of immanent “threats” (galloway & thacker, 2007, p. 74). what does this mean for those who seek to wage an anticolonial struggle for social justice in the 21st century? in this article i explore this question through an examination of the challenges and the possibilities facing palestinians and others who belong to a growing movement of international solidarity with the palestinian liberation struggle. palestine and the global the struggle for justice in palestine bears a microcosmic and often prophetic relationship to changing global structures of violence and social control. during the turbulent years of the “long 1960s” (isserman & kazin, 2007), for example, exiled palestinian revolutionaries responded to a reality they did not choose—the radical delocalization set in motion by the creation of the state of israel—in a way that revealed a great deal about emerging global realities: they chose to “occupy,” in effect, the world’s increasingly intricate web of transnational communication and transportation arteries. this decision, which effectively represented a move not just around but beyond national sovereignty, has had significant global consequences (virilio, 1978/1990). between acceleration and occupation 201 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 escobar (2004) describes as the impulse toward “the defence of particular, placebased historical conceptions of the world and practices of world-making” (pp. 222223). these contemporary struggles for social justice, he insists, are “place-based, yet transnationalised.” they retain and seek to defend a deep connection with the land, rejecting both neoliberalism’s relentless commodification of life forms and the most extreme kinds of rootlessness associated with a networked world—yet they also pursue their aims by tapping into the very networks that globalizing technologies have helped create. all of this is happening, however, within dramatically changing—and, it appears, shrinking—conditions of possibility. in part this is a function of traditional geopolitics (the politics of spatial and territorial control): the continuation of zionism’s settler project has left palestinians, much like the primary victims of settler colonialism in north america and australia, confined to smaller and smaller pockets of land. the possibility of engaging in a viable popular defense in palestine, however, is also threatened by other realities that belong in the realm of chronopolitics (the politics of temporal control). in particular, palestine functions as a kind of laboratory for the deeply underexamined and undertheorized vectors of global acceleration that are continuing to shape not only the changing nature of violence, but also the very possibility of democratic politics. acceleration is a general process that permeates all levels of social life (scheuerman, 2004), albeit in ways that manifest themselves quite unevenly across the globe. most important for our purposes here is the relationship of acceleration to power and violence, a relationship that has at least two distinct faces. first, as virilio’s critical work on “dromology” (the logic of the dromos, or the race) demonstrates, power is linked as much with speed as it is with wealth: the powerful, “dromocratic” ruler is the one whose hand is on the throttle, with the ability to speed things up or slow things down strategically (virilio & lotringer, 2002, p. 65). at the same time, the dromological perspective insists that we go beyond actor-centered conceptions of power in order to recognize how the very acceleration that benefits particular actors (including, occasionally, subaltern actors) also can take on a life of its own, bypassing anyone’s control and rendering everyone vulnerable to new forms of “necropolitics” or “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (mbembe, 2003). these two sides of acceleration come together in the form of what i will call dromocratic violence: violence that both uses and is used by acceleration, operating both within and beyond a politics of control. arguably a form of sovereignty unto itself, acceleration is now integrated into the circuits of “pure war,” or the endless preparation for war enabled by the merging of science, technology, communication, and militarization (virilio & lotringer, 1983/1997). no one—not even those who seek to mount a politics of nonviolent resistance—can fully opt out of this system. bringing all of these processes together, we can see that the struggle for justice in palestine finds itself in the difficult position of operating between acceleration (or what might be called the “dromocratic imperative”) and occupation (or the “habitational imperative”). there is no question that israel is heavily invested in the structures and practices of dromocratic power, from its diverse arsenal of mechanisms of social control deployed against palestinians to its vanguard role in the global “homeland security” economy (klein, 2007). some palestinian groups, in turn, have sought to meet israel on the dromological level by launching their own 202 john collins studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 forms of accelerated violence. the entire colonial dynamic, in this case, continues to provide oxygen to the dromocratic war machine in ways that have damaging global implications (collins, 2008). given this reality, activists working for justice in palestine are faced with one of the most important political dilemmas of our time: how to maximize one’s investment in the politics of occupation while minimizing one’s contribution to the politics of violent acceleration. more than an abstract philosophical question of violence vs. nonviolence, it is a question of how to negotiate, in a way that is creative and liberating, the unavoidable issue of one’s relationship to and implication in the emerging structures of global violence. at the same time, as i argue in the concluding section, it is precisely this dilemma that creates an increasingly strong basis from which to build bridges with wider movements that are confronting the same dilemma, including movements for global justice, ecological sustainability, and indigenous rights. dangerous walking in his remarkable book palestinian walks, ramallah lawyer and human rights activist raja shehadeh (2007) narrates a series of lengthy walks through the hills and valleys that make up the “vanishing landscape” of the west bank, using each as an opportunity to explore the complex ecosystems of the area and the dramatic transformations set in motion by israeli colonization. one of these walks takes place in 1999, after the creation of the palestinian authority (pa) but before the outbreak of the second intifada. in a sort of colonial subcontracting operation during this socalled “interim phase,” palestinian security forces were “given” nominal control over small pieces of the west bank, resulting in an even more byzantine set of checkpoints (both israeli and pa) and jurisdictions throughout an increasingly fragmented and militarized territory that remained under effective israeli domination. as shehadeh and his wife are trekking through the a’yn qenya valley, they suddenly come under sustained gunfire. are the shots coming from israeli soldiers, jewish settlers, pa police, or other palestinian gunmen? are they being mistaken for settlers or suspected terrorists? after twenty harrowing minutes, they are able to extricate themselves and return home. later shehadeh discusses the issue with the muhafiz (the palestinian governor of ramallah), who suggests that the shooters had been a group of shabab (young palestinian men) engaging in target practice and says matter-of-factly, “you shouldn’t go to the valley.” for shehadeh, a lifelong hiker and defender of palestinian land rights, hearing this message from a fellow palestinian is too much to bear: “they mustn’t do this,” i said. “there are shepherds there and others who walk in the hills. i have been walking for twenty-five years. nothing ever happened to me in these hills. i never had to worry. people should be encouraged to walk in the hills. it will increase their attachment to their country.” the muhafiz didn’t agree. “you shouldn’t walk,” he repeated in a concerned paternal tone. “it’s much too dangerous.” (shehadeh, 2007, p. 92) between acceleration and occupation 203 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 the settler-colonial dynamic in palestine has reached a kafkaesque point where authorities invested in the structures of dromocratic violence are inclined to blame civilians who remain invested in the most basic activities. as anthony hall (2003) argues, this sort of attitude is integral to the expansionist logic of settler colonialism and its “transient frontierism” (p. 24). notwithstanding powerful patriotic discourses that invoke the beauty of the land and the need to defend it, settler projects tend to be oriented toward the violent conquest of territory rather than the peaceful occupation of it. drawing on the work of wendell berry, hall writes that this orientation has produced in north america “a pattern of sustained hostility towards any group that wove its way of life together with its sense of identity into the ecological fabric of a particular place” (p. 24). the same argument applies to the settler-colonial hostility toward the indigenous population of palestine. 3 shehadeh’s surreal experience appears prophetic in light of “operation cast lead,” israel’s 2008 assault on gaza. describing the attitude of the israeli military toward palestinian civilians during the attack, one israeli soldier demonstrated precisely what happens when the logic of the muhafiz (“you shouldn’t walk. it’s much too dangerous”) is merged with the realities of dromocratic violence. “if we detect any thing that should not be there—we shoot,” the soldier observed. “we’re told the air force distributed flyers telling everyone to go to gaza city. if beyond this line any people are detected—they are not supposed to be there” (pcati, 2009, p. 18). the soldier’s testimony, while laudable for its honesty, is ultimately redundant. after all, within the terms of the settler-colonial project, palestinians by definition are “not supposed to be there,” and the policies of the settler state are geared toward the perpetual demonstration of that definition. as the authors of the pcati report point out, the confined and carceral realities of gaza (a territory of only 139 square miles) meant that the israeli policy of pushing civilians to flee their homes guaranteed that large numbers of civilians would find themselves on the street and therefore considered, in the words of one israeli commander, “not innocent” and “doomed to die” (p. 19). israel’s “war on the milieu” what happened in gaza is not simply the product of a specific and relatively recent dynamic between israeli and hamas violence; it is also the culmination of israel’s entire post-1967 policy vis-à-vis the palestinians, a policy that serves continued colonization and illustrates the operational logic of permanent war. even as it was projecting its military reach externally toward the exiled palestinian guerrillas, the israeli state was establishing a strategy of perpetual counterinsurgency in the west bank and gaza, a strategy that has increasingly taken the form of what virilio (1976/1998, p. 30) calls “war on the milieu.” he distinguishes this from an earlier model (“war of milieu”) in which war was waged within a specific arena (e.g. the “pacific theatre”). in the newer model, war is waged directly on civilians, their capacity for biological and social reproduction, and the natural and built environment that ensures their survival. in virilio’s subtle change of preposition from “war of milieu” to “war on the milieu,” we find an important clue to understanding israel’s policy in the west bank 204 john collins studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 and gaza. as the late edward said was fond of pointing out, the zionist/israeli colonization of palestine has always been a policy of extraordinary detail symbolized by chaim weizmann’s mantra, “another acre, another goat” (said, 1994). this policy, in other words, has its own (colonial) ecology rooted in the careful and systematic attempt to manage the natural and built environment to its own advantage, if necessary by destroying it. nothing illustrates the logic of israel’s war on the milieu more clearly than the systematic destruction of olive trees and its devastating impact on palestine’s economy. in a sustained campaign that recalls a host of u.s. actions directed against the milieu in many places from the western plains of north america to the jungles of vietnam and the cities of iraq, the israeli military has uprooted hundreds of thousands of olive trees since 1967. this process has accelerated significantly during the construction of the wall in recent years, lending credence to the notion that the wall constitutes a broad colonial system unto itself. 4 an equally visible aspect of israel’s war on the milieu has been its practice of eliminating palestinian homes, whether through direct demolition, systematic discrimination against non-jews in the issuing of building permits, or the “collateral damage” associated with military campaigns. 5 the military’s use of overwhelming force in urban environments has extended this aspect of the colonial project to a wider range of structures including mosques, hospitals, factories, and government buildings. this development is reflected in the difference between 2002’s “operation defensive shield” in the west bank (approximately 900 buildings destroyed) and “operation cast lead” (nearly 4,000 buildings destroyed in space roughly onefifteenth the size of the west bank) only six years later (pcati, 2009, p. 24). nor has this ecological war stopped at the ground level. a less visible aspect of the colonial project is the diverting of water resources from underneath the feet of palestinians. yet while the water issue has received a fair amount of attention from scholars, journalists, and political negotiators, another underground issue—the politics of sewage—has remained largely ignored. eyal weizman (2007) connects the sewage issue with zionism’s “hygienic phobia” that “sees the presence of palestinians as a ‘defiled’ substance within the ‘israeli’ landscape” (p. 20).6 the politics of sewage points us to an understanding of the biopolitical nature of the war on the milieu. gaza, in particular, has been the site of what amounts to a sustained experiment in emerging forms of social control (li, 2006). cut off from the outside world by the israeli policy of “closure,” gazans have found themselves targeted by the weaponization of food. in a move that connects directly with a global trend toward militarized humanitarianism, israel’s control of access to gaza proceeds through a combination of collective punishment and the occasional provision of food to prevent mass starvation. the opening paragraph of a 2006 new york times report illustrates this process perfectly, noting that israeli authorities had briefly opened the main crossing into gaza “to allow delivery of flour and sugar to palestinians,” only to close it thirty minutes later “citing security threats” (myre, 2006). by reducing many palestinians to “bare life” (agamben, 1998), this policy bears primary responsibility for a well-documented pattern of food insecurity, stunted growth, once again, the most extreme manifestation of the issue is to be found in gaza, where periodic sewage crises garner momentary attention as much for their “threat” to israel as for what they say about the living conditions of palestinian refugees. between acceleration and occupation 205 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 deteriorating public health conditions, and psychological trauma in gaza (giacaman et al., 2009; roy, 2009). finally, and equally biopolitical, one of the most devastating effects of the creation of israel’s web of checkpoints during the post-oslo years has been to place the very process of reproduction at special risk as women on their way to the hospital are forced to wait, sometimes for hours, at checkpoints. meanwhile, perhaps owing to its ongoing national obsession with maintaining jewish demographic superiority, israel is also a world leader in assisted reproductive technologies, thus making it a pioneer in global colonization’s newest incarnation: the colonization of the body by technology (virilio & lotringer, 2002, p. 101).7 when placed in the broader context of the processes discussed in this section, israel’s politics of reproduction echo the settler-colonial biopolitics of north america (smith, 2005) in forming an important part of its war on the milieu. habitational resistance the cumulative material effects of israel’s war on the milieu have dramatically altered the political horizon of palestinian nationalism and the conditions within which palestinians engage in the popular defense of their communities. there is little doubt, for example, that the phenomenon of palestinian suicide bombing is at least partly a product of this changing political environment (hage, 2003). more generally, however, the war on the milieu has left the majority of ordinary palestinians on the ground with little option but to embrace the kind of existential resistance has always constituted the most implacable obstacle to the settler-colonial project and its “logic of elimination.” 8 shehadeh’s book is emblematic of a tradition of palestinian occupation that has long formed the bedrock of the popular struggle against this project. this palestinian occupation has been present throughout the period of settler colonization but has been relatively ignored thanks to zionism’s ideological success in focusing the attention of external observers on more spectacular forms of palestinian resistance. recent developments have given the palestinian occupation greater visibility as the politics of survival and habitation take center stage. with its emphasis on an unhurried and grounded relationship with place, the palestinian occupation is also opposed to the dromocratic structures in which the state of israel and some of its adversaries—those who seek faster and more effective ways of visiting violence upon israelis—are heavily invested. equally important, shehadeh’s story of being shot at by palestinian gunmen— young men linked with the extensive security apparatus created after oslo as part of what was ostensibly a kind of proto-state structure—illustrates a tension between sovereignty and what might be called self-sovereignty, a tension that cannot be resolved satisfactorily by appealing to state-centered anticolonial nationalism. 9 one of the by-products of this gradual shift is that it makes the settler-colonial nature of the situation more visible to all. within israel and in the diaspora, zionism is as the dream of a truly independent palestinian state fades into oblivion, more and more palestinians find themselves engaging in different forms of habitational resistance. the things they are defending are less the things that make for sovereignty and more the things that make for self-sovereignty. 206 john collins studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 reaching a crisis point that is reducing the ideological space available to those who might wish to separate zionism from its settler foundations. among palestinians, articulations of an “indigenous” identity—that is, a “fourth world” identity that would suggest strong linkages with, say, the cherokee (finkelstein, 1995) or aboriginal australians (wolfe, 2006)—have historically been rare when compared with the salience of pan-arab, pan-islamic, or pan-“third world” solidarity. yet the necessary shift toward a politics of habitation has left palestinians with a growing need to prioritize one of the cardinal, near-ontological principles of indigenous identity and power in a settler-colonial world: the refusal to leave the land and disappear. existence, in this sense, is resistance. the case of abdel fattah abed rabbo illustrates the lengths to which a settlercolonial project will go in order to oppose this existential resistance. in november 2009 the 48-year-old abed rabbo found himself facing eviction from a cave he was occupying in the hills between jerusalem and bethlehem. it appears that he was targeted for eviction more than once, most recently because of plans to build a new colony, givat yael, as part of israel’s ongoing expansion of jerusalem on land annexed illegally in 1980. an earlier report spotlighting abed rabbo’s plight notes the irony of charging a cave-dweller with lacking a building permit. “don’t charge me,” countered abed rabbo. “charge nature” (ross, 2009). settler colonialism, of course, does both: it “charges” not only the colonized but also their “natural” connection to the land, a connection that frustrates the settler project and provokes the very “ecological struggle” (virilio, 1978/1990) the settler state must then violently suppress. the experience of violent and continuing dislocation generates in refugees not only a deep longing for return, but also new attachments to the very places to which they have been dislocated and confined. communities such as balata refugee camp, for example, have a palpable sense of collective identity and determination to engage in popular defense (collins, 2004), even against the most aggressive forms of israeli military assault (weizman, 2007, pp. 185-221). similarly, palestinian refugees in gaza have developed a strong sense of gazan identity despite having been pushed to live there against their will. in short, the palestinian occupation to which i am referring is a product not only of centuries of habitation in shehadeh’s west bank hills, but also of the deterritorialization wrought by settler colonialism. this palestinian occupation has always had as its basic building block the actions of families on the micro level. with colonization largely taking the daily, inexorable form of “another acre, another goat,” palestine is full of examples of families and individuals, like abed rabbo, who have spent literally years struggling against land confiscation within the israeli court system and staying on their land amidst the colonial encroachment. here one is reminded of virilio’s (1978/1990) description of the family as the foundational source of social solidarity and, even more provocatively, the original “commando group” (pp. 80-82). states and the military class that often control them typically seek to disrupt this network by cultivating suspicion within families and communities, as israel has done through its system of collaborators throughout the west bank and gaza since 1967. the politics of habitational resistance historically have found further expression in the long tradition of palestinian collective action at the community level, such as the growth of popular committees (lijân shacbiyye) during the first intifada. these between acceleration and occupation 207 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 committees addressed a wide range of tasks related to popular defense, from medical relief and clandestine education to local security and food production (lockman & beinin, 1989; nassar & heacock, 1991). such efforts, however, built upon a process of popular organizing that had been building steadily throughout the two decades after 1967 (hasso, 2005; taraki, 1991). women, youth, students, workers, shopkeepers, farmers—all of these groups have been centrally involved in resistance to israeli rule. it would be an exaggeration to say that ecological awareness has played a major role in the palestinian liberation movement to date. with the growth of an indigenous consciousness, however, comes the recognition, to quote former american indian movement spokesman john trudell (2008), that “we are the land” (p. 224). in such a context, the simple act of walking in the hills becomes more than a recreational pastime, even more than a way of claiming political sovereignty; it becomes an act of habitational resistance. as the war on the milieu raises the ecological stakes, it also produces new ways of conceiving the project of anticolonial resistance. 10 “gravity and density” the increased visibility of habitational resistance in palestine is partly due to the presence of the international solidarity activists who provide direct support to the nonviolent struggles of ordinary palestinians. now more than ever, the popular defense of palestine is a globalized process. the growth in collaboration between palestinian communities and activists affiliated with the international solidarity movement (ism) and other groups during the past decade (dudouet, 2006; kaufman-lacusta, 2010; seitz, 2003) has coincided with the escalating process of dromocratic confinement described above. when edward said wrote presciently in 1993 of the “principle of confinement” animating the practices of u.s. imperialism, he also identified an “elusive oppositional mood....an internationalist counter-articulation,” effectively prefiguring the rise of the ism and, more broadly, the new global justice movement (p. 311). many of the movements associated with this global “counter-articulation” have consciously responded to the “principle of confinement” by insisting on their right to inhabit streets, abandoned buildings, and other public spaces. taking back the notion of occupation, in other words, is an important component of the activist networks that make up a global movement for which attachment to the palestinian cause is an increasingly prominent element. in the case of some, of course, it is a shallow and highly romanticized attachment that does not stretch beyond the exercise of political fashion statements such as wearing a kufiya. in other cases, however, the connection with palestine is more deeply felt and becomes the basis for life-changing decisions. in one of his last and most powerful articles, said addressed the story of american activist rachel corrie, crushed to death by an israeli bulldozer in 2003 while defending a palestinian home in gaza, and used it as an occasion to reflect on the continuing and growing power of the solidarity movement: what rachel corrie’s work in gaza recognized was precisely the gravity and the density of the living history of the palestinian people as a national 208 john collins studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 community, and not merely as a collection of deprived refugees. that is what she was in solidarity with. and we need to remember that that kind of solidarity is no longer confined to a small number of intrepid souls here and there, but is recognized the world over. (said, 2004, p. xv) in invoking the ideas of “gravity” and “density,” said called attention to the transformation that often occurs when activists cross the geographic threshold and find themselves on the ground in palestine, feeling the weight not only of the deep structures put in place by settler colonization, but also of the tenacious occupation maintained by the colonized. the key practices of the solidarity movement are those associated with the nonviolent politics of habitational resistance: witnessing, documenting, standing with palestinians in their homes and at checkpoints, assisting with the harvesting of olives under the threat of settler violence, and, perhaps most visibly, working in communities that are most directly affected by the construction of the wall. communities such as qalqilya and bil’in (http://www.bilin-village.org/english/), sharply victimized by land confiscations, have become internationally-known focal points of palestinian popular defense. these sites are laboratories not only of israeli colonization, but also of grassroots action, including the practice of activists chaining themselves to trees. reviving popular defense when the nobel committee announced its decision to award its 2004 peace prize to wangari maathai, the kenyan environmental activist best known for planting trees, more than a few observers raised their eyebrows. in her acceptance speech, maathai acknowledged that the committee had done something unusual by choosing to recognize her work in founding the green belt movement and championing the causes of reforestation and (literal) grassroots empowerment. “the committee, i believe, is seeking to encourage community efforts to restore the earth,” she said, “at a time when we face the ecological crises of deforestation, desertification, water scarcity and a lack of biological diversity” (maathai, 2004). the world’s only superpower had other ideas. the day before maathai accepted her nobel prize, the u.s. congress passed legislation authorizing the federal aviation administration to issue permits for space tourism at a time when american officials were talking hopefully about the future colonization of mars. settler colonizers, it seems, are willing to pay almost any price in order to escape the grassroots. for much of the rest of the world, however, the importance of protecting trees is self-evidently a matter of life and death. the choice of maathai represented a recognition of the organic relationship between the struggle for peace and the struggle to defend the biosphere, including and especially the most vulnerable communities that inhabit it, against the impact of a predatory system of global colonization that combines endless capital accumulation with war on the milieu. the growing awareness of global climate change and the related global food crisis have only heightened the need for creative strategies. it is here that virilio’s suggestive discussion of “popular defense” comes most directly into play. the heyday of popular defense, he argues, was an earlier period http://www.bilin-village.org/english/� between acceleration and occupation 209 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 when local communities were more easily able to defend themselves and their land, whether through sabotage or through other strategies of slowing down the dromocratic invader. the replacement of the ancient “right to armed defense” with the kind of “military protection racket” that formed the basis of modern states, however, began a steady process of reducing the possibility of a successful popular defense (virilio, 1978/1990, pp. 45-46). the exponential shift in violence set in motion by modern military inventions from the machine gun to the ballistic missile, he suggests, dramatically accelerated this process. in many ways, the age of high globalization has seen the gap between popular defense and the power of the war machine widen even further. moreover, the shift from geopolitics to chronopolitics means that the very notion of place itself is under siege as “time displaces space as the more significant strategic ‘field’” for dromocratic elites (der derian, 1990, p. 308). are there any places left to defend, or are we only inhabiting time now? reading virilio’s work, one almost gets the impression that the game is over, leaving us with no choice but to play out the apocalyptic string from within a dromocratic prison. within this pessimistic framework, contemporary movements for popular defense are no more than quixotic remnants of a vanished past. or perhaps not. as the example of today’s palestinians and their international solidarity comrades suggests, the urge to defend locality through various forms of popular defense remains a powerful impulse with a growing sense of global urgency. the limitation of virilio’s perspective in this case derives from having been seduced by the particular realities of globalization and globalized violence that were emerging in the 1970s. by reading the palestinian situation solely through the lens of its most deterritorialized and deterritorializing elements—namely, the nomadic hijackers who turned popular defense into a suicidal “popular assault” and the israeli state’s borderless military response to this development—he rendered invisible the continuing ecological and habitational presence of palestinians on the land. activism and dromocratic violence the power of popular defense, in palestine or anywhere else, is not to be underestimated. neither, however, should it be romanticized or exaggerated. the great value of the dromological approach is that when combined with close attention to what is happening on the ground, it helps us understand the dilemma with which i began this article. while drawing their motivation and their moral strength from the imperatives of occupation, individuals and communities seeking to engage in popular defense also inevitably find themselves confronted by the realities of acceleration. the same technologies that enable them to communicate, educate the public, and bear witness to what is happening on the ground also enable others to carry out dromocratic violence with increasing speed and lethality. the activist’s dilemma, then, is how to negotiate a path between acceleration and occupation without being swallowed by the former. the gaza tunnel system that has been targeted in recent years by the israeli military is an interesting example of this dilemma. created as a response to the carceral conditions that prevailed after the israeli “disengagement” from the territory, the tunnels undoubtedly serve an ecological function: they enable palestinians in 210 john collins studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 gaza to keep inhabiting the land without completely running out of food or fuel. they also constitute a powerful symbolic device that can be mobilized and circulated globally as evidence of palestinian suffering and desperation. at the same time, their military function of facilitating the entry of weapons tells us that the tunnels also serve to push forward the very dynamic of violent acceleration that is shaping life for gaza’s population. many palestinians, for understandable reasons, might see this as a necessary contradiction, perhaps because they have been forced again into a position where they feel they have no choice but to launch a “popular assault.” but it remains a contradiction, one that reveals a great deal about the starkly limited situation that colonization has produced in palestine. the implication to be drawn from virilio’s provocative framework is that engaging in a true popular defense today requires eschewing, to the greatest extent possible, the politics of violent acceleration. in a world of immanent securitization, however, no one can claim to be fully outside the circuits of violence; even a philosophical commitment to pacifism doesn’t guarantee that one can control the effects of one’s own actions. these global realities, combined with the highly complex and dangerous political environment in palestine, mean that activists working for popular defense there must continually negotiate their own relationship to local agents of dromocratic violence. while it is not impossible to imagine isolated individuals affiliated with the solidarity movement who might deliberately engage in clandestine cooperation with armed palestinian groups, or even with the israeli state, the larger issue is that the global structures of dromocratic violence leave all activists vulnerable to unintended consequences. the pro-israeli propaganda campaign against global solidarity activists in palestine leverages precisely this fact by taking a movement that presents itself as nonviolent and attempting to reframe it as a material supporter of the kind of terrorism (in the form of suicide bombings) that must be subject, in the dominant public discourse, to “absolute moral condemnation” (hage, 2003, p. 67). the networked nature of contemporary violence and the representation of violence means that solidarity activists can never refute such charges definitively. between the third world and the fourth the dilemmas facing solidarity activists point us toward one of the most important social justice questions of the 21st century: how to politicize acceleration. in the same way that workers’ movements helped politicize wealth, or feminism and other “new social movements” helped politicize identity, what is needed now is a kind of global occupation movement that opposes militarization through a habitational politics in order to make visible the relationship between acceleration and the permanent social war that we see all around us. fortunately, we also see all around us evidence of what amounts to the social basis for such a movement. the broad, coalitional orientation of the world social forum is one of the key elements of this picture, but it has also found itself subject to a variety of critiques. created primarily as a grassroots response to the claim that “there is no alternative” to the globalization of neoliberal capitalism, the wsf has been criticized for privileging the perspectives and the leadership role of middle-class, educated between acceleration and occupation 211 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 populations and also for being significantly whiter than the larger population it claims to represent (teivainen, 2002). the opposition of these relatively privileged groups to the dominant system, some suggest, is drastically undercut by their often unacknowledged investment in it, an investment symbolized by their level of comfort in inhabiting the placeless world of the internet at a time when more marginalized populations are engaged in place-based struggles. similarly, the forum’s origins in the critique of capitalism initially had the effect of downplaying some of the issues (e.g., environmental sustainability, militarization) and perspectives (e.g., those of indigenous people) that would presumably be most central to maintaining and strengthening the tradition of popular defense. more recently, however, there are indications that the wsf and the many national and regional forums it has spawned are moving toward a more inclusive approach in response to both internal critiques and the emerging realities of “imperial globality” and “global coloniality” in which “the global economy comes to be supported by a global organisation of violence and vice versa” (escobar, p. 214). boaventura de sousa santos, one of the most prominent intellectuals associated with the wsf, signalled this direction shortly after the launch of the u.s. war on iraq in 2003, arguing for a “strategic shift” that would recognize the struggle against militarization as “a necessary condition for the success of all the other struggles” (santos, 2003). the integration of issues related to environmental sustainability represents a further step along this path toward a political framework that would underpin an integrated response to the global war on the milieu. the shift that santos envisions is not a minor one, nor is it necessarily a palatable one for those who insist that war is simply a tool of capital. nonetheless, refusing to subordinate the struggle against militarization to a narrow anti-capitalist politics is arguably more in tune with the global realities that colonization in general, and settler colonialism in particular, have fostered in the modern era. for this reason, it is also more in tune with the “tradition of the oppressed” (benjamin, 1978, p. 257) that arguably finds its clearest expression in the perspectives of those who have been targeted, displaced, and enslaved by settler-colonial projects. in this light, it is hardly accidental that the idea of “globalization from below” has coincided with a renewed global politics of indigeneity. the wsf itself probably could not have emerged without the impetus provided by the 1994 zapatista uprising, which articulated its identity and its goals explicitly in response to a 500year system combining violent colonization and, more recently, neoliberal capitalist exploitation. with the zapatistas in mind, hall (2003) argues that the alternative traditions of sovereignty associated with indigenous people, in fact, represent the “last line of defence” against unchecked corporate globalization (p. 150). there are indications that the wsf’s “movement of movements” has begun to redress the marginalization of indigenous voices, a development that could have farreaching consequences (conway, 2009). such a shift can only help the process of exploring the linkages among militarization, neoliberalism, and global climate change at a time when new thinking is sorely needed. indigenous people, of course, are not the only people who have good reason to mount a determined politics of occupation and popular defense; the same holds true for all those who are facing structural violence and dislocation. without question, however, indigenous voices are of central importance in pushing for a renewed ecological politics focused on core issues of land, water, food, and climate—issues that are also of concern to many 212 john collins studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 within the global privileged class, including those who populate the various “slow movements” that often prioritize sustainability and a return to small-scale agriculture (particularly organic agriculture). the political convergences we are seeing on the level of escobar’s “place-based yet transnationalised” social movements suggest a step away from the kind of “third worldist” approach rooted firmly in modernity. in reaching toward something that is “beyond” modernity, they have much in common with the kind of “fourth world” thinking that has always been suspicious of the linear, hierarchical thinking imposed by colonial projects and internalized by many anti-colonial nationalists (hall, 2003). at the same time, as escobar rightly notes, “many of the conditions that gave rise to third worldism have by no means disappeared” (p. 207). this gray area between third and fourth world realities and responses is precisely where the palestinian struggle is currently located. for those who see it as the last remaining struggle against colonialism, it is the quintessential third world issue awaiting resolution in the form of palestinian statehood. for others, however, palestine’s primary importance lies in its connection with wider struggles for social, economic, and even environmental justice.11 this may explain why palestine continues to be one of the most unifying issues within the lively, diverse, and often contentious global justice movement. while moments of confrontation with supporters of israel remain unavoidable, the primary debates within the movement have concerned strategic questions such as the relative value of government sanctions on israel vs. the civil society-based approach that has produced growing calls for divestment and boycotts in recent years (“palestinian strategic options”). with palestine’s status as cause célèbre for global justice activists, of course, come a number of dangers. not least of these, as noted above, is the danger of romanticization (bhattacharyya, 2008). perhaps even more concerning, however, is the danger of oppressive orthodoxy. to the extent that an undifferentiated notion of “palestine” becomes an article of faith within the global justice movement, it becomes more difficult for anyone to ask critical questions about the relationship between palestinian resistance, international solidarity, and the deeper structures within which both are embedded. what these dangers highlight is the importance of making sure that solidarity does not, as said famously warned, have the effect of blinding its adherents and silencing the kind of critical reflection that is the lifeblood of any struggle for social justice. 12 regardless of the exact path that the global justice movement takes, there is little doubt that solidarity will provide the glue holding together these efforts and enabling them to connect productively with the global movement for justice in palestine. as i have argued here, the search for effective and liberating responses to the structures of dromocratic violence—structures that are organically related to settler colonialism and its ongoing global impact—remains a key point of convergence that gives everyone a stake in the struggle to maintain the palestinian occupation. between acceleration and occupation 213 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 notes 1 for some of the most incisive contributions to a growing literature on palestine and settler colonialism, see elkins and pederson (2005); piterberg (2008); shafir (1996); veracini (2006); and wolfe (2006). 2 virilio’s essentially anarchist perspective views the state as a “permanent conspiracy” engaged primarily in the business of domination and resource extraction. he distinguishes domination from the sort of “pure power” that stretches beyond the control of politics and manifests itself, for example, in processes of runaway militarization. 3 the architects of zionism, as joseph massad (2005) and others have argued, saw themselves as emissaries of “progress” and “civilization” who would, as the popular slogan goes, “make the desert bloom.” this formulation reveals a great deal about how palestine’s indigenous population has been positioned within settler discourse. the same formulation also provides a context for understanding a range of contemporary israeli discourses that praise israel’s high-tech economy, cutting-edge farming techniques, and other features while marking palestinians as the antithesis of this ultra-modernity and/or obstacles to its full realization. 4 for an extended discussion of how the construction of the wall has affected palestinian farmers, see makdisi (2008). 5 the israeli committee against house demolitions (www.icahd.org) is an excellent resource for information on this issue. icahd places the number of palestinian homes demolished since 1967 at over 24,000. 6 weizman also notes that thanks to the chaotic building and destruction that have taken place in the “wild frontier of the west bank,” raw sewage has proven to be quite uncontrollable, often ending up in israel despite the intentions of israeli authorities to keep it contained in palestinian areas. 7 for a detailed discussion of israeli “nationalist biopolitics,” including the aggressive provision of contraceptives and abortion services for palestinians who live in israel, see kanaaneh (2002). 8 patrick wolfe (2006) uses the term “logic of elimination” to designate one of the basic characteristics of settler-colonial projects of the sort undertaken in australia, north america, south africa, and palestine: the desire to create a new society in place of an existing one. while such projects do not always result in genocide, wolfe argues persuasively that they do seek the “elimination” of the indigenous population through some combination of forced removal, mass killing, and biocultural assimilation. 9 i owe this distinction to ghassan hage, and in particular to his plenary lecture at the 2008 “new worlds, new sovereignties” conference held in melbourne. if sovereignty typically refers to the desire to establish and maintain formal control over territory and other people, self-sovereignty refers to the desire to feel “at home” in the world and to feel some sense of control over one’s own circumstances. in hage’s reading, colonial sovereignty is inherently linked with ecological domination and the desire to “domesticate” the other by denying and/or killing the other’s political will. 10 the bustan qaraaqa (tortoise garden) project located in the west bank town of beit sahour, for example, is a deliberate experiment in the kind of “permaculture” that seeks to create “sustainable human habitats by following nature’s patterns, using the stability and resilience of natural ecosystems to provide a framework and guidance for people to develop their own sustainable solutions to the problems facing their world” (bustan qaraaqa). 11 the marketing of palestinian olive oil as part of the global “solidarity economy” in recent years is a good example of how international activists who are well-connected on the ground in palestine have been able to build bridges with wider ecological struggles. the same olive tree that has nationalist significance for palestinians and political significance for activists who lend their hands to the annual olive harvest campaign in the west also has ecological significance for consumers who may not necessarily be personally involved in the palestinian liberation struggle. 12 in his classic 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(original work published in 1976) virilio, p., & lotringer, s. (1997). pure war (m. polizzotti, trans.). new york, ny: semiotext(e). (original work published in 1983) virilio p., & lotringer, s. (2002). crepuscular dawn (m. taormina, trans.). los angeles & new york: semiotext(e). weizman, e. (2007). hollow land: israel's architecture of occupation. london: verso. wolfe, p. (2006). settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. journal of genocide research, 8, 387-409. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1127461.html� http://www.stoptorture.org.il/files/no%20second%20thoughts_eng_web.pdf� http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/617187� http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/sara-roy/if-gaza-falls-� http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2003/63/santos.html� studies in social justice volume 3, issue 2, 173-190, 2009 correspondence address: diane-gabrielle tremblay, télé-université, l’université du québec à montréal, montréal, qc h2x 3p2, canada. tel: +1 514 843-2015, email: dgtrembl@teluq.uqam.ca émilie genin, école de relations industrielles, université de montréal, montréal, qc h3c 3j7, canada. tel: +1 514 343-6111, email: emilie.genin@umontreal.ca issn: 1911-4788 aging, economic insecurity, and employment: which measures would encourage older workers to stay longer in the labour market? diane-gabrielle tremblay télé-université de l’université du québec à montréal, montréal, québec, canada émilie genin 1 école de relations industrielles, université de montréal, montréal, québec, canada abstract in the present context of aging populations, the question of how to support older workers who want to stay in employment longer is of particular importance, especially from a social justice perspective with regards to income. the challenges faced by organizations and governments are unprecedented. interesting conclusions can be drawn from our research with regard to these challenges. first of all, the perception of retirement appears more or less unchanged over the years and remains very positive. consequently, one of the barriers to the employment of older workers may be the image of retirement itself, since it is still perceived as a gift or a right. secondly, our results confirm that forcing people to stay longer in the labour market is a largely unpopular measure. consequently, if public retirement plans offer limited income, governments and organizations should adopt a more voluntary approach to encourage older workers to stay in employment longer for a better income. our results highlight the importance of the sector and type of job in the measures or incentives that could encourage older workers to stay in employment longer. consequently, governments and organizations will probably have to adopt a contingent approach; i.e., all incentives do not necessarily fit all jobs or all sectors and social justice would require this be taken into account. we identified three sets of measures that could encourage older workers to stay in employment longer, and thus have access to better economic security: the reduction of working time, the flexibility of working time, and the individualization of retirement options and working time. the progressive reduction of their working time appears most interesting to our respondents. these measures appear to favour social justice in terms of income and right to employment at the end of active careers. 174 diane-gabrielle tremblay and émilie genin studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 introduction the aging of the baby-boom cohort, coupled with subsequent declines in fertility, is contributing to accelerated population aging. these combined effects lead to immediate and near-future concerns with older workers (habtu, 2002; hicks, 2003a, 2003b; marshall & mueller, 2002) as well as with possible problems of economic insecurity and insufficient incomes at retirement, especially in the context of the financial crisis which hit the world in 2008. as well, in europe, in the face of low employment rates and high levels of poverty in some groups of the various countries’ aging populations, in addition to preoccupations with maintaining public health and social security budgets, the “lisbon agenda” has called for an increase in the employment rates of aging populations (conseil d’analyse economique [cae], 2005; guillemard, 2007; inspection générale des affaires sociales [igas], 2004). with the aging of the population, our perception of retirement as an institution is being questioned. the institutionalization of retirement, coupled with a dynamic increase in life expectancy over the past century, forged a period of time between when a person stopped working and died, called “retirement” (marshall & mueller, 2002). retirement as a major social institution created a separate category in the overall age structure. retirement is a socially constructed institution, meaning there is nothing biologically inevitable about a "normal" age for retirement and that the “normal” moment for this can vary from one country or social group to another (bellemare, poulin, & tremblay, 1998; marshall & mueller, 2002). a series of studies by the international labour office (ilo) has provided ample evidence of how older workers are often used as a balancing factor to regulate labour supply, moving them out of retirement in response to economic pressure. the use of downsizing strategies is also a factor which contributed to lowering the retirement age of canadian men (statistics canada, 2007). however, “employment is a powerful means of mitigating the effects of aging on social protection schemes” (international labour office [ilo], 2005, p. 13). while this has been recognized for some time (commission européenne, 1999; supiot, 1999), the pressure seems to have increased over recent years (cae, 2005; guillemard, 2003; igas, 2004; morrissette, schellenberg, & silver, 2004; morrissette & shang, 2004). also, in the context of the present crisis, where many retired persons have seen their savings drastically reduced, staying in employment or returning to it may be one of the only ways of reducing economic and income insecurity (tremblay, 2008), at least in the countries where public pension benefits are rather low and where people’s retirement income depends in part on financial markets. it must be noted that even before the crisis, many retirees were returning to employment, partly because of insufficient income at retirement, the percentage having been evaluated at about a third in canada (tremblay, najem, & paquet, 2007), and possibly increasing in the context of the present financial crisis; others (17%) also return because of interest in their work. however, it is not always possible or desirable to return to work full time, since some aging workers have had a difficult work life experience or difficult working conditions, which may impede their capacity to work, and especially to work full time (david, 2007). these two elements, i.e., the obligation for many to stay in or return to employment rather than opt for retirement, and the desire for adaptation of working aging, economic insecurity, and employment 175 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 conditions at the end of their career, brought us to look into this issue and design a survey to determine which measures would encourage older workers to stay in employment in a way that is acceptable or even desirable for them, while contributing to macroeconomic objectives without forcing this group into unwanted working situations. several types of measures have been taken to improve employment rates, including the establishment of targets by the majority of western countries (ilo, 2005), but to date these targets in themselves have had no impact, in the absence of changes in work organization. one aim of these targets is to extend the working life of aging people. while this is important, a key challenge is to find the precise means which will make it possible to increase the employment and participation rates of all population groups (ilo, 2005). this is an important challenge, since it has been shown that it is extremely difficult to change the image of retirement as a “gift” or a “right,” and that not all workers have a positive view of employment at the end of their career (bellemare et al., 1998). indeed, research has shown there is a diversity of situations at retirement age, the differences relating to gender, professional category, sector, etc. (bellemare et al., 1998; tremblay, 2007). as guillemard (2007) has shown, the proposition put forward in france of pushing back the age of retirement, with the 2003 fillon laws, does not necessarily have an impact on prolongation of activity. indeed, as much research shows (david, 2007), if working conditions and working hours are not satisfactory, it is difficult to keep workers longer and if their working conditions are difficult, many workers do not, understandably, wish to prolong their activity. most analysts now conclude that to facilitate employment of those aged 55-64, it is necessary to redesign work and working time (david, 2007; schetagne, 2007; turcotte & schellenberg, 2005). this is why we wanted to address the issue of working time from a lifelong perspective, since it appears that the ternary or tripartite model (schooling, work, retirement succession) is challenged (guillemard, 2007) and that working times should be envisaged in a more flexible way. indeed, over time, the institutionalization of the life course has led to three defined phases in life: education, work, and finally, retirement as a period for rest and leisure (marshall & mueller, 2002). however, this tripartite model was adapted to the life course of white men and a given situation in terms of health and economics. the traditional pattern of three successive parts of the life course is now being questioned in canada as in many other countries, and it is apparently being redefined (guillemard, 2003). these changes are simultaneously happening in the social, economic, and psychological spheres. if we consider the wide range of varied education and work experiences over the life course and family transitions such as multiple periods of singlehood, marriage, and child-rearing, the permutations in which life course transitions may occur is increasingly complex. however, in many societies such as canada, there is a culturally normative conception of the life course. a move towards lifelong education presents a great challenge for public policymakers (marshall & mueller, 2002), and a move to a more active end of life also presents management and social challenges. indeed, this tripartite model has been questioned, since the three activities that traditionally were found in succession over the life course are now overlapping in the real life courses of individuals. 176 diane-gabrielle tremblay and émilie genin studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 amongst the issues to be addressed are the fact that women are still far more likely to have non-linear or non-traditional careers than men, with movements in and out of the labour market and more part-time or occasional work (tremblay, 2004). the women with unstable work histories are often less economically secure in later life (marshall & mueller, 2002); they are amongst the groups who might want to prolong their labour force activity, although this is not always easy, nor desired, in all professional categories and all economic sectors (bellemare et al., 1998, tremblay, 2009). in the context of the crisis, more and more male workers also need to prolong their activity in the face of economic hardships and diminishing returns in their savings and pension plans (rodgers, 2008). moreover, recent studies and indicators suggest that older workers may stay in employment longer. in 2006, canada registered a record proportion of 60to 64-year-olds in the labour force (45%). furthermore, the average age of retirement remained steady at 61.5—still up from a low of 60.9 in 1998 (marshall & ferrao, 2007). however, behind this increase are two different trends for men and women. the participation rate for older men went from a high of 76% in 1976 to a low of 58% in 1995, rebounding by 2007 to 67%. women, on the other hand, have seen a constant increase, from 32% to 53% (marshall & ferrao, 2007). retirement behaviour is thus related not just to the immediate circumstances prior to retirement itself, but to the broader context of the career and economic situation at the moment of retirement (david, 2007; marshall & mueller, 2002). amongst the various factors mentioned to explain retirement or early retirement in particular, we can mention reasons related to health and to personal and professional issues. it appears that the social context of the longest occupation held at mid-career influences timing of complete exit from the labour force (marshall & mueller, 2002). it also seems that stress and psychological pressure have an impact (david, 2007), as well as health and financial issues (feldman, 1994; gratton & haug, 1983). it has also been noted that the professional and economic situation of the partner is an important variable (szinovacz & de viney, 2000; van solinge & henkens, 2005). in the context of all of these challenges related to economic insecurity over the life course, and especially at the end of the life course, this article will address the issue of the aspirations of aging workers with respect to the end of their active life. before we present the methodology of the research referred to here, and the results, let us present a few elements on the participation rates in canada and quebec, in order to complete the introduction and contextualization of the issue and data. participation and aging quebec is the canadian province which presents the most challenges since it will age most quickly; however, the rest of canada follows close behind and the canadian government is also preoccupied with this issue. the working age group (15-64) will soon start shrinking in quebec, while those 65 and over will increase their share and those aged 0-14 will decrease their share substantially. the problem of the aging population is all the more significant in quebec in comparison to ontario and the us since the age group of 55-64 is much less active in quebec in comparison to the us and even to ontario, although it is more active than aging, economic insecurity, and employment 177 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 in many european countries (tremblay et al., 2007). even if there has been an increase in the activity rate of these groups, it is still well below that of canada and the us. the aging of the population is somewhat more accelerated in quebec because it receives less immigration than the two other zones and immigrant families generally have more children. in any case, given the present economic context, the realities of aging populations and the stress on public budgets in many countries, most countries are worried and searching for ways to encourage higher employment participation rates. this is also a worry for pensioners and recent retirees in many countries as well, especially with the crisis which has increased economic insecurity for many. a study from statistics canada (2007) shows that the majority of the youngest pensioners continue to do some work for pay, but the attachment to the labour market loosens with age. the study found that at least half of people in their 50s who recently retired had at least some employment income the year after they began receiving their pension. however, if this threshold of employment income were raised to a mere $5,000, the proportion would fall to less than one-third. the study found a sizeable gap between rates of post-pension employment for men and women. in 2004, one in three young male pensioners earned at least $5,000 from employment the year after retirement; only one-quarter of their female counterparts did so. other studies have shown that women still contribute more time to housework and the care of the elderly, which may account for lower re-employment rates. women earned less than men in both pensioned and non-pensioned groups (statistics canada, 2007). data definitely showed a recovery in “re-employment” among early pensioners since the mid-1990s (marshall & ferrao, 2007). during the 2000s, the rates have remained essentially flat, but it is expected they will increase with the present economic hardships, as many need to work to maintain a decent level of income. (baril, 2004; rodgers, 2008). also, the loss of potential labour supply is highlighted by a significant gap in labour market attachment between pensioners and non-pensioners. this gap is clear at the age of 50, and widens for older age groups (statistics canada, 2007). consequently, the aging workforce has thus become a serious concern for many industrialized countries for about a decade and the challenge might be all the more important in the coming years, not only from an economic and budgetary point of view (need for higher employment rates in order to support the costs of an aging population) but also for the individual’s economic security (cae, 2005; morrissette et al., 2004). indeed, not only the massive retirement of the baby-boomer generation and the constant drop of birth rates are expected to provoke workforce shortage and the loss of invaluable knowledge for organizations, but the 2008 financial and economic crisis may reduce many retirees’ income (baril, 2004; rodgers, 2008). for example, the market value of assets held in employer-sponsored pension funds fell by 8.7% during the third quarter of 2008, the largest quarterly decline in a decade (statistics canada, 2009). in our study, in trying to determine avenues which are acceptable to aging workers and not only to governments and firms, we examine the image of retirement among a sample of retired and older workers. since the needs and aspirations of older workers may in many ways differ from those of other workers, we also analyze measures that could possibly encourage them to stay in employment longer, since this appears to be one of the very few avenues possible, aside from increasing retirement pensions or 178 diane-gabrielle tremblay and émilie genin studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 imposing later retirement or other compulsory solutions, both of which appear difficult to realize in the present context (david, 2007; morrissette et al, 2004). the increase in pension benefits is proposed by some, but in the absence of increased employment participation and fiscal revenues for the state, this does not appear feasible. methodology we will present here the results of a vast survey carried out in collaboration with the réseau fadoq (previously fédération de l’âge d’or du québec, an association which represents the 50 and over, including some working people and other more elderly). this population was of interest because the members of this association, and thus all our respondents are either “older workers” or retired. the data were collected via the internet during the spring of 2007. an e-mail was sent to the members of the association. it contained a hypertext link giving the members access to an online questionnaire. 2 the respondents were also asked to express their agreement or their disagreement of a list of measures that could lead older workers to stay in employment longer. every item was assessed on a likert’s scale in 5 points (very interesting = 1; not interesting at all = 5). the list of measures comes from different governmental reports (quebec, 2003), proposals from the different aging workers’ associations (fadoq, 2007), as well as previous studies (david, 2007; tremblay et al., 2007). the respondents were also asked to answer questions on the ideal age for retirement we obtained 276 usable questionnaires; 54% of our respondents were women while 46% were men. this sample is not large enough to be considered as representative of the canadian population; that is the reason that this study should be considered as exploratory. nevertheless our results give interesting perspectives for further development. two-thirds of our respondents are between 55 and 64 years old, 15% are under 55 years old and 17% are 65 years old or over. nearly half of our respondents are currently retired, 25% are in employment without having ever been retired, and nearly one-third of our respondents returned to the labour market after their retirement (which is the percentage found in a representative survey for canada) (tremblay et al., 2007). some 60% of them live with a spouse or partner which, as we saw earlier, can influence the end of career aspirations (van solinge & henkens, 2005). the questionnaire we designed first asked general socio-demographic questions (age, gender, sector of activity, etc.) and information on their family situation (i.e., the day-to-day situation). the questionnaire then assessed the motivations for retirement and the measures that could encourage older workers to stay in employment longer. in order to do so, the respondents were invited to evaluate the importance of different motivations on a likert’s scale of five points (1 = very important; 5 = not important). the list of motivations for retirement integrates the results of different studies (david, 2007; guillemard, 2007; schetagne, 2007; tremblay et al., 2007). aging, economic insecurity, and employment 179 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 and on measures taken in other countries, such as raising the legal age of retirement from 65 to 67 years. results ideal age for retirement first of all, we note a very positive perception of retirement among all our respondents, something which had been observed in other research, but of a more qualitative nature, some ten years ago (bellemare et al., 1998). indeed, it seems that ten years later, retirement is still perceived very positively and even as almost “the best time of life” by a large majority. in addition, we also note an important preoccupation with health. consequently, retirement can be the best time of life inasmuch as one enjoys good health! moreover, amongst our respondents still in the labour market, 40% plan to retire before 55 years of age.3 table 1. perceptions of later retirement this percentage may appear very high but almost one quarter of them plans to retire between 65 and 69 years old. question: some countries, such as germany and the united states, decided to raise the legal age of retirement from 65 to 67 years to compensate for the aging population. this change aimed at encouraging people to stay in employment longer. do you agree with this measure? yes, i totally agree 13% yes, i agree 17% i don’t know 6% no, i disagree 38% no, i totally disagree 26% according to our respondents (already retired or still in the labour market), the ideal age for retirement is around 60 years old, but answers are very heterogeneous with important standard deviation. conversely, they consider on average that one is able to work until 70 years old, but answers are still very diverse. more than 60% of our respondents think it is absolutely possible to complete a work of quality after 65 years old. on the other hand, only 30% of them agree with the idea of raising the legal age of retirement from 65 to 67 years old; while 64% of them indicate their disagreement (sum of disagree and totally disagree) with this proposal. table 1 gives the results of the question asked in relation to this. therefore, our results underline the massive refusal of our respondents to impose on all retirement at the age of 67. this is clearly an indication that forcing later retirement is quite unpopular (as was seen in france as cited in guillemard, 2007), and therefore puts forward the question of measures which might make staying in the labour market of greater interest. 180 diane-gabrielle tremblay and émilie genin studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 table 2. preferred measures for remaining in employment longer question: if the following measures are (or were) offered by your employer, which ones do you think you will use (or did use) at the end of your career? progressive retirement 16.9% flexitime 11.8% retirement and part-time job in the same organization 6.6% reduced week to 4 days (paid 4 days) 9.3% retirement and part-time job in the same organization 6.6% longer annual holidays 6.6% additional leaves 6.2% voluntary reduced working time 5.1% compressed week (5 days’ work done in 4 days and paid the total of the normal hours) 4.8% shorter working days 3.7% possibility to telework some days a week 2.6% voluntary shared job (two employees working half-time) 1.8% possibility to telework full-time 1.1% question: if the following measures are not (or were not) offered by your employer, which ones would you like to use (or would you have liked to use) at the end of your career? progressive retirement 13.0% retirement and part-time job in the same organization 11.9% longer annual holidays 10.2% possibility to telework some days a week 8.9% voluntary shared job (two employees working half time) 8.7% flexitime 8.2% voluntary reduced working time 8.0% shorter working days 6.9% additional leaves 6.1% reduced week in 4 days (paid 4 days) 5.6% constricted week in 4 days (paid the total of the normal hours) 4.1% possibility to telework full-time 3.7% aging, economic insecurity, and employment 181 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 also, our respondents appear to be interested in measures allowing a progressive passage to retirement and/or maintaining a part-time job as measures to encourage them to stay in employment longer. other measures include: retirement combined with part-time work, flexitime, longer annual holidays, and additional leaves (see table 2). thus, we note a demand for reduced and adapted working time in preparation for retirement, as well as more flexible forms of retirement. table 3. preferred form of retirement question: what type of retirement did you take (or want to take)? progressive retirement 21.1% full retirement 30.4% early retirement 10.0% retirement and another full-time job 1.4% retirement and another part-time job 17.5% retirement and self-employment 15.4% other 4.3% as table 3 shows, a third of our respondents took, or would like to take, a definitive retirement, 21% a progressive retirement and 17.5% would like to return, or have returned, to employment in another part-time job after their retirement. consequently, it is interesting to note that nearly half of our respondents continue, or think they will continue to work after their retirement. this result may support the need for public policies aimed at maintaining more of the aging workers in the labour market, but also may translate feelings of economic insecurity on the part of these individuals. as regards the retired and pre-retired respondents, the main reasons for retirement or pre-retirement are: the desire for more flexibility with one’s time, the possibility to accomplish new projects and the possibility to have more time. the desire to have more time is therefore a very important variable for respondents who decide to retire, and it has also a significant impact on the questions concerning the measures which would encourage older workers to stay in employment longer. appendix a presents the principal reasons that made our respondents decide to retire or take early retirement. measures or incentives to stay in employment longer among the measures which could, according to our respondents, encourage them to stay in employment longer, the most popular are: progressive retirement, flexible working hours, longer holidays and keeping a part-time job in the same organization at the same time as retirement (see appendix b). no statistically significant differences were found between men and women, except one. more women than 182 diane-gabrielle tremblay and émilie genin studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 men are interested in shorter working days (61% of them find this measure a very interesting or rather interesting measure, as compared to 35% of men). in the health sector, we note a much more marked interest for additional days off and longer annual holidays than in other sectors. this may reflect the situation of workforce shortage in this sector, in which obligatory overtime is a widespread practice. consequently, it seems that aging workers in this sector aspire, more than in other professional categories, to more time off, or to more time to “breathe” (see appendix c and tremblay & larivière, 2009). in addition, the demand for telework is stronger in the education/research and public sectors, perhaps because this type of job is particularly suitable for telework. finally, it is in the public sector that we find the highest rate of respondents declaring that no measure would persuade them to stay in employment longer. this may be due to the relative stability of the pension benefits in the public sector and the fact that they are often better than those found in the private sector. according to our respondents the main factors that could favour the participation of those 50-years-old and over in the labour market are: progressive retirement, more flexible working conditions, and longer holidays (see appendix b). it is interesting to note that these factors are not directly linked to governmental measures but are more linked to the goodwill of employers. as in the case of retired persons, respondents still in employment express a demand for more flexibility at the end of their career. moreover, a third of them plan to have a paid occupation after they retire, but only part-time (see table 3). about 75% of our respondents still in employment would like to have the possibility to work at home occasionally. this result is interesting because telework is sometimes considered as a possible solution to work-family conflict, and this especially in the presence of young children. however, our result shows that telework can also interest older workers, or even encourage them to stay in employment longer. thanks to factorial analysis (see results in appendix d), we found three factors to sum up the measures which, according to our respondents, could encourage older workers to stay in employment longer. consequently, the incentives government and/or employers can use to persuade older workers to stay in employment longer are of three types, all related to flexibility of working time, as well as of retirement: the reduction of working time: the first set of measures focuses on the reduction of working time, through more holidays and leaves. it includes: reduced week in four days (four days paid), work week compressed in four days (paid the total of the normal hours), shorter working days, additional leaves, longer annual holidays. these measures seem particularly attractive for older workers that experience pressure and strain at work, for example nurses and others in the health sector. other canadian data from the workplace employee survey support this interest for reduction in working time for aging workers (tremblay & najem, 2009). the flexibility of working time: the second set of measures concerns the flexibility of working time, including the possibility of telework. it includes the following measures: possibility to telework some days a week, possibility to telework full time, and flexitime. these measures could persuade older workers to stay in employment through better working conditions, with more control in the way they can organize aging, economic insecurity, and employment 183 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 their time. this type of measure might not be available to all workers, since many professions require the physical presence of workers, in the construction or in the health sectors, for example. nevertheless, this may be an interesting avenue for sectors in which tasks can be easily relocated to home (e.g. administrative workers). the individualization of working time and retirement options: finally, the last set of measures deals with the individualization of working time, which means adapting retirement and working time to the specific needs of each worker at different stages of his/her life. it includes individual arrangements such as flexible working hours at the end of career, voluntary reduced working time, voluntary shared jobs (two employees working half time), progressive retirement, retirement and a part-time job in the same organization, retirement and activity or job in another organization. this avenue has been studied with regard to work-life balance, but research is still needed with regard to adapting work to older workers. this is certainly a promising approach but it presents huge challenges in practice for employers. indeed, such an approach would demand a deep reflection on work organization and on task coordination. these challenges also interfere with other challenges related to knowledge management, i.e., how to ensure the transmission of knowledge from one generation of workers to another in such a context. this is surely not impossible, but requires some thinking and reorganization on the part of employers, although some consider that employers are often the source of lack of knowledge transfer (flamant, 2005). discussion/conclusion in the context of aging populations, the question of how to support older workers who want to stay in employment longer is of particular importance, especially from a social justice point of view. the challenges faced by organizations and governments are unprecedented and need original responses. the demographic evolutions most industrialized countries are facing question the traditional tripartite model of education-work-retirement, according to which these three phases are found in a succession, with little or no overlap. indeed, continuing education is more and more needed to maintain the competences of workers throughout their work life (tremblay, 2008). moreover, retirement can represent a period of time nearly equal to work life. the cost of this “expanded” retirement is judged unacceptable by many governments, leading to the question of how to encourage older workers who want to stay in employment longer. interesting conclusions can be drawn from our research with regard to these challenges. first of all, the perception of retirement appears more or less unchanged over the years. its perception is still very positive. consequently, one of the barriers to the employment of older workers is, perhaps, the image of retirement itself, since it is still perceived as a gift or a right. furthermore, the perception of retirement contrasts with the perception of age. indeed, a large majority of respondents do believe one can carry out work of quality after 65 years old, but nevertheless, many appear to want to retire. this result questions work in itself. why do older workers want to stop working? is work too hard? too boring? too exhausting? unsatisfactory? if 184 diane-gabrielle tremblay and émilie genin studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 they want to retain older workers, organizations and managers will have to adapt work to their specific needs. secondly, our results confirm that forcing people to stay longer in the labour market is a largely unpopular measure. consequently, governments and organizations should probably adopt a more voluntary approach; hence the importance of the evaluation of the different options to encourage older workers to stay in employment longer, since they vary from one professional category and sector to another. our results highlight the importance of the sector in the measures or incentives that could encourage older workers to stay in employment longer. the reasons that people would stay in employment longer depend on the type of job. consequently, governments and organizations will probably have to adopt a contingent approach; i.e., all incentives do not necessarily fit all jobs or all sectors. we identified three sets of measures that could encourage older workers to stay in employment longer (the reduction of working time; the flexibility of working time and the individualization of retirement options and working time). the relevance of these incentives seems to depend on the job and sector characteristics. as a consequence, more research is needed to determine more in depth which kind of measures could produce positive effects in various sectors. this conclusion also leads us to underline the role of the work environment, level of revenue, and income security in the decision to retire. among the measures that could support older workers who want to stay in employment longer, we identified the progressive reduction of their working time. such an approach represents an important breach in the traditional tripartite model. indeed, it would inaugurate a new period of time between work life and total retirement. organizations and government should then develop new systems (in terms of social security, laws, etc.) to institutionalize this period of time so that older workers can draw advantages from it without losing the benefits of their retirement, thus ensuring social justice between the various categories of workers. solutions for governments and organizations are neither simple nor unilateral. in order to produce positive effects, the measures taken should be integrated with a deeper reflection on work organization and retirement options. notes 1 diane-gabrielle tremblay is canada research chair on the socio-organizational challenges of the knowledge economy and professor at the télé-université de l’université du québec à montréal) and emilie genin was post-doctoral student at the chair during this research and is now professor at université de montréal. the authors wish to mention their appreciation for the comments provided by their three anonymous reviewers. 2 since the internet is not necessarily the best way to reach aging workers or retirees, we also distributed questionnaires at an activity of the fadoq, and received five questionnaires here. unfortunately, the participants in this activity were mainly the most elderly and they were for the most part quite far from employment preoccupations, having retired many years ago or not even having ever worked in the case of some elderly women. so in the end, the internet appeared to be a better way to obtain answers from aging workers who were about to leave the labour market or had just done so. 3 at least this was the case in 2007, when the survey was done; the economic crisis may have some effect, possibly increasing the level of those who might want to stay on, but aging, economic insecurity, and employment 185 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 simultaneously pushing more into unemployment and eventually retirement because of the lack of job possibilities. references baril, g. 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(2007, february 21). study: young pensioners. the daily. ottawa, on: statistics canada. retrieved from: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/070221/dq070221d-eng.htm 186 diane-gabrielle tremblay and émilie genin studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 statistics canada. (2009, march 12). employer pension plans (trusteed pension funds). the daily. ottawa, on: statistics canada. retrieved from: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/090312/dq090312deng.htm szinovacz, m. e., & de viney, s. (2000). marital characteristics and retirement decisions. research on aging, 22, 470-498. supiot, a. (ed.). (1999). au-delà de l’emploi : transformations du travail et devenir du droit du travail en europe (rapport pour la commission des communautés européennes). paris: flammarion. tremblay, d.-g. (2008). from casual work to economic security: the paradoxical case of selfemployment. social indicators research. 88, 115-130. tremblay, d.-g. (ed.). (2007). vers un nouveau management des âges et des temps sociaux. québec: presses de l’université du québec. tremblay, d.-g. (2004). économie du travail; les réalités et les approches théoriques (rev. ed.). montréal: editions saint-martin et descarries éditeur. tremblay, d.-g (2009). d’une culture de retraite vers de nouvelles fins de carrière ? québec : téléuniversité, presses de l’université du québec. tremblay, d.-g., najem, e., & paquet, e. (2007). travail et vieillissement : vers une nouvelle articulation des temps sociaux sur l’ensemble du parcours de vie? in d.-g. tremblay (ed.), vers un nouveau management des âges et des temps sociaux (pp. 65-82). québec : presses de l’université du québec. tremblay, d-g., & larivière, m. (2009). la conciliation emploi-famille dans le secteur de la santé au québec : le soutien organisationnel fait-il défaut aux infirmières? in genre et diversité en gestion. paris: agrh. pp. 101-118. tremblay, d.-g. & najem, e. (2009). work, age and working time preferences: towards a new articulation of social times in a context of economic crisis? the international journal for responsible employment practices and principles. 1(1) 53-71. turcotte, m., & schellenberg, g (2005). job strain and retirement, perspectives on labour and income, 17(3), 35-39. van solinge, h., & henkens, k. (2005). couples’ adjustment to retirement: a multi-actor panel study. journal of gerontology: social sciences, 60b, s11-s20. aging, economic insecurity, and employment 187 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 appendix a: reasons contributing to decision to retire or to take early retirement question: did the following reasons contribute to your decision to retire or to take early retirement? very important important neutral not really important not important at all because my work was too hard 13.42% 14.09% 4.03% 25.50% 42.95% because my work was too tiring 12.84% 13.51% 12.84% 22.30% 38.51% i was unsatisfied with the nature of my job 16.78% 10.07% 14.09% 12.75% 46.31% i was unemployed 1.46% 2.19% 0.73% 5.11% 90.51% i could not find a job meeting my expectations 3.65% 2.92% 2.19% 7.30% 83.94% i was unsatisfied with the relationships with my boss and colleagues 10.56% 13.38% 15.49% 8.45% 52.11% i wanted no more bosses 12.59% 3.50% 10.49% 13.29% 60.14% i wanted more independence and freedom 17.24% 13.10% 11.72% 15.17% 42.76% because my job was precarious 5.67% 2.84% 4.96% 7.80% 78.72% i wanted more flexibility to organize my time 20.42% 19.01% 15.49% 9.86% 35.21% i wanted to spend more time with spouse and/or family 8.33% 16.67% 15.97% 11.11% 47.92% because i couldn’t balance my work with my family 7.04% 5.63% 12.68% 74.65% because i was caring for an elderly parent 1.42% 1.42% 5.67% 5.67% 85.82% because my spouse or partner was retired 3.57% 4.29% 4.29% 10.00% 77.86% because i had enough money to retire 16.08% 20.28% 20.98% 9.79% 32.87% because i wanted to do more volunteering 3.55% 7.09% 14.18% 17.02% 58.16% to carry out new projects 24.14% 30.34% 17.24% 6.90% 21.38% to have more time for myself 31.08% 34.46% 15.54% 4.73% 14.19% because my health was too bad to continue to work 13.89% 4.86% 13.19% 7.64% 60.42% 188 diane-gabrielle tremblay and émilie genin studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 appendix b: measures or incentives to stay in employment longer question: if all of the following measures were offered, which ones would encourage you (or have encouraged you) to stay in employment longer? very interesting interesting neutral not really interesting not interesting at all progressive retirement 50.49% 25.73% 11.65% 4.37% 7.77% flexible working hours at the end of career 46.58% 30.59% 10.50% 3.65% 8.68% flexitime 43.96% 22.71% 13.53% 7.25% 12.56% longer annual holiday 42.58% 28.23% 12.44% 5.74% 11.00% retirement and part-time job in the same organization 37.62% 33.33% 12.38% 5.24% 11.43% additional leaves 30.50% 32.50% 17.50% 6.50% 13.00% possibility to telework some days a week 28.43% 21.57% 18.14% 7.84% 24.02% voluntary reduced working time 28.14% 26.13% 24.12% 7.04% 14.57% reduced week in 4 days (paid 4 days) 24.64% 25.12% 22.22% 11.11% 16.91% retirement and activity or job in another organization 22.92% 22.40% 27.60% 9.38% 17.71% shorter working days 22.17% 25.12% 22.17% 8.37% 22.17% constricted week in 4 days (paid the total of the normal hours) 21.29% 12.38% 14.85% 20.79% 30.69% voluntary shared job (two employees working half time) 20.60% 28.14% 18.59% 9.55% 23.12% possibility to telework full time 14.29% 13.78% 23.47% 14.29% 34.18% aging, economic insecurity, and employment 189 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 appendix c: measures or incentives to stay in employment longer according to professional category additional leaves very interesting interesting neutral not really interesting not interesting at all manufacturing workers 23% 23% 23% 15% 15% public sector 24% 30% 11% 13% 21% education / research 13% 4% 32% 9% 41% finances, insurance, real estate 36% 21% 43% 0 0 health sector 44% 44% 9% 0 3% longer annual holiday very interesting interesting neutral not really interesting not interesting at all manufacturing workers 31% 31% 8% 22% 8% public sector 40% 20% 17% 7% 15% education / research 12% 17% 21% 12% 37% finances, insurance, real estate 40% 40% 20% 0 0 health sector 62% 28% 6% 0 3% possibility to telework some days a week very interesting interesting neutral not really interesting not interesting at all manufacturing workers 31% 31% 7% 0 31% public sector 29% 20% 20% 20% 11% education / research 33% 7% 20% 7% 33% finances, insurance, real estate 20% 28% 14% 7% 30% health sector 21% 14% 17% 0 48% 190 diane-gabrielle tremblay and émilie genin studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 appendix d: rotated matrix of principal component analysis rotated principal components matrix component 1 2 3 reduced week in 4 days (paid 4 days) .549 constricted week in 4 days (paid the total of the normal hours) .567 shorter working days .559 additional leaves .799 longer annual holiday .798 flexitime .459 possibility to telework full time .890 possibility to telework some days a week .872 flexible working hours at the end of career .506 voluntary shared job (two employees working half time) .485 voluntary reduced working time .648 progressive retirement .654 retirement and part-time job in the same organization .805 retirement and activity or job in another organization .673 extraction method: principal component analysis rotation method: varimax with kaiser normalization. the rotation led to 7 iterations. stein final dec 5 19 correspondence address: jessie stein, department of earth & environmental sciences, cuny graduate center, new york, ny, 10016; email: jstein1@gradcenter.cuny.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 241-245, 2020 book review migration in performance: crossing the colonial present johnston, caleb, & pratt, geraldine. (2019). abingdon uk & new york: routledge. isbn 9780367138301 (paper) us$49.95; isbn 9781138885639 (cloth) us$150.00; isbn 9781315715339 (e-book) us$24.98. 190 pages jessie stein cuny graduate center, new york, usa caleb johnston and geraldine pratt’s (2019) migration in performance: crossing the colonial present is a captivating book that travels alongside “nanay,” a site-responsive theatre production staging archived testimonies of filipino women involved in canada’s live-in caregiver program (lcp). through nanay, johnston, pratt, and their collaborators seek to challenge the presumed generosity of the lcp program – a program that offers participants the opportunity to apply for permanent residency after 24 months of service – by shedding light on how, in practice, the conditions of the program leave participants vulnerable to exploitation and marginalization. by bringing testimonies accumulated through a research collaboration with the philippine women center (pwc) of british colombia (bc) to the stage, nanay aims to unsettle an intercultural audience into uncomfortable conversations about canada’s dependency on racialized labour migration to fulfill its social reproduction, the uneven geography of circumstances that propel this movement of peoples, and the generational consequences it has for migrant workers and their families. from the outset, the play aimed to invite a process of “complex witnessing” (p. 61) through the choice of testimonial genre, intercultural attendance, the intimacy and interactivity of the piece, and through talkback sessions in which audience members could comment and ask questions. this feedback formed a new archive as nanay travelled, which in turn informed subsequent productions, prompting an iterative pattern of research-becomingcreation-becoming-research again. johnston and pratt followed nanay (and jessie stein studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 241-245, 2020 242 its spin-off performance tlingipino bingo), as it traveled with its “baggage” across the different yet interconnected geographies of berlin, quezon city and bagong barrio (two differently positioned migrant sending communities in metro manila), and whitehorse. unpacking the sometimes-unforeseen contents of this baggage in motion is the project of this indispensable book. the relational comparison that emerges in johnston and pratt’s account of the travels of nanay resonates with what cindi katz (2001) terms a “countertopography.” whereas a topographic approach examines the ways global forces intersect in particular places, and is routinely used as an instrument of capitalist domination, a countertopography appropriates topography as a comparative device, and might instead be used to “work out a situated, but at the same time scale-jumping and geography-crossing, political response to it” (katz, 2001, p. 1216). as nanay travelled, the authors highlight how the play’s reception shifted in relation to each new location’s place along the global care chain. johnston and pratt seize on performers’ and attendees’ situated knowledge to both improve the theatre piece, and to productively unsettle their analysis. the book’s chapters are organized chronologically around performances, each chapter delving into the challenges and accomplishments that accompanied nanay in a new context, and tracing where the contours of each performance site connect to the global care chain. chapter one is oriented around the initial creation of the play from 2007 to 2009, where, in a collaborative process with the pwc of british columbia, the researchers, actors, and director alex ferguson, put together the first public performance of nanay for the push international performing arts festival. the chapter also touches on a similar but modified staging of the script in berlin at the hebbel am ufer (hau) theatre later that same year. this performance is left relatively under-explored. while these first versions of the play were generally well-received, they faced some criticisms around (a) the use of shadow-puppetry, which has no tradition in the philippines, (b) for a monologue that was edited in such a way that it cast the speaker as a victim, and (c) for a scene in which the audience is invited to walk through a replica of a domestic worker’s bedroom. although the bedroom was created in collaboration with the domestic worker in question, one colombian woman found walking through the room alongside a white audience to be invasive and offensive. as nanay began to travel the difference and yet connectedness of place began to surface more prominently. the second chapter follows the play to its first performance in the philippines. after members of pwc of bc expressed the desire to share these stories with their families back home, arrangements were made to take the play to manila. the play was redesigned for the peta theatre, and the script was reworked in ways that tried to address critiques of the earlier production. it included new material developed from a talkback session in vancouver where a philippine government representative had participated, as well as other interventions in the script that addressed some book review studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 241-245, 2020 243 concerns raised in earlier performances. in manila, audience members who had family members in the lcp appreciated insight into their lives in canada, and others in the middle-class audience used it to think about the care workers employed in their own homes. however nanay also faced important criticisms, particularly around the play’s tone and use of english. in the talkback, one audience member commented that they could feel the white audience implied in the play: “they were talking like we didn’t know what they were talking about” (p. 86). this comment caused johnston and pratt to reflect on the deficiencies of their efforts to transnationalize the piece, as well as on how the use of english in the philippines is laden with colonial meanings. this, among other criticisms, spurred a deeper engagement with the other ways western framings were embedded in the play, by laying bare the work that hadn’t yet been done to situate the play within contemporary colonialism (p. 89). what was a problem in the performance ends up being a gift to the reader. indeed, johnston and pratt’s openness about their failures is perhaps the best part of the book. in the moments where they engage with their failures, the authors model the kind of “unstable allyship” (p. 163) and responsibility that they hoped to instil in canadian audience members. new layers of complexity emerge in the third chapter, co-written with vanessa banta, which traces nanay’s return to metro manila’s bagong barrio community in order to address the “sobering” (p. 94) feedback from the peta production. migrante international, an alliance of filipino migrant activist groups, pointed out that the venue had been expensive and inaccessible to many migrant workers. to address the way that whiteness still “clung to the play,” a new team completely reworked the earlier script (p. 95). in this second trip to the philippines, johnston, pratt, banta and their collaborators – among them the community theatre group teatro ekyumenikal along with migrante international– reinvented nanay. the entire performance was translated into tagalog, and new migration narratives of overseas filipino workers in other parts of the world were added. these accounts placed the lcp in the context of a global geography of labor migration, and were put into relief with scenes documenting bagong barrio’s local history of resistance through union organizing, protest, and strikes during the repressive years, 1972-1981. the book’s last chapter looks at returning from the philippines with this body of work for two performances in canada, but this time in the very different context of whitehorse, yukon. the first of the two productions happened at the pivot theatre festival in 2015 and received mixed reactions. filipino response in particular was different than it had been in vancouver. attendees resisted the tone of the play by stressing whitehorse’s filipino community’s success: how they have been able to buy cars and houses and to sponsor family members’ immigration through savvy use of the yukon nominee program. jessie stein studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 241-245, 2020 244 an attendee at the first whitehorse production of play, sharon shorty, a tlingit elder, emerges as one of the most interesting characters of the book. she spoke in the talkback session about the resonances of filipino overseas workers’ experiences of family disruption with indigenous experiences of canada’s residential schools. from this emerged a collaboration between shorty and hazel venzon, who had been involved in earlier versions of nanay. together they created tlingipino bingo, a mostly improvised performance involving joke-telling, stories, bingo, and a drag performance by “miss lituya,” a character created by ricky tagaban who has tlingit and filipino origins. johnston and pratt show how shorty – in character as “gramma susie” – and miss lituya draw out connections between tlingit and filipino people, decentre western conceptions of queer, and put canadian colonial framings and “rigidities” (simpson, 2014) in the back seat, all through laughter and trading stories. johnston and pratt argue that it is important to bring shared indigenous and migrant experiences to light, as “silences about histories of international intimacies, like the history of filipinos and tlingit stop us from knowing other ways of relating” which could be tools for imagining the future (p. 143). at the same time, they maintain that settler colonialism and racialized labour migration are fundamentally different phenomena. they warn that their histories, although interwoven in ways that leave them open to solidarity-building, are also prone to reinforcing liberal narratives of a multicultural canada, which leaves the settler-colonial backbone of the state intact. throughout the book johnston and pratt grapple with the politics of turning research into performance. these recurring moments of reflexivity are deeply valuable and come across in migration in performance’s tentative language. the authors, to their credit, make no positivist claims, and are quick to question their own project. these practices are important to aligning the authors’ methodological approach with the decolonial politics that underlie the book. as white settlers, johnston and pratt take an auto-critical posture, and pose the question of whether as allies they might contribute to “shaking the foundations of racial capitalism and dismantling the binaries through which racial violence works” (p. 163). leaving open the possibility that the answer to this question is “no,” they opt to proceed with the often-suggested project of dismantling the coherence of the transparent white subject as a way forward. through their open questioning, johnston and pratt offer a history of attempts to think through how to respond ethically to the interconnected particularities of the places nanay was privileged to travel. in vancouver, concerns centred on creating a piece which would provoke a mode of spectatorship that evaded the tendency towards “liberal sentimentality” characteristic of many emotionally intense, but ultimately deresponsibilizing dramatic works (p. 34). controlling responses to the medium of documentary theatre is a difficult task, and the intention of destabilizing viewers into book review studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 241-245, 2020 245 taking responsibility touches on long debated questions about the nature and impact of politically charged art. images and performances are particularly fraught when they lean on the affective heft of portrayals of violence or marginalization (sontag, 2003). if the intention of a work of art is to inspire feelings of responsibility in an audience, showing extreme hardship is no guarantee of success. indeed, as maggie nelson notes in her “reckoning” with representations of cruelty in the arts, “whether or not one intends for one’s art to express or stir compassion, to address or rectify forms of social injustice, to celebrate or relieve suffering, may end up irrelevant to its actual effects” (2011, p. 9). whether nanay was able to meet its goals is up for debate. drawing on rancière (1999), johnston and pratt propose that theatre’s political potential, perhaps “rests in the opportunity it provides to blur the opposition between those who look and those who act (between passivity and the capacity to take action), and between those who are locked within their functions, roles and social identities and those who exist beyond them. the potential lies in being and not just professing an egalitarian space” (p. 40). constructing space more evenly, whether at the scale of the local theatre, or the world, is the work of social justice. doreen massey wrote that the pursuit of such spaces is both “imperative” and a “fantasy” (2005, p. 153). migration in performance addresses this imperative with energy, creativity, and an ongoing openness to revision, which in a small way, may inch towards the fantasy. if it does so, this happens by diligently refining the fine lines that connect people together in the space of the theatre. references katz, c. (2001). on the grounds of globalization: a topography for feminist political engagement. signs: journal of women in culture & society, 26(4), 1213-1234. massey, d. (2005). for space. los angeles: sage. nelson, m. (2011). the art of cruelty: a reckoning. new york: w.w. norton. rancière j. (1999). disagreement: politics and philosophy (j. rose, trans.). minneapolis mn: university of minnesota press. simpson, a. (2014). mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham nc: duke university press. sontag, s. (2003). regarding the pain of others. new york: farrar, straus & giroux. microsoft word 91-125_baruchello & johnstone.docx studies in social justice volume 5, issue 1, 91-125, 2011   correspondence address: georgio baruchello, faculty of social sciences, university of akureyri, iceland. email: giorgio@unak.is rachael lorna johnstone, faculty of law, university of akureyri, iceland. tel: +354 460 8666, email: rlj@unak.is issn: 1911-4788 rights and value: construing the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights as civil commons giorgio baruchello* & rachael lorna johnstone** *faculty social sciences, háskólinn á akureyri/university of akureyri, akureyri, iceland, **faculty of law, háskólinn á akureyri/university of akureyri, akureyri, iceland. abstract this article brings together the united nations’ international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (icescr) and john mcmurtry’s theory of value. in this perspective, the icescr is construed as a prime example of “civil commons,” while mcmurtry’s theory of value is proposed as a tool of interpretation of the covenant. in particular, mcmurtry’s theory of value is a hermeneutical device capable of highlighting: (a) what alternative conception of value systemically operates against the fulfilment of the rights enshrined in the icescr; (b) the increased relevance of the icescr with regard to the current global economic crisis; (c) the parameters to determine the degree to which the rights at issue have been realized. reflections on environmental implications of both the icescr and mcmurtry’s axiology conclude the article. introduction law and philosophy have met each other happily on many occasions. indeed, jurisprudence, legal theory and, to a relevant extent, constitutional law are nothing but a combination of legal and philosophical concerns, aims, conceptions, and methodologies. however, as far as the present authors are aware, there has been hitherto no attempt whatsoever to bring together the 1966 international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (icescr) and john mcmurtry’s lifegrounded onto-axiology, a specific theory of value.1 such a coupling, as the following pages will show, does not constitute a futile academic exercise. rather, the icescr can serve as a prime example of “civil commons,” that is to say an original philosophical conception of mcmurtry’s that is entering the mainstream of the nomenclature of today’s anglophone social scientists and humanists and, on occasion, institutional practice (e.g. dartmouth common master plan, 2009).2 at the same time, mcmurtry’s theory of value can provide the theoretical underpinning required for a more nuanced understanding and perhaps a theoretical 92 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   framework for interpreting the icescr. mcmurtry’s work enables us to unpack the legal principles of the icescr as the real content of social justice: guaranteed access to those goods and institutions needed by human beings to survive, develop, and live good lives. mcmurtry’s work has not to our knowledge been analysed from a human rights perspective, but it too is well recognized within the un network, having been adopted as the philosophical perspective within unesco’s encyclopedia of life support systems (eolss). in what follows we will analyse the icescr from the standpoint of mcmurtry’s life-value onto-axiology, emphasising throughout how it gives legal substance to the core values of mcmurtry’s life-grounded understanding of social justice.3 before proceeding to the coupling of the icescr and mcmurtry’s axiology, an introduction to each will be provided. subsequently, mcmurtry’s theory of value will be utilized to reveal: (a) what alternative conception of value systemically operates today against the fulfilment of the rights enshrined in the icescr; (b) the increased relevance of the icescr with regard to the current global economic crisis; (c) the parameters to determine the degree to which the rights at issue have been realized, (a) notwithstanding. reflections on the environmental implications of both the icescr and mcmurtry’s axiology conclude the article. introduction to the icescr a human rights chapter was not included within the 1945 un charter itself but the economic and social council established under the charter was entrusted to set up “commissions in economic and social fields and for the promotion of human rights” (article 68). at its first meeting in 1946, it established the commission on human rights (chr), with which it entrusted the task of drafting a binding treaty on human rights law, as well as the commission on the status of women. in 1948, the united nations’ commission on human rights agreed and submitted to the general assembly the universal declaration of human rights (udhr), where it was approved with no negative votes.4 however, the udhr is not a treaty and therefore not in itself legally binding. the udhr was expected to form the foundation for a treaty to which states could commit themselves, but during a process that took nearly two decades, two, not one, treaties emerged: the icescr and the international covenant on civil and political rights (iccpr). it was another ten years before they would come into force (whelan & donnelly, 2007). modern readings often interpret the division of the udhr into two distinct treaties as cold-war politics: the west was suspicious of economic, social, and cultural rights qua rights; the east considered them as more fundamental than civil and political rights (arbour, 2006; tomasevski, 2005). the truth is, as usual, more nuanced and the udhr owes the breadth of its content in some measure to the united states of america and in particular roosevelt’s “four freedoms” (alfredsson & eide, 1999; eide, 2001; whelan & donnelly, 2007). western states and traditional allies of the united states, including australia, canada, germany and the united kingdom were amongst the first state parties to the icescr. however, having signed the covenant during the carter presidency, american resistance to the icescr was only consolidated during the reagan administration (alston, 2009). rights and value 93 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   the transformation of the udhr into two legally binding treaties, rather than one, was intended to address not so much differences of opinion about the relative importance of different rights but more pragmatic concerns about implementation: in particular, state capability and institutional justiciability (alfreddson & eide, 1999; whelan & donnely, 2007). to the extent that fulfilment of economic, social, and cultural rights had significant budgetary implications, it was not self-evident that the courts were the proper fora for such fine assessments (alfredsson & eide, 1999). yet, it was pointed out that economic, social, and cultural rights were no different from civil and political rights in this regard in that both groups contain both positive and negative elements, or, in the common parlance of the united nations committee on economic, social and cultural rights (escr committee), established to monitor state compliance with the icescr, duties to respect, protect, and fulfil (alston & quinn, 1987; craven, 1995; scott & macklem,1992). civil and political rights likewise require state expenditures (certification case, 1996, para. 77). from the standpoint of a life-grounded understanding both are equally essential as what any just society must guarantee to each of its citizens. still, at the time of drafting, it was obvious that a number of states were in no position to guarantee overnight all the economic, social, and cultural rights promised in the udhr but they were better equipped to facilitate civil and political rights. in most states, in 1966, there was already in place a rudimentary framework that could ensure even those civil and political rights that require extensive state investment, such as the right to a fair trial or the right to vote. in other words, the overwhelming majority of states had operational courts, functioning judiciaries and could hold rudimentary elections. yet, most were very far from guaranteeing adequate housing or health-care facilities for everyone, nor could any such infrastructure be built in the anticipated three months period between ratification and entry into force (alfredsson & eide, 1999; whelan & donnely, 2007). thus, whilst states agreed under the iccpr to guarantee civil and political rights to the full immediately, they agreed only to work towards full enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights, i.e. they undertook the obligation to “progressively realize” these rights.5 the progressive realization standard solved the capability problem: states had to take all appropriate means—within their means—to realize the rights in the icescr. however, this formulation brought with it its own set of problems, in particular, the justiciability problem. how could courts adjudicate the satisfaction or violation of rights that lacked explicit benchmarks, that were effectively contextual and which depended on the relative means of each state party? if there is no absolute obligation on the state, how can it be determined if the state has breached its obligation? in reply, we would point to numerous rights within the icescr which are not vague at all, such as the right to join a trade union of one’s choice and the right not to be discriminated against in respect of economic, social, and cultural rights (icescr, 1966, articles 8 and 2(2)). on the other hand, there are likewise rights within the iccpr that are inherently vague and subject to contextual interpretation such as the right to privacy which can be subject to “lawful” and “non-arbitrary” interference and must be balanced against freedom of expression (iccpr, 1966, articles 14, 18 and 19(2); scott & macklem, 1992). with regard to more complex rights, two decades of output from the escr committee has provided ever greater clarity and precision as to what is required of state parties and adjudication by the committee under the new communications 94 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   process will further enrich understanding (op-icescr, 2008).6 economic, social, and cultural rights have been introduced into modern constitutions and are regularly adjudicated by judges all over the world, most famously in south africa.7 the justiciability horse needs no more flogging here.8 the escr committee is not a creature of the icescr, in contrast to its counterpart, the human rights committee, established under the iccpr (article 28). instead, the escr committee was established nearly ten years after the covenant came into force, on the back of resolution nr. 1985/17 by the united nations economic and social council (ecosoc). like the human rights committee, it reviews state reports, discusses them with state parties and makes concluding observations, and it issues general comments addressed to all state parties (langford & king, 2009). if the heart of the iccpr is the “right to life” (article 6), the heart of the icescr might be considered the “right to live” i.e. the right to live a dignified life; the right to a quality of life; the right to a life free of fear of hunger and destitution; a life where the human spirit has space to flourish. this flourishing, which is contingent upon the comprehensive satisfaction of the needs recognized by the ‘right to live’ is the ultimate goal of life-grounded social justice. genuine fulfilment of the covenant requires realization of many of the values that are at the heart of modern conceptions of “social justice,” such as access to fair employment, education, and healthcare provision. the substantive provisions of the icescr include: the right to self-determination of peoples, including the right to control their own natural resources (article 1); the right to work (article 6); the right to just and favourable conditions of work, including remuneration (article 7); the right to trade union organization and participation (article 8); the right to social security (article 9); the right to recognition and protection of marriage and paid leave for new mothers (article 10); the right to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, clothing, and housing (article 11); the right to the highest attainable standard of health (article 12); the right to education (articles 13-14); and the right to take part in cultural life, to benefit from scientific progress and to benefit from one’s own intellectual creations (article 15). overlying these rights is the principle of non-discrimination (article 2(2)), with gender equality emphasized (article 3), the prohibition of abuse of rights (article 5), and the permission for states to set limits on the enunciated rights only “for the purposes of promoting the general welfare in a democratic society” (article 4). as an international treaty, the icescr is unquestionably binding as a matter of international law (vclt article 26). nevertheless, state practice does not always conform to states’ obligations. indeed, alternative or even incompatible normative frameworks can shape the discourse. to name just a few examples vis-à-vis articles 1, 6, 12 and 13 respectively: (a) in 2009, the government of peru responded by means of police and military crackdowns to protests by indigenous populations against the legislation that opened peru’s virgin forests to oiland gas-drilling operations (cordero, 2009); (b) in 2010, unemployment in the eurozone reached double figures; but the european central bank engaged in no quantitative easing to counteract this trend, comparable to the steps taken between 2007 and 2009 to rescue failing private banks (oecd, 2010); (c) in the past biennium, the adoption of a universal healthcare coverage in the united states of america has been vocally rights and value 95 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   opposed by mobilized individuals that dub themselves the “tea party” movement, and whose number and influence are reshaping the republican party (espo, 2010); (d) plans are being unveiled in the british parliament to slash education funding at tertiary level at english and welsh universities, which are therefore likely to take in fewer students in the future and demand higher tuition fees (vasagar, 2010). apart from suggesting that governmental authorities neglect the covenants to which they are bound, the examples above signal that alternative conceptions of value exist and may even be predominant in politics and institutional life, to the point of rejecting the rights enshrined in international law. how are such views to be assessed? do they imply that the values embodied by the icescr are incomplete? in pluralist societies such as ours, which values should be upheld and, above all, upon what grounds? in the following sections, we will show how the work of mcmurtry can help to answer some of these deep and controversial questions. introduction to john mcmurtry’s axiology possibly terrified by the consequences of the uncompromising statements of value characterizing totalitarian ideologies, all “classic” anglophone theorists of value of the second half of the 20th century have offered highly abstract and impractical interpretations.9 whether intentionally or not, these interpretations have reflected the dominant liberal economic conception of value of their age, whereby the “preference satisfaction” of the contract-stipulating individual determines value by the exercise of allegedly universal and neutral money-demand in the so-called “free market.” thus understood, value is ultimately subjective (i.e. different individuals have different values), atomistic (i.e. societies’ values are aggregates of individuals’ values) and quintessentially human (i.e. human beings ascribe value to non-human beings, which would otherwise possess none). mcmurtry (2009-10) is aware of the perplexities that arise regularly with regard to any objective determination of value: “as the recent history of philosophy discloses, the multiplying particular bearings of language games, specific practices, incommensurable epistemic perspectives, anti-foundationalist conversations and poststructural principles of difference have overwhelmed the very idea of a unifying value system, good or ill, as inconceivable to acceptable meaning” (para. 1.10.4).10 nevertheless, after pondering upon the recurrent “meltdowns” of the post-brettonwoods age and the social and ecological losses accompanying them, he claims that we must: “follow reason where it leads to recover step by step the missing lifeground of values and the ultimate meaning of how we are to live” (para. 1.16). since the formal and relativist options debated in mainstream axiology have proven tragically useless vis-à-vis both economic and ecological crises, he endeavours to provide a substantial and objective alternative.11 yet what exactly is the “lifeground” that has gone amiss and that, if recovered, can reveal how we should live? the definition of this key-term is unusually simple to grasp: “concretely, all that is required to take the next breath; axiologically, all the life support systems required for human life to reproduce or develop” (mcmurtry, 2009-10, glossary).12 without enough bread, clean water, breathable air, open spaces in which to move, regular sleep, acceptable education and meaningful socialization, no value whatsoever that we cherish will ever be expressed in reality.13 here the life-ground works beneath 96 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   established ideological and philosophical disputes about the meaning of social justice to expose its material core in the satisfaction of human life-requirements. all values with no exception, whether ethical, political, economic, epistemic or aesthetic, rely upon this vital platform—the life-ground—typically in a pre-reflexive manner.14 there can be no life, not to mention any good life, outside this ground. as mcmurtry (2009-10) states, “life support systems—any natural or human-made system without which human beings cannot live or live well—may or may not have value in themselves, but have ultimate value so far as they are that without which human or other life cannot exist or flourish” (para. 6.2.1).15 even the civil and political rights enshrined in liberal democratic constitutions and in the iccpr itself—be they justice, equality, liberty, or democracy—are formal fictions if the prerequisites for prolonged survival and adequate individual and social existence are not met. as eloquently stated forty years ago by liberal icon isaiah berlin (1969): “it is true that to offer political rights, or safeguards against intervention by the state, to men who are half-naked, illiterate, underfed, and diseased is to mock their condition… what is freedom to those who cannot make use of it? without adequate conditions for the use of freedom, what is the value of freedom?” (p. 124). mcmurtry calls “needs” these prerequisites, the scrutiny of which serves then the end of clarifying the composition and the scope of the life-ground.16 not anything that we may claim to “need” is, after closer scrutiny, a need.17 according to mcmurtry (1998), “‘n’ is a need if and only if, and to the extent that, deprivation of n always leads to a reduction of organic capacity” (p. 164).18 only that without which organic capacity is harmed regularly and unequivocally counts as need. we can live, and even prosper, without motorbikes or memory pens, but we cannot live, not to mention prosper, without nourishing food, shelter and several hours of sleep per night. upon such needs and their prolonged, secure satisfaction rests everything else that may be regarded as valuable: art, sport, conversation, commerce, scientific research, sexual experimentation, political activism, philosophical meditation, etc. and whenever any such derivative form of agency harms or hampers the prolonged, secure, universal satisfaction of needs, then disvalue ensues.19 whilst the recognition of human needs by mcmurtry is an important beginning, the satisfaction of human needs is not the same as the recognition of human rights to the satisfaction of the same. needs should not be met by the state as a matter of welfare, a matter of charity, which the state enjoys discretion to withdraw. a citizen should not beg for the assistance necessary simply to stay alive; instead they should be able to demand that their needs be met and, moreover, have confidence that their needs will continue to be met. “to enjoy something only at the discretion of someone else, especially someone powerful enough to deprive you of it at will, is precisely not to enjoy a right to it” (shue as cited in skogly, 1993, p. 769). holding a right is a special sort of entitlement for which there is no shame attached to its claiming; and it is an entitlement that remains notwithstanding budgetary uncertainty or constraints on the duty bearer. given that mcmurtry (2009-10) regards life as unfolding along three modes of ontological manifestation—i.e. “thought,” “experience” (also “feeling” or “felt being”), and “action” (also “biological movement” or “motility”)20—the fundamental coordinates of value are as follows (italics in the original): rights and value 97 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011    “x is value if and only if, and to the extent that, x consists in or enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought/feeling/action than without it” (para. 6.1);  “x is disvalue if and only if, and to the extent that, x reduces/disables any range of thought/experience/action” (para. 6.1).21 devoid of a theoretical underpinning as comprehensively abstract as mcmurtry’s life-ground—the attainment of which is after all the philosopher’s raison d’être—the world’s nations have provided themselves with an array of concepts, traditions, collective praxes, facilities, charities, foundations, and disciplinary branches whose main task is enable to foster life capacity expression and enjoyment. ethical principles, notions of the common good, human rights, life-expectancy rates, hygiene standards, methods for waste disposal, suicide rates, manic-depressive pathologies, crime rates, literacy levels and many other dimensions of individual, social and natural existence have been conceptualized, discussed, followed, scrutinized, addressed and managed daily by corresponding institutions, such as ethical committees, scholarly communities, human rights treaty bodies, municipal registrars, public hygiene offices, mental hygiene departments, police corps and other law-andorder enforcers, schools, research centres, etc.22 whether conscious or not of their life-serving function, much of organized human existence, both material and immaterial, has been spent in view of conceiving, perceiving, preventing, denouncing, and countering any assault on life capacity, as this is revealed by the particular, standardized indicators that are specific to each institution.23 mcmurtry (1999) lists a vast and diverse array of conceptions, arrangements and artefacts aimed at fulfilling these paramount ends in most diverse socio-historical contexts: [u]niversal health plans, the world wide web, common sewers, international outrage over vietnam or ogoniland, sidewalks and footpaths, the chinese concept of jen, the jubilee of leviticus… water fountains, robin hood of sherwood forest, the air we breathe, effective pollution controls… music… old age pensions, universal education, sweden’s common forests… the second commandment of yeshua… the rule of law, child and women shelters, parks, public broadcasting, clean water… the un declaration of human rights, occupational health and safety standards, village and city squares, the brazilian rainforests, inoculation programmes, indigenous story-telling, the ozone protocol, the tao, the peace movement, death rituals, animal rights agencies, community fishhabitats, food and drug legislation, garbage collection, the ancient village commons before enclosures. (pp. 206-207) all of these human creations are “civil commons” i.e. “[a] unifying concept to designate social constructs which enable universal access to life goods. life support systems [cf. note 5] are civil commons so far as society protects and enables their reproduction and provision for all members” (mcmurtry, 2009-10, glossary). the predicate “civil” used in mcmurtry’s phrase reveals the socially constructed and socially aimed dimensions of the commons.24 mcmurtry is not talking, say, of pastures available to all without supervision and sanctions for misuse, but of pastures that the community recognizes and manages to yield life-supporting fruits for the 98 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   whole community through time.25 as a consequence, mcmurtry’s notion should not be confused with garrett hardin’s (1968) unregulated natural “commons,” whose tragic doom justifies their appropriation for private ends. on the contrary, mcmurtry’s works are, usually, critical of such an appropriation, inasmuch as it has taken place for class or elite benefit (e.g. 19th-century highland clearances [richards, 2000]) and/or converted the existing civil commons into means of non-universal (e.g. 1999 privatization schemes of water resources in south africa [pauw, 2003] and elsewhere [roberts, 2006]) and/or non-life-enabling ends (e.g. the use of scientific knowledge for the production of biological weapons), thus perverting their original function. historical examples of this perversion abound, as highlighted by the numerous tokens of resistance to each, e.g. the english peasantry’s revolts against early-renaissance enclosures, the anti-colonial catholic-communist costa rican social legislation of the 1940s-70s, recent eu-wide protests against the bolkenstein directive, contemporary non-governmental organizations’ (ngos) demands for the re-regulation of de-regulated speculative trade of peoples’ currencies. different economic systems, the life-ground, and the icescr mcmurtry’s negative emphasis on privatization and his positive emphasis on the commons might suggest that he is a member of the marxist camp, to which he did in fact contribute a significant piece of research (mcmurtry, 1978) at the beginning of his long scholarly career (mcmurtry, 2008). however, since the civil commons are meant to guarantee universal access to life goods, mcmurtry departs from the marxist tradition, which focuses on guaranteeing access to the means of production of life goods to a numerically predominant yet specific social class. also, by linking the notion of civil commons to that of need, mcmurtry presumes no framework of historical necessity, as with marx’s structural laws of socio-economic development, but rather a framework of biological necessity alone, i.e. no matter what our beliefs and preferences may be, we are going to suffer reduction of organic capacity and eventually death if we do not meet our vital needs. departing further from the marxist paradigm, mcmurtry’s emphasis upon biological necessity opens value judgments to domains of existence completely neglected by the marxist canon, such as planetary ecosystems and the earth’s biosphere. finally, mcmurtry’s approach does not even imply the abandonment of today’s free market economies, which mix already liberal elements (e.g. freedom of contract between companies manufacturing armaments and the engineers that they employ) and socialist ones (e.g. state-funded bailouts of bankrupt private companies), but its effective regulation according to lifegrounded criteria (e.g. careful and consistent implementation of food-and-health regulations in for-profit food manufacturing). from a life-grounded perspective, which system of ownership, management and trade ought to be predominant is not relevant per se, as an ideological, ethical or political summum bonum.26 similarly, and in contrast to many international agreements of recent decades, the icescr is neither a trade agreement presupposing significant degrees of free-market activity, legal frameworks and economic policies; nor does it depend upon free-market activity or any particular legal framework or economic policies. the escr committee has taken care to point out that the treaty rights and value 99 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   does not exclude a libertarian model as long as everyone’s rights are in fact fulfilled, noting in 1990 that: [t]he undertaking “to take steps… by all appropriate means including particularly the adoption of legislative measures” neither requires nor precludes any particular form of government or economic system being used as the vehicle for the steps in question, provided only that it is democratic and that all human rights are thereby respected. thus, in terms of political and economic systems, the covenant is neutral and its principles cannot accurately be described as being predicated exclusively upon the need for, or the desirability of a socialist or a capitalist system, or a mixed, centrally planned, or laissez-faire economy, or upon any particular approach. (general comment no. 3, 1990, para. 8) it is thus quite reasonable for the state to assume that individuals will be able to a large extent to satisfy their own rights, with a minimum of state intervention. for example, individuals should be likely to be able to satisfy their rights to work and to an adequate standard of living, with the state only stepping in for those who are unable to do so independently (alfredsson & eide, 1999). there is one notable exception in the treaty: the right to education, which, at least at primary level, must be compulsory and free (icescr, 1966, articles 13(2)(a) and 14). in practice, the escr committee’s ecumenical approach to market systems only goes so far; a state party is not simply empowered to intervene to guarantee the relevant rights for its inhabitants but is obliged so to do when a dogmatically antiinterventionist approach leaves some individuals unable to secure their own economic, social, and cultural rights. for example, concluding the review of the report on hong kong in 2001, the committee considered that the region’s reliance “on the philosophy of ‘positive non-interventionism’” was a factor limiting the full implementation of the treaty and “had a negative impact on the realization and enjoyment of the economic, social, and cultural rights of hong kong’s inhabitants, which has been exacerbated by globalization” (escr committee, 2002, p. 176). similarly, the committee has expressed the view that increasing privatization of services has been accompanied by increasing challenges for certain groups of vulnerable individuals to satisfy their own basic rights; hence increasing responsibilities for state parties to intervene to ensure their rights are guaranteed qua rights (craven, 1995). from a life-grounded perspective, if the appropriation of the commons for private ends is preferred and performed, as ceaselessly done worldwide in the past three decades, it is crucial that it be able to spur life-capability more widely in both space and time.27 from such a perspective, an economy is truly successful if it can “secure provision of means of life otherwise in short supply (i.e. the production and distribution of goods and the protection of ecosystem services which are otherwise scarce or made scarce through time)” (mcmurtry, 2005). consistently, true “civil commons” are only those life-support systems that genuinely allow for such an economy to operate. since life is the value-compass utilized by mcmurtry, not any priced commodity contributing to the generation of profit or to augmented grossdomestic-product (gdp) figures should be counted as wealth-creation: “claimed ‘economic goods’ which disable or do not enable life abilities are not means of life; they are economic ‘bads’” (mcmurtry, 2005). carcinogenic pesticides, cluster 100 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   bombs, junk commodities, speculative financial products and hazardous mining are not good. they are bad. they may be extremely profitable, like slaves had been for many centuries, but inasmuch as they reduce life-capacity, they are “goods” if and only if we wish to indulge in oxymoron.28 perplexingly, standard economics endorses unflinchingly such an oxymoronic language.29 all life-reducing items of trade mentioned above are called, in standard economic language and praxis, “goods,” with no exception. this glaring conceptual confusion, whereby nourishing bread is equated with golden toilets, can take place because in a value-system devoid of life-coordinates all that which does not compute as an item of trade in the free market is marginal or de facto invisible unless it is reconstructed as monetary loss or business opportunity (baruchello, 2007a, 2008). non-moneyed people, cultural homogenization, pollution, the loss of biodiversity, and the melting of the arctic ice-shelf are economic “externalities” until, say, reduced cost of labour, carbon trade mechanisms, medical research, and lawsuits by indigenous communities seeking compensation make them expressible in moneybased terms. it is only whether and when the “externalities” can be “internalized” that economic calculus can actually compute them in its equations. this externalization of living beings and life support systems takes place regularly even if no economic calculus can actually exist without many of them and, in reality, presupposes several “externalities” throughout (e.g. the generation of children, human languages, earth’s breathable air and oceanic plankton).30 as soon as this “internalization” occurs, any item may become a tradable “good,” even if the former “externality” has not been reconstructed as life-serving civil commons, but rather as a non-universal and even life-damaging for-profit activity (e.g. unnecessary stressinducing medical testing of paying pregnant women, disappearance of traditional birthday songs from films and plays due to copyright attribution, exclusive air stations in polluted asian capitals). moreover, these “goods” can now be attributed a value-expressing price by exercise of money-demand in a comparative market system of aggregate individual preferences.31 this fact implies that sight may be lost altogether of their other axiological dimensions, for their economic value is now forcefully on the foreground, not their religious sacredness, incomparable beauty, categorical moral normativity, vital ecological function, etc. as former chief economist of the world bank lawrence summers stated: “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that” (as cited in smith, 2007).32 this conceptually confused yet “impeccable” logic explains why life-enabling economic, social, and cultural rights, irreducible to money-value have been repeatedly sacrificed to the pursuit of life-impairing economic efficiency, as amply testified33 by, e.g.: longer working hours (bunting, 2004; icescr, 1966, article 7(d)); less-inclusive pension schemes (elliott & atkinson, 2008; icescr, 1966, article 9); reduced parental leave (law 173/2008, article 7; law 70/2009, article 18; icescr, 1966, article 10); cheaper, lower-quality school meals (“allarme mense,” 2008; icescr, 1966, article 11(1) and 12); reduced healthcare provision (stuckler, king, and basu, 2008; icescr, 1966, article 12);34 increased market opportunities for performance-enhancing drug-dealing, whether legal or illegal (angell, 2004; d’argenio, 2008; icescr, 1966, article 12);35 cuts to educational services rights and value 101 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   (mcmurtry, 1998; icescr, 1966, articles 13 and 14); and reductions in publicly funded cultural programs (“budget cuts,” 2008; icescr, 1966, article 15). similarly, since at least the late 1970s, when it comes to determining the course of monetary policy in free-market economies, their sovereign right to issue coin and credit, and the levels of taxation for capital gains, there seems to have been no other guideline but to make entire countries “attractive” to business.36 this attractiveness has been so interpreted as to be achieved by slashing protective regulation, thereby maximising returns for private shareholders, even if entire societies are harmed in the process (glyn, 2006; mcmurtry, 1999; stiglitz, 2003) and democratic self-rule is thwarted by oligarchic privilege.37 indeed, the conflict between genuine political autonomy and large concentrations of wealth is as old as the very first modern democracy (jefferson, 1816, 1817) and it has been described most adamantly by w.l. mackenzie king former prime minister of canada (comer, 1996, p. 16): “until control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile... once a nation parts with control of its credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws... usury once in control will wreck any nation.” the inherent conceptual confusion and absence of decisive life-criteria within the economic logic epitomized in sumners’ quotation can explain why so much contention has surfaced amid experts about whether the results of the long wave of privatizations of the 1980s-2000s have been socially positive or negative (e.g. florio, 2004). as regards more specifically the privatization of credit creation and its unregulated free movement across borders, even influential conservative european statesmen seem to have no doubt any longer that it has been harmful, rather than beneficial, to collective wellbeing (e.g. putin, 2009; sarkozy, 2010; tremonti as cited in cazzullo, 2009).38 this fact becomes most evident if life-grounded nutritional standards and death rates are taken as relevant indicators of collective wellbeing, as done by spokespersons of one of the most active promoters of 1980s2000s financial liberalizations, i.e. the international monetary fund ([imf] plant, 2008; strauss-kahn as cited in swann, 2008).39 as epitomized by bill clinton’s presidency of the united states of america, privatizing services and productive structures that had been previously held by public bodies and delivering them into worldwide free trade was claimed to better serve human communities by promoting “growth,” “development” and, as implied by analogous watchwords, much of what is desirable and good.40 such has been the “conventional wisdom” of the past few decades, despite the equally obvious problems that profit-oriented activities posited vis-à-vis, to name one critical area, environmental safety.41 indeed, as leading finnish jurist aulis aarnio (1991) observed back then: “environmental values and economic values often clash, as in the protection of the forests and waterways. almost without exception, the values that have prevailed have been economic” (p. 131). the current crisis, the life-ground, and the icescr twenty years later, the imf acknowledges that “[t]he world economy is entering a major downturn in the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s” (“major global 102 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   downturn,” 2008) and the un’s secretary-general states that the “economic and financial turmoil sweeping the globe is a true wake-up call, sounding an alarm about the need to improve upon old patterns of growth and make a transition to a new era of greener, cleaner development” (ban, 2009). under these momentous and dramatic circumstances, mcmurtry’s substantial and objective theory of value, which treats life as the paramount end of human agency and economic activity as a means, becomes a plausible conceptual tool for reconsidering the axiological hierarchies that have led the international community to the crisis denounced by the un’s secretary-general. indeed, if one considers that mcmurtry’s main works focussed already in the 1990s on the pernicious axiological confusion of de-regulated financial activity in the face of persistent socio-economic meltdowns and environmental losses, their relevance as the current crisis is concerned is manifest and cassandra-like.42 under the same circumstances, the icescr becomes a major point of reference vis-à-vis the sort of value-choices that should be made so as to guide policy-making and international cooperation. first of all, the rights addressed by the icescr are precisely the sort of rights that today’s crisis affects most critically. in times of crisis, it becomes more difficult for people to realize their own needs, fulfil their own rights, without state intervention; yet the state is simultaneously under pressure to cut such assistance, both domestically and internationally. both scientific journals and mainstream media sources—the latter being generally more cautious vis-à-vis the economic powerhouses from which they directly or indirectly depend—have been revealing amply and candidly the astounding social, economic, and cultural losses due to the economic crisis since 2008.43 secondly, as discussed in part 4, the icescr addresses economic, social, and cultural rights from a position that is ostensibly neutral as to a state party’s economic system, at least up to a certain extent.44 as such, the icescr endures as a set of binding goals for the international community regardless of the dominant market ideology within a state and irrespective of whether the crisis incites more or less intervention. in fact, the escr committee has pointed out that in times of economic crisis, the treaty becomes more, not less important: “under such circumstances, endeavours to protect the most basic economic, social, and cultural rights become more, rather than less, urgent” (general comment no. 2, 1990, para. 9).45 thirdly, of 192 member states of the un, 160 are parties to the icescr and a further six have signed it.46 the state parties include states from all different geographical, legal, economic, cultural, and religious traditions at all levels of development, indicating shared recognition of the importance of economic, social, and cultural rights. emblematically, after decades of negotiation, the optional protocol (op-icescr, 2008) was unanimously adopted by the un general assembly in december 2008—just as world leaders were waking up to the depth of the current financial crisis. when opened for signature in september 2009, twentynine states immediately signed the protocol, indicating their support for the communications process. since then and at the time of writing, a further four states have signed and two states have ratified it.47 fourthly, and crucially for the aims of the present work, the icescr embodies paramount life-goals, consistent with mcmurtry’s understanding of value. the lifegrounded character of the icescr is manifest already in its preamble in which the rights and value 103 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   vital dimensions of felt being and action are acknowledged as the goal to strive for: “the ideal of free human beings enjoying freedom from fear or want” (emphasis added).48 each state is required to ensure the conditions that allow for moving in this direction, in other words “to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation, especially economic and technical, to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights” (icescr, 1966, article 2(1)). no “freedom, justice and peace” can be attained if states fail in this task. to secure this fulfilment is not charity (icescr, 1966, preamble); it is not an option; and it is not an expression of good will: it is a duty of states. so crucial are these rights, that even individuals are said to be morally bound by them: not as charity, not as an option, not as an expression of good will, but as a moral duty to their fellow citizens: “the state parties to the present covenant… realiz[e] that the individual, having duties to other individuals and to the community to which he belongs, is under a responsibility to strive for the promotion and observance of the rights recognized in the present covenant” (icescr, 1966, preamble).49 strengthening the life-centred tone of the covenant, article 1 affirms that “[i]n no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.” article 7 speaks of “just and favourable conditions of work… a decent living for themselves and their families… safe and healthy working conditions… rest, leisure and reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” article 8 requires “the right of everyone to form trade unions and join the trade union of his choice,” given their historical role in promoting equitable access to life-goods under democratic regimes (e.g. noonan, 2006). article 9 recognizes “the right of everyone to social security, including social insurance.” article 10 acknowledges “[t]he widest possible protection and assistance… to the family… mothers… all children and young persons… [who] should be protected from economic and social exploitation… [e.g.] employment in work harmful to their morals or health or dangerous to life or likely to hamper their normal development.” article 11 identifies “adequate food, clothing and housing” as well as freedom “from hunger” and “an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need” as key-factors in adhering to the covenant. article 12 adds “physical and mental health… the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality… environmental and industrial hygiene… medical attention in the event of sickness.” articles 13 and 14 further acknowledge the thinking dimension of life by stressing “the right of everyone to education… primary education… [to be made, if not already so,] compulsory and free to all,” whilst “[s]econdary” and “[h]igher education” should “be made generally available and accessible to all.” similarly, article 15 highlights “the right of everyone… to take part in cultural life… enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications… the conservation, the development and the diffusion of science and culture.” labour standards, nutritional standards, health and safety regulations, living standards, education, healthcare provision, the promotion and diffusion of cultural activities and scientific knowledge: they all spring from the life-ground and, unsurprisingly, they are recognized as valuable by the international community. mcmurtry himself (2010) emphasizes the pivotal role that the rights enshrined in the icescr should play in rebuilding the life-fabric of “meltdown-ed” societies, “because of their centrality to contemporary human life and their bridging across the received disjunction between economic and ethico-political rights in an integrated 104 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   shape.” as a matter of fact, the onto-axiology of mcmurtry (2010) allows us to perceive that “the unifying principle of these rights is to protect and enable human life,” which encompasses action (e.g. means of subsistence), felt being (e.g. mental health) and thought (e.g. education). a counterfactual test may suffice to further substantiate this point: none of these rights can be sensibly described as intentionally, eminently or evidently prone to biocide or life-destructive agency, at least as long as mcmurtry’s work is adopted as a viable philosophical hermeneutic, that is, a creative, insightful, learned, and rigorous set of wideand deep-reaching categories of interpretation of reality. fulfilling one’s duties, the life-ground, and the icsecr the icescr appears to be a case of “civil commons.” on the one hand, the rights addressed by the icescr are a conceptualization of the “commons” upon which human communities stand and, possibly, flourish, e.g.: the shortand medium-term life-sustaining means that all members need (articles 1 and 11); the protection and generation of human life (article 12); its adequate care, socialization and education (articles 10, 13 and 14); the long-term life-sustaining and life-enriching occupational, vocational and recreational opportunities of the physically and mentally fit members (articles 6, 7, 8 and 15); the humane and humanity-enhancing assistance due to those who are not fit (articles 9 and 12). on the other hand, the vast institutional consensus underpinning the icescr as a binding legal document requiring its parties to report regularly on the implementation of the covenant manifests that these commons are “civil” in the sense that they allow for civilization to be and continue to be (articles 16 and 17). the icescr shows vividly how the international community already possesses long-standing resources for interpreting and resolving life-threatening circumstances, despite the fact that even a legally binding international human rights treaty is difficult to enforce. one means of evaluating firm obligations and adjudicating violations is to set a minimum level below which the citizens of all nations should never be allowed to fall, which is what the escr committee has defined as “minimum core” obligations (general comment no. 3, 1990, para. 10; langford & king, 2009; chapman & russell, 2002). in this respect, mcmurtry’s understanding of human needs can serve as an example of where exactly one should set the threshold of the minimum core, at least as actual living persons—as distinguished from legal persons—are concerned. progressive realization of the icescr ought to be pursued without drastic short-term sacrifices that undermine the most rudimentary means of life in the present. a failure to guarantee the minimum core, the fundamental organic capacity of each person in a state’s jurisdiction, constitutes a violation of the covenant unless the state can demonstrate “that every effort has been made to use all resources that are at its disposition in an effort to satisfy, as a matter of priority, those minimum obligations” (general comment no. 3, 1990, para. 10). the reduction of organic capacity can take many forms, be more or less expedite, and more or less rapidly fatal. death is its most easily detectable indication, and it is in fact mentioned in the icescr itself (e.g. article 12). still, it is possible to observe reduction of organic capacity long before that final stage, which is what the icescr rights and value 105 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   presumes by its references, inter alia, to “the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger” (article 11(1)), and “the prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic and occupational diseases” (article 12(2)(c)). social scientists tracking rates of spousal abuses, nutritionists and social workers monitoring nutritional imbalances and poverty, public health experts reporting on pathological trends and their causes, whether aware of the covenant or not, are all engaged in a worldwide assessment of life-grounded phenomena that are pertinent to the aims of the icescr.50 as concerns the variety of ways in which reduction of organic capacity can happen, scientific standards are debatable and debated, as all human creations are, but are nevertheless employed daily by national public bodies and international authorities in determining, for example, the acceptable quality level of school meals (e.g. 1981 united states department of agriculture [usda] discussions on whether to assess ketchup as a vegetable), the new types of car engines that may be manufactured and sold (e.g. european-union[eu]-wide emission standards), plausible grounds for separation or divorce (e.g. german judges’ use of expert psychiatric opinions), literacy requirements for job applicants (e.g. british literacy and numeracy tests for aspiring civil servants), the regularity and fairness of democratic elections (e.g. regular monitoring of elections worldwide by the organisation for economic cooperation and development [oecd]). consistently, the escr committee requires states parties to submit detailed and disaggregated sociological data in its initial and periodic reports in order to review each state’s situation in light of its obligations (state report guidelines, 2009).51 in this connection, mcmurtry (2002) offers a “well-being index” (wbi) comprising “the complete and universal set of needs which all humans require to be met in order to flourish” (p. 156). this re-grounding of standard scientific and institutional criteria and praxes as civil commons includes: 1. breathable air, sense-open space, and daily light (atmospheric means of life) 2. clean water, nourishing foods and self-waste disposal (bodily means of life) 3. shelter space from the elements with ample provision to retire, sleep and function (home means of life) 4. environmental surroundings whose elements and contours contribute to the whole (environmental means of life) 5. intimate love, social inclusion, safety and healthcare when ill or infirm (caring means of life) 6. activities of language-logos/art-play to choose and learn from (educational/recreational means of life) 7. meaningful work or service to perform (vocational means of life) 8. self-governing choice in each’s enjoyment consistent with each’s provision (just form of life) debatable and perfectible—mcmurtry himself has produced different versions of it—the wbi highlights several needs without meeting which human life, both individual and collective, would eventually disintegrate by accumulated physical and mental deficiencies.52 the wbi has a willing accomplice in the escr committee’s 2001 statement on poverty, in which the committee attempts to integrate human 106 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   rights in poverty eradication strategies. the statement addresses poverty in the following terms: in the recent past, poverty was often defined as insufficient income to buy a minimum basket of goods and services. today, the term is usually understood more broadly as the lack of basic capabilities to live in dignity. this definition recognizes poverty's broader features, such as hunger, poor education, discrimination, vulnerability, and social exclusion. the committee notes that this understanding of poverty corresponds with numerous provisions of the covenant. in the light of the international bill of rights, poverty may be defined as a human condition characterized by sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights (escr committee, 2001 para.. 7-8). considering the wbi in light of the icescr and the work of the committee, we can compare as follows: 1. atmospheric means of life: the icescr incorporates “the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health” (article 12(1)) and imparts a duty on states to take steps towards the “improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene” (article 12(2)(b)) and ensure a “[s]afe and healthy working environment” (article 7(b)). the escr committee recognizes “a healthy environment” as a fundamental component of the right to health (general comment no. 14, 2000, para. 4 and 15). 2. bodily means of life: “the states parties to the present covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing, and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions” (icescr, 1966, article 11(1)). identified minimum core rights include the right not to be hungry and to have access to nutritionally and culturally adequate food and a safe water supply covering essential needs, with non-discriminatory, genuine and safe access to and equitable distribution of water facilities (general comment no. 12, 1999, para. 8; general comment no. 14, 2000, para. 43(b)(c); general comment no. 15, 2002, para. 37). the state parties “recogniz[e]… the essential importance of international cooperation based on free consent” (icescr, 1966, article 11(1)). with regard to the right to be free from hunger (as distinguished from the right to adequate food), state parties “recognizing the right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international cooperation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:” to improve food production, conservation and distribution and ensure an “equitable distribution” of food supplies (article 11(2)).53 rights and value 107 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   3. home means of life: this is incorporated in article 11 above and has a dedicated general comment (general comment no. 4, 1991). additionally, “[b]asic shelter, housing and sanitation” are recognized as minimum core components of the right to health (general comment no. 14, 2000, para. 43(c)). the right to social security crosses both bodily and home means of life, including, as the minimum core, that each have access to social security providing a “survival standard” (general comment no. 19, 2007, para. 59). 4. environmental means of life: the icescr has a limited approach to the environment, recognizing its value only where it contributes to the realization of “human” rights. this point will be addressed in greater depth below (part 7). 5. caring means of life: “the widest possible protection and assistance should be accorded to the family, which is the natural and fundamental group unit of society, particularly for its establishment and while it is responsible for the care and education of dependent children… special protection should be accorded to mothers during a reasonable period before and after childbirth” (icescr, 1966, article 10). the escr committee has highlighted the importance of family for persons with disabilities and older persons, groups whose members have historically found their rights to live in a supportive family environment constrained (general comment no. 5, 1994, para. 30-32; general comment no. 6, 1995, para. 31). the committee has a dedicated general comment on the right to health in which they identify the minimum core components of health-care, including non-discriminatory access to and equitable distribution of health-care services and essential drugs (general comment no. 14, 2000, para. 43(a) and (e)). 6. educational/recreational means of life: states parties “recognize the right of everyone to education” (icescr, 1966, article 13(1)). this right is not only the right of children to schooling but to all individuals of all ages to education at a suitable level. the minimum core incorporates basic primary education and equality of access to all for education at other levels (general comment no. 13, 1999, para. 57). primary education must be “compulsory and available free to all” (implicitly including adults who lack basic numeracy and literacy skills; icescr, 1966, article 13(2)(a)) and this is the only provision for which the means for progressive realization are spelt out in a distinct icescr article, which requires: each state party to the present covenant which, at the time of becoming a party, has not been able to secure in its metropolitan territory or other territories under its jurisdiction compulsory primary education, free of charge, undertakes, within two years, to work out and adopt a detailed plan of action for the progressive implementation, within a reasonable 108 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   number of years, to be fixed in the plan, of the principle of compulsory education free of charge for all (article 14). the minimum core of the right to “take part in cultural activities” (article 15) includes non-discriminatory access, free expression and choice as to whether to participate in cultural activities, and involvement of stakeholders in development of policies relating to cultural activities (general comment no. 21, 2009, para. 50). further, states recognize, within the context of the right to work, the right of everyone to “[r]est, leisure and reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay, as well as remuneration for public holidays” (icescr, 1966, article 7(d)). 7. vocational means of life: the icescr states that “the states parties to the present covenant recognize the right to work, which includes the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain his living by work which he freely chooses or accepts, and will take appropriate steps to safeguard this right” (article 6(1)) and they “recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of just and favourable conditions of work” (article 7). within the minimum core of the right to work are the fundamental principles of equal access to employment and non-discrimination (general comment no. 18, 2005, para. 31). 8. just forms of life: the indivisibility of the icescr and the iccpr means that fundamental freedoms may not be sacrificed in order to fulfil basic needs or economic, social, and cultural right (icescr, 1966, preamble; general comment no. 3, 1990, para. 6 and 8). thus, for example, is individual self-determination recognized as a central element of the right to health and coercive medical treatment is prohibited (general comment no. 14, 2000, para. 34). in line with mcmurtry’s theory of value, rights are established by the icescr so that needs are met and life thus enabled to open towards wider ranges of:54 (a) action, e.g. stepping from sheer survival (the right not to be hungry as the minimum core) to adequate food, i.e. a nutritious, well-balanced diet (full realization of the right to food); (b) felt being, e.g. stepping from adequate food to adequate good food (food can possess an aesthetic dimension that encompasses several different levels of sentience); and (c) thought, e.g. stepping from adequate good food to adequate, good, culturally significant food (traditions and local culture can be expressed and apprehended via food choices and food-related rituals).55 the icescr was not promulgated in order to specify only a floor below which nations may not fall. rather, it was meant to provide its parties with defining principles and purposes concerning the sort of development desired by the international community. the “minimum core” obligations are merely a starting rights and value 109 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   point. the distance from which each country still stands from fulfilling the covenant over 30 years after its entry into force, and, indeed, the regressive outcomes in a number of states, suggest that new conceptions of the factors that systematically oppose the icescr are needed.56 the time may have come for mcmurtry’s axiology to enter into the human rights mainstream. the environment, the life-ground, and the icsecr mcmurtry’s wbi is his most conspicuous contribution to the alternative standards for the measurement of growth and wellbeing (e.g. human development index [hdi], genuine progress indicator [gpi], the statistics canada system of environmental and resource accounts) that have been championed in the recent past by a number of scholars and scientists, such as amartya sen (1992) and gene shackman (2006-9).57 some such alternative standards have already been used by the un and other institutions, including the world bank, in order to deal with the dimensions of human capital and natural capital and, more generally, to attempt to assess growth and decline in non-market-dependent ways.58 nevertheless, they are still far from being the leading parameters of evaluation actually employed by individual states and major international organizations vis-à-vis economic performance and inform most decisive aspects of policy-making (latouche, 2004, 2007). almost without exception, what has appeared to be paramount to states in the end is growth or potential for economic growth, narrowly defined by life-blind money-value parameters, whilst human rights considerations have been left largely undersupplied (mcmurtry, 2002, 2009-10). were growth measured in this sense to correspond with progressive realization of economic, social, and cultural rights, then the bare pursuit of growth would be a reasonable interpretation of the most “appropriate means” for a state to take to fulfil the covenant. yet, as highlighted by the current crisis, this does not seem to be the case (e.g. un, 2002-9 and ban, 2009).59 in particular, what has emerged from expert debates on the destabilization of climate and hydrological cycles is that the type of growth pursued under the banners of “globalization” and “international trade” has had systemic negative implications upon both human health and the environmental conditions of planetary survival. that is to say, “globalization” and “international trade” have had systemic negative implications upon the integrity of life support systems at all levels, thus affecting the possibility of satisfying vital needs through generational time (un, 2002-10; worldwatch institute, 2009). as we write, the deepest “living conditions” of humankind, present and future, are being impoverished to an unprecedented rate. the international scientific community at its highest and most representative levels has denounced vocally and repeatedly that human civilization has become for the first time in its history a threat to the planetary environment that allows for humanity’s own existence (union of concerned scientists, 1997). eminent scholars have further emphasized this point. a few weeks before his death, hans jonas (1993), father to modern bioethics, declared in a speech (translation by the authors): [e]very debate about race has become anachronistic, irrelevant, almost farcical vis-à-vis the gigantic challenge that our threatened environment 110 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   throws in the face of the entire humankind. caught in the grip of this challenge, whether it knows it or not, humankind becomes one kind, as it loots its earthly home, shares the fate of its own ruin, and remains the only possible saviour of both: the earth and itself... [t]he "human condition" has been transforming... in the old days religion told us that we were all sinners because of the original sin. today it is our planet's ecology that accuses all of us of being sinners because of the overexploitation of human ingenuity. back in the old days religion terrified us with the last judgment at the end of times. today our tortured planet predicts the coming of that day without any divine intervention. the final revelation... is the silent scream emerging from things themselves, those things that we must endeavour to resolve to rein in our powers over the world, or we shall die on this desolate earth which used to be the creation.60 these words may seem rhetorically blown out of proportion, but heed should be paid to the fact that there is actually no aspect whatsoever of the earth’s environment that has not been depleted in the processes of extraction, production, transportation, consumption, and disposal of the “goods” enhancing today’s mainstream conception of “growth”: the biosphere-protecting ozone layer, breathable-air producing and reproducing pluvial forests and oceanic life-systems, vegetaland animal-lifesupporting hydrologic cycles, self-regenerating water aquifers, nourishing-foodproducing arable spaces, and natural-equilibrium-maintaining and scienceand technology-inspiring biodiversity (un, 2002-10). denials of this dramatic situation are an exercise in intellectual dishonesty, as the causal link between the pursuit of profit in contemporary market economies and environmental degradation becomes visible every time environmental and health-and-safety regulation, or effective enforcement thereof, is resisted as “too costly,” “rigidifying” or “anti-competitive” (gaggi, 2008; international labour organisation, 2006), or is by-passed by illicit behaviour and/or by off-sourcing to countries that have actually little such regulation or none at all.61 mcmurtry’s serving as honorary theme editor for the philosophy section of unesco’s eolss highlights the fact that one of the recurring concerns of his oeuvre is the acknowledgment that a healthy biosphere is valuable as such. by contrast, the icescr does not address environmental concerns for their own sake. for that reason, the escr committee cannot make broad statements of law or policy on environmental issues but can only address the environment from a strict anthropocentric perspective. in other words, under the icescr, the environment has no intrinsic value, but is only valuable to the extent that it maintains or improves humans’ abilities to enjoy their economic, social, and cultural rights. as a result, the committee has no self-standing general comment on the environment or the need for the development required to fulfil economic, social, and cultural rights to be “sustainable.” nevertheless, the perpetual validity of the icescr implies that immediate moves to fulfil its provisions must not come at the cost of future fulfilment.62 thus, the committee recognizes both the relevance of the environment for current enjoyment of human rights as well as the need for sustainability in the means chosen to realize human rights.63 a “healthy environment” is an integral factor in realising the highest attainable standard of health and explicitly addresses states’ responsibilities to reduce rights and value 111 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   workplace toxins that threaten the health of either employees or the general population (general comment no. 14, 2000, para. 4, 11 and 15). the right to water requires control of pollutants and additional protection in times of crises, such as conflict or natural disasters (general comment no. 15, 2002, para. 7 and 22). the committee adopts “respect for the environment” as one of the aims of education, with reference to the world declaration on education for all, and considers it “implicit in, and reflect[ing] a contemporary interpretation of article 13(1)” (general comment no. 13, 1999, para. 5). sustainability was addressed by the escr committee in 1991 in the general comment on the right to adequate housing which requires “sustainable access to natural and common resources, safe drinking water, energy for cooking, heating and light, sanitation and washing facilities, means of food storage, refuse disposal, site drainage and emergency services” (general comment no. 4, 1991, para. 8(b)). the concept came into its own in the context of the right to food when the committee asserted that adequacy and sustainability are two sides of the same coin: “the notion of sustainability is intrinsically linked to the notion of adequate food or food security, implying food being accessible for both present and future generations” (general comment no. 12, 1999, para. 7). the sustainability of food resources is considered to be so fundamental as to constitute an element of the minimum core of the right to adequate food (general comment no. 12, 1999, para. 8). on the same basis, sustainability is a crucial component of the right to water (general comment no. 15, 2002, para. 11). these comments are particularly relevant for contemporary capitalist countries, the number of which has grown tremendously since the disappearance of europe’s communist bloc. from a life-grounded standpoint, for example, a global free market that still causes scores of diseases due to pollutants, junk food, and addictive substances, (boffetta, 2006; world health organization [who], 2009) while corporate pharmaceutical profits boom, (angell, 2004) is not a desirable development model for it implies that such a market has been interested inherently in perpetuating or worsening such pathological circumstances rather than preventing them (clorfene-casten, 1996). on a global scale, as hans jonas’ remarks anticipated, “growth” in the orthodox economic sense may have even been pursued successfully for the past two decades (shackman, 2007), the ongoing international crisis notwithstanding. yet, at the same, this narrowly conceived growth has been reducing the likelihood of planetary survival via depletion of the earth’s life support systems and the ability of states and the individuals within them to realize their economic, social, and cultural rights (un, 2002-10).64 concluding remarks lawrence summers’ “impeccable” logic stands today under-reformed, if not unreformed, within the legal frameworks and the concrete policies of nearly all countries suffering from the ongoing economic crisis.65 on the contrary, states have rescued and revived profit-driven banks that were responsible for the crisis with public money, which is not being used to fund life-protecting and life-enhancing institutions. quite the opposite, public expenditures are being reduced most thoroughly in several countries so as to counter the risk of inflation, which is 112 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   demonstrated thereby to be a much more pressing concern to many governments, economists and business elites than environmental degradation and the fulfilment of the rights enshrined in the icescr.66 such money-centeredness and life-blindness do not come as a surprise, for the lifedestructive expressions of today’s leading economic system have been not aberrations, but recurrent, ordinary aspects of the same.67 they are the result of a faulty understanding of value, which does not consider the long-term satisfaction of vital needs as paramount, and focuses instead upon for-profit “short-termism” (baruchello & lintner, 2009, p. 40). laconically, mcmurtry (1999) connotes this faulty understanding of value as follows: “the system is by its inner logic a horizonlessly expanding money-demand machine engineering all that lives to extract more money value from it, to reduce the costs of continuing its existence, or to extinguish it as of no money worth” (p. 242).68 in this system, value has been shown daily and repeatedly not to correspond to the life-grounded parameters enshrined in the icescr, but rather reduced to the money price that one can get for whatever alleged “good” may be traded in a money-based market of buyers and sellers, such that each of them seeks only, or is expected to seek only qua rational agent, the most for herself (castoriadis, 1997a). if the rights sanctioned in the icescr are ever to enjoy a brighter future, then many governments, economists and business elites will have to prove themselves capable of undergoing a major value shift, which is what mcmurtry’s axiology has been offering for some time. notes   1 for the sake of avoiding repetition, “theory of value” and “axiology” are used as synonyms. in contrast, mcmurtry’s “life-grounded onto-axiology” is going to be explained and discussed in detail. although still alive and active, john mcmurtry has already produced a significant amount of literature in axiology, which can therefore be considered established as a coherent set of conceptions. 2 the number of researchers making use of this original notion has been growing steadily for at least a decade (e.g. ato, 2006; dickinson, becerra, & lewis, 2009; finlay, 2000; florby, shackleton, & suhonen, 2009; hodgson, 2001; johnston, 2003; johnston, gismondi, & goodman, 2006; jordan, 2004b; kaara, 2005; mook and sumner, 2008; noonan, 2006; scarfe, 2006; shurville & brown, 2009; shurville, brown, and whitaker, 2009; streeck, 2009; turner & brownhill, 2004; westhues, 1999). 3 as of 2003 john mcmurtry has been the honorary theme editor for the philosophical section of eolss, i.e. the world’s largest repository of information on sustainable development and related issues or, as defined by the un, on “life support systems” i.e. “[a]ny natural or humanengineered (constructed or made) system that furthers the life of the biosphere in a sustainable fashion. the fundamental attribute of life support systems is that together they provide all of the sustainable needs required for continuance of life. these needs go far beyond biological requirements. thus life support systems encompass natural environmental systems as well as ancillary social systems required to foster societal harmony, safety, nutrition, medical care, economic standards, and the development of new technology. the one common thread in all of these systems is that they operate in partnership with the conservation of global natural resources” (un, 2002-10, “definitions,” para. 2). 4 there were 48 positive votes and 8 abstentions. rights and value 113 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011     5 cf. icescr, 1966, article 2(1) and iccpr, 1966, article 2; article 23 applies a “progressive realization” standard vis-á-vis equality in marriage since states did not consider themselves able to immediately guarantee this right. this is not to suggest that even in 2011 states are successful in fulfilling the iccpr in its entirety. 6 in july 2010, op-icescr had attracted 31 signatures and 2 ratifications. on coming into force, it will have a competence comparable to that of the human rights committee to consider communications from aggrieved individuals or groups. noteworthy are also the general comments by the escr committee, 1989-2009, and the concluding observations on state reports, included in the committee’s annual reports to the economic and social council (ecosoc). 7 curiously, south africa is not a party to the icescr, having signed in 1994 but never ratified, yet its constitution reflects much of its content, even using the committee’s framework of duties to respect, protect and fulfil human rights (constitution of the republic of south africa, 1996, s7(2); see also liebenberg, 2009). other countries that incorporated economic, social, and cultural rights in recent constitutions include: brazil, bulgaria, burkino faso, congo, colombia, estonia, hungary, macedonia, poland, and turkey (cf. langford, 2009, footnote 39 and this collection in general for reviews of over 2000 cases). 8 for a review of the debate, see nolan, porter, and langford (2007). the debate has moved on from whether economic, social and economic rights are justiciable to how they can best be adjudicated (p. 29). 9 harvard professor ralph barton perry (1954) argued: “a thing—anything—has value or is valuable in the original and generic sense, when it is the object of interest—any interest” (pp. 23). nicholas rescher (1969), “champion” of the anglo-american analytic tradition, rarefied further the notion of value and reduced it to the status of linguistic rationalization of individual yens: “a value represents a slogan capable of providing for the rationalization of action by encapsulating a positive attitude toward a purportedly beneficial state of affairs” (p. 9). even more abstract was zdzislaw nadjer's (1975) option, whereby: “m is an axiological value if and only if m is a judgement, ascribing the quality of valuableness to objects, properties or states of affairs, and constituting within the given value-system a final justification of other judgements of the system” (pp. 63-4). 10 michel foucault (2008) claims that the prolonged experience of top-down determination of social values by the state, from “bismark’s state socialism” to “national socialism” (p. 101), was a crucial factor in the development of german neo-liberalism, most notably hayek’s work its emphasis upon individual independence in value options by way of the principle of free choice in the free market. 11 mcmurtry (2009-10) characterizes his own theory of value as “onto-axiology,” thus stressing the connection between value—as indicated by “axiology”—and being as such—as indicated by the prefix “onto-.” the life-ground is therefore both (a) the vital platform of life support systems upon which all values stand as real-world beings, and (b) the prime value that all beings reveal, whether explicitly (e.g. mcmurtry’s own theory, the un’s eolss) or implicitly (e.g. by eating, seeking medical assistance, or preferring life to death). 12 a considerable amount of philosophical and socio-political literature has centred in recent years upon “life,” yet in connection with the foucauldian notions of “biopower” and “biopolitics” (e.g. agamben, 1998, 2005; esposito, 2004, 2005). however, no attempt has been made to clearly define “life” and articulate it beyond the juxtaposition of “zoe” (biological life) and “bios” (political and/or fully human life), nor has any objective criterion of value been proposed in this context (nacci, 2009). 13 limited attention has been paid by western philosophers to the life-ground, which has been regularly presupposed or left under-analyzed (allen & baruchello, 2007; baruchello, 2007b). as a consequence, this essay is going to refer extensively to john mcmurtry and mcmurtry scholars. 14 to deny the life-ground’s import constitutes a token of performative contradiction (baruchello, 2009). besides, even philosophical pessimism (baruchello, 2005) and otherworldly religions have testified to it (baruchello, 2007b). 15 logically, it is possible to distinguish between life as possessing intrinsic value and the lifeground as being instrumentally valuable. ontologically, this is impossible: “all that is of worth consists in and enables life value to the extent of its experienced fields of thought, felt being and action (intrinsic value), and what underlies and enables these fields of life themselves, life support systems” (mcmurtry 2009-10, para. 6.1.4). 16 after maslow’s (1943) pioneering work in the field, rollo may (1969) was alone, in the late 1960s, in challenging pareto’s notion of ophelimity and suggesting that value is what satisfies a 114 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011     need, rather than a preference. later, apart from mcmurtry, few others have tackled “need” in depth, e.g. jennifer sumner (2005, 2008) and jeff noonan (2006)—who are mcmurtry scholars like giorgio baruchello—len doyal and ian gough (1991), david wiggins (2002), and julio boltvinik (2007). 17 “need” is hardly discussed and articulated in recent literature, to the point of being undistinguishable from the cognate notion of “preference” (or “desire,” “want”), e.g. one of italy’s most used reference websites for students in economics and the social sciences recites: “needs are a feeling of dissatisfaction due to the want of something. human needs are unlimited, subjective, resurgent and variable” (“i bisogni,” 2007). yet, as argued by jeff noonan (2006) “needs” and “preferences” (or “desires,” “wants”) can be distinguished sharply from each other. first of all, “deprivation of needs always leads to harm whereas deprivation of wants is only harmful in light of revisable self-interpretation” (p. xiv). secondly, “needs are satiable whereas wants are not” (p. 57). 18 to avoid misunderstandings, it should be emphasized that: (a) organisms can be harmed psychologically, not just physically; and (b) organisms are not always reducible to individual creatures. it is long-standing practice in the sciences to regard societies (e.g. spencer, 1860; steiner, 1985; hodgson, 1993) and ecosystems (e.g. bunyard, 1996; lovelock, 1979) as being organisms comprising others within themselves. 19 there may be simpler and more complex comparisons of value or evaluations of life-gains and losses. nevertheless, if mcmurtry’s axiology is correct, then the preferred option in hard cases should be still the result of comparisons of life-value, e.g. a court’s painful decision to separate a child from her cruel parent to foster the former’s “best interest,” or john of salisbury’s and john milton’s classic justifications of tyrannicide. 20 no ontological dualism is implied: “although we can distinguish the cognitive and feeling capacities of any person, this does not mean dividing them into separate worlds as has occurred in the traditional divisions between mind and body, reason and the emotions. life-value ontoaxiology begins from their unity as the nature of the human organism” (mcmurtry, 2009-10, para. 6.3). 21 mcmurtry’s onto-axiology allows for the determination of good and evil, cutting across received dualisms (e.g. utilitarianism vs. deontology, free choice vs. paternalism, free trade vs. protectionism, individualism vs. collectivism, etc.). life-enablement and disablement signal respectively positive progress and negative regress. 22 noonan (2006) argues that the history of democracy should be understood as the struggle of downtrodden sectors of society to attain guaranteed access to vital resources and pursue increased life-capability. 23 in our use of “institution” as semiotic artefact we follow castoriadis (1997b): “the social imaginary is not the creation of images in society, it is not the fact that one paints the walls of towns. a fundamental creation of the social imaginary, the gods or rules of behavior are neither visible nor even audible, but signifiable” (p. 183). 24 buried in historical contexts, the life-supporting character of the civil commons has been expressed in a variety of forms. the same applies to their management, e.g. religious precepts, laws, medical prognoses. 25 the “civil commons” embrace both social and natural commons, for the latter become social too as soon as they are conceived of as commons and regulated accordingly. 26 george soros (1998) and joseph stiglitz (2003) dub “market fundamentalists” those economists who, since the 1970s, have been proclaiming one interpretation of capitalism—known as “neoliberal” or “neoclassical”—to be absolutely good. still, the dogmatic, if not outright political character of economics runs further back in the history of the discipline, as the michigan institute of technology’s economics visiting committee tried to have paul samuelson’s 1948 classic textbook called off because of its inclusion of “left-wing” keynesian economics (poterba as cited in krugman, 2010b). 27 it follows that, were the privatized civil commons to fail a life-grounded test of success, alternatives ought to be sought promptly, e.g. nationalization of “too-big-to-fail” private companies, as discussed in galbraith (1977). 28 unless explicitly and effectively prohibited by public authorities in their capacity as civil commons, the for-profit commerce of human beings or parts of their bodies is far from being a thing of the past, not only as a daily engagement for criminal organizations, but also as an acceptable notion amongst academics. morrison and wilhelm, jr. (2007) argue the outlawing of rights and value 115 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011     indentured servitude to be an example of how the state has historically “undermined an agent’s property rights over his own person” (p. 43). on his part, savulescu (2003) argues that “[p]overty which is acceptable to a society should not be a circumstance which prevents a person” from selling her organs; to prevent it by law exemplifies “paternalism in its worst form” (p. 193). were ever the trade of human organs to be explained on life-grounded premises, still the fundamental question is begged here as to why the poverty that leads a person into selling no less than parts of her body should be accepted at all. 29 in 2009 the world bank criticized the chinese government for not stimulating adequate domestic consumption (rampini, 2009)—of whatever consumer goods, e.g. life-enabling rice and lifedestructive cigarettes. 30 ingerid straume (2008) argues that the conceptual blindness to children of liberal and neo-liberal economics extends to traditional liberal political thought, which takes as its starting point the adult. 31 this idea is often referred to as “consumer sovereignty,” whereby some people, i.e. moneyed people, are willing to purchase certain priced goods rather than others, thereby steering their production and their price. in this manner, money-demand determines that one thing is more important than another (galbraith, 2007). 32 most examples of for-profit life-depletion discussed in this essay focus on the biological dimension of life, but the psychological dimension is commonly affected too, for entire sectors of today’s economy thrive on promoting, preserving and managing human unhappiness (galeano, 2000; orbach, 2009). 33 our use of references to mainstream media sources is meant to show how mcmurtry’s axiology allows for the comprehensive understanding of everyday phenomena that are treated typically as distinct. 34 jordan (2004a) argues that free-market emphasis on individual choice has not only reduced the funds available to public services, but has also damaged their role as the collective context for convivial, co-operative social relations and the socially beneficial sense of widespread solidarity and civic community. 35 aside from outright crime (public accountant, 2008; “usa,” 2008), the border between legal and illegal profiteering is porous, insofar as illegal revenues are recycled in, and to the benefit of, legal ones. 36 hobsbawm (1995, 2000), elliott and atkinson (2008) argue that the advent of neo-liberalism in the 1970s meant the end of a thirty-year-long period of state-overseen, real-economy-centred, wealth-redistributing development, which was itself a keynesian “compromise” aimed at preventing any illiberal, soviet-like revolution from taking place in the west. in this view, neoliberalism has been staunchly counter-reformist. 37 exceptions have not been absent altogether, such as china and, more recently, malaysia, whose governments refused to follow wholeheartedly this agenda, despite pressure from the imf and the world bank (basu, 2008; mcmurtry, 1999). still, meltdowns have been frequent worldwide, bearing high social and environmental costs. 38 many critical voices of the 1980s-2000s, including mcmurtry’s, were ridiculed and marginalized by growingly dogmatic economists and streamlined scholars, thus preparing the ground for today’s crisis. sneeringly, foreign affairs contributor jagdish bhagwati (2002) wrote: “the disappearance of alternative models of development provoked anguished reactions from the old anticapitalists of the postwar era… from socialists to revolutionaries… captive to a nostalgia for their vanished dreams… in fields other than economics. english, comparative literature, and sociology are all fertile breeding grounds for such dissent” (pp. 2-3). 39 in the aftermath of the recent “credit crunch” crisis, the number of persons going hungry worldwide grew sharply as a consequence of the subsequent real-economy crisis that reduced commercial and employment opportunities for vast sectors of the population of many countries (fao, 2008; vidal, 2008). this latter and more life-destructive crisis is still unfolding, also in the affluent nations where the former crisis was initiated, as noted by respected commentators (e.g. krugman, 2010a; posner, 2010). this crisis adds also further havoc to the impacts of previous structural adjustment programmes and policies, which have been widely researched and critiqued in connection with the actual enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights (narula, 2006). countries with imf-led structural adjustment programmes have been found to have worse food security, both relative to other similarly situated countries and to themselves prior to the imf’s intervention (e.g. argentina; cf. langford & king, 2009). having much stronger enforceability mechanisms than human rights treaties, the effect of some international financial restructuring 116 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011     agreements has been to divert state’s attention from its obligations to its population and towards its agreements with international financial institutions (narula, 2006). besides, the loan conditions imposed by the imf often make it less rather than more likely that the loan will ever be repaid (narula, 2006). indeed, the charters of such organizations as the imf and the world bank do not explicitly authorize them to take account of human rights matters when formulating and implementing restructuring programmes. nor, being states, can they become parties to the icescr or any other human rights treaty, even if they so desired. on the other hand, to the extent to which certain human rights norms constitute customary international law and even ius cogens—such as the prohibition of slavery and apartheid—the permissible actions of these organizations may be prescribed (belgium v spain, 1970, para. 34; un, 1945, article 55). still, few, if any, provisions of the icescr can be considered to have reached the status of customary international law, therefore it may be more conducive to consider instead the responsibility of the member states of multi-state institutions, the vast majority of whom are parties to the icescr. 40 democracy itself has been believed to follow from free trade: “just as democracy helps make the world safe for commerce, commerce helps make the world safe for democracy. it’s a two-way street” (clinton, 1996, p. 36). consistently, independent non-capitalist countries were targeted in secret since the 1980s for “quiet revolutions” aimed at bringing them free trade and western-style democracy (e.g. chossudovsky, 1996). 41 we do not claim that public provision of services and public ownership may not be as environmentally damaging as their private counterparts, as amply demonstrated by the disastrous environmental record of former soviet union (deutsch, feschbach, & friendly jr., 1968; ziegler, 1990). systemic arrangements may be necessary, albeit per se insufficient to secure lifeprotection and promotion: individual behaviour must also be consistent with systemic aims for these to be attained, partially or entirely. 42 mcmurtry (1999) writes: “[f]inancial crises always follow from money-value delinked from real value, which has many names but no understanding of the principle at its deepest levels” (p. 243). 43 starvation levels are still rising (“u.n.: one billion worldwide face starvation,” 2009); unemployment soars around the developed world (“a decade of high unemployment is looming,” 2009; barkham, 2010; seager & elliott, 2009; weisbrot, 2010; tremlet, 2010; vinnumálastofnun, 2010); wages are cut (traynor, 2009; mcdonnell, 2009); and out-of-work social security rights— paid for by contributions during the boom years—are under attack (elliott, 2010a); pensions are reduced (traynor, 2009) ; mental pathologies are expected to take a heavier toll in coming years (smith, 2008); nutritional standards have been dwindling and the physical and psychological development of an entire generation of children (i.e. about 250 million) is bound to suffer from it (de pee et al., 2010); education becomes less affordable to larger sectors of the population in affluent countries (“crescere un bambino?,” 2010); healthcare provision is threatened by budgetary concerns arising from public bailouts of bankrupt private banks (triggle, 2009), despite the imf’s unusual advice not to cut public expenditures and keep current taxation levels (iezzi, 2008; elliott, 2010b); and so are the promotion and diffusion of cultural activities and scientific knowledge even in countries that are said to have been affected only limitedly by the crisis (“actors condemn harper’s culture cuts,” 2008). 44 cf. general comment no. 3, 1990, para. 8 quoted above, at p. 11 and accompanying text. 45 the 2008 “credit crunch” was due to “toxic assets” created and traded for profit by the world’s largest financial institutions, which were rescued from the brink of bankruptcy by massive state intervention (stiglitz, 2010) and henceforth allowed to: (a) lend money for profit to taxpayers whose tax-money had saved them; (b) deny money to public bodies to the point of nearbankruptcy (e.g. the us state of california); (c) pay bonuses to executives responsible for the “crunch” due to “toxic assets”; and (d) speculate against and/or force states to cut public spending via control of treasury bonds and other securities. whilst (a) and (c) contradict the capitalist ethos, (b) and (d) have obvious negative implications for publicly funded civil commons. 46 states which have signed a treaty undertake not to undermine its object and purpose, pending ratification (vclt, 1980, article 18). 47 the protocol will come into force when 10 states have ratified it, thus giving individuals and groups within those jurisdictions the right to bring communications indicating violations of their rights to the escr committee (op-icescr, 2008, article 18). 48 the icescr here refers explicitly to two of the “four freedoms” articulated by f.d. roosevelt (1941), which formed the foundation of the udhr (whelan and donnelly, 2007). the preamble of a treaty is not legally binding on state parties per se, but forms part of its context and indicates rights and value 117 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011     its object and purpose. therefore, when interpreting the substantive articles, reference to the preamble can be made (vclt, 1980, article 13). 49 non-state actors, as well as states, are prohibited from relying on any of the rights within the icescr to deny others the same (icescr, 1966, article 5(1)). 50 at the implicit heart of biology and medicine there are grounds from which one may deduce universal criteria of planetary and human life-needs, hence guidelines for public welfare too. however, today’s “life sciences” epitomise the life-blindness of much scholarship and scientific research, for this term includes life-destructive praxes such as the corporate stipulation of new disorders and the development of biological weapons. 51 the data requests have been criticized for being too detailed and burdensome, in particular for developing states (chapman and russell, 2002). 52 jordan (2004b) criticizes mcmurtry for producing different indexes and explains this fact by suggesting that whereas most biological needs are invariant, emotional and thought-related ones are not so. rubino (2010) claims jordan: (a) to be confusing invariant emotional and thoughtrelated needs with the varying degrees of awareness of them and the many means by which to satisfy them; as well as (b) to be missing the scientifically appropriate openness of mcmurtry’s wbi to empirical correction and theoretical amelioration. 53 “shall” is used to indicate a binding state obligation and the use of “everyone” indicates that the obligations of state parties are to all world inhabitants, not only those in the home state, nor even only those inhabitants living within other state parties. also, the escr committee goes further, relying on articles 55 and 56 as well as the icescr to state that: “international cooperation for development and thus for the realization of economic, social, and cultural rights is an obligation of all states” (general comment no. 3, para.14). in other words, the committee does not only claim that states should take the covenant into account when engaging in development cooperation but that development cooperation itself is an obligation, not a discretion for members of the un. 54 noonan (2006) observes that needs balance one another, as, say, the need for liquid fluids is eventually countered by the need to urinate, or the need to be educated, if unrestrained by the needs to properly rest and socialize, will eventually turn into unhealthy ivory-tower bookwormlike existence. needs, unlike wants, are satiable. however, life-enablement can progress farther than the perfect satisfaction of needs, for it is possible to think of an impeccably sustainable worldwide community of healthy, happy, educated human beings, who test the limits and improve upon athletic ability, explore at ease the pinnacles of aesthetic bliss, and dwell passionately yet wisely the utter depths of learning. perhaps, this was the ideal horizon towards which the drafters of the icescr dreamt for humanity to be able to advance, after experiencing the great depression and its most abhorrent child, the second world war. 55 general comments no. 4, 1991, para. 8(g), 12, 1999, para. 8 and 14, 2000, para. 12(c) focus upon the importance of the cultural appropriateness of housing, food and healthcare respectively. 56 in blatant opposition to the life-aims of the icescr, primary education is not available for free to millions of african children (transparency international, 2010) and labour unionization in some developed countries has been reduced to a tiny fragment of the total workforce (friedman, 2008). 57 an ongoing effort in this direction can be found in giovannini, hall, morrone, and ranuzzi (2009), who are developing an alternative framework to measure the progress of societies for the oecd. 58 to these all, mcmurtry (2009-10) adds a theoretical foundation, which perhaps philosophy alone can produce. still, it is significant that attempts have been made to evaluate performance in ways that differ from those of standard money-bound criteria (e.g. “full employment” in keynesian economics). 59 although the icescr and the escr committee are ecumenical regarding the type of economic system employed by a state to realize, progressively, the treaty, the committee expresses doubts that rights can be fulfilled entirely for all in a wholly unregulated market and recommends that in the case of privatization, the state ensure some back-up protection for vulnerable groups (e.g. general comment no. 3, 1990, para. 8, general comment no. 5, 1994, para. 11-12, general comment no. 14, 2000, para. 35, general comment no. 18, 2005, para. 25). 60 jonas’ work, especially jonas (1984), adds the awareness of life-destruction to the understanding of modern science-technology, whose study qua binomial was initiated by his famous mentor, martin heidegger (1982). 61 as this article is being completed, news agencies report of the $1.2m fine imposed on londonbased trafigura for illegally exporting toxic waste to ivory coast, thus causing illness to about 118 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone   social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011     30,000 local inhabitants. possibly, trafigura had attempted to adhere to the waste-dumping logic sanctioned by lawrence summers. 62 neither the icescr nor the iccpr contain provisions for denunciation (withdrawal) by states parties, in contrast to the vast majority of treaties in other fields of international law. 63 general comment no 19, 2007, para. 11, recognizing the need for social security schemes to be sustainable “to ensure that the right can be realized for present and future generations.” 64 revealing of the degree of planetary exhaustion is the recent proposal by maldivan president mohamed nashed to create a fund whereby to purchase a new homeland for his nation’s inhabitants, as their archipelago is foreseen to disappear under water in the near future (“le maldive,” 2008). 65 the mind-lock of leading economists and policy-makers is exemplified ostensibly by the notion that some countries were affected less severely by the “credit crunch” of 2008 because of “backward” banking systems that were more tightly regulated and/or less prone to speculation (draghi, 2008). 66 whereas money was created by central banks across the globe to salvage the international financial system from itself, any such money-creation has been resisted for the past thirty years as inflationary and irresponsible, especially if prompted for environmental and/or social aims (halimi, 2008; “threat of inflation,” 2009). 67 money-demand does not determine the ranking of different options amongst private agents alone. typically, in capitalist countries, money-demand has been driving the behaviour of public institutions as well. the need for food and shelter of millions of third-world sub-saharans carries little money-demand, whereas the first-world’s middle-classes’ desire to travel across the globe carries much more. as a result, first-world states subsidize private enterprises designing new aircraft engines more generously than they fund aid programmes for african countries (european commission, 2007; “panel urges g-8,” 2008). 68 the absence of any life-grounded goal for this self-replication of money-sequences is one of the crucial reasons why mcmurtry (1999) claims capitalism to have reached its “cancer stage” (cf. the title of the book). in its systemic patterns of agency, this self-replication of money-sequences mimics the life-disconnected self-replication of cancerous cells within a living host. a second reason is that this self-replication of money-sequences, exactly like the sprawling of cancerous cells, leads eventually to loss of organic capacity, given that planetary life support systems and societies’ civil commons have been stripped visibly and regularly in order to allow further selfreplication of money-sequences. a third reason is that societies’ civil commons such as publicly elected governments, business schools, and regional development agencies have failed to perceive and respond to the ongoing assault, or actively contributed to it (chomsky, 2003), analogously to the immune defences of a living organism that do not recognize the ongoing pathology for what it is. references a decade of high unemployment is looming (2009, december 27). msnbc business. retrieved from 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(1990). environmental policy in the ussr. amherst: university of massachusetts press. egner final correspondence address: justine egner; email: egnerconsulting@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 #actuallyautistic: using twitter to construct individual and collective identity narratives justine egner abstract employing critical autism studies and narrative analysis, this project examines how autistic twitter users engage in narrative meaning-making through social media. by analyzing the hashtags #actuallyautistic and #askingautistics this project broadly explores how individuals construct identity when lacking access to positive representations and identity communities. answering the research question, “how do autistic people construct individual and collective identity narratives through twitter?,” findings indicate that autistic twitter users use their social media presence to build virtual learning communities. common knowledge about autism is often oversimplified and highly medicalized. therefore, autistics use twitter to make meaning of their experiences that are not represented within cultural notions of what it means to be autistic. autistic twitter users reject medicalized narratives by contesting stereotypes, flipping negative narratives into positive stories, re-inscribing “deficiencies” as beneficial, and resisting rehabilitation and “cure.” users do important social activist work by building strong autistic communities in ways that counter current negative representation, constructing positive self-affirming individual and community identities and resisting eugenic notions that autistic people are “less valuable.” keywords autism; neurodiversity; critical autism studies; twitter introduction employing critical autism studies (cas) and narrative analysis, this project examines how autistic twitter users engage in narrative meaningmaking through social media. by analyzing the hashtags #actuallyautistic and #askingautistics this project broadly explores how individuals construct identity when they lack access to positive representations and identity justine egner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 350 communities. specifically, i examine how autistic people use twitter to engage in community and identity building.1 the idea for this project was born out of my work examining the community building of autistic and neurodivergent queer people in online blogs through the development of the politic neuroqueer. in this (once) small corner of the internet resides a group of self-advocates, activists, and academics engaging in dialogues and dreaming up non-medicalized ways of being neurodivergent. through this project, i came to the realization that my personal identity as an autistic person was almost entirely shaped by the interactions i have had with medical professionals, therapists, teachers, and the few other grade school students in the special education program i attended in rural pennsylvania. i had no peers in my identity community when i was a child and i have none now as an adult. yet, i was sure that i had an understanding of my autistic identity, that i knew many other autistics, and that i was a part of a community. i realized almost every interaction i experienced with other autistic people was in the virtual world. with the development of social media, seemingly overnight, a vibrant and active community of autistic people was gaining ground in virtual spaces, on blogs and livejournals, on tumblr, facebook, instagram, twitter, and now tiktok. from a quick glance at my social media news feeds #actuallyautistic people were everywhere. yet away from social media it was as if autistics didn’t exist. they didn’t in other forms of media, outside of one-dimensional, medicalized portrayals and the occasional depiction of an autistic savant, and not visibly in our daily lives. while there are some gathering places for autistic people outside of the virtual world, there aren’t many.2 like most people with disabilities, we are likely born into families of all able-bodyminded or allistic people.3 we rarely have a vertical identity group (or what goffman (1963) described as tribal identity) from which to learn and build connections. similarly, it is difficult for autistics to build horizontal community or communities made up of peer groups. we can’t join an autistic club on a college campus or hop down to the autistic bar to meet up with friends. so, i came to the question: how do autistic people, who lack positive media representation and rarely have cohort communities, construct individual and collective identity narratives? by examining social media data this paper explores one component of this 1 reflexivity statement: as a queer autistic scholar, i believe my work should be emancipatory in focus and i wish to bring academic attention to the way disabled and autistic people resist 2 while such groups do exist in larger cities and the occasional college town, they are almost entirely non-existent in rural spaces, are a challenge to find, and are often framed in terms of support groups. 3 inspired by o’toole (2015) and price (2015), i use the term “bodymind” to refer to bodies and minds collectively as a rejection of the cartesian mind/body split that situates bodies and minds as separate and/or oppositional. able-bodyminded refers to the experience of not being disabled. allistic is a common term for people who are not autistic. allistics can be neurodivergent or neurotypical. #actuallyautistic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 351 guiding question and attends to the specific research question: how do autistic people construct individual and collective identity narratives through twitter? to attend to this question, i begin by situating this work within both cas and narrative analysis and highlight the importance of self-narrated accounts. critical autism studies much of what is socially and culturally understood as autism is constructed from the perspective of health professionals, therapists, and parents who frequently unintentionally or explicitly rely on deficit-based models of autism (barnett, 2014; woods et al., 2018). narratives of autistic personhood are often oversimplified, highly medicalized, and view autism as a series of deficits (o’dell et al., 2016; woods et al., 2018). it is imperative to provide scholarly examinations of autistic experiences through lenses that challenge stigmatizing and overly medicalized depictions of autistic people. this paper uses critical autism studies (cas) to examine autistic peoples’ self-narrated experiences via the social media site twitter. cas is a rapidly emerging field, developing out of the neurodiversity movement, and describes a body of work produced mostly by contemporary autistic scholars who are exploring social, historical, and cultural considerations of autistic identity and experience (waltz, 2014; woods et al., 2018). beginning in the late 1990s neurodiversity activists began publicly calling for the de-pathologization of autism, rejecting medical definitions which highlight deficiency (shapira & granek, 2019). neurodiversity is a politic that recognizes the diversity of human neurology, in which neurodivergence is understood as natural human variation not to be devaluated (silberman, 2017). neurodivergence refers to deviations from neurotypicality, while neurodivergent references those who identify as nonneurotypical (strand, 2017). cas scholars “investigat[e] power dynamics that operate in discourses around autism, questioning deficit-based definitions of autism, and [are] willing to consider the ways in which biology and culture intersect to produce ‘disability’” (waltz, 2014, p. 1337). this group of interdisciplinary researchers examines medicalization of autism, construction of autistic identity and community, disability rights, and autism as a site of structural inequality (woods et al., 2018). over the last decade, critical approaches to autism have resulted in the expansion of autism research led by autistic researchers or partnered with autistic participants, such as work in participatory research (see fletcher-watson et al., 2019; jivraj et al., 2014; macleod, 2019; nicolaidis et al., 2011). here, i employ cas to explore autistic community and identity through self-storying. justine egner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 352 narratives narratives are culturally recognizable stories embedded with cultural, symbolic, and emotion codes that contribute to the construction of personal, organizational, and institutional meaning and identities (loseke, 2007, 2009). they can be powerful resources for making sense of the self and others (loseke, 2011; melucci, 1995). when narratives are evaluated as believable and important, they can be successful at acquiring societal support. narratives about marginalized groups that do not conform to cultural expectations that rely on stereotypes frequently receive little public support because they are not culturally recognizable (egner, 2019). narratives rely on various systems of meaning based on “local cultures” (holstein & gubrium, 2000), and “emotion cultures” (mesquita & walker, 2003). systems of meaning are changeable, locally and historically situated, and there is no absolute universal interpretation (stearns & stearns, 1985). both storytellers and listeners are active participants that can resist, create, and alter cultural meaning systems and narratives (atkinson, 2006; loseke, 2018). identitybased groups seeking to change stereotypical depictions must create new selfstories that challenge dominant depictions and stock stories through the employment of resistance narratives that oppose or reject dominant cultural codes and ideology (atkinson, 2006). new stories provide the possibility to construct alternative and positive “self-stories” and community culture through the creation of multidimensional and positive identity narratives. the social media users examined here are contesting established narratives about autistic people and building community narratives by co-creating community and individual narratives. the importance of self-narrated accounts autistic voices, thoughts, and feelings are often excluded from scholarship and frequently dismissed within activist spaces in favor of family and medical-led discourses (barnett, 2014; egner, 2019b). while work on autism from both autistic scholars and from the perspective of autistic participants has become more common, the vast majority of research is conducted by non-autistic scholars and frequently relies on the perspectives of teachers, educators, therapists, and family members rather than of autistic individuals themselves. medical and deficiency-based discourses permeate even “inclusive” activist and academic work (egner 2017, 2019b). however, cas scholarship works both to highlight the perspectives of autistic people and reject academic and cultural pathologizing of autism. some recent scholarship has focused on social media to examine autistic people’s self-storying, identity, and experiences (see benham, 2015; egner, 2019b; karusala et al., 2019; welch et al., 2020a, 2020b; zolyomi et al., 2020). welch et al. (2020a, 2020b) uses blog data, and both benham (2015) #actuallyautistic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 353 and zolyomi et al. (2020) use twitter data to elucidate autistic social media users’ construction of identity narratives through the rejection of stigmatizing, medicalized, and negative framings of autism. similarly, i found (egner, 2019a) that neuroqueer social media users resist their exclusion from autism narratives and want their voices to be forefronted. this project works to foreground the perspectives of autistic social media users by highlighting their activity on twitter as both activist work and academically relevant. self-narrated accounts in research are especially important when examining emerging and marginalized communities as they have the ability to challenge dominant group power, reject oppressive discourses and promote self and community reliance (bradford & clark, 2011, p. 180). narratives present in media help make sense of our experiences, identities, and how we understand the world. today, we are not lacking narratives about disability and there is certainly autistic representation in media. indeed, 2017 was coined the “year of autism inspired tv” (hickman, 2017). however, disabled and autistic people are often tokenized, stereotyped, and oversimplified (egner, 2019a; hevey, 1993). one need look no further than their own netflix queue to see examples; hit tv shows such as parenthood and early seasons of the good doctor and atypical portray autistic people as undesirable, emotionally stunted, or difficult to love (notably, they are almost always depicted as white boys or men). a lack of positive representation contributes to exclusion, stigmatization, invisibility and oppressive stereotyping (dahl, 1993; hartnett, 2000). through self-narratives, communities construct individual and community identity, make claims about their oppression, and advocate for social change (bradford & clark, 2011; loseke, 2007; melucci, 1995; polletta, 1998a, 1998b). autistic people lack positive, nuanced and accurate representation, and are therefore either excluded from popular narratives and representation or they are frequently inundated with stories of stereotypical representation that reinforces stigmatization, thus rendering accurate portrayals invisible and inaccessible. both stereotypical depictions and a lack of representation of specific (often marginalized) identity implies that autistic identities should be hidden, overcome, changed, and avoided. as the majority of academic research, activist work, and media representation tend to ignore the perspectives of autistic people and rely on deficiency-based models, it is imperative that we examine autistic self-narratives (gillespie-lynch et al., 2017). methodology disabled and autistic people’s perspectives have been historically and culturally silenced (barnett, 2014; egner, 2019a; yergeau, 2018). using social media to examine personal narratives allows researchers to explore the thoughts, ideas, and feelings of autistic communities that have been justine egner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 354 historically ignored. online media platforms are also particularly useful in addressing disability and autistic experiences, as digital technologies are able to relieve some communication barriers that are often present in face-to-face communication (although they do present their own communication challenges) (egner, 2019b). drawing on feminist disability research methodology (garland-thomson, 2005), research involving disabled people who often experience marginalization should be emancipatory. the purpose of this project is to highlight a group of self-advocates and bring further attention to their creative work. my objective is not to coopt and authoritatively interpret their stories, but rather to bring mainstream academic attention to their important perspectives. moreover, as an autistic scholar, i have a personal investment in the perspectives of autistic social media users and i wish to bring academic attention to the way autistic people resist deficit-based medical models of disability and construct positive self-stories through virtual community building. data collection i collected data through periodical data scrapes (at two-week intervals) of twitter, using qualitative data collection and analysis software nvivo 12, between august 2019 and december 2020. twitter is a social network platform in which users connect via quick, short (maximum 280 characters), and frequent communications or micro-blogging called tweets. twitter users have a profile page they can update with information about themselves and they connect with others via their feed/timeline. the timeline displays the tweets of the users one follows as well as the tweets they like. users can retweet others’ posts, retweet and add their own content, comment on tweets, and like tweets. they can search and save hashtags so that they are able to follow specific topical conversations. using nvivo, i searched the hashtags #actuallyautistic and #askingautistics and downloaded every public original tweet and retweet as a data file to be examined within the software program. each data scape of these two hashtags together amounted to between 10,000 and 20,000 tweets and retweets. i am interested in how autistic people use social media to build collective narratives. therefore, i applied virtual ethnographic methods (such as following field connections to examine user interactions) in order to gain a more complete picture of the data. by following field connections (hine, 2000) of particularly popular and relevant tweets that used the above hashtags, i downloaded sets of comments on tweets as individual data files. virtual ethnographic methods treat the internet as both culture and cultural artifact, thus it is particularly valuable in examining the way the internet is socially meaningful (hine, 2000). the data examined here is entirely open access, none of the accounts referenced are private, and tweets were visible without a twitter account. #actuallyautistic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 355 many of the autistic twitter users referenced in this paper are autistic advocates, activists, and scholars with highly public twitter presences. as such, and because i believe that the work of these twitter users deserves recognition and understand that citation can be a powerful tool in deciding what knowledge is valuable,4 i do not provide pseudonyms for the quoted material throughout this paper and refer to the majority of twitter users by their twitter name or handle. many of the users employing these hashtags make a living from their social media presence and many of them are activists or academics using twitter to author, promote, and disseminate their work; they deserve credit for their ideas and thoughts. if, however, their twitter presence appears to only be personal (and not used for activist, academic, or professional work) i have not included their handles, and if the tweet was easily searchable i only paraphrase, consistent with many recent academic conversations about the ethics of using publicly available social media data (benton et al., 2017; o’callaghan & douglass, 2021; townsend & wallace, 2017; williams et al., 2017). from my perspective, to quote or paraphrase the work of autistic activists and authors without providing proper citation could be unethical, and therefore i make a distinction between public profiles and personal profiles by examining follower counts, number of retweets and likes, and profile statements. this project was approved by my institutional internal review board. there is a short history of academic manuscripts citing the social media work of activists and scholars (brown et al., 2017; cole, 2021; egner, 2019a). williams et al. (2017) argues that scholars should contend with the ethical considerations of the use of data from twitter in ways that consider users’ expectations and behaviors. since the majority of users referenced here use twitter to disseminate their work, i promote and give credit. i argue that academic audiences should engage with the work that scholars and activists are producing on social media in their own right (not just with the academics who reference them) (egner, 2019a). data analysis this paper utilizes virtual data collection methods in combination with narrative analysis, practicing loseke’s (2012) approach to analyzing formula stories. the data in this article are treated not as inanimate texts, but rather as interactional, cultural resources artfully employed by twitter users. although narratives are often skillfully employed by individuals, they shouldn’t be oversimplified as only personal stories. narratives are “simultaneously about the personal, the social, and the cultural” and they inform and are informed by private life, “public social processes, social forces and societal institutions” (loseke, 2019, p. 85). this methodological 4 moreover, american psychological association, american sociological association, and modern language association style guides all require the in-text citing of tweets. justine egner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 356 approach requires the researcher to begin the analysis by situating the contexts of stories via asking reflective questions and considering the authors, claims, and audiences (geiss & egner, 2021; loseke, 2012). after compiling all the data into nvivo for analysis i began by asking: who are the authors? who is their audience? what type of story are they attempting to tell? i then examined the common and prevalent narratives to gain an understanding of the central themes of the stories. i took note of the particularly popular tweets to better understand what narratives are evaluated as important by the social media users. in subsequent passes, i re-coded, using lumping and splitting techniques (zerubavel, 1996) to begin generating common thematic categories. i used these categories and codes to pull out the narratives that were common across all the tweets from different social media users. the final step of this analysis was to systematically analyze the symbolic codes (cultural ways of thinking) and emotion codes (cultural ways of feeling) embedded in the data (loseke, 2012) by asking further guiding questions, such as: what knowledge about the world does this statement assume? what would i need to believe about the world for this statement to be believable and important? what specific values are being reflected/transmitted (loseke, 2012, p. 262)? a narrative analysis of twitter is especially useful as comments, liking, and retweeting allows a researcher to examine what narratives are evaluated as valuable and taken up by a specific community (egner, 2019a, 2019b). recent scholarship has utilized virtual methodology to explore narratives in the digital world (busby & laviolette, 2006; geiss, 2019; underberg & zorn, 2013), and i have recently examined how narratives are constructed, employed, modified, and imparted in virtual spaces (egner, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, geiss & egner 2021). findings most narratives and media representations about living life as an autistic person are oversimplified, highly medicalized, rely on stereotypical depictions, and present autism as a series of deficits. autistic people are thus using twitter to try to make meaning of their experiences that are not represented within these very medicalized notions of what it means to be autistic by establishing virtual learning communities. the findings section below will begin with a brief analysis of how autistic social media users utilize twitter to establish learning communities. the remainder of this section will address five narrative tactics autistic twitter users employ to reject medicalized inaccurate depictions and construct new self and community affirming resistance narratives. #actuallyautistic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 357 establishing a virtual learning community autistic social media users utilize twitter to build virtual learning communities in which they collectively recognize the lack of representative and relatable circulating stories that accurately depict their experiences in recognizable ways. throughout the data there were hundreds of posts from autistic authors criticizing and discussing poor and stereotypical representation. for example, users expressed frustration and anger with the portrayal of autistic girls in musician sia’s recent movie project and her response to autistic self-advocates criticizing these portrayals via twitter. notably, in this set of tweets chiarichey (an activist writer with over 5,000 followers working at the intersection of disability and race) describes how stereotypical portrayals of autism can have real life implications for autistic people. why is sia still talking? why? we’re still being compared to a man from a movie that came out before i was even born & he wasn’t even #actuallyautistic!... it’s wrong af and you don’t get why. #siastop #siadoesntspeakforus… now a whole generation of nonspeaking girls will hear ignorant bull for the rest of their lives just like we still hear rainman. (nov. 27 2020) chiarichey elucidates what many scholars of narrative have explained: culturally recognizable stories (however inaccurate) can have severe implications for personal identity construction as narratives are our most powerful resource for making sense of the self and others (atkinson, 2006; egner, 2019b; loseke, 2011, 2017; melucci, 1995). in response to these inaccurate depictions, autistic people turn to twitter to build a virtual learning community in which they collectively write new resistance narratives. they employ common community hashtags as valuable communication tools to purposefully interact with and learn from other autistics. as autistic architect explains in a tweet: “the #actuallyautistic tag means that the person writing the tweet is actually autistic. it’s how we identify each other. also #allautistics. the #askingautistics tag will bring replies from the #actuallyautistic community” (sept. 22, 2020). users engage with these hashtags to construct self-understanding and self-identity that they are not able to build within established medicalized and cultural narratives about autism. this is evident when one twitter user explains: navigating the #actuallyautistic community has taken me to my lowest ebb and it’s also taken me to my highest. because it’s been a self-awareness & education my diagnosis didn’t give & no amount of research can offer i can honestly say i’m thriving thanks to meetin[g] all of you. as there are few in-person communities of autistic people and the majority of information about what it means to be autistic relies on deficit-based models, justine egner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 358 social media users turn to twitter. in doing so, they are constructing a virtual community and establishing identity narratives. rejecting medicalized cultural narratives autistic twitter users reject current cultural narratives of autistic personhood (often embedded with medicalized and stereotypical notions) by employing five resistance strategies: (1) building autistic identity beyond medical conceptions, (2) recognizing shared experiences of marginalization, (3) debunking stereotypes, (4) flipping both negative stereotypes and pathologized evaluations of their “deficiencies” into positive self-stories, and (5) contesting medicalized perspectives that autistic bodyminds should be cured, rehabilitated, and avoided. building autistic identity beyond medical conceptions. first, autistic twitter users utilized the hashtags #actuallyautistic and #askingautistics to connect with other autistics and relate their experiences to each other outside of and beyond medical conceptions of what it means to be autistic. there were many tweets in this dataset in which users shared and asked other users to share how they understand, perceive, and make sense of a variety of different experiences related to their identity. autism health and wellbeing (an autistic activist twitter account centered on wellbeing) explains that they love stimming and autistic movements as well as asks how other autistic hashtag users understand autistic wellbeing.5 they write in a thread: …i am #autisticwhileblack (with some added sprinkles) & love to wiggle! …some of the things that i am a nerd for are stimming/expression/movement & general beingness (especially autistic beingness). if you’re interested in seeing what some of that looks like you can check out: dancing is existing, & something that i have been curious to know since i joined this blog… if anyone reading would be so kind to help me explore, is: as an autistic, what does wellbeing mean to you? (dec. 1, 2020) users like the account referenced above are perception-checking their own experiences with other autistics, recognizing that they experience the world differently than allistics and use twitter as a place to explore what these differences looks like and what it means to be autistic (outside of deficitbased models). they are establishing, confirming, and reaffirming autistic self and collective identity. this is evident when one autistic user asks “do any other #actuallyautistic folk sometimes have such intense emotions that it overwhelms you in a very problematic way? #askingautistics cause i made a friend recently but i am now an absolute mess. any suggestions on… 5 stimming refers to self-stimulating behaviors such as repetitive movements or noises. #actuallyautistic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 359 managing this?” commentors on this tweet reaffirmed this experience and shared advice on how they navigate similar situations. commentor rosemcarreiro (an autistic and mental health advocate with over 3,000 followers) states “me. i try to figure out what exactly is stressing me out and try to find solutions to remove or decreasing the trigger.” another user confirms that they experience this too and encourages others to recognize that just because feelings are different doesn’t make them wrong. importantly, these narratives extend well beyond diagnosis criteria and common medical and cultural conceptions of autism. users frequently employed these hashtags to describe their perception of, or feelings associated with, an experience that they viewed as uniquely autistic (or mostly unique to autistics). this is evident when chairychey writes about (what they refer to as) autistic scripting: #actuallyautistic scripting: coming up with every question and answer relevant to a situation that could possibly be asked at any point in time, although it may never be... ever. i’ll probably forget the most important ones & still end up looking like an unprepared failure tho. commentors affirmed this, explaining that they do it “outloud” and “with different tones.” chairichey and some commentors expressed that, through twitter interactions, they have realized that this might be part of being autistic. chiarichey responds “yes! i’m reading these like ‘it’s not just meeee???’ like i know we all script, but i have a whole play in my head with every scenario possible lmao.” because the majority of medical and therapeutic advice about problems many autistics experience are embedded with negative evaluations of autism and are almost entirely constructed by non-autistics, users turn to twitter to help name and recognize what they are going through and get advice from fellow autistics in how to manage a variety of concerns and situations (such as responding and dealing with over-stimulation, coming out as autistic, negative comments from peers or family, and experiencing meltdowns) in non-medicalized ways. lilririah – an autistic activist with over 21k followers who advocates specifically for the recognition of autistics who are black, indigenous, people of color – writes in a thread: i realize that i (still) have a really limited understanding of meltdowns, as i’ve seen a few examples over this past month or so of meltdowns being prolonged (full day?) events. for my body, when i think of meltdowns, i think of what is essentially a seizure. can people help me understand how this can differ for their bodies? (nov. 30. 2020) in turning to other autistics for advice users are not (or not just) reaching out to “experts” on autism (such as healthcare providers, therapists, educators, and allistic family members) for help. it is likely that the day-to-day experiences of being autistic and what it means socially to identify as such justine egner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 360 are not part of medicalized communications and prominent cultural narratives. for instance, there are dozens of tweets with long comment threads detailing stories of autistic meltdowns, indicating that what it actually feels like and means to experience an autistic meltdown is not communicated by “experts” nor are recognizable stories of meltdowns present in dominant narratives. these conversations suggest that autistic people utilize twitter to construct these narratives for and with each other outside of medicalization. autistic identity as shared marginalization. the second tactic autistic twitter users employ is the use of these hashtags to story their identities through common experiences of stigmatization and oppression. many posts detailed the ways in which societal and medical understandings of autism, autistic behaviors, and autistic communication devalue autistic people, rely on negative evaluations of autism, and contribute to marginalization of autistic people. autistic twitter users commiserate together and cast the “problem” of autism as societal prejudice rather than individual inability or lack. this is illustrated when autileven writes, people tell me i just like to label myself. to that i always say: ‘society has labeled all kinds of inaccurate negative labels on me, long before i did anything. now i have an accurate positive label. it’s society’s labels that are the problem, not my actual label.’ (nov. 28. 2020) cultural narratives about autism portray autistic people as insensitive, as lacking an ability to understand and communicate with others, as rude, as unable to pick up on jokes or as lacking sense of humor, among a variety of other misconceptions. these conceptions of autism ask autistic people to change, hide, and “overcome” their autistic behaviors. when autistic twitter users tell their stories of stigmatization, they construct their experiences as valid and valuable and resist both stereotypical portrayals of autism and the notion that autistic people should change. this is evident when hopper (an autistic activist) depicts neurotypicals (opposed to autistics) as insensitive: “the three primary types of neurotypicals: 1. the ones that are demeaning cause i’m different. 2. the ones that tell me i’m not different. 3. the ones that do both simultaneously.” this is further elucidated in the following exchange between autisticwookie and commenters as they provide positive self-stories: autisticwookie: since “coming out” as #actuallyautistic at work people send me details of learning events about autism (this weeks favourite is “reasonable adjustments & practical support for people living with autism”). whatʼs an nt approved way of pointing out itʼs not me that needs training? beautidivergence: it’s so cute when they think they can educate us on autism. just tell them you’ve been put through a complete, immersive experience, that is the best available training in the world. #actuallyautistic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 361 autistic wookie: and that i am in fact one of those “persons” therefore they could try doing something radical like... just listening to me! save the course fee and believe people who live it daily! sparkleclass: i often use deliberate misunderstanding with nts, especially when they send me info with no bloody context or action. “thank you for this, is this something you’re planning to attend or are you asking me if it’s suitable for your needs?” debunking stereotypes. third, autistic twitter users employ these hashtags to combat stereotypical representations and beliefs about autism. extremely common threads (like the following) work to educate readers about what “it is really like to be autistic.” commaficionado (an autistic writer with over 47k followers) asks “autism mythbusters let’s get rid of some of those incorrect stereotypes. please share educate folk today!” (nov. 30. 2020). commaficionado follows up with their own thread of examples of debunking stereotypes, such as: “autistic people can have friends… perhaps a smaller number? maybe, but not necessarily.” this post had 27 replies, over 600 retweets, and over 900 likes. kinkybaron rejects more stereotypes in a thread of replies containing a list of things that can be true of autistics: autistic people can be the most sarcastic, jokey people and often are the life of the party when around people who the[y] are comfortable with in social settings we can understand… autistic people think of “communication” as more than just speech. for most of us, our idea of communication is actually very broad and considers many other forms of communication that allistics often overlook… autistic people make amazing friends. we are deeply loyal, fair, empathetic, open, honest, compassionate, accepting, and consistent. flipping negative narratives into positive stories. fourth, many twitter users utilized these hashtags to flip negative narratives into positive stories, by re-inscribing “deficits” as beneficial. for instance, autistics are often criticized for lacking “good” communication skills (they’re often deemed tactless or too blunt), and irisdyoung describes autistic styles of communication as preferable when they write, “i find it so much easier and more comfortable to communicate with autistic people on average. i like communicating directly and literally, and i prefer writing over speaking.” in another example of citing the cultural problems of autism and reframing them as positive another user writes, “so many allistic people insist on framing autistic traits in negative ways. even when they clearly recognise something in us that they can’t pass off as terrible, they still force negative connotations onto it.” they continue with a thread of examples in which they reframe behaviors that are often evaluated as problems into skills and advantages: people will sometimes acknowledge that autistics often like order and routine, but they’ll call it ‘a lack of imagination’ and ‘rigid thinking’ and try to force us to be justine egner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 362 ‘more creative’ (as though no art was never made of neat lines, as though poetry is never structured)… here’s an idea: autistics are great at finding patterns in a chaotic world, and we’re great at creating them! you don’t need to pressure us to think like you, and we can’t do that anyway, ‘cause we’re us!.., people will sometimes acknowledge that autistics can spend a lot of time thinking, but they’ll call it ‘being slow’ (or worse, the r word) or ‘self-absorption’ or ‘refusal to engage socially,’ and try to force us to spend less time thinking and more time talking… here’s an idea: autistic people are largely introspective, and maybe the world would be better if everyone spen[t] a bit more time thinking and a bit less time talking. in reframing autistic associated behaviors that are culturally devalued and deemed problematic into positive stories and advantageous skills, autistic twitter users are contributing to the construction of more recognizable individual and collective autistic identity narratives. i want to be clear here that autistic twitter users are not employing these script-flipping tools in ways that resemble inspiration porn.6 they do not position their skills as a way to “overcome” autistic behaviors nor do they cast themselves as autistic savants (so often depicted in popular media). rather, they are self-narrating complex, multifaceted, recognizable, and relatable positive stories of autistic personhood. rejecting and providing alternative narratives to cure. fifth, users resist medicalized narratives by rejecting notions of rehabilitation and cure. medical model conceptions, that are deeply embedded in our cultural beliefs, understand disabled bodyminds as problems that need fixing and therefore employ tactics to force disabled people to conform to normative expectations of bodies, behaviors, and practices (berger, 2013; conrad & barker, 2010; egner, 2017; oliver & barnes, 2012). the autistic twitter users referenced here reject the idea that autistic behaviors and bodyminds, frequently understood as deviant, are an individual problem in need of fixing. rather, they recognize that the problem is located within cultural and medicalized narratives that devalue bodily and mental diversity. in other words, autistic social media users are doing important social movement work by resisting eugenic notions that autistic people are “less valuable” (stoll & egner, 2021) and by contesting normalizing narratives that perpetuate destructive medical model discourses of cure. for example, stimming is a common autistic behavior that has been highly medicalized and stigmatized and is often recognized by many medical professionals, educators, and family members as a problem in need of fixing. autistics are frequently encouraged or taught not to stim. many posts focused on stimming as a natural behavior with a variety of benefits. in one tweet neurorebel (an autistic writer, public speaker, and educator with over 36,000 followers) asks followers to fill in the blank on 6 inspiration porn is the portrayal of disabled people as inspirational solely based on their disability, typically presented to and for able-bodyminded audiences (see young, 2014). #actuallyautistic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 363 their experiences and beliefs about stimming, writing: “stimming is __________?” comments included answers such as “autocomplete says: stimming is a good time i have nothing to add”; “part of me”; “relaxing and calming. also natural”; “a reclamation of self”; and “automatic! i don’t even realize i’m doing it most of the time. when i do notice, it can be hard to make myself stop, and the second i stop paying attention it’ll start happening again.” twitter users resist the idea that disabled bodyminds are passive objects on which the medical or cultural agendas of others should be enacted, and recognize that the reinforcement of normative behavior can have detrimental effects. one user explained that they used to receive enjoyment from their stimming but they were trained out of stimming and that they actually stop breathing, stating “i can’t stim so i hold my breath. my husband still has to remind me to breathe. that’s how screwed up people get when you don’t let them stim. it’s super f*cking hard.” they counter the medical knowledge that describes stimming as unproductive, distracting, unnatural, conscious, and deviant and reclaim it as a natural and positive part of autistic identity. autistics use their twitter platforms to attempt to challenge these notions of pathology. some of the most prominent conversations in this dataset focused on not “hiding” autistic identity and autistic behaviors. twitter users rejected the pathologized notion that autistic behaviors could be removed and unlearned through desensitizing and masking. this is evident in a conversation with an allistic social worker when they employ the #askingautistics to search for advice on how to explain that desensitizing is “the worst” and “why it’s wrong.” commentators responded by referencing their own experiences of subjection to desensitization practices. growing up autistic (who uses twitter to share their journey with their 6,000 followers) responds: growing up i wanted to go to concerts but the noise/lights bothered me. after awhile i got “used” to it… or so i thought!. years later i realised i had been masking it & eventually i felt drained. finding ways around this is more important then getting “used” to it. another user elucidates that desensitization is an attempt to make someone seem more neurotypical, calling it “a flippant case of forcing neurotypicality,” and explains that just because they don’t show their discomfort doesn’t mean they are desensitized to painful stimuli. another user articulates that attempting to suppress discomfort will have consequences sooner or later such as burnout, mental illness, meltdowns, and shutdowns. they explain that such desensitizing practices are taking someone’s mental health and “turning it into a time bomb” out of convenience to neurotypicals. moreover, masking is described not as rehabilitation but as covering-up and hiding autistic bodyminds in order to better fit in with preconceived justine egner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 364 expectations of acceptable behavior. this is articulated by aspergersgirls (an autistic author with over 6,000 followers) when they write: my masking was a result of others isolating me, manipulating me, bullying me, shaming me, and wanting me to validate their beliefs, choices, existence, and established norms. i had the choice of hiding within myself or dying. i am thankful my mask is off now and i love myself. (aug. 6. 2019) often users express that without these behaviors, reactions, and experiences, autistics don’t get to know who they really are. this is clear when another user writes: i have been doing it for so long that i don’t know how not to. until i was diagnosed 6 years ago at 52 yo i felt like an imposter but i never knew why. it might have served a purpose before, but now i feel like it prevents me from knowing me. twitter users position an authentic autistic identity as one that resists socialized expectations of normative bodymind presentation. this is elucidated when emrieirving (an autistic author and artist with over 4,000 followers) argues that we are taught to hide our autistic traits but autistics should be valued: “trust yourself more than the protocols you’ve used to protect yourself. when you wanted to do _autistic trait_ as a young person you were right and valid. you. were. right. there is nothing ‘wrong’ with how you work. let yourself be.” moreover, ipiluni (an artist and blogger who uses twitter to discuss navigating the world as autistic) sums this experience up by writing: sometimes my brain decides i should be masking. the internal ableism makes those days are exhausting… i mask because i think it’s literally the only way to be independent/self-supporting. i think it’s completely negative and exhausting. nobody cares who i actually am. removing the mask is difficult because masking is so often an unconscious protective mechanism for discrimination… i think you have to basically re-learn who you are, what you feel, what you enjoy, etc., because you’ve learned to suppress it. (dec. 3 2020) central to resisting these harmful medicalized narratives is finding ways to counter and resist notions of cure and rehabilitation. sometimes this resistance comes in the form of rejecting beliefs that stimming is unproductive or in describing forced masking as harmful. autistic twitter users recognize that the current medicalized cultural narratives and representation of autism subtly and overtly reinforce the notion that autistic people should be changed, avoided, rehabilitated. they contest these cultural beliefs while simultaneously constructing positive self-stories. this is clearly expressed when a user writes, “why the hell are so many people bothered about the ‘causes of autism’ instead of just accepting that autistic people are a #actuallyautistic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 365 goddamn blessing to this world and being thankful for what we can actually offer you?” conclusion despite the majority of cultural narratives that demean and devalue autistic bodyminds, and despite the lack of recognizable positive representation and lack of in-person community, autistic people are resiliently constructing affirming individual and collective identities through twitter. the findings here provide insight on how people who lack positive culturally resonating identity narratives use virtual spaces to construct group identity in ways that are representative and affirming. social media can be a useful tool in disseminating and constructing narratives that resist stereotypical and inaccurate depictions of marginalized identity. this work highlights the importance of social media in current narrative construction and the techniques that marginalized identity groups use to reinscribe their identities outside of existing stigmatizing narratives. typical and prevalent narratives about autistic people are embedded with medicalized symbolic codes that position autistic people as problems that should be addressed through individual rehabilitation. autistic social media users are doing important social activist work building strong autistic virtual learning communities and by constructing these resistance narratives in ways that counter current negative representation and resist eugenic notions that autistic people are “less valuable” and a problem in need of fixing. moreover, the autistic twitter users referenced here construct an authentic autistic identity as one that contests socialized expectations of normative bodymind presentation. in other words, what it means to be autistic is in part a rejection of neurotypical socialization and forced normalization. to be autistic, as described by the #acutallyaautistic twitter community, is to share common experiences, including experiences of marginalization, but also experiences of autistic joy, autistic frustration and anger, autistic behaviors, and autistic reactions to stimuli and social interactions. furthermore, to be autistic is to live in a bodymind that has been highly moralized and medicalized through prominent narratives and stereotypes, yet to contest that medicalization through resistance tactics. to be autistic, then, is a powerful form of social-political resistance. limitations and considerations for future work there are many limitations to virtual social media data, one of which is that not everyone has access or the means to participate in social media. as such, this data is self-selected and limited to twitter users who have access to both social media and the internet. additionally, this type of media privileges justine egner studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 366 autistic people who are comfortable communicating via text, typing, and written word. although social media can relieve some communication barriers for autistic people it also creates new barriers for some. this type of data collection also doesn’t pose direct question to twitter users and therefore future work should consider engaging with autistic social media users via interview methodology. furthermore, due to the expansiveness of the data, many themes emerged that could not be explored in this article. themes such as self-diagnosis, disagreements between parents of autistic children and #actuallyautistic people, the over-prevalence of whiteness, maleness, and cisness of autistic virtual communities and prominent narratives, and the inaccessibility of social media and formal institutions, although not addressed here, should be further explored in future work. acknowledgements i would like to thank the autistic activists in social media spaces who are doing the important work of supporting fellow autistics and making these experiences intelligible. i would also like to thank dr. carley geiss, dr. sara green, and dr. allison carey. finally, i would like to acknowledge the reviewers and editors of this special issue. references atkinson, j. 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(2020a). from “since” to “if”: using blogs to explore an insider-informed framing of autism. disability & society. doi: 10.1080/09687599.2020.1836479 welch, c., cameron, d., fitch, m., & polatajko, h. (2020b). living in autistic bodies: bloggers discuss movement control and arousal regulation. disability and rehabilitation, 43(22), 3159-3167. williams, m. l., burnap, p., & sloan, l. (2017). towards an ethical framework for publishing twitter data in social research: taking into account users’ views, online context and algorithmic estimation. sociology, 51(6), 1149-1168. woods, r., milton, d., arnold, l., & graby, s. (2018). redefining critical autism studies: a more inclusive interpretation. disability & society, 33(6), 974-979. yergeau, m. (2018). authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. duke university press. #actuallyautistic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 349-369, 2022 369 young, s. (2014). i’m not your inspiration, thank you very much [video]. tedxsydney. https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much ?language=en zerubavel, e. (1996). lumping and splitting: notes on social classification. sociological forum, 11(3), 421-433. zolyomi, a., jones, r., & kaftan, t. (2020). # actuallyautistic sense-making on twitter. the 22nd international acm sigaccess conference on computers and accessibility. acm. https://doi.org/10.1145/3373625.3418001 studies in social justice volume 3, issue 2, 231-245, 2009 correspondence address: doris marie provine, school of transformation, arizona state university, tempe, arizona, 85287-0403, united states. tel: +1 480 965-7682, email: marie.provine@asu.edu issn: 1911-4788 justice as told by judges: the case of litigation over local anti-immigrant legislation doris marie provine faculty of justice & social inquiry, school of social transformation, arizona state university, tempe, arizona, usa abstract in the absence of comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level, many american states and localities are undertaking their own legal reforms. the new state and local laws have been challenged by immigrant-rights organizations and individuals on the grounds that the federal government has already pre-empted the field. the lawsuits bring a new narrative voice—that of judges—into the boiling u.s. immigration debate. judges engage the controversy over local enforcement of immigration enforcement, as they have other contentious disputes, both as pragmatic decision-makers and as spokespersons for justice. the tensions this dual role entails are explored here in the context of a single, controversial case. close-up analysis of the judge’s narrative strategy reveals a range of specific techniques to create moral distance from a decision, combined, ironically, with the enlistment of moral themes to justify the ruling. the inter-twining of rule-of-law and justice rhetoric mirrors and also shapes a broader politics of justice in the united states. introduction the inaugural issue of this journal carried an interview with david harvey in which he observed that ideas about justice had changed in his lifetime. in the 1970s, activists focused on what justice might look like in a better world because they were convinced that justice is sometimes achievable. that conviction has disappeared: “[i]njustice is what we talk about. we don’t have a positive conception of justice; we have a negative conception of lack of justice—injustice. that is a very important mobilizing idea” (pender, 2007, p. 16). harvey’s observation certainly fits the case of immigration policy. no one seems certain about how to achieve justice in immigration, but there is constant talk of the injustices of the current system. those who would restrict immigration are as dissatisfied as those who advocate its expansion, which helps to explain why “comprehensive” immigration reform is so difficult to achieve in the united states and in other wealthy immigrant-receiving nations. 232 doris marie provine studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 in the united states, municipalities and states have responded to the political vacuum and more dispersed patterns of immigrant settlement with their own initiatives. in 2008 state legislatures considered 1,562 bills and enacted 240 immigration-related laws on subjects ranging from eligibility for drivers licenses to sanctions for employers who hire persons without legal status (national conference of state legislatures, 2009). many cities and towns have enacted their own legislation (ramakrishnan & wong, 2007). most of these laws are designed to make it more difficult for immigrants without legal status to work, acquire housing, or become eligible for educational or other benefits. at the same time, some local police forces are being asked or required to inform federal immigration officials when they encounter potentially unauthorized persons (decker, lewis, provine, & varsanyi, 2009). the rise of anti-immigrant legislation at this level has, not surprisingly, provoked litigation from those most affected, particularly employers and immigrants. the role that courts can play in the controversy is limited, but important for both pragmatic and ideological reasons. judges have no power to rule on the wisdom or efficacy of legislation, but they can determine whether lawmakers are acting within their proper scope of authority in creating law, and they decide who can sue for relief from its strictures. for state and local governments, the principal issue is whether they can step into the perceived gap in the current federal framework and adopt their own regulatory statutes and ordinances. those who challenge these laws must show that they have suffered a sufficient degree of harm, a complex issue when the complainant is without legal status to remain in the country. while the ultimate impact of these legal challenges remains uncertain, it is clear that a new voice has been added to the sharp political debate over unauthorized immigrants and their rights. judges speak to these issues with a distinctive approach. the stories they create in their opinions begin from the premise that justice can be achieved through the proper application of the rule of law. although most would admit that justice is not always achieved, the prevailing view is that justice is most likely to be achieved through high quality lawyering and competent judging focused on the rule of law. this collective conviction that justice is within reach is the very quality that david harvey found lacking in contemporary public debate. judicial decisions thus merit attention as a distinctive species of justice talk, even apart from their practical impact. for critical legal scholars, the relationship between law and justice is much more problematic (see e.g. delgado, 2007; fitzpatrick & tuitt, 2004; kairys, 1998; unger, 1996). from a critical perspective, judicial opinions memorialize a kind of victor’s justice in which alternative voices are either muffled or absent. in this view, judicial decisions are hegemonic in their claim of final authority, but they hide the exercise of power involved by claiming to rely only on abstract principle that is neutrally derived from precedent and other binding authority. law, in other words, hides its prejudices, and its violence, by clinging to its formality (cover, 1985; fish, 1991). so, from a critical perspective, the debate over whether judges are “activist” or not begs the question—all judging is an exercise in power, and judgment often provides a rationale for the powerful to remain that way. to claim the process is a search for justice is to place a conceptual fig leaf over a political process. justice as told by judges 233 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 but for judges, maintaining the fiction of a decision’s inevitability is not a matter of individual proclivities – it is an occupational requirement. every judicial opinion necessarily has both pragmatic and ideological goals. at a pragmatic level, the judge’s narrative must provide a history of the dispute, review the legal process involved, and defend the result reached. at an ideological level, the narrative must subtly re-frame the controversy to fit within a relatively narrow rule-of-law framework. by creating a sense of the inevitability of the result, the judge implicitly suggests that justice has been done. appeals to justice may also be more direct, but they will always rest within a legal frame. a judge who appealed to moral principle in deciding a case would blur the carefully constructed boundary between law and justice (sarat, 2004, p. 93). judges write judicial opinions, in short, to dampen conflict and enhance the legitimacy of the judicial process through story telling. in the anglo-american context, that is a judge’s job (see e.g. powell, 2008). in attempting to separate law from moral impulses and from social context, judicial narratives implicitly assert that the two can be separated, and should be, at least in the context of litigation. this professional project has been successful, so successful in fact that americans often rely on judicial opinions to trump moral arguments. the professional project, however, has not been entirely successful. empirical research on satisfaction with courts indicates that, while the public expects justice that is blind to a judge’s personal preferences, litigants also expect judges to be realistically engaged in the dispute at hand (ewick & silbey, 1998; merry, 1990; nielsen, 2000; shiffrin, 1989; tyler, 2006). conley and o’barr (2006), for example, note the widespread expectation among law’s consumers that it will reflect a reasonably attentive response to social problems, and the disappointment that people experience when the process proves unresponsive: “scholars are discovering that citizens come to the law seeking a holistic response to their social problems, and go away unhappy when it insists on its institutional isolation” (p. 871). such expectations among non-professionals suggest a paradox that cannot easily be resolved. on the one hand, americans are comfortable with the idea of conceptualizing justice in legalistic terms, and used to relying on courts to resolve difficult moral issues. de tocqueville (1835/2003) noted the american citizen’s reliance on law and fascination with courts early in 1835 after he toured the u.s. but this tendency has a serious downside. when ordinary americans believe that justice issues can be neatly resolved through legal analysis, they will abstain from more encompassing and searching debate. it is important to understand that judicial opinions intentionally avoid confronting moral concerns directly and intentionally narrow the scope of concern. public debate over contentious issues like immigration enforcement should be more open to moral concerns, and more broadly based. but how do judges construct inevitability in their decisions? discovering these narrowing techniques requires close analysis. the ideal vehicle for studying the process is a single, controversial case, because this is the most difficult type to depoliticize. the strategy of decision and the specific tactics deployed should be relatively easy to spot in this context. the case examined here, lozano v. hazleton, is appropriately contentious and well known, particularly to people who follow news about immigration. 1 the suit involves hazleton, pennsylvania, a small town that in 2006 adopted legislation designed to discourage settlement by unauthorized immigrants. the local ordinance was one of the first of its kind, and partly for that reason, became a test case in the debate over the power of localities to devise their 234 doris marie provine studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 own rules for deflecting unauthorized immigrants. within a year, according to the migration policy institute (2007), approximately 90 localities had proposed more than 100 similar ordinances, and at least 35 had passed. judging as a political act the link between an individual judge and the decisions he or she reaches has long fascinated political scientists and historians. how does this literature bear on the issue of morality in judging? in political science, there is a very substantial academic literature linking judicial decisions to beliefs and attitudes, usually through aggregate analysis of votes on an appellate bench. these studies suggest the connection between personality and behaviour, treating decisions themselves as little more than justifications for previously held beliefs. such findings could be read to lend support to the argument that judges are too “activist,” that is, too willing to bring moral concerns to bear in reaching their decisions (lipkin, 2008; provine, 2005). what is important to note, however, is that judges themselves firmly reject this whole approach to their work. judges consider the “activist” label either as an insult or as a serious misunderstanding of their devotion to the core principle that law alone determines the outcome of adjudication (see e.g. o’scannlain, 2009). “judicial activism” was a lay term for a lay audience that has found traction in politics, but not in the legal profession (kmiec, 2004). the legal profession appears to be devoted to the fiction that judges are mere oracles of the law. law students learn how to pluck rules of law from judicial opinions, to be deployed as needed. the role of moral ideas in the legal process remains unproblematized and suspect in legal education. as austin sarat (2004) observes: “law schools generally try hard to undo the naïve, innocent impulses of their entering students, in particular their impulse to think about law in moral or political terms…. the goal of professional education remains constant – to sever the connection between the question of what is good and right and what the law permits or prohibits” (p. 87). legal practice reflects this same preoccupation with techniques for manipulating rules and suspicion of moral argumentation. lawyers may litigate an issue with an eye to moral sentiments, but they do so strategically, engaging in an outcome-oriented politics of law to achieve their goals (scheingold 1974, sarat 2004). this is not to say that lawyers are unmoved by moral conviction. cause lawyers, for example, promote their vision of justice through litigation (epp, 1998; mccann, 2006; sarat & scheingold, 2001. but for purposes of law practice and litigation, law and morality remain quite separate. judges carry this professional project forward in their opinions. as cass sunstein (1996) notes, it is their goal to attempt to resolve cases without taking sides (p. viii). the legal rules to be applied must emerge from the law, not from the judge, reflecting the baseline principle of blind justice. the use of the first person must be avoided. fulsome citations to precedent are standard because they demonstrate reverence for authority and help to diffuse the reality of individual authorship. facts must be linked to these legal rules in a way that suggests the inevitability of the decision reached. the judge, in other words, must appear to be above the justice as told by judges 235 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 controversy, but immersed in law. to a critical reader, the judicial narrative is a study in judicial modesty cloaking the exercise of real power. a case like lozano v. hazleton, which challenges the power of a local community to determine its own destiny, puts judicial narrative skills to a difficult test. will the court uphold the rights of persons without a legal right to remain against the wishes of local citizens, as expressed through their elected representatives? immigration has always been an emotional issue, “a powerful and elemental leitmotif of american national development,” according to daniel tichenor. he suggests that americans are perhaps distinctive among citizens of countries of immigration in “the degree to which they have woven immigration narratives and iconography into their collective cultural identity” (tichenor, 2002, p. 871). the case law concerning the power of localities to restrict unauthorized immigrants was sparse when the aclu and other groups and individuals filed their challenge to the hazleton ordinance. this created a significant legal problem for judge james m. munley, the federal district judge in the pennsylvania middle federal district court who was assigned to decide the case. there were no supreme court precedents directly on point. those that were most relevant focused on other issues, or were old and predate current federal legislation. nor had the intermediate appellate courts taken a clear stand. the situation has changed only slightly since then. other federal district courts are beginning to weigh in on the issue, and at least three of them have reached decisions sharply at variance with judge munley’s decision in the hazleton case (see e.g. preston, 2008). several of these cases have resulted in appeals, but decisions had not been reached in any of them at the time of this writing, including an appeal filed by hazleton in this case. 2 an indication of the lack of available guidance from appellate courts can be seen in discussions that are occurring in some state and local legislative bodies. representatives are being pressured to enact restrictive laws, but they have become wary of the costs of defending these laws. riverside new jersey rescinded its hazleton-type ordinance, citing the fiscal burden of defending it (migration policy institute, 2007). indiana received so much conflicting advice from legal experts about the constitutionality of its own proposed employer sanctions law that it moved the topic to a study committee after a september 2008 hearing (kelly, 2008). hazleton takes a stand the hazleton city council took decisive action against unauthorized immigrants working or residing in hazleton on july 13, 2006, when it enacted the initial version of its illegal immigration relief act. a number of revisions and additions followed during august and september. in the final version, employers were required to check the immigration status of those they wished to hire. failure to do so would result in loss of one’s business license for five years. landlords were also affected. renting to persons without legal authorization to remain in the united states could result in a $1000/day fine. the new legislation also declared english to be the city’s official language; city employees were required to get official permission to translate any document. mayor louis j. barletta, grandson of an immigrant, drafted this legislation. he wore a bulletproof vest to the council meeting that considered the proposals in order 236 doris marie provine studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 to suggest a connection between undocumented immigration and violent crime, a connection not evident in the local crime statistics. 3 mayor barletta’s opposition to undocumented immigrants and his advocacy for local action made him a media celebrity and gave him visibility in washington and in immigration forums in other locations. 4 his vows to make hazleton “the toughest place on illegal immigrants in america” netted him many favourable emails and donations to a web site, small town defenders. 5 he ran for congress in 2002, 2006, and again in 2008, losing in a close election against the long-time incumbent, paul kanjorski. mayor barletta’s strong support for the hazleton ordinance may also have helped him gain re-election as the city’s mayor. the issue, barletta argued, is not at all racial – he claimed to “love” “his” legal immigrants. it was the undocumented immigrants who threatened hazleton’s peace, security, and way of life. with the influx of undocumented immigrants, he mused, “i’ve lost my city” (powell & garcia, 2007). not surprisingly, hazleton’s new law drew national attention. a lawsuit soon followed challenging the city’s right to control work and living opportunities on the basis of legal status. the lawsuit was brought by a coalition of immigrants and supportive civil-rights organizations against hazleton’s mayor and council, who were defended by their own group of lawyers. the case turned on two issues. the preliminary question, which had to be answered in the affirmative for the case to continue, was whether persons without legal status to remain in the united states could nevertheless be heard in its courts to complain about legislation directed against their continued residence, and whether they could proceed anonymously. the plaintiffs, once they established their right to be heard, were asking the court to decide that hazleton had exceeded its law-making power, pre-empting a role reserved for the federal government. hazleton’s new law sparked a trend. four neighbouring pennsylvania municipalities and one in new jersey quickly passed identical ordinances. other communities both near and far began to consider them. the trend, which has since become nationwide, appears to be centered in small cities and towns across the united states, rather than in most major cities. passions about immigration are most likely to be aroused, powell and garcia (2007) observe, “not in the urban megalopolises, but in small cities and towns, where for the first time in generations, immigrants have made their presence felt” (p. 1). hazleton mayor barletta was correct in claiming that immigration had transformed his city. in 2002 hazleton, with 22,729 residents, was nearly 95 percent white. wages and educational levels were below national averages.6 but at about that time puerto ricans and dominicans from the new york/new jersey area began to arrive, attracted by jobs and the low cost of living. 7 cargill meat solutions, a meat-packing plant, opened in 2002, offering employment to approximately 1000 people, about 600 of whom were latinos. the new latino residents helped the town grow to 31,000 people, while the non-hispanic population declined slightly (powell & garcia, 2007). the county became one of the fastest-growing latino destinations in justice as told by judges 237 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 the united states. this influx of new residents increased the vitality of a central city that had been hurt by economic decline. this was not the first time that hazleton has been transformed by immigration. the discovery of anthracite coal in the 1830s helped the tiny town grow into a small city by giving employment to a diverse population of poles, italians, irish, and other european immigrants. 8 manufacturing came later, fuelling the economy as coal declined. during world war ii hazleton was a boomtown because of its production of silk parachutes used in war-time. its population was 38,000 in 1940. the city had steadily declined in size until cargill’s arrival. these changes occurred in a place that is relatively isolated from major urban areas. the nearest neighbours are wilkesbarre, allentown, and scranton, pennsylvania. philadelphia lies nearly 100 km to the southeast. hazleton, nestled in the foothills of the pocono mountains, has made a virtue of its rural character. the city’s web page describes its golfing, fishing, hiking and biking in glowing terms as key elements in its quality of life. the lawsuit on august 15, 2006, after a failed settlement attempt, a coalition of hazleton residents, local businesses, and community organizations filed suit in federal court to block the “illegal immigration relief act.”9 judge james m. munley scheduled two weeks for the trial, which began on march 12, 2007. a 70-year-old pennsylvanian who had remained in the state through college, law school, law practice, and twenty years as county judge before becoming a federal judge in 1998, his ties to the locality could not have been stronger. judge munley was not only an experienced judge, but also a law teacher and author of several articles. his 206-page opinion in lozano v. hazleton reflected his zest for writing and devotion to clarity. two national organizations, the american civil liberties union and the puerto rican legal defense fund, represented the plaintiffs, along with a coalition of individual attorneys and locally based organizations. the immigration reform law institute, the mountain states legal foundation, and several private attorneys represented hazleton. three organizations, including the us chamber of commerce, filed amicus briefs. it was clear that this was going to be a big case and that it would be appealed, no matter what the result. the decision at the trial level would nevertheless determine the facts of the case and a working framework for decision. appellate courts must respect the lower court’s evaluation absent a manifestly incorrect resolution of the legal issues. the right to be heard hazleton strongly contested the right of the plaintiffs to bring the case to court. the plaintiffs, a coalition of immigrants with and without authorization remain in the united states and organizations supporting them, sought a permanent injunction against enforcement of the city’s illegal immigration relief act. how, the city asked, could anyone without the right to be in the united states complain about this legislation? and what stake did persons with legal status have in pursuing litigation? 238 doris marie provine studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 a decision that these plaintiffs had no “standing to sue” would quickly bring the case to a close. the “standing” issue occupied nearly half of judge munley’s opinion. he began by reciting us supreme court precedents requiring that the plaintiff allege “such a personal stake in the outcome of the controversy” as to justify judicial intervention. 10 he then described the injury sustained by each plaintiff, and granted all but one pair of them the right to proceed (lozano v. hazleton, 16-18). judge munley rejected defendant’s contention that these immigrants, because they were not legally present, have no grounds for complaint. immigrants, he responded, even those currently without papers authorizing their stay, are not necessarily illegally present in the united states. the matter remains indeterminate until an appropriate legal official has ruled on the matter (43). it was legally irrelevant that some of these immigrants believed that they were “illegal” because they are not qualified to make that judgment. judge munley reinforced the point by caricaturizing the city’s position: this argument appears to be a species of argument often heard in recent discussions of the national immigration issue: because illegal aliens broke the law to enter this country, they should not have any legal recourse when rights due to them under the federal constitution or federal law are violated. we cannot say clearly enough that persons who enter this country without legal authorization are not stripped immediately of all their rights because of this single illegal act (43-44). he reminded the city that the 14th amendment offers its protection to “persons,” not just citizens. there are several noteworthy elements of a law-based theory of justice in this part of the opinion. first, judge munley repeatedly deflected attention from his own role as the sole judge in this case by consistently referring to himself as “we” and by using the passive voice (“recognized by law”). even in this passive form, the court decides nothing—it “finds” the results it announces. judge munley also took the opportunity to reassert the pre-eminence of law by reframing the term “illegal immigrant.” whether or not an immigrant is legally present, judge munley reminded his audience, can only be decided by a competent legal authority. that some of the parties to the dispute characterize themselves as “illegal immigrants” is legally irrelevant. more significantly, judge munley asserted the relevance of higher law, the u.s. constitution, in resolving this dispute. the protection of anonymity the city of hazleton also objected to allowing some of the plaintiffs to proceed anonymously. anonymous litigation is not strictly prohibited in american jurisprudence, but it is generally discouraged by the federal rules of civil procedure and by traditions of vigorous advocacy. the city alleged that the unnamed plaintiffs did not follow requirements in seeking an exception, nor did they qualify for one. in letting them proceed as “john doe” plaintiffs, the defendants asserted, the court (i.e. judge munley) was affirming and supporting evasion of us law. the judge justice as told by judges 239 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 responded to this attack in his usual passive, third-person style: “we find no merit to the defendant’s arguments, but we shall address them all” (59). the judge’s discussion of the anonymity issue began, not surprisingly, with a recitation of relevant authority, including nine factors found by other courts to weigh in favour or against the use of pseudonyms by plaintiffs. he also felt obliged to discuss a case relied upon by the city, jane doe 1 v. merten, in which a federal district judge had denied undocumented immigrant students the right to proceed anonymously. the students were contesting a virginia law that prohibited undocumented immigrants from admission to state universities. 11 judges have a procedure for handling such situations: a decision at the same level cannot be “controlling,” but it should be considered “persuasive authority”—if it is “on point” and “correctly decided.” judge munley thus had two options: to “distinguish” merten as inapposite to the current case, or to criticize it as incorrectly decided. he chose to “distinguish” merten: unlike merten, where plaintiffs were seeking admission to state colleges and universities, the plaintiffs in this case do not seek to receive any goods provided by the state. further, their immigration status does not determine whether they will be subject to the terms of the ordinance. accordingly, the individual identities and interests of the plaintiffs are not at issue in this case to the degree they were in merten and are not necessary to reach the issues of constitutionality raised by the lawsuit. the intense public interest in this case makes the risks from exposing sensitive information about one’s identity exponentially more dire than in merten and make more persuasive plaintiffs’ reasons for seeking to proceed without revealing their true names (66-67). at this point judge munley turned to the facts of the case before him. he detailed threats received by persons associated with the case, and described fights that had broken out the night the city council adopted the illegal immigration relief act. even us citizens associated with the case, judge munley noted, had faced “public condemnation and confrontation” (73). the rich description of these details stands out in an opinion otherwise devoid of context. the details work to defend the judge’s decision regarding anonymity, and they reinforce the sense that, if this dispute were not heard by a court of law, it would be decided in the streets. yet nowhere in this discussion does judge munley betray any sign that his own sense of justice and decent conduct has been offended. nor did he infer any improper motive in the defendant’s demand that all of the immigrant plaintiffs identify themselves: “we have no evidence to indicate that defendant adopted this position for illegitimate reasons” (81). his final point, however, was subtly condemning. judge munley again repeated the defence charge that he was recognizing and affirming evasion of the laws in allowing undocumented plaintiffs to proceed anonymously. his response to this direct, and grave, attack was to invoke the founding principles of our nation: a venerable principle of constitutional law holds that all persons in the united states have rights under the fourteenth amendment to the united states constitution, whether they are citizens or not…. allowing the doe plaintiffs to proceed anonymously in the unique conditions of this case would not reward them for evading the country’s immigration laws. it 240 doris marie provine studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 would instead provide them an opportunity to secure the rights guaranteed them by the constitution of the united states (83-85). the exchange between the defendants and judge munley illustrates how depersonalization can defuse conflict, even within the confines of a case. the defendants couched their assertion of an ethical lapse in institutional terms, referring to “the court” rather than the judge by name. judge munley’s response was similarly impersonal. but this exchange went further. judge munley invoked the u.s. constitution to drive home his argument. in so doing, he reached for a higher-law principle, aligning his position with long-accepted principles of justice as embedded in the fourteenth amendment’s guarantee of due process of law. he further intimated that all individual rights protected by the constitution are guaranteed, not on the basis of citizenship, but on the basis of personhood. hazleton’s right to regulate undocumented immigration the sections that deal with hazleton’s power to restrict the employment and housing of undocumented persons constitute most of the second half of the opinion. this part is replete with citations to case law but almost devoid of references to the local context. the issue was whether hazleton had overstepped its powers, intruding upon the federal government’s traditional superior, or plenary, power in matters related to immigration. the federal level, in other words, holds the trump cards, and when it chooses to play them, it takes precedence. the procedures hazleton had created, according to the plaintiffs, also violated constitutional guarantees of due process, equal protection, and privacy. in addition, the plaintiffs contended, hazleton had exceeded its powers under pennsylvania law. judge munley considered each element of these claims in turn, methodically laying out the arguments and the relevant case law and announcing his decision on each element. the initial question was whether there was any room for local employer-sanctions ordinances after congress had created its own regulatory scheme in the immigration reform and control act of 1986 (irca). hazleton wanted to avoid a head-on collision with the federal law, so it followed the federal law’s basic framework, but imposed its own penalty for non-compliance: suspension of the offending company’s business permit. (the federal statute, on the other hand, imposed fines and criminal sanctions.) it is not very clear from irca’s language how much discretion remains at the local level. irca states: “the provisions of this section pre-empt any state or local law imposing civil or criminal sanctions (other than through licensing and similar laws) upon those who employ or recruit …. unauthorized aliens” (section 1324a(h)(2)). judge munley decided against hazleton. he noted that the city had developed, not just its own sanction, but its own standard for behaviour: “under hazleton’s interpretation of the provision, a state or local municipality properly can impose any rule they choose on employers with regard to hiring illegal aliens” (96). then he moved to the penalty issue, referring to the city’s provision for suspending a violator’s business license as the “ultimate sanction.” the wording suggests a kind of entrepreneurial death penalty. building on this idea, judge munley argued that justice as told by judges 241 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 congress could not have intended to allow localities to have such a weighty sanction: “it would not make sense for congress in limiting the state’s authority to allow states and municipalities the opportunity to provide the ultimate sanction.” so, the judge concluded, hazleton’s sanction could not stand: “such an interpretation renders the express pre-emption clause [of the federal law] nearly meaningless” (ibid.). to someone unfamiliar with legal argument, it might seem odd that the judge found support for his point in a supreme court decision that had ruled against unauthorized immigrants. the case, hoffmann plastics compounds, inc. v. nlrb (535 u.s. 137 (2002)), involved the right of these immigrants to join a union. they lost because the supreme court gave priority to the federal government’s interest in controlling employment of unauthorized immigrants over the federally protected right to organize (147). plaintiffs had achieved the victory they sought. judge munley nevertheless felt compelled to discuss several variants on the pre-emption issue, “for purposes of completeness.” he used this discussion to demonstrate the intricacy of the federal regulatory approach, and the federal government’s long-standing interest in employment. the effect was to bolster his decision by suggesting how employers might find themselves “betwixt and between” federal and local regulations. hazleton’s effort to discourage apartment rentals to undocumented tenants also failed under the weight of federal pre-emption and other constitutional defects. the rental ordinance required a verification process designed to prevent landlords from “harbouring” unauthorized aliens. hazleton had erred, judge munley ruled, in assuming that all unauthorized aliens are deportable (128). federal officials sometimes give unauthorized immigrants residency status, he noted, and aliens have procedural rights in this determination. no state or locality could possibly know who might ultimately be allowed to stay. in support of his position he drew on justice blackmun’s concurrence in plyler v. doe: “the structure of the immigration statuses makes it impossible for the state to determine which aliens are entitled to residence, and which eventually will be deported.”12 the entire discussion proceeded as if there was a clear path through the forest of precedents and statutes cited by the litigants. to find that path, all that was required was careful legal analysis. there was no discussion of the one inconvenient political fact that brought about this controversy. hazleton had acted because federal law was widely perceived to be ineffective in discouraging employers from hiring unauthorized immigrants. legally speaking, it was irrelevant whether city leaders had been motivated by high-minded concerns for local workers with legal status or by calculations of base political advantage arising out of fear of newcomers. motivation is sometimes, but not always, relevant in law, a reminder that legal forums often can define their own scope of inquiry and concern. hazleton, like the texas school authorities in plyler, was interfering with a well-calibrated federal administrative structure. justice concerns, however, found their way into judge munley’s narrative at several points. he returned to this theme near the end of his opinion, focusing on the high ideals of the u.s. constitution, while subtly disparaging hazleton for using its law-making power to harm a “disfavoured group”: the genius of our constitution is that it provides rights even to those who evoke the least sympathy from the general public. in that way, all in this nation can be confident of equal justice under its laws. hazleton, in its zeal 242 doris marie provine studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 to control the presence of a group deemed undesirable, violated the rights of such people, as well as others within the community. since the united states constitution protects even the disfavoured, the ordinances cannot be enforced (189). conclusion by casting hazleton’s legislation as an attack on society’s most vulnerable people, judge munley drew upon the proud tradition of the civil-rights movement. hazleton, from this perspective, had deemed some of its residents “undesirable” and used its law-making power to encourage them to leave. the city’s illegal immigration relief act thus bore a passing resemblance to the jim crow laws of an earlier era and the race hatred that underlay them. on the opposing side in that struggle, and this one, were the constitution, and dedicated lawyers and judges determined to uphold its principles. the moral basis for the decision was finally clear. but should hazleton’s motivations be judged so harshly? judge munley’s opinion entirely avoids the dilemmas that face small communities in adjusting to large numbers of new residents. it says nothing about the failure of the federal government to more actively support the integration of immigrants or to recognize in its own programs the ineffectiveness of its control over unauthorized entry. the 1986 legislation had combined legalization with sanctions as a quid pro quo. hazleton’s leaders may have been frustrated that the federal government had not kept its bargain or even acknowledged the problems its policies had created. even reading hazleton’s legislation in a more critical light, it can at least be said that violence had been (for the most part) avoided, something that was not true in an earlier era when vigilantism was common. clearly there are more dimensions to this conflict than judge munley addressed in lozano v. hazleton. litigation confines conflict, domesticating it, and channelling energies into limited, particularized inquiry. the intervention of skilled, highly paid legal professionals with no personal stake in the conflict is thought to bring rationality and calm to the scene. 13 the decision in lozano v. hazleton will not settle the issues at stake, nor will the appeal, whatever its outcome. legal decisions frame disputes too narrowly to satisfy the yearning for justice that moves people who believe they have suffered serious harm. jenness (2001) has observed the same tendency in the wording of civil-rights guarantees, which, by custom and convenience, are set forth in generic terms that mask the pain and outrage that prompted their adoption. a judicial narrative is, of course, much more nuanced and detailed than a statutory prohibition. the successful recall that judge munley spoke of the “excessive zeal” of hazleton’s leaders without admitting to any feelings on his own part. i suggest, however, that judge munley revealed in his long opinion a certain zeal for a legally constrained justice. he deployed a judge’s usual stratagems to depersonalize judgment and render it “blind.” he put law at the centre of his response to the litigants, de-contextualizing the dispute from the particular personalities involved. most significantly, he drew from the well of constitutional ideals to suggest the underlying values at stake in this controversy and the need for a just resolution. justice as told by judges 243 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 judicial narrative uses the tools of law to build a final result, while subtly suggesting affiliation with the broader contours of justice. were opinion-writing a cloistered professional activity, judicial strategies for depersonalizing their decisions would be of only passing interest. in american political culture, however, these narratives play a more significant role. judicial decisions provide rhetorical heft in public debate, and even more importantly, they subtly shape ways of framing issues and make them seem familiar and defensible. consider for example, the irritating retort: “what part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” the implication here is that law provides a ready answer to the question of how to respond to people who have settled in communities without authorization. the belief that law can be divorced from moral concerns is false, and dangerously so. but this belief is widespread because legal habits of thought are pervasive in the united states. de tocqueville noted, and praised, this tendency over a century ago; he should perhaps have viewed it with a more critical eye. whether or not one agrees with judge munley’s opinion in lozano v. hazleton, it is important not to be seduced by its methodology. judicial decisions are a necessary element in the resolution of social conflict, but they are not a sufficient guide to moral choice for concerned observers. the difficult questions raised by enforcing immigration laws against settled residents require an expedition into moral territory that lawyers and judges—and many of the rest of us—tend to avoid. notes 1 (no. 06-cv-01586-jmm (m.d. penn. 2006, 153 dlr a-3, 8/9/07). the page quotes in the sections that follow are taken from the initial citation. the case is currently under appeal in the u.s. court of appeals for the third circuit in philadelphia. oral argument occurred on october 30, 2008. as of this writing, a decision on hazleton’s appeal has not been reached. 2 the third circuit u.s. court of appeals has the case under appeal (lozano v. hazleton, pa. (no. 07-3531; 22 dlr a-7 2/4/08). the eighth circuit is hearing an appeal from a districtcourt decision that upheld a valley park, missouri city ordinance similar to hazleton’s (gray v. valley park, mo. 2008 u.s. dist. lexis 7238 (e.d. mo. jan. 31 2008). see 22 dlr a-7, 2/4/08. the ninth circuit has decided not to rehear its september 17, 2008 decision upholding arizona’s employer sanctions law (chicanos por la causa inc. v. napolitano, 9th cir. no. 07-17272, 182 dlr aa-1, 9/19/08, denial of re-hearing 3/9/09). the tenth circuit is reviewing a district court’s preliminary injunction that postponed enforcement of portions of an oklahoma law that involved employer sanctions. a federal district court recently ruled against an unusual illinois law that would have barred employers from using the federal employee verification system, e-verify (no. 07-3261). in villas at parkside partners v. the city of farmers branch (2008 u.s. dist. lexis 42452 (n.d. tx may 28, 2008) a federal judge granted a permanent injunction barring enforcement of a city statute that required proof of citizenship prior to renting or leasing residential property on grounds of federal pre-emption. 3 while thefts and drug-related crime have increased on a per capita basis since 2000, rapes, robberies homicides, and assaults have decreased. gaiutra bahadur, “hazleton gets a jolt it didn’t want,” philadelphia inquirer, september 20, 2006, p. a-02. 4 barletta visited washington to suggest that the department of homeland security establish an immigration control enforcement (ice) office in the hazleton area. he participated in a forum at notre dame university on october 12, 2007 as one of three prominent speakers on immigration. 244 doris marie provine studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 5 this website features a picture of mayor barletta and his call for donations, which can be sent c/o the mayor. http://www.smalltowndefenders.com/public/ 6 this document, prepared by the state of pennsylvania, but based on u.s. census bureau figures (population division) can be found (along with other demographic information) on the hazleton chamber of commerce, greater hazleton community profile. http://www.hazletonchamber.org/images/stories/pdf/profile.pdf. see also a demographic profile prepared by pennsylvania for cities in the state: http://www.idcide.com/citydata/pa/hazleton.htm 7 savageau’s places rated almanac ranks the hazleton, scranton, wilkes-barre area below the national average, with hazleton offering less expensive living than its rivals. this information is quoted in the greater hazleton community profile, footnote 6. 8 one observer described hazleton in 1837 as a “patch” with a few houses, a hotel, and an inn. the determined efforts of ario pardee to bring this new type of coal to market had a major impact on hazleton, which incorporated as a city in december 1891, with 14,000 residents. in 1899 it attracted a french manufacturer, the duplan silk corporation, which eventually employed 2000 residents, displacing coal as the city’s major industry. that plant closed in 1953, leaving a relatively weak local economy fueled by manufacturing and tourism. see our roots: hazleton area history retrieved on 4/12/09 at: http://www.hazletonhistory.8m.com/pardee.htm 9 letter to louis barletta, august 15, 2006 offering to settle without cost if the city would revoke the ordinance and promise not to enact others attempting to regulate immigration. fifteen plaintiffs’ lawyers, representing nine firms and associations, signed the letter. mayor barletta received a letter in july from many of the same attorneys opposing the statute and arguing that the proposed ordinance was unlawful. letters on file with the author. 10 p. 14, lozano v. hazleton. # 3:06cv1586. judge munley is quoting from simon v. eastern kentucky welfare rights org., 426 u.s. 26 at 38 (1976). the doctrine of standing has few clear guidelines. it is fundamentally pragmatic, based on the idea that courts should not get involved in disputes without the justification of an injured party demanding relief. the courts often state this requirement in constitutional terms, citing the constitution’s grant of jurisdiction to courts for “cases and controversies” arising under article iii, section 2. 11 jane doe 1 v. merten, 219 f.r.d. 387 (e. d. va. 2004). a may, 2007 new york employment law letter discusses this dilemma in the context of fair labor standards act claims by undocumented immigrants, suggesting that inquiry into a worker’s immigration status would likely intimidate workers from filing valid claims. such inquiries should therefore be avoided. (michael dichiara, vol. 14, issue 5, may, 2007). 12 plyler v. doe, 457 us 202 (1982) at p. 236. this case overturned a state law excluding undocumented alien children from public schooling in texas. it is currently under attack by conservatives who see it as an obstacle to their efforts to deter unauthorized immigration. 13 the plaintiff lawyers requested $2,333,351.50 for time and resources spent on the case, citing fees of up to $410/hour for some of the attorneys. see plaintiffs’ petition for attorneys’ fees and costs, pedro lozano v. city of hazleton, civil action no. 3:06-cv01586-jmm. at least one wilkes-barre law office touted its membership on the team in advertizing its services http://www.poconoimmigration.com/id11.html. references bahadur, g. (2006, september 20). hazleton gets a jolt it didn’t want. philadelphia inquirer, a-02. cover, r. (1985). violence and the word. yale law journal, 95, 1848. decker, s., lewis, p., provine, d.m., & varsanyi, m. (2009). on the frontier of local law enforcement: local police and federal immigration law. sociology of crime, law, and deviance, 13, 263-78. delgado, r. (2007). the law unbound! a richard delgado reader. new york, ny: paradigm. de tocqueville, a. (2003). democracy in america. new york, ny: penguin classics. (original work published 1835) justice as told by judges 245 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 epp, c. r. (1998). the rights revolution: lawyers, activists, and supreme courts in comparative perspective. chicago, il: university of chicago press. ewick, p., & silbey, s. (1998). the common place of law: stories from everyday life. chicago, il: university of chicago press. fish, s. (1991). law wishes to have a formal existence. in a. sarat & t. r. kearns (eds.). the fate of the law. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. fitzpatrick, p., & tuitt, p. (2004). critical beings: law, nation, and the global subject. aldershot, uk: ashgate. jenness, v. (2001). the hate crime canon and beyond: a critical assessment. law and critique, 12, 279308. kairys, d. (1998). the politics of law: a progressive critique. new york, ny: basic books. kelly, n. (2008). (2008, september 10). legal minds at odds over immigration edicts. retrieved from http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?aid=/20080910/news07/809100301/ kmiec, k. (2004). the origin and current meanings of judicial activism. california law review, 2004, 1442-1480. lipkin, r. j. (2008). we are all judicial activists now. cincinnati law review. 77, 182-238. lozano v. hazleton (2007). no. 06-cv-01586-jmm (m.d. penn. 2006, 153 dlr a-3, 8/9/07). mccann, m. (2006). law and social movements: contemporary perspectives. annual review of law and social science, 2, 17-38. merry, s. (1990). getting justice and getting even. chicago, il: university of chicago press. migration policy institute. (2007). top 10 migration issues of 2007: issue #7: us cities face legal challenges, and all 50 states try their hand at making immigration-related laws. retrieved from http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?id=659 national conference of state legislatures. (2009). state laws related to immigrants and immigration in 2008. retrieved from http://www.ncsl.org/programs/immig/2008statelegislationimmigration.htm nielsen, l. b. (2000). situating legal consciousness: experiences and attitudes of ordinary americans. law & society review, 34(4), 1055-90. o’barr, w. & conley, j. (2004). back to the trobriands: the enduring influence of malinowski's crime and custom in savage society. journal of law and social inquiry, 27(4), 847-74. o’scannlain, d. f. (2009). on judicial activism. open spaces quarterly. retrieved from, http://www.open-spaces.com/article-v3n1-oscannlain.php pender, s. (2007). an interview with david harvey. studies in social justice, 1(1),14-22. powell, j. h. (2008). constitutional conscience: the moral dimension of judicial decision. chicago, il: university of chicago press. powell, m., & garcía, m. (2007). pa. city puts illegal immigrants on notice. retrieved from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14463098/ preston, j. (2008, february 10). in reversal, courts uphold local immigration laws. new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/us/10immig.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin provine, d. m. (2005). judicial activism and american democracy. in k. l. hall & k. t. mcguire (eds.) the judicial branch. new york, ny: oxford university press. ramakrishnan, k. s., & wong, t. (2007). immigration policies go local: the varying responses of local governments to undocumented immigrants. retrieved from http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/bclbe/ramakrishnanwongpaperfinal.pdf sarat, a. & scheingold, s. (2001). cause lawyering and the state in the global era. new york, ny: oxford university press. sarat, a. (2004). crossing boundaries: from disciplinary perspectives to an integrated conception of legal scholarship. in a. sarat (ed.) law in the liberal arts. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. savageau, d. (1999). places rated almanac. new york: wiley. scheingold, s. (1967) the politics of rights: lawyers, public policy and political change. (1st ed.) new haven, ct: yale university press. shiffrin, s. h. (1989). the first amendment, democracy, and romance. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. sunstein, c. r. (1996). legal reasoning and political conflict. new york, ny: oxford university press. tichenor, d. (2002). dividing lines: the politics of immigration control in america. princeton, nj: princeton university press. tyler, t. (2006). why people obey the law. princeton, nj: princeton university press. unger, r. (1996). what should legal analysis become? new york, ny: verso. judging as a political act hazleton takes a stand hazleton the lawsuit the right to be heard the protection of anonymity hazleton’s right to regulate undocumented immigration conclusion nath final correspondence addresses: nisha nath, centre for interdisciplinary studies, athabasca university, canada; email: nnath@athabascau.ca. willow samara allen, faculty of education, university of victoria, bc, v8p 5c2; email: willowallen@uvic.ca. issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 settler colonial socialization in public sector work: moving from privilege to complicity nisha nath athabasca university, canada willow samara allen university of victoria, canada abstract in this piece, we ask, what are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that begins and ends with privilege? what does it mean to declare privilege when embedded in institutions of the settler colonial state? these questions are raised through an ongoing project where we interview provincial public sector workers on treaty 6, 7 and 8 (alberta, canada) and coast salish territories (british columbia, canada) about their implications in settler colonialism through public sector work. in the project, we articulate the interdisciplinary framework of settler colonial socialization to consider the space between individuals and structures – the mesospace where settlers are made by learning how to take up the work of settler colonialism. for these reasons, in our research we ask, “what do the pedagogical processes of settler colonial socialization tell us about how systemic colonial violence is sustained, and how it might be disrupted or refused in public sector work?” in this paper, we narrow our focus to the declarations of privilege that many of our interview participants are making. we reflect on these declarations and consider whether focusing on settler complicity and indigenous refusals can better support a decolonial politics for settlers working in the public sector. we argue that declarations of privilege risk reproducing settler-centric logics that maintain settler colonialism, settler jurisdiction, and settler certainty, and we reflect on how to orient participants (and ourselves) towards the material realization of relational accountability and towards imagining otherwise. keywords settler colonial socialization; settler colonialism; deep colonizing; public sector workers; reconciliation; antiracism; privilege; complicity settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 201 introduction what are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that begins and ends with privilege? what does it mean to declare privilege when embedded in institutions of the settler colonial state? these questions are raised through our ongoing project where we interview provincial public sector workers on treaty 6, 7 and 8 (alberta, canada) and coast salish territories (british columbia, canada) about their implications in settler colonialism through public sector work. in the project, we articulate the interdisciplinary framework of settler colonial socialization to consider the space between individuals and structures. it is in this meso-space where settlers are made by learning how to take up the work of settler colonialism (see crosby & monaghan, 2012; matsunaga, 2021). although public sector work is frequently perceived as serving the public good, it relies on and reproduces colonial domination, dispossession and violence, yet its inner workings are largely hidden (matsunaga, 2021). for these reasons, in our research we ask, “what do the pedagogical processes of settler colonial socialization tell us about how systemic colonial violence is sustained, and how it might be disrupted or refused in public sector work?” in this paper we narrow our focus. at the present preliminary stage of our research, in which we are still recruiting and interviewing, we adopt tuck’s (2015) pedagogy of pausing by “intentionally engaging in suspension of one’s own premises and project, but always with a sense of futurity” (p. xii). our pause is with the notion of privilege. despite our choice to veer away from privilege frameworks in our interview questions, many of our participants thus far have chosen to name their privilege. we reflect on these declarations, and consider whether focusing on settler complicity and indigenous refusals can better support a decolonial politics for settlers working in the public sector. we begin this paper by outlining our project’s theoretical frame and methodology, and then consider the limitations of privilege. illuminated through participant articulations, we reflect on how and why some participants have gone to a comfortable and legible space of declaring privilege. we argue that the declaration of privilege risks reproducing settlercentric logics that maintain settler colonialism, settler jurisdiction, and settler certainty. this risk is particularly pernicious in the public sector given that the public sector relies on its jurisdiction to act as being treated as absolute, which is in part justified through notions that it works for the “public good” (matsunaga, 2021). we then offer reflections on why we bring settler complicity and indigenous refusals together in our interviews, through our interview structure and subsequent analysis, in order to foreground indigenous people’s sovereignty and the material realization of relational accountability to orient participants (and ourselves) towards imagining otherwise. nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 202 grounding this research as researchers, we share experience with providing public-sector training on indigenous specific racism. in our roles as facilitators, we witnessed direct links between workplace narratives and violent manifestations of settler colonialism across jurisdictions and sectors in health, child welfare, policing, and education (allen & nath, 2019). encounters described by public sector workers, and widely witnessed by the public, made apparent the systemic nature of racism and the fatal implications of colonial myths. in a recent statement, coroner gehane kamel, who oversaw the inquiry into the death of joyce echaquan, an atikamekw mother who confronted ongoing racism while in a québec hospital, confirmed that joyce’s death was preventable (richardson, 2021). although long voiced by indigenous people and thoroughly documented in media, scholarship and reports, systemic harm continues (blackstock et al., 2020; gouvernement du québec, 2019; harding, 2018; nimmiwg, 2019; rhoad, 2013; trc, 2015; turpel-lafond & johnson, 2021). reflecting on our experiences in antiracism training, we witnessed that public sector workers across sectors and roles enacted, ignored or sometimes themselves experienced colonial violence rooted in a set of strikingly coherent mythologies. some public sector workers did intervene; others were uncertain about how to do so, especially if institutional leadership and accountability mechanisms were lacking. bearing witness to this harm brought us together as non-indigenous researchers – nath, a settler woman of colour living on the lands covered by treaty 6, and allen, a white settler woman living on lək̓ʷəŋən peoples’ lands – to investigate how colonial violence becomes institutionalized at the mesolevel. at this level the authorization to act (and not) is rooted in (re)asserting settler entitlement to indigenous lands, and in the settler “logic of elimination,” which attempts to disappear and assimilate indigenous people (wolfe, 2006). our focus on what we call the meso-level positions settler colonialism as a deep colonial structure,1 reproduced in part through the routine work of public sector workers (neu & therrien, 2003; wolfe, 2006). critically, these deep structures – of culture, norms, attitudes, and reward, recognition, and penalty – are not absolute. instead, they are marked by spaces of “tension, resistance, subversion and sabotage” (batliwala, 2013, p. 200). our research attempts to access the deep structures of settler colonial organizations in order to unpack the entrenched beliefs and practices grounding resistance to structural change, and to identify the organizational cultures that endure despite official commitments to reconciliation, antiracism and equity (ahmed, 2012; liu, 2020; regan, 2010). moreover, 1 we draw from feminist scholar srilatha batliwala (2013), who writes that deep structures are “the hidden sites and processes of power and influence, the implicit culture, the informal values and systems of reward and recognition… deep structures [invisible and obscured power hierarchies] are, in a sense, like the elephant in the room – we all know they’re there, but we do not know how to name them and tackle them analytically or practically” (pp. 199-200). settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 203 this research becomes distinctively urgent given that provincial public sector workers are entrenched in the most “visible and pervasive components of the state… [shaping] daily life like few others” (leifso, 2020, p. 12). our research is anchored by rose’s (1996) concept of “deep colonizing,” which describes the “conquest embedded within institutions and practices which are aimed towards reversing the effects of colonization” (rose, 1996, as cited in veracini, 2011, p. 179). deep colonizing reveals the temporal manipulation characterizing the settler colonial project, wherein equity, justice and sovereignty for indigenous people are forever promised in the future (tuck & yang, 2016). initiatives aimed at reconciliation have been accompanied by powerful critiques that they neither aim to effect structural change nor buttress indigenous self-determination and sovereignty (coulthard, 2014; de costa & clark, 2016; yellowhead institute, 2019). the implication is that state actors can further deep colonizing by simply following the aims and orders of their institutions. consequently, in our project, we ask: how do white settlers, settlers of colour, and other people of colour learn to uphold the settler colonial state and reproduce the violence of colonialism? how might interrogating the meso-level with public sector workers – principally in the “helping” professions of health, education, child welfare – illuminate how they are socialized to reproduce settler colonial structures and enabled to resist them?2 to respond to these questions, we articulate a framework we call “settler colonial socialization,” which integrates individual learning processes and the structures of settler colonial governance through two principal pillars: settler colonial common-sense (rifkin, 2013, 2014) and settler colonial pedagogies (hiller, 2017). settler colonial common-sense refers to how “non-native access to indigenous territories comes to be lived as a given, as simply the unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history, and personhood” (rifkin, 2013, p. 323; emphasis added). tied to settler colonial pedagogies, this learning works to “clear the land discursively, materially, and violently of its indigenous occupants/owners in order to make way for (white) settlement and development” (hiller, 2017, p. 417). critically, settler colonial pedagogies are social projects that “school our imaginations... rendering as well as enforcing the given-ness of our place here, and shoring up the legitimacy of our claims to be the true inhabitants of the land” (hiller, 2017, p. 417; emphasis in original). 2 although our focus in this paper is non-sectoral, our ongoing analysis is located in a rich body of research that examines the reproduction of settler colonial harm in various sectors; see e.g., lafontaine (2018) and allan & smylie (2015) in health, blackstock et al. (2020) in child welfare, and battiste et al. (2002) in education. moreover, other key threads of our analysis consider the specific complexities of positionality in processes of settler colonial socialization. note that when referencing participant narratives, we include the racialized and gender identifications that participants themselves name in the interview process. nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 204 settler colonial socialization pulls together logics (common-sense) and learning (pedagogy) to illuminate how structures of domination, jurisdiction and authority enact and codify extractive, siloed, and inequitable relationalities: to other people, to structures, and to land, waterways and other-than human life. this framework focuses on the impacts of colonization for indigenous people within a context where indigenous sovereignties are pre-existing and enduring, and where indigenous relationalities are grounded in duties of care to human and other-than human kin. critically, in the constant making of settler colonial common-sense is the potentiality for unmaking, particularly given our context of “enduring indigeneity” (kauanui, 2016). in light of our project’s focus on the meso-level and the learning processes that position public sector workers to take up the work of settler colonialism, we turn to the theme of privilege, which has been raised specifically by many participants thus far. what do privilege pedagogies tell us about patterns of learning for settlers? what can be learned through public sector workers’ declarations of privilege? do these declarations, and the pedagogies they can be reliant on, disrupt or reinscribe settler colonial common sense and settler colonial pedagogies in public sector work? methodology and participants we center pedagogical processes and anti-racist interventions in our interviews, drawing on okolie’s (2005) interviewing methodology. this methodology tasks researchers to respond to participant narratives and intervene by unpacking with participants how they understand their lives and broader structural conditions through the experiences and discourses they bring forward. researchers are meant to critically analyze participant discourse, returning to build on their analysis with participants in a second interview. our three-step interventive process consists of a brief survey and two 90-minute interviews.3 this staging supports participants in drawing connections between structures and their meso-level worlds, with the intention to animate reflection on complicity, and to prompt participants to 3 the survey contains questions about participants’ early lives, their memories of racism, and their learning about colonialism. this step is intended to set the stage for participant reflection, and to provide a sense of the participant’s experiential and relational entry points. building on individual survey responses, the first interview is structured around three themes: (1) identity and social location, (2) relationships and distance, and (3) impacts of settler colonialism. following the first interview we ask the participants to reflect on four questions during the intentional space of two to three weeks allocated between interviews. these questions foreground the four themes of our second interviews that focus on participant experiences in the workplace through nonidentifying examples based around four key themes: (1) settler colonial common-sense, (2) naming and disrupting complicity, (3) the authority and discretion to act, and (4) imagining relationships and governance otherwise in response to indigenous refusals. settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 205 enter into a place that “confounds colonial ‘common sense’” (martineau & ritskes, 2014, p. iv). seven months into the project, we are at different stages of interviewing with 24 participants from british columbia (14) and alberta (10) in the sectors of education, health, child welfare, lands and resources, housing, and business development. participants work in a variety of policy, front-line and management positions. participants thus far are predominantly white settlers (19) and settlers of colour (5), with upcoming interviews with indigenous and non-indigenous participants. participants are being recruited through social media and snowball methods. in what follows we draw from the interviews we have conducted thus far to consider privilege and complicity, as part of a “pedagogy of pausing” in which we continually reflect back and sometimes disrupt our own interview scripts as spaces of our learning as well. we consider how the assumptions animating privilege pedagogies surface in interviews, what this illuminates about settler complicity within the public sector, and the implications of this for our research. in addition, in drawing on participant quotations, we recognize the limitations of including short excerpts of extensive dialogues, rich with the complexity of experience and analysis that participants brought forward. we analyze the excerpts not to center individuals, but to locate privilege pedagogies as social patterns of learning situated within the structures of settler colonialism. circling privilege drawing from scholarship on privilege and complicity, we consider how privilege pedagogies can impede transformational politics in three ways: (1) by invoking a confessional politics, reinforcing a settler-move to innocence (tuck & yang, 2012) and colonial unknowing (vimalassery et al., 2016); (2) by reproducing a static and non-relational understanding of power, and (3) by operating as a performative “declarative politics” (charania, 2015, p. 383) where the declaration becomes “the doing” (ahmed, 2012), and the “confession ends up being the antiracist action” (lensmire et al., 2013, p. 410). as cabrera (2017) notes, white privilege pedagogy – or the conception that learning about one’s privilege is integrally transformative – is meant to disrupt “epistemologies of ignorance.” white people can learn about and name the unearned social benefits they receive but do not notice.4 moreover, one can presumably shed or contest benefits according to one’s own volition, 4 note, declarations of privilege can manifest variably, even in the absence of the word “privilege.” in that, we take up privilege declarations as a set of structured encounters invoking a set of discursive acts. nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 206 a framing that does not attend to the insidious ways that whiteness is “constitutive of one’s very being” (applebaum, 2008, p. 294). since mcintosh’s (1989) accessible metaphor of the invisible knapsack, “privilege” has emerged in many contexts as the focus of pedagogical disruption (e.g., cabrera, 2017; flynn, 2015; margolin, 2015). while several critiques have emerged about white privilege pedagogies, we focus on their settlercentricity. patel (2021) describes settler-centric pedagogies as extractive and foreclosing engagement with “the power and heterogeneity of indigenous peoples’ histories, resilience, and work of decolonization” (p. 7). moreover, privilege as a settler-centric pedagogy comes packaged within narratives of “good intention” or “benevolence,” risking forms of allyship that happen “on behalf of indigenous peoples like they are disappearing, and not already fighting colonialism more fiercely than racialized or white settler allies ever can” (patel, 2021, p. 8; emphasis in original). the confession as levine-rasky (2000) notes, the “body of the white individual resides at the fulcrum of the confessional model and at the core of white privilege pedagogy” (p. 274). when rooted in a liberal understanding that education is individual transformation, learning about one’s privilege fulfills a “redemptive function” in a confessional encounter (levine-rasky, 2000, p. 276). this confession is powerful: it can purify us and change not what we do, but who we think we are... white people are revealed as racists and in this revelation are purified and made into non-racists, or at least people seeking to become non-racists. (lockard, 2016, p. 16; emphasis in original) also released in the confession is the accountability to act (levine-rasky, 2000, p. 276). this can be challenging given that our interviews can affectively feel like a confessional space that invites individualized declarations of privilege. the register of confessional and of performing the “good settler” can feel particularly “thick” when asking participants to reflect on their social location. yet, thinking of these declarations of privilege as structured and patterned invites consideration of what privilege pedagogies “do,” anticipate or expect. as a relationally structured encounter, absolution lingers in the air; if one announces one’s privilege, and in that same gesture establishes that they are a “good settler,” they become the exception and their morality remains intact. this can be challenging to interrupt when participants name the privilege they possess, then move swiftly to resolve that privilege through good intention. for instance, after noting she wanted to take responsibility for her settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 207 family’s history of participation in colonial structures, a white woman in health stated: i certainly have privileges, someone who has white skin and has been born in canada. and the biggest privilege that i do recognize is that i have a really good working brain….that’s another piece of privilege that i’ve added on to my scope of trying to ensure that when i’m leading a meeting, or if i’m the person in the room, like to advocate for someone...or give space... (interview #1) similar to some other white participants, this participant demonstrates how privilege can be an essential framework for knowing oneself as white and reconciling one’s relationship to power. here, privileges are lived and embodied possessions that can be itemized. while this list can contract or expand, the declaration of privilege coupled with the declaration to use one’s power to advocate becomes the tentative resolution. in learning to understand and draw on privilege in these ways, setters are positioned as owners of privilege who can do better with that privilege and are (re)centerd as moral agents of change (applebaum, 2008). another participant, a white woman in child welfare/children’s services, described how early learning experiences related to settlement and whiteness shaped her. articulating a commitment to equality from a young age, she shifted to focus on the intersection of whiteness with gender, navigating between racism she stated she could not know due to her racial identity, and her experiences of sexism. following this, she noted: you get that sense of, ‘guilt’ like, okay, i am blessed. i mean i worked hard, and i was able to walk through the world system easier based on my colour and location. and then at the same time, it’s like, i fucking hate... those barriers that get put up for you as a woman. (interview #2) one can consider how the confession of guilt can feel like an obligation of privilege pedagogies. such declarations beg the question of what guilt is meant (or not) to do as a settler colonial politics of emotion, particularly when interwoven with conceptions of self-determined (hard work) and endowed (blessed) articulations of self. although frequently unnamed, power operates palpably in discussions that turn to privilege, through its implication (e.g., what allows a white settler body to walk through the world with ease), and through its negation (e.g., barriers for white women). relationally, power becomes “slippery” within these encounters. those receiving the confession are positioned to exercise a narrow and constrained response. the pressure to praise, comfort or grant absolution for (often white) settler guilt and shame can be intense. these are dynamics that bring our own social locations into play. the expected absolution in the confessional space would “resolve” not only the tension in the moment, but a deep sustaining tension of the structures of settler colonialism. nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 208 confessional declarations of privilege are settler-centric and powerful in their extension of settler innocence (tuck & yang, 2012). discussing distance within relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people, another white woman in health shared her memory of first coming to know that extreme racism against indigenous people existed through hearing another woman’s strong racist utterance: she expressed something that i had never heard before, which was extreme racism against indigenous people. and i had no idea that existed... that was the first time it clicked in my head about slurs, and like why would you be racist against indigenous people? that didn’t make any sense to me... that was the first time that i really saw my whiteness and my privilege. (interview #1) another participant, a woman of colour in child welfare/children’s services identified how this innocence is a collective process of conditioning: a frame of mind is necessary to justify not only the harms that have been done, the harms that continue to happen, but also to remain kind of innocent of guilt. and also to maintain the certain status quo, right?... if you’re in a position of power and privilege, you’re going to want to hold on to that positionality... through learning and teaching, settlers have been conditioned in a way... to not have to see a lot of things. (interview #3) these settler moves to innocence secure a colonial unknowing that is “[produced] and practiced in concert with material violences and differential devaluations”, and works to “preclude relational modes of analysis and ways of knowing otherwise” (vimalassery et al., 2017, p. 1042). a woman of colour in health describes this as manifesting through “guilt, complacency and sometimes malice.” this obstinate unknowing is a response, an “epistemological counter-formation which takes shape in reaction to the lived relations and incommensurable knowledges it seeks to render impossible and inconceivable” (vimalassery et al., 2017, p. 1042). severed relationality colonial unknowing in the confessional requires several violent erasures, one being the obfuscation of agents of domination, or “who is doing what to whom” (leonardo, 2004, p. 138). privilege is articulated as a non-relational status, which “[renders] unintelligible” relational entanglements of power (vimalassery et al., 2016, n.p.). often functioning at the level of the individual who is expected to divest themselves of privilege through selfawareness, understandings of privilege as a “status” that incurs material benefits erase settler colonialism’s reliance on a “constitutive relation to indigenous peoples” (vimalassery et. al., 2016, n.p.). these settler colonial relationalities that require both indigenous displacement and settler settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 209 emplacement are produced through settler colonial knowledge formations (monaghan 2013, p. 491). settlers can name their privilege, yet never articulate that privilege emplaces us in relationship to indigenous people and lands. this silence is imposing when declarations of privilege are accompanied by harmful colonial narratives. a white woman in education illustrates how the declaration of privilege cannot resolve how settler colonial violence continues, in spite of (and sometimes precisely through) the processes through which non-indigenous people come to learn and name privilege. she named herself as a white settler for the first time in this interview, attributing her learning to a former student: and she talked quite a bit about colonialists, and how she had to deal with a lot of colonial stuff at [her university]. when she first said it, it was like, ‘oh my god, she’s talking about me!’… i started thinking about it over the last couple of years, and in fact, a former principal and i ...had such a wonderful conversation about it. i realized in talking to him how much connection i’ve had with first nations people, more than maybe the average colonialist… i just never thought about it. it just always seemed so normal and natural… i didn’t say it out loud at the time, but you’re saying it out loud definitely made me feel, ‘okay, i’m just gonna come out and say it.’ that’s who i am. (interview #4) elaborating further, she stated that “there’s that little anxious, nervous kind of connecting to something that i’ve always thought was so horrible. but i am connected to it. so i have to start getting used to that idea.” after this moment, the participant named a family member’s specific role in residential school administration. yet, the declaration of white settlerhood is buffered through recounting the openness of other family members and their “very positive connection” to indigenous people. in this participant’s words, and variably in other interviews, we witness how the work of reconciling pulls violently in two directions: i do remember when they first started talking about the terrible things that were happening in residential schools. and i remember very well worrying about my [family member], and what happened and did anything happen? and, in fact, my cousin sent me a beautiful piece that was put into the newspaper... but it was all about how my [family member] had been a good man. and he let them speak their language. and he had let them continue on with their canoe building and different things... and that was written by a first nations person who had been to the school, so i felt a little bit better about it then… i think it’s horrendous and would never condone anything like that now, but then you just sort of took for granted. (interview #4) while declarations of privilege can be moments of recognition, they are often not moments of deep disruption, and instead can become spaces of intense (re)investment in settler colonial relationalities. these declarations nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 210 render it possible to not only reconcile extraordinary settler colonial violence, but to do so in service of the need for settlers to (re)constitute themselves and avoid implication.5 this impulse can be particularly strong given the exaltation of white femininity within the helping professions in which this participant is situated (allen, in press, 2020). focusing on the individual, as opposed to how settler colonialism is (re)established relationally, obscures power (levine-rasky, 2000, p. 274). as witnessed with many participants, they have power to shape their work lives (through mandate letters, policy development communications, intake procedures, assessment tools, consultation frameworks, etc.), and they have power to intervene and disrupt. put differently, settler-centric pedagogies of privilege rely on obfuscations of the relationships of power in which settlers are implicated. settler participants are challenged to even name where they exert power and discretion. this obfuscation renders it possible to “think” about oneself, instead of collectively reconstituting to dismantle power structures. the move is that by acknowledging my privilege, i can do better with my privilege, by acting more responsibly and being better intentioned. a woman of colour in health describes this as follows: i think it comes from, basically trying to convince ourselves that our presence here is okay... it’s almost like trying to tell ourselves whatever it takes to sleep better at night – that we stole these people’s land, and we’re living here and it’s completely unjust still, and nothing’s being done about it. (interview #5) retreat to comfort finally, while naming privilege can in some contexts be disruptive, its easy extraction from relational and structural understandings of power renders it comfortable. for example, as ahmed (2012) notes, confessions of privilege regularly become the political project itself. charania (2015, p. 383) elaborates: the impulse to narrate ourselves in these ways reveals the long reach of neoliberalism where auditing our politics and lives to some place comfortable and implicated, comes to stand in for collective forms of life and social organizing. 5 we also found that until intentional additions were made into our interview script, participant responses to our probing around hegemonic forms of settler colonial common sense and mythologies rarely if ever invoked the reliant forms of common sense and mythologies about settlers, white settlerhood and canadian sovereignty. put differently, the mythologies described were largely about indigenous people, and few participants brought forward mythologies grounding white settler forms of entitlement, or mythologies about the benevolent and multicultural canadian state. where participants did trouble, for example, the myth of meritocracy, the focus was less on how the myth of meritocracy sustains forms of antiindigenous racism, and more on their own negative experiences of navigating assumptions around meritocracy. settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 211 the implication is that the perpetual deferral of decolonial change reflects settler colonial temporalities (tuck & yang, 2016). if declarations of privilege are structured encounters that “do” something, they are “delimited by the timeframes of modern colonizing states as well as the selfhistoricizing, self-perpetuating futurities of their nations” (tuck & yang, 2016, p. 6). they push decolonial change into a future never meant to come. the responses privilege declarations invoke are not unlike “emotional responses evoked by a therapeutic model of unlearning racism” (jafri, 2012). reconfiguring anti-racist critique, this approach recenters “the subject rather than destabilizing the settler/native binary through which the settler’s social power is constituted in the first place” (jafri, 2012). in effect, this approach ignores how “white emotionality is socially and politically produced within material, affective, and discursive structures of whiteness and white supremacy” (barreiro et al., 2020, p. 138). extrapolating further, this therapeutic approach depoliticizes whiteness, white supremacy, and white settlerhood. this settler-centricity enables a retreat to comfort as the possibility for (and accountability to) structural change is foreclosed (jafri, 2012). consider how macintosh’s metaphor has led to a series of checklists to visibilize the privileges that white people receive. these checklists operate from a white normative pedagogy that centers white people’s learning, delimiting understanding of how visibilization, and “privilege” itself, are experienced in vastly distinct ways for non-black racialized people, black people and indigenous people (jafri, 2012, 2013). the premise of visibilization negates the reality that these privileges are deeply visible to non-black racialized people, black people and indigenous people. a woman of colour in child welfare/children’s services invoked this complexity as she began to unpack what she identifies as a “different experience” of mixed familial lineages, and structural processes of settlement: it’s a bit of a different experience as a person of color. and i’m also mixed race, so grappling with some of the complexities of knowing that, for example, my great grandfather was gifted land, and that’s part of my history. and my privilege is that i’ve benefited from. (interview #3) articulations like hers steer us toward a “messier” orientation that does not end with declaration, but is imbued with more analytical, pedagogical and relational possibilities. nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 212 circling complicity moving to contemplate complicity can animate settlers to think through implication and power in settler colonial structures and then, most critically, build and enact relational accountabilities. patel (2021), for example, invokes a relational ethos and describes thinking about complicity as “mandatory” work for white settlers and racialized people. she argues that interrogating our complicity asks more of us, in that we must attend to how to be “in better ethical relationships with indigenous peoples of this territory” (patel, 2021, p. 7). citing probyn-rapsey (2007) who describes thinking about complicity as ethical engagement, patel (2021) foregrounds how complicity must be taken up at multiple scales, including methodology, practice, theory of ethical engagement, and as relational across time. thus, acknowledging and naming one’s complicity must extend into “an effective regular practice for non-black and settler people” (patel, 2021, p. 17). where patel is attuned to ethical engagements, jafri (2012, n.p.) takes up complicity as “messy, complicated and entangled,” where settlerhood is not simply an “object that we possess.” jafri (2012) points to the “field of operations’’ in which settlers are located and acting, inviting consideration of how complicity manifests in the exercise and extension of settler state authority and jurisdiction through agents of the state. both orientations to complicity are instructive in this research with public sector workers who are bound by codes of conduct or ethical frameworks that discount the settler colonial context, existing indigenous sovereignty, and the ethical accountabilities of settlers, particularly those vis-a-vis indigenous people and nations. part of the messiness that jafri (2012) brings forward relates to how social location (e.g., migration status, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, class, caste, education) mediates settler privileges and advantages. for example, when accounting for pervasive anti-blackness, we cannot trace complicity “along the same coordinates as white people’s complicity” (patel et al., 2015, p. 9). moreover, positionality can animate distinct settler logics and feelings. for example, rifkin (2014) and mackey (2016) discuss feelings of entitlement and certainty for white settlers in securing intergenerational power and land, while jafri (2013) addresses feelings of desire and precarity for racialized immigrants in securing a place in the settler state and economy. taking up patel’s understanding of complicity as ethical engagement, and jafri’s (2012) call to distinguish between privilege and complicity, we shift our attention to systemic conditions and relationships rather than (re)centering the settler-self.6 6 this focus helps to sift through discussions over who is deemed to be a settler, the extent of access one has to settler privileges and citizenship advantages derived from living on and off indigenous lands and resources, and recognition or status within state institutions, but also to the investments in sustaining settler colonialism certainty and power (jafri, 2013; mackey, 2016; rifkin, 2013, 2014). as one does not become a settler through arrival to these lands alone, we settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 213 in the remainder of the paper, we explain our intentional move to complicity in our interviews in two ways: first, that complicity demands a relational understanding; and second, that complicity can illuminate the distinctive ways that non-indigenous public sector workers are implicated in settler colonialism. drawing from the interventions of participants, we foreground why locating complicity in the settler colonial bureaucratic context is critical. we stress how settler colonial logics shape the field of operations of public sector workers, but also how settler colonial relationalities can impede settlers from imagining and acting outside of these logics and the asserted authority and jurisdiction of settler governments.7 complicity and relationality when privilege pedagogies characterize settlerhood as an inert status, the agency, domination, and investment of white settlers and some settlers of colour in settler colonial governance is submerged. yet the structures of settler colonialism are reliant on particular relationalities. as gaztambidefernández (2012, p. 52; emphasis in original) writes, “individual subjects do not enter into relationships, but rather subjects are made in and through relationships.” as such, settler colonial socialization is a pedagogy of a particular kind of relationality that teaches, at a minimum, disconnection, extraction and settler innocence. oriented differently, indigenous relationalities are socially interconnected and premised on culturally embodied knowledges connected to other-than-human life, land and waterways. this understanding of relationality has been a core epistemological and ethical premise of the indigenous social research paradigm that begins “with an awareness of our proper relationships with the world we inhabit, and is conducted with respect, responsibility, generosity, obligation and reciprocity” (moreton-robinson, 2017, p. 71). wilson (2008) further explains that relational accountability is grounded in respect, reciprocity and responsibility. settler colonial relationalities do not invoke these understandings, nor an “ecological understanding of human relationality” (donald, 2012, p. 535). in this way, settler colonial relationalities are meant to foreclose the material realization of indigenous conceptions of relational responsibilities, take up complicity to unpack how immigrant and arrivant settler subjectivity-making takes place and how “a process of becoming” contributes to ongoing settlement (jafri, 2013, p. 81). for additional recent work on complicity and implication, see rothberg (2019) and shotwell (2016). 7 here it is helpful to note the distinction we are making between relationality, which, in this paper, references distinctive ways of being in relationship (e.g., settler colonial relationalities and indigenous relationalities), from relational which references an analytic orientation to understanding power, processes and structures that decenters individuals qua individuals, and points instead to co-implication. nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 214 conceptions that could transform indigenous-settler relationships in meaningful, liberatory ways. analytically then, we understand settler complicity as “always enmeshed in complex social relations and influenced – though not fully determined – by one’s location within those relations” (mihai, 2019, p. 506). moreover, attuned to the complexities of power, we also consider the intraand inter-dynamics of domination in relationships among indigenous, black and other people of colour (dhamoon, 2021). dhamoon (2021) describes this as relational othering: “the interactive processes of re/making, re/organizing, and managing subjugating formations of difference… [operating] not only in contexts of dominance but in relation to one another as well” (p. 874). this invites a focus on systems of white supremacy, but also looks to how “nonwhites become sutured, even necessary, in racist and colonizing hegemonies” (dhamoon, 2021, p. 877). these complex settler colonial relationalities are manifest in our interviews. for instance, a non-binary participant of colour in business development reflected on their implication in a work experience that did not feel ethical or just, and that had punitive consequences for an indigenous business: i did something, but it’s like the safety of behaviors that i function in… i’m only willing to push this far because this is what i’m comfortable with... i am implicated in this, 100% implicated... if i’m in a place where i’m still mentally thinking about what i can do and what i can’t do, i’m mostly not gonna say anything… i guess the rights of indigenous people, in terms of self-determination, access to their culture, identity, shouldn’t be dependent on... a settler’s emotional process. they shouldn’t have to trigger my emotions for me to say this is something that i should [do]. (interview #6) this participant’s words are contextualized in the bureaucracy which they, and to differing extents other participants, describe as a space where one’s identity, humanity, and emotions are to be “checked at the door.” this is especially the case for indigenous people, black people, and people of colour. in their interviews, this participant named how the racialized, gendered and classed entanglements of immigration and settlement shape their position, access, safety, and experience of racism in the whiteness of the public sector, and what this means for their resistance to decision-making that negatively impacts indigenous people. they identify settler affective processes we are witnessing and shed light on the emotional and cognitive distancing we encounter with some participants from colonial violence and their authority to act in their roles. this participant’s intervention links back to our assertions about settler-centric privilege frameworks, which rely on appeals to settler affectability as the basis for change. participants seem to buttress the complexities of jafri’s analysis of the logics of entitlement and certainty for white settlers, and desire and precarity for people of colour. bringing forward how racialized participants can become adjacent to white settlerhood, participants also illuminate logics of settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 215 settler colonial relationality that are entrenched in the way of doing work and relationships in the public sector. the critical insight here is the coherence across provinces, sectors and roles that we can map from participant articulations. strong themes of settler colonial common sense and relationality include: hierarchical, siloed working environments and relationships; tightly controlled and “sanitized” communications;8 the anticipation of resistance, hence the self-policing of one’s work from being “too” disruptive; pressures of leadership-imposed timelines and political mandates; paternalistic relationships in front-line work; extractive engagement and intentional absences of full consultation with indigenous people; and a broader commitment to protect government from “risk.” many participants spoke, for example, about the temporalities of extractive and transactional bureaucratic relationships. these relationships can deprioritize change as illustrated in statements made by a white woman in child welfare/children’s services, and by a woman of colour in education: it’s presumed common sense that we can just take, take, take info and – as opposed to flip it. what info do you want to share? or... what can we give in return?... so it’s not even a relationship-building exercise, it’s an information gathering exercise, not a people-centric process. so common sense is missing people and humanity at the center of our processes. (interview #2) because we are the funders and working with indigenous stakeholders, there is that power dynamic... i get the sense that it’s not a priority to sort of repair the relationships with indigenous folks. especially with my department, people are really bogged down by work with the daily grind, and there’s not many opportunities to think about things that are really higher level in terms of reconciliation and addressing problematic structures like racism and paternalism. (interview #7) these articulations demonstrate how the bureaucracy is grounded in temporalities in which there is never “enough” time to consult with indigenous people, to build relationships, or to think beyond the immediacy of meso-level demands. participants describe how their work is shaped by multiple temporal pulls – where change is deferred, work is tied to electoral cycles and mandate letters, but also where everything must be done “right now.” in this, participants reveal how settler colonial temporalities do not simply exist but are deployed through public sector work and workers. across provinces, sectors and roles, participants also describe how they are expected to come into this work. as opposed to mutuality and interrelatedness, themes of alienation, silos, abstraction, extraction and dissonance come forward clearly in participant narratives, especially around the ethics of “good intentions” and “the public good.” these discourses speak 8 for example, silencing terms like colonialism, racism, or violence in clinical communications. nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 216 to the role benevolence has in masking individual and institutional complicities.9 everything that we do in the public service is... grounded by good intentions... it rarely happens that there is good impact to the extent that it was intended. like there might be marginal impact at most, like good impact at most, but i think a lot of good intentions are actually harmful. i always think about the residential schools policy – the government probably had, from their perspective, good intentions, but the impact was – it’s still felt to this day, and it’s very negative. i still think about [it], especially in working in education. (interview #7; a woman of colour in education) it’s a common understanding that whatever the public service decides is for the public good... there’s a general acceptance of ‘this is just the way it is’ right? and that a public servant is here to provide our best in a way that’s palatable for whiteness as an institution. we’re such big institutions, so what’s decided as good policy must be good policy – how could it be that a ministry or department of 500 people is doing something wrong? (interview #6; a non-binary person of colour in business development) the coherence of these articulations of settler colonial relationality points to the importance of examining “the function of these convergences, divergences, and multidirectionality for modalities of governance” (dhamoon, 2021, p. 877; emphasis in original). a shift to complicity invites interrogation (and interruption) in ways that are distinct from privilege frameworks. as jafri (2012) writes, shifting to complicity can turn to the strategies that produce relational hierarchies and authorize settlers’ governance and sense of entitlement to act upon others. complicity and bureaucracy turning to complicity is particularly salient in a bureaucratic context that positions itself as apolitical. mihai (2019) describes this as “routinised, often unreflective, patterns of complicity or series of complicitous acts in temporally stable, structural violence” (p. 506). a non-binary participant of colour in business development names this bluntly: “the public service and 9 in our interviews the gendering of “good intentions” and benevolence, and the role of white women as exalted national subjects is a strong theme. particularly as we interview a range of white women at various stages of their careers, how white women have found their authority to act within the state is a prominent theme that speaks to a distinct form of gendered and racialized relationality cultivated in this public sector work. this echoes back to a long lineage of white women’s particularized emplacement and complicities in settling and securing the state through the “helping” professions and within the home and community (allen, in press). also see lefrançois’ (2013) discussion of the intersection of white identity and “benevolent” institutions in constituting the “good” social worker, all the whole reconstituting “the social relation of dominance and subordination with racialized and colonized others” (p. 116). settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 217 government in general... is extremely violent, right?... the basis of the crown... is... rooted in colonial violence, right?” (interview #6). they go on to expand the conception of what counts as violence, describing systemic neglect and its implications for “access to shelter, food, healthcare, wellbeing and identity” as a form of “state sanctioned violence.” in this context, the aforementioned sense of dissonance gains meaning, particularly given how participants describe the public sector as guarding against “risk”: i’ve looked very carefully at the high level... documents that are supposed to be guiding government operations. there’s undrip. there’s the trc report... then the missing and murdered indigenous women report [and] the new report on health care… they’re about sovereignty, they’re about self-determination. the government reads those and interprets them through an assimilationist lens that they call reconciliation... and then a layer beneath that is actually how policies work and what they look like in the community... it just gets watered down at every step. (interview #8; a white man in health) there’s always been a lot of fear... there’s a risk averse thing that you’re going to make a bad decision, it’s going to end up in the news and somebody is going to get fired… to be able to operate outside the bureaucracy, you need to have a sense of safety... emotional safety, physical safety, psychological safety, career safety, to take risks and do things differently. (interview #9; a white woman in child welfare/children’s services) participants illuminate a fundamental tension with respect to who they “serve.” speaking about settler colonial common sense, and what it means to work as a bureaucrat, a white woman in child welfare/children’s services stated that “as a representative of government, you will not do harm to government” (interview #2). another white woman in child welfare/children’s services reflected, “i learned very quickly that... we needed to in some weird way protect the government from itself” (interview #9). complicity, then, lends a critical lens, allowing for “recognition of the historical, social and political conditions that render some sufferings and injustices permissible and habitual, or part of everyday repertoire and social interaction” (zembylas, 2020, p. 323). put differently, it is striking that harm to the state is clearly centered as requiring the vigilance of non-indigenous public sector workers. here, we recognize that in bureaucratic contexts “collaborators, beneficiaries of violence and bystanders often have mixed motives for action, that long-term, indifferent collective passivity frequently elides reflexive intent, and that the effects of complicity are often ambitious and difficult to isolate” (mihai, 2019, p. 507). pushing further, participants reflect on what it means to be a public sector worker who is implicated in the settler colonial state: nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 218 i’m choosing to make some pretty huge ethical compromises to live this lifestyle that i lead. i don’t delude myself into thinking that i’m making a positive difference in the world. i work for a colonial capitalist government, that’s hell bent on genocide… that’s a compromise that i have to find ways to live with right now. it’s a temporary compromise... but that’s kind of the sacrifice i needed to make to live the lifestyle i do. (interview #8; a white man in health) i know that i’m very privileged to be in this position. this position provides me with all the benefits, like financial stability… i already see myself as complicit because i work for the state. i already don’t think that we should have states, i don’t think that people should have power over other people... hopefully, i’m helping people with my policy. but i am part of the state, i am complicit in the system that is enacting violence on people. (interview #5; a woman of colour in health) complicity is neither incidental, nor immaterial. lethabo king (2013) writes of the materiality of settler colonialism in terms of settler commodification, conquering, and owning of land, but also of a cognitive ordering of the “mind of the settler, shaping and allowing the settler to survey land, knowledge, bodies – and art – for potential yield as commodities” (as cited in martineau & ritskes, 2014, p. vi). this securing of settler colonial order is inextricably linked to presumptions that the authority, legitimacy and jurisdiction of the public sector are absolute. in variable ways, many participants describe their discretion to act within these assertions of settler jurisdiction: at the end of the day, i’m an entry-level administrator in a giant public service. and there’s only so much that i can do... there are things that i can do as an individual in terms of learning systems of colonialism and trying to challenge that part of my being, there are things that i can do in my team… then again, i’m the most junior member of our team. so there’s a power dynamic there in terms of how much i can get away with pushing back and challenging. (interview #10; a white male in health) it’s very recommended that we need to consult with indigenous people, but even then, today, my friend was like, ‘oh my god, i was just thinking about how we didn’t consult with indigenous people on this framework.’ i know that he holds a lot of the same beliefs as we do, and he tried to push for it in his own work. but it just didn’t happen for whatever reason – you can still get away with not doing it. if we exist in indigenous sovereignty, it would be like of course you have to do it. (interview #5; a woman of colour in health) i’m consulting, but my duty is to seek consent not to get it. so right from the beginning, i know that i have all the power and the rights to make this decision. and i will take input from any group. and even if it’s no, it’s still my decision to make. (interview #11; a white man in natural resources) these conversations on complicity have demonstrated how the investments of settlers are protected, and how this delimits imagining a future outside of settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 219 settler colonial governance. still, we consider what complicity may open up imaginatively, particularly as we reflect on one participant’s utterances: i see a responsibility to do the best that i can from the position i’m in. i think it’s working towards ensuring that your position is no longer needed in the future... we should be working to work ourselves out of a job to ensure that we are limiting how complicit we are... it’s bigger in the public service, because it’s like, how are you going to work yourself out of the state? as an individual can i actually?” (interview $5; a woman of colour in health) orienting towards refusals and otherwise adopting a different framework or language does not unravel settler colonialism; this is not simply something that settlers can “think themselves out of” on their own. reflecting on complicity can still activate a similar confessional process, ultimately centering and emplacing settler colonial futurities (patel, 2021). consequently, our focus on complicity is not meant to begin and end with transforming settler consciousness. rather, this naming and rupturing of complicity is meant to disrupt settler colonial pedagogies and orient participants to act at this meso-level. more critically, complicity is never meant to be read outside the imperatives of decolonization, meaning that in this research and in the interview questions, complicity is not simply linked to settler agency, but framed as invoking relational accountability to indigenous sovereignty and refusals. put differently, our move to interrogate complicity is meant to support material practices of relational responsibility.10 thus, we end our interviews by inviting participants to imagine otherwise, and learning from patel (2021), we similarly ground complicity by turning to indigenous refusals. critically, the invitation to imagine otherwise at the end of our second interview comes after extensive conversation in which we have: (a) supported participants in locating themselves and their learning within larger structures and patterns; (b) supported participants in identifying patterns (and impacts) of settler colonial common sense in which they (and we) are complicit; and (c) dislodged and disrupted the certainty of settler colonial jurisdiction to act. as an ongoing series of interview interventions meant to support participants in decentering themselves as settlers, we name both settler refusals to be in indigenous sovereignty (nicoll, 2004), and share arvin’s (2019, p. 228) articulation of indigenous regenerative refusals: 10 notably, throughout most interviews, participants wanted to speak about their involvement in change. at times this serves as a pivot away from pointed questions about complicity, and in other contexts, their challenges to settler colonial common sense and relationalities are critically illuminative of how participants are trying to navigate the system to disrupt. nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 220 regenerative refusals recognize violence and pain, but not to make that the center of indigenous identity; rather, these refusals highlight the importance of envisioning and enacting different futures that are suffused with more love, humor, connection, and freedom… refusals allow for a blooming of desires beyond the structures of settler colonialism that pretend to be eternal and unchangeable. specifically, we ask participants to reflect on indigenous refusals they have witnessed, often invoking a reinterpretation of previous encounters, and a recognition that the erasure and delegitimization of indigenous refusals as intentional and political are critical sites of complicity. in doing so, we invite participants to contemplate how settlers can be accountable to indigenous refusals moving forward, even when some refusals are not “for” settlers.11 for settler participants, the invitation to imagine otherwise is meant to start from the already destabilized ground of settler authority, jurisdiction and legitimacy, from collective thinking away from individual narratives of selfimprovement, and towards creating futures where we are different selves under changed relations of governance. as goodyear-ka’ōpua (2019) notes, futurities are “ways that groups imagine and produce knowledge about futures, that assemble styles of thinking, practices that give content to futures, and logics” (p. 86). with this in mind, we ask participants to imagine beyond settler colonial relationalities and futurities of “containment, removal and eradication” (goodyear-ka’ōpua, 2019, p. 86). goodyear-ka’ōpua (2019) describes indigenous futurities as enactments of radical relationalities “that transcend settler geographies and maps, temporalities and calendars, and/or other settler measures of time and space” (p. 86). these settler colonial relationalities and scales obscure as opposed to illuminate – foreclosing horizons, as opposed to extending them. this has stood out to us when posing questions about what relationships and governance might look like outside of existing settler colonial dynamics of “power over,” and in imagining sovereign indigenous nations. for example, a white male in health responded, “i guess that’s part of the trick of colonization is such a different reality, it makes it almost unimaginable” (interview #8). a woman of colour in health answered that, it’s hard to imagine what [indigenous sovereignty] would look like beyond the state, but still living in our modern society... if we continue with an allegory of the public service, then indigenous people are their own ministry or something, and therefore their own nation, and we have to work with them – they’re not just like 11 drawing from coulthard (2014) and simpson (2007), leanne betasamosake simpson (2017) has described several sorts of refusals that have been articulated by indigenous scholars, including the refusal of “state recognition as an organizing platform and mechanism for dismantling the systems of colonial domination” (p. 176). refusal also includes refusing how the state frames the issues to be organized around (simpson, 2017), and the refusal of “divisions of colonial spatialities, networks, or constellations” (p. 197). settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 221 an optional stakeholder that we can maybe consult with and not pay. (interview #5) lastly, a non-binary person of colour in business development said, i have always kind of thought about, ‘oh, let’s dismantle the system,’ but i don’t know if i’ve really visualized for myself what that looks like afterwards. it’s not that i don’t have an imagination... i think maybe it’s just how much we’ve accepted this is our reality that i haven’t really taken the time to think about what that may look like otherwise. (interview #6) these articulations speak to the deep ways settler colonialism can delimit imaginations, and what is perceived as already existing, possible or impossible. we note this delimitation even for people with political orientations against settler colonialism, and even for several participants who engage in anticolonial and anticapitalist organizing. of course, as batliwala (2013) reminds us, deep structures are not absolute because they are contested, and subject to sabotage; this requires imagining that is relational. drawing from joy james and edmund gordon’s assertions on the foundation of radical subjectivity, martineau and ritskes (2014) describe that the task for decolonial researchers, activists and artists is not one of rehabilitation, or of offering “amendments or edits to the current world, but to display the mutual sacrifice and relationality needed to sabotage colonial systems of thought and power for the purpose of liberatory alternatives” (p. ii; emphasis added). we hope to prompt participants and ourselves to get to a place that is “not simply away from colonialism, but away from any standpoint where colonialism makes sense” (martineau & ritskes, 2014, p. iv; emphasis added). conclusions: implications of complicity and witnessing for us in this paper we have paused while immersed “in the deep” with our participants. the reflection invited here is not only of our participants’ complicities, but of ours as well. indeed, as zembylas (2020) notes, “a critique of complicity is never free of complicities” (p. 323). neither centering nor decentering our or our participants’ privilege enables us to think through ethical engagement, or our relational accountabilities in this research. while we have been and will continue to structure this work in discussion with indigenous contacts and colleagues within our institutions, particularly vis-a-vis local protocols and accountabilities, we also see the limits of the academe, whose logics are not oriented to the temporalities of decolonial work, much less the fundamental refusal of settler colonialism. yet, while the academe values settler colonial temporalities and certainty – of methodology, findings and impact – the framework of settler colonial nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 222 socialization implores a methodological opening that resists this settler hubris. guided by indigenous colleagues and educators who have made clear that settler decolonization work is for settlers to take responsibility for, as settlers, we still question, how are we being accountable and not reproducing extractive relationalities with indigenous participants, colleagues, and researchers throughout this process? at this time, our intentions with the broader findings – to locate possibilities of antiracist learning and decolonial change, and bolster support for the development of policies and practices that challenge settler colonialism and foreground indigenous people’s sovereignty – situate us in the paradoxical tensions of this work. are we looking for change within the existing structures? are we asking participants to make everyday disruptions and to create greater equity in violent institutions while also asking them and ourselves to imagine and act beyond them? we linger in this paradoxical space of asking participants and ourselves to do differently in institutions set up to harm, while being accountable to indigenous refusals and honouring an orientation of otherwise. theories of change are implicit in all social science research, shaping “the directions a project takes, how it begins and where it ends, who a project is responsible to, speaking to, and speaking for… how we think things are known, what counts as evidence, and what argumentation style will convince those we want to convince” (tuck, 2018, p. 157). we hold that settler colonial socialization is never wholly determinative, given that settler colonial common sense and pedagogies are characterized by moments of learning, reproduction, and complicity, as well as possible contestation and disruption. heeding the call to move “beyond telling a simple story about complicity” (saranillio, 2013, p. 36), we aim to unpack settler colonialism as pedagogies of dominance and illuminate pedagogies of relationality grounded in material practices of relational responsibility that are and can be otherwise. acknowledgements we wish to acknowledge the participants who committed to being “in the deep” of the research process with us, during a global pandemic no less. you have taught us so much, and we are grateful for the time, critical reflection and care everyone took to grapple with concepts, questions and settler colonial harms that cannot be easily responded to yet remain imperative to interrogate. this research is supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. settler colonial socialization in public sector work studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 223 references ahmed, s. 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(2018). biting the university that feeds us. in m. spooner & j. mcninch (eds.), dissident knowledge in higher education (pp. 149-167). university of regina press. tuck, e., & yang, k. w. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 1(1), 1-40. tuck, e., & yang, k. w. (2016). what justice wants. critical ethic studies, 2(2), 1-15. turpel-lafond, m. e., & johnson, h. (2021). in plain sight: addressing indigenous-specific racism and discrimination in bc health care. bc studies: the british columbian quarterly, 209, 7-17. veracini, l. (2011). isopolitics, deep colonizing, settler colonialism. interventions, 13(2), 171189. nisha nath & willow samara allen studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 200-226, 2022 226 vimalassery, m., pegues, j. h., & goldstein, a. (2016). introduction: on colonial unknowing. theory & event, 19(4). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633283 vimalassery, m., pegues, j. h., & goldstein, a. (2017). colonial unknowing and relations of study. theory & event, 20(4), 1042-1054. wilson, s. (2008). research is ceremony: indigenous research methods. fernwood publishing. wolfe, p. (2006). settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387-409. yellowhead institute. (2019). land back: a yellowhead institute red paper. https://redpaper.yellowheadinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/red-paper-reportfinal.pdf zembylas, m. (2020). re-conceptualizing complicity in the social justice classroom: affect, politics and anti-complicity pedagogy. pedagogy, culture & society, 28(2), 317-331. review of ¡marcha! latino chicago and the immigrant rights movement studies in social justice volume 4, issue 2, 217-218, 2010 correspondence address: carlos sandoval garcía, instituto de investigaciones sociales, universidad de costa rica, apartado postal 4920-60, ciudad rodrigo facio, san josé, costa rica. tel. (506) 2511-8690, email: carlos.sandoval@ucr.ac.cr. issn: 1911-4788 review of ¡marcha! latino chicago and the immigrant rights movement carlos sandoval garcía instituto de investigaciones sociales, universidad de costa rica ¡marcha! latino chicago and the immigrant rights movement. by amalia pallares and nilda flores-gonzález (editors) (2010) illinois: university of illinois university press, 279 pp. ¡marcha! begins by offering a political and historical context and is organized around three key themes: institutions, agency, and subjectivities. chapters on institutions look at churches, schools, and trade unions from which many of the mobilizations took shape. the section on agency explores ways in which migrants and latinos negotiated their mobilizations both within their own organizations as well as with those institutions (e.g. schools) whose permission they needed to join the marches. the third section, subjectivities, looks at the ways in which subjective positions influenced the decision to join the mobilizations while positions were being shaped by the process of participating in the demonstrations. a key conclusion that can be drawn from the chapters included in ¡marcha! is that the 2006 mobilizations were not spontaneous. rather, they were the consequence of years of initiatives taken by a diverse array of individuals and organizations at different scales. to ignore this would mean to subscribe to simplistic interpretations which frequently represent migrant mobilization as the “awakening of the sleeping giant,” as if such mobilizations occurred in a political vacuum. nor can these impressive mobilizations be interpreted as a guarantee of comprehensive immigration reform in the united states. recent changes in arizona’s legislation and similar pending initiatives in other states confirm that, despite migrant organization, stricter migration policies are likely to develop in the years to come. the current global economic crisis, which has been particularly damaging in the united states, makes reformist policies even more difficult. the hardening of immigration policies has brought about what another recent edited book calls “the deportation regime” (de genova, 2010). a reading in parallel of these two edited collections greatly illustrates how an increase in regulation expresses itself through migration policies, portraying migrants as criminalized and deportable subjects. the politicization of migration therefore, means both the 218 carlos sandoval garcía studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 recognition of tougher policies and the strength of migrants as collective subjects (e.g. actors, projects, scales) emerging from both within the migrant rights movement and beyond it. this tension between potential avenues for political intervention and political limits demands a careful reading. to ignore the deepening of right-wing views on migration does not allow an identification of the terrain in which political initiatives are going to take place. yet, to recognize only the repressive policies without any attempt to think of the political potential of migrants at different scales (local, national, and transnational) would have a demobilizing effect. rather than taking a fixed view of this tension, ¡marcha! makes a very important contribution, reflecting on the routes, actors, agendas, contradictions, and subjectivities from the location of a global city such as chicago. in times when the term de-territorialization can denote loosely-grounded empirical research, this edited book reminds us that it is possible to articulate questions which have international repercussions while staying connected to the locality. in the case of this volume on immigrant rights movements, the locality is chicago, and all contributors to this volume are affiliated with institutions in that city (university of illinois at chicago and depaul university). ¡marcha! would be of most interest to those working in latino studies, immigration studies, and community studies. a translation to spanish, making this recent history available to those working for migrant rights in latin america, would be a welcome next step. reference de genova, n. & peutz, n. (2010). the deportation regime: sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement. durham, nc: duke university press. hjalmarson final before ts correspondence address: elise hjalmarson, anthropology & sociology, the graduate institute on international & development studies, 1202 genève, switzerland; email: elise.hjalmarson@graduateinstitute.ch issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 543-547, 2021 book review border and rule: global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism walia, harsha. (2021). fernwood press. isbn 9781773634524 (paper) cdn$27.00; isbn 9781773634531 (e-book) cdn$26.99; isbn 9781773634555 (pdf) cdn$26.99. 320 pages. elise hjalmarson the graduate institute, switzerland if ever a book raged against borders, this one does. harsha walia’s border and rule: global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism takes popular, liberal depictions of migration to task, and in doing so brings the accelerating crises of our time into sharp relief: namely, globalized capitalism, racist nationalism, exclusionary borders, and a warming planet. together, these intersecting crises have created a cycle of displacement, detainment, deportation, and death, all the while masquerading as the status quo. such outcomes, walia argues, are far from inevitable. the book culminates with a call not to open, but to dismantle borders entirely, and to “transform the underlying social, political, and economic conditions giving rise to what we know as the ‘migration crisis’” (p. 213). a must-read for scholars and comrades in the struggle for the freedom to move or to remain, this is a book by which future critical work on borders and migration will be measured. chapter one explores the creation of the us-mexico border as a violent technology of white supremacy. looking to recent history, walia shows the border’s modus operandi to be twofold: the unilateral protection and elevation of whiteness, and the simultaneous entrapment of black and indigenous labour. she exposes the anti-black roots of border policing, whose first patrol members came from the ranks of the notoriously racist texas rangers and the klu klux klan (kkk), and the lengths to which the elise hjalmarson studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 543-547, 2021 544 us government and elites went to keep black communities from recovering following the horrific injustices of slavery. walia contends that “by excavating mutual histories and interlocking logics, we replace narrow frameworks of immigration with a more expansive analysis, illuminating the border as a tool of population management and racial ordering that is at once domestic and global” (p. 37). the policing of us borders at home occurs in tandem with the expansion of us militarism abroad. in chapter two, walia details the sharing of practices, technology, training, and bodies-on-the-ground across police, border, and military forces. in the americas, the funding and training of violent paramilitary groups and the proliferation of free trade agreements has led to the displacement of millions of people who flee north only to be met with hostility at the us-mexico border. meanwhile, in the united states, the criminalization of blackness creates consent for policies which “gr[o]w the carceral state while shrinking the welfare state” (p. 41), leading to the targeted defunding of social services with a disproportionate impact on marginalized groups, especially women and mothers. ultimately, the problem, writes walia, is not a border crisis, but a “crisis of displacement generated by us policies” (p. 39). there can be little doubt that us foreign, trade, and “security” agendas are among the leading causes of displacement. in chapter three, walia examines the role of neoliberal exploitation across export processing zones and environmental shock in driving people from rural communities into urban slums, and frequently into unfree labour schemes. she calls readers’ attention to growing global inequality, noting that while billions of people around the world are housing-insecure, the real estate market in many parts of the west/north has reached astronomical heights. the implications of housing insecurity during a pandemic are dire: while some of us safely self-isolate in the comfort of our homes, this option is not available to all. just as someone does not simply lose their home and livelihood, walia asserts that “migrants and refugees don’t just appear at our borders; they are produced by systemic forces” (p. 62). chapter four takes us from the causes of displacement to four specific techniques of border governance: exclusion, territorial diffusion, commodified inclusion, and discursive control. perhaps the first technique to come to mind when one imagines the border is exclusion, which includes physical barriers such as walls or fences whose purpose is to keep out “undesirables” and protect the purity of a positively racialized community. territorial diffusion functions as internal bordering which follows migrants once they have crossed into the sovereign territory of another nation-state, frustrating their access to public services and daily lives, and promoting their self-deportation. she characterizes commodified inclusion as the differential inclusion and exploitation of people with precarious status and who have reduced bargaining power under threat of deportation. finally, via discursive control, walia explains, borders facilitate the division, categorization, and book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 543-547, 2021 545 management of people on the run, most notably in their differentiation between migrants and refugees, or “bogus” versus “true” refugees. these four techniques form the brick and mortar of much contemporary migration policy, as chapters five and six illustrate. walia first explores practices of border externalization, taking australia’s offshore detention centre on manus island in papua new guinea as her case study. she shows how the seemingly disconnected banishment of pacific islanders, exclusion of chinese labourers, and dispossession of indigenous peoples are, in fact, deeply intertwined, and form part of a larger project to keep australia white. turning to the european context, whether via border externalization, socalled migration management programs, harmonized surveillance systems, or policies of “rescue and return,” the end goal is the same: to contain black migration within africa. walia details the efforts of european powers to block various migration routes over land and sea to prevent african migrants from reaching the borders of the continent and claiming asylum. migration blaming, according to walia, is like rape culture: in condemning migrants for freely opting to undertake dangerous journeys, we exonerate our willful efforts to make their journeys unsafe, when we could easily do otherwise. such rhetoric, as well as that which compares migrant trafficking to slavery in order to bolster consent for anti-migration policies, masks the role of the state in manufacturing violence and coopts black struggles for freedom of movement. even in the face of abhorrent anti-blackness, capitalism demands expendable labour, particularly for the dirty, dangerous, and demanding work that landed elites and citizens reject. chapter seven thus invites readers to think critically about the relationship between capitalism and the border visà-vis temporary labour migration. while the “proletarianization of displaced peasants into migrant farmworkers” may be one of capitalism’s “cruelest ironies” (p. 131), the permanency of so-called “temporary” migration is another. walia exposes nation-states’ structural reliance on circular labour migration, deemed a success for ensuring that racialized workers return to their countries of origin, and thereby maintaining their perpetual precarity. she delineates five key features of migrant labour regimes: first, statesanctioned indentureship; second, legalized segregation “outside the nationstate and outside the bounds of belonging” (p. 139); third, neoliberal insourcing; fourth, a distinct mode of racialization; and fifth, carceral regimes. in closing, walia notes the profound undervaluing of domestic and care work – gendered labour that is mostly performed by women of colour globally. gendered dimensions of migrant labour remain in focus through chapters eight and nine, as walia narrows in on two infamous migrant labour schemes: the kafala system in the gulf states and canada’s temporary foreign worker program (tfwp). as many as 30 million migrants laboured under the kafala system in 2017, and some 20 thousand domestic workers flee their places of employment each year. the customary, legal transfer of elise hjalmarson studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 543-547, 2021 546 migrant workers between sponsors facilitates a horrific gendered violence, particularly against domestic workers, in the form of super-exploitation, carceral surveillance, rape, and murder. walia notes that while the media is quick to blame arab culture, migrant justice would be better served in denouncing globalized capitalism and nationalist borders. a case in point, despite its global reputation as a model program, canada’s tfwp is renowned for wage robbing, inadequate and crowded housing, deplorable working conditions, and poor legislative oversight, among other sins. in the okanagan valley, british columbia, a region known for its fresh fruit and award-winning wine, farmworkers from guatemala, mexico, and jamaica live in waspand mouse-infested trailers, without electricity or potable water, surrounded by trash; employers pass off refurbished chicken coops and granaries as “housing,” and workers sleep on haybales instead of mattresses. in too many instances, they are not permitted visitors and must ask their employer for permission before leaving the farm premises. migrant women report intensified employer surveillance, often via camera, and many become targets of sexual violence (weiler & cohen, 2018). despite formidable evidence of such injustices, march 31st, 2021 marked 55 years of the agriculture stream of canada’s tfwp, one of the world’s oldest such programs still in use today. dismally, labour regimes like these are liable to continue in a context of rising fascism. zooming out yet again, in chapters ten and eleven, walia takes the far right to task, calling out its reliance on a “glaring convergence of racist nationalism and border imperialism” (p. 194). she notes increasing transnational alliances between right nationalist movements and the world’s most powerful militaries. although they take distinct forms across various geographies – white nationalism in the united states, hindutva in india, and zionism in israel – the racist violence they condone and propagate is one and the same. in brazil and the philippines, penal populism functions to criminalize the poor and justify the extrajudicial killing of land defenders and indigenous peoples. meanwhile, overtly racist anti-immigration rhetoric sweeps the european continent, with migrants serving as scapegoats for myriad homegrown worries. “the problem”, contends walia, “isn’t foreign workers, it’s capital: the problem isn’t foreign workers, it’s labor segmentation” (p. 204). rather than prioritizing either race or class, walia reminds us that just as they congeal around one another, our critiques – and our responses – must account for both. as nick estes argues in his compelling afterword, “migration crisis” is a misnomer. rather, what we are experiencing is a crisis of humanity. in displacing indigenous peoples and peasants through free trade agreements only to close borders, lock up children, criminalize livelihoods, and deport those seeking better lives to regions either warming or militarized (or both), the north shows itself – and its immigration politics – to be morally bankrupt. this is not to say that there is no hope, no just future to cultivate for which to till onward. in defiance of border controls and migration management book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 543-547, 2021 547 policies everywhere, migrants themselves are on the forefront of global struggles for freedom of movement. walia identifies the movement of migrants and refugees against the bolstering of fortress europe as “a form of decolonial reparations” (p. 122). such a corrective does not apply to fortress europe alone, but to the entire “gated globe” (cunningham, 2004). just as justice for climate refugees today requires that their claims be accepted as such, reparations for black asylum seekers, migrant farmworkers, displaced indigenous peoples, and so many others demand “a politics of repair” (p. 214). as this book remarkably illustrates, this is a justice that only a world without borders can offer. references cunningham, h. (2014). nations rebound?: crossing borders in a gated globe. global studies in culture and power, 11(3), 329-350. weiler, a., & cohen, a. (2018, may 1). migrant farmworkers vulnerable to sexual violence. the conversation. https://theconversation.com/migrant-farm-workers-vulnerable-to-sexualviolence-95839 studies in social justice volume 3, issue 2, 145-154, 2009 correspondence address: diane-gabrielle tremblay, télé-université, université du québec à montréal, montréal, qc, h2x 3p2, canada. tel: +1 514 843-2015, email: dgtrembl@teluq.uqam.ca issn: 1911-4788 work, insecurity, and social justice diane-gabrielle tremblay télé-université de l’université du québec à montréal, montréal, canada this issue on work, insecurity, and social justice appears very timely, given the present economic crisis, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008-9, and constitutes an important contribution to the debate on this theme. indeed, over recent decades, work has become less and less secure for many groups (less educated, some aging workers, some women, etc.) and income and economic insecurity have moved high on the agenda of individual and social preoccupations. despite the existence of workers with more or less stable jobs, and despite some labour regulations or collective agreements favouring job stability, slow growth periods and repeated crises in the 1980s, 1990s, and again in 2008-9 have resulted in workforce rationalization and layoffs, long-term unemployment, and a reduction in the coverage of as well as level of employment insurance benefits for jobless people. today only about one out of every two workers is eligible for employment insurance, and in the resource-dependent regions of canada, where unemployment is higher and long periods of unemployment are more frequent, many workers end up excluded from the employment insurance regime and must rely on social assistance regimes. furthermore, available jobs are often precarious and poorly paid, which leads to lower benefits while many aging workers are altogether excluded from employment when companies are confronted with difficult times. in the current economic environment, companies are in an endless search for improved competitiveness and productivity, which often results in demands for flexibility, diversified types of employment, changing work shifts, and ultimately, insecurity for workers. globalization and the international division of labour have contributed to the displacement of both investment and jobs to developing countries, which leads to an increased feeling of job insecurity for many groups (lowe et al., 1999), potentially more so for those entering the labour market (youth) and those about to leave (aging workers). employment insecurity is partly a subjective notion; something an individual feels given his or her job situation and the overall economic situation. job insecurity, however, can lead to income insecurity and economic insecurity, and this is, of course, a very difficult situation. 146 diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 in the north american context in particular, where social benefits are often not as high as in many european countries, especially the nordic countries, economic insecurity can lead to important issues of social justice (freyssinet, 2003). indeed, aging workers in canada, for example, have much lower benefits than those found in belgium. this can translate into an important issue of social justice, since some individuals may have worked hard all of their lives, but still find themselves in a situation of poverty at the end of their active career. this is, of course, only one view on the relations between work, insecurity, and social justice. in recent years, there has been debate regarding the meaning of the concepts of security and insecurity itself, with some authors indicating that this is a relative concept whose meaning changes over time. according to standing (1999, p. 37), security involves a sense of well-being or control, or mastery over one’s activities and development, as well as the enjoyment of a certain amount of self-esteem. inversely, insecurity involves anxiety and uncertainty (standing, 1999). collective security can also be distinguished from other forms of security or insecurity. again, as per standing (1999, p. 37), collective (or societal) security could be seen as the need to identify with or belong to a group and typically to exercise control over the behaviour of others or to limit their control. security arises from multiple forms of identity, such as class, occupation, and community membership (standing, 1999), to which we would add territorial belonging (fontan, klein, & tremblay, 2005a, 2005b), which are also sources of social identity, and therefore, a certain level of security. the company or employer can also be considered a source of security, so it is therefore possible to refer to a certain amount of “company security” such as that found within a japanese company which generally ensured employees a long term job (tremblay & rolland, 2000). there is also individual security; a person’s curriculum vitae, skills, and union membership can provide a feeling of personal security (standing, 1999, p. 37). another question has arisen in research: how can insecurity and security be measured? this is a particularly complex issue which has been the subject of relatively little study. dasgupta (2001, p. 9) indicates that there are both objective and subjective measures. objective measures are interesting but limited: unemployment rates, average length of employment vs. unemployment, fixed term contracts vs. indefinite employment, skill transferability, etc. these constitute individual measures of the likelihood that given individuals will maintain ongoing employment, stability, and security. there are also contractual measures, such as the rate of non-standard jobs or job status (vosko, zukewich, & cranford, 2003), and institutional measures such as legal protection and collective agreements (dasgupta, 2001, p. 9). as well, there are subjective measures. these may relate to the feeling that one’s permanence in employment is guaranteed by the company, as in japan, or by society and public employment policy, such as in sweden. in order to assess an individual’s relative insecurity or security, the following measures would be of interest: the likelihood of losing one’s job, the likelihood of finding another, the value of the current job, and the value of the future job or period of unemployment (dasgupta, 2001, p. 9). therefore, we may conclude that insecurity is related to the perception of risk and this perception may vary from one person to another and in different contexts. work, insecurity, and social justice 147 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 in the context of mass production and large organizations (fordism), the stability of employees was considered to be a desirable standard for industrial society. the development of trade unionism and the seniority standard contributed to making it expensive for a person to quit his or her job, which tended to favour job stability and the non-mobility of employees. we might wonder why the regulation of the job market occurred. in fact, historically speaking, employment standards, unionization, and unemployment insurance came about as a result of workers’ struggles, as a way to compensate for workers’ weaker power, but also to ensure stable labour supply for companies who wanted to counter chronic labour instability among farm workers at the beginning of the industrial era. over the years, income security became associated with the welfare state. however, benefits were only for full-time workers while women were frequently dependent on the family benefit coverage of their spouses (tremblay, 2008). in light of the reservations set out about the importance of the labour market as the source of rights, insurance, and income, certain questions arise such as whether job security is still important today, and if so, why, for whom (an issue of social justice), and how. from the point of view of employers, job security is a constraint on efficiency and flexibility in adjusting production. publications of the oecd have shown an inverse relationship between job flexibility and job security. further, a study of several european countries showed that economic slowdowns always relaunch the debate about labour flexibility, precarious forms of employment and wage reductions (freyssinet, 2003). some, especially employers, raise the notion that workers should adapt to having less security. however, this raises an issue of social justice, since not all need to adapt to this. in support of job security, some defend the idea of job security as the main source of economic security, and thus criticize the restrictions imposed on the employment insurance regime several years ago in canada. job security is considered important for the well-being of workers and their families, as well as being seen as favouring macro-economic stability. furthermore, it appears that flexibility and wage reductions do not necessarily translate into job creation, contrarily to orthodox economic theory’s claims (freyssinet, 2003). there are other avenues to economic security and possibly to social justice, and some theorists defend the concept of a guaranteed or citizen’s income. while flexibility is necessary, and some consider that job protection works against flexibility, a citizen’s income, or minimum guaranteed income, could possibly offer some form of economic security and provide some degree of social justice. some writers indeed believe that this would simultaneously ensure social justice and efficiency (standing, 1999, p.184). however, this position is contested by many. it overlooks the non-financial advantages of work, including participation in social life, self-esteem, and personal development. other critics hold that the cost of providing such a citizen’s income at an appropriate level would be extremely high, and that a true minimum income is more realistic. finally, it is argued that the stigma attached to social assistance would not necessarily disappear by just changing the name of the program, even though some believe that a “citizenship” income, considered the right of every citizen, might change people’s perspective (standing, 1999). this remains an issue of debate in relation to social justice and economic security. 148 diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 in this issue, two papers deal with end of career and retirement issues, since this is a period of work life which often translates into income or economic insecurity and raises many issues of social justice. the difference between retirement schemes, which may seem normal to the nationals of different countries such as canada and belgium, raises the issue of social justice. indeed, public retirement schemes are apparently more generous in belgium and more workers can manage to retire early and live decently, which is not the case for many canadians, who need to work later, and even return to work in some cases, especially in the aftermath of an economic and financial crisis such as that which came upon us in 2008-2009. this crisis will surely have effects on unemployment, exclusion, economic insecurity and social justice over the next decade. the first paper, by nathalie burnay, deals precisely with what happens to older workers in a changing social policy context. the author first reminds us that in comparison with other european countries, as well as many north american or asian countries, the employment rate of older workers in belgium is rather low. in fact, burnay indicates that there had been a trend of decreasing participation in the labour market for workers over 55. in belgium in 1960, 85% of men aged 55 to 59 years were active while in 1980, it had decreased to 74 percent and in 1997 the proportion further decreased to 49 percent, a sharp decline. as for women, the author indicates that participation has been very low until the late nineties: about 20 percent for women 55 to 59 years of age, and approximately five percent for women aged 60 to 64. the proportions reached 31 and 9 percent respectively in 2005, which is still quite below that observed in many other zones, including canada, where participation rates are much higher. burnay reminds us that international organizations have been quite preoccupied about the viability of pensions systems. in belgium, as in the european union, the government decided to introduce a series of measures in the early 2000s aimed at encouraging older people to remain in or to re-enter the labour market. the author indicates that in more recent years different factors have led policy makers to reevaluate this policy since it has proved somewhat more difficult than expected to keep people in employment. in such a context, the balance between public policies, trade unions and older workers appears to be disruptive. the paper addresses this challenge thus: the author presents research which sheds light on the impact on workers and discusses the results of this changing social policy pattern in terms of well-being and intention to leave the labour market. the author reminds us that from the perspective of new institutionalism early departure from the labour market needs to be understood not simply as a personal choice but rather as a public policy question. she also reminds us that it is the “social benefits” system that encourages particular behaviour in individuals by offering or withdrawing employment opportunities for those over 50, as has been shown in the work by guillemard, amongst others. the author mentions that the belgian social protection policies reflect the continental model (a combination of state, private, semi-private, parastatal and ngos that provide benefits) where the generous unemployment benefits coexists with many possibilities of early withdrawal from the labour market and very limited systems which encourage and integrate the older employee, and this of course has an impact on the attitudes and preferences of aging workers. indeed, it appears that older workers are condemned to inactivity at the end work, insecurity, and social justice 149 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 of their careers and that early retirements are quite numerous, a trend which is difficult to change after some time of functioning in this manner. while many consider the possibility of early retirement to be an issue of social justice, it is clear that the public retirement schemes are creating a heavy burden for the state budget, and this is an issue in many countries today, but maybe more so in belgium because of its many rather generous schemes. burnay’s paper addresses the important issue of well-being at the age of retirement, as well as the intentions of older workers to retire and sets all of this in the context of changing policies in order to show how these policies influence the attitudes and preferences of workers, given their impact on income and economic security. her paper indicates that public policy developed since the 1980s in france as in belgium has fundamentally changed the view of retirement in society as well as the associated models or norms. because of this, alongside the then established system, new approaches are now seen as equally legitimate. the author indicates that this is not sufficient to explain the important movement towards early retirement in belgium. according to burnay, other variables intervene, particularly other normative elements such as self realization, personal growth, and the need to do something “different” in life. these elements are quite interesting and the analysis presented here helps us to better understand an important societal change: it appears that “the individual no longer expresses their individuality through only one facet of their life but compose elements and facets of their life into a whole through various levels of symbolic participation.” all of these elements make it possible to keep a certain distance as regards work and professional investment or other dimensions of self realization. on the basis of burnay’s paper, the end of one’s career is seen as a special period of life in which individuals can reassert or redefine their identity with other forms of activity, either within the family circle or outside it, with volunteer work for example. the “older unemployed” status established in the 1980s in belgium has clearly contributed largely to the well-being of this specific category of unemployed people, and this is clearly viewed as an element of social justice for the workers concerned. it is, therefore, difficult for the state to go back on these advantages which people apparently enjoy, in relation to early retirement. burnay’s paper also shows that early retirement is not only the result of a desire to escape, and thus leads to a multidimensional and very interesting view on end of careers in the labour market, work, economic security, and self-realization. in the paper by tremblay and genin, the question of how to support older workers who want, or need, to stay longer in employment in order to have decent incomes is addressed. this issue is of great importance, especially from a point of view of social justice with regards to income, considering the fact that public retirement schemes in canada offer limited income and that many have lost money in their retirement funds in recent years (due to the financial crisis and, sometimes, poor management of these funds including fraud in some cases). the challenges faced by organizations and governments are unprecedented. the demographic evolutions most industrialized countries are facing question the traditional tripartite model of education-workretirement, according to which these three phases are found in succession, with little or no overlap. indeed, continuing education is needed more and more to maintain the competences of workers throughout their work life. moreover, retirement can represent a period of time nearly equal to work life. the cost of this “expanded” 150 diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 retirement is judged unacceptable by many governments, leading to the question of how to encourage older workers who want to stay longer in employment. interesting conclusions can be drawn from this paper with regard to these challenges which concern retirement income and social justice. first of all, the authors show that perception about retirement appears more or less unchanged over the years and remains very positive. consequently, one of the barriers to the employment of older workers may be the image of retirement itself since it is still perceived as a gift or a right, which is, once again, a social justice issue. however, if the right to retire can be seen as an issue of social justice, the right to a decent retirement income should be as well. unfortunately, this is not the case for many. while the paper does not address the financial dimension, it is known that up to 30% of retirees return to the labour market, many for lack of sufficient funds at retirement. this number may increase in the aftermath of the present financial and economic crisis. the research also shows that the perception of retirement contrasts with the perception of age. indeed, a large majority of respondents do believe one can perform quality work after the age of 65 but, nevertheless, many appear to want to retire. this result questions work in itself. the research also shows that forcing people to stay longer in the labour market is a largely unpopular measure. consequently, governments and organizations should probably adopt a more voluntary approach; hence the importance of the evaluation of the different options to encourage older workers to stay longer in employment, since they vary from one professional category and sector to another. the results highlight the importance of the sector and type of job in the measures or incentives that could encourage older workers to stay longer in employment. governments and organizations, therefore, should adopt a contingent approach in order to ensure social justice; i.e., all incentives do not necessarily fit all jobs or all sectors, and it may be unjust to force people who have worked very hard, in difficult sectors, to go on working in difficult conditions, while white collar and professionals or managers may see an extended work life as a positive. this paper also indicates that among the measures that could support older workers who want to stay longer in employment, the progressive reduction of their working time appears the most attractive option. such an approach represents an important breach in the traditional tripartite model. indeed, it would inaugurate a new period of time between work life and total retirement. organizations and government should then develop new systems (in terms of social security or laws) to institutionalize this period of time so that older workers can draw advantages from it without losing the benefits of their retirement, thus ensuring social justice between the various categories of workers. the paper by cloutier, bernard, and tremblay addresses the issue of social justice from a gendered perspective. it analyses the evolution of men and women’s work over a decade (1997-2007), on the basis of statistics canada labour force survey. the authors show that the significant increase in the presence of women on the labour market is one of the most important events to have occurred over the last few decades on the issue of work, economic security, and social justice. job feminization has grown to become a regular feature in most oecd countries and it is thus important to analyze how exactly women have gained their place in the labour work, insecurity, and social justice 151 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 market, whether it is with more precarious jobs, as was often said in the past, or whether they have accessed the same economic security (same wages and job stability) as men, which would mean that social justice has been attained. the authors show that, unfortunately, this is not necessarily the case. the massive integration of women into the labour market has translated itself into very different forms of hiring, of jobs, and in working conditions that often tend to increase gender inequality, and thus, social justice between men and women. even where differences between wage earnings of men and women have strongly decreased in terms of their respective numbers, and this may appear to favour better social justice for women, some indicators also uncover a degradation with respect to job quality of some subgroups. indeed, female employees fare less well than their male counterparts. women often hold less lucrative jobs, are more often confined to part-time work against their will or to short-term employment, and are given fewer opportunities to deploy and establish their skills because they are given jobs and assignments that require little, if any, proficiency or aptitude. persistent gender inequality clearly wears more than one mask; it is not related only to access to employment and to wages, and may conceal true social injustice. although they have gained equal footing with men in their level of schooling (statistics canada, 2006) and filled the education gap, women apparently still cannot achieve their full potential and access complete socioeconomic independence in less prominent professional occupation or employment status; women are more likely to depend on a spouse’s or on someone else’s immediate support, financially or otherwise. gender disparity, however, is not limited to the labour market: there are acute gender issues as well in the division and sharing of family responsibilities and these are highlighted in the paper. the uneven distribution of domestic and professional work between men and women implies that women, although they are part of the workforce, will assume responsibility for more family tasks than men and this apparently has an impact on the types of jobs that many will have access to, thus creating some form of injustice in regard to men’s situation; on the other hand, men shoulder more responsibility for financial resources through work in the paid labour market. actually, both trends reinforce each other in maintaining women in a situation that is less interesting in both spheres, that is the private—home or family—sphere and the public, paid work sphere. the paper presents a very detailed analysis of the way in which work quality has evolved for women and for men in québec over the last decade and proposes a new multidimensional typology that could be used to analyze the situation in various other countries, on the basis of data available in the labour force survey. this paper represents a contribution to the research being done on “quality of work” all over the globe at present and also contributes to the reflection on economic insecurity and social justice in relation to employment and conditions of work. in morel’s paper, the main concern is with economic insecurity, a theme which is very high on the agenda in times of high unemployment, and with the need of a theoretical shift in economics for analysing and devising efficient and innovative policy reforms to combat employment insecurity and, thus, economic insecurity. it is clear in periods of economic crisis and unemployment that social justice is questioned. indeed, the persons excluded from employment are the last ones to have entered the labour market, the less educated, the oldest or youngest, depending on a firm’s strategy or options. in any case, it brings forward issues of social justice. 152 diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 morel considers that the analysis of the crisis and its impact must be questioned and that mainstream economics is unable to provide appropriate theorizing about economic phenomena, including economic insecurity. it thus appears important turn to economic theories which radically question the dominant paradigm in economics. john rogers commons’s institutionalist theory is proposed here as a substitute. the author highlights the fact that the inadequacy of mainstream economics, or of neoclassical economics, is a fact insufficiently known. she mentions that this approach generates an economic analysis on the basis of concepts and models disconnected from the real-world economy and because of this fact it cannot provide appropriate theorizing about key factors of economic life, nor strategic economic issues. the author indicates that it is essential to proceed to a theoretical reconstruction in economics. what is at stake is all the more important in the present economic context, since it is our ability to understand economic insecurity in all its complexity, as well as to design appropriate solutions to it by means of innovative analysis of labour and employment issues. first, the author of this paper outlines the distinctive character of commons’s institutionalist theory by presenting some of its crucial methodological differences with neoclassical economics. commons is one of the founders of what is called the original institutionalism, which was developed at the end of the 19th century and continued until the 1940s in the united states. commons’s theory, whose relevance to the world today is being rediscovered, provides a coherent interdisciplinary conception of economic facts, grounded in their cultural context, in which economics, law and ethics are reconciled. the author then explains how economic insecurity is conceptualized as an “instituted” process with this theory of institution. a better mastery of this specific school of thought in economics appears to help solve the problems met by mainstream economics by proposing a real theoretical alternative for the development of a truly evolutionary, trans-disciplinary, and ethical economic theory. the author thus presents a very stimulating reflection in a context where every government, party, or organization is searching for means to bring us out of the economic crisis while trying not to have such a situation reproduce itself too quickly. the author considers that the current worldwide crisis characterizes itself by an overdeveloped sophisticated financial sector which is clearly detrimental to sustained employment, due to the fact that labour has become the main adjustment variable in economic processes. if this crisis, which, according to the author “has now degenerated in many countries into a crisis of employment, jeopardizing the economic status of important segments of the population and primarily those who are the most vulnerable—is a turning point for the goal of achieving decent work and social justice, it is clear that platforms of action should be rooted in a sound theoretical basis.” it is in this perspective that the author presents commons’s institutionalism as an economic theory that could play an important role in the social sciences. the general thrust of the paper is thus to demonstrate that commonsian institutionalism represents a real theoretical alternative to mainstream economics for the development of a truly evolutionary, trans-disciplinary, and ethical economic theory that could contribute positively to less economic insecurity and more social justice. work, insecurity, and social justice 153 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 all four papers thus contribute to important insights on the issue of economic insecurity and social justice. the last paper does so from a more theoretical perspective, engaging in discussion on the right to work and the right to a decent income as a basic issue of social justice, thus answering standing’s proposal (1999) of citizenship income, while the three others address the situation of specific categories of workers, namely aging workers in the first two cases, and women versus men in the third. as mentioned above, the specificity of the north-american context for aging workers is that they are expected to ensure their economic security largely on their own. in this context, aspirations to prolong working life may appear, but as we say, these aspirations appear to be associated to a demand for more flexibility at the end of the life course. the situation in belgium is different and the paper shows that policies have an important impact on the attitudes and preferences of workers, given their impact on income and economic security. it also shows that it may be difficult to change policies once workers have organized on the basis of specific policies, for example more generous benefits in a situation of unemployment, as is the case in belgium. in canada, social benefits are often not as high as is the case in many european countries, especially the nordic countries; economic insecurity can lead to important issues of social justice. but age is not the only dimension to be taken into account and one paper shows that a gendered analysis brings forth interesting elements. in québec, it appears that women’s employment situation has improved and is closer to that of men in general. however, this situation also highlights the importance of detailed analyses of various groups, since the situation varies widely, and low levels of education still bear a cost in terms of economic insecurity. all these issues lead to important questions in terms of social justice: how to ensure more social justice among various groups in the labour market and how can more justice be ensured through policy? all the issues of insecurity and social justice could not be covered in so few articles, but the articles in this issue do lead to important questions that encourage further research on the relations between work, insecurity, and social justice. the question, thus, appears to remain open still: how to ensure simultaneously economic security, social justice, and efficiency? (standing, 1999; dasgupta, 2001). the papers on aging workers highlight the importance of the non-financial advantages of work, including participation in social life, self-esteem, and personal development, which explains why some workers want to go on working past retirement age for reasons other than economic security. this however raises a social justice issue, since not all workers can work at a later age; work is more physically difficult for manufacturing workers than white collar and often leads to an accelerated biological aging process. also, as mentioned previously, the stigma attached to social assistance still remains and this is why economic security needs to be addressed and orthodox economics and neoliberal views questioned (see espinganderson, 1985 and chapon & euzéby, 2002, on the evolution of social models and the market). this issue of retirement and the end of one’s career remains an object of debate in relation to social justice and economic security; the present economic crisis has questioned the neoliberal orthodoxy, many wonder whether our governments and leaders will have the courage to question dominant economic dogma and try to ensure social justice and economic security. the papers presented here cannot address all of the many dimensions of insecurity and social justice. they do make a contribution, however, to the debate on issues of 154 diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 work and economic insecurity and they relate to social justice inasmuch as the right to work and the right to a decent income are at the basis of the issues dealt with in all the papers. the papers thus constitute an important contribution to advancing the debate on the meaning of insecurity, on the dimensions to be studied, and on ways to resolve the situation of insecurity, while respecting social justice issues. references chapon, s., & euzéby, c. (2002). vers une convergence des modèles sociaux européens? revue internationale de sécurité sociale, 55(2), 49-71. dasgupta, s. (2001). employment security: conceptual and statistical issues. geneva: international labour office. esping-anderson, g. (1985). politics against markets: the social democratic road to power. princeton: princeton university press. fontan, j.-m., klein, j.-l., & tremblay, d.-g. (2005a). collective action in local development: the case of angus technopole in montreal, canadian journal of urban research, 13(2), 317-336. fontan, j.-m., klein, j.-l. & tremblay, d.-g. (2005b). innovation sociale et reconversion économique. le cas de montréal. paris: l’harmattan. freyssinet, j. (2003). les trois inflexions des politiques de l'emploi. alternatives économiques, 210, 38-45. lowe, g., schellenberg, g., & davidman, k. (1999). re-thinking employment relationships. (cprn discussion paper no. w-5.) ottawa: canadian policy research network. paugam, s. (1998). le revenu minimum d'insertion en france après six ans: un bilan contrasté. intervencions économiques, 28, 21-45. retrieved from www.teluq.uquebec.ca/interventionseconomiques standing, g. (1999). global labour flexibility: seeking distributive justice. london: palgrave. statistics canada, (2006). chapter 4: education, women in canada: a gender-based statistical report (5th ed.) (p. 89-97), (catalogue no. 89-503-xpe). ottawa, on: statistics canada. tremblay, d.-g. (2008). precarious work and the labour market. in d. raphael (ed.), social determinants of health: canadian perspectives (pp. 75-87). toronto: cspi press. tremblay, d.-g. & rolland, d. (2000). labour regime and industrialisation in the knowledge economy: the japanese model and its possible hybridisation in other countries. labour and management in development journal, 1(7), 1-20. vosko, l. f., zukewich, n., & cranford, c. (2003, october) le travail précaire: une nouvelle typologie de l'emploi. l'emploi et le revenu en perspective, 4(10), 40-51. quijada -final deb 23 20 correspondence address: david quijada, ethnic studies program, saint mary’s college of california, moraga, ca, 94575; email: daq2@stmarys-ca.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 117-121, 2020 creative intervention we the people… mestizo arts & activism collective salt lake city, usa we the people… was written and performed by the mestizo arts & activism (maa) collective (https://maacollective.org), a social justice think tank led by the urgent concerns of young people of color living on the west side of salt lake city, utah (usa). the piece was written at a time when political and public debate over immigration status, education, and geographic boundaries has become increasingly hostile, especially as utah’s 90% white majority has shifted over the last few decades. because immigration issues are one of the most important concerns for youth researchers, one significant site for our activist research is the utah state capitol. during each legislative session, we follow proposed policies and discuss their implications and potential impacts upon our community. we write our representatives, track bills, attend committee hearings, and speak to legislators about our concerns. within this time span, hundreds of anti-immigrant policies have been proposed, dominating the state’s annual legislative session with xenophobic discourse that fans the fire of racism, “demonizing” immigrants as the main problem with balancing the state budget and overall economic crisis (cahill, 2010; cahill, gutiérrez alvarez & quijada cerecer, 2015). several of our participatory research projects were inspired by our experiences at the state capitol and address particular legislative concerns that affect our community. in february 2008, we co-created the site-specific spoken word piece, we the people, which maa performed in the rotunda of the state capitol on the last night of the utah state legislative session. speaking to the ongoing struggles faced by our communities that are in stark relief today, the piece was inspired by our research and was another way that we shared our work with a broader public.1 the title of the piece, we the people, refers to the preamble of the 1 mestizo arts and activism collective considers how the arts might provide a social and shared context for challenging racialized characterizations by engaging community-based participatory action research for social change (see quijada cerecer, cahill, gonzález coronado & martinez, 2019). mestizo arts & activism collective studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 117-121, 2020 118 u.s. constitution. in an effort to complicate the said inclusive and just declaration of “we the people,” maa youth researchers rearticulated what “we the people” means based on their personal, familial, and communal lived experiences with immigration debates and policies. *** the following transcript is read by 10 youth researchers who organize themselves into two opposing groups: residents of the westside (alberto, vicky, erica, antonia and octavio) and the corporates (amanda, azucena, theresa, daniel and lorenzo). pseudonyms have been used for youth researchers. (octavio) we the people of the westside! (wr2: erica & antonia) las supa cholas of love.3 (wr) we the people of the westside! (wr: alberto) we from your so-called “shadow” lands… my home… my pride land… come one… come all. welcome home, homes! (wr: octavio & alberto) home sweet home (shake hands). (wr: alberto) we are the familia, the people. we the familia who cares and has each other’s back. we the ones that regulate. (wr: vicky, erica & antonia) the sista cholas of love. (c 4 : amanda, azucena, theresa, daniel & lorenzo) walk toward the westside residents (alberto, vicky, erica, antonia, & octavio) – creating spatial divide and representing the rupture of safety – threatening body language. (c: amanda) we the people (the corporates) we’ve come to tell you what to do and how to live. it’s not my fault that you guys just can’t do everything we do and how we do it. that is the reason why we get lobbyists to change laws to fit our needs not yours. 2 wr = westside residents. 3 the super cholas of love. chola (singular) or cholas (plural) is a reclaimed urban latina identifier that in this context connotes a familial affiliation beyond street gang culture. 4 c = the corporates. we the people… studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 117-121, 2020 119 (c: azucena) we own your labor and know that you need the money… so, go ahead and quit if you don’t like the health plan… there’s a person behind you, waiting to replace you! not to worry – we got your interest in mind – so sit back, relax and let us take control. (c: theresa) we who started off by putting chains on ankles and wrists, and stole dirt and earth even though it was a gift. we who re-sell what you build and break your backs in the field so our green eyes of dead presidents can keep slavery alive, and if you don’t do your time in our factory then were sure we have one of your family doin’ time in the yard without salary. westside residents speak in protest and with assertive voice. (wr: erica) you call us gangsters and yet you have come to change laws that only profit you… (wr: antonia) you call us gangsters and yet you have come to raid our minds with your ideas and your ideas only… and sequester our power. (wr: alberto) you are the wall of white middle class, heterosexual males that keep us from our rights, only willing to jump5 us in if we conform to your ideas. (wr: vicky) you are the gangsters who masquerade behind suitcases and ties, who sit behind the bougie6 appeal of your seats … complain at defeats and seek the demise of those who challenge you. you are the blue and the red – republican and democrat. the gangsters who hide behind suits and ties… telling us allllllllllll lies. in retort, two corporates (lorenzo & daniel) – who turn out to be undercover intergalactic aliens in shades and suits – speak. (c: lorenzo) you don’t know who i am. i am more than you. what makes you think we are equal? (c: daniel) we are those beings who observe and experiment with laws because we know we shall fly free of our own decision and their consequences. who no doubt can reconvene, clean the board and start all over, again… and again…. 5 a slang term used to initiate someone into a street gang. 6 abbreviated version of bourgeoisie. mestizo arts & activism collective studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 117-121, 2020 120 all corporate performers, including the undercover intergalactic aliens, unmask themselves (remove sunglasses), ending their performance as corporates. now all ten performers collectively speak to the audience. (lorenzo) we the people of color… the purples, blacks, yellows, browns, and reds… yes don’t forget the reds! (antonia) the people con sabor en la sangre!7 (daniel) we have abandoned the shadow to proudly speak our minds. to challenge the “commonsense” that claims we are apathetic and careless. (erica) it is obvious we will not melt into the pot, but rather will savor our flavors in a pico de gallo bowl. (octavio) we are most importantly the people who make up utah. (azucena & theresa) we are loyal and hardworking citizens who are not represented and listened to. (amanda) i am a sister. (alberto) a brother. (vicky) a mother. (alberto) a father. (octavio) and i am them and they are me. (lorenzo) we all smile, we all cry. (erica) we share the same land, breathe the same air, live on the same soil. why are we not treated the same? (all performers) we have come – our time is now! today! not yesterday! (antonia) we are rejecting the crumbs we have been given and demand that we be given a piece of the pie – a piece with which we will nourish our communities and counteract the hunger we have been plagued with. (octavio) we are hungry! hungry for change! 7 literally translated as flavor in the blood, which in this context represents the performers’ collective identity as people of color. we the people… studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 117-121, 2020 121 (all ten performers) meaningful change! references cahill, c. (2010). “why do they hate us?” reframing immigration through participatory action research. area, 42(2), 152-161. cahill, c., gutiérrez alvarez, l., & quijada cerecer, d. a. (2015). a dialectic of dreams and dispossession: the school-to-sweatshop pipeline. cultural geographies, 23(1), 121-123. quijada cerecer, d. a., cahill, c., gonzález coronado, y. s., & martinez, j. (2019). “we the people”: epistemological moves through cultural praxis. cultural studies-critical methodologies, 19(3), 214-221. studies in social justice volume 4, issue 1, 47-66, 2010 correspondence address: ada s. jaarsma, department of philosophy, sonoma state university, 1801 east cotati ave, rohnert park, ca 94928 usa. tel: +1 707 664-3192, email: ada.jaarsma@sonoma.edu issn: 1911-4788 rethinking the secular in feminist marriage debates ada s. jaarsma 1 department of philosophy, sonoma state university, rohnert park, california, usa abstract the religious right often aligns its patriarchal opposition to same-sex marriage with the defence of religious freedom. in this article, i identify resources for confronting such prejudicial religiosity by surveying two predominant feminist approaches to same-sex marriage that are often assumed to be at odds: discourse ethics and queer critical theory. this comparative analysis opens to view commitments that may not be fully recognizable from within either feminist framework: commitments to ideals of selfhood, to specific conceptions of justice, and to particular definitions of secularism. i conclude by examining the “postsecular” turn in feminism, suggesting that we can see the same-sex marriage debate not in terms of an impasse between differing feminist approaches, but in terms of shared existential and ethical affinities. introduction several years ago, good friends of mine, two gay men in san francisco, invited their friends and family to participate in a beautifully organized two-day wedding. one of them, reflecting on the significance of the event, explained that he was interested in discovering who—and who would not—accept this invitation and, by attending the wedding, acknowledge his marriage as real and meaningful. deciding to marry and, perhaps more importantly, holding a public ceremony in the presence of community reflects core values that both men uphold: building a family, owning a home, demonstrating intrinsic connections between their way of life and their identities as gay men. the wedding itself, then, was not simply about the sharing of vows, but rather about securing recognition, by the people who matter most, of their relationship and life together. this recognition was achieved literally in the form of a large marriage certificate, signed by every guest; everyone who attended the wedding was in this way bearing witness. according to these friends of mine, to advocate same-sex marriage, whether as a bride, groom, or guest, is to stand up for specific ideals of social justice. these ideals include the equality of all citizens under the law, such that marriage is an inclusive institution, available to heterosexual and to gay and lesbian couples. efforts to legalize same-sex marriage stem from more than simply an abstract commitment to equality. legalization reflects the achievement of the public recognition of non48 ada s. jaarsma studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 heterosexual commitments. such recognition is coveted by gay and lesbians like my friends in san francisco because it seems to verify and validate the essentially normal goodness of same-sex intimacy. the belief that same-sex marriage embodies ideals of equality and inclusivity animated the short-lived celebrations in san francisco of same-sex marriage in 2004, made legal by mayor gavin newsom and later annulled by the supreme court of california. as it happens, my friends got married in 2007, and so their wedding ceremony did not yield a legally bound marriage contract, since it did not occur in the brief months of 2008 in which same-sex marriage was actually legal in the state of california. whereas the state continues to uphold as legal the unions of those couples who did marry in california between june 16, 2008 and november 5, 2008, the federal government in the united states does not recognize any same-sex marriage as legal. as a canadian woman living in the united states, i am somewhat less persuaded that same-sex marriage should be an overarching ideal for social justice efforts, even though, since my partner is a woman and so cannot become my legal spouse, we are restricted from partaking of the significant privileges enjoyed by married people. for example, although i have permanent residency in the united states, my partner, who is finnish, cannot appeal to our relationship as grounds for access to residency herself. in contrast, since same-sex marriage has been legal at the federal level in canada since 2005, i would be able to sponsor her for residency in canada on the basis of our relationship. of course, i am delighted that this possibility exists and would not refute the essential rightness of the constitutional arguments that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in canada. however, as people who cross borders on a regular basis, my partner and i are not convinced that same-sex marriage actually does secure equality and civil inclusivity for every individual, especially given the contingencies of citizenship itself. if we attend to the fact that the laws and conventions that govern citizenship are historical and cultural and result inevitably in the exclusions of some from core rights and privileges enjoyed by others, then such exclusions become troubling because they reinforce highly problematic disparities between what is considered “normal” (good citizens with property and classmobility) and what is marginalized. moreover, even though we ourselves would benefit pragmatically from the immigration rights that emerge from legally recognized marital unions, the version of “family” that is affirmed by such rights is also essentially contingent. many people and countless domestic situations are excluded from such benefits: for example, single individuals, individuals who may be committed to each other but are not lovers, people with polyamorous relationships. in my reflections here, i do not intend to undermine my friends’ approach to samesex marriage. in fact, i want to articulate their framework—as well as my own—in light of two prevailing feminist methods of striving for social justice: liberal discourse ethics and queer critical theory. it can be valuable to examine debates about social justice, like the debate within feminist philosophy between proponents of discourse ethics and queer critical theory, because a comparative analysis of these different approaches can make explicit the commitments that underlie each framework. rethinking the secular 49 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 on the one hand, discourse ethics argues that the ideals of reciprocity, respect, and reflexivity should govern public debate and policy change, and for this community of thinkers, social justice manifests as a drive towards equality and enfranchisement. along these lines, my friends in san francisco celebrate same-sex marriage and work for its legalization because it represents real progress towards equality under the law. in contrast, the queer critics of these ideals argue against the goal of equality, associating it with a stifling homogeneity that promotes highly specific versions of morality and normalcy at the expense of other ways of living. i hesitate at the idea of a large wedding ceremony in which my partner and i exchange vows in part because of the normalizing, often consumer-based, prescriptions that seem inherent in such rituals. i find it difficult to imagine a wedding that does not in some way depend upon ideologies of consumption and conformity to heterosexual notions of nuclear family; this difficulty in turn raises questions about the nature of marriage itself, given its institutional history of racist and patriarchal practices. within these two lines of thought, we find different models for where we should ultimately place our hope for social justice and are left with two seemingly incommensurate questions. 2 this debate currently animates feminist discussions about the legalization of samesex marriage. whereas discourse ethics emphasizes the inclusive ideals of social institutions, the queer critique examines the exclusionary effects of an institution such as marriage. differing positions on the significance of the genealogy of marriage, on the relations between law and intimacy, and on the public benefits and harms resulting from various marriage policies emerge from these two camps. should we look to ideals like autonomy and equality to guide our theory and activism? or should we be attuned to the exclusions that result from what may be misguided attempts to secure equal recognition under the law? 3 nevertheless, while proponents of each approach may disagree about the relationship of individuals to the public sphere, they share important underlying feminist commitments to identify and undermine patriarchal forms of prejudice. in the ongoing debates over same-sex marriage, such prejudice is found most visibly within the christian right in the united states. 4 the christian right’s opposition to same-sex marriage, which is at odds with both feminist arguments, depends upon maintaining a firm religious/secular divide, and this divide, a divide which is generally unquestioned by all parties involved in debating same-sex marriage, is the subject of my analysis in this article. in its battle against same-sex marriage, the christian right combats what its leaders call the “perilous ascendancy of american secularism” (castelli, 2007, p. 156). such arguments mobilize explicit language of religious persecution, with evangelicals positioned as martyrs in an ongoing “war on christians.” within this conservative logic, “efforts by gay people to seek redress in the courts become acts of religious intolerance and persecution” (2007, p. 160) because this activity is identified not as the democratic work of citizens but as a secularizing assault against highly specific theological and cultural commitments. the legalization of same-sex marriage is thus cast as an attack on christianity itself. although most of the virulent opposition to same-sex marriage employs religious rhetoric, it is far from apolitical. these arguments are, according to elizabeth castelli’s (2007) analysis, unabashedly political, framing issues like the opposition to same-sex marriage in terms of religious freedom, “arguing that christians are the victims of bigotry, second-class status, and court-sanctioned injury” (p. 159). the 50 ada s. jaarsma studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 christian right thus appropriates language of equality and reciprocity, mobilizing the resonances of terms associated with the liberal left even as it attempts to combat leftist political platforms that place gay and lesbian unions on equal footing with the “traditional” and “religiously sanctioned” family unit. it endorses deeply discriminatory views of gender and sexuality, prejudices that kathleen sands (2008) has recently diagnosed as a “revitalized patriarchalism” (p. 318). its anti-feminist opposition to same-sex marriage depends upon explicitly religious rhetoric for its condemnation of deviations from a heterosexual “creational” ideal of marriage. 5 the political and cultural impact of a growing alliance between the christian right and pro-market capitalists has been considerable, especially in the united states.6 normative ideals and normalizing critique given this powerful christian-capitalist alliance, there is a clear need for productive, explicitly feminist work that subverts the influence of such patriarchal bellicosity. rather than adjudicating between the two feminist modes of reasoning about samesex marriage described above, in what follows, i outline their contrasting positions in order to identify valuable resources within each approach for confronting the revitalized patriarchalism of the christian right. i go on to assess how the feminist debates over same-sex marriage risk reinforcing a religious/secular divide, and i question the consequences of this divide. i argue that reflecting on the religious/secular divide is useful for several reasons. first, it opens to view commitments that may not be fully recognizable from within either feminist framework, commitments to ideals of selfhood and to specific conceptions of justice. i will outline, for example, how discourse ethics’ approach to secularism tends to invoke freedom as a matter of choice, asserted without coercion by individuals; in contrast, the queer approach to secularism appeals to a form of freedom in which selfhood is understood to be a matter of becoming, along particular lines. second, when the religious/secular divide remains under-theorized, it risks granting deference to the category of religion itself, unintentionally ceding ground to anti-feminist patriarchalisms. third, by reflecting on an alternative genealogy of secularism, we can access valuable ethical and existential resources, resources that offer pragmatic means by which to advance feminist projects of social justice; these resources correspond to what i will identify as a “postsecular turn” in contemporary feminist thought. both feminist discourse ethics and queer critical theory are united in their critique of conservative patriarchalisms and offer tools to identify and overturn social injustice. their methodologies differ considerably, however, and at the heart of this difference is this question: do we want to achieve normalcy, or do we want to subvert normalcy? whereas discourse ethics looks to normative ideals as both guided by and guiding healthy democratic practice, the queer critique characterizes such ideals as exclusive, normalizing prescriptions. pragmatically, this debate means questioning the degree to which state intervention should secure equal rights based on formal recognition and substantive access to privileges. should we, for example, strive for full civic inclusion in our communities by securing the legality of same-sex marriage? or rethinking the secular 51 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 should we rather focus our attention on ways in which marriage laws deepen longstanding prejudices about who does and does not belong in our communities? feminist theorists who employ the liberal project of discourse ethics look to a procedural conception of justice and uphold a conception of rationality that is essentially emancipatory. according to this approach, as well-socialized and educated citizens, we are able to engage in public debates that are inclusive and critical rather than in segregated debates that merely reinforce difference. in other words, through the very workings of public debate, we can hope to secure equality, reciprocity, and respect for all participants, despite differing cultural or religious backgrounds. 7 in the terms of discourse ethics, we can undermine discriminatory norms like heterosexism on two significant grounds. first, the sincerity required for discourse ethics depends upon an “exacting kind of impartiality” in which each participant actively puts herself into the situation of everyone else, taking the other’s understanding as seriously as her own (habermas, 1999/2003, p. 270; keller, 2008, p. 176). as citizens, we are each called to reflect on the values of our own particular communities and cultivate the capacity for acknowledging—as opposed to ignoring or repudiating—the stranger. the existence of a stranger challenges us to confront any prejudicial assumptions that might exclude this other individual. 8 in order to advocate for same-sex marriage employing the framework of discourse ethics, the case can be made that its legalization furthers the broader project of creating a legitimate democracy. according to discourse ethics, a shared world is not a given but a mandate that has to be achieved collaboratively: we actually achieve a moral and just society together through an inclusive “we-perspective” brought about by participants. take, for example, the advisory opinion to canada’s parliament that the legalization of same-sex marriage through the 2005 civil marriage act would have legal validity: in this opinion, the canadian supreme court explained, “our constitution is a living tree which, by way of progressive interpretation, accommodates and addresses the realities of modern life” (as cited in hogg, 2006, p. 717). since, according to discourse ethics, justice extends in principle to all individuals universally, we are prohibited from appealing to those particular norms that govern our own specific cultural or religious communities. rather, we must search for norms that are inclusive of the stranger and the neighbour, and the democratic ideals that govern this process will secure our hope for social justice. we can therefore condemn prejudicial exclusions—including arguments against same-sex marriage— both as falsely universalizing and as wrongly imperial about the goodness of one community’s norms over another. 9 this statement exemplifies the expectation upheld by discourse ethics that our democracies are, in jürgen habermas’s terms, “truth-sensitive” (2006, p. 18) and self-correcting. it is important to note that public debate can help legitimate democracy only through the specific institutions and procedures of each democratic system. in other words, the debates over same-sex marriage in canada and in the united states differ in part because of real procedural differences between the two countries. when the hawaii state supreme court ruled in favour of same-sex marriage in baehr v. lewin in 1993, this decision gave rise to sweeping countermobilizations across the us in “defense” of the sanctity of heterosexual family: the introduction of the defense of marriage act in 1996, the passing of many mini 52 ada s. jaarsma studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 domas by state referendums and ballot initiatives, and george w. bush’s declaration of a special “marriage protection week” in 2003.10 in contrast, same-sex marriage was legalized at the federal level in canada in 2005. in her analysis of this contrast, miriam smith (2005) points out that the samesex marriage debates within the united states reflect the very recent legal linkage between variant forms of sexuality and criminality (p. 226). it was only a few short years ago in 2003 that the u.s. supreme court overturned the criminalization of sodomy as unconstitutional in lawrence v. texas. 11 in canada, sodomy was decriminalized in 1969. because of this difference in the two nations’ historical timelines, smith explains, opponents of same-sex marriage in the united states tend to define non-normative sexualities as illegitimate on religious and moral terms, whereas in canada communities have had many decades to recover from the legacy of the rhetoric of criminality. in canada, then, the debate over the legalization of same-sex marriage can more naturally be treated as a question of human rights; opponents of same-sex marriage therefore lack easy recourse to the moralizing rhetoric south of the border. by citing this example, i do not mean to endorse a progressivist narrative in which equality results, somewhat inevitably, through historical developments; rather, i want to emphasize the specificities of not just the terrain of the debate itself but the institutional procedures for pursuing policy change. the second way in which discourse ethics enables us to undermine discriminatory norms like heterosexism concerns its distinction between two forms of rationality: “strategic” rationality, which is oriented towards profit, power, and efficiency, and “communicative” rationality, which is oriented towards truth, moral rightness, and democratic legitimacy. according to discourse ethics, strategic rationality threatens our capacity to achieve social justice when it colonizes social realms that are crucial for the socialization and coordination of citizens—realms that should be characterized by the contrasting form of reason, communicative rationality. 12 to participate in public debate is in principle to commit to combating the invasion of commercial interests into democratic spheres of education and media; we need access to good information as well as the freedom to make our own voices heard. emphasizing the priority of communicative reason over strategic reason is to affirm the fundamental equality of citizens because it is truth and moral rightness, not financial gain or power, to which public debate is oriented. we see this prioritizing of communicative reason in the marriage debates where many feminist liberals advocate for changes to marriage law because of the necessity of redistributing access to state-administered benefits, whether through a more egalitarian version of legalized marriage or through the dissolution of marriage altogether because of its inherent economic privileging of some relationships over others. 13 conversely, we find examples of the invasion of strategic reason into the realms of communicative reason in the christian right’s opposition to same-sex marriage when it employs the profit imperatives of the market rather than the valid claims of a democratic community. in the “evangelical” community in north america, prejudicial norms are promulgated through the contemporary commercial christian music industry, through very profitable magazines that advise girls and boys on appropriate lifestyle choices, and through an increasing number of television shows and films that pander to the christian consumer base. we can employ discourse rethinking the secular 53 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 ethics to call into question this encroachment of strategic interests into the realm of public debate.14 strategic reason is also at work in the expansion of the gay marketplace. in her recent analysis of gay tourism, for example, nan alamilla boyd (2008) identifies the neo-liberal imperatives of profit and efficiency that underlie gay and lesbian marketing campaigns, in which spending is equated with civil rights (p. 226). political enfranchisement, rather than securing the formal inclusion of all citizens, occurs through highly specific practices of consumption, and gay marriage becomes an export commodity, as cities, provinces, and countries that legalize same-sex marriage begin to actively court the “lavender dollar” (p. 228). whereas discourse ethics tends to support liberal arguments in favour of same-sex marriage, it does so on the basis of the equality of individuals, not on the grounds that the gay demographic is worthy of civic recognition because of its inherent promise of profitability. to sum up, becoming “normal” as a goal of discourse ethics involves specific acts and capacities: being able to listen impartially to others, especially to strangers, and engaging in public debate. on a broader level, as citizens, we need to be socialized in ways that cultivate our sensitivity to truth and to moral rightness. through these habits, we gain the will to oppose any procedures at odds with the ideals of equality and autonomy, as we develop suspicions toward arguments of profit and efficiency. to become normal is thus to become reasonable and to participate in the collaborative project of creating a healthy, legitimate democracy. the feminist argument that develops out of queer theory takes a more sceptical stance. rather than affirming the ideals of communicative reason, the queer critique looks to the exclusions inherent in certain versions of democratic enfranchisement. 15 these differing perspectives on “normal” hinge upon debates over the very nature of identity-claims: is an identity claim a demonstration of authenticity? if so, then a claim to gay or lesbian identity is deserving of recognition and equal treatment under the law in part because it reflects the transparent self-understanding of a citizen. in contrast, is such a claim potentially a symptom of bad faith because ideals of essentialism depend upon masking their prescriptive and contingent nature? whereas the role of the citizen in discourse ethics reflects an essentially formal identity, open in principle without discrimination to all who belong to the nationstate, the alternative feminist approach to social justice questions such claims to neutrality. according to the queer critique, the so-called “good citizen,” recognized and rewarded under the law, not only reflects highly substantive cultural values but also reinforces the likelihood of ongoing state-regulated inequities. the “good citizen” can pass as “normal” and is therefore subjectively invested in perpetuating what is normal. becoming normal, on these terms, inevitably supports the discriminatory exclusion of many forms of difference. 16 in the case of this latter argument, those citizens who enjoy certain privileges do so through the specifics of their situated bodies, specifics which do not appear marked precisely because they accord with the normative picture of a deserving citizen—for example, whiteness, able-bodied and class-based indicators of mobility, gendered conformity, and heterosexuality expressed most commonly through marriage. such individuals can enjoy a sense of “rightness” and self-deservingness without needing to acknowledge the ways in which their situations and, perhaps more significantly, their identities conform to state-prescribed expectations. 54 ada s. jaarsma studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 depending on enfranchisement and other forms of state recognition for social justice, queer critics argue, only reinforces the normalizing powers of the state. in other words, we are included as enfranchised citizens only if we disavow our own bodily realities. 17 the history of marriage law, with its long-term legacy of discriminatory violence, demonstrates this linkage between enfranchisement and exclusion. becoming normal on these terms means essentially accepting the bribe of privilege offered by the governing legislative authorities that maintain the right to draw boundaries around heteroand homosexual identities and to determine what counts as a marriage. 18 amy l. brandzel (2005), for example, describes the history of marriage in the united states as exclusive, privileged, and normative, concluding that “advocacy for same-sex marriage reifies and reproduces these effects” (p. 173).19 we can find support for brandzel’s argument in the recent anti-proposition 8 campaigns in california, where the rhetoric often revolved around claims to normalcy: as in, since gays and lesbians are normal tax-paying citizens, we deserve the right to get married. the anti-proposition 8 campaigns relied upon images of upstanding, monogamous, often parental couples, images that illustrated conformity to class-based reproductive heterosexual norms: endorse our right to marry because we are just like you. according to the queer critique, such a campaign is not likely to transform inequitable values from within because affirming “normal” is always to risk demonizing the “abnormal.” rejecting claims to normalcy along these lines means that we cannot do what discourse ethics does, which is to assert the moral rightness of equality. rather, in contrast, a queer critique of prejudice tends to affirm what queer thinkers identify as the “perversity” of sexual desire. according to this line of thought, desire cannot be categorized as deviant or anomalous because there is no concomitant category of normal sexuality; given that the perversity of desire is universal, constituting a formal aspect of sexuality, then any juxtaposition of “normal” with “pathological” fails to take into account the actual workings of desire itself. 20 to ground one’s defence of same-sex marriage in one’s own claims to a “normal” identity, then, is to inadvertently subtend a logic of normal/pathological, since what is “normal” implicitly sets itself against what is “abnormal.” 21 this means that queer scepticism towards identity claims exposes problems with arguments for same-sex marriage that depend explicitly on identity politics. for example, rather than appealing to the shared ground of citizenship, the queer approach identifies the concept “citizen” as itself a source of discrimination and indefensible requirements. 22 especially in the united states, liberal advocates often argue for the legalization of same-sex marriage on the basis of an analogy between the civil rights movement and the ongoing exclusions faced by gay and lesbian citizens. just as anti-miscegenation laws were over-turned, so too should the exclusively heterosexual definition of marriage. in sharp contrast to this line of thought, the queer approach identifies such analogies between sexual orientation and race to be both ahistorical and insufficiently attuned to the intersecting relations of racialized, sexed, and gendered embodiment. 23 the emphasis on ahistoricity is noteworthy because it renders problematic the ways in which discourse ethics ignores the history of specific forms of reason. kimberly hutchings (2005), for example, points out that discourse ethics excludes other views because of its understanding of modern rationality: “in buying into rethinking the secular 55 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 [habermas’s] discourse ethics, one is also buying into an account of collective moral learning in which modernist liberal societies are the source of moral authority” (p. 162). hutchings claims that “civilization” is not in fact a component of reason. in other words, discourse ethics, despite its self-understanding as neutral and inclusive, endorses idealized conceptions of particular versions of rationality and argumentation. if we accept this argument, then we need to admit that it is a political argument and not simply a reflection of reason itself when we call for the taking on of another’s perspective (young, 1997, p. 47). 24 what does this translate into, in terms of actual practice? it means that the antidote to prejudice cannot simply involve recourse to education, reason, or public debate. moreover, as i seek to participate in debates, i cannot assume that the other’s point of view will be intelligible in my own terms. according to iris marion young (1997), it is ethically vital that we acknowledge the impossibility of impartial imagining (pp. 38-59) and seek to cultivate asymmetry and moral humility (p. 49). this approach leads us to an understanding of prejudice as the symptomatic expression of my own failure to listen and perhaps to be silent before the other. elsewhere, i describe these insights in terms of a certain “humility” in queer theory itself—a willingness to affirm the meaningfulness and fragility of desire in everyday life, especially in the face of diseases, prejudice, and change. 25 this humility means giving up one’s own claims to “identity” as a secure source of belonging, resisting the temptation to ground one’s sense of rightness by pointing to another’s deviance. it also means working for social justice by undermining the violence of not only marriage laws but the increasingly draconian laws that govern national borders and that set up ideological divides between “citizens” and “non-citizens.” secularism and the same-sex marriage debates in this section, i want to follow an intuition that the commitments of the two feminist frameworks come more closely into focus when we consider the forms of secularism at work within their approaches. because of the need to undermine the prejudicial arguments of the christian right, the two feminist approaches risk shoring up a religious/secular divide. this is problematic because it gives the christian right license to elevate its position as a defence of religion itself, thereby aligning the patriarchal opposition to same-sex marriage with freedom. in what follows, i explore the extent to which discourse ethics and queer critique cede the terrain of the “religious” to the anti-feminist patriarchalists, suggesting that ultimately the queer approach holds more potential for highlighting the instability of the boundary between the religious and the secular. the liberal feminism of discourse ethics tends to define secularism as nonsectarian openness to dialogue. in her persuasive criticisms of the opposition to same-sex marriage, for example, margaret denike (2007) makes the case that “religious doctrine is fundamentally incompatible with the secular law of liberal democracy” (p. 77). habermas, more moderately, warns that there are real social dangers when religious communities do not acknowledge the pluralistic nature of democracy. according to this line of thought, religious believers need to translate their own claims into terms that are inclusive of all citizens, regardless of background or religious affiliation, in order to be able to participate in democratic 56 ada s. jaarsma studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 society. when believers do not translate their claims, relying instead on arguments that make sense solely to members of their own community, habermas explains that they risk unleashing “a destructive potential” (2003, p. 104) that threatens the democratic project, as seen for example in the conflicts over “god, gays, and guns” in the 2004 elections in united states (2006b, p. 3).26 this liberal version of secularism, then, places a certain burden on religious communities by asking believers to translate their claims into accessible terms. this burden is justified in the name of securing religious freedoms for individuals and communities. according to the liberal terms of discourse ethics, the freedom of religion tends to be understood as an individual’s right to express his or her own choices about which beliefs to uphold and follow, choices that, by definition, are not imposed by external forces. 27 for example, canada’s supreme court advised parliament that the legalization of same-sex marriage would not mean that religious officials could be compelled to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies if they deemed such ceremonies to be contrary to their religious beliefs. rather than being obliged to participate in acts that contradict their beliefs, religious citizens have the constitutional right to uphold, freely, the truth of religious propositions.28 in other words, one’s right to religious belief is protected in part because of the very independent or non-coerced origins of those beliefs. an alternative approach to freedom of religion does not define belief in terms of an individual’s voluntary decisions about truth, emphasizing instead the many aspects of an individual’s situation, conscience, and socio-historical forces that might lead to specific religious actions and affiliations. 29 from this perspective, it seems misguided to place so much emphasis on individualist choice as it comes close to defining religion as yet another consumer good, such that religion reflects one’s lifestyle rather than reflecting, constitutively, an end in itself. it also seems to endorse a form of consumer-based citizenship—do-it-yourself (diy) citizenship— where freedom is essentially understood in terms of freedom of consumption. 30 from this line of thought, we can identify in liberalism what could be called an unintentional deference to the very category of religion. defining religion in terms of an individual’s chosen beliefs is not itself a neutral approach to religion, and we see this when we take a long historical view of liberalism’s emergence within specifically protestant concerns. the queer critique, positioned in part directly against liberalism’s appeals to neutrality and equality, seems to demonstrate this latter understanding of religious freedom, reflecting what we could call a different genealogy of secularism. rather than appealing to the secular state—since the state’s regulatory powers over intimacy and desire are in part defined as discriminatory—the queer approach to secularism emphasizes embodied practices, rather than beliefs and choices, and resists placing hope in the autonomy of the liberal individual. 31 while the term “belief” is used within liberalism to refer to the essence of all religions, “belief” as a concept actually reflects a metareligious understanding of religion, inherited from one specific religious tradition— namely, protestant christianity. 32 a protestant approach to religion emphasizes the capacity of an individual believer to choose, identify, and interpret his or her own beliefs, without relying on the mediation of authorities. liberal secularism, in other words, reflects what michael warner (2008) identifies as “the meta-religious rethinking the secular 57 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 understanding of post-calvinist protestantism, generalized as an understanding of religion per se” (p. 613).33 one feminist predicament that arises from this essentialized definition of religion is that religiously marked voices in the public sphere are able to position themselves as advocates, not only of their own particular theological traditions but of religion itself. kathleen sands (2008) comments that since the 1970s, “the more religiously orthodox a group is, the less feminist it will be. and the more orthodox and antifeminist a religious group is, the more its views are able to register in public life as religious” (p. 321). 34 this response, frequently articulated from within liberal feminism, identifies and seeks to undermine religious patriarchalism first by defining it as fundamentalist and second by refuting fundamentalism because of its essentially violent nature. however, one of the important arguments made from within secular studies is that equating fundamentalism with violence is ahistorical and risks masking ongoing acts of international violence. talal asad (1993), for example, directly refutes linking religious fundamentalism with violence, arguing instead that western imperialism, including the coercive increase of economic and ideological power over noneuropean peoples, is part of the conditions of possibility for modern liberal arguments about tolerance and rational progress (p. 229). in other words, the processes of westernization in non-western contexts, which appeal to the very ideals of tolerance, result in many forms of violence; this makes it highly difficult, according to asad, to distinguish between the so-called “liberating powers of transcendental reason” upheld by liberal discourse and the “secular powers that destroy and reconstruct” (p. 231). in my reflections on the differences between these two feminist approaches, i have come to see this next point as marking the biggest gulf between the two. if we take seriously the call to reflect historically on the religious/secular divide, we do not have recourse to one tempting way of responding to the increasingly aggressive anti-feminism of the christian right. rather than calling into question the distinction between the religious and the secular altogether, it seems that the queer critique tends to highlight the instability of the boundary between the two. this instability can be seen in the ways in which liberal secularism often seeks to remake religious subjectivities in order to make them compliant with liberalism. 35 from this perspective, determining which choices qualify as appropriately “religious” and, therefore, deserving of protection is not a neutral act, especially given the contrast of “religious” choices both with “secular” choices that remain unmarked and with choices that seem to conflict with protestant assumptions about religion and religiosity. as one example of the latter, saba mahmood (2005) points out that islam is frequently cast as an eruption of religion outside the supposedly “normal” domain of suitably individualist worship, and so “it is a secular-liberal inquisition before which islam must be made to confess” (p. 189). for example, the french government defines what is and is not religious attire (mahmood, 2006, p. 325), and so secularism can be seen in part as a reshaping of religion, rather than its banishment from the public sphere. put differently, secularism has not entailed the abandonment of religion as much as its ongoing regulation. just as the unmarked privileges of normative gender and heterosexuality tend to pose as neutral, the secular itself can invoke a certain neutrality, disavowing its own highly specific history, one which, as sands (2008) points out, provides generously 58 ada s. jaarsma studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 for those who bear its own cultural heritage (p. 309). the form of secularism underlying queer theory, then, provokes attention to the specifically protestant history, not only of liberal secularism but also of the shared common law traditions found in both us american and canadian marriage policies. 36 the postsecular turn in feminist reasoning these common law traditions emerged historically out of religious ecclesiastical practices, and so marriage itself, as an organizing social bond, has religious origins. as i mentioned above, my friends in san francisco, whose warm and celebratory wedding invited community support of their relationship, demonstrate a liberal approach to social justice, an approach that contrasts with my own commitments to social justice as a queer thinker. our differing choices related to marriage demonstrate differing forms of rationality, or different approaches to reasoning about the issue, each of which offers important ways to identify and overturn forms of injustice. 37 in my conclusion, i am not aiming to settle the question of whether or not we should as feminists support same-sex marriage in the name of social justice. rather, i want to raise the question of what it might look like to take up the alternative genealogy of secularism, described above, in order to participate in what rosi braidotti (2008) has called the “postsecular turn in feminism.” this turn, as an approach to articulating and advancing social justice, offers the possibility of an intellectual reconciliation between the two feminist modes of reasoning discussed above—a reconciliation based upon acceptance and perhaps even affirmation of their differences. while we may need to relinquish certainty about where our particular methods will lead us, foregoing the comfort that comes from adamantly endorsing one’s own ethical project, we gain hope in the futureoriented work of social change. rather than seeking to overcome the dissonances between the feminist liberal project and queer critical theory, the postsecular turn indicates tremendous value in dissonance itself. “postsecular” is a term that refers to the instability of the boundary between the “religious” and the “secular.” it prompts awareness of the very question of methodology—of how we decide to strive for social justice—because it calls attention to the habits, actions, and methods adopted by thinkers and activists as they attempt to achieve their varied goals. rather than focusing on our goals for social justice, we can focus on who we actually become, in and through our adoption of modes of rationality or reasoning. even scholarly techniques of criticism, for example, are oriented towards becoming specific kinds of actors: namely, individuals who are capable of highly particular skills or attuned to achieving particular ideals.38 according to postsecular thinking, to highlight the means through which an individual employs a particular framework is to examine his or her ethical aspirations; in these terms, reasoning practices are, essentially, ethical practices. by “ethical,” i am referring to capacities and potentialities that an individual gains, through his or her practices of reasoning. 39 the crux of this point is that it disturbs any supposed neutrality of secularizing modes of reason. by looking at the ethical significance of those tasks to which we along these lines, both discourse ethics and queer critical theory can be seen as essentially ethical projects. rethinking the secular 59 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 are devoted, the division between “religious” and “secular” becomes less relevant, and we face the challenge of accepting responsibility for our ethical practices, not taking them for granted as prescribed or inevitable. in other words, we take into account the very capacities that we have cultivated, opening up space for acknowledging other ethical practices. as individual thinkers and activists, we ourselves might participate in differing ethical projects. similarly, we can value differing ethical projects without needing to resolve this tension by subsuming the differences under the name of “tolerance.” we are left without the tempting recourse to condemn other ethical projects simply because they are religious, and this point might very well raise the stakes for feminist commitments. for example, referring to her own ethnography of the pious practices of islamic women in egypt, saba mahmood (2005) asks, “have i lost sight of the politically prescriptive project of feminism in pushing at the limits of its analytical envelope?” (p. 36). by “pushing at the limit,” i understand mahmood to be referring to the dissonance that results from seeing and perhaps even participating in various ethical projects, without collapsing their differences; while mahmood’s own feminist commitments seem in line with liberal democratic ideals, these commitments do not preclude her engagement with the very different practices of islamic piety. in other words, one’s own framework, while necessary for producing one’s own particular habits and goals, need not become the overarching lens through which to understand all social justice practices. the first quality of the postsecular turn, then, is concerned with acknowledging the ethical, rather than strictly rational or even political, nature of our social justice practices and accepting that dissonance might result from such an acknowledgment. the postsecular turn also calls attention to the impassioned ways in which we live out our commitments, thereby opening to view the existential component of social justice projects. by “existential,” i am referring to the subjective investments that animate our rational choices and to the meaning that we find and attribute to our social justice practices. when we strive to achieve social justice, we do more than make rational claims about justice; we participate and contribute to an ethos of debate, in and through the mode by which we articulate our claims. as actors, we inhabit rational arguments with passionate attitudes, and such attitudes can differ dramatically: we might hold onto our claims with such adamance that our attitudes become dogmatic or bullish, or, in contrast, we might infuse our arguments with a spirit of openness towards differing views. we might, for example, differ on substantive grounds about the nature or the goals of social justice and yet inhabit our ideals with a shared ethos of generosity and fallibility. likewise, as william connolly (2008) points out, evangelical and corporate leaders can share a spirit of revenge and bellicosity, despite considerable doctrinal differences (p. 41).40 put differently, the same argument can be inhabited by generous or by domineering forms of spirituality or ethos (p. 128).41 it is a real possibility to create pragmatic alliances, even with those who uphold different philosophical approaches, by searching for similarities in attitude or “affinities of spirituality” (connolly, 2008, p. 41). practically speaking, we can look for resonances with others who, regardless of their choice of rational framework, cultivate an existential ethos of generosity and peace. together, across theoretical divides, we can strengthen our opposition to prejudicial violence, opposing especially those thinkers and policy-makers who reinforce an ethos of bellicosity, 60 ada s. jaarsma studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 resentment, and vengeance. here is where theory and praxis intersect, and where we can find intellectual as well as pragmatic accord between discourse ethics and queer critical theory. how can we recognize existential allies whose spiritual ethos lines up with our own? one quality to both strive for ourselves and search out in allies emerges from an acceptance of the fallibility of our chosen methodologies: namely, the quality of humility. according to existential thought, our capacity for choice intensifies when we take responsibility for our own choices, including our chosen methodologies that we employ as we work for social justice. existentially speaking, when we “choose” to choose, we are able to acknowledge the contingency of our frameworks, rather than assuming them to be inevitable or unquestionable. this point may seem counterintuitive—that we increase our sense of responsibility when we attend carefully to the limits and partialities of our adopted frameworks. however, rendering explicit our own attachments to arguments removes their “conceit,” as connolly puts it (1995, p. 5).42 we can translate the first aspect of postsecular thinking—acknowledging that social justice can be sought through differing ethical projects—into our own existential approaches to social justice. in particular, by accepting that my own project of becoming is fallible and contingent, i allow for an expansiveness towards others’ equally fallible projects of becoming. for instance, my own enjoyment as a guest at my friends’ wedding was in no small part related to my sense that my friends’ position on same-sex marriage did not require complete consensus among the participants about the importance of marriage. i could participate fully without subscribing, myself, to the tenets of the ritual. choosing to choose one’s own methodology means resisting the temptation to turn one’s own goals into dogmas that are prescriptive of others’ choices. it also means recognizing the longings and needs of others, including the desire for recognition manifested in a wedding. the hope of postsecular thinking is that solidarity emerges most powerfully when people who, upholding differing ways of achieving social justice, forge alliances through shared existential affinities of generosity and openness towards dissonance. as i suggested above, however, liberal proponents of discourse ethics might experience more difficulty in adopting the postsecular turn. for example, in contemplating my friends once again, it is unlikely that their wedding plans could have included cultural rituals that conveyed the very partiality of pro-marriage arguments. it is hard to imagine, for example, a witness at a wedding whose appointed role would be to identify some of the problematic exclusions inherent with the institution of marriage. the emphasis placed on formal democratic procedures, inclusive in principle of all citizens, seems to be at odds with the postsecular emphasis on the specificity and contingency of ethical projects of becoming. whereas the postsecular affirmation of liberal becoming follows rather naturally from its underlying assumptions, the reverse is not necessarily so—that liberalism is, alongside other possibilities, one approach to inhabiting and passionately embracing a path towards social justice. however, the hope remains that the individual liberal actor, encouraged to contemplate his or her own subjective and existential choices about social justice, might thereby take up responsibility for those choices in an expansive and authentic mode of choosing to choose.43 rethinking the secular 61 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 there is a time for fighting passionately for the legalization of same-sex marriage, and also a time to protest the normalizing forces of marriage, consumption, and border-policing policies. the same person might participate in these various projects at different times, for convincing reasons. given that discourse ethics and queer critical theory already do exist alongside each other, occupying different contexts for differing purposes, we may embrace the tensions that come from affirming different methods. 44 we might accept, without resentment, the contingency of our own goals, as we hold out hope for a variety of ideals of social justice. notes 1 i would like to thank tara pedersen and lindy patterson for contributing invaluable insights and suggestions to this article. 2 for the sake of clarity, i am grouping together disparate thinkers under these two names, “discourse ethics” and “queer critique.” while i hope to show that particular concepts and commitments can become clearer through comparative analysis, i realize that there are limitations to delineating arguments in this way. for example, not every thinker that i cite self-identifies in terms of “discourse ethics” or “queer critique.” as well, while i am identifying both of these frameworks as “feminist,” arguing that productive alliances can be forged between these approaches, the term “feminist” is currently itself a matter of debate. for example, janet halley’s analysis of queer theory depends in part upon a real category distinction between feminist and queer commitments (2006). similarly, see young and boyd (2008) for an analysis of same-sex marriage debates in canada in which liberal discourse ethics is identified as distinct from feminist arguments; their analysis challenges my alignment of discourse ethics with feminism. while i am sympathetic especially to halley’s position, i am interested in advancing an argument about the “postsecular feminist turn” in which both frameworks can be understood as valuable and productive for feminism. 3 nancy cott, a preeminent feminist historian of marriage, writes, for example, “a just marriage policy can arise only from a clear definition of the public good, built on a vital sense of the collective public” (2004, p. 36). to debate marriage policy is also to debate larger questions about the regulatory boundaries of specific social relations. 4 i have decided not to employ the term “fundamentalist” as the optimal adjective for this movement, although it is a term frequently employed to refer to the self-designation by militant protestant christian organizations, such as the moral majority, which emerged in the mid to late 20th century (marsden, 1991, p. 4). the term “fundamentalism” seems most useful from within the framework of discourse ethics, where “fundamentalism” refers to the refusal of a religious community to undertake the learning process that habermas (2005/2006) argues is imperative for all members of a secularized nation—namely, the process that compels both secular and religious adherents to reflect on their own respective limits (p. 23). 5 for an example of this kind of religious rhetoric in the christian evangelical tradition, see tanya erzen’s recent analysis of the ex-gay christian movement, which employs highly determined notions of identity and sexuality in order to legitimate solely a heterosexual model of marriage (2006). 6 this argument can be found in william connolly’s compelling analysis of the alliance of capitalists and conservative christians in the united states; while the capitalists and the evangelical leaders do not make identical arguments about same-sex marriage, they share what connolly calls a defensive bellicosity: “leaders insist that they are being persecuted unless they are thoroughly in power” (2008, p. 44). 7 feminist theorists who exemplify this approach include seyla benhabib (1992), nancy fraser (1985), maría pía lara (1998), and amanda anderson (2005). 8 see charles wright (2004) for an analysis of postconventional moral reasoning and feminist theory. on wright’s interpretation, the distinction between conventional and postconventional rationality is between two modes of moral reflection; the latter mode is marked by the insight into the contingencies of custom and tradition that must be justified 62 ada s. jaarsma studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 discursively. on his account, then, postconventional morality is sufficiently critical for subverting our own prejudices. 9 similarly, prime minister jean chretien reversed his own position in 2003, when he voted against a motion by the alliance party to define marriage as essentially heterosexual; he attributed his reversal to the recognition that “society has evolved” (as cited in hiebert, 2003, p. 13). 10 pointing out the irony of bush’s “marriage protection week,” amy brandzel asks, “what could have arisen to threaten the citadel of marriage in spite of doma, the mini-domas, and marriage’s grounding in the natural and eternal heterosexual couple” (2005, p. 180)? similarly, wendy brown comments that “marriage grows steadily more fragile and imperiled even as it remains idealized, sought after, and clung to” (2004, p. 89). 11 another key procedural difference, in the united states, opponents of same-sex marriage have access to state-level initiatives not available in canada, and marriage is largely a matter of state jurisdiction. in contrast, due to the constitutional division of powers, the canadian provinces lack jurisdiction over marriage, and so in 2003, the supreme court of canada’s advisory opinion upheld the federal government’s exclusive authority over the definition of marriage. this made possible the subsequent legalization of same-sex marriage in canada in 2005. 12 see fraser (1985). 13 for examples of this argument, see denike (2007, p. 81) and card (2007, p. 29). denike calls an “integrated approach” to feminist arguments about same-sex marriage, bringing together the demand for legal recognition with a substantive redistribution of socioeconomic resources. while i agree with the way in which denike characterizes these two arguments, i am aligning them both with the broader project of discourse ethics because i think that the distinction between strategic and communicative action enables both approaches to social justice. i realize that my rendering of discourse ethics is particularly broad and may not convince every reader, given for example nancy fraser’s emphasis on the real differences between the politics of recognition with redistributive politics. 14 pointing to the role that strategic reason plays in the christian right’s operations, connolly (2008) refers to “that ungodly alliance between cowboy capitalism and extremist christianity” (p. 62). more specifically, same-sex marriage is often opposed in the name of an alignment between capitalism, creation, and god, in which, as connolly (2008) puts it, “the christian, heterosexual family becomes the wondrous site of sexual excitement” (p. 31). 15 thinkers who follow in the spirit of this argument include lauren berlant (1997), michael warner (2002), eric o. clarke (2000) and janet e. halley (2000b). feminist interlocutors of discourse ethics who join queer theorists in questioning the claims to normativity include iris marion young (1997) and kimberly hutchings (2005). 16 for a more in-depth explanation of the existential aspects of queer theory, see my chapter “the ideology of the normal: desire, ethics, and kierkegaardian critique” (2009). 17 eric o. clarke (2000) makes this point from within the context of queer theory, referring to the “subjunctive imperatives” of the democratic promise of inclusion—act as if you accord with the universal characteristics of whiteness, straightness, et cetera. similarly, see eric fassin (2001) for an analysis of the emergence of “gay conservative” arguments in favour of same-sex marriage rights in the united states, including, for example, the claim that “it is by normalizing homosexuality that homosexuals are made ‘normal’” (p. 222). contrasting the history of same-sex marriage debates in the us with contemporary debates in france, fassin (2001) demonstrates the importance of considering the political and historical context of the various logics employed in such public sphere debates. 18 see janet e. halley (2000a) for an examination of ways in which the category of heterosexuality is epistemologically determined in two juridical cases. similarly, see claudia card (2007) for a rejection of the legalization of marriage per se because such legalization involves both the recognition and regulation of intimate relationships by the state. card (2007) points out, “abusive marriages easily become lethal,” and it can be highly difficult to exit an abusive marriage because the state demands that certain demonstrable grounds be met. because of the benefits attached to marriage, moreover, marriage as an institution contributes to the inequitable distribution of goods in society (p. rethinking the secular 63 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 25). card (2007) therefore explains, “my ideal is that the law not define or in any other way regulate durable intimate unions between freely consenting adults” (p. 27). 19 for another exemplary argument along these lines see siobhan b. somerville (2005). 20 for examples of this particular line of thought, see lee edelman (2004), james penney (2006), and tim dean (2009). it is noteworthy that within queer theory it is the lacanian theorists above all who argue that there is an emancipatory promise to be found within the universality of perversity. 21 even a defence of gay identity as “normal” betrays the workings of desire; along these lines, for example, tim dean claims that “the ego, even the gay ego, is the enemy of desire” (1995, p. 125). 22 brandzel writes, for example, “i believe that ‘queer’ and ‘citizen’ are antithetical concepts” (2005, p. 197). similarly, lisa duggan remarks, “surely gay respectability politics and the sentimentality of the citizen who only wants to be ‘good,’ now dominant on the us political landscape, do not lead us anywhere else, but only into the moribund institutions that deaden the body politic (marriage, the military)” (2009, p. 279). 23 for examples of scepticism towards analogies between same-sex marriage and the overturning of anti-miscegenation laws, see janet e. halley (2000a) and somerville (2005). 24 young argues that seyla benhabib’s feminist intervention into discourse ethics sustains the privilege given by habermas to the historical “achievement” of intercultural moral learning. 25 see my forthcoming article “queering kierkegaard: sin, sex, and critical theory” where i expand on this point, looking especially at the role of silence in queer critical theory. 26 in this liberal argument, the secular state is often described as a historical achievement, crucial for the reduction of religiously based violence. maeve cooke (2007) describes the danger, for example, that “dispensing with the requirement of a secular basis for political authority will create the conditions for the kind of religiously-based, authoritarian state that the secular state sought to overcome” (p. 234). 27 describing this liberal approach to religious freedom, michael j. sandel (2004) writes, “religious beliefs are ‘worthy of respect,’ not in virtue of what they are beliefs in, but rather in virtue of being ‘the product of free and voluntary choice,’ in virtue of being beliefs of a self unencumbered by convictions antecedent to choice” (p. 84). kathleen sands (2008) identifies this approach as the “exceptionalist tradition”, in which religion is identified by interior faith, which cannot be “coerced” (p. 310) and which is incommensurable with the secular realm of politics, law, and public debate. 28 for a description of the supreme court’s advisory opinion, see peter w. hogg (2006, p.720). 29 sandel (2004) describes nicely the ways in which this second approach to the freedom of religion contrasts from the liberal understanding. rather than maintaining that religious beliefs can be adequately described as “the product of free and voluntary choice of the [unencumbered] faithful” (p. 85), in this alternative approach, religious liberty is defined in terms of the freedom of conscience; as “encumbered” selves, we have the right to follow the dictates of our conscience, duties that we cannot renounce and so, in a sense, are not choosing ourselves. 30 as anne cronin (2000) explains, diy citizens express individuality through fashion-based choices. the need for self-expression modeled by consumption reflects what cronin (2000) calls the imperative of “compulsory individuality” (p. 277), framed through consumerist discourses of self-actualization and choice: “the promise of the brand is that it taps into and expresses the essence of who you are in ways that you can barely articulate yourself” (p. 276). 31 michael warner (2008) makes this case persuasively (p. 612). 32 in addition to warner, kathleen sands (2008) makes this point as well, adding that this definition of religion also risks making certain anti-judaic assumptions: “and if modern western secularism constitutes a descendent of christian universalism, it may carry an inherent anti-semitism that jews have learned to navigate, just as they always have navigated their way within christian hegemony” (p. 318). 33 warner (2008) suggests that what we actually mean by religion could be better described as “religiosity about religion” (p. 616), arguing that when secular democratic governments manage religious freedom, they are actually regulating “what counts as religion” (p. 613). 34 according to sands (2008), this public defence of religion has in recent years begun to lose its feigned universality, replaced instead by an aggressive, openly ethnocentric evangelicalism (p. 324). 64 ada s. jaarsma studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 35 for example, saba mahmood (2006) claims that liberal secularism often involves the remaking of religious subjectivities in order to make them compliant with liberalism; in other words, there is a “civilizing and disciplining” normative impetus here that calls itself religiously neutral (p. 328). 36 in its judgment in favour of the legalization of same-sex marriage in goodridge v. department of public health (2003), for example, the massachusetts state supreme court cited the ontario court of appeals decision, halpern v. canada (2003), demonstrating the shared basis of english common law in massachusetts and ontario. see smith (2007, p. 14). 37 for example, adèle mercier (2008) suggests that the marriage debates can best be understood by assessing the ideals and models of reason at work implicitly within the various lines of argumentation. examining the arguments made by the opposition to samesex marriage in canada, for example, mercier (2008) comments, “if same-sex marriage were unreasonable, it wouldn’t take such unreasonable arguments to prove it” (p. 409). 38 warner (2004) explains, “critical reading is the pious labour of a historically unusual sort of person” (p. 36), qualifying the so-called “objectivity” of the secular scholar in terms of the “piety” of acquiring academic skills and following academic conventions. 39 the term “ethics” has a wide variety of references; in this context, i am employing the term in line with thinkers like saba mahmood and michael warner who look to michel foucault’s later writings on the ethical practices of selfhood. 40 similarly, gilbert herdt (2009) describes the opposition to same-sex marriage as a movement to incite “moral panic,” concluding that “their aim is not to educate but to promote panic and confusion, thus shutting off debate. we cannot have democracy in that way; down that road lays fascism” (p. 193). 41 connolly (2008) writes, “a key idea is that affinities of spirituality—whether finding expression as a devotion to a loving god, a disposition to tolerance, care for the future, love of this world, or a drive to revenge against the most fundamental terms of human existence—often jump across different professions of creed, doctrine, and philosophy” (p. 41). 42 kathleen sands (2008) notes that the arguments advanced by the religious patriarchalists no longer even pretend to invoke universality (p. 324), demonstrating instead attitudes of resentment towards any alternative positions. in sharp contrast, then, we can find ways to accept without resentment the contestability of our chosen philosophical frameworks in the eyes of others (connolly, 2008, p. 7). 43 see my forthcoming article “habermas’s kierkegaard and the nature of the secular” for an examination of the existential elements of liberal discourse ethics. 44 warner suggests that liberal glbt projects and queer projects need not be mutually exclusive, pointing out, “queer activists are also lesbians and gays in other contexts—as, for example, where leverage can be gained through bourgeois propriety, or through minorityrights discourse, or through more gender-marked language” (2002, p. 213). references anderson, a. 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(1997). intersecting voices: dilemmas of gender, political philosophy, and policy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. rethinking the secular in feminist marriage debates ada s. jaarsma0f department of philosophy, sonoma state university, rohnert park, california, usa introduction normative ideals and normalizing critique secularism and the same-sex marriage debates the postsecular turn in feminist reasoning studies in social justice volume 3, issue 1, 99-116, 2009 correspondence address: jamey essex, department of political science, university of windsor, 401 sunset avenue, windsor, on n9b 3p4, canada. tel.: +1 519 253-3000, email: jessex@uwindsor.ca issn: 1911-4788 the work of hunger: security, development, and food-for-work in post-crisis jakarta1 jamey essex department of political science, university of windsor abstract food-for-work programs distribute food aid to recipients in exchange for labour, and are an important mode of aid delivery for both public and private aid providers. while debate continues as to whether food-for-work programs are socially just and economically sensible, governments, international institutions, and ngos continue to tout them as a flexible and cost-effective way to deliver targeted aid and promote community development. this paper critiques the underlying logic of food-for-work, focusing on how this approach to food aid and food security promotes labour force participation by leveraging hunger against poverty, and how the ideological and practical assumptions of food-for-work become enmeshed within discourses of geopolitical security. i rely on a case study examination of a us-funded food-for-work program in jakarta, indonesia following the 1997 financial crisis. the crisis produced acute food insecurity and poverty in indonesia, provoking fears of mob violence by the hungry poor and the spread of radical islamism in the post-crisis political vacuum. food-for-work programs were, in this context, meant to resolve the problems of both food insecurity and geopolitical insecurity by providing food to targeted populations, employment to those otherwise thrown out of work, and resituating the hungry poor in relation to broader scales of local, national, and global power. introduction with one billion people suffering from chronic hunger globally, food aid programs remain crucial for addressing short-term insecurity and long-term development needs. multiple forms of food aid exist, however, and their strategic deployment needs investigation in the context of global economic and security considerations. food-for-work (ffw) programs distribute food aid to recipients in exchange for labour, and have long been used by aid agencies to plan and deliver food aid. governments, international institutions such as the world food programme (wfp), and ngos tout them as a flexible and cost-effective way to deliver targeted aid, promote community development, and improve long-term prospects for development and food security. in the post-9/11 period, the us agency for international development (usaid) has cited ffw programs as potentially effective deterrents to 100 jamey essex studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 terrorist recruitment strategies, while development and food security more broadly have been incorporated into national security and geopolitical strategies and discourses, especially but not only in the us. despite the ostensible advantages of exchanging food aid for labour, however, debate continues as to whether and under what conditions food-for-work programs are socially just and economically sensible. common criticisms include the inherently exclusive character of self-targeting mechanisms that underlie ffw, the potential violations of labour rights in paying individuals in food rather than fair cash wages, and the long-term viability of nutritional and infrastructural improvements made through short-term ffw programs. in their comprehensive review of global food aid, barrett and maxwell (2005) conclude that because of its numerous socioeconomic drawbacks and uneven developmental and nutritional record, the food-for-work approach “is nowhere near the magic bullet suggested by some of its proponents” (p. 131). what then accounts for food-for-work’s persistence as a model of aid delivery? i explore this question by examining the disciplinary mechanism operating within the ffw paradigm, focusing on how this approach to food security and development leverages hunger against poverty to promote participation, and how the ideological and practical assumptions of food-for-work become enmeshed within discourses and strategies of geopolitical security. using the case study of a ffw program implemented in jakarta, indonesia, following the 1997 financial crisis, i argue that food-for-work’s labour requirement is meant to resolve the problems of both food insecurity and geopolitical insecurity, by providing food to targeted populations, employment to those otherwise thrown out of work, and re-situating the hungry poor in relation to broader scales of national, regional, and global power. the next section examines the rationale for and criticisms of ffw as a mode of food aid delivery. i then examine the jakarta case study and how the disciplinary aspects of ffw mesh with neoliberal geopolitics, focusing on three themes: the geopolitical and geoeconomic context as shaped by us power in, and relations with, indonesia, foodfor-work’s self-targeting mechanism, and the influence of pre-existing networks of local power and governance. combating hunger, disciplining the hungry food-for-work as a mode of food aid delivery has a long history, and its labour requirement has often made it a punitive measure, with the british workhouse system established under the 1834 poor law among the most commonly cited (and one of the most extreme) institutionalized examples (vernon, 2007). davis (2001) also recounts the horrific labour requirements placed on impoverished and hungry populations in colonial india during the prolonged droughts and famines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. indeed, forcing the hungry to work in exchange for food aid was an accepted practice of both imperial control and labour discipline, rooted in the combination of two laissez-faire ideologies, one liberal that brooked no intrusion on free markets, and one malthusian that understood famine and hunger as natural punishment for the supposed moral defects of the poor. as vernon (2007) demonstrates, the brutality of these paired ideologies, along with new scientific and technical forms of calculating individual nutritional requirements and the work of hunger 101 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 standardizing measurements of hunger and relative caloric need, and the politicization of hunger by revolutionary nationalists in colonial ireland and india, allowed for the “discovery” of humanitarian intervention by the late nineteenth century, and the development of a moral politics of food aid and security. this led to new understandings of the hungry as in need of assistance, with a claim to dignity and rights to subsistence, and formed the basis for the us-dominated global food aid system following world war ii. this system made food aid and the eradication of hunger a major part of cold war developmentalism, with problems such as food shortages, low agricultural productivity, and political, economic, and social instability understood as the result of pre-modern food and agricultural systems requiring western expertise and material inputs for their resolution. in this system, the hungry were potential threats, in that their hunger could drive them toward political claims and ideologies opposed to market capitalism and liberal democracy. the history of us food aid, which has long constituted the largest portion of global food aid, is ably summarized elsewhere by murphy and mcafee (2005) and barrett and maxwell (2005), but it is important to emphasize here the threatening character of hunger and the hungry within the geographic imagination of both cold war geopolitics and contemporary neoliberal and neoconservative worldviews (glassman, 2005a). during the cold war, food assistance was a means to protect and extend the ideological foundations of american hegemony and the market reach of american food producers, so much so that us secretary of agriculture earl butz bluntly stated in the early 1970s that “[f]ood is a tool. it is a weapon in the us negotiating kit” (quoted in patel, 2007, p. 91). with the cold war’s end, the context and rationale for food aid and development assistance changed. emergency assistance and geoeconomic positioning associated with trade liberalization became crucial considerations in directing global flows of food and development aid, while food security was re-imagined as a social good to be achieved through markets (mcmichael, 2003). the terrorist attacks of september 11, 2001, and the subsequent global war on terror have reasserted the geopolitical alongside the geoeconomic, and sharpened the fear of hunger as a causal condition within the complex matrix of underdevelopment, state failure, and terrorism. given that hunger is viewed as both a humanitarian problem and a political and economic threat, food-for-work presents a useful entry point for examining how such threats, because of their combined moral and political claims and potentially oppositional nature, are understood and managed. the ffw approach subverts, subdues, and dismantles these threats through the imposition of a labour requirement in exchange for food. this has both material and representational aspects, both of which act as disciplinary measures, a point made well by edkins (2000) in her study of ffw programs in eritrea during the 1990s. as edkins (2000) argues, the labour requirement underpinning ffw disciplines participants and directs their work toward infrastructural and environmental improvement projects as designated by program managers, so that “[f]ood for work programs are the site at which the linking of malthusian and entitlement discourses takes place” (p. 72) food scarcity and emergency are thus corrected by the proper management and improvement of entitlement bundles, including environmental sustainability and labour market access (sen, 1983, 1999; watts, 2000). within ffw, the complex relations between social, economic, and political rights (e.g., to food, land, markets) that make up entitlements, which have become central to mainstream conceptualizations and 102 jamey essex studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 practices of food security and aid, rest on the labour requirement imposed on the hungry poor. food aid programs follow a number of modalities, each reflecting a different organizing principle of humanitarian action or developmental assistance. food aid distributed directly to those in need, as in many acute food shortages or in the wake of natural disasters, operates from the assumption that there exists a moral obligation to help those in extreme need, even those we might consider strangers and outsiders (chatterjee, 2004). while this basic assumption is quite idealized and ignores the political character of humanitarian relief selectivity and delivery (kleinfeld, 2007), it is nonetheless conceptually distinct from the developmental goals and assumptions that drive other food aid programs, especially those managed by the us. in practice, these often overlap, and the political economy of food aid rests on a tangled matrix of interest groups, legislation, and foreign policy considerations in donor countries, as well as a complex of non-governmental organizations that work across scales and increasingly handle the bulk of food aid delivery. because of the multiple, sometimes competing, goals and objectives that food aid is meant to fulfill, it often works quite inefficiently, and can even exacerbate existing emergencies and structural problems in agricultural and consumer markets. barrett and maxwell (2005) argue that the only useful justifications for food aid today are to provide short-term humanitarian assistance in the face of market failures that undermine food security and basic human rights, to provide a long-term safety net for vulnerable populations with limited productive assets, and to build assets among such populations when other forms of aid are unavailable and food aid can do only good with no harm (p. 2). many food aid programs stray from such principles in actual operation, however, largely because they are designed principally to meet donors’ needs rather than recipients’. us food aid programs, for example, were established following world war ii to pull newly independent former colonies into the american geopolitical orbit, while also giving us agricultural producers a safety valve for surplus goods and building future export markets (murphy & mcafee, 2005). while these objectives have changed in line with the neoliberal shift toward emphasizing trade openness and enforced connection with the flows and networks of neoliberal capitalism (essex, 2008b; roberts, secor, & sparke, 2003), food aid remains an entrenched part of the global humanitarian infrastructure, and a key tool donors use to both placate domestic interest groups and provide an entry point for advancing other geopolitical and geoeconomic objectives in recipient countries. this can be understood as a constitutive element of an emergent “disaster capitalism,” which uses crisis moments to advance radical new forms of neoliberal governance and securitization (klein, 2007). civil society organizations, especially those with international reach and extensive aid programming and delivery experience, are enrolled both directly and indirectly in meeting these objectives, even if they run counter to stated aims of humanitarian relief and durable socially just development progress. this is an important point given the increasing reliance on nongovernmental entities to program and distribute food aid. in 2000, direct bilateral government-to-government aid accounted for only 34% of global food aid flows, with the remaining 66% distributed through ngos and multilateral channels, especially the wfp (barrett & maxwell, 2005, p. 14). this complicated funding and the work of hunger 103 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 distribution system is made more so by the us policy of food aid monetization, “the sale of food aid on local markets in developing countries to generate funds for development projects” (murphy & mcafee, 2005, p. 29). this practice provides a major revenue stream for many ngos and other private organizations, but is problematic because it displaces local producers from markets in recipient areas and disrupts local market pricing mechanisms, exacerbating food insecurity and undermining agricultural investment and productivity. many ngos are aware of the problems surrounding monetization, and have advocated local purchase of food aid and cash-based assistance, discussed in more detail below. within this us-dominated system of global food aid, food-for-work programs are categorized as a form of project aid, in which food aid is given to ngos or governments and then sold on local markets to pay for other specific development projects. ffw stands out within this categorization, however, because it often operates in the form of stand-alone programs designed to meet the short-term food security and long-term infrastructural needs of a given area or population through direct distribution of food aid to participants. barrett and maxwell (2005) argue that a major danger with ffw is that such programs will “crowd out or distort private investment, thereby generating little, or even negative, net change in future productivity,” while also failing to meet the immediate needs of food insecure and vulnerable populations (p. 131). yet because of its decentralized character and heavy reliance on ngos for implementation, not to mention the promise of public works and food security improvements achieved by tapping into (or even creating) and putting to work contingent and often unruly labour markets, the food-for-work model appears perfectly suited as an aid delivery paradigm within a neoliberal policy environment. this is particularly so given the complications presented by geopolitical fears of networked, hard-to-predict, and difficult-to-control risks associated with terrorism, criminality, and socioeconomic demands which markets alone cannot meet. official and mainstream approaches treat food insecurity as both a measure of poor governance and a contributor to political instability and persistent underdevelopment (brown, 2009; sheeran, 2008). these are in turn addressed through food aid and development programs and national security strategies, which frame food insecurity and the vulnerability it creates as fertile ground for terrorist and criminal networks. again, ffw’s disciplinary aspect comprises a significant element of the logic behind such programs, and the discursive treatment of hunger and the hungry as both humanitarian emergencies and geopolitical and geoeconomic threats. selecting target populations and individuals in this context becomes a key part of the aid process, and ffw ostensibly offers a solution to the difficulties of aid selectivity and distribution. barrett and maxwell explain that the immediate assumed benefit of ffw is its strong “self-targeting” mechanism, which implies that participants select themselves for participation in ffw projects because of their inability to obtain adequate food or employment elsewhere, and positions the individual, as aid recipient, program participant, and labour input, as the primary object of program operation. this mechanism always operates imperfectly because of the challenge of setting appropriate wage rates. the desire to reduce administrative costs and overhead by setting wage rates that attract “only the truly poor or acutely food-insecure people” runs into problems when wage rates are either too high or too low (barrett & maxwell, 2005, p. 144). wage rates that are too high 104 jamey essex studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 will attract those who may not need food aid, disrupting local labour markets, while those set too low to “enable the truly food-insecure to meet their food requirements” undermine the quality of work and nutritional impact of ffw, especially when entire households must depend on single individuals, usually women, to attain such employment and meet all members’ caloric needs (p. 145). such logic recalls the infamous “temple wage” in late nineteenth-century india, in which wage rates for famine victims set to hard labour were so low as to provide nutritional and caloric intake insufficient to sustain already weakened individuals (davis, 2001). while modern ffw programs do not replicate this scenario, they nonetheless remain unable to solve the mystery of wage rates linked to the material experience of hunger, while self-targeting more generally is problematic because it “is predicated on the presumption of surplus labour, which the most vulnerable often do not have” (maxwell, 2007, p. s36). this points to a basic assumption underlying the entire ffw approach, namely that the demands of the hungry are best addressed by putting them to work, and further, that only labour on public works can resolve the conditions of underdevelopment and poverty producing hunger and vulnerability. this solves what are considered two separate but linked problems—first, that impoverished and food insecure communities are lacking in public infrastructure, which worsens poverty by compounding disconnectedness, and second, that governments and local communities are unable to provide functioning markets or investment opportunities for food, labour, infrastructure or aid on their own (gebremedhin & swinton, 2001; papanek, 2004). it also makes participant individuals and communities assist in their own exclusion from the aid process, with self-targeting achieved through supposedly impartial market forces rather than the dictates of the state, donors, or implementing agencies. following a foucauldian critique, edkins (2000, p. 85) identifies these aspects of ffw programs and argues that they constitute a form of disciplinary control, in which discipline is exercised through the supervised expenditure of participants’ labour, focusing not only on the selection of participants through selftargeting mechanisms, but also “the public nature of the works carried out and how this is involved with what is seen as a process of reform.” the idea that the hungry are in need of reform is central, as “[s]ome of the enthusiasm for food for work programs on the part of donors arises from the assumption that otherwise people would sit around doing nothing” (edkins, 2000, p. 92). while ffw programs are not supposed to interfere with existing local labour markets, in order to maintain selftargeting by the very poor, they nevertheless constitute participants as unemployed, or even unemployable, in formal labour market terms, and devalue the labour of social reproduction or within the informal economy in which participants may already be engaged. the administration of ffw programs thereby creates its subjects as the marginally employed or unemployed, creating work for them as part of a reform process that ostensibly addresses both their vulnerability to hunger and their status as potential threats emerging from the moral or material deficiencies their vulnerability embodies. edkins (2000) notes that this approach also produces the need for administrative and supervisory structures and institutions, which can add up to 40% to the nonwage costs of ffw projects, and makes ffw projects “conflicting sites of power” between and within different levels of government, different systems of economic the work of hunger 105 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 valuation, and civil society (p. 97). they can also exacerbate previously existing systems and practices of domination and exclusion, particularly with respect to local class, ethnic, and gender differences, and can tie such local systems to broader networks and practices of geopolitical and geoeconomic power (quisumbing & yohannes, 2007; rankin, 2004). the reliance on participation by local-level and community leaders, especially in an administrative and oversight capacity, presents a major challenge to the effectiveness and justness of ffw, especially when it reproduces existing social and economic divisions or fails to adequately address or overturn corruption and uneven networks of local patronage and access. lappé et al. (1998) note this in the case of a rural haitian village, where a us-funded ffw program chose a leading local family to help implement and administer the program, resulting in disproportionate benefits to this family with little or no alleviation of underlying conditions of vulnerability and poverty for the majority of village residents. as lappé et al. (1998) state, ffw reproduced and strengthened local patronage networks and improved the lead family’s lands and transport options, while taking poorer program participants “away from their lands five days a week” and cutting into their ability to improve their own plots in exchange for short-term work and food benefits (p. 136). the jakarta case discussed below echoes this, though its situation in an urban rather than rural setting made for different development and security concerns. the threat of political mobilization and violence are heightened by the concentrated setting of urban centres, while the differential availability of cash work in urban settings alters the opportunity costs presented by labour opportunities and food resources available though ffw programs in urban areas. the point regarding the important role local networks of social leadership and patronage play stands, however, as discussed below. in her analysis of ffw programs in eritrea and ethiopia, edkins (2000, p. 101) concludes that food-for-work, and food aid more generally, “maintains the relations of power that exist in international politics between first and third worlds but depoliticizes them” in order to suppress political claims by the hungry that might otherwise disrupt established systems of power and control. despite the strength of this critique, however, edkins fails to directly address the multiscalar political economy of food-for-work, or to identify the specific ends to which the selection and control of ffw participants are directed. these issues are left to a generalized explanation of disciplinary power that lacks political economic context or sufficient engagement with the relationship between program selection, implementation, administration, and measurement at differing scales. barrett and maxwell’s (2005) argument is instructive for highlighting these issues, as they suggest that the finite character of resource transfers involved in ffw programs “limit[s] the geographic reach of the program to a few administratively selected locations,” with specific programs “often placed where the expected return on investment is great rather than where need for assistance is greatest, trading off targeting errors for investment efficacy” (p. 145). in this sense, the idea that food aid is distributed as an investment that must produce an economic or political return for donors becomes a crucial component of ffw program design and implementation. edkins’ conclusion is therefore correct, but incomplete. understanding and examining the political economy of ffw, and how specific programs, participants, and places are constituted by their disciplinary purpose presents a useful way forward, but must be tempered by the points about 106 jamey essex studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 scale, power, and the specificity of distinct political economic projects discussed above. as larner (2000) emphasizes, the broad political and economic program of neoliberalism, while neither as complete nor all-encompassing as described in many critical treatments, hinges on “the invocation of individual choice” and the development of “forms of governance that encourage both institutions and individuals to conform to the norms of the market” (p. 12). the practical objective and effect of this shift, which is both discursive and material, is the redefinition of political subjectivity, resulting in “the citizen . . . re-specified as an active agent both able and obliged to exercise autonomous choices” (larner, 2000, p. 13). this opens the subject to a multiplicity of choices that incorporate, produce, and reproduce new technologies of governance, institutional arrangements, and political economic projects. larner (2000) argues as well, however, that analyses of neoliberal governmentality “[have] not paid a great deal of attention to the politics surrounding specific programmes and policies,” concentrating instead on “broad governmental themes rather than specific neo-liberal projects” (p. 14). focusing on how specific technologies of governance, such as those emphasizing the disciplining of the hungry poor through food-for-work programs, are articulated with wider projects associated with a us-dominated neoliberal geopolitics, usefully bridges the divide not only between the geographic scales at which such articulation occurs, but also overcomes the conceptual and empirical gap larner identifies. hart (2004) and sparke (2004, 2007) highlight the complex articulation of social categories, and the forms and exercise of power that build from these, as crucial for grasping the shifting, unstable character of domination under neoliberal forms of governance. sparke’s (2004) treatment of domination within neoliberal globalization, for example, accentuates the fact that “dominance that is sometimes coactive with consent in a particular personal sphere of social reproduction is interarticulated with dominance at other scales” (p. 780). thus, in the context of a neoliberal geopolitics emphasizing forced connections between recalcitrant or unruly places and the continued internationalization of capital achieved through the violence of markets and military force (roberts et al., 2003), the continued prevalence and specific operation of ffw in food aid distribution must be addressed not simply as the maintenance of unequal power relations between states, or as the imposition of localized discipline on disconnected populations. rather, we must interrogate ffw as one means by which the scalar contradictions of neoliberal geopolitics are placed on the hungry and the forms of social reproduction available to them. the jakarta program examined below demonstrates this in one specific but instructive case. case study: ffw in post-crisis jakarta in this section, i examine the operation of a multi-year ffw program in jakarta, funded by us food aid and development accounts (first via public law 480 title ii emergency program funding, and then through the special transitional activities program) and implemented by the us-based international ngo mercy corps. i rely on documents published by mercy corps and the us agency for international development (usaid), as well as an interview with a mercy corps official familiar with the program. more systematic interviews with ngo staff proved difficult to the work of hunger 107 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 obtain, especially considering the emergency and transitional aspects of the ffw program concluded in september 2004, and the diffuse nature of the ngo’s operations, with staff often on the move and located at many points around the world. gaining access to relevant staff members at mercy corps was difficult in this respect. nevertheless, access to mercy corps was easy compared to access granted to usaid interviewees, as approximately a dozen usaid staff members failed to respond to three separate email requests for interviews for this project. i was finally able to obtain one interview with a usaid food for peace official, arranged and attended by a usaid media relations officer; unfortunately, this official was unable to provide any information of relevance for discussion of the jakarta ffw program. direct use of interview material is therefore used sparingly here, to fill gaps and to highlight operating conditions and programming considerations not covered in mercy corps’ report on the ffw program. the interview material also, however, pointed to the ambivalence many ngos have about both the ffw approach and their relationship with official funders in government. the mercy corps-managed ffw program examined here operated from 1999 to 2004, and distributed food aid in return for labour on a number of public works projects related to basic infrastructural needs, community development, and health services in poor and slum neighbourhoods in jakarta. because infrastructure and service needs in these communities are so great, mercy corps’ (2005) ffw program worked on a wide variety of specific projects: road and gutter rehabilitation and improvement; rehabilitation or construction of public bathing, washing and toilet facilities or mandi, cuci and kakus (mcks), community centers for health posts and other activities, schools, bridges, garbage collection sites, sports courts and water towers; environmental clean up; brick making for construction and road paving projects; skill-building activities for women; and small-scale urban gardening. (p. 7) the emergency and transitional ffw program helped plan and complete a total of 87 infrastructure projects in jakarta, employing and distributing food to over 25,000 people (mercy corps, 2005, p. 8). as noted, the first five years of program funding came from usaid money dedicated to both emergency food aid funding and transitional activities to help indonesia recover from the economic crisis. continued usaid funding has allowed mercy corps’ work in jakarta and elsewhere in indonesia to continue through 2009, and has shifted to funds provided through the development assistance program (dap), with the aim of consolidating previous development and food security gains and focusing programs on groups that remain vulnerable, especially mothers and children (tango international, 2004; usaid, 2004). these activities have centred on food-for-training and other uses of food aid rather than the ffw projects of the first five years, and are designed specifically to improve child and mother nutrition. as these programs remain in operation or have only recently concluded, mercy corps, usaid, and other ngos have not yet reported on their successes or failures, and so are not included in this discussion. this case study therefore remains somewhat speculative as to the impacts and future directions of ffw’s deployment, though mercy corps’ 2005 report on its jakarta program is highly self-reflexive, and usaid has referenced it explicitly in further examination of various food aid 108 jamey essex studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 distribution models (fanta-2, 2008; lai, 2008). the observed and perceived advantages and disadvantages of different food aid modalities, including ffw, are well documented in these recent technical reports. usaid notes, for example, that ffw “tends to exclude the food insecure who are labour poor,” a category that often includes women, children, the ill, and the elderly (fanta-2, 2008, p. 12). in addition, usaid argues that “[p]opulation density in urban areas heightens the need for security and crowd management” at aid distribution sites, and that “as in rural settings, urban food distribution programs pose the risk of sexual exploitation of beneficiaries” by others in recipient communities who command and influence access to aid programs (fanta-2, 2008, p. 8). this highlights the security concerns surrounding urban ffw programs and the differential impact of recipients’ gender on access to such aid, as well as the increased attention by donors and implementing agencies to the difference an urban setting makes. in analyzing the jakarta ffw program and mercy corps’ role in undertaking this model of food aid and development assistance, i emphasize three themes that demonstrate the problematic nature of food-for-work for both recipients and implementing agencies: the geopolitical and geoeconomic context, the self-targeting mechanism, and pre-existing networks of local power and governance. each highlights the central disciplinary element of ffw programs discussed above, while also underscoring concerns with scale and the relative positions of the hungry, international civil society, and official development and national security institutions in programming, delivering, and monitoring food aid. again, this is not to argue that an ngo such as mercy corps is engaged in a conscious and purposeful attempt to enact a crude form of discipline on an impoverished and vulnerable population. indeed, the ffw program examined here helped alleviate acute food insecurity in severely disadvantaged communities and set a foundation for possible long-term improvements in food security and material living conditions for these communities. yet even an extensive and well-respected international ngo such as mercy corps must work with funding agencies, such as usaid, that may have different or competing objectives, and must confront a range of potential problems and injustices in the actual implementation of any program. likewise, the material benefits of a given program must be considered against the means by which these are achieved, and the long-term consolidation of broader political and economic projects with which they may be associated. geopolitical and geoeconomic context there is a direct connection between usaid’s selection of jakarta (and indonesia more generally) for aid, the choice of a food-for-work model to deliver this aid, and ongoing support for engagement with the hungry poor in urban areas of the developing world. the financial crisis that buffeted indonesia and southeast asia more widely in 1997-98 produced acute food insecurity and poverty, provoking fears of mob violence by the hungry and poor, and the spread of radical islamism in the post-crisis political and economic upheaval. jakarta was pinpointed as a flashpoint, with local and national elites and observers in official western geopolitical circles concerned that the city could erupt in “large scale conflict” due to political the work of hunger 109 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 manipulation of its impoverished residents by competing political factions, especially those led by ethnic and religious extremists (kelly, 2003). food aid was seen as critical in dousing the threat of radicalization and avoiding further political and economic collapse, and ffw programs like those implemented by mercy corps were meant to resolve the double problem of food insecurity and geopolitical insecurity. by providing food and employment to vulnerable populations and resituating the hungry in relation to broader scales and institutions of local, national, and global power, the jakarta ffw program was touted as a successful short-term defence against humanitarian disaster, economic collapse, and political radicalism, as well as the first step on a long-term path to development and security (usaid, 2005). on one hand this reasoning seems quite justifiable, and even necessary, as marginal and vulnerable people within jakarta were in dire need of food resources, and the spread of violent forms of islamism poses a tangible security threat within indonesia. however, considered in light of the indonesian state’s maintenance of national order by violently crushing ethnic and religious separatist movements across the archipelago, the consequent militarization of aid in post-tsunami aceh (essex, 2008a), and the reinforcement of sub-imperial relations that foster both neoliberalization and connections to us-dominated security discourses and strategies (glassman, 2005b), the ffw program appears in a different light. indeed, it can be seen as a paradigmatic example of neoliberal geopolitics in practice, in which “a new global vision of almost infinite openness and interdependency” is set against a conceptualization of danger and risk “defined as disconnection from the global system”; in this understanding, the appropriate response becomes “to insist on enforcing connection” (roberts et al., 2003, p. 888). the uniqueness of contemporary forms of such connection hinges on their mediation “through a whole repertoire of neoliberal ideas and practices,” including a reliance on international civil society to manage and implement connections that serve state and private interests, in both washington and jakarta, focused on global economic position and securitization (roberts et al., 2003, p. 889). in the case of the post-crisis jakarta ffw program, the danger posed by the hungry in jakarta’s slums was attributed paradoxically to both their vulnerability to volatile global economic forces and their disconnection from a supposedly properly functioning system of international neoliberalism. this in turn led many urban poor to an alternative form of connection, namely via the circuits of fundamentalist islamism, wherein militant organizations handed out cash payments to the poor in return for their support (usaid, 2005, p. 14). the response was to provide both relief and development through resource transfers and community engagement, but always within the parameters of security concerns tied to anti-terror strategies outlined by the us and anti-separatist strategies undertaken by the indonesian state. while there is no evidence of top-down micromanagement of aid programs or implementing ngos, usaid’s portrayal of the jakarta ffw program as a fundamental component in combating terrorism, extremism, and disorder in indonesia is a vital consideration. for usaid, the program was a successful antiterror initiative in a vulnerable but geopolitically vital state, and addressing the underlying concern with the threat posed by hunger through the rubric of antiterrorism stands as a major donor priority in advocating and funding such programs. as usaid (2004, p. 365) argued in its 2005 budget justification to congress, 110 jamey essex studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 “indonesia is too important to fail.” in such a context, hunger becomes a perverse asset for the hungry, bestowing them with moral and material claims to international flows of aid, while also comprising a liability, embodying weakness and vulnerability in a dangerously interdependent world. the potentially radical political threat this poses to neoliberalization more broadly arises precisely because it demonstrates the failure of neoliberal connection to provide just and sustainable human security not beholden to volatile global markets dominated by speculative finance capital. this is not to argue that neoliberal geopolitics, neoliberalization, or securitization are complete, cohesive, or finished projects. there exists a good deal of experimentation, trial and error, and muddling through in the ongoing development of these processes in place and across scales. the reliance on civil society to implement broad strategies devised and funded from thousands of miles away is typical of the diverse, often contradictory alignment of, and articulation between, neoliberalization and other processes (hart, 2004). the second, transitional phase of the program discussed here, including non-ffw elements implemented by other ngos, actively encouraged “experimentation,” as “ngos developed, adapted and piloted creative approaches and tools such as community-based disaster management and the linking of relief and development in community-based nutrition programming” (tango international, 2004, p. 5). as discussed, the “communitybased” character of this process has definite, if shifting limits, set by networks of power and strategic decision-making stretching across multiple scales, and with differing capacity to articulate claims to entitlements, justice, and rights that may oppose the dominant marketand security-oriented foci of neoliberal governance. while i would not want to overstate the argument based on the single case study presented here, it nevertheless stands to reason that the enhanced food security, infrastructural development, and community mobilization produced by mercy corps’ work in jakarta could not lead to more radically oppositional or democratic demands without upsetting the balance of geopolitical and geoeconomic forces that gave impetus to it in the first place. in this context, the responsibilization of the poor, exacted through the ffw model’s self-targeting mechanism, and the enrolment of local communities, international civil society, and existing networks of governance and power appear to resolve the scalar and political economic contradictions of neoliberal geopolitics precisely because they enforce global connection without upsetting the balance of forces identified here. self-targeting as noted, one of the primary benefits of food-for-work is its self-targeting mechanism, attracting only the poor and hungry and excluding those who do not need food aid or who can find other work. in post-crisis jakarta, the choice of a ffw program to deliver food aid was tied to security concerns arising from the potential threat the urban hungry posed in the wake of political upheaval and economic collapse. ffw was understood as an effective way to provide needed food and developmental assets in the immediate post-crisis setting, and dissuade the urban poor from turning to radical or terrorist organizations for political and economic the work of hunger 111 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 opportunities. in addition, and echoing edkins’ (2000) argument that project visibility is central to donors’ and aid workers’ conceptualization of program effectiveness, the mercy corps official with whom i spoke noted that ffw projects in jakarta were easy to see, and therefore provided a strong demonstration of overall aid effectiveness. while ffw remains just one among many modes of food aid delivery, and one that my interviewee indicated mercy corps only uses when it is neutral (i.e., food is needed, but equally good results can be achieved with other forms of aid, such as cash) or beneficial, the food-for-work model nevertheless offered a way for donors to see direct, tangible results of aid. for mercy corps, this was a relatively new foray into ffw programming, as the organization has typically dealt with emergency relief distribution and civil society capacity building in the past. it is also not usual for ffw to be implemented in a distinctly urban setting, as it is more often deployed in rural areas where seasonal employment fluctuates and remoteness requires special provisions for infrastructural improvement. so why did mercy corps adopt a ffw approach in the jakarta postcrisis environment? for one, this approach gave mercy corps the chance to quickly expand operations and inject badly needed food resources in a difficult context. ffw allows for a relatively direct and rapid means of providing food to recipients, though the planning process can be slow. the extreme nature of the post-crisis food and poverty emergency in jakarta was a deciding factor in mercy corps’ approach, rather than the political context, which was more important for usaid in approving the program and providing funds. the mercy corps official i interviewed noted that the self-targeting function of ffw was a plus in the jakarta setting, especially as a secondary aspect of this is participants’ self-valuation of their own labour. this ostensibly allows the priorities and existing resources of vulnerable communities to be set by community members themselves, and mercy corps (2005, 2007) concentrates on community-level planning and input in its approach, emphasizing these as key elements in long-term infrastructural and developmental sustainability. even with community input to help identify social and infrastructural needs and plan and implement aid projects, the self-targeting function of ffw remained the centre of mercy corps’ rationale, as it was tied to fostering community involvement and encouraging participation by those often excluded from decision making. the jakarta projects were understood as neutral, as similar results could likely have been achieved with cash aid rather than food aid, but food assets were deemed more badly needed in the context of post-crisis currency problems and the options offered by usaid funding structures. in jakarta, the self-targeting mechanism transferred food resources directly to vulnerable and marginal urban populations, and had “significant impact on household debt levels and spending capacity among ffw beneficiaries,” as well as positive impacts on community health through the expansion of public sanitation facilities (mercy corps, 2005, p. 8). this also prevented mercy corps or usaid from having to make difficult choices on program participation in a highly fluid economic situation, as the ffw wage rates were meant to make this choice through their market operation. the shortened planning horizon, necessitated by the urgency of the post-crisis food insecurity and poverty situation, led to less emphasis on long-term project maintenance and more on immediate resource transfer, leading staff and participants to view the projects as distinct and discrete food-for-work activities rather than as “community mobilization” to achieve greater food security and development 112 jamey essex studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 progress (mercy corps, 2005, p. 14). this was exacerbated by the fact that “minimal resources were available for the purchase of materials in support of ffw structures,” and so many projects focused on using materials at hand and basic maintenance of existing infrastructure (mercy corps, 2005, p. 8). in such a context, community cohesion and vulnerable members’ full incorporation into development planning and decision-making, achieved in the short run, would likely not be sustainable in the longer term, especially if the larger community’s marginal status in the formal economy and political environment were not resolved. to reiterate barrett and maxwell (2005), surplus labour produced or tapped by ffw, and the ability to expend it for more than payments in staple foods, are not guaranteed. the fact that the jakarta projects exhibit high rates of completion, community use, and sustainability is due more to mercy corps’ administrative approach of widespread inclusion of community members in planning and design, including household members not working directly on projects, than to the operation of ffw as a selftargeting mode of delivery dependent on participants’ rational decision-making regarding expenditure of labour time. local networks of power and governance likewise, community involvement alone does not guarantee project success or sustainability, and the incorporation of the broader recipient community into programming and planning specific ffw projects can present numerous problems not easily resolved by ngos and other non-local institutional actors involved in relief and development work. complex local and regional networks of power and inequality must be navigated and, indeed, mitigated or overturned, if ffw is to a have a lasting beneficial impact for governance and not simply reproduce or deepen vulnerability. this was especially difficult for mercy corps’ jakarta program. a political culture dominated by corruption, sharply uneven access to food resources and employment opportunities, urban development pressures, and the formalization of urban planning without resident input were all factors mercy corps had to address.2 in addition, and following standard ffw program design, mercy corps sought explicitly to enrol local elites (as opposed to government officials and elected leaders) within the urban communities where projects were undertaken to press the case for involvement and encourage greater rates of participation and project success. this meant potentially trading off some control over aid recipient selection within project communities in return for infrastructure needs as defined by local elites. as mercy corps’ (2007) guide to cash-based aid delivery suggests: in larger communities or urban settings, it may not be appropriate or possible to hold community meetings. instead, local leaders or elected committees may be responsible for selecting beneficiaries based on the goals of the project and any other jointly decided criteria. in this instance, the process of beneficiary selection needs to be as transparent as possible so that the entire community knows not only who was selected but how the decision was made. (p. 18) the work of hunger 113 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 this was the approach adopted in jakarta, and it demonstrates a long-running difficulty in making ffw a participatory model for food and development aid delivery, namely, how to make projects meet recipient rather than donor needs without reproducing already existing social inequities and systems of control. in the jakarta program, the power of leading local families was a potentially useful but problematic factor in assessing project success and sustainability. mercy corps’ (2005) own assessment noted an example of this difficulty in dealing with additional contributions to ffw project resources by local elites: one health post received significant material and labor contributions from the local leader and the family of a local health volunteer during construction. however, the structure was later co-opted by the local leader for his office whenever the once-per-month health services were not being provided. (p. 17) another example stemmed from participant and resident perception of ownership of completed projects, and local elites’ role in planning and managing project infrastructure, as well as the influence of geographic proximity in infrastructure construction and use: the local neighborhood leader initiated the rehabilitation of the first mck [public toilet] that was very close to one family’s home. the [assessment team] observed very little use and ownership by the wider community who perceived the mck as belonging to the family nearby. (mercy corps, 2005, p. 16) the mercy corps official with whom i spoke added that the urban setting in which the ffw program was carried out presented numerous challenges to community members’ input. many residents in recipient neighbourhoods were young migrants who had recently moved to jakarta, and so community cohesion was quite weak, lacking the extended family structure and institutional knowledge that might otherwise contribute to household and community food security. the cramped, unsanitary, and unplanned character of the recipient communities also meant that land tenure was tenuous at best, shaped by corruption, the influence of local and municipal officials, and the demands of an urban land market seeking to expand formal development (fanta-2, 2008; lai, 2008). residents’ ability to deal with these pressures, let alone those of an ngo with relatively little experience in managing urban food aid programs, made the pre-existing local networks of power a formidable obstacle to useful community input in project planning, implementation, and assessment. this made reliance on, or at least incorporation of, local elites with knowledge and influence a necessity for program success, insofar as community mobilization was a project objective and a baseline for long-term sustainability and progress. to avoid local elites’ co-option of process and infrastructure, however, mercy corps (2005) argues it is also necessary “that various levels of government are consulted and feel ownership of the project,” as efforts “to build linkages between community and government can help to deter government leaders from dominating control of communal facilities or instigating policy that may lead to its destruction” (p. 18). in learning from its ffw projects to develop cash-for-work programs, mercy corps 114 jamey essex studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 (2007) suggests that in the absence of local non-governmental leadership structures or committees, “it may be necessary to establish one for the purposes of the program, with the vision that this group could continue into recovery and development programming” (p. 15). in this sense, the ffw program becomes a coordinating effort, an intervention in local networks of power and governance designed to facilitate the formalization of community mobilization and incorporate participants into existing structures of decision-making. of course, any single relief or development program can achieve only incremental change in the face of broader entrenched systems of exclusion and power, such as those tied to larger projects of securitization and neoliberalization. mercy corps’ (2005) major success on this front was in “engaging a once reluctant and even prohibitive national level ministry of health in the nutrition component of the program”; the ministry “is now seeking training in the approach for their own replication” (p. 18), even as mercy corps moves away from ffw in project communities. whether national institutions will engage ffw programs in a way that enhances and emphasizes the mobilization and political voice of the urban poor and food insecure, rather than using ffw as a disciplinary measure or a means of co-opting local elites, remains to be seen. conclusion there is ample evidence that in the right context and with appropriate contextspecific planning and implementation, food-for-work can be an effective means for ameliorating short-term food insecurity crises and building capacity for long-term development. it can also be a means for expanding and adapting neoliberal governance and geopolitics, disciplining the hungry and enforcing their connection to broader networks of capital, security, and knowledge. in this web of interdependency, the hungry, especially in urban areas, pose a threat, embodying the failures of both liberalized markets and coercive force to promote development and human security. the disciplinary logic and decentred administrative structure underpinning the food-for-work model fits well within this formulation, providing a double answer to the threat of the hungry—it provides food resources by putting the ostensibly unemployed to work, while engaging local communities, or at least local elites, in the development process. this appears to answer recipient needs while remaining within the parameters set by donors, and allows implementing agencies to handle on-the-ground challenges without donor micromanagement. ffw programs like the one mercy corps implemented in jakarta can provide much needed food resources and a footing for further material improvement in the lives of impoverished, marginal, and vulnerable populations. such programs, or any other form of aid, can never, however, fully escape the logic and demands of the broader systems of power, knowledge, and funding that set them in motion, and they are always in the end caught between the competing and contradictory demands of recipients and donors. it is partly for this reason that the ngo community has become divided over the future of food aid, with care and, to a lesser extent, mercy corps working increasingly in cash rather than food commodities and strongly critiquing the food aid industry, particularly the policy of monetization. care has been most vocal on the work of hunger 115 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 this front and will phase out its use of monetized food aid by september 2009 (care, 2006), while other ngos, such as world vision, and major international organizations like the wfp continue to use monetized and other forms of tied food aid. this signifies a deep ambivalence about the global food aid system within the institutional networks charged with programming and delivering aid, and bodes an uncertain future for such aid amid deepening economic crisis and persistent security concerns. the fit food-for-work demonstrates with neoliberal geopolitics, however, indicates that it may remain an important mode of aid delivery for the foreseeable future, in no small part because it represents a less extreme version of what sparke (2007) identifies as “a form of highly coercive and forced imposition of neoliberal idealism, an imposition of geoeconomic hopes . . . underpinned by geopolitical fears” (p. 346). even as food-for-work programs offer some measure of success in combating hunger, then, ngos and recipient communities continue to struggle with the challenges they pose for social justice, food security, and development progress. notes 1 the author would like to thank the organizers and attendees of the security and exclusion workshop, held in october 2008 in windsor, ontario, as well as two anonymous reviewers for commenting on previous drafts of this paper. this research was supported by a university of windsor sshrc 4a grant. all mistakes and oversights remain those of the author. 2 mercy corps (2005, p. 14) notes that “indonesia is currently ranked among the ten most corrupt countries in the world,” and that corruption within political systems was often accepted as the norm by community members surveyed in ffw project locations. vickers (2005) provides a comprehensive history of recent indonesian politics, and highlights the extensive presence of corruption under suharto and his successors. references barrett, c. b., & maxwell, d. g. (2005). food aid after fifty years: recasting its role. london: routledge. brown, l. r. (2009). could food shortages bring down civilization? scientific american.. retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=civilization-food-shortages. care. (2006). white paper on food aid policy, care usa. atlanta: care. chatterjee, d. k. (ed.). (2004). the ethics of assistance: morality and the distant needy. cambridge: cambridge university press. davis, m. (2001). late victorian holocausts: el niño famines and the making of the third world. london: verso. edkins, j. (2000). whose hunger? concepts of famine, practices of aid. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. essex, j. (2008a). the neoliberal geopolitics of food security: the case of indonesia. human geography, 1 (2), 14-25. essex, j. 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(2000). neo-liberalism: policy, ideology, governmentality. studies in political economy, 63, 5-25. maxwell, d. (2007). global factors shaping the future of food aid: the implications for wfp. disasters, 31(s1), s25-s39. mcmichael, p. (2003). food security and social reproduction: issues and contradictions. in i. bakker & s. gill (eds.), power, production and social reproduction (pp. 169-189). new york: palgrave macmillan. mercy corps. (2005). built to last: a sustainability study of food-for-work infrastructure projects, 19992004. jakarta: mercy corps indonesia. mercy corps. (2007). guide to cash-for-work programming. portland, or: mercy corps international. murphy, s., & mcafee, k. (2005). us food aid: time to get it right. minneapolis: the institute for agriculture and trade policy. papanek, g. f. (2004). the poor of indonesia: the impact of economic decline, rapid growth, and crisis, 1952-2003. washington, dc: usaid. patel, r. (2007). stuffed and starved: markets, power and the hidden battle for the world’s food system. toronto: harpercollins. quisumbing, a. r., & yohannes, y. (2007). how fair is workfare?: gender, public works, and employment in rural ethiopia. washington, dc: international food policy research institute. rankin, k. n. (2004). the cultural politics of markets: economic liberalization and social change in nepal. toronto: university of toronto press. roberts, s., secor, a., & sparke, m. (2003). neoliberal geopolitics. antipode, 35 (5), 886-897. sen, a. (1983). poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation. oxford: oxford university press. sen, a. (1999). development as freedom. new york: alfred a. knopf. sheeran, j. (2008). hunger as a national security and global stability issue. keynote address, women’s foreign policy group, september 29, 2008, washington, dc. retrieved from http://home.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/newsroom/wfp189715.pdf. sparke, m. (2004). political geography: political geographies of globalization (1)–dominance. progress in human geography, 28 (6), 777-794. sparke, m. (2007). geopolitical fears, geoeconomic hopes, and the responsibilities of geography. annals of the association of american geographers, 97 (2), 338-349. tango international. (2004). putting development relief into practice: title ii and development relief in indonesia (draft) (prepared for the office of food for peace, bureau of democracy, governance and humanitarian affairs, usaid, washington, d.c.). tucson, az: tango international, inc. us agency for international development (usaid). (2004). budget justification to the congress (fiscal year 2005). washington, dc: usaid. us agency for international development (usaid). (2005). fragile states strategy. washington, dc: usaid. vernon, j. (2007). hunger: a modern history. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. vickers, a. (2005). a history of modern indonesia. cambridge: cambridge university press. watts, m. j. (2000). the great tablecloth: bread and butter politics, and the political economy of food and poverty. in g. l. clark, m. p. feldman, & m. s. gertler (eds.), the oxford handbook of economic geography (pp. 195-212). oxford: oxford university press. http://home.wfp.org/%20stellent/groups/public/documents/newsroom/wfp189715.pdf� the work of hunger: security, development, and food-for-work in post-crisis jakarta0f constructing citizenship without a licence studies in social justice volume 4, issue 2, 165-178, 2010 correspondence address: fran ansley, college of law, university of tennessee, knoxville, tn, 379961810, usa. email: ansley@utk.edu issn: 1911-4788 constructing citizenship without a licence: the struggle of undocumented immigrants in the usa for livelihoods and recognition1 the presence of low-wage southern immigrants in the wealthy countries of the north creates a space where the contradictions of uneven development are fran ansley college of law, university of tennessee abstract this article questions the meanings and expression of “citizenship” in the context of new latina and latino migration into the southeastern united states—a region long marked by legally policed racial systems and now experiencing the varied shocks of globalization. focused on a legislative campaign that won access to a state-issued driver’s licence for undocumented migrants in tennessee in spring 2001, the article explores some of the tensions that emerged on the road to this unlikely victory and raises questions for the immigrants’ rights movement in the us about the costs and gains that may follow from different ways of framing its demands. the dominant frame this particular campaign adopted was a pragmatic and politically acceptable call to improve traffic safety, one that reflected a conscious choice to downplay issues of rights, justice or global perspective. yet the article also reports that the campaign in fact created and used opportunities for activists to raise issues related to migrant rights. it also made a dramatic, albeit temporary, improvement in the daily lives of migrants in the state. the article then sketches three citizenship norms that current struggles might prefigure. these three norms are: the full right to international mobility of human beings; the right to identity; and duties of citizenship in a globalizing world. this article tells the story of a legislative campaign mounted by immigrants and their allies in tennessee, a state in the southeastern usa that has experienced a dramatic new wave of low-wage labour migration from latin america. the campaign fought successfully for access to a state-issued driver’s licence for people who could not produce proof of lawful presence in the usa. far from focusing overtly on the “meanings and expressions of citizenship,” this effort was initiated by and designed to benefit a population of non-citizens. moreover, at least in its public aspect and public rhetorical strategies, it seldom mentioned anything remotely like “rights.” nonetheless, the campaign and its aftermath should be of interest to those who believe that traditional ideas about citizenship and its attendant rights and duties need to be re-imagined for a global age. 166 fran ansley studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 manifested in a particularly striking way; this space offers important learning opportunities for students of citizenship. efforts like these, where transnational migrants attempt to improve their material and legal standing, occur at a site where traditional ideas of national or territorial citizenship come into particularly sharp confrontation with the new dynamics of accelerating globalization. since they are being initiated by some of the people most directly and adversely affected by global dynamics, these efforts provide an opportunity for scholars to listen to how such people perceive and define the unprecedented problems they face, and to see what kinds of solutions they have begun to propose. sometimes the most interesting of such efforts will be those that are just emerging and least shaped into demands that fit existing templates. another reason these pro-immigrant campaigns are valuable and worthy of study is that they pose important questions about who in the global economy has the “right to have rights” in the first place. they press more of the native-born to consider the exclusionary, “fortress” side of northern citizenship in today’s world. the first section of the article will provide some historical and factual backdrop for the tennessee campaign. the second section will sketch some highlights of the campaign itself —or rather, of the campaign up to summer 2003, since the story is far from over. the third section will offer some reflections and tentative conclusions. background historical boundaries of u.s. citizenship citizenship means many things, of course. sometimes it signifies a formal, legal status, and, at other times, a substantive set of citizenly obligations and rights. both of these meanings have been at the centre of past struggles for social justice in america, movements whose successes and failures alike have profoundly affected the nation’s history and character. the question of citizenship as formal legal status was a major theme during the fight to abolish and dismantle slavery, and in the process of resolving the status of peoples taken over in expansionist moments of u.s. history. in the infamous 1856 dred scott case, for instance, the u.s. supreme court ruled that american blacks “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the united states.” 2 other great arenas for contestation about status citizenship in america have been immigration and naturalization (saito, 1997). for example, the right to become a naturalized citizen was limited by federal law to “white persons” in the naturalization act of 1790, a restriction not formally repealed until the mid . it took a prolonged period of legal and extra-legal struggle before american black people won their freedom and formal citizenship under an amended constitution, and the twentieth century was half over before the basic political and civil rights of africanamericans were recognized or enforced in any serious way (bell, 2000; foner, 1988). american indians and puerto ricans are only two of many groups that have been subsumed under formal u.s. control, but whose relation to status citizenship has been circuitous and uneven (prucha, 1986; roman, 1997). constructing citizenship without a licence 167 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 twentieth century (lopez, 1996). similarly, the right to immigrate (a predicate to any later naturalization) has been subject to a long train of overtly race-based restrictions, stretching from the chinese exclusion act of 1882 through to the national quota systems that were not finally abolished until 1965 (neuman, 1996). those targeted by these exclusions did what they could to oppose them, but successes were limited (mcclain, 1994; rosales, 1999). to the present day, the supreme court remains highly deferential toward legislative action by the u.s. congress in this area. the court takes the position that congress has “plenary power” over immigration and naturalization questions, and its exercise should not be subjected to the same standards of judicial review that the court would apply in almost any other context (motomura, 1990; wu, 1996). of course, much social justice work in the usa has focused on the proper substance of the rights to be enjoyed by citizens, not on the formal criteria for who was eligible to be one. organizations and citizens’ movements have worked to deepen the substance of the citizenship rights accorded to groups that have been subjected to subordinating or marginalizing practices of different kinds. in good times, they have fought for more expansive understandings about things that all citizens should be able to expect from the state and from each other, and in bad times they have defended what rights they had against incursions by public and private power. while these struggles over the substance of citizenship went forward, the categories and divisions associated with outsiders’ access to the status of citizenship continued, although often at the margins of mainstream national consciousness. present context today we are in a period when the status of citizenship in the usa—the line between citizen and non-citizen—is back in the spotlight, and given the turbulent global conditions that presently prevail, the task of drawing and justifying such a line is likely to prove difficult in ways not felt before. a vibrant if embattled network of new groups has emerged, and older organizations have also begun to see that lowwage immigration presents both in opportunity and an imperative for those interested in organizing for justice (delgado, l993; milkman, 2000). meanwhile, working for immigrants’ rights has become more difficult but also more important in the atmosphere that gripped the nation after september 11, 2001 (lawyers committee for human rights, 2002; 2003). the campaign to win and then to defend immigrant access to the driver’s licence in tennessee is a case in point. agriculture originally dominated the tennessee economy, but in more recent times, agriculture has been complemented and partly supplanted by a strong industrial sector concentrated largely in low-wage industries like garments, textiles and consumer electronics. many manufacturing firms first moved to tennessee from further north in search of the low wages, docile and unorganized workers and “business friendly” regulatory environment for which the southeast has long been known. today, tennessee is experiencing trends familiar elsewhere: agriculture is increasingly mechanized and concentrated in ever fewer hands; manufacturing is in rapid decline; the service sector is on the rise; and the proportion of the workforce that is organized into labour unions is steadily slipping. 168 fran ansley studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 while many manufacturing jobs have moved to lower-wage locations in mexico and elsewhere, mass in-migration and settlement of low-wage latina and latino workers has emerged as a major demographic phenomenon (lowell & suro, 2002).3 i teach at a tennessee law school, where post-baccalaureate students prepare for professional practice. in the course of my research and service with local community groups, new arrivals from the global south have been entering and transforming both labour markets and the texture of daily life in many communities, large and small (fink, 2003). in tennessee, the overall number of latinas and latinos is still a relatively small percentage of the population, but they are nonetheless a striking new presence. in some counties, the growth has been especially dramatic, with attendant impacts on schools and other institutions that are ill-prepared to cope equitably or competently with the newcomers they are now challenged to serve (mendoza, 2002; smith, 2001). 4 as we made contact, over and over we heard the same refrain. three main concerns predominated and the three were closely related. and while supervising students in field placements, i became interested in latina and latino newcomers. my students and i began searching out opportunities to talk with immigrants about their experiences with the legal system and about their need for legal services. 5 such a bar was significant in ways that may be difficult for non-us readers to appreciate. in tennessee, as in many other u.s. locations, there is basically no local public transportation outside the tight central core of the larger cities. for the vast majority of people, including poor people, an automobile is a virtual necessity for even the simplest acts of daily existence, including the task of getting to and from one’s place of work. our informants were eager to explain how the pieces of this situation fitted together into an oppressive whole that greatly magnified their vulnerability: first the immigrants we spoke with wanted to understand their rights (or lack thereof) in situations where they were stopped or arrested by the police. second, they wanted to know the circumstances under which such a stop or arrest might lead to an entanglement with the immigration authorities. third, they wanted to tell us about the impossibility of getting a driver’s licence, and to explain to us what a huge impact that was having on their lives. we learned that the law in tennessee had recently changed, so that applicants for a licence now had to provide a social security number. (only persons who are authorized to work in the usa are assigned such a number, and for the most part this means citizens and those who have been granted legal permanent residency status, with its accompanying “green card.”) the new law effectively barred undocumented immigrants from obtaining a licence to drive. • all undocumented people were prohibited from getting a tennessee driver’s licence • a significant percentage of the latina/latino community in tennessee was undocumented • the chances that any given person found “driving while brown” would also be driving without a licence were therefore astronomically increased the simple probabilities produced by these facts could not possibly escape the notice of law enforcement officials. under the circumstances, it seemed that the constructing citizenship without a licence 169 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 temptation for a police officer to engage in racial profiling would be almost irresistible, whether they were interested in oppressing and harassing latinas and latinos, hustling a personal bribe or simply enforcing the law about driving without a licence. stories confirming the frequency of such profiling were common fare in these conversations. it seemed that any latino then at the wheel of a car in tennessee both felt, and was, a target for police attention abuse or both. upon hearing these stories in the field, the black law students on my courses found it easier than the white students to identify with the apprehension expressed by immigrants toward the police. they also could better imagine the stress induced by the need for constant vigilance. but all of us, black and white alike, found it bizarre to think that at the conclusion of one of our discussion sessions—at some venue such as the prosaic fluorescent-lit and linoleum-floored fellowship hall of the local catholic church, for instance—one group of us would get into our automobiles and return to our homes routinely, with little or no apprehension that a police stop might change our lives. meanwhile, another group would drive home as though players in some suspense-filled war movie about life under military occupation, eyes peeled for each police cruiser, stomachs jumpy with the knowledge that any random road block might spell economic and family disaster. the campaign as we came to find out, we were not the only people in tennessee who were hearing these kinds of stories. a growing population of native-born people was developing an awareness about the existence and the situation of undocumented people. many had become staunch supporters of the immigrant community and its right to live unmolested, and many appeared to be itching for something they could do about what they saw as harsh injustice. not a single immigrants’ rights organization was yet in existence in the state, however: no informal network, list of statewide contacts, phone tree, system of referrals. there were smaller networks where new knowledge about immigrants was starting to circulate, and were people were beginning to discuss issues, compare notes and express outrage. in the spring of 2001, the drivers’ licence campaign provided the seed around which these emerging trends and networks could crystallize. an ad hoc statewide coalition emerged, drawing support from a broad range of likely and unlikely bedfellows. a website and e-mail lists were created, and the tennessee campaign took advantage of then-nascent national network that had identified the issue of the driver’s licence as one that was worth the time of immigrants’ rights. in amazingly short order, the new coalition managed to put together a legislative campaign, move a bill through the general assembly, and secure the republican governor’s signature. the programme was implemented, and soon licences were being issued once again to undocumented immigrants in tennessee. within days, throngs of latinas and latinos descended on licensing stations. native-born people, who had not paid that much attention to immigration dynamics, got quite a jolt if they happened to show up to get their licence during that period. but the initial bottlenecks soon passed, and a new normalcy appeared to have taken hold. 170 fran ansley studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 many people involved in the effort, myself included, admitted to being somewhat dumbfounded at the campaign’s success. several had been dubious about the prospects of securing this reform, especially given the conservative tenor of the tennessee legislature and the reservoirs of anti-immigrant feeling that advocates had reason to believe existed in the state. the concerns of these doubters were not illfounded. for instance, anti-immigrant groups in the state scrambled to respond to our campaign, and soon after the bill’s passage launched a repeal effort. then when the world trade center was attacked a few short months later, the impacts were wide and deep. anger and fear among the native-born were epidemic, and immigrants of all kinds became the objects of widespread fear and suspicion. despite the post-9/11 climate, the pro-immigrant forces in tennessee have succeeded so far in maintaining immigrant access to the driver’s licence. however, access is now more burdened, in that people without a social security number have that fact flagged on the front of their licences. nevertheless, our initial success, and our ability to resist full-scale repeal after 9/11, represent important victories. several factors helped to secure them. perhaps the most basic contribution is that latina and latino immigrants themselves, together with their transnational family and friendship networks, laid the basic foundation, without which nothing would have been possible. the mass migration from latin america to the usa is itself quite a multi-generational feat of human adventure and engineering, and it has been accomplished against stiff odds and despite sometimes intense repression, intimidation and harassment. 6 second, we succeeded (to the limited and still unstable extent that we did) because the time was right. in many communities, the latino population had reached sufficient critical mass to create free spaces for communication and planning—in places like latino groceries, hispanic church services, scattered radio stations and small newspapers around the state. meanwhile, among the native-born population, the anti-immigrant forces were still relatively quiescent, but pro-immigrant individuals and emergent networks were ready and eager to sink their teeth into a concrete project. as a result, when we organized visits to the state legislature in nashville and made our calls to legislative offices, our side represented the vast majority of contacts the legislators were receiving. once here, these legions of low-wage immigrants have built relationships and “proved” themselves in-ways that contain plenty of irony and ambiguity, but in any event have created a multitude of potential patrons and allies. third, we learned that support for immigrants can come from unexpected quarters. agricultural employers, the nashville chamber of commerce and the police chiefs of several major cities were on our side, in addition to more accustomed allies like church groups, service providers, civil rights organizations, labour unions and social justice groups. these unusual bedfellows had political clout, and they offered cover for legislators that the “human rights types” could never have mustered alone. the eagerness of the republican party to establish ties to the latino community undoubtedly had some influence on the outcome, increasing the willingness of our republican governor to sign the bill into law, and later to defend it from full repeal. a final reason i believe we won this struggle for the rights of undocumented workers in tennessee is that we did not frame the campaign as a struggle for rights at all. instead, at least in its visible, public face, the campaign was framed almost entirely around the desires, interests and preferences of u.s. citizens. for instance, constructing citizenship without a licence 171 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 the ad hoc group that we created to push the reform was called “health and safety for tennessee highways.” that group developed talking points that stressed things like the value of having these potentially dangerous latino drivers properly trained, tested, licenced and insured. it also pointed out that if undocumented immigrants possessed a driver’s licence, they could be tracked down more easily by police. the central messages developed by organizers focused on the training, testing and insurability of immigrant drivers, on disruptions to local business and commerce, and on the cost to the state government of forgoing licence-related fees paid by immigrants and of volunteering to shoulder the duties of federal immigration law enforcement. the choice of a frame that left immigrants themselves so decidedly in the shadows was not uncontroversial within the campaign, but it represented a clear majority of opinion among those who developed the strategy. certainly, the highway safety issues were not trumped up. the statistics about deaths and injuries in car crashes involving latina and latino immigrant motorists are alarming, and the number of people—native-born and immigrant alike—who drive uninsured in tennessee is a scandal. nevertheless, most people who threw themselves into our campaign did not come to it out of an involvement in issues of highway safety, but because of a strong concern for immigrants’ needs and rights. the decision to frame the issue as one of highway safety grew out of the organizers’ conviction that putting immigrants’ rights or their welfare at the centre of the campaign (or even out toward its margins, if openly expressed) would be the kiss of death. although i was among those who questioned this decision, in retrospect i believe we probably would have lost the campaign had we pursued a more rights-oriented or immigrant-centred approach. for all those involved, the decision was made easier by our knowledge of the acute difference that this particular concrete reform could make in the lives of people we knew. it would magnify freedom and decrease terror for sizeable numbers of people we knew and cared for. it seemed that success on this issue would be an educational and confidence-building win for the immigrant community, even if the framing and the official rhetoric deployed in the campaign pretty thoroughly ignored the issue of justice for immigrants. of course, the dilemma we faced was hardly unique. most legislative campaigns involve trade-offs and choices about long-term goals and short-term realities. efforts at organizing relatively powerless people from below will always have to wrestle with how much to highlight the rights or needs of the weak, and how much to appeal to the self-interest of the strong including potential allies who have more resources and clout, as well as the decision-makers themselves. legislative campaigns that aim to benefit undocumented immigrants are especially likely to raise these questions because such campaigns are situated at the fault-line over who should have even the “right to have rights.” after all, undocumented immigrants cannot vote, and are therefore not part of the constituency to which an elected legislator owes formal accountability. further, significant numbers of the people who are part of the legislator’s formal constituency are likely to view the concerns and wellbeing of non-citizens as an illegitimate object of their representative’s concern. nevertheless, within and beneath this “non-rights campaign,” many issues of rights, justice and morality did indeed emerge. individual campaigners with whom i have spoken echoed my own experience that actual conversations often led us naturally beyond the official theme of safety and security for native tennesseans, 172 fran ansley studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 and provided openings—some small and subtle, others more generous and clear—for telling other kinds of stories, and pressing other kinds of arguments. in fact, no matter what the public rhetoric on either side, everyone understood that beneath the announced issues lay a mass of other questions that profoundly challenged the current immigration regime. in any case, once the anti-immigrant organizations began to get themselves in gear, there was no way entirely to ignore the issues of immigration policy, even if the campaign had been unambivalent in wanting to do just that. so in the end, this last ingredient of our success is something of a paradox. we did create and stick with a credible public frame that spoke to citizens and legislators about their own self-interest, and i believe that probably contributed to the success of the campaign. at the same time, the choice of this public frame was not as narrowing or chauvinistic as it may sound, because in actuality it did not banish more immigrant-centred conversations and frames from playing an important role in the life of the campaign. sometimes by choice and sometimes by necessity, the campaign did create a space for public debate and dialogue with native-born tennesseans about the immigrant community that has grown up in our midst, and about the justice or injustice of its circumstances. in fact the campaign’s role as the start of something bigger may be the most important point to make here. in preparation for this article, i contacted a number of people who had been active in the 2001 campaign and asked them for their present thoughts. all of them were pleased and proud of the victory that was won, but also acutely aware of its continuing fragility. each remarked with amazement how gratifying it had been to participate in something that created such a dramatic, concrete change for the better in the lives of so many vulnerable people. on one final point they were particularly vocal. the best thing about the campaign, they said, was that it enabled immigrants and their supporters around the state to find each other and to begin building longer-term relationships and collaborations. tennessee is now home to a formal organization, the tennessee immigrant and refugee rights coalition. it has a budget and a (very modestly) paid staff, and it holds regular state-wide meetings. the coalition continues to be involved in the question of the driver’s licence, but its agenda is now much broader and it speaks out regularly on many issues of concern to immigrants and refugees. these days, more meetings are conducted in spanish, 7 and more leadership roles are filled by immigrants and refugees themselves than in the early days of the campaign, when most of the co-ordination was provided by citizen allies rather than by immigrants themselves. the challenges that lie ahead are serious ones, but networks and relationships among people interested in fighting for immigrants’ rights are substantially ahead of where they were when the driver’s licence campaign began. meanings and expressions of citizenship the final section of this article will step back from the immediate facts of the driver’s licence campaign, to ask what lessons we might take from it about the meanings and expressions of citizenship. i am interested in building knowledge that can be put to use by scholars and activists who want to help mount democratic, bottom-up challenges to social exclusion and injustice. constructing citizenship without a licence 173 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 the discussion here will assume that ideas of “citizenship” and of “rights” are neither good nor bad in themselves. although the concept of citizenship and the rights attendant to it may offer helpful resources for winning a more democratic, open and sustainable order (johnston, 2002; mouffe, 1992; 1993), it sometimes can and has been used for very different ends. so my question is not whether rightsbased approaches associated with citizenship can be useful to the project i have named, but rather when, how, and under what circumstances they are most likely to be useful—or not. the tennessee driver’s licence campaign is a paradoxical but significant site for studying rights and citizenship. it was part of a wider mobilization that continues today in the usa; one in which undocumented immigrants—people with no standing as u.s. citizens or even as legal residents—are “making a way out of no way,”8 in many instances, those involved in this mobilization are not claiming formal legal rights, because in the context at hand they cannot point to any officially recognized rights that are available for them to claim. to be sure, there are some justiciable protections, constitutional and otherwise, that apply to immigrants in the usa (chin, romero & scaperlanda, 2000). further, a number of immigrants’ rights groups are attempting to win new, formally recognized rights for immigrants in specific contexts, such as access to higher education, and broader regularization of guest workers in agriculture. nevertheless, much of the activity pursued on behalf of immigrant welfare is pursued by necessity in a landscape of “no rights.” offering the rest of us much-needed windows on to the global landscape, demonstrating new models, and inviting us to reinvent our own citizenship (hair, 2001; smith & sugimori, 2003). one might characterize the larger context for these campaigns as a large-scale, decentralized social experiment that combines diverse elements, including: • the mass migration itself, which can in some ways be best appreciated as a kind of collective civil disobedience • political mobilizations and community and labour organizing efforts carried out with various allies (including communities of native-born and naturalized latinas and latinos in some regions of the country, as well as church groups, civil rights organizations and labour unions) 9 • the building of social and economic capital through a thicket of relationships and channels that are fusing immigrants into society in ways that already appear impossible ever to undo. the loose national network of driver’s licence campaigns across the usa provides a vivid example of the still-emergent, still-inchoate work of building new claims suited to our new global economy. sometimes such claims are based on formally realizable rights; at others they may only hint toward a possible future. sometimes, instead of invoking rights, campaigns speak forcefully of needs, or of higher principles beyond existing domestic or international norms, or of the self-interest of those in a position to grant rights or mere concessions. in any case, these campaigns provide spaces where immigrants are objecting to their exclusion from the licensing system, telling stories about what it means to lack a formal “identity” sufficient to grant access to the normal workings of the national economy in which one labours. such campaigns allow immigrants to describe in 174 fran ansley studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 arresting detail the irrationality and strain of their situation: thoroughly integrated into the mundane workings of the aboveground economy, and at the same time legally excluded, forced to traverse daily an uneven and unpredictable minefield of simultaneous normalcy and criminality. in providing the rest of us with these narratives, immigrants help themselves and us to imagine the human rights we need for our new global condition, there is no assurance that all immigrants’ rights movements in the usa will smoothly advance toward stronger rights, or that they will develop in ways that challenge rather than sustain existing power relations. but current campaigns for access to the driver’s licence are one part of a pre-legal, pre-institutional process that is helping to incubate novel rights claims appropriate for the new economy. in what follows i will sketch three citizenship norms that may be prefigured in current discussions and dialogue growing out of these concrete struggles. the full right to international mobility of human beings a full right to human mobility across international borders is a radical idea, one whose realization would require a direct assault on the notion that the unfettered authority to exclude non-citizens is an essential feature of national sovereignty. (even the united nations’s international convention on the protection of the rights of all migrant workers and members of their families, which entered into force in 2003 and is a welcome new development, only guarantees international mobility as the right to leave any state, plus the right to return to one’s country of origin.) in the u.s. context, full international mobility would also require a confrontation with deep patterns of white racial privilege that run through the nation’s legal and social history. nevertheless, the idea of radically more open borders has proved to be a difficult claim for wealthy states entirely to shake off; in part because it points up the sharp contradiction embedded in free trade regimes such as the north american free trade agreement (nafta) that force signatory states to submit to the free flow of goods, capital and services but do not similarly protect the free flow of people. whether despite or because of its unsettling implications, the call for open borders seems always just beneath the surface of every conversation on immigration. it appears simultaneously to be the only logical solution and—at least at present—a political impossibility. the right to identity another emergent claim of right that may be gestating in the driver’s licence campaign is a “right to identity”‒ something like a transnational right to recognition of a migrating person’s identity and origin. in today’s high-tech world, this would include a right of entry into the computerized identity systems that exist at a national and sub-national level all over the world, but most hegemonically in core countries. undocumented immigrants teach us that the lack of capacity to identify oneself in the information economy can be a devastating disability. immigrants in the usa want a driver’s licence first and foremost so they can engage in daily travel with less constructing citizenship without a licence 175 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 vulnerability. but many of them also want such a licence because it serves as a general identity document, needed nowadays for everything from renting a video to flying back home for a parent’s funeral. a u.s. social security number is generally available only to citizens or legal permanent residents. in recent years, its uses have expanded, and it is now demanded for an increasing range of public and private transactions and background checks. undocumented immigrants are by definition excluded from access to this powerful number, and yet they encounter multitudinous situations where proof of identity is required. accordingly, both from immigrants themselves and from those who have dealings with them, the pressure for some method of identification has become intense. troubling questions surround the notion of a right to identity like the one sketched here. how would such a right relate to the emerging u.s. security state and its powerful new information technologies? surely there is some irony in the idea of vulnerable people clamouring for admittance to a computerized system that will subject them to more efficient surveillance by a hostile and powerful foreign state. given the dramatic erosion of the rights and liberties of both citizens and noncitizens that has accompanied the bush administration’s announced war on terrorism, the cost of being integrated into state licensing systems warrants thoughtful deliberation. still, the cost of not being included is also demonstrably high, as we learned from immigrant narratives in tennessee. this dilemma about the costs of entry into information systems mirrors similar painful choices about global economic integration that presently confront poor people and poor countries around the world. duties of citizenship in a globalizing world if immigrants’ rights activism in countries of the north provides a hospitable environment for imagining and incubating new rights, these settings may also provide important laboratories for discerning the duties that should attend new conditions of global economic integration. some duties suggested by the situation of transnational low-wage workers make up the duties of the powerful. as many have argued, in a just legal order the shape of both rights and duties would be determined with pointed reference to power relations and would be designed to reduce and repair illegitimate disparities. with superpowers, they imply, should come super-responsibilities (matsuda, 1991; stammers, 1999). for instance, given the role that the usa has played in shaping and constraining the economies of most countries in the world, perhaps it should recognize a specifically american duty to admit many more economic refugees for secure and dignified employment in the usa. however, although pre-eminent, the usa is not alone in its disproportionate influence on the fate of other countries. perhaps all the nations of the global north should take on co-ordinated duties of admission, keyed to their respective powers and histories. history-conscious, postcolonial immigration practices by some european states offer imperfect models for thinking about how such duties might be framed. the facts of immigrants’ lives also suggest that duties toward trans-national migrants do not reside with states alone. exercises of private power can affect labour migration as greatly as do exercises of state power. accordingly, both the pushes and 176 fran ansley studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 the pulls that affect global migrant streams point to other duty-bearers, such as multinational corporations, international financial institutions and the public/private machineries that create, embody and administer international trade agreements. immigrants’ rights struggles also require citizens of the north to think about their own duties as persons who are in a position of relative privilege as compared to citizens of poorer countries. to be sure, workers and low-income people in the usa have many interests that are significantly aligned or at least overlapping with those of workers in other countries. but even they enjoy privileges and powers whose parameters they are seldom able to appreciate without the perspective added by looking through the eyes of others. the cauldron of immigrants’ rights struggles provides one place where first world citizens can begin to discern something more about their privileges and the duties they should imply. speculation about pockets of immigrant activism helping to incubate not only new global rights but also new “duties of global solidarity,” takes me far beyond the tennessee campaign for the driver’s licence. as someone who learned much from being a participant observer in the one small campaign described here, i can say with confidence that many native-born citizens who become involved with immigrants— in fights that range from the mundane to the sublime—have been profoundly changed by the experience. for the most part, americans have precious little knowledge of our own nation’s immigration law, few experiences that help us understand the role our government and corporations play abroad, little familiarity with international institutions that our government dominates, and only the thinnest exposure to cultures and languages other than our own. the driver’s licence tight gave many tennesseans a chance to start knowing more about these things and to consider our own responsibilities as citizens of a thoroughly fractured and connected world. notes 1 this article was originally published as a chapter in inclusive citizenship: meanings and expressions, naila kabeer, ed. london: zed books 2005, pp. 199-215. 2 dred scott v. sandford, 60 u.s. 393, 404 (1856). 3 demographics are intently watched in the usa, given their relationship to racial politics. the u.s. census reported that the u.s. hispanic population grew by 57.9 per cent between 1990 and 2000, as compared with 13.2 per cent for the population as a whole. over half were of mexican origin (guzman 2001). 4 for more background on this research, on my organizational collaborator (the tennessee industrial renewal network, now renamed the tennessee economic renewal network), and on my experiences as a participant observer in some of the organization’s work, see ansley (2001); tirn (1993). 5 the issues centred on the concerns of undocumented people, so it may be worth pointing out that many of the people we spoke to in this information-gathering process were ‘legal’; that is, many of them were lawfully present in the usa and also entitled to work, because they were birthright citizens or naturalized citizens, or because they had been granted legal permanent resident status, which entitled them to a (non-green) “green card” and a social security number. but all of them, legal or not, made it clear that the concerns of the undocumented were questions of the highest priority. the vast majority, even if they were lawfully present themselves, had family members or close friends who were undocumented. in any case, the operating assumption seemed to be that the treatment accorded to undocumented immigrants directly affected all other members of the latino community. constructing citizenship without a licence 177 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 6 i do not mean to suggest that all latina/ latino immigrants to the usa consider themselves to be part of a social movement for rights or any other organized social project. latino immigrants are an extremely diverse group. they come to the usa with many different goals; they subscribe to many different ideologies and dreams; they bring with them many different levels of resources; and they are changed in many different ways after they arrive. 7 the coalition’s membership is not limited to english and spanish speakers, nor is it limited to issues of concern to the latina/latino community. there are active participants from africa, the middle east, asia and eastern europe, and their issues are prominent on the agenda of the coalition. nevertheless, spanish is by far the most numerically significant minority language spoken in the coalition and in the state. 8 this lovely phrase is one passed on by american labour and civil rights historian michael honey (1999, p. 86). 9 recently, the american federation of labor and congress of industrial organizations (afl-cio), the nation’s largest labour federation, announced a sharp reversal of its previous restrictive position on immigration. now, the federation and many of its union affiliates are campaigning for broader legalization programmes and are actively recruiting among immigrant workers (nissen, 2002). of course, many difficulties and questions about the future of organized labour and its relationship to immigrant workers remain. references ansley, f. (2001). inclusive boundaries and other (im)possible paths toward community development in a global world. university of pennsylvania law review, 150, 353-417. bell, d. (2000). race, races and american law (4th edition). new york, ny: aspen publishers. chin, g., romero, v., & scaperlanda, m. (eds.) (2000). immigration and the constitution: origins of constitutional immigration law. new york & london: garland publishing. delgado, h. (1993). new immigrants, old unions: organizing undocumented workers in los angeles. philadelphia: temple university press. dred scott v. sandford. 60 u.s. 393: 404 (1856). fink, l. (2003). the maya of morganton: work and community in the nuevo new south. chapel hill, nc: university of north carolina press. foner, e. (1988). reconstruction: america’s unfinished revolution, 1863-1877. new york, ny: harper & row. guzman, b. (2001). the hispanic population. census 2000 brief. washington, dc: u.s. bureau of the census. hair, p. 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(1990). immigration law after a century of plenary power: phantom constitutional norms and statutory interpretation. in g. chin, v. romero & m. scaperlanda (eds.) (2000) immigration and the constitution: origins a of constitutional immigration law (pp. 285-613). new york & london: garland publishing. mouffe, c. (ed.). (1992). dimensions of radical democracy: pluralism, citizenship, community. london & new york: verso. mouffe, c. (1993). the return of the political. london & new york: verso. neuman, g. (1996). strangers to the constitution: immigrants, borders and fundamental law. princeton, nj: princeton university press. nissen, b. (ed.) (2002). unions in a globalized environment: changing borders, organizational boundaries and social roles. armonk, ny: m. e. sharpe. prucha, f. p. (1986). the great father: the united states government and the american indians. lincoln, nb: university of nebraska press. roman, e. (1997). empire forgotten: the united states colonization of puerto rico. villanova law review, 42, 1119-1211. rosales, f. a. (1999). pobre raza!: violence, justice and mobilization among méxico lindo immigrants, 1900-1936. austin, tx: university of texas press. saito, n. t. (1997). alien and non-alien alike: citizenship, "foreignness" and racial hierarchy in american law. oregon law review, 76, 261-345. smith, b. e. (2001). the new latino south: an introduction. memphis: center for research on women. smith, r. & sugimori, a. (2003). low pay, high risk: state models for advancing immigrants' rights. new york, ny: national employment law project. stammers, n. (1999). social movements and the social construction of human rights. human rights quarterly, 21, 980-1008. tirn (1993). from the mountains to the maquiladoras [video]. knoxville, tn: tennessee industrial renewal network. wu, f. (1996). a moderate proposal for immigration reform. in g. chin, v. romero & m. scaperlanda (eds.) (2000) immigration and the constitution: origins of constitutional immigration law (pp. 61-100). new york & london: garland publishing. correspondence address: keith mann, department of sociology, cardinal stritch university, 6801 n. yates road, milwaukee, wi 53217, usa. email: kamann@stritch.edu, tel.: (414) 4104217 issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 2, 165-179, 2014 social movement literature and u.s. labour: a reassessment keith mann cardinal stritch university1, usa abstract largely due to its conservative profile at the time, the u.s. labour movement was largely absent from modern social movement literature as it developed in response to the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. recent labour mobilizations such as the wisconsin uprising and the chicago teachers’ strike have been part of the current international cycle of protest that includes the arab spring, the antiausterity movements in greece and spain, and occupy wall street. these struggles suggest that a new labour movement is emerging that shares many common features with new social movements. this article offers a general analysis of these and other contemporary labour struggles in light of contemporary modern social movement literature. it also critically reviews assumptions about the labour movement of the 1960s and 1970s and reexamines several social movement concepts. most commentary on the contemporary u.s. labour movement focuses on the decades-long decline of union strength in terms of membership, power, and influence. reflection on labour protest tends to emphasize the defensive nature of strikes and other forms of collective action. but a close look at labour struggles over the last five years suggests that a new labour movement is emerging that differs in many ways from the labour movement of the last half century. this emerging labour movement begs close analysis from the perspective of social movement literature. yet, those looking to existing social movement literature for cues on how to study contemporary labour as a social movement will find that very little of the considerable amount of social movement literature produced over the last half century has been devoted to labour. indeed, the labour movement has always held a peculiar position in studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 166 keith mann modern social movement literature. implicitly and occasionally explicitly, labour has been almost the anti-social movement, the counter example to the “real” social movements that arose in the second half of the twentieth century—the civil rights, women’s, anti-war, gay and lesbian, and other movements. in social movement literature, labour is the quintessential “old social movement” as opposed to the “new social movements” that began with the post-war u.s. civil rights movement (touraine, 1971; calhoun, 1993; buechler, 2011). this article reexamines the labour movement as a social movement. it explores how assumptions both accurate and inaccurate about labour shaped modern social movement literature. it also offers a general analysis of recent labour struggles from the point of view of modern social movement literature. finally, it suggests some implications of these movements for social movement theory and research. we begin by briefly reviewing aspects of the labour movement from the 1930s to the time of the emergence of contemporary social movement theory in the 1960s. from insurgency to complacency the 1930s were in many ways one of labour’s golden ages. the 1920s had been a time of repression and decline. unions declined in strength relative to the period before world war i in the face of ferocious repression against labour radicals and union organizers while taylorist rationalizing and speedups made factory life miserable and dangerous. but in the 1930s, industrial union organizing drives tapped into the anger, energy, and creativity of millions of unand semiskilled workers. the 1930s labour movement bore the characteristics of what social movement theory would later describe as an “emerging” social movement. the mass strikes, including sit-down strikes of the mid-1930s in auto plants and also in department stores and textile mills, areas of female labour, demonstrated the determination and creativity of these workers. by reaching out to unorganized and unemployed workers, the unemployed movements of the great depression reflected the broad social concerns and vision of the labour movement (piven & cloward, 1977). militant, mass labour protest continued into the 1940s and 1950s, exemplified by bitter coal strikes in the 1940s and steel strikes including the months-long steel strike begun in july, 1959 which involved 500,000 strikers. the spectacular victories of union organizing drives, the passage of the national labor relations act (nlra), also known as the wagner act in 1937, and the formation of the new deal coalition made labour a player in national politics. but these same victories also helped produce a bloated, conservative union bureaucracy, increasingly distant from the rank and file, while the institutionalization of work place labour relations had a demobilizing effect on the mass of rank-and-file workers. eventually, a dynamic labour movement was transformed into what social movement literature would later refer to as a “routinized” social movement. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 social movement literature and u.s. labour 167 worlds apart: the labour and civil rights movement while the world watched spectacular actions by the post-war civil rights movement in the name of basic human rights, the labour movement seemed to lapse into a slumber. to many observers, the labour movement of the 1960s seemed stodgy, conservative, and narrow in scope, focus, and composition. these were the years when afl-cio head, george meany, declared with pride that he had never walked a picket line, when new york city hardhats attacked antiwar demonstrators, and corruption and mob influence in unions like the teamsters sent top labour officials to prison. no post-war labour leader ever came close to enjoying the moral stature of a martin luther king or even a gloria steinem or a betty friedan. women and minorities held few positions in the often well paid union officialdom. in fact, the latter had to wage concerted campaigns, including recourse to legal action, to gain access to union posts (needleman, 2003). the success of large unions in manufacturing like auto, steel, rubber, etc. in securing favorable contracts at the bargaining table, without recourse to mass collective action like strikes and demonstrations, and their studied avoidance of criticism of u.s. foreign policy and reluctance to champion broader social issues, made the labour movement seem worlds apart from authentic social movements and unionized workers seemed to be an increasingly privileged layer of the working class. missing identity the prominence of identity issues in the civil rights, women’s and gay and lesbian movements also seemed to remove labour from consideration as a bona fide social movement. given the dominant culture’s erasure of the working class as a distinct social category, a reflection of the rampant individualist impulse in u.s. society and the cultural hegemony of the employing class, post-war representations of labour offered by the labour movement and its observers did not underscore the working class as a social, political, or cultural category, in spite of a manufacturing sector that employed a full 35% of the work force in the immediate post-war world. in traditional marxist terms, the working class seemed to exist “in itself” but not “for itself” at a time when black and women’s consciousness-raising efforts were integral to the internal life and public demands of the civil rights and women’s movements. much of this attests to the integrative power of u.s. capitalism in the postwar boom. the combination of significant wage and benefit concessions by industrial capital to powerful industrial unions on the one hand, and red baiting and witch hunting on the other, gave a section of the white, male working class unprecedented material gains while their unions became conservative, fossilized, and undemocratic (pries, 1972). one of the consequences of the regularization of industrial conflict brought about through the national labor relations act (nlra) was a routinization of shop floor industrial relations. over time, the masses of rank-and-file workers became demobilized and studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 168 keith mann out of touch with the active participation of the 1930s, while movement organizations’ (smos) unions became routinized and bureaucratized (dobbs, 1977; meyer, 1992; preis, 1972). the marginalization of labour from the social movement research agenda also reflected—and was given theoretical justification by—the view that the working class had lost its sociological cohesion as a social group in the new post-war “post-industrial society.” (gorz, 1980; touraine, 1971). by the 1980s, social and labour historians influenced by postmodern social theory also began to challenge the existence of class in general (jones, 1983; scott, 1988). this was the backdrop to the development of modern social movement theory and research. by 1970 relative deprivation theory had become a well-established theory, perhaps the first innovation in social science theory developed in response to the social movements of the time. during the 1970s, resource mobilization acquired state-of-the-art status largely supplanting relative deprivation as the leading explanatory device to account for the emergence of social movements. some of the best social movement literature, such as doug mcadam’s freedom summer, involved sustained research into specific social movements (mcadam, 1998). but given the reality and perceptions of the labour movement at the time, labour as a social movement received little attention from social movement scholars. social unionism and wildcat strikes but this view of labour was far from complete. while it did accurately describe the trajectory of the union bureaucracy, there was simultaneously another side of the labour movement. although the “business unionism” of big industrial unions in the manufacturing sector and in the building trades seemed to represent labour as a whole, unions like the united farm workers (ufw), continued the tradition of rank-and-file mobilization and social unionism. in doing so, they resembled the newly emerging social movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. the ufw’s reliance on a community-oriented strategy, the combined character of the organization as both a labour and civil rights organization at a time when the chicano rights movement was in full swing, and its use of strategies and tactics borrowed directly from the civil rights movement made the ufw and the campaigns it championed the center of a new social movement. the grape boycott it called in the 1970s reached well beyond agricultural labour and mexican-american and mexican immigrant communities. the struggles of the ufw and their high profile leader, caesar chavez, did not of course escape the view of social movement scholars. but they were not seen primarily as labour struggles (shaw, 2010). although far less well known than the ufw campaigns, there was significant rank-and-file labour militancy during those years. rick fantasia and judith stepan-norris (2004) have offered evidence of an impressive number of wildcat strikes carried out without the approval, and often studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 social movement literature and u.s. labour 169 against the wishes, of the official union leadership. their limited size and short duration put them under the radar screen of government statisticians. extrapolating from data collected on strikes at the westdale steel plant for the years 1944–1958, they conclude that from 1961 to 1977 wildcat strikes accounted for 47 to 66 percent of all strikes (p. 568). many of these strikes were launched in response to taylorist-like speedup drives whose full force fell inordinately on black and women workers who were overwhelmingly assigned to the unskilled and semiskilled sectors where taylorist speed-up drives were rampant. according to the militant rank-and-file black worker’s organization, the dodge revolutionary union movement (drum), only 10% of skilled positions were held by black workers. drums’s newsletter chronicled in detail how black unskilled and semiskilled workers were treated markedly worse by management and foremen than their white counterparts (drum, volume 1, number 2). in 1968, the organization led wild cat strikes at chrysler. drum also challenged the conservative uaw leadership that had failed to integrate black workers into union structures (geschwender, 1977; glaberman, 1969). one of the most significant rank-and-file challenges against conservative, bureaucratic unionism was the formation of the teamsters for a democratic union (tdu) in the 1970s in the notoriously undemocratic teamsters union (brenner, brenner, & winslow, 2010; labotz, 1991). in europe, bursts of rank-and-file militancy and mass mobilization like the 1960-1961 general strike in belgium, the june 1968 strikes in france, and the italian wave of strikes in 1969 known as the autonno caldo made european labour relations far more turbulent than in the united states. the differences between the european and u.s. scene reflected in part the different balance of forces between labour and capital in europe and the united states. a powerful u.s. capital class was able to take advantage of its dominant position in the post-war capitalist world to offer concessions in return for labour peace. european employers lacked this marge de maneauvre. recent scholarship has also spotlighted a wave of rank-and-file militancy in france in the years following the may-june 1968 upsurge involving wildcat strikes and the use of militant tactics like sequestration (mann, 2011; vigna, 2007). in addition to the bureaucratization and routinization of the labour movement, and the low profile of rank-and-file struggles, fantasia and stepan-norris (2004) offer another reason why labour has been marginalized in social movement literature. they point out that many social movement scholars have been “predisposed by their own biographical experiences of social movement activism to study those movements that are similar to those in which they have worked or those that have played a role in the development of their own intellectual stance and career trajectory, as well those movements that embody their own political values (p. 556).” in other words, many social movement scholars of the time had been involved with the civil rights, women’s, antiwar, gay and lesbian, and other struggles but had little connection to the organized labour movement. as university studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 170 keith mann students living on college campuses, and then as professors, they were far removed from labour struggles. many were of middle class origin, isolating them further from proletarian lives and struggles. behind these developments were important changes in the composition of the working class. women’s work force participation has steadily risen both in real numbers and as a percentage of the labour force since at least the 1970s. in 1970, 31,543,000 women (as opposed to 51,228,000 men) participated in the paid work force, representing 38% of the work force. by 2012 women represented 47% of the work force. women, along with immigrants and table 1 civilian labour force by sex, 1970-2012 number (in thousands) percent of the labour force year women men women men 1970 31,543 51,228 0.38 0.62 1980 45,487 61,453 0.43 0.57 1990 56,829 69,011 0.45 0.55 2000 66,303 76,280 0.47 0.53 2012 72,648 82,327 0.47 0.53 source: bureau of labor statistics (bls), current population survey (cps)/ graph by the women’s bureau, u.s. department of labor people of color were overwhelmingly concentrated in low-skill, lowwage jobs, which lacked health insurance and other benefits and were often dangerous as well. so the dominant view of labour as an old social movement, defined as a conservative, routinized smo, is largely correct as a description of the labour bureaucracy and the general dominant, public image of labour. but, at the same time, rank-and-file collective action and social justice unionism which operated on a deeper, less publicized and officially documented level displayed many of the features found in the new social movements and highlighted in social movement theory and research. but the dominant view of labour as an old social movement served to establish a sharp division between old and new, which served to remove labour from the social movement research agenda. contemporary labour and the international cycle of protest beginning in 2010, a wave of protests erupted, including the arab spring, the upheavals in greece and spain, the wisconsin uprising, and the occupy wall street movement (buhle & buhle, 2011; yates, 2010). labour struggles studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 social movement literature and u.s. labour 171 have been prominent. in the fall of 2010, unions in france launched mass protests against the sarkozy government’s move to raise the retirement age. the organized labour movement has been marginalized in the greek and spanish movements protests due to the ties between the major union confederations and socialist parties who advocate and implement neo-liberal austerity policies. in both countries millions of young workers, including many with college degrees, have never held full-time jobs, and therefore have never been union members. but the greek and spanish movements are labour protest due to their overwhelming popular nature as movements embodying much of civil society against deep austerity drives. in both countries, the organized labor movement has fought to be relevant. while the urban protests in egypt gathered most of the attention in the uprisings that forced mubarak out of office in february, 2011 and then morsi in july, 2013, the backdrop of the movement had been thousands of labour strikes throughout the country. it has been argued that the mass strikes of february 9, 2011 were the decisive blows to the mubarak regime (hartshorn, 2013). together, these various struggles conform closely to what social movement scholar sidney tarrow has called a cycle of protest (tarrow, 1994). the basic features of a cycle of protest according to tarrow involve a phase of heightened conflict and tension across the social system that includes: a rapid diffusion of collective action from more mobilized to less mobilized sectors; a quickened pace of innovation in the forms of contention; new or transformed collective action frames; a combination of organized and unorganized participation; and sequences of intensified interaction between challengers and authorities which can end in reform, repression and sometimes revolution. (p. 153) although space limitations here preclude a detailed, point-by-point application of these features to contemporary struggles, the general affinity between these features of a cycle of protest and the protests that emerged since 2010 should be evident. contemporary labour as a social movement in the us, the current cycle of labour protest has been going on long enough to meet the “sustained” requirement that charles tilly and lesley wood (2009) argue necessary for a movement to qualify as a social movement. the current cycle of labour protest involves three arenas of collective action: 1. a series of rank-and-file insurgencies against conservative leaderships in the name of union democracy and militancy (brenner, 2013). 2. public sector strikes in wisconsin in february-march 2011, and the chicago teachers strike in september, 2012. it also includes the worker mobilizations in michigan and indiana against the passage of “right to work” legislation. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 172 keith mann 3. demonstrations and strikes by low-wage undocumented workers whose struggles have combined immigration and labour issues. these include the mobilization of immigrant communities such as the los angeles janitor’s strike, the “day without latinos” may day cerebration in 2006, and most recently the successful efforts of mexican immigrant car wash workers, the washeros, in winning union recognition. these also include strikes and union organizing drives at powerful low-wage employers like wal-mart and mcdonald’s. although the focus here is on events since 2010, the roots of the current revival of social movement unionism can be traced back to the 1990s when unions like the service employees international union (seiu), the hotel and restaurant employees international union (here), and the textile union unite launched bold and often successful organizing drives against powerful employers. the labour forces in these low wage service sectors were overwhelmingly immigrant, female, and people of color, groups which bureaucratic unions had long considered unorganizable. in their 2004 book, hard work, rick fantasia and kim voss identified a series of practices in these campaigns that contrasted sharply with those of business unionism (fanstasia & voss, 2014, chapter 4). these included innovative organizing campaigns and a strong dose of social justice unionism. an analysis of these developments suggests that the current cycle of labour protest in the us resembles in many ways the new social movements of the 1950s onward. at the same time they also present challenges to contemporary social movement wisdom, which in turn calls for updates of, and revisions to that literature. the next section provides an overview of the current cycle of labour protest through the lens of established concepts within social movement literature, drawing heavily from the work of charles tilly and his colleagues. the concepts and theories used to describe and analyze these movements are: • wunc performances. these are worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. social movements display these. • repertoires of collection action. these refer to the tactics used by social movement actors. tilly and wood (2009) see them developing in their modern form from the late 18th century onwards. • political process theory refers to the connection between social movements and institutional politics. in the us, the wisconsin uprising looked much more like a 1930s rankand-file labour upheaval than the routinized, bureaucratically controlled labour actions of recent decades. the revolt in early 2011 against republican governor scott walker’s ‘budget repair” bill, which eliminated collective bargaining in wisconsin for public sector workers, demonstrated many of these features. far from the routine, well-orchestrated rallies typically organized by the union officialdom, this struggle was arguably as close to an studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 social movement literature and u.s. labour 173 example of spontaneous collective action as possible, and it displayed classic examples of the repertoire of collective action. protestors flocked to madison immediately following news reports of the introduction of the bill. hundreds occupied the capitol building itself, sleeping on its marble floors for days on end. noisy and spirited mass marches and rallies were held nearly daily for six weeks. the marches featured the display of banners and signs, mostly handmade, the chanting of slogans, and the wearing of badges. the breadth, scope, sustained militancy, and overall grassroots character of the uprising was clearly more reminiscent of 1930s style labour militancy and other familiar and recent social movements than the stale, top-down routinized labour actions seen in much of the post-war period. in the days and weeks that followed, the local and national union bureaucracy scrambled to assume control of the movement. national union staffers arrived and rented office space in front of the capitol and the marching route. the sea of hand-written signs and banners gradually mingled with professionally produced signs and banners, courtesy of the afl-cio. the wisconsin uprising differed in other ways from labour protest of the last half century. although few journalistic observers seemed to notice, the madison uprising was largely a women’s movement; teachers were the largest group of affected public sector workers, and seventy-five percent of these are women. the chicago teachers’ strike was not only a largely female action; it also featured a large percentage of people of color, symbolized by karen lewis, an african american woman who became union president with support from the reform caucus, core. given trends in the workforce as a whole, there is every reason to expect that the new, emerging labour movement will evince a profile quite different from the white, native-born, male-dominated labour movement of the past. contemporary labour and wunc performances both the wisconsin uprising and the chicago teachers’ strike embodied many classic features highlighted in social movement literature. both illustrate charles tilly’s wunc performance model (worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment). regarding worthiness, the strikers, largely teachers, portrayed themselves as community-minded citizens who work under difficult circumstances to educate disadvantaged children. the display of picket lines and the wearing of t-shirts were powerful examples of the unity reflected as was the success in winning huge majorities voting in favor of the strike. rallies were attended by large numbers of teachers and supporting parents and students. the commitment of the strikers was shown over a long period of organizing as was the willingness of teachers to take on a powerful urban political machine with strong ties to the obama administration. like the wisconsin uprising the teachers were largely women, as was their leader karen lewis. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 174 keith mann universalistic demands as we have seen, the largely exclusive focus on wage, benefit, and job protection issues by the labour movement for much of the post-world war ii period helped conservatives paint it as a narrow “special interest,” a far cry from the broad progressive social force it was in earlier times, and helped to exclude it from the social movement research agenda. the contemporary labour movement, however, has raised demands that are pitched in the type of broad, universalistic terms that have always impressed social movement scholars as emblematic of authentic social movement master framing. the struggle against the walker law was pitched in terms of social rights such as collective bargaining and universal principles such as democracy, as well as wages, benefits, and working conditions, in similar ways that other social movements have framed their struggles. the madison protesters quickly latched onto one of the main master frames of the contemporary international cycle of protest, democracy. one of the main slogans chanted during the demonstrations was “this is what democracy looks like.” first chanted during the 1999 protests against the wto in seattle, the slogan took on special force as protestors linked their struggle to the emerging arab spring. theirs was a radical, grassroots, bottom-up democracy. the chicago teachers strike also was framed in terms beyond salaries, benefits, and working conditions. the teachers’ union conducted their struggle in words and deeds as much as a fight for poor, minority children, their families and communities as a fight to defend their interests as employees. the union forged durable alliances with community groups which were approached as partners. the union “was upfront about its view that treatment of chicago students amounted to institutional racism” (bradbury, brenner, brown, slaughter, & winslow, 2014, p. 80). under its new leadership, the ctu launched a campaign against banks like the bank of america, whose foreclosures of homes in working class, poor, and minority neighborhoods have had a “devastating impact” (bartlett, 2012, p. 7) on those communities, in part because foreclosures lead to reduced tax revenues for school budgets. some contemporary labour struggles are deeply connected to immigration issues and struggles, clearly a form of social justice unionism. these add identity issues to the other classic social movement features seen in wisconsin and chicago. grass roots union organizing an unintended consequence of the assault on unions and collective bargaining has been a return to 1930s-style grass roots union organizing. in wisconsin nearly every teachers’ union local in the first elections retained certification and collected voluntary dues through the type of one-on-one organizing that faded away with automatic dues check offs and routinized grievance procedures. there is also evidence that this is occurring in michigan following the enactment of “right to work” legislation in that state. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 social movement literature and u.s. labour 175 the contemporary cycle of labour protest qualifies, therefore, as a social movement in the sense that u.s. and, to an extent, european social movement literature has defined new social movements. at the same time, however, a close look at this movement reveals processes that are not completely explained by social movement literature. these include the relationship between existing bureaucratic smo structures, mass insurgent groups, and mass rank-and-file mobilization, and the utility of the terms “old” and “new” social movements. “old” versus “new”: a useful distinction? among european social movement scholars, the notion of an “old” and “new” social movement as staked out by alain touraine (wievorka, 2012) focuses mostly on the types of demands the movement raises. old social movements like labour focused on the material issues of wages, benefits, and working conditions, as opposed to the broader, more universalistic concerns that animate new social movements. in the us, scholars tend to define old and new social movements more by their forms of collective action and degrees of grass roots participation. we have seen in the above review of current labour mobilization that recent labour protest qualifies as a social movement and shares many features with the new social movements of the last few decades. indeed, scholars such as craig calhoun, marco guigni and nina eggert have found the distinction between old and new social movements increasingly less satisfying. with the european labour movement in mind, guigni and eggert see a “homogenization” of the two types (calhoun, 1993; eggert & guigni, 2012). bruce spencer sees the distinction as problematic as well. he argues that the canadian labour movement has adopted social movement strategies that bear close resemblance to new social movements (spencer, 1995). should social movement scholars view recent labour protests as the latest emergence of a new social movement along the lines that this has been understood by modern social movement literature? it might appear so, given the evidence. however, a close look at the internal dynamics of entrenched and insurgent forces within the union movement suggests that contemporary labour struggle combines so much of what has been considered “old” and “new” that the distinction has become untenable. labour and social movement organizations two features of the union movement and the system of collective bargaining in the us distinguish the labour movement from other social movements. firstly, the absence of a labour party in the us with mass working class support and institutional ties to the trade union movement is one of the most glaring examples of american exceptionalism. this means that the organizations, the smos of the labour movement, are largely limited to unions studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 176 keith mann and labour confederations like the afl-cio and, since 2006, change to win. living wage campaigns involve both unionized and non-unionized activists and are loosely affiliated with unions, giving them some independence from the officialdom, but they tend to be small. given the steady decline of the percentage of the unionized workforce in the us (currently around 11% as opposed to 35% following wwii), the unions, and therefore the labour movement, directly represent only a small minority of u.s. workers. this too cuts across class identity as it suggests that unions represent occupational groups rather than the working class as a whole. in other countries, labour, socialist, and communist parties have claimed to represent and have been seen as representing the working class, although their neo-liberal turn in recent years has compromised their legitimacy in the eye of many working class voters. secondly, while other social movements usually involve a plethora of smos (think naacp, student nonviolent coordinating committee, southern christian leadership conference, etc.), giving these movements a pluralistic character and allowing new elements to challenge older, entrenched leaderships through the establishment of new smos, the institutional structures connected to the collective bargaining machinery set up following the enactment of the nlra limit the emergence of new smos in the labour movement. collective bargaining agreements posit specific unions as bargaining agents, which sharply limits the ability of insurgents to challenge leaderships outside of the boundaries of the organizations controlled by incumbents. the labour movement, therefore, has fewer smos than the civil rights and other movements, which makes it more difficult to challenge entrenched leaderships. the wisconsin uprising produced an independent smo, the wisconsin wave, founded in january, 2011. however, this organization is outside of the labour movement itself and, while working against the walker measures, does not constitute a rankand-file effort to challenge the union officialdom in their own organizations or replace the current leadership with a more militant leadership. with no reform current or caucus challenging the teachers’ union, the national education association (nea) grew out of the movement in spite of the dissatisfaction with the current leadership. however, the wisconsin wave helped organize an ultimately unsuccessful recall election against governor walker. but the successful petition campaign to recall walker (thus forcing new elections in which wealthy out-of-state conservative forces like the koch brothers donated large sums to walker’s successful reelection campaign) involved thousands of union and non-union members who collected 900,000 signatures. in chicago, however, the strike was led by a militant leadership. the leadership was itself the product of an impressive, long-term struggle by a militant, reform caucus, the caucus of reform educators (core), that unseated a conservative old guard in 2010. labour radicals, including organized socialists, played a key role in core’s success (bartlett, 2012). these struggles, their democratic ethos, and rank-and-file, grassroots nature look much more like the social movements that served as models for the building of social movement theorizing and concept development from the studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 social movement literature and u.s. labour 177 1960s on than the post-war labour movement. both the union and core were dynamic smos that led the movement. core was clearly an emergent smo. given its transformation under new leadership, the ctu can be considered emergent as well. like the concepts old and new, the concepts “emerging” and “bureaucratized” are inadequate in and of themselves to capture the dynamism of some of the current developments in labour. in particular, the madison and chicago examples demonstrate how fresh rounds of mobilization occur both within and outside of existing smos. existing structures both make possible and constrain the development of mass rank-and-file mobilization. most of the hundreds of thousands of state employees and their allies who participated in the six weeks of marches and demonstrations in madison and elsewhere throughout wisconsin had never participated in such actions and were not in any way part of the union bureaucracy. most had never participated in union activity before. they participated as union members in the madison protests even before the union bureaucracy took over the movement. missing from the wisconsin uprising was rank and file control of the course of the movement. the bureaucracy assumed and retained control of the strike. it refused to entertain the possibility of a general strike, even though some locals endorsed this idea. the movement, therefore, displayed both aspects of an emerging social movement with its dynamism and spontaneity, as well as, on the organizational plane, a classic bureaucratized, routinized social movement organization. emergent and routinized social movements “emergent” and “routinized” are general concepts within social movement literature that seek to broadly characterize movements in terms of their distance from formal political participation and also their dynamism and level of rank-and-file activism. the labour movement both historically and currently invites us to consider these concepts more closely. some labour scholars have noted the conservatizing influence of organized unions with substantial paid bureaucracies in stifling rank-and-file activism, while the general wisdom of resource mobilization is that organizations and material resources are necessary to social movement development. but does the distinction between emergent and routinized unions always describe unions during periods of upheaval? the chicago teachers strike was led by a militant leadership, responsive to the rank and file. this leadership was itself the product of a successful rank-and-file reform movement, the caucus of reform educators (core), that unseated an entrenched union bureaucracy that had long made the chicago teachers union the embodiment of the notion of a routine social movement organization. thus a challenging organization (core) within a larger organization (the ctu) successfully overthrew the bureaucracy and assumed leadership of the union. shortly thereafter, that leadership led a struggle that had all the hallmarks of a new social movement. like the distinction between old and new social movements, the hybrid nature studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 178 keith mann of contemporary labour struggles, in terms of the emergent and routinized trope, demonstrates how the new labour movement challenges many of the assumptions of social movement literature. the other arenas of the current cycle of protest, particularly the arab spring and occupy, obviously also present challenges to social movement wisdom. both the wisconsin and chicago movements suggest that public sector unionism has been the sector that may continue to produce some of the most important labour struggles in the us. employers and conservative politicians and elected officials are clearly targeting public sector unions. the wisconsin case as well as the passage of “right to work” legislation in indiana and michigan are the most obvious manifestations of this. the stunning victory of the chicago teachers sends a signal to both other public sector unions and those that would crush them, that fighting back can be successful. both the government and private sector offensive against unions and resistance to that offensive can be expected to continue2. as they do, further innovations in the forms of protest and organization will continue to develop, presenting both challenges and opportunities for social movement literature to offer insights into these remarkable movements and the prodigious hopes they inspire. notes 1 the author wishes to thank michael hanagan (history, vassar college) and the anonymous reviewer for studies in social justice for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. 2 a decision expected in the spring or summer of 2014 by the us supreme court in harris v. quinn could extend “right to work” legislation, currently in force in twentyfour states, to all fifty states. references bartlett, r. (2012). chicago teachers’ strike looms: going head to head with mayor “1%.” against the current. may-june. bradbury, a., brenner, m., brown, j., slaughter, j. & winslow, s. (2014). how to jump-start your union: lessons from the chicago teachers. detroit: labour notes. brenner, a., brenner, r. & winslow, c. (eds.). (2010). rebel rank and file. new york: verso. brenner, m. (2013). reform rekindled. labor notes, 410. buechler, s. (2011). understanding social movements. paradigm publishers: boulder. buhle, m. & buhle, p. (eds.). (2011). it started in wisconsin. new york: verso. calhoun, c. (1993). “new social movements” of the early nineteenth century. social science history, 17(3), 385–427. dobbs, f. (1977). teamster bureaucracy. new york: monad. drum (newsletter), (1968). volume 1, number 2. eggert, n. & guigni, m. (2012). the homogenization of “old” and “new” social movements: a comparison of participants in may day and climate change demonstrations. mobilization, 17(3). fantasia, r. & stepan-norris, j. (2004). the labor movement in motion. in d. snow, s. a. soule, & h. kriesi (eds.), the blackwell companion to social movements. malden, ma: blackwell. fantasia, r. & voss, k. (2004). hard work. university of california press: berkeley. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 social movement literature and u.s. labour 179 geschwender, j. (1977) class, race, and worker insurgency: the league of revolutionary black workers. cambridge: cambridge university press. glaberman, m. (1969) dodge revolutionary union movement. international socialism (1st series), no. 36, april/may 1969. gorz, a. (1980) farewell to the working class. new york: pluto press. hartshorn, i. (2013). labor unions under attack in morsi’s egypt. http://muftah.org/laborunions-under-attack-in-morsis-egypt/ jones, g. (1983). languages of class: studies in english working class history, 1832–1982. cambridge: cambridge university press. mann. k. (2011) a revival of labor and social protest research in france: recent scholarship on may 1968. international labor and working class history, 80, 203–214. mcadam, d. (1998). freedom summer. oxford: oxford university press. meyer, s. (1992). “stalin over wisconsin”: the making and unmaking of militant unionism, 1900-1950. new jersey: rutgers university press. needleman, r. (2003) black freedom fighters in steel: the struggle for democratic unionism. piven, f. f. & cloward, r. (1977). poor people’s movements. new york: vintage. preis. a. (1972). labor’s giant step: twenty years of the cio, 1936–1955. new york: pathfinder press. scott, j. (1988). gender and the politics of history. new york: columbia university press. shaw, r. (2010). beyond the fields: cesar chavez, the ufw, and the struggle for justice in the 21st century. berkeley, ca: university of california at berkeley press. tarrow, s. (1994) power in movement. cambridge: cambridge university press. tilly, c. & wood, l. j. (2009). social movements: 1768-2008. boulder: paradigm. touraine, a. (1971). the post-industrial society. tomorrow’s social history: classes, conflicts and culture in the programmed society. new york: random house. vigna, x. (2007) l’insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68: essai d’histoire politique des usines, rennes: presses universitaires de rennes. wievorka, m. (2012). the resurgence of social movements. journal of conflictology, 3(2), 13–19. yates, m. d. (ed.). (2010). wisconsin uprising: labor fights back. new york: monthly review press. ndlovu final feb 19 20 correspondence address: duduzile ndlovu, african centre for migration & society, university of the witwatersrand, p.o. box 76, wits 2050, johannesburg, south africa; email: duduzile.ndlovu@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 166-168, 2020 creative intervention the migrant nurse dilemma duduzile sakhelene ndlovu university of the witwatersrand, south africa ⁠i am a nurse1 i work with pregnant women i moved here in august2 ⁠ i just wanted exposure there we are still behind it’s a challenge with foreigners check the passport proof of residence in case she has a problem i take them even if it’s not valid they are pregnant send her away? she collapses? last week this other lady came she could see, we could see it’s not her it’s your sister’s passport? now your sister is on arvs ⁠3 another one’s passport expired in 2012 i just said, “hey, go to home affairs, you’ll come back on wednesday” i know she won’t 1 poetic transcription of an interview conducted by becky walker in 2015 with a professional nurse as part of a study funded by mrc/dfid/esrc/wellcome trust health systems research initiative (mr/m002160/1) through a wellcome trust investigator award. i was involved in the fieldwork for the study. 2 from another province in south africa. 3 anti-retroviral therapy for hiv infection. the migrant nurse dilemma studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 166-168, 2020 167 i go home i sleep stressed end up in a dilemma what do i do with this person? someone who is pregnant i even asked from home affairs ⁠4 give me something so that i am safe nothing… even if there was a protocol, human rights are not specifically for south africans i don’t even know the policy i am looking for how should i treat the foreigner? if she doesn’t have a valid passport she’s a human being context i wrote this poem based on the transcript of an interview between a researcher and a nurse at a primary health care center in johannesburg, south africa. i assigned the anonymised transcript to a graduate research methods course for students to practice qualitative analysis. all the students presented in their analysis the conclusion that the nurse was xenophobic, and none engaged with how the nurse grappled with mixed feelings over her xenophobic actions. the poem emerged initially with the intention to reflect on the health care encounter from the perspective of the nurse: a migrant, black, south african woman providing care for migrant, black, non-south african women. the poem brings out the nurse’s mixed feelings and how she experiences her location. as a nurse she has “power” to decide to grant or bar people’s access to health care, but this choice is not without complexity. she finds herself torn between her professional role as a nurse representing institutional policies and regulations (which are not always clear) and her position as a fellow human being providing health care to others with whom the caring relationship is structured by national borders. the nurse expresses a sense of powerlessness regarding the legal provisions that are not clearly spelt out, and a moral dilemma as she recognizes that despite nationality the patients are equally human. on the other end of these ambiguously interpreted regulations and the nurse’s moral dilemma, migrants are forced to develop different strategies to navigate difficult challenges accessing health care, even though the world health organization (who) considers health care a right for all, and international law provides for migrants’ access to health care (hanefeld et al., 4 the south african department of home affairs. duduzile sakhelene ndlovu studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 166-168, 2020 168 2017). this right is protected in the south african constitution, but is not clearly outlined in either the national health act or the immigration act (ncumisa, 2018). the result is a grey area in which many migrants experience challenges accessing health care, while health workers may also experience frustration over the lack of guidelines for how to deal with nonsouth african patients. this grey area in the legislation has also sometimes led to some government officials issuing unconstitutional circulars to health centers, for example, incorrectly directing migrants to pay for services, which presents a huge barrier for many who cannot afford to pay (e.g., see vearey, 2014). the situation in south africa is also underscored by widespread xenophobic perceptions of migrants who are often seen as a burden to the health care system (see clifford & hazvineyi, 2019; crush & tawodzera, 2014). references clifford, c., & hazvineyi, l. (2019, january 29). analysis: are south africa’s public hospitals ‘overburdened’ by foreign patients? retrieved 25 october 2019, from africa check website: https://africacheck.org/2019/01/29/analysis-are-south-africas-publichospitals-overburdened-by-foreign-patients/ crush, j., & tawodzera, g. (2014). medical xenophobia and zimbabwean migrant access to public health services in south africa. journal of ethnic and migration studies, 40(4), 655–670. hanefeld, j., vearey, j., lunt, n., bell, s., blanchet, k., duclos, d., … adams, j. h. (2017). a global research agenda on migration, mobility, and health. the lancet, 389(10087), 2358– 2359. ncumisa, w. (2018, january 7). ensuring health and access to health care for migrants: a right and good public health practice. retrieved 25 october 2019, from https://www.sahrc.org.za/index.php/sahrc-media/opinion-pieces/item/1422-ensuringhealth-and-access-to-health-care-for-migrants-a-right-and-good-public-health-practice vearey, j. (2014). healthy migration: a public health and development imperative for south (ern) africa. samj: south african medical journal, 104(10), 663–664. trowbridge final nov 19 19 correspondence address: terry trowbridge, department of socio-legal studies, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: ttrow@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 332-334, 2019 book review mind the tracks sosa-velazquez, maida. (2018) niagara falls, on: grey borders books. (saddle stitch paper) cdn$7; 28 pages terry trowbridge york university, canada it might be unusual to review a pocket-sized saddle stitched chapbook of 25 poems like maida sosa-velazquez’s mind the tracks, published by grey borders books, a small press from niagara falls, ontario. mind the tracks is emblematic of a sea change in the social geography of lake ontario. there are different reasons for reading this chapbook as a sample of the next generation of literature coming from canada’s economic golden horseshoe. sosa-velazquez was born in montevideo, uruguay, and now lives in etobicoke, a suburb of the greater toronto area. she is a full-time commuter on the provincial government’s public commuter go train system. for 365 days, she wrote at least one poem about what she observes on the commuter train. the result is a collection of 365 commuter poems that have yet to appear in one book. mind the tracks is the first selection of those poems to be published in a chapbook. the economy of toronto has been radically altered by the policy and planning of provincial and city governments in the 21st century. while the greater toronto area (gta) has a substantial manufacturing economy, the downtown core of toronto has shifted into a high-density information-based commercial zone. workers have been priced out of the toronto core by a sudden construction boom. the workforce has moved to the suburbs, as far west as hamilton, as far north as lake simcoe, as far east as oshawa. the go train is the pulmonary transit system for thousands of commuters each day. likewise, there has been a steady, incremental increase in the size of the newcomer immigrant community to southern ontario. toronto has always been the obvious destination for immigrants in ontario, with many families book review studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 332-334, 2019 333 landing in toronto before either settling in community enclaves, or else bouncing to oshawa, mississauga, oakville, hamilton, niagara falls, guelph, or london. the last ten years of changing economies and new condominium buildings, however, have narrowed the destinations for the most recent newcomers to the go train routes along lake ontario’s north shore. meanwhile, academic sociologists and public policy researchers are now noticing new trends in the diverse multicultural diaspora of the gta. racialized and minority families are moving to the suburbs, east to ajax, pickering, oshawa, west to oakville and burlington. the movement of second and third generation canadians is as much a product of new housing opportunities as an attempt to avoid toronto’s racial profiling, which inspires landlords to exploit tenants and police to criminalize youth. therefore, growing populations of the most culturally unique, mixed language, mixed heritage families, now live in the suburbs and work in toronto. they are connected by the go train. the commuter culture of the go train’s hourlong journey east, north, and west, is the daily reality of multilingual urban professionals of varying incomes and a railroaded homogenized workingclass experience. the go transit system is being expanded toward the niagara region on the south shore of lake ontario, and grey borders, as a niagara falls publisher, is helping to complete that interconnectivity and the cultural sprawl of the urban gta into the collective literary consciousness in the areas that the train is promised to one day reach. mind the tracks’ 25 poems reveal maida sosa-velazquez has an original voice that is direct, plain spoken, and unpretentious. her poems present her vision in two directions. firstly, as an insider, she documents her commuter peers with speculative empathy about what go riders can feel, think, and react to, while they are confined to a seat with strangers. the train is, in some ways, not a place in itself, but rather in-between places. commuters are limited by their body’s immobility and their overlapping personal space. sosa-velazquez documents how their confinement is not necessarily without its own tragic or comic episodes. on “may 24, 2017” sosa-velazquez records a woman avoiding the attention of a man by pulling her hair into a closed gesture and “pounding sanctuary on the pages of her book” while the man, “lowers his lips to a coffee/and sips her.” whether their gaze connects or disconnects them is ambiguous. a mouthful of coffee, he metaphorically “holds her in his mouth/until her heat fades./he swallows./she burns inside.” sosa-velazquez interprets the small physical gestures that communicate emotion and constitute the interactions of seated strangers in a muted but highly styled, shared daily ritual. secondly, as a newcomer and an outsider in a train car full of strangers, sosa-velazquez practices a kind of ethnography. her ethnographic observations separate herself from other travelers. her vision is wider than theirs. in “may 5, 2017” she observes, “kids in costumes on phone screens./kids on beaches on phone screens./kids piled on other kids on terry trowbridge studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 332-334, 2019 334 phone screens.” the kids have a narrowly concentrated gaze on a small patch of digital images in front of them. in contrast, sosa-velazquez, reaching for her phone, pauses before checking its texts, “i…rest my hand there for a minute./in the distance, a flock of sparrows take flight.” she notes the urban wildlife outside the train window. there is a context for the commuter experience wider than the go train aisle. sosa-velazquez therefore is a dual observer. she is a lyrical voice from the tens of thousands of go train peoples. she is developing their literature, a library for a newly created intercultural, intercity lifeworld. she is also an ethnographer, a documentarian of what the others might also see, but only she has chosen to record and report. mind the tracks with its go transit-green tinted cover is pocket sized, purse-ready, like the normal ephemera of a go rider on their way to and from work. even though the chapbook is short, it serves as a record of ontario society from a newcomer’s voice. it also serves as an example of the sort of art that can come from the notes we generate during ethnography and participant action research. in plain voice, presenting interpretation without the adornment of an introduction about theory, mind the tracks is worthy reading for students of field research or public policy to consider the ways their own work can be translated into literary work, and from literary work into a handy guidebook to the world they create. brady final correspondence address: miranda j. brady, school of journalism and communication, carleton university, ottawa on k1s 5b6; email: miranda.brady@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 onstage and behind the scenes: autistic performance and advocacy miranda j. brady carleton university, canada abstract for many autistic performers in arts and entertainment, the stage can be an important site of self-advocacy and creative expression. whereas everyday social interactions may be unpredictable, being onstage can allow autistic performers to work from a script and anticipate audience responses. this article explores the affordances and challenges of performance for young autistic adults in canada through interviews with four autistic performers (two singers and two stand-up comics). while solo performance was the focus, participants discussed the creative employment of diverse media platforms, from the stage to screenwriting and children’s books, and emphasized the need for autistic people to be involved in all creative realms. this research follows a critical disability studies (cds) framework which challenges deficit models of autism (mcguire, 2016), “supercrip” tropes (clare, 2015, p. 2), and narratives of overcoming autism (cheng, 2017). while one participant noted being uncomfortable with the sense that they were a source of inspiration for non-autistic audiences, each found it encouraging that autistic audiences relate to their work and might be motivated to participate in similar forms of self-advocacy; in particular, they noted the value of performance in building confidence. as previous cds literature is wary of disability as spectacle (darke, 1994), this research provides insight into how young autistic adults use their work onstage and behind the scenes to promote and perform self-advocacy. keywords autistic adovocacy; performance; comedy; media introduction: theatre as platform for a long time, the only way i could be liked by people was by making jokes and being funny. that’s still by far the easiest way i can relate to people. (jack hanke, asperger’s are us, 2016) people on the spectrum… sort of feel like an alien being dropped in from outer space, and you can’t quite connect properly… being on stage and making a room miranda brady studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 430 full of people laugh, felt like a connection i hadn’t been able to establish in any other environment. (hannah gadsby, as cited in gross, 2020, para. 7) in the statements above, autistic comedians jack hanke and hannah gadsby get at the core of what being on the stage can mean for an autistic performer: a highly coveted sense of connection and affirmation of their skills and talents. while often underestimated, autistics can have unique strengths (arendell, 2015) and perform at very high levels in a variety of artistic forms and venues from televised talent competitions (cheng, 2017) to classic opera conservatories (addicott, 2019). in fact, some argue that autistic people are especially well-suited for the arts as they are prone to “creative thinking” and “see the world a bit differently” (buckley et al., 2020, p. 5). among other benefits of autism, the autistic comedians and singers interviewed for this article discussed having humorous, outsider perspectives on social interactions, perfect pitch, and a natural ability to mimic vocal presentation. having access to the stage and training in performance also gives them the opportunity to actively challenge ignorant assumptions about autistic people. interviews with four young adult autistic performers, and family members who support their work, indicated that their experience and training in performance (e.g., vocal coaching and improvisation), has helped them gain confidence, which can be especially important for self-advocacy.1 participants found that in addition to having a platform for expression, some of the skills built through performance training transferred into their everyday contexts and helped reduce anxiety. they also noted that because performance can be scripted and rehearsed, they are often more comfortable in a performance context than in everyday social interactions with people they do not know, which can be significantly less predictable. another advantage of the arts is that performers can determine a creative genre and style that works for them. for example, in addition to being “quick and cheap to produce” and often devoid of “the whims and prejudices” of casting directors, one autistic stand-up comedian noted that performing solo rather than with other people leaves less to chance as he does not need to rely on others to get their lines right as with traditional theatrical productions (sandahl, 2003, p. 29; m. mccreary, research interview, 2019). another solo performer, who sings and adds autobiographical elements into her 1 this project was reviewed and approved by the carleton university research ethics board (cureb-a) in june 2019. study participants are listed below. actual names of participants are used with their permission: • doug mccreary. [21 aug. 2019]. phone interview. • michael mccreary. [22 august 2019]. phone interview. • samantha mutis and april mutis. [2 october 2019]. phone interview. • sara sobey and kim souch. [5 november 2019]. phone interview. • adam schwartz. [1 october 2019]. email interview. onstage and behind the scenes: autistic performance and advocacy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 431 performances, noted the opportunity to control and play with audience expectations as a way for her to turn them on their head (s. mutis, research interview, 2019). above and beyond enhancing the performance of self in everyday life (goffman, 1956; sandahl & auslander, 2005), the understanding of performance described by interview participants spoke to a model of social justice couched in self-advocacy as performers discussed the broader sociocultural implications of having an audience and moving beyond “stigma management” to challenge ideals of normalcy (sandahl, 2003, p. 40; garland-thomson, 1997) and normative “aesthetic and social values” (johnston, 2012, p. 5). as kirsty johnston (2012) notes, it is high time for disabled performers to be meaningfully included in theatre and to have their own venues. disability theatre in canada follows an activist tradition, and more broadly, shares many intersections and affinities with other forms of activism by marginalized groups (sandahl, 2003), which have undoubtedly paved the way for emerging autistic performers. while the past several years have seen a markedly generative period for canadian disability theatre as national institutions and granting councils have supported new initiatives in line with equity mandates (sandahl, 2003), accessibility is still a concern in the arts. as johnston (2012, p. xiv) states, given how often disabled characters and productions involving disability themes arise in theatre, it is unacceptable that inaccessibility remains a problem in professional theatres and training programs. i am far from the first person to take issue with how often disability is and has been mined for pathos and comedy and enacted to demonstrate virtuosity in theatres that do not support people with lived disability experiences to take the stage or sometimes even a place in the audience. similarly, while there has been celebratory discourse around performance and autism (arendell, 2015), there are still some questions worth exploring about the struggles of autistic performers and their unmet access needs. for example, as buckley et al. (2020) point out, auditions can lead to disproportionate levels of stress for people prone to anxiety, and other production factors like lighting or loud sounds can be difficult or impossible to navigate for people with sensory sensitivities. as previous literature suggests, the idea of the “neutral” (non-disabled, neurotypical, or allistic) actor can also act as a tyranny in actor training, further reinforcing social invisibility (sandahl, 2005, p. 255). as sandahl (2003) writes, “many programs are dubious of disabled people’s talent or simply do not recognize it” (p. 30). for example, winnipeg-based autistic comedian adam schwartz noted that while he took acting classes, he did not feel he was a success because he has difficulty expressing a range of emotions, which is expected of most actors. he attributes this inability to express emotion to his experiences of bullying as a child (a. schwartz, research interview, 2019). as researchers note, autistic people show an increased risk of experiencing traumatic events such bullying, which can result in post-traumatic stress miranda brady studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 432 disorder (ptsd) (haruvi-lamdan et al., 2020) and many, like schwartz, also experience co-existing conditions like depression. as another barrier to access, it can be very difficult to earn a living wage with contract performing; this compounds with the high rates of unemployment amongst autistic and disabled people more generally (buckley et al, 2020; statistics canada, 2017). in some cases, this led participants to diversify their work into different media forms, for example writing children’s books. autistic performers may sometimes need to cater to broad audiences to earn a living wage. they may also feel as if they are novelties because of the combination of their autism and impressive abilities. this tokenization of autistic and disabled people in media has been called inspiration porn: where the autistic/disabled body gives neurotypical/able-bodied people feelings of relief and gratitude for their perceived normal status and generosity as a benevolent savior of the less fortunate (ellcessor, 2017; young, 2014). this follows longer, ableist tropes seen in popular media, and what autistic comedian michael mccreary describes as the “neurodivergent inspiration porn genre.” as he states, “it’s about the arch of the neurotypical character as they come to accept and understand somebody who’s different” rather than being about the autistic person themselves (m. mccreary, research interview, 2019). as mitchell and snyder (2000) point out, disability is often used as a “narrative prosthesis,” or an “opportunistic metaphorical device” upon which dominant narratives are dependent, with the “discursive dependency” on disability as a vehicle for evoking inspiration in non-disabled audiences being a popular and deeply entrenched trope (p. 47). a prime example of the inspiration porn trope was demonstrated when judges on the show america’s got talent saw a performance by codi lee, a blind autistic singer; following the performance, they cried and expressed their shock (cheng, 2017). rather than simply acknowledging lee’s talent, the show framed lee’s performance as an “overcoming” of his autism (cheng, 2017, p. 184). as disability rights activist stella young (2014) famously pointed out, such inspiration porn leads to the objectification of disabled people for the benefit of non-disabled people (young, 2014). another danger of such a narrative trajectory is the misguided notion that autistic and other disabled people can simply “overcome” disabling infrastructures and attitudes in order to gain access to institutions that other people can easily navigate (cheng, 2017; clare, 2015). the existence of these ableist tropes in part stems from the fact that it has traditionally been people who are not disabled who have primarily shaped discourses of disability (murray, 2008). in particular, critical autism studies notes the struggles between autistic self-advocacy and professional and parent advocacy voices in autistic and autism communities (brady & cardin, 2021; mcguire, 2016; yergeau, 2018). hollin (2020) notes of the “parental gaze” through which the majority of autism narratives are told: “it isn’t just that the stories told are those of parents, it is that we are placed resolutely in the parent’s shoes and see things entirely from their perspective” (p. 2). the onstage and behind the scenes: autistic performance and advocacy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 433 dominance of parental discourses and perspectives in popular culture make clear the need for a centring of autistic perspectives while encouraging mediated kinships amongst disabled and neurodivergent people beyond the family unit (ginsburg & rapp, 2016). a related theme that emerged in interviews reflected the desire for increased independence as autistic performers learn the ropes of performance and reach adulthood. as michael mccreary jokingly states, “you know, my dad drives me everywhere, you don’t gotta remind me that i’m like useless” (m. mccreary, research interview, 2019). but, despite these broader tensions, it was clear that some of the autistic performers interviewed for this chapter have incredibly supportive parents who help their children to develop their talents and dreams. in some cases, parents provided the technical support and coordination for performances, acting as stage managers. michael’s father, doug, travelled across the country to support michael’s comedy tour, and sara’s mother, kim, often performs with her daughter and ensures that necessary accommodations are written into contracts. importantly, such support has helped these performers gain a platform so that they are able to advocate for themselves and address some of the systemic ableism and stereotypes that they have faced. overall, each of the performers interviewed found it encouraging that autistic audiences related to their work and might be motivated to participate in similar forms of advocacy; in two cases, the fact that non-autistic people initially underestimated them also added an element of surprise to their performances as they turned ableist assumptions on their head. while not using the term “social justice,” performers noted their broader goals of encouraging well-being and a model of self-advocacy for autistic audiences as well as the enjoyment of entertaining as motivation for performing. a brief note on methods following institutional ethics approval, the performers (young autistic adults) interviewed in this piece were identified through snowball sampling, beginning with michael and doug mccreary, who the researcher met following a show in ottawa. semi-structured interviews took place during the summer of 2019 over the phone in three cases and via asynchronous communication (email) in one case. in order to make participants feel more comfortable, they were sent questions in advance of the interview and were offered a transcript and the opportunity to revise their comments in cases where interviews took place over the phone. while a larger sample of participants might have expanded on a broader and more diverse range of experiences, the limited focus allowed the researcher to include a more detailed account and profile of each participant. block quotations are used in several cases to centre participant experiences. miranda brady studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 434 michael: on making awkward extroversion a career i was diagnosed with asperger’s syndrome at the age of five, and while it can be challenging at times, i wouldn’t change the way i am. cause then i’d be somebody else. if anything, i’d kinda like to change you, so you could have a better understanding. (m. mccreary, 2016) toronto-based comedian michael mccreary has been performing stand-up since he was 14-years-old. since that time, he has become one of the bestknown comedians in ontario, and possibly in canada, to focus on his experiences as a young autistic adult in his sets. in 2019, he embarked on a canada-wide comedy tour performing in a variety of venues from churches to comedy clubs. michael first performed in school plays after seeing his older brother in theatre, and given his extroverted personality, he was a natural. he later received comedy and improvisation training through the stand-up for mental health program in guelph and subsequently a program for autistic students at second city in toronto. autism is a central topic in his comedy, public speaking engagements, and written work. importantly, michael’s humour is gently self-deprecating, but it emphasizes how important it is for neurotypicals (or allistics) to better understand and respect autistic people (m. mccreary, research interview, 2019). ironically, while he has spent a lifetime learning about acceptable social cues and how to avoid problematic dynamics with allistics by understanding how they communicate, he notes that most neurotypical people do very little to learn about autistic people. his shows make this lesson accessible for general audiences without letting them off the hook; humour can be an especially powerful vehicle to challenge ableism without seeming too didactic (sandahl, 2003). as hannah gadsby has pointed out, it can be dangerous in comedy when the most marginalized of people become the butt of their own jokes (valentish, 2020). gadsby, like michael, has learned to turn the lens back on neurotypicals while treating themselves with more compassion as she demonstrated in her 2020 comedy special douglas (gross, 2020). like many autistic people, michael experienced bullying and loneliness as a child. because some autistic people can be trusting and fail to recognize nefarious intentions operating below the surface, they can misunderstand that they are in an abusive dynamic with others in which they are the targets. after coming to this realization as a youth, michael distanced himself from an unhealthy social group and turned to writing, theatre, and eventually comedy (mccreary, as cited in cbc, 2016). as he journaled, he was able to not only process his experiences, but recognize humour in his unfortunate circumstances, for example, how ridiculous and insecure his bullies were. in addition to sticking up for himself, he also learned to defend other autistic students, with one of his first jokes on the schoolyard being a “yo mama” onstage and behind the scenes: autistic performance and advocacy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 435 joke used to deflate a bully (mccreary, 2019). for him, learning performance skills was an important part of self-advocacy. as he explains: oh yeah sure, i don’t think about it [performance training] in term of conditioning… like here’s how you act ‘normal,’ performance skills are good for self-advocacy. you’re like hey, i know this is wrong, or people have put me in a position that makes me feel bad, how do i articulate that, how do i take control of the situation? how do i get out of there? how do i be assertive? i think that’s such a great avenue for it. i remember second city launched a program for teens on the spectrum, that i thought was really groovy… improv encourages you to not only anticipate radical change on a moment to moment’s basis, it lets you not be scared of it. in fact, it kind of makes it exciting, and that to me, is how it felt. even though i don’t do improv, and it’s not my ideal style of performing, it wasn’t my favourite thing to do, but i felt it was invaluable for transferrable skills…that was why so many kids, who were my friends who had asd [autism spectrum disorder] loved drama in high school, cause they were like, wow here’s a forum where i could actually… where i could feel like i’m getting something out of it socially. that helps me articulate where i’m at. (m. mccreary, research interview, 2019) self-advocacy is especially important because the construction of autism in popular culture most frequently comes from the perspective of people who are not autistic (allistic). when interviewed, michael disclosed that he believes most people’s perceptions of autism are formed by film and television, but it is not just the characters themselves that are problematic when it comes to the construction of autism in popular culture. as he states, autistics should be included in every part of every production in the entertainment industry in order to normalize autistic experiences so that they do not just become “a checklist of characteristics.” as he states: that’s what happens when you have exclusively neurotypical writers or producers, or whatever… whoever they may be… writing characters that are not part of their life experience. to me, i think the best thing that they could have is not only autistic people in the writer’s room contributing to the characterization of a cast or character, but i think what we need is them involved in every facet of production… pre-production, production, post-production whatever. (m. mccreary, research interview, 2019) this lived experience need not be directly translated into autistic characters, and importantly, michael points out that some of his favourite characters are ones that are not overtly cast as autistic, but who he can read, or interpret, in that way. moreover, he finds it important for shows to get past the idea of having a singular autistic character and making the show all about that. if more autistic people were involved in creative production, autism would be more normalized, and plots would not need to revolve around autism itself, it would just implicitly be understood (m. mccreary, research interview, 2019). miranda brady studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 436 in order to be welcoming to autistic people, the industry must seriously consider accessibility concerns, and as previously discussed (buckley et al., 2020), performing arts in general can be difficult to navigate. in particular, comedy, which has a long history and culture of “toxic masculinity,” can be brutal for autistic people amongst other equity seeking groups, such as women, queer, and transgender people (gadsby, as cited in valentish, 2020). however, unlike hannah gadsby, who had a late diagnosis and only began focusing on autism in her shows in 2019/2020, mccreary’s audiences are communities who are often familiar with autism. one upside to having this speciality is that many of the hosts who invite him often “get” his access concerns, though this can vary from site to site. michael points out the benefits of show producers being flexible in letting performers prepare for a set, even if their methods for doing this can be a departure from the norm. although his experiences have been mostly good, he notes that in entertainment in general, performers are expected to be conditioned to perform when and where producers expect them: i think there is something kind of scary in entertainment, and i think this goes beyond being on the spectrum, and is more about neurodivergences or even about people with psychological variations where they go like, hey, can i like take a break… and not take a break from this long term, but hey, i need to just go off and do this thing… we are so conditioned to go, like okay, you’re waiting in the wings to go on. where i go, i know what’s going on, i know how long everything is, can i just go pace out in the hall because that’s how i do my thing. (m. mccreary, research interview, 2019) before a show michael goes through a process which generally involves pacing by himself in a quiet space. during this time, he identified that he would like to be left to his process, rather than being shepherded or infantilized. at the crux of this is respecting his autonomy and access concerns and assuming that he is going to “bring it” as an experienced professional (m. mccreary, research interview, 2019). samantha: on classical training and upending expectations when i’m singing, i feel happier than i normally am, especially when i’m in my bedroom singing to a playlist… and also in front of a big audience. i really like that because i feel i can actually have people pay attention to me for once [laughing]. (s. mutis, research interview, 2019) samantha first knew she wanted to be a professional singer at age 11 when she saw the talent competition show american idol. she had been performing in school choir since the age of eight, but she describes her exposure to american idol as a key point in her life: “and i thought, ‘that could be me.’ onstage and behind the scenes: autistic performance and advocacy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 437 and i fell in love with it. i got really serious, and i actually got voice lessons for my 12th birthday, so that’s kind of where it all started.” growing up, samantha looked up to singers like kelly clarkson and avril lavigne. little did she know, she would eventually have the opportunity to audition for the show canadian idol, even making it past the first round of cuts (s. mutis, research interview, 2019). samantha’s mother, april, believes that samantha’s penchant for music actually started much earlier, even beginning while in utero. as a child, starting at 18 months she had a knack for impersonating accents and the styles of singers like judy garland, “and i mean just like judy garland because she was such an incredible mimic that she could sing just like judy garland.” this sometimes evoked laughter or surprise, but for samantha, “she realized it helped her to sort of be included. and, same with all music.” while samantha was praised for her musical talents, singing “at a level different than everyone else” her age, social interactions came much less easily (a. mutis, research interview, 2019). as an autistic adult who also struggles with severe social anxiety, samantha notes that she finds comfort in the predictability that comes with performance, and in turn, her training has also helped her feel more at home in social interactions. samantha’s smooth and composed public speaking engagements and poised singing were cultivated over many years of vocal training as a youth and later honed in her formal musical training at the university of toronto, where she focused on jazz (s. mutis, research interview, 2019). however, despite the benefits of coaching, university was not easy for samantha, especially in her second year, just prior to her diagnosis with an anxiety disorder. as with many university students, that period of young adulthood was tumultuous, and the pressures of her competitive program combined with her autism and co-existing conditions sometimes sent her spiraling. i would have a performance test, and i would be so nervous, i would be sweating and shaking, but then after the performance, i would still be shaking and convulsing and all that stuff, and i think it’s because i felt such high pressure, so much was expected from all my teachers and stuff. and, i was going through a lot of personal stuff as well. a lot of family issues, just trying to balance all my course load, and family issues, and relationships, yeah, it was intense. (s. mutis, research interview, 2019) better understanding her anxiety disorder was one helpful way of constructively addressing her stress. another was to carefully plan and script presentations and performances down to the last detail. as a young woman, samantha started giving presentations about her experiences with autism that generally had a musical component, and preparation was paramount. as samantha states: miranda brady studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 438 the challenges, sometimes my speech freezes or i stutter, so that made me really have to script everything to a t in my speeches. as i got older i did start to substitute certain words for others, every now and then in my speeches, but when i was younger, i had to stick exactly to a script because i would either freeze or say something inappropriate… or freak out, and that also is a real challenge for me… another for me is extreme social anxiety, constantly feeling that you’re going to be judged just for something that you did that you were not necessarily aware of… that you did. (s. mutis, research interview, 2019) in addition to years of practice learning poise as a singer, samantha, like michael, had the opportunity to take improvisation training. she also went through a program designed specifically for autistic performers through second city in toronto. samantha explains how both training in performance as a singer and improvisation have helped in different but complimentary ways: my basic understanding of human behavior and life skills actually really improved through improv. but then, through singing, i learned how to present myself in a professional way. how to carry yourself, how to prepare for these performances, and that learning that a little bit of nerves are a good thing. (s. mutis, research interview, 2019) like michael, samantha noted that most of the venues where she has performed have been accessible, because she generally performs at autismrelated events. she has also had family supports, with her mother acting as stage manager to ensure access needs, lighting, and sound are accounted for in advance of a performance. however, simple considerations for accommodation can also go a long way. for example, samantha finds it very important to have a podium on which she can plan to rest her notes or presentation roadmap. moreover, like michael, samantha pointed out one area that is sometimes lacking: green rooms, or private areas to spend time preparing before a performance. this quiet space can be especially important for autistic performers, and in samantha’s case, someone with a severe social anxiety disorder. as samantha states: in my opinion, the one thing that a lot of performance spaces were good with but others were not was providing like a green room area, sort of a quiet green room area that performers could go in to warm up, to decompress a little bit, and sort of get in the zone… the one thing that i was often very concerned about was people hearing me warm up. (s. mutis, research interview, 2019) according to samantha, the green room also helps keep her “abilities under wraps until getting on stage.” in this comment, samantha points to the ways in which such spaces can help autistic performers prepare, and also alludes to the perception that audiences sometimes underestimate her, which she in turn uses as an element of surprise. onstage and behind the scenes: autistic performance and advocacy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 439 in addition to sometimes being underestimated by allistic audiences, samantha explains that parents sometimes have emotional responses to her performances. this makes her uncomfortable, in part, because of popular media depictions of autism as tragic. one example samantha described as disliking the most was the 2006/2007 autism speaks ad campaign. as she describes the ad: there was one of the mothers who said in that video she contemplated taking herself and her autistic child and driving off a bridge into the water in that video. i was thinking, “how can you do that?” like i understand autism is frustrating, but there’s just something wrong with that. (s. mutis, research interview, 2019) this ad campaign reproduced what mcguire (2016) refers to as normalized violence against autistics and privileged the perspectives of mothers rather than self-advocates. as samantha suggests, it seemed to her that the mothers in the ad were complaining about how difficult it was having autistic children. this discourse of tragedy around autism in combination with the treatment of autistic performers as objects of inspiration makes for an uncomfortable mix. despite her impressive performances, samantha reports an aversion to flattery in general and discomfort when parents approach and compliment her after a presentation “crying happy tears” (s. mutis, research interview, 2019). some parents may feel a sense of optimism that their children could accomplish the things that samantha has accomplished, but for her, this seems to reveal parental doubt of their children’s potential, and by extension, the potential of all autistic people. while disturbed by these reactions samantha indicates that being onstage allows her to play on and disrupt such ableist tropes and centre her own experience. adam: on media platforms and making a living but the most awkward part of the gym has got to be the men’s locker room. let me just say that sometimes it’s okay to be naked, such as the bedroom with the lights off and your socks on. the strip club, if you’re the stripper. and the shower. otherwise, you should never be naked for more than three mississippis. (adam schwartz, rumours comedy club, winnipeg, n.d.) adam schwartz identifies primarily as a comedian. as he joked in our email interview, “i’ve always had people laughing with me and more likely at me, therefore i thought i’d be a natural” (a. schwartz, research interview, 2019). with his deadpan delivery and gentle cadence, adam’s humour sometimes sneaks up on audiences. just when they think he is naïve, he exhibits his edge, often accompanied by a bit of a dirty joke. adam is a seasoned performer with a knack for producing original material. although his shows are funny, the winnipeg-based comedian also miranda brady studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 440 taps into his own sometimes painful experiences as material for his shows, with dating being one of his favourite topics. he explains that having desire and a relationship are things that most people want, including young autistic adults: “we all want to be loved, and many people – autistics and neuros – struggle with finding meaningful relationships” (a. schwartz, research interview, 2019). therefore, schwartz is also addressing a deep sentiment that is relatable across audiences. however, despite adam’s efforts to play on universal themes, he sometimes struggles to appeal to wide audiences. as he states: my biggest problem is getting gigs. i have a hard time getting people out, and since i'm not the most charismatic, people prefer to put other comedians in their show, take them on the road with them. there are not enough autistic performers that we can create our own shows. (a. schwartz, research interview, 2019) as mentioned earlier, schwartz attributes his inability to demonstrate a range of emotions to bullying he experienced as a child (a. schwartz, research interview, 2019). this illustrates a broader problem pointed out by disability studies scholars and media makers (ellcessor, 2017), where disabled performers are generally allocated one so-called diversity part rather than appearing based on their various styles and talents.2 in an effort to broaden his audience, adam decided to try different performance and media platforms. he tried his hand at a book for adults, i’ve got asperger’s, so i’m better than you… shhhh don’t tell mom, the title coming from a joke that got laughs in his show (a. schwartz, research interview, 2019). he also began writing children’s literature like jonathan and the big barbecue and no school today. working with a local non-profit, inspire community, adam also adapted his children’s book, anna and the substitute teacher (schwartz, 2018) into a stage play. in the book, the protagonist, saves her classmates from a sinister substitute teacher with her autistic super-power (her avoidance of eye-contact with the teacher, who appears to be a medusa-like figure that locks the children in the closet after freezing them with her gaze). adam notes that he developed anna as a female protagonist because autistic girls are underrepresented in popular culture. as he states, “women on the spectrum are often not believed, as autism is seen as a male thing. being able to blend in and not get the supports can also lead to lots of unhappiness, being unable to be yourself” (a. schwartz, research interview, 2019). schwartz’s screenplay was performed at the winnipeg and edmonton fringe festivals in 2019. though written for a family audience, it also 2 in the online show my gimpy life (created by teal sherer), this scenario plays out in a humorous manner as the main character, teal, an aspiring actress who is a wheelchair user, competes for such parts with her nemesis, a dwarf also named teale (played by teale sperling) (two shades of teal, 2012). as adam indicates, the real implication of token diversity parts is to set up competition within disadvantaged groups. onstage and behind the scenes: autistic performance and advocacy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 441 featured some of adam’s irreverent edge. according to one reviewer, “anna’s frustrations felt genuine and familiar – and as well as being generally heartwarming, there are a number of quite funny moments, including an increasingly drunken principal on the p.a. and a hilariously sudden announcement of someone having to poop” (griwkowsky, 2019; emphasis in original). when asked about the differences between writing for stand up and for a family audience, schwartz jokes that his adult comedy is mostly for “a drunker audience at the bar,” and his children’s materials convey positive messages about autism (a.schwartz, research interview, 2019). jokes aside, schwartz notes the serious need for these messages: “my children’s books are about creating for kids the message that it’s our difference that make us great and that we are stronger as a result of them” (a. schwartz, research interview, 2019). he also notes that while he was happy to develop such a positive character, he also did this out of necessity to try to create new revenue streams for himself as a struggling artist. adam’s versatility in traversing different media and performance genres demonstrates the great potential of having autistic creative workers at every point in production, both onstage and behind the scenes. across media platforms, adam’s material, silly, edgy, and deeply soulful, reflects not only his lived experience, but touches on the universal struggles of his audiences. sara: on respecting your audience well, sometimes i have plausible dreams that i might get nominated for an oscar. (s. sobey, research interview, 2019) sara started singing as a toddler, before she could speak, and by the time she was eight, she knew she wanted to perform. as her mother, kim, explains, sara did not have a lot of language as a small child, but was always interested in music. as she recounts, laughing, “i basically handed her the microphone, and she was off to the races” (k. souch & s. sobey, research interview, 2019). sara’s natural talent was refined through music lessons with her mother, who is also a talented musician. together, kim and sara make up the singing duo, kisara. sara has performed for a variety of audiences from school visits to singing the national anthem at toronto’s rogers centre for a blue jays’ professional baseball game. both sara and her mom explain that one of the benefits of singing is that it provides a social connection with other people; whereas verbal communication can be challenging, sara can express her creativity and emotion onstage. some of sara’s favourite artists are michael buble and celine dion, and she especially loves symphonic performances. in may 2018, her dream of performing with an ensemble came true when she was accompanied onstage by the stratford symphony orchestra, singing miranda brady studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 442 “possibilities,” written by her mother, and “somewhere over the rainbow,” a duo with singer donna bennett.3 in addition to her singing, animation and fanfiction screenwriting are sara’s other passions and sources of social connection. in particular, she finds that knowing a lot about animated films and how they are produced is a good way to connect with people. in our interview, sara described that she identified autistic characters in stories, films, tv shows, and more: some characters overtly autistic, and others read as autistic – characters who can appear to be autistic, especially identified by autistic audiences. for example, sara postulated autistic characters such as “bartok from anastasia, and darkwing duck, and the grinch… and, there’s some theories that sponge bob square pants might have autism too …and pearl from steve and the universe as well” (s. sobey, research interview, 2019). sara loves writing prequels and sequels of films including her favorite characters like the cat in the hat and the grinch who stole christmas. one that she is currently writing is a follow-up to a short animation that aired in 1981, called the grinch grinches the cat in the hat. certainly, this littleknown knowledge of an animated short that aired 40 years ago is the sign of a true fan! as sara explains, “so the sequel i wrote is an adaptation of that much longer and more developed characters. but, the characters are more developed and more consistent to the first” (s. sobey, research interview, 2019). while not always a central motif, sara tries to work autism themes into her rewrites. she has tried her hand at graphic novels and likes to draw illustrations, but she prefers to stick to long-form script writing.4 writing provides an important outlet for sara and a way to express both her struggles and creativity. she is also keenly aware that potential readers may be other autistic people who have similar experiences, and she takes very seriously “respecting your audience” through good character development, visuals, and a story that authentically portrays emotions, because, as sara explains, “i understand emotions… how it’s good to have some sadness in your life. rather than just blocking it to try to be happy for everyone” (s. sobey, research interview, 2019). while she writes largely for herself, she also pictures her audience in this way: yes, someone who struggles with self-esteem and some depression and struggling to be happy. and someone with identity… and it could help them be themselves, and realize it’s okay to have a disability. it’s okay to cry sometimes, even if it hurts sometimes. (s. sobey, research interview, 2019) 3 like michael and samantha, sara emphasizes the importance of what she calls “retreat spaces” (what samantha called “green rooms”) before performances. as someone with sound sensitivity, sara has found that wearing headphones and listening to her music in places with lots of “random” noises helps her prepare for sets and she also uses “buffer” items like her phone, books, or puzzles to help her to focus and to block out overwhelming noises. 4 see sara sobey’s manuscript in this issue, where the persecution of the grinch and his family by the whos is an analogy for the abuse of autistic people. onstage and behind the scenes: autistic performance and advocacy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 443 while scriptwriting is important to sara on many levels, she is both “nervous” and excited for her ultimate dream to come true – that someone in the entertainment industry will pick up and produce one of her scripts. as kim explains, “oh yeah, i understand that! being an artist is always nerve wracking when you’re putting your work out there” (s. sobey & k. souch, research interview, 2019). but, it is clear that creativity is kinetic for both kim and sara, and they explain what it’s like when they’re both full of energy and new ideas. sara explains “i’m a pacer,” and this both helps her calm down when she is stressed and is something she does when she is “excited about something” like “new ideas for… stories.” kim, warned, “watch out in our hallways if we’re both on the move at the same time!” as it may result in “bumper cars!” (s. sobey & k. souch, research interview, 2019). in reflecting on michael’s comments and those made by other contributors throughout this special issue, it is essential to consider how autistic creatives make contributions not only onstage but behind the scenes in other creative realms. as sara notes, while autistic audiences have told her how much her performances onstage have impacted them, “i’m hoping it would do the same thing with my story writing too” (s. sobey, research interview, 2019). conclusions interviews with canadian autistic performers michael mccreary, samantha mutis, adam schwartz, and sara sobey demonstrated how important it is for autistic people to participate at all levels of performance and production, from the stage to behind the scenes, writing “what they know” (m. mccreary, research interview, 2019). being on the stage and writing their experiences into stories is not just an important opportunity for creative expression, it can be one of the unique opportunities where autistic performers and writers feel a genuine connection with an audience and have an opportunity to be heard. this kind of platform and training for self-advocacy and advocacy for others is essential to social justice for meaningful inclusion. this is not unlike the performance of disability onstage discussed by sandahl and auslander (2005) in the book bodies in commotion; they say, “such performances are forums for profoundly liberating assertions and representations of the self in which the artist controls the terms of the encounter,” where such “artistic engagement with self-display is a medium for social critique and positive identity politics” (p. 34). it was clear in interviews with autistic performers that their art forms are largely for them and for their own creative inspiration. however, they also noted the importance of positive messages and self-determination for autistic audiences, and they used their platforms to disrupt expectations about autism for those who are not autistic. this is especially important given the paradigm miranda brady studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 444 where discourses of autism have primarily been dictated through the parental gaze and medical models (hollin, 2020). moreover, as adam and sara use different media to tell their stories, there may be more affordances to expand to new audiences and to adapt the dominant narratives and centre them on autistic experiences. however, considerations of current economic conditions should not be understated as there is a strong relationship between disability and economic disparity.5 as adam made clear, his decision to diversify the media in which he works was partly motivated by economic need. it is often up to disabled people in canada to self-advocate for their rights. even when employers comply, or meet the minimum basic standards of legislation like the accessibility for ontarians with disabilities act, this may not actually provide adequate access concerns for autistics who may have unique access needs. although the performers interviewed for this article had developed a number of clever coping methods to help them prepare for performances, they all identified areas where performance venues could be more accessible through simple measures like private green room or retreat spaces. while making performance venues accessible for autistic performers is “not something like comedy clubs just need a ramp for wheelchairs” (a. schwartz, research interview, 2019), the need for greenrooms or quiet spaces was emphasized by michael, samantha, and sara. such spaces can be essential to help performers manage sensory sensitivities and anxiety. moreover, allowing autistic performers to prepare to go on stage in ways that make them comfortable can be important, even if those vary from methods used by allistic performers (e.g., if performers stim or pace outside in the halls rather than quietly “waiting in the wings”) (m. mccreary, research interview, 2019). allowing support people to accompany can also be helpful as it is hard to predict whether there will be overwhelming stimuli as performers enter new spaces, and these as well as other buffers can help with navigating challenging venues. even small access considerations can help mitigate the tyranny of the neutral performer (sandahl, 2005). considering the substantial effort and adaptability that autistic performers exhibit, such minor considerations seem a small price to pay for the remarkable creativity that they bring to the stage. significant structural changes could go even further. they could encourage autistic advocacy onstage and in the media, make the performance economy more accessible and adaptable to all performers, and help dismantle widespread ableist beliefs. 5as statistics canada (2017) notes, most people will experience some form of disability in their lifetime, and 22% (6.2 million) canadians are currently disabled. of those, 40% say it has limited their job options. canadians with disabilities earn 44% less and are more likely to live in poverty (statistics canada, 2017). onstage and behind the scenes: autistic performance and advocacy studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 445 acknowledgements i would like to thank all participants for generously sharing their time and insights. i would also like to thank the editors and reviewers of the autism_media_social justice special issue in studies in social justice for their insightful feedback on earlier versions of the piece. references addicott, r. (2019, january 21). why did it take me 40 years to be diagnosed with autism? daily mail online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6616681/why-did-40-yearsdiagnosed-autism.html arendell, t. d. (2015). the autistic stage: how cognitive disability changed 20th-century performance. sense publishers. brady, m. j., & cardin, m. (2021). your typical atypical family: streaming apolitical autism on netflix. topia: canadian journal of cultural studies, 42, 96-116. buckley, e., pellicano, e., & remington, a. (2021). “the real thing i struggle with is other people’s perceptions”: the experiences of autistic performing arts professionals and attitudes of performing arts employers in the uk. journal of autism and developmental disorders, 51, 45-59. cbc. (2016, july 14). aspiecomic michael mccreary in studio q [video]. youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0deo8oaorc cheng, w. (2017). staging overcoming: narratives of disability and meritocracy in reality singing competitions. journal of the society for american music, 11(2), 184-214. clare, e. (2015). exile and pride: disability, queerness, and liberation. duke university press. darke, p. a. (1994). the elephant man (david lynch, emi films, 1998): an analysis from a disabled perspective. disability and society 9(3), 327-342. ellcessor, e. (2017). kickstarting community: disability, access, and participation in my gimpy life. in e. ellcessor & b. kirkpatrick (eds.), disability media studies (pp. 31-51). new york university press. garland-thomson, r. (1997). extraordinary bodies: figuring physical disability in american culture and literature. columbia university press. ginsburg, f., & rapp, r. (2016). screening disabilities: visual fields, public culture, and the atypical mind in the twenty-first century. in b. linker & n. j. hirschmann (eds.), civil disabilities: citizenship, membership, and belonging (pp. 103-122). university of pennsylvania press. goffman, i. (1956). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: random house. griwkowsky, f. (2019, august 16). fringe review: anna and the substitute teacher. edmonton journal. https://edmontonjournal.com/entertainment/festivals/fringe-review-anna-and-thesubstitute-teacher gross, t. (2020, may 26). autism spectrum diagnosis helped comic hannah gadsby ‘be kinder’ to herself. npr. https://www.npr.org/2020/05/26/862081893/autism-spectrum-diagnosishelped-comic-hannah-gadsby-be-kinder-to-herself haruvi-lamdan, n., horesh, d., zohar, s., kraus, m., & golan, o. (2020). autism spectrum disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder: an unexplored co-occurrence of conditions. autism, 24(4), 884-898. hollin, g. (2020). within a single lifetime: recent writings on autism. history of the human sciences, 33(5), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695120915799 johnston, k. (2012). stage turns: canadian disability theatre. mcgill-queens university press. lehmann, a. (director). (2016). asperger’s are us. [film]. duplass brothers productions. miranda brady studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 429-446, 2022 446 mccreary, m. (2016, may 28). does this make my asperger’s look big? [address]. tedxyorkuspectrum, toronto, canada. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbvpgyixllw mccreary, m. (2019). funny, you don’t look autistic: a comedian’s guide to life on the spectrum. annick press. mcguire, a. (2016). war on autism: on the cultural logic of normalized violence. university of michigan press. mitchell, d. t., & snyder, s. k. (2000). narrative prosthesis: disability and the dependencies of discourse. university of michigan press. murray, s. (2008). representing autism: culture, narrative, fascination. liverpool university press. sandahl, c. (2003). queering the crip or cripping the queer? intersections of queer and crip identities in solo autobiographical performance. glo: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, 9(1-2), 25-56. sandahl, c. (2005). the tyranny of neutral: disability and actor training. in p. auslander & c. sandahl (eds.), bodies in commotion: disability and performance (pp. 255-268). university of michigan press. sandahl, c., & auslander, p. (2005). introduction. in p. auslander & c. sandahl (eds.), bodies in commotion: disability and performance (pp. 1-12). university of michigan press. schwartz, a. (2018). anna and the substitute teacher. createspace independent publishing platform. schwartz, a. (2016). i’ve got asperger’s, so i’m better than you… shhhh don’t tell mom. createspace independent publishing platform. schwartz, a. (n.d.). jonathan and the big barbeque. createspace independent publishing platform. schwartz, a. (2020). no school today. https://www.adamschwartzcomedy.com/wpcontent/uploads/2020/03/no-school-today-1.pdf statistics canada. (2017). new data on disability in canada, 2017 (11-627-m). https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2018035-eng.htm valentish, j. (2018, july 16). ‘i broke the contract’: how hannah gadsby’s trauma transformed comedy. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/jul/16/hannah-gadsbytrauma-comedy-nanette-standup-netflix yergeau, m. (2018). authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. duke university press. young, s. (2014, april). i’m not your inspiration, thank you very much [address]. tedxsydney, sydney, australia https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much /transcript?language=en ranauta final before ts correspondence address: jaspreet ranauta; email: jaspreetranauta@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 transnational modernity/coloniality: linking punjab’s canal colonies, migration, and settler colonialism for critical solidarities in canada jaspreet ranauta abstract this paper offers a transnational analytical framework to inform contemporary anti-racist solidarity building in what is now called canada by engaging with migration, colonialism, and indigeneity. in particular, i trace the historical entanglements of modernity/coloniality from the british empire’s canal colonies project in punjab to colonial policies in what is now called british columbia while centring land and indigenous sovereignty. keywords indigeneity; coloniality; british columbia; punjab; migration; solidarity in may 2017, a public dialogue organized by the indian summer festival took place between indigenous and diasporic south asian historians, elders, and scholars on the unceded coast salish territories of the skwxwú7mesh (squamish), səl̓ilwətaɂɬ təməxʷ (tsleil-waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (musqueam) nations, upon which vancouver, british columbia is settled, in an effort to “support solidarity between south asian and indigenous communities through the arts” (indian summer festival, 2017). that year, organizers of the festival introduced a new programming stream based on the punjabi word taike (pronounced tha-a-kay), which “was used when first nations and south asian men worked and lived together at lumber mills. it means ‘father’s elder brother.’ [organizers hoped] to highlight and reinvigorate this special and shared sense of community and kinship between these communities” (indian summer festival, 2019). in personal conversations with the two south asian panelists from the inaugural taike programming, i learned that this word was used by early punjabi settlers to refer to indigenous peoples of turtle island, upon which canada is settled and created, with its etymology specifically rooted in the constructed settler transnational modernity/coloniality studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 353 colonial space and intracultural circumstances of british columbia. however, i also learned that it was eventually reimagined with pejorative connotations, complicating the clear notions of respect and kinship that likely informed its origins. the intentions for this paper are in some ways aligned with the festival’s taike programming: to understand the nuances of settler colonialism, migration, and complicity, and to forge new and critical paths of kinship informed by shared and interwoven colonial histories of oppression and power. central in the following analysis is the land upon which these conversations of solidarity and reimagining relations, and others like it, have begun to take place. although scholarship engaging with south asian and especially punjabi migration to canada is substantial, few scholars situate their analysis in british colonial policies relating to land and water in punjab in order to understand the out-migration of punjabis into polities of the british empire, including british columbia, as a function of modernity/coloniality. this paper offers a transnational framework on colonialism and indigeneity by drawing on these two contexts following the british annexation of punjab in 1849. i position the british empire’s canal colonies project in punjab as a point of focus in order to trace the entanglements of policies in punjab under british rule to those in british columbia concerning land and settlement impacting indigenous communities under settler colonialism. within contemporary discussions of settler colonialism and social and environmental justice, analysis is often limited to histories and points of entry centering white european settlers and indigenous communities. these discussions should be broadened beyond the white settler/indigenous binary by re-engaging with early migration histories of settler communities of colour to canada, and by expanding the frame of analysis beyond colonial stateimposed territorial borders and temporally restrictive articulations of settler colonialism that often situate these events “in the past” or confine them to specific geographies (i.e., within south asia or canada). understanding the ways in which the retelling of punjabi migration stories can silence and erase indigenous histories that have existed since before this migration began is critical to cultivating a renewed sense of kinship and solidarity. dhamoon (snelgrove, dhamoon, & corntassel, 2014, p. 19), states, people of colour are... structurally implicated in dispossession, whether that’s our choice or not. so it posits that... issues of indigenous land are not separate from ‘my’ issues if i care about racism, sexism, and i must think about the ways they are related to settler colonialism. corntassel (snelgrove et al., 2014, p. 20) offers the following reflective response on solidarity: there is a different sense of indigenous place-based and living histories that should be understood by folks proposing to act in solidarity. if someone is just jaspreet ranauta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 354 simply saying ‘i’m canadian, and i don’t know my history,’ how useful is that to deepening solidarity? maybe that forgetfulness... is also sort of convenient. you haven’t done the hard work to uncover your role, or your family’s role in, whether it’s direct colonial actions or just settling here. i put this project forward with care and humility, taking direction from work by indigenous scholars and activists to avoid perpetuating the erasure of indigenous communities’ experiences on turtle island and exercising a move to innocence (tuck & yang, 2012) for myself or on behalf of punjabi settlers to this land. to be clear, while i refer to and engage with interlocked colonial histories of oppression and dynamics of power between the punjabi diaspora and indigenous communities in british columbia, this should not be understood as an argument that looks to debate or question the oppressive structure of settler colonialism in which punjabi settlers came to participate in the early 1900s, albeit indirectly, or that the british colonial/imperial history in punjab can somehow be equated and compared to the colonization of indigenous peoples and ongoing settler colonialism in canada. instead, my analysis seeks to interrogate the ways in which these histories and experiences became connected through changing relationships to land and territory for punjabis as a result of british legacies of modernity/coloniality in the punjab region as well as their complicity in settler colonialism through their eventual settlement on turtle island. understanding these broad global entanglements with increased nuance provides an entry point for future critical analyses on punjabi and indigenous social and environmental justice solidarities within the settler colonial context of canada. therefore, this paper engages with historical policies of colonialism/imperialism in punjab under british rule and their connection to the out-migration of punjabis to british columbia in the early 1900s, and draws upon and centres indigenous experiences regarding environmental justice and settler colonialism, while critiquing normative colonial systems of knowledge that extend transnationally. modernity/coloniality while originally theorized in analyzing the history of colonialism of latin america, the concept of modernity/coloniality (casas, 2014; grosfoguel, 2012; maldonado-torres, 1997; mignolo, 2009; quijano, 2000, 2007) offers a distinctive framework to understand transnational relationships among land, race, epistemic violence, and power in global empire. therefore, it can be effectively applied to an analysis of the british legacy of colonialism/imperialism that connected colonial ambitions in punjab with the settler colonial project in what is now called canada. using this framework, i also briefly engage with the significance of caste in the transnational relationship between the punjab region and british columbia. coloniality can be understood as the “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a transnational modernity/coloniality studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 355 result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. thus, coloniality survives colonialism” (maldonado-torres, 1997, p. 243). modernity is articulated as the celebration and propagation of european enlightenment-era thinking and its specific traditions, social norms, and technological advancements (mignolo, 2011, p. 2). the enlightenment period saw the european “creation of a new framework of ideas about man, society, and nature, which challenged existing conceptions rooted in a traditional world-view... which was sustained by the church’s authority and its monopoly over the information media of the time” (hamilton, 1996, p. 24). furthermore, according to hamilton (1996, p. 37), science was the epitome of enlightened reason... and intimately bound up with the enlightenment’s concept of progress... because it seemed to offer the prospect of increasing man’s control over those aspects of nature most harmful to human interests. science could ensure a more efficient and productive agriculture, and thus the elimination of famine; it could lead to the invention of processes and machines which would convert raw materials into goods that would be of benefit to mankind... [and] roll back the frontiers of a nature hitherto quite hostile to man. this notion of humanity’s power over nature through enlightened reason, or science, offers insight into the connection between progress and modernity, as well as between modernity and environmentally exploitative policies in european colonialism/imperialism. as european modes of social life derived from the enlightenment period became increasingly normalized, attaining the raw material supply to fuel these social norms, such as tea, sugar or cotton, spurred european colonial/imperial pursuits to sustain them. colonial missions by the british empire to discover new trade routes and land on which to produce sugar and tobacco, for example, facilitated the power and global network of the british empire (mignolo, 2011, p. 318). modernity/coloniality is not temporally or geographically contained, but rather operates as a “web of empire” (ballantyne, 2012), undergoing reconfigurations in response to anti-colonial resistance and counterhegemonic pressure in order to be sustained. coloniality and its enduring power structures are reinforced through developmental policies in the name of progress as “the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality are… two sides of the same coin” (mignolo, 2011, p. 318), where one cannot exist without the other. the historical legacy of british imperialism in india has been documented in scholarship and widely captured in the orientalist gaze of popular culture, often eliciting imagery of the spice and silk trade, sugar, tea, opium, and perhaps to a less romanticized degree, indentured labour for other polities of the empire, including the americas. locating the origins of modernity/coloniality within the era of european enlightenment unveils its connection to the emergence of “a new type of economy (capitalism) and the jaspreet ranauta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 356 scientific revolution” (mignolo, 2011, p. 6), which facilitated the epistemic and physical violence of colonialism/imperialism. in this way, western-centric knowledge is weaponized to entrench hierarchies of power that are constantly reconfigured and sustained, including the persisting normalization of a subject-object dualism in which human beings are rendered superior over other living and non-living things in our natural world. by extension, this dualism drives a wedge between humanity and nature (acker, kaltmeier & tittor, 2016, p. 7) in order to deliberately separate those who were considered human beings according to european worldviews (i.e., white, christian men) from nature: “the ‘subject’ is a bearer of ‘reason,’ while the ‘object,’ is not only external to it, but different nature. in fact, it is ‘nature’” (quijano, 2007, p. 172). the notion that this rational and self-aware subjectivity was intrinsically european would become vital to colonizing powers during the conquest of turtle island as it was thought to be necessary in advancing humanity towards civility by means of industrial projects of modernity. the exclusivity of rational thought became equated with the exclusivity of civility, an understanding that justified the colonization of indigenous people around the world, including in what came to be known as canada and india. thus, european culture, its practices, religion, and worldview were established as a norm through colonizing the bodies and epistemologies of non-european societies: “from an aboriginal perspective... academic, religious, and governmental eurocentrism has made itself the default position of what counts as being legitimate knowledge and practice, dismissing or marginalizing ‘other’ed epistemologies, bodies, stories, and practices” (haluza-delay, o’riley, cole, & agyeman, 2009, p. 4). through this logic, nature and non-white bodies are conflated and become synonymous with the uncivilized and pre-modern, and both become objects to serve the productive and dominant capitalist-based world system; the capitalist paradigm is the means by which this aspirational modernity is achieved. it is through this nexus of global modernity, and upon this base of epistemic violence and expendability of racialized labour, that the links between punjab and british columbia emerge. moving towards more critical solidarity, one that centres settler colonialism and takes into account the position and histories of punjabis in canada, a wide but focused transnational analytical frame is required, as the british empire and its far flung jurisdictions, including the dominions (canada, new zealand, australia, and south africa), colonies (hong kong and india), and territories (the straits settlements) were not discrete or separate polities but were integrated through a coordinated network of railways and steamships that joined land to sea. (mawani, 2018, p. 8) furthermore, migration channels to british columbia that had opened for punjabi migrant labourers in the early 1900s were developed through these transnational modernity/coloniality studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 357 modes of modernity and in response to policies of inclusion and exclusion in other parts of the british empire (puri, 1993, p. 15). thus, critically engaging with migration and settler colonialism requires examining relations of power originating through global mechanisms of colonial empire that normalized western-centric knowledge, including the alienation of human beings from their land under the guise of developmental progress. working through the inextricable links between modernity and coloniality (mignolo, 2011, p. 318) is a necessary step in understanding how through coloniality, normalized western-centric knowledge has facilitated the ideological separation of human beings from what is commonly referred to as “nature” or “the environment.” this has allowed for an enclosure of the commons through, for example, the development and promotion of large scale agricultural farming, exploitative resource extraction, and the privatization of land. in punjab, this occurred through the canal colonies project, an extensive network of perennial agricultural irrigation that transformed the punjab region into “one of the major centres of commercialised agriculture in south asia” (ali, 1987, p. 3), and the punjab land alienation act of 1900, under which british mandated social reforms constructed and deeply entrenched an interlocked triad of caste, land ownership, and militarization within punjab (ali, 1987, p. 4). this large scale shift towards development discourse and modernity under british rule linked punjab, migration and capitalism to british columbia, through the british military. from this historical point of analysis, we can trace the displacement and migration of punjabis to british columbia as an expendable labour force to further the empire’s settler colonial aspirations for a colonized canada. in effect, the canal colonies project was one of modernity/coloniality, the construction of which worked to de-link punjab from its territory, land, and people and absorb it as an extended space of the global “webs of empire” (ballantyne, 2012). modernity/coloniality in punjab punjab’s modernity/coloniality legacy and absorption into the global nexus of empire began under british imperial rule following its annexation in 1849, by which time the settler colonial project on turtle island had already been well underway. punjab, translating to the “land of five rivers,” has and continues to have a deep-rooted connection to its territorial water and soil through agriculture, making it a critical area of conquest for british imperialists. today, the pre-colonial territory of punjab and its rivers remain divided between pakistan and india following multiple movements for independence and the violence of the indian partition in 1947. during british rule, the relationship between punjabis and their land and water was drastically reformed. these changes also extended into a reconstruction of the punjabi social ladder by reinforcing and recreating caste identity, particularly that of jaspreet ranauta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 358 the jat sikh, which would become a critical element in the migration history of punjabis to british columbia. prior to annexing punjab, the british “had found an immense variety of structures of social relationships and adaptations to the land” (gilmartin, 2003a, p. 5060) that were at odds with their colonial imperatives. the canal colonization project and its policies are arguably the most significant aspect of the british imperial legacy that began to uproot punjab’s people from their land. talbot (2007, p. 9) emphasizes the importance of the canal colonization policies and “the development of a system of colonial law in the punjab [as] the conflicting pulls of the region’s strategic importance and the tying in of its agricultural economy into the world market.” in effect, the webs of empire were extended to connect the punjab region, its reimagined territorial borders under colonial rule, and emerging pool of labour with other established polities of the british empire through the movement of goods and labour. these policies are a part of what imran ali (1987, p. 3) calls the “agricultural colonization in the punjab,” which would serve as the primary catalyst for displacement and subsequent waves of migration of punjabis out of the region in search of new opportunities, eventually bringing them to the territories of the coast salish people in what came to be known as british columbia, embedding them within the settler colonial project already taking place on turtle island. the cornerstone of this agricultural colonization was the canal colonies project, a massive irrigation system to institute perennial agriculture with longer growing seasons and increased production (ali, 1987, p. 8), which began in 1885 and quickly led to punjab being “regarded as india’s model agricultural province” for british colonizers (talbot, 2007, p. 3). the massive project “was seen as the colonial state’s greatest achievement” (talbot, 2007, p. 7) through a lens of western modernity. however, the canal colonies project resulted in the epistemic foundational shift that brought a future of environmental, social, and economic devastation to punjab that would be reconfigured through subsequent cycles of the same developmental logics of modernity/coloniality following indian partition in 1947, during the green revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, and into contemporary contexts of environmental and social justice related issues. the canal colonies project encapsulated western-centric ideas of modernity and sought to exploit the region’s supply of water, land, and bodies to meet the imperial vision of the empire. this feat of ambitious engineering would result in the “transformation of six million acres of desert into one of the richest agricultural regions in asia” (talbot, 2007, p. 7), and entailed …the construction of a network of canals that took off from the rivers, with branches and distributaries spread over the flat, alluvial plains of the western punjab. the canals were laid out primarily on uncultivated land, which was but sparsely inhabited by a semi-nomadic population. (ali, 1987, p. 8) transnational modernity/coloniality studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 359 the development of these colonies was to ensure “canal irrigation was extended to regions where settled agriculture was not yet the established mode of livelihood” (agnihotri, 1996, p. 38) in a reimagining of land/human relations in the region. this was in line with the colonial logic of disrupting pre-existing cultural norms in order to advance the goals of conquest and modernity through the separation of nature and humanity, “a basic epistemological operation of coloniality” (acker et al., 2016, p. 9). as talbot (2007, p. 7) states, the punjab canal colonies project was an attempt to remake both the natural environment and its people. nowhere were the ideals of the modern rational state better epitomised than in the neatly laid squares of land in the canal colony villages, and the eight bazaars in the new market town of lyallpur radiating out from the central clock tower, ‘a telling symbol of middle-class regularity.’1 european temporalities “imposed an epistemic shift ... through the regimentation of british calendars and its greenwich-based clock; the reconfigurations of timekeeping demanded by new technologies – such as railways and irrigation systems” (mooney, 2013, p. 280). similar to the european colonization of turtle island and its indigenous communities, temporal hierarchies were established, positioning specific social groups of punjabis at different proximities to the “colonial present” during the early periods of the colonial reimagining of punjab (mooney, 2013, p. 280). thus, the effects of the canal colonies project were far greater than simply the expansion of irrigation for agriculture and would permanently alter the cultural and social structure of punjab, with global reverberations. coloniality in punjab actively worked to reimagine its land, water, and people through the newly constructed spaces of the canal colonies, an attempt to rewrite existing stories of place in the language of western-centric normative knowledge as a force of epistemic violence. punjab’s water played a significant role in this process. as gilmartin (2003a, p. 5057) reflects, colonial water engineering in the punjab grew out of emerging 19th century european ideas about the relationship between science and political economy more broadly. these ideas defined punjab’s river waters as a ‘resource,’ open to increasing state control for purposes of productive ‘use’ and ‘development.’ engineers constructing the canal colonies in punjab operated through a western scientific doctrine “defined by a common struggle for production against a wasteful nature” (gilmartin, 2003a, p. 5059), where the term “waste” was attributed to water that went unharnessed for agricultural production. thus, “the language of opposition between engineering science and natural ‘waste’ paralleled the dominant language of market efficiency 1 the embedded quotation is from gilmartin (2003b). jaspreet ranauta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 360 shaping late 19th century ideas of political economy and economic man” (gilmartin, 2003a, p. 5059). british policies in the punjab operated with the specific purpose of “cultural and intellectual colonization, via epistemologies of difference and superiority, which embedded indian communities allochronically and differentially within the corpus of modern historicity and thus time” (mooney, 2013, p. 279). the exertion of power over punjabis, then, was dependent upon control over knowledge and the utility of the region’s water and land, where “increasing state control over water – and thus over the land – defined new frameworks for the exercise of control over the local ‘communities’ comprising indus basin society” (gilmartin, 2003a, p. 5057). as one british colonial official stated in his accounts, a tribe in the chains of its own customs, unrelaxed and unrefined, may stand still for centuries, but a tribe recognised and lifted into the system of british administration … has, in the guardianship of the governing body, the best possible chance of disguising savagery and learning the wisdom of civilised men. (talbot, 2007, p. 9) the means by which this ascent to civility would be effectively realized, according to the british, was through european articulations of modernity. thus, the raj commissioned and depended on the production and implementation of... colonial forms of knowledge and representation [that] were paradigmatic exercises in power... written within a project that sought to characterize india as in a state of “arrested development”... that required british intervention. (mooney, 2013, p. 279) narratives of rendering non-white bodies as uncivilized and savage are consistent with european discourses and processes of modernity/coloniality that were also applied to the colonization of turtle island. the positioning of punjabis along an evolutionary continuum relative to british conceptions of modernity and civility not only facilitated british efforts to redefine the ways in which local communities interacted with their land and water, but also included the entrenchment of caste identity to these new environmental formations. efforts to permanently establish colonies on the land between the newly formed network of canals, or doabs, were supported by introducing land granting schemes and proprietary status in order to promote migration from more densely populated areas of punjab (ali, 1987, p. 13). however, the distribution of doabi land was strategic and divisive, and would not only serve the colonial imperial aspirations of the empire, but also legally entrench existing social caste distinctions, exacerbate social differences, and completely transform land/human relations. in effect, british policies of modernity/coloniality in the punjab looked to aggressively institutionalize the transnational modernity/coloniality studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 361 environmental formations of private property (dempsey, gould, & sundberg, 2011) and colonial capitalism. the allotment of much of the canal colony land was deliberately tied to wide scale military recruitment for the british indian army that heavily favoured jats (predominantly sikhs), a caste in punjab that the british sought to socially position and legally entrench as superior to others and that could be relied upon for continued political and military loyalty (ali, 1987, p. 5). as mooney (2013, p. 280) explains, caste distinctions were categorized, quantified, administered and imposed to preserve and extend imperialism through the well-known tactic of divide and rule and religious categories were joined to caste and similarly reconfigured and fixed in tactics of colonial domination. therefore, the colonial project in punjab not only involved an exacerbation and entrenchment of existing social class distinctions, but also included the reformation of land relations through western-centric notions of modernity that wove together private property ownership, military expansion, and agricultural development. through accounts by british ethnographers and colonial administrative officers, jat sikhs came to be celebrated “as both a martial race and a caste of yeoman agriculturalists” (mooney, 2013, p. 278). malcolm darling (1925), who was assistant commissioner of punjab, provides an account that captures the epitomization of the jat sikh: the jat... is the very marrow and soul of the peasantry. [jats] have a tenacity of character and a skill in farming which make[s] them the best cultivators in india… it would be difficult in any country to find a more remarkable combination of cultivator, colonist, emigrant and soldier. educated and organized, and relieved of the handicaps imposed upon him by custom and debt, he might well become the foundation of a new rural civilization in the punjab. (p. 38) however, these imagined colonial identities of punjabis, particularly the idealized jat sikh, were constructed “through the orientalist imperial gaze, which denied contemporaneous modernity to colonial subjects” (mooney, 2013, p. 278) and co-opted pre-existing knowledge and histories in the region and reconfigured them to serve british imperial interests of modernity, specifically through military expansion and agricultural development. this construction would serve british “interests through an essentialist and masculinist view of the men of particular communities, not races nor necessarily castes or religions but ethnic groups ... as being especially suited to military recruitment by virtue of their bravery, fortitude and heroism” (mooney, 2013, p. 281), giving rise to a what talbot (2007, p. 4) describes as the “punjabifisation of the indian army from the 1870s onwards.” thus, the british resettlement project of punjabis into the newly created canal colonies following annexation intimately embedded the imperial facets of militarism jaspreet ranauta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 362 and revenue extraction through agriculture within a deliberate effort to target and appeal to the jat sikh colonial subject. over time, the canal colonies became fundamentally linked to westerncentric modernity/coloniality through both agriculture and the military. the emerging caste, military, and private property ownership triad would play a role in the eventual migration and settlement of punjabis to british columbia. furthermore, “as punjabi agriculture was commoditized and both prosperity and debt exacerbated... the military provided an important means of financial recourse to struggling families, as did the burgeoning opportunities of the punjabi diaspora” (mooney, 2013, p. 283). the growth of the punjabi diaspora in the pacific northwest and the community’s strong presence in its emerging forestry industry would solidify the transnational reciprocal relationship between the british colonial project in punjab and the settler colonial project in canada, specifically in british columbia. punjabi migration, settler colonialism, and modernity/coloniality on turtle island the out-migration of punjabis into the diaspora, particularly to british columbia, during the early twentieth century developed from the processes of modernity/coloniality that alienated punjabis from their land through colonial subjectivities, opening new channels of migration and opportunity: “the extension of railways in the twentieth century was meant primarily to forge linkages for the export and import of foods for trade, though these lines promoted passenger traffic as well” (grewal, 2013, p. 45). this led to the establishment of regular channels of migration to coast salish territory, facilitated through the british modernity/coloniality project that tied punjab and its reformed economy to other polities of the empire. for example, by “1906, the shipping agents of the canadian pacific railways in calcutta city were playing a role in attracting emigrants towards canada” (verma, 2002, p. 103). these migration channels for students, tourists, former military officers and labourers emerged for punjabi migrants to canada, the first of which arrived in 1904, to work primarily in british columbia’s forestry industry and to a lesser extent its fishing industry (jagpal, 1994, p. 19). as gold mining in the province began its decline, natural resource industrialization in british columbia, specifically with the forestry and fishing industries, began to grow, coinciding with the development of the canadian pacific railway (nayar, 2012, p. 11). this particular transnational connection of predominantly farmers impacted by british imperial policies in punjab migrating to coast salish territory was significant, and became entrenched to a point where “punjabi settlement patterns reflected the changes in [british columbia’s] forestry industry” (nayar, 2012, p. 28), and in early and mid transnational modernity/coloniality studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 363 twentieth century canada, “lumber labour had become associated with ethnicity” (nayar, 2012, p. 28). racialized migrant labour was utilized for constructing the canadian pacific railway as well as in the logging industry that produced its materials. the railway helped develop a sense of canadian national identity through the symbolic and material unification and amalgamation of territory and resources appropriated from indigenous communities. its construction and employment of racialized migrant labour was dependent upon clearing land of its indigenous inhabitants who were subjected to purposeful and planned starvation by the canadian state in the name of modernity (maynard, 2017, p. 32). also, the railway served as a conduit for market capitalism through the natural resource exploitative economy that had begun to take shape in canada. british columbia’s industrialization, the marketization of indigenous land, and the use of exploitable racialized labour from the british colonies to work on nation-building projects of modernity such as the canadian pacific railway (puri, 1993, p. 21), illustrate the dense entanglement of settler colonialism with global processes of modernity/coloniality. the structural nature of settler colonialism (tuck & yang, 2012, p. 5), which continues to operate within broader processes of modernity/coloniality, connects the british colonial project in punjab and the arrival of punjabis to coast salish territory. however, settler colonialism is itself different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain… within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth. (tuck & yang, 2012, 5) while some of these dynamics of power can also be identified in different contexts of colonialism, such as that which took place in punjab, settler colonialism operates through internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial separation between metropole and colony … [and] the horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and require a mode of total appropriation of indigenous life and land, rather than the selective expropriation of profit-producing fragments. (tuck & yang, 2012, p. 5) obtaining indigenous land has been the cornerstone of the canadian nation-building project, an imperative facilitated through the normalization of private property ownership over pre-colonial indigenous relations to land. tuck and mckenzie (2015, p. 64) articulate, through the process and structuring of settler colonialism, land is remade into property, and human relationships to land are redefined/reduced to the relationship of owner to his property. when land is recast as property, place becomes exchangeable, saleable, and steal-able. the most important aim of jaspreet ranauta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 364 recasting land as property is to make it ahistorical in order to hack away the narratives that invoke prior claims and thus reaffirm the myth of terra nullius. western-centric private property land ownership regimes were a key site through which first nations peoples were racialized as uncivilized and inferior due to their apparent lack of this particular land management regime…the institutionalization of private property rights in canada, therefore, was a crucial mechanism in colonial projects of whitening both space and subjects. (dempsey et al., 2011, p. 240). thus, the colonization of indigenous territory, knowledge, and bodies included the stratification of a social, racial, and epistemic hierarchy that reinforced notions of european superiority. this was done by aligning indigenous bodies and their epistemologies with nature and narratives of being uncivilized, which were echoed, albeit with different consequences and relations of power, in the colonization of punjab in the late 1800s. in punjab, “recording of rights in land, periodic settlements of land revenue, and extension of agriculture through canals” (grewal, 2013, p. 47) represented the foundational planks of an imperial policy that was consistent with an “external colonialism” as described by tuck and yang (2012), in which an administrative colonial dynamic of power operates to construct aspects of what is called nature into natural resources to be exploited for the benefit of the colonizer: “bodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattel” (p. 4). interconnected relations of colonial power tied punjab and british columbia together in the global nexus of modernity/coloniality and spacemaking, particularly through british columbia’s forestry industry. racialized labour from british colonized punjab helped to further european epistemologies normalizing the separation of humanity and nature and the utilization of this nature for development. the emergence of british columbia’s forestry industry coincided with the intensification of “annexation and reterritorialization of lands occupied by first nations” (black, 2017, p. 24), whereby white settlers were able to privately acquire forested land. as black (2017, p. 25) explains, these early land policies of the british crown, based on distinctly english conceptualizations of property laws and land ownership, enabled colonial administrators to unilaterally transfer land rights and all their attendant advantages to private bodies through… crown grants and pre-emptions. consistent with british developmental policies in punjab, epistemic violence was apparent in british columbia which devalued indigenous conceptualizations of land/human relationships and relied on the premise of terra nullius to continue indigenous land dispossession. according to coulthard (2014, p. 12), “canadian state-formation and colonial-capitalist development required first and foremost land,” which served as a precursor to the entrenchment of the forestry industry and settler colonial structure in transnational modernity/coloniality studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 365 british columbia. punjabis settling in british columbia in the early 1900s largely found economic opportunities in a forestry industry that had surged under new licensing policies and foreign speculation (black, 2017, p. 30). these changes to land policies and land/human relations were a component of the structure of settler colonialism highlighted earlier by tuck and yang (2012), which also included residential schools, the reserve system, and restricted movement for indigenous communities. this structure would also eventually rely on the settlement of racialized bodies for cheap and exploitable labour, including punjabis in the forestry industry, linking the settler colonial project to other polities of the british empire. it is within this specific context of settler colonialism that punjabis would find themselves simultaneously encountering their own experiences of inclusion and exclusion, while in their own fight to belong also contributing to the erasure of turtle island’s indigenous communities. mawani (2012, p. 372) traces the extension of colonial hierarchies across the pacific and their use by passengers aboard the komagata maru to challenge the discriminatory continuous passage legislation and disembark onto coast salish territory, thereby “making claims to their own racial superiority and their readiness to join the imperial polity.” mawani (2012, p. 380) states that those aboard the ship, and their middle-class supporters in india and elsewhere were well aware of these hierarchies and strategically made demands for inclusion by flattening some racial distinctions and emphasizing others. claiming to be “imperial citizens,” they drew comparisons between themselves and white britons, thus demanding the same rights of mobility and residence across the empire. the legal challenge undertaken to allow passengers aboard the ship to disembark undermined indigenous sovereignty, played into colonial racial hierarchies, and reinforced the western-centric epistemological foundation of the colonial settler state. examining these legal proceedings, dua (1999) traces the ways in which race and its connection to subjecthood and citizenship became intertwined with white settler formations of the nationstate as a direct result of chinese, japanese, and indian presence in british columbia. furthermore, lawyers for the passengers argued that punjabi migrants were “‘not of the asiatic race’ but of the ayran one, and thus, the order-in-council that excluded asiatics did not apply… [and] ‘that the hindus [sic] are of the caucasian race, akin to the english’” (mawani, 2012, p. 386). this narrative, however, reached beyond the specific context of the komagata maru. it invoked internalized racial hierarchies and aspirations to whiteness embedded within and implemented through the global nexus of modernity/coloniality (quijano, 2007, p. 169) which, in the context of british colonialism/imperialism in india and turtle island, would position migrants from british india, specifically the punjabi jat sikh, as superior to racialized others, namely native africans in british south africa and indigenous communities of turtle island (mawani, 2012, p. 394). as mawani (2012, p. jaspreet ranauta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 366 395) explains, “during his time in south africa, [mahatma] gandhi gestured repeatedly and strategically to the putative racial superiority of indians over africans” by utilizing the colonial and western-centric trope of the industriousness and hardworking indian while positioning native africans as lazy and uncivilized, feeding into western-centric narratives of measuring humanity through capitalist productivity. thus, belonging among indian migrants within the spatial bounds of the british empire, including punjabis travelling to british columbia, became contingent on a likeness to whiteness and the internalization of western-centric epistemologies. upadhyay (2019) reflects on how non-indigenous and non-black racialized communities, particularly south asians, continue to benefit from indigenous erasure in settler states through their labour and investments in whiteness, contributing to the making of model minorities (p. 156). the canadian state ultimately ruled migrants from india to be inherently different and less civilized than white europeans and unable to assimilate (mawani, 2012, p. 388). recalling the analysis regarding the construction of the jat sikh identity (mooney, 2013), it becomes clear how normative constructions of the separation of humanity and nature as well as the spatial and temporal limits of civility worked in tandem to maintain and uphold the power structures of modernity/coloniality between different localities within the web of empire such as punjab and turtle island. conclusion when the etymology of taike is broadened and traced back along the transnational web of empire that led to punjabi migration and settlement on coast salish territories, it reveals complexities for contemporary solidarity building efforts. in particular, it becomes necessary to engage, as i have tried to do in this article, with present-day positionalities and dynamics of power through a deeper historical analysis, one that considers how land, race, and caste relate to punjabi migration to canada. the analysis presented here takes place against a backdrop of persisting social and environmental injustice impacting indigenous communities in what is now called canada as well as the people of punjab. the deep-rooted history of imperialism in the punjab region explored above through the canal colonies project provided a foundation for the exploitative and environmentally destructive green revolution of the 1960 and 1970s, resulting in the water, farmer suicide, and agricultural crises gripping punjab today. within the canadian context, “since european contact, aboriginal peoples have been articulating environmental injustices in relation to loss of land, aboriginal title, and devastation of their traditional territories and the life forms they support” (haluza-delay et al., 2009, p. 7). indigenous communities across canada continue to feel the impact of these injustices. many reserves are still without access to safe drinking water (haluza-delay et al., 2009, p. 15; mcgregor, transnational modernity/coloniality studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 367 2012, p. 6) and toxic emissions and chemical runoff into local water systems from large-scale industrial projects continue to disproportionately impact indigenous communities. indigenous and non-indigenous ally activists and scholars have noted the deliberate marginalization of indigenous voices in calls to action and self-proclaimed solidarity as a means to ignore the ties between environmental justice and settler colonialism, and preserve “settler futurity” (tuck & mckenzie, 2015, p. 70). as tuck and yang (2012, p. 5) explain, “the disruption of indigenous relationship to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence… [which] is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation.” policies of genocide inflicted upon indigenous communities continue to sever human relationships to land through the modernity/coloniality apparatus so that “epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. made savage” (tuck & yang, 2012, p. 5). by extension, if “indigenous nationhood is seen as something of the past, the present becomes a site in which indigenous peoples are reduced to small groups of racially and culturally defined and marginalized individuals drowning in a sea of settlers” (lawrence & dua, 2005, p. 123), de-centering settler colonialism and perpetuating an erasure that stands to benefit settlers. as the transnational threads connecting punjab and canada persist through multi-generational migration and global capitalism, it has become increasingly urgent to broaden analytical perspectives to also consider displacement and migration, race, settler colonialism, and environmental justice if we are to reimagine effective solidarities of resistance. however, solidarity is multi-layered and complex. anti-racist and indigenous scholars continue to grapple with questions surrounding the positionality of diasporic communities of colour in the context of settler colonialism, in solidarity movements, and within anti-racist theory. in particular, the politics of naming punjabis arriving in british columbia, themselves displaced by british colonialism/imperialism in india, as “settlers of colour” is reflected in broader ongoing conversations (arvin, 2019; byrd, 2019; chatterjee, 2019; dhamoon, 2015; jafri, 2012; lawrence & dua, 2005; phung, 2011; sehdev, 2011; sharma & wright, 2008/2009), adding more considerations when thinking about the role and positionality of peoples of colour within settler colonial structures. the use of “settlers of colour” in this analysis does not subordinate or render irrelevant the exploitation of punjabi labourers in british columbia’s forestry industry, or the racism and discrimination they experienced from the canadian state and white settlers. instead, it allows for relationships to land to be centred in critical solidarity building, particularly indigenous land rights and sovereignty. analyzing race, caste, and indigeneity in the context of south asians working in the alberta tar sands, upadhyay (2019, p. 164) notes “it is necessary to unsettle the logics of similarities and commonalities between differently racialized and colonized communities” in order to move away from what byrd (2019, p. jaspreet ranauta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 368 208) calls “slippages inherent in identity politics, positionality, and the ranking of oppressions that have us collapsing distinctions for expediency within the necessities of rapid mobilization.” upadhyay (2019, p. 165) goes on to suggest that “to dismantle varying cacophonies of power, intersectional, transnational, and decolonial analyses are required to see the intertwined processes of violences.” for example, in line with this trajectory, future work may apply the transnational frame of analysis developed here to engage with the formation of the anti-colonial ghadar movement in the pacific northwest, its connection to colonial land policies in punjab, and calls to end global empire (tirmizey, 2018, p. 136). what may be required is a framework that expands the scope of analysis transnationally and historically beyond the events of settler arrival to explore global linkages of modernity/coloniality, so that solidarities – while differently aligned – are understood as interwoven and rooted in anti-colonial struggle. references acker, a., kaltmeier, o., & tittor, a. 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(1993). ghadar movement: ideology, organisation, and strategy. guru nanak dev university press. quijano, a. (2000). coloniality of power and eurocentrism in latin america. international sociology, 15(2), 215-232. quijano, a. (2007). coloniality and modernity/rationality. cultural studies, 21(2-3), 168-178. sehdev, r. k. (2011). people of colour in treaty. in a. mathur, j. dewar, & m. degagne (eds.), cultivating canada: reconciliation through the lens of cultural diversity (pp. 263–274). aboriginal healing foundation series. sharma, n., & wright, c. (2008/2009). decolonizing resistance: challenging colonial states. social justice, 35(3), 120-138. talbot, i. a. (2007). the punjab under colonialism: order and transformation in british india. journal of punjab studies, 14(1), 1-10. tirmizey, k. a. (2018). learning from and translating peasant struggles as anti-colonial praxis: the ghadar party in punjab. socialist studies/études socialistes, 13(2), 134-153. tuck, e. & yang, k. w. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education, and society, 1(1), 1-40. jaspreet ranauta studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 352-370, 2020 370 tuck, e. & mckenzie, m. (2015). place in research theory, methodology, and methods. routledge. upadhyay, n. (2019). making of ‘model’ south asians on the tar sands: intersections of race, caste, and indigeneity. journal of the critical ethnic studies association, 5(1), 152-173. verma, a. b. (2002). the making of little punjab in canada: patterns of immigration. sage publications. studies in social justice volume 3, issue 1, 9-22, 2009 correspondence address: david mutimer, york centre for international and security studies, york university, 4700 keele street, toronto, on m3j 1p3, canada. tel.: +1 416 736-5156, email: dmutimer@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 my critique is bigger than yours: constituting exclusions in critical security studies1 david mutimer york centre for international and security studies, york university abstract critical security studies proceeds from the premise that words are world-making, that is that the ways we think about security are constitutive of the worlds of security we analyze. turned to conventional security studies and the practices of global politics, this critical insight has revealed the ways in which the exclusions have been produced. perhaps most notable in this regard has been david campbell’s work, showing how the theory and practice of security are an identity discourse producing both insides and outsides, but the production of excluded others is a theme that runs through the critical scholarship on security in the past decade or more. this article turns the critical security studies gaze on itself, to explore the field’s own complicity in the production of exclusions. the article reads three important instances of critical security studies for the inclusions and exclusions they produce: ken booth’s theory of world security, the epilogue to david campbell’s writing security, and the case collective manifesto. the article concludes by asking about the nature of the inclusions and exclusions these divisions produce and the politics which those exclusions, in turn, (re)produce. critical security studies should know something about exclusion. while the character of critical security studies is the subject of some considerable debate, there would be broad agreement that the nature and purposes of exclusion are at its heart. whether framed in terms of inside and outside, self and other, domination and oppression, or termed directly inclusion and exclusion, the production of a zone of security and the necessity of both an exclusion from that zone and a borderland where the secure meets its other are at the very heart of any work that would lay claim to the critical security studies label. critical security studies began with the recognition that the traditional approach to security masked the socially produced nature of these divisions. security was considered “natural,” and yet who was secured, from what, and by what means, were radically contingent. the first steps of critical security studies was to reveal that contingency and the 10 david mutimer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 social practices that made it possible, and as such, necessarily, raised questions of exclusion. the traditional answers to the question of who was secured, from what and by which means were simple and widely understood: security concerned the preservation of the state from external threats by military means. these answers rested on a prior set of answers that were less well known, but not tremendously controversial once revealed: security was ultimately about protecting “people,” but the state was the means to providing that protection, and as the only thing that could (existentially) threaten the state was external military power, we could largely forget people and concentrate on the security of the state from military threats. as keith krause and michael williams noted in the first book titled with critical security studies, “the [conventional] vision of security effectively makes it synonymous with citizenship. security comes from being a citizen, and insecurity from citizens of other states” (krause & williams, 1997b, p. 43). to the degree that is true, however, security is necessarily predicated on a dual exclusion: the first is the citizen from citizens of “other” states, and the second is the citizen from the non-citizen.2 so, from its outset, critical security studies has been concerned with the way in which security produces an included (citizen) and an excluded (otheror noncitizen). for the majority of its practitioners, however, the concern with exclusion is far more extensive than this initial exclusion constituted around citizenship, as important as that may be. krause and williams initially eschewed the temptation to characterize the “critical” in critical security studies as anything more than a vague orientation: “our appending of the term critical to security studies is meant to imply more an orientation toward the discipline than a precise theoretical label . . . ” (krause & williams, 1997c, pp. x-xi). most who have followed them, however, would adopt a slightly more demanding notion of social critique. ken booth, for instance, has tried to capture the nature of “critical” in a manner that a range of theoretical positions would accept: “critical theorizing does not make a claim to objectivity but rather seeks to provide deeper understandings of oppressive attitudes and behaviour with a view to developing promising ideas by which human society might overcome structural and contingent human wrongs” (booth, 2007, p. 30). put more simply, at some level critical security studies is committed to a politics of emancipation(s), and so is concerned not only with identifying forms of exclusion but with overcoming them. 3 you might think, therefore, that with a project predicated on revealing the production of exclusion as a condition of oppression, and a politics committed to overcoming the oppressions produced by exclusions, critical security studies would not be a field in which exclusions are (re)produced. you would be wrong. in this article, i explore the exclusions that are being produced in the critical security studies literature. i begin by locating the production of exclusion in three key texts of the critical security studies tradition. the first is ken booth’s theory of world security, a text that aims to provide an emancipatory security theory. booth’s book, and his other work, are located within the tradition of critical scholarship that can be called “german” or perhaps “post-marxist.” the second text i will read hails from the second major strand of critical theorizing, the “french” or “post-structural,” and is the epilogue to the second edition of david campbell’s writing security. the book is centrally concerned with exclusion, as it is an exploration of the production my critique is bigger than yours 11 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 of the united states through discourses of fear, which necessarily place some “other(s)” as the threatening outsider. in the epilogue to the second edition, campbell turns his attention from foreign policy to disciplinary politics. having considered the ways in which exclusions are effected in both major strands of critical theorizing, i turn to a text that explicitly seeks to work across them: “the critical approaches to security in europe (case) collective manifesto.” the manifesto is a collective effort that seeks to bridge the gaps that are emerging in the critical study of security, at least in europe. in the third section of the article, i examine that effort, and the raft of exclusions this explicitly inclusionary exercise has produced. the critical security studies literature accepts the “world-making” ability of words, or put another way, understands the scholarly enterprise to be necessarily political. regardless of the theoretical tradition informing the critique of critical security studies, its authors would accept that the exclusions that are (re)produced in the pages of critical security texts do work in the (re)production of exclusions beyond those pages. having examined those exclusions in three key texts in the literature, i turn in the final section to ask questions of that politics. why does it matter that exclusions are (re)produced in the pages of critical security studies texts? selectively diving for pearls ken booth’s theory of world security4 ken booth is perhaps the leading figure in critical security studies, and his 2007 text, theory of world security, is the most complete statement to date of his views on questions of security, theory, and world politics. indeed, booth describes the book as the culmination of a thirty year project, which began with an early version of what became 1979’s strategy and ethnocentrism (booth, 2007, pp. xvii-xviii). theory of world security is a work of truly impressive scope, aiming to “explain and advance a case for a particular theoretical framework with which to explore and engage with the security of real people in real places” (booth, 2007, p. xii). the theoretical framework, the “theory of world security” of the title, is informed by the “emancipatory realism”5 that booth has been developing for more than the past decade, and is applied in the text to the broad sweep of contemporary world politics. booth aims to illuminate a “new 20 years crisis” we are entering, that he feels will culminate in the “great reckoning”—a concatenation of a series of profound challenges to world politics. his central thesis is that to respond to that crisis we need a critical theory of world security, as only emancipation can produce true security.6 in his recent work, building to his statement of a critical security theory, booth has been explicit on grounding that work in the tradition of post-marxist thought in general, and the frankfurt school in particular. in theory of world security, while retaining his intellectual debt to this tradition, booth seeks to be both broader and more eclectic in his theoretical presuppositions. he adopts an approach he calls “perlenfischerei” (pearl fishing), following from hannah arendt (booth, 2007, p. 3840). he plucks pearls from a range of sources to string together his theoretical necklace, though the work loses more in coherence of approach than it gains in its eclecticism. nevertheless, the central theoretical commitments of the text are clear. 12 david mutimer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 booth explicitly seeks to reclaim the enlightenment project of reason and progress (booth, 2007, p. 116-33), informed by a commitment to a communitarian future which owes much to the vision of jurgen habermas and his student in ir, booth’s colleague at aberystwyth, andrew linklater (booth, 2007, p. 40-58). there is one oyster bed into which booth refuses to dive in search of his theoretical pearls, however, and readers of his work in the past decade will not be surprised to learn that it is post-structuralism, for, as he writes: “postmodern approaches (as they generally do not like to be known) are invariably obscurantist and marginal, providing no basis for politics . . .” (booth, 2007, p. 468). the passage is quite remarkable for its recapitulation of so many of the problems in the treatment of approaches to security which draw on the generally french thinkers of the poststructural. first of all, if “they” generally do not like to be known as postmodern, who are the “they” that are captured by the label? the answer might be apparent if any of the scholars whose work booth dismisses were discussed, but they are not. so, how do we know that they are all invariably obscurantist? (perhaps because the label is one applied by booth rather than by the authors, he includes only those that are?) furthermore, how do we judge the lack of a basis for politics? booth’s politics is based, in part, on an ethics which begins from the face-to-face (though he refers to it only in passing), and yet he does not engage with the range of scholarship that has been thinking for the past decade about the ethics of world politics beginning from levinas’ conception of the face-to-face (campbell, 1995; campbell & shapiro, 1999; dauphines, 2008; edkins, 2003; lisle, 2006). indeed, it is well worth wondering how booth can dismiss the capacity for a politics without engaging, at least, with those trying to develop just such a politics. the most significant such example is david campbell’s national deconstruction (campbell, 1998b, p. 165244). while not all would agree with his argument, it seems strange that booth would not engage with a notion of multiculturalism in the context of a “democracy that is to come” which seems, superficially at least, similar to his own ideas on cosmopolitanism and the goal of democracy. it seems likely, on the evidence of the text, that booth is aware of the problems of a critical theory effecting the sort of exclusion that he performs in relation to poststructural literature. in looking to the future of security studies writ large, he argues: “but to argue for the primacy of a critical theory of security is not to argue for disciplinary totalitarianism. such would be contrary to the nature of the critical project. furthermore, intellectual pluralism is desirable in order to keep everybody honest. tomorrow’s security studies should be pluralistic, and informed by accessibility, relevance, and engagement” (booth, 2007, p. 462). he continues to give examples of the breadth of such an accessible, relevant and engaged security studies: since the late 1970s, the agenda of academic theorizing in international relations has broadly been established by the neo-realism inspired by kenneth waltz’s theory of international politics. his book was an exercise in “parsimonious” theorizing, and remains the discipline’s apogee in that regard. there is a role for parsimonious theory, but only a limited one, in saying a few big things about a big issue (booth, 2007, p. 463). my critique is bigger than yours 13 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 it would appear, therefore, that the pluralist scope of security studies is expansive enough to include waltz’s neo-realism and its explicitly statist agenda (if only in a small way, to say some “big” things). booth’s concession is quite monumental in the context of a field of study that has developed from opposition to the very realism of which waltz is the parsimonious apogee. despite his expansive conception of security studies, there is no place for the post-structural. booth, then, effects an impressive and impermeable exclusion in theory of world security.7 his theory is eclectic, but intentionally restrictive. he is not setting out to define a field of security studies, but rather to provide a specific theory of security in the contemporary context. as such, he builds from a range of post-marxist scholarship, and supplements it with ideas he takes from where he can find them. as only one theory, however, he recognizes that it should not be considered exhaustive or even exclusive in its commentary on contemporary security. however, while the nearly full range of alternative theorizing is accepted, the post-structural (or “postmodern” as they generally do not like to be called) are excepted. there is a clear, glowing intellectual line in booth’s thought, and (only?) post-structuralism is placed outside. border politics8 the epilogue to campbell’s writing security booth produces a boundary by which to exclude the post-structural, but what happens within that bounded, excluded space? i now turn to that question, inquiring into the exclusions produced by post-structural writing on security. within the disciplinary politics of international relations, there are few positions that have been more aggressively and systematically excluded than the post-structural. booth’s antagonism to those who have derisively been described as “french fries” is far from unique; it is only surprising inasmuch as it fits so badly with his own expressed theoretical and disciplinary preferences. indeed, both booth’s basic opposition—that there is no possibility for a post-structural politics—and his apparent pluralism in letting ninety-nine flowers bloom, echo the loudest disciplining voices over the past two decades. post-structural writing on security, therefore, should be the most sensitive to the nature and power of exclusionary practices, on at least two levels. the work itself has been centrally concerned with the politics of “othering,” while at the same time being identified as everyone’s other. david campbell’s work has been at least as significant as booth’s, both inside and outside the study of security. in this section, i read one small instance of campbell’s work, the epilogue to the 2nd edition of writing security, to explore the ways in which he too produces exclusions. writing security is a study of the production of the united states through a discourse of fear. campbell shows how two “foreign policies”—the capitalized foreign policy we are used to discussing in international relations and a lower-case foreign policy working both domestically and internationally to “make foreign” (campbell, 1998a, p. 35-38)—work together to produce dangerous “others,” and how the us constitutes itself in then opposing these “others.” it is a book, therefore, that is centrally concerned with the production and effects of the security exclusions that are the starting point for this article. 14 david mutimer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 in the epilogue, campbell turns his attention from us foreign policies to the politics of the discipline of international relations. indeed, a primary motivation for the epilogue is precisely in the disciplinary exclusions that had been effected against post-structural work in the decade before it was written: the contingency and flux of the post-cold war period has provided a moment that furthered the cause of already existing critical theories, and triggered a pluralization of critical approaches in international relations.... in this epilogue, i want to explore the disciplinary politics evident in the reaction to these changes. specifically, i want to consider the growth in international relations’ scholarship dealing with questions of political identity since writing security was first published, and the way the disciplinary reaction is a form of discipline that renders the new as “foreign” and “dangerous” (campbell, 1998a, p. 209). campbell begins with a defence against the mainstream abhorrence of post-structural work, but, as he notes, the requirements for defence have lost some of their urgency: “where once the above objections to the impoverished understanding of “postmodernism” in international relations would have been made in a defensive mode, now they are put forward with an air of resigned exasperation” (campbell, 1998a, p. 215). in other words, even by 1998, post-structural work was well enough established that the gatekeepers were left, as he puts it: “observed in the rearview mirror waving their arms wildly and still demanding their papers and price of admission” (p. 215). thus, with the fight against the mainstream gatekeepers appearing largely to be won, campbell takes on more difficult targets: first the “modernist constructivism” of alexander wendt and others, and then the constructivism “deployed by critical scholars sometimes intellectually allied with poststructuralism” (p. 222). campbell considers the conventional constructivists through a reading of the development of wendt’s work, together with a discussion of a leading constructivist volume on security, the 1996 book the culture of national security (katzenstein, 1996). his central criticism is that: what we are witnessing in arguments such as [these], therefore, is little more than an attempt to domesticate “discourse” and related notions, so that the substantive interests of critical scholars can be mapped onto the preexisting strictures of empirical social science, while the larger metatheoretical (and thus ethico-political) questions of their positions can be avoided (campbell, 1998a, p. 218). the “constructivist” work, therefore, attempts a marginalization of the post-structural in many ways more potent than the mainstream’s outright dismissal. the work of those like katzenstein and wendt draw in the post-structural concerns of culture and identity, and even some of the language of post-structural writing, without altering the epistemological or even, to any great degree, the ontological assumptions of conventional international relations scholarship: “indeed, wendt’s self-professed modernist constructivism . . . reendorses state-centric realism, with its implications of volitional agents, while marginalizing a more radical understanding of identity” (campbell, 1998a, p. 219). my critique is bigger than yours 15 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 what of the second group of constructivists campbell identifies, those fellowtravellers “intellectually allied with poststructuralism”? here campbell treads carefully, but still seeks to draw a clear line between this form of constructivism and post-structuralism: to draw distinctions between poststructuralists and critical constructivists goes against an increasingly common tendency . . . . it is also a distinction which in the first instance is difficult to make and contentious to suggest, not least because much critical work combines in a productive way the different positions (campbell, 1998a, p. 223). despite these difficulties, he continues to draw the distinction because it yields an important theoretical point. the critical constructivists stop at the final point at which the post-structural break with the modernist constructivists is complete, seeking to retain an acting subject in some sense independent of the discourses and practices which it constructs. the problem with this philosophical hesitation, campbell concludes, is that “critical constructivist arguments can be more easily drawn into the realm of judgment where the protocols of “empirical social science” rule, to the detriment of a politicized account of important practices” (campbell, 1998a, p. 225). the argument campbell develops in the epilogue is sophisticated and nuanced, rather more than my short account can capture. the effect of his discussion, however, is to develop a graded series of inclusions and exclusions: 1. at the extreme (either outside or inside depending on your vantage) is the mainstream, which adheres to the protocols of empirical social science, including a rigid separation of subject and object, and an ontological commitment to the primacy of the state in world politics. in terms of disciplinary politics, these are the gatekeepers who have so vigorously opposed the introduction of continental social theory into the study of international relations. 2. next are the modernist constructivists, who accept the empirical importance of “culture” but provide an analysis of social construction by means of extra-discursive agents who engage in “construction.” campbell sees these scholars and their work as dangerous because they adopt the language of identity and social construction, but they do so in a way that actually reproduces the static, statist agenda of the mainstream. 3. if the modernists are on the side of the mainstream, raiding across the border to the substantive concerns of the post-structuralists (campbell, 1998a, p. 216), then the critical constructivists occupy the boundary space between the mainstream and their constructivist allies and the poststructuralists. in some ways the critical constructivists are perhaps even more dangerous than the modernists, as they openly ally with the intellectual politics of post-structuralism, but in a way that can reinforce the exclusions of the mainstream. 4. finally, at the other extreme (again outside or in) are the post-structuralists, who pursue the philosophical and political implications of the performative constitution of identity, in which “there is no power, constructed as a subject, that acts, but only . . . a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and stability” (judith butler, as cited in campbell 1998a, p. 224). 16 david mutimer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 what is campbell’s purpose in drawing these fine distinctions, particularly the last between the post-structural and critical constructivist? it “is to enable a better response to the mainstream appropriations” (campbell, 1998a, p. 225). in other words, he seeks to draw a hard and fast line between the post-structural and modernist constructivist positions, and invites those in the margins to get on the right side of the line! even in a text that explores so well the dangerous political consequences of producing difference as exclusion, written from a position that has felt the power of being excluded, exclusions are produced and policed. does critical security studies have no answer to these repeated exclusions? the next section considers the work of a group of scholars who tried to answer this question in the affirmative. manifest exclusions the case collective’s “networked manifesto” in 2006, security dialogue published an article that was rather unusual in the canon of security studies, and indeed of the social sciences more broadly. it was unusual in at least two senses. the first was that the author was identified as the “case collective.” case stands for critical approaches to security in europe, and the collective is just that, a group of scholars writing collectively. while it is not uncommon for a number of authors to collaborate on a text, there tend to be two, three or at times four; the case collective numbered twenty-five. also, the usual way of identifying collective authorship is to list the authors as authors; the case collective identifies the collective as the author, and then lists its membership in a footnote.9 the second sense in which the article is unusual is in its use of the term “manifesto.” manifestos are intensely partisan documents, issued by governments or political parties to outline and justify policies or platforms. 10 while critical theory is attuned to the political nature of all scholarship, it is not common for a scholarly paper to be labelled so overtly politically. the politics the collective was pursuing is set out in the first few pages: [t]he aim of working and writing as a collective, a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, is based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamic of individualist research agendas and to establish a network that not only facilitates dialogue but is also able to speak with a collective voice (case collective, 2006. p. 444). the goal of the collective, therefore, is to overcome the divisions that have riven critical approaches to security (in europe), including those that divide the postmarxist work of booth and his colleagues and the post-structural work of campbell and his: the authors share the view that, over the past two decades, important innovations in the study of “security” have emerged among european scholars in particular. although the genesis of these innovations involves scholars on both sides of the atlantic, these approaches have arguably my critique is bigger than yours 17 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 gained momentum and density in europe, leading to the emergence of distinctive european research agenda(s) in the traditionally us-dominated field of “security studies.” consequently, it was felt that the time had come to evaluate these “european” approaches, both in order to increase their exposure and to push them further in specific directions (case collective, 2006, p. 444). indeed, the manifesto is explicit in both naming three “schools” of thought and undermining their meaningfulness: schools they term “copenhagen,” “aberystwyth,” and “paris.” the first refers to those developing the ideas of “securitization” that were originally articulated by ole waever, of the university of copenhagen, and then married to the sectoral approach to security of barry buzan (buzan, waever, & de wilde, 1999). the second refers to booth and his colleagues, centred on the department of international politics at aberystwyth university. the paris school is broadly post-structural, though has the same eclecticism as is evidenced throughout the literature identified in this fashion. the city label refers to the importance of didier bigo at sciences-po in paris. “the aim of the case collective is precisely to go beyond the artificial boundaries [of the three schools] in order to combine a variety of critical approaches under a common framework, without, nonetheless, reducing one approach to another” (case collective, 2006, p. 451). the manifesto is, therefore, extraordinary in its attempt to be inclusive, explicitly aiming to construct a productive network across approaches that have overtly excluded one another in the past, and that, in some cases, are based on fundamentally different notions of the nature of security and of science. i have shown above how booth works to ensure that post-structuralism is outside the pale. as for the copenhagen approach, in its most extensive elaboration, security: a new framework for analysis, it is at pains to distinguish its framework from both a constructivist critical security studies, and a post-structural approach to security. both constructivism and post-structuralism, the copenhagen authors argue, are committed to the prospect of social change, and embrace both epistemology and ontology that are at odds with those of copenhagen: although our philosophical position is in some sense more radically constructivist in holding security to always be a political construction and not something the analyst can describe as it “really” is, in our purposes we are closer to traditional security studies, which at its best attempted to grasp security constellations and thereby steer them into benign interactions. this stands in contrast to the “critical” purposes of css, which point toward a more wholesale refutation of current power wielders (buzan et al., 1998, p. 35). the copenhagen approach considers the structures of international social life to be sufficiently sedimented that they can be treated as if they were objective (hence in keeping with traditional security studies and opposed to the “critical purposes” of critical security studies) (buzan et al., 1998, p. 34-35). in the manifesto, then, we might expect to find no production of exclusions, for the collective is taking its exclusions as given and working to overcome them. quite remarkably, however, in a series of responses to the text that were published in the 18 david mutimer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 subsequent volume of security dialogue, the collective was taken to task precisely for the exclusions it served to effect. andreas behnke (2007) argues that the collective violates the critical project in the closures it effects: one of the strengths of css is its loose boundaries, multifaceted nature and constant productivity. in this sense, the manifesto’s intent to define insiders and outsiders, both geographically and personally, is a highly problematic move. yet, this move can be understood in terms of a manifesto’s need to impose closure upon truth and to keep what is in the shadows from view. the manifesto at hand engages two topoi, “place” and “author,” to engender this closure (p. 106). behnke’s primary concern is with the second of his two topoi, the “author.” specifically, he shows how the collective’s personalization of the history of case in particular and critical security studies in general hides their constitutive intellectual traditions, which in turns enables the exclusion of some. in particular, he is concerned with the excision of carl schmitt: “perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the manifesto is its treatment of one of the constitutive contributions to its critical philosophy. the dismissal of carl schmitt’s work on the political and the exception forecloses a proper investigation of the processes of depoliticization that are rightly at the heart of the case agenda” (behnke, 2007, p. 108). in terms of place, behnke is concerned with the way a line is drawn around “europe,” a concern that is picked up in a second response by mark salter: “to what extent does the collective wish to be tied to the continental metaphor of ‘europe’?” (salter, 2007, p. 114). behnke notes the ambiguity of the geographic inclusion / exclusion, wondering if ultimately it refers to the citizenship or home base of the scholars in question. “in either case, it is an undue and peculiar exclusionary move that in fact expresses an epistemic ontopology counter to the professed network character of the case collective. networks, after all, are notorious for transcending boundaries” (behnke, 2007, p. 106). salter notes the strange position of canada in the world that case produces, by opposing critical europe to american-dominated security studies (salter, 2007, p. 116-17). as he notes, the research program at the heart of the “paris” school is jointly run by didier bigo out of paris and rbj walker out of either the universities of victoria (canada) or of keele (uk), depending on the time of year. canada is too small for canadian scholars to be insularly canadian, and many seek their primary intellectual and professional ties in europe, and yet they are excised from the case universe by that final “e.” salter does not stop there, however, posing two further questions of exclusion to the collective: “to what extent does the collective want to define the limits of the case endeavour? and to what extent does the collective intend to police its membership, through the approval or disavowal of specific kinds of scholarly and political interventions?” (salter, 2007, p. 114). he then explores these questions, with particular reference to the post-colonial and development studies—both excluded from the case collective’s apparent ambit—and asks a difficult question of central importance to the question of inclusion and exclusion: where does the collective end, or will all disciplines be assimilated? the paradox with this kind of expansion is that the collective must choose in my critique is bigger than yours 19 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 some sense between a description of assumptions and problems that are common and non-negotiable, or a more amorphous concern with general issue-areas. the former risks alienating some scholars and potential partners; the latter risks starting an endless debate as to what constitutes the field (salter, 2007, p. 117). in other words, while salter contests some of the exclusions case effects, and particularly laments the evident policing in which they seek to engage, he suggests that some exclusion is necessary. i return to the question of the necessity of exclusion in the conclusion. in some ways the most startling of the responses to the collective’s manifesto was that published three issues after behnke’s and salter’s. in her piece, christine sylvester (2007) produces a close reading of one footnote of the manifesto to show how the collective has excised certain forms of scholarship, while valuing others. in particular, the footnote excludes from the collective “hard-core postmodernists” and “feminists” (p. 549). sylvester takes up the question of the exclusion of feminism from the case network, focussing in particular on the work of lene hansen. hansen is indeed mentioned in the footnote sylvester analyses, as the author of interesting work not included in the collective (together with four others, three of whom are canadian!) sylvester asks what it means to exclude the writing of a leading post-structural feminist scholar, whose work is clearly “critical” and concerned with “security”? the question is particularly pointed in the case of hansen, for not only has she written a widely-cited piece on the exclusion of feminism from the copenhagen school (hansen, 2000), but actually works at the university of copenhagen: “that she works in copenhagen could make her part of the copenhagen school; but, given that the collective takes pains to avoid drawing too literal a line under place-names, it might just be that she does critical security studies but not in approved school ways” (sylvester, 2007, p. 551). the overtly inclusive exercise of critical network building, then, seems to produce even more exclusions than the earlier texts that were explicit in their exclusions. the collective’s “european-ness” serves to exclude canadians (and, presumably, australians and others), although it might be possible to breach this boundary by moving (even part-time) to “europe.” perhaps even more troubling, the tripartite form of the “schools,” together with an all-too rigid understanding of what fits within them, works to exclude forms of (critical) scholarship from the privileged european core: schmitt and those working from him are out, as are “hard-core postmodernists” and (at least some) feminists even if they happen to be european, and even when they work in copenhagen or aberystwyth. conclusion kept from dancing on the pin’s head to conclude, i want to ask why this all matters. i have outlined a series of exclusions that are produced in the pages of books and journals that, if we are to be honest, are read by very few—in the grand scheme of things, at least. am i not simply taking a new angle on a very old characterisation of philosophical futility (originality!), and seeing which angels are not dancing on the pin’s head? 20 david mutimer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 most critical scholarship in international relations begins, in some sense, from robert cox’s observation that all theory is for someone and for some purpose. (cox, 1986, p. 207) it is rarely noted that this means, necessarily, that theory is also against someone and against their purposes. while rarely noted, it would generally not be seen as overly problematic by critical theorists if it were, because the assumption is that critical theory is for the oppressed, for the excluded, and is therefore against the oppressor, against those on the inside keeping the deserving out. but who are the deserving? our reflex is that they are any that are kept out, but here is the point at which the discussion i have just followed gains its significance. the various forms of critical theorizing about security identify those deserving by identifying whom it is their theory is for. by effecting exclusions from the critical project, the different forms of theorizing produce some as doubly excluded: they are outside, but not deserving. emancipatory critical theory is revealed to be against not only the oppressors, those inside guarding the gates, but against some of those on the outside as well. as christine sylvester puts it: when critical people of all persuasions and locations forget to recognize that critical comes in many forms, when they designate some critical analysts as ‘other participants’, fall into the habit encouraged by camp ir to focus narrowly and rally around a few thinkers, when they forget that feminists are dissidents too and that women are in security peril the world round . . . they are in trouble . . . ” (sylvester, 2007, p. 556) the conclusion is unavoidable, then, that each of the positions i have surveyed is “in trouble,” as each effects just such exclusions of other forms of critique and the insecure outsiders for whom those others speak. booth’s post-marxism privileges those excluded on the basis of class, but the disparagement of post-structuralism effects an excision of not only the writers but the varied forms of identity for whom they write. these multiple and overlapping forms of identity include, but are not limited to, those constituted by race, sexual orientation and, of course, gender. the case collective, even in its aim to be inclusive, excludes feminists and the insecure women for whom they write, as well as the non-europeans who may also write for subjects other than those that are the focus of european authors. the question that remains, of course, is whether we can escape the production of exclusions in our attempts at critical (security) scholarship. my answer is that no, we cannot. by speaking for some we necessarily speak against others, and the range of those who face oppression, those for whom critical scholarship is written, is too great for them all to be written for at once. my corollary to this observation is that there will be different outsiders who most need critical theory at different times and in different places. in taking this step, i make clear my own choice amongst the inclusions and exclusions i have surveyed, for from this corollary follows a poststructural critical ethos. while we cannot avoid effecting exclusions in our work, we can resist the temptation to effect them a priori. rather, we need to turn our critical gazes constantly on ourselves to ask if, at each time and in each place, we are theorizing for those most in need. doing so acknowledges that other outsiders will be excluded by our choices, but has at least the benefit of doing so in a limited and contingent fashion. my critique is bigger than yours 21 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 notes 1 a previous version of this article was presented at the workshop: “security and exclusion,” centre for social justice, university of windsor, and october 23, 2008. i would like to thank the participants for their comments and suggestions, which made for a better piece; the problems that remain are, of course, mine alone! 2 the importance of this primary exclusion has, of course, been dramatically highlighted in the years since 9/11. the protection a state owes its citizens, for example, led to maher arar’s “rendition” to syria for torture rather than the return to canada he (by right) demanded. on the other side, the near medieval “security certificates” that the supreme court has only recently reined in, are applicable only to the non-citizen. 3 for a discussion of critical security studies in the context of a commitment to progressive politics and emancipation(s), see mutimer (forthcoming 2009). 4 parts of the following discussion of booth’s text have been published in a different form as mutimer (2008). 5 booth has been using the term “utopian realism” for his approach to security for some time, but has “become resigned to thinking that the label is unhelpful: ‘utopia’ is an idea with too much negative baggage, and in any case smacks too much of a static blueprint” (booth, 2007, p. 90). 6 the relationship between emancipation and security has been central to booth’s thinking, and his contribution to the development of critical security studies, since its early articulation in booth (1991). 7 this is not a new exclusion for booth. see, for example, booth (2005a). 8 the title is taken from the first section heading in the epilogue (campbell, 1998a, p. 207). 9 the collective appears serious about the collective nature of the enterprise, as the rejoinder piece published the next year under its name identified only 16 authors, and some had not been part of the original collective. (case collective, 2007). 10 the most famous manifesto, of course, is the communist manifesto of marx and engels. more mundane, though no less partisan, the electoral programs of the british political parties are known as their manifestos. references behnke, a. (2007). presence and creation: a few (meta-)critical comments on the c.a.s.e. manifesto. security dialogue, 38(1), 105 11. booth, k. (1979). strategy and ethnocentrism. london: croom helm. booth, k. (1991). security and emancipation. review of international studies, 17(4). booth, k. (ed.). (2005). critical security studies and world politics. boulder: lynne rienner. booth, k. (2005a). beyond critical security studies. in k. booth (ed.), critical security studies and world politics. (pp. 259-278). boulder: lynne rienner. booth, k. (2007). theory of world security. cambridge: cambridge university press. buzan, b., waever, o. & de wilde, i. (1998). security: a new framework for analysis. boulder: lynne rienner. campbell, d. (1998a). writing security: united states foreign policy and the politics of identity (2nd ed.). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. campbell, d. (1998b). national deconstruction: violence, identity and justice in bosnia. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. campbell, d. (2002). atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of bosnia—the case of itn versus living marxism. journal of human rights, 1(1), 1-33 & 1(2), 143-172. campbell, d. & shapiro, m. (eds.). (1999). moral spaces: rethinking ethics and world politics. minneapolis: university of minnesota. case collective. (2006). critical approaches to security in europe: a networked manifesto. security dialogue, 37(4), 443-87. case collective. (2007). europe, knowledge, politics: engaging the limits: the case collective responds. security dialogue, 38(4), 559-576. cox, r. (1986). social forces, states and world orders: beyond international relations theory. in robert keohane (ed.), neorealism and its critics (pp. 204-254). new york: columbia university press. 22 david mutimer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 dauphines, e. (2008). the ethics of researching war: searching for bosnia. manchester: manchester university press. edkins, j. (2003). trauma and the memory of politics. cambridge: cambridge university press. hansen, l. (2000). the little mermaid’s silent security dilemma and the absence of gender in the copenhagen school. millennium: journal of international studies, 29(2), 285-306. katzenstein, p. (1996). the culture of national security norms and identity in world politics. ithaca: cornell university press. krause k., & williams, m. c. (eds.). (1997a). critical security studies: concepts and cases. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. krause, k. & williams, m. c. (1997b). from strategy to security: foundations of critical security studies. in k. krause & m. c. williams (eds.), critical security studies: concepts and cases (pp. 33-59). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. krause, k. & williams, m. c. (1997c). preface: toward critical security studies. in k. krause & m. c. williams (eds.), critical security studies: concepts and cases (pp. vii-xxi). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. lisle, d. (2006). the global politics of contemporary travel writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. mutimer, d. (forthcoming, 2009). critical security studies. in v. mauer & m. dunn cavelty (eds.), handbook of security studies. london: routledge. mutimer, d. (2008). review: ken booth, theory of world security. ethics and international affairs, 22 (4), 429-430. salter, m. (2007). on exactitude in disciplinary science: a response to the network manifesto. security dialogue, 38(1), 113-122. sylvester, c. (2007). anatomy of a footnote. security dialogue, 38(4), 547-558. studies in social justice volume 4, issue 2, 219-200, 2010 correspondence address: michael d. royster, prairie view a&m university, prairie view, tx, 77446 usa. email: mdroyster@pvamu.edu issn: 1911-4788 review of hijacked justice: dealing with the past in the balkans michael d. royster division of social work, behavioral and political science, prairie view a&m university hijacked justice: dealing with the past in the balkans. by julena subotic (2009): ithaca, ny & london, uk: cornell university press this book explores how nations deal with legacies of genocide and ethnic conflict through state noncompliance with international standards based on the phenomenon of “transitional justice,” defined by julena subotic as the process of collective healing through seeking out the truth. the author argues that this noble cause is often hijacked by the so-called “institutions of transitional justice” which use various forms of coercion (economic, symbolic, and bureaucratic) to force a truncated view of justice onto nations. according to subotic, the use of coercion often has the unintended and paradoxical effect of leading justice-seeking countries to respond to external impositions by resisting justice and truth-seeking in various ways. to prove such claims, subotic examines the cases of three former members of communist yugoslavia—namely, the republic of serbia, croatia, and bosnia and herzegovina. subotic fails to take up the case of the former yugoslav republic of slovenia, which achieved independence following a brief two-week long war with belgrade, and is currently the only former yugoslav republic to have been admitted into the european union (eu). the eu is a symbolic promised land, and acts as a pressure point to exact legal and other reforms in former yugoslav republics. she also omits the cases of macedonia and kosovo. war crimes institutions, such as the international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia (icty) and various other truth commissions have polarized the populations and parties of the three nations in question. the book sympathizes with the victims due to the author’s favourable view of transitional justice functioning as a means towards national healing. however, the author exposes the fallibility of current transitional justice norms and their disturbing yet diverse outcomes as evident in bosnia, serbia, and croatia. some of these unexpected, negative consequences include the assassination of serbian reformist 220 michael d. royster studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 leader, zoran dindic, as well as political paralysis in bosnia. the author does not offer conclusive resolutions for the welfare of post-conflict societies. instead, she expresses a call for internal accountability and international involvement because delayed justice which allows perpetrators of war crimes to go unpunished and the abandoning of victims without restitution prevents collective healing and progress. subotic concludes by drawing parallels to the cases of cambodia, burundi, and sudan. however, similar tactics of delayed justice prevail in racialized societies such as the united states in terms of racial and ethnic minority groups. has the united states achieved “transitional justice” and reconciliation with its historical past, including slavery and the extermination of native americans? whenever political leaders can convince the public that the interest of the nation faces imminent danger, efforts at truth telling and reconciliation are abandoned. the various techniques that legitimize war crimes and delay justice include: (1) turning perpetrators into victims; (2) recourse to various “civil religions” such that national interest comes before the interest of minorities; and, (3) denial of human rights results from challenges to the status quo. julena subotic’s book represents a significant contribution to the study of the aftermath of the balkan war. however, the author fails to explore the reason why some nations seem to be ignored by the international community despite their history with war and genocide—namely, the fact that international propaganda tends to give more attention to those countries which have a significant stake in global markets, neglecting such peripheral nations (as the balkans) in their post-war and postgenocide years. the problem lies in the premise that war crimes have been presented as “acceptable practices” and are sustained by a code of silence. after carefully analyzing these three case studies the author concludes that “when we deal with the past not as a comprehensive social enterprise but as a mechanistic international requirement, we give political elites who do not think what happened was wrong an opportunity to close accounts on the past instead of opening them” (p. xii). the construction of internal ethical nihilism becomes the price for external national honour with the posture of justice. subotic opens the doors for further research and investigation in terms of evaluating the legitimacy of torture techniques, the effectiveness of the use of truth commissions, and operational procedures for governments in transition. the multiple political shifts of the past two decades, the emergence of new satellite nations, and the rearranging of alliances as political powers shift, attest to the relevance for social scientists to further investigate the effectiveness of methods for restructuring postconflict societies. cahill final dec 12 19 correspondence address: caitlin cahill, social science & cultural studies, pratt institute, new york, ny, 11205. email: ccahill@pratt.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 122-124, 2020 creative intervention caution mestizo arts & activism collective salt lake city, usa figure 1. caution (© mestizo arts & activism collective) one of the interesting things is that this image has always been interpreted, and even called, “caution, we have power.” in reality, the conversation within the group never headed in that direction. it was more of a ‘we are peaceful and we care about each other, our communities, our families and we have a responsibility to each other. “estamos junt@[x]s pase lo que pase (we are together whatever happens).” which, now that i come to think about it, could be interpreted as “caution, we have power.” alonso r. reyna rivarola, youth researcher (2008-2011), co-director (2012-2015), mestizo arts & activism collective caution studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 122-124, 2020 123 caution was created by young people as a way of making sense of their experiences of xenophobia and racism (cahill, quijada cerecer, reyna rivarola, hernández zamudio & alvarez gutiérrez, 2019; quijada, cahill & bradley, 2011). specifically we created the image in response to online racist and hostile comments posted below an article in the local newspaper featuring the mestizo arts & activism collective (www.maacollective.org). reading the hostile comments we felt sad and outraged, and decided to create this image “by us and for us” to collectively process and respond to the hate directed towards the latinx immigrant community. “theorizing from the flesh” (anzaldúa 1987) literally and figuratively, caution offered an opportunity to rework cultural narratives that misrepresent our community. the mestizo arts & activism collective (maa) is an intergenerational social justice think tank based in salt lake city, utah that engages in critical participatory action research (par), placing emphasis upon the particular contribution and access young people bring to understanding their everyday lives. collectively we co-create spaces of recognition that center the agency of young people of color, immigrants, and our capacity to make change on our own terms (maacollective.org). more than a method, critical par is an epistemological position grounded in everyday life experience and a commitment to both the “right to research” (appadurai, 2006) and the right to represent. as cultural representations are key to the criminalization and exploitation of immigrant communities, in our collective creative practice we document and respond to undocumented immigrants’ intimate everyday experiences of racial capitalism, and challenge what we call the “school-tosweatshop pipeline” (cahill, alvarez gutiérrez & quijada cerecer, 2016). in our work, participatory art-making is a critical aspect of our activism and inquiry whereby “people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which, and in which, they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (freire 1974, xx; quijada cerecer, cahill, gonzález coronado & martinez, 2019). references anzaldúa, g. (1999). borderlands la frontera: the new mestiza (2nd ed.). san francisco, ca: aunt lute books. appadurai, a. (2006). the right to research. globalisation, societies and education, 4(2), 167–17 cahill, c., quijada cerecer, d., reyna rivarola, a., hernández zamudio, j., & alvarez gutiérrez, l. (2019). “caution, we have power”: resisting the school-to-sweatshop pipeline through participatory artistic praxes and critical care. gender & education, 31(5), 576-589. cahill, c., alvarez gutiérrez, l., & quijada cerecer, d. a. (2016). a dialectic of dreams and dispossession: the school-to-sweatshop pipeline. cultural geographies, 23(1), 121-137. freire, p. (1974). education: the practice of freedom. london: writers & readers publishing cooperative. mestizo arts & activism collective studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 122-124, 2020 124 quijada cerecer, d.a., cahill, c., gonzález coronado, y. s., & martinez, j. (2019). “we the people”: epistemological moves through cultural praxis. cultural studies-critical methodologies, 19(3), 214-221. quijada, d., cahill, c., & bradley, m. (2011). resist this! embodying the contradictory positions and collective possibilities of transformative resistance. the international journal of qualitative studies in education, 24(5), 587-593. gold final before ts correspondence address: becky gold, graduate program in theatre & performance studies, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: blgold@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 neurodivergency and interdependent creation: breaking into canadian disability arts becky gold york university, canada abstract disability arts has traditionally been understood as that which is led, created, and/or curated by disabled artists. while disability arts and culture in canada has continued to grow and develop over the last number of decades, i have perceived a notable lack of neurodivergent artists being included at disability arts events and community gatherings. i question if this lack of representation may be due in part to this perception of disability arts as having to be led exclusively by those with lived experience of disability. in this paper, i will critically engage with concepts of inter-abled artistic collaboration, interdependency and the need to re-imagine disability arts leadership structures to better include neurodivergent artists and their allies. i will further position my ideas around this topic within the context of the roundtable discussion on the future of disability arts leadership that took place at the cripping the arts symposium in 2019. keywords neurodivergency; disability arts; interdependence; inter-abled collaboration; leadership introduction disability art has traditionally been understood as that which is led, created, or curated by disabled artists. recognizing that the disability arts movement in canada emerged from the disability rights activism of the 1970s and 1980s (gorman, 2007, p. 46), it is unsurprising that much of the art being created by disabled artists is rooted in social justice organizing and commentary. while disability arts and culture in canada has continued to grow and develop over the last number of decades, there is still a noticeable lack of neurodivergent artists present on our stages or represented at disability arts community gatherings or symposia. becky gold studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 210 as a non-disabled artist and researcher who for the past seven years has worked primarily with neurodivergent teens and adults through collaborative arts practices, i am interested in confronting this absence. why are neurodivergent people so scarcely represented within the canadian disability arts community? what are the reasons for this fissure in inclusion and representation? what practice-based resources and understandings are lost for the wider disability arts community from this lack of inclusion? in this paper, i query the reason for this scarcity of representation by investigating the fact that neurodivergent artists often work in collaboration with or under the direction of non-disabled artist allies. this dynamic has received both criticism and praise and is ultimately in need of further scholarly engagement. (hadley, 2020; hargrave, 2015; perring, 2005). drawing from current community discourse around neurodiversity, i use the term “neurodivergent” to describe minds that function in ways that diverge from dominant societal standards of “normal.” in contrast, “neurotypical” describes minds that function in predictable ways and meet conventional societal standards (walker, 2014). using this definition, neurodivergence describes a number of diverse disability experiences that include autism, down syndrome, brain injury, dyslexia, etc. i do not use “neurodivergent” to refer specifically to members of the neurodiversity movement, which stems from the autism rights movement. rather, i use the word as an umbrella term for the diverse community of artists whom i have the most experience working with as a non-disabled artist collaborator. this group of neurodivergent artists may otherwise be labelled as having intellectual or developmental disabilities, learning or cognitive disabilities, and require or seek certain levels of creative support that others who might share their diagnosis (e.g., autism) may not necessarily require. i offer a final note about terminology to acknowledge that while it is always preferable to describe individuals using the terms that they use to self-identify, the various self-labels used by the artists i work with are extensive and varied and thus i choose to use neurodivergent for this purpose. in an attempt to unpack the lack of representation of neurodivergent artists in disability arts circles i will examine the ways in which this exclusion may in some ways extend from the complex histories of inter-abled artistic relationships.1 to do this, i look specifically at the concepts of “art brut” and “outsider art.” i explore these concepts to draw attention to the ways in which they have historically diminished the autonomy and undercut the personal creativity of disabled artists, and further, how this has shaped the desire for contemporary disability arts to be exclusively disability-led. while overlap between outsider art and disability art exists in terms of bringing the work of marginalized artists to the fore, in this paper i will demonstrate how disability 1 i use to the term “inter-abled” to refer to relationships between those who have lived experience of disability and those who do not. the term inter-abled is commonly used to describe romantic relationships between a disabled and non-disabled individual though that is not my purpose here. neurodivergency and interdependent creation studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 211 art distinguishes itself by centring disabled artistic vision and practice. as an artistic and sociocultural movement, i suggest that disability arts has the potential to facilitate the inclusion of disabled artists in canada’s arts and culture sector and offer unique and innovative aesthetics and processes of artistic creation. by exploring the roles of and relationship between neurodivergent artists and their non-disabled collaborators, i will highlight how their artistic work and collaborations complicate and disrupt existing understandings of disability arts practices and protocols, while offering new ways of working and creating that embrace alternative ways of knowing and being in the world. to explore these collaborative practices and processes i will present three examples of canadian inter-abled and interdependent artistic collaborations,2 noting their unique contributions to the field of disability arts and the ways in which they navigate dynamics of power and artistic leadership within their practice. i then work with these examples to show how support-based structures of artistic creation are approached and implemented outside of the canadian context, demonstrating how these practices inform accessible, interdependent methodologies, and have the potential to inform the canadian disability arts canon and community. i will conclude this paper by offering a detailed account of my experience leading a roundtable discussion on the future of disability arts leadership at the cripping the arts symposium in 2019.3 cripping the arts brought together disabled artists, allies, and key stakeholders in disability arts practice and scholarship to create a supportive and encouraging space to engage in critical conversations about the state of disability arts nationally and internationally. it was the conversations that took place during this leadership roundtable that prompted my desire to explore in more depth the complexities of inter-abled collaboration and leadership within canadian disability arts.4 by thinking critically about the interdependent approaches to artistic creation that happen in inter-abled collaboration, i reimagine an approach to disability arts that takes into account the generative, supportive partnerships between neurodivergent artists and the neurotypical allies who often facilitate access to and participation in artistic creation and production processes 2 interdependence is a term positioned as a critical alternative to the oft-valued independence. interdependence is a shared or reciprocal dependency between people. as noted by mia mingus (2010), “interdependency is both ‘you and i’ and ‘we’. it is solidarity, in the best sense of the word” (n.p.). 3 cripping the arts was a three-day symposium that took place in 2019 at toronto’s harbourfront centre. the symposium events included panel discussions, co-creative workshops, exhibitions and performances. the programming of these events intended to animate “how deaf, mad, and disability arts and activism changes how we experience art and culture as well as the ways [this] sector contributes, and leads to, the achievements of disability rights and justice movements” (harbourfront centre, 2019) 4 the cripping the arts leadership roundtable panelists included nicholas herd, sage lovell, sean lee, michael nimbley and catherine bourgeois (herd et al., 2019). see https://youtu.be/xiwacbrjpw0 (creative users project, 2019) becky gold studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 212 (hadley, 2020). while historically the collaborative work of neurodivergent and neurotypical artists has been understood within the context of “art therapy,” i suggest that within the framework of disability arts culture that centres the disability experience and takes a cripistemological approach to artistic practice and production,5 that there is opportunity for these inter-abled collaborations to develop and thrive. counter to the view that inter-abled collaborations diminish the value or authenticity of disability arts practice, i argue that such innovative and interdependent ways of working and creating may in fact lead to new artistic aesthetics and methodologies that can support greater inclusion of neurodivergent artists and serve the wider disability arts community. opening the doors of disability arts and culture to more neurodivergent artists and the non-disabled artist allies who support their practice helps create a disability arts future that welcomes participation from artists across the spectrum of disability experience. outsider art versus disability art while an in-depth examination of outsider art is beyond the scope of this paper, what follows is a brief overview of the genre, its connections to disability arts history and the early recognition of disabled artists. the term “outsider art” was coined by roger cardinal in 1972 as an extension of french artist jean dubuffet’s concept of “art brut,” roughly translated to english as “raw art.” dubuffet’s conception of art brut was deeply rooted in the artistic works of institutionalized individuals, often people living with experiences of mental illness, madness or neurodivergence, whose work he valued for its innocence or naiveté, whereas cardinal’s interest in outsider arts encompasses the work of marginalized artists more broadly (rhodes, 2013). art history scholar colin rhodes writes that cardinal’s conception of outsider art could be “any work of art produced by an untrained idiosyncratic artist who is typically unconnected to the conventional art world – not by choice but by circumstance” (2013). for cardinal, this untrained quality makes the work more “authentic” as it is not being “predetermined by a set of rules and aesthetic judgements developed by the elite and imposed by existing systems of education in art” (nelson, 2016, p. 101). today, neurodivergent artists, particularly theatre performers, contest the description of “unbridled authenticity” for it presumes that they are unable to act or perform as anyone other than themselves (reason, 2018). while a number of artists have received significant attention for their art under the outsider label, the power dynamics engrained within the outsider arts structure are undeniably problematic. firstly, the label of outsider artist is often imposed by an insider or curator rather than self-selected, therefore 5 johnson and mcruer (2014) coined the term cripistemology (crip+epistemology) as a means of addressing ways of knowing and navigating the world through the experience of disability. neurodivergency and interdependent creation studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 213 minimizing an artist’s ability for self-representation. this extends to the paradigm of a self-taught artist being “discovered” by an insider who holds institutional power and positions the outsider artist as lower-than and in some ways indebted to those who “discovered” them. further, outsider art is, as argued by nelson (2016), rooted in “the ongoing fetishization of the artists’ biographies rather than celebration of the artists’ works” (p. 102), thus diminishing the artistic value that these artists have to offer. disability art is also interested in artists’ lived experience of disability, although more as a response to and reframing of the outsider arts model. in this way, disability art aims to honour the artists’ lived experience and agency as well as their unique artistic aesthetic, practice, and work. as carrie sandahl (2016) notes, “disability art reflects the move toward selfdetermination in the cultural arena; disabled artists are consciously reshaping the media that have always shaped them in the public sphere.” although outsider art and disability art approach the disabled artist differently, there are intersections and overlaps that complicate the distinctions between these approaches. in her keynote speech at cripping the arts, geetha moorthy, founder and executive director of the south asian autism awareness centre (saaac), offered an approach to art and disability that arguably treads the line between outsider art and disability art. below is a brief overview of her speech, “from creative to cognitive: supporting autism through the arts.”6 to begin, moorthy explained that the aim of her keynote address would be to demonstrate the ways in which “the arts can play a role in autism care” and more specifically, how arts practice is conducted at saaac (moorthy, 2019). moorthy discussed her background as a traditionally trained dancer in sri lanka and her family’s arrival to canada as refugees in the early 1980s. shortly after, moorthy opened her own dance company dedicated to teaching children the traditional dance and movement styles that she learned growing up. in 2007, moorthy was approached by a small group of mothers who asked if she would be willing to teach their autistic children to dance. moorthy explained that although she knew very little about autism at this time, she accepted and began teaching this group of children in the basement of her home. in 2008, she founded saaac. moorthy’s keynote highlighted the various arts programming facilitated by saaac, and the skills that saaac aims to teach through the arts such as following multi-step directions, gaining comfort with social interactions, eyecontact, and communicating through facial expressions. moorthy’s talk emphasized teaching and learning these “normative” social skills and behaviours as being a significant element of saaac’s practice. she articulated how, through this learning, students are being “given a voice,” as well as how the arts (both visual and performing) are used benefit the goals of 6 moorthy’s keynote from cripping the arts is available to watch online through creative users projects youtube page: https://youtu.be/xiwacbrjpw0 becky gold studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 214 therapeutic interventions such as speech therapy or applied behaviour analysis (aba) (moorthy, 2019).7 the saaac approach to working with neurodivergent people focuses on how the arts can be a tool for achieving more normative interpersonal and life skills as well as building artistic employment opportunities to program participants. the arts, according to moorthy, is a therapeutic approach to nurturing normativity. art as therapy has been widely critiqued within the canadian disability arts movement. as gorman suggests, “it is not the therapy per se that is the problem, but the institutional practices that position disabled people as being in need of development (social, psychological, or functional) and nondisabled counsellors (sometimes in the form of art therapists and art animators) as providing rehabilitation/therapeutic services intended to address these developmental deficits” (2007, pp. 47-48). through this lens, saaac’s approach can be understood to use artistic practices to assimilate or dampen the autistic markers of participants with the intent of reducing stigma through such “normalization” (oliver, 1990). moorthy emphasized the perceived benefits of artistic practice for individuals on the autism spectrum and its potential to “empower and build self-esteem” (moorthy, 2019). throughout her presentation, she projected photos and video clips of saaac participants smiling and laughing. however, the opportunity for these students to represent themselves or comment about their unique experience remained absent. in stark contrast to the rest of the cripping the arts programming, which focused on the work and experiences of disabled artists from a disability culture perspective – a perspective that centres the autonomy, politics, desires, and intentions of disabled, mad, and deaf artists – moorthy’s presentation demonstrated an approach that focused on creating culturallyspecific social and artistic opportunities for their students to build “normative skills” and minimize autistic behaviours. yet while aspects of saaac’s approaches to art and education may be controversial and depart from a disability cultural perspective, particularly its emphasis on the importance of disability leadership, saaac is recognized for the work it does to create opportunities for autistic people while confronting ableism, disablism, and imperialism in culturally specific ways. in a 2014 interview for cbc news, gowri kobrikrishna, parent of a teenaged saaac student, highlighted her 7 applied behaviour analysis or aba is most widely described as “the process of systematically applying interventions based upon the principles of learning theory to improve socially significant behaviours to a meaningful degree” (baer et al., 1968, p. 91). this practice is often used as a tool to “treat” children with autism, and more specifically “teach social, motor, and verbal behaviours, as well as reasoning skills” (autism canada, n.d). aba therapy is highly criticized by many autistic people and other members of the neurodiversity movement community as a form of abuse for the ways in which it enforces normative behaviours and actions and punishes those deemed non-normative. a number of autism advocates and bloggers, such as lydia x. z brown, max sparrow, ido kedar and amethyst schaber have offered insightful critiques of aba. neurodivergency and interdependent creation studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 215 family’s experience of the stigmatization of autism in their community, and the positive impact that saaac has had on their whole family. she states, it’s really helpful and we get together and we share our experience, we have someplace to go… before that, we didn’t find a program that [my son] could fit in. and even us parents, we have a place to go and socialize and we are laughing, which we never did before. (cbc news, 2014, n.p) moorthy’s keynote surfaced a productive tension within contemporary disability justice discourse that calls for more expansive and intersectional understandings of the disability experience as shaped by race, culture, gender, class, etc. (berne et al., 2018; erevelles, 2011; mingus, 2011; puar, 2017). by adopting an intersectional understanding of disability, we respond to chris bell’s call to push against “white disability studies” (2006). it is essential not to position a white, western perspective as the “default” or “correct” reference point for disability experience but rather consider the important ways that disability experience manifests differently across communities (bell, 2006; connor et al., 2016; erevelles, 2011; waldschmidt, 2019). saaac’s methodologies may not align with my own, but they do remind me of how important it is to acknowledge the value inherent in different experiences and perspectives. from this position, i now explore practices of inter-abled collaboration and interdependent approaches to artistic creation. to inclusion and beyond: inter-abled collaboration in canada more representation of neurodivergent artists and their collaborators is necessary within disability arts spaces, but the inclusion of these artists needs to be approached mindfully. it is not enough to simply widen the margins of who and what can be understood under the disability arts umbrella. rather, we must consider what greater inclusion of neurodivergent artists and their collaborators within disability arts might do for this sector. how might neurodivergent artists disrupt current disability arts culture, practices, and protocols in ways that push the movement forward? what unique artistic aesthetics and ways of navigating creative processes might be developed? conversations about access and inclusion, disability aesthetics and accessible practices are ever evolving. what do neurodivergent experiences of disability bring to the table? in what follows i highlight three examples of canadianbased neurodivergent/non-disabled artistic collaborations; each one brings a unique approach to artistic practice. i consider the impacts of having neurodivergent artists at the helm of collaborative creative projects and what these inter-abled collaborations have to offer canada’s disability arts community more broadly. becky gold studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 216 niall mcneil and marcus youssef – vancouver on the west coast of canada, niall mcneil, a playwright and performer with down syndrome has been involved in the british columbia theatre community since he was a child. his most recent plays, peter panties (2011) and king arthur’s night (2017) were co-written with siminovitch prizewinning playwright marcus youssef. as i will demonstrate, mcneil and youssef’s artistic relationship highlights the possibilities of interdependent creation processes. following its world premiere at toronto’s luminato festival in 2017, king arthur’s night travelled to ottawa and was presented at canada’s national arts centre. in 2018, the production had its hometown premiere as part of the vancouver’s push international performing arts festival, and in early 2019 this play was programmed at no limits at the hong kong arts festival (neworld theatre, n.d.). mcneil and youssef’s work pushes a number of boundaries, challenges preconceived notions about who creates professional theatre, and demonstrates the potential for international success for neurodivergent artists. in addition to onstage success, king arthur’s night and peter panties were published in 2018 as a two-play collection, king arthur’s night and peter panties: a collaboration across perceptions of cognitive difference (mcneil & youssef, 2018). in the introduction for the book, youssef writes about how he came to work with mcneil, the methodologies that they use for devising new work interdependently, and the impact that their collaborations have had on him and his artistic practice. youssef explains that his and mcneil’s collaborative writing process works in many ways within the framework typically used in developing “verbatim theatre.” verbatim theatre is a form of documentary theatre in which plays are scripted exactly, word for word, from people interviewed about their lived experience with a certain topic. interviews are typically audio recorded to ensure precise documentation and are later transcribed and excerpted into a script. for mcneil and youssef’s collaborative writing process, youssef records all of his sessions with mcneil, recognizing that great ideas could come at any moment. youssef notes in particular mcneil’s incredible strength for association and creating connections between seemingly unrelated themes or concepts (mcneil & youssef, 2018, pp. xvi-xvii). this artistic process, building connections through playwrighting, resonates with how mcneil makes sense of the world around him. their practice aligns with mcruer and johnson’s (2014) concept of “cripistemologies” – both in the ways in which mcneil brings his own unique perspective to his work, and in how youssef embraces mcneil’s ways of knowing and navigating his lived experience as it manifests in their collective and interdependent writing process. highlighting the value of this artistic partnership youssef writes, neurodivergency and interdependent creation studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 217 [this work] has led to one of my most valued and rewarding collaborative relationships, one that demands my fullest presence and deepest, most authentic self. it has forced me to be more attentive not just to niall’s impulses, but also to my own. it has made me a better writer. (mcneil & youssef, 2018, p. xxiii) youssef’s reflection emphasizes that when interdependent collaboration is enacted with sensitivity and care it benefits all parties equally – artistically, professionally, and relationally. creating work in collaboration between neurodivergent and non-disabled artists is not about charity or “giving back” to a marginalized community, but rather about embracing alternative ways of thinking, working, and being. such collaborations offer new artistic terrain to explore mutually while challenging current artistic structures and breaking boundaries along the way. sol express – toronto sol express has been pushing boundaries with regard to interdependent artistic practices and collaborations between neurodivergent and non-disabled artists since it was founded in 2007. sol express runs out of l’arche toronto, whose mandate is to celebrate the abilities of people with intellectual disabilities, foster a community that addresses the needs of their members, and embrace diversity across culture and background (l’arche toronto, n.d). sol express operates as an arts-focused day program for neurodivergent adults. founded by performing artist cheryl zinyk in collaboration with core l’arche community member janet munro, sol express was a response to the lack of training and performance opportunities for adults with intellectual disabilities in toronto. prior to starting sol express, zinyk had performed in community productions with neurodivergent actors and noticed they were continually cast in small roles; their ability as performers not taken seriously. driven to better understand and address this fissure, zinyk invested in her own training and studied with various disability theatre organizations in canada, the united kingdom, germany, and ukraine. she returned to toronto with both the desire to create theatre from the perspectives of artists with intellectual disabilities and the belief that this work could offer something refreshing and exciting to the wider performing arts community (c. zinyk, personal communication, august 1, 2019). to date, the sol express ensemble develops new skills by attending workshops with professional working artists and then works together to devise original works for the stage. for the past three years the ensemble has had their original plays staged as part of the toronto fringe festival (toronto fringe, n.d.).8 the subject matter of these works reflects the interests of the ensemble and engages with topics such as cycles of life and seasons, the 8 seasons (2017), birds make me think about freedom (2018), red knows (2019). becky gold studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 218 history of the institutionalization of people with intellectual disabilities in ontario, and the power of the spoken or written word. collectively, l’arche toronto’s institutional commitment to arts-based day programming for their community members, zinyk’s ongoing investment in the artistic skill development of neurodivergent theatre practitioners, as well as the sol express ensemble’s unending desire to create and perform new work, demonstrates a framework of interdependence that is meaningful and generative for inter-abled collaboration. joe jack et john – montréal montreal’s joe jack et john also demonstrates interdependence within their company’s leadership and artistic development structures. joe jack et john is a theatre company that produces original multi-disciplinary work that combines video, dance, spoken word, and bilingualism with an artistic approach that is “deeply humanistic and inclusive” (joe jack et john, n.d.a). the company includes actors with intellectual disabilities, non-disabled actors, and people of diverse cultural backgrounds (joe jack et john, n.d.a). founded by catherine bourgeois in 2003, joe jack et john has continued to produce work that pushes boundaries and challenges artistic norms. michael nimbley, one of joe jack et john’s veteran members, is a neurodivergent actor who has been collaborating and performing with the company for over 12 years. in 2018, nimbley was invited to be joe jack et john’s first artist in residence. during his residency, nimbley began developing his first creative work, les waitress sont tristes (which translates from french to english as the waitresses are sad) (joe jack et john, n.d.b). as co-director (with bourgeois), nimbley created the concept of the les waitress and drives the play’s themes, plot, structure, and aesthetics while working with the rest of the company to further develop the work through a collaborative devising process. while nimbley and bourgeois share the codirector role, nimbley leads the creative decision-making (c. bourgeois, personal communication, july 29, 2019). bourgeois and nimbley are learning to navigate this new and interdependent leadership relationship together through the creative process (c. bourgeois, personal communication, july 29, 2019). joe jack et john’s inclusion and support of the leadership and artistic vision of neurodivergent company members demonstrates a commitment to both the creative and professional development of these artists. it also surfaces a need for more leadership-focused professional development opportunities for neurodivergent artists within the canadian disability arts and culture sector. these three examples of inter-abled artistic collaborations offer a glimpse into some of the generative partnerships between neurodivergent artists and their non-disabled artistic allies. while each bring different strengths and priorities to their projects, they all share a commitment to continuing the neurodivergency and interdependent creation studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 219 growth of inter-abled working relationships and approaches to creating interdependently. most significantly, mcneil and youssef, sol express, and joe jack et john resist any kind of vertical or top-down approach to their artistic partnerships, rather they aim to work in ways that are more horizontal, rhizomatic, and fluid in which each member of the group contributes and in turn benefits from the collective whole (mar & anderson, 2010). each of these collaborations offers a unique insight into how inter-abled artistic work is developing in the canadian context. as my own practice-based, community-engaged work aligns with the practices and perspectives of the collaborators discussed above, i will now offer a brief example from my personal experience working in artistic collaboration with neurodivergent artists. i also examine how this has shaped my perception of disability arts more broadly. directing towards disability arts and community in 2018/2019, i facilitated a multi-arts program for neurodivergent teens and adults in toronto. the first few months of the program were straightforward – i would come up with a number of performing arts activities, crafts, facilitate collaboratively choreographed dance numbers, etc., and offer instruction in ways that i found were accessible for participants. i used the first few months of the nine-month program to get to know the participants, their needs, how they coped with stress and frustration, and what i could do to ensure their comfort and safety in my class. once we had established a strong understanding of each other as people and as artists, it was time to dive deeper, to explore important topics that were relevant to their experiences as members of the disability community. “self-advocacy” became our new buzzword. some participants had never encountered this term before, so we took the time to unpack it and discuss what it might look like both in our class as well as in the community. my impulse to discuss advocacy with the group stemmed from the realization that neurodivergent artists like those participating in this program were not well represented in the disability arts and activism spaces i am allied with and often find myself in. i hoped that sparking conversation about advocating for one’s own needs and understanding the implications of such an action would be meaningful. i offer this example to draw attention to a disconnect that i have noticed between neurodivergent artists in my classes and the wider, established disability arts community. i found that the neurodivergent artists i was working with were more inclined to seek inclusion and acceptance in nondisabled spaces, whereas my disabled artist friends and colleagues deeply value the sense of community they experience in disability arts community. i have been drawn to consider why this might be? could these neurodivergent artists’ ability to pass as non-disabled drive them away from disability becky gold studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 220 centred spaces? might they perceive disability centred spaces as restricting, or an attempt to box them in, limiting what they can and cannot do? while i recognize the value and desire of fitting in and feeling accepted in all spaces, i also believe in the power of community and the benefit of being with a group of people who share many aspects of one’s own lived experience. in alison kafer’s book, feminist, queer, crip (2013), she highlights the ways in which disability culture evokes a powerful sense of community. she quotes simi linton who writes, “we are all bound together, not by [a] list of our collective symptoms but by the social and political circumstances that have forged us as a group” (cited in kafer, 2013, p. 12, emphasis in original). while linton reflects this strong sense of cohesion “forged” by the disability community, kafer notes that it is essential to recognize “the ways in which those forgings have been incomplete, or contested, or refused” (p. 12). here kafer acknowledges the significance of finding community in disability culture, but also the importance of recognizing who may not be present or equally included. in my work facilitating accessible arts programming for neurodivergent teens and adults i attempt to nurture a recognition of disability as a prideful identity. as an ally who shows up in support and solidarity, i can feel the strength of the disability community and believe the neurodivergent artists that i continue to support might find meaning in feeling that too, if they so choose. it is powerful to be welcomed and included in community space and i believe there to be great value in such cultural connections. conversations about disability identity and justice should be made accessible to all disabled people. my perspective echoes those of disability artists and activists who conceptualize disability justice work as intersectional, embracing cross-disability solidarity, interdependence, and working toward collective access (berne et al., 2018; mingus, 2011). access includes access to physical space, community, culture, ideas, and conversations and should include a broad range of disabled people. it is particularly important to note the challenge of access when conversations become culturally specific to “insiders” or academics. specialized language, tempo of speech, noisy or over-stimulating environments, and other needs of community members should all be considered when inclusion is prioritized. all voices, bodies, and minds should be welcomed and equally supported in engaging in critical conversations around disability art and the disability experience more broadly. considering further the value of pursuing community inclusion, carrie sandahl (2003) writes about how queer and crip folx often endure similar experiences of isolation or stigmatization as “they are rarely born into queer or crip families, much less communities” (p. 36). i believe that sandahl’s connection between queer and crip identities and the value of community relations resonates with the issues that i am highlighting here: as neurodivergent people are rarely born into families in which there are other immediate family members with disabilities, feeling at home in a community of people with similar life experience is significant. neurodivergency and interdependent creation studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 221 with all of this in mind, it must be considered that for neurodivergent artists to enter these spaces and conversations in a way that is accessible to them might mean in some cases also inviting and including their non-disabled collaborators. to refuse to be “in relationship” (acton et al., 2019, p. 52) with non-disabled artists or supports, is in essence to exclude neurodivergent artists. within the framework of disability arts culture and its alignment with disability justice organizing, i’m drawn to philosopher hannah arendt’s (1987) notion of collectivity which bickel et al. (2011) describe as “that which engenders a form of power: not in terms of strength, violence or the law, but a power created through the ephemeral coming together in momentary gestures of speech and action” (p. 91). it is this idea of coming together, to offer support, guidance and community that is both so valuable, and yet missing for many neurodivergent artists and their collaborators who may find themselves positioned outside of disability arts and activist spaces. inter-abled collaboration internationally collaborations between neurodivergent and non-disabled artists are still relatively new in the scope of disability arts and culture in canada, however they have a more established history and currency in other parts of the world. in this section i explore how inter-abled collaborations are approached and received in europe, the united kingdom (uk), and australia. in contrast to canada’s current disability arts scene, neurodivergent artists are at the centre of both mainstream and disability-focused theatre productions across europe (schmidt, 2017). further, the prevalence of neurodivergent performers working in the uk, europe, and australia prompts a consideration of what structures and methodologies are in place that have brought these artists into the spotlight in ways that many canadian neurodivergent artists have yet to experience.9 i suggest that much of the success in bringing neurodivergent artists to the fore has been due to the acceptance of and investment in support personnel for these disabled artists. the role of “creative enabler” is a good example. a term developed by london’s graeae theatre company, a creative enabler is described by michael achtman as “a support worker with skills and experience in the area practiced by the disabled artist. the artist can call on the creative enabler to assist in ways they could not ask of a general access support worker or personal assistant” (2014, p. 36). a creative enabler offers support to disabled artists in order to allow for more artistic autonomy and independence. the role of creative enabler is typically undertaken by a nondisabled artist and the goal is to provide support and guidance without 9 some of the more well-known companies creating mainstream work with neurodivergent artists include mind the gap, blue apple theatre, access all areas (uk), theatre hora (europe), back to back theatre (australia). becky gold studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 222 necessarily offering artistic input – ensuring the that disabled artist maintains creative control. other approaches to engaging in artistic-based support work exist too in which parameters of artistic support may be more fluid or collaborative. while some disabled artists may be seeking someone to be strictly a scribe or to assist with memorizing lines, others may desire more of an artistic partnership, looking to their artistic support worker as a collaborator or co-creator. in her article for research in drama education (ride)’s special issue on “international perspectives on performance, disability and deafness” (2017), yvonne schmidt explores a number of working models that facilitate artistic support for neurodivergent directors and artists in europe. schmidt is frank about the potential issues with this dynamic and the importance of being aware of “who is acting as a mouthpiece for whom, and who gets the final word during the creative process,” which, she notes, “is too often ‘shaped’ or ‘filtered’ by non-disabled company directors” (2017, p. 446). schmidt takes seriously the care and integrity required in inter-abled artistic relationships and calls for models of working that cultivate a greater understanding of the needs of neurodivergent artists as they navigate between maintaining their own artistic vision and utilizing the structures of support facilitated by nondisabled collaborators. schmidt offers up what she calls a “spectrum of collaboration” (see figure 1), which outlines a range of roles and their corresponding degrees of support. for example, an “organiser” engages strictly in organizational duties and is not required to have any artistic background. a “filter” actively participates in the creative devising process with a disabled artist and allows them to improvise and author the work. schmidt explains that the filter role is the one most commonly used to support theatre artists with cognitive disabilities in europe. as a filter, one collaborates with the disabled artist in facilitating a creative process and helps shape and form the work to create what audiences will eventually experience on stage. this approach resonates with the process mcneil and youssef take up in their co-created productions outlined above. figure 1. spectrum of collaboration (source: schmidt, 2017). image description: graphic of schmidt’s “spectrum of collaboration.” the graphic delineates five collaborative roles that support artists with cognitive disabilities. the graphic appears as neurodivergency and interdependent creation studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 223 steps moving upward from left to right and in gradient colour from purple to blue to teal. the colours and steps represent the increase in artistic involvement for each support role and move from least involved to most involved. the roles are: organiser, framer, coach, artistic collaborator, and filter (schmidt, 2017, p. 450). these roles, as outlined by schmidt’s spectrum of collaboration, provide disabled artists with options for what kind of support they want and need in order to produce their work. they also mark in varying degrees levels of artistic influence a support person might have in the process. recognizing that there is no prescriptive way to offer support, these different roles offer options while stressing the need for communication and individualized approaches to support, similar to what one would need from any other kind of disability support worker. what i understand as the most important aspect of this work, regardless of the degree of artistic input, is recognizing how these forms of support foster inter-able collaboration, disability advocacy, and social justice practice. a disability justice framework is useful to understanding the importance of interdependent relationships between neurodivergent artists and their nondisabled collaborators. as a practice and social movement, disability justice emphasizes the importance of disability leadership, intersectionality, collective access, cross-disability solidarity and interdependence (berne et al., 2018). disability justice’s emphasis on collective access and crossmovement solidarity is relevant to honouring all experiences of disability and putting value on the various ways in which neurodivergent people participate and contribute to artistic life and to the disability justice movement. berne et al. (2018) write, we are committed to breaking down ableist/patriarchal/racist/classed isolation between people with physical impairments, people who identify as ‘sick’ or are chronically ill, ‘psych’ survivors, and those who identify as ‘crazy,’ neurodiverse people, people with cognitive impairments, and people who are of a sensory minority, as we understand that isolation ultimately undermines collective liberation. (p. 228) this commitment emphasizes the need for acceptance and value of all disability experiences within both society at large and within the disability community itself. positioning all disability experiences as valid and valuable, and including neurodivergency explicitly, will move all people toward collective liberation. collective liberation emphasizes the need for disability justice to develop and progress while also ensuring that “no body/mind is left behind” (berne et al., 2018, p. 229). for instance, within the context of my argument about the importance of inter-able collaborations, creative enablers (or similar support personnel) can help to ensure that neurodivergent artists are welcome in community events and art spaces and can participate fully, comfortably, and therefore are not left behind. as a non-disabled artist support worker and advocate, i feel strongly that non-disabled artist allies be cognizant of the impact our involvement may becky gold studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 224 have on artists’ processes and work, the privilege that we hold within artistic spaces, and what implications these things have on the disability arts community. personally, i see myself as an outsider coming into disability arts spaces and make sure to be clear about my positionality as an ally, and my ongoing commitment to the community and the disability arts and culture movement. as discussed throughout this paper, disability arts will benefit deeply from greater cross-disability solidarity by way of more intentional inclusion of neurodivergent artists in ways that support their creative practice. this often means the inclusion of inter-abled collaborations. while criticism of nondisabled collaborators working in disability arts spaces is worthy of further attention (hargrave, 2015; stephenson, 2019), i would simultaneously suggest the need to break away from the rigid understandings disability art as being exclusively disability-led. in loosening the parameters of the disability art designation to be more inclusive and accepting of interdependent and inter-abled collaborations, we may find an increase in neurodivergent representation in disability art spaces. as i have demonstrated, inter-abled collaborations offer enormous potential to include neurodivergent artists and cultivate complex and excellent artistic work. these ideas around disability leadership and its relationship to inter-abled support structures within disability arts served as a significant conversation point for the leadership roundtable at cripping the arts 2019, which i will now take up. cripping the arts – futures of deaf and disability arts leadership i was privileged to moderate a roundtable conversation on disability arts leadership at the cripping the arts symposium in january 2019.10 the artists that participated in this panel are considered leaders and forward thinkers in canada’s deaf and disability arts communities. the panelists included nicholas herd, a performer with sol express; sage lovell, founder of deaf spectrum; sean lee, director of programming at tangled arts + disability; michael nimbley, a performer and artist in residence with joe jack et john; and catherine bourgeois, artistic director of joe jack et john. i was thrilled to have been asked to facilitate this important discussion and very pleased to discover that two of the panelists were neurodivergent artists. the inclusion of neurodivergent artists on a panel discussing leadership, which is often exclusive of this community was critical and led to a generative discussion. the discussion below highlights a few of the key ideas from our conversation. prior to the symposium event, we panelists had the opportunity to meet with each other via video conference and discuss how each of us connected 10 the cripping the arts leadership roundtable is available in its entirety on the creative users project youtube channel (https://youtu.be/tcphs1syipo). neurodivergency and interdependent creation studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 225 with our roundtable topic – the future of deaf and disability arts and deaf and disability arts leadership in canada. together we came to a shared understanding that disability art is deeply connected to disability leadership, artistic autonomy, and self-advocacy. as a result of this initial conversation, we developed a list of key questions that we felt would spark a critical dialogue for our conversation at the symposium. we discussed the importance of disability-led arts and culture, the significance of being assigned a disability arts designation, how current understandings of disability-leadership may unintentionally devalue creative relationships rooted in interdependent, inter-abled practices and how we might challenge or disrupt these understandings. on the day of our roundtable discussion, i introduced our topic and each artist introduced themself and offered some initial thoughts on leadership in deaf and disability arts. nicholas herd articulated a number of insights about the importance of disability arts to him and for other artists in his community. he spoke passionately about his appreciation for the opportunities he has had to engage in training and performance practice. herd also pointed to the lack of opportunities that would have been available to people like him (as a person with down syndrome) less than 50 years ago given canada’s history of institutionalization of disabled people. herd’s enthusiasm for disability arts community and culture and his passion for this artistic work highlights further the value that neurodivergent community members can bring to the disability arts conversation. in his self-introduction, michael nimbley spoke about his passion for the performing arts. he noted that while he has had a number of jobs over his 62 years of life, he is pleased that his final professional career will be as a theatre artist. nimbley spoke of his collaborative work with catherine bourgeois at joe jack et john and what his disability brings to their creative process: catherine does not know what it is to be disabled, she wants to understand. even if i am slow when i am doing things, it is my way to express myself. i am able to make theatre and to write … it doesn’t matter if you have a disability. disability is the reason why i do theatre. (herd et al., 2019) nimbley’s reflection is poignant – it is his disability and lived experience of neurodivergence that has given him the opportunity to train as an actor and to perform and direct with joe jack et john. i interpret his comments about bourgeois as recognition of her artistic solidarity. while bourgeois does not have lived experience of disability, her goal is to support and to understand nimbley’s artistic vision through ongoing collaborative engagement and investment in his professional artistic development. both herd’s and nimbley’s comments emphasize the importance of fostering inter-abled or collaborative opportunities for neurodivergent artists to develop and create artistic work. our conversation continued and we shifted to discussions of disability leadership structures. sean lee, director of programming at tangled art + becky gold studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 226 disability, noted that although tangled prides itself on being the first entirely disability-led and run arts organization in canada, they “have not very successfully included artists with intellectual disabilities as part of the leadership process” (herd et al., 2019). lee continued by commenting on the inherently disruptive nature of disability arts and the ways in which tangled seeks to embody that perspective in the work that they produce and curate. in a moment of reflexivity, lee contemplated how tangled might expand its reach: “i think a really great first step is being fully disability led, but i think it means continuing to complicate it” (herd et al., 2019). he suggested a need to push against predetermined notions of what kinds of disabled bodies and minds might be able to hold leadership positions and questioned what it would mean to view a leadership role as one that could work at a slower pace and resist traditional and ableist working structures that put significant value on timely and consistent production and output. this leadership roundtable brought together people with various relationships to disability arts and culture. we collectively articulated the need to reframe how we presently conceive of the disability arts designation and questioned how future disability arts leadership might be reimagined and expanded to further embrace inter-abled, interdependent ways of working and creating. conclusions – inter-abled collaboration: where do we go from here? there are no universal ways of knowing or understanding disability arts and culture. however, when we explore a variety of ways to navigate the inclusion of neurodivergent artists, inter-abled collaborations emerge as viable and integral parts of this world. neurodivergent artists deserve full access to all that disability arts culture and community has to offer. as someone who works in artistic practice with neurodivergent artists, i aim to facilitate entry points into disability arts culture and community through the art that we create interdependently. i hope that others who are currently participating in inter-able collaborations or are interested in doing so will consider exploring more deeply neurodivergent-driven ways of working and creating, while maintaining cognizance of how non-disabled privilege can so easily permeate and fill a creative space. inter-abled collaborations can and do prompt innovation in practice and production and generate artistic excellence, as demonstrated in the examples above. as the representation of neurodivergence in canadian disability arts is still emerging, i urge curators, directors, and event organizers to be mindful of whose work, voices, and perspectives are included and whose may be missing from the stages, pages, workshops, and tables where critical conversations are taking place. further, i ask key stakeholders within disability arts to consider the ways in which interdependent forms of leadership may offer opportunity for more cross-disability solidarity, neurodivergency and interdependent creation studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 227 innovative approaches for activating access, as well as more diverse representation within the canadian disability arts and culture. the faithful disability rights movement maxim, “nothing about us without us” rings through. fostering a canadian disability arts culture that is inclusive, welcoming, and supportive of the needs of all community members will make for a culture that can create meaningful art together while continuing to fight for justice and inclusion for all members of the disability community. acknowledgements many thanks to the editors of this special issue, particularly eliza chandler for her sensitivity, insight and support in navigating this process. thanks to cheryl zinyk and catherine bourgeois for taking the time to speak with me in more depth about their work, as well as the deaf and disabled artists who participated in the cripping the arts 2019 panel on the “future of disability arts leadership”: nicholas herd, sage lovell, sean lee and michael nimbley. references achtman, m. (2014). how creative is the creative enabler? alt.theatre: cultural diversity and the stage, 11(3), 36. acton, k., johnson, m., jung, k., louw, a., mcaskill, a., simões peres, m., quest, s., & watkin, j. (2019). being in relationship: reflections of dis-performing, hospitality, and accessibility. canadian theatre review, 177(1), 51-56. l’arche toronto. (n.d). sol express. http://www.larchetoronto.org/sol-express/ arendt, h. (1987). collective responsibility. in j. w. bernauer (ed.), amor mundi: explorations of faith and thought of hannah arendt (pp. 43-50). springer. autism canada. (n.d.). applied behaviour analysis. https://autismcanada.org/living-withautism/treatments/non-medical/behavioural/aba/ baer, d. m., wolf, m. m., & risley, t. r. (1968). some current dimensions of applied behavior analysis. journal of applied behaviour analysis, 1(1), 91-97. bell, c. (2006). introducing white disability studies: a modest proposal. in l. davis (ed.), the disability studies reader (pp. 275-282). routledge. berne, p., levins morales, a., langstaff, d., & sins invalid. (2018). ten principles of disability justice. women’s studies quarterly, 46(1&2), 227-230. bickel, b., springgay, s., beer, r., irwin, r. l., grauer, k., & xiong, g. (2011). a/r/tographic collaboration as radical relatedness. international journal of qualitative methods, 10(1), 86-102. cbc news. (2014, october 7). autism diagnosis can mean isolation for south asian families. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/autism-diagnosis-can-mean-isolation-for-southasian-families-1.2789019 connor, d. j., ferri, b. a., & annamma, s. a. (2016). discrit: disability studies and critical race theory in education. teachers college press. creative users project. (2019, january 24). cripping the arts: trajectories of access [video]. youtube. https://youtu.be/xiwacbrjpw0 creative users project. (2019, january 25). cripping the arts: deaf and disability futures [video]. youtube. https://youtu.be/tcphs1syipo becky gold studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 228 erevelles, n. (2011). disability and difference in global contexts: enabling a transformative body politic. palgrave macmillan. gorman, r. (2007). whose disability culture? fuse magazine, 34(3), 46-51. hadley, b. (2020). allyship in disability arts: roles, relationships, and practices. research in drama education: the journal of applied theatre and performance, 25(2), 178-194. harbourfront centre. (n.d). cripping the arts. https://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/crippingthearts/ hargrave, m. (2015). theatres of learning disability: good, bad, or plain ugly? palgrave macmillan. herd, n., lovell, s., lee, s., nimbley, m., bourgeois, c., & gold, b. (2019, january 25). cripping the arts symposium. in b. gold (moderator), leadership [roundtable presentation]. toronto, on, canada. joe jack et john.(n.d.a). history. https://joejacketjohn.com/historique/?lang=en joe jack et john.(n.d.b). les waitress sont tristes. https://joejacketjohn.com/les-waitress-sonttristes/ johnson, m. l., & mcruer, r. (2014). cripistemologies: introduction. journal of literary & cultural disability studies, 8(2), 127-148. kafer, a. (2013). feminist, queer, crip. indiana university press. mar, p., & anderson, k. (2010). the creative assemblage. journal of cultural economy, 3(1), 35-51. mcneil, n. & youssef, m. (2018). king arthur’s night and peter panties: a collaboration across perceptions of cognitive difference. talonbooks. mcruer, r., & johnson, m. l. (2014). proliferative cripistemologies: a virtual roundtable. journal of literary & cultural disability studies, 8(2), 149-169. mingus, m. (2010, jan. 22). interdependency (excerpts from several talks). leaving evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/interdependency-exerpts-from-severaltalks/ mingus, m. (2011, feb. 12). changing the framework: disability justice. leaving evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/changing-the-framework-disabilityjustice/ moorthy, g. (2019, january 24). from creative to cognitive: supporting autism through the arts [keynote address]. cripping the arts symposium, toronto, canada. nelson, k. (2016). deaf and disability arts: insiders, outsiders, and the potential of progressive studios. in c. kelly & m. orsini (eds.), mobilizing metaphor: art, culture, and disability activism in canada (pp. 98-117). ubc press. neworld theatre. (n.d). king arthur’s night. https://neworldtheatre.com/portfolio-item/kingarthur/ oliver, m. (1990). the politics of disablement. macmillan. perring, g. (2005). the facilitation of learning-disabled arts: a cultural perspective. in c. sandahl & p. auslander (eds.), bodies in commotion: disability and performance (pp. 175-189). university of michigan press. puar, j. k. (2017). the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. duke university press. reason, m. (2018). ways of watching: five aesthetics of learning disability theatre. in b. hadley & d. mcdonald (eds.), the routledge handbook of disability arts, culture and media (pp. 163-175). routledge. rhodes, c. (2013) outsider art. encyclopedia britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/outsider-art sandahl, c. (2003). queering the crip or cripping the queer: intersections of queer and crip identities in solo autobiographical performance. glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, 9(1), 25-56. sandahl, c. (2016). disability art. encyclopedia britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/disability-art schmidt, y. (2017). towards a new directional turn? directors with cognitive disabilities. research in drama education: the journal of applied theatre and performance, 22(3), 446-459. neurodivergency and interdependent creation studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 209-229, 2021 229 toronto fringe. (n.d.). seasons by the l’arche toronto sol express ensemble. creative users project. http://creativeusers.net/events/seasons-by-the-larche-toronto-sol-express-ensemble/ stephenson, j. h. (2019). examining disability and work in small island developing states. in inequality and organizational practice (pp. 235-264). palgrave macmillan. waldschmidt, a. (2019). why critical disability studies needs a cultural model of dis/ability. in k. ellis, r. garland-thomson, m. kent & r. roberston (eds.), interdisciplinary approaches to disability: looking towards the future (pp. 71-79). routledge. walker, n. (2014, september 27). neurodiversity: some basic terms & definitions. neurocosmopolitanism. https://neurocosmopolitanism.com/neurodiversity-some-basicterms-definitions/ studies in social justice volume 5, issue 1, 11-61, 2011 correspondence address: john mcmurtry, department of philosophy, university of guelph, guelph, on n1g 2w1, canada. tel.: +1 519 824-4120 x 53272; email: mcmurtry@uoguelph.ca issn: 1911-4788 human rights versus corporate rights: life value, the civil commons and social justice john mcmurtry department of philosophy, university of guelph abstract this analysis maps the deepening global crisis and the principles of its resolution by life-value analysis and method. received theories of economics and justice and modern rights doctrines are shown to have no ground in life value and to be incapable of recognizing universal life goods and the rising threats to them. in response to this system failure at theoretical and operational levels, the unifying nature and measure of life value are defined to provide the long-missing basis for understanding the common interest, human rights and social justice—that is, the universal life necessities of humanity across cultures and the evolving civil commons infrastructures to ensure them. in contrast, the treaty-imposed corporate rights system miscalled “globalization” is structured to predate life means and support systems at all levels with no accountability beyond itself. only the logic of life value, human rights and life-protective law, it is concluded, can comprehend or govern this inherently life-blind and cumulatively eco-genocidal regime. breaking out of the box of life-blind rights the deepest problem we have with rights in general is that we have no life-value criterion whereby to tell whether a right is good or bad. thus the dominant rights of our epoch—property rights in money capital—remain presupposed even if they cumulatively threaten terrestrial and human life organization by their globally lifeblind demands. indeed these rights now rule our economic, political and cultural worlds with no accountability to the life requirements of human beings, ecosystems or, unprecedentedly, even sovereign states. reigning since the english, american and french revolutions centuries ago, they have become incrementally absolute and total in the last 30 years. yet any deeper value principle to determine whether these increasingly totalitarian rights are valid has remained unconceived. marxian analysis is itself stuck within the capitalist system’s contradictions with rights themselves conceived as merely system functions, and no state party, political theory or movement defines the life-value standards to reset the system to coherence with human and planetary life requirements. private property in money capital with no limit thus continues as an a-priori assumption of market and state activities across borders. as we know, under this 12 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 system less than 1% of the population of the world have increasingly more wealth than the bottom 90%, and the social suffering which follows this disparity gets worse. yet since john locke and the private-property revolutions he provides the canonical justifications for in england and america, any idea of relating privateproperty right to human needs is undiscussed in public discourses while economic theory itself rules out the connection a-priori. at the same time the criterion of what a human need is across cultures and selves does not exist in received theory or policy discussion. private money rights to more without end are assumed with no life value to ground their legitimacy, their limits, or their performative requirements. we have to go back to john locke to find any discussion of these issues, and even so, what he says is fork-tongued. he specifies three provisos of an individual property right claim in his historic second treatise of government which was published within a year of the english revolution against james ii in 1688. his justification of the conditions for the legitimacy of private property are lifegrounded, but for the last time in his work and subsequent market doctrine: (1) “mixing one’s labour with” the property to entitle it; (2) “always good enough left over for others”; and (3) “no waste or spoilage” of it (locke, 1980, p. 21). yet while locke’s rhetoric of freedom and democratic accountability is recited almost word for word in the u.s. declaration of independence, his life-grounding conditions of private property have been ignored since their magniloquent statement at the beginning of the treatise, including by locke himself. having made the case at length for this “natural right” by these three justifications, he erases them with a stroke of the pen with the words “the introduction of money” (locke, 1980, p. 23). 1 a subordinate clause within a 10-line sentence is enough for this disappearance act. locke’s shell-game has stood since—a synecdoche of the era. once his lifegrounded provisos have vanished without a trace, fateful implications follow. to resolve this and related deep-structural problems, the life-value test is defined and explained by which we tell whether any claimed right, however powerful it is in the world, is sound or not, and to what extent. private property right itself—from personal fixed possessions to corporate kingdoms—is neither holus-bolus justified nor rejected, but grounded in and tested by its life value. the general theory behind my analysis is life-value onto-axiology, what i have spelled out in depth for unesco (mcmurtry, 2010). the onto of the concept refers to ontology, literally “the philosophy of being”; and the axiology refers to theories of what is of value, truth being a primary value. yet because multiplied disciplinary divisions into fields and areas of specialty exclude any unifying principle of value, a major incapacity of thought has evolved. even connected life and life-support systems’ collapse across the world cannot be detected in its causal mechanism or life-value resolution. right to life and pro-life reduced to false slogans one major cognitive block against understanding has been the slogan “right-to-life” attached to america’s most popular issue of life-value contention—a woman’s right to end her pregnancy. when i first introduced life-value theory in generic form to the canadian philosophical association’s annual meeting in 1998, a well-known feminist philosopher, alison jaggar, repudiated the idea as more “right-to-life” human rights versus corporate rights 13 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 advocacy. i report this position to illustrate the metaphysical stupefaction that has come with the internalization of this slogan in a distinguished feminist philosopher ’s mind. life value has been so pervasively equated with an embryo in a woman’s body that re-grounding in a coherent conception cannot compute. while such an ontoethical reductionism is seen to be fatuous once examined, it conforms to a ruling syntax of thought that is life-blind at a global level, which is the greatest problem of our age. expressed in the so-called “right-to-life” slogan, it excludes almost all of life from its referent. with even philosophers internalizing such conception, the need to re-ground in life-coherent meaning and method becomes self-evident, a turning point of humanity’s evolution (mcmurtry, 2009, pp. 69-91; mcmurtry, 2010a). as it stands, the abortion issue poses “woman’s right to choose” as in ultimate conflict with “the right to life of the unborn human being.” legions of people adopt one side or the other in sustained elaboration of the one or the other position, ignoring the common life-ground that life-value understanding begins with—that is, that life is good, and is better the more coherently inclusive its life-fields and ranges in thought, felt being, and action. this forms the primary axiom of life value. 2 in contrast, the opposing sides of this issue (and countless others) privilege a standpoint of exclusive right in either-or disjunction. here as elsewhere, life-value understanding goes underneath this one-sided structuring to the deeper ground of life value itself, and applies the life-value test to both sides. thus the normalized circle of sterile conflict found in rights conflicts in general—in which each side obscures the underlying principle of life value in attachment to an aspect which excludes the other—is reset to comprehend the wider common ground of life value itself to resolve dispute in terms of this more ultimate and unifying meaning. life-value analysis therefore always goes to what is at stake in life capacity gain or loss—a life re-grounding which is foreign to the global corporate-rights reign. life-value method identifies the extent to which any side stands—or does not stand—for life value, and exposes false pretences masking the underlying life-value issues. here as elsewhere, there is one ultimate criterion of life-value/disvalue across domains, the formal axiom of life value and its converse. as testing will show, it applies across value conflicts. with respect to the woman’s “right to choose” whether to continue bearing an embryo or fetus, it follows, life-value analysis recognizes that the principal life value here lies with the person who organically bears the life. gain or loss of life value and decision on how to go living better or worse is hers by the objective life coordinates of life itself. for she alone in the world is the direct experiencer and carrier of it. all concept and image thought is borne by her. the felt side of being within is carried by her. she and not anyone else lives the action of the one organism. all of these facts are undeniable—that is, they cannot be life-coherently denied—and all are basic to the “right to life” of the pregnant woman herself and the fields of life she organically bears. this is not another argument for private property, as the woman’s right has been reduced to. it is a life-value diagnosis which explains and limits rights. in distinction, the embryo she bears has as yet little or none of these life-bearing values. it only comes to bear them in growing through the ontogeny of embryonic existence to fetal differentiation, to eventually the stage when full human being has developed: that is, when it is no longer life-coherently conceived as merely “part of the woman’s body,” but a self-organizing unity capable of independent fields of life learning, sentience, affect and body action. 14 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 thus in accordance with this development by life-value measure, the embryo/fetus within the woman’s organism is of intrinsic worth insofar as it realizes and bears these life fields and value—beginning with intra-uterine movement, felt side of being, and image thought in early form. yet conversely in proportion to nonexistence of these fields of life value, the embryo or fetus is correspondingly lower in life value—not only, as aldous huxley clinically observes in point counter point, “a potential fish,” but also a human potential (huxley, 1947, p.2). observe that lifevalue analysis does not import the imagined future of a human person into present value any more than it does the image of a full-grown fish, but still recognizes projective imagination and its embryonic referent have life-value in their own right by life-value measure. in short, life-value analysis brings us back to ground. it affirms the right of both bearing mother and embryo/fetus as life value within themselves to the extent of fields of life borne—not by mere projection, which in this age has also conferred rights of super persons on lifeless corporate stocks, a connected derangement of the ruling syntax of value and meaning. together more than either, woman and offspring have compounded life value in the same being, the pregnant woman. here they incorporate in their unity opposing life values only by conceptually constructed reification of a non-person as a person—a metaphysical inversion that has oppressed the world at different levels. the passionate certitude with which these reifications are proclaimed is familiar in cults, but now has mainstream megaphones proclaiming them. what is morally deranged is that the rights of non-persons and their interests override the life interests of real persons in the name of life. the life-value onto-ethic recognizes the disorder, and grounds in human life as coherently conceived. more generally, it stands for what consistently enables human and ecological life together (the life coherence principle) and upholds it to the most inclusive level possible without life-value loss (the life compossibility principle). guided by these principles, almost any case of life-sacrificial trade-off is understood as preventable beforehand—although one would hardly know this in the endless positing in our culture of the “necessity” of pesticides, prisons, lay-offs, environmental destruction, foreign wars, and so on. behind these social habits of life sacrifice lies a deeper and fatal problem. the rules and rights by which we live are ungrounded in life and life value and the slowmotion collapse of planetary life infrastructures signals this across domains. finding our lost life-value ground and measure: the common life interest and ground of legitimate rights and social justice instituted exclusion of the common life ground and interest follows logically from the atomic division of interests into competing rights in automaton selfmaximization—the life-blind value syntax of the age. the principle of life value goes beneath this agon of rights to the underlying common life-ground which is the base of all terrestrial value. it explains the validity of any and all positions by the lifevalue comprehension it stands for, seeking beyond competing partialities to coherence with life requirements without whose satisfaction life capacities are always despoiled. it understands this as the common life interest which takes into account objective life requirements at ecological, social and individual levels. it human rights versus corporate rights 15 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 therefore recognizes that human rights and rules must cohere with the common life support systems that enable the reproduction of all, or else disaster follows. humanity’s common life interest is thus understood to begin with the universal life support systems that all human life, life conditions and fellow life depend on, the ultimate bottom line of terrestrial existence. this life-ground is, accordingly, the real and unseen base of all legitimate human rights—what they must cohere with to be valid. this ultimate foundation of rights is, however, not recognized by economic, ethical, political and rights discourses. life-value understanding thus requires this comprehension, and rejects any position which does not as invalid and unsound. it works by this life-coherence principle towards a resetting of meaning to deep rights, what enables individual human life consistently with the reproduction of terrestrial life support systems through generational time. all legitimate rights cohere in virtue of this common life-ground that enables the compossible validity of each. it therefore follows from life-value onto-ethics that one can only justify a right as ultimately legitimate if it enables life in a way not possible without it—the necessity condition of the right joined to its required coherence with other life systems. for example, the human right to living space not violated by forces external to it is the life-value foundation of private-property rights. this was their historical justification before they were debased as absolute rights which take account of neither condition of legitimate rights. any right has limits, and life space is one—most obviously overridden in such claims as the claimed rights of the nazi regime to lebensraum, or global corporations to other societies’ life resources. a legitimate right is thus defined by both the life necessity and life coherence of its good. the primary axiom and its converse explains the general life-value base here in universal principle, with margins of life-range gain or loss the life-value measure of the necessity of any right and the compass of their coherence with each other. the human vocation, in turn, is to be of living worth in these terms, with right and obligation arising where reduction of human life capacities results without their fulfilment. consider, for example, the human right to clean water and the corresponding obligation to provide for it at both social and individual levels. what is required at the baseline of understanding and prescription is an incontestable and sufficient criterion of life necessity coherent with others’ same necessities. such a criterion must meet three problems which are typically regarded as insuperable, but are perfectly soluble: (i) to distinguish needs from mere wants and habits; (ii) to provide a criterion which is consistent with and works for all needs; so that (iii) it clearly applies across diverse ways of life and individual differences. the baseline criterion of life necessity, in other words, yields the ultimate principle of validity of both human rights and obligations, and thereby the essential structure of social justice. what is due to and from human beings, the ancient formula of justice, right and obligation, is understood throughout in systematic and objective life-value terms. life-value analysis has grounded in a universal criterion of life necessity or need and its corresponding good since its inception: to wit, n is a need if and only if, and to the extent that, deprivation of n’s good always results in reduction of life capacity. this may be called the n-criterion, that which denotes, and only denotes, any and all life needs whatever. thought experiment as well as the findings of science will demonstrate that there is no vital need that does not satisfy this criterion, and that no claimed need that does not is a life need. both also confirm that there is no life capacity that is not also measurable by this principle—for example, the need for 16 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 drinking water measured by the calibrated life capacity loss without it through time. both poles of life capacity admit of many levels and kinds of capability test. note, however, that the life-value meaning of capability is not that of amartya sen and the capabilities literature (cohen, 2008; nussbaum, 2000; nussbaum & sen, 1993; o’neill, 1998; sen, 1992). it refers strictly to life capabilities—or more exactly— their ranges of function for life not to be demonstrably reduced in its capacities. no such principled ground or qualifications are defined in the received meaning of “capabilities.” this is why political and corporate rhetorics have been quick to pick up on the concept—merely “ability to perform functionings”—which validates private preferences for non-life functionings, like private motor powers. these may meet no life need at all, but violate them in both the owner (who needs the exercise instead) and, more so, other life (which is oppressed by its effects of noise, pollution and life-field occupation). martha nussbaum, the other best known leader of the capabilities literature, goes further than sen in “taking a stand” on what capabilities are, but her schema lacks any defined principled ground or any criterion whereby the claimed life goods can be anchored, tested, and integrated. the missing life-ground and criterion is the n-criterion. nothing that does not satisfy this objective and comprehensive criterion qualifies as a necessary good or capability. nor can it have a just right to it as distinguished from a mere privilege. again contrast this to sen’s position that all capabilities we might “have reason to value” count as valid. such a criterion legitimates the right to any commodity which people “have a reason to value.” thus a personal sports vehicle with 6-foot tires or a 500 horse-power marine engine one desires to have to be “safe and well-served” qualifies. what criterion in the capabilities literatures rules against these capabilities as good? as in the capitalist market of choice, there is none. corporations accordingly talk about their “capabilities” all the time, and those of their products –giant gas-fuelled personal motors, fast-repeat guns, exciting video kill games, two-pound burgers piled high, and so on. all grant the abilities to “perform functionings” that “the individual chooses,” and everyone is given a “reason to value” them. until a life-value criterion is built in, the worst can and does happen in the name of “choice,” “capability,” and “value.” sen is concerned with equality of capabilities and rights to them, however, whereas the market system selects for inequality with no concerns. all that matters for its value system is that people pay. while the market is bound by money-demand, sen understandably wants those without it to have more equal standing. so far, so good. but again the question persists at a general level. what if the desired capability for which people claim a right is for what stunts or violates life capacities at an ecological or organic level? the issue is simply avoided, and this avoidance conforms to an underlying syntax of value which regulates beneath recognition at both market and high-theory levels. in light of its life-blind inner logic, a question is posed by life-value principle. how can corporate rights—to exploit the resources of the world to maximally satisfy what individual consumers have a right to choose have any limit to despoliation of life fields and support systems outside their exchanges? neither market theory nor received rights doctrines can meet the problem. with no life-value requirement entering as a condition of the legitimacy of these rights and freedoms, two fatal outcomes are predictable in principle: a collapsing planetary life system and social injustice beyond human bearing. human rights versus corporate rights 17 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 many will protest that cultural and individual differences and freedoms make any universal principles of good and bad impossible, or undesirable, or both. for example, some choose to satisfy their need for food in the form of fish and beans, others by meat and potatoes, and still others by vegetables and fruits, with many further variations among these menus. hence the false inference arises that even the need for food is not universalizable because of these cultural and individual differences. more careful consideration resolves the problem, however, because it recognizes that the organic need is for a complement of nutritional food which can be spelled out across these different fares by the objective n-criterion and primary axiom of value. no one “decides for others” this or any other life necessity and good. it is a necessity of life recognized by a scientifically verifiable criterion of life-value understanding, and it admits of endless degrees and choices within its objective principle of determination. whether recognized or not, the objective criterion of life value always remains a constant, and so too the life-value ground of rights and social justice. the test is in all situations always whether life capacities are more restricted or reduced in range without the life necessity and good than with it. empirical science can confirm or disconfirm, but all need everywhere is always this. right to what is not needed by these objective and comprehensive life criteria, conversely, cannot therefore be a deep or legitimate right, or a requirement of social justice. this is a primary conclusion of life-value onto-axiology, and is open to counter-argument any step of the way. yet how manifold is the resistance to understanding the self-evident at this principled level. still another avoidance is to argue that the need-criterion of legitimacy of right is reductionist for people’s lives beyond need. yet again one asks: what exactly is worthwhile that is not an expression or enjoyment of a life capacity? if nothing is, and need is solely that without which life capacities are reduced, what of true life value can be ruled out? thought experiment confirms that nothing of value can be ruled out. as we consider the universal life needs which satisfy the ncriterion—a long research study whose conclusions are reported for examination ahead—we find that there is nothing worthwhile in life that is excluded because all that people do or choose to do requires life capacities, and they in turn require the goods that meet needs to flourish, however free and unique they may be. whatever the manifold variations and choices within the generic goods of these universal life needs, no life-coherent possibility is pre-empted. moreover, all that a human life can have a legitimate right to is that which is needed to enable life capacities to live and flourish as human—the universal life needs and goods which derive from the primary axiom and the n-criterion. explanation needs to be very exact and conclusive here because there has been a longstanding and world-wide confusion on these issues. amidst tireless variations on the slogans of “individual and consumer differences and choice” and “what is a need to some is a want to others,” the absence of any ground of understanding of humanity’s ultimate directive meaning defines the age. postmodern, relativist and sceptical theories of all kinds explicitly or tacitly refuse to accept any universal good or necessity at all. in the background, for over 2500 years philosophers have largely avoided the issue of universal life needs and any common life-ground of moral meaning. economists in particular have systematically conflated needs and desires with no recognition of their ultimate distinction by life necessity itself. 18 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 life needs or necessities, that without which life capacities are lost, form the common life-ground and interest of humanity which has been abandoned. conditioned market desires, preferences and wants are the opposite in principle because without them no life capacity is reduced, while all admit of the excesses and perversions that need rules out. life-value research has therefore recognized that identifying the human life necessities and goods actually required by human flourishing is an unfulfilled task, and meets it with one common test—whether anyone could live without it and not suffer a loss of life capacity. one cannot do without oxygenated air or potable liquid or caloric intake in any degree, for example, without a proportionate reduction or destruction of life capacity. thus develops the life-value calculus. it identifies in every of life good the scientifically establishable limits of life capacity range and the degrees of its reduction correlating with the degrees of deprivation of it. for example, one cannot live six minutes without any breathable air, a day or so without water, a week without any food, and so on. the italicized parameters apply across need-capacity domains, with very different lines of necessity and loss from deprivation of different universal life necessities. insufficient breathable air leads quickly to incapacitation by the degree of deprivation, but deprivation of open space or light take far longer to show the loss of ability to function through range. nonetheless they are universal life necessities and goods, in the correspondingly qualified sense. and so on through the entire framework of universal life needs/goods spelled out ahead. consider a paradigm need in illustration. the nourishment requirement is many-sided in calorie, protein, and vitamin necessities of intake, with research establishing required range quantities for size and age parameters and corresponding physical degeneration by significant deprivations. deprivation of communicative culture, on the other hand, is more complex and less dramatic in its effects, but is still expressed in life capacity loss. although no reading or writing tools for a writer would score far higher as a disabling deprivation than it would for someone preferring music and play as human communication forms, people without any of these are made subhuman. although need satisfiers and choices vary immensely, reduction of life capacities without any of them is clear, and variously quantifiable by loss of life-function range. to move into still further spheres of these universal human life necessities and goods—the real basis of legitimate human rights—we may consider what is often blinkered out as a merely subjective or cultural issue. consider a human life without anyone caring for its existence at any level. life-value analysis can recognize such a deprived life is a kind of hell, although capacity loss from its deprivation is not as instantaneous as is life without potable water. there is still a human life necessity of supportive care or “love” which some say the greatest need of all. certainly without it people variously lose life capacity including the will to live itself, and infants and children variously shrivel up and die to the world without it, as research has shown across the primates. in every case there are implications for human rights and obligation corresponding to the life-value loss and provision involved. still another universal life good and necessity across cultures admitting of very different forms is the need for a physical or natural environment in some integrity of form. this is why people having to live in an environment of squalid disorder is a human right violation and social injustice. deterioration of the life fields of thought, felt being and action follows—as has been shown by animal welfare research with even human rights versus corporate rights 19 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 livestock reduced in their vital signs of alertness, brightness of eye and skin sheen if they are deprived of environmental form and stimulus. at this point explanation calls for some unifying complete set of these universal human life goods/needs/ necessities without which human beings variously suffer life capacity loss towards inertia, disease and death. we require the full framework and coordinates to ground legitimate human rights, obligations and social justice across cultures. this objective and comprehensive framework of universal human life goods and necessities liberates understanding from an absurd ruling culture which recognizes no objective ground of human life at all but self desires, market demand aggregates, and welfare indexes without any principled life-ground. the standard need-set of “food, clothing, housing, and so on” which marx first recognized 176 years ago after centuries of theory without any life-requirement emerging to attention is a turning point in intellectual history, but still woefully inadequate. it has no criteria, measure or organizing framework of meaning. the ubiquitous “basic needs” invoked by ngo’s and others today is essentially vacuous. average annual income is hardly better. it allows economists to claim a “rising standard of living” in the poor world from an income rise equivalent to a bottle of pop. “feeding the poor” can mean only processed junk—as in u.s. school lunches where the highlight of food for poor children, ketchup, has qualified as a vegetable. as for the ultimate need of a human vocation—to serve, express and enjoy human life capacities as a coherent end-in-self of value—this core of social justice does not yet exist as a known concept. in short, humanity has been a long time without its most basic life-value bearings, and this absence of meaning fits the ruling order like a glove. life-need disconnect across theories: a reprise of 2500 years sound criterial measure of human life necessities is a life-and-death matter. yet the reigning economic theory everywhere since adam smith has confused necessity with market demand. in anglo-american justice theory as well as economics and studied philosophy in general, no standard of life need ever arises. the concept in principled form might as well be outlawed. john rawls’ famous “primary goods,” for example, is decoupled from life needs altogether. the ruling proxy of money “income” substitutes for them even in the twentieth century’s reputedly leading work on social justice. theory in general continues the effective prohibition in the political economy discourses of the left which track capitalist-system mechanics with no ground of meaning in life necessity itself. one might say there is a pathological block against the life-value meaning of needs in western civilization—except that eastern civilization may be more blinkered still. it does not and cannot distinguish between a vital human need and an extinguishable attachment in its vedanta and buddhist forms, while confucianism prioritizes propriety to superiors over the life needs of anyone. unsatisfied life needs are left as a problem of the lower classes, while the decorum of the rich gives the illusion they are above them. the labour of appearances takes their place. the great exceptions are lao tzu in the east and the recorded jesus in the west, who speaks of “feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and giving shelter to the homeless.” nonetheless official culture and lead thinkers normally subjectivize need 20 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 a-priori, and almost never relate rights to defined life needs. philosophy seeks to understand the ultimately regulating principles of the human condition, but has avoided this ultimate issue from the beginning, most dogmatically since its linguistic turn of the twentieth century. economics is meant to comprehend production and distribution of otherwise scarce goods for human society to develop, but is blind even to the distinction between life goods and bads. history is supposed to find the deciding ground of what uprisings and forward movements of peoples are about if it is to understand what is going on, but ruling-order provision of life necessities and goods for society and its technological-social possibility remain unexamined as an historical struggle and trend. does any social science do better? the general fact is that is that no higher-order theory of rights and social justice grounds in the life-and-death necessities of human existence. even materialist theories avoid universal human life needs. the ancient carvaka of india focused on voluptuous desires, and no known materialist doctrine since has comprehended or researched a universal life-necessity framework. karl marx brought european ideology “down to earth,” but begins capital by saying on the first page that “the nature of human wants, whether for instance they spring from the stomach or fancy, makes no difference” (marx, 1986, p. 43). the issue of the life goods all people need to live and live well has been essentially a blank slate except in medicine, and as we know its contemporary dominant forms have been biased towards expensive corporate commodities for profit—exotic machines and corporate pharmaceuticals for symptoms. even with the new welfare indexes where we seem at last to be getting towards the life base for rights, duties and social justice, there is no criterion of life good or necessity in any. a leading formation of such an index in canada, the canadian well-being index, is a case in point. when provided with formal demonstration of the universal needs principle and framework required for any concept of welfare to be life coherent, the assembled experts, in the words of a lead participant, “greeted it with a strange silence and would not engage it.” 3 this response symptomizes the ruling syntax of contemporary thought. life-value analysis, in contrast, begins with humanity’s necessary life goods as its ground. standard categories like “income,” “primary goods,” “prosperity,” “rights,” “freedoms” and so on are discovered under analysis to have no principled meaning of life value at all. one must therefore build from the ground up. once research and reflection manage to arrive at defining principled grounds of humanity’s universal life necessities and goods, life-value analysis can work towards laying bare a unifying framework of them. this has been a difficult road in a cognitive context in which countless varieties of relativism, differences, custom and resistance rule out such a research project a-priori. again we find there is virtually nothing to work with that is well formed and life-grounded. yet without such a principled life-ground one cannot truly know what human beings have rights to as humans nor what social justice consists of. the onto-axiological base and substance of what really matters to people’s lives and life conditions remain missing. against this ruling arbitrariness of rights, life-value understanding re-grounds thought and analysis at the level of human life necessities and capacities and, therefore, in the ecological support systems that make them possible at the same time. this is the ecology of life value and justice underpinning the regulating whole. human rights versus corporate rights 21 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 social sciences and philosophy have nowhere yet so grounded themselves. readers may think, what about marx? he seems to re-ground in human life needs and capacities, but on closer examination his ultimate base is found to be historical productive force development which he assumes realizes human life needs and capacities and necessitates the revolution of capitalism to full human freedom and self-realization at the same time. yet marx and marxists have never provided lifevalue criteria to explain or to bridge the three levels of life-and-death issue which are skipped over here: (1) why seizure of the state from capitalist control is ensured against the systematic life-blindness of the order it grows out of; (2) what collective life-values there are to guide this state rule and its productive force development beyond more material output as an end in itself; and (3) how human life needs and capacities are to be enabled and fulfilled by this program as assumed, rather than distorted or imprisoned by it. the modern blind eye: no life-value standard to steer productive development productive force development can go well or badly depending on its regulating value purpose—well if steered by life-value coordinates to realize human needs, badly if steered to maximize private profits or state-party power. in itself, productive force development means nothing but more material output. one of the greatest confusions of mankind is to assume that more productivity or material output automatically means better lives and life conditions for people. without any life-value criterion to show or enable this outcome, it is pure magical thinking. consider for example a state-induced flooding of the natural wonder of the yangtze river three gorges into a central power dam with millions of inhabitants who are forcibly uprooted and beaten if they resist this action, and the potential for long-term ecological catastrophe ignored by the ruling engineers of the central committee. under the direction of private money capital, the outcomes can be much worse. more material output with no accountability to any objective but more private money-value to fast-profit stockholders can end in only more job losses, waste, and junk in the world. one cannot, in short, assume that technological advances or innovations in themselves serve human needs and capacities to live fuller lives. they can only reliably do so if life-value standards govern them, and they have never been so governed. marx was not as life-blind as classical and so-called neo-classical economics or states run by engineers, but he still supposed life-value advancement by productive force development as the ultimate principle of historical change. his essential justification is that private capitalist control for profit explains the monstrous outcomes. yet however much this analysis explains, its argument cannot in principle meet the ultimate problem. for life-grounded standards are not only missing, but never formed as an alternative. without them to help recognize the conflict between human life and life support requirements, on the one hand, and more and bigger material outputs on the other, only the assumption of a better life for people is left to rely on. this has been the deepest onto-axiological fault-line of both the marxian and the capitalist ideas. what is required to steer the world from its cumulative construction of human-and-terrestrial-life catastrophe has been fatally screened out: the life-coherent use of technology. 22 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 the capitalist story of the private market’s invisible hand necessitating the best of all possible results or “optimal” social welfare may be the prototype of the life-blind logic of rule, but whatever doctrine is believed, only life-coherent technological development can resolve the problem in principle, and that requires regulating life standards at both human and ecological levels. the industrial method of factory and assembly-line production expanding to ever vaster and world-changing forms can continue to be either by slave-like mass labour and ever more nature-destructive machines and methods or, at the other pole of possibility, organized by coherent life standards to ensure humanity’s universal life necessities and goods including human vocation and environmental integrity of growth. this is the deciding choice process of social rule-system. the belief that the powers of production themselves “discipline, unite, organize” the working class into revolutionary self-determination and human freedom is one of the still-believed formulae on the left that has blocked the life standards required. for every moment of this discipline and organizing in capitalism is to save private money costs for absentee investors, and to do so by turning all moments of production including workers into life-numbed mechanical functions. why would people so conditioned become an oppositely-structured force against their conditioning around the clock? without life values regulatively steering productive forces, the outcomes are not magically arranged by an invisible hand or dialectical laws to be optimal. to steer by life-coherent standards rather than magical thinking is the social choice space that has been lost by both warring parties. the long-term outcome has come to be virtually every life system in cumulative decline. yet this life-blind automatism still leads at the front end. 4 the ultimate requirement of social justice: re-grounding in universal human life goods soviet industrial development showed that the mounting life catastrophe is not only capitalist in nature. it had few or no effective life-value standards at the political and ecological levels. the infamous mass murders and industrial ecocides require no elaboration here. in fact, they have provided the choral chant of capitalist propaganda since. where states like cuba or venezuela in our time have better structured towards meeting basic life needs, they have been made international pariahs by the usual selective reporting for which provision of universal life necessities is blinkered out a-priori. while no thinking person should be duped by the orwellian clamour, life-value analysis applies to clarify the problem on both sides. neither cuba nor venezuela specifies principled life-value standards to ensure accountability of the ruling party to their realization. yet cuba, which has been at its socialist revolution for 50 years in spite of u.s. continuous criminal embargo and violations of international law, has advanced far. in elite performances of conventional forms of sport, music, and dance, free scientific and literacy education to a universal level, and life-serving medical care at an international level of commitment, the accomplishments have been immense. on the other hand, critical dialogical development of public discourses and political policy has atrophied, with locally-led innovation and the common resources to organize better social living human rights versus corporate rights 23 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 conditions on the ground absent—such as the poor rebuilding their barrios with stateprovided materials in chile before president allende was murdered in 1973 by a u.s.-supported military coup to restore the capitalist market. advance or degradation of the human vocation is the key on all sides—the ultimate need for life contribution and enjoyment which entails free critical speech, thought and creative action in realizing the life capacities and needs of people. here corporate globalization has moved rapidly backwards, cumulatively eliminating the human vocation without noticing it. even its critical higher education and research, once the leader of the world, have been subjugated to the corporate private-profit mechanism as the next generation has ever diminishing opportunities for any work except private-profit service jobs serving no life need. beneath rising structural unemployment for post-2008 youth, falling vocational security at life-serving functions across the world is the greatest unseen crisis of globalization. life-value understanding therefore proposes a meta shift of rights towards each person’s right of access to a universal human life good rather than being confined within the now ruling legal concept of merely private rights to exclude all others from whatever is held. this is a foundational distinction which brings into the light the universal life needs of human beings which have been blocked out in rights and other discourses. every one of the goods specified in what follows from objective criteria which have been lost to received analysis. each denotes, that is: (i) a universal good which is (ii) also a universal life necessity, and (iii) holds across individuals and cultures (iv) if and only if, and (v) to the extent that, (vi) deprivation of n (vii) always results in reduction of life capacity. we will designate (i) to (v) the n-axiom. before identifying the set of universal life needs and goods which frame the issues of rights and social justice for a life-coherent standpoint, there are a number of issues to be considered as one works through them. every sphere of goods defined ahead is necessary to human well-being by this n-axiom, but to very different degrees of necessity from one good to another. as we have seen, for example, deprivation of clean water is more immediately life-destructive than of environmental goods, but environmental goods are nonetheless necessary to a human life by the same measure. one should also keep in mind that even if most humans alive have not had sufficient access to these goods, it remains true by life-need criterion and measure that they are reduced in their life capacities, even when this reduction is normalized. in official measures of people’s welfare, for instance, only an aggregate average of private money-demand is involved therefore more priced goods (commodities) which may be junk or disease-causing are still classified as “welfare enhancing.” at the same time, impoverishment in a society’s real life goods—its jobs, its environment, its foods, and its natural resources—do not factor in. perhaps no absurdity has been more ruinous than the private money-demand measures of human well-being and development—more lethally fatuous by far than buying indulgences from the church to better one’s life chances. yet innumerable false doctrines collaborate in disconnecting corporate, state, popular and academic intelligence from objective life values and so too rights and obligations. even democratic theory has become ungrounded from what people require to live and live well. with the ruling model as electoral headcounts in a corporate-state field of propaganda, a majority can be indoctrinated to support on cue as “freedom” a belligerent war, or the depredations of young lives as “treats for the children.” high theory does not re-ground, however, 24 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 but de-grounds further. fictitious contractarian models and debates with no lifeground nor organic need—nor mention of corporate profit itself—multiply in journals, books and graduate schools as “the latest research on justice.” in opposition to all this, life-value understanding recognizes that real development and social justice advance by better provision of universal life goods and necessities to people without which they suffer loss of life capacity—an objective fact admitting of objective degrees of advance or regression. theories and practises are thus obliged to face a life-coherence principle of validity—that is, whether their positions are consistent with or blind to the most universal requirements of human life itself. in short, life-value understanding reconnects to the universal goods which each and all objectively need to live a human life—the missing life-value meaning of the socratic wisdom that “an unexamined life is not worth living.” whatever creative choices one might make and be individuated by within the range of possibilities opened by access to these life goods, they are required by every human being; and human rights and social justice correspond in development to their sufficient provision. yet no sooner are such words as “universal” and “necessary” out than charges of “paternalism,” “neo-colonialism,” “the terrorist universal” and so on are unleashed. in high theory as well as the capitalist market, a conventional thoughtspace of life-disconnect reigns. a useful experiment here is to identify any universal and necessary life good whatever for humanity which is acknowledged as such in the entire literature of contemporary higher-order thought. as perhaps future inhabitants of the globe will recognize in amazement that any life was possible for them after such a global disorder, this system-wide disconnect has become so complete and complaisant that most in governing circles and the academy resist understanding of what is happening even as the ice-caps melt and the next generation cannot find a livelihood or vocation. what is miscalled “the economy” has one supreme law that overrides requirements of life at every level—to turn private money into more money for its possessors ad infinitum through private money-and-commodity vehicles. the mind-lock binding acceptance is that this system is alone capable of “delivering the goods” when, in reality, it increasingly despoils life goods and rights across the world. one can only know this, however, if one knows what these life goods are. the universal life needs and goods of humanity: understanding the life-base of rights and obligations in the unifying life-value framework of needs/goods defined below, each is a universal life necessity and good because no-one across cultures can be deprived of it without losing life capacity towards disease and death. all are distinct from each other because none can be provided for by any or all of the rest. these general facts may be tested through every one. in life-value social justice, the universal necessity of each confers a universal human right of all to it, linked to the corresponding obligation of all to work for this provision. it is the greatest if unseen failure of the global corporate market that not one of these universal human life necessities is in fact ensured by its organizing order, and increasingly more are endangered or overridden by it. indeed because it is blind to human rights versus corporate rights 25 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 life necessity itself and depends on producing scarcity to extract private profit, this system is a-priori structured against sufficient life goods provision for society. whether any of these life needs are met, or are violated root and branch, is a matter of indifference to its value code. yet provision of these universal life goods, and only access to such life goods, enables the “good life” for anyone. conversely, deprived of any of these universal life necessities/goods, and to the extent of this deprivation across the italicized categories below, human suffering and social injustice demonstrably follow. (1) the atmospheric goods of unpolluted air, sunlight, climate cycles, and seeinghearing space; (2) the bodily goods of clean water, nourishing food, fit clothing, and waste disposal; (3) the home good of shelter from the elements and noxious animals/materials with the means to sleep and freely function; (4) the environmental good of natural and constructed elements contributing to a lifesupporting whole; (5) the social goods of reliable care through time by supportive love, work-day limits/safety, accessible healthcare, and security of person; (6) the cultural goods of language, the arts, participant civil rights, and play; and (7) the vocational good of enabling and obliging each to contribute to the provision of these universal life goods consistent with the enjoyment of them. the reader may independently test this needs/goods index at every point. two generic questions arise for any sound criterion or definition, and they are worth applying to each and all of (1) through (7) as well as the whole set at once. is anything claimed that is not a demonstrable universal need/good by the n-criterion? or is anything missing from the set or any part of it? in elementary logic, these are known as the questions of “too broad?” or “too narrow?” they take us through all the questions and debate required to know the sound answer. this is the process of truth for life-value onto-axiology, the process of more coherently inclusive taking into account. the resting point of valid criterion is reached when there are no exceptions to show that the frame of life-needs and goods above is too narrow or too broad in any category or as a complete set. the process moves through testing counterexamples as long as these can be given, at which point one knows the provisionally sound solution has been developed. if this set of universal life needs/goods of human beings still stands in the face of counter-argument until no life-coherent candidate remains, then it has stood the test of truth. once at this point, we recall the principle of measure. each and all of these universal life goods admit of sufficiency or insufficiency which is definable by the margin gain, or loss, of life range with, or without, provision. sufficiency is reached when no life good is missing from this set without which life capacities are reduced—a condition that flourishing human lives and societies both enjoy and provide for. it should be emphasised in the face of long confusion and nonsense on this point that socially assured sufficiency of life goods does not mean authoritarian government or levelling of individuation and diversity. the goods are universal necessities of a human life, not dictated by central authority or anyone else. people’s lives are not levelled, but on the contrary, more diverse, free and individuated by their assured provision. 26 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 at the same time, the universal ethic and social justice of the general principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is provided with what it has long lacked—the precise criteria and right-obligation linkage of its basic terms. while life-value understanding endorses this principle, it recognizes and meets its three fatal problems: (1) “needs” themselves have remained without definition and bound. thus damaging habits conceived as needs may qualify as benefits, leading to disabling consequences and disputes. (2) the “ability” expected from each is not grounded in human life capacities themselves. thus dehumanizing use of abilities can be obliged “from each,” allowing for distortion of the underlying life capacities they express. (3) there is no principled linkage between needs and abilities to ensure the coherence of their realization. thus the ancient division between the unequal abilities and needs of people still remains unresolved. with no defined criteria of its burden-benefit sides to solve (1) to (3), the fromeach/to-each principle remains only a resonant slogan without directive substance. the principle’s greatest advocate, karl marx, disclosed the first of its central problems himself without realizing it. he affirmed “need” growth with no limit— counting tobacco and mansions as needs if these were the norm of the stage of productive development of the society in question. at the same time, he uncritically assumed that the productive development conditioning these “needs” was their external determiner beneath choice. what other great philosophies like buddhism and lao tzu’s taoism affirmed as the ultimate choice-space of humanity—release from created wants—was not only ignored by marx, but overridden by affirmation of human needs without end. ironically capitalist economics since marx have assumed non-satiety of wants as the first premise of market growth. in this way, marx and bourgeois economics agree on perhaps the most ruinous assumption of modern thought. life-value onto-axiology adopts an opposite stand. it recognizes as needs only goods without which life capacities are reduced. humanity’s economic and social advance can thus be objectively understood by life-value criteria, as distinguished from propagandized without check. at the same time, human rights and social justice are provided with the substantive life content that has long been missing. beneath the recognition of policy and theory: global corporate war against the human vocation, civil commons, and social justice the ultimate life good of human vocation, (7), is axial to human justice and wellbeing because it links peoples’ rights to universal human goods with their obligation to contribute to them. this obligation is precisely not coercive inasmuch as it is answering to humanity’s deepest need—to do what is of value to others and meaningful to oneself. this is, most of all, why human beings are more than twolegged animals. two-legged animals are identical with their self-desires in the human rights versus corporate rights 27 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 individual, and are unconnected to each other by rules for mutual life-good provision within herd and peck-orders. this inhuman state admits of degrees, but almost all societies we know today are bound in this direction by the ruling system of all competing against one another for means of existence and private profit for the few. while almost anyone can recognize by first-person test the human vocation to produce life-value for others beyond self—it is what drives every artist and selfrealizing occupation that exists—this human vocation has long been conditioned out of conscious recognition by the system within which most live. even in high theory, it gets lost in atomic concepts of “self-respect,” as in the rawlsian and adlerian traditions. most deeply, it is directly reversed by the ruling market onto-ethic since adam smith which conceives work as a disutility —what one has to sell into another’s property to survive. constructive activity to produce life-value for others as goal—what we are impelled to do if we are healthy human beings—is thus erased or repressed as a form of life and motivation. while it remains in home-making work, teaching and other professions not yet subverted by external money-sequence subjugation, it grows ever scarcer in the global market system. throughout, revealingly global-market corporations never stop telling us that what they do is for us. they obliquely recognize the basic meaning of human being, but its motivation has in fact been driven into the life-unconscious at both market and theoretical levels. we already know intuitively that no-one can flourish who does nothing of value for others. this is why people so often pretend that they are when they aren’t, why deadbeats wither on the vine, why disemployment causes disease, and why both left and right have long recognized that a large percentage of people without work is a social disaster. on the other hand, the insistent reduction of human beings to manipulatable desiring machines is the onto-axiology of economic doctrine and its ancillary psychological sciences. in his paradigm-setting work, mathematical psychics, frances edgeworth crystallizes the onto-axiology at work for the first time (italics added): “the conception of man as a pleasure machine may justify the employment of mechanical terms and mathematical reasoning in social science” (edgeworth, 1932, p. 15). 5 this concept of humanity as a pleasure machine is a fatal reduction built into the ruling money-sequence and commodity system because it is set to perfect indifference to all life and life conditions beyond priced desire-objects for atomic selves. while purporting to serve people’s interests in the most productive and efficient way possible, its life-blind organization has in fact cumulatively hollowed out their planetary life support systems, while leaving an increasing majority without the life necessities they require to be human. an economy is productive and efficient in fact to the extent that it provides life goods which are otherwise scarce to its members through generational time. what ensures that a society does this, rather than merely produce more luxuries for some and life-means deprivation for the many, is what life-value research designates as the civil commons. the civil commons is amnesiac in this era, but it is the social basis of all valid human rights and social justice—that is, any and all social constructs which enable universal access to human life goods without which people’s capacities are always reduced or destroyed. thus defined as scientific principle, the civil commons can be recognized as the unseen differentia of the species which first emerges in linguistic symbols themselves and distinguishes all subsequent supra-genetic evolution. lest this moving line of social development continue to be blocked out within the reigning system which dismantles them, civil commons functions still 28 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 sustain the human condition everywhere we look beneath the surface of private commodification. as i sit now in my home, there is nothing i experience and need that is possible without the civil-commons infrastructures enabling it. the electricity flow to my word-processor, lamp and space-heater are built and guaranteed by publicly built public hydro sources, lines and safety regulations including the standard-plug structure and sustained currents whose failure at any point might destroy my machine as well as my projects. yet even this fundamental necessity of my human vocation, of my light, warmth, cooking and refrigeration could not occur without long civil planning, contribution and struggle to develop and retain every moment of their common life support systems. here and elsewhere, however, private money-sequence forces dismantle common infrastructures without identification of their causal mechanism of destruction—as the example of new orleans shows, but does not teach. it could not withstand an offshore hurricane with its stripped civil commons leaving nothing intact in its natural and built sea-delta substructures and community resources of rescue, health and housing. hurricane katrina was not a natural, but a system-made disaster—from its background destabilization of hydrological cycles through its thousands of stranded and drowned people to the millions of new orleans people still homeless or ruined today. even with the already long-achieved provision today of what is relevant to the satisfaction of all human needs, the private money-sequence system is structured against sufficient provision. consider universal electricity generation and distribution, one of modern humanity’s great advances in life goods provision. new private-profit control of electricity provision recently bankrupted the wealthiest state of the us, and treated its citizens to endless blackouts and extortionate prices up to 200 times the normal, making the new scarcity it had caused ever more profitable to its agents. that enron money-sequence managers and sales personnel were ebullient at every blackout in california in anticipation of lavish commissions to them from scarcity prices disclosed the anti-supply bias of the privatized system. yet until it collapsed, enron was regaled as a global market leader with its “asset light efficiency of private energy management and supply.” such is the fate of profitizing public infrastructures. public sectors have, however, much longer built in a civil commons direction. the sidewalks we walk on, the increasingly common pathways for bicycles, the growing gardens and life habitats for public view, the multiplying commons of free-ware and knowledge are civil-commons constructions which advance and diversify against the private corporate tide. i can still breathe the air outside my inner-city home because there are public regulations, also hard-won, on exhaust fumes from private and private-profit automobiles and from corporatefactory pollutions—still poisonous in the big cities, and dangerous even in a small town for citizens with bronchial and respiratory illnesses. so far as they exist, all such life goods and protections are provided free of profit demands and defended by public regulations. yet both these civil commons formations sustaining society and the war of private corporate rights against them are without a received theoretical literature identifying the life-and-death forces at work. this is the empty theoretical space which life-value analysis maps to define an underlying struggle whose ultimate stake is the future of terrestrial life itself. its critical application makes clear what remains otherwise invisible. consider for instance one of the most basic life spaces of all—the life field human rights versus corporate rights 29 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 of hearing which, beneath public notice, has been cumulatively invaded and occupied by private commodity machines across the rural-urban divide. here as elsewhere, the pattern is familiar but unseen. as a common life good is made scarce by market spoiling, it creates a new market for profitable commodification of what has been deprived (e.g., gated communities and wealthy tourist retreats). thus the circle of life-value destruction feeds on itself. only effective public regulation can defend against this spiral downwards by life-protective laws and requirements—for example, mandatory corporate-machine silencers to protect public life space. the civil commons is this life space and defence at the macro level. yet now new lifefield occupations occur by massively state-subsidized industrial corporate windturbines which occupy horizons, destroy countless birds and flight paths, and propagate subsonic waves which disequlibriate the autonomic systems of human and other life. mass-built for private corporate profit at public expense, they require almost as much fossil fuel to build and sustain power outputs as the fossil fuels they are supposed to replace, destroying common life fields on further levels. on the wider plane of commercial energy failures, still more government handouts are extended to leading carbon polluters while the public solution which has worked in past crises of collective life threat, public rations of use, do not enter policy conception. what does not conform to system demands is again blocked out at the level of public understanding itself. 6 when analysis re-grounds in the life infrastructures of the civil commons, however, it still finds long-won rights of human life which are protected around the clock beneath conscious theoretical and economic conception—not only the publicly produced electricity, water, waste, and regulated oil-gas systems sustaining and protecting their lives, but countless other enforced public norms against assaults and threats, toxins, disease bearing biota, spoilage dates, hidden commodity contents, and so on. yet as long as they not seen, defended and advanced as the very life-security fabric of society and individual freedom, the civil commons are relentlessly circumvented by private corporate interests and governments serving them. their sole goal under law is to sell more for private profit. already these private forces have taken over independent government testing of food and beverage products, smuggled in genetically-engineered contents, sabotaged public efforts to flag junk foods and drinks from local to un levels, uploaded sugar, caffeine and salt contents to disease levels in even children’s drinks, and the like. humanity’s food supply itself has been cumulatively contaminated and debased around civil regulations while global life support systems are more competitively stripped and polluted at the same time. yet no theory or practise can decode the causal mechanism of life-destructive effects or its civil commons resolution without life-value principles of analysis. this is why the global war of occupation is still called “economic development” and “productive growth” even by marxian opponents—an example of the inverting group-mind at work in the most unexpected places. thus the life-serving social infrastructures which have been built since the nineteenth century are not adopted as a conscious historical base to universalize across the globe: unbreakable laws to ensure the purity and universality of water supplies; open travel paths and lanes across the world for all to use; construction and maintenance of community sewer systems and garbage cycles; inspection, disinfestation, and condemnation of private as well as public structures deemed to be health hazards; the systematic testing, inspecting and screening of hardware products 30 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 to validate their safety for human use and consumption; publicly enforced workplace standards in private factories and places of business; provision of public spaces and paved paths to ensure non-priced free and safe movement for all; development over generations of non-profit public media, libraries, museums and universal learning systems managed by public servants for whom price or profit demands would constitute a criminal offence; and most recently and perhaps revolutionarily, nonprofit-led development of a universal nano-second communication system of information and reliable knowledge bases without price barriers, corporate monopoly or state censorship in the civilized world. karl polanyi’s classic work, the great transformation (1944), perceives the “natural and social life substance” that has been historically market attacked, but identifies no through-line of development of society’s common life bases themselves, many of them emerging after his study. his emphasis is on pre-market community and stop-gap social measures. marx and marxism focus on the class divisions within the capitalist system with little or no civil commons recognition beyond factory inspectors and the 10-hour day act. because conceptions of human well-being and justice in general have long been decoupled from the biophysical world, from human needs and their criterion, and from the contending principles of providing these life means, no theory we know has recognized or defined the common life interest and its foundations. while opposed on the surface, “conservative,” “libertarian,” “liberal” and “communitarian” schools of theory share these blinkers in different ways. each may glimpse a dimension of the civil commons, but never its organizing ideas, criteria, and full substance. 7 the ancient idea of the “commons” is itself radically inadequate because it applies only to natural forests and the immediate natural resources characterizing medieval and remaining village commons. it does not recognize the social construction of their protection and reproduction, nor their more important cumulative modern form of civil commons infrastructures and services for all citizens. in short, no received literature however progressive has recognized the onto-ethical nature and evolutionary ground of civil commons which distinguishes the human condition itself. thus “the commons” that remain to conception are stripped of their universal meaning even when the term is retained. transnational corporations see only limitless resources to exploit rent-free, while those who see them as something more still have no criterial ground of their affirmation. the civil commons remain thus open to any block or distortion at the level of meaning itself. without principled comprehension of humanity`s evolving social life support systems, disconnection from them follows. who is the historical subject? what can replace the industrial proletariat? what concept of collective agency can we have? the now established box of formal analysis is that economic and political science cannot think beyond aggregates of atomic selves, while philosophers are stuck within an agent-relative ontology where social agency disappears a-priori. 8 thus confined to market, electoral and moral aggregates of private individuals, the expropriation and spoilage of common life support systems proceed for ever more private commodities and wastes. with no social subject or life-value ground, shared life supports can collapse all around with no-one accountable for the results. “impersonal market competition” decides, the supreme alibi for abdication of social self-direction and responsibility. this is the core of the entire failure of contemporary humanity. human rights versus corporate rights 31 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 the sovereign demand to be “more competitive in the global market” rules out human meaning itself. thus new jobs for the younger generation occur only in private money-sequencing functions or sub-functions—from fast-food services to telemarketing of unneeded commodities, from assembly-line training and jobcasualization of the academy, to management services to private money sequences. one master rules as inhuman meta-program. thus even when the most beloved and recognized civil commons formations—like canada’s public healthcare system— cannot be cut without loss of the next election, the system’s inner logic is not understood. like plato’s cave-dwellers held by chains of conditioning to see only dancing shadows projected onto the wall, the regulating forms behind the changing appearances are not seen. in the wider global whole, the civil commons substructure of society is defunded, privatized in bits and wholes, opened to foreign corporate takeover, tax-starved and stripped back at every level from one decade to the next without connection of the dots. the state itself is reduced step-by-step to two ruling functions which are assumed but not named: armed defence of private global corporations’ interests at home and abroad and unconditional government hand-outs to ensure their competitive growth. if their money-sequence overreaching bankrupts them, the corporate-market state re-finances them across the world with public money and strips back social sectors to pay. 9 the captive state is throughout represented, however, as the opposite to what it is. increasing hundreds of millions of people can be without ecological security or even water and nutrition as global wealth multiplies in the control of an apical few. yet the freedoms and well-being of the poor are declared to be rising. ever greater volumes of junk commodities may undermine the health of children and non-affluent across the globe, but when critical science recognizes the epidemic damages, governments still leave bio-assay responsibilities to private corporate control. social infrastructures of education, health and pensions may be slashed and privatized to pay compound-interest public debts to private foreign banks, but the transfer of wealth from the impoverished to the rich is pronounced “economic necessity.” public electro-magnetic spectrums may be all privatized for global media corporations to mass produce commercial and violence images, but a “global information culture” is proclaimed. wars and domestic oppressions by force of arms may dominate public budgets as common life support systems degrade and collapse, but “world security” is declared the ultimate purpose in national and international forums. life-coherent analysis does not stop at recognition of the privatized state and its propaganda. it re-grounds in what class analysis of the system does not, the life-blind incompetence of this rule which is objectively demonstrable by life-value parameters which class and systems analysis fail to penetrate: the deprivation of universal human life necessities requirements across society at every level. this is the lost baseline of human society which is unexamined and ungrounded by received theory. only from it can deep political economy steer beyond the ruling-class state by exactly understood civil commons institutions that demand defence and development now more than ever—for primary example which is hardly discussed, by publicutility banks to lend to the people including a central bank to lend to all levels of government, retaining interest charges in public budgets for further spending back into the economy and issuing credit for common life-interest purposes. this is an already constitutional path of currency and credit responsibility, but it has been variously abdicated by captive states over a long period. 10 as with sound public 32 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 education or natural resource protection, there is one underlying principle of directive meaning, the civil commons. only its ground and direction meet the void of theory and practise at this ultimate level of social foundation and change—always bridging from one or more human universal life necessities to universal provision, from common fires, water sources and language symbols to public spaces, hygienic practices and shared life respect itself. the civil commons through-line is the lost thread of humanity’s meaning and advance—the human being who decides the laws by which it lives, and who becomes just by the universal life goods in which all of its citizens both participate and enjoy by society’s organizing rights and obligations. from this underlying human life code to the knowledge commons of today, social justice is the civil commons process which enables what each and all are due as human. performance evaluation of the civil commons and the private for-profit system: the universal goods of our lives and how they are safeguarded or destroyed the facts of daily life in developed society have been so painstakingly and historically constructed across generations to enable universal access to the life goods of evolved humanity that, as a result, we need systematic understanding of the comparative performances of civil commons and private corporations in providing them. beyond the civil commons bases of safe and reliable energy flows into homes to perform the functions required for individual creation, food, warmth, and sleep, beyond the evolving body of public rules and regulations to ensure the safety of clean-and-waste water cycles and building structures, and beyond the publicly built and kept pathways and routes of people’s lives in every life-value domain, still more layers of civil commons enable us to live and flourish as humans. the universal education that has taught people how to read, compute and research, the public repositories of books, film and documentation resources which all can access without price, the universal public healthcare without which countless lives are bankrupted, terrorized or destroyed, the universal pensions for old age, unemployment-income insurance, disability allowances and supports, the civil interventions available in countless forms to prevent harms to person, property and home, the public information resources and consumer protection requirements, the public holidays and celebrations of multiple kinds for all, the countless government offices to respond to needs of every kind —where do the civil commons stop? they stop where they are forced to a stop by corporate-state defunding, privatization, deregulation, tax undercutting, rising allocations to private money sequences, militarized budgets and, most violently in the second half of the twentieth century, by capitalist state wars against societies with developed socialist infrastructures (e.g., vietnam and iraq, with prosperous yugoslavia destabilized in between). indeed civil commons formations are apt to be equated to “communism” by the mere fact that they are not controlled for private profit—a hate epithet more destructive of human life than centuries of witch hunts and anti-semitism. yet what human benefit of culture and civilization do we reliably enjoy that the publicly funded civil commons do not enable for people’s lives? and what attack on the civil human rights versus corporate rights 33 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 commons is not from private for-profit forces? here is the moving line of the unseen war against human society itself. the pretext is that civil commons formations are “too costly” to invest in, but trillions of dollars of public wealth are transferred to private banks and corporations which produce nothing of life value as “necessary to keep the economy going.” the defunded civil commons by which people’s lives and life conditions are continuously enabled on every level is, at bottom, the lost common ground of our lives. yet from publicgrade school education stripped in africa to pay foreign money-sequence debts to public health systems, and income security for the unemployed, civil services, pensions and higher research in the industrialized world privatized for profit, there seems no end to the reversal of both humanity’s very social evolution and the possibility of social justice. the defining principle of all universal human life necessities and what social justice provides by society’s true development is (1) that without which the life capacity of anyone is reduced (2) by the degree of the good’s necessity, (3) to the extent of its deprivation when (4) the means are available to provide it. this is the exact line and measure between social justice and injustice across life domains. the universal goods which are provided or deprived are, in turn, goods which have: (i) have intrinsic value so far as they are felt and conscious to human being (e.g., the air, environment and fellow beings felt as values in themselves); (ii) have instrumental or ultimate value without which human life is reduced or destroyed by degrees; (iii) mark systematic injustice to the degree of their necessity, deprivation, and life loss without them; and (iv) mark social justice to the measure of the protection and enabling of their provision through time by (v) society’s system of benefits and burdens progressively ensuring their provision. once social justice is thus defined with principled life coordinates, we are able to understand how it is in fact won or lost in the world: for example, by potable and waste water cycles, literacy levels, social security programs, and accessible time, play and creative opportunities for gains or losses of citizens’ life capacities through time. at this point it is worth reviewing the fate and trends of all the universal human life necessities and goods under corporate-market rule. it is here that we can define the destructive lines of corporate invasion of humanity’s life fields and conditions in the name of “development” and “prosperity.” (1) the natural atmospheric goods of breathable air, open space and light are not conserved nor protected by the corporate-rights system, but systemically depredated insofar as (i) the air is polluted by its commodities’ production and uses (e.g., ever more motor vehicles for profit with no limit on their numbers or ration of their use on land, air or water); (ii) open space is cumulatively occupied by these same private corporate uses and commodities disabling people’s lives (e.g., by pervading fumes and motor-spike decibels and subsonic propagations); and (iii) the light of the sun has been made toxic by corporate-commodity effluents having cumulatively destroyed the ozone layer for protecting the earth from infra-red solar radiations. on the other hand, where public regulatory interventions have been prevailed, there are air-pollution abatement measures, open-space protections, and sun-radiation buffers (by ozone-layer protocol, the sole life standard in transnational business treaties). free corporate use of the universal atmospheric goods of breathable air, open space and natural light is, in all, totalizing in despoliation without public authority effectively regulating every phase of its cycles. as with provision or deprivation of 34 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 all the universal life goods of (1) to (7), human rights and obligations or their violation follow, along with social justice or injustice. (2) the bodily goods of clean water, nourishing food, and waste disposal have been increasingly depredated by reigning corporate rights and commodity cycles insofar as: (i) the fresh waters of aquifers, lakes and rivers are polluted and drawn down by corporate activities of manifold kinds from factory farming, toxic discharges across industries and commodity extraction, with untreated public sewage itself led by these open-waste methods and by corporate blocking of taxes required to resolve the problem; (ii) the world’s foods and beverages are increasingly sugar-saltand-oil laden, chemically adulterated, and genetically contaminated to serve moneysequence functions of mass sale, masking of age and quality, and care-cost reduction, thereby leading multi-disease causation and depletion of seed stocks, vitamin yield, forest covers, and organic immune resistance; and (iii) massive waste methods increase by non-selective forest and fish stock looting, throwaway products and packaging, and non-recycling of waste products. (3) the home and habitat goods of shelter from the elements and noxious animals and insects with means to freely function are improved in countless expendable conveniences, but under the ruling corporate system: (i) a home is dependent on private money stocks or debt-servitude to private banks at compound-interest charges exceeding principal and, simultaneously, tied to private-developer profits so that increasing numbers of families are home-insecure or homeless; (ii) corporate “development” is pervasively sited on shrinking farmlands to exploit their already historically developed life capital of cleared, graded and drained lands for what maximizes its external money gains; and (iii) protection from noxious animals and insects is by profitable commodities of instant poisons, solvents and other killmechanisms which are hazardous to life forms in general and blinker out lifecoherent methods of public resolution. (4). the built and natural environmental goods of surrounding elements and contours contributing to the whole are what form all pleasant human surroundings across cultures, but this environing life good also requires public coordination and control which private developers and financiers have displaced: (i) by massive ungreen urban sprawl “development” around one town, city, and beauty space to the next across borders, if not over-ruled by externally enforced regulations (e.g., old european towns or public parks); (ii) by buildings determined only by corporateperson profit for unit sold and not for their contributing place in the whole unless regulated by such public standards; (iii) leased public lands and resources to be torn apart and polluted by private corporate looting of forests and minerals, military attack or practice areas by high-profit weapons, and private commodity noise machines multiplying in number. (5) the life-protective goods of civil life security and healthcare provision when ill are the mark of civilized humanity in all places and times, but are undermined by corporate-person rule insofar as: (i) the private money-sequence system it presides over redistributes public wealth and worker wages to its own global growth, thereby depriving increasing majorities of civil commons and income security; (ii) the mass sale of addictive and life-disabling junk drinks and foods and the injection of toxins and carcinogens into commodity cleaners, consumables and personal care products which afflict countless people with diseases, whose cause by these products is human rights versus corporate rights 35 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 unresearched or undisclosed; and (ii) the privatization for profit of health-restoring goods so that what does not serve corporate money sequences is ruled out, including public health plans and their extensions. (6) the universal human life goods of language, music, art, and play which constitute culture in all its diverse human forms are debased or eliminated insofar as corporate money-sequence growth selects for funding and reproduction of only those forms which directly or indirectly produce and mass-market commodities for corporate profit. whatever does not serve this ulterior goal is not funded or, if integral to people’s lives, distorted into a form that does (e.g., public education tailored to the demands of corporate rule). thus culture becomes commodified to sell corporate brands, communication is reduced to what promotes sales by instant images and sound bites, and public cultural policies are determined by corporate modes (e.g., publicly financed spectacle sites in place of community play and performance areas). the cultural form is decided as “good” or “bad,” in turn, by private money-value returns—that is, how much is paid for product or reproduction (high art), or how well it sells corporate commodities (commercial art). in general, culture becomes funded or defunded as it returns higher or lower money value to private parties. students, for example, are required to “invest” in their higher education by debt contracts with private banks to pay for “the higher returns” of their learning—the money sequence of value imposed on and regulating education itself. (7) the good of human vocation is the ultimate life good for human beings in community insofar as it enables and obliges people to contribute to the provision of universal life goods consistent with each person’s enjoyment of them. the logic of rights and obligations here follows from understanding the nature of these universal human life goods themselves. to enjoy the atmospheric goods of nature obliges one to not degrade but preserve them. to benefit from the bodily goods of clean water, nourishing food and waste disposal requires that each contribute to their provision by sustaining taxation and participation. in a similar way, the universal human goods of home and pleasant environment, civil safety and care when ill, and enjoyment of cultural goods are realized in terms of the same logic of human vocation and social justice across differences. at the highest level of abstraction, the vocation of each individual is to do what s/he can that is of life-value to others and of life-interest to self. for none to shirk the duty of giving back in to what enables the humanity of each is the obligation in return for these rights—the human ordering of social justice. these are the true bases of self-respect and freedom. the value of such work for others, in turn, is defined by its contribution to the provision of the universal goods each and all require to live as human. the autonomous artist is not an exception, but an exemplification of giving of the self to provide the world with a great life good, a transformative human creation. one can be a clean-up worker, or an academic, or both in life-time given, or any other number of life-time contributions to the provision of humanity’s ultimate life goods. mothers count as much as farmers who count as much as heads of state in this human ecology of vocation. the commensurable unit of obligation is hours worked for provision of the life goods needed. in systemic contrast, the private for-profit corporate commodity system increasingly results in more permanently unemployed, more downgraded jobs, more extended laid-off periods, less sustaining incomes, more squeezed-out work, more eliminated life benefits, ever fewer people with work pensions, more 36 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 despoiled natural and built environments and—perhaps most ruinously—rapidly dwindling life vocations for the young. contemporary justice theory fails to recognize any common life interest while contemporary justice theory has become perhaps the most active field of philosophy in recent decades, it remains within the ruling disorder. any life-value ground or goods of justice remain blinkered out, and the reigning money-sequence itself system is off-limits to discuss. the substance of both justice and injustice is thus abstracted out a-priori. the central issue becomes, instead, one of money-value “incentives” to “the talented” to “serve the least advantaged”—a logic of justice that is introduced by john rawls’ canonical a theory of justice (1971) that produces most of the churning industry of anglo-american philosophy on justice. the lifeand-death problems confronting humanity are thereby screened out within a myth of the ruling ideology—that the primary inequality of money gain is based on personal talent. that money-possession differentials do not in fact come from the “superior talent” of individuals, but from the private control of money issue and money capital, is the underlying social structural issue that is ruled out from discussion. the question is not permitted to arise, however, as review of the vast literatures on “the difference principle” confirms. the examples used are revealingly selective and disconnected while politically correct at the same time. a paradigm example is the pay for superior performance necessary to get a woman surgeon to do the high surgery she can rather than the gardening she prefers. on the basis of such dubious examples, necessary money incentives to the talented stand in as the central problem of social justice. the general principle from which these hot-house debates are generated, “the difference principle” of rawls’ a theory of justice, is that “the higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they improve the expectations of the least advantaged members of society.” while rawls and justice theory appear here to propose a high standard, the ultimate questions of social justice are blinkered out. the ground of private property itself, money-capital right to become more with no burden, natural resources left over for others, the non-waste obligation, the protection of common life support systems, the production of means of existence, the rights and duties justly assigned to ensure their provision, and how humanity is to live with nature so as not to despoil it—all of these issues are abstracted out apriori. critical discussion, instead, turns on how inequality of the income of the “more talented” can be justified. at the highest level of generality, all substantive issues of life-coherent justice are thus erased. the implicitly cordoned-off areas of discussion are worth identifying to comprehend how this framework of analysis of social justice pre-consciously conforms to the ruling money-sequence program. however basic their importance to our lives and their right regulation, the following foundational areas of concern disappear from view a-priori: (1) the biophysical world itself and its universal requirements of reproduction; (2) human needs, their nature, criterion and universal structure; human rights versus corporate rights 37 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 (3) production of the means whereby societies live, and its organizing principles of regulation; (4) the nature of actual money-capitalist society and its money-profit sequence; (5) the conception of any of (1) to (4) as normative issues or questions; (6) any right or obligation of justice not based on contractual agreement of atomic individuals; (7) any resource to repudiate any social regulator as evil; (8) any allowance of method to ground in or introduce (1) to (7) as what must be addressed by a theory of justice. “what is left that matters?” one might ask. this is a question that does not arise. in this way, all the real-life problems of social justice are screened out by the unseen syntax of argument itself. the universal human life necessities and goods, the natural life-ground and the human vocation are all excluded from this meaning and value structure. at the same time, the actually ruling capitalist system, its money-sequence logic and despoliation of common life support systems are as effectively removed from discussion as if they were taboo to name. the reigning philosophical vision of social justice is, accordingly, a-priori life-blind like the ruling system. they are both governed at different levels by one meta-structure of meaning in which none of these issues can arise. from the start, discussion of “the difference principle” is linked to the life-empty standard of “pareto optimality,” a touchstone of modern social and philosophical sciences. although pareto himself does not define the principle in natural language, it means a condition in which no-one can be made better off without someone being made worse off—with no coordinates of life meaning entering conception. against a surface appearance of fairness, the pareto principle is in fact consistent with the most extreme immiserization of the majority. for example, if the given distribution is a small fraction of society possesses most of its assets, pareto “optimization” would leave all their wealth intact with no redistribution because this would make the super-rich “worse off”, and thus be a violation of optimal pareto efficiency. rawls recognizes a problem here, but shifts it to the deplored feudal past. “it may be that under certain conditions,” he says with emphasis added, “serfdom cannot be significantly reformed without lowering the expectations of some representative man, say that of landowners” (p. 12). former marxian scholar, g.a. cohen, goes with rawls to the pareto principle in rescuing justice and equality (2008), but he too rejects it as inadequate for justice. both he and rawls, nonetheless, entirely sidestep the capitalist world reality of allocating money to money-capital profit without limit or desert. this is the unstated requirement of oxbridge-ivy league respectability. global capitalism is off-limits to discuss without saying it. indeed none in this dominant discourse ever engages this actually ruling structure. since the elephant in the room is not there, its trampling of human and ecological worlds never enters as an issue. as antonio gramsci has observed, hegemonic ideas never touch the essential core of ruling economic relations. while standing against any inequality, cohen declines as well to question rawls’ position that inequality-producing incentives in fact do get people to produce more real goods from which the poor benefit. instead just-so stories continue to stand in for reality. there are specially talented and productive individuals, they alone can produce what people need, and the issue is whether to give them higher money incentives to induce them to provide their superior work. life-coherent reason does 38 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 not go down this primrose path. it observes there is no criterion of need here, nor account of the productivity of the higher paid, nor sound correlation of incentive to either. all of this is taken for granted by the ruling myth which is never challenged. what is not reflected from the wider world is any trace of the actually ruling system of inequality to which no part of the myth applies. in the real world, it is not talented individuals receiving more merit pay, but a financial sect’s control of money sequencing to more private money with no productive merit required, and at steeply rising costs to the majority’s lives and their common life support systems. the actually regulating structure of injustice is, thus, pre-empted from view to attend solicitously to the myth. with life-value, money-capital profit and the common life-ground all unspeakable within this disconnected framework, the multiplying assumptions at work construct an ideological illusion which is uncritically reproduced across the world in “justice theory” itself. money inequality is correlated with superior persons and their performances of value for others—the ultimate alibi of the system. its popular version, which rawls emulates without notice, is: “the rich create a larger social pie from which the poor benefit.” the man behind this idea in the academy is pareto, the leading mantra-name in rational choice theory. his position is worth briefly visiting not only because rawls and cohen do not, but because it discloses the pedigree of the principle from which the reigning discourse on justice comes. to begin with, pareto’s (1971) canonical manual of political economy itself repudiates any equalizing mechanism as economic nonsense. 11 it is only used “to get rid of one aristocracy and replace it with another (p. 93), with aristocratic rule as “what always exists” (pp. 311-312). it is a law of nature which only “decadent” and “degenerate” members of the ruling class oppose, he says. these “decadents” are only moved by a “morbid pity” or because they are “eager for perverse enjoyment” (pareto, 1971, p. 73). pareto thus affirms war and the mass killing as necessary to “european civilization” whose advance he regards as “the fruit of an infinite number of wars and of much destruction of the weak—[by whose] sufferings the present prosperity has been acquired” (pareto, 1971, p. 48). “very moral civilized people,” he asserts, “have [also] destroyed and continue to destroy, without the least scruple, savage or barbarian peoples.” all the “so-called liberal professions [medical care and education, for example],” he declares in implicit pre-emption of any compensating services to the poor, “derive their income from factory owners” who would be deterred from producing wealth for society by such “humanitarian absurdity” (pareto, 1971, p. 304). we may see in pareto the core intellectual program of the global corporate system of rapacious greed which economists justify as “paretooptimal.” while it seems paradoxical that liberal egalitarians would appropriate pareto to their apparently opposite cause, there is less paradox than first appears. pareto’s principle of “equilibrium,” as he calls it, in which none can be made better off without others being made worse off—is a logic of status-quo adhesion. it is consistent with the most extreme and growing life-value deprivation of the majority in the name of a bigger pie. this is where the rawlsian difference principle seems to ensure fairness and justice where the pareto principle does not. yet when we examine it more carefully, we find that it has no criterial limit on justifiable inequality to ensure that it is not as permissive of the inequality which the capitalist ideology of “trickle-down” has human rights versus corporate rights 39 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 justified since rawls’ famous a theory of justice was published. in fact, almost every capitalist gain-scheme advocated in the world in these decades—global free trade and investment without borders, ever lower taxes and regulation, “right to work” breaking of unions, and so on—has been similarly represented as a “policy to benefit the poor.” now the imf calls its breaking of debtor-countries, “poverty alleviation programs.” with no life-value standards, people’s life necessities can be systematically degraded and deprived to enlarge money circuits, and so long as average income rises a few cents for the poor, justice is seen to have been served. consider here subsistence farmers driven from their farmland, their family and their community supports into the city—as hundreds of millions are every decade by these “development programs”—with the price of a cup of coffee in new average income counting to the ruling value metric as “millions lifted out of poverty.” where does justice turn? only by grounding in a defined set of means of life universally necessary to human survival and flourishing is the problem soluble, with civil commons the process of building social justice in life-coherent terms. beyond masking myths and equivocal equality: the need to reset justice theory to recognize global injustice g.a. cohen’s rescuing equality and justice is the most egalitarian opposition to the rawlsian “difference principle” within the dominant academic discourse. yet all the life-blind exclusions identified by (1) to (8) above still govern his understanding of social justice. criterial life substance, basic needs, and existing ruling social structure continue to be blocked out a-priori. the worst-off are therefore not better recognized in what makes them badly off. the reigning order of wealth allocation by unearned capital income is never mentioned. the masking myth of personal talent reaping higher pay (benefit) for superior productivity of performance (burden) remains in place unflagged. again we may see the ruling value syntax at work. thus even radical egalitarian argument here avoids stating the life goods making anyone’s life better or worse, blinkers out the money-capital governance of the world producing the deepest real inequalities, and accepts the idealizing equation of deserving more money for superior performance as the ultimate issue to argue about. conceptions of justice and injustice again disappear into the terms of the masking myth, while the ruling money-sequence syntax remains untouched. yet what could be wrong with “equality” as one’s standard to uphold against any inequality, as cohen does. what is not addressed is that the normative category of “equality” allows for limitless exploitation of its ambiguity of meaning. this is why “equality” has been at the forefront of system-justifying doctrine since john locke and the u.s. constitution he inspired, while also being a rallying cry of radical oppositions from british levellers to the french sans-culottes to socialists today. it is an equivocal concept which brings out whatever discussants project onto it. this is why market capitalism has been long described as a system of “equality” and a system of “inequality” at the same time. even when one seems to have a straight-on disagreement in principle—for example, g.a. cohen opposed to robert nozick opposed to john rawls, the list is long—the most apparently inegalitarian position like nozick’s is itself a demand for equality before the law in property protection from a redistributive state. “equality of rights” is thus routinely proclaimed even if a 40 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 growing number have insufficient food and housing, live in garbage-strewn slums, and are functionally illiterate. until analysis gets underneath the equivocal category of “equality” to what people actually need for their lives not to be deprived, the slogan prevails even in theory. on the ground, the most basic common life goods can be despoiled beneath recognition as “more equality” in both market competition and mass consumption. consider the human food system itself which has in these names been globally stripped of nutriments by ever more price-reducing factory-farming monocultures, chemical-genetic concoctions and sugar-salt foods to equalizing malnutrition and obesity. 12 re-grounding in the missing life base the most basic onto-axiological principle in the dominant theoretical discourse is itself ungrounded in life value, with a “rational plan of life” as the given frame of good for anyone. contractual justice theory and moral philosophy presuppose this frame of conception as an ultimate good prior to choice. “communitarian” justice theory does not, but its base is established social relations with no way beyond these constituted attachments to more life-coherent forms of vocation and social order. this is why liberals reject “communitarianism” for open “rational life plans” of individuals. the underlying life-ground is not touched by either. the ideological debate is waged within the parameters of the reigning system, and the logic of life value and civil commons is a-priori abstracted out. no-one in this industry of debate appears to disagree. yet what of those who have no such “rational plan of life,” but reject it as a careerist closure to the creative openness of human being? young people in particular find elders insisting on such a life plan as oppressive bores, and experience any force-fitting of them into such a “rational plan” as an injustice to their lives. yet such considerations cannot enter because the young are excluded from this scheme of justice as young. rawls is clear that their elders must choose for them, and this is not seen as a problem although it may be the upbringing source of all the others. 13 yet the young are not alone. consider the possible exceptions to this presupposition of justice. giving one’s all to the challenging tasks at hand can make the “career plan” a cramping, egoic distraction. an all-round life may rule out a “life plan” as a one-sided reduction. still the “rational life plan” remains a premise without an argument for it. in practice, the “rational life plan” means in fact a selfmaximizing financial plan—not only a career across decades of unpredictable self, age and world changes, but one within private money sequencing in the global market as the ordering of one’s life. what is not noticed at any level of this framework of “rational life plan” is that the good of life itself has silently disappeared. life as ground, ultimate value and connectively guiding goal is simply abstracted out. at the same time, world movements for social justice—whether for “basic needs fulfilment,” climate justice,” “end the war,” “food sovereignty,” “no privatization of water,” “public health not private profit,” or “no blood for oil”—cannot compute to the dominant paradigm. reflect on the contrast between justice theory that is structured to screen out these issues that move people across borders and a lifecoherent understanding of justice that speaks directly to them. the profoundly human rights versus corporate rights 41 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 unresolved issue of exactly what is due on both sides of the right-obligation ledger is only answerable by understanding the means of existence which all humanity requires to live a human life, and the social structure and agency whereby these are to be provided. this is why life-value onto-ethics defines these life means and goods with exact criteria, and comprehends the civil commons agency and life-coherent rationality required to enable them. it understands social justice on the ground, in turn, as an historical process of society’s achievement of universal human life goods for all by its social rule-system—in the most comprehensive sense of these goods, from natural capital preservation and the coordinated capabilities of scientific technology to life-protective imperatives and universal education and social security. the need/good of human vocation in particular is recognized to be the life-coherent contribution of each to these life goods to receive the benefits and enjoyment of them. this linkage of right and obligation at a system-wide level is in fact the ultimate onto-ethical issue of human civilization, and requires any system to be accountable to enabling these universal human goods as its measure of legitimacy. when we stand back to consider the historical pattern of the last 80 years, for example, we are able to recognize the meta logic of humanity’s universal life necessities/goods and their evolving civil commons provision since the great depression and war, on the one hand, and the private-profit corporate war upon them to appropriate and dismantle their resources for private profit since 1980, on the other. this meta conflict explains why ever more growth of wealth by the rule of this system goes along ever more impoverishment of most people’s lives and life conditions. this is the unseen war of social injustice—that is, ever more unnecessary suffering from life capacity reduction by deprivation of life goods. life-value understanding therefore recognizes and stands for the missing life base of social justice and human advance—the age-old process of civil commons building. thus, for example, it understands that national public healthcare which became socially provided without price barrier for all those in need of it was a major civil commons victory for social justice in many societies, just as public water and sanitation systems were a century before and still are today in much of the world. in the private corporate rule of the us, in contrast, it recognizes that citizens are ruined or bankrupted by medical costs more than any other cause, and that far more people than the population of canada are without protection. it understands too that even long-successful public health systems are endangered by the same private for-profit corporate forces which invade civil commons in all spheres in the name of “freedom of choice” or “new efficiencies” or other demonstrably false claim. yet even in progressive forms, social-structural analysis still reduces the struggle to one of waged workers against capitalism or women against patriarchy to go on missing the underlying common life-value ground. consider here the jobs and benefits of universalizing literacy as well as public healthcare, society-wide water and sewer systems as well as life-protective laws and norms, life security in old age and disability as well as in unemployment, scientific understanding normalized as well as public play and art areas, open internet communication and information as well as public parks and historic squares and streetscapes—all the civil commons spelled out in prior pages. yet while there is no level of our human lives and conditions not enabled by them, they remain invisible as common property—not only drowned by saturating devotions to private-profit commodities in the mass media, but not 42 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 penetrated either by economic-classism which blinkers them out in principle. while life-value understanding, the civil commons, and the life coherence principle in fact underlie all authentic human advance, their ultimate ground of meaning and value is not comprehended. as with the amnesiac on the individual level, society’s deeper life bearings and human identity have been lost to consciousness. the corporate system versus the civil commons: the inner logic of the world war the global disorder is glimpsed in everyday symptoms, but not in the deep-structural conflict itself—the war on common goods for human life by unliving and unaccountable corporate persons. we may sense the soulless mega machine behind the undoing of the world whose symptoms erupt every day, track capitalist class machinations, or merely intuit a system thrown out of joint. but that it is a-priori lifeblind and selects for every life-system attack that humanity is now confronted by is not decoded as a value program. backed by law and armed force with alias names, no borders of place, no duties but to money profit and no death limit, the private global corporation and its limitless morphs into new forms is in principle inhuman by this program. its moving human parts and victims no more matter to it than the public subsidies propelling its ever more gargantuan global mechanisms matter to captive states. there is much room for pro and con slogans here, but analysis needs a criterial definition of this constructed mechanism so that we do not remain lost in rapidly changing effects. its meaning is complex, but can be exactly framed in formal terms. the corporation is a changing pool of money owners defined by a unitary legal goal of profit maximization for its shareholders and their non-liability for the corporation’s actions. it is also the sole right holder as “the investor” in transnational treaty legal mechanisms whose rules since 1988 govern the global market and whose articles exclude all labour and citizens rights. above the lines of natural life and death—“lacking both a body to be kicked and a soul to be damned, they therefore do as they like” in the words of british lord chancellor turlow (1731-1806)—the corporation is the sole agent inducing obligations in contemporary international trade with a unilateral rights to sue governments for “loss of profit opportunity” through binding and punitive tribunals with powers of unlimited financial penalty. in domestic law, the private corporation writes its own charter of incorporation as distinct from its original reception of power by sovereign government conferral. this deep structure of rule is blocked out across disciplines and cultures, most of all as the collective agency behind the cumulative and systematic destruction of global life itself. while its surface expressions and human manifestations are infinite and pervasive, all conform to one syntax of rule. the subject is private money capital whose verb is seeking to become more without upper limit, and all modifiers are money-demand or its equivalents. competing money-capital subjects purchase, exchange and dispose of human and natural resources, commodities, and stock futures to become more money capital and commodities as final end. rationality is, in turn, regulatively presupposed as (i) self-maximizing strategies in (ii) conditions of scarcity or conflict over (iii) desired payoffs at (iv) minimum costs for the self to human rights versus corporate rights 43 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 (v) win/gain more. one can see that this syntax of meaning and value is what no human being is—life-value blind in every dimension—but the causal mechanism of disaster it forms is not recognized nor examined, even in philosophy whose formal paradigms of rational justice and morality simply presuppose (i) through (v). yet what systemic injustice and violation of human and ecological life systems today is not driven by globalization of this syntax of value in money-value terms? the question is not asked, but its answer discloses whether or not any other causal mechanism can explain it. formally represented again, this ruling system of rights has disconnected its private money sequences from even the tangible products of classical industrialization in $ 123 - n sequences of merger and equity predation, currency speculations, shorting bets, price arbitrages, carrying trade margins, derivative covering, credit swaps, and so on. private money-value multiplication decoupled from any commitment to life goods production of any kind captures government revenues formerly available for investment in social life goods and regulatory structures and increasingly dominates all levels of the world system. while many blame personal moral defects for the disorder—there is a profound tendency of human thought to personify—the problem goes far deeper into the built laws of the system itself. the turning points go back to u.s. court decisions that effectively prescribe corporate avarice against higher motive of business. for example, in a paradigmsetting state supreme court decision (dodge v. ford motor co., 204 michigan 459 (1919) the court held in a precedent ruling that has not since been overturned that it is a violation of “the lawful power of a corporation” to decide anything not “organized for the profit of the stockholders.” here even henry ford’s own plan to “employ more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and homes” was ruled against the law. it transgressed the rights of corporate stockholders to maximum profits revenues to themselves. in short, the corporate person could not plan for the life benefits of anyone, even “the greatest possible number” of real persons, without violating its legal purpose of private money sequencing to maximally more for money-stock investors. the corporate person remains programmed by law to this one overriding goal in exclusion of providing more life means for more people by stillprofitable business. the resolution may be expressed in one life-value principle. transnational corporate-person rule by money sequencing as the sovereign driver of world society must be regulatively reset—however this is done—so that goods are selected to sustain rather than predate social and ecological life-support-systems. state or capitalist control makes no difference except as they do one rather than the other. the civil commons principle identifies this required ordering. yet it must first be distinguished from the age-old concept of “the commons” which is used today in profoundly contradictory ways—“global commons” open to corporate-right despoliation or shared life goods of local communities. this confusion is as cooptively lethal as “civil society”—what in fact denotes private property holders, but is now whatever its users assert on opposite sides of meaning. the global crisis is hinged on the language by which people think and act, often comfortably on both sides of the fence oblivious to the burning issues blinkered out. the actual “commons” were and remain nature-given forests and fields in which villagers graze their livestock, draw water, pick plant-stuffs for food, and access wood and plants for fuel and materials in accordance with their regulating customs. 44 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 they were not, as famously misunderstood in garrett hardin’s “the tragedy of the commons” (1968), natural resources which local people spoiled by individual exploitation. before they were expropriated by the first agribusiness interests in britain—the war goes back over centuries—they were structured by community rules for their community protection and reproduction through generational time. harden’s article projects agri-business over-exploitation onto its victims, a familiar operation of the ruling ideology. in truth, the meaning and substance of the civil commons goes far beyond what is given by nature, and is opposite in regulating meaning. it includes all human-made goods that people need and to which community members have universal access by social regulation of production and use. from the earliest times on, civil commons include community abodes and lifespace, structured water sources or wells, care of the young and ill, repulsion of external attacks, human waste and burial routines or rituals, community stories, and tribal languages, sacred symbols, arts and games. readers may observe that so rich and broad are these constructed common fabrics and infrastructures of human life across the ages that any list always opens to new dimensions. as with other rigid designators of generic qualities across numberless differences and creative possibilities, the civil commons are pervasive in their variety of expression, but contingent on social development of rule-systems –the defining feature of the human species’ evolution which is open to reversal or advance, to systematically disabling as well as enabling forms and turns. thus virtually every form of the civil commons is now predated and displaced by the global corporate-rights system of rules, but beneath social recognition. what is not comprehended is not protected. yet the unseen organizing order of the civil commons is exactly verifiable and defined in principle as (i) the social rules of access or activity or production which (ii) enable the access of all members to (iii) life goods whose generic criterion is (iv) that without which human life capacity is always reduced. confusion, however, goes both ways. what is thought to in the common life interest and even revered as such is often the opposite. we can tell this by the fact that the alleged good does not qualify under these criteria and may maximally violate them—for example, armed-war aggression on distant societies promoted as “defending our country and our freedom.” the civil commons criteria, in short, provide the missing objective grounds for distinguishing what has not before been reliably told apart—government and private-sector formations that serve the common life interest versus ones that do not, but pretend that they do. in the longer pull of history, the civil commons principle also tells in every case traditions and norms worth preserving from those better left behind. without this ultimate principle of normative validity, any confusion can reign, and has done so. for example, an endless politics and ideology of invalidation as “socialism” and “communism,” on the one hand, or “unaffordable,” “not working-class centred” or “unrecognized in the literatures,” on the other, has fatefully blinkered out comprehension of humanity’s advance of universally accessible universal life goods in our era from historical backgrounds of natural scarcity, perpetual fear and misery, and arbitrary individual death—just what we see rapidly rising again in global market capitalism today. as always, the life-blind ruling value syntax prevails by screening out the common life-ground of its subjects. received political and economic understanding are indicators of the instituted mental block at work here— human rights versus corporate rights 45 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 as unconsciously biased against recognition of the civil commons as received prejudice is against recognizing the human in other races. when the dramatically lower life-costs and money-costs of public life goods are compared to private money-sequence rule by corporate persons, however, we can discern the ruling interests behind the established blinkers. for this reason, the efficiency, durability and good management of non-profit public infrastructures and common goods are unconsciously taboo to observe, inverted by the ruling system ideology into silly stereotypes like “marxist” or “nanny state,” or otherwise discounted and silenced. that social versus corporately privatized healthcare, water provision, higher research, communications, shareware, and mass transport have proven far superior in life-enabling outcomes and profitless cost efficiency is thus off limits in dominant public and academic discourses. yet where does this system superiority not hold? modern public enterprise in accordance with the civil commons principle is an incontrovertibly more evolved and proven system of production and distribution for the wellbeing of citizens’ lives in all areas in which it has been permitted to openly and democratically develop. when we consider an exception sector, such as the greening and flowering of people’s private homes and gardens in recent years in advanced communities, we find that it is yet another example of the civil commons principle. all who pass by such homes and gardens are able to enjoy their biodiverse life and beauty without charge or profit, along with community vegetable and roof gardens restoring real growth to grey urban worlds. even the pervasive corporate pesticides and herbicides sold into this community greening come to be banned by public struggles for the wider common life goods of non-toxic air and earth, which represent the civil commons at the most basic level of natural life support system protection. what then of factory production which provides machine-made mass goods? they are the great productive achievement of capitalism—but not when they systemically deplete and destroy human lives, ecosystems and natural resource bases, produce nothing of life value, and wasting whatever does not cost money to money-investors for profit. this is the structural derangement intrinsic to the system where civil commons constructs are most necessary of all—to regulate the machine-good economy to be life coherent. this process was in fact incrementally occurring in advanced societies until the global market mechanism was treaty-imposed by lead corporate states as a-priori life-blind. what is missing is the civil commons steering mechanism, compass and life-value coordinates which this system must have if it is not to continue its global ecogenocide in motion. yet there are now no unifying principles or even name for the life standards and common agency required as the deadly system destabilizations rise towards global life-ground collapse. with only factional splinters and causes seen or reported, the great common interest and agency on which human and planetary life now depend remains effectively unconscious. meanwhile corporate-system drivers of deregulation, privatization, lower taxes, corporate-right trade fiats, military spending and foreign wars as well as trillions of public dollars given to private banks and public austerity programs to pay for them together lead massive reversals of life standards and civil commons evolution across the globe. when 70% of france supports the strikes against raising the public pension age in the autumn of 2010, resistance to the totalizing private-profit agenda stands for civil commons only at the margins of its historic gains with its common life benefit still obscure. in the wider world, private money-sequence invades public 46 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 sectors in every domain, the last great frontier of the world capitalist system. civil commons are dismantled, defunded and restructured to serve the private-profit order and invariably bring in their wake decline in life goods and cost-efficiency for society—the unspeakable fact for even public broadcasters. on the global plane, the great disorder of private money-value growth cumulatively despoils humanity’s universal life goods from the atmosphere and breathing air to the phytoplankton and fish stocks of the world’s oceans. the divided state: the common life interest versus the corporate servo-mechanism life-value analysis recognizes that there is not one modern state, but two warring states within one: the now dominant state to grow private corporations and commodity markets at whatever cost to life capacities and their support systems versus public government to serve the common life interest of universal life goods for human life capacities for more people at more levels. in the defining lines of this still preconscious world war, the backwards or forward transformation of human society is decided. without recognition of its life-and-death stakes and inner logic, there is no hope beyond political rhetoric. for on the make-or-break level of public funding and taxation, government functions and expenditures are increasingly structured to subsidize private-profit interests towards bankrupting public government itself, and thus also the possibility of social justice. we are already at this pass now. longitudinal diagnosis reveals a system-wide pattern of subsidization of major forprofit corporations in staggering haemorrhages of public wealth into the global corporate maw: unceasing major tax cuts and write-offs to fractions of former liabilities to pay less tax than their lower-end employees; growing subsidies for extraction of public resources and pollutive commodity production; rising public subsidies for private automobile, weapons, aeronautical and commodity research and manufacture; perpetual expansion of heavy-gauge highways and police-and-prison systems tailored to private corporate interests; rising armed forces and corporate weapons production to guard these and other for-profit corporate appropriations and interests beyond home borders; ever increasing bankrolling of corporate-trade offices, negotiations and enforcements to systemize and extend corporate rights further within and across borders; and continued abdication of constitutional credit and currency creation to private banks for profit. all are justified as “necessary” and “in the public interest” until we recognize the opposite structure of facts, such as the unprecedentedly clear connection between the direct transfer of trillions of dollars of public wealth to failed private money-sequencers and banks who produce nothing and the public-sector and debt crises across the world since to pay the bills which bleed them dry. life-blind categories of judgement and decision prop every step of society’s reversal of a century of advances. the european union whose public sectors and civil commons infrastructures have led the world are variously hollowed out to sustain the carcinogenic system. at the same time, public constitutional control of credit and currency remains blocked out and is nowhere in this era yet directed to funding of the common life interest and social justice—not to protect human rights versus corporate rights 47 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 social and natural life support systems, not to secure employment for life-serving purpose. in these ways beneath the surface play of phenomena, the corporate-person rights’ system for private money gain coerces the world into civil as well as ecological breakdown. yet the deepest civil commons remains unrecognized, the publicly instituted and protected exchange medium itself which has been wrested away by private forces—what benjamin franklin reported as the main reason the thirteen colonies rebelled against british rule, the outlawing of the “colonial scrip” by the 1775 currency act which had enabled the independent prosperity of the colonies and whose seizure by the private bank of england caused major depression. this is the private money-sequence appropriation of public currency and credit issue continuing today as the social gene of public dispossession across the globe. as long as its public and constitutional jurisdiction is not re-grounded in public control for life-serving purpose, the step by step breakdown of the life security of peoples and their life conditions passes undetected even by marxian analysis. 14 the life-value ecology of justice: bridging rights and obligations to the civil commons in nature, rights and obligations do not exist. the right is to the stronger, and no obligations confine what is seized and predated. yet what is not seen by those affirming the “right of the stronger” across species is that few or no beings survive in nature whose functions do not contribute to their wider life-host. scientific ecology has made this clear over the last 50 years, but it is a theme of understanding that goes back to the tao-te ching over 2500 years ago. herein lies the natural basis for understanding human rights and obligations—a life-grounded ecology of justice at the human level. to put the matter boldly, the same logic of the italicized law can be applied to the human level in rights terms. humanity evolves beyond the peckingorder, leave-to-die and predation system of nature when its rules of reproduction regulate by life-protective rights and obligations. even in nature, the young are protected, fed and taught around the clock by the lives of their mothers in mammalian and bird species. . in classical and neo-classical market philosophy, however, not even this pre-human obligation exists. as adam smith says in a littleknown overview of the market’s supply-demand system, “among the inferior ranks of people the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce. (smith, 1966, p. 85). notwithstanding the homicidal logic of the ruling market system and doctrine, the human right-obligation order supersedes the natural system and, as in all social order, is constructed by the rules or norms societies live by. for life-value understanding, rights for individuals depend on obligations fulfilled to the life-hosts that sustain them at social and natural levels. just as social rules replace absolute rights of market property and trade structured to such mass human life sacrifice. the rightsobligations structure of society is life-blind until it is ordered to enable the lives of all its members by the greatest possible provision of universal life goods each requires to flourish as human. this is the life-value ecology of rights by which civil commons development has long been governed beneath principled attention and 48 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 understanding—precisely what the globalizing private money-value disorder predatorily attacks. wherever this system is not subordinated to civil authority as an instrumental mechanism of life goods provision (e.g., as efficient machine manufacturing and price mechanism within life-coherent constraints), it reverts to this predatory rule. without social recognition and regulation of this predatory logic, this system can—and typically does—blindly destroy and despoil human and natural life support systems to maximize private money returns as an end-in-itself. when in opposition to this life-blind growth, the council of canadians or the right to food movement of india or other non-governmental civil commons formation stand instead for universal provision of these life goods on the basis of a national health act and public distribution system—the latter struggling against private-take norms at all levels to achieve a universal public distribution of food as a life-saver for half of india’s children suffering from malnutrition—we observe the civil commons in action in both governmental and active-citizen forms. if we revisit the universal life goods defined in this study, we will be able to further find long-term movements of this kind operating beneath theoretical connection, a meta pattern of history not yet conscious of its meaning. when even the world’s richest men like bill gates and warren buffett try to organize their number to give away most of their wealth to social causes where human life is clearly at risk and in need of intervention—for example, malaria in the majority world where there is little market demand to generate private investment for maximal profit—we can rightly be concerned about their tax write-offs and privatefoundation powers as well as the token nature of this enterprise affecting a tiny segment of the deadly global injustice in isolated spheres. life-value analysis at the system level recognizes that only civil commons formations backed by public funding and universal life-need programs can work at a social level and in the long term. yet it also recognizes an important shift occurring—that those best at the private money-sequence game realize that something is wrong and must be responded to, the human vocation expressed even by them. beneath such positive symptoms of which george soros is perhaps the lead example, life-value understanding recognizes the deep-structural issue—that society’s regulation to secure and provide life goods otherwise in short supply or its system failure to do so is what ultimately matters. the rules by which people live decide whether a society is well or ill, and whether it rises or falls in the long run. they form the moving line between healthy societies and diseased ones, between the well-being and the illbeing of human societies and communities across time and cultures. life-and-death implications are thus built into governing rule systems which determine whether people are repressed and deprived or enabled to live and develop. herein lies the lifeand-death choice-space of society. the deciding line is towards ever more socialecological disaster by the money-sequence disorder and its supreme right of private profit with no accountability to life requirements, or towards a life-valuing order of provision of universal life necessities for ever more and accountability to social and ecological life support systems. the former is society’s cancer gene, and the latter its immune system and evolving humanity. it is not as if we do not know this inner life-value logic in our own lives. yet while global corporations are lavishly subsidized and armed-force defended by captive states they pollute the world at every level, draw down its non-renewable resources, human rights versus corporate rights 49 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 competitively disemploy and underpay workers across cultures, systematically shirk public tax obligations and run down public infrastructures, destroy the habitat of species, and so on—all within the global market competition to survive as private money sequences, the master code of value absurdly presupposed as a law of nature. this is not what any sane individual would do in her own person, of course. not even corporations will acknowledge this is what they do, but insist on the opposite in every ad. the human vocation comes out one way or another. yet as we have seen, corporate-person law and rights dictate private money-sequencing as their sole obligation, and their meta program over the last 30 years has been an all out counterrevolution against the civil commons developed since 1929 in the face of the world capitalist depression and the nazi holocaust. “economic efficiency and growth” always justify the system, but the reality is that this system wastes many times more life goods than all previous systems put together. it is, in fact the greatest diseconomy in history, but life-value diagnosis is required to see it. whether a rules system produces life goods and conditions with non-waste as its ecology of value, or depredates them for private profit as its supreme law, is the true distinction between sustainable and unsustainable systems. yet only judgment by life standards can distinguish between them. thus, goods mean in truth life goods, not any priced commodity which may be bad for ecological and human life. necessity means what is needed by the lives of human persons, not the demand of what those with money want to buy from private corporations. supply is not excluded to priced commodities for profit, but provision of human life goods by all means—civil commons, ecosystem services and womens’ unpaid work included. productivity is not measured by ever more manufacture, transport and sale of profitable commodities by loot-andpollute methods at lower money costs, but productive gains in life goods produced and secured for citizens and peoples. the human vocation of life-value understanding and advance recognizes all this as self-evident. it is what conscious and life-conscious human beings already do in their personal lives as the inner logic of the life value code and is the basis for real “family values.” at the macro level, it is what the civil commons infrastructures of societies evolve through generational time, including by a private market sector accountable to life standards. ultimately all legitimate rights are linked to the provision of these life goods (true economic demand); while the only legitimate basis of work obligation is to contribute the hours required to enable this provision (true economic supply). this is the human vocation at the level of socioeconomic organization, and subsumes whatever serves lifecoherent human and ecological life capacity. it is not a blind a-priorism of socialism versus capitalism critical economic and social-justice theory begins to comprehend this logic of real economy and life-value right and obligation, but do not yet have the life-good criteria to ground soundly underneath the measure of money-value or political-party right which have, in fact, led to steeply shorter rather than greater supply of human life goods for the world, and more life-capital loss than ever before. on the ecological plane of species survival by species contribution to the natural life host, on the social justice plane of right-obligation due to provide for a human life for each, and on the economic plane of productive efficiency and non-waste, the ruling system has cumulatively and now fatally failed. the problem is that pervasive misrepresentation and partial views have blocked recognition of the disorder and the logic of its resolution. 50 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 from the depression, anti-fascist war and decolonization to the corporate occupation the war between life requirements of human beings and private money-rights for corporate persons has been an under-theorized contradiction. before 1945 ended the most systematically genocidal system in history, the nazis’ proclaimed natural right to rule other societies by eradication of non-aryan peoples followed upon earlier cultural genocides and enslavements of other peoples from latin america to africa to india and east asia by a broader and longer-lived euro-american colonialism. accompanying and preceding these imperial systems there were the ecogenocides of the first peoples across the american hemisphere, while before and coincident with these there was the clearance of the village commons of the british countrysides during and through the rise of its world-wide empire. analysis can track this ruling pattern of ecogenocidal rule back through millennia and before corporate rule to the command of yahweh to “exterminate all the men, women and children” of the “promised land.” this enduring pattern of massacre, occupation, and exploitation where all rights favour one side only underlines the importance of europe’s emergence out of a continental zone of wars into an enduring multinational union of many-sided civil commons and rights of human life led world civilization. yet the only lasting largescale social system in modern history to regulate towards social justice and universal human life goods provision for all citizens is being systematically traduced and reversed. transnational corporate relocation of production to regions with no labour or environmental standards to sell back into societies to bankrupt their advanced and independent civil commons has been the unseen formula. captive states extending cumulative public subsidies of every kind to these same borderless corporations has been the complementing formula for financial transfer to the rich. to celebrate the results has been the function of media disinformation. “the tough new global marketplace” is the master idea, as in john d. rockefeller ’s early declaration: “the disparity in income between the rich and the poor is merely the survival of the fittest—the working out of a law of nature and a law of god” (mcmurtry, 2010b). at the level of international law which has long moved beyond old-testament market theology, sustainment of the illegitimate order has required that no life-protective or life-enabling law is enforced. instead unilateral private corporate rights are imposed by transnational trade treaties—the macro restructuring of the global system including now russia and china. overall this corporate war of movement explains why even in the aftermath of the self-caused corporate-bank collapse of 2008, virtually all public funds have gone to large corporate bank bailouts while the people impoverished by it—the disemployed, the home-expropriated, the pension-ruined— have received nothing, and the civil commons been stripped to refund the parasitic rich. it follows from the still ruling agenda that human persons and nature itself progressively dissolve into functions or detritus of transnational corporate rule by private money-sequencing. backed by countless rules enforceable against governments, corporate money-sequences rights reign. except in pretence, real persons’ lives and life support systems at individual or social levels do not factor in. while corporate rule for private profit is assumed inevitable by “economic laws” and “human nature,” it is in fact imposed by constructed corporate rights—the secret human rights versus corporate rights 51 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 history of humanity since the before the reagan presidency’s turn from “human rights” to the “fight against communism” (essentially indigenous poor people fighting for land and a human existence). world war ii, in contrast, was against rather than for fascism. history is decided, not fated. this war required civil commons to fight it—from public rations of scarce life goods to full employment of citizens. over 30 years of civil commons building was then achieved while world rule for private money profit was contained and turned back by the global social turn. its social formations evolved in mixed and socialist economies, and were backed by statesmen as well as workers and middle classes. return of this civil-commons evolution occurs again in diverse ways in latin america at the head of a growing repudiation of the “neoliberal model” in which the earth and society are reduced to transient instruments for private money sequencing to more. universal human life goods for all is the inner logic of purpose and development of this historic movement across generations and cultures. a 1944 state of the union address by u.s. president franklin d. roosevelt reveals the structural shift of official policy goals towards government by life values and standards against enemy powers within and without. roosevelt said in précis: “we cannot be content if some fraction of people is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure. true individual freedom cannot exist without life security. regardless of station, race, or creed, there is a right to a useful and remunerative job, to adequate food and clothing and recreation, to a decent living, to freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home and abroad, to a decent home, to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health, to adequate protection from the fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment, to a good education.” observe how comprehensive and concrete the universal life goods named here are. the human vocation, standards of life value, the life coherence principle, and civil commons constructs are all implicit. yet roosevelt was aware of the private corporate reaction still in force which had collaborated with the nazis in armouredvehicle manufacture, information technology for concentration camps, and chemical and pharmaceutical production. 15 from the ultimate socio-political conflict he was standing within, the “leader of the free world” concluded: “our rightful place in the world depends on how fully human rights have been carried into practice for citizens. for unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world. but there are grave dangers of rightist reaction and should it develop it is certain that, even although we shall have conquered our enemies abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism at home.” 16 and indeed roosevelt’s civil commons project of universal human life rights has since been attacked at every stitch of historical construction by private money-sequence powers. he rightly foresaw that universal life goods accessible to all must be “carried into practice,” or the “rightist redaction at home” and “the spirit of fascism” will prevail. one might conclude from post-1980 imposition of transnational corporate-right rule that the enemy roosevelt alluded to has in fact won in both the us and the world, but in a different way than in the past. it has reversed the evolved social state by three deciding levels of “rightist reaction” which form a new strategic pattern into the present. my research over 25 years has found and confirmed a systematic structure underlying what we might call the great reversal. it can be concisely formulated at a high order level of conception as follows: (1) systematic defunding, privatization and reversal of evolving social sectors in the name of eliminating public debt and 52 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 deficits caused in fact by i. compounding high-interest bank rates, ii. radical tax cuts to corporations and higher incomes, and iii. increased military spending; (2) by corporate-trade treaties with overriding rights decided and instituted outside elected legislatures and without electoral support by transnational corporate agents in and out of public office; (3) by private funding of propaganda against the social entitlements and for market-capitalist values, while increasingly tying higher research funding itself to corporate commodity and weapons development. 17 the elements of this systematic pattern of “rightist reaction” to the present may be tested on all the phenomena of cutback on civil commons formations over the last 30 years, and will find few deviations from it. the evidence has, in fact, become ever more abundant. these regulating principles continue today beneath public and scientific reports, and all deprive most people of the life goods they would otherwise have access to had civil commons development continued its trajectory of advance from the war against fascism. claims or assumptions that social programs became “unaffordable” for government are silly because they ignore the general facts that the debt and deficit growths used as pretext for social-program slashing were over 94% due to prior tax cuts to corporations and the rich (canada’s typical pattern), and to 20% prime compound-interest rates charged to governments by private banks silently appropriating the constitutional right of governments to issue credit through public treasury (as swiftly occurred for wall street later). the “unaffordable” argument also ignores the general fact that government tax and other subsidies to private arms manufacturers and agribusiness alone exceed the cost of social programs in the us one needn’t refer to big lies to recognize them and their underlying pattern of serving one factional interest—private-profit money sequencing. since the fall of the soviet union in 1991, there has been no need to compete with better social programs and universal life goods because now transnational corporate persons have the right to do as they please where there are no obstacles like free unions or independent democratic procedures. globalization in this condition is what is never reported in legislatures or by the media—the globalization of corporate-person rights as absolute, unaccountable, and unlimited—in short, fascism in a new form. 18 since the law of motion of this globalization is to become more private money demand without boundary across all borders and domains, its rule technologically expands by increasingly powerful instruments from earth-moving machinery and ocean-bottom drillers to genetically modified organisms and financial derivatives within government-deregulated-and-subsidized conditions. weapons of mass destruction and monopoly mass media are then the transnational guarantors of world submission. social or environmental justice in this reigning disorder does not factor in except as false ideology, and is attacked where it does—unless, as in brazil, the economy functions far more efficiently with guaranteed incomes for poor mothers, or china, where private banks are on a tight leash, or venezuela or bolivia where public oil wealth is allocated to public purposes. the war goes on one way or another, blinkered out in the anglo-american world and its client dictatorships. it always goes better for life and justice when the disorder is recognized and put under publicly accountable control, and always worse if not. where the transnational corporaterights reign is not put on a leash or public resources reclaimed, the worst creeps rapidly and pervasively. at the macro level, human beings are ever more widely structured as inputs to serve the corporate money-sequence value mechanism while human rights versus corporate rights 53 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 public-sector, farming and home-worker positions are eliminated continuously in tens of millions. on the environmental level, there is no research in the last 30 years that rebuts the general fact that every life-system on the planet is in decline or collapse. while invariably represented by economists and corporate media as “competing for prosperity and freedom,” life-value understanding recognizes the opposite in fact—an absolutist social construction led by armed force and command treaty at every step that deprives ever more people of their necessities of life and, thus, their freedom. while rights in general mean lawful or law-backed claims to goods of any kind, the regulating rights of the global corporate system are in fact absolutist rather than democratic because they: (1) recognize only the trans-border rights of money-capital owners or “investors”; (2) exclude all rights not backed by private money demand, and (3) legally erase any national legislation not in compliance with these treatyinstituted rights. the trade-and-investment treaties defining this rights system are anchored in the north american free trade agreement (nafta) and the subsequent world trade organization (wto) which require that foreign corporations receive equal treatment “without discrimination” in all societies so contracted in all matters of purchase, sale and subsidy, as well as the corporate-person or “investor” right to sue governments which do not comply or which are alleged to have caused “loss of profit opportunity” (e.g., by banning advertisements for a commodity such as cigarettes or regulating against a fuel additive with neurotoxins for national health reasons). at the same time, what used to be a matter of political debate and judgement within national borders—for example, to exchange domestic market access and natural resources for reciprocal returns from the corporations receiving these rights (e.g., manufacturing in the host country for free access to the domestic auto market)—have been outlawed. with all other deviations by democratic selfgovernment, they are punishable by severe financial or trade penalty. the ultimate right to exchange between domestic public and foreign corporation is thereby abolished in favour of unilateral corporate rights—the only actual content of tradeinvestment treaties in this period. much follows from absolutist prescription against the sovereign rights of government to negotiate with foreign corporate persons—in fact, the abolition of their free trade. transnational corporations receive what they have not had since decolonization –the rights to sell in foreign markets without impediment, to buy domestic industries without limit, to receive guaranteed free access to the natural resources of other societies, and to receive government subsidies on a citizen basis. sovereign government over society’s mode of reproduction is in this way replaced by foreign corporate rights as “non-discrimination” against them. no rights, on the other hand, are granted to workers, or citizens. in this new “free trade” arrangement, no government at any level may pass legislation which infringes these corporate rights or “profit opportunities,” with central trade-lawyer tribunals judging in secret and punishing governments for deviation from the new rules. “performance requirement” and “process of production” condition by host or importing society, formerly givens of democratic self-government, are made illegal and subject to unsustainable financial punishment. the ecological consequences are least of all discussed. unconditional rights of transnational corporations to nationally owned natural resources for exploitation of oil, minerals, fish and timber permit their worldwide corporate looting of one region after another with no accountability under the 54 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 rules for future supplies or ruinous effects (u.s. exceptionalism aside). with the binding regulations of these corporate rights upheld and adjudicated by secret meetings of trade tribunals, proceedings are unpublished and judgements to enforce the “least trade restrictive practices” in all matters are final and not appealable. the new rules by which societies’ economies must live are, however, effectively outside public debate, as may be tested by seeking where they are identified anywhere in public policy forums and economic policy discussions. yet this inner logic of supreme rights to corporate persons and none to living persons has received little academic attention, including by moral philosophy, justice theory and ethicist literatures. because the new regulatory apparatus runs to over 20,000 pages of legal jargon in the prototype nafta, few have the skill or patience to read the defining terms. because as well the myriad articles nowhere reveal the underlying principles regulating them, the philosophical under-labour required to decode their moral meaning has been missing. the ruling corporate rights structure has also been obscured by confusing it with the opposite ordering of the local free market which occurs on public property, sells local produce and crafts, does not advertize, prepackage or expatriate profits, has no external hierarchy or stock-profit demands, does not lobby governments for handouts and favours to dominant sellers, and cannot manipulate supply or demand. the global corporate “free market” is, in short, the opposite of its representation. as elsewhere, the meanings of words are reversed. in line with the unobserved sea-shift across borders in the name of opposite meanings, rights of human beings and fellow life do not count in. indeed individual rights become the rights of corporate persons instead—rights to commercial free speech with no criterion of factual truth, for example, and to anonymous external funding of election propaganda with no limit as, again, “freedom of speech.” the equal rights of the u.s. fifth amendment intended to protect freed slaves are also appropriated by corporations as “equal persons” so that 99% of litigation for these equal rights are to protect these “corporate persons” which have been fabricated by law. life-protective and enabling rights of real persons are at the same time expelled from human work across domains. corporate rights have become so unquestioned that jürgen habermas adopts their rule as a technical given -“the technical-administrative apparatus” of the “norm-free sociality” of the economy. the most powerful norm system ever is thus assumed as the opposite at the highest levels of theoretical research publication. life-value analysis, in contrast, recognizes the absurd misrepresentation of reigning norms as not norms. no social system is decided by natural laws. as social constructions, rule systems vary widely from social order to social order through cultures and the means available. in our era, society’s rule and rights systems have developed in fact a primary contradiction between them: human-life-protective/enabling norms and rights versus money-capital-protective/enabling norms and rights. the latter, however, rule and do so by being ludicrously conceived as not norms at all, but technical givens like the law of gas expansion driving wheels. the underlying normative contradiction is even deeper than between classes or cultures: it is between human and ecological life’s inherent requirements both to reproduce and biodiversify in more forms and unliving money-capital’s imperative to produce private commodities and profit in violation of life needs and capacities at every level. the former increasingly necessitate life standards to enable human life and life human rights versus corporate rights 55 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 conditions to survive and flourish (the civil commons), while the latter expands whatever cumulative degradation and exhaustion of resources and sinks it causes (which results from corporate rights without accountability). individuals as well as states have become creatures of this ruling meta program. for grounding in a concrete particular case, consider a microcosm of the corporate rights system, a phenomenological decoding of the rights and freedom of the individual in this ruling disorder. while individual right and freedom appear to be another indisputable fact repeated mantra-like across the fields of public and private meaning, life-value analysis decodes a more sinister pattern of individual unfreedom and life oppression. thus, for example, the “free individual expressing his rights” becomes his spending on and consuming power-motor commodities. decoded s/he is propelled along the following steps of self right: “(1) i the consumer has a right to (2) the hearing and sight fields around me (2) because of my high-cost commodity motor to (3) occupy the public life space i choose (4) with no barrier to this consumer enjoyment nor (5) rations for what grows scarcer for the world (6) whatever sentience of other life is violated because (7) i have bought and paid for it and (8) this is my right and my freedom. life-value analysis looks beyond such incantations of individual rights and freedoms to what is, in fact, a life-blind expression of the corporate meta program in individual form with no obligation to recognize the requirements of other life. re-grounding in and advancing the human rights which have been won there has in fact been a long war of corporate rights against life security of human communities and ecologies over centuries—from the private east india company over 250 years ago ruling entire peoples with supreme rights over life and death to more omnipresent global corporations today competitively indifferent to any lifedestructive cost so long as it is profitable to be so. while heinous life consequences are ignored, projected onto opponents and left to deepen and spread so that all may seem hopelessly bound to disaster, life-value analysis recognizes a deeper and more human substructure long developing beneath the corporate despotism. it recognizes for principal example the universal life-protective norms that have been recognized since the 1939-45 world war which are of life-and-death necessity and advanced in meaning. the problem is not that such civil norms have not been recognized across national and cultural borders. it is that they have been usurped by global corporate rule and backed by captive states to be above the law. consider the united nations universal declaration of human rights instituted within four years of roosevelt’s “new bill of rights” near the end of the world war. one underlying principle governs each and all of the rights it recognizes—to protect and enable human life in all domains. each is also directed against a common enemy—the forces known to violate these human life rights. the u.n. declaration is worth citing in full to recognize their underlying life-value logic: the rights to “freedom of speech and belief,” “freedom from want,” “dignity and worth of the human person,” “not to be subjected to—inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment,” “equal access to public service,” “universal and equal suffrage,” “social security—and [the resources required for] the free development of personality,” “work [and]—just and favourable conditions of work,” “rest and leisure,” “standard of living adequate for the health 56 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 and well-being of himself and his [sic] family, including food, clothing housing and medical care,” and “education—and equally accessible higher education.” the underpinning principle of all of these rights, the one onto-ethical ground of which each is another and complementary aspect of an implied moral whole, is to enable human life against its many-sided oppression. the u.n. declaration of human rights can thus be understood—although this meaning has eluded philosophy, law and economics—to be a universal statement of life-value morality and social justice agreed to by states across cultures. revealingly the universal declaration of human rights has been criticized from both the left and the right. the marxist conceives it as a “merely ideological mask” of capitalist reality, while the right denounces it as “dangerous nonsense” and “communism in disguise.” yet the real problem is that the common life support systems required for these human life rights are the still missing ground—the infrastructures not yet made conscious as the defining substance of human advance. states jealous of their sovereignty have not prevented universal life rights so much as imperial corporate states have prevented popular governments from the social reforms necessary to realize them. for example, there has been a united nations’ charter of economic rights and duties of states since 1974 which spells out the conditions required for human life standards to be economically instituted at a state level. this codified global agreement was passed by the united nations general assembly by a 120-6 vote just after the u.s.-supported and murderous military coup of the democratically elected government of chile. while this u.n. charter of economic rights was cooperatively written and near-unanimously supported by nation-state representatives to the u.n. from across the world to lead another kind of globalization than the one unveiled by the u.s.-managed pinochet coup in chile, it was effectively annulled by extra-parliamentary passage of the transnational corporate rights edicts explained above. under this new world order, the terms of the charter of economic rights and duties of states were silently overridden in their entirety—in particular the “sovereign and inalienable right of every state to choose its economic system,” and its “permanent sovereignty, including possession, use and disposal over all its wealth, natural resources and economic activities.” the political rights of states “to regulate and exercise authority over foreign investment within its national jurisdiction” and “to regulate and supervise the activities of transnational corporations” were erased by the new global corporate-rights system. ensuring that this reversal was as inconspicuous as possible, the new transnational corporate-rights system was undiscussed in legislatures, unread by legislators, and formed, adjudicated and enforced outside of electoral processes and democratic accountability. david rockefeller, a leader of “the new world order” and founder of the transnational bilderberg meetings behind it, frankly described its meaning to the 1991 gathering of world leaders in a leaked transcription: “a supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practised in past centuries.” private corporate rights were thus given the force of supreme world law without recognition of the fact that the “plan for world rule” had long been ascribed to the much weaker soviet union. just as the life-protective rights of the 1948 u.n. declaration were earlier decoupled from the economic conditions required for their realization, and just as the collective rights of national economies to develop in human rights versus corporate rights 57 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 control of their own natural resources and markets under the protection of the u.n. charter of economic rights were overridden, so also further life-protective rights formed by the united nations were ignored or vilified. examples include, but are not confined to, the u.n. convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (1951), united nations convention on the political rights of women (1952), and the convention on the rights of the child (1986). binding international criminal law existing in some form since the nazi war leaders were tried under the nuremburg charter to protect the lives of people against the “supreme crime” of a war of aggression and “all the crimes following from it”—“war crimes,” the “crime of genocide” and “crimes against humanity”—has also stayed unenforced since. its final institutional formation as the international criminal court (i.c.c.) in 2002 has been restricted to prosecution of unallied third-world leaders, or—in guantanamo style—young muslims resisting u.s.-led nato occupation of afghanistan charged with “war crimes.” the “supreme crime of a war of aggression” by the major states has at the same time been kept beyond the court’s jurisdiction. as in the 2003 invasion of iraq and corporate privatization of its economy and oil extraction, the global corporate rights system proceeds across borders and above the law as did the prior fascism. but it does so more long-lastingly by a money-led occupation of electoral processes and government ministries, and the extra-parliamentary dictates of transnational treaties. today we may observe life-enabling and protective rights receiving little or no enforcement, while private money-capital rights of corporations backed by transnational u.s.-led armed force are systematically prescribed in trade treaties to violate them. with widespread confusion and cynicism about “human rights,” and corporate-person rights overriding them under the mask of “free trade,” one might think the corporate war against life-value social justice had been won. yet lifeprotective norms still continue to evolve beneath the interregnum. one need only look at the unprecedented world charters and covenants cited above to see a 70-yearlong swing towards international life-security norms before unimagined. the problem is in implementation. legal scholars widely agree that the issue with even the legally binding covenants on life-protective rights is the problem of enforceability across borders. few or none see that if the same regulatory instruments were applied as they are in the enforcement of private corporate rights across borders, the problem of enforceability would be solved. such enforcement of universal life-protective rights, however, is so effectively blocked that not even learned advocates of human rights recognize the possibility. all that is required is the inclusion in international trade treaties of those life standards which are already formed and agreed upon across nations. the united nations international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (1966), for mainspring example, is both legally binding and global in jurisdiction. it is an established global legal and lifevalue ground from which to enforce life-protective rights against unaccountable global corporate money-rights. yet its existence and its articles are not recognized by over 99% of the population in a world whose public media and journals are overwhelmingly owned by a few private transnational corporations. the terms of the international covenant are nonetheless of great significance because they are legally binding and their unifying meaning is to guarantee universal access to universal human life goods: namely, “just and favorable conditions of work,” “a decent living for themselves and their families,” “safe and healthy working conditions” (article 7); 58 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 “the right of everyone to form trade unions—to social security including social insurance” (article 8); “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living,” to “an equitable—environmental and industrial hygiene” (article 11), and to “distribution of world food supplies in relation to need”(article 12), and “primary education compulsory and free to all” as well as “equally accessible” and “progressively free” provision of “higher education” (article 13). we may see how these articles of the binding international covenant are all subsumed by the universal human life needs and goods of humanity spelled out in an earlier subsection. in deeper implicit significance, they express the underlying life-value onto-axiology, life-coherence principle, and civil commons meaning as so far recognized in international law. it is as if the principled grounds and theory of life-value understanding were at work as the higher value syntax of human and civil commons evolution underneath the private corporate occupation and ecogenocidal exploitation of life support systems. what has been overlooked in the human rights struggle, however, is the linkage of rights to obligations at the economic level—not only to fellow human but to ecological requirements themselves. this is what the human vocation and civil commons movement bridge towards in the next steps of humanity’s social evolution. how to live—critical philosophy’s oldest question—is not only an individual issue, but more primarily a social one. a life-coherent rule system has already been largely achieved in international law and the most developed communities. we already know it is possible to agree upon the terms across diverse cultures because they have already been defined and signed as a solemn covenant across diverse nations. all of the life standards named in the international covenant are, in fact, governed by the same underlying principle governing advanced societies—provision of that without which human life capacity is always reduced. together these life goods and standards carry the full substance of what the world’s nations have agreed that all humanity requires to survive and flourish, however different its cultures. yet the private money-sequencing system and corporate-right rule have warred upon these universal life standards at all levels. thus not one article of this international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights has been permitted into the solely effective mode of transnational law that humanity knows—its economic treaties. even when operationalization of life-protective law in this treaty system is known to work—as the 1989 montreal ozone protocol has proved by its explicit inclusion in the nafta prototype of the wto and general adhesion to it—the ruling meta-program blocks even public conception of the principle. it is forgotten as an exception once the emergency has passed. in more evolved form, the european union has long made corporate rights accountable to human life rights across borders by its community charter of fundamental social rights. its underlying principle of governance is principally livelihood rights: to equitable remuneration; a maximum number of hours per working week; free association in trade unions and collective bargaining; professional training; sex equality; minimum health and security provision; employer-employee consultation and participation; a minimum working age of 16; minimum pension rights; protection for disabled workers; and prohibition of slavery, forced labour and the use of the human body or body parts for financial gain. predictably, no level of the european union’s social organization has not been attacked by european big business and transnational media, as does the economist in human rights versus corporate rights 59 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 every issue. this is the predictable reaction of the global money faction whose sequences of control and growth run through elected heads of state and politicians themselves. nonetheless the integrated moral-economic european model has already evolved over half a century regulated by life standards, and has worked far better than any other international paradigm over 60 years in protecting the lives and freedoms of citizens. of course, it is everywhere denigrated by the corporate politicians and media for restrictions on “globally competitive” practices with no life standards, so that the life security and freedoms of the great majority are ridden under even as i write. this is the post-1945 neo-fascist war under cover, and the race to the bottom of life standards for the rest of the world. yet it only succeeds so far as it remains uncontested as corporate-right usurpation of humanity’s social evolution, and cumulative destruction of the life-carrying capacities of the planet itself. recognition of the life-value logic of social justice and its civil commons foundation are the missing ground and link of human emancipation. notes 1 the fallacious logic and devious strategy of locke’s argument is anatomized step by step in value wars: the global market versus the life economy (london: pluto press) 65-73. 2 the formal axiom of life value is: x is of value if and only if, and to the extent that, it constitutes or enables a more coherently inclusive range of life than without it: within the fields of life of thought (conceptual and image), felt side of being (sentience, emotion, mood), and/or action (animate movement through space-time). conversely, x is of disvalue if and only if, and to the extent that, it disables life so defined. 3 verified by author may 1, 2011. 4 philip mirowski’s machine dreams (2000) is a very informed study tracking the machine model in contemporary market economic theory into the “automaton theater” of economic, military and decision-theory research today – extending the magic thinking of the invisible hand’s necessitation of the best of possible worlds into the mechanism of a life-blind system automatism. 5 bernard hodgson spells out the implications of edgeworth’s principle in his economics as moral science (heidelberg: springer press, 2000). 6 edward bernays, a nephew of freud , explains how in his propaganda (1933) new york: liveright. as the primary pioneer of modern mass-market conditioning, he identifies the key of the process is to appeal to and control unconscious desires to sell commodities and manufacture social consent at the same time. my essay entry, “the ruling group-mind” (encyclopedia of case-study research, 2008) spells out the unexamined premises and lifedestructive consequences of this and other group-mind phenomena. 7 although. g.a. cohen favourably cites richard titmuss in his rescuing justice and equality (2008) as advocating the individual motive force of, nicely put in the abstract, “principled commitment and fellow feeling” (p. 189), neither he nor titmuss recognizes the objective civil commons principles which unify and define these life-support institutions across cultures and over millennia. 8 amartya sen’s nobel speech on “social choice” preconsciously reveals the problem. in his immense bibliography, there is no concept of social choice he reports that does not assume it as an aggregate of individual agents choosing in market, electoral or other such atomic grid of choice space 9 thus as in-all $12 trillion-plus of government money was extended in private financial arrangements in the us to “get credit going again,” not even this function was remotely 60 john mcmurtry studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 served. senator bernie sanders reports the secrecy surrounding these facts that he was only able to discover by an amendment to federal financial reform legislation, <http//sanders.senate.gov> accessed 19/12/2010. 10 amschel mayer rothschild famously said in 1838, “permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and i care not who makes its laws.” there is much fact to support his view. even the world’s most powerful man decades earlier, napoleon, depended on privatebank credit for his wars of expansion until, growing tired of the negative effects on business and in light of napoleon’s claim that the bank of france “belongs more to the emperor than to the shareholders,” the private-bank creators of credit shifted alliances through a regime change. abraham lincoln decades later noted the long-term adverse effect of the private “money powers” on america when he said shortly before his assassination: “the money powers prey on the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. the banking powers are more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. . . . . as a most undesirable consequence of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow. the money power will endeavour to so prolong its reign by working on the prejudices until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of the few, and the republic is destroyed” (cited by andrew gavin marshall in chossudovsky and marshall (eds.), the global economic depression (2010), pp. 310-11). 11 few realise that pareto’s classic is based on dyadic asset exchange with no relation to life needs, given distribution, work hours, ecological support systems, or economic performance. 12 the corporate-servant state and academies enable the equalizing pathology. in britain’s department of health under new “big society” conservative government, for example, the alcohol “responsibility group” is chaired by the wine and spirit trade association, diet and health is dominated by processed and fast-food corporations, and the sub-group on calories is chaired by pepsi-walker chips. (felicity lawrence, “fast food firms get health role,” guardian weekly, (19/11/2010). north american university researchers meanwhile lead “the life sciences”—a re-brand term coined by industrial food giants—in commercial research in genetic contamination and agricultural-consumer products with no life standards. 13 this argument is made in mcmurtry, “the case for children’s liberation,” interchange (1979-80) 10(3), with critical response and reply. 14 mcmurtry (1999/2002), the cancer stage of capitalism (london and tokyo: pluto and springer press) explains this anomaly and the underlying money-sequence source and cause of cumulative world system collapse. ellen brown (2010), the web of debt (baton rouge, louisiana: third millennium press) provides a thorough historical account of the private money power’s control and predation of public currency from before 1776 to the wall street public bailout since 2008. 15 little known even today is that the ford, general motors, ibm and dupont corporations produced for the nazi war machine in these functions even after the us was at war with it (charles higham, trading with the enemy: an expose of the nazi-american money plot 1933-1949. new york, dell publishing co., 1983). moreover these corporations received government compensation for their bombed factories and losses in germany after the war was ended, an indication of the supreme and borderless power wielded upon which the “new world order,” a nazi concept, was instituted by national and international mechanisms of law identified in this paper. 16 this was the preamble to roosevelt’s introduction of the second bill of rights in his state of the union address, january 11, 1944 before his untimely death prevented its formalization as policy and law. 17 i have tracked these strategic patterns in depth in prior work such as unequal freedoms: the global market as an ethical system (toronto: garamond/university of toronto press, 1998). 18 the underlying fascist logic is explained in my fascism and neo-conservatism: is there a difference? (1984), praxis international 4 (1), 86-102. human rights versus corporate rights 61 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011 references bernays, e. w. (1933). propaganda. new york, ny: liveright. chossudovsky, m., & marshall, a.g. (eds.). (2010). the global economic crisis: the great depression of the xxi century. montreal: global research publishers. cohen, g. a. (2008). rescuing justice and equality. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. edgeworth, f. (1932). mathematical psychics. london: london school of economics. glasbeek, h. (2002). wealth by stealth: corporate crime, corporate law and the perversion of democracy. toronto: between the lines press higham, c. (1983). trading with the enemy: an expose of the nazi-american money plot 1933-1949. new york, ny: dell publishing co. hodgson, b. (2001). economics as moral science. heidelberg: springer press. huxley, a. (1947). point counter point. london: chatto and windrus. international forum on globalization (1998). the siena declaration on the crisis of economic globalization. siena, italy. locke, j. (1980). the second treatise on government. indianapolis, in: hackett. marx, k. (1986). capital, vol. 1. moscow: progress publishers. mcmurtry, j. (1979-80). the case for children’s liberation. interchange, 10(3), 10-28 mcmurtry, j. (1984). fascism and neo-conservatism: is there a difference? praxis international, 4(1), 86102. mcmurtry, j. (1998). unequal freedoms: the global market as an ethical system toronto and westport ct: garamond and kumarian. mcmurtry, j. (1999). the cancer stage of capitalism. london and tokyo: pluto and springer press. mcmurtry, j. (2002). value wars: the global market versus the life economy. london: pluto press. mcmurtry, j. (2008). the ruling group-mind. in a.j. mills, g. durepos, & e. wiebe (eds.), encyclopedia of case-study research (pp. 790-793). toronto: sage. mcmurtry, j. (2009). rationality and scientific method: paradigm shift in an age of collapse.” interchange, 40(11), 69-91. mcmurtry, j. (2010). what is good? what is bad? the value of all values across time, place and theories. oxford: eolss. publishers. mcmurtry, j. (2010a). reclaiming rationality and scientific method: the life coherence principle as global imperative. retrieved from: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21302 mcmurtry, j. (2010b). the disparity in income between the rich and the poor is merely the survival of the fittest: the working out of a law of nature and a law of god. retrieved from www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/back-good-old-days. mirowski, p. (2000). machine dreams. cambridge: cambridge university press. nussbaum, m., & sen, a. (eds.). (1993). the quality of life. clarendon: oxford university press, nussbaum, m. (2000). women and human development/the capabilities approach. new york: cambridge university press. o’neill, o. (1998). towards justice and virtue. oxford: oxford university press. pareto, v. (1971). manual of political economy, new york: a.m. kelley. polanyi, k. (1944/2000), the great transformation. boston: beacon press. rawls, j. (1971). a theory of justice. cambridge mass: harvard university press. sen, a. (1992). inequality reexamined. cambridge mass: harvard university press sen, a. (1998). the possibility of social choice. trinity college, cambridge: 1998 nobel lecture in economics. retrieved from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1998/senlecture.pdf smith, a. (1966). an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. new york: a.m. kelley. titmuss, r.m. (1968). commitment to welfare, london: allen and unwin. turner, t., & brownhill, l. (2001). gender, feminism and the civil commons. canadian journal of development studies, xxii, 819-855. weisbrot, m., baker, d., & rosnick, d. (2006). the scorecard on development: 25 years of diminishing progress. international journal of health services, 36, (2): 211-234. woodhouse, h. (2009). selling out: academic freedom and the corporate market. montreal & kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21302 file:///c:/users/ant/documents/copyediting%20for%20ssj/2011/special_issue_on_life-value_and_social_justice/www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/back-good-old-days ryan final correspondence address: kennedy laborde ryan, school of journalism & communication, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: kennedylryan@cmail.carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 470-473, 2022 dispatch stim, like, and subscribe: autistic children and family youtube channels kennedy laborde ryan carleton university, canada the title of this dispatch comes from a play on words of the ubiquitous youtuber call-out, typically uttered within the first 30 seconds of a video after a cheery “hey guys!.” “likes” or “thumbs up” bump up the position of a video in the site’s algorithm and allow youtube to fine-tune recommendations by showing users videos that others who have similar interests spend their time watching (arthurs et al., 2018). this dispatch examines the challenges posed by the family vlogging channel fathering autism (fatheringautism, n.d.), which focuses on disability and family dynamics and bills itself as a distinctive voice in the digital disability space. i aim to question the oft-muddied distinction between education and entertainment in fathering autism’s content, in order to contribute to discussions surrounding social justice and autism. specifically, i question whether it is ethical to create content that relies heavily on the participation of a nonspeaking autistic child. this question is part of a larger debate that considers whether it’s ethical to cast any children in homegrown content, given the limits to the consent they can give to being filmed. asa maas, the vlogger behind the fathering autism channel, has credited his family’s success on the platform to their overlapping circles of identity. maas put it succinctly when he accepted an award at a healthcare disruptors industry conference in november of 2019: not only is fathering autism a family vlogging channel, it is also an autism family channel, as well as one that focuses on an autistic girl. a recent systematic review and meta-analysis pegged the ratio of autism in boys and girls at 3:1, which is higher than the research community’s previously stated and widely circulated benchmark of 4:1 (loomes et al., 2017). this means that families like the maas’ are underrepresented in depictions of autism, which are only slowly becoming limits of informed consent on disability family youtube channels studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 470-473, 2022 471 more inclusive of girls and women on the spectrum (thorpe, 2017). the channel, which has been hosting videos since 2011, focuses on various maas family activities. most of their vlogs, which are posted daily, feature jacksonville-based asa and his wife priscilla as well as their two children: 17-year-old isaiah and abbie who is 14, nonspeaking, and autistic. the content of the vlogs runs the gamut from coffee runs, pranks, and drone footage to sensory meltdowns and frank discussions about autism itself. the volume of footage that emerges from the family’s lives is astonishing – each video seems to run at an average of 12 to 20 minutes. according to socialblade, a social media aggregator and analytics platform that draws from youtube’s publicly available application programming interface (api),1 as of december 2019, fathering autism had 447,000 subscribers, 1,044 uploaded videos, and 86.5 million unique video views. socialblade estimates the income the maas family draws from the channel at somewhere between $2,400 and $38,300 per month, or $28,700 to $459,700 per year (social blade stats, n.d.). these numbers do not include all of the family’s income streams from the channel: in addition to revenue generated directly from youtube, the maas’s also sell their own line of merchandise and consult for companies who wish to better serve the needs of their customers with autism. they also have quite a robust presence on amazon affiliates, an initiative of the seattle-based company that allows influencers to earn commissions on a curated selection of their favourite products.2 an uncomfortable aspect of family vlogs is that performing authenticity becomes the family business; fathering autism is the main source of the maas’s income as discussed by asa (fatheringautism, 2018). both parents work fulltime as content creators, with asa producing, editing, and recording daily videos, while priscilla posts cooking tutorials on her pots, pans, priscilla channel. unfortunately, fathering autism’s success is predicated on a representation of autism that shows neurodiversity through a neurotypical lens in which the perspective of the autistic subject is wholly absent from the final product. all of abbie’s communication, her signing and stims, are interpreted through another family member, and a significant portion of the videos serve as educational content about autism (sample titles include “autistic bedtime routine,” and “how a girl with autism talks”) without any input from abbie beyond her presence. abbie has yet to communicate for herself to the camera, and by extension to the audience, which raises the question of how much leeway has been given to that possibility. what worries me is that the “educational” messages being disseminated come from a neurotypical viewpoint that relies heavily on the medical model to frame autism as a “condition” that must be “managed.” autism was 1 an api is what developers use to build apps that mesh with the youtube platform. 2 a selection from the fathering autism affiliates page includes filming equipment favourites, sensory playthings, and road trip essentials. kennedy laborde ryan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 470-473, 2022 472 identified as early as 1911 as a “mode of thinking” rather than a “disorder in and of itself” (mcguire, 2016). this understanding of autism is analogous with ways of thinking that would later give rise to a social model of disability – one that is only shown in glimpses on the fathering autism channel. surveillance of autism is as old as the naming of autism itself. indeed pathologization and surveillance of neurodiverse individuals go hand in hand, an uncomfortable reality that is compounded by the filming and packaging of voyeuristic content that relies on the shock value of “deviant” autistic traits for entertainment purposes. the surveillance of abbie in the maas’s home is near-constant.3 it is unclear whether abbie has given consent to be filmed; it seems that her brother isaiah has, as he participates actively in the videos. abbie is non-speaking and communicates differently than the rest of her family, which means that on the fathering autism vlog they are the sole interpreters of her will and intent. all of her utterances are filtered through one of her family members, either through signing or a communication app on her ipad; this leaves a lot to be desired in terms of self-representation. when youtube is the family business, the question of what protections are in place for children whose home has been turned into a workplace emerges. in the case of fathering autism, the family has been transmogrified into a production team. each member of the maas family works to move forward the entertainment product that their life has become. household tasks that would have previously been routine are now the raw material of their videos. this embellishment of the benign – the performance of authenticity for views – merits further critical scrutiny, especially when it is purportedly done in the name of autism education. abbie and isaiah are examples of a much larger pool of invisible workers: the children of influencers who are labouring in what i’ve identified through researching this dispatch as a legal and regulatory blind spot. being children of media influencers puts them in a legal grey area. conventionally, child stars are labelled as performers and enjoy protections as workers. the california child actor’s bill, known colloquially as the coogan act,4 is designed to protect child performers’ rights as workers, and contains specific guidelines about the amount of earnings that must be set aside until adulthood, as well as strictly enforceable rules about how many hours a child can spend on set per day. no such protections currently exist for the children of influencers, or even influencer children. the recent decision by youtube to demonetize content aimed at children seems to be a step in the wrong direction, due to the massive waves of backlash that are currently rippling through professional influencer circles, as well as the ongoing lack of workplace protections for children whose lives 3 despite my critique i have no reason to suspect any malicious intentions behind asa maas’s vlogging. i believe that like most parents he is acting in good faith and attempting to do the best by his children. 4 the coogan act was passed in 1939 in response to the case of jackie coogan, a child actor who earned millions only to discover that his parents had squandered the money by the time he turned 18. limits of informed consent on disability family youtube channels studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 470-473, 2022 473 are being filmed and photographed for audiences of millions. these children are themselves labourers and the work of producing content is work. these shifting norms are of course a reflection of wider patterns of precarity – ones that tear down traditional workplaces and contracts in favour of zero-hour contracts and “disruption.” this casualization leaves children vulnerable to the whims of the same algorithms their parents depend on to make money. questions are being raised by the platform and people who use it about the ethics of marketing to kids by kids, but what about the question of how to protect kids who are being used as tools of marketing? if the logical conclusion of inclusion is full participation in public life (asan, n.d.), then we must examine how the desire to include people with disabilities plays out in the digital public sphere. capturing family life on camera invites a level of surveillance into the home as thousands, sometimes millions, of people are made privy to the lives of children as they grow up in front of a lens. autism family vlogs like the maas’ present us with a difficult question: what are the implications of being someone’s caregiver and also their producer? references arthurs, j., drakopoulou, s., & gandini, a. (2018). researching youtube. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 24(1), 3-15. asan (the autism self-advocacy network). (n.d.). “the best outcome we’ve had”: key themes from a self-advocate summit on community living. https://autisticadvocacy.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/06/community-living-thematic-analysis.pdf fatheringautism youtube. (n.d.). youtube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/uczwd0qnewpquqlnm5nwzpsa fatheringautism. (2018, march 7). this is scary... we are going to be full time youtubers! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyo2sxnqami loomes, r., hull, l., & mandy, w. p. l. (2017). what is the male-to-female ratio in autism spectrum disorder? a systematic review and meta-analysis. journal of the american academy of child & adolescent psychiatry, 56(6), 466-474. mcguire, a. (2016). war on autism: on the cultural logic of normative violence. university of michigan press. socialblade. (n.d.) fatheringautism’s youtube stats (summary profile) social blade stats. https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/fatheringautism liddell final before ts correspondence address: jessica l. liddell, school of social work, university of montana, missoula, mt 59812–4680, usa; email: jessica.liddell@mso.umt.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 “we live in a very toxic world”: changing environmental landscapes and indigenous food sovereignty jessica l. liddell university of montana, usa sarah g. kington tulane university, usa catherine e. mckinley tulane university, usa abstract the purpose of this article is to understand how historical oppression has undermined health through environmental injustices that have given rise to food insecurity. specifically, the article examines ways in which settler colonialism has transformed and contaminated the land itself, impacting the availability and quality of food and the overall health of indigenous peoples. food security and environmental justice for gulf coast, state-recognized tribes has been infrequently explored. these tribes lack federal recognition and have limited access to recourse and supplemental resources as a result. this research fills an important gap in the literature through exploring the intersection of environmental justice and food insecurity issues for this population. partnering with a community-advisory board and using a qualitative descriptive methodology, 31 gulf coast indigenous women participated in semi-structured interviews about their healthcare experiences and concerns. through these interviews, participants expressed concerns about (a) the environmental impacts of pollution on the contamination of food and on the health of tribal members; and (b) the impact of these changes on the land, such as negatively impacting gardening practices. the authors of this study document how environmental changes have compounded these concerns and contribute to the overall pollution of food and water sources and unviability of subsistence practices, severely effecting tribal members’ health. in conclusion, we show how social and environmental justice issues such as pollution, industry exploitation, and climate change perpetuate the goals of settler colonialism through undermining cultural practices and the overall health of indigenous peoples. “we live in a very toxic world” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 39 keywords food sovereignty; indigenous; food desert; gardening; native american; environmental justice environmental injustice is a contemporary form of historical oppression (burnette & figley, 2017; burnette et al., 2018) that is increasingly being explored in relation to indigenous sovereignty and health disparities (hoover et al., 2012; singer, 2018; tsosie, 2007; vinyeta et al., 2016). historical oppression of indigenous peoples has occurred across time through land dispossession via coercive treaties and forced relocation, and as a result of settler colonialism. it continues today through chronic, pervasive, and intergenerational forms of environmental injustices, which have disrupted cultural continuity, diet and well-being (burnette & figley, 2017; burnette et al., 2018). the environmental justice framework provides activists and scholars a way of conceptualizing how social justice issues, and historical and contemporary forms of oppression intersect with environmental issues such as land use, pollution and resource extraction. indigenous peoples experience disproportionate rates of acute and chronic health conditions, which are often linked to diet, and are an important social justice concern (blue bird jernigan et al., 2012, 2013, 2017; milburn, 2004; sowerwine et al., 2019). food security is the availability, access, and ability to procure safe and nutritious foods that are aligned with the food preferences of groups and consistent with their social and cultural customs and values (pinstrup-andersen, 2009). despite the pronounced impact that climate change and other environmental justice issues have on food production and the contamination of local resources (adamson, 2011; smith ahern, 2020), the intersections between environmental justice, social justice, overall health and food security have been underexplored. food security and environmental justice have also been understudied for state-recognized indigenous peoples who experience additional obstacles posed by a lack of federal recognition and the associated impairment in controlling and regulating their land and resources (crepelle, 2018; fletcher, 2006). this is an important social justice issue facing members of the tribe in this study. tribes located in the gulf coast experience environmental injustices, climate change, and land loss at accelerated rates due to both the impacts of climate change (e.g., rising sea levels) and industrial exploitation (e.g., oil company activities which weaken the land and accelerate wetland loss) (austin, 2006; maldonado, 2014). it is important to note that while the particular environmental injustices experienced by indigenous peoples are place-specific, parallel environmental injustices related to industry exploitation (e.g., oil extraction in standing rock, peru, and ecuador (giliowhitaker, 2019; sawyer, 2004)) and the impacts of climate change (e.g., warming oceans and rising sea levels in alaska (ahtuangaruak, 2015)) are extensively documented among indigenous peoples throughout the us and across the world (hoover, 2017). jessica l. liddell, sarah g. kington & catherine e. mckinley studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 40 this research fills a gap in the exploration of the interrelationships between health, environmental justice, social justice, and foodways for state recognized indigenous peoples who are impacted by colonization and place in distinctive ways. it is important to explore state recognized tribes specifically, as these tribes have not only undergone historical oppression related to colonization, but also continue to experience restrictions in acknowledgements and resources due to a lack of federal recognition. this research contributes to greater understanding about the connection between environmental justice issues, health and food security for indigenous peoples, necessary to develop targeted interventions and policies promoting the sovereignty and well-being of indigenous peoples. the purpose of this article is to explore the intersection of environmental injustice, social justice, health and food security among women from a staterecognized indigenous tribe in the gulf coast of the united states. the overarching research question is: “how has historical oppression undermined the health of indigenous peoples through environmental injustices and food insecurity?” we situate these experiences to show how settler colonialism, which began with the forced removal and genocide of indigenous peoples, is an ongoing process; it continues in the present through the exploitation of indigenous resources by industry and land loss related to climate change, industrial exploitation, and the precarious geographical location of the tribe resulting from forced tribal relocation (burnette & figley, 2017; glenn, 2015; hixson, 2013; wolfe, 1999). settler colonialism, food security, and indigenous peoples many of the contemporary and historic injustices experienced by indigenous communities can be linked to the history of settler colonialism, which has included genocide and the forcible removal of indigenous peoples from their ancestral land. settler colonialism is a component of historical oppression (burnette & figley, 2017); far from being viewed as a discrete, historical event, it can instead be understood as an ongoing process (burnette & figley, 2017; glenn, 2015; hixson, 2013; wolfe, 1999). as such, the extensive and concomitant health disparities experienced by indigenous peoples are not exceptional occurrences but are, in fact, consistent with the settler colonial project. forms of historical oppression experienced by tribes in this region include both past and contemporary social and environmental injustices, from being forcibly removed from ancestral land onto less desirable land to frequently experiencing exploitation by industries (ahtuangaruak, 2015; burnette et al., 2019; billiot, 2017; billiot & parfait, 2019; burnette et al., 2018; crepelle, 2018; gilio-whitaker, 2019; hoover, 2017; liddell & kington, 2021; liddell et al., 2021; sawyer, 2004). moreover, it is well documented that indigenous peoples are exposed to high levels of pollution in the air, water “we live in a very toxic world” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 41 and land (thompson & kwok, 2004). while pollutants are context specific, they have important implications for food security as pollution can render food unsafe and unusable (hoover, 2017; rotkin-ellman et al., 2012). this article examines how environmental and social injustices such as these affect sovereignty and enculturation of indigenous peoples by negatively impacting food security. the continuation of environmental injustices and resulting food insecurity is an extension of settler colonial goals, in which indigenous peoples’ control over land and resources is impeded. tribal setting and context the focal tribe resides on the gulf coast, and lives throughout a large geographic region that is home to bayous, wetlands, and river systems (austin, 2006; lambeth, 2016; maldonado, 2014). this setting contributes to the economic, cultural, physical and mental well-being of the tribe in a variety of ways, including through the provision of food (austin, 2006; crepelle, 2018; lambeth, 2016; maldonado, 2014). activities such as gardening, raising livestock and especially fishing provide both nutritional sustenance and important cultural activities for the tribe (burnette et al., 2018). the focal tribe experiences oil and gas industry exploitation (crepelle, 2018; sawyer, 2004), as well as issues of land loss. climate change has caused rising sea levels, and more severe and more frequent hurricanes, both of which exacerbate coastal erosion (austin, 2006) and increased flooding (lambeth, 2016; tully et al., 2019). oil company infrastructure and activities, such as the dredging of canals, is prevalent in the region, and exacerbates these issues by weakening the land and leading to increased loss of wetlands, which are a natural buffer against flooding and storm surges (austin, 2006; tully et al., 2019). indigenous peoples in this region are adversely affected by oil rigs due to pollution, oil spills and this dredging of canals, but are also often employed by the oil industry, making them dependent on these corporations for their livelihood. this simultaneous oppression and reliance on the oppressor – due to their greater wealth, power and status – is a characteristic challenge of historical oppression (burnette & figley, 2017). while the effects of climate change and industrial activities on land loss, flooding and hurricanes is widely acknowledged, the issue of saltwater intrusion receives less attention, perhaps because it is not as visible (tully et al., 2019). saltwater intrusion can have a variety of causes and sets off a cascade of dramatic biogeochemical and environmental changes. the coastal region this indigenous group resides on experiences some of the primary causes of rapid saltwater intrusion, including sea level rises, storms and tides which push seawater inland, and increased water connectivity due to oil canals and levees (tully et al., 2019). saltwater has around 400 times more jessica l. liddell, sarah g. kington & catherine e. mckinley studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 42 salt than freshwater, and this dramatic change of ionic concentration causes significant osmotic stress to organisms not adapted to saltwater; very few plants can grow successfully in saltwater (tully et al., 2019). the gulf coast region also experienced the impacts from the historic and catastrophic 2010 bp oil spill, which dumped more than 4.9 million barrels of oil into the gulf of mexico, causing rapid contamination of the environment, including the contamination of previously relied upon food sources. this devastating event led to negative mental and physical health outcomes, as well as decreased employment and negative economic impacts for those in the region (cope et al., 2013; patel et al., 2018). the impacts felt by this indigenous group resulting from disasters such as this, climate change and petroleum activities is especially injurious considering the history of forced tribal relocation to this area (fitzgerald, 2015). although this indigenous tribe has been well-documented in the region and is recognized by the state, they have been unable to gain federal recognition, a process that is highly political with little standardization in enforcement (fletcher, 2006). without federal recognition, tribes are unable to receive benefits and resources afforded to them under federal treaty agreements which impedes their ability to receive resources following disasters (u.s. commission on civil rights, 2004). additionally, without federal recognition, tribes are unable to exercise authority over the use of the land on which they reside, including the preservation of sacred sites, and cannot enact environmental regulations as they desire, an important social justice issue (burnette et al., 2019; liddell et al., 2021; maldonado, 2014). a lack of federal recognition has also helped to facilitate environmental exploitation in the region by petroleum industries, and allowed bp to deny them resources following the oil spill since they only recognize claims from federally-recognized tribes (crepelle, 2018; liddell et al., 2021). occupational options for the tribe have been limited due to the history of educational discrimination, and the most common employers among the tribal members are the fishing and oil industries; this complicates the relationship many members have with oil companies (crepelle, 2018; maldonado, 2014). while previously many tribal members relied on indigenous healers for healthcare, this trend has been decreasing, potentially as a result of the changing landscape and the negative impact it has had on plants and medicines used in healing (bates, 2016; maldonado, 2014; vinyeta et al., 2016). this is an example of the multiple pathways through which the changing environment is impacting indigenous health and wellbeing. “we live in a very toxic world” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 43 methods research design data was drawn from a larger qualitative descriptive study that took a holistic ecosystemic, life course, and resilience informed approach to investigate the reproductive and sexual health experiences of women from an indigenous gulf coast tribe (liddell, 2020; liddell & kington, 2021; liddell & mckinley, 2021; liddell & doria, 2022; liddell & lilly, 2022). although the broader study focused on women’s health, given that health, resilience and land are inseparable among many indigenous communities (kirmayer et al., 2009), environmental concerns came up emergently and frequently, warranting their own attention. this qualitative study centered the historical and social context for the focal tribe and deferred to participants’ voices, following their lead throughout the interview process. as such, many themes related to the environment, land, gardening and health emerged organically; these are the focus of this article. qualitative descriptive methodology has been frequently used and recommended for research with indigenous peoples (burnette et al., 2014; mckinley et al., 2019). the straightforward interpretation of findings elevates the real experiences of participants as portrayed by their own words, enabling a more accurate understanding and working to limit bias (denzin et al., 2008). the project utilized a community engaged research approach designed in collaboration with a community advisory board (cab) made up of tribal members. the principal investigator (pi) was invited to do this project by one of the cab members based on the pi’s previous engagement with the tribe. the study protocol and interview guide were designed with cab members, as were discussions about study findings and potential uses of research findings. the cab and the tribal council approved the study and offered feedback on the research study during each step of the research process. in addition, the steps outlined in burnette et al.’s (2014) “toolkit of strategies for culturally sensitive and ethical research with ai/an communities” were followed throughout. the qualitative descriptive methodology utilized semi-structured, in depth, qualitative interviews and conventional qualitative content analysis, the analysis of choice for qualitative descriptive studies. setting and participants the first author conducted interviews with 31 women from a staterecognized indigenous tribe located on the gulf coast. the tribe’s identity remains anonymous due to agreements with the tribal council, who requested their name not be included. this is congruent with best practices in conducting research with indigenous peoples and is related to previous jessica l. liddell, sarah g. kington & catherine e. mckinley studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 44 negative experiences other indigenous peoples have had with researcher exploitation (burnette et al., 2014). to qualify for the study, participants needed to be 18 years or older and self-identify as a woman and a member of the tribe. participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 71, with a median age of 51.17. most participants (83.4%) had at least one child, and those with children had an average of two or three children. data collection & analysis institutional review board (irb) approval was granted from both tulane university, and the tribal council. recruitment flyers were posted at tribal and community centers, and purposeful snowball sampling was assisted by the community advisory board. a semi-structured interview guide was used, informed by responsive interviewing (rubin & rubin, 2011), and questions followed the life trajectory to gain overtones of a life course approach (sandelowski, 2000). a life course approach was used to identify generational changes in health experiences, to understand life experiences with the context in mind, and to explore differences in perceptions about health issues. participants were asked a range of questions about their health experiences, including questions related to health barriers and supports in the tribe. here we focus on responses related to food and diet brought up by participants. see liddell & kington (2021) for the full interview guide. interviews were conducted from october 2018 to february 2019, and ranged from 30-90 minutes in length, with an average interview lasting 66 minutes. participants were offered a $30 gift card to compensate them for their time. interviews were recorded with participant permission, transcribed via a professional transcription service, then checked by the pi to make sure they had been transcribed verbatim. data were analyzed with nvivo software using conventional content analysis. this approach began with open coding to identify broad themes, followed by direct coding to identify subthemes (milne & oberle, 2005). all but three participants were provided a summary of all research findings (two were unable to be reached, and one declined to participate) through member checking. participants were supportive of findings and did not request that any changes be made. a summary of findings was also presented at a tribal council meeting and was approved by the tribal council. in the following quotes, interviewees are given anonymous identifiers to show how themes were represented across participants. results the importance of food in family and community traditions was a recurrent theme among women. nineteen of 31 women described concerns related to “we live in a very toxic world” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 45 food and diet when asked about community health barriers. food was often described as an important reason for social gatherings. however, many women also mentioned concerns they had about food, including the themes of “food contamination” and “barriers to gardening.” women made explicit connections with changes they saw occurring in the environment and the themes of contamination of food and changes in the ability to garden. “we live in a very toxic world,” and “the food doesn’t taste the same”: food contamination participants described their concerns that environmental changes were negatively impacting the health of the community by polluting the food people have access to. participant 6 described concerns that the food people ate was being poisoned by toxins in the environment, noting that many of her family members died of cancer following the b.p. oil spill: all at the same time we lost them one after the other. and this is all after b.p. and my dad worked for them…that had a lot to do with it. so i think it might have been the seafood or something…i know after b.p. that’s when they [relatives] started falling like flies…you can tell it’s not…good stuff…. now, it stinks when you’re out there [on the water]. very nasty. i think that’s got a lot to do with the people getting sick too...i guess the old people, they lived longer because they didn’t have all this nonsense they have now because back, long time ago, the people used to live longer than they live now. this participant felt that tribal members used to live longer before the environmental contaminants introduced by the b.p. oil spill. participant 20 also described how tribal members used to live to old ages: my grandma was [a] 100 when she died. my great grandma was 96 when she died. yeah. or 97. she was, way up there, right… but nowadays…their diet is, i mean it’s, it’s seafood… whatever they can go out and catch… so i’m sure there’s a link. this woman felt that the decrease in life expectancy could be directly tied to changes in diet, and especially to contamination of seafood. participant 4 further highlighted how pollution in the water not only undermined tribal members’ ability to consume seafood from the water, but also the ability of tribal members to financially survive: because now there’s no shrimp. you can’t make a living off of shrimp no more… there’s no shrimp nowhere…even the crabs are not like when they used to be... [because of] pollution in the water. another participant (11) also described her concerns that the oil spill had caused there to be contaminants in the seafood: jessica l. liddell, sarah g. kington & catherine e. mckinley studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 46 it’s [that the oil spill is causing health problems] being kind of discredited because people are self-reporting… like… people say they have symptoms from like exposure from the cleanup, the dispersants… they’re like [government agency], “no, it’s not bad. it’s totally fine.” but it’s [contaminants] like killing animals and stuff. like i don’t think it’s totally fine. and not to mention all it does is make the oil sink. so that’s going to reemerge, and you know when it’s going to reemerge is when there’s a hurricane, like another bad hurricane that kind of stirs all that up… that was one of the things we’ve kind of talked about hoping that we can maybe do is come up with some type of way to test seafood for these hazards because so many people, especially like tribal communities rely on the seafood. this participant also noted that tribal knowledge was often being discredited; despite tribal members’ noting the changes to the seafood and the environment, government agencies often dismissed this type of experiential knowledge and data. this participant went on to state: so, if you can’t put money to it, it’s just like, might as well not exist. and it’s just like, well no, you [outsiders] don’t understand. like these people eat shrimp like three or four nights a week and now they’re having to go to the store…because people didn’t eat seafood for a while [following the b. p. oil spill]. like they said, they were pulling up crabs, crabs where like the gills were black. women also expressed that it was getting harder to find high-quality seafood, and noted concerns about possible toxins. participant 1 reported feeling like there were more toxins in the food: i believe it’s our diet that has caused the cancer, you know, and then all of the preservative[s] and all the fast foods…because that’s not healthy… it’s either chemical, all these things, it’s made out of a lab or do you take a chance and eat the chemicals from the water? yeah, it’s kind of give or take. what else do you do? the cancer rate over here is so alarming down here. it is very alarming. this participant felt that there was a risk for tribal members in eating food from the environment, while also describing feeling that the increase in fast food and processed foods was dangerous for the health of tribal members as well. reduction in the ability to live off food from the environment meant that tribal members had to rely more on fast food and processed food. participant 11 described the increase in processed food, in addition to discussing her concerns about the lack of regulation of food and its impact on health: we live in a very toxic world from everything that we touch and put in our bodies and breathe and drink and expose ourselves to… we live in a very contaminated world, especially with the food, processed food … i think it’s getting worse… the epa and the food administration and all these other “we live in a very toxic world” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 47 organizations that control all of these things, the more, lax, they get on regulations… the more spikes that we’re going to see because… you don’t see it until it’s too late… we don’t see what we’re putting in our bodies and i’m guilty i mean, i just ate a hamburger from wendy’s… i’m in a lot of circles where i know… that eating processed meat is one of the worst things that you can do because the high rate of chemicals that are feed to these cows that are pumped with hormones, that are put into a facility that’s not completely… like the whole trail from grass to cow to facility to manufacturer, to plastic company to the supermarket…. we poison ourselves every day, with everything that we do… there’s not enough… water containers and… antibiotics soap that’s gonna stop it. this participant connected eating more processed food with existing health issues. participant 12 noted that food tasted different than when she was growing up: i feel like the food that you get from nature, that you get in the wild, don’t taste the same when i was growing up…. the food doesn’t taste the same… i like ducks and i like [indigenous name for a type of marsh hen] and stuff like that… they don’t taste the same, i really don’t eat... and i used to be crazy about that and i really don’t care for... in fact, i don’t even eat chicken or pork anymore… because when i see chicken, that the legs are this big, i won’t eat it… that’s not healthy. when she was asked what she thought caused this change, she answered, “all the chemicals.” this participant also described getting eggs from her son, who had his own chickens: “he grows his own chickens… i get my fresh eggs from my son.” this participant noted that in her own family she was seeing a return to, and a desire to still live off the land. “they going to die in that saltwater”: barriers to gardening although many women described gardening as being important in their families, especially while growing up, many stated that because of increased saltwater and flooding, it was getting harder and harder for people to continue to garden. participant 1 described not seeing young people garden as much, although she also reported being excited to work on her relative’s garden: “gardening… i see some, young people doing that, but not like a whole bunch you know?... that’s what i told my aunt… she’s got a big garden…. [i’m] excited to be able to start helping out there cause i haven’t been gardening forever.” this participant noted that growing up she had helped her grandmother garden, and that helping out in the garden was a common chore for younger children: we all had our part to do, duties. both of my grandmothers lived on the same street. when we were in school… we would go eat at our grand, one of the jessica l. liddell, sarah g. kington & catherine e. mckinley studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 48 grandparents’ house and walk over there… and then after school we would have to help with the garden, cause they both had huge gardens. so we had to all help out with that. all of us. so we grew up doing a lot of gardening. participant 4 also noted that young people no longer knew how to garden: “and the kids don’t want to learn how to make a garden.” participant 11 attributed some of the decrease in gardening to environmental changes: “it’s hard to grow fresh crops here with so much, so much salinity in our soil. so you won’t find as many people [gardening].” increased saltwater intrusion changed what types of crops and plants could grow in the soil. participant 16 also noted the issue of saltwater intrusion: it’s bad because of the saltwater. my husband plants peas and green beans but he’s got it up in a container so the water don’t... and everything else you can’t plant orange trees because the saltwater… even if you make a garden today when the water gets high what you going to do?... that’s why we plant in those containers… i got all my flowers on my porch because they going to die in that saltwater. although this participant was able to adapt by putting some of her plants on her raised porch, this was not possible for a full garden and for fruit trees. although many women described gardening as being important in their families, especially while growing up, many stated that because of these changes to the land, it was getting harder and harder for people to continue to garden. participant 11 attributed some of the decrease in gardening to these environmental changes: food wise, it’s just been decimated tremendously. not only by processing… i mean like here in [state name] agriculture below [city name] is almost, almost nonexistent except for like sugar cane… because it’s hard to grow fresh crops here with so much, so much salinity in our soil. so you won’t find as many people [farming]. our elders, like my grandfather, he, he’s been a gardener since he was six years old, helping his dad on a plantation and he’s 84 years old now and he still has a garden, but he, every year he swears that he’s not going to do it anymore… it’s not worth the hassle because it’s not producing what it once was. but a lot of that has to do with our grounds are so polluted and our grounds are so… chemical-ridden that is just like, it doesn’t even pay to eat what comes out the ground sometimes… especially down here, there’s so much salt in our soil that you can’t even get anything to grow. pollution and increased saltwater intrusion changed what types of crops and plants could grow in the soil. this participant also noted that although previously many tribal members had worked in agriculture, because of the changes to the environment many of them no longer were able to grow crops and eat foods that they grew to the same extent. participant 29 also described the hardship of growing a garden only to have it be destroyed by a storm and flooding: “we live in a very toxic world” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 49 like, you go to get just fruits and vegetables, it’s expensive. not many people grow their own things anymore either… you spend all this money having a garden… making a garden and then the flood comes in and wipes it all out… and we have a huge yard and i always say we have so much room to have a garden… it’s just the floods… my brother actually was trying to grow some peppers and cucumbers and he did great… you just gotta be dedicated to it and know when to plant… around the hurricane season and you just hate to have it all wiped out if a flood comes. participant 10 also made the connection between the previous ability of tribal members to live off the land and their dependence now on the very companies that had destroyed the environment for food: and like the way we used to live… and then destroying the land… to where now we have to rely on you for the food. like we have to rely on the walmarts and like nobody farms anymore. [people] used to have like tons and tons of crops, people had crops, people had cattle, people had all their own livestock and everything, and so it’s, all the gas exploration has really like stripped us of our ability to even care for ourselves and made us dependent on the very infrastructure that’s destroying our environment. participant 1 described the important role that gardening played and the types of vegetables tribal members were able to grow previously: oh, everything. i mean, everything was seasonal too. green beans, okra. you know, squash, tomatoes, tomatoes, lasted pretty much all year long… tomatoes lasted. cucumbers. eggplant. potatoes, onions. a lot of potatoes. we ate a lot of potatoes. we used to dig a lot of potatoes… i can just remember my grandma’s garden. participant 11 described hoping that tribal members could learn more about aquaponics as a way to adapt to the changing conditions of the land: i think people learning how to do aquaponics… where they [the plants] don’t have to be necessarily in the ground… i think any kind of alternative planning like that, or self-sustaining kind of agriculture where we don’t have to rely so much on what we’ve normally used, but adapt to these new ways of, you know, being, providing for ourselves and, and also at the same time keeping cultural… influences in there, of growing our own food… because there are people and organizations and other, and other groups that they’ve learned to adapt to these changing conditions… and kind of try and take back of this health crisis that we’re in. this participant noted her hope and confidence in the ability of tribal members to combat some of the changes that were happening to the land, while continuing to be able to provide for themselves. jessica l. liddell, sarah g. kington & catherine e. mckinley studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 50 discussion findings highlight the impact of environmental and social justice issues on the food security of an indigenous tribe located in the gulf coast. tribal members described environmental and social justice issues that changed the land such that tribal members could no longer grow the foods they had traditionally grown, which contributed to food insecurity and undermined enculturation and resilience by obstructing subsistence practices (burnette et al., 2018). participants contrasted their current difficulties in successfully growing food with the experiences of their elders and their experiences growing up, when tribal members were able to subsist off of the land. this ability to produce one’s own food, rather than simply having access to food (i.e., food security) is a key tenet of food sovereignty and social justice, and tribal members describe clear disruptions to this process (hoover, 2017; menser, 2018). in addition, tribal members expressed concerns about the impact of environmental justice issues such as oil company exploitation on the health of community members, through the contamination of food and water. importantly, participants themselves saw and described the connection between environmental injustices, its impact on food security and availability, and their health. it is important to note that participants were not directly asked about environmental changes, or food security issues, highlighting the salience and importance of these issues for interviewees. many tribal members experienced a dissonant relationship with their oppressor (burnette & figley, 2017), as they were employed by corporate oil companies that undermined food and land security and indigenous health, whilst simultaneously providing needed employment. still, the ability to access fresh and safe seafood was severely impacted by corporate oil companies, undermining subsistence. the tension between dependence on local industry for employment, and concerns about its impact on the land and health of tribal members was prominent for tribal participants, and is consistent with previous studies noting this important social justice topic (mckinley et al., 2019). tribal member’s ability to recognize these impacts to the land emphasizes the particular part indigenous peoples, and women in particular, play in noticing environmental changes because of their close relationship with nature through subsistence practices (billiot, 2017; billiot & parfait, 2019; burnette et al., 2019; hoover, 2017; hoover et al., 2012; liddell et al., 2021; liddell & kington, 2021; vivas, 2012). these changes to the land, and their potential causes, were evidenced in the connections participants drew about the detrimental impact of increased salinity on the success of their gardening, a subsistence activity that is practiced predominately by women (hoover, 2017; tully et al., 2019; vivas, 2012). participants expressed their concerns that harmful environmental changes were undermining cultural knowledge and practices, which is a risk factor for negative outcomes across multiple dimensions (burnette et al., 2018; “we live in a very toxic world” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 51 burnette et al., 2019; vernon, 2015). gardening is also important because it encourages physical activity and time spent in nature, both of which are important for physical and spiritual health and wellbeing (burnette et al., 2018; maller et al., 2006; mckinley et al., n.d.). enculturation, or engagement with cultural practices, has been found to contribute to indigenous resilience and engagement through connection to land and subsistence practices (burnette et al., 2018). both enculturation and subsistence practices are damaged by environmental changes, since many cultural practices involve land-based activities and time spent outside (billiot & parfait, 2019; burnette et al., 2018, 2019; jessee, 2020; kirmayer et al., 2009; mckinley et al., n.d.) there is a need to explore alternatives for tribes where gardening and relying on local food in the traditional form may no longer be possible, or where other barriers exist. this may be especially true for the context of this indigenous group, where the land is disappearing due to coastal erosion. participants worried about the impact of pollution on food and water because of industrial contamination, which is consistent with previous research that notes the environmental justice experiences of indigenous peoples (adamson, 2011; hoover et al., 2012; tsosie, 2007). pollution from industries, such as oil, is particularly salient for this indigenous group because of their lack of federal recognition, which makes holding the oil industry accountable or regulating its continued activities, difficult (billiot & parfait, 2019; crepelle, 2018; jessee, 2020; maldonado, 2014). in addition to changing the land itself, the pollution from local industries, such as oil, can impact subsistence food practices (burnette et al., 2019; liddell et al., 2021; rotkin-ellman et al., 2012; tirado et al., 2010). pollution understandably contributes to concerns about contamination of these food sources, which directly undermines indigenous health and food security (liddell et al., 2021; mckinley et al., n.d.; rotkin-ellman et al., 2012). pollution has deleterious impacts on health and wellbeing; it not only disrupts cultural subsistence practices, which contribute to resilience and bonding through intergenerational transmission of knowledge, but it also impairs indigenous peoples’ ability to consume traditional diets, necessitating the purchase of more processed and expensive foods (bodirsky & johnson, 2008; burnette et al., 2018; gracey & king, 2009). federally recognized tribes have successfully enforced protections of the environment, including regulating companies and local governments located offreservation but whose activities impact tribal members (crepelle, 2018; gilio-whitaker, 2019). the impacts of changes to food and gardening have especially important implications for social justice, as indigenous peoples’ physical health as well as cultural autonomy are undermined by these environmental changes. for instance, food has been described as medicine by some indigenous scholars and activists (adamson, 2011), and gardens have been proposed as a tool of decolonization through their reconnection with foodways and land, and as a way of addressing food security and health issues among indigenous peoples jessica l. liddell, sarah g. kington & catherine e. mckinley studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 52 (adamson, 2011; hoover, 2017; rudolph & mclachlan, 2013). gardens return land and foodways to indigenous communities in limited ways (sowerwine et al., 2019). the relationship to land itself is distinct for indigenous peoples; in contrast to the western view of ownership of the land, the relationship to land for indigenous peoples is based on recognition and reciprocity for the sustenance it gives (kirmayer et al., 2009; glenn, 2015). the relationship to the land also plays a role in many indigenous conceptualizations of health and wellbeing, and resilience (kirmayer et al., 2009). this connection to the land also means that environmental injustices may have particularly negative consequences for indigenous peoples who live in close relationship with their environment (cidro et al., 2015; vernon, 2015). limitations findings from this qualitative data were emergent and sometimes unexpected, largely due to the methodology used, which prioritizes participants’ voices and allows for their concerns to take precedence. a benefit to gathering data in this way is that the importance of food and food sovereignty was made salient without the participants being prompted; a limitation, is that we were not able to explore all of the relevant concepts related to food sovereignty. as such, important topics, such as the role of the community and the tribal council in reclaiming their food system and building food sovereignty in the face of these threats, were beyond this study’s scope, and thus not explored in this inquiry. future studies should explicitly follow up on emergent themes to explore food sovereignty and related topics in more depth, especially as they relate to community resilience and food sovereignty. another potential limitation is that the tribe’s identity remains anonymous due to agreements with the tribal council, who requested their name not be identified. this is congruent with best practices in conducting research with indigenous tribes and is related to previous negative experiences other indigenous tribes have had with researcher exploitation (burnette et al., 2014). because environmental changes are often highly unique to particular geographic regions and historical and contemporary contexts, and considering the immense diversity among indigenous peoples in the united states, these findings should remain specific to the tribe in this study. in addition, although a goal of this study was to explore the impact of environmental changes on the food practices of indigenous women, individuals were only interviewed at one point in time. future research may also want to explore the experiences of men who are uniquely impacted by their frequent employment by oil companies. longitudinal studies may be better able to explore these changes. this study also focuses on self-reported experiences of the impact of environmental change on food practices, and “we live in a very toxic world” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 53 future research in fields such as public health or environmental sciences may be helpful in corroborating these findings. conclusion results demonstrate the importance of sovereignty as it relates to land for indigenous peoples and highlights the significance of federal recognition for indigenous peoples in achieving food security. the viability of land and subsistence practices are tied closely to the overall health of indigenous peoples, particularly in areas like the gulf coast, where resources are frequently extracted by industry, or where the effects of climate change have more damaging consequences and important social justice implications. despite the impact of these environmental changes and social justice issues on indigenous food security, their interrelationships are infrequently explored. these findings fill an important gap in the literature by exploring the intersection of environmental, social justice and food security issues among a state-recognized gulf coast indigenous tribe. this study documents how environmental changes have negatively impacted subsistence practices such as gardening, in addition to tribal member concerns about the impact of pollution on food and water sources, and tribal member health. this research builds upon previous research exploring the impact of environmental justice issues on indigenous peoples and connects it to food justice and sovereignty movements (burnette et al., 2018; 2019; liddell et al., 2021). viewed in the context of settler colonialism, these findings document how environmental justice issues such as pollution, industry exploitation, and climate change all further the goals of settler colonialism through undermining cultural practices and the health of indigenous peoples. important implications of these findings include the urgent need for federal recognition for tribal members and for their inclusion in the development of environmental policy and interventions. in addition, immediate action should be taken by both the public and private sector to address the extensive environmental damages and health impacts experienced by indigenous communities. acknowledgements the authors are thankful for the dedicated work and participation of the tribal members who participated in this study and our community advisory board members. jessica l. liddell, sarah g. kington & catherine e. mckinley studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 54 references adamson, j. 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(2019). enhancing food sovereignty. journal of agriculture, food systems, and community development, 9(b), 167-190. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.013 thompson, k., & kwok, c. (2004, sept. 30). tribal superfund program needs clear direction and actions to improve effectiveness (report no. 2004-p-00035). us environmental protection agency. https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/201512/documents/20040930-2004-p-00035.pdf “we live in a very toxic world” studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 38-57, 2022 57 tirado, m. c., clarke, r., jaykus, l. a., mcquatters-gollop, a., & frank, j. m. (2010). climate change and food safety: a review. food research international, 43(7), 1745-1765. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodres.2010.07.003 tsosie, r. (2007). indigenous people and environmental justice: the impact of climate change. university of colorado law review, 78, 1625. tully, k., gedan, k., epanchin-niell, r., strong, a., bernhardt, e. s., bendor, t., mitchell, m., kominoski, j., jordan, t. e., neubauer, s. c., & weston, n. b. (2019). the invisible flood: the chemistry, ecology, and social implications of coastal saltwater intrusion. bioscience, 69(5), 368-378. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biz027 us commission on civil rights. (2004). broken promises: evaluating the native american health care system: (510712006-001) [data set]. https://doi.org/10.1037/e510712006-001 vernon, r. v. (2015). a native perspective: food is more than consumption. journal of agriculture, food systems, and community development, 5(4), 137-142. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2015.054.024 vinyeta, k., whyte, k., & lynn, k. (2016). climate change through an intersectional lens: gendered vulnerability and resilience in indigenous communities in the united states (ssrn scholarly paper id 2770089). social science research network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2770089 vivas, e. (2012, february 8). without women there is no food sovereignty. esther vivas. https://www.scholacampesina.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/without-women-there-isno-food-sov-esther-vivas.pdf wolfe, p. (1999). settler colonialism. a & c black. reorienting deliberation: identity politics in multicultural societies studies in social justice volume 4, issue 1, 7-23, 2010 correspondence address: rebecca mason, department of philosophy, kresge hall 2-335, 1880 campus drive, northwestern university, evanston, il 60208-2214, usa. tel: +1 847 491-3656, email: remason@u.northwestern.edu issn: 1911-4788 reorienting deliberation: identity politics in multicultural societies rebecca mason department of philosophy, northwestern university, evanston, illinois, usa abstract many political theorists argue that cross-cultural communication within multicultural democracies is not best served by a commitment to identity politics. in response, i argue that identity politics only interfere with democratic participation according to an erroneous interpretation of the relationship between identity and reasoning. i argue that recognizing the importance of identity to the intelligibility of reasons offered in the context of civic deliberation is the first step towards the kind of dialogue that democratic participation requires. introduction democratic societies minimally require communication among citizens and between citizens and governments in order to develop and maintain the legal and political frameworks that are most likely to promote peace and justice. given the importance of this kind of communication to democratic participation, it is necessary to ask the following question: what is most likely to facilitate communication within a multicultural civic public in which citizens do not necessarily share a cultural history let alone political values or ideals? many political theorists have answered by arguing that cross-cultural communication is not best served by a commitment to identity politics. 1 in response to waldron, i argue that identity politics only interfere with democratic participation according to an erroneous interpretation of the relationship between identity and reasoning. drawing from the work of linda alcoff (2006), i argue that recognizing the importance of identity to the intelligibility of reasons offered in the in this paper i respond to the objection that identity politics interfere with cross-cultural communication in democratic societies. in particular, i address an objection to identity politics raised by jeremy waldron (2000), who argues that members of minority groups make a mistake when they assert their identity as rights claims in the context of civic deliberation. identity politics, on this account, obstruct civic deliberation by preventing citizens from entering the discursive space that cross-cultural communication requires. 8 rebecca mason studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 context of civic deliberation is the first step towards the kind of dialogue that democratic participation requires. alcoff suggests that one’s identity consists in one’s positioning in what she calls a “horizon of intelligibility.” according to alcoff, a horizon of intelligibility is a “perspectival location from which the interpreter looks out at the world” (p. 95). according to this view, identities are interpretive locations that enable individuals to make comparative judgments about questions of central importance to their lives. i use alcoff’s conception of identity to respond to the objection that identity politics interfere with communication and therefore democratic participation. identities, in alcoff’s account, frame our understanding of the world and how we are situated with respect to it and the other citizens with whom we share it, and should be seen as starting points for reasoning rather than endpoints that dictate belief. in other words, identities have an important epistemic role as locations “from which knowing and perceptive analysis take place” (p. 125). as such, identity can factor into civic deliberation without suspending debate. by taking up alcoff in response to waldron, i hope to demonstrate that objections to identity politics on the grounds that identity interferes with democratic deliberation depend on an unnecessarily problematic conception of identity politics as well as the role identity plays in reasoning. before going into the details of waldron’s objection to identity politics, and my response to it, i should make two things clear. first, i want to elaborate what i mean by “identity politics”—a term much used and abused in political and philosophical theorizing around issues of social justice. identity politics have come to signify a collection of political activities and theoretical discourses organized around the experience of injustice of members of certain social groups. in academic as well as public discourses about social justice, identity politics are used to ground both claims for redistribution and for recognition. for the purposes of this paper, i employ waldron’s conception of identity politics as well as alcoff’s alternative to it. according to waldron, identity politics are a political strategy whereby citizens call attention to their cultural identities as the basis for demands of rights owed to them in virtue of their cultural-group membership. my critique of waldron’s view involves claiming that this understanding of identity politics fails to take notice of the nuanced and various ways in which cultural identities are stitched into the fabric of citizens’ epistemic and political lives. i engage alcoff to suggest that identity politics is better conceived as a particular orientation to democratic participation. according to this view, identity politics affirm and embrace the ways in which cultural identity participates in the practice of deliberative reasoning that is instantiated in civic participation. i argue that focusing on the role identity plays in reasoning helps us to think beyond the idea that identities are prima facie obstacles to communication. getting the right conception of identity politics is of paramount importance to this debate. insofar as democratic deliberation (as i discuss it here) is primarily concerned with establishing and evaluating the basic structure of society, and how it distributes benefits and burdens among citizens, our understanding of identity politics will bear directly on how we think social justice is best achieved. in fact, identity politics—when properly understood—are the sine qua non of social justice. according to the characterization of identity politics i endorse here, the welfare of citizens is best promoted when cultural identity is recognized as a standpoint from which citizens reason about the social, political, and economic reorienting deliberation 9 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 institutions which shape the societies in which they live. because waldron is concerned to establish normative standards for civic deliberation that best promote social justice, alcoff’s conception of identity politics is germane to the overall goal of his project. the second thing i wish to clarify before i say more about my objection to waldron’s view is my reason for thinking that waldron’s account in particular merits attention in the first place. i have chosen to single out waldron’s view for two reasons. the contemporary aversion to identity politics has been expressed in a variety of ways; however, in comparison to many of his contemporaries, waldron’s critique is quite moderate. not only does he take cultural identification seriously by arguing that culture is deeply connected to the ways in which people engage in political life (waldron, 2000), he makes an honest attempt to accommodate cultural difference. his view can be contrasted with that of arthur schlesinger (1992), an influential critic of identity politics, who argues that the current “obsession with difference,” threatens the possibility of a well-ordered society in which individuals are bound together by a common identity and a shared purpose. “the multiethnic dogma,” schlesinger says, “abandons historic purposes, replacing assimilation by fragmentation, integration by separatism” (pp. 16-17). he continues by claiming that separatism “nourishes prejudices, magnifies differences, and stirs antagonisms” (p. 17). likewise, jean bethke elshtain (1993) claims that identity politics ultimately collapse into contradiction because, according to her description, they advocate the exclusivity of group identities like ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, achieving inter-group diversity only at the expense of intra-group diversity. she argues that identity politics are “anathema to democratic thinking” (p. 38) because they encourage individuals to be more concerned with group-related grievances than with engaging in political life under the banner of the identity they share with others as free citizens. elshtain says in no uncertain terms, “to the extent that citizens begin to retribalize into ethnic or other ‘fixed-identity groups,’ democracy falters. any possibility for human dialogue, for democratic communication and commonality, vanishes as so much froth on the polluted sea of phony equality” (p. 75). because waldron’s view represents a moderate position in contrast to the extreme views of theorists like schlesinger and elshtain, i think it is worth looking at his view more carefully. this paper engages waldron on the very notion of reasonableness that his work both expresses and defends. furthermore, waldron’s critique stands out because of his choice to situate the politics of identity within the framework of human rights. i think this is a logical place to start the discussion given the important role rights have historically played in protecting individuals and groups from various forms of discrimination and coercion. the choice is also descriptively accurate: indeed, many contemporary identity claims are voiced in the language of rights. 2 although i ultimately reject waldron’s rights-based interpretation of identity politics, i think it is important to bring the politics of identity into conversation with “the moral and political language of the communities in which we live” (brennan, 1999, p. 260). the language of rights continues to be the language in which most claims to social justice are voiced; as such, it is an appropriate starting point for a discussion of identity politics. 10 rebecca mason studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 cultural identity and human rights governments throughout history have responded to cultural diversity with devastating brutality, inflicting a variety of abuses on ethnic minorities including but not limited to genocide, expulsion, coercive assimilation, and segregation. the popularity of the concept of “universal human rights” after world war ii ushered in a new political era and with it a new set of policies to protect cultural minorities from the crimes of past centuries (kymlicka, 1995). liberals embraced the idea of universal human rights and the protections those rights afforded members of minority groups. human rights help to ensure that “the members of ethnic and national groups are protected against discrimination and prejudice, and [that] they are free to try to maintain whatever part of their ethnic heritage or identity they wish, consistent with the rights of others” (kymlicka, 1995, pp. 3-4). given this history, it is not surprising that waldron situates the politics of identity within a framework of rights. but the conflict between identity politics and democratic deliberation on his account arises primarily because of this association between culture and rights. waldron argues that when individuals assert their identities as a matter of human rights, they fail to live up to their duty of civic deliberation. in response, i argue that the framework of human rights is ill-equipped to accommodate some of the social and political challenges that arise in modern multicultural societies, in particular, those challenges posed by identity politics. 3 most countries in the world today are multicultural. that is to say, states rule over people from a variety of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. but the brute fact of geographical proximity is no guarantee that agreement on concerns relevant to the governance of a country can be taken for granted. given this reality, waldron argues that individuals have a duty to deliberate responsibly among themselves about the basic structure of society. waldron claims that the duty of civic participation is a duty to come to terms with others who have disparate views and beliefs about societal relations and organization in order to maintain peace and promote justice and human flourishing. this duty requires that citizens engage with each other in a my point is not to refute waldron’s analysis entirely; indeed, i agree with waldron insofar as i believe that the connection between human rights and identity politics may be ill-suited to the task of promoting cross-cultural communication. however, waldron fails to consider that there are other ways to conceive of identity politics and understand how identity might factor positively into civic deliberation. waldron’s rights-based critique of the politics of identity derives from a misunderstanding of the nature of identity and how it functions in the conversational spaces of liberal-democratic, multicultural societies. i argue that waldon imposes constraints on multicultural dialogue that actually undermine the possibility of a rich, cross-cultural conversation that is likely to (1) promote justice and human flourishing, and (2) facilitate understanding among differently positioned citizens in multicultural societies. because waldron’s account of civic participation is intended to ensure the realization of these values, the core commitments of his account demand that he revise his understanding of the role identity plays in democratic deliberation. on closer examination, i argue, waldron’s rejection of rights-based identity claims does not preclude a revised conception of identity politics which aligns with his commitment to the ideals of democratic participation. reorienting deliberation 11 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 manner that is careful, responsible, and attentive to difference. waldron explains that the duty of civic participation has two aspects: it means (1) participating in a way that does not improperly diminish the prospects for peace or the prospects that the inhabitants will in fact come to terms and set up necessary [social, legal, and political] frameworks. and it means (2) participating in a way that pays proper attention to the interests, wishes, and opinions of all the inhabitants of the country. (2000, p. 155) waldron’s duty of civic participation is designed to promote and protect communication among citizens and between citizens and governments. but identity politics, waldron argues, is in conflict with the first aspect of civic participation outlined above. a commitment to the politics of identity improperly diminishes the chances that citizens will come to terms with one another’s cultures and values in order to set up the social, legal and political frameworks necessary for a peaceful and just society in which all citizens can flourish. proper attention “to the interests, wishes, and opinions of all the inhabitants of the country” does not involve treating cultural identity as a non-negotiable right. waldron (2000) maintains that cultural identity is serious politics. 4 identity politics, according to waldron, pose a serious problem in circumstances in which various cultures propose different solutions to questions central to the governance of society. identity claims of the sort waldron discusses are usually made in the politics of a larger multicultural society; the larger society also has its own solutions to problems, and some of those solutions will contradict solutions posed by other cultures. some solutions are “rivals” in that “they constitute alternative and competing answers to what is basically the same question” (waldron, 2000, p. 161). if members of various cultures within one multicultural society assert their identification with the practices of their respective cultures as a rights claim, that is, as both inviolable and non-negotiable, resolution will be unattainable because not all cultures are “compossible.” he points out that it is “played out for high stakes and with serious ramifications not only for who ends up with what, but also for the terms on which the basic social settlement is framed” (p. 158). society’s basic structure has such a profound influence on the lives of its citizens that the social, political, and economic institutions that comprise it demand justification. in waldron’s view, however, individual rights claims are not necessary or sufficient for a state to sanction the norms or practices of a particular culture. in fact, he argues that if cultural identity is asserted as a right, it will “undermine or preclude altogether the fundamental settlement which is the goal of civic participation” (2000, p. 156). in what follows, i explain how waldron reaches this conclusion and provide a way to meet the objection he raises. 5 waldron uses the concept of “compossibility” to understand the relationship between two contrary cultural practices, particularly in circumstances when it is difficult or impossible to accommodate both cultural practices within the same society. waldron draws on what he admits is a “crude” example to illustrate his point: in response to the enduring question of what rules are to be set up to govern the organization of families and households, culture a may answer “polygyny,” culture b may answer “polyandry,” and culture c may 12 rebecca mason studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 answer “monogamy.” if the larger society s (which includes individuals who self-identify as as, bs and cs) opts for monogamy, then clearly it is opting for an answer which directly contradicts the answer given in a (not to mention the answer given in b). (waldron, 2000, p. 161) these solutions, waldron argues, are rivals in that they provide different and competing answers to the same question: how should families and households be organized? although most cases in which identities are asserted as rights are not this straightforward, waldron uses this simplified and rather unnuanced example to illustrate a situation in which there is some degree of opposition between different ways of life. all three solutions cannot possibly be accommodated in the larger multicultural society because members of each culture a, b, and c think that the solution posed by the other cultures is mistaken or repugnant. in other words, they are not merely different, they are contrary. the liberal enterprise, waldron explains, relies on the premise that rights claims are not contrary in the way i’ve just described. “if i claim non-negotiably that some interest of mine simply has to be respected, my claim is thrown in question—not refuted necessarily, but thrown in question—by showing that it could not possibly be accommodated in a political union along with the similar claims of other people” (waldron, 2000, p. 159). waldron argues that when identity claims are presented as rights, in circumstances where the cultural practices in question are not merely different, but contrary, no society can accommodate the identity claims of all citizens. 6 he argues that the role played by reasons and reasoning is vitally important to a proper understanding of culture and its function for individuals and societies. in the therefore, according to waldron, the legitimacy of identity claims in liberal democratic societies is prima facie dubious. notwithstanding the democratic challenge posed by identity politics, waldron points out that it may nonetheless be the case that it is neither possible nor reasonable for individuals to give up identity claims of this sort notwithstanding their contrariety. “identity should not be expanded to cover every demand that a person makes, every opinion he had, every preference he wants fulfilled” (2000, p. 168). however, waldron admits that neither can identity claims be shrunk, simply to dissolve the political difficulties contrary claims create. waldron argues that although, when possible, identity claims ought to be accommodated, he nonetheless maintains that identity politics “not only exaggerate but distort the way in which a person relates to the culture which is part of his identity” (2000, p. 168). he implores us to think about individuals’ involvement in a culture in a non-multicultural setting and claims that “in this setting it is doubtful whether thoughts about one’s culture —how marvelous it is; how colourful and distinctive; how important it is to the identity of each of us—will loom very large in people’s involvement in the life of their community” (2000, p. 169). waldron suggests that the contemporary assertion of identity claims as rights often stems from a desire to conform to the norms of one’s culture, full stop. but he demurs: “it seems very odd to regard the fact that this is ‘our’ norm—that this is what we irishmen or we french or we maori do—as part of the reason, if not the central reason, for having the norm and for sustaining it” (2000, p. 169). waldron thinks identity claims are often asserted as rights in multicultural societies as a matter of unreflective allegiance, rather than on the grounds of reasons. reorienting deliberation 13 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 example above, cultures a, b, and c, disagree in response to the question of what rules ought to be set up to govern the organization of families and households. waldron argues that members of culture a ought not to recommend polygyny on the grounds that polygyny is just what as do. by the same token, cultures b and c ought not to recommend polyandry and monogamy respectively, on the grounds that polyandry and monogamy are just what bs and cs do. rather, each culture is expected to offer a reason-grounded proposal as to why the wider society s ought to adopt polygyny, over polyandry or monogamy over polygyny. the debate might go as follows: members of culture c claim that monogamy provides a more stable familial structure within which to rear children. members of culture a reply that polygyny is actually the ideal form of family organization because multiple childrearing parents can provide mutual support for one another and care for the children in a way only two parents cannot. members of culture c reply that polygyny degrades women by treating them like property. members of culture b weigh-in claiming that polyandry cannot be said to oppress women, yet is still a form of polygamy. cultures a and b discuss the benefits of a non-nuclear family. civic deliberation thus proceeds by evaluating the reasons for proceeding one way rather than another. waldron argues that it is only when members of cultures a, b, and c participate in democratic deliberation according to this model that they meet their duty of civic participation. waldron’s understanding of culture is framed by his view of citizens’ and governments’ civic task as one of establishing norms and institutions that conduce to peace and flourishing. various cultural norms should be understood as offering reason-grounded proposals for proceeding in one way rather than another, thus these norms should not be asserted non-negotiably. but it is important to understand that waldron is not simply invoking the constraints of “public reason” in his positive account of civic deliberation. in rawls’ political liberalism, public reason is a concept that specifies the guidelines and principles that should structure political deliberation. public reason is a regulatory concept that restricts the kinds of reasons permitted in the process of civic deliberation to only those that draw upon public values and public standards; that is, reasons that could be accepted by another citizen qua citizen (rawls, 1997, p. 771). many political philosophers argue that “deliberation needs to be disciplined by norms of ‘public reason,’ which will exclude, for example, appeals to religious revelation or whose contents or appeal are in some other peculiar sense private or limited” (waldron, 2000, p. 160). waldron’s position is unusual among many liberal theorists for rejecting the restrictions that public reason imposes on democratic deliberation. he argues: “it is a serious mistake to approach the problem of intercultural deliberation first with the idea of deliberative discipline and the exclusion of certain lines of argument on the basis of some rawlsian idea of public reason” (waldron, 2000, p. 163). while reasons and reasoning are important to waldron’s model of civic deliberation, in his view we have a responsibility to “converse with others on their own terms, as they attempt to converse with us on ours” whether their reasons are public or not (waldron, 2000, p. 163). the duty of civic deliberation, he argues, does not require “the tendentious and usually one-sided discipline of ‘public reason’” (waldron, 2000, p. 164). for waldron, cultures are functionally significant. he argues that cultures ought not to be uncritically respected simply because they are connected to individuals or 14 rebecca mason studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 groups; instead, cultures ought to be evaluated according to the reasons for which their cultural norms were established. waldron suggests that cultural norms are best understood as solutions to social questions, such as how to rear children. different cultures have different answers to significant social questions of this kind. “a culture,” according to waldron, “is (something like) an enduring array of social practices, subsisting as a way of life for a whole people . . . it represents the heritage of a particular people’s attempts to address and come to terms with the problems of social life” (waldron, pp. 160-161). cultures ought to be taken seriously and taking them seriously, according to waldron, involves showing respect for the reasons behind cultural norms, not cultural norms simpliciter. cultural identification does not entail unqualified respect for cultural practices: absolute respect ignores the important function these norms have for a culture and misunderstands the function that they should have as reason-grounded proposals within a multicultural civic public. waldron concludes that rights-based identity claims are not only impossible to accommodate in a civic union along with the analogous claims of other people. they are also unnecessary for members of minority groups to defend their cultural identities. because it is both possible and reasonable to expect people to give up identity claims qua rights, we do not have an obligation to respect cultural norms qua individual rights. yet all waldron’s argument demonstrates is that thinking of identity operating as a “right” is the wrong way to think about identity politics. he argues that a rightsbased interpretation of cultural identity misunderstands the relationship between cultures and individuals. 7 rights, waldron claims, deemphasize or conceal the vitally important role played by reasons and reasoning in the relationship between individuals and their cultures. i think that there is some truth to both of these claims and my response to waldron does not aim to refute either entirely. “rights are more than moral concepts; they are also a practice,” samantha brennan argues (1999, p. 269), and the practice of rights can go wrong in various ways. waldron’s argument helps to show that the association between identity politics and human rights is one of the ways in which the practice of rights can go wrong. identity politics qua rights may interfere with our ability to discharge our duty of civic responsibility; however, this does not mean that identity politics are wholly pernicious. waldron’s thesis that identity, when asserted as a rights claim, interferes with cross-cultural communication may be correct, but this does not entail that identity plays only a debilitating role in the process of civic deliberation. a rights-based interpretation of identity politics may obscure the relationship between cultures and individuals, but i think it also obscures the relationship between cultural identity and reasoning. notwithstanding the political utility of rights-based identity claims, the language of rights does not provide an adequate framework for understanding the claims of modern identity politics. instead, what is needed is a reimagining of how identity fits into the political and epistemic lives of individuals. a rights-based interpretation of identity politics may conceal the relationship between cultural identity and reasoning, but there are other ways of understanding cultural identity that do not conceal that relationship. alcoff’s account of cultural identity, to which i will turn below, provides just such an alternative understanding. reorienting deliberation 15 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 in conclusion, waldron maintains that modern identity politics characterizes respect for culture in terms of human rights, claiming that the inviolability of individuals entails that individuals have a right to their cultural identity. he says, “the strongest demand that is made by modern identity politics is that we should respect the distinctive dignity of the cultural or ethnic background that each individual has or claims as his own” (waldron, 2000, p. 158). waldron concedes that identity claims are often appropriate, last-resort strategies employed by minority groups in circumstances where their claims to social justice are simply ignored, but maintains that identity politics otherwise interfere with democratic participation. he argues that there is a conflict between the assumptions of identity politics and our duty of civic responsibility. identity, when asserted as a rights claim, interferes with or prevents cross-cultural communication, which is the responsibility of all citizens to promote. he advocates the view that allegiance to the practices of one’s culture ought to be held and presented as a matter of reasons, rather than identity. only then can the presentation of one’s cultural practices in the process of civic deliberation count as fulfilling one’s duty of civic responsibility, that is, “one’s duty as a citizen to participate responsibly in deliberation about policy and law” (waldron, 2000, p. 174). in response, i argue that the conflict between identity politics and civic deliberation that waldron describes is specious; waldron misinterprets the nature of identity and how it affects civic responsibility. waldron’s principal concern is that democratic participation will be undermined by the demands of identity politics; however, because he misinterprets how identity ascriptions affect our duty of civic participation, he gives up what would, differently interpreted, better serve the ideal of responsible citizenship to which his account of civic participation aspires. thus waldron’s critique of identity politics undermines his stated goal: that citizens in multicultural societies will come to terms with one another in order to set up the social, legal, and political frameworks necessary for a peaceful and just society in which individuals can flourish. in the next section, i support this claim by defending an alternative conception of identity provided by alcoff. i offer a reinterpretation of the relationship between identity and communication, in particular, the kind of crosscultural communication that characterizes democratic participation in multicultural societies. identities as horizons of intelligibility alcoff (2006) provides an account of identity that does not entail the negative interference with our duty of civic participation as waldron describes it. when individuals from cultures a, b, or c make an identity claim, they are not being inauthentic, or opportunistic; neither do they blindly identify with a cultural norm devoid of its reasons. their identification, according to alcoff’s view, consists in their positioning in a “horizon of intelligibility”—a perspectival location that frames their understanding of the world and how they are situated with respect to it and the other citizens with whom they share it. alcoff builds on the concept of horizon used by charles taylor (1989). according to taylor, “my identity is defined by the commitments and identification which provide the frame or horizon within which i can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be 16 rebecca mason studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 done, or what i endorse or oppose” (1989, p. 27). he argues that living within substantive frameworks or horizons is constitutive of human agency: “our identities define the space of qualitative distinction within which we live and choose” (taylor, 1989, p. 30). in sources of the self taylor advances an alternative picture of selfhood—one that contrasts sharply with the disengaged self of modernity. according to the modern ideal, individuals ought to achieve self-mastery through reason. when successful, this results in a self who is capable of not only objectifying the surrounding world but her emotions, inclinations, fears, and compulsions as well. taylor argues that this picture of the self is deeply mistaken. when taylor talks about identity, he is discussing it in the general sense of answering the question: how should we understand what selfhood amounts to? alcoff builds on taylor’s concept of the self as situated within a horizon which determines where one stands regarding questions of what is good, worthwhile, admirable, or of value and applies it to the contemporary debate about identity politics. in the context of my discussion of civic deliberation, the concept of a horizon represents a substantive perspective from which central life questions (as identified by waldron) have significance and within which the cultural solutions to those questions are comprehensible. understanding identity as a kind of orientation in a horizon of intelligibility explains how identity politics might factor into civic deliberation without suspending debate or representing inauthentic ways of engaging with a culture. 8 it is possible to engage in some amount of self-reflection about one’s framing assumptions . . . and to submit these assumptions to thoughtful examination, but the judging that is going on even in this process of examination requires the operation of qualitative discriminations, or in in this view, identities operate as interpretive horizons that enable individuals to make comparative judgments about questions of central importance to their lives. a non-cultural example may help to make things clearer. say i identify as an environmentalist. as an environmentalist, (say) i believe that nature (plants, animals, ecosystems, etc.) is intrinsically valuable. my identity, as well as my substantive belief in the intrinsic value of the natural world, guides all sorts of other beliefs i have. for instance: i believe that finding and using renewable sources of energy is extremely important; i believe that humans have an obligation to protect endangered species; i believe that drilling for oil in alaska is not the right response to the scarcity of fossil fuels; i believe that it’s better to get a little bit sweaty riding my bike to work than to drive a car. now, say i am engaged in a debate with one of my fellow citizens about how the government should use the revenue from a recent tax increase. one possible use for the tax dollars is a state-of-the-art, national recycling and composting program. such a program would have the practical consequence of diverting sixty per cent of waste away from landfills. the importance of my identity to reasoning comes into sharp relief when one considers what it would mean for me to “set aside” my identity as an environmentalist in order to participate in civic debate over what to do with the tax revenue. how could i possibly do such a thing and still have any opinion at all on the matter? i could not consider the advantages and disadvantages of the various programs the money could fund without having some kind of frame of reference—a horizon of intelligibility—that guides my reasoning on the issue. alcoff argues: reorienting deliberation 17 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 other words, a context within which the reasons one gives for one’s conclusions will be intelligible as well as plausible. (2006, p. 54) participating in the debate over the tax increase just means bringing my identity (and the substantive beliefs it comprises) to bear on the issue. without my identity my participation in the debate would be, quite literally, meaningless. 9 this example helps to illustrate that when an individual draws attention to her social identity, she identifies herself as someone who is embedded in a particular frame of reference and whose particular value judgments inform her political perspective. 10 according to the view of identity i am endorsing, identities are fundamental to reasoning and do not represent inauthentic ways of identifying a culture. alcoff (2006) explains, “the horizon is just the individual or particular substantive perspective that each person has, that makes up who that person is, consisting of his or her background assumptions, form of life, and social location or position within the social structure or hierarchy” (p. 96). alcoff’s view shows how attention to identity is vital to the positive project of civic engagement that waldron endorses. the remainder of this paper defends her insight that identity politics support rather than undermines the ideals of democratic participation waldron recommends. identities, cross-cultural communication, and civic deliberation before the development of the radio and telegraphs, when the primary method of communication over a distance (other than letter writing) was through smoke signals and beacons, the distance to the visible horizon represented the maximum range of communication and vision. as a consequence, “a horizon of” is usually used as a metaphor for the limit of perception, experience, or interest. according to the standard interpretation, a horizon could be used metaphorically to convey the limit of an available cultural viewpoint. but alcoff uses the horizon metaphor in a nonstandard way to draw attention to both the limit of an available cultural viewpoint and the possibilities for understanding the horizon provides. as alcoff uses it, the metaphor “a horizon of” takes on a kind of duality. as the example of the environmentalist who is asked to participate in a debate without her identity demonstrates, understanding the issue at hand is impossible for her without her identity. she can’t bring her opinions to bear on the discussion without some frame of reference within which she can make judgments about what is good, valuable, worthwhile, and so on. thus a horizon of intelligibility opens up possibilities for understanding. because each individual’s identity is grounded in a horizon that sets the range and scope of communication possible from that location, a horizon also represents the maximum range of intelligibility that an individual’s perspective affords. thus a horizon of intelligibility limits possibilities for understanding. my analysis embraces this duality, advocating a stance towards communication that does not understand horizons of intelligibility as fixed and unchangeable. communication among individuals situated in different horizons is an imaginative exercise. it involves not simply evaluating the reasons behind a particular cultural norm; it involves imagining oneself as having a different set of substantive beliefs and value commitments. if citizens are unwilling to shift their location on the 18 rebecca mason studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 horizon with respect to other citizens with whom they are in conversation, the possibility for cross-cultural communication will be diminished by the limiting aspect of horizon. but discursive spaces can be adjusted to accommodate the various ranges of communication afforded by the various horizons of intelligibility that inform the reasons offered up in the process of civic deliberation. if another person’s perspective is grounded in a location beyond one’s horizon of intelligibility, the only way to make communication possible is to shorten that distance by one or both of the individuals reorienting themselves in the discursive space. an example may help to make this point clearer. alcoff imagines how most parents in the united states or canada would react to the decision of one of their children to join a religious sect, like the amish. the child could explain the reasons behind her decision in detail and with clarity to parents who listened carefully to her every word.11 nonetheless, the parents would still fail to understand the child’s decision unless their lives were such that they had previously held, or were open to holding, a particular set of values: “the value[s] of community and having a wellordered, morally and spiritually meaningful life over the value[s] of individual freedom, autonomy, integrity, or self-determination, and perhaps even over rationality itself” (alcoff, 2006, p. 55). parents’ failure to understand such a decision would constitute a “gap of intelligibility between the reasons the child gives and what their parents can comprehend” (alcoff, 2006, p. 54), and would point to a difference in substantive belief that cannot be bridged by examining the child’s stated reasons for her choice. it is not simply the reasons the child articulates that are the source of the parents’ failure to understand, but the substantive commitments that make those reasons intelligible. before the child’s choice could be understood as rational, the parents would not simply have to rigorously evaluate the child’s reasons; rather, they would have to reorient themselves in qualitative space in such a way as to be open to an entirely different set of substantive commitments. in contrast, waldron sees interaction between cultures in terms of negotiation. in circumstances in which mutual accommodations are not available, what norms societies ought to follow must be decided through a process of civic deliberation, which involves examining the reasons behind cultural norms. waldron suggests asking the following questions in order to assess the appropriateness of cultural norms in civic debate: is the argument a good one? are the facts right? do the major premises of the argument point to values that are of real importance? could the important values be secured by any other means? in response, i ask: what does it mean to ask oneself any of these questions in absence of one’s cultural identity (recall the example of an environmentalist participating in a debate about the tax increase)? none of the questions that waldron proposes to guide civic debate can be answered without qualitative judgments, according to which assessments of what is good, worthwhile, admirable, or of value are intelligible. waldron’s model of civic deliberation relies heavily on participants’ ability to evaluate the reasons behind various cultural norms. but, as alcoff points out, evaluative judgments always make use of substantive commitments and qualitative distinctions. her analysis draws attention to the “interpretive nature of identity” (2001, p. 63): reorienting deliberation 19 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 to attain knowledge in most cases we must engage in a process of reasoning, and to engage in most kinds of reasoning—practical reasoning, moral reasoning—we must engage in a process of judgement . . . judgment involves a qualitative weighing of the evidence; it is not simple deduction, but more akin to an interpretation. (alcoff, 2006, p. 94) this interpretive account of identity focuses on the epistemic role of identities as locations “from which knowing and perceptive analysis takes place” (alcoff, 2006, p. 125). accordingly, our duty of civic participation requires more than the articulation of the reasons behind cultural norms. as the example above demonstrates, it often requires an attempt to understand the substantive commitments that make up a person’s cultural identity and render the world intelligible to her. because identity is constitutive of how individuals come to understand the world and their place in it, our civic obligations extend beyond the articulation and examination of reasons. our obligations extend to the identity or interpretive horizon in which reasons are situated. this involves a stance towards civic debate that acknowledges the cultural embeddedness of rationality and how that might affect the ways in which individuals from different cultural locations enter conversational spaces as reasoners. susan babbitt provides an example that helps substantiate alcoff’s insight that, even when expressed in a process of civic deliberation, reasons may remain opaque across the cultural backgrounds of different individuals and groups (alcoff, 2006). in “freedom and democracy in cuba: a problem of understanding,” babbitt calls attention to the fact that the conditions for understanding the social and political norms in cuba require more than the articulation of facts or evidence about the cuban situation. she says that understanding requires “reference not just to a way of life, but more importantly . . . to an orientation toward that way of life” (1999, p. 87). babbitt points out that despite the fact that there are 54 doctors per 10,000 citizens in cuba (much higher than the respective proportion in the united states, even though the united states is much wealthier than cuba), that all education is free to all cubans, and that cuba’s constitution guarantees rights to work, health, education, and social assistance, cuba is still criticized for failing to respect human rights. 12 babbitt argues that in the case of cuba: it is not enough to consider empirical evidence; it is also necessary to consider the conceptual and practical background which explains the importance given to the evidence. moreover, one has to consider the fact that relevant philosophical assumptions are now very powerful, that they constitute the basis for a world view, informing the way people see themselves and interpret stories and experiences. (babbitt, 1999, p. 83) babbitt explains that the fact that cuba continues to come under criticism for failure to respect human rights is not because critics fail to consider the evidence. it is, instead, because they occupy a cultural-epistemic location such that they assign a lower level of importance (or no importance at all) to the evidence in question— evidence such as higher literacy rates and a better healthcare system in cuba. instead, a high level of importance is assigned to the fact that cuba lacks a multiparty democratic system. freedom to choose among a variety of political candidates, according to this point of view, trumps all other evidence offered for the belief that cuba respects human rights. while all of the evidence presented is true, 20 rebecca mason studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 the respectively low and high levels of importance assigned to the evidence inform the belief that human rights in cuba are not, in fact, respected. conversely, those who believe that human rights in cuba are, in fact, respected occupy a culturalepistemic location such that they attribute a low level of importance to a multiparty democratic system and a high level of importance to the other evidence. whether or not human rights in cuba are, in fact, respected is not, however, my concern in this paper. what babbitt’s example helps to demonstrate is how, in alcoff’s vocabulary, horizons of intelligibility direct salience and importance, and influence value judgments such that the articulation of reasons and the evidence cited to substantiate those reasons is inadequate to support the kind of civic deliberation waldron describes. the debate around whether or not cuba respects human rights reaches a stalemate despite the fact that both sides articulate the reasons behind their respective beliefs because both sides attribute different levels of importance to the evidence. understanding why one might believe that cuba does respect human rights “requires not just truth, but the development of the conditions for ascribing importance to truths, for seeing how such truths matter or could matter” (babbitt, 1999, p. 92). in the case of cuba, understanding involves considering the substantive commitments and value judgments that explain why different levels of importance are assigned to the evidence. similarly for the process of civic deliberation, the substantive commitments of both sides, the position each occupies on a horizon of intelligibility, the conditions for ascribing importance to truths, not just the reasons, must be considered. each side must be open to holding a different set of values—of attributing a different level of importance to the evidence in question in order to evaluate those reasons. babbitt’s discussion of cuba helps to illustrate alcoff’s point that while our ability to conduct conversations across conceptual schemes is not impossible, cultural identity is a condition of those conversations, by being a condition of the kind of reasoning we must deploy to participate in them. waldron argues that our first responsibility “is to make whatever effort we can to converse with others on their own terms, as they attempt to converse with us on ours, to see what we can understand of their reasons, and to present our reasons as well as we can to them” (waldron, 2000, p. 163). alcoff’s analysis shows how cultural identity is vitally important to the intelligibility of reasons offered in the context of civic deliberation. in order to enable productive deliberation, individuals must not only recognize the important relationship between cultural identity and reasoning, they must be willing to reorient themselves towards different interpretive horizons; that is, in the context of civic deliberation they must be willing to engage with the cultural identities of their fellow citizens, as well as their reason-grounded proposals. learning to understand the substantive commitments that guide reasons and value judgments across different horizons will increase the maximum range of intelligibility among diverse social locations, thus enabling the kind of productive multicultural dialogue waldron hopes to achieve. conclusion understanding identity claims in terms of individual rights is but one way to understand the politics of identity and is neither necessary nor sufficient to facilitate reorienting deliberation 21 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 dialogue and promote peace and justice in present-day multicultural societies. the framework of human rights has served many important political movements quite well, even while it stands in the way of others. waldron insightfully moves beyond the constraints of rawlsian public reason, but he fails to envision ways of understanding cultural identity outside of the human-rights framework that presents problems for his account of civic deliberation. because the intelligibility of reasons depends on a framework of substantive commitments, cultural identity ought to be seen as an epistemic resource necessary for civic debate not as an impediment to it. the interpretive analysis of identity proposed by alcoff avoids the obstacles entailed by a rights-based account waldron describes. alcoff suggests that identity politics involve an orientation to political deliberation which pays heed to the reality that reasoning requires a deliberative orientation to get off the ground. her analysis indicates that the gap between unintelligibility and intelligibility requires more than the articulation of reasons that waldron’s analysis recommends. it involves an imaginative participation in the debate; that is, a willingness to reorient oneself towards different cultural identities in the discursive space by imagining one’s self as having a different set of substantive beliefs and value commitments. according to the alternative interpretation of identity that i have supported, responsible citizenship and social justice will involve civic deliberation in which the deliberative space is characterized by citizens whose perspectives are rightly informed by their cultural identities and in which they engage with the cultural identities that inform the reasons of their fellow citizens. notes 1 in visible identities: race, gender and the self (2006), linda alcoff identifies three main political arguments behind the contemporary critique of identity: the separatism problem, the reification problem, and the reasoning problem. her taxonomy helpfully maps the complicated terrain of the debate around identity politics in much more detail than i have space for in this paper. 2 for instance, in france there is a total ban on religious symbols and apparel in schools. in their objections to the law, many muslims argue that the hijab is a cultural head covering traditionally worn by muslim women. it is an important part of their cultural identity and therefore they have a right to wear it. the same claims are made by french jews, sikhs, and christians regarding skull caps, turbans, and large crosses respectively. 3 this thesis is not tantamount to a rejection of rights tout court. as brennan (1999) argues, it may be the case that our moral theories ought to include rights, but that rights alone aren’t sufficient. for the purposes of this paper i wish to remain agnostic or at least ecumenical with respect to human rights. 4 contrast this with schlesinger’s trivializing analysis: schlesinger locates the impetus behind identity-based movements in “the need for ethnic cheerleading” (schlesinger, 1992, p. 56). while disingenuously touting the importance of cultural pluralism, he decries what he describes as the self-esteem building function of identity politics. he argues, “low selfesteem is too deep a malady to be cured by hearing nice things about one’s own ethnic past. history is not likely to succeed where psychiatry fails” (schlesinger, 2000, p. 101). 5 “compossibility” is a technical term waldron traces back to leibniz. two things are compossible when they are possible together; conversely, two things are incompossible when the existence of one rules out the existence of the other. in ethics and politics, he says, the term compossibility takes on a slightly different meaning. there, it refers to joint practicability. it is in this sense that waldron employs the term compossibility. for the purposes of this paper, the term “contrary” is less technical and cumbersome and will suffice to convey the appropriate meaning. 22 rebecca mason studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 6 waldron argues that when claims made by cultural groups are not contrary to similar claims of other citizens in a multicultural society, those claims ought to be accommodated. 7 it is also worth mentioning that waldron does not fully credit the ways in which individuals are driven to make rights-based identity claims in liberal democratic societies. given the significant influence of human rights considerations on the ways in which legal and political frameworks are currently set up in the societies waldron considers, there are few other ways in which cultural minorities can voice these claims even when they are not acting “strategically.” because i want to step outside of the framework of human rights in my discussion of identity politics, however, i do not here consider this objection to waldron in detail. 8 the argument that rights-based identity claims represent inauthentic ways of engaging with one’s culture is the only argument waldron makes which i find exaggerated and unreasonable. there are real problems with his view that identity claims are artificial. unfortunately, there is no room in this paper for a full exposition of my objections to his claims about inauthenticity. the thesis i do advance in this paper neither stands nor falls with those objections. 9 drawing from taylor, one might describe giving up my identity as a kind of “identity crisis”: “an acute form of disorientation, which people often express in terms of not knowing who they are, but which can also be seen as a radical uncertainly of where they stand. they lack a frame or horizon within which things can take on a stable significance, within which some life possibilities can be seen as good or meaningful, others as bad or trivial” (taylor, 1992, pp. 27-28). 10 note that my identity, while necessary for me to participate in the debate, need not dictate my belief in the debate over the tax increase or the recycling program. of course i am going to be strongly disposed to using the tax revenue to fund a recycling program, but this does not preclude my revising my commitments (even my identity) if new and compelling evidence is brought to my attention over the course of the debate. perhaps i live in a country without public heath care (something i knew before the debate began) and learn (in the course of the debate) that even with the tax hike, there is not enough money to both fund public health care and the recycling program. i am persuaded to give up my support for the recycling program and lobby to have the tax increase support health care instead. i decide to start a small composting program in my community; i write letters to companies whose products i use most often encouraging them to limit their packaging as much as possible. i increase my monthly donation to the world wildlife fund. 11 we can imagine the child citing such reasons as: “with the state of the world as it is, i have come to believe this is what’s best for me,” or “this community gives my life purpose, it makes me feel grounded in a way i’ve never felt before.” 12 babbitt also draws comparisons with other statistics in the united states. in the united states she cites the facts that “59 per cent of those condemned to death are members of minority racial groups . . . that funding for prisons has increased 30 per cent in the past 10 years while funding for education has decreased by 18 per cent during the same period . . . 60 percent of the children at age eight do not know how to read; that 54 per cent of the suicides of young people in developed countries take place in the united states; and that social assistance has been reduced by 60 per cent” (babbitt, 1999, pp. 82-83). references alcoff, l. m. (2001). on judging epistemic credibility: is social identity relevant? in sandra morgen and nancy tuana (eds.), engendering rationalities (pp. 53-80). albany, ny: state university of new york press. alcoff, l. m. (2006). visible identities: race, gender, and the self. new york, ny: oxford university press. babbitt, s. (1999). freedom and democracy in cuba: a problem of understanding. in c. koggel (ed.), moral issues in global perspective (pp. 82-95). peterborough, on: broadview press. reorienting deliberation 23 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 brennan, s. (1999). reconciling feminist politics and feminist ethics on the issue of rights. journal of social philosophy, 30(2), 260-275. elshtain, j. b. (1993). democracy on trial. cbc massey lecture series. toronto, on: house of anansi press ltd. kymlicka, w. (1995). multicultural citizenship: a liberal theory of minority rights. new york, ny: oxford university press inc. rawls, j. (1997). the idea of public reason revisited. the university of chicago law review, 64(3), 765807. schlesinger, a. m. (1992). the disuniting of america. new york, ny: w.w. norton & company. taylor, c. (1989). sources of the self: the making of modern identity. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. waldron, j. (2000). cultural identity and civic responsibility. in w. kymlicka & w. norman (eds.), citizenship in diverse societies (pp. 155-174). toronto, on: oxford university press. degagne final before ts correspondence address: alexa degagne, women’s & gender studies, athabasca university, 1 university dr., athabasca, ab, t9s 3a3; email: adegagne@athabascau.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 protecting cisnormative private and public spheres: the canadian conservative denunciation of transgender rights alexa degagne athabasca university, canada abstract the public sphere has been seen by conservatives as an arena for safeguarding private relations. private power relations (in the family, religion, community and economy) could be threatened by newly recognized social groups that make claims on the state for justice and equality. therefore, conservatives have been concerned about who can speak and exist in public and who can thereby make demands on the state. in the debates over transgender rights in canada, social conservatives and neoliberal forces have merged in complex and impactful ways. analyzing house of commons and senate debates and committee proceedings for bill c-279 (2015) and bill c-16 (2016–2017), i examine three conservative arguments that illustrate attempts to maintain private power relations and hierarchal gendered divisions by ensuring that transgender and gender nonconforming people are not allowed to exist, speak or make claims in public: first, the assertion that gender identity and gender expression are not definable identity categories for claims-making because transgender people are deceptive and can change their gender based on their feelings; second, the targeting of public facilities, and particularly public bathrooms, as sites of contention, danger and necessary gender segregation; and third, the attempt to delegitimize rights claims by criminalizing transgender people in relation to cisgender women and children. keywords transgender; human rights; conservative; canadian politics; public and private spheres introduction canadian conservative social movements, federal parties and politicians have had an acrimonious relationship with 2slgbtq communities and people.1 steeped in cisnormative and heteronormative ideology, social conservatives 1 2slgbtq is an acronym for two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer. alexa degagne studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 498 rebuke 2slgbtq people and compel federal conservative party members to vote against government efforts that support and enhance gay and transgender rights.2 conservative politicians have responded to this pressure by championing purportedly neutral policies of austerity (brodie, 2007), which have had marginalizing effects on 2slgbtq people. however, progressive conservatives have simultaneously tried to downplay and impede social conservative influences in federal conservative parties for fear of alienating moderate supporters and 2slgbtq voters. over the past decade, all federal parties, conservative included, have tried to court 2slgbtq votes, with varying degrees of success. for example, in 2016, the conservative party of canada (cpc) voted to revoke their policy against same-sex marriage but stopped short of officially supporting its legalization.3 moreover, cpc leader andrew scheer (2017-2020) voted against same-sex marriage and refused to march in a pride parade but advocated for gay people in russia and supported the liberal government’s 2017 apology to 2slgbtq canadians. in response to this ambivalent approach to the 2slgbtq community, lgb members of the cpc advocated for the party to improve its appeal by celebrating gay conservatives at blue tent convention events and forming within-party lgb groups such as lgbtory (boily & robidoux-descary, 2019).4 in another positive move, cpc interim leader rona ambrose (2015-2017) supported bill c-16, which added both gender identity and gender expression to the canadian human rights act and the criminal code’s hate crime section. in 2016, the cpc caucus was free to vote on this bill as they chose, and 52% of cpc members of parliament voted against the expansion of rights to transgender people (40 opposed, 38 in favour). as parliament debated transgender rights, several cpc mps and conservative senators employed fear-based and violent discourse against transgender people. thus, while the cpc’s relationship to 2slgbtq people appears to be incoherent and divided by long-simmering tensions between social conservative, neoliberal and progressive conservative wings of the canadian conservative movement, a majority of cpc mps in the end voted against transgender rights. how does this opposition to the 2 i use transgender and trans as umbrella terms for diverse gender identities and expressions including but not limited to transgender, trans, intersex, two-spirit, non-binary, gender nonconforming and gender queer. 3 the cpc formed in 2003 through the merger of the progressive conservative party (19422003) and the canadian alliance (2000-2003). the progressive conservative party was one of two main governing federal parties (along with the liberal party of canada) throughout the second half of the 20th century. the canadian alliance formed out of the reform party (19872000), which was a conservative populist party born from a western canadian regional sense of alienation. i trace the historic and ongoing relationships between these conservative parties and 2slgbtq people, paying particular attention to the relationship between the cpc and transgender people and issues. 4 lgbtory was founded in 2015 and characterizes itself as a “network of lgbt canadians from all walks of life and diverse identities, but we all share a belief in the fundamental conservative principles of individual liberty, personal responsibility, reward for hard work, a free-market economy and democratic government” (lgbtory, 2017). protecting cisnormative private and public spheres studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 499 expansion of transgender rights reinforce deep-rooted cisnormative and heteronormative ideological tenets within the canadian conservative movement? in this paper, i argue that through their engagement with transgender rights, the majority of cpc mps and many conservative senators remain interested in protecting the cisnormative and heteronormative forms and functions of the private sphere by narrowing who can speak and gain representation in the public sphere, and by seeking to regulate which issues are appropriate for public debate and ultimately state engagement.5 in parliamentary debates over transgender rights, social conservatives and neoliberal forces in conservative politics have merged in complex and impactful ways. neoliberal policies supported by conservative interests have employed the dual tactics of denying difference and inequality between social groups and narrowing avenues through which people can make social justice claims on the state. iris marion young (1990) claims that recognition of social group difference at the state level is an essential aspect of social justice. marginalized social groups and the individuals who comprise them need to be acknowledged and incorporated as members of the political realm, so they are able to influence state decision-making processes and outcomes that affect them, to name and challenge domination and oppression and to make claims for resources, rights and protections (young, 1990). social conservatives use a neoliberal narrowing of recognition, inclusion and claims-making to argue that gender identity and gender expression are not legitimate justice concerns worthy of state protection, and that transgender people should not have access to public space (including public bathrooms and political institutions) because their gender nonconformity represents a public threat to the equality and safety of cisgender women and children. in the first part of the paper, i provide the recent historical context for this argument, tracing conservatives’ preoccupation with maintaining cisnormative and heteronormative hierarchal power relations in the private sphere. while scholars have mapped and traced the ideological commonalities and tensions among various wings of conservatism in canada in relation to gender and sexuality, they have yet to consider canadian conservatism’s relationship to transgender people and issues, a gap that this research addresses. in the second part of the paper, i explore how conservative preoccupations with protecting a normative private sphere have shaped conservative parties’ engagement in debates over transgender rights. i do so by employing a discourse analysis of house of commons and senate debates and committee proceedings for bill c-279 (2015) and bill c-16 (2016-2017), the transgender rights bills. i specifically analyze parliamentary 5 although senators are not required to affiliate with a party, there is a senate caucus of the conservative party of canada. in this paper, i analyze the debate statements of senators who are officially identified as conservative. while some independent and un-affiliated senators have opposed trans bills, i only include their comments if they were officially affiliated with the conservatives at some point in their senate tenure. alexa degagne studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 500 debates to understand how members framed their arguments within the public space of parliament, unfiltered by press and social media analysis. my discourse analysis process unfolded by conducting a general survey of all the documents to identify recurring themes that are related to my research question and theoretical framework, including discussions of the public and private spheres, transgender identity, rights, protection/safety of transgender people, and the presence of transgender people in public spaces. i then identified the discursive strategies and frames deployed by cpc mps and conservative senators, as well as the contradictions in their language or arguments, to expose potential discrepancies and divisions among them. finally, i identify and examine three main conservative arguments that attempt to maintain cisnormative private sphere power relations and hierarchal gendered divisions by impeding social justice and ensuring that transgender people’s public lives, voices and claims-making are delegitimized: first, the assertion that gender identity and gender expression are not definable identity categories for claims-making because transgender people are supposedly deceptive and can change their gender based on their feelings; second, the targeting of public facilities, and particularly public bathrooms, as the site of contention, danger and necessary gender segregation; and third, the attempt to delegitimize rights-claims by criminalizing transgender people in relation to cisgender women and children. canadian conservatism in public and private spheres conservative attachments to the private to contextualize canadian conservatives’ engagement with transgender rights, this section considers how conservatives delineate who can and should exist, speak and be represented in the public political sphere. corey robin (2011) argues that conservatism is not defined by a commitment to individualism; rather, it is fundamentally concerned with maintaining and reasserting hierarchal power relations in both public and private spheres of social life. robin asserts that conservatives view the power relations that organize the private realm as foundational to and constitutive of the proper functioning of social and political life. the private and public are not separate but rather mutually reinforcing; those who command authority in private – be it the home, church or business – are to likewise engage in the public and political sphere as leaders (robin, 2011). this assertion is predicated on the historical cisnormative and heteronormative divisions between the public and private wherein the public sphere is framed as civilized, rational, emotionless and masculine, and the private as natural, irrational, emotional and feminine. social conservatism has championed the role played by the cisnormative heteropatriarchal family in the proper functioning of private and public protecting cisnormative private and public spheres studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 501 realms. brenda cossman explains that according to conservatives, “individuals are first and foremost members of communities, united by common morals, values and traditions. within this vision, the family is the basic unit of society, forging individuals together through its moral authority, instilling children with moral values and traditions” (2005, p. 433). in social conservative ideology, moral values and traditions are to be based on a cisnormative gender binary wherein people are divided into the mutually exclusive sex categories of male or female, and have accordingly been assigned opposite and complementary cisnormative gender markers and roles. they also conform to a heteropatriarchal model in which cisgender women and children are dependent, passive and vulnerable, thus requiring cisgender men (and the state) to protect and provide for them. even though neoliberals and social conservatives have differing opinions on how the state should influence the private sphere, they agree it should be protected by limiting who can exist and speak in public; what issues are worthy of public consideration; and who should be protected by the government. public speech can constitute a challenge to normalized power relations when marginalized people make claims on the state for social equality and participation in decision-making processes. as christina foust (2010) explains, transgressions against norms and hierarchies expose the fluidity and fragility of a system of power, ultimately weakening the legitimacy of authority structures. indigenous women, women of colour, queer people and transgender people have long understood the family (biological and chosen) and the private sphere more generally to be a site of regulation but also empowerment and resistance, and have accordingly sought changes in the public realm by rejecting and rebelling against imposed western, colonial, cisnormative heteropatriarchal family and gender norms. recognizing transgender people in both realms is a social justice-based challenge to the primacy and legitimacy of cisnormative and heteropatriarchal roles and models, which subverts and unsettles the ostensibly natural sex binary and its attendant cisgender norms and power relations in social and political life (see stryker, 2008). the following section traces how canadian conservative parties have conceptualized and reacted to challenges to their cisnormative heteropatriarchal public/private model. canadian federal conservatism and personal issues “personal issues,” such as divorce, abortion and homosexuality, were first brought into formal federal political debate through a joint house of commons/senate committee report on divorce law reform in 1967 and the liberal party’s omnibus bill to amend the criminal code of 1968-1969 (hooper, 2014). in line with robin’s (2011) definition of conservatism, james farney (2009) argues that at that time the progressive conservative alexa degagne studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 502 (pc) party viewed such issues as personal and moral, and therefore beyond politicization. social conservatives in the pc party, however, saw these debates as opportunities to “use political means to promote traditionalist notions of correct sexual behavior and family structure” (farney, 2009, p. 243). since the 1960s, social conservatives have warned that the cisnormative family and the private sphere have been attacked by identity groups who have been bolstered and armed through public sphere interventions: divorce laws that enable heterosexual couples to abandon marriage; labour rights through which women have gained economic independence; and gay rights campaigns that denigrate marriage. social conservatives have accordingly sought state intervention into the private realm to strengthen and promote the cisnormative heteropatriarchal family through various policies relating to marriage, healthcare, reproductive rights, public education, immigration and welfare provisions. forgoing divisions between the state and civil society, social conservatives have argued that the state could access and regulate citizens’ private gender and sexual lives through society’s most foundational institution – the family (dauda, 2010). despite these efforts, between the 1960s and 1990s social conservatives were not able to exert much influence in the pc party, which “rejected the notion that abortion and same-sex rights were appropriate topics on which to take a partisan stand,” and sought to avoid political dispute over the issues by arguing that they should be left for private deliberation (farney, 2009, p. 250). the pc practice was to enable private structures and relations to regulate such changes in gender and sexuality relations by shielding the issues from public scrutiny and debate. although social conservatives have jostled for a position in canadian conservative politics, neoliberalism has been the dominant current of conservatism in canada since the 1980s. as janine brodie states, successive canadian governments have “abandoned the vision of social citizenship, social security, and social justice, offering in their place a new social imaginary that pinpoints the market, one buoyed by the logics of neoclassical economics, as the primary, if not ‘natural’ source of both individual wellbeing and freedom, and political legitimacy” (2007, p. 99). neoliberalism thus bolsters private power relations by abolishing or privatizing particular social welfare programs; positioning the market as the natural system for economic and political activities; idealizing individuality and personal responsibility; narrowing political recognition and curtailing avenues for political participation; and delegitimizing claims to rights and social justice (brodie, 2007). canadian governments have impeded recognition and justice claims-making to absolve themselves from acknowledging, much less addressing, structural inequality and injustices as people are disciplined to deny “identity markers” that differentiate them from the norm, to “rise above systemic barriers,” and to take personal responsibility for their successes and failures in the natural and equal market (brodie, 2007, p. 104). protecting cisnormative private and public spheres studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 503 as neoliberalism deteriorated the public sphere, social conservatives feared that the public and political influence of the church and communal traditions, as well as the family, would weaken and disappear. these same institutions, however, were enrolled to assume the responsibilities and tasks of the gutted neoliberal state, and thereby gained new forms of influence in people’s lives. neoliberalism accepted the family as an economic unit. hetero and cisgender white individuals and families were structurally positioned to succeed in the neoliberal fair market, much to social conservative approval. the birth of the populist reform party provided social conservatives an opportunity to engage with and influence a federal party, to leader preston manning’s discontent. social conservatism and populism came together largely through gay rights and same-sex marriage, which were framed as threats to the primacy of heterosexual marriages. social conservatives’ influence in the party waned once same-sex marriage was legalized, and they lost their major policy preoccupation (farney, 2012). under stephen harper, the party avoided boasting about its anti-2slgbtq initiatives, while social conservatives continued to attempt to use the state to strengthen and promote the cisnormative heteropatriarchal family and gender relations by maintaining a homophobic age of consent (dauda, 2010) and restricting welfare services, public education curriculum, immigration (gaucher, 2018), international maternal health programs and abortion access (saurette & gordon, 2016). these goals were cautiously pursued. social conservatives’ success in bringing social issues into conservative party debate rendered social conservatives’ issues vulnerable to the whims of the larger conservative movement and party (farney, 2012), and thereby threatened their ability to use the public forum to maintain and bolster their ways of life. at the same time, canadian federal conservative parties covertly implemented neoliberal legislation to entrench gender and sexual hierarchies. as the next section examines, this tactic of restraint was tested when the ndp and then the liberals introduced legislation to protect transgender rights, which reignited social conservatives’ willingness to risk reinserting the private into public debate, to ensure that transgender people’s voice and claims-making would be delegitimized. transgender rights and conservative panic in response to years of advocacy by transgender people and organizations, ndp mp bill siksay introduced a bill that proposed adding gender identity and gender expression to the human rights act, which went through three iterations, in 2005, 2007 and 2009. in its final form, bill c-279 was introduced by ndp mp randall garrison in 2011 but permitted to die on the order paper when government senate leader and pc claude carignan deliberately delayed debate on its passage (baglow, 2015). transgender activists were angered by years of bigoted and hateful debate about the bills alexa degagne studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 504 (gothoskar, 2015). in 2016, the liberals introduced bill c-16, which proposed adding both gender identity and gender expression to the canadian human rights act (chra) and the criminal code’s hate crime section. the bill passed in 2017 with full liberal, ndp and green support, while 40 cpc mps and 11 conservative senators voted against it (mas, 2016). not all cpc elected officials were against these transgender rights bills, yet there remained resistance and tension among cpc and conservative members in the house of commons and the senate.6 as many trans activists pointed out, inclusion in the chra and hate-crime policies was only one of numerous priorities for their communities and movement, which were dealing with under-representation in political institutions; systemic and daily violence; poverty and homelessness; the systemic lack of transgender competence in physical, mental and addictions health services; inadequate legal and social services for trans refugees and immigrants; and anti-transgender and racist policing, criminal legal and carceral systems. they argued that exercising one’s rights in the chra and hate-crimes policies is complicated and costly. trans activists and academics further noted that relying on the police and criminal justice system for protection through hate-crime provisions bolsters anti-trans, anti-black, colonial institutions that target and criminalize trans and street-involved people, sex workers, indigenous persons, black people and people of colour (vipond, 2015). while the importance of including gender identity and gender expression in the chra and hate-crime policies was contested by many transgender activists, it became a flashpoint for debate and anti-trans fearmongering among a substantial group of federal conservatives. my analysis of house of commons and senate debates and committee proceedings for bill c-389 (2009), bill c-279 (2015) and bill c-16 (2016-2017) demonstrates that opponents presented many arguments, including religious beliefs about the divine form of cisnormative heteropatriarchal families; the unfounded assertion that certain immigrant groups may not be accustomed to transgender people and therefore inadvertently discriminate against them; the fear that recognizing more than two genders may be confusing for children’s sports teams; and the claim that free speech would be violated if people were compelled to use transgender people’s pronouns, starkly pitting certain people’s free speech rights against other people’s dignity, safety and public existence. this free speech argument garnered media attention, fueled transphobic speech and acts at universities and public protests and in online 6 the canadian parliamentary system, miriam smith (2008) argues, makes it difficult for controversial or extremist views or issues to gain traction within parties and among the electorate because mps tend to be subject to dominant leaders, and usually need party approval to introduce bills and ask questions. senators, conversely, are not subject to the same partisan expectations, as they are unelected. as these debates on transgender rights demonstrate, several conservative senators used decidedly more aggressive and discriminatory language and arguments in their opposition to the proposed bills. protecting cisnormative private and public spheres studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 505 fora, and demonstrated that these reactions to violations of cisgender norms permeate canada’s society and are perpetuated in popular discourse. in what follows i explore three main arguments developed by conservative senators and cpc mps that received less media and popular attention than the free speech debates, but that also attempt to maintain cisnormative dominance and reinforce the notion that only certain people should be represented in public and protected by the state. their discourse on transgender rights attempts to delegitimize transgender identity claims, restrict public space through the “bathroom bill,” and criminalize transgender people in relation cisgender women and children. delegitimizing transgender identity claims common and dangerous tropes – that transgender people are deceptive, lie about their gender and change their gender on a whim – have long been used to unsettle and delegitimize transgender people’s claims to identity, representation, rights, protections and ultimately social justice. kristen schilt and laurel westbrook explain that, these ideological collisions between those advocating transgender rights and those who insist on sex at birth determining gender, and the ensuing panics, put into high relief the often-invisible social criteria for ‘who counts’ as a woman and a man in our society. (2015, p. 29) in defence of the assertion that gender is anchored in a biological sex-binary, transgender rights opponents deny that people can legitimately identify as and express genders other than and/or beyond the sex and gender they were assigned at birth. accordingly, opponents to transgender rights argue that there is no basis for a claim to group identity, no undue inequality experienced by transgender people and therefore no justification for a request for group protection against discrimination and violence. throughout parliamentary debates, several opponents of transgender rights doubted gender identity and gender expression were legitimate categories for protection, especially compared to other identity categories. conservative senator betty unger argued that the category of transgender, as stated in the bill, was too broad and therefore vulnerable to “imposters who would abuse this protection” (bill c-16, march 2, 2017). cpc mp cathay wagantall stated the following during a debate on bill c-16: the labels for this population are continually morphing and evolving, and the numbers that identify with this population are somewhat dubious at best. in our zeal to want to be seen as fair and open-minded, we seem to have forgotten the faces of those whose equal rights also exist. if we are in fact prepared to pass this law and let everyone do whatever they want on any given day or whim, do we not have a responsibility to ensure that we are not now discriminating against the alexa degagne studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 506 larger population's health, safety, and quality of life? (bill c-16, october 18, 2016) here, wagantall’s description of transgender identities as “morphing and evolving” – changeable not just “on any given day” but also by “whim” – renders trans identities unstable and undefinable. moreover, she stated that the precarity of transgender identities threatens “those whose equal rights also exist,” referring to cisgender women who supposedly fit into a definable, stagnant and yet vulnerable identity category. conservative senator donald neil plett expressed his comparable doubts even more starkly: further to the case of some people not being known as what they are, the fact of the matter is that is exactly one of the problems i have. the human rights commission has very clearly ruled on transsexuals. transsexuals i understand, but transgender is saying, ‘today in the morning i feel like one thing, and tomorrow i might feel like something else,’ and innocent victims are impacted by that. i will always yield to the innocent victims, especially if they are children. (bill c-279, may 23, 2013) later i discuss the claim that transgender people are a threat to cisgender women and children’s safety. for now, note that while many transgender activists and advocates had pushed for a more open understanding of gender as complex and dynamic yet meaningful and identifiable, wagantall, plett and the like misrepresented this call to challenge the strict gender binary by portraying transgender people as indecisive, flippant and threatening. this line of argumentation was further articulated through the focus on how transgender people feel about their gender. in this case, conservatives argued that transgender people’s claim to an identity was subject to their feelings. in this vein, cpc mp wagantall asked, will a new law protect people who have committed to and changed their identification, as well as those who want to change or think they want to change, or perhaps they have been thinking for the past couple of weeks they want to change, or in the last hour? it is a very broad spectrum we are asked to consider today, from ‘i feel like a woman today’ to someone who has completely committed to the process, changed him or herself, has gone through transformational surgery, and now wants protection from discrimination. (bill c16, october 18, 2016) wagantall claimed to support transgender people who “have completely committed to the process, changed him or herself through transformational surgery,” but was drawing a line at those who “feel like a woman today.” for wagantall, a transgender person was only serious if they physically changed their body according to a medically-regulated binary gender category. feelings, then, were constructed as irrational, undependable and therefore not genuine and the proper basis for a group identity claim. certain emotions seem to have no place in the public sphere. protecting cisnormative private and public spheres studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 507 cpc mp brent rathgeber took issue with the definition of gender identity in one of the proposed bills, which stated, “‘gender identity’ means, in respect of an individual, the individual’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex that the individual was assigned at birth” (canada, december 6, 2012). the phrase “deeply felt,” according to rathgeber, was too vague and open for interpretation. rathgeber acknowledged that, “these are serious matters, and the witnesses who have testified, especially those who have testified from the transgender community, all feel very deeply about their gender identity. they feel very deeply about their gender expression.” nonetheless, he suggested that the government adopt an “objective analysis to give credibility to the claim that one has gender identity issues” (canada, december 6, 2012). yet he claimed that “a cursory look at the individual would likely tell the commissioner or the tribunal that the person in fact falls into a class of individuals that are afforded protection by race, sex, or ethnic origin,” but that option was not feasible for people who were challenging gender norms and expressions (canada, december 6, 2012). as with wagantall’s comparison between cisgender women’s identity and transgender people’s identity, rathgeber claimed that race and ethnic origin are easily and visually identifiable categories – an assertion that is challenged by critical race scholars (see smith, 2003) – but that gender identity and expression are too subjective, especially visually. in sum, these opponents of transgender rights attempted to weaken and delegitimize transgender people’s identities and ability to make a claim on the state by arguing that their trans identities were ever-changing, often based on people’s subjective feelings and whims, and not solidly defined like race or ethnicity. thus, conservatives argued that transgender people’s unstable and category-crossing genders not only rendered them illegible for state identity-based protections, but also, as i discuss next, rendered them a threat to gendered public spaces. public gender regulation and the bathroom bill the question of who can and should exist in public spaces unfolded as a debate about whether or not the proposed bill would enable transgender people to use the public bathrooms associated with their gender identities and expressions. transgender people have used public bathrooms and facilities for as long as there have been public, gender-segregated bathrooms, and they have continually experienced high rates of gender policing, harassment, sexual assault and violence in these spaces (crawford, 2020; cavanagh, 2010). social conservatives and the cpc were not focused on these issues, however, until transgender people began campaigns to attain rights on the basis of gender identity and expression. as backlash to these rights campaigns, social conservative activists in canada and the united states alexa degagne studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 508 declared bathrooms as the latest battle ground in their culture war, fomenting fear and hate toward transgender people. given the conservative preoccupation with regulating private and public spaces, it seems congruent that cpc members focused on public bathrooms and other gender-segregated facilities as the primary battle grounds for these transgender rights “bathroom bills.” sheila cavanagh explains the significance of the bathroom and toilet in canadian and american cisnormative society: much of what we cannot say in polite society surfaces in the toilet. the toilet, like the unconscious, is a dumping ground for unacceptable impulses, sexual practices, identifications, and desires. the vicissitudes of love and hate, desire and aggression are not only written on bathroom walls but enacted in real time. people die and have sex in toilets. illicit messages are etched onto partition walls that span from the lascivious to the hate filled. people cry and vomit, bond and gossip, inject needles and illegal substances, learn about gay sex and birth control (thanks to condom dispensers and birth control advertisements on the back of cubicle doors); we do all kinds of things deemed imprudent, illegal, or vulgar in polite society. (2011, p. 18) public bathrooms exist with blurred boundaries between their public and private status and functions; they are claimed as public space yet represent so much of the “undesirable” elements of human existence and are treated as depositories for all things private, dirty and scandalous. former conservative senator lynn beyak argued that, “pierre elliott trudeau got it right decades ago when he said there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. i would submit that holds true for kitchens, hallways, basements and bathrooms, too” (bill c-16, february 28, 2017). although beyak may seem to have been arguing that the government should let public bathrooms be unregulated spaces, she is actually stating that the government should not change the status quo of binary cisgender segregation in bathrooms. she was seeking to use the government to protect the current structure and function of this public/private space. to regulate and erase the contamination of particular private and public acts in these public spaces, conservatives have sought to bring order, cleanliness and safety through the claim that bathrooms need to be segregated according to the cisgender binary. doing so obscures but also intensifies the violence that is experienced by transgender people in public facilities, and it regulates who can perform private human functions in public spaces. conservatives blend the public and private by arguing that separate bathrooms are needed because cisgender women are weak and vulnerable in these public spaces, and men are either their predators or the protectors (faktor, 2011). violence is always assumed to come from an intruder coming into the bathroom. as cpc mp harold albrecht remarked, “i am concerned about the potential harm to innocent children and youth as a result of the possible invasion of their privacy” (bill c-16, october 18, 2016). as schilt protecting cisnormative private and public spheres studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 509 and westbrook find in their media analysis of transgender rights in the united states: opponents worried about what transgender women, who they assume have penises, might do if they were allowed access to women-only spaces. transgender women in these narratives are always anchored to their imagined ‘male anatomies,’ and thus become categorized as potential sexual threats to those vested with vulnerable subjecthood, namely cisgender women and children. (2015, p. 29) as i have discussed, with supposedly loose definitions of gender identity and expression, transgender people are denounced as deceitful, threatening and in pursuit of identities, spaces and protections that they do not deserve. to protect against these threats, cpc mp wagantall asked, is it prudent for responsible legislators to expand this umbrella so irresponsibly? to ask the majority of canadians to give up their own rights to privacy and to gender identity and expression, and bear the cost for the same, is asking too much. i am confident that a good portion of our society agrees with this. (bill c-16, october 18, 2016). senator beyak argued further that the government should not be burdened with protecting transgender people within these spaces: millions of hard-working taxpayers who do not care what people do in their bedrooms and bathrooms, as long as they don’t have to pay for it. a perfectly reasonable position. i’m speaking today for john, and my other gay friends who feel exactly the same way and who have lived in quiet dignity together, celebrating 50-year anniversaries without expecting or getting a single thing from government. by living in quiet dignity, they have never had to face any kind of discrimination or uncomfortable feelings. i would assert that is how the vast majority of the lgbt community feels. sadly, we only focus on the vocal minority. (bill c-16, february 28, 2017) later in this speech, beyak reiterated her opposition to the bill’s potential cost to taxpayers: “for what? to appease a very small and vocal minority against whom, quite frankly, the clear majority of canadians do not discriminate” (bill c-16, february 28, 2017). she claimed that bill c-16 would duplicate the canadian charter of rights and freedoms and therefore place monetary burdens on the government and taxpayers for court challenges, sign enforcement and information campaigns. beyak used the neoliberal tactic of denying inequality and difference to justify restricted government spending. she argued that if a “vocal minority” wants to avoid discrimination and discomfort, they should live their lives quietly in private; their concerns should not be brought to the public and the government should not pay to protect them. the bathroom, accordingly, is a public space where cisgender women and children (who are all assumed to be cisgender) should be granted privacy alexa degagne studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 510 (which is usually reserved for private spaces) from potential threat, leering and violence that comes with intruding outsiders. thus we see how conservatives stoked fear in their attempt to limit transgender people’s access to public spaces. next i analyze how conservatives built on this denigration of transgender people to deny their requests for public safety and state protection. who is worthy of state protection? in tandem with delegitimizing transgender people’s identities and regulating their existence in public bathrooms and facilities, opponents have also worked to villainize and criminalize transgender people. paul amar argues that the state “‘hypervisiblizes’ raced, classed, and gendered bodies as sources of danger precisely to render the political nature of hierarchy invisible” (quoted in seikaly, 2015, p. 343). this construction of particular people as threatening and dangerous obscures their social marginality and vulnerability. thus, marginalized people’s inequality is ignored, and they are subject to harsher treatment and regulation by the state, police and society. in relation to these issues, opponents of transgender people’s rights have tried to undermine claims of trans marginalization, discrimination and violence by stirring up fear and revulsion of transgender people, claiming that they are a threat to the safety of cisgender women and children, particularly in public spaces. over its 15-year existence, the cpc has been focused on the safety of cisgender women and children, especially in relation to sexual predators, pornography, age of consent, forced marriages, polygamy, human trafficking and gender-selective abortions (see dauda, 2010; gaucher, 2016; saurette & gordon, 2016). the cpc has cast cisgender women and children as powerless victims who need state (patriarchal) protection in the form of increased police presence and powers and stricter, longer prison sentences. children are assumed to be cisgender, thus invisiblizing transgender children, denying transgender children’s need to access public spaces safely and further vilifying trans adults (gill-peterson, 2018). historically, transgender people and queer people have been socially chastised as sexually perverse, immature and self-gratifying. such discourses have been produced and perpetuated by medical and psychiatric institutions and governments, instilling unsubstantiated fear that transgender people and queer people are predatory and seek to lure people, particularly young people, into sexual perversion. these discourses were reproduced in parliamentary discussions about transgender rights and bathrooms. for example, cpc mps and conservative senators argued that the bill would enable “male sexual predators” who wanted to access women’s bathrooms. senator don meredith stated that, “bill c-279 will not improve the lives of canadians. it will confuse lawmakers and enforcers and will protecting cisnormative private and public spheres studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 511 place fear in the hearts of parents and grandparents who worry about the safety of their children” (bill c-279, may 29, 2013). senator don plett added, i believe in protecting women and children, and i have seen too many cases where people abuse it. listen, i don’t believe any legitimate, if you will, transgender person, transsexual person, is a danger. but we have seen over and over again where people take advantage of laws. and this law is wide open for perverts, pedophiles, to take advantage of. (page, 2015) cpc mp dean allison likewise warned of dangerous sexual predators: as the bill would also give special rights to those who simply consider themselves to be transgendered, the door would be open to sexual predators having a legal defence to charges of being caught in a women’s washroom or locker room. i find this potentially legitimized access for men in girls’ bathrooms to be very disconcerting. as sexual predators are statistically almost always men, imagine the trauma that a young girl would face, going into a washroom or a change room at a public pool and finding a man there. it is unconscionable for any legislator, purposefully or just neglectfully, to place her in such a compromising position. (bill c-279, april 5, 2012) cpc mp rob anders produced a petition in opposition to the gender identity bill, citing the bathroom argument, to which ndp lgbt critic randall garrison responded: “anders’ petition is based on ignorance, misinformation, and fear. he is deliberately promoting prejudice against transgendered and transsexual people by portraying them as sexual offenders and pedophiles” (new democratic party, october 5, 2012). the ndp worked in defence of the bill against mp anders’ petition, and called out the transphobic parliamentary debate. cpc michelle rempel stood in contrast to many of her colleagues: “most importantly, they live with the consequences of these acts of non-compassion, of false assumptions that, simply by virtue of their state, they are sexually promiscuous, or more ludicrously, that they are criminal” (bill c-279, march 7, 2013). still, the repeated fear-based association between transgender people and violence against cisgender women and children (assumed to be cisgender) produced the effects of exclusion, harassment and violence against those who were seeking a remedy to oppression in the first place. moreover, these discourses play a role in perpetuating the police surveillance and disproportionate criminalization of transgender people and people of colour (sudbury, 2011), which also serves to remove them from the public through their spatial relocation to carceral systems (johnson, 2014). transgender people were held as failing to fulfill the criteria for equal citizenship and consequently deemed unworthy of state-granted rights and protections, as well as a public existence. this point was reinforced by representatives from real women canada, who were called on by conservative members to speak to the senate on different iterations of the alexa degagne studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 512 bills. diana watts of real women canada stated that, “in canadian penitentiaries, this issue will also create problems. if bill c-279 is passed into law, prison officials, at taxpayers’ expense, will be required to provide treatment for those inmates claiming they were born the wrong gender” (canada, november 27, 2012). watts claimed that incarcerated transgender people who “undergo sex reassignment surgery” would face transphobic violence; therefore, she argued, incarcerated transgender people should not be allowed to transition in prisons, especially not at taxpayers’ expense. the severe and constant violence faced by incarcerated transgender people, especially when housed in gender-segregated facilities that do not correspond to their genders (girshick, 2011), was not questioned in itself; rather, such violence was blamed on transgender people who transitioned in the prison environment. while prisons are organized according to a gender binary, as julia sudbury explains, the disproportionate incarceration of transgender people renders prisons “a site of heightened gender variation” (2011, p. 307). state violence of gender-segregation is enforced as trans people are denied access to publicly funded private spaces that offer protection (e.g., affordable housing, emergency and domestic abuse shelters, social and community services), are subject to heightened police and state surveillance and are consequently removed from the public sphere and relocated into gendersegregated prisons, wherein they are subject to misgendering, discrimination and violence. transgender people’s claims to rights and protections were further questioned in relation to the rights of cisgender women. as schilt and westbrook summarize, opponents disseminate ideas that women are weak and in need of protection – what one of us (laurel westbrook) frames as creating a ‘vulnerable subjecthood’ – and that men are inherent rapists. at the same time, they generate fear and misunderstanding around transgender people along with the suggestion that transgender people are less deserving of protection than cisgender women and children. (2015, p. 27) relatedly, conservative senator donald neil plett stated that, women have worked and continue to work extremely hard to make headway on the issue of equality and women’s rights. we now have the opportunity to protect and defend the rights women have worked so hard to obtain. i urge all honourable senators to stand up for the rights of women and girls. i urge you to strongly consider the impact that blurring the lines of gender will have. (bill c-279, may 23, 2013) alex faktor points to this exclusion of transgender women from the category of woman as a “reactionary preservation of an abstractly ‘pure’ (that is, heterocentric and cissexist) female identity” (2011, p. 14-15). the exclusion of transgender women, faktor (2011) claims, is troubling because it pits the safety of one marginalized group against the safety of another. protecting cisnormative private and public spheres studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 513 the differentiation between cisgender and transgender women was likewise articulated through claims that transgender people were asking for special and extra rights. cpc mp harold albrecht asked, is it fair to have their rights trampled upon by this imposition of extra rights for some? […] i am supportive of equal rights for all, but in my opinion this bill goes far beyond equal rights into the territory of granting extra rights or special rights for some; and in the process of granting those extra rights for some, we automatically diminish and deny the legitimate time-honoured rights of many others. (bill c-16, october 18, 2016) conservative senator donald neil plett stated, “i am not sure i want to fastforward to a place where the safety of society is jeopardized for the empowerment of a few” (bill c-279, may 23, 2013). transgender people’s rights would not be equal to cisgender women’s rights but would be special and extra because of their supposed ability to threaten cisgender women’s purity of identity and safety. yet this line of reasoning silences women, who are cast as mere victims of men who are pretending to be transgender, thereby simultaneously regulating cisgender women and transgender people’s presence, movement and speech in public and private spaces according to cisnormative heteropatriarchal hierarchies. in sum, through these debates, conservatives argued that transgender people were unworthy of state protection because their existence not only threatened the safety of cisgender women, but the gender binary itself. conclusion tensions and ambiguity persist within the cpc and the canadian conservative movement in relation to 2slgbtq people and issues. before, during and after the passage of bill c-16, the cpc’s approach to 2slgbtq issues remained seemingly contradictory: the cpc under stephen harper supported select lgbt issues abroad while implementing continuous funding cuts to domestic non-profit organizations working in areas of social justice (gaucher & degagne, 2014); social conservatives took credit for andrew scheer and erin o’toole’s cpc leadership victories but lgbtory has downplayed the influence of social conservatives in the party; the majority of cpc mps voted against transgender rights; conservative senators and cpc mps deployed fear-based and violent anti-transgender discourse; scheer supported the liberal government’s 2017 apology to 2slgbtq canadians but refused to march in a pride parade; and erin o’toole will only participate in pride parades if police organizations are included. these tensions are not contradictory but reveal how the cpc and conservatives are trying to make their social agenda more palatable to centrist voters. as paul saurette and kelly gordon (2016) argue in relation to the anti-abortion movement in canada, conservative discourse has coopted and alexa degagne studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 514 redeployed progressive discourse and values, for example by claiming to protect women against the threats of abortion (2016) and in this case transgender “predators.” the cpc purported to welcome lgbt people to the party but denied structural inequality experienced by transgender people, and specifically did not actively pursue policies to ameliorate the lives of 2slgbtq people within canada. formally excluded people are welcome within the cpc if they do not seek to uproot enshrined hierarchal power relations. the establishment of transgender rights tested conservatives’ tactic of avoidance and exposed many conservatives’ acrimony toward transgender people. this moment in the relationship between canadian conservatives and transgender people has been characterized by reactiveness toward perceived threats to cisgender and heterosexual order in the public and private spheres. combining social conservative values and neoliberal tactics, several cpc and conservative members of the house and senate attempted to redress perceived losses of cisnormative privilege in three main ways. first, the transgender rights opponents attempted to delegitimize transgender identity and group rights claims, asserting that gender identity and gender expression were undefinable, ever-changing and emotionally-determined categories. second, they argued for the restriction of transgender people’s access to public spaces through a fixation on and battle over gender-segregated bathrooms, denying the violence experienced by trans people in such spaces by fomenting unfounded fear over outsiders entering the gendered spaces. third, they delegitimized transgender people’s requests for state protection by asserting that they were threats to cisgender women and children’s safety, and by claiming that the recognition of transgender people’s unique group identity demeaned the identity-based protections gained by cisgender women. when combined, these three arguments sought to undercut transgender rights advocates’ bid for social justice, complete with state acknowledgement of group-based difference and discrimination, state representation for the specific needs and issues facing transgender people and state-granted resources, rights and projections. as stated, many transgender advocates argued that the inclusion of gender identity and expression in the canadian human rights act and criminal code is a narrow and limited version of social justice (vipond, 2015), which will not lead to a fundamental shift in state anti-trans institutions or cisnormative canadian society. moreover, those who were seeking social justice and protection through the state were subjected to questioning, shame and misrepresentation, tactics used to reinforce private and public order through the exclusion of those who challenge the norms. notwithstanding their failure to deny trans rights, conservatives brought into sharp relief that public and private spheres remain deeply and consequentially gendered and intertwined. protecting cisnormative private and public spheres studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 497-517, 2021 515 acknowledgements thank you to megan gaucher, kelly gordon and joanne muzak for offering their insights and advice throughout this project. thank you as well to the journal’s anonymous reviewers and editors for their helpful recommendations. references baglow, j. 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(1990). justice and the politics of difference. princeton university press. schneider final correspondence address: christopher j. schneider, department of sociology, brandon university, brandon, mb, r7a 6a9; email: schneiderc@brandonu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 public criminology and media debates over policing christopher j. schneider brandon university, canada abstract public criminology is concerned with public understandings of crime and policing and public discussions of such matters by criminologists and allied social scientists. for the purposes of this paper, these professionals are individuals identified by journalists on the basis of academic credentials or university affiliation as those who can speak to crime matters. this qualitative study investigates media statements made by criminologists and allied social scientists following the 2020 murder of george floyd with two questions in mind: how have they responded to debates over reforming, defunding, and abolishing police? what insight can these responses provide about public criminology more generally? i analyze statements offered by criminologists in news reports and on twitter using qualitative media analysis, an approach that emphasizes the processes through which discourse is presented to audiences. i argue that recent criminological debates in the media concerning the future of policing have exposed unresolvable tensions among scholars who engage in the practice of public criminology, suggesting that the public is not receiving coherent, authoritative messages about these issues. the findings also raise questions about public criminology and illuminate new concerns regarding scholarly expertise related to knowledge claims and credibility relative to social justice. keywords public criminology; policing debates; racial justice; media; qualitative media analysis introduction the year 2020 saw widespread public movements for racial justice, with calls to eliminate systemic bias and racism from the criminal justice system in response to the police murder of george floyd. this paper asks: how have criminologists and allied social scientists who produce knowledge about crime and its control responded in media to debates over the reform, defunding, and abolition of police? and relatedly, what insight might such responses provide about public criminology more generally? i answer these christopher j. schneider studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 228 questions by investigating statements offered by criminologists in news reports and on twitter using qualitative media analysis (altheide & schneider, 2013), a type of ethnographic content analysis that focuses on a reflexive, immersive awareness of the communicative processes, meanings, and emphases contained in media documents. i argue that criminological debates concerning the future of policing following the murder of george floyd on may 25, 2020 have exposed unresolvable tensions among various scholars who engage in the practice of public criminology. many of the widespread discussions about changes to policing were framed in relation to social justice, understood as racial justice, which concerns matters of fairness and equity in direct relation to policing and the criminal justice system (delgado & stefancic, 2017, pp. 120-124). discussions about racial bias in policing were a recurring staple of news coverage across north america in 2020. the general theme across these reports was rather pointed: police and law enforcement are biased in their treatment of racialized people who are disproportionately subject to police violence and death. african americans, for instance, accounted for 28% of people killed by police in 2020 in the u.s. despite being only 13% of the total population (mapping police violence, n.d.). a database of deaths across canada as a result of police action in 2020 reveals that black and indigenous people are disproportionately killed by police (flanagan, 2020; singh, 2020). evidence further indicates that police violence is a leading cause of death for young, racialized people in the u.s. (edwards et al., 2019). while data across north america show the disproportionate police killing of racialized people, what exactly is to be done about police violence relative to the actualization of social justice is another matter entirely. police reform is widely touted as the primary solution. the protests in 2020 against police violence, in which “defund the police” and “abolish the police” served as popular rallying cries, helped bring these important debates, previously located at the margins of public discourse, into mainstream news media discussions. the findings in response to the first research question articulated above reveal that some scholars responded by injecting lived experience into the debates. in answering the second research question, the findings provide evidence of competing strands of public criminology, affirming the basic argument of this paper that contemporary media debates over police have exposed unresolvable tensions among various scholars who engage in the practice of public criminology. my argument contributes to the public criminology literature by spotlighting how social justice concerns are simultaneously advanced and undermined by contradictory public criminological interventions, a process that problematizes struggles for racial justice and the push for social change following the police murder of george floyd. this research also contributes to scholarship on public criminology more generally by adding to the limited studies that investigate criminologists’ media statements (see richards et al., 2020) and by bolstering public criminology & media debates over policing studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 229 evidence that criminology remains a divided discipline, particularly over how criminology should be done (bosworth & hoyle, 2011). criminology is not monolithic, nor has it ever been. the events of 2020, however, seem to have (re)exposed tensions in the different degrees of criminological commitment to social justice issues regarding the maintenance, promotion, and dissolution of forms of state-sanctioned violence. public conversations in response to the social justice inspired events of 2020 have materialized into public debates ranging from calls for police reform to defunding and abolishing the police. loader and sparks (2011) suggest there are myriad ways in which criminologists and others under “allied banners” engage with publics about crime and related issues like policing, collectively understood as public criminology. a brief overview of the public criminology scholarship is provided in the next section to situate my research questions in a foundational literature. following that is a discussion of my methodological approach, which is theoretically informed by symbolic interactionism. next, i present my findings, which empirically underscore the argument of this paper that contemporary media debates over police have exposed unresolvable tensions among various scholars who engage in the practice of public criminology. i conclude by buttressing my analysis with insights from critical race theory to showcase epistemological concerns that the data raise for public criminology debates. public criminology public criminology is concerned with public understandings of crime, including how crime is discussed and subsequently managed (loader & sparks, 2011). it is generally understood as a particular approach to “doing” criminology, with a commitment to engaging in public education and debates about crime, rather than a particular theoretical perspective or methodological approach. while there is no universal agreement on the definition and scope of public criminology, it is generally regarded as an offshoot of public sociology, a cooptation of alfred lee’s (1978) question, “knowledge for whom?” and robert lynd’s (1939) query, “knowledge for what?” (burawoy, 2005). the aim of public sociology is to engage with multiple and diverse publics about public issues (burawoy, 2005). criminology follows a “distinctive progression” similar to public sociology (uggen & inderbitzin, 2010, p. 179), although questions about what publics public criminologists aim to engage and how are often less clear (piché, 2015). burawoy (2005) envisions public sociology as one distinct form of sociological practice that coexists alongside professional, critical, and policy sociologies. these forms of sociological practice vary in their commitments. the professional sociologist, for instance, embraces a neutral position consistent with the status quo, in the interest of careerism, whereas the critical christopher j. schneider studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 230 sociologist does the opposite by questioning the status quo. both achieve these interests from the confines of the ivory tower. the policy sociologist serves market-based interests, and the public sociologist addresses the needs of publics by generating dialogue. following burawoy’s (2005) categorization, uggen and inderbitzin (2010) apply the same typology to various practices of criminology. the professional criminologist contextualizes the study of crime in a body of disciplinary knowledge. policy criminologists apply theories of crime and methods to reduce and control crime. the work of professional and policy criminologists preserves the status quo by serving the interests of state institutions and therefore may perpetuate state violence and harm (piché, 2015). finally, critical criminologists aim to interrogate foundational questions about the meaning of crime for a scholarly audience. however, a basic feature of criminology that sets it apart from the discipline of sociology is its close relationship with criminal justice practitioners, which “makes some variants of public criminology more palatable” for criminologists (uggen & inderbitzin, 2010, p. 731). offshoots of public sociology have existed more-or-less as long as the discipline itself (shrum & castle, 2014). more recent attention to public sociology is credited to herbert gans, who coined the phrase in his 1988 presidential address to the american sociological association (gans, 1989). nevertheless, it was burawoy’s (2005) dramatic reinvention that sparked contemporary debates over public sociology (gans, 2009) – debates that were subsequently “imported” into more recent criminological discussions (loader & sparks, 2011). central to envisioning any form of public criminology is an orientation to some type of public-facing knowledge mobilization to generate debates and dialogue around crime matters. barak’s (1988) “newsmaking criminology” is a related example. barak suggests that newsmaking criminology concerns conscious efforts by criminologists to share their knowledge with publics and shape the presentation of crime-related news (see also turner, 2013). others assert that public criminology entails more than shaping news and should also close the gap between public perceptions of crime and criminologically-informed knowledges by injecting evidence into public debates (uggen & inderbitzin, 2010) and, in some other circumstances, by speaking in a “prophetic voice” against state and corporate crimes (kramer, 2012, p. 41; for a lengthier discussion of the ethics associated with taking a public moral position see hanemaayer & schneider, 2014). while public criminology has been criticized for appealing to the state (piché, 2015), others have cautioned against this limited view (henne & shah, 2020). criminology is not monolithic, nor is its public face. for instance, while criminology can and does operate in coordination with or in the interests of state apparatuses, some criminologists also critique governments or state actors in media outlets. public criminology & media debates over policing studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 231 as with public sociology, a common theme across the ideological and epistemological debates of public criminology is facilitating public dialogue. however, criminology remains a divided discipline (bosworth & hoyle, 2011) and concerns over the practice of public criminology is no exception. what public criminology is, who it serves, and how it is practiced and by whom, remain contested (henne & shah, 2020; nelund, 2014; piché, 2015; ruggiero, 2012). given these debates over public criminology, it is somewhat surprising that little research has empirically investigated who appears in the media, how often they do so, and what kinds of statements they make (richards et al., 2020). research also illustrates that social scientists use social media to engage the public and distribute materials in the public realm, but scholarship in this area remains underdeveloped (schneider, 2014, 2015, 2017; schneider & simonetto, 2017; wood et al., 2019). i address these gaps in the literature in what follows, but first turn to a discussion of my research methodology. methodology qualitative media analysis (qma) is a useful method to answer the question of how public criminologists responded in media to debates over the reform, defunding, and abolition of police in 2020. it is an ethnographic immersive approach to media documents that emphasizes the process through which discourse is presented to audiences (altheide & schneider, 2013).1 qma is theoretically informed by symbolic interactionism, a perspective that maintains that social order is symbolically communicated, with media playing an essential role in the process. qma is a particular type of ethnographic content analysis that focuses on a reflexive awareness of the communication processes, meanings, and emphases contained in documents. the study of media documents using this technique enables researchers to place symbolic meanings in context, but also to track the process of meaningmaking and the influence meanings have on social definitions of categories like reform, defund, and abolish. the method entails a 12-step process (see altheide & schneider, 2013, pp. 39-73). the researcher identifies the topic (step 1) and reviews the literature (step 2) and selected media documents (step 3). the next three steps create a data collection instrument or protocol. step 4 involves listing identified variables or categories that emerged during steps 1-3; the identified variables are then tested against the data (step 5), and the protocol is revised if necessary (step 6). a sampling strategy is then utilized (step 7). the data are gathered using preset codes (step 8) and analyzed (step 9). differences identified during the analysis stage are included in written summaries (step 1 for a detailed discussion of the “ethnographic” nature of this method, see altheide & schneider, 2013, pp. 23-37. christopher j. schneider studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 232 10), alongside typical examples (step 11). data are compared and contrasted, and differences are integrated into a manuscript draft (step 12). i focused on media formats in which claims made by criminologists and allied others appeared (steps 1-3). news media documents (i.e., mass media) served as the primary data source and twitter (social media) as a secondary data source. news and social media formats as data sources are consistent with spaces in which public criminology occurs, in the traditional sense (e.g., statements provided to journalists and published in news media) and e-public criminology (e.g., posts made to social media platforms like twitter) (schneider, 2015). lexisnexis was utilized to collect news media articles as the “primary documents, which are the object of study” (altheide & schneider, 2013, p. 7, emphasis in original). searches of news media were conducted between may 25, 2020 (the date of george floyd’s death) and december 31, 2020. data were downloaded and converted into searchable portable document format (pdf) datasets. i focused on statements made by criminologists and “allied others” presumed to have academic or professional knowledge on the issue of policing (steps 8-9). as the protocol was developed and revised (steps 4-6), lexisnexis searched documents for “criminologist” and “police reform” (164 results, 700 pdf pages), “criminologist” and “defund the police” (89 results, 402 pdf pages), and “criminologist” and “abolish the police” (12 results, 47 pdf pages). data analysis, aided by adobe acrobat pro software, involved reading, sorting, and searching collated statements by criminologists across the collected news reports, which allowed me to identify key themes associated with reforming, defunding, and abolishing the police. themes refer to “the recurring typical theses that run through the lot of the reports” (altheide & schneider, 2013, p. 53). subsequent searches of lexisnexis followed the same criteria with “professor” in place of “criminologist” so that allied scholars who engage with journalists about crime matters would also be included in retrieved data. these additional searches produced a lot more data: “professor” and “police reform” (3,024 results, 16,674 pdf pages), “professor” and “defund the police” (1,677 results, 11,061 pdf pages), and “professor” and “abolish the police” (361 results, 2,254 pdf pages).2 some statements on twitter were referenced in the collected news media documents. data from twitter served as “secondary documents,” or those records about primary documents that “are at least one step removed from the initial data sourced by a researcher” (altheide & schneider, 2013, p. 7, emphasis in original). sampling of all data materials followed qma’s “progressive theoretical sampling” approach (step 7), or “the selection of materials based on emerging understanding of the topic under investigation. the idea is to select materials for conceptual or theoretically relevant reasons” (altheide & schneider, 2013, p. 56). 2 several opinion pieces i authored or co-authored on related policing issues were excluded. public criminology & media debates over policing studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 233 while these data sets are very large, the pdf search function assisted with more quickly developing a deeper familiarity with the context of public criminology statements situated in coverage across multiple articles. the volume of these datasets was reduced to a more manageable size by aggregating the pdf files using adobe’s advanced search function to a lineby-line context. for example, an aggregated search of the largest dataset (i.e., “professor” and “police reform”) for “professor” reduced 16,674 pdf pages of data to 665 pages of line-by-line context. congruent with my research questions, these data were then carefully reviewed for names and supplementary data like title, rank, and position (e.g., associate professor of criminal justice, assistant professor of sociology), and published research like books or articles. retrieved names of professors were then re-entered into the datasets for a more nuanced reading of select news articles for additional context and references to relevant secondary documents. findings reforming the police a theme in response to police reform across examined articles were remarks from scholars that situated policing in strictly historical terms, often referencing or discussing policing in the context of slavery, racism, and colonization. such commentary usually seemed to suggest, directly or indirectly, that the policing institution and some of its practices (notably biasbased profiling) had not been reformed (i.e., changed), at least not relative to other related social, institutional, and governmental changes intended to remedy racial disparities and combat discrimination (e.g., affirmative action). an examination of the data revealed that, while police reform was understood generally to refer to corrections or changes to police practices, there was no one shared solution across reports among those scholars who agreed with, or argued in favour of police reform, or among those academics who offered tacit support. there were, however, numerous suggestions for reform touted by scholars with wide ranging academic expertise and across diverse disciplines. body-worn cameras were among the more popular suggestions and a frequently cited measure for realizing police reform. a thematic summary of the various remarks offered with respect to body cameras and police reform is illustrated in the following: “the big take-away from research on body-worn cameras is that their effectiveness depends on context and specific implementation, said andrea headley, an assistant professor at the john glenn college of public affairs at ohio state university” (frolik, 2020). professor headley’s statement and others like it are underpinned by the normative assumption of the necessity of police, a methodological position christopher j. schneider studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 234 that is consistent with headley’s existent research partnerships with police agencies. remarks by former police officers who had become academics were regularly included among the commentary provided by criminologists and allied others. some of these statements by former officers were critical of any proposed or enacted changes to status quo policing, an indicator of their positioning, first, as former officer and, second, as an academic. as an example, consider the following report on the approval of the creation of a separate department to handle traffic enforcement in berkeley, california: “traffic stops are one of the most unpredictable and therefore dangerous duties of law enforcement. there is no such thing as a routine traffic stop and to perform them effectively and safely takes months of police training in and outside of an academy,” said frank merenda, a former new york city police department captain who is an assistant professor of criminal justice at marist college. philip stinson, a criminal justice professor at bowling green state university, called the idea an “overly simplistic plan that could have deadly consequences for unarmed traffic enforcement officers.” (har, 2020) comments invoking fear-based concerns about reforms, like perceived dangers to police or to the public in the form of spikes in crime, emerged as a theme usually where the “expert” was expressing criticism of police reform. however, what stands out in this example is the emphasis on merenda’s status as a former police officer, which is presented before his academic credentials. in other words, merenda’s police experience is only buttressed by his scholarly credentials. philip stinson (also quoted above) is similarly reported elsewhere as a former police officer. not all former police officers turned academics were necessarily critical of police reforms, nor was their previous status mentioned each time they were quoted in media. the point to stress is that personal experience here extends to scholarly expertise where academic credentials add value to lived experience. for example, remarks by thaddeus johnson, a georgia state university criminologist and former officer with the memphis police department, link former police officer status and life as a black man: the reason i left the police force is everybody i arrested looked like me...there are a lot of black officers who are conflicted like that: “my god, what am i representing, what am i doing?” […] as a black man who has been on both sides of this, my god, i can see both sides of the suffering, but neither one can see the others because of their own suffering. (jonsson et al., 2020) highlighting lived experience alongside academic expertise was not unique to former police officers. the theme of lived experience appeared in commentary on police reform provided by black scholars regarding their own experiences with police as black people. for instance, recalling her interaction with an officer who was called to a dispute with a parking public criminology & media debates over policing studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 235 attendant, delores jones-brown – a retired professor of law, police science, and criminal-justice administration at john jay college of criminal justice – said that police see “blackness first.” the report continued: she said her husband of 29 years, a black journalist from philadelphia, has had such “negative experiences” with police officers over the years that he views dialing 911 as “a last resort.” his motto is “don’t call the police to this house unless somebody’s dying,” jones-brown said. (mahbubani, 2020) such experiences point to calls to defund the police that would reallocate resources away from law enforcement to subsidize social services that could respond in situations that do not warrant dialing 911 and summoning the police to otherwise non-life-threatening situations. defunding the police the conceptual distinction between reforming and defunding police was often unclear across news coverage, with discussions of both frequently appearing together in the same reports. stories about the meaning of defunding and subsequent clarifications provided by criminologists and scholars are a clear indicator that defunding lacks a basic definition or shared public narrative. this lack of a unified understanding was a dominant theme across reports. unlike statements about police reform, which were generally regarded as referring to change, a great deal of scholarly commentary concerning defunding the police focused on definitional issues. words like “reallocation” and “reimagining” recurred in statements as attempts to clarify the meaning of defund. a few thematic examples help demonstrate the point. when discussing a course he was co-teaching with his father, peter marina, an associate professor of sociology at the university of wisconsin-la crosse and retired police officer, said, “it shouldn’t be called defunding the police, it should be called reallocating resources” (vian, 2020). other scholars stressed that the phrase did not mean eliminating police, as was sometimes understood by the public. rather, the concept of defund simply referred to the moving of funds from police budgets to other social service providers: associate professor of criminal justice jennifer gibbs explained that when people call to defund the police, they don’t usually want to eliminate law enforcement altogether. rather, activists want to reform the law enforcement system and reallocate most of its budget to programs like education and affordable housing. “for so long, we have been investing more and more resources toward punitive measures to address a lot of social problems,” gibbs said, “at the expense of social programs that would help prevent crime and the need for the criminal justice system.” although gibbs hesitated to endorse the concept, she agreed it was a viable option. “the police are being asked to deal with any new social problem that comes up,” gibbs said. “drugs, mental illness. all of these things christopher j. schneider studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 236 are coming to the public’s attention, and because we don’t have another 24/7 emergency response system to deal with all of these issues, they fall to the police.” (baker, 2020) here gibbs provides a somewhat balanced perspective regarding defunding by bringing public attention to the ways in which funds could be reallocated. akwasi owusu-bemphah, an assistant professor of sociology at the university of toronto, added: “the defund the police movement really is a call to remove funds from police budgets, not asking police to move funds within their budgets” (thompson, 2020). in another news article, he clarified his approach, calling it “de-tasking” the police, suggesting that the “police are currently doing too much” and that “we want to scale back the work the police do, and associated with that would be a reduction in police funding” (rankin, 2020). however, owusu-bemphah’s remarks do little to add clarity to public understandings concerning the meaning of defunding, instead seeming to provide a discourse (de-tasking) that can be appropriated by police administrators to reify the need for police. others offered more direct assessments that outright dismissed defunding efforts. as reported in the toronto star, laura huey, a professor of sociology and criminologist, says the calls to defund police are occurring in a vacuum of evidence and policy… “there’s little research to suggest that many of the social programs likely to be funded in place of police forces will do much to reduce the social problems that have become police matters [...] because we don’t have good, solid evidence on what could potentially work, everything’s a trial, [and] this is a really risky thing to do when you don’t really know what the hell you’re doing.” (powell, 2020) in 2015, professor huey founded the canadian society of evidence-based policing (can-sebp), the core mandate of which is to empower canadian police agencies. the can-sebp is aggressively pro-police, beginning from an ontological position that assumes the necessity of police for social order and of conducting research that privileges police perspectives and voices (walby, 2021). can-sebp members’ interests with respect to funding and access for research are entwined with those of police, and can-sebp regularly provides commentary that could be characterized as antithetical to social justice concerns, further underscoring the organization’s position with respect to defunding the police. beyond definitional matters and the dismissal of defunding initiatives, some commentary, albeit less typical, took a decidedly more antagonistic and divisive tone, including remarks by academics who do not research police or criminal justice, or anything even tangentially related. as a standout example, harald uhlig, an economist at the university of chicago, shared his thoughts about defunding the police on june 8, 2020 to his more than 8,000 twitter followers, comparing those calling for defunding the police to “flat earthers.” public criminology & media debates over policing studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 237 the post generated subsequent news media coverage in the new york times (2020) and elsewhere: too bad, but #blacklivesmatter per its core organization @blklivesmatter just torpedoed itself, with its full-fledged support of #defundthepolice: “we call for a national defunding of police.” suuuure. they knew this is non-starter, and tried a sensible orwell 1984 saying, oh, it just means funding schools (who isn’t in favor of that?!?!). but no, the so-called “activists” did not want that. back to truly “defunding” thus, according to their website. sigh. #georgefloyd and his family really didn’t deserve being taken advantage of by flat-earthers and creationists. oh well. time for sensible adults to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest, respectful conversations about it all: e.g., policy reform proposals by @thedemocract and national healing. we need more police, we need to pay them more, we need to train them better. look: i understand that some out there will wish to go and protest and say #defundpolice and all kinds of stuff, while you are still young and responsibility does not matter. enjoy! express yourself! just don’t break anything, ok? and be back by 8 pm. social media like twitter offers the possibility for public facing scholars to be both the generator and interlocutor of dialogue. in this circumstance, professor uhlig’s comments generated dozens of comments on twitter and news media coverage. consistent with the basic theme of scholarly statements concerning the meaning of defunding the police, some users on twitter (including academics) also attempted to define the meaning of defund. as one illustrative example, susie symes replied to uhlig’s tweet: “like in economics, there’s a spectrum about what the term means, but broadly: reduce police budgets + spend the saved resources on improving lives in the community” (symes, 2020). another twitter user offered the following suggestion to uhlig’s twitter post: “end of policing by alex s. vitale start reading this book then decide.” vitale’s book is a key text regularly cited in response to abolishing the police, to which i now turn. abolishing the police abolishing the police received the least amount of media coverage, likely because of its outlier status or “extreme” position, as it was described in some reports on the spectrum of solutions to policing. there was less discussion and direct support of police abolition from academics quoted in news reports, compared to reform and defund debates. further analysis revealed that many of the abolitionist points made by criminologists and other scholars aligned closely with efforts to defund the police, making the gradual abolition of police the end goal of defunding. statements of this sort were made as the hopeful outcome of defund and divest movements. alex s. vitale, a professor of sociology and author of the 2017 book the end of policing, was among the most cited scholars on the question of christopher j. schneider studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 238 abolishing the police and the most mobilized in support of calls to abolish the police. professor vitale’s remarks below are illustrative of the position of gradual abolition, with an emphasis on harm reduction: no one is talking about a situation where tomorrow there is some magical switch and there are no police. what we’re talking about is an interrogation of the specific things that police are doing which have caused significant harms, have reproduced race and class inequality in america and demanding that we replace policing solutions. does that mean at the end of the process there are no police? well, we don’t know what is at the end of this process. it’s about communicating with communities about what their needs are that have been ignored by government for generations now and demanding that they no longer turn those things over to folks whose tools for solving their problems are guns and handcuffs, coercion, and threats. (isaacson & amanpour, 2020) similarly, patrick sharkey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at princeton university, had his remarks in a washington post article included in a new york times opinion piece: decades of criminological theory and growing evidence demonstrate that residents and local organizations can indeed “police” their own neighborhoods and control violence – in a way that builds stronger communities. we have models available, but we’ve made commitments only to the police and the prison system. (bokat-lindell, 2020) professor sharkey here provides evidence-based recommendations in support of social programs that can work as alternatives to police, an assertion that directly contradicts professor huey’s claims that evidence suggests otherwise (i.e., the need for police), thus revealing an incongruent ontological positioning between these two scholars. further analysis indicates that the language and theme of abolishing the police was often paired with statements provided by activists and abolitionists (less so scholars). “activist” and “abolitionist” were identity markers not generally associated with professors in the examined data, at least not directly. but there were exceptions. as an example, consider anup gampa, an assistant professor at harvey mudd college in california, who told the student life newspaper that he was “in full solidary not only with the call for defunding the police but to entirely abolish the police” (engineer, 2020). unlike reform or defund, there were no conceptual issues regarding abolish terminology across reports, and thus abolishing the police was the most consistent and cohesive of the three responses to policing in 2020. scholars pointed out that calls to abolish the police are rooted in the prison abolition movement. the prison abolition work of distinguished professor emerita angela davis of the university of california santa cruz was sometimes cited. as one example, tyler d. parry, an assistant professor of african american and african diaspora studies, claimed that, “police abolition is inspired by the prison abolition movement. what a number of people, angela public criminology & media debates over policing studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 239 davis among them, were in favor of is abolishing the prison-industrial complex” (scavone, 2020). ajima olaghere, an assistant professor of criminal justice at temple university explains: these institutions no longer work, so how do you fundamentally change them or turn them into something different? and i think abolitionists are calling for, in the case of policing, reduced dependency on and liberation from police because right now police are the gatekeepers to the criminal justice system as a whole – a system that is predicated on, and that imposes, retribution and deprivation […] we should have other institutions taking a larger and more proactive role in ensuring that we don't let people fall through the cracks. (kochis, 2020) a basic argument of this paper is that the more recent criminological debates concerning the future of policing have exposed some unresolvable tensions among public criminology scholars. all of this suggests that the public is not receiving a coherent, authoritative message about these issues, which can problematize struggles for social justice and the push for social change, among other concerns, to which i now turn in the concluding discussion. concluding discussion the movements for social justice in response to racialized police violence following the death of george floyd put a spotlight on public criminology across much of 2020. the statements herein provided by criminologists and allied scholars, while not generalizable, do provide some empirical insight into the role that criminologists play in injecting criminological materials into public discourse. i now return to the first question introduced at the outset of this article: how have criminologists and allied scholars who produce knowledge about crime and its control responded in media to debates over reforming, defunding, and abolishing the police? public criminology cannot exist without expertise from professional criminologists. at the core of criminology, as has been asserted about public sociology, is the understanding that professional criminology provides both legitimacy and expertise for public criminology (burawoy, 2005). one consistent finding about how criminologists responded in 2020 that cut across debates over reforming, defunding, and abolishing the police concerned matters of expertise. the findings indicate that one’s degree credentials, scholarly research and publications, and university affiliation collectively served as a baseline for the recognition and affirmation of research expertise across news media reports. this is unsurprising. however, the findings also reveal that criminologists and scholars responded by injecting their lived experience into these debates, drawing from encounters with police as racialized person, former employment in law enforcement, and sometimes both. this finding points to a burgeoning storytelling and counter-storytelling narrative turn that christopher j. schneider studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 240 adds “the notion of a unique voice of color” to public criminology, which is simpatico with critical race theory that builds “on everyday experiences with perspective [and viewpoint in an effort] to come to a deeper understanding of how” the public sees race (delgado & stefancic, 2017, pp. 11, 45). according to delgado and stefancic (2017), “the voice-of-color thesis holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, american indian, [indigenous], asian, and latino writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know” (p. 11). however, in other circumstances, albeit less frequent, some scholars injected personal opinions unrelated to their expertise or lived experience, as was the case with economist harald uhlig’s comments on twitter. what is at stake here is that the lived experiences of racialized scholars may be conflated by publics with the personal and irrelevant opinions of other scholars, which can possibly undermine advancements in racial justice. nevertheless, critical race theory’s narrative contributions to public criminology debates in 2020 are important and help advance our understanding of social justice related to criminal justice in that critical race theory has built “on the work of radical criminologists” and abolitionists who have collectively sought to draw attention to the racism baked into the entire criminal justice system (delgado & stefancic, 2017, p. 120; piché & larsen, 2010; saleh-hanna, 2008, 2017). the finding that the narrative turn of critical race theory is flourishing in public criminology debates across 2020 seems to suggest that some of the core tenets of radical criminology are working their way into mainstream popular thinking, by incorporating social justice concepts related to policing and “by describing the changing nature of what is to be abolished” (piché & larsen, 2010, p. 391; see also davis, 2005). the influence of radical criminology on critical race theory and 2020’s narrative turn in public criminology is also a finding consistent with research that maps criminology onto other theoretical interventions (e.g., ahmad & monaghan, 2019). future research might explore and further develop this matter as it relates to the literature on defunding the police and the police abolition movement. in their book public criminology?, loader and sparks (2011) contend that there are numerous ways in which criminologists and others under “allied banners” engage with publics about crime and related issues, as demonstrated by the data above. the evidence in this paper seems to warrant the addition of an “antagonistic banners” categorization of scholars; statements provided by criminologists and other scholars in response to 2020’s social justice movements were sometimes at odds, as was the case with questions over whether to reform or abolish the police, perhaps creating confusion among publics. when scholars like patrick sharkey and laura huey provide contrary statements about the same issue, with each citing authoritative “evidence” to support their position, who exactly is correct? while each scholar injected evidence into the debates over policing, it is professor public criminology & media debates over policing studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 241 sharkey who arguably speaks in a “prophetic voice” concerning criminological interventions oriented at harm prevention, and thus is more consistently situated within a social justice agenda (see kramer, 2012). the same could be said about remarks offered by professor alex s. vitale. furthermore, it has been suggested that laura huey and like-minded propolice colleagues “ignore critical literature and ignore existing literature on the topic” (walby, 2021, p. 4). nevertheless, media narratives citing these conflicting perspectives provide public audiences with information that shapes their understandings of definitional claims, like whether defunding the police is better or worse or is or is not supported by evidence. but because “the definition of the situation ultimately lies with audience response,” current research does not provide insight into the reception and lasting impacts of the legitimate and trusted expertise that criminologists offer publics (altheide & snow, 1979, p. 19). the findings also raise additional questions about public criminology and expertise concerning knowledge claims and credibility. reflecting on the issue of credibility, becker (1967) noted in his 1966 presidential address to the society for the study of social problems that, “‘everyone knows’ that responsible professionals know more about things than laymen, that police are more respectable and their words ought to be taken more seriously than those of the deviants and criminals who they deal with” (p. 242). given the close relationship that exists between criminology and criminal justice, academics who invoke law enforcement experience may be taken more seriously as the “real experts” than racialized scholars who discuss their personal encounters with police, the nature of their academic credentials aside (uggen & inderbitzin, 2010, p. 734). while there has been a lack of diversity in public criminology, the findings presented here suggest there is a growing array of voices being represented in the media as experts on policing and crime (uggen & inderbitzin, 2010). despite this move toward greater inclusivity, there is a danger in privileging of one form of lived experience (police officer) over another (racialized identity), and future research should explore this important and less understood knowledge credibility issue in public criminology. returning briefly to my second research question, what insight might scholarly responses to 2020’s movements for social justice provide about public criminology more generally? the topic of policing generated numerous, what we might call criminology-esque statements from a wide range of scholars across an array of disciplines. the data reveal that significantly more commentary was offered by academics under allied/antagonistic banners than was by “official” criminologists, as defined in media reports. the evidence also reveals that criminology-themed statements across reports frequently offered incongruent frames that both appealed to the state (reform) and were in opposition to it (abolish). this paper then provides evidence of competing strands of public criminology (public criminologies), adding confusion to public christopher j. schneider studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 242 understandings of criminology and related advancements in social justice. at a minimum, what these collective empirical observations seem to indicate is a continued blurring of already loose disciplinary boundaries. they also speak to broader concerns about the nature of public criminology (or criminologies) – what it is exactly, and who it speaks to – thus complicating the realization of social justice as it relates to public criminological interventions. future research might investigate how allied scholars (i.e., not criminologists) are engaging with crime and related issues with broad public appeal and reach, such as policing, with an eye to how the loosening of disciplinary boundaries might impact the advancement of social justice concerns. a shortcoming of this research is that it is limited to an analysis of statements made by criminologists in media. media data in this study highlight the unresolvable tensions that exist among scholars who engage in the practice of public criminology. so future research is necessary to identify and further delineate the different epistemological, ontological, theoretical, and methodological approaches and commitments of public criminologists to provide more insight into the individual motivations that underscore public criminological interventions. lastly, future research might take grassroots organizing and other efforts that draw on public criminology tactics into consideration to better understand the tensions among scholars who engage in public criminology. this exploratory research project contributes to the limited but growing scholarship that investigates public statements made by criminologists and other social scientists. it remains necessary to explore public criminology as it develops in media. the findings here are not intended for generalization. nevertheless, the materials herein add some necessary insight to our understandings of public criminology and provide a few directions for future research. acknowledgements i would like to thank my colleague stacey hannem for her helpful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. i am grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers of this paper and editor nancy cook for providing many valuable suggestions for improvement. references ahmad, f., & monaghan, j. (2019). mapping criminological engagements within radicalization studies. british journal of criminology, 59(6), 1288-1308. altheide, d. l., & schneider, c. j. (2013). qualitative media analysis (2nd ed.). sage publications. altheide, d. l., & snow, r. (1979). media logic. sage publications. public criminology & media debates over policing studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 243 baker, c. (2020, june 15). penn state criminal justice experts weigh in on police reform. daily collegian. https://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/campus/penn-state-criminal-justiceexperts-weigh-in-on-police-reform/article_76b74ebe-ae98-11ea-bccc-93db918e0647.html barak, g. (1988). newsmaking criminology: reflections on the media, intellectuals, and crime. justice quarterly, 5(4), 565-587. becker, h. s. (1967). whose side are we on? social problems, 14(3), 239-247. bokat-lindell, s. (2020, june 25). what is to be done about american policing? new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/opinion/george-floyd-police-abolition.html/ bosworth, m., & hoyle, c. (2011). what is criminology? oxford university press. burawoy, m. (2005). for public sociology. american sociological review, 70(1), 4-28. davis, a. y. (2005). abolish democracy: beyond empire, prisons, and torture. seven stories press. delgado, r., & stefancic, j. (2017). critical race theory (3rd ed.). new york university press. edwards, f., lee, h., & esposito, m. (2019). risk of being killed by police use of force in the united states by age, race-ethnicity, and sex. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america, 116(34), 16793-16798. engineer, a. (2020, july 3). new harvey mudd professor brings abundance of insight on blm protests and racial attitudes. the student live. https://tsl.news/anup-gampa-black-livesmatter/ flanagan, r. (2020, june 19). why are indigenous people in canada so much more likely to be shot and killed by police? ctv news. https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/why-areindigenous-people-in-canada-so-much-more-likely-to-be-shot-and-killed-by-police1.4989864/ frolik, c. (2020, june 13). dayton is the largest ohio city without police body cameras. dayton daily news. https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/dayton-largest-ohio-citywithout-police-body-cameras/qo2t62tv5v86gftqawzi9h/ gans, h. j. (1989). sociology in america: the discipline and the public american sociological association, 1988 presidential address. american sociological review, 54(1), 1-16. gans, h. j. (2009). a sociology for public sociology: some needed disciplinary changes for creating public sociology. in v. jeffries (ed.), handbook of public sociology (pp. 123-134). rowman & littlefield. hanemaayer, a., & schneider, c. j. (2014). the public sociology debate: ethics and engagement. university of british columbia press. har, j. (2020, june 16). berkeley moves toward removing police from traffic stops. st. louis post-dispatch, sec. news, p. a13. henne, k., & shah, r. (2020). handbook of public criminologies. routledge. isaacson, w., & amanpour, c. (2020, june 8). minneapolis abolishing entire police department. cnn, sec. news, international, p. 4. jonsson, p., bruinius, h., & robertson, n. (2020, june 15). amid spike in crime, a question of who owns the streets. christian science monitor. https://www.csmonitor.com/usa/justice/2020/0715/amid-spike-in-crime-a-question-ofwho-owns-the-streets/ kochis, l. (2020, september 2). reimagining the role of police in society through research. temple now. https://news.temple.edu/news/2020-09-02/reimagining-role-police-societythrough-research/ kramer, r. c. (2012). public criminology and the responsibility to speak in the prophetic voice concerning global warming. in e. stanley & j. mcculloch (eds.), state crime and resistance (pp. 41-53). routledge. lee, a. m. (1978). sociology for whom? oxford university press. loader, i., & sparks, r. (2011). public criminology? routledge. lynd, r. s. (1939). knowledge for what? the place of social science in american culture. princeton university press. mapping police violence. (n.d.). police violence map. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ mahbubani, r. (2020, june 18). the deaths of george floyd and rayshard brooks have soured the already strained relationship between black people and the police. insider. christopher j. schneider studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 227-244, 2022 244 https://www.insider.com/george-floyd-rayshard-brooks-police-killings-worsen-blackcommunitys-mistrust-2020-6/ nelund, a. (2014). troubling publics: a feminist analysis of public criminology. radical criminology, 4, 67-84. piché, j. (2015). assessing the boundaries of public criminology: on what does (not) count. social justice, 42(2), 70-90. piché, j., & larsen, m. (2010). the moving targets of penal abolitionism: icopa, past, present and future. contemporary justice review, 13(4), 391-410. powell, b. (2020, december 15). why biggest line item in city’s budget remains ‘untouchable’; police union lobbying and politics stymie efforts to trim spending. toronto star, sec. news, p. a1. rankin, j. (2020, december 10). 8 canadian voices on what they mean when they say: defunding the police. toronto star. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/12/10/8canadian-voices-on-what-they-mean-when-they-say-defund-the-police.html/ richards, i., wood, m. a., & iliadis, m. (2020). newsmaking criminology in the twenty-first century: an analysis of criminologists’ news media engagement in seven countries. current issues in criminal justice, 32(2), 125-145. ruggiero, v. (2012). how public is public criminology? crime, media, culture, 8(2), 151-160. saleh-hanna, v. (2008). colonial systems of control: criminal justice in nigeria. university of ottawa press. saleh-hanna, v. (2017). an abolitionist theory on crime: ending the abusive relationship with racist-imperialist-patriarchy [r.i.p.]. contemporary justice review, 20(4), 419-441. scavone, j. (2020, june 10). reform, defund, or abolish the police? university of nevada, las vegas news center. https://www.unlv.edu/news/article/reform-defund-or-abolish-police/ schneider, c. j. (2014). social media and e-public sociology. in a. hanemaayer & c. j. schneider (eds.), the public sociology debate: ethics and engagement (pp. 205-224). university of british columbia press. schneider, c. j. (2015). public criminology and the 2011 vancouver riot: public perceptions of crime and justice in the 21st century. radical criminology, 5, 21-45. schneider, c. j. (2017). $#*! sociologists say: e-public sociology on twitter. qualitative sociological review, 13, 2, 78-99. schneider, c. j. & simonetto, d. (2017). public sociology on twitter: a space for public pedagogy? the american sociologist, 48, 233-245. shrum, w., & castle, l. (2014). visionary sociology: diversions of public sociology and audiovisual solutions. the american sociologist, 45(4), 412-431. singh, i. (2020, july 23). 2020 already a particularly deadly year for people killed in police encounters, cbc research shows. cbc news. https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/fatalpoliceencounters/ symes, s. [@susiesymes1]. (2020, june 9). it’s really not that hard. like in economics, there’s a spectrum about what the term means, but broadly: reduce police budgets + spend the saved resources on improving lives within communities currently getting a lot of police resources =>reduce permanently ‘need’ for policing. [tweet]. twitter. https://twitter.com/susiesymes1/status/1270359936887898113?s=20 thompson, n. (2020, june 17). toronto police board to review anti-racism measures at friday meeting. cbc news. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ont-racism-police-1.5616712/ turner, e. (2013). beyond ‘facts’ and ‘values’: rethinking some recent debates about the public role of criminology. british journal of criminology, 53(1), 149-166. uggen, c., & inderbitzin, m. (2010). public criminologies. criminology & public policy, 51(2), 438-448. vian, j. (2020, august 31). digging into human rights policing. wisconsin state journal, sec. local, p. a2. walby, k. (2021). swat everywhere? a response to jenkins, semple, bennell, and huey. the police journal: theory, practice & principles. doi:10.1177/0032258x211002596 wood, m. a., richards, i., iliadis, m., & mcdermott, m. (2019). digital public criminology in australia and new zealand: results from a mixed methods study of criminologists’ use of social media. international journal for crime, justice, & social democracy, 8(4), 1-17. trowbridge final correspondence address: terry trowbridge, socio-legal studies, york university, on, m3j 1p3; email: trowbridgeterry@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 3, 538-542, 2021 book review surface area pierre, terese mason. (2019). anstruther press. isbn 9781988699486 (paper) cdn$10.00; 19 pages. terry trowbridge york university, canada surface area is a collection of 13 poems by terese mason pierre, published by anstruther press in 2019. surface area launched in knife/fork/book, a multifunctional shared artist space on queen west, in toronto. there was standing room only, coats were piled upon heaps. half the attendees were established writers of review essays about literature, cinema, and stage. toronto’s poetry reviewers were already composing hypothetical reviews. to anyone in the room, terese pierre is a star in toronto’s literary sky, one national award away from canlit’s aurora borealis. pierre’s literary life is already on secure grounds. she was the poetry editor at the speculative fiction journal augur magazine. she is mentored by banoo zan, as a co-organizer of the multicultural literary series shab-e she’r. pierre is a principal organizer for augurcon, a science fiction and speculative fiction convention grown from augur’s success. she is a luminary in other worlds as well. she is a respected intellectual contributor on the university of toronto’s campus. her picture appears on posters and recruiting leaflets. pierre has accepted responsibility for helping ensure there is an intellectual community writ large and small in toronto. we could relate her to malcom gladwell’s (2000) sociological theory of tipping points in social networks. gladwell’s theory involves three kinds of persons who maintain social networks or bring about change: connectors, who maintain numerous friendships; mavens, who gather information about social networks and constructively evaluate them; and salesmen who pass messages through the network based on personality rather than direct knowledge. pierre’s success as a connector and maven was instrumental for book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 538-542, 2021 539 maintaining intergenerational, multicultural mandates in the literary scenes of toronto in the pre-pandemic moment. who am i to review of surface area? at least 15 years older than she, i have partied after poetry readings with pierre more times than she probably remembers and fewer times than is useful for name-dropping her as a close friend. what i can do, is begin my reading of surface area with pierre’s personal calm. pierre is quiet, serene, happy. i have seen her hawklike observation of writers in conversation. her confident ability to naturally keep an idea in-progress when a speaker trips on their words betrays her foreknowledge – she has already thought what they are about to think. i’ve seen her effortlessly dispel a harasser near glencairn subway station as if without even registering that she deflected his hand. pierre is a problem solver among cliques of contagiously neurotic poets. she never stops being serious, never extinguishes laughter, is always capable. she is reflective, at the speed of light. the poems of surface area are united by the interplay of surfaces. the feeling of water on skin, both sea and rain. beach sand. clean paper pages. bookshelves. the poems are reflections, but none contain a mirror. even when pierre invokes a mirror in the poem “pyrite” the absence of a mirror is replaced by a combination of touch and abstract graph theory, “what i really wanted was/to see my reflection in you,/to ground you into/a beautiful uniform/the way nature creates/planes and vertices” (p. 9). even windows in the poem “subject” are without images on the panes, “will i, barrier-free, you-free./windows are wide. you provided those” (p. 14). taken as a whole, the poems are self-portraits, written in the first person, messages directed to her love, her mate, describing him at various times they spent together. therefore, i propose that each poem retains the quality of a mirror. looking at ourselves in a mirror set on the wall of a private room, we can see the scene behind ourselves clearly, but in particular we discern the shape of our lover on a bed or couch, recumbent, dreaming, obscured partly by our own body. in that instant, we exclude our bodies and reverse the conventions of portraiture. we know ourselves, by the negative space of the portrait, the image that surrounds us. our hands work on autopilot, tying our hair, our minds consist only of our gaze, we focus on the reflection of our love. in that instant, we are a collection of feelings about them, and those feelings are what constitute ourselves. this moment of reflection is preceded by another state of being, afterglow. given the substance of the monologue in each poem, i am reaching for a psychoanalytic substitution. these poems are the report of what is inspired by afterglow. pierre’s gaze regarding her love echoes her afterglow state. we live in a society with media-driven hypersexuality. our visual palettes, music, scripts, are trained to recognize meet-cutes, anxieties, foreplay, sex. pornography is ubiquitous, and so is sex as a cycle of character-driven goal setting for both entertainment and intellectualism. so immersed, how many poems can we write using the first person, without merely recreating the terry trowbridge studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 538-542, 2021 540 narcissism of mass culture where our love should be? pierre manages to use herself, in the form of “i” the unreliable narrator, to create a generous portrait of her lover by the convergence of his touch and her emotions. in surface area, therefore, pierre introduces herself as a complicated philosopher of time and phenomenology in the analysis of love or devotion. to her, meaning is accessible through experience, in afterglow. her ability as a poet is to make that meaning accessible to her readers. pierre activates afterglow as a spacetime for writing poetry, and by extension, philosophy. my second proposal in this review is that in doing so, pierre resurrects a romantic era theory of poetics which our current era tends to reject as too outside of the fear of missing out and the anxious rush of mediated culture. pierre disproves that we need to embody anxiety or the rush of buildup, execution, then immediately move on to the next experience. dwelling in afterglow, pierre could bring a renewed meaning to the hackneyed claim of william wordsworth. wordsworth’s clichéd claim is that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” if we want to, we can make this chapbook the locus of a movement for renewal of the romantic era in 21st century canadian poetry. there are advantages to poetry written in the tranquil recollection so soon after the spontaneous overflow of feeling. afterglow is a protecting moment of introverted privacy. in that privacy, our emotions present us with the options of calm or boredom, satiety, or the unsure. afterglow is private, whether on a webcam, entwined in someone’s bedsheets, or alone. romantic poetry in this century, therefore, would not be an instant social media reaction. romantic poetry would be written in private, beyond the panopticon. the status quo of canlit is to create blogs and create online personas in order to fulfill the images of poet, novelist, journalist, researcher, professor, writing a commodified set of signals catered to social media. afterglow is impossible for social media to mediate. afterglow is a place and a time. the philosophy of afterglowing is phenomenological, immediately produced within ourselves. in the light of wordsworth’s definition of poetry, pierre’s poetry collection is exposed as an opposite to our contemporary writing formalism. for example, the idea of plunderverse, championed by the canadian poet gregory betts (2005), takes fragments from social media and invites participation from facebook friends and twitter networks. we can have a heated argument about whether plunderverse can be personal, philosophical, or private. there is, at first blush, a public requirement for the visible, mediated artifice of plunderverse’s arrangement of others’ ideas on capitalized media which are synonymous with silicon valley’s colonialism; colonialism that recruits, repurposes, builds cvs, uses capital’s platforms to turn collaborative events into something for salesmen to parody and generate more content. colonialism is invasive, it ruins the sincere spontaneity of the book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 538-542, 2021 541 moment. afterglow happens entirely within our bodies, is the opposite of invasion, is alone within us as an experience. pierre, by writing from the time and place of afterglow also presents an opposite of steven takatsu’s keitai shousetsu, cell phone novels. takatsu pioneered the cell phone novel first in japan, then in canada. almost by definition, the keitai shousetsu is a novel which, by hitting the send icon, involves a kind of readiness to communicate, to move ideas from one person to another. the phone text is like the unquenchable need to make conversation between flexible, fast wits. the keitai shousetsu is maybe the most intellectual booty call of all, the flirtatious writing of the cybernetic era we’ve entered. every paragraph is an invitation to hit send and communicate a work-in-progress and await (or ignore) a burgeoning inbox of replies. pierre’s collection is the opposite of foreplay, written from afterglow, in verse rather than prose. pierre’s collection of poems is therefore a potentially new romanticism. pierre, depending on her proclivities, can reinvent poetics during an historical moment when many of us think privacy is impossible. to do so, she would be writing in an outlaw capacity, because every telecommunications device and media device is working with the law to foreclose on privacy and data mine our selves with ubiquitous surveillance. she would also be, unintentionally but as a side-effect, a canadian poet, because almost all those data mining surveillance companies are located in california, staffed by americans who have worked in their largely male dominated offices since they were college aged interns, interpreting everything they do through the lens of cupertino’s masculine, economically monotonous subcultures. canadian afterglow might happen in the aural bath of itunes playlists, but the experience is introverted and transcendent. my reading of surface area might also be an opportunity for me to rejuvenate the concept of mindfulness in my own critical race theory. mindfulness has been informed by theorists like bell hooks, who combined her practice of north american buddhism with her expertise in cultural studies. mindfulness has long since been reduced to a commercialized buzzword. cornell west, another early theorist of mindfulness, regularly appears on cnn’s political panels where he contributes to a progressive political resistance movement, but harvard recently denied him tenure. what is mindfulness going to be, in my review? pierre has written a collection of poems that offer a glimpse of her meditations about intimacy and the body. i must consider to what extent i am writing a response, versus to what extent i am leaning so heavily that the poems can’t breathe. i am a white man reviewing her work, analyzing what i believe to be a shared experience of privacy. my review is on the cusp of invasive. even if i understand pierre’s synthesis of experience, should i critically contribute to the updated romantic era movement that i am proposing? i am most assuredly elevating the risk of reproducing the colonialism that i think her poems resist. terry trowbridge studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 3, 538-542, 2021 542 the romantic movement i propose is based on how far social media has encroached on our previously private experiences. there are so few places without the panopticon, that afterglow is plausibly the only time that we experience ourselves without monetized media. white men can only seriously decolonize their private lives by reflecting on racialized women’s experiences. decolonization includes recognizing pierre as a poet who can change the meaning of my own private experiences of intimacy; and synthesizing that experience for a wider public. the racial hierarchies present in our identities must somehow create a conflict between pierre and myself, as well as myself and black women poets as a kind of mutually supporting demographic. i am consciously making a decolonizing gesture. pierre’s audience at the book launch was evidence she helps to break more than one glass ceiling. i will obviously be cut by the broken glass. a hypothetical movement that grows from pierre’s collection of poems does not need me to participate. movements move on. pierre’s poems, though, offer a white male reader an opportunity to read the current, canadian experience that can inform critical theory texts like bell hooks and cornell west’s breaking bread: insurgent black intellectual life. there is little point to white men reading classics of critical race theory, unless we access contemporary black women writers and learn from them. references betts, g. (2005). plunderverse: a cartographic manifesto. poetics.ca, 5. http://www.poetics.ca/poetics05/05betts.html gladwell, m. (2000). the tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. new york: little, brown, & company. hooks, b., & west, c. (2017). breaking bread: insurgent black intellectual life. routledge. mensah final correspondence address: joseph mensah, faculty of environmental and urban change, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: jmensah@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic: a precarious entanglement among black immigrants in canada joseph mensah york university, canada christopher j. williams york university, canada abstract as several commentators and researchers have noted since late spring 2020, covid-19 has laid bare the connections between entrenched structurally generated inequalities on one hand, and on the other hand relatively high degrees of susceptibility to contracting covid-19 on the part of economically marginalized population segments. far from running along the tracks of race neutrality, studies have demonstrated that the pandemic is affecting black people more than whites in the u.s.a. and u.k., where reliable racially-disaggregated data are available. while the situation in canada seems to follow the same pattern, race-specific data on covid-19 are hard to come by. at present, there is no federal mandate to collect race-based data on covid-19, though, in ontario, at the municipal level, the city of toronto has been releasing such data. this paper examines the entanglements of race, immigration status and the covid-19 pandemic in canada with particular emphasis on black immigrants and non-immigrants in toronto, using multiple forms of data pertaining to income, housing, immigration, employment and covid-19 infections and deaths. our findings show that the pandemic has had a disproportionate negative impact on black people and other racialized people in toronto and, indeed, canada. keywords covid-19 pandemic; racism; black people; visible minorities; toronto; canada introduction as canada is a white settler society, black people are routinely tagged as the binary opposite of “true” canadians in many identity-related discourses – joseph mensah & christopher j. williams studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 124 especially of the us-versus-them ilk – with other racialized groups typically situated between these polarities. in addition to the discursive domains in which this diametric opposition holds true, it is also actualized at the level of social structure vis-à-vis the relative positions of whites and blacks within the canadian class structure. consider, for example, 2016 census data on income deciles, which show that 67% of black people are in the bottom five income deciles, whereas 47% of those designated as “not a visible minority” are similarly situated.1 not only do such income differentials reflect what scholars of racism (e.g., goldberg, 1997; jardina, 2019) mean by racialized class structures, they also draw attention to questions of how racially differentiated life chances intensify in the context of crises such as the covid-19 pandemic. studies show that the pandemic is affecting blacks more than whites in both the u.s.a. and u.k., where reliable data are available (booth & barr, 2020; stafford et al., 2020). while the situation in canada seems to follow the same pattern, data on covid-19, broken down by race, are hard to come by. presently, there is no federal mandate to collect race data on covid-19, though the city of toronto has started collecting such data, just as montreal and vancouver are using neighborhood data as proxies to ascertain the impacts of the pandemic on different ethno-racial groups. the literature on social determinants of health shows that health risks vary based on race and other socioeconomic variables such as income, gender, and age (cockerham, 2013; thisted, 2003). however, very little is known about how these aspects are playing out regarding covid-19 in canada due to the dearth of data. still, one can hypothesize that the pandemic is affecting racialized people more than whites, given their over-representation in such frontline sectors as healthcare and social services (subedi et al., 2020). additionally, black people and other racialized groups are more likely to have difficulties adhering to public health protocols pertaining to the pandemic because of factors beyond their control. for instance, it is not easy to keep physical distance in overcrowded homes and neighborhoods where many black people in canada find themselves. this paper examines the entanglements of racism, socio-structural constrains, and covid-19 infections in canada with emphasis on black people (both immigrants and non-immigrants) in toronto, where some reliable race-based data on covid-19 exist. the paper also uses the modest data available to shed light on the situation in the gateway cities of montreal and vancouver, where there are sizeable black populations. while racism has 1 the employment equity act (1995) defines visible minorities as “person, other than aboriginal peoples, who are non-caucasian in race or non-white in colour.” in the census, the category “not a visible minority” includes respondents who reported yes to the aboriginal identity question as well as respondents who were not considered to be members of a visible minority group. in addition to caucasians and aboriginals, the “not a visible minority” category includes persons who reported “latin american,” “arab,” or “west asian” and who provided a european write-in response such as french (statistics canada, 2016, p.1-4). socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 125 little regard for the immigration status of black people, the imbrication of race and immigrant status often intensifies the challenges of black immigrants in accessing government support systems in crises. as covid19 is a moving target, the data we use represent a snapshot at the time of writing. every so often, the role of the government is re-forged in times of crisis. with the pandemic, many orthodoxies on how we work, socialize, and relate to government institutions have been upended. as a corollary, it is imperative that we formulate our mitigation strategies in accord with social justice, given the social and racial disparities that are part and parcel of the covid-19 pandemic. the significance of individual resistive agency cannot be altogether gainsaid; however, individual agency is inescapably constrained by structural constraints, making social justice advocacy doubly important. even though theories of social justice abound, many of which propose specific formulae for their advocacy (e.g., kant, 1998; rawls, 1971; sen, 2009), we could not agree more with sen’s (1999, p. 283) observation that in resolving social injustice, “it is not so much a matter of having exact rules about how precisely we ought to behave, as of recognizing the relevance of our shared humanity in making the choices we face.” accordingly, we draw quite eclectically on the works of scholars such as rawls (1971), sen (2009), foucault (1997, 2004), mbembe (2019), and agamben (1998) to espouse a social justice position that highlights the (bio)politics implicated in the pandemic to affirm our common humanity. with insights from these scholars, we suggest ways to approach the pandemic to improve the life chances of black people and other racialized populations in canada. the black population in canada: a profile black africans were among the first non-indigenous residents of canada, with a history going back to the 17th century (walker, 1996). still, it was only after the introduction of the immigration points system of the 1960s that free black african immigrants and refugees began to arrive in significant numbers (winks, 1997; walker, 1996). the black population in canada is highly heterogeneous in its ethnicity, immigration status, generation, place of origin and other factors, with some coming from continental africa, others from the caribbean, united states, europe, and elsewhere, and still others tracing their nativity to canada as “indigenous” black canadians (mensah, 2010). unlike the united states, the black population in canada is relatively small. for instance, whereas black people accounted for 10.5% of the us population in 1961, the corresponding figure in canada at that time was 0.2% (hackworth, 2016). by 2011, the relative share of the black population in canada had increased tenfold, but still stood at only 2.88%. the 2016 census puts the total number of black people in canada at 1.19 million, which is 3% of the canadian population. still, black people are the third largest racialized group joseph mensah & christopher j. williams studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 126 in canada, after south asians and chinese. of the estimated 1.19 million black people in canada, 623,190 (or 52%) are immigrants, while the rest are either non-immigrants (531,090 or 44%) or non-permanent residents (44,280 or four percent). even though black people in canada come from around the world, the majority come from africa and the caribbean. available data (statistics canada, 2018) show that the leading source countries of african-born immigrants, based on the 2016 census, were morocco (72,905), egypt (67,195), algeria (67,045), nigeria (52,380), and republic of south africa (48,015); others include ethiopia (34,295), kenya (28,840), somalia (28,190), dr congo (27,800), and ghana (24,660). indeed, people from northern african countries such as egypt, morocco, and algeria often see themselves as maghrebi. also, one would expect that many of the immigrants from south africa would be white, rather than black, given the racial differences in education and income in that country, and canada’s general preference for professionals and higher income people in its immigration pool. however, as mensah (2020) points out, the number of african-born immigrants increased from 398,100 in 2006 to 689,630 in 2016. regarding the caribbean, the top source countries of immigrants to canada in 2016 were jamaica (144,225), haiti (97,140) trinidad and tobago (66,325), cuba (18,905), barbados (15,085), and st. vincent and grenadines (13,930). other top sources included the dominican republic (11,880), grenada (10,500), st. lucia (6,810), and dominica (2,865). these same countries were the top sources in 2006, with a few of them changing their rankings. obviously, not all immigrants from caribbean countries are black, given the longstanding ethno-racial mixing in that part of the world. at the same time, the caribbean remains a fecund source of black immigrants in canada. notwithstanding the complex spectrum of ethno-racial gradation in the caribbean, more than 90% of jamaica’s and haiti’s populations are black, while more than a third of trinidad and tobago’s population is black (thomas, 2012). table 1 gives a snapshot of selected socioeconomic characteristics of black people and other canadians as of 2016. clearly, to be black or another racialized group in canada comes with socio-economic costs. for instance, while the educational level of visible minorities – as measured by the percentage of those with bachelor’s level education or more – is higher than that of non-visible minorities, the former still have higher unemployment rates, higher prevalence of low incomes, and far lower median incomes (table 1). in the specific case of black people, the data show that even though their level of education is fairly similar to that of the non-visible minority population, their unemployment rate is far higher, just as their prevalence of low income is twice as high as that of non-visible minorities. additionally, the median income of black people was 75% that of non-visible minorities in 2016. although black people are not always at the very bottom socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 127 of the metrics shown in table 1, they are usually among those who are worst off, together with west asians, koreans, and arabs. also, while current disaggregated data are not readily available, it is reasonable to expect indigenous peoples, as well as the immigrants among black people and other racialized groups, have equally, if not far more, straitened socio-economic circumstances, based on previous studies such as galabuzi (2006), block and galabuzi (2011), and mensah and williams (2017). group with bachelors degree or above (%) unemployment rate (%) prevalence of low income (%) median income ($) south asian 38.3 9.2 16.5 25,280 chinese 39.5 7.9 23.4 22,973 black 20.1 12.5 23.9 27,263 filipino 36.0 5.2 7.4 32,508 latin american 25.1 9.1 19.8 26,843 arab 38.0 13.5 36.2 20,803 southeast asian 20.3 8.2 17.6 25,048 west asian 41.1 11.0 34.7 19,107 korean 46.1 8.4 32.6 18,795 japanese 36.6 6.4 12.9 32,200 visible minorities n.i.e.1 18.9 8.6 18.5 29,409 multiple visible minorities 29.7 8.6 16.7 26,653 total visible minorities 33.9 9.2 20.8 25,514 not a visible minority 20.3 7.3 12.2 36,538 total canada 23.2 7.7 14.2 34,205 table 1. selected socio-economic characteristics by ethno-racial background, 2016 (source: statistics canada, 2016). undoubtedly, occupation is a social determinant of health risks. those in frontline occupations such as health care, transportation, and sales are likely to face relatively high exposure to covid-19, since they have few options but to work outside their homes. according to the national occupational classification data (table 2), while the percentage of black people in management occupations is 5.38% (which is far lower than the “all canadians,” visible minority, and non-visible minority averages of 11.02%, 8.74%, and 11.63%, respectively) the percentage of black people in health occupations is 11.19%; the comparable shares for “all canadians” (6.81%); visible minorities (8.00%) and non-visible minorities (6.49%) are all lower. similarly, when it comes to sales and service occupations, black people are over-represented in comparison to “all canadians,” visible minorities, and non-visible minorities as groups. joseph mensah & christopher j. williams studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 128 national occupational classification (noc) canada n=18,268,120 (%) blacks n=578,530 (%) visible minority n=3,896,330 (%) non-visible minority n=14,371,790 (%) 0: management occupations 11.02 5.38 8.74 11.63 1: business, finance and admin occupations 15.73 14.88 15.50 15.79 2: natural and applied sciences and related occupations 6.97 5.20 9.19 6.36 3: health occupations 6.81 11.19 8.00 6.49 4: occupations in education, law and social, community and government services 11.70 12.37 9.92 12.18 5: occupations in art, cultures, recreation and sport 3.05 2.44 2.30 3.25 6: sales and services occupations 23.35 29.08 28.48 21.96 7: trades, transport and equipment operators and related occupations 14.60 12.56 10.65 15.68 8: natural resources, agriculture and related production occupations 2.27 0.91 0.92 2.64 9: occupations in manufacturing and utilities 4.45 5.94 6.24 3.97 total 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.0 table 2. canada: occupational classification by ethno-racial background, 2016 (source: statistics canada, 2016). while recognizing the considerable capacity of anti-black racism to impose structural/material hardships on black people in canada, it is important to note that the black canadian population has discernible intragroup differentiation, with respect to unemployment rates and other economic indices, along the axes of immigration status. across canada, for example, black people aged 25-64 who are non-immigrants had an unemployment rate of 9.7% (based on the 2016 census); the corresponding figure for their immigrant counterparts who arrived in the 2011 to 2016 period was much higher at 15.1%. focusing on a particular subset of the black canadian population age 25-64, namely those with bachelor degrees and higher, reveals an unemployment gap of even greater magnitude. among non-immigrants, the unemployment rate was 5.8%, whereas among immigrants who arrived from 2011 to 2016 the unemployment rate was 2.7 times higher at 15.5% (statistics canada, 2017). clearly, then, our observations about structural disadvantage among black canadians in general apply with even more force to black people who are relatively recent arrivals to canada. as we shall socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 129 soon see, on the basis of available data from toronto, media accounts and related studies (e.g., carman, 2020; subedi et al., 2020), covid-19 has affected black people and other racialized groups more than members of the dominant majority. theoretical background and preliminary empirical considerations in the course of responding to the findings of an october 2020 statistics canada report on covid-19 mortality in canada’s ethno-cultural neighbourhoods, dr. andrew boozary, executive director of population health & social medicine at the university health network in toronto, had this to say: this isn’t about a deficiency in people or communities. these are structural deficiencies that we’ve allowed to take place because of structural racism, because of structural discrimination… everyone in public health could have predicted where covid was going to be most concentrated because of the structural vulnerabilities, because of the impossible situations that certain populations and neighbourhoods are in. (carman, 2020) these observations by dr. boozary are in close accord with substantial bodies of research, which explicate how particular socio-structural configurations generate predictable patterns of racially differentiated life chances that persist quietly decade after decade, but reveal themselves loudly in the context of crises such as the covid-19 pandemic (guinier & torres, 2003). additionally, dr. boozary’s reference to the “impossible situations” faced by populations victimized by prevailing structural arrangements constitutes a valuable countervailing proposition vis-à-vis claims that marketbased choices – in the domains of employment and housing, for example – are abundant to the point where virtually anyone can extricate themselves from life-diminishing material conditions. of course, the tightness of employment markets is frequently such that choice is asymmetrical: employers have an abundance of prospective employees to choose from, whereas job applicants (especially those who are unemployed or underemployed) must take whatever they can get. consider in this regard that in 2019, the year before covid-19 struck canada, the unemployment-to-job vacancies ratio was about 3.3:1 in a typical month; the standard situation was 1.2 million unemployed people and 360,000 job vacancies (statistics canada, 2019). ratios of similar magnitudes are found in other advanced countries, and writing about the united states william k. tabb provides a striking illustration of how resultant forms of desperation are expressed, even by those who are employed: the poor, who have few choices, may sell the very life space they occupy for short-term reward… as one worker in a chemical plant told a reporter who asked joseph mensah & christopher j. williams studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 130 if he minded working without protective equipment, ‘hell, i’d jump in the damn vat if they told me i had to, to keep my job.’ (tabb, 2002, p. 50) figuratively speaking, there are thousands of canadian workers, many of whom are racialized, who are jumping into the vat (i.e., going to work multiple days a week) for fear of job termination if they remain home during the pandemic. this paper sheds light on some of the structural constraints many black people in canada face as they live precariously amidst the covid-19 pandemic. we could not agree more with massey and denton’s (1993, p. 149) observation that: the structural organization of society… plays a profound role in shaping the life chances of individuals. structural variables are elements of social and economic organization that lie beyond individual control, that are built into the way society is organized. structural characteristics affect the fate of large numbers of people and families who share common locations in the social order. invariably, in social orders that are also racial orders, racism functions in ways that generate and reinforce the relegation of racial “others” to lower levels of class structures than they would otherwise occupy. racialized class structures, as constitutive aspects of material life in white settler nations, are sustained through a variety of processes that are often identifiable as being rooted in the collective agency of superordinate groups. writing about “strategies of action” in socio-political fields of race, emirbayer and desmond (2015, p. 152) draw attention to “a conservation strategy on the part of dominant racial actors, in which their overriding aim is to preserve the structure of power most favourable to them and to safeguard or even enhance their position in this structure.” resonant with the weberian concept of social closure, conservation strategies exist in contexts marked by salient ingroup/outgroup racial divisions, but do not require outright hostility as a motive force (jardina, 2019). in-group affinities, combined with control over key levers of institutional power, can and do suffice to drive successful conservation strategies. every so often, dominative collective agency finds tripartite expression at the levels of materiality, spatiality and ideology. for example, it has been noted, with reference to concentrated poverty, that: the concentration effect exacerbates the products of a racially exclusionary poverty by concentrating them in a containable space easily avoidable by those not so confined. conservative commentators largely emphasize the pathological character of the racialized poor as the overriding causal consideration in extending their poverty. so, the concentration effect is not just spatial; it is also ideological. (goldberg, 1997, p. 15) zones of concentrated poverty are usually spaces in which life chances are markedly sub-optimal, the political power of confined groups – such as black people – is rather anemic, and exposure to pernicious conditions, inclusive of socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 131 readily transmissible diseases, is a feature of quotidian life. “who lives and dies, how long they live, what diseases they are subject to suffer without adequate healthcare… are all shaped by the egregious fiscal realities in racist societies,” observes leonard harris (1999, p. 43). congruently, roughly five decades ago, johan galtung noted that low income, low health and low power “tend to be heavily correlated due to the way they are tied together in the social structure” (2009, p. 83). when propositions along these lines are advanced in conjunction with considerations of imbrications between class and race, a standard rejoinder pivots on two interrelated anti-reductionist injunctions, namely, do not reduce race to class and do not reduce class to race. that stance is a reasonable one insofar as “race-thinking isn’t class-thinking, essentially, because the two categories can get out of phase with each other: a race may be divided into many classes; a class may be divided into many races” (taylor, 2004, p. 61). but even when, for example, this or that racial group is divided into multiple classes, the class composition of one group can significantly differ from that of another group. specifically, if we turn again to the 2016 canadian census data on income deciles (statistics canada, 2018), and take the temporary liberty of conceiving of these deciles as proxies for class, we find that the class structure of black canadians is very bottom heavy compared to that of canadians designated as “not a visible minority.” focusing on extremes – the bottom decile and the top decile – enables this point to be illustrated in the form of a bottom-to-top decile ratio. in 2016, a total of 202,795 black people were in the bottom decile whereas 44,970 were in the top decile, so the bottom-to-top ratio was 4.5:1. this is what it means to say the black class structure is bottom heavy: for every black person in the top decile, there were 4.5 in the bottom decile. by sharp contrast, among the “not a visible minority” population, 2,280,695 were in the bottom decile and 2,921,775 were in the top decile. the resulting bottom-to-top ratio was 0.78:1, meaning the class structure of this comparator group is far more equilibrated than that of black canadians. with these statistics, the probable health consequences for black canadians can be inferred on the basis of two additional sources of data. first, the public health agency of canada’s health inequalities data tool shows that, with respect to deaths by all causes by income quintile during the years 20092011, the rate per 100,000 for the highest quintile was 601, while the rate for the bottom quintile was 50% higher at 902 (public health agency of canada, 2017). second, a statistics canada study of 2.7 million canadians aged 25 and older who died from 1991 to 2006 revealed major differences in death rates, by income quintile, due to communicable diseases. in terms of respiratory infections, for example, the mortality rate for females in the lowest quintile, which stood at 26.6 per 100,000, was 39% higher than that of their counterparts in the highest quintile (19.1 per 100,000). for males, the death rate disparity was even greater: the rate for males in the lowest quintile joseph mensah & christopher j. williams studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 132 (47 per 100,000) was 61% higher than the rate for males in the highest quintile (29.2 per 100,000) (tjepkema et al., 2013, pp. 17-18). given the relative concentration of black canadians in the lowest income quintiles, these general and specific (respiratory infection) mortality rates accord with our understanding of race-specific covid-19 infection and death rates, as our subsequent empirical analysis will show. race and covid-19 in canada from the preceding discussion, we know that black people in particular, and racialized groups in general, are over-represented in occupations that have frontline status during the covid-19 pandemic. while the federal government does not collect race-based data on covid-19, the city of toronto has started publishing ethno-racially-disaggregated data on covid19. however, the ethno-racial categories used by the city are different from the ones used for “visible minorities” in the national census. for instance, whereas “japanese” and “koreans,” are stand-alone groupings in the census, toronto’s database lumps these groups into one (i.e., “southeast asians”). at the same time, the category “black” is featured in both the census and the toronto covid-19 database, and this augurs well for our empirical purposes. in this section, we rely mainly on the covid-19 data compiled by the city of toronto to examine how the pandemic has affected black people, relative to other ethno-racial groups in the city; we also shed light on the uptake of covid-19 vaccines in black neighborhoods, using the preliminary data available. group population share of population (%) share of covid-19 cases (%) count of covid-19 cases odds ratio arab, mid. eastern or west asian 96,350 3.73 9.97 725 2.65 black 239,850 9.28 24.00 1,763 2.59 east asian 354,515 13.72 3.77 277 0.27 latin american 77,165 2.99 8.47 622 2.84 s. asian or indocaribbean 338,970 13.12 18.83 1,383 1.44 southeast asian 194,360 7.52 13.40 984 1.78 white 1,282,745 49.64 21.66 1,591 0.44 total 2,583,955 100.00 100.00 7,345 1.00 table 3. the city of toronto: covid-19 cases by ethno-racial groups as of september 30, 2020 (note: odds ratio = share of covid cases divided by share of population) (source: city of toronto, 2020). as can be seen from table 3, whereas black people constituted 9.28% of the city of toronto’s population as of september 30, 2020, they accounted socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 133 for almost a quarter (24%) of covid-19 cases; this is more than double what one would expect, based on the share of black people among the city’s population. contrast this with the case of whites in toronto, who constituted 49.64% percent of the population, but only 21.66% of covid-19 cases. in fact, the covid-19 cases among “arabs, middle eastern or west asians” and “latin americans” were even higher than among black people. furthermore, black neighborhoods in the city have more covid-19 cases, an unsurprising fact since people’s exposure to covid-19 at work contributes to inordinate transmission risks in their neighborhoods and vice versa. figure 1. black neighbourhoods in the city of toronto. mensah and william (2017, p. 57) defined toronto’s “black neighborhoods” as those among the city’s 140 neighborhoods in which 16% or more of the population is black, keeping in mind that black people constituted 8% of toronto’s population at the time of their estimate; the 10 black neighborhoods, per mensah and williams’ (2017) estimate, are presented in figure 1. as table 4 shows, toronto’s black neighborhoods are heavily populated by racialized groups, with neighborhoods such as jamestown, black creek, and malvern having over 80% of their respective residents being racialized. unsurprisingly, these neighborhoods have higher rates of unemployment and higher rates of residents with low income than the city’s averages. figure 2 shows that toronto’s black neighborhoods also have more covid-19 cases than average neighbourhoods in the city. the joseph mensah & christopher j. williams studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 134 mean infection rate for the 140 neighborhoods of the city stood at 1,076 cases per 100,000 by november 2020; and ranged from a low of 274 per 100,000 in the “the beaches” (a neighbourhood with a miniscule black population) to a high of 3,313 per 100,000 in the black neighbourhood of weston. the standard deviation was 667, pointing to high variability from neighborhood to neighborhood. in fact, all but one black neighbourhood (west hill) had wellabove-average covid-19 caseloads, as of november 8, 2020 (figure 2). priority (sub)neigbourhoods1 total pop.2 black pop.3 % visible minority4 unemployment rate (%)6 median household income7 % in low income8 mount olivesiverstonejamestown (2) 32,954 8,395 (25.5%) 86:51 12:8 $55,334: $65,829 27:20 jane-finch humbermede (22) black creek (24) glenfield-jane heights (25) 15,545 21,737 30,491 3,440 (22.1%) 6,315 (29.1%) 7,365 (24.1%) 77:51 81:51 77:51 10:8 13:8 11:8 $57,609: $65,829 $46,580: $65,829 $51,964: $65,829 22:20 33:20 25:20 weston-st dennis weston (113) mount dennis (115) 18,992 13,593 6,045 (33.6%) 4,360 (32.1%) 61:51 68:51 11:8 11:8 $45,695: $65,829 $52,162: $65,829 30:20 25:20 malvern (132) 43,794 8,295 (18.9%) 89:51 11:8 $64,114: $65,829 20:20 eglinton e. (138) 22,776 3,320 (18.1%) 78:51 11:8 $53,081: $65,829 26:20 scarborough village (139) 16,724 2,855 (19.8%) 73:51 13:8 $49,568: $65,829 32:20 west hill (136) 27,392 5,840 (21.3%) 63:51 12:8 $56,051: $65,829 25:20 1the city of toronto has 13 priority neighbourhoods, many of which are made up of sub-areas or sub-neighbourhoods. the numbers in parenthesis are used by the city of toronto planning office to identify the city neighbourhood. 2refers to the total population of the (sub)-neighbourhood. 3the population of black in the (sub)-neighbourhood; the percentage of blacks in the (sub)neighborhood is in parenthesis. 4this is the ratio of the percentage share of visible minorities in the (sub)-neighbourhood to the corresponding figure in the city of toronto as whole. 5the ratio of percentage share of single parent families in the neighborhood to that of the city. 6the ratio of the unemployment rate of the (sub)-neighbourhood to that of the city. 7the ratio of the median income in the (sub)-neighbourhood to that of the city. 8is the ratio of low income population in the (sub)-neighbourhood relative to the city. table 4. socioeconomic characteristics of toronto’s black neighbourhoods, 2016 (source: city of toronto, 2021a). socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 135 figure 2. rates of covid-19 in black neighbourhoods in toronto, november 8, 2020. table 5 shows the housing characteristics of the 10 black neighborhoods in toronto in 2016, as we have operationalized them. this dataset is particularly relevant given the spatial dimensions of covid-19, which at the very least catalyzes the need for physical distancing as a mitigating strategy. according to table 5, all but two of the 10 black neighborhoods have higher population densities than the toronto average of 4,334 persons per square km; the corresponding average for the 10 black neighborhoods stood at 5,687. in fact, black neighborhoods such as weston and eglinton have population densities that exceed 7,000 persons per square km. of course, the issue here is not merely one of density, for expensive condominiums in other parts of the city are equally dense; however, the residents of these black neighborhoods generally have low-incomes and therefore much less control over their lives and employment options and conditions. table 5 also shows that the average household size in the black neighborhoods is larger than the city’s average by a ratio of 2.88:2.42, just as the percentage of unsuitable housing (i.e., overcrowded housing) is far greater than the city’s average by a ratio of about joseph mensah & christopher j. williams studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 136 22:12. similarly, the percentage of inadequate houses (i.e., houses in need of major repair) is, on average, higher in the black neighborhoods. priority (sub)neigbourhoods1 population density household size unsuitable housing2 inadequate housing3 mount olive-siverstonejamestown (2) 7,271 3.32 30.9 10.1 jane-finch humbermede (22) black creek(24) glenfield-jane heights (25) 3,565 6,282 5,864 3.07 2.95 3.05 22.9 26.6 23.1 8.0 13.6 10.8 weston-st dennis weston (113) mount st. dennis (115) 7,197 6,442 2.33 2.56 19.3 20.1 9.7 11.1 malvern (132) 4,948 3.26 17.3 6.7 west hill (136) 2,856 2.70 12.2 11.6 eglinton (138) 7,051 2.81 22.8 11.1 scarborough village (139) 5,395 2.77 22.3 12.8 black neighbourhood: mean 5,687 2.88 21.75 10.55 city of toronto: mean 4,334 2.42 12.1 7.1 1the numbers in parenthesis are used by the city of toronto planning office to identify the city neighbourhoods. 2unsuitable housing is the percentage of private households in dwellings with insufficient bedrooms according to their size and composition. 3inadequate housing is the percentage of private households in dwellings that are in need of major repairs. table 5. toronto’s black neighbourhoods: housing characteristics, 2016 (source: city of toronto, 2021a). unlike toronto, the other two major gateway cities of montreal and vancouver do not filter their covid-19 data by race and ethnicity. consequently, the ethno-racial dimensions of the pandemic in those cities are hard to ascertain with any appreciable degree of accuracy. nonetheless, a cbc report on montreal found that: montreal districts with higher number of black people and more cramped housing have registered the most cases of covid-19… the findings confirm what many already suspected, given the high death toll in low-income, racially diverse neighbourhoods like montréal-nord, where 222 people have died from the virus – more than in all of british columbia. (rocha et al., 2020, p. 2) due to the lack of relevant data, the report used “place of residence” as a proxy for “ethno-racial background”; while this is not perfect, it is a reasonable approximation. also, with the aid of regression analysis, the cbc analysts found their strongest correlation between “the rate of infection” and the “percentage of black residents.” they also “found strong correlations for concentrations of health-care workers, low income earners, and unsuitable housing” (rocha et al., 2020, pp. 2-5), all of which chimes well with our socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 137 preceding assessment of the situation in toronto. even in vancouver – where sizeable black enclaves, comparable to those in toronto and montreal, are virtually non-existent – there is some evidence that the pandemic is having its worst impacts in neighbourhoods with high proportions of racialized groups, such as south asians, filipinos and blacks. a cbc report on british columbia notes that “communities in b.c. that were home to more than 25 per cent visible minorities had an age-adjusted covid-19 mortality rate that was 10 times higher than neighbourhoods that were less than one per cent visible minority” (carman, 2020, p. 2). while this finding is about all of british columbia, the fact that the bulk of the province’s visible minority population lives in the vancouver metropolitan area, especially in such places as surrey and richmond, makes it relevant to our assessment of the situation in canada’s three major cities. overall, in toronto, where covid-19 data are filtered by race, we found that black people and other racialized groups are at more risk than their white counterparts. similar trends are noticeable in both montreal and vancouver, albeit to a lesser degree, even though the data in these two cities are not disaggregated enough to give a clear picture. moreover, while the available covid-19 data in toronto, montreal and vancouver are not filtered per immigration status, one can reasonably speculate that the covid-19 situation among black people and other racialized immigrants is likely the same, if not worse. by early june of 2021, the canadian vaccination program was well underway; ontario, for one, was in step 2 of its 3-tier criterion for opening up the province. step 2 is where 70% of the adult population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 20% are fully vaccinated, while step 3 is where 70 to 80% of the adults have received one dose and 25% of the adults are fully vaccinated. at the time of doing the final editorial corrections to this paper in january 2022, the ontario government had announced new restrictions in response to the spread of the omicron variant, “saying the province will return to a modified step 2 of the reopening plan” (katawazi, 2022). with its vaccine rollout well underway, toronto public health (tph) acknowledged on its website that systemic racism is implicated in the differential impact of the pandemic on racialized populations; tph’s admission is worth quoting at length here: racialized and immigrant communities are more likely to work in low-wage, front-line and essential work, and many neighborhoods with high rates of covid-19 have a high percentage of people at higher risk. systemic racism and discrimination are important drivers of these inequalities. the covid-19 pandemic has also had important negative socio-economic impacts and has led to deeper inequalities, challenges and barriers. (city of toronto, 2021b; emphasis added) with this explicit acknowledgement, tph is trying hard to make vaccines accessible to people in poor, racialized neighborhoods. as they put it: joseph mensah & christopher j. williams studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 138 the city of toronto public health, health care and community partners are working together to expand access to covid-19 vaccination for neighborhoods and populations that have been most impacted by covid-19, including black, indigenous, racialized, disability and newcomer communities. this includes providing mobile vaccination clinics in local neighborhoods, and vaccine-related communications, outreach and support that reflects the languages and cultures of local residents. (city of toronto, 2021b) with the preceding two quotations in context, one would have expected the vaccination rates in toronto’s black neighborhoods to be at least close to, if not on par with, the toronto average by the end of june 2021. however, the situation on the ground was quite different: whereas the vaccination rate for the overall toronto population (18+ years) stood at 45.3% by june 30, 2021, the corresponding average for the 10 black neighborhoods was 36.9%, with rates for black neighborhoods such jamestown (30.1%), mount dennis (31.7%), humbermede (35%), weston 35.4%, and west hill (35.5%) falling some 10 percentage points below the city’s average (city of toronto, 2021b). while it is hard to account for this race-linked spatial variation, there is little doubt that some level of vaccine hesitancy is implicated. discussion: racism, biopolitics, and social justice amidst covid-19 the government of canada has intervened quite generously in the economy since the pandemic started, with some workers even placed on governmentfunded furlough and others getting unemployment benefits. still, there is no denying that the pandemic has reinforced the inequities in the canadian labour market, as it has across many parts of the world. with the pandemic, labour has come under a tripartite typology, entailing those functions that are “essential,” those that have been “lost,” and those that have transitioned to online formats (rose, 2020). while some black workers and other racialized workers have lost their jobs, many are still working in frontline jobs such as in warehouses, farms, and long-term health care facilities where the threat of covid-19 is particularly high. we also know from the preceding analysis that black people, in particular, are overrepresented among those living in low-income and overcrowded neighborhoods, with higher unemployment rates. the present study has shown that these subpar material conditions have disproportionately exposed black people to the pandemic, and these findings corroborate those of recent studies by subedi et al. (2020, p. 4) and choi et al. (2020). these results stimulate important questions related to social justice. for instance, are we prepared to pay essential workers “essential” wages that are commensurate with the existential risks of their work? given that some of these frontline workers are undocumented immigrants and temporary labourers, such as jamaican farm workers in ontario, are we prepared to socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 139 regularize their stay or simply overlook the risks they are taking to make life easier for canadians? as george (2020) puts it: will canada give its foreign essential workers their rights? what freedoms do these racialized essential workers actually have amidst covid-19, since many can hardly afford to lose their paycheck? more importantly, how can we best protect these vulnerable workers from the real and present dangers of the pandemic? undoubtedly, the pandemic has, in the context of pre-existing structural inequities, created differentiated health risks to the detriment of black people and other disadvantaged groups in canada; the racial, biopolitical, and social justice ramifications of life under covid are quite palpable. and although the virus itself does not discriminate, judith butler (2020, p. 5) justifiably notes: social and economic inequality will make sure that the virus discriminates [and creates] a distinction between grievable and ungrieveable lives, that is, those who should be protected against death at all cost and those whose lives are considered not worth safeguarding against illness and death. foucault (1997, 2004), in his lectures on biopolitics, discusses how racism is deployed in the calculi of biopower to divide people into those who must live and those who must die. similarly, mbembe (2019) uses his notion of necropolitics to highlight the extent to which western democracies have embraced their “dark side,” with ever-increasing racism, inequality, and nationalistic forces, thereby hollowing out the values, rights and freedoms they routinely celebrate. for his part, agamben (1998), in his homo sacer, describes the life of disadvantaged, racialized, and marginalized people as “bare life” (i.e., a purely biological or animal life, stripped of any social and political dimensions). the issue then is: what socio-political processes can change their lives from “bare life” status to that of rights-bearing subjects amidst the pandemic? we offer two specific suggestions in this regard. first, guided by rawls’ (1971) difference principle, we urge authorities to distribute covid-19-related resources, including the vaccine, in ways that favour the most vulnerable among us, which obviously includes frontline workers. secondly, with insights from sen’s (2009) notion of justice as freedom of opportunity and of process, we urge authorities to accord frontline workers the freedom to choose what they may value – or consider safe – doing or not doing in the midst of the pandemic. as sen (2009, p. 227) observes: “in assessing our lives, we have reason to be interested not only in the kind of lives we manage to lead, but also in the freedom that we actually have to choose between styles and ways of living.” indeed, the freedom to determine the nature of our lives is one of the valued aspects of living that we have reason to treasure. accordingly, these workers should be given humane and realistic options to work under conditions that are as safe as possible; joseph mensah & christopher j. williams studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 140 conceivable options and incentives could include reduced hours, higher pay to reflect their exposure to covid-19 risks, and reasonably paid sick or stress leave. conclusion the economist notes in a recent report that “the coronavirus affects everyone, but not equally. the young often shrug off the virus; the old often die of it. the rich shrug off the economic shock; the poor cannot” (september 26, 2020, p. 16). from the preceding analysis, we can convincingly add a racial component to this observation to the effect that black people and other racialized groups are more likely to die of it. clearly, consequential antipodal realities are germane to the subject matter here. our findings suggest that, at least at the general level, the dominant material arrangements of canada enable the accrual of substantial life-enhancing advantages to whites, and the externalization of the worst social conditions onto black people and other racialized populations. insofar as the worth of whiteness is tied to certain empirical correlates of material advantage (e.g., lower unemployment rates or higher incomes) it is understandable, from the standpoint of amoral logic, why non-disruption of the canadian racial status quo may be viewed as a good thing in some ideological circles. on the other hand, in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, racist hermetic fantasies run up against the fact that, at the time of finalizing the corrections to this paper (january 20, 2022), the virus has killed 31,982 people in canada and there is no way to fully shield whites from its fatal effects. although our findings point to racially disproportionate impacts of covid-19, disproportionate by no means implies exclusive, and, as a result, there is a strong case to be made for our collective concern or genuine care about how the virus has disproportionately affected racialized communities. we could not agree more with mbembe’s (2019) conception of care, which enjoins us to see the other not as people to exclude or abhor, but as people with whom we can build a more just and humane world. acknowledgements from chris: thank you to dr. joseph mensah for generously extending me the opportunity to contribute to this article, and to the members of the studies in social justice editorial team for all the work they have done to bring our work to print – much appreciated. from joseph: this article is dedicated to the cherished memory of my dad, the late mr. m. y. mensah, who passed in september of 2021. socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 123-142, 2022 141 references agamben, g. 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(2012). a demographic profile of black caribbean immigrants in the united states. migration policy institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/cbicaribbeanmigration.pdf tjepkema, m., wilkins, r., & long, a. (2013, july). cause-specific mortality by income adequacy in canada: a 16-year follow-up study. statistics canada. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-003-x/2013007/article/11852-eng.pdf walker, j. w. st. g. (1996). african canadians. in p. r. magocsi (ed.), encyclopedia of canada’s peoples (pp. 139-176). university of toronto press. winks, r. (1997). the blacks in canada: a history. mcgill-queen’s university press. suarez estrada final correspondence address: marcela suárez estrada, lateinamerika-institut, freie universitäat berlin, 14197 berlin, germany; email: marcela.suarez@fu-berlin.de issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 feminist strategies against digital violence: embodying and politicizing the internet marcela suárez estrada freie universität berlin, germany abstract this article aims to analyze feminist strategies against digital violence and their relation to performative forms of social justice. based on new feminist materialisms (coole & frost, 2010; souza, 2019), the article shows how female bodies are at the crossroads in our digital society. on the one hand, they are a target of digital violence because of their political activities, while on the other hand feminist protesters are opening new political possibilities for mobilization. by conducting a digital ethnography with two social collectives located in mexico city – luchadoras and laboratorio de interconectividades – i argue that embodying and politicizing technologies are strategies to mobilize the body as a political, critical and material category, which reveals a renewed feminist agency in hacking the hegemonic meanings of digital technology and resignifying its materiality in order to politicize it. furthermore, i argue that based on the body as material category, innovative forms of social justice for feminist collectives emerge. these strategies are related to the critical questioning of technologies to repoliticize digital violence, to render visible the memories and affectations in women’s bodies, as well as to mobilize a new feminist positioning called hackfeminist self-defense. all in all, this article seeks to contribute to understanding the broader issue of feminist politics performing social justice in the digital era. keywords new materialisms; social justice; performativity; digital violence introduction from argentina to mexico, structural violence has led to the mobilization of thousands of women in the last two decades. female bodies have taken the streets and social networks to demand justice and an end to state impunity. the most emblematic example of such mobilizations was the 2019 performance 242 marcela suárez estrada studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 “un violador en tu camino” (“a rapist in your way”)1 from the chilean feminist collective las tesis, which was replicated in several cities around the world. the video of the performance flooded social networks showing a mobilization that accounts for a new form of feminist agency, which – by putting the focus on violated bodies – reveals new ways of performing social justice by subverting guilt and holding judges accountable for the violence exercised on women’s bodies. however, this same video confronted viewers with a harsh reality: female bodies are violated both in public spaces and on the internet with misogynistic comments and with parodies of the video. these actions aimed to further discipline female bodies (ananías soto & sánchez vergara, 2019; garcía-gonzález & guedes, 2020; suárez & mitrović, 2023). just as in public spaces, the internet has become hostile and violent for women, especially those for whom digital space is a forum for their political activities. in a context of generalized violence affecting women to varying degrees, as well as the increased penetration of digital technologies into our daily lives, digital violence constitutes an extension of the violence to which women are exposed everyday (powell & henry, 2017). whether it is harassment, threats, or sending images with explicit violence to silence women who take the streets and digital networks, women globally are increasingly faced with the threat of digital violence (ging & siapera, 2018; henry & powell, 2018; nidhi, 2015). however, according to judicial authorities, digital violence does not cause bodily harm. moreover, as is the case with other types of violence, women’s testimonies are not taken seriously (cerva cerna, 2021; gardiner, 2018; jane, 2014; savigny, 2020). it is particularly problematic that women activists mobilizing for political purposes are constantly exposed to practices of digital violence that are aimed at instilling fear. in this context, the internet is another contested space where women are weaving networks to resist violence. in mexico, in the contexts of extreme (including institutional) violence against female bodies and impunity for perpetrators, women have taken to the streets and digital networks to defend their right to life without violence. the mobilization against macho acts of violence in 2016 and the protest #nomecuidanmeviolan against sexual violence by police in 2019, render visible new ways of women irrupting affectively in the political arena (suárez & mitrović, 2023). new feminist materialism is a pluralistic research agenda for analyzing multiple relations from and with matter (barad, 2003; bennett, 2010), which will serve in this article as a guide to analyze the feminist bodily strategies against digital violence. entanglements between political actions in public and in digital spaces are put in motion in protests in latin america that have in common a focus on the female body. new feminist materialisms provide a fresh perspective to analyze the paradoxical situation of female bodies in our digital society: the body as the target of violence, but also with a capacity to enunciate renewed agency (baer, 2016; souza, 2019). in this article, i zoom in past focus 1 performance of the collective las tesis “un violador en tu camino” (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab7r6hdo3w4). feminist strategies against digital violence 243 studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 on mass feminist mobilizations to analyze the social fabric at the micro-scale of social feminist collectives. the guiding questions of the article is: what are the strategies of feminists against digital violence in mexico city and how do they relate to bodily performativity forms of social justice? to explore these questions, i conducted an ethnographic study with two feminist collective projects: luchadoras and the laboratorio de interconectividades. based on interviews and analyses of these collectives’ web pages and videos, i argue that the main feminist strategies to fight against digital violence involve embodying and politicizing digital technologies. further, i demonstrate that these are political, critical and material strategies that go beyond the idea of appropriating digital technologies in order to hack their discourses and to return to their materiality, but this time in a politicized form. the politicization of technology by feminist collectives has put in motion a repoliticization of violence and exposed its normalized practices. one example of such politicization is placing digital violence in the context of structural violence against women, and showing the state’s responsibility for this violence. through a digital ethnography, i foreground renewed feminist entanglements with technologies, which articulate a critique of violence while enabling a political positioning aimed at subverting the logic of this violence in order to accomplish feminists’ own political objectives. the feminist strategies of embodying and politicizing are linked to the critical questioning of technologies, the rendering visible of memories and affectations of digital violence in women’s bodies, as well as to mobilizing bodily methodologies, for example hackfeminist self-defense and mapping the violence. in the following section, i present the new feminism materialisms as a dynamic research agenda to analyze the paradox of female bodies in the digital society. in the third section, i analyze women in movement in the struggle against violence in mexico. section four discusses embodying and politicizing technologies as a form of social justice. i conclude by presenting in detail the feminist strategies against digital violence and highlighting how this renewed relationship with technology has consequences for the broader domain of emergent forms of social justice. new feminist materialisms and the paradox of bodies on the internet renewed forms of doing politics using the internet have been discussed as part of the current feminist agenda (clark-parsons, 2016; esquivel, 2019; savigny, 2020), while a body of critical literature has focused on online violence and oppression toward female bodies (baer, 2016; garcía gonzález, 2021; noble, 2018). between these two largely unrelated literatures is an opportunity to provide a more integrated analysis of the political role of female bodies in relation to the internet. 244 marcela suárez estrada studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 despite growing critiques of the supposed immateriality of the internet (parikka, 2015; reichert & richterich, 2015; starosielski, 2015), ways of viewing it as a non-embodied social space continue to persist in the relevant literature. this tends to reinforce binaries such as the digital/non-digital divide, as well as an apparent dissociation of the body into the analog and the digital. more work is needed to provide a more integrated account of the place of the body in our increasingly digital society. new feminist critical materialisms can assist with the task of discussing renewed ways of situating the body in its multiple power dynamics to account for both alliances and disputes with technologies. this research agenda shares an interest with other interdisciplinary areas of knowledge such as posthumanisms (braidotti et al., 2016), which critically analyze relations with non-human entities, making visible the taxonomies of what it means to be human and how these materialize in processes of gender exclusion and inequality. with the focus on the body, new materialisms are also nourished by another research area related to the body as a political site (bargetz, 2019; sassatelli, 2012; souza, 2019). there is a common focus in these research agendas to think of the body as a situated place from which we can critically rethink hierarchical relations among “others”: humans, machines, algorithms, infrastructures or territories. in latin america, recent discussions about the political role of the body are at the center (souza, 2019). due to the always increasing violence against women, authors have been linking the body to political atrocities such as the war against the female body (segato, 2016). women’s mobilizations in latin america are not only ways of denouncing the violence enacted on their bodies but also ways of rendering visible the responsibility of the state in participating in the war against women’s bodies. thus, this renewed female agency also incorporates a discussion about alternative means for social justice. women are not only fighting for a politics of redistribution and recognition (fraser, 2007), they are already performing social justice on their own terms. at the same time, bodies in movement create a political place of a renewed feminist strategies (laudano, 2019; souza, 2019; sued et al., 2022). the category of the body-territory has also rendered visible the relations among bodies, territories and the practices of extractivism, violence and colonialism (cabnal, 2010). body-territory emerges from ecoterritorial feminisms originating from the struggle and resistance of peasant and indigenous women (tait lima & moreno, 2021). current discussions of the materiality of digital colonialism have also argued the importance of the body to render visible the affectations of territory via the internet (mejias & couldry, 2019; tait lima et al., 2022). feminist strategies against digital violence 245 studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 women in movement in the struggle against (digital) violence large social mobilizations in latin america have been accompanied by the emergence of feminist collectives that mark a clear difference in the way women do politics. one of these differences is the focus on the struggle against violence toward women’s bodies. digital violence increases when female bodies are mobilized either in the streets or on social networks for political purposes. the feminist mobilizations in 2019, which followed the rape of two minors at the hands of police officers in mexico city, constitutes one such example of digital violence enacted on the bodies of activists. gender violence was brought back into the public spotlight after protests across 18 cities with interventions on social networks to demand justice, and to stop the impunity of gender violence in mexico (internet es nuestra mx, 2019). participants gave performances outside the police station and painted graffiti on historical monuments accompanied by the hashtags #nomecuidanmeviolan (the police do not take care of me, they rape me) and #mecuidanmisamigasnolapolicia (my friends take care of me, not the police). after these protests, some collectives experienced coordinated digital attacks, such as threats of rape and murder (im-defensoras, 2019). likewise, hashtags that demeaned feminist mobilizations such as #asinomujeres (not like that ladies and #ellasnomerepresentan (they do not represent me) began trending on social networks. this example shows that despite the role of technologies in feminist mobilizations, both in the streets and on social networks, technologies have still afforded space for the exercise of violence and disciplining of female bodies. violence thus has been consolidated as one of the main axes that articulates women’s political struggles. such violence has provoked a multitude of feminist social collectives, including those constituted of victims, family members, students, artists and activists working at the intersection of human rights, technology, law and gender. various groups have formed alliances and thus created a social body. as a result, political spaces have now emerged that go beyond the mere circulation of hashtags and street protests. in this article the analysis of the strategies of collectives at the micro-scale emphasizes the ways in which they are performing social justice. to accomplish this task i focus on two feminist collectives in mexico city: the luchadoras and the laboratorio de interconectividades. the collectives were selected according to the following criteria: (a) that they mobilize strategies through political projects to fight digital violence, (b) that they are organized as a feminist collective, and (c) that they are located in mexico city. the two collectives on which i focus have both similarities and differences in their feminist strategies. luchadoras is a social collective with a strong focus on cyberfeminism to amplify women voices on the internet through communicational strategies, whereas the laboratorio de interconectividades, as its names indicates, is a lab specializing in hackfeminism with a focus on bodily experimentation. both collectives focus strongly on bodily strategies to fight digital violence. members of the two collectives know each other and 246 marcela suárez estrada studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 collaborate in mutual projects such as workshops on self defense and hackfeminism, and the creation of feminist content on the internet. through a digital ethnography, i focus on these collectives’ material practices, narratives and events as well as the ways in which they struggle against digital violence. according to murthy (2011), digital ethnography is a qualitative research approach that focuses on the interweaving of offline/online spaces, and is not limited to cyberspace. using this ethnographic approach, several types of information were collected in the period from january 2018 to december 2020. first, face-to-face interviews lasting approximately two hours each were conducted. in the case of luchadoras, four interviews were conducted with its members at different points in time to inquire about the evolution of certain topics as part of a larger project i am conducting.2 however, for this article i only analyze one interview out of these four. in the case of the laboratorio de interconectividades, one interview was conducted and the communication was continued through an app in text and audios formats. the interviews with members of both luchadoras and laboratorio de interconectividades had an open-ended question format and revolved around the following topics: the interview participants’ historical trajectories as activists and feminists; how they became part of the feminist collectives to which they belong; the role that technologies have had in transforming the ways of doing feminist politics; their own meanings of politics, feminism, internet and digital violence; the main political stakes of their collective; and the legislation against digital violence and dialogues with the government after the protest of august 16, 2019. ethnographic notes based on participant observation served as a further source of information that emerged from social networks, blogs, websites and diverse events of the collectives. these include face-to-face workshops on various topics such as digital security, feminist self defense, feminist internet, digital literacy, and technofeminism. i also conducted participant onsite observation at the march 8, 2020, protest in mexico city, online observation of events such as jornada de hacktivismo and the #nomecuidanmeviolan protest of august 16, 2019, as well as of a series of video interviews called hackear/nos. finally, it was possible to collect various audiovisual and textual materials from the collectives, which were sourced from websites and social networks. the main strategies that emerged from interrogating all these materials in the collectives’ struggle against digital violence were the embodiment and politicization of technology. below, i introduce the two collectives and present evidence related to those strategies. 2 the project is entitled “feminist politics against violence in the era of digitalization” and tracks how feminist collectives have been appropriating internet and digital technologies to fight digital violence against women. feminist strategies against digital violence 247 studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 the luchadoras: “the internet is like the street, like the house, like the bed” we are a feminist collective that inhabits public, digital and physical space. we want women, young women and girls to live with joy and freedom both in physical and digital spaces, aware of their personal and collective strength and potential. (luchadoras, 2020) the collective was born in 2012 with the broadcasting of interviews on the web concerning women who are making a transformation in their environment (personal communication with a member of the luchadoras collective, march 9, 2018). its political objectives are focused along two lines. the first is “mujeres guerreras,” whereby the priority is to tell the narratives of diverse women as mechanisms of social transformation. this objective is related to the creation of feminist content: video-interviews, blogs, and reviews of protests to render visible the work of social defenders and their diversity. the second is to perform an “internet feminista” as a space for research and advocacy with political and social actors to politicize the use of the internet as a public space (personal communication with a member of luchadoras collective, march 9, 2018). one of the collective’s goals is to have digital violence called out as such because it impacts bodies. for the luchadoras, the internet is like the street, like the bed: a public space to be inhabited and defended (personal communication with a member of luchadoras collective, march 9, 2018). according to barrera & rodríguez (2017) the lack of a typology of the diverse practices that encompass digital violence has contributed to significant ignorance of its existence as a public problem. the major motivation of luchadoras is to create a methodology to render visible the materiality of digital violence. this methodology consisted of inviting 25 activists and survivors of digital violence from different states of mexico (chihuahua, jalisco, michoacán and yucatan) to a workshop. the workshop was held over three days in march 2017, during which the activists expressed their testimonies and described the types of attacks they experienced. they poured their testimonies into a body map to render visible the violence experienced. a member of luchadoras recounts her experience of what she lived in the following way: “it was the first time that the women named and connected the aggressions, with the impacts on their bodies” (personal communication with a member of luchadoras collective, march 9, 2018). based on the testimonies, luchadoras made a typology of digital violence, contrasting it with categories from international organizations. subsequently, they discussed this typology with other civil society organizations in mexico such as article 19,3 cimac,4 and the national network of women human rights defenders, and from there published them in the document: “online violence against women in mexico” (barrera & 3 article 19 is an international non-governmental organization that fights against attacks on freedom of expression, including violence against journalists (www.article19.org). 4 cimac is an investigative journalism organization with a gender perspective that promotes the organization of women journalists (see: www.cimac.org). 248 marcela suárez estrada studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 rodriguez, 2017). this document is the first in the country to incorporate a detailed typology of practices of digital violence with a total of 13 categories, as well as the subsequent bodily harm as defined by the women themselves.5 in a second investigation, the luchadoras documented digital violence aimed at taking women candidates out of the electoral process in mexico. by monitoring testimonies of violence in the media, on social networks, in interviews and through public information requests to the government, the collective documented 85 acts of aggression associated with digital technology against 62 female candidates in 24 states. they divided these into nine types: discriminatory expressions, threats, discrediting, impersonation or identity theft, dissemination of intimate images without consent, harassment, extortion, dissemination of personal information, monitoring and stalking. based on this evidence, the collective established that these aggressions were carried out in a coordinated fashion, which also included smear campaigns on social networks. the luchadoras’ process of repoliticizing violence involved three strategies. their research first provides evidence that digital violence has consequences, not only on women’s bodies but also on their political trajectories, given that women candidates were unable to run for political positions owing to the violence they experienced. with this, the collective repoliticizes gender-based violence in digital environments as it shows how attacks in the private sphere of women candidates’ lives resonated in the political sphere. likewise, the report shows that 62% of the total aggressions comprised patterns of genderrelated violence, with women judged and sexually objectified simply for being women. examples of this include the sale of a whole collection of pictures with sexualized female bodies (e.g., “the best female candidates of the elections”), aggressions against one’s family and insults based on gender roles or physical appearance. in the case of women human rights activists, the collective identified coordinated trends of digital violence such as viral hate responses to public denunciations on social networks, as well as being banned from social networks, suffering extortion under threat of dissemination of intimate images without consent, state surveillance, and smear campaigns. as in the case of female candidates, these tactics were clearly aimed at silencing and intimidating women for their political activities. the collective’s second strategy to repoliticize digital violence was to engage in a methodology that i refer to here as embodiment, whereby violence (including institutional violence) was mapped and then connected to bodily effects. that is to say, the methodology did not simply focus on the categorization of the various forms of violence. in addition, the objective was to make visible the effects suffered by bodies. these include bodily discomfort (sweating, nausea, crying, back, head, stomach and kidney pain), emotional 5 these categories are: unauthorized access or control; control and manipulation of information; impersonation and identity theft, discriminatory expressions; monitoring and stalking; harassment; threats; dissemination of personal or intimate information; extortion; smearing; technology-related sexual abuse; affecting channels of expression; omissions by actors with regulatory power (see barrera & rodríguez, 2017). feminist strategies against digital violence 249 studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 damage (nervous affectations, stress, anguish, anger, rage, depression, paranoia, fear, confusion, powerless feelings), bringing one’s public image into disrepute, sexual harm, limitations to mobility, invasion of property and loss of identity (barrera et al., 2018). thus, this mapping was not only an exercise in the documentation of violence, it was a means of politicizing the effects of digital violence by traversing the category of the body. third, digital violence was politicized by providing 13 categories in which the various practices were described in detail. this continues to be key in counteracting reductionist discourses employed by the authorities, which try to diminish and thereby normalize digital violence. with these three strategies, the luchadoras broaden the meaning of the internet as a public space, helping to expose its oppression dynamics. through this process, the luchadoras collective then articulate themselves as subjects of rights, aiming, first and foremost, to give themselves a public voice. laboratorio de interconectividades: “everything comes from the body” the laboratorio de interconectividades was created in 2014. on its website, it declares itself a nomadic experimentation space with points of intersection between art, hackfeminisms and cyberfeminism in the development of strategies of self-defense (referred to hereafter as autodefensa), and digital collective care. the lab seeks to inhabit the internet as a political space of encounter and a common good accessible to all in the generation of safe spaces of struggle, enjoyment, and in the provocation of an ecosystem of free culture in different interfaces of the internet, mexico and latin america. the political aims of the laboratorio are digital collective care, hackfeminist autodefensa, free culture ecosystems, inhabiting the internet and creating networks and free technologies (laboratorio de interconectividades, 2020b). what are our bodies capable of when they are connected? this was the question that launched the video review of the second edition of the hackfeminist autodefensa workshop held in oaxaca in 2016 by the laboratorio de interconectividades. a female voice opens the video with the following introduction: we activate hackfeminist autodefensa practices in our daily fights, we want to complement strategies of collective care inside and outside the internet. we reconnect with our bodies, autonomies, technologies and affects. we explore our intention and put into practices integral to autodefensa, both physical and digital. (zaragoza, 2016). in the video, women participants can be observed discussing strategies to counteract and reverse the impact of the aggressions of violence: “yes i am tough, and i love to be so,” “discovering the inner strength from the body not only from my mind,” “occupying spaces that are not for us ... by experimenting 250 marcela suárez estrada studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 in bodily exercises and in the compu that seems to be so complex” (zaragoza, 2016). since 2015, the laboratorio de interconectividades and comando colibrí have allied to realize the project autodefensas hackfeministas as a hybrid methodology between martial arts techniques, feminist autodefensa and digital collective care. the goal of this methodology is to create spaces to reflect on bodies, technologies and feminisms that go beyond suggestions for reacting to digital violence, and which focus instead on the body and its work of collective strength. during my conversation with the founder of the lab, she recounted the meaning of this workshop by pointing out that they were encounters, to conspire, to weave networks, to feel, where memories of violence were awakened. at the same time, she spoke of complicity with others but “with the body turned on” (personal communication with the founder of the laboratorio de interconectividades, march 27, 2019). for the laboratorio de interconectividades, autodefensa is not only a way of learning to defend oneself, it is above all political work. the founder explains this as follows: “autodefensa in mexico is communal, it is not only defense, and it is not only about martial arts. it is a deeper political process, politicized, of containment and accompaniment” (personal communication with the founder of the laboratorio de interconectividades, march 27, 2019). “hacktivist” is related to the ways in which we can look at the body as our first technology, that which is cared for and defended in each of the territories it inhabits. hackfeminism, by contrast, becomes the political stance that seeks to transcend exclusion, violence and the reproduction of power relations related to technology (laboratorio de interconectividades, 2020a). however, this political stance is not individual; hackfeminism refers to a way of weaving collectivity among women in an area that has been historically excluded: technology. according to laboratorio de interconectividades, feminism is the practice of political questioning that emanates from the body, which not only renders the memories of violence visible but also awakens a capacity for agency in terms of what one wants to be. when the founder of the laboratorio de interconectividades refers to the body as the first technology and immediately relates it to hacking, she unveils a meaning that transgresses the hegemonic versions of who is authorized to be a hacker, usually limited to the knowledge of a male expert. instead, laboratotio de interconctividades confronts these discourses when it asks: where is the freedom of bodies in free software technologies, as well as the techniques to hack the body? as a way of hacking corporate discourses related to technology, they appeal to a vision of the body as the first liberating technology and this necessarily implies “getting hands on, arming and disarming not only the machines to see how they work, but above all the bodies” (personal communication with the founder of the laboratorio de interconectividades, march 27, 2019). for the laboratorio de interconectividades bodies are like machines in the sense that they require self-care to remove the violence by doing a reset (personal communication with the founder of the laboratorio de interconectividades, march 27, 2019). they suggest hacking narratives that you feminist strategies against digital violence 251 studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 can be part of, where female bodies do fit and where vast technical knowledge is not a prerequisite. with this, the laboratorio hacks the very discourse that tends to exclude women and reproduce violence within hacker communities. the laboratorio de interconectividades also articulates a critique of the disembodied and unsituated discourse of technologies (haraway, 1991). hence, in the autodefensa workshops, care is developed as a form of awareness of the body and its relationship with technologies in order to hack those same technologies. the laboratorio narrative it is very clear that embodying technologies is a specific means of politicizing the internet. as such, it could be said that hackfeminist autodefensa is just that: crossing the divide between the body and digital technology. it is thus not surprising that computers were rarely used during the actual workshop. instead, the body was enunciated in all the activities that took place. embodied exchanges of information were one such example. this refers to the exercise where bodies precisely simulate antennas in order to regain their materiality and question their impact on both bodies and territories. each movement in the workshop was part of a strategy to connect the body with an apparently immaterial practice. “how do you move when you see violence coming, how do you make it not only a reaction, but also a strategic one?,” asks the laboratorio de interconectividades. as such, embodying technologies are related to observing, feeling and questioning the materiality on the internet. the founder of the laboratorio further explains this materiality as follows: “the body is always there, and it resonates, reacts physically, chemically and emotionally, it is affected by one thing and another. you can feel a blow in the same way no matter what the scenario is, if it is violence” (personal communication with the founder of laboratorio de interconectividades, march 27, 2019). her narrative unveils a continuum of bodies and technologies in political processes. this continuum is not articulated to exalt a triumphalist discourse of technologies. rather, it is traversed by the body in order to question disembodied corporate discourses, and to emphasize the ways in which digital violence has affective impacts. the laboratorio refers to technologies as interfaces, which facilitate action, communication and connection. from this perspective, the meetings of the laboratorio de interconectividades were concrete moments of interconnection and bodily experimentation. they hacked the corporate narrative and focused instead on the political network of affection in the sense of very close work with bodies. that is why the collective bears the name “laboratorio” (laboratory), as a space of bodily experimentation to reflect and feel what happens when you connect the body within the context of consumer technologies and how this relationship between technologies also consumes you as you are using them (personal communication with the founder of the laboratorio de interconectividades, march 27, 2019). as could be seen in the luchadoras workshop, laboratorio de interconectividades similarly affirms that women experienced an awakening of memories of violence from years before in the course of their hackfeminist autodefensa work. the laboratorio explains that many women were shocked 252 marcela suárez estrada studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 by everything happening in their bodies. she herself had felt pain from physical exertion, but had never experienced what it was like to feel pain because her body was awakening (laboratorio de interconectividades, personal communication, march 27, 2019). this idea of awakening can be read as an awakening of the violences that have gone through it, of the impact of hate speeches, of corporate abuses, as well as others that intersect with pain. it is a pain that, when felt, is questioned, situated, politicized, put into movement in the form of effects. these are the basis of the autodefensa as a political strategy. the laboratorio de interconectividades accounts for the imbrications between bodies and territories when the founder states that if you defend territories, you are thinking about the body, and if you defend the body you are also thinking about community (laboratorio de interconectividades, personal communication, march 27, 2019). in fact, the laboratorio’s idea of hackfeminist autodefensa is very close to that of defending bodies, and this cannot be understood without situating them in specific territories (cabnal, 2010), which in this case refers to the consequences of technological corporatism and the institutional violence that they house. embodying technologies as a form of social justice from the body, the methodologies proposed by both collectives resituated the materiality that is inherent to digital violence. for the laboratorio de interconectividades, the body is the first technology – not only to resist but also to liberate and stand in the world. all this gives life to a new feminist political positioning called hackfeminist autodefensa that seeks to transgress the separation between technology on the one hand, and bodies on the other, in order to politicize both. in the same way, for the luchadoras, the body is the category from which digital violence is politicized. from this category, the dichotomies of public/private, digital/non-digital violence and technology/body are each interrogated to show their continuities and their political possibilities. the internet is then conceived of as a public space to occupy, and at the same time as a disputed territory where bodies are violated. both collectives are fighting the battle to inhabit the internet as a feminist space, and thereby mobilize these strategies as forms of embodied social justice. both projects transgress offline and online dichotomies and especially question the idea that the body cannot be violated on the internet because it is not present. bringing the category of the body to the forefront broadens understandings of it not only in its material-corporeal aspect, but in its broader effects. these transgress the limits of the body itself in its temporal and spatial dimension (haraway, 1991; powell & henry, 2017). this extension of embodiment coheres with new feminist materialisms in thinking about matter in refreshing ways (coole & frost, 2010; menjívar, 2009). from this position, the body is not a mere object of digital violation. rather, it is a site of politics feminist strategies against digital violence 253 studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 where the capacity to actively inflict physical and material damage comes to the fore. these possibilities of materialization challenge the discourses of governmental and corporate authorities in their attempts to erase female bodies and their effects, and only make them visible in order to monitor or commercialize them (noble, 2018). the luchadoras collective politicized technology as a way to create a counter-narrative to judicial authorities and demonstrate that digital violence does indeed have an impact on bodies. moreover, digital violence also has consequences in the political careers of women candidates. they did so by analyzing the cases of various women, including activists and women candidates who were seeking to attain political positions through the electoral process, and who had experienced digital violence. for its part, the laboratorio de interconectividades politicized technologies through workshops to raise awareness of the materiality of infrastructures and of the circulation of information on the internet, which undoubtedly enabled a feminist critique and a counter proposal to the ways in which technologies are currently embodied. this counter proposal stresses not only the use of open software technologies but advocating above all for the liberation of bodies as a condition to liberate technologies as well. another point of convergence between both collective projects is in the memory of the violence that was awakened in the workshops. both methodologies show testimonies of feeling that the body had awakened to the affectivity of violence. each demonstrated that being in a collective served to contain the linked emotions as well as politicizing them. this was a clear process of politicization of affects as feminist materialist strategies (bargetz, 2015; liljeström, 2015). the luchadoras did this through workshops to unveil the embodiment of the acts of violence, while laboratorio de interconectividades carried it out through hackfeminist autodefensa workshops as a bodily method to awaken dormant violence. once again, the category of the body allowed mapping the various formats of violence (institutional, familial, political, digital) that intersect in it, turning it into an embodied disputed space (brown & gershon, 2017). this shows a critical materialist feminist positioning that reveals that these collectives go beyond the discursive dimension of violence in social networks that has received the most attention in the literature (caro castaño, 2015; giraldo-luque et al., 2018). the strategies mobilized by both collectives to fight against digital violence were located in the body so as to release it from all those discourses that had materialized in effects, and, from there, to embody technologies from a critical positioning. therefore, both projects also have similarities in politicizing affects. in the luchadoras project, the effects of digital violence on the body are situated. in the case of the laboratorio, the effects of the violence of the body that were awakened in the encounters are politicized to weave networks of affection and organize from the hackfeminist autodefensa. both projects imagine innovative forms of social justice from the body and its effects; for example, the idea of taking effects as a political motive materialized in the slogan “choose to live,” which advocates the right to life in a context of extreme violence against female 254 marcela suárez estrada studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 bodies. choose to live contentedly feeling peace, not just reacting to violence (personal communication with the founder of the laboratorio de interconectividades, march 27, 2019). this slogan is also a way of vindicating women as subjects of rights to a life free of violence. these accounts aimed at seeking forms of social justice, the focus of which extended beyond the distribution or the recognition of rights (fraser, 2007). these rights are articulated beyond universalist categories (souza, 2019) and are therefore not limited to the actions of the government. in the face of a context of systematic violence as in mexico, the feminist strategies show female bodies with agency, bodies determined to shake off the label of victims. instead, they perform social justice, in the sense of creating enunciated reality (barad, 2003): the kind of justice that the state cannot provide. this agency is also expressed in a renewed emphasis on technologies not as neutral extensions of the body, but as entities to be politicized. from these effects of violence, there emerges a capacity for women to assert their agency and actively make demands. in addition, both projects see the internet as more than a communication network. the internet is a disputed territory where women’s bodies continue to be objectified, controlled, disciplined and violated (la_jes, 2018). the luchadoras emphasizes the internet as a public space that women have to fight to inhabit. the laboratorio de interconectividades, on the other hand, reappropriates the category of body-territory (cruz, 2016) to explore the internet as a territory that is not disembodied. given that bodies are linked to territories, and that at the same time the internet has impacts on diverse territories, hackfeminist autodefensa is practiced as a real political option for social justice. by making the materiality of the internet visible in terms of bodies, spaces and disputes between its diverse actors, hackfeminist autodefensa is a performative way to inhabit that territory, to defend it, to embody it and politicize it. in fact, after the demonstrations of august 2019, in the face of failed attempts to engage in dialogue with the mexico city government, women organized themselves in feminist assemblies where the option of creating autodefensa nuclei throughout mexico city was discussed. these assemblies were created as a counterweight to the government’s weak actions in the face of gender, political and institutional violence. as a result, the groups asamblea feminista metropolitana and asamblea feminista autónoma e independiente were created as coordinating entities for various actions and mobilizations in micro-collectivities. conclusions in this article, i have proposed that new feminist materialisms have allowed us to bring materiality back to the internet, with the focus not only in infrastructures but above all bodies and their affectations. i have also argued that embodiment and politicization are the main feminist strategies to fight feminist strategies against digital violence 255 studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 241-258, 2023 against digital violence. these strategies involve the politicization of technology and with it, the repoliticization of violence by rendering visible the effects on the body. my argument contributes to a movement beyond current debates on the utopias and dystopias of the internet. new feminist materialisms have allowed us to situate female bodies at the crossroads of digital society. bodies can be located as the target of disciplinary acts of digital violence enacted as retribution for their political mobilizations, as well as for their ability to hack technology with a view to carrying out their political objectives. it is from these actions that innovative forms of social justice emerged. by engaging in methodologies of embodying technologies, feminist collectives created innovative forms of social justice in the face of a bleak panorama of violence against women’s bodies under extreme cases of negligence, impunity and omission of action by the corresponding authorities. the politicization of technologies to render visible the memory of violence and the mobilization of effects, as well as hackfeminist autodefensa, were ways in which women showed a capacity for agency as political subjects with the right to justice beyond the tutelage of the state (souza, 2019). the politicization of both technology and violence served as a form of social justice in three ways: first, to argue that technologies are not neutral and that the internet is a space where violence and the disciplining of bodies are reproduced; second, to articulate a counterargument to that of the government in order to assert that digital violence does harm bodies; and third, the refusal to see digital violence as a new phenomenon that would erase the trajectory of historical feminist resistance. in the war against female bodies (segato, 2016), these are embodied forms of social justice that, above all, defend the lives and integrity of women. this shows a renewed feminist agency in organizing to defend the territory of the internet. ultimately, what is stake here is feminist politics performing social justice in our increasingly digital society. acknowledgements i could not have undertaken this research journey without the funding of the berlin equal opportunities program (berliner chancengleichheitsprogramm, germany) through the digital programm for my project: “feminist politics against violence in the era of digitalization.” references ananías soto, c., & sánchez vergara, k. 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(2011). emergent digital ethnographic methods for social research. in h.-b. sharlene (ed.), handbook of emergent technologies in social research (pp. 158-179). oxford university press. nidhi, t. (2015). cyber violence against women and girls. a report by the un broadband comission for digital development working group on broadband and gender. international telecommunication union. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york university press. parikka, j. (2015). a geology of media. university of minnesota press. powell, a., & henry, n. (2017). sexual violence: a feminist criminological analysis. in a. powell & n. henry (eds.), sexual violence in a digital age (pp. 23-47). palgrave macmillan uk. reichert, r., & richterich, a. (2015). digital materialism. digital culture & society, 1(1), 6-17. sassatelli, r. (2012). body politics. the wiley-blackwell companion to political sociology, 5(1), 347-359. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444355093.ch31 savigny, h. (2020). cultural sexism the politics of feminist rage in the #metoo era. bristol university press. segato, r. (2016). la guerra contra las mujeres. traficantes de sueños. souza, n. m. f. de. (2019). when the body speaks (to) the political: feminist activism in latin america and the quest for alternative democratic futures. contexto internacional, 41(1), 89112. starosielski, n. (2015). the undersea network. duke university press. suárez, m., & mitrović, m. 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(2016). ¡así vivimos el taller autodefensas hackfeministas en oaxaca! vimeo [video]. https://vimeo.com/240301634 bunch final before ts correspondence address: mary bunch, cinema & media arts, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: bunch@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 blind visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye mary bunch york university, canada abstract this article proposes the concept of blind visuality as a response to the injunction to look differently at both visual images, and vision itself, posed by bruce horak’s exhibition through a tired eye. the brightly colored impressionistic paintings suggest an artist who revels in the domain of the visual, yet he describes his practice as a representation of blindness. this accessible exposition of blind visuality speaks to the broad question of what critical disability arts contribute to discourses about vision, visuality and spectatorship in the arts. i analyze horak’s paintings as examples of blind epistemology and haptic visuality, showing that this work evokes a way of seeing that blurs the boundaries between vision and embodied feeling. i argue that by expanding understandings of vision and multi-sensory knowledge, deconstructing the separation between vision and haptic perception, and challenging western ocularcentricism, blind visuality poses an alternative economy of looking that reflects disability aesthetics, shifts from individualism to relationality, and challenges understandings of perception/knowledge as a form of mastery. keywords blind epistemology; haptic visuality; disability aesthetics; critical disability studies; blindness; spectatorship introduction on entering bruce horak’s exhibition through a tired eye (2019a), a painting of a giant, abstract eye is positioned in the entrance as if to announce that this exhibition is an interrogation of ways of seeing. the exhibition, mounted at tangled art + disability gallery, is part of cripping the arts,1 a disability arts festival that took place at toronto harbourfront centre in 2019. the painting disrupts normative assumptions about vision with a look back from the margins of sight. indeed, in his artist statement, horak (2019a) 1 the presenting partners of the cripping the arts symposium were british council, creative users projects, tangled art + disability, ryerson university, and harbourfront centre. the symposium was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council. mary bunch studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 240 writes that he paints blindness itself as a vehicle for vision, focusing on the auras, distortions and floaters through which the image appears for him, a blind person. this exhibition speaks to the broad question of what disability arts bring to discourses about vision, visuality and spectatorship in the arts. more specifically, with its injunction to think differently about both visual images, and vision itself, horak’s exhibition evokes “blind visuality,” a concept i develop in this article to refer to crip ways of seeing/sensing that disrupt modern western scopic regimes.2 in other words, blind visuality challenges the ways that vision orders the world. blind visuality is a political concept that challenges the socially constructed hierarchies that privilege vision and normative ways of seeing. it is distinct from “blind sight,” a term i use here to refer to heterogeneous ways of seeing with blindness.3 the term “visuality” frames vision as a social act (jenks, 1995, p. 1), not just a biological function whereby rays of light convert signals into images in the brain. the term originated in the 18th century, meaning “the visualization of history” (mirzoeff, 2011). this situates vision within specific historical and cultural contexts, including the cultural meanings attributed to vision and blindness (davis, 2008; mirzoeff, 1998). visuality refers to imaginary rather than perceptual processes. a wide variety of ideas, images and information are assembled in order to visualize history – more than any single person could perceive. this process reflects the hegemonic power of the authority that assembles it, an authorization that mirzoeff shows “requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the ‘normal,’ or everyday, because it is always already contested” (2011, p. 2). blind visuality names one site of this ongoing contestation, informed by critical disability discourses of blind epistemology and crip aesthetics. blind epistemology engages blindness as a way of knowing, rather than as a deficit or pathology (healey, 2019; jones, 2016; kleege, 2018; michalko, 2002; thompson, 2017). crip aesthetics is a judgement of beauty that embraces a variety of human bodies, sensory experiences and minds (cachia, 2013; chandler, 2017; siebers, 2010). analyzing the exhibition through a tired eye as an expression of these concepts in disability arts, i integrate two concepts developed in art criticism and cinema studies respectively. the first is haptic aesthetics, which refers to artistic consideration of touch and other bodily sensations (fisher, 1997). the second is haptic visuality, a way of seeing that blurs the boundaries between vision and embodied feeling by evoking physical memories of touch (marks, 2000). the concept of blind 2 my use of “crip” uses this reclaimed derogatory term referring to a disabled person as an analytic that works similarly to the “queer” of queer theory. crip in this sense is a verb, rather than a noun, that deconstructs the binary between normal and abnormal, and resists social homogenization and compulsory ablebodiedness (sandhal, 2003; mcruer, 2006; lewis, 2015). see the “editors’ introduction” to this special journal issue for a more extensive definition. 3 my use of “blind sight” is not the same as the medical term “blindsight,” referring to some blind people’s ability to detect and locate visual stimuli despite not being able to see it (mazzi et al., 2016, p.1). blind visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 241 visuality weaves these concepts together to expand understandings of vision and multi-sensory knowledge, deconstruct the separation between vision and haptic perception, and challenge the ways that vision is privileged in western modernity. it poses an alternative economy of looking that reflects disability aesthetics, and contests modern individualism and understandings of perception/knowledge as a form of mastery. horak’s exhibition invites both mainstream and disability arts audiences to reconsider the scopic regimes that invisibly structure aesthetic judgment and assumptions about the nature of knowledge. where blindness and vision are often treated as dichotomous, the exhibition contests the presumption that blindness knows nothing about seeing. pairing the words “blind” and “sight” or “visuality” is provocative in mainstream and critical disability studies contexts alike, although for different reasons. many people outside of disability contexts presume that blind people, by definition, cannot see, and in this respect blind sight and blind visuality appear to be oxymorons. those working in disability spheres, especially people who address blind experience and knowledge, are more likely well attuned to the fact that blindness is a nuanced, highly variable and socially constructed experience. yet they are confronted by a persistent privileging of vision in western theories of knowledge and art. so why highlight vision in a critical discussion that seeks to decentre vision? first, this article was conceived in response to the framing aim of horak’s exhibition: he paints to answer the question “how do you see?” that is often posed to him as someone who is legally blind (2019a). second, my inquiry derives from my situatedness as a nondisabled, sighted scholar concerned with questions about how disability-informed critique shapes concepts like visuality and aesthetics in the realm of the political. rather than approach these questions as a disability expert – a category fraught within ableist history and power/knowledge dynamics – i want to understand how blind visuality unsettles taken for granted norms about vision, visuality and knowledge. my research participates in feminist and critical disability methodologies that seek to dismantle patriarchal, ableist and imperialist hierarchies of knowledge. i ask what is significant about blind visuality for the broader sphere of visuality – the imaginary assemblage of images and ideas that tell a particular story about human history and ultimately what it means to be human? what role does blindness play in this story, according to what authority, and how does attention to blindness change a conversation that is framed as being about “visuality” in the first place? blind visuality is an analytic that embodies as well as reflects an ethics of non-mastery, that is, of knowing by yielding, by respectfully being-inrelation with others.4 blind visuality challenges not only cultures of sense, but also the ways that we conceive of ourselves as knowers and political actors in a world of others. 4 this relational ethics of non-mastery is informed by dolleen tisawii’ashii manning’s published and unpublished work on anishinaabe epistemology (2014, 2017). mary bunch studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 242 crip aesthetics and blind epistemology the interconnected spheres of crip aesthetics and blind epistemology are at the centre of this investigation into blind visuality. aesthetics refers to concerns with sensorial beauty and artistic taste. these are ways of knowing the world through sensory perception, and so have an epistemological dimension. defining aesthetics as “the sensations that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies” tobin siebers delineates disability aesthetics as the embrace of beauty that is by normative standards “broken” (2010, p. 3). this extends understanding of what it means to be human, since as siebers writes, aesthetics “defines the process by which human beings attempt to modify themselves, by which they imagine their feelings, forms, and futures in radically different ways, and by which they bestow upon these new feelings, forms, and futures real appearances in the world” (2010, p. 3). amanda cachia points to the emergence of a disability arts movement that critically and consciously employs disability aesthetics to speak to the complexity of sensing, knowing, being human as well as making and accessing art (2013, p. 261). she argues that artists and curators in disability arts “fold digital practices, access, intersectional identity politics, complex embodiment, disabled phenomenology and more into their art-making, alongside disrupting sensory perceptions and ideas of access” (2013, p. 261). thus, on the one hand, disability aesthetics shadows narrow normative notions of beauty in modern art with the persistence and beauty of human variability (siebers, 2010). on the other, disability aesthetics is a critical intervention by an art movement that intentionally engages disability themes from critical perspectives informed by disability identity and experience (cachia, 2013). crip aesthetics troubles conventional ways of knowing disability and it draws on a myriad of embodied, cognitive and sensory experience to expand what it means to be human, and what it means to know the world. as such crip aesthetics is a dimension of what johnson and mcruer refer to as cripistemology (2014). this is “a way of knowing and unknowing disability, making and unmaking disability epistemologies and the importance of challenging subjects who confidently “know” about “disability” as though it could be a thoroughly comprehended object of knowledge” (2014, p. 130). this term combines “crip” and “epistemology” to designate a theory of knowledge specific to critical disability understandings. these understandings derive on the one hand from the materiality of embodied, cognitive and sensory difference, and on the other, reflect a project of interpretation and meaning making that, like queer theory, contests normativity and proffers an analytic that sets “normal” understandings and perceptions askew (johnson & mcruer, 2014). blind epistemology is a subgroup of cripistemology concerned with perception as a source of knowledge, under the particular biological and social conditions associated with blindness. according to catherine jones, it “demands a rethinking of how we form knowledge” and a skepticism of western ocularcentrism (2016, p. 3). in blind visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 243 other words, blind epistemology challenges the ways that vision is centered, and given precedence, as the most important route to knowledge in western culture. blind epistemology is a way of knowing that presupposes a more careful interrogation of the relationship between sensory experience and knowing that considers the heterogeneity of the human senses, and of human experience and perspective more broadly. normative visuality is constructed, in part, from particular ideas and images of blindness that are based on myths and stereotypes associating blindness with lack and pathology. enlightenment thought equates vision with knowledge and rationality, and blindness with ignorance, misery, and emotion (healey, 2019; jones, 2016; kleege, 2018). these myths, like other tropes about disability, make their way into art discourses in ways that are often unthought. as georgina kleege shows, the figure of a blind person is a common trope in visual art intended to symbolize ignorance. blindness is likewise treated as an analogy for the artistic process – positioned as a void to be conquered by the act of creation: “the painter stands like a blind man in the darkness of the white canvas” says the narrator of the documentary the mystery of picasso (clouzot, 1956, as cited in kleege, 2018, p. 64) similarly, james elkins writes, “a drawing … begins in blindness, with a pure white sheet” (1996, as cited in kleege, 2018, p. 64). under such conditions the practice of a blind painter is unintelligible. such stereotypes of blind ignorance are based on erroneous assumptions about blindness and vision. the myth that blindness is the opposite of sightedness rests on a presumption that blindness is a complete absence of vision (healey, 2019; kleege, 2018; michalko, 2002). this absence signifies a lack. as rod michalko writes, “this opposition imagines blindness not merely as opposite to sight, but as the negation of it, generating a conception of blindness as lack – lack of knowledge, lack of normalcy, lack of ability” (2002, p. 27). the opposition further implies something about normative vision, its perfection, completeness, and all-knowingness. crip aesthetics and cripistemology deconstruct the sighted/blind dichotomy and refer to the heterogeneity of human sensory experience. in this frame, blindness is not a problem, rather the hegemony of sight produces the discrimination and difficulties experienced by blind people. blindness is instead a mode of perception with its own capacities and potentialities (michalko, 2002). while blind visuality refers to a crip politics of the senses rather than vision per se, it is also connected to blind sight. indeed, blind sight helps shape the contours of blind experience for the vast majority of blind people.5 even people who are totally blind sometimes “see” sparks, shapes, flashes of light and visual hallucinations (rose, 2015). there exists a myriad of different ways of seeing with blindness. horak talks about experiencing tunnel vision, light sensitivity, floaters and auras in his vision (2019a). kleege describes 5 only about three people in every 10,000 are born with no visual perception (kleege, 2018, p. 4). mary bunch studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 244 being able to distinguish between light and dark and perceive motion. she writes that “forms appear amorphous with unstable outlines that seem constantly on the verge of merging into their surroundings ... i can make sense of the wavering forms and blurry blobs before my eyes mainly because i have a good sense of what’s out there” (2018, p. 4). devon healey, in contrast, describes her blindness as an oil spot, “a shimmering swirl of colours” or “little galaxies” that “move as if they had such purpose, as if they were doing something, creating something” (2019, pp. 167-168). where what falls within the range of “normal” vision remains fairly homogenous, blind vision draws attention to the variability of human sight, and to the coextension of sight with the other senses. this subverts a hierarchy in western cultures that usually places vision first (san roque et al., 2014) – at least a particular kind of “normal” and distanced vision. blind perspectives contribute to aesthetic discourses and cultural knowledge. kleege (2018) provides numerous examples of blind artists and audiences who offer complex insights to what it means to look and see. these insights are examples of what hannah thompson refers to as “blindness gain” (2017). she is here reworking “deaf gain,” a concept developed to oppose constructions of deafness as a loss, referring to the “unique cognitive, creative, and cultural gains manifested through deaf ways of being the world.” (bauman & murray, 2014, p. xv). thompson describes how her blind way of seeing enriches and enhances her perception, by compelling a “close reading” that orients her to the specific, rather than the general, highlighting the “tiny details” of a literary text rather than its broader context (2017, p. 8). she cites maxime du camp’s “short-sighted school” and “long-sighted school” of literary description to show how blind readers, writers or literary characters expand the sphere of literature by literally seeing texts differently. du camp writes, short sighted people see the tiny things, they study each contour, prioritize each thing because each thing appears to them in isolation; they are surrounded by a kind of cloud onto which each object is projected in apparently excessive proportions; it is as if they have a microscope in their eye which magnifies everything. (1994, as cited in thompson, 2017, p. 9) the point here is that blindness enhances, rather than diminishes the visual domain, contrary to normative assumptions. in addition to offering multiple ways of seeing differently, blind epistemology and crip aesthetics de-centre vision and situate it in relation to other senses. the discussion of blind visuality that follows draws significantly from theories of hapticality – the sense of touch and the felt sense of the body that is associated with blindness to the point of becoming a cliché. while many blind scholars and artists draw attention to haptic experience, it is important to also caution that the cliché of blind tactile proficiency is inaccurate and can reinforce stereotypes about blindness. while many blind people develop heightened awareness and skill at interpreting blind visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 245 tactile perceptions, their capacity for touch is the same as sighted people’s (kleege, 2018, p. 10). kleege points to the figure of the hypothetical blind man used by modern philosophy and cognitive science as a “prop for theories of consciousness” to show how the analogy between vision and touch is problematic (2018, p. 14). descartes, in the famous example of the hypothetical blind man, makes an analogy between vision and a blind man who uses two sticks to find his way as he moves around in space. by treating touch as analogical to sight, descartes reifies sight as the dominant sense. the blind man’s hands, extended by sticks, are just an inferior version of the all-knowing eye. of this example, kleege writes, “thus it is established that if the sighted theorist is all eyes, the hypothetical blind man is all hands ... the focus is riveted on his tactile perception to the complete exclusion of all his other senses” (2018, p.17). kleege does not dispute the importance of physical touch in blind experience and crip aesthetics. indeed, she writes extensively about tactile and kinesthetic art works and museum touch tours, elaborating with obvious pleasure the sensation of feeling what the artist felt, imitating their motions as her hands follow the contours of a work, and standing in the positions they must have adopted while creating it (2018, p. 63). such tactile sensing knows differently than sight does, expanding aesthetic experience and bringing about different understandings. she cites helen keller’s evocative writing about her tactile experience as a blind art audience, in which her touch is able to “see” in a way that challenges the classical idealization of symmetry and order. keller instead perceives the beauty of variety and disorder, writing: eloquence to the touch resides not in straight lines, but in unstraight lines, or in many curved and straight lines together. they appear and disappear, are now deep, now shallow, now broken off or lengthened or swelling. they rise and sink beneath my fingers, they are full of sudden starts and pauses, and their variety is inexhaustible and wonderful. so you can see i am not shut out from the region of the beautiful, though my hand cannot perceive the brilliant colours in the sunset or on the mountain, or reach into the blue depths of the sky. (2003, as cited in kleege, 2018, p. 64) the examples of helen keller’s tactile knowledge of the painting, and kleege’s experiences on museum touch tours, show that touch does not merely imitate what the eye sees by tracing out forms with the hand, and then imagining them in the “mind’s eye” in visual form (2018). indeed, kleege suggests a “mind’s hand” or “mind’s body” might be a more accurate description for the images she forms in her mind of what she perceives with her senses (2018, p. 76). touch knows what it feels in its own terms. unlike the eye, the hand does not seek out the outline of a drawing, instead “the hand embraces the object in its multifaceted complexity” (p. 64). descartes’ hypothetical blind man seems oblivious to other sensory features of the landscape he inhabits: “the scene descartes imagines is unnaturally silent. in the real-world trees emit sounds even on a still mary bunch studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 246 night…vegetation and soil exhale telltale scents, and the temperature changes as he leaves a wooded area or approaches water” (kleege, 2018, p. 15). compare descartes’ imaginary blind man to healey’s description of blind flaneurship in which the sensory landscape of a city street is marked by the musicality of sound and flows of movement: the heartbeat of a blind person moving in the street is contrapuntal to the rhythm of the street. both rhythms represent a melody, but a melody different from one another. the rhythm of blindness is sometimes contrapuntal with that of the city or any other environment and at other times discordant. blindness forces a blind person to “figure out” (almost always by hearing and feeling) the rhythm of the city; a traffic flow, the pedestrian flow, the rhythm of the sound, the rhythmic movement of the city. sometimes an environmental rhythm presents an opportunity for the blind person to know the space through which she is moving. (2019, p. 119) healey transforms the everyday experience of walking down the street to an experience of crip aesthetics: a dance choreography and soundscape. she focuses on proprioception, her body moving through space, encountering other bodies, surrounded by the musical rhythms of the street. these features are present for sighted people that walk or roll through city streets, but blindness draws a focused attention to what many people take for granted. healey describes various dimensions of haptic experience, including the body’s sense of movement and force, connecting this further to hearing. for healey, blindness is not an experience limited to the eyes, rather it is felt, embodied and lived. she describes the experience of becoming blind, the way this experience was felt in her body, before she was able to identify that something was different in her vision: before i ever saw my blindness, i felt it... i would shift my ribcage forward allowing my eyes to focus on an image, bringing them (my eyes and the image) closer so that i could capture the details that i knew were there. text on a poster, a price tag hanging from a sweater, the keys of my laptop, handwritten notes – each required the movement of my upper body bringing my eyes closer so that i could see. i began using my neck muscles to support the dropped weight of my head as i hovered over images to see. the new physicality of my sight, almost an intersection of sight and my body, brought with it muscle pain, neck cramps and even muscle spasms. my muscles felt tight and strained. i was unusually tired at the end of the day but my sight, ironically, my creeping blindness was not yet something i noticed. i was just a bit more tired. i attempted to correct, what i had interpreted, as neglectful posture; sit up straight became my mantra, squinting, my new habit. (2019, p. 32) healey did not at first notice her “creeping blindness,” instead interpreting this felt experience as a concern of the body. she adapted her movements, changed her posture, gradually becoming aware that there is a connection between her moving body and her vision. she could no longer take for granted the relationship of her body to space, the movements of the body that blind visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 247 “seek to close the distance between the eye and the world” (2019, p. 34). she troubles the presumption that the eye crosses a distance to bring the world close, since in her experience, the world became distant as her sight changed. instead, she explains, “my body brought me to the world” (p. 35). she thus describes her experience of blind vision as an embodied movement. finding herself disconnected from the ways of seeing that she formerly participated in prior to becoming blind, healey describes the onset of new ways of knowing and sensing. herself a cultural producer in theatre and performance, she interprets the felt experience of blindness as a poetics as well as an epistemology. returning to the scene of the blind flaneur in “blindness in v acts,” she notes the “taken-for-granted demands” of city life that her experience of blindness both imitates and resists, that “orient one’s sense of belonging in the street” (2019, p. 125). with her changing sight comes new insight. she notes that the rhythm of the street is based on the visual hegemony of sighted people, who don’t even seem to notice the rhythms and flows created by their “normative expectations” (p. 125). blind people must sensorially navigate this space, their “polyrhythmic” difference either syncing into harmony if they can mimic sightedness to such an extent that they can pass as sighted or offering “discordant” notes and “contrapuntal beats” (p. 125). for healey, this difference evokes an expanded awareness, and is the site for creativity and knowledge (p. 131). in blind visuality, vision and touch do not keep their distance at opposite ends of a sensory spectrum. in blindness one sees, feels, moves and hears simultaneously, summoning a heightened awareness of the ways that sensory experiences combine, signaling their vast variability in human experience. healey’s experience of blindness can be understood as a kind of “haptic vision,” a way of seeing with and through felt experience. this is different from the concept of “haptic vision” derived from cinema studies that we shall consider shortly, which refers to visual images that evoke a felt sense, as opposed to felt sense evoking images. i will return to this distinction later. kleege’s, healey’s, and thompson’s rich descriptions of the qualities of blindness, its gains and particularities, begin to give a sense how epistemology – ways of knowing – are tied to phenomenological experience of the world. in other words, we know the world through our sensory perception of it. we can begin to understand the limits of the reductive, narrow theory of knowledge inherited from the enlightenment that gives (normative) vision such an elevated and exclusive place. instead, people with a wide variety of sensory experiences come to know the world in a myriad of ways. the senses work together, and different senses do not work in the same way. yet visuality – the visualization of history – is authorized by normative structures that eclipse this richness. blind epistemology demands a dethroning of vision as the master sense against which all other senses are judged or compared. attention to touch, movement, smell and sound in crip aesthetics adds dimensions of art criticism that are often left unconsidered. blind audiences, as well as blind artists, contribute to cultural knowledge mary bunch studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 248 with their particular ways of sensing and perceiving. indeed, as kleege writes, “the integration of blind perception and experience will change the foundational assumption of the culture; change how the human condition is defined" (2018, p.1). haptic aesthetics and haptic visuality blind epistemology and crip aesthetics each draw attention to the importance of haptic perception and haptic aesthetics. from the greek haptesthai, meaning “to touch,” and háptein “to fasten,” (oxford english dictionary, 1989) haptics is “the sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to [one’s] body by use of [one’s] body” (gibson, 1966, p. 97). this includes tactile touching by the sensory neurons located in the hands and under the body’s skin, as well as kinesthetic and proprioceptive senses – sensations of body movement, muscle force, and body position. where vision is a distal (or distance) sense, hapticality is “proximal.” it is in contact with, or near the body (fisher, 1997, p. 6). this different quality relays a difference in meaning. fisher’s description of the distinction between vision and touch is helpful here: where the visual sense permits a transcendent, distant and arguably disconnected, point-of-view, the haptic sense functions by contiguity, contact and resonance. the haptic sense renders the surfaces of the body porous, being perceived at once inside, on the skin's surface, and in external space. it enables the perception of weight, pressure, balance, temperature, vibration and presence. (1997, p. 4) kleege’s tactile explorations in museum touch tours, and healey’s rhythmic movement through city streets, highlights various dimensions of hapticality. some of these involve physical contact with objects by the hands and body, others explore space with one’s entire body and multiple senses. this is very different from the distance, objectivity, and transcendence evoked by optical vision. vision and hapticality take place in socio-political contexts wherein these different meanings are connected to different material effects. when a spectator feels an artwork with their hands, they are immediately adjacent to the work, feeling the textures of its surfaces, its shape and temperature, the extent of its resistance under their palm or fingertips. because of this proximity, hapticality is associated with relational properties such as intimacy, emotion, and materiality. yet fisher points out that hapticality is not entirely disconnected from distal senses. recall healey’s rich descriptions of her body moving through space, bringing the world to her, as she navigates the choreography of other bodies in public space through proprioception, rhythm and sound. haptic perception, as fisher writes, “can elucidate the energies and volitions involved in sensing space” with an “affective touch” that does not necessarily involve actual physical touch (1997, p. 6). for fisher such affectively charged haptic awareness is already a part of the blind visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 249 experience of viewing art in a gallery or museum, where bodies perambulate from one exhibit to the next. it is especially pronounced when interacting with specifically haptic work, such as vibratory and tactile art, which are often featured in crip curation practices. haptic visuality is a concept in cinema studies that brings the qualities of haptic aesthetics to the visual field of the moving image. in “skin of the film,” marks (2000) addresses a particular kind of cinematic image and visual experience that she identifies is present in intercultural cinema. her contribution is significant, merging two kinds of sensory experience, and blurring the boundaries between categories. for marks, certain images and ways of looking are integrally haptic: in such instances the eye does not merely gaze, it touches. to develop the concept of haptic visuality, she distinguishes between images that are optical, and haptic images. optical images, with their distance and perspective, establish a clear demarcation between an object being represented and its ground, as well as a clear distinction between the viewer and the object being looked at. the haptic images marks refers to are structured by closeness rather than distance, and the eye’s movement over the textured surface of an image, rather than its penetration into the illusion of three-dimensional space. such haptic images can be found in grainy, faded stock footage, close up shots so detailed they obscure the whole, or extreme close shots imbued with intimacy (marks, 2000). haptic images do not contain all the resources necessary to interpret them. instead, the gallery-goer actively engages in a perceptive and contemplative process that draws on their own memory and imagination to complete the image (marks, 2000). marks writes: the works i propose to call haptic invite a look that moves on the surface plane of the screen for some time before the viewer realizes what she or he is beholding. such images resolve into figuration only gradually, if at all. conversely, a haptic work may create an image of such detail … that it evades a distanced view, instead pulling the viewer in close. such images offer such a proliferation of figures that the viewer perceives the texture as much as the objects imagined. (2000, p. 163) a haptic image is like an extreme close up or an abstract painting that the eye cannot penetrate, but only brush across. the eyes relax and soften their focus, and the images’ poetic meaning unfolds. haptic images are not immediately decipherable, easily consumed, and readily mastered. what is important is the image’s material presence, rather than its power to represent objects or narratives, or its capacity to invite identification with a figure (marks, 2000). haptic visuality, in contrast, refers to the image’s reception, the spectators’ “inclination to perceive” it (marks, 2000, p. 162). as marks describes, “in haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch” (p. 162). she writes “haptic looking … is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze” (p. 162). mary bunch studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 250 while marks does not address blindness beyond a few brief references to films that visually and narratively play with metaphors of blindness (2000, p. 138), her observation that “a haptic work may create an image of such detail … that it evades a distanced view” is strikingly close to thompson’s description of short-sighted reading. marks is not engaging with critical disability discourse here, yet the similarity is more than merely coincidental. she is critiquing the imperialism and eurocentric bias of the same modern scopic regimes that marginalize disability and cast blindness as pathology and lack. in addition to decentring vision and disrupting normative vision, both these intercultural and cripistemological critiques blur the boundaries between vision and other senses. yet attention to critical perspectives of blindness adds new dimensions that deepen and expand the meaning of haptic visuality. significantly, blind epistemology draws attention to the fact that the hapticality of vision is not just analogical – one does not see as if the eye is touching the surface of the image – but rather hapticality is fundamental to the act of seeing. in delineating a felt sense of vision, healey’s analysis reminds us that the eye is located in the body, so that any experience of biological vision has a haptic dimension. the body brings us close to, or further away from the object of its sight, it carries a moving eye, around which a world rolls and flickers, warms and cools, hushes, roars and murmurs. the body is situated, its positioning frames one’s perspective (haraway, 1988). it becomes dizzy, invigorated, nauseous, excited, bent, stretched or strained, depending on what and how it sees. haptic visuality is thus both a way of seeing with, and through felt experience – a felt sense that evokes images – and it refers to visual images that evoke a felt sense. both of these senses of haptic visuality inform the understanding of blind visuality developed in the sections that follow. haptic visuality is neither restricted to blind experience, nor essential to it; yet the overlaps between blind epistemology and haptic visuality are significant. each disrupts hegemonic cultures of looking that prioritize optical visuality, and in so doing shift the values associated with visual domains from distant, transcendent individualized qualities to intimate, material, and relational ones. analysis of horak’s through a tired eye and new works canadian writer, director and performer bruce horak started painting in response to the question “how do you see?” that is often posed to him as a blind person with partial sight in one eye (horak, 2019a). answering this question was a key aim of the 2019 solo exhibition through a tired eye, the culmination of a month-long residency at tangled art + disability that exhibited from january 24 to february 24, 2019 as part of the cripping the arts festival in toronto, canada. during the residency, horak hosted multiple sessions at the gallery to paint portraits of friends and strangers, blind visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 251 recording the conversations as an audio component to the work. the venue, tangled art + disability, is canada’s first accessible gallery for disability arts. this situates the exhibition both at the centre of toronto’s disability arts movement and independent art scene, since the gallery is housed in the vibrant art hub at 401 richmond (ahsan, 2016). tangled art + disability, which grew out of the 2003 abilities arts festival, is a non-profit organization that aims to enhance opportunities for deaf, mad, and disabilityidentified artists, support their cultural contributions, cultivate disability arts, and enhance access to the arts for both artists and audiences with diverse abilities (tangled, n.d.). curators at tangled present art in various modes that anticipate artists and audiences with diverse bodies, senses and minds, hanging paintings at different levels, using audio and captioning, and producing tactile versions of artwork (ahsan, 2016). through a tired eye is no exception. the exhibition engages with disability aesthetics in multiple ways, through the inclusion of audio work, tactile sculptures, a touchable painting, and a live performance, “mov[ing] art off the wall and into the space for an immersive, tactile experience” (tangled, 2019). such multisensory engagements together comprise an aesthetic experience inextricable from access concerns. access is not a mere supplement that is added on as an afterthought. rather, access is part of the meaning that is produced when an exhibition addresses a public presumed in advance to perceive and engage with art in a variety of ways. as such through a tired eye does more than simply represent blind ways of seeing and knowing. it invites participation in blind visuality in a manner that critiques and transforms hegemonic visuality and conventional aesthetics. in this context, horak’s exploration of blind sight becomes a part of a wider political critique in both visual studies and the arts. my analysis focuses on certain paintings featured in through a tired eye (2019a) selected because they are examples of haptic images. these include the painting, “through a tired eye” (54” x 44,” acrylic on canvas, 2017), the series of 34 acrylic portraits completed during the residency, titled new works (2019b) (each approximately 8” x 10”), and the tactile painting “new brunswick grove at night” (2019c) (30” x 48” acrylic on canvas, 2019).6 “through a tired eye” (2017) is installed on its own partition wall, centred at the entrance of the gallery. a pupil and iris, in white and grey with subtle charcoal detail, form the centre of the work, while erratic lines in white and bright colours, red, pink, yellow and blue seem to shoot out in different directions in a dynamic play, while black creeps in at the edges. the second example is the portrait series “new work” (2019b) (acrylic on canvas), which are installed as a block of portraits with no space between them on one of the gallery’s interior walls. the entire series seems to fragment at the 6 in metric measurement, “through a tired eye” is 137 cm x 112 cm, the paintings in new works are each approximately 20 cm x 25 cm, and “new brunswick grove at night” is 76 cm x 122 cm. mary bunch studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 252 bottom. the top three rows form a solid block with seven paintings each, followed by three diminishing rows from top to bottom (six, four, and finally three). each of these 34 colourful painting are discernable as portraits, but it is as if the faces and bodies are emerging from a brightly coloured haze. hanging on the wall next to the paintings is a set of earphones. through these, gallery-goers can listen to a sound component to the work, comprised of recorded conversations between horak and the subjects of the portraits. the final example is a painting that is both visual and tactile. “new brunswick grove at night” (2019c) is richly textured with gels and other mediums and marked with a note inviting audiences to touch it. a pond with a bridge, crosshatched in red and suspended across the silvery water is surrounded by thick brushstrokes of blue and green, dotted with yellow. the central importance of the painting “through a tired eye” (2017) in this exhibition is abundantly clear. this work gives the exhibition its name, announcing that it is an interrogation of ways of seeing. the painting also establishes horak’s method and artistic vision for the exhibition. that the eye is tired, suggests a disability aesthetic and embodied vision whose blindness and fatigue condition a perspective, rather than a pathology. in his artist statement about the work, horak writes that the painting began as an image of bare, stark trees against a clear sky. painted at the conclusion of a seven-week artist residency on toronto island, horak describes experiencing eye strain that resulted in “swirling and rolling patterns” of “floaters and flashers” that obscured his vision (horak, 2019a). he set up a camera on time lapse and captured the process of painting these floaters and flashers over top of the original image. the time lapse video is installed on an ipad next to the painting, so that viewers can watch as the floaters and flashers fill the canvas, completely obliterating the trees and sky, leaving in their place what appears to be a giant, abstract pupil and iris, made of light. hung on a partition wall placed at the centre of the gallery’s entrance, audience members cannot miss this work. it is visually dominating, confronting the audience with a look back from the margins of sight. physically it obstructs the path into the gallery from the open hall; people are compelled to stop and consider the work, to attend to its demand to look differently, before going around it to enter the space. yet the work is not about obstructed or occluded vision. the obstruction is a provocation, not a conclusion. recall kleege’s earlier description of the cliché of the blank canvas as a space of lack; a metaphorical blindness that the artist must overcome with an act of creation (2018). horak paints his blindness as an active, shifting and moving excess of sight. his blindness fills the canvas, overflows the more static, distant, optical image that he began with. the brush strokes are filled with movement, as he “chases” the floaters and extends “the motion of [his] body in concert with what [he] see[s]” (horak, 2019a). “through a tired eye” (2017) thus captures the ecstatic moment where the artist surrenders to what blindness offers. blind visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 253 horak adopts a similar method in the portraits he paints during his residency at tangled. he describes his process here as follows: “i begin with the auras that i see, using them as a base-tone for the painting. i add the distortions and floaters and over the course of the sitting, a figure emerges in the paint” (horak 2019a). the impressionistic brushstrokes that seek to capture the halos, auras, and floaters produce an image that is obscured, floating at the surface of the canvas, without clear demarcation of figure and ground. like the first painting, these images are imbued with qualities that are often attributed to touch: they are immediate and up close, textured and abstract, with a density that spreads across the surface. in new works, (2019b) the images appear unfocused and pixelated, and the faces blend in with the background to such a degree that i had to squint with one eye to see the faces form. close up each painting is a swirl of colour and texture in which auras and floaters take form as distinct objects within the field of vision. only by stepping back do the faces come to view, framed by glowing halos, accented and obscured by bright squiggly lines. yet i also found myself pulled in close, to experience the forms, shapes, textures and movements of the brushstrokes, without the context or distance to masterfully “know” what i see. by prompting this physical, kinesthetic relationship with the work and the other people in the gallery with whom i had to negotiate movement, i had a sense of being with the work – and being in the world with others – as opposed to gazing from an objective distance. these close, textured, and relational qualities are all features of haptic images (marks, 2000). they compel a particular, haptic way of looking that moves across the surface, yielding to the image. horak invites such a reception by painting what he sees through blindness. it is an injunction to look at and experience visual images differently, in response to an image that establishes a dynamic bodily relationship with its audience. the painting “new brunswick grove at night” (2019c) offers a different kind of haptic experience, for it is intended to be literally touched. the textures of this work are enhanced through the use of gels, inviting a different way of looking/feeling that is accessible to people with a range of vision and experiences of blindness. as my earlier description makes evident, the quality of actual touching is distinct from haptic vision, which treats touch analogically – one sees in a way that shares some touch-like qualities. when i touch it, i can feel the raised edges of the brush strokes, the ways these cluster and disperse, rumple and smooth out. my fingertips follow the contours, seeking the movement of the painter’s hand that left these marks. my eyes follow a different pathway. they are drawn first to a silvery white pool of light in the lower left corner, and then move upward, following bands of golden, squiggly lines whose trajectory narrows as the highlighted area moves toward the upper right corner, like a stream of light or plume of smoke. touching with one’s fingertips, hand, or body is not the same as touching with the eyes in marks’ (2000) sense. from an access perspective this makes all the difference. “new brunswick grove at night” is accessible mary bunch studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 254 to blind audiences without the supplement of a sound work or audio description. but interacting with this painting also makes clear that touch is also just different than sight. my eye travels across the painting in a certain way, it forms an image from an abstract collection of strokes in bright and dark colours. i can see that this is a painting of a pond with a red bridge if i step back and soften my eyes. but my touch tells me something else, it moves me differently, places me in direct proximity to the work, and connects me to the art with my body. i can sense a topography of textures that are undefinable as a figure of any sort; i surmise a different meaning and make a different kind of judgement. both the tactile, and visual apprehension of these works involves a shared work of perception and contemplation. the image is completed by the spectators’ own memory and imagination. whether or not one is actually touching it, the haptical qualities of the painting overflows beyond the boundaries of the image, to include and provoke the spectators’ embodied experience. “though a tired eye” (2017), the portraits in new works (2019b), and “new brunswick grove at night” (2019c) each evoke a felt experience of visuality, rather than the distanced, optical modes of looking that dominate western visual culture. the brush strokes emphasize the surface of the canvas, rather than the depth of perspective. they erode, rather than demarcate clear boundaries between figure and ground. horak’s paintings sensuously draw on the spectators’ experience as a body that touches, moves and has contact with other bodies within the particular context of crip aesthetics and tangled gallery. the paintings evoke a disability aesthetic not merely because the artist is blind, but because the work subverts stereotypes about blindness as a deficiency in vision, representing the particularity and richness of blind sight, and treating sensory difference as valuable in itself. it is this critique of visuality that transforms the experience from a merely optical experience of looking, or physical experience of touching, to the critical position of blind visuality. thinking about haptic visuality in the context of crip, and particularly blind aesthetics invites both similar and some different insights than we find in the sphere of intercultural cinema that marks (2000) is concerned with. in part this is related to the difference in media and the embodied experience of viewing cinema, which is almost always a distant experience, even when the shot is closely framed. one cannot touch a film projection, and the closer one sits, the harder it is to see it. in contrast, the visual arts audience member perambulates through a gallery, it is their roaming body and moving hand or eye that brings motion to a painting or sculpture. the gallery-goer can change their perspective, move further away or closer, and they can reach out and touch the work. this opens the possibility of a wider interpretation of “haptic” than in the cinema context. in particular, the challenge posed to modern visual culture by haptic visuality is highly relevant to crip aesthetics. at the same time, crip aesthetics brings a new dimension to the concept though a consideration of the felt experience and visual heterogeneity of blind visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 255 blind sight, challenging modernist understandings that centre the normatively sighted eye, and with it, the individual subject. conclusion: toward an alternative economy of looking the exhibition through a tired eye (2019a) offers a different perspective on vision, one that speaks to the political stakes of an alternative economy of looking. the paintings provoke a physical and interpretive engagement that press the spectator to yield to the artist’s way of seeing through blindness. his blind sight invokes a mode of reception that marks refers to as haptic visuality (2000). this involves ways of yielding to haptic images in a relational, dynamic engagement with the work. situated in the context of crip aesthetics and blind epistemology, the exhibition reflects a mode of critique i refer to as bind visuality, contributing to wider discourses countering norms about vision, visuality and knowledge in fields such as critical disability, feminist and decolonizing methodologies. coupling “blind” with “visuality” counters narrow interpretations in which these concepts seem to exclude each other. in my formulation, they instead both supplement and deconstruct each other. blindness infuses visuality with heterogenous ways of seeing and perceiving. blind visuality refers to a myriad of ideas, images and information, assembled not only to “visualize history,” but to re-imagine and re-authorize it through multi-sensory images and an anti-normative imperative. there is nothing inherently problematic about optical vision: indeed, such distance-based ways of looking have many uses and potentialities. likewise, we cannot presume that haptic aesthetics and perception necessarily offer a better or more pure way of knowing. haptic visuality can be as problematic as the normalizing gaze of optic visuality when it claims to offer more natural or complete access to truth or reality (marks, 2000, p. 143). the point is that by expanding and transforming hegemonic cultures of visuality from a narrow, normalizing ideal, blind visuality opens up possibilities for new social and political meanings. blind visuality challenges not only the dominant culture of sense, but also the ways that subjects are conceived as knowers and political actors in a world of others. normative sight is a cultural effect that prioritises the distant viewing of optical images. such optical vision implies disconnection and transcendence, qualities that embody enlightenment thought. optical distance enables the viewer to “organize him/herself as an all-perceiving subject” (marks, 2000 p. 162) and think of the self as “disembodied …. [and] represented by (optical) vision alone” (p. 176). the viewer becomes the author of a centralized discourse, a point of view that establishes a monolithic claim to truth about what falls within the purview of their sight (berger, 2008). the blind person, in such constructions, can hardly know anything at all. the point of view of the subjects of optical vision comes to seem universal, rational, and objective. their perspective carries an appropriative mary bunch studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 256 force, as though the viewer has a kind of mastery over all that is seen. optical visuality is thus tied to modern individualism, with its role in capitalist social and economic arrangements, the appropriating forces of imperialism, the medical/scientific gaze of eugenics and the medical model of disability (davis, 2008; michalko, 2002; mirzoeff, 2011; smith, 2012), that is, to projects of dominance and subjection (smith, 2012). the idea that objectivity is derived from the “god’s eye” view of a detached observer isolates vision from embodied contexts and material realities (haraway, 1988). it further presumes all humans share an identical, normative capacity of sight, disconnected from complex networks of sensory perception. such ocularcentric epistemologies confuse appearance with truth, overlooking the way that conceptual frameworks of seeing are influenced by material conditions, power, and ideology (davis, 2008; michalko, 2002; mirzoeff, 2011). blind visuality critically re-orients these relationships and hierarchies of knowledge. in blind visuality, there is no singular, preferred way of seeing or perceiving. vision, rather than being cast as an ideal way of knowing, is put under continual contestation. other senses, such as haptic perception, imbue perceiving, knowing and seeing with different qualities than the individualized perspective of distant, optical vision. i focus in particular on haptic perception in this article, led by the distinctively haptic qualities of horak’s paintings “through a tired eye” (2017) and new works (2019b), and the touchable painting “new brunswick grove at night” (2019c). together these offer examples of both haptic visuality and haptic perception. where optical visuality isolates its objects and focuses on them representationally, haptic visuality co-presents with its objects relationally. this is a mode of “speaking not about, but nearby” the object being visually represented (minh-ha, 1982, as cited in marks, 2000, p. 164). as a relational form, aesthetics plays a performative role in how people are produced as subjects in relation to others and social discourse more broadly (fisher, 1997, p. 4). haptic aesthetics is a sensuous way of knowing, in which audiences yield to their environment, a body among other bodies. likewise, the gaze that allows a haptic image to be comprehensible shares qualities with touch and cooperates with the body’s kinesthetic perceptions. such a gaze has little to do with the capacity of the biological eye to see “normally” or “perfectly,” nor to possess its objects with a singular claim to truth. it is an intimate, sensory and interpretive view, rather than a distant and informing one. by bringing the image closer to the body and its multiple senses, and by bringing the body closer to the image, haptic aesthetics and visuality produce a relationship between self and other/object that marks describes as “yieldingknowing” (2000, pp. 151-152). haptic aesthetics and haptic visuality thus incline toward relationality in an alternative economy of looking/sensing that acts back and reconstructs aesthetic and political discourse (fisher, 1997, p. 6). attention to haptic sensibilities produces more inclusive and accessible galleries and has cultural blind visuality in bruce horak’s through a tired eye studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 239-258, 2021 257 effects. where in the history of western representational practice and enlightenment thought more broadly, the individualized visual subject seems disembodied and all-perceiving, the haptic subject is embodied, socially located, and situated in the world proximal to other subjects and objects. as such, hapticality lends itself to multiple perspectives rather than monolithic truth claims, and ways of knowing characterized by yielding to one’s environment, rather than appropriating and mastering it from an objective distance. haptic aesthetics is experienced, rather than apprehended, and audiences participate actively in its processes of knowing (fisher, 1997, p. 6). horak, tangled gallery, and the disability arts movement more generally participate in creating an alternative economy of looking that is part of a broader movement of aesthetic resistance. blind visuality shifts from cultural attitudes of distance and disconnection to embodied social location, from individualization to relationality, and from appropriation and domination to yielding to others and environments. here, blind epistemology resists dominant discourses of optical visuality, and crip aesthetics meets haptic aesthetics in practices of embodied, relational perception. this call for a more complex, multi-sensory understanding of aesthetic experience, and of vision itself, shows some of the ways that blind modes of seeing and perceiving challenge and transform aesthetic hegemony and by association, the political imaginary. acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge the contributions of the two anonymous reviewers, whose insightful feedback strengthened this paper considerably. references ahsan, s. (2016, june). tangled, toronto's first accessible art gallery for disabled artists, is bringing the outsiders in. national post. https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/tangledtorontos-first-accessible-art-gallery-for-disabled-artists-is-bringing-the-outsiders-in bauman, h., & murray, j. (2014). deaf gain: raising the stakes for human diversity. university of minnesota press. berger, j. (2008). ways of seeing. penguin. cachia, a. (2013). ‘disabling’ the museum: curator as infrastructural activist. journal of visual art practice, 12(3), 257-289. chandler, e. (2017). reflections on cripping the arts in canada. art journal, 76(3-4), 56-59. clouzot, h. g. (director). (1956). the mystery of picasso [film]. filmsonor. davis, l. (2008). disability studies, the humanities, and the limits of the visible. in m. smith (ed.), visual culture studies: interviews with key thinkers (pp. 85-102). sage. du camp, m. (1892/1994). souvenirs littéraires (d. osler, ed.). aubier. elkins, j. 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(2019b). new works [painting series]. http://www.brucehorak.com/availableworks horak, b. (2019c). new brunswick grove at night [painting]. http://www.brucehorak.com/availableworks jenks, c. (1995). visual culture. routledge. johnson, m., & mcruer, r. (2014). cripistemologies. journal of literary & cultural disability studies, 8(2), 127-148. jones, c. (2016). the global work of art: world’s fairs, biennials, and the aesthetics of experience. university of chicago press. keller, h. (1908/2003). the world i live in (r. shattuck, ed.). new york review of books. kleege, g. (2018). more than meets the eye: what blindness brings to art. oxford university press. lewis, v. a. (2015). crip. in r. adams, b. reiss, & d. serlin (eds.), keywords for disability studies (pp. 46-48). nyu press. manning, d. 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(2012). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). zed books. tangled art + disability. (n.d.). about us. https://tangledarts.org/ tangled art + disability. (2019). through a tired eye. exhibits. https://tangledarts.org. thompson, h. (2017). reviewing blindness in french fiction, 1789–2013. palgrave. kunin final correspondence address: johana kunin, universidad nacional de san martín, campus miguelete edificio de ciencias sociales, av. 25 de mayo 1021 (b1650hmi), san martín, buenos aires, argentina; email: jkunin@unsam.edu.ar issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas johana kunin consejo nacional de investigaciones científicas y técnicas & universidad nacional de san martín, argentina abstract this article provides an ethnographic analysis of the agency of women who reside in the rural areas of the argentine pampas, based on their promotion and production of agroecological family horticulture. the recognition of these women’s agency through care – care of their children, global care, and green care – offers a significant challenge to some metrocentric and eurocentric feminist perspectives that claim care work can only be oppressive for women. the first of these types of care empowers women to improve the nutrition of their children. it also relates to another underlying type of care, which is to provide a sufficiently robust education as to ensure their children have a better and alternative future. the second type of care has the power to socially transform the territorial space of the district’s countryside and its marginalized populations which, through care, acquire greater public and political attention. the third type of care empowers women to transform and care for the environment, and is exercised by not using pesticides in horticultural production and by disseminating knowledge on the matter. in line with discussions of postcolonial feminism (abu-lughod, 1986; mahmood, 2001; suárez navaz, 2008), i argue that certain properties that are attributed to women relative to caregiving – by way of a dichotomous view of gender relations – fuel their agency: for these women the cultivation of vegetables is a form of agency that actively combats food, training and labor inequality. keywords care; argentina; rural; women introduction is care work always oppressive for women? the central hypothesis of this study is that for women in the context of this study, caregiving is a form of agency, even if it does not seek to intentionally subvert gender relations nor achieve individual autonomy. this paper is based on an ethnographic field study carried out between 2014 and 2017 in rural buenos aires province, johana kunin studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 186 argentina. the field study followed the coordinators and participants of an initiative that promotes agroecological family horticulture in a district that is structured around the cultivation and trade of soybeans.1 the soyification of the pampas, which includes buenos aires province, had impacts on economic and domestic life, and the new productive dynamic enabled a transformation of the agency of women. at the same time, community development initiatives such as the one investigated as part of this study also influenced women’s agency through contributing to women’s incorporation as political subjects. it can be observed that it is mainly women – who care for their children, for people from the surrounding neighborhoods and lands, and for the environment – who propose alternative moral repertoires for the life of the community in transformation. this paper begins by presenting the theoretical framework, explaining what agency means and what has been said regarding care, agency and oppression by diverse feminist scholars. this is followed by describing the methodology used in the study and the socio-productive profile of the rural district where it was carried out. a characterization of the agroecological horticulture promotion initiative under investigation and an analytical description of its coordinators’ and participants’ activities is then developed: during the call to action; while selling at the market; and at the agroecological training. the final main section of the paper presents an analysis of the three types of what i call broad-spectrum care. theoretical framework feminist organizations and feminist thought have been studied on numerous occasions in argentina (barrancos, 2008; di marco, 2010; masson, 2007; nari, 2004; tarducci & rifkin, 2010; trebisacce, 2013). the emancipatory movements that strengthened since 2015, in favor of the decriminalization and legalization of abortion and the heterogeneous movement “ni una menos” against femicides and gender violence, were also addressed widely (felitti, 2014; gago, 2018; rosales, 2016; vázquez laba & masson, 2018). beyond these specific works, it is also important to note that the diversity of political dynamics becomes evident when registering the differences that exist between organizations and movements in metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas of the country. taking this into account, and starting from the heuristic dialogue with the theories and practices of my field interlocutors who understood their practices in terms of care, i decided to dialogue with feminist studies of care to account for some not explicitly “emancipatory” repertoires 1 agroecological agriculture is part of an agricultural production system that provides food without agrochemical residues, but its certification is so called “social” (i.e. there are no private or public certifying agencies with fixed standards as in organic agriculture: people who work alongside and are not external to the community are the ones who certify the way that production is carried out). rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 187 of socio-political action − as ni una menos − but with strong presence in the experiences of many local rural women of the pampas. emic theories and practices have allowed me to nuance, question and analytically challenge some of the approaches within feminist studies that equate agency with resistance: i argue that what i call the power of care provides agency not necessarily understood as emancipatory or anti-patriarchal. however, it is a valid type of agency in the ethnographic context presented in this study and therefore deserves to be analyzed. an important part of feminist care studies is concerned with problematizing the sexual and unequal division of “domestic work,” which assigns men as priority actors to the public spheres and women (and feminized identities) to the private spheres. in my work, however, this will be nuanced. in the first place, i sustain that some supposedly domestic care practices can also be public and political practices. production and reproduction can take place in spaces that are not clearly differentiated. secondly, a perspective and description of what i call broad-spectrum care will be developed. the spectrum is broad because it aims, in its analysis, to go beyond home, that is, to exceed the scenarios that are typically designated as care settings. it is common for feminist scholars of care to point out the invisibilization and oppression that women suffer because they are in charge of “innocuous” tasks, or tasks that are socially undervalued, such as care (federici, 2018). caregiving practices are usually performed by women or by people seen as feminized, and who are therefore dehierarchized and seen as deserving no or little remuneration (folbre, 2006). i argue that it is precisely this supposed innocuousness of care that gives agency to women in a conservative social context that defines them as women-mothers-caregivers, with certain values and ethics. caring is “a woman’s thing,” it is not highly valued socially, but it justifies extra-ordinary actions on the part of the women participating in the agroecological horticulture activities i have followed. on the other hand, women’s agency is often studied as resistance from perspectives that historicize local feminist movements or from historical perspectives that are too broad, commonly under metrocentric perspectives. in dialogue with the native perspectives i found, i propose a definition of women’s agency that is not synonymous with resistance. for the women who are part of this study, caring is a form of productive agency, which does not intentionally seek to subvert normative gender relations, nor does it seek to achieve women’s individualized autonomy; it is a relational agency, inherently linked to their relationships with others, and interstitial, where the capacity for action sneaks through the twists and turns of what is possible in situated contexts. agency is understood as the capacity for action that relations of subordination enable and create in a given historical context. that is to say, the meanings and senses of agency of a given population cannot be defined before the ethnographic work is carried out. moreover, it is desirable to understand agency as that which can also aim toward continuity, stasis and stability, and which is present in the lives of women whose universe has been constructed in johana kunin studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 188 communities that are not markedly liberal (mahmood, 2001). that is why mahmoood, and her postcolonial feminist approach, proposes that the notion of agency must be decoupled from liberal feminist projects, because prioritizing women’s agency as a subversion of gender norms ends up being politically prescriptive and invisibilizes the totality of women’s possibilities for action. this paper, for example, shows how caring can potentially empower women in the context of unequal and asymmetrical relations. beyond the particular agency of women, at a more general level giddens (1976, 1981) and sewell jr. (1992) explain that agency is not opposed to social structure but constitutes it. the social structure shapes people’s practices, and at the same time people’s practices constitute and reproduce structures. therefore, it is necessary to put an end to the western fantasy of the free and autonomous agent. that is to say, for the case of this paper, the agent (rural women) is not necessarily understood as opposed to patriarchal structures, because women’s agentive capacity is the fruit of their immersion in patriarchal structures with their associated limits and possibilities. this paper explains that the studied women’s power of care is intelligible only within that structural framework, with the particular conditions and fields of possibility (grimson, 2011, p. 172) that enable it, by the political subjects produced by the power relations of that same framework. intersectionally speaking, that is why perspectives that state that care practices are mere oppressions neither represent nor understand the emic points of view of all women. neither is it a question of thinking of care as a case of infrapolitics (see scott, 1987, 1990), because i avoid speaking in terms of resistance, but scott’s approach is worth highlighting as it allows us to consider other ways of understanding politics. in turn, ortner (1995) observed that much of the literature on resistance practices lacks “density.” for their part, abu-lughod (1990) and gutmann (2012) warned about the risks of romanticizing the term resistance, as it implies a reductionism of theories of power, promotes an inconsistent hope regarding the failures of the systems of oppression, and exalts “resistant heroes.” sahlins (2002) pointed out that resistance expresses, above all, the values of the position of the speaker (i.e., the analyst). it is not possible to understand the power of care without reflecting on the materiality of soybean monoculture, the displacements it causes, the consequent housing problems of migrant populations, and public policies such as the promotion of agroechological gardening studied here. to there we go then. an ethnographic approach to la laguna this research is part of a much larger investigation on women and agency in the argentine pampas region (kunin, 2019), for which the ethnographic field work was conducted between 2014 and 2017. this work involved a group of rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 189 women that promotes agroecological family horticulture,2 with whom i conducted more than 40 formal interviews; i also had many informal conversations with the coordinators and participants of the initiative. the group is composed of approximately 25 women market gardeners and five agricultural technicians, whose ages range from 25 to 50 years. as part of the research, two years were spent observing the bimonthly agroecological horticulture market held by the women at the main square, and observations were also made of the participation in a year-long training course held for the women as part of the initiative. in addition, the interactions of the group were followed on the social media platform, facebook, as well as in closed whatsapp chat groups. furthermore, particularly with the coordinators, there were opportunities to participate in the daily social lives of group members (especially coordinators) at home, at work, and in exchanges with different social actors at a variety of different events. interviews were also held with actors who interact in different ways with the coordinators and participants; these included politicians, government officials, social workers, trade unionists, teachers, residents of the surrounding areas, and others. before describing the initiative that is the focus of my research, it is important to have an understanding of the territory where it took place. for the purposes of this paper, la laguna is a fictitious name i have given to one of the 135 districts that make up the province of buenos aires. located 260 km from the capital of argentina, the main activity of the region is production for the agro-export market. the district is located in the northwest of buenos aires province and it is at the core of the so-called pampas region, the most fertile region of the country. the main city shares the name of the district, and is home to approximately 40,000 inhabitants (instituto nacional de estadística y censos de argentina, 2010). an additional 12 towns make up the rest of the district. the population of each of these towns is seldom more than 1,000 and some of them have fewer than 100 inhabitants. the typical sociability of these towns means there is a great deal of interconnection between the inhabitants. the leading farmers carry sociopolitical weight that influences the decisions of the district, and family as a social institution is important for social cohesion and integration. they are agricultural towns as defined by albaladejo (2013); that is to say, they are units composed of a main town and the rural space that surrounds it. the main city of the district is the hub around which the agricultural activities and the rest of the productive and service sectors (industry, administrative, judicial, etc.) that constitute the dynamics of the territory revolve. since the 1990s, the pampas have undergone a transformation from being an emblematic area for mixed production of diverse crops and cattle ranching, to being an area dominated by a genetically modified soy monoculture. as giarraca and teubal (2006) state, this new agri-food model is expanding on a global scale with the support of 2in order to protect the identities of those involved in the study, the name of the group has been rendered anonymous, and the name of the informants, the city and district where the field work was carried out have been changed. johana kunin studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 190 large international agribusiness corporations. the use of new inputs and technologies developed or driven by these large companies is expanding, with the rationale that an increase in the scale of production must go hand-in-hand with more intensive agriculture. thus, since 1996 roundup ready soy, that is soybean cultivation using genetically modified seeds combined with a notillage system and the use of pesticides such as glyphosate, has gained prominence. the use of these pesticides represents a proven danger to the population, as they lead to the development of cancer, allergies, genetic damage and other serious diseases.3 the concentration, foreign ownership and vertical integration of the country’s agri-food system is increasing, and contract farming is on the rise. it is a production system that has had two important consequences: it has contributed significantly to the disappearance of a number of farms, and it is oriented almost entirely towards exports. according to giarracca and teubal (2006), the disappearance of hundreds of rural towns, the loss of smalland medium-sized farms, the exodus of many inhabitants, and unemployment in rural areas, are some of the consequences of this “agriculture without farmers” model (p. 81). there has been significant movement of the population from the countryside to the main city of the district and its surroundings. there are areas where the lack of local jobs generates daytime migration patterns where (male) workers travel to neighboring communities for their work activities. they include fathers, family members and partners of some of the women who form part of this study. women who used to dedicate themselves to the reproductive work of their domestic unit in the fields, and to performing unpaid productive work as “help” to their husbands or by performing occasional cooking and cleaning tasks for their husbands’ employers, stopped doing so when they went to live in periurban agglomerations with their children. as much of the land is held by sowing pools,4 there is no longer a landowner family living at the productive unit for whom the women can occasionally work. women have also begun to have more fluid contact with metropolitan ideas through social and development initiatives, such as the agroecological family horticulture promotion initiative that is in the center of this study. as will be shown, this new dynamic enabled a transformation of women’s agency, job and training prospects, and family dynamics. what follows is an analytical description of three moments in the promotion and production of agroecological family horticulture to better undertand the relationship of care and agency of these 3see kunin and lucero (2020) for an analysis of the proven dangers of toxic agrochemicals such as glyphosate in the argentine countryside. 4 according to fao (2004) the “sowing pools” (pooles de siembra) are speculative investment funds. they provide financial management, commercial and agronomic, for the large-scale production of cereals in argentina. they contract land to third parties with a mix of crops and regions in order to have geographical diversification and reduce the climatic and price risks. the aim is to give investors returns that are superior to those of other financial options. on the scale at which it operated, the acquisition of inputs such as fertilizers could be effected at the wholesale level. rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 191 women: the call for action, the market, and the training. marina’s call to estelita marina is a middle-class teacher at a rural alternating school,5 and estelita is a former student at the same institution who graduated 11 years ago. estelita, who is 30 years old, visited her former school to offer some tomatoes from her own garden; she had produced so many that she could not get rid of them all even by making sauce for the winter or giving them away. marina, the teacher, suggested she should take them to the market. estelita lives in the rural countryside on land that belongs to her husband’s employers; he works as a parquero, or caretaker.6 neither estelita nor her husband knew that there was a agroecological horticulture market every two weeks in the square of the district’s main city. estelita did not consider her way of producing to be “rocket science.” to her, it was just simple to work without remedios (herbicides).7 her family had never had money to buy them – they were always expensive, imported, and at prices pegged to the dollar – so she cultivated her quinta without them,8 and she was able to grow enough for her husband, son and herself to eat. later in 2019, estelita became one of the main leaders of the la laguna agroecological market. she was not able to work as a domestic like her mother, as she had always imagined she would, because she had no employers to work for; the company that had purchased the farm was far away. occasionally an engineer would visit, alone, to give orders and check on everything. the alternating secondary school she had formerly attended was still holding on. alhough it had fewer and fewer students, it was supported by social actors who carried out rural development actions and tried to prevent a total exodus. the teachers believed that women were responsible for keeping the roots of the family in the countryside, and so they began to implement initiatives such as the agroecological horticulture market so that women would have something to do in rural areas. and that is where the story of marina, the teacher, comes in. marina is the daughter of a farmer who follows the conventional practices of spraying and sowing (as does the sowing pool company that owns the land where estelita lives). marina often clarifies, as if wanting to clear her name and take ownership of her family genealogy at the same time, that “no nací de 5alternating schools follow a pedagogy that structures the educational process between alternating periods at school and at home. 6a parquero is similar to a gardener, groundskeeper or caretaker. a parquero performs different tasks around a house that belongs or belonged to the landowners. 7remedios (“remedies” or “medicines”) is a term that usually refers to the resources used to solve a problem or cure a disease, usually human. nevertheless, in the pampas region, it is an emic term that refers to herbicides. in terms of semantics, by using this term, any suspicion of danger is removed. 8a quinta is a part of a garden or rural plot that is dedicated to cultivating agricultural products. johana kunin studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 192 un repollo agroecológico” (“i wasn’t born in an agroecological cabbage patch”). she became a mother at 40 years old, which is unusually old by local standards. she graduated from universidad de la plata as an agricultural engineer and has worked as a teacher at the rural alternating secondary school for almost 20 years. because there are no universities in la laguna or other nearby towns, middleand upper-class youth tend to move to buenos aires or la plata when they are 18 years old, to study and live either temporarily or permanently. after finishing their studies, the vast majority do not return home. marina received an education in different agroecological subjects while at the universidad de la plata, through a new course that had few students enrolled at the time. the agroecological approach is not dominant at the university or among her colleagues at the alternating secondary rural school who educate the children of the few rural employees and laborers who continue to work in the fields. her coworkers at the school look down on her, as if they hold something personal against her. they believe that marina does not like to work nor to teach the students how to “do the real work in the field.” many believe that “agroecology is a crazy idea of marina and her hippie friends.” at the alternating school, marina and her fellow teachers visit their students to follow up on their on-site apprenticeships. they see how students grow crops and care for animals on the land where they reside and where their parents often work as well. in this way the teachers get to know some of the daily and domestic realities their students and families may face, and which are especially complicated due to the social, job and environmental consequences of soyification. marina has many doubts about how to communicate the agroecological paradigm to people who are highly exploited and whose livelihood conditions are pushing them to their limits. as part of her quest to care for and collaborate with the population, she worked in the agroecological horticulture’s market. she invited families that she knew had smalland medium-sized gardens to participate. in general, those who accepted the invitation were the mothers of students or female graduates of the school, like estelita. the male graduates and fathers were in the minority, as they were working the fields. according to marina, that is why the women “se engancharon,”9 or got hooked into it. the gardeners and their sales at the market it is the end of may and a cold autumn wind blows through the main square in the town of la laguna. there must be fewer than 10 buildings in the entire town that are higher than eight floors. the rest are all low-lying homes. and so, the cold wind blows in from the fields and through the square. it is 8:00 in the morning and estelita and her fellow market sellers – all bundled up – are 9 se engancharon is a colloquial term used to refer to when you catch someone’s attention, interest or willingness to act. rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 193 setting their wares on folding wooden tables. most have been awake for several hours. the dirt roads that connect the fields where they live to the main town are always in bad condition, and they have to travel slowly to reach the market. they also have to get up early to finishing harvesting and packaging the produce. the market sellers talk about their children – the littlest ones are asleep in the cars, or sometimes bundled in wool blankets in the sellers´ laps – their grandchildren or how many millimeters of rain last fell. they set up their wooden tables, covering them in green tablecloths they received thanks to state funding, and they wear matching aprons in the same green to identify themselves as market gardeners. they exhibit their products, all at the same price, as agreed at the coordination meeting. the prices are never displayed in writing. they always tell them to their customers. much of the produce remains in the wooden or plastic crates in which it arrived. the eggs go on the table, as do the canned fruits, the hand-painted pots and the scales that each market gardener uses to weigh their produce. at 8:30 am the customers begin to arrive. most are over 40 years of age, women neighbors from “downtown.” many come because they have heard that the produce here is flavorful and more healthy. estelita, who is very active and easy-going, tells exactly that to every customer she sees. mirta, a market gardener who is originally from the northeast of argentina, is extremely timid and is learning to deal with talking to clients and keeping track of change. she dropped out in her first year of high school, more than 10 years ago, to run away with her boyfriend. since then, she has been moving from one farm to the next. marina and her fellows think of mirta’s presence at the market as a kind of victory. “empowering” a woman who is timid and from “the middle of the middle of nowhere” is to them a “double empowerment.” mirta’s voice continues to tremble when she speaks, and it is hard for her to make eye contact with strangers even after two years at the market, but she continues to come, every two weeks. people begin to line up at the stalls. it is 10:30 am and the stalls continue to sell. the market does not have a specific closing time; it finishes when the produce runs out, or when there is little left. this is often the case as the women cannot produce enough to meet demand, because they do not have their own land. but not everything in the world of these women market gardeners has to do with sales. “training” sessions play a key role as well. training to make it click in 2017 marina and other teachers (female and male) from the alternating rural schools in the province’s northwest asked an agricultural engineer from the ministry of agroindustry of buenos aires province to teach an agroecological horticulture course in la laguna. he works from the central headquarters in la plata, but he is originally from a province in the north of argentina. he johana kunin studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 194 gives the impression of a man who is a “friend of the countryside.” this means he is adored by the teachers and producers, who invite him to barbecues and copious afternoon teas accompanied by homemade treats every time he comes to la laguna. his course was certified by the ministry and he teaches once a month, for nine months, at the rural school. the number of students attending each class varies between 20 and 40, and they are made up of rural teachers and female and male producers from across the entire region. the engineer presents powerpoint slides showing photos of plants, weeds and bugs. he teaches them that there are benezas, or “good weeds” that can protect their horticultural output. this information opposes the moral view that glyphosate, the herbicide, is an agricultural hero, and it adds to the reputation of agroecology, where lettuce and good weeds coexist in an arrangement that is desirable and productive. the same occurs when he provides information about certain insects. “now i understand that there are some bugs that you don’t have to kill,” says isidora gonzález, one of the family farmers. many of the producers’ grandparents cultivated their crops in an agroecological manner, but their parents’ generation grew up working in the fields using genetically modified soy and glyphosate. old traditions of observing nature and caring for it have been lost along the way. those who practice agroecology today are in the minorit, and they are seen as troublemakers who produce without using “remedies.” at the course taught by the agroecological engineer they can speak among peers without being regarded with suspicion or contempt. estelita says: before, no one talked about this. i heard about chemicals and i accepted it and didn’t use them. here, as an adult [she is 30 years old], i learned that they also use chemicals on the lettuce. now if i eat something i haven’t produced myself, i eat it with distrust. this course has left a mark on me. it makes everything go click. the idea of eating with distrust will have an influence on estelita’s nutritional choices, for example, when she feeds her son. the course will also make her reconsider what happened during the pregnancy of her cousin pablo’s wife, who had a miscarriage.10 estelita now suspects that the fetus did not survive due to the glyphosate spraying that took place where they lived. this causes her pain and she fears for her son. the distrust, disgust and fear of nonagroecological products felt by estelita and her companions are part of a new 10pablo worked as a farm laborer on the same ranch where estelita lived. however, unlike his cousin, pablo sprayed hundreds of hectares of soybean with the herbicides that the managing engineer sent him to buy. as a teenager, he was strong and had a promising future as the lead goal scorer for the local soccer team. he dropped out of school at about the age of 15 because he was going to be a father for the first time; he got a job as a rural employee to be able to start earning money to support his family. since then, his spirit has begun to drain: he had something similar to asthma and suffers constant skin rashes. his future son never arrived, because pablo’s girlfriend, who was already living with him on the ranch, lost the baby when she was five months pregnant. rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 195 moral universe. a new world of senses and sensations that opened to them upon receiving this information is the source of their agency based on care. so far i have given a brief overview of some of the moments in which agroecological horticulture has been promoted and produced: the call to action; selling at the market; and the agroecological training. we shall now see how the three types of broad-spectrum care practices that were analytically developed are intertwined in these moments. broad-spectrum care practices the practices that have been ethnographically analyzed are broad-spectrum care practices, meaning practices that are carried out not only within the home. this idea is taken from tronto’s (1993, p. 103) notion of care, which states that care is a set of social activities that include everything we do to conserve, continue or repair the world so that we can live in it in the best possible way. this includes one’s own body, one’s own self, and the environment. from this perspective, three types of broad-spectrum care practices and work are analytically proposed: child care practices and work, global care practices and work, and green care practices and work. estelita and her care for children in analyzing the promotion and production of agroecological horticulture, it becomes clear that the practices and work of caring for one’s children are a primary motivation for participation. initially, one may think that carrying out this type of care simply responds to the traditional place that women have occupied in most sexual divisions of labor. and, in part, this is true. however, it can be argued that it is precisely from this traditional division – where gendered beliefs present mothers as the best and most “natural” caregivers – that these women gain agency and the power to change or attempt to change the state of affairs in their society. let us return, by way of example, to the story of estelita, the market gardener. part of her activity as a small horticultural producer is related to inspiring her six-year-old son, jeremias. he goes with her to the bi-monthly coordination meetings and walks around his mother’s stall, playing with other little ones while the women sell their goods in la laguna’s central square. the most important activity happens at estelita’s vegetable garden, which is located inside and outside of the greenhouse she erected in the back garden of her house, thanks to her work and with materials provided by the government. her house is located on the ranch where her husband is employed; in other words, she produces her crops, like most of the market gardeners, on land that is not her own. johana kunin studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 196 jeremías “sees a seed and wants to plant it,” says his mother proudly. that is why estelita prepared a small plot for him to learn how to grow vegetables and herbs. she gets excited when she explains that she wants to generate in him a “fanaticism for the farm.” she says that if she works her garden and sells her produce, “her son will do it too.” estelita wants jeremias to have a “garden mentality,”11 so that when he grows up, he does not have to work as a groundskeeper like his father, and can have an enterprise of his own far removed from any contact with chemicals. estelita and her husband dream of owning their own land someday, leaving their jobs and dedicating themselves to horticulture on a larger scale. they do not yet know how they will do it. estelita’s participation in the market has generated an economic supplement to her and her husband’s activities, but her main objective is to teach her son about the world of gardening through daily learning opportunities that will provide him with employment and economic alternatives in a rural world that is increasingly concentrated and exclusionary. childhood “fanaticism,” as estelita calls it, is for her both proof and the result of caring for the child’s future. a garden mentality implies doing something in spite of the general social stigma that “having a garden is for the poor.” in fact, very few people in la laguna grow food for themselves or for others on a small scale. those living in rural areas are surrounded by wheat, corn and especially soybean crops that are grown for the export market. for their own daily diet, they purchase supermarket lettuce and tomatoes that are produced in other regions with the use of agrochemicals. thus, having a garden mentality goes against the grain, as does using your hands to make food for yourself or others, and growing crops in an alternative way. this is caring and taking care of oneself. from this story we can understand care as a formative experience: disseminating practical knowledge transmitted from generation to generation as a condition for the autonomy and shaping of subjects (in this case children) capable of self-sustainability. estelita’s agency is expressed in how she explicitly values her knowledge and how she transmits it to her son through what lave and wenger (2001) call the “community of practice.” in estelita’s opinion, knowledge about agroecological horticulture will allow jeremias to have a better life than she and her husband, even though she recognizes that having a future in the countryside is very uncertain for her son. estelita’s supposedly domestic practices are without a doubt public and political practices in the broadest sense: she feeds her son and others in a healthy way, and from the heart of her home she educates her own family. the cultivation of vegetables is a form of agency that actively combats the food, training and labor inequality that are hallmarks of contemporary soybean farming, where profits are accumulated by the few. personal gardens are also political and public gardens loaded with collective meaning even though – or 11by this she means to give priority to horticulture and to work seriously to flourish in the activity. rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 197 precisely because – as segato (2016, p. 114) says, they fall outside the “totalitarianism of the public sphere.” in the same respect, federici points out that when you produce food for yourself, for your own survival, for subsistence, you are producing and reproducing at the same time (federici, interviewed in navarro & linsata, 2014). the separation between production and reproduction occurs only in a market economy. federici stresses that there are territorial logics, such as those that exist in la laguna, where production and reproduction are not separate. the argument of this paper is in line with feminist research that deconstructs the tradition of analyzing the patriarchy as a system of separate spheres. in line with molinier’s (2013) arguments, this paper recognizes that family as an institution is political, and therefore is both a producer and (re)producer of differential subjugations in accordance with the relative position of inclusion or marginalization of an individual. significantly, due to its political nature, the family is a potential and crucial space for the resistance and ethical subjectivation of its members. marina: global care practices through the creation of spaces global care work and practices imply the power to socially transform the territorial space of the district’s countryside and its marginalized populations which, through care, acquire greater public and political attention.12 marina, the agricultural engineer and rural teacher, develops her agency through “creating a space” in the main square of the district capital of la laguna. together with her companions, she succeeded in having the women gardeners’ market held every two weeks. the owner of a chain of greengrocers and several notable neighbors complained to the municipality that selling produce at a “social price” (that is, cheaper than the greengrocer) was not an appropriate activity for the most important square in the city. marina and her companions confronted these opinions by presenting letters containing several dozen signatures in support of their efforts, and speaking with the city council and several officials. the municipality also tried to make the market share their location with another market, the feria franca or artisan’s fair, which takes place in the same square on weekend afternoons. to prevent this from occurring, marina and her colleagues had to explain to the municipality that agroecological produce cannot be sold in the middle of the afternoon, because the market gardeners harvest their crops the night before market day, or even early in the morning on the day of the market. after harvesting, they have to transport their products from the fields to the main square. the production would spoil if it was harvested under the midday sun or at siesta time. the municipal secretary of production did not understand that changing the time of 12 by global care i mean territorial or community care. i call it “global” as it is a broad spectrum care performed outside women’s homes, when they look after impoverished or marginalized communities as a whole, that is to say “globally.” johana kunin studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 198 the market would affect the market gardeners in all of these ways. marina and her colleagues had to explain the logic that governs the agricultural work of small agroecological horticulture, as part of her global care for the workers and to protect them from the changes the municipality wanted to make. agency based on global care often involves taking actions in a timely manner, not only in terms of doing, but also in terms of preventing. through their promotion of agroecological horticulture, marina and her companions want families to continue living in the countryside and to confront the soybean model that is driving them out. they believe that the will of women to act is fundamental to this occurring, as women are the ones that “root” the domestic unit to the rural environment; that is, they are the ones that anchor the family to the countryside, in emotional, cultural and economic ways. in many cases, even if marina and her colleagues denounce the closure of rural schools and criticize the negative consequences of the socioeconomic model of agribusiness, they believe that families move to the periphery of the main city due to the lack of desire and tenacity of the women-mothers of the family group to remain in the rural environment. soy does not bring economic promises or expectations of improvement to families; rather, it closes or fumigates rural schools and it is the protagonist of a production model that results in male workers ending up living on their own at the farms far from their amilies, or with their families in urban outskirts from which they have to commute daily to work. according to marina, in these contexts women’s will guides the decisions regarding where their families reside. in these circumstances, the agentive global care of marina and her companions involves preventing family groups from moving (and the consequential separations of residences) and trying, when possible, to obtain land for farming families, though the latter has not yet been successful. the notion of commitment is crucial to understanding the emic concept of global care as agentive care. in this sense, the use of the coordinators’ domestic spaces to work constitutes a commitment for them. for example, marina receives farmers at her home at 7:00 a.m., while still wearing her pajamas, and without them having made an appointment. they simply knock on her door to tell her that their greenhouse was blown over by last night’s thunderstorm, or they take advantage of a trip to the city for some paperwork to pass by her house and tell her what has happened, or about the things that worry them, or to see if she can help solve their problem. others seek her out because they don’t know how to issue an electronic invoice, or how to register online so that they can pay their taxes and pensions as small rural producers. or they come by because they have to do an online transaction and they do not have a computer or internet access where they live. marina helps with all the necessary arrangements. she is under no formal agreement to give this type of support from her home, where the boundaries between public and private blur. a quick looks at marina’s work day suggests that, like many women throughout the world, she takes on a double or triple burden, working days that are two or three times longer than a typical paid workday. it could be said that rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 199 marina operates in a contxt of labor flexibility, or flex-time, where her workday never ends, as often occurs under contemporary neoliberal working conditions. this is partly true, but not the only explanation. zelizer (2009) shows that there are ties between the economic and emotional spheres of our everyday lives, that human lives encompass a number of different, yet “connected” spheres (p. 26). in the same vein, feminist anthropologists have criticized the separation between the “public” and “private” for decades. micaela, marina and green care work and practices finally, the third type of care studied, which has been analytically defined as “green care practices and work,”13 provides the power of transformation and care for the environment. the dynamics of the group promoting and selling agroecological horticulture fosters two types of green care, one that is pragmatic-emotional and practiced by those who work the land. it involves day-to-day practices and relationships with the humans and non-humans associated with them, where the former humanizes the latter. the other type of green care is the ideological-intensive care exercised by those who organize or promote information or awareness-raising activities, but who do not personally get their hands dirty. let us first examine and analyze the pragmatic-emotional group of green care practices and work exercised by the women market gardeners. micaela is a small agroecological market gardener from a town of 2,000 inhabitants in the same district. she often posts photos of her lettuce and tomatoes on her social media, as if they were photos of her children. on her social media and whatsapp groups, she posted one photo that was extremely striking; it showed her holding a 6-kilogram squash as if it were a baby. the sheer size and weight of her vegetables make her proud, and she posts about them as often as she can. micaela does not spray pesticides and she fights pests using natural formulas, which involves a lot of manual work based on daily observation and patience. this kind of dedication deepens the emotional relationship between producers, their vegetables, and the land. that is why micaela sometimes feels like crying when she sees her garden empty. it is not easy for her to transform her intimate possessions into merchandise: “it is hard for me to cut the lettuce i harvest [to sell]. it makes me very sad to see my row of crops empty [after harvesting and selling at the market].” despite her sense of unease, micaela is encouraged when she cultivates relationships with the customers at the market. receiving the recognition and gratitude of those who consume her vegetables for their healthy qualities also comforts her and makes her proud: 13although it is denominated here as “green care,” this does not refer to the practice of “greenwashing,” a term used to refer to the practices of some companies wherein they present a product or proposal as being environmentally friendly, even though it is not. johana kunin studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 200 a customer asked me how to know whether they are buying [something] healthy. ‘i will show you,’ i said. and i showed her the holes in the lettuce. ‘if it didn’t have any holes, it wouldn’t be healthy,’ i said. and the next week she asked me for lettuce with holes in it. (micaela) the holes are a sign that the vegetable has not been sprayed with chemicals, because it has been attacked by small pests. this reverses the hegemonic reasoning that leads one to believe that the most “beautiful” vegetables and fruits are the brightest, most perfect, or uniformly colored. for micaela and her customers the “ugliest” fruits and vegetables – the ones with the most holes – are healthiest, the tastiest; holes and good taste are evidence of the naturalness of the production process. the aesthetics and appearance of the horticultural products are of great importance in the agroecological world; evaluating these conditions implies a moral criterion and agency related to green care. let us now turn to ideological-intensive green care, looking at the case of marina, the rural teacher and coordinator of the market gardeners’ initiative. marina began to bring up the issue of the dangers of pesticides and the advantages of agroecological producton in the teachers’ room at the rural school, and at the school council meetings between teachers and parents. for the majority, marina is a “crazy woman” and they fail to see any reason to criticize the “countryside that provides work.” however, marina takes care of this by using her teaching modules for “rural development” to promote the market, and by organizing the training course for the market gardeners at the school. marina and micaela’s agentive care gives them the power, or at least the will, to transform the environment in la laguna. however, unlike other women’s social organizations in latin america today – many of which are led by indigenous women – the leaders of this project do not engage in nor identify directly with ecofeminist language (mies & shiva, 1993; plumwood, 1993), which usually relates the gender oppression of women to the oppression of nature. nor do they identify with other movements that fight for the land, such as those resisting capitalist extractivism (gago, 2017; navarro & linsata, 2014; ulloa, 2016). as reiterated throughout this paper, it is from within and even through taking advantage of patriarchal structures that women like marina and micaela promote care practices to improve their world. through what i term the power of care, women increase their agency, working for and with their family, on the fields, their communities, and the environment. conclusion views that point to care practices and work as being mere oppressions neither represent nor understand the emic points of view of all women. these practices, which are supposedly domestic, can also be public and political practices. production and reproduction can take place in spaces that are not rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 201 clearly differentiated. so-called domestic spaces can be powerful and crucial spaces for the resistance and ethical subjectivation of their inhabitants. in this specific case, a feminism that is not intersectional will not be capable of understanding the perspectives of rural migrants that are displaced by soybean production, nor the perspectives of some of the middle-class women of la laguna who return from experiences in metropolitan areas with the desire to care for marginalized neighborhoods, the countryside and the environment. this paper thus shows a dynamic that is at times triangular, which is often presented as purely dichotomous. on the one hand, there is the hypermodernizing agribusiness paradigm, which displaces those who live in the countryside. on the other hand, there is the alter-modernizing paradigm of the many coordinators who want the displaced to become “ecologicalideological.” but there is a third vertex, the paradigm of the desires, logics and possibilities of the inhabitants of the countryside: in this case the agroecological market gardeners. there are points of contact between the three; they are not irreconcilable options. the third alternative seems to imply other positions beyond the first two dichotomous ones that the local conservative and liberal classes usually hold. we must account for the gray areas between these seemingly contrary and irreconcilable perspectives. in the same way, there is an apparent form of reproduction (care performed by women or feminized subjects) that is not contradictory to social change, even if it is not a subversive, revolutionary or structural change. i have aligned my work with postcolonial feminist literature to seek explanations for the existence of women’s collective actions, at times seemingly contrary to the assumptions of some feminisms. as suárez navas (2008) explains, “behaviors that reproduce and even fuel the subordination of women have been explained either as false consciousness, or as a search for women’s own spaces, from which cultural practices are subverted in a feminine key” (p. 57). here, the analytical approach to the three types of care studied and their related agency is linked to the latter view, without failing to recognize the emancipatory possibilities that feminist discourses have opened up for many women in the region, or the oppression suffered by women and feminized and dissident identities. references abu-lughod, l. 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(1990). domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. yale university press. rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 185-203, 2023 203 segato, r. (2016). la guerra contra las mujeres. traficantes de sueños. sewell jr., w. (1992). a theory of structure: duality, agency, and transformation. american journal of sociology, 98 (1), 1-29. suárez navaz, l. (2008). colonialismo, gobernabilidad y feminismos poscoloniales. in l. suárez navaz & r. hernández castillo (eds.), descolonizando el feminismo: teorías y prácticas desde los márgenes (pp. 31-74). cátedra. tarducci, m., & d. rifkin, d. (2010). fragmentos de historia del feminismo en argentina. in s. chaher & s. santoro (eds.), las palabras tienen sexo ii: herramientas para un periodismo de género (17-39). comunicación ediciones. trebisacce, c. (2013). memorias del feminismo de la ciudad de buenos aires en la primera mitad de la década del setenta. tesis presentada con el fin de cumplimentar con los requisitos finales para la obtención del título doctor en antropología. universidad de buenos aires, facultad de filosofía y letras. tronto, j. (1993) moral boundaries. a political argument for an ethic of care. routledge. ulloa, a. (2016). cuidado y defensa de los territorios-naturalezas: mujeres indígenas y soberanía alimentaria en colombia. sustentabilidad desde abajo: luchas desde el género y la etnicidad. lateinamerika-institut der freien universität berlin. vázquez laba, v., & masson, l. (2019). que pensamos sobre la agenda feminista. anfibia. zelizer, v. (2009). la negociación de la intimidad. fce. studies in social justice volume 3, issue 1, 39-66, 2009 correspondence address: daniel o'connor, department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology, university of windsor, 401 sunset avenue, windsor, on n9b 3p4, canada. tel: +1 519 253-3000, email: doconnor@uwindsor.ca willem de lint, department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology, university of windsor, 401 sunset avenue, windsor, on n9b 3p4, canada. tel: +1 519 253-3000, email: delint@uwindsor.ca issn: 1911-4788 frontier government: the folding of the canada-us border daniel o'connor and willem de lint1 department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology, university of windsor abstract in this paper the border is evaluated as a fold of power relations in which sovereign capacity and competence is marshalled alongside strategies of control, surveillance, and risk management to constitute, what we call, a zone of frontier government. we advance the argument that the border is a site for both negative and positive power, for insertion and subtraction, and that the assemblage of surveillance and compliance regimes are “run” not so much in the furtherance of a precautionary or pre-emptive end-state, but as intermediate values that are sufficiently malleable by an invigorated sovereign, expressed in the residue of discretion in and between the many border agencies. our analysis is based on extensive policy and program documents, as well as twenty-five interviews with officials in various agencies engaged in the us-canada and, particularly, the windsor-detroit corridor. introduction in recent literature,2 certainly, there is much to lend initial support to this view. there has been a transformation in the practice of liberal governance where officials, policy an argument is put forward that neoliberal societies are obsessed with uncertainty and have shifted their policies and practices to align with a precautionary logic. this precautionary logic involves the avoidance of steps that create a risk or harm, even to the extent of avoiding steps that are part of the legal obligations of the state. this uncertainty and obsession is said to derive from an age of catastrophe where certain generalized “facts” of the social world, and interactions of individuals, populations, and governments, create new forms of risk and therefore stimulate new risk avoidance strategies. for beck (2006) “the logic of compensation breaks down and is replaced by the principle of precaution through prevention” (p. 334). an “insurance-based society” overcomes the challenge to its postulates (attributing threat to an “objective value or price”), represented by events such as 9/11, by lurching toward precautionary, pre-emptive, or “pre-crime” strategies (see hebenton & seddon, 2009; zedner, 2009). mailto:delint@uwindsor.ca� 40 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 bureaucrats, and experts have been challenged to respond to all sorts of “dangers” or “threats,” not just those thought to be catastrophic or existential. as andreas (2003) summarizes, the north american border environment, characterized by a “cyclical pattern of policy priorities” between security and economy, has been reset. he argues that the post-9/11 policy is predicated not on the “traditional concern of interstate military conflict, but rather terrorism,” and this creates “an awkward policy dilemma” because it requires “squeezing the arteries” of a highly integrated and interdependent economy “to filter out the bad from the good” (andreas, 2003, p. 19). but while there is little doubt that the border is being transformed and the change draws from this discourse of terrorism, this is not to accept that the difference represented in the predicate of “new dangers” is the prior, necessary, or sufficient “objective fact” of such a transformation. there has been a shift in emphasis that has made the border zone more than a sieve for tariffs or taxes on trade and a checkpoint for passports and visas. bordering practice is also less like an arterial squeeze (on mobility processes including the mobility of goods, migrants, tourists, financial resources) and more like an arterial hardening associated with the extension of the logics and practices of the frontier and the pioneering of new governance strategies within these frontier zones. newness or difference of risk and the necessity of precaution at times of existential uncertainty is how decision-making is framed by policymakers and practitioners. however, the predicate is a more continuous or durable feature of liberal governance: a constant need to innovate and enhance the sovereign agent in the capacity to act. the alternative view begins with the notion that the border is a marker of sovereign limit as this is expressed or shaped deploying the existential predicate (fear of the death of the sovereign). according to schmitt (1932/1979), deciding the exception is a capacity of a competent sovereign. in order to maintain the capacity to make competent decisions agents seek to advance opportunities where they can and with the tools and technologies that they are uniquely positioned to exploit. competence, being “absolute and independent of the correctness of its content” (p. 15), may not be derogated and audited for particular types of decisions. accordingly, leading agents and agencies maintain the scope of what they do by deploying, attributing, and utilizing tools, processes, and practices that conserve both imperative and discretion. the reading should not be that this is a response to the march of independent phenomena like a new catastrophic risk, a new kind of threat (global terrorism), a new insecurity, or a new way of thinking. on the contrary and to put it squarely in schmittian terms, “a philosophy of concrete life” will always be interested in the exception (p. 15), interested in avoiding the division of executive competency and in maintaining decision-making that is “absolute and independent of content.” sovereign exceptionalism and liberal risk management are combined to affect an unfolding of the border in new frontier zones. frontier zones function as technologies of governance that involve territorializing formations and knowledge functions in the sovereign aim of securing the exception. unlike those liberal processes that secure against “known” risks (typically the task of welfare professionals), securing the exception requires that conditions are established and maintained so that the exception may materialize in space and time (to designate indices of suspicion or “out of place or time events.” as such, frontier zones serve to frontier government 41 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 reproduce sovereign capacity (to decide the exception and mark the exclusion through material formations) and develop sovereign competence (as exclusive knowledge through the enfolding of information from various sources). once again, the enfolding of liberal risk rationalities (or precaution) into border processes may be understood in terms of border advancement initiatives that are aimed at reproducing sovereign significance as that which is given without being known, and therefore as managing “unknown risks” and “unspecified threats.” through risk rationalities, sovereignty both survives and surpasses the “correctness of contents.” reaffirming both its excess signifying power and capacity to decide the exception, risk affords sovereignty a new way of evaluating the border and managing its limits. this paper is organized as follows. first, we present a way of thinking about the site of the border as an ambiguous and bi-directional fold of sovereignty. next, we briefly describe the border as a site in which multiple agencies assemble as capacities and competencies in insertion and extraction activities, organized in terms of electronic manifests, frontier zones (of detection and ambiguity), and intelligenceproduced “lookouts.” this activity does indeed find “organization” by reference to the precautionary approach. we then examine three “cases” that illustrate that capacity and reach of border agencies in a “border assembly” is accomplished for the maintenance of a sovereign reservoir and against a concrete or substantive “quotient” of insecurity. the paper draws from interviews with officials in various private and public sector agencies about their role in “servicing the border”3 and policy and archival data related to bordering activities. this information was collected between 2003 and 2008. assembling ambiguous sovereignty governmental efforts have long presupposed the capacity or necessity to finesse asymmetrical advantages within fields of visibility and knowledge.4 as forcefully argued by schmitt (1932/1979), deciding the exception is a capacity that is attributed to the competent sovereign. if sovereignty has exception as its primary function or reference point asymmetrical visibilities are ubiquitous in surveillance for security and are often regarded as an everyday necessity in the face of crime, disorder, and other potential threats, and therefore seem less “political” in character. yet events (for example, normalized high crime rates [garland, 1996]) do not, in themselves, dictate particular responses; instead they rely on discursive strategies to turn them into security issues (neal, 2006). threat, danger, necessity, and security are central figures in the discourses of exceptionalism; they evoke a form of legitimacy that is deep and more profound, a pre-law for the norms associated with social life and civil society (neal, 2006, p. 39). because these figures are associated with the governance of exchange relations (trade) and economic life generally, the discourse of “risk” also gains legitimacy by lending to the practices of exception. 5 and acts on the organization of life through exceptional treatment, what is of concern is how the exception is constituted through the stratification of what can be said (through discourse or information) and what can be seen (the formation and organization of matter), and through their integration as qualified substance/subjects (such as authorizing authorities and making subjects and places receptive to interventions) (deleuze & guattari, 1987, p. 66-67). at the same 42 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 time, however, sovereignty is a function of limits; 6 it is constituted as a bounded enterprise expanding and contracting through the deployment of distinctions, established through limited relations to other sovereign projects (in order to promote prosperity or ward off anarchy-war). the “limited sovereign” enabled the social to emerge as a domain of government by means other than sovereign power (wickham, 2008), but it also establishes a margin where multiple forms of government (sovereign, surveillance/discipline, risk, and control7 distinctions between politics and security often appear less clear at the margins of liberal thought, most notably where liberalism rubs up against its externalities. at this limit, the idea of the liberal sovereign as a representation of a unified “general will” or as invested with the strength and capacity for deciding the exception comes up against those liberal instruments that champion process or decision-making over decisionism, or the view that in politics the final say is not subject to law or rule but is “wholly original to the power in question” (lazar, 2006, p. 257). the liberal margin discloses a tension between the norms (legal, social, and technical) associated with the everyday frame of life and the need for decisive action when the limits of the everyday have been surpassed (dean, 2007, p. 185). but it also establishes sites where the disparate logics of “risk” and “threat” form conjunctions. sovereign capacity or competence is most thick at the cross-section or borderlands or where the challenge to that capacity or competence provides an opportunity, a “nomos of the political space”, for sovereign spectacles or “rehearsals” (chappell, 2006). ) meet and intermingle. 8 within liberal domains the shaping and limiting of sovereignty has long bound knowledge (as actionable information) and power in a relationship of reciprocal presupposition (wickham, 2008). as dependent both on limits and the breaking of those limits, the liberal-sovereign establishes a knowledge protectorate through exceptions on collection and dissemination standards: it creates a value of “national security” knowledge by feeding it through the prism of intelligence and risk management, including the strategic appropriation of the protected knowledge of others. if sovereign power is about finessing limits within an absolute system of reference, then it need not refer to a single source or location, nor does the system of reference refer to an original distinction ([state of] nature-culture), though this is often (nostalgically) claimed as its legacy. sovereignty may be found in nonsubjective intentionality or in a multiplicity (network) of delegated authorities linked by the limits of their decision-making. in these marginal sites, the negative, subtractive powers of sovereignty come into contact with the more productive powers of contemporary society (see dean, 2007, p. 157). consequently, a fold is a margin or threshold where liberal and illiberal governance strategies intermingle; it can warp space-time, become more or less porous, more or less thick (through unfolding), and it can enfold or weave together mundane and other forms of government. the border is a site of the folding of liberal and illiberal government, the unfolding of frontier zones, and the enfolding of risk logics within the discourses of threat and (national) security. there are a number of instruments or methods that are deployed to effect the threshold function at such borderlands. they include the multiplication of forces, the reversal of accountabilities, and generally the monopolization of knowledge resources or politically actionable information. in the absence of counterforces, such breaching gambits lead inexorably to the normalization of exception or frontier government 43 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 the diffusion of border agency everywhere. unfolding the border . . . for decades literally, canada was very proud of maintaining a special relationship with the us, in terms of our trading relationships and in terms of how the border was operated. we considered ourselves to be exceptional. if the u.s. administration was pursuing security policy, the canada-us line was often times exempt from these. however, since 9/11, it has been very clear to us that the security policies that the us is pursuing would be applied to the canada-us land border and canadian citizens also. (senior canadian government transport official) the canada-us border spans 6,416 km between the atlantic and pacific and another 2,475 km between the pacific and arctic oceans. every minute, over $1 million of goods cross this boundary which total $500 billion in annual two-way trade. of this, 62% of canada-us trade, 80% of canadian imports and $1.5 billion worth of goods is hauled by an average frequency of 16,149 truck crossings per day (u.s. department of transportation [dot], 2008). of this share, the windsor-detroit international trade corridor is the busiest. in 2008, 9,651,136 vehicles, including 2,297,445 transport trucks (accounting for 39% of all truck trade between canada and the us) and 7,306,627 passenger vehicles travelled between canada and the us through the windsor-detroit corridor (dot, 2008). trade of this enormity has been a constant pressure on sovereign relations between canada and the us. as early as 1962, george grant predicted the death of canadian sovereignty with canada’s “social and economic blending into [the american] empire” (aiken, 2007, p. 182).9 however, even after the collapse of communism and the spiking of global trade in the 1990s and 2000s (including a progressive rise in economic integration between 1989 and 2002), social, political and economic forces have failed to pull canada and the us into a regional political union. despite the load on infrastructure with the adoption of just-in-time delivery by the automobile sector, including its reliance on a network of supply and assembly plants that spans the border, the transportation security regime was not a significant priority for american and canadian governments until after 9/11. for the us, as flynn (2003, p. 115) puts it, “episodic attention directed at the northern border was primarily centered on efforts to minimize any source of administrative friction that added to the cost and delay of legitimate commerce.” that suited canada, which saw the border with the united states as an opportunity to display deference to the united states through the non-imposition of impediments to american traders and tourists.10 for many american officials, the northern border has been too porous and its security administration too lax, not only post-9/11 where false rumours that the hijackers crossed contributed to delays in re-opening of border crossings, but 2 years previously when canadian officials failed to alert their american counterparts of the summarizing the pre-9/11 condition, szyliowicz (2004, p. 57) concluded that there was a lack of intergovernmental coordination [also referred to policy harmonization and institutionalization of governance, (biersteker, 2003, p. 154)], and a dominance of law enforcement and technology rather than security and intelligence under a systems or network approach. 44 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 movement across the border of the osama bin laden-linked algerian terrorist ahmed ressam. 11 although the policy environment included voices calling for a more straightforward militarization of the border or a common north american security perimeter, these options were deemed politically and institutionally unfeasible. instead, following earlier initiatives to improve interoperability between law enforcement,12 the current regime was built on proposals that developed out of a congressional commission report (u.s. commission on national security/21st century [hart–rudman report], 200113) that made agency coordination and information sharing the top shelf policy agenda.14 under the terms of the smart border and the emerging canada-us policy generally, multiple “compliance” steps were to be required from those wishing to make, or make good on, border crossings. those wishing to take themselves or their goods across the border would be evaluated on their readiness with information provided in advance and on the measures they took to ensure the chain of custody. in particular, the declaration called for sharing on advance passenger information, the development of secure identification cards with biometric identifiers, the reinstitution of nexus or equivalent (a fast lane for frequent crossers), a mechanism to transition commercial goods shipment from “load and go” to advance electronic manifests, a system of container seals and assurances, a system for sharing information on oceangoing container shipments arriving in either country, a plan to allow customs officers from either country to be posted in the other, and finally, a mechanism to bring intelligence instruments and agencies to bear on the targeting and discovery of suspicious cargo. the contours were set in october and november 2001, when negotiations between canadian deputy prime minister john manley and homeland security director tom ridge resulted in the signing of the canada-us smart border declaration (in december 2001). following the declaration, a 32-point implementation plan for “strengthening the border” began the process of policy harmonization in accordance with common security and trade agendas. while canada publicly promoted its security autonomy, plans for security interoperability followed the pattern of negotiations on economic integration: instead of institutional harmonization (a policy that could not be accepted in canada), interoperability was to be gained at a much lower register: information-sharing, intelligence co-production, and agency cross-fertilization. prodded by scathing reports on information sharing by a variety of public commissions and auditors (9/11 commission, auditor general, etc.) canadian and american officials developed border security instruments on the idea that the circulation of security information is prefatory to identity and sovereignty. secondly, while it was impossible to create governance, let alone law enforcement, customs or military agencies that followed the european perimeter model, the post-9/11 environment provided ample opportunity to innovate on the circulation of personnel within a common north american territory. thirdly, intelligence-sharing and risk prevention (with previously-elaborated neoliberal responsibilization caveats on trans-border commerce and tourism) offered a basis to the post-9/11 rhetoric. if “danger” and “enemies” were now also intrinsic to the flows of people and goods, they would be countered by a mix of law enforcement operations and national security instruments. furthermore, if risk prevention, intelligence-sharing, and the individual duty to frontier government 45 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 provide information in exchange for mobility rights provided a reasonable operating logic, so too did rootedness to constitutional protections on one hand and the distinction of sovereignty as a property of the nation-state on the other become less fungible. in the meantime differences could be referenced by display on uniform insignia as “fusion teams” were struck cross-nationally and cross-sectorally. these measures enfold private producers and carriers into new “secure” relations under a regime of advance information delivery. enfolding the flow as noted by aradau and van munster (2009, p. 10), there is a confluence of thinking among academic experts spanning international relations and criminology, and policymakers spanning domestic and foreign portfolios, that has pushed “catastrophic imaginaries” and attached these to “precautionary risk,” which in turn has brought forward the institutionalization of exception in liberal states. the precautionary element configures and launches risk from the vaulted position of the existential claim (avoiding catastrophe). this “radical contingency of the future” “brings the exceptional within governmental processes.”15 the border is comprised of an array of agencies precautionary risk management, consequently, is the installation of a “politics of zero risks based on imaginations of worst-case scenarios” (p. 11). 16 that produce intelligence (or actionable political knowledge) in the maintenance or enhancement of sovereign competence and capacity. border agencies and agents seek to order and make interoperable information that is actionable and do so deploying the discursive array of risk and precaution. in this section, we review precautionary programs and also the division of the border by risk prevention into zones of inspection and detection. fronting precaution under the previous “load and go” regime, commerce and travel between canada and the us was understood in the context of the “open” and “undefended” border. inspections were completed on-site without advance information and secondary inspections did not sort and differentiate business and pleasure travel prior to arrival. it permitted a practice “whereby drivers could simply load, pick up their paperwork, and show up at the border unannounced” (transport canada, 2005). in the domain of marine security and container security prior to december 2, 2002, the us only required that a manifest be on board the vessel. today, border agencies have been reconfigured through precautionary programs. canada-us border security rules require that carriers submit their “paper work” in advance of arriving at the border. this is achieved through a number of complementary initiatives. under the advanced electronic presentation of cargo information (aepci) of the u.s. trade act, pre-arrival information has become mandatory (i.e., one hour) before trucks arrive17 at the u.s. border.18 the key process of pre-arrival information acquisition and analysis is paps (selectivity pre-arrival processing system). paps is a u.s. customs and border protection (cbp) border program that utilizes electronic information and barcode technology to expedite the release of commercial 46 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 shipments. it provides importers or shippers a module to electronically transmit summary data elements to the cbp via customs brokers. in addition, under the 24 hour advance vessel manifest rule of the customs trade partnership against terrorism (c-tpat), detailed manifests are required to be provided to u.s. customs 24 hours before loading at a foreign port. the container security initiative, developed shortly after 9/11, requires pre-screening of high risk containers before they are loaded and subjecting containers to gamma rays and x-rays).19 the canadian counterpart to aepci is the advance commercial information (aci) program and emanifest. 20 according to cbsa policy documents, aci is a risk management process coupled with “tools to identify threats to our health, safety, and security prior to the arrival of cargo and conveyances in canada.”21 the emanifest is an electronic transmission of advance cargo and conveyance information from carriers and advance secondary data from freight forwarders and importers (or their brokers) for all highway and rail shipments. under emanifest rules, information (formerly “paperwork”) must arrive at the border in advance of persons and matter. its effect is that the border process is doubly encoded and stratified. 22 the cbsa has also developed the partners in protection (pip) program. this aims to enlist “the cooperation of private industry to enhance border and trade chain security, combat organized crime and terrorism, and help detect and prevent contraband smuggling” (canada border services agency [cbsa], 2009b). initially developed in 1995 with the purpose of “promoting business awareness and compliance with customs regulations,” the program shifted focus after the events of september 11, 2001, to the supply chain, urging members “to improve their physical, infrastructure, and procedural security” (cbsa, 2009b). since 2002, enrolment in pip is a prerequisite to participate in fast and secure trade (fast), a joint initiative between the cbsa and u.s. customs and border protection that enhances border and supply chain security while expediting legitimate trade across the canada-u.s. border. and as agreed in the smart border declaration, fast programs, ostensibly provide expedited border clearances for preapproved importers, carriers, and drivers (cbsa, 2009b).23 again, participation in pip/fast requires private producers and carriers to supply cbsa with information in the form of a “security profile” every three years. this is to provide the specific “security measures” that they and members of their international supply chain have undertaken. the information obtained by the profile is used to determine their eligibility for membership in pip. security measures are defined as “physical objects, actions, procedures, processes and policies employed as precautions against theft, espionage, sabotage etc.”(cbsa, 2009b) canada has advance notification for air and rail cargo, and has a similar precautionary program for marine security called the prior arrival information system (pais) as well as a bilateral canada-us program called the joint vessel inspection team program (jvit). these programs, according to a senior marine transport officer, require “any ship 96 hours outside of canadian waters” to supply information (such as the goods, the crew, the last 10 ports of call) to the central canadian coast guard stations. according to a senior officer, “we have an extensive overseas network where we have people actually doing screening of good and persons before they come to canada.” frontier government 47 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 division by risk precautionary programs extend the time and space of the border and, thereby, of exceptionalism into the routine of everyday or quotidian practices. weighted by this ballast—a “radical contingency of the future”—liberties or mobility choices must be prescreened and agents and agencies vetted in pre-crime and threat evaluations. in addition to precaution, the space-time of the border is extended through risk divisions in zones of detection and inspection. for instance, not only is canadian border security defined in terms of risk targets, many frontline border agents are referred to as “targeters.”24 targets, and also, it would seem, targeters, are evaluated in terms of hit/miss ratios. preliminary or precautionary systems process data and divide targeting by risk level, through programs like titan™.25 a senior official of cbsa characterized their risk assessment as follows: while the national risk assessment centre (nrac) reviews data for threats to national security (e.g. radioactive materials) regional targeters focus on contraband and other threats. targeters divide risk spatially and temporally. on every shipment, a risk assessment is done on every component of the shipment itself, including; the driver; the importer, which is different sometimes than the actual carrier; the company; the exporter; where it’s coming from; the type of goods that are being transported; the routing. every component is taken into consideration in assessing the risk of the shipment coming in. it is also profiled and cross-checked with other databases. 26 the emanifest system is also accounted for using risk assessment. according to a senior official, when fully implemented, emanifest . . . will take into account: your company history against your past; similar companies importing the same goods; your transportation company and if your transportation company has been involved in incidents with other companies. it will be much more linked and holistic in its analysis and then there will be some kind of scoring and anything over 70 out of 100 gets examined, anything between 50 and 70 gets recommended. zones of detection and inspection the border is enfolded or doubled up through data streams that may be referred to as zones of detection and inspection. zones of detection are inserted27 primary inspection is a means of matching manifests to the “material double” of cargo, truck and driver. it is a check that paperwork related to the material and drivers are in order. it involves a set of screening operations (or looking for indicators) according to a simple binary operation where the presence of indicators variously to stream, disaggregate, and recombine matter and information, applying spatial and temporal ordering regimens. they encompass zones d’attentes, loading zones, and transit zones and have evolved from the template of primary and secondary inspection. 48 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 (some “hard” or non-discretionary, some “soft” and discretionary) will essentially indicate “fail” and where the decision is made to make a referral to secondary inspection. with respect to those “soft” indicators, officers have a great deal of discretion and, according to one official, “officer selections” or “cold hit referrals” from their position in primary inspection booths remains an important zone of detection. we continue to have success with officer selections based on human observation, what we call non-verbal indicators; nervousness; sweaty; lack of eye contact. we continue to have success with dialogue and “this doesn’t look right.” we count on the border officer sitting on a needle in a haystack. that’s how some of our bigger investigations get underway, based on some cold hit, chance encounter. sometimes it’s as simple as a phone number that you find in a car somewhere. that’s relevant, because you can check that number against other criminal groups. sometimes these groups are fairly loosely put together and they don’t even know themselves if they are overlapping. that’s the only way for you to make a link. secondary inspection, also called “enforcement actions,” results from primary inspection referrals and entail further interviews and/or searches, both physical and informational. physically, travellers, drivers, vehicles and cargo may be subject to comprehensive searches using a variety of scanning technology.28 inspection includes non-routine indices. in other words, the information collection includes passive and active knowledge production. innovation on the collection parameters is understood as active production. the cbsa, for example, engages in random searches known as “compliance surveys.” according to an official in the agency, informationally, secondary operations access more data-bases such as interpol and american and canadian criminal records. in addition, they act as screens for further data insertions: “as well, our agency has a lookout sharing initiative where we share lookouts with homeland security and they share their lookouts with us” (senior officer interview). what we do periodically is compliance surveys, where we randomly select, with no cause, shipments for examination. from that we derive a non-compliance ratio. we then test that against what we discover in our normal operations, and then we know how far off we are. that’s a more legitimate test than the “secret shopper events;” these are just contrived and mostly they are probably for the press. they are not really a statistically valid way of testing compliance. because we are measured against the unknown; no one knows how many people we don’t know about. in the commercial environment compliance surveys carried out through random samples adjust the parameters: “we can adjust the random referral rate; our system can generate a system hit so that one in every hundred vehicles be referred [to secondary inspection].” all vehicles are potential subjects of random secondary inspections, including fast shippers and nexus travellers. 29 indeed, contrary to the expectation of nexus travellers, it is systems testing that is prioritized: frontier government 49 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 we probably over-sample our trusted shipper programs because we are a little paranoid about saying this is a trusted traveller. so if you have a nexus card, chances are you are going to be examined more often. in trying to maintain such a high integrity of those programs, the end result is that they don’t actually provide the convenience level. while random examinations are commonplace in both the commercial and traveller (or non-freight) environments, there are occasions where all cars are examined. in a traveller’s environment we do some random sampling, but we also do stints where we try to examine everyone in a certain period . . . . because it gives you a really good picture of threat for a certain date and time. so, on a friday night, if you examined everyone you got over an hour, it will give you a pretty good picture of what your non-compliance is on a typical friday night. the same senior official characterizes the risk and identifies its primary sources: the highest risk of “non-compliance,” as we call it, is with the driver. a single guy, who crosses the border three times a day for [company x] and brings something like auto parts across very routinely, might decide he needs to buy his christmas booze supply, and so he picks up a case of whiskey or whatever. we do find that the drivers are a higher risk than the importers, exporters, or corporate entities . . . . we find a higher noncompliance with certain source countries; we find certain source countries have a very high risk for very high-risk commodities, like drugs and weapons. to summarize, zones of detection are deployed in the service of at least three objectives. first, they are a means of enfolding or re-ordering the flow of material and data for the purposes of discovering and seizing contraband or identifying targets. second, they are a means of evaluating the effectiveness of that “primary” purpose or the relationship between “hits” and “misses.” finally, they are deployed to push out a competent sovereign capacity, including its manifestation as unpredictable action on action. lookouts and bulletins a “watch-for,” “target” or “lookout” refers to the “identification of a person or good to be intercepted based on pre-arrival information” (cbsa, 2008). the interception is the direction to secondary processing and the lookout also stipulates the “level of examination that may be warranted.”30 in most cases the lookout is an electronic entry that resides within a database that directs that a person, vehicle, or shipment of goods is to be held or otherwise further processed at a port of entry. however, the basis of the entry is various. lookout information the cbsa receives comes from law enforcement and intelligence agencies (as well as transport canada) and is generally received in the form of an electronic transfer. it includes but is not limited to suspicions that infractions have been made or are taking place with respect to 50 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 customs, immigration, currency, drugs, and national security laws or regulations. 31 as we noted, lookouts are passed on to border agents at primary and secondary inspection booths and are shared with american counterparts in homeland security in accordance with foreign data-sharing rules and regulations.32 in addition, “lookout indicators” (typically based on the modus operandi of successful hits), provide the logic for “cold hit referrals.” indicators include behavioural cues. a senior official describes how enforcement actions can be transformed into lookouts: let’s say the border officer gets a “cold hit” with no intelligence information [and] we discovered some contraband or some kind of violation. [the officer] can say, based on this: “i think we should look at shipments that have these commonalities.” so an intelligence official can say; “that’s a good idea” and takes the information and creates a lookout based on what the border officer discovered. lookouts are passed to other line officers in the form of intelligence bulletins. as one senior officer stated, “any time there is an enforcement action in our region, we broadcast that to all the other officers to let them know what was found how it was found, what were the indicators. every week we have bulletins that go out.” intelligence bulletins are specific tools that line officers both contribute to and use to make enforcement decisions. the practice is also noted as a driver of (illegal) innovations: once we discover a pattern or mo [i.e., modus operandi method of operating] and we pick off a few shipments, we can almost count on putting ourselves out of business in that particular line of inquiry. they [the perpetrators] figure it out just as fast as we do, that we know enough and that this [particular practice] becomes very dangerous. they have real time information that says: “ok, that’s not working too good anymore, so we need to change that.” and they do. so, i think we drive the change. so long as we don’t discover a particular mo, it will be used, since there is no loss involved. in fact, it is the loss that drives them to become more creative. in this respect, information collection and knowledge production is more or less proactive. intelligence bulletins provide cbsa line officers with information on offence patterns typically used to thwart border regulations. the information is generated and generalized from prior enforcement practices in other zones of detection of the cbsa. all government departments take data from the collected pool. cbsa may say: “what’s the cargo? who is on board?” manifest information is vetted through intelligence liaisons stationed in the marine security operation centers (msocs), including representatives from transport canada, the department of national defence (dnd), rcmp, and other agencies. acting alongside canadian officials at the msocs are american officials that canada has signed bilateral agreements with. a senior official explains this pushing out of the border: frontier government 51 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 what we have in place, in various loading ports around the world, is officers of canada border services agency. for instance, there’s one in south africa, in australia…. in places where containers are loaded for destination to canada, we get that information prior to loading and the officer there will actually screen shipments and say which should or shouldn’t go on, and which, when they are on, are high risk. so, when they arrive, we are going to be looking at them. as we have said, the border is a sovereign fold or a site in which liberal and illiberal practices converge. lookouts are not only a means of re-assembling information and material flows at a given point. they are also a means of inserting or asserting a connection between material and informational flows. the insertion or assertion is accomplished all over the network of agencies in the border security assembly. trolling and tolling is carried out in order to differentiate and prime a target and to provide a preliminary determination of the nature, authorities, and coordination of the countermeasures to the (risk or threat) values.33 at first blush by the accounts of the practitioners themselves, we find confirmation that the principle of precaution is what connects and drives the pushing out of the border. the detection events are driven by the benchmarking of the “dark figure” of non-compliance, the risk sorting and profiling of the temporal environment of the border, and the targeting of high risk mobilities. however, it is also apparent that there are multiple authorities under which collection, registration, and positive insertions are enacted, or to put it in other words, where liberal and illiberal practices are enfolded. these authorities traverse the whole panoply of mandates from the particular and quotidian (e.g. proper refrigeration and packaging, licensing and registration of vehicles) to the existential (the terrorist threat to “national security”). the effect of this production of a zone of detection is also the pushing out of a “zone of ambiguity” 34 or the normalization of a condition in which it is the authorities but not their targets that may or must have a sufficient reservoir of “unknown unknowns.”35 advancing the frontier: assembling authorities the assemblage of border security agencies project a set of priorities, protocols, and practices that affirm both the ambiguity of their purpose and the efficiency of their method.36 expansion follows as other agents or “petty sovereigns” seek the application of a new “governance normal” in arrangements or procedures in novel sites or settings, marking outposts farther from the traditional centre or home base (asserting the transcendence of both risks/threats and the practices used to combat them). given that the state of security is already idealized and prioritized as a means of policy distinguished from, for example, the state of justice (brodeur & shearing, 2005), these apparently contradictory themes find justification, first, in the need to protect actionable knowledge about security, (in intelligence parlance, in maintaining disclosures that are strategic and information that is productive through strict control) and second, in the need to protect the capacity or competence (including the possibility of decisions against the grain) of the sovereign as a security knower. sovereign competency or capacity is expressed by making exceptions at points of contestation. 52 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 expansion is consolidated through further claims to expediency, necessity, value, and mission. however, the harmonization or interoperability of linked agencies (a “security continuum” as per neal, 2009, p. 252) according to an extant ideology or policy discourse follows, but that objective is suspended, dodged, or avoided wherever it draws too near to boxing in the sovereign. ultimately, it is the capacity of sovereignty, the process of security (zedner, 2009) and not the explicit content or ends of a re-clarified sovereign-subject relation that may stand for what harmonizes the assemblage. in sum, the border security assemblage is justified action on action on the basis of the assertion and the detection of out of place or time occurrences, the innovative replication of processes (redundant risk avoidance), and the conversion of common information sources into exclusive knowledge resources. the “handshake” between agencies and the population (as information sources) enables the extrapolation of the assembly and the forging of the new governance normal. expansion is checked through observance of best practices and peer evaluation, which also serves to aid distribution of resources within the assembly. it is also checked through the status of the agency in the information chain and the strategic resources to which the agency has differential access. finally, it is checked by pushback against the adoption of the new practices by extant traditional interests and agents (traditional political power) and retrenchment of rights belonging to traditional liberal subjectivity. avoidance of pushback is essential because successful blockage of an initiative somewhere on the frontier of the assembly may provide countering interests and institutions with a strategy to take against the assembly at other outposts as well as assisting their attempt to reconfigure the resistance to attract greater popular and political support. however, while the replication of arrangements, procedures and protocols into institutional domains is pushed forward to achieve sovereign capacity and competence, there is also a measure of “draw back.” this is because the successful subordination of all issues of social or public policy as security matters (a process called “securitization” – see e.g. neal, 2006, p. 33) would lead to a condition in which security and securitization would be evacuated of meaning (nothing left to distinguish targets, no object or condition of security). what would be the incentive to securitize where there is no object or process (“security” is known as process, see zedner, 2009), nothing left to register, or no “difference with a difference” left to convert? on the contrary, it is important that fears and dangers are continuously (and deliberately) revivified and countermeasures are branded as “new” and “different” and also that structural, procedural, and administrative gaps remain as an objectlesson: securitization will never be complete, but there must nonetheless be a marching on toward completion. political and individual rights claimed by citizens in constitutional democracies certainly present an obstacle, but they also represent a necessary counterweight without which the forces of securitization would lack a teleology or common purpose. example 1: isscs as with other components of the assembly, the cbsa pushes out to position itself as the leading edge and to overcome resistances of traditional institutions. cbsa is frontier government 53 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 positioned to do this perhaps like no other agency because it is already a product of previous expansionary gambits. in particular, it assumes a dual role of police agency and customs and border control agency, with the doubling up of the powers of each of these distinct roles. it has powers of arrest and warrant issuance, the power to detain and operate detention centres, and expansive powers of search and seizure. as one senior cbsa official stated, “we can search randomly; we can search without probable cause; we can search without warrants.” in general, the cbsa has appropriated the coercive authority of a rights-based regime but has avoided being subject to its typical stipulations and accountabilities. the capacity to initiate investigations because things do not appear to “look right” becomes a powerful tool for managing risks or non-compliance. line officers have access to databases that enable them to risk assess someone upon arrival. according to a senior officer, “the officer has the ability to initiate a name query, as well, the licence plates are captured. we rely on officers in the primary line to screen those licence plates and screen the travellers by name through the systems that we have.” an illustration of how these powers have been utilized to advance the frontier as a “zone of ambiguity” is provided in the case monitoring that cbsa was empowered to do of individuals subject to security certificates, or isscs. after the security certificate procedure was declared unconstitutional by the supreme court in february 2007, the cbsa was charged to oversee the court-imposed restrictions of house arrest on four issc men released from prison, including gps monitoring by electronic bracelet, taps on their phones, monitoring of all incoming and outgoing communications, cctv monitoring outside their houses, random searches and seizures by government agents, and trips outside the house (allowed only with cbsa escorts). the cbsa handled this role by creating a tripwire for a wider regime of out of place or time occurrences. for example, it requires that a trip to the grocery store by the arrestee be preceded by notice 72 hours before the event. it also produced a manual for use by cbsa officers, “security certificate case monitoring,” which pushes the displacement of the rights-based regime. one of the subheadings reads: “there is no zero risk situation.” it defines risk broadly as “the chance that something bad will occur.” it instructs officers to be “on the lookout” for any behaviour or action that might constitute “a threat to national security” and asks officers to assess whether “the surrounding area pose(s) a risk to national security in any way.” the purpose of the manual is clear: it is intended to discipline cbsa officers to a perspective that there is widespread opportunity for action in the expanded frontier. the cbsa also innovated on the replication of security processes. the issc supervisors are those persons who have been “responsibilized” to vouch for the issc. in the diametric opposite of the legal protection against forcing inculpatory spousal testimony, family members become “supervisors” whose duty to the security regime is so onerous that one of the wives asked that her husband be returned to prison in order to rescue her children the intensive and extensive interference with the most basic quotidian events. finally, the cbsa innovated on the collection or reach of the assembly by producing exclusive knowledge resources. for example, the cbsa conducts “integrity checks” on issc “supervisors”. the cbsa manual also recommends that officers extend the surveillance beyond the isscs to their “associates” and that it use 54 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 the regime to find “additional targets.” the manual states that “even when a breach of condition is not apparent, the information may be beneficial for intelligence purposes.” also: “where possible, monitoring officers should attempt to gather intelligence for use by headquarters, the regions and other government departments.” example 2: shiprider, community watch while bringing multiple authorities to bear under one program is one gambit in advancing and maintaining sovereign capacity and competence, another is the bringing together of multiple agencies under a single task, project, or objective. a leading example of this is are integrated border enforcement teams (ibets), comprised of five partner agencies, cbsa, rcmp, u.s. ice (immigration and customs enforcement), u.s. coast guard, and u.s. border patrol. ibets are “force multipliers.” because cbsa has customs authorities of search and seizure (warrantless searches) that the rcmp does not enjoy, and the rcmp has some authorities (specifically in their range beyond the border) that do not belong to the cbsa, a team of both of these acting as one on out of place or time occurrences is far superior to each agency acting singly. this multiplication of authorities is even more powerful when it involves transnational partnerships and intelligence linkages. with respect to transnational partnerships, an innovation that is awaiting a full rollout is transborder law enforcement authority. in 2007, a two month pilot program called shiprider gave canadian law enforcement officers the authority to make arrests in u.s. territory and u.s. law enforcement officers the authority to make arrests in canada. in october, 2007, on the st. lawrence river, a boat carrying a u.s. coast guard officer and an rcmp officer apprehended a vessel heading toward canadian waters and seized 47 kg of marijuana and made arrests of the smugglers. (kieserman, 2008) with respect to intelligence, the ibets overcome some of the restrictions on information flows that are established to prevent “fishing expeditions” because they each are in attendance at the occurrence that one of the agencies has the authority to investigate. in addition, the ibets are connected through joint intelligence groups (jigs) with all the significant intelligence and law enforcement agencies with whom they meet regularly to share information and intelligence. thirdly, beginning in the 1990s and aided with a hugely expanded intelligence complement of about 800 officers (shultz, 2009, p. 196) and a brochure that informs residents of the signs of actionable activities, ibet agents generate a “community watch” program or a web of local contacts and sources that vastly multiplies each conduit in a network of watchers and listeners. in a different variation of community watch, a recent plank in the northern border project, a border security initiative of u.s. homeland security and the secure border initiative, involves the deployment of surveillance towers (including day and night cameras, radar, and unattended ground sensors) along a 60 km long stretch of the st. clair and upper niagara rivers on the canada-us border, as well as the deployment of a 18 m long helium surveillance balloon, with attached high resolution camera, owned by the sierra nevada corporation (technology which it hopes to sell to homeland security), over the border area near sarnia, canada. the objective of the frontier government 55 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 project is to “prevent illegal entry of persons, materials, and terrorists into the united states,” according to u.s. customs and border protection, as well as to “demonstrate the integration of air, land, and marine capabilities into a common operating picture, and deploy proven surveillance capabilities along selected areas of the northern border” (2009). as a way to push back against what is considered by some an intrusive form of governance, residents of the community of sarnia protested the deployment of the surveillance balloon in a “moon the balloon” event held on august 15, 2009 (the observer, 2009; the canadian press, 2009). an additional illustration of agency multiplication and expansion of the frontier is provided in an event that took place in the winter of 2008 when one of the authors was approached while walking his dog by two police from the windsor-detroit ibet at colchester harbour on lake erie in south-western ontario. an unmarked suv drove into the parking lot of the marina and an ontario provincial police and rcmp officer emerged from the vehicle. the rcmp officer approached the author introducing himself as part of the ibets program, asking if the author knew anything about it, confirming that the author is a resident of the community (walking his dog), and then stating that he was interested in any unusual behaviour or people frequenting the marina. the rcmp officer asked to take the author’s name to which the author asked if that was really necessary, to which the rcmp officer replied that it was, to confirm that the author had no outstanding warrants. the author queried this, asking if this was not a matter for local police from which also the initiative to follow up on warrants might stem, to which the rcmp officer replied that the rcmp has jurisdiction throughout canada and could follow up on warrants in conjunction with the local police. the author’s name was provided after which the officer asked for date of birth. at this point the author asked again how this was necessary and assured the officer that no warrants were outstanding. the officer allowed the author not to provide the date of birth. the rcmp officer provided the author with his business card. once again, we can see that the assembly is being advanced through forays or interstice approaches that both discover and build capacity to recover out of place or time events. a community resident walking his dog is a potential informant, a public relations opportunity, and in the displacement of the law enforcement standard of search and seizure by the border standard, a means to assert, piecemeal, the rightsbased regime as the “new normal.” note how this is accomplished by discrete, volitional actions on the part of agents exercising discretion in an ambiguous terrain crossed by multiple agencies. the processes that are being replicated or innovated on here stand at the very heart of liberal governance and the sovereignty of the liberal subject. part of what the author was being asked to do was report on out of place or time occurrences where what constituted “unusual” was something that the interviewee him or herself was being exploited to guess at according to his or her own viewpoint. this is an extension of “eyes and ears” not quite through responsibilization (as the issc family members are responsibilized), but through the assertion of national security/border security authority farther down the supply or information chain to the source in ambiguous, unknown “population,” information, or risky data points. lastly, common information sources are being converted into exclusive knowledge resources. it is noteworthy in this context that the rcmp considers 56 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 canada a leader in the field of human intelligence and the rcmp itself is launching a significant drive to build “community intelligence” on the assumption that there is an extraordinary law enforcement capacity that may be tapped to feed the national security knowledge coffers. example 3: department of foreign affairs and international trade/justice department our final example brings us back to regime substitution. ericson (2007) hypothesized that neoliberal politics is increasingly possessed with security, uncertainty, and innovating systems to manage risks. countering uncertainties and risks results in the exchange of the rule of law—regulations that follow or are predicated on constitutional principles and protections—for “counter-laws”—laws that seek to criminalize behaviour and explicitly undermine conventional legal practices (p. 24-25). we have suggested that the sequence: danger/fear  precautionary measures + risk assessment  threat aversion is found in practices pursued by an assembly of agencies and that the effect is a new governance normal. that new normal makes carriers and travellers responsible for the duties of risk prevention as it spreads a precautionary ethic throughout the frontier, shunting aside the duties to protect both juridical subjects and the rule of law. in the expansion of the frontier as a zone of ambiguity, we have concentrated on mechanisms that may be defined as more instrumental than symbolic, but some of the work to normalize a radical shift from the supremacy of constitutional law (enfolding it in the border logos) is undertaken directly as a matter of public policy, democratically debated and resolved.37 canadian citizen abousfian abdelrazik travelled to sudan to visit his ill mother in 2003 and was arrested upon arrival on a request by the canadian government which provided information to the sudanese that suggested links to al-qaeda. he was imprisoned twice for long periods and tortured, and according to a standard operating procedure that also ensnared maher arar, abdullah almalki, ahmed el maati, and muayyed nureddin interrogations by the sudanese were based on questions fed to them by canadian and/or american intelligence agencies. in 2004, he was released by the sudanese but was unable to return to canada or leave the canadian embassy in sudan because his name appeared on the united nations security council’s 1267 no-fly list. the canadian government wrote to the un security council in december 2007 to request that his name be removed, following the threat assessment of the canadian security intelligence service (csis) and the rcmp (likely from information gained through torture) that cleared abdelrazik, finding that there was no reason for him to be on it. however, also in a move similar to the pattern in arar, the us objected to his removal. given this, abdelrazik needed an “emergency passport.” the canadian government provided assurances that if abdelrazik was able to obtain a confirmed flight reservation it would provide that passport. however, once mr. abdelrazik did obtain this flight reservation the minister of foreign affairs in april 2009 refused a passport under section 10.1 of the canada passport order, which states that “the minister may refuse or revoke a passport if the minister is of the opinion that such frontier government 57 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 action is necessary for the national security of canada or another country.” the department of justice filed a claim in federal court stating that the 1267 un travel ban “prohibits other states” from allowing anyone passage through its airspace. the claim also added: “the requested remedy of repatriation would interfere in matters of crown prerogative, foreign affairs and high policy and risks putting canada in breach of its international obligations” (koring, 2009). in fact, the blacklist is easily overcome with a routine exemption. abdelrazik began his journey home on the 30th day after a ruling of a federal court judge ruling that the canadian government was in breach of abdelrazik’s charter rights and had a positive duty to repatriate him. 38 we have been arguing that the border security assembly is justified action on action on the basis of the discovery of out of place or time occurrences, the innovative replication of processes (redundant risk avoidance), and the conversion of common information sources into exclusive knowledge resources. in this example we see how both the vertical and horizontal relations of the assembly are finessed for these discoveries, innovations, and exploitations. discovery slips between national and transnational agencies (un, us), whose findings may very well align with the preferences of the national agencies. discovery also slips vertically between the national bodies (foreign affairs, csis, rcmp), such that the locus of decisionmaking remains ambiguous. because the locus is ambiguous or shifty, innovation is a property that also may shift between “lead” agencies. of course, part of this shiftiness pertains to the movement of information from common sources into exclusive resources. here, there was an implicit claim by foreign affairs and international trade canada (dfait) that “trumped” a security clearance based on information that is ostensibly more exclusive than that of csis or the rcmp. in this case, the “old normal,” the rule of law as interpreted through the canadian charter of rights of freedoms and the federal judiciary, was able to assert pushback, a consequence, if it holds, that clarifies the boundary in just the way that assembly agents may have wished to avoid. nonetheless, the gambit an effort to assert decision-making that is “absolute and independent of content.” here it can be added that intelligence serves as the sine qua non of that sovereign capacity of government. discussion the cross-border detection/inspection regime, consisting of instruments for insertion and subtraction, is predicated on the necessity of the sovereign exercise, but its applications do not cease with the exercise of sovereign power. it remains the case that, under the auspices of “the border,” rights are converted into authorities, mobilities into territorialities, and ambiguities into certainties. however, as an instrument of conversion, the border is a zone of exception that has, with the sovereign itself, been retemporalized, reterritorialized, and reauthoritized. mobility, as purposive action or enterprise across space, both challenges and reconstitutes the territorial fix, dominion, or sovereign utility. reviewed from the point of view of effects, the border instrument codes flows of information and inserts positive and negative attributions. zones of detection are insertion points that stratify the flow of whatever from wherever. the unfolded border enables the conversion of “raw data” (data elements) into advanced signals for intelligence operations. discrete data elements are then traced through the 58 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 intelligence grid in order to code them, that is, to establish structural couplings and see if they make a difference.39 it is in the space-time of intelligence operations that signals are combined into the intelligence objects called “lookouts.” lookouts serve as indices of risk and direct the attention to codes in the flow. they produce distinctions and differentially organize and order matter and information to indicate and extract contraband from the flow. contraband this process takes time without taking time away from the material flow because it occurs within the expanded frontier of intelligence operations. signals that are not received within the temporal security horizon or in the appropriate condition, result in exclusions, or “turn backs” at the border. stratifying matter and information thus enables the conditions for intelligent controls to be developed alongside material or visibility controls. 40 in this respect, the border involves the “folding” of liberal governance. the folding consists in the convergence of two planar flows, one material, one informational, and the establishment of conjunctions of the stacked or stratified flows (of what can be seen and what can be said). the surface of the material plane comprises observable dimensions and representations and what is made visible through surveillance machines, inspection protocols, and the various orchestrations of the spectacles of liberal rule, including juridical relations, observance of rights, etc. the surface of the bottom plane comprises information that moves through a subterranean network of agencies and comprises the security intelligence substrate of the frontier assembly. information tracks toward the border ahead of the matter flows of both people and goods where it is captured, sorted and coded, tagged with caveats, and pushed to agencies throughout the frontier. the conjunction of flows serves as the measure of the security-value of the assembly and of its convergent governance strategies. is indicated through response to questions, through intelligent lookouts, and through secondary searches in the zones of detection through the organization of visibility and the order of words. contraband is the negative encoded object or that which is subject to the ban or the exclusionary decision. it provides a structure to the relation of the ban and is a measure of both the knowledge competency and capacity of the sovereign. lookouts encode an excess signification for the sovereign decision and its continued rehearsal albeit in a capacity limited by the risk-managed frame. while unfolded in the expanded spatial temporal frontier, the border prevents the piling up of matter and information but facilitates the piling up of power-relations (sovereign, disciplinary, and risk-based). conclusion for many decades, the canada-us border has inserted itself and subtracted its due from the flow of coded goods in motion in terms of tariffs and duties.41 tariff extraction, as a form of negative power governing the border, has been supplemented by a new emphasis on contraband.42 the primary aim has undergone a transformation from a concern with the extraction of tariffs based on the value of goods to the recording of actionable differences based on the (threat/risk) value of contraband. in this regard, the border is a mechanism for capture and insertion or negative and positive power. in particular, it provides a set of tools for the sovereign capture or enabling of capital flows so that they may be subject to tariff, redirection, frontier government 59 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 or requalification and for the capture of and insertion into labour flows similarly in the negation and production or management of labour pools. however, the contemporary border produces a margin of uncertainty (danger/risk) and a site for sovereign multiplications. rendered not in terms of traditional tariffs or duties subtracted by a singular sovereign competence and capacity, but in terms of the mobile and multiple array of decision-makers, the border mechanism also remains a policing capacity, or a means of protecting or asserting sovereignty for its own sake. in this regard, the border stands in for the idea of liberal rule as rehearsal of or on limits (chappell, 2006; rose, 2007). the border as a contact point or insertion of the liberal enterprise and rule is a productive enterprise. it affords exceptional practices of insertion, registration, and extraction. it affords the uptake of information that then becomes the “content” of exclusive sovereign knowledge advantages. it is a site for selective feedback, where selective representative “petty spectacles” may be launched to “prove” the mode of contact and maintain it for the mode of government that is presumptively exercised (liberal democratic), as for instance in “border closures” or “contraband displays.” it is exploited to prove the capacity of the sovereign to know and to act. there is tension in the use of the border in these means and ends. on the one hand, there is an expansion of frontier processes, practices, and mentalities to an expanding array of sites. as we have seen, information tolls are pushed out. bordering-at-adistance means that security governing agencies are enlisted to private sector partners in the development and maintenance of spatially diverse and reterritorialized border zones located throughout the supply chain. private “partners” do more of the implementation of border security43 and pay an increasing financial and informationtoll through their participation in cbsa security profiles.44 on the other hand, there is the formation of parallel information norms. the conjunction of security surveillance and security narratives form the basis for the intelligent controls and precautionary aims associated with these border efforts. the assembly of border security agencies and the decision-making practices that unite them may be understood in terms of “making counter-law” (levi, 2009) in a response to unease, catastrophic uncertainties, or a breakdown in the logic of compensation. however, we have advanced an alternative reading. we find the predicate in the clash of economy and sovereignty, specifically in the demand for both prediction and uncertainty, or in the ambiguity that is essential in the relationship (aka liberal politics) between the flow of sovereign and commercial enterprise. thus quotidian decision-making involves the allocation of common and exclusive knowledge about security, the contest over the attribution of out of place or time occurrences, and the development of practices in the constant attempt to produce a “new normal.” production zones of suppliers, of parts and other finished products are encompassed and surveyed into increasingly fortressed zones (with newly developed conditions of visibility and organizations of matter). in exchange for coding and controlling the flow of people and goods through their facilities, companies are promised expedited access across nation-state boundaries and to world markets. ambiguity and access are key: ambiguity inasmuch as there is a contest over decision-making authority; access inasmuch as reconfiguring frontier government into “a new normal” requires enabling agencies and agents to broker new arrangements: border security, the “war on drugs” and similar policy initiatives may 60 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 be understood as a moving intermediate target. the object is not immunization against risks or harms, be they from illegal goods or persons. the object is the continual re-tooling of quotidian decision-makers so that the very chance of a competent sovereignty that has the capacity to act and re-enact the ambiguous registrations of existential dangers is kept alive and kicking. notes 1 both authors contributed equally to the theoretical and substantive development of this paper. lead authorship rotates with each paper derived from our research collaboration. the authors would like to thank the social sciences and humanities research council of canada for its support of research for this paper. we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors of studies in social justice and all the participants in the workshop in october 2008, also supported by the social sciences and humanities research council. the authors would also like to recognize and thank our research assistants, catherine brooke and kara brisson, for their significant contributions toward the completion of this work. 2 some notable recent works include ericson (2007), ewald (2000, 2002), beck (2006), levi (2009), and o’malley (2008). 3 since this is a very difficult area to study in term of gaining access to security personnel and security strategies, a chain-referral technique was used to enable the authors to trace the dimensions of border governance. this ascending methodology provided us with an expanding set of potential contacts and proved especially useful in identifying and studying the interactions among the various agencies involved with border security. in accordance with ethical guidelines, and to protect the confidence of our interviewees, we have made the transcribed interviews anonymous by removing all identifying information associated with placements in departments, agencies, programs, and projects. in accordance with the national tri-council statement on “ethical conduct for research involving humans,” this study received ethics clearance by the university of windsor’s research ethics board. 4 “[p]olitical power always implied the possession of a certain type of knowledge. by the fact of holding power, the king and those around him held a knowledge that could not and must not be communicated to the other social groups. knowledge and power were exactly reciprocal, correlative, superimposed” (foucault, 2001, p. 31, cited in wickham, 2008, p. 35). 5 other diagrams of power have different functions such as care, training, punishment, etc. 6 according to wickham, “limitless authority can only be maintained if it is prepared to limit itself; the more it checks and limits itself, the stronger its potential power, a power it needs to display on fewer and fewer occasions” (2008, p. 36). 7 the frontier/border is also a site of “humanitarian governance” (see walters, forthcoming). 8 the fold modulates the norm and the exception in a “zone of indistinction” (dean, 2007, p. 94). sovereignty enters into zones of contact with the productive powers of contemporary society (p. 157.) sovereign power is delegated to agents and derogated within certain domains (p. 157). 9 a more recent poll found that only 42% of canadians believed that canada “probably will” exist in 25 years (macleans-l’actualité (crop) poll, macleans magazine, september 9, 2002). 10 it might be said that as pertains to the discourse of the border, canada’s rhetoric has been more liberal and less influenced by deterrent protectionism than that of the us. for canada, there has been a strong affirmation of its unique government institutions, most especially the canadian charter of rights and freedoms and also, recently, its own “brand” of security priorities that were made official with the publication in 2004 of its first national security strategy document securing an open society (canada, 2004). canadians have taken pride in multior bilateral relationships (hristoulas, 2003, p. 24), and have tasked the department of foreign affairs and international trade and supported the canada border services agency (cbsa), the ministry of transportation, the canada food inspection agency, and federal, provincial and municipal law enforcement as well as the agencies invested with the national frontier government 61 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 security portfolio with what might be termed a holistic approach to the border. 11 ressam was questioned on the american side a customs inspector “on suspicion” and given a secondary inspection whereupon it was discovered that he had bomb-making equipment in the trunk of his car and was then found to be plotting an attack on lax. 12 in canada after the kaufman commission, the campbell commission, and in anticipation of the air india commission. in the us following steps to glean advance information of foreign airline passengers. 13 that report was commissioned in 1998 by the u.s. congress and led by senator gary hart and former senator warren rudman on strategic challenges that the us would face. the report made recommendations with respect to how the border should be rethought including an insistence that there be an information and organizational revolution that would balance trade with security, openness with information awareness. in particular, it called for the borders to be pushed outward in a “layered defence” that involved information sharing with foreign countries to analyze threats before they arrived at the “last line of defence.” it also involved responsibilizing private industry in the duty to avoid being unwitting conduits of contraband or illegal entries and exits. lastly, it called for investments in intelligence gathering and sharing among government agencies to enhance the targeting of high risk goods. 14 it is noteworthy that already by 2000, under the auspices of airline security, the us was getting apis data from 67 airline carriers or 2/3 of all incoming air passengers into the us (alden, 2008, p. 29) and that this system of advanced information also applied to domestic flights, allowing all 19 terrorists to be identified within 45 minutes of the attack (p. 32). 15 “the imagination of dangers as catastrophic and the precautionary measures needed to deal with their radical contingency… have led to a particular deployment of exceptionalism” (aradau & van munster, 2009, p. 11). 16 now headed by the u.s. customs and border protection, homeland security, united states food and drug administration, united states department of agriculture, state and federal departments of transportation, u.s. department of transportation and state, municipal and federal law enforcement and supported by a pronouncements about a “new world order” and “paradigm shift” the united states seized upon the border as a front in the global war on terror and thus also as a vehicle for the transitioning of law enforcement, military, and intelligence instruments into a powerful array of countermeasures. 17 the process requires customs brokers to enter 69 required data elements into the cbp computer system. “once you add customs broker transaction times, the pre-notification time can increase to two hours . . . . in some instances, the time between submitting the shipment information to the customs broker and the customs broker then submitting the information to cbp can take up to three hours” (transport canada, 2005). in addition, the u.s. public health security and bio-terrorism preparedness and response act of 2002 require that the u.s. food and drug administration receive prior notice of two hours for food imported or offered for import into the united states (transport canada, 2005). 18 “the reason for this is to allow risk management targeting and to permit a red light or a green-light decision upon arrival [at the border]” (transport canada, 2005). 19 western hemisphere travel initiative (id initiative for border crossing), intelligent border (ontario), nafta, land pre-clearance initiative (from security and prosperity partnership-extraterritorial location of customs-canadian in us and vice versa), u.s. visit, national security entry-exit registration system –requiring all persons from men aged 1645 from muslim countries to be fingerprinted and photographed (now u.s. visit does same), border information architecture—to coordinate how information technologies get used and how to whom it is sent, legislation including bill c3 mandating any infrastructure (bridge to be approved by federal government), s. 6 of the customs act. 20 developed under the fast and secure trade (fast) harmonization scheme. 21 “the aci program is about providing cbsa officers with electronic pre-arrival cargo information so that they are equipped with the right information at the right time to identify health, safety, and security threats related to commercial goods before the goods arrive in canada” (cbsa 2009a). 22 security production involves the stratification of flows and their conjunction (as a form of normalization, organizing, ordering). primary stratification involves distinguishing discursive formulations and non-discursive formations. these strata of expression (speaking) and visibility (thinking) are irreducible. “the statement does not relate to the 62 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 visible (as presumed by propositional logic), and the visible is not a mute meaning that must be realized in language (as in phenomenology)” (deleuze, 1999, p. 64; cited in juniper & jose, 2008). statements and visibilities are governed discrete conditions namely, the conditions of enunciation (what can be said) and conditions of emergence (what can be seen/imagined). stratification and the conjunction of strata (of statements and visibilities) are rendered by power relations to produce indices (of risk/threat in this case). indices are force relations that direct attention and action toward particular emergent objects. 23 customs trade partnership against terrorism is a program equivalent to pip and is administered by u.s. customs and border protection. 24 the cbsa refers to staff involved in using advance information to identify travelers or goods posing potential risks as “targeters.” 25 according to the treasury board of canada secretariat’s website: one of only two automated risk-assessment systems in the world, titan™ provides the cbsa with the ability to automatically screen all marine commercial shipments for indications of risk prior to departure for canada; marine carriers no longer submit paper documents as shipments are assessed electronically. by using risk management as the guiding principle for border management, titan™ tm identifies high or unknown-risk cargo while promoting the flow of legitimate low-risk trade. this provides the cbsa the time to assess risk more effectively and to make informed decisions on directing resources to shipments posing the highest risk to canada's health, safety and security. titan™ forms the cornerstone of cbsa's risk-management regime. (http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/rma/dpr1/04-05/bsa-asf/bsa-asfd4502_e.asp) 26 as one officer described the joint vessel inspection team program: “transport canada officials and u.s. coast guard go on a ship in montreal and do a security inspection if it is going into the great lakes. once this ship is checked, it is entered into our database; it is entered into the u.s. missile database; u.s. coast guard has access to it; transport canada has access to it, so when the ship comes in, we can opt if it’s already been checked. but the great lakes msoc [marine security operation center] and the msoc east, they then can start profiling ships and from that profile we can say: ‘i think we are going to board that ship; that’s a ship of interest.’” 27 according to amoore (2007), a form of watchful politics underscores this monitoring—a constantly vigilant mode of looking that produces a “ubiquitous border.” 28 in terms of physical searches, cargo is subject to an on-the-fly inspection process, where the truck moves through a vehicle and cargo inspection system (vacis). the system is selfdescribed as a “state-of-the-art technology that assists officers in examining dense freight in order to detect contraband, weapons, and other potentially dangerous goods.” using a “cobalt 60 energy source” vacis emits a gamma-ray beam that produces an image similar to x-ray systems. using this optical machine, vacis operators view radiographic images of goods to determine the consistency of the commercial cargo image with the order-words of the document manifest.” vacis can “see” through 6.5 inches of steel to determine the consistency of the object in terms of what is seen and what is said about it and so in the inconsistency indicative of the presence of contraband, disorder, or matter out of place. according to a senior transport official “it’s like an mri, i mean, it’s just amazing–it gives you a three dimensional view of everything that’s in there. they can pick up piles of marijuana in the middle of a truck . . . if there are people hidden in the truck, they see that too.” 29 nexus reterritorializes the borders in that it also enables the collection and analysis of information in advance of the border. the program for “pre-approved clearance” involves, background checks (criminal, immigration, etc), a personal interview, fingerprints, iris scans, facial recognition, and rfid cards. the nexus rfid card computer chip containing a reference number to a data base, is imbedded into the card, along with tiny rfid antenna. “the nexus card holder presents the card to an rfid reader mounted a few feet in front of the custom agent’s booth. the information associated with the reference number is instantly displayed on a computer monitor inside the customs agent booth. if the frontier government 63 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 photo displayed on the monitor is that of the driver and passengers, they are authorized to proceed” (rfid, 2009). as of march 1, 2004 niagara region whirlpool bridge was reserved for nexus approved travellers only (niagara falls bridge commission, 2009). 30 border lookouts (or flags) also encompass issues of food security, as one official noted: “if it’s commercial, it could be the type of goods that we flag; sometimes we have concerns such as the salmonella outbreaks in spinach. we can target all spinach imports from california, and we could flag them for a more detailed examination.” 31 according to the senior cbsa officer, lookouts are “continually reviewed to make sure [that they] accurate and relevant, that we’re not just continually targeting someone for no reason.” 32 according to a senior cbsa official, lookouts shared under circumstances such as “if we knew there was a threat to the us. for instance, a lot of times we’ll be investigating a conspiracy that involves importing contraband to canada and exporting contraband to the us. as a result or our investigation, we might discover that.” in addition, generic information about patterns or mo are also shared: “we obtain information from homeland security, and we share our information with homeland security, in the generic sense; you know, we’re seeing an increase in this, this, and this.” 33 a senior border officer described the complex blending of sovereign, enforcement, and regulatory authorities as follows: “all of the information is vetted for intelligence purposes to find out if that ship or the containers on that ship are a threat. . . . if we feel the ship is a threat, we will go to a “priority 1,” which is an armed boarding. dnd will send out a ship with rcmp enforcement teams, most likely tactical teams or ert teams, emergency response teams, they will board the ship just prior to getting into canadian waters. you have to understand, as we are doing that, the americans are also monitoring us. the other [priorities,] 2, 3 and 4, are more inspection processes that we would take against the ship. for instance the ship is coming from an area that we are not so sure . . . for instance darfur. any ship that comes in from darfur we pay attention to, from a regulatory point of view, not from and enforcement point of view . . . we are the regulatory group. because of our delegation of authority by the minister, we do not need warrants to go on ships. we don’t even need reasonable grounds to go on ships. we can go on a ship and do security inspection.” 34 agamben also insists on an ambiguity in the state of exception where the connection between space (territorializition) and order (law/norm) breaks down (see dilken, 2002, p. 291). 35 as per donald rumsfeld, this is a category of unknowns that, due to a lack of knowledge, may fail to categorize. 36 as in walters (forthcoming) we envision the assemblage as a complex arrangement of forms of reason, forms of authority, and technologies of government (see also haggerty & ericson, 2000). 37 this is not to suggest that policy-making, because it is subject to the required democratic processes, is sufficiently democratic. 38 indeed, the duties of the canadian government are stipulated. canadian legislation includes section 19(1) of the immigration & refugee protection act, which states that “every canadian citizen [ . . . ] has the right to enter and remain in canada [ . . . ] and the officer shall allow the person to enter canada if the officer is satisfied [ . . . ] that the person is a citizen or a registered indian” and section 6 of the citizenship act which states that “a citizen, whether or not born in canada, is entitled to all rights, powers and privileges [ . . . ] to which a person who is a citizen under paragraph 3(1)(a) is entitled [ . . . ].” 39 in these systems, the assumption is that it is possible to “build a complete picture of a person,” to quite literally see who they are before they board a plane or transfer money, by relating them to the norms of a wider population and identifying their degree of deviance (de goede, 2006; cited in amoore, 2007). 40 contraband, in the broadest sense is of that which has been banned, and the activities that render it from the flow, tie together territorialization and coding, matter and information, the non-discursive and the discursive as reciprocally related actions. contraband and its related activities serve to produce and reproduce the territorializations within which the ban holds (see agamben, 1998, p. 29). these exceptions/subtractions are now made as a continuous mode of action on the flow (i.e., by “control”) by petty sovereigns (through regulatory or administrative functions). 41 as one official noted; “twenty or thirty years ago, there wasn’t a whole lot of checking citizenship or looking for contraband at the borders; it was: “how many things have you 64 daniel o'connor and willem de lint studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 bought that you need to pay taxes and duties on.’” another senior official characterized the border as a system of accounting: “the only system was the accounting system. they want to pay you 120 dollars? we put the 120 dollars here [in this column], so at the end of the day we added how much we took in.” 42 part of the transformation of border practices is explained by the development of new trade policies. as one senior official explained, “one of the effects of the free trade agreement with the united states is, especially in windsor [the major land border for trade with the us], is that most of the trade that we are talking about over this border is u.s. origin and is no longer dutiable… if i was in vancouver, a lot more of the trade is dutiable.” 43 this is consistent with dean’s (1999) analysis of neoliberal governance. 44 it is estimate that the impact of the u.s. border security measures on the canadian trucking industry is estimated to range from $179 million to $406 million (transport canada, 2005). references agamben, g. 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(2009). security. new york: routledge. http://niagarafallsbridges.com/which_bridge.php3� http://www.rfident.org/rfidnexus.htm� http://www.canadaeast.com/rss/article/761904� http://www.theobserver.ca/articledisplay.aspx?e=1680060� http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/nssg.pdf� http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/border_security/sbi/projects/project_descrip/north_border.xml� http://www.transtats.bts.gov/bordercrossing.aspx� coburn final correspondence address: elaine coburn, centre of feminist research, york university, toronto, on, m4n 3m6; email: ecoburn@glendon.yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 “theorizing our place”: indigenous women’s scholarship from 1985-2020 and the emerging dialogue with anti-racist feminisms elaine coburn york university, canada abstract in this article, i review contemporary indigenous women’s scholarship, describing transformations from 1985 to the present, first to characterize this scholarship on its own terms and second to situate this literature with respect to recent, nascent dialogues with anti-racist feminisms. what is the focus and range of indigenous women’s scholarship, from 1985 until today? what does this work seek to do, that is, what are the intertwined political and scholarly aims of this scholarship? i suggest that indigenous women’s scholarly writing is concerned with resilience, or survival, resistance or challenges to colonial power and relationships, and resurgence, or a turning-inward to renew indigenous knowledges and practices. in the discussion, i briefly consider how the increasingly rich and diverse field of indigenous women’s theorizing and praxis informs an emerging dialogue with anti-racist feminist scholars within the academy and in the broader context of colonial canada. keywords anti-racist feminisms; indigenous epistemologies; indigenous feminisms; resistance; resurgence “how can we theorize our “place,” when the place itself is stolen?” (razack, smith & thobani, 2010, p. 2) to answer that question, posed by three prominent anti-racist feminists, demands engagement with indigenous perspectives. towards those ends, i review contemporary indigenous women’s scholarship from 1985 to the present, exploring the following questions: • what is the focus and range of indigenous women’s scholarship, from 1985 until today? • what does this scholarship seek to do, politically and analytically? elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 430 • what are the different ways that indigenous women’s scholarship has begun to enter into dialogue with anti-racist feminisms? i seek to highlight indigenous women’s scholarly voices in their diversity, contradictions and individuality, since, as larocque observes, “we were most assuredly ‘human,’ and how best to know this but by our uniqueness?” (2010, p. 155). in its diversity, i suggest that indigenous women’s social scientific writing is concerned with resilience, or survival, resistance or challenges to colonial power and relationships, and resurgence, or a turning-inward to renew indigenous knowledges and practices. 1 each emphasis suggests different forms of solidarity with anti-racist feminisms, and moments when such solidarities are complicated, in an unequal, racialized gendered colonial context that shapes relationships within and beyond the academy. after defining key concepts, i describe three successive, overlapping “waves” of indigenous women’s research, and conclude by discussing the emerging dialogue with anti-racist women scholars within the academy and in the broader context of colonial canada. colonialism and indigenous women’s scholarship: some definitions as green (2003) describes, “colonization is not only about the physical occupation of someone else’s land, but also about the appropriation of others’ political authority, cultural self-determination, economic capacity, and strategic location” (p. 52), for the benefit of the colonizer at the expense of the colonized. in canada, colonization began over five hundred years ago and persists into the present, as the colonial state appropriates and occupies indigenous lands. with some hard-fought exceptions – often gained through the juridical system, where the colonial state is at once party and judge – the colonial state presumes its political, legal and cultural authority over indigenous peoples, who may be consulted but who are nowhere accepted as fully self-determining polities, much less as having authority over colonial actors. indigenous people are “original settlers, in the sense of being a deeply rooted and settled indigenous presence on this land we now call canada” (larocque, 2010, p. 7). as métis scholar chris andersen describes (2014, p. 15), indigenous people have a precolonial presence, that is, presence prior to the formalization of the colonial state. in addition, they are subordinated across their traditional lands but nonetheless maintain a will to perpetuate and further develop their own ways of being, knowing and doing. today, across lands claimed by canada, there are more than one hundred different peoples, including the nuu-chah-nulth, métis, huron-wendat, cree, saulteaux and 1 i do not examine indigenous women’s creative writing. for a rich discussion of indigenous literature, much of it by indigenous women, see larocque (2010). “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 431 diverse inuit polities, among others. further, as lawrence and anderson (2003) describe, indigenous women’s experiences include “reserve residents and urban women, those with indian status and those without, those who identify as mixed-bloods, those who call themselves métis,2 and those who identify unequivocally as “indian,” (pp. 11-12). inequalities cross-cut these communities, along the axes of class (menzies, 2018, pp. 4-5; alook, hussey & hill, 2019), gender (green, 2017; suzack et al., 2011), sexuality (belcourt, 2016; a. wilson, 2008), disability (demas, 1993) and more. indigenous actors, like all human beings, are diverse and may be complicit in unjust inequalities, whether endogenous or exogenous to indigenous communities. indigenous scholarship, a recent subset of indigenous knowledges, is writing produced by indigenous academics in university press books and scholarly journals, intended mainly if not only for academic audiences (see also coburn, 2016). this does not exhaust indigenous knowledges, as these have developed, in a wide range of forms, over thousands of years, prior to and outside of the creation of universities (battiste, 1998). further, indigenous ways of knowing are transforming understandings of scholarship beyond this working definition (see, e.g., s. wilson’s (2008) research is ceremony). in this essay, i consider scholarly writing that cheryl suzack of the batchewana first nation describes as feminist, because it “analyses how gender injustice against indigenous women emerges from colonial policies and patriarchal practices that inscribe gendered power dynamics to the detriment of indigenous women” (2015, p. 261). suzack’s description might be augmented by cree/saulteaux scholar gina starblanket’s observation that (some) indigenous feminisms, further, “see[k] to shed light on indigenous women’s experiences of heteropatriarchal and colonial oppression” (2017, p. 21), challenging men’s power over women and the institutional suppression, marginalization and pathologizing of same-gender relationships by the heteronormative colonial state and within indigenous communities. as starblanket observes, the most liberatory indigenous feminisms support the “resurgence of ways of being that are free from heteronormative logics of empowerment” (2017, p. 21), including questioning land-based knowledge practices that limit women and men to relatively rigid roles in the name of tradition (2017, pp. 28-33). conceptualizing such approaches as feminist is contentious for some indigenous scholars who write about indigenous women and gendered power, but do not identify with feminism, seen as commensurate with white liberalism (for a helpful discussion see st denis, 2017, and monture-angus, 1995, below). finally, as a practical limit on this essay’s scope, i consider indigenous women’s scholarship within the canadian context. the aim is neither to reify 2 métis is sometimes used, problematically, to denote “mixed heritage” (gaudry & leroux, 2017). in this essay, i follow métis scholars jennifer adese (2016) and chris andersen (2014), among others, in emphasizing métis peoplehood as political belonging grounded in a distinct culture, historically rooted in the red river region. elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 432 colonial borders nor to elide common dynamics with australia, finland, new zealand, sweden, and other settler states. 3 rather, this recognizes the specificities of the colonial histories and present of the canadian political economy and culture, including within scholarly traditions. indigenous women’s scholarship: the colonial context and the academy the current context for indigenous women includes ongoing genocide against indigenous peoples through forcible dispossession of lands and access to waterways, deliberate starvation, intergenerational trauma from the separation of children from families in the residential school, and the sundering of kinship relationships through contemporary social welfare systems. this includes, too, the systemic underfunding of indigenous housing, education, and health, chronic lack of access to clean water in many indigenous communities, and the uninvestigated murders of indigenous women and girls (national inquiry into missing & murdered indigenous women & girls: supplementary volume on genocide, 2019). to write that the political and social context for indigenous feminism is hostile is therefore to badly understate the circumstances. ongoing unjust inequalities, not least systemic violence, translate into “a scarcity in emotional and material resources, both personal and collective” (larocque, 2010, p. 144). indigenous women are often in a reactive struggle for survival. in the academy, indigenous persons and knowledges are notable for their centuries-long absence. as cree and saulteaux scholar margaret kovach and her colleagues observe, “given that the first university in canada, laval university opened its doors in 1663 followed by the oldest english language university, the university of new brunswick in 1785, one could interpret the integration of an indigenous presence as constituting a short period of inclusion within a long history of exclusion” (kovach et al., 2015, p. 23). indeed, under an 1880 amendment to the indian act, status indians who obtained university degrees were forcibly enfranchised – they lost indian status, and, given the patriarchal provisions of the act, so did their wives and children. although in the 1970s, indigenous faculty began to enter the academy in greater numbers, today, indigenous persons remain radically underrepresented as faculty, where they make up less than 2% of the professoriate (canadian association of university teachers, 2018, p.2), compared to nearly five percent of the canadian population. 3 see mohawk intellectual audra simpson (2014) for a sustained challenge to the colonial border between the united states and canada. for indigenous feminist theorizing that attends to similarities across a range of settler states within a globalizing, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal system, see, among others, sámi scholar rauna kuokkanen (2008) and maori and scottish professor makere stewart-harawira (2005). “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 433 contemporary institutionalized divisions of intellectual labour further marginalize indigenous scholarship. hence, indigenous knowledges are “specialized,” meaningful within “native studies” but supposedly without relevance to whitestream, canonical knowledges. familiarity with indigenous scholarship is rarely a requirement outside of native studies, although that may be slowly changing as a consequence of the truth and reconciliation commission (but see gaudry & lorenz, 2018). further, and uncomfortably, indigenous women’s voices are often marginalized within indigenous scholarship. as green (2007b) bluntly observes, “in canada, since the 1970s, the academic literature has been strengthened by the emergence of a cadre of aboriginal intellectuals, most of whom were gender-blind or hostile to gendered analysis” (p. 14). if many indigenous women critically analyze the intersections of race, gender and colonialism from diverse political, cultural and individual perspectives, they do so against the grain of much colonial and indigenous scholarship and despite a broader patriarchal, colonial and genocidal context. finally, indigenous scholarship develops within an academic context in which anti-racist feminisms have been absented from whitestream canons (for a survey of anti-racist feminisms up to the 2000s, see dua, 1999, pp. 8-9, 17). nonetheless, in the 1980s, anti-racist feminisms made visible and critiqued the whiteness foundational to canadian society (dua, 1999, p. 14), including social construction of “women of colour” as others against naturalized white citizens (bannerji, 2000; carty & brand, 1993). anti-racist feminists, including sedef arat-koç, himani bannerji, tania das gupta and the late roxana ng, among others, described and analysed the concentration of racialized women in low-paying employment (dua, 1999, p. 14) within a socialist feminist political economy framework. black and african feminists in canadian universities describe and analyse resilience and diversity among francophone and anglophone women in the diaspora, from slavery through to today (e.g., mckittrick, 2006; mianda, 1997; wane, 2009). yet white women’s scholarship dominates feminist contributions (carty, 2014; henry, 2015). in this way, the academy (re)produces the insights of “women of colour” – those women principally responsible for developing anti-racist feminisms – as marginal, rooted in their racialized, gendered and classed marginalization within the canadian political economy, as a whole, and within the university, specifically (dua, 1999, p. 19; henry et al., 2017). in short, both indigenous faculty and faculty racialized as “women of colour” are underrepresented, their scholarship marginalized. if this means there are shared reasons to challenge the whitestream status quo, this dialogue has to be actively sought out and created outside of the ordinary academic (re)production of knowledge. as the late mohawk scholar patricia monture4 (monture-angus, 1995) observes, in a context in which white women and 4 patricia monture published as patricia monture, patricia monture-angus and patricia montureokanee. elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 434 men dominate the academic conversation, “we do not know what the differences are between a black woman’s experience and an indian woman’s experience because we have never had the chance to talk about it” (p. 23). this dialogue must be achieved with limited resources, further complicated because indigenous and racialized women scholars’ energies are diverted into coping with and combatting those everyday and institutional racisms they experience personally (monture-angus, 1995, ch. 1; cote-meek, 2014; henry et al., 2017, ch. 6 & 7). in the discussion below, i consider how this dialogue is nevertheless emerging. contemporary indigenous feminisms: resilience, resistance, and resurgence imperfectly and with some “slippage” across conceptual categories (dua, 1999, p. 10), indigenous women’s writing, since 1985, is concerned with indigenous women’s resilience, resistance and resurgence. resilience means struggles for survival despite the genocidal colonial context. borrowing from lawrence and anderson (2005), indigenous women’s resilience is “about how we are ‘still walking’ in spite of some of the abuses that we have endured” (p. 6). as gail guthrie valaskakis (chippewa), madeleine dion stout (kehewin first nation) and eric guimond (mi’kmaq) (2009b) describe, “‘resilience’ means getting along, getting through, and getting out of a difficult situation” (p. 2), an emphasis on indigenous women’s agency that deliberately counters dominant “deficit” narratives focussing on indigenous women’s victimhood. as cynthia c. wesley-esquimaux (chippewa of georgina island first nation) (2009, p. 28) observes: instead of telling only the stories about trauma and victimization and pain, let us talk about our survival and our undeniable strengths. it is essential for us to articulate the strengths that we have, not only in a way that validates our survival, but in a way that validates and “victorizes” our ability to take control of our lives and be, in spite of past pain and present dysfunction. indigenous feminisms insist on indigenous women’s agency, strength and survival despite the ongoing violence of colonial, patriarchal power. indigenous women’s decolonizing resistance means, further, “challenges to the undemocratic, sexist, unrepresentative and colonial impulses” that are part of normalized, institutionalized relations and discourses across colonial canada (green, 2017b, p. 173). for some, traditional knowledges and practices are a powerful source of resistance, rooted in matriarchal relationships (monture-angus, 1995). others emphasize the need for a critical uptake of indigenous traditions, insofar as some reproduce patriarchal relations of power (green, 2017b; larocque, 2017) and heteronormative ideologies (starblanket, 2017) rooted in naturalized but actually historically “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 435 contingent and colonial male-female gender binaries (a. wilson, 2008; hunt, 2016, pp. 5-9). as indigenous feminists maile arvin (kanaka maoli), eve tuck (unangax), and angie morrill (the klamath tribes) (2013) describe, indigenous feminisms challenge “social systems in which heterosexuality and patriarchy are perceived as normal and natural, and in which other configurations are perceived as abnormal, aberrant and abhorrent” (p. 13) and hence rightfully destined for elimination. if indigenous women’s resilience is about indigenous women’s literal survival, resistance is about their selfconscious opposition to the reproduction of oppressive (hetero) patriarchal relationships, institutions and commonsense ideas that normalize heterosexuality and men’s power and authority over indigenous women. by resurgence, i follow kahnawake mohawk scholar taiaike alfred and tsalagi professor jeff corntassel (2005), in describing a turning-inward to draw upon and renew diverse indigenous worldviews, here with the aim of supporting indigenous women and girls’ self-determination.5 as starblanket (2017) observes, indigenous women’s resurgence “allows indigenous peoples to shift our focus beyond western liberal political institutions or actors and attribute ourselves with a greater degree of political agency to shape, and be shaped by, the world we live in” (p. 34). for many indigenous women, this means attentiveness to “everyday” relations and practices, challenging the depoliticitization of supposedly private “women’s issues,” including domestic violence (starblanket, 2017, p. 35). resurgence is about renewing everyday relationships “with others, with our languages, our spirituality and the lands we inhabit” (p. 34) to support indigenous women’s well-being. indigenous women’s scholarship describes and participates in indigenous women’s resilience, resistance and resurgence. performatively, indigenous women’s academic writing demonstrates resilience by enacting the survival of indigenous knowledges in (and beyond) the academy, albeit often at the margins. much of this scholarship is “resistance literature” creating a “counter-discourse” to dehumanizing eurocentric, hate literature (larocque, 2010, pp. 3-5), including by challenging damaging stereotypes created and reproduced through supposedly objective but actually colonial historiography, anthropology, sociology and other disciplines (smith, 1999; coburn et al., 2013; walter & anderson, 2013; hunt, 2014). this literature may not be heard – as larocque (1990) has written, “here are our voices – who will hear?.” nonetheless, this literature exists and may be drawn on by those seeking to learn from it. finally, by theorizing from diverse indigenous worldviews, rooted in “an ethic of care towards each other and the rest of 5 alfred and corntassel (2005) describe resurgence as about reconstructing, reshaping and actively living “the teaching of our ancestors” (p. 612). as they write, “we do not need to wait for the colonizer to provide us with money or to validate our vision of a free future; we only need to start to use our indigenous languages to frame our thoughts, the ethical framework of our philosophies to make decisions and to use our laws and institutions to govern ourselves” (2005, p. 614, italics in original). resurgence is a turning away from the colonizer and a turning inwards towards diverse indigenous worldviews and practices. elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 436 creation” (starblanket, 2017, p. 35), indigenous women’s writing participates in the resurgence of indigenous knowledges through and beyond the specific genre writing of the academy. first wave of resistance literature (1985-1995): indigenous women challenge the indian act the first wave of indigenous women’s academic literature, roughly from 1985 to 1995, centres on analyses and support for legal struggles against sexist provisions in the indian act. enshrining patriarchal, eurocentric cultural traditions as law, the indian act of 1876 stipulated that status indian men who married non-status women granted these women status. conversely, indigenous women who married non-status men were forcibly “enfranchised,” that is, both the women and their children and descendants lost federally recognized “indian” status. as simpson (2008) argues, such legislation indigenized white women, while indigenous women and their children, now without status, were obligated to leave the reserves on which they grew up and where, often, their families still lived. this gendered, forcible enfranchisement destroyed matriarchal traditions, where they existed, and created a new social reality, making outsiders of these women, their children and descendants (st. denis, 2007, p. 1073), unable to live or even be buried on reserve lands with their families and ancestors (green, 1985, p. 94, fn 14). for indigenous women, this created a long, difficult struggle in which they faced opposition from the colonial state and many men in their own communities. in the context of limited financial resources, pressures on inadequate reserves lands and male-led band councils,6 the national indian brotherhood (now the assembly of first nations) opposed indigenous women’s legal struggle to re-instate indian status for forcibly enfranchised women and their children (lawrence & anderson, 2005, pp. 2). scholarly writing thus joined with indigenous women’s legal struggles, which sought to turn the state’s juridical apparatus against itself, to make broader arguments against colonial and indigenous patriarchies and for indigenous women’s resurgent political, social and spiritual authority. in native studies review, green (1985) observes that the indian act presumed the colonial state’s right to decide membership on native reserves and did so in patriarchal terms, reflecting the fact that, “european societies were patrilineal and patriarchal” (pp. 82-83). against this, green argues for the absolute right for self-determining indigenous government, including the right to decide citizenship. for green, this means rejecting “violent and 6 until 1951 only men could vote in and stand for band council elections, according to the indian act (cannon, 2019, p. 16). today, these band council positions continue to be dominated by men (lawrence & anderson, 2005). “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 437 emotional” (p. 90) rhetoric mobilized by some indigenous male leaders against indigenous women, accused of “watering down indian genes and destroying culture” by out-marrying – charges she observes were not leveled against out-marrying men (pp. 90-91). at the same time, green argues that indigenous polities prepared to carry out responsibilities as nations are required to meet international obligations to gender equity, including with respect to citizenship (p. 92). in this way, green’s analysis of legal struggles is the entry point into a deconstruction of patriarchal logics, both colonial and indigenous, and an argument for indigenous nationhood. in the same year, cree scholar verna kirkness (1986) unfavourably contrasts the sexist provisions of the indian act and the patriarchal christian norms that inspired the legislation, with prior, gender-egalitarian indigenous practices. in asserting women’s voices as equals to men, kirkness argues that indigenous women are restoring traditional matriarchal authority systematically destroyed by the colonizers: “native women are emerging in search of the equality once enjoyed by women within indian society” (kirkness, 1986, p. 415). in her writing, kirkness draws on oral traditions that colonial scholars have typically ignored or discredited, insisting upon the validity and usefulness of this form of knowledge. epistemological and methodological innovation – bringing songs, for instance, into the annals of legal scholarship – combines with a call for resurgent gender-equal practices within traditional matriarchal societies, in which women and men are equally valued as complementary social and spiritual partners (p. 411). mary ellen turpel (1989), another cree legal scholar, highlights the efforts of the native women’s association of canada (nwac) to challenge sexist colonial legal principles, “based on the inherent jurisdiction of first nations to make laws for their own peoples” (p. 155). pointing to the limits of the colonial language of human rights, turpel roots indigenous women’s selfdetermining struggles in the “four directions” teachings. for turpel, these teachings emphasize responsibilities, respecting principles of kindness, honesty, sharing and strength (p. 155). what might today be called “resurgent” indigenous knowledges and ethics are repositioned, in the stead of colonial worldviews, as the normative principles underlying indigenous women’s voice and relationships of responsibility. in enough is enough: aboriginal women speak out, janet silman (1987) of scottish métis descent, published interviews with women from the tobique reserve in new brunswick. silman was invited to write the book as an academic liaison, so enabling “lay” indigenous women’s activists voices to be heard, as they fought the legal battle against the indian act’s forcible “enfranchisement” of indigenous women (silman, 1987, pp. 15-16). 7 7 likewise, the organization “indian rights for indian woman” cooperated with the advisory council on the status of women to publish a book by kathleen jamieson (1978), indian women and the law in canada: citizens minus. given the relative paucity of indigenous women in the academy, indigenous women’s associations strategically mobilized non-indigenous scholars to bring their voices into scholarly literature. elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 438 silman’s interviews are life-histories: women sharing their experiences growing up, their interactions with family, both french and indigenous, and their encounters with the catholic church and a “white society” that seeks to take away their languages and knowledge practices (juanita perley, in silman, 1987, p. 52). foregrounded are critiques of and resistance to eurocanadian, christian patriarchal tradition, including for how these inform the indian act’s sexist provisions. performing the resistance that they describe, these women recall the intergenerational transmission of land based knowledges, in their own words, so honouring their ancestors’ and their own insights and challenging the monopoly of white “expert” voices. finally, if not exhaustively (see e.g., battiste, 1989; johnston, 1989; mcivor, 1995), canadian woman studies published an article by the native women’s association of canada (nwac, 1992), linking ongoing legal struggles by indigenous women with new movements asserting their right to participate on their own behalf in constitutional discussions with the federal government. stating bluntly that, “so far, aboriginal men and male organizations have not represented our interests” (p. 14), the nwac insisted that, “negotiating a right to self-government does not mean recognizing and blessing the patriarchy created in our community by a foreign government” (p. 15). thus, the nwac challenged patriarchal racisms in the colonial state and male domination in indigenous communities, including through the institutionalization of (male) band council chiefs. patriarchy is represented as an exogenously imposed system of inequity, reproduced by contemporary indigenous men’s leadership. the article concludes with an assertion of resurgent indigenous women’s agency and the urgency of attending to their insights: “our voices must be heard” (p. 17). in these essays, the emphasis is on the politically urgent task of resisting colonial law and asserting indigenous women’s self-governing agency, often arguing that this is a renewal of indigenous women’s traditional authority. several scholars emphasize that indigenous polities are self-governing nations, with green arguing that, as nations, indigenous governments must uphold international commitments to gender equity in citizenship and other rights. if spurred on by the specific struggles against gender discriminatory clauses in the indian act, these indigenous women’s analyses are broader, challenging colonial governance and patriarchal practices. in so doing, these indigenous women scholars innovate from traditional indigenous epistemology, ethics and methodologies. turpel draws on insights from four directions teachings and silman, like kirkness, brings in oral histories so challenging colonial scholarly traditions that dismiss such knowledge as amateur, folkloric, biased or simply inferior (battiste, 1998). all insist on indigenous women’s self-determining authority against patriarchy, as enshrined in sexist clauses in the indian act, in male dominated band council governance and in constitutional negotiations with the colonial state that disregard indigenous women’s representation and participation. “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 439 second wave of resistance literature in the 1990s: diversification of indigenous women’s voices overlapping the first wave of resistance literature (see green, 1992, and turpel, 1993), what mohawk intellectual audra simpson (2014, p. 196) describes as the “second wave” of indigenous women’s writing emerged in the 1990s. new voices emphasize indigenous women’s diversity against homogenizing and dehumanizing stereotypes. some argue for the resurgence of traditional valorizations of indigenous women, said to hold distinct (often maternal) responsibilities, while others advocate for a critical engagement with tradition, as not necessarily emancipatory for indigenous women. less usually, two authors describe struggles for survival by indigenous women facing “triple jeopardy” given racism, sexism and homophobia or ableism, so challenging indigenous communities to make a place “in the circle” for all indigenous women and girls (a. wilson, 2008, p. 178), as integral to indigenous resurgence. in her book, iskwewak--kah' ki yaw ni wahkomakanak: neither indian princess nor easy squaws, janice acoose/misko-kìsikàwihkwè (1995) writes against “white-eurocanadian-christian-patriarchy,” referred to in an abbreviated shorthand as “weccp” (p. 21) – left deliberately un-capitalized to diminish this tradition’s historical authority. acoose is concerned with literal physical survival despite murderous violence against indigenous women, resistance to dehumanizing, sexist colonial ideologies in canadian fiction and resurgence through the revitalization of indigenous worldviews by indigenous artists, with a view to supporting a realistically complex portrayal of historical and contemporary indigenous women. drawing on diverse indigenous women scholars, including maria campbell and jeanette armstrong, acoose argues that animalizing, reductionist imagery distorts and attacks indigenous women’s humanity. such stereotypes deny the complex realities of indigenous women’s lives, making them targets of murderous violence: stereotypic images of indian princesses, squaw drudges, suffering helpless victims, tawny temptresses, or loose squaws falsify our realities and suggest in a subliminal way that those stereotypic images are us. as a consequence, those images foster cultural attitudes that encourage sexual, physical verbal or psychological violence against indigenous women. (acoose, 1995, p. 55) in an indigenous literary renaissance or resurgence, acoose turns to indigenous artists as leaders, informed by maternal-centric indigenous languages and cultures, in the vital struggle for indigenous women’s empowerment against “weccp.” in a collection of her essays, thunder in my soul: a mohawk woman speaks, monture (monture-angus, 1995) – one of the best-known voices from this period – argues forcefully that whitestream women’s political ambitions for equality are inadequate compared to the traditionally powerful, elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 440 and not merely equal standing of women in haudenosaunee culture (see also monture-okanee, 1992, 1993). as she famously expresses this idea, “equality is not a high standard in my way of thinking” (monture-angus, 1995, p. 179). in making claims “under the box of sex” (p. 141) whitestream feminism mobilizes a conceptual vocabulary that falsely universalizes white women’s experience; this is as inadequate as the english language for describing what it means to live specifically as a mohawk woman (p. 140). monture thus disavows “(w)hite, well-meaning, middle and upper-class feminists” (p. 20), especially those who appropriate her painful experiences and turn them into an object of expert analysis, so furthering their own scholarly careers. despite rejecting feminism, thus characterized, monture insists on the imbrication of indigeneity, class and gender in the production of colonial knowledge and colonial law. innovating what today would be called an intersectionalist perspective, monture wrote, “i can locate my own experience… as both an aboriginal and a woman” (monture-angus, 1995, p. 139). this social location informs an experiential knowledge that monture mobilizes to describe the oppression and violence that indigenous women suffer. as she explains with characteristic directness, under colonial relationships, “aboriginal women have been victims of abuse” (p. 145). at the same time, monture questions the ability of colonial law, including the canadian charter of rights and freedoms, to protect indigenous women from harm, since these declarations do not acknowledge “colonialism and colonization” (pp. 146-147), much less their implication in indigenous women’s oppression. critiquing nwac’s decision to engage with the charter, all while recognizing “the heart-felt emotion of their response” (p. 146), monture summed up her position bluntly: “canadian law is not my aboriginal solution” (p. 147). against colonial laws made by (white) men, monture emphasizes the indigenous women’s unique authority: “women are at the heart of it. women are at the centre of it” (p. 262) with specific responsibilities for the making of laws (p. 263) that allow all peoples to “retai[n], teac[h] and maintai[n] good relationships” (p. 258). indigenous women’s resistance to patriarchy means turning away from colonial worldviews, including as these are legally institutionalized as rights, towards specifically mohawk relations of responsibility led by women.8 an anthology published in this second wave of resistance scholarship, women of the first nations: power, wisdom and strength, edited by christine miller, blackfoot confederacy (siksikaitsitapi), and patricia chuchryk (1996), insists on indigenous women’s “power, wisdom and strength” as the title emphasizes. the editors mobilize diverse indigenous women’s voices – as well as white activists and scholars – to counter 8 monture does much more, bringing her perspective to concerns as varied, but related as indigenous children being separated from their families and communities by the colonial social welfare system and unmasking the injustices of the colonial juridical system and the incarceration of indigenous women. “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 441 portrayals of indigenous women as homogenous blocs.9 they resist scholarly and popular narratives that describe indigenous women as victims and in homogenizing ways: “we have maintained our commitment to diversity and our belief that in the diversity of women’s voices we can find strength and wisdom” (miller & chuchryk, 1996, p. 6). the collection includes scholarly historical explorations of métis, saulteaux and prairie women, from archival sources, as well as shorter chapters, some just a few pages long, drawing on knowledges passed down orally from one generation of women to the next. as betty bastien (1996), from the peigan first nation, observes, despite “racism and cultural annihilation,” “we must not forget” those ways of situating “ourselves” that honour “the interdependencies of self and others” (p. 128). for bastien, recalling indigenous peoples’ place within “the web of creation” (1996, p. 128) recalls indigenous women’s ongoing relationships with the natural world, relationships the colonial state has systematically sought to destroy. the collection features diverse, even divergent perspectives. beverly hungry wolf (1996), emphasizes complementary roles for women and men, maintaining that, “as givers of life, we women have special relationships to the earth” (p. 81) and so must teach children, indigenous communities and the broader public about responsibilities to the natural world. in contrast, larocque (1996) recognizes the usefulness of much traditional knowledge, but calls for more sceptical engagement, suggesting that, “as women we must be circumspect in our recall of tradition” (p. 14). respect and honour towards women, she warns, cannot substitute for difficult questions: “we must ask ourselves wherein lies our source of empowerment” (p. 14) and be prepared to critique and move beyond traditions harmful to and constraining upon women’s agency. neo-traditionalist approaches, centered on women’s maternity confront indigenous feminisms that argue for critical engagement with traditions, as the way forward for women surviving “the chaos, despair, hostility and death” brought about by colonial patriarchal rule (armstrong, 1996, p. xii). in this period, two interventions draw attention to the marginalization of indigenous women within their own communities, further complicating whitestream assumptions about the socially constructed category of “indigenous women” as unified, while contextualizing this marginalization within the violence of the colonial context. in 1993, doreen demas, a blind disability activist from the canupawakpa dakota nation in manitoba, published a still-rare article from an indigenous feminist disability standpoint. demas’ concern is to indigenize white disability services while ensuring that indigenous feminists support disabled women within their own communities. a lack of clear jurisdictional responsibility between colonial and indigenous 9 the contributors include rosemary brown, a white anti-racist activist, not to be confused with rosemary brown, the first black woman to be elected as a member of the legislative assembly in british columbia. elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 442 authorities, she warns, combines with chronic underfunding of indigenous agencies to produce “triple jeopardy” for disabled indigenous women, their needs unmet by both governments. in a similarly path-breaking article, alex wilson (1996), from the opaskwayak cree nation, writes about the then-recent resurgence of “two spirit” indigenous persons from across north america. the concept of “twospirit” is used “by many cree and other aboriginal lesbian, gay, bi, and trans people” (a. wilson, 2008, p. 193), wilson explains, to situate themselves as holding both masculine and feminine characteristics within spiritually charged relationships “deeply rooted in our cultures” (a. wilson, 1996, p. 304). for lesbian, gay and bisexual indigenous persons, wilson argues, racial and sexual identity are indissociable, given the simultaneous experiences of colonial racisms and homophobia. neither whitestream lgbt politics nor anti-racist lgbt struggles can address the specific existential and social realities of two-spirit persons. instead, the renewal of (diverse) indigenous spirituality and ethical commitments, like an ethic of non-interference that allows for a wide range of gender and sexual practices, support the distinctive sexual and gender expressions of indigenous two-spirit persons as they “come in” to their communities (a. wilson, 2008). this second wave scholarship recognizes the devastation of patriarchal colonialisms, but contrapuntally affirms indigenous women’s resilience, their capacity to survive genocidal erasure and to write specifically, for instance, as mohawk and/or two-spirit indigenous women. this means resisting dangerously dehumanizing stereotypes about indigenous women as sexually available “squaws” while challenging the invisibilization and marginalization of indigenous women with disabilities. resurgent traditional knowledge is an important source of insight and support, as when a. wilson (2008) invokes an ethic of non-interference to create space for two-spirit ontologies purposefully destroyed by colonial powers and now stigmatized by some in indigenous communities. in this second wave, reflecting the growing number of indigenous women’s voices in the academy, both diversity and divergences within indigenous women’s politics appear. some second wave scholars argue that indigenous women play especially powerful roles in challenging colonial patriarchies as mothers and grandmothers, while others, notably larocque (1996), caution that some resurgent traditionalisms discipline rather empower women and therefore require critical evaluation, with women’s well being the ultimate standard against which any practice or norm must be judged. this resurgence of a range of indigenous women’s standpoints, countering reductionist stereotypes and rearticulating cultural knowledge for the present in ways supportive to indigenous women, deepens with the third wave. “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 443 the 2000s third wave of resurgence literature: strengthening and broadening the field of indigenous women’s scholarship since the early 2000s, a third wave of indigenous women’s scholarship has developed, which, especially in the last decade, is now so vast and important as to defy any easy, much less comprehensive, description. during the first decade of the 2000s, critical indigenous women’s contributions include the publication of five edited collections: lawrence and anderson’s (2003a) strong women stories: native vision and community survival; green’s (2007a), making space for indigenous feminism; valaskakis, stout and guimond’s (2009a) restoring the balance: first nations women, community and culture; monture-angus and patricia mcguire’s (bingwi neyaashi anishinaabek) (2009a) first voices: an aboriginal women's reader; and suzack, shari huhndorf (yup’ik), jeanne perreault, and jean barman’s (2010) indigenous women and feminism: politics, activism, culture. these collections alone brought nearly one hundred indigenous women’s voices – including activists, traditional knowledge keepers, writers and artists – into the scholarly conversation through texts, interviews, and in some cases, poems and photographs. there is some tension across these collections. many contributors emphasize indigenous women’s vitality and strength but eschew to identify as feminist, while others specifically embrace indigenous feminisms, as a political commitment and source of necessary insight into racism, colonialism and patriarchy. as monture-angus and mcguire (2009b, p. 2) emphasize, there is “a great diversity of aboriginal women. not only do we come from different nations, each of whom have their own traditions, ceremonies, laws and languages, but aboriginal women also act in the world in multiple ways.” whatever the differences in argument, theme and approach, however, the third wave of indigenous women’s scholarship builds upon and affirms indigenous women’s knowledge and agency – on their own behalf and with respect to transforming relationships beyond current patriarchal colonial institutions, practices and ideologies. as lawrence and anderson (2003b) explain, indigenous women grapple with “the fallout of colonization and the challenge to rebuild” (p. 12), and indigenous scholarship reflects these ongoing struggles. this generates scholarship about a wide range of concerns. among them, kiera ladner (2000), examines the changing salience of gender within historical and resurgent blackfoot nationalisms. lawrence (2004) deconstructs the complexities of the colonial state’s social-legal production of new, gendered categories of indigenous personhood and the consequences for urban indigenous identity. zapotec scholar isabel altamirano-jiménez (2013) contributes political economic analyses of indigenous women’s resistance to neoliberal forms of capitalist dispossession, across the continent now called north america. in their edited collection, anderson, campbell and métis artist christi belcourt (2018) join more than 20 contributing authors to elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 444 describe indigenous women’s resilience against ongoing genocidal violence, in a persistent return to indigenous women’s ongoing struggles against murderous colonialisms and for reconfigured relationships on bases respecting indigenous women’s humanity. other indigenous women scholars diversely theorize the meanings of critical relationships, especially those with the land, and associated concepts like “place.” cree scholar karyn recollet (2015) investigates and celebrates urban spatial “glyphs” that perform solidarity and repossess cityscapes, while protesting violence against indigenous women. for their part, starblanket and heidi stark (turtle mountain ojibwe) (2018) refuse the western colonial idea of land, whether urban or rural, as “bounded territories in which only our primordial practices can permeate so long as they are understood as temporally and spatially fixed” (pp. 190-191). instead, “it is our mobility, our movement across the lands and waters that activates our relationships and responsibilities” (p. 192), demanding attentiveness to and the nurturing of expansive kin relationships, in recognition of those humans, plants and animals “who came before us, who already governed the territories we came to inhabit” (p. 193). in a related discussion, lawrence and anderson (2003b) ask what it means to “come home,” when land and associated cultural knowledges have been lost, or when home is a site of patriarchal oppression and must be struggled for and re-established as “a place where we have the respect, authority and freedom that are due us as native women” (p. 15). across multiple, complex conversations that can only be gestured to briefly here, the emphasis is on indigenous women’s agency, challenging the dominance of victim-centered narratives. as valaskakis, stout and guimond (2009b) argue, “women are guardians of indigenous traditions, practices, and beliefs – and agents of change for their families and nations” (p. 2). as sarah hunt (tłaliłila'ogwa) emphasizes, this includes the resilient presence of twospirit indigenous persons who decolonize with and through the revitalization of two-spirit sexualities and genders (hunt & holmes, 2015; hunt, 2016). pragmatic and “future-oriented,” they grapple with and seek to move beyond “historic trauma” to act for health and healing, including through artistic, cultural and language revival or resurgence (guimond, valaskakis, stout, & guimond, 2009b, p. 3). recognizing the hard realities of ongoing colonial violence co-exists with a contrapuntal emphasis on indigenous women’s and, as hunt underlines, two-spirit agency and possibility. for green (2007b), rebuilding indigenous relationships against patriarchy, including within indigenous communities, is a feminist task. in the most forthright statement of indigenous feminist commitments in the scholarly literature up to that time, she writes: aboriginal feminists. they exist; they choose the label, the ideological position, the analysis, and the process. aboriginal feminists raise issues of colonialism, racism, sexism, and the unpleasant synergy between these three violations of human rights. aboriginal feminists illuminate topics that but for their voices, would not be raised at all. (green, 2007b, p. 20) “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 445 such theorizing of the intertwinings of colonialism, racism and sexism is not always welcome within indigenous communities, construed as a betrayal of indigenous women’s solidarity with men or dismissed as white women’s politics (green, 2017b, pp. 12-13). feminist analysis is said to be “divisive” within indigenous communities and indigenous women who challenge patriarchy may be labelled untraditional, a powerful way of delegitimating their arguments in a context in which tradition is often insulated – dangerously, in green’s view – from critique (p. 13). indigenous feminisms persist because they are deeply connected with indigenous women’s broader struggles for justice and creative assertions of presence against colonial genocide. as huhndorf and suzack (2010) observe, “indigenous feminism…has arisen from histories of women’s activism and culture that have aimed to combat gender discrimination, secure social justice for indigenous women and counter their social erasure and marginalization” (pp. 5-6). a sharp political edge informs indigenous women’s scholarship, especially explicitly feminist indigenous resurgence that challenges historical and contemporary power inequities rooted in gender and sexuality (starblanket, 2017, pp. 25-28) collectively, third wave indigenous women’s scholarship describes and analyses indigenous women’s resilience despite genocidal colonial violence, marginalization and erasure, while celebrating resistance against the colonial foreclosure of indigenous women’s futures and challenging dispossession in both country and urban spaces. indigenous feminists support resurgence – at once scholarly, activist and artistic – contributing to the well-being of indigenous women, their families and communities. towards these ends, some, like monture (monture-okanee 1992, pp. 251-266), eschew the feminist label, while others emphatically embrace a new indigenous feminist politics, placing questions of gender, sexuality and power at the centre of resurgence movements and renewed responsibilities to each other and the land. this increasingly broad and richly diverse indigenous feminist scholarly conversation draws strength from indigenous women’s movements across politics, economics and culture. the nascent dialogue with anti-racist feminisms emerges in this context. “constellations of co-resistance”: towards indigenous and anti-racist feminist solidarity since the 2000s, indigenous women have explicitly theorized the relationship between indigenous and anti-racist feminisms, complicating narratives about existing or possible solidarities. lawrence and anti-racist feminist enakshi dua’s (2005) path-breaking, “decolonizing anti-racisms” contends that anti-racist feminists fail to recognize the ongoing colonialism of indigenous peoples on lands claimed by canada (p. 122) – or problematically integrate elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 446 indigenous feminisms as “single issue” topics rather than as vitally informing all anti-racist analyses. refusing a political “race to innocence” (fellows & razack, 1998), lawrence and dua argue for frank recognition of racialized migrants’ occupation of indigenous lands, whether voluntary or involuntarily, and so their functional implication in colonial dispossession. consequently, there is no easy structural alignment of interests or automatic solidarity across indigenous and racialized women. instead, significant political and scholarly labour lies ahead, beginning with forthright acknowledgement of “the complex histories of interactions between peoples of color and aboriginal peoples” (lawrence & dua, 2005, p. 136), in moments of cooperation and conflict. a few years later, zainab amadahy, an african american scholar-activist with cherokee ancestry, and lawrence (amadahy & lawrence, 2009) published a dialogue exploring black and indigenous relationships, including often-occluded black indigeneity. observing that “both black and indigenous peoples have experienced unique global levels of devastation as races” (p. 106) through the global slave trade and genocide in the americas, they warn that devastating histories may nonetheless be taken up unproductively – fueling antagonistic claims of the primacy of suffering of one community, while failing to acknowledge and challenge anti-black racisms in indigenous communities and the erasure of indigenous peoples in many black liberation narratives. further, urgent life and death struggles across black and indigenous communities maintain both in “a perpetual state of crisis” (p. 131), with little energy to divert into dialogue with each other. despite such challenges, amadahy and lawrence argue for the importance of relationshipbuilding between indigenous and black scholars, including feminists, for future generations and for the future of the earth that sustains us all. in more recent years, there have been further constructive efforts by both indigenous and anti-racist scholars to develop analyses informed by commitments to solidarity, although not all are specifically feminist. 10 among them, anti-racist scholars corey snelgrove and rita dhamoon with corntassel (snelgrove, dhamoon & corntassel, 2014) argue that solidarity demands recognition of the incommensurability of diverse indigenous worldviews and other knowledge paradigms. this demands that “we” hear indigenous women scholars in their own voices (antjie krog repurposed by huron wendat political philosopher yann allard-tremblay, 2019, p. 2), as they bring unique ways of knowing into the academy – knowledges violently suppressed in the genocide against indigenous peoples. monture writes as a mohawk woman scholar, for instance, with insights unique to her person but at the same time, deeply informed by haudenosaunee culture. rather than being inserted into existing scholarly knowledge paradigms, whether colonial 10 there have been unhelpful interventions, as well. if these must be deconstructed, i choose not to do that work given limited space here. see coulthard and simpson’s (2016) critique of “antinative sentiment,” in theorizing by some contemporary anti-racist scholars (pp. 252-253). “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 447 or anti-racist, her theorizing necessarily begins with an appreciation of the distinctive character and grounding of her scholarly-political contributions. this does not mean accepting indigenous women’s knowledge uncritically, an impossibility, in any case, given divergent, conflicting views among indigenous women. meaningful critical engagement – and possibilities for real solidarity – nonetheless depends on an expansive capacity to hear this knowledge in its own voice, not as raw material to be subsumed into another theory but as theorizing in its own right. as larocque (2010) insists, “of course, there are different theories about how we theorize, and there are also conflicting theories among us, but we do theorize” (p. 165). likewise, responsible engagement requires familiarity with the diversity and debates across and among indigenous women and feminists, refusing to flatten out a wide range of voices – incompletely and partially gestured to here – into a monolithic pan-indigenous bloc. as anti-racist scholars, whatever our social location, our relational responsibility to indigenous colleagues means becoming familiar with indigenous women’s literature in its range and depth, contradictions and common arguments. in pointing to recurrent themes of resilience, resistance and resurgence over three waves of increasingly rich, diverse scholarship by indigenous women, this essay seeks to encourage such familiarity. in so doing, i join an existing indigenous feminist and anti-racist scholarship. this includes, for instance, dhamoon’s (2015) characteristically insightful exploration of indigenous and critical race theorizing, which explores the “context of colonial formations of heteropatriarchal, racial capitalism and concurrent systemic implications in settler colonialism” (p. 34) and her innovation, with davina bhandar (bhandar & dhamoon, 2019), of a “colonial analytic” (p. 15) that seeks to simultaneously address dynamics articulated in both post-colonial and contemporary colonial contexts. in a different, but equally useful approach, robyn maynard’s (2017) analyzes state violence in policing black lives. if maynard focuses on the specificities of systemic anti-black hatreds, she consistently points to similarities and differences in the colonial policing of indigenous peoples, consciously opening up space for black-indigenous solidarity. short dialogues, like the conversation among simpson, black theorist rinaldo walcott and coulthard (simpson, walcott & coulthard, 2018) about the indigenous movement idle no more and black lives matters, alongside longer edited collections like the aboriginal healing foundation’s cultivating canada: reconciliation through the lens of cultural diversity (mathur, dewar & degagné, 2011), allow racialized and indigenous scholars to think through their relationship and responsibilities to each other amidst and against white supremacy, colonialism and associated violences and injustices. in opening up and pursuing these conversations and relationships, anishinaabe public intellectual leanne simpson (2016) writes about “constellations of co-resistance,” envisioned as “flight paths or doorways out of settler colonial representation and thought” (p. 27, drawing on insights by elaine coburn studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 448 jarrett martineau). in developing such flight paths, solidarity can mutually reinforce relatively marginalized groups, strengthening both across the margins – and this is necessary to survival in contexts of violence, exploitation and oppression. at the same time, scholarly theoretical and analytical vocabularies must express the specificities of harms and the distinctiveness of diverse knowledges, against a context in which indigenous peoples’ knowledges have been deliberated, violently erased and racialized women’s knowledges systematically marginalized. to borrow from lawrence and anderson (2003), indigenous women’s resilience, resistance and resurgence are existential and political projects that “explor[e] what we need to know about who we are and where we have come from as native women…to look at where our communities are now and where we want them to go” (p. 11). in surviving and resisting heteropatriarchal colonialism, indigenous scholars and actors share both common and distinct experiences of white racisms, institutionalized and personal, with anti-racist feminists. in turning away from colonial powers and inward to renew diverse indigenous knowledges, indigenous women innovate through their own distinct cultures and individual self-expression, while creating relations of responsibility to other peoples and to the natural world that may offer new political possibilities for solidarities across difference and inequities rooted in gender, race, sexuality and colonialism. if this essay has made any single overarching argument, it is that in “theorizing our place,” there is now a rich, diverse indigenous women’s scholarship with insights that may be appreciated on their own terms and more recently, with an aim to building relationships with anti-racist feminisms on lands that sustain us all. there is no neat end-point to such conversation, now or into the future, but only a commitment to a growing dialogue that, at its best, is rooted in four directions principles of kindness, honesty, sharing and strength (turpel, 1989, p. 155). as monture (montureangus, 1995) might observe, this is a process that stretches through to responsibilities in the present, for the seven generations to come and even beyond: “this story does not have an end. it goes on and on and on” (p. 23). acknowledgements thank you to soma chatterjee and tania das gupta for inviting me to contribute this piece and for editorial advice, and to ena dua, joyce green and emma larocque for conversations informing this article in different ways. i acknowledge two anonymous reviewers for suggestions on a very early, inadequate draft of this paper. i hope this responds to their important concerns. responsibility for the arguments here remains mine. “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 449 references acoose, j./misko-kìsikàwihkwè. 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(2009). black canadian feminist thought: perspectives on equity and diversity in the academy. race, ethnicity & education, 12(1), 65-77. wesley-esquimaux, c. (2009). trauma to resilience: notes on decolonization. in g. g. valaskakis, m. stout & e. guimond (eds.), restoring the balance: first nations women, community and culture (pp. 13-34). university of manitoba press wilson, a. (1996). how we find ourselves: identity development and two spirit people. harvard educational review, 66(2), 303-318. “theorizing our place” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 429-453, 2020 453 wilson, a. (2008). n'tacinowin inna nah': our coming in stories. canadian woman studies, 26(3), 193-199. wilson, s. (2008). research is ceremony: indigenous research methods. fernwood press. fonseka et al final before ts correspondence address: trehani fonseka, school of social work, king’s university college at western university, london, on, n6a 2m3; email: tfonseka@uwo.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 use of arts-based research to uncover racism trehani m. fonseka1 king’s university college at western university, canada akin taiwo king’s university college at western university, canada bharati sethi king’s university college at western university, canada abstract the article provides an overview of arts-based research (abr) within social work and general healthcare practice in canada, and how it can be used to uncover racism within vulnerable populations, particularly youth, women, immigrants and refugees, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (lgbtqi) community, and indigenous peoples. this is a general review of the literature. a literature search was conducted using the university of western ontario’s summons database, with coverage from january 2000 to february 2019. data exploring participant experiences, personal identity, voice, and invisible powers were extracted, and analyzed using a critical race lens to examine the intersection of societal and cultural practice with race and power. results indicate that abr can support therapeutic recovery from oppression by enhancing self-expression of feelings and thoughts, and affording participants the agency to reclaim and reframe their personal narrative. abr can further generate a sense of community by creating connections between participants with similar oppressions to overcome disconnection and marginalization. within a broader community context, abr permits the sharing of stories and insights with others, which can generate dialogue on important social 1 all authors had full access to the data presented in this review and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data interpretation. study concept and design: tmf, at, bs. acquisition of data: tmf. interpretation of data: tmf. drafting of the manuscript: tmf. critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: tmf, at, bs. study supervision: at, bs. at and bs contributed equally to this article. all authors have given approval for the final version of the article to be published. the authors have no conflicts to disclose. this research was funded by king’s university college (kuc) at western university. the opinions, results and conclusions are those of the authors and no endorsement by kuc is intended or should be inferred. trehani fonseka, akin taiwo & bharati sethi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 44 issues to expose areas of social inequity and oppression alongside potential solutions for transformative social action. this dialogue can also extend to discussions with policy makers on the impact of social inequities to guide recommendations that address system gaps for broader community-level change. the paper concludes that abr can move beyond merely reflecting on social conditions toward actively addressing them by promoting sustainable social change. the voices expressed through abr illustrate possible solutions to overcome racism through inclusive social practice, deconstruction of the racial status quo, and movement toward an equitable distribution of power. keywords arts-based; racism; discrimination; social justice; vulnerable populations; canada introduction arts-based research (abr) is a transdisciplinary approach to building knowledge that uses creative art processes and practices to holistically address all stages of the research process (leavy, 2017). abr is a relatively new and emerging qualitative methodology that capitalizes on the use of artistic forms and expressions (i.e., written, visual, sound, and performance art media including but not limited to photovoice, digital storytelling, the movement of sound and music and its interaction through listening, and theatre) to analyze, understand, and embody human experiences, generate and convey meaning and awareness, and enhance reflexivity and empathy (leavy, 2017; mullane, 2010; savin-baden & wimpenny, 2014). multiple media forms can also be integrated together, for example, through the merger of visual imagery and written word to create an original a/r/tography, which is a method of arts-oriented and educational research (springgay et al., 2008). abr is grounded in a philosophy that recognizes the power of making and responding to art to convey truth and awareness, and generate preverbal forms of knowledge that engage sensori-emotional, perceptual, kinesthetic, embodied, and imagined ways of knowing as part of an “aesthetic intersubjective paradigm” (chilton et al., 2015; gerber et al., 2012). the reference to “intersubjectivity” pertains to the experience of knowledgesharing as relational, where individuals can generate meaning with others and nature (conrad & beck, 2015). despite its affiliations with qualitative research, abr is still considered somewhat distinct as it is rooted in a “groundless theory” approach instead of the more common “grounded theory” (neilsen, 2004). in addition to being informed by varied philosophical underpinnings, advances in areas such as creative art therapies, the study of arts and learning, and qualitative research have also propelled abr forward (leavy, 2017). to support knowledge generation, abr operates within a participatory action framework that incorporates more inclusive and empowering methods to engage participants directly in the research itself rather than to merely be a use of arts-based research to uncover racism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 45 subject of it (conrad & campbell, 2008). participatory methodology can be used to furnish marginalized individuals more control over the research process (wang & redwood-jones, 2001), such as by shifting the power to identify and discuss important social issues from the researchers to the participants (wang & burris, 1997). under this design, the process of producing the art becomes equally as significant as the art itself (flicker et al., 2014). through abr, participants can enhance the self-expression of their feelings and thoughts (darley & heath, 2008; huss, 2009), while researchers benefit from capturing perspectives that may otherwise be overlooked by more mainstream research methods (van der vaart et al., 2018). although abr can extract personal truths from participant experiences, these outputs must be framed within an understanding that the knowledge is subjective, context-dependent, and in constant flux (finley, 2008). therefore, the products of abr cannot be analyzed outside of the intended context, as the art reflects complex interrelationships between people, places, and social conditions of a specific milieu (flicker et al., 2014). there is significant value in identifying personal expressions of knowledge, particularly its ability to inform and propel social change. when participants are given an opportunity to share their voice on larger social issues, it can create a powerful dialogue that exposes areas of social inequity and oppression alongside potential solutions for transformative social action (finley, 2008). as participants publicly share how their personal truths have been shaped by broader sociocultural, political and economic influences, the audience is challenged to re-evaluate their understanding of the current social climate and examine new ways of existing and interacting with others (gonick, 2017). since this dialogue is enriched when more people join the conversation, particularly those whose voices are most often excluded in society, abr is a practical means to present information in a manner that is more accessible and relatable to the masses (savin-baden & major, 2013), such as by overcoming educational and language barriers that are common within traditional research (wang & burris, 1997). due to the potential to bridge scholarly inquiry with personal expressions of knowledge, abr has received considerable uptake across a variety of disciplines including social work, health, and education (wang et al., 2017). for this review, the authors will address how abr can be used within social work and general healthcare practice in canada to uncover racism in society, specifically among vulnerable populations. the authors will address this research question by exploring participant experiences around personal identity, voice, and invisible powers, and including the stories of marginalized population such as youth, women, immigrants and refugees, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (lgbtqi) community, and indigenous peoples. the inclusion of indigenous groups in a discussion of racism within a canadian context is of utmost importance. although the authors recognize that the experiences, historical oppressions, trehani fonseka, akin taiwo & bharati sethi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 46 and social locations of indigenous peoples are distinct from other marginalized groups, due to space limitations, an in-depth exploration of these topics is beyond the intended scope of this review. methodology a literature search was conducted using the university of western ontario’s summons database, with coverage from january 2000 to february 2019. search terms were: (‘racism’ or ‘discrimination’ or ‘marginalization’ or ‘microaggression’ or ‘othering’) and (‘arts-based’) results were restricted to peer-reviewed, english language articles using data from canadian populations. conference and dissertation abstracts and papers were excluded. reference lists from review papers were also examined for additional articles of relevance. results were individually reviewed for concordance with search criteria. data were analyzed using a critical race lens to examine the intersection of societal and cultural practice with race and power. stovall (2010) outlined three main tenants of critical race theory, which will inform our analyses: first, race is a social construct that is not fixed, but instead, has political implications for marginalized versus dominant social groups. outside of biological determinants, societal understanding of race and racism are influenced by macro-level (e.g., sociopolitical) and micro-level factors that shape the experiences of marginalized groups with respect to how race goes on to intersect with other identities, such as gender and class. second, economic and social policies that are intended to yield racial equality are often enforced only to the extent that they benefit dominant racial groups. third, narratives are a central element to articulate the experiences and understandings of marginalized racial groups that have otherwise been silenced, in order to shape education, policy, and the law. how can abr be used to explore racism? racism is a socially constructed ideology that is heavily integrated into society through institutions, policies, and general social practice (robinson, 2017). abr is a useful tool to uncover the effects of racism in society by providing a forum for discussion that allows stereotypes and oppressive discourses to be exposed and challenged, rather than passively accepted, and replaced with more empowering and culturally-accepting ideologies (flicker et al., 2014). the inclusion of diverse voices in this dialogue can also shed light on how race intersects with other social locations such as gender, sexual orientation, religion or socioeconomic status, to influence one’s personal use of arts-based research to uncover racism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 47 experience(s) of oppression (collins, 2000). the process also offers an opportunity to build connections across individual experiences to reveal how racism functions at the broader social level (bell & roberts, 2010). within this discussion, there are different voices expressed through abr and each reveals their own personal truth on racism. the voices of those who are marginalized and stigmatized reveal lessons on invisible social barriers and struggles but can also be a testament to self-affirmation and resiliency in response to oppression. voices of resistance illustrate possible solutions to battle racism through inclusive social practice, while other voices aim to deconstruct and challenge the racial status quo and promote social change (bell & roberts, 2010; strack et al., 2004). in this way, abr can move beyond merely reflecting on social conditions toward actively changing them. voices, identities, and balancing power there is a great deal of artistic variety within abr (e.g., medium, method, style), which permits complex expressions of personal identity through both the final product and the creative style or process itself (flicker et al., 2014; malandra, 2007). the medium also allows participants with intersectional experiences of multiple oppressions to share their stories and insights with others, offering knowledge that would not otherwise be accessible to those outside of the experiences (bochner & ellis, 2003; wang & burris, 1997). this knowledge dissemination can promote social action to change inequitable or oppressive social conditions and give agency to participants to become community-level advocates (strack et al., 2004; wang & burris, 1997). in this advocacy context, dialogue can extend to discussions with policy makers on the impact of social inequities to guide recommendations for broader community-level change (wang, 1999; wang & redwood-jones, 2001). this arrangement is supportive of mutual knowledge sharing (wang & burris, 1997), where participants can equally participate in decision-making processes, share skills, and create counter-narratives that make visible the identities or experiences that would have otherwise been silenced (flicker et al., 2014). by creating a more equal balance of power between those in positions of power and participants of abr (huss & cwikel, 2005), dialogue becomes more participatory than hierarchical, where the art not only conveys impactful messaging but also provides a transformative opportunity to engage with power structures, culture, and personal identity development (flicker et al., 2014). trehani fonseka, akin taiwo & bharati sethi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 48 using abr to uncover racism in different populations in recognizing that abr has significant utility in empowering marginalized peoples toward individual and broader-level social transformations, this methodology has been used to address racism within distinct vulnerable subgroups. children and youth abr has application across both young children and older youth populations. among children, abr is a developmentally-appropriate medium that has been leveraged as a therapeutic tool to support participant healing from oppression, as observed among racialized children during the holocaust (green, 1969). to support this outcome, abr allows children to process and overcome oppression by documenting their experiences directly in their pieces or reframing them to reflect alternative (e.g., more positive) outcomes (st thomas & johnson, 2007). the artistic process is also highly valuable as it provides a means for emotions and critical elements of past experiences to become visible and actively explored within a safe, therapeutic context, which can help children to gain a better understanding of themselves and also learn emotion regulation, impulse control, and viable coping strategies (levine, 2015). abr can further be used as a vehicle to generate positive social change among youth. for example, the anti-racism arts festival is a national antiracism event in canada that features local artists, many of whom are youth, in a movement to use the arts to bring about social change and challenge racism (canadian cultural mosaic foundation, 2019). in other cases, through the deliberate use of racialized language within their personal narratives, youth reclaim and reframe derogatory terms as a stance against racism, which is especially powerful within “colour blind” contexts where discussions of racism are often ignored (roberts et al., 2008). the ability to control the presentation of the artistic product appears to contribute greatly to the healing process of the younger demographic by giving them agency to reclaim their oppression. women the use of abr to share experiences among women has notable effects in generating community through a connection over similar oppressions, which can overcome disconnection and marginalization (coholic et al., 2012; grassau, 2009; walsh et al., 2013). in high-risk situations, performance abr, particularly acting, has been advantageous; acting has allowed women to express the depth of their oppression(s), such as the intersectional use of arts-based research to uncover racism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 49 oppressions of racism and sexism, through multiple voices without having to divulge too much information about themselves (lee, 2005). photography has also become a popular abr method, permitting a more comprehensive glimpse into participant experiences (sethi, 2016), while maintaining high levels of participant engagement (chio & fandt, 2007). through this dialogue, women are able to co-create reflective knowledge and critical self-awareness regarding the presence of invisible powers and inequalities in their lives (lee, 2005; sethi, 2016). by validating and giving voice to these personal narratives, abr empowers women to turn invisible oppressions into visible realities that can be leveraged as a tool for education and advocacy (sethi, 2016; walsh et al., 2013). an enhanced understanding of oppression can help to improve community conditions and address system gaps to ultimately mitigate experiences of racism and oppression for others (walsh et al., 2013). immigrants and refugees the stories of immigrants and refugees can provide insights into the adjustment process of relocating to a different nation and bring to light the various preand post-migratory stressors that can influence personal outcomes. in particular, this subpopulation is often faced with ongoing racism, dehumanization, and discrimination within the employment sector (sethi, 2012, 2017), as evidenced by poor recognition of participant education, skills, and abilities (sethi, 2016). these discriminatory experiences can further manifest themselves as either an inability to secure employment or being forced into positions characterized by low wage, poor conditions, and persistent racism from colleagues or customers, coupled with a fear of reprisal to speak up against these inequities (sethi, 2016). in recognition of this fact, abr provides participants with a safe forum to give voice to their lived experiences of racism and discrimination (sethi, 2016). abr also supports participants in maintaining a sense of hope in the face of oppression by integrating their self-concept to better understand and reframe their experiences to develop a more positive outlook (ratkovic & sethi, 2017). the same phenomenon can be observed among refugee children who use abr to improve understanding of their perceptions and experiences across different contexts, and to reframe their focus onto hopeful imagery (yohani, 2008). moreover, abr is useful in the presence of language barriers, as it allows participants to share personal narratives on oppressive experiences through non-linguistic mediums, such as photography, to bypass the difficulties of articulating details in a foreign language (sethi, 2016). trehani fonseka, akin taiwo & bharati sethi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 50 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (lgbtqi) community abr has significant utility toward addressing social injustice within the lgbtqi community, as the arts have a long and productive history of being heavily repurposed as a powerful activist tool to address various social issues including hiv/aids and the intersectionality of sexuality with race and gender. for example, the black lives matter global network, which is an activist organization that aims to liberate african americans from violence and systematic racism across all intersectionalities (e.g., sexuality, gender, ability, class), uses art and culture to unite and empower the marginalized and promote positive social change by exposing ongoing oppressions, disrupting the status quo, and challenging how members of the black community are viewed (black lives matter, n.d.; fogg, 2016). visual art has also been used to promote collective action in response to the aids epidemic, while documenting the emotions and meanings behind both the crisis and the social change (sember & gere, 2006). similarly, the aids coalition to unleash power (act up), an activist group that aims to mitigate the aids crisis by speaking up against stigma and discrimination and increasing the accessibility of accurate medical information, formed the arts collective, gran fury, to leverage the power of art for their cause (act up, n.d.). the artistic pieces that gran fury produced most notably included installations of a pink triangle that was reclaimed from its historic use during the nazi regime to mark homosexuals for genocide to now signal the struggle for sexual rights and the urgency to end the aids epidemic, in addition to featuring the popular silence=death logo, which was originally developed by the silence=death project (sember & gere, 2006). act up has also integrated theatre into their work by staging events to publicly challenge dominant discourse around aids and promote alternative representations (gamson, 1989). inspired by the transformative potential of gran fury, aids action now!, a community hiv/aids activist group, followed suit and developed collaborative artistic posters as part of their poster virus project, which is a street and online art initiative to respond to the aids crisis (aids action now!, 2012). the poster virus project contributed to social change by documenting the current realities of people living with aids and pushing the boundaries on how aids is discussed publicly (alexander mcclelland, n.d.; kerr, 2016). the activist organization, visual aids, which is an online network for artists living with and responding to hiv/aids, is a vital location of abr as it similarly utilizes art to promote dialogue by allowing contributors to showcase their practice-based work (and accompanying statements) through a personalized profile with the intent to educate and reach larger public audiences (visual aids, n.d.). collectively, these works, among others not mentioned here, have inspired a new wave of social use of arts-based research to uncover racism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 51 activism that has reframed the aids epidemic as a social crisis and transformed public health messaging by inviting persons with lived experience to join the conversation on aids (sember & gere, 2006). indigenous peoples indigenous peoples in canada have been subject to considerable racism and cultural oppression. this is most evidently observed by colonization and assimilation efforts (macdonald & steenbeek, 2015), in addition to ongoing exposure to racialized stereotypes and stigmatization, racial violence, and structural racism through various sociopolitical institutions within canada (loppie et al., 2014). together, these oppressive experiences have intersected to produce disproportionately high rates of social and health inequities among indigenous peoples (reading & wien, 2009) that can be explored through abr. abr can be used as an anti-oppressive strategy to yield therapeutic effects for indigenous peoples by linking traditional healing practices with cultural identity (trépanier, 2008), which allows participants to reconnect to their heritage and value systems (herring, 1997). in recognition of the relationship between the arts and indigenous wellness, health programs often aim to include creative methods, where possible (archibald & dewar, 2010). both the art and the creative process are integral to therapeutic outcomes by not only providing an outlet for emotion exploration but also tapping into strengthsand resiliency-based approaches by connecting participants to their culture through the use of traditional art forms (flicker et al., 2014). the qualitative methods of abr also support decolonization by empowering participants to share their subjective truths and by moving toward balancing power dynamics with researchers (castleden & garvin, 2008). moreover, abr can yield positive effects for indigenous communities by uniting people in solidarity and empathy under common experiences (coholic, 2012), and using art to connect to broader cultural practices for intergenerational teaching and knowledge transmission (herring, 1997; trépanier, 2008). abr empowers participants to engage in a critical dialogue about the effects of colonization on indigenous peoples and potential resolutions for these injustices (flicker et al., 2014). the positive effects of abr have also been noted among indigenous youth who experience increased pride in an art practice that allows them to serve as change ambassadors, relaying important cultural messaging and generating awareness of broader social issues (flicker et al., 2014). in considering these outcomes abr may offer an effective strategy to support decolonization intergenerationally. despite the noted benefits of abr to address social, historical, and structural oppressions affecting indigenous peoples in canada, researchers are cautioned to ensure that the voices of indigenous participants are not trehani fonseka, akin taiwo & bharati sethi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 52 constrained within the boundaries of western research processes. brayboy et al. (2012) highlight the overemphasis of singular and objective truths within academic research, which is a more positivist approach that mimics imperialism and colonialism by suggesting that western scientific methods and ideological frameworks are the only legitimate forms of knowledge production and output. consequently, this can make researchers susceptible to analyzing abr outputs for an objective meaning that becomes estranged from its complex subjective truths and the context from which it was created and intended to be understood. the application of critical race theory and critical indigenous research methodologies (cirm) becomes integral to conducting ethical research with indigenous peoples by promoting anticolonial and emancipatory agendas that prioritize the self-determination and sovereignty of indigenous participants, in addition to broader community-level interests (brayboy & chin, 2018). the application of cirm within abr can assist researchers and institutions move away from limited definitions of knowledge and more openly consider the unique ways that indigenous peoples can contribute to scientific knowledge inquiry (brayboy et al., 2012). strengths and limitations to the authors’ knowledge, there is a paucity of data examining the utility of abr to uncover racism in the context of canadian social work and healthcare practice. this general review of the literature aims to address this gap using a critical race lens. moreover, in recognizing that oppressive experiences are unique to different groups based on the intersectionality of their various social locations, the authors examine the use of abr separately within distinct marginalized subdemographics. however, this review is not without its limitations. for one, the inclusion of marginalized groups within this review is not an exhaustive list, and abr has applicability to broader topics beyond racism and oppression. in addition, although the authors focus on the application of critical race theory to abr, other theories and texts beyond what is featured in this paper also have utility to better understand abr and its uses. secondly, due to the scope of this review, the authors are only able to address abr as a general overview and highlight specific examples of its use, which may result in intricacies of member experiences or other expressions of abr being overlooked. another limitation to consider is the role that privilege plays within academia with regard to interpreting the outputs of abr. as previously mentioned, western scientific methods and ideological frameworks tend to privilege knowledge that aligns with objectivity and singular truths, which can restrict the types of artistic pieces that are deemed acceptable for abr, and bias interpretation away from recognizing complex subjective meanings that are rooted in the context and experiences of the participant (brayboy et use of arts-based research to uncover racism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 53 al., 2012). if not carefully managed, these biases may inadvertently exclude certain subdemographics from participating in abr because their methods and forms of artistic expression are not considered legitimate forms of knowledge. if this were to occur, the accounts of these subdemographics would be silenced from the literature, which distorts the available knowledge base and violates the principles of empowerment and inclusivity upon which abr is based. consequently, effects related to the structural power and privilege inherent in the policies, institutions, and systems where abr is delivered must be examined to ensure that abr does not become a vehicle to reinforce systemic discrimination (kaiser, 2017). it is therefore imperative that the use of abr is accompanied by the goal of narrowing the gap in expectations and practice between more formal clinical or research hubs and community-level sites to ensure that perspectives of privilege are not reproduced. one potential way to achieve this goal is by applying an intersectional framework to abr that acknowledges differences across power, oppressions, and the social construction of meaning within art to better understand differences in participant experiences (kuri, 2017). this goal further requires that those in privileged positions, whether as a researcher or art therapist, engage in an exploration of their own use of power with participants to ensure that it remains ethical (karcher, 2017) and does not stray from the goals of abr by shifting away from social care and knowledge exploration toward social control. even among those who are included in abr processes, it is important to ensure that researchers refrain from promoting ageist or ableist biases that may infantilize the participants or their final artistic products or minimize the power of the artistic process (anacleto, 2018). this consideration further extends to ensuring that, when applying an external lens to an abr output, the power inherent in the position of the researcher does not result in the content being pathologized or responded to with an intent to “fix” the artist (maclagan, 2005). instead, the artist must be given fair opportunity to explain their art and define the meaning and function of any symbols or imagery that are used, for example, to maintain their connection with and ownership over their art piece. beyond the content, respect must also be afforded toward participant selection of their artistic processes and methods of production, such as those pertaining to medium, technique, and style. an examination of the artistic process as part of abr is particularly important when considering how an artist’s connection to their various identities, social locations, and communities can influence their choices. for example, when examining the role of culture, participants may opt to select traditional art forms to connect to broader cultural practices that have intergenerational value (flicker et al., 2014; herring, 1997; trépanier, 2008). the consideration of these factors is important to ensure that the meaning of the art does not lose its connection to the artist’s subjective truths and the context from which it was created and intended to be understood, otherwise abr can become another tool of trehani fonseka, akin taiwo & bharati sethi studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 54 oppression within power-imbalanced relationships with researchers and clinicians (huss & sela-amit, 2019). collectively, these limitations in how abr outputs are interpreted can be applied to the literature that has been included in this review, as the presented themes would have been influenced by the lens of the researcher(s) who extracted them, and thus, may reflect a biased interpretation that does not hold true to the intended meaning ascribed by the artist (graeme, 2010). these limitations must therefore be taken into consideration when reflecting upon the conclusions that are drawn within this review. going forward, to minimize the likelihood of biased outcomes, it is recommended that researchers avoid imposing strict submission criteria for abr projects that may limit applicant eligibility or constrain artistic vision and voice. in addition, member-checking should be included as a mandatory step within data verification to ensure that the themes and meanings attributed to a given art piece accurately align with the subjective intent and context assigned by the artist. conclusion abr can be an effective methodology when it includes people from different ableist, economic, gendered, racial, and sexual backgrounds as equal participants in an ongoing dialogue on racism, discrimination, and general experiences of oppression. the knowledge extracted from these narratives is integral to identifying system gaps and building recommendations to create equitable social practices. as part of this dialogue, abr can be used to generate a comprehensive picture of an individual’s experiences of oppression that acknowledges the complex interrelationships between various social locations and contextual factors. for example, abr can be used to expose hegemonic binaries around what is or is not deemed socially respectable based on comparisons against dominant groups, and by exploring how these conceptualizations affect access to status and rights for marginalized groups (higginbotham, 1994; vasudevan, 2019; wilson, 2019). by creating awareness on how these norms are legitimized and their oppressive effects, abr can initiate a dialogue to promote positive social change by diffusing hegemonic effects and fostering greater equity and inclusion (rivers, 2020). abr can also be used to mobilize change within larger social systems by renegotiating new meanings toward traditional symbols and imagery, which may translate into more positive behaviours, solutions, and social organization (huss & sela-amit, 2019). this important work also needs to occur alongside efforts to increase the visibility of marginalized groups, which can yield similar outcomes toward the acknowledgement and acceptance of difference, and social transformation. although care must be exerted to ensure that art processes within research and clinical work are not pathologizing or oppressive, abr use of arts-based research to uncover racism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 43-58, 2021 55 can nevertheless function to increase the visibility of marginalized groups by making their experiences, perspectives, and identities more publicly visible, which provides a platform to share voices that may have otherwise been silenced (whittier, 2017). this public disclosure has the potential to emotionally and cognitively shift both personal perceptions of identity and cultural conceptualizations of larger oppressed groups, which can alter public attitudes to reduce “othering” and discrimination within social institutions and policies (whittier, 2012, 2017). abr can also be therapeutic, allowing participants to process and reclaim their oppression(s) and reframe focus toward more hopeful outcomes, such as by building connections with others who have comparable experiences. taken together, abr is a highly effective research methodology that can support individual-level change toward healing and recovery alongside imbuing participants with the agency to become change advocates that work toward improving community conditions to mitigate racism and oppression. these advantages of abr can also be used to inform social work and healthcare practice. since abr provides an efficacious and low-cost option for personal healing, it should be provided as a therapeutic option for clients within clinical practice. abr could be delivered on an individual basis to safely allow clients to process and reclaim their oppressive experiences, or within group settings where shared experiences can foster a sense of belonging and community to overcome marginalization. abr can even be taken outside of clinical settings and incorporated into community-level programming that provides preventative or early intervention supports to people affected by racism and oppression. since abr has demonstrated utility across all ages, its inclusion in earlyand school-age programming could also yield promising results. the opportunities to customize the delivery of abr, such as through integration with cultural art forms, can offer greater meaning to participants and a deeper level of experiential processing. the products from abr can also be used as a powerful educational tool to disseminate knowledge on social injustices that require collective action. community exhibits that showcase the works of participants can provide a forum for knowledge exchange to occur and increase the potential for abr to educate lay audiences by using a relatable and accessible methodology that transcends educational and language barriers. this work can bridge into broader community-level 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(2019). pre-service art education: examining constructions of whiteness in/through visual culture. journal of cultural research in art education, 36(1), 73-89. https://jcrae.art.arizona.edu/index.php/jcrae/article/view/127 yohani, s. c. (2008). creating an ecology of hope: arts-based interventions with refugee children. child and adolescent social work journal, 25(4), 309-323. correspondence address: carlo fanelli, ryerson university, 350 victoria street, toronto, ontario, canada m5b 2k3. email: carlo.fanelli@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 2, 119-143, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base: the significance of 2012 carlo fanelli ryerson university1, canada abstract this article explores how the politics and economics of austerity has influenced collective bargaining between the cupe locals 79/416 and the city of toronto. i explore the relationship between neoliberalism and workplace precarity, drawing attention to the importance of the municipal public sector to trade unionism and the political potential of urbanized left-labour radicalism. following this, i provide an overview of the repeated attempts by city council to extract concessions from unionized workers with a focus on the concession-filled 2012 round of bargaining and its relationship to earlier rounds. in what follows i discuss the implications of austerity bargaining for locals 79 and 416 members, drawing attention to the repercussions this may have for other public sector workers. to conclude, i propose an alternative political strategy for municipal public sector unions, stressing the importance of a radicalized labour approach. it is my contention that this requires the development of both alternative policies and an alternative politics rooted in demands for workplace democracy and social justice. public sector austerity has been a main staple of policymaking since the onset of the great recession. while cultivated in earlier forms of austerity, recent initiatives across scales of public administration indicate a significant opening-up of the public sector in order to create new spaces of accumulation, extract wage and benefit concessions from unionized workers, and erode and dismantle what remains of public sector services and assets. this article examines how the politics of austerity has influenced canadian union of public employees (cupe) locals 79 and 416 in the city of toronto. i begin with an overview of the relationship between neoliberalism and workplace precarity, with a focus on the importance of the municipal public sector to trade unionism and the political potential of urbanized left-labour radicalism. next, situated in historical perspective, i provide an overview of the repeated studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 120 carlo fanelli attempts by city council to extract concessions from unionized workers with a focus on the concession-filled 2012 round of bargaining and its relationship to previous rounds. from there, i discuss the future implications of austerity bargaining for locals 79 and 416 members, drawing attention to the repercussions this may have for other public sector workers. to conclude, i highlight an alternative political strategy for municipal public sector unions, stressing the importance of a radicalized labour approach. it is my contention that this requires the development of both alternative policies and an alternative politics rooted in demands for workplace democracy and social justice. my research is informed by my experiences as a part-time worker with the city of toronto for over a decade, a participant in three strikes since 2000 and as a picket captain with local 79 through the 2009 strike. grounded in a critical political economy approach, my analysis is informed by engaged participant observation and a first-person scholarly account of how new pressures for concessions are affecting municipal workers in toronto. this study, like earlier research (fanelli, 2014a), grounds my intellectual work by supplementing textual evidence, union documents and media reports with an insider’s assessment of how austerity is affecting services provisioning, the working environment and collective bargaining. one of the advantages of being a participant observer and trade unionist is that i was able to gain access to a group of workers who may otherwise object to being studied by non-union members. as such, participants generally behaved as they ordinarily would, which meant that my research was open to new insights and evolving areas of inquiry. in utilizing such a method of research, i was able to collect and interpret data which might be unavailable or missed using other methods. i also draw on existing scholarly works, statistics canada data, newspapers as well as formal and informal interviews in order to supplement the qualitative data i have collected. neoliberalism, precarious work and austerity in both practice and political ideology, neoliberalism is many-sided including a broad set of macroeconomic policies, a worldview and an approach to public policy. neoliberalism’s intellectual roots, both ideational and ideological, can be found in the classical liberalism and the economic writing of von mises, hayek and friedman (peck, 2010; stedman jones, 2012). although an offspring of the great depression, the keynesian crisis of the 1970s reignited latent class antagonisms culminating in the three-decades-long struggle for neoliberal hegemony. neoliberalism’s most vocal expositors took a longestablished core of liberal values and refashioned them in new form. in this sense, the intellectual inspiration and policy developments of neoliberalism have been multidimensional, variegated and heterogeneous across time and space. neoliberalism can be understood as the latest set of socio-spatial and institutional configurations in the ongoing development of a capitalism composed of conflicting tendencies toward destruction and creation (brenner studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base 121 & theodore, 2002a). as a political project, neoliberalism has been characterized by a capitalist class and state offensive in which the aim has been to rescind the collective gains made by labour in the quarter-century proceeding wwii, while at the same time extending new forms of commodification (brenner & theodore, 2002a; peck, 2010; peck & tickell, 2002). in this regard, neoliberalism is a politically guided, yet frequently contested, process seeking to alter the balance of class forces in favour of capital at the expense of labour. this restructuring has had especially harmful consequences for the delivery of public services, the workers delivering those services and the users of those services. at the root of this restructuring is a socio-spatial, historical and political process seeking to extend and deepen the relationship between the state and the market. understood this way, neoliberalism is not a juxtaposition of (less) state against (more) market, but rather about a particular kind of state suited to the logic of capital in a specific historical phase of capitalist development. this has included reducing public services and assets in order to open up the state sector to new profit-making opportunities; lowering wages, benefits and working conditions for a more flexible and market-dependent workforce; and deploying the coercive apparatuses of the state to enforce these market mechanisms. the politics of austerity and policy practices since the great recession, then, should be understood as a class strategy that takes further steps toward the ‘total privatization’ of the public sector (albo & fanelli, 2014). in an effort to reduce service costs, many public sector employers, like their private sector counterparts, have adopted a neoliberal approach to employment which is achieved through the temporary and discretional use of layoffs, labour intensification, the denial of benefits and retrenchment of wages. this has included the curtailment of free collective bargaining rights, management strategies that promote multi-skilling, continuous re-training, performance-based pay, tightly controlled managerial practices and enhanced workplace supervision (camfield, 2011; evans, 2013; panitch & swartz, 2003). what’s more, feminist and anti-racist political economists have identified key dimensions of neoliberal policies which often go unaccounted for in analyses that neglect racialand gender-based oppressions. for instance, in the context of persisting gendered and racialized divisions of labour, the reduction and privatization of social services have increased both the demands on women’s responsibilities in the home and exacerbated lowwage occupational job segregation (braedley & luxton, 2010; jenson & sineau, 2001). furthermore, from the reduction of child and elder care services to ongoing workplace-based segregation, the broad policy matrixes of neoliberalism have further reinforced canada’s genderand colour-coded labour market (block & galabuzi, 2011). this is especially pertinent to women and racialized groups in the public sphere where they have made the most gains and labour market segmentation is less pronounced in comparison with similar private sector work (baines, 2013; briskin, 2013; pupo & noack, 2010; warskett, studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 122 carlo fanelli 2013). as neoliberal policies are ingrained across the public sector, gender and racialized labour market inequalities are further sharpened as weakened labour market and income security protections worsen historical patterns of marginalization. this is reflected, for example, in women’s and racialized groups’ over-representation across low-income occupations as well as in higher rates of poverty (block and galabuzi, 2011; lewchuk, clarke, & de wolff, 2011; braedley & luxton, 2010). thus, as ethno-racial and genderbased inequalities, rooted in fundamentally antagonistic class relations, are further intensified through the marketization of public services, the burden increasingly falls on historically racialized groups, women and (im)migrants, to occupy the most precarious labour market positions. in the alleged absence of market failure, the principle of individual failure has come to dominate public policy debates as collective social policymaking increasingly fades from view. with the dissolution of the keynesian maleincome-earner model, the neoliberal employment relationship is one characterized by increasingly insecure labour market arrangements, low pay, the absence of benefits or entitlements and growing work-life imbalances (vosko, 2006).2 as a means of “rationalizing” the elimination of public services and deteriorating working conditions, proponents of neoliberalism have promoted tax cuts as a cure for nearly all of society’s social ills. to borrow from marx, tax cuts have become the new opiate of the masses. such changes in the nature and content of public policy have had significant implications for labour market conditions as the generally inferior working conditions and wages of the private sector have become the new benchmark which, in the process, has provided the rationale for attacking public sector workers’ compensation. the ongoing transformation of the public sector via policy prescriptions expounding the virtues of neoliberalism have perhaps been most apparent with the growth of new public management (npm) theories which have sought to “modernize” the public sector through “efficiency”-generating principles based on private sector management models. by increasing market exposure, proponents of npm advocate a transition from public “administration” to public “management” via the privatization of public goods and services, a greater reliance on outsourcing, contracting-out and user-pay provisions. competition between public agencies and private firms is alleged to increase cost-effectiveness, while the use of short-term and contract labour, including performance-related pay and bonuses, is envisaged as constructing a “lean” state (sears, 1999). npm theories, like the overarching neoliberal framework in which they are embedded, seek to enhance capital accumulation by limiting trade unions’ rights and freedoms, privatizing public services and employment, and establishing the generally inferior private sector labour practices in the public sector. this restructuring has had particularly deleterious effects on racialized groups and women at the municipal scale as both the quality of work and the mental well-being of workers have declined (mcdonough, worts, fox, & dmitrienk, 2008; worts, fox, & mcdonough, 2007; baines, 2004). studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base 123 in canada there are some important differences between how neoliberalism has affected private and public sector work. whereas casualization in the private sector has been mainly in long-term part-time work, it has taken place primarily though temporary full-time work in the public sector. thus, in the public sector, short-term full-time work has eclipsed permanent parttime employment as the main form of casualized labour. given significant structural forms of discrimination, such as those historically linked to the female gender wage-gap and racialized exclusions, transformations in the quality and form of public sector work and working conditions remain important given that nearly one in five canadians, sixty-one percent of which are women, work in the public sector (stinson, 2010). the public sector remains a crucial stronghold of canadian trade unionism.3 it is this very strength and potential that help explain why public sector workers and their unions have come under such political and economic consternation from across the political spectrum. furthermore, given public sector workers’ concentration in urban centres and their strategic location as the providers of a broad range of services, they are in a unique position to build deeply integrated labour-community alliances fighting for the pursuit of social justice and expanded public services (brenner & theodore, 2002b, 2005; harvey, 2009; turner & cornfield, 2007). workers employed by municipal governments are in a distinctive position to build popular political support, since municipal services are typically provided and consumed in a shared geographic region. in many cases, these workers provide essential services to others in the city, but are often also the users of those services. thus, there is a greater potential to build solidarity in the struggle to defend and transform the provision and governance of public services because they appeal more directly to people’s everyday lives. it is in the context of an increasingly urbanized planet that cities and wider metropolitan regions have become pivotal sites for, on the one hand, the elaboration of neoliberal projects and, on the other hand, central sites of contestation. yet, cities are much more than merely ideological and institutional experiments of neoliberalism. they are also important sites for mass rebellion and collective action, wherein a range of progressive left organizing, labour militancy and alternative visions for urban life may be developed, challenging the narrow policy parameters of neoliberalism as well as the structural constraints of capitalism (brenner & theodore, 2012b; harvey 2013). as will be shown in the case study of the 2012 round of collective bargaining between municipal workers and the city of toronto, the local state sought to deepen and extend market imperatives by cheapening labour and making paid employment more precarious. eroding trade union rights and freedoms has been a recurring feature of neoliberalism (fanelli, 2013; panitch & swartz, 2003; ross & savage, 2013). in this regard, many local governments are implementing broad programs of “austerity urbanism” (peck, 2012; 2013), which in some cases is driving a fiscal crisis at the urban scale. although municipal fiscal crises have been a recurring problem for some three decades studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 124 carlo fanelli as fiscal capacities could not keep up with increased pressures for service demands and urbanization, this process of neoliberal urbanism has escalated over the past decade as tax-shifting for competitiveness and reductions to social services, as well as the 2008-10 economic crisis, have combined to intensify neoliberal urbanism (boudreau, keil, & young, 2009; fanelli, 2014a, 2014b; hackworth, 2007). continuity and confrontation: collective bargaining at city hall the canadian constitution has never regarded municipal corporations, as they are formally called, as sovereign political entities.4 rather, from the very beginning they were subject to the rights and powers conferred on them by their respective provinces. across canada, municipal labour relations have in the main fallen under general or private-sector labour relations statutes (fudge and tucker, 2001). since the 1980s, neoliberal policy experiments have been a chronic feature of canadian pubic administration (mcbride, 2001). under this truncated and uneven process of marketization, many federal, provincial and municipal governments have resorted to reducing public services, eroding investments in public assets and infrastructure as well as demanding concessions from workers delivering key services. canadian municipalities in general and toronto in particular have had a long history of dealing with the structural constraints of urban neoliberalism (albo, 2009; boudreau et al., 2009; fanelli, 2014a, 2014b; fanelli & paulson, 2012; keil, 1998; 2002; keil & kipfer, 2002). this has affected municipal workers most acutely. while this is not the place for an exhaustive overview of cupe local 79’s history of bargaining with the city of toronto, some brief discussion is nevertheless necessary in order to trace the continuity in concessions and confrontations between earlier rounds and the 2012 rounds of bargaining.5 the 1980s and 1990s was a period of significant budgetary austerity for federal and provincial governments which looked to shed “liabilities” by transferring administrative and financial responsibility for public services and programs onto other tiers of government (mcbride, 2001). over the 1980s and 1990s, the municipal political economy increasingly moved away from manufacturing goods towards banking, finance, insurance and real estate services (boudreau, 2000; boudreau et al., 2009; caulfield, 1994; friskin, 1993; lemon, 1985). over the keynesian period, toronto became the strategic nodal point connecting canada to the global economy. the period of neoliberalism since the 1990s has sought to deepen and extend these connections, remaking toronto in the form of an ultra-competitive “global city” (kipfer & keil, 2002; lemon, 1985; todd, 1998). this process reached its apogee in 1998 when six surrounding boroughs were merged, creating the new single-tier “megacity”—one of the world’s few major cities created by and for neoliberal purposes (carson & siemiatycki, 2014). in this sense, toronto has long been a laboratory of neoliberal experimentation in the remaking of the local state. this reengineering of the local state was studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base 125 not, however, accompanied by the transference of administrative and fiscal powers. as a result, this intensified interand intra-city competition between and within toronto and its surrounding municipalities. in an effort to deal with post-amalgamation fiscal challenges, the city of toronto has recurrently tried to extract concessions from its unionized workforce.6 these initiatives have revolved around extracting wage and benefit (primarily job security) concessions from workers and attempts to outsource and privatize public services and assets for profit-making opportunities. in 2000 and later in 2002, local 79 and 416 twice struck against the city’s demands for concessions. in the latter case, the local’s right to strike was suspended as the provincial conservative government, with the backing of a majority conservative city council, legislated them back to work. as part of this administrative reorganization of state capacities, the aim was not to bypass or supersede the state, but to create a different kind of state as part of a broader strategy of enhancing competitiveness within the city and vis-à-vis other jurisdictions. local 79 is the largest municipal union in canada. thus, the extent to which neoliberal reforms are implemented in the toronto municipal sector often has implications for other jurisdictions. through the period of neoliberalism, the city has experienced significant growth of producer services and media capitals, as well as a whole range of low-wage service and hospitality industries, especially professional services tied to housing-related demand for credit, renovations and legal services. as the centre of financialization in canada, toronto, like other “global cities,” has become highly dependent upon the internationalization of capital. as such, the city has undergone a significant restructuring of both municipal government and services, as well as changes in the city’s relationship with its employees and the broader economy. far from a casualty of a globalized economy, this restructuring has been a politically guided process—non-linear and frequently challenged— seeking to deepen and extend the relationship between the state and market. said differently, the state has in some instances led and in other instances created the conditions for capital to lead in remaking the conditions of work and labour, further integrating neoliberal imperatives. in line with federal and provincial attacks against free collective bargaining, the local state has undertaken an aggressive program of urban austerity. in the case of the 2009 round of bargaining, four issues were central: defending attacks against the controversial sick leave benefit program (slbp) which allowed for the banking of sick days; staving off attempts to erode job security provisions, seniority rights, transfer and promotional opportunities; challenging a freeze on cost-of-living increases to wages as well as the implementation of two-tiered wages; and curtailing attempts by management to contract-out employment and increase control over the labour process through enhanced disciplinary and surveillance measures. throughout bargaining, the economic uncertainty stemming from the great recession served as a political and economic pretext justifying and intensifying the neoliberal reconfiguration of the city. despite a “progressive studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 126 carlo fanelli coalition” at city hall made up of new democrats, liberals and a few independents, council set forth attacking labour in order to meet its fiscal challenges—challenges generated by capitalism in economic crisis and the policies of neoliberalism. in short, after 39 days on strike, an agreement was reached between locals 79/416 and the city of toronto. economically, both locals managed to stave off major concessionary demands to freeze wages, institute a multi-tiered wage system and limit seniority-based promotion. the banking of sick days and cash payouts was replaced with a short-term disability plan that extends paid-leave until a third occurrence after which pay is reduced. both locals were successful in gaining 2 percent raises over 3 years. local 79 part-timers, however, did not see any extension of benefits nor do they have now any form of a sick plan. the other concessions were taken off the table. as will be shown shortly, however, the economic gains of the strike were a hollow achievement as the political implications of the strike far outweighed the minor and temporary economic benefits of the agreement. the strike was a political failure when it came to mobilizing sustained action and education, garnering public support as well as linking the defense of unionized workplaces with fighting for workers in non-unionized jobs and the un(der)employed. what’s more, the outcome of the strike exposed locals 79 and 416 as both strategically and politically unprepared in important ways. first, the executive committee bargained in almost complete isolation from the rest of the membership, failing to build active solidarity from the bottom up. second, the union did not book members off as full-time organizers until right before the strike was set to start. this resulted in poor organization and cooperation amongst members as well as with other labour and community groups, resulting in a significant lack of solidarity amongst unionized and non-unionized workers. third, financial and personnel resources were allocated in ineffective and inequitable ways across the city’s regional strike offices. fourth, beyond administrative assistance and very minor input in decision-making processes, cupe national played a very limited role in the broader coordination of bargaining despite the fact that this could have established the pattern of bargaining across cupe’s other 250 municipal locals. this raises a set of issues which, although outside the purview of this article, are related to cupe national’s notoriously fragmented approach to bargaining and the enduring tensions related to national leadership and local autonomy. these questions are themselves enmeshed within broader debates about the structure of the union, its priorities, vision, and strategic outlook (ross, 2005). as a result of these combined pressures, many members were resentful toward the executive and the politics of the strike as public condemnation mounted and workers were marginalized. this was reflected in low morale on the picket lines as well as in a lack of awareness of the key issues involved in negotiations. furthermore, despite over one month on strike, the agreement did not make work any less precarious, particularly for part-timers, women and racialized groups that make up the bulwark of unionized members. with studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base 127 some political imagination the strike could have been strategically situated in relation to a number of connected issues such as past experiences of public services privatization, taxation and revenue generation as well as poverty and income inequality. likewise, decades of downloading could have been related to the broader attack against labour across traversing scales of public administration and in the private sector. while the strike was not an absolute failure, illusions about the strike being a victory impeded rather than obliged serious discussion about the shortcomings of the 2009 round of bargaining and its implications for future rounds. 2012 bargaining: paved with concessions the 2012 round of collective bargaining served as a litmus test for both the city of toronto and locals 79 and 416 in a battle of opposing class interests. as noted earlier, austerity’s impacts are not class neutral, but rather a capitalist class strategy that is simultaneously racialized and gendered. hypothetically, if the city were able to extract a host of concessions from the unions, this would signal an open attack across municipalities and the broader public sector. on the other hand, if locals 79 and 416 not only managed to hold off concessionary demands, but actually extended those benefits to those most precariously employed and tied those gains to the community groups they served, it might have sparked a fight-back in the public sector serving also as an example for other private sector unions. unfortunately, the outcome of the 2012 round of collective bargaining tended toward the former scenario, likely serving as a template for other municipalities across canada. under the leadership of authoritarian populist mayor rob ford (kipfer & saberi, 2014), it was clear from the beginning that the city’s negotiating team would be taking a hard-line position during negotiations.7 having made significant inroads to concessions during the 2009 round of bargaining, the city used the unpopularity of the previous strike as an opportunity to further extend their mandate of austerity and attacks against workers. the employee and labour relations committee (elrc), a subcommittee of mostly conservative councillors hand picked by the mayor, was responsible for negotiating with the unions’ various bargaining committees. the elrc did not need the approval of council to lock out workers or unilaterally alter the terms of the contract. locals 79 and 416’s collective agreements expired january 1, 2012. by october 2011 the city had already served notice to local 416 to begin bargaining. as will be argued, this formed part of the city’s broader machiavellian orchestration to thoroughly defeat what remained of trade union militancy in locals 79 and 416. while talks had started months earlier, by mid-december 2011 both the city and local 416 were accusing each other of bargaining in the media. to what extent this was grandstanding is unclear, but by this point the city had already requested a conciliator as mandated by law. just three days into the new year, the city of toronto informed the ministry of labour that bargaining studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 128 carlo fanelli had reached an impasse. two issues were crucial at this juncture. first, upon receipt of the city’s request, the ministry of labour could issue a “no board” report, which meant that after a period of seventeen days the city could lock out workers, unilaterally impose conditions or go on strike. second, the city used the time in between the issuance of a “no board” and a deadline as an opportunity to publicly bargain and intimidate workers into accepting the terms of a new agreement. rather than threatening a lockout, the elrc argued that unless the terms of a new agreement were accepted, they would be unilaterally imposed. in order to meet the challenges of a “cash-strapped city,” argued councillors and media pundits, workers would need to concede wages and benefits and, most of all, job security. while negotiations faltered, on january 13, 2012 local 416 held a press conference to try to sway public support. the union’s announcement was straightforward. in return for rolling-over the existing contract, the union would forego wage increases for the duration of the contract. a moratorium on wage increases would translate into approximately $10 million in yearly savings. local 416 also made the case that public sector workers should not be made to pay for an economic crisis not of their making. but the city immediately rejected what representatives of the elrc deemed a public relations ploy, stressing that what was central in this round of bargaining was employer “flexibility” not wage concerns. in this regard, the recasting of working people and job security as outmoded entitlements has been one of the great successes of neoliberalism. despite local 416’s very public play, the city continued to push for the complete removal of a no-contracting-out clause that required workers whose jobs were eliminated or technologically displaced to be redeployed to another position. additionally, the city was seeking reductions to health and dental benefits as well as the termination of a clause that required the city to collect dues for the union. for accepting these so-called productivity-enhancing amendments, the city would give workers a lump sum payment of 1.5 percent. the city later sweetened the pot by offering job security to those with at least 25 years of seniority, while the union moved from a position of no-concessions bargaining to job security for those with five years of experience (a divisive strategy on the part of the city which created a row between newer and older members). while the city continued to bargain with local 416, local 79 was focused on replacing its outgoing president and executive council, playing a very minor role as local 416 continued to bargain. on january 18, 2012 a “no board” report had been issued which meant that a february 5th deadline had been set. the city continued to publicly stress that unless the union gave up “jobs for life,” an agreement would be imposed. this was framed in terms of increasing innovation, efficiency, flexibility and saving “taxpayers’” money, as well as in terms of rebalancing “managerial rights” (deputy mayor doug holyday in dale and boyle, 2012). members of the elrc argued that public sector labour contracts must fall in line with the private sector. the city and union bargained past the deadline, reaching an agreement on february 13th. four terms of the agreement are central. first, the new agreement includes studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base 129 language that allows the city to unilaterally make any changes to shift schedules so long as employees are served notice. job performance criteria are now used to determine shifts and scheduling. this was a concession the city tried to force in 2002, 2005 and 2009, as the previous contract required that the worker and union agree to any shift/scheduling changes. second, the new contract removes a letter of agreement that provided protection to all permanent employees regarding contracting-out or technological displacement. under the new agreement, the threshold of protection was reduced from covering all workers to only those with at least 15 years of seniority (a decrease of coverage from 100 to about 68 percent of employees). this was also tried in previous rounds of bargaining. third, the city reduced the amount of coverage for health and dental benefits which, according to the terms of the new agreement, is expected to save the city some $20-35 million, and also eliminated the expected post-retirement liabilities of $54 million. fourth, in return for giving up a significant portion of their job security, workers received a one-time bonus of 1.5 percent, 0 percent in 2012, 0.5 percent in 2013, 1.75 percent in 2014 and 2.25 in 2015. a remaining issue left over on the table is that related to reducing workplace absenteeism. both the union and the city have agreed to study the matter further in what will likely be a major point of contention in the next round of bargaining. with local 416 having set the bar, the agreement was essentially rolled over to local 79, which put it up for a vote without recommendation. of local 79’s four bargaining units, two units (full-time and part-time unit b) voted to accept the deal as is, but recreational part-time workers voted the deal down. the city and local 79 went back to bargaining and were able to obtain some minor changes that increased the amount of hours an employee is allowed to work in a particular position as well as included the provision of paid time for mandatory recertification. part of the recreational part-time workers’ antipathy toward the deal stemmed from a recent arbitrator’s decision that harmonized downwards pay, hours and recognition of expertise still lingering from the amalgamation of city workers in 1998. a fourth unit representing part-time employees of long-term care homes and services facilities also rejected some aspects of the new agreement due to a reduction of work hours and ongoing scheduling conflicts, but that dispute was sent to binding arbitration as these workers are deemed “essential.” as the experiences of labour history generally and local 79 in particular have shown, small concessions beget larger concessions and unless workers are prepared to take job action, they will be hard pressed to resist demands for future concessions.8 unfortunately, while the city of toronto may have drawn important lessons from the experiences of 2009, locals 79 and 416 seem to be undergoing a slow-motion death by a thousand cuts. in other words, locals 79 and 416 continue to travel down a road paved with concessions without a cohesive strategy or political pushback to match the state’s and capital’s offensives. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 130 carlo fanelli lessons (not) learned: labour’s last gasp or comeback? since the 1980s, the centre of gravity in the canadian labour movement has gradually shifted from one centred in the predominantly “blue-collar” private sector to one increasingly centred in the “white-collar” public sector and female-led. with some 70 percent of the public sector still unionized, compared to about 16 percent in the private sector, the attacks on public sector unionism threatens to consolidate the defeat of labour (ross & savage, 2013). in light of the string of concessions for locals 79 and 416, it was clear that the city of toronto had drawn important lessons from the experiences of 2009. equally important, it was evident the city, unlike the union, was thinking in broader class terms. with more than 250 cupe locals bargaining across canada, municipalities and capital were watching closely as the experiences of toronto served as a template for other jurisdictions preparing to take on their public sector workers. “municipalities will pay attention to what’s happening here,” argued deputy mayor doug holyday. “[this round of bargaining is] the defining experience in our city’s recent history,” he added. and, “it hasn’t been done [in the public sector],” added councillor denzil minnan-wong, “no one else had the balls.” (ridler, 2012; grant, 2012). in place of labour radicalism, then, it has been state militancy that has seized the moment and adapted to the conditions of recession and austerity. as one executive member of local 79’s bargaining committee put it, unions have not adapted to the conditions of the 21st century which require a new radicalized approach. “now i know what it feels like to be an autoworker.” (personal communication 1, 2013). indeed, in an ambitious strategy more than a year in the making the city undertook a number of important initiatives that require further thought. first, in order to avoid summer bargaining (and potentially a summer strike with garbage once again lining the streets), the city served notice to begin bargaining to local 416 (which includes waste disposal workers) months in advance of the contract expiring. as part of the strategy, the aim was to divide and separate from one another different locals, especially the largest, local 79, whose contracts expired around the same time.9 second, the city put together an aggressive negotiating team stacked with management firm lawyers with vast amounts of experience extracting concessions from unionized workers. this assisted the city in successfully establishing the tone of bargaining early as they engaged in a public relations campaign to delegitimate and marginalize locals 79 and 416 (grant, 2012). third, rather than lock out workers, the city of toronto threatened to unilaterally impose contracts and alter the terms of employment. this was an unprecedented move by a canadian municipality, although it shares precedent with moves first undertaken in the u.s. industrial sector and later deployed by various tiers of government (fletcher & gapasin, 2008; moody, 1997). its legality, however, has not been established in the canadian public sector.10 fourth, in the event of a strike the city was prepared to implement a sixmonth contingency plan, which they did not have back in 2009. the city studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base 131 was prepared to install hundreds of cameras at different picket sites and implement a waste management plan that would establish trash drop-off sites at yards and arena parking lots rather than city parks. collectively, these strategies worked brilliantly to stifle, undermine and get the better of locals 79 and 416. it should also, once and for all, expose the limitations of cupe’s, the locals’ and the toronto and york region labour council’s excessive emphasis on lobbying individual councillors. councillors’ first priority is to get re-elected and, as the 2009 round of bargaining with a labour-friendly “social-democratic” mayor and “progressive council” showed, individual councillor support often hinges on broader public opinion (fanelli, 2014a; kipfer & saberi, 2014; carson & siemiatycki, 2014). in light of recurring concessions, the question then is: what are cupe as a union and specifically locals 79 and 416 prepared to do? how might unions rebuild their capacities while renewing an emphasis on working class politics? with the backing of ruling class circles, mayor ford and conservative councillors continue to push a program of austerity infused with a deeply racialized, gendered and classed form of authoritarian populism (kipfer & saberi, 2014). considering the concerted attacks against labour, should unions wish to regain their once-prominent role in the pursuit of social justice and workplace democracy, they will need to take the risks of organizing working class communities and fighting back while they still have some capacity to do so or risk continuing the decades-long labour impasse and union decline. in my view, this requires a radicalized perspective that seeks to develop both alternative policies and an alternative politics rooted in the working class. the failure to do so may consolidate an impending class defeat. in what follows, i outline some thoughts on strategy that might aid in developing a radicalized labour movement and left politics. it is a well known truism that exclusion from the benefits of unionization often builds resentment which has been made more intense in a neoliberalized landscape where the social welfare state has been dismantled. a genuine engagement requires taking stock of this dismantling and how badly and disproportionately it is affecting poor people and marginalized communities. rebuilding unions and renewing working class politics must engage directly with that resentment if it is to counter the drumbeats of austerity and retrenchment (fanelli, 2014c). future contract negotiations will not only be the test of the ford agenda and whether conservatives can consolidate their hold over council, but will reveal whether the toronto and canadian labour movement as a whole is up to the task of fighting back. in the absence of such a fight back, mayor ford and council, with the support of toronto’s and canada’s ruling classes, will continue to be forceful with respect to layoffs, service cuts, asset sell-offs and attacks against labour. this setting requires some exploratory thinking on a progressive labour strategy, in particular for cupe locals 79 and 416, given the harsh fact that the economic crisis has so far strengthened reactionary forces and efforts to reconstruct neoliberal policy frameworks. of course, such rethinking also has broader implications for unions and community activists as a whole. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 132 carlo fanelli first, previous strikes by local 79 and 416 have made it painfully clear that the locals cannot go into bargaining alone. even with the limited support of cupe national, community groups, social justice activists and other progressive unions, the mobilizational capacities, resources, organization, community and political support were not sufficient. as one activist member of local 79 put it, “the new leadership is doing a much better job with outreach and advocacy, but it is not enough. what’s worse, if federal legislation like allowing secret ballots during strikes, banning the use of dues for so-called political purposes, requiring increased financial disclosure by unions, removal of the rand formula, and right-to-work legislation passes, cupe could lose up to 20 percent of its membership. in ontario we’re in serious trouble... as if it wasn’t already bad enough! we’re talking about the survival of collective bargaining here...” (personal communication 2, 2013). transforming our unions internally and solidifying their relationships to others affected by the concerted push for austerity means not only building on the successes of earlier struggles (carson & siemiatycki, 2014) but also confronting the shortcomings of previous strategies. calls for solidarity without substance are mere posturing, just as militancy for militancy’s sake is reactionary and might well pave the way for future defeats. the challenge confronting locals 79/416 and other unionized workers is to take the necessary steps in order to avoid sounding militant but then reproducing the status quo. in other words, issues around rank-and-file mobilization, sustaining engagement and deepening coalitions beyond defensive struggles are central to (re)building workers’ political and organizational capacities. while strikes can be explosions of class consciousness, the working class solidarity they generate rarely gathers momentum beyond the immediate event (mann, 1973). hence, while strikes may lead workers to question the unequal relationship between employers and employees, those concerns rarely translate into a coherent awareness of class differences and class struggles, let alone critical assessments of deficiencies in the political structure or capitalist system. militancy alone rarely accomplishes much beyond spontaneous bursts of discontent and may well be constrained by workplace particularism. indeed, bursts of “militant particularism” might fizzle just as quickly as they erupted (williams, 1989; mann, 1973; harvery, 1996). while strikes are certainly important and can go a long way toward galvanizing broader community support in defense of decent jobs, the challenge is to connect these seemingly particular or localized concerns to a broader political project that makes clear the relationship between individual subjectivities and structural forms of oppression. as elucidated by harvey, the paradox of militant particularism is that it often develops amongst one group of workers at the expense of workers elsewhere, stifling a more universal working class, socialist consciousness and movement across space or particular locales. moderating expectations and seeking to arrive at an equal partnership with so-called responsible politicians and businesses in the hope that labour will gain a seat at the table have been proven time and again over the course of history to be fool’s gold. rather, as recently argued by sam gindin (2013, p. 244), ‘the radical is studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base 133 increasingly the only thing that is practical…’ as part of dealing with past failures, cupe locals 79 and 416 must come to the bitter realization that the existing way of doing things simply is not working anymore. although a product of historical differentiation among blue-collar and white-collar workers, cupe locals 79 and 416 will need to seriously consider merging and doing away with what are otherwise arbitrary and eroding distinctions between its workers. their independent and collective futures depend on it. other unions have partly recognized the impasse and taken similar steps (stanford, 2013). many of the positions of cupe locals 79/416’s workers often intersect, are co-dependent and take place in the same location. additionally, the terms of one local’s contract often set the terms of pattern bargaining for other locals, so they have a vested interest in one another just as they do with other unionized city workers (e.g. library workers, police11, fire, toronto hydro, etc). confronting austerity means rethinking sectional divisions among unionized workers. second, as a public strategy, the issues of bargaining and keeping services and assets public should be at the centre of the unions’ demands. this message might help to reveal linkages between the users and producers of services as well as the shortcomings of past examples of privatization and contracting-out (armstrong et al., 2001; loxley, 2010). advocating for public services would need to demonstrate their superior quality while acknowledging existing shortcomings and putting forward alternative solutions for making them better that enhance democratic participation and are not market-oriented. this could be framed as not wanting to hand ownership and control over to the “1 percent” and questions of democratic decision-making. local 79’s “taking care of toronto” radio, internet, billboards and television ads are a good start, as is local 416’s campaign for public services, but the limitations of media public relations campaigns need to be made clear. there are no substitutes for face-to-face interactions and civic engagement, and these need to happen within the workplace and extend into the city’s neighbourhoods. rebuilding trade union capacities and working class politics requires integrating as well as going beyond social media campaigns and engaging in the concrete struggles of labour and community groups, including protests, sit-ins, workplace and public space takeovers, minimum-wage and “good jobs” campaigns. in an era of unprecedented income inequality and labour degradation, keeping the public service could be tied to the growth of precarious work, youth unemployment, higher minimum wage campaigns and general social insecurity tapping into a wellspring of discontent. third, past experiences have shown garbage collection to be a lightning rod for public and media disdain. although representative of a minority of workers on strike, it is without question the most visible and conflict-ridden source of frustration. preventing torontonians from disposing of their waste is also the most politically volatile and, in my view, foolish of tactics. in addition to exposing what happened in other similar cases of contracting-out garbage collection – underbidding and then falling services and escalating costs (tea, 2011) – the locals needs to tie the issue of waste management studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 134 carlo fanelli to climate change, public health and sanitation. but preventing communities which might otherwise be on the side of workers by prohibiting them from getting rid of their waste is not only a poor strategic move but reinforces the portrayal of unionized workers by the media, management and others as indifferent to the needs of the communities they serve. furthermore, preventing community members from disposing of their waste will do little to disrupt the functioning of the city’s day-to-day activities. as was obvious in 2009, despite 39 days on strike, the city could have gone on for months more filling waste yards. alongside the public’s obvious frustration, a majority of workers do not work in waste disposal, which meant, for example, that recreational staff, ems workers, water, parks and road maintenance workers, animal services, child and elder care workers, public health nurses and social workers with little to no experience with waste disposal, were tasked with shutting down these facilities and devoting their energies in arguably futile ways. perhaps there is a way of using these highly skilled workers’ knowledge and abilities in ways that demonstrate their important contributions to city services. in other words, is there a way of utilizing striking workers so that a broader connection can be made between services and communities, privatization and public goods? in 2009, there were certainly other picket lines throughout the city that demonstrated this, such as those at social services centres and councillors’ offices, which suggests that only new forms of strike action could reorient the public’s perception away from the stigma of a “garbage strike” and toward a strike about keeping services public.12 fourth, locals 79 and 416 continue to struggle with moving beyond the limitations of past strikes and rethinking the way union organizing needs to adjust to the new climate of austerity bargaining. past experiences suggest that local 79 has had great difficulty creating a larger rank-and-file bargaining team that does not rely exclusively on executive-led mandates. while part of this is simply a matter of logistics, it is also a matter of trade union praxis and political culture. top-down bargaining is a recipe for disaster and only an active and engaged membership will be able to lead from below. there are, of course, no simple and immediate solutions to democratizing and rebuilding workers’ political capacities. workers are not inherently radical or conservative but adapt to the structured conditions they encounter daily; thus politicization is always a process in motion. in this regard, attempting to democratize the union will require rebuilding relationships, educational and political capacities across not only the many layers and segments inside of the union, but also in the relationship of the union to the left outside of organized labour, including the radical intelligentsia. this also speaks to the need to rebuild the small, fragmented and isolated left outside of organized labour, thereby broadening the terrain of labour and social justice activism (gindin, 2013). fifth, the turn in the “social-democratic” miller regime toward neoliberalism already demonstrated that the old clientalistic relations between union leaders and progressive city councillors is long gone. even studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base 135 individually supportive councillors could do little to prevent the decline of city services, selling-off of assets or the consolidation of neoliberalism across municipal sectors. rather, a much more engaged and working class-centred strategy for locals 79 and 416 is necessary if the focus is going to be on building active solidarity. for example, groups of union members could go on a door-to-door educational campaign to residents and local businesses in the community informing them of members’ issues and in turn take stock of community concerns. while there will certainly be resistance from some residents and likely businesses, this could form part of an ongoing strategy for the union to develop the collective educational and political capacities of its members in addition to deeper ties with social justice and community groups. this could aid in not simply building connections within the groups that exist but also in developing the competencies and memberships of these groups as well to challenge the daily barrage of taken-for-granted neoliberal assumptions regarding public services, unions, taxation and so forth. all in all, creating a bolder public image means mobilizing members to make the connections between the services they provide and the communities they serve more visible. sixth, a greater emphasis needs to be placed on urbanizing left strategy and tactics (kipfer & saberi, 2014; macdonald 2013). i offer one example which may be worthy of further discussion. since community centres are located at the heart of various neighbourhoods, they serve as pivotal spaces for the exchange of information and discussion. why not reclaim or occupy community centres as central spaces of the community via city providercommunity user alliances? the unwillingness to place such options on the agenda have had significant implications for other unionized workers (rosenfeld, 2013). unless locals are prepared to force the issue onto the public agenda, such as occupying or reclaiming in the public interest a community centre would do, there can be little hope for the development of a mobilized and class-conscious movement fighting on behalf of their communities. the political potential of an “occupy” community centre in coordination with community groups and activists, particularly in light of hundreds of millions in service cuts and tens of millions in new user-fees since the election of rob ford, is rife for all sorts of political openings.13 but militant job actions are not enough. they need to be tied to different visions of the union and the city as a whole, ones that challenge the structural constraints of neoliberalism and the democratic shortcomings of liberal capitalism. this might lead to communities demanding more decision-making power over the programs and events being held at their community centres, parks and public spaces, leafleting campaigns outside recreation and daycare centres, child and elder care facilities, public health and social assistance centres. these concerns could be communicated by pressuring local councillors, sitins, park protests, educationals and the creation of community caucuses made up of labour, social justice and other activists. since the latter would be locally rooted, the potential exists for city-wide alliances and the development of a collective set of demands to begin thinking about and strategizing around. in studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 136 carlo fanelli short, job actions should be about most effectively demonstrating the many skills and competencies of city workers in ways that connect them with the communities they are rooted in, and the value in keeping them public. history has shown that this is not only possible but most successful.14 finally, in addition to uniting with other unions’ campaigns for public services, there may be ways of coordinating action with other community groups such as the toronto environmental alliance, workers action centre, ontario coalition against poverty, social planning toronto and others in ways that reinforce existing campaigns or take on initiatives that the unions are not in a position to do. rebuilding trade union capacities and working class politics in ways that mutually reinforce critical struggles in and around communities works on a number of intersecting levels. because neoliberalism not only subjugates and attacks working people but integrates and builds upon workers’ interdependencies, a successful project for union renewal must aim to rebuild not only the capacities of its members but those of the working class as a whole (camfield, 2011; fletcher & gapasin, 2008; kumar & schenk, 2006; turner & cornfield, 2007). as part of this process, a renewed left would need to have connections both inside and outside of the labour movement and seek to link these issues across workplaces, engage in political debates and organize across communities. this requires working to build the capacities of the entire union to fight back against concessionary demands, developing a movement inside the union that pushes for enhanced democratic participation and control, a radically feminist, antiracist, class struggle-oriented political praxis that engages with the struggles of the broader community, and educational efforts intent on building a cadre of workers and activists that embody both intellectual understanding and engagement..15 as a final point, two recent experiences illustrate the importance of an anti-capitalist perspective both within trade unions and to the left outside of organized labour. under the leadership of the caucus of rank and file educators (core), the chicago teachers union (ctu) has recently moved in the direction of a radicalized labour approach which played a central role in combating the forces of privatization and corporate education reform (brogan, 2014; sustar, 2014). likewise, although not a union struggle (although certainly union-influenced and generally supported), the quebec student/popular movement of 2012 is suggestive. led by the coalition large de l’association pour une solidarité syndicale (classe), many engaged activists were anti-capitalists and the perspective that unified classe—and was widely communicated throughout the movement—was largely anti-neoliberal with important segments of anti-capitalist activism and infused with a deep undercurrent of class politics (ayotte-thompson & freeman, 2012; choudry & shragge, 2013; solty, 2012). these two examples, while recent exceptions, illustrate the significance of a radicalized anti-capitalist approach for both labour and social justice activism in combating the austerity agenda and rekindling demands for social justice. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base 137 conclusion and directions for future research the city of toronto has been in a steady state of decline in the quality of its public planning, services and infrastructure for several decades now. the foremost strategy of the ford administration is to try and make do with even fewer public spaces and to leave as much room as possible for market forces to accommodate the continual pressures of urban growth. notwithstanding ford’s own personal controversies, the conservative political agenda at city hall continues largely unabated. unions alone are incapable of posing alternative social and political strategies that reject corporatism. this requires a radicalized labour movement, left of social democracy, that can serve as a nodal point of community engagement and place a range of alternatives on the public agenda. despite cascading series of defeats, however, this is not yet happening within the mainstream of organized labour. like labour generally, the left in toronto continues to be divided into a panoply of coalitions without any coherence of strategy or programme. changing this will require a radicalized labour and social justice movement that transcends activist sub-cultures, makes political demands and builds organizational capacities that are locally entrenched and territorially expanded. without a strong municipal union strategy, deeply rooted in the community and forging new relationships with workers providing specific services and the users of those services, indications suggest toronto city council will continue down this hard right agenda with the avid support of ruling class circles. toronto civic workers face a historic test which may well set a precedent nationally, given the pivotal place of civic workers in public sector unions. future research will need to assess to what extent urban labour struggles in toronto mirror those in other cities and other regions. given the pressures of urban austerity, how have other municipal unions fared in their negotiations with the city of toronto? are there certain segments (e.g. women, racialized workers) and services of the public sector disproportionately affected (e.g. librarians, recreation staff) or unaffected (e.g. police, fire)? if so, why or why not? how might union-community initiatives in other unions deepen and extend a revitalization of working class politics? what new political openings offer hope? considering the multiplicity of pressures, time will tell if a major resistance is in the cards. notes 1 carlo fanelli is an instructor and sshrc postdoctoral research fellow. thanks are due to the editors and anonymous reviewers of studies in social justice for their important suggestions, greg albo and sam gindin for comments on earlier drafts, as well as the social sciences and humanities research council for funding this research. all errors are, of course, my own. 2 recent scholarship regarding the growing spread of precarious work is also revealing new insights. lewchuck et al. (2011) propose that the labour market may be in the midst of a major shift in the interrelationship between production and social reproduction. their data suggests that men’s and women’s employment experiences are becoming studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 138 carlo fanelli increasingly similar. however, for the most part, this is not due to the improvement of women’s employment opportunities and wages, but the result of the general downward convergence of wages and working conditions across the labour market. in other words, disparities typically associated with “feminized labour” are being replaced by dual precarious-earner households. as they argue, “white male workers can no longer assume that secure labour market positions are theirs, while new opportunities for hidden forms of both gender and racial privileging/discrimination have merged in the less secure segments of the labour market, in the pay differences, constant scheduling, and rehiring/firing of temporary and contingent work” (lewchuk et al., 2011, p. 94). 3 public sector unionism in canada remains generally understudied. for an introduction to canadian public sector unions see ross and savage, 2013 as well as panitch and swartz, 2003, and swimmer and thompson, 1995 for earlier explorations. 4 section 92(8) of the constitution act grants the provinces complete authority over municipalities. without the transfer of any administrative or fiscal supports like the ability to go into debt, print money and implement a range of tax measures (e.g. income, corporate, sales, resource and import taxes), municipalities rely predominantly on property taxes to raise revenue outside of federal and provincial transfers. and from this they must provide for their public utilities, public works, parks and recreational facilities, waste management, transit services, public housing and a whole range of other social and community services. furthermore, because ontario municipalities are prohibited from running a deficit, yearly budgets are regularly cost-crunching exercises as city councils seek to balance uncertain revenues with fluctuating demands for city services. as a consequence, the threat of fiscal bankruptcy distinguishes urban governance from national and provincial politics (fanelli, 2014b). 5 traditionally whiteand pink-collar workers, local 79 is the largest municipal local in canada with a membership of 18,000, although various contingent, seasonal and parttime workers push estimates of membership upwards to 24,000. local 416 is primarily made up of blue-collar workers and has approximately 6,200 members. together, they work in areas of public health and education, child and elder care, parks, recreation, water treatment, emergency medical services, as well as housing and court services, road maintenance, by-law and safety enforcement, building inspection, animal rescue, waste collection and social services administration. some 79/416 members were deemed “essential” (e.g. ems workers) and did not strike. approximately 70 percent of local 79’s members are women, with some 50 percent representative of historically racialized groups. at least half are employed in part-time, seasonal and contingent forms of employment, with inconsistent hours and without the supplemental health benefits enjoyed by full-time employees. 6 parts of this section are drawn from fanelli, 2014a where they are explored in greater detail. 7 in fact, the election of rob ford owes a great deal to the debacle of 2009 as he explicitly campaigned on reigning-in allegedly overgenerous wages and benefits, and reducing the “gravy train” at city hall. rob ford has been very clear that “the gravy is in the number of employees we have at city hall.” no evidence of irresponsible spending, inefficient service delivery and unproductive workers has been found, yet city employees and the users of its services are now being characterized as dependents of the state. toronto’s public service has already been reduced by more than 2,300 workers, mostly through attrition and leaving vacancies unfilled since ford took office. in 2012, the city announced 1,200 layoffs, with plans to further reduce the city’s 50,000 person workforce by another 5,000 positions by the october 2014 election (dale, 2011). 8 toronto public library workers’ contracts expired around the same time as locals 79 and 416. half of the 1,500 cupe local 4948 members are employed part-time and three-quarters are women. the city was essentially trying to rollover the parameters of the 79/416 contract, which would build on the prior elimination of 100 positions and sought to cut 10 percent from the library’s operating budget. local 4948 positions have been reduced by 17 percent since amalgamation, even though toronto public library usage grew 29 percent. part-time members have difficulty securing full-time work, and rarely qualify for benefits; even though they must pay 40 percent of those benefits, only 22 percent qualify. a major sticking point throughout negotiations was the city’s studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 toronto civic workers bargaining without a base 139 trying to remove a clause that made seniority a factor in assigning part-time shifts, as well as a clause that prohibited layoffs in the event of technological displacement or the elimination of positions. having reached an impasse, on march 18, 2012, local 4948 struck. the union received much more widespread public support and media sympathy than did locals 79/416. eleven days later the strike was ended with a new agreement. under the terms of the new four-year deal, full-time and part-time workers are protected from layoffs after eleven years (unlike 79/416s 15 years) seniority. local 4948 members also received a lump sum payment of 1.5 percent in 2012, 0.225 in 2013, 1.75 in 2014 and 2.25 in 2015 as well as the creation of some new full-time positions. it is important to note that back loading wage increases to the final year of the contract is an insidious strategy on the part of employers used to manufacture a financial crisis using the uptick in wages as a rationale. there have yet to be any scholarly post-strike assessments. 9 a lack of coordination among cupe locals was compounded because local 79 was in the process of electing a new president and executive. local 79, or the other two cupe locals bargaining 4948 and 2998 for example, could have served notice to begin bargaining earlier but they did not, which may have been a significant strategic mistake. 10 in canada, this tactic was brought to light in ontario when college administrators threatened to unilaterally impose the terms of the agreement unless unionized instructors accepted concessions in 2009-10. after forcing a contract on instructors, just 51 percent of the union accepted the agreement (cbc, 2010). in a similar fashion, unless cupe locals accepted the terms of the agreement, the city made clear it would simply implement their final offer. the union could then either strike completely, implement rotating strikes, work-to-rule, or choose to continue bargaining with the city. 11 indicative of the authoritarian neoliberalism at city hall and so-called tough-on-crime approach, in 2011 toronto police were awarded an 11.5 percent wage increase (about $100 million) over four years. with this in mind, locals 79 and 416 and other unionized workers in the city of toronto need to make clear the class function and repressive nature of police work and begin a discussion about why not all city workers are treated equally, as the outcome of these negotiations seem to suggest. 12 consider child care and recreation. ford has been very clear in suggesting that toronto’s 24,000 child care spaces should be privatized. council recently moved to eliminate 2,000 subsidized spaces that were previously cost-shared with the province. as such, affordable child care remains one of the most sorely needed services in the city (and the country) with nearly 20,000 children still wait-listed. what’s more, in 2011 the chair of the community development and recreation committee, giorgio mammoliti, argued that the city should get out of the business of directly providing childcare and recreational services, suggesting that elimination of programs or contracting-out was preferable. with over 650 city-subsidized child care centres in the city, local 79 could have made this a real public services and media issue and engaged directly in a campaign with parents and caregivers to “keep the service public” while drawing attention to the crisis in affordable child and afterschool care more generally. 13 additionally, for example, local 79 might look to take a more interventionalist approach in the communities its members serve. since animal services is an important part of the city, what if union headquarters or community centres, parks, public spaces, etc., held ‘animal information events’ and gave community members an opportunity to bring their animals out so that they could ask questions, creating relationships between workers and community members, and publicizing the other services workers supply. or perhaps offered health and fitness assessments provided by healthcare professionals, questions for child and elder care workers, discussions with city architects, planners and transit specialists, etc. these are just a few small-scale examples that might offer a more effective use of workers’ diverse skill sets, which could form part of a broader public relations and engagement strategy. 14 recently, striking museum workers in ottawa and gatineau put together regular cultural events that normally would have taken place inside the museum, but held them outside instead. these events were open to the public and provided the workers with an opportunity to organize and work together on the picket line in a fulfilling way. the successful execution of the events, such as the one honouring veterans on remembrance day and the “picket line tea party” held in celebration of prince charles’ visit to canada studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 140 carlo fanelli contributed in a substantial way to workers’ ability to maintain their spirits throughout the strike. the events also demonstrated the skill and creativity of workers to the public, as well as presented them as a valuable and productive force. this was especially clear when the museum of civilization opened the “afghanistan: hidden treasures” exhibit and the workers created their own featuring themselves and entitled “striking treasures.” as striking workers gained confidence through concerted action, and the support of the community mounted, there was a clear turn toward a more class conscious unionism as the connections between the employed and unemployed, communities and workplaces, became all the more clear. see fanelli and lefebvre, 2011. see also the experiences of cleaners in the city of toronto, carson and siemiatycki, 2014. 15 efforts to democratize local 79 have resurfaced at many different points over the last decade. the most recent was in response to the failure of 2009. a core of activist members with a commitment to social justice began the local 79 reform caucus. after a few months of organizing, however, the caucus stagnated then disappeared owing to worker burnout due to a disproportionate share of organizing borne by a small group of members. the reasons for how and why such reform movements fail or succeed and the challenges they encounter are important areas of future research. references albo, g. 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(2007). “doing something meaningful”: gender and public service during municipal government restructuring. gender, work and organization, 14(2), 162-184 studies in social justice volume 3, issue 2, 247-262, 2009 correspondence address: mary breunig, department of recreation & leisure studies, brock university, st. catharines, on l2s 3a1, canada. tel: +1 905 688-5550, email: mary.breunig@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 teaching for and about critical pedagogy in the post-secondary classroom mary breunig recreation and leisure studies, brock university, st. catharines, canada abstract while there is a body of literature that considers the theory of critical pedagogy, there is significantly less literature that specifically addresses the ways in which professors attempt to apply this theory in practice. this paper presents the results from a study that was designed, in part, to address this gap. seventeen self-identified critical pedagogues participated in this qualitative research study. participants reported their use of the following classroom practices, including: dialogue; group work; co-construction of syllabus; and experiential activities. this paper critically examines the social justice-oriented nature of these critical classroom practices. introduction as a self-identified critical pedagogue teaching courses on critical pedagogy and experiential education at a canadian university, students in my courses are often impelled to consider the justice-oriented nature of the theory of critical pedagogy. while the course content for many of these classes introduces students to critical pedagogical theory, the class structure itself has often been quite traditional. a typical class meets twice a week for 1 hour and 20 minutes each session; on most days, the students read an article or a series of articles, many of these written by a number of influential educational pedagogues, including: bell hooks, patti later, henry giroux, roger simon, ira shor, deborah britzman, paulo freire, donna haraway, and michael apple, to name a few. when teaching students about critical pedagogy, i have tended to adopt a fairly didactic method of teaching. on occasion, i present an activity that relates to the topic. over time, i have become increasingly concerned about the gap between what i teach and believe and my pedagogical practice, how i teach. more recently, the students in my classes and i have been talking about the ways in which we could engage in both classroom and out-of classroom experiences that would be more justice-oriented. more specifically, i am interested in how to develop a more 248 mary breunig studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 purposeful classroom practice that acts on the theoretical underpinnings of critical pedagogy. this present study developed, in part, out of this lived experience. how do professors who teach critical social theory and critical pedagogy attempt to practice it within the post-secondary classroom? i wonder about the degree to which professors’ pedagogical approaches correspond with their critical curricula. these queries led me to this present study which explores the successes and challenges that critical pedagogues encounter as they endeavour to turn the theories of critical pedagogy into post-secondary classroom practices. while there is a body of literature that considers the theory of critical pedagogy, ira shor (1996) and stephen sweet (1998), among others, assert that there is less literature that specifically addresses the ways in which professors attempt to apply this theory in practice. jennifer gore (1993) argues that, in fact, some of the best writings of critical theorists offer little suggestion of strategies that teachers might use in practice. furthermore, many of these theorists provide too little explication of what attempts are made within these educators’ own classrooms to implement the critical pedagogy that they espouse (keesing-styles, 2003). these arguments, in essence, represent a “call to action” for those professors who teach about critical pedagogy to continue to examine their own classroom practices. the purpose of this paper is to present some of the key findings from a qualitative research study which explored the ways in which 17 self-identified critical pedagogues actually engage in critical pedagogical praxis within the post-secondary classroom. specifically, this paper will focus on presenting examples of effective critical classroom practices that arose as a result of this study. it will additionally examine the justice-oriented nature of some of the reported examples of practice. critical pedagogy there are multiple and varied definitions of critical pedagogy (see table 1 below). many of these definitions centre around some of the influential critical theorists. for example, the critical theoretical tradition developed by the frankfurt school was greatly influenced by the work of karl marx, particularly his views about labour. according to marx, the essential societal problem was socioeconomic difference. marx believed that all people needed to work toward a socialized economy within which each individual received according to her needs and contributed according to her ability (eisner, 2002). in essence, marx argued that social justice is dependent upon economic conditions. in the late 1970s and 1980s, the “new left scholars” including henry giroux roger simon, michael apple, and peter mclaren began to focus their efforts on examining and better understanding the role that schools play in transmitting certain messages about political, social, and economic life believing that a revolutionary critical pedagogy will allow educators to realize the possibilities of democratic social values within their classroom (kincheloe, 2004). the critical theory of the “new left” was politically influenced by the anticolonial liberation movements breaking out in africa, asia, and perhaps most notably latin america (kincheloe, 2004). one of the key figures in the latin teaching for and about critical pedagogy 249 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 american liberation movement was paulo freire, who is commonly regarded as the inaugural philosopher of critical pedagogy (mclaren, 2000). freire’s work with the poor in brazil introduced him to the lives of impoverished peasants. his experiences compelled him to develop educational ideals and practices that would serve to improve the lives of these marginalized people and to lessen their oppression. freire’s (1970) problem-posing model of education valued the importance of student experience and a dialogical method of teaching and learning whereby the student and the teacher were mutually engaged in the production of knowledge and the process of teaching and learning. a more present day conception of critical pedagogy examines the influence of the postdiscourses (e.g. poststructuralism and postcolonialism) on theory and praxis (kincheloe, 2004). patti lather’s work in the field of critical education has revolved around characterizing the relationship between feminist and critical pedagogy, feminist ethnography, and poststructuralism (kincheloe, 2004). lather (1991) examines the ways in which many of the postdiscourses can help critical pedagogues explore and critique the role of power and hegemony in research methods and modes of knowledge production. caroline shrewsbury (1987), bell hooks (1994), and kathleen weiler (2001), alongside other feminist pedagogues, argue that education should serve to challenge the structure of the traditional canon and should develop and offer alternative classroom practices. feminist pedagogy reinforces the idea that both the content of the curriculum and the methods of pedagogy employed teach lessons. table 1. overview of historical roots—critical pedagogy critical social theoristssocial and economic equality liberatory education emancipation from oppression pedagogical project of possibility disrupting the dominant (socioeconomic privileged) discourse feminist pedagogy disrupting the dominant (male privileged) discourse post structuralism multiple “ways of knowing” that are situated, contextual, and partial the possibility of pedagogical practiceemploying the theory of critical pedagogy in praxis max horkheimer paulo freire henry giroux bell hooks patti lather paulo freire theodor adorno peter mclaren (cultural studies) caroline shrewsbury donna haraway ira shor herbert marcuse michael apple (curriculum studies) kathleen weiler deborah britzman roger simon despite the fact that table 1 (above) may represent an oversimplification of many aspects of the historical roots of critical pedagogy, it does provide one way to view some of the pedagogies that are central to this review of literature. within this abridged “history,” there is contradiction, overlap, and resistance to the attempts of 250 mary breunig studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 some critical theorists and pedagogues to identify the “one perfect” definition or a narrow set of prescriptive practices that constitute the field of critical pedagogy. some of this contradiction and overlap centers around an approach to critical pedagogy that adopts a positive, revolutionary utopian approach (britzman, freire, giroux, hooks, mclaren, shor) versus a negatively critical approach (gur-ze’ev). each approach offers both possibilities and limits. despite these varied conceptions of critical pedagogy and the multiple and varied definitions, there seems to be some congruence between them. essentially, the intent of critical pedagogy is to contribute to a more socially just world (kanpol 1999; keesing-styles, 2003; kincheloe, 2004). this definition is the one that will be employed throughout this paper. the term social justice is one that will be employed throughout this paper as well. historically (and and in its simplest conception), social justice is the attainment of equality in every aspect of society (atkinson, 1982). it is a philosophical and ideological construct – one that examines a multiplicity of issues pertaining to egalitarianism (e.g. economic, religious, political, gender, age, etc) (atkinson). for many contemporary justice-oriented theorists and pedagogues, social action is a key and necessary component of this concept (kolmuss & agyeman, 2002; o’donoughue & lotz-sisitka, 2002; prilleltensky, 2001). critical pedagogical praxis the above definitions and abridged historical overview provide a theoretical foundation of critical pedagogy and social justice. yet, the mere transmission of theoretical knowledge about these concepts does not ensure that students are acting upon the justice-oriented intentions that the theory purports. theory needs to be connected to practical, lived experiences both outside and within the classroom (van manen, 1999). there is clearly a responsibility on the part of the teacher to create appropriate classroom strategies and practices that incorporate the theoretical insights of critical pedagogy and that are appropriate for the particular classroom context (keesing-styles, 2003). as keesing-styles suggests, however, “[t]his is not to say that specific ‘recipes’ for educative practice are required” (p. 6). rather, classroom practices need to be shaped around the lives of students, the classroom context, the educative aims of the practice, and the institution to construct learning experiences that articulate these. while the majority of writing to date has focused on theoretical knowledge, there have been a few studies conducted which offer insight into the theory/practice relationship. beatriz ruiz and juan-miguel fernandez-balboa (2005), and doune macdonald and ross brooker (1999), both examined physical education teacher educators’ critical pedagogical praxis. they concluded that many of their study participants reverted back to the type of transmission-based pedagogy they knew best from their own formal school experiences because these professors lacked concrete examples of how to engage in critical praxis (ruiz & fernandez-balboa, 2005). macdonald and brooker (1999) discovered that there was a need for more explicit information regarding how educators can employ critical pedagogical praxis within the post-secondary classroom. teaching for and about critical pedagogy 251 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 in finding oneself in the classroom: a critical autoethnographic narrative chronicling the risks and rewards of a teacher and her students as they engage in the practice of critical pedagogy” nancy horan (2004) identified some of the successes and challenges that she and her students experienced when attempting to put the theory of critical pedagogy into practice. in when students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy, shor (1996) discusses his experiences with trying to engage in critical praxis in his utopia course, highlighting the successes, challenges and lessons learned by both him and his students when trying to practice critical pedagogy. wink (2005), in a somewhat similar vein, wrote about her attempts to implement critical pedagogy. critical pedagogy: notes from the real world (wink, 2005) is, in my view, part critical pedagogy primer and part manual for practicing critical pedagogy. for example, in her sixth chapter, entitled “how in the world do you do it?,” she enumerates many examples of how to apply the theory of critical pedagogy within the university classroom. in addition, there is a body of literature that examines praxis-oriented teacher education across various contexts. shauna butterwick and jan selman (2003) investigated the ways in which popular theatre, with its creative approach to naming and acting on problems, provided an opportunity for study participants to gain insights into issues related to social justice and the value of participatory and democratic classroom processes. academic service-learning combines academic study with community service (eyler & giles, 1999). service-learning can provide students with an opportunity to engage in an experiential, hands-on activity that helps them examine and modify their often prejudicial attitudes toward race, class and economic injustices (green, 2001). a number of studies have examined the ways in which students often change their attitudes toward themselves and the community as a result of engaging in service-learning projects (boyle-baise & kilbane, 2000; green, 2001). critical media literacy represents another example of a praxis-oriented activity. the intent of critical media literacy is to emancipate students’ worldview and for students to engage in transformational social action (hull, 1993). numerous studies have examined the ways in which these praxis-oriented forms of pedagogy can be used as a means to link what goes on in the classroom with what goes on in society (mclaren & farahmandpur, 1999; norton-meiers, 2002). these studies, books, and examples provide some insights into the theory/practice relationship within post-secondary classrooms. this study was designed to expand upon that information and to respond to the “call to action” within the literature (keesing-styles, 2003; lusted, 1986; mclaren, 2003; shor, 1992; 1996) imploring critical pedagogues to begin to more fully integrate the ideal of the theory of critical pedagogy with a classroom praxis that is congruent with that theory. methodology the following key query guided the research study: what are the ways in which selfidentified critical pedagogues actually engage in critical pedagogical practices within the post-secondary classroom? this section will outline the research participants, materials, and the research design for this study. 252 mary breunig studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 participants i sent out several “calls” for research participants to the listserv of the critical educators for social justice special interest group (cesj-sig) of the american educational research association (aera) in september, 2005 to recruit selfidentified critical pedagogues who were interested in participating in this study. in total, there were 17 self-identified critical pedagogues from that group who participated in this study. of those 17 people, ten were female and seven were male. there was a wide age range, with one participant being between the ages of 30-40 and one participant being over 70 years old. most participants were between the ages of 50-60. ten participants were non-tenured professors and one of these was a fulltime lecturer and doctoral student. seven participants were tenured professors. thirteen participants self-identified themselves as caucasian; one as latina; one as native-american; one as chicana; and one as asian american. two research participants were canadians, teaching in canadian universities and the rest (15) were from the united states, teaching in universities in the united states. participants were made aware of the nature of this study, their role in it, provisions for confidentiality, and their option to withdraw from the study at any point. signed informed consent was obtained prior to the collection of data. participants’ names were changed for the purposes of anonymity and pseudonyms are used within the results section of this paper. materials i conducted phone interviews with the 17 participants between october, 2005 and february, 2006. the length of each interview varied only slightly, each one lasting approximately one hour. the interviews were semistandardized (berg, 2004). the value of this form of “less structured” interview was that it allowed for opportunities for exploration of areas that i had not previously considered (reinharz, 1992). as previously mentioned, the specific purpose of this paper is to present some of the key findings related to examples of effective critical classroom practices that arose from a larger qualitative research study which explored the ways in which 17 self-identified critical pedagogues actually engage in critical pedagogical praxis within the post-secondary classroom. the initial interview queries included questions about critical pedagogy definitions, aims and purposes. although this paper will not present all of the results related to those responses, they will be briefly mentioned next in order to highlight some of the diversity within the group as it related to selfidentification. eight study participants mentioned that their teaching focused on social justice, employing terms such as emancipation and/or transformation, social consciousness and activism, and social change. five participants responded to the interview queries related to definition and central aims of critical pedagogy using terms that suggested a more student-centred or constructivist orientation, employing terms such as critical thinking, profound learning experiences, and student-centredness. three participants self-identified as freirean pedagogues and one participant said that he was a social reconstructionist. teaching for and about critical pedagogy 253 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 because this paper focuses on classroom praxis, the list of guiding questions specifically related to that aspect of the study consisted of a small set of queries lifted from a larger set of interview questions from the study as a whole. the questions were: do you believe that you engage in classroom practices that reflect the theories of critical pedagogy? what are some examples of your classroom practices that reflect the ways in which you employ critical pedagogy? design the study employed appreciative inquiry (ai) as the methodological framework. ai involves the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen either a system’s or a person’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential (cooperrider, whitney & stavros, 2003). it seeks to build upon achievements, unexplored potential, innovations, strengths, competencies, stories, lived values, traditions, and visions. taking all of these together, ai seeks to link these positive insights directly to a change agenda (cooperrider, whitney & stavros, 2003). data analysis all 17 interviews were transcribed by a transcriber. i sent a copy of the transcripts back to each interview participant for his or her review. the process of data analysis was guided by the main objective of the study and by the review of related literature. i thus began data analysis by establishing some initial categories and themes related to the objectives and the literature. i next read through all of the transcriptions in the spirit that berg (2004) suggests—“as a passport to listening to the words of the text and understanding better the perspective(s) of the producer of these words” (p. 269). i read through the transcriptions with a view to identify other categories and themes that emerged out of participants’ responses to the interview questions. results and discussion the results and discussion section will integrate the findings from this study with the critical pedagogy literature that examines theories and practices. this section will focus on presenting examples of effective critical classroom practices that arose as a result of this study. it will additionally examine the justice-oriented nature of some of the reported examples of practice, critiquing some of the claims made by participants. the critical query that will be explored in this next section will be: are the examples cited within the results of this study truly congruent with the justiceoriented nature of the theory of critical pedagogy? the conclusions drawn here are those that emerged out of an analysis of participant responses. this next section therefore includes select quotes and paraphrases with relevant literature integrated. the following classroom practices emerged as central themes: classroom community and group work; dialogue; curriculum negotiation, and assessment and evaluation; experiential activities; and “traditional” classroom practices. these 254 mary breunig studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 themes will be highlighted and discussed within this next section. surprisingly, there were few results that could be attributed to some of the differences in participant demographics. in other words, differences in age and gender, among others, did not factor into the results in any significant way and are thus not discussed in this next section. classroom community and group work many interview participants responded that building a classroom community was one of the central features of their critical praxis within the post-secondary classroom. for example, bailey commented on how she tries to “create a really safe and comfortable space for students to talk and to process their own stuff. i also do a ton of sharing of my own stories.” taylor said that: [i] try to create a safe space where students will feel comfortable, expressing where they’re at and moving from there. i just ask that they be open to other ways as well and we spend a lot of time every semester engaged in basically community building. participants additionally reported about the importance and value of group work, and this classroom practice was often closely linked with the practice of dialogue. graham said that he asks students to complete an assigned reading and then asks them to break out into groups and prepare questions. he said that students then, “[d]iscuss the readings in small groups during class time. they then come back into a large group and see what the consensus was around the reading and the topic.” bailey said that she uses “think-pair-share” as a group work technique, whereby a student first individually works on a particular question or problem and then pairs up with another person to problem solve and explore the question; that pair then finds another pair or two and continues to brainstorm, synthesizing the various responses that have resulted from this “think-pair-share” experience to formulate a response. the concept of building a classroom community and employing collaborative learning techniques, including small group work and activities similar to “think-pairshare” (lyman, 1981) have been widely researched and advocated throughout educational literature (bruner, 1996; gokhale, 1995; mckeachie, pintrich, lin, smith, & sharma, 2000). for example, anurhadha gokhale (1995) examined the effectiveness of individual learning versus collaborative learning in enhancing the critical thinking skills of 48 university students using a pretest/posttest questionnaire and found that students who participated in collaborative learning performed significantly better on the critical-thinking test than students who studied individually. according to felder and brent (1996), student-centred instruction involving active learning, student involvement, experiential activities, and cooperative learning led to increased motivation to learn. even with students in large classes (between 200-300 students), using techniques such as group work and peer assessment resulted in students having a more positive response to class, attending class more often, and developing effective learning strategies (scott, buchanan, & haigh, 1997). teaching for and about critical pedagogy 255 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 this research on student-centred and constructivist-oriented classroom practices leads me back to my query regarding the critical (or justice-oriented) nature of these forms of praxis. if students are engaged with content and are motivated to learn through constructivist approaches (felder & brent, 1996; meyers & jones, 1993), but there is no explicit communication of the ways in which these practices can be used as a means to bring about a more socially just world, then critical pedagogues (at least those participants in this study) may not be fulfilling the goals of the justiceoriented and liberatory nature of critical pedagogical praxis per se. however, the value in this form of praxis cannot be too quickly discounted. creating a democratic space in the classroom through student-centred and constructivst-oriented classroom practices can be an act of social justice itself (dewey, 1938), particularly in schools and classrooms where these practices are counterhegemonic and anti-oppressive (shor & pari, 2000). dialogue dialogue was another central theme that arose as a result of participants’ reports about their critical pedagogical praxis. bob talked about the importance of group work and group discussion within the classroom, but he also highlighted the value of what he referred to as a dialogue journal. for bob, the use of a dialogue journal provides students with an opportunity to reflect on their learning throughout the semester. meg talked about the ways in which she combines computer technology with dialogue. she said: i use the blackboard system [an online forum] a lot. i’ll post a discussion question and then, what i did this year was, i made all the students in the class teaching assistants in the class which allowed them to post their own questions and generate forums for discussion themselves. so i’m not always guiding that. although there exists some evidence that using dialogue to engage student voices can enhance learning (jarvis, 1996) and impel students to reconceptualize “traditional” power relations (lather, 1991; shor, 1996), others would argue that the notion of liberatory dialogue and authentic voice represent a repressive myth in the field of critical pedagogy (ellsworth, 1992; gore, 1993; hooks, 1994; luke, 1992). gur-ze’ev (1998) claims that often critical pedagogues fail to more fully examine their use of dialogue and voice alongside the broader issues of who gets heard, what gets said, and who has authority, asserting that professors start with a critical selfexamination of their own practices. dialogue thus conceived may attend to the justice orientation of a critical pedagogical praxis but the results from my study did not reveal the justice-oriented nature of this praxis; rather, participants focused on the value of this praxis as a form of student-centred learning and teaching. assessment and evaluation participants said they also regarded their use of alternative methods of assessment and evaluation as critical in many respects. examples of these alternative methods 256 mary breunig studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 included: co-designing assignments and rubrics; self and peer assessment; contract grading; and the use of portfolios. for example, jack talked about how students must prepare their final assignment in his “ethics and equity in education” course. they have to prepare a paper as though they are going to give a presentation to the school board. they have to articulate an ethical position around what i would call the intrinsic morality of learning that is being ignored under the current school reform efforts. eleven research participants reported about the ways in which students coconstruct the course syllabus and negotiate the curriculum within the critical pedagogical classroom. bob talked about how he predetermines some of the assignments and includes those on the initial course syllabi but leaves some opportunity for assignments to be co-determined by the class as a whole once the course is underway. a number of people talked about their use of selfand peer-assessment, providing feedback on assignments without grading them, offering assignment rewrites, and trying to develop assessment tools that foster knowledge acquisition and critical thinking more than competition, including contract grading. for example, meg said, “what i decided to do this year was to have students do individual learning contracts, rather than come up with a specific set of assignments or something that i would just impose on everybody.” according to reports, negotiating the curriculum (bob, donna, and meg), developing rubrics (anne, bailey, and nancy) co-designing the syllabus (bob, linda, tom, mark, meg, and sam) and selfand peer-assessment (bailey, catherine, and sarah) were examples of classroom practices. according to participants, students felt more engaged with the learning process and thus attended classes more often and produced work that was of a higher quality. keesing-styles (2000) and tilemma (2003) affirm that assessment can serve as a powerful contributor to the learning process if students are empowered to participate in establishing the assessment criteria. since assessment and evaluation have traditionally been the purview of the professor and one means for professors to maintain authority and power within the classroom (shor, 1996), participants’ reports related to their classroom practices provide some noteworthy counterhegemonic practices. the above findings thus represent solid evidence of the value of student-centred and constructivist classroom practices but point less conclusively toward anything that could be identified as justice-oriented per se. participants themselves alluded to this toward the end of their interviews. interestingly, for example, mark said that he believed that there may be much to be learned about justice without explicit instruction. as previously mentioned, mark, in fact, said that often he will be deliberately less intentional about the social justice agenda of his teaching so that students, through group work, discussion, and written assignments, can come to that conclusion on their own. in this sense, mark was asserting that a constructivist approach to learning may often be enough if the professor orients the curricula toward the purpose of social justice. teaching for and about critical pedagogy 257 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 experiential activities participants cited both on campus and off campus experiential activities that they employed within their post-secondary practices, echoing the sentiments of peter mclaren and donna houston (2004) who assert that “critical pedagogy needs to flee the seminar room” (p. 36). these practices included: in class activities (including media literacy activities, role playing, and mock debates); community servicelearning and action research projects; and other experiential activities. in class experiential activities there were a number of in class experiential activities that participants reported. for example, bailey talked about using an activity that she calls “take a stand.” she described the practice: the students line up in a row and then they take two steps forward if they have a library in their home and one step backwards if they were bussed out of their neighbourhood to school and they respond to various questions like that and it inevitably stratifies the people in the room pretty much by class, race and gender. bailey said that she then facilitates a discussion about issues of oppression and privilege based on the students’ experience with the “take a stand” activity. she reported that she has facilitated this activity in a number of different settings, including within the classroom and at conferences and she said that this activity always provokes conversation. bailey said that she will also ask students to take a survey, such as peggy mcintosh’s (1989) white privilege checklist, saying “i’ll have them do the checklist and then write a reflection and then talk to a partner and share their reflections on their experience with having to list their privileges.” she said that this helps students better understand some of the unearned privileges that many of them experience. jack said that he tries to “get people through a case study experience and asks them to role play some of the cases.” he said he asks students to role play people in various positions of privilege within schools and those people in positions of less privilege. sam said that he asks students to draw an anatomy of an effective school leader as one example of an art-oriented experiential activity. he said that, “students do drawings in small groups and i know when they’ve understood some of what i have been teaching when they come back with a head drawn with big ears and a small mouth.” he said that in his view this demonstrates that students are able to comprehend some of the theory that he is teaching them. community service-learning and/or action research projects several study participants cited examples of community service-learning and action research projects as examples of post-secondary classroom practices. anne talked about the ways in which she uses community service-learning to teach about critical pedagogy and issues of justice: 258 mary breunig studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 in the past i had a teacher education class. it was a curriculum development course and i had my students create enrichment curricula for three homeless shelters. so they created this curriculum, using a freirean approach. they had to interview the shelter residents and get to know them and find out what their whole day looked like and what interests they had. they then had to create evening enrichment activities for the shelter guests. she said that another group of students conducted: first person interviews with vietnam veterans and listened to various speakers who served in vietnam and then did some research and had to create curriculum related to the vietnam war for the war memorial in new jersey for third grade students and fifth grade students based on their knowledge from these first person sources. anne said that both these experiences seemed to deeply enhance her students’ understanding of issues of social justice, privilege, and oppression. as previously mentioned in the literature review, academic service-learning combines academic study with community service (eyler & giles, 1999) and requires students to apply theoretical knowledge to “real world” situations (simons & cleary, 2005). researchers have found that students often change their attitudes toward themselves and the community as a result of engaging in service-learning projects (boyle-baise & kilbane, 2000) and modify their perceptions regarding race, class, and economic injustices as a result of these service-learning activities (green, 2001). service-learning has come under some recent critique, however (hesford, 2005). hesford urges educators to more fully consider the intent of service-learning activities, in particular to ascertain how and whether particular programs actually counter and/or comply with exploitative practices (e.g. local/global labour practices). recent research provides a counter argument to some of this critique however. according to breunig (2005) and jensen (2002), among others, the explicit articulation of the justice-oriented intent of an activity (e.g. service-learning) and the way in which it is facilitated significantly impacts and affects students’ beliefs and actions about issues of justice, thus emphasizing the educative potential of a “well” and intentionally-facilitated activity. meg talked about an action research project that she does called “photovoice” whereby students take pictures of their communities (people, buildings, businesses, library, etc.) as a means to examine issues of hegemony. laurie said that in her classes, students design a research project that examines a particular aspect of teaching and learning and conduct actual research in k-12 schools. sam asks students to conduct a similar action research project. both laurie and sam have had students conduct research, write up their results, and occasionally present these projects as poster sessions at conferences. donna has students read dewey’s books, democracy and education (1916) and experience and education (1938). she then asks student to consider the k-12 school context and asks them to try to identify and propose some changes that could be made within that system that would demonstrate some of the principles that dewey presents in his teaching for and about critical pedagogy 259 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 books. students engage in social action projects whereby they actually propose some of these changes to school administrators and local school boards. teaching about action research and the action research project itself can be dually oriented toward social change (fletcher & coombs, 2004) and toward improving teacher practice. given some of these responses and the relevant research (boylebaise & kilbane, 2000; eyler & giles, 1999; fletcher & coombs, 2004; green, 2001), it is interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that participants cited so many examples of both community service projects and the numerous community-based action research projects that are components of their critical praxis. in light of the above, the critical pedagogue who is employing this form of actionoriented praxis should provide both an activity and the appropriate facilitation, reflection, and justice-oriented content to help students consider and/or modify some of their previous prejudices. in other words, experience alone or “letting the experience speak for itself” may not be adequate. other experiential activities graham talked about the impact of other kinds of field activities, stating, “well, i think taking the students out in the field is really it. having them see that what i’m talking about isn’t just theoretical and abstract, that poverty isn’t an abstract issue or philosophic issue,” for example, is really important. a number of study participants talked about the value of media literacy activities, as reported in the results. about half of the participants said that they bring in outside speakers or employ media literacy activities (e.g. analyzing films such as the color of fear (mun wah, 1994) and crash (haggis, 2004)) to teach students about justice-oriented issues. lori norton-meiers (2002) notes that the notion of films as visual texts worthy of academic study has been growing within the postsecondary academy for some time. critical and media literacy activities can focus on developing students’ ability not only to read and write, but also to critically assess texts and films in order to understand the relationships between power and domination that underlie and inform those texts (hull, 1993). ultimately, the intent of critical literacy is to emancipate students’ worldview and for students to engage in transformational social action (hull). mclaren and ramin farahmandpur (1999) recommend that these praxis-oriented forms of pedagogy be utilized as a means to linking what goes on in the classroom with what goes on in society. the above action-oriented examples of classroom practices, alongside the review of related literature, suggest that these classroom practices can attend to the justice-oriented nature of a critical pedagogical praxis. conclusion in reference to this study and in reference to some of the examples listed above, i now wonder if perhaps some participants engage in critical pedagogical praxis but their praxis represents an implicit approach to teaching and learning about issues of justice. if that is the case, can this implicit praxis still be called critical pedagogy? mary brewer (1999) argues, “there is little point in transforming our degree programs, revising the aims and objectives of courses or their content, or introducing 260 mary breunig studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 new pedagogical discourses if our students do not know the purpose behind the changes” (p. 24). it is clear that critical practices and classroom activities alone do not automatically or necessarily incite social justice and action (keesing-styles, 2003; van manen, 1999). in fact, there have been recent critiques of some critical pedagogical praxes asserting that these activities actually may hold miseducative potential (hesford, 2005). additionally, the burgeoning justice-oriented pedagogue ought to “mind the gap” between knowledge and attitudes and actions (jensen, 2002; kolmuss & agyeman, 2002; o’donoghue & lotz-sistika, 2002). the notion that justiceoriented praxes (e.g. environmental justice) are automatically educative (russell, 1999) and the presupposition that knowledge and attitudes about justice lead to changed actions and behaviours may be a myth (o’donoghue & lotz-sisitka, 2002). perhaps then in light of the results from this study, there may be value for the selfidentified critical pedagogue to begin to develop strategies that explicitly and overtly address the justice-oriented nature that is purported by the theory of critical pedagogy. additionally, critical pedagogues should be mindful about the facilitation of classroom activities and consider designing them in a manner that is congruent with the theory of critical pedagogy. one major limitation to this study is that i did not conduct follow-up interviews and thus was unable to explore some of these practices and facilitation techniques in more depth. additionally, i was unable to further query participants about the potential gap(s) (those identified by participants themselves in the results of this study) between students’ knowledge about critical theory and direct social action. future studies should explore this knowledge/action gap. future studies should also focus on continuing to develop a set of “best practices” related to critical pedagogical praxis. there has been significant research to date regarding the value of student-centred and constructivist approaches to teaching and learning and less research to date regarding critical pedagogical praxis. for this reason, future studies should focus on encouraging self-identified critical pedagogues to articulate the ways in which their classroom practices do indeed attend to justice-oriented issues and should explore facilitation techniques alongside this. in closing, both the participants in this study and the review of related literature seem to suggest that there may be a need for critical pedagogues to continue to broaden their understandings of the justice-oriented nature of critical praxis and to begin to articulate this intent more explicitly within their post-secondary classroom practices. this need is particularly true if the intent of critical pedagogical praxis is to contribute to a more socially just world (kanpol, 1999; keesing-styles, 2003; kincheloe, 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(1998). practicing radical pedagogy: balancing ideals with institutional constraints. teaching sociology, 26, 100-111. tilemma, h. h. (2003). integrating developmental assessment with student-directed instruction: a case in vocational education in the netherlands. journal of vocational education and training, 55(1), 113127. van manen, m. (1999). the language of pedagogy and the primacy of student experience. in j. loughran (ed.), researching teaching: methodologies and practices for understanding pedagogy (pp. 13-27). london: falmer. weiler, k. (ed.). (2001). feminist engagements: reading, resisting, and revisioning male theorist in education and cultural studies. new york, ny: routledge. wink, j. (2005). critical pedagogy: notes from the real world (3rd ed.). boston, ma: allyn and bacon. field final dec 6 19 correspondence address: sean field, school of philosophical, anthropological & film studies, college gate, st. andrews, ky16 9aju, uk; email: sf95@st-andrews.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 235-240, 2020 book review organizing the 1%: how corporate power works carroll, william k., & sapinski, j. p. (2018). winnipeg, ma: fernwood publishing. isbn 9781552668900 (paper) cdn$25.00; isbn 9781773630823 (kindle); isbn 9781773630816 (epub) cdn$24.99. 187 pages sean field university of st. andrews, uk in organizing the 1%: how corporate power works, carroll and sapinski (2018) argue that corporations unify the interests of the one percent, are the root of economic inequality, and shape the agendas of governments and public institutions, such as universities. the book has seven chapters and is written in a way that will likely be accessible to most undergraduate readers. the first chapter focuses on the concept of corporate power and begins with the authors’ main objectives: to “provide an overview of how corporate power operates in canada today” and to “lay out a basic history” (p. 2). the authors define many of their key concepts such as capital and corporate power early in the book. they also discuss how civil society and the family are central to the reproduction of labour and intergenerational class stratification. in chapter two, carroll and sapinski trace canada’s early corporate history from its settler-capitalist roots and the “dispossession of land from its original occupants” (p. 23). the authors periodize canadian corporate development into three epochs (european colonialism; early industrial capitalism; and the rise of modern corporations), highlight major corporations established around the turn the twentieth century, and draw attention to powerful industry lobby groups that have advanced interests of large corporations, such as the canadian manufacturers’ association and the canadian bankers association. carroll and sapinski detail their power-structure empirical framework in chapter three and use it to illustrate how major canadian corporations are sean field studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 235-240, 2020 236 connected through a web of corporate board seats and cross-ownership. in chapters four, five and six, they discuss how the priorities of the corporate elite are turned into “common sense” cultural norms through corporate public relations campaigns, corporate-friendly government policies, and corporatefriendly research by universities and think-tanks. interestingly, it is not until well into chapter five that the authors define gramsci’s concept of hegemony, despite using the concept in the preceding pages and chapters. much of chapters five and six focus on how hegemony is constructed by legitimating and positioning elite and corporate interests as congruent with interests of the poor and working classes. they also briefly address how hegemony can descend into sheer domination using the examples of bill c51 (that classified some activists as terrorists) and the collaboration between the canadian security intelligence service (csis), the royal canadian mounted police (rcmp), and fossil fuel companies. the book concludes, in chapter seven, by discussing resistance and alternatives to corporate domination. the authors point to community-based ways of life and robert albritton’s concept of human flourishing as a utopian goal worth striving for. they argue that civil society can push corporate power back, through union activism, cooperative business models, and shareholder activism – divestment in particular. corporate influence over governments can be curbed, they argue, by shutting “big money” out of politics, monitoring and restricting corporate lobbying, and ending corporate participation in regulatory bodies. *** i am sympathetic to the authors’ objective and was excited to read this book. the overarching issue with the book, however, is that carroll and sapinski present little new information, with the exception of some interesting powernetwork maps. most of the book is a literature review. this raises the question: who is the intended audience? if the intended audience is firstand second-year undergraduate students, then this book would suffice as an introduction to corporate power, some basic marxian concepts, and the authors’ method of power-structure analysis. if the intended audience is academics, then readers somewhat familiar with the corporate mapping project (2019) that carroll is a part of, carroll and huijzer’s (2018) canadian centre for policy alternatives paper “who owns canada’s fossil-fuel sector?,” the vast academic literature on corporations, and basic concepts in marxian analysis, will find little new material here. aside from these broad issues of content and audience, there were several specific areas where the book’s arguments could have been strengthened. first, the authors could have expanded their discussion of corporate personhood beyond limited liability. limited liability corporations were introduced in 1862 via the english companies act (pulbrook, 1865). an important aspect of the salomon v. salomon & co. (1897) case, which was book review studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 235-240, 2020 237 decided in england but applied to canada (ross & yolles, 2018), is that it affirmed the principle of corporate personhood. in the words of lord herschell, one of the lords who decided the case, a corporation is a “distinct legal persona” (salomon v. salomon & co., 1897: 42). in the us, corporate personhood was established in 1886 by the us supreme court case santa clara county v. southern pacific railroad co. (1886) and affirmed most recently in the citizens united v. federal election commission (2010) case. when canada and several provinces updated their corporate laws in the 1970s and 1980s, the corporate laws they adopted seemed to reflect a mixture of british and us corporate law on the issue of corporate personhood. today, the federal canada business corporations act (2019) defines corporations as follows: “a corporation has the capacity and, subject to this act, the rights, powers and privileges of a natural person” (part iii, section 15.1). similarly worded laws exist at the provincial level. corporate personhood gives corporations the same rights as individuals, meaning they are not limited to a specific charter (e.g., to log forests or make gin). as “natural persons” they can do virtually anything a citizen can do, with the exception of voting (at least directly). unlike flesh-and-blood people, however, large corporations can pool vast sums of capital beyond what anyone, except a scarce few ultrawealthy, ever possibly could. this makes them the most powerful citizens in the country, not just limited liability shells. i expected the authors to delve into this most fundamental aspect of corporate power, and perhaps to identify it as an area of resistance and reform. second, the authors make several statements throughout the book that could have been further explained or supported with evidence. some examples among many include: “corporate power is so pervasive that, like fish swimming in water, we may be altogether unaware of its presence” (p. 2); “at the same time, as production becomes more capital-intensive, the actual basis of profit – labour – shrinks relative to investments in machinery and technology, and this dampens the overall rate of profit” (p. 9); “this shift from the ‘patient money’ of long-term loans to transaction-based finance has weakened the institutional relations between banks and their corporate clients” (p. 86). are people unaware of corporate power in their lives? how does capital intensity dampen profit? is money really less patient now than before and why? these claims raise more questions than they answer. it is not that i disagree with the authors – although in some places i do – but without careful explanation or evidential support these are hollow assertions and metaphors. for example, as production becomes more mechanized the proportion of labour needed to produce the same output typically goes down (e.g., agriculture and automobile manufacturing). it is not clear how increased mechanization “dampens” profit. if the authors mean that less labour means less income, and less demand in the big macro-economic sense, then this argument should have been made. by contrast, mechanization can enhance a firms’ profitability by augmenting labours’ productive capacity, sean field studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 235-240, 2020 238 using the labour embedded in machines to exploit labour further, which is why some capitalist enterprises are incentivized to do so. third, the authors do not discuss the culture of shareholder value as an aspect of corporate hegemony that implicates institutional investors, like pension funds. carroll and sapinski talk about institutional investors at a few points in the book, notably chapter four, but quickly move to describe them in the most general terms of how institutional investors have become “more financialized.” an opportunity is missed here to specify how pension funds have shifted from defined contribution to defined benefit plans, and how this shift made pension outcomes more tied to investment performance and less like deferred wages to which employers were required to contribute. they also miss an opportunity to define what they mean by financialization, a term that has been defined in various and ambiguous ways (christophers, 2015), including the reliance of firms or national economies on the financial sector to produce economic growth; the orientation of corporate managers toward financial metrics (rather than operational metrics) to measure corporate goals; the proliferation of financial speculation since the latter part of the twentieth century, and the proliferation of “investor culture’ amongst the middle classes that have been pushed into individualized retirement savings. linking financialization to how the fate of pensions is increasingly tied to swings in the stock market, for example, would have clarified their argument. fourth, the authors do not define the concepts of neoliberalism or ideology. if the book is intended for students, defining these terms and their origins would have been helpful. laidlaw, in venkatesan, laidlaw, eriksen, mair, & martin (2015, p. 913), for example, has referred to neoliberalism as “a handy tool for attributing a virtually unlimited range of bad states of affairs in the world to the same undefined cause.” neoliberalism, however, has a specific genealogy that connects political economic ideology, people, governments, and policies over time and across places. foucault (2008) and peck (2010) trace the genealogy of neoliberalism from academia to policy and social norms. ganti (2014, p. 91) has shown that neoliberalism has intertwined manifestations as an ideology that values market exchange as an “ethic in itself”; policy reforms (concerned with deregulation, trade liberalization, and privatization); prescriptive policies for economic development; and a form of governance that embraces the “free market,” competition and self-interest as a mode of “effective and efficient government.” some discussion around what neoliberalism is and how it has been adopted in various ways in canada would have strengthened the authors’ arguments. finally, the authors fail to address issues of gender and race, except in the introduction and conclusion. referring to unpaid domestic labour and the social reproduction of the labour force, the authors say “the predominant assignment of these activities to women has been a continuing source of gender inequity” (p. 19). arguing that there is “much common ground” between feminist, anti-racist, environmental and other social movements, they say “capitalism as a way of life intersects with and reinforces gendered, book review studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 235-240, 2020 239 racialized and other inequities while posing the greatest barrier to recuperating the health of the earth” (p. 122). while these assertions are hard to disagree with, these are the only places where the intersections of gender and race with class struggle are mentioned, and then only superficially. in their analysis of how the one percent organizes itself, the authors could have examined how gender and racial diversity unfold (or not) in the corporate boardrooms and c-suites of the firms they examine, and contrast that diversity (or the lack thereof) with the diversity reflected in the canadian population. *** this book is a fine introduction to corporate power in canada and has some good examples. however, i had hoped that carroll and sapinski would not only present new primary data, but also suggest new ideas for shaping future alternatives. for example, ethnographic data could have complemented the authors’ analysis and broadened their recommendations for affecting change. while ethnographic data is not easy to obtain when studying elites, it could have illuminated the social and cultural factors that also connect and organize the one percent, such as social clubs, family connections, education, schools of thought, cultures of masculinity, and cultures of whiteness (see e.g., ho, 2009). how the one percent are organized through boardrooms and c-suites is vitally important, as the authors illustrate. on its own, however, the book provides a limited analysis of how elite organizations and corporate power works, and how it might be challenged. future alternatives will depend not only on structural changes to the economy and government, but will also require challenging elite corporate social and cultural norms. references carroll, w., & huijzer, m.j. (2018). who owns canada’s fossil-fuel sector? ottawa: canadian centre for policy alternatives. retrieved from www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/who-owns-canada’s-fossil-fuel-sector christophers, b. (2015). the limits to financialization. dialogues in human geography, 5, 183200. citizens united v. federal election commission 558 u.s. 310. (2010). retrieved from https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/ corporate mapping project. (2019). retrieved from www.corporatemapping.ca/who-owns/ pulbrook, a. (1865). english companies act, 1862, with analytical references and copious index. london: effingham wilson, royal exchange. retrieved from https://archive.org/details/companiesactwit00pulbgoog/page/n4 foucault, m. (1979/2008). the birth of biopolitics. m. senellart (ed.). new york: picador. canada business corporations act of 1985 r.s.c., c. c-44 (2019). retrieved from https://lawslois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-44/index.html ganti, t. (2014). neoliberalism. annual review of anthropology, 43, 89-104. ho, k. (2009). liquidated: an ethnography of wall street. london: duke university press. peck, j. (2010). constructions of neoliberal reason. oxford: oxford university press. ross, s.g., & yolles, a. (2018). canada: a new and restrictive approach to piercing the corporate veil. toronto: rogers & partners llp . retrieved from sean field studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 235-240, 2020 240 www.mondaq.com/canada/x/743284/trials+appeals+compensation/a+new+and+restricti ve+approach+to+piercing+the+corporate+veil salomon v. salomon & co ltd. ac 22 (1897). retrieved from www.translex.org/310810/_/salomon-v-salomon-co-ltd-%5b1897%5d-ac-22/ santa clara county v. southern pacific railroad co. 118 u.s. 394 (1886). retrieved from https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/118/394/ venkatesan, s., laidlaw, j., eriksen, t. h., mair, j., & martin, k. (2015). debate: the concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century. journal of the royal anthropological institute, 21, 911-923. mendenhall final before ts december 4 18 correspondence address: mary mendenhall, teachers college, columbia university, new york, ny, 10027; email: mam2017@tc.columbia.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 356-363, 2018 dispatch teachers for teachers: advocating for stronger programs and policies for and with refugee teachers in kakuma refugee camp, kenya mary mendenhall teachers college, columbia university, usa teachers are expected to facilitate learning for children and youth, attend to their students’ diverse academic needs, and provide emotional support and encouragement, while simultaneously meeting the expectations and demands of students, families, colleagues, school leaders and the larger education system. in crisis-affected and displacement contexts, teachers are regularly expected to perform these duties with little to no training, support or materials (burns & lawrie, 2015). jackie kirk, along with her colleague, rebecca winthrop, captured the inherent tension of this situation and the uncertain sense of identity that teachers in these contexts experience. kirk and winthrop (2007, p. 719) proposed the ideas of “spontaneous teachers,” who become teachers reluctantly given the circumstances, and “tentative teachers,” who feel uncertain about serving as teachers or remaining in the profession. their conceptualization of teacher identity rings true for the teachers that my graduate students and i have been working within kakuma refugee camp in northwestern kenya since 2013. a similar sentiment is captured in the following quote from a young refugee teacher in the camp from south sudan: yes, i’m happy to be a teacher, but with a condition. if i can get training and prove that i’m a teacher, that’s when i will tell that i’m happy to be a teacher. but as per now, i have not yet known the sweetness of being a teacher because i have not been trained…. as per now, i don't call myself a good teacher. i am not good because i am not a professional. (male teacher, south sudan, july 2015) teachers for teachers studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 356-363, 2018 357 inspired by kirk and winthrop’s work on teacher identity in crisis contexts, and with hopes of raising the profile of these teachers, my students and i have been engaged in an intertwined research-practice approach that aims to better support teacher professional development in refugee settings, while simultaneously creating opportunities for teachers in the camp to comment, critique, shape and continually refine our collaborative approach to supporting their needs. as we continue to advocate for the right to education for all children around the world, including the 75 million out of school due to conflict and crisis (nicolai et al., 2016), we must simultaneously take more concerted action in the name of social justice to support the teachers working in these contexts. this dispatch will share and reflect on our efforts to collaborate with teachers in kakuma over the years and how we continue to do so through the more recent creation of our “teachers for teachers” initiative. connecting with teachers in kakuma refugee camp kakuma refugee camp is situated near the south sudan border and has existed since 1992. the camp currently hosts 177,798 refugees from 20 different countries (unhcr, 2017). the majority of the refugees hail from somalia and south sudan, but also sudan, the democratic republic of congo, ethiopia, burundi and uganda (unhcr, 2017). currently, 86% of all teachers in the camp are refugees (unhcr, 2017), and as new recruits to the teaching profession, they are relatively unprepared to manage enormous class sizes (average: one teacher to 96 pupils), provide psychosocial support to learners, handle multiple languages spoken in the classroom and cope with a scarcity of resources including desks and learning materials. i first visited kakuma refugee camp in 2013 as part of a research team examining the quality of education for refugees in both camp and urban schools in kenya. i was shocked that so few teachers had received training. even though this camp had existed for over two decades, only 20% had received any training (see mendenhall et al., 2015). the kenyan government had recently recognized the schools in the camp as national schools, as they had been teaching the kenyan curriculum for some time. the protracted nature of the crises in neighboring countries that caused refugees to come to kakuma, however, situated the camp in the gray zone between humanitarian relief and development aid, which may provide a partial explanation for the limited teacher support provided given overall decreases in funding levels for camp activities.1 in the summer of 2015, i was able to return to kakuma with two graduate 1 it is important to note that in recent years there have been considerable developments around teacher training offered by ngos working in the camp and in partnership with kenyan tertiary institutes or foreign universities. mary mendenhall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 356-363, 2018 358 students, to conduct a research study on refugee teacher identity and to pilot a teacher training program as part of a larger inter-agency effort to bolster support to teachers working in refugee contexts.2 during our time in kakuma, we conducted multi-part interviews over several weeks with teachers about their experiences as learners (many of them grew up and attended schools in kakuma), their experiences as teachers, and their ideas about their own professional development needs. in between these interviews, we were also piloting the training program on the weekends. we quickly realized how valuable this approach was for creating feedback loops, as information shared during the interviews informed our conversations in the training room and vice versa. the combination of one-to-one interviews and group training observations also often illuminated interesting contradictions or provided more nuance to the discussion that we may not have uncovered through a more singular approach that emphasized research or training alone. for example, in the first interview about teachers’ own childhood experiences as students, all 27 of the teachers commented on the negative impressions left by their childhood teachers’ use of corporal punishment, while in the second interview, teachers would often justify why they now used corporal punishment. in the training room, more complexities would emerge in conversation with other teachers about the positive and negative implications of using harsher physical punishments while also providing a space to consider alternative and more positive practices of classroom discipline. this approach proved to be an important opportunity to triangulate teachers’ perceptions through different methodologies and across different settings in which we interacted with the same teachers. another important decision during this early phase was to co-facilitate the pilot trainings with local partners. our entire approach greatly benefited from the involvement of a head teacher, who was also a refugee in the camp. this teacher worked with our team on a weekly basis to review the draft training materials and to help make adjustments to the language and vignettes embedded in the curriculum to ensure that they were culturally responsive to the needs of the teachers (emdin, 2016; ladson-billings, 1995). he then cofacilitated or led select sessions during each training workshop, a practice that we continue to emulate in our current activities in the camp. our approach embraces kirk and winthrop’s (2007, p. 720) notion of “alternatively qualified teachers,” which aims to acknowledge the “very valuable qualities and abilities that inexperienced and unqualified teachers do have.” teachers’ involvement in developing and facilitating the training sessions was one way to show our respect for these teachers and the expertise that they bring with them to these environments. 2 for more information and access to the open-source training materials that the teachers in crisis contexts working group has produced, please visit: http://www.ineesite.org/en/ticccollaborative teachers for teachers studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 356-363, 2018 359 expanding support for teachers in refugee and crisis contexts building on this strong foundation, we started to develop the model that is now called teachers for teachers. this model entails a multi-modal approach that combines teacher training, peer coaching and mobile mentoring as strategies to improve the quality of professional development opportunities available and to extend continued support to teachers (see mendenhall, 2017, for more details about this project). we piloted this new approach from may 2016 through august 2017 with 130 refugee and national teachers working in the kakuma camp. teacher training took the form of workshops (utilizing the training pack piloted in kakuma the previous summer) through which international and local partners led in-person training sessions with cohorts of approximately 25-30 teachers. training topics included teacher’s role and well-being; child protection, well-being and inclusion; pedagogy; and curriculum and planning. trainings were interactive, practical and drew on local expertise in the kakuma context. the teaching corps in kakuma is predominately male and our first cohort reflected that imbalance with just 17 female teachers to 113 male teachers. given that many of the female teachers were more reserved than their male counterparts during training sessions, we are creating one all-female cohort this year to explore the extent to which gender configurations may help or hinder the training experience for women. teachers from south sudan also made up a significant proportion of the total teaching corps, though we had mixed groups throughout with teachers from other countries, including burundi, democratic republic of congo, ethiopia, rwanda, somalia, sudan and uganda. although it merits closer examination, we did not observe any outright tensions between different nationalities or between different ethnic groups from the same country during our training activities. anecdotally, we do see improvements in bringing together the refugee teachers with the kenyan teachers who also teach in the camp. kenyan teachers make up around 20% of the total teaching population in kakuma. one kenyan teacher commented: you see, in the teaching fraternity, we have national staffs and we have incentive staffs – our colleagues who are from the refugee side. and teachers for teachers provided a platform whereby me, as a national [teacher], i join my friends who are refugees. that one now made us be like we are one. it provided a platform to make us to be one. and in that i found it now a bit of... a good ground for them to understand me and for me to understand them at that level. once teachers completed the initial training workshop, they moved into the coaching phase. small groups of teachers connected with a peer coach, another teacher from their training cohort, who facilitated continuous opportunities for learning through teacher learning circles and classroom visits. the three-day peer coach training to help prepare teachers for this new role emphasized adult learning, positive leadership, supportive mary mendenhall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 356-363, 2018 360 communication and goal setting. upon completion of the training, all participating teachers were also assigned a global mentor, who provided online practical support for approximately six months. global mentors were recruited and trained through online webinars to connect with groups of four to five refugee and national teachers over whatsapp. global mentors and teachers connected on a regular basis to share experiences, offer teaching tips through a complementary mobile mentoring curriculum, and problem-solve in real-time with teachers on issues they face in the classroom. safaricom, a kenyan telecommunications company, generously provided smartphones and credit for airtime, data and text messaging for all participating teachers, which greatly facilitated the mobile mentoring activities.3 the integrated and continuous nature of the teachers for teachers approach aimed to provide robust professional development support by creating safe spaces for teachers to test new strategies, boost their confidence and overall identity as teachers, grapple with challenges, collaborate with fellow teachers and celebrate their successes. we have continued to conduct complementary and participatory research in alignment with these professional development activities. our mixed-methods approach has included preand post-training questionnaires, classroom observations, teacher learning circle logs, interviews and focus group discussions with teachers, teachers’ reflective journals, and a most significant change (msc) technique that asked teachers to reflect on what had changed the most in their teaching practice during their participation in the program. teachers are instrumental to the success of the teachers for teachers initiative. whether they help to adapt training materials, co-facilitate or lead training sessions, support one another as peer coaches, collect monitoring and evaluation data, or share their reflections through focus group discussions and personal stories, teachers are and should be central players in efforts to strengthen the support we offer in crisis-affected and displacement contexts. what have we learned to date from this approach? our research-practice activities indicate that our efforts to better support teachers pay dividends in improving their teacher identity and teacher-student relationships. first, working with teachers to help improve their knowledge and skills leads to stronger teacher self-confidence, which in turn leads to a more positive sense of well-being and increased levels of motivation, which 3 it is important to note, however, that in an early prototype of the mobile mentoring approach, teachers were able to participate in these activities with their own phones (e.g., basic, feature or smart), an approach we will return to in the future as we test the long-term sustainability of this model. there is also significant technological development and innovation currently taking place in kakuma, led by vodafone and their instant network schools initiative, which means more teachers will have access to the internet at key locations throughout the camp. teachers for teachers studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 356-363, 2018 361 ultimately leads to a stronger sense of overall teacher identity. one teacher shares what this feels like: the strategies have also given me a lot of confidence. i feel very, very confident whenever i go to the class. i have the feeling that i am doing the right thing all the time. it also give[s] me a bit of motivation. apart from the fact that my learners are enjoying [class], it really motivates me… when i see them smiling, participating, i feel better. i feel totally better. (male teacher, south sudan, june 2017) second, confident, motivated and emotionally well teachers experience significant improvements in their relationships with their students; in fact, improved teacher-student relationships were the most commonly cited example offered by teachers. a teacher reflects on some of the changes he has experienced as a result of participating in the program: [t]he strategies that i gained in teachers for teachers is helping me a lot. now [i] build relationships between me and my learners… before i was having just a small relationship with the learners, not like the way i have gained from teachers from teachers. you know in that relationship, maybe i was feeling like them because [i recently] came from high school. i thought i’m just like them. so i act the way…they are acting. if they have high tempers, i have to react like the way they are. but when i learned that i’m a teacher from teachers for teachers, then it buil[t] my attitude. [i]t shows that me, i’m someone, i’m someone different from the learners, and i’m the right person to shape them. i’m responsible for them. (male teacher, south sudan, july 2017) third, while it will eventually be important to be able to measure the impact of this approach on student learning to the extent that we can, we feel strongly that the enhanced focus on teachers at this early juncture is equally critical. teachers with strong pedagogical practices, confidence, motivation, and well-being will be better placed to then focus on improving their and their students’ content knowledge and overall learning outcomes. the emphasis on teachers merits attention, and improvements in teacher practice and on teacher identity are equally important goals in our collective efforts to provide quality education and learning opportunities for all children. finally, in addition to the emerging benefits of this approach to the teachers working in the camp, our team members and global mentors are also benefiting greatly from these relationships and learning more about what teaching in crisis-affected contexts entails. as a result of these exchanges, there is potential for teachers working in comparatively stable contexts to improve their teaching practice and perhaps develop deeper empathy and understanding for their learners, particularly in classrooms where teachers are working to accommodate refugee and immigrant children and youth. a recently recruited global mentor interested in volunteering her time to the program stated that “sharing knowledge and supporting teachers in a refugee context cultivates empathy and would be mutually beneficial for our mary mendenhall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 356-363, 2018 362 respective personal and professional development. i welcome the cultural exchange and learning more about life as a refugee.” this type of engagement provides all of us with opportunities to reflect on the teaching profession, to wrestle with the challenges that teachers have to overcome across myriad educational contexts and to potentially build a robust community of practice at a global scale to establish support mechanisms, facilitate knowledge-sharing, and participate in shared advocacy efforts across national contexts. social justice for teachers teachers are critical to improving our local, national and global communities. as a teacher in kakuma clearly stated: “you see even me… if it were not for [a] teacher, i would not be here. even the doctor would not be a doctor if the teacher did not teach, even a pilot comes through the teacher. a teacher, i can say, is everything” (female teacher, ethiopia, july 2015). while a teacher “posits possibility, open-ness, and alternative… [and] points to what could be, but is not yet,” (ayers in guyton, 2008, p. 108), there is no more important place to create this type of environment than in refugee camps and other settings of displacement among teachers, youth and children facing “unknowable futures” (dryden-peterson, 2017). one teacher reflected on her role as follows: being a teacher to me is very important because teachers empower the community with knowledge [and] skills…. that is what i’m doing, i’m empowering the community. as refugees here we want…at [sometime in the future], if they leave with something going to their places. (female teacher, uganda, july 2015) while we might not know what the future entails for the individuals, families and communities affected by crisis, teachers working in these settings who are committed to helping their students become literate, numerate and civically engaged, both need and deserve our help. while efforts to improve teacher professional development and to establish communities of practice are important, they are only part of the solution. if we want to uphold notions of social justice, we must simultaneously work to effect change in the policy sphere to ensure that teachers working in these contexts have fair policies in place regarding recruitment, training, certification and compensation, in both home and host countries. the various institutional stakeholders responsible for these policies – i.e., national governments and local, national and international organizations working in these spaces – need to work collectively to make significant improvements in both practices and policies for teachers. those of us interested in partnering in these efforts, including higher education institutions, also need to address in a more concerted way the policy and funding challenges that will ultimately hinder any progress made to improve teachers’ knowledge, skills teachers for teachers studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 356-363, 2018 363 and sense of professional identity. we must collectively aspire and take action to match jackie kirk’s indefatigable efforts to help improve the lives of teachers by authentically engaging with teachers to meet these goals. references burns, m., & lawrie, j. (eds.). (2015). where it’s needed most: quality professional development for all teachers. new york: inter-agency network for education in emergencies. dryden-peterson, s. (2017). refugee education: education for an unknowable future. curriculum inquiry, 47(1), 14-24. emdin, c. (2016). for white folks who teach in the hood... and the rest of y'all too: reality pedagogy and urban education. boston, ma: beacon press. guyton, e. (2008). social justice in teacher education. the educational forum, 64(2), 108-114. kirk, j., & winthrop, r. (2007). promoting quality education in refugee contexts: supporting teacher development in northern ethiopia. international review of education, 53, 715-723. ladson-billings, g. (1995). toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. american educational research journal, 32(30), 465-491. mendenhall, m. (2017). strengthening teacher professional development: local and global communities of practice in kakuma refugee camp, kenya. london: save the children, unhcr & pearson. mendenhall, m., dryden-peterson, s., bartlett, l., ndirangu, c., imonje, r., gakunga, d., … tangelder, m. (2015). quality education for refugees in kenya: pedagogy in urban nairobi and kakuma refugee camp settings. journal on education in emergencies, 1(1), 92-130. nicolai, s. et al., (2016). education cannot wait: proposing a fund for education in emergencies. london: overseas development institute. unhcr. (2017). unhcr kakuma: population statistics by country of origin, age, sex and age group. retrieved from: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/57657 rivest final correspondence address: marie-pier rivest, école de travail social, université de moncton, moncton, nb, e1a 3e9; email: marie-pier.rivest@umoncton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 when lay knowledge is a symptom: the uses of insight in psychiatric interventions marie-pier rivest université de moncton, canada abstract in psychiatry, the concept of “insight” commonly refers to a patient’s judgment that they have a mental illness and need clinical treatment. however, this concept has been criticized because it imposes psychiatric knowledge on the subjective experiences of mental illness and possible interventions. a significant body of literature is critical of mental health interventions; however, insight remains underexplored in this realm. this paper adds to critical analyses of insight by exploring how it is defined and deployed by mental health professionals in an acute inpatient mental health unit in a canadian general hospital and what disciplinary and epistemic effects it has on patients. to this end, i draw on foucault’s theories of psychiatric power and fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice to analyze results from an ethnographic study conducted in an inpatient mental health unit. the results show how patients’ resistance to medical compliance is framed by staff as a lack of insight, which reinforces the psychiatric model of mental illness. keywords mental health; fricker; foucault; ethnography; qualitative; psychiatry; social work deinstitutionalization, individualization and contemporary mental health services in north america, the deinstitutionalization of mental health services in the mid-to-late 20th century instigated crucial changes in mental health service planning and delivery. this process led to the closure of many psychiatric institutions, the transfer of patients to general hospitals, and a commitment to reinvest resources in community-based care interventions that centre on psychosocial readaptation and recovery (klein et al., 2018; sealy & whitehead, 2004). however, this shift has been challenging. despite the change in mental health services away from hospitals, the medical/psychiatric model remains predominant in community-based care framings of mental health, illness, and treatment (roy et al., 2017). consequently, marie-pier rivest studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 246 deinstitutionalization freed psychiatry from the asylum walls, but attached it to other mental health interventions (klein et al., 2018). this process has been enabled by the medicalization of social distress (conrad, 2005) and the psychologization of social interactions (roy et al., 2017). in the context of institutional mental health practice, and due to organizational constraints, the tendencies described above entail specific consequences. notably, practitioners are more inclined to provide short-term, solution-focused interventions that bypass the more challenging process of rearranging social structures that contribute to social injustice and associated mental distress (khoury & rodriguez del barrio, 2015; rivest & moreau, 2015). the notion of “recovery” (anthony, 1993; deegan, 2003), for instance, has become a pillar in many institutional and community mental health services. its predominant vision is focused on the individual, encouraging self-management and self-improvement, two notions imbricated in contemporary neoliberal social relations (roy, 2019). the individualization of mental health and illness can be linked to psychocentrism (rimke, 2018; rimke & brock, 2012), a concept critical of the predominance of the biomedical model that locates “mental and emotional distress” (rimke, 2018, p. 17) within the individual and promotes individual solutions to problems that are often rooted in structural injustices. it could be argued that on a structural level, psychocentrism elevates saneness as a normative ideal, contributing to what procknow (2018, p. 1166) calls “sane supremacy,” a society in which saneness is seen as the norm, thereby othering and marginalizing individuals perceived as insane and legitimizing various types of sanctions (medical, legal, social, etc.) against them (leblanc & kinsella, 2016). these reflections, however, remain incomplete if we omit the role of racism and white supremacy in fuelling these social forces. to this point, joseph (2015) explains that “psy” disciplines are “complicit in the formations and advancement of a normative subject (often centered as a white, christian, able-bodied, able-minded, heterosexual, cis-gendered male […])” (p. 35). critiques of the mental health system and interventions – including the present paper – must then be understood as critiques of their raced, gendered, abled, and sexed dynamics and outcomes. given this context of individualization, psychocentrism, and white-malesane supremacy, it is relevant to reflect on contemporary figures of patienthood in mental health service provision. more than ever, psychiatric patients are required by practitioners to exhibit signs of autonomy, initiative, and personal responsibility during their treatment and recovery. in previous work (rivest, 2017), i describe how hospital staff and patients understand the meaning of “patient” in two canadian mental health service institutions: an inpatient psychiatric unit in a general hospital and a client advisory council of a tertiary mental health institution. in this paper, i add to critical examinations of mental health services by focusing on the concept of insight, exploring how it is mobilized explicitly and implicitly by members of the hospital staff and patients themselves. i demonstrate how this concept contributes to the when lay knowledge is a symptom studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 247 ordering of social interactions and the disciplinary construction of an “ideal” patient, who is characterized by autonomy and personal responsibility expressed through compliance and agreement with psychiatric explanations of mental illness. these processes legitimize psychiatry as the dominant framework for understanding mental distress, and at the same time delegitimize disagreement and dissent from this perspective (diesfeld & sjöström, 2007). my argument unfolds in four sections. i first define insight and review the literature on the concept. i then develop a conceptual framework, including the work of foucault (1979) and fricker (2007), which enables me to critically reflect on the uses of insight in the inpatient mental health unit. in the third section, i provide methodological details about this critical ethnography. fourth, i present my analysis in the form of four vignettes that illustrate how insight serves to discipline patients and coerce them, to varying degrees, into accepting the psychiatric model. i conclude with reflections on the need for further critical inquiries on insight. psychiatric definitions of insight the concept of insight originates from greek philosophers’ interest in selfknowledge and is associated with more recent notions of introspection and lucidity (marková, 2005). insight made its debut in psychiatry at the beginning of the 19th century, when alienists began to integrate into the diagnostic process patients’ assessments of their level of self-consciousness about their mental illness, which signifies a shift in the definition of madness and its relation to reason. whereas “mad” individuals were once understood to be devoid of reason, the founders of modern psychiatry documented varying degrees of madness, which implied variable degrees of reason. pinel, for example, spoke of a “reasoning madness” (marková, 2005, p. 5), a condition in which individuals experience extreme emotional states while preserving some awareness of their psychological state. insight crystallizes the relationship between reason and madness, which is evident in how it is defined. there are many definitions of insight (marková & berrios, 1995; mintz et al., 2003), but the concept encapsulates one or more of the following elements: “awareness of mental disorder, awareness of the social consequences of disorder, awareness of the need for treatment, awareness of symptoms of mental disorder and attribution of symptoms of mental disorder” (mintz et al., 2003, p. 78). other definitions include the ability to associate one’s behaviours and beliefs to symptoms of a psychiatric disorder (david, 1990). insight can be assessed on a continuum, ranging from a “complete” understanding of one’s mental state and the need for treatment to a partial consciousness of one’s diagnosis and relative inability to marie-pier rivest studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 248 appreciate its implications. in cases of marked absence of insight, patients may be labelled delusional or irrational. insight is relational in two ways. first, insight does not exist in and of itself but always refers to an object: insight into one’s symptoms, condition, need for treatment, etc. second, insight is understood almost solely in the context of medico-psychiatric interactions. so, insight is an integral part of mental health assessments (beck-sander, 1998; galasiński & opaliński, 2012; guibet lafaye, 2015). in other words, insight is produced during patient and clinician encounters rather than being a “fixed and objectively measurable trait” (pilling et al., 2018, p. 196). patients’ perceptions are then measured by clinicians against the health-related observations of family and friends, while they consider the conditions and context in which patients were first brought to hospital. finally, these observations are translated into psychiatric vocabulary to assess patients’ levels of insight. studies have associated insight impairment to poor treatment outcomes and adherence (segarra et al., 2012) and diminished help-seeking behaviour (konstantakopoulos, 2019). despite the well-established use of insight in mental health interventions, a growing body of literature has begun to critique various aspects of its definition and use in clinical practice. beck-sander (1998) notes that insight lacks conceptual clarity. insight can be associated with awareness of illness and compliance, but the extent to which these notions are central to the concept varies. the “interpretive flexibility” (diesfeld & sjöström, 2007, p. 96) of insight can have implications at the practical level. hamilton and roper (2006) call on mental health practitioners (nurses in particular) to reassess their reliance on the notion of insight. they challenge the taken-for-granted place that insight occupies in mental health interventions, explaining that professionals may come to different conclusions about an individual’s level of insight based on what they know about the person and their background. the concept also leaves little room for patients’ perspectives and may even imply “trust and gratitude for effective medical treatment” (hamilton & roper, 2006, p. 420). others have noted that insight appears to be highly dependent on individuals’ acceptance of the psychiatric model (galasiński & opaliński, 2012). research demonstrates that patients who agree with psychiatric explanations of their distress and comply with treatment are likely to be described by professionals as being more insightful than individuals who contest framings of their situation as the result of mental illness. for instance, pilling et al. (2018) examine how relations of race, gender, class, and sexuality shape the uses of insight. they conclude that patients belonging to oppressed groups are more likely to be seen as lacking insight than socially privileged patients. consequently, the confluence of racism, colonialism, sanism, and other systems of oppression must be integrated into a critical approach to psychiatric power (joseph, 2015) and insight. after having outlined a general definition of insight and provided an overview of critiques of the concept, i now expand on the latter by presenting the theoretical when lay knowledge is a symptom studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 249 orientations that animate this paper. thinking critically about insight: theoretical anchors critical perspectives on insight can be augmented by drawing on foucault’s views on psychiatric power and fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice. these elements can illuminate how insight is mobilized, and to what effects, in the professional-layperson relationship in a psychiatric context. foucault (1979) asserts that modern western societies can be characterized as disciplinary, meaning that the institutional definition and surveillance of “normality” within a human population is a form of productive power that compels individuals to monitor and create themselves (and others) as socially “normal” subjects. foucault (1979) uses the metaphor of jeremy bentham’s panopticon to illustrate how individuals constantly selfmonitor to perform socially intelligible subjectivities as proscribed by institutional authorities. in this context, specific institutional knowledges that delineate “normality” and “abnormality” are used to “refine and intensify the exercise of power” (roberts, 2005, p. 35). indeed, human science disciplines are imbricated in this production of knowledge about human beings and truths – or discourses – about what are considered normal and abnormal subjects. individuals come to think, behave, and understand themselves in accordance with dominant discourses to constitute themselves as socially intelligible subjects, just as social institutions apply this knowledge to classify and control human populations. these processes constitute a generalized disciplinary society created through the operations of productive (rather than repressive) power. psychiatry and the broader mental health field have been characterized as social institutions that produce normalizing discourses (perron et al., 2005; rivest & moreau, 2015). they enable the production of normalized “psychiatric subjects” who can be diagnosed and treated by mental health professionals. these professionals produce and draw from a body of disciplinary knowledge that makes particular assumptions about mental (ab)normality (for example, through the dsm) that guide their psychiatric interventions. in this sense, psychiatric institutions can be understood as disciplinary spaces or carceral environments (kilty & dej, 2018) in which individuals – or psychiatric subjects – are observed, assessed, and encouraged to participate in therapies and interventions so they are eventually able to regulate “their own conduct in accordance with the norms promoted by psychiatry” (roberts, 2005, p. 36). we see here the use of coercive interventions typically found in carceral settings (ben-moshe, 2020; fabris, 2011). marie-pier rivest studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 250 in psychiatric power, foucault (2006) explores confession as integral to the relation between the mental health professional and the psychiatric subject. he analyzes an encounter between famous psychiatrist philippe pinel and a patient who initially refuses pinel’s diagnosis and treatment proposal but eventually acquiesces and confesses his suffering before accepting to be treated: “and, when the scene succeeds, there must be a victory in both struggles, the victory of one idea over another, which must be at the same time the victory of the doctor’s will over the patient’s will” (foucault, 2006, p. 11). foucault (2006) conceives this scene as a power struggle between the psychiatric expert and the layperson, and insight and its assessment can be seen similarly. “having insight” from a foucauldian perspective is indissociable from accepting a psychiatric explanation of one’s mental state. judgment of one’s insight can only be made through a professional’s interpretation of the patient’s expression of self-perception using medical language. in short, foucault’s (2006) discussion of psychiatric power allows us to understand a lack of insight as an individual moral fault attributable to madness or a flaw needing to be corrected through psychiatric interventions. these observations can be linked to psychocentrism (rimke, 2018) and sane supremacy (procknow, 2018), in that the patient’s perception is reinterpreted within a biomedical framework and measured against a (classed, gendered, racialized, and sexualized) sane ideal. because insight implies a confrontation between two perspectives emanating from differing social positions, the concept of epistemic injustice (fricker, 2007) is relevant to a critical examination of insight. while foucault (1979) explores how institutional knowledge is imbricated in the exercise of power, fricker (2007) emphasizes the effects of social positioning on the legitimization of an individual’s knowledge. she defines epistemic injustice as “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower” (p. 1). while fricker (2007) distinguishes two forms of epistemic injustice, i emphasize its primary form: testimonial injustice. testimonial injustice refers to situations in which “someone is wronged in their capacity as a giver of knowledge” (fricker, 2007, p. 7). this is the “primary form” of epistemic injustice and occurs when, due to individual prejudice or structural arrangements, a speaker is granted less credence as a knower or epistemic agent (fricker, 2007, p. 4). fricker (2007) draws on the example of race to demonstrate how this social construct and associated harmful racial stereotypes are often used to discredit black men’s legal defences. in a similar analysis, crichton et al. (2017) explain that the prevalence of negative stereotypes about mental illness can lead mental health professionals to question and discredit patients’ accounts, even if their accounts are truthful from their own perspectives and positionalities. being a psychiatric patient puts individuals at risk of being epistemically discredited, and the intersection of mental illness with other marginalized social identities can exacerbate testimonial injustice. when lay knowledge is a symptom studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 251 for example, through their analysis of psychiatric charts, pilling et al. (2018) demonstrate that when patients explain their mental health situations using spiritual or cultural trauma-based narratives (e.g., sexual violence), they are less likely to be perceived as insightful. their results also show that poor insight could justify using coercive measures such as community treatment orders and involuntary hospitalization. these results can also be linked to the infantilization of psychiatrized people; they are viewed as children who are unable to express legitimate knowledge and not competent enough to make their own decisions (mills & lefrançois, 2018). in a broader sense, mills and lefrançois (2018) explain that the metaphor of infantilization has been used in colonial projects to justify coercive actions against marginalized groups such as disabled people, racialized people, and people labelled as mentally ill. insight can thus be understood in this context as a mechanism that upholds white saneness. despite this body of research, the concept of epistemic injustice and foucault’s perspective on psychiatric power remain underutilized when thinking about insight. in the next section, i present the method that allowed me to analyze the uses of insight in an inpatient psychiatric unit. exploring patienthood to understand the uses of insight data presented here were collected as part of a larger critical ethnographic study (madison, 2019; thomas, 1993) that focuses on normative injunctions regarding patienthood in contemporary mental health services (rivest, 2017). the research aims to understand and compare meanings and outcomes of the “career of the mental patient” (goffman, 1968) by taking into account different power relations between staff and patients (foucault, 1979) within two mental health services. i undertook the research from the positionality of a privileged white settler woman who studies mental health as an outsider to first-hand psychiatric experiences. my training in social work – a discipline in which care and control are inextricably linked to its past and present operations (chapman & withers, 2019; kelly & chapman, 2015) – renders me complicit in the social processes i critique. it is possible that these aspects of my identity encouraged some people to participate in my study but deterred others from doing so, and my methodology may contain weaknesses related to the dimensions in which i hold privilege. for instance, my identity may have attracted research participants who share a similar social positioning (such as race), but at the same time it may have discouraged others who may be mistrustful of my intentions as a white settler woman affiliated with the social work profession. my positioning may also hinder my attempts to grasp the extent of the confluence between sane supremacy and white supremacy in relation to insight and contemporary mental health marie-pier rivest studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 252 interventions. critical ethnography reveals “broader social processes of control, taming, power imbalance and the symbolic mechanisms that impose one set of preferred meanings of behaviours over others” (thomas, 1993, p. 9). i used this approach in a patient council in a tertiary mental health centre and an acute inpatient mental health unit in a general hospital. because my argument sheds light on the inpatient unit, i describe the methods used concerning this specific site. to understand how the hospital represents itself and what values it claims are central to its mission and actions, i surveyed relevant grey literature such as annual reports, bulletins, legal texts, pamphlets, and websites. while grey literature can offer initial insights on contextual elements, observation constitutes another common component of ethnography that allowed me to understand the role insight plays in the mental health unit. so for four months, i shadowed social workers in the hospital as they interacted with other staff members (e.g., psychiatrists, nurses, occupational therapists), patients, and their family members. i also followed them on morning rounds, witnessed discharge planning and follow-ups, and attended staff meetings, initial intake interviews, case conferences, and family and individual meetings. after this observation period, i used a purposive volunteer sampling strategy to recruit interview participants from two groups. first, i employed a semi-directed interview methodology with three inpatient social workers and two managers – all white women ranging in age from 30 to 55 with university degrees in health, social services, or management – to understand their role in the unit, perceptions of their relationships with patients, and vision for mental health services. second, i conducted approximately 90-minute semi-directed interviews with 15 people (three inpatient social workers, two managers, and 10 patients). i used purposive, volunteer sampling to recruit all participants. two selection criteria were used: they had to have been hospitalized in the mental health unit and were able and willing to talk about their experiences in the mental health system, their relationship and interactions with staff and other patients, and their social network outside the hospital. all participants are white, which prevents me from considering how insight may be instrumentalized to serve sane supremacy (procknow, 2018) alongside white supremacy. they range in age from 20 to 53 and had an average of 13 years of interaction with psychiatric services. at that time, nine of 10 participants were unemployed, on medical leave, or receiving unemployment assistance. to solicit patient participation, i presented the study to a recreational group held weekly in the acute mental health unit. i was allowed a few minutes at the start of the group to explain the study’s aims and the nature of participation, and to answer patients’ questions about the research. interested patients then contacted me after their discharge to schedule an interview. patient participants received $25 in cash. this recruiting method may have influenced the data collected (kristensen & ravn, 2015), as staff chose which when lay knowledge is a symptom studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 253 patients could attend this recreational group. employees may have invited patients whom they felt were more suitable to participate in this study due to their mental stability and positive view of hospitalization. indeed, while some participants held critical opinions of their experiences in the mental health unit – primarily related to coercive practices – overall views were positive. i analyzed observational and interview data by writing up what laplantine (2010) calls an ethnographic description containing descriptive and narrative devices. thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) of the interviews and grey literature documents was conducted with nvivo 11. the themes identified were then integrated into the ethnographic description to write up the results. because the aims of the larger study did not include a focus on insight, there were no interview questions that promoted participants to speak about insight specifically. however, the relevance of insight emerged through my observational activities, and interview participants (both staff and patients) also evoked the concept explicitly and implicitly, for instance, when they discussed differing perceptions of their situations or defined patients’ roles in the mental health unit. in the next section, i conceptualize the mental health unit as a disciplinary space (foucault, 1979) in which insight and other techniques are deployed to produce psychiatric subjects. then i discuss staff’s definition and uses of insight, which sets the stage for exploring four case vignettes i constructed from my observations and interviews. these vignettes exemplify four different patient relationships to insight. the mental health unit as a disciplinary space an individual’s journey through the inpatient mental health unit is regulated by a series of assessments that ensure they adhere to specific norms, which are required to achieve the goal of being discharged from the hospital. in this context, hospital staff (psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, etc.) are gatekeepers of patients’ “progress” through the unit. they apply various techniques to reward or punish patients. insight plays a crucial role in staff’s assessment of patients’ progress. patient assessment occurs in two wards, each with differing rules, security levels, and privileges. the south wing, a smaller section of the ward, is reserved for individuals deemed to be at risk of harming themselves or others. psychiatrists and social workers initially evaluate most patients in this ward. it is locked, most personal belongings are confiscated, and patients have minimal visitation rights. once their mental state has stabilized and they are no longer perceived as a risk, patients are transferred to the centre ward, in which they can circulate more freely, gain more privileges (taking breaks marie-pier rivest studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 254 outside, having visitors, etc.), and participate in therapeutic activities such as arts and crafts, yoga, bowling (a privilege reserved for a small number of patients), etc. to be discharged, patients must participate in these activities, as well as adhere to their medication regimes. in discipline and punish, foucault (1979) explains that disciplinary institutions employ strategies that convince individuals to conform to specific norms such as these. staff participants define and deploy insight in three main ways that indicate to patients what is expected of them. first, a social worker’s definition of insight demonstrates how this concept is intimately linked to specific behaviours expected from patients. these behaviours include accepting treatment recommendations and taking their medication: it’s when someone acknowledges that they have a mental illness; on the one hand, they accept it on a certain level as well. acknowledging and accepting are two different things. so, insight is what brings someone to accept our team’s recommendations, like medication, taking medication, and accepting follow-ups: seeing their general practitioner, their psychiatrist, seeing their cmha [canadian mental health association] worker, working with them. and understanding – that’s another criterion as well – that they understand the consequences of not taking their medication. (natalie, social worker, interview)1 this definition links insight to an understanding and appreciation of one’s mental state and draws a connection between insight and adhering to the medical team’s treatment recommendations. second, it is also a common practice for social workers to draw on insight to justify their interventions. if a patient is assessed as having poor insight, then interactions are shorter, while patients with more insight benefit from prolonged interactions with staff. the notion of acceptance also appears in staff’s conceptualization of insight. for instance, another social worker views an individual’s refusal to be hospitalized as a symptom of mental illness: i document to protect myself legally. i also try to support the family by redirecting them to form 2 [a request for psychiatric examination made by family members to a justice of the peace]. there are a lot of feelings of powerlessness because the patient is still very symptomatic, sick, psychotic. (claire, social worker, interview) third, patients are generally perceived as having little to no insight upon admission to the inpatient unit. being hospitalized is in and of itself a reason to doubt patients’ level of insight. their status as a “patient” is thus seen as grounds to question their capacity as knowers in relation to their mental health (fricker, 2007). therefore, it is difficult for staff to reconcile that a patient may refuse services while having some level of insight. indeed, a social worker explains that their interventions are facilitated when the patient has insight: 1 participants’ names (staff and patients) have been changed to protect their identities. when lay knowledge is a symptom studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 255 but there’s a link – because if they have a good level of insight, they will say yes to everything because they realize they need help. so ideally, in a utopian sense, that’s it. it makes our job more manageable, and the therapeutic relationship is easier to develop because we’re on the same page – we work together and everything. when patients – and that’s a characteristic of mental illness. when insight is not present, we work against the grain, and we have to distance ourselves. (natalie, social worker, interview) here the participant links insight with compliance to treatment. according to this reasoning, a patient with sufficient understanding of their mental condition would never refuse treatment. this perception shapes staff interventions and interactions with patients. the notion of insight as acceptance follows galasiński & opaliński’s (2012) observations that psychiatrists often equate insight with compliance. these findings echo diesfeld and sjöström’s (2007) claim that insight possesses a certain “interpretive flexibility” (p. 96), encompassing elements such as “awareness of illness; agreement regarding diagnosis or degree of disorder; compliance with the type or dosage of medication or willingness to remain hospitalized” (p. 96) that allow insight to be used in diverse situations. the idea of insight being related to an acceptance of hospitalization and treatment led me to construct four vignettes drawn from my interviews and observations that correlate patients’ level of insight with acceptance and perceived compliance to clinical recommendations. these vignettes also help to understand which types of intervention are deployed according to the perceived level of insight, as i summarize in the table below. each quadrant represents a different type of relationship i observed or gathered from interview data, entailing differing outcomes. while i focus on one specific example per vignette, each represents patterns of interventions and interactions that punctuate patients’ journeys through the inpatient unit, with distinct epistemic and disciplinary effects. the difficult patient • low understanding, may refuse hospitalization; • insight is perceived to be low; • often receives involuntary status and is deemed incompetent to consent. the intractable patient • understands but does not accept hospitalization; • refuses treatment; may appeal to the consent and capacity board; • may leave against medical advice in some cases the confused patient • varying understanding of the situation; • fluctuating insight; • deemed unpredictable and volatile. the ideal patient • understands and accepts hospitalization • is seen as insightful and compliant; • most likely to be moved to centre ward table 1. relationship between insight, understanding, and acceptance. marie-pier rivest studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 256 low level of insight and refusal of hospitalization and treatment: the difficult patient mrs. latour (observed patient) was described as having very little insight. at the beginning of her hospitalization, mrs. latour presented herself as a medical professional and attorney. staff found it difficult to establish a therapeutic alliance with her. mainly due to her claims about her employment, mrs. latour was deemed to have no insight into her mental health situation and was characterized as being in denial about needing help. in this case, professionals must exercise patience and wait until the patient can hold a conversation before exploring treatment and discharge options (research observation notes). in such situations, psychiatrists can award or withdraw privileges to encourage good behaviour. in contrast, they can sometimes file requests to prolong an involuntary status and declare patients legally incapable of consenting to treatment. these interventions fall into the realm of infantilizing practices (mills & lefrançois, 2018) because they presume patients are unable to make decisions for themselves and frame patients’ conflicting perspectives as something needing to be punished and corrected, similar to how children can be seen as being “irrational, incompetent… and in need of (parental) guidance” (p. 519). some insight and refusal of hospitalization and treatment: the intractable patient some patients may understand their hospitalization, but staff perceives them as having less insight because they resist hospitalization or treatment. in these situations, patients have the option to appeal their involuntary status at the consent and capacity board (ccb), refuse treatments, and, more rarely, leave against medical advice. this mixture of understanding and resistance punctuates stephanie’s (interviewed patient) most recent hospitalization (at the time). she received nearly 10 forced injections during a past hospitalization due to her refusal to accept hospitalization. although she understood her need to be hospitalized on this occasion, she refused to comply with treatment: i went on an ‘everything strike.’ i didn’t eat, shower, or get up from my bed; i refused to speak… it was really hard for [the staff]… i was uncomfortable with what happened to me, and i didn’t want to be there… they got me to do at least one thing a day, another tomorrow; it was easier like that. i stopped striking; i drank ensure, i started drinking water again. (stephanie, patient, interview) although she remained highly resistant to any attempt from staff to provide treatment, she gradually accepted her hospitalization. an employee explains that “psychiatrists do not like going to court [the when lay knowledge is a symptom studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 257 ccb]” (research observation notes) to justify their decision to declare a patient involuntary. staff also report that in some instances of persistent refusal and challenging interactions with patients, some psychiatrists lower the dose of certain medications so patients cannot effectively state their case during a hearing (research observation notes). so, refusing to be hospitalized is perceived as a lack of insight. and this refusal can be punished by stifling patients’ voices and their ability to advocate for themselves, which constitutes a form of epistemicide (mills & lefrançois, 2018). this dynamic is also illustrative of the discrediting of individuals’ experiences and perspectives due to their identity as patients (diesfeld & sjöström, 2007; fricker, 2007) through the use of medical knowledge that exercises psychiatric power to reach desired “therapeutic” outcomes. varying insight and acceptance of hospitalization and treatment: the confused patient stephanie had some insight and was gradually convinced to accept treatment, but other patients are sometimes described as “confused,” alluding to their variable acceptance of hospitalization. while staff generally aim to discharge patients within two weeks, patients in this situation may be subjected to longer stays. this was mrs. tremblay’s (observed patient) situation; she oscillated between understanding and confusion about why she was hospitalized. her weeks on the unit turned into months, with staff unable to guarantee a safe discharge as they waited for her transfer to a specialized residence. this situation strained her relationships with staff to the point of reaching an impasse. she would often express that she did not know why she was still hospitalized and despair that she could not be discharged. staff explained to her family members that her “progress” was inconsistent and unpredictable (research observation notes). her level of insight and acceptance varied from one day to another. before meeting patients in a similar state, staff would sometimes warn me that we should “brace ourselves” (research observation notes) for the unpredictability of the situation, drawing an association between lack of insight and resistance (pilling et al., 2018). high insight and complete acceptance of hospitalization and treatment: the ideal patient in the three types of patients described above, staff’s emphasis on insight – or lack thereof – is evident. engaging in therapeutic activities is necessary for patients to be discharged from hospital. if little to no insight is diagnosed, marie-pier rivest studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 258 then therapeutic work cannot be undertaken, and patients may not be transferred to the centre ward, which is a stage that brings them closer to discharge. insight constitutes a prerequisite for patients to authentically accept their hospitalization and allow the “real” therapeutic work to begin. the more insight a person is perceived to possess, the more they are perceived to adhere to mainstream psychiatric explanations of their hospitalization and thus to be legitimate epistemic subjects (fricker, 2007). this position of total understanding and acceptance constitutes the fourth vignette constructed from my observations and interviews. this “ideal patient” was embodied by denise’s (interviewed patient), who, after her second stay in the mental health unit, came to understand that she did “need help” (denise, interview) from a psychiatrist. while she was as resistant as other patients during her first hospitalization and briefly during her second, this resistance turned into complete acceptance and engagement in the therapeutic process: i didn’t like it at first. i was really fighting it. but once i said – no, i really do need help. it took me about 12 hours to accept that i really do need help and that i need to stay, so i stayed… everybody deals with things their own way, and what seems stupid to other people, it’s not to you. you are you, and it’s a problem for you. just talk about it. and i told the psychiatrist more than i had ever told before. it took her two tries with me. i didn’t talk the first time i was there. (denise, patient, interview) denise’s perspective regarding her hospitalization encapsulates what is expected from patients; they must understand the reasons for their hospitalization, accept it, and comply with the proposed treatment. these notions go hand in hand, in that it is impossible to truly accept treatment if there is incomplete understanding of why receiving help is deemed necessary. if patients do not fully accept their hospitalization – even though this resistance is allowed under the mental health act (1990) – then they are perceived as not fully understanding and insightful. while danielle did not explicitly mention insight, her emphasis on realizing her need for help and understanding why she needs the supports offered at the hospital echoes professional definitions of insight. using an evocative simile, a social worker explained how even extreme resistance to hospitalization can lead to acceptance: “we see people come in who are completely disorganized, psychotic, violent. they leave the hospital gentle as a lamb and thank us for our services. right there, that’s a success” (lisa, social worker, interview; emphasis added). this excerpt implies that resistance and non-compliance are seen as proof or cause of lack of insight (diesfeld & sjöström, 2007), and even a symptom of mental illness itself (galasiński & opaliński, 2012), even though the notion of insight does not appear in diagnostic criteria. once patients reach this ideal state, they can engage in therapeutic activities in the centre ward. staff may facilitate progression toward this state when lay knowledge is a symptom studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 259 through medication (sometimes by force) and by establishing a therapeutic relationship. and, as shown above, when professionals implicitly associate insight with non-compliance, the concept may be used to justify coercive interventions to help develop or restore insight – and thus compliance – in patients (pilling et al., 2018). these actions compel patients to understand the necessity of hospitalization. because insight is dynamic, a patient’s level of insight may change many times during their hospitalization. thus, privileges can be revoked or reinstated; patients can be transferred back to the south ward if their mental state deteriorates and they are assessed as needing more surveillance. in this section, i analyzed how insight is defined and deployed by staff members. my analysis demonstrates that insight is a crucial concept used in upholding psychiatric norms of ideal patienthood. patients must accept their hospitalization and reframe their situation in a way that adheres to psychiatry’s view. in the following section, i discuss key dynamics and implications of this analysis. discussion regarding applications of insight, staff participants believe that lack of insight is a symptom of mental illness and adjust their interactions with patients until they observe sufficient levels of insight and compliance. when patients begin accepting their hospitalization and the medical team’s treatment recommendations, they are perceived as having regained insight and stabilized mental illness. these results point to the possibility of an inverse relationship between the level of insight and length of hospital stay. insight plays a role in orienting interventions despite problems related to its “interpretive flexibility” (diesfeld & sjöström, 2007, p. 96). diluting the meaning of insight by associating various attitudes and behaviours with the concept raises conceptual and practical issues in providing mental health services. conceptually, basing clinical definitions – even partially – on a concept that may mean different things to different professionals does not provide solid foundations for interventions. it is also interesting to note that while patients did not speak of insight per se, their interview narratives implicitly refer to notions of refusal, understanding, acceptance, and collaboration that professionals articulate explicitly. these notions are seen as markers of good insight. patients often frame their hospitalization experiences in a manner that shows progression from their initial protest and resistance toward an eventual acceptance of their hospitalization and psychiatry’s explanation of their mental difficulties. when i asked patient participants if they had appealed their involuntary status, many answered that they had not. while the mental health act (1990) marie-pier rivest studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 260 delineates a patient’s right to appeal involuntary hospitalization and judgments of their inability to consent, this practice was discouraged and even punished at times by mental health practitioners. moreover, if patients do not adhere to the medical model, then psychiatry is unable to understand their experiences and ways of making sense of their situations. patients’ refusal of hospitalization, whether in a voluntary or involuntary context, is seen as a routine aspect of hospitalization and an obstacle to be overcome. insight plays a key role in framing dissent as a symptom or consequence of mental illness. interventions are put in place to help individuals become “more insightful” and accept their hospitalization. these observations support pilling et al.’s (2018) conclusions that insight is often used as a tactic in “delegitimizing disagreement” (p. 195). indeed, staff’s use of expressions such as “getting a patient’s side of the story” seems to place patients in a position of testimonial injustice (fricker, 2007); as my four vignettes indicate, only the ideal insightful patient who expresses maximal understanding and acceptance is heard, understood, and given credence as an epistemic agent. as i have demonstrated, patients’ testimonies can be viewed as a symptom of their diagnosis. help is conditional on accepting and adhering to psychiatry’s explanation of mental distress. these elements confirm psychiatry’s status as the principal model of explaining mental distress (rimke, 2018; roy et al., 2017). the extent to which patients shared psychiatry’s vision of their situation demonstrates its epistemic hold on human suffering and constitutes a key feature of the normative psychiatric subject. in this context, carceral notions of punishment remain a routine aspect of psychiatric interventions (ben-moshe, 2020). indeed, formal (e.g., privilege system, forced injections) and informal (e.g., adjusting medications to punish resistant patients) mechanisms show the persistence of a carceral logic in the mental health unit. conclusion: moving beyond reform and toward abolition in this paper, i contribute to critical perspectives on mental health services by exploring the uses of insight in a psychiatric inpatient unit. this objective leads me to discuss the disciplinary and epistemic effects of insight. while insight – or lack thereof – is not a symptom of mental illness per se, uses of insight by mental health professionals go beyond clinical definitions and threaten patients’ right to be comprehended and treated as credible epistemic subjects (fricker, 2007). while the concept of insight was not a primary concern when i initiated the study (it focused more broadly on contemporary patienthood), insight emerged in the data as an element that influences how individuals incorporate the patient role in their own lives, following mental health professionals’ use of it in orienting their interventions. when lay knowledge is a symptom studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 245-263, 2022 261 the analysis presented here should be understood as exploratory, warranting the need for further research on insight and its uses in mental health interventions. notions of understanding, acceptance, compliance, and at times a positive view of services all seem to be associated with insight. in cases in which perceived low insight is associated with poor therapeutic “progress,” patients could be subjected to coercive measures to restore insight. as tate (2019) stresses, to alleviate this problem alternative perspectives to dominant psychiatric discourse must be rendered legitimate to allow patients to be conceived as “equal epistemic agents” (p. 98). the most poignant results from this study, however, relate to the use of coercive and punitive methods to restore insight and compliance. there is an urgent need for further studies that deeply reflect on the carceral logic deployed in mental health services, both inside and outside institutions (fabris, 2011; fabris & aubrecht, 2014), and highlight the necessity of an abolitionist analysis and strategy (ben-moshe, 2014, 2020). forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, and classism influence individuals’ experiences in psychiatric services and may lead to marginalized groups’ increased rates of institutionalization (ben-moshe, 2020; kilty & dej, 2018). in this sense, my results point toward the possible existence of a “white insight” that serves normative ideals useful to white supremacy and other confluent forces (joseph, 2015). future critical studies on insight must consider these elements to promote a social justice-oriented view of mental health and illness that locate white, patriarchal, and sane supremacy at the heart of psychiatric interventions. acknowledgements i want to thank my research participants for generously sharing their experiences with me. the data analyzed here were collected with the support of a sshrc doctoral scholarship (2014-2017). i would also like to acknowledge the contribution of anonymous reviewers who provided constructive comments. finally, i would like to thank studies in social justice editor nancy cook for her attentive reading of the final draft of this manuscript. references anthony, w. a. 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(1993). doing critical ethnography. sage publications. studies in social justice volume 3, issue 2, 191-212, 2009 correspondence address: luc cloutier, institut de la statistique du québec, montréal, qc h3b 4j8, canada. tel: +1 514 876-4384 email: luc_cloutier@sympatico.ca paul bernard, département de sociologie, université de montréal, montréal, qc h3c 3j7, canada. tel: +1 514 343-6111, email: paul.bernard@umontreal.ca diane-gabrielle tremblay, télé-université, université du québec à montréal, montréal, qc h2x 3p2, canada. tel: +1 514 843-2015, email: dgtrembl@teluq.uqam.ca issn: 1911-4788 job quality and gender inequality: key changes in québec over the last decade luc cloutier institut de la statistique du québec and université de montréal, montréal, québec, canada paul bernard université de montréal, montréal, québec, canada diane-gabrielle tremblay 1 the significant increase in the presence of women in the labour market is one of the most important events to have occurred over the last three decades. job feminization has grown to become a regular feature in most oecd countries (cooke-reynolds & zukewich, 2004; fullerton, 1999; international labour organization [ilo], 2007; johnston, 2005). such massive integration, however, has led to very different forms of employment and working conditions which often tend to increase gender inequality. télé-université de l’université du québec à montréal, montréal, québec, canada abstract using a new typology based on information available from the labour force survey, the authors analyse how job quality evolved in québec for both women and men over the last decade (1997-2007). results show that family situation and educational attainment are two important factors in the determination of gender inequality in the labour market. the analysis emphasizes the very significant decline in gender differences with regard to job quality (from 23% to 35% according to groups), especially for persons without children and individuals who achieved higher education. the changes represent a definite progress in the status of women in general, although some indicators also reveal degradation with respect to job quality in some of the sub-groups. introduction 2 even where differences between wage earning men and women have strongly decreased in terms of their respective numbers, female employees fare less well than their male counterparts. women often hold less lucrative jobs, are more often confined to part-time work against their will or to short-term employment, and 192 luc cloutier, paul bernard, and diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 are given fewer opportunities to deploy and establish their skills because they are given jobs and assignments that require little, if any, proficiency or aptitude (cranford, vosko, & zukewich, 2003; hughes, lowe, & schellenberg, 2003; johansson, katz, & nyman, 2005; kim & kurz, 2001; lemière & marc 2006). persistent gender inequality wears more than one mask and may conceal true social injustice. although they have gained equal footing with men in their level of schooling (statistics canada, 2006a) and filled the education gap, women still cannot achieve their full potential and access complete socioeconomic independence in less prominent grades of professional occupations or employment status; women are more likely to depend on a spouse’s or on someone else’s immediate support, financially or otherwise. gender disparity, however, is not limited to the labour market: there are acute gender issues as well in the division and sharing of family responsibilities. the uneven distribution of domestic and professional work between men and women (tremblay, 2008) leads women, although they are part of the workforce, to assume responsibility for more family chores than men; on the other hand, men shoulder more responsibility for financial resources through work. actually, both threads reinforce each other in maintaining women in an inferior situation in both spheres (boje 1996; maruani, 2000; hirata & kergoat, 1998). this paper analyses how work quality has evolved for women and for men in québec over the last decade, using a new multidimensional typology we created, based on the information available in the labour force survey. but first, it is useful to proceed to a quick review of the literature on the subject, in order to outline the relevant theoretical underpinnings, to describe the design and the methodology that lead to the typology we developed, and finally, the analytic process applied to the data. review of the literature one may use several theoretical perspectives to highlight the factors involved in the gender differences or inequalities in the labour market. we shall first examine these factors and then move on to the issue of job quality. theories explaining disparities between men and women according to occupational segregation theory (anker, 1997) unequal situations in the domestic sphere often lead women to similarly unfavourable circumstances in their professional life. as mentioned by maruani (2000, p. 47), “the concept behind a gendered division of work proposes a critical approach to the distribution of the activities. first, it indicates that work is not distributed in a neutral fashion, and that men and women hold different positions in the world of professional and domestic work.” in the domestic sphere, a sexual division of labour would subsist with reference to the relationships between genders, and such realities are likely to transfer into the professional sphere (due billing & alvesson, 1998; tremblay, 2004). other authors have shown the impact of the gendered division of labour, with women in a less favourable professional status in terms of earnings and working job quality and gender inequality 193 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 hours (anker, 1997; armstrong & armstrong, 2001; boje 1996; daune-richard, 1998; silvera, 1998). but the gendered division of labour cannot explain everything. gender discrepancies in the labour market finds another explanation in the theory of compensating differentials (anker, 1997; boisard, cartron, gollac, & valleyre, 2002; godechot & gurgand, 2000; joly, 2006): women would “wilfully” seek lower quality and professionally less demanding jobs, involving lower wages, part-time or temporary employment, requiring limited skills, but jobs that are compatible with their family situation; men, on the contrary, would seek better quality jobs (stable, high wages, full-time) and with more stringent requirements. in this perspective, men play the male provider role and women make a secondary income available to the household. although this theory doesn’t quite fit today’s social reality, it remains somewhat relevant since many families with children still operate along this scheme of supplementary income, with men involved more substantially in the paid labour market. new analyses, however, have shown a definite change in women’s participation to household income in canada (marshall, 2006; sussman & bonnel, 2006). the very noteworthy enhancement of women’s qualifications in the last decades certainly comes into play in this respect and, following the human capital theory (cf. schultz, 1961; becker, 1975), it is deemed that women should progressively improve their professional standing as a result; indeed the human capital theory states that wage earnings are established according to the marginal productivity of labour, at least in the framework of the neoclassical theories of labour and capital (tremblay, 2004). gendered wage discrepancies are, according to this theory, due in part to differences in human capital between men and women. owing to family responsibilities, women would acquire less human capital than men, and this would prevent them from accumulating one of the main components of human capital, work experience, the other significant factor being education: “the assumption of these models is that responsibility for family and household work induces women to interrupt their labour force participation and to work part time. besides the direct effect this has on wages, it reduces the incentives for women to ‘invest in human capital’” (johansson, katz, & nyman, 2005, p. 343). this being said, a fair number of women possess strong human capital that is not necessarily recognised in the job market on an equal footing with that of men. actually, the phenomenon of professional over-qualification unquestionably affects women more than men, at least in québec (cloutier 2007; gagnon, 2008). how is it that women cannot capitalize on their full potential and adequately move to good jobs that are more in keeping with their skills? theories that deal with discrimination offer a relevant explanation in this regard: women may face different types of discriminations in access to both jobs and equal wages. joly (2006), havet (2003), johansson, katz and nyman (2005) and anker (1997) indeed mention discrimination based on preferences, statistical discrimination, and professional segregation. each of these theories, in their own way, attempt to explain that certain jobs, mostly held by women, are not recognized adequately when compared to jobs more often held by male workers. the lesser recognition of female work (lower wages in particular) is a form of discrimination that further generates barriers to the forward thrust of women on the job market. career disruptions or disturbances, lesser or different work experience, productivity decline and family responsibilities would also contribute to 194 luc cloutier, paul bernard, and diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 women’s uneven access to promotions and to better paid jobs (avellar & smock, 2003; budig & england 2001; hersh, 1991; kalleberg & rosenfeld, 1990; mandel & semyonov, 2005; pernal, 2001; raley, mattingly, & bianchi, 2006;). this quick overview indicates that gender differences in the labour market are a multi-dimensional issue and are of concern to human capital and its enhancement; they are rooted in family responsibilities and in discrimination as well. we therefore need to design a multi-dimensional approach to understanding how job quality differences have evolved between men and women in québec over the last decade. in order to cover the different aspects of the processes affecting women’s (and men’s) employment issues, we will define work quality with respect to the various component dimensions of the question: wages, working hours, skills and job stability. we will observe that men and women are in different positions despite the fact that the discrepancies have regressed over the years. more importantly, we will examine in detail how gender differences came to evolve as a function of educational attainment and family status; these two factors offer additional insights into the situation. job quality the concept of job quality is particularly useful in the study of gender inequalities. we will see how the concept may be used to highlight the trade-offs among available jobs. given the constraints and opportunities involved in their participation in the job labour market, including educational attainment and family status, female and male workers are offered various types of jobs by firms who largely determine the working conditions of various groups; the ensuing jobs may be seen in terms of a package of working conditions that may—or may not—be acceptable to individuals, but which they do not always have a choice to accept, given their personal characteristics or level of education. this is the issue that we wish to bring to light with our job quality typology. there is no exact or precise definition of job quality. the concept is very polysemic: the meaning varies according to the data used and the research perspective (cee 2006; drolet & morissette, 1998; green 2006; hughes et al., 2003; khran, 1992; meisenheimer, 1998; oecd, 2001; rose, 2005). generally, however, research has embraced at least three fundamental dimensions: remuneration, stability in the employment relationship, and working hours (anker, chernyshev, egger, mehran, & ritter, 2003; handel, 2005; european commission, 2001; european foundation for the improvement of living and working conditions, 2002; kalleberg, reskin, & hudson, 2000; lemière & marc, 2006; lowe, 2007; mcgovern, smeaton, & hill, 2004; rose, 2005) all of these dimensions are present in most studies focusing on job quality, and they thus provide the basis of the concept reviewed here. in a recent study, cloutier (2008) developed a conceptual framework for job quality in order to give shape to the concept. based on key studies carried out on the subject in the last decade, we can identify nine dimensions of job quality: remuneration, work leaves, pension plans, group insurance, working hours, working schedules, stability, skills, and physical and psychological conditions. these indeed job quality and gender inequality 195 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 provide a rather comprehensive definition of “job quality.” other dimensions often pointed out in studies pertaining to job quality refer instead to characteristics of the labour market or of the work per se, for example minimum work standards, unionization, occupational injuries, work-family balance, professional autonomy, working climate, professional recognition, employee involvement in decisions, etc. while it is impossible to pinpoint a single, consensual definition of job quality, it remains important to identify which dimensions should come into play because it is unrealistic to attempt studying them all at once. we also need to take into account the availability of data since we wish to determine how the phenomenon has evolved over time in québec. 3 studies dealing with gender differences in employment and working conditions often refer to the above mentioned fundamental conditions (remuneration, work duration, and employment stability), but they are explored one at a time. (commission of the european communities, 2008; european foundation for the improvement of living and working conditions, 2008; statistics canada, 2006b). but the working realities for men and women are rather polymorphic and involve countless configurations. moreover, it is necessary to combine the various dimensions in order to appraise the trade-offs that women and men make in selecting jobs: since they will not get all that they want in most cases, they will seek an adjustment between the various features of their jobs and the characteristics of their personal situation, in particular their education and their family responsibilities. we are, therefore, limited to the data provided in the regular surveys carried out by statistical agencies; we cannot focus on dimensions that add to the richness but for which sets of data may be lacking uniformity or regularity, or be altogether non-existent. constructing a typology of job quality―methodology the construction of a typology must obey two fundamental requirements. firstly, it must provide a sense of the quality of employment that will take into account all the key dimensions for which good data are available. as was seen above, at least three dimensions appear to be necessary and to offer good data: remuneration, stability and working hours. secondly, several aspects of job quality combined into types, so that it becomes possible to highlight the trade-offs at play on the job market and that shape job quality. while it is relatively easy to identify the jobs that provide very high quality conditions from those that offer hardly any, the intermediate configurations need to be carefully identified in a multidimensional typology. the intermediate items reflect the multiple trade-offs that occur on the labour market between what is offered by employers, subject to their competitive environment, and what is wanted by workers, subject to their personal situation and professional aspirations, all of this resulting in the job quality situation. there will be jobs in which stability may be acquired at the cost of marginal remuneration and long working hours, and others where sizeable remuneration is obtained at the cost of endless hours, and so forth. such configurations are presented below in order to systematically represent labour market inequalities and their distribution according to gender. in canada, the main source of data available to satisfy our requirements is statistics canada’s labour force survey (lfs). the lfs provides on a monthly 196 luc cloutier, paul bernard, and diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 basis, since 1997,4 the most significant elements on employment and work conditions. beyond the three basic dimensions of job quality, the lfs allows for the integration of another significant characteristic: skills. 5 this is fortunate, since skill level and the ability to use one’s skills are a major component of job quality, often referred to in the literature. a four-dimension typology figure 1 shows the cross-classification of the four leading dimensions (remuneration, skills, stability, and working hours), with the categories associated with each6 figure 1. schematic diagram of a job quality typology along four leading dimensions of course one cannot study job quality with a typology containing 120 configurations; an aggregation of the manifold configurations into a reasonable number of categories is necessary. beyond job categories that provide the highest quality and very low quality, one must group these configurations into categories that convey different patterns of intermediate job quality. . as one can see, this yields 120 configurations for job quality. the higher quality job would entail an hourly rate of $25.00 and more, high skills, stability and normal fulltime working hours (30-40 hours per week). at the other end of the spectrum, the lowest quality job entails an hourly rate under $10.00 per hour, requires limited skills but is held by an over-qualified worker; it offers unstable conditions and short working hours (involuntary part-time). we have developed such a classification scheme (cloutier, bernard, & tremblay, 2008; cloutier 2008). overall, twelve job categories or job groups were identified in compensation / wages qualification . less than $ 10.00 . over-qualified workers . $ 10.00 14.99 . poorly qualified . $ 15.00 19.99 . highly qualified . $ 20.00 24.99 . $ 25.00 and more dimensions 5 x 3 x 2 x 4 combine to yield stability working hours / duration . unstable . involuntary part-time (<30 hrs) . stable . full-time (41 hrs or +) . voluntary part-time (<30 hrs) . full-time (30-40 hrs) 120 possible job quality configurations source : cloutier, 2008. job quality and gender inequality 197 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 order to reflect the main features of job quality, while leaving in each category a number of sample cases that will allow further analysis according to the various other characteristics of individual workers and of the labour market. figure 2 provides a visual representation of the results, and the next paragraphs describe the twelve job categories. group 1 in many of the studies analysing the labour market and job quality (notably european research), involuntary part-time work is a category in itself because it shows a strong discrepancy between the workers’ aspirations and the possibilities offered by the labour market or the employment at hand. the fact that workers may not obtain more working hours may be a significant indicator of job insecurity and remuneration may especially be deemed unsatisfactory by those who hold such jobs. involuntary part-time work is a disincentive to the workers’ integration because they cannot fully establish their skills even where they hold positions that require the skills they possess. in view of the qualitative aspect of this argument, we have established a category specific to involuntary part-time work in our typology. on the quantitative side, the number of employees holding this type of job is relatively small (156,300 in 1997, about 6.6% of the entire workforce). in this group, not only are the jobs involuntary part-time, but most of them are stable, they require various levels of skills and 70% are poorly paid (less than $15.00/h). groups 2 to 8 while involuntary part-time employment is unsatisfactory or inadequate for the workers, we may nevertheless consider that those who choose this work regime (whatever their rationale) find themselves in an acceptable if not favourable situation. since the employee wishes to work fewer hours, the question relating to the remuneration (employment gains) may well be less of a concern. voluntary part-time work is thus a way to accommodate different activities, and to avail oneself of somewhat more flexibility. 7 in addition, we may consider that where this type of job is stable, it offers improved quality because employees benefit from such schedules over a longer time horizon. from the standpoint of job quality, it seems appropriate to aggregate voluntary part-time jobs (less than 30 hours/week) and normal employment (30-40 hours), since they share stability as a defining characteristic. regular employment between 30 and 40 hours per week is also likely to satisfy workers inasmuch as it provides them with acceptable revenues and allows them, to a certain extent, to articulate work with other activities. it is understood that normal jobs (30-40 hours) are less likely to conflict with other social times (such as family responsibilities, domestic work, leisure and rest, among others) than jobs entailing longer hours (41 hours or more). the vast majority of jobs are stable and offer normal working hours (full time, 30-40 hours) or voluntarily shortened working schedules (voluntary part-time). for example in 1997, two out of three workers (1,554,800) share these characteristics. given the large number of workers involved in this type of job, we were able to create seven groups displaying salient differences with respect to other dimensions, namely skills and remuneration. 198 luc cloutier, paul bernard, and diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 we first considered the jobs classified in one of the three possible skill levels (high skills, low skills, over-qualified), yet with low remuneration (less than $15.00 per hour). workers in this job category are distributed as follows: 10.3% (or 244,800) in group 2 (high skills), 12.4% (or 293,000) in group 3 (low skills) and 6.8% (or 162,000) in group 4 (over-qualified workers). next, we examine jobs that require higher skills and offer average to high remuneration ($15.00/h and more). the number of jobs requiring higher skills allowed for the creation of three groups of workers distributed as follows: 8.6% (or 203,500) in group 5 (jobs with a remuneration between $15.00/h and $19.99/h), 7.3% (or 172,200) in group 6 (between $20.00 and $24.99 per hour) and 9.8% (or 231,100) in group 7 ($25.00/h and more). finally, a group featuring low skilled jobs or jobs held by over-qualified workers was created; this group includes jobs that nevertheless offer $15.00/h remuneration or more; it should be noted that in group 8, two out of three jobs offer a remuneration ranging between $15.00 and $19.99 per hour. overall, 10.5% of workers (or 248,200) held a group 8 job in 1997. groups 9 and 10 compared to stable jobs, unstable employment usually offers limited professional perspectives (term contracts) and limited access to good remuneration and to other benefits. in 1997, 8.3% of workers (or 195,600) held a job in this group.8 where unstable jobs only are considered, the only other distinctive dimension or feature is wages: an unstable job with low remuneration is much more casual or risky than another unstable but better paid job. in view of these considerations and despite the fact that unstable employment includes a limited number of jobs, we chose to give weight to remuneration and distinguish between low-paid unstable jobs (less than $15.00/h) and better paid unstable jobs ($15.00/h and more): the former corresponds to group 9 and is populated by 4.2% of the workers (or 100,000), and the latter belongs to group 10, which is made of 4.0% of the workers (or 95,600). it appears that low paid unstable jobs are mostly low skilled jobs (low skills and over-qualified workers), while better paid unstable jobs are mostly high skills jobs. finally, most jobs in groups 9 and 10 offer regular work duration (30-40 hours). groups 11 and 12 studies that investigate occupational health and work-life balance also underline the impact of work duration on workers. to be specific, long working hours may affect one’s physical and mental health, for example where rest periods are inadequate (reduced sleep or sleep deprivation, lack of leisure times) and where it is difficult to sustain a healthy lifestyle (inadequate diet, lack of physical exercise, etc.). moreover, being forced to perform long working hours may induce high levels of stress because workers cannot spare enough time for other activities, such as fulfilling their obligations or simply attending to their own needs. this is especially true of parents of young children, who must bear significant family duties. time shortage induces sustained stress, which may in turn generate other problems, whether professional or personal. job quality and gender inequality 199 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 200 luc cloutier, paul bernard, and diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 long-hours jobs display one very important facet of job quality and therefore it is relevant to highlight this characteristic in the typology. in 1997, 21.0% of workers (or 496,100) held a job that required long working hours (41 hours or more). among all long-hours jobs, those that also feature volatility have already been included in groups 9 and 10. yet, since the number of long-term and stable jobs is substantial, it remains possible to highlight the differences with the remuneration factor. we distributed the category into two groups; jobs with low remuneration (less than $15.00/h) and better paid jobs ($15.00/h and more). long-term stable and low paid jobs (group 11) are held by 7.9% of workers (or 186,700), while better paid jobs (group 12) are available to 11.6% of workers (or 274,100). group 11 jobs require various levels of skills while group 12 jobs are generally high skill jobs. characterization of job quality types the last step in the preparation of our job quality typology consists of associating identifiers to each of the 12 groups of job quality, in order to obtain a categorization of workers allowing the analysis of job quality for men and women. where involuntary part-time workers are concerned (group 1), we will speak of constrained workers. women and men who hold this type of job do face constraints since first and foremost they cannot work as much as they wish in their employment. others whom we will call cheated workers hold jobs that feature low remuneration, and yet require high skills (group 2). while these persons are highly qualified and those skills are taken advantage of, they do not receive an adequate compensation, as do other workers. low-end workers (group 3) are the workers who hold low skills and low paid jobs. these are also low skilled individuals. their schooling status limits them to the lower rungs of job quality since they may hardly improve their situation. downgraded workers (group 4) are highly qualified but seem to be unable to secure jobs that are in keeping with their professional profile. these persons are truly misplaced in the labour market, especially since they hold jobs with low remuneration that are however generally stable and regular. standard workers (group 5) enjoy quite acceptable employment conditions since they receive above average remuneration (between $15.00 and $19.00 per hour); they hold jobs that are in keeping with their skills and they (generally) work normal schedules in stable jobs. group 6 is populated by privileged workers, who work under the same conditions and yet are paid between $20.00 and $ 24.99 per hour; on the labour market, these workers are among the most fortunate. top-ranking workers in group 7 enjoy the same job quality as standard and privileged workers, but they are offered the highest wages ($25.00 or more). top-ranking workers sit at the top of the job quality classification. established workers (group 8) hold low-skilled yet stable jobs that offer normal working schedules. this group of workers are better paid than bottom-rung or underprivileged workers, yet a large number are overqualified for the job. since the remuneration, however, partly compensates for the skills mismatch, group 8 workers are somewhat trapped in their jobs, with comparative advantages perhaps designed to retain them but at a cost: the risk of seeing their skills and qualifications erode and vanish. job quality and gender inequality 201 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 vulnerable workers (group 9) hold low quality jobs that are typically short-lived and poorly paid, while casual workers (group 10) enjoy better remuneration yet are confronted with job instability. both group 9 and group 10 workers face job insecurity on the labour market. in group 11 heroic workers put in long hours in poorly paid jobs; they probably do so precisely because remuneration is slim. finally, breathless workers (group 12) also put in long working hours but their jobs are better paid. it may be that they wish to secure a better income or are required to do overtime. group 11 workers (heroic workers) hold jobs that require diverse skills, while group 12 workers (breathless workers) generally hold high skill jobs. workers in groups 11 and 12 are usually rewarded with stable employment. female/male job quality evolution in québec table 1 displays the dissimilarity coefficients9 between genders for 1997 and 2007. the coefficients indicate the global difference in the distribution of male and female workers within the 12 job quality groups defined above. results are distributed according to family status and education levels of the persons since those are significant determinants of job quality for both women and men. in 1997, the coefficient was 26.6% for the entire working population. one decade later, it dropped to 18.4 %. this 8.2 percentage point dive is substantial: it corresponds to about one third of the initial difference. 10 table 1. dissimilarity coefficients between genders based on a 12-group typology of job quality: results according to family status and education level, québec, 1997 and 2007 coefficient (in %) variation 1997 2007 in points in % aggregate 26.6 18.4 -8.2 -30.8 persons without children 21.1 13.7 -7.4 -35.1 persons with children 33.5 25.8 -7.6 -22.8 persons with poor education/schooling 32.1 24.7 -7.4 -23.0 persons with average education/schooling 27.6 19.1 -8.5 -30.7 persons with high education/schooling 24.1 17.3 -6.8 -28.2 1. poor education refers to high school education or less; average education means post-secondary, and higher education means completed university education or more. source: statistics canada, labour force survey (lfs). calculations performed by the authors. the data indicate that a definite narrowing of the gender gap occurred in job quality during the decade of 1997-2007 in québec. examining the situation of different groups of workers, one may note that the narrowing is especially significant for people without children (35.1%) and that it is not so large for persons with children (22.8%) or persons with little schooling (23.0%) compared to approximately 30% for persons with higher education. it should be noted that the narrowing of 202 luc cloutier, paul bernard, and diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 differences actually occurs where differences were already less important in 1997. persons without children offer a good illustration of this trend (data not shown): initial differences in the highly educated workers category were narrower than in the average schooling category and the dip is slightly lesser. what happened? table 2 offers an answer to this question by focusing on the evolution of the differences between genders for each type of worker over the period. one of the most significant findings in our analysis is that the most substantial reduction in the differences between genders occurred in the less advantageous categories of job quality. there is indeed a narrowing of the gap in the constrained workers group, in the cheated workers group (at the start of a career, probably), as well as in the downgraded workers group (younger and older workers, probably). these jobs are involuntary part-time jobs, they offer low income or require unskilled labour. actually, the most significant narrowing of differences occurring in the constrained workers group (involuntary part-time jobs) concerns highly educated workers (more than 4 points of percentage); actually, in 2007, there is hardly any gender difference in this job category, while the weakest reduction in this respect is found in the category of workers with basic schooling only, for which gender differences remain the highest. in the cheated workers category, persons with adequate skills which are drawn upon, but who receive low remuneration, the most significant reduction in malefemale job quality discrepancies occurs for persons without children and for persons with average schooling (almost four points). gender discrepancies nevertheless remain sharp in the group of people who assume family responsibilities; discrepancies are higher among them than in any other category. elsewhere, differences among low-end workers who assume family responsibilities tends to drop sizeably (reduction of 3 points). by and large gender differences remain, in 2007, twice as high in the category of persons with children than for workers without children. family responsibilities thus truly seem to affect gender differences with respect to job quality. this finding is given substance by the increase in the difference between men and women with children in the downgraded workers group, that is, persons who are over-qualified for the job and receive low remuneration (professionals at the start of a career, probably). the difference between men and women in this category is double that of persons without children. among the standard workers group, those who are paid between $15.00 and $19.99 per hour, who enjoy stable jobs in which their skills are recognized, and who generally work 30 to 40 hours per week, there is a drop in gender differences in all sociodemographic groups. however, in the (often unionized) top-ranking workers group where the best job quality is found, the most significant reduction occurs within the category of workers with higher education. here, it is the human capital effect that comes into play. job quality and gender inequality 203 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 204 luc cloutier, paul bernard, and diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 the substantial narrowing of gendered differences in the established workers group can be seen in all the groups except in the highly educated category, where discrepancies are negligible as we have seen at the outset. whether they have children or not, whether they possess low or average schooling and training, workers who are well paid in jobs that require low skills display much narrower gender differences than before. it must be noted, however, that the gap is still significant in the category of persons with limited schooling (almost 5 points). finally, the overall drop in gender differences may also be analyzed by focusing on working time. table 2 shows that there were significant reductions in the number of heroic workers and breathless workers. in the former group, which involves longterm but poorly paid jobs, there is a narrowing of the gap for all socioeconomic groups, but especially in two categories: persons without children and persons who completed higher education. the latter category is in fact the one which displays the most significant narrowing in the breathless workers group, that is, those who work long hours and receive very good pay. when both the heroic and the breathless groups of workers are examined―they are often found in the private sector or in management positions―we can see a narrowing of 5 percentage points in malefemale differences among those with higher education. no other swing of that magnitude can be observed elsewhere in the data. nevertheless, working hours appear to play, just as well as remuneration and over-qualification, a major role in the reduction of gender differences in job quality. since a narrowing of gender differences in job quality does not necessarily translate into an overall improvement of job quality, we need to examine the situation of men and women in 2007 beyond the changes observed. for example, a smaller gap in the low-end category of workers could simply be driven by an increase of male workers in this group or a smaller gap in the breathless workers group could simply mean that more women have entered this group of workers. table 3 displays the data required to proceed to such analysis. in a general way, it appears that changes in job quality occurred mainly among female workers, where indeed more important shifts occur, in the order of 2 points of percentage or higher. female constrained workers, for example, substantially decreased in number over the years. drops of more than 4 points are noted in the categories of women with and without children, and of women who have completed average schooling. while the number of female constrained workers tends to decline overall, their number remains quite high among women with lower schooling; in 2007, female constrained workers with low schooling are twice as numerous as women with high education. women’s problems with finding more work or working more seems to relate to their human capital because there are no significant differences between women with children and women without children. elsewhere, in the cheated workers group (highly qualified women in poorly paid job), persons without children lost some of their importance, while the number of women with children remained just about the same. since the latter type of job is of low quality and the proportion of women remains the same over the decade, it may well be that women with children still have problems balancing family and professional responsibilities if they hold high quality jobs. this finding, however, is not limited to this type of employment, since downgraded workers (women who are over-qualified and poorly paid) significantly job quality and gender inequality 205 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 increase their numbers over the period (by almost 4 percentage points). such a situation is nowhere observed among women without children or among men with and without children. it appears, then, that women with children are subject to more social inequality than any other category of workers in accessing quality jobs. however, other changes in the data on job quality show a significant improvement for women with children. table 3 shows both a decrease in the number of female workers in the low-end group (down almost 5 percentage points) and a significant increase of their numbers in the top-ranking group (more than 3 points). these changes are the most important to have occurred for both men and women. in our view, this means that a number of female workers with parental obligations succeed in escaping or in avoiding very low quality jobs and actually access jobs that offer better, more suitable conditions. the data thus bring to light significant signs of change in the evolution of job quality for women. time devoted to family responsibilities, therefore, is still asymmetrically distributed between females and males, and gender discrepancies frequently translate into more working hours for men; more men hold jobs that require longer working hours (41 hours or more) in the labour market. data in table 3 indicate changes in this respect. over the period, there is a significant drop in the number of heroic workers (workers who work long hours for low wages) among men with children. no change occurs, however, for breathless workers, who work long hours in well paid jobs. for men without children, the situation is similar to that of men with family responsibilities; however, the drop that occurs with heroic workers is more important than for men without family responsibilities. up to this day, working time remains an issue for work-family balance. although a number of workers work fewer hours, the changes observed in the data do not indicate any significant reduction of gendered inequalities with respect to work-family balance. workers who care for children and who hold top-ranking jobs have seen their numbers increase significantly between 1997 and 2007 (almost 3 percentage points), thus limiting the narrowing of the gap between men and women in that category. if gendered inequalities remain for this group of jobs, it must be said that the increase in the number of top-ranking workers who have children is the highest among all groups of male workers. if, moreover, the established workers group and the heroic workers group have definitively lost some ground among those who have children (down 2.5 and 2.9 percentage points respectively), it seems that the conditions to reconcile family and professional obligations are better today than they were ten years ago for men. however, the fact that this group improved its job quality situation more than any other explains in part why there was not a similar narrowing of the gender gap for workers with children compared to persons without children (down by 22.8% and 35.1% respectively). 206 luc cloutier, paul bernard, and diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 job quality and gender inequality 207 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 it comes as no surprise, then, that job quality did not improve for the category of persons with low schooling. although the number of women with little schooling in the constrained workers group has dropped, other women with poor schooling have not really improved their situation over the period, except for the fact that there are fewer women in the heroic group of workers. for men, a significant decrease can be observed in the poorly schooled heroic workers (a drop of more than 3 percentage points), but this combines with a significant increase of men in the cheated workers group and in the low-end workers group. the situation of poorly schooled men and women thus improves in some respects, but it worsens elsewhere; this explains partly why the gender gap in job quality has not narrowed sizeably. for persons with average schooling and training, multiple changes can be identified in women’s job quality. the number of females who are constrained workers, cheated workers, and low-end workers has decreased, and this helps narrow the job quality gap with men. men also contribute to the process, since their numbers drop significantly in the heroic workers group and rise sizeably in the standard workers group. even more salient is the fact that the number of over-qualified women with average schooling increases dramatically over the period: more than 3 percentage points among downgraded workers and established workers. this situation is singular because no similar movement is observed among poorly schooled or highly educated workers. this increase in women’s occupational overqualification illustrates the persistence of gendered inequalities in the labour market, in spite of the narrowing of the gap in other job categories. female workers in québec appear to experience serious discrimination even when they have undeniably improved their level of education, especially in comparison with men; women’s additional education achievements do not seem to be as profitable to them as one would expect from human capital theory. finally, issues of remuneration and working hours are at the heart of changes in job quality for both women and men who enjoy higher education. table 3 shows that female workers significantly increase their numbers in the top-ranking group of workers, while there is a sharp drop for women in the constrained workers group (almost 5 percentage points). for men, data shows a significant drop in the heroic workers group as well as in the breathless workers group; the combined decrease in these groups of workers is almost 5 percentage points. it may be said that access to well-paid jobs by highly educated women, combined to a significant drop in involuntary part-time jobs as well as the decline of highly educated men in jobs that require long working hours, has led to a major narrowing of the overall gender gap for this category of persons. conclusion our analysis of changes in the gap of male/female job quality in québec over the last decade reveals both the shrinking of some differences and the persistence of a significant set of discrepancies. the latter are strongly related to family status and, therefore, to important gender inequalities with respect to family responsibilities in interaction with women’s level of education. in general, the situation of women without children and that of highly educated women improves more consistently. 208 luc cloutier, paul bernard, and diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 nevertheless, women who assume family responsibilities have registered significant gains. issues relating to earnings, to professional skills, and to working hours remain at the heart of job quality discrepancies between genders. in some instances, women are able to leave low quality jobs, where limited working hours, low wages, and lowskills jobs are involved; and they make headway towards good-paying jobs. men tend, rather, to modify their behaviour with respect to working time, regardless of family responsibilities and high or low education. it is worth noting that this type of change is less present when children are involved and more significant among those with higher education. finally, professional over-qualification is more prevalent among female workers, especially those with children and with average schooling. despite the definite reduction of gender differences over the past ten years, all these findings draw up a portrait in diverse shades of grey for job quality changes in the québec labour market. in light of the results presented, there should be no doubt that issues such as the gendered division of labour, human capital, and discrimination still play a key role in understanding these inequalities. more detailed analyses are required in order to better understand how professional and family dimensions interact to shape and alter the gender gap in job quality. the reduction of gender inequalities in the québec labour market over the last decade is sizable if not dramatic. a reduction by one third in the differences between women and men in québec over such a short period is witness to this fact. the last decade has seen relatively strong economic growth, and this has no doubt contributed to a better integration of women in the labour market. but economic factors do not explain everything. over the last decade, québec has promoted progressive legislation and governmental measures aimed at enhancing gender equality (or equity) with respect to work and life outside the workplace. among such actions, it is worth noting, are the pay equity act (loi sur l’équité salariale, 1997), the employment equity act (reviewed in 2001) and several other measures involving family policies, including affordable childcare services (reduced contribution program implemented gradually, starting in 1997).11 the measures appear to have been instrumental in reducing gender inequalities in the labour market, especially with respect to job quality (cloutier, 2007). given these circumstances, can we expect this trend will continue to continue in québec? will it lead to a convergence in the employment situation of women and men? this remains to be seen, especially in light of the recent economic downturn and the financial crisis. more often than not, women bear the brunt of economic downturns such as recessions (ilo, 2009; trade union congress, 2009; confédération syndicale international, 2009). some believe, however, that the ongoing crisis is “sexist” in nature because it affects the economic sectors where jobs are mainly held by men, with the exception of the financial sector, so terribly struck, but including those sectors now supported by governments (for example the car manufacturing sector). for all intents and purposes, job quality issues will be at the heart of the debates on economic renewal. should job quality tend to degrade, it may be expected that gender inequality will also increase. workers, and especially women, who are less skilled or burdened with family responsibilities are likely to pay a higher price. a similar analysis to ours should thus be undertaken as we come out of the current crisis. job quality and gender inequality 209 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 notes 1 luc cloutier is statistical analyst (institut de la statistique du québec) and doctoral candidate at the université de montréal. paul bernard is a université de montréal professor and diane-gabrielle tremblay is a téluq-uqam professor (télé-université de l’université du québec à montréal). the authors wish to extend their appreciation for the seminal comments provided by their three anonymous reviewers. 2 we use the expression “gender” to typify the social differences and disparities conveyed in the relationships between men and women both at work and outside the workplace. it is more relevant to use the “gender” concept than that of “sex” since the latter refers to the biological differences between women and men. 3 in addition, it is our intention to compare the situation in québec with that of other canadian regions in order to develop a better understanding of trends as they become salient. 4 actually, remuneration and employment stability (permanent and temporary) were first included in the 1997 survey. 5 the ”skills” dimension is used to classify the job into high or low skills; the former includes technical or professional occupations and management positions, and the latter includes intermediate or plain simple jobs. the classification reveals whether the worker is qualified or over-qualified for the job. a worker is over-qualified for a job when the minimum requirements of the job are lower than the candidate’s level of education. 6 the division into subset categories is explained in full detail in cloutier (2008). 7 this may be the case of mothers returning to the labour market following maternity leave. their choice of the part-time regime, however, does not necessarily entail that a quality job is available. research by gatrell (2007) has indeed shown that highly qualified mothers returning to part-time employment (as a percentage of full-time placement) has translated into curtailed career development opportunities and in some instances into accepting work designed for less qualified personnel. 8 since all involuntary part-time jobs are included in group 1, this figure excludes unstable involuntary part-time jobs. 9 the dissimilarity coefficient indicates the proportion of individuals in one of the distributions being compared that would need to be moved to other groups in order to match its distribution with that of the other group. a zero (0) coefficient indicates that two groups (for example, women and men) display an identical distribution, while a 100% coefficient indicates the absence of one group in all the categories where the other group is present. the higher the coefficient, the steeper the differences between the groups being compared. 10 for comparison purposes, the coefficient in canada shifted from 26.8% to 20.4% for a 23.9% drop (or 6.4 percentage points). in ontario, the drop is in the same range (-22.5% or 5.9 percentage points) and in 2007 the coefficient is 20.2%. alberta’s situation is atypical with a drop of 15.1% only in the coefficient, only half of that in québec. that part of the western region displays a coefficient that remains very high at 26.9% in 2007. québec therefore presents a reduction in the differences between genders that is larger than in other canadian region. 11 lately, other measures were implemented in québec; for example, enhanced parental leave providing mothers (as well as fathers) with a better replacement income over a longer period. the impact of this measure on women’s job quality is still unclear, however, because it may well translate into a less profitable re-entry into the labour force (for more on this issue, gatrell, 2007). references anker, r. 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(2001). the relationship between family responsibilities and employment status among college and university faculty. the journal of higher education, 72(5), 584-611. raley, s. b., mattingly, m. j., & bianchi, s. m. (2006). how dual are dual-income couples? documenting change from 1970 to 2001. journal of marriage and family, 68(2), 11-28. rose, m. (2005). job satisfaction in britain: coping with complexity. british journal of industrial relations, 43(3), 455-467. schultz, t. w. (1961). investment in human capital (american economic association presidential address), the american economic review 1(2), 1-17. silvera, r. (1998). les salaires: toutes choses inégales par ailleurs? in m. maruani (ed.), les nouvelles frontières de l’inégalité, hommes et femmes sur le marché du travail (pp. 127-138).paris: éditions la découverte/mage. statistics canada. (2006a). chapter 4: education. women in canada, a gender-based statistical report catalogue no. 89-503-xpe (pp. 89-97). ottawa, on. statistics canada, (2006b). women in canada: a gender-based statistical report catalogue no. 89-503xpe. ottawa, on. sussman, d., & bonnell, s. (2006). wives as primary breadwinners. perspectives on labour and income, 7(8), 10-17. http://www.egalite.cfwb.be/upload/album/ap_138.pdf� 212 luc cloutier, paul bernard, and diane-gabrielle tremblay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 trade union congress. (2009). women and recession: how will this recession affect women at work? retrieved from http://www.tuc.org.uk/extras/womenandrecession.pdf. tremblay, d.-g. (2004). économie du travail. les réalités et les approches théoriques. montréal: éditions saint-martin. tremblay, d.-g. (2008). conciliation emploi-famille et temps sociaux. québec: presses de l’université du québec. http://www.tuc.org.uk/extras/womenandrecession.pdf� older workers in changing social studies in social justice volume 3, issue 2, 155-171, 2009 correspondence address: nathalie burnay, département des sciences politiques et sociales, université de namur, b-5000 namur, belgium tel: +32 081 72 48 93, email: nathalie.burnay@fundp.ac.be issn: 1911-4788 older workers in changing social policy patterns nathalie burnay département des sciences politiques, sociales et de la communication, facultés notre-dame de la paix, namur, belgium unité de sociologie et d'anthropologie, université catholique de louvain, belgium abstract compared to other european countries, the employment rate of older workers in belgium is rather low. this paper argues that one of the most relevant factors underlying the problems of this low employment rate in belgium is the social policies directed at older workers. indeed, when unemployment became a widespread phenomenon in the1970s and 80s, early-retirement schemes were designed to alleviate the financial implications on an aging workforce. the government encouraged anyone over 50 to leave the labour market through early retirement schemes, unemployment payment programs, medical retirement, and career breaks. these practises were based on a wide consensus of government, business, and workers. however, for some years now, international organizations have been concerned about the viability of pension systems and their ability to achieve their objectives. in recent years, different factors have led policy makers to rethink this policy. but changing the trend and keeping people on the job has proven more difficult than foreseen. the transformations of public policies begun at the dawn of the 21st century radically changed the balance between the state, workers, and employers, who had all previously seen early retirement as favourable. this paper also tries to show how early retirement is not simply a desire to escape, but can also be explained as an aggression against the person by the labour market. leaving professional life early thus seems more to be a case of necessity, in fact not a choice at all, but an obligation, or even a sacrifice, and must be seen in the perspective of professional duties and their evolution. context compared to other european countries, the employment rate of older workers in belgium is rather low. in fact, until recently there had been a trend of decreasing participation in the labour market for workers over the age of 55. in 1960, 85% of men from 55 to 59 years of age were active in the labour market; in 1980, this proportion had decreased to 74% and in 1997 the proportion further decreased to 49% (data from eurostat, 1998, as cited in romans, 2007). a similar decrease was observed for men in the age group of 60 to 64: from 71% in 1960, to 40% in 1980 156 nathalie burnay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 and to 18% in 1997. in 2006, however, the statistics show a small increase as compared to 1997: 53 and 20% for men of 55 to 59 years of age and those 60 to 64 years respectively. in the female labour market participation was very low until the late nineties: about 20% for women of 55 to 59 years of age, and approximately 5% for women 60 to 64. the proportions reached 31 and 9% respectively in 2005. yet there remains a substantial difference in labour participation between older male and female workers. these low levels of activity are explained by the situation faced by belgium in the crisis of the 1970s. during the 1970s and 80s the rate of unemployment evolved within a context of major industrial upheaval and large scale restructuring and downsizing. the government policy to deal with the rising unemployment from about 1975 on, strongly favoured the young unemployed to the detriment of the older unemployed and even older workers (simoens, 1980). the government encouraged anyone over 50 to leave the labour market through early retirement schemes, unemployment payment programs, medical retirement and career breaks. additionally, reinterpretation of certain regulations regarding poor working conditions allowed others to leave work. these practises were based on a wide consensus of government, business, and workers. the federal government took in hand the direct costs of payments to the older unemployed and those taking early retirement, and the indirect costs through subsidies to businesses. however, for some years now, international organizations have been concerned about the viability of pension systems and their ability to achieve their objectives. in belgium, like in the european union, the government introduced, in the beginning of the 2000s, a series of measures aimed at encouraging older people to remain in or to re-enter the labour market. in recent years different factors have led policy makers to rethink this policy. in fact, these transformations obviously raise questions about the relationship between older workers and social justice and correspond with the expansion of liberalism. justice, within this context, demands that economic rewards and societal resources are linked to ambition, effort, and prudent exercise of individual choice, rather than, for example, to citizen status (armstrong, 2006, as cited in brodie, 2007, p.103). this model also assigns personal responsibilities, rather than collective social problems (beck & beck-gernsheim, 2002, pp. 22-26; brodie, 2007, pp. 103-104). but changing the trend and keeping people on the job has proven more difficult than foreseen. the balance between public policies, trade unions and older workers is breaking now. this paper discusses the results of this changing social policy pattern in terms of well-being and intention to leave the labour market. retirement and well-being from the perspective of new institutionalism (esping-andersen, 1990; hall, 1993; hall, & soskice, 2001; pierson, 1998), early departure from the labour market needs to be understood not simply as a personal choice but rather as a public policy question. it is in fact the “social benefits” system that encourages particular behaviour in individuals by offering or withdrawing employment opportunities for those over 50 (guillemard, 2002; guillemard, 2003). belgian social protection older workers in changing social policy patterns 157 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 policies reflect the continental model (a combination of state, private, semi-private, parastatal and ngos that provide benefits) where generous unemployment benefits coexist with many possibilities of early withdrawal from the labour market and very limited systems which encourage and integrate the older employee. thus older workers are condemned to inactivity at the end of their careers. in this way, the model cannot help but create widespread early retirement (guillemard, 2003). the development of a political model characterized by “marginalization and relegation” has consequences for the resolution of conflicts generated, for example, in the case of large-scale layoffs, but also the way in which early retirements are handled. this approach creates a feeling in the individual that the process is normal and an anticipation of retirement in the worker. we then see a whole culture of early retirement develop as norms and values evolve which are associated with the age of the employee. social norms develop alongside the practise of early retirement which is more and more common, as well as the perceived legitimacy of these practises. the creation of acknowledged procedures and practises seals the social contract between the state, the worker (and their union) and the employer. we then see a real change in the social perception and place of workers, linked to their age. the results below show how much these legal changes are accepted socially, even by the older workers themselves. the data were gathered within the panel study of belgian households (psbh,),1 a longitudinal research project providing questionnaire data from 1992 to 2002. the study population consisted of 5,790 subjects, 2 to evaluate subjective well-being, the following outcome variables were assessed: sociability (leisure activities and membership in an association), life satisfaction, and mental health. table 1 summarizes the outcome variables and their indicators (data from 2002). divided into four age groups: less than 30 years of age, 30 to 39, 40 to 49 and 50 to 65. employment status was categorized into five groups: stable job, temporary job, insecure job, unemployed, and pre-retired (only applicable in the oldest group). table 1. concepts, dimensions, and indicators. concepts dimensions indicators sociability life satisfaction mental health leisure activities with others association member to go to the cinema to go to a sport event to go to the pub to go to a restaurant to do sport educational association cultural activities sports environment, ecology third world development political parties or groups life satisfaction depression scale 158 nathalie burnay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 the concept of sociability can be divided into three dimensions (gallie & paugam, 2000; centre d’études des revenus et des coûts [cerc], 1993). primary sociability refers to the immediate family: the presence of a partner or live-in children contributes to tight social relationships (not studied here). secondary sociability describes the number of informal contacts with the extended family and mutual leisure activities. tertiary sociability refers to the membership of one or more associations or to the participation in certain leisure activities. since social isolation can be assessed by the number of social activities and contacts with family and friends, only secondary and tertiary sociability components were assessed within the context of this article. life satisfaction was assessed by a single question. mental health was assessed by the health and daily living form global depression scale (moos, cronkite, & finney, 1990). the following variables were also taken into account in the analyses: gender, education level, income, and family composition. the outcome variables were compared across employment statuses, using logistic regression analysis, with the stable job group as the reference category. 3 table 2 brings up two important elements. firstly, as often mentioned in the literature, the experience of unemployment has a destructive impact on the individual (eisenberg & lazarsfeld, 1938; hepworth, 1980; jahoda, 1979; paugam & russell, 2000; rosenberg, 1965). whether in terms of sociability, personal happiness, or mental health, these indicate that the unemployed have greater difficulties than those in a stable job. secondly, and more importantly in the present study, after the age of 50 this tendency is no longer significant. these unemployed benefit from a special status that means that they resemble more an early retired person than a younger unemployed person. this special status created in 1985 means that the requirement to enrol as a job seeker is waived, and that social benefits are increased for seniority. these measures permit the older unemployed, in periods of high unemployment, to withdraw from the labour market in the same way as does early retirement. the general principle is: after a year of unemployment a 50 year old can ask to obtain “older unemployed” status at which point they are no longer required to enrol as job seekers or go for weekly cheques to the employment office. in addition, while keeping their unemployed status, these unemployed people can begin self-employed work on a part-time basis (outside of normal working hours); this is not normally permitted for unemployed adults. these unemployed people are not counted in official statistics. this special status is in fact a kind of recognition by society that it is almost impossible for the older worker to re-enter the labour market. these measures are accepted by public opinion on the reasoning that by having worked for many years, these unemployed people have fulfilled their moral obligation to society. thus we see in the above statistics the positive impact that this status of “older unemployed” has on those concerned. an understanding was established between political decision makers, unions, workers, and the business community. in the case of business owners they can thus easily reduce the number of senior employees when restructuring the business or when salaries are too high (in belgium salaries are strongly linked to seniority). older workers in changing social policy patterns 159 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 table 2. odds ratios for well-being odds ratios for having some kind of leisure activities (data from 2002, n=5790). employment status <30 yrs 30-39 yrs 40-49 yrs 50-65 yrs stable jobs temporary jobs insecure jobs unemployment pre-retired reference 0.75 (n.s.) 0.72 (n.s.) 0.30*** reference 0.89 (n.s.) 1.98 (n.s.) 0.38*** reference 0.67 (n.s.) 0.52 (n.s.) 0.45** reference 0.70 (n.s.) 1.00 (n.s.) 0.97 (n.s.) 1.26** odds ratios for being a member of an association (data from 2002, n=5759). employment status <30 yrs 30-39 yrs 40-49 yrs 50-65 yrs stable jobs temporary jobs insecure jobs unemployment pre-retired reference 1.27* 0.52*** 0.70** reference 1.22 (n.s.) 1.15 (n.s.) 0.37*** reference 0.52** 1.32 (n.s.) 0.48*** reference 1.19 (n.s.) 0.89 (n.s.) 0.74(n.s.) 1.35** odds ratios for having good life satisfaction (data from 2002, n=5652). employment status <30 yrs 30-39 yrs 40-49 yrs 50-65 yrs stable jobs temporary jobs insecure jobs unemployment pre-retired reference 0.75 (n.s.) 3.57* 0.99 (n.s.) reference 0.96 (n.s.) 4.22* 0.71** reference 1.72 (n.s.) 1.00 (n.s.) 0.72** reference 0.30* 0.63* 1.47** 1.57*** odds ratios for not having mental health problems (data from 2002, n=5210). employment status <30 yrs 30-39 yrs 40-49 yrs 50-65 yrs stable jobs temporary jobs insecure jobs unemployment pre-retired reference 0.81 (n.s.) 0.78* 0.31*** reference 0.86 (n.s.) 0.99 (n.s.) 0.22*** reference 0.85 (n.s.) 0.61 (n.s.) 0.42** reference 0.75* 0.66* 1.23* 1.56*** * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01, n.s. non relevant 160 nathalie burnay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 changing political approaches at the beginning of the 2000s many international bodies have come to recognize the importance of age and have made it a priority. since 1995, the oecd has sounded the alarm based on demographic changes: the financial ability to cover retirement and other social welfare services are put in serious doubt by costs that are growing exponentially. the aging of the population has worried international bodies that have seen the numbers of those active in the labour market and those in retirement permanently reversed. increased life expectancy, when seen in relation to the shape of the rest of the age pyramid, means that there is a generation of retired people for whom money must be found. it is given this context that the oecd tries to promote “active aging” policies which remove all obstacles to continued economic activity with age, be it because of early retirement or forced retirement at a given age both of which discourage any activity after a certain age (oecd, 1995; 1998). in 1999 the european union recognized the question as a major political challenge. in its 1999 report “the european labour market in the light of demographic change,” the 50-64 age group was recognized as being the principal reservoir of labour power for the future. the lisbon summit (march 2000) proposed that member states implement employment policies with an overall objective “to bring the employment rate for people 15–64 (presently 61% on average) to approach as nearly as possible 70% in 2010 and to arrange that women’s participation in the labour market (presently 51% on average) increase to 60% by 2010.”4 a policy to prevent people leaving the employment market; the stockholm summit (march 2001) confirmed the decision of the member states to reach full employment as a way to respond to “the challenge of an aging population.” it established intermediate objectives for 2005, an employment rate of 67% for 15–64 year old men and 57% for women. but more importantly, an objective of a 50% employment rate was set for 55-64 year old men and women for 2010. among other measures, there was a request for a report to specify how best to reach these objectives. keeping older workers active was finally on the agenda. at the beginning of the 2000s, the belgian government, like the european union, introduced a series of measures aimed at encouraging older people to remain in or to re-enter the labour market. in recent years, different factors have led policy makers to rethink this policy. it is no longer the policy to reduce the rate of unemployment, but rather to increase the rate of employment. the aim is two-fold: continue with the existing retirement system while increasing the rate of employment (more contributions for retirement, therefore increased means to manage the deficit connected with the aging population), enhance the possibilities for business to best use the potential of experienced workers. the belgian program is based on three complementary objectives: a shorter work week and other improved conditions, to facilitate life for workers over 50; public policy measures to reinsert the older unemployed back into the employment market. older workers in changing social policy patterns 161 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 the preventive policy was created by the government of the time to reduce the risk of early ejection from the employment market by reducing the principal factors of risk, for example the inability to adjust to new production processes and new technologies. to combat this, it was necessary to reinforce the possibilities of job changes as well as the offers of continuing education and training of older workers, often excluded supposedly because they will soon be leaving. some measures have also been taken to prevent layoffs of workers aged 45 or over, but this is done only as an informational initiative for employers. when an employee of over 45 is laid off, the employer must offer them help to find other work (outplacement, psychological aid, and evaluation of strengths and weaknesses). these measures to prevent exclusion from the job market are clear indications to the worker that they are responsible for their reinsertion in the job market. this aid is provided to assist in their job search, but in the end, it is the worker that has the responsibility to get back into the work force. the final objective of the 1999 reform is clearly part of this policy to get older workers back in the job market. the special “older unemployed” status created in 1985 has been progressively revised. conditions to enter the program have been narrowed and “back to work” programs developed. tax breaks have also been added for businesses who hire unemployed older workers. this change in policy begun by the federal governmental in 1999 has been continued and expanded since then. in the 2003 national action plan (plan d’action national pan), belgium made active aging one of its priorities. this policy is expressed through 4 points: 1. enrolling older unemployed as job seekers. being enrolled means that the job seeker must accept any reasonable job offer until the age of 58. this seriously reduces the use of the special “older unemployed” status created in 1985 and favours remaining active in the job market; 2. maintaining workers in the job market by improving their “employability.” to do this, special tutoring programs have been developed to assist recycling older workers within their professional sphere. the government is promoting training for older workers and developing ways to validate their abilities and experience; 3. financial advantages provided for both employee and employer also means keeping more senior workers in the job market; 4. changes in attitudes are promoted through repeated awareness campaigns with the concerned parties. the actions taken by the federal government vis-à-vis the management of the end of career show the difficulties encountered in trying to reconcile macro-economic and demographic shifts within existing public policy. moreover, the belgian legislature is expected to take into account all these local conditions and to still implement the directives imposed by the eu. while changes in policy are undertaken to keep older workers in the job market, we see a transformation of the substance of the proposed measures themselves. here too, the belgian legislature follows the european recommendations, basing policy on the development of strategies to activate older workers and job seekers by promoting 162 nathalie burnay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 the assistance tailored as closely as possible to the individual’s needs. the key elements of the european strategy indicate that the activation procedures must be individualized; the content cannot be based on a general national policy, on the contrary, it must be established on a case by case basis and respond to the needs and capacity of each. rather than give relatively high unemployment benefits and invest to create employment, the objective is to upgrade the skills of the individual. instead of protecting rights and employment, the approach is to provide the individual with the needed capabilities to find their way in the job market (bonvin & burnay, 2000). there is therefore a two pronged approach: the worker is held responsible for their own actions and leaving the job market is individualized. the older worker is left in charge of their own ongoing development, must keep themselves “employable,” and negotiate with their employer the time and manner of their progressive retirement. in 2005 the federal government, after long negotiations with union, social and business organizations and against fierce opposition, brought in the “agreement for solidarity between generations” (pacte de solidarité entre les générations). this text confirms and reinforces the two pronged approach previously set in motion. in a chapter which is clearly concerned with “active aging,” the belgian government: increases training programs, especially for older workers; reforms government regulations concerning mass layoffs (more restrictions in the use of early retirement as part of the social measures, proactive engagement with workers through the creation of employment action groups); raises the retirement age; adds limitations to early retirement; establishes the return of older unemployed to work, in particular by developing outplacement. this tightening of controls, concerning the end of career and retirement, is not the result of any change in public opinion, which does not question the solidarity between generations, quite the opposite in fact. the unions, which have an important role in belgium, put all their power and weight behind stopping these federal government reforms, though in fact there was little public protest when the vote was taken. the working public seems to be slowly accepting the idea that it’s necessary to work longer if we wish to maintain the same level of social service provision. these changes are moving forward in a climate of social tension but in which public opinion seems resigned to the inevitable. analysis of the intentions to leave work and retire the change of public policy begun at the dawn of the 21st century radically changed the balance between the state, workers, and employers, who previously had all seen early retirement as advantageous. the legal changes were to support those in difficulty at the end of their career or those in situations of mass layoffs with important social impact. older workers in changing social policy patterns 163 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 in a recent belgian study of workers, 5 the average age at which people wanted to retire was about 58, with two modal points, the most desired age was 60 chosen by 35% of those questioned, followed by the age of 55 for 30%. the age of 65, the legal retirement age in belgium, was of interest to only 8% of those questioned.6 if we split the variable responses, (with either the cut off equal to or less than 59 or equal to and superior to 60) 48% of people want to retire at 60 or later and 52% before (n= 748, that is 92% of 816 workers). these results confirm earlier studies in france and belgium. we see that there are numerous studies that show the common aspiration to retire before the legal retirement age. the french study employment (emplois) of 1996 shows that the vast majority (71%) of retired people do not want to continue any professional activity (cited in guillemard, 2003). in a recent belgian study by a team at the vrije universiteit brussel (elchardus & cohen, 2003), the ideal age to end a working career was established at between 59 and 60. the preliminary results of the share europe wide study show that france is one of the countries where the desire for an early retirement is most frequently expressed 7 the intention to leave the job market early arises for several reasons. it is difficult to clearly delineate each element as there is a great deal of interaction among them. this kind of end of career is perceived as a positive change by the majority of workers and corresponds to their objectives, be they personal, family or social: related factors include the work situation of the partner, their involvement with their children or grand children, free time considerations for leisure activities (hardy & hazelrigg, 1999; schultz, morton, & weckerle, 1998; szinovacz & de viney, 2000). (blanchet & debrand, 2005). exiting the job market is thus explained by personal factors even though it is part of a larger social process. financial constraints and health factors seem to be equally good predictors (barnay & jeger, 2006; feldman, 1994; friedman & orbach, 1974; gratton & haug, 1983; mcgoldrick & cooper, 1980; parker, 1980; saurelcubizolles et al., 1999, walker, 1985). the greater the importance of the financial needs in the family, less often the decision to leave the job market definitively is taken: the salary loss engendered by the change cannot be sustained by the household. changes in health can also contribute to leaving work, especially if the work history involves a lot of heavy or difficult manual labour (lund & borg, 1999). health probelms are an important reason why people leave the workplace, either using the mechanisms in place for this, notably the invalidity benefits procedure, or through other available procedures. exiting the job market for health reasons represents 12% of men and 8% of women in the case of rheumatic diseases and 7% and 5% respectively in the case of cardiovascular disease (molinié, 2006). there is however an important link between these types of retirement and the difficulty of the employment situation (molinié, 2006). the family structure, more particularly the professional circumstance of the partner, is a determining factor in the decision making process (szinovacz & de viney, 2000; van solinge & henkens, 2005). the scientific literature illustrates that the reasons for quitting work do not rely solely on an individual’s desires, while certainly important, there are also individual, familial or social constraints at play. table 3, based on data from the capa study confirms this idea. 164 nathalie burnay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 table 3. main reasons expressed for early retirement (%) main reasons men women total health reasons professional reasons heavy manual labour stress or psychological pressure working hours total professional reasons personal reasons total 36.3 6 17.2 4.1 27.3 36.5 100 38.4 7.4 9.6 2.7 19.7 41.9 100 37.2 6.6 13.6 3.4 23.6 39.2 100 the two main reasons for early retirement are not directly related to the conditions of work, but rather failing health and personal reasons. in fact, almost 40% of the workers surveyed (42% of women, 36% of men) want to leave professional life early for reasons that are unrelated to the world of work itself. the general acceptance of the cultural model where work is not the principle element of personal identity thus finds its expression: other norms and widely shared values are more important to individuals. these lead to a preference to leave work early, which some call the “early retirement culture” (guillemard, 2003, p.47). but in addition to this aspiration to open new horizons, there also exists a second solid reason for this phenomenon, almost as important as the first: health considerations push nearly 37% of workers to consider early retirement. the subjective impression of one’s good health tends to diminish significantly after 45: while 90% of workers state that they are in good health before the age of 45, only 70% of those between 45 and 54 and nearly 75% of workers over 55 say the same thing. in a similar finding, less than 25% of those under 45 felt their health was poorer than five years previously while 40% of those over 45 felt this way. on the other hand, the actual work capacity seems not to be influenced by age: the capacity is estimated to be 90% of the optimum performance in all age categories. so, while the subjective appreciation of health may not be a significant factor in understanding a choice to retire early (see preceding discussion), declining health might justify a departure that is imposed by necessity. in this sense, it is a kind of non-choice. these statistics help us better understand what is at stake at the end of the working life. people see their health as diminishing with age–except for those over 55. this fact, which seems contradictory, can be explained by the selection of those surveyed: only those over 55 and still in work answered our questionnaire, the others, probably in poor health, were not part of our sample. on the other hand, the perception of reduced health does not seem to affect work abilities. this happens as though the state of health, even when diminished, remains adequate to get the job done. here we older workers in changing social policy patterns 165 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 see that early retirement affects only those workers with significant health problems, that is to say health that is no longer adequate to deal with the necessities of the job. only 23% of the reasons given for early retirement are directly professional, and of those more than half concern psychosocial pressures. the weight of these psychosocial pressures, especially for men, reminds us of the importance of stress as identified previously. but even though only 23% of workers directly mention the importance of work related factors in explaining their desire to leave, we are still forced to group these strictly professional reasons together with those related to the subject of health. clearly, if declining health is an identified reason, it is not possible to say that it is not, at least in part, due to the work environment and therefore indirectly connected to the world of work. it could be hypothesized that retirement for reasons of health is more socially acceptable than reasons that are more strictly professional. table 4 allows us to better understand the basis for early retirement. each of three separate and independently conceived models is examined using logical regression analysis: each reason invoked is a model. a high odds ratio indicates that the worker wanting to end their work career early has a tendency to cite this motive as the principle reason. different variables allow us to explain the motivations for early retirement, though some of these are not always significant in the overall motivation picture. these motivation variables have been reworked as four homogeneous blocks to better understand and describe them: socio-demographic variables, professional variables, health variables, and finally variables of sociability. there are only two significant socio-demographic variables, sex and the level of education, though other variables were tested: number of children, the presence of a partner, type of housing, location of housing, etc. while the sex of the person had no significance in model 1 (health reasons), it did have a contrasting impact in models 2 and 3. more women than men cited “personal reasons” as their motivation for ending their working career, while it was just the contrary for “professional reasons.” the level of studies did not seem to come into the picture in model 2 dealing with “professional reasons” while it was pertinent in models 1 and 3. workers with post secondary studies cited health reasons less to justify their end of career. as the level of education goes down it appears that personal reasons are also less determinant to justify the choice made. professional variables also intervene in the choice of early retirement. professional status is also an important factor. we see that labourers mention health reasons more than other groups, which is partially explained by a lower level of education. on the other hand, the more the status is that of a labourer, the less are the reasons for retirement likely to be professional. model 3 seems to be very little influenced by the status. as for the sector of activity, it seems to have an impact only on model 1: secondary sector workers plan to stop working early for health reasons more than those in the tertiary sector. financial satisfaction influences only model 2, as workers that benefit from good financial conditions will raise professional reasons more often to justify their departure than those who are dissatisfied with their financial situation. the subjective appreciation of health seems to be a significant variable in model 1. this is quite logical: people who have health problems plan to end their working career for health reasons! however, the stress variable is more interesting, while it is 166 nathalie burnay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 table 4. logical regression analysis of the reasons for retirement model variables model 1: health reasons model 2: professional reasons model 3: personal reasons socio-demographic variable sex men women n.s. 1 0.52 (***) 1 1.31 (**) educational level post secondary secondary primary 1 2.03 (**) 1.58 (***) n.s. 1 0.85 0.52 (*) professional variables professional status labourer employee lower management upper management 1 0.41 (***) 0.48 (***) 0.59 (**) 1 1.67 (*) 2.65 (***) 1.85 (**) 1 1.51 (**) 0.91 (n.s.) 1.21 (n.s.) economic sector secondary tertiary 1 0.64 (**) n.s. n.s. financial satisfaction (revenue) very low to average good to very good n.s. 1 1.4 (**) n.s. health variables subjective appreciation poor to alright good very good or excellent 1 0.61 (***) 0.71 (**) n.s. n.s. stress at work no stress little stress average to high stress n.s. 1 3.49 (***) 5.05 (***) 1 1.04 0.62 (*) sociability variables primary sociability (family) never or little contact from time to time often 1 0.34 (***) 0.41 (**) 1 3.60 (**) 1.84 (*) 1 1.72 2.21 (*) secondary sociability (friends) never or little contact from time to time often tertiary sociability (social or cultural activities) never rarely less than 2hr/week + less than 2hr/week n.s. 1 0.43 (***) 0.54 (**) 0.61 (*) n.s. 1 2.82 (***) 2.17 (**) 1.51 (*) 1 1.54 (*) 1.84 (**) 1 1.68 (*) 1.80 (**) 1.89 (**) * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01, n.s. non relevant not significant in model 1, it is very important in model 2: stress is in fact the best predictor of early retirement for professional reasons. older workers in changing social policy patterns 167 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 the last group of variables deals with sociability. these allow the indirect measure of the person’s social relations outside the work sphere, that is to say, their symbolic investment outside the work environment. it is seen that primary sociability deals with family relations and more precisely the frequency of contact with the immediate family. while primary sociability restrains early retirement for health reasons, it is just the opposite in the case of models 2 and 3. the higher the level of primary sociability, the higher is the level of risk of early retirement for professional or personal reasons. in the same way, the higher the level of secondary sociability, the greater the risk is of early departure for personal reasons. this correlation is seen again for tertiary sociability: the more a person is involved in social or cultural associations, the more likely they are to leave their employment early for professional or personal reasons. the foregoing analysis establishes three typical profiles. the first profile is workers who want to retire early for reasons of health. these are generally workers with low levels of education and who work as labourers. their health is not good and has declined in the last five years. they have little contact with their families and participate very little in social or cultural activities. they can be described as socially withdrawn and isolated; their work and health are a weight on them. these are essentially workers that are tired and worn out but not especially stressed. the second profile is of those workers that want to leave their professional life for reasons directly related to their professional life. here we are talking about hyperactive men, who have developed strong primary sociability and many cultural activities, highly qualified and often upper management. early retirement here is deeply rooted in the conditions of the work and more precisely the associated psychosocial pressures; the weight of stress is the principle reason. the third profile is more feminine, and well educated. these workers develop many social relations, as much within the family circle as with a large group of friends. they are likely to get involved in social or cultural associations. their symbolic investment is not centred only on their professional engagements. while little present in their lives, the stress they have is both professional and personal. the main consideration for these workers is to reconcile both personal and professional life, this equilibrium remains dynamic and can shift at any moment and lead to a retreat from the professional sphere. there is also a strong correlation between the high levels of sociability and working part-time which is probably chosen and not imposed. these three profiles illustrate how leaving the work place early is not simply a wish for new horizons but is also an answer to various forms of aggression against the person, wear and tear at work, stress and other maladies are also predictive of an early exit from the workplace. taken in this sense, the recent hardening by the belgian government of legislation is contrary to this experienced distress. in recent years, changes in working conditions and intensified pressure in the workplace weigh heavily on the lot of individuals (askenazy, cartron, & de conick, 2006; de nanteuil-miribel, & el akremi, 2005; gollac & volkoff, 2000). the following results (table 5) show that the outcome variables, life satisfaction, leisure activities and mental health, decreased significantly during the eight year span of the psbh study. in fact, older workers reported to have fewer organized activities were less satisfied with their life and had more mental health problems in 2002 as compared to 168 nathalie burnay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 1992 (data from panel study of belgian households, 1992-2002). these results could perhaps reflect a deterioration of working conditions over eight years. table 5. evolution of the outcome variables between 1992 and 2002, expressed as odds ratio with the 1992 situation as reference. outcome variables 1992 2002 association member leisure activities life satisfaction mental health reference reference reference reference 0.94 (n.s.) 0.72 (**) 0.61 (***) 0.79 (**) * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01, n.s. non relevant (the figures apply only to the group of subjects 50 or older with stable jobs). conclusion public policy developed since the 1980s in france as in belgium has fundamentally changed the view of retirement in society and by extension the associated models or norms, thus creating, alongside the then established systems, new approaches which are seen as just as legitimate. however, this is not sufficient in itself to explain the incredible surge towards early retirement. other factors are at work, in particular the utilization of other normative imperatives: self-realization, personal growth, and the need to do something “different” in life! this tidal shift in society helps us to better understand the phenomenon: the individual no longer expresses their individuality through only one facet of their life but composes elements and facets of their life into a whole through various levels of symbolic participation. these multiple facets allow the person to keep a certain perspective as regards their professional investment and other aspects of self realization. looked at in this way, the end of career is seen as a special time used to reassert or redefine one’s identity through other kinds of activity, either within the family circle or outside it, for example, through volunteer work. the older unemployed status established in the 80s in belgium contributed to the well-being of this specific category of unemployed people. but the question of retirement is complex and multidimensional: it engages the individual in their relationship to the world, thus, to the very centre of society’s underlying principles and mechanisms. this paper has also tried to show how early retirement is not simply a desire to escape, but can also be explained as an aggression against the person by the work world. leaving professional life early thus seems more to be a case of necessity, in fact not a choice at all, but an obligation, or even a sacrifice and must be seen in the perspective of professional duties and their evolution. so while the older worker could, up until now, benefit from certain accommodations at work (pailhé, 2005), recently intensified work and transformed management methods condemn them, together with their younger colleagues: age is no longer of any protection! older workers in changing social policy patterns 169 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 as for the choice of early retirement and in the reasons for this choice, the importance of health, and in particular of stress, is undeniable. this problem could well increase as we see the conditions that young workers are subjected to be worse and worse and can even put their health in danger. today’s youth are tomorrow’s retirees. the recent transformations of the social policies towards older workers fall within the framework of the neoliberal conception of social justice and especially the expansion of individualization. first of all, the risks of the precarious existence increase if the government modifies the conditions for early retirement to raise the level of employment. moreover, individualization is increasingly embedded in strategies for social policy reform, which both promote the illusion of choice and are designed the shape citizens into self-sufficient market actors who provide for their needs and those of their families (brown, 2005, as cited in brodie, 2007, p. 103). this definition obviously fits with the evolution of the older workers’ status in belgium. but the labour market seems definitively closed for the older workers: businesses do not seem to have any interest in keeping older workers nor have they established policies which deal with aging as part of their hr management. so, whether it comes through personal choices or necessity, the question and management of retirement cannot be done solely through a transformation of public policy, even a radical one. can’t the future of retirement be found in rolling out new policy initiatives that try to reconcile the financial constraints of an aging population with the aspirations of workers? don’t we need to be more creative in the modalities of progressive retirement that would perhaps allow us to properly take into account (dis)continuation of professional life, the individual’s aspirations, the transmission of knowledge, and societal constraints? the object of the exercise then becomes how to shift public policy based on early retirement to a progressive retirement policy and not a strategy of forcing people to stay in work. notes 1 for more information, see: www.psbh.ulg.ac.be 2 people come from the north (dutch language) and the south of belgium (french language). but there is no relevant difference between french and dutch people in terms of well-being in this sample. 3 in order to perform logistic regression analysis, the outcome variables were dichotomized. the variable “leisure activities” was dichotomized into never vs. the others. the variable “membership of an association” was dichotomized into membership of any association vs. no membership. the variable “life satisfaction” was dichotomized into unsatisfied subjects vs. the others. the variable “mental health” was dichotomized into with vs. without any mental health problems. 4 data available from http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/fr/ec/00100-r1.f0.htm 5 capa study, financed jointly by the european social fund and the belgian federal public service employment, labour and social dialogue. survey based on 812 responses obtained in 2005 spread over 12 different sectors of activity: chemical industry, tool and machine manufacture, automotive industry, construction, large retail, hospitality industry, insurance and finance, research and development, public service, education, health care, and social services. 170 nathalie burnay studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 6 there is no relevant difference between the north and the south of the country. the average age at which people want to retire is similar. 7 maybe this desire for early retirement will be changed by the important reform of the french retirement system in 2003. these statistics are too recent to analyse this transformation. 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(1985). early retirement: release or refuge from the labour market, the quarterly journal of social affairs, 1(3), 211-229. * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01, n.s. non relevant (the figures apply only to the group of subjects 50 or older with stable jobs). zellars final before ts correspondence address: rachel zellars, department of social justice & community studies, saint mary’s university, halifax, ns, b3h 3c3; email: rachel.zellars@smu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 dreams of a black commons on turtle island rachel zellars saint mary’s university, canada abstract this essay opens with a discussion of the black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between black land relationality and indigenous sovereignty. two sites of history – black slavery and black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to black and indigenous relations on turtle island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about black life. while the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, i highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as tiffany king has named, between black and indigenous peoples. at the end of the essay, i return briefly to anna tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, i conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of black freedom and indigenous sovereignty. keywords black commons; emancipation; settler colonialism; migration outside the house, between the forests and fields, bounty is not yet exhausted. anna tsing (2012, p. 152) what would life be that was not interested in leaving a trace of human habitation? fred moten (duke franklin humanities institute, 2016, 34:00) introduction in her essay “unruly edges,” critical anthropologist anna tsing (2012) draws her reader, with great enchantment, into a world that is foreign for most – that is, the world of wild, uncultivated mushrooms. wild mushrooms, with their species interdependency, call a forager back to places of detailed familiarity over and over and over again, she writes. to search for a coveted dreams of a black commons on turtle island studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 455 mushroom is to also return to a wonted tree or stump – “the oak that lives with chanterelle mycelium” (tsing, 2012, p. 142). to wander into a forest, to lag slowly across an open field in search of wild mushrooms, is to move the body in harmony with the earth and itself, at “the speed of bodily pleasure and contemplation” (tsing, 2012, p. 141). tsing’s (2012) words about the wandering and unruly lives of wild mushrooms are also an allegory about the stark human-made costs of agricultural cultivation and as she details, the irreparable connection between global colonialism’s logic of mastery and destruction of the land. to “settle agriculture” also, importantly, entailed the ownership of the enslaved (krauthamer, 2013, p. 3). her essay also proposes an opening for further contemplating black historic presence and land relationality on turtle island, as well as a possibility for dreaming and plotting, more fully, a black commons.1 to plot a black commons, as j. t. roane (2019) has recently written, is to create “possibilities for survival, connection, and insurgency through the strategic renegotiation of the landscapes of captivity and dominion” (p. 242). to plot, as roane also reminds, is steeped within a long tradition of black land relationality and black life on turtle island since the moment of its arrival. in his close study of enslaved peoples’ relationships with the land in the “lower chesapeake ecotone” between maryland and virginia, he describes a sacred kinship that is witnessed through the “unintelligible” funerary rites for their kin, as well as their defiant alimental relationships with the land (roane, 2019, p. 250). refusing a simplistic characterization that would either collapse black peoples “into the environment” or cast them “as unconcerned about the preservation of the biosphere,” he uses the term “fugitive commensality” to encapsulate black people’s care for the land as integral to acts both radical and communal – here, “the unsanctioned and often illicit procuring, preparation, and sharing of food” (roane, 2019, p. 251). as his work illuminates, the black commons is a spiritual land relationality that offers a possibility for black life on its own terms, one that hones a resourcefulness against all odds, and relies, specifically, on anti-capitalist logics and an interdependent relationality for its continuity. roane’s example is one of many, i argue, that captures black peoples’ “relation to and from the land but without precluding movement, multiplicity, multidirectionality, transversals, and other elementary or material currents of water and air” (byrd et al., 2018, p. 11). to paraphrase tiffany king’s (2019) urgent question: why has the black discourse of conquest – and sacred histories of black land relationality, such as those roane (2019) described – remained “unthought” within contemporary discussions about indigenous genocide, colonialism, slavery, 1 i invoke the term turtle island to honor the sacred creation name given to north america by many indigenous nations, but also to signal the real possibility, as leanne simpson (2017) has written, “to respect each other’s governance, sovereignty, and jurisdiction while committing to taking care of our shared ecosystem” (p. 231) in black and indigenous relations. rachel zellars studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 456 and settlement in north america?2 by “black discourse of conquest,” i mean to invoke the full spectrum of ways in which black peoples not only named, but also behaved, suffered, and expressed fugitivity under settler colonialism. i want to name king’s question as distinct from other recent attempts to address black and indigenous relationality. recently, byrd et al. (2018) asked: “how might we apprehend relationality across systems of capitalism, colonialism, and chattel slavery and its afterlives?” (p. 11). this important question, i believe, must follow king’s, as her question demands an interrogation of the “unthought” – or the well-rooted “bare life” of antiblackness in our relations. in short, i hold, to grapple with what is unthought, unimaginable about black life, is to also reckon with certain practices in our relations, both discursive and lived, as a “mode of thought, already in the act,” as well as the histories that precede and produce them (manning & massumi, 2014, p. vii). this essay attempts a response to king’s (2019) question, with hopes of provoking a softer relationality, a “new relationality” (p. 209) as she writes at the end of the black shoals, for black and indigenous peoples on turtle island. indeed, the last decade has seen continued discussions between community and academic scholars who have contemplated the relationship between sovereignty and abolition – each unique, visionary end-goals in the respective struggles for indigenous and black freedom.3 these discussions have been, at times, painful. this essay is most interested in the generative dimensions of what is hard and painful in these conversations between us. throughout, i am thinking with roderick ferguson’s 2018 asa address, where he communicated an urgent need for “seeing complexities, and to holding the possibilities for meeting life with life as a matter of being in difference and activating interrelatedness across the antagonisms history has left us,” as jodi byrd (2019a, p. 342) has described. there are three key concepts in this characterization that guide the intention and structure of this essay, and i receive them as theoretical guidance: foremost, a willingness to witness a rich complexity threaded through black life historically and presently; secondly, a generative compatibility within thought and work that holds a tension of difference; and thirdly, an “interrelatedness across the antagonisms history has left us” (byrd, 2019a, p. 342). this third point, i argue, entails facing down the oft-unnamed history of slavery, its long arc and impact, and its constitutive anti-blackness tangled within numerous native histories of black enslavement on turtle island (king, 2014). there is a lateral tension that guides this history, historian barbara krauthamer (2013) 2 see also byrd et al. (2018) and hartman and wilderson (2013). “on one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the position of the unthought” (hartman & wilderson, 2013, p. 184). 3 see also byrd (2011, 2019a, 2019b), byrd et al. (2018), ciccariello-maher (2016), coulthard and simpson (2016), day (2015), king (2014, 2016), leroy (2016), miles (2019), nelson (2016), sexton (2016), sharma and wright (2008), spady (2017), tuck and yang (2012), walcott (2014), wilderson (2003, 2010), and wolfe (2006). dreams of a black commons on turtle island studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 457 writes – one that together holds the “histories of chattel slavery and indian removal” (p. 41), as well as settler colonialism. this essay first offers an overview of recent scholarly conversations between black and indigenous peoples on the subject of freedom. it is important to offer a brief characterization of sovereignty and abolition herein for the purpose of avoiding the pitfall of conflating land sovereignty with the private ownership of land. dene scholar glen coulthard (2014) helps sharpen this distinction by naming indigenous struggles as those that must be informed by “land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations” (p. 78) rather than ownership – an ethical system he has named “grounded normativity.”4 byrd et al. (2018) also offer the expansive term “grounded relationality.” in a recent article, they frame the “african american and native responses to dispossession” as “reparations and sovereignty,” respectively (byrd et al., 2018, p. 10). i offer that a black politics of abolition – which strives both for an end to “the mutually-reinforcing relationships between surveillance, policing, the courts, and imprisonment” and imagines and builds ways of living “otherwise” – best captures the radical historical thrust of black peoples’ “response to dispossession” on turtle island (kaba & hassan, 2019, p. 13).5 simply, it is more accurate to situate the most persistent, generative arc of black struggle on turtle island within an abolitionist framework. this essay then opens up two sites of history, the first of which considers historical research on the native ownership of enslaved black peoples beginning in the late 1700s. “blackness,” as king (2014) reminds, “is much more than labor within both slavery’s and settler colonialism’s imaginaries” (p. 3). as such, krauthamer’s (2013) historical work is centered for her attempts to name the unnamable and for mapping out settler colonialism’s historical anti-black modalities. the second offers a way of thinking of black 4 his beautiful, generative characterization of sovereignty as a system of ethics deserves attention. in an interview, he said, “grounded normativity is a concept that privileges decolonial practice; it is a practical ethics informed by indigenous contexts and relationships. it attempts to capture the ethical engagements – with situations, communities, land, and relationships – that inform our understandings of right and wrong, how to go about resolving conflict, and how to best relate to the world and each other in a healthy and sustainable manner” (gardner & clancy, 2017, para. 17). 5 here, i am also thinking of sexton’s (2016) description of black liberation as that which supersedes a desire for recognition, such as reparations, as he writes that a politics of abolition “could never finally be a politics of resurgence, recovery, or recuperation” (p. 593). the notion of living “otherwise” is both foundational to a politics of prison abolition and also interwoven through the work of many black scholars, such as snorton (2017; “fugitive fungibility”) and hartman (2019; “a dream book for existing otherwise”). for more, see hartman’s (2019) close engagement with this concept. while arguments about the intention of black politics supersede the space allotted here, i am guided by the generosity in analysis afforded when one “considers the possibility that 1) the ‘black diasporic struggles’ under examination are irreducible to antiracism, 2) that anti-racism is irreducible to demands upon the state, and 3) that demands upon the state are irreducible to statist politics” (sexton, 2016, p. 590). rachel zellars studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 458 presence in canada specifically prior to the civil war through a historical logic that i refer to as “metamigration.” this history is evoked for the purpose of highlighting the conditions of displacement and racial segregation that continually ordered the movements of black peoples within colonial canada and through the nineteenth century. black metamigration makes plain the ways that antiblackness commands placelessness for black peoples on turtle island. as such, both areas of history, i insist, call for greater centering within ongoing conversations about black and indigenous relationality. the return to a painful history, as the sankofa aphorism expresses, is essential for clarity and advancement. the final section of this essay offers the black commons as a resting place, one that both acknowledges black peoples’ historical, spiritual relationships with land under settler colonialism on turtle island and also offers a way to meet “life with life as a matter of being in difference” (byrd, 2019a, p. 342). i conclude with a return to lessons drawn from tsing’s (2012) descriptions of foraging – those that offer a bridge in our current relations, and also align beautifully both with the practical ethics of grounded normativity and a black commons. debating black place on turtle island in 2006, anthropologist patrick wolfe offered a characterization of settler colonialism as “a structure and not an event” (p. 388), as a complex and continuous social process that has dispossession and elimination as primary goals, in his article “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” one year after its publication, hartman (2007) introduced the expression “afterlife of slavery” as a way of articulating a living history for black peoples “imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (p. 6). both expressions have influenced the disciplines of indigenous and native studies, as well as black and african-american studies over the last decade, in communicating the ways in which the histories of black slavery and settler colonialism have sustained living histories of dispossession for native and black peoples on turtle island. over the last two decades, a number of critical scholars have resisted flattening black peoples’ relationship within indigenous sovereignty – a misstep wilderson (2010) has termed a “ruse of analogy” (p. 37). king (2014) has argued, for example, that the “unusual” historical landscapes of black fugitivity and migration require a rethinking of “the usefulness of convenient and orthodox epistemic frames” (p. 4) that would situate historic black presence as aligned with settler colonialism. in a recent critique of eve tuck and k. wayne yang’s (2012) oft-cited article “decolonization is not a metaphor,” tapji garba and sara-maria sorentino (2020) insist that tuck and yang cheapen slavery to “the forced labor of stolen peoples on stolen dreams of a black commons on turtle island studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 459 land” (p. 4), and in turn, “fold slavery into settler colonialism in order to mediate the dis/similarity between the slave and native” (pp. 2-3). discussing the struggle for natural and legal rights after legal emancipation, hartman (1997) has characterized the “burdened individuality of freedom” (p. 121) and has asked whether or not it was ever truly “possible to unleash freedom from the history of property that secured it” (p. 119). as a precursor to the more recent work of philosopher charles w. mills and his examination of john rawls’ political philosophy, hartman’s (1997) work on the foundations of liberalism aptly described the notion of “burdened individuality”: what does black desire of equality mean, she asked, where the liberal individual, rights bearer, and raced subject exist as “equal, yet inferior, independent yet servile, freed yet bound by duty, reckless yet responsible, blithe yet brokenhearted?” (p. 141). additionally, hartman (1997) has detailed the ways that the late nineteenth century harnessed black life through new structures, legal and social, that set out to determine “where the boundary between public and private society should be drawn” (p. 167). de jure and de facto segregation, as well as disciplinary practices of white terror and violence, ensured ongoing spatial domination in the lives of black people throughout north america after emancipation. as historian stephanie smallwood (2019) reminds, “decoupling the stories of black life and those of national sovereign-ties across the hemispheric americas opens up room to ask questions that are inconceivable within the liberal humanism that organizes disciplinary history” (p. 414). in light of these works, a study of post-emancipation histories of social control in the lives of black peoples in canada and the us between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries sketches a demarcation between enslavement and emancipation that reorganizes as granular and seeping, rather than fixed. as such, why has there been such an ongoing failure to “examine the shifting and transformed relations of power that brought about the resubordination of the emancipated, the control and domination of the free black population, and the persistent production of blackness as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational, and infectious” in the nineteenth century, particularly within native studies (hartman, 1997, p. 116)? why does the conflation between formal emancipation and black people as “beneficiaries” of liberal democracy persist? what does black desire mean to sovereignty, when it was circumscribed within continuing forms of subjection after the legal end of slavery? and what kinds of care and nuance are needed to think through the ways that, together, “black communities do indeed benefit from the dispossession of indigenous lands,” alongside “the desperate quest for survival” that marks black historical relations with the settler state (miles, 2019, p. 422)? a number of scholars have also theorized the ways that black and indigenous freedom struggles require both historicity and context. for instance, sexton (2016) and king (2014) have both described the ways that antiblackness is “constitutive to settler colonialism” (king, 2014, p. 1) and rachel zellars studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 460 that a critique of settler colonialism in the americas must also critique blackness as an abject position and antipode – specifically, one that served as a pre-condition both for settler colonialism and its ubiquitous logic of white supremacy. the historicity of such claims, as well as the ontological position of blackness expressed in some radical black critique, has been contested (kauanui, 2017). regarding the notion that black enslaved peoples constituted laborers (albeit forced ones), king (2014) has written that the notion of “fungibility,” a condition particular to black enslavement, means that the enslaved were “the conceptual and discursive fodder through which the settler-master could even begin to imagine or ‘think’ spatial expansion” (p. 3) and are thus always “outside the edge and boundary of laborer-ashuman” (p. 2). in short, they argue, asserting the enslaved as laborer and thus, agential subject, obscures both the specificity of fungibility and antiblackness as constitutive to settler colonialism. since the introduction of these expressions by wolfe (2006) and hartman (1997), some scholars have continued to collapse black north american history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – specifically the histories of black enslavement and migration – within the discursive category of settlerhood.6 recently, historian ikuko asaka (2017) undertook an expansive transnational study about black displacement and colonization efforts in canada and the us between 1780 and 1865. alongside her thesis that biological determinism justified black “dislocation to tropical regions” and ensured economic and social marginalization “in the metropoles and on continental frontiers,” her study also explored “the intersections between black freedom and settler colonialism” (asaka, 2017, p. 17). concurring with a fraught 2005 article in her opening chapter, asaka wrote that “in thinking about freedom and settler colonialism, one should keep in mind that aspirations for landholding by the emancipated were ‘premised on earlier and continuing modes of colonization of indigenous peoples’” (2017, p. 18). in her conclusion, asaka returns to this point: “the codification of black rights to become settlers was a paradigm shifting development” (2017, pp. 197198), which made black peoples “the legal beneficiaries of the official apparatus of native land divestiture” (2017, pp. 197-198). i want to name the way that this abridged logic has made continuing discussions of black and indigenous relations, both within a scholarly and community context, uneasy, as well as an antiblack logic that flattens the historical position of black life on turtle island to inhabitants on lands “appropriated and contested” (lawrence & dua, 2005, p. 134). of course, scholars have since offered more elaborative terms – “arrivant” (byrd, 2011, 6as one starting point for this position, see lawrence and dua (2005), who state flatly that “people of color are settlers” (p. 134). this position was reiterated in 2006, during the “diasporic hegemonies: race, gender, sexuality, and the politics of feminist transnationalism” conference, held at the university of toronto from october 17 to 19. for additional context and critique, see dahmoon (2015), sharma and wright (2008), tuck and yang (2012), and walcott (2014). for a discussion of “settlers of color,” see trask (2000). dreams of a black commons on turtle island studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 461 p. xix) and “exogenous others” (veracini, 2010, p. 18) come to mind – that signify complexity in the context of the movement of racialized populations onto and through turtle island, historically and presently. historian tiya miles (2019) recently concluded that “the exoduster, ambiguous settler, arrivant, or exiled settler disturbs the fixed boundary line between native and settler, pushing us to trace and represent the past with exactitude and imagination” (p. 425).7 i am drawn to and honor the possibilities for richness and care that such terms offer. yet, the introduction of these terms has neither produced an abundance of conversations, nor works by native studies scholars “about how the relations of conquest structure black and indigenous relations” (king, 2019, p. 59), nor has the potential within these terms trickled down, widely, to the level of organizing.8 additionally, i have found that the vying “exceptional status” that scholars have warned against, continues to show up in a less rigid, but nonetheless exigent fashion in some scholarship.9 how, for example, might byrd et al.’s (2018) insistence that black slavery “must always already be a collision with indigenous presence” (p. 5) signal a kind of primacy that is distinct from the claim that “antiblackness is constitutive to settler colonialism” (king, 2014, p. 1) and distinct from krauthamer’s (2013) statement that “the histories of chattel slavery and indian removal overlap in complex and uncomfortable ways” (p. 41). in short, what kinds of possibilities for analysis and synthesis exist in the latter, but may be precluded in the former with its claims to temporal primacy? grappling with the “antagonisms” of history: slavery and black migration history is not about the past. it’s only incidentally about the past. history is about arguments we have about the past. because it is about arguments, we have about the past, it is really about us, our times, and our problems. (ira berlin, 2015, p. 1) by invoking these histories here now, i am thinking of the sankofa bird with its feet planted firmly forward and neck turned backwards – this a rich, 7 here, miles (2019) writes skillfully about the post-civil war black migrations in the us through the end of the twentieth century and their ongoing exposure to white violence, and issues a call for the creation of a “refreshed vocabulary” (p. 20) that both considers the historical intricacies of black and indigenous relations and creates “currency” for our present relations. 8 however, scholars such as nakia parker, barbara krauthamer, tiya miles, and shona jackson, amongst others, have rigorously engaged these questions in their work over the last decade. the point here is not to “vie for exceptional status as the foundational violence of modernity,” as justin leroy (2016) has written, but rather highlight those committed to examining the lingering antagonisms of history in our relations. 9 as a pointed example of this dynamic, see kauanui (2017) for the danger in using a singular, historical snapshot to conclude that blackness cannot constitute an ontological position, and to undermine wilderson’s (2010) claim that “blackness is incapacity in its pure and unadulterated form” (p. 38). rachel zellars studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 462 longstanding metaphor syncretized within the liberation philosophies of many black peoples whose ancestors were enslaved on turtle island.10 the sankofa bird icon – resting but ever-ready for flight – is both aphorism and a proverb of ethics communicated through an adinkra symbol and in twi, the language spoken by the akan of ghana, that means to “go back and get it.” in short, the aphorism expresses the need for peoples whose ancestors were colonized or enslaved to return to a history that has profound implications for the living history of our present moment. the return, as the turned neck symbolizes, is for the purposes of inquiry, clarity, and finally, guidance for moving forward. cultural theorist christel n. temple (2010) also describes sanfoka as a practice of cultural resilience and resistance to white supremacy. sankofa, she writes, is an act of “resistance with respect to rejecting european language and world views and insisting on the relevance of using african conceptual possibilities to define and characterize” black life in the present (temple, 2010, p. 128). this conceptualization of sankofa feels akin, in important ways, to leanne simpson’s (2017) description of biiskabiyang, a practice rooted in her community’s nishnaabeg belief system. “biiskabiyang,” she explains, is “the process of returning to ourselves, a reengagement with the things we have left behind, a reemergence, an unfolding from the inside out” (simpson, 2017, p. 17). recently, the sankofa symbol was highlighted throughout the final report from the nova scotia home for colored children restorative inquiry (2019), which examined a historical site of patterned abuse, torture, and extreme neglect for many, many of the children who lived in the home between 1920 and 1990. in the report, the sankofa proverb was invoked as part of its intention to return to the site of trauma, to document the stories of survivors and former home administrators, and to understand what failures occurred over decades that led to the magnitude of violence that befell black children within an institution, at times, led by well-known community members. in the proverb, the return to the site of harm is essential. as the report states, “while sankofa reminds us to go back, it is clearly for the purpose of finding what we need in order to move forward” (nova scotia home for colored children restorative inquiry, 2019, p. 26).11 but why slavery, when other sites of history hold the “antagonisms history has left us” (byrd, 2019a, p. 342) and also, as miles (2019) recently wrote, require “a refreshed vocabulary for characterizing these nuances conversant with a current settler colonialism frame?” (p. 420). in part, my response is a personal one – one born out of years of community work in which antiblackness has uneasily, disorientingly appeared or resonated within black and indigenous relations. these experiences, as well as my own scholarly areas of study, ultimately led me to history and the body of historical writings about the native ownership of the black enslaved. within this canon, i observed the 10 see, for example, gerima (1993), grayson (2000), and temple (2010). 11 while i have a number of criticisms about the undertaking and the final 600-page report, i am highlighting here the importance of returning to the site of harm as a crucial gesture for altering relations within our living histories. dreams of a black commons on turtle island studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 463 presence of black women scholars and noted, in particular, the tremendous complexity and care they balanced with their methodologies and in their writings. the history of black slavery on turtle island is a history of black subjugation and ongoing spatial displacement born, first, of natal alienation and ongoing displacement. slavery with its long, entrenched historical arc, is the site where blackness as debasement – as “the zone of nonbeing” (hartman, 1997, p. 178) – was conscripted. the history of slavery on turtle island is also a history that includes the ownership of black enslaved by native owners, and the work of historians who study this area of history communicate the ways that native slaveholders “crafted and refined their own ideologies of racial identification and differentiation” beginning in the early eighteenth century that viewed black peoples as inherently inferior and uniquely conditioned for enslavement (krauthamer, 2013, p. 17).12 similar to slave ownership broadly, native slaveholders also “sought to maintain a social and economic order premised on the commodification and degradation of black people’s bodies and labor” (krauthamer, 2013, p. 5). this logic of black subjugation was not exclusive to native owners. in her study of the choctaw’s and chickasaw’s engagement in black slavery, krauthamer (2013) writes that by the end of the eighteenth century, choctaw and chickasaw slaveholders, as well as those who did not own slaves, came to embrace those elements of euroamerican racial ideologies that identified people of african descent as an inherently and permanently inferior group. (p. 4) additionally, the years preceding the civil war did little to alter the perception of black peoples, enslaved and free, who lived within or outside of nations: by the 1840s, proslavery ideology hardened in the indian nations, creating a climate of animosity towards all black people especially those who were free. indian law and custom unequivocally linked blackness with servitude and defined citizenship in terms of race, effectively making free black people social and civic anomalies. (krauthamer, 2013, p. 71) crucially, the internalized white supremacy that regarded black peoples as loathsome and enslaveable is historically discernable from a white supremacy that viewed native peoples as disposable and inferior to whiteness. krauthamer (2013) explains, “while southern indians may have dispensed with the aspects of the dominant american racial ideology that exalted white superiority and posited indian inferiority, they firmly embraced a racial 12 see, as examples, bentley (1991), berry and parker (2018), halliburton (1977), miles and krauthamer (2005), saunt (1998, 2004, 2006), and saunt et al. (2006), as well as a podcast episode where nakia parker speaks of this (winfree, 2018). for slave ownership by joseph brant in canada, see archives of ontario (n.d.). rachel zellars studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 464 hierarchy that degraded blackness and associated it exclusively with enslavement” (p. 32). as comanche scholar and curator paul chaat smith summarizes, the five civilized tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the confederacy in the civil war.… they were willful and determined oppressors of blacks they owned, enthusiastic participants in a global economy driven by cotton, and believers in the idea that they were equal to whites and superior to blacks. (smith, 2018, paras. 6–12) the history of native ownership of the black enslaved is, of course, limited to specific nations. yet, to assert that antiblackness was concretized within the conditions and longevity of the practice of slavery, also tells a complicated story about the nations who owned black enslaved peoples; about those who remained, laterally, in kinship with their communities over the centuries; and about the logic of antiblackness produced and sustained – uniquely and nonetheless – under the conditions of settler colonialism. in short, we need to ask questions about the texture of antiblackness in native communities historically and insist that our ongoing discussions are not condensed within the faulty liberal notion of legal emancipation. my point here is not to finger-point to a particular nation or group of nations, nor conflate the practice of slavery to all nations on turtle island. rather, i believe that the common practice of black slavery within nations and a widely embraced “racial hierarchy that degraded blackness” calls us to attend to the stark erasure of “the history of black people’s enslavement, emancipation, and struggles for meaningful freedom and citizenship in the indian nations,” as well as the afterlife of antiblackness, broadly, within nations on turtle island (krauthamer, 2013, p. 154).13 this inquiry is not one that can be answered by black scholars or organizers alone. what does it mean to address the substance of this history, as well as its self-internalizing logic of white supremacy? what agency do we attribute to historical actors who have been long cast within the static shadows of historical production, rather than within an agential light of its making and design? thinking with alexander weheliye’s (2014) inquiries about the bounds and breaks of historical agency, i ask how we may better attend to and conceptualize the “warring intimacies” (p. 11) or corrupted agencies that existed between lateral relations, between those “not-quite humans and nonhumans” (p. 11) who co-existed under settler colonialism? what actions are ours to bear when the conditions that prepared the ground for harm and violence were beyond an individual or collective capacity for radical change? and, what happens when the conditions change, but the convictions linger? 13 see, importantly, johnson’s (2019) recent article on the ways in which antiblackness was made curricula in residential schools. dreams of a black commons on turtle island studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 465 how do we parse out the “thought in the act” that shackles us in ways that are remnant of the old times? of course, full responses to these questions are beyond the scope of this paper. rather, i insist that we must begin, that cracking open this history with the intention of sankofa represents a beginning, and that the work is both necessary and generative. to begin addressing these lingering “antagonisms history has left us,” i insist, is consistent with an intention for an interrelatedness that meets life with a new kind of life, and in the spirit of sankofa, offers the most capacious possibility for a “new relationality that can imagine new kinds of black and indigenous futures” (king, 2019, p. 209). this history of black migration in canada prior to the twentieth century also raises historical questions, “lingering antagonisms,” in our relations because it expands and deepens a conceptualization of black spatiality on turtle island. in canada, the story of black dispossession also entails a history of “metamigration.” i define metamigration as a commingling of migration, internal and external displacements, and emigration into the atlantic world characteristic of black presence throughout the nineteenth century. 14 to study the history of slavery alongside the narratives of emancipation that shaped black life prior to 1865, is to witness a history of black metamigration. 15 within this history, discussions of the border’s meaning also abound (zellars, 2019). in the context of this essay, the troublesomeness of black presence in canada, historically, deserves brief attention. of course, many more essays and monographs have been written on the subject of black presence in canada beginning in the eighteenth century, but for the purposes of this essay, i center two historical loci oft excised from discussions pertaining to blackness and sovereignty on turtle island: the stark experience upon arrival, and secondly, the forces that compelled black people into the atlantic world and home southward after arrival to colonial canada. the constraints imposed upon black life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are visible whether black migration northward occurred as fugitivity, or in another fashion during the american revolution or the war of 1812; they are visible throughout all the territories.16 in his discussion 14 for a detailed analysis, see zellars (2019, p. 81). similarly, in the u.s. context, field (2015) describes the “continuum of flight” (p. 696) that characterized the lives of black peoples after the civil war. see also asaka (2017). 15 for a detailed historical exploration of black metamigration within canada, as well as its bibliography, see zellars (2019). while there are many more excellent sources, in this essay i am especially thinking alongside the following foundational writings that detail the complex histories of black migration and settlement during the time period herein: arenson (2013), berlin (2010), brown-kubisch (2010), cooper (2000), donovan (2014), freyer and campbell (2011), mclaren (2004), pybus (2006), riddell (1919), silverman (1985), smardz frost (2007), smardz frost and tucker (2016), spray (1972), whitfield (2002, 2006, 2016, 2017), wigmore (2011), wilkerson (2010), and winks (2000). 16 for discussions of canadian slavery in each territory historically, see nelson (2016), whitfield (2016), and winks (2000). the latter applies the term “canadian slavery” to describe “the region rachel zellars studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 466 of the revolutionary war and the war of 1812, historian harvey a. whitfield (2006) writes that “the british offered physical freedom to american slaves willing to abandon their patriot owners” (p. 31). yet, black freedom was a carrot, and promises of emancipation outside of the united states were, decidedly, “tactics [employed by the british] to defeat the united states” (whitfield, 2006, p. 31) in its imperial wars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as part of a “settler colonial impulse” that “drove and shaped racial geographies of freedom” (asaka, 2017, p. 16). whitfield’s (2006) work is crucial for understanding the profound hopes “for stable families, independent farming, and freedom of movement” (p. 37) that black migrants held, as against what was experienced upon arrival after the american revolution and war of 1812. black migration to the maritimes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not the project of fugitivity, settlement, and freedom as is popularly understood. rather, its terminus underscores “those forms of captivity which sometimes promised kinship, only to be transformed” (walcott, 2014, p. 96) into chattel slavery and other technologies of captivity. as asaka (2017) has recently argued, the periods coinciding with the largest black migrations to canada failed to constitute even a “freedom of residence” (p. 2) for the formerly enslaved. in addition, black migration to canada also signifies the “diaspora within diaspora” (pybus, 2006, p. xvii) that the continual movement, flight, and geographic dispersal of black peoples borne of slavery, racial violence, and ongoing discrimination made. as one well-known example illustrates, white resistance to black presence in colonial nova scotia pushed at least 1200 to emigrate to sierra leone in 1792 and again, in 1800 in search of an emancipation more than the racial hatred and forced poverty they encountered in nova scotia (pybus, 2006; smardz frost, 2007; whitfield, 2006). white violence against black migrants was so severe that in 1821, 95 blacks from the united states who arrived in nova scotia after the war of 1812 decided to depart for trinidad, despite the practice of slavery on the island at the time (whitfield, 2002). in addition to the decisions that black peoples made to continually depart the maritimes in the early nineteenth century, the stream of fugitivity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that nelson (2016) and whitfield (2016) detail in their extensive examinations of runaway ads in new france and the maritimes, respectively, also attests to the sustained violence in the lives of black peoples within canada. writing about the forced migrations and flight that classified black fugitivity and movement in the nineteenth century, miles (2019) captures the reality of black life in the us succinctly. “african americans had but two choices as the young united states solidified its hold over the central portion of north america,” she contends, “make homes on indigenous lands or die” (miles, 2019, p. 422). that encompasses present day newfoundland, prince edward island, nova scotia, new brunswick, ontario, and quebec” (whitfield, 2016, p. 132). dreams of a black commons on turtle island studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 467 what are the freedom costs for black peoples migrating or forcibly brought to canada who lived with the condition of forced displacement and when untenable, were segregated? if the study of black peoples in canada may be best articulated through the notion of “displaceness,” as walcott (2014) has suggested, how can formulations of metamigration be better understood as they relate to black presence in canada and issues of indigenous sovereignty? conclusion: more than and otherwise i became very conscious about how comfortable you could be roaming around outdoors in a certain kind of environment.… [my life] became more spacious. i had a lot of freedom at that time. i spent a lot of time outdoors alone. those are my best memories. (joy james in yancy, 1998, p. 246) witnessing the complexity of metamigration – the ceaseless movement, displacement, and transit of black life through and beyond turtle island wrought by slavery – and black peoples’ coterminous relationship with the earth, together offers a refusal of “convenient and orthodox epistemic frames” in an ongoing study of black people and settler colonialism (king, 2014, p. 4). alongside the visionary possibilities for black life/living recently offered by thinkers such as saidiya hartman, fred moten, adrienne maree brown, and others, tsing’s (2012) spiritual science of the wild mushroom and her allegory for the human condition also illuminates, i now conclude, emancipatory dreams of black life beyond the break – life as a “beautiful experiment,” a more tender relationality, a land-based “more than human” existence, a black commons. the inability to couple both things together – black peoples’ forced movement and black land care – i contend, is an antiblack logic produced by slavery and nested within our relations. it is one that refuses complexity and expresses a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about black life. the “bare life” of antiblackness, i hold, is a logic that fundamentally expresses an impossibility, an unimaginable complexity, and an utter disinterest in black subjectivity – an underpinned presumption of the worst.17 throughout her essay “unruly edges,” tsing (2012) describes living as an ethical engagement with the earth. as a student of wild mushrooms and avid forager, she writes that the rewards are twofold: “first, the undeserved bounty of the gift; and second, the offer of a place that will guide my future walks” (tsing, 2012, p. 142). her words allude to the bridge existent between a black commons and an ethics of grounded normativity that, in shared 17 with my term “the bare life of antiblackness,” i am thinking with weheliye’s (2014) radical question: “why are formations of the oppressed deemed liberatory only if they resist hegemony and/or exhibit the full agency of the oppressed?” (pp. 11-12). rachel zellars studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 468 fashion, capture “the ethical engagements–with situations, communities, land, and relationships–that inform our understandings of right and wrong, how to go about resolving conflict, and how to best relate to the world and each other in a healthy and sustainable manner” (coulthard, in gardner & clancy, 2017, para. 17). her study of the lives of wild mushrooms, i conclude, is also a meditation on a black politics of abolition, which is to say, a meditation on black land relationality historically and a prompt for an ongoing set of practices that guide black land relationality. transformative justice (tj), the bedrock of abolition, is a set of living practices that guide human relations, radiating outwardly from practices beginning at the smallest scale, in order to respond to harm and violence non-punitively. tj is a non-scripted and ever emergent set of practices that organize in ways designed to confuse the conditions and state structures that impede black autonomy – the progeny of black plunder, as well as the systems of policing, child welfare, criminal justice.18 tj, i offer, is one of the “endless number of beautiful models in living otherwise that encounter defeat and then, must reemerge again” (duke franklin humanities institute , 2016, 37:00). transformative justice practices are also tandem practices of persistence and discomfort: as long-time organizer adrienne maree brown (2019) once described, they are akin to a process of untangling tightly drawn knots of nerves. to attend to the lives of wild mushrooms is to also engage in practice, to study places of familiarity and return to them again and again (tsing, 2012). foraging practices express both an intimacy and reciprocity with the earth. “grounded normativity,” coulthard and simpson (2016) have written, “houses and reproduces the practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place” – by “the oak that lives with chanterelle mycelium” (p. 142). in addition to the personal rewards that tsing (2012) describes in her own practice as a forager, the lives of wild mushrooms and their refusal for grand scale encourage us to eat smaller, live smaller, and attend to familiar places time and again in their search. such actions are movements that express commitment and sweetness. as “every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act,” to forage and engage in the work of tj is to be changed by the practice and to be guided by modes of thoughts sharply attuned to the otherwise (manning & massumi, 2014, p. vii). the otherwise is synonymous with a wayward life. to live waywardly, hartman (2019) writes, “is the practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies” (p. 228). crucially, the lives and foraging of wild mushrooms signal the irreconcilable failures of capitalism across all lines of sociality. human desires for scale, largess, and ownership are incompatible with the cellular plans of the wild mushroom, as well as the well-being of the earth. tsing 18 for more on transformative justice in canada, see the work of the third eye collective (n.d.). dreams of a black commons on turtle island studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 469 (2012), for example, reminds her reader that monocultivation is both a laborious and extractive technology, as well as the practice that birthed the plantation. “only through extreme order and control,” she writes, “could anything flourish in this way; but with hierarchy and managed antagonism in place, enormous profits (and complementary poverties) could be produced” (tsing, 2012, p. 148). in contrast, to forage and study the small-scale order of the wild mushroom is to move ever-counter to the technologies that fostered black dehumanization, native ownership of black peoples, and the genocide of native peoples in the new world (krauthamer, 2013). it also exposes an opportunity to fashion something anew, to embody a different way of being on and with the land. tj – as a practice that hones itself within the interpersonal, the parental, and the local – refuses a model of size or scale for its effectiveness and viability. as i have come to understand, an ethics of grounded normativity also conceptualizes sovereignty in anticapitalist terms. “grounded normativity,” as coulthard and simpson (2016) have explained, teaches one how to live a life in relation “to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitive manner” (p. 254). for tsing, as well, the failures of domestication are shared between the field and the home, both historically racialized spaces.19 finally, as humans, we harm one another. and still, we are reliant on one another for our well-being. to study the lives of wild mushrooms, is to understand that its interspecies associations with other living things are “not always benign” (tsing, 2012, p. 143). specifically, “fungal appetites are always ambivalent in their benevolence,” and simultaneously, are always parallel “companions to other species” (tsing, 2012, p. 143). in short, the wild mushrooms that guide tsing are as relational and hardy as they are harmful. it is this very complex quality of species interdependence that “is a well-known fact – except when it comes to humans” (tsing, 2012, p. 143) and our relation to one another. acknowledgements the author graciously thanks robyn maynard and darryl leroux for their close readings and rigorous feedback of earlier drafts, as well as the 19 in the nineteenth century, as many have written, white women became models and “agents of racial hygiene” (tsing, 2012, p. 149) in north america, those not only responsible for “maintaining the boundaries – of homes, families, species, and the white race” (tsing, 2012, p. 149) but also paternalistic agents and landlords who infringed upon the lives and homes of black women. in her descriptions of the encompassing racialized state surveillance in the lives of black women beginning in the later part of the nineteenth century, hartman (2019) describes: “women were arrested on the threshold of their homes and inside their apartments, while exiting taxicabs, flirting at dance halls, waiting for their husbands, walking home from the cabaret with friends, enjoying an intimate act with a lover, being in the wrong place at the wrong time” (p. 254). for context of this history in canada, see valverde (2008). rachel zellars studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 454-473, 2020 470 reviewers for their thoughtful comments and efforts towards expanding and revising this paper. references archives of ontario. 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(2019). “too tedious to mention”: pondering the border, black atlantic, and public schooling in colonial canada. left history, 23(1), 62-93. https://doi.org/10.25071/19139632.39486 studies in social justice volume 3, issue 1, 117-131, 2009 correspondence address: timothy donais, department of global studies, wilfrid laurier university, 75 university ave. w., waterloo, on, n2l 3c5, canada. tel.: + 1 519 884-0710, email: tdonais@wlu.ca issn: 1911-4788 inclusion or exclusion? local ownership and security sector reform timothy donais1 department of global studies, wilfrid laurier university abstract this paper explores the dynamics of security sector reform (ssr), a term used to refer to efforts made to reform the security structures of states emerging from conflict or authoritarianism. while “local ownership” is increasingly viewed as a necessary element of any sustainable ssr strategy, there remains a significant gap between international policy and practice in this area. in practice, the ssr agenda continues to be driven largely by international actors, with minimal input, let alone ownership, on the part of either governments or civil society within reforming states. indeed, the notion of local ownership has come to serve as much as a disciplining mechanism as a tool to overcome exclusion in the making and execution of security policy, and the effectiveness and sustainability of ssr programming have suffered as a result. in light of this, the paper will explore both the potential for, and the limits of, rehabilitating the notion of local ownership to enable more participatory forms of ssr, and argues that any practical local ownership strategy requires a dual policy of negotiating with state actors and engaging with non-state actors. since the end of the cold war, both the study and the practice of security have been in a state of turmoil. academics and practitioners alike have struggled to come to terms with the reality of “new” security threats and with the ongoing referent object issue—neatly captured by recent debates about human security—concerning who or what is to be secured through the practices of security. no less controversial (if somewhat less prominent in academic or policy debates) is the question of the relationship between the providers and the consumers of security. security has long been characterized by a clear (and typically gendered) divide between protector and protected, with the former enjoying a near monopoly of agency over how, and to whom, security is provided. both in discourse and in practice, therefore, security has been not only about including and excluding particular populations, but has also been about who enjoys, and who is denied, the ability to “speak” and to “do” security. as lene hansen (2000) has argued in her critique of the copenhagen school’s notion of security as “speech act”, “those who . . . are constrained in their ability to speak security are therefore prevented from becoming subjects worthy of consideration and protection” (p. 285). 118 timothy donais studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 in recent years, a growing body of scholarship from both the human security and critical security schools has begun to challenge the conventional subject-object distinctions of security studies, along with the long-standing cult of expertise surrounding security policy and practice. security sector reform is one of the areas in which this broader debate over agency has been playing out, particularly in the context of calls for greater local ownership over both the processes of reform and the ongoing provision of security. a relatively recent addition to the security lexicon, security sector reform (or ssr) refers to efforts to re-structure the security apparatus—including armies, police forces, judiciaries, and associated oversight mechanisms—of states emerging from war, authoritarianism, or both. local ownership, as a concept, refers to the extent to which local actors (however defined) exercise control or influence over the initiation, design and implementation of reform processes. taken together, then, examining security sector reform through the lens of local ownership entails asking questions about inclusion and exclusion in one prominent area of contemporary security practice. drawing on recent policy debates, this paper explores this broader ownership question in ssr. it suggests that there are two important conceptual divides across which local ownership questions play out: the first is between the international and the domestic, and the second is between state and non-state. on both fronts, the discourse and the practice of ssr has been exclusionary for those on the receiving end of reforms. at the same time, while the principle of local ownership has been advanced as a means of addressing and overcoming this exclusion, the ownership question has been framed in ways that largely perpetuate ssr’s exclusionary nature. in light of this, the paper will explore both the potential for, and the limits of, rehabilitating the notion of local ownership to enable more participatory forms of ssr. local ownership and the emerging ssr paradigm security sector reform, in the words of sean mcfate (2008), “is the complex task of reforming the ‘security sector’—those organizations and institutions that safeguard the state and its citizens from security threats—into professional, effective, legitimate, apolitical and accountable actors” (p. 1). as a concept, ssr gained prominence at the end of the cold war, initially in response to the challenge of making the security structures of post-communist eastern europe more effective, accountable, and affordable as part of the broader transition to liberal democracy. since then, security sector reform has come to be seen as an essential component of any successful democratic transition. this is especially true in the case of countries emerging from conflict; from haiti to bosnia and from afghanistan to east timor, the task of rebuilding (or constructing de novo) effective and accountable security institutions now occupies a prominent place in contemporary post-conflict transitions, and is increasingly accepted as a basic precondition for sustainable peacebuilding. apart from a few prominent exceptions (south africa being the most notable), ssr has been predominantly a donor-driven enterprise. donors have provided the bulk of the funding and the impetus for ssr processes, and in recent years the inclusion or exclusion? 119 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 development assistance committee of the organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd dac) has emerged as a driving force in the articulation of both principle and practice on ssr issues.2 regardless of the merits of this overarching policy prescription—and there is little doubt that the effective implementation of the ssr vision described above would significantly enhance the human security of millions currently living under repression or in the shadow of armed conflict—ssr is also a fundamentally normative enterprise. it aims, in short, to transform societies not only through institutional engineering but also by altering basic understandings of local actors concerning the state-society relationship. given donor control over both funding and agenda-setting, a strong streak of donor paternalism runs through much ssr programming, and ssr often appears as an exercise in externally-driven social engineering, in which outsiders “teach” local counterparts how to construct and manage a western-style security sector. local actors, in this reading, are not so much agents of transformation themselves as objects to be transformed. unsurprisingly, therefore, the emerging ssr agenda has tended to reflect donor understandings and priorities, and it is no stretch to suggest that from a donor perspective, the entire ssr enterprise has been about making “their” security institutions look more like “our” security institutions. regardless of the peculiarities of the reform context, the idealized model of ssr advanced by the donor community involves the creation/consolidation of a professional, democratically-accountable security sector guided by a “peoplecentred,” public-service approach to security provision, underpinned by liberal principles of human rights and good governance (oecd, 2007, pp. 21–22). from the perspective of both the “beneficiaries” of ssr programming and of contemporary development thinking, this view of ssr as a modern-day mission civilisatrice is far from unproblematic. on the one hand are ethical concerns about ssr imperialism, about the privileging of external knowledge and agendas over local ones, and about whether the actions of international actors are always (or ever) benignly altruistic (woodward, 2003). on the other hand, there are also practical concerns about the sustainability of externally-driven reform processes, however well-intentioned. as joseph stiglitz (1998) has noted, visions of development in which all the answers and all the agency are seen to lie in the hands of outsiders are not only inherently problematic but ultimately self-defeating: “policies that are imposed from outside may be grudgingly accepted on a superficial basis, but will rarely be implemented as intended.” in this sense, the outcomes of ssr are largely inseparable from the processes of ssr. in response to the perceived flaws of outside-in models of ssr, there has been of late a growing and widespread recognition that local ownership is in fact a key component of successful ssr. the oecd dac, for example, has cited local ownership as one of three overarching objectives of donor engagement in ssr (2007, p. 10). yet despite the emergence of local ownership as part of the contemporary commonsense of security sector reform, from definitional and operational perspectives the concept remains both elastic and elusive. considerable ambiguity persists, in particular, around the precise identity of the locals to whom the concept refers, as well as around the specific meanings of ownership. state-centric traditions of national security have meant that the conventional response to the question of “which locals” has tended to focus on national governments of reforming states, which are assumed to possess not only the 120 timothy donais studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 authority but also the legitimacy to engage in ssr. however, as alex martin and peter wilson (2008) have suggested, the absence of properly representative government in many of the countries currently undertaking ssr raises obvious questions about whether political elites are, or should be, the only relevant local owners in ssr processes (p. 84). similarly, annika hansen (2008) has noted that because ssr involves redistributing the way power is exercised in a particular society, “those that are the most dominant players are also the ones least likely to be cooperative in a reform effort because they have the most to lose” (p. 44). in other words, while local political elites may be the most obvious local owners, they can also be the most problematic. growing recognition of such problems has led some observers to distinguish between regime ownership and national ownership (goodhand & sedra, 2007, p. 54). while regime ownership refers to a commitment on the part of the formal institutions of government to reform, national ownership by contrast refers to a much broader, societal-wide embrace of, and engagement with, ssr. civil society is typically viewed as a kind of collective national owner, and a potentially progressive counterbalance to those holding the formal reins of power (pouligny, 2005). yet while the notion of national ownership is in principle inclusionary, participatory, and democratic, it is no less fraught than that of regime ownership, albeit for different reasons. in particular, more maximalist conceptions of ownership tend to underestimate the extent of social fragmentation within societies undertaking ssr, while overestimating levels of non-state expertise in and engagement with security issues (bendix & stanley, 2008). in addition, then, to the very practical question of how to engage society writ large in a wide-ranging debate on the future of the security sector, there is the broader challenge of achieving a minimal level of societal consensus on the shape of the security sector to be constructed. in the field of ssr, the most precise formulation of what ownership could, and should, mean has been offered by laurie nathan (2007). informed by south africa’s post-apartheid experience of security sector reform, widely viewed as both successful and as the product of a genuinely-inclusive and broad-based national process, nathan has suggested that “the principle of local ownership means that the reform of security policies, institutions and activities in a given country must be designed, managed and implemented by domestic actors rather than external actors” (p. 4). echoing stiglitz, nathan argued that in the absence of substantive local ownership, ssr is bound to fail. in contrast to the donor-driven model of ssr described above, then, nathan’s vision of locally-owned ssr puts local actors squarely in the driver’s seat, with external actors relegated to a supporting and facilitating role. while the donor community might accept this vision in principle— indeed oecd dac documents draw directly on the nathan framework—in practice there remains an ongoing and widespread unease with the notion that ssr should be fully “owned and operated” by local actors. in many ssr contexts, this unease is justified, and advocates of a strong form of local ownership—one in which the local actors truly design, manage, and implement reforms—must confront some uncomfortable realities. the most obvious challenge is that in many states, there is little reason to believe that greater local ownership of ssr will actually lead to improved security, which is ostensibly the ultimate goal of ssr programming in the first place. indeed, local actors may pursue ssr not out of inclusion or exclusion? 121 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 a commitment to improved security governance, but rather as a means of enhancing their capacity to suppress dissent or to undermine political opponents. as i have noted elsewhere, “it is one thing to cede authority and control (over ssr decisionmaking) to committed, democratically elected, western-oriented reformers, and quite another to do the same vis-à-vis former warlords with dubious democratic legitimacy and troubling human rights records” (donais, 2008, p. 277). in many contexts, international security assistance remains deeply controversial precisely because of the concern that outsiders will not have sufficient control over the uses, and potential abuses, to which such assistance is applied. even without ascribing nefarious intent to domestic elites, it is also the case that in many contexts, local actors lack the cohesion, capacity or commitment to engage in long-term structural reforms aimed at building robust and democratically-controlled security systems. to idealize local ownership, in other words, is no less problematic than to ignore it. this debate reveals a basic tension at the heart of the emerging ssr paradigm between a commitment to the normative and institutional principles underpinning ssr and a commitment to the principle of local ownership. while this tension is muted in contexts where the relevant local actors embrace the normative framework of ssr, it emerges most clearly in those situations in which locals prove either unable or unwilling to accept these basic normative premises. as annika hansen has framed the issue: if local authorities decide they would like to have a bicycle with square wheels, should the internationals allow them to have such a bicycle even though they know it won’t go anywhere? or should they insist on imposing round wheels against the wishes of their local partners? (cited in pietz & von carlowitz, 2007, p. 10). while hansen’s analogy might be fanciful—and make implicit assumptions both about the rationality of the relevant actors and the locus of decision-making authority in ssr contexts—the contemporary world of ssr provides an abundance of examples where profound tensions emerge between the principles of local ownership and those of good governance. in afghanistan, to take one example, local influences over ssr in the post-taliban period have led to the factionalization (both sectorally and geographically) of security governance, a trend which has run directly counter to the ongoing efforts of the international community to de-politicize and professionalize the broader security sector (giustozzi, 2008). while there are clear tensions with regard to what are often differing political motivations of the various actors involved in ssr processes, a more fundamental tension is also at play here. one of the core assumptions underpinning the local ownership principle is that the success of any reform process depends on the extent to which it is perceived as legitimate by those who have to live with the outcomes; this legitimacy, in turn, depends in large part on the degree to which reform processes resonate with local values, norms, and traditions (talentino, 2007). successful reform processes must, therefore, tread a fine line between promoting fundamental change and respecting long-standing tradition. afghanistan’s posttaliban loya jirga process represents one contemporary example of a forwardlooking reform process married to a traditional, locally-legitimate institutional framework. in most ssr contexts, however, “the local” has been seen more as problem than solution, while the universality of the norms and values attached to the 122 timothy donais studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 broader ssr enterprise has tended to be taken for granted. as eric scheye (2008) has argued, however, “although it is the donors’ ideological and normative position progressively to inculcate the values and beliefs embodied in human rights conventions and principles … empirically it is doubtful that today western beliefs are widely accepted or even intelligible in many fragile environments” (p. 70). what emerges, then, is a tension between a liberal-institutionalist approach to ssr, rooted in the belief that a universally-valid and legitimate set of principles and structures around security governance exists, and a corresponding communitarian perspective which holds than any successful ssr process must be carefully tailored, from initial premises on up, to fit the particular socio-cultural context in which it is to be enacted. at the level of policy, the imperative of navigating these tensions has led not to a broader effort to reconcile liberal and communitarian positions, but rather to the emergence of an understanding of local ownership that is less challenging to the normative principles of donor-defined ssr. in contrast to the nathan definition, in this vision locals are asked, and expected, to “take ownership over” what remains primarily an externally-defined process; local ownership, in this sense, is increasingly associated with local “buy-in.”3 the recent experience of police reform in post-dayton bosnia provides one illustration of the ways in which ownership questions have played out in practice, particularly in the context of post-conflict ssr. under the terms of the dayton peace accords, policing in bosnia is an entity-level responsibility; each of bosnia’s two ethnically-divided entities enjoy exclusive policing competency within their respective territories, and the leaders of republika srpska (rs) in particular see policing as a crucial foundation of the semi-sovereign status of their entity. as part of the international community’s broader state-building agenda in bosnia, however, an internationally-led police restructuring commission (prc) was established in 2004. the three core principles on which the commission’s final report was based— that budgetary and legislative authority for policing be shifted to the state level, that policing operations be free from political influence, and that policing districts be established on operational and technical (as opposed to political) criteria—directly challenged the post-dayton status quo, even if the principles were defended in the name of de-politicizing and professionalizing policing in bosnia (perdan, 2008, pp. 263–64; donais, 2006). in the face of predictable resistance from the rs, and in light of the failure to convince the rs leadership that thorough-going police reform was in their own long-term interests (paving the way for bosnia’s eventual entry into the european union), the police reform issue became a national crisis when the eu warned that bosnia would proceed no further along the eu accession path unless the prc recommendations were adopted. while the rs leadership eventually buckled under enormous international pressure, it is clear that in this particular case, local ownership was less a manifestation of local agency and more a function of coercive arm-twisting aimed at securing local “buy-in.” local ownership, in this sense, appears increasingly tied to a broader conception of responsibility, in which the exercise of ownership is conditional on prior acceptance of an externally-defined set of norms, values, and in this case institutional frameworks. as caroline hughes and this semantic move is far from insignificant, as it focuses attention on the relatively narrow question of who owns the process, rather than on the broader and far more normatively-charged question of who defines the process and fills it with substantive content. inclusion or exclusion? 123 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 vanessa pupovac (2005) have noted in a comparative assessment of international interventions in both bosnia and cambodia, “while responsibility for politics is to be placed back on the shoulders of local people, this is a disciplined politics, regulated by international norms” (p. 883). the ownership as responsibility theme also emerges in the myriad efforts to foster local ownership through longer-term processes of norms-transmission. the dominant metaphor here equates reforming states with novice drivers, with the international community playing the role of nervous parent: before the latter hands over the car keys, the former must be taught how to drive responsibly. in the area of ssr, one manifestation of this model involves the efforts of international police assistance missions to socialize police officers in developing or post-conflict states— through training, mentoring, technical assistance, and institutional development efforts—into adopting internationally-accepted norms of modern democratic policing. in this context, local ownership becomes possible only once the local subjects and institutions have been re-engineered, and ownership emerges as the desired end of any reform process, rather than as the means through which particular ends are achieved (chesterman, 2007, p. 7). there are, of course, some heroic assumptions—concerning both the ability of external actors to fundamentally transform transitional societies and the willingness of local actors to uncritically embrace the key normative principles of the ssr agenda—underpinning the belief that local actors can be taught, socialized or coerced into accepting an external agenda for reform. the fact that police reform in bosnia continues to be a source of considerable contention across the internationallocal divide despite the forced agreement on core principles suggests, as mark baskin (2004) has noted, that even in highly intrusive international operations such as bosnia there remains a significant gap “between unlimited formal international authority and limited international operational capacity” (p. 129). similarly, as alice hills (2008) has suggested, despite increasing international pressure and assistance in the promotion of democratic policing models across sub-saharan africa, “most police in most african countries are fundamentally unchanged from what they were ten years ago … politicized, under-resourced, and inadequately trained” (p. 216). indeed, there is a growing and substantial body of empirical evidence demonstrating the limits of such outside-in processes (nathan, 2007). in other words, in the absence of substantive local ownership (as defined by nathan), reforms have been thinly institutionalized and ssr norms weakly internalized. the debate over the role of local ownership in ssr processes, then, has led to something of an impasse. regime ownership has been limited by the suspicions (sometimes well-founded) of international actors concerning the commitment of local political elites to the normative foundations of ssr, while national ownership remains limited by the sense that non-state local owners are both unwieldy as a constituency and only marginally relevant to the core concerns of ssr. on the other hand, however, there also appear to be real limits on the ability of outside-in ssr processes to remake non-western security sectors in the absence of genuine local commitment. clearly, therefore, any attempt at moving towards a more inclusive form of ssr, in which notions of local ownership are taken more seriously, must involve careful consideration of both the identity and the intentions of the relevant local actors. it must also involve the recognition that at its core, ssr is a dialectical process, involving a complex set of relations among international and domestic 124 timothy donais studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 actors (both state and non-state) (hills, 2008). in this relationship, none of these sets of actors is entirely unproblematic as a vehicle for effective ssr, yet all are necessary if any sustainable ssr process is to emerge. advancing ownership and ssr any attempt to generalize about the possibilities for more substantive and inclusive local ownership in ssr processes is necessarily complicated by the immense variability of the conditions under which ssr unfolds. indeed, the absence of wellfunctioning liberal democratic institutions may be the only shared characteristic of many reforming states. the stable, strong-state situation of indonesia, for example, is a world away from the fragile state context of bosnia, in terms of state capacity and political will, in terms of the level of outside engagement with ssr, and in terms of domestic perceptions of ssr’s legitimacy. there is, in fact, an important distinction between post-conflict ssr processes and post-authoritarian ssr processes. in the former, international actors play a much more prominent role in initiating, designing and implementing ssr, security politics is inextricably wrapped up in the contentious politics of post-war transition and the realities of ongoing insecurity, and the regimes in power are often more concerned with day-to-day survival than with long-term structural transformation. in the latter, ssr is more likely to be regimeinitiated and is therefore less dependent on international impetus and largesse, while the state itself has greater capacity both to envision and to manage longer-term reform processes. despite these contextual differences, however, and the inevitably greater complications of local ownership in post-conflict settings, there is an emerging consensus that some degree of local ownership is a necessary if not sufficient condition for successful ssr. while there are important differences between the view that local actors must drive the reform process from conception to implementation and the contrasting view that local ownership is about “winning [local] acquiescence for externally generated policies” (bendix & stanley, 2008, p. 95), both positions accept—implicitly or explicitly—that local ownership matters to the long-term success of reform. in the context of specific reform environments, however, both positions may suffer from excessive idealism, the former because it risks over-estimating local capacity and political will, the latter because it overestimates international capacity and political will. in what follows, i draw on the distinction between regime ownership and national ownership to make the case that any practical local ownership strategy requires a dual policy of negotiating with state actors and engaging with non-state actors. quite obviously, there is no avoiding the broader question of regime ownership in ssr processes. national-level governments, as trustees of the state’s claim to hold a monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force, are both central and authoritative in matters of security governance. while regimes may be more or less dependent on external actors, and more or less capable of providing security for both state and citizen, even the weakest regimes are capable of exercising a de facto veto over ssr. in other words, while many states lack the capacity to plan and manage coherent and comprehensive ssr programs, domestic authorities retain considerable capacity to inclusion or exclusion? 125 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 block, circumvent, and/or undermine initiatives they oppose or which threaten the interests of key domestic actors. this is, at least in part, a consequence of the reality that while outsiders can design and fund ssr programming, they remain fundamentally dependent on domestic actors in the implementation phase. ultimately, then, given the inherently limited capacity of outsiders to transform, replace, or circumvent domestic political elites, and given the high likelihood that ssr programming undertaken without the support of such elites will fail, undertaking effective and sustainable ssr must almost inevitably involve a negotiated partnership with the governments of reforming states. while this may seem self-evident, a number of important implications flow from this notion of ssr as negotiated partnership. first, it suggests that hierarchical donor-recipient or teacher-pupil models of ssr are misleading, since local actors (especially governments) retain considerable agency in ssr processes. it also acknowledges the reality that in any negotiated process, knowledge and information flow in both directions. as olawale ismail (2008) has argued, just as locals can learn from outsiders about ssr best practice, in both technical and normative terms, outsiders have much to learn from locals about the domestic political context in which reform processes must unfold. most importantly, perhaps, conceiving of ssr in terms of a negotiated partnership points to the need for outsiders to engage local elites in a broader discussion about whether and how international norms concerning good governance in the security sector can be reconciled not only with local traditions, practices, and values, but also with the more parochial interests of elites themselves. none of this is meant to suggest that reconciling different visions of how security should be organized or provided is a simple matter, or that difficult compromises can be easily avoided. on the question of reconciling different normative orders, for example, the debate over justice sector reform in post-taliban afghanistan provides a compelling example. on the one hand, there are good arguments for rooting locallevel justice processes in shuras, which enjoy considerable local legitimacy as a traditional form of dispute resolution. others contend that because shuras tend to be comprised almost exclusively of male elders, such mechanisms should be progressively bypassed in favour of modern court systems, which may lack local legitimacy but are more consistent with principles of due process and representativeness.4 while regime ownership may be a sine qua non for effective ssr, the non-state dimensions of the ownership question also matter, and may in fact represent a largely untapped resource through which international and local agendas can be reconciled. to be sure, there are formidable obstacles to achieving genuinely wide and deep at the same time, reconciling international norms with the political interests of local elites almost necessarily implies difficult choices about whether ssr processes must work within existing domestic power structures, or whether they should be part of a broader process of transforming such structures. while there are few easy solutions to such dilemmas, it is probably fair to say that ssr practitioners have done less than they could to both understand indigenous forms of governance and explore how they might be compatible with ssr’s broad normative agenda. fortunately, many forms of democratic good governance exist, just as there is no single template for an effective security sector; the lesson here, then, is that respectful negotiation, creative problem-solving, patience and effective cross-cultural communication can be just as useful as deep pockets or technical expertise in the promotion of sustainable ssr. 126 timothy donais studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 national ownership over any ssr process. first, as noted above, ownership implies some minimal consensus on common goals, and the wider the constituency the more difficult the consensus-building process. the security sector also tends to be among the most closed and secretive arenas of national political life, while few transitional states have histories of non-state involvement in security affairs. consequently, nonstate actors typically lack both expertise and capacity, and they face considerable obstacles in obtaining access to both information and to decision-making fora on security-related questions. funding dependency further reduces the scope for civil society groups—the primary expressions of national ownership—to exercise substantive and independent voice over the form or content of ssr processes. despite these barriers, much of the contemporary literature on ssr views civil society as having a legitimate—if circumscribed—role to play in ssr processes. in most cases, civil society is seen as a potentially useful public-service watchdog, holding state security agencies accountable for corruption and other abuses of power, or as a transmission belt conveying information between the state and the wider populace. more generally, however, as marina caparini (2004) has suggested, “while frequently invoked in ssr circles, civil society tends to be understood superficially, discussed in narrow terms, and is the subject of little systemic research” (p. 56). with regard to the broader debate on local ownership in ssr, then, both in theory and in practice the connections between civil society and ssr remain relatively unexplored. this is a significant issue, particularly given that ssr, as it has developed over the past decade, has arguably become at least as much about human security as about state security: if ssr is supposed to be people-centred, what then is the appropriate role for “the people” in this process? in many ways, this question gets to the heart of what ssr is all about: as laurie nathan has argued, beyond its more technical dimensions ssr is also both a democratic and a democratizing project, aimed at opening up the historically-closed box of the security sector and subjecting it to democratic control and oversight (2007, p. 9). marina caparini makes a similar point, noting that in security affairs no less than in other dimensions of political life, “the participation of citizens in decisions that affect their lives distinguishes substantive democracy from formal or procedural democracy” (2004, p. 56). seen through a slightly different theoretical lens, the argument for greater civil society involvement in ssr processes is also an argument for the de-securitization of the security sector. as ole waever (1995) has suggested, to label something a “security issue” is to lift it out of the realm of normal politics and authorize extraordinary means to address it. by its very nature, then, the entire security sector—as the agent of extraordinary means—can be seen as a domain outside of normal politics, and therefore not subject to the same sets of checks and balances that constrain other political actors and institutions. the converse of securitization, of course, is de-securitization, in which issues are downgraded from existential threats to matters of everyday politics. calls for national ownership over ssr processes therefore represent part of a broader effort to de-securitize the politics of security provision by subjecting the security sector to greater transparency, by forcing security actors and decision-makers to be more accountable, and by broadening the scope of public involvement in security affairs. democratizing inclusion or exclusion? 127 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 security affairs through the processes of de-securitization is consistent not only with ssr’s normative underpinnings but also with more substantive visions of local ownership, since the outcomes of such processes are not pre-determined, but rather subject to the interplay of domestic political forces. there are other good arguments for expanding the boundaries of the relevant local owners to include civil society. beyond the broader contention that civil society serves as a useful counterweight to the state, bringing to light a range of issues and concerns in an environment where state institutions and actors may not effectively represent the public interest, the ability of civil society actors to articulate their own lived experiences of security and insecurity can act as an important corrective to some of the top-down assumptions of mainstream ssr. externally-driven ssr tends to project western solutions onto non-western contexts, and in the process may neglect key aspects of the security dynamic in reforming states. carving out a greater space for civil society voices in ssr processes may not only help ensure that such dynamics are addressed, but may also help shift the focus from institutional isomorphism—replicating western institutional frameworks in non-western environments—to addressing the lived insecurities of real people in real places. one template for how this might be achieved is provided by the so-called zwelethemba model, based on a series of experiments in local security governance carried out in south africa during the first decade after apartheid.5 informed by a vision of security governance emphasizing “locally generated responses to locally generated questions,”6 the zwelethemba experiments facilitated the establishment of local peace committees and peacemaking fora to respond to specific local security problems. while not ssr in an institutional sense, such experiments (similar initiatives have been undertaken in the afghan context)7 ultimately, civil society can serve as a crucial ally for the international community on ssr issues. while it would be a mistake to see civil society as necessarily benevolent and progressive, it is also the case that the vast majority of those on the receiving end of ssr programming are likely to want what donors are selling, which is the promise of better governance and improved security. a longer-term investment on the part of international donors in building civil society capacity to engage with ssr-related issues may not only serve to erode the notion that security issues are the exclusive preserve of politicians and uniformed service personnel, but may also counter—in the context of a broader democratization process—self-serving elites tempted to manipulate ssr processes for their own political ends. demonstrate the potential of mobilizing local capacity and knowledge in the management of community-level security affairs. as shearing (2001) notes, early results from zwelethemba were promising in terms of generating locally-driven, future-focused resolutions to security problems, even if, to date, such initiatives have tended to be piece-meal and disconnected from more conventional top-down security reforms (p. 25). 8 widespread participation of “the people” in ssr processes, in other words, may provide a better long-term guarantee than abstract normative principles that security structures will in fact be “people-centred.” 128 timothy donais studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 conclusion as the debate on security sector reform has evolved, the notion of local ownership has come to serve as much as a disciplining mechanism as a tool to overcome exclusion in the making and execution of security policy. while donors and international institutions pay lip service to the idea that locals should be in the driver’s seat when it comes to planning and implementing reforms to their security sectors, the practical implementation of this vision has been hampered by the widespread belief that the locals don’t know how to drive. as a result, substantive versions of local ownership have given way to shallower notions of ownership focusing on responsibility, in which a commitment to a liberal-democratic set of norms and institutions becomes a condition for local ownership. in this sense, local ownership becomes less about local authorship and control than about getting domestic actors to buy into what remains largely an externally-defined vision. a basic premise of this paper has been that local actors can neither be ignored, bypassed, nor easily transformed. while it is increasingly accepted that some degree of local ownership is a prerequisite for sustainable ssr, the notion of ssr as a form of externally-driven social engineering ultimately leading to a locally-owned security sector which is democratically-controlled and human rights oriented both overestimates international capacities and under-estimates potential domestic resistance. while it would be neither realistic nor wise to advocate that donors support illiberal or undemocratic ssr processes—or that donors simply provide blank cheques to reforming governments and hope for the best—this paper has suggested that considerably more flexibility is required if the tensions between ssr (as currently constituted) and local ownership are to be successfully navigated. such flexibility could be generated by focusing on the core principles of security and participation. this suggests, on the one hand, emphasizing enhanced security as the core underlying goal of ssr, while recognizing the myriad routes and mechanisms through which the goal of enhanced security can be achieved. it also suggests, on the other hand, the importance of widespread and meaningful participation in ssr processes. participation enhances legitimacy, broadens the range of potential supporters of a “people-oriented” form of ssr, reduces the likelihood of elite capture, and enhances the possibilities for reconciling local practices and traditions with basic international norms. participatory ssr—involving ongoing engagement and dialogue among international actors, host governments, and domestic civil society—is almost by definition messy, time-consuming, and open-ended, but is also democratic in the more substantive sense of the term and represents an alternative route to a sustainable, locally-owned security sector that effectively merges the topdown with the bottom-up. from the donor perspective, making the transition to more participatory, inclusive forms of ssr will be a major challenge for a least two reasons. first, the bureaucratic structures and processes of most donor agencies are not particularly amenable to a more substantive conception of local ownership. in short, donors increasingly demand value for money in terms of concrete, measurable results within relatively short timeframes, and the vision of participatory ssr outlined above is unlikely to produce such outcomes, even if the outcomes it does produce may ultimately be more sustainable. a second reason for scepticism is that as much as inclusion or exclusion? 129 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 ssr is a normative project, it is also a political one. particularly as ssr is increasingly linked to the broader goals of the war on terror, donors may increasingly be pursuing ssr in transition countries for their own security interests. in contrast, then, to edward joseph’s recent defence of “dispassionate outsiders” (2007, p. 110), given the range of interests at play in ssr contexts donors may be increasingly tempted to insist on their own solutions rather than defer to—or at least negotiate with—local owners. as bendix and stanley warn, “calling for an enhancement of local ownership and less control for donors is perhaps naïve when one considers that ssr was conceptualized by donors in order to gain access to security matters” in transitional states (2008, p. 101–2). despite these concerns, however, it seems clear that the debate over local ownership in security sector reform processes is not going away. thinking through how local ownership may be most effectively fostered and sustained, therefore, remains an important challenge, particularly as the gap between ambition and outcome in ssr processes remains wide, and as recipients become increasingly disillusioned by the gap between donor rhetoric about ownership and donor actions on the ground. notes 1 portions of this paper draw from and build upon my earlier work on the same topic, especially donais, 2008. 2 see especially oecd, 2007. 3 indeed, as daniel bendix and ruth stanley have noted, some analysts have stretched the notion of local ownership so far as to suggest that it is achieved as long as local actors “appreciate the benefits” of policy measures (2008, p.95). 4 on this debate, see undp, 2007. 5 information on the zwelethemba process is drawn from shearing, 2001; the author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to this study. 6 adedeji ebo, cited in bendix and stanley, 2008, p. 102. 7 on the afghan experience, see waldman, 2008. 8 on specific capacity-building strategies for civil society in ssr contexts, see nathan, 2008. references baskin, m. (2004). between exit and engagement: on the division of authority in transitional administrations. global governance, 10, 119–137. bendix d. & stanley, r. (2008). deconstructing local ownership of security sector reform: a review of the literature, african security review 17(2), 93–104. caparini, m. (2004). the relevance of civil society. in c. mccartney, m. fischer, & o. wils (eds.), security sector reform: potentials and challenges for conflict transformation (pp. 53–61). berghof handbook dialogue series no. 2. berlin: berghof center for constructive conflict management; available at: http://www.berghof-handbook.net chesterman, s. (2007). ownership in theory and in practice: transfer of authority in un statebuilding operations. journal of intervention and statebuilding, 1(1), 3–26. donais, t. (2006). the limits of post-conflict police reform. in m. innes (ed.), bosnian security after dayton: new perspectives (pp. 173–190). london/new york: routledge. donais, t. (ed.). (2008). local ownership and security sector reform. zurich/berlin: lit verlag for the geneva centre for democratic control of armed forces (dcaf). 130 timothy donais studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 giustozzi, a. (2008). shadow ownership and ssr in afghanistan. in t. donais (ed.), local ownership and security sector reform (pp. 215–232). zurich/berlin: lit verlag for the geneva centre for democratic control of armed forces (dcaf). goodhand, j., and sedra, m. (2007). bribes or bargains? peace conditionalities and ‘post-conflict’ reconstruction in afghanistan. international peacekeeping, 14(1), 41–61. hansen, a. (2008). local ownership in peace operations. in t. donais (ed.), local ownership and security sector reform (pp. 39–58). zurich/berlin: lit verlag for the geneva centre for democratic control of armed forces (dcaf). hansen, l. (2000). the little mermaid’s silent security dilemma and the absence of gender in the copenhagen school. millennium, 29, 285–306. hills, a. (2008). the dialectic of police reform in nigeria. journal of modern african studies, 46(2), 215– 234. hughes, c., and pupavac, v. (2005). framing post-conflict societies: international pathologisation of cambodia and the post-yugoslav states. third world quarterly, 26(6), 873–889. ismail, o. (2008). enabling local ownership: participation and capacity-building in ssr. in t. donais (ed.), local ownership and security sector reform (pp. 127–145). zurich/berlin: lit verlag for the geneva centre for democratic control of armed forces (dcaf). joseph, e. (2007). ownership is over-rated. sais review, 27(2), 109–123. martin, a., & wilson, p. (2008). security sector evolution: which locals? ownership of what? in t. donais (ed.), local ownership and security sector reform (pp. 83–103). zurich/berlin: lit verlag for the geneva centre for democratic control of armed forces (dcaf). mcfate, s. (2008). securing the future: a primer on security sector reform in conflict countries. us institute of peace special report 209. washington: us institute of peace. retrieved from www.usip.org nathan, l. (2007). no ownership, no commitment: a guide to local ownership of security sector reform. birmingham: university of birmingham press. nathan, l. (2008). the challenge of local ownership of ssr: from donor rhetoric to practice. in t. donais (ed.), local ownership and security sector reform (pp. 19–35). zurich/berlin: lit verlag for the geneva centre for democratic control of armed forces (dcaf). organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd). (2007). the oecd dac handbook on security system reform: supporting security and justice. paris: oecd publishing. perdan, s. (2008). bosnia: ssr under international tutelage. in t. donais (ed.), local ownership and security sector reform (pp. 253–272). zurich/berlin: lit verlag for the geneva centre for democratic control of armed forces (dcaf). pietz, t., and von carlowitz, l. (2007). local ownership in peacebuilding processes in failed states: approaches, experiences, and prerequisites for success. report on an expert meeting, center for international peace operations (zif), berlin, 20–21 april 2007. retrieved from http://www.zifberlin.org/fileadmin/uploads/analyse/dokumente/veroeffentlichungen/local_ownership_workshop_re port_dezember_07.pdf pouligny, b. (2005). civil society and post-conflict peacebuilding: ambiguities of international programmes aimed at building ‘new’ societies. security dialogue, 36(4), 495–510. scheye, e. (2008). unknotting local ownership redux: bringing non-state/local justice networks back in. in t. donais (ed.), local ownership and security sector reform (pp. 59–81). zurich/berlin: lit verlag for the geneva centre for democratic control of armed forces (dcaf). shearing, c. (2001). transforming security: a south african experiment. in h. strang & j. braithwaite (eds.), restorative justice and civil society (pp. 14–34). cambridge: cambridge university press. stiglitz, j. (1998). towards a new paradigm for development: strategies, policies and processes. the 1998 prebisch lecture. geneva: unctad. retrieved from . http://siteresources.worldbank.org/cdf/resources/prebisch98.pdf talentino, a. (2007). perceptions of peacebuilding: the dynamic of imposer and imposed upon. international studies perspectives, 8, 152–171. united nations development program (undp). (2007). afghanistan human development report 2007. kabul: undp/center for policy and human development. waever, o. (1995). securitization and de-securitization. in r. lipschutz (ed.), on security (pp. 46–86). new york: columbia university press. waldman, m. (2008). community peacebuilding in afghanistan: the case for a national strategy. oxford: oxfam. retrieved from . www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingnotes/community_peacebuilding_in_afghanistan_report_feb08 inclusion or exclusion? 131 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 woodward, s. (2003). in whose interest is security sector reform? lessons from the balkans. in g. cawthra & r. luckham (eds.), governing insecurity: democratic control of military and security establishments in transitional democracies (pp. 276–302). london/new york: zed books. yalamarty final correspondence address: harshita yalamarty, graduate program in gender, feminist & women’s studies, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: harshita@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 dispatch lessons from “no ban on stolen land” harshita yalamarty york university, canada today at the #laxprotest, native people conducted a welcoming ceremony to call in our muslim and refugee sisters as relatives. we danced a long round dance to the beat of the drum… when another native brother took to the megaphone and told our new muslim relatives that we are here to protect and fight for them, that we and this land recognize their humanity, they wept tears of joy. that is what i witnessed today. that is the power of native-led movements. we never stopped practicing our own customs of kinship making, citizenship and belonging. this land recognizes our humanity because we never gave it up. trump and all us forms of citizenship and law are illegitimate on stolen land. so when we say "muslims and refugees welcome on native land," we mean it!! #nobanonstolenland #banusa facebook post by melanie yazzie (diné), february 2017 (reproduced in #nodapl archive) in this context, it is essential that, as we consider bans and walls, we do not exclude native peoples and histories from the conversation. the intentional erasure of native people from public conversations has historically led us to assume that the united states is the only entity that is entitled to claim control of these spaces, and that it is the inherent right of its government to welcome some migrants while restricting and placing quotas on others. elizabeth ellis (peoria) (2018) in this dispatch, i will reflect on the slogan “no ban on stolen land” and the lessons, theoretical and mobilizational, that it offers us in the current milieu. these lessons are modelled in words and practice by indigenous activists, thinkers and feminists, two of whom are quoted above. my hope is to carry on this conversation among fellow critical anti-racist educators, towards reframing the stakes around decolonization, indigenous sovereignty and migrant and refugee justice. lessons from “no ban on stolen land” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 475 *** in toronto, a pakistani man tells me that his visa application to india has been rejected multiple times. “i have a canadian passport, and yet…” he rues, “i just want to go see the taj mahal.” i wonder aloud whether the place of birth in his passport is the reason why, and he agrees with me; we reflect together on how those colonial borders are being redrawn and inflicted on us here, on the other side of the world. he adds that his nephew was not allowed to travel to the united states a couple of years ago, despite having a british passport. he says no more, because we both know he is alluding to the travel ban enacted by the american president donald trump in 2017. an “executive order on protecting the nation from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals,” introduced on january 27, 2017, prevented the entry of visitors from seven “countries of concern” – syria, iran, iraq, sudan, somalia, libya and yemen – for 90 days, and refugees from all countries for 120 days (full text, 2017). the order initially included green card holders, but an exception was made by the department of homeland security two days later. reports stated that customs and border protection (cbp) officers, tasked with policing entrants into the usa, were detaining and questioning people despite federal courts issuing blocks against detentions and deportations and bans on the order (helmore & yuhas, 2017). a five-year old boy, who was an american citizen with an iranian mother, was detained and handcuffed for more than four hours. the white house justified this action by claiming that they could not eliminate threats based on an individual’s age and sex (roberts, 2017). on february 4, 2017, a canadian muslim woman was denied entry into the usa after cbp officials checked her phone and found prayers, leading them to question her views on president trump (mann, 2017). later that month, a british welsh muslim teacher accompanying a group of students on a trip to the usa was denied entry and removed from the plane on their stopover in reykjavik, iceland (morris, 2017). the commonality in these cases is that the affected individuals are muslim, indicated by their names or bodily presentation; the indicators of their nationalities – their passports – do not seem to matter to cbp officers. in short, contrary to the letter of the executive order, the travel ban proceeded as a de facto “muslim ban,” by targeting muslim individuals and families regardless of their citizenship and their passports. this was justified by the cbp under the broad rubric of “protecting the nation from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals.” as the ban and its consequent detentions and deportations unfolded, protests erupted at airports across the country. protesters emphasized the narrative of the usa as a “nation of immigrants,” for example by singing songs like “this land is your land.” the glorification of this narrative serves to erase the history and presence of indigenous peoples in the usa harshita yalamarty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 476 and other settler countries, by reframing initial settler occupation of sovereign indigenous lands as migration.1 seeking to counter this erasure and make connections with those affected by the travel ban, indigenous activists and professors melanie yazzie (diné) and nick estes (lower brule sioux) brought the slogans “no ban on stolen land” and “refugees welcome on stolen land” to the protests at the los angeles airport, changing the way the protesters claimed ownership and citizenship as they fought for immigrant and refugee rights (monkman, 2017). as lawrence and dua remind us, “to speak of opening borders without addressing indigenous land loss and ongoing struggles to reclaim territories is to divide communities that are already marginalized from one another” (2005, p. 136). yazzie’s facebook post, quoted in the opening epigraph, helped further spread this idea of linking refugee and migrant rights to a critique of the settler state, by describing indigenous-led calls for migrant and refugee justice grounded in indigenous sovereignty. the hashtag #nobanonstolenland quickly circulated across social media spaces. i watched these events on my computer screen in india, unable to travel to canada to rejoin my graduate program and my teaching assistant position, having lost my own passport at new delhi airport. while i waited for a new passport and a replacement canadian visa, i read the heartbreaking stories of other graduate students flying back to the us after their winter breaks, unable to exit the airport or their planes, returned to their countries, feeling immobilised and purposeless. at least i didn’t have to go to the usa, a few friends said to console me. in clear criticism of president trump and american policies, canadian prime minister justin trudeau tweeted messages of support and welcome for those refugees fleeing war and persecution. in mid-february, photographs emerged of a smiling royal canadian mounted police (rcmp) officer helping a refugee somali family across the usa-canada border at quebec. these photographs and their reception added to the narrative of canada as welcoming and tolerant, as opposed to an increasingly hostile and intolerant usa (paling, 2017). in 2014, at a black lives matter protest in portland, usa, against the decision not to indict police officer darren wilson for the murder of teenager michael brown, a freelance photographer captured a young, tearful black boy hugging a white police officer. the image became widely shared and held up as an example of the human face of race relations in america. taken together with the image of the rcmp officer helping a refugee boy, it is evident that technologies of infantilising people of colour enable the state to demonstrate its benevolent, paternalistic power, which offers and promises protection as long as people of colour remain harmless (grinberg, 2014). however, when we juxtapose “no ban on stolen land” with the photographs of the somali family’s border crossing, we can consider how this 1 see, e.g., moreton-robinson (2015) on australia, and razack (2002) on canada, among others. lessons from “no ban on stolen land” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 477 crossing took place between new york, usa and quebec, canada, on haudenosaunee land. on the map of turtle island, the canadian-us border is an illegal settler-colonial construct that violates indigenous sovereignty and cuts across indigenous territory. keeping this map – and the artificiality of borders – in mind helps us to grasp the breadth of violence faced by refugees fleeing us cbp officials and submitting to arrest by canadian rcmp officials, and to trouble the notion of “citizenship” on stolen land built on practices of what harsha walia (2014, p. 23) has called “border imperialism.” *** as i wrote this dispatch in 2019, the state of india had made its latest moves in effectively occupying the territory of kashmir and stripping it of its democratic rights, and large swathes of the amazonian rainforest had been set on fire yet again, threatening the indigenous tribes with forced displacement through “ecocide” in the amazon basin (tekayak, 2016). the disabling and debilitating of the people of kashmir is carried out through information and communication blackouts (kanjwal, 2019) pellet guns, enforced disappearances or curfews (zia, 2018), tactics that are chillingly similar to those used in the ongoing occupation of palestine (puar, 2017). around the world, it is evident that longstanding processes of settler colonialism are continuing unabated in various forms, working in tandem with state technologies that impose borders and destabilise people and communities, creating displacements and refugee populations.2 on august 5, 2019, article 35a and article 370 of the indian constitution were revoked by the government of india. these articles enshrined special status for jammu and kashmir, including a separate constitution, autonomy over its internal administration and a separate set of laws on citizenship and property ownership. this amendment also converted jammu, kashmir and ladakh to union territories, which are administered federally and do not have elected governments of their own. beginning the previous day, the government also ordered a total communications blackout to and from kashmir, and silenced news from the region. along with being cut off from the rest of the world, curfews and a heightened military presence demonstrate that a purposive immobilization of the people of kashmir is in process. further, these changes to the indian constitution mean that indian citizens 2 social media has been pivotal in amplifying voices of the kashmiri diaspora, some of whom are themselves displaced, and organizing solidarity vigils in support of kashmir across the globe through the hashtag #standwithkashmir. see the social media campaign toolkit by stand with kashmir 2019 (http://standwithkashmir.org) and the work of the critical kashmir studies collective (https://www.facebook.com/criticalkashmirstudies/). brazilian indigenous youth have also organized on social media to bring their voices as amazon defenders to public attention, with groups such as mídia índia (https://www.instagram.com/midiaindiaoficial/) (martinez, 2019). harshita yalamarty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 478 can now buy and own property in kashmir, and already indian corporate interests have announced their multimillion dollar plans to invest in the region, at the cost of impairing local business networks (chaudhary, 2019; das gupta, 2019). on the other side of the globe, the right-wing regime in brazil has opened up the rainforest for clearing by cultivators, miners and ranchers, thereby enabling the deforestation and destruction of indigenous reserves within the amazon (correa et al., 2019), and rendering the landscape particularly vulnerable to spreading forest fires. in north america, despite fierce indigenous-led protests and credible environmental warnings against them, privately owned pipelines have been routinely approved for construction by the us and canadian governments, without the consent of the indigenous nations whose territories, living conditions and livelihoods would be affected; in multiple locations, this construction has been enforced with the use of state military power (standing rock sioux tribe, 2019; unist’ot’en camp, 2019). in each of these cases, the agenda of the militarised settler-colonial state is centered on land – that is, stealing land and land-based resources from those who live on it, and in the process scattering and discarding them. how do we make sense of these events in different corners of the globe, connected nonetheless by the logics and histories of settler/colonial statism, and how do we respond, organize and resist? as hokulani aikau (kanaka ʻōiwi hawaiʻi) states, “when indigeneity is placed at the center, when we turn our attentions in a material rather than a metaphorical way to the lands upon which we stand, to ʻāina, then we are able to challenge the fundamental legitimacy of the nation-state structure” (aikau et al., 2015, p. 83). to grapple with these issues, i find myself returning to the powerful brevity of #nobanonstolenland. yazzie spoke about the value of the hashtag as political education from screens to streets, and indeed, the proposed border wall on the us-mexico border was met with “no wall on stolen land,” and the slogan “no wall, no ban, no building on stolen lands” was used as a joint protest against trump’s travel ban and the israeli government’s plan to build settlements in gaza (alternative information centre, 2017). cherokee scholar joseph pierce (2019) also reminds us that building walls is a settler colonial strategy. wall street, the famous centre of capitalist activity and former slave market in manhattan, new york city (lenape territory), is named for the wall built by african slaves owned by the dutch west india company to keep out native people, pirates and english colonists (clarkson, 2008). analysing the slogan in her article “the border(s) crossed us too,” indigenous feminist elizabeth ellis (2018) states that by grounding our critique of the travel ban in indigenous sovereignty, “we critically reframe the conversation about borders and immigration and more effectively challenge us justifications for exclusion and expulsion” (n.p.). i propose that we add to this statement the need for conversation around “mobility,” encompassing voluntary, involuntary and forced mobility. lessons from “no ban on stolen land” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 479 indigenous populations have always been mobile, “by choice or by force, or some combination thereof” (peterson & chatterjee, 2017, p. 141).3 cherokee scholar qwo-li driskill (2004) refers to their family as “diasporic,” because of the removals and genocides they have endured (p. 52). asserting the sovereignty of indigenous nations as opposed to colonial borders, indigenous feminism has been characterised as “already transnational” in navigating settler-colonial realities (aikau et al., 2015). ellis (2018) lays out how the expansion of the usa as a settler-colonial state built upon regulating the mobility of indigenous people, and imposing constructions and restrictions where there had been none, inspiring the statement, “the border(s) crossed us too.” in canada, the story of indigenous mobility and purposive immobilization stretches from the indian act (lawrence, 2004), the history of the reserve pass system (carter, 1999, p. 163), residential schools, the “sixties scoop” (truth & reconciliation commission of canada, 2015) to the highway of tears (carrier sekani family services, 2006). in addition to forced removals and displacements, the state’s exercise of power in deciding mobility is enforced through the technology of the passport, as we saw in the unfolding of the 2017 travel ban. in his book the invention of the passport (2000), john torpey examines how modern nationstates assume the authority to restrict movement, and he turns to the metaphor of the state’s “embrace” of its population through the passport. in contrast to travel documents, passports stand as symbols of an individual’s affiliation to a nation-state, wherein states “embrace” and bind particular individuals to themselves as their nationals or citizens. these citizens are nurtured and rendered legible by this affiliation, and thus turned into resources needed by the nation-states to reproduce themselves. others – non-citizens, undesirables, illegals – are denied that embrace, for example through travel bans. radhika mongia (1999) argues that modern passports are imbricated in race-based exclusion, as they evolved as a technique of regulating migration by un-naming race and instead naming “nationality,” allowing nation-states to delimit their boundaries, assert their sovereignty and acquire a monopoly over who would be allowed within the state’s embrace. indigenous nations have long undermined the settler-colonial state’s authority over their movements, for example by issuing their own passports (ellis, 2018). the haudenosaunee have issued passports since 1923 as expressions of their sovereignty. high profile incidents such as the iroquois nationals lacrosse team being blocked from entering the united kingdom on 3 peterson and chatterjee (2017) use this phrase to describe the various circumstances under which people of colour came to be on this colonized land. i use it to evoke the displacements and removals, as well as migrations across territories, faced by indigenous people as well, in order to puncture the ostensible binary of refugees and migrants as mobile, and indigenous folks as not. elizabeth ellis, for instance, describes herself as “living as an uninvited guest in new york city on ancestral lenape territories” (2018, n.p.). harshita yalamarty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 480 their haudenosaunee passports in 2010 (kolva, 2012), highlight the settlercolonial move of regarding haudenosaunee passports as “fantasy documents,” concretely denying their claims to sovereignty and right to move across international borders (hill, 2015). according to onandaga nation tadodaho sid hill, maintaining our sovereignty demands that we use our own passport. this is why we stamped the passports of visiting nations – including us americans and the british – in september when the world indoor lacrosse championships was held for the first time on haudenosaunee land: to underscore that this has always been and remains our land. (hill, 2015) it is important to note that indigenous passports function as statements and symbols of indigenous sovereignty rejecting settler colonial authority over borders; they are not backed by a state-centred bureaucratic and militaristic apparatus that presumes to impose borders. as a symbol of solidarity, indigenous nations have also issued passports to refugees, in order to critique refugee detention and incarceration systems while asserting indigenous sovereignty in the face of settler state violence. in 2010, two tamil asylum seekers indefinitely detained in villawood camp in sydney, australia were issued original nation/aboriginal passports;4 subsequent passport ceremonies created a space for migrants to recognize indigenous sovereignty and be allied with indigenous peoples (aboriginal passport ceremony, 2012). tasmanian aboriginal activist michael mansell articulated a critique of the settler nation-state’s self-narrative as the “nation of immigrants”, by drawing out the distinction between unarmed asylum seekers arriving as “boat people” and being denied basic human rights, and the arrival of the “original boat people” who led an occupation and genocide of indigenous peoples in australia (mansell, quoted in smith, 2013).5 as recently as july 2019, indigenous communities issued aboriginal passports to refugees being held for processing in papua new guinea, aiming to bring attention to australia’s offshore detention regime and its problems (faa, 2019). in each of these instances, the underlying message is clear: “under indigenous law, refugees are welcome to this land” (rise: refugees, survivors and ex-detainees, 2016). 4 for more about the unmapping of villawood detention centre on aboriginal land, see bui et al. (2017). 5october 2019 marked the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the ships mv ocean lady and mv sun sea, on the west coast of canada. together the ships carried more than 500 tamil asylum seekers, who were characterized by the canadian government as ‘illegal’ or human smugglers, and detained amid calls for deportation (hasan et al, 2019). at demonstrations outside the jails where asylum seekers were kept, indigenous elders opened the protests by welcoming the refugees (walia, 2014, p. 67). connecting the arrival of the komagata maru in 1914 to the ocean lady and sun sea, hasan et al. (2019) argue that “the colonization of indigenous nations in north america is connected to south asia through the european project of empire and colonial expansion” (p. 123). lessons from “no ban on stolen land” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 481 refugee communities in canada have also drawn on struggles against occupation in their homelands, to show solidarity with indigenous sovereignty. for example, on the website of students for free tibet canada, an indigenous land acknowledgement is accompanied by the statement, “we also commit ourselves to continue to unlearn and decolonize spaces we occupy and work in solidarity with indigenous peoples in their struggle” (students for free tibet, n.d.). using slogans like “no one is illegal; canada is illegal!,” migrant and refugee rights organizations such as no one is illegal (noii), based in canada, and refugees, survivors and ex-detainees (rise) based in australia, center indigenous sovereignty in their critiques of settler-colonial state policies. taking the example of support for the idle no more movement in 2012 from palestinians within the occupied territories of palestine as well as diasporic communities, dana olwan (2015) argues that these solidarities are not natural and cannot be presumed, but have to be relationally worked out in critical, strategic ways. *** in such a milieu, it is imperative that we as anti-racist educators and scholars turn to the leadership of indigenous activists, thinkers, elders and youth, to envision a future beyond contested geopolitical territories. as harsha walia, following sto:loh poet and author lee maracle, writes, “there is nothing contradictory about supporting struggles for migrant justice and indigenous self-determination; our liberation is interconnected” (2014, p. 68). returning to the protests led by yazzie and estes at the los angeles airport, yazzie in her facebook post mentions a welcoming ceremony and round dance, which invited refugees and migrants as well as non-indigenous activists and protesters into a different relationality with each other, one grounded in the history of the land and asserting the presence of indigenous people (monkman, 2017). eve tuck, allison guess and hannah sultan, with their work on the black/land project, write about necessarily “contingent collaborations,” offering a path as we reconfigure the work of decolonization together on the same land – work that offers no easy resolutions (tuck et al., 2014). cherokee scholar jeff corntassel calls for “insurgent education” (2013, p. 48), meaning that solidarity work in different places must follow the lead of local indigenous communities organising for self-determination. this solidarity work needs to guard against becoming ahistorical by “simultaneously recogniz[ing] the potential mutualities and various incommensurabilities of struggles for justice against settler-colonial states,” based on historically situated distinctions (olwan, 2015, p. 100) and a recognition of complicities. it also needs to guard against turning a “settler gaze” (corntassel, 2013, p. 50) on struggles that may seem far away, as with kashmir and the amazon basin, by making connections with local harshita yalamarty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 482 indigenous struggles, as well as the campaigns organised by those communities in the diaspora. what might such relationality mean for refugees, migrants, black and other people of colour on indigenous lands? by reflecting on “no ban on stolen land” and its lessons, we can center indigenous sovereignty in supporting migrant and refugee rights. this could focus our critiques and efforts against the settler colonial authority which presumes to ban, displace, exclude, detain, and shrink the spaces and terms on which those displaced can relate to each other and respond to the violence of being rendered illegal or immobile. organising against the state’s controlling mechanisms and violences by taking our lead from indigenous communities’ refusal to cooperate with settler colonial logics of genocide can be a creative means of resistance that leads us toward just sites of coexistence and a viable future for all. acknowledgments i wrote this dispatch while living on anishinaabe and haudenosaunee territories, and tried to bring lessons from there to conversations in new delhi, india. thank you to nishant upadhyay, amar wahab and sabina chatterjee for making space and these conversations possible. references aboriginal passport ceremony. (2012, august 6). more than 200 migrants to receive aboriginal passport. [press release]. green left. https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/more-200migrants-receive-aboriginal-passports aikau, h. k., arvin, m., goeman, m., & morgensen, s. (2015). indigenous feminisms roundtable. frontiers: a journal of women studies, 36(3), 84-106. alternative information centre. (2017, february 14). no wall, no ban, no building on stolen land! protests against the racist agendas of netanyahu and trump are planned for wednesday in washington d.c., tel aviv, and across the u.s. https://web.archive.org/web/20170217145729/http://www.alternativenews.org/ bui, m., chan, d., perera, s., pugliese, j. & singh, c. (2017) villawood: a suburban deathscape in plain site. deathscapes: mapping race and violence in settler states. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/villawood carrier sekani family services. (2006). highway of tears symposium recommendations report: a collective voice for the victims who have been silenced. https://www.highwayoftears.org/uploads/highway%20of%20tears%20symposium%20re commendations%20report%20-%20january%202013.pdf carter, s. (1999). aboriginal people and colonizers of western canada to 1900 (vol. 5). university of toronto press. chaudhary, a. (2019, september 2). in kashmir shops are closed and all is silent, but it’s far from peaceful. bloomberg quint. https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/in-kashmirshops-are-closed-and-all-is-silent-but-it-s-far-from-peaceful clarkson, g. (2008). wall street indians: information asymmetry and barriers to tribal capital market access. lewis & clark law review, 12, 943. lessons from “no ban on stolen land” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 483 corntassel, j. (2013). insurgent education and the roles of indigenous intellectuals. in m. s. smith (ed.), transforming the academy: indigenous education, knowledges and relations (pp. 47-51). university of alberta. critical kashmir studies collective. (n.d.) timeline [facebook page] https://www.facebook.com/criticalkashmirstudies/ correa, l., lobao, m., & kaiser, a. j. (2019, august 29). ‘join our fight’: indigenous people in brazil speak out against amazon rainforest fires. global news. https://globalnews.ca/news/5830182/amazon-indigenous-people-protest-fires/ das gupta, m. (2019, october 18). 43 companies with rs 13,700 crore investment plan promise j&k a new beginning. the print. https://theprint.in/india/43-companies-rs-13700-croreinvestment-promise-jk-new-beginning/307398/ driskill, q. l. (2004). stolen from our bodies: first nations two-spirits/queers and the journey to a sovereign erotic. studies in american indian literatures, 16(2), 50-64. ellis, e. (2018). the border(s) crossed us too: the intersections of native american and immigrant fights for justice. emisférica, 14(1). https://hemisphericinstitute.org/pt/emisferica-14-1-expulsion/14-1-essays/the-border-scrossed-us-too-the-intersections-of-native-american-and-immigrant-fights-for-justice2.html faa, m. (2019, 17 july). refugees on manus to receive australian first nations 'passports' from activists aboard sail boat. abc far north. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-0717/refugees-on-manus-island-to-recieve-aboriginal-passports/11310214 full text of trump's executive order on 7-nation ban, refugee suspension. (2017, january 28). cnn. http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/28/politics/text-of-trump-executive-order-nation-banrefugees/ global detention project. (2018, june 18). immigration detention in canada: important reforms, ongoing concerns. https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/immigration-detention-incanada-important-reforms-ongoing-concerns grinberg, e. (2014, december 1). the hug shared around the world. cnn. http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/29/living/ferguson-protest-hug/ hasan, n., krishnamurti, s., rahemtullah, o. s., thiyagarajah, n., & upadhyay, n. (2019). borders, boats, and brown bodies. in r. k. dhamoon, d. bhandar, r. mawani & s. k. bains (eds.), unmooring the komagata maru: charting colonial trajectories (pp. 121140). ubc press. helmore, e., & yuhas, a. (2017, january 30). border agents defy courts on trump travel ban, congressmen and lawyers say. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2017/jan/29/customs-border-protection-agents-trump-muslim-country-travel-ban hill, s. (2015, october 30). my six nation haudenosaunee passport is not a 'fantasy document'. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/30/my-six-nationhaudenosaunee-passport-not-fantasy-document-indigenous-nations kanjwal, h. (2019, august 5). india’s settler-colonial project in kashmir takes a disturbing turn. the washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/05/indiassettler-colonial-project-kashmir-takes-disturbing-turn/ kolva, b. (2012). lacrosse players, not terrorists: the effects of the western hemisphere travel initiative on native american international travel and sovereignty. washington university journal of law policy, 40, 307-336. lawrence, b. (2004). “real” indians and others: mixed-blood urban native peoples and indigenous nationhood. university of nebraska press. lawrence, b., & dua, e. (2005). decolonizing antiracism. social justice, 32(4), 120-143. https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/bonita-lawrence-decolonizing-antiracism.pdf mann, h. (2017, february 8). canadian woman denied entry to u.s. after muslim prayers found on her phone [radio broadcast transcript]. cbc radio. www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/asit-happens-wednesday-edition-1.3972400/canadian-woman-denied-entry-to-u-s-aftermuslim-prayers-found-on-her-phone-1.3972404 harshita yalamarty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 484 martinez, m. (2019, september 17). while the amazon burns, brazil’s indigenous peoples rise up. waging nonviolence. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/09/while-amazon-burnsbrazil-indigenous-peoples-rise-up/ mídia india-oficial. [@midiaindia] (n.d.) posts. [instagram profile]. https://www.instagram.com/midiaindiaoficial/ mongia, r. v. (1999). race, nationality, mobility: a history of the passport. public culture, 11(3), 527-556. moreton-robinson, a. (2015). the white possessive: property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. university of minnesota press. monkman, l. (2017, february 2). ‘no ban on stolen land,’ say indigenous activists in the u.s. cbc news. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenous-activists-immigration-ban1.3960814?fbclid=iwar2uil5fonaotg1dirl-xo8vcwkg8yyb3kfncofp8jnfjw0vmtfijljibc morris, s. (2017, february 20). british muslim teacher denied entry to us on school trip. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/20/british-muslim-teacherdenied-entry-to-us-on-school-trip olwan, d. m. (2015). on assumptive solidarities in comparative settler colonialisms. feral feminisms, 4, 89-102. paling, e. (2017, february 18). asylum-seekers fleeing u.s. border agents receive helping hand from quebec rcmp. huffington post canada. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/02/18/hemmingford-quebec-rcmp-refugees-asylumborder-photo_n_14842790.html peterson, r., & chatterjee, s. (2017). dancing with complexity: decolonization and social justice dialogues. in m. morrow and l. h. malcoe (eds.), critical inquiries for social justice in mental health (pp. 138-164). university of toronto press. pierce, j. (contributor) (2019, august 9). joseph pierce on why academics must decolonize queerness (no. 37). [audio podcast episode]. in hyperallergic. https://hyperallergic.com/512789/joseph-pierce-on-why-academics-must-decolonizequeerness/ puar, j. k. (2017). the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. duke university press. razack, s. (2002). race, space, and the law: unmapping a white settler society. between the lines. rise: refugees, survivors and ex-detainees. (2016, july 13). media release – sovereignty + sanctuary: a first nations/refugee solidarity event – 13/07/2016. http://riserefugee.org/media-release-sovereignty-sanctuary-a-first-nations-refugeesolidarity-event-13072016/ roberts, r. (2017, january 31). white house claims five-year-old boy detained in us airport for hours 'could have posed a security threat'. the independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/white-house-five-year-old-boydetained-dulles-international-airport-hours-sean-spicer-pose-security-a7554521.html smith, k. (2013, august 10). aboriginal groups welcome refugees. green left. https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/aboriginal-groups-welcome-refugees stand with kashmir. (n.d.) go #redforkashmir. https://www.standwithkashmir.org/redforkashmir standing rock sioux tribe. (2019, august 16). standing rock sioux tribe seeks court ruling to halt pipeline operations, as dakota access llc pushes for expansion. https://www.standingrock.org/content/standing-rock-sioux-tribe-seeks-court-ruling-haltpipeline-operations-dakota-access-llc students for a free tibet canada. (n.d.). mission. https://www.sftcanada.org/mission tekayak, d. (2016). protecting earth rights and the rights of indigenous peoples: towards an international crime of ecocide. fourth world journal, 14(2), 5. torpey, j. (2000). the invention of the passport: surveillance, citizenship and the state. cambridge university press. truth and reconciliation commission of canada. (2015). honouring the truth, reconciling for the future. http://caid.ca/trcfinexesum2015.pdf tuck, e., guess, a., & sultan, h. (2014, june 26). not nowhere: collaborating on selfsame land. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society. lessons from “no ban on stolen land” studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 474-485, 2020 485 https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/not-nowhere-collaborating-on-selfsameland/ unis’tot’en camp. (n.d.). no pipelines: background of the campaign. https://unistoten.camp/nopipelines/background-of-the-campaign/ walia, h. (2014). undoing border imperialism. ak press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com yazzie, m. (2017). #nodapl archive – standing rock water protectors. https://www.nodaplarchive.com/solidarity-events.html zia, a. (2019). blinding kashmiris: the right to maim and the indian military occupation in kashmir. interventions, 21(6), 773-786. studies in social justice volume 3, issue 2, 263-265, 2009 correspondence address: kanchan sarker, department of sociology, university of british columbia, okanagan, kelowna, bc v1v 1v7, canada. tel: 250-807-8706, email; sarkerk@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 review of build it now: socialism for the twentyfirst century kanchan sarker department of sociology, grant macewan college, edmonton, alberta, canada build it now: socialism for the twenty-first century by michael a. lebowitz new york, monthly review press, 2006, (pb) isbn: 1-58367-15-5 michael a. lebowitz’s book build it now: socialism for the twenty-first century is one of the most valuable contributions to scholarship on the prospect of 21st century socialism. it may even provide a “handbook” for those who are striving for a better society where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (marx, 1848, as cited in lebowitz, p. 12). lebowitz’s analysis of the problems associated with capitalist relations of production and its ideology leads to conclusions about how to change the resulting inequalities. to bring change, workers should know why they want the changes they do and also they should have knowledge of existing solidarity among other people as fellow producers. for lebowitz, the process to change this capitalist world is continuous revolutionary struggle through participatory democracy with the right for the working class to make its own mistakes and learn from the dialectic of history (p. 72). the cherished site of this change is present day venezuela. as lebowitz was no doubt aware, this task is daunting with several ideological and structural obstacles. foremost among these is the mentality of tina, which stands for there is no alternative. among the more structural challenges are bretton woods institutions, the struggle against property rights, commodification, and the invasion of money and prices in all aspects of our life. in lebowitz’s view, only if people consciously practice such resistance and continually build solidarity across the world can we change this capitalist world to a socialist one. given that lebowitz believes venezuela is an appropriate site for 21st first century socialism, he analyzes how the country is moving toward this goal. it is an oil-rich country where infrastructure is at the level of centuries past and oil rents have made some people rich while 80% of the people remain poor. in lebowitz’s terms, capitalism in venezuela is parasitic, demonstrating the virtual disappearance of 264 kanchan sarker studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 manufacturing and agriculture, while possessing a pervasive culture of clientalism, corruption, and a “sham democracy.” hugo chávez was elected as the president of venezuela in 1998. by 2000, the country had a new name and new constitution: the bolivarian republic of venezuela and the bolivarian constitution. the constitution was based upon equality of rights and duties, solidarity, common effort, mutual understanding, and reciprocal respect. article 62 of the bolivarian constitution declares that participation by the people is “the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective” (p 72). this is a constitution that demands a democratic, participatory, and protagonistic society. within the new system are key elements of capitalism, such as the right to hold private property, recognition of the role of private enterprise in generating growth and employment, and autonomy for the central bank of venezuela. however, it is different from the regulatory framework of neo-liberalism penetrating much of the western world. rather than “worshipping the market,” it has rejected the privatization of oil and other state industries. rather than government retraction, the state is actively involved. to lebowitz’s surprise, there was little role for the selfmanaging co-operatives in the “social economy” of the bolivarian republic of venezuela. the system encourages private investment, creating a domestic environment for foreign investment, yet it does not follow neo-liberalism, which leaves markets virtually untouched. in this strategy for endogenous development, the active state works as the supply side: it acts not as entrepreneur, but as facilitator, correcting market failures and encouraging the development of technology, growth, and accumulation. the focus on endogenous development began on a relatively modest scale, not copying any previous path, but by inventing a new one. chavez repeatedly pronounced, “you can not end poverty without giving power to the poor” (p. 101). yet obstacles remain; the most important among them are the general belief that there is/was no place for co-management in strategic industries and worker self interest (as opposed to solidarity or a collective). lebowitz argues that in order to overcome these problems, venezuela must reinvent socialism. the way to do so is to develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition. this reinvention is not state socialism like in the soviet union. instead, it is a system which puts humans first, and not machines, or the state. in theory, this is a production system where the collective producer is both the object and subject of power. lebowitz demonstrates that this occurs not by a sudden change to society through state capitalism and bureaucracy, but rather through a step by step, gradual process with the people and through their understanding and choice. in his view, democratic decisions taken both in the workplace and by the community; production based on satisfying needs; common ownership; a democratic, participatory, and protagonistic government; and, solidarity based upon recognition of our common humanity characterize “the true human society” (p. 67). for that to be achieved, we need to learn from the lessons of the 20th century. as rosa luxemburg said, the working class “demands the right to make its own mistakes and learn in the dialectic of history” (p. 72). the bolivarian constitution of venezuela is one of the documents of this learning process. lebowitz suggests that book review: demands the right to make its own mistakes 265 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 the experience of yugoslav self-management offers a good example of learning from our own mistakes. build it now: socialism for the twenty-first century is unique in many ways. first, lebowitz calls our attention to early marxian thought from an early draft of the communist manifesto. to paraphrase, the goal is to organize a society where every member can develop and use their capabilities and powers in complete freedom without infringing on the basic conditions of society. lebowitz reminds us that contrary to the much talked about economic equality, the ultimate goal of the communists was something different. this goal—social relations of freely associated producers, free development of each and free development of all—may not be an unattainable alternative. if we look to lebowitz, then the way toward this goal is continuous revolutionary practices through participatory democracy, providing that we learn from our mistakes: it is the marxism of che guevara. studies in social justice volume 4, issue 1, 67-85, 2010 correspondence address: clara fischer, irish school of ecumenics, trinity college dublin, bea house, milltown park, dublin 6, ireland. email: fischecc@tcd.ie issn: 1911-4788 consciousness and conscience: feminism, pragmatism, and the potential for radical change clara fischer1 building upon this insight, i will explore the power of personal transformation in bringing about systemic social change. in this way, i hope to undo the limitations placed upon a potentially liberatory understanding of social justice by a too-narrow preoccupation with large-scale institutions and systems. for example, first-wave feminism’s focus on suffrage and democracy as a vehicle for the realization of social irish school of ecumenics, trinity college dublin, dublin, ireland abstract pragmatist philosopher john dewey famously stated that man is a creature of habit, and not of reason or instinct. in this paper, i will assess dewey’s explication of the habituated self and the potential it holds for radical transformative processes. in particular, i will examine the process of coming to feminist consciousness and will show that a feministpragmatist reading of change can accommodate a view of the self as responsible agent. following the elucidation of the changing self, i will appraise key pragmatist concepts of inquiry, such as doubt and self-reflexivity, with regard to their treatment of deep-seated internalizations of oppressive norms and the initiation of change. ultimately, i will argue that a feminist-pragmatist understanding of transformation is conducive not only to the project of personal transformation, but also to social and political change more generally. introduction as societies are generally characterized by power differentials between various— sometimes overlapping—groups, demands for social justice fundamentally constitute demands for an abolition, or at least a diminishing, of such power disparities. social movements, however, often appear incapable of carrying out the perhaps more radical visions of change they promise and thus fall short of fulfilling said demands for social justice. for example, despite the sustained activism of women, gender equality remains a formality in many countries, with men still in control of the majority of the world’s economic and political resources. it is because of this that many feminists have come to theorize the possibility of radical change not merely in terms of institutions and political structures, but in terms of something much more drastic: we, our very selves, need to change. 68 clara fischer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 justice has been shown to be only partially successful, particularly as women’s political representation failed to soar and instead flattened out in many countries in the early decades of the twentieth century. while political structures are of course pertinent in the context of social justice, we should also pay considerable attention to the workings of our individual consciousnesses, and the kind of selves we are. but what exactly is the self? how do we change our selves? and what is the connection between a changed self and its environment? this paper will try to answer these questions and will draw attention to the role knowledge plays in relation to radical transformative processes. such processes usually require a rethinking of oppressive norms and values that are portrayed as unproblematic and natural. hence, alternative knowledges and altered understandings have a central role to play in undermining oppressive systems. specifically, this paper will draw upon the work of john dewey in order to establish a feminist-pragmatist analysis of change, which will be explored via the radical transformative process of coming to feminist consciousness. insights gained from such an analysis at the level of the self will then be extrapolated onto the broader institutional level. additionally, dewey’s melioristic worldview will be discussed and the question of a democratically devised notion of progress broached. throughout, i will keep in mind such questions as the following: is personal change possible? what causes personal change? what is the role of knowledge in changing oneself? what implications does changing ourselves have for us as moral beings? i will begin by outlining the relationship between self, agency, and moral responsibility, and the possibility of personal change from a feminist perspective. morality, agency, and the possibility of change in her essay “moral responsibility and social change: a new theory of self,” feminist philosopher ann ferguson (1997) outlines what she calls the “determinismresponsibility problem” (p. 117). this consists of the following predicament: how can systems of oppression be dismantled, or at least to some extent changed, if people’s agency is overly deterministic? in other words, in order to be held morally accountable for changing systems of oppression, oppressor and oppressed need to be theorized as being capable of carrying out such change in the first place. indeed, to avoid this [determinism-responsibility] problem, any explanation of how systems of domination are supported by dominators and submitted to by subordinates must avoid being deterministic in a way that implies that both those who benefit and those who are oppressed are not morally responsible for challenging and resisting those systems. (p. 117) ferguson explores various feminist theories which aim to explain systems of oppression, but finds each of these incapable of solving the determinismresponsibility problem. for example, radical feminism’s essentialism (women as naturally caring, loving, and good vs. men as aggressive, cold, or calculating) does not allow for a change in these supposed intrinsic natures. social constructionist theories, on the other hand, while defying a view of fundamental inalterable male and female natures, consciousness and conscience 69 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 overemphasize the role of socially created structures of selfhood. thus, as “both dominators and dominated are made to collude in sexist practices through the force of internalized desires and constructions of self” (p. 119), these theories “so overstate the determinism involved as to make it unclear how anyone could ever escape racist self-concepts or heteropatriarchal desires” (p. 120). liberal feminist theory “rules out psychological theories that posit social oppression as creating a ‘deformed’ or ‘truncated self’” (p. 120), as liberalism’s rational individual operates purely in terms of costs and benefits accrued in social situations. 2 while ferguson goes on to outline her “social materialist, decentred theory of subjectivity” (p. 116) as an alternative capable of overcoming the determinismresponsibility problem, i contend that john dewey’s view of the self can also be appropriated by feminists to do precisely that. dewey provides us with an explication of the self, which accommodates both a permanent, connected, and coherent self, on the one hand, and a flexible, dynamic self, on the other. thus, dewey’s theory of subjectivity represents a third option to those overly deterministic visions of the self, and those transient, overly fluid interpretations of the self, both of which render change, and hence moral responsibility, impotent. it is in this sense then, that the deweyan view of selfhood can make change an ethically valuable concept, drawing attention to the moral responsibility we each have as agents in the transformation of oppressive systems. finally, poststructuralist theory initially appears to escape over-determinism, as it views the self in constant flux. and yet, “such a self-process must have some relatively stable elements in order even to take on the goal of changing,” including “a sense of a unique history, set in social relationships with specific others, and habitual responses tied to a particular body through both memory and aspiration” (p. 121). as ferguson demonstrates, all of these major feminist theories—radical, social constructionist, liberal and poststructuralist— have major shortcomings in that they portray selves as either too deterministic or too transient. this in turn prohibits them from positing a self that is capable of changing. dewey’s self for dewey, the self is a corporeal, socially embedded being, 3 composed of a unique set of habits. habits are socially acquired responses, 4 which we come to amass over the course of a lifetime—a process enabled through our capacity to learn. thus, according to dewey (1985b), habit is the mainspring of human action, and habits are formed for the most part under the influence of the customs of a group. the organic structure of man entails the formation of habit, for, whether we wish it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, every act effects a modification of attitude and set which directs future behaviour. (p. 334) this future-directed interpretation of habit is also morally significant, as we learn to identify good and bad acts and dispositions. 5 hence, in the case of a misbehaving child, for example, the adults of a group tend to correct the child so it knows which way to act in future. dewey writes: 70 clara fischer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 the child . . . is at first held liable for what he has done, not because he deliberately and knowingly intended such action, but in order that in the future he may take into account bearings and consequences which he has failed to consider in what he has done. (1985a, p. 303) although this socially learned process of habit acquisition may imply uniformity and conservatism, our particular set of habits actually makes us unique, as nobody’s experiences, and hence nobody’s responses, will be absolutely identical. as gouinlock (1972) notes: each individual possesses a fund of habits distinguishable from that of others. the fact that habits function together, and in ways distinctive of a particular individual, accounts for the fact of “character”—of a more or less unified and dynamic composite of personality traits. this, indeed, is what dewey means by the self: a dynamic organization of habits. (p. 95) dewey believes that there is a tendency in adults to submit to stale and inflexible habits, while younger people are still more adaptable and open to different ways of thinking and acting. however, this does not mean that an adult cannot change her habits (1985a, p. 305). in fact, according to dewey, we need to constantly reassess our habits, particularly as the world is an evolving place, where old habits may no longer be suitable to novel conditions. dewey’s organic view of the world thus posits a self which is stable, but which is also constantly changing, and which we should enable to change according to its environment. as we can see, dewey does not view the person as separated, but as embedded and influenced by the world around her. hence, every act we undertake will have an effect on the world (and vice versa), including on our own self. as dewey (1985a) explains: except as the outcome of arrested development, there is no such thing as a fixed, ready-made, finished self. every living self causes acts and is itself caused in return by what it does. all voluntary action is a remaking of self, since it creates new desires, instigates to new modes of endeavour, brings to light new conditions which institute new ends. our personal identity is found in the thread of continuous development which binds together these changes. (p. 306) here we have the fluidity of selfhood which is so common of poststructuralist theory. yet at the same time, this transient, changing view of the self is complemented by a stable and enduring structure of personal identity. the dual aspect of deweyan selfhood is aptly described by him as containing a “distinction between an old, an accomplished self, and a new and moving self, between the static and the dynamic self” (p. 305). as he outlines, the former aspect is constituted by habits already formed. habit gives facility, and there is always a tendency to rest on our oars, to fall back on what we have already achieved . . . hence, the old, the habitual self, is likely to be treated as if it were the self; . . . we become uneasy at the idea of initiating new courses; we are repelled by the difficulties that attend entering upon them; we dodge assuming a new responsibility. we tend to consciousness and conscience 71 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 favour the old self and to make its perpetuation the standard of our valuations and the end of our conduct. in this way, we withdraw from actual conditions and their requirements and opportunities; we contract and harden the self. (p. 306) and yet, “the growing, enlarging, liberated self . . . goes forth to meet new demands and occasions, and readapts and remakes itself in the process. it welcomes untried situations” (p. 307). for dewey, we are constantly faced with a choice between acting in accordance with the old, static self, or with the new, dynamic self. we should not, however, think of these two selves as ontologically separate, but rather as coexistent and interwoven aspects of a single self, which is both constant and changing at the same time. hence, dewey’s depiction of a stable-yet-dynamic self serves to highlight the nature of the self as a fund of habits which is always moving, but which also contains a permanent structure. habits are the unique ways in which we interact with the world, but they also constitute the building blocks of our very character. dewey makes the point by drawing an analogy with a house (1988, p. 64). we can imagine that a house may be run down in certain parts (with drain pipes leaking in the bathroom, and damp developing on an outside wall), while other parts may display entirely new features (a new extension), and yet others showing signs of repairs (replacement windows for example). similarly, the structure of my self is provided by the structure of the house, and just as certain habits of mine have fallen into disrepair and become abandoned, others are either completely new or have been refreshed and updated. now, as we have noted, the self is constructed through habit by its interactions with its environment, and vice versa. in the context of my own life, 6 this change in habit becomes interesting when we note how complex the self really is. piano playing is just one of many, many habits making up my self, and the processes habits undergo—whether they remain static, become replaced by other habits, or get recycled into yet others—are multifarious and often overlapping. i mean overlapping here in two senses: changes in habit can occur at different speeds; in addition, they may necessitate further changes, as certain habits depend upon other habits. dewey (1988) characterizes the former, temporal aspect of change in habits by noting that the structure of a house forms “an arrangement of changing events such that properties which change slowly, limit and direct a series of quick changes and give them an order which they do not otherwise possess” (p. 65). in other words, the stability provided by the structure composed of habits enables changes to take place at different speeds, and provides the framework in which change can take place coherently against a backdrop of the past and potentiality of the future. also, as we then, we can say that my being born into a musical family meant that my character and the habits making up my character were informed by this musical environment and helped to shape myself as a musical self. for example, i acquired a habit of piano playing, which for a long time was a central part of my self, with many hours of practice strengthening this habit. unfortunately moving out of the family home several years later meant that i no longer had access to a piano and hence the habit of playing the piano, like the drain pipe or the damp wall in our analogy of the house, was gradually neglected. recently, however, the gift of my mother’s old piano rekindled and strengthened the formerly abandoned habit of piano playing, which now again forms an important part of my self. 72 clara fischer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 will see more clearly in the next section, it is precisely because habits are part of a structure that the removal or introduction of a particular habit can have a knock-on effect on other habits. for example, since my habit of piano playing has been restored, i now find myself increasingly on the look-out for sheet music. hence, i have acquired a new habit of purchasing and borrowing sheet music. the money needed to engage in this new habit has been directed away from other habits, hence the habit of buying coffee twice a week after work has now been met with the same fate piano playing once encountered after my move out of the family home. but how does this relate to the moral questions we raised at the beginning? recalling that dewey’s division of self into dynamic and stable is merely a functional division, aimed at clarifying the structure/change accommodation of the self as a fund of habits, we can assert that dewey places particular emphasis on the dynamic aspect of the self. for dewey (1985a), the latter implies not only progress, but moral progress. he writes: for everywhere there is an opportunity and a need to go beyond what one has been, beyond “himself,” if the self is identified with the body of desires, affections, and habits, which has been potent in the past. indeed, we may say that the good person is precisely the one who is most conscious of the alternative, and is the most concerned to find openings for the newly forming or growing self; since no matter how “good” he has been, he becomes “bad” . . . as soon as he fails to respond to the demand for growth. any other basis for judging the moral status of the self is conventional. in reality, direction of movement, not the plane of attainment and rest, determines moral quality. (p. 307) indeed, for dewey, the ethical person cultivates a habit of openness which enables her to remain flexible and to question the dependability of other, perhaps rather outdated, habits. such self-reflexivity is fostered through intelligent inquiry, and constitutes growth, a process which is morally significant, as morality is held to be movement, rather than the attainment of static ends. 7 having said all this, we can see that dewey’s habituated dynamic-permanent self constitutes an alternative to both unduly deterministic theories of subjectivity and poststructuralist theories, thereby overcoming the determinism-responsibility problem by allowing for a self that is capable of change. dewey also places the burden for change squarely into the hands of every agent, reinforcing the view that a refusal to welcome change is not only outmoded or inappropriate, but that it is immoral. from a feminist point of view, this is, of course, utterly appealing, as dewey’s theory of selfhood can explain agency, thus rendering personal, as well as large-scale, social transformation possible. since people are shown to possess the capacity to resist or subvert oppressive systems, they can be held morally accountable for failing to do so.8 the process of coming to feminist consciousness is perhaps one of the most lifealtering events a person is likely to experience, as it initiates not only a radical rethinking of one’s existence as such, but it usually also acts as a catalyst to changes feminist consciousness consciousness and conscience 73 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 stretching far beyond one’s personal experience of self. indeed, the changes we undergo in understanding ourselves, the relationships we have with other people, institutions and the world as such, appear to be so radical, that coming to feminist consciousness is frequently described in epiphanous terms, as an “aha moment” or a sudden enlightenment. outlining her entry into the early women’s liberation movement, lynne segal (2007), for example, recalls her own experience of coming to feminist consciousness and the intense feeling of personal change as follows: that sense of being lost, lonely and bewildered, the condition i thought i had brought upon myself in fleeing respectability, turned out to be far from unusual . . . why were so many of us quite so confused? . . . we were educated to be happy, healthy, thinking people, and more was invested in and expected of us than ever before. but many sensed the cloud behind that silver lining, suspecting that our growth and fulfilment was not compatible with the image of femininity thrust before us . . . the narratives that would address our needs and confusions, . . . seemed to operate like a spiritual renewal: “women’s liberation suddenly lifted the curtain concealing the big world from us . . .” i too experienced exactly those moments of sudden awakening. (pp. 64 – 67) this experience of moving from a state of confusion to sudden awakening is something that is frequently attested by feminists. 9 but what can dewey tell us about this personal, very radical, life-altering experience? indeed, radical is perhaps the best word to describe it, as with hindsight it seems that my life can be split into a pre-feminist, unenlightened phase, and a postconversion, feminist phase, with two completely different selves acting under the guise of “me.” but is this possible? is the separation of pre-feminist self from a feminist self feasible? if we take on board dewey’s insights with regard to a stable yet dynamic self, we know that this cannot be so. recalling dewey’s analogy of the house, we know that change takes place non-uniformly and at varying speeds, but also against the back-drop of a structure provided by the house. hence, feminist consciousness must have changed certain habits which formed part of my self, but it did not erase all of my habits prior to the conversion experience. as sullivan (2000) notes: while segal’s experience will reflect the zeitgeist of the time, the “conversion” process itself is something many women describe in remarkably similar terms. thus, even though the once popular feminist consciousness raising groups seem to have disappeared in the west, and even though women’s status and social roles have undergone considerable changes since those early women’s liberation days, the actual experience of encountering and identifying with feminism for the first time appears to be as epiphanous and enlightening as ever. this certainly holds true for my own feminist conversion, which took place in a very different setting, and which rebelled against a different paradigm of femininity nearly forty years after segal’s moment of awakening. release from all structures of identity—if such a thing were possible— would not free us . . . to be whatever we want. rather, it would dissolve us into beings with no capacity for or agency to effect transformation and change, effectively eliminating—not increasing—our freedom. (p. 29) 74 clara fischer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 the complete annihilation of a pre-feminist self would simply not allow for a rebuilding of a new, feminist self, for who would do the building? feminist consciousness has allowed me to discard some habits, which i’ve deemed to be patriarchal in origin, while retaining other habits, and acquiring yet others—all of which collectively make up my character. as we’ve noted, changes of habit take place according to varying tempos, impacting on other habits in non-uniform ways. feminist accounts of coming to feminist consciousness as a truly radical experience confirm this interdependent nature of our habits. indeed, it appears that once one has become “converted” or “enlightened,” feminism and feminist analyses seem to permeate large swathes of one’s life. so norms surrounding sexuality, body-image, personal relationships, career paths, and so on, are all re-evaluated with old, patriarchal habits being dropped (to varying degrees and at varying speeds), making space for newly developed habits. it is for this reason that theorists often speak of viewing the world with gendered or feminist lenses. to clarify further, let me illustrate the point. feminist accounts of coming to feminist consciousness attest to a personal transformative process, which begins with perplexity and uncertainty, and reaches a state of greater clarity (hence the “aha” sensation), aided by a new feminist understanding of one’s self. habits are gained, rejected, or reused, as they are interpreted as either patriarchal or not. for example, several women philosophers have noted their reluctance in calling themselves philosophers. 10 the trouble lies in the inertness of established habit. no matter how accidental and irrational the circumstances of its origin, no matter how coming to feminist consciousness can allow women philosophers to gain an awareness of this, to analyze its causes, and to try to undo this tendency. the habit of referring to oneself subordinately as a “teacher of philosophy” or a “person in philosophy” can thus be abandoned, and replaced by a new habit directly asserting “i am a philosopher.” the impact this can have on one’s character is tremendous, as habits interact with other habits to form the dynamic-yet-stable self. all of this, of course, requires a high level of reinterpretation of previous experiences, and a high level of self-reflexivity. as feminists have shown, patriarchy can work very subtly, and as social constructionists in particular have pointed out, our very desires, hopes, and aspirations may be informed by internalized sexism. and yet, recalling the discussion of the previous section, we should be wary of falling back into an over-determinism which completely denies our agency. indeed, “dewey’s somewhat paradoxical-sounding advice that we need to form the habit of not forming fixed habits” (sullivan, 2000, p. 39) can help us to be more selfreflexive. but is such self-reflexivity enough to counter unconscious sexist norms? considering the rigorous socialization processes we undergo from a very young age, can a habit of openness and questioning undermine such gendered internalizations? could this, in turn, diminish dewey’s capacity to overcome the determinismresponsibility problem? have we been too hasty in designating dewey’s view of a self composed of habits as the solution to this problem? let us briefly return then, to what dewey (2002) has to say about the habituated self and the potential for change. habits are capable of providing structure, precisely because they resist change to a certain extent. hence, dewey asserts that: consciousness and conscience 75 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 different are the conditions which now exist from those under which the habit was formed, the latter persists until the environment obstinately rejects it. (p. 125) this, for dewey creates a “vicious circle” (p. 126) in which our selves are composites of socially acquired habits, but where changes to those habits are rendered nigh on impossible. to counter this, dewey recommends the fostering of self-reflexivity, preferably from a very early age when our habits are still more malleable, hence the importance of education in dewey’s philosophy. however, there is another route out of the “vicious circle.” our habits, according to dewey, are often contradictory and in tension with each other. in moments of heightened tension and friction we encounter the real possibility of change as the seeming harmonious functioning of our habits ceases to be, and we need to discard those well-worn grooves etched by our modes of being and start creating new ones (2002, p. 128). but what happens when we deny or avoid such increased tension? dewey acknowledges that people often want to revert to old habits to reclaim a sense of stability. however, laxity due to decadence of old habits cannot be corrected by exhortations to restore old habits in their former rigidity. even though it were abstractly desirable it is impossible. and it is not desirable because the inflexibility of old habits is precisely the chief cause of their decay and disintegration. plaintive lamentations at the prevalence of change and abstract appeals for restoration of senile authority are signs of personal feebleness, of inability to cope with change. it is a “defense reaction.” (p. 130) this last sentence is significant, as it indicates that dewey was aware of our resistance to change. of course we are often not cognizant of this, particularly when it comes to aspects of our selves which are difficult to deal with. sullivan (2004) outlines this in relation to racial discrimination and white privilege. she notes that habits “can often be defense mechanisms by which one protects oneself from perceived dangers and conflicts, the protection often including avoidance of conscious self-examination” (p. 200). the language here is remarkably similar to dewey’s, and yet, i think dewey drastically underestimated the power of such selfsabotaging habits. this is not simply a matter of a lazy reliance on old and trusted habits in spite of novel conditions, but a resistance to changing habits of self which are the result of and the creators of oppressive norms. it is for this reason that dewey needs to be complemented by feminist theorizing on the creation, functioning, and perpetuation of such norms, and the habits and psychical structures which try to resist their transformation. while dewey was certainly aware of women’s inferior positioning in society, it is feminist theories, which explicitly take such positioning as a starting point, hence feminism’s capacity to illuminate the intricate and often unconscious workings of oppression. since oppression is often murky and elusive, feminists, like miners, have had to unearth the more or less unquantifiable, the seemingly illusory and the intangible. 11 the fruits of this digging around in conscious and unconscious gendered existence lie in the prolific analyses of a range of aspects of people’s lives—from body image to moral development. by capturing and articulating the specific manifestations of patriarchy and their effects on women and men, feminists 76 clara fischer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 have been able to tease out not only the intersections and functionings of the more obvious oppressive patriarchal norms, but also of the very habits underpinning these as part of our unconscious selves. feminist theories are therefore fundamental to an understanding of selves which are both informed by, and instrumental in, the perpetuation of oppressive norms and the systems they uphold. it is only by facing the unconscious, obstructive workings of our habits head-on that our selves can be changed, and the functioning of oppressive norms interrupted. premised upon this transformation of individual (un)consciousness is the real possibility of wider, systemic change. a feminist-deweyan analysis of change therefore holds the potential not only for change of the self, but also for change of oppressive systems. but how does such an analysis explain the occurrence of change in habits in the first place? in this regard, dewey’s appreciation of habit as socially acquired response is pertinent. as we have seen, dewey (1985a) believes correcting a child is useful not as punishment, but rather as a way for it to understand what has been done wrong in the past, so the mistake can be avoided in the future. the same can be said for an adult, as the fact that one did not deliberate before the performance of an act which brought injury to others, that he did not mean or intend the act, is of no significance, save as it may throw light upon the kind of response by others which will render him likely to deliberate next time he acts under similar circumstances. (p. 304) from a feminist point of view, such a reliance on people’s responses can be problematic, as in an oppressive system, where sexism is openly or tacitly condoned, a reprimand for sexist actions and attitudes by others is likely not to occur. similarly, those more subtle, even unconscious, habits discussed above are probably not going to be questioned by many women, nor by the rest of society. we have noted, however, that feminist theories of socialization and the psychology of sexism are capable of shedding light on these phenomena, and it is from these that new habits, and hence new character, emerge. indeed, the process of coming to feminist consciousness can replace the dominant, oppressive group of social approvers/reprimanders posited by dewey in the formation of habits, with the discourses and analyses of the oppressed group. in other words, our habits are no longer structured by patriarchal norms, but by feminist ones. thus, after coming to feminist consciousness, a woman will turn to other feminists for approval, and her actions, beliefs, ideals, etc., will be shaped by their advice, their insights. this will also take place retrospectively, with past experiences now understood within a feminist world-view. 12 since we are capable of learning, our new feminist insights and our entry into the feminist community will ensure that other feminists’ responses to our actions and thoughts will enable future feminist—rather than sexist—acts. 13 it is in this sense, also, that motivations resulting from internalized patriarchal norms can be undermined, as feminists have done considerable work on highlighting and capturing these previously unnoticed sexist preconceptions. by drawing upon feminist analyses of the pervasiveness of the values of oppressive systems, dewey’s view of the melioration of acts which were not intended to do harm, but which in fact do contribute to the continuation of oppressive systems, can be asserted. in other consciousness and conscience 77 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 words, those unintentional, yet harmful, acts (which are plentiful in patriarchal societies where people assume sexist norms often unconsciously) can be countered by adopting dewey’s account of group approval, and embellishing it with feminist theories of socialization and the psychology of sexism. 14 for now, it is important to note that what might be termed the “approvaldisapproval mechanism” and its ethical implications for change on a personal level are instrumental in the creation of a feminist self. this is not to claim that we merely tailor our ethical beliefs and actions to the dominant ideals of the group thus, feminist insights can undo dewey’s short-sightedness in relation to deep-seated, unconscious oppressive norms, thereby providing a feminist-deweyan solution to the determinismresponsibility problem. further, the combination of feminist and deweyan theory, and its explication of a transformation of habits through group approval and disapproval, is pertinent not only in the scenario of coming to feminist consciousness, but also for the possibility of larger, structural change. 15 —a sort of herd mentality—but rather that our social nature plays a vital role in the creation of selves which require a certain sense of community. thus, mckenna (2002) describes deweyan individuals as being “formed, though not determined, by their society” (p. 147). on top of this, dewey (1985a) notes that “being held accountable by others is . . . an important safeguard and directive force in growth” (p. 305). growth again, being the movement of ethical development, a process of moral improvement, where our new, dynamic, and now feminist self undergoes continuous adaptation, with actions shaping new ideals, in turn creating new aspects of the self, and so on (1985a, p. 306). thus, “the fact that each act tends to form, through habit, a self which will perform a certain kind of acts, is the foundation, theoretically and practically of responsibility” (p. 304). knowledge, doubt and change but what sparks such a monumental identity shift, such as coming to feminist consciousness, in the first place? is it really the case that an article, a course, or a women’s group, holds the power to suddenly change our entire lives, seemingly without warning and without precedent? we have seen that the cultivation of a habit of flexibility and openness can enable us to reassess other habits, to doubt the certainty of previously taken-for-granted habits. indeed, the concept of doubt is often posited by pragmatists as the basic prerequisite to inquiry, which in turn, can lead to change. on this account, doubt is conceived of as an “irritation,” an underlying uncertainty that must be resolved. thus, for dewey (1997), doubt forms the very basis of thought: “the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt. thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion . . . there is something specific which occasions and evokes it. given a difficulty, the next step is suggestion of some way out” (p. 12). one will naturally appeal to past experiences and previously accumulated knowledge to find the “way out,” or the right course of action, in a given situation. however, if the problem is incapable of being answered by the already existing fund of prior knowledge, we must be open to further investigation. as we know, dewey believes that there is a tendency for us to rely on previous habits, including mental habits, and it is our rejection of this easy way out that truly enables critical thinking. for dewey, 78 clara fischer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 the easiest way [out of perplexity] is to accept any suggestion that seems plausible and thereby bring to an end the condition of mental uneasiness. reflective thinking is always more or less troublesome because it involves overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance. reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful . . . the most important fact in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion . . . to maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry—these are the essentials of thinking. (p. 13) dewey’s positing of a self-reflexive, doubting habit that prompts questioning of other, entrenched habits (along with his account of doubt as the basis for reflective thought) highlights the link between change of the self and the development of new knowledge and new understanding of the changed self. this new knowledge emerges during transformative experiences and needs to be understood in terms of dewey’s naturalism, in which mind and nature are coterminous, and not separated realms. hence, speaking of moral knowledge, dewey (2002) asserts that “consciousness and conscience have more than a verbal connection” (p. 134). moral knowledge is an organic function of moral situations and the self as responsible agent. 16 i believe that this epistemological connection to selfhood is pertinent for an analysis of the process of coming to feminist consciousness, where new information and a reframing of previously taken-for-granted norms go hand in hand with the development of a new self. thus, i maintain that the concept of doubt can be applied in this context, and used to explain the apparent abruptness and intensity of the conversion process. this is largely due to the fact that doubt can be protracted over extended periods of time, even covering the majority of one’s life. we can draw a parallel between the perplexity dewey refers to as the initial catalyst for a process of inquiry and the confusion segal relates in her experience as a woman prior to feminist consciousness. her bewilderment and uncertainty associated with living in conflict with standard paradigms of femininity is something many women experience, as is acknowledged by her question: “why were so many of us quite so confused?” the answer, of course, is that the ideals of femininity and masculinity endorsed by patriarchal societies are simply unattainable, hence, the confusion and perplexity caused by the contradiction of one’s actual life and the ideal one is supposed to emulate. a feeling of confusion and an underlying suspicion that things just somehow do not fit right, a conscious or even subconscious feeling of doubt, is something that can infuse a person’s life, even from a very young age. it is when we come to understand what it is we are to direct our doubt at, what we should be doubting, what is causing the contradiction in our lives, that we begin the process of coming to feminist consciousness. otherwise, doubting remains a purely internalized suspicion, a feeling of unease, indeed, a self-doubt.17 feminist analyses and a feminist interpretation of the world can help us understand what, exactly, is causing the unease segal is referring to, and what is inducing these feelings of doubt that may have been with us for a lifetime. consciousness and conscience 79 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 it is in this sense also that sandra bartky’s (1990) depiction of feminist consciousness as an “anguished consciousness” (p. 14) is significant. following marx, bartky similarly locates the possibility of change in contradictions, although not, as dewey would, in contradictions of habit, but rather in “modes of production,” as well as “in the social order” (pp. 13-14) more generally. for bartky, such contradictions provide the very possibility of change, as they allow for a rejection of oppressive norms and for an imagining of a state of liberation. bartky writes: “this possibility [of the liberation of women] is more than a mere accidental accompaniment of feminist consciousness; rather, feminist consciousness is the apprehension of that possibility” (p. 14). beneath this identification of feminist consciousness as the apprehension of change lies an appreciation of the sense of indeterminacy involved in the process of raising said consciousness. thus, “there is an anguished consciousness, an inner uncertainty and confusion which characterizes human subjectivity in periods of social change”, hence “feminist consciousness, in large measure, is an anguished consciousness” (p. 14). bartky locates this uncertainty and confusion (reminiscent of segal’s account) in the actual conversion process itself, and in the subsequent negotiations of the self with a sexist world, which the feminist henceforth has to contend with. rather than positing confusion and doubt as a precondition for raised consciousness, uncertainty results from the conversion process and characterizes one’s existence as a feminist. 18 thus, in my own experience, i realize that my introduction to feminism amplified an already existing, nagging doubt, which had to be framed and trusted. this created a questioning of previously taken-for-granted, patriarchal explanations of the world, and led to further inquiry in the form of self-exploration and a search for new answers. in sum, the long-term presence of doubt induced by contradictory gender norms, combined with an introduction to feminist theory and feminist community while it is very likely that feminists experience feelings of uncertainty and doubt even after coming to feminist consciousness (particularly as they begin to reframe and reconceptualize the various aspects of their lives as “feminist”), bartky’s account perhaps places insufficient emphasis on the insights and certainty to be drawn from the social and communal nature of feminist consciousness as it is structured by means of the approval-disapproval mechanism. additionally, not enough credence is given to doubt as a primary factor in initiating change. although bartky understands change as a consequence of contradictions, doubt appears during and after consciousness is raised. but isn’t doubt a product of the contradictions required for change? and don’t such contradictions occur (long) before the process of feminist consciousness is consciously embarked upon? by positing doubt as more or less dormant in selves—even over the course of extended periods of time—the radical feminist conversion experience can be re-evaluated. 19 and the resultant reassessment of self and environment, all constituted a monumental process of what dewey terms “reflective thinking.” since the doubt underlying such critical thought was already present, and presumably growing before the actual feminist awakening as such occurred, we can see that coming to feminist consciousness is not as sudden as it may initially seem, but rather a protracted process that has its root in the very contradictions making up our selves. dewey’s account of heightened tension created by clashing habits as a catalyst for change gives further credence to this. the feminist depiction of coming to feminist consciousness as an “aha moment” or a conversion can thus be replaced by a more 80 clara fischer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 gradual account of this transformative process. doubt and uncertainty experienced over a prolonged period of time before raised consciousness give way to greater clarity and assuredness once the reorganization of habits begins to take place. while perplexity will presumably persist to some extent, the tension of conflicting habits will ease off as the self comes to reconstitute itself in light of feminist consciousness. we have seen, then, that dewey’s view of the changing self provides a framework for understanding the gradual process involved in coming to feminist consciousness: a coherent self undergoes substantial change by dropping habits or changing them in favour of new ones. these new habits are acquired by means of the approvaldisapproval mechanism, with a new, feminist group now informing one’s habits. while doubt lies at the very root of change, we have also seen that this can linger in a woman’s conscious or unconscious life for a very long time, making the conversion process all the more intense as it covers a whole plethora of habits acquired over the course of a lifetime. this change in the self is epistemically conditioned, as new knowledge and a new understanding of self and world are integral to the transformation experienced in the process of coming to feminist consciousness. finally, the movement of growth, the movement toward a “better” self, is presumed by dewey in all of this. with this model of change and progress i want to return to the possibility of wider, systemic change touched upon earlier. beyond the self dewey’s thought is fundamentally melioristic: his belief in the betterment of our selves and our world is constantly present in his writing on politics, economics, and a myriad of other topics. growth, for dewey, is a moral category: an evolving self has the agency to choose to improve, that is, to choose a new self over an old self, indeed, a good self over a bad self. where this becomes problematic, of course, is when it comes to defining what is good and what is bad. who gets to decide what constitutes progress? 20 in light of this, we should be mindful of the connection between changes in selves and larger systemic changes. i have argued that the latter can come about through the instantiation of the former. while feminist theorists have long drawn attention to the while this may be seen as a stumbling block, i believe that it is possible to use dewey’s insights on change examined above, to counter some of the more problematic aspects of “change as progress.” an in-depth discussion lies beyond the scope of this essay. i will, however, make the following suggestion: dewey’s radical and passionate attachment to democracy can provide a useful tool for further analysis, including allowing for a democratically devised notion of progress, indeed a multiplicity of accounts of progress. dewey’s view of democracy as a system involving collective inquiry has already been described as a precursor to what is now known as deliberative democracy. this holistic and cooperative approach could be strengthened by the model of inclusive democracy outlined by iris marion young (2000) in inclusion and democracy. such a model could allow for progress to be expressed and heard by all members of society, including those on the margins. inclusion is particularly pertinent from a feminist point of view, as women’s traditional exclusion from spheres of power has resulted in oppressive institutions and systems that are especially harsh on women and girls. consciousness and conscience 81 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 importance of a changed self as a precondition for more wide-spread and institutional change, i believe that a feminist-pragmatist understanding of the habituated self can illuminate how the self functions in oppressive systems, and the role it plays in sustaining and upholding such systems. feminist analyses are capable of shedding light on the specifically gendered nature of our beings (whether conscious or unconscious), while dewey’s explication of the self as a fund of habits allows for structure and flexibility in its depiction of an enduring-yet-dynamic self. by adopting this feminist-pragmatist view of a morally responsible self capable of change, indeed responsible for change, social movements can gain a clearer picture of the moral self, and the potential it holds to effect broader systemic change. dewey’s notion of progress, when rearticulated as an expression of inclusive or deliberative democracy, can help us to evaluate the changes we seek to realize. i noted in the introduction to this essay that social movements often fail to bring about the changes they promise. i maintain that a feminist-pragmatist understanding of change, as proffered above, can aid the production of systemic change by being an effective instrument in the understanding and dismantling of oppressive norms and systems, thereby fulfilling social movements’ aspirations for social justice. conclusion in this essay, i have argued for a feminist-pragmatist analysis of change. such an analysis allows us to theorize oppressors and oppressed as instigators and participants in transformative processes. at the level of the self, we saw how this is possible by applying a feminist-pragmatist analysis to the process of coming to feminist consciousness. by combining dewey’s view of a habituated dynamic-yetstable self with feminist analyses of sexism and feminist consciousness, we arrive at a notion of selfhood that can support the self’s diminishment of unconscious sexist habits. this feminist-pragmatist view of selfhood is also fundamentally connected to epistemological concerns, as we can draw parallels between the process of coming to feminist consciousness and dewey’s notion of “reflective thinking.” we should also note the centrality of doubt and self-reflexivity in bringing about change, and the importance of group approval/disapproval in the creation of new habits. finally, i have argued that a feminist-pragmatist analysis of change is also applicable on a wider, systemic scale, with dewey’s promotion of democracy harbouring the potential for a rethinking of the notion of progress itself. in sum, we can say that a feminist-pragmatist interpretation of change overcomes the determinismresponsibility problem by restoring agency and moral responsibility to individuals, thereby facilitating personal and social change. thus, change becomes a moral process capable of undermining oppressive systems, while holding the promise of a continuous and truly radical transformation of our lives, in the realization of social justice. rethinking social justice as a matter concerning not only political institutions and structures, but also personal transformation and consciousness, enables us to counter what bartky calls the “half-submerged weapons” of sexism with a greater understanding of the unconscious habits of the feminist-pragmatist self. 82 clara fischer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 notes 1 i wish to thank all those who generously shared their thoughts on this paper, especially the anonymous reviewer and the editors of this volume, phyllis rooney and catherine hundleby. 2 ferguson writes: “according to this theory, the human agent instrumentally adopts gender norms and identities because of rewards or punishments received for doing so. women accept less pay for equal work and do more unpaid work in the family than men do, not because we are more altruistic than competitive or self-interested, but simply because the external and social constraints against not doing this create more costs than benefits” (1997, p. 120). 3 both pragmatism and feminism critique the widely held philosophical view of the self as abstract and disconnected. hence, corporeality and the social nature of our existence are not simply theorized away, but are shown to be fundamental aspects of the way we experience our selves, each other, and our environment. to this end, feminist and pragmatist theorists have highlighted the arbitrariness of philosophical dualisms which set up aspects of our lives in opposition to each other, with the second oppositional usually assuming an inferior role. mind/body, individual/community, subject/object—all of these dualisms constitute a false and unnatural separation of coterminous spheres, and as feminists have shown, the identification of women with all of these allegedly subordinate secondary categories has played a vital role in the perpetuation and justification of patriarchal norms. for more on the overlap between feminist and pragmatist critiques of dualisms, see particularly chapter seven of seigfried’s pragmatism and feminism: reweaving the social fabric (1996). 4 for dewey, these are usually actions, however, he notes that this does not imply a disconnectedness of individual acts or of acts from the self, but rather, “habit covers in other words the very make-up of desire, intent, choice, disposition which gives an act its voluntary quality. and this aspect of habit is much more important than that which is suggested merely by the tendency to repeated outer action, for the significance of the latter lies in the permanence of the personal disposition which is the real cause of the outer acts and of their resemblance to one another. acts are not linked up together to form conduct in and of themselves, but because of their common relations to an enduring and single condition—the self or character as the abiding unity in which different acts leave their lasting traces” (dewey, 1985a, p. 171). 5 this essay will only deal with certain aspects of dewey’s ethical thought. for a more detailed account of dewey’s ethics see welchman (1995), fesmire (2003) or most recently pappas (2008). 6 at the risk of seeming narcissistic, this essay makes use of my own experiences, a move that is not supposed to put my life in the forefront, but rather to ground the larger, theoretical concepts under discussion, in the particular. this emphasis on contextualism is typical of much pragmatist and feminist theorizing, where the traditional philosophical view-fromnowhere is replaced by a view-from-here. for more on this see paula droege (2002). 7 dewey (1985a) expresses this as follows: “we set up this and that end to be reached, but the end is growth itself. to make an end a final goal is but to arrest growth. many a person gets morally discouraged because he has not attained the object upon which he set his resolution, but in fact his moral status is determined by his movement in that direction, not by his possession” (p. 306). 8 this is not to imply that those who experience extreme victimization in oppressive systems have the same capacity or power as their oppressors to change those systems. however, a complete denial of agency simply replicates the dehumanizing portrayal of the oppressed by the oppressors. also, as social constructionists have shown, the deep-seated psychological impact of life in an oppressive system can blind us to certain internalized, sexist norms, which in turn would have an impact on agency and moral responsibility. as noted, this should not infer a lapsing into overly deterministic models of social construction which cannot be escaped, but should spur a reassessment of how the deweyan model of selfhood can accommodate the unconscious. this will be explored in the next section. 9 rebecca klatch (2001) similarly outlines the process of coming to feminist consciousness experienced by sue jhirad, who was active in the u.s. left-wing organization, students for a democratic society (sds): consciousness and conscience 83 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 “i just had this complete and total revelation that suddenly everything was sort of turning inside out . . . i began to see all these things that happened to me in my life . . . i began to see for the first time . . . these were political questions. i got very engaged in the women’s movement at that point” (p. 808). 10 see, for example, alcoff (2003). 11 bartky (1990) describes this elusiveness as follows: “it is difficult to characterize the tone of an article, the patronizing implications of a remark, the ramifications of some accepted practice, and it is even more difficult to describe what it is like to be bombarded ten or a hundred times daily with these only half-submerged weapons of a sexist system” (p. 17). 12 feeling part of a new group, and the attendant experience of solidarity, is also something erika summers-effler (2002) holds to be an integral part of the experience of feminist consciousness. 13 this is not to assert that there is only one feminist community, or that feminists do not hold different and often opposed views on how to overcome the difficulties posed by patriarchy. however, as feminism is often treated as a uniform discourse by those who find themselves outside of this discourse, for many women coming to feminist consciousness, the types of feminisms and the various strategies proposed by feminists remain to be seen. what is important in the process of feminist “enlightenment,” however, is not an immediate understanding of the multiplicity and complexity of feminism, but rather that there is an alternative to the norms professed by patriarchy. that there are in fact many alternatives, is something which only gradually transpires the more one learns about feminism as such. 14 this approach of supplementing dewey’s thought with feminist analyses of the ubiquity of sexist norms is also something erin mckenna (2002) advocates. shannon sullivan (2004) similarly explores the difficulty of challenging unconscious oppressive habits. she writes: “a pragmatist understanding of habit . . . needs development in connection with a psychoanalytic appreciation of fantasy, desire, and pleasure and a psychoanalytic picture of the unconscious as often actively scheming against one’s best efforts at change” (p. 200). 15 which, as i have noted is not uniform, but actually consists of a whole variety of different groupings with differing beliefs and political approaches. 16 in this essay i have used the phrase “coming to feminist consciousness” in the sense of awakening, awareness, etc. as it is typically used by feminists. dewey’s use of the word “consciousness” here should be understood in broad, epistemological terms as “a special agent for knowledge,” be it “soul, consciousness, intellect or a knower in general” (p. 184). as i have noted above, a separate, “special agent for knowledge,” which is detached from experience and nature is something dewey strongly criticizes. 17 feminists have frequently pointed out that such self-doubting can lead to serious mental and physical health problems. betty friedan (1965), for example, outlined the lived contradictions and resultant anxiety experienced by middle class suburban north american women, and highlighted the increase in alcoholism among such women. one need also merely think of the myriad of women suffering from eating-disorders and negative bodyimage to see how self-doubt, induced by contradictions in patriarchal ideals of femininity and women’s lived experiences, negatively affects women. 18 bartky notes that “it might be objected that the feature of feminist experience i have been describing is characteristic not of a fully emergent feminist consciousness but of periods of transition to such consciousness, that the feminist is a person who has chosen her moral paradigm and who no longer suffers the inner conflicts of those in ambiguous moral predicaments. i would deny this. even the woman who has decided to be this new person and not that old one, can be tormented by recurring doubts. moreover, the pain inflicted in the course of finding one’s way out of an existential impasse, one continues to inflict” (p. 20). 19 recourse to the extensive work carried out by previous generations of feminists is something that plays an instrumental role in the process of coming to feminist consciousness. the fact that there is an existing language through which gender norms can be named and analyzed, means that the groundwork for a feminist reframing, so to speak, has already been laid, allowing younger women to join an already well-established feminist discourse. klatch (2001) notes the limitations women experienced in absence of such discourse: “early sds women did not have access to a vocabulary to voice grievances. the prevailing universe of political discourse excluded women’s experiences from the pool of legitimate grievances; they were viewed as personal or diversionary from the real political issues. there was no 84 clara fischer studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 prevailing language by which to frame discontent . . . without a language to label their experiences, these individual feelings were not recognized as being rooted in gender nor were they seen as collective issues” (pp. 803-804). 20 this question is also akin to “what about change for the worse?” so far we have seen that dewey assumes growth to be a movement toward the better, i.e. progress. but is it not also true that people, systems, and institutions often change for the worse? dewey’s organic view of the world seems to imply that a person changing for the worse is actually a person clinging to old habits, becoming dogmatic and therefore not changing as she should in accordance with the changes happening around her. thus, the damage is done by stasis instead of change, as progress is prohibited. however, as the above section argues, “change for the worse” can perhaps best be elucidated by clarifying how characterizations such as worse, better, and progress are defined and by whom. references alcoff, l. m. (ed.). (2003). singing in the fire: stories of women in philosophy. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. bartky, s. l. (1990). toward a phenomenology of feminist consciousness. in femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression (pp. 11-21). london: routledge. dewey, j. (1985a). ethics. in j. a. boydston (ed.), john dewey: the later works, 1925-1953, vol. 7: 1932. carbondale & edwardsville, il: southern illinois university press. dewey, j. (1985b). the public and its problems. in j. a. boydston (ed.), john dewey: the later works, 1925 1953, vol. 2: 1925-1927. carbondale & edwardsville, il: southern illinois university press. dewey, j. (1988). experience and nature. in j. a. boydston (ed.), john dewey: the later works, 19251953, vol. 1: 1925. carbondale & edwardsville, il: southern illinois university press. dewey, j. (1997). how we think. mineola, ny: dover publications. dewey, j. (2002). human nature and conduct. mineola, ny: dover publications. droege, p. (2002). reclaiming the subject, or a view from here. in c. h. seigfried (ed.), feminist interpretations of john dewey (pp. 160-185). university park, pa: the pennsylvania state university press. ferguson, a. (1997, summer). moral responsibility and social change: a new theory of self. hypatia, 1(3), 116-142. fesmire, s. (2003). john dewey and moral imagination: pragmatism in ethics. bloomington & indianapolis, in: indiana university press. friedan, b. (1965). the feminine mystique. london, uk: penguin. gouinlock, j. (1972). john dewey’s philosophy of value. new york, ny: humanities press. klatch, r. (2001, december). the formation of feminist consciousness among leftand right-wing activists of the 1960s. gender & society, 15(6), 791-815. pappas, g. f. (2008). john dewey’s ethics: democracy as experience. bloomington & indianapolis, in: indiana university press. mckenna, e. (2002).the need for a pragmatist feminist self. in c. h. seigfried (ed.), feminist interpretations of john dewey (pp. 133-159). university park, pa: the pennsylvania state university press. segal, l. (2007). making trouble: life and politics. london: serpent’s tail. seigfried, c. h. (1996). pragmatism and feminism: reweaving the social fabric. chicago, il: the university of chicago press. seigfried, c. h. (ed.). (2002). feminist interpretations of john dewey. university park, pa: the pennsylvania state university press. sullivan, s. (2000, winter). reconfiguring gender with john dewey: habit, bodies, and cultural change. hypatia, 15(1), 23-42. sullivan, s. (2004). from the foreign to the familiar: confronting dewey confronting racial prejudice. journal of speculative philosophy, 18(3), 193-202. summers-effler, e. (2002, march). the micro potential for social change: emotion, consciousness, and social movement formation. sociological theory, 20(1), 41-60. consciousness and conscience 85 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 welchman, j. (1995). dewey’s ethical thought. london, uk: cornell university press. young, i. m. (2000). inclusion and democracy. oxford, uk: oxford university press. soldatic final correspondence address: karen soldatic, school of social sciences & institute for culture & society, western sydney university, penrith nsw 2751, australia; email: k.soldatic@westernsydney.edu.au issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 disability’s circularity: presence, absence and erasure in australian settler colonial biopolitical population regimes karen soldatic western sydney university, australia abstract in this paper, i explore the ways in which settler-colonial states utilize the category of disability in immigration and indigenous population regimes to redress settler-colonial anxieties of white fragility. as well documented within the literature, settler-colonial governance operates a particular logic of population management that aims to replace longstanding indigenous peoples with settler populations of a particular kind. focusing on the case of australia and drawing on a range of historical and current empirical sources, the paper examines the central importance of the category of disability to this settler-colonial political intent. the paper identifies the breadth of techniques of governance to embed, normalize and naturalize white settler-colonial rule. the paper concludes with the suggestion that the state mobilization of the category of disability provides us with a unique way to identify, understand and analyse settler-colonial power and the interrelationship of disability, settler-colonial immigration regimes and indigenous people under its enterprise. keywords disability; impairment; settler colonialism; australia; indigenous; migration introduction: disability circularity and settler-colonial power it is well established within international literature that settler-colonial societies have a complex set of governance practices that have been, and remain, determined by the logic of colonial power (morgensen, 2011). veracini (2014) has argued that the logic of colonial power within the settlercolonial landscape is quite distinct to that of colonization. veracini suggests that this distinction needs to be understood as that shaped by distance and dispossession. colonization was shaped by its distance – a governing of faraway lands, waters, species and peoples, whose resources and labour power disability’s circularity studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 307 were exploited, extracted and brought back to the centre of colonial power for colonial appropriation. settler colonialism is marked by its focus on “accelerated reproductive capacity” (veracini, 2014, p. 616) as a distinct form of colonial power. settler colonialism seeks to dispossess its colonized territories of lands, waters, species and peoples for settlement by the colonizer. the rapid reproduction of settler humans, their animals, plant life and other species on these stolen lands is the point at which colonial power is established. that is, the colonial power is aimed at embedding, normalizing and naturalizing the settler on stolen lands and territories. the aim is to remove the presence of those who came before, “the prior,” “the indigene,” “the first,” so that the presence of the settler-colonial state is understood as all that has existed in place, as though there were nothing before the settler’s arrival. thus, while colonization extracted and appropriated from a distant centre of power, settler-colonial governance dispossesses through direct strategies of elimination, to make totally absent those who came before (veracini, 2014). patrick wolfe (2006) anticipates veracini’s arguments, stating that “settlercolonialism destroys to replace” (p. 387). feminist scholars examining historical developments within settler colonialism have also suggested that this focus on settler population naturalization and, in turn, its concentration of accelerated reproduction, has meant that within the settler colony, women’s reproductive capacities and sexuality have come under particular scrutiny (bashford, 2004). carol bashford (2004) has mapped out the ways in which heteronormative reproductive controls were critical to settler-colonial governance in australia. this is done in two ways, firstly by monitoring white women’s fecundity and establishing state practices to encourage white women’s reproduction (soldatic, 2015). secondly, indigenous queer scholar madi day (2019) has argued that the settler-colonial preoccupation with population replacement is a unique form of heteronormative governance over indigenous peoples, involving monitoring interracial marriages between white men and indigenous women, and indigenous community sexual practices and identities. all of this work empirically confirms veracini’s (2014) suggestion that settler colonialism is marked by political narratives of reproductive urgency, such as in australia where the “populate or perish” theme dominated in the inter-war years. combined, these scholars suggest that settler-colonial relations of power lead to a very specific form of biopolitical management, which promotes the desire to naturalize settler-colonial power. interestingly, despite broad scale recognition of the importance of biological reproduction for furthering settler-colonial power on stolen territories, few settler-colonial scholars have considered the central importance of the category of disability within this paradigm. this is curious given that eminent disability scholars have mapped out the important role of disability in the rise of eugenics as the vanguard of turn-of-the-20th-century nationalism (mitchell & snyder, 2015). disability scholars, too, have karen soldatic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 308 neglected to differentiate between settler colonialism and colonialism, in terms of the nuances of these two different relationships of power. in both fields of scholarship, while disability is present, settler colonialism is absent, and vice versa. in this paper, my aim is to outline the importance of the disability category for settler colonial securitization on stolen indigenous lands. employing a range of empirical material, i show how the category of disability in settlercolonial australia was and is used to control and sustain territorial borders, and to dispossess indigenous peoples of their lands and communities. the analysis is both historical, at the point of nation-state formation in 1901, and contemporary, with the advent of neoliberal settler-colonial rule. i examine three strategic sites of intervention: first, indigenous population management; second, migration and offshore detention; and third, the gendered relations of indigenous disability care and migrant labour regimes. this analytical juncture responds to the work of chatterjee (2019), who has consistently argued for greater depth to our analyses of systems of racialized power within the contemporary settler-colonial state. it also seeks to address the tensions raised in rachel gorman’s (2016) critical work on dominant narratives within disability, which argues for the need to be explicit about biopolitical practices that are ableist and highly racialized. through its circular mobilization across, through and within different settler-colonial biopolitical instruments of power, disability factors importantly in the biopolitical techniques of governance that break down indigenous bodiesand-minds and immigrant bodies-and-minds, and generate impairment. by further scrutinizing settler-colonial capitalist logic and practice, and disability scholarship on nation-state formation, i argue that it is also possible to identify the governance techniques that extract value from bodies-and-minds and, in turn, reproduce disability in much higher proportions within the ongoing regime of settler colonialism. my aim is not to conflate biopolitical techniques of settler-colonial governance with either disability or race, but to make visible the role of the category of disability in settler-colonial governance to erase impairment from all spheres of australia’s claims to territory. i use the notion of circularity to illustrate how disability is mobilized to secure the settler-colonial state. this circular movement through the axis of presence, absence and erasure, mobilises bodies-and-minds through circuits of settler colonial power – at times used to mark out disability’s presence to dispossess indigenous peoples, at other times through strategically making disability absent to hide the ongoing violence of settler colonial rule, and finally, the erasure of disability to hide white settler colonial anxieties. as argued throughout this paper, disability persists and is reproduced by and through settler-colonial regimes and their ontoformative outcomes on bodies-and-minds. disability’s circularity studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 309 disability, dispossession and death: indigenous population management socio-legal constructions of nationhood with the formation of settler colonialism rendered indigenous bodies-and-minds invisible in the australian constitution. indigenous peoples were explicitly erased not only through their absence from the constitution (povinelli, 2011), but also through the nation’s racialized governance with the false claim of terra nullius – that the australian settler colony was formed on lands never inhabited by a prior peoples (rose, 2004). such socio-legal constructions make visible the white settler’s desire to erase australia’s indigenous peoples, a form of social, cultural and political death (rose, 1999). australia was exemplary in its framing of white settler-colonial biopolitical structures, as it “assumed the elimination by expulsion onto ‘reservations’ or by genocide” (hobsbawm, 1987, p. 24) of its indigenous peoples. it imagined a past without its indigenous peoples at the moment of its constitutional formation, whilst imagining its future as a particular bodily formation. even though indigenous peoples have mobilized for an alternative constitutional framework with the uluru statement (a joint statement on indigenous sovereignty, rights and territory), this claim for recognized presence has been rejected by white settler-colonial political elites, including prime ministers and other national leaders (see wahlquist, 2017). the struggle for recognition, fair and just representation, and territory and sovereignty continues to remind the settlercolonial population of its anxious insecurities and vulnerabilities, and of the enduring presence of australia’s first peoples (ravenscroft, 2012). that is, indigenous peoples will not be erased. to counter indigenous claims for justice, settler colonialism makes the presence of indigenous peoples known by bringing to the fore discourses of disease, deficiency, death and decay, drawing on highly medicalized discourses of disability through the realm of statistical counting. indigenous scholar maggie walter (2016) argues that indigenous’ ongoing presence under the veil of settler-colonialism is only ever made known through statistical regimes that pivot around the five ds of settler-colonial data: indigenous disparity, deprivation, disadvantage, dysfunction and difference. thus, data collection is mobilized to measure the exceptionality of indigenous peoples within the australian settler-colonial state as a means to separate the settler from the indigene. the marking out of indigenous people as a site of exceptionality circles back to disability as a site of settler-colonial power. absent from these statistical narratives is the ways in which disability appears in indigenous peoples as the embodiment of settler-colonial relations of power (connell, 2011). drawing on the concept of ontoformativity, connell’s (2011) work illustrates that disability exists in an ontoformative relationship with power relations. soldatic (2018), drawing on connell’s work, documents this in settler-colonial australia to show how ontoformativity generates high rates of disability for indigenous peoples through settler colonial violent rule, and also how disabled indigenous karen soldatic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 310 peoples are mobilized through unique structures of settler-colonial racialised regimes of ableism. the clearest example of how ontoformativity is realised in current settlercolonial regimes is the more recent developments in neoliberal welfare-towork policies and how the disability category is used to reestablish longstanding divisions between the deserving and undeserving of redistributive welfare (soldatic & fitts, 2020). even as disability is clearly made visible through statistical counts that document indigenous rates of disability as at least twice that of settler populations (australian bureau of statistics, 2017a, 2017b), the disability category within australia’s welfare regime has become increasingly tightened. since 2015, over 200,000 people living with severe disabilities, chronic conditions and illness are no longer deemed disabled and are moved onto general unemployment benefits (soldatic & fitts, 2018). general unemployment social security payments are not only lower cash transfers with significantly lower entitlements, but impose new forms of conditionality to ensure that unemployed disabled people remain “engaged” and “active,” with their bodies-and-minds mobilized in circular movements across a range of welfare landscapes (soldatic & fitts, 2020). to maintain access to their welfare payments indigenous australians living with disability have to move from medical appointments to government welfare offices and then specialist employment providers in a continuous circular movement to ensure ongoing access to welfare (soldatic, 2018). indigenous peoples living with disability are particularly vulnerable to the contradictory effects of this neoliberal welfare regime, which both count the heightened statistical representation of disability within indigenous people whilst simultaneously denying them access to disability social protections for not being “disabled enough” (soldatic, 2018). indigenous peoples living with disability are propelled onto highly conditional income-management regimes managed by technical experts of disability welfare governance and surveillance (bielefeld, 2016). through these neoliberal surveillance regimes, indigenous peoples living with impairment are required to make themselves known to able-bodied social security workers who monitor their ongoing compliance to settler-colonial systems of power, which simultaneously propels settler-colonial narratives of indigenous exceptionality. failing to “comply” because of the ontoformative outcomes on their bodies-and-minds of settler-colonial rule – that is disability – propels them deeper into the assemblage of neoliberal welfare surveillance to ensure that their only form of mobility is determined by the power of the settler-colonial state. disability’s circularity simultaneously erases settlercolonial dispossession, erases its ongoing power over indigenous peoples, yet makes present settler-colonial statistical framings of indigenous bodies-andminds (soldatic, 2019). its circularity is thus always central to settler-colonial anxieties of securitization. settler colonial racialized violence, conversely, disability’s circularity studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 311 mobilises disability differentially within its border regimes through making the presence of disability known. disability & immigrant exceptionality it is said that we live in a time of chronic mobility. the movement of people across borders is unprecedented in modern times, with the united nations high commissioner for refugees (2019) declaring that human movement across national borders and boundaries has surpassed that occurring in world war ii. the mass movement of bodies-and-minds has become highly visible. our online screens, social media sites such as facebook and twitter along with our instagram networks, remind us of the sheer velocity of bodies-andminds on the move with the destruction of nations, communities and peoples. syria has alerted the world once again to the vast devastation caused by war and armed conflict. this mobility is unprecedented not only in numbers but also in the highly militarized violence that plagues our embodied vulnerabilities, temporalities and situated logic of settler colonial securitization. disability and racialized management at the border through entry policies settler-colonial australia has been at the forefront of highly racialized immigrant population management. its national classificatory logic of inclusive citizenship is grounded not only in european invasion but also in its formation as a nation with its constitutional framing in 1901. internal population regimes to address settler-colonial anxieties of securitization are coupled with the biopolitical management of immigrant flows at the border. and the presence of disability, disease and potential death circulates through immigrant governance regimes in interrelated processes. disability has a relationality between the immigrant body-and-mind and indigenous peoples within the settler colony of australia. disability has been mobilized by the settler colonial state at key historical moments, extending beyond the original colonial strategy of externalizing disability through closing down territorial borders to its very possibility, which began with australia’s first national parliamentary act, the immigration restriction act 1901. white colonial settlers imagined the body politic of the nation as white and able-bodied. whilst the constitution denies the presence of australia’s indigenous peoples, the immigration restriction act explicitly excluded the disabled immigrant at the nation’s border. this act, the foundation of the white australia policy, is internationally known for its racialization of border control. lesser known is its marking out of disability with the explicit exclusion of “any idiot or insane person” or “any person suffering from an infectious or contagious disease of a loathsome or dangerous character” (immigration restriction act 1901 s3 (c) karen soldatic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 312 & (d)). the disabled immigrant was central to white settler-colonial discursive positionings that situated whiteness as biological purity, free from disease and disability. thus, the visibility of disability operated as the underlying logic of a moral-political imaginary for a new nation that explicitly cleansed itself of its past (soldatic & fiske, 2009). the formation of a white australia, as a national “body” politic, was the “confluence of border controls and public health measures, underpinned by medical science” (jakubowicz & meekosha, 2003, p. 180). disability is well established in transatlantic scholarship surveying the critical role of eugenics in maintaining colonialised governance (bashford, 2004; jarman et al., 2002), and in australia the hunt for disability was central to settler-colonial political history (baker, 2002).1 whilst the white australia policy was officially withdrawn in the early 1970s (fleay, 2015), settler-colonial anxieties surrounding the possibility of disability breaching the border have retained their salience (national ethnic disability alliance, 2015). even the migration act 1958 – the legislation designed to replace the immigration restriction act – is marked by the continuity of settler-colonial anxieties. disability is made explicit in the migration act via the requirement of stringent medical assessment for all potential migrants. the hunt for disability in australia’s settler-colonial immigration regime is a highly formulated process relying on statistical calculations of significance. this affirms levy and peart’s (2004) suggestion that the settler colonial state’s use of statistical prejudice in immigration regimes is one of continuity from the eugenics period to the present. if disability is shown to be present, or potentially present in the bodies-andminds of potential immigrants at some time in the future, an economic calculation is made to attempt to measure its so-called future cost burden on the settler-colonial state (st guilluame & finlay, 2018). in utilising highly specific medical assessment technologies, the settler-colonial state aims to neutralise the historical continuities of its eugenic logic by inscribing disability with a productive value of exchange. at the moment of body-andmind assessment, this value is made against the imaginary of the fit, productive, white, able-bodied citizen as a point of comparison in some future time. past, present and future anxieties of the settler-colonial state are hidden through these biopolitical practices of the border. thus, settlercolonial anxieties for securitization on stolen lands circle back to disability. this became most evident with the passage of the disability discrimination act 1992. while reforms to the migration act 1958 replaced the visible racialization of australia’s settler-colonial border regime, the act remains the only piece of legislation exempt from the disability discrimination act. disability’s place of exceptionality is not without 1 in line with baker’s (2002) historical account of disability within settler colonial education policy, i utilise the notion of “hunt/hunting for disability” to signify disability’s refusal to be erased even as the settler colonial state seeks it out for erasure and elimination. disability’s circularity studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 313 temporal significance. the disability discrimination act was established in the same year as australia introduced its mandatory detention policy for all unregulated migrants (soldatic & fiske, 2009). disability’s presence works in tandem with, and circles back to, the settler colonial anxiety to secure the borders that never belonged to them. disability and offshore detention centres despite the global displacement of vast numbers of people, numerous nationstates are closing their borders to refugees. now more than ever, there is a global presence of harsh policies of mandatory incarceration, both on and off shore, and at the fringes of borders. the incarceration of immigrant bodiesand-minds, young and old, offers a level of visibility, although the strategic intent is to make invisible the new immigrant arrivals. many of the very nation-states that ratified the 1951 un convention on refugees (including australia) have established the harshest regimes of indefinite incarceration (rice et al., 2018). the massive increase in indefinite detention centres has normalized immigration spaces of incarceration, removing them from exceptionality. it is now often argued that immigration detention centres are the norm of global migration geopolitics of territoriality (see flynn, 2016). while the bodies-and-minds, peoples and communities incarcerated inside these walls disappear from our memories, the symbolism of rejection, despair and exclusion in the fences, barbed wired and interlocking walls of the detention centre is highlighted by the nation-state so as to crush the desires of desperate others, in a geopolitics of deterrence (watkins, 2017). the detrimental impacts of mandatory incarceration illustrate connell’s (2011) proposition surrounding the ontoformative effects on bodies embroiled in relations of power. as well documented in the media (barrett & barlow, 2014; bbc news, 2016) and in scholarly research, ongoing offshore incarceration generates severe human distress, disablement and immeasurable suffering (fleay, 2015; st guillaume & finlay, 2018). the temporality of indefinite incarceration creates newly formed ontoformative vulnerabilities of mental illness and suicidality, and reproduces many of the very vulnerabilities that one’s mobility had hoped to avoid, involving the destruction of one’s body, mind and spirit (amnesty international, 2012, 2014). hope is displaced by despair, desperation with enduring forms of intolerable suffering. the slow breaking down of bodies-and-minds, the very intimate bonds of sociality that one sought to protect, the slow death of the soul, make the visible presence of distress, disability and death a pernicious practice of state-generated social suffering (national ethnic disability alliance, 2015). the erasure of asylum seekers and refugees from the settler-colonial imaginary has been actively sought through the banishment of racialized bodies-and-minds off shore excised from australian territoriality (poynting & karen soldatic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 314 briskman, 2018). established in poor developing nations within the asiapacific borderlands, these off-shore detention centres are not only the places that contain non-white bodies-and-minds seeking asylum in australia, but also have become places that manufacture disability with the harms generated by their very walls (st guilluame & finlay, 2018). the australian settler state has privatized and outsourced the running of the centres to some of the largest global contractors, and paid previously colonized territories to host them. through years of incarceration the presence of disability becomes visible in the bodies-and-minds of those forced within their confines for indefinite immigration detention. rather than erasing disability by placing people out of sight, the very act of banishment has an ontoformative effect that generates disablement, cycling through disability’s material embodiment. gendering indigenous and immigrant disability circularities immigrant and indigenous population strategies of biopolitical management regimes coexist around the gendering of reproductive control and practices of care (soldatic, 2015). these practices are gendered and gendering through the pursuit of highly invasive medical regimes and practices of child removal alongside national narratives of responsible regimes of care for others as a deliberate display of caring for, and about, the settler-colonial nation (see soldatic & fitts, 2020). reproductive controls, to forfeit disabled and indigenous women’s fertility, proliferated across the australian settler colony with its formation as a new nation in the early 1900s (soldatic, 2020). national strategies promoted the reproduction of the white settler-colonial polity through so-called positive eugenic strategies such as pro-birthing strategies for white, middle-class, settler-colonial women, which operated via broad scale maternal hygiene and social security regimes, involving national maternal payments and public maternal health care. these were coupled with strategies of “negative” eugenics in relation to indigenous and racialized women through such practices as sterilization, withholding of maternal social security payments and health services (soldatic, 2015). these biopolitical practices were critical to the white, able-bodied, settler-colonial imaginary that sought to secure the lands of which indigenous peoples were dispossessed. these strategies of settler-colonial biopolitics were aimed at erasing the presence of indigenous and disabled peoples to address settlercolonial anxieties of their own vulnerability and fragility. negative reproductive controls of disabled women’s and indigenous women’s bodies thus pursued erasure not only of highly racialized and disabled bodies, but also revealed the haunting continuity of white settler-colonial vulnerability. while such gendered practices of reproductive controls have now been marked as discriminatory and illegal in most of australia, the settler-colonial state, with the onset of neoliberal biopolitics, has developed a confluence of heteronormative techniques of power and practices of governance that disability’s circularity studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 315 represent what deborah bird rose argues is a form of “deep colonisation,” where the “colonising practices… may conceal, naturalise, or marginalise, continuing colonising practices” (rose, 1999, p. 189). deborah bird rose illustrates how settler colonial state practices that purport to be empowering and decolonizing, further embed settler colonial power over indigenous peoples (marchetti, 2006). disability’s circularity here operates through racialized processes of gendered relations of care that are central to gendered immigration labour regimes (burns, 2019). in australia, settler-colonial practices of immigration control are increasingly propelling poor, immigrant women of colour into secondary care-labour markets on indigenous lands and country in outer urban areas and rural australia (peisker & tilbury, 2006). immigration regimes seek to push the labour power of poor women of colour to the edges of urban landscapes and to the depths of indigenous lands through quantitative weightings granted to poor immigrants who will reside in rural and remote areas of the settler colony for extended periods of time (goel & penman, 2015). bodies of colour come together in distant indigenous lands to care for each other, where migrant women are willing to provide low-paid care for indigenous strangers, and facilitate disability relations of care in rural and remote indigenous communities (adamson et al., 2017; morrison‐dayan, 2019). these gendered and racialized regimes of disability care labour address settler-colonists’ anxieties, as it enables them to continue to make absent from national narratives the devastating longstanding ontoformative effects of settler-colonial rule on indigenous peoples. paradoxically, indigenous people with disability are seen as complicit in the wearing down of the bodies of poor immigrant women, who are propelled into unprotected and barely regulated precarious care-labour markets (reid et al., 2016). while these migration regimes of care labour appear to recognize the care needs of indigenous peoples and purport to support their indigenous practices of care within the community, these regimes of care continue the settler colonial project through the precarious care labour of immigrant women. new immigrant care-labour regimes within the settler colonial state are thus a deeper form of colonization, as deborah bird rose (1999) has continued to demonstrate. settler colonial articulations of gendered relations of care is thus a highly racialized process (howard-wagner, 2016). at the same time, immigrant care regimes are misrepresentations of indigenous women’s care labour within the settler-colonial enterprise and its gendered-racialised stigmatisation. to reiterate elizabeth strakosch’s (2016) point, “indigenous groups are rendered as objects of settler governmental care and control” (p. 68), to naturalise the ongoing denial of sovereignty. the techniques of governance, the boundaries of rule and repertoires of population patterning, combined strategies of scientific racism with that of scientific ableism (soldatic, 2015). it is now well documented that the settlercolonial strategy of separating indigenous mothers from their children was central in attempts to erase indigenous peoples with the advance of eugenic karen soldatic studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 316 ideologies of racialization (atkinson, 1990). despite national recognition of the ontoformative effects of longstanding child removal, such as intergenerational trauma, today indigenous women and mothers, along with disabled mothers and carers, endure the highest rates of child removal (australian institute of family studies, 2016; human rights and equal opportunity commission, 1997). the continuity of settler-colonial governance in indigenous women’s lives, including the continued practice of child removal, undermines their capacities to care for children, family members and extended kin (cutcher & milroy, 2010). malone (2014) argues that normative constructions of caring for others mean that disabled mothers are under constant surveillance, where small “misdemeanors” inscribe them as deviant, incapable mothers. disabled indigenous mothers and carers who provide care for family members with disability seek to make invisible the ontoformative effects of longstanding settler-colonial rule within their own bodies, while making visible the impairment in the bodies of those they care for, a result of settlercolonialism’s intergenerational transference (miller et al., 2017). the settlercolonial racialized project of indigenous erasure combined with the settlercolonial state’s continual hunt for disability, is both gendered and gendering, circulating through indigenous women’s practices of care for others and for themselves. it also misrecognizes their claims for self-care as disabled women who provide care for others within their familial and kinship networks. through welfare-to-work regimes that have tightened the disability category for redistributive cash transfers, the settler-colonial state can hunt for disability to address its biopolitical anxieties. as soldatic and fitts (2020) discuss, disabled indigenous women who care for other family members living with disability increasingly feel the surveillance of the settler-colonial state in their capacity as disabled carers. while immigrant care labour regimes propel women of colour to indigenous lands and country, building connectivity through settler-colonial circuits of gendered labour, this pushing out enables the settler-colonial state to place its own anxieties of securitization at a distance. simultaneously, it erases from the national narrative the ontoformative impacts on indigenous peoples of longstanding settler-colonial rule. disability’s circularity is thus mobilized to erase the possibility of settler-colonial anxieties. concluding circularities settler-colonial strategies of disability containment, control and elimination are by their nature contradictory as the number of people living with an impairment, illness or chronic condition has persisted over time. further, settler-colonial biopolitical practices create impairment in the very process of trying to eliminate it – the ontoformative effects of settler-colonial power. as disability’s circularity studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 306-320, 2020 317 discussed throughout this paper, indigenous bodies-and-minds are intergenerationally embroiled in the ontoformative outcomes of settlercolonial anxieties to secure stolen indigenous lands, which are themselves productive of impairment. through settler-colonial immigration regimes that rely on strategies of expulsion, impairment is generated in the bodies-andminds of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants incarcerated in off-shore processing detention centres. despite the mythologies of biopolitical screening and assessment devices to erase disability from the settler-colonial imaginary, the ontoformative impact of settler colonialism always circulates back to disability. disability thus exhibits its own chronic mobility. it speaks back to settlercolonial biopolitical population management regimes – it does not allow itself to be erased. disability circulates to reinforce its positionality of power, mobilizing to contest and delegitimize settler-colonial imaginaries of a pure, white, fit, able-bodied and productive national body politic. across time, through time and in time, disability moves and creates movement, pushing against borders and boundaries, opening up the fringes and edges of settlercolonial anxieties. at times, it is given presence as a means to legitimize the drawing of boundaries around settler-colonial nations; at other times, it is deliberately erased to propel and legitimize the biopolitical violence of settler colonialism on indigenous bodies. in the end, disability haunts the axis of presence, absence and erasure, despite the settler colonist’s violent attempts to keep disability away. disability’s circularity through these settler-colonial regimes always embodies the very vulnerabilities, the breaking down of bodies-and-minds, and the human species’ march towards death that the settler-colonial state seeks to erase. its ever presence distinctly resonates with settler-colonial anxieties of ruin on stolen lands. acknowledgements i would like to thank kelly somers for her editing support, soma chatterjee and tania das gupta for their ongoing critical engagement with the paper throughout its development, and the reviewers for their insightful and wellstructured feedback, all of which have been essential to the development of the paper. references adamson, e., cortis, n., brennan, d., & charlesworth, s. 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(2006). settler-colonialism and the elimination of the native. journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387-409. studies in social justice volume 3, issue 1, 67-78, 2009 correspondence address: benjamin j. muller, department of political science, king’s university college, university of western ontario, 266 epworth avenue, london, on n6a 2m3, canada. tel: +1 519 433-0041, email: bmuller@uwo.ca issn: 1911-4788 borders, risks, exclusions benjamin j. muller department of political science, king’s university college abstract this paper focuses both on the use of risk management and biometric technologies in the contemporary management of the canada/us border. it argues that these measures contribute directly to a politics of exclusion. in particular, the increasing centralization of authority for border security and the transformation of the border into a more deterritorialized "virtual border," serves to exclude local stakeholders in the borderlands. in fact, the very efficacy of the borderlands itself is in question as the politics and experience of the border is moved further from the territorial border and thus out of the conventional borderlands. the paper considers the ramifications of relying on risk management, considering the (in) appropriateness of it as a strategy for the provision of public security, and specifically border security, but also reflects on three noted trends directly associated with "governing through risk" at the canada/us border: the quantification of security and risk and the subsequent "zero risk" approach; the technologization of security; and finally, the centralization of authority. to contend that borders are sites of exclusion is far from novel. integral to modernity and sovereignty, the porous character of borders has and continues to be concealed by the exercise and contemporary (re)articulation of sovereign power. since the events of 9/11, even the most genteel of borders, such as the canada/us border, have witnessed an increased preoccupation with exclusionary practices, virulent applications of risk management, and a general embrace of biometric and radio frequency identification (rfid) technologies focused on identity management of varying forms. as a result, the border has been further securitized and in some regards, even militarized. although strengthened borders and the intensified securitization of migration related to these changes in border security are relatively well documented, such accounts tend to argue that borders are “thickening.” specifically in the canada/us case, the notion of a thickened border post-9/11 is nearly prosaic. while not altogether rejecting the metaphor of the thickened border, there is something more complex afoot. rather than simply making the border more difficult to cross, the invocation of specific technologies—namely biometrics and rfid—which are contextualized within a near obsessive application of risk management by the 68 benjamin j. muller studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 agencies charged with the responsibility of border security have both had wider consequences, and can be placed within a wider context of contemporary rearticulations of security, danger, and identity. in particular, these practices have fostered a proliferation of borders and bordering practices. the reliance on various identity management schemes, such as trusted traveller programs, tends to extend the border outwards. furthermore, these developments occur within a context where such bordering practices that are hinged on identity management techniques and risk management strategies are pervasive throughout society. furthermore, the experience of borders and border crossings, both because of particular technological imperatives and the perceived need to push the assessment of risk further from the physical geographical border, is dramatically altered. the focus of this paper is both on the use of risk management and biometric technologies in the contemporary management of the canada/us border, but more specifically, the politics of exclusion that results from a reliance on these identification and risk assessment schemes. in particular, the increasing centralization of authority for border security and the transformation of the border into a more deterritorialized “virtual border,” serves to exclude local stakeholders in the borderlands. in fact, the very efficacy of the borderlands itself is in question as the politics and experience of the border is moved further from the territorial border and thus out of the conventional borderlands. this analysis begins from the assertion that contemporary canada/us border security—led by the initiative of the us and generally closely followed by canadian counterparts—is advanced by the risk management (rm) model. drawing on contemporary literature, notably aradau and van munster’s pivotal argument on “governing through risk,”(2007), i contend that more than simply adopting rm as the principal strategy for managing border security, officials have come to govern through risk at the canada/us border. the paper considers the ramifications of this move, considering the (in)appropriateness of rm as a strategy for the provision of public security and specifically border security, but also reflects on three noted trends directly associated with governing through risk at the canada/us border: one, the quantification of security and risk and the subsequent “zero risk” approach; second, and intimately related to the first trend, the technologization of security; and finally, the third trend is the centralization of authority. however, for this analysis, the disempowerment and exclusion of robust stakeholders in the borderlands, which is the correlating development of this centralization, is what is of specific focus. these three trends in contemporary border security raise critical considerations regarding a range of issues akin to brunet-jailly and dupeyron’s fundamental two elements of security at/in borders and borderlands: “human activities (the agency and agent of power of individual ties and forces spanning the border); and second, the broader social processes that frame individual action, such as market forces, government activities, and regional culture and politics of a borderland” (2007, p. 1). borders, risks, exclusions 69 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 securitization and governing through risk at the border: “all that is fluid solidifies” since september 11, references to “securitization” have proliferated. in what appears to be a never ending move towards the “securitization of everything,” references to the insecurity of transportation, borders, financial institutions, a burgeoning “critical infrastructure,” and a host of other critical portions of our modern liberal information society are made in the news media and popular culture, by politicians and bureaucrats. as the potential, necessary, and/or long overdue, “securitization” of various sectors is raised, it is a discourse of insecurity and not security that is invoked. to claim, for example, that a border is porous is on the one hand to accept the general operation and function of a border for time immemorial; as a line crossed, regularly by those in borderlands, and far less so by those from distant lands, and a signification of some form of authority, in most modern instances, state sovereignty. the alternative, however, is to express the permeability of the border as not integral to transboundary communities, international commerce and trade, the integrity of a borderland’s cultural, political and socio-economic resiliency, but as something dangerous, threatening, and potentially risky. drawing on the critical theory tradition, the first point to be gleaned is the absolute necessity of asking the “how possible?” question of securitization. in other words, how is it possible that particular issues are labelled as security issues, by whom, and in whose interests? in the case of border security, a critical question becomes that of out-sourcing of surveillance infrastructures, id card systems, biometrics, and so on, and the extent to which the security professionals responsible for providing these systems—or what bigo (2002) and others have termed “managers of unease”—construct the field of risk itself (leander, 2005; salter, 2008a, 2008b). in other words, once opened up, security professionals have the ability to not only provide “security solutions,” but also frame the necessity of certain solutions in such a way as to characterize and even define the risk itself. the reliance on forms of biometric identification, cctv surveillance, and various id card and trusted traveller schemes, in presenting themselves as solutions or mitigation strategies make powerful assumptions about risk: what/who the potential risks might be, and how these threats are likely to operate/behave. this brief comment picks up on a particular notion of “securitization” that has emerged among scholars in the field of critical security studies. the breadth of securitization approaches is too grand to fully engage here; however, it is worth noting that in many cases, and indeed in this article, references to securitization connote far more than what the early theorists of this approach referred to as “speech acts” (waever, 1995). that is to say, when considering the securitization of the canada/us border, for example, the analysis that follows is reflecting on deeper questions of constructing the issue and discourse of security, taking note of the actors involved, and the broader social processes that frame and are affected by this move, as opposed to simply noting how a particular issue area comes to be referred to as a security issue. this particular understanding of securitization, referred to by some as the paris school (see case collective 2006), fits well with the notion of “governing through risk.” in their article on “governing terrorism through risk: taking precautions, (un)knowing the future,” aradau and van munster (2007) develop a notion of 70 benjamin j. muller studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 “precautionary risk.” drawing from the work of ulrich beck and others, the notion that certain risks (such as “manufactured risks”) do not come from outside, as external risks do, but are “manufactured by the very impact of our developing knowledge about the world” (ceyhan, 2008, p. 105). unlike simple external risks, manufactured risks, such as environmental, health, nuclear, etc., are not tied to our ability to calculate them, since we cannot and do not know the real level of risk (p. 105). as françois ewald (1991) notes, nothing is a risk in and of itself, but rather, it depends on how the evaluation of danger and the context and circumstances is made. similarly, beck (2006) and others refer to such risks as incalculable risks; risks that are uncertain or even considered to be “intentional catastrophes,” like terrorism. aradau and van munster’s notion of “precautionary risk” is precisely at this limitation of risk thinking, and thus represents an attempt at prevention, taming the limit, monitoring, managing, and governing the ungovernable and the uncertain (2007, p. 107). still others have connected this to a preemptory logic that is embedded in such attempts to “manage uncertainty” and “govern the ungovernable” (de goede, 2008a, 2008b), which is precisely how the task of contemporary border security has been framed: mobility itself becomes potentially threatening (packer, 2006) as the porosity of borders is assumed away in a reversal of the marxian dictum, “all that is solid melts into air” and all that is fluid and porous solidifies. to simply note that “governing through risk” is an influential force behind the institutions charged with securing the border tells us very little. the prevalence of rm strategies in contemporary border security is ubiquitous. just months after 9/11, the signing of the “smart border declaration” in december 2001, and the subsequent smart border accord, which is responsible for inspiring many of the current border security strategies such as nexus—the much touted trusted traveller program—and the western hemisphere travel initiative (whti) expressed a strong commitment to rm. similarly, “secure flight” and “passenger protect,” the respective american and canadian “no fly list” programs are heavily motivated by the logic of rm. indeed, even the thinking behind the more substantial trilateral security and prosperity partnership (spp) between mexico, canada, and the us, is clearly not untouched from the logic of rm. moving towards specifics, the canadian government is itself not altogether satisfied with the performance of the relatively newly created canada border services agency (cbsa), citing that it “lacks an integrated risk management framework” (standing committee on public accounts, 2008). although the statement suggests the cbsa has not successfully integrated a risk management framework, it underscores the commitment to “governing through risk” by their political masters. the account forwarded here does not engage in the specific actuarial calculations and technicalities of rm in contemporary border security, nor is there an attempt in this analysis to provide a scale or continuum upon which one can judge more or less effective applications of rm on the basis of its own logic. in contrast, the general logic of governance that accompanies the employment of rm in a more general sense is of interest, as is the extent to which its efficacy can or cannot actually be measured. rather than critique rm as a strategy in general, the focus here is to critically question its application in canada/us border security. rm may indeed be sound as an approach to governance for a whole range of reasons, however, in dealing with so-called “incalculable risks” or uncertainties, or what aradau and van borders, risks, exclusions 71 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 munster label “taming the limit,” its strategy, method, and utility are in question. if, as beck contends, “risk is ambivalence,” one would never know it from the ubiquitous calculations, measurements, and numbers, that are literally haemorrhaging from contemporary security professionals to rationalize their tactics, justify their costs, and valorize their efforts. the “risk” of quantification the alleged necessity of enhancing border security verges on prosaic in the post-9/11 context. although a number of issues were flagged by, among others, the 9/11 commission report, border security seemed to progress to the head of the class overnight. bolstered by catastrophic thinking often forwarded in popular accounts such as stephen flynn’s america the vulnerable, the securitization of the canada/us border was quickly underway. specifically, as part of the institutional restructuring under the newly formulated department of homeland security (dhs), the institutional management of the border followed suit, and customs and border protection (cbp) was created. as with many other post-9/11 developments particularly (and for some obvious reasons in the case of border security, being that the border itself is shared), canada followed the us lead, creating the cbsa. in both cases, the management of the border shifted from one focused on customs collections to an obsessive preoccupation with security. charged with securing the border, these new institutions quickly found themselves at odds with massive amounts of commercial, leisure and tourist traffic that crosses the canada/us border on a daily basis. the department of transportation regularly finds itself in a difficult position, a department of the government and thus interested in state security by definition, and yet it is charged with enhancing the flow of goods, services, people, etc. even across borders and through airports. these contrasting ambitions are yet unresolved. the extent to which border agencies need likewise be concerned with more than simply securing the border is abundantly apparent on a daily basis across the length of the canada/us border. how then can the security of the border be enhanced while maintaining the imperatives of relatively efficient and timely border crossing for goods and services? “properly executed” rm techniques are believed to be the answer to this dilemma. 1 since its origins are in the insurance industry, rm continues to be commonplace throughout that arena. risks such as potential flooding, fires, and vandalism, to name a few, are quantified and measured in terms of low to high risk, primarily on the basis of the assessed potential frequency and impact of such risks. there are statistics on fires, it is clear that certain materials are more flammable than others, low lying areas are more prone to flooding, etc. when applied to so-called “acts of god” natural disasters, or in the case of this analysis, potential terrorism, there is clearly a deep problem associated with quantifying the risk. as salter (2008b) has eloquently put it, we are in the space of “imaginary numbers” at this point. the importance of “imagination” cannot be over-emphasized, as preparation for the risks that fall into the category of the ungovernable or uncertain have little if any data upon which the quantification can be based, and thus are premised to a much greater degree on what unfortunately, the nature of rm presents some problems when applied to border security, both in terms of the underlying logic and its method. 72 benjamin j. muller studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 is often referred to as “catastrophic thinking.” the pacific northwest economic region (pnwer), for example, conducts a program called “blue cascades,” in which a potential catastrophe is imagined, and scenarios and simulations are worked out as a mode of preparation. once imagined, one then must engage in a risk assessment, wherein the frequency and impact of the risk is measured. table 1: security screening positive: presence of prohibited item, detection, “stop” decision false positive: presence of prohibited item, no detection, “go decision” negative: no presence of prohibited item, no detection, “go” decision false negative: no presence of prohibited item, detection, “stop” decision (salter 2008b: 256). the potential problems associated with the use of rm in border security can be divided into two categories: the first is associated with the use of rm itself in terms of its strategies and assessment techniques; the second is linked to creating resiliency through redundancy, and what is termed here as “the redundancy problematic” (muller forthcoming). the analysis begins with a brief overview of rm, considering briefly its emergence as a central logic in contemporary border security. as a part of new public management techniques, rm has emerged as a ubiquitous strategy across much of the contemporary public and private sectors. as a method for rationalizing increased resource allocation to particular sectors under conditions of increased demands on government and resource scarcity is where much of the attraction lay for rm strategies. a significant problem with this is the reliance on quantification in rm, and the extent to which success and/or failure is quantified. in the case of border security, as table 1 from salter’s (2008b) analysis of rm and quantification indicates, measuring false positives is difficult if not impossible unless these errors result in a catastrophic failure, such as richard reid (“the shoe bomber”), or the death of robert dziekanski at vancouver airport (discussed later), which causes subsequent institutional changes and adaptations to the risk assessment. in other words, one has no way of knowing how many people are crossing the border with contraband, weapons, etc., unless they are used in such a way that it results in some sort of catastrophe. similarly, no records are kept of how many false negatives occur, which in security terms may be of little relevance, yet in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of border security are of great import. in the case of the canada/us border in the cascade gateway—a relatively populated corridor between seattle, washington and vancouver, british columbia— for example, vehicles and passengers are regularly subject to more in-depth checks by both canadian and american officials, often to no end. the argument can be made that such random interrogation acts as a deterrence, but the counter-argument that this is simply inconveniencing honest travellers who are without contraband and who do not pose any serious security threat is equally valid, as neither argument can be proven with any certainty or statistical measure. providing meaningless borders, risks, exclusions 73 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 measurements of such matters, or simply failing to compile such statistics, is precisely what salter refers to as “imaginary numbers.” in order to underscore the problem with rm in terms of its reliance on quantification for rationalizing increased resource allocation and specifically measuring success or failure of the security approaches used, and the general exclusionary principles behind these strategies, the anecdote of robert dziekanski in vancouver international airport in october 2007 is particularly instructive. not only does the dziekanski case expose the extent to which measurement of the success or failure of rm is somewhat reliant on catastrophic failure, but it also exposes the emerging harsh, and exclusionary practices of border security. on october 13, 2007, a flight arrived at vancouver international airport (yvr) at approximately 3:15pm. a middle-aged construction worker from poland, robert dziekanski, was aboard this flight, with the intent of immigrating to canada from poland to live with his mother in kamloops, british columbia. upon completing initial customs clearance, mr. dziekanski was referred to secondary immigration processing. it was already clear that mr. dziekanski was unable to speak english, as he required assistance in the initial processing. it was also obvious that he was under some duress, noted by airport staff, as he was pale and sweating. between 4:00pm and 10:45pm, mr. dziekanski’s precise whereabouts are unclear. however, he was in a secure area of the airport, which he could not leave without proper documentation, and interviews done after the fact indicate that he was milling around the luggage carousels during this period. it should be noted that this is a secure area of the airport. during this period, mr. dziekanski’s mother, who was waiting in the public arrivals area of the airport, asked about the whereabouts of her son, but without appropriate flight information, she received little information and was told he had not arrived. assuming he missed the flight, dziekanski’s mother left for kamloops. at approximately 10:45pm, mr. dziekanski attempted to leave the secure customs hall area, and was again referred to secondary immigration for processing. after finding some missing bags that contained necessary immigration information and finally completing secondary processing, mr. dziekanski was free to go at 12:15am. after sitting for another 30 minutes in the customs hall, mr. dziekanski was asked by airport officials to leave the secure area and move to the international arrivals reception area at yvr. mr. dziekanski became increasingly agitated, propped the doors between the secure customs hall and the arrivals reception area open with a chair, and threw a small table and computer to the ground. the royal canadian mounted police (rcmp) were called by airport officials at this point, and upon arriving asked an agitated mr. dziekanski to move up against a wall in the secure customs hall area where mr. dziekanski was waiting. approximately 25 to 30 seconds after arrival, the rcmp officers decided to deploy the use of the taser, an electroshock weapon,2 and after tackling mr. dziekanski to the ground officers chose to taser mr. dziekanski once more. as a result of the taser, mr. dziekanski tragically died at the scene. there is a reasonable amount of precision regarding the timeline and facts of this incident, in part because the event has been the subject of a public inquiry into the use of tasers by law enforcement, and in part because a member of the public captured the final moments of mr. dziekanski’s life, including the tasering by rcmp, on video which was subsequently shown on the internet and the national and international news media. 74 benjamin j. muller studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 aside from the obvious tragic death of mr. dziekanski, and some serious questions regarding the use of tasers by law enforcement officers, there are a series of critically important issues regarding the use of rm in border security that expose emerging exclusionary and exceptional practices at ports of entry. not least of which, complications associated with the management of virtual borders in the modern airport and to what extent highly exclusionary practices in border security are fostered over inclusionary ones, or at the very least, whether approaches to border security are sensitive to the diverse bodies crossing borders, and acknowledge the porous nature of those borders. as a point of entry, the airport is by definition a virtual (and biometric) border (muller, 2008b). while this particular incident ended in tragedy, there is no real way of knowing how often people are able to loiter unaccounted for in the secure customs hall in the airport, since such figures are not kept and would indeed be incredibly difficult to obtain. this situation also underscores some of the problems associated with the strategy rm provides, when applied to areas of public security, or in this case, specifically border security. while rm provides four options when faced with risk—accept, mitigate, avoid, transfer—the reality is that one, and at best two of these strategies are not only the sole desirable options when confronted with risks in public security, but they are indeed the only possible options. the incident involving mr. dziekanski not only highlights the extent to which the complexity of overlapping and unclear lines of authority at the virtual border makes the transfer of risk possible—that is, let’s say from the cbsa in this instance to the rcmp—but also that accepting the risk and possibly mitigating it, are in fact the only genuine options. avoiding it is simply not rational for the provision of public security, and even transferring the risk only contributes to institutional and inter-departmental power struggles, uncertainties, and incongruities, thus not providing increased public security. as this specific case indicates, those lines of authority and authorization are unclear. furthermore, not only does the catastrophic failure of the dziekanski case indicate a reliance on such cases for measuring the success or failure of rm, but it is also indicative of emerging logics of exception and exclusion as the “default” response in the contemporary management of borders. although the management of the border has changed vis-à-vis institutional transformation from one of simply customs, excise, and to a lesser extent, an immigration and visa regime, towards a far greater emphasis on security (including, even, arming the cbsa at great cost to the canadian taxpayer), the efficacy of this decision is unclear in light of this particular case. when confronted with what was assessed at the time as a security risk, or one might even say a security breach, the new and reinvigorated cbsa designed to manage and most importantly secure “the border” was shown to be rather impotent, and relied on traditional institutional arrangements to deal with the situation, and a general embrace of exclusionary methods associated with conventional sovereign power.3 thus, the mismanagement and subsequent tragic death of robert dziekanski highlights not only the general impossibility of quantifying certain failures with border security—and subsequently indicates that claims of success are speculative—but also raises serious doubts about the efficacy of the rm approach itself when applied in the realm of public security, and specifically, border security. the close relationship and even correlative borders, risks, exclusions 75 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 association between the reliance on rm and the subsequent technologization of contemporary border security is also worth noting. technologization: the emerging biometric border as rm emerges as the dominant model of security, the thirst for quantification that accompanies it contributes directly to the technologization of border security. put simply, technology has itself become the centerpiece of contemporary security systems (ceyhan, 2008). as salter (2006) notes, by imposing biometric passports on foreigners who seek entry into the united states, the us administration contributed directly to the transformation of biometrics into a global security norm (also see ceyhan, 2008). both institutional changes to the border agencies in canada and the us, as well as the increasing reliance on surveillance and technological means of prescreening—which is presented as an effective means for pre-assessing risk—have dramatically changed how the border functions and is experienced by those crossing it, and have likewise dramatically altered the landscape of influential stakeholders involved in the management of the border. the material design of the border itself is significant, insofar as it contributes to freer movement for those voluntarily enrolled in trusted or registered traveller schemes, such as nexus or the enhanced driver’s licence.4 together with the institutional transition from customs enforcement towards a security function, the border moves away from a visa/passport/ immigration regime towards a surveillance regime that is less tied to geography and more caught up in a politics of exclusion. although these changes are considered to a far greater extent elsewhere,5 the transformation and/or securitization of the canada/us border, in this case specifically in the cascade gateway, owe much to the increasing reliance on technology. the increasing use of surveillance techniques, biometric identification vis-à-vis both the us visit system and nexus, as well as the relatively less secure and more controversial rfid technology in the enhanced bc/washington state driver’s licence pilot program (which is also present in nexus), has altered how the border functions, as well as how it is experienced by those crossing. some brief commentary is needed here, as it is a crucial part of the puzzle in terms of the transformation of the canada/us border, materially, institutionally, and “bodily.” 6 in much the same way as “no fly lists” function, nexus (and the commercial equivalent, fast) and other such programs extend the border outwards, (i.e., cause a proliferation of borders, as opposed to a thickening of the sovereign border), enabling a preassessment of risk far before one physically crosses the border. in the case of virtual borders in airports, pre-assessment is far easier, due to the necessary reliance on travel agencies or online ticket booking services, and commercial airlines. in sharp contrast, aside from registered traveller programs, there is currently no method to pre-assess risk at the land border, as those wishing to cross it are by in large relying on personal modes of transportation, and thus not entering any existing transportation networks which might facilitate screening, other than bus or train travel. unfortunately, as the experience with the commercial registered traveller program, fast, has shown, due in large part to the desire to securitize the entire supply chain, registration and pre-assessing risk can force almost crippling administrative burdens on the users, making such measures relatively ineffective, 76 benjamin j. muller studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 due to the complexity of the pre-assessment, and the ensuing cost and inconvenience. on the subject of cost, there is little if any public consultation regarding the use of certain technologies. aside from such privacy concerns and the like, the monetary costs deserve debate. the lack of discussion over such matters raises serious concern over what didier bigo and others have referred to as “managers of unease” (bigo, 2002; leander, 2005). as with the use of private contractors in iraq, or the decision to use particular id card schemes in various national contexts (bennett & lyon, 2008), the relationship between the providers of the technology and related commercial interests and the decision makers themselves is often far too close for comfort, which raises serious concerns about what or whose “security” these schemes actually serve. as leander has effectively noted in the case of private security contractors, these actors gain the capacity to construct specific articulations of security and insecurity to their own advantage. in the case of border security, similar issues of concern arise when security technology providers gain prominence. certainly the lack of information surrounding specifics about the pilot program for a joint bc–washington enhanced driver’s licence does not leave even the most casually curious observer void of suspicion.7 together, these issues further underscore the extent to which the capacity, control, and effective authority/authorization over the contemporary management of the canada/us border by the borderlands has been continuously eroded and driven towards a politics of exclusion. liberty, security, and the disempowerment/exclusion of the borderlands the primary focus of the analysis presented here is on the employment of rm in the contemporary securitization of the canada/us border, and the subsequent technologization of security that follows. however, one ought not underestimate the rich borderlands and the actors that comprise it in this specific context. the international mobility and trade corridor project (imtc) hosted by the whatcom council of governments (wcog), or the work of the pacific northwest economic region (pnwer), not to mention the close collaboration and support the border policy research institute at western washington university receives from and provides to these coalitions of actors, underscores the effectiveness, capacity, and increasing frustration of these key stakeholders in the borderlands. victim of a rather narrow set of political objectives, contemporary us homeland security, and border security specifically, has succumbed to the securitizing and centralizing post-9/11 trends that have effectively not only excluded those defined as “risky,” but also those in the borderlands. the interests of cultural, political and market factors with long standing histories of cross border collaboration and cooperation in borderlands have been neglected, ignored, or in the most nefarious reading of the situation, intentionally disempowered and excluded. the reliance on rm strategies in border security, which leads almost inevitably to a “zero risk” approach to border security, when combined with centralized political authority and a securitization of identity vis-à-vis biometric technologies leaves both the local and the global out of the picture. while the ramifications of such an approach are widespread, it acts most acutely to the borders, risks, exclusions 77 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 detriment of the long-standing trans-border cultural, political, and market relations that make the borderland so robust, and able to foster a politics of inclusion rather than exclusion. notes 1 the paradoxical relationship between security and the imperatives of mobility is most obvious in the case of the virtual border(s) at the airport. although airport security has been dramatically heightened in the post-9/11 environment, and as a point of entry it acts as a “virtual border,” with regards to passenger prescreening in airports, one of the primary measures of success for both the transportation security administration (tsa) and the canadian transport security authority (catsa) is how quickly passengers are processed through security checks. 2 the use of the taser is premised on the argument that it is considered to be a non-lethal form of restraint that is to be used by special trained police officers in place of lethal force. the taser is an electroshock weapon that is intended to incapacitate the neuromuscular system through involuntary contractions and stimulations. tasers use approximately 50,000 to 100,000 volts to incapacitate the victim. while marketed as non-lethal, the number of lethal incidents and proliferation of inquiries into its use and moratoriums suggest its lethality remains open to debate. 3 not only was the creation of the cbsa scrutinized, but the decision to arm cbsa staff was highly contentious, both in terms of objections rooted in canadian political culture and identity and the perspective on firearms, but arguably more importantly from the rcmp itself, which is most clearly evident in the canadian customs and excise union (ceuda) submission to the standing committee on national security and defence discussion of bill c-26: an act to establish the canadian border services agency. 4 it should be noted that the enhanced driver’s licence (edl) is not a trusted traveller program, but simply a registered system. for example, being convicted of a felony will not in and of itself prevent one from obtaining an edl. 5 see muller 2008b; epstein 2007; amoore 2006. 6 on problems with the enhanced driver’s licence scheme and the reliance on rfid technology, see testimony of sophia cope, staff attorney/ron plesser fellow, center for democracy and technology, before senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs, subcommittee on oversight of government management, the federal workforce, and the district of columbia, on the impact of implementation: a review of the real id act and the western hemisphere travel initiative, tuesday april 29, 2008. 7 the pilot program for the joint bc-washington enhanced driver’s licence is one among a few similar programs across canada/us borderlands. increased background checks and socalled “breeder documentation” (birth certificate, proof of residency, etc.) is required in order to apply for this program. however, criminal background checks are not a requirement, and as this program is not a “trusted traveller” card as such—like nexus— one could be guilty of a felony and hold an enhanced dl. furthermore, there has been relatively strong government support and enrolment in the program in washington state, whereas the british columbia trial is capped at 500. references amoore, l. 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(2006). the global visa regime and political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies, biopolitics. alternatives: global, local, political, 31(2), 167–189. salter, m. b. (2008a). political science perspectives of transportation security. journal of transportation security, 1, 29–35. salter, m. b. (2008b). imagining numbers: risk, quantification, and aviation security. security dialogue, 39(2–3), 243–266. standing committee on public accounts. (2008, march 26). canada border services agency must improve its risk management. house of commons, ottawa, on. retrieved from . http://www2.parl.gc.ca/housepublications/publication.aspx?docid=3512859&language=e&mode=1 &parl=39&ses=2 waever, o. (1995). securitization and desecuritization. in r. d. lipschutz, (ed.), on security (pp. 46–86). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. raby final nov 21 19 correspondence address: rebecca raby, dept. of child & youth studies, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: rraby@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 231-234, 2020 book review the kids are in charge: activism and power in peru’s movement of working children taft, jessica k. (2019). new york: nyu press. isbn 9781479854509 (paper) us$30; isbn 9781479862993 (cloth) us$80. 272 pages rebecca raby brock university, canada over the past few decades, recognition of children’s participation in creating and engaging in the social world around them has become increasingly important to many child and youth scholars and advocates, but sometimes children’s participation is discussed as if the idea is a brand new, western idea. jessica taft’s (2019) book on peru’s movement of working children provides rich, compelling, and inspiring evidence to the contrary, although she is also cautious not to idealize the movement. peru, as well as other parts of latin america, has had a vibrant, long-term, participatory organization of working children and their adult colaboradores. peru’s movement of working children is mobilized around an understanding of children as political and economic participants, working together with adults to pursue children’s rights to dignified work and other social justice issues relevant to children. rather than write about the specific question of children’s work, however, taft concentrates on the history, values, processes, activities, possibilities, and challenges of this children’s social movement. her research is based on four ethnographic research trips to peru that involved attending numerous organizational meetings, interviewing key children and adults, analyzing movement documents, and attending many events. through her analysis, taft deconstructs assumed binaries between adult and child, and narrow, naturalized understandings of childhood that are used to justify adults’ rule over children’s lives; instead, she outlines an alternative vision of childhood that fosters horizontal, intergenerational collaborations. rebecca raby studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 231-234, 2020 232 the kids are in charge opens with information and history about peru, and especially about the peruvian movement of working children, including its somewhat complicated network of delegates, branches, and associated groups. the movement is linked to liberation theology, although over time the focus has shifted from a more overtly marxist approach towards greater concentration on children’s rights, activism and inclusion, especially in response to the international labour organization’s aim to abolish early child work. significant critiques of inequality and dominant power relations remain central to the movement, however, alongside commitment to broad social change. in chapter two, taft reflects on dominant and rival understandings of childhood that play a role in the peruvian movement of working children. current dominant views of childhood draw a rigid line between adults and children, romanticize children, and focus on children’s protection, although more recently, global understandings of children as rights-bearers have also gained prominence, leading to tensions between protection and participation. taft also highlights related, colonial models of childhood, which position indigenous children and their parents as unruly and needing control. these understandings of childhood are contrasted with the andean/indigenous model, which considers children to be interdependent community members within networks of care, mutual respect and responsibility. reflecting this andean/indigenous approach, and inspired by liberation theology, the peruvian movement of working children centres on protagonismo, the idea that everyone, including children, has dignity and freedom, and that we are all collective social actors who should be involved in meaningful participation. this vision of childhood focuses on building intergenerational, horizontal politics in the face of ongoing assertions of adult power. following protagonismo, the peruvian movement of working children acknowledges and values children’s broad experiences of work beyond the stark image of child labour that we most commonly read about. instead, the movement recognizes and values the breadth of work that children do, including work with family and in the home, and is most concerned that this work is trabajo digno (dignified work). the peruvian movement of working children understands intergenerational relationships through a guiding emphasis on horizontalism, which is the focus of chapter three. horizontalism focuses on equality of dignity, capacity, and insight: equality of dignity recognizes that both adults and children have equal worth and deserve equal respect; equality of capacity recognizes that both children and adults need to, and can, learn social movement skills; and equality of insight recognizes that everyone can contribute to understanding and analysis. these ethics guide the entire movement. sometimes horizontalism can be tricky, though, especially within the broader global climate of adultism. for instance, the organization needs the involvement of adults, but adults must accept and embrace children’s contributions and book review studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 231-234, 2020 233 decisions. another obstacle is that experience is valued in the movement more than age, but age often brings experience. chapter four, “teachers, mothers and compañeros,” more deeply explores adults’ roles in the children’s movement, and how some roles are more likely to foster horizontalism than others. for instance, some adults in the organization are seen as motherly figures. while the motherly role can provide support, well-being, and deep listening, it can also reproduce a hierarchical relationship. colaboracion as compañeros is seen as the ideal within the movement, but there are different views among the movement’s adults on what colaboracion should look like, with some embracing horizontalism and others more focused on being educators, which can be a more hierarchical role. a significant long-term figure in the movement, alejandro cussianovich, embraces a form of colaboracion that is premised on equality and a freirian approach premised on feelings, emotion and love in pedagogy. the issues raised in chapter four point to the ongoing need to navigate age-based assumptions and hierarchies within a children’s movement, assumptions held by both the adults and children. these challenges are further explored in chapter five, alongside organizational strategies that have been developed to address them. while the movement prioritizes horizontalism, it also embraces the goal that children should have more power than adults in the organization. on this basis, children are the ones who set the rules, discipline each other, and vote for delegates, including the adult delegates. children are also encouraged to speak up, especially as adults talk more easily and frequently. at the same time, when adults aim to “orient” the children through education, conversations can be shifted towards adult views and values. taft discusses how some of the adults are more conscious of this inclination and try to work against it. this is one of the few places in the book that focuses on gender, recognizing that the organization’s young women are more likely than the young men to gradually downplay their own voice and authority as they age into adulthood. another challenge faced by the movement for working children, and other child-led organizations, is that as delegates gain experience, they are also growing older and new children must take their place. the book’s final substantive chapter explores the broader impacts of the movement on policy, school, family, and on individual lives. has the movement shaped policy? has it positively influenced adult-child relations in schools, families, and broader society? the main focus of the movement is to increase acceptance of child workers, especially at the international level. the movement is also concerned with changing societal views about children and addressing other issues that affect children’s lives. these are challenging tasks, especially when it is difficult for journalists, policy makers and politicians to accept what the children are arguing, and when children do not have the resources to make significant changes without adult support. taft notes that the children’s views are frequently dismissed, especially around the rebecca raby studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 231-234, 2020 234 issue of work. despite these challenges, taft sees how the movement has shaped the views of some politicians and the language they use to talk about children, how it has altered some family dynamics, and how it has shaped some policy. for instance, the peruvian working children’s movement has been involved in local participatory budgeting processes. taft is quite cautious in viewing broad movement successes, however, as child-adult hierarchies remain rigid in peru, especially in schools. she is more certain of how the movement has had a positive impact on the individual growth and futures of child delegates, many who are coming from impoverished backgrounds. over the last decade, we have seen significant youth-led, social justice activism around the world, facilitated by the ease of sharing information through social media. these young activists are celebrated as heroes, but they are also trivialized as young, inexperienced, and exceptions among children. as taft argues in the book’s conclusion, the experiences of the children involved in peru’s movement for working children are similarly fraught, and participants’ advocacy is frequently dismissed. as taft emphasizes, young people need real decision-making authority, not just voice, and peru’s movement for working children fosters this kind of horizontal, intergenerational activism and shared decision-making. taft is careful not to idealize peru’s movement for working children, or to exaggerate its successes, but perhaps she consequently downplays the really exciting aspects of this movement. it has a long, deep, philosophically and politically grounded, social justice tradition. it has a fundamental ethos of equality between adults and children, and it has developed many internal, organizational practices that attempt to put this ethos into practice. finally, those in the movement are speaking out, repeatedly, on children’s right to dignified work and the value of children’s work. taft is clear that her book is focused more on the organization of the movement, on the children as participants and activists, and on the promises and challenges of horizontalism, than on children as workers. she tackles this goal with accessible, compelling, friendly writing, and careful explanation of somewhat elaborate organizational dynamics. at the same time, taft importantly keeps the discussion complicated in terms of thinking about conceptualizations of childhood, relations of power, and social movement challenges. each chapter also opens with a captivating vignette that left me wanting more in terms of the children’s stories and backgrounds with regard to their work, family and community. such details emerge in the final chapter when taft talks about the movement’s impacts on the children’s school and family, but i wished for more of these biographic details throughout the book. fletcher-randle final correspondence address: jessy erin fletcher-randle; email: erinfletcherrandle@cmail.carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 where are all the autistic parents? a thematic analysis of autistic parenting discourse within the narrative of parenting and autism in online media jessy erin fletcher-randle1 abstract although content related to parenting autistic children is common in online media, little attention is paid to the experiences of autistic parents. there is a growing trend of parents receiving autism diagnoses after their children are diagnosed, yet a basic google search on “parents” and “autism” reveals myriad data on the experiences of parents of autistic children and little on experiences of autistic parents. a systematic online search, augmented with a “crowd-sourcing” request to online parent support groups, identified only 15 articles and blogs that discuss autistic parenting in advocacy, lifestyle, and parenting websites. this article explores the scope and content of autistic parenting discourse in these online media to consider how the experiences of autistic parents are conceptualized and situated within broader narratives of neurodiversity, autism and parenting. media discourse focused on women who had received their autism diagnosis in adulthood, their experiences navigating their diagnoses, minimizing parenting challenges, and pushing back against autism stereotypes, with the majority of content intended for allistic audiences. recent increased recognition of autism in women has coincided with a new interest in autistic parenthood, raising questions about gendered assumptions and disabled mothering. the media narrative includes “defying stereotypes” and “proving” autism is compatible with parenthood, echoing mainstream beliefs. social justice issues reinscribed in the narrative illustrate how centring the voices of autistic parents can reconceptualize public perception of autism and bridge the disconnect between parenting autistic children, and autistic parenting of children. 1 i am a feminist, autistic individual with an interest in policy, social justice and disability rights. i began university studies online at age 23 without a high-school diploma or any academic support, and i still struggle to find my place in mainstream academia 10 years later. i was diagnosed with autism at age 32 after years of misdiagnoses and misunderstandings. i hope to make a difference in employment accessibility policy one day through my work as a public servant. jessy erin fletcher-randle studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 390 keywords adulthood autism; autistic parents; thematic media analysis; neurodiverse parenting; #actuallyautistic more people are being recognized/diagnosed as autistic than ever before.2 this fact has been attributed to a widening of autism diagnostic criteria, a possible increase in actual prevalence (apa, 2013; bargiela et al., 2016; lai et al., 2015) and more adulthood recognition/diagnosis of people (especially women) who went undiagnosed in childhood. many women are recognizing their own autistic traits upon diagnosis of their child (apa, 2013; pohl et al., 2020) and coupled with the rise in autism advocacy and online social groups (davidson & orsini, 2013), some autistic parents are sharing their parenting experiences, strengths, and challenges online. but how are the experiences of autistic parents being presented and discussed in mainstream online media, and what does this mean for representation and social justice for autistic parents? among autistic parent voices are people in the public eye. autistic advocate and writer cynthia kim has published several books and maintains the website musings of an aspie (kim, n.d.). chris fischer, spouse to comedian amy schumer, received his diagnosis and discussed his upcoming fatherhood in a documentary episode on his wife’s pregnancy (hammer & cunningham, 2020). lana grant, an autistic specialist advisor, is the author of a biographic novel and pregnancy guide, from here to maternity: pregnancy and motherhood on the autism spectrum (2015). however, until recently, little research or media included discussion of autistic parenthood (pohl et al., 2020). this absence of representation in the online worlds of parenting, neurodiversity, and autism has social justice implications for autistic parents. when i was a newly diagnosed autistic parent, the people around me made me feel that autism and parenting were incompatible. as a graduate social work student with a passion for stories and writing, i was keen to explore media sources to discover what stories mainstream media tell about autistic parenting, who is doing the telling, and with what potential consequences for autistic parents. deploying a thematic content analysis, i identified and explored parenting and lifestyle sources published in mainstream news, autism advocacy, and parenting websites to better understand how online media texts articulate the stories and experiences of autistic parenting. my findings indicate that autistic parents are not well represented, and narratives are skewed toward late recognized/diagnosed mothers seeking to “prove” autism and parenting 2 “autistic” is capitalized and used here to reflect critical disability discourse and to indicate community identity. throughout the article, i refer jointly to autistic recognition/diagnosis to deemphasize professional diagnosis and medicalization of neurodiversity and autistic people. where are all the autistic parents? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 391 are compatible. refuting autism stereotypes was central to constructing the narrative of autistic parenting in the media sources. further, medical solutions to parenting needs and challenges tended to be emphasized rather than structural accommodation approaches. as autistic parenting is a relatively new discussion in an emerging field of adulthood autism research and literature, i argue that hearing from additional and diverse autistic parents is crucial to understanding how autistic parents are situated within the discourse of parenting, neurodiversity and disability. centring discussion on autistic parents’ voices will allow for a more fulsome, intersectional account of autistic parenting to develop and grow. understanding autism autism is a lifelong experience that is partly genetic and affects roughly one to two percent of the population (apa, 2013; pohl et al., 2020). it is characterized by neurological differences in social and cognitive style and sensory functioning (asan, 2021a; pearson & rose, 2020; walker, 2021). traditionally, autism was diagnosed in childhood by health professionals guided by the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm) (apa, 2013). this is still the case for many people, but increasingly people self-diagnose later in life. in 2013, the dsm fifth edition (dsm-5) widened the criteria and reclassified the previously separate conditions of autistic disorder (classic autism), asperger’s disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (pdd-nos) into one category. according to the dsm-5 (apa, 2013), the female:male sex-ratio of autism is 1:4, although several research studies claim the ratio is closer to 1:3 or even 1:2 in practice (bargiela et al., 2016; loomes et al., 2017; pohl et al., 2020).3 it is known that girls and women are diagnosed at a much lower rate, with a sex-ratio of 1:5 and a historical ratio of 1:7 (whiteley et al., 2010). females are also diagnosed later than their male counterparts (bargiela et al., 2016; lai et al., 2015; pohl et al., 2020). this gender disparity in autism diagnosis, coupled with increased public knowledge as more children are diagnosed under the dsm-5, has led to more women being recognized/diagnosed later in life. trans and non-binary members of the autistic community are not included in these analyses but are becoming more visible in research and advocacy (pyne, 2021).4 3 the cisnormative nature of the studies cited mean that they do not take into account the complexity and separate nature of gender and sex. for more information on sex, gender identity and autism research, please see strang et al. (2020). 4 for more information, see the autistic women & nonbinary network resources at https://awnnetwork.org/ jessy erin fletcher-randle studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 392 autism tends to be conceptualized as either a medical condition or socially constructed disability. the medical model views autism as a developmental disorder or condition. it focuses on treating individuals for “deficits,” and preventing, fixing, or curing autism through clinical and biomedical intervention (gruson-wood, 2016; pellicano et al., 2014). the medical model situates medical professionals as experts on the needs of autistic people and positions neurotypicality as the lens through which the autistic experience is conceptualized and studied. this model does little to forward social justice and social change for autistic people, as it locates deficits in the individual and targets all interventions and modifications at an individual level. the social model of disability conceptualizes disability as an incompatibility between the environment and individual’s needs, situating people with disabilities as the experts on their own experiences (barnes, 2019; oliver, 1996; shakespeare, 2010). through the social model lens, an autistic individual’s experience of disability arises from their environment’s failure to include and support the different ways people communicate, experience, and interact in society. this model posits that accommodating neurological differences will reduce the experience of disability for autistic people. although the social model is not a complete theory of disability and should be used in conjunction with models which incorporate impairment, it is helpful in its reconceptualization of disability as the outcome of social exclusion (oliver, 2013; shakespeare, 2006). the social model is a bridge between the medical model and the more radical position taken by the neurodiversity movement. this movement views differences in neurocognitive functioning as a natural form of human diversity and seeks full societal inclusion and social justice for all neurodivergent people, including autistic people (asan, 2021b; ballou, 2018; walker, 2021). as one action of this movement, the autistic online community and selfadvocates have been shifting the focus of autism expertise by centring autistic people as experts of their own experiences and decentring parents of autistic children, whose advocacy dominates in current debate (altay, 2021; eartharcher, 2017; osorio, 2020). as one way to centre the voices of autistic people, the hashtag #actuallyautistic is used in many social media platforms to differentiate content and posts written by autistic people about autism or autistic people, from content and posts that non-autistic people write (altay, 2021; eartharcher, 2017; osorio, 2020). this hashtag is an effort to advance social justice for autistic adults and youth through voice. in this discussion, i take inspiration and perspective from #actuallyautistic. given the emergence of autistic parents as a relatively recent topic for media and research, autistic parents must have increased presence and credibility in conversations about autism and opportunities to share their expertise based on lived experience (osorio, 2020). it is crucial that their varying perspectives are presented on mainstream parenting, news, and autism advocacy websites to build representation and understanding for where are all the autistic parents? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 393 and about autistic parents; debunk stereotypes; explore the breadth of parenting experiences across gender, race, class, sexuality and neurodiversity; and reach more segments of the autistic population, including newly diagnosed children and the parents raising them. autism and parenting much like orsini’s (2012) distinction between the autism movement and the autistic movement, i use the term autism parents to refer to allistic adults who are parenting an autistic child, and the term autistic parents to refer to autistic adults who are parents.5 while autism parent refers strictly to allistic parent/autistic child relationships, an autistic parent may have an autistic or an allistic child. given that there is considerable diversity within the autistic community, including race, gender, class, sexuality, neurodiversity, and more, and no two autistic people have the same experiences, there may still be significant diversity within and among these relationships. further, children are often raised by more than one parent, and parents may raise more than one child. research literature about parents of autistic children reveals that reported stress levels are higher for parents of autistic children than parents of children with other disabilities, such as intellectual disability and cerebral palsy (farmer & reupert, 2013; ku et al., 2019; pozo et al., 2014). many quality of life studies have attributed this high-stress rate to the “severity” of the child’s impairments in verbal communication, social communication, and behaviours, as well as the parent’s adaptation of a new set of skills in parenting an autistic child (hall et al., 2016; poslawsky et al., 2014; pozo et al., 2014).6 a program evaluation study found that parents who participated in an education class to better understand autism, their child’s development, and the neurological basis for autism, subsequently reported lower stress levels and higher confidence in parenting (farmer & reupert, 2013). therefore, a lack of accurate autism knowledge and understanding may underpin some of the stress faced by parents of autisitc children, especially those parents without personal knowledge or experience with autism, and their needs for resources and information should be met wherever possible. autistic parents may experience similar challenges as autism parents in navigating situational challenges and neurodiversity within the family, but there is not much research exploring their experiences. while one study 5 allistic is a more inclusive term used by the autistic community to refer specifically to those who are not autistic but may not be neurotypical (autism canada, 2020). this article will employ the term allistic to denote people who are not autistic. this article capitalizes allistic as it is referring to a group of people. 6 this language of “impairment” is consistent with the cited quality of life studies and is retained for accuracy in data interpretation. jessy erin fletcher-randle studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 394 explored the quality of life of autistic parents, focusing exclusively on the experiences of mothers and women (pohl et al., 2020), others have focused on the needs of autistic women during pregnancy and childbirth (rogers et al., 2017; suplee et al., 2014). there is limited research available that focuses on autistic parents and their parenting. in addition to the scientific literature on the quality of life of parents of autistic children, there are several qualitative analysis studies of online stories of the experiences of parents of autisitc children (fleischmann, 2005; reinke & solheim, 2015; zeman et al., 2011). these studies reveal varying purposes and research goals, from understanding parents’ journeys and needs, to forming a knowledge base for developing and optimizing supports for these parents. no studies analyzing the online stories of autistic parents’ experiences were found, and this qualitative thematic analysis study helps to fill this gap. methods this article reports on a small independent research project involving a twotier online search for mainstream media content on autistic parenting and a thematic content analysis of selected works to answer the research question: how are the experiences of autistic parents conceptualized in mainstream online media, and what does this mean for representation and social justice for autistic parents? the research began with a keyword search on google and google scholar, and included the following search terms: “(autis* or asperger or aspie or neurodivers*) and (mother(ing) or father(ing) or parent(ing)).”7 articles and blog entries that featured an autistic parent were included, and those that did not were excluded. simultaneously, a request was posted on four facebook social support groups for autistic adults, asking members to help identify any english language, text-based media on autistic parenting they have noted. i was a long-standing member of these groups. this callout yielded many suggestions of articles, websites, blogs, studies and community figures who have spoken about autistic parenting and helped broaden the online search. in effect, this method offered a “crowd-sourced” approach to enhance the breadth and depth of basic online data collection. media content was initially reviewed for inclusion based on the following criteria: • the article or blog entry must contain actual accounts of autistic parents; 7 although the dsm-5 no longer has the distinct diagnosis of asperger’s syndrome and many within the autistic communities reject this label on moral grounds, many adults still carry the diagnosis and use this term. where are all the autistic parents? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 395 • the article or blog entry, if written by the child of an autistic parent, must include the parent’s self-diagnosis or formal diagnosis status,8 and not be a speculative account or attempt to diagnose based solely on characteristic autism traits; and • the article or blog entry must mention elements or aspects of parenting and of autism, whether negative, positive, or neutral; any depth of account qualified. the search was conducted in october and november 2020 and yielded 32 articles and blogs. seventeen of these data sources did not fit the criteria. after this initial review, the 15 remaining selected articles and blog entries were read and analyzed, with relevant information recorded in a protocol template designed to capture and compare the dominant subtopics, themes, and framework in their narratives of autistic parenting. all of the data sources used in this analysis discussed experiences of a self or formal-diagnosed autistic parent through written accounts in either blog or article form. these works were a compilation of online news articles (5), parenting (3) and health (1) magazine interest stories, autism advocacy articles (5), and blog entries on disability websites (1). most of the selected content were articles written for websites or newspapers, and only two could be classified as blog entries. ten of the data sources were presumed to be written for an allistic, general audience due to their location on mainstream online websites. the remaining five data sources, found on autism advocacy websites, were presumed to be for both autistic audiences and allistic general audiences, as the content on these websites are typically written by and for the autistic community and the general population. in total, seven of the data sources were written by allistic journalists (discussing between one and four autistic parent families). eight were written by autistic parents, each discussing between one and 13 autistic families. the writers of these data sources can be further broken down as follows: 11 journalists or writers (73%), three of whom are also autistic parents, and four autistic parents who write based on their own experience (27%). eleven of the 15 data sources featured women diagnosed with autism after becoming parents. the remainder of the data sources featured men (2) and men and women (2), many of whom recognized themselves as autistic before becoming parents. in sum, this search yielded a small selection of online data sources, showing that the topic is somewhat “fringe” in online discussions surrounding interest in neurodiversity and parenting sites. journalists wrote 8 adults with self-diagnosed autism or asperger’s syndrome were included due to inequities in the formal diagnosis process for many women, bipoc and lgbtq persons who may go underrecognized in healthcare. jessy erin fletcher-randle studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 396 most of these accounts, while autistic parents, including journalists, were represented but not dominant. the media content for autistic parenting is relatively new and limited. over half the data sources included in this analysis were written within the past four years, with the oldest dated article from 2014. most autistic adults sharing their experiences were late-diagnosed women, with only two articles or blog entries incorporating men and childhood-diagnosed adults. additionally, only autistic parents who could speak with a journalist or write about their experiences in a more traditional media format were represented, as a result of the nature of the project design, media representation, and availability of online content. this limited the sample distribution towards the particular experiences of late-recognized autistic women with autistic children and may not reflect the majority of autistic parents, especially as there has been little research into the demographics and statistics of autistic parents (pohl et al., 2020). online discourse of autistic parenting experiences: advocacy, stereotypes, challenges the online discourse on autistic parenting reveals a robust and cohesive advocacy stance that aims to refute beliefs that autistic people should not be parents and demonstrate that autism and parenting are not mutually exclusive: i think more needs to be done to show how autistic parents actually parent. not just anecdotal stories, but actually do some case studies on families. that just hasn’t happened. since the majority of actual literature out there says we’re innately negligent, that is what services providers are going to perpetuate. (pacton, 2016) autism is much misunderstood. stereotypes abound, and many would assume that autism and motherhood don’t make comfortable bedfellows. i don’t believe this to be true. (james, 2019) disabled parents have fought hard to be accepted as parents (pinto, 2010), and this review shows that autistic parents and their advocates have joined this fight. many of the parents represented in the data sources wanted to provide information and hope for autistic adults who are just beginning parenthood and cannot find the resources and information they need online. other parents indicated that their motivation to share their experiences of ableist discrimination in accessing child/parent services was to educate professionals about autistic parents’ needs and prevent others from experiencing the harm they and their children had sustained. most stories were from unrecognized/undiagnosed autistic mothers who, upon having children, were abruptly disabled by the sensory experience, social tasks, and where are all the autistic parents? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 397 gendered burden of parenting. this experience led to an autism diagnosis and a growing self-understanding of their needs and strengths: i am emotionally stronger, smarter, more flexible, less obsessive, less selfabsorbed, more aware of my surroundings and more patient than at any time prior to the birth of my son. (farmer, 2020) i also know that my autism helps me be a good mother: autistic people get obsessions, and my obsession is making sure i’m doing everything i can to give my children everything they need, to love them, fight for them, and get them to adulthood healthy and happy. (hill, 2017) these accounts were often paired with lengthy descriptions of parents feeling left out or unsupported in their parenting by mainstream parenting support groups, in autism-related services, and online parenting resources, which framed successes as overcoming obstacles (deweert, 2017; hill, 2016; hill, 2017; justine, 2020; kim, 2014a; malia, 2020; pacton, 2016). for example, many data sources described autistic parents feeling judged or misunderstood by professionals, attributing these problems to both ableism and social communication (deweert, 2017; hill 2016, 2017; james, 2019; kim, 2014a, 2014b): people believing me incompetent or emotionally lacking is dangerous in the sense that i could be assumed incapable of being a parent. and so, it feels very scary sometimes being an autistic parent, wondering whether one day my parenting will be seriously questioned due to discrimination and misunderstanding. (pacton, 2016) i understand that my autism makes me a difficult person to deal with: i don’t know when to back off when i know i’m right. i can’t look people in the eye, so i come over as being shifty. autistic people get hyper-focused but they mistook my obsession as a sign i was unstable. (hill, 2016) many parents advocated for supports to help autistic parents communicate effectively with their child’s school, social services, and health professionals to combat discrimination and eliminate communication barriers (deweert, 2017; dias, 2019; hill, 2016; kim, 2014a). this narrative advocates for structural change, usefully questioning whether the origin of these communication barriers lies with neurological differences or with a system that relies on allistic expectations for social communication to form opinions on parent fitness. the autistic parenting discourse emphasized the strengths autistic parents bring. for example, while meeting a child’s emotional needs was typically described as a potential challenge, these data sources debunked the stereotype that autistic people lack empathy or emotion (deweert, 2017; james, 2019; justine, 2020; o donnell, 2019). they emphasized parents’ commitments to jessy erin fletcher-randle studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 398 self-awareness and the utility of logic-based responses over emotion-based responses in certain parenting situations: looking back, my parenting differences were never more apparent than when my children were in their teens. i noticed just how logical, rather than emotional, my mothering was. while my friends would sob, rage and blame their children and themselves when things went wrong (such as children dropping out of college, drinking too much, experimenting with drugs or having pregnancy scares), my approach would be infinitely more pragmatic. if something went wrong, i would discuss it with my children, try to understand why they did it and help them get back on track. (james, 2019) the emotional work of parenting can also be a challenge for people with autism… drew is acutely aware of being a parent with autism, and constantly monitors himself to make sure he provides what his daughter needs… the irony is that his awareness of having a condition that makes it difficult for him to express affection has transformed virtually his every action into an expression of love. (deweert, 2017) if they’re doing something you don’t like, it’s because you have a preconceived idea of how children should be, behave or look. that’s illogical. if, on the other hand, they are doing something dangerous, then it’s much more effective to sit down and discuss it with them. (hill, 2017) the overarching advocacy narrative was of autistic parents achieving growth, adaptation, and parental satisfaction in spite of the lack of neurodiversity-friendly parenting resources.9 further, this narrative pushed back on stereotypes that suggest autistic adults cannot adapt to new roles and routines, empathize or respond to emotion. the discourse emphasized that acceptance and appreciation for neurological differences are crucial for raising children (dias, 2019; farmer, 2020; hill, 2017; james, 2019; justine, 2020; parker, 2019; rudy, 2020). it also reframed autistic parents’ need for structure and routine as providing stability, and logic-based responses as supporting their child’s autonomy. the following quotes encapsulate this reconceptualization: i didn’t have that same self-consciousness as many of my neurotypical friends that their children were a reflection of themselves, so i allowed them to grow into their own people very early on in their lives. (james, 2019) it [adulthood autism diagnosis] has also given me space to accept that i also have an obligation to meet my own needs so that i am better able to parent my kids. i 9 an example of a neurodiversity-friendly support or resource is one that strives to be inclusive, respectful of different learning styles, takes into account various sensory needs, and allows multiple communication methods. where are all the autistic parents? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 399 have learned to recognize when i am overwhelmed before i reach the burnout stage, and i have learned to take some time to recharge. (rudy, 2020) getting my own diagnosis has helped me liberate from the social pressures and enabled me to help my son become his own personal best. (dias, 2019) being autistic has meant my autistic children have grown up without the usual pressures and stresses that neurotypical parents can unknowingly subject their children to. my parents tried to force me to be ‘normal’ and to conform. they tried to force me to socialise, eat normally, behave normally. (hill, 2017) while most data sources discussed the problems of ableism and discrimination in society, at the same time, some sources also reproduced ableism and other discriminatory stereotypes. these problematic mindsets were evident in autistic parent story-telling that uncritically accepted the onus of change, even while finding it harmful to their well-being. this view suggests that ending discrimination requires professionals to behave with more acceptance, tolerance, skill and knowledge but does not advocate for structural and societal changes to accept and support neurodiversity within mainstream society. this line of argument was emphasized in several ways, including through data sources stressing the need for early diagnosis and intervention that valued reducing the appearance of autism traits over accomodating differences in social functioning and reducing unnecessary social tasks. most data sources discussed the importance of autism diagnosis for parents. however, some emphasized that diagnoses should lead to swift and targetted interventions: “missing that critical intervention [of diagnosis and targeted treatment] may have lasting effects on women, including depression and anxiety caused by a persistent feeling of failure” (dias, 2019). suggested interventions for increasing autistic parents’ social functioning ranged from communication skills training to occupational and behavioural therapy (dias, 2019; kim, 2014a). one journalist specifically asked about parents’ “autismrelated therapies that help [them] better manage parenting” (rudy, 2020), to which one parent replied that therapy is not “one-size-fits-all,” while the other parent replied that behavioural therapies (the most well-known “autismrelated” therapies) were a negative experience for him. these data sources depict autism as a medical condition requiring treatment rather than a disability experienced due to an ableist world. in some data sources, this medicalized approach was inadvertently reinforced through narratives emphasizing autistic parents’ sense of social obligation to mask challenges and appear adept at social tasks: the level of care an autistic girl needs to be able to socialise is vast. because i’m autistic, i understand and will spend the necessary hours helping them [her daughters], before they go out socially, to work out everything that could possibly happen when they’re out and how they could react. we then work out a jessy erin fletcher-randle studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 400 contingency plan for if something happens that we have not predicted. (hill, 2017) i am a constant bag of nerves, since being a mum requires me to try to do all those things [social tasks of parenting]. not doing them, or asking my parents or husband to do those things, makes me feel like a failure, a ‘bad mum.’ doing them causes me such stress that i feel utterly drained afterwards for a fairly long period of time, from hours to days. (sandham, 2017) another issue influencing this autistic parenting discourse was its implicit assumptions about gender. most data sources and research literature included in this article centred on women, making the word “parent” almost synonymous with “mother.” while men make up a higher proportion of the autistic population (bargiela et al., 2016; lai et al., 2015; loomes et al., 2017), women were selected as the exclusive subjects of the pioneer study into autistic parenting experiences (pohl et al., 2020). this gender bias could be because women remain the primary caregivers in many families, and that increased recognition/diagnoses of autistic women bring societal attention to the idea that autistic people are more than subjects of care, as noted in the broader women’s disability movement (frederick, 2014; macdonald, 2016; track, 2014). both feminist and disability scholars have long drawn attention to the unequal gendered distribution of parenting accountability (frederick, 2014; grue & lærum, 2002; malacrida, 2009; romero, 2018; track, 2014). gender and ability can come into play for parents in the child welfare system, producing inequities for women with disabilities that neither disabled men nor non-disabled women face (blumenthal, 2015; track, 2014). as mothers, women with disabilities are under increased scrutiny in society, including healthcare, child welfare, and educational systems (blumenthal, 2015; braedley, 2010; malacrida, 2009; track, 2014). this judgment and scrutiny of disabled mothering may explain why laterecognized/diagnosed women appear to be favoured – even the ideal subject – in online discourse on autistic parenting. men tend to be recognized and receive autism diagnoses sooner than women (bargiela et al., 2016; lai et al., 2015; pohl et al., 2020), and thus are more likely to be perceived as intentional actors in passing on their genes when becoming parents. however, men also experience less scrutiny and fewer societal expectations as parents due to mothers’ assignment as children’s primary caregivers. as the narrative of autistic parenting tends to reflect the experiences of autistic mothers who are diagnosed only when their children are assessed for autism and do not as yet reflect experiences of men and women aware of being autistic before having children, further research into the gendered burden of parenting and its impact on autistic mothers may be warranted to explore any potential bias against intentional autistic parenting. this phenomenon may be best studied from a disability framework, situating autistic mothering within the broader where are all the autistic parents? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 401 social movement of disabled mothering (frederick, 2014; grue & lærum, 2002; malacrida, 2009). a final issue emerging in the online discourse of autistic parenting was the tendency to emphasize that autistic parents were good for raising autistic children due to the potential for understanding and support based on shared neurology, while neglecting to interview or discuss autistic parents who are raising allistic children (dias, 2019; hill, 2016; malia, 2020; pacton, 2016). one data source explicitly framed autistic parent/autistic child relationships as valuable examples to autism parents: this is really just the tip of the iceberg of the excellent conversations i had with these moms, but it highlights why we must keep including autistic parents in parenting conversations. their insights are crucial for neurotypical parents (like myself) who are raising autistic kids, and their voices must be heard so we can continue to combat stigma and discrimination. (pacton, 2016) this issue ignores and hides autistic parenting of allistic children and many other aspects related to neurodiversity within family life. reframing autistic parenting for social justice given the strong advocacy narrative in online discourse about autistic parenting, coupled with its problematic ableist, individualist, and gendered assumptions, what social justice aims would address and reframe autistic parenting narratives to more fully align with the wider realm of parenting, autism and neurodiversity discourse? first, and perhaps most obviously, increasing representation and centring of autistic parents’ voices and experiences in online discussions of neurodiverse parenting can debunk discriminatory perspectives of autism and parenting. drawing on lessons learned through campaigns such as #actuallyautistic, this approach could develop a wider societal appreciation for neurological differences and increase the representation and presence of autistic parents in social media conversations about autism and parenting. this effort could build appreciation for neurodivergence and different ways of performing parenthood, situate autistic parenting solidly within the realm of parenting discourse and reconceptualize what it means to parent and nurture a child with a different neurotype. second, autistic parents and autism advocates need to demand change to services for parents and children, including educational, health care, and social services. drawing on the social model of disability more explicitly, autistic parents and autism advocates must challenge assumptions about individual responsibilities to adapt to a discriminatory society. third, autistic parenting experiences and quality of life are underdeveloped and newly emerging fields in autism research and parenting jessy erin fletcher-randle studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 402 research. much work is needed to fully understand autistic parents’ experiences and develop a knowledge base for autistic parents and those who support their families in the school, health, and family services systems. researching and writing about vulnerable groups, especially parents with disabilities, can perpetuate harm if conducted without sensitivity to participants’ intersectionality (macdonald, 2016; romero, 2018). critical disability and feminist research exploring disabled motherhood could inform future research of autistic parenting and ensure all gender experiences are considered, including autistic fatherhood. conclusion this thematic analysis reveals that content on the experiences of autistic parents is a sparse but developing area located on the fringes of the broader dialogue of neurodiverse parenting, as research and online media focus on the experiences of autism parents. however, late-diagnosed women are sharing their parenting journeys of self-discovery, building more representation of both autistic adults and autistic parents. much of the resulting narrative focused on autistic parents’ strengths and challenges and detailed how they successfully met their children’s needs despite a lack of autism-friendly parenting resources for new parents. autistic parents’ concerns and priorities mostly revolved around discrediting harmful stereotypes of autism and appealing for more understanding of adulthood autism for themselves and the professionals working with their families in various capacities. this analysis identified reinscribed ableism in the narrative of many data sources reviewed, focusing mainly on three themes. first, there was a medical approach to autism by emphasizing treatment as the goal of adulthood diagnosis to the exclusion of social approaches that focus on environmental adjustments and supports. second, the proliferation of the experience of latediagnosed autistic women in the narrative of autistic parenting, despite men making up a higher proportion of the autistic population, led me to question the implicit assumptions of gender and disability in autistic parenting. i strongly recommend that future autistic parenting research attend to intersectionality and that discourse surrounding autistic mothering be situated within the broader social movement of disabled mothering, which already attends to the power dynamics and increased scrutiny of mothers in society. third, limiting stories of autistic parenting to those who shared neurology with their child isolated the narrative of neurodiverse parenting to allistic parent/autistic child relationships only. this analysis also revealed an appreciation for neurological differences in several articles, which effectively reframed autistic parenting as a welcome variation in parenting and an equally valid way of being. this reconceptualization demonstrates that centring autistic parents’ voices is where are all the autistic parents? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 389-406, 2022 403 essential in reframing autistic parenting and enabling positive representation of autistic parents in the dialogue of autism, parenting and neurodiversity. throughout the article, i attempted to espouse the principles of both the social model of disability and #actuallyautistic by preserving and centring autistic parents’ voices via excerpts. although #actuallyautistic is still firmly a social media movement and tool, it has future potential to amplify autistic parents’ voices and build representation and presence in discussions of parenting, autism, and neurodiversity in more traditional online media sources. this shift in the narrative can reconceptualize how autistic parenting is discussed, reach broader audiences, and increase social justice for autistic parents in the social realm of parenting. acknowledgements thank you to angela vrieze, zoe brow, jodi van der laan and bonnie schroeder for your helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article. thank you to dr. susan braedley for your expert advice, comments and support, which really helped get this article to the next level. thank you to the editors and anonymous peer reviewers for your valuable input and to the members of my facebook social support groups for autistic adults for your enthusiasm and support of my online search. references altay, a. 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(2011). strengths classification of social relationships among cybermothers raising children with autism spectrum disorders. the school community journal, 21(1), 37-51. studies in social justice volume 3, issue 1, 23-37, 2009 correspondence address: mark neocleous, department of politics and history, brunel university, uxbridge ub8 3ph, uk. tel.: +44 (0) 1895 266824, email: mark.neocleous@brunel.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 the fascist moment: security, exclusion, extermination mark neocleous department of politics & history, brunel university abstract security is cultivated and mobilized by enacting exclusionary practices, and exclusion is cultivated and realized on security grounds. this article explores the political dangers that lie in this connection, dangers which open the door to a fascist mobilization in the name of security. to do so the article first asks: what happens to our understanding of fascism if we view it through the lens of security? but then a far more interesting question emerges: what happens to our understanding of security if we view it through the lens of fascism? out of these questions it is suggested that the central issue might be less a question of “security and exclusion” and much more a question of “security and extermination.” security presupposes exclusion. take the piece of legislation passed just a few weeks after the attack on the world trade centre, called the uniting and strengthening america by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism act. coming in at over 340 pages and carrying twenty-one legal amendments, the act was said to be necessary and essential to the new security project about to be unleashed on the world. it changed criminal law and immigration procedures to allow people to be held indefinitely, altered intelligence-gathering procedures to allow for the monitoring of people’s reading habits through surveillance of library and bookshop records, and introduced measures to allow for greater access to property, email, computers, and financial and educational records. but if the act is about security, it is also immediately notable for the wordy title, designed for the acronym it produces: usa patriot. the implication is clear: this is an act for american patriotism. to oppose it is unpatriotic. the patriot act is, unsurprisingly, intimately connected to ideological tropes that have been very much part of the discourse of security more generally, such as “our way of life” and “our values.” this emerged as a theme very quickly on the day of the attacks on the world trade centre. bush made three statements or proclamations on that day. in his first speech bush was simply concerned to state his overall control of the situation, but by the third and longest statement, delivered as an “address to the nation” just 12 hours after the attacks, he began to articulate the idea that the attacks were on “our way of life” (bush, 2001a). a few days later, bush delivered 24 mark neocleous studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 some remarks at the national day of prayer and remembrance which sounded as much like a eulogy for america as for the dead, a hymn to the “national character” and “national unity” (bush, 2001b). by september 20, the theme had been developed into the now famous rhetorical question “why do they hate us? answer: they hate our way of life” (bush, 2001c). this trope was hardly an invention of bush’s or the current “war on terror.” it had for example been present in the rhetoric of “humanitarian intervention” in the previous decade. the bombing of serbian forces in kosovo was conducted on the grounds of “upholding our values,” as clinton (1999) put it, or for the “moral purpose [of] defending the values we cherish” as blair commented, adding the obvious link with security: “the spread of our values makes us safer” (1999). yet despite these precursors, it is the “war on terror” that has put this idea at the heart of the political debate around security. this has led many people to suggest that one of the most notable features of the “war on terror” has been its grounding in “identity”: in the construction of both the “evil,” “alien” enemy and the “good” american, where what is at stake is something to do with values, a way of life, a national character or political culture. it seems to me that it is also very much about that logic which is so presupposed by security (and identity, for that matter): exclusion. this is why the patriot act and key speeches have sought to affirm the inclusion within the nation of its loyal muslimarabic subjects against the need to exclude those who lack the required loyalty. “arab americans, muslim americans, and americans from south asia play a vital role in our nation and are entitled to nothing less than the full rights of every american,” notes the act, calling upon the nation “to recognize the patriotism of fellow citizens from all ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds.” likewise: “there are millions of good americans who practice the muslim faith who love their country as much as i love the country, who salute the flag as strongly as i salute the flag,” commented bush a week after the attacks in september 2001 (bush, 2001d). and the mechanism of exclusion is by no means limited to questions of identity or values. it extends, for example, to the realm of international law through categories such as “unlawful combatants,” “illegal belligerents” or “rogue/failed states,” all of which function ideologically as a means of excluding the people or states in question from the supposed standards through which international order is managed. in other words, the logic of security underpinning the “war on terror” requires knowing who or what should be included as part of the object to be secured and thus who might be excluded as a threat to the security of that object.1 security politics is a politics of exclusion, then; that much is clear. security is cultivated and mobilized by enacting a set of exclusionary practices. conversely, exclusion is cultivated and realized on security grounds. this mutual presupposition of exclusion through security measures and security through exclusion practices has a long history, underpinning as it does all the historic practices through which civil society and borders—both internal as well as external—have been policed: of how the class of poverty was originally excluded from the body politic, of how the dangerous classes, the urban poor, the racially inferior, the threatening immigrant, the sexually deviant, the politically oppositional, the colonial subject, have been administered in ways excluding them from certain spheres of civil society and the state, certain occupations and careers, certain powers and pleasures. the fascist moment 25 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 a number of writers have noted that such exclusions have been central to liberal politics—enacted “not in spite of liberal democracy, but as an integral part of it” (curthoys, 2003, p. 9; also lake, 2008, p. 23).2 “rather like the figure of janus, liberalism presents us with opposed yet ultimately connected faces,” notes barry hindess (2001, pp. 365–366). one, superficially more appealing, expresses the familiar liberal claim that government should rule over, and as far as possible rule through, the activities of free individuals. the other, less benign face reflects the equally liberal view that substantial portions of humanity consist of individuals who are not at present capable of acting in a suitably autonomous fashion. accordingly, along with the view of individuals at liberty to conduct themselves in rational liberal ways, the liberal gaze also falls on groups of others who cannot be trusted, those not “at home” in the liberal empire. the outcome, these writers suggest, is an integral relationship between liberalism and exclusion. yet the figure of liberalism begins to appear less janus-like when one realizes that security, rather than liberty or inclusion, is in fact its key concept (neocleous, 2008). if we recognize that liberalism is less a philosophy of liberty and more a technique of security, as mitchell dean puts it (1991, p. 196; 1999, p. 117), then liberalism’s supposedly janus-like quality, in which it looks in one direction towards an inclusive conception of free individuals and in the other direction towards problematic categories of the population which need excluding in some way from the body politic, turns out to be far from two-faced as first appears. in fact, it turns out to be very single-minded in pursuit of its one key goal: security. it then becomes clear that liberalism has to exclude because the logic of security requires it. picking up any recent book, article, or government document on security, and one is always reading about one liberal practice of exclusion or another. texts on security simply are texts about exclusion, implicitly where not explicitly so. other articles in this issue of studies in social justice explore some dimensions of this liberal practice of exclusion. in this article, however, i want to pursue a slightly different line, one that pushes this argument about security and exclusion to its limits. and those limits take us into the world of fascism. a number of writers have noted that there is a real schmittian logic underpinning security politics (for example, williams, 2003). casting an issue as one of “security” tends to situate that issue within the logic of friend and enemy. in so doing it ratchets up strategic “security” fears and dangers and so encourages a political decisionism concerning the “state of exception” (neocleous, 2006a; 2008, pp. 39–75). such political reason is the core of schmitt’s concept of the political. “the political is the most intense and extreme antagonism,” says schmitt, “and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.” the nature of friendship lies in a set of common values distinguishing the friend from the “other, the stranger” (schmitt, 1932/1996, p. 29). the political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in 26 mark neocleous studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible (1932/1996, p. 27). for schmitt, this friend-enemy antagonism is the essence of the political, reaching its highpoint in a state of exception which allows sovereignty to be asserted and reinstated: “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (schmitt, 1922/1985, p. 5). this decision is conducted in defence of and with the support of the friend grouping. now, this kind of argument has been a powerful undercurrent in a fair amount of recent thinking around security. for example, in their influential work aiming to develop security concepts away from classical and realist arguments centred on the security of the state and towards a wider range of “societal sectors,” barry buzan, ole waever and jaap de wilde nonetheless still resort to schmittian concepts and language. something becomes a security issue “when [that] issue is presented as posing an existential threat to a designated referent object.” in such a context, “by saying ‘security,’ a state representative declares an emergency condition” (buzan, waever, & de wilde, 1998, p. 21). for these writers, the broadening of the sphere of security does little to change the assumptions underpinning the existential threat. yet there is a problem here. for schmitt is the thinker who was once described as “theorist for the reich” (bendersky, 1983) and, more recently, “crown jurist for the third reich” (stirk, 2005). i have no desire to rehearse the reasons why schmitt’s work is fascist to the core (see neocleous, 1996). but if there is a real schmittian logic to much of the language of security, and if there is a fascist dimension to much of schmitt’s work (of the 1920s and 1930s at least), then does this not demand a proper exploration of the relationship between the logic of security and fascism? “speaking and writing about security is never innocent,” says jef huysmans, “it always risks contributing to the opening of a window of opportunity for a ‘fascist mobilization’” (2002, p. 43). events since september 11, 2001, bear witness to this. it is now clear that any revival of fascism will come through a political mobilization in the name of security (harootunian, 2007). to push this idea i want to explore initially the thematic of security within the original fascist context. as far as i am aware, this has not been done, a fact that is especially odd when one considers that fascism is often understood in terms of the idea of a “police state” and that security is the core category of police (neocleous, 2000). the initial question i want to ask, then, is: what happens to our understanding of fascism if we view it through the lens of security? but then a far more interesting question emerges: what happens to our understanding of security if we view it through the lens of fascism? these two questions point us to what we might call “the fascist moment.” 3 at which point, the central issue might appear to be less a question of “security and exclusion” and much more a question of “security and extermination.” or maybe we need to think the three together: security, exclusion, extermination. “anti-semitism fused with security issues” it is well known that the nazis constantly used euphemism to mask the deeds of the nazi state and played around with language in order to reframe political questions, as the fascist moment 27 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 victor klemperer (1946) has shown at length: “productive work” rather than slave labour or being taken into “protective custody” rather than being arrested, to give just two examples. in similar fashion, people who had been robbed of their valuables found that in fact the state had simply “secured” (sichergestellt) their property. and rather a lot of such “securing” went on. from the moment communists started being detained “for security reasons,” in dachau in march 1933, security became integral to the glossary of nazi ideas. as such, we need to examine the increasing “securitization” of german society from 1933 onwards. in april 1933, a new “secret state police” (geheime staatspolizei, or gestapo) was formed as part of the new nazi state. the law creating this new body claimed that it was necessary “in order to assure the effective struggle against all of the efforts directed against the existence and security of the state” (as cited in gellately, 1991, p. 29). concerns had been widespread since the seizure of power at the end of january 1933 that not enough was being done in terms of security. for example, adolf wagner, staatskommissar at the bavarian ministry of the interior, wrote on march 13, 1933, to hans frank, staatskommissar at the bavarian ministry of justice, that “the order for the arrest of all communist officials and reichsbannerfuhrer [social democrat squad leaders] has not so far been carried out as thoroughly as necessary for the preservation of peace and security” (as cited in broszat, 1968/1973, p. 144). the securitization of german society was afoot. yet the feeling that the “security of the state” was not being properly defended was still in place three years later, and led to a huge reorganization of the security apparatus. in june 1936, major changes were made to the organization of certain aspects of the nazi state. hitler appointed himmler as head of the german police, allowing him to combine this with his role as head of ss. himmler divided the police into two sections: the order police (ordnungspolizei, or orpo) and the security police (sicherheitspolizei, or sipo). the latter was a new organization combining the gestapo and kripo (kriminalpolizei; the criminal police). the security police was to be headed by reinhard heydrich, who was also head of the sicherheitsdienst (sd), the nazi party’s security service. later, at the beginning of the war in september 1939 the security police and the sd were combined into a new reich security head office (reichssicherheitshauptamt; the rsha). drawing together these complementary party and state agencies created a powerful new organizational tool which was to become crucial in the war against the communist-jewish enemy, for a number of reasons. first, many nazis believed that the project of extermination could be conducted only by those willing and able to undertake it. “only the security police has the necessary experience in this area,” commented franz rademacher, head of the jewish desk in the german foreign office (as cited in browning, 2005, p. 85). time and again the experience of the security police in “security matters” was used by the nazis as an explanation for the institution’s role in dealing with the “jewish problem.” to give just one further example, eichmann’s close associate theodore dannecker commented in january 1941 on the importance of the “extensive experience” of the security services in carrying out the final solution (as cited in browning, 2005, pp. 103–104). second, just as the military is the least likely institution to resist a military coup, and the police the least likely institution to resist a police state, so the “security services” are the least likely to question, resist or refuse actions carried out in the name of security. and third, having such actions carried out by the security police gave the whole 28 mark neocleous studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 project an air of legitimacy. for example, rudolf lehmann, chief of the legal division of the armed forces high command (okw), commented in a document on the jurisdiction of military courts that to make the use of military courts “somewhat more palatable” he would omit references to “the carriers of the jewish-bolshevik worldview” and “jewish-bolshevik system” and would instead emphasize the rationale of security (browning, 2005, p. 220). thus to point to the institutional mish-mash of police and security organizations— sipo, kripo, orpo, gestapo, ss, sd, and so on—as a way of highlighting “confusion about the nature and mission of the organizations charged with “security” in the third reich” (gellately, 1991, p. 143), is in some sense to miss the point, which is that “security” was the raison d’être of the institutional framework as a whole. the institutional mish-mash is therefore somewhat irrelevant; indeed, is there any state which does not have an institutional mish-mash of institutions concerned with “security”? what is crucial is that security was the logic which underpinned the whole system. as browder’s (1996) work has suggested, the institutional identity conferred by security work had a kind of elective affinity with nazism. that this should be so should not surprise, since in mein kampf hitler had referred many times to the importance of security: of economic security for the nation and the insecurity generated by trade unions; the security of the living space for the race and the security of the state within this living space; the security of germany in the international system; the importance of a food supply and national honour to the nation’s security; the security of the means of executing a movement’s ideas; the list goes on and on (hitler, 1925, pp. 50, 130, 131, 133, 136, 150, 177, 325, 601). by the time the nazis came to power, and consolidated this power within the wider international system in the 1930s, a system in which the new ideology of security was becoming increasingly important, this thematic could very easily be used to underpin the whole system. symptomatically, the sa often denied that they were a “storm section” (sturm abteilung), and preferred to present themselves in a guise more consistent with this raison d’être: as a “security section” (sicherheits abteilung); the initials “sa” conveniently stood for both (heiden, 1944, p. 234). security thereby permeated the system of legal terror exercised by the nazis. the sicherungslager (security camp) was one of the main categories of the concentration camp system. but nikolaus waschmann (2004) has also shown that the regular legal system—that is, the system of trial and punishment that imprisoned people to such an extent that until august 1944 the numbers in the regular prisons outnumbered those in concentration camps—was also founded on the notion of security. the whole system was based on the notion of “security confinement” (sicherungsverwahrung), derived from the law against dangerous habitual criminals of november 24, 1933, and aimed at excluding (that is, imprisoning) people said to be a danger to the security of the community—the sicherungsverwahrter krimineller, who wore a triangle with the letter “s.” judges made extensive use of security confinement sentences, which were eagerly carried out by prison officials committed to the notion, to the extent that both retrospective security confinements (even for people who had not actually been sentenced by the courts for anything) and the indefinite imprisonment of offenders even after the end of their original sentence became common. security confinement was not just a weapon of criminal policy, but was explicitly political: it was central to nazism’s the fascist moment 29 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 attempt to reorder the german polity and society by excluding “security threats”— “inferiors,” “outsiders,” “deviants,” critics and resisters—from the national community. eventually sicherungsverwahrung became a euphemism for concentration camp incarceration and “security confinement prisoners” (sicherungsverwahrungshaftlinger), including jews (often arrested for their political opposition to the regime rather than as “racial aliens”), trade unionists, communists and other problematic outsiders, were taken into “protective custody” (schutzhaft). this term, schutzhaft, was applied initially following the proclamation of the emergency decree of february 28, 1933, but became widespread from april 1933. (in the intervening weeks such arrests were often referred to as a transfer into polizeihaft [police custody], and relevant orders throughout 1933 refer varyingly to “political protective custody,” “police custody for political reasons,” and “political custody” [broszat, 1968/1973, p. 144; caplan, 2005], reminding us of the extent to which security and police overlap as political concepts.) the key to such custody was that those taken into it were regarded as enemies of security—a term which in effect “provided the gestapo with virtually unlimited powers of arrest and confinement” (gellately, 1991, p. 13). in other words, the logic of “security” helped not only legitimize the acts of exclusion on which nazism was initially founded, but also led to the final acts of extermination. the wannsee conference of january 20, 1942, taken by many to be the formal meeting to launch the final solution, was essentially a meeting of security police. overall control of the final solution lay with the reichsfuhrer ss and chief of the german police (himmler, with heydrich as his representative). indeed, it has been suggested that the purpose of the wannsee conference was not merely to finalize the plans for the final solution, but “to reinforce the rsha’s pre-eminence in all aspects of the jewish question” (roseman, 2002, p. 83). it might also be pointed out that the key administrative agency for supervising the concentration camps alongside the rsha was the office of economic policy (wvha), giving us not only another nice euphemism—extermination as economic policy—but also another nice example of the conjunction between security and conceptions of economic order. “what explains the decision to extend killing to the whole of european jewry?” asks michael burleigh. warning bells began to sound in the autumn of 1941, when notice was dramatically served on the jews of western europe too. it is important to grasp…that what follows had nothing whatsoever to do with rationalising economies or settlement plans, but involved anti-semitism fused with security issues (2001, p. 645). whenever the extermination was to be stepped up, such as following the warsaw uprising in april 1943, it was always as a “security threat” that jews were depicted, a depiction which of course countervailed against any arguments concerning, say, their economic utility. as christopher browning puts it, “with the exception of artisans, jews were not an important labour factor. instead, they presented a security threat that had to be neutralized in the interest of the ‘absolutely necessary, quick pacification of the east.’” thus, “in the eyes of german officials, especially outside the civil administration, the economic usefulness of jews as forced labourers was far 30 mark neocleous studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 outweighed by their being perceived as a threat to security” (browning, 2005, pp. 285–286, 297). security was thus the major theme in managing the occupied states and the extermination policies carried out there, and for the measures carried out against other social groups for which “exclusion” wasn’t quite enough. let me briefly discuss the case of the lithuanian jews as an illustration of the point about occupied states, and gypsies and homosexuals as illustrative of the point about social groups. the initial pogroms and shootings of lithuanian jews in the summer of 1941 were understood in terms of the security of the region and conducted under the guise of security. heydrich authorized the lithuanian police to carry out “cleansing operations” to secure the movement of the einsatzgruppen and einsatzkommandos. the local understanding was that the project was a security measure: since the jewish people were the active agents of bolshevism, their initial exclusion and eventual destruction was necessary on security grounds. asked under interrogation in 1958 about his role in the shooting of jewish men in kretinga in 1941, ssunterfuhrer krumbach from the police station in tilsit commented: “it was explained to me then that according to an order from the führer, the whole of eastern jewry had to be exterminated so that there would no longer be jewish blood available there to maintain a world jewry, thus bringing about the decisive destruction of world jewry. this affirmation was by itself not new at that time and was rooted in the ideology of the party. the einsatzkommandos of the sipo and of the sd were instituted for this task by the führer” (as cited in diekmann, 2000, p. 246). once the pogroms against the jews were set in place, a second dimension of the nazi obsession with security could then be set into play. the leaders of the einsatzgruppen had to give the pogroms the appearance of being carried out spontaneously by lithuanians as revenge against the jews for their supposed bolshevik activities. in this way the responsibility of the security police for the killings would not become widely known—one of the many instances in which the exercise of violence is erased from the concept of security. the sipo, as the agent of this particular security project, could thereby be protected from accusations of uncontrolled brutality. diekmann (2000, p. 269) cites the report of einsatzgruppe a, from october 15, 1941: “it was however not undesirable that they [the german security police] . . . did not give the appearance of using the clearly unusually harsh measures, which would certainly elicit a stir in german circles. it must be shown to the outside world that the native population itself took the first measures, of its own accord, in a natural reaction against centuries of oppression by the jews and the terror of the communists in former times.” this then served to facilitate a further dimension to the importance of security: that the security police could then be seen to step in as the guarantor of order—as some kind of institutional check on the “wild wrath of the people.” thus the security police would be needed to restore order, reaffirming once more security’s “positive” role. dieckmann suggests that in terms of the solution to the jewish problem in lithuania, “national socialist security policy was the most important element.” the intent to exterminate the jews was clear from the plans for deportations. the analysis of the policy as it actually developed makes it seem possible that further factors were also necessary. the modification of the fascist moment 31 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 the racist starvation policy . . . meant first and foremost the pauperization of the jewish population, which was to be denied the right to live. the mass killings were in this connection legitimized on the grounds of national socialist security policy (p. 266). his point applies to the whole of the third reich, not just lithuania. in terms of social groups, guenter lewy (2000, pp. 70–77) has shown that the persecution against the roma was conducted under a range of security measures. the notion easily spread that roma were not merely “plague” or “nuisance,” the traditional ways of distancing them, but were also in fact working for foreign intelligence services. this was the reason given to explain why roma liked to live in border areas. thus on january 31, 1940, the high command of the armed forces requested from himmler an order prohibiting on the grounds of “defence” roma from living in the border zone. on april 27, 1940, heydrich issued a decree on “resettlement of gypsies” which gave orders to begin transporting 2,500 roma away from the western and north-western border zones and to the general government. these requests and orders were gradually realized through 1940, during which period the security theme became prevalent. lewy comments that the idea that the expulsion was based in the main on concern about military security is less than credible, for if it was then why did it take so long? and why limit the number to 2,500? why send them to the general government, which was also a border zone and where they could do as much damage? and why were foreign roma excluded? these are fair questions, but they only make sense if one takes the security project at face value. but no security project should ever be taken at face value. security always functions as an underlying rationale for some political project: an exclusion here, an extermination there; a partial solution here, a final solution there. moreover, security could play this foundational role precisely because of the way it obliterates any distinction between inside and outside, domestic and foreign. the internal enemy needed to be exterminated because it was in fact integral to the external enemy—international communism. the external security project which identified the soviet state as the key enemy could thus slide into an internal security project aimed at the supposed agents of the soviet state, namely the jewishbolshevik conspiracy. at the same time, and in common with many security forces in the west, the nazis perceived homosexuals as a security threat, part of a broader range of “nonconformist” activities which were the basis for one security measure after another (browder, 1996, pp. 65–66, 72). gellately suggests that everyday life became so politicized in nazi germany that even the sphere of sexuality and friendship became an issue (p. 147) and the nazis criminalized any behaviour that appeared oppositional (p. 157). indeed, but that’s where the logic of security takes us. forms of “deviant” or “perverse” sexuality have long been treated as a security problem in liberal democracy as well as under fascism (neocleous, 2006c, 2008, pp. 123–141). another 6 million “i have talked a good deal about hitler,” says aimé césaire in his discourse on colonialism in 1955. why? “because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see 32 mark neocleous studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 things on a large scale.” césaire adds, “at the end of capitalism, there is hitler. at the end of formal humanism and philosophical renunciation, there is hitler” (1955/2000, p. 37). he may well have said: at the end of security, there is hitler. this is precisely why the schmittian logic underpinning so much of the security discourse is so telling. for in schmittian terms the question of security unveils the nature of the political, inherent in which is the idea of combat and annihilation (1932/1996, p. 32). “war is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. but as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which . . . thereby creates a specifically political behaviour” (1932/1996, p. 34). as much as the state presupposes the concept of the political, so the political presupposes the concept of war. to this end, hobbes’s war of all against all becomes the “fundamental presupposition of a specific political philosophy” (1932/1996, p. 65). however, whilst hobbes’s state of nature is a war of individuals, schmitt’s account posits collectivities at war, albeit undefined: “an enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity” (p. 28). and it is clear that this enemy may be domestic as well as foreign: the fight in question may be a civil war as much as war between nations, a war of extermination against internal as much as external enemies. this is the main reason schmitt so despises liberalism: because it demilitarizes politics and reduces intensely political concepts such as combat to either economic competition or intellectual discussion (1932/1996, p. 71). in so doing “the decisive bloody battle” is transformed into a parliamentary debate (1922/1985, p. 63).4 for schmitt, war is the pinnacle of great politics and the highest form of human behaviour: “what always matters is the possibility of the extreme case taking place, the real war” (1932/1996, p. 35). war therefore needs no real justification as such; or, rather, its existence is its justification: “the justification of war does not reside in its being fought for ideals or norms of justice, but in its being fought against a real enemy” (1932/1996, p. 49). being at war with one’s enemy follows logically from the decision to identify the “other,” the “stranger,” as different and alien—an enemy and therefore geared for combat. but because schmitt’s decisionism is an essentially existentialist politics, war is not just a perpetual phenomenon of the political, but is its highest form. “the high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy” (1932/1996, p. 67). for schmitt, in contrast, the decisive bloody battle becomes the defining characteristic of the political, the key to the nature of the decision and to the identification of friends and enemies. schmitt argues, “a world in which the possibility of war is eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics” (1932/1996, pp. 35, 78). 5 the concrete clarity of the enemy raises the possibility of “life” and the struggles surrounding it being accorded an existential meaning. in this context, the importance of the state of exception is that it breaks through the torpid, repetitive everdayness of bourgeois norms. just as in existential philosophy moments of peril call forth individual “authenticity,” so the state of exception, as moment of political peril, calls forth a political authenticity. the state of exception—the clampdown in the name of security—is thus granted an existential significance. but because the enemy, as other, is existentially alien, exclusion is not enough. rather, its physical annihilation takes on an existential meaning; extermination is necessary. “the the fascist moment 33 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing” (1932/1996, p. 33). extermination is thus beyond the requirement of any normative meaning; it is justified for its own sake, for the meaning it brings to the political. exclusion is not extermination. but the extermination exhibited by the fascist moment and legitimized in the work of a thinker such as schmitt serves as a salutary reminder of the contiguities between them. it serves also as a salutary reminder of one of the fundamental lessons of history: that extermination has frequently been carried out in the name of security. working out the figures here would be an impossible task of course. but take, as just one example, the calculation by john stockwell. stockwell had been part of a cia project in angola which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people but, reflecting more generally on the achievements of the security services in which he worked, he commented: coming to grips with these u.s./cia activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of laos or the hills of nicaragua is very difficult. but, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed—and this is a minimum figure. included are: one million killed in the korean war, two million killed in the vietnam war, 800,000 killed in indonesia, one million in cambodia, 20,000 killed in angola—the operation i was part of—and 22,000 killed in nicaragua (1991, p. 81). note: the six million is a minimum figure; he omits to mention rather a lot of other interventions; he was writing in 1991; and his focus is solely on the security practices of one state. if we started factoring these into the picture the figure of 6 million would quickly be dwarfed, and would thereby quickly dwarf the 6 million estimated to have been exterminated by the fascist regime in germany. the slaughter bench of history appears coated in the blood of those murdered in the name of security. in 1953 franz neumann commented that the integrating element of liberal democracy purports to be a moral one, whether it be freedom or justice. however, he also noted that “there is opposed to this a second integrating principle of a political system: fear of an enemy.” such fear, he notes, is a key feature of fascist political thought, which “asserts that the creation of a national community is conditioned by the existence of an enemy whom one must be willing to exterminate physically.” but neumann adds that when the concepts of “enemy” and “fear” come to constitute the energetic principles of politics, democracy becomes impossible and the system is ripe for dictatorship (1953, pp 223–224). his reference is to schmitt, and reflects also on his own experience of having lived through the rise of fascism in germany. but it is difficult not to think that he also had in mind the security practices then being carried out by liberal democracies, such as the loyalty program being carried out in the pursuit of american security in which the fabrication of fear and insecurity was the crucial dynamic. this program replicated and in some ways surpassed the practices for consolidating loyalty, national identity and political unity used by fascist and authoritarian regimes: lack of toleration of different political opinions in public life; police incursions into personal lives; the proscription of lawful associations; star chamber proceedings on the basis of anonymous testimony; persecution for political beliefs entailing no criminal conduct; and the enforcement 34 mark neocleous studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 of rigid political orthodoxy through the use of vague and sweeping standards of loyalty. the fear of the enemy, and the equally substantive fear of being denounced as part of the enemy, meant the continual reiteration of patriot acts on the part of the good citizen-subjects. the program was also being conducted at a time when the national security state was employing fascists in its struggle for security. 6 thriving in the crises of liberalism, the fascist potential within liberal democracy has always been more dangerous than the fascist tendency against democracy (adorno, 1959/1998, p. 90; neocleous, 1997). bearing in mind that the crises of liberalism are more often than not expressed as crises threatening the security of the state and the social order of capital, and bearing in mind the extent to which fascism comes draped in its own security blanket and can speak the language of security as well as anyone else, it really is no exaggeration to say that were such tendencies to be realized now, they would do so in the name of security. this poses a very real political problem for those academics and activists who in recent years have sought to rethink, redefine, remap, and revamp security, since it is not clear that simply broadening the security agenda does anything to mitigate against the fascist potential that lies within security. for in constantly harping on about the need for a new security agenda these “solutions” might actually be part of the problem. rather than yet another rethinking of security, then, the solution lies in moving away from “security” entirely; it lies in the critique of security. neumann clearly sensed that much of what he said about fascism could be used to point to dangers that actually lie within liberalism, dangers rooted in allowing a mythical security to become the only measure of political judgment and fear the basis of order. 7 in the opening section of his essay “the work of art in the age of its reproducibility” (1936/2002), walter benjamin comments that as well as contributing to the creation of conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself, the essay also tries to develop concepts which “are completely useless for the purposes of fascism.” the critique of security is part of this project. but given the extent to which the ideology of security has become the dominant trope of contemporary politics, and given the ways in which ideology works by imposing an obviousness or naturalness on ideas (althusser, 1969/1971, p. 161), which is nowhere truer than with security (a goal so “obvious” and “natural” that it can barely ever be questioned), the critique of security is not without its difficulties. faced with such difficulties, and in the context of the rise of fascism, benjamin enquired in 1929 about “the conditions for revolution.” in bleak tone, he suggested that surrealism had come close to the communist answer. “and that means pessimism all along the line. absolutely. mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of european humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals” (benjamin, 1929/1999, pp. 216–217). “literature,” “freedom,” “humanity”: the slogans and clichés of a bourgeois liberal humanism always seeking a “reconciliation” of some sort or another.8 to which we should add: “security.” mistrust in security, all along the line. the fascist moment 35 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 notes 1 hence the prompt rounding up of some 1,200 immigrants and antiwar activists following the passing of the patriot act. the precise figure remains unknown, due to security’s sister concept: secrecy. 2 curthoy’s point is well made, and her historical material refreshing, but she pulls her punches in dramatic fashion at the end of her article, in which liberalism turns out to be the basis for freedom and equality after all (p. 32), as though she had forgotten the previous 20 pages of her own argument. 3 in his work on security and modernity, robert latham (1997) shows the central role of security in the process of international order-building following world war ii, in which liberal order was achieved via a military-strategic strategy shaping both the international realm and the identity of the liberal state. this ‘liberal moment’, as latham calls it, was the moment of security. in fact, the origins of this liberal moment lie a decade earlier, in the 1930s as the logic of social security comes to the fore as an explicit dimension of the administrative state (neocleous, 2006b, 2008). but if the real moment of security was in fact between the wars, and if the period between the wars is remembered for the rise to power of fascism as much as anything else, then we might gain something from thinking of this as ‘the fascist moment’—a fascist moment which was also part of the moment of security. 4 schmitt is ridiculously wrong on this point. as any analysis of the history of liberalism shows, there’s nothing that liberals like more than dealing out a good dose of slaughter against either external or internal enemies. that schmitt chooses to ignore this dimension of liberalism is rather telling. 5 interpretations of schmitt which seek to play down the glorification of war are only possible if one ignores the existential nature of his conception. 6 the 1998 war crimes disclosure act requiring the cia, fbi and army to declassify operational information has revealed the extent to which being a fascist was not a security problem for the us state: between late-1946 and december 1952 over 600 german scientists were brought from germany to the us and placed in major universities and corporations (breitman, goda, naftali & wolfe, 2005; for the broader historical backdrop see simpson, 1988 and 1993). it might also be noted that at the height of his power many people feared that joe mccarthy’s search for security would bring fascism to america, a fear founded in part on his early sympathy for mein kampf and an episode in his early senatorial career in which his investigation of a nazi massacre in belgium gave rise to concerns of nazi sympathizing (kovel, 1997, pp. 118, 281). 7 this is distinct from critical security studies which, as i show elsewhere (neocleous, 2008), has more in common with classical liberalism than with critical theory. 8 for an extended argument against the conservative nature of “reconciliation,” see neocleous, 2005, pp. 29–35. references adorno, t. 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(2003). words, images, enemies: securitization and international politics. international studies quarterly, 47(4), 511–531. sharma final before ts correspondence address: nandita sharma, department of sociology, university of hawai‘i at manōa, honolulu, hi 96822; email: nsharma@hawaii.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 against national sovereignty: the postcolonial new world order and the containment of decolonization nandita sharma university of hawai‘i at manōa, usa abstract in this paper, i examine the growing reliance on discourses of autochthony in nationalisms throughout the world. native-ness (or indigeneity) is increasingly being made a key criterion for claiming national sovereignty over territory, as well as the more amorphous – but no less consequential – claim to national membership. by examining the crucial colonial genealogy of autochthonous discursive practices, i argue that claims to autochthony are metaphysical and, as such, deeply depoliticizing of the exclusions they produce. drawing upon historical studies showing how imperial-states deployed autocthonous discourses to divide those they categorized as natives and migrants from one another in an effort to maintain their imperial rule, i show the continuities of such practices in the postcolonial new world order of nation-states. despite their rhetoric, i argue that contemporary, nationalist discourses of autochthonies have not – and cannot – succeed in realizing decolonization, precisely because of their reliance on modes of political, economic, and social exclusion based on the separation of people categorized as either nativenationals or as migrants. the material force of ideas of native-nationalism(s), because they are premised on territorial sovereignty and not on the end of practices of expropriation and exploitation across the planet, are part of the worldwide relations of ruling and not threats to it. keywords autochthony; settler-colonialism; national sovereignty; postcolonialism introduction racism was a crucial component of european colonialism. european imperial-states placed people into racialized typologies and categories, hierarchically ranking those holding imperial power as “superior” in all ways to the people whose labour created the vast wealth of empires and the people living on land incorporated into imperial territory. the categorical distinction nandita sharma studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 392 made between “europeans” and colonized “natives” was a key negative duality of the racism of imperial-states. rulers identifying as european, and later as “white” had long employed racism to elevate themselves from exploited and expropriated classes in europe. in order to preserve imperial rule, european-ness (and, later, whiteness) was eventually extended to working people racialized – and territorialized – as part of the imperial metropoles (see hyslop, 1999; miles, 1993). while this did not end their dispossession, exploitation, or denigration, ideas of white supremacy did give whitened workers certain powers and privileges over workers categorized as the natives of the americas, africa, and asia. the separation of the “white working class” from all other working people was critical to the continuation of imperial rule, as it profoundly weakened opposition to imperialism, capitalism, and racism. so too was the separation of various colonized people from one another. as cedric robinson (1983) put it, “the tendency of european civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones” (p. 26). just as racism was central to colonial practices, so too was anti-racism central to anti-colonial struggles. those fighting colonialism well understood that collective liberation required eliminating racism (see fanon, 1963; james, 1938; williams, 1944). today’s efforts to narrow the definition of “anti-racism” to something that takes away from anti-colonial struggles is an act of disavowal of the deep connections between racism and colonialism. in particular, i argue that the view of anti-racism as only of importance to those negatively racialized people who are not also classified as native (or indigenous people) is part of how the definition of “colonialism” has been expanded to include all people, things, and processes seen as “foreign” and, therefore, as migrant. this is evident in increasingly popular efforts to remake people categorized by the state or popularly represented as migrants into “settler colonists,” which is still the main framing, (fujikane & okamura, 2000; lawrence & dua, 2005; wolfe, 1999), “interlopers” (nossiter, 2017), “occupiers” (ward, 2016), or even “invaders” and “vipers” (fuller, 2012). while some scholars have tried to complicate such formulations and have offered different terminologies by which to understand non-natives, for example jodi byrd’s (2011) much discussed category of “arrivants,” a key distinction remains between natives and migrants. although for some readers, such distinctions are seen as largely relevant only to political life in the former british white settler colonies of canada, the united states, australia, and new zealand, the characterization of migrants as “settlers/colonists” is, i show, prevalent across the world and across the left-right political spectrum. indeed, nationalism(s) everywhere increasingly centre indigeneity – or autochthony – as a key criterion for claiming both national sovereignty over territory as well as the more amorphous – but no less consequential – idea of national membership. against national sovereignty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 393 such discourses are reframing the basis for social, economic, and political life by reframing human mobility as tantamount to colonialization. an increasingly employed method for normalizing exclusive political claims to nationalized territory is to set the “nation” against people constituted as migrants. as i discuss below, this is currently playing out in a particularly deadly way in myanmar (formerly burma), where, as i write, dominant burmese buddhists and the state are actively engaged in genocidal practices against rohingya people who have been re-presented as “migrants from bangladesh,” and, as such, “colonizers” who must be expelled. indeed, autochthonous movements are themselves intensifying. electoral districts within some nation-states have been re-defined as autocthonous places where non-natives (allochthons) do not belong (and should not be allowed to vote). in cameroon, for example, a prominent opposition leader, samuel eboua, stated that, “every cameroonian is an allogène [french for allochthon or nonnative] anywhere else in the country… apart from where his ancestors lived” (ceuppens & geschiere, 2005, p. 390). the separation of natives from migrants, and the related separation of antiracism from anti-colonialism, is, therefore, part of the hardening of nationalisms and racisms (see also sharma, 2020). in the process, national – and even sub-national – borders are being further reified and valourized. in this article, i reject the separation of anti-racism from anti-colonialism by examining the separation of people categorized as natives from people categorized as migrants. i discuss the philosophical and political premises of the imperial state category of native (increasingly recast as indigenous) and show that it is incapable of acting as the basis for decolonization. instead of leading to liberation, i argue that national sovereignty movements centering indigeneity, like other national sovereignty movements, work to ensure the continuation of the practices deeply associated with colonialism, namely the practices of expropriation and exploitation, dispossession and displacement. the hegemonic association of national territorial sovereignty with decolonization, might allow the rulers of nation-states control over territory and the people on it, but it has not – and will not – allow people living in those territories to regain access to land (or water or air). instead, far from being crucial to the politics of decolonization, the autochthonous equation of migration with colonization is a critical part of contemporary racist discourses of anti-immigration, which help to legitimize nationalisms “from above” as well as “from below” (see sharma & wright, 2008/2009). thus, i discuss the historical separation of people categorized as either natives or migrants in order to situate the contemporary widening of their separation as a fundamental aspect of what i call the postcolonial new world order (sharma, 2020). i show that after the end of world war two (wwii), as the imperial form of state power was delegitimized, a new governmentality of nation-state power was put into place. by the 1960s, most imperial colonies and all of the european imperial metropoles had nationalized their sovereignties. nationalism was so thoroughly legitimized that even in those nandita sharma studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 394 colonial sites without a national sovereignty of “their own,” nationalism informed most of those engaged in anti-colonial efforts. this postcolonial world of nation-states (and nationalisms) failed to live up to the hopes, desires and expectations of those fighting colonialism (gilroy, 2005). instead, nation-sates facilitated the further globalization of capitalist social relations as well as the expansion of state power over people. private and public practices of expropriation and exploitation accelerated in the first, second, and third worlds alike and disparities of income and wealth ballooned within nation-states and across the international system (oxfam, 2017). this postcolonial new world order of national sovereigns, i argue, was critical to the political containment of radical, anti-capitalist and anti-racist demands to end colonial practices. anti-immigrant politics – and the intensification of national border controls – were an important part of this containment. claims of indigenous sovereignty played no small part in this process. by investigating the intersection of claims of autochtony with the hegemonic global system of national sovereignty, i show that viewing national sovereignty as the only legitimate form of political power, and making indigeneity the only legitimate grounds for wielding this power, have together intensified anti-immigrant politics the world over. whether this discourse is deployed by those who see the existing nation-state as “theirs” or by those seeking a different national sovereignty over the same territory, both view migrants as colonizers because they are are not native to the territory they are living and working on. consequently, the key binary of postcolonial rule – the figures of the national and the migrant – are being further refracted through the lens of autochthony so that the “true” national is the nationalnative, while migrants are always seen as usurpers of native territorial sovereignty. the similarities between people deploying autochthonous political frameworks are not only semantic (e.g., their shared use of the term “indigenous”). regardless of their variety, all autochthonous discourses assert that national-natives are the original and ultimate source of law and the grantor of rights. all transform land (and water and air) into nationally sovereign territory. all autochthonous discourses rely upon – and are productive of – essentialist and ahistorical ideas of “nation” and “race.” and, in standard postcolonial style, all claimants to autochthonous national sovereignty imagine themselves to be engaged in anticolonial resistance. this is why, as the hard, exclusionary edge of nationalism is further sharpened, the figure of the migrant comes to be re-presented as a colonizer settling on national-native territories. today, re-making migrants into colonizers is the surest way to not only delegitimize their political demands but also their very existence. these shared features belie claims made by some indigenous scholars and/or activists, particularly in the former british “white settler colonies,” that their understanding and use of the term “national sovereignty” is fundamentally different than those drawing upon “western” political theory (see brown, 2018, for an overview of such claims). in the next section, i against national sovereignty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 395 argue that the philosophical basis of indigenous claims to national sovereignty have a crucial colonial genealogy based on discourses of autochthony. as did imperial discourses of autochthony, contemporary claims also rest on processes of racialization and on the related territorialisation of people's relationship to land and to one another. the metaphysical and imperial underpinnings of indigeneity derived from the greek autos (self) and khthon (earth), an autochthon is one (originally in the plural) who has literally “sprung from the earth.” the term has historically referred to “an original or indigenous inhabitant of a place” (oxford english dictionary [oed], n.d.c). the term indigenous is also from classical greece. to be indigenous is to be “born inside, with the class connotation of being born ‘inside the house’” (ceuppens & geschiere, 2005, p. 385). autochthony or indigeneity is inherently a territorialized identity, for anyone (or anything) deemed autochthonous or indigenous is seen to be “born or produced naturally in a land or region; native or belonging naturally to (the soil, region, etc.)” (oed, n.d.d). the negative counterpart to autochthonous or indigenous people are those represented as allochthons. its meaning is predicated on the greek allo, referring to that which is other or different, and the indo-european allo, referring to something or someone “else.” it too carries a territorialized connotation. first used as a geological reference, classifying something (like rocks) as allochthonous denoted that it was said to originate from someplace else than where it was found (oed, n.d.b). allochthony was first applied to people in the mid-nineteenth century (oed, n.d.a). these two figures – the autochthons and the allochthons – existed in a binary that produced imaginaries of static, geographical origins. regarded as incommensurable, discourses of autochthony territorialized autochthons as the “people of a place” while allochthons became “people out of place.” discourses of autochthony view indigeneity as a first principle of political action. in classic aristotelian thought, first principles are concerned with discerning a particular kind of distilled truth or essence for any given social phenomenon. the “truth” claimed in discourses of autochthony is that an original and essential link exists between people identified as autochthons, specific territories, and political power. in such discourses, an autochthonous link to territory is the only rightful basis for power in and over a place (and the people in it) – in the past, today, and into the future. as with all forms of essentialism, that which is elevated to a first principle is its own validation. within autochthonous discourses, autochthony is said to be originary. as a result, having indigenous sovereignty to national (and, increasingly, to subnational) territory is presented as self-evident and divorced from history, contingency, or interpretation. one deeply troubling and uncanny consequence of this, one that reveals its colonial foundation, is that nandita sharma studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 396 autochthonous discourses constitute indigenous people as being “a people” without history. the special relationship that claims of autochthony make between indigenous people and place is thus a metaphysical one. michel foucault (1977) pointed out in regards to other metaphysical worldviews that the search for an origin (ursprung) that attempts to “capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities,” allows one to be confident in the belief that “things are most precious and essential at the moment of their birth” (p. 142). olaf zenker (2011) notes that this is why autochthonous claims are usually represented as “‘authentic,’ ‘primordial,’ ‘natural’ and ‘self-evident’” (p. 67). consequently, autochthonous claims foreclose efforts at further explanation, inquiry, and, perhaps most especially, contestation. for this reason, autochthonous discourses are profoundly depoliticizing. making autochthonous claims to national, territorial sovereignty “unpolitical” immunizes them from the critical practice of deconstruction (brown, 1995, p. 14). within autochthonous discourses, whether emanating from the political left or right, only indigenous people have a just claim to territory. we can see this in the work of leanne simpson (2011, 2014), whose view of liberty is deeply infused by autochthonous – and metaphysical – views that see the sovereignty of indigenous people as grounded in their being the “people of a place.” although referring to “land,” simpson (2014) draws upon autochthonous discourses of indigenous territoriality when arguing that, “we cannot carry out the kind of decolonization our ancestors set in motion if we don’t create a generation of land based, community based intellectuals and cultural producers who are accountable to our nations and whose life work is concerned with the regeneration of these systems…” (p. 13). the “we” that simpson (2014) refers to here is not the broader “we” of all those people living and working on the land, but the nishnaabeg “nation” whose claim to the territorial sovereignty rests on their descent from autochthonous ancestors. such autochthonous claims to territorial sovereignty transform people constituted as indigenous into the people (i.e., into “nations”), while making all non-natives – with the figure of the migrant being perhaps the quintessential non-native – into “people out of place” in the places they actually live and work. in the process liberty itself is territorialized. emplacing indigenous-natives and displacing migrants like other discourses of “nationhood,” autochthonous claims to indigenous national sovereignty are productive of ideas of “race.” through a discourse of shared origins, autochthony proposes an imagined sameness of the nation’s members. the basis of this national sameness are racialized ideas of ancestral genealogies, kinship, blood, or national culture (balibar, 1991, p. 43). against national sovereignty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 397 claiming indigeneity as the grounds for political action on land reframed as national territory, autochthonous discourses establish racialized limits to belonging, rights, and political power. racialized imaginations of national territorial belonging are part of the continuing legacy of imperial thought. by the early seventeenth-century, the feudal ruling class category of native had long been associated with “a person born in bondage; a person born to servants, tenants, etc., and inheriting their status” (oed, n.d.e). a 1604 definition of native also denoted a person born in a particular place (oed, n.d.e). european imperialstates represented colonized people as natives to try and normalize their exploitation while also portraying them as part of the “resources” of specific imperial colonies. by the end of the seventeenth century, nonhuman animals as well as plants also began to be emplaced and defined as native (or not). by the mid-nineteenth century, these meanings of native had intensified, so much so that any given place was identified by that or those said to be native to it. these related meanings combined to territorialize natives as the colonized people “of” a given colony. working in tandem with imperialist practices of racialization, each group of colonized natives was ranked along a racist hierarchy and emplaced as a part of the wealth of particular administrative unit of empires. just as europeans remained european even when they were not in europe, natives remained natives of the particular colonial territory they were racialized as being an essential part of, regardless of where they actually were. in short, people were categorized according to the birthplace of their “race.” autochthonous discourses gained greater institutional traction as imperial state practices shifted from “direct rule colonialism” to “indirect rule colonialism” from the mid-nineteenth century onward (mamdani, 2012). in the process, colonized natives, long divided from – and subordinated to – europeans, were separated from one another. the critical factor came to be whether a native person was “indigenous” or if they were a “migrant.” those colonized natives placed in the imperial-state category of “indigenousnatives” were racialized as having “sprung from” a given (then imperial) territory and represented as being temporally and spatially static (i.e., the “people of the place”). the negative counterpart to indigenous-natives were those colonized people re-categorized as migrant-natives. empires claimed that this group of natives did not originate in the colony but had moved there from someplace else. migrant-natives were thus defined by their mobility and by their lack of any territorial claim to the places they lived. regarded as no longer being in “their own” native land, they were seen by european empires, and by indigenous-natives, as “people out of place.” the making of these divisions between colonized natives were part of the political effort of european empires to retain power. specifically, mahmood mamdani (2012) has shown that the shift to indirect-rule colonialism was a response by the british empire desperately trying to quell further rebellions nandita sharma studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 398 in british india, one of its most profitable colonies. the 1857 indian rebellion had begun in may 1857 when soldiers of the bengal army shot their british officers and marched on delhi. the power of the rebellion grew across the northern and central parts of the subcontinent as civilian natives joined in. lasting well over a year, the indian rebellion was considered one of the greatest challenges made to a european imperial power in the latter part of the nineteenth century (mamdani, 2012). it was feared that colonized natives would overthrow imperial rule. this was neither an exaggerated nor a fleeting worry, and its effects were felt beyond the british empire. in the united states, for example, the “british mutiny” played into “an anxiety toward slave revolts in the late 1850s and into the civil war” (bilwakesh, 2011, pp. 1-2). after brutally putting down the indian rebellion, britain passed the 1858 government of india act and took control from the east india company. ironically, the british imperial-state’s direct control over british india was accompanied by an “indirect” style of rule. the east india company, reliant on existing elites to both extract wealth from native workers and to suppress their dissent, had engaged in a strategy of “civilizing” the native ruling class as well as native members of its military by trying to have them adopt british laws, technology, and even christianity. otherwise, the company mostly ignored the day-to-day lives of the working natives. this changed when the british government took over in 1858. believing that the indian rebellion was sparked by collective native resentment at efforts to “civilize” them according to ideas of british-ness, indirect-rule colonialism presented direct imperial rule as a means to protect the traditions and customs of the natives from the intrusions of a “modern” world (mamdani, 2012). of course, many of these “traditions” and “customs” were invented by the empire precisely to maintain its rule over the colonized natives (see hobsbawm & ranger, 1983). the imperial governmentality of “protection” was applied most stridently to those categorized as indigenous-natives (sharma, 2020). part of the protection services offered by imperial-states was to defend indigenousnatives from the predations of the supposedly more “modern” migrant natives (mamdani, 2012). imperial-states assigned native authorities to govern indigenous-natives to supposedly ensure the continuity of native tradition and custom. in contrast, migrant-natives, were excluded from the political community represented by the native authorities and denied access to the land these bodies nominally controlled (see mamdani, 2009). the imperial construction of separate legal systems, political constituencies, and differential access to land, produced juridical distinctions between the now bifurcated natives. indirect-rule colonialism also produced long-standing antagonism between the two. this was the point. what british indirect rule colonialism was trying to protect, of course, was the empire. the overriding goal of indirect rule colonialism was to dilute the strength of colonized people by normalizing against national sovereignty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 399 their separating from one another. mahmood mamdani (2012) has aptly termed such distinctions as part of the imperial strategy of “define and rule” (p. 45). “the ambition of indirect rule,” he argues, “was to remake the subjectivities of entire populations” such that “cultural difference was reinforced, exaggerated, and built up” (p. 48). in such practices, the discursive practice of autochthony proved useful. those categorized as indigenous-natives were temporally enclosed within “tradition” or “custom” and spatially confined as belonging to a specific geography. at the same time, the treatment of migrant-natives as “outsiders” to the colony was institutionalized. in the process of cementing the association of indigenousnatives with a particular place, people who moved between places became out of place. by employing interlocking ideas of racialized “blood” and territorialized “soil,” the “sameness” of one group of natives simultaneously materialized “differences” between natives in the same imperial territory. over time, biopolitical technologies like the labyrinth of censuses and tax rolls initiated in the colonies, also from the mid-nineteenth century onward, established long-lasting social and political boundaries between people in separated native groups. by collecting data on more and more facets of what the empire believed defined and divided one native group from another (e.g., in india, the british compiled data on the caste, religion, profession, and age of each native), european imperialism eventually changed how people came to know and relate to one another through racialized temporalities and geographies of stasis and mobility. started in the british empire, imperial discourses of autochthony permeated the practices of other imperial-states, thus globalizing the distinction between people seen as either indigenous or as migrants across the world. this played no small part in materializing “indigenous” and “migrant” as political identities. imperial geographies thus manifested racialized ideas of essentialist origins in territorialized form and in so doing buttressed colonial rule. today’s growing separation between people categorized as either natives or as migrants is part of this imperial legacy. contemporary movements centering their claims on indigeneity draw from these discursive practices of autochthony. whether it is in asia, africa, europe, the americas, including the former “white settler” colonies, each such movement mobilizes autochthonous philosophical, material, and relational ways of knowing and being that normalize the postcolonial new world order of nation-states. while each version of autochthonous discourse is contextual and layered through specific imperial legacies and nationalist politics, it is nonetheless the case that in each instance when political claims are grounded in autochthony, the idea that the “people of a place” (i.e., indigenous people), should rule is mobilized. people deploying autochthonous discourses have wildly varying abilities to achieve national sovereignty. indeed, it is not unusual that those making autochthonous claims have few alternatives to try and affect national politics or global markets and few chances at realizing their goals. indeed, as jean nandita sharma studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 400 comaroff and john comaroff (2001) have shown, autochthonous discourses have intensified since the 1980s, as the political legitimacy of neo-liberal reforms has become hegemonic. as the expansion of capital’s reach and power, dramatic cuts to social services, and the intensification of state violence (e.g., the rise of mass incarceration) have been normalized, so too has the mobilization of autochthonous discourses. people across the world, perhaps most especially those without market-based access to the stuff of life, have increasingly made claims that centre indigeneity (see sharma & wright, 2008/2009). in such claims, indigeneity is normalized as the original and ultimate source of law and rights. significantly, in the postcolonial new world order of nation-states, the authority of which rests on the rejection of imperial-states, those mobilizing autochthony to make claims to power and resources also imagine themselves as engaging in anticolonial resistance. anti-colonialism has long been imagined as opposition to someone/something represented as a “foreign invader.” colonialism has long been defined as the foreign usurpation of indigenous people’s place as sovereigns over specific territories. as a result, anti-colonialism has been defined as the obtainment of national territorial sovereignty. in a world of nation-states, nationalisms have proceeded in their “anti-colonial” project by demonizing the figure of the migrant who is defined as the quintessential outsider to national rule. migrants have been redefined as “colonizers” who “settle” on indigenous territories. today, this has become one way to delegitimize the presence of those people constituted as migrants as well as their own political claims. postcolonial new world order of national exclusion: the imperial-state legacy of separating national-natives from migrants is a constitutive feature of nation-state power in an era of postcolonial rule. postcolonial rule became hegemonic shortly after the end of world war ii (wwii), when the rapid nationalization of state sovereignty ushered in a postcolonial new world order. by the 1960s, the major imperial states effectively ceased to exist and the imperial form of state power had lost its political legitimacy. the imperial world order was replaced by an international system of nation-states whose control over territory and people was deployed in the name of the “nation.” under postcolonialism, nationstates were widely regarded as the only legitimate form political communities could take. assembled by the former colonizers, the formerly colonized who became “independent,” as well as those people who organized themselves into the people whose “nations” still sought a territorial sovereignty of “their own,” the postcolonial link between national identity, national territory, and national sovereignty fundamentally reorganized the political basis of making claims. “national self-determination” became a fundamental organizing principle for against national sovereignty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 401 the postcolonial international legal regime. as stated in the founding charter of the aptly named united nations (un), the organization’s very purpose was “to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace” (united nations, 1945, chapter 1). the un channeled anticolonialism into postcolonialism by normalizing the organization of political communities as nationally sovereign states. under postcolonialism, only people who could credibly claim to be a “nation” were able to lay claim to territorial sovereignty. to be “national,” however, often depended on laying claim to the racialized geographies first established by european imperial-states. national geographies were formed by the placement of limits to both national citizenship and to immigration. indeed, actions taken by states after wwii solidified the link between nation-state sovereignty and citizenship and immigration restrictions. it became unimaginable that states would not – and should not – control the entry of people into their territories or determine who could become their citizens. by the 1960s, as empires were rapidly dismantled and most of their former colonies and metropoles were replaced by nation-states, capital was given greater ability to penetrate previously closed imperial economies. at the same time, each new nation-state enacted new immigration restrictions for anyone not deemed to be a national citizen. indeed, national sovereignty was announced by the enactment of exclusionary citizenship and immigration controls (see sharma, 2020). as edward said (1993, p. 303) cogently noted, the newly triumphant politicians seemed to require borders and passports first of all. what had once been the imaginative liberation of a people – aimé césaire’s “inventions of new souls” – and the audacious metaphoric charting of spiritual territory usurped by colonial masters were quickly translated into and accommodated by a world system of barriers, maps, frontiers, police forces, customs and exchange controls. as almost all people became the people of one or another “nation,” identifying people by their nationality – and requiring them to bear stateissued papers attesting to this when crossing national borders or trying to access rights within national territory – became universal. whether one was categorized as a national citizen or as a migrant thus also became more consequential. postcolonialism thus took imperial practices of indirect rule colonialism and transformed them through the global implementation of national immigration controls. as nationalisms have hardened and citizenship and immigration controls have intensified, autochthony has increasingly been the grounds for limiting who can – and cannot – claim national sovereignty. the separation of national-natives and migrants now animates some of the deadliest conflicts in our world. one of the most deadly is the persecution of rohingya people in myanmar (formerly burma). human rights observers call it a genocide (green et al., nandita sharma studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 402 2015). rohingya are victims of the growing autochthonization of national belonging, and in their case, the autochthonization of formal national citizenship. even before mass killings began in june 2012, the discourse of autochthony formed the ideological basis for the separation of “indigenous” burmese from “migrant” rohingya. in 1974, the burmese state re-registered rohingya, living primarily in the borderland regions of western myanmar, as foreigners, effectively making them stateless – and deportable (see de genova, 2002). the first mass expulsion of rohingya took place in 1978. the situation intensified in 1982 when a new burmese citizenship law was passed emphasizing the link between citizenship and taingyintha (“national” or “indigenous races”). the re-categorization of rohingya as “not-national” and not-indigenous “races” normalized their exclusion from all areas of social, political and economic life in burma. since that time, the discourse of autochthony has sharpened in myanmar (re-named as such in 1989). u oo hla saw, general secretary of the rakhine nationalities development party (rndp), the largest party in rakhine state where most rohingya live, proclaimed that “this is our native land; it’s the land of our ancestors” (fuller, 2012). rndp chairperson and member of parliament aye maung added that, “we need to rebuild the rakhine state only for the rakhine who alone are the indigenous on the soil” (zarni & cowley, 2014, p. 694). responding to questions about the recent pogroms against rohingya people, the head of a buddhist monastery in the rakhine capitol of sittwe, u pynya sa mi, maintained that “the rakhine people are simply defending their land against immigrants who are creating problems” (motlagh, 2014). likewise, the head of an association of young monks in sittwe, u nyarna, was quoted as saying that rohingya were “invaders, unwanted guests and ‘vipers in our laps’” (fuller, 2012). buddhist monk leader ashin htawara encouraged the government to send rohingya people “back to their native land” (hindstrom, 2012). these autochthonous discourses have great material force. in 2012, myanmar constructed approximately sixty-seven camps and forcibly relocated about 140,000 rohingya people there (human rights watch, 2012). many observers regard these as nothing less than concentration camps, both because of their biopolitical basis as well as the calculated pain suffered by those held captive in them (motlagh, 2014). since then, violence against rohingya people has intensified further: from late-august 2017 to january 2018, two-thirds of all rohingya in myanmar – about 688,000 people – fled the raging violence against them, including the systematic raping of women and children, and crossed into bangladesh (united nations high commissioner for refugees [unhcr], 2018). these attacks were led by myanmar’s military forces (see ibrahim, 2018; unhcr, 2018). myanmar’s state counsellor, and nobel peace prize winner, aung sang syu kyi has been silent about it. so too has the “international community,” led by the united states and china. eager to maintain relations with myanmar and gain access to the estimated “tens of billions of dollars’ worth against national sovereignty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 403 of verified natural gas deposits… found in the bay of bengal off the coast of arakan [rakhine] state,” where the targeted and supposedly “migrant” rohingya minority primarily reside. while the myanmar government persecutes them, the border controls of other nation-states work to thwart their efforts at escape. they are regularly denied entry into and rights within nation-states whose citizenship they do not possess. together this leaves rohingya people in a highly dangerous situation. they are, unfortunately, far from alone in facing such a situation. in the darfur region of sudan, a “save darfur” movement has successfully reframed the economic, ecological and political legacies of european imperialism into a conflict between “indigenous africans” and “migrant arabs” (see mamdani, 2009). this has played directly into the hands of oil companies and further fuelled the islamaphobic u.s. led “war on terror.” in rwanda in 1994, those acting in the name of native hutus killed approximately 800,000 tutsis who had earlier been defined by the former imperial rulers as migrants. keeping with the tenor of contemporary autochthonous discourses, the most potent and inflammatory label for tutsis during the rwandan genocide was that of “colonizer” (kabanda, 2007, pp. 62-72). a not dissimilar process took place in the 1991-2002 “yugoslav wars.” ideas of autochthonous territorial sovereignty fuelled the claims of serbian, croatian, and bosnian nationalists. people targeted for “ethnic cleansing” were re-defined as “foreign elements” who were “out of place” in other people’s “native homelands.” 140,000 people were killed and another two million people were displaced in the process (shraga & zacklin, 1994). such politics also inform white supremacist moral panics over “immigrant invasions” across europe. the far-right national front party in france has been amongst the most successful to mobilize votes by employing autochthonous discourses. in 2017 it ran under the autochthonous slogan les francais d’abord (“first french”). at a rally in the southern port city of marseille, party leader le pen promised a “moratorium” on immigration as a response to “interlopers from all over the world [who] come and install themselves in our home.” she declared that she would make france “more french” and allow “the owner to decide who can come in.” the crowd of about five thousand people roared its approval and chanted, “this is our home!” (nossiter, 2017). le pen closed the rally by saying, “more and more are coming from the third world, taking advantage of our benefits,” adding that, “it’s a choice of civilization. i will be the president of those french who want to continue living in france as the french do” (nossiter, 2017). that year, the national front came the closest it had to date to governing france. in the first round of presidential elections, marine le pen was second with 21.3% of the vote. she won almost 34% of the vote in the second round. discourses of autochthony are also evident in the united states, canada, australia and new zealand. here, there are two competing discourses of autochthony claiming national sovereignty and territory. i have termed these two biopolitical groupings: white national-natives and indigenous nationalnandita sharma studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 404 natives (sharma, 2020). white national-natives identify as the heirs of european colonizers and base their claims to national-nativeness on the autochthonous principle that they were the “first” to “productively use” (i.e., exploit) land and labor. as “improvers,” they claim to have been the first to “civilize” (i.e., bring into the purview of state power) land and people, thus territorializing both to become their first sovereigns. in short, claims of white national-nativeness are based on a discourse of white supremacy, one that now depends on a disavowal of its colonial basis. the other grouping, more commonly associated with claims to national-nativeness, are those highly diverse people colonized by european imperial states and defined as the natives of these former “white settler” colonies. indigenous nationalnatives base their claims on the autochthonous principle that they are both the first inhabitants and the first sovereigns of these territories. the discourses of white national-natives and indigenous nationalnatives, each powerful in its own way, are highly asymmetric. the discourse of white national-nativeness informs the operation of nation-state power and dominates its historiography. the discourse of autochthony deployed by indigenous national-natives, on the other hand, has no hold on the dominant structures of any of these nation-states. nonetheless, their claims to autochthony carry a great moral and, sometimes, significant legal weight. indeed, in the global field of autochthony, bengt karlsson (2003) notes that, “the ‘archetypical case’ against which indigenousness is to be measured remains that of white settler colonies” (p. 414). despite the massive dissymmetry between them, white and indigenous discourses of autochthony share some important things in common: both stake an exclusive claim as the rightful national sovereigns of the territory in question. both also view the existence of migrants as a barrier to their obtainment of this goal. this is evident in the growing intensification of antiimmigrant discourses, their manifestation in evermore draconian citizenship and immigration controls, and in the growing chorus of opinion that asserts that all people who are “not native,” including those racialized as black, latino or asian, are not only migrants but also “settler colonists.” although some in the former british “white settler colonies” have attempted to excise black people from the list of people of colour who are “settler colonists” by reframing them as “allies” – and by acknowledging the economic, political, and social importance of the enslavement of people from africa to european imperial projects – nonetheless, the broader separation of natives and (those left in the category of) migrant is kept intact, as is the autochthonous basis for national territorial sovereignty (e.g., amadahy & lawrence, 2009). the stretching of the category of “settler colonist” to include those expressly excluded from imperial, settler-colonial projects, is part of a politics that insists that, ultimately, national territory and sovereignty over it belongs to those who claim autochthonous belonging to it. this is evident not only in the discourse of “settler colonialism,” but also in the everyday practices of policing national membership within indigenous political against national sovereignty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 405 structures. two of the better known examples of this are the kahnawà:ke mohawk law and moratorium on mixed marriages, which declared that “any mohawk who married a non-native lost the right to residency, land allotment, land holding, voting, and office-holding in kahnawà:ke” (alfred, 1995, p. 165) and the effort to abrogate the cherokee nation’s 1866 treaty with the united states (reportedly signed under great duress), which decreed that african slaves once owned by cherokees and their descendants “shall have all the rights of native cherokees” (warrior, 2007). although each of these nationalist conflicts has its specific historical, political, economic, social and cultural context, what connects these different nationalist movements is their employment of a discourse of autochthony wherein the figure of the non-native “migrant” is defined as the barrier to the realization of native national rule. that autochthonous discourses are plausible, that they can do political work in a remarkably wide set of circumstances, ranging from the far-right to the social justice movements of some of the most immiserated, subjugated and oppressed people on the planet, demonstrates the importance of the politics of autochthony to the contemporary character of power. conclusion: postcolonial autochthonies across the global system of nation-states and across the left-right political spectrum, claims to place and to belonging increasingly rest on claims to autochthony. in this era of postcolonial rule, in which nationalisms have been thoroughly depoliticized and rendered normal, claims to indigeneity help to secure claims to territory and sovereign power over it (and the people on it). as autochthony is made the fundamental basis for legitimate political claims and for access to social and economic resources, violent competition and conflict across the world have created separations between the two key figures of the postcolonial new world order: national-natives and migrants. with the consolidation of postcolonial rule over the past seventy odd years, a further solidifying of the autochthonous basis of nationalism has taken place. sharing a national citizenship is increasingly less important than sharing the “bloodline” of national-native ancestors. while some people figured as migrants have become national citizens, the racialized and territorialized grounds for being native make it impossible for them to become national-natives. consequently, the deployment of autochthonous discourses across the world of nation-states – in asia, africa, europe, the americas, the caribbean, and oceania – present migrants (even if they are formally co-citizens) as the barriers to achievement of “national selfdetermination.” the very existence of people figured as migrants (again, even if they are, in fact, co-citizens) is seen as usurping the national sovereign power of national-natives. this is true for those people whose “nations” already have national sovereignty (but see it as under attack by nandita sharma studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 406 “foreigners”) as well as those people whose “nations” still seek it. across the world, and across the left-right political spectrum, we see migrants increasingly being re-defined as “interlopers,” “settler colonists,” and even “occupiers,” “invaders,” and “vipers.” embedded in all such national discourses that demonize those people deemed to be “out of place,” is the older, imperial discourse of autochthony. informed by the imperial discursive production of indigenous-natives as both natured and emplaced in the colony, nationalisms are grounded in a fantasy of familiarity on the part of those seen to share “origins.” much old imperialist wine has indeed been repackaged in new national bottles. indeed, global inequalities in a postcolonial world of nation-states are worse than they were in the age of empires. as jason hickel (2017) found, “global inequality has tripled since 1960.” one stark indication of the ongoing geopolitical divide between the rich world nation-states and those in the poor world, especially between the united states and the rest of the world, is the recent finding that, “an american having the average income of the bottom u.s. decile [was] better-off than 2/3 of [the] world population” (milanovic, 2002, p. 89). another way of putting it is that the material basis for the postcolonial new world order of nation-states has not diverged fundamentally from the previous imperial world order. yet, although disparities across as well as within nation-states have grown as practices of expropriation and exploitation have intensified in the postcolonial new world order, nationalist historiographies remain replete with always glorious pasts. and nationalist movements promise ever brighter futures for members of the “nation.” the evident fact that postcolonial nation-states with “their own” territorial sovereignty have failed to bring about either the promised peace and prosperity or the justice and liberty demanded by anticolonial movements, has not dissuaded native-nations from trying to obtain the ultimate postcolonial prize: “national self-determination.” yet, the poverty of autochthonous nationalisms is perhaps no more evident than when “nations” who possess a national sovereignty of “their own,” continuously represent their suppression of those they define as not-native (and re-present as migrants) as usurping their power. attacks against those people re-presented as migrants are portrayed as part of the continuing “anticolonial” struggle of natives against “foreign rule.” the autochthnous basis of much state violence is in full display in myanmar’s ongoing persecution of rohingya people who have been removed from the rolls of this nation-state’s citizens and officially re-categorized as “illegal migrants.” recognizing that national sovereignty has not met – cannot meet – the dreams of decolonization is not an argument for a return to empire. it is, instead, a call to reject the postcolonial system of nation-states and build social relationships, social bodies, and practices of social reproduction able to meet liberatory demands. key to this, i believe is a rejection of the politics of nationalism with their basis in discourses of autochthony. across their against national sovereignty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 407 various permutations, all autochthonous discourses rely upon – and all are productive of – essentialist and ahistorical ideas of “nation” and “race.” i thus conclude this essay by arguing that any and all claims to national territorial sovereignty work to further entrench relations of ruling. i further conclude that if we want a decolonized world – as i think we must have – we will need to achieve it against national sovereignty, not through it. otherwise, we will be left with a nationalist, racist politics of anti-mobility that rests on the separation of natives and migrants. references: alfred, g. r. 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(2007, august 9). cherokees flee the moral high ground over freedmen. news from indian country. against national sovereignty studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 391-409, 2020 409 williams, e. (1944). capitalism and slavery. university of north carolina press. wolfe, p. (1999). settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: the politics and poetics of an ethnographic event. cassell. zarni, m., & cowley, a. (2014). the slow-burning genocide of myanmar’s rohingya. pacific rim law & policy journal, 23(3), 681-752. zenker, o. (2011). autochthony, ethnicity, indigeneity and nationalism: time-honouring and state-oriented modes of rooting individual-territory-group triads in a globalizing world. critique of anthropology, 31(1), 63-81. connoy final jan 6 20 correspondence address: laura connoy, arthur & sonia labatt family school of nursing, western university, london, on, n6g 1g8; email: lconnoy@uwo.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 (re)constructing and resisting irregularity: (non)citizenship, canada’s interim federal health program, and access to healthcare laura connoy western university, canada abstract this article analyzes the experiences of refugee claimants in toronto’s everyday healthcare places, like walk-in clinics, doctor’s offices, and hospitals, in the aftermath of the 2012 interim federal health program (ifhp) revisions. by drawing upon critical migration scholarship that prioritizes (non)citizenship, as well as semi-structured interviews, i highlight how the social positioning of refugee claimants is modulated in ways that justify and extend the ifhp revisions to effectively deny access to healthcare, demonstrating the indeterminacy of access. i understand this process through the concept of irregularity, a non-juridical status that is contingently configured and enforced by state and non-state actors when one is (re)constructed as “out of place,” hence limiting access to resources and rights. in accordance with citizenship, it indicates how we can think of the (re)fashioning of people and groups particularly within the everyday. i follow this with a critical analysis of the contestations that emerged to challenge the ifhp revisions and the irregularity of refugee claimants so as to capture the politics of irregularity. keywords refugee claimants; (non)citizenship; irregularization; healthcare; interim federal health program over the past decade, canadians have witnessed the introduction of measures that aim to circumvent the rights of refugee claimants. most notably, in 2012, the conservative federal government amended canada’s existing refugee legislation with the introduction of the protecting canada’s immigration system act (pcisa). with the aim to protect canada and its citizens from “bogus” refugee claimants, the pcisa created specific categories of migrants and refugees, emphasized efficiency of the system, and expanded powers to the government (atak, hudson & nakache, 2017; huot, bobadilla, bailliard & rudman, 2015). during this time, the federal government depicted canada’s social assistance programs and laura connoy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 202 public services, like healthcare, as key “pull factors” and vulnerable to exploitation by refugee claimants unless control measures were introduced (huot et al., 2015, p. 135). an ensuing measure was the june 2012 revocation and replacement of the interim federal health program (ifhp), a federal healthcare coverage program for refugee populations. introduced in 1957, the ifhp covers basic and supplementary services, and prescription medications for refugee populations and other vulnerable groups. the 2012 replacement program significantly reduced coverage for basic and supplementary services and denied coverage for prescription medications for refugee claimants. while some of the reasons for the move were to ensure “fairness” to canadians, “protect public health and public safety in canada,” and “defend the integrity of canada’s refugee determination system and deter its abuse,” critics claimed the cuts were intended to deter individuals from making an asylum claim and to force those already in the country to leave more quickly (canadian doctors for refugee care, et al. v. canada, 2014, pp. 7-8,18). as precarious status noncitizens,1 it is unsurprising that refugee claimants face barriers to rights and resources, including healthcare. although the provision of healthcare to refugee populations is federally mandated, the (non)citizenship and anti-refugee discourses employed by the federal government during the time of the 2012 changes problematized this custom (along with those who receive ifhp coverage) to justify their abdication as providers of healthcare coverage to refugee claimants. the targeting of refugee claimants was not only witnessed at a federal level. healthcare professionals also came to target this population within everyday healthcare places (like walk-in clinics, hospitals, and doctor’s offices) as a result of such discourses and confusion regarding the details of the ifhp, which led to unexpected denials to basic primary healthcare services regardless of ifhp coverage (barnes, 2013, p. 6). drawing upon critical citizenship and migration scholarship (baines & sharma, 2002; castañeda, 2013; hepworth, 2014; isin, 2002), grey literature and interview data collected in toronto, ontario, i critically examine how refugee claimants were (re)constructed in ways that problematized their access to canadian healthcare resources during the time of the ifhp cuts. informed by isin’s (2002) work on the emergence of the citizen identity in relation to noncitizen “others,” and how this identity is (re)defined and (re)constituted in everyday encounters (hepworth, 2014), i highlight how refugee claimants are (re)constructed and (re)identified as “irregular,” a social status position that reflects one’s constructed abnormal and problematic presence. this not only problematizes and denies access to resources and rights but also affects life chances. this contingently configured process is an effect of (non)citizenship and shapes how others 1 precarious status noncitizens are persons with insecure status who are denied the rights associated with permanent residence and citizenship (goldring, berinstein & bernhard, 2009, pp. 240-241). (re)constructing & resisting irregularity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 203 are imagined and encountered as belonging or not belonging, deserving or not deserving. in this regard, this analysis critiques the legitimacy of the citizen/noncitizen divide and the nation-state, and questions the validity of the ifhp and the exclusion of refugee claimants from provincial and territorial healthcare coverage. my interest lies not only in the regulatory aspects of (non)citizenship, but also how it is contested. i draw upon the concept of “acts of citizenship” – those powerful forms of dissent that fundamentally call into question the unjust boundaries of citizenship (isin, 2002, 2008). rather than emphasizing the acts of noncitizens, i focus on the ways that healthcare professionals question and undermine the irregularity and broader health inequalities that constitute noncitizenship. the mobilization of healthcare workers and national health associations is one of the most distinctive and unexpected aspects of the ifhp, as well as the forms of organization they practice, including protests and demonstrations, occupations, data collection, op-eds, scholarly publications, and conference presentations (jackson, 2018; interviews with doctors, toronto, 20 october 2015 and 10 november 2015). i also highlight the unintended outcomes of allied mobilization and their critical interrogation of the inequalities that define (non)citizenship. these acts came to constitute a new feature of refugee politics in canada and effectively capture the politics of irregularity. in light of the above, the purpose of this article is to showcase the politics of irregularity that came to define not only a part of canada’s social policy history but also the evolving nature of (non)citizenship. focusing on the ifhp, i shed light on the dynamic (re)construction of irregularity in the everyday as it relates to (non)citizenship and refugee claimants,2 and by doing so, this article contributes to existing scholarship on the healthcare experiences of refugee claimants in canada (olsen, el-bialy, mckelvie, rauman & brunger, 2016; vanthuyne, meloni, ruiz-casares, rousseau & ricard-guay, 2013), the ifhp (barnes, 2013; beatson, 2016; dhand & diab, 2015; sheridan & shankardass, 2015), and analyses of (non)citizenship within the canadian context (bhuyan, 2012; landolt & goldring, 2015; nyers, 2003, 2010; villegas, 2013, 2015a, 2015b). below, i provide an overview of my research methods, followed by a conceptual framework of irregularity informed by critical citizenship and migration scholarship. an overview of the ifhp is then presented, followed by an empirical analysis of irregularity within toronto’s healthcare places. i conclude with an empirical analysis of resistance to the ifhp and irregularity. 2 it is important to note that irregularity is not simply founded on the citizenship/noncitizenship dyad since many permanent residents and citizens experience barriers to services such as government-assisted refugees, and street involved and aboriginal populations. irregularity can therefore alert us to other forms of differentiation and discrimination founded, for example, on race and class. laura connoy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 204 methodology data was collected from primary (interview data) and secondary sources (scholarly publications, federal court documents, and grey literature). the collection of primary data occurred between september 2015 and march 2016 in toronto, ontario, and included semi-structured interviews with 42 participants: five healthcare professionals, four lawyers, five settlement workers, one policy specialist, seven executive directors and program managers of refugee agencies, three provincial ministry of health officials, five city officials, and 12 refugee claimants. i relied on academic and grey literature, as well as a google search, to identify key actors and organizations that work with and for refugee claimants. participants were contacted via email and cold-calling, or through snowball sampling. with regard to contacting refugee claimants, i relied on participants who worked with this population to send out information forms with contact details. this resulted in connections with two individual refugee claimants and one focus group consisting of 10 refugee claimants. lasting between 45 minutes to one hour, interviews allowed me to gain an understanding of the effects of the ifhp, the implications of this program for the healthcare rights of refugee claimants within everyday healthcare places, and resistance strategies. the semi-structured format of the interviews allowed participants the freedom to express their interpretations of and experiences with the program, and of refugee healthcare in general. an iterative analysis was employed whereby interview transcripts were read several times to establish conceptual links; these were triangulated between participants and relevant documents to highlight and develop emerging themes. through this methodological approach, the consequences of policy and practice and the effects of irregularity in everyday life are revealed (johnson, 2014, p. 206). this research was approved by the office of research ethics at the university of waterloo; all of the data collected for this project was treated according to ethical guidelines. (non)citizenship and irregularity citizenship is conventionally understood as a legal and political institution constituted by “a collection of rights and obligations which give individuals a formal legal identity” (turner, 1997, p. 5, 7). this formal legal status and identity not only denotes one’s inclusion (i.e., legal membership) in the nation-state but also performs an allocative function that shapes access to key (scarce) societal resources, including healthcare (turner, 1997, p. 6, 7). isin (2002) builds upon this understanding by drawing attention to how citizenship, as an invented and inherited phenomenon, is narrated by dominant groups who articulate their identity in relation to others – being strangers, outsiders, and aliens. (re)constructing & resisting irregularity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 205 the formation of citizens and others involves relations of power, exercised through strategies and technologies of citizenship that shape conduct, constitute citizens as virtuous, and work to legitimize the inheritance and exclusivity of citizenship (isin, 2002). in this regard, citizenship is not a static identity, but rather one founded on alterity, in that citizenship emerges in relation to others or noncitizens and evolves with time (isin, 2002, p. 4). encounters are a key site in the formation of others as they entail “the presence and recognition of other groups” allowing for the realization of oneself (isin, 2002, p. 49). landolt and goldring (2015) and bhuyan (2012) analyze how access to services is informed by the (re)assembling or (dis)assembling of (non)citizenship within everyday encounters between precarious status noncitizens and social service actors. through the medium of encounters, scholars are highlighting the contingency of (non)citizenship. for example, hepworth (2014, p. 2) approaches (non)citizenship as an “emergent condition” that is “modulated in the everyday to constitute a range of legitimately and illegitimately present non-citizen subjects,” regardless of juridical status, whereby rygiel (2011, pp. 13-14) alerts us to how the legitimacy or illegitimacy of one’s presence – or one’s concrete locality within space – can be modified in and through encounters, which can interrupt access to rights. the technologies that emerge in and through the encounter aim to immobilize, segregate, incarcerate, or constrain constructed others, while simultaneously increasing solidarity among citizens (isin, 2002, pp. 25-26, 49). for example, interrogation, intimidation and humiliation is exercised by border authorities which work to construct the identity of stranger and ultimately constrain movement (villegas 2015b, p. 2359), highlighting the inequality of the social interactions that constitute these encounters and others like them. heeding the above arguments, i approach (non)citizenship as a dynamic and contingent articulation of one’s identity or position, and as therefore experienced variably. it is shaped, or assembled (landolt & goldring, 2015), through a confluence of various elements including actors, knowledges, discourses, and practices which confer or deny rights, entitlements, and access to services, based upon the degree to which one is (re)constructed as other or noncitizen. the outcome of this constructed positioning is understood here as irregularity. irregularity is a positioning that reflects one’s (re)constructed abnormal, or irregular, presence. as noted by hepworth (2014, p. 7), this positioning emerges “each time particular bodies are deemed inor out-of-place.” irregularity, in this sense, attempts to identify an effect of encounters. but, this is not one that impacts juridical status. rather it is a non-juridical status that is contingently configured and enforced by state and non-state actors when one is (re)constructed as “out of place,” hence limiting access to social resources and rights; in accordance with citizenship, it indicates how we can think of the (re)fashioning of people and groups through the laura connoy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 206 modulation of (non)citizenship, particularly within everyday encounters. this understanding of irregularity, made in relation to critical citizenship scholarship, speaks to mcnevin’s (2011, pp. 15-16) valuable assertion that abnormality is part of the history of citizenship and the production of “citizenship’s outsiders.” resisting irregularity to approach citizenship as entailing relations of power means it is constituted by struggles that shape the content and extent of citizenship (isin, 2002, p. 2). as argued by isin (2002), citizenship involves moments of “becoming political,” when strangers, outsiders, and aliens enact themselves as “different from the dominant image given to them” (p. 33) by questioning “categories, classifications, and identities” (p. 4). to become political then is to call into question “the naturalness of the dominant virtues” and reveal their arbitrariness (isin, 2002, p. 275). here, dominant virtues refer to those entitlements and exclusions that emerge in and through citizenship; it is the irregularity accorded to noncitizens and the lack of rights that inform this positioning that are rendered arbitrary and resisted. analyses of becoming political are founded on acts of citizenship, being “those acts when, regardless of status and substance, subjects constitute themselves as citizens or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due” (isin & neilson, 2008, p. 2). acts rupture “given orders, practices, and habitus” (isin, 2008, p. 36) by “call[ing] the law into question and, sometimes, break[ing] it” (p. 39). through this lens, scholars have drawn attention to how: non-status algerian refugees in montreal selforganized to end deportation and to regularize their status (nyers, 2006); eritrean refugees in israel publicized their presence as rightful through demonstrations and the issuance of id cards (müller, 2016); and intergenerational migrant youth in france resisted national linguistic and ethnic ideologies through vernacular music and language (ní mhurchú, 2016). by shifting attention away from the actor to the act itself, or in other words by emphasizing performativity, conventional ways of identifying citizen and noncitizen subjects – typically as fixed identities based on legal status – are challenged. in effect, the idea of who counts as a political subject is critically confronted. i contribute to this scholarship by focusing on the acts that emerged through the ifhp that questioned the legitimacy of the cuts and the irregularization of refugee claimants. the acts this article focuses on are those of canadian healthcare professionals, which differentiates them from the examples cited above. yet, a connection is maintained to acts of citizenship scholarship. as noted by isin, (2009, pp. 380-381), acts of citizenship addresses the emergence of new beginnings and identities, including the activist citizen who re-writes (re)constructing & resisting irregularity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 207 predetermined scripts and makes a difference. this political subject who emerges vis-à-vis acts can, according to nyers (2011, p. 8), come from both “usual and unusual subjects, expected and unexpected voices, and obvious and not so obvious places, spaces, and temporalities.” it is the usual, expected, and obvious that i consider in this article. i am influenced here by castañeda (2013, p. 228), who argues the provision of medical aid to undocumented migrants in germany disrupts exclusionary logics of citizenship, making it “a powerful form of dissent” and a fitting example of acts of citizenship. for her, these acts by physicians critically re-examine the exclusionary logic of citizenship by treating noncitizens who lack rights to healthcare as citizens who have a right to such rights. my focus on citizens also stems from my awareness of the conditions of oppression and injustice that define the lives of precarious status noncitizens. during the time of the ifhp cuts, many refugee claimants chose to not engage in (visible) acts for fear of state retribution. for example, a program manager approached a refugee to participate in a campaign only to be told “my family members won’t come. they think the government will come after them and take away their status in canada” (interview with program manager, toronto, 7 october 2015). according to a doctor, patients who are refugee claimants have expressly stated their fear of seeking out healthcare services, “because maybe the government will then think that they’re costing the system too much and then they will not approve their refugee claim” (interview with doctor, toronto, 20 october 2015). landolt and goldring (2015, p. 854) still consider such choices as exercises of agency. in light of the above, i focus on healthcare professionals in toronto, and their attempts to make a difference in the everyday lives of refugee claimants through healthcare provision and advocacy efforts that challenge the exclusionary nature of (non)citizenship. prior to discussing these acts, however, it is important to situate them within the context of the ifhp. the interim federal health program (ifhp) introduced through a 1957 order-in-council, the ifhp provides refugee claimants, protected persons, resettled refugees, and refused refugee claimants in canada with limited, temporary healthcare coverage in the form of basic healthcare coverage, coverage for preventative and supplementary care, prescription drug coverage, certain dental procedures, limited eye care, immunization, and prenatal and obstetrical care; this is similar to what permanent residents and citizens on social assistance receive. refugee claimants receive ifhp coverage once their claim is deemed eligible to be heard by the immigration and refugee board (irb), and it lasts until they are eligible to receive provincial healthcare coverage or can afford private health insurance. for many years the program acted as a supplementary form of coverage for those refugee claimants residing in laura connoy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 208 the province of ontario; prior to 1995, refugee claimants received coverage under the ontario health insurance program (ohip), however, eligibility rules were altered to deny coverage to this population and other temporary residents. as a result, reliance on the ifhp increased in addition to total program costs (dhand & diab, 2015, pp. 357-358). by 2012, it is estimated the program covered close to 129,000 persons across canada at a cost of over $80 million per year (dhand & diab, 2015, p. 358; olsen et al., 2016, p. 61). due to the increasing number of recipients, financial costs, and the broader securitized environment, as evident through the introduction of the pcisa, amendments were made to the ifhp in 2012. on 5 april 2012, the federal government passed an order-in-council (p.c. 2012-433) that repealed and replaced the original 1957 order-incouncil that established the ifhp with a much more restrictive program, without consultation from provinces, the public, or direct stakeholders. for sheridan and shankardass (2015), this blatant disregard of stakeholders is a major cause of the ifhp’s failure. coming into effect on 30 june 2012, the new program restricted healthcare coverage for refugee populations, particularly refugee claimants. the 2012 program introduced three different types of healthcare coverage: expanded healthcare coverage, basic healthcare coverage, and public health and public safety (phps) coverage. for refugee claimants, those from a non-designated country of origin (dco) received basic healthcare coverage, 3 which included urgent and essential medical services, limited lab and diagnostic services, and no medication or vaccinations except to prevent or treat a phps threat or condition.4 the most restrictive coverage – phps coverage – was provided to dco claimants and failed claimants; they received no coverage for services or medications unless to prevent or treat a phps threat or condition, meaning that life-sustaining medications like insulin were no longer covered (ccr, 2013). for raza, rashid, redwoodcampbell, rouleau and berger (2012, p. 728), the cuts represented a transition to “emergency treatment,” which “underscores a deep change in the way in which human beings are assigned value.” here, the health and wellbeing of refugee claimants only became important if the health or safety of citizens were affected; “the refugee person in this context is no longer valued as a unique and worthy human being but is considered a ‘risk factor’ for others” (raza et al., 2012, p. 728). in addition to this “insidious and deeply dehumanizing” shift (raza et al., 2012, p. 728), the cuts increased the chances of refugee claimants opting to delay or forgo 3 introduced in 2012, designated countries of origin (dco) deemed certain countries as “safe” countries because they “do not normally produce refugees, but do respect human rights and offer state protection.” people making a claim from one of these countries faced significant restrictions throughout the claim process, including limited access to the ifhp (government of canada, 2017). in may 2019, the federal government suspended the dco policy. 4 a phps threat includes tuberculosis, hiv, malaria, measles, and chicken pox. phps conditions include mental health conditions that may cause harm to the individual or others (canadian doctors for refugee care, et al. v. canada, 2014, p. 25). (re)constructing & resisting irregularity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 209 healthcare, or be denied healthcare by professionals and frontline staff. these denials were largely a result of administrative delays, the confusion generated by the administrative complexity of determining eligibility, and the vague directions provided to healthcare providers by the federal government (barnes, 2013, p. 6). this shaping of one’s actions – delaying, denying, or forgoing care – demonstrates the effectiveness of the regulatory aspects of the ifhp. in addition to limiting the extent of coverage and deterring the abuse of canada’s refugee determination system, an emphasis on “fairness” to canadians and the protection of canadian generosity was employed to justify the ifhp cuts (fitzpatrick, 2012; government of canada, 2014a). as stated by then conservative minister of citizenship and immigration jason kenney, “canadians take great pride in the generosity and compassion of our immigration and refugee programs. but they have no tolerance for those who abuse our generosity or take advantage of our country” (kenney, 2012). for him, the ifhp reforms would, “stop the abuse of canada’s generous and overburdened healthcare system by bogus refugees” (olsen et al., 2016, p. 60). this sentiment was shared by the subsequent conservative minister of citizenship and immigration chris alexander when he stated “we have no tolerance for those who take advantage of [our] generosity and consume welfare benefits and precious health-care resources” (alexander, 2014). the emphasis on generosity amounts to what can be termed “canadianness,” which is “inextricably joined” to “the operation of citizenship in canada” (baines & sharma, 2002, p. 85). ideas of canadianness, such as being just, accepting, and tolerant, work to construct an image of the other (or non-canadianness) as disingenuous, selfish, and threating. the agonistic relationship that emerges is one of conflict and competition, which reaffirms the privileged position and entitlements of canadian citizenship and justifies cuts to refugee healthcare (olsen et al., 2016, p. 59, 63; see sharma, 2001). the ifhp cuts represent an expression of the bio-inequality founded on the prioritization of citizenship (see willen, 2011, p. 304) and canadianness. it can also be viewed as bolstering the foundation of the canadian nation-state, as seen through the mobilization of an “imagined community” of canadians, so as to enact the state’s duty to protect the virtuousness of citizenship and the security of citizens and social programs (see baines & sharma, 2002). in this regard, the targeting of refugee claimants arises as a result of the very nature of citizenship and the nation-state. the ifhp allows us to witness not only the nature of power and citizenship, but how the content and extent of citizenship shifts over time. furthermore, it illustrates not so much the construction of irregularity as its reconstruction. in response to the 2012 cuts, a charter challenge was launched against the federal government by the canadian doctors for refugee care (cdrc), the canadian association of refugee lawyers (carl), justice for children and youth (jfcy), and two refugee claimants, daniel garcia laura connoy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 210 rodriguez and hanif ayubi. they requested a judicial review of the federal government’s decision to reduce coverage, claiming the cuts were inconsistent with canada’s international obligations to refugees and in violation of section 7 (the right to life and security of the person), section 12 (cruel and unusual treatment), and section 15 (discrimination) of the canadian charter of rights and freedoms (carl, 2013). on 4 july 2014, the court ruled the cuts were in violation of sections 12 and 15 of the charter and ordered the conservative government to draft a new chartercompliant policy within a four-month timeline. the government appealed the ruling, reflecting their support of this policy, and requested to suspend the decision until the appeal was heard, which the federal court of appeal denied (carl, 2014). the government introduced the “temporary ifhp” on 4 november 2014 while appealing the court decision. the temporary ifhp restored benefits to pregnant women and children, and covered medical, diagnostics, hospital services, and medications for phps threats or conditions for all refugee claimants regardless of country of origin (government of canada, 2014b). however, this victory was shortlived because the new revisions to the program added more confusion to an already complex program through the introduction of six types of healthcare coverage (with refugee claimants receiving “type three” coverage) (see government of canada, 2014c). a doctor argues that this temporary program forced professionals to navigate a “complex matrix of impenetrable and incomprehensible degrees of coverage,” leading many to “just throw up their hands and give up” (interview with doctor, toronto, 10 november 2015). the confusion and resulting withdrawal of physicians was “one unexpected impact” of the ifhp changes (barnes, 2013, p. 6), highlighting the indeterminacy of access to healthcare and the expansion of disentitlement that defined this era. below, i detail how the ifhp – including its complexity and discourses of noncitizenship – came to shape encounters between refugee claimants and healthcare professionals within toronto’s healthcare setting. the everyday healthcare places that constitute this setting are sites where (non)citizenship is (re)negotiated and where the irregularity of noncitizenship is (re)constructed. (re)constructing irregularity in toronto’s everyday healthcare places in toronto’s everyday healthcare places, the (re)construction of irregularity is evident when refugee claimants are “made ineligible for care” (interview with policy analyst, toronto, 21 october 2015). making one ineligible for care, and hence inscribing a status that informs this ineligibility, emerges through encounters between healthcare professionals (including frontline staff) and refugee claimants with ifhp coverage. shaping the encounter are (re)constructing & resisting irregularity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 211 the healthcare professionals’ imaginations of refugee claimants, limited understandings of the ifhp (barnes, 2013, p. 6; interview with doctor, toronto, 20 november 2015), assessments of the moral worth of refugee claimants, and personal evaluations of canada’s socioeconomic situation (vanthuyne et al., 2013; see villegas 2015a, p. 233) all of which may combine to threaten the health and well-being of precarious status noncitizens. prior to the 2012 changes, all ifhp recipients received the same type of coverage, which not only allowed doctors to more easily navigate the program, but also made the program more acceptable and normal. as stated by a doctor: as long as someone had a valid ifh certificate, you didn’t have to know if they were government assisted, or privately sponsored, or a claimant, or they were from this country, or they had their hearing, or they’re filing a federal court review. that became irrelevant. it became just like having an ohip card in many ways. (interview with doctor, toronto, 19 october 2015) here, the acceptability of the program – based upon its likeness to ohip – had an effect on how recipients were encountered. the program’s similarity to ohip normalized and rendered more acceptable the presence of ifhp recipients, thereby according a regularized social positioning within the healthcare setting. however, the ifhp is not ohip; it is visibly different, and has separate bureaucratic regulations, payment delays, pre-approval processes, and lower financial compensation (mckeary & newbold, 2010; olsen et al., 2016). these fundamental differences meant that access to healthcare services was not always guaranteed. according to a social worker, “i remember having clients in 2010 who would say ‘i tried to go to the doctor and they didn’t understand what ifh was’ […], and i remember having to explain it to a secretary, like a medical secretary” (interview with social worker, toronto, 26 november 2015). lack of familiarity with the program may not have been the only issue. one doctor questions whether healthcare professionals “have chosen on purpose to not register [to provide ifhp services]” (interview with doctor, toronto, 20 october 2015). they explain: we came across this with a dermatology clinic that i sent a patient to – that i send most of my other patients to who have ohip – and they refused to see him, and they said “we’re not an ifh provider”, and apparently that’s allowed. that they can just say that they don’t provide ifh. that they don’t serve this population. (interview with doctor, toronto, 20 october 2015) this quote illustrates what raza et al. (2012) argue is the increasing devaluation of the lives of refugee claimants. in this regard, there is both an ignorance of this program, as well as an unwillingness to learn about it and provide primary care services to those with ifhp coverage. accompanying laura connoy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 212 such forms of devaluation was not only the (re)affirmation of the value and validity of ohip and ohip recipients – a signifier of belonging and membership within the nation-state – but the negative imaginations of refugee claimants. as argued by isin (2002, p. 34), “dominant groups often develop strategies and technologies to adjure the dominated to recognize that they lack virtue.” while the ifhp revision is an example of this, isin reminds us to also be aware of the qualities and stereotypes attributed to dominated groups, which typically are the worst attributes of the dominant group. these attributes work to legitimize unequal treatment and form irregularized identities. some forms of unequal treatment and discrimination within healthcare settings include religious or cultural insensitivity, unfriendly behaviour, “racial slurs, stereotyping, and receipt of inferior care” (pollock, newbold, lafrenière & edge, 2012, p. 63). as a refugee claimant explains, “i can feel the discrimination when i pull out my papers. i don’t have ohip. the receptionist’s face will take on a look of disdain. i get worse treatment than the canadians who have the right card” (campbell, klei, hodges, fisman & kitto, 2014, p. 172). other examples include a refugee claimant with ifhp coverage who had contrasting experiences with two doctors within a toronto walk-in clinic (interview with refugee claimant, toronto, 11 march 2017), and “incidence[s] of hospitals trying to convince people that it’s not an emergency in order to get them [un(der)insured people] to go away” (interview with program manager, toronto, 8 october 2015). pregnant refugee claimants, and other un(der)insured pregnant precarious status noncitizens, were particularly prone to discrimination, disproportionate health risks, and inconsistent access to healthcare. labelled as “medical tourists” who deliver “anchor babies” (villegas, 2010, cited in vanthuyne et al., 2013, p. 81), pregnant refugee claimants embody the discourses of greedy and threatening others, leading tyler (2013, p. 217) to argue that their bodies come to be constructed as “corporeal border zones” to manage “the undesirable reproduction of noncitizens.” the targeting of noncitizen bodies occurred irrespective of ifhp coverage. consider for example when a pregnant refugee claimant from mexico was forced to sign a waiver by a hospital administrator – as per hospital policy – rendering her responsible for hospital fees should her ifhp coverage change, or when another pregnant refugee claimant was told by her obstetrician that she would need to pay $1,500 or be denied further services, even though both women had full ifhp coverage as a result of making refugee claims prior to 2012 (marwah, 2014, p. 10; interview with doctor, 19 october 2015). these cases, along with many others, highlight how increased risks of targeting, discrimination, and denied access to services is a result of non-state actors who may come to employ a more exclusionary construction of noncitizenship beyond that which is prescribed by the state (bloom 2015, p. 895). according to a midwife, the lack of (re)constructing & resisting irregularity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 213 ohip documentation played a key role in targeting and rendering pregnant women irregular: i feel like there is that kind of prejudice where somebody assumes like, oh she doesn’t have ohip, she’s not going to be able to pay, she’s here illegally, or without status. so, i think that’s a lot of social barriers [and] racism that people encounter in these situations. (interview with midwife, toronto, 22 january 2016) the utilization of (non)citizenship discourses can render the presence and healthcare claims of refugee claimants as out of place regardless of the legally authorized status of refugee claimants and the rights accorded to them. i take these cases as illustrations of how the (re)construction of irregularity can be imagined and the manner in which noncitizenship is an “emergent condition” (hepworth, 2014). although this article focuses on denied or restricted access to healthcare services, not all refugee claimants with ifhp coverage faced such barriers. as noted by one refugee claimant, “when my answer hadn’t arrived yet, everything was good. i was getting medical attention from the doctors without paying anything from my pocket. so, the government was covering that […] so it was really helpful” (interview with refugee claimant, toronto, 18 october 2015). in this regard, while the ifhp is foundational to the irregularity of refugee claimants, it is simultaneously a means to ameliorate irregularity and its affects (of denied access); without access to the limited program, refugee claimants would face significantly more barriers to healthcare. irregularity is not fixed. rather, it is inconsistently and contingently (re)constructed. as one lawyer notes, while patients may be denied “immediate access,” a process of “going back and forth, back and forth, [having] several conversations” may eventually lead to accessing the required service (interview with lawyer, toronto, 11 november 2015). the important point here is that the consequences of such inconsistencies, including those discussed in the cases above, are different and perhaps more consequential for those with an irregularized status. rather than approaching irregularity and noncitizenship as either/or scenarios, it is in fact much more complex. resisting irregularity in toronto’s healthcare setting the complexity of irregularity lies not only in its (re)production but also its confrontation. in the ifhp case, an impressive counter-mobilization emerged that not only defeated the government before the courts, but also served to publicize and sensitize canadians to the experiences, needs, and rights of refugee claimants and prompt canadians to critically question the exclusionary nature of their healthcare system. this was complemented by the everyday acts of healthcare professionals who played a key role in laura connoy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 214 challenging the boundaries upheld by citizenship by providing medical aid; for castañeda (2013, p. 229), this “has the ability to disrupt the scaling of citizenship” and undermine its exclusionary organizing principles. important actors here include doctors from toronto’s inner city health associates (icha) who offer primary care and psychiatric services (as well the costs of x-rays, ultrasounds, and potentially blood work and medications) to residents of drop-in centres, homeless shelters, and refugee shelters (interview with doctor, toronto, 20 october 2015). also important are the services provided at crossroads refugee clinic which is toronto’s first hospital-based refugee health clinic, toronto’s community health centres, and uninsured clinics such as the canadian centre for refugee & immigrant healthcare (ccrih) and the scarborough women assessments and needs (swan) clinic, where inter-disciplinary teams of healthcare professionals offer free primary, paediatric, dental, and chiropractic services regardless of status (ccrih, n.d.). i view the act of healthcare provision as having both momentary and momentous political effects. the direct provision of care can be understood as an enactment of “momentary” politics (johnson, 2012, p. 115), in that it may not overtly challenge systemic practices but does establish noncitizens as rights bearing subjects. furthermore, in these momentary acts, healthcare providers documented the impacts of the ifhp revisions through the refugee health outcome monitoring and evaluation system (refugee homes) tool, “a simple online survey that is completed by health providers when they care for refugees” (barnes, 2013, p. 3). the knowledge generated through this tool informed publications, pamphlets, demonstrations, campaigns, letters, media statements, and national days of action, and was used as evidence in the court challenge. it can be argued that the liberal party came to echo the issues raised in the collection of this data in their political platform, as noted by their desire to fully re-instate the ifhp (liberal party of canada, 2015, p. 65). in this sense, the effects of service provision impact more than the confines of the everyday and individual lives. there is a scalar aspect of acts, in that there is an important intimate connection between momentary and momentous resistance to the systemic features of irregularization. however, the provision of the above services was and continues to be patchy. for example, icha does not provide services everywhere and oftentimes refugee claimants only find their services by chance. as noted by one refugee claimant: because i was from [seaton house], first started, they provide me service from a family doctor. they are giving me service until now. but if i directly came here [to my current refugee shelter], then it was a problem for me. there is no service. i have to pay from my pocket. money i have not, then it’s extremely a problem for me. (interview with refugee claimant, toronto, 11 march 2016) a social worker offers a similar account of serendipitous healthcare service discovery in that as a result of residing within a specific shelter, access to a (re)constructing & resisting irregularity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 215 family physician may be provided (interview with social worker, toronto, 26 november 2015). furthermore, not all medications are covered. according to a refugee claimant, after informing the doctor of his prescribed diabetes medication he received in his country of origin, the doctor at the shelter responded, “we are paying, and that this is very costly, we can’t provide these pills to you, we will give other pills that will control your diabetes but slowly” (interview with refugee claimant, toronto, 11 march 2016). he follows this by stating “at my home, i was taking only one pill in the morning for diabetes, but here, two in the morning, two in the evening. four pills i am taking for diabetes. that is a problem” (ibid.). while providing healthcare to refugee claimants within the spaces they inhabit is an act that aims to break down barriers, we continue to witness the perpetuation of what villegas (2013, p. 221) argues is the “insecure and negotiated quality of access to health care” among canada’s precarious status noncitizens. this insecure access is also reflected in the unreliability of uninsured clinics with regards to knowing “where they are and how to access them and what services they provide and when they provide them, because […] they are not open every day of the week” (interview with city official, toronto, 6 october 2015). the difficulty in finding these healthcare places for underinsured populations like ifhp recipients is an effect of the silence that surrounds them. as one doctor states, the provision of healthcare is “a balance between wanting people to know they can seek services versus not declaring that we are providing services to people who are potentially nonstatus” (interview with doctor, toronto, 20 october 2015). drawing upon nyers’ (2010, p. 141) critique of the sanctuary city, the provision of healthcare services to irregularized populations arguably inadvertently “reproduce[s] the logic of silence, [and] subterfuge” that characterizes their daily lives while simultaneously aiming to avoid the gaze and “sovereign retakings” of the state (nyers, 2003, pp. 1086-1087). the provision of healthcare services to refugee claimants is laudable, and the degree to which these actors affect the everyday lives of refugee claimants is remarkable. however, their acts can produce unintended outcomes. in their attempts to humanize refugee claimants, healthcare professionals and allies utilized familiar paternalistic discourses of voicelessness and powerlessness, which are themselves key indicators of “refugeeness” (malkki, 1996, p. 385). according to one doctor: one of the things we can easily be accused of is paternalism, speaking on behalf of people, but [...] they couldn’t. they were terrified. they didn’t want to expose themselves to the state, and so, because they couldn’t speak, we had to. there was […] this leading american doctor who said that doctors had a duty to use their voices loudly and strongly to intervene on behalf – to intervene not only for justice and healthcare, but for justice in general which is affecting patients’ health, […] and that’s exactly what we were doing the whole time. (interview with doctor, toronto, 10 november 2016, emphasis added) laura connoy studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 216 this duty to protect may perpetuate unequal power relations, speaking to how the places and roles of citizens and noncitizens is a central dilemma of migrant politics (castañeda, 2013, p. 233; see nyers, 2003). beatson (2016, p. 130) argues the victim frame employed by physicians and allies during the ifhp protests emphasized passivity, along with charity (over obligation), which avoids any serious attempt “to elevate the status of refugee claimants in canadian society on a more fundamental and permanent level.” the contradictions and complexities emerging from acts are an indication of how they risk reinstating exclusionary configurations. in addition to such depoliticized framings of refugee claimants, the persistent call for the reinstatement of the ifhp among healthcare professionals and refugee advocates (cdrc, n.d.) – as a way to rectify the negative impact of the cuts – may in fact perpetuate the irregularity of refugee claimants. as noted in this article, the program is inherently irregularizing as a result of being administered within a context that prioritizes national citizenship, the rights of citizens, and provincial or territorial healthcare coverage. conclusion the confusion and barriers created through the ifhp revisions came to an end in april 2016 when the program was fully restored to its pre-2012 levels under the newly elected federal liberal government; it was further expanded in april 2017 to refugees awaiting resettlement to canada. however, concerns continue to be raised about the healthcare barriers faced by refugee claimants and other un(der)insured and nonstatus persons (caulford & rahunathan, 2017; chen, gruben & liew, 2018; wright, 2018), alerting us to how this program perpetuates health inequality and contributes to the (re)irregularization of refugee claimants. in this article, i draw on critical citizenship and migration scholarship (baines & sharma, 2002; castañeda, 2013; hepworth, 2014; isin, 2002), to highlight how the irregularity of refugee claimants was (re)constructed during the time of revisions (2012-2016) in ways that led to denied access to healthcare coverage and services. i also reveal how healthcare providers resist irregularity – as acts of citizenship – and the consequences of such forms of resistance and struggle. in this regard, i emphasize how irregularity entails regulatory and resistive elements, which accentuates the messiness that defines (non)citizenship and the experiences of precarious status noncitizens. through the lens of irregularity, this paper draws further attention to how the healthcare rights and entitlements of refugee claimants within canada are circumvented by way of (re)constructing a non-juridical status at both national and local scales. (re)constructing & resisting irregularity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 201-220, 2019 217 the rights and overall wellbeing of refugee claimants are also challenged outside of the healthcare sector. refugee claimants face barriers to affordable, long-term shelter (kissoon, 2013; rider, 2018), and female refugee claimants navigate a system that often does not recognize their genuine fear of domestic abuse (bhuyan, vargas & pintin-perez, 2016). furthermore, canada continues to differentiate asylum claims based upon country of origin, while canadian citizenship is increasingly being rendered a “conditional privilege,” leading to “citizenship stripping” and de facto statelessness (stasiulis, 2017, pp. 2-3). coming to terms with irregularity within this context will allow scholars and activists to critically confront the naturalness with which the virtuousness of citizenship is portrayed, and the barriers to justice and equity that it upholds. references alexander, c. 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(2015b). moments of humiliation, intimidation ad implied ‘illegality’: encounters with immigration officials at the border and the performance of sovereignty. journal of ethnic & migration studies, 41(14), 2357-2375. willen, s. (2011). do “illegal” im/migrants have a right to health? engaging ethical theory as social practice at a tel aviv open clinic. medical anthropology quarterly, 25(3), 303330. wright, t. (2018, august 15). canada violated rights of irregular migrant by denying her essential health-care: un human rights committee. the globe and mail. retrieved from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-violated-rights-ofirregular-migrant-by-denying-access-to/ morrison final before ts november 27 18 correspondence address: joanna morrison, independent consultant, kathmandu, nepal; email: jojomorrison@hotmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 girls’ menstrual management in five districts of nepal: implications for policy and practice joanna morrison independent consultant, nepal machhindra basnet psi nepal anju bhatt agriculture & food security project (afsp), nepal sangeeta khimbanjar herd, nepal sandhya chaulagain wateraid, nepal nepali sah unicef nepal sushil baral herd international, nepal therese mahon wateraid marian hodgkin independent consultant abstract discriminatory practices related to menstruation affect the social, mental and physical wellbeing of girls in many lowand middle-income countries. we conducted mixed methods research in five districts of nepal to explore how menstruation affected girls’ ability to fully participate in school and community life. we conducted 860 structured interviews, 26 group interviews and 10 focus group discussions with schoolgirls in rural areas, 14 semi-structured interviews with girls’ joanna morrison studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 252 mothers, and 10 interviews with health teachers. girls in all districts experienced social, material and information barriers to confident menstrual management. menstrual blood was believed to carry diseases, and girls’ movement was restricted to contain ritual pollution and protect them from illness, spirit possession, and sexual experiences. taboos prevented girls from worshipping in temples or in their home, and some girls were not allowed to enter the kitchen, or sleep in their home while menstruating. teachers and parents felt unprepared to answer questions about menstruation and focused on the maintenance of restrictions. teachers and students were embarrassed discussing menstruation in school and classes were not questiondriven or skills-based. gender disaggregated teaching of menstruation and engagement of health facility staff may have positive effects. community participatory approaches that engage girls, their families and the wider community are necessary to address harmful cultural practices. cross-sectoral approaches to provide clean, private, safe spaces for girls and increased availability of preferred materials could enable confident menstrual management. keywords public policy; gender; culture introduction adolescence presents a critical window to break cycles of poverty, transform gender roles and improve health outcomes (un general assembly, 2015). yet for many girls in lowand middle-income countries (lmics), menarche results in practices which are gender discriminatory and stigmatising (crawford, menger, & kaufman, 2014). the linkages between menstruation and girls’ participation in school and society were highlighted by jackie kirk (kirk & sommer, 2006). jackie was committed to ensuring that policies and programmes were informed by girls’ experience. listening to girls as expert “knowers” of their own lives was an important focus of jackie’s work (kirk & garrow, 2003). this paper is inspired by her legacy of working across academic and practitioner worlds to improve girls’ lives, and is the result of an inter-agency collaboration between unicef, wateraid and herd international. we present the findings of research conducted in five diverse districts of nepal to describe how girls managed their menstruation and explore how menstruation affected their ability to participate in school and community life. effects of menstruation on girls in lowand middle-income countries material and psychosocial deprivations experienced by menstruating girls in lmics limit confident menstruation management (crichton, okal, kabiru, & msiyaphazi zulu, 2013). inadequate access to water, sanitation and hygiene (wash) facilities in homes and in schools affects girls’ experience of and access to education (alam et al., 2017; kirk & sommer, 2006; mahon & fernandes, 2010; mason et al., 2013; sumpter & torondel, 2013; wateraid, girls’ menstrual management in five districts of nepal studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 253 2009). challenges in accessing materials which can be easily washed, dried and disposed of, often mean that girls’ confidence and ability to participate in community and school activities is curtailed (hennegan, dolan, wu, scott, & montgomery, 2016; hennegan & montgomery, 2016). access to comfortable menstrual materials is particularly challenging for girls in rural areas. psychosocial deprivations are caused by cultural taboos around menstrual blood, which is often considered to be polluting and dirty. a recent literature review found that girls in diverse contexts were subject to restrictions in their daily lives while menstruating because of these taboos (chandra-mouli & patel, 2017). girls were commonly prevented from cooking, participating in religious activities and moving freely outside the home (sumpter & torondel, 2013). a lack of accurate and pragmatic information can lead girls to feel ashamed, anxious, confused and fearful about menstruation (crichton et al., 2013; mcmahon et al., 2011; sommer, 2010). menstrual management in nepal nepal is an ethnically diverse, mainly hindu, patriarchal society (central bureau of statistics, 2012). menstruation is commonly believed to be polluting and should be contained through ritual and restriction (bennett, 1983; crawford et al., 2014). in nepalese hindu culture, menarche is associated with female sexual maturation. traditionally, if a girl is married when she starts menstruating, her sexual maturation is unproblematic because she belongs to her husband’s family who will ensure that her sexuality is properly channelled in the procreation of the patrilineal line. however, if a girl starts menstruating before marriage, her “unattached sexuality” can endanger herself and her family. her purity and the reputation of her family are vulnerable from menarche onwards (bennett, 1978; cameron, 1998). menarche is therefore often marked by a period of seclusion from the family. in some families in the west and far-west of nepal, a form of this seclusion is practiced every time a woman menstruates through the practice of chhaupadi (l. joshi, 2015; ranabhat et al., 2015). while practicing chhaupadi, women must sleep in a hut (chhau goth) away from the family home in order to prevent ritual pollution. in 2015, 71% of women aged 15-49 in mid-western nepal reported practicing chhaupadi (g. o. n. central bureau of statistics, 2015). chhaupadi was declared illegal in 2005, and enforcing chhaupadi is punishable by a fine or prison sentence. multi-sectoral commitment to eradicate chhaupadi and enable confident menstrual management is evident in ministry of health, ministry of water supply and sanitation and education sector policies and plans (karki et al., 2017). there are few peer-reviewed publications which explore the experience of menstruation from the perspective of schoolgirls in nepal, and nongovernmental organisation (ngo) reports usually describe practices from a joanna morrison studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 254 specific area among a small population (karki et al., 2017). by combining the results of two mixed methods studies, we seek to capitalise on political interest in menstrual management and provide evidence from diverse contexts to inform policy and practice in nepal. this paper seeks to inform decentralised planning in nepal’s new federal structure through presentation of district specific findings, and inform policy direction at a national level by examining commonalities across districts. both studies used similar methods to describe practice and explore experience. data collection for wateraid occurred from february 2016, and for unicef from april 2016. we consider the multiple dimensions of “menstrual poverty” (crichton et al., 2013) using a framework which describes knowledge, material and social environmental factors as affecting confident menstrual management (van eijk et al., 2016). methods study design we used a parallel mixed method design to answer different research questions about the same phenomenon. quantitative cross-sectional surveys with girls were used to describe menstruation management practices, and qualitative group interviews (gis), focus group discussions (fgds) and semistructured interviews (ssis) were used explore how menstruation affected girls’ ability to participate in everyday life. districts and schools were selected according to the interests of commissioning agencies. unicef specified that we should collect data in rural areas of accham, bajura and parsa districts where some schools had received the wash in schools (wins) programme. we collected data in two schools that had received the wins programme and two schools that had not received the programme in each district (n = 12 schools). wateraid was preparing to implement a wash programme in sindhuli and udaypur districts, and needed to understand differences between urban and rural areas. therefore, we collected data in six rural schools, one urban school, and one peri-urban school per district (n = 16 schools). since many girls drop out of school during the transition from primary to secondary education and classroom sizes were small (unicef, unesco, & government of nepal, 2016), we sampled girls in grades seven to 10 in large schools. we collected qualitative and quantitative data in 10 schools, and quantitative data only in the remaining 18 schools. girls from four urban/periurban schools and 24 rural schools participated in the study. our sampling strategy, consent process and methods of data collection were the same in all five districts. girls’ menstrual management in five districts of nepal studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 255 setting bajura and achham districts are hilly and among the least developed districts in nepal (central bureau of statistics, 2014) (government of nepal & united nations development programme, 2014). chhaupadi is practiced in these districts. chhaupadi is not commonly practiced in parsa in the plains, nor in hilly sindhuli and udaypur. udaypur has a higher development ranking and higher female literacy of 62%, compared with achham, bajura and parsa with female literacy rates of 37%, 43%, and 44% respectively (table 1). district terrain area (km2) region population devpt. ranking out of 75 districts human devpt. index female literacy udaypur hill 2,063 east 317,600 37 0.475 61.9% sindhuli hill 2491 central 296,192.8 52 0.440 52.6% parsa plains 1,353 central 601,017 42 0.464 44% achham hill 1,680 far west 257,477 71 0.378 37% bajura hill 2,188 far west 134,912 75 0.364 43% table 1. study district characteristics (sources: central bureau of statistics, 2014; government of nepal & united nations development programme, 2014) sampling qualitative sampling: students and teachers from classes seven to 10 were briefed about the study and received written information and parental consent forms. we asked teachers to identify girls who might be willing to participate, and girls from low socioeconomic status households who did not attend school regularly, because we hypothesised that they may experience challenges in menstrual management. we checked that these girls had menstruated and had parental consent, and invited them to participate in a group interview or focus group discussion. quantitative sampling: in order to describe and estimate the prevalence of many practices in study districts, and enable comparison between one district and another we sampled 860 girls in total: 200 girls per district from achham, bajura and parsa; and 130 girls per district from udaypur and sindhuli. we excluded girls who had participated in qualitative discussions, those without parental consent, and those who had not started menstruating. we randomly sampled eligible girls by drawing names from a basket, and invited them to be interviewed. we calculated the required sample size on the basis of a prevalence of girls who had received information about menstruation before menarche. a previous study showed that most girls have joanna morrison studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 256 not received information about menstruation before menarche (wateraid, 2009), and our sample size was sufficient to detect such rare outcomes. qualitative and quantitative data collection data were collected by district teams of four trained and experienced female researchers (table 2). topic guides and questionnaires were developed in english, translated into nepali, and back-translated for quality control. researchers also spoke bhojpuri and doteli and conducted discussions in local languages when necessary. tools were piloted in rural schools in kavrepalanchok and parsa districts that were not sampled for the main study, and adapted. informed written parental consent and participant consent were taken. ethical approval was obtained from the nepal health research council. respondents (n) method (n data collected) number of respondents accham bajura parsa udaypur sindhuli quantitative data collection structured interviews 200 200 200 130 130 qualitative data collection mothers ssis* (14) 2 2 2 4 4 girls gis*(28) 8 8 8 16 16 girls fgds* (10) 12 12 13 13 12 teachers ssis* (10) 2 2 2 2 2 *ssi = semi-structured interview; gi = group interview; fgd = focus group discussion table 2. data collection group interviews: to make girls feel as comfortable as possible we asked them to choose between an individual semi-structured interview, or an interview with a friend. all preferred to be interviewed with a friend. group interviews are similar to semi-structured interviews because they allow for an intimate and in-depth exploration of experiences. we explored girls’ personal experience with menstrual management in school and at home with four pairs of girls per school in sindhuli and udaypur, and two pairs of girls per school in achham, bajura and parsa. focus group discussions: we used focus group discussions to discuss community and school norms about menstrual management. focus group discussions allow participants to interact with each other, building-on or challenging others’ ideas. we used a game, storytelling and body mapping to enhance communication and participation. we conducted one focus group discussion per school with six to eight menstruating girls to explore how girls’ menstrual management in five districts of nepal studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 257 knowledge, the social environment and the material environment affected their experience of menarche and menstrual management. semi-structured interviews: to triangulate information from girls, and collect data on school and community barriers to confident menstrual management, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 mothers of participants from the mixed methods schools, and 10 teachers who taught the “environment, health and population” subject for class six to nine per school. this subject covers adolescent health, sexual and reproductive health and menstruation. three teachers were female and seven were male. we discussed similar topics with mothers and teachers as we did with girls, additionally asking teachers about how menstrual management was taught and about how the school was supporting confident menstrual management. cross-sectional surveys: questionnaires were administered by researchers. we collected socio-demographic data, and data describing menstrual management at school and at home. we asked about materials used, cleaning and disposal of materials, experience of restrictions and sources of information. data management and analysis quantitative data management and analysis: quantitative data were collected on samsung tablets using open data kit software, and uploaded to a central server throughout data collection. data were analysed using spss v20. we generated a wealth index using household assets (table 3). for each household characteristic, participants received a score of one, and then scores were summed. if a household scored four or lower they were categorised as having low socioeconomic status, if they scored from five to seven they were of medium socioeconomic status, and scores of eight and above were classified as having high socioeconomic status (ministry of health & population, 2011). qualitative data management and analysis: all qualitative data were transcribed in nepali by researchers. transcripts were then translated from nepali to english and checked. descriptive content analysis was conducted using nvivo v11 (green & thorogood, 2005). authors joanna morrison, machhindra basnet and anju bhatt read the data, making memos, and made an initial coding structure based on emergent themes. this coding structure was applied to a sample of data from each respondent type. we discussed patterns in the data, compared responses from respondent types and districts, revised the coding structure and coded the data. joanna morrison studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 258 household assets • electricity • solar • radio • television • mobile phone • computer • livestock • bank account roof construction • calamine/ cement fibre • cement dhalan house construction • brick and cement • stone and cement • cement block toilet facility • flush to septic tank • flush to somewhere else • pit latrine with slab water supply • piped water in compound table 3. variables used in the wealth index calculation results of the 860 girls surveyed, 92% (794) were hindu. achham and bajura had more hindu advantaged brahmin/chettri girls (64% (128) and 78% (126) respectively), and more girls from disadvantaged hindu hill dalit ethnic groups (24% (48) and 18% (35) respectively). in udaypur and sindhuli there were more girls from buddhist disadvantaged hill janajati groups than other districts (34% (44) and 52% (68) respectively), and in parsa 70% (140) of girls were of marginalised hindu madhesi ethnicity. seventy-six percent (657) of the girls’ mothers were not educated, and 67% (573) lived in midrange socioeconomic status households (table 4). girls’ mean age was 15 years old, and ranged from 11 to 19 years old. we present our findings in terms of how knowledge, material and social environmental factors affected menstrual management (van eijk et al., 2016). quotations are referenced by district, respondent type and identification number. knowledge and information knowledge and information at menarche: the mean age of menarche was 13 years old. seventy-six percent (653) of girls did not know anything about menstruation before menarche. most girls were scared, embarrassed and upset: “i was panicked and i felt strange. i thought that i might die because of the heavy blood flow. i felt that there might not be enough blood in my body” (sindhuli fgd 402). those who knew about menstruation received information from mothers (56%, 117), older sisters (54%, 112) and friends (39%, 81). information was usually about restrictions, or cramps. girls’ mothers told them to “sit carefully” so that blood would not stain where they girls’ menstrual management in five districts of nepal studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 259 total n=860 (%) achham n=200 (%) bajura n=200 (%) parsa n=200 (%) udaypur n=130 (%) sindhuli n=130 (%) caste/ethnicity brahmin/chettri 384 (44.7) 128 (64) 156 (78) 9 (4.5) 51 (39.2) 40 (30.8) madhesi 140 (16.3) 0 (0) 0 (0) 140 (70) 0 (0) 0 (0) hill janajati 121 (14.1) 3 (1.5) 3 (1.5) 3 (1.5) 44 (33.8) 68 (52.3) hill dalit 84 (9.8) 48 (24) 35 (17.5) 1 (.5) 0 (0) 0 (0) sanyasi/sahi thakuri 55 (6.4) 21 (10.5) 6 (3) 0 (0) 12 (9.2) 16 (12.3) terai janajati 54 (6.3) 0 (0) 0 (0) 25 (12.5) 23 (17.7) 6 (4.6) muslim 11 (1.3) 0 (0) 0 (0) 11 (5.5) 0 (0) 0 (0) terai dalit 11 (1.3) 0 (0) 0 (0) 11 (5.5) 0 (0) 0 (0) religion hindu 794 (92.3) 200 (100) 199 (99.5) 187 (93.5) 124 (95.4) 84 (64.6) buddhist 41 (4.8) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 1 (0.8) 40 (30.8) other (christian, muslim) 25 (2.9) 0 (0) 1 (.5) 13 (6.5) 5 (3.8) 6 (4.6) educational level of mother none 657 (76.4) 166 (83) 173 (86.5) 128 (64) 92 (70.8) 98 (75.4) below class 10 (higher secondary) 177 (20.6) 30 (15) 25 (12.5) 64 (32) 33 (25.4) 25 (19.2) class 10 and above 20 (2.3) 1 (0.5) 2 (1) 7 (3.5) 5 (3.8) 5 (3.8) university 2 (0.2) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 2 (1.5) don’t know 4 (0.5) 3 (1.5) 0 (0) 1 (0.5) 0 (0) 0 (0) wealth index low 190 (22.1) 42 (21) 53 (26.5) 48 (24) 14 (10.8) 33 (25.4) medium 573 (66.6) 148 (74) 134 (67) 103 (51.5) 99 (76.2) 89 (68.5) high 97 (11.3) 10 (5) 13 (6.5) 49 (24.5) 17 (13.1) 8 (6.2) table 4. study participant characteristics joanna morrison studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 260 sat. some girls received advice from elder sisters about how to fold menstrual cloth, and the importance of using clean cloth. few girls were given information about disposal of menstrual materials. girls and mothers gave vague descriptions of menstruation, and explained it as the body disposing of “impure” blood. most mothers felt embarrassed and unprepared to talk to their children about menstruation: “what can be discussed with my son? i have not even talked about (menstruation) with my daughter, how can i talk with my son?” (udaypur ssi mother 313). knowledge and information after menarche: after menarche, girls received information from mothers, friends and teachers (table 5). seventy percent (80) of girls in achham and 83% (125) of girls in bajura received information from teachers. survey data from bajura, achham and parsa showed that 88% (529) of girls had received a class about menstruation. girls told us that menstruation was often taught with prevention of sexually transmitted diseases: “sir told us that women should not walk around alone during menstruation and should not live with anyone. if anything happens then it causes hiv.” (sindhuli fgd 401). linkages between menstruation and infection were taught in schools: “[the teacher] taught us that we should regularly bathe, otherwise there would be germs and we would get infected” (achham gi 306). teachers also related menstrual hygiene with cervical cancer: “we teach our students that they should keep themselves clean during menstruation to remain healthy, if not they might face many health problems in the future such as uterine problems and cancer” (sindhuli ssi teacher 9). mothers also related menstruation with weakness and vulnerability to disease: “i feel like menstruation is the starting point of disease for every woman. various deadly diseases are all caused because of menstruation” (udaypur ssi mother 1). resting and eating “nutritious” food, such as fruit, was believed to restore the body: “in class nine we knew that impure blood comes out, then our body will be weak so we must eat more fruit” (udaypur gi 309). when menstruation was taught about in the classroom, teachers focused on menstrual physiology and girls were dissatisfied with the class. teachers often got embarrassed, referred students to their textbook, and did not answer questions: “if girls try to get beyond a theoretical explanation i suggest them to get married and then they will get all the information” (sindhuli ssi teacher 415). teachers said that materials and training were inadequate, and they found it difficult to manage mixed gender classes. there were not enough classrooms and teachers to disaggregate classes by gender. although 29% (154) of girls were invited to ask questions in this class, most did not: “we didn’t ask, we only thought about things. we couldn’t say anything” (bajura gi 205). instead, they asked their friends: “why is there so much bleeding? why does our stomach hurt so much? do they have the same problems?” (bajura gi 203). girls said that they were more comfortable discussing menstruation with female teachers, but if a class was well taught girls’ menstrual management in five districts of nepal studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 261 the gender of the teacher was not important. girls, mothers and teachers were positive about ngo personnel teaching menstrual management. one teacher said: when i was new to this profession i did not recognise any students so it felt easy to teach them about (sexual and reproductive health). but as i have built-up a relation with students and their guardians, it becomes difficult to teach them. (udaypur ssi teacher 316) total n=860 (%) achham n=200 (%) bajura n=200 (%) parsa n=200 (%) udaypur n=130 (%) sindhuli n=130 (%) have learned information since menarche 590 (68.6) 114 (57.0) 151 (75.5) 167 (83.5) 48 (36.9) 110 (84.6) source of information (n=590) (n=114) (n=151) (n=167) (n=48) (n=110) mother 340 (57.6) 57 (50.0) 63 (41.7) 129 (77.2) 15 (31.3) 76 (69.1) older sister 250 (42.4) 42 (36.8) 67 (44.4) 65 (38.9) 18 (37.5) 58 (52.7) friend 352 (59.7) 66 (57.9) 114 (75.5) 78 (46.7) 25 (52.1) 69 (62.7) teacher 364 (61.7) 80 (70.2) 125 (82.8) 99 (59.3) 15 (31.3) 45 (40.9) book/magazine/ health magazine 213 (36.1) 27 (23.7) 120 (79.5) 12 (7.2) 20 (41.7) 34 (30.9) female relatives (cousin/sister in law) 132 (22.4) 25 (21.9) 37 (24.5) 37 (22.2) 8 (16.7) 25 (22.7) child club/young champion/ adolescents group 83 (14.1) 4 (3.5) 21 (13.9) 4 (2.4) 13 (27.1) 41 (37.3) radio 51 (8.6) 9 (7.9) 30 (19.9) 1 (0.6) 1 (2.1) 10 (9.1) others (tv, internet/health worker) 47 (8.0) 15 (13.2) 12 (7.9) 8 (4.8) 8 (16.7) 4 (3.6) table 5. knowledge about menstruation after menarche joanna morrison studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 262 material environment total n=860 (%) achham n=200 (%) bajura n=200 (%) parsa n=200 (%) udaypur n=130 (%) sindhuli n=130 (%) material usually used for menstruation cloth (reusable) 690 (80.2) 188 (94) 110 (55) 174 (87) 115 (88.5) 103 (79.2) sanitary pads (reusable) 69 (8) 6 (3) 55 (27.5) 7 (3.5) 0 (0) 1 (0.8) sanitary pads (disposable) 67 (7.8) 2 (1) 6 (3) 19 (9.5) 14 (10.8) 26 (20) wears several pairs of underwear 24 (2.8) 4 (2) 20 (10) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) nothing 10 (1.2) 0 (0) 9 (4.5) 0 (0) 1 (0.8) 0 (0) preferred material for managing menstruation cloth (reusable) 388 (45.1) 123 (61.5) 62 (31) 112 (56) 46 (35.4) 45 (34.6) sanitary pads (disposable) 379 (44.1) 66 (33) 76 (38) 70 (35) 83 (63.8) 84 (64.6) sanitary pads (reusable) 89 (10.3) 10 (5) 60 (30) 18 (9) 0 (0) 1 (0.8) don’t know/nothing 129 (15) 28 (14) 65 (32.5) 21 (10.5) 13 (10) 2 (1.5) have ever used sanitary pads 331 (38.5) 35 (17.5) 31 (15.5) 83 (41.5) 82 (63.1) 100 (76.9) how often do you use disposable sanitary pads? n=331 n=35 n=31 n=83 n=82 n=100 usually 80 (24.2) 2 (5.7) 10 (32.3) 21 (25.3) 15 (18.3) 32 (32) sometimes 160 (48.3) 18 (51.4) 6 (19.4) 33 (39.8) 43 (52.4) 60 (60) rarely 91 (27.5) 15 (42.9) 15 (48.4) 29 (34.9) 24 (29.3) 8 (8) how did you obtain them? self-bought 147 (44.4) 9 (25.7) 11 (35.5) 11 (13.3) 46 (56.1) 70 (70) from relative 184 (55.6) 26 (74.3) 20 (64.5) 72 (86.7) 36 (43.9) 30 (30) table 6. menstrual materials eighty percent (690) of girls used reusable, used cloth to absorb menstrual blood and 99% (685) of these girls always used dry cloth (table 6). in bajura, girls’ menstrual management in five districts of nepal studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 263 menstrual management habits were slightly different than in other districts. fifteen percent (29) of girls wore several pairs of underwear during menstruation and 28% (55) of girls used reusable sanitary pads. girls in bajura preferred reusable pads: “blood will not leak and stain our clothes and we can go wherever we like. no-one will know we are menstruating” (bajura fgd 201). although many girls in all districts had been taught how to make reusable sanitary pads, only girls in bajura were enthusiastic about using them. girls in other districts found them time-consuming to make, complained that they didn’t dry properly, found them uncomfortable and did not feel confident when wearing them. girls in udaypur and sindhuli preferred disposable pads: “while using disposable pads there is no stress. there is total freedom. all the blood is absorbed there. cloth moves and you feel tense about whether your clothes will get stained or not” (udaypur gi 309). although 61% (529) of girls had never used disposable pads, 44% (379) said they would prefer to use them. seventy percent (70) of girls in sindhuli and 56% (46) of girls in udaypur bought pads, whereas girls in other districts tended to receive them from relatives. girls often preferred disposable pads when they travelled because they could dispose of them after use, and they were less likely to leak. mothers tended to stay at home while menstruating, which made it easier to wash, dry and dispose of menstrual cloth. it was important to wash and dry reusable cloth soon after it was soiled to prevent staining, to prevent other people seeing menstrual blood and to prevent catching diseases when reusing the cloth. cloth was always washed before disposal. seventy-two percent (499) of girls concealed drying menstrual cloth (data not shown in table) to prevent bringing shame on their family, to prevent being cursed by the person who saw the cloth and to prevent polluting the area. one mother told us: “i dry my cloth by covering it up, hiding it. people will say different things…i am afraid what society will say” (sindhuli ssi mother 412). mothers, teachers and girls believed there were harmful bacteria in menstrual blood, and girls in udaypur and sindhuli worried that bacteria would be transferred to their hands while washing menstrual cloth. materials and health: girls received conflicting information from mothers, teachers and friends about how different materials affected their health. cloth and pads were reported to cause itching, rashes, or chaffing. girls were worried about decayed cloth entering the body, and the “chemicals” in disposable pads: “[the teacher] taught us that hazardous chemicals are mixed in disposable pads” (parsa gi 105). in udaypur, girls said that disposable pads help to keep girls healthy by killing menstrual bacteria. both pads and cloth were blamed for causing cancer and infections. the disposal of menstrual materials was linked to beliefs about menstrual pollution and menstrual blood as carrying diseases (table 7). only three schools had waste disposal facilities, and none had private washing and drying facilities. girls took used cloth home, and either burned, buried, threw joanna morrison studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 264 in a stream or threw materials in secluded places where no-one could see their materials or be infected by them: “the germs in the used pad can affect people…if the used pad is thrown anywhere then the flies can transmit diseases” (achham fgd 301). in bajura, girls said: “the air will be polluted if cloths are burned and then the polluted air will mix with water, and there will be high risk of spreading diseases” (bajura fgd 201). in parsa, girls and mothers were additionally worried about public shame and spirit possession if used materials were seen. total n=860 (%) achham n=200 (%) bajura n=200 (%) parsa n=200 (%) udaypur n=130 (%) sindhuli n=130 (%) disposal method burn 72 (8.4) 9 (4.5) 46 (23) 2 (1) 13 (10) 2 (1.5) throw away far from home 81 (9.4) 20 (10) 16 (8) 9 (4.5) 5 (3.8) 31 (23.8) bury in rubbish pit 118 (13.7) 36 (18) 20 (10) 11 (5.5) 30 (23.1) 21 (16.2) bury on land away from home 245 (28.5) 14 (7) 30 (15) 137 (68.5) 19 (14.6) 45 (34.6) throw in a stream 238 (27.7) 108 (54) 59 (29.5) 19 (9.5) 23 (17.7) 29 (22.3) always re-use cloth 72 (8.4) 7 (3.5) 27 (13.5) 5 (2.5) 32 (24.6) 1 (0.8) other 34 (4) 6 (3) 2 (1) 17 (8.5) 8 (6.2) 1 (0.8) table 7. disposal of used materials social environment containing sexuality and menstrual pollution: girls, teachers and mothers discussed how menarche signified a new phase in girls’ lives, when they become a taruni (pubescent girl). girls told us: “we cannot live like we did before” (sindhuli fgd 402). hindu girls were usually secluded inside a room for one week at menarche, staying away from the sun, friends and family, and not attending school. one teacher in parsa said: it felt like something drastic had happened… after menarche, parents say ‘now that she has started menstruating, she could get pregnant’. she should not go anywhere where she can be influenced by others because if anything happens, her family will lose their social standing. (ssi teacher 109) seclusion at menarche was strict in achham and bajura: girls’ menstrual management in five districts of nepal studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 265 my family did not let me touch my brother or anyone else or even the cattle. they did not let me go outside. i had to stay alone for 12 days. on the fourth day of menstruation they gave me nutritious food to eat …(and) they only let me enter the house after 12 days of menstruation. (achham gi 303) it was believed that menstruating girls could curse their household with a look. girls said: “we are kept in another person’s house and we should not look at our father or the roof of our house” (udaypur gi 002). seclusion at menarche was less strictly followed in udaypur and sindhuli. after menarche, there were fewer menstrual restrictions on girls in sindhuli, udaypur, and parsa than other districts, perhaps because there were more buddhist and madhesi households in these districts. irrespective of religion and ethnicity, almost all girls were restricted from worshipping gods in the temple or at home while menstruating (table 8). containing menstrual pollution avoided angering the gods and being possessed by spirits, which lead to misfortunes or illness in the family: “if you go into the kitchen to eat some food, then you will be possessed by the gods that are worshipped in our house” (bajura gi 204). girls in all districts told us about their fears of infertility, failing their exams, illness, and illness of family members if they worshipped at home or in a temple. total n=860 (%) achham n=200 (%) bajura n=200 (%) parsa n=200 (%) udaypur n=130 (%) sindhuli n=130 (%) cannot visit religious place 846 (98.4) 200 (100) 198 (99) 194 (97) 127 (97.7) 127 (97.7) cannot attend religious occasion 678 (78.8) 191 (95.5) 172 (86) 121 (60.5) 96 (73.8) 98 (75.4) cannot worship in the household 844 (98.1) 199 (99.5) 198 (99) 195 (97.5) 126 (96.9) 126 (96.9) cannot touch male family members 390 (45.3) 119 (59.5) 123 (61.5) 32 (16) 68 (52.3) 48 (36.9) cannot cook food or enter inside kitchen 562 (65.3) 191 (95.5) 195 (97.5) 55 (27.5) 72 (55.4) 49 (37.7) cannot go outside as much as normal 149 (17.3) 58 (29) 46 (23) 12 (6) 17 (13.1) 16 (12.3) cannot eat any foods or drinks of their choice 512 (59.5) 159 (79.5) 179 (89.5) 94 (47) 38 (29.2) 42 (32.3) cannot sleep in the same household as others 159 (18.5) 120 (60) 34 (17) 1 (0.5) 3 (2.3) 1 (0.8) cannot sleep in the same bed as others 338 (39.3) 94 (47) 165 (82.5) 11 (5.5) 36 (27.7) 32 (24.6) table 8. cultural restrictions joanna morrison studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 266 survey data showed that 60% (120) of girls in achham and 17% (34) of girls in bajura practiced chhaupadi. in bajura, 83% of girls couldn’t sleep in the same bed as others. eighty percent (159) of girls in achham, and 90% (179) of girls in bajura were restricted from eating certain foods. other common restrictions forbid menstruating girls from touching or going near livestock (particularly milk producing livestock), cow dung, crops or fruit producing trees because their touch could make animals barren, stop milk production, make fruit rotten, kill crops and plants. mothers and teachers said that it was important to keep menstruating girls away from men who wore a sacred thread, and “pure” substances related to the hindu goddess laxmi (cow dung, cows, and milk products). girls’ understanding of the reasons for restrictions somewhat differed, but the effect was the same: “during menstruation, we should not carry cow dung as we might be infected with tetanus. my elder sister was infected” (parsa fgd 102). survey data showed that most girls followed restrictions because they were either scared of divine retribution, harming others or themselves or they were restricted by family members (table 9). qualitative findings suggested that many girls sought to respect their family by following traditions. girls said that poor families, joint families or families of a high social class were most likely to maintain restrictions: “there are more old people living in joint families and they control us more during menstruation” (achham fgd 301). girls discussed the consequences of not following restrictions: “if we – the high class family – don’t follow restrictions during menstruation then our social standing will go down” (achham fgd 301). teachers felt pressured to follow community traditions to maintain their reputation: “you have to follow restrictions otherwise people here will say: ‘sir ate the food cooked by his wife, or cooked by other menstruating women.’” (udaypur ssi teacher 316). eating pickles and sour foods were believed to cause heavy bleeding in all districts. heavy bleeding was also believed to be caused by lifting heavy loads in parsa, udaypur and sindhuli. some girls resisted restrictions, but they were fearful that in doing so they were endangering their family and that they would be blamed for any misfortunes. only 17% (149) of girls reported having their movement restricted while menstruating, but this may be because their movement was limited even when they were not menstruating: “here, they do not allow us to go outside the house very often. people in society frown on us going out alone. they say we are carelessly roaming around” (achham gi 303). some girls didn’t like to go outside while they were menstruating because of physical discomfort, fear of leakage (and others seeing their menstrual blood) or fear of doing something they were not meant to do: “if we go out we are worried…people get angry if you walk in the roads where there is a temple, so they do not let you go there” (achham fgd 301). this was also reported by mothers: “everyone gets afraid of touching things and people, and getting scolded” (sindhuli ssi mother 413). girls’ menstrual management in five districts of nepal studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 267 reasons for restrictions n (%) g ir ls (n =8 60 ) d on ’t fe el w el l fe ar d iv in e re tr ib ut io n fa m ily d on ’t al lo w d on ’t w an t t o it is th e ri gh t th in g to d o pe op le to uc he d w ill b ec om e un w el l fo od w ill b e ru in ed w ill h av e he av y bl ee di ng o th er restriction: cannot visit religious place 846 (98.4) 3 (0.4) 433 (51.2) 380 (44.9) 8 (0.9) 15 (1.8) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 7 (0.8) restriction: cannot attend religious occasion 678 (78.8) 4 (0.6) 296 (43.7) 341 (50.3) 17 (2.5) 14 (2.1) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 6 (0.9) restriction: cannot worship in the household 839 (97.5) 1 (0.1) 415 (49.2) 385 (45.6) 7 (0.8) 13 (1.5) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 18 (2.1) restriction: cannot touch male family members 390 (45.3) 0 (.0) 48 (12.3) 194 (49.7) 5 (1.3) 3 (.8) 130 (33.3) 0 (.0) 0 (.0) 10 (2.6) restriction: cannot cook food or enter inside kitchen 562 (65.3) 24 (4.3) 59 (10.5) 385 (68.5) 3 (0.5) 6 (1.1) 0 (0) 82 (14.6) 0 (.0) 3 (0.5) restriction: cannot go outside as much as normal 149 (17.3) 14 (9.4) 17 (11.4) 82 (55.0) 20 (13.4) 6 (4.0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 10 (6.7) restriction: cannot eat food or drinks of their choice 512 (59.5) 74 (14.5) 73 (14.3) 258 (50.4) 10 (2.0) 9 (1.8) 0 (0) 0 (0) 84 (16.4) 4 (0.8) restriction: cannot sleep in the same household as others 159 (18.5) 2 (1.3) 23 (14.5) 130 (81.8) 0 (0) 3 (1) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 1 (0.6) restriction: cannot sleep in the same bed as others 338 (39.3) 4 (1.2) 40 (11.8) 227 (67.2) 22 (6.5) 17 (5.0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 28 (8.3) table 9. restrictions and reasons for those restrictions discussion it was challenging for girls to confidently manage their menstruation in all districts. in bajura and achham, there were more menstrual restrictions than in other districts, and in all districts many girls feared divine retribution if they worshipped in temples or at home. in parsa, sindhuli and udaypur, girls feared spreading infection and being cursed if their menstrual blood was seen. joanna morrison studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 268 girls’ participation in school and community life was restricted because of these beliefs. knowledge and information our study and others have found that girls were usually ill-informed and unprepared at menarche (chandra-mouli & patel, 2017). when girls are informed, they feel confident in managing first and subsequent menstrual periods (marvan & molina-abolnik, 2012; sumpter & torondel, 2013). we found that information was acquired from mothers, sisters, friends and sometimes teachers, yet this was not always skills-based or accurate. information often focused on maintaining menstrual restrictions. interventions enabling peer education can be effective in providing knowledge and increasing confidence (abedian, kabirian, mazlom, & mahram, 2011; hytell et al., 2017; posner et al., 2009), but our study and others show that it is also important to empower mothers, teachers and other stakeholders with accurate information about menstruation. empowering these stakeholders enables them to support confident menstrual management, answer questions from boys and girls and challenge harmful restrictions (hennegan & montgomery, 2016). we found that inaccuracies in teaching about adolescent hygiene and menstruation may reinforce beliefs about illness being caused by menstruation. skills-based teacher training on how to teach menstrual management could improve access to accurate information (d. joshi, buit, & gonsalez-botero, 2015). girls and teachers often find it difficult to talk about menstruation in mixed gender environments (pokharel, kulczycki, & shakya, 2006). gender disaggregation of classes, and involving female nurses in menstrual education may be effective in rural contexts where there is a shortage of female teachers (borawski et al., 2015). adolescent health training by ngo personnel can be ad hoc, and could be supplemented with systematic engagement with local health facilities. teaching should respond to questions, teach beyond the physiology of menstruation, and give girls and boys the chance to question taboos and restrictions in a safe space (sommer, sutherland, & chandra-mouli, 2015). material environment it is important that girls are able to make informed choices about menstrual management materials, and understand the effect that they have on their health. clear and accurate information about materials should be given to teachers, mothers and girls. girls in our study expressed discomfort with both cloth and pads, which may be due to infrequent changing of materials (mason et al., 2013). we found that girls were motivated to maintain good menstrual girls’ menstrual management in five districts of nepal studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 269 hygiene, but their environment made this challenging. adequate school changing facilities, waste disposal and regular clean water supply are key in developing confident menstrual management and could be enabled through multi-sectoral approaches between wash, education and health sectors. girls’ assessments of reliability, comfort and satisfaction with changing, washing, carrying and disposing of materials should be at the forefront of intervention design (hennegan et al., 2016). reusable pads have been promoted as an environmentally sustainable approach to menstrual management, but our research showed that they were not suitable for all girls. there is limited evidence about their effectiveness in improving participation in school or community life, improving psychosocial health and physical health (hennegan & montgomery, 2016; montgomery et al., 2016). increased accessibility of materials that are cheap, clean and easy to dry and dispose of would benefit girls. further studies of menstrual cups are warranted as they may be locally acceptable (oster & thornton, 2011), they may decrease the risk of lower bacterial vaginosis (phillips-howard et al., 2016) and disposal infrastructure is not required. for girls who prefer cloths or disposable pads, community waste disposal strategies should be designed in collaboration with women to ensure their needs are met (mahon & fernandes, 2010). waste disposal infrastructure could eliminate girls’ stress of others seeing their menstrual blood, and the stress of being accused of environmental pollution. social environment menstrual restrictions were enforced by the older generation, often in joint family households, and traditional beliefs upheld by influential community members such as teachers. following menstrual restrictions was important to maintain social status. this indicates the importance of engaging the wider community and girls in designing and enacting strategies to address harmful practices. girls need support to push boundaries in a context which seeks to constrain and protect them as they transition to adulthood (bennett, 1978; cameron, 1998). community groups working through participatory learning and action cycles have proven effective in changing community behaviours and improving newborn and maternal health in lmics (prost et al., 2013). this approach of locally defining, planning and implementing strategies to address problems enables community-led and locally acceptable action, and could be used to improve menstrual management. limitations we were unable to explore issues affecting out-of-school girls, and data collection in larger schools may have excluded girls from remote areas. joanna morrison studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 251-272, 2018 270 despite these limitations, our study findings are valid for the contexts in which they were collected, and can inform intervention development. conclusion in order to better meet the needs of girls, we need to hear their stories. (kirk & sommer, 2006, p. 11) in this paper, we have used girls’ experience of menstruation in five diverse districts of nepal to inform recommendations for policy and practice. girls’ needs were not being met, and restrictions excluded them from participating fully in school and community life. jackie kirk felt it was important to put girls at the centre of programming, to address inequalities and develop confident menstrual management. we heed the legacy of jackie kirk in advocating for cross-sectoral collaboration to address girls’ needs, as well as developing the knowledge and skills of girls, mothers, teachers and community workers to enable confident menstrual management. in doing so, care should be taken to communicate accurately in ways which do not reinforce harmful social norms. participatory community-wide engagement to develop locally relevant strategies may enable harmful social norms to be addressed and increase girls’ participation in school and community life. acknowledgements we would like to thank all the girls, teachers, head teachers, mothers, school management committees, district education offices, and local partners of wateraid and unicef nepal. we acknowledge jackie kirk; her intellectual rigour, collaborative approach and uncompromising commitment to her work as both an academic and practitioner who continues to inspire. the research was funded by unicef and wateraid nepal, and no funding was received for the conceptualization and write-up of this article. the views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organisations that they work for. references abedian, z., kabirian, m., mazlom, s., & mahram, b. 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(2016). menstrual cups and sanitary pads to reduce school attrition, and sexually transmitted and reproductive tract infections: a cluster randomised controlled feasibility study in rural western kenya. bmj open, 6, e013229. pokharel, s., kulczycki, a., & shakya, s. (2006). school-based sex education in western nepal: uncomfortable for both teachers and students. reproductive health matters, 14(28), 156161. posner, j., kayastha, p., davis, d., limoges, j., o'donnell, c., & yue, k. (2009). development of leadership self-efficacy and collective efficacy: adolescent girls across castes as peer educators in nepal. global public health, 4(3), 284-302. prost, a., colbourn, t., seward, n., azad, k., coomarasamy, a., copas, a., . . . costello, a. 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(2015). transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. new york: united nations. unicef, unesco, & government of nepal. (2016). global initative on out-of-school children. kathmandu, np: unicef. van eijk, a., sivakami, m., thakkar, m., bauman, a., laserson, k., coates, s., & phillipshoward, p. (2016). menstrual hygiene management among adolescent girls in india: a systematic review and meta-analysis. bmj open, 6, e010290. wateraid. (2009). is menstrual hygiene and management an issue for adolescent school girls? kathmandu, np: wateraid nepal. moffette & walters final june 14 18 correspondence address: david moffette, department of criminology, university of ottawa, ottawa, on, k1n 6n5; email: david.moffette@uottawa.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 flickering presence: theorizing race and racism in the governmentality of borders and migration david moffette university of ottawa, canada william walters carleton university, canada abstract analytics of biopolitics and government have proven to be powerful tools in a growing scholarship examining the bordering, surveillance, securitization and contestation of migratory processes. yet the critical potential of such research is hampered by the rather limited ways it has managed to make sense of race and racism. while foucault was insistent that governmentality should orient itself to the understanding of singularities, too often race appears, when treated at all, as a general phenomenon. this article makes two contributions aimed at addressing these shortcomings. first, we survey studies in the governmentality of migration and develop a typology of what we call framings of race – the ways that race appears, is mobilized, or haunts this scholarship. second, we look to recent debates about race and racism in science & technology studies for useful theoretical innovations that might help us study borderand race-making as mutually constitutive processes. keywords race; racism; governmentality; migration; topology; science & technology studies introduction genealogies and analytics of biopolitics and government have proven to be powerful tools in a growing scholarship examining bordering, surveillance, securitization and contestation at play in the struggles over migratory processes in europe and north america (for overviews, see fassin, 2011; walters, 2015). over the last two decades, an important number of scholars have deepened the conversation between the study of mobilities and migration and the foucauldian analysis of government, the management of flickering presence studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 93 circulation and flows, and the biopolitics of population sketched out in security, territory, population (foucault, 2007) and later studies of governmentality (e.g., dean, 1999; o’malley, weir & shearing, 1997; rose, 1999; walters, 2012). while we are largely sympathetic to the aims and outcomes of this conversation, in this article we draw attention to the rather marginal place questions of race and racism occupy within it. the heterogeneous scholarship on the governmentality of migration and borders is constantly changing, and the most dynamic innovations currently center on “the problematic of migration and borders, along with the social mobilizations, interventions and concerns that have emerged around keywords such as ‘border regimes,’ ‘border spectacle,’ ‘autonomy of migration,’ or ‘border as method’” (de genova, mezzadra & pickles, 2015, p. 59). in a recent contribution oriented to an inventory of certain keywords, de genova, mezzadra and pickles (2015, p. 56) map out this new approach to migration. “what’s new about migration and borders?” they ask. their answer identifies an emergent epistemic community defined in part by its connections with migrant movements, struggles, and concerns. but it is also defined by a new understanding of borders. these are not seen as limits or lines that simply exclude, nor as withering away, as was predicted by early theories of globalization. instead, by joining migration and borders together these studies draw attention to the tendency of borders to multiply. they highlight borders as tools of “governmentality and management”; not purely negative or repressive tools of sovereignty but “more open and complex ways in which borders react to diverse kinds of migrant subjectivities and thereby operate to produce differentiated access and ‘rights’” (de genova, mezzadra & pickles, 2015, p. 57). we concur with these authors that in bringing the question of borders into the heartland of the study of migration some novel perspectives and emphases are being pursued. these include the fostering of a much more acute sensibility towards the different territorializations and securitizations of migration; the differential play of inclusion and exclusion; the complex place of technologies of government in shaping and contouring migration spaces and experiences; and a more sophisticated account of the relationship among states, territories, populations, and migratory processes. yet, we find that the critical potential of such research is hampered by the rather limited ways it has managed to make sense of race and racism. in this article we ask: where and how do race and racism feature in these studies of migration and borders? based on a preliminary and admittedly incomplete survey of this literature, our first point is that these themes and analytics are not as prominent or as central as one might expect. xenophobic fears, extremist movements, racist attacks, the circulation of stereotypes, problematics of integration and marginality, and nativist rhetorics are all very much present in the literature (fassin, 2011; huysmans, 2006; schinkel & van houdt, 2010), and yet many write of securitization and demonization with only a brief allusion to the racially coded discourses at play. indeed, in many accounts race only operates in the background (amin-khan, 2012; david moffette & william walters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 94 moffette & vadasaria, 2016). discussions regarding differential mobilities, sovereign bans, regimes of detention and deportation, or risk profiling draw attention to operations of profiling, segmentation, partition, and the fostering and capitalization of anxiety (bigo, 2002; geiger & pécoud, 2013; muller, 2009; rumford, 2006). yet the connections to racialization and the postcolonial are generally muted or presumed. of course, there exists an extensive scholarship in critical race theory (crt), postcolonial studies and the sociology of immigration that does, at times, engage with those topics and where race is central. but it is still marginal in the governmentality of borders and migration scholarship. perhaps it is thought to be so obvious as to not require foregrounding? or perhaps this reflects the fact that one of the main locations of borders and migration studies has been international relations (ir), a discipline that has historically shown a blind spot for race and coloniality (gruffydd jones, 2008; sabaratnam, 2011; vitalis, 2015; vucetic, 2015). whatever the precise elements at play, they have meant that there has been only a limited engagement with race. this article makes two contributions. in the first part of the article, we survey studies in the governmentality of migration and borders, and develop a typology of what we call framings of race – the ways that race appears, is mobilized, or haunts the governmentality of migration scholarship. this helps us clarify the different ways that scholars have tackled this issue and explore how conceptualizations of race may, in turn, transform our understanding of governmentality. if we are to develop better ways to center race in our analyses, it is important that we start by mapping out its place in this scholarship and identifying engaging lines of research that do accord dynamics of race and racialization a prominent place. three framings are identified. first, we discuss works that rarely mention race despite being informed, or rather haunted, by it. we call this framing the absent presence of race. we then look at works that use the words “race” and “racialization” and, at times, conceptualize them, but where the specificities of the complex historical process that the suffix “-ization” refers to are often left unexplored. we call this framing racialization as a generic process. here, the language of racialization seems to be used in lieu of an analysis of the context-specific processes whereby race is made, unmade, and remade. finally, we analyze works that pay close attention to shifts and emergence and provide non-linear genealogical accounts of the changing material and discursive regimes of race historically. we call this third framing, for lack of a better term, the transformationalist approach. although the development of this typology is a useful exercise in its own right, we use it to identify other sources of inspiration that are epistemologically, theoretically and methodologically compatible with the assumptions of the governmentality of migration and borders scholarship, and can provide us with tools to write better accounts of race and racism. in the second part of the article, we thus look to recent debates in science & technology studies (sts) for useful theoretical innovations that might flickering presence studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 95 address some of these shortcomings. in particular we highlight the theme of topologies of race, and argue that it would be fruitful to start a conversation between studies of topology and the three framings we identify. absent presence of race in some otherwise very good work on immigration governance, race and racism are surprisingly completely absent (e.g., bourbeau, 2011). in most of the literature however, race makes infrequent appearances through notions such as racism and islamophobia, or in passing among the other items of the inventory of discriminations based on race, gender, class and sexuality. despite a very limited engagement with race, racialization, and racism, these notions do inform the analysis. just like in the societies that are the objects of analysis, in this literature “race tends to be a shadowy and slippery object” (m’charek, schramm & skinner, 2014a, p. 462). it is for this reason that, borrowing from various scholars (ahmed, 2003; goldberg, 2009; m’charek, schramm & skinner, 2014a, 2014b; wade, 2010), we refer to this framing as one featuring an absent presence of race. indeed, even when the objective is to critique surveillance and border technologies, many researchers’ focus on risk categories, digital surveillance, and bordering practices ends up simultaneously assuming race and racism but moving it to the background. this is the case in much of the surveillance literature. if one takes as a representative sample of this scholarship the recent routledge handbook of surveillance studies, the trend is quite obvious throughout the book (ball, haggerty & lyon, 2012).1 here, “race is not absent in a straightforward way. instead it is masked, tacit, hidden and displaced” (wade, 2010, p. 44). indeed, some of the works in the governmentality of migration scholarship study bordering practices and surveillance technologies and even denounce discrimination without ever centering race in the analysis. while this scholarship critiques the alleged neutrality of technological smart borders, for instance, it provides accounts of the social sorting of surveillance and of the filtering of borders (e.g., lyon, 2008) in ways that contribute to the broader social trend that sees “race disappears into the seams of sociality” (goldberg, 2009, p. 157). in so doing, this scholarship unwittingly also leaves the normativity of whiteness intact (browne, 2015; kobayashi & peake, 2000; pugliese, 2010). this is one of the limits that browne tackles though her historicizing of the racialized nature of current biometric information technology. re-centering the practice of slave branding as an early biometric technology and drawing on the concept of epidermalization (see browne, 2010; gilroy, 2001; hall, 1996), she coined the argument that we should “come to think of the concept of digital epidermalization when we consider what happens when certain bodies are 1 the chapters by browne (2012) and by sa’di (2012) are exceptions. david moffette & william walters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 96 rendered as digitized code, or at least when attempts are made to render some bodies as digitized code” (browne, 2015, p.193). through this move, she put race and blackness, as they developed through the histories of the atlantic slave trade, as central to any understanding of surveillance. unfortunately, works like browne’s remain uncommon in surveillance studies. this absent presence is also frequent in security studies, and of particular interest here, in the foucauldian securitization of immigration literature. scholars have developed tools to study the ways that certain issues are framed and governed as security threats through a variety of discursive and non-discursive practices, and provided very insightful critiques of the logics of securitization (e.g., huysmans, 2006), but rarely do they make explicit the racial dimension of the grids of intelligibility that provide the grammar for this framing. as with surveillance studies, there exist exceptions here too, but despite critiques pointing to the lack of attention to race (amin-khan, 2012; ibrahim, 2005; moffette & vadasaria, 2016), it remains the norm in foucauldian critical security studies as well. while this absent presence often manifests in the scholarship in ways that echo this open secrecy (sedgwick, 1993) of race in western societies, at times scholars appear to simultaneously downplay race and grasp its haunting presence. bigo’s (2002) description of a governmentality of unease contributing to the securitization of immigration is perhaps the best example. in this landmark publication, bigo develops a foucauldian perspective on securitization and shows how security professionals, politicians and the media target immigrants as a way to both incite and manage a generalized unease distributed across our risk society. he frames this securitizing process as “a transversal political technology, used as a mode of governmentality by diverse institutions to play with the unease, or to encourage it if it does not yet exist, so as to affirm their role as providers of protection and security” (bigo, 2002, p. 65). race is not mentioned here. now one can only do so much in an article, and opening security studies to a foucauldian analytics was bigo’s aim, not the conceptualization of race. and yet his account portrays a rampant unease that appears like an eerie fog, a fear of uncertainty and otherness that sticks to racialized others, in a manner similar to ahmed’s (2003) accounts of the affective politics of fear. it is almost as though bigo is actually depicting this absent presence of race in society – we easily read this fear and unease in his account as one that is racialized – but then race also evaporates from his own text. here again, the racial dimension of the structural unease and the grids of intelligibility that inform the governing of immigration is not centrally discussed. racialization as a generic process the second framing that we identify makes use of the language of race and racialization to account for the differentiated ways that borders impact flickering presence studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 97 subjects, as well as for the racialized dimension of technologies and knowledges. this framing goes beyond listing race, gender, class and sexuality in passing as markers of social differentiation, and uses the language of racialization to account for the historical, processual and dynamic quality of race. this is an important contribution. and yet, the concept often appears as a generic term, used in lieu of a fuller analysis of the specific working of “race in the making” (vukov, 2016, p. 83) in a particular social and historical context. for instance, in an important contribution basham and vaughan-williams (2013) make the point that while gender and race have featured increasingly in research on migrations, borders and differential mobilities, scholars have failed to explore questions of intersectionality. as they put it, “drawing on sherene razack’s [2004] work, we emphasize how such apparatuses [of biopolitical security] go hand in hand with gendered and racialized categorisations such as ‘dangerous’ muslim masculinities, ‘imperilled’ muslim femininities and ‘modern’ civilised western subjectivities” (basham & vaughan-williams, 2013, p. 510). they are interested not just in how borders affect men and women “of varying racial backgrounds” differently but how “bordering practices are indeed made possible by certain operating logics that are always already both highly gendered and racialized, and are structured by economic conditions of (im)possibility” (p. 510). they examine “the work that particular assumptions about gender, race and class do in shaping the political possibility of norm and exception as part of a broader investigation into how some borders give rise to others” (p. 510). we highlight this work because it represents one of the most sophisticated and systematic treatments of race understood as a structuring or conditioning logic in recent governmentality of migration scholarship. the point is crucial, as it registers the assumptions that attach to perceptions of migration and refugees, the differentiated reactions, and the policies that are justified in their name. further, their point about intersectionality is important, and with regard to racialization shows an understanding of race as always already gendered and classed. their account also provides a remedy to the homogenizing effect resulting from the overly broad depiction of migration and migrants in some of the autonomy of migration literature (sharma, 2009). they join other authors who attempt to address some of the bias of floworiented foucauldian readings of the governing of migration by providing accounts of the links between racialization and subjection, and of the struggles between movement and control as one to be studied through an analysis of raced, gendered, and classed embodied encounters (scheel, 2013a, 2013b). but we also see two important limits to these framings of racial difference as racialization. first, in some usages the idea of racialization becomes overly monolithic and insufficiently historicized. indeed, while genealogies and other critical studies of race show that it can be otherwise (barot & bird, 2001; muri & solomos, 2004), the literature on the governmentality of david moffette & william walters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 98 migration often seems to presume an overarching play of practices and processes of differential valuation that serve to negatively code the actions and lives of some, while implicitly or explicitly upholding and affirming (usually) white subjectivities. there is sometimes insufficient attention to shifts, reversals or discontinuities in regime. there is also sometimes a bundling together of anti-black racism, islamophobia, anti-semitism and their distinct manifestations in different places and times, when instead we need to account for a diversity of racisms with distinct genealogies. we need tools to study racializing processes in their plurality. this argument echoes goldberg’s (2009) reason for avoiding the term “racialization.” in general, he says, it is unclear whether the term is used in a descriptive or a normative manner. he explains: “quite often it is put to work simply to suggest raceinflected social situations, those informed or marked by racial characterization” (goldberg, 2009, p. 67), and not to deepen the analysis. this is often the case in the scholarship that concerns us here: the contradictions and complexities of the historicallyand context-specific processes of racialization are missing from the analysis. while foucault is at times invoked for ideas of race, it is usually in reference to his reflections on state racism, which he sees as a dividing practice that makes some live and lets others die. while this concept might work for the racisms of colonial modernity, we suspect it needs to be rethought and not merely transposed onto the racial present. or while colonialism is often invoked, there is little attention paid to the twists and turns, and in particular the effects that anticolonial struggles and postcoloniality have introduced into the field of racial difference. a more foucauldian approach to race would, one might assume, take seriously the idea of a genealogy to consider how distinct racializing processes emerged through “manifold circuits of production and reproduction” (dillon & lobo-guerrero, 2008, p. 283). perhaps here we should leave the foucault of security, territory, population (2007) and revisit the specific genealogy of race and racism in 17th to 19th century france developed in society must be defended (2003) to look not for answers, but for methodological inspiration (jabri, 2007). second, notions of racialization used in the governmentality of migration literature are too often presented as one-sided and exterior to their subjects. racialization is typically something negative that is being done to migrants and refugees. they are being racialized, cast negatively, demeaned, made abject. despite an abundance of work by critical race theorists to draw from, rarely is race examined as a site of struggle or contradictory subjectivity; the possibility that race-in-the-making contains the active presence of its subjects is not sufficiently canvassed. what might this active presence look like? how would it register the production of race through contradictory processes and struggles? here, we fully share the call made by mezzadra, reid and samaddar (2013) for a more political reading of foucault’s relevance to the postcolonial present. they insist that it is not enough to explain how “postcolonial regimes have achieved the debasements of political flickering presence studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 99 subjectivity,” and that we should also register how “peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance” (mezzadra, reid & samaddar, 2013, p. 2). to grasp that race is made and remade from all sides, as it were, and not just from above, one needs look no further than recent work on genomics, postgenomics and biological citizenship (inda, 2014; rose & novas, 2005). while the biological sciences are generally regarded as one of the foundations with which race thinking sought to ground its dystopian vision of social domination, studies of the sociopolitical entanglements of the new genetics point to new framings of race and identity directed towards a potentially more progressive end. hence, in writing of the “genetic reinscription of race,” abu el-haj (2007, p. 283) notes that while new genetics may well have exclusionary effects within the governance of population, this is not all it does: after all, the political impetus for including race, for insisting on diversity in the conduct of postgenomic medicine, comes in large part from people who organize or identify as minorities (including physicians/researchers) and who demand the right to equal treatment: medicine has met identity politics, and out of that meeting point novel practices of both race and medicine […] have been borne. (el-haj, 2007, p. 292). extrapolating from such work we might observe that racialization is frequently a process of excluding, demeaning and fostering hierarchies. but that should not occlude the fact that race is also produced and transformed out of the many ways in which such asymmetries are contested. transformationalist perspectives while racialization is sometimes invoked by recent scholarship on the governmentality of migration in rather generic ways, we can identify a third perspective where race is more fully historicized. we call this framing transformationalist (e.g., balibar, 1991; de genova, 2016; duffield, 2006; hansen & jonsson, 2011; hindess, 2002; korvensyrjä, 2017; turner, 2015). the second approach discussed above is largely oriented towards the vital endeavour of exposing and criticizing racial hierarchies, inclusive exclusions, and power relations in conjunction with migration policies, politics, and security apparatuses. sometimes it makes reference to deep structures of colonialism but often only in passing. transformationalist approaches, by contrast, provide a longer historical perspective and foreground questions of shifts and emergence. as such, they might be considered closer to the ethos of genealogy since they insist on developing understanding of the singularity and complexity of the present. david moffette & william walters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 100 in an important and agenda-shaping set of essays, balibar (1991) has done more than most to sketch the outlines of a transformationalist approach, revealing its potential for studies of race, migration and borders. nowhere is this more so than in his framing of the question of neo-racism and racism without races. while it is over two decades since this book appeared, some of its key arguments are worth revisiting in the context of migration and borders debates. balibar (1991) juxtaposes biology-based and culturalist types of racism. according to him, the latter became a hegemonic form in western europe in the post-war years following the discrediting of the former amidst the ruins of the nazi project. in a series of points elaborating this shift, balibar illustrates the value of historicization. he claims that cultural racism is a racism “of the era of ‘decolonization,’ of the reversal of population movements between the old colonies and the old metropolises, and the division of humanity within a single political space” (balibar, 1991, p. 21). or, as duffield (2006, p. 71) puts it, we have gone from a racism of “biological-types in location” to a problematic of “cultural-types in circulation.” this is important because the governmentality of migration literature has come to treat as second nature the fact that migration appears in dominant discourses as a human flow from “over there” to “here,” and what these points underscore is how european racism is so bound up with a complex of im-migration that immigration has for some time functioned as a “substitute for the notion of race” (balibar 1991, p. 20; also see de genova, 2016, p. 80). yet, this complex has perhaps only existed for some 70 years or so, and culture-based racism has never completely erased biological framings and foundings (m’charek, schramm & skinner, 2014a; wade, 2010). the perspective on shifts and types which transformationalism offers is important not just for specifying different racisms and their social and geopolitical context. this approach is also important because it theorizes how former racisms, as well as the policies formulated to govern those racisms, are still a part of our present. as mezzadra and rahola (2006, n.p.) put it, this relationship of immanence is manifest in a particular experience of time: postcolonial time is that in which colonial experience appears, simultaneously, to be consigned to the past and, precisely due to the modalities with which its ‘overcoming’ comes about, to be installed at the center of contemporary social existence – with the entire burden of domination, but also the capacity for insubordination, that distinguishes this experience. this is reflected in what balibar (1991, p. 21), borrowing from taguieff (1986), calls “turn-about effects,” but we might also call such discursive moves reversals or inversions. for example, the way that multiculturalism today is blamed for fostering communities that live apart, which creates – as the story goes – breeding grounds of alienation and, most alarmingly, radicalization. in other words, we have dominant discourses which implicate earlier formations of anti-racism in their explanations and justifications of flickering presence studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 101 contemporary forms of racialization. one is dealing with a multi-layered phenomenon in which past and present collide and interact. transformationalism is also important because it speaks to a problem we identified in many references to the racialization framing, namely the fact that they see race as constructed by dominant discourses and policies yet fail to acknowledge how struggles and histories are sedimented in those discourses. they plot racism on a straight line. mezzadra and rahola (2006, n.p.) warn of the danger that in positing […] a logic of absolute continuity we end up validating and perpetuating a “redemptive” mechanism, whether of self-absolution (in the case of the subaltern subject) or of mere removal (in the case of the “western” subjects): removal, to the extent that it dispenses with anti-colonial struggles as a mere inconvenience […] along the linear and uninterrupted thread of the history of domination and exploitation, as well as it deprives the insurgent colonial subject, the rebellious subaltern, of all possible forms of agency or of any possibility of directly intervening in history; self-absolution, to the extent that it eliminates from history all direct responsibility that is not identified with the colonial west and, so too, any revolutionary act that does not belong to the west, not only hands over all responsibility but also – and above all – shifts action from the colonised subject to the eternal (neo-)colonial subject. although it is important to stress continuities with the past, we must temper such references with an openness to the new, and ask always how the emergent is shaped by struggles. in other words, we need genealogies that account for the “messy actualities” of racial governmentality (o’malley, weir & shearing, 1997, p. 504). finally, we insist one should not see transformationalism as providing a ready to use set of concepts, as though it were just a question of identifying other instances of cultural racism. in fact, it might well be that the described shift towards cultural racism was overblown and that, as m’charek, schramm and skinner (2014a, p. 462) argue, “culture, culturalism, or cultural fundamentalism […] has in any case not simply taken the place of racism grounded in nature […] rather, culture and religion come to be linked to biological differences and thereby gain a sense of duration and stability.” more than the concepts themselves, it is the ethos of inquiry of the transformationalist approaches that is important: the task of interrogating and specifying forms, working out their historical relationships, entanglements, precedents, continuities and discontinuities. drawing from science & technology studies (sts): topologies of race so far, we have argued that studies in the governmentality of migration need to engage more fully with the question of race, racialization and racism, and have encouraged researchers to consider the ways that race is being made, david moffette & william walters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 102 remade and unmade discursively and materially in the context of migration and border struggles. here, we suggest that we can productively look at the recent debates in sts to find tools that are conceptually, methodologically and epistemologically compatible with a governmentality orientation to further this project. the concept of topology – which became influential in governmentality studies following collier’s (2009) seminal article and has been taken up in sts – is key here in bridging the two scholarships. collier (2009, p. 80) developed this concept through “a rough analogy to topology as a branch of mathematics concerned not exclusively with the geometrical properties of objects but with how spaces are organized, with the connectivity properties that arise from certain arrangements of elements, and with their transformation.” he argues that by paying attention to the transformation and reconfiguration of heterogeneous bits and pieces, a topological approach is best “suited to analyzing the dynamic process through which existing elements, such as techniques, schemas of analysis, and material forms, are taken up and redeployed, and through which new combinations of elements are shaped” (collier, 2009, p. 99). although not often mobilized explicitly in the governmentality of migration and critical border scholarship, the concept of topology clearly belongs here. indeed, this scholarship already produces accounts of borders as performed through an assemblage of dispersed practices, symbols, representations, architectural devices, check points, passports, visa, biometrics, data doubles and so on. therefore, the recent work in sts that mobilizes the concept to study race can provide tools to conceptualize the production and performance of race in a way that is compatible with our theoretical framework, and help us start to better explain not only how race informs bordering but also how borders and race are mutually constitutive. as we have seen, the argument that western societies have undergone a wholesale shift from biology-based to culture-based forms of race-making no longer holds up (m’charek, schramm & skinner, 2014a). after a period during which the objectification and reification of cultural differences seemed to have taken the central stage, today scholars talk of a “genetic reinscription of race” (abu el-haj, 2007, p. 283) – and in fact race has always mobilized both repertoires. and yet, despite this return of biology through genetics, we have difficulty accounting for the ways that race-making is also materially and biologically grounded for fear of contributing to its reification. work in sts and crt can help us in this task and provide us with tools to see how race-making is “intimately and inextricably linked to the matters, and not simply the meanings of race,” as rodríguez-muñoz (2016, p. 216), playing with winant’s (2015) word, puts it. with sts scholars we can ask: what material and discursive bits and pieces play a role in race-making in historicallyand context-specific situations? how might a focus on the technologies of population, policing, borders and identification enhance our understanding of race and racialization? and perhaps more precisely: what role do mobility and spatial arrangements play in producing race as a mode of flickering presence studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 103 knowing and organizing the world, and in racializing particular individuals and groups? in his historical study of the production of race knowledges in colonial modernity, roque (2014) looks at how the mobility of living human beings and artefacts such as skulls, blood, and biometrics became central in the production and the reification of something called race. he uses the concept of racial regimes of mobility to describe the paradox of how “the process of mobility of humans as scientific things […] accompanied the sciences’ pursuit of the immutable racial condition of humans” (roque, 2014, p. 608). race was produced, in part, through the circulation of humans as scientific things and their inscription into regimes of visibility in museums, curiosity shows, anthropological notes, medical cabinets and laboratories in europe and elsewhere. the image of a museum displaying human skulls will strike many readers as emblematic of the horrors of scientific racism and a frightful past that we have thankfully moved beyond. yet do our technologies of population and border control not also rely upon circuits that put body parts, or traces and simulations thereof, in motion? we know, for instance, that the circulation of data doubles is central to migration and border governance (lyon, 2008). surveillance and governmentality scholars have studied these digital profiles as part of a surveillant assemblage that “operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows [that] are then reassembled into distinct ‘data doubles’ which can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention” (haggerty & ericson, 2000, p. 606). they are assemblages of various data on nationality, patterns of consumptions, sites of travel, dietary preferences, countries of origin, biometric information, measurements, eye colours, marital status, and so on. they are at once tied to and detached from material bodies and social identity; they are at once absent and present, and they contribute to the way people are governed and therefore also to subject formation. yet these systems have a very ambivalent and complex relationship to race. unlike the technologies of migration control, which may have been quite explicit that their goal was to uphold a policy of white australia or chinese exclusion, any kind of racial agenda is typically disavowed by political and security officials today. if challenged, they would probably respond that these databases and information systems are not about race but rather about managing problems of security, crime, illegal immigration, and terrorism. and yet, the burden of the exclusions and social hierarchies enacted by these programs and technologies fall very unevenly, and we should be careful not to conclude that this ambivalent relationship to race means that it is, in fact, not playing a fundamental role (see pugliese, 2010; browne, 2015). we need to find ways to map out its presence. it is precisely this ambivalence that forms the entry point of m’charek, schramm and skinner’s (2014b) work. “in the european context, race is shadowy and seldom expressed openly in language,” they observe, leading david moffette & william walters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 104 them to “examine technologies that seem indifferent to racial differences and show how in specific practices they contribute to the enactment of race” (m’charek, schramm & skinner, 2014b, p. 471). their key theoretical move is to insist on the utility of topology as a concept and imaginary for theorizing race amidst a focus on technologies of government. the idea of a topology of race is itself not new. some time ago, lee (1994, p. 758) argued that “we can never predict whether a practice will be racist or antiracist. instead, we must examine the practice’s social situation and effects” in order to make sense of “the constantly changing topology of race and racism.” but topology has acquired a recent centrality in scholarship where it is now embedded in the study of technologies of power and the recombinatory properties of assemblages (collier, 2009; see also robinson, 1999). it is this line of analysis that we argue can help us produce accounts of race-in-the-making through borderwork. in m’charek, schramm and skinner’s (2014b, p. 471) version, topology attends to “the distributed nature of race,” allowing race to be understood as a “temporal and spatial relation that cannot be reduced to one single entity (skin tone, dna, religion, culture, nationality) or traced through a single, linear historical process.” they give the example of a university that might want to collect data on the countries of origin of its students. in many contexts, knowing that a student is of moroccan descent is not necessarily race-related. after all, such data might be sought for marketing purposes. but when the database is linked to crime statistics, and when the student is studying in the netherlands today, this “classification might become a racial category suggesting the tendency of moroccans to commit crime” (m’charek, schramm & skinner, 2014b, p. 472). for a topological approach, the level of analysis becomes not the individual, the group, or ideologies, but the sociotechnical assemblage. it is all about following the connections, the relations, the couplings and uncouplings by which things that are otherwise distant in space and time, and not intrinsically related, get brought into a relationship. we argue that a topological approach has much to offer to the attempt to figure race and racism within the governmentality of migration, borders and populations. robinson (1999, p. 60) argues that topologies employ analyses which move “more through continuous folding and involution at critical points” whereas chronologies utilize a linear evolution, from segment to segment. hence, topologies compensate and challenge any residual chronological tendencies that might inhere in the transformationalist framing that we already discussed. but in favouring a mathematical metaphor, we should not gloss over struggles and conflicts, we should not imagine a smooth space. we insist that the notion of topology should be broadened to encompass the ways in which race is named and critiqued within processes of contestation and struggle. echoing the point we made in our earlier discussion of racialization as generic process, here too more consideration needs to be given to the role that contestation plays in the production of race. flickering presence studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 105 the point is best made through another example, this time about contested meaning of the unequal distribution of traffic stops among various groups in the canadian capital. our point in highlighting this case is to show how a topological approach can engage with contestation. in 2016, an expert report was published showing that “in ottawa, middle easterner and black groups, irrespective of their sex and age, are the two race groups with disproportionately high incidences of traffic stop,” a situation even worse for men 16 to 24 years old (foster, jaccobs & siu 2016, pp. 3-4). data for the report came from analysis by a research team from york university of over 80,000 traffic stops. like most canadian forces, ottawa police does not collect data on the race or ethnicity of those stopped. in the absence of such data, police could claim they do not practice racial profiling. but in this case, the police agreed to collect and share such data as part of a settlement involving an earlier human rights case brought against them. while the researchers were careful to state that their statistical report could only prove the existence of disproportionality in stops, not of racial profiling by officers, the evidence did seem to point to the reality of racial profiling. once the report was made public, a debate about racial profiling ensued, with public consultations and discussion as to what steps, if any, needed to be taken. race is constructed in a particular way here – as racial profiling – amidst a very heterogeneous ensemble of relationships, technologies, persons and things, which include traffic stops, police databases, criminologists, race data, high-crime neighbourhoods, civil society groups, human rights agencies, and driving. but what it also suggests – the value-added of this example – is that race only emerges in this specific form here because of struggles and contestations. had actors not mobilized in the first place, the ontario human rights commission would probably never have pressured the police to collect so-called race data. moreover, it is not as though the report establishes a consensus so much as a “hybrid forum” in which disagreements circulate (callon, lascoumbes & barthe, 2009, p. 139). even for the police chief, it seems that it was and wasn’t about racial profiling. indeed, in the media, he stressed that the report did not prove racial profiling was being practised by his force. but later, at a police-organized event to present the results and attended mostly by black residents, the public was getting annoyed at the researchers insisting that methodologically speaking, their research may suggest the possibility of racial profiling but simply could not prove its existence. the chief of police responded by acknowledging publicly that there appears to be a problem of racial profiling in the ottawa police like in the rest of society. race, in the form of racial profiling, appears here not as a matter of fact, but following latour (2005, p. 19), as a hotly contested “matter-of-concern.” let us conclude this discussion of topologies of race by noting that there is a methodological lesson here. many observers would see racial profiling as evidence of racist discrimination. it would appear as a somewhat self-evident phenomenon, a social expression of something more deeply seated, such as david moffette & william walters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 106 institutional racism. a topological approach turns this assumption on its head. instead, it treats racial profiling as an event, a peculiar object whose emergence we need to trace quite empirically across various sites and incidents. the point would be that, as with hacking’s (1991) genealogy of child abuse, racial violence has an extremely long history. but racial profiling is a relatively new object whose contours, formation and conditions of possibility we can examine in all their singularity. and recognizing the role that oppositional groups and forces play in all this is crucial. when race is an absent-presence, the temptation is for the scholar to appear as the sharp-eyed observer who discerns its presence when others do not. but when we attend to the way social actors mobilize and name race themselves, then we are able to side-step this problem and instead deepen our understanding of race as something made and unmade from all sides and directions (including by scholars). conclusion in this article, we have argued that the scholarship on the governmentality of migration and borders has been insufficiently attentive to questions of race and racism. at the same time, we have recognized important work that has engaged with these questions. to better appreciate the nature of that work and to advance further research on governmentality and race, we proposed a non-exhaustive typology of three different framings of race and racism already present in this scholarship. we then turned to a discussion of some very recent work that, drawing from sts, investigates race in terms of topologies. a topological approach captures folds, reversals and recombinations in a way that might be missed by a more linear narrative. it is therefore well suited to capture “both the surprises and the constancies of race and also why newness comes temporally freighted” (amin 2010, p. 5, cited in venn 2011, p. 104). and because topology emphasizes that the construction of race happens through the connections and disconnections forged between near and far, old and new, it also offers us a distributed account of race, one in which no particular property or element is essential, but any can become active markers of difference. this focus on distribution and connection lends topologies well to the analysis of race as absent-presence. yet we do not intend to set up a hierarchy here. all these framings have their uses. it is better to think of them as tools that might be used in conjunction, as and where appropriate, rather than self-contained theories. for example, to study topologies we require, as m’charek, schramm and skinner (2014b) note, detailed and contextualized case studies. but the danger of such a focus is to lose sight of much broader patterns of change, the kind which writing on racialization and transformation have captured well. one of the little noted features of what foucault does when he writes genealogies is that he brings a polytemporal and multiscalar sensibility to the flickering presence studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 92-110, 2018 107 understanding of power. like a film-maker, he zooms in and out. for example, in his lectures on governmentality, he combines an appreciation for changes in pastoral power on the scale of millennia with a fine-grained analysis of neo-liberalism unfolding on the scale of decades. it is just this kind of sensibility which we want to encourage in future research at the interface of the governmentality of race, migration and borders. bringing a focus on topology into the mix of tools can be a useful contribution to that end. acknowledgments an earlier 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(2015). the dark matter: race and racism in the 21st century. critical sociology, 41(2), 313-324. journalism for peace and justice: towards a comparative analysis of media paradigms studies in social justice volume 4, issue 2, 179-198, 2010 correspondence address: robert a. hackett, school of communication, simon fraser university, burnaby, bc, v5a 1s6, canada. email: hackett@sfu.ca issn: 1911-4788 journalism for peace and justice: towards a comparative analysis of media paradigms robert a. hackett school of communication, simon fraser university abstract this paper compares different normative and institutional paradigms of journalism with respect to peaceful conflict resolution and democratic communication. it begins with the problematic but still dominant “regime of objectivity,” and then considers three contemporary challengers: peace journalism, alternative media, and media democratization/communication rights movements. the paradigms are compared in terms of such factors as public philosophy, epistemological assumptions, characteristic practices, institutional entailments, relationship to dominant institutions and power structures, allies and opponents, and antagonisms and synergies between them. i conclude with strategic considerations for cultivating social justiceoriented journalism. struggles for peace and justice are also struggles for democratic communication. that is a core premise of this paper.1 communication practices and institutions (particularly journalism as a culturally central form of storytelling) are interwoven with movements for and against social justice, with contemporary processes of peace and war, 2 this paper explores possibilities for transforming journalism so that it might better contribute to more peaceful and democratic social relations. drawing from secondary literature, i outline and compare four contending paradigms in the media field, each of which mobilizes energy, generates incentives and institutional logics, organizes ways of producing, legitimizing and disseminating knowledge, and reinforces, challenges and/or creates power relations. i start with the arguably disintegrating but still dominant “regime of objectivity” (hackett & zhao, 1998) characteristic of north american journalism’s period of “high modernism” (hallin, 2000). i then outline three challenger paradigms: peace journalism, “alternative media” and its correlates, and with other intersecting crises facing humankind—impending climate catastrophe, humanitarian emergencies, terror war, poverty, forced migrations, and human rights abuses (cottle, 2009, p. 15). simultaneous with these societal crises, journalism (at least in the north atlantic heartland of global capitalism) is facing its own crises of legitimacy, institutional identity, and economic viability—crises intensified by both global financial meltdown and the diffusion of digital media. 180 robert a. hackett studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 and the movement for media democratization and communication rights. 3 while this paper cannot address all of them, the following questions were posed to each paradigm and suggest a much broader research program. what is its normative ideal or public philosophy? what does it propose as the core purpose of journalism? what epistemological assumptions does it make about journalism, and about human capacity to understand social reality? does this paradigm advance distinct discourses or frames? what specific journalism practices, and institutional arrangements within and beyond the media field, does it entail? what are its historical conditions of existence? against what problem or “other” is it reacting? does the paradigm pose a counter-hegemonic challenge to mainstream journalism or broader power relations? who are its active promoters, passive constituencies, and likely opponents? what functions or interests does it serve? what antagonisms or synergies exist between these paradigms? these three paradigms are examples of attempts, respectively, to reform dominant media from within, to bypass dominant media by creating a parallel field, and to reform dominant media from without by changing economic structures and legal contexts. i conclude with brief reflections on how synergies between these paradigms could contribute to progressive change. the regime of objectivity i begin with a paradigm that can be labelled the “regime of objectivity.” dominant in anglo-american journalism for much of the twentieth century, it is acquiring global significance as journalists seek new roles and institutional supports within formerly authoritarian regimes elsewhere. objectivity has positive connotations, such as the pursuit of truth without fear or favour. what objectivity means in practice, however, and whether it is a desirable and achievable goal for reporting in a democratic society, are debatable questions. objectivity is not a single, fixed “thing.” hackett and zhao (1998) suggest that in contemporary north american journalism, objectivity constitutes a multifaceted discursive “regime,” an interrelated complex of ideas and practices that provide a general model for conceiving, defining, arranging, and evaluating news texts, practices and institutions. they identify five general levels or dimensions in this regime. first, objectivity comprises goals that journalists should strive for—values concerning journalism’s ability to impart information about the world (accuracy, completeness, separation of fact from opinion), and values concerning the stance that reporters should take towards the value-laden meanings of news (detachment, neutrality, impartiality and independence, avoiding partisanship, personal biases, ulterior motives, or outside interests) (mcquail, 1992, chapters 16 & 17). second, such values are assumed to be embodied in a set of newsgathering and presentational practices, discussed below. third, this paradigm implies assumptions about knowledge and reality, such as a positivist faith in the possibility of accurate descriptions of the world-as-it-is, through careful observation and disinterested reporting. fourth, objectivity is embedded in an institutional framework. it presumes that journalism is conducted by skilled professionals, employed within specialized journalism for peace and justice 181 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 institutions—news organizations, usually corporate-owned, but in which editorial and marketing functions are separated. in their relations with the broader society, journalists and news media are assumed to enjoy legal guarantees of free speech, and independence from the state, political parties, and other outside interests. fifth, objectivity provides language for everyday assessments of journalistic performance. this language includes terms like “fairness” and “balance,” which some see as more flexible and achievable substitutes for objectivity. objectivity is often counterposed to propaganda, and personal or partisan “bias.” who are the beneficiaries of the objectivity regime, and what functions does it serve? notwithstanding the apparently high-minded altruism and universalism of its ethos—telling truth in the public interest without fear or favour—the historical and sociological roots of journalism objectivity reveal that it serves quite specific interests (bennett, 2009, pp. 189-192; hackett & zhao, 1998). non-partisan reporting helped the commercial daily press to displace the party-oriented papers of the nineteenth century, and to aggregate the broadest possible readership for advertisers; the claim to objectivity thus corresponded with the imperatives of mass marketing. neutral non-partisan language also served the interests of the news agencies that emerged during the 1800s to provide wire copy to newspaper clients with a variety of partisan orientations. to the extent that objective reporting requires specialized skills, it enhances journalists’ claim to professional status. the objectivity regime helps to manage the symbiotic relationship between news media and the state. politicians gain access to media audiences and an opportunity to shape the public definition of political issues; conversely, so long as they follow the rules of objectivity, working journalists gain relatively stable access to senior officials and politicians, without sacrificing their public image of political independence and neutrality. indeed, the objectivity doctrine “obscured and therefore made more palatable [their] unprofessional compromises with managerial imperatives and corporate politics” (bagdikian, 1997, p. 180). the claims of objectivity and professionalism also provided ideological cover for media monopolies against the threat of government anti-trust legislation or regulation (mcchesney, 2004, pp. 6364). finally, the practices of objectivity, such as the “balanced” reporting of political issues, opened the public forum to interest groups that had the resources and willingness to play the game (hackett & zhao, 1998, chapter 3). a powerful coincidence of interests underpinned the longevity of the objectivity regime. in addition to demystifying its social and political roots, academics have repeatedly demonstrated the shortcomings of actually existing journalism when measured against the stated ideal of objectivity, while others have advanced telling critiques of the epistemological foundations of journalism objectivity (see e.g. hackett & zhao, 1998, chapter 5). it is more relevant here, however, to consider the regime’s key narrative and reportorial practices and their systematic political consequences. those practices include “documentary reporting” that allows journalists to transmit only facts that they can observe or that “credible” and authoritative sources have confirmed (bennett, 2009, p. 193). journalists also practise “balance” when covering controversies that are regarded as legitimate, providing access to the most dramatic or authoritative leaders of “both sides.” other conventions include the separation of “fact” from “opinion,” and the privileging of personalities over structures, political strategies over policy analysis, and discrete and timely events over long-term processes, conditions, or contexts. 182 robert a. hackett studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 when measured against sensationalism or wilful propaganda, these objectivity practices have much to recommend them (bagdikian, 1997, p. 179). yet they also have predictable consequences that are highly problematic for informing public opinion, or incentivizing remedial action, in relation to global crises of conflict, ecology, and poverty. take the practices of “balance.” in american environmental journalism, “balance” gave undue weight to climate change deniers, resulting in inaccurate reporting at odds with the scientific consensus (bennett, 2009, pp. 108112). balance constructs and reduces complex issues to two sides, marginalizing other perspectives, and giving excessive weight either to dramatic and polarizing voices, or to the usual official sources (such as political party leaders). balance also naturalizes the construction of conflicts as two-sided zero-sum contests, in which one party can only gain at the expense of the other; alternative conflict resolution and win-win options are thus marginalized (lynch & mcgoldrick, 2005a, pp. 203-212). other practices are equally problematic. the reliance on credentialed facts from elite sources, and the privileging of events over contexts both reinforce a global status quo of misery for millions of people, sidelining issues such as poverty, labour exploitation, or private sector corruption that are not on official agendas until they erupt in catastrophic upheavals. such journalism can contribute to social turbulence as “unestablished groups” adopt disruptive tactics to attract media attention (bagdikian, 1997, p. 213). balance and official orientation can also make it difficult for “objective” journalism to challenge governments’ war-making policies, even when they are founded on dubious motives and evidence, in the absence of oppositional elite voices. the american media’s virtually free pass to the bush administration as it prepared to invade iraq in 2003 is now widely recognized as a tragic case in point (dimaggio, 2009, esp. chapter 3). in a parallel fashion, the journalistic privileging of events and personalities over contexts and structures makes it easier for political leaders to foreground and demonize figures like saddam hussein, and to deflect attention from their own motives and contributions vis-à-vis conflict escalation, and from the “collateral damage” of their own policies (such as the massive civilian cost of the pre-2003 sanctions imposed on iraq). a related line of critique asserts that the objectivity ethos directly contributes to the production of systematically one-sided or ideological news accounts, and legitimizes media practices that undermine democratic public life, such as a stance of cynical negativism divorced from coherent analytical perspectives, and the framing of politics as a game of insiders motivated only by electoral success (e.g. bennett, 2009, chapter 6). the appearance of objectivity arguably also masks other media democratic deficits, discussed later, that critical political economists have identified. such critiques are contentious, but there is widespread agreement that the objectivity regime is in crisis. anglo-american journalism is increasingly dissolving within profit-driven conglomerates, its economic basis threatened by audience fragmentation, its occupational ethos shifting from public service (however conservatively defined), to consumerism and commercialism. no single paradigm has replaced objectivity, but several promising challengers have emerged. one of them was pioneered by johan galtung, a founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies (cited in lynch & mcgoldrick, 2005a, p. 6). peace journalism (hereafter pj) is an internal reform movement, operating in the corners of journalism education and news organizations to revise professional practices. journalism for peace and justice 183 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 peace journalism like objectivity, pj is a multi-faceted paradigm. briefly, as outlined by lynch and mcgoldrick (2005a), pj is an analytical method for evaluating reportage of conflicts, a set of practices and ethical norms that journalism could employ in order to improve itself, and a rallying call for change. in sum, pj’s public philosophy “is when journalists make choices—of what stories to report and about how to report them— that create opportunities for society at large to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict” (ibid., p. 5). pj draws upon the insights of conflict analysis to look beyond the overt violence that is the stuff of conventional journalism, which is often tantamount to war journalism. pj calls attention to the context of attitudes, behaviour and contradictions, and the need to identify a range of stakeholders broader than the "two sides" engaged in violent confrontation. if war journalism presents conflict as a tugof-war between two parties in which one side’s gain is the other’s loss, pj invites journalists to re-frame conflict as a cat’s cradle of relationships between various stakeholders. it also calls on journalists to distinguish between stated demands and underlying needs and objectives, to move beyond a narrow range of official sources to include grassroots voices—particularly victims and peace-builders. pj seeks to identify and attend to voices working for creative and non-violent solutions, to keep eyes open for ways of transforming and transcending the hardened lines of conflict, and to pay heed to aggression and casualties on all sides, avoiding the conflictescalating trap of emphasizing “our” victims and “their” atrocities. pj looks beyond the direct physical violence that is the focus of war journalism, to include the structural and cultural violence (e.g. racism, militarism) that may underlie conflict situations (hackett, 2006; hackett & schroeder with newswatch canada, 2008, p. 27). one of pj’s prescriptions is to expand the horizons of conflict reportage, from the immediate conflict arena and the most prominent adversaries, to broader venues and time-frames that multiply the potential causes, instigators, outcomes, and solutions. as one example of pj’s approach, lynch (2008, chapter 6) analyzed british press coverage of the “iran nuclear crisis” from this perspective, suggesting that full coverage would (but usually did not) include these topics: the nuclear nonproliferation treaty; iran’s right to develop civil nuclear power under the npt’s terms; the failure of the uk and us governments to engage in negotiations to disarm their own nuclear arsenal, as obligated under the npt; any evidence that iran is not actually developing nuclear weapons; iran’s possible reasons for seeking a nuclear arsenal, if it were to do so, in terms of deterrence against outside threats. 4 is pj counter-hegemonic? does pj constitute a counter-hegemonic challenge to either journalism, or broader social structures? there is no unequivocal answer. while its advocates ask journalists to engage with concepts and ideas from the academic discipline of conflict analysis, they often prefer to speak in the language of journalistic professionalism. indeed, when initiating pj as a reform campaign within the journalism field, lynch preferred to avoid the term “peace journalism,” which for 184 robert a. hackett studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 some may imply an illegitimate prior commitment to extraneous values. he labelled the new initiative “reporting the world” (lynch, 2002). indeed, in justifying pj’s prescriptions, lynch and mcgoldrick (2005a, pp. 9, 185, 223, 242) are able to quote from formal editorial guidelines published by one of the world’s bastions of the objectivity regime, the bbc, and to use its language—balance, fairness, responsibility (lynch, 2002, p. 3). one scholar characterizes pj as a prerequisite of good journalism, one “which only forbids the unacceptable,” such as the narrowing of news perspective to that of “war-making elites,” or acting as a conduit for propaganda (kempf, 2007a, p. 4; cited in lynch, 2008, p. xvi). in this view, pj embodies the best ideals of journalistic professionalism—including comprehensiveness, context, accuracy, and the representation of the full range of relevant opinions—and it critiques actually existing journalism from that standpoint while providing practical alternatives (lynch, 2008, p. xviii). and yet, in some respects, pj stands between the fields of established media and oppositional social movements. consider the contrasts between conventional journalism and the peace movement as paradigms for structuring thought and action. the movement values long-term peace-building processes, collective decisionmaking, political commitment, human solidarity, social change, and low-cost grassroots mobilization. dominant journalism favours timely events, official hierarchies, a stance of detachment, dyadic conflict, a consumerist worldview, and costly production values (hackett, 1991, pp. 274-275). while pj should not be equated with the peace movement, it shares some of the above-noted incompatibilities vis-à-vis dominant news discourse. first, pj constitutes an epistemological challenge to the objectivity regime. in this view, journalism inherently involves choices; it is a matter of representation, not of reality-reflection. notwithstanding its professed disinterestedness, conventional “objective” journalism enshrines practices that predictably favour some outcomes and values over others—including, too often, war over peaceful conflict transformation. objective journalism is thus “irresponsible,” in that it shuns max weber’s “ethic of responsibility” in public affairs—the idea that “one should take into account the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions…and adjust one’s behaviour accordingly” (lynch & mcgoldrick, 2005a, p. 218). in conflict situations, far from being passive observers, journalists are often caught in a “feedback loop” with political players. for instance, based on their previous experience of the media, powerful sources create “facts” that they anticipate will be reported and framed in particular ways. thus, every time journalists re-create those frames, they influence future actions by sources. by focussing on physical violence divorced from context, and on win-lose scenarios, conventional “objective” news unwittingly incentivizes conflict escalation and “crackdowns,” impeding a morally and professionally justifiable incentivization of peaceful outcomes (lynch & mcgoldrick, 2005a, pp. 216-218). pj thus challenges the very epistemological basis for a stance of detachment, calling instead for journalists’ self-reflexivity vis-à-vis the institutionalized biases of their routine practices, the inescapability of framing and sourcing choices, the nonpassivity of sources, the interventionist nature of journalism, and the potential of its becoming an unwitting accomplice to war propaganda (lynch, 2008, pp. 10-14). that said, pj is not renouncing the commitment to truthfulness, only questioning why some kinds of facts and sources are privileged, and how they feed into conflict journalism for peace and justice 185 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 cycles (p. 9). pj rejects both the positivist stance that journalism simply reports selfevident facts, and the relativist position that “it’s all spin,” that there is no independent basis to separate truth from propaganda. instead, pj offers interdisciplinary intellectual anchorage in peace and conflict studies, pursues the rigour of social science, and is reflexive, explicit about its normative commitments, open to justification, and aware of participant/observer interaction (pp. xv, 21).5 second, beyond epistemological differences, pj challenges dominant news values, the taken-for-granted and usually implicit criteria that routinely guide journalists in selecting and constructing news narrative. some pj scholars suggest otherwise, pointing to specific failures in specific cases, such as the “peace euphoria” framing of the oslo “peace process” in israeli media (mandelzis, 2007). yet aspects of pj surely clash with dominant news values. in a recent update of a classic study by galtung and ruge (1965), harcup and o’neill (2001) identify ten dominant characteristics of newsworthy stories in the british press: power elite, celebrity, entertainment, surprise, bad news, good news (events), magnitude or scope, relevance (to the audience), follow-up (continuity), and the newspaper’s own agenda. pj’s emphases on conflict formation and resolution, on win/win positive outcomes, on long-term processes and contexts, and on grassroots sources, challenge the news values of violence, negativity, unambiguity, timeliness, elite nations, and elite people. indeed, pj’s prescription to broaden the range of sources, to consciously search for the voices and options for peaceful resolution, can be considered a third dimension of its challenge to conventional war reporting. some observers see pj as offering an even more fundamental challenge—not just to the professional conservatism of journalists who cling to “objectivity,” and the routinized market share-building formats of profit-oriented news corporations—but also to the entire global war system and its “deadly forms of propaganda,” the “lethal synergy of state, corporations, think tanks, and the media (richard falk, in introduction to lynch, 2008, pp. v, viii). other critics fear that pj challenges a liberal value central to democratic journalism—that of freedom of expression. in the view of hanitzsch (2004), pj implies that “bad news” and controversial topics, whose dissemination could contribute to the escalation of conflict, should be avoided. there is no evidence, however, that peace journalists actually make such a claim. but in one sense, pj does challenge the currently hegemonic definition of free speech, as the right of individuals to speak without fear of state punishment. pj implies not just a right to speak freely, but a right of access by all significant voices to the means of public communication. free speech needs a chance to be heard, in order to be effective—a normative imperative that underpins alternative media and media democratization movements. the environment for pj given that pj is, to some extent at least, counter-hegemonic, what are the prospects for actually putting it into practice? what strategies and what enabling environment would help it to flourish? one broad strategy is to reform the journalism field from within. a landmark review of scholarship on “influences on media content” suggests that there is some 186 robert a. hackett studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 degree of agency for newsworkers in traditional mass media (shoemaker & reese, 1996). excellent context-providing documentaries, or news reports on grassroots bridge-building across political divides, can be found within conventional news media. one example is a recent cbc television report on an association of israeli and palestinian families who have lost loved ones in the ongoing conflicts. and there is experimental evidence that structural themes and de-escalation-oriented coverage can stimulate audience interest as much as escalationand elite-oriented war journalism (kempf, 2007b). still, the barriers to pj within conventional media are wide-ranging. they include the difficulties of constructing “peace” as a compelling narrative (fawcett, 2002), the national basis of much of the world’s news media and their audiences (notwithstanding the recently hypothesized emergence of “global journalism”), and the embeddedness of dominant media and states in relations of inequality (as the new world information and communication order (nwico) movement had argued in the 1970s and 1980s) (hackett, 2006). unfortunately, it seems that in the western corporate media, journalists have neither sufficient incentives, nor autonomy vis-à-vis their employers, to transform the way news is done, without support from powerful external allies. while systematic comparative research is lacking, it seems that pj is likely to find more fertile ground in societies where media are perceived to have contributed to socially destructive internal conflict or ethnic tensions, and in news organizations which have a stake in avoiding their audiences’ dissolution into opposing camps. moreover, in “transition societies” emerging from authoritarian rule, the political roles and professional norms of journalism may be more open to self-reflexive change than they are in washington, london, or other imperial citadels of the objectivity regime. 6 pj’s advocates focus on the dominant institutions of public communication, since these are presumably those with the greatest influence on conflict cycles. the current crisis in north american journalism presents opportunities for pj—there are more footholds in the system for different and experimental forms of journalism. but in light of blockages to pj in the dominant media, as well as the growing hybridity and complexity of the global media field, the uptake of pj in indonesia, the philippines and some sub-saharan african states offers preliminary support for these hypotheses. 7 it is worth exploring other spaces for peacebuilding communication. if indeed pj is to become “more than an argument at the outer margins of political debate” (richard falk, in introduction to lynch, 2008, p. ix), it must become part of a broader project. one approach is to build a new field, parallel to currently-existing journalism consisting of alternative organizations and networks, supported by civil society, relatively autonomous vis-à-vis corporate or state power, and capable of putting into practice the ethos of pj. alternative media compared to pj, alternative media constitute a less coherent field or paradigm. debates in the burgeoning scholarly literature reveal its heterogeneity on core questions. how should the phenomenon be demarcated and labeled? various adjectives have been deployed: alternative, radical, autonomous, independent, tactical, citizens’, alternative, participatory, community media (kidd & rodriguez, journalism for peace and justice 187 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 2010, p. 1). each of these terms, which i use somewhat interchangeably below, has distinct connotations and limitations, reflecting disagreement over other questions: what are “the descriptive features to which we give the greatest priority” for categorizing media and for empirical investigation (couldry, 2010, p. 25)? should such media be defined on the basis of their own characteristics, and if so, which?: their content, or their egalitarian, participatory and/or noncommercial processes of production? or, should they be defined by what they differ from—presumably, the “mainstream”, corporate, or state media? and if so, how should such difference be understood? simply as divergence from a dominant model (perhaps meeting needs unmet by it) or as opposition and resistance to it? if alternative media are oppositional, what is the object of their contestation? the institutionalized forms and concentrated nature of “media power” (couldry, 2003), or broader forms of social and political domination? and if the latter, if alternative media are contesting political domination, are such political challenges necessarily “progressive,” in the broad sense of seeking a more equitable distribution of social, economic, cultural and political resources (hackett & carroll, 2006)? or can media of the radical right (for example, racist or religious fundamentalist websites) also be considered alternative (couldry, 2010, p. 25; downing, ford, gil, & stein, 2001)? no attempt is made here to resolve these questions, beyond noting that repressive and exclusionary alternative media are unlikely to constitute communicative spaces for non-violent conflict resolution. for analytical purposes, an ideal type of alternative journalism might include these characteristics: participatory models of production; challenges to established media power (including the professionalization and highly capitalized economy of commercial journalism, and the division between media producers and audiences); more “bottom-up” ways of scanning and reporting the world, challenging conventional elite-oriented and ideologically conservative news values; and a positive orientation to social change, social movements and/or marginalized communities (hackett & zhao, 1998, pp. 206-213; atton, 2009; atton & hamilton, 2008, p. 1). in light of that description, one can see that alternative journalism is complementary to pj in several ways. first, like pj, alternative journalism represents dissatisfaction with not only mainstream practices or coverage, but also with the epistemology of news (atton & hamilton, 2008, p. 1). by contrast with the objectivity regime, citizens’ journalism often valorizes indigenous knowledge, personal testimonials, and participant accounts, over those of professional observers, constructing “a reality that opposes the conventions and representations of mainstream media” (atton, 2008; brooten, 2008). both participatory researchers and practitioners of alternative media embrace “praxis as a method—learning by doing—and as an epistemological point of departure—knowledge starts from the experience (stories) of participants—that encourages critical thinking towards social change” (riaño-alcalá, 2006, p. 273; cited in rodriguez, 2010, p. 137). while alternative journalists are likely more stridently to reject the very possibility or desirability of objectivity, they share with pj skepticism towards dominant journalism’s claims to have achieved it. alternative journalism also shares with pj a commitment to move beyond the reporting of daily events, to analyze contexts and critically explore structures of power. moreover, alternative journalism is opposed to poverty, the political exclusion of the poor, and top-down approaches to development (bekken, 2008; brooten, 2008; wilkins, 2008); it resists domination along axes of gender, class, and 188 robert a. hackett studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 ethnicity, and the underand mis-representation of subordinate groups. these commitments align well with pj’s call for the voices of victims and peacemakers to be heard, and for structural and cultural violence to be exposed and analyzed. one example of such alternative journalism is the national magazine canadian dimension. its masthead “for people who want to change the world,” is an unabashed rejection of the objectivity regime. by contrast with the corporate press, its decision-making is collective, its financing is readershiprather than advertiserbased, and its editorial content interweaves analysis and reports from a consistently progressive and bottom-up standpoint. consider coverage of the toronto g20 summit. while the corporate press focused on a handful of violent protesters and on security costs to taxpayers, canadian dimension (issue of september/october 2010) highlighted the mass arrests of protesters and human rights violations by toronto police, explored the political issues the protesters were raising, and critically analyzed the tactics of various groups associated with the protests. the environment for alternative journalism what about the institutional framework for the practice of alternative journalism? pj has relatively well-defined institutional locations—journalism education and established news organizations, albeit to date, in the margins. by contrast, alternative journalism is more variegated, hybrid, and complex, spanning the continents and the centuries (see downing, et al., 2001). moreover, in a mediascape which is increasingly globalized, digitalized, and networked, and where the producer/user distinction is blurring, it is more difficult to specify the institutional and technological scope of alternative media. alternative media’s contemporary constituencies include “youths, immigrants, minorities, social movements, and cultural and political outsiders” (bekken, 2008). its technological and organizational forms include community radio (arguably the most important form globally), internet “radio,” small print publications (like the samizdat underground papers of the soviet era), weekly urban newspapers, audiocassettes (during the 1979 iranian revolution), public access television in the us, documentary and eyewitness video for social movements, political and citizens’ journalism websites, blogs by unaffiliated individuals, the anti-copyright open source movement…this list is illustrative, far from exhaustive or systematic. of its various forms, those alternative media that most closely match pj’s ethos are probably those linked to communities seeking to protect themselves from direct violence, or to oppositional social movements seeking the “four rs” of democratization—recognition, representation, rights, redistribution (sreberny, 2005)—in the face of structural violence. under what conditions is alternative journalism likely to flourish? alternative media face a paradox: they tend to emerge in periods of upheaval, and in conditions of violence, repression or exclusion, to express needs ignored or actively suppressed by official or commercial media. political or social repression obviously hinders the production and distribution of alternative media. yet a supportive political communication regime that lowers the costs of mobilization and enhances alternative media’s sustainability (effective guarantees of free speech, recognition and even subsidization by the state) would also reduce the incentives to mobilize. the decline of participatory underground media, as post-communist regimes in eastern and journalism for peace and justice 189 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 central europe consolidated, offers one historical example (sparks, 2005).8 there are, to be sure, tensions between the two paradigms. first, pj calls for responsibility and reform within the field of institutionalized journalism. it accepts the presence and desirability of professionalism, and thus the distinction between journalists and citizens/amateurs, with the former privileged in the construction of public discourse. accordingly, pj exhibits more concern with the framing of news content (in so far as it feeds into feedback loops and conflict cycles on a broader scale), than with news production processes as such, except for the reform of certain practices such as sourcing. quite possibly, the perceived need for pj arises similarly in situations of crisis, when societies are drifting towards avoidable conflict, or struggling to rebuild and engage in processes of reconciliation. alternative and citizens’ media, by contrast, prioritize participatory processes, and people telling their own stories. such media are (by definition) seeking to build a parallel and alternative set of practices and organizations that will often be consciously oppositional to dominant media, and competitive for some of the same resources (audiences, credibility and, occasionally, revenues). moreover, citizens’ media are inherently more precarious than state-owned or market-oriented media. the seeds of pj may find fertile soil in some corners of the alternative media field, but organizationally, they would need frequent re-planting. and alternative media’s typically marginal status means that they often cannot influence the immediate trajectories of conflict cycles. second, some alternative media are advocates for one side of a conflict. they may be organs of political contestation, linked to movements that advocate violence or that lack a commitment to universal human rights and/or other-oriented ethics. within the broad spectrum of ethnic diaspora media, some amplify the most militant or uncompromising views. such media may see themselves as representing particular communities, but the concept of “community” is politically ambiguous: it can be employed to help construct essentialist and exclusionary identities (downing, et al., 2001, pp. 39-40). that kind of “community” media may reject pj’s precept of productive dialogue between the different parties in a conflict. there are nevertheless profound complementarities between pj and alternative media. they share a commitment to social justice, and to the critical analysis of social structure beyond the quotidian spectacles of conventional news, a commitment implicit in pj’s stance of critical realism, and its call for the exposure and removal of cultural and structural violence. both paradigms reject the epistemology of the regime of objectivity, insisting that journalists acknowledge they are embedded in social processes and communities, and act ethically on that basis. both seek to challenge elite war propaganda, and to broaden the range of voices accessed to the public arena, especially those of peacebuilders and the victims of violence in conflict situations. 9 pj then, could profitably seek its expansion in alternative and community media. sometimes community media can have a direct bearing on conflict resolution, as with the abovementioned colombian radio stations. in especially repressive regimes like iran’s, citizens’ underground media may be virtually the only internal communication option for promoting peace and democracy. at the same time, given the limitations of alternative media discussed above, and the need to address the commanding heights of public communication in most conflict situations, another 190 robert a. hackett studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 paradigm that challenges the concentration of “objective” symbolic power in the media field should also be considered. by intervening in politics and other adjacent fields to change the environment of journalism and the gravitational pulls to which it is subject, movements for media democratization, discussed below, may offer new spaces for public communication favourable to social justice. media democratization and communication rights throughout the twentieth century, social movements used communications to mobilize, to gain standing with publics and policymakers, and to pursue political and social change. implicitly, most movements thereby accepted the media system as an obdurate part of the political environment (hackett & carroll, 2006). recent decades have added a new dimension, however. citizens’ movements have emerged in a number of countries, demanding democratic reform of media industries and state communication policies, in order to change the media field itself (see e.g. hackett & carroll, 2006; mcchesney, 2004; stein, kidd and rodriguez, 2009). social movement organizations and less formal networks operate both locally (e.g. media alliance in san francisco) and nationally (e.g. the media reform groups free press in the us, campaign for press and broadcasting freedom in the uk, or the citizens’ online campaign against restrictive copyright regimes in south korea (lee, 2009). in recent years, similar efforts have been directed towards democratizing global media governance, such as cris, the campaign for communication rights in the information society (ó siochrú, 2005). such groups are not necessarily directly engaged in producing or advocating new models of journalism. rather, campaigning around a range of issues—intellectual property and the public sphere, broadcast content and regulation, foreign and concentrated media ownership, competition policy, the internet’s accessibility and architecture—they seek to change the structures that currently constrain more diverse and democratic forms of public communication in general. thus, the threat against which such movements are mobilizing is the democratic deficit of corporate and state media and telecommunications—a deficit often masked by claims of objectivity and responsiveness to consumers. that deficit has multiple dimensions, including the failure to constitute a democratic public sphere in the face of commercial pressures; the centralization of political and symbolic power; the conversion of economic inequality into unequal media representation and access; the homogenization of discourse, masked by the proliferation of channels and technologies; the loss of localism in many commercial media; the corporate enclosure of knowledge through restrictive user-pay and intellectual property regimes; secretive and elitist communications policy-making; and the erosion of privacy and free expression rights in the post-9/11 climate of surveillance and national security (hackett & carroll, 2006, chapter 1). many of these democratic shortcomings are related to the commodification of communication and the global expansion of market relations. other media deficits derive from state coercion, which, however, is arguably (as with intellectual property regimes) a necessary ingredient of a market-oriented neoliberal order (hackett & carroll, 2006, p. 10). journalism for peace and justice 191 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 against this democratic deficit of the corporate media and the social order in which they are embedded, what alternative principles do media democrats propose? an analysis of the people’s communication charter, a landmark document extrapolating from international covenants and circulated by ngos in the 1990s, suggests these: independence from both government and commercial/corporate control; popular access and participation in communication and policy-making; equality, not just of rights, but of access to the means of communication; diversity and pluralism; human community, solidarity, and responsibility; and universal human rights (hackett & carroll, 2006, chapter 4). a more recent discourse analysis of the campaign for communication rights in the information society (cris) and other transnational civil society advocacy groups reveals a similar set of principles: freedom, inclusiveness, diversity, participation, and knowledge as a common good (padovani & pavan, 2009). each of these principles is multifaceted and susceptible to different and perhaps contradictory emphases. media diversity, for instance, could refer to types of programming, ideological frameworks, types of ownership, language of service provision, or the representation of various social groups in media content and employment. moreover, the constituencies promoting media democratization are themselves diverse, ranging from relatively privileged professionals in academic and media institutions, to minorities of colour in the global north, to communities and social movements struggling against authoritarian regimes and/or the impact of neoliberalism in latin america and elsewhere. thus, it is not surprising that the struggle for democratic public spheres is framed differently by different tendencies. at least five such frames can be identified in recent north american media activism (hackett & carroll, 2006, pp. 78-79). a free press, freedom of expression frame invokes mainstream liberal values, but often extends them to include struggle against both corporate and state censorship. media democratization connotes egalitarian and participatory notions of democracy, as both informed, shared self-government, and participation in the communication system. media justice, articulated in particular by american activists of colour, emphasizes struggle against broader forms of domination, and links with social justice movements outside the media field (see arevalo & benfield, 2009). a mental or cultural environmental frame implies a struggle against a media-promoted toxic culture, and a parallel with the relatively successful environmentalist movement. finally, a right to communicate frame links media change with struggles for other human rights, as well as a legalistic focus: the entrenchment of rights recognized in international law, such as article 19 of the un declaration of human rights, concerning freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas. these different frames vary on several dimensions. some emphasize procedural changes (e.g. communication rights), while others propose substantive moral reform, the redistribution of resources and values (e.g. cultural environmentalism and media justice). some (free press) emphasize freeing individuals from constraints, while others (media justice) seek to forge new collective identities (hackett & carroll, 2006, p. 81). beneath the different frames and forms of mobilization, however, one can identify a coherent paradigm, critical of established media power. it is centered on the institutional organization of public communication so as to enable all segments of society actively to participate in constructing public cultural truth (white, 1995), and 192 robert a. hackett studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 to be in a position “to introduce ideas, symbols, information and elements of culture into social circulation” so as to reach all other segments of society (jakubowicz, 1993, p. 41). this paradigm entails the intertwined projects of both democratization of media, and the use of media for broader social change—democratization through the media. is media democratization counter-hegemonic? the most radical branches of the movement (such as media justice) are challenging the social order as a whole, seeing media democratization as integral to a larger process of political and social transformation. this tendency has much in common with the alternative media paradigm, rejecting dominant media’s claims to a universalizing stance of objectivity, and pointing to the imbrication of media power with an unjust social order. by contrast, liberals advocate limited reforms with no necessary linkage to broader transformations beyond improving the operation of liberal democracy. such reforms may be justified in the language of dominant political discourse such as freedom of expression, consumer choice, journalistic professionalism, and indeed the protection of news objectivity. one approach that has both “mainstream” and oppositional elements is the movement for communication rights. first articulated within unesco in 1969 as the “right to communicate,” it gained traction during the highly polarized nwico debates of the 1980s, in the context of the east-west cold war, and demands from governments of the non-aligned movement for a more “balanced flow” of media content and technology between the global north and south (padovani & nordenstreng, 2005). hampered by its own internal contradictions and by the bitter opposition of media corporations and neoliberal governments in the west, nwico was defeated as an inter-governmental movement in the 1980s. but in today’s vastly different geopolitical and technological context, the torch for redressing unjust imbalances in communication structures and policies has been picked up by certain academics, ngos and civil society advocacy networks (like cris), and redefined as an effort to implement existing internationally recognized communication rights, in the plural. on the one hand, this nascent movement speaks the language (widely accepted in principle if not practice) of human rights. on the other hand, it pushes against both the conceptual limitations of those rights, and the institutionalized impediments to their realization. for example, cris argues that the conventional liberal conception of freedom of expression is necessary, but too limited, in many ways. it is confined to the level of individuals rather than groups (e.g. cultural, indigenous or linguistic minorities). it emphasizes protecting individuals from censorship or punishment by the state, but is silent about the centralization of means of symbolic production, and other blockages to the effective use of people’s right to free expression, such as illiteracy, language barriers, government and corporate secrecy, fear of surveillance, hierarchies of cultural capital (such as the privileging of written documents over oral traditions), or inability to afford schooling (cris campaign, 2005, pp. 19-24). communication rights more broadly address the social, cultural, economic, and political environment needed to nurture democratic public communication. if journalism for peace and justice 193 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 democratic communication is a multi-staged cyclical social process of dialogue, “free speech” addresses only part of that cycle: the ability to seek and receive ideas, to generate ideas and opinions, and to express or speak them. free speech does not guarantee a right to be heard and understood (or the reciprocal obligation to listen and understand), nor does it address the learning/enhancing/creating and responding/sharing stages of the communication process (cris campaign, 2005, pp. 25-26). conversely, some forms of speech (e.g. manipulative war propaganda, or hate incitement) may not constitute a process of dialogue aiming towards consensus or mutual understanding, and may therefore not merit legal protection as communication (dakroury, 2009). in the absence of communication rights, conventional legal protection of press and speech freedom may sometimes increase communicative inequalities; for instance, it has yielded judicial support for media corporations seeking to prevent public interest regulation of their power. allies and opponents as the nwico debate demonstrated, the “democratic ideal” in communication has powerful opponents: media conglomerates, authoritarian and/or neoliberal governments, and a “conservative libertarian belief system that is broadcast widely across the globe” (hamelink, 1995, p. 33), one centered on privatization and the reduction of democratic citizenship to consumer choice within a hierarchical social order. the post-9/11 political climate of fear and “terror war” (kellner, 2003), the frequently self-marginalizing stance of the left, and the regime of objectivity that inhibits journalists from joining coalitions, are other obstacles, especially in the us (hackett & carroll, 2006, pp. 131-142). notwithstanding such obstacles, social movement organizations for media reform, such as free press in the us, have achieved some momentum in the past decade. they have been able, unevenly and not without setbacks, to mobilize constituencies that can be roughly conceptualized as three concentric circles (hackett & carroll, 2006, pp. 51-52). the first comprises groups within and around media industries, whose working life may stimulate awareness of the constraints on creativity and public information rights generated by state and corporate media: media workers, independent producers, librarians and communications researchers. a second circle comprises subordinate or marginalized social groups, whose lack of social, cultural, or economic capital is paralleled by lack of access or misrepresentation in traditional and networked media, and whose interests sometimes bring them into conflict with the social order, particularly social movements that need access to public communication in order to pursue their political project. the outermost circle comprises more diffuse sectors for whom communication policy and practices are rarely a central concern, but who may occasionally mobilize on the media front in order to promote other material or moral interests: parents concerned with media impact on the young, ngos and small businesses who need affordable access to the internet, communities struggling for local access media or commercial-free public space, citizens concerned with the disconnect between democratic and media agendas, progressive religious or human rights groups advocating ethical conduct and governance. 194 robert a. hackett studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 concluding comments what are the strategic implications of the above analysis of journalism paradigms? this is no place for a blueprint, but several themes stand out. first, the challenger paradigms of peace journalism, alternative media and communication rights stand in an ambivalent relationship to conventional journalism, and to the broader social order of liberal capitalism. i have suggested that in certain respects, they are counter-hegemonic, but they also draw upon such dominant ideals as freedom, democracy, diversity and human rights. in those societies where such norms are well-established ideologically, if less so in practice, it is both principled and strategic to adopt the habermasian approach of immanent critique, using the system’s own legitimating norms to propose institutional reforms. pj can legitimately present itself as a more complete and accurate form of journalism than the standardized and stunted practices of “objectivity.” movements for media democratization are pursuing communication rights that are formally recognized in national and international law. while i have noted tensions between the challenger paradigms, they generally share the objectives of expanding the range of media-accessed voices, building an egalitarian public sphere that can raise conflict from the level of violence to that of discussion, promoting the values and practices of sustainable democracy, and offsetting or even counteracting political and economic inequalities found elsewhere (hackett & carroll, 2006, p. 88).10 finally, i have critiqued the practices of the objectivity regime, but as a normative ideal, it has democratic dimensions that should be maintained: a commitment to substantive journalism and an ethic of truth-telling on matters of public interest, its capacity to cushion the intrusion of political and commercial interests on news, and its cultivation of ethical, skilled and independent professionalism. as a recent visit to eastern europe confirmed, these ideals are understandably very attractive to prodemocratic forces in “transition societies” emerging from authoritarian regimes. in north america, traditional journalism has been “hollowed out” by the vectors of hypercommercialism, media mergers, neoliberal deregulation, and corporate there are also potential strategic synergies between these paradigms. for instance, alternative media help to foreground the democratic deficit of corporate media, and have been key allies in media democratization campaigns, whose success would in turn create more space for pj, given the ideological and economic entrenchment of war journalism within existing media structures. as tehranian (2002, p. 80) notes, “the structure is the message.” media structure influences, if not determines, journalism practices and content. tehranian identifies the need for more “structural pluralism in media ownership and control” as a precondition for more democratic checks and balances, and for more content pluralism, including the diversity of voices in conflict situations called for by pj. structural reforms applicable to all three challenger paradigms include public and community media that offset the biases of corporate and government media towards commercial and political propaganda, subsidies for media production and access in the global south, genuinely internationalist media, and media governance regimes that reinforce popular communication rights. curran (2002, pp. 239-47) similarly proposes a working model of legal supports and state subsidies for diverse media to serve different democratic purposes—including social market/minority, civic/interest group and (as the central pillar) public service broadcasting sectors. journalism for peace and justice 195 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 disinvestment in journalism, bringing to a new climax the longstanding tension between a free press and profit-oriented media industries (mcchesney & nichols, 2010). in seeking to preserve and reinvigorate the best of the objectivity regime in a cluttered but still corporate-dominated new media ecology, a media democratization movement is already finding allies amongst professional journalists. for the emerging paradigms to succeed, movements beyond those already engaged in media activism need actively to recognize the democratization of public communication, including journalism, as integral to the success of other social justice struggles. notes 1 i thank rune ottosen, jake lynch, ibrahim shaw and other members of the international peace journalism research group for comments and advice, and angelika hackett for editorial assistance. 2 indeed, it can be argued that increasingly “the news media do not only communicate or ‘mediate’ the events of war; they enter into its very constitution shaping its course and conduct” (cottle, 2009, p. 109). 3 potentially, this analysis could be expanded to other paradigms, including anti-war/peace movements, peace and reconciliation processes, and other social change movements. 4 for a visual example, contrasting “war journalism” and pj coverage of a suicide bombing in israel, see lynch & mcgoldrick, 2005a, pp. 21-26, or their film news from the holy land. 5 a critical realist epistemology is evident in pj’s call to distinguish truth from propaganda; to distinguish between stated demands and underlying needs, goals and interests; to look beyond direct physical violence to explore its “invisible” effects (such as cultural militarization or psychological trauma), and the underlying patterns of cultural and structural violence (lynch & mcgoldrick, 2005a, pp. 28-31; hackett & schroeder with newswatch canada, 2008, p. 44). 6 i am indebted to jake lynch for some of these points; interview, university of sydney, june 25, 2010. 7 grassroots internet-based outlets are introducing new voices and expanding the definition of journalism, but at the same time, dominant media corporations are extending their influence transnationally, through a multi-faceted and uneven process of globalization of media markets, firms, formats, governance and (ambiguously) effects (zhao & hackett, 2005, pp. 6-8). 8 but for a somewhat contrary view, see bresnahan (2010), who argues that neoliberal media policies, more than changed political conditions, accounted for the decline of chile’s alternative media after pinochet’s downfall. 9 one overlap between pj and alternative media is provided by the 18 community radio stations in the magdalena medio region of colombia, home of one of the worst internal armed conflicts in the world. the stations’ participants may never have heard of pj, but they have participated in local peace-making processes, mediating between armed factions, cultivating nonviolent conflict resolution in a culture where violence is normalized, and buffering civilians from the negative impact of direct violence. they have done so in “complex, multifaceted, and context-driven” ways (rodriguez, 2010, p. 143). the stations’ mediating role included providing a public forum for discussing, negotiating, and finding common ground between communal groups and bitterly opposed political candidates. despite her own theoretical preference for the term “citizens’” media, rodriguez suggests that these community radio stations are “almost” alternative media, in so far as they opened “communication spaces in which communities can consider, experiment with, and witness” alternative, nonviolent ways of dealing with conflict, understanding difference, and developing collective imaginaries (p. 151). the stations’ active mediation role, however, distinguishes it from pj: 196 robert a. hackett studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 2, 2010 the stations are not sending messages to the community about how to solve conflict in nonviolent ways. instead, the stations themselves are mediating conflicts; their communication competence is not being used to design messages about peaceful co-existence, but instead the stations are constructing peaceful co-existence through communication. (p. 151; emphasis in original) 10 as an example of shared objectives, pj has a “democratic prospect” of promoting public deliberation on the question of war. its critique of conventional war reporting identifies the “missing pieces required to round out the generic war story that stifles democratic praxis; when practised, it elevates public discourse to “a level of complexity and awareness that confounds demonising images” (ivie, 2009, p. 6). writing in the wake of the invasion of iraq, two of the leading exponents of pj similarly identify its relevance to the liberaldemocratic ideal of free expression that can “animate, and bring about a collision of, alternative views and propositions as to how progress can be made,” a role particularly vital when political elites promote policies as drastic as war (lynch & mcgoldrick, 2005b, p. 269). references arevalo, j., & benfield, d. m. 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(2009). making our media: global initiatives toward a democratic public sphere 2, national and global movements for democratic communication. cresskill, nj: hampton. tehranian, m. (2002, april). peace journalism: negotiating global media ethics. harvard journal of press/politics, 7(2). white, r. a. (1995). democratization of communication as a social movement process. in p. lee (ed.), the democratization of communication (pp. 92-113). cardiff: university of wales press. wilkins, k. g. (2008). development communication. in w. donsbach (ed.), the international encyclopedia of communication. malden, ma: blackwell. zhao, y., & hackett, r.a. (2005). media globalization, media democratization: challenges, issues, and paradoxes. in r.a. hackett & y. zhao (eds.), democratizing global media (pp. 1-33). lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. correspondence address: jiří navrátil, ph.d., department of public economics, faculty of economics and administration, masaryk university, lipová 507/41a, 602 00 brno, czech republic. email: jiri.navratil@econ.muni.cz issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 2, 181-205, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? the process of reconfiguring the czech social justice movement in times of crisis jiří navrátil masaryk university, czech republic abstract the contemporary economic crisis is sometimes labeled as the greatest crisis of capitalism since the great depression. therefore one might expect it to become a perfect mobilizing grievance for the transnational social justice movement, which used to target the ideology of neoliberal governance and social consequences of unrestricted global financial markets. however, the current responses to the crisis and consequent austerity policies have remained mostly embedded at the national or even local level. the symbols of this struggle—los indignados and the occupy movement— have focused on targeting national political issues rather than on organizing transnational coalitions and international protest events, while paying little attention to the role of global institutions and corporations. this article focuses on the case of czech republic and traces two broad processes—scale shift and identity shift— that led to a broader change in the meta-logic of social justice mobilization. these processes and their constituent mechanisms have transformed the globally-focused and weakly-integrated movement into dense and nationally embedded coalitions that have started to target the national consequences of neoliberal governance instead of its global political foundations. introduction this article aims to explore the evolution of the czech social justice movement in the last decade. it traces the processes of its decline leading to the vanishing of its mobilizing capacity and transnational focus even in an era of global financial crisis. generally, the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2007 and the following austerity measures in many western democracies studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 182 jiří navrátil might be expected to be a logical and convenient target and mobilizing issue for the global justice movement (gjm) or for the global anti-capitalist left in general. however, it seems that not only did the former transnational mobilizing structures remain largely quiescent, but most of the mobilizations related to the recent economic downturn and its social consequences have remained located mostly at the level of national polities, and have lost much of their transnational scope and political universalism. in other words, largescale supra-national mobilizations and the imagery of the anti-capitalist and reformist left that flourished at the beginning of the new millennium across europe or in america were not repeated. the article examines this “missed opportunity” of radical transnational politics. more specifically it asks what happened to the collective mobilization of the social justice movement after its heyday at the turn of millennium and during the recent economic crisis. what are the processes and factors that prevented another cycle of transnational social justice mobilization from taking place? in my attempt to address these questions i focus on the evolution of the czech social justice movement, which may illustrate some of the more general processes of transformation of the transnational social movements. as the czech radical left became a firm part of the european branch of the global justice movement at the turn of the millennium—both in terms of framing, targets, and coordination of transnational protest events—its subsequent evolution also tells the much broader story of the transformation of global justice actors in liberal democratic settings. this article builds upon the theoretical framework of dynamics of contention as formulated by the mcadam, tarrow and tilly (mcadam, tarrow, & tilly, 2001; mcadam, tarrow, & tilly, 2008; tilly & tarrow, 2007). following the theoretical assumptions of this perspective, and drawing on previous research, the article also outlines a more general scheme of the possible path of a detransnationalization of political contention. the article suggests that the transformation of the czech social justice movement—or its decline—was the outcome of two intertwining social processes: a scale shift, and an identity shift. these consisted of a series of environmental, relational and cognitive mechanisms, which generally turned a trans-nationally oriented and nationally rather isolated actor back into a nationally-focused and nationallyembedded one. while it is often agreed that it is the supra-national organizational structure that qualifies a social movement as a genuine transnational subject, also there may be other aspects of collective mobilizations that make it transnational in a broader sense—such as protest issues, targets or mobilizations—while the rest of them may remain embedded in national or local context (cf. rucht, 2009, p. 207). in this article i rely on the latter understanding of a transnational collective action for two reasons. first, it brings in a more dynamic perspective on the shifts between various aspects and levels of contemporary collective action, and second, it befits better to the czech social justice actors and protests that only transiently qualified as “fully transnational” subjects in a strict sense of the term. this implies that the transnational dimension of studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 183 collective action is perceived here as more flexible, less enduring and always partial (most notably in the case of collective identity), and firmly rooted in the local or national sphere. therefore, the article considers different scales of contention within a particular cycle of protest or field of activism not as mutually conflicting but rather as complementary ones. the structure of the article is as follows: the czech social justice movement and its rise as a transnationally-oriented actor in 2000 is introduced. next, the theoretical outline of the article is laid out, focusing on the dynamics of contention (doc) perspective, and types of mechanisms that transform political contention—environmental, cognitive and relational—are described. the article continues with a description of the data and methods used. fourth, the evolution of the czech social justice movement between 2001 and 2011 is described in terms of environmental, relational and cognitive mechanisms. finally, the whole process of transformation of the movement is outlined and evaluated, and general conclusions are drawn from the analysis. the rise of the czech global justice movement (1990-2000) the regime change in 1989 set up special conditions for the evolution of the czech social justice movement consisting of the radical left social movement organizations (smos) that constituted its ideological and organizational backbone. the split between the communist left and the other streams of the radical left soon became embodied in the persistent cleavage between the collectivist (sometimes labeled as “authoritarian”) left and the libertarian one, even if the former had also consisted of newly-founded trotskyite or marxist smos with strongly negative attitudes towards the ancien régime (bastl, 1999). the initial ideological fragmentation on the radical left slowly gave way to more coordinated efforts among the libertarian (anarchist, autonomist, squatting) and radical environmental groups, which became more integrated in a rather indirect fashion via the internalization of the existing symbolic frameworks and identities of western gjm, and via their affiliations with other transnational organizations (císař & koubek, 2012). from the very beginning, however, the czech political environment was largely unreceptive to radical left ideologies and frames of reference, which led to both the public marginalization of the movement, and to changes in its focus. in other words, most of the public events organized by the movement in the midand late 90’s were focused on the negative impacts of globalization, but in more particular and indirect ways. generally, the political economy of global capitalism (neoliberalism, economic injustice) remained strategically neglected, and globalization was targeted mostly as an issue of “corporatism.” typically, the impacts of globalization on culture (“coca-colonization” or “mcdonaldization”), environment (gentrification, automobilism) and communities (commercialization of life) were examined and criticized (kolářová, 2008, p. 4; růžička, 2007, p. 37). the main type of protest event in this period, symbolizing the rising integration of czech studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 184 jiří navrátil social justice smos into transnational structures, were the street parties that were explicitly inspired by the repertoire of people’s global action, reclaim the streets, and other western networks (cf. císař & slačálek, 2007, p. 2). the street parties started in 1997, and the largest took place in 1998 and 1999 with two thousand and five thousand participants, respectively, which was interpreted as a clear success for the movement. however, in terms of building a transnational actor out of the existing social justice one, the international monetary fund/world bank (imf/wb) summit in september 2000 was a clear milestone—not just in terms of the number of participants, but also in terms of inter-organizational integration, and because of its supra-national character and importance for global justice activism in general. at the same time, because of these and other circumstances, the impact of this event on the czech social justice movement is hardly comparable to other domestic processes and events (císař, 2008, p. 148; kolářová, 2009, pp. 50–55). the preparatory activities that were so important for the integration of the czech social justice movement began in mid-1999, and led to the creation of an unprecedentedly wide coalition of domestic and foreign smos (iniciativa proti ekonomické globalizaci [initiative against economic globalization], inpeg) in close coordination with transnational gjm actors like peoples’ global action (pga), indymedia and others (welsh 2004). despite the fact that the majority of radical left actors involved themselves in the process of organization through a single platform (inpeg), there were still some networks that participated in the event but were involved in the preparatory process through the alternative platform “stop imf!” (trotskyites, communists). at the end of the day, there were several series of separately-organized protest events during the summit, but both streams of the movement eventually participated in some major marches and demonstrations. therefore, the event was a success not only in terms of the number of participants (estimated between ten and twelve thousand, many of them coming from abroad) but also because of the unprecedented (albeit temporary) integration of various streams of the czech social justice movement jointly participating against the same enemy. also, because the symbolic integration of the movement was complete. during the preparation for the event and the event itself, the former local environmental, cultural and political claims were shifted both upwards and outwards towards a more explicit political economy framing. due to the extremely strong presence of foreign networks and groups, the event aimed at an open critique of the international economic system and its ideological roots. the event represented a completion of the process of integration of the czech social justice movement by way of confirming its transnationallyembedded collective identity. the “global justice” identity and framing that was inspired by western activism and contention was internalized by particular streams of the czech social justice movement, isolated from one another and working instead through their connections with foreign counterparts and media. while the event led to the strengthening of the transnational dimension of the movement in terms of its symbolic aspects, it also exposed its very studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 185 low level of practical inter-organizational integration. this feature emerged in the preparatory strategies and cooperation during the protests. even if all these activities were fostered by the extraordinarily strong presence of the movement’s foreign counterparts, participation by activists from abroad, and the presence of the international media, the practical fragmentation of the movement along the lines of its primary ideological identities still remained. in other words, after the event the czech social justice movement became better integrated symbolically, but its social and inter-organizational embeddedness remained on almost the same level as before. however, the arrival of the global financial crisis to the czech republic after 2008 found a social justice activism of a very different type (navrátil & císař, 2014). public protests were mostly organized by recently-founded, well-integrated and broad czech social justice networks (e.g. proalt, or stop vládě [stop the government]) that were formed by the former czech global justice actors and joined by other domestic smos. however, these framed the protests almost exclusively on the national or even local level, while targeting the government and its economic and social policies, and justifying their activities as democratic resistance by the citizens against the arrogance and corruption of national political elites. despite the participation of most of the radical left smos, there were almost no signs of anti-capitalism or diagnostic framing that would rely on broader ideological schemes and identify the roots of the financial crisis or logic of austerity measures in the neoliberal political order and its doctrine. so, what has happened to czech social justice activism? how has the movement evolved? and what were the key factors and mechanisms in the process of its transformation? changing context, networks, and perceptions theoretically, this article builds upon the dynamics of contention framework as formulated by mcadam, tarrow and tilly (mcadam, tilly, & tarrow, 2001; tilly &tarrow, 2007; mcadam, tilly, & tarrow, 2008). more particularly, it assumes that process-based rather than a variable-based perspective could help us identify causal relations within the interactive multi-actor dynamics in the field of political contention. furthermore, it assumes that these relations consist of a series of mechanisms and processes that recur across a variety of episodes in contentious politics. the mechanisms are defined here as “delimited changes that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations” (mcadam, tilly, & tarrow, 2008, p. 308). in this view, social processes are concatenations of such “building units”—mechanisms. therefore, social processes may be defined as a more complex set of interactions than mechanisms, because they are treated here as a composite of several mechanisms (mcadam, tilly, & tarrow, 2001, p. 27). in this sense, mechanisms are best differentiated because of their recurrent character, while processes may combine these mechanisms in different ways and with various outcomes (2001, p. 28). studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 186 jiří navrátil in order to understand more fully the dynamics of the different factors determining the evolution of the czech social justice movement, this article opts for this mechanistic perspective in the study of contentious action. at least two key broad and closely-intertwined processes consisting of several mechanisms worked to transform the czech social justice movement after it reached its “transnational” peak in 2000. the first is the process of downward scale shift that demotes the coordination of collective action to a more local level than at its initiation (tilly & tarrow, 2007, p. 94). in other words, while the claim-making of the czech social justice movement during its “global justice” period largely targeted transnational institutions and symbols, at the end of the process the national and local consequences of economic hardship became the dominant issue of the movement, which also framed issues in a way that was resonant in czech society. the other process is an identity shift, which is broadly defined as the emergence of new perceptions of the actors themselves and of the essences that constitute the movement. more particularly, the czech social justice movement in its “global justice period” defined itself primarily as a member of a transnational movement fighting globalized capitalism and its consequences all over the world, often despite the attitudes and opinions of other czech smos and citizens (navrátil, 2010). however, this changed after the arrival of the global financial crisis, when the movement instead began to define itself more as an advocate for czech citizens, targeting national and local institutions and political elites and becane embedded in a national coalition of smos and networks. in other words, the emphasis on symbolic transactions and active alliances with ideologically-aligned and often foreign counterparts gave way to intensive cooperation within broad coalitions of domestic smos, while suppressing the ideological aspects and supra-national framing of protest issues. the process of an upward scale shift has been described in many analyses typically focusing on the rise and mobilization of the global justice movement (cf. ayres 2004; della porta & tarrow, juris, 2008; munck, 2007; smith, 2008; 2005; tarrow, 2005). on the other hand, while the processes of localization of protest in the global era have also been described and analyzed (hamel, lustiger-thaler, pieterse, & roseneil, 2001; navrátil & císař, 2014; starr & adams, 2003), there is still a lack of procedural analyses of the decline of the scale of contention in contemporary societies. in analyzing the composition of both processes and tracing their constituent mechanisms, this article differentiates among their environmental, cognitive and relational types (cf. heaney & rojas, 2011; mcadam, tilly, & tarrow, 2001), and makes use of a catalogue of existing concepts of processes and mechanisms that have been analyzed so far (tilly & tarrow, 2007, pp. 214-217). the environmental mechanisms stand for “externally generated influences on conditions affecting social life” (mcadam, tilly, & tarrow, 2001, p. 25). namely, these are shifts in the societal and political environment where actors operate and mobilize that affect the strategies and outcomes of political protest. in this article i conceive of environmental mechanisms as studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 187 the shifts in threats or opportunities that might have (if thus interpreted) largescale consequences for a particular field of activism (cf. almeida, 2003; alimi, 2007; goldstone & tilly, 2001). among the many environmental changes in the field of the czech social justice movement, two were of extraordinary importance for the transformation of key aspects of its collective identity and focus during the time of recent crisis. first was the public announcement of an inter-governmental agreement between the u.s. administration and the czech government to install a u.s. military base in the czech republic. this led to a decisive transformation in the logic of collective action in the field of anti-war activism in which the social justice actors had been largely involved since 2003. second was the transformation of the political context in the field of socio-economic contention in 2008 and 2009, when extensive domestic economic reforms were effectively launched by the government, and the first impacts of the economic crisis appeared in the czech republic. relational mechanisms refer to the transformation of “the connections among people, groups and interpersonal networks” (mcadam, tilly, & tarrow, 2001, p. 26). there were two key relational mechanisms in the czech case: the brokerage mechanism producing new connections between nonconnected actors and fields of activism, and defection, or the discontinuation of existing relation between actors or networks. in addition, the mechanism of renewal of previously existing alliances—emulation (tilly & tarrow, 2007, p. 215)—also appeared. basically, while the czech social justice movement has taken off as a set of weakly connected and highly profiled collective actors with clearly defined ideological boundaries, this slowly began to change at the peak of the global justice protests, and coalitions became more frequent during the era of the anti-war campaign. the term “cognitive mechanism” denotes the transformation of a perception on the individual and collective level (mcadam, tilly, & tarrow, 2001, p. 26). most importantly, it links the structural changes in a movement’s environment with its perception and interpretation on the part of its activists or its constituency. in this article, the single most important cognitive mechanisms were the attribution of a threat or opportunity to a particular shift in political environment, and changes in the collective identity of the movement through the mechanisms of boundary deactivation and formation. data and methods this article builds on both quantitative and qualitative data. the former consists of two protest event datasets, with protest event being the unit of analysis. while the first was generated via official media sources1 and is used to map long-term and broader shifts in the trajectory of the czech social justice movement, the second focuses on the field of anti-war activism and is used to illustrate the relational and cognitive mechanisms that were part of the movement’s transformation in this field of contention. the protest event is defined here as an actual gathering of at least three people convened in a studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 188 jiří navrátil public space in order to make claims that bear on the interests of an institution/ collective actor. only real episodes of collective action are included; threats of resorting to collective action, such as strike alerts, were excluded. petitions were excluded from the analysis. the first dataset (pea left, n=471) is based on the electronic archive of the czech news agency (can) which was searched for news between january 1989 and december 2011 using selected keywords. the following variables were coded for each event: date, place, duration, collective participants and organizers, number of individual participants, main issues and framing and their scale, target of the claim, repertoire, reaction of elites, and police activity. all news covering any protest event was selected and coded. the whole dataset consisting of 6524 protest events was used to sample events that have taken place since 1990 and in which one of the organizers was a social justice actor, defined as an actor raising explicit social justice claims (typically radical left-wing smos—anarchist, communist, trotskyite, marxist or other left smos). generally, i consider the year 2009 to be the start of the contention related to the global financial/economic crisis, as the first claims explicitly related to the crisis appeared in january 2009. four key variables were used in the present analysis. first, the target scale was coded as national/sub-national or supra-national according to the nature of the main target of the event. nine types of targets for each event were re-coded as national/local (nationwide political institutions, courts, local political authorities, regional political authorities, welfare state) or supranational (eu, international institutions and other states), or others (non-profit organizations, private companies). the ratio of national and supra-national targets was analyzed. second, two main protest issues were coded for each event (performance of state institutions and the quality of democracy; historical justice/recognition; the eu; economic issues; industry; urban planning; social policies; cultural and sport policies; agriculture; consumer issues, domestic security, foreign policies and war; environment; women rights; glbt rights; minority rights, other human rights; and religion), and the five most frequent ones were selected for analysis. third, event attendance was recorded. in cases when the exact number was not available (several dozen, several hundred etc.), its lower boundary was coded (20, 200, etc.). fourth, the number of actors coordinating the protest events was recorded, and the average number of smos co-organizing the event was counted. the second dataset (pea anti-war, n=287) was generated by triangulating several key resources, and covers czech anti-war activism between september 2002 and april 2009. the whole period under study (2002–2009) is divided into three successive phases (september 2002 – december 2002; january 2003 – july 2006; august 2006 – april 2009) according to the evolution of the political environment, and two ruptures between these periods are conceptualized as environmental mechanisms launching further chains of events. first, the press monitoring database anopress, which covers news articles from all key nationwide and local (both printed and electronic) newspapers and journals, was used to generate a list of protest events within studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 189 the period under study (from the start of the protest cycle against nato in september 2002 to obama’s visit to prague in april 2009 to announce his willingness to start the process of nuclear disarmament, settle us-iran relations, and re-evaluate the deployment of a us anti-missile radar base in the czech republic). the web pages of relevant smos that engaged in antiwar activism were another regular source of information (e.g. haddenn & tarrow, 2007). the other sources of information were the alternative and activist media, personal e-mail communications, and interviews with the representatives of the most important groups and networks. the following types of events or activities were not included in the dataset: running an information stand, events that were announced as anti-war but contained only other-than-anti-war claims (typical for the extreme right), counterevents to anti-war events, referendums, and events where anti-war claims were absolutely minor ones (typically for political parties during election campaigns). the following variables were coded for each event: location, time, organizing and participating groups and organizations, number of participants, repertoire, number of individual participants (computed as an average of all values that were available), and main claim of the event. also, any overall claim that was raised during the event was recorded and coded (either the direct open claim was recorded from speeches and interviews for the media, or it was reconstructed from banners and pickets). because of the character of some events (e.g. local events that were not covered by the media in much detail), only 69% of claims raised at the events were recorded (100% from the first period, 38% from the second, and 30% from the third). recorded claims were coded along two dimensions: first, the basic scale of the claim was coded (international/global or national/local); and second, the key content component of the claim was distinguished (economic, democratic or environmental). the categories for coding were created inductively from the data. identification of the cognitive mechanisms related to the opening of political opportunities relied mainly on the analysis of the public discourse within the different periods of anti-war campaigns (opinion polls, newspaper articles, press releases of the government), and on interviews with activists. identification of the cognitive mechanisms related to the intensification of the threat was based on an analysis of the framing of protest events, where the scale of framing represents the extent to which the issue (threat) was perceived as imminent and close to the domestic environment, and on the interviews with activists. identification of the relational mechanisms and emulation is based both on the activist interviews and on the social network analysis (sna) that was applied to protest event data. the protest coalition, that is, ties between two or more smos, exists when these smos cooperate on the same protest event (i.e. sharing time, place, and attendance). the platforms or coalitions that arose within the different periods of anti-war campaigns were broken down into particular groups and organizations in order to make the single smo the unit of analysis. the tie between smos is treated as undirected; in studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 190 jiří navrátil other words, when two groups took part at the same event, the tie is always considered symmetric. the reason is that anti-war actors do not take part at the event without the consent of the other organizing or participating actors; the co-occurrence of actors is thus conditioned upon the mutual agreement of all participating actors. the tie here represents the acted-upon willingness and capacity of the group to cooperate with other group(s) within the protest event, and to contribute to the success of the event either by mobilizing their own members and supporters or by assisting with logistics and know-how. the original 2-mode (affiliation) network that was created from the protest event data for each of the three periods under study was transformed into one-mode valued directed network. the value of the arc in the weighted cooperation networks equals the number of joint co-occurrences of two groups at some anti-war protest event. self-loops within all networks were deleted. events that were not organized by smos were not included in the sna. visual analyses were conducted in ucinet (borgatti, everett, & freeman, 2011). the third main source of data are articles in the activist journal solidarita (trotskyite) and qualitative semi-structured interviews with three key representatives of czech social justice smos, conducted in order to clarify the role of key factors, and to identify the mechanisms that were in play in the process of the movement’s transformation. the respondents were active in different anti-war campaigns, and together they represent three different key ideological platforms that took part in the campaigns: anarchist, trotskyite, and religious. evolution of the czech social justice movement the early formation of the czech global justice movement clearly relied on transnational backing, and the movement went through the process of transformation soon after the prague event of 2000 was over. the czech social justice movement then entered into the next phase of its evolution. evolution of the czech social justice movement: three periods in quantitative terms, the evolution of the czech social justice movement (sjm) might be described as consisting of three major phases that broadly correspond to major shifts in the political context relevant to the movement: the first phase of renewal (1990–1992), the second phase of expansion (1993–2000), and the third phase of decline (2001–2011). the first phase (1990–1992) might be described as post-1989 euphoria, when the radical left was trying to seize the attention of the public and bring in the left political agenda. both freshly formed anarchist and autonomist groups and networks, and communist organizations soon became very active in organizing public protests (see figure 1). the second period in the evolution of the movement started with the sharp fall in protest activities in 1993, and was characterized by slow but persistent re-activation and intensification of the movement’s protest activities, which peaked in 2000, studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 191 “the year of miracles.” since then, the movement has experienced a clear decline that persisted even through the arrival of financial crisis to the czech republic in 2009. figure 1: number of protest events (1990–2011) source: pea left not only were the social justice smos very active in the early 1990s, but their reception by the citizens was relatively positive, as illustrated by the high level of participation at the events, especially in 1991 (see figure 2). however, the dynamics of event participation in the next phase contrasted with the protest activity of the smos: despite higher activity by the smos in the second phase, the annual attendance at events was lower, if more stable, than in the previous period. on the other hand, in the last phase the general decline in participation at protest events organized by social justice smos paralleled the lower activity of social justice smos. finally, the third period (2001–2011) was evidently an era of decline for the movement. the indicators of activity for the movement—both the number of events and attendance by members and sympathizers—steadily declined after 2000, with few exceptions (2006–2009 and 2011). figure 2: number of participants (1990–2011) source: pea left studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 192 jiří navrátil one of the key aspects of social justice activism is the scale of its targets. during the first period, a clear prevalence of the national/sub-national framing was evident. the second period was characterized by a growing balance between the two levels. there was a steep decline in the relative number of domestic targets of protest activity in the period (e.g. national political institutions, courts, local authorities); meanwhile this was not compensated for by any increase in foreign and transnational targets (other states, international institutions) (see figure 3). after 2000, two processes may be identified. first, there was still a close relation in the evolution of the two target scales until 2006. second, from 2007 an opposite process to that of the previous period took place. there was a growing imbalance between the two target scales, which led to the complete dominance of the national scale of protests by the end of the period; even this was marked by sharp irregularities in their trends. the very end of the period was characterized by protest more than ever aimed at national/sub-national institutions and organizations. figure 3: scale of target (1990–2011) source: pea left these shifts in social justice activism were also reflected in the prevailing issues that were raised at the events. the constellation of issues raised during the first period also indicates the openness of the political space for social justice actors and their agenda at the time, which was simply not just the dissemination of radical left ideas but was also closely connected to mobilization against the extreme right and in favor of the democratization of state institutions (see figure 4). almost the same key issues were on the agenda during the second phase of social justice activism, with two important exceptions. first, even though this was an era of increasing internalization of foreign/transnational issues and symbols, it was not dominated by the issue of foreign policy. however, it is apparent that the importance of this issue was on the rise, while the importance of targeting the extreme right declined, together with the promotion of radical left ideologies and issues. second, while the economy was never the single most important issue for social justice activism, it nevertheless rose in the studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 193 second half of 1990s and peaked in 2000 with the culmination of global justice activism. on the other hand, the issue of quality democracy and state institutions continued to play an important role (figure 4). during the last period, several changes in the trends occurred. once again, the issue of right wing extremism had become even more important than it was in early 1990s, and most of the other issues remained much less important, with two exceptions. the first was the decline of foreign policy as an issue (with the exception of 2002 and 2007), the second, the quality of democracy and political institutions issue at the end of the period. more particularly, the changes in the frequency of the foreign policy issue in this phase were strongly negatively correlated with the frequency of the democracy issue (-0.57). on the other hand, there was a very strong positive correlation between the importance of the issues of democracy and economy (0.84). in the previous two periods, the issue of foreign policy was strongly positively correlated with the topic of the economy (0.67), while the relation between the issues of democracy and economy was negative (-0.25). figure 4: protest issues (1990–2011) source: pea left apparently, many different but closely-interrelated shifts took place in the trajectory of the czech social justice movement. before 2000 we were witnessing the quantitative growth of social justice activism, along with the increased importance of transnational targets, and the increasing importance of the issue of economy—at the expense of the issue of democracy, and focused mostly on the national level. it seems that the issues of democracy and foreign policy were closely interrelated, and dominated at the peak of the movement in 2000. while it could be expected that there would be some period of decline in global justice protest after the large international event in prague in 2000, a series of sudden shifts in target scale, importance of issues, and number of events and protest participation after 2007 indicate that other factors and effects rather than just “exhaustion” of the movement might have been at play. the period before the onset of the financial crisis found social justice activism increasingly focused on the national level, articulating problems of economy mostly in connection with the issue of democracy and the quality of national political institutions. even the arrival of the global financial studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 194 jiří navrátil crisis and the subsequent austerity measures effected no change. two related questions follow from this: first, what mechanisms occurred to prevent social justice activism from raising the scale of contention? second, how was the character of the movement, or its identity, changed? mechanisms of transformation after 2000 after 2000, the overall decline of social justice activism may be illustrated by the evolution of protest events explicitly framed as a critique of the political economy of globalization. street parties as the key form of movement strategy took place in prague in 2001 and 2002. an annual spinoff of the prague street parties began in the second largest czech city, brno, with approximately the same number of participants over the following years. the framing of these events slowly shifted back from explicit economic alter-globalization towards more environmentally and culturally oriented issues. street parties, organized mostly by the anarchist sector, were also held as part of the national social forum process that took place in 2004, 2005 and 2007. on the other hand, starting with the nato summit in prague in 2002 and continuing with the war in iraq, the movement gradually started to invest a considerable amount of its energy and capacities into the area of anti-war activism. generally, while its activities in the field of socio-economic contention were reduced right after 2000, the movement was expanding into the realm of anti-war activism: during the nato summit, social justice actors organized or coorganized 52% of anti-war events, during the war in iraq 50%, and after 2006, 54% (pea antiwar). therefore, both of these areas of contention should be examined in order to single out and analyze the mechanism and processes of the movement’s decline in the era of financial crisis. environmental mechanisms one of the key factors that shaped the evolution of the czech social justice movement was the transformation of its political context. there were two key environments for the movement between 2001 and 2011: the field of socioeconomic contention, and the anti-war field. the first important shift occurred in late 2002 with the nato summit in prague. it was directly related to the intensity of involvement by the social justice movement in the field of anti-war activism, as it provided an opportunity for the movement to deal with anti-war issues from the perspective of international political economy. the political context remained unfavorable: most citizens supported the country’s membership in nato, and the political elite displayed an exceptional consensus in its positive attitudes toward nato strategies and structures (šandera, 2002). at the same time, the police took a lesson from the previous international summit and declared a high level of willingness to monitor protesters and to have them under permanent physical control. this, together with soft repression strategies (intimidation of activists through media) and the very limited presence of foreign participants studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 195 and groups, led to an increased level of repression during the events. the second important shift took place in 2003, when the international threat of war in iraq arose. first, the preparations for the war in iraq were launched; then the war itself started in march 2003. from that moment on, the political context for anti-war activism started to open up, as the previous political alignments of major domestic political forces related to the issue changed. the government, a key decision-maker in the czech political system in the field of international issues and policies, and major political parties underwent serious internal disputes and splits related to the iraq invasion. furthermore, the public became opposed to the conflict, and police did not take any repressive measures during anti-war protests, while softening their protest management strategies. the next important shift in political context took place in august 2006, when anew threat appeared. the potential deployment of a u.s. missile system to the czech republic was unexpectedly brought to the forefront of the political agenda. the political context remained open, as the government promoting the deployment was not backed by a majority in parliament; thus the parliament became the central political institution dealing with the issue and new alignments appeared. this led to a radical change in the political landscape for extra-parliamentary political mobilization. as in the previous period, there was a pool of influential allies and supporters of anti-war activism (both among the political and cultural elites, and among other nonstate collective actors). finally, the era after 2008 was largely characterized by shifts in the socioeconomic context of political contention and a return by the social justice smos “back” to the arena of social-economic contention. right after its installment in mid-2006, the new right-wing government made efforts to promote economic deregulation and pro-market reforms. liberalization of health care, tax regulation, and the welfare system became effective in january 2008, which opened up opportunities and offered grievances for socio-economic conflict. political elites were sharply divided on the scope and necessity of austerity measures, and these measures also became largely unpopular among the population. in late 2008, the first worries about the impact of the global financial crisis on the czech republic appeared. while its measurable impact on the czech economy before 2009 was far from dramatic, the czech right-wing government had used the notion of crisis to legitimize further liberalization and fiscal restrictions in economic, healthcare, and social policies that would otherwise have been applicable only with significant political costs and difficulties. even if the government denied that the czech economy could be directly endangered by the coming financial crisis, it nevertheless threatened citizens with “the greek example” if there were no further spending cuts and tax growth. the political right succeeded in framing the crisis as a consequence of “generous and irresponsible left-wing policies” to such an extent that they succeeded in the parliamentary elections in mid-2010. the establishment of a new right-wing government was thus interpreted as studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 196 jiří navrátil representing the prevailing agreement of the citizens with austerity policies, and led to the closure of the political context. however, the government’s austerity policies, massive restitution of church property, continuing economic downturn, and corruption scandals among the political elites led to broad disagreement on the part of the public and the political opposition, and the political context for the social justice movement began to open up again. relational mechanisms after the important milestone of 2000 when social justice smos shared some key protest events (even if they did not jointly co-organize them), cooperation among these groups became less frequent again. while the “stop imf!” platform was from the very outset considered to be a temporary cooperation intended only for the duration of the summit, inpeg was a very ambitious project. however, it continued to exist for a few more months, and gradually declined after internal disputes broke out (slačálek, 2000). non-coalitional events (i.e. events organized by single smos) became obviously dominant, and the mechanism of defection became ever more intensive until 2006 (see figure 5). as indicated above, “pure” social justice events after 2000 were still most frequently organized by single smos or by their ideologically defined clusters (namely, by anarchist ones consisting of street parties, and trotskyites and communists focusing on social forum events). this trend changed in 2006 when the share of events that were co-organized began to increase, at the expense of events organized by any single smo. this turnaround was closely tied to coalition-making in the field of anti-war contention. while the context shift in 2003 led to a significant reduction in the role of ideological barriers in forming protest alliances and pushed new actors into the anti-war arena, the imposition of a new threat in 2006 led to the mechanisms of emulation and brokerage, i.e., to the building of broad and firmly-integrated protest platforms on the ground. this led not only to better integration among social justice smos but also their engagement with new domestic actors (see figure 5). studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 197 figure 5: anti-war protest coalitions (2003-2006 and 2006–2009) source: pea anti–war note: the black areas denote core social justice smos, the red ones are those that consider themselves to be part of the movement but are not identified as such on the part of the social justice actors, and the blue ones are other smos (environmental, religious etc.). the size of the node denotes its coalitional activity, and the strength of ties denotes the frequency of cooperation between the two nodes. what is more important, however, is that in 2006 the brokerage mechanism also seemed to operate in the field of social justice and the socio-economic areas. the intensifying of the general brokerage mechanism was interrupted in 2010, when protest events organized by single social justice smos generally prevailed, thus fully giving way to the mechanism of defection. because of the subsequent intensive negotiating and preparations for the new anti-austerity platform, however, the situation changed abruptly next year and the strategy of co-organizing protest events became the only game in town in all issue areas, including social justice. undoubtedly, the mechanism of brokerage was re-activated. figure 6: evolution of protest coalition work (2001-2011) source: pea left a general look at the average number of members of protest coalitions reveals two major findings: first, for the most of the period until the u-turn studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 198 jiří navrátil in networking strategies in 2010, the most common number of co-organizers of protest events was between two and three. second, the last year under study is characterized by considerably broader protest coalitions. this further underlines the intensity of the brokerage mechanism (see figure 6). figure 6: average number of protest coalition members (2001-2011) source: pea left cognitive mechanisms the changing environment and changing relations among social justice actors were closely related to changes in their understanding of the political context and the shaping of their collective identity. the protesters clearly perceived the heightened police repression during the anti-nato summit in late 2002: “essentially, all of my peers that are also against nato simply feared going here and getting into conflict with police”(kuchyňová, 2002). this fear of attending anti-war or other protest events did not appear again later, and was rather exceptional. the perception of political closure was supplemented by polls of citizens’ attitudes towards nato in which nearly 60% of respondents displayed their trust in nato, and 70% supported czech membership in the alliance (šandera, 2002). the prevalent framing of protests during the period was related to the economy (67%), and claims remained firmly embedded on the supranational level (86%) (pea anti-war). the start of the war in iraq was marked by a change in public opinion and by rising serious tensions among political elites: “the attack on iraq caused doubts even among the social democrats that were in the government, which was obviously on the side of nato during its prague summit. a skeptical view of usa strategy was shared among a much larger part of society” (representative of socialist solidarity group, interview conducted may 6, 2013). the released data on citizens’ attitudes further showed that two thirds of them opposed a military solution to the situation, and this attitude prevailed for the next three years of the anti-war campaign (červenka, 2005). again, the most important type of framing remained the economic one (88%), with majority claims remaining on the supranational scale (81%), thus showing that the major understanding of these anti-war protests was still mostly related to capitalism and economic interests (pea anti-war). studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 199 the next shift in the political context that took place in 2006 was perceived by social justice smos as a more dramatic one. apart from a major shift in their understanding of the nature of the target of the protest, the scale of the perceived threat also changed considerably. of significance, the most important type of framing used during the protest was related to democracy (70%), and the share of claims targeting transnational institutions or organizations rapidly decreased (57%) (pea anti-war). the change in the issues as well as the rising discontent among the population (červenka, 2009) were perceived by social justice smos and were clearly related to their change in strategies: “the issue played its role. the closer it was (not only in terms of geography) to the czech public, the easier it was to consider its mobilization” (interview 1). essentially, the prevalence of the democracy issue and the shift in attention from the transnational to national level were maintained even during the shift in the socio-economic context of contention related to national economic reforms in 2008. even if the war in iraq and the financial crisis were still reflected and debated inside the movement, the issue of domestic economic reforms and their social consequences still prevailed until 2009. in 2009, however, the situation changed. first, the movement utilized the opportunity of obama’s visit to prague to indicate a change in u.s. foreign policy. second, the government lost a no-confidence vote and stepped down. consequently, the movement declared victory in the anti-war campaign. at the same time, the financial crisis hit the country and became part of the national political discourse, and the movement switched to the domestic economic agenda while trying to benefit from its mobilization successes in the anti-war campaign: “now it is important not to be lulled to sleep by the fall of the government supporting the missile system. it is necessary to demonstrate further that those 70% of citizens are not just a number but a real power that every future government must take into account” (molnár, 2009). since 2010, the socio-economic agenda has become fully dominant, and the movement has used the opportunity of parliamentary elections (may 2010) to mobilize against the past and future austerity policies of the political right. while the social democrats actually won the elections, conservativepopulist right parties won the majority of seats, and formed a government that supported the focus of the movement on the transformation of domestic politics: “and as i mentioned above, the left-wing parliamentary party is primarily the outcome of a movement, so let’s build a movement instead of relying on miracles. there will be a plenty of opportunities for that in the immediate future” (franke, 2010). while the perceptions of shifts in the political context were changing quite frequently, it seems that there were only slow shifts in the collective identity of the movement. as described above, individual currents of the movement with different ideological variants on the social justice identity internalized their alter-globalist character around 2000 at the latest. this simultaneous multiple belonging to both the transnational movement and to a particular domestic ideological stream (anarchism, trotskyism, marxism, deep studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 200 jiří navrátil ecology) enabled their closer coordination, even if their primary ideological particularities never disappeared (císař & slačálek, 2007; kolářová, 2009, pp. 56–57). this secondary “transnational identity” proved to be quite persistent, and seemed to exist even after the nationalization of the domestic anti-war campaign in 2006. an analysis of a symbolic nomination network after the launch of the domestic phase of anti-war activism (2007) revealed that the self-identification of social justice smos and their identification as global justice actors on the part of other members of the movement match very well (navrátil, 2012, pp. 101-102). at the same time, even after five years of intensive involvement in anti-war activism, only a minor part of the movement embraced what might be called a “peace movement identity” (navrátil, 2012, p. 97). however, after 2009 it became increasingly evident that the transnational global justice identity had become rather an organizing tool for inner coordination of what might be called the “national social justice movement.” this consisted of former global justice actors being engaged in new national platforms, and derived its identity from the achievements of the anti-war movement, and not the global justice movement: “now the task is to build, and especially in the czech republic, the network of individuals and organizations that would find a common will to search the alternative solution of contemporary crisis with respect to autonomy of particular organizations” (horňáček, 2009). the process of transformation after 2000 the above-described shifts in the environmental, relational, and cognitive aspects of the czech social justice movement after 2000 represent constituent parts of two broader and closely intertwined processes: the scale shift and the identity shift. this description should help us understand the paths by which the transformation of the “meta-logic” of the social justice movement’s activities occurred. it had previously mobilized against the broad economic and social consequences of neoliberal globalization, while maintaining sparse ties with other actors on the national level. later, the social justice movement became anchored in the domestic political and social context, and focused on the national instead of transnational institutions and processes. the intertwining of identity and scale shift processes started with the protests against nato that launched the movement’s spillover into anti-war activism. the counter-summit provided the movement with an opportunity to rely on its international focus and to draw on its global justice identity while emphasizing issues of peace and war. the specific ideological affiliations of the movement still remained activated. the opening of the political context during the iraq war was interpreted as an opportunity for the movement to generally continue mobilizing according to its previous socio-economic agenda, but at the same time the mechanism of brokerage became extremely important. the movement began to build on the widely-shared consensus of opposition to the iraq conflict in czech studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 201 society and among the political elites after 2003, and substantially increased coordination with other czech smos. even though peace issues were usually considered part of the global justice agenda, the movement’s anti-war focus fostered the brokerage of new domestic coalitions that bridged more ideological gaps than the global justice focus had ever done before. the shift to a different field of political contention enabled ties to be formed with new actors—both with peace smos and with former ideological enemies. the favorable context made the movement stay in this area and combine anti-war and global-justice rhetoric. both the opportunity itself and its framing were still situated firmly on the transnational level. an unexpected shift in the political context and the resulting perception of an imminent threat in 2006 prevented the movement from making great use of socio-economic framing and anti-capitalist rhetoric, and pushed it into playing the nationalist tune against the “new occupation”. this was accompanied by the building of much closer and integrated national platforms with former loose alliance partners and other, newer actors; at the same time, it was backed by unprecedented support from the national public, which the movement attempted to mobilize. the activation of the emulation mechanism once again showed that the former ideological divides within social justice activism could be overcome much more easily in a different field of contention and under imminent threat than in the generally open context of global justice activism. despite this, the sense of global justice identity persisted even during this phase of the movement’s evolution, while the anti-war identity did not take root in the movement. the former alliances belonging to the “international” phase of anti-war activism were used as the foundation for well-organized national networks within which social justice and other smos learned how to cooperate effectively. the end of the national anti-war campaign in mid-2009 was interpreted as an unequivocal (and much needed) success, coming at the same moment as the socio-economic conflict in the country was at its height. the movement switched to this area of contention, but the success of the national anti-war campaign became the main determinant of the movement’s subsequent strategies and mode of operation: the ability to effectively organize broad national coalitions with a common cause was utilized for fighting the consequences of the crisis for the citizens and domestic democracy, not for an anti-systemic critique of the transnational political and economic order. a return to the area of socioeconomic contention was followed by the mechanism of emulation of previous anti-war coalitions, but now focused mostly on domestic economic issues and grievances. the emergence of new opportunities in the field of socioeconomic contention and the movement’s subsequent shift in that direction after 2008 enabled the movement to return to its original issue, however, this time with almost no long-term supranational focus, global justice framing, or transnational identity. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 202 jiří navrátil conclusions this article focused on the processes of transformation of the czech social justice movement between its global justice phase and the arrival of the global financial crisis to the country. by tracing the shifts in three aspects of the movement’s evolution—environmental, relational, and cognitive—this article argues that the movement’s intensive involvement in the field of anti-war activism was itself dramatically transformed in 2006, leading to subsequent changes in its mode of operation and collective identity. the nationalization of anti-war activism had an impact on social justice actors, with several consequences. the global justice movement’s identity was transformed into a national social justice one and the movement became anchored in domestic activist networks. even if this is a case study of czech social justice activism alone, it may also have broader consequences for other types of activism in general. first, it seems that the changes in transnational opportunity structures might have very serious consequences for the cooperation strategies of social justice (or other) smos on the national or even local level. second, the spillover of the movement into different areas of contention may help the movement to avoid or slow its decline, but may also radically transform the movement’s character and have far-reaching consequences for its identity and mode of operation. it seems that the firm embeddedness of the movement in the national inter-organizational networks and social context (in whatever field of contention this takes place) pushes it towards more reflexive and intelligible strategies with regard to the domestic public and its issues, moods and attitudes, but at the same time deprives the movement of an anti-systemic supra-national element of its identity and ethos. on the other hand, there are still questions that remain unanswered in terms of a broader context of the study of transnational contention. initially, one may wonder whether the scale shift of social justice activism after 2000 should not be viewed simply as a return to a more “natural” mode of its operation rather than some kind of a shock or recession: before and even during the peak of its transnational activities, czech social justice actors remained active on a local and national scale as these levels constituted their primary operating environment. second, aforementioned shifts in a contention scale are always temporary and reversible. this article highlighted the circumstances that have driven the process of scale transformation, and we might hypothesize that diverse outcomes could be observed in a short period of time if these were replaced by different ones. last, as outlined in the introductory part, this article has focused on the scale shift of particular aspects of collective action, while it has left aside the others (e.g. structures of organization, non-protest cooperation, cross-border communication etc.). this poses apparent limitations on our thorough understanding of the scale of contention dynamics and suggests that further research of the issue is needed. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 domesticating social justice activism in the global era? 203 acknowledgement this work has been supported by the project “employment of newly graduated doctors of science for scientific excellence” (cz.1.07/2.3.00/30.0009) co-financed from european social fund and the state budget of the czech republic, and by the project collective action and protest in east-central europe (code gap404/11/0462) funded by the czech science foundation. notes 1 there is a potential bias in this data source. while the data from a nationwide press agency may underrepresent local or politically marginal events, events with controversial and violent content may be overrepresented. generally, one has to keep in mind that the dataset from the mainstream media may over-represent the events that are attractive for a broader audience (cf. koopmans & rucht, 2002, p. 247). references alimi, e. y. 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(2005). the new transnational activism. new york: cambridge university press. tilly, c., & tarrow, s. (2007). contentious politics. boulder: paradigm publishers. welsh, i. (2004). network movement in the czech republic: peturbating prague. journal of contemporary european studies 12, 321–337. mellifont final before ts correspondence address: damian mellifont, centre for disability research & policy, the university of sydney, new south wales 2006, australia; email: damian.mellifont@sydney.edu.au issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 facilitators and inhibitors of mental discrimination in the workplace: a traditional review damian mellifont university of sydney, australia abstract discrimination can closely follow disclosure of neurodivergence in the workplace. this traditional review of the literature therefore aims to (a) critically explore factors that facilitate and inhibit mental discrimination in workplace environments, and (b) produce an evidence-based, anti-discrimination guide supporting neurodivergent employees. applying content analysis to 64 scholarly articles retrieved from scopus, proquest central and psycinfo (via ovidsp) databases, this traditional review offers three main messages which should be of value to hr policymakers and practitioners. first, the spirit of diversity and inclusion needs to be practically applied in recruitment processes so that neurodivergent applicants are not exposed to discrimination. second, employees or prospective employees should not feel that they will be punished for disclosing their neurodivergence. finally, sanist workplaces that refuse to be inclusive and accommodating of neurodivergent persons might experience lost productivity as a result. keywords human resources; inclusion; neurodiversity; workplace; discrimination introduction mental discrimination in the workplace is a social justice topic that is worthy of scholarly attention. discrimination is defined as, “treating someone differently or unfairly because of a personal characteristic or distinction, which, whether intentional or not, has an effect that imposes disadvantages not imposed on others, or that withholds or limits access that is given to others” (jones et al., 2018, p. 87). distinguishing stigma from discrimination, nardodkar et al. (2016) purport discrimination to be the behavioural expression of stigma. sanism is defined as, “the specific prejudice, stigma and discrimination associated with mental illness that, according to perlin, is damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 60 largely invisible and socially acceptable” (perlin, 2000, as cited in williams, 2014, p. 151). sanism is opposed by the paradigm of neurodiversity, defined as “the diversity of human minds, the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species;” the term neurodivergent “means having a brain that functions in ways that diverge significantly from the dominant societal standards of ‘normal’” (walker, 2014). when considering mental stigma and discrimination, it is important to recognise the compounding impacts of other forms of oppression. in this regard, draper et al. (2012) report of racism, ageism and sexism amplifying disability stigma. the extent to which sanism is experienced across across personal, organisational and societal levels should not be downplayed. at a personal level, individuals with mental health issues often report employment discrimination (henderson et al., 2012). draper et al. (2012) caution that these individuals are stereotyped in terms of danger and incompetence. according to russinova et al. (2011), employer discrimination constrains the recruitment, retainment and advancement prospects of persons with mental ill health. employees with mental health issues can be more likely to experience discrimination in covert and overt forms (snyder et al., 2010, as cited in cavanagh et al., 2017). the impacts of such discrimination upon employee wellbeing should not be underestimated. lockwood et al. (2012) report that discrimination intensifies the disability that is experienced by persons with mental ill health. crucially, the workplace environment influences the general wellbeing of employees (coduti et al., 2015). at an organisational level, leasher and miller (2012, p. 282) note that discrimination is a considerable issue for workplaces owing to its “deteriorating effects.” nardodkar et al. (2016) warn that universally the participation of people with mental ill health in the employment market has been stunningly low. at a societal level, williams (2014) notes that persons with mental illness are regularly characterised as being fundamentally dissimilar from others, marked by their mental illness, and subsequently rejected and distanced. undesirable social reactions to the mentally ill have endured throughout generations regardless of improvements in care, legal assistance, and medical understandings (gordon et al., 2004). under systems of structural subordination, “slow death” indicates the “wearing out” of persons in a population (berlant, 2007, p. 754). however, in contemporary society, the lives of citizens with mental illness who are perceived as dangerous can also be quickly cut short as a result of police brutality. citizens with mental disabilities have been excessively impacted by the application of deadly force (international human rights clinic, 2017). for instance, in the united states, a 2016 washington post report claimed that of the 963 persons who were killed by police, 25% of these were associated with mental ill health (bratina et al., 2020). recognising the negative and ongoing impacts of sanism upon individuals, workplaces and society more broadly, together with coduti et al.’s (2015) call for research to reveal workplace issues that influence mental health, this facilitators & inhibitors of mental discrimination in the workplace studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 61 traditional literature review has two fundamental objectives. first, it aims to identify mental discrimination facilitators and inhibitors in the workplace. second, the study endeavours to produce an evidence-based, antidiscrimination guide that is supportive of neurodivergent employees. method a traditional literature review is used to critique and summarise the literature as well as to make conclusions about a topic of interest (cronin et al., 2008). this study has principally followed stages for conducting this type of literature review described by cronin et al. (2008). having selected a review topic, the data collection phase involved applying the following search term against scopus, proquest central and psycinfo (via ovidsp) scholarly databases: “disability discrimination” and “workplace” and (“mental” or “psychiatric”) informing the relevance of articles, the following inclusion criteria were then applied: years = 2010-2019 and field = search all fields and language = english and document type = article and article is accessible and abstract is available and no duplicates and (text describes workplace mental discrimination facilitator(s) and/or workplace anti-mental discrimination measure(s)) this search strategy was deliberately constructed to generate a sample of scholarly texts that was sufficient to support informative findings. the inclusion criteria were assessed in the first instance against the abstracts. those articles showing potential were downloaded and examined in detail for evidence of mental discrimination facilitators or inhibitors. the analytical phase of the literature review was guided by the inductive content analysis steps as depicted by elo and kyngäs (2008). this involved: (a) open coding (i.e., highlighting data in the text); (b) grouping and coding (i.e., grouping data into themes according to coding rules); (c) abstraction (i.e., combining themes where possible); and d) modelling (i.e., positioning the themes into a conceptual map). finally, the writing phase of the traditional review included recording results and critically discussing the study findings. results of the scholarly database searches, scopus produced 138 possibly relevant articles with 37 relevant. proquest central produced 249 possibly relevant articles, 220 possible after removing duplicates, with 17 relevant. psycinfo (via ovidsp) produced 76 possibly relevant, 37 possible after removing damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 62 duplicates, with 10 relevant. hence, the total number of relevant articles informing this study was 64. appendix a identifies five mental discrimination facilitator themes (i.e., bias, legal shortfalls, silence and intersectionality), coding rules and exemplary quotes. appendix b is comprised of five mental discrimination inhibitor themes (i.e., legal reforms, policy, culture, education and contact), coding rules and exemplary quotes. these are inductive themes (i.e., they emerged from the coding process). as such, they represent the different ways in which mental discrimination in the workplace is promoted and resisted. offering a conceptual map of study findings, figure 1 graphically illustrates these evidence-based themes derived from my content analysis in terms of their contribution to either mental inclusive or mental discriminatory workplace environments. the mental discrimination inhibitors are positive in that they encourage work environments to be inclusive of neurodivergence. in contrast, the mental discrimination facilitators are negative in their promotion of work environments that discriminate against neurodivergence. figure 1. mental discrimination facilitators and inhibitors in the workplace. discussion as part of the writing phase of the traditional literature review as undertaken by this study, mental discrimination facilitator themes of bias, legal shortfalls, silence and intersectionality are each critically discussed, after which themes of legal reforms, policy, culture, education and contact are examined respectively in terms of their particular roles as sanism inhibitors. neurodivergence in the workplace – mental discrimination facilitators the literature broadly aligns discrimination with stigma (draper et al., 2012; nardodka et al., 2016) (see appendix 1). the part played by mental bias in facilitators & inhibitors of mental discrimination in the workplace studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 63 the mistreatment of prospective and current neurodivergent employees should thus not be understated. such prejudice is highlighted in the following quote from russinova et al. (2011), “even co-workers who know of my psychiatric history make horrible degrading remarks about library patrons who are ‘perceived’ to be mentally ill” (p. 234). temple et al. (2018) purport that persons who are experiencing psychosocial disability are more prone to reporting discrimination. disturbingly, those reporting neurodivergencerelated discrimination in the workplace should not assume that they are to receive fair hearings. lockwood et al. (2014) caution of management bias due to the claimant’s “invisible” disability (p. 179). such tendency towards mental prejudice, however, is not confined to those in management. activists suggest that the issue resides with a “neurotypical society” that refuses to acknowledge “different ways of thinking or behaving” (o’connell, 2011, p. 898). discrimination in the workplace and more broadly in society targets various forms of neurodivergence including those of autism, depression, anxiety and schizophrenia (goffman, 1963, as cited in barber, 2015; lee et al., 2016; levin, 2013). mental bias is pervasive in the sense that it can seep into recruitment processes. specifically, psychiatric stigma can negatively influence hiring intentions (ameri et al., 2018; hickox & hall, 2018). this discrimination against neurodivergent job applicants represents a structural obstacle to their involvement in competitive employment (nardodkar et al., 2016). as employees with physical disabilities can be favoured over workers with mental health issues (burke et al., 2013), mental stigma appears to contribute to unemployment (wright et al., 2015). moreover, employers think that persons with mental ill health will be “awkward” in their place of work (unger, 2002, as cited in maroto & pettinicchio, 2014, p. 79). hence, mental bias toxicity can flow freely beyond recruitment and into the realm of job retainment. roulstone and williams (2014) vividly depict this contamination as follows: you only have to get the wrong boss with views of mental illness as a personal failing or a tabloid view linking mental illness with violence and then you might find yourself being eased out. (p. 22) further to the topic of retaining employment, snyder et al. (2010) note that accommodating invisible disabilities might be seen as less warranted. consequently, accommodations for psychological disabilities can be permitted far less frequently than for physical disabilities (telwatte et al., 2017). even on occasions where accommodations are successfully received by neurodivergent staff, these adjustments might come at a heavy price. resentment can spread following a perception that an employee is receiving preferential treatment (patton, 2010). fevre (2013) elaborates, “co-workers may ill-treat employees with disabilities because of what they believe to be unreasonable or unfair variations in workplace norms for such employees” (p. 302). mental bias is evidenced in other unwanted forms of attention in the workplace. employees can experience additional scrutiny because of their damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 64 mental difference (griffin, 2016). in addition to negatively influencing the recruitment and retainment of neurodivergent individuals, mental bias also has potential to stifle job advancement opportunities. in this light, staff with mental health issues are less likely to hold managerial or professional positions (longhi et al., 2012). legislative shortfalls are another factor influencing the mistreatment of neurodivergent employees. özcan et al. (2011) recognise that people with disabilities are confronted by discrimination despite legal attempts to protect them. of particular relevance to this paper, o’connell (2011) comments, “discrimination law still struggles to deal with the neurologically different” (p. 899). employer size might play a part in promoting discrimination against neurodivergent persons. ameri et al. (2018) raise the prospect that as small employers have americans with disabilities act (ada) exemption, they are participating in discriminatory behaviour. lavan (2019) also recognises that not all persons have the resources to seek legal justice. conversely, some employers might decide to use some of their considerable resources to support the continuation of discriminatory practices. nardodkar et al. (2016) indicates that because of mental stigma, employers might elect to be fined rather than hire individuals with mental ill health. also, laws are no guarantee that neurodivergent employees will receive the accommodations that they might require. fairclough et al. (2013) understand that the criteria for accommodating mental disabilities in the workplace can be problematic. as acknowledged by bell (2015), inclusion of mental health conditions in the workplace requires a wider response that puts less emphasis on personal enforcement. hence, the literature undermines any proposition of the legal policy instrument as a panacea for sanism in the workplace. stigma and discrimination work to silence people. santuzzi et al. (2014) recognise that stigma might deter the disclosure of mental disabilities in the workplace. a study by horton and tucker (2014) indicates that the stigmatising of mental illness as “weakness” is a popular explanation for employee non-disclosure (p. 80). de lorenzo (2013) also notes that stigma and concerns over career harm act to extensively lessen the number of staff who disclose their mental ill health. the literature offers the following quotes which collectively emphasise the powerful influence of anticipated discrimination in constraining the disclosure of neurodivergence in the workplace: i would be wary of disclosing until i saw how the employer actually treated employees with mental health issues, not just their stated policy. (von schrader et al., 2014, p. 251) i would never disclose (my mental disability) because it’s not like you’re forgiven. (jans et al., 2012, p. 160) facilitators & inhibitors of mental discrimination in the workplace studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 65 phila shared that he preferred not to disclose his disability and shared his experiences after previously disclosing: they were more stand-offish. they would say, ‘he is on meds. he is a bit of a psycho.’ (mckinney & swartz, 2019, p. 12) anxiety, such as that which is expressed above, can speak loudly to neurodivergent employees who are contemplating disclosure. these perceived fears are not unfounded. coduti et al. (2015) raises concerns about being treated differently and having colleagues change their views about the competency of the person. appreciating these risks (and that disclosure should be a personal choice), attempts to conceal neurodivergence in the workplace in efforts to avoid stigma and discrimination can also have deleterious consequences. santuzzi et al. (2014) suggest that a loss in health and performance are two areas of concern. this finding suggests that workplaces who fail to be inclusive of neurodivergent persons might be penalised through possible reductions in employee wellbeing and productivity. it is appropriate that intersecting and compounding oppressions such as racism and sexism, which have the capacity to contribute to sanism in the workplace, be acknowledged. racism is connected with negative health influences by lowering accessibility to health advancement resources including that of employment (paradies et al., 2015, as cited in temple et al., 2018). racism thus plays a role in lowering employment opportunities for prospective neurodivergent employees. in the context of high exposure to violence as reported by persons with mental illness, employers are encouraged to be aware of such “patterns of vulnerability” as well as “intersections with gender and other risk factors” (dammeyer & chapman, 2018, pp. 8-9). neurodivergence in the workplace – mental discrimination inhibitors opposing legislative shortfalls as a mental discrimination facilitator are legal and policy reforms (see appendix 2). long (2018) advises that legal definitions of disability have been considerably expanded enabling a better coverage of persons with mental health conditions. nardodkar et al. (2016) stress a need to protect against covert as well as overt discrimination. greater legal protections are also required across areas of hiring practices, disclosure of neurodivergence and requests for accommodations. support has been given for affirmative action (i.e., quotas) to be utilised to redress mental discrimination in recruitment processes (corrigan & gelb, 2006, as cited in nardodkar et al., 2016). human resources (hr) policies need to consider the high level of concealment of mental ill health (de lorenzo, 2013). there is also a need for additional understanding about accommodating mental illness in the workplace together with the benefits of these accommodations (mcdowell & fossey, 2015). potentially undermining these kinds of legal damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 66 and policy reforms, santuzzi et al. (2014) warn that the cultural stigma connected to certain disabilities might be beyond the control of organisational policies. opportunities might therefore arise to help reduce mental discrimination through an improved workplace culture. countering the undesirable outcomes of disclosure, an inclusive workplace culture encourages health-related conversations (munir et al., 2005; niehaus et al., 2008, as cited in vornholt et al., 2018). russinova et al. (2011) also advise that changes in workplace culture are needed to deal with covert expressions of mental bias. the role of supervisors in supporting organisational cultural change should not be underestimated. bruyere et al. (2010) elaborate that workplace culture is enhanced for all when managers take part in constructive “diversity behaviours” including those of being cooperative, flexible and respectful of everyone (p. 56). such flexibility challenges the standardisation of work practices and spatial organisation that can form part of an assemblage of discrimination against neurodivergent employees. education should not be overlooked in the fight against mental discrimination. hanisch et al. (2016) advise that anti-stigma measures can be helpful in adjusting employees’ knowledge about mental ill health. broadly speaking, increased knowledge is associated with desirable treatment (rossetto et al., 2019). efforts should therefore be made to inform staff members about neurodivergence. occupational health staff can train managers and make known the harmful impacts of mental stigma and discrimination (downey, 2012). rehabilitation counsellors can advise persons with mental ill health about discrimination in the workplace and of the procedures for raising perceived issues with employers and unions (an et al., 2011). counsellors can also assist with planned disclosure as a way to acquire workplace accommodations and to avoid stigma (corbière et al., 2014, as cited in vornholt et al., 2018). moreover, allott et al. (2013) advise that as part of the individual placement and support (ips) model, disclosure can happen in a collaborative, flexible and personalised way. coduti et al. (2015) describe as vital the raising of supervisor awareness to behave supportively towards employees who disclose. education can also promote effective accommodations at the time of recruitment (chen et al., 2016). mcdowell and fossey (2015) comment: education is required for employers, rehabilitation professionals, and employees without the support of a supported employment agency to increase understanding of disability discrimination legislation and workplace accommodations. (p. 201) the price to be paid by neurodivergent employees for persisting ignorance is potentially high. failing to educate people about mental disabilities would likely result in colleagues and supervisors continuing to depend on stereotypes and to discriminate against the mentally ill (hickox & hall, 2018). mental discrimination in the workplace can also be lessened through greater contact with neurodivergent persons. research indicates that contact involving persons with mental ill health and the broad public might be facilitators & inhibitors of mental discrimination in the workplace studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 67 effective in redressing prejudicial attitudes (corrigan et al., 2001, 2002; wood & wahl, 2004, as cited in burke et al., 2013). rossetto et al. (2019) also purport that contact is connected with positive treatment. furthermore, darcy et al. (2016) highlight the importance of people to be willing to “come out” and to oppose disability discrimination (p. 1264). and in supporting strategic research direction, henderson and gronholm (2018) comment that more understanding is needed about how contact can be integrated into workplaces so as to allow for a sustainable impact. anti-discrimination guide supporting neurodivergent employees a preliminary guide endeavouring to help to reduce discrimination involving neurodivergent staff is provided in table 1. this guide was developed from the discussion above, which was itself informed by a traditional review of the literature. the guide offers practical, evidence-based ways in which to promote social justice through work environments that are inclusive of neurodivergence. preliminary guide for redressing discrimination against neurodivergent employees 1. in defining the policy problem, policymakers need to recognise mental bias, legislative shortcomings and silence as key facilitators of neurodivergence discrimination in the workplace. 2. employers should introduce affirmative action (i.e., quotas) to redress the prospects of discrimination involving neurodivergent applicants in the hiring process. 3. undertake hr policy reforms that attempt to address the issue of non-disclose by encouraging a culture where people are safe to openly talk about neurodivergence. 4. support workplace cultural reforms wherever needed so that managers and others are encouraged to be open minded, flexible and respectful on the topic of neurodivergence. 5. provide mandatory training for new and current employees about the harmful impacts of mental stigma and discrimination and let it be known that such attitudes and behaviours will not be tolerated. 6. inform neurodivergent staff about their rights not to experience discrimination as well as the process for reporting such perceived behaviours. 7. ensure that job selection panel members are aware of their responsibility not to discriminate against neurodivergent applicants and to reasonably accommodate damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 68 these persons throughout the hiring process wherever needed. 8. counsellors to inform staff about the planned disclosure of neurodivergence and its benefits in terms of enabling access to reasonable accommodations that might be required. 9 explore the role of the ips disability employment support model in assisting clients to confidently and safely disclose their neurodivergence should they desire to do so. 10. invest in research that explores the possible ways in which greater contact between neurotypical and neurodivergent staff members might be achieved. 11. promote a culture where diversity and inclusion are openly celebrated and neurodivergent employees (including those at an executive level) are safe to disclose their neurodiversity should they wish to. table 1. preliminary guide for redressing discrimination against neurodivergent employees. conclusion supporting the advancement of social justice, neurodivergent citizens should have a far greater representation in employment. this paper reveals examples of the ways in which the discriminatory practices of sanism are conducted in workplaces. despite its presence and persistence within contemporary workplace cultures, sanism should not be considered unchallengeable. by embracing the anti-discrimination guide provided above, socially inclusive workplaces will be implementing evidence-based measures that endeavour to attract and retain more neurodivergent employees. this traditional review yields three main messages that employers who aspire to be more inclusive of neurodivergence would do well to heed. first, the spirit of diversity and inclusion needs to be practically applied in recruitment processes so that neurodivergent applicants are not exposed to discrimination. this necessitates job selection procedures to be flexible and panel members to remain open minded about possible accommodation requests. second, employees or prospective employees should not feel that they will be punished for disclosing their neurodivergence. any staff member (regardless of their position) found to be engaging in such discriminatory behaviours against neurodivergent persons should be held accountable. finally, sanist workplaces who refuse to be inclusive, flexible and accommodating of neurodivergence might be the ones who find themselves to be experiencing lost productivity. the findings of this review should be considered preliminary in that the traditional literature review undertaken was purposefully confined to the facilitators & inhibitors of mental discrimination in the workplace studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 69 search term that was applied and the three databases that were accessed. future studies applying different search terms or accessing different data sources might identify themes outside of those 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(2019). employment integration barriers: experiences of people with disabilities. the international journal of human resource management. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09585192.2019.1579749?casa_token=czdy f_-oj00aaaaa:2ttg8onb8qfn0maoigghtl0sbidicsgge890fbj9ewod3mbprq45fzwcguwh4knlh8zjvyhvwu munir, f., leka, s., & griffiths, a. (2005). dealing with self-management of chronic illness at work: predictors for self-disclosure. social science & medicine, 60(6), 1397-1407. nardodkar, r., pathare, s., ventriglio, a., castaldelli-maia, j., javate, k. r., torales, j., & bhugra, d. (2016). legal protection of the right to work and employment for persons with mental health problems: a review of legislation across the world. international review of psychiatry, 28(4), 375-384. niehaus, m., marfels, b., vater, g., magin, j., & werkstetter, e. (2008). betriebliches eingliederungsmanagement: studie zur umsetzung des betrieblichen eingliederungsmanagements nach § 84 abs. 2 sgb ix. o’connell, k. (2011). from black box to ‘open’ brain: law, neuroimaging and disability discrimination. griffith law review, 20(4), 883-904. özcan, k., özkara, b., & kızıldağ, d. (2011). discrimination in health care industry: a research on public hospitals. equality, diversity and inclusion: an international journal, 30(1), 2240. paradies, y., ben, j., denson, n., elias, a., priest, n., pieterse, a., gupta, a., kelaher, m., & gee, g. (2015). racism as a determinant of health: a systematic review and metaanalysis. plos one, 10(9). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0138511 patton, j. (2010). disability support. occupational health & wellbeing, 62(6), 26-27. perlin, m. l. (2000). the hidden prejudice: mental disability on trial. american psychological association. price, s., lusznat, r., mann, r., & locke, r. (2019). doctors with asperger's: the impact of a diagnosis. the clinical teacher, 16(1), 19-22. roberts, g. (2013). crunch time for past trauma. occupational health & wellbeing, 65(5), 1618. rossetto, a., robinson, e. j., reavley, n. j., & henderson, c. (2019). perceptions of positive treatment and discrimination towards people with mental health problems: findings from the 2017 attitudes to mental illness survey. psychiatry research, 273, 141-148. roulstone, a., & williams, j. (2014). being disabled, being a manager: ‘glass partitions’ and conditional identities in the contemporary workplace. disability & society, 29(1), 16-29. rüsch, n., corrigan, p. w., todd, a. r., & bodenhausen, g. v. (2010). implicit self-stigma in people with mental illness. the journal of nervous and mental disease, 198(2), 150-153. russinova, z., griffin, s., bloch, p., wewiorski, n. j., & rosoklija, i. (2011). workplace prejudice and discrimination toward individuals with mental illnesses. journal of vocational rehabilitation, 35(3), 227-241. santuzzi, a. m., waltz, p. r., finkelstein, l. m., & rupp, d. e. (2014). invisible disabilities: unique challenges for employees and organizations. industrial and organizational psychology, 7(2), 204-219. sayce, l. (2011). getting in, staying in and getting on: disability employment support fit for the future (vol. 8081). the stationery office. schur, l., han, k., kim, a., ameri, m., blanck, p., & kruse, d. (2017). disability at work: a look back and forward. journal of occupational rehabilitation, 27(4), 482-497. scie. (2014). mental health, employment and the social care workforce. http://www.scie.org.uk/publications/reports/report48/files/report48.pdf facilitators & inhibitors of mental discrimination in the workplace studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 73 shaw, l. r., chan, f., mcmahon, b. t., & kim, j. h. (2012). employee and employer characteristics associated with elevated risk of filing disability harassment charges. journal of vocational rehabilitation, 36(3), 187-197. snyder, l. a., carmichael, j. s., blackwell, l. v., cleveland, j. n., & thornton, g. c. (2010). perceptions of discrimination and justice among employees with disabilities. employee responsibilities and rights journal, 22(1), 5-19. social exclusion unit. (2004). mental health & social exclusion. seu & odpm. stergiou-kita, m., mansfield, e., daiter, l., & colantonio, a. (2015). good intentions? employer representative conceptualizations and, challenges to the workplace accommodation process: the case of electrical injuries. employee responsibilities and rights journal, 27(1), 1-25. telwatte, a., anglim, j., wynton, s. k., & moulding, r. (2017). workplace accommodations for employees with disabilities: a multilevel model of employer decision-making. rehabilitation psychology, 62(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rep0000120 temple, j. b., kelaher, m., & williams, r. (2018). discrimination and avoidance due to disability in australia: evidence from a national cross sectional survey. bmc public health, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-6234-7 unger, d. d. (2002). employers' attitudes toward persons with disabilities in the workforce: myths or realities?. focus on autism and other developmental disabilities, 17(1), 2-10. van wieren, t. a., armstrong, a. j., & mcmahon, b. t. (2012). autism spectrum disorders and intellectual disabilities: a comparison of ada title i workplace discrimination allegations. journal of vocational rehabilitation, 36(3), 159-169. villotti, p., corbière, m., fossey, e., fraccaroli, f., lecomte, t., & harvey, c. (2017). work accommodations and natural supports for employees with severe mental illness in social businesses: an international comparison. community mental health journal, 53(7), 864870. von schrader, s., malzer, v., & bruyere, s. (2014). perspectives on disability disclosure: the importance of employer practices and workplace climate. employee responsibilities and rights journal, 26(4), 237-255. vornholt, k., villotti, p., muschalla, b., bauer, j., colella, a., zijlstra, f., van ruitenbeek g., uitdewilligen, s., & corbiere, m. (2018). disability and employment – overview and highlights. european journal of work and organizational psychology, 27(1), 40-55. walker, n. (2014, september 27). neurodiversity: some basic terms & definitions. neurocosmopolitanism. https://neurocosmopolitanism.com/neurodiversity-some-basicterms-definitions/ williams, v. (2014). ‘sanism’, a socially acceptable prejudice: addressing the prejudice associated with mental illness in the legal system [doctoral dissertation, university of tasmania]. university of tasmania open access repository. wood, a. l., & wahl, o. f. (2006). evaluating the effectiveness of a consumer-provided mental health recovery education presentation. psychiatric rehabilitation journal, 30(1), 46-53. wright, s., henderson, c., thornicroft, g., sharac, j., & mccrone, p. (2015). measuring the economic costs of discrimination experienced by people with mental health problems: development of the costs of discrimination assessment (coda). social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 50(5), 787-795. damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 74 appendix a – sanism (i.e., mental discrimination) facilitators theme: bias coding rule: mental discrimination is encouraged through bias. exemplary quotes: “this research suggests that disability discrimination may be based in part upon stigma” (draper et al., 2012, p. 204). “while stigma undoubtedly plays a role, discrimination is its behavioural manifestation” (nardodka et al., 2016, p. 375). “the ambiguity caused by those conditions perceived as less tangible such as stress, mental health conditions or those with medically unexplained symptoms, aroused scepticism” (bramwell et al., 2016, p. 244). “in examining the individual impairments that together comprise behavioral disorders, charging parties with anxiety disorder, depression, bipolar disorder and other psychiatric impairment filed 20% to 64% more harassment complaints than other types of discrimination charges” (shaw et al., 2012, p. 193). “becker’s model of taste-based discrimination may apply, given the well-documented history of stigma and prejudice against people with disabilities. under this model, prejudiced employers refuse to hire applicants with disabilities (or with particular disabilities such as mental health conditions)” (becker, 2010, as cited in schur et al., 2017, p. 484). “for example, higher concern has been found in hiring people with mental or hidden disabilities than people with physical disabilities” (heera & devi, 2016, p. 66). “negative employer attitudes may exacerbate the failure of employment support programmes to promote the benefits of employing workers with intellectual and mental health disability (luecking, cuozzo and buchanan, 2006)” (bartram et al., 2018, p. 733). “among people with only one type of impairment, individuals with a mental illness or a nervous and emotional condition reported the lowest overall labour force participation rates” (hogan et al., 2012, p. 5). “employees with psychiatric disabilities who have received some accommodation may also be targeted for harassment because they are seen as receiving preferential treatment, leading to resentment” (hickox & hall, 2018, p. 589). “copeland et al. (2010) reveal how employers’ attitudes towards persons with disabilities can be affected by their knowledge of accommodations legislation, beliefs regarding what constitutes a disability, perceptions regarding how reasonable the accommodation is, and perceptions about workers’ abilities and levels of productivity” (stergiou-kita et al., 2015, pp. 4-5). facilitators & inhibitors of mental discrimination in the workplace studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 75 “as well as diminishing morale in the workplace, the antipathy these accommodations could create may also give rise to issues of disability harassment (fox v. general motors 2001)” (fairclough et al., 2013, p. 284). “the most common, well-known and powerful mechanism of prejudice and discrimination involves the use of practices that target explicitly such workers either through open encounters or behind the scenes unfavorable decisions concerning them or through gossip and badmouthing” (russinova et al., 2011, p. 237). “such negative impact on workers with psychiatric conditions may easily negate intended benefits from reasonable accommodations, may exacerbate original psychiatric symptoms and may lead to work interruptions and job loss” (russinova et al., 2011, p. 238). “one uk social worker described their experience when they disclosed to their employer about the mental illness they are living with: ‘they have made me feel as though i have something to be ashamed of and punished for, rather than recognising the additional expertise my experience gives me as a practitioner’ (scie, 2014)” (healy et al., 2015, p. 1089). “people with mental health problems are the impairment group least likely to be in senior positions in all sectors (sayce 2011; social exclusion unit 2004)” (roulstone & williams, 2014, p. 18). “those with health conditions are less likely to be in professional or managerial occupations, and this is particularly the case for those with mental health conditions” (longhi et al., 2012, p. 946). “while disability rights advocates are pushing for views of wellness and individual worth that are inclusive of disability and less obsessed with physical and mental differences, the wellness approach tends to coalesce around some universal standards of health that are supposedly desirable and achievable for all or most” (basas, 2014, pp. 1054-1055). “compared to the general disabilities group, allegations from employees with psychiatric disabilities were filed less frequently in small companies and medium-size companies with fewer than 200 workers” (an et al., 2011, p. 15). “both groups commonly make allegations against the following industries (and in the same order of frequency): retailtrade, manufacturing, accommodations/food service, and health care/social services” (van wieren et al., 2012, p. 166). - damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 76 theme: legal shortfalls coding rule: mental discrimination is encouraged through legislative shortfalls. exemplary quotes: “not all people with mental health problems are disabled within the meaning of the act, but establishing a disability discrimination case is the only significant route by which such an employee can challenge their employer’s or potential employer’s actions” (brohan et al., 2012, p. 10). “the challenge of providing inclusive workplaces for those with mental health problems demands a broader response that places less weight on individual enforcement” (bell, 2015, p. 221). “one response could be to re-examine the scope for incorporating participation rights into the legal framework on anti-discrimination. this might involve a duty to inform and consult workers on equality policies, including workplace procedures for providing reasonable accommodation” (bell, 2016, p. 32). “whilst the criteria for assessing essential job functions and providing reasonable accommodations are well suited to evaluating employees’ physical impairments, it is our opinion that they are more problematic when evaluating mental disabilities” (fairclough et al., 2013, p. 281). “there is still a long way to go before the cross-cutting application of reasonable accommodation can be assured in practice” (ferri, 2018, p. 48). “it is also important to note here that, despite explicit mention of equal treatment and non-discrimination in 64% of country laws, in many of these countries persons with disabilities, including mental disabilities, were barred from specific areas of employment such as national security services, armed forces, or occupations that are deemed hazardous” (nardodkar et al., 2016, p. 378). “nevertheless, neurodiversity poses a challenge to law because it offers a way of seeing the ‘disabled’ brain that is in keeping with other activist movements that have driven legal protection for other identity-based groups by framing stigmatised difference as positive diversity” (o’connell, 2011, p. 899). - theme: silence coding rule: mental discrimination is encouraged through silence. exemplary quotes: “the potential stigma that could accompany coworkers and supervisors’ knowledge of the disability may lead employees with invisible disabilities to keep those features concealed at work, even at the cost of health and performance impairments” (santuzzi facilitators & inhibitors of mental discrimination in the workplace studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 77 et al., 2014, p. 206). “deciding whether or not to disclose presents dilemmas for people with mental illness because of fears of being stigmatized and risks of discrimination (corbière et al. 2014)” (villotti et al., 2017, p. 869). “themes of perceived stigma and discrimination appeared frequently as reasons for restricted or non-disclosure...” (irvine, 2011, p. 184). “persons with mental health problems report difficulties in returning to work, for disclosure of the information about mental illness further increases risk of stigma and discrimination at the workplace (brohan et al., 2012)” (nardodkar et al., 2016, p. 381). “although disclosing the diagnosis could be helpful in improving communication and feedback in the workplace, the participants described very mixed responses when informing others” (price et al., 2019, p. 22). “‘in the end, i decided not to disclose, not to come out, as i have come across too many scare stories from those with mental health problems in particular, who have come out and disclosed their condition or their diagnosis to their colleagues, managers and employers and about the discrimination they have experienced for me to want to take the risk’” (barber, 2015, p. 42). “similarly, persons who view themselves as stigmatised are more likely to accept discrimination which adds to further condone such actions and at the same time to make self-disclosure a less attractive option (rüsch et al., 2010)” (de lorenzo, 2013, p. 227). “subtle discrimination against disabled people is difficult to eradicate because victims rarely complain (beauchemin et al., 2010)” (hemphill & kulik, 2016, p. 539). - theme: intersectionality. coding rule: mental discrimination is encouraged through intersectionality. exemplary quotes: “racism has been shown to be associated with negative health impacts through several key pathways including by... reducing access to key health-promoting resources (e.g. employment, education, health and aged care services etc.)” (paradies et al., 2015, as cited in temple et al., 2018, n.p.). “the findings here call attention to the significantly higher levels of violence reported by people with disabilities and particularly those with mental disabilities. clinicians and other health professionals as well as service providers and employers should be cognizant of these patterns of vulnerability and the intersections with gender and other risk factors” (dammeyer & chapman, 2018, pp. 8-9). damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 78 appendix b – sanism (i.e., mental discrimination) inhibitors theme: legal reforms coding rule: reduce mental workplace discrimination through legal reforms. exemplary quotes: “the adaaa substantially broadened the definition of disability, thus providing significantly greater coverage for individuals with a variety of physical and mental impairments” (long, 2018, p. 742). “legal protection must be provided against obvious as well as subtle discrimination” (nardodkar et al., 2016, p. 382). “it has been argued that affirmative action strategies such as a quota system, giving incentives to employers to recruit persons with mental health problems should be used to as strategies to eliminate stigma of mental illness, and can end discrimination towards persons afflicted with mental illness (corrigan & gelb, 2006)” (nardodkar et al., 2016, p. 382). “given the impetus of disability discrimination legislation, along with high rates of unemployment and low job retention among people with mental illness returning to work, there is a need for further understanding the nature of workplace accommodations for people with mental illness and their benefits” (mcdowell & fossey, 2015, p. 198). - theme: policy coding rule: reduce mental workplace discrimination through policy reviews. exemplary quotes: “as concealment of mental illness and other chronic health conditions is high, hr policies need to factor this into their policy toolbox by recognising that employees with poor performance and/or attendance may be unwell and not insubordinate or lacking in work ethic” (de lorenzo, 2013, p. 235). “until societal stigma collapses, and most persons with a mental illness feel comfortable about revealing their illness in the workplace, a change to performance management policies is overdue and necessary as a proactive system for dealing with employees who will persistently choose not to divulge they have a mental illness” (de lorenzo, 2013, p. 235). “legislative and policy measures aimed at eliminating discrimination hold potential in empowerment of persons with mental illness (bhugra, ventriglio, & pathare, 2016)” (nardodkar et al., 2016, p. 375). facilitators & inhibitors of mental discrimination in the workplace studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 79 “importantly, general stigma attached to particular disabilities may be determined in the broader social context and not a function of experiences specifically within an employing organization. thus, the cultural stigma attached to some disabilities might not be in the control of the organization or its policies” (santuzzi et al., 2014, p. 208). - theme: culture coding rule: reduce mental workplace discrimination through improved culture. exemplary quotes: “to counteract negative consequences of disclosure, a trusting and inclusive atmosphere (workplace culture) should be established in order to increase the readiness to make health and disease a subject of discussion at work (munir et al., 2005; niehaus et al., 2008)” (vornholt et al., 2018, p. 49). “while the ada attempts to target tangible acts of discrimination, more attention is needed to implement changes in the workplace culture that will address specific manifestations of psychiatric prejudice which are less overt but may have an insidious negative impact on individuals with mental health backgrounds who have entered the mainstream workforce” (russinova et al., 2011, p. 239). “workplace culture is improved for everyone when managers engage in positive ‘diversity behaviours’, such as acknowledging all team members, promoting cooperation, being flexible, and respecting everyone” (bruyere et al., 2010, p. 56). - theme: education coding rule: reduce mental workplace discrimination through education. exemplary quotes: “rehabilitation counselors can take several actions to increase the probability of achieving the goals of the ada in the workplace for people with psychiatric disabilities. they can work with people with psychiatric disabilities to help them understand ada title i protections, the dynamics of workplace discrimination, and the procedures for addressing perceived discrimination either with the employer, the union, or the eeoc.” (an et al., 2011, p. 16). “without education about psychiatric disabilities, both coworkers and managers are likely to continue to rely on stereotypes and to discriminate against mentally ill workers who are willing and able to work” (hickox & hall, 2018, p. 591). “negative views and attitudes were predominant among management and employees due to scepticism of a disability, and the absence of clear symptoms (e.g. those with clinical depression)” (cavanagh et al., 2017, p. 32). damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 59-80, 2021 80 “employment specialists or counsellors can facilitate the process of planned disclosure as a means to obtain access to work adjustments in the workplace and to revent stigma (corbière et al., 2014b)” (vornholt et al., 2018, p. 49). “under the ips model, management of disclosure can occur in a flexible and collaborative way while honouring client preferences” (allott et al., 2013, p. 340). “education is required for employers, rehabilitation professionals, and employees without the support of a supported employment agency to increase understanding of disability discrimination legislation and workplace accommodations” (mcdowell & fossey, 2015, p. 201). - theme: contact coding rule: reduce mental workplace discrimination through increased contact. exemplary quotes: “research findings suggest that there is strong evidence that contact between the general public and people with psychiatric disabilities may be an effective approach for addressing prejudicial attitudinal change (e.g., corrigan et al., 2001, 2002; wood & wahl, 2004)” (burke et al., 2013, p. 34). “the logistic regression results appear to indicate that less stigmatising attitudes are associated with reduced avoidance and discrimination, while greater knowledge and reported contact are associated with positive treatment” (rosetto et al., 2019, p. 146). “in addition to a change in attitude on the part of employers, it is important to recognise that this will only happen with the courage of people with disability who are prepared to face potential prejudice and ignorance and ‘come out’ as here and able to challenge disability discrimination in the workplace” (darcy et al., 2016, p. 1264). “once the effects of the underlying medical condition are made known by oh to the employer, they will be in a position not only to...but also make any adjustments necessary...” (roberts, 2013, p. 18). “we need to better understand how to integrate effective contact into workplaces and educational settings so that it can have a sustained impact” (henderson & gronholm, 2018, n.p.) chazan & baldwin final feb 19 20 correspondence address: may chazan, gender & women’s studies, trent university, peterborough, on, k9l 0g2; email: maychazan@trentu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 granny solidarity: understanding age and generational dynamics in climate justice movements may chazan trent university, canada melissa baldwin trent university, canada abstract since the 2018 intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc) report, a global shift in consciousness has taken place around the urgency of the earth’s climate crisis. amidst growing panic, teenagers are emerging as key leaders and mobilizers, demanding intergenerational justice and immediate action. they are, however, often depicted as lone revolutionaries or as pawns of adult organizations. these representations obscure the complex and important ways in which climate justice movements are operating, and particularly the ways in which dynamics of age intersect with other axes of power within solidarity efforts in specific contexts. this article explores these dynamics, building on analyses of intersectional and intergenerational solidarity practices. specifically, it delves into detailed analysis of how the seattle group of the raging grannies, a network of older activists, engaged in seattle’s shellno action coalition, mobilizing their age, whiteness, and gender to support racialized and youth activists involved in the coalition, and thus to block shell oil’s rigs from travelling through the seattle harbour en route to the arctic. drawing from a pivotal group discussion between grannies and other coalition members, as well as participant observation and media analysis, it examines the grannies’ practices of solidarity during frontline protests and well beyond. the article thus offers an analysis of solidarity that is both intergenerational and intersectional in approach, while contributing to ongoing work to extend understandings of the temporal, spatial, cognitive, and relational dimensions of solidarity praxis. keywords climate justice; climate change; intergenerational; age; aging; solidarity; gender; race granny solidarity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 245 introduction in october of 2018, signalling a shift in global consciousness, the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc), a group of the world’s leading climate scientists, reported that humans have 12 years to reduce carbon emissions by 45% in order to avoid triggering a series of feedback loops that would make future life on earth untenable (brake, 2018). this declaration of climate crisis amplifies widespread messages of urgency by scientists, land and water protectors, indigenous elders, public figures, and activists (brake, 2018; water docs, 2019b). amidst this growing panic, teenage activists, like greta thunberg, autumn peltier, and jamie margolin, are emerging as world leaders, raising their voices at global summits and inciting mass mobilizations (burton, 2019; water docs, 2019a).1 post 2018, youth leaders are capturing media attention with sophisticated analyses and complex demands. they are calling for deep transformation of global economic systems, away from capitalist-colonial extraction, toward different ways of organizing societies, economies, and lives (margolin, 2019; peltier, 2018; tait, 2019). ultimately, they are demanding intergenerational justice: calling on older generations, particularly those who have reaped the benefits of wealth accumulation and technological advancement over their lifetimes and who now hold the balance of global power, to radically change their actions, beliefs, and lifestyles now in order to prevent the mass suffering and extinction of generations to come (eisen, mykitiuk & scott, 2018; winter, 2017). they are repeatedly questioning how older people in positions of power – many of them parents and grandparents – can continue to protect their own comforts knowing that they are putting future life at risk. while these youth leaders are truly remarkable, dominant media representations of youth-led climate justice uprisings depict them as lone revolutionaries within a global movement replete with generational divisions (e.g., cohen, 2019; tait, 2019).2,3 such representations are, however, not 1 there are many critiques of how media representations centre white activists, like greta, as leaders, while erasing indigenous, black, and brown activists (frazer-carroll, 2019). indeed, there are many prominent youth activists of colour in the climate justice movement, including tokota iron eyes, mari copeny, artemisa xakriabá, ridhima pandey, alexandria villaseñor, ayakha melithafa, xiuhtezcatl martinez, isra hirshi, and others (burton, 2019). further, while the current visibility, media prominence, and vast numbers of youth mobilizing for climate justice might be new, youth mobilization around climate change far predates 2018 (e.g., winona laduke and severn suzuki addressing the un in 1977 and 1992, respectively (honor the earth, 2019; united nations, 2017)). 2 climate justice is “a broad and unsettled concept” and framework for global resistance that exposes the unequal and inequitable impacts of climate change (black, milligan & heynen, 2016, p. 286). diverse climate justice movements centre social injustice rooted in inequality between groups who have most benefited from global extractive development, and those who are and will be most impacted. they also expose how those in positions to make immediate and material changes towards radically reducing carbon emissions are also those who profit from extractivism. climate justice discourses link “environmentalism” to intersecting analyses of may chazan & melissa baldwin studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 246 based on grounded analysis of intergenerational and age dynamics within climate justice organizing, and thus they fall short. the complex age dynamics at play are obscured amidst this global imaginary, as are the particularities of how intergenerational solidarities are understood and practiced in different contexts.4 meanwhile, the ways in which intergenerational politics and relationships are practiced in response to the climate crisis hold enormous repercussions for future life on earth (winter, 2017). a number of key questions thus emerge: what roles are older people playing in climate justice mobilizations and coalitions? how are intergenerational solidarities understood and practiced within different contexts? how are dynamics of age and generation intersecting with other axes of difference – race, gender, geography, ancestry – within these climate justice efforts? this article explores these questions, drawing from the authors’ longstanding research with older women activists across north america. we investigate the ways in which one group of older women, the seattle chapter of the raging grannies,5 worked in solidarity as part of a multifaceted anti-oil campaign – specifically through their actions at protests, roles in organizing spaces, and commitments to personal (un)learning. our analysis builds from five years of research with a network called the raging grannies. elsewhere we have written about how some raging grannies groups, as groups of predominantly older (60s through 80s, and hence of the early baby global wealth disparity, ongoing (settler) colonialism, capitalist extraction and profiteering, border imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and more (mersha, 2018; margolin, 2019). 3 in widespread media representations, these teen activists are often depicted alone, speaking to immense audiences of adults who hold power (e.g., tait, 2019; water docs, 2019a). moreover, youth leaders are frequently described as the “solution” or the “hope,” while older people are represented in opposition as the “problem.” this divisive rhetoric further erases intergenerational dynamics and obscures the roles and relationships of younger and older people within this movement (see winter, 2017). this centering of youth as inspiring revolutionaries in the post2018 climate response has been critiqued as polarizing young environmentalists in opposition to a homogenous generation of environmentally destructive boomers (e.g., cohen, 2019). 4 “solidarity,” a hopeful political concept with roots in labour movement organizing, is frequently deployed as a model of political engagement that holds possibilities for working across differences in power toward common goals for social change (gaztambide-fernández, 2012; featherstone, 2012). “solidarity” has been critiqued and reimagined, particularly by transnational feminist and indigenous scholars, who challenge assumptions of similarity among “women” or across indigenous/settler positions, paying explicit attention to solidarities across differences in power and privilege (mohanty, 2003) and offering compelling re-imaginings of relational and interdependent solidarities (snelgrove, dahmoon & corntassel, 2014). 5 the raging grannies are a network of older women activists who mobilize for a variety of social and environmental causes. the raging grannies first organized in 1987 in victoria (canada), as peace activists imaginatively and humorously protesting the appearance of u.s. submarines carrying nuclear warheads in the victoria harbor. their humour captured the imaginations of other older women across turtle island: now, over 100 groups span the continent, and some even exist abroad (see www.raginggrannies.org). these groups, though selfdirected and distinct, share the tactic of mobilizing ageist stereotypes of “little old ladies” in parodic performances, with colourful shawls, large hats, aprons, and other props (roy, 2004; sawchuk, 2009; goldman, chazan, & baldwin, 2018). granny solidarity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 247 boomer cohort) white settler women, are practicing solidarity-building with indigenous-led movements in the canadian context (chazan, 2016); about assumptions of older women’s feminist politics, specifically presumptions of their limited intersectional analysis or awareness (chazan & baldwin, 2016); and about motivations for engaging in activisms in later life more broadly (chazan, baldwin, & whattam, 2018).. we focus here on the seattle raging grannies’ roles in the shellno action coalition, which in 2015 organized a series of sophisticated and impactful land and water actions, protesting arctic oil extraction and the presence of shell oil’s drilling rigs in the port of seattle, on coast salish, xwmǝɵkwǝy̓ǝm (musqueam), and skwxwú7mesh (squamish) territories. specifically, we explore some of the complex age dynamics within this climate justice coalition,6 in which over 15 groups explicitly organized around a logic of intersectional and intergenerational solidarity. by this logic, those most impacted by climate change (youth, indigenous communities, people of colour) were intended to lead, while those occupying relative positions of privilege (white, middle class, and so on, including the raging grannies) were meant to offer tactical support. drawing closely from research at the raging grannies biannual international “unconvention” held in seattle in 2016, we consider what we can learn from the raging grannies’ practices, as well as from their coalitional partners’ reflections and feedback. in so doing, we extend analysis of age and intergenerational dynamics (as they intersect with other systems of power and difference) within climate justice mobilizations specifically (greenfield, 2019), and within relationships of solidarity more generally (binnie & klesse, 2012). we argue that, during the 2015 shellno actions, the raging grannies mobilized their age together with their gender and whiteness to confer protection from the police, for themselves and for more targeted coalition members. we also explore how dynamics of age, gender, and race informed their roles and relationships in other organizing spaces beyond frontline protests. context and methodology the seattle raging grannies unconvention opened with a panel of predominantly younger, indigenous and/or racialized activists: eight nongranny activists from the shellno action coalition, with whom the grannies had been nurturing relationships since before the 2015 actions. rather than open their gathering with presentations from grannies themselves – many of whom are seasoned older activists who continue to work tirelessly in many 6 this is one of many protests against oil extraction, profiteering, and pipelines, as part of the climate justice movement, and as intertwined with indigenous land protection and sovereignty, and and anticapitalist challenges to extreme wealth (e.g., challenges to the dakota access pipeline at standing rock and by the unist’ot’en people; see rowe & simpson, 2017; noisecat & spice, 2016). may chazan & melissa baldwin studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 248 movements – these older, mostly white settler women chose to position themselves as listeners first. we take this observation as our starting point for this article. our analysis focuses on this panel discussion, in which the grannies posed a critical question to themselves as a movement: how could they (i.e., raging grannies) do solidarity better? the panel was moderated by a member of seattle raging grannies, who we call “granny x” to maintain her privacy, and included the following coalition members (listed in speaking order): panelist 1, a younger woman of colour and founder of women of colour speak out; panelist 2, an indigenous (tlingit, haida, and tsimshian) woman who identified as a spiritual activist and has directed both idle no more washington and native women rising; panelist 3, a young black woman who was organizing with got green, a racial and climate justice organization; panelist 4, a young man of colour who organized with rising tide seattle; panelist 5, a younger white woman activist, writer, and co-founder of 350 seattle; panelist 6, an older white woman who was part of the red noses affinity group, which offered legal and frontline action support and police liaison; and panelist 7, a white woman who identified as a spiritual activist and engaged in direct action. the discussion centred the perspectives of the first three panelists, which granny x explained was to recognize that racialized, indigenous and youth activists are often the most impacted, hardest working, and least recognized within activist coalitions. panelists reflected thoughtfully on what they had learned through their experiences, to an audience of approximately 100 grannies from over 12 geographically diverse groups. the shellno action coalition was organized with an understanding of intergenerational and racial equity and justice, and a recognition that the impacts of climate change are uneven (kaijser & kronsell, 2014; margolin, 2019; mersha, 2018). though this mobilization took place before the pivotal 2018 ipcc report, this coalition (like others globally) already centred the needs, perspectives, and voices of young, indigenous, and racialized activists. the actions to block the passage of arctic drilling rigs took place on land, in water, and in mid-air. coalition members organized through varied tactics: confident swimmers took to kayaks; tlingit and haida singers and drummers shared music, dance, and prayer on the deck of a renewable energy barge; artists created massive banners to close off a train terminal and elaborate lanterns to move through the water; and raging grannies locked themselves and their rocking chairs to train tracks.7 we base our analysis on several sources of information. first, at the unconvention we recorded the two-hour opening panel discussion (with permission), offering the recording and transcript back to the organizers and 7 for coverage of these actions, see democracy now, 2015; kaplan, 2015; and ryan, 2015. granny solidarity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 249 panelists.8 most directly, our analysis draws on our close thematic readings of this transcript, including the moderator’s comments and the question and answer period that followed. second, we texture this analysis with close readings of media coverage of the shellno actions, including pieces from large news outlets as well as movement-generated social media. third, we contextualize our analysis with our participant observation undertaken at other gatherings and actions. we are aware that our focus on the raging grannies within the shellno mobilization lends itself to a critique of how this could reinforce the prominence of white activists in a movement that is seeking to instead shift this power dynamic. yet, we also believe that in the context of existing climate coalitions there is value in understanding how older white women are practicing solidarities across all forms of difference – including instances in which their coalitional partners experience this as both meaningful and insufficient. we seek to understand the operations of whiteness in combination with age, gender, and so on within the shellno effort. our example concerns “older” white women in solidarity with “younger” racialized and indigenous activists, but we also recognize the important work of older indigenous and racialized activists within climate justice struggles broadly and the need for more attention to their contributions (meadows, thurston & lagendyk, 2009; water docs, 2019b). though shellno predated the 2018-2019 youth uprisings, the dynamics and lessons learned remain as relevant as ever. doing intergenerational and intersectional solidarities we turn now to our conceptual framework. we draw on a growing body of critical scholarship on “intersectional solidarities” – that is, political/social struggles carried out collaboratively by those who hold different privileges, oppressions, and positions vis-à-vis these struggles, and who explicitly seek to account for how these multiple intersecting axes of power inform their relationships and efforts (bilge, 2011; mohanty, 2003; tormos, 2017). this work thus attends to difference – without erasing it or requiring “innocence and sameness as prerequisites” (olwan, 2015, p. 90; mohanty, 2003) – while also exposing the potential for epistemic violence and other nuanced workings of power within coalitional politics (e.g., boudreau morris, 2017; snelgrove, dhamoon & corntassel, 2014; walia, 2012). while dynamics of gender, race, geography, ancestry, are class are centred within much of this intersectional solidarity work, power relations associated with age and generation are rarely incorporated into these analyses. at the same time, there exists a small body of scholarship on intergenerational solidarity, but much of this work is less engaged with critical decolonial and antiracist analyses 8 this panel was a closed meeting as part of the raging grannies gathering, intended as a space for internal discussions of their practices and ongoing learning. may chazan & melissa baldwin studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 250 (binnie & klesse 2012; cooper, 2014). this article’s core conceptual contribution is therefore to offer one grounded analysis of solidarity practices that is both intersectional and intergenerational in approach (chazan, 2016; bilge, 2011). we draw on scholarship that conceptualizes solidarity as praxis, understanding solidarity as a doing – as contingent and ongoing practices of forging relations through political struggle to challenge forms of oppression (chazan, 2016; gaztambide-fernández, 2012). attending to how age intersects with race, gender, and ancestry, we consider how a praxis of solidarity in the shellno coalition comprised not only one-off, frontline actions taken during protest, but also ongoing relationship-building behind the scenes, thus conceptualizing solidarity as a “long-term commitment to structural change” (arvin, tuck & morill, p. 19, cited in flowers 2015, p. 35). further, we consider how the grannies’ solidarity practices involved the internal work of grappling with dominant white settler epistemologies and destabilizing their own certainty (boudreau morris, 2017; langley, 2018; regan, 2010). we draw on flowers, who argues that “solidarity means decentring ourselves… confronting the impulse to claim to know or have authority over a struggle” (2015, p. 35), and on adele sholock (2012), who explores how white settler activists might practice epistemic “uncertainty” to unbound their solidarities from colonial and white-centric logics. as we consider how age shapes solidarity as praxis, we bring our analysis into dialogue with emerging scholarship on aging and social movements, and specifically on older women’s roles in working for social change (e.g. meadows et al., 2009; chazan, baldwin & whattam, 2018). scholars in this area note how sexism and ageism (among other systems of power) shape older women’s ways of organizing and experiences of discrimination, and they debunk dominant discourses of social movements as the domain of youth (chazan, baldwin & evans, 2018). moreover, where other critical movements across north america are concerned (including intersectional feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-poverty movements), older white women are frequently assumed to dominate organizing processes with little awareness of their own privilege and limitations (e.g., chazan & baldwin, 2016). critiques of white-centric and racist “white feminism” are often specifically linked to age and applied unilaterally to older white women, even though this kind of “feminism” can certainly exist among younger white women as well (chazan & baldwin, 2016; cargle, 2018; frazer-carroll, 2019). by attending to dynamics of gender, race, and age concurrently, we engage with and intervene in some of these assumptions. most pertinently, we bring this conceptual frame – a critical intersectional and intergenerational analysis of solidarity – to scholarship on climate justice organizing: while there is widespread understanding that youth and future generations will be inequitably impacted, here too there has been little attention to how age operates and is mobilized within coalitional politics (winter, 2017). in popular discourse, older generations (”boomers”) tend to granny solidarity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 251 be depicted as either helplessly vulnerable to the environmental crisis (e.g., paterson-cohen, 2017), or as apolitical, frail, indifferent, or “the problem” (e.g., eisen, mykitiuk & scott, 2018). tropes of the old handing the responsibility of a burning future over to the young pervade (e.g., council of canadians, 2019). as nicole greenfield (2019) suggests, we urgently need further analysis of how intergenerational dynamics intersect with other systems of power within climate justice movements (see also shell, 2019; eisen, mykitiuk & scott, 2018). grannies on the front lines: mobilizing gender, age, and race when the seattle raging grannies joined activists of all ages to protest at the frontlines of the 2015 shellno actions, they contested narratives of all boomers as “the problem” in the climate crisis, and of older people as apolitical and frail (patersen-cohen, 2017; sawchuk, 2009). in several actions, they mobilized their privilege as older white women along with ageist assumptions about their bodies in two strategic ways. first, the grannies practiced intergenerational solidarity by deploying their well-known “little old ladies” parody (their satirical protest performance of ageist and sexist stereotypes, intended to draw attention and subvert such assumptions) to divert media and police attention, allowing younger activists to carry on with other key organizing. in one prominent action, several grannies locked themselves down on rocking chairs over train tracks in order to block oil trains from passing through to the port of seattle. the grannies dressed in feather boas, bright hats, aprons, and shawls, and hung photos of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren around their necks; they sat chained to their rocking chairs, knitting and drinking tea. one media account described the grannies’ rocker lockdown as a “visual victory,” specifically describing how the eldest granny “[wore] her standard granny uniform of sunhat and flowing skirt, wielding every one of her 92 years like a weapon. being a raging granny is all about making the most of an older woman’s moral clout” (kaplan, 2015). this visual victory was also a tactical victory: panelists at the 2016 unconvention explained that by holding the line in their rockers for many hours, the grannies kept the police busy and freed up the younger activists to carry on with other organizing. as one panelist explained, the lock-down began with a larger group of younger activists chained to oil drums alongside the grannies. as the police arrived, the grannies insisted that they would stay to the end, which allowed the younger activists to carry out the next set of actions and avoid one more direct encounter with police. at the same time, the “how” of this diversion reveals important dynamics of age: the grannies were making strategic choices of where, when, and how to resist based on their bodies (i.e., their bodily needs as older people as well as their white privilege and assumed frailty). many grannies would not have been able to participate in actions in kayaks, for may chazan & melissa baldwin studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 252 instance, because of mobility challenges. staying on land, being seated moreor-less comfortably in rockers for the five-hour protest (which ended in their arrest) best suited their bodily abilities and coincided with effective political strategy for the broader coalition. their little old lady parody was thus more than just attention-grabbing; it linked to the needs, assumptions, and privileges that accompany their bodies, and made space for younger activists to carry out other coalitional work. second, the grannies’ mobilized their social positions not only to divert attention but also to confer protection to younger activists of colour specifically. mobilizing ageist assumptions of older women (as frail, apolitical, and innocent), and recognizing that their whiteness protected them from disproportionate police brutality, the grannies were the ones to stay on the tracks and be arrested. as granny x explained, the grannies anticipated that police would be relatively gentle with their old, white bodies, and that in their rocking chairs and aprons they would be deemed a very low threat. knowing they would be treated better than any others in the coalition, which proved true, they stayed to relieve younger racialized activists from this police encounter. as the five grannies held their ground, the police took their time to cut them free as delicately as possible. unlike other younger and racialized organizers who were arrested and held during the course of the shellno actions, the five grannies who were arrested were released immediately after processing. panelist 6, also an older white woman, explained: [this] never happened before in my experience of doing anything. the grannies were so gingerly treated when they were arrested. i was one of the police liaisons and i was told that we could send a couple of ‘support’ people with them in the van – they weren’t going to be cuffed – to the police station! granny x further explained that their gentle treatment was in stark contrast to the police brutality inflicted upon young racialized people by the same officers: it is one of the most important things grannies can do, is to show up to these actions and protect younger activists of colour. if the seattle grannies have learned nothing else, we have learned that. we have terrible racist police in seattle, terrible, racist, violent police. […] they always treat the grannies really nicely. so, if we are there, it’s some protection for our friends. panelists and the seattle grannies alike felt this way of conferring protection was a most tangible expression of frontline solidarity and support to people of colour’s organizing in general, and this sentiment was widely supported by the raging grannies in the audience. indeed, when panelist 1 responded to granny x’s assertion with the statement, “we need the white allies and our white elders to come and stand in front, to be that shield,” the granny audience cheered, many nodding eagerly. the seattle grannies knew that the granny solidarity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 253 combination of ageist assumptions and white privilege would likely protect them from serious danger, and they wielded these assumptions to act as a barrier. what emerges, then, is that on the front lines, youth were not resisting alone. the ways in which panelists discussed the raging grannies’ contributions suggest that the strategic roles these older women took on supported and bolstered the work of younger coalition members. as well, age, and its intersections with gender and race, was operating in many crucial ways to inform solidarity practices – ways that both subverted and mobilized ageist assumptions and aging bodies. grannies mobilized their privilege as white women, a tactic often discussed in writings about solidarity across difference (e.g., mohanty, 2003; sholock, 2012), but they also deployed marginalizing age-based stereotypes, to ultimately divert attention from and confer protection to other coalition members. moreover, the intergenerational nature of this coalition augmented the creativity and inventiveness of its tactics – tactics tailored to differing bodily abilities. what might have been assumed to be limiting about older age became a valuable tool to the intergenerational resistance. grannies behind-the-scenes: deepening understandings and practices of solidarity the shellno coalition’s frontline protests were successful at stopping the passage of shell’s oil rigs to the arctic, in part because of intergenerationality and diversity of tactics. yet, as the unconvention panel explored, the coalition’s workings were far from perfect. our research revealed three aspects of how the grannies’ solidarity practices extended or could have extended beyond the frontlines: first, how the grannies could have mobilized their intersecting age, race, and gender in behind-the-scenes organizing to confront racism and sexism within the coalition; second, how the grannies did extend their solidarity through continuing relationships and by taking a posture of uncertain learning in the shellno panel; and third, how panelists also invited the grannies to build solidarity with ancestors and generations unborn. we highlight how each of these temporal and spatial extensions of conceptualizing solidarity challenge assumptions of solidarity as confined to impermanent, strategic frontline actions. these shifts require deconstructing white settler certainties with continued attention to dynamics of age, gender, and race. panelists at the seattle unconvention’s opening suggested that the grannies could have further mobilized their positions and perceived moral authority to confront sexism and racism playing out behind the scenes within the coalition – but reflected that the grannies did not fully take this on. for instance, these panelists noted that in organizing meetings there were a few “toxic white males” who manipulated their power and authority to try to may chazan & melissa baldwin studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 254 control the actions of indigenous and racialized organizers, and that these dynamics were not meaningfully confronted: no one ever confronts the toxic white male, and because of that, the people of colour in the room, who are marginalized to begin with, they don’t feel like they have the support to also confront the toxic white male…. we need our white allies, all our white allies, but particularly our elder white allies, to step up … do it strongly and do it so everyone else sees it, and do it so that the people of colour and the marginalized people in the room know that they have back up. that is, in many ways, what we didn’t have during shellno. (panelist 1) several panelists noted that the grannies were well positioned to stand up to this behaviour (by deploying their white privilege and age-related moral authority) and that, by not intervening, they gave up opportunities to make space for racialized, indigenous, and youth voices. though this discussion unveiled some of the ways grannies might have mis-stepped in their solidarity efforts, we observed a predominant sense of gratitude for the learning emerging from this conversation, among the seattle grannies and the wider audience. panelist 1’s remarks about needing white allies to step up to toxic white men in organizing spaces were repeatedly met with applause from the audience, including from the seattle grannies. in conversations following this panel, the seattle grannies expressed their commitment to keep working to do better in all the organizing spaces, and their new understanding of the specific roles they can play behind the scenes as older white women. with the exception of one comment in the q & a (from a granny from elsewhere in the usa, defending the actions of racist police in protest spaces), all of the responses we witnessed from grannies were rooted in their commitment to still learning. this call on the grannies to confront racism was also a call to confront how white knowledges (and the privileging of white knowledge's dominance and effectiveness) tend to scaffold organizing spaces in racist ways that go unchecked by white organizers like the grannies (in line with hunt & holmes, 2015). panelist 2, for instance, explained that the presence and dominance of such toxic white males betray not only a difference in privilege and power, but also a friction in the very values and ideas that underpin activism. she explained that the grannies have a responsibility to confront toxic white males, but also to confront how an implicit privileging of white ways of knowing seeps into organizing structures. through this discussion, it became evident that the grannies’ positions did not render them inconsequential to climate justice organizing, but rather conferred specific roles for them as co-conspirators in all of the spaces and moments of the coalition. we also observed how the grannies’ missteps gave way to this important panel, which offered knowledges and relationship-building not only to the seattle grannies, but to the international network of raging grannies – a reminder of the importance of persisting relationships of solidarity through messiness and uncertainty. the grannies’ willingness to granny solidarity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 255 listen and learn from their mistakes catalyzed the panel’s critical discussion about how intergenerational solidarity could be practiced within climate justice organizing widely, and about how age might be further mobilized by older activists to support youth leadership. while this specific dialogue offered learning about the missed opportunities, the 2016 panel is also an example of how grannies’ solidarity practices extended into longer-standing relationship-building, learning, and listening outside of frontline action. that is, the grannies were clearly still building relationships with coalition members at this unconvention, one year after the shellno actions. and, in organizing this panel, they centred the knowledge of younger women of colour and indigenous women while positioning themselves as learners and listeners. by design, the panel asked the grannies in the audience to step back. granny x introduced the panel as a way to extend her own learning from the coalition and to share this learning with grannies around the continent, recognizing it as an unending process. as part of this process, the grannies encouraged each other to sit with the discomfort of having their whiteness exposed and confronted: we ask you, our grannies in the audience, to do a few things. you may hear some things that make you uncomfortable. so, we ask you to be willing to experience discomfort; it’s not always a bad thing. it can be a good thing to challenge and stretch ourselves…. if you do experience discomfort, do your best to be present and keep listening, rather than, for example, trying to think of responses. (granny x) the grannies prioritized women of colour and indigenous women on the panel, structuring it so that they would always speak first. this practice of prioritizing those whose voices are often less heard was also a broader approach to solidarity, modelling “some of the things that we seattle grannies learned through the whole shellno process” (granny x). the panel itself, then, flipped age expectations of who is the knower/speaker and who is the learner/listener, while also challenging white-dominant assumptions about whose knowledge is most valid, authoritative, and legitimate (margolin, 2019). several panelists, particularly the first three, reinforced the idea that doing solidarity, for the grannies, should involve this kind of ongoing cognitive work to unsettle their own epistemic certainty. in fact, panelists 1 and 3 explicitly encouraged the grannies to extend their solidarity into organizing spaces and through adopting daily lived practices of uncertainty – that is, to ask themselves regularly why they believe they know, and how their knowledges might uphold colonial and white supremacist systems (sholock, 2012). panelist 1’s impact on grannies became clear in the weeks following the unconvention, which speaks to the grannies’ openness to learning to practice uncertainty, listen, and challenge their own epistemic dominance. this was evident through various email communications and facebook posts from different granny groups. several grannies stayed on in seattle, for instance, may chazan & melissa baldwin studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 256 to take a separate workshop from this panelist to learn more about decolonizing their own activist and solidarity practices. one granny later shared with the network her own learning about the powerful effects of practicing solidarities that bring together while respecting political, cultural, epistemic, and experiential differences, beckoning other grannies to draw on their learning to support standing rock mobilizations against the dakota access oil pipeline. throughout these email exchanges, the tone was not to assume that there would be a role for the grannies, or what that role should be, but to ask whether and how their presence or resources might be wanted – always referring this approach back to the panelists’ reflections. this deepening conversation challenged assumptions that all older white women are uncritical white feminists (chazan & baldwin, 2016) with no role in intersectional climate justice organizing, while further extending ways of doing solidarities into these internal processes of unsettling. observing younger racialized activists taking this time with the grannies also confounded popular presumptions that there is futility to investing in educating older people (winter, 2017). thus, we witnessed the grannies extending their solidarity into nurturing relationships, continuing their learning, and embracing uncertainty. we also note how they entered into an even deeper process of rejecting expectations that they, as older white women, necessarily have expertise, by learning from younger indigenous and racialized activists. lastly, panelist 2’s reflections (drawing on indigenous epistemologies) further rupture the temporal and spatial limits typically imposed on understandings of activism and solidarity, even beyond organizing spaces and internal unsettling work, while extending intergenerational solidarity out to future generations: what would i say to these people walking by who know nothing about what was going on? i would ask them, “what did you do when shell oil was here? what are you going to tell your grandkids 50 years from now? what part did you play in this?” so, i just want people to know that this work, it’s ourit’s not even about activism… it’s my responsibility, it’s my duty to do this work for the next seven generations. (panelist 2) noting that dominant colonial knowledges inhibit this kind of cross-temporal solidarity, she called on audience members to instead enter into solidarities rooted not only in friendship and responsibility to one another, but also to ancestors past, generations to come, and to non-human relations. extending thinking about intergenerational solidarities back and forward through time, she explained to the grannies that taking on their responsibilities as the ancestors to generations to come would require them to shift their timeframe and goals well beyond immediate action and winnable coalition work. as she reflected, solidarity is not time-limited, it is not about one-off actions, nor is it about short-term goals. instead, it is about caring for past, current, and future life, for human and non-human entities, for ancestors and those yet unborn, granny solidarity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 257 which all require expanding the goals, strategies, and assumptions that are often considered to be constitutive of solidarity. this idea also challenges old-versus-young polarizing age rhetoric to instead understand that we are all ancestors to future life, and we are all in relation to our own ancestors, with responsibilities to act accordingly (flowers, 2015; snelgrove, dhamoon & corntassel, 2014). and, critically, her example illuminates how sometimes the motives behind acting in solidarity are conditioned by capitalist and colonial defaults that privilege products and outcomes over processes and relationships. this panelist asked the grannies to consider how indigenous knowledges might offer other ways of thinking about solidarities, expanding even further beyond tactical considerations and one-off actions. overall, then, the solidarity practices revealed in this research suggest that grannies engaged in a temporally and spatially extended praxis of intersectional and intergenerational solidarity – on the frontlines, in organizing spaces, through transforming their thinking, and into the ancestral realm. indeed, this multifaceted solidarity-building also requires unsettling the dominant epistemologies that tend to frame solidarity in such a temporally and spatially bounded way in the first place. what becomes important is that an isolated action or protest is not the only way of practicing solidarity; practicing being in meaningful relationships, making spaces for others, (un)learning, and listening are all also significant tactics (sholock, 2012). and, critically, the raging grannies been invited into this work specifically from their positions as older white women. conclusions while youth are leading climate justice uprisings around the world – and indeed have been engaged in this work for some time – dominant perceptions of them acting alone amid stark generational divides depict a far too simplistic version of these mobilizations. yet, as noted, there exists limited analysis of how age and generation interweave dynamics of race, gender, class, ancestry, and geography within climate justice efforts or elsewhere in solidarity movements. as the earth continues to heat up, it is crucial to better understand how intergenerational dynamics are, and could be better, practiced in climate justice mobilizing, and how age and aging can shape and strengthen solidarity building. this article offers the example of the raging grannies and the shellno coalition as one entry point into this much-needed intergenerational and intersectional analysis – an example that illuminates grounded successes, missteps, practices, intentions, and lessons learned. in the shellno coalition, the raging grannies were invited into very specific roles related to their age, gender, and whiteness – roles that did not compromise, but rather honoured, the brilliance, energy, knowledges, and leadership of younger activists. on the frontlines, the grannies deployed both their parody of ageist and sexist may chazan & melissa baldwin studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 258 stereotypes and their white privilege to divert attention and confer protection to younger indigenous and racialized activists. this frontline work was an example of meaningful tactical solidarity in action, and its practice was clearly infused with age dynamics. beyond the frontlines, in other organizing spaces, younger coalition members suggested that the grannies could have more proactively confronted sexism and racism by similarly drawing on the moral authority they hold as older white women. such solidarity practices might have created space for racialized, indigenous, and youth activists to offer even more behind-the-scenes leadership. where the grannies were extending their solidarity practices beyond the frontlines was in their ongoing relationship-building with coalition members, as evident in the organizing of the panel discussion that opened their 2016 unconvention. by situating themselves as learners/listeners and younger panelists as speakers/educators, they demonstrated a humbleness, or even a desire for humbleness, in their own knowing. the importance of this humbleness, particularly given their age and whiteness, was also reinforced by panelists. panelists called on the grannies to deepen their work toward unlearning the assumption that, as older white people, they have more experience and know best, and to learn from youth knowledges, racialized knowledges, and indigenous knowledges. these reflections also indicated the panelists’ investment in meaningful exchange with this network of older women, challenging assumptions of older white feminists as uncritical of their own privilege, assumptions that youth and racialized activists do not want or need support from older white people, and assumptions that older white women do not have a role in confronting racism (e.g., chazan, 2016). through these continued relationships, moreover, panelists invited the grannies to carry their solidarities into an ever more temporally and generationally expansive practice; they challenged grannies to reorient their activism, taking on ancestral responsibilities, and acting for all future life. our research contributes conceptually to scholarship on solidarity by bringing intersectional and intergenerational analyses together to offer insight into how age, race, and gender shape grounded solidarity practices (e.g., brown & yaffe, 2014; gaztambide-fernández, 2012). it also extends conceptions of solidarity as praxis to include the internal work of unlearning white settler certainty (sholock, 2012; boudreau morris, 2017). importantly, we offer an example of how older people – attending to dynamics of age – can be and are integral to critical, intersectional climate justice organizing. this kind of analysis is crucial to counteract rhetoric of generational divides. in this pivotal moment, generationally polarizing discourses are far too simplistic, and their tendency to incite and reify the divisions they portray is potentially dangerous to the kind of intergenerational and intersectional movement-building needed to protect life on this planet. granny solidarity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 259 references arvin, m,, tuck, e., & morill, a. 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(2018). black lives and climate justice: courage and power in defending communities and mother earth. third world quarterly, 39(7), 1421-1434. mohanty, c. t. (2003). feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. durham, nc: duke university press. noisecat, j. b., & spice, a. (2016, aug. 9). the history and future of resistance. jacobin magazine. retrieved from www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/standing-rock-dakota-accesspipeline-protest/ olwan, d. m. 2015. on assumptive solidarities in comparative settler colonialisms. feral feminisms, 4, 89-102. paterson-cohen, m. (2017, nov. 10). the intersection of resilience, climate change, and aging. critical gerontology blog. retrieved from https://criticalgerontology.com/climate-changeaging/ peltier, a. (2018, mar. 22). wikwemikong first nation representative autumn peltier spoke to un general assembly. cbc news. retrieved from www.cbc.ca/player/play/1192177731983/ regan, p. (2010). unsettling the settler within. vancouver, bc: ubc press. rowe, j., & simpson, m. (2017, oct. 9). lessons from the frontlines of anti-colonial pipeline resistance. waging nonviolence. retrieved from https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/lessons-front-lines-anti-colonial-unistoten-pipelineresistance/ roy, c. (2004). the raging grannies: wild hats, cheeky songs, and witty actions for a better world. montreal, qc: black rose books. granny solidarity studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 244-261, 2019 261 ryan, j. (2015, may 18). hundreds of ‘kayaktivists’ in seattle protest shell’s arctic drilling. npr. retrieved from www.npr.org/2015/05/18/407619645/hundreds-of-kayaktivists-inseattle-protest-shells-arctic-drilling sawchuk, d. (2009). the raging grannies: defying stereotypes and embracing aging through activism. journal of women & aging 19, 171-185. shell, l. 2019. intergenerational activism: achieving environmental justice. the bubble. retrieved from www.thebubble.org.uk/current-affairs/intergenerational-activismachieving-environmental-justice/ sholock, a. (2012). methodology of the privileged: white anti‐racist feminism, systematic ignorance, and epistemic uncertainty. hypatia, 27(4), 701-714. snelgrove, c., dhamoon, r. k., & corntassel, j. (2014). unsettling settler colonialism: the discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with indigenous nations. decolonization: indigeneity, education, & society, 3, 1-32. tait, a. (2019, june 6). greta thunberg: how one teenager became the voice of the planet. wired. retrieved from www.wired.co.uk/article/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis tormos, f. (2017). intersectional solidarity. politics, groups & identities, 5(4), 707-720. united nations. (2017, oct. 27). listen to the children – severn cullis-suzuki's famous speech on the environment (1992) [video file]. retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgds8ts63ck walia, h. (2012). moving beyond a politics of solidarity towards a practice of decolonization. in a. choudry, j. hanley & e. shragge (eds.), organize! building from the local for global justice (pp. 240-253). toronto, on: between the lines. water docs. (2019a, mar. 15). how one girl from sweden sparked a global youth-led climate movement. water docs. retrieved from www.waterdocs.ca/water-talk/2019/3/15/how-onegirl-sparked-a-global-climate-movement water docs. (2019b, mar. 8). the women who walk for the water: grandmother josephine mandamin's legacy. water docs. retrieved from www.waterdocs.ca/news/2019/3/8/thewomen-who-walk-for-the-water-grandmother-josephines-legacy winter, c. j. (2017). the paralysis of intergenerational justice: decolonizing entangled futures [unpublished doctoral dissertation]. university of sydney, sydney, au. retrieved from https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/18009/winter_cj_thesis.pdf?sequence =1&isallowed=y hallenbeck final correspondence address: jessica hallenbeck, department of geography, university of british columbia, vancouver bc v6t 1z4; email: jessica@lanternfilms.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 316-317, 2017 creative intervention water ethics: think like a watershed jessica hallenbeck university of british columbia, canada water ethics: think like a watershed is the fifth and final video developed for urban water: innovations for environmental sustainability, a massive open online course (mooc) that explores urban solutions to the global freshwater crisis, characterized by a dwindling supply of and access to freshwater. 1 dr. karen bakker, the professor of the course, approached lantern films to create a series of videos on the topic of water and the built environment. lantern suggested a film series that featured vancouver-based innovations to water infrastructure and design; from a building that uses captured rainwater, to an energy utility that utilizes waste thermal energy to heat a neighbourhood, the videos focus on local urban innovations that reduce freshwater consumption. while the first four videos used in the urban water course are heavily focused on the built form – buildings, energy utilities, neighbourhood design, and creek regeneration – water ethics, featuring interviews with secwepemc scholar dr. dorothy christian cucw'la7 and poet dr. rita wong, asks us to critically think about our relationship with water. dorothy christian brilliantly reframes the discussion about water, moving away from a supply and demand framework to one based on ethics, rights, and relationality. “when i think about ethics, for me it’s a right relationship with the water. for me to be in right relationship with the water is to be sure that i am taking care of it, as it will take care of me” (water ethics, minute 1:04). dorothy’s words are a call for us all to resituate our connections with water by engaging in participatory water ethics: visiting where the water we drink comes from, understanding its flow, and acknowledging how it has been cared for. in the context of vancouver, which is unceded coast salish territory, resituating our relationship with water also entails fundamentally –––––––––––––––––––––––– 1 the video discussed here – water ethics: think like a watershed – may be accessed at https://vimeo.com/198392259 water ethics 317 centering xʷməθkwəy̓əm (musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (squamish), and səlil̓wətaʔɬ (tsleil-waututh) law and stewardship of water. in their introduction to the book downstream, reimagining water, christian and wong argue for a move away from presumptuously “knowing about water to humbly learning with and through water opens new possibilities that would be foreclosed by a colonial mindset” (christian & wong, 2017, p. 10). in british columbia, water is part of a colonial system of governance. 2 indigenous laws and knowledges are largely excluded from decisions about water (harris & simms, 2016). while the aforementioned urban interventions successfully reduce freshwater consumption, they are still based on a colonial mindset of “knowing about” water. what christian and wong are advocating for is a decolonial relationship with water. inspired by what christian and wong had shared, the filmmaking team decided that we wanted to mirror this relationship with water in the film itself. as the directors, cinematographers, and editors of the short film dave shortt and i felt that it was important to visually create an affective relationship with water. we visited and filmed water in different areas of the vancouver watershed. we recorded the sounds of water from the places that we visited, and synced them up with each place, because ethically we wanted to respect the fact that the sounds of water change with each place and with each listener. we also wanted to film a festival that brought people together to care for water, highlighting the ways that this ethic of care, or “right relationship with the water” is being cultivated. essentially, the film was intended to reframe the discussion of water rights by asking all of us to affectively enter an emotional relationship with water: to visit it, to listen to it, and to engage with our responsibilities to water. references bakker, k. (2003). good governance in restructuring water supply: a handbook. ottawa: federation of canadian municipalities. christian, d., & wong, r. (eds.) (2017). downstream: reimagining water. waterloo: wilfrid laurier university press. harris, l., & simms, r. (2016). ‘all of the water that is in our reserves and that is in our territories is ours’: colonial and indigenous water governance in unceded indigenous territories in british columbia (project report). vancouver: canadian water network & water, economics, policy and governance network, university of british columbia. lantern films (2015) water ethics: think like a watershed. vancouver, bc: lantern films/university of british columbia. –––––––––––––––––––––––– 2 “colonial water governance refers to systems of water governance implemented by colonial governments in canada, understood here as: “the range of political, organizational and administrative processes through which communities articulate their interests, their input is absorbed, decisions are made and implemented, and decision makers are held accountable in the development and management of water resources and delivery of water services” (bakker, 2003, p. 3). mensah & tucker-simmons final before ts correspondence address: joseph mensah, faculty of environmental and urban change, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: jmensah@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 1, 81-101, 2021 social (in)justice and rental housing discrimination in urban canada: the case of ethno-racial minorities in the herongate community in ottawa joseph mensah york university, canada daniel tucker-simmons avant law, canada abstract in 2015, the predominantly visible minority immigrant community of herongate, in ottawa, ontario, was slated for redevelopment by its landlord, timbercreek asset management. this redevelopment involved mass eviction of the incumbent tenants, demolition of the existing affordable housing and its replacement with luxury rentals, which, by all indications, are beyond the financial reach of the former herongage tenants. this paper seeks to problematize large-scale residential real estate redevelopment in canada and examine its impact, using the herongate situation as a case study. among other things, it profiles the herongate community, its history and present redevelopment, and explores the legal framework, and the limits thereof, constraining mass evictions of this type in ontario. the findings indicate that the selection of herongate for redevelopment was not fortuitous; generally, racialized and immigrant communities like herongate are disproportionately likely to be selected for large-scale redevelopment projects, and thus subjected to mass-evictions. further results suggest that the dissolution of the herongate community – and the attendant dislocation of its members – has exacted a pronounced social and economic toll and compounded the racial discrimination already experienced by the former herongate residents, most of whom are visible minorities. the paper concludes with an appeal to imbue the redevelopment process with a greater regard for social justice, and a right to housing as a policy solution to address the injustice caused by real estate redevelopment. keywords housing discrimination; mass evictions; social justice; gentrification; ottawa joseph mensah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 82 introduction in his “letter from america,” written as a prologue to danny dorling’s injustice: why social inequality still persists, sam pizzigati (2015) observes that “injustice envelopes us today and assaults us from every direction. we can’t escape it. injustice lurks everywhere we look, everywhere we click. week by week, only the particulars change” (p. xiv). one such particular is what we grapple with in this paper: the mass eviction of a group of lowincome minority renters in the herongate community in ottawa. as amartya sen (2009) points out, “what moves us… is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just… but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate” (p. vii; emphasis added). convinced that some forms of injustice are remediable, this paper sheds light on the herongate situation, and provides reasoned arguments to promote social justice in canada’s housing market, in general, and the herongate community, in particular. the paper draws its theoretical insights from john rawls’s (1971) conception of social justice as fairness and danny dorling’s (2015) analysis of why social inequality persist. in 2015, the corporate landlord of the herongate housing complex, timbercreek asset management, began to implement a phased demolition of its properties in the herongate community. the first phase, which began in 2015, affected some 80 units in herongate (kestler-d’amours, 2018). a notice for the second, which was slated for 2018 and affected 150 units, was served on tenants by may of 2018, with the termination date of september 2018 (kestler-d’amours, 2018). by all indications, the notice complied with the minimum notice requirements and other obligations under the residential tenancies act of ontario. in fact, the tenants in the 150 units have all been evicted; the last ones left the complex in november 2018. media accounts have it that the landlord wants to demolish the herongate units mainly because, from the perspective of the landlord, the affected units are simply beyond repair (schnurr, 2018). couched in the theorization of social justice by rawls (1971) and dorling (2015), this paper examines the dynamics of housing discrimination and mass eviction, using the herongate situation as its main point of departure. more specifically, we examine the causes and manifestations of housing discrimination in canada, and explore whether the herongate situation exemplifies the phenomenon or not. to the extent that the herongate neighbourhood is an ethno-racial enclave, occupied mainly by visible minorities and muslims, we synthesize the extant literature on the formation of ethnic enclaves, the (de)merits of living in ethnic enclaves, and how mass evictions affect people in such neighbourhoods and herongate. finally, we take on the issue of “a right to housing,” and shed light on how mass evictions are regulated in canada in the context of this human rights ethos. there are a number of unique features about herongate that make it particularly well suited for a case study of modern gentrification and housing social (in)justice & rental housing discrimination studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 83 discrimination in canada. for one, the fact that the herongate community is virtually coterminous with the statscan census tract 5050007.02 permits a detailed analysis of the ethno-racial facets of gentrification processes. in addition, herongate’s socio-economic composition makes it an archetypal example of an urban space that is susceptible to the encroachments of contemporary gentrification. it has a high density of people of colour (70%), immigrants (52%), and muslims, and it is relatively poor. further, unlike the dismantling of africville and similar urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 1970s, which were state-led initiatives, the forced displacement of herongate residents was driven entirely by a financialized, corporate landlord, a somewhat newer and understudied phenomenon in the canadian urban context (fields, 2014; mensah, 2002). drawing on the extant literature as well as data from herongate, the specific questions addressed in this paper include the following: what is housing discrimination, and what evidence is there to suggest that it occurs in canada? how and why do ethnic enclaves form? what are the causes of large-scale evictions, and which parts of the city usually attract such fates? how does mass eviction affect its victims? to what extent are the existing canadian regulations on mass evictions efficacious in addressing the herongate situation? we intend to show that, indeed, canadian cities, including ottawa, are not immune to the phenomenon of housing discrimination, and that blacks feature markedly among its victims. while the herongate case study corroborates the extant literature on housing discrimination in canada, as we shall soon see, it exhibits a clear novelty in dealing with people who are, simultaneously, vulnerable to discrimination from the standpoints of their race, religion, and social class. the mutually reinforcing nature of this triple-jeopardy of discrimination makes the herongate situation highly detrimental to the lives of the victims. also, while most of the previous studies deal with the experience of housing discrimination at the micro or individual level, at its core, the herongate case is about the experience of housing discrimination at the macro or group level by way of mass eviction. naturally, then, the ensuing discussion goes beyond matters of individual identity and individual justice to those of collective identity and social justice, thereby eliciting discourses of collective action, social resistance, and mass compensation. in addition to providing much-needed advocacy, and attendant publicity, in support of those evicted from the herongate community and others like them who are fighting against rental discrimination, the paper could serve as a handy backgrounder for social justice and public interest legal practitioners and advocates grappling with housing discrimination in canada. before examining the theoretical base of the study, the next section provides a brief overview of the herongate community. joseph mensah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 84 the herongate community in ottawa: a profile the herongate neighbourhood is situated some seven kilometres south of downtown ottawa and corresponds with census tract number 5050007.02. the neighbourhood is bounded in the north and east by the community of alta vista, in the south by south keys, and in the west by ridgemont. according to the census, herongate had a population of 4,681 in 2016, which represented some 0.35% of ottawa’s total population of 1,23,783 at that time (statistics canada, 2016). beginning in the early 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, herongate attracted an increasing number of immigrants and their families, particularly those of somali origin fleeing civil war. from the 1990s until the present, herongate was transformed incrementally into a predominantly immigrant community. perhaps the most striking feature of the herongate community was the overwhelming presence of visible minorities. by 2016, as many as 70% of the residents in herongate were visible minorities, compared to an overall visible minority proportion of 21.6% in ottawa (statistics canada, 2016). according to the 2016 census, 30.9% of herongate’s resident were blacks, 15.2% were arabs, and 11.8% were south asians; the comparable figures for ottawa in general for these ethnic groups at the time were 6.0%; 3.8%, and 3.1%, respectively. additionally, by 2016, more than half of herongate’s residents were immigrants, while only 19.7% of ottawa’s residents were immigrants (statistics canada 2016). with such a high concentration of visible minorities and immigrants, it was not surprising that many herongagte residents were of low-income background, with some 49.1% of them having incomes of under $40,000 per year by the 2016 census, compared to 21.2% of ottawa’s residents who belonged to this income category then. even though there is no data on housing quality in herongate, anecdotal reports by the residents and the landlord suggest that much of the complex required major repairs or redevelopment entirely. partly for this reason as well as others that are elaborated below, herongate was also an affordable place to live, with significantly lower average rents than alta vista on its northern border as well as much of the rest of ottawa.1 some of the evicted herongate tenants and other tenants from cognate properties owned by the same landlord, together with tenants from nearby properties owned by other landlords, have formed the herongate tenant coalition (htc) to resist the eviction, both through organizing efforts and through a legal application to the ontario human rights tribunal. a 2018 htc census found that approximately 120 of the 150 townhouses slated for demolition were occupied, and provided housing for approximately 550 1 the average rent statistics produced by the canada mortgage and housing corporation do not include specific statistics for herongate. however, reports from 36 evicted tenants suggest that most herongate residents either had to pay significantly higher rents or had to downsize when they moved to other areas of ottawa. social (in)justice & rental housing discrimination studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 85 people, including some 200 children (htc, 2018). moreover, nearly 90% of the tenants captured by the htc census were racial minorities, with somali immigrants accounting for about 44%; a significant proportion of the remainder were arab. the htc census also revealed that a sizeable proportion of the herongate tenants were newcomers to canada; and 21 of the units were homes to people who were receiving support from the rent geared to income (rgi) program in the city (htc, 2018). theoretical grounding this section sets the theoretical context by discussing our conception of social justice, together with our views on why social injustice persists in canada and around the world, drawing primarily on the works of rawls (1971) and dorling (2015), respectively. theorizing social justice: the rawlsian approach given the diversity of perspectives underpinning the regulation of social (in)justice, it is unsurprising that the theorization of social justice remains an area of intense debate. different principles yield different theories, with varying emphasis on themes such as desert, merit, entitlement, equality of opportunity, and equality of outcomes. perhaps the most substantive contemporary theory of social justice comes from the work of john rawls (1971), who sees social justice as a demand for fairness. even though it is virtually impossible to do justice to the rawlsian theory of “justice as fairness,” it is still worthwhile to identify its salient features to help ground our ensuing discussion properly. any fair distribution of benefits and burdens of society is expected to entail equality. however, equality means different things to different people, with some seeing it in terms of equal distribution of outcomes and others in terms of equal distribution of opportunities. rawls (1971) made a ground-breaking contribution to the debate on the relationship between social justice and equality with his emphasis on fairness. his theory starts with a thought experiment in which people find themselves in an “original position” from which they are working together to form a new society. how do individuals in this original position establish the principles of justice for their new society? to address this questions, rawls uses his famous metaphor of a “veil of ignorance” to postulate a situation in which all those who form the new society are ignorant of their place in it: they do not know their own background characteristics such as age, class, creed, place of birth, and gender. rawls argues that to be fair is to be impartial, and the most reasonable way to be impartial, in his view, is to operate behind a veil of ignorance. the overarching argument here is a simple one: even though we joseph mensah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 86 might want to promote our self-interest, because we do not know our own place in society, we will play it safe and ensure that no one group is disadvantaged in order to give advantage to another group. by far the most important aspect of rawls’s (1971) theory for our present study is his difference principle, which posits that inequality in the distribution of scarce goods and services is justified if and only if it serves to increase the advantage of the least favoured groups in society. this is how rawls describes the application of the difference principle: in applying it, one should distinguish between two cases. the first case is that in which the expectations of the least advantaged are indeed maximized… the second case is that in which the expectations of all those better off at least contribute to the welfare of the more unfortunate. (p. 78) invariably, the herongate situation has “winners” and “losers,” with serious social justice implications, which are clearly amenable to a rawlsian analysis. drawing on the difference principle, we urge the powers-that-be to review all aspects of the case to see whether or not the mass eviction stands to increase or decrease the advantage of the least favoured group. rawls’ (1971) difference principle requires us to make the worst-off members of society as well-off as possible in our social justice estimation. in the next section, we examine why social injustice and inequality persist even in a rich country such as canada, drawing on the work of dorling (2015). why social injustice and inequality persist: insights from danny dorling regardless of where one stands in theorizing social (in)justice and inequality, we all have good reasons to appreciate danny dorling’s (2015) recent contribution to the discussion through his book injustice: why social inequality still persists. in this book, dorling examines the myths that sustain inequality in society. according to dorling, inequality persists because of five main myths, including the beliefs that elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good, and despair is inevitable. as sam pizzigati (2015) points out in his prologue to dorling’s book, “we have simply imbibed too many myths from those who lord over us” (p. xvi); and dorling’s effort is to cut through these myths to help ameliorate the situation. according to dorling (2015), one of the enduring myths that sustain inequality is the belief that elitism is efficient, and that people get to the top through meritocracy. feeding into this myth is the idea that the elite are, perhaps, a gift to others, who should be grateful for the elite’s talents and rewards. in dorling’s view, people are very similar in ability, and for the elite to think that they are perhaps superhuman – without acknowledging the intergenerational transmission of privileges, wealth, and other advantages – misses the point, and, indeed hurts not only the poor but also the elite themselves. social (in)justice & rental housing discrimination studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 87 another myth that sustains inequality, according to dorling (2015), is the belief that exclusion is necessary. in a way, this myth emanates from the first one, as elitism is often used to justify exclusion. as inequality widens through elitism, social and spatial exclusions become commonplace. the third myth in dorling’s account is the belief that prejudice is natural, which is, in turn, a derivative of the preceding two. as he puts it: elitism and exclusion have further causes and corollaries, and the chief among these is prejudice. as elitism and inequality rise, and as more people become socially excluded… those at the top more often look down on others with ever greater distain and, at the same time, with fear, as evidenced by growing social segregation. (p. 8) the idea that prejudice engenders fear is worthy of note here, since it underpins much of the racism and islamophobia that undermine the wellbeing of racialized people in many western countries, including canada. the next myth exposed by dorling (2015) concerns the belief that greed is good. dorling traces the greed that led to the financial crisis of 2008, for example, to the rise of elitism, exclusion, and prejudice in the preceding years. dorling notes that “by late 2014, chief executives of uk ftse 100 firms were paid, on average, 342 times more than their minimum wage employees” (p. 233). needless to say, the situation in canada is not much different. the final myth presented by dorling (2015) concerns the belief that despair is inevitable. there are indications that despair (in many of its guises, including fear, mistrust, uncertainties, anger, stress, and depression) has increased in recent years, as intraand inter-national inequalities widen. as dorling rightly notes, “human beings are not mentally immune to the effect of rising elitism, exclusion, prejudice and greed. they react like rats in cages to having their social environments made progressively more unpleasant… the greater the dose of inequality, the higher the response in terms of poor mental health” (p. 305). dorling urges us not to give in to despair as though it is inevitable, for it is not. what lessons can we glean from dorling’s (2015) work for our examination of the herongate situation? media accounts suggest that the corporate landlord of the herongate complex is planning to upgrade the property for a more affluent clientele of tenants. clearly, then, some elitism is implicated in the endeavour, as the planned eviction is to benefit the owner, as well as those in the top end of the housing market. similarly, the eviction entailed exclusion, since the plan is to replace the former low-income tenants with affluent tenants. also, there is some prejudice involved to the extent that most of the evicted tenants were minorities, the majority of whom are black and muslims who routinely encounter racism and islamophobia in canada. moreover, the planned upgrade, and the rent hike that would invariably come with it, points to some selfish desire or greed (justified or not) on the part of the owner. from dorling’s work, we are convinced these dynamics are joseph mensah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 88 neither inevitable nor justified, and neither is the despair they engender for the individual and the collective. understanding housing discrimination and its prevalence in canada housing discrimination is a social practice in which individuals or families are treated unfairly in their effort to access or retain housing, based on their background characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, social class, gender, disability, or sexual orientation (lemert, 2011, p. 146; scott & marshall, 2009, p. 189). thus, housing discrimination is not limited to unfair treatment in accessing housing in a particular building or location; it also involves prejudicial treatment in retaining housing. clearly then, there are exclusionary and non-exclusionary dimensions to housing discrimination. the former connotes “actions and practices that exclude an individual or a family from obtaining the housing of their choosing [while the latter]… refers to discriminatory actions that occur within an already established housing arrangement” (roscigno et al., 2009, p. 52). there is considerable evidence to show that housing discrimination exists in canada, and this is unsurprising, given the prevalence of discrimination in canadian society, especially as it pertains to racialized people in employment, education, and law enforcement (james, 2012; tanovich, 2006; tator & henry, 2006). the common methodologies used to determine whether housing discrimination exist or not include housing discrimination audits or paired-testing methods, quantitative surveys, and qualitative interviews. with housing discrimination audits, two people – normally one white and the other a visible minority – pose as equally qualified home seekers, inquire about the availability of apartments or homes, and record their respective experience regarding whether they were called back, whether they ware told the unit was (un)available, whether they were required to pay any fee or deposit, etc. even though paired-testing studies are uncommon in canada, some noteworthy ones exist, including the pioneering works of chandra (1973) in montreal; the manitoba association of rights and liberties (1981) in winnipeg; garon (1988) in montreal; and henry (1989) in toronto. a more recent paired-testing study was conducted by the center for equality rights in accommodation (2009), which found significant levels of discrimination against all five groups studied: lone parents, blacks lone parents, people with mental illness, south asians, and people on social assistance. in addition to this paired-testing research, there are numerous studies in canada that rely on either quantitative surveys or qualitative interviews, or both, in cities such as montreal, london, winnipeg, ottawa and toronto, with the latter featuring most prominently (hulchanski, 1993; hulchanski & weir, 1992; mensah & williams, 2014; murdie, 1994, 2002, 2003; owusu, 1996; teixeira, 2006, 2008). while many of these studies deal exclusively social (in)justice & rental housing discrimination studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 89 with a particular ethno-racial group, some of them examine how two or more groups compare with each other, with african immigrants featuring quite frequently in these comparisons. for instance, murdie (2002) compares the housing discrimination faced by somalis and polish immigrants in toronto; mensah and williams (2014) compare the cultural dimensions of the housing problems and discrimination faced by ghanaians and somalis in toronto; and teixeira (2008) compares the housing problems faced by angolans, mozambicans, and cape verdean immigrants in toronto. teixeira’s (2008, p. 253) findings indicate that the darker the skin colour of the african immigrant, the greater the risk of discrimination in the rental market. clearly, there are studies pointing to the prevalence of housing discrimination in cities such as toronto and montreal, but is there any evidence of housing discrimination in ottawa? our extensive literature search uncovered only a few such studies in ottawa. still, the limited number of studies on housing discrimination in ottawa should not be taken as evidence of no housing discrimination in ottawa. there could be other reasons for this lacuna, including the lack of interest in such a controversial topic among mainstream canadian social scientists and the dearth of a critical mass of ethno-racial minority scholars to tell their own stories. meanwhile, given the prevalence of discrimination in many spheres of life in canadian cities, including ottawa (daigle, 2017; mohamed, 2007; social planning council of ottawa, 2008), it is hard to see how ottawa could be immune from housing discrimination. one of the first studies on housing discrimination involving ottawa was conducted by the canadian civil liberties organization (cclo) in 1976, and published in 1977 by alan borovoy. in this study, the cclo examined whether real estate agents in toronto, hamilton, london, windsor, and ottawa were willing to discriminate on behalf of a fictitious family, which purportedly wanted to sell its home, but only to a white person. the findings indicate that “of the 30 agents surveyed, 90% agreed to comply with the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ to discriminate” (borovoy, 1977, as cited in novac et al., 2002, p.16). in another study in ottawa, rupert (1997) found that as many as 60 neighbours mounted a campaign to oppose the opening of a group home for teenagers under the care of the children’s aid society of ottawa. in a related study, hodan mohamed (2007) examined the settlement and integration challenges of somali single mothers in ottawa, together with their health implications. she found that the women experienced race-based discrimination and social exclusions in their efforts to settle in ottawa, and that many of their mental health problems were underpinned by racial discrimination in employment and housing. joseph mensah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 90 ethno-racial enclaves: exploring their formation and (de)merits from the standpoint of social theory, “ethnicity” is a socially constructed attribute of individuals or groups based on their culture or nationality. members of an ethnic group, therefore, share a common cultural heritage (macionis & gerber, 1999, p. 324). ethnicity is often distinguished from “race,” which is also a socially constructed attribute, but based on people’s physical characteristics, such as skin colour or hair texture (mensah, 2002, p. 16). while the two concepts are often used interchangeably, they are, indeed, different. thus, we find some scholars (mensah & williams, 2017) using the term ethno-racial to be all-embracing in an effort to avoid the conflation of the two concepts. an “enclave” connotes the spatial concentration of a particular group within a city (qadeer et al., 2010; walks & bourne, 2006), while an “ethnic enclave” implies the spatial concentration of an ethnic group and its cultural institutions and businesses (qadeer et al., 2010). another closely related concept is that of a “ghetto.” while “ethnic enclave” and “ethnic ghetto” are related, they are different because of their disparate formation. enclaves are normally formed voluntarily by their residents, within the strictures of the housing market and prevailing institutions and norms. ghettoes, on the other hand, are mostly formed as a result of extreme social exclusion practiced by mainstream society. of course, there is usually outside pressure behind the formation of both ghettoes and enclaves; however, the level of pressure is more intense in the case of ghetto formation. ethnic enclaves are generally looked upon far more favourably by outsiders, as “positive” spaces with some benefits to their residents, compared to what ghettoes could ever offer. the available canadian literature indicates that ghettoes, at least those that are comparable to what obtain in the united states, do not exist in canada (murdie, 1994; qadeer et al., 2010; walks & bourne, 2006). the spatial concentration of ethnic minorities in ethnic enclaves is often seen as a form of racial segregation, with all the pejorative connotations that the term conjures. to be sure, ethnic enclaves can undermine the integration and social mobility of some minorities. for one thing, life in the ethnic enclave undercuts minorities’ effort to learn the official language of the host society, as they are constantly interacting mainly with people of their own ethnicity in their native language. also, given the lack of local resources and employment opportunities in many ethnic enclaves, residents often endure long spells of unand under-employment, low-income and, sometimes, problems of crime. meanwhile, as mensah and william (2017) note in their thought-provoking book, boomerang ethics: despite the negative perceptions of minority enclaves in the minds of some canadians, it would be erroneous to think that there is nothing good about these places. among other things, spatial concentration allows ethno-racial minorities to maintain their cultural values and practices, strengthen their social networks and, ultimately, enhance their intragroup social cohesion. (p. 62) social (in)justice & rental housing discrimination studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 91 moreover, studies (e.g., peach, 1996; phillips, 2007; walks & bourne, 2006) show that such clusters allow minorities to attain the requisite critical mass of population to support their economic enterprises and sociocultural institutions. more often than not, the social networks engendered by these enclaves give ethnic-owned businesses a competitive edge over other businesses operating in these spaces. finally, ethnic enclaves provide some level of defense against racial discrimination from the majority. urban renewals, gentrification, and the mass eviction of the urban poor the prevailing literature generally deals with large-scale demolitions and evictions in cities under the umbrella of “urban renewal,” which is often used interchangeably with such terms as “urban redevelopment,” “urban reconstruction,” and “urban revitalization,” depending on place and time. over the years, urban renewal has been used to describe large-scale redevelopment of “the built environment in downtown and older inner-city neighbourhoods, typically undertaken by the state or more recently in the strategic form of a public-private partnership” (ley, 2002, p. 881). urban renewal projects were very popular from the 1950s to the 1970s, as they were used to change the general layout of cities by renovating and rearranging some buildings and roads (uzun, 2003, p. 365). indeed, since the publication of jane jacobs’s the death and life of great american cities (1961), the use of “urban renewal” has declined, with some scholars only deploying it in the past tense, in an effort to avoid its associated baggage. a closely related concept to urban renewal is gentrification. ruth glass, who coined the term gentrification in 1964, used it to describe a form of revitalization, entailing the upper-income (i.e., the gentry class) takeover of victorian mews in london, uk (glass, 1964). in its contemporary usage, gentrification connotes “the influx of upperand middle-class households into an area of old homes that were previously occupied by lower-middle and low-income individuals and households” (yeates, 1993, p. 221). since the global financial crisis of 2008, there is a burgeoning literature pointing to a newer form of gentrification, induced primarily by a growing financialization of the housing market (aalbers, 2008, 2016; august & walks, 2018; fields, 2014; fields & uffer, 2016; rolnik, 2013). perhaps, the best depiction of the new gentrification is by august and walks (2018) in their observation that: while traditional forms of gentrification involved the conversion of rental units to owner-occupation, a new rental-tenure form of gentrification has emerged across the globe. this is driven by financialization, a new tenant protection, and declining-social housing production, and it is characterized by the replacement of poorer renters with higher-income tenants. (p. 124) joseph mensah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 92 evidently, gentrification is taking on different shapes in different cities, and, thus, becoming difficult to pin down as a phenomenon with a clear explanation. while its older version was dominated by “mom and pop” landlords, the newer version is underpinned by globalization and the growing financialization of the economy underway, with ownership accruing to private equity funds, financial asset management corporations, and real estate investment trusts (august & walks, 2018). moreover, the new gentrification involves what august and walks (2018) call “squeezing” and “gentrification-by-upgrading” (p. 124). with squeezing, the financialized landlords try to get as much revenue as possible from the incumbent renters. the common tactics used include rent increases; increases in ancillary fees, such as fees for parking and laundry; reduced services and maintenance; and harassment, disruptive renovations, and unwarranted evictions, as witnessed in the herongate complex. gentrification-byupgrading is where the financialized landlord uses a host of sophisticated asset management tactics to “upgrade, flip, and gentrify entire buildings” (august & walks, 2018, p. 124). the idea here is to reposition and transform the buildings to help shift their tenant base from lowto high-income people. in fact, media accounts suggest that the landlord of the herongate complex plans to upgrade the herongate units to “build an alignment” with alta vista an affluent and white community just north of herongate (“alta vista residents,” 2016; “petition,” 2017). census data indicate that alta vista is 80% white, with about 55% of its households having incomes of over $100,000 per year, which is far higher than what obtained in the herongate community, where only about five percent of the households had incomes of over $100,000 by the 2016 census. clearly, regardless of their causes, gentrification and mass evictions are exercises in displacement. the fact that neighbourhoods in and around the inner city tend to attract such projects too is quite telling in the context of the power differentials between the displacers and the displaced after all, the inner city is where the advantages of proximity and easy access to historic attractions are often found; why wouldn’t those with power manoeuver for such spaces at the expense of low-income people with no power? relatedly, given the empirically verifiable overlap between race, class, and space in urban canada (mensah & williams, 2017), and more so in the united states, it is unsurprising that such low-income neighbourhoods are mostly inhabited by ethno-racial minorities and new immigrants who generally struggle to find housing outside of the neighbourhood, due both to their exposure to housing discrimination and their lack of financial resources. social (in)justice & rental housing discrimination studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 93 the struggle for housing at herongate: insights from rawls and dorling dorling (2015) observes that “if you had to choose one word to epitomise the nature of human society as it is currently arranged worldwide, there is no better word than injustice” (p. 6). regardless of how one looks at gentrification and mass evictions, they often entail injustice of one form or another. some people are bound to gain, while others lose, depending on the context of who is doing the eviction and what options are available to the parties involved based on their respective socioeconomic and political power. the benefits of such projects may include increased revenues from the replenished housing stocks and the attendant increase in property tax, as well as access to improved amenities in the neighbourhood. for the most part, the new residents (most of whom tend to have more disposable income than the incumbent tenants) demand more upscale goods and services, resulting in what lees et al. (2007, p. 131) have dubbed “boutiqueification.” at the same time, not only are the incumbent tenants “forced to find alternative housing, but they also face the emotional impact of removal from social networks and familiar community structures” (murdie & teixeira, 2011, p. 73). moreover, such large-scale evictions tend to affect low-income people more, since they find it difficult to acquire alternative housing in other parts of the city. the situation is even more damaging if the victims are racial minorities for whom housing discrimination is a reality in most cities in canada. as the preceding paragraphs show, most of the tenants evicted from the herongate complex are somalis and other visible minorities, who are, susceptible to housing discrimination. moreover, the work of mensah and williams (2014) shows that somali immigrants, in particular, often live closer to their mosques to allow them to participate in their religious practices, including praying five times daily. additionally, somalis and other muslims prefer to live in their ethnic enclaves where they can easily procure religion-sanctioned (halal) food, and where women can wear hijab freely without condescending looks from outsiders. even the fact that some islamic sects disallow their members to borrow money with interest payments makes it difficult for them to acquire mortgage in the mainstream banking system, thereby undermining their home ownership. add to these challenges large household sizes – especially among somalis (mensah & williams, 2014) – and their need for prayer rooms and gendered spaces within their homes, and one would appreciate the unique difficulties that somalis and other muslims evicted from herongate encounter in their search for affordable housing. what would rawls and dorling say about the herongate situation? how do we reconcile the competing interest of the tenants and the landlord in the context of social justice? what does the herongate situation tell us about the urban citizenship and sense of belonging of the evicted tenants, particularly given that most of them look different and come from far away lands? should the evicted tenants be compensated, and if so by how much, knowing very joseph mensah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 94 well that the poor, beset with income insecurity, can be easily enticed to accept low cash payments? undoubtedly, some of the evicted tenants may be able to afford their relocation with or without any support. however, for most of them, the eviction is simply too much to bear, not only because of the financial cost, but also because of the attendant emotional and health consequences (fullilove, 2001, 2004; goetz, 2011; paradis et al., 2014; shah, 2013). as fullilove (2004) observes, by destroying their individual and collective identities and their social networks, such displacements shake up, if not destroy, the basic roots of the displaced and their communities. with the difference principle, rawls (1971) entreats us to operate in ways that increase the advantage of the truly disadvantaged in terms of money, power, and access to scarce resources. compared to the landlord and the potential gentrifiers, the evicted herongate tenants are the least favoured, and thus deserve preferential treatment. adherence to the difference principle can come in many ways, ranging from the status quo to different levels of compensation aimed at a reasonable amelioration of the monetary, emotional, and health cost to the victims. with the herongate tenants protesting against their eviction, it follows that they would like to be reinstated; thus, from the standpoint of the difference principle, it would be prudent to take their request to return seriously. should this demand be too much for the landlord to bear, then different levels of compensation should be on the table for the tenants. with the difference principle, rawls draws our attention to the moral power and obligation that people have regarding their sense of justice. similarly, sen (2009) argues that “if someone has the power to make a change that he or she can see will reduce injustice in the world, then there is a strong social argument for doing just that” (p. 205). if one accepts this argument, as we do, then it follows that people with power should neither operate in their self-interest alone nor on the basis of mutual interest, but, indeed, go further to address the unilateral obligation that comes with the asymmetry of power they wield in society. evidently, both rawls and sen recognize the obligations of power and the need for the powerful to do more to advance the wellbeing of the poor and marginalized to reduce injustice. from the work of dorling (2015), we know that injustice is not inevitable; after all, hegemony breeds its own counter-hegemonic movement. accordingly, the herongate community and its supporters should be encouraged to resist the eviction, or pursue the commensurate compensation to redress the monetary, emotional, and health costs implicated in the eviction. to the extent the social justice advocacy is at its core moralistic, what forms of resistance are ethically permissible? what can the evictees of herongate demand from the landlord and civic authorities, without infringing on moral sensibilities? notwithstanding – or, perhaps, because of – the moral imperatives of social justice advocacy, the herongate protestors should not be faulted for their outrage. as sen (2009) poignantly reminds us, resistance to injustice is not only based on sound argument but it also draws on indignation (p. 390). still, among the most prudent approaches opened to the herongate social (in)justice & rental housing discrimination studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 95 protesters are open-minded engagements with the housing gatekeepers; petition-imbued public protest; and legal action, without any inclination toward physical violence and the destruction of property. the herongate situation: the right to housing and the regulation of mass evictions the herongate tenants and their allies engaged in various forms of resistance, including lobbying politicians, public protest, and legal action. still, they were displaced and only minimally compensated. though some were able to relocate within the neighbourhood, many others moved to disparate neighbourhoods and lost their connection to the herongate community. even if some of the herongate tenants are eventually afforded the right to return to the new development, which is one of the legal remedies some of them have requested from the human rights tribunal of ontario, they will never be fully compensated for the substantial disruption to their lives or the erosion of their community. one way to realize greater justice in development projects like herongate is to recognize a right to housing in canada. this right is enshrined in several international covenants, most notably article 11 of the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (icescr), to which canada is a signatory. the icescr’s broad guarantee of housing rights has been interpreted to include specific protections against mass evictions for large development projects. the institution tasked with reporting on and advancing the rights enshrined in the icescr, the un committee on economic, social and cultural rights, elaborated on specific rights with respect to evictions in its general comment numbers 4, the right to adequate housing, and 7, the right to adequate housing: forced evictions (kothari, 2007). these rights include a right for tenants to be consulted on large-scale development projects that threaten to displace them, and a right to return or permanent resettlement upon project completion. in 2007, the un special rapporteure published the basic principles and guidelines on development-based evictions and displacements, which enjoins states to ensure, among other protections, that those displaced in mass evictions carried out for the purposes of large-scale development may return upon project completion (kothari, 2007). although the icescr has been signed and ratified by canada, it is yet to be implemented by parliament into domestic law. the absence of a domestic law enshrining a right to housing means that although canada has committed itself internationally to upholding that right, there is no domestically judiciable law to make it meaningful and enforceable, despite an impressive, yet ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to have it read into sections 7 (right to life, liberty, and security of the person) and 15 (right to equality) of the charter of rights and freedoms in the context of charter litigation in joseph mensah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 96 tanudjana v. canada (attorney general), 2014 onca 852. to date, whether section 7 of the charter guarantees a right to housing, or whether it imposes any other positive obligation on the state to take action (rather than merely restraining state action), is subject to an ongoing legal debate (cottrill, 2018, p. 84; heffernan et al., 2015, p. 30). in the absence of a justiciable right to housing in canada, there is no general right of return for tenants evicted en masse for the purposes of real estate redevelopment.2 it was not entirely fanciful for timbercreek to assume that it could redevelop herongate from an affordable to luxury rental complex without encountering major legal obstacles, such as the right to housing. in its eviction of herongate residents, timbercreek complied with the residential tenancies act, which regulates evictions in ontario, and it otherwise followed municipal regulations for demolitions and property development. although the manner in which timbercreek pursued its development violates international law, it could do so with impunity in the absence of a corresponding domestic law to stop it. a right to housing per se is therefore not being asserted in the legal challenge launched by the herongate tenants coalition in the human rights tribunal of ontario in various applicants v. timbercreek asset management inc., et al. hrto file numbers : 201936509-1 to 2019-36523-i. rather, the application advances novel arguments based on the anti-discrimination provisions of the human rights code of ontario, maintaining that it is discriminatory to displace a community composed overwhelmingly of migrants, people of colour, and people sharing other personal traits protected by the code, in order to replace it with a community of affluent whites. even if successful, the herongate case will not result in the recognition of a general right to housing in canada. although the herongate tenants’ application argues in favour of a right to housing, that right is not being advanced as the robust, constitutionally enshrined right that it was in tanudjaja (although the herongate case could help lay the groundwork for such a right in a subsequent case). rather, the application argues that where a violation of the right to housing, such as mass eviction without consultation or the right to return, creates a discriminatory impact by adversely affecting people because of their race, colour, and ethnicity, among other grounds, then the human rights code has been violated. put another way, the argument is that when a landlord develops its property, it is required by the code to ensure the development does not discriminate against people because of their race, skin colour, or other personal traits protected by the code. if the application is successful, the practical consequence will be that developers in ontario would be prohibited from acquiring a predominantly immigrant or racialized neighbourhood, and then evicting everyone for the purpose of developing upscale rental housing or condos to rent to more affluent whites. 2 the notable exception is toronto, and possibly other municipalities in canada, which have bylaws that empower the city to impose a right of return in certain circumstances. social (in)justice & rental housing discrimination studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 97 however, the rights being asserted in the herongate case are not a perfect substitute for a universal right to housing. they are an effective workaround for some, at best. what if, for example, a developer takes over a poor white working-class neighbourhood, evicts everyone, redevelops the property and then rents to more affluent whites? discrimination based on poverty or economic status is not prohibited by the code. so a mass eviction in those circumstances is not prohibited because of the absence of racial, ethnic, or other form of discrimination prohibited by the code. but should not the right to be free from arbitrary eviction be guaranteed to everyone, including working class whites? if so, what would those rights look like? how could they be enforced? more robust and meaningful housing rights, and greater social justice in housing, are possible. a justiciable right to housing has been implemented in other jurisdictions internationally, in some cases with admirable results (see, for example, king, 2015). an exhaustive list of states that have enshrined a right to housing in law is beyond the scope of this article, but noteworthy examples include south africa, scotland, and france. these countries and others have, to varying degrees, implemented the housing rights enshrined in the icescr and ancillary documents. south african courts, for example, have recognized a specific right of persons being displaced by large development projects to meaningful engagement and mandatory consultation (chenwi, 2015, pp. 78-80). had the right to housing been implemented in canada, the herongate evictions may have looked much different. conclusion forms of capital absorption in cities, including gentrification and mass evictions, are dialectical processes, and thus entail creative destruction or destructive creation. as such, these processes often have “losers” and “winners;” and to the extent that they also have class and racial dimensions, it is not hard to realize that it is the “poor, the underprivileged and those marginalized from political power that suffer first and foremost” (harvey, 2008, p. 33). it is clear from the preceding discussion that housing discrimination is real in urban canada. additionally, it is evident that, unlike the formation of ghettoes in the us, where extreme external pressures are involved, ethnic enclaves, such as the herongate community in ottawa, come about mainly because they conform, at least in part, to the needs of the minority group in question. even though such segregated spaces often engender negative connotations in the minds of outsiders, they help the minority residents to sustain their cultural values, strengthen their social capital and social cohesion, and ultimately promote their settlement and integration in the host country. clearly, then, mass evictions of minority populations from their enclaves do not only take a monetary toll on residents, joseph mensah studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 98 but they also exact considerable emotional, psychological, and health consequences – all of which have social justice implications. with insights from rawls (1971) and dorling (2015), we noted that it is about time that landlords seeking mass evictions paid due attention to the well-being of the incumbent tenants, especially when the tenants are lowincome minorities who are likely to face extreme difficulties in finding housing outside of their enclave. thus, mass eviction decisions should not be informed by raw economic considerations alone, for there are always some underlying ethical issues to be addressed. for one thing, if renovations lead to improvement in the housing stocks, and even yield profit for the city, developer, and landlord, at the expense of the vulnerable, weak, and poor members of society, then what are we to make of the moral sensibilities of our society? moreover, how are we to protect the interests of the powerless against those of the powerful? rawls, for one, would expect us to maximize the wellbeing of the powerless relative to the powerful in such situations. and from dorling’s work we know that resistance and counter-hegemonic advocacy in such situations are worthwhile, since, in his view, injustice and despair are neither justified nor inevitable. meanwhile, as demonstrators and social movement activists bring their loud laments about these mass evictions to the public, it is uncertain whether their opposition will be sustainable enough to produce any meaningful and mutually agreeable solution. still, there is hope, for urban resistant movements are increasingly going global, with supporters and signs of rebellion coming from far and wide places with the aid of social media. in addition to the pressures exacted by urban resistant movements and the insights drawn from the works of rawls and dorling, federal, provincial, and municipal governments have a role to play to resolve this social (in)justice. a clear policy suggestion from the preceding discussion is for the federal government to pass a domestically judiciable law – in consonance with the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (icescr) – to uphold canadians’ right to housing. relatedly, there is the need to establish a mass eviction complaints board, of a sort, at the provincial or municipal level to help resolve the conflicting interests of the parties involved in such disputes by conducting hearings and prescribing legally binding compensations. clearly, our approach to resolving the herongate situation has its limitations, since it dwells mainly on the antidiscrimination provisions of the human rights code of ontario, which, obviously, does not prohibit discrimination based on social class or poverty per se. thus, while poor blacks can be protected by the code, from the standpoint of their race, the same cannot be said of poor whites. until canada enacts a domestically justiciable law to enforce the right to housing, the need for further research to deal with the special case of poor whites who might fall prey to mass evictions cannot be over-emphasized. social (in)justice & rental housing discrimination studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 81-101, 2020 99 references aalbers, m. 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(1993). the north american city. harper collins. hlatshwayo final before ts correspondence address: mondli hlatshwayo, centre for education rights and transformation, university of johannesburg, auckland park 2006, south africa; email: mshlatshwayo@uj.ac.za issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 setbacks and partial victories: social justice struggles after 28 years of democracy in south africa mondli hlatshwayo university of johannesburg, south africa abstract post-apartheid south africa is ravaged by crises of extreme unemployment, poverty, and inequality. while the majority who were politically excluded by apartheid can now choose their government through democratic elections, social and economic justice continues to elude them. neoliberal policies which seek to reduce state expenditure on social services and promote state policies that protect the interests of big businesses at the expense of working-class and poor communities, along with corruption and abuse of power, are the primary causes of poverty and unemployment. however, what is missing in the assessments of social justice since the pre-1994 democratic era is the recognition that social justice organisations have not simply disappeared, but have actually remained involved in social justice struggles. based on information from in-depth interviews and internet sources, this article records some of the partial victories scored through these struggles, albeit in the context of generalised pauperisation of working-class and poor communities. these partial victories in the era of defeats show that these organisations, although weakened, have not given up the struggle for social justice. keywords social justice; south africa; democracy; setbacks; victories; inequality introduction despite being severely weakened through some of its leading activists joining the state and the private sector, as well as by factors such as neoliberalism, chronic underfunding, and the generalised decline in mass mobilisation since the dawn of democracy, social justice organisations in post-apartheid south africa have contributed to partial victories in the form of achievements that are accompanied by neoliberal constraints. such constraints include chronic unemployment and poor service delivery by the state, as well as setbacks in the form of the state’s inability to advance pro-poor policies and actions. mondli hlatshwayo studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 592 using in-depth interviews with several leading intellectuals from social justice organisations and academics who have written on social justice in south africa, this article critically discusses some of the partial victories scored by movements for social justice in the context of a generalised weakening of the struggles for social justice within the country post-1994. unlike other reviews of democracy, this one is sourced from those who have actively participated in struggles for social justice in post-apartheid south africa (du preez, 2013; friedman, 2019; mkhwanazi, 2014; smith, 2021). while analyses such as those from the aforementioned writers help in understanding the conditions of working-class communities, the poor in general, and the state of democracy, the challenge is that there is a dearth in the literature providing a summative evaluation of various components of social justice organisations in post-apartheid south africa.1 there have been sector-specific evaluations of trade unions, ngos, and social movements in urban and rural areas, but these do not provide an overview of the role of specific social justice organisations in a democratic south africa (bezuidenhout et al., 2017; brown, 2021; hlatshwayo, 2021; kenny, 2020; sisaye, 2021). to elaborate my point, kenny (2020) provides an analysis of the state trade unions and workers in post-apartheid south africa, an important subset of the social justice organisations, but her analysis does not, for instance, include housing struggles led by the urban poor. steyn (2012) and pithouse (2008) evaluate the roles of social movements involved in urban struggles for access to housing, water, and other basic needs, but do not discuss the role of social justice organisations in the workplace. while all these contributions give some understanding of the challenges and partial successes of relevant organisations, they do not assess partial victories or successes led by social justice organisations as a whole. below, the article sketches the socio-economic context in which social justice organisations operate, characterised by chronic unemployment, poverty, and inequality after 28 years of democracy. whilst the socioeconomic status of the majority of south africans has not improved in general, as is argued below, the paper also uses social justice and development theory to explain inequality, partial victories, and setbacks led by social justice organisations. subsequent to that, the paper delves into research design questions, and then presents the findings of the research. 1 on the one hand, authors, such as kenny (2020) and bezuidenhout et al. (2017), focused on the evaluation of trade unions as a social justice organisation since 1994. on the other hand, hlatshwayo (2021) and brown (2021) reflected on the state of social movements – one arm of the social justice organisation. sisaye (2021) examined the role of non-governmental organisations (ngos) after 30 years of democracy in south africa. to addresses this dichotomic analyses, this paper seeks to provide an overview of the state of social justice organisations irrespective of the sectors or areas in which they organise. social justice struggles after 28 years of democracy in south africa studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 593 chronic unemployment, poverty and inequality a number of scholars have evaluated the socio-economic conditions of those who had been politically, socially, and economically oppressed by racism and apartheid for well over a century – now in the period after 25 years of democracy (friedman, 2019; saul & bond, 2014). in assessing social justice after 25 years of the formal end of apartheid, beresford (2020) concludes: “twenty-five years after democratic transition, the political liberation of black south africans has yet to translate into socioeconomic transformation” (p. 6). essentially, in indirectly supporting the statement made by beresford (2020), most socio-economic statistics emerging after 25 years of democracy indicate that five democratically elected governments since 1994 have not been able to address social and economic inequality, and instead inequality has deepened. in 2019, even the conservative world bank admitted that south africa, which has voluntarily implemented its neoliberal policies in post-apartheid south africa, is the most unequal country in the world. the world bank also reported that the richest 20% of people in south africa control almost 70% of the resources (mlaba, 2020). similarly, the report by oxfam south africa noted that the average white male chief executive officer’s (ceo) income is equal to that of 461 black women in the bottom 10% of earners (cerruti & baloyi, 2020). and just over 30% of black women in south africa are in employment compared to 70% of white men, showing that black women have very low absorption rates in the economy. the report further states that many of those black women are employed as precarious workers earning low wages, with few or no benefits. qualified black women earn 24% less than qualified white women; black women between the ages of 18 and 34 with a university degree have an average monthly income of r13,000 (usd841.42), but white women of the same subset earn r17,000 (usd1,100.32) on average; almost 90% of black households do not have medical insurance and have to use the state’s poorly serviced medical facilities, while 70% of white-headed households have access to medical insurance (cerruti & baloyi, 2020). the report further reveals that the average monthly income of a black woman doing precarious work is just r2,500 (usd161.81), which, compared to a white woman in the same position who on average earns r10,000 (usd647.24), is very low (cerruti & baloyi, 2020). what is also worrying, according to the oxfam inequality report, is that the post-apartheid state has dismally failed to deliver services like water, electricity, health care, housing, public transport, education, and other services to those who were socially and economically disadvantaged by apartheid and racism (cerruti & baloyi, 2020; mlaba, 2020). on the other hand, the black economic empowerment (bee), a policy that was meant to increase the economic participation of black people, was seen to be only benefiting those who were politically connected, many of whom in the 1990s became billionaires and multi-millionaires. the broad-based black mondli hlatshwayo studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 594 economic empowerment (bbbee) act, no. 53 of 2003 was adopted by parliament to go beyond black ownership in the economy to focus on skills development and support for black businesses. this improved the positions of black people and black women in the workplace, expanding land rights to black folk and enhancing the conditions of black communities. in other words, the act was meant to subvert the economic inequality created by colonialism and apartheid. in 2013, the bbbee act, no. 46 of 2013, was amended to ensure that the private sector takes the policy seriously by, inter alia, giving more state business to those companies that implement elements of the policy (vilakazi & bosiu, 2021). perhaps the social group that has benefitted most from policies such as the bbbee is the black middle class, which grew from 2.2 million in 1993 to 5.4 million in 2008, and again to 6 million in 2018. since 2014, the majority of south africa’s middle class has been black (zwane, 2019). a very big portion of this class is located in the public sector, which means that the private sector’s top positions continue to be generally occupied by the white middle class (undp, 2020). the increase of the black middle class in the context of poverty, inequity, and unemployment means that the income gap between the black middle class and the poor and working class is increasing. however, the covid-19 pandemic and lockdown has seen this social group being squeezed economically through retrenchments, heavy indebtedness, and closure of many companies. it was reported by the undp (2020) that “as many as 34% of households are likely to exit the middle class into vulnerability [in 2020]” (p. 1). clearly, the covid-19 pandemic has deepened the poverty and unemployment crisis. for example, the lockdown, a measure intended to contain the spread of the virus, prevented many workers from participating in employment. between the end of march and the end of april 2020 (the onemonth hard lockdown), the national income dynamics study – coronavirus rapid mobile survey (nids-cram) was undertaken, involving a sample of over 6,000 adults aged 18 to 59. the results of the survey revealed a substantial decline in employment. importantly, about one out of every three employed persons in the sample “either lost their job or did not work and received no wages during april (2020)” (ranchhod & daniels, 2020, p. 1). south africa previously suffered from chronic unemployment, but this survey highlighted that the pandemic has exacerbated the situation. moreover, nearly a year later, the congress of south african trade unions (cosatu), the biggest trade union federation in south africa, stated that more than 50% of the working-age population were unemployed in february 2021, and this figure is the highest since 2008. close to 91% of those who are unemployed are black (mahlakoana, 2021). despite the aforementioned economic hardships, several stories highlight that some progress has been made, notwithstanding the general setbacks. through life history research of a black domestic worker who lives in johannesburg, and in an attempt to assess the progress made after 20 years of social justice struggles after 28 years of democracy in south africa studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 595 democracy, kihato (2014) argues that discourses of “success” and “failure” create binaries that are not that helpful in understanding the state of democracy and social life post-apartheid. instead, according to kitaho (2014), the domestic worker, referred to with the pseudonym “phindile,” shows that south africa’s transition to democracy has been characterised by “progress, setbacks and stagnation” (p. 357). despite setbacks regarding racial integration and low-income working-class communities, the housing programme, although very limited, provided many working-class families with shelter in the cities. in trying to explain the causes of difficulties to change the social and economic transformation in post-apartheid south africa, michie and padayachee (1998) and marais (2011) explain that the south african transition to democracy, and democracy in general, has been constrained by the neoliberal global environment promoting austerity measures, budget cuts, and privatisation, expressed from a policy perspective in the growth, employment and redistribution (gear) adopted in 1996. corruption is also one of the major causes of the lack of development of the infrastructure and the failure to deliver services to poor working-class communities. for example, it was reported in 2019 that south africa lost us$34 billion through corruption between 2009 and 2018 when jacob zuma was the state president (cotterill, 2019). despite some pronouncements and actions to curb corruption after the removal of zuma from public office in 2018, according to mlambo and masuku (2020, p. 549): the covid-19 pandemic has not only laid bare the inequalities within south african society but sadly, it has also portrayed how successive south african public sectors have failed to deal with corruption which has become entrenched within every sector of society. to sum up this section, the democratic transition from apartheid to democracy paved the way for the entrenchment of political rights for the black majority and the establishment of institutions seeking to support democracy, but the social and economic challenges, such as chronic poverty and unemployment, episodic xenophobic violence, murder, and rape are a threat to a democratic order. this has to do with the fact that struggles against apartheid and for democracy were not just about political rights but were also about social and economic justice (shapiro & tebeau, 2011). perhaps the recent uprising (in july 2021) after the arrest of zuma for contempt of court is an indication that south africa’s economic crisis and inequality are a key source of discontent in the country. about 3,000 shops were looted during the protests and 200 banks were vandalised in kwazulu-natal and some parts of gauteng. however, the uprisings were not in direct support of zuma, but were rather caused by chronic poverty and unemployment in the country. the initial protests may have been instigated by some of zuma’s supporters, but the subsequent uprisings were carried out by individuals who had no mondli hlatshwayo studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 596 demands related to the former president’s arrest. it was ordinary workingclass people who raided shopping malls located in the working-class areas characterised by unemployment and poverty (cottle, 2021). therefore, the partial victories discussed in this paper took place in the context of chronic poverty, unemployment, and inequality, which is theorised below. theorisation of social justice in the south african context social justice as a theoretical concept has to be contextualised and grounded in concrete issues, demands, and issues of those striving towards its attainment. subreenduth (2013) takes this point when she contends that social justice “is an ideal that must continually be re-visioned in theory, policy, and practice because context, history, and interconnected global relationships and global social movements change the landscape of justice and equity” (p. 581). in liberal democratic countries, especially in the global north, the majority of the population is not excluded from political participation and access to social and economic rights. subreenduth (2013) questions the notion of social justice in the context of neoliberalism, which tends to entrench racial and gender inequality especially in south africa, and argues that although political rights have been attained, the social and economic lives of many of those belonging to the black majority have not changed for the better. in explaining this conundrum, buhlungu’s (2010) theorisation of the failure of south africa’s democracy to deliver social, labour, and economic rights to the majority of the population has to do with the “paradox of victory.” on the one hand, the unions and other social justice organisations have a democratic space that enables them to organise relatively freely. on the other hand, economic policies adopted by the successive anc (african national congress) governments since 1994, as well as corruption, have derailed and undermined the attainment of social and economic justice for the vast majority of the population (buhlungu, 2010; lehulere, 2017). however, as taylor (2018) contends, south africa presents a difficult and complex case as far as political, social, and economic justice is concerned. the majority of the south african population lives in conditions that exclude them from accessing resources, economic activities, and livelihoods precisely because of the structural and resilient economic and social imbalances created by centuries of economic, political, and social projects based on colour and sex. social justice is also about dismantling political and economic institutions, laws, and policies that sought to socially exclude the black majority, and some progress has been made in this regard (taylor, 2018). although south africa faces many socio-economic challenges, scholars and analysts trying to understand the social justice struggle cannot ignore some of the gains that have been made since the dawn of democracy. according to taylor (2018), these gains include social grants that cover 17 social justice struggles after 28 years of democracy in south africa studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 597 million people in a country that has a population of 55 million people, as well as access to free basic education, primary health care, and free housing for income-poor households. however, hassim (2008) argues that social welfare and the political rights obtained by the black majority have not helped to curb the escalating rise in social and economic inequality. hassim (2008) elaborates: “a focus on social sector spending alone is inadequate to address questions of social justice” (p. 104). distributing social grants falls into the context where infrastructure such as transport, water, and electricity mean that women continue to carry most of the social and economic burden in households in patriarchal south africa. although women occupy key positions in the state institutions and parliament, they have not used these positions to advocate for pro-poor policies to undermine patriarchy and women’s oppression (hassim, 2008). a note on research design research to review the state of social justice organisations was funded in 2019 by the raith foundation, a south african donor supporting social justice organisations. a team of three researchers, including myself, conducted the study which sought to assess the role of social justice organisations between 1994 and 2020. the researchers also worked closely with the reference group constituted by leaders from organisations funded by the raith foundation. after public release of the report from the main study, it was agreed that the individual researchers could use the data that were collected to write their own independent academic articles, which would not in any way purport to represent the views of the foundation, its partners, and other researchers who had participated in the project. pursuant to this, 75 in-depth interviews with the leaders of trade unions, social movements, ngos, public intellectuals, and academics who have an intellectual association with social justice organisations in south africa were conducted. it must be noted that we were not able to interview all of the leaders of the social justice organisations due to time constraints. those who participated in the study were chosen based on their knowledge of, and experiences in, struggles waged by social justice organisations during apartheid, as well as their participation in social justice struggles as activists and as intellectuals during and after formal apartheid. they shared invaluable knowledge and information on partial victories and setbacks in the struggle for social justice since the dawn of democracy. the interviewees were against apartheid and continue to be involved in social justice struggles in postapartheid south africa. therefore, their analysis and views are based on their daily or even hourly engagement with social justice issues. to make sure that leaders of social justice organisations who did not participate in the study are also represented, the researcher perused their statements and views on youtube and other internet sources. the limitation of the research could be mondli hlatshwayo studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 598 that rank-and-file members of social justice organisations were not interviewed. however, the purpose of the paper is to capture the views and opinions of leaders of social justice organisations, and academics and formal intellectuals associated with the social justice organisations. their views, perceptions, and perspectives are important from a scholarly point of view, because their location helps shape the direction of social justice organisations. it is important to note that there are many partial victories or even victories that have not been mentioned here. for example, several land and environmental struggle victories and partial victories in certain localities have not been reflected on due to the limited scope and objectives of the paper. there are many access-to-land struggles waged by small and large communities; the reason for not addressing them here is because the land reform issue remains elusive, to the extent that all social justice role-players or organisations in the land struggles realise that in general the land question has not been addressed on a national scale. between 1994 and 2021, land redistribution and restitution has only moved from 13% to 17% of ownership by black people (kirsten & sihlobo, 2021). that is why there are debates about changing section 25 of the south african constitution and the establishment of a land agency of the state to speed up land reform. due to covid-19 and the national lockdown beginning in early 2020, data were collected virtually, using the online platforms of zoom and whatsapp. all interviewees gave their informed consent to having the sessions recorded, transcribed, and quoted in the publication of the findings of the research. below i discuss the findings from the interviews on what the participants regarded as successes or partial victories spearheaded by social justice organisations since 1994. the treatment action campaign’s (tac) victory in the struggle for antiretroviral drugs (arvs) after lengthy legal battles and mass demonstrations (some nearly a decade long), the south african government introduced free antiretroviral drugs (arvs) in the public sector in april 2004. today, south africa’s antiretroviral treatment (art) programme is the largest in the world, but also a direct result of the treatment action campaign’s (tac) campaigning. the programme has contributed directly to an increase in life expectancy from 56 years in 2010 to 63 years in 2018 (avert, 2020). what made the tac’s victory possible? kumi naidoo, an environmental activist, noted that an interesting feature of the tac’s victory was that it was an initiative of a social movement, not an ngo. the strategy that was employed was “fantastic,” according to naidoo, because it combined agitation, mobilisation and litigation, and concrete organisation of activists like field workers, before resulting in the saving of tens of thousands of lives social justice struggles after 28 years of democracy in south africa studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 599 by ensuring that poor people could access arvs (k. naidoo, personal communication, july 3, 2020). zackie achmat, who was a leader of the tac and led the campaign for access to arvs, had this to say about the significance of the victory: “i think that the struggle of the treatment action campaign, the struggle of tens of thousands of people in south africa meant that people across the world could get access to generic medicines that can save millions of lives and will continue to save millions of lives” (achmat, 2013). gender-based violence (gbv) struggles khwezi (pseudonym) was a 31-year-old hiv positive woman who brought a rape charge to the johannesburg high court in november 2005. the accused in the case was jacob zuma, then 63, who was about to become the anc president and the state president of south africa. although he was formally acquitted, the case demonstrated how women face vilification and violence when they lay charges of rape and sexual violence. right from the start, the zuma presidency, which began in 2009, was riddled with controversy. in condemning the african anc women’s league, a women’s structure in the anc, hassim (2008) had this to say: “the vocal leaders were perhaps the most shocking – the anc women’s league. the storm troopers of patriarchy, they mobilised actively against fezekile [khwezi] both in public and in private” (p. 1). on average, only one in nine rape cases are reported to the police in south africa. the country’s femicide rate is five times higher than the global average. in august 2018, thousands of people, mainly women, organised public events to highlight the crisis of gender-based violence in south africa (odufuwa, 2018). the events, which coincided with women’s month in south africa, were called “the total shutdown,” and spread to botswana, lesotho, and namibia (odufuwa, 2018). after that, there were women-led protests in sandton, a business and financial sector hub in the city of johannesburg, to highlight the complicity of big businesses in gender-based violence. government held a conference in 2018, and subsequently a national strategy plan on gender-based violence was drafted, but the problem is that due to the state’s austerity measures the plan is most likely not to be funded. according to wendy pekeur, an activist, some of the highlights as far as gender-based violence is concerned is that the gender-based violence conference, discussed above, in 2018 put on the government’s agenda the need to take gender-based violence seriously (w. pekeur, personal communication, may 29, 2020). besides what has been stated by pekeur, some laws have managed to advance the rights of women and children. in this regard, caroline peters, a community activist, elaborated: mondli hlatshwayo studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 600 if i look at the sexual offences bill and what we have achieved, and how far we have come – the domestic violence act, the trafficking of persons bill, and the child rights bill – the bills and rights put in place – our successes are huge. we have the best bills and acts. (c. peters, personal communication, may 27, 2020) despite the challenges in their implementation, the laws have had a positive impact on the fight against gender-based violence, according to peters: “the domestic violence act – before the act, if you called the police, the police would say it’s a domestic issue… and wouldn’t interfere. now the police must intervene and arrest” (c. peters, personal communication, may 27, 2020). another problem cited by peters is that sometimes police and clerks do not know their roles in the implementation of the laws that seek to protect the rights of women and children. twenty years ago, there was a lot of training for police and magistrates, but it made little difference to the number of instances of gender-based violence. creating awareness among members of law enforcement agencies is currently one of the key tasks of the state. resources have to be made available so that magistrates, judges, and police officers can ensure that all the laws are implemented (c. peters, personal communication, may 27, 2020). social welfare after a series of campaigns and legal battles between the state and ngos over social grants, in 2018 the black sash, an ngo, reported to the public that the south african social security agency (sassa) had signed a fiveyear contract with the south african post office (sapo) to disburse social grants to beneficiaries. the new bank accounts of social grant holders do not allow for the deduction of debit and stop orders. this was after the state terminated an unconstitutional contract with cash pay master services (cps) on 30 september 2018 (black sash, 2019). highlighting the significance of the victory scored by the social justice sector and the black sash, karabo rajuili, an activist, said that: the black sash played an important role in ensuring that money is not deducted illegally from the social grants of individuals who are already vulnerable economically. this can help to make certain that social grants are directly used to deal with hunger and poverty, especially in poor communities. (k. rajuili, personal communication, july 2, 2020) social relief was extended during the national lockdown in april 2020. for example, for the first time in south africa, the unemployed who did not receive any social grant and money from the unemployment insurance fund (uif) received r350 per month from the state for six months. shaeera kalla, a member of the c19 people’s coalition – an alliance of social movements, social justice struggles after 28 years of democracy in south africa studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 601 trade unions, and community organisations struggling for social and economic rights in the context of covid-19 – argued that the social grant was not enough, but it helped five million unemployed people to have access to some food (mathe, 2021). what was disturbing was that councillors who were supposed to help with the distribution of food parcels abused their power by stealing the food and distributing it to their friends and members of their political parties (mahlangu, 2021). housing and urban struggles as cities begin programmes of gentrification, working-class people and the urban poor become victims of forced removals and astronomical increases in rent, which results in open and hidden struggles in many cities globally. housing and urban struggles are a global phenomenon, often characterised by ongoing battles between slum dwellers, urban poor communities, and racialised minorities, on the one hand, and states, housing departments and agencies, local authorities, and the police, on the other (august & walks, 2018; chenwi, 2015; mensah & tucker-simmons, 2021; walks & bourne, 2006). for example, one of the crucial points raised in the study conducted by mensah and tucker-simmons (2021) is that redevelopment in areas like herongate, an area in ottawa, tends to entrench the racialisation of immigrant communities, as they face mass evictions led by the state, the private sector, and local authorities. joel modiri, an academic and activist, stated: “some of the landmark cases from grootboom until now – these are cases that have been driven through the social justice sector – pushed the jurisprudence in the direction of holding greater accountability for the state” (j. modiri, personal communication, july 10, 2020). irene grootboom was part of a group of 4,000 residents living in wallacedene, an informal settlement outside of cape town, who in 1998 launched a lawsuit against the south african government. the informal settlement lacked housing, piped water, sanitation, electricity, and other basic services. finally, in 2000, the (constitutional court of south africa, 2000) ruled in favour of grootboom and others, confirming that, constitutionally, they had the right to housing, so that government had to find the means for housing to be delivered to the residents of informal settlements within reasonable periods. at the same time, the government had to provide immediate social relief for communities that had no access to water, sanitation, or adequate shelter. despite the ruling, irene grootboom died in 2008 without having realised the right to housing, as ruled by the constitutional court (hweshe, 2008). christopher rutledge, an activist who supports mining communities in south africa, cited the grootboom case as a success, in the sense that it confirmed that the government has to take social and economic rights mondli hlatshwayo studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 602 seriously, housing in particular, by developing concrete plans to ensure that socio-economic rights are realised (c. rutledge, personal communication, july 16, 2020). harry may, an activist, had this to say about the setback in grootboom’s court victory: “on the housing [front], the sad part about the grootboom judgement [is that] she died without getting a house” (h. may, personal communication, june 12, 2020). another landmark judgement was initiated by the abahlali basemjondolo (abm), an urban-based social movement. the provincial government of kwazulu-natal tabled the kwazulu-natal elimination and prevention of reemergence of slums act, no. 6 of 2007 (“the slums act”), in 2007. the proposed law was unjust because it gave the already powerful landowners and municipalities in the province unlimited power to evict tenants and those who were landless. abm headed to the high court in kwazulu-natal to challenge this law, but lost the case early in 2009. subsequently, the organisation approached the constitutional court, which ruled in favour of abm and, in late 2009 ordered the kwazulu-natal provincial government to pay the legal costs (mitlin & mogaladi, 2013). working with the socio-economic rights institute (seri), abm scored another court victory in the durban high court in 2012. in 2009, a court order had instructed the ethekwini municipality to organise alternative housing for households that were removed from the siyanda informal settlement in march 2009 to pave the way for the construction of a road. the deadline passed in 2010, and the community was still living in a transit camp, under terrible conditions. on 19 september 2012, the high court handed down a judgement instructing the city’s mayor, the municipal manager, and the director for housing to find alternative accommodation for the evicted people. failure to do so, according to the judge, would result in the fining or imprisonment of the three officials. the judgement was ground-breaking in the sense that politicians and administrators in municipalities who fail to comply with court orders, especially those relating to social and economic rights, could be fined or imprisoned (abahlali basemjondolo [abm], 2019). according to s’bu zikode, a leader of abm, litigation is always accompanied by mobilisation of those who are directly affected by the injustice, such as forced removals and lack of basic services provisioning by the state. zikode (2018) elaborated on this point: “we have managed to resist all forms of repression, including evictions. that is one thing we have been able to do; we remain a home and a hope for thousands of shack-dwellers and other impoverished people in the country” (p. 1). besides court victories, some urban struggles sought to undermine the apartheid geography. bevil lucas, a leader of reclaim the city, an organisation affiliated with the housing assembly, prefaced his response to the question of how his organisation was undermining apartheid geography by saying: “we need to note that victory comes in various forms – long-term, short-term, and immediate” (b. lucas, personal communication, may 16, 2020). lucas then talked about the occupation of the old woodstock social justice struggles after 28 years of democracy in south africa studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 603 hospital, which began in 2017. according to lucas, the first phase of the occupation was initiated by only 30 people, and their efforts encouraged many homeless people in cape town to join the occupation. today, the old woodstock hospital accommodates 305 households who would have been homeless had they not decided to occupy empty state buildings in the inner city of cape town. the aim of the occupation, according to lucas, is to symbolically transcend the colonial borders created by colonialists and imperialists. xolobeni: environmental struggles xolobeni is a rural area located in the wild coast region of the eastern cape. the xolobeni community has been challenging the state (department of mineral resources) and an australian company, mineral commodities ltd. (mrc), which has been seeking to mine titanium on their land since 2010 (bega, 2019). in 2016, sikhosiphi bazooka rhadebe, a leader of the amadiba crisis committee (acc) – a community organisation opposed to mining in the area – was assassinated, and his untimely death was attributed to opposition to mining in the area by his organisation. other committee members were receiving death threats for their involvement in the antimining campaign (washinyira & groundup staff, 2016). after realising how mining in other parts of south africa destroyed the environment and caused pollution, as well as diseases and sickness like tuberculosis among mine workers, the xolobeni community rejected mining. media campaigns, legal actions, and protests became their tools of struggle to oppose mining in the area (washinyira & groundup staff, 2016). following research, educational workshops, community meetings, marches, and picketing, the acc approached the court to challenge the australian company transworld energy and mineral resources (tem) over mining rights in the xolobeni area. in her groundbreaking judgement handed down in 2018, judge annali basson ruled “that the mineral resources minister must obtain consent from the community, as the holder of rights on land, prior to granting any mining right to tem” (mitchley, 2018, p. 1). that was a significant court victory because government and politicians have always tended to ignore the cultural and environmental rights of communities when granting mining contracts to mining companies. again, in 2021, the high court in cape town ruled that defamation lawsuits amounting to r14.25-million brought by australian mining company mrc and its local subsidiary, mineral sands resources, against three environmental lawyers, two community activists, and a social worker who criticised the operations of the mine regarding its intention to mine in the xolobeni area, were an abuse of south africa’s legal processes (bega, 2019). mondli hlatshwayo studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 604 zuma must fall former president, jacob zuma, resigned on 14 february 2018 after a sustained campaign to force him to quit as president of south africa. various political formations, some civil organisations, businesses, and the mass media accused zuma of having handed over the executive authority entrusted to him to the gupta family. part of this campaign included journalists analysing “gupta leaks,” which led to the release of many email exchanges about corrupt activities on the part of the gupta family, in collusion with local companies and politicians. khadija patel, a journalist, recounted this victory, but also argued that a setback is that no one has been jailed for this massive corruption: “the gupta leaks was successful, but no one went to jail” (k. patel, personal communication, july 9, 2020). it was the media that analysed a series of leaked emails showing how the guptas, who were businessmen, had direct influence in the appointment of some cabinet ministers, leaders, and managers of state-owned companies, and the allocation of big state contracts; all these activities amounted to what is regarded as state capture. these leaks were made possible by the bravery of journalists and the fact that south africa still has an independent media (dadawala, 2020). social justice organisations, such as trade unions and ngos, played a role in the “zuma must fall” campaign. litigation, organising protests, and analysis of the gupta leaks to further expose activities of state capture, were some of the actions taken by social justice organisations. the establishment in 2018 of the zondo commission to investigate corruption and state capture, signalled the possibility of responding to corruption effectively within the confines of the law. to fight corruption and state capture, some social justice organisations have made submissions to the commission with a view to making sure that those who are guilty are brought to book. zuma’s resignation and the promises of cyril ramaphosa (who succeeded zuma) to end corruption did not in any way lead to the reduction of corruption in south africa. covid-19 and the lockdowns in 2020 saw corrupt acts allegedly perpetrated by national and local leaders of the ruling anc. former minister of health, zweli mkhize, who had to lead the fight against the pandemic was also accused of corruption and had to resign as minister. deokaran, who was a witness in gauteng's personal protective equipment (ppe) corruption scandal, was gunned down outside her house in august 2021 after dropping her daughter off at school (carmen, 2021). workers’ rights following “rhodes must fall,” a campaign calling for the removal of colonial symbols in public spaces and decolonisation, students fought a number of battles. provoked by the announcement of fee increments by social justice struggles after 28 years of democracy in south africa studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 605 university managers in 2015 and 2016, university students and workers intensified their struggle for access to higher education and to end the outsourcing of work in universities, respectively, leading to some partial victories for students and workers. dubbed as “fees must fall” (fmf) and “outsourcing must fall” (omf), students and workers participated in nationwide protests, and in this regard, shaeera kalla, a former student leader at wits university, highlighted some of the victories achieved. the obvious one was the no fee increase announced by the state, which indicates a material gain. another was the pressure placed on the national student financial aid scheme (nsfas) to accommodate more students; as a result, the department of higher education and training (dhet) allocated additional funds to the scheme. other victories were that the children of workers at the university were able to study free, and that outsourcing was discontinued (s. kalla, personal communication, may 29, 2020). according to kalla, student activists involved in fmf contributed to the struggles that ended outsourcing in 2015 and 2016. since the late 1990s, outsourcing of what was described as “the non-core activities of universities” led to black women who worked as cleaners losing direct employment with universities and, in effect, carrying most of the social and economic burden in the university context. before the student uprising, which began in 2015, campaigns against outsourcing were low-key and isolated from the public eye. kalla elaborated on how outsourcing of workers was ended: the ability to join together with the workers was very important to [the] fees must fall [campaign] at wits, particularly because we had to support their struggle for an end to outsourcing. they were also very supportive of our struggle for free education because that also affected the working class. (s. kalla, personal communication, may 29, 2020) the solidarity between students, workers, political groups, and some academics ended in less than a year what the unions could not end for close to 25 years. to be more specific, according to hlatshwayo (2020), the campaign resulted in wage increases for the workers, which in some cases were more than 100%, and in 2016 the repudiation of outsourcing by many south african universities. these two partial victories for students and workers in universities do not necessarily mean that struggles in institutions of higher education have stopped. democracy coincided with the entrenchment of neoliberal policies that sought to weaken the positions of labour. what has been happening since 1994 has been a trend towards the generalised rise of precarious work, which is a type of work that has no or very limited security and benefits (hlatshwayo, 2009; jinnah, 2020). as mentioned earlier, the covid-19 pandemic and national lockdown fuelled the burgeoning trend of precarious work through massive retrenchment and the entrenchment of chronic mondli hlatshwayo studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 606 unemployment. even workers who are regarded as permanent employees with benefits are more precarious due to retrenchments resulting from work reorganisation, eroding many victories scored by workers since 1994. eddie webster, an academic, spoke about the complexities of victories for the labour movement in post-apartheid south africa. for example, according to webster, having full-time shop stewards paid by management to do union work was a partial victory. on the other hand, the problem is that these fulltime shop stewards tend to get co-opted and end up serving the interests of managers, not workers. another example given by webster was that winning the right to strike and to have protected strikes are some of the victories for workers. however, webster noted another contradiction in this success by saying: your right to strike is protected by the labour relations act of 1995, but there are procedures which at times make it difficult to use striking as a weapon. so i think that sometimes these victories turn out to be a double-edge[d] sword. (e. webster, personal communication, may 28, 2020) cosatu president, zingiswa losi, argued that organised labour has scored a number of victories in post-apartheid south africa. losi comments: success is when the campaign has been won and employers and government have agreed to demands. they are implemented by the employer, passed into law by government and given resources; for example, the national minimum wage bill was passed into law and is being implemented across the country. maternity leave exists for all workers, paid for by the employer or the uif. parental leave is being implemented and laws have been passed that protect farm workers. access to the uif has been massively expanded and is being felt by millions of workers. (z. losi, personal communication, june 22, 2020) losi mentions the basic conditions of employment act and the minimum wage act, and there are laws that were passed in 1997 and 2019, respectively, as partial victories of workers, including precarious workers. pinky mashiane, a worker leader, concurs with the view expressed by losi, and mentions that domestic workers can now access the uif as well as approach the commission for conciliation, mediation and arbitration (ccma) when they are unfairly treated by employers, as outlined by the basic conditions of employment act (bcea), no. 75 of 1997. the regulation of a minimum wage and conditions of work by the state are some of the victories scored by organised domestic workers. however, one of the setbacks is that some employers do not comply with these legal requirements. educating and organising domestic workers around these victories will help them realise these rights (p. mashiane, personal communication, june 22, 2020). igshaan schroeder, who heads the casual workers advice office that supports the struggles of precarious workers in south africa, was more social justice struggles after 28 years of democracy in south africa studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 607 reserved about victories of labour in post-apartheid south africa. schroeder indicated that workers are fighting a struggle to defend their minimum rights. according to schroeder, it makes sense to talk about partial victories, which tend to be temporary and small in nature. he elaborated further by saying: it’s important to understand that it’s a period of defensive struggles… we have had quite a lot of partial victories, for example, workers are made permanent, and the minimum wage increases. but i regard them as partial victories because it’s not long before the bosses restructure and dismiss the workers again, or they just force the workers to sign new, shorter contracts. so it has been difficult for the workers to struggle to hold on to the victories. (i. schroeder, personal communication, may 28, 2020) contextualising partial victories and setbacks in some cases, these successes have been accompanied by contradictions, hence i regard them as partial victories. for example, progressive laws or policies may not be implemented by the state due to the inefficiencies within the bureaucracy and a lack of political will. some of the victories are visible and seek to directly undermine the racial geography created by the apartheid state and maintained by politicians and businesses that believe that black people are not supposed to live in cities like cape town. direct actions, like the occupation of an unused government building in the inner city of cape town, can be counted as partial victories, because they show that workingclass people can challenge the oppressive system and establish their own ways of living, which embrace democracy and solidarity (robins, 2021). another piece of advice from rutledge is that winning a court victory is important, but the implementation of court decisions is another matter. in the final analysis, according to rutledge, “without mass participation and mobilising people to claim their rights, a victory in court is meaningless” (c. rutledge, personal communication, july 16, 2020). this point raised by rutledge emphasises that social justice organisations must recognise that, in the final analysis, those who are directly affected by different forms of social and economic oppression can only achieve real and meaningful change by follow-through of initial victories. shamim meer, a feminist, mentioned that activists want to see the endpoint, which is about changing power relations in society, in order to improve the lives of workers, women, and all marginalised members of our communities, and to make sure that people participate meaningfully in decision-making at all levels. moreover, meer pointed out that, “we need to measure the incremental changes that move us towards that long-term goal” (s. meer, personal communication, may 28, 2020). changes caused by actions of social justice are incremental in the sense that social justice struggles are an uphill battle requiring organising, patience, and recognising that there are powerful forces constantly undermining social justice. mondli hlatshwayo studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 591-611, 2022 608 conclusion some of these mentioned partial victories, as alluded to by schroeder, demonstrate that social justice organisations and poor communities have to continue to struggle for social justice to improve their living and working conditions generally, from the short-term up to the long-term. the article has shown that political life in south africa, like elsewhere in the world, is contradictory and dynamic. if one just reads the statistics that show the depressing economic and social life in south africa, one may wrongly conclude that social justice struggles that are supposed to improve the social and economic lives of the economically excluded have disappeared. however, as this article has demonstrated, social justice organisations not only continue to exist, but they are also involved in a constant uphill battle characterised by defeats, setbacks, and some partial victories. more research is required on how to build social justice organisations that can cohere around common issues and demands without undermining the autonomy of each social justice organisation in its sector. acknowledgments i would like to thank the raith foundation for funding the data collection process that led to the production of this article. however, the views expressed in this article are mine and not those of the funder. the reviewers and the editorial team of the journal gave feedback which strengthened the quality of this article. comrades jessie turton, fatima shabodien, and isobel frye educated me about the state of social justice organisations as we were collecting and analysing data for the social justice organisations project. references abahlali basemjondolo (abm). 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(2019). black middle class more than doubled but the struggle continues. the city press, 29 april 2019, https://www.news24.com/citypress/business/black-middle-classmore-than-doubled-but-the-struggle-continues-20190429 stasiulis et al final mar 25 20 correspondence address: daiva stasiulis, department of sociology & anthropology, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: daiva.stasiulis@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 1-12, 2020 migration, intersectionality and social justice – guest editors’ introduction daiva stasiulis carleton university, canada zaheera jinnah university of victoria, canada blair rutherford carleton university, canada this special issue contributes to a growing paradigm shift among migration scholars seeking to unpack the complexity of power relations, inequities and forms of social oppression among migrants, and intrinsic to border and migration policies, through the deployment of intersectionality as an analytic tool (abu-laban, 1998; anthias, 2012; bastia, piper & carron, 2011; carastathis, kouri-towe, mahrouse, & whitley, 2018, grosfoguel, oso & christou, 2015; truong, gasper, handmaker & bergh, 2014). both migration and intersectionality are inextricably linked to social justice. both involve processes of categorization that are deeply embedded in social science and policy, providing an important means by which we construct and apprehend the social world. both also serve political purposes and agendas, and are associated with hierarchical systems of “worthiness” and access to bounded systems of rights (crawley & skleparis, 2018, p. 51). international migration involves authorized and unauthorized human crossings across borders of nation-states whose sovereignty is daily enacted through legally and (in accordance with international law) “legitimately” discriminating between those who are deemed to be desirable entrants and those defined as undesirable. in the latter category are migrants who defy border restrictions, rendering them prey to a host of risks and predations. this special issue explores the multiple pathways across state borders and the multiple jeopardies and experiences within the borders of “transit” and “destination” countries among migrants who embody the characteristics of those whom the late african-american poet and activist june jordan (2005) describes as “the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent” daiva stasiulis, zaheera jinnah & blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 2 and who also may be the “wrong sex” and the “wrong gender identity,” or the wrong religion, nationality or ethnicity. most of the papers gathered in this thematic issue were originally presented at a conference on intersectionality and migration held in ottawa at carleton university in the fall of 2016. this conference was conceptualized by the three guest editors as part of a broader research and teaching partnership between carleton’s migration and diaspora studies and the institute of african studies, and the african centre for migration and society at wits university, south africa, to raise questions and explore opportunities on migration studies. it brought together scholars based in south africa and canada whose research on migration encompassed these two destination countries as well as south korea, and where migrants originated from countries in southern and eastern africa, south and east asia, and central and south america. it soon became apparent that the focus of most papers was trained on the most precarious of migrants produced by the intersection of their non-citizenship statuses with their location in low-wage work and “obfuscated employment relations” (anderson, 2010, p. 300) or in statedesignated categories that left them highly vulnerable to hyper-exploitation and oppression. commonly, destination and transit states either reinforce such precarity or ignore its effects in producing highly insecure and inhumane conditions and high probabilities of violence. other transecting relations of power deepen and define migrants’ exposure to structural insecurities vis à vis state authorities, employers, various mobility agents including traffickers, and hostile, xenophobic and fearful local populations. the topics in this special issue range broadly – and include work in segmented labour markets and struggles for livelihood; the links between family, security and nation-building; border, migration, health and employment policies; inter-migrant relations, law and legal reform; crimmigration and deportation. collectively, the articles in this issue suggest that despite the many characteristics of migrants deemed “undesirable” through their location in racialized, gendered, class and other power relations, states both tolerate and selectively recruit certain groups of such “wrong” migrants who are perceived to serve significant purposes for states, employers and families of better-resourced residents. these include providing household care of children and elders, a captive cheap and disposable labour force, or (as in south korea) biological reproduction of a nation grappling with declining fertility rates. the categories in which states place such migrants draw upon, compound, and deepen subjugating processes of racialization and class oppression, that are also gendered, sexualized, and may be intertwined with other stigmatizing dynamics. rarely, a promise for more permanent status in destination countries is extended to low-wage or poor migrants, whose combined and intersecting characteristics may be regarded as producing a cultural or civilizational deficit or drain on state resources. yet to the extent that such pathways to regularization or permanence exist, they are almost always contingent on the migration, intersectionality & social justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 3 fulfillment of several exacting conditions. these egregious conditions vary from country to country and also by the state-defined categories (temporary seasonal worker, migrant caregiver, marriage migrant, refugee, etc.) where migrants are placed. as elaborated below, migration categories entitle select migrants to some level of “protection, rights and resources whilst simultaneously disentitling others” (crawley & skleparis, 2018, p. 59). among the many injustices experienced by migrants compelled to prove their worthiness for long-term legal residence or citizenship status is forced separation from family members and considerable loss of autonomy and ability to safeguard their person, health and livelihoods against a broad range of possible hazards. in other cases, such “wrong” migrants are placed in a purgatory of permanent impermanence. in all cases, through its migration management apparatus and several other agencies, the state plays an active role in perpetuating and ignoring the multiple sources of insecurity that migrants face. states may actively seek to indefinitely sequester in deplorable conditions and deport migrants deemed unfit for settlement, integration or humanitarian assistance, or they may simply overlook their very existence, rendering invisible the gross violation of human rights that their treatment within these states represents. as u.s. supreme court justice william brennan wrote in a 1987 case, “[b]anished from everyday sight, they exist in a shadow world that only dimly enters our awareness” (quoted in hernandez 2019, p. 15).1 formidable barriers exist to bringing meaningful social justice to undocumented, unauthorized, and even selected migrants with temporary status, who bear considerable risks but who nonetheless persist in crossing borders as a survival strategy, often fleeing unbearable perils as much as motivated at forging a better life in a relatively wealthier or more stable country. neoliberalism, succinctly defined as market-based governance practices such as “the privatization, commodification and proliferation of difference,” accompanied by “authoritarian, national-security driven penal state practices” provides a global landscape that since the 1980s, has compelled and managed global migration (mohanty, 2013, p. 970). thus, as mohanty elaborates, neoliberal states facilitate travel across borders and cosmopolitanism for some economically privileged communities, but such enhanced mobility occurs at the expense of a more halting or stalled mobility, a “holding in place” through conditionality, criminalization and incarceration of impoverished migrants with irregular or temporary statuses (hernandez, 2019; mohanty, 2013). 1 justice brennan was here referring to prisoners in general, but his sentiment applies as well to vulnerable migrants, whose presence is hidden from view, forgotten or ignored. daiva stasiulis, zaheera jinnah & blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 4 de-fetishizing migrant categories migrants may be forcibly displaced by deteriorating political, economic, military or climatic conditions or domestic or sexualized violence. often when crises compound, protracted conflict in a country devastates its economic infrastructure, producing severe shortages and loss of homes and livelihoods. in such circumstances, movements across national borders may become the only survival strategy available. the un’s 2019 global trends report estimates that worldwide close to 71 million people were forcibly displaced from their homes by wars, violence, and deepening human rights, political and economic crises – about twice as many as 20 years previously – with roughly 26 million counted as refugees by the unhcr (edwards, 2019). these conditions have contributed to the ballooning in overall numbers of international migrants globally, reaching an estimated 272 million in 2019, comprising 3.5% of the global population, compared to 2.8% in 2000 (edwards, 2019). most international migration occurs within rather than across regions, particularly in sub-saharan africa, the middle east, eastern and south-eastern asia, latin america and the caribbean, and central and southern asia. many migrants cross borders to contiguous states where conditions are scarcely better and a far cry from offering a safe haven, rights or secure livelihood (united nations department of economic & social affairs, 2019).2 migrants may also be actively recruited through temporary labour schemes, in sectors and jobs often rejected for their grim conditions by more settled workers, whom by virtue of being citizens, especially in wealthier countries, have relatively greater autonomy, work choices, and familial, community and state protection and support. international labour migration is rising with the international labour organization estimating that in 2017, there were about 164 million migrant workers worldwide – an increase of about nine percent since 2013, with about 42% female (international labour organization, 2018). as impressive as these official figures may be, they vastly undercount the numbers of migrants from countries in the global south who work in other countries, insofar as they are incapable of capturing the large numbers of “irregular” migrants (some of whom enter through having been smuggled or trafficked) who may wish to escape notice of state authorities for fear of punitive consequences, or whose employers may wish to hide their crimes from authorities. many migrants who enter through irregular migration frequently engage in a variety of risky micro exchange transactions for survival, often with other migrants who live similarly perilous lives within the grey economy (see rutherford, this issue). regardless of whether the perceived risks of remaining in home countries or the lure of better 2 by contrast, international migrants in north america, oceania, northern africa and western asia, in the vast majority, were born outside their region of residence (united nations department of economic & social affairs, 2019). migration, intersectionality & social justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 5 livelihoods in destination countries are stronger, the rise in increasingly restrictive immigration regimes and hostile environments towards distinctly racialized or otherwise “othered” migrants in migrant-receiving countries accentuates the extreme vulnerability of unauthorized border-crossers, lowwage migrants, and non-waged migrants. migration scholars, policy makers and international organizations have long distinguished between “forced” and “voluntary migration” (similar to the un and ilo categories discussed above regarding forced/refugees and labour migrants). yet the distinctions between these categories drawn in migration management policies, laws and conventions are not always clearcut and the uses of such categories are deeply politicized. thus, while the un refugee convention offers a legal definition of a refugee, “its interpretation and application takes place at the national level reflecting national interests and priorities which change over time” as is apparent in shifting “safe country lists” which result in the production of “deportable failed asylum seekers” (crawley & skleparis, 2018, p. 51). crawley and skleparis (2018) persuasively argue that binaries such as forced vs. voluntary migration fail to capture the nuanced complexities of mobile lives across space and time, reworked and re-categorized in new locations. as schrover and moloney (2013, p. 8) observe, many migrants who entered as “guest workers” during the 1970s to north-west europe were fleeing politically repressive regimes, such as those of salazar in portugal, franco in spain, the colonels in greece, and king hassan ii in morocco. migrants categorized as guest workers were escaping both poverty and repression, and when the guest-worker schemes came to an end in the mid1970s, applications for refugee status and family reunification swelled in number. as these authors suggest, “[c]ategories of migrants are like communicating vessels: migrants change categories, and the bureaucrats who decide on entry or residence might allocate them to different categories” (2013, p. 8). states that appear to offer shelter from constant human insecurity might also attempt to close off legal entry to all but the most select immigrants, thus creating novel irregular movements of “illegal” migrants. a significant problem flagged by crawley and skleparis (2018, p. 55) with the “dichotomous, location-based categorization which dominates much scholarly and policy-thinking is that it presupposes that people move between two fixed places.” the addition of a third location – such as “transit state” – is an effort to conceptually include the in-between origin and destination states, but “replicates the linear understanding of migration processes and experiences” (crawley & skleparis, 2018, pp. 57-59). as these authors suggest, many migrants considered at one time the country to which they initially moved to be a destination country where they intended to settle. yet circumstances such as failure to secure a good livelihood, political factors, severe discrimination (e.g., based upon or targeting some combination of race, sexuality, or religion) or lack of access to citizenship or rights may daiva stasiulis, zaheera jinnah & blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 6 result in onward migration and the seeking out of another country in which to settle and live. in their journey involving loss of homes, livelihoods, and members of families, displaced peoples might in one location be a refugee, in another a migrant, and in yet another may adopt or be designated some other status: “[p]eople can and do shift between and across categories both in their countries of origin and as they travel through space and time” (crawley & skleparis, 2018, p. 59). as brenda yeoh suggests in her characterization of migrations in and out of asia, they are less likely to “take the form of permanent ruptures, uprooting and settlement [and] more likely to be transient and complex, ridden with disruptions, detours, multi-destinations, and are founded on interconnections and multiple chains of migration” (yeoh, 2017, p. 144). yet, in each space, mobile persons may have their rights and their interactions with others fenced in and severely restricted by a particular migrant or non-national category that defines their relation to the state within which they are (often) temporarily residing. while expressing recognition of the risks of opening up categories such as “refugee” which provide protection under international law, crawley and skleparis suggest that scholars approach migration policy categories from a more critical perspective and question how it is that those placed in one category are somehow more deserving than others (2018, p. 60). specifically, they advocate challenging “categorical fetishism,” which treats categories such as “‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ as if they simply exist, out there, as empty vessels into which people can be placed in some neutral ordering process” (crawley & skleparis, 2018, p. 49). as discussed below, introducing an intersectionality lens may go some distance in comprehending why some mobile humans are placed in more or less deserving categories than others, exposing them to multiple forms of injustice. the articles in this special issue are informed by such a critical perspective, asking how it is that household migrant workers, seasonal agricultural workers, petty traders, migrants exploited by other migrants, unauthorized border-crossers, migrant sex workers, racialized migrant women and men, migrant women victimized by domestic violence – in other words, “the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent” (jordan, 2005) – are categorized, rendered problematic or invisible in law and policy, and treated as abject, less deserving, deportable and even disposable. transnational and national networks of migrant activists, human rights ingos (international non-governmental organizations) and trade unions have also been involved in a project of de-fetishizing migrant categories. indeed a central goal of no-border movements is abolishing the entire system of categorization in relation to national borders. they have sought a range of legal and extra-legal protections against violence, hyper-exploitation, imprisonment, deportation and even deaths among the most vulnerable among border crossers and migrants. as zaheera jinnah (this issue) outlines in her article on female migrant domestic workers (from zimbabwe, malawi migration, intersectionality & social justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 7 and lesotho) in south africa, post-apartheid gains have been made as part of sweeping reforms in employment standards in the 1990s that recognized, for instance, that care workers were “employees” rather than servants, and that non-citizen workers as “residents” deserved rights on par with citizen workers. in a sobering assessment of familiar patterns experienced by migrant domestic workers worldwide, jinnah concludes that actual pay, working and living conditions have scarcely improved. in canada, employment standards in some provinces boast equal coverage for temporary and citizen agricultural workers and offer some level of protection to migrant caregivers. yet, as daiva stasiulis (this issue) argues in her paper on “migrant disposability,” lax administration of these provisions and the puny fines imposed on employers for often-gross breaches of standards suggest that such protections for migrant workers exist primarily on paper. underlining the willful neglect of human rights violations against migrants is the unwillingness of “host” countries (including all western migrantreceiving states) to sign the 1990 united nations international convention on the rights of all migrant workers and members of their families (icmw), rendering the icmw “one of the most neglected treaties in international human rights law” (pécoud, 2017, p. 57). as pécoud dryly observes, “the rights of migrants are difficult to reconcile with market logics in destination countries” and the under-ratification of the treaty reflects lack of support for migrant rights at both national and international levels (2017, p. 57). compounding the absence of state protection of migrant rights is a reluctance of many migrant-producing countries to ratify the convention for fear of alienating rich destination countries and the promise of bountiful remittances sent to migrant-origin countries earned from the blood, sweat and tears of poorlyor un-protected migrants (pécoud, 2017, p. 65). often, as in south africa, the expansion in international and state recognition of the human and worker rights of migrants appears to float above and scarcely touch the reality of deteriorating material conditions and increased risks faced by low-wage migrant workers. as ndlovu’s poem “the migrant nurse dilemma” (in this issue) expresses, state documentary practices in barring migrant access to fundamental rights such as health care poses a dilemma for front-line health care workers, who acknowledge that citizenship trumps human rights and international protocols bear little weight. states are constituted as the primary guardians of sovereignty (cohen, 2018, p. 83), and an inter-state consensus dictates that state sovereignty is contingent upon state expansion of control and fortification of borders against unauthorized or non-selected migrants. the pre-eminence of national (state, employer, and citizen) interests prevails even when some state laws recognize certain rights of noncitizens, as other legislation and their enforcement may deny those rights. as ndlovu notes in the explanatory text following her poem: daiva stasiulis, zaheera jinnah & blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 8 it [access to health care as a right for all] is protected in the south african constitution however this is not clearly outlined in the national health act or the immigration act (ncumisa, 2018). this has created a grey area in which many migrants experience challenges accessing health care, while health workers may also experience frustration over a lack of guidelines on how to deal with nonsouth african patients. those migrants subjected to the greatest punitive controls are invariably marginalized and marked as unfit, uncivilized, or security risks through a variety of intersecting (e.g., racialized, class-based and gendered) discourses. states and major segments of populations in receiving countries have stepped up efforts, as detailed by all authors in this special issue, to exclude, criminalize and deport these migrants (abji) and subject them to a variety of harms – including stigmatization as fraudulent (lee-an), precaritization (jinnah), gendered and racialized insecurities (rutherford, liu), and even disposability as human waste (stasiulis). the absence of perspectives or consultations with the most marginalized – migrant and immigrant women – in legal reforms in precarious work such as sex work silences the voices of those who experience the greatest risks and harm. as jamie liew argues, this silence reproduces epistemic violence against these migrants in employment sectors heavily populated by (im)migrants. the absence of intersectional analysis contributes to a failure to address many of the root causes that render racialized, migrant female workers prey to violence, hyper-exploitation, and rightlessness. efforts to exclude, invisibilize, dehumanize, deport and dispose of vulnerable migrants occurs even while many of the economies and citizens of receiving states reap rich rewards from the employment and hyper-exploitation of migrants with precarious statuses in the form of business profits, cheaper food and more affordable privatized child and elder care. why intersectionality for migration studies? the promise of intersectionality for addressing justice concerns of migrants, and injustices created through the migration process, is rooted in its simultaneous engagement with multiple power relations that exclude and silence the most marginalized. since its introduction into scholarly literature in the 1980s, intersectionality has been strongly linked to issues of social justice and has occupied a central position in analyses of global, national and localized inequalities as well as in feminist legal, political and policy discourses of international human rights (cho, crenshaw & mccall, 2013, p. 786). intersectionality as an analytic framework or conceptual tool made its initial appearance within feminist and anti-racist scholarship during the 1980s in several mainly global north countries, where women of colour and antiracist feminist scholars and activists sought to bring issues of racism to the migration, intersectionality & social justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 9 fore and give epistemic privilege to the most marginalized communities of women. 3 these writers began to name, analyze and interrogate the relationships among the distinct and multiple forms of discrimination, oppression and agency among women whose life experiences and identities defied single axis thinking. intersectionality was designated in a variety of ways (including black/chicana/mohawk/south asian, etc., feminism, antiracist feminism, triple oppression), with each designation often signaling the author’s multi-layered and communal standpoint, epistemology, and intellectual and political affiliations. in the united states, african american women (many of whom self-identified as “black feminists”) and other racialized and colonized women provided theorization and significant empirical analyses that demonstrated their oppression could neither strictly be defined in terms of gender nor race. key pioneering intersectionality scholars in the u.s. included patricia hill collins (1991), hazel carby (1982), kimberlé crenshaw (1989, 1991), bonnie thornton dill (1988), bell hooks (1981) and chandra talpade mohanty (1986) who sought to “decolonize feminist scholarship.” in canada, authors who first began to explicitly theorize how race, ethnicity, gender, and class co-constituted experiences of subordination and resistance for immigrant, black, indigenous and other racialized women (and less commonly men) included sedef arat-koc (1989), abigail bakan (bakan & stasiulis, 1997), himani bannerji (1987), monica boyd (1992), dionne brand (1984), agnes calliste (1989, 1993), gillian creese (creese & stasiulis, 1996), tania das gupta (1991), marlee kline (1989), patricia monture-angus (1995), roxana ng (1986), and daiva stasiulis (1987, 1990, 1999; stasiulis & yuval-davis, 1995).4 significant early scholars of intersectionality working in britain were amina mama (1982), pratibha parmar (1982), floya anthias and nira yuval-davis (anthias & yuval-davis, 1983, 1992). in australia, gill bottomley, marie de lepervanche and jeannie martin (bottomley, de lepervanche & martin, 1991) were among the early scholars of intersectionality. this is a woefully very partial (and somewhat idiosyncratic) list of scholars who were involved in fashioning intersectionality as an analytic tool in these various contexts.5 3 collins and bilge (2016, pp. 3-4) contend that intellectuals and activists in the global south “have [long] used intersectionality as an analytic tool, often without naming it as such,” simultaneously confronting several axes of social division such as (in india) caste, gender and class. 4 for an insightful analysis of this early canadian anti-racist, feminist scholarship, see dua (1999). 5 the idiosyncrasies here largely capture a partial list of the network of anti-racist feminists with whom stasiulis interacted, read, or occasionally had the pleasure of collaborating with, in the 1980s and early 1990s. the references to relevant scholarship are also merely indicative. the building of a feminist intersectionality lens attentive to issues of race, racism and colonialism critically reflected upon the national specificities of intersecting relations of power, but was equally a collective, transnational endeavor, and has become even more so in its 21st century “renaissance.” daiva stasiulis, zaheera jinnah & blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 10 as crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) foundational analysis of legal redress of violence against black women in the united states illuminated, intersectional analysis was required to ensure that african american women would not fall between the cracks of laws and policies that implicitly assumed that women were generically white or black people were generically male. no longer would a race-free analysis of women’s oppression, or race-, genderand colonialism-free analysis of class exploitation suffice to account for the specific mutually constituted and layered forms of oppression experienced by black women, indigenous women, or other women of colour in the united states, britain, canada, australia, and several other countries. as virtually all of the initial intersectionality writers were women, the subjects of analyses were almost exclusively oppressed women or more infrequently women privileged through their respective locations in relations and discourses of race/whiteness, class, sexuality, colonialism and imperialism (amos & parmar, 1984; ware, 1992). while the original trinity of “gender, race and class” (grc) became by far the most significant constellation of social relations explored in intersectional analysis of marginalized people, its application to study complexity and power across a variety of disciplines, national and local spaces, and communities of people, has seen an efflorescence of various combinations of power and identity including sexuality, ethnicity, indigeneity, religion, age, generation, ability, and citizenship status, as well as the original grc trinity. at the same time, simply adding more intersections does not, we would argue, strengthen the critical potential of intersectionality to advance the social justice claims of migrants (carastathis et al., 2018, p. 9). rather, specific choices of (a manageable number of) axes of power permit deeper understandings of their genealogy through time and space, and are more likely to offer insightful analyses of migrant experiences, and law, policy, resistance and solidarity. there are historical lessons here to be learned from the foundations of feminist and critical race intersectional thinking in praxis. the rootedness of theorizing about intersectionality in activism among those excluded from or subordinated in progressive social movements and rightsand equality-enhancing social welfare policies, assured a close relationship between scholarship advancing analyses of multiple, simultaneous and intersecting sources of oppression, and praxis aimed at transforming systemic forms of discrimination, exclusion and oppression. social justice was foregrounded as well in intersectional analyses that sought to comprehend and address structural forms of inequality, such as the links among capitalism, colonialism, racism and hetero-patriarchy. in contrast, social justice concerns began to fade in a type of identity-focused scholarship when intersectional thinking became unmoored from concrete struggles and analyses of structural power. filtered through a post-structural and postmodern (proliferation of differences) lens, much intersectional analysis engaged in a more playful and often creative consideration of the complexity of overlapping individual identities, ignoring, however, the embeddedness of migration, intersectionality & social justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 11 identity in material bases of intersectional injustice, violence and oppression (cho, crenshaw & mccall, 2013, p. 797). the focus on inequality, oppression and social (in)justice dimmed in cultural analysis that sought to study and theorize the infinite complexity, hybridity and transnational fluidity of identities. at the same time, intersectionality scholars have cautioned against the adoption of too rigid an opposition between identity and power, arguing that recognition of marginalized identities is essential for addressing the exclusions of subjugated communities (cho, crenshaw & mccall, 2013, pp. 797-800). here intersectional identities are what produce embodied, situated knowledge, and perspectives that have traditionally been marginalized and erased in many disciplines and interdisciplinary scholarship such as migration studies (dhamoon, 2011, pp. 232-233). demarginalizing such knowledge is in turn critical to resistance strategies that focus on “dismantling the violent capacities of racialized-gendered systems that operate under the pretense of neutrality” (dean spade, quoted in cho, crenshaw & mccall, 2013, p. 798). as tungohan (2016, p. 353) suggests, many of the migrant grassroots organizations base their mobilization of members on the anti-essentialist premise that intersectional identities are derived from grassroots politics rather than politics being derived from identities. for example, a decades-long tradition of dissident diasporic filipino theatre has migrants as active creators of scripts reflecting their struggles, painful separation from children and family and indignities of migrant caregiver life. equal parts politics, therapy and socializing, such artistic expressions are empowering for the most subjugated of migrants. they are also one strand of resistance within multi-scalar grassroots networks such as migrante and gabriela where activists view their struggles as ranged in opposition to interlocking structures of power (tungohan, 2016). such creative interventions also attest to the situated character of such knowledge and forms of resistance. the article by geraldine pratt, sarah zell, caleb johnston and hazel venzon (this issue) sharply demonstrates such potentialities as they analyse the “testimonial play” nanay about the interactions among filipino domestic workers with their children, nanny agents, government officials and canadian employers. different patterns of filipino migration to different canadian cities are regulated by diverse temporary worker and provincial migration programs, producing distinctive micro-geographies of intersectionality, power, marginalization and solidarity. there are other contributions that insightfully examine as well as illustrate creative interventions that seek to challenge the layering of injustices facing different migrants. the multiple methods in this special issue speak both to how knowledge is being created and how social justice issues such as migration are being represented in both academic and popular domains. in their piece in this issue, “we the people” by the mestizo arts & activism (maa) collective, young people of colour living on the west side of salt lake city, utah (usa), provocatively center issues of social justice. daiva stasiulis, zaheera jinnah & blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 12 they question notions of power in whiteness, class, race, gender and sexual identities by repurposing the preamble of the us constitution. through a performance in the state of utah legislature, the group assume roles of what they call “corporates,” those representing political and economic power, and residents of a neighborhood challenging ideas of who belongs, who gains, and who controls access to economic and political power. in their dialogue, they write, “[w]e own your labor and know that you need the money… so, go ahead and quit if you don’t like the health plan…. there’s a person behind you, waiting to replace you! not to worry – we got your interest in mind – so sit back, relax and let us take control.” elsa oliveira and rebecca walker (this issue) draw on their experience in a participatory arts-based project with migrant women in johannesburg, most of whom were still waiting for a decision on their refugee applications. reflexively examining the process of research and the creation of quilts by the women, they engage in important deliberations concerning the ethics and politics of power and relationships in research, while showing through their analysis and images how these women challenged hegemonic discourses of gender and citizenship as their “creative works weave through many strands of their lives, from being accused of witchcraft, to watching loved ones murdered, and the difficulties of raising a child with disabilities.” the screenprints by moozhan ahmadzadegan invite the readership of this special issue into a conversation about current debates in canada and elsewhere concerning migration and refugees. the overlay of queries over stock pictures very familiar to, say, those who are conversant with mediated discussions about european immigration to settle the americas and australia or about war in the middle east this century, arrests the viewer, prompting one to (further) rethink how xenophobia permeates so much of the public discourse in one’s communities. intersectionality in migration studies intersectionality is an analytic approach that understands “the social reality of women, [men and non-binary genders] and the dynamics of their social, cultural, economic and political contexts to be multiply, simultaneously, and interactively determined by various significant axes of social organization” (stasiulis, 1999, p. 347, emphasis in original). the implicit or explicit adoption of intersectional frameworks in migration studies has stemmed from the realization that migrants are not undifferentiated human subjects, nor can migrant movements be defined only along one parameter of difference: thus, neither “women” nor “migrant women” are unitary groups with common experience, with the latter highly differentiated through the intersection of their lived circumstances in their home, transit and destination countries and their mode and status of entry, racial and ethno-religious differences, skill level, age, and education, among others (anthias, 2012, pp. 102, 106). migration, intersectionality & social justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 13 the connection between migration and intersectionality was often implicit in much of the early intersectionality scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s. this seemed inevitable in high immigrant-receiving countries such as canada (and australia) where the official state narrative taken up by many migration scholars is that canada (or australia) is a multicultural nation built on successive waves of immigration (kaushik & walsh, 2018, p. 28). some of the authors of such pioneering scholarship (such as feminist historians and social scientists of various minority ethnicities) were immigrants from less favoured countries themselves or had grown up in immigrant households and thus experienced first-hand distinctive forms of othering (see, for canada, iacovetta, 1992; lindström, 1988). black caribbean female scholars documented the devastating impact of punishing racialized routes to migration in canada for black immigrant women offered by foreign domestic worker policies (calliste, 1989; silvera, 1989). colonialism and fading european empires had established pathways of international migration leading these scholars to discern just how enmeshed migrants and immigrants were in (settler) colonial logics that also were intertwined with relations of race, class, gender and sexuality. more recently, it has been less the multiplicities of relations of power that constituted the construct of “immigrant women” (see ng, 1986) and more, as salina abji argues in this issue, how “race, gender and other axes of difference are mobilized in the enactment of punitive immigration controls.” such controls can have devastating and deadly consequences as migrants deemed “illegal” may be imprisoned and denied a modicum of rights or care. perhaps more astonishingly, despite their legal and highly regulated presence in canada, low skill temporary labour migrants can also be subjected to technologies of disposability in sites such as immigration law and provincial/territorial employment legislation, the workplace, transport, living conditions, access to health care and the practice of medical repatriation of injured and ill migrant workers (see stasiulis, this issue). whether an intersectional lens is still in its infancy or well-established as a key analytic lens within contemporary migration studies is a matter of debate, and likely also reflects the prevailing paradigms within different branches of migration studies. thus, carasthasis et al. (2018, p. 6) observe that “the majority of (forced) migration [and refugee] scholarship continues to approach the subject without attending to the simultaneity of experiences and co-implications of positionalities shaped by gendered, racialized, class, and sexuality-based power relations.” indeed, they argue that the “question of gender” in migration remains a marginal focus and when deployed, gender has been included as an “essentially demographic category” rather than understood as produced “through both nationalized and transnational heteropatriarchal power relations” (2018, p. 7). similarly, kaushik and walsh (2018, pp. 34-35) argue that the significant body of research focused on settlement and integration (in canada) “has almost entirely refrained from using intersectionality as a main analytical framework.” daiva stasiulis, zaheera jinnah & blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 14 in contrast, scholarship on the globalization of reproductive labour, examining female-dominated migration from (and within) the global south to the global north, especially domestic, household or care workers, but also migrant sex workers and nurses, has at least since the late 1980s been keenly focused on global north-south divisions, and dynamics of racialized, gendered, class-based power relations (arat-koc 1989; bakan & stasiulis, 1997; calliste, 1989; parreñas, 2001; romero, 1992; silvera, 1989; stasiulis & bakan, 2003). an intersectionality lens has been utilized to inform the structural dynamics of colonialism/imperialism, capitalism and patriarchy that have given rise to unfree labour systems and reinforced the citizenship divide in receiving countries between employers and employees (bakan & stasiulis, 2003). in many countries, options for even highly educated women to migrate from the global south have narrowed to temporary stateauthorized migrant programs or through undocumented and irregular migration directed to address the care gap in middle and upper class private family households. this is clearly a vast, though often invisible globalized sector of employment where the entry of the migrant woman analytically altered the thinking of many feminist scholars in exposing the limitations of single axis thinking. not merely the position of migrant women in hierarchies of race, class, gender and citizenship, but their relationship with employers positioned in more privileged positions within these intersecting dynamics abruptly erased notions of “shared sisterhood” in feminist discourse. such analyses applied intersectionality to various levels of scale and spatiality – from exploring the devastating dislocations among local populations stemming from the imposition of imf and world bank structural adjustment policies in home countries such as the philippines, to the replication of these globalized racialized, gendered and class-based dynamics of privilege and oppression played out at the micro level in private family households in destination countries (stasiulis & bakan, 2003). as migration studies have tended to reproduce northern-centric social science, we are less aware of how the concept of intersectionality has traveled or how an intersectional sensibility has informed scholarship on gendered patterns of migration circulating within the global south (grosfoguel, oso & christou, 2015; oishi, 2005; truong et al., 2014). this does not mean that migration studies have ignored the south but rather that this scholarship has placed the emphasis on the south as migrant producing rather than migrant receiving or as regional sites where migration circulates (yeoh, 2014). many scholars working within or writing about the exploitation of female migrant household workers in the southern as well as northern hemispheres have for some time incorporated intersectional approaches that give “attention to class, race, gender, citizenship, language and other forms of social difference” (yeoh, 2014, p. 143). as jinnah (this issue) observes, despite such research conducted through an intersectional lens, there is limited scholarship on the “heterogeneity of global care chains, the perspectives of employers and migration, intersectionality & social justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 15 workers, and the dynamics and patterns in [different regions] of the global south.” further, in the case of south africa, a protracted history of colonialism and apartheid has strongly informed migration studies scholarship in the country. concepts of race, class, and masculinity are inherent in much of the germinal work in this field (see for instance crush, williams & peberdy, 2005; dodson & crush, 2004; moodie & ndatshe, 1994; moodie, 1988; wolpe, 1972). however, an explicit intersectional analysis was only introduced in the late 1990s and 2000s, following the transition to democracy, and a new migration regime, which heralded diverse and rapid flows of migration. ally (2006) and dodson (2000) raised questions of how multiple identities such as gender, race, migrant status and class shape migratory experiences. their work illustrates the difficulties and importance of developing a layered analytical framework that is both responsive to the gendered and racialised context of the country (collins 1998), but also able to transcend these approaches to raise broader questions that speak to a global scholarship on precarity and resilience (dodson, 2000). in the last two decades, south african migration studies have broadened in scope and analysis. ongoing scholarship on migration policies (segatti, 2011), gender (kihato, 2013), regional migration, (schierup, 2016) xenophobia (nyamnjoh, 2006), sexuality (caminga, 2017) and labour (barchiesi, 2011; jinnah, 2010; munakamwe, 2017; rutherford, 2008) attempts to understand the diversity and complexity of migration from multiple approaches. new questions of nationality, ethnicity, migratory status, sexuality and gender identity, and class, alongside longer-standing issues of governance and citizenship, show how migration studies might be enriched by intersectional approaches. migration policies in “settler society” countries in the global north, as well as more developed hubs in the global south, have been shifting towards temporariness and conditionality, with narrowing and more complex pathways to permanence and citizenship. in the global south, transient migration has long been prevalent giving rise to hierarchies of citizenship and non-citizenship, often constructed through intertwining assets or “deficits” based on class, race, nationality, language, religion, and disability (among others) (yeoh, 2014). at the same time, more affluent asian countries, confronting their own demographic fertility and household care challenges, are defining the characteristics of new distinctions between settler and temporary migration. jiyoung lee-an’s analysis (this issue) of marriage migration to south korea powerfully conveys how the combined characteristics of migrants from asian developing countries are constructed through state and popular discourses as alternatively desirable or risky for the nation-building and fertility projects of that state. specifically, women from southeast asia of child-bearing age who marry older south korean men are provided pathways to permanent status if they fulfill their reproductive promise, whereas unions between south asian migrant men and older korean daiva stasiulis, zaheera jinnah & blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 16 women are treated with suspicion and assumed to constitute “fraudulent marriage.” the centrality of a critical intersectionality lens is thus, however unevenly, implicitly or explicitly informing a growing body of migration research. the absence of intersectional analysis is much more glaring in legal reform of sectors of work, living conditions and health policies, where there is notable representation if not domination by vulnerable migrants. thus, jamie liew’s (this issue) analysis in the canadian context of the mountains of text produced by parliament and the courts in legal reform of sex work contains scant mention of the multiplication of risks among racialized migrant women with irregular status, thus adding epistemic violence to their everyday experiences of risk, uncertainty and violence. migrants deemed illegal are rendered invisible and thus left to deteriorate. state sovereignty and national border security are prioritized over the ontological security and autonomy of vulnerable migrants. the proliferation in types of migration and categories of conditional, temporary and unauthorized statuses, many without a pathway to permanence, produced or abetted by restrictive neoliberal and securityconscious immigration policies, has broadened the focus of justice-minded intersectional writing in migration scholarship. moreover, the fact that violence and risk permeate the livelihood of migrants within (non-safe) borders of states necessitates adopting an intersectional analysis of “not only ‘irregular’ migration, but also the strategies of survivorship that racialized and migrant women [and men] have developed to address the multiple forms of violence in their lives” (abji, this issue; see also rutherford, this issue). the promise of analytic gains in deploying an intersectional lens in answering questions such as why specific migrant groups face discrimination, oppression, violence and dehumanization – or alternatively, relative privilege – becomes apparent in rich, insightful ethnographic work that illuminates the hazards and opportunities of crossing borders, and being forever marked as not belonging in specific national or local spaces (e.g., rutherford, 2017). thus, in this issue, anthropologist blair rutherford illuminates how an intersectional lens can inform the ways in which the survival of zimbabwean female migrants in south africa is continuously rendered insecure by risks of violence, not merely at the border but also in various sites and by various actors in work, shelter, and unexpectedly, in their interaction with humanitarian organizations. similarly, ying-ying tiffany liu’s (this issue) ethnographic and participatory fieldwork in johannesburg, spent in kitchens of restaurants owned by chinese petty capitalist migrants, who employ but also hyper-exploit other (zimbabwean) migrants, reveals how intersectionality can be fruitfully deployed as a flexible analytical tool attentive to not only larger structural forces but also highly localized economic and sociopolitical conditions. liu’s finely textured ethnographic research reflects that differences among distinct national and racialized migrants are not merely hierarchical but also result in patterned migration, intersectionality & social justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 17 interdependencies among migrants who possess various types of social and economic capital. intersectionality, less a theory than an analytic sensibility (cho, crenshaw & mccall, 2013, p. 795), assists in making sense of the complexity and diversity of migration, discriminatory state (im)migration and a host of other exclusionary policies and laws, and migrant experiences, agency and politics. insofar as each concept named within specific intersectional frameworks (race, gender, class, sexuality, colonialism, etc.) is itself the subject of intense debates and lack of consensus, intersectionality is helpful in only marking out certain ground for analysis rather than actually performing that analysis. for instance, with the global rise in discrimination against muslim immigrants, intersectionality theorists debate whether or not islamophobia is a form of racism and whether religious identities, differences, clothing and symbols have been racialized (grosfoguel, oso & christou, 2014, p. 635). certainly the prominence of various concepts in academic and popular discourses in different national contexts to signal similar forms of fear and hatred, exclusion, violence and discrimination (such as xenophobia against migrants in the south african context) reflects the situatedness in place and time of knowledge and understanding of specific social relations of power in intersectional analyses. such placeand historically-situated analysis inhibits essentializing type of thinking and indeed the production of any universalizing intersectional theory. it is the rigidity (such as the essentialism, categorical fetishism and imposed stability of the rcg trinity) of intersectional frameworks that is often the subject of harshest critiques among theorists. as the papers and creative interventions in this special issue illuminate, it is often more productive to examine what intersectionality does to enrich our understanding of the complexities of migration, the vulnerabilities of migrants, and the oppressions built within migration policies, rather than to dwell on the question of what intersectionality is (cho, crenshaw & mccall, 2013, p. 788). the augmenting embrace of intersectionality by migration scholars directs attention to the intertwining dynamics of key structures of power pertaining to the relationship between migration and social (in)justice. it is an important analytic sensibility to confront and redress the epistemological and social erasure within state policies, laws and citizens’ consciousness of entire mobile networks, distinctive social communities and groups of migrants who are demonized for their “wrong” presence within state borders, and who like poet june jordan (2005; emphasis in original) declare: “i am not wrong: wrong is not my name. my name is my own my own my own.” in this vein, the mestizo arts & activism collective created caution (this issue) in response to on-line racism in a local salt lake city newspaper. this is a striking photographic image of solidarity “by us and for us” that subverts misleading narratives about the latinx community. caution offers one glimpse into how the creative capacities of the community can be harnessed to serve research and education purposes about the community’s daiva stasiulis, zaheera jinnah & blair rutherford studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 1-21, 2020 18 criminalization and exploitation through the “school-to-sweatshop pipeline.” it offers a defiant refusal to be defined by denigrating images and discourses of racialized undocumented migrants and residents by offering an alternative vision of how a much maligned immigrant community demands recognition and justice. not surprisingly, as several of the contributors suggest, intersectionality has become a key analytic and political sensibility in the tool box of activists who seek not merely to understood the interlinking sources for the injustices and insecurities of border and migration policies, but to transform and abolish them. references abu-laban, y. 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(2016). intersectionality and social justice: assessing activists’ use of intersectionality through grassroots migrants’ organizations in canada. politics, groups & identities, 4(3), 347-362. united nations department of economic & social affairs. (2019, sept. 17). the number of international migrants reaches 272 million, continuing an upward trend in all world regions, says un. retrieved from https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/international-migrant-stock2019.html ware, v. (1992) beyond the pale: white women, racism and history. london, uk: verso. wolpe, h. (1972). capitalism and cheap labour-power in south africa: from segregation to apartheid. economy & society, 1(4), 425-456. yeoh, s. a. (2017). transient migrations: intersectionalities, mobilities and temporalities. transitions: journal of transient migration, 1(1), 143-146. rabiah-mohammad final correspondence address: fawziah rabiah-mohammed, arthur labatt family school of nursing, western university, london, on, n6a 3k7; email: falmalk2@uwo.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 syrian refugees’ experiences of housing stability during the covid-19 pandemic: barriers to integration and just solutions fawziah rabiah-mohammed western university, canada leah k. hamilton mount royal university, canada abe oudshoorn western university, canada mohammad bakhash university of new brunswick, canada rima tarraf alberta health services, canada eman arnout western university, canada cindy brown university of new brunswick, canada sarah benbow fanshawe college, canada sagida elnihum canada mohammed el hazzouri dalhousie university, canada victoria m. esses western university, canada luc theriault university of new brunswick, canada fawziah rabiah-mohammed et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 10 abstract research has shown high levels of housing precarity among governmentassisted refugees (gars) connected to difficult housing markets, limited social benefits, and other social and structural barriers to positive settlement (lumleysapanski, 2021). the covid-19 pandemic has likely exacerbated this precarity. research to date demonstrates the negative consequences of the covid-19 pandemic for refugees and low-income households, including both health-related issues and economic challenges, that may exacerbate their ability to obtain affordable, suitable housing (jones & grigsby-toussaint, 2020; shields & alrob, 2020). in this context, we examined syrian government-assisted refugees’ experiences during the pandemic, asking: how the covid-19 pandemic has impacted syrian refugees’ experiences of housing stability. to examine this issue, we interviewed 38 families in calgary, london, and fredericton. using a qualitative descriptive methodology for analysis and interpretation (thorne et al., 1997), we found the liminality of settling as a gar has been compounded by isolation, further economic loss, and new anxieties during the pandemic. ultimately, for many participants, the pandemic has thwarted their housing stability goals and decreased their likelihood of improving their housing conditions. based on our findings, we discuss potential policy and practice relevant solutions to the challenges faced by refugees in canada during the pandemic and likely beyond. keywords covid-19 pandemic; government-assisted refugees; syrian refugees; housing instability; social inequities; policy recommendations introduction the global rate of displaced persons is growing substantially. between 2009 and 2020, the number of displaced persons grew from 43.3 million to 80 million (unhcr, 2018, 2020a). the civil war in syria has contributed to this increase considerably, resulting in 12 million syrians fleeing their homes in a short period of time (unhcr, 2018, 2020b). of these, 6.7 million syrians have refugee status around the world (unhcr, 2018). in canada, between november 2015 and january 2016, 26,172 syrian refugees were resettled (hamilton et al., 2019), ranking canada as one of the top countries welcoming this particular group of refugees (unhcr, 2018). the unhcr defines refugee resettlement as “the selection and transfer of refugees from a state in which they have sought protection to a third state that has agreed to admit them – as refugees – with permanent residence status” (2020c, p. 1). in canada, this group of refugees receives assistance from different initiatives provided by the government, private, and community groups (ircc, 2019a). government-assisted refugees (gars) are persons who fled their home countries and are referred to canada by the united nations refugee agency for resettlement (unhcr) (ircc, 2019b). refugees, under the gar program, are supported by the canadian government for one year (ircc, 2019b) and are eligible for the resettlement assistance program (rap), which assists with providing income support and immediate essential services (ircc, 2019c). syrian refugees & housing stability during covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 11 the one-year timeframe does not necessarily align with the length of time it often takes to find stable and suitable housing. refugees experience challenges when they arrive in the receiving country, including with the new health and social systems, a new culture, mental health and trauma (bulik & colucci, 2019). generally speaking, gars arrive in the receiving country with weaker language skills, lower education, and less access to employment than other categories of refugees (wilkinson & garcea, 2017). those who arrive with high educational attainment struggle to get their credentials recognized in the receiving country (rose, 2019). as a result, gars show the worst long-term housing outcomes of all newcomers (rose, 2019). affordability, accessibility, suitability of size and location, unemployment, or low-paying jobs all create significant obstacles to achieve housing stability among gars (rose, 2019). although settlement services enhance refugees’ housing situations, covid-19 has brought a new set of challenges and stressors that have reduced gars’ ability to access community supports, employment, and mental health resources (shields & alrob, 2020). this paper highlights the unique precarity of the refugee resettlement experience during the covid-19 pandemic, with particular attention to challenges related to housing and refugees’ sense of home. the research question this paper addresses is: how did the covid-19 pandemic impact syrian refugees’ experiences of housing stability? to answer this question, we explore the experiences of housing stability among syrian refugees during the covid-19 pandemic in three cities in canada: london, calgary, and fredericton, and provide recommendations for addressing barriers to achieving housing stability among this population. the significance of this investigation revolves around understanding the effects of a global event that has created short and long-term economic insolvency, stressors, and social disturbance that exhaust the tangible and intangible resources of vulnerable populations, in particular, refugees. the literature review we provide next discusses vulnerabilities specific to refugees and the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on their lives. it outlines refugees’ challenges during resettlement in canada, including challenges to housing stability, employment, and social integration in light of the pandemic. refugee vulnerabilities because refugees live through unstable conditions when leaving their home country (bulik & colucci, 2019), being in transit, living in refugee camps (wessels, 2014), and waiting for approval to be admitted to a receiving county (laban et al., 2005), they are at increased risk of experiencing negative social and health consequences (kirmayer et al., 2011; müller et al., 2018). once they arrive in a receiving country, accessing appropriate housing is often a daunting experience in both urban and rural areas, and efforts to access suitable housing may be even more difficult while trying to address fawziah rabiah-mohammed et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 12 social and health consequences. unit location, family size, accessibility, and landlords’ attitudes toward refugees are structural factors that determine refugees’ ability to find suitable housing (oudshoorn et al., 2020; weidinger & korde, 2020). evidence suggests the desire for homeownership among immigrants and refugees is strong (haan, 2012). homeownership brings a sense of integration into the new community and increases access to businesses, schools, parks and community centers, because these services are more likely to be available in neighbourhoods with a high proportion of home owners (haan, 2012). after experiencing displacement multiple times in their home country and transit countries, for refugees housing stability means more than simply having a home (immigration partnership, 2016; fadlalla, 2011; miraftab, 2000). the concept of housing stability encompasses the material aspect of the residence, social relations, and the system supports that people can access in their community (jakubec et al., 2012). thus, housing stability combines several elements, including the home’s physical structure, social networks, and resources and services, all of which are interconnected and dynamic in nature (jakubec et al., 2012). in the context of refugees, the meaning of housing stability extends to growing roots and establishing a sense of belonging in a new environment (fadlalla, 2011). despite the importance of housing stability for resettlement, finding suitable, affordable housing remains one of the main challenges that refugees face upon their arrival to canada (rose, 2019; oudshoorn et al., 2020; walsh et al., 2016). refugees can experience housing precarity when they struggle to pay rent, live in a small rental unit or in an unsafe neighbourhood, and have limited access to information (preston et al., 2011). this housing precarity is inter-connected with financial precarity and depleted social support (rose & charette, 2020). to further understand their experiences with achieving housing stability and explicating how housing stability is intertwined with their financial status, oudshoorn and colleagues (2020) explored the resettlement experiences of 17 syrian gar families in a midsized canadian city. they found that the primary barriers these families faced when trying to obtain suitable and stable housing were limited employment options, lack of affordable housing, reduced residential home quality, and unsafe conditions and insufficient dwelling size (oudshoorn et al., 2020). because language proficiency is an essential requirement for obtaining employment (lumley-sapanski, 2021), language proficiency affects the family’s likelihood of accessing adequate accommodation (francis & hiebert, 2014). oudshoorn and colleagues add that the goal of acquiring sufficient language for accessing employment within the first year (when resettlement financial support is available), while dealing with multiple responsibilities of childcare and establishing a new life, may not be achieved for most families. as a result, many families cannot meet their needs independently. consequently, they rely on social assistance after the one-year resettlement allowance period (lumley-sapanski, 2021) and struggle with syrian refugees & housing stability during covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 13 limited housing options as their social assistance income is insufficient for the housing market. rose and charette (2020) highlight other factors contributing to housing precarity for gars. resettlement assistance program (rap) providers operate under extreme limitations in finding permanent housing for gars. when compounded by limited housing market availability in terms of small and unaffordable rental units, housing instability for gars persists. because obtaining adequate housing depends on the availability and accessibility of secure employment (francis & hiebert, 2014), low-wage earners are more likely to struggle with housing instability (flatau et al., 2015; francis & hiebert, 2014; rose, 2019). in the context of covid-19, the canadian labour market lost three million jobs in three months as the pandemic was declared and restrictions were put into place (hou et al., 2020; shields & alrob, 2020). evidence suggests that recent newcomers to canada (those living in canada for less than 10 years) were especially affected by the economic downturn because they tend to have short job contracts, which makes them vulnerable to losing their jobs during economic crises (chan et al., 2020; shields & alrob, 2020). around one-third of recent newcomers work in low-wage employment (hou et al., 2020). as a result of the pandemic’s continued economic impacts, these low-paying jobs were most negatively affected (lemieux et al., 2020) and less likely to be recovered (britneff, 2020; morissette, 2020). the precarity of low-wage employment, compounded by the effect of the pandemic on the economy, exacerbated issues related to housing stability as the housing sector has seen high demand pressures related to increased investment in housing, as well as more affluent households in search of increasingly spacious homes, thus driving up purchase prices and rents (jones & grigsby-toussaint, 2020). low wages combined with higher housing costs have placed refugees in double jeopardy. short and long-term consequences triggered by the covid-19 pandemic among refugees and low-income households varied between health-related issues and economic challenges that exacerbate the difficulties of housing suitability and affordability (jones & grigsby-toussaint, 2020; shields & alrob, 2020). in terms of getting infected with the virus, marginalized and racialized communities, including immigrants and refugees, are among the highest frequency groups that tested positive for covid-19, due to unsafe workplaces and inadequate housing (bromley, 2020; guttman et al., 2020). overcrowded houses, high-density neighbourhoods, and multigenerational homes can contribute to higher infection rates (bromley, 2020; guttman et al., 2020). the “new normal” of working from home is not an option for many refugees because of their employment situation. working in certain occupations, for example, meat processing or warehouses, in which it is difficult to engage in social distancing, places refugees at increased risk of covid-19 infection (bromley, 2020; guttman et al., 2020). furthermore, the pandemic has posed specific challenges related to housing in terms of space and size (jones & grigsby-toussaint, 2020). high rental fawziah rabiah-mohammed et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 14 prices lead families to live in units that are inadequate for the family size (jones & grigsby-toussaint, 2020). spending time in lockdowns and quarantining in a small unit with limited access to nature increase the damage caused by covid-19 to both physical and mental health (cdc, 2020). moreover, evidence suggests that immigrant men have been more likely to express concerns about losing their income source due to covid-19 (atlin, 2020; larochelle-côté & uppal, 2020; turcotte & hango, 2020). therefore, maintaining an adequate house becomes an ongoing financial struggle (mackinnon & cooper, 2020), especially when house prices are rising (siatchinov et al., 2020) and in the context of refugees tending to have larger families than the canadian average (oecd/european union, 2015). the implementation of social distancing and “stay at home” orders to stop the spread of the virus has increased the need for more spacious accommodations (clarke et al., 2021). when refugees strive to obtain any housing at all while being laid off or living on minimum wages, the pandemic’s impact on refugees’ lives may be especially complex. the pandemic has resulted in economic and social challenges, which may reoccur in the future due to natural disasters, civil war, persistence of the current pandemic, or another pandemic. therefore, this analysis aims to explore refugees’ experiences of housing stability during the pandemic and understand how the pandemic created barriers to achieving housing stability for syrian gars. whereas previous research has investigated the many housing challenges for refugee populations, including gars, the current research provides a detailed examination of the housing experiences of syrian refugee families during the covid-19 pandemic. in doing so, it uncovers systemic inequities revealed by the pandemic that disproportionately impact vulnerable populations. furthermore, this paper provides some concrete recommendations to minimize barriers to housing stability and enhance the social and economic conditions of refugee families. theoretical approach this project is situated within a critical social theory (cst) perspective. cst provides a foundation for understanding the concept of social location and how it creates inequalities. social inequalities are rooted in social locations such as race, refugee status, class, gender, and sexual preference, which determine the resources and opportunities one may have. these inequalities related to social location are less about interpersonal interactions and more about how policies structure an inequitable system (or systems). in the context of forced migration, a critical social theory perspective provides focus on the complex marginalities of uprooted peoples both within their home environments and in their new communities. under this theoretical perspective, cst does not examine the human experience in a vacuum (i.e., refugee individuals and families); rather, it expands the understanding of the syrian refugees & housing stability during covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 15 phenomenon to support analysis of the policies and practices that frame these experiences. applying a cst perspective means it is important that we outline the assumptions that underpin this analysis. government-assisted refugees (gars) are a uniquely marginalized group and syrian gars particularly so. although syrian refugees in canada consented to migrate to canada, they did not have a voluntary choice to leave their home country, and many syrian gars who resettled in late 2015-early 2016 were only given a few days to decide whether they wanted to migrate to canada (esses et al., 2020). dynamics of unfamiliarity with systems in the receiving country, limited skills in the local language, being a member of a racialized group, and discrimination that is aggravated by refugee status intersect and create disadvantages while building a new home in the receiving country. therefore, this analysis seeks to understand the experience of housing stability or instability during the covid-19 pandemic for syrian refugee families in three locations and varying in personal characteristics. method this focused analysis of the pandemic experiences of syrian refugee gars was made possible by a research project already underway with syrian refugee families across canada. the primary study is following a grounded theory approach looking at barriers and facilitators to achieving desired housing over a period of five years post-migration. the sub-analysis described in this paper involves a qualitative descriptive review of project interviews that were conducted during the covid-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on the pandemic impacts. data for the primary project are in the process of being collected annually over a five-year period from three cities in canada: fredericton (small), london (medium), and calgary (large) through connections with local settlement agencies and established networks. the analysis presented here includes 38 interviews: 16 from calgary, 11 from london, and 11 from fredericton. all interviews were collected during the third data collection round of the larger project. these interviews were conducted in the spring and summer of 2020, during the covid-19 pandemic. all families arrived in canada between november 2015 and february 2016 as gars from syria. the families include young parents with young children or teenagers and older parents with adult sons or daughters. family size ranges from four family members to 12 family members. the parents’ average age was 37 years old while the current data were collected, and the children’s average age was nine years old. few families have relatives who live in the same city, while the majority are pursuing the family sponsorship program to reunite family members, and all keep connected to families virtually. around half of the families in this study live on social support incomes; the other half worked in services and manufacturing jobs with minimum wages. all fawziah rabiah-mohammed et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 16 families rented their first permanent home upon arrival, and three out of the 38 families included in this study owned a house in the fourth to fifth year in their settlement. due to social distancing requirements during the pandemic, in-depth interviews with the families in the three sites were conducted in arabic through telephone or zoom. the average length of the interviews was 16 minutes; these are subsequent interviews for all families and longer interviews had been conducted in previous years. time of interviews ranged from six minutes to 57 minutes. the overarching goal of this interview round was to follow up on the participants’ housing condition and discuss whether and how the pandemic impacted it. the interview guide included questions such as: are there any challenges you are experiencing with food, income, or rent because of the pandemic? if this continues for several more months, do you have any concerns? have you been able to keep socially connected by phone or online? what does home look like for you? interviews were transcribed and then translated to english by two research assistants who speak arabic as a first language and are experienced with qualitative research with the syrian community. the participants were compensated between $20 to $30 for their time. qualitative descriptive methodology was applied to analyze and interpret the data. thorne et al. (1997) proposed a non-categorical approach termed interpretive description that stems from philosophical underpinnings that recognize shared realities and acknowledges the subjective human experience of being socially constructed (1997). thorne et al. (1997) presume that researchers bringing their preconceptions and clinical observations to the research inquiry is inevitable. therefore, they recommend the use of an analytical technique called adaptations, which requires extensive immersion in the data before taking on any coding activities or making any analytical linkages (sandelowski, 1995). thorne and colleagues justify utilizing this procedure as it allows researchers to “capitalize on such processes as synthesizing, theorizing, and recontextualizing rather than simply sorting and coding” (1997, p. 175). this premise has been met; in addition to being immersed in the primary project for close to three years, the team has been collecting, translating and transcribing the data for this particular analysis for a period of over four months. the lead author read all transcripts and listened to each voice-recorded interview multiple times. next, a coding scheme was created inductively based on the stories that participants shared. because data collection and analysis occurred simultaneously, restructuring the coding scheme was ongoing, and new codes were added as they emerged from the interviews. the coding scheme was then shared with the project’s research team for triangulation to ensure verification and confirmation (denzin, 1970; thorne et al., 2004). categories and themes were then proposed after sorting and grouping codes to make sense of them and to decide on what codes fit under each category (nowell et al., 2017; thomas, 2006). pseudonyms were used syrian refugees & housing stability during covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 17 throughout the analysis process and writing. interviews were analyzed across the cities because major differences based on geographic location were not detected. that is, differences based on location did not emerge in the current study. one interpretation for this finding is that during the time period in which the interviews were conducted, the covid-19 pandemic was affecting these three canadian cities similarly. findings “we have been through a lot”: social isolation these families are located in a unique place between the past and the present where they live in the moment, but at the same time still feel deeply attached to their past. they recently settled in canada (less than five years ago) and remain strongly connected with their immediate or extended families dispersed in syria and around the world. from their new residence in canada, they are constantly reminded of the atrocities and adversities that are happening to loved ones in their original home or transient locations through family and friends’ everyday stories. this has made them cognizant of their displacement experience and their still relatively new chapters in canada. within the pandemic context, various emotions and memories that stem from the conjunction of their past and present were evoked. these realizations reinforced a conflicting sense of appreciation and distress. the circumstances of the pandemic of uncertainty, loss, and harm reminded them of the adverse events that they experienced when they fled their home and during their displacement. at the same time, because they viewed these challenges as events from the past, it gave them a sense of security and appreciation as they reached a sanctuary in canada. because these families have an open window to their previous life through family members and friends in syria who are undergoing the pandemic’s extreme effects, they feel fortunate to be in canada. participants expressed gratitude for living in canada, believing this would help them avoid the worst effects of the pandemic. at the same time, the pandemic triggered a sense of uncertainty, loss, and grief. it triggered emotions of loss and nostalgia for their extended family, kith, and home. moreover, the social isolation that the pandemic created deepened the feeling of housing instability and took away from the feeling of being home. many families spoke of the long-term separation from their parents, siblings, or children who were left behind. anxiety and uncertainty stemmed from spending months in small housing units, isolating themselves from the social connections they established before the pandemic, losing their normal routine and habits, and lacking certainty about the future. amal, a mother of two boys, cried during the interview as she talked about the need for her mother’s and sister’s support since her husband was very busy working fawziah rabiah-mohammed et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 18 during the pandemic. amal spoke about the difficulties she was experiencing being alone in her rental unit looking after two young boys in complete isolation. she explained that her sons have no access to activities inside or outside her residence. she tried to take her sons out for a walk but found herself the target of discrimination as an immigrant mother trying to entertain her children in public spaces. because her children stayed at home for a longer period during the pandemic, once they got outside, they ran to the sidewalk. when she ran after them to keep them closer to the building, she got yelled at for letting her children run outside. this experience added to her growing stress and isolation. amal distinguished between having relatives in canada and having friends by saying: but being with your family is different, your mother, brothers, sisters. you can leave your kids with them, and they are not going to complain about it because they are their family too. they are not going to say: ‘she left her kids with us and go.’ she ended her story by saying, “i went back to my unit, crying, and my kids asked me why i was crying.” a similar concern was echoed by khaled, a father of eight children, ranging in age from three years to 19 years old. khaled struggled with significant anxiety; being cut-off from his siblings and other extended family members deepened his sense of isolation. his voice got loud when he talked about how lonely and isolated his family is in their neighbourhood in canada. he responded to a question about changes to his housing condition by associating housing stability with having extended family living in the same city: “we get sick of being alone. we do not see people; we are homesick; we do not see our family here. all of us have these feelings, we miss the family [extended family].” when the interviewer asked khaled if he was able to be socially connected with his friends in canada during the pandemic, he repeatedly mentioned the dire need for some family members regardless of the size of the social network that he has built in his new surroundings. khaled noted that visiting a friend is not always possible because of the financial obligations that come along with the visit. because hospitality in arabic culture is highly valued and observed, providing a lot of food for guests may cause financial pressures for the host. “if you would visit them [friends], they will not like it; they will think that your visit would cost lots of money, so they will find excuses.” the need for extended family members was readily apparent in this group, and the pandemic’s circumstances have contributed to this. both amal and khaled think that the restrictions around refugees visiting their country of origin contribute to their growing sense of isolation and adverse mental wellbeing. when khaled was asked what concerns he has if this pandemic continues, he said with exasperation: syrian refugees & housing stability during covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 19 i have all kinds of concerns and depression from the expensive life here since i came to canada, and it is getting worse now. i do not have any sister, father, mother, aunt to go and visit. nobody, i have nobody. khaled emphasized what most families had shared when they were asked what home looks like for them. besides home meaning owning the place where you live, he continued: when you do not have siblings or relatives [he takes a deep breath], then you look to other people. they came [to canada] with their relatives and some cousins, except us [came without any member of their extended family], oh god. families who have relatives in canada have fared better than those who lack any local family support. relatives provide a high degree of support to each other and help with childcare. seeing each other even if six feet apart relieves their stress. being able to connect with siblings or extended family members who are blood-related and knowing that they are available in the same area provides comfort and buffers against feelings of loneliness and ambiguity triggered by the pandemic. this support helps them to grow a sense of being at home in the receiving country. “like other people, but...”: financial challenges during the pandemic participants framed their response to the covid-19 pandemic within the collective experience of the global reaction to the virus. the sense of shared experiences of the pandemic was highlighted. ahmed answered: “we were like other people; it was difficult. people stayed at home, and those who work were laid off.” while they presented their experience of the pandemic as being in a way the same as others, they also contrasted this with how it felt different. when the discussion was centered on income and employment, it was clear that the participants believed they are faring much worse than the general population in canada. positively, because of the financial support they received through federal and provincial emergency benefits, social assistance programs, or their employment income, all families were able to pay their rent. however, participants felt uniquely financially marginalized due to limited employment opportunities, high family expenses, and barriers to language acquisition, all related to their social location as newcomers and refugees. parents spoke to the challenges they faced in budgeting with limited income while paying for unexpected expenses that occurred with the pandemic. some families were financially vulnerable to the extent that any slight increase in their budget would cause financial strain and add to their increased financial stress. the “new normal” that the pandemic created has significant repercussions for these families who were already experiencing financial instability. before the pandemic, these families used to spend all their income on rent and would fawziah rabiah-mohammed et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 20 live off their child benefit; however, during the pandemic, some found themselves in a situation where their expenses were very rapidly exceeding their income. shaker explained how the pandemic increased their expenses: for the food, my kids have not eaten like this before. food consumption has increased by 200%. my kids are bored, so they eat a lot. even us, the parents, start to have from five to six meals a day. i do grocery for $1000 as for a month or month and a half, but it lasts for 10 days. because education was transferred online, having children at home increased their expenses as well. some parents explained that their children asked for new means of entertainment, ranging from sketchbooks to smartphones, which affects the family’s budget and exhausts parents’ financial ability to keep up with their children’s needs. several families linked their budgeting and the challenges they have faced regarding unexpected expenses to their children’s needs as a new demand brought on by the pandemic. further, the pandemic’s negative effect on employment opportunities has stifled many families’ employment and economic growth. the concept of having employment defines the fatherhood experience for most men in this group and gives them a sense of empowerment and ability to care for their families, especially when some fathers viewed the concept of living on social assistance as being a burden on the government. mansour explained, “i needed to go back to the job because i don’t want to rely on the government support, social support. i don’t want to be under someone’s support and help. i want to earn money by myself.” during the first wave of covid-19, some participants were still working in services and manufacturing industries, and others lost their jobs as uber drivers. although working in a crowded workplace environment, such as in factories, amplifies the risk of getting covid-19, families who had at least one family member working during the pandemic showed more resiliency than families who experienced job loss. in addition, of interest, families who lost their jobs sounded more optimistic during the pandemic compared to families living on social assistance (despite relatively limited employment insurance benefits). they considered losing their job as an unpleasant event that was not a fault of their own. therefore, receiving earned employment insurance benefits differs from receiving social assistance given to people who do not have employment. despite low incomes and job insecurity, those families who had maintained their employment showed resilience and satisfaction during their resettlement experience in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic. they revealed lingering hope and ambitious plans for homeownership since the majority of our participants had been homeowners in syria, and they were actively proceeding with this goal through navigating the housing market and negotiating with banks to apply for a mortgage. some participants showed syrian refugees & housing stability during covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 21 autonomy and feelings of empowerment by being able to work during the pandemic. tareq showed a sense of being independent when he was asked about the ability to pay rent. he answered: “yes, as long as i work, i can pay the rent.” although families who lost their main income and went back to receiving financial assistance or emergency benefits sounded more optimistic than families who remained on social assistance, both shared similar feelings of being excluded from a decent life that their canadian neighbours are perceived to enjoy. many families emphasized that they wish they could live like other people in canada who have secure and well-paying jobs. hanaa, a mother of six children, talked about her resentment when her husband was laid off and how devastating this has been for her family. hanaa expressed her disappointment when she talked about struggling to manage their budget after her husband’s small business closed during the pandemic. she desperately vented her sorrow about losing her vision of improving their housing situation when her husband lost his main source of income, by saying: you know, whoever lives in canada has a decent life, people here have a good life on average, but we do not have this life since we came to canada. in the first house, we had bedbugs, and we lost our furniture, now in this house, you see, we have this skunk, and we will eventually throw out our furniture again. like, if my husband works and my daughter and my son and my other son and me, we are still not going to have a decent life like other people here [in a disappointed tone]. it is important to note that the experience of families with adult children differs from families with young children. adult children who were working during the pandemic or who received employment insurance benefits provided crucial support by contributing to the total family budget, with some exceptions when fathers prefer to be the sole family provider. ultimately, individuals who lost their jobs during the pandemic emphasized the importance of having secure employment in order to qualify for a mortgage to ultimately accomplish their goal of homeownership. other families, including three with family members experiencing disabilities, had given up their desire for housing stability, and consequently, homeownership, entirely. these three families explained they had forgone the dream of homeownership due to not being able to seek employment; thus, they believe social assistance is designed to keep them in a survival state rather than striving toward improving their housing situation. amar talked about being on social assistance, how he was apart from his son, who had been accepted as a refugee in the us, and his limited english skills, with absolutely no financial support other than the disability program. when he was asked about the goals that he can achieve in life, he answered: “the things that i can achieve is that i am still alive.” some families who had been saving their employment or business income in order to have a down payment for their first home found themselves needing to live off their savings during the pandemic. this has contributed to fawziah rabiah-mohammed et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 22 a growing sense of hopelessness about improving their employment prospects and housing situations. it has also created a feeling of starting from the bottom again. this example spoke to the meagre support available for refugee families that aspire to live independently. they found themselves wrestling with the ramifications of two dimensions: the location (i.e., the receiving country), and the time (i.e., a pandemic). as the pandemic continues, these families’ tangible and intangible resources have depleted. this highlights how fragile their economic and social situations are in canada. “it was bad; then it got worse”: housing instability the social location of study participants as refugees exacerbated the consequences of the pandemic and their extreme situation of vulnerability. families in this group internalized their location in society as refugees and associated it with a low level of housing opportunity. when they spoke about their housing condition, they associated being a refugee with the current precarious or poor housing condition they live in. from this realization, the families’ narratives highlighted two distinct experiences of housing stability during the pandemic. the first experience spoke to the insufficient housing condition during the lockdown and the second experience revealed the extreme precariousness of their resources to achieve housing stability. many participants lived in small spaces, had few rooms relative to their family size, and lived in poor quality residences. being confined to these spaces was very challenging. families displayed this feeling by using phrases such as “confinement at the rental unit,” “forced to stay here,” “captive in this place,” or “it feels like a prison.” the perception of their dwellings together with not being able to improve their employment status worsened their housing condition. spending time isolated in small rental units was described as “choking” for some families, especially those who live in places where no connection with nature is possible or in an apartment building where neighbours live downstairs. as they were spending more time at home during the lockdown, these parents were worried about their children making too much noise and getting complaints from the neighbours. some families described their rental units as “prisons” to portray not only the physical characteristics of their housing situation (e.g., small), but also the fact that they cannot get out of their inadequate housing situation easily since securing better housing was not an option for most of the families. elham spoke about how her children have been spending the lockdown in small spaces: we do not have a balcony. even a balcony, we do not have it. during covid-19 [lockdown], we wanted to breathe some fresh air [but] we were always inside the apartment. i told my husband if we just have some money, we can buy a house or rent a house so the kids can play outside in the backyard. syrian refugees & housing stability during covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 23 because the majority of these families live in accommodations that they perceive as inadequate, they consider public places as one way to accommodate for the disadvantage of small residences. public spaces such as parks and malls are essential facilities for this group to establish a sense of housing stability. since the majority of families complained about small rental units, public spaces serve as an extension of their desired housing. many families talked about the time they spent outside in malls or parks and how spending some time away from their units compensates for the small space and insufficient housing. however, during the initial phases of the pandemic and with the states of emergency that were declared in provinces and territories across canada in 2020, this option was not available, which created another layer aggravating the experience of staying at home during the lockdown. wael, a father of six children, said: “before the pandemic, we used to spend some time outside, picnicking. now we are home from morning to the morning the next day.” the lockdown experience among families who rent a house versus those who rent an apartment was notably different. families who rent houses expressed higher satisfaction during the pandemic than families who rent an apartment. also, a few families who were able to move from apartments to houses before the pandemic talked about how fortunate they felt to spend quarantine time in a bigger place where children have the opportunity to play in the backyard and move around without being nervous about making noise and bothering neighbours. ameer confirmed: in this house, we have a backyard, so we can go outside to change our moods during the staying at home order. this helped a lot. it was our good luck to have this house so we can have the kids playing in the backyard. when these interviews were conducted, all families wished to purchase a house or an apartment. they indicated that home means owning the place where they live. given the pandemic’s impact on their financial situation, some of these families thought that housing stability (i.e., homeownership) would be possible only with government support, either through first time home buyer programs or affordable housing programs. although most families were struggling with meeting their basic needs during the pandemic, let alone achieving housing stability, almost all families emphasized their plan to stay in canada long term for their children’s future. they were looking for better job opportunities, which may lead them to leave the city or the province, but not the country. few families that were experiencing extreme poverty and social exclusion were considering going back to syria if the political situation improves. fawziah rabiah-mohammed et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 24 discussion refugees in canada faced structural inequities long before the pandemic. earlier research demonstrates that, after arriving in canada, refugees struggle to access decent work, receive sufficient income, develop strong language skills, have their degrees recognized, have family support, maintain good mental health, and access adequate housing (oudshoorn et al., 2020; rose, 2019; rose & charette, 2020). from their social location as refugees, their opportunities to access secure employment and acquire some skills such as language are minimized. from our analysis of refugees’ families’ experiences, it is clear that these circumstances have been amplified by the covid-19 pandemic, which creates barriers to achieving sufficient housing, secure employment, and strong social integration. this analysis expands our understanding of how marginalized groups, such as refugees, experience a global pandemic and how the structural inequalities deprive gars of achieving housing stability either through losing their means of income or lacking extended family support that could mitigate the consequences of the pandemic financially and emotionally. it is clear that families who arrived as gars have struggled to improve their housing condition during the last five years of their resettlement in canada. one of the root causes of housing instability is the mismatch between the rental market and refugees’ incomes (ircc, 2016). all families who participated in this study are considered low-income households, and the income they receive (via social assistance or relatively low-paying jobs) barely covers rent and basic utilities. this is consistent with findings reported by a variety of researchers, which identify the challenges faced by syrian refugees in establishing a new home in canada. primary barriers are limited employment, lack of affordable housing, reduced residential home quality, and unsafe and insufficient dwelling size (oudshoorn et al., 2020; rose, 2019; rose & charette, 2020). lack of affordable housing has increased due to the pandemic, and unsafe and insufficient dwelling size are even more problematic when gars need to isolate at home. although all of the families who participated in the study were able to maintain their payment of rent, their inadequate housing conditions have created barriers to maintaining physical and socio-emotional wellness during the pandemic, which may be re-traumatizing. covid-19 has negatively impacted employment opportunities for newcomers and refugees. prior to the pandemic, refugees had already faced significant barriers to finding decent jobs and earning an income that is consistent with their skills (dempster et al., 2020). with the pandemic effect, they have been disproportionately affected by job loss in canada due to covid-19. several studies have found that refugee families are more likely to hold temporary jobs and earn low income compared to other groups of immigrants or the canadian-born (esses et al., 2013; hou et al., 2020; wilkinson & garcea, 2017). because refugees are overrepresented in syrian refugees & housing stability during covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 25 secondary job markets that the pandemic has heavily impacted (lemieux et al., 2020), they are overrepresented among canadians who have experienced job loss (hou et al., 2020; sevunts, 2020). employment instability and job loss during covid-19 were discussed by several participants in this study. canada’s immigration policies, particularly when it comes to providing gars with one year of federally-funded income support, do not reflect the realities refugees face when searching for employment. the expectation that gars will acquire english language fluency, employment, and be positioned to start repaying the transportation loan for their travel to canada after 12 months of government support does not reflect reality (francis & hiebert, 2014). besides the language barrier, recognizing their degrees and having canadian experience are significant obstacles to accessing secure employment, and consequently, achieving housing stability (kelly et al., 2014; oudshoorn et al., 2020; unhcr, 2015). consistent with past research (rose, 2019), the current findings illustrate that the ability to pay for decent housing depends on having secure employment. additionally, having a secure job attenuates any economic downturn, such as the effect of the pandemic on the economy. insufficient housing related to financial concerns in the context of the pandemic heightened refugees’ sense of isolation. refugees experience a higher rate of mental health concerns compared to the rest of the population (evra & mongrain, 2020). in line with the who study (2020) reporting that refugees express increased mental health concerns worsened by the pandemic, our participants experienced a considerable sense of isolation and loneliness despite online communication with their family. key factors that exacerbate the sense of alienation include social isolation, lack of extended family support, and financial concerns including having to give up on goals of home ownership or exhausting savings towards a down payment. indeed, in 2020, refugee resettlement was at the lowest level in two decades (unhcr, 2020d). this disruption impacts syrian families who were waiting for other family members to arrive in canada. therefore, increased emotional and psychological supports are needed for refugees since they are vulnerable to the growing risks of the pandemic. policy implications although the government of canada has created policies and procedures to mitigate the pandemic’s financial and social effects, the pandemic has exposed structural inequalities that lead vulnerable groups, such as refugees, to bear the brunt of its consequences. for instance, the closure of public playgrounds disproportionately affects refugee families who live in apartments and do not have access to backyards or residential green spaces. these inequalities can be addressed through creating effective policies and fawziah rabiah-mohammed et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 26 just solutions around three areas: housing, employment, and social integration. undoubtedly, the covid-19 pandemic will have a long-term effect on refugees’ lives socially and financially, which will result in prolonged housing instability. on a longer-term basis, the government ought to consider sustainable solutions to canada’s housing crisis, including the creation of more safe, affordable, government housing units. adopting measures to improve housing conditions for gars is critical, such as facilitating access to social housing units and closing the gap between financial assistance and cost of suitable housing so that gar families can obtain decent and affordable housing (rose, 2019). whereas the covid-19 pandemic is mainly a health crisis for some populations, it is a health and socio-economic crisis for refugee families (unhcr, 2020d). because the pandemic’s consequences are likely to increase poverty and mental health issues among refugees (dempster et al., 2020), economic and social barriers to cope with covid-19 consequences should be lowered and removed. the results of this study illustrate the importance of covid-19 benefits, such as canada emergency response benefits (cerb) and employment insurance benefits (ei). these benefits, as well as general social assistance and child benefits, help refugees maintain their housing. through cerb, ei, and social assistance, syrian families were able to pay rent and afford necessities. however, the government of canada should review the gar program and develop new policy options related to the duration of the first-year support and income rate, as gars earn lower income in the first 10 years of their settlement compared to other refugee categories (picot et al., 2019). relatedly, vulnerable groups such as refugees, as well as indigenous communities, individuals who are homeless, and other low-income canadians, should be given special consideration in national plans to respond to the covid-19 pandemic. the government should extend financial support to meet the needs of refugee families and ensure a smooth transition back into or entry into the labour market for those who still have not found jobs (dempster et al., 2020). it is more relevant than ever to explore different approaches to include refugees in the secure job market, particularly gars as they are identified as the highest needs group among other refugee categories (rose, 2019). gars arrive in canada with a low level of educational attainment and big family size; therefore, they end up with few employment opportunities and low earning rate (rose, 2019). they lack english or french skills and experience a higher rate of violence, trauma, and dislocation than privately sponsored refugees. as a result, they tend to depend on social assistance (rose, 2019). these circumstances thwart gars’ attempts to pursue housing stability goals. eliminating barriers and addressing structural inequalities to access stable and decent work would support refugee families to achieve housing stability in the long term. this effort should not be devoted only to a global health crisis; rather, when refugee families improve syrian refugees & housing stability during covid-19 pandemic studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 27 their employment, it helps them to avoid being dependent on the social system in the future (dempster et al., 2020). specific policies and programs to help ensure that gars families are integrated into the labour market and become self-supporting through secure employment should be established. these plans could include an increase in minimum wages to correspond to their actual housing needs. in addition, recognizing refugees’ credentials can help them to resume careers and attain their academic objectives, which increases the opportunity to find secure employment and enhance their housing condition (loo, 2016). moreover, initiatives to sponsor extended families of refugees could result in creating stronger social network support and mitigate mental health deterioration. policies that facilitate the process of extended family migrations are needed. it is in canada’s best interest to invest in family sponsorship and reduce barriers to reunite families. this will help refugee families to contribute to the country’s economy and prosperity in the long term (ircc, 2015). sponsored family members can provide additional household income through employment, support with childcare, and mitigate psychological adversity, especially during the pandemic. the degree of social integration for refugee families depends on the receiving country’s openness to embracing different cultures. social integration allows refugees to participate in their communities, build a social network, and seek connections. furthermore, access to green spaces was a notable issue in this group’s experience of isolation during the pandemic especially those who do not have residential playgrounds available in their area during multiple lockdowns. general planning for more green spaces is needed to ensure greater access to these spaces for vulnerable and refugee populations beyond the covid-19 pandemic (hassen, 2021). this could be possible by allocating public funds to build and maintain public spaces in low-income neighbourhoods. relatedly, increasing social opportunities for gars may enhance their social integration especially during the covid-19 pandemic (pathways to prosperity, 2021). programs and initiatives such as the welcome group program help to connect volunteer canadians or established newcomers with recent newcomers to strengthen community support. limitations and future research directions despite the theoretical and practical contributions of the current study, there are some limitations worth mentioning. of note, the current study focused on one particular group of refugees and might not be generalizable to all gars. moreover, more men than women participated in this study. although female participants’ input was absent in one site, mothers led some interviews in the other two sites. that said, future researchers may wish to further explore the role of gender when examining gars’ housing experiences, specifically how fawziah rabiah-mohammed et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 9-32, 2022 28 the division of labour in the household impacts the financial condition of refugees’ families. this is particularly important when considering groups of gars that are disproportionately female (e.g., yazidi). while we believe our results should be applicable to other groups of gars (e.g., those from different countries of origin, and those living in different canadian cities), ultimately these are questions that warrant further investigation. finally, the current study explored the effects of the pandemic at one point in time in the first summer of the pandemic. it will be important for future research to examine the long-term effects of the pandemic by conducting longitudinal studies on gars’ housing experiences during and after the pandemic recovery period. future research may focus on exploring how covid-19 has affected gar families’ goal of housing stability. in addition, there is value in examining how gar families manage the economic and social consequences of covid-19. conclusion refugees go through a unique experience when establishing a life and building a home in a new country. the journey to achieving housing stability was arduous prior to the pandemic, as refugees experience multiple vulnerabilities before and after arriving in their sanctuary. refugee families have been grappling with difficult situations related to employment, housing, and social integration since long before the pandemic. in the context of the pandemic, another dimension of struggles and difficulties has been added to their experience. the pandemic has intensified the situation of housing precarity and worsened the financial and social aspects of gars’ experience. without an immediate response to gar families’ unique needs, housing instability and barriers to social integration will continue, and the pandemic will leave long-lasting adverse effects on gars’ settlement experience. acknowledgements this research is supported by sshrc (grant no: 953587). references atlin, j. 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(2017). the economic integration of refugees in canada: a mixed record?. migration policy institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/economicintegration-refugees-canada-mixed-record liang final correspondence address: bridget liang, graduate program in gender, feminist & women’s studies, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: b.jianjian@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 divided communities and absent voices: the search for autistic bipoc parent blogs bridget liang york university, canada abstract both autistic adults and families of autistic children rely heavily on blogs and other digital platforms to create community and gain experiential knowledge about autism, but research on autism blogs has failed to distinguish between the perspectives of autistic adults and neurotypical parent bloggers. furthermore, intersections in the experiences of bipoc autistics are rarely examined. using a content analysis with a feminist critical disability studies lens, i explore six autism parent blogs from diverse demographics: a white neurotypical father, a white autistic mother in an interracial relationship, a white neurotypical mother, an indigenous autistic trans father, a black autistic nonbinary mother, and a black neurotypical mother. i examine the attitudes of these bloggers to get a sampling of their opinions on autism, how they parent autistic children, and how their social location, specifically race, impacts their experiences. more intersectional research needs to be done to boost the perspectives of bipoc autistics and the expertise of autistic parents. keywords autistic; bipoc; blogging; activism; content analysis for some of us, autism isn’t a disease but rather something more analogous to being gay or deaf – a condition that, yes, imposes hardships but also helps to make us who we are. (garcia, 2015) when you have an understanding of yourself you aren't measuring yourself any longer by someone else's criteria. if you are a bird you want to measure yourself by flying not by swimming, because you're not a fish. (giwa-onaiwu, quoted in rozsa, 2017) in this project, i approach autistic digital community differently than previous studies on autism blogs. i make a distinction between autistic and autism blogs, as mcguire (2016) and carey et al. (2020) do with respect to advocacy projects. autistic blogs are written by those who are themselves autistic, while autism blogs are created by non-autistic bloggers who are invested in bridget liang studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 448 autism, such as neurotypical parents of autistic people. as elaborated in further sections, the goals of (presumably) neurotypical parents of autistic children have often been incompatible with those of autistic adults, and many autistic communities distinguish carefully between the terms used (bagatell, 2007; brown, 2011; carey et al., 2019; rosqvist et al., 2015; sinclair, 1993). in my scan of texts on autism blogs, the researchers did not distinguish between the experiences of autistic people (including autistic parents) and neurotypical parents who have autistic children. in this study i center race in my analysis in order to address what brown et al. (2017) highlight as an overwhelming whiteness in autism discourse. moreover, this work is oriented by a critical disabilities studies framework that does not pathologize or dehumanize, and values self-determination of disabled people (clare, 1999; davis, 1995; kafer, 2013; piepznasamarasinha, 2018). critical disability studies (cds) is an identity-based approach, and this work extends cds further by developing intersectional experiences of privilege and oppression. using a content analysis, i examine six autism blogs by racially diverse parents of autistic children, including parents who are themselves autistic and non-autistic. i illustrate the importance of studying autism/autistic parenting communities online through an intersectional lens. this project is only a snapshot of what a few parents of autistic kids think about autism, how they parent, and how power informs whose voices (blogs) get seen. more and deeper intersectional analyses of autistic experiences is needed. literature review online communities and blogging digital platforms are important to autistic and autism communities as they facilitate social support, information, and community (abel et al., 2019; coppala & hardy, 2017; loukisasa & papoudi, 2016; newton et al., 2009; nguyen et al., 2015; saha & agarwal, 2015, 2016; welch et al., 2020). the first autism blog came online in 1991. this blog was created to offer information about autism and emotional support to parents (abel et al., 2019). the advent of web 2.0 led to an explosion of disability communities online including autism and autistic communities (ellis & kent, 2011; haller, 2010). existing studies unanimously echo that blogs provide social support to autism and autistic communities (abel et al., 2019; coppala & hardy, 2017; loukisasa & papoudi, 2016; newton et al., 2009; nguyen et al., 2015; saha & agarwal, 2015, 2016; welch et al., 2020). parents use these blogs to find information about autism, support for changes in their life, spaces to share their experiences, encouragement from other parents, and to make sense of what it means to have an autistic child (abel et al., 2019). divided communities and absent voices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 449 blogs and online communities are also useful to autistic people themselves. it has been posited anecdotally and with some research that autistic people “fit” better online. the asynchronous, incorporeal nature of digital communication aligns with the preferred communication styles of many autistics (abel et al., 2019). online, people don’t rely so heavily on nonverbal communication and social norms. in many instances, the lack of faceto-face interaction and expectations around it, especially the anticipated timeframe to respond to others, aren’t as pressing, which allows autistic people to communicate better with other people (abel et al., 2019; newton et al., 2009). neurotypical norms of communication such as turn taking and eye contact may be absent, thus removing one of the ways autistics are dis-abled and socially excluded by neurotypicals. despite the dsm-5 naming autism as a “social deficit,” the fact that many autistic people seem to flourish online suggests that autistic people have communication styles at which they excel, and that neurotypical expectations of communication are dis-abling to autistic people. blogs are one of many kinds of online space that have the potential for autistic people to thrive in. thousands of autism blogs have been reported to exist; it is unknown how many of them are autistic blogs (written by autistic people), so further research is needed (saha & agarwal, 2015). additionally, an intersectional analysis of autism is largely absent. conversations around ethics, consent, and representation are also being had about blogging (çevik, 2015). i connect these conversations to ethics about memoirs on disabled people (couser, 2004). couser problematizes how disabled people are written about in memoirs by their non-disabled family members and how these family members gain prestige or money based on their writing. he argues that disabled people do not have the opportunity to represent themselves or benefit financially from these memoirs about them. çevik (2015) voices similar critiques when she asks, “where do my parental rights to share my children's photos end and their rights to individual privacy begin?” (çevik, 2020). she advocates for consent (not coercion) and names the power differential between parent and dependent child. more conversations on ethics are ongoing around who can represent whom and how they may financially benefit. neurotypical parents of autistics mcguire (2016) indicates that autism advocacy was first observed in 1962 in the united kingdom. neurotypical parents formed a group they named the autistic children’s aid society of north london which would later be renamed the national autistic society. at the time, autism was understood as something that developed because of cold, well-educated, working parents, particularly mothers. the psychoanalyst bruno bettelheim called these mothers, “refrigerator mothers” (bettelheim, 1967), based on psychologist bridget liang studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 450 leo kanner’s thoughts that they lacked maternal warmth. bettelheim’s theory of refrigerator mothers insinuated that the child was neglected or abused by their lack of motherly love. implicit in battelheim’s theory was that women needed to stay home and care for their children. thus, subsequent activism by the mothers of autistic children carried an undercurrent that they had to be a “good mother” by doing everything to care for their child. they did this by raising awareness of autism as a disorder that needed support (carey et al., 2020; garcia, 2015; mcguire, 2016). through decades of activism, apparently neurotypical parent activists have fought for better conditions for their children. they advocated for having their children included in schools, access to services and treatments, and breaking down institutionalization. they fought against stigma, and for legal and policy rights (carey et al., 2020). out of the tireless work of neurotypical parent activists, therapies were tried and evaluated (e.g., dirfloortime®, sensory integration therapy, treatment and education of autistic and related communications handicapped children (teacch®), and applied behavioural analysis (aba)) (carey et al., 2020). yet as the children of these neurotypical parent activists grew up, tensions arose between neurotypical parents and children on how it was best to understand and support autistic people (bertilsdotter rosqvist et al., 2015). neurotypical parents were more likely to understand autism as, “a pathology of the mind and body; a grueling cost; a life draining epidemic; a dangerous threat; a biological problem necessitating a biomedical solution; an illness needing to be stopped, cured, fixed, eliminated” (mcguire, 2016, p. 19). in stark contrast, their children voiced opinions that normalized autism and viewed it as a positive difference. this division of opinion and activism is what the autism scholar, michael orsini coined as “the autism wars” (orsini, 2009; see also bertilsdotter rosqvist et al., 2015). some scholars argue that neurotypical parent activism has nuances (carey et al., 2019, 2020; neely-barnes et al., 2011; sousa, 2011). their activism has led to many services, laws, and policy changes designed to support autistic children. neely-barnes et al. (2011) examine the issues facing neurotypical parents of autistics. criticizing kanner’s and bettelheim’s traditional mother-blaming theories on autism, neely-barnes et al. (2011) note that parents, especially mothers, are frequently blamed for their child’s autism, demonstrating the persistent harms of these traditional theories. neely-barnes et al. (2011) further demonstrated that parents of autistics experienced more depression, stress, and lower levels of well-being. the care of children is significantly gendered (carey et al., 2019, 2020; fritsch, 2017; neely-barnes et al., 2011; sousa, 2011). mothers have been blamed for their children’s autism by some fathers and their extended families, which has fed into the refrigerator mother trope. in order to become a “good mother,” these mothers had to shoulder the role of tireless advocate on behalf of their children (sousa, 2011). this level of activism earned them the term “warrior mom” (jack, 2014; sousa, 2011). the growing expectations of mothers of divided communities and absent voices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 451 autistics to be warrior moms likely contributes to worsened mental health in parents of autistic children, as they are expected to develop instant mastery in skills such as navigating bureaucracy, law, campaign management, lobbying, education, and more, which is an unrealistic expectation for anyone. some black mothers of disabled children used different tactics to get support. they pivoted their blackness or their children’s disability to either play up or downplay those identities in order to try to circumvent the additional layers of racism to the ableist barriers to getting services (jacobs et al., 2010). despite the sometimes hostile relationship between autistic and neurotypical parent activists, there is complexity to parent activism. parents of autistic people are often victims of systems that provide shoddy support to families and to autistic people. they can also be victims of harassment and sexism, along with any other marginalities they may face. all parents, particularly mothers, deserve compassion, care and support, but not at the expense of their autistic children. black, indigenous, people of colour (bipoc) autistics i believe that my experience as an autistic person has definitely been affected by my gender and race. many characteristics that i possess that are clearly autistic were instead attributed to my race or gender. as a result, not only was i deprived of supports that would have been helpful, i was misunderstood and also, at times, mistreated. (giwa-onaiwu, 2016) giwa-onaiwu details the experience of working on the anthology, all the weight of our dreams (brown et al., 2017). this book is groundbreaking as the only book about bipoc autistic people’s experiences edited and fully written by bipoc autistic authors themselves (giwa-onaiwu, 2020). this anthology had 52 bipoc autistic people talk about what it means to be a bipoc autistic person. giwa-onaiwu discusses how confused people were that this anthology was even needed. she quoted someone saying, “autism is autism, right? does race really make a difference?” (brown et al., 2017, p. x). an interview of giwa-onaiwu identifies that there is a struggle for visibility and understanding for any autistic who isn’t a white cisgender man (rozsa, 2017). when she goes to autism events, she plays a game of “spot the person of colour” because so few of them are there, even though we know that autism presents itself in all populations (becerra et al., 2014). this may be because the typical screening tools used for diagnosis are based on the results of white cisgender boys developed in early studies (kanner, 1943; martin, 2016; silberman, 2016; weddle, 2016), while women, girls, and i would argue trans folks, generally present different traits (rozsa, 2017). this results in more autistic women, girls, and trans folks having their autism un/misdiagnosed/recognized or diagnosed later in life. bridget liang studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 452 as well, bipoc children’s autism gets misdiagnosed more frequently and instead given labels like adhd, “mental retardation,” or behavioural disorders like oppositional defiant disorder. in the (in)famous 2002 documentary, refrigerator mothers, dorothy groom, a black mother of an autistic son, spoke about how her son exhibited all the typical autistic traits, but the entire team of doctors at the university of illinois refused to diagnose him as autistic because he didn’t fit the traits of an upper middle class white family. this experience of misdiagnosis was also echoed by hardwick (2020), who was diagnosed with an emotional disturbance instead of autism. results in a recent center for disease control (cdc) study show that black students receive diagnoses an average of two years later than their white counterparts (constantino, 2020). additionally, black families are reported to receive less attention from pediatricians (silberman, 2016). it is clear that there are biases against black families (and likely other people of colour) and autism in healthcare. even within bipoc communities, autistics face barriers. weddle (2016) talks about her experiences being black and autistic. she describes her communities’ view of autism as “a behavioral problem, a set of character flaws, stubbornness, and eccentricity bordering on mental illness” (weddle, 2016). she talks about the lack of understanding she experienced and how she had to learn to be tough to survive. she wasn’t allowed to cry, be a picky eater, or refuse to look people in the eye, which are all common autistic traits. she faced a lot of ostracism for being blunt and truthful to a fault, stimming, and having different interests from her peers. this is not a call to educate black communities about autism, but to name autism as real and existing in black and other bipoc communities, which need to be part of autistic communities too (weddle, 2016). in addition to the microaggressions and lateral violence faced by bipoc autistic people, they also face disproportionate rates of police brutality, arrest, and murder at the hands of police, like all bipoc people. in a white paper written for the ruderman family foundation on media coverage of police brutality faced by disabled people (perry & carter-long, 2016), the authors claim that from a third to about a half of people murdered by police officers are disabled. it would be helpful to know how many of these disabled people were also bipoc. it is important to note that fear of the police transcends educational, career, and professional status for bipoc autistics. as eric garcia (2015, 2016), a latino autistic journalist notes, despite being employed professionally, welleducated, and living independently, he fears for his life when he encounters law enforcement. he discusses how autistic behaviours such as stimming, sensory processing or overloads, and i would add autistic non-verbal communication, can be read as threats by the police on top of stereotypes associated with bipoc men (garcia 2015, 2016; perry & carter-long, 2016). given the inequities faced by bipoc autistics, further research is divided communities and absent voices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 453 needed to better explore the intersections of autistic/autism parenting communities online, as i address in the examples below. tying it all together i focus on online communities, parent experiences, and bipoc autistics to draw attention to why we need intersectional autism research that centers the needs of autistic people while simultaneously supporting parents. the needs of bipoc autistics and other intersectional groups differ from the white, middle class, cisgender heterosexual male autistic that kanner constructed through early diagnostic criteria. the solutions to support everyone associated with autism need to be complex and nuanced to address multiplicity and conflicting needs. online communities and blogs demonstrate the resourcefulness of families and autistics in organizing and sharing knowledge and experience in the face of insurmountable systemic ableism. this research focused on the intersections of bipoc autistic/autism parenting communities to address the following questions. how do the struggles and needs expressed by parents in blogs differ based on factors of intersectionality? what omissions do we see when we look at most autism parenting blogs? although the following examples are not representative, they provide a starting place for further research that centers diverse populations when thinking about autism and parenting communities online. methodology blogs are a publicly available and easily accessible form of media for most people with the privilege of basic internet connection. blogs allow “disabled people, their parents, and disability organizations [to take] control of the information about disability available to the general public” (haller, 2010, p. 1). mainstream media may not cover points that are important to disabled people and their families. blogs allow ordinary people to represent themselves and share their experiences with others (haller, 2010). informed by critical disability studies and its emphasis on the importance of agency and bodily autonomy of disabled people (clare, 1999), i scoped the internet for blogs written by parents of autistics from diverse backgrounds. influenced by patricia leavy (2007), i developed a methodology in line with feminist disability content analysis. leavy (2007) describes feminist content analysis as a tool to ask different (i.e., identity-based) questions about norms, values, and other indicators of culture. according to leavy, applying a feminist lens brings up issues relevant to feminists, such as equality, power dynamics, and gender norms in a culture. i adapt this feminist lens, focusing on race, disability, and gender, paying attention to social location to point out how systemic oppression impacts people’s lives and what needs to be done to bridget liang studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 454 address it. for this reason, i used a scoping sampling method to get an idea of what different representatives from different social locations experienced and thought (arksey & o’malley, 2005). i name my own social location as a mixed race, autistic, queer, disabled, trans scholar who is not a parent. this puts me in a position where more intersectional, autistic-centered research would be directly beneficial to my interests and life. by focusing on the words parents have said on public domain blogs i infer how different identity groups view autism and parenting. my content analysis process first sampled blogs using inclusion and exclusion criteria outlined further below. next, i selected posts for analysis. third, i coded for predetermined themes. finally, i analyzed posts for content related to autistic/autism parenting experiences and their intersections with race. i analyzed two posts each from six separate blogs. i selected blogs based on the blogger’s social location. because this is an exploratory paper, my aim was to demonstrate a breadth of different experiences through diverse social locations across race, gender, and neurotype. this resulted in a white neurotypical mother, a white neurotypical father, a white autistic mother, a black autistic nonbinary mother, an indigenous autistic trans father, and a black neurotypical mother. i excluded blogs if they were not clearly authored by a parent, such as those run by an organization. i also excluded microblogs on platforms like facebook or twitter because the brevity of their posts made it challenging to compare them to the long style posts on individual blog sites. i began my search for autism/autistic blogs with a google search and immediately found a top autism blogs list; their top parent blogs were a white neurotypical father and a white neurotypical mother (cherney, 2020). there were no bipoc parent blogs on this list so i had to make a more concerted effort to find them. my google search terms were “bipoc” “poc,” “black,” “asian,” “racialized,” “indigenous,” “native american,” “latino,” and/or “autistic,” “asd,” “autism parent blog”. i could not identify any bipoc parent blogs using the search criteria listed above (perhaps because of the limitations of google algorithms), but results did yield a white autistic mother through this search. because i did not identify any bipoc parent of autistic blogs through my first searches, i asked my friend, lydia brown (l. brown, personal communication, june 11, 2020), a well-connected autistic activist in bipoc circles, for blogs that fit my inclusion criteria. they provided me with a few names of bipoc autistic parents who might have blogs. searching for these parents’ names led me to find two bipoc autistic parent blogs. additionally, i identified the black neurotypical mother’s blog in an article for my literature review (giwa-onaiwu, 2020). i selected blog posts through searching for keywords based on themes from my literature review. i searched for “parenting,” “education,” and “aba.” the latter represents service provision, because until 2019 it was the only autism service funded by ontario (janse van rensburg, 2021). aba is also a divided communities and absent voices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 455 highly divisive topic internationally that elicits strong feelings from many parties invested in supporting autistics. focusing on aba allowed me to explore some of the complexities of autism/autistic parenting. i created a coding key of questions based on predetermined ideas and themes taken from the literature review (autistic self advocacy network, 2009; brown, 2011; carter & hyde, 2015; coppala & hardy, 2017; garcia, 2015; glenn, 2004; mcguire, 2016). these themes included pathologizing autism; police brutality; negative views on autism; lack of personhood; silencing; self-determination; language used; and filicide. using inductive and deductive approaches to coding, i was surprised to see how many presumptions i made. therefore, codes were revised with the consultation of a friend from a4a and i performed a second round of analysis.1 sample rob gorski rob gorski is a white, neurotypical father whose blog is called the autism dad. he’s a single father with three autistic boys aged pre-teen to young adult. he names all his children in his posts and often talks about what is going on in his and their lives. he characterizes his blog as transparent, open and honest about the ups and downs of their lives on his about page. according to his revolver maps widget, his blog has received 537,805 hits from august 18, 2019 to january 25, 2022 and he’s been featured on news stations such as bbc worldwide and cnn. his blog has some income generated through autism product reviews, sponsorships, and paypal donations. he doesn’t write about whiteness, privilege, or his social location, and there was no evidence of connection to autistic peers or autistic organizations. the blog posts analyzed were, “this is how i know i let my kids down and it breaks my heart” [809 words] (gorski 2020b), and “a break down of autism behavioural analysis (aba) therapy for parents” [663 words] (gorski, 2020a). meghan ashburn meghan ashburn is a white, autistic mother whose blog is called not an autism mom: parenting… with a dash of awareness. she is in an interracial marriage with two mid-childhood autistic sons and two neurotypical teenage sons. she does not name her children on the blog, but there are some images of them. she writes a bit about them, but her focus is more on her experiences 1 a4a or autistics4autistics is an autistic advocacy group in ontario fighting for autistic rights and self-determination through activism. their website is https://a4aontario.com/ bridget liang studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 456 as an autistic parent, giving advice to other parents. her blog is based on the fact she is #actuallyautistic, a mother, and the education work she’s doing. she’s developed a community through her book club and by interviewing prominent autistics and autism service providers. she has published on five other blogs including neuroclastic and the mighty. she has some income generated from an ad banner, patreon, an etsy shop, and consultations. despite having mixed-race black children, ashburn’s focus is not generally on whiteness, but more on being autistic and motherhood. the blog posts i studied were, “autism didn’t ruin that event. my own expectations did” [737 words] (ashburn, 2019b), and “before you start grieving for your autistic child…” [1405 words] (ashburn, 2019a). kate swenson kate swenson is a white, neurotypical mother whose blog is called, finding [redacted]’s voice.2 she’s a married professional with one mid-childhood autistic and two neurotypical sons and an early childhood daughter. her children are named in the blog and their lives are documented explicitly. her autistic son’s name is even in the title of the blog itself. she defines her blog as a safe, honest, caring space. swenson has a huge following of 600,000 people on facebook, and numerous guest contributors. of all the bloggers i sampled, she seems to have the most sources of income, with two advertisement banners with active ads in them, a subscription service to her own community group, a t-shirt store, a memoire, and amazon affiliates. she also runs a donation service to fund caregivers for three sessions of therapy. she does not talk about whiteness or her social location and there do not appear to be any connections to autistic peers or organizations. the blog posts studied were, “the secret world of finding [redacted]’s voice” [1387 words] (swenson, 2017), and “sometimes i forget” [576 words] (swenson, 2019). oswin latimer oswin latimer is an indigenous, autistic trans father, and his blog is called, autistic spectrum parenting. he is married and has multiple autistic and neurodivergent children who are probably teens. latimer doesn’t talk much about his children in his most recent entries, but digging through his archives, he refers to them by initials; it is only further back that one can find their names. his goal in this blog is to make space for autistic parents. there are no banners or organization affiliations, but he did start his own autism service 2 i redact her son’s name in order to at least give him a semblance of privacy from having a blog about him with his name in the title. divided communities and absent voices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 457 run by autistics. his only sources of income from the blog are consultation or workshop fees. i did not find any articles where he talked about being indigenous or trans, but he talks often about being autistic and his connections to other autistic organizers. the blog posts i looked at were, “preparing for the future” [668 words] (latimer, 2017b), and “beyond awareness – perceptions and informed parenting” [830 words] (latimer, 2017a). morénike giwa onaiwu morénike giwa onaiwu is a black autistic nonbinary mother whose blog is called, just being me…who needs ‘normalcy’ anyway? she’s married and identifies her family as multicultural, serodifferent, and neurodiverse. she has multiple children from middle childhood to teenage, some of whom are autistic. i didn’t find any of her children’s names, just their initials or nicknames for them. her blog is part of her website which documents her work in multiple sectors. she is very well-published, has connections to 38 organizations, and had been featured in 149 news articles at the time of data collection (june 2020). she generates income from consultations, trainings, talks, and likely some of her writing contributions. her blog posts often weave together the complexities of being black, autistic, and a parent. blog posts by giwa-onaiwu that i studied were, “don’t pray my autism away” [1,465 words] (giwa-onaiwu, 2015), and “all of me: how do i know where blackness ends and neurodivergence begins?” [3,739 words] (giwaonaiwu, 2016). mrs. kerima çevik mrs. kerima çevik is a black, neurotypical mother and her blog is titled, “the autism wars.”3 she’s married to a turkish man and has an adult neurotypical daughter and teenage autistic son. her son is named throughout the blog, but she has written about only posting references to and images of him on the blog with his consent (çevik, 2020). her blog is an extension of her work as a human rights activist and is primarily devoted to bipoc autistics who have been murdered by parents or the police. her blog does not have any social affiliations, but she frequently refers to other bipoc or autistic people and organizations as well as intersectional issues affecting bipoc and autistic folks. she does not seem to make any money off of the blog. the blog posts i examined were, “autism, accommodation for 3 she prefers being referred to as mrs. because of some peoples’ racist assumptions that black women like her all had children out of wedlock (see http://theautismwars.blogspot.com/p/blogpage.html). bridget liang studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 458 disability, and traumatic normalization” [1,282 words] (çevik, 2017a), and “hobson's choice, nonverbal autism, technology, and the myth of no future” [2,409 words] (çevik, 2017b). discussion from my observations, there is a clear schism of attitudes on autism and parenting based on the communities to which the parents studied in this research had access. gorski and swenson did not seem to find support from adult autistic communities, judging by the absence of autistic people or autistic-led organizations; these were present in all the other blogs. nor did i readily find intersectional content that was cognizant of power and privilege. these two blogs were also the only ones in the sample that were found using a simple google search for autism blogs. all the other bloggers, by contrast, had a fairly consistent, affirmational view of autistic ways of existing and mentioned autistic adults and autistic-led organizations without the need to search for them. their levels of explicitly intersectional content varied. i was only able to get some indicators of popularity for the white bloggers. swenson has over 600,000 facebook followers, gorski has over 500,000 hits, and ashburn has over 200,000 hits. none of the bipoc bloggers had any widgets or counters that reported number of hits. social location only gorski and swenson failed to discuss their social locations. what is more interesting is that ashburn additionally doesn’t name herself as white despite having mixed-race kids. these observations are in line with how whiteness is non-raced or made invisible (dyer, 2013). for those with privilege such as whiteness or being abled, it is made the default. privilege is invisible, yet it is carried like an invisible backpack (mcintosh, 1989). in practice, this means that neurotypical and white people are less likely to acknowledge the ways society treats them with respect and dignity due to that facet of their social location, or knowingly use their privilege to support their autistic or bipoc children. for example, ashburn has a recommended book list on autism and has sections for autistic authors, non-speaking autistic authors, parents and educators, women and trans folks, books in spanish, queer folks, a general section, picture books, kids, and teens. despite a good intersectional list, there is no list on bipoc autistics (ashburn, 2020). there are some bipoc authors on these lists, but there is no list for them specifically. despite many areas where ashburn uses her privilege, race is glaringly absent. çevik was unique in how she deploys her neurotypicality in her blog. under her tab, “why i blog”, she says, “my intent is to stand by my son and divided communities and absent voices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 459 his neurodivergent peers and work with them to improve my son's quality of life by helping improve the quality of the lives of everyone in the autism community” (çevik, n.d.). monetization monetization can be an indicator of success or privilege. only the white bloggers, both autistic and non-autistic, had their blogs monetized directly. latimer and giwa-onaiwu only advertise they can be hired for consultations and çevik doesn’t seem to make any money off her blog. this may point towards the effects of white privilege. ashburn, despite being autistic, has a large enough following (273,444 visitors on january 25th, 2022) to warrant a patreon, an etsy shop,4 a spot for an ad banner (not occupied), and she too offers consultations. gorski’s blog includes autism product reviews, sponsorships, and donations through paypal. swenson has two active ad banners, a subscription service to her paid group, a t-shirt store, amazon affiliates, a memoire, and she runs a donation service to fund caregivers for three sessions of therapy. exact incomes could not be found, but it appears that swenson may have the highest income from her blog judging by the number of advertisements, sponsorships, and different sources of income in comparison to everyone else. while ashburn derives income through her blog, it’s gorski and especially swenson who have significant sources of income through their blogs. this may indicate the effects of whose voices are privileged over others because ashburn, despite being a well-credentialed white autistic parent, has significantly fewer hits and sources of income than her neurotypical counterparts. it concerns me that these two neurotypical parents make money off of their children’s lived experiences. if their children weren’t autistic, would they have gone viral in the first place? if they talked less openly about their child’s tantrums, would their blogs get nearly as much support and validation? if gorski’s children weren’t autistic, would companies ask him to review their products? and if their children weren't autistic, would this style of blogging be considered exploitative? what qualifications do gorski and swenson have to warrant people giving them money for their expertise on autism when compared with autistic and bipoc parents of autistic children? there was no indication of degrees related to autism or years of experience working with autistic people anywhere on their blogs. by contrast, ashburn is an educational consultant and former teacher, çevik has worked for autistic organizations, completed research studies, worked with legislators, and she’s a contributing author to 4 patreon is a website for content creators and artists to solicit money from fans through monthly membership fees. the members gain perks like extra content or direct conversations with the creator. etsy is an online marketplace where individuals can sell handmade or vintage products. bridget liang studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 460 multiple blogs. both giwa-onaiwu and latimer are highly qualified autistic professionals. yet none of these qualifications held by bipoc and autistic parents of autistic children seem to warrant the plethora of followers and monetization enjoyed by white autism parents gorski and swenson. further research needs to be done on algorithm bias, racism, and blog revenue. confidentiality another important theme emerging in the blogs that relates back to my literature review (çevik, 2015; couser, 2004), were conversations about ethics around autism blogs. some of that discussion relates to monetization as discussed previously, as well as privacy concerns. while çevik brought up confidentiality for children on her own blog, all the neurotypicals including çevik revealed their children’s (apparently real) names in their blogs. swenson went so far as to put her autistic son’s name in the title of her blog. in contrast, autistic bloggers studied in this sample, regardless of race, generally referred to their children by initials, nicknames, or a descriptor such as, “my eldest/youngest,” or “the twins.” it is interesting to note latimer and ashburn named their children earlier in their blogging history, but have not recently (ashburn, 2017a; latimer, 2014). this may indicate they held different perspectives on privacy or did not think as much about it when they first began blogging. çevik calls for better consent yet explicitly names her son in her blog (çevik 2015). she says she obtains consent before posting any photos or telling stories about him, but it is unclear if she had conversations with him about if he wanted his name disclosed on the world wide web, or the possible consequences of no longer being anonymous online (gay family values, 2011). by contrast, blogs like gay family values (2011) offered their children opportunities to make their own informed decisions by talking with them about difficult topics related to public profiles, and treat their children like they are human beings with their own thoughts, feelings, and decisions to make. this is something i find lacking in swenson’s, and to a lesser degree gorski’s, blogs. the following quote demonstrates how swenson feels about keeping the details of her son’s life confidential after receiving aba therapy: no meltdowns. no off the wall behaviors. it’s sleeping through the night. no fighting over food or pants or swimming. no hitting. no screaming. no self injuring. suddenly, i am smiling more. i am sitting and watching my children in my living room. all three of them. (swenson, 2019) if her son read those publicly accessible words about his behaviour and struggles, how might he feel? if he had friends who read the blog, how would divided communities and absent voices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 461 they react to his mother’s words? with a reach of at least tens of thousands of viewers, how will her son be seen by her readership? gorski may not have kept details about his children’s lives confidential, but he did not reveal potentially harmful details about them: i sat him down and talked to him for a little while about how grown-up stress isn’t his fault and that it’s something i need to better manage. i told him that yes, he can drive me crazy but that’s what kids do. i know i drove my parents crazy and he was simply granting their wish that someday i would know what it’s like to be a parent driven crazy by their children. (gorski, 2020b) from this discussion, the ethics of confidentiality run a gamut of experiences. giwa-onaiwu, latimer, and ashburn, as autistics, speak to their own experiences of autism and of parenting independently of their children and kept their children’s names confidential, at least in the more recent posts on their blogs. it was only when i went diving through their archive that i found their children’s names. on the other hand, swenson’s blog exemplifies why i have concerns about the ethics of blogging about one’s child as it openly discusses their children’s struggles and shows no sign of informed consent. gorski and çevik occupy a middle space where i don’t know if they get informed consent from their children about what they’re posting, but it seems that çevik is more explicit about discussing informed consent. attitudes towards autism i began the discussion section by noting that the bloggers who talked about autistic adults and autistic organizations were the ones who had a uniformly positive understanding of autism. all of them name the negative feelings some parents have towards autism as the real barrier: “your child is the same amazing, lovable, caring, goofy, courageous child they were before getting an autism diagnosis. you get to decide how you feel about it” (ashburn, 2019b). as this group was mostly comprised of autistic people who are parents themselves, they have the unique position of having lived experience growing up autistic (even if their autism was not recognized/diagnosed) and raising autistic children of their own. çevik is the exception as a neurotypical mother who passes on the lessons she has learned from the autistic people with whom she is associated, as evidenced on her blog. ashburn and çevik give parenting advice and encourage neurotypical parents to learn to accept their autistic child as normal just as they are. they simultaneously propose supportive ways to parent: it is a question of supporting decision making, educating your children about the scope of their disability and how to keep their mental health intact by using accommodations and assistive technology to support their processing and navigating a world not built for them. (çevik, 2017a) bridget liang studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 462 giwa-onaiwu’s approach is to discuss many of her experiences and those of her children and how other people stereotype them. for example, she wrote about an old church lady who wanted to pray both her and her daughter’s autism away (giwa-onaiwu, 2015). in another incident in a department store, her child was infantilized by a worker while trying to pick out new clothes (giwa-onaiwu, 2016). latimer takes up a more academic approach in his blog articles naming issues such as pathologizing autism, autism as an epidemic, autism cure narratives, and pseudoscience (latimer, 2017a, 2017b). he is concerned less with the everyday experience of being a parent and more with evaluating support services or discursive issues that autistic people and parents may face, for example, what it means to have a generation of kids coming of age who grew up with internalized ableism from autism “treatments.” this is about what we as an autistic community are about to face. a generation of autistic people that have been told that autism is bad. a generation of autistic people that have been taught how to not be autistic. a generation of autistic people who have been forced medical interventions, diets, and pseudoscientific treatments. (latimer, 2017a) gorski and swenson expressed more negative or stigmatizing values towards autism. they expressed views of autism as a disorder, and a medical condition that needs treatment. in one of gorski’s blog posts, he praises his understanding of aba and doesn’t even take into consideration what the child would want out of autism services. nowhere does he explain the importance of why a behaviour or a skill is necessary. according to the chosen goal for your child, successfully learning a skill rewards them with a meaningful present, praise, or activity. over time, this activity leads to a change in behavior as the positive reinforcement encourages your child to repeat success. (gorski, 2020a) gorski seems to have a discrepancy in his understanding of the competence and agency of autistic people. when interacting with his own children, he is willing to apologize for mistakes he makes and explain what he did wrong (gorski, 2020b). he also refutes the “eternal child” stereotype when he talks about his children growing up (gorski, 2020a). in another blog post, (gorski, 2020c), his eldest son expressed interest in moving out and into a living situation with people his own age and support needs. while i applaud gorski’s positive language and unconditional support for his son, he focuses more on his son’s lack of readiness (o’brien & o’brien, 1998) instead of how to work alongside his son to ensure he’s able to thrive outside the home. swenson’s views of autism in contrast are uniformly negative: “i’ll forget that it’s autism. i’ll think maybe it’s better now” (swenson, 2019). she refers to her son’s disability as confusing without any evident concern about what her son may be going through (swenson, 2017). she doesn’t see that her divided communities and absent voices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 463 child is autistic with potentially different desires and life trajectory than what she expected and all this feeds into a number of autism stereotypes, such as “autism holding their child hostage” and “subhuman/incapable of making decisions” (autistic self advocacy network, 2009). by contrast, swenson focuses on her own struggles as the mother of an autistic child with a very public profile. for example: on average i have to ban 10 people a week who say things to me like…i’m a terrible mother, i am ugly, my kid is brat, my kid is ugly, i should just die, i should just shut up, and my personal favorite…autistic kids are a product of the devil. (swenson, 2017) race and autism out of all the blogs, only those by giwa-onaiwu and çevik overtly engaged intersectional issues. while it is great that all the autistic bloggers talk extensively and critically about autism, i combed through multiple pages of each blog looking for references to intersectional issues related to race, gender, sexual orientation, or class and only managed to find short references in ashburn’s blog. however, this related to her older children, who are not autistic, and autism was not referenced. ashburn talks about how she fears her sons will experience police brutality in this political climate with more visible and violent racists (ashburn, 2017b). latimer wrote about white fragility, but explicitly stated that this post had nothing to do with being autistic or having autistic kids (latimer, 2018). i could not find any posts where he talked about being indigenous or included racism in his discussions about autism or parenting. nor did i find anything about how his transness and queer relationship speak to his experiences of being an autistic parent. contrast this with giwa-onaiwu who did an excellent job discussing the tensions and difficulties of both herself and her family navigating being black and autistic and various other disabilities. for example: it is unclear to me which characteristic was the driving factor behind an assumption by “professionals” of intellectual impairment in the absence of evidence or formal testing. they had written her off without even verifying if their hypothesis was right or wrong. (giwa-onaiwu, 2016) the lack of race-based analysis, let alone other intersections, demonstrates how much work needs to be done in order to support diverse autistic populations. there are very few works that talk about bipoc autistic experience or issues, particularly that have breached the ceiling of peer reviewed, academic publications. bridget liang studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 464 limitations this study relies on a very small sample size, and has yielded preliminary research meant to encourage other researchers to pick up from where i end. more research is needed on the differences between different populations’ attitudes towards autism and their lived experiences and barriers with autism and interacting with the world. more work needs to be done that focuses on bipoc autistics. more support needs to be given for bipoc autistics to be published in academic journals and books. this study only looked at people who are parents. there are bipoc autistic bloggers that are relatively easy to find through google. there could also be a study on microblogs, on platforms such as facebook or tiktok. sexual orientation and gender identity were not addressed in this paper partly because these were not topics discussed explicitly by the bloggers in their posts, nor did i have the space to delve into the literature. as a scholar trained in feminist, queer and disability theory, i prefer theorizing about power and oppression over other ways to analyze the texts. i chose to examine sample populations of bloggers in order to curate diverse perspectives on autism parenting. as an autistic person, i have biases against neurotypical autism parents because of the things i brought up in this paper. there were not many texts that dealt with specifically bipoc autistic people, let alone by bipoc autistic people published in an academic journal. the lack of racial diversity among bipoc people included in the study is because that was what was available. conclusions and recommendations autistic parents need to be at the center of knowledge produced and services created for autistic people. autism needs to be de-associated with suffering, being a burden, and autistics needs to be presumed competent people who desire self-determination. we also need to integrate diverse, intersectional autistic experiences and perspectives into services created, knowledge produced, and knowledge published. in the process of conducting this research, it was challenging to find any bipoc autism parent blogs, although blogs by white neurotypical parents abound. it did not take more than a few google searches to find a white autistic mother. but i only found bipoc people through personal connections and through my literature review. it is remarkable that çevik, giwa-onaiwu, and latimer are not as easily found with google searches given the importance of their perspectives and expertise; they should be at the top of autism blogs lists. the fact that a united nations-recognized, wellpublished, well-connected, smart person like giwa-onaiwu is not more wellknown suggests the influences of ableism and racism. she deserves the fame of temple grandin. divided communities and absent voices studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 465 i would like to see a breadth of bipoc experiences across different populations represented across different platforms. future research should explore important questions that arise with intersectional research, for example, what differences are there between black, tamil, and white passing mixed japanese people’s experience of autism services? how is autism understood in the mohawk nation and is it different from coast salish? where are the studies looking at racial biases in aba practitioners? where is planned parenthood campaigning to voice how bipoc autistics face higher levels of sexual violence? where is the commission to investigate the harassment of chinese autistics during the covid pandemic? the lack of research delving into the nuances of different racial groups and their experiences of autism is another indicator of how racism is alive and well. it is a challenge for bipoc and other marginalized peoples to get into positions of power or produce knowledge recognized by decision makers as valid (such as an essay like this). when latimer didn’t bring up much intersectional content in his blog posts, i was disappointed, but i cannot blame him. the pressure to be a multiply marginalized role model is strong, as is the pressure to produce perfectly intersectional texts all the time. what really disappoints me is when white bloggers never overtly address whiteness. this absence is what resounds loudest (glenn, 2004). the divide between autistic adults and neurotypical parents needs to be addressed and healed, and one step in doing this is to critically examine intersectional experiences in parenting autistic children. without neurotypical parent activists, there would be even fewer autistic services than there already are. however, as is clear from this study, differences in positionality mean differences in need and priorities. future research and policy must be nuanced and take into consideration the needs of both autistic people and their families, keeping intersectional considerations like race a priority. i would like to suggest for neurotypical parents to seek autistics, especially autistic parents, from which to get advice. they should also find the support they need, and learn to accept their autistic child. i imagine a future group like pflag (parents and friends of lesbians and gays), where neurotypical parents can learn from each other, with autistic people leading with some valuable insider knowledge. the amount of work that needs to be done is astronomical. we autistic people cannot do this alone. we need all people interested in making a world better for autistic people, including the neurotypical parent bloggers. acknowledgements i’d like to thank the mitacs research and training award for funding that allowed me to do this work during the early pandemic. i’d also like to thank my supervisors, jake pyne and eva karpinski for their guidance. i’m thankful bridget liang studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 447-469, 2022 466 to my partner tristan fassel and my roommate catherine duchastel for letting me vent/cry at them the entire way through. thank you to the editors of the special issue for their tireless work nudging me about deadlines and helping to shape this into something readable. thank you, lydia brown, for giving me resources to look, into and the bipoc autistic discord for being excited and supportive, which helped keep me resolved to finish. and lastly, thank you to a4a for their encouragement and being another set of eyes. references abel, s., machin, t., & brownlow, c. 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(2020). from “since” to “if”: using blogs to explore an insider-informed framing of autism. disability & society. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2020.1836479 studies in social justice volume 4, issue 1, 25-45, 2010 correspondence address: shari stone-mediatore, department of philosophy, ohio wesleyan university, 61 s. sandusky st., delaware, oh 43015 usa. tel: +1 740 368-3795, e-mail: ssstonem@owu.edu issn: 1911-4788 epistemologies of discomfort: what militaryfamily anti-war activists can teach us about knowledge of violence shari stone-mediatore, department of philosophy, ohio wesleyan university, delaware, ohio, usa abstract this paper extends feminist critiques of epistemic authority by examining their particular relevance in contexts of institutionalized violence. by reading feminist criticism of “experts” together with theories of institutionalized violence, i argue that typical expert modes of thinking are incapable of rigorous knowledge of institutionalized violence because such knowledge requires a distinctive kind of thinking-within-discomfort for which conventionally trained experts are ill-suited. i turn to a newly active group of epistemic agents—anti-war relatives of soldiers—to examine the role that undervalued epistemic traits can play in knowledge of war and other forms of structural violence. there are a hundred ways to be a good citizen, and one of them is to look finally at the things we don’t want to see. barbara kingsolver (2003) introduction for several decades now, feminist theorists have criticized modern epistemic norms, revealing male and upper-class biases beneath seemingly neutral epistemic standards. theorists including genevieve lloyd (1984), dorothy smith (1987), lorraine code (1991, 2006), sandra harding (1991), linda alcoff (1993), val plumwood (1993), and carol cohn (1993, 2003), have made compelling cases that received epistemic norms over-value traits associated with upper-class men, such as emotional detachment, certainty, and abstraction, at the expense of the more engaged and exploratory ways in which we come to know the world. the result, they suggest, is not only that our professional institutions fail to give a fair hearing to people who are associated with the undervalued epistemic traits. just as dangerously, those institutions tend to produce knowledge that is rigid, narrow in outlook, and inadequate for addressing human problems. 1 and yet, despite feminist criticism, modern epistemic norms continue to determine who gets authorized to speak on public affairs. in the context of war, such policing of public debate is particularly troubling, for it tends to reserve authority for detached 26 shari stone-mediatore studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 professionals, who treat war as a rational means of policymaking, while people close enough to war to appreciate its horrors are denied authority to speak. in one case, for instance, when a columbus dispatch reporter was interviewing a young veteran, the reporter discounted any of the young man’s remarks that seemed to him coloured by the young man’s “anger at having been sent to iraq.”2 i begin by reviewing feminist criticism of the institutions that regulate epistemic authority in our society. while feminist criticism of modern epistemic norms has been vast, i am particularly interested in critiques that address the social and cultural mechanisms by which epistemic authority has been produced and regulated, for these similarly, when veterans of iraq and afghanistan gathered outside d.c. to present first-hand accounts of the violence, the veterans were virtually ignored by the mainstream media (thompson, 2008). and in the early years of the war, when i proposed a campus forum featuring members of veterans for peace and military families speak out (mfso), a colleague dismissed my proposal, commenting that such people are “not academically-oriented.” in response to this exclusionary character of public debate on war, this paper seeks to strengthen feminist critiques of epistemic authority, so that such critiques can be more readily brought to bear on public life. the project has both political and philosophical aims. politically, i aim to help expose the limits of recent debates on war and open debate to new voices. philosophically, i seek to enrich feminist critiques of epistemic authority by examining their particular relevance in contexts of institutionalized violence. my central claim is that responsible thinking about institutionalized violence, including war, demands a distinctive kind of thinkingwithin-discomfort for which conventionally trained public-affairs experts are illsuited and for which undervalued epistemic traits play a crucial role. in essence, i argue that typical expert modes of thinking are not only biased in ways elaborated by the above feminist theorists. they are also particularly incapable of meaningful engagement with the violence of our own institutions. i draw on theorists of institutionalized violence, including hannah arendt (1953b, 1978, 1979, 1992, 1998), simone weil (1977), and john glenn gray (1998), to substantiate this connection between typical expert modes of thinking and failure to address meaningfully and rigorously institutionalized violence. in a more constructive vein, i turn to a newly active group of epistemic agents—anti-war relatives of soldiers—to examine the role that undervalued epistemic traits can play in rigorous knowledge of violence. my aim in examining the epistemic practices of these activists is not to reverse the hierarchy between experts and amateurs, but to contribute to a rethinking of epistemic authority in the domain of institutionalized violence in such a way that recognizes the potential epistemic value of closeness to and passionate engagement with issues and that distinguishes more (from less) knowledge-worthy forms of emotional engagement. ultimately, these political and philosophical projects meet, for they are both efforts to elucidate and promote the responsibly engaged thinking that arendt (1953a, 1953b) suggests is our best hope for resisting institutionalized violence. feminist critiques of authority epistemologies of discomfort 27 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 explain how certain biases have become systemic to the people who get recognized as authoritative thinkers in our society. smith, code, and cohn write from distinct theoretical perspectives (feminist sociology, analytic feminist philosophy, and cultural theory, respectively) but they offer similar insights into the institutions that train and regulate our society’s authoritative thinkers. their analyses suggest that these institutions follow the paradigm that we might call the expert, by which the institutions train thinkers to claim authority by mastering received professional vocabularies and methods, restricting themselves to strictly professional (as opposed to personal) ties to their material, and assuming self-certain intellectual styles. most importantly here, their analyses suggest that such training not only promotes facility with disciplinary knowledge and analytic discipline, but also sheltered, orthodox, and privileged-class biases. as smith (1987) explains, the professional institutions that train our society’s aspiring professionals teach them to view their subject matter in terms of established discourses and methods. “a determinate conceptual framework” she says, “is identified with the discipline,” such that to explore different conceptual frameworks or methodologies “is to step outside the discipline” (p. 60). academic and professional institutions, such as journals and professional organizations, regulate these frameworks, including “the topics, themes, and problematics” that define the discipline (p. 61). they do so, for instance, by identifying legitimate professional work and thereby determining the work that should be cited and engaged by other legitimate members of the discipline. as a result, in order to be recognized as a “proper participant” in one’s field, “the member must produce work that conforms to appropriate styles and terminologies, makes the appropriate references, and is locatable by these and other devices in the traditions” (p. 61). moreover, although institutionalized discourses and methodologies may seem neutral, they actually tend to reflect the standpoint of people at the governing end of society, whose concerns to control and regulate the social world have tended to dominate institutional arrangements as well as the basic logic and categories of professional discourses. the result is that the basic structure of professional fields, including their methods, conceptual tools, scope, and primary topics, tend to reflect the standpoint of ruling groups. thus, professionals learn to direct their attention to data and problems that are of concern to rulers (code, 2006, p. 77; smith, 1987, pp. 54-65). for instance, in the field of mental health, both the field and its problems have been defined from the standpoint of “those whose professional business it is” to process mental illness and who do so through institutional structures that have separated mental illness from poverty (smith, 1987, p. 63). and in defence policy analysis, cohn (2003) finds that the field is governed by a techno-strategic discourse that presupposes the standpoint of the people who use weapons (not the people at the receiving end of weapons), a subject matter of weapons (not living beings), and a logic of the military’s zero-sum game (not the logic of ordinary people trying live their daily lives in a world shared with others). the structure of professional workplaces and the norms that guide professional practice also habituate professionals to disengage from the existential content of the material they study. for instance, the division of labour between higherand lowerechelon workers accustoms the former to bypass flesh and blood phenomena for material that has already been transposed for them into analytic categories by technicians, nurses, social workers, and others who work more directly with living 28 shari stone-mediatore studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 individuals. at the same time, epistemic norms that valorize abstract over experiential knowledge and that demand “professional distance” encourage professionals to treat their abstract categories as if they were more real than the living phenomena from which they were distilled. such norms of detachment from the living world are enforced by the institutional regulation of the discipline described above as well as by professional cultures that degrade individuals who veer from these norms, often by invoking gendered conceptions of professionalism. for instance, cohn (1993) recounts how a physicist who suddenly shifted from technical analysis and remarked on the horrific human impact of the bombs he was analyzing was met with derisive silence from his colleagues, making him feel “like a woman.” such regulation of professionals’ emotional reactions to their material may seem to protect knowledge practices from bias. however, so-called professional distance does not really free expert thinking from bias as much as it promotes a standpoint of distance from and aloofness toward social suffering (code, 1991, pp. 222-264; 2006, p. 43; cohn, 1993; 2003, pp. 65-68; smith, 1987, pp. 49-78; 1990, pp. 66-104). academic and professional cultures also promote rigidity in thinkers insofar as they train thinkers to embrace institutionalized discourses and methods as a means to maintaining prestige within the discipline. following the standard language and methods of the field, smith (1987) explains, “is how we recognize ourselves as professionals” (p. 60). cohn (2003) experienced this when (in spite of herself) she began to feel pride in her mastery of defence-policy jargon and when she realized that, after immersing herself in the jargon, a more human perspective on defence was not only difficult but would make her appear “inexpert, unprofessional” (p. 65). closer to home, my students who have gone through our university’s economics program are often so identified with discourses of “comparative advantage”3 finally, when epistemic norms that valorize certainty join with competitive professional cultures, they encourage peremptory and self-certain styles as a means to ward off criticism and speed professional advancement. unfortunately, such professional pressures can make experts so concerned with appearing authoritative that they fail to admit their mistakes, to consider what they might learn from others, to address factors that might complicate their certainty, or to venture beyond orthodoxy (even when they may present their analysis as novel). public expectations reinforce these tendencies, for we expect authorities to exhibit “the male-mode of self-assured, self-assertive, unqualified declaration” (jones, 1988, p.122). in effect, like plato’s euthyphro (plato, 2002), we confuse the self-confidence that can accompany intellectual pride with the defining mark of wisdom. a student of mine unwittingly attested to this confusion when she remarked on the “brilliance” of another professor, with whom she had never taken a class. when i inquired about the basis of her evaluation, she replied, “the way he holds himself when he walks around that, even when the students are presented with testimony from people who do not regard current trade institutions as to their advantage, the students resist even considering alternative narratives of the transnational economy, as if doing so would de-authorize them as economists. and my environmental ethics students last year initially refused to participate in a “guerrilla gardening” activity led by a local farmer, as their academic self-image seemed to be threatened by the playful and rebellious spirit of the activity, which they deemed “not appropriate for college.” epistemologies of discomfort 29 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 campus; he seems judgmental, superior, intimidating.” in such a context, aspiring experts may feel more pressure to appear all-knowing than to pursue honest inquiry into human problems. feminist critiques and the possibility of academic authority feminist studies of authority present not so much a rejection of professional authority as much as a provocation to consider more responsible forms of professional training and exercises of authority than those prescribed by the current paradigm of the expert. the studies challenge us to consider, for instance, how professional training could help us to become adept in professional discourses and disciplined analysis, while also sensitive to the historical and political dimensions of received discourses, the uncodified existential content of phenomena, the limitations in our own thinking, and the moral implications of our work. such mindsets may be at odds with dominant professional norms but they are not impossible in professional contexts. such epistemic humility and moral and political awareness might be cultivated, for instance, by training in the political and discursive dimensions of knowledge production4 and by greater openness about the practical-ethical motivations of our professional projects.5 elsewhere, i have pursued the problem of alternative pedagogical practices that are more conducive to feminist and democratic values (stone-mediatore, 2007). i focus here, more specifically, on the way that dominant forms of epistemic authority have skewed public discussion of war and on the kind of knowledge practices that war and other forms of state-supported violence demand. my own claim to authority in this paper aims to follow this kind of professional practice that is explicit about its extraacademic sources and goals. in my case, these include the inspiration that i have drawn from veterans and family members of soldiers who have spoken out so that others might not have to suffer the consequences of militarism, my efforts to gain recognition on my campus for the educational value of discussions with grassroots activists, and my frustrations as an educator whose explicit orientation toward broad ethical goals and explicit situatedness within the community has often put me at odds with an academic culture that values detached and peremptory authority. insofar as my personal and social concerns have motivated me to theorize alternative forms of authority, i cannot claim disinterest or neutrality in this research; however, i do claim to be addressing problems with immediate relevance to me and to be attentive to the moral-historical implications of my work. 6 to this end, i turn next to theories of institutionalized violence and to the dangers that typical expert modes of thinking present in the context of such violence. epistemic practices and institutionalized violence the kind of biases that feminist theorists have found problematic in experts bear strong resemblance to the kind of attitudes that scholars of institutionalized violence have found in the ordinary people who comply with state violence. just as feminist theorists have criticized experts for their tendencies toward overly abstract, managerial-minded, and peremptory thinking, so have theorists of institutionalized 30 shari stone-mediatore studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 violence warned that similar modes of thinking that are prevalent in modern society, generally, have thwarted our capacity for understanding and judgment and thereby have helped to shield us from violence that is routine in our society. if we read feminist critiques of authority together with studies of institutionalized violence, we can appreciate the particular dangers of expert tendencies in contexts of institutionalized violence. institutionalized violence by institutionalized violence, i refer to harms that are systemic to established institutions and that are severe enough to be considered violent. since the late 1960s, liberation theologists, peace theorists, and social theorists have employed this concept (or sometimes, structural violence or systematic violence) to identify severe harms that exist even in seemingly peaceful societies, and even when no one intentionally or directly harms someone else. institutionalized violence, these theorists explain, results not from individual lawless acts, but from established social and political institutions that systematically offend human dignity, or systematically deprive certain people of the conditions necessary for physical and mental integrity. for instance, paul farmer describes how neoliberal economic policies, which subject all aspects of social life to the dictates of so-called market forces, have left hundreds of millions of people worldwide without access to health-care and other basic human needs. in this situation, farmer argues, violence exists, even if no laws are broken and no bullets fired (farmer, 2003; see also galeano, 1997; galtung, 1969; gutierrez, 1983). in this framework, social injustice is a form of violence. the concept of “social injustice” directs our attention to the systematic privileging of some groups at the expense of others, to the centrality of economic inequities in problems from health care crises to the exploitation of young men as soldiers, and thus to the ways that struggles for human rights, democracy, and freedom mean “above all defending the rights of the poor” (gutierrez, 1983, p. 211). in turn, the concept of “institutionalized violence” allows us to view such social justice struggles as struggles against violence. this latter concept implies that all significant and systemic forms of deprivation and offenses to dignity, even when they are routine to our institutions, demand the kind of moral, legal, political (and, i would argue, epistemic) responses that are called for by violence. some critics have used the concept of institutionalized violence to broaden the scope of peace advocacy (galtung, 1969). others have used this concept to underscore the criminality of severe and systemic poverty. as these critics point out, everyday poverty-related suffering fails to garner the media and political attention of natural disasters, tyranny, and civil rights abuses. nonetheless, “murder by poverty,” as galeano calls it (1997, p. 5), is just as consequential as any kind of murder and more pervasive. it is also just as avoidable and therefore just as inexcusable as other forms of violence. moreover, severe poverty and inequality often set the stage for more overt forms of violence, including military conflict and human rights abuses. the concept of institutionalized violence registers this moral and historical epistemologies of discomfort 31 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 continuity between economic injustice and more publicized forms of violence (farmer, 2003, pp. 8-17, 29-50; galeano, 1973; gutierrez, 1983, pp. 132-135). the concept of institutionalized violence is useful to me here because it makes explicit the broader notions of violence and responsibility that are implicit in the work of arendt, fanon, gray, and weil and that form a common thread in their work. the vocabulary of institutionalized violence was not yet current when these philosophers wrote. nonetheless, they each address forms of violence that are best understood as institutionalized violence, insofar as the violence of concern to them arose not mainly from direct and intended actions on the part of sociopaths and “evildoers” but, rather, from the routine activities of ordinary people. for instance, arendt (1978) focuses on the “administrative mass murder” of nazism, which was enacted by ordinary professionals who served as accountants, technicians, and managers of the death camps. fanon (1963) is concerned not only about the blatant violence of the french military, but also the economic violence of businessmen who managed the exploitation of african resources as well as the complicity of journalists, bureaucrats, and diplomats who went about their business indifferent to colonialist crimes. similarly, weil examines the brutality of modern socio-economic practices (1977, pp. 53-72, 126-152), and gray stresses the dangers of indirect, aloof participation in violence by “normal” men (1998, p. xviii). when these theorists investigate the mindsets that have made possible such routine forms of violence, they are, in effect, investigating the cultural conditions of institutionalized violence. in addition, the concept of institutionalized violence enables me to link military violence with other forms of structural violence and to investigate the distinct epistemic practices that all such violent institutions demand. in effect, although my focus here is on war, the identification of war as a form of institutionalized violence enables me to consider how the epistemic practices demanded by war would also be demanded by other forms of systematic violence and injustice. institutionalized violence and understanding arendt offers a useful starting point for conceptualizing the kind of epistemic practices that meaningful engagement with institutionalized violence demands. all political inquiry, she explains, requires not only empirical and theoretical analysis but also engaged and particular-focused understanding, for the essence of political phenomena can be grasped only when we address their human content, their uniqueness, and their situatedness within our world. unlike theoretical knowledge, understanding does not stand apart from its objects and locate them within preconceived categories and causal chains but instead attends to phenomena in all of their strange and disconcerting aspects and seeks to comprehend them as nonetheless human phenomena that are part of our world. understanding is thus the activity by which we “try to be at home in the world,” not in the sense of being comfortable, but in the sense of reckoning with our connection to our world’s most odd and disturbing elements (arendt, 1953b, p. 377). although understanding never attains certainty or conclusiveness, the constant work of trying to understand strange political phenomena and to integrate them into a meaningful narrative of our world is necessary in order to orient ourselves in a complex and ever-changing world. judgment, by which we bring understanding to bear on the evaluation of specific 32 shari stone-mediatore studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 phenomena, is also necessary in order to participate actively and responsibly in public life (arendt, 1953a; 1953b; 1992, pp. 294-297; stone-mediatore, 2003, pp. 38-43, 200).7 for instance, arendt and weil stress that we can face the horror of violence that has become routine in our society only when we judge the world for ourselves, based on our own sensitive engagement with specific phenomena. such individual judgment of specific phenomena is avoided, however, when we confine our thinking to abstract categories and logics, for instance, abstractions of “democracy” or fixed formulas of “progress” or “class struggle.” arendt and weil (like smith) recognize that some degree of abstraction from immediate experience, and some theorizing of patterns that provide coherence to particular facts, is essential to thinking. their criticism is not directed toward abstraction, per se, but to our tendency to prioritize abstract categories over historical life and to treat abstract categories as if they were the material and motor of history. when we do this, they argue, we bypass the in this account, responsible knowledge-claims about political affairs must conform to conventional criteria of truth, including consistency with empirical facts and with the causal mechanisms that have produced the facts. in addition, however, they should also direct our attention in ways that help us to understand political phenomena in their existential richness and their relevance to our world. all genuine understanding is risky and discomfiting, as it challenges us to reconcile alien phenomena with familiar worldviews, and to adjust our sense of our identity and projects accordingly. judgment is also risky, as it involves inserting ourselves into the world and exposing ourselves to judgment by others. understanding of institutionalized violence, however, presents particularly acute cognitive and emotional unease, for understanding the violence of our own institutions defies euphemistic ruling discourses and disturbs flattering images of ourselves. at the same time, judgment of institutionalized violence interrupts any comfortable aloofness we might have from the political world and calls on us to denounce violence in our midst. cultural conditions of institutionalized violence arendt’s account of understanding and judgment helps to identify the kind of intellectual practices whose absence she and others have found central to ordinary people’s complicity in violence. arendt (1979), fanon (1963), farmer (2003), gray (1998), and weil (1977) address diverse manifestations of institutionalized violence, ranging from nazi death camps to military brutality by the allied powers, from french colonialism in algeria to economic violence in europe and central america. despite their diverse historical focuses, they share common insights about the kind of mental practices that have enabled ordinary people to participate in violent institutions. their studies suggest that certain modes of thinking that are prevalent in modern life—notably, mechanical thought processes that proceed without responsiveness or a sense of accountability to the living world—have thwarted our processes of understanding and enabled many of us to analyze and administer violent institutions without disturbing comfortable thought patterns or troubling our consciences. epistemologies of discomfort 33 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 complexities of historical life along with community discussion about such complexities in favour of conformity to abstract formulas, whose consistency and clarity “exists nowhere in the realm of reality” (arendt, 1979, p. 471). we likewise begin to disengage from the existential content of our world and to subordinate living beings to abstract imperatives, while we gain a false sense of intellectual mastery that leads us to overlook phenomena that diverge from expected patterns. thus, as michael ignatieff (2007) admits, ivy-league scholars tend to remain in esoteric realms, where particular facts can be viewed “as instances of some big idea” and messy and “unexpected” events can be avoided (p. 28). abstract formulas may be safe, but when we employ abstract categories such as “democracy” or “socialism” without investigating their relation to particular historical affairs, those concepts become “vacuous entities” that “stupefy the mind,” for they serve as facile substitutes for examining the specific factors that harm and improve human life in specific contexts (weil, 1977, p. 284). most importantly here, when we allow such abstract formulas to replace individual reckoning with specific phenomena, we cannot evaluate critically practices that have become routine in our society. we may make moral evaluations (e.g., we may, like ajami, 2003, 2005, evaluate the arab world as “decaying” and u.s. military intervention as a “gift”), but our evaluations remain limited to those programmed into received political formulas (arendt, 1953b, pp. 380-392; 1979, pp. 469-478; stone-mediatore, 2003, pp. 56-60; weil, 1977, pp. 28-38, 269-284). arendt and others also stress that understanding of violent institutions demands that we forgo professional distance and risk engaged, whole-person responsiveness to the phenomena we study, for only openness to the moral and emotional responses that violent institutions evoke in us can sensitize us to their human character (arendt, 1953a; fanon, 1963, pp. 77-78; farmer, 2003, pp. 1-41). weil (1997) suggests, further, that the social suffering that accompanies institutionalized violence can be recognized only with a kind of receptivity that is akin to love. truth and affliction can only be heard, she says, with “intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention. . . . which is pure love” (p. 33). such unbounded, whole-hearted attention is a kind of love in the sense that it involves a letting go of oneself and exposing oneself to strangeness and discomfort in order to be receptive to another person or phenomenon. by contrast, when journalists, administrators, or analysts maintain an “objective attitude,” they protect themselves from such receptivity. bureaucratic and technical modes of thought help to maintain this thick skin, for they direct attention to aspects of the world that can be readily categorized and regulated without activating any personal relationship or response (arendt, 1992, pp. 68-69, 105-110; fanon, 1963, pp. 77-78; farmer, 2003, pp. 10-17: galeano, 1991, p. 120; 1997, pp. 266-67). facing the violence of our own institutions also demands a willingness to accept some responsibility for social harms and for resisting those harms. such difficult obligations are again avoided, however, by the common mindset that we have no accountability to the wider community. contemporaries live “godlessly,” says gray, in the sense that we feel no need to answer to anyone, including ourselves, for what we do (1998, p. xviii). such moral apathy and denial of our spiritual embeddedness within the world is blatant in war, says gray, but it also pervades civilian life, where we have become increasingly disconnected from our social and natural environments. gray and others attribute this widespread social and moral alienation 34 shari stone-mediatore studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 to the excessively abstract and sterile mindsets described above as well as to the modern separation between personal and professional life, by which we routinely leave hearts and souls at home when we go to work (arendt, 1978, pp. 231-234; farmer, 2003, pp. 1-28, 245-256; galeano, 1991, pp. 106-107; gray, 1998, pp. xviii, 8-9). these common intellectual modes—abstraction from historical life, clinical relation to the world, and separation between professional and personal life—may be justifiable as elements of a reflective process; however, when they dominate our thinking, the above theorists suggest, they divert us from the existential content of violent institutions and the moral demands that such violence makes on us as human beings. in other words, these epistemic approaches do not so much repress or deny violence as they direct our attention to more innocuous elements of the world that can be readily subsumed within received categories without challenging our intellectual mastery over or aloofness from the world we study. in effect, they enable us to analyze and administer violent institutions without risking understanding those institutions as human phenomena with ties to our own lives. experts and institutionalized violence because public affairs experts tend to be trained in excessively abstract, detached, and institutionalized modes of thinking, they are particularly prone to evade the disturbing content and moral pull of institutionalized violence. granted, such experts are not so directly involved in violence as people who are designing bombs or administering death camps. nonetheless, when public affairs experts approach the world with deliberately detached, rote, and managerial mindsets, they practice a particularly strong evasion of human content and denial of their human ties to the world. and when they confine their analysis to institutionalized discourses, they exhibit a particularly strong tendency to avoid phenomena that are incongruent with ruling worldviews. as a result, they play a particular role in glossing and thereby maintaining violent institutions. expert standpoints on the war: ignatieff and ajami the recent political context, in which war has been so readily used as a means of policymaking and public debate on war has been so limited, makes urgent the need to bring critiques of authority to bear on public discussion of war. i contribute to this project by tracing the expert-related biases in two influential foreign-affairs experts, michael ignatieff and fouad ajami. ignatieff, who in 2007 withdrew his support for the war, is currently a canadian member of parliament and leader of the liberal party, former director of the carr center for human rights policy at harvard, a carnegie institute “expert” on war and ethics, and a regular contributor to the new york times. ajami, who continues to support the u.s. military presence in iraq, is a political conservative who directs the paul h. nitze school of advanced international studies at john hopkins university, appears regularly as “middle east expert” on television talk-shows, and contributes regularly to foreign affairs, the epistemologies of discomfort 35 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 new republic, and the wall street journal. despite their political differences, their writings on the iraq war exhibit striking similarities that illustrate the warrationalizing tendencies of much expert thinking. although presumably addressing the concerns of the general public, both public affairs experts presume an elite standpoint, from which war is less a living phenomenon than an opportunity for projects and policymaking.8 in addition to glossing violence with managerial language, both experts demonstrate greater commitment to neoliberal and neo-colonialist discourses than to the complexity of the situation on the ground. ajami, for instance, has described the war as “a reformist project,” in relation to which iraq is not so much a living community as a “starting point” from which the united states can “modernize and transform the arab landscape” (2003, pp. 7, 17-18). ignatieff, in turn, has described the invasion as a means of governing, characterized by “manag[ing] the insurgent zone,” “bringing order” to a “vacuum of chaos,” and “polic[ing] the world” (2003). although typical of political discourse, their construction-project and law-and-order metaphors have little relation to the insecure and chaotic reality of war, which in the case of iraq has involved an undermining of order and security so severe that unemployment has risen to an estimated 50-70 %, many iraqi men working for the u.s. military have been forced for safety reasons to abandon their families and live in hiding, some parents lacking basic resources have been compelled to abandon their children, and women cannot go to work or walk the streets, without fear of being kidnapped by gangs with police complicity (anderson, 2006; finer, 2006; sandler, 2003; tavernise, 2007). 9 for instance, in accord with neoliberal narratives of freedom and democracy, ignatieff reduces these broad political aims to u.s.-style markets and elections, such that, despite the devastating effects of u.s. military activities on iraqi family, civic, economic, and cultural life, he can equate the u.s. intervention with the promotion of “free markets, human rights and democracy” (ignatieff, 2003). both experts also invoke colonialist stereotypes that present gross violence on the part of western nations as part of a civilizing mission. for instance, widespread lawlessness and abuse on the part of the u.s. military has been well documented; as one soldier put it, u.s. soldiers “freak out and beat the crap out of people all the time . . . [iraqi] people are just constantly getting their asses kicked over there, for no reason” (jamail, 2008, p. 28; kramer & glanz, 2007; thompson, 2008). and yet ajami describes the u.s. occupation as “noble” work, a “gift” to a “decaying,” hopelessly backward arab world, who need the “reforming” influence of americans (2005; 2003, p. 2). similarly, ignatieff (2003) describes the occupation as a “noble (albeit dangerous) mission” to civilize a “combustible region of islamic peoples” who are hopelessly unable to create “competent, rule-abiding states” on their own. 10 experts do sometimes relate stories of specific individuals. for instance, ignatieff (2007) refers to his iraqi exile friend who, at the onset of the u.s. invasion, regarded the war as his generation’s “only chance . . . to live in freedom in their own country” (p. 27). as in this example, however, experts tend to use individual stories only in safe and superficial ways, to support general claims; not as a source of nuanced and unpredictable perspectives on the world that spur new thinking. 11 ignatieff’s formulaic interpretation of the war is reinforced by his concern for his reputation. despite increasing iraqi opposition to the u.s. occupation and the war’s exacerbation of mideast instability and international terrorism, 12 ignatieff continued 36 shari stone-mediatore studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 through 2005 to rationalize his stance that the war was “spreading democracy’s promise” (2005b). rather than re-examine his position in light of increasing problems with the occupation, he defended his pro-war stance as brave and unorthodox while he dismissed critics of the war as “ideological fools” who support the insurgents (2004, 2005a).13 in 2007, amidst spiralling home-front anti-war sentiments, ignatieff finally acknowledged the war’s failure; however, he devoted his first major essay on the war in two years not to examining iraqi reality but to showcasing his own “daring” vision and “good judgment” (2007, pp. 27, 29). notwithstanding his shift of position, he retains (with ajami) the narrative of america seeking to grace iraq with an american-style “free state,” even if he now considers that mission to have been thwarted by iraq’s sectarianism (2007, p. 29). tellingly, one iraqi man interviewed on cnn after the 2005 iraqi elections stressed that freedom and democracy must also include jobs that enable people to feed their families. and other iraqis have protested foreign oil contracts and demanded control over their country’s resources (jasiewicz, 2008). both experts, however, have ignored such concerns and have restricted debate to whether or not americans have the might and right “to sponsor liberty in the middle east” (ignatieff, 2005b). vital questions related to the meaning of liberty and democracy, the specific effects of u.s. military activities on iraqi communities, and the specific conditions necessary for all iraqis to freely and self-consciously govern their lives remain unasked. military-family activists and engaged authority while experts tend to restrict themselves to questions formed within ruling discourses and to shield themselves from any cognitively or emotionally threatening phenomena, the military-family activists who have been most effective at invigorating public debate have done the opposite: driven by their closeness to and care about the issues, they have turned attention to “things we don’t want to see” and questions we feel uncomfortable asking. military family activists have not claimed epistemic agency easily. when, for instance, ohio military mom teresa fowler dawson first began to examine critically the administration’s case for invading iraq, her husband asked dismissively, “what could you know about iraq that the president doesn’t?” cindy sheehan faces similar dismissals of her epistemic agency, with pundits from all sides claiming that she is being manipulated by ideologues and “pontificat[ing] on subjects beyond [her] expertise” as a mother (barsamian, 2006, p. 38; houppert, 2006, p. 13). despite the obstacles, however, military-family activists have persisted and have begun to interrupt debate as usual. in addition to their insider-critic status, their success seems to lie, as well, in their challenge to basic epistemic premises of public debate. motherand wife-identified activists, perhaps because their feminine roles have pitted them against norms of expertise, have been particularly bold in this challenge. when anti-war mothers and wives of soldiers assert authority as family members driven by their concern for loved ones to face war honestly, they defy epistemic norms and demonstrate the role that emotional closeness to and care about issues can play in rigorous thinking about discomfiting phenomena. epistemologies of discomfort 37 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 irresponsible uses of emotion clearly, personal and emotional closeness to war do not guarantee either critical or nonviolent thought. indeed, fear, anger, and even love can sometimes fuel fanaticism and even murder: “we are following our hearts,” said one israeli settler, as he explained his family’s efforts to terrorize their arab neighbours.14 and, as wartime atrocities have made only too clear, soldiers’ grief for fallen comrades often transposes into rage that spurs frenzied killing. 15 arendt, weil, and gray suggest some ways that we might distinguish uses of emotion that promote understanding of historical phenomena and awareness of our ties to other living beings from uses of emotion that obscure relevant phenomena and alienate us from our neighbours. emotions have obfuscating and alienating effects, they explain, when they take shape not from individual reckoning with specific phenomena, but from set reactions to oversimplified entities; for instance, love for “the free world” or hatred toward “the enemy” (arendt, 1998, pp. viii; gray, 1998, pp. 133-135; weil, 1977, pp. 270-276). such “abstract emotions,” as gray calls them, remain oriented by mechanical formulas, even when they may be accentuated by a personal grievance. thus, although the person guided by abstract emotion is more passionate than the aloof expert, he is equally “insulated against experience and free reflection” and “more or less an automaton” (gray, 1998, p. 158). ultimately, abstract emotions stifle intelligence because, like overly abstract reasoning, they bulldoze any subtleties of historical life that do not fit received categories while they gain clarity and certainty at the expense of “the very elements of [historical] intelligence,” namely “the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency,” which are the only ways by which abstract terms apply meaningfully to rich and varied historical phenomena (weil, 1977, p. 271). thus, before turning to responsible uses of emotion, i specify the character of irresponsible uses of emotion, so that the two can be more systematically distinguished. ignatieff acknowledges his susceptibility to such crude emotions when he attributes his overconfidence in the war to his emotional reaction to saddam-ruled iraq (2007, p. 29); however, whereas ignatieff blames emotion per se, weil and gray allow us to specify ignatieff’s judgment-impairing emotion as an abstract emotion that is complicit with his overly abstract thinking: both ignatieff’s emotions and intellect presuppose a stereotypical “combustible region of islamic peoples” whose disorder is defined against a mythic democracy-spreading america, with the result that, even when ignatieff acknowledges the war’s failure, he retains those facile stereotypes. emotions also impede rigorous thinking when they substitute for critical reflection on our historical responsibilities and projects. for instance, when love is expressed as unconditional loyalty to the mission that a loved one serves or the identity to which a loved one belongs, such love transposes into group allegiance. such groupallegiance-oriented love is not only divisive but dulls thinking, for it avoids examining critically group identities and missions. grief can have a similarly dulling and myopic effect when it is channelled into rage and violence. such grief-turnedvengeance seeks to escape the pain of losing a loved one by immersing oneself in revenge, as if one’s loss could be cancelled by inflicting loss on others; in the words of one settler, “they kill our children, so we kill theirs.” ultimately, such emotions 38 shari stone-mediatore studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 not only erect barriers between people but avoid the difficult task of understanding past conflicts and building less violent futures. emotional engagement and rigorous thinking although some uses of emotion cloud thinking and fuel ideological divisions, the activists who have turned attention to the war’s complex and discomfiting elements demonstrate that the solution to emotionally fraught zealotry is not to purge emotion from our thinking–a move that only further alienates us from the living world–but to allow ourselves to feel deeply our love, grief, and even anger, and then to use those feelings to know the world more fully and intimately as a world to which we belong and are accountable. in effect, they practice and further elucidate the kind of responsibly engaged and situated thinking called for by arendt, weil, fanon, and gray. on one level, these activists demonstrate how personal ties to war, when combined with a concern for honesty about the world that homes loved ones, can help them to face vexing realities, even when this exposes them to intellectual uncertainty and social ostracization. for instance, dawson’s ties to her children in the military led her to shed the safety of her military and republican upbringing and to study reports from around the world in order to be able to evaluate for herself the reasons for her children’s possible deployment. as she put it, “with two children in the reserves, i made it my business to know about the war.” military wife christine langer has similarly forgone the comforts of certainty and clarity in order to struggle with the contradictions of a war that called her husband to service. she underscores the role that love has played in her resistance to mental indolence: military families are trained to follow mechanically the military’s cut and dried logic, langer explains, so that your mind becomes attached to the seeming certainty of that logic and its simple explanation for your sacrifices, even while “in your true heart” you know that the issues are not as simple as the military would have you believe (cited in houppert, 2003, p. 14). candace robison confirms the heart’s role in critical thinking. “i needed more evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction,” she says, “before i was ready to accept that my husband might come home in a body bag” (cited in houppert, 2003, p. 13). granted, the historical insight that langer attributes to her “true heart” seems to include intellectual understanding of the issues while the investigative impulses of dawson and robison are actualized with cognitive and research skills. nevertheless, when langer identifies her critical distance from military logic with her “heart” and when dawson and robison emphasize their personal ties to the issues that they scrutinize, they indicate that the kind of mental alertness, or “waking up,” that philosophers throughout history have associated with critical thought is not merely intellectual but is enlivened by a passion-motivated concern for truth. they remind us, in other words, as socrates suggests in his cross-examination of meletus, that sound understanding of an issue has a lot to do with caring about it (plato, 2002, p. 30). thus, dawson and robison cannot rest content with vacuous abstractions about the war, but demand historical precision, when their families are part of that history. “if the intention is to bring ‘democracy,’” says dawson, “then get them water, epistemologies of discomfort 39 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 power, infrastructure. that’s what my son’s unit is trained to do. they are ‘can-do’ people. if [democracy] was a priority, it would have been done.” in addition to driving them to examine critically the relation of abstract claims to historical reality, the activists’ personal closeness to the war has also helped them to appreciate human dimensions of the conflict, which, while not hidden, escape detached and managerial mindsets. the activists’ awareness of the war’s human elements may begin on a personal level; however, when combined with a sense of their situatedness within history, such awareness does not remain merely personal but guides them toward important but often-overlooked historical phenomena. for instance, having experienced directly the strain of the war on her marriage, dawson was intrigued to research the subject further and found, amongst less publicized statistics, that since 2003 the divorce rate amongst active duty personnel has risen 300%.16 many such human elements of the war should not be unexpected or difficult to comprehend, and yet they challenge our comfort level and mastery, so that we attend to them only when an emotional connection jars us into addressing things that we otherwise conveniently ignore. the grief of those who have lost loved ones in the war underscores how emotional responsiveness to the issues can spark an awareness that is missing from institutionalized thinking; in this case, an acute awareness of the value of individual lives and their irreducibility to abstract causes. when we allow “intense, generous attention” to expose us to the preciousness of the lives that are damaged and destroyed in war, we do not gain easy answers to conflict; however, we do unsettle comfortable attachments to “projects” and “missions” and are moved to consider profound effects of the war—the destruction of families, the loss of loved ones, the life-long psychological damage to iraqi children—that are too easily overlooked by detached theorizing. sensitive to the effects of war on everyday life, she has also seen beyond project sites and “combustible regions” to iraqi people, not so different than herself. for instance, when the united states military implemented “shock and awe” (a strategy based on overwhelming and spectacular uses of force, which included intensive bombing of baghdad) dawson’s youngest son was still a toddler, whose fears she had to quell every night before he would go to sleep. from her mother’s perspective, dawson wondered how mothers in iraq could possibly relieve their children’s bedtime fears in the context of shock and awe. not surprisingly, iraqi caretakers attest to the war’s damage to iraqi children’s basic psychological wellbeing (finer, 2006). emotional engagement and historical responsibility finally, the more effective activists demonstrate how emotional closeness to the issues can enhance our sense of connection and responsibility to the historical world. although not all emotional responses ground us in the world in responsible ways, precisely targeted emotions can generate the sense of historical responsibility that both abstract emotions and detached analysis lack. carefully focused anger, for instance, affirms that comfortable aloofness is not adequate, but that we need to denounce wrongdoing and demand better behaviour from our fellows. feminist theorists help to distinguish such “corrective-surgery” anger (as audre lorde puts it) from hatred and rage. hatred seeks destruction and rage is hurled without focus or 40 shari stone-mediatore studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 attempt at communication. by contrast, anger that is “focused with precision” and expressed within a community of peers serves positive growth, for it identifies intolerable practices and enjoins others’ participation in change (lorde, 1984, p. 127; also spelman, 1989, pp. 270-272). thus, the rage of frenzied soldiers, which is expressed indiscriminately at anyone who fits a vague notion of the enemy, promotes only crude categorizing and destruction. by contrast, when dawson responds angrily to her community’s naive “support-the-troops” gestures—“those yellow ribbon magnets won’t keep my son safe from sniper bullets” (often written on cards left on car window shields)—and when sheehan makes clear that someone is to blame for her son’s death—“casey wasn’t lost; he was killed by george bush’s murderous policies,”17 they target specific contradictions in their own communities. in so doing, they stir uncomfortable controversy but also provoke us to account for our slogans, symbols, and national policies. grief, when not lost in feel-good abstractions of pride or revenge, can also awaken community awareness and responsibility. on one level, grief that is faced as both a personal and historically situated experience can heighten our sense of historical responsibility. as sheehan put it, the emotional knowledge of “know[ing] how much it hurts to have a child killed” led her to the sense that she was embroiled in the issue and had to “do something” to prevent others from experiencing such pain (cited in barsamian, 2006, p. 38). moreover, although george bush may think that arlington cemetery is watered by “silent tears,” 18 such grief-awakened and historically grounded sensitivity to our common vulnerability to violence may not yield certain knowledge but it is not “mere feeling” either. it directs our thinking toward vital human patterns and problems that both ideologically formed emotions and institutionalized discourses neglect; in particular, our common humanity across differences and our need to find ways of living some relatives of buried soldiers have openly expressed their grief and thereby affirmed the political relevance of war’s personal toll. sheehan underscored this point when she mourned publicly outside bush’s crawford ranch and demanded an explanation from bush as to why her son had to die. in so doing, sheehan disrupted norms that would have us accept passively the death of soldier-kin. she thereby created a context in which others, too, could experience their grief and anger as legitimate reactions to the death of loved ones in the military and as politically relevant speech to which policymakers must respond. of course, not all grieving mothers react with the same kind of communal awareness. as sara ruddick observes, our concern for our own children often contends with our concern for the well being other children (1984, p. 39). nonetheless, even if they cannot avoid entirely the tension that ruddick identifies between “the demands of one’s own and the demands of the whole,” sheehan and other goldstar mothers for peace demonstrate how the sharing of grief across communities can help to surpass the narrow loyalties that sometimes consume grieving parents. through sharing feelings of fear and loss, they have not only forged human-level connections with other parents but have gained appreciation for our common vulnerability to violence across continents and have been moved to organize on behalf of the security of all families. thus sheehan and her peers have joined with women around the world to “end this madness” because, whatever their cultures and languages, their “hearts understand the pain . . . caused by this war” (sheehan cited in barsamian, 2006, p. 38). epistemologies of discomfort 41 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 together without inflicting massive violence on one another. not distance and disinterest but only emotional responsiveness, combined with a sense of historical situatedness and responsibility, can turn our attention to such challenging human projects. conclusion: the need for epistemologies of discomfort military-family activists have highlighted crucial aspects of the iraq war that public affairs experts regularly overlook; for instance, the long-term psychological damage that the war inflicts on soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict, the dubious commitment of the u.s. government to support their own troops or to protect the infrastructures of democracy, and our responsibility as members of the human community to make all families safe from violence. the virtual absence of these issues from most public debate on the war reflects not only the limits of ruling discourses on war but also general cultural tendencies to avoid phenomena that might disturb ingrained beliefs or trouble our consciences. much like the dominant culture’s inattention to the working poor or to homeless people (many of whom are veterans), our inattention to the profound damage of war seems to arise less from the obscurity of the issues than from our self-protective evasion of phenomena that make us uncomfortable. with homelessness as with the horror of war, full and receptive attention would likely threaten comfortable worldviews and raise tough questions about our moral obligations. avoidance of these phenomena is, thus, a common tendency. nonetheless, experts tend to exacerbate these common self-imposed ignorances. with their commitment to established discourses, to intellectual mastery over their subject matter, and to professional distance, experts are particularly prone to avoid phenomena that defy ruling conceptual frameworks or that make claims on us as human beings situated amongst other living beings. if we are to confront the current wars—or any violence or injustice of our own institutions—in a rigorous and responsible manner, then we will need to face phenomena that are discomfiting and that call attention to our own moral and historical responsibilities. the success of some military-family activists in bringing public attention to difficult aspects of the iraq war suggest the importance in this endeavour of closeness to and care about the issues. with their explicitly passiondriven concern for truth and their grounding of historical reflection in the intensity and complexity of troubling experience, activists like dawson, sheehan, and langer have exceeded established discourses and comfortable aloofness so as to identify violence in which their own lives are entangled and to sketch historical projects that are vital to human security but that escape managerial and nation-based logics. academics can contribute to the revitalizing of security debates initiated by these activists by registering the authority of their voices and by affirming the need for all of us to risk reckoning on a human level with uncategorized and uncomfortable phenomena, if we are ever to face the intellectual and moral challenges that the current wars—and any institutionalized violence or social injustice—present. 42 shari stone-mediatore studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 notes 1 i thank catherine hundleby, phyllis rooney, and the anonymous journal reviewers for thoughtful and illuminating criticism of earlier drafts of this paper. 2 my own interview with the veteran’s mother, theresa fowler dawson, april 21, 2005. all subsequent quotations from dawson are from my interviews with dawson in april 2005, july 2006, and december 2007. i have written about dawson and other military-family activists before in “examined lives in the shadow of iraq,” the humanist (march/april 2006) and “military families speak out and the challenge to war epistemology,” bridges: an interdisciplinary journal of philosophy, theology, history, and science (summer 2007). 3 in economics, the so-called “law” of comparative advantage posits that all individuals and communities benefit when each specializes in the goods that they can produce at the lowest relative cost. as my students seem to understand this law in the context of the current transnational economy, it posits that all nations (and people within nations) benefit when we implement the current set of neoliberal trade rules, which prohibit regulations and tariffs that could impede transnational trade. 4 for instance, in my critical thinking course, students gain understanding of the political and cultural dynamics of knowledge production by studying karl marx, roland barthes, arundhati roy, and aldous huxley, and then applying these theorists’ insights to analysis of contemporary texts, including professional texts from their other courses. students also gain appreciation for open-mindedness by reading, and then participating in exercises that challenge them to practice and extend immanuel kant’s theory of enlarged thought. 5 see, for instance, farmer (2003, pp. 1-28, 137-138), harding (1991, pp. 296-312), plumwood (1993, pp.189-196), and smith (1987, pp. 151-255). 6 by knowledge practices i refer broadly to all of those modes of inquiry that inform how we think about the world, including empirical investigations, theoretical analysis of causal mechanisms, and also the interpretive practice that arendt calls understanding, by which we come to terms with the significance of phenomena as living phenomena of our world. i include the latter because (as arendt argues and as i discuss below) an interpretation of the moral and emotional meaning that political phenomena have for us is central to all substantive knowledge-claims about the political world, even when such knowledge-claims present themselves as objective analysis. 7 in arendt’s account, understanding is achieved through the practice of storytelling. a full account of arendt’s notion of storytelling is beyond the scope of this paper but, in brief, storytelling, for arendt, is a disciplined, empirically accountable interpretive activity that is also engaged and creative, insofar as it articulates vivid metaphors and beginning-ending sequences in attempt to present political phenomena in terms of their human content and ties to our own world. storytelling can be held to standards of rigor and accountability but is nonetheless always partial and community-situated, insofar as the story is always only one way of transforming a living phenomenon into an articulate narrative. see arendt (1953a, pp. 777-781; 1953b, pp. 388-390; 1958, pp. 184-192) and stone-mediatore (2003, pp. 2694). 8 this elite standpoint passes unnoticed because the same standpoint is shared by their audiences. for instance, a glance at the advertisements in the journals in which ignatieff and ajami publish makes clear that their audiences are upper-echelon professionals who own or manage businesses, whose worries about the future centre on stock growth and retirement plans, and who view the globe in terms of investment and travel opportunities. in one particularly revealing foreign affairs advertisement, guardsmark security services appeals to business executives and refers to national and international violence as a threat to business operations. “war, terrorism, workplace violence, sabotage, theft,” the advertisement reads, “the list of security-related worries preoccupying today’s executive seems to grow each year.” it urges readers to consider “the costs of crime and terror—the human tragedy, the liability expenses, the legal fees, the public relations, management costs, the increased insurance premiums, the lost revenue from business interruption.” 9 in fact, ignatieff and ajami each combine neoliberal discourse with an updated cold-war discourse. both discourses identify freedom with the spread of western institutions, but cold-war discourse is more explicit about the role of military intervention in achieving this political hegemony. for instance, in cold-war fashion, ignatieff claims that “america,” epistemologies of discomfort 43 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 through military intervention, can “help other people attain their freedom,” even if we cannot always control the outcome (2003). ajami likewise invokes typical cold-war metaphors of america’s role in fighting freedom-threatening forces: he describes a “furious islamism [that] blew in like a deadly wind,” whereupon america responded with “regime change and ‘rollback’” (2003, p. 3). 10 on the wider prevalence of white-man’s-burden rhetoric in expert discussions of the iraq war, see monthly review (2003). 11 i discuss this problem further in stone-mediatore, 2003, p. 62. 12 see, for instance, paley (2006, p. a22), rothschild (2007, p. 9), jasiewicz (2008, p. 27) and whalen (2006, pp. 11-18). 13 for instance, rather than engage critics’ concerns about u.s. oil interests in iraq or about the inability of the u.s. military to bring democracy, ignatieff caricatures critics as belonging to the “michael moore-style left” (2005b). ignatieff seems particularly unfair when he describes the war’s critics as “anti-war ideologues” who cannot admit that “positive outcomes can result from [the bush administration’s] bad policies and worse intentions” (2005a); for, a year earlier, ignatieff himself asserted that “intentions do shape consequences” (2004). 14 this and all subsequent references to israeli settlers are from the documentary “frontline: israel’s next war?” 15 frank 1971, p. 459; gray, 1998, p. 139; and major robert hanafin, presentation at ohio wesleyan university, delaware, ohio, april 21, 2005. 16 dawson’s statistics are from www.military.com. see also urbina (2007, pp. 1, 14). 17 sheehan cited in barsamian, 2006, p. 39. 18 see http://www.cnn.com/2008/politics/05/26/memorial.day/index.html. references ajami, f. 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(2006, october 16). revolt of the generals. the nation, 11-18. epistemologies of discomfort: what military-family anti-war activists can teach us about knowledge of violence studies in social justice volume 4, issue 1, 87-91, 2010 correspondence address: lynda lange, department of humanities (philosophy), university of toronto at scarborough, 1265 military trail, toronto, on m1c 1a4, canada. email: lange@utsc.utoronto.ca issn: 1911-4788 review of reshaping the university: responsibility, indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift lynda lange department of philosophy, university of toronto, toronto, ontario, canada reshaping the university: responsibility, indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift. by rauna kuokkanen vancouver, university of british columbia press, 2007. isbn # 978-0-7748-1356-3 according to rauna kuokkanen, “indigenous people who come to the university face many challenges and difficulties, including benevolent ignorance, misconceptions about their cultures, individual and institutional discrimination, and systemic marginalization” (p. 49). rejecting “culture” as a term for their “difference,” as not only too vague, but also limited in the sense that multicultural appreciations of culture can too easily leave colonial structures unaddressed, kuokkanen uses the notion of an “episteme” to make her arguments concerning the depth of exclusion and silencing that indigenous students and intellectuals face in contemporary universities. the notion of an episteme may in large part be understood by what it is not. it is not an epistemology in the sense in which western philosophers have different epistemological views concerning how we can claim to know that a proposition is true. these differing ideas are all within the same philosophical tradition, and hence, all within the same episteme. an episteme is a primary and comprehensive worldview with a particular ontology that tells those within it what exists or is “real,” and hence what can be considered “true” or “false,” as opposed to “meaningless.” a fundamental claim of the author is that there is a distinctive indigenous episteme that has been marginalized or even invisible within western universities. this cannot be corrected by dialogue or “inclusion” that remains uncritically within the same western episteme, but requires a fundamental shift in attitude. kuokkanen shares with numerous other “critical epistemologists” the view that approaches to knowledge, and knowledge production, are ultimately inextricable from ethical considerations. this work sets out an important nonassimilationist analysis of the possibilities for indigenous intellectual life in the university, and for the university as a whole. however, there is occasional slippage 88 lynda lange studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 in this work between “episteme” and “epistemology” and “philosophy,” attesting to the difficulty of writing about these concerns. as kuokkanen writes, the world’s idea of the university was shaped in the 19th century to be enlightenment: modern, liberal, and also colonial. this general idea is indisputable, but as edward said wrote in his introduction to orientalism (1979) concerning his claims that “knowledge is political,” this is one of those ideas that can receive wide assent and at the same time not be considered to be of much importance. it is therefore important that kuokkanen, like said, goes into considerable depth to explain what has occurred, and continues to occur, in the university so characterized, regarding indigenous intellectual life. she draws on a great range of theoretical literature in making her analysis, using deconstruction (especially derrida and spivak), critical theory, and postcolonial theory. in addition, her mix of resources differs from many others by including her extensive and informative use of contemporary indigenous theoretical works in education, such as those by patricia monture-angus, devon mihesuah, and angela c. wilson. kuokkanen gives credit to those who have struggled to make universities more open and acknowledges that this is what has made work like hers possible. in the last many decades, universities have been pressured to be inclusive of previously marginalized groups. responses have ranged from more inclusive admission policies, to affirmative action approaches, to creating more diverse faculty that may be scholarly role models to a diverse student body, to the creation of new programmes (e.g. women’s studies, sexual diversity studies, and many “area” studies). most of us are also familiar with the generally well intended efforts of many university people to make scholarly events such as conferences, as well as committees and governing bodies more representative of the diversity of students, or the diversity of the society of which the university is a part. even the more conservative among academic people now seem to accept some version of the “politics of recognition,” as well as the inevitability of inclusiveness, that is, of “letting in” those previously excluded. kuokkanen argues that these developments, though they can be important steps, are nonetheless limited by the very notion of “including” people of diverse backgrounds in an “episteme” that is not, in spite of its pretensions or aspirations, really “objective” or “universal,” but historically specific to the dominant and colonizing strain of modern western thinking. this thinking is modern in the sense of considering itself “free,” that is, against any authority of tradition (or at least any non-european tradition). it is an “exchange” economy in the sense of requiring, or at least expecting, the exchange of value for value. if i produce value, whether widgets or writings, i ordinarily expect a return of payment or, in the case of ideas, at least recognition that these ideas, or designs for widgets, are mine. kuokkanen’s book reminds us how closely these exchange expectations are related both to hegemonic standards of rationality (especially “rational self-interest” in economic terms) and to our ideals of individual autonomy. if i give and take value for value, i am under no obligation to others or they to me; i am independent. even justice seems to follow this model—i “have” my rights, separately from others, and there are rules concerning what can be done with them. this exchange economy no doubt has seemed to many to be only sensible, but it is this mentality of exchange, ownership, and competition, that has made it possible for the university and the “value” it review of reshaping the university 89 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 produces to be made to conform more and more to neo-liberal monetarist expectations, a development that kuokkanen, along with many other commentators, particularly laments. this work takes a basic position that the marginalization of indigenous peoples is not (only) a question of racism or ethnic minority rights, but it is a marginalization of peoples with rights to self-determination. in the academy, their episteme (to be explained more fully below) is generally not only ignored, but also not even recognized as such, that is, as a worldview that is another complete discourse. the university assumes that its western, modern episteme is not only the best one for the pursuit of knowledge, but really the only one. writing from an indigenous perspective (she is herself sami), kuokkanen exposes the limitations and specificity of these expectations by setting out a profoundly different episteme, which she terms “the logic of the gift.” derrida has famously argued that modernity, including philosophy itself, is characterized by constant efforts to externalize the “other” in various ways, in vain attempts to get at coherent self-identity and tell a single coherent story about itself. for example, all territories have (and have always had) diverse populations, but the development of the modern nation-state involved repressing differences by subsuming them under a unified narrative about the “nation.” but the “other” is “always already” (that ubiquitous phrase in deconstruction) in society, in thought and language, and even in what one may take to be one’s “self.” it is the frustrated effort to effect this externalization that is the source of many different senses of modern violence (e.g. physical, social, intellectual, colonial). europeans did intellectual (along with other) violence to indigenous peoples by claiming that their beliefs were/are primitive, irrational, or even incomprehensible. as the author states, “the construction of the colonial subject depends on the indigenous ‘other,’ who can only be represented by that subject” (p. 83). derrida, partly inspired by levinas, maintains that all ethics are exemplified by the nature of our relation to the “other,” and proffers the ethic of hospitality and “the gift.” we should welcome the “other” and give to them, without anticipating a return of some kind in exchange. in respecting the dignity and validity of the “other,” we must also respect the concrete distinctiveness of their contexts from their point of view, accepting them without demanding to be able to comprehend them by means of predetermined categories of our own. kuokkanen makes use of these ideas, but also questions them, adding her own and others’ understanding of indigenous epistemes, to put forward her own “logic of the gift.” in this alternative way of thinking, which is held to be characteristic of indigenous societies, one routinely gives or shares with others. one gives to individuals and the community, of course, but in indigenous epistemes one also gives to the natural world that sustains human life, or to aspects or places in it. one does this without an expectation of something in direct exchange, or even of equal value. if i give something to you, you will later give something else to a third party. it is an economy of circulation that implicitly acknowledges both human interdependence and human dependence on the non-human world. in indigenous gift logic it is important that i may also extend intangibles such as respect, gratitude, and prayers, and these also circulate and contribute to the bonds of interdependence. kuokkanen is of course mindful that indigenous peoples are not homogeneous, but she also maintains that they share certain values driven by their age-old intimate relationship 90 lynda lange studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 with the natural world and their ethic of relationship, reciprocation, reverence, and responsibility to both human and non-human beings. kuokkanen particularly criticizes the “sanctioned ignorance” in the academy concerning indigenous epistemes and issues. she notes, i think correctly, that academics generally have the privilege of simply not knowing, without any embarrassment, about indigenous epistemes and issues, a stance that i think is also often found with regard to any area of study that proposes social change and lessening of oppression of a non-hegemonic group. foucauldean uses of the notion of an episteme often stress incommensurability, but kuokkanen is serious about the need for non-indigenous learning about indigenous epistemes, and seems to reject the notion that epistemes are necessarily unintelligible to each other, even as she discusses the problem of translation. for indigenous epistemes to cease to be marginalized and silenced, kuokkanen argues that this episteme must first be recognized as such and received as a gift by others in the academy. this is in large part because our natural world is in peril and we need a new ethic of responsibility toward it, but also to move the university away from the type of hierarchy that has its roots in colonialism, such as the privileging of certain cultures and disciplines. philosophical readers may wonder about an apparent claim to “universality” in the context of deconstructionist critique, but kuokkanen’s argument is not about shifting from one episteme to another, but about listening and learning across epistemes. following the logic of the gift, this practice must be a learning process that involves the epistemic “gift logic” virtues of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. this should be an ongoing practice, rather than a study that could ever be definitively concluded. this approach recommends engaging the process and not trying to settle in advance questions of universality, incommensurability, and so on. none of this can be really persuasive unless readers can fully absorb the reality that, despite colonization, indigenous peoples and their epistemes continue to exist and develop. we have no way of knowing how indigenous people may have developed, intellectually or otherwise, without the extreme measures taken to try to extinguish them as peoples. although there can be no return to authenticity uncontaminated by the experience of colonialism, nonetheless, as kuokkanen puts it, their epistemes, as they are now, are sui generis yet contemporary. it is fundamental to kuokkanen’s non-assimilationist approach that indigenous epistemes have their own independent history, going back as far as we may be able to go, but at the same time have continued to develop and change, as all human epistemes do, into the present. they should therefore be acknowledged as contemporary and not, as it were, frozen in thought as “ancient.” it is also useful for non-indigenous readers to be reminded that indigenous thinkers sometimes disagree with each other. given her position, it may be surprising that kuokkanen shares a critique with aboriginal political theorist dale turner of aboriginal thinker taiaiake alfred. alfred’s call for a return to indigenous culture as a necessity for decolonization, however reasoned, strikes them both as a kind of unfeasible cultural fundamentalism. kuokkenen stresses the need for very radical change concomitant with the realization of the limitations of the exchange ethic and the learning of the gift ethic, along with acknowledgment that there are diverse epistemes. at times she offers a review of reshaping the university 91 studies in social justice, volume 4, issue 1, 2010 kind of immanent critique of the university in saying that its silencing and exclusion of “other” epistemes contradicts its own objective of free and open-ended pursuit of knowledge. in my view, this idealization of the university suffers from a conflation of the university and the world not unfamiliar in radical critics of the university wherein the university is treated as a complete world that should fulfill all things. however, this approach neglects the really sticky question of the university’s role as an institution that accords recognized credentials. i think (and the author may well agree) that it is societies at large that need this freedom and open-endedness, before the university can be transformed. many are disappointed by the narrowness and/or corporatization of universities, so it is important that the author affirms that we are in fact able to understand epistemes other than the one most basic to us at a particular time. in attempting to do this as a reader, in relation to the themes of this work, i wondered if the logic of the gift, as a powerful episteme, might have its own potential for exclusion. i am sure that kuokkenen is right that land-based communities have a greater sense of interdependence and responsibility to each other and to the natural world than mobile modern “individuals,” but surely they also have a sense of who is a stranger. on the other hand, there is a sense in which academics, even in present circumstances, do not completely fail to practice the logic of the gift. i think many academics practice “the gift” (not calling it that), with recognition, reciprocity, and responsiveness, at conferences, in discussions, and conversation. the limitation here is that this occurs within self-chosen circles. those unlucky enough not to be admitted to a circle that is relevant for the development of their work (and this can happen for a multitude of reasons) can have a severe sense of marginalization even though they do not have a different episteme. the logic of the gift may not spare us the need to decide who is included. these thoughts are matters for ongoing discussion. what is most important now is the acknowledgement that “there is an alternative vision of the human: those who have stayed in place for more than thirty thousand years” (p. 155). whether or not the university at the institutional level, or western societies in general, can learn how to “enlarge the circle” is an important question for the future of all of us. abu alrob final correspondence address: zainab abu alrob, phd candidate in policy studies, ryerson university, toronto, on, m5b 2k3; email: zainab.abualrob@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 a covid-19 state of exception and the bordering of canada’s immigration system: assessing the uneven impacts on refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers zainab abu alrob ryerson university, canada john shields ryerson university, canada abstract responses to covid-19 have been characterized by rapid border closures that have transformed the pandemic from a crisis of health to a crisis of mobility. while canada was quick to implement border restrictions for non-citizens like refugees and asylum seekers, exemptions were made for some migrant groups like temporary workers. the pandemic marked a departure from who is considered worthy of admission to canada. in fact, the border through restricted and securitized measures has filtered desirable versus non-desirable migrants, creating a hierarchy among migrants within canada’s immigration system by categorizing groups into those deserving versus non-deserving of admission. deeply embedded societal discrimination and structural inequalities means that covid-19 has exacerbated the vulnerabilities of migrant groups more than others. covid-19 has placed an uneven burden on refugees who face increased border restrictions, significant health and safety risks, and limitations in accessing human rights. this paper documents the challenges, social and economic impacts, and exacerbated vulnerabilities border closures have imposed on refugees, asylum seekers and temporary migrants. we assess the many challenges that covid-19 has created at the intersection of border studies, security resilience and human rights. we employ the conceptual frame of security resilience to critically analyse the dynamics of how and why border strategies have restricted migrant groups in times of crisis and amounted to an unjustified weakening of refugee rights. finally, we argue that social resilience, which is rooted in rights-based strategies, not only ensures that societies are prepared to meet external shocks and disruptions, but that policy responses mitigate societal discrimination and inequalities. we highlight these strategies as effective mechanisms for reconciling both public health concerns and the rights of migrants to create more cohesive societies in times of crisis. covid-19 and the bordering of canada’s immigration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 55 keywords pandemic border policy; migration; international refugee law; resilience; migrant rights introduction in response to the spread of covid-19, forced immobility quickly became a common management tool used by states around the world. while the pandemic is a health crisis, state responses have managed it as a migration crisis by relying heavily on migration management controls (gagnon, 2020; sanchez & achilli, 2020). around 219 countries issued blanket border restrictions and over 46,000 travel restrictions by april 2020 (iom, 2020b; sanchez & achilli, 2020). the reliance on migration control has raised concerns over the short and long-term impacts on migrant groups, in particular, asylum seekers and refugees. the pandemic has created new forms of vulnerability for migrant groups who are facing an uneven covid-19 impact through high virus transmission, barriers in accessing health care, precarious housing, denial of access to refugee protection, poor and overcrowded living conditions and an increased risk to safety and well-being (chetail, 2020; groupe urd, 2020; shields & abu alrob, 2021). despite calls from international organizations like the united nations and the world health organization for states to introduce quarantine and health measures for those escaping persecution, states made few exceptions to allow the admission of asylum seekers and refugees (meer et al., 2020). this left many vulnerable refugees in situations whereby access to safety from persecution is denied. return to country of origin for many refugees and asylum seekers has negative consequences. aside from the risk of danger and persecution, risks associated with social stigma, income loss, remaining in overcrowded camps with no access to health care, clean water, or space to quarantine and selfisolate are high (groupe urd, 2020). while forced immobility has been deemed a necessary health measure, the need to escape persecution was not. in fact, the need for protection from persecution is the apex of essential travel and movement (perzyna, 2020). yet, a covid-19 state of exception and the bordering of migration have prevailed. during crises, international refugee law provides a guide for state action towards migrant groups, including refugees and asylum seekers. while international law does not specifically outline how states must respond to a health crisis like covid-19, legally binding principles regarding access to territory for refugees in times of emergency do exist to guide the formulation of state responses. at the core of this is the principle of non-refoulement, whereby the return of refugees to a risk of persecution is prohibited even in the context of a global pandemic. measures to mitigate health risks resulting from movement across borders would ensure that legal principles of international law are protected, and refugees are not discriminated against nor placed at an increased risk of danger, torture, or persecution (unhcr, zainab abu alrob & john shields studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 56 2020c). as blanket border measures stand, the global refugee regime confronts an uneven covid-19 burden, jeopardizing the rights of migrants and placing many of them at a great risk of infection. this paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the short and longterm implications of covid-19 on refugee protection. we focus on differential bordering practices that have denied country access to asylum seekers and refugees but awarded access to temporary migrants through selective pandemic border policy. we recognize that it is difficult to predict long-term impacts due to the evolving nature of the pandemic, but our goal is to reflect on how selective bordering practices during the pandemic depart from international norms for refugee protection and human rights. we highlight how bordering practices have resulted in differential inclusion for categories of migrants by relying on border studies and security resilience. we conclude by discussing how social and rights-based resilience strategies that rely on international law can reconcile both public health concerns and the rights of migrants. using the concept of security resilience, we assess the state’s reliance on migration control to manage a health crisis. drawing on border studies we offer a critical assessment of how and why border strategies have been used to stratify mobility through hierarchically restricting some migrant groups from admission to canada. next, we document border restrictions in canada and assess the challenges, impacts, and vulnerabilities they have created for refugees, asylum seekers and temporary migrants. we focus our analysis on these three migrant groups to highlight the selectivity of pandemic border policy whereby asylum seekers’ mobility is constructed as a threat and used as a justification for exclusions from travel exemptions. international legal frameworks are drawn on to assess how current pandemic policies depart from international law norms for refugee protection and human rights. government reports and information sources, including statistics canada, academic and think tank-based studies, and grey literature from the community sector and civil society, are used to map the challenges covid19 has created for vulnerable migrant groups. finally, a social resilience lens is employed to highlight the importance of rights-based strategies for reconciling both public health concerns and the rights of migrants in times of crises. security resilience and the bordering of canada’s immigration system: forced immobility as a covid-19 management tool the concept of resilience has become widely embedded in a range of disciplines to address and react to various external shocks related to health crises, social and urban policy, migration flows, climate change, other environmental disasters, and economic crisis (brassett & vaughan-williams, 2015; coaffee & fussey, 2015). resilience is derived from the word resilio, covid-19 and the bordering of canada’s immigration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 57 which means to “jump back,” and was initially formulated to characterize the process of adapting to unexpected events. psychologists, for example, study whether being resilience is an innate characteristic in individuals or a learned skill (brassett & vaughan-williams, 2015). meanwhile environmental scientists use resilience to assess how ecological systems can cope with external events (bourbeau, 2013). this has resulted in multiple theories that seek to apply resilience to various fields of study. social scientists for example define it as “the capacity of a social system (for example, an organization, city, or society) to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances” (brassett & vaughan-williams, 2015, p. 33). various indicators have also been developed for the assessment of resilience in different fields of study (akbar & preston, 2019). still, the objective of resilience remains consistent across disciplines, including creating conditions to sustain the stability, safety and survival of individuals, institutions, and social systems in the face of external shock events (cavelty et al., 2015). in this paper, we understand resilience to be the ability to bounce back and recover after a crisis or external threat. we advocate for resilience-based policy approaches that equip societies with the tools to effectively react, adapt and prevent future disruptions or threats by planning and building resilient strategies that are rights-based (coaffee & fussey, 2015). this is important for mitigating discriminatory and inequitable policy outcomes. existing studies on migration resilience have analyzed how migrants employ coping skills and community networks to adapt to the challenges of settlement and integration in host societies. studies have applied resilience as a method of managing the risk of high consequence events (smith & fischbacher, 2009), but not as a tool to analyze the role of border policy in mitigating migration challenges specifically in response to covid-19. to fill this gap, and to better understand migration resilience in a pandemic era, this paper will draw on conceptualizations of security resilience from international relations studies to understand government rationales behind the forced immobility of migrants. forced immobility has created a “refuge” crisis within a health crisis. as such, security resilience can help us understand the logic behind state responses to external shocks. the intersection of security resilience and borders speaks to the dynamics of how and why border strategies are applied differently to migrant groups. further, we identify how state responses that are not able to bridge “the tension between global trends and local impact” can place an uneven burden on already vulnerable groups and jeopardize the recognition of their rights (pope, 2017, p. 4). zainab abu alrob & john shields studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 58 security resilience security resilience is understood to play an important role in riskmanagement, specifically its ability to help societies “prepare for, adapt to and live with a spectrum of possible, perhaps unknowable risks” (brassett et al., 2013, p. 225). the strategies that governments or other actors choose to employ for adaptation to external shocks depend heavily on how threats are interpreted (bourbeau, 2013). consequently, external shocks need to be read and translated as a security threat. at the core of security resilience is the creation of a subject, one that can be blamed and made responsible for the cause of disruptions. accordingly, responses are organized around how these subjects create vulnerability and expose society to potential harm. resilience requires a “vulnerable subject to thrive,” thus, it “constantly re-produces it” by objectifying and negating the agency of individuals (cavelty et al., 2015, p. 7). with covid-19, migrant agency is interpreted as contributing to insecurity. migrants’ mobility, despite border restrictions, profiles them as subjects that fail to abide by pandemic policy and thus cannot be emergency managed. tropes of migrants bringing in disease through their movement across borders create an image of the state as vulnerable to a migrant threat that is an unforeseeable risk. the hostility against migrants in health crises often blames displaced people for carrying and spreading diseases (elias et al., 2020). ebola is a recent example whereby haitian people were blamed and stigmatized (perzyna, 2020). this also happened in the 1900 plague where chinese people were discriminated against and detained in san francisco. similarly, in 1918 the spanish flu caused hostility and intolerance towards outsiders (elias et al., 2020). meer et al. (2020) note that the medicalised prejudice against migrants was also evident in 1920 in the uk whereby the “aliens order” denied refugees admission based on being a health danger. this is also evident in narratives that characterize migration flows as “swamps, likening them to unhuman entities that carry disease” (meer et al., 2020, p. 6). accordingly, the nation-state is seen as a single unit that needs protection from an external force that is linked to germs and carries infection through its unmanaged movement (markel & stern, 2002). this perception leads to the scapegoating and stigmatization of “outsiders” whose very existence poses a threat and danger to nation states (elias et al., 2020; meer et al., 2020). states react to these threats by mobilizing restrictive and exclusionary measures to protect their polity and remain resilient in the face of danger. resilient responses to crisis can be positive or negative depending on their objective. some suggest that resilience provides a positive value if it seeks to help society “prepare for, withstand, and ultimately improve when faced with extreme events” (brasset & vaughan-williams, 2015), like building socially resilient communities through rights-based strategies (bourbeau, 2015). this is seen by security-resilience scholars like bourbeau (2015) as the bright side of resilience. meanwhile, the dark side of resilience, or negative resilience, covid-19 and the bordering of canada’s immigration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 59 aims to organize responses to shock events around threat and uncertainty. this type of resilience places the burden of recovery on the individual (brasset & vaughan-williams, 2015) and may take on different forms of securitized policy responses. bourbeau (2015) notes that negative resilience responses happen after an issue or situation has already been securitized. of relevance to border practices, he points to “resilience as marginality” as a policy response to external events that does not challenge existing larger immigration or migration policy norms in times of crisis. in other words, novel policy responses are not employed to mitigate a new threat. rather, these policies expand on existing practices that may forego the rights of specific groups and result in disproportionate consequences as they create deserving versus nondeserving individuals. in the context of covid-19, border closures announced on march 16, 2020 introduced the return of asylum seekers arriving to canada from the united states in a temporary border agreement. this policy can be seen as an extension of the existing safe third country agreement (stca) where asylum seekers arriving to canada are sent back to the united states on the basis that it is a “safe” country where refugees can make their claims (government of canada, 2020d). while the implications of this controversial policy have been documented in a legal challenge at the federal court of canada they have been further exacerbated for already vulnerable individuals who now are increasingly exposed to covid-19 through removal. security resilience helps us understand how the mobility of asylum seekers during the pandemic has been constructed as a threat. this can be characterized as negative resilience whereby one migrant group is excluded from travel exceptions while others are awarded entry. we revisit these restrictions in detail below to discuss their impact. while government responses to covid-19 have attempted to create a sense of disease containment through border restrictions, a looming fourth wave extends the state of emergency into the future. as illustrated, resilience directly links security to various “logics of governance” and calls for making “conceptual linkages” to various actors and phenomena (cavelty et al., 2015). we find that resilience responses in the context of migration all rely on the border to filter out mobility “threats.” as such, we explore the intersection of security resilience and borders to more comprehensively understand how borders are being used to create outgroups, like refugees and asylum seekers, from admission to canada during covid-19. we note that this has been done through resilience as marginality, whereby states are employing tools already existent within migration management strategies. the importance of social resilience, also known as rights-based resilience, comes to the fore. social resilience is positive and works to remove the burden of adjustment to crisis from the individual and place it within the collective. it also is grounded in a human rights approach, whereby the rights of all persons irrespective of legal status are protected regardless of the severity of a crisis (human rights and democracy network, 2017). we turn to the discussion of zainab abu alrob & john shields studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 60 migrant rights under international law at the end of the article, where positive resilience strategies to mitigate the consequences of covid border policies are highlighted. borders and the creation of outgroups humanitarian exceptionalism within the context of migrant admission across borders has in recent history been used to distinguish canada from other countries. the notion that canada has welcomed and provided a safe haven for refugees has set it up as a leader in the hospitality of those fleeing persecution (nguyen & phu, 2021). this was exemplified when prime minister justin trudeau emphasized on twitter that refugees are welcome, after former us president donald trump issued what became known as the “muslim ban.” more recently (august 2021), the canadian government announced that it would be resettling 40,000 afghan refugees through a “special immigration program” and a commitment to spend $350 million by 2023 (government of canada, 2021a; lau, 2021). similar to the syrian initiative in 2016, afghan refugees will arrive to canada as government and privately sponsored refugees. special consideration is to be given to vulnerable groups including women, lgbti, and persecuted religious minorities, among others (government of canada, 2021a). while this is an example of canada’s humanitarian exceptionalism and human rights approach to global refugee issues, it also represents a state of exception in migration policy. canada’s approach to humanitarianism has limitations in its selectivity in terms of whom it admits or excludes for refuge (nguyen & phu, 2021). this approach is in large measure guided by political considerations and the desire to shape the country’s image as a human rights leader, especially in contrast to the us (nguyen & phu, 2021). covid border responses in canada are an example of the selectivity used by the government to allow the entry of specific groups of migrants while denying others admission. in response to covid-19, blanket border restrictions became a management tool to restrict the admission of people within state boundaries. border studies as a field is concerned with both physical and material border boundaries as well as their symbolic and social dimensions. borders are studied as a multi-layered and interlinked phenomenon (i.e., social, political, economic, local, regional, and national processes) (sevastianov et al., 2015). they can be characterized by their “inherent selectivity,” thereby differentiating the right to admission among categories of people (muller, 2013). balibar (2002) outlines that the border is a process where controls like health and security checks are used selectively for specific groups of people. selection processes are applied to those who are suspected of being a risk or threat to society (muller, 2013). this is known as bordering. bordering processes can be characterized by the “bounding of territorial identity” based covid-19 and the bordering of canada’s immigration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 61 on “perceived threats to the nation-state” (hataley, 2015, p. 100). boundaries for some identities are thus created in social-political settings and are perpetuated by narratives and discourses. various theoretical lenses speak to the settings in which differential inclusion is created and sustained. these include neoliberalism, the political economy of migration, racialization theory and the racial state, and many more outside the scope of this paper. while the focus of our attention is on border studies and providing a generalized overview of the creation of outgroups through bordering practices, we acknowledge the role of neoliberal processes in politicizing border measures to divert attention away from issues at the core of covid19 policy responses. neoliberal austerity has deepened structural inequalities, especially among vulnerable migrant populations, leaving them in greater danger of covid-19. the politics of neoliberalism has also helped to produce a clash between evidence-informed versus highly divisive populistoriented pandemic responses, to the detriment of migrants (see shields & abu alrob, 2021). mezzadra and neilson (2013, p. 7) outline that differential exclusion is a process where borders become tools “of inclusion[/exclusion] that select and filter people” based on “different forms” of movement. authorized identities are those that have mobility privileges, and include business travelers, economic immigrants, and frequent flyers (cote-boucher, 2015). coteboucher (2015) argues that in canada bordering practices are based on xenophilic (foreign language, culture, customs) preferences. these preferences can depend on factors like qualifications, family orientation, wealth or human capital, and are evident in migration policies that privilege a particular migrant group over others in admission to canada. examples include federal skilled workers, those who fall under the canadian experience class, provincial nominee programs, skilled trade workers, caregivers, as well as investors and entrepreneurs. the economic contributions and advantages of these groups privileges their admission. the exemption of temporary migrants to canada despite blanket border measures can be seen as an extension of this privilege to specific migrant groups. dauvergne (2008) outlines that “moral worthiness” of specific migrant groups is assessed based on xenophilic imagery. in other words, preferences for specific migrants determine degrees of mobility. groups are consequently compared to one another. we see this imagery in mutually exclusive dichotomous narratives whereby desirable migrants are played off against “undeserving” and “bogus” refugees taking advantage of political, social and economic institutions (coteboucher, 2015). admission for the former is preferred over the latter. similar to security resilience discourses, uncertainty is created around the mobility of outsiders. hence, bordering practices will work to detain, expel, and exclude specific migrant groups. in canada, the criminal refugee “other” arriving at the border unannounced has been at the centre of migration policies that work to prevent irregular migration (cote-boucher, 2015; perzyna, 2020). similar discourses are reflected in pandemic border policies that construct asylum zainab abu alrob & john shields studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 62 seekers as threats because of their uncontrolled mobility. meanwhile, resettled refugees, temporary migrants and immigrants are increasingly admitted in a controlled manner that does not warrant danger or threat. the exclusion of groups from admission through bordering practices creates hierarchies that stratify migrant groups (macklin, 2020). in the context of covid-19, the risk of “outgroups” like asylum seekers has been increasingly emphasized despite the need for refugee protection (perzyna, 2020). indeed, the arrival of asylum seekers at borders is a case of the vulnerable attempting to exercise their rights under international law (macklin, 2004; unhcr, 2020c). barreneche (2020) outlines that the pandemic has provided space for political narratives to blame the “other” for external health threats. the mobility of groups is seen as negative and a sign of irresponsibility. here narratives of the unmanageable resilient subject creating vulnerability are at play. further, and similar to security resilience, bordering strategies rely on a “villain” to blame for external threats. the state is seen as vulnerable to the threat of covid through unauthorized mobility. consequently, asylum seekers’ exclusion from admission to canada, despite their need for protection, is justified and made to be seen as necessary. there are implications to bordering canada’s immigration system and stratifying admission to canada. we document these implications and analyze their human rights impact below. the covid-19 state of exception: assessing the uneven impacts on migrant groups it is now widely evident that migrant groups have been greatly impacted by covid-19. some have been stranded at borders while others have been lost at sea with no means to return to their countries of origin (unhcr & iom, 2020). despite the pandemic and resulting forced immobility, migration has not stopped. in fact, research suggests that the pandemic has been a growing push factor for people to move across borders (mixed migration centre, 2020). the risks associated with irregular migration have grown in parallel with health threats as countries continue to deport and remove migrants who arrive at border entry points. for example, mexico’s national institute for migration reported the deportation of 480 migrants from honduras, elsalvador and guatemala (sanchez & achilli, 2020). return to country of origin for many refugees and asylum seekers has negative consequences. aside from the risk of danger and persecution, threats associated with social stigma, income loss, remaining in overcrowded camps or poor living conditions with no access to health care, clean water, or space to quarantine and self-isolate are high (groupe urd, 2020). border controls have long enforced the otherness of refugee groups through narratives that depict them as “bogus” thereby denying their legitimacy. as outlined above, agency and free mobility across borders has covid-19 and the bordering of canada’s immigration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 63 been used by states as an indication of refugee ingenuity (osterberg, 2016). current pandemic policy shows that in times of emergency no exceptions have been made for the most vulnerable in society. this must be addressed through positive resilience, as it jeopardizes the rights of migrant groups and state obligations under international law during times of crisis. the stratification process during the pandemic marks a departure regarding those we consider to be essential to our very survival. asylum seekers, as we document below, are low on this hierarchy of exemptions (macklin, 2020). temporary migrants on the other hand have been highly stratified, moving from unskilled laborers to essential workers exempt from blanket border restrictions due to their necessity to canada’s economy, specifically food security. resettled refugees, we argue, have been placed in the middle with an initial halting of resettlement later resuming, but with very slow and controlled progress. resettlement blanket travel restrictions announced on march 17, 2020 included the complete halting of canada’s resettlement efforts. the united nations refugee agency (unhcr) and the international organization for migration (iom) announced the temporary suspension of resettlement due to covid19 (unhcr, 2020a). prior to the pandemic, canada had increasingly advanced resettlement efforts surpassing both the us and uk in 2018 (radford & connor, 2019). despite federal resettlement targets for 2021 being 36,000, arrivals were suspended (harris, 2020b). in response to calls to resume resettlement, the office of the minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship (ircc) marco mendocino outlined that ircc “will work with partners to continue to resettle refugees” (omstead, 2020) but failed to indicate firm dates. the impact of covid-19 on resettlement is significant. resettled refugees are those residing in third countries in camps, detention, or other settlements like dense urban centres (farge & paperny, 2020). those residing in camps are most vulnerable to covid-19. they are confined to tight spaces with little capacity to social distance, lack of adequate sanitation, medical services, and health care (ashad, 2020; hedayet, 2020; united nations network on migration, 2020a). in the moria camp in greece, for example, 1,300 people are forced to share one water source, significantly restricting the capacity to hand-wash (medecins sans frontieres, 2020). the norwegian refugee council (nrc) has reported its inability to reach 300,000 people in the middle east to deliver humanitarian aid (2020). similarly, unhcr has reported challenges in delivering aid to displaced people. these challenges include a collapse in the supply of personal protective equipment (ppe), lack of medical items, restricted methods of transportation due to border closures, flight reductions and quarantine restrictions (bigg, 2020). lack of ppe is zainab abu alrob & john shields studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 64 especially critical for health workers on camp sites who cannot treat patients without appropriate covid-19 health protective measures (root, 2020). educational programmes have also been restricted due to covid-19. unicef has been implementing home-based learning programs in cox’s bazaar, bangladesh, which is home to one million rohingya refugees, with the support of the canadian government (government of canada, 2020c). despite this, refugees report difficulty in adapting. workers share this concern and note that while remote programs help fill gaps, they do not ultimately address the problem (government of canada, 2020c). in light of the halting of resettlement, refugee advocates have called on the canadian government to resume resettlement. in june 2020, unhcr and iom announced that the temporary hold on resettlement has been lifted (unhcr, 2020b). since june, 250 refugees per week are being admitted to canada under the resettlement program (harris, 2020b). travel exemptions have only been awarded to refugees who had been approved by the canadian government before march 18, 2020 (desjardins, 2020). the canadian refugee sponsorship agreement holders association (crsaha) – which represents 118 refugee sponsorship agreement holders – had called on the canadian government to extend travel exemptions to “all refugees that are and will be approved for permanent residence in canada, regardless of their approval date” (desjardins, 2020). crsaha further stressed that refugees remain in vulnerable circumstances with many not only living in poor conditions but also suffering from income loss. ndp mp jenny kwan, speaking in support of refugee advocates, outlined that “canada can lift travel restrictions for refugees while still protecting public health and safety” (harris, 2020b). the spokesperson for minister of immigration marco mendocino announced that the canadian government was “working to identify the most urgent refugee cases as international partners begin to resume operations abroad” (harris, 2020a). urgent cases include vulnerability considerations as well as capacity, travel availability and travel limitations (harris, 2020b). resettled refugees – the small number who were partially exempted from blanket travel restrictions – face an uneven covid-19 burden. fcj refugee centre (2020) outlines that there are delays in family reunification, leaving families separated and in limbo as they wait for sponsorship applications to be approved. one resettled family in st. johns new brunswick has been waiting three years to be reunited. due to covid-19, flights had been cancelled. family members remain in camps while awaiting resettlement and in poor conditions until travel is allowed (walsh, 2020). while the reduction of resettlement to abide by public health measures can be understandable, it is important to ensure that it does not impact long-term settlement efforts. although limited, the exemptions awarded to resettled refugees are aligned with border narratives that prefer resettlement over asylum arrivals. the canadian government has grown to favor “resettlement from un-vetted refugee camps” in its migration policy (perzyna, 2020). tropes of agency and covid-19 and the bordering of canada’s immigration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 65 hopelessness can be juxtaposed here. the handpicking of refugees for resettlement can be seen as a preferred migration management tool that allows states to control admission (perzyna, 2020). in contrast is the uncontrolled and unprecedented mobility of asylum seekers whose agency and resilience pose a challenge to state control over its borders. in light of this, resettled refugees are resilient subjects whose mobility can be controlled by the state. thus, they can and are subject to exemptions from border measures. temporary migrants travel exemptions for temporary migrants came after concerns were raised over food insecurity as a result of labour shortages in canada (hooper & le coz, 2020). temporary migrants, particularly from mexico, jamaica and the caribbean are heavily relied on in the agricultural sector (statistics canada, 2020). in ontario alone, 20,000 migrant workers are recruited for planting and harvesting (dubinski, 2020). on march 21, 2020, in an effort to “maintain” canada’s food security, the government announced travel exemptions for agriculture, fish and seafood workers (harris, 2020c; orton, 2020). those arriving through the temporary migrants program would have their flights arranged by the ministry of agriculture (dubinski 2020). health measures such as a 14-day quarantine, where employers are required to arrange appropriate living accommodations and monitor the health of migrant workers, were instituted (dubinski, 2020; government of canada, 2020b). the admission of temporary migrants despite border restrictions marks a departure from who is considered essential and worthy of exemptions. they have been highly stratified among other migrant groups because they are considered essential for the survival of canada’s food as well as other industries (shields & abu alrob, 2020). political narratives created a sense of urgency and elevated the status of foreign workers. words like “essential,” “survival,” and “security” distinguished migrant workers from other groups as worthy and deserving of admission to canada to help fight a looming food crisis. positive resilience was attached to this group in light of their exemptions. a senate of canada national survey (nanos survey, 2020) reveals that public opinion towards temporary migrants is positive. the study found that 40% of canadians support avenues for migrant workers to remain in canada, with atlantic residents holding the highest rates. further, 56% of female respondents and 46% of men also supported granting benefits and protection to migrant workers, including minimum wage protection, health care and workers compensation (nanos survey, 2020). the contribution of essential workers to canada has indeed paved a pathway to citizenship for them. on may 22, 2020 the federal government announced that non-seasonal workers in meat processing, animal farming (i.e., poultry, cattle), greenhouse and nursery production, may apply for zainab abu alrob & john shields studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 66 permanent residency through the agri-food pilot program (government of canada, 2020a). the pathway to citizenship is part of government efforts to recognize the essential contribution of migrant workers and also to “build resilience in the agriculture sector” (fraser, 2020). while this is a welcome development, there are only 2,700 spots available and some groups like seasonal farm workers and other full year agricultural workers have been excluded from applying (emmanuel, 2020). recognition of the value brought by temporary migrants has occurred without acknowledging their poor living and working conditions. migrant workers have long reported overcrowded accommodations, with as many as 30 workers forced to share poorly equipped and cramped facilities (basok & george, 2020; kelly, 2020). this along with poor work conditions have exposed foreign workers to covid-19 at higher rates than the rest of the population. since their arrival to canada, reports of outbreaks at nurseries have been plentiful (rodriguez, 2020). wes (2020) reported the findings of a study that assessed access to services in canada among immigrant and migrant groups, including international students and temporary migrants. unemployment due to covid-19 was 14% among temporary migrants. when asked about access to services, 43% indicated not knowing that they were eligible and only seven percent responded yes when asked if they had contacted a social service agency during covid-19. further, 20% reported not being able to afford their rent, mortgage or utilities. this indicates that while the work of temporary migrants deemed them essential and provided them with an exemption to travel restrictions, they continue to face an uneven covid-19 burden. access to health and social assistance are also important to address the inequalities workers face, especially during covid-19 (united nations network on migration, 2020a). as such, migrant groups including temporary migrants residing in canada should be able to access social support services like employment insurance, cerb, and social subsidies like child benefits (guadagno, 2020). asylum asylum seekers have arguably faced the greatest impact of covid-19. the suspension of asylum has weakened the right to international refugee protection and access to fundamental refugee rights (groupe urd, 2020; united nations network on migration, 2020a). the impacts of these restrictions have exacerbated the vulnerabilities of this migrant group. some have been stranded at borders and are at an increased risk of persecution (iom, 2020a). others have been subject to detention, extended confinement due to covid-19 and deportation to danger (groupe urd, 2020). individuals sent back to the united states by the canadian government are an example of this. since march 2020, the centre for disease control and covid-19 and the bordering of canada’s immigration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 67 prevention in the us has issued the deportation of any non-citizen arriving to the united states (lakhani, 2020). to prevent the spread of covid-19 immigration officers have been authorized to deport and remove asylum seekers (hernandez & miroff, 2020; meer & villegas, 2020). as of april 2020, immigration officers had deported 17,965 asylum seekers including 95 minors, many of whom have tested positive for covid-19 (dickerson & semple, 2020). the speed at which these deportations occur have been reported to be a mere 96 minutes (hernandez & miroff, 2020). the us’s deportation and removal of asylum seekers was criticized by the un for its violation of international law (lakhani, 2020). the united nations network on migration (2020b, p. 1) called on states to “suspend forced returns during the pandemic, in order to protect the health of migrants and communities, and uphold the human rights of all migrants, regardless of status.” further, it stressed that asylum seekers face an increased risk of return to danger, torture, and persecution. what is more, the health risks associated with forced returns are high for asylum seekers, immigration, and border officers as well as health care workers, both in country of origin and country of arrival. the health systems of refugee producing countries are lacking in capacity to protect citizens from covid-19 and mitigate the social and economic issues the pandemic has created (united nations network on migration, 2020a). this is in addition to lack of adequate health systems and poor living and working conditions where sanitary and confinement measures are compromised (unhcr & iom, 2020). canada’s return of asylum seekers to the us where the risk of detention along with deportation is high poses a threat to the recognition of asylum rights. the us’s annual detention population was over 500,000 in 2019, significantly higher than the rest of the world’s detention rates combined (keller & wagner, 2020; perzyna, 2020). it is no surprise that in june 2020, the federal court of canada ruled that the return of asylum seekers through the stca is in fact impeding their rights. the court cited the return of asylum seekers to the us where detention and denial of access to protection as a violation of section 7 of the canadian charter of rights and freedoms, whereby the rights to liberty and security are guaranteed (atak et al., 2021). by extension, the temporary covid-19 measures to suspend asylum and return individuals to the united states flouts section 7 of the charter and the principle of non-refoulement under international law. significantly, reports of canada deporting “thousands of people” have begun to emerge (paperny, 2021). the number of deportations for 2020 was 12,122, the highest since 2015 (paperny, 2021). in march 2020, canada paused deportations because of covid-19, except for cases of serious criminality (gerster, 2020). however, since november 2020 deportations have resumed. the health risks associated with this are high. removals involve airport transfer, and enclosure of people with others. the canadian association of refugee lawyers has criticized the government’s actions, zainab abu alrob & john shields studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 68 citing that there is “no indication” that these “removals are essential” (paperny, 2021). against the backdrop of international refugee and human rights law: is refuge in crisis? the differentiated admission policies granted to migrant groups like temporary migrants versus those for asylum seekers brings to the fore one important question: is refuge in crisis? it is worth noting that despite exemptions both resettled refugees and temporary migrants still face an uneven covid-19 burden. the halting of asylum warrants our attention as a global community. this urgency comes from the risk of extending emergency measures without an end in sight (groupe urd, 2020), and with the normalizing of extraordinary policies for groups that need protection in and outside times of crisis. the pandemic also presents an important moment for bringing change and setting the right precedent for the future of refuge. we want to bring to the fore the gravity of blanket border restrictions against asylum seekers by referencing international refugee and human rights law. both legal and normative frameworks provide a valuable tool to assess the short and long-term impacts of the pandemic. we are in a moment where a refuge crisis looms within a growing health crisis. the measures against refugees and asylum seekers are discriminatory and weaken international norms and standards for refugee protection (fcj refugee centre, 2020). health risks should be mitigated with appropriate measures like quarantine, self-isolation, and access to vaccinations, thereby allowing governments to manage migration in a safe way that does not pose larger risks to society (fcj refugee centre, 2020). legal principles under international refugee and human rights law make evident the lack of justification for differential border restrictions on the grounds of health risks (fcj refugee centre, 2020; unhcr & iom, 2020). sovereign power awards states the control to regulate admission across their borders. these measures, however, may not result in the denial of the opportunity to apply for refugee protection using legal state avenues or lead to refoulement (return to torture, danger, or persecution) (unchr, 2020c). individuals should be granted the opportunity to have their refugee claim individually assessed. further, states hold the responsibility to ensure that individuals who are within their territorial boundaries are not subjected to refoulement. there are two levels of legal norms to consider regarding the human rights of migrants. the first are core and fundamental rights that always apply both inside or outside a crisis or emergency. these include the rights to freedom from torture, inhumane treatment, degradation, and the right to life. particularly applicable to asylum seekers and refugees is protection from refoulement, expulsion, discrimination, and racism (chetail, 2020). second are exemptions afforded by select conventions whereby states covid-19 and the bordering of canada’s immigration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 69 may employ lawful restrictions to rights. for example, freedom of movement can be restricted at border points with the purpose of preventing the spread of covid-19. however, these restrictions – although lawful – cannot impede on fundamental human rights, specifically the rights of refugees to seek asylum and be individually assessed for their claims (chetail, 2020; unhcr, 2020a). in these circumstances alternative measures must accompany restrictions, for example alternatives to detention whereby the risk of covid-19 in overcrowded facilities is mitigated (chetail, 2020). further, legal obligations and considerations for persons accessing territory for the purpose of refugee protection during covid-19 may – and should – include preventive measures like health screening and quarantine requirements (guadagno, 2020). this is important for resilient and coherent policy, and also for effective governance of the pandemic (chetail, 2020; united nations network on migration, 2020a). prior to the temporary agreement with the us, canada had announced that it would screen asylum seekers and require a 14-day quarantine period (embensadoun, 2020). this was commended by unhcr as it ensured that asylum seekers had access to protection (macklin, 2020). this was reversed and justified by prime minister trudeau as a “temporary” response that was “in line with canada’s values on the treatment of refugees and vulnerable people” (harris, 2020a). as we have documented, the use of migration control as a covid-19 management tool has not reconciled health and human rights (chetail, 2020). this can be done using a rights-based lens and with positive social resilience at the core. chetail (2020) details this as a forward-looking perspective, whereby health considerations and migrant protections are integrated to rethink migration policy. he further argues that the “neglect of human rights is counterproductive and arguably dangerous in addressing the health crisis” for two reasons (chetail, 2020). the first is that stopping asylum through returns increases the spread of covid-19 to other populations. second, it creates incentives for irregular migration avenues where health control is not possible to manage. sanchez and achilli (2020) agree with this assessment and outline that border restrictions “will not stop irregular migration or smuggling.” they further note that the demand for smuggling services has not diminished during covid-19. evidence of this is in the boats that continue to carry people to the canary islands and malta from libya and other countries (sanchez & achilli, 2020; united nations network on migration, 2020a). the undetected movement of people between borders makes it more difficult to respond to pandemic threats, and increases risks of human trafficking as well as the abuse and exploitation of refugees by smugglers (unhcr & iom, 2020; united nations network on migration, 2020a). these consequences can be mitigated by socially resilient border management tools that both enable regular mobility and protect international refugee and human rights law, while maintaining health protocols (unhcr & iom, 2020). zainab abu alrob & john shields studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 70 looking forward: social resilience as an effective crisis management tool social resilience as a positive strategy works to prepare societies to meet external shocks and disruptions, and also to reinstate stability and help communities “emerge stronger” through a rights-based approach (pope, 2017). at its core are social structures and institutions that work to provide support to community members, thereby allowing them to bounce back from barriers and obstacles caused by an emergency or shock event. social resilience embraces collectivist and solidarity-based approaches in opposition to individualistic and exclusionary approaches to mitigating the impacts of crises (preston et al., 2021; shields & abu alrob, 2020). uneven covid-19 policy impacts on migrant groups threaten access to rights as well as successful integration and social cohesion. they can also threaten the resilience of social infrastructure, create tension between community members and weaken support for political institutions (shields & abu alrob, 2020). discrimination, lack of adequate access to healthcare and rights as well as social and financial supports may lead to distrust among migrant groups (gagnon, 2020; mcauliffe & bauloz, 2020). as noted, for migrant groups that have been admitted during the pandemic, uneven covid-19 impacts are still faced. this is where social resilience strategies that are rights-based become key not only to mitigating the implications of regressive asylum and refugee policy but to building socially cohesive societies where migrants can successfully settle and integrate. this approach does not allow for policies that burden the individual with coping during public crisis in a manner that violates their human rights (human rights and democracy network, 2017). the state’s responsibility when employing resilient strategies to mitigate external shocks is to continue to secure the rights of all persons, and not to weaken migrant rights for the sake of security or managing health threats. social resilience will require the introduction of active policy measures that are committed to addressing precarity and the uneven burden of covid-19 on migrant groups. the impacts of the pandemic will take time to reverse. yet, efforts that bring structural reforms are an important policy window of opportunity to invest in response and recovery plans that are inclusive and reduce the inequalities faced by the most vulnerable in society (blasi, 2020; shields & abu alrob, 2020). there are seven key characteristics that are identified as positive resilience responses and central to building resilient communities in the face of high consequence events. these emerge from the rockefeller foundation (2021) where 100 cities have incorporated policies into their governance strategies that have proven effective for building resilience in response to economic, social, health and physical shock events. resilient policy strategies include: (1) reflection on how past experiences can better inform policy-making; (2) robust and well-managed systems; (3) ability to accommodate and adapt to shock events; (4) flexibility in the covid-19 and the bordering of canada’s immigration system studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 71 adaptation of alternative strategies; (5) integration among different levels of governance; (6) recognition of the value of alternative resources; and (7) prioritizing inclusivity of various stakeholders and community groups in decision-making (100 resilient cities, 2019). we focus our attention on multi-stakeholder partnerships and strengthened inclusion of various groups. while all seven strategies are important, these two align with the united nations network on migration (2020a) recommended guidelines on effective covid-19 “preparedness, prevention and response.” the admission and inclusion of migrants in socio-economic response strategies as well as mitigating barriers in accessing health, social security services and information into policy responses are an important whole-ofgovernment approach to covid-19. to ensure that these policy strategies are rightsand evidence-based, engagement with migrants and community groups will ensure policy sustainability and effectiveness (united nations network on migration, 2020a). this will bring to the fore the facilitation of inclusive, affordable, non-discriminatory policies that place the rights of migrants at their core and work to protect their rights. attention should be placed on reversing discriminatory border policies and the vulnerabilities covid-19 has exacerbated for migrant groups. conclusion we have documented the many challenges migrant groups disproportionately face due to covid-19 border policies. using security resilience and a border lens, we highlight how pandemic policy responses have heavily relied on migration control to manage a health crisis. the bordering of canada’s immigration system hierarchically admits and stratifies groups. further, we identify the policy developments that pose a threat to the state of refugee protection and a weakening of refugee rights. while border restrictions for some migrant groups like asylum seekers are an extension of migration control before the pandemic, it is evident that human rights have been jeopardized for the sake of crisis management. we recognize that in times of emergency states can restrict some rights, like free movement. however, border policy must take into consideration the human rights that are fundamental to humanity. the shuttering of borders to refuge may not be justified on the grounds of virus contagion. states can reconcile international refugee and human rights law with public health measures. the unhcr’s (2020c) call on states to incorporate health measures at the border and not forego the rights of refugees in seeking protection during the pandemic is significant. the escape from persecution should be the “apex” of exception (perzyna 2020), not the other way around. there are canadian examples of positive resilience strategies that have worked to include migrant groups and recognize their contributions, including the essential frontline work they perform. this is an approach that zainab abu alrob & john shields studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 54-77, 2022 72 values human capital and the contributions of migrant groups. temporary migrants are a prime example of this. yet, their case reveals more than just recognition. despite their exemption from border measures, they, along with resettled refugees, continue to be vulnerable and carry an uneven covid-19 burden. this calls for a rights-based model of inclusion that should prevail in both pandemic and post-pandemic policy. while these are extraordinary times, the rights of migrants must not be compromised in the name of temporary or emergency measures. social resilience approaches reveal the discrimination and barriers that migrant groups face. in this context, rights-based strategies during a crisis can work as a window of opportunity to create structural and systemic reform that creates constructive alternatives within migration policy and practice based in social justice principles. this is integral to a post-pandemic society that places social justice at the fore and helps to reconcile human rights with effective migration management. acknowledgements this research was conducted as part of the building migrant resilience in cities – immigration et résilience en milieu urbain (bmrc-irmu), a research partnership in ontario and quebec implemented by york university and numerous partners with support from the government of canada’s social sciences and humanities research council grant #895-2016-1004. the views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. references 100 resilient cities (2019). resilient cities, resilient lives: learning from the 100rc network. https://resilientcitiesnetwork.org/downloadable_resources/ur/resilient-cities-resilientlives-learning-from-the-100rc-network.pdf akbar, m., & preston, v. 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(2020). covid-19 and immigration detention in the usa: time to act. lancet public health, 5, e245-e246. https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanpub/piis2468-2667(20)30081-5.pdf kelly, a. (2020, april 23). ‘system of oppression’ puts temporary migrants at risk of covid-19: advocate. city news. https://www.citynews1130.com/2020/04/23/temporary-foreignworkers-risk-covid-19-advocate/ lakhani, n. (2020, april 17). us using coronavirus pandemic to unlawfully expel asylum seekers, says un. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/usasylum-seekers-coronavirus-law-un lau, b. (2021, october 25). canada promised to take in 20,000-40,000 afghan refugees. where are they? national post. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-promised-to-take-in20000-40000-afghan-refugees-where-are-they macklin, a. (2004). disappearing refugees: reflections on the canada-u.s. safe third country agreement. columbia human rights review, 36, 365-426 macklin, a. 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(2020, march 21). canada to exempt tfw’s, employers must isolate workers 14 days. business in vancouver. https://biv.com/article/2020/03/canada-exempt-tfws-employersmust-isolate-workers-14-days osterberg, e. (2016, june). social impacts of the securitized arrival experiences of in-canada refugee claimants. the canadian network for research on terrorism, security, and society working paper series no. 16-09. https://www.tsas.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2018/03/tsaswp16-09_osterberg.pdf paperny, a.m. (2021, january 22). canada deporting thousands even as pandemic rages. reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-canada-deportationiduskbn29r1el?taid=600ac55ce8fa030001a3c9f8&utm_campaign=trueanthem:+trend ing+content&utm_medium=trueanthem&utm_source=twitter perzyna, m. 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(2020, july 8). n.l. refugees enduring long family separations, due to covid-19 delays. cbc news. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/pandemicpause-refugees-canada-1.5640083 wes (world education services). (2020, december). impact of covid-19 on the economic well-being of recent migrants to canada: a report on survey results from permanent residents, temporary migrant, and international students in canada. https://knowledge.wes.org/rs/317-ctm-316/images/wes-research-report-covid-19-recentimmigrants-in-canada.pdf studies in social justice volume 3, issue 1, 133-143, 2009 correspondence address: ronjon paul datta, department of sociology, university of alberta, edmonton, alberta, t6g 2h1, canada. email: rpauldatta@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 review essay critical theory and social justice ronjon paul datta department of sociology, university of alberta honneth, a. (2009). pathologies of reason: on the legacy of critical theory, columbia university press. isbn 978-0-231-14626-5 (hardcover) this book is welcome and needed; i highly recommend it to all those interested in social justice. it offers a sophisticated, exceptionally well-crafted answer to a highly pertinent question: what social scientific criteria are there for making normative judgments about why and how western civilization should change? to stress “social science” means a commitment to thinking about what is concretely happening in the world and why as opposed to drawing on pre-given axioms as the basis for social criticism (e.g., human rights as an axiom, greater inclusion as an axiom, etc.). honneth carefully explicates how the normative dimensions of doing critical theory (and hence a normative justification for an explanatory science of social totalities) have themselves been developed by the self-reflexive immanent critique of critical thought since kant. at the same time, theoretical critique provides an ontology for justifying the normative dimension of a research program, which is then extended to the practical goal of arguing for why, and how we should change the world. this is a book then, in which social scientists, whether they identify as “critical theorists” or not, will find themselves having to think through the old (but not passé) challenges of the ontological linkage between the “is” and the “ought”; between “fact” and “value”; freedom and determinism; history and politics. in this regard, the book functions as an explication of the metatheoretical commitments (and their supporting arguments) of a critical theoretic approach to social justice. the book is a timely reminder of the pertinence of this kind of theoretical work not least because of the relatively marginal status of critical theory in contemporary english speaking social science. indeed, as honneth puts it “critical theory appears to have become an intellectual artifact” (p. 19). a caveat should be added here: zizek’s work has had a significant impact on contemporary critical social analysis, much indebted to critical theory. however, it is less likely to be classified as such since his main reference point is lacan, even if he shares a left-hegelianism with critical theory. an important consequence of this marginalization has been the difficulty of generating normative arguments for the task of social science and the 134 ronjon paul datta studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 parallel development of a prevalent form of social criticism “that does without sociological explanation” (p. 29). there has been a marked contemporary tendency to assume that inequality generates undesirable social outcomes without offering a clear justification of what counts as desirable, thus unwittingly endorsing already existing dominant conceptions. in a similar way, it is assumed that more inclusive social institutions are also desirable without, again, the examination of the questions of “include in what?” and crucially, in nietzschean terms, “for what?” a further assumed criteria for making normative negative assessments of the present concerns the analysis and description of localized types of domination with the implicit proviso that “domination” is undesirable and hence, in as much as we can identify how dominations work, we should resist, challenge and struggle against them but without offering a program of how and why this should be done, or the program of viable and desirable alternative forms of social organization. this, however, is a non sequitur. a fourth type of critical advocacy excavates the criteria by which institutions and social programs claim that they should be judged, showing where they fall short and then suggesting how and why those objectives (or broader, more abstract and general norms active within a society) can be better met by adopting some changes. a main consequence of these approaches though is that they bracket why we should identify dominations (be it in the form of economic exploitation or varieties of exclusion, for example), and struggle for their abolition. an important legacy of critical theory is that it has avoided these pitfalls. since the 1960’s, critical theory played a significant role in challenging both positivist and structuralfunctionalist accounts of theoretical work and accounts of how societies, as totalities, worked. in doing so, it placed the role of reflexivity in all facets of social science and a rejection of the “micro-macro” dichotomy as a false one, firmly on the table. it is important to keep in mind that much of the impetus in the original development of critical theory was a concern with the circumstance that when faced with increased misery and exploitation in the 1930s, the masses decided to side with a racialized aristocracy rather than with the oppressed class (neocleous, 1997, p. 41). reich put the issue clearly when he posed the question about how the masses come to desire the conditions of their own domination and repression (cf. deleuze and guattari, 1994), surely a pertinent issue today in the current crises facing capitalist societies. the central aim of the book is to explicate and defend the project of critical theory as pertinent to the present and the future. it does so by attending to conceptions of the link between normative claims and explanatory social science as found in kant, adorno, benjamin, freud, franz neumann, alexander mitscherlich, and albrecht wellmer; as well as providing a compelling critique of michael walzer. the task of critical theory involves explaining how social conditions impede a rational understanding of the causes of the distortions of reason that in turn undermine the use of reason in democratic will-formation and hence also, to the concrete means for transforming dominations from which stem distortions of reason. consequently, the possibilities for emancipation from those dominations are blocked. reason is held to be an inherent capacity of all humans, but defined precisely as the capacity of self-reflection and self-critique that drives people to improve their lives, their conditions, and indeed become freer. pathologies of reason include capitalism and the pervasiveness of instrumental rationality (i.e., means-ends thinking, in which everything, including human life, becomes only a means to an end, reducing human review essay: critical theory and social justice 135 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 subjectivity to mere objectivity). structural dominations undermine the resources for appealing to reason when advocating for transforming the conditions that impede freedom (and with it, the free use of reason). with a rational appeal for freedom impeded, the legitimacy of emancipatory political projects also takes a blow. chapter 2 and the appendix powerfully distill these main features of critical theory. readers interested expressly in social justice will find chapter 2 (“a social pathology of reason: on the legacy of critical theory”) and the appendix, “idiosyncrasy as a tool of knowledge: social criticism in the age of the normalized intellectual,” particularly stimulating. both clearly explicate the methodological protocols of critical theory. chapter overview the opening chapter is a surprise. while it appears somewhat scholastic, it offers the compelling argument that one finds in kant the theoretical resources for stating that norms are matters to be struggled over and for, in the practical working out of life. thus, in contrast to the usual argument that normative judgments are to be deferred to universal criteria (and universalizing procedures), the normative sphere, rather, is understood to be one of pragmatics and hence deferential to the existing state of affairs of having to get on in the world through the use of reason. the promise of the enlightenment, even in kant and anticipating habermas, thus lies in a “conflictridden learning process” (p. 18) that compels the progress of practical reason toward increasing freedom, a freedom that is not inevitable, but is fought for. in doing so, honneth finds a way to recuperate facets of kant (liberal rationalist par excellence) for critical theory. chapter 2 offers a succinct explication of the salient features of critical theory. significant here is the emphasis on sociological explanations of the pathologies of reason under capitalism that while blocking the use of reason in emancipatory politics, they do not eradicate it. hence reason remains a potential that can be drawn upon. the metatheoretical grounds of critical theory as pertains to social justice are well expressed as follows: critical theory must couple the critique of social injustice with an explanation of the processes that obscure that injustice. for only when one can convince the addressees by means of such an explanatory analysis that they can be deceived about the real character of their social conditions can the wrongfulness of those conditions be publicly demonstrated with some prospect of their being accepted. because a relationship of cause and effect is assumed to obtain between social injustice and the absence of any negative reaction to it, normative criticism in critical theory has to be complemented by an element of historical explanation. a historical process of the deformation of reason must causally explain the failure of a rational universal, a failure that constitutes the social pathology of the present (p. 30). meeting the requirements of this task involves the careful empirical study of how the universal capacity to reason is concretely practiced in the modern world and 136 ronjon paul datta studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 pathologically deformed by capitalism (p. 24). crucially, the normative dimension of critical theory must also explain the lack of public reaction to injustice, thus blocking emancipatory projects (pp. 20, 29). the source of optimism about social justice is argued to rest in “a space of potentially common reasons that holds the pathological present open to the possibility of transformation through rational insight” (p. 40). chapter 3, “reconstructive social criticism with a genealogical proviso: on the idea of ‘critique’ in the frankfurt school” elaborates on the protocols of holistic social research discussed in chapter 2. the genealogical proviso provides methodological protection against functionalism when theorizing the constitution of societal totalities. in doing so, honneth theorizes the place from which meaningful theoretical critique beyond the alternatives of appearing too radical and thus denouncing the present (risking being ignored) or too removed because of the remoteness of the questions and methods of critical theory. the solution to this dilemma is stated as follows: “the critique of society can be based on ideals within the given social order that at the same time can justifiably be shown to be the expression of progress in the process of social rationalization” (p. 51). what genealogy does is trace how the initial, intended designs of practices and institutions (“the real context of application of moral norms” p. 52) are later taken up and put to different uses because of societal conditions that make this possible. this is what produces the unintended consequences of effective reason (cf. p. 187). chapters 4 and 5 deal with adorno. chapter 4 “a physiognomy of the capitalist form of life: a sketch of adorno’s social theory” provides a corrective to what might be taken as being the overly rationalist, intellectualizing focus of critical theory. adorno’s approach rests in “determining the figures of action and consciousness” (p. 55) such that social life becomes reified and largely incomprehensible rather than something subject to history and reason. adorno’s main methodological reference point is argued to be a modified weberianism focused on “a materialist hermeneutic of the capitalist form of life” (p. 59). it draws upon a phenomenology of how cognitive constructs impact bodies, exaggerating its features in theoretical explication, especially as concerns the experience of physical suffering. this is crucial because it runs contrary to the centrality of loving care experienced in infancy (apprehensible through psychoanalysis), the remnant of which “tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different” (p. 69). indeed, that child development occurs through the imitation of loved ones provides the normative ontological basis for intersubjectively understanding one’s own suffering and the suffering of others, hence opening the door to decentring the pervasive pathological egoism of a world dominated by capitalism and instrumental reason. chapter 5, “performing justice: adorno’s introduction to negative dialectics” continues this explication of adorno, focusing more intently on methodology. negative dialectics is presented as an alternative to the rationalism of both the hegelian and marxian traditions. the aim is not to “rationally penetrate the world” (p. 77) but rather hinges on a phenomenological immersion into a social reality that is always held to exist prior and external to knowers: social reality can never be completely transformed into its corresponding thought object. hence “identitythinking” (i.e., hegelian correspondence truth criteria) is a ruse. adorno’s technique review essay: critical theory and social justice 137 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 provides a further indication of how he modifies weber’s ideal-type method in his own conception of developing “models,” the adequacy of which can only be developed through the application of a phenomenological immersion that exactly challenges our preconceptions, spurring self-reflection and self-critique. its aim “is to show exemplarily in particular cases to what extent the conceptual determinations of central ideas of the philosophical tradition do not do justice to the intended state of affairs because they deny their origin” (p. 87). this is shown to be the meaning of adorno’s trope of “doing justice to” social reality. indeed, the loss of the belief in the sovereignty of one’s reason is itself liberating. striking in this chapter are potential resonances with both althusser’s materialist epistemology (cf. jameson, 2007, p. 60) and the radical durkheimian phenomenology of georges bataille, both of which are typically taken to be antithetical to critical theory. chapter 6, “saving the sacred with a philosophy of history: on benjamin’s ‘critique of violence’ is a careful explication of benjamin’s theoretical logic. crucial here is the aim to find a means of thinking about existence that is not subjected to instrumentality i.e. is “sovereign.” with this is associated a strong conception of politics as a radically discontinuous moment in history, “an experience that abruptly interrupts the continuity of social life by making something hitherto unknown appear” (p. 91). in short, benjamin’s optimism is placed in politics. this valorization of politics also required a radicalization of kantian critique by attending to the dominant standards of an historical epoch. thus, a philosophy of history is necessary for escaping the trap of doing a critique of values only from within the terms of the set of standards given in the present. in the modern world, law is held to legitimize and facilitate instrumental rationality, backed by the “law-preserving or ‘administrative’ violence” (p. 112) of the state that cannot find legitimate justification within the terms of law itself. crucially, law is disarticulated from justice, which for benjamin is to be based on already existing forms of voluntary altruism and intersubjectivity in social life that potentially fuels popular moral outrage. this is then contrasted with “law-making or executive violence” (p. 108) as found, for instance, in general strikes. for benjamin, justice can only be achieved beyond law, in sacral revolutionary form that immediately produces justice through the performance of violence against state law that pervades the whole of social life. the chapter also includes a useful discussion of war, violence and their effects on law. chapters 7, 8 and 9 are more psychoanalytic in nature, exploring respectively freud’s conception of freedom, franz neumann’s analysis of how political justice is affected by anxiety, and alexander mitscherlich’s consideration of the subjective conditions necessary to democracy. at the same time, they also offer the reader more of honneth’s own work, especially as pertains to his understanding of anxiety. chapter 7 draws attention to the freudian decentring of rationality, consciousness and ego by repression. the point of psychoanalysis is to show that the ruptures in consciousness can be overcome “through [the ego’s] own reflective activity” (p. 127). the loving care that has been experienced in infancy provides a memory of the possibility of non-pathological intersubjectivity, and with it, a desire for it. this remnant provides the fuel for the use of reasoned discourse about blockages and impasses surrounding human fulfillment as a consequence of dominations and anxieties. 138 ronjon paul datta studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 chapter 8 covers neumann’s contribution to theorizing how anxiety impedes democratic engagement. as honneth states, “it appears to me extremely useful to follow neumann in trying to understand neurotically intensified mass anxieties as a kind of social pathology that can profoundly interfere with the individual’s ability to participate in democratic will-formation. in order to autonomously form an opinion and be able to articulate it publicly, freedom from anxiety is indispensable, since anxiety impairs self-esteem, limits deliberative powers, and allows ego-estranging idol-substitution” (p. 154). in short, the absence of secure intersubjective relationships blocks the formation of subjects able to freely and democratically engage in the public sphere. chapter 9 on mitscherlich discusses parallel themes but along more positive lines. the subjective conditions of democracy and tolerance are argued to have an origin in an individual’s capacities to deal with what is “other” or “alien” within themselves through a process of articulation. in short, one cannot be truly tolerant of difference without being able to first do so with oneself. for those interested in possible lines of theoretical compatibility between critical theory and poststructuralism, the discussion of wellmer in chapter 10 will prove a stimulus. wellmer’s approach stems from his attentiveness to “objective contradictions” (p. 167) accompanied by a habermas-inspired conception of critical theory “understood as a mode of reflection of the universal claim to maturity inherent in the structures of the human practice of reaching understanding” (pp. 1689). this in turn displaces the marxian stress on the critique of political economy onto a theory aiming to find emancipatory potentials in communicative intersubjectivity. at the same time though, wellmer is far less of a rationalist than habermas because of his attention to the role played by art and aesthetics. echoing adorno and having significant parallels with bataille and foucault, wellmer advocates for an “aesthetic radicalization of the idea of modern freedom” including a “right of freedom to unreason” grounded in “transgressive experience” (p. 174). his work is argued to exemplify the commitment of critical theory to democracy, both substantively as “constitutionally guaranteed procedures but also as the embodiment of a whole form of life” (p. 176). in sum, wellmer’s work attends to domains beyond the limits of communicative reason, i.e., “the aesthetic conduct of life and the always unavoidable decisions in politics and law” (p. 176). in doing so, wellmer envisages a “democratic ethical life” appropriate to the contemporary world, “in which citizens orient themselves to democratic principles from habit and with heart, where they would not be convinced solely through rational arguments” (p. 176). wellmer’s work then is suggestive of further research to be done in the tradition of critical theory. the appendix consists of a sharp and focused critique of walzer, showing how critical theory offers a needed alternative to the version of social criticism advocated by walzer. in doing so, honneth provides a comprehensive outline of the central theoretical and methodological tenets of critical theory. in my view, this chapter itself justifies reading the book. crucial here is the role of the intellectual, perhaps best formulated as the difference between the “intellectual/expert” and the “social critic.” for honneth, we live in a world of experts, who as a matter of course find their place in the public sphere in commenting on “day-to-day politics,” leading to a circumstance in which the role of this type of “intellectual” becomes normalized (p. 181). the cost though has been a failure to reflect upon, challenge, and question “the cultural or social mechanisms that establish the conditions of acceptance for review essay: critical theory and social justice 139 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 position in public debate” (p. 183). honneth correctly stresses the role that holistic and genealogically oriented explanations must play if single-issue interventions by experts are to be avoided (p. 185). it is at this point that the political (and radical) character of social criticism comes to the fore. the point is not to articulate positions or policy proposals likely to be immediately successful (because they are palatable and premised on the already existing normative consensus in the public sphere). rather, “social criticism does not aim at rapid success in the democratic exchange of opinions but at the distant effect of gradually growing doubt about whether given models of practice or schemas of needs are in fact appropriate (for us). it is paid in the coin not of momentary argumentative convincingness but in justified reorientation in future processes” (p. 188). honneth’s explication of the legacy of critical theory, thus offers a distillation of what is at stake in this style of theorizing. does it hold up? discussion: marxism, critical realism and foucault while the justification for critical theory appears to rest in the last instance on the possibility of rational cognition (an appeal to reason), this is in contrast to the marxian justification as concerns the extent to which real-concrete contradictions undermine the capacity of social formations to reproduce themselves (well evinced in the current crisis of capital accumulation): both investment banker and autoworker have had their capacities to reproduce themselves (as occupational categories, which if occupied, generate incomes necessary for subsistence) are undone precisely by doing their jobs well, as pertains to performance criteria. in this respect, while a materialist conception of history remains a guiding thread, marxian political economy does appear rather marginal to the defence of the legacy of critical theory. at the same time though, honneth’s elaboration of the metatheoretical foundations and methodology of critical theory provides less a means of broadening what a materialist approach to history must include (although it does this) and more an ontological grounding for a communist norm as, “an ethical idea that places the utmost value on a form of common practice in which subjects can achieve cooperative self-actualization” (p. 26), the possibility of which is a consequence of a universal constitution of human (social) subjectivity, derived from kant (cf. sixel, 1995, p. 5). crucially then, the legacy of critical theory is one that challenges the view that normative arguments for radical societal transformation are based on moralism, common ground shared with marxism (cf. collier, 2008, pp. 152ff). the normative justification for a sophisticated, non-reductionist explanatory social science found in critical theory also anticipates what has been more recently formulated as “explanatory critique” in critical realism (led by roy bhaskar). in bhaskar’s formulation, “inasmuch as we can explain, that is show the (perhaps contingent) necessity for some determinate false consciousness, or perhaps just some determinate consciousness under the determinable false, then the inferences to a negative evaluation of its source(s) and a positive evaluation of action oriented towards their dissolution are ceteris paribus mandatory” (bhaskar, 1989, p.101; cf. sayer 2007). honneth’s version of critical theory though, does better than bhaskar on several fronts. first, its sociology is better and actually substantively oriented and governed, rather than being based on arguments for the limited postulates necessary 140 ronjon paul datta studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 to doing the philosophical underlabour for emancipatory social science (bhaskar’s aim). second, the commitment to psychoanalytic conceptions of the constitution of personhood and psychic life, deemed by them the most sophisticated conception of subjective formation available (with which i concur), protects critical theory from devolving into the individualism of the transformation model of social activity, derived from winch and giddens (bhaskar, 1989). moreover, in demonstrating the variety of methods with which critical theory works, drawing from sociology, political economy, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, history and philosophy, critical theory has advanced and applied a better developed sense of the need for, and use of, pluralist methods within a unified methodology, in contrast to the restricted focus on the philosophy of social science. that said, bhaskar’s significant critique of the positivist versus humanist debate in the philosophy of science is something that should be taken seriously by critical theory not least since critical theory unwittingly accepts the positivist account of science, typically leading it to an untenable epistemological conventionalism. arguably, the main rival to critical theory is foucault. at the same time, foucault’s work is a kind “critical theory” minus its humanist theoretical anthropology, derived from the psychoanalytic critique of kant’s conception of subjectivity and its dependence on rationality, a position from which foucault explicitly distanced himself (foucault, 2003c). even here though, we should be wary of over-stating the case. as foucault argues, “thought does exist, both beyond and before systems and edifices of discourse. it is something that is often hidden but always drives everyday behaviors. there is always a little thought occurring even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits” (foucault, 2003a, p. 172). thought then, appears to be a universal condition of sociality. foucault himself identified with kantian critique (2003b) and critical theory and foucault’s work share genealogical sensibilities as concerns unintended consequences, e.g., prisons produce delinquents, not disciplined, productive citizens (honneth, 2009, p. 48). both, too, are concerned to analyse actualizations of effective reason. the bone of contention hinges on the question of “emancipate what?” if we take foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis in the history of sexuality (1994) seriously, and by extension, the methodological power of his nominalism, which i think we should, then we cannot assume the existence of a nonsocial substrate of human existence (i.e., the inherent rationality of human cognitive faculties that makes it possible for us to think, and in thinking, free ourselves from natural and social constraints), that, under conditions of social justice, would allow us to use our reason more freely, precisely in the interest of our freedom from domination. to return to the previous quote, “thought” is a property of institutions (a social domain), not of thinking persons. indeed, the foucauldian point is that it is precisely the savoirs of the human sciences, and their reliance on small, but pervasive exercises of domination, that has made possible such a conception of human reason and subjectivity. in this regard, the rousseauan traces in critical theory are a major stumbling block since dependent on affect and sympathy as the basic precondition of sociality and ground of normative judgments. this position is untenable in foucauldian terms, and durkheimian ones too, given his critique of both kant’s and rousseau’s romanticism, since they are ultimately dependent on a psychologistic assertion about human nature that cannot be substantiated empirically review essay: critical theory and social justice 141 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 (i.e., sociologically) (durkheim, 1964). in foucauldian terms, the normative criterion of critical theory is the product of the material and practical power-knowledge dominance of the human sciences, hence undesirable as a means of escape. badiou’s work (2001), somewhat differently, also challenges the humanism inherent to critical theory because it is tied to the notion of human suffering (cf. honneth, 2009, pp. 36, 38, 69). for badiou this ethical turn, especially as evinced in the focus on human rights, is based on the notion that what is deemed “good” means the absence of suffering. however, what he rejects is the premise that humans in this respect need to be viewed as victims “because the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, equates man with his animal substructure, it reduces him to the level of a living organism pure and simple” (badiou, 2001, p. 11) and thus is actually based on an anti-humanism. thus, it is the humanist progressives’ advocacy of human rights that end up denying the human agency that they champion against structuralists and poststructuralist anti-humanists. whether or not critical theory can marshal a reply to this challenge remains to be seen. yet, in what may come as a surprise to many, it is precisely on the practical normative front that foucault and critical theory share some ground. this is especially so when it comes to foucault’s displacement of legal-political judgments (an archaism belonging to the diagram of sovereignty and the monarchy) by aesthetic ones as found in his optimism about and endorsement of “arts of existence,” meaning the practices in and through which individuals problematize what they are (and are not) and make themselves an object and project of transformation, involving the care of themselves and others (foucault, 1986, pp. 14-32). indeed, ethics is a practice constitutive of “the self.” the normative rule then, is to “transform yourself” (foucault, 1996a, p. 130; 1996b), in a manner not beholden to the discourses of reason and the human sciences but in a manner more akin to avant-garde art. adorno’s and wellmer’s positions are compatible with foucault in this respect. these alternatives to critical theory, strictly speaking, warrant the kind of explication and defence offered by honneth. i attempt my own distillation of its theoretical logic as concerns the making of normative judgments grounded in explanatory social science. the appeal that is made is to the partial capacity of human reason, not as a static capacity for making ordered, coherent sense of the world and one’s place in it, but as a drive, a spontaneous will worked out in everyday activities, to try and confront and resolve those things that cause human misery and suffering: “human subjects cannot be indifferent about the restriction of their rational capacities. because their self-actualization is tied to the presupposition of cooperative rational activity, they cannot avoid suffering psychologically under its deformation” (p.39). this position, deriving from kant’s critique of empiricism and his specific form of rationalism, remains important. our immersion in the world does not immediately give us access to the truth of the world. there is an a priori active agency in human beings—the intelligence—that spontaneously organizes and makes sense of the massive welter of stimuli that comes to us from the world as it is in itself, organizing it such that we feel at home in the world we perceive and experience. reason is thus always active and exists as this activity. it then becomes a matter of what we do with effective reason. crucially, while perception is already organized sense, this is not the same as “understanding.” this was the enlightenment challenge that kant advocated: the maturity of the enlightenment, tied to its project, is to use one’s capacity to reason in order to perpetuate and further make reasoned 142 ronjon paul datta studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 (as opposed to dogmatic) sense of the world. at the same time, this alone is insufficient to change the world. thus, critical theory is not a rationalism or intellectualism. this is because critical theorists fully recognize that material institutional forms and resources must be made available to actualize this potential to reason. furthermore, while this capacity for reasoning is held to exist in all human subjects, it will not, left to its own devices, spontaneously make sense. we make sense of the world and hence use the capacity to reason only in a substantive way drawing on historically available discursive resources, materials that one may adopt “as is,” or that one may use as raw materials. hence the importance of the hegelian form of immanent critique, self-reflection and self-critique: theoretical work and its inherently historical character is an inescapable terrain for making better substantive sense of the world and our place in it. as habermas stresses, argumentative reason “always allows the individual to be responsive to better reasons” (p. 41). the power of reason in socio-historical conditions (that make it possible for only some to realize their dreams and schemes), is unwittingly affirmed in the circumstance that unintended consequences stem from intentional processes—reason was at work, but in limited, incomplete and often distorted form. even still, these two conditions, the capacity to reason and forms of democratic organization facilitated by reasoned argument, are insufficient. the third component, providing the impetus for the other two, is love. a romanticism, drawn from rousseau (as found in adorno for instance) and developed by recourse to psychoanalysis, refers to a catalyst for the creation of the other two. in this respect, without love, the goal of democracy cannot resonate. in sum, the case for a critical theoretical approach to social justice, as presented by honneth, goes something like this: the capacity for human reason is a real potential inherent in human beings, in part actualized in the spontaneous perception of the world and the affective (emotional) and corporeal experience of it. a fuller actualization of reason, crucially that of understanding the causes of experience, is possible through the combined effect of the critical inspection of dominant discourses (to explain how and why they are inadequate to understanding the world, plus an explanation of the structure of societies such that they become dominant) and democratic forms of social organization fostered through procedures that require intersubjective understanding governed by reasoned arguments that at once are the practical justification of the results of critical theory, while at the same time providing further grounds for realizing the emancipatory promise elaborated and defended by critical theory. the impetus of the use of reason finds it constitutive ontological ground in the experience of loving care, generating a hope and a drive for the social conditions of real self-actualization. this fuels the confrontation with what hinders this under the domination of capitalism, instrumental reason and the possibility of the critical theoretic explanations of current obstacles and suggestions about means of overcoming these obstacles. critical theory, as presented by honneth, has lost none of its provocativeness. perhaps it can be summarized as something of a scandal, namely, the future identity of love and political violence: the first is the constitutive impetus for, and ontological ground of, social justice, potentially actualized in law-making political violence, paving the way for the expansion of the first again in democratic social organization. review essay: critical theory and social justice 143 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 references badiou, a. (2001). ethics. new york: verso. bhaskar, r. (1989). reclaiming reality. new york: verso. collier, a. (2008). marx. oxford: oneworld. deleuze, g. & guattari, f. (1994). anti-oedipus. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. durkheim, e. (1964). appendix: portion of the introduction to the first edition subsequently omitted by durkheim. in the division of labour in society (pp. 411-435). new york: the free press. foucault, m. (1986). the use of pleasure. new york: vintage books. foucault, m. (1994). the history of sexuality. new york: vintage books. foucault, m. (1996a). friendship as a way of life. in s. lotringer (ed.), foucault live (pp. 308-312). new york: semiotext(e). foucault, m. (1996b). sex, power and the politics of identity. in s. lotringer (ed.), foucault live (pp. 382390). new york: semiotext(e). foucault, m. (2003a). so is it important to think? in p. rabinow and n. rose (eds.), the essential foucault (pp. 170-173). new york: the new press. foucault, m. (2003b) michel foucault. in p. rabinow and n. rose (eds.), the essential foucault (pp. 15). new york: the new press. foucault, m. (2003c). questions of method. in p. rabinow and n. rose (eds.), the essential foucault (pp. 246-258). new york: the new press. jameson, f. (2007). late marxism. new york: verso. neocleous, m. (1997). fascism. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. sayer, a. (2007). understanding why anything matters: needy beings, flourishing, and suffering. in j. frauley & f. pearce (eds.), critical realism and the social sciences: heterodox elaborations. toronto: university of toronto press. sixel, f. (1995). understanding marx. new york: university press of america, inc. review essay chapter overview discussion: marxism, critical realism and foucault liddell et al final before ts correspondence address: catherine mckinley, school of social work, tulane university, new orleans, la, 70118; email: catmckinley@tulane.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 historic and contemporary environmental justice issues among native americans in the gulf coast region of the united states jessica l. liddell tulane university, usa catherine e. mckinley tulane university, usa jennifer m. lilly fordham university, usa abstract settler-colonialism is founded in environmental racism, and environmental justice is foundational to all forms of decolonialization. native american groups located in the gulf coast region of the united states are particularly vulnerable to environmental justice issues such as climate change and oil spills due to their geographic location and reliance on the coastal region for economic and social resources. this study used the framework of historical oppression, resilience, and transcendence (fhort) to explore the historic and contemporary forms of environmental injustice experienced by a native american tribe in the gulf coast region of the united states. this critical ethnography analyzed a series of individual, family, and focus group semi-structured qualitative interviews with a total of 208 participants. following the critical ethnographic method, data were interpreted through reconstructive analysis using nvivo. findings of this study reveal the continuing impact of the bp oil spill and difficulty accessing resources following the spill, complicated by the tribe’s lack of federal recognition. additional themes include the continuing impact of coastal erosion, historical and contemporary land loss, geographic marginalization, and concerns about a loss of tribal identity when tribal members are forced to relocate. lack of federal tribal recognition has exacerbated all of these issues for this tribe. this study supports national findings that native american groups experience extensive historic and contemporary environmental injustices and contextualizes these findings for a native american tribe in the gulf coast region of the united states. recognizing native american sovereignty is key to addressing the environmental justice issues described. jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 2 keywords environmental justice; native american; american indian, indigenous; gulf coast; climate change environmental justice, defined as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and polices” (u.s. environmental protection agency, 2020), has frequently been unobtainable for people of color (singer, 2018; tsosie, 2007; vinyeta et al., 2016). environmental injustice often includes disproportionate impact of environmental policies on the health and well-being of communities of color (maantay, 2002). issues of environmental justice and injustice are increasingly being recognized as needed areas of research and intervention among native american tribes (bates, 2012; cantzler & huynh, 2016; crepelle, 2018a, 2018b; fitzgerald, 2015; maldonado, 2014; vinyeta et al., 2016). environmental justice issues experienced by native american groups are comprised of both historic events (related to settler colonialism) and contemporary events, such as increasing land loss to rising water and pollution (billiot & parfait, 2019; canzler & huynh, 2016; vinyeta et al., 2016). although most research focuses on current examples of environmental injustice, an exploration of settler-colonial history reveals environmental oppression is fundamental to colonialism, as indigenous groups were pushed out of ancestral homes and pressured into relinquishing sovereignty over the land (billiot & parfait, 2019; canzler & huynh, 2016). colonialism at its root includes an extensive history of environmental racism, and scholars have noted how environmental justice is a foundational component of decolonization, as virtually every political struggle in which indigenous groups are engaged has environmental implications (canzler & huynh, 2016). framework of historical oppression, resilience, and transcendence this study used the framework of historical oppression, resilience, and transcendence (fhort; burnette & figley, 2017) to contextualize experiences of environmental injustice as distinct forms of historical oppression for one gulf coast tribe. this native-focused framework was developed through work with the focal tribe and integrates the impact of colonization in its organizing framework (burnette & figley, 2017). historical oppression is a distinct concept put forth within this framework; it includes both historical traumas (such as genocide, historical land loss, polluting of native lands, and famine) and contemporary trauma and oppression (including current environmental injustices, concomitant health disparities, political marginalization, and discrimination). historical environmental justice & native americans in the gulf coast region studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 3 oppression helps explain and contextualize contemporary environmental injustice experiences as continuations of oppressive practices imposed for centuries (burnette & figley, 2017). the fhort was developed with indigenous communities, including the focal tribe, and is helpful in situating strengths and resilience within the sociostructural causes of environmental and health inequities (burnette & figley, 2017; mckinley et al., 2020). this is important so as not to “blame the victim” for problems but rather to connect adverse social, environmental, and health conditions to their sociostructural causes, while acknowledging indigenous peoples’ immense strength and resilience after experiencing centuries of injustice (burnette & figley, 2017; mckinley et al., 2019, 2020). resilience is viewed here as the ability of individuals, families, or communities to adapt, recover, or bounce back from challenges and hardships (burnette & figley, 2017). the fhort has been used to explain and understand violence (burnette & figley, 2017) and health equity (mckinley et al., 2020), and it is recommended as a culturally based framework to situate inequities (mckinley et al., 2019); however, it is just beginning to be used to understand historical oppression related to environmental injustice (burnette et al., 2019), making this a novel and innovative contribution to the field. because of the immense diversity in the number and types of tribes in the united states – there are more than 574 federally recognized tribes (bureau of indian affairs, n.d.), more than 60 state-recognized tribes (national conference on state legislatures, 2015), and numerous other tribes that exist outside of either jurisdiction (u.s. government accountability office, 2012) – environmental justice must be examined within the context of particular tribes. the purpose of this study was to explore the historic and contemporary environmental injustice issues experienced by a tribe in the gulf coast region of the united states through the lens of the fhort. this tribe is referred to as “coastal tribe” to keep tribal identity confidential due to recommendations for culturally sensitive and ethical research (burnette et al., 2014) and tribal agreements. this study was conducted to address gaps in the existing literature on the experience of environmental injustice among native american tribes, particularly in the gulf coast region. the overarching research question was: how do tribal members perceive historic and contemporary environmental justice issues? environmental justice and indigenous people both historic and contemporary forms of environmental injustice impact the holistic well-being of indigenous people. indigenous people and other communities of color are more likely to be exposed to high levels of pollution and contaminants in their environment, which often have lasting negative impacts on the health of community members (maantay, 2002). this jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 4 exposure is implicated in high rates of asthma, cancer, reproductive health issues, and lowered life expectancies (billiot, 2017; hoover et al., 2012; singer, 2018). climate change, in particular, undermines the important spiritual, social, emotional and economic relationship that connects many native american cultural systems with the land, in addition to undermining indigenous healing traditions (billiot, 2017; vinyeta et al., 2016). loss of land also impedes the intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge (burnette et al., 2018, 2019; fitzgerald, 2015). indigenous food sovereignty is also negatively impacted when subsistence food practices are no longer available, which is harmful for indigenous health (burnette et al., 2018; billiot, 2017; billiot & parfait, 2019; whyte, 2016). frequently, the land on which indigenous people are located is especially vulnerable to climate change and repeated natural disasters, such as flooding, hurricanes, and droughts (burnette et al., 2019; singer, 2018; tsosie, 2007). indigenous groups risk land loss on multiple fronts, including rising water and land grabs aimed at exploiting natural resources (orta-martinez & finer, 2010; sawyer, 2004; singer, 2018; tsosie, 2007). oil company exploitation is a key example of both historic and contemporary oppression of indigenous peoples, beginning in the 1920s when oil companies seized land through semi-legal and illegal tactics and continuing to the present day in accelerated land loss through canal dredging and other forms of environmental damage (orta-martinez & finer, 2010; sawyer, 2004; tsosie, 2007). despite the apparent salience of environmental injustices experienced by indigenous peoples, research examining their experiences of and perspectives on these issues is limited. this study addresses this gap in the literature through a qualitative examination of historic and contemporary environmental injustice experienced by members of a tribe in the gulf south. coastal tribe the region inhabited by coastal tribe is a dynamic landscape influenced by its proximity to the gulf coast, wetlands and bayous, large river systems, and human-made infrastructure such as canals, levees, and others related to petroleum extraction (austin, 2006; lambeth, 2016; maldonado, 2014). many native american people in this region depend on coastal areas, swamps, and bayous for food, as well as cultural and economic resources (bates, 2016; johnson & clarke, 2004; maldonado 2014), making them particularly vulnerable to climate change (austin, 2006; crepelle, 2018a, 2018b; lambeth, 2016; maldonado, 2014). in the past century, the gulf coast has been impacted by multiple hurricanes, extreme flooding events, and the 2010 bp oil spill, which have negatively impacted tribal communities in the area (burnette et al., 2019; bailey et al., 2014). the bp oil spill, in particular, highlights the potential for future hydrocarbon events to devastate the environment and local communities. as environmental justice & native americans in the gulf coast region studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 5 one of the largest oil spill disasters in history, the bp oil spill killed 11 crewmembers and poured over 4.9 million barrels of oil into the gulf of mexico (smith et al., 2011). people living in gulf coast areas have faced rapid and unanticipated changes to their environment and livelihoods (fan et al., 2015). although relatively few environmental health studies have been done following the spill, and even fewer that look specifically at the impact on native american tribes that were affected, studies conducted with the general population or with other demographic groups indicated the spill negatively impacted self-reported mental and physical health, increased disparities related to healthcare access, and was associated with mental health issues related to displacement and unemployment in the aftermath (cope et al., 2013; croisant et al., 2017; fan et al., 2015; patel et al., 2018). climate change is thought to be associated with increases in the number and severity of hurricanes and other weather events in the region (lambeth, 2016). hurricanes and incidents of increased flooding exacerbate the impact of levee construction, dredging of canals, and oil extraction activities on coastal erosion (austin, 2006). recent research has shown the particular ways these adverse weather events impact the lives of native american peoples in the region (burnette et al., 2019). the impact of climate disasters, such as the impact of hurricanes on those living near the gulf, has received widespread attention; however, their impact on native american people has received little attention (bates, 2016; lambeth, 2016; maldonado, 2014; simms, 2016). this scarce attention is concerning, given native american tribes in this region are intricately connected with the environment for both social and economic resources, and the majority of tribes along the gulf coast live below sea level, placing them at high risk for flooding and land loss (fitzgerald, 2015). while research that specifically looks at the impact of relocation on tribal identity for native american tribes in this region is nascent (bates, 2016; lambeth, 2016; maldonado, 2014), interviews with the general population in the gulf coast find participants are highly ambivalent about relocation and worry it will undermine social relations and individual identity, which is strongly related to sense of place (simms, 2016). coastal tribe members were forced out of their ancestral homeland in the early 1700s and pushed into the coastlands and bayous where they are now especially vulnerable to the impacts of land loss, climate change, and tropical weather events (fitzgerald, 2015). in their new home, tribal members developed new traditions and practices centering around the water, and their lives continue to focus on and depend on this resource (burnette et al., 2019; billiot & parfait, 2019; fitzgerald, 2015). despite a long-documented history of existence in the region, a variety of historical events and political factors contributed to the tribe being denied recognition as a federal tribe, though it is recognized at the state level (billiot & parfait, 2019; crepelle, 2018a, 2018b). the federal recognition process has been criticized for being extremely expensive and time consuming, for being highly political, and for guidelines jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 6 being inconsistently applied (crepelle, 2018a, 2018b; fitzgerald, 2015; fletcher, 2006). this lack of federal recognition has severely undermined the ability of coastal tribe to access both state and federal resources following disasters such as hurricane katrina or the bp oil spill (burnette et al., 2019; crepelle, 2018a; maldonado, 2014; miller, 2003). tribes that are not recognized at the federal level do not receive the resources and benefits allocated in federal treaty agreements (u.s. commission on civil rights, 2004). many of these tribes are concentrated in the southeastern portion of the united states, and the majority of them lack access to land reservations (national conference on state legislatures, 2015; salazar, 2016). in addition to limiting access to needed funds and programs, lack of federal recognition has meant this tribe is denied the ability to control management of and access to land, water, and air in their community. it also limits their ability to receive funding following disasters, potential relocation following land loss, and the protection and handling of sacred sites (burnette et al., 2019; crepelle, 2018a; maldonado, 2014; miller, 2003). this is in contrast to federally recognized tribes that are usually able to regulate and control land under their jurisdiction, enacting environmental regulations they deem appropriate (burnette et al., 2019; crepelle, 2018a; maldonado, 2014; miller, 2003). this lack of tribal sovereignty has also allowed for oil companies to target and take advantage of individual tribal members, taking their land through legal agreements that are in some cases not fully understood by tribal members (billiot & parfait, 2019; crepelle, 2018a; maldonado, 2014; rhoan, 2010). in addition to losing land because it was held individually and not in a federal trust by the tribe, not being recognized prevented the tribe from receiving resources from bp following the oil spill because bp refused to recognize claims from state-recognized tribes (billiot & parfait, 2019; crepelle, 2018a; maldonado, 2014; rhoan, 2010). this marginalization impairs the physical safety of tribal groups whose land tends to be located outside of the protection of the levee system, a clear example of “environmental racism” (billiot & parfait, 2019; crepelle, 2018a; rhoan, 2010). although climate change and other environmental justice issues are increasingly impacting all tribal communities, and indeed all individuals, the lack of federal recognition has made this particular tribe especially vulnerable to its continuing effects. tribal members are not concentrated in one geographic area, but are spread out through the coastal region (crepelle, 2018a; maldonado, 2014). many tribal members are employed in the oil or fishing industry, further complicating this tribe’s relationship with the oil industry (crepelle, 2018a; maldonado, 2014). english is not the first language of all tribal members, and some tribal members experienced educational discrimination, where they were banned from attending either black or white schools (burnette et al., 2019; bates, 2016; crepelle, 2018a; maldonado, 2014). many tribal members environmental justice & native americans in the gulf coast region studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 7 continue to visit traditional indigenous healers, although this tradition is becoming less frequent. this change may be caused by environmental changes and barriers to the continued transmission of cultural knowledge (bates, 2016; johnson & clark, 2004; maldonado, 2014; vinyeta et al., 2016). in the face of these challenges, this tribe is highly resilient, tight-knit, self-sufficient, and values and supports family and community members (burnette et al., 2019; mckinley et al., 2019). although tribal members are buffered from some of the most negative impacts of climate change because of strong social networks, resilience, and self-sufficiency, their lack of access to resources and sovereignty has undermined their ability to recover from environmental disasters. methods research design this article is part of a broader critical ethnography to identify risk and protective factors across the ecological societal, community, family and individual levels related to psychosocial disparities among native american people (carspecken, 1996). the method of critical ethnography was chosen because it is congruent with the fhort, which is an extension of critical theory as outlined by paolo freire (freire, 1996). it has been recommended and used in numerous studies with native peoples as a culturally congruent decolonizing methodology (burnette et al., 2014; mckinley et al., 2019; 2020). critical ethnography focuses on power dynamics and centers the voices of participants, making it appropriate for the study population and purpose (burnette et al., 2014; mckinley et al., 2019, 2020). burnette et al.’s (2014) “toolkit for ethical and culturally sensitive research with indigenous communities” was used to guide the research process, ensuring this community-based study was conducted respectfully and ethically throughout. this research was conducted with a state-recognized (but not federally recognized) tribe located near the gulf coast in the united states. due to confidentiality agreements with the tribe, the tribal identity is not revealed. data collection participants were recruited through word of mouth and by distributing fliers online and at community/tribal agencies. all participants who consented to participate in the study were interviewed, and individuals across the life course (children, adults, elders) participated. data collection included: (a) participant observation, (b) individual interviews, (c) family interviews, and (d) focus groups. these methods engaged a total of 208 participants. all jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 8 participants were compensated for their time ($20 gift card to a local department store for individual and focus group interviews and $60 for the family during family interviews), and interviews took place where participants preferred (generally at community centers or at individuals’ homes) between june 2014-july 2015. interviews took a life-course approach (carspecken, 1996), using a semi-structured guide with questions developed from the overarching research questions. questions in the guide were geared to a fifth-grade education level. questions were developed from the fhort to understand how people responded to adversity and what contextual factors were salient. example questions include, “describe a hard time growing up and how your family responded to that challenge” and “what made things harder at that time?” it is important to note that although participants were not explicitly asked about their feelings or experience with environmental justice or injustice, these results inductively emerged from the data, adding to the credibility and trustworthiness of findings. data analysis interviews were professionally transcribed before being analyzed in nvivo 11, a qualitative data analysis program. a collaborative, team-based approach was used throughout data analysis. the data analysis team included native american and non-native american phd students who worked collaboratively with the principal investigator to enhance the project’s cultural sensitivity. reconstructive analysis, a specific type of thematic qualitative analysis rooted in critical theory, was used to interpret data. during reconstructive analysis, team members read and listened to transcripts several times to develop initial impressions of the data. then interviews were analyzed line-by-line to develop initial hierarchical coding schemes, paying attention to both implicit and explicit meanings in the data. team members met on a biweekly basis to compare and discuss findings. cohen’s kappa interrater reliability coefficients were extremely high (.90 or above). strategies for rigor all strategies for rigor of this particular method were upheld (carspecken, 1996). participants received the results summary, interview transcripts (with the exception of group interviews due to confidentiality), and the opportunity to discuss, change, or add to interpretations and results. no participant disagreed with researcher interpretations, although many participants expanded upon their previous statements in agreement with research findings. peer debriefing occurred weekly with four research team members. consistency checks facilitated participants’ perspectives. over half of participants were interviewed more than once. research findings were environmental justice & native americans in the gulf coast region studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 9 presented to the tribe on over 10 occasions during tribal council meetings, at trainings, during community group presentations, and during community dialogue meetings. results and discussion as coastal communities continue to experience exposure to environmental hazards due to land loss, climate change, and environmental exploitation by corporations and government agencies, research that addresses the unique experiences of vulnerable groups is needed to inform interventions and the provision of appropriate resources. here, the specific environmental injustices experienced by a gulf coast native american tribe are contextualized using the fhort (burnette & figley, 2017). this framework allowed us to see the interconnections between historic forms of oppression and trauma experienced by this tribe and contemporary forms of oppression, in addition to highlighting the ways in which this tribe has expressed resilience, pride, and optimism while experiencing environmental injustice. as figure 1 displays, a lack of federal recognition, oil company exploitation, the bp oil spill, coastal erosion, land loss, geographic marginalization, and lack of indigenous involvement in interventions were the most commonly mentioned forms of historical oppression participants described. other forms of historical oppression mentioned by participants included loss of natural flood barriers, contaminated food and water, lack of self-determination in relocation, pollution, educational discrimination and environmental changes due to climate change. lack of federal recognition, which undermines state-recognized tribes’ ability to exert sovereignty over the land, including in issues of management, restoration, preservation, and resources, was especially important since this form of oppression often interacted with and compounded the effect of other forms of historic oppression. experiences of environmental justice issues were reported across 30 individual interviews, eight focus groups, and 12 family interviews, comprising 51 total sources. the topic of environmental justice was referenced 185 times, across 51 female speakers and 17 male speakers. to preview results, the most prominent findings included: (a) continuing impact of the bp oil spill, (b) concerns about coastal erosion, (c) historical and contemporary land loss, (d) geographic marginalization, and (e) the loss of tribal identity. jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 10 figure 1. forms of historical oppression in the context of environmental injustice. continuing impact of the bp oil spill: “i don’t trust the water” the presence of oil companies has introduced an interesting juxtaposition for many tribal members. the land and environment were profoundly damaged by oil companies, yet many tribal members depended on the same companies for their employment. tribal members have adapted to the presence of these companies by accessing these job opportunities and building up tribal economic resources. a prominent issue, however, was the continuing impact of the bp oil spill, which harmed these economic supports in the community. these economic effects were felt because a large portion of the tribe relies on the oil industry for employment/income. additionally, tribal members were unable to eat seafood after the spill, which undermined cultural traditions and family time, especially traditions centered around food, fishing, and vacationing near water. there were persistent concerns about safety and health following the oil spill related to eating seafood, spending time on the water, and working in the oil industry on clean-up. tribal members had ongoing concerns about litigation and frequently had difficulty accessing resources following the spill, further complicated by the tribe’s lack of federal recognition and other factors. environmental injustice environmental changes due to climate change b.p. oil spill coastal erosion land loss loss of natural flood barriers lack of indigenous involvement in interventions oil company exploitation contaminated food and water lack of self determination in relocation pollution lack of federal recognition educational discrimination geographic marginalization environmental justice & native americans in the gulf coast region studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 11 the economic impacts of the bp oil spill were frequently mentioned by participants. loss of jobs in the oil and seafood industry following the disaster undermined many tribal members’ economic security. as one participant noted, some tribal members whose families had worked in the seafood industry for many generations had to leave the profession because of the spill: my daddy trolled [fishing by trailing a line behind a boat that has been baited], and i had one brother that still trolls . . . my older brother, he fishes. . . . he used to troll, but then he got a job, because he had a family, and he got to support his family, because after the bp, it’s like . . . [implied doesn’t occur anymore]. the economic impacts of the bp oil spill act as a risk factor for undermining the economic resilience tribal members developed. this was particularly poignant for some tribal members who expressed pride in the work of tribal members who brought seafood to the world: “it was beautiful . . . down here. i'm proud that a lot of . . . shrimp and seafood comes from our tribal members, things like that.” the damage to the seafood and fishing industry caused by the oil spill acts as a risk factor for cultural resilience and identity of tribal members. when asked how this increased economic stress following the spill impacted family life, another participant reported “they start drinking.” continuing litigation regarding compensation following the bp oil spill also negatively impacted tribal members, and the protracted and bureaucratic process of holding institutions and companies accountable has been conceptualized as a form of trauma itself (picou et al., 2004; rhoan, 2010; rung et al., 2019; strasburger, 1999). ongoing concerns about litigation were reported as a persistent stressor for many participants: “there is still a lot of litigation.” others noted they “were not allowed to speak about it or anything.” participants reported additional stressors following the spill related to losing the ability to eat seafood due to increased cost or health and safety concerns about seafood consumption after the spill. from the lens of the fhort, the ability to maintain traditional forms of subsistence living demonstrates tribal members’ resilience. by preventing tribal members from continuing to engage in such practices, the bp oil spill acts as a risk factor for wellness, leading to negative physical and mental health outcomes (burnette et al., 2018). one participant noted increased price: “the price of shrimp was sky high. they didn't have any.” participants also reported not necessarily trusting reports that the food was safe to eat: they say, “you can eat so many oysters, and it won’t affect you. you can eat this amount of shrimp that it won’t affect you. this amount of crabs, and it won’t affect you,” but the crabs are from the bottom. jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 12 another participant also noted this, saying, “now, they're saying the seafood’s safe, and then you hear [the] seafood’s not safe, so it’s like you hear different things.” concerns about safety went beyond worries about seafood, extending to fear about drinking the water for some participants. one participant said, “i believe it’s our water. i don't even drink coffee from the faucet water. i don't drink it . . . i drink bottled water because i don't trust the water.” the impact of years of oil company and governmental exploitation is reflected in participant distrust of reports from these agencies (billiot & parfait, 2019; rhoan, 2010). not being able to rely on local resources of food and water is a risk factor for economic and cultural resilience in the community. many participants mentioned worries about the impact of the oil spill and the oil industry on participants’ health. as one participant noted, “since the oil spill and all, my health been going down [sic].” another participant discussed the negative health impacts for those who worked in the oil industry during clean up and who lived in close proximity to it: “he died of cancer. he worked on a [sic] oil spill and then all these people that worked in the oil spill. . . . we counted eight people [who died], just in their limited community, with cancer. . . . this is from all spill [sic].” one participant noted how they expected more events like the bp oil spill to occur because oil companies were never forced to pay the costs: we would be wealthier than saudi arabia if we had kept all of our oil royalties. we got zero. starting in 2017, we're going to get a portion of one third of the oil royalties. we'll have to split [that] with the other coastal states. even though we put up over 90% of the damages from producing those oil royalties. everything that's happening to us is happening in the name of oil for america because america is addicted to oil and gas. . . . as long as they didn't have to pay the costs. the environmental costs, the social costs, the cultural costs, the tears and blood costs . . . for this participant, oil company exploitation was expected to continue as long as u.s. energy continued to depend on oil and government remained unwilling to hold oil companies accountable for the impact of their industry on local communities. problems accessing resources following the oil spill were especially complicated by the tribe’s lack of federal recognition, in addition to other factors: i would like for us to be recognized and then maybe we'd have more support of . . . you know like sometimes they have grants and stuff . . . the bp oil spill the shrimpers were really struggling, you know. we didn't have no help whatsoever, we still have to make do with what we had. another participant noted the particular irony of having to prove who they were following the spill, when they were not responsible for causing the damage: “that kind of upsets me too, because native americans were here environmental justice & native americans in the gulf coast region studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 13 first. you came here, and then we have to prove to you who we are. that's kind of messed up. and then after you screwed everything up.” lack of federal recognition has undermined tribal sovereignty and has allowed for oil companies to continue to exploit the land without paying for the consequences (billiot & parfait, 2019; crepelle 2018a; maldonado, 2014; rhoan, 2010). being denied tribal recognition at the federal level is an acutely experienced example of historical oppression; it both allowed oil companies to operate on tribal lands that were not able to be held in trust by the tribe and created barriers in accessing resources following the bp oil spill (billiot & parfait, 2019; crepelle, 2018a; maldonado, 2014; rhoan, 2010). concerns about coastal erosion: “by the time the levee's done, they ain't got no more islands” historic and contemporary forms of land dispossession are important forms of oppression tribal members identified. indeed, climate change and coastal erosion have been described as the “indigenous land dispossession of the twenty-first century” (fitzgerald, 2015, p. 89). the disappearance of this land was facilitated by the dredging of oil canals, the creation of levee systems, the draining of wetlands and swamps, and the increasing frequency and intensity of coastal storms (fitzgerald, 2015). these circumstances act as risk factors that impede the resilient strategies tribal members developed to adapt to and thrive in their environment. participants noted this dramatic acceleration in coastal erosion, causes of the erosion, and worries about losing the land and not being able to pass it on to their children and grandchildren. participants also reported seeing rapid changes to the land on which they had grown up: oh i've been seeing it for 25 years, it was steady, every time i get in my boat and go, everything was different. [parts of the land] was [sic] not there. [the land] started shrinking, shrinking, you go, you wait another couple of weeks, and it’s gone. . . . i think if . . . building all them levees, if they took that money and go to start on the outside, not inside, go start on the outside, build a levee out there, protect [land] . . . protect that first. by the time the levee’s done, they ain’t [sic] got no more [land], they ain’t [sic] got nothing down there. but that's engineering, that's government for you. tribal members have developed traditions for economic and cultural survival based upon their interaction with the environment, which are now being undermined by coastal erosion. participants also reported feeling that solutions were not being enacted at the local or federal level, and that interventions were not using local and indigenous knowledge about the area. as coastal erosion continues, interventions designed to mitigate its effects without including tribal members are likely to be unsuccessful (bates, 2016; billiot & parfait, 2019; crepelle, 2018a, 2018b; maldonado, 2014). denying jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 14 meaningful involvement in decisions about the environment is a key component of environmental injustice (u.s. environmental protection agency, 2020). being denied federal recognition is an example of historic oppression that continues to exacerbate contemporary forms of oppression by denying tribal members the sovereignty to participate meaningfully in the creation of environmental policies. a tribal member recalled their family land now being totally submerged by water: they used to have wild horses. my family had a lot of cattle there. all that’s under water. the woods, i mean all the thick woods. it’s all gone. all the houses, there’s no indication that there ever was woods or land, period. . . . now it’s just miles of water . . . miles. and if you don’t go out there often, you just never know if the land’s disappearing so fast. the perishing, people just don’t know. i mean, we did because we’re out in the water all the time . . . and we see it. as this individual notes, tribal members are in a special position to see these environmental changes happening because of their strong connection with and time spent out in the local environment. the intergenerational transmission of knowledge about the land acts as an important protective factor for tribal members, and its integration into environmental policy may lead to more effective and culturally relevant interventions. because of this intimate knowledge participants had of the land, they were able to see directly the relationship between the increase in coastal erosion and the intensification in oil company dredging and drilling in the region: in the early 30s, they discovered [oil] so that’s when they came in and started dredging all of our land. digging, putting these navigation canals all over the place and then so, since that has happened, there’s no fresh water to replenish that. they didn’t block that or nothing, sort of left it open to the gulf . . . so the gulf now, the saltwater, eats up the land. another participant reported seeing places where tribal members used to live disappearing because of the presence of oil company infrastructure in the area: i mean, they had people who used to live on bayou [name removed] they called. uh, but the oil companies came and the like, i don’t know, docks so the boats could pass, and the land, you know now the land is washed away and that’s where a lot of people used to live. these experiences are examples of contemporary land loss and displacement experienced tribal members, and act as risk factors for tribal members’ economic and cultural resilience. environmental justice & native americans in the gulf coast region studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 15 historical and contemporary land loss: “they don't tell you anything, you never get a letter, they just take” historical oppression in the form of land loss related to coastal erosion was further exacerbated by land loss due to oil company land grabs, in addition to a failure to include indigenous leaders in decision making and selfdetermination. not including indigenous voices in environmental policy is a violation of environmental justice and is likely to lead to interventions that fail to take account of the characteristics of the local environment and the needs of inhabitants (cantzler & huynh, 2016; u.s. environmental protection agency, 2020), in addition to being a form of contemporary oppression and a risk factor for community resilience. lack of recognition has exacerbated both historic land loss, when many tribal members lost their land to unscrupulous oil companies, and contemporary land loss, where individuals lose land to rising water and misinformation about land ownership and taxes. for one participant, their inability to pay caused them to lose their family land, saying, “if you don't pay your taxes, they'll take it [land] away . . . they done [sic] took it away.” for another individual, loss of land due to government rules and regulation was directly related to historical oppression through educational discrimination resulting in a lack of formal education for many tribal members. for this participant, this gap in education was purposeful: “no, they didn't want to educate the people because they get more power. the more educated you get the more power you've got, you can learn more about the law.” mistrust in the government, a consequence of historical oppression, extended back to colonization for some participants: if you live in a little shack . . . and it's been in your family for 6, 7, 10 generations. the land has been there. nobody's ever opened the succession because they didn't have money. . . . because people didn't trust government, it was part of their natural thing. . . . the government screwed them every which way from the time the government was french. . . . it was survival, so they don't trust government easily. they didn't read or write, and they certainly didn't trust the english. they found out that they stole everything. they never found successions and probates, so nothing was ever done. not being able to read and write because of educational discrimination and historical oppression, in addition to a lack of federal recognition, allowed land to be stolen in some cases because tribal members were unable to prove their ownership of the land. in other instances, land was taken as part of attempts by government agencies to mitigate land loss: not as . . . now they just, like they took our land for the levy and they keep taking more to build it up. they don't tell you anything, you never get a letter they just take. . . . it's for our protection, for our good so we can't say anything. jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 16 if tribal members were federally recognized, land would not be able to be seized in this manner, even as an attempt to prevent further land loss. finally, rising water was also responsible for contemporary loss of land: there's laws in [state name removed to protect tribal identity] that once the land turned into water, it becomes state property . . . it's not our bayous. . . . it once was our property because my grandfather, we own a lot of land down at our . . . i said a lot, but you know, a few acres . . . used to be our land. well now its water so, we don't get hardly anything. i think maybe $200 in royalty a year. where, way back in the days, it'd be $2,000 which is $10,000 today. yeah, it's hard, and they not stopping, you know? it's just, it's so much. so many issues of injustice around here. this participant noted the many interconnections among forms of environmental injustice experienced by tribal members. the impact of coastal erosion here is especially harmful since it not only deprives members of access to the physical land underneath the water but also denies tribal members ownership of the property itself once it is covered by water. these historic and contemporary forms of land loss undermine the economic selfsufficiency of tribal members and the transmission of important cultural traditions. geographic marginalization: “we all got here because we were kicked out or stormed out, or sold to, or shoved out of someplace else” inhabiting land seen as less desirable is an insidious form of historical oppression experienced by tribes. this has often led to living in areas especially vulnerable to environmental changes, which was noted as a common factor throughout the tribe’s history (fitzgerald, 2015). tribal members identified their continued geographic marginalization throughout the tribe’s history, noting that historically they were forced to relocate to the coastal and bayou areas of the region because it was less desirable land removed from city infrastructure (fitzgerald, 2015). currently, this marginalization continues as tribal members lose land, are unable to receive compensation, and are unable to afford to move to nearby communities where land is less vulnerable to climate change (burnette et al., 2019; billiot & parfait, 2019; fitzgerald, 2015). many tribal members were worried tribal identity may be lost if tribal members are forced to relocate farther away from each other and the gulf. these environmental justice issues impact tribal and family dynamics and intersect with sociodemographic factors. participants noted most tribal members will not have the economic resources to relocate to nearby communities. one participant explicitly described the role of socioeconomic status and geographic marginalization: environmental justice & native americans in the gulf coast region studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 17 everything is by the water. if you want to look at a person’s socioeconomic status in the hierarchy, you look at how close to the water they live, and what type of water. if it's river water, fresh water, and you live next to it, you're more likely to have lighter skin and more wealth and better schools to send your kids to. if it's saltier water and its wetlands, the more likely you are to have darker skin. another participant noted how in the history of the tribe, members got pushed farther and farther south, and this led to the development of many of the cultural traditions, and forms of resilience and self-sufficiency seen in tribal members today: it's different now, but it comes and goes. native americans got pushed further and further and further. because they were independent. . . . at first they were made slaves, but it was hard to keep a native american a slave because this being their homeland, they knew how to escape. the slave owners didn't know how to get them so they created a whole subculture as well. the native americans from along the river who escaped, escaped down to the bayous. of course, they became swampers and they cut trees in the swamp and they provided a service. they built businesses by providing wood and moss, and whatever. they become moss pickers and everything. this participant described the important role of enculturation and resilience for tribal members, who demonstrated their self-reliance and ability to adapt to changing circumstances. cultural traditions can act as an antidote to experiences of historical oppression (burnette & figley, 2017; wexler et al., 2009. this same participant expressed concern that because of the important connection between the land and tribal members, loss of the land would marginalize tribal members and hurt the community: the more people move around, the more it changes. they start to pick up and drop different traits based on where they've relocated. the environment plays a huge role in how their culture develops. in [state name removed to protect tribal identity], once people got here we had very little to do with outsiders. . . . down here, the people were disenfranchised. the people who settled this far down . . . doing the environmental advocacy because of all the stuff trying . . . actually, it's community advocacy, but part of our thing is if we don't have an environment, we don't have a community. . . . you see how the environment plays a role in the structure of the community, the survival of the community, or in our case, the destruction of the community. how we got here . . . the people who settled here, and have been here for generations and generations and generations. . . . like i told you the other day, we are the least transient population in the country. we all got here because we were kicked out or stormed out, or sold to, or shoved out of someplace else. this speaker highlighted the ability of tribal members to act resiliently in the face of hardship and to act as advocates for themselves and for their communities. importantly, this speaker also identified how resilience is a jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 18 “fluid process” (fleming & ledogar, 2008). this same participant expressed pessimism that effective action would be taken to protect the land: there is no way on earth they're going to save [region name removed to protect tribal identity]. it's not in the plans. it's not going to happen. we're too far from the mississippi, too far from the [river name removed to protect tribal identity]. sea level rise is going to be the final nail in the coffin of [region name removed to protect tribal identity] below the inter coastal canal, maybe the whole [removed to protect tribal identity]. by continuing to not honestly talk to the people of the coast and tell them, we're not going to save you. . . . they say, well, we're going to try or we're going to have this project or we're going to have that project. it is denying the people who need it the most the ability to make decisions . . . a failure to talk honestly and openly about the real risk posed by climate change was identified as being especially dangerous by this participant because it undermines the ability of the most vulnerable individuals to protect themselves, their families, and their communities. participants expressed concern about the impact of these environmental issues on their ability to continue to pass on cultural traditions and even their ability to continue living in proximity to other tribal members and family. the loss of tribal identity: “they're just throwing them under the boat” an important component of indigenous community resilience is indigenous cultural knowledge, values, and practices (kirmayer et al., 2009). connection to land and the environment are fundamental dimensions of this cultural resilience, and loss of land harms the intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge (burnette et al., 2018; 2019; billiot & parfait, 2019; krimayer et al., 2009). concerns that loss of land and being forced to relocate would undermine tribal identity were frequent worries among participants. because tribal identity was often associated with the connection of many members to the seafood industry, one tribal member worried that, because of the fact that we live in one of the richest estuaries in the world . . . the most renewable resource in the world is right here in your backyard. sadly though, the world market has destroyed our prices. twelve years ago, a shrimper could get $4 a pound for 21 to 25 to the pound shrimp. today you might get $1.80. all the prices have dropped and people have to struggle to make a living. it's an honorable profession, but if you can't make a living, you've got to use your skills and put them where you can live. tribal members reported concerns about what would happen if they had to relocate, including worries they wouldn’t be able to move to nearby communities: environmental justice & native americans in the gulf coast region studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 19 if communities . . . have to relocate, they're not going to relocate in [region name removed to protect tribal identity]. they won't be able to afford to, so they're going to be competing now for housing, for jobs in other parts of the state that they may be not well adjusted to adapt to. no one in the regime of the coastal restoration and protection hierarchies is actively and designing for that eventuality and funding that eventuality. they're going to wait until . . . they're just throwing them under the boat. as indigenous cultural resilience is frequently tied to connectedness to place, including traditional lands and environments (kirmayer et al., 2009, many participants directly linked loss of land to loss of culture: we were here before the coast was. the coast moved to us, not us to it. they don't understand that by destroying the coast, and by allowing the coast to be destroyed, you're destroying a whole culture that really struggled to survive, and were brought here not in the best of circumstances. this loss of tribal identity was a concern for participants because they viewed the connection between the environment and culture as so strong: it's because of the environment. the environment is part of the social structure. if you have to relocate these native american tribal groups from [region names removed to protect tribal identity]. . . . if you have to start moving these groups, there's no way you can save the coast. . . . if they have to move north where there is no water, or not the type of wetlands that they're used to surviving in, they will survive because we're very strong, resilient people, but it will never ever be the culture that is here. a desire to preserve the land was strongly connected with a desire to preserve tradition and the ability to pass on tribal practices to one’s children. that this is our land, and we should do everything that we can to preserve it. i know that it's really far gone in my lifetime, but there are things that we can do to build it back up. we don't have to just let it go away. stay strong to your roots. if your family . . . if they . . . they do pow-wows, carry that on. that's something that will die if you don't pass it on to your children. although acknowledging the great risk of the current environmental issues facing the tribal community, this participant also expressed hope that the tribe would be able to persevere. these findings identify some of the key historic and contemporary environmental justice issues experienced by a native american tribe in the gulf coast region of the united states. participant responses indicate the most salient environmental justice issues faced by this tribe relate to (a) continuing impact of the bp oil spill and difficulty accessing resources, (b) concerns about coastal erosion, (c) historical and contemporary land loss, (d) geographic marginalization, and (e) the loss of tribal identity. interpreting these findings through the fhort allows for an exploration of both the risk jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 20 and protective factors that influence the well-being and resilience of tribal members experiencing environmental injustice. these findings indicate that historical oppression, especially in the form of a lack of federal recognition, is a major risk factor for tribal wellness and resilience in the face of environmental injustices. these findings also indicate forms of historical oppression often interact with each other, as is the case with educational discrimination and a lack of federal recognition allowing for oil company exploitation. these forms of historical oppression interact with the protective factors described previously, such as strong connections to the environment, the ability to adapt and live sustainably through subsistence living off the land, and passing down cultural traditions. these findings indicate that the ability of tribal members to bounce back and adapt from current environmental challenges may be undermined through their continued lack of federal recognition and the other forms of historical oppression they experience. conclusion this research identified the environmental injustice experiences of one native american tribe and contextualized these findings through the lens of the fhort. the results of this study indicate this tribe is especially vulnerable to continued environmental injustices such as land loss, climate change, and oil spills due to its reliance on the land for employment, cultural, and family traditions. these findings indicate there is a pronounced need for corporations and government agencies in the area to address and take responsibility for existing environmental damages, in addition to the implementation of increased environmental regulation going forward. the results emphasize the ways in which a lack of federal recognition influences tribal members’ experiences of environmental justice, acting as an additional risk factor that exacerbates the negative impacts of climate-related changes to the environment. a lack of federal recognition has exacerbated existing obstacles for tribal members in accessing needed resources following disasters such as the bp oil spill, hurricanes, and other climate-related changes to the environment. this lack of federal recognition has undermined the ability of this tribe to exercise sovereignty over their land, a key environmental injustice experienced by this tribe. this lack of recognition has also weakened existing interventions, as they have not meaningfully included the voices of local leaders. as participants noted, tribal members are often in the best position to identify needed interventions because of their close connection to the land and ability to observe changes in real time. cantzler and huynh (2016) offered a useful framework for analyzing whether interventions meaningfully engage with the principles of indigenous environmental justice. indigenous environmental justice must entail “fair distribution of the benefits of those resources, environmental justice & native americans in the gulf coast region studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 21 equitable decision making power over all matters affecting the resources, and the recognition of and respect for indigenous peoples and their unique cultural orientations towards the natural world” (cantzler & huynh, 2016, p. 219). recognizing tribal sovereignty over the land would allow for more stringent environmental regulation, as is the case for the city of albuquerque, which must abide by the higher water quality standards put in place by the pueblo of isleta tribe (crepelle, 2018b). other tribes have used the clean air act to restrict air pollution from off-reservation industries, and legal obstacles related to the dakota access pipeline largely rest upon its passage over federally recognized tribal land (crepelle, 2018b; gilio-whitaker, 2019). although these findings are extremely important for shedding light on the environmental justice issues experienced by this gulf coast tribe, it is important not to generalize these findings beyond this particular tribe as each tribe will have its own particular geographic and cultural context. these findings are also cross-sectional, and although our approach is congruent with the strategies outlined in critical ethnography, future research could benefit from repeat interviews over an extended period of time to explore long-term changes in greater depth. this may be particularly important when exploring issues of climate change. future research should further explore the health impacts of environmental issues in the region, as several participants expressed concern about increasing cancer prevalence and other health problems. these findings support national findings that native american groups experience high levels of environmental injustice (maldonado, 2014; vinyeta et al., 2016) and further contextualize these findings for a native american tribe in the gulf coast region of the united states. one of the distinct contributions of this work is it expands the use of the fhort to environmental injustice. these findings highlight that the experience of environmental justice issues and lack of federal recognition act as interacting risk factors that impact the overall well-being of tribal members. attempts to mitigate further land loss in the region should include native american leaders and voices and address concerns related to the loss of tribal identity associated with land loss. considering the rapid changes occurring to the landscape, the need for action driven by indigenous desires and knowledge is urgent. acknowledgements the authors are thankful for the dedicated work and participation of the tribes and research assistants over the years who have contributed to this work. this work was supported by the fahs-beck fund for research and experimentation faculty grant program [grant number #552745]; the silberman fund faculty grant program [grant #552781]; the newcomb jessica liddell, catherine mckinley & jennifer m. lilly studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 1-24, 2021 22 college institute faculty grant at tulane university; university senate committee on research grant program at tulane university; the global south research grant through the new orleans center for the gulf south at tulane university; the center for public service at tulane university; office of research bridge funding program support at tulane university; and the carol lavin bernick research grant at tulane university. this work was also supported, in part, by award k12hd043451 from the eunice kennedy shriver national institute of child health & human development of the national institutes of health (krousel-wood-pi; catherine mckinley (formerly burnette) – building interdisciplinary research careers in women’s health (bircwh) scholar); and by u54 gm104940 from the national institute of general medical sciences of the national institutes of health, which funds the louisiana clinical and translational science center. research reported in this publication was supported by the national institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism of the national institutes of health under award number r01aa028201). the content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the national institutes of health. references burnette, c. e., sanders, s., butcher, h. k., & rand, j. t. 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(2016). indigenous food sovereignty, renewal and us settler colonialism. in m. c. rawlinson & c. ward (eds.), the routledge handbook of food ethics (pp. 354-365). routledge. calcagni final correspondence address: mariana calcagni, institute of sociology, freie universität berlin, 14195 berlin, germany; email: mariana.calcagni@fu-berlin.de issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 peasant struggles in times of crises: the political role of rural and indigenous women in chile today mariana calcagni freie universität berlin, germany abstract this article explores the political role of rural and indigenous women in the context of the socio-environmental, health and political crises in chile, where social movements have pressured the political establishment to decisively move towards a change in chile’s constitutional foundations. the study analyses the historical political demands and strategies of the national association of rural and indigenous women (anamuri) as a case of the women’s peasant movement with a relevant political role in shaping the social demands in the face of the crises. following the political ecology of food through the decolonial and ecofeminist perspective and the social movement theory, findings indicate the current relevance of rural and indigenous women as political actors of change, a relevance that has been neglected for most of chile’s history. with their leadership and socially grounded demands, peasant and indigenous women are influencing the political agenda decisively using strategies that are shared with other peasant movements in latin america. rural and indigenous women are fundamental political actors that should undoubtedly be considered when studying struggles for social change in the 21st century. keywords peasantry; socio-environmental justice; food sovereignty; ecofeminism; peasant popular feminism; anamuri; chile introduction the debate on a new constituent framework is shaping chile's political and social agenda for this new decade. in 2020, a constituent convention was democratically elected, composed of 154 representatives, with gender equity, and 17 seats reserved for indigenous representatives. the constituent process is still open, since in 2022 the chilean people voted to reject the constitutional proposal made by the convention. nevertheless, political actors previously absent from democratic processes made their way into the political arena, among them rural and indigenous women. the first president of the peasant struggles in times of crises studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 161 constitutional convention (cc), elisa loncón, was not only a renowned academic but also a mapuche women activist for the linguistic rights of native peoples. her election, as well as the election of many rural women, indigenous women, and leaders of social movements who have long been absent in the spaces of direct political advocacy, shows the relevance of these political actors in the new power spheres. the current civilizational crisis in latin america (cusicanqui, 2018; estermann, 2012; millán, 2013; svampa, 2010) is manifested in distinctive ways in each country. in chile, the cradle of the neoliberal model, the critical conjuncture is expressed in at least three coexisting crises associated with the socio-environmental, health and political situation. the expression of these crises over the last 10 years has found its culminating point in the social outbreak of october 2019, the largest social mobilization in the history of the country, aiming for a fairer country and a dignified life. the context of crises in chile has opened a window of political opportunity (tarrow, 2011) for the channeling of demands that historically have not been resolved by a neoliberal, subsidiary and strongly centralized state. organized citizens have been the ones who have pushed the political agenda and are promoting a profound change in the political landscape, generating a social “tipping point” that has irremediably changed the chilean identity. this organized citizenship is made up of diverse movements and demands – some more visible than others – that advocate for a change in the development model, and voices that had been silenced for a long time but have now spoken out and repositioned themselves in the space of disputes over the ways of living. one of these voices is that of peasant and indigenous women, whose struggle for political change has been overlooked in the sociological analysis of recent decades. drawing on political ecology, ecofeminist and decolonial perspectives, this article aims to explore the political role of rural and indigenous women in this context of crises in chile. the study offers important insights into peasant and indigenous women as crucial political actors for better understanding the struggles for social change. a case study is presented based on the analysis of the historical political demands and strategies of the oldest and largest women’s movement in rural chile, the national association of rural and indigenous women (asociación nacional de mujeres rurales e indígenas, anamuri). founded in 1998, anamuri’s mission is to contribute to the integral development of rural and indigenous women and “its work is based on an ideology aiming to build equal relations, considering the gender, class and ethnicity, in an environment of respectful relations between people and nature” (anamuri, 2021b, para. 2). the anamuri’s foundresses came from other leftist peasant organizations with long territorial work during the civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990) and split from their movements to form an autonomous space exclusively by and for women (valdés, 2017). initially with 54 women, today it has over 10,000 members and is present in all regions of chile, grouped in intermariana calcagni studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 162 regional fronts (northern, central and southern zone). it is composed of grassroots organizations and individual affiliations, including the participation of several indigenous women from the aymara, colla, diaguita and mapuche peoples. they have a clear ideological stance against capitalism, neoliberalism, patriarchy, extractivism and colonialism. in 2021, two members of anamuri were chosen to be among the 154 people to write the new political constitution. following a qualitative case study, this research conducts a systematic content analysis of anamuri’s reports, documents, and statements over the last 11 years, covering the period from 2010 to 2021.1 the main source is the correo de las mujeres del campo, a bulletin created to disseminate the activities carried out by anamuri, which also includes political articles, analysis of political affairs, and presentations of relevant topics that serve as material for political education. it also analyses the content of the two online conferences held by anamuri in october 2020 and may 2021, during the campaign for the elections of representatives for the political constitution. the structure of the article is as follows. it begins with an overview of three intertwined crises that help us to understand the current socio-political context in chile is introduced. next, a theoretical discussion on the political ecology of food through the lenses of the decolonial and ecofeminist perspectives is presented. the third section delves into food movements and popular peasant feminism in latin america. the fourth section presents the main findings regarding anamuri’s political demands, while the fifth section describes their main strategies. the last section offers some conclusions, accounting for the perseverance of anamuri’s demands and strategies that broaden the focus toward hopeful futures for social movements in latin america. understanding the chilean situation from the perspective of intertwined crises social movements have provided important inspirations for the discussion on the global civilizational crisis (cusicanqui, 2018; estermann, 2012; leinius, 2021; millán, 2013; svampa, 2010). critiques of the development model, the consequences of exacerbated capitalism, and the links between patriarchy and extractivism have become a fundamental part of academic debates and social struggles in latin america (leinius, 2021). however, the civilizational crisis is expressed in differentiated manners according to each context. for analytical purposes, i distinguish three different ways in which the civilizational crisis expresses itself in chile today. these have been forged over the last decades, 1 the collected documents are available on anamuri’s website (https://www.anamuri.cl/). the content analysis was structured in four stages: (i) exploratory cross-sectional reading of all content on the website since 2010; (ii) selection of the main documents and statements according to thematic relevance and depth of content; (iii) in-depth analysis of the content of the main documents and statements; (iv) in-depth analysis of the online conferences. coding was carried out in three stages: open, axial and selective, with maxqda software. peasant struggles in times of crises studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 163 and although they have different temporal and political origins, today they coexist and define part of the ongoing issues that characterize the current times. the crises correspond to the socio-environmental crisis, the health crisis, and the political crisis. firstly, the socio-environmental crisis in chile is expressed in its vulnerability to climate change and the weak environmental governance of damages caused by extractivist industries. the rural sector in chile follows an agro-export model that concentrates its main economic activities in the extractive industries of forestry, mining and agriculture. on top of that, for the last 12 years, the country has been facing a megadrought (alvarez-garreton et al., 2021), which together with a system of private governance of water resources has caused the increase of pockets of water poverty and inequality in a worrying way (correa-parra et al., 2020). at the same time, there are still environmental sacrifice zones where the inhabitants get seriously sick due to the contamination of ecosystems caused by polluting hotspots (valenzuelafuentes et al., 2021). one hundred sixteen socio-environmental conflicts and more than 1,100 socio-environmental protests with demands from indigenous peoples, environmentalists and regionalists were registered only between 2012 and 2017 (allain, 2019), and that number is likely to have increased. the rise of environmental concerns is not just a question of post-material values (inglehart 1990), but a material reality that affects all people who require at least clean water, food, and air daily. the concern for the satisfaction of these basic needs: …is not based on ethical or aesthetic ideals, nor abstract feelings about “nature” or planet earth; it arises as a response to a concrete situation: the deterioration of the environment in which people live or the change in the rules of access to resources, which has a direct impact on people’s well-being and the reproduction of their ways of life. (folchi, 2020, p. 101) thus, and as folchi and many other environmental scholars and activists conclude, an environmental issue is in itself a social issue, and environmental justice is also social justice (folchi, 2020). the second crisis that helps us to better understand the current chilean context is the one related to the global health issue, which has been most severely evidenced through the covid-19 pandemic, but this has also shown the existence of a once-forgotten health crisis: the global syndemic. it refers to the coexistence of high rates of obesity and overweight with rates of malnutrition in the context of climate change and raises the question of food security and food sovereignty (martorell et al., 2020; mendenhall & singer, 2019; swinburn et al., 2019). chile is the country with the highest prevalence of overweight and obesity in the oecd (74%), and this figure is increasingly accentuated in the most vulnerable sectors, in the female and rural population (oecd, 2019). the health crisis has also evidenced the lack of a robust social protection system able to cope with the socio-economic repercussions of the mariana calcagni studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 164 crisis and the need for a transformation of the food systems to sustain a healthy population (martorell et al., 2020). recent evidence shows that the covid-19 pandemic hit women and female-headed rural households particularly hard, especially in terms of income generation and food security (mlynarz et al., 2021). the explosive rise of communal cooking (ollas communes),2 as a popular strategy for coping with the food challenges of the covid-19 pandemic, is just one example of the lack of a public policy consistent with the challenges of access to good quality food at a fair price. finally, the third crisis has to do with political matters. the politicalinstitutional crisis of the last 12 years in chile shows the steady decline of trust in institutions while the perception of injustice has increased (latinobarometro, 2020). social inequality between rich and poor has increased over the last decade and has been particularly detrimental to women and indigenous people (coes, 2020). currently, the population in poverty conditions in rural areas is more than double that in urban areas (ministerio de desarrollo social, 2017). from a historical perspective, several scholars argue that rural inequalities date back to the totalitarian regime. all the improvements in social rights of the agrarian reform (1964-1973), such as unionization, land restitution and land distribution for peasants, were reversed by the counter-reform carried out during the civil-military dictatorship (1973-1990) (bengoa, 2015; bowen et al., 2012; gómez, 2002; kay, 1978, 2015; valdés, 2017). peasants were expropriated of their means of production, especially land and water, a process that bengoa (2017) refers to as a period of typical original accumulation. the chilean agrarian structure changed, replacing the hacendal model with the agribusiness model that implied profound changes in rural lifestyles. among these implications are the precariousness of working conditions, the feminization of agricultural jobs, the increase in seasonal workers (temporero/as), and the increase in the immigrant population in informal conditions (valdés, 2017, 2021). as a result, thousands of peasants ceased to be peasants and became pobladores, impoverished inhabitants of small towns or the most impoverished areas of the cities (bengoa, 2017; valdés, 2015, 2021; valdés et al, 2017). during the last decade, social movements have emerged with great force demanding changes in the policies inherited from the dictatorship, whose epitome is the political constitution imposed in 1980. however, they are also demanding structural changes given the consequences of a neoliberal model that has deepened inequalities and generated unfulfilled expectations (araujo, 2019; folchi, 2020). faced with this neoliberal model, and with the peasantry and the indigenous population being among the most disadvantaged groups, 2 ollas communes are a popular strategy for community food and cooking and stand out for being self-managed and with a strong component of political denunciation of hunger. their leaders are most often women. in chile, they have been used historically in times of economic difficulties, for example in the economic crises of the 1930s, 1980s and during the covid-19 pandemic in 2020-2021. peasant struggles in times of crises studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 165 peasant movements have been demanding for decades a change in the food system and the development model (bowen et al., 2012). at the same time, this process has coexisted with the cycle of social mobilizations that began in 2011 with the student mobilization demanding public, free, and good quality education. it was followed by the social movement for a decent retirement and a pay-as-you-go pension system, the environmental movements, and the feminist movement. the latter burst with great force as an important wave in 2018, demanding gender equality, free and safe abortion, and the end of patriarchal violence. thus, social mobilization from the last decade has been the form of expression of a broad social discontent that criticizes the fundamental bases of a neoliberal social and economic model that has prevailed for at least four decades (araujo, 2019). the culmination points of the social mobilizations occurred in october 2019 with the social outbreak (estallido social), which was initiated by a hike in the subway fare (see araujo, 2019; coes, 2020; folchi, 2020; waissbluth, 2020). the student revolt reacted quickly to this fee increase and was joined by many of the social actors who had been demanding sectoral changes for over a decade, this time with a common demand for a dignified life. the mobilized actors included students, labor unions, health and education unions, the feminist movement, the environmental movement and movements for popular sovereignty and peoples’ autonomy. as mentioned above, these political demands were channeled institutionally, opening the way for the election of a constitutional convention with gender equity and representation of indigenous people in october 2020. after the rejection of the proposal in 2022, the constitutional process is still ongoing, and will probably be open for a long time. it is very early to conclude what the constituent process will bring about. however, in this article, i am interested in highlighting the work that anamuri has been doing during the last decade and that allowed them to reach the constitutional process supported by a long trajectory of work in pursuing the claims for rural and indigenous women. a political ecology of food from the decolonial and ecofeminist perspectives one of the fundamental critiques advanced by political ecology has to do with the rejection of positivist approaches such as the ontological separation between nature and culture, and the epistemological and political consequences of this separation in the context of power and inequalities (moragues-faus & marsden, 2017). food and its hybrid ontology of both pure matter and also loaded with cultural meanings and symbolisms (fischler, 1988; guptill et al., 2013), offers a useful perspective to analyze and rethink human-environment interactions from an approach that overcomes, or at least questions, the traditional nature-culture dichotomy. i define this dualism as an anthropocentric analytical distinction of eurocentric, christian and cartesian mariana calcagni studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 166 origins that envisions the human being as a species with subjective and reflective intellectual capacities (“culture”), a fact that would separate us from the rest of the material world, which does not possess these capacities (animals, plants, objects). nature from the cartesian approach is seen as mere matter or resource, establishing a radical split between subject and object (larraín, 2021). this analytical distinction has had substantive epistemological consequences, as it constitutes the basis of the modern western worldview. in latin america, this ontological separation was brutally imposed in the colonial period, as the original inhabitants (now called indigenous) did not and do not necessarily share this ontology. of course, over time this analytical distinction has been debated and complexified in a dialogical way, mainly by the decolonial perspectives that intend to offer meaning to the alternatives or subaltern cultures (conway & lebon, 2021b; cusicanqui, 2018; escobar, 2012; espinosa miñoso et al., 2014; kiran, 2013; kothari et al., 2019). questioning the predominant ontology of nature/culture duality is key for the discussion of the socio-environmental crisis and has led to a debate on the epistemological process of standpoints, and a return to the basic questions of who observes, from where they observe, and what observation is considered valid. for that, the work of amerindian anthropology, especially that of viveiros de castro (2013) on amerindian perspectivism, is illustrative. something that for the current eurocentric academia seems disruptive, in latin america appears as a founding part of the diverse worldviews that exist in the territory and makes evident that for centuries these worldviews have been silenced, criminalized, and underestimated. boaventura de sousa santos thus proposes the need to delve into the epistemologies of the south that acknowledge the diverse ways of understanding the world beyond the eurocentric ontology (de sousa santos, 2010). these diverse ways of understanding are also different ways of feeling, acting, and relating. this decolonial perspective calls for diversity not to be monopolized by a general theory, but to move towards the recognition of the plural and pluriversal forms of knowledge that historically have been oppressed (de sousa santos, 2010).3 another contemporary variant of the debate on standpoints, although with origins in feminist theories and science and technology studies, has contributed to the understanding that all knowledge is situated (haraway, 1988). in line with the idea of overcoming dualities and recognizing that these dualities are not equivalent, but that there is a moral valuation that privileges one over the other (knowledge produced by privileged epistemic subjects vs. marginalized subjects of the feminist standpoint theory), haraway criticizes the idea of empiricist and positivist scientific knowledge and proposes that all knowledge is situated and partial knowledge (haraway, 1988). this gives relevance to peripheral, marginalized or subaltern perspectives, the worldviews of which 3 the notion of pluriverse refers to a “broad transcultural compilation of concrete concepts, worldviews, and practices from around the world, challenging the modernist ontology of universalism in favor of a multiplicity of possible worlds” (kothari et al. 2019, p. xvii). peasant struggles in times of crises studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 167 are usually rejected or subjugated. one of haraway’s radical ideas, in line with the neo-materialist school of thought, is that nature is not a raw material subject to humanization, to be “discovered,” decoded or produced, but is rather a conversation charged with social relations of power (manzi, 2020). feminist political ecology takes up the concept of “naturecultures” proposed by haraway, understanding that “nature is not other to culture but rather the two inform and co-create each other” (harcourt & nelson, 2015, p. 17). thus, and in coincidence with amerindian perspectivism, haraway proposes an analysis that acknowledges the active agency of the “world,” and not only of human beings (also see chakrabarty, 2021). following ecofeminisms, understanding the world as an active subject implies recognizing its agency and not seeing it as an appropriable resource (haraway, 1988; piazzini, 2014). as early as 1993, mies and shiva developed the foundations of ecofeminist thinking, concerned with the recognition of women in the reproductive sphere. they wondered about the relationship between patriarchal oppression and the oppression of nature in the name of progress (mies & shiva, 2014). the authors developed the ecofeminist theory as a practical and activist philosophy, where the intersectional approach acquires fundamental importance when analyzing socio-environmental phenomena.4 ecofeminisms question the hierarchical dualisms and ask for alternatives, subaltern visions and proposals for new ways of inhabiting that allow us to understand not only the relationships between humans but also between humans and other living beings (herrero, 2016; mies & shiva, 2014; puig de la bellacasa, 2017). this is one of the founding ideas of the “more-than-humans” perspectives, which starts from the recognition of an ethic of care as the basis of any social interaction between humans and nonhumans (puig de la bellacasa, 2017). thus, according to mies and shiva, ecofeminisms could give us clues to solve the civilizational crisis, affirming that there can be no development without respect for human and ecological limits (mies & shiva, 2014). however, ecofeminist perspectives have been criticized for being essentialist and valuing women’s reproductive capacity as a feature that would bring them “closer to nature.” for example, the traditional simile between women and seeds as both with potential and reproductive capacity has been strongly criticized by constructive ecofeminists, calling it a positivist essentialism typical of the structuralism that is at the base of the patriarchal notion. for the same reason, alicia puleo garcía (2017) proposes the urgent need for critical ecofeminism to overcome the capitalist and patriarchal model. indeed, given the relative position of women in economic development and the increasing feminization of agricultural work, women farmers are more likely to be 4 intersectionality “recognizes the multidimensional and relational nature of social locations, places and forces (economic, cultural, political), lived experiences, and overlapping systems of discrimination and subordination. in this way too, an intersectionality approach captures several levels of difference while simultaneously revealing how intersecting forms of oppression create opportunities and benefits for those who identify as normative” (williams-forson & wilkerson, 2011, p. 11). mariana calcagni studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 168 affected by socio-environmental crises, especially those related to access to critical resources such as water, land and food (agarwal, 2014; valdés, 2005, 2015). according to puleo, “food sovereignty and agroecology have proven to be excellent travel companions of ecofeminism in the construction of this new model that not only addresses the environmental balance but empowers women in their daily lives” (puleo garcía, 2017, p. 214).5 studying anamuri seed curators, cid and hinrichs (2015) report that the female seed curators produce an identity based on the historical female roles of caring for and conserving seeds from the gardens. this image consolidates the traditional rural sexual division of labour, which associates women with the reproductive sphere. however, the authors argue that this production of identities is a political strategy to acquire visibility and political centrality. this production of identity would be associated with what spivak calls strategic essentialism, which corresponds to “reflecting on the claims of subaltern groups (indigenous people and women, among others) that call upon and construct an essence to achieve political, economic and/or social objectives” (cid & hinrichs, 2015, p. 353). the approaches of political ecology, together with decolonial and ecofeminist perspectives presented in this section, will illuminate the critical analysis of the demands and strategies used by anamuri to position itself as a social movement that claims food sovereignty and the role of peasant and indigenous women in food production and agricultural cultures in chile. food movements and popular peasant feminism in latin america food systems have been strongly criticized by social movements for their severe social impacts (edelman et al., 2014; fundación heinrich böll et al., 2018; mcmichael, 2009; schiff & levkoe, 2014) and environmental impacts (crippa et al., 2021; gillespie & van den bold, 2017; haysom et al., 2019; ingram, 2011). these impacts have generated many forms of inequalities that are interconnected and influence each other in an entangled way (jelin et al., 2017). alternatives to the corporate food regime (mcmichael, 2006) are diverse in their demands and scales of action (local, national, regional, transnational) coming mainly from peasant, indigenous and organized ecological activist groups. these groups can be interpreted analytically as food movements that advocate for transforming the corporate food regime towards a more just, ecological and democratic food system (allen, 2010; motta, 2021b).6 in this sense, anamuri as a peasant and indigenous organization can be understood 5 unless otherwise noted, all translations from spanish or portuguese are the author’s. 6 food movements advocate for overcoming inequalities in the food system. they include but are not limited to peasant movements, alternative food networks, feminist alliances for food sovereignty, food justice movements, vegetarian or vegan movements (motta, 2021b). peasant struggles in times of crises studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 169 as a food movement. many of these movements question the very logic of the human-environment interactions described in the previous section, as well as the intersectional inequalities (i.e., class, gender, ethnicity, race, citizenship, etc.) that are reproduced in the food system (motta, 2021a; teixeira & motta, 2022). it is precisely these alternative movements that have made visible the main injustices and negative impacts of the agribusiness sector, with a focus on combating hunger, land grabbing, climate change, food waste, nutritional health, and social rights, and which are promoting a food and agricultural transition (fundación heinrich böll et al., 2018; motta, 2021b). therefore, they fight for a transition based on productive alternatives, such as peasant family farming, agroecology, regenerative agriculture, organic production, and permaculture, among others. despite local particularities, the struggle of peasant movements in latin america has been organized around certain common demands in the region, among which i highlight the struggle for land, the struggle for food sovereignty, the defense and promotion of labor rights, the recognition of indigenous and peasant cultures and their ways of production, and access to and governance of common goods. sociological interest in the figure of the peasantry faded as rural migration to urban spaces and agribusiness progressed. however, the civilizational crisis seems to bring back the figure of the peasantry as a relevant political actor, especially for critical agrarian studies and feminisms in latin america (carrasco & corral, 2017; edelman, 2016; lópez & betancourt, 2021; rosset & altieri, 2018; svampa, 2010; van der ploeg, 2010). although critical agrarian studies acknowledge the peasant as a relevant contemporary actor (edelman, 2011; edelman et al., 2014; van der ploeg, 2010; rosset & altieri, 2018), the gender perspective is still absent and represents a challenge for current sociological research. there is evidence, though, that the interlinkages between popular feminisms, food sovereignty and peasant struggles are gaining more attention from both scholars and social movements and require further analysis (e.g., the world march of women, marcha das margaridas, anamuri, la via campesina) (conway, 2018, 2021; motta, 2021a; teixeira & motta, 2022). popular feminism emerged in latin america in the 1980s, with specific demographic and political features. it represents the demands and experiences of the lower class, economically marginalized, and working-class women commonly called popular sectors, with a leftist political stance characterized as anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial (conway, 2018, 2021). in its origins, it closely overlapped with the struggles of the women’s movements of that time (conway, 2021; hiner, 2021). due to geopolitical factors such as neoliberal democratization processes and the decline of socialism as a political horizon, the concept lost salience among academics and activists during the 1990s (conway & lebon, 2021a, 2021b). popular feminism returned to the forefront in the 2000s, with the world march of women as one important referent. mariana calcagni studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 170 however, the absence of deeper reflections and debates on the inclusion of indigenous perspectives and racialized communities in latin american popular feminism has been criticized (conway, 2021; hiner, 2021). thus, recent efforts have been made to foster popular feminisms that advocate for understanding the complexity of racialization, indigenization, and decolonization processes (conway, 2021). popular peasant feminism is one of these multiple strands and has its origin in social movements, specifically, in the women’s articulation of the latin american coordination of rural organizations (coordinadora latinoamericana de organizaciones del campo, cloc) – la via campesina (pinheiro barbosa, 2021). it started as a political project distancing itself from urban and upper classes feminisms, but also from the popular feminism of the 1980s, acknowledging decisively and explicitly the specific struggles of indigenous, afro-descendant, and peasant women in rural territories in latin america (bhattacharjya et al., 2013; cid & hinrichs, 2015; hiner, 2021; pinheiro barbosa, 2021; siliprandi & zuluaga, 2014). the rise of popular peasant feminism has brought new spaces of convergence among women’s struggles, now related to the natural commons. in this, we find many points of convergence with the approaches of critical ecofeminisms: as popular feminism is reconfigured in relation to rural, racialized, and indigenous popular sectors, the content of women’s care work and the politics of popular feminism shift and expand to include the defense of land, water, and ecosystems and resistance to despoliation and dis-possession. (conway & lebon, 2021b, p. 20) this invites us to delve deeper into the political demands and strategies used by women peasant movements, and anamuri in particular. anamuri’s main demands: popular sovereignty, self-determination, and food sovereignty for a new political constitution anamuri was founded in 1998 to strengthen the partnership and demands of indigenous and rural women, but its origins date back to the pre-dictatorship period. some of the foundresses call themself “daughters of the agrarian reform,” acknowledging their peasant and popular origins. others were militants of socialist or communist political parties and were initiated into trade union struggles at a very early age. they define themselves as a peasant and women’s movement with socialist political demands, as a movement opposed to the capitalist, extractivist and patriarchal economic system that “violates the rights of peasant and indigenous women to live in a place free of contamination, in harmony with the environment and that denies us the basic necessities for the subsistence of our agro-cultures” (anamuri, 2021b). with over 20 years of experience, anamuri’s struggle is complex and advocates for systemic change. to better understand anamuri’s struggle, i distinguish and describe its political demands organized into four intertwined peasant struggles in times of crises studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 171 categories, which refer to popular sovereignty, self-determination and the question of feminism, food sovereignty, and the demand for a new political constitution. the political claim that encompasses all the demands and is at the base of anamuri’s struggle is popular sovereignty rooted in requests for fundamental social rights, with a strong focus on labor rights and gender equity, and principles such as solidarity, sisterhood, the common good, cooperativism, and social justice. popular sovereignty can be considered as an umbrella concept that implies more than just the right to vote (commonly interpreted as national sovereignty), and more than the defense of constitutional rights and guarantees. it is grounded on a motivation to change the prevailing extractivist, racist, and neoliberal capitalist model in chile. this is expressed in the following statement: under the concept of modernity there is no guarantee for historical social rights and rights of nature, the individual and collective rights are restricted: gender, class, territory, sovereignty are alien concepts. therefore, the right to a life of dignity and free of violence towards sovereignty and the recognition of the active role of women and dissidents in all spheres of society is vital for a new deal. differences exist, but the state under capitalism maintains a relationship of entrepreneur– salaried, employer–tenant. our struggle is against capitalism and against imperialism. we advocate for other forms of non-vertical and non-sectarian organization, as well as respecting the differences. there is a segregating culture, the violence is singular and collective, material and cultural, gendered, physical, psychosocial, symbolic, and economic. it is imposed and does not respect otherness. (anamuri, 2020, p. 48) anamuri has developed a radical and profound criticism of extractivism and the exploitation of nature, which reflects the deep discomfort felt by rural and indigenous women with chile’s development model. a significant part of anamuri’s reports is dedicated to criticizing the extractive and agricultural industries and their negative social and environmental impacts. the salmon industry, forestry, mega-mining, agribusiness and agrochemicals are the main industries scrutinized and criticized. government policies are also criticized for allowing and promoting the extractive industry in the national territory. anamuri’s demand for popular sovereignty simultaneously reflects social class and decolonial struggles. it refers, on the one hand, to the traditional struggles of the lower classes (hence the term popular) demanding the fulfilment of social and labour rights. on the other hand, from a decolonial perspective, it demands the capacity to generate political guidelines based on indigenous identities and respecting ancestral knowledges and nature. popular sovereignty can be understood as a critical concept that questions the foundations of power; it is a demand that opposes and tries to overcome the subordination and economic and cultural domination of the popular classes and indigenous peoples in chile. mariana calcagni studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 172 the struggle for popular sovereignty is intertwined with a second fundamental demand, which i refer to as the self-determination of peasant and indigenous women. following the work of margara millán, this demand for self-determination can be understood as a struggle to recover its poiesis (millán, 2013), that is, its capacity to produce and maintain itself. although other scholars have referred to it as a struggle for autonomy and the reduction of economical dependency (rosset & altieri, 2018; van der ploeg, 2010), the idea of self-determination is more comprehensive and includes the question of peasant identities. for anamuri, self-determination implies having access, governance, and protection of common goods (such as water, land, and seeds) and to be able to have an “economic development with local identity” (anamuri, 2015b, p. 12) that does not leave rural and indigenous women at the mercy of the variations of the capitalist labor market. anamuri’s concerns regarding self-determination have a special focus on preserving peasant and indigenous identities and traditions. although anamuri recognizes that indigenous and peasant identities are diverse,7 they defend and celebrate the plurality of these identities and find common ground in the struggle for their historical demands. some older women leaders and members have expressed concerns about the feeling that indigenous and peasant identity is disappearing or fading because of the migration process of the young people that move to cities for working or studying. this reveals a concern for the relationship between identities and territorial belonging. the demand for self-determination also includes a stance on feminism and the relevance of women’s rights. anamuri does not have a unique vision regarding the type of feminism they endorse as an organization, but there is a clear reference to popular peasant feminism, and although not explicit aspects of ecofeminism were found in the document analyses. the idea of a “feminist proposal” appears for the first time in the analysis of the may 2015 bulletin and a special issue for popular peasant feminism was launched in december 2015. popular peasant feminism and the role of women’s mobilizations were highlighted in 2019, pointing out particularly the joint work with other feminist organizations such as the coordinadora 8m in chile and the world march of women. according to anamuri, popular peasant feminism is a term under construction that unifies feminist demands with a class perspective, specifically, peasant demands, and “calls for equality and justice between men and women at the level of society, of the peasant movement organizations themselves and of the families and communities to which they belong” (anamuri, 2015, p. 53). 7 the acronym was originally “anamur” and did not explicitly include indigenous demands. but indigenous women, especially mapuche, quickly insisted on incorporating their identity explicitly in the name and in the organization’s demands, especially claims to land restitution and self-determination. peasant struggles in times of crises studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 173 the idea of popular peasant feminism is relatively recent and is shared by other lvc organizations (áreas blass, 2021).8 analysis of the complementary bibliography confirms that the dispute over the various types of feminisms is not resolved within anamuri and is mainly related to the perspectives of indigenous women who do not always share feminist thought. mapuche communities, for example, do not believe that the popular feminist tradition is something they can relate to since its cosmovision is based on complementary duality (anamuri, 2015a; cañet & painemal, 2018; painemal & huenul colicoy, 2021). in this regard, two mapuche members of anamuri, isabel cañet and millaray painemal, pose the following question: “how much does embracing a ‘chilean’ or western-style feminism contribute to our [mapuche] people’s struggle?” (cañet & painemal, 2018, para. 11). referring to the popular peasant feminism, they state: indigenous women have said they do not feel represented and have expressed their disagreements [with it], which have not been well received and have generated certain tensions. indigenous women have appealed for recognition of their own way of thinking and to reestablish elements such as balance and complementarity, which is present in the cosmovision. (cañet & painemal, 2018, para.8) this shows the disputes within the organization that demonstrate the complexity of creating a national movement that unites common demands. nevertheless, anamuri has embraced this complexity and the differences within their members through the idea of peasant and women’s solidarities and by stating that respecting their differences is what makes them stronger. the idea of solidarity is closely related to that of class identities, and the cause of preserving rural and popular cultures seems to be something that unites the members within anamuri. the concept of solidarity among indigenous and peasant women appears as a guiding principle in most of anamuri’s texts, by calling upon cooperation and building women’s alliances to face adversities. members are encouraged to foster solidarity in the struggles, and it is also celebrated when it becomes evident, as in catastrophes such as the 2010 earthquake, the forest fires in the summer season and the covid-19 pandemic. like many other food movement members of lvc, food sovereignty is perhaps anamuri’s most visible flag, and it includes choosing what and how to produce, defend and reproduce the peasant seeds,9 and demanding a new agrarian reform that advocates for the social function of the land. in latin 8 the slogan “without feminism there is no socialism” was embraced in the quito declaration (la via campesina, 2010), during the iv assembly of articulation of rural women of the cloc, but it did not explicitly refer to popular peasant feminism. 9 the term “peasant seeds” “refers to all or part of a plant organ (seed, tuber, cutting …) which is for reproduction. the peasants’ seeds come from plant populations managed by farmers, selected, sorted, and preserved before being sown, hence the term ‘peasant seed.’ the selection of seeds is both a selection by the farmer and a natural selection in the fields” (dubrulle et al., 2019). mariana calcagni studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 174 america, the commercialization of seeds and the promotion of industrial monocultures were marked by the entry of monsanto (now bayer) in the 1990s. anamuri was founded in this context, working in the defence and recovery of peasant seeds from its beginnings as a movement. anamuri has declared itself against the international convention for plant breeders (upov 91) that allows the breeder (whoever creates or discovers a seed variety) to have intellectual property over the seed. upov 91 was approved in 2011 despite citizen discontent but had to be reversed in march 2014 after criticism and large mobilizations by peasant and environmental organizations, including anamuri. however, now the most pressing struggle in this regard is against the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-pacific partnership (tpp11, including australia, brunei darussalam, canada, chile, malaysia, mexico, japan, new zealand, peru, singapore and vietnam), which among other things would affect the right to preserve indigenous and peasant seeds by again including upov 91 during its ratification. the government of president sebastián piñera put four times “extreme urgency” to the bill approving the tpp11, generating the frustration of social movements (including anamuri) that advocate for the protection of popular sovereignty. anamuri’s demand for food sovereignty also includes a struggle for a new comprehensive agrarian reform with a focus on the restitution of land lost during the counter-reform in the dictatorship. although calls for comprehensive agrarian reform were made as early as 2011, this demand is seen more distinctly in the analyzed reports from 2019, the year of the social outbreak. concerning anamuri’s struggle for food sovereignty, this quotation sums up their perception of the role they are playing in challenging the dominant food system: we are the peasant, rural and indigenous women who feed the world under healthy and clean peasant production systems, who fight every day against the agroindustrial food systems that manage monocultures and industrial animal production under perverse systems of production and animal abuse, which are causing enormous damage to people’s health and greenhouse gas pollution unprecedented in the history of our planet. (anamuri, 2020, p. 5) the demands for popular sovereignty, self-determination and food sovereignty have their culminating point in the demand for profound changes in the chilean political model. anamuri’s demand for a new political constitution through a “free and sovereign” constituent assembly (ca) has been a historical one, precisely because its founders fought for democracy and the end of the dictatorship. the current constitution was written in 1980 during the military dictatorship, and although it was reformed once in 2005 the social outbreak of 2019 was a sign of citizen discontent with the constitution and its origins. anamuri, which has its origins in peasant and leftist movements that fought against the dictatorship, has been campaigning for over 20 years for a constituent assembly to create a new supreme law. anamuri advocates for a new constitution to involve parity, and be plurinational and sovereign: peasant struggles in times of crises studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 175 a new constitution is necessary through a constituent assembly that encompasses all the assemblies and popular councils. it must be plurinational, that is, to assume that in the national territory there were other people before the constitution of the chilean state. the existence of other people and nations in the territory with their full sovereignty must be recognized. (anamuri, 2020, p. 38) many of the demands raised above have been curbed by pinochet’s constitution, well known for its emphasis on the role of the private sector (water rights being the epitome of this). hence, the struggle for a new constitution has become relevant and highly valued. as shown in the following section, these social demands have been channeled through political strategies and windows of opportunity that have allowed anamuri to position the movement’s demands. strategies for social change: alliances, political training, unionism, and advocacy towards a fair future the main strategies used by anamuri follow formal and informal institutional channels. the political strategies for directing anamuri’s demands can be grouped analytically into four interlinked dimensions: (i) alliances and political articulation; (ii) social and political training; (iii) unionism and women’s labor rights, and (iv) political advocacy. the first two can be understood to be “actions of social reproduction,” a term used by teixeira to refer to “activities that create the necessary conditions for the development of collective actions and for the very existence and permanence of social movements, such as the politics of alliances with other social movements, meetings, and political training” (teixeira, 2021, p. 5). the actions of social reproduction differ from forms of collective action, which refer to public and visible actions for advocacy such as strikes, demonstrations, or participation in public policy processes (teixeira, 2018, 2021). in that sense, the strategies of unionism and political advocacy can be understood as forms of collective action. concerning the alliances and political articulation, anamuri follows the traditional pattern of creating alliances at different scales, which are the basis of its operation. as an association, it is composed of grassroots organizations or individual members who decide to come together for a common good. at the national level, anamuri coordinates its actions with other social, indigenous and peasant movements, among which long-standing alliances with other chilean movements that are part of lvc stand out (e.g., with the ranquil confederation, the national assembly left-wing mapuche, the beekeeping network and the national council of producers (conaproch)). in addition, relevant alliances with other social movements are with the student movement (from 2011 onwards), the no + afp movement and, especially, the feminist mariana calcagni studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 176 movement. anamuri is part of the coordinadora 8m for the women’s demonstration on the 8th of march, and the articulación territorial feminista elena caffarena, which comprises many feminist organizations and works for a feminist perspective in the constitutional convention. at the international level, the main alliances are with lvc, cloc, and their member organizations, in addition to other food movements in the region that, although not part of lvc, share anamuri’s principles, such as the union of land workers (utt) of argentina. in these alliances, it is possible to observe a direct coincidence between anamuri’s demands described above and those of the other organizations and movements with whom they are articulated, generating a coherence at the level of movements in the latin american region. in addition to these alliances, anamuri receives support from international organizations that help them finance their trips, projects or activities. the german foundations heinrich böll, friedrich ebert and rosa luxemburg have strongly supported its work, as have other socialist organizations from europe. social and political training is one of the main strategies used by anamuri to consolidate its work and expand its territorial scope. anamuri’s organization is decentralized, but there are three thematic axes or fronts that articulate the work at the national level: the women workers’ front, the women producers’ front, and the indigenous front. to strengthen the fronts, anamuri has created training schools for rural and indigenous women that operate under the decolonial perspective. they work under the peasant-topeasant (ptp) methodology of horizontal learning, diálogo de saberes (dialogue of knowledge), and the promotion and safeguarding of ancestral and indigenous knowledge through orality. among the schools they have developed, the following stand out: the school of union training, the school of parity constitution, the gabriela mistral national itinerant school (on women in the movement, human rights, sustainable development, and organizational development), the school of agroecology, and the sociopolitical school. in fact, in 2015 the school of agroecology evolved into the institute of agroecology of latin america (iala) chile called “sembradoras de esperanza” (sowers of hope), through an initiative prompted and supported by clov and lvc. an important demand of anamuri is related to the labor rights of women workers in the agricultural and aquaculture sector. for the same reason, and following its trade unionist tradition, anamuri has consistently fostered the promotion of women workers’ labor rights and the recognition of reproductive work. the union training school and the work of the front salaried women evolved into the creation of the first national union of women workers of the land and sea in 2019, which aims at “the unity and strengthening of the agricultural and maritime sectors in the face of the subjugation of companies and the lack of interest of governments in solving the problems that afflict women workers” (anamuri, 2020, p. 30). the main reasons why they formed this union are related to their perception of trade unionism as a tool of legitimation of the organization, to strengthen the national unity of women peasant struggles in times of crises studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 177 workers in front of the companies, and to define unique tariffs in the country. anamuri had worked in ethical tribunals, but they had no legal weight. now, these tribunals became legal instances of denunciation and protection of labor rights before the national labor directorate. this represents an important step forward in making concrete the political demands of the organization for the defense of the labor rights of rural and indigenous women. in terms of political advocacy, anamuri is already a well-recognized national movement and has positioned itself as a relevant voice for public policies related to rural development and women. for instance, in the case of the upov 91 and tpp11 discussions, anamuri was invited to present at the working tables of the national congress to give its opinion on the matter and has also been invited by the ministry of agriculture and the ministry of women and gender equity to work in the rural women’s roundtables at the national and regional levels. the long trajectory of political advocacy allowed anamuri to deploy all its forces of active and binding participation in the constitutional process initiated after the social outbreak in october 2019. in line with their historical demand for a constitutional assembly, in the elections of councilors and constituents in may 2021 anamuri presented 13 women candidates to the municipal councils and eight women candidates to the constitutional convention. in this process, two women candidates for constituents were elected (ivanna olivares and alejandra flores), in a context where the lists of independents (not affiliated to political parties) achieved a relevant incidence and some traditional parties saw their incidence reduced to a minimum. by way of reference, the christian democratic party (dc) which is a party with a long trajectory and was crucial during the last 30 years of democracy from the centre-left coalition also obtained two seats, which represents a total failure for them. however, for anamuri, a movement with neither resources nor party trajectory, having two seats is probably the most relevant triumph in its history as a movement. the elected candidate ivanna olivares (30 years old) is the president of the diaguita taucan indigenous community. she could have made use of the quotas reserved for indigenous peoples but did not use them in a strategic way, thus increasing the membership of indigenous representatives in the convention. so did alejandra flores (60 years old), a teacher of aymara origin and self-defined ecofeminist. ivanna olivares is part of both anamuri and the movement for the defense of water, land and environmental protection (modatima), and the main focus of her campaign was the promotion of a solidary, plurinational, feminist, ecocentric, decolonial, secular and decentralized state. likewise, alejandra flores developed a program with the axes of human rights guarantees, labor and social security, health, education, culture, science, gender equity, free development and reproductive rights, inclusion and ecocentrism (among others). in the context of heated campaigns, both candidates stood out for having invested very little money in their campaigns compared to the traditional politicians running for office, thus disproving the idea that the more money political campaigns invest in mariana calcagni studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 178 advertising, the better the result will be.10 this was a historic triumph for anamuri, as they had a direct impact on the drafting of the proposal for a new chilean constitution to position their political demands, an inconceivable situation only 10 years ago. in the following quote, alejandra flores summarizes the themes that marked her political campaign and shows her disapproval of the traditional political parties: as i am aymara, one of the main issues is to fight for chile to be a plurinational, intercultural, ecological state, with the defense of our mother earth, of course, of water, land, territories, air... everything that implies the rights of nature. but my campaign focused more on bringing the voice of women to the constituent assembly… the equal participation that we women are going to have in this constituent process was not given to us by the political parties, we won it in the streets. (anamuri, 2021a). conclusions the main goal of this article was to analyze the political role of anamuri in the context of civilizational crises. a systematic content analysis methodology was used to obtain a deeper understanding of the movement’s demands and strategies. a limitation of this methodology is that it emphasizes what has already been published and often hides the processes of reflection and construction that the social movement goes through to arrive at the official text. therefore, future research on anamuri could build on what is proposed in this article and explore the personal experiences and trajectories of anamuri members. the evidence from this study suggests that, although food sovereignty remains the main banner of struggle and claim of the peasant movements in general and anamuri’s in particular, the demands of this movement are much deeper and more radical as they acknowledge the urgent need to change the capitalist, patriarchal and developmentalist model. in line with postdevelopment approaches, it is evident that there are important social bases with the potential for major socio-cultural transformations to overcome a model that continues to reproduce socio-environmental inequalities at the global level, including the food system. to conclude, i would like to emphasize that, first, anamuri has been fighting for over 20 years for popular sovereignty and human rights, for the self-determination of rural and indigenous women, for food sovereignty and for a new constitution to change the regulatory framework inherited from the military dictatorship. the conjunctural moment of multiple crises (socioecological, health and political), but especially the social outbreak in 2019, 10 ivanna olivares spent 1,165 usd and alejandra flores spent 7,895 usd according to the platform “quiénes son?” which gathers information on the candidacies (anon, 2021). peasant struggles in times of crises studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 179 constituted a relevant change in the structure of political opportunities (tarrow, 2011) for civil society. social activism and mobilizations managed to push the political agenda towards transformative changes. second, in this context, anamuri did not waste the change in the structure of political opportunity; quite the contrary, it took advantage and capitalized on its entire trajectory as a movement to position its demands strategically and it succeeded in doing so by gaining two seats on the constitutional convention. among the other 152 members, the two elected candidates from anamuri wrote a proposal for a political constitution for chile and used a privileged position to ensure that the historical demands of the movement were heard and become a permanent reality in the country. in this context, the ideas of popular peasant feminism (conway & lebon, 2021b), ecofeminism (mies & shiva, 2014) and decoloniality (infante, 2013; kiran, 2013) are gaining momentum in the political discussion, offering alternatives toward a more socially and environmentally just future. third, the strategy of alliances with the rest of the convention was fundamental to concretize their demands, and anamuri triumphed in at least some fundamental aspects of their struggle, such as the decolonial demand for a plurinational state, the inclusion of the right to food and the right of peasants and indigenous people to use and exchange traditional seeds, the ecofeminist demand for the recovery of water as a common good for public use, and the feminist demand for gender equality. all these points were effectively approved by a large majority in the proposal of the constitutional convention. anamuri has a long experience in using the strategy of alliances to achieve its goals, which was evidenced when analyzing its main strategies which included political training, advocacy, and unionism. despite that the first proposal was rejected, this experience in building alliances should continue to be used during the upcoming negotiations of the constitutional process. the involvement of anamuri in this novel process thus opens a new research agenda relevant to the sociology of social movements and post-development studies and inspires other social movements to keep fighting for their demands collectively. finally, i would like to reflect on the relevance and difficulty of studying sociological processes that are currently ongoing, such as the constitutional process in chile. of course, anamuri’s struggle is older than the events that mark the present, but the relevance of this historical moment makes it fundamental to analyze it with the tools at hand. certainly, time will allow us to gain a greater perspective, gain greater depth in the alliances and achievements reached by the constitutional convention, and assess the impact of women in the process. for the time being, rural and indigenous women are fundamental political actors that should undoubtedly be considered when studying the struggles for social change in the 21st century. mariana calcagni studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 160-184, 2023 180 acknowledgements i am grateful for the work of all the members of anamuri and the support they have given me during the research process. i appreciate the support, advice, and inspiring conversations with my colleagues in the project “food for justice: power, politics and food inequalities in a bioeconomy” at the institute for latin american studies of the free university of berlin. special thanks to prof. dr. renata motta, the supervisor of my phd thesis on the role of rural food movements in challenging the prevailing food system. my sincere thanks to the editors and the reviewers of this article, who helped me to refine the arguments and suggested new perspectives to deepen my thoughts on latin american feminisms and the agrarian question. this research was funded by the national agency for research and development (anid) / scholarship program / becas chile in the framework of the agreement signed with the german academic exchange service-daad 2020. references agarwal, b. 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(2013). la mirada del jaguar: introducción al perspectivismo amerindio. ediciones tinta limón. waissbluth, m. (2020). origenes y evolución del estallido social en chile. centro de sistemas públicos. universidad de chile. https://www.mariowaissbluth.com/descargas/mario_waissbluth_el_estallido_social_en_chil e_v1_feb1.pdf williams-forson, p., & wilkerson, a. (2011). “intersectionality and food studies.” food, culture and society, 14(1), 7-28. doi: 10.2752/175174411x12810842291119 correspondence address: peter brogan, department of geography, york university, 4700 keele street, toronto, ontario, canada m3j 1p3. email: pbrogan@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 2, 145-164, 2014 getting to the core of the chicago teachers’ union transformation peter brogan york university, canada this article draws on a comparative study of urban change and rank-and-file teacher rebellion in new york city and chicago, to explore the contemporary dynamics of what jamie peck (2013) calls “austerity urbanism” and its relationship to a rebirth of a social justice, grassroots teacher unionism in us urban centres. tracing the trajectories of one group of rank-and-file teacher dissidents in chicago, it argues that municipal unions are uniquely situated to lead the fight against austerity urbanism and the crisis tendencies of contemporary capitalism. to do this, however, trade unions will need to be reinvented and a different form of working class politic forged, grounded both in and outside of the trade union movement. only then may we see organized labour in north america contribute to a movement for radical and systemic change, which is key to building a more socially just urbanism and society more broadly. the case of the chicago teachers is highly instructive for activists, both inside and outside of the north american labour movement. introduction global cities like chicago are increasingly at the forefront of economic restructuring and political confrontation in an era of capitalist militancy and austerity (brenner, 2001; brenner & keil, 2006; sassen, 2001). a key component of global city development in the united states and canada since the great recession of 2008 has been to attack public sector workers and their unions in order to de-fund and commodify public services. as argued elsewhere (brogan, 2013), the dismantling of public education across the globe, while highly uneven and variegated (like neoliberalization), has been essential to restructuring contemporary capitalism and cities over the past two decades. one of the chief goals of education “reform” is to destroy the remaining vestiges of social welfare, thereby expanding capital accumulation and containing largely racialized populations in degraded parts of cities studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 146 peter brogan where people languish in poverty with few options for decent employment or improving their chances in life more generally (lipman 2011; ctu 2013). against the imperatives of neoliberalism, teachers’ unions have been among the most vocal defenders of publicly funded and universal education. yet, at the same time, many local affiliates, of both the american federation of teachers (aft) and the national education association (nea), and the national federations themselves have been either complicit or ineffective in combating the neoliberalization of public schooling (weiner 2013). in what follows i explore the experiences of the chicago teachers union (ctu), which has been one of the few local unions, in either the public or private sectors, in the united states to effectively challenge austere economic measures and push back against the neoliberal project in public education. in so doing, i argue, that they have inspired other workers in chicago and across the us and canada to build a different kind of social justice, grassroots unionism. such a unionism is a vital component of developing an alternative working class politics. this case demonstrates that if unions are to regain their once prominent role in the pursuit of social justice and workplace democracy, they will need to take the risks of organizing working class communities and fighting back through the construction of reciprocal labour-community alliances (tattersall 2010). it also illustrates how the contradictions of global city development may be leveraged in uniquely effective ways by a teachers’ union and its allies. in this, we should see the ctu under core’s (caucus of rank and file educators) leadership as a leading light in the renewal of public sector unions which have only recently become the subject of increased academic enquiry (ross & savage 2013, camfield 2013, 2009; johnson 1994). in part, this burgeoning literature on public sector unions is a result of the major decline of private sector unionism in both the united states and canada. but it is just as importantly a recognition by scholars of the special character of the public sector, employment within it and the potential that a reinvigorated municipal trade unionism might have in constructing a broader working class movement for social justice and systemic transformation. the research for this article is part of a broader, comparative ethnography of the geography of urban change and teacher unionism in new york city and chicago. it draws on 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with teacher activists, union staff, parents and community organizers between may 2011 and october 2012 in chicago, where i worked closely with core and the chicago teachers solidarity campaign. in addition, i draw on media coverage in the chicago sun-times and the chicago tribune, policy briefs and union research reports, communications and many informal conversations with teachers and their supporters at meetings and protests. first, this article unpacks the context and background of the rank-and-file rebellion that has led the ctu on a path of reinvention and revitalization. second, it discusses the political and economic pressures that preceded the 2012 round of negotiations between the chicago board of education and the ctu. i then explore the 2012 strike and its aftermath, with particular attention given to its implications for broader struggles for social justice in studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 getting to the core 147 chicago and elsewhere. i conclude by elucidating the most essential lessons the case holds for activists and scholars alike. background and context in the united states the erosion of private sector unionization has been offset by the evolution of public sector unions composed to a significant extent of women and historically racialized groups (rosenfeld 2013; lichtenstein, 2012). since the great recession, union density in the private sector has suffered the worst losses, with public sector density remaining steady at approximately 36 percent of the national average compared to 6.7 percent for the private sector in 2012. in this sense, public sector unions should be seen to a certain extent as the last bastions of working class strength in the united states, with the greatest potential capacity to lead an effective opposition to the politics and economics of austerity. it is this very strength and potential that help explain why public sector workers and their unions have come under such political and economic consternation from across the political spectrum. moreover, given public sector workers’ concentration in urban centres and their strategic location as the providers of a broad range of services, they are in a unique position to build deeply integrated labour-community alliances fighting for the pursuit of social justice and expanded public services.1 as hale and wills (cited in jordus-lier, 2012) have argued, workers employed by municipal governments are in a distinctive position to build popular political support, since municipal services are typically provided and consumed in a shared geographic location and are so vital to the production of everyday life.2 jordus-lier (2012, p. 428) usefully contrasts this with textile workers who typically do not have the same geographical proximity and sense of place which bring together public sector workers, service delivery systems, and communities who use diverse public services. thus, there is a greater potential to build solidarity in the struggle to defend and transform the provision and governance of public services because they appeal more directly to people’s everyday lives. in contrast to the stereotype of the union member as a white male, most us union members today are african-americans, latinos and women, especially in large metropolitan areas. they are also better educated then they were 30 years ago (rosenfeld, 2013). in the us as a whole, 13 percent of union members are black, 10 percent are latino and 33 percent are women. but these percentages are much greater in places like new york city and chicago, and much higher in the public sector (milkman & luce, 2013). as in canada, women and racialized groups generally in the us have made both the most gains in public sector employment as well as internally in trade union structures (lane, 2000; lichtenstein, 2012). turning to education policy in the united states today while critics on the left and the right alike begin from the premise that urban education is in crisis, with african-americans and latinos suffering the brunt of negative studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 148 peter brogan impacts, analyses of the cause of the crisis and possible solutions are miles apart. the us public school system is constituted as a network that includes traditional public neighbourhood schools, charter schools, and schools run under public-private partnerships. the neoliberal education reform project that has dominated education policy for the past 20 years is committed to dismantling public school systems and privatizing them through an expansion of charter schools and vouchers, a focus on standardized testing, the construction of scripted curriculum, a reorganization of school governance along corporate models (saltman, 2010), and the institution of draconian disciplinary policies aimed largely at working class african-american and latino students. the replacement of democratically elected school boards with mayoral-appointed bodies, demands for union and worker “flexibility,” and the introduction of merit pay schemes and new evaluation systems for teachers based overwhelmingly on standardized tests have similarly been essential to this program of restructuring. these new teacher evaluation systems have been used to undermine seniority rights and make it easier to fire teachers (saltman, 2012). while implemented in local districts, these new evaluations systems are in most cases enshrined to one degree or another in state law, giving unions little or no room to reject them outright in local negotiations. these trends have disproportionately targeted veteran teachers, not because they are inferior or under-educated, but because they are more experienced, often more educated, and subsequently better paid. along with mayoral control, first implemented in chicago in 1995, there has been an increase in the appointment of corporate ceos—with little or no background in education—to administer these school districts. there has also been an increase in the direct involvement of corporate actors and philanthropists dictating school district policies (caref et. al., 2012; saltman, 2012; lipman, 2011). the federal law driving the neoliberalization of schools in the us is the obama administration’s race to the top (rttp) program, which is an integrated and expanded version of bush’s no child left behind (nclb). these policies are based largely on earlier reforms developed chiefly by the gates foundation and the civic committee of chicago (ccc) and implemented in chicago during the 1990s. the trajectory of these policies has led to an injection of competition for funds between traditional neighbourhood schools and privately run charters. these reforms have not led to any significant improvements in test scores or graduation rates in chicago (lipman, 2011; brogan, 2013). inspired by the nclb and rttp programs, the civic committee of chicago’s 2009 report on student performance titled still left behind became the blueprint for city policy. the report advocates “tough-minded” teacher evaluations and “broad outsourcing of the management of failing schools to independent organizations” (civic committee, 2009, p. 4). although teachers have been organized into unions or professional associations since the early 20th century, with the ctu being founded as local 1 of the national aft, it was only in the 1960s and early 1970s that teachers won the legal right to studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 getting to the core 149 collective bargaining in cities and states across the u.s. these newfound legal and juridical protections came about as a result of sustained organizing and collective action, in particular strikes deemed illegal (murphy, 1992). despite this earlier period of militancy, however, a gradual ethos of accommodation and conservative politics has weakened radical forces within a good many teachers’ unions (weiner, 2012) and in the labour movement more generally (moody, 2010, fletcher & gapasin, 2008). yet as weak as, and often complicit with, the corporate reform agenda as many of these unions have become, teachers’ unions remain the largest roadblock to “reforming” public education out of existence (brogan, 2013; weiner, 2013; weiner and compton, 2008). like the aft more generally, the ctu has been at an impasse since the 1990s, having failed to mobilize or politically engage its membership. although the ctu was once a progressive force in chicago’s labour movement and municipal politics (lyons, 2008), by 2008 the union had atrophied, becoming one of the most conformist unions in the city to the finance and real estate-led model of economic development and education. despite a slate of layoffs resulting from budgetary cuts and school closings in predominantly racialized communities, by the early 2000s the ctu, under the leadership of marilyn stewart and the united progressive caucus (upc), did little beyond telling its members to “get their resumes ready” (interview with author, january 2012). since the 1960s the upc, which is affiliated with the new yorkbased progressive caucus (pc), has dominated the leadership of the ctu. with fairly progressive origins in the organizing of african-american teachers in the 1960s, the upc led the chicago teachers out on a series of eight strikes from 1969 through 1987. it was only after the 1987 strike that the relationship between the ctu and the city grew more routinized. in this sense, the upc transformed the union into a more compliant partner with the city, even as it confronted an escalating erosion of teachers’ rights in chicago public schools—with state legislation enacted in 1995 that unilaterally targeted chicago teachers by severely restricting what the ctu could legally negotiate with regard to wages and benefits, and eliminating system-wide seniority. this meant that all matters relating to class size, pedagogy, and other areas that clearly affect the working conditions of chicago teachers (students and parents) could only be negotiated if both sides agreed to do so. it is in this context that a small group of teachers and paraprofessionals who called themselves the caucus of rank and file educators (core) came together to organize for change in their union and against neoliberal school reform. in particular, they chose to organize against public school closures, “turnarounds,” and “co-locations,” all of which sought to expand charter schools. the actions organized against these changes have become an annual routine since 2004 and the unfurling of renaissance 2010 by the city of chicago. membership in core ran the gamut from those who were relatively new to activism or involvement in the union, including some who never saw themselves as “political,” to others who were members of socialist groups studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 150 peter brogan like solidarity, the international socialist organization (iso), unaffiliated radicals of different stripes, as well as those teachers interested in progressive/ alternative pedagogy, many of whom were members of a smaller social justice organization of educators called teachers for social justice (tsj). thus, core developed from its initial formation as a multi-racial and multigenerational group. one of the first things this group of union reformers did after their initial meeting was to search for a better grasp of what was driving neoliberal school reform and the attack on teachers. in doing so, members combined a macro-criticism of global capitalism developed in reading groups with what they were experiencing in the chicago public school system. from its earliest days, core has thus been studying and debating an array of vital political and strategic questions ranging from an examination of the spatial organization of racism and its relationship to education restructuring and urban development in chicago to what kind of teacher union and public education activists should be seeking to create. when core was first founded it was with an explicit recognition that it needed to be different than existing caucuses within the union and within the labour movement more broadly. this meant not being overly focused on economic issues or too inwardly oriented. members raised concerns about the limitations of top-down leadership without an engaged rank-and-file. they critiqued a narrow organizing strategy that sought to lobby elected officials (usually democrats) for changes instead of mobilizing the membership. only a small leadership team ever knew what was happening in contract negotiations, leaving general members with little idea of what the union was fighting to win. this is why, when they were elected in 2010, only two short years after forming3, core assembled a much larger bargaining committee, one comprised of over 60 members, for the 2012 round of negotiations. additionally, information about what was happening throughout negotiations constantly flowed to members through email, picket captains, social media, and regular bargaining bulletins. central to this strategy of “collectivizing” bargaining, core also built alliances with community groups like action now, the pilsen alliance, blocks together, and the kenwood oakland community organization (koco) in order to work together to fight school closures and privatization. not long after their initial collaboration in 2008, these groups formed the grassroots education movement (gem) to help broaden and facilitate this organizing. gem organized rallies and marches to the offices of both the board and to those of the leading proponents of corporate reform. when a school was targeted for closure, core and gem members would go there and meet with the teachers and parents who wanted to fight the closure. in doing so, they made it clear that they were there to help build resistance in that community. thus, instead of restricting their opposition to critiquing the incumbent union leadership and focusing solely on workplace problems, from the beginning core members sought to politicize workplace issues by connecting them to studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 getting to the core 151 the broader struggles encountered by the community. this activity resulted in the establishment of highly durable relationships of solidarity between core members and social justice groups working in neighbourhoods throughout chicago. in forging a community or social justice unionism, core members pushed beyond narrow economic issues—while not entirely neglecting important issues likes wage increases and the protection of benefits either— and articulated all of their 2012 contract demands with broader social issues affecting the communities they served. such a social justice framing and political practice must be central to any project of rebuilding the power of public sector unions (ross, 2013, moody, 2007). yet not all issues and tactics were given equal priority; difficult decisions were made on what particular campaigns or actions to prioritize based in part on what would most develop the respective collective capacities of the different organizations, both unions and community groups, working together in order to advance the broader struggle for social justice in chicago (luskin, 2013). advocates of neoliberal education restructuring, including stand for children and mayor rahm emanuel, reacted to the ctu’s radicalism by getting the state legislature to pass a new law, illinois senate bill 7 (sb 7), that has made it easier to unilaterally fire teachers as well as lengthen both the school day and school year. it specifically targeted the ctu by requiring that any teachers’ union in a district in illinois with a population greater than five hundred thousand (only chicago) submit to arbitration before they can legally strike. in order to legally strike, the union would now need to secure 75 percent of the entire membership’s vote (with all those who did not vote being counted as no votes) and go through a drawn-out mediation process. building a strong foundation: power in the workplace and in the community while core members have put an emphasis on building strong alliances with parents, students and community organizations, they have continued to prioritize building rank-and-file power in the workplace. indeed, one of the reasons core is unique amongst past union reformers because it does not see these two elements of struggle as separate; rather, they recognize that a well-organized neighbourhood and workplace are the strongest bases from which to engage parents and communities, and to wage an effective struggle across geographical scales. this orientation is easily understandable—and develops more organically than it would in other forms of employment— because of the unique nature of a workplace that is a neighbourhood school. teachers are, to a greater extent than many other public sector workers, in constant contact with the parents of their students. this typically makes the task of community outreach and relationship building easier. a key strategy of ctu organizers in their neighbourhood and workplace organizing is to carefully situate what is happening in any given place as connected to a wider geographical struggle against a neoliberal agenda for school reform and studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 152 peter brogan urban development. this type of social justice-orinted union reform caucus is being emulated in a number of other us cities, such as portland, newark, new york city, and los angeles. the organizing that the core-led ctu has conducted, especially in the electrifying seven-day strike of september 2012, has demonstrated just how powerful and emancipatory a politics in place can be. mobilizing the attachments people have to place, both within neighbourhoods and at a citywide scale, remains vital for social justice struggles today. at the same time, a key strategy of core and ctu organizers in their neighbourhood and workplace organizing is to carefully situate what happens in any given place as connected to extra-local struggles against a neoliberal agenda for school reform and neoliberal urban development that puts profits ahead of people. ctu activists and members have increasingly come to understand the policies they are contesting through the occupy framework of the 1 percent growing richer at the expense of the 99 percent. and in this way the ctu has helped its members and the communities they have been organizing to gain a deeper understanding of what doreen massey (1991) understands as the political and economic forces that produce or lie behind the formation of places. how rahm “mayor 1 percent” emanuel helped organize parents prior to the 2012 strike, the supposed fiscal crisis at the state level in illinois gave cps a rationale for implementing broad cuts to music and arts as well as for increasing class sizes, both of which impacted not only racialized and impoverished neighbourhoods but also traditionally more affluent “white” neighborhoods in chicago. in conjunction with mayor emanuel, the ceo of the schools, jean claude brizzard, decided to impose a longer school day and school year on chicago schools. this provided an opening for new alliances between more privileged parents, ctu members, and those who had been suffering the brunt of cuts for years, the poor, largely black and latino populations of chicago. middle-income earning parents were upset by these cuts and the imposition of a longer day, which many parents saw as disruptive to their lives and the lives of their children, many of whom were in the privileged position to participate in sports and other extracurricular activities after school. this was especially important because chicago mayors had previously worked to attract these mostly white, middle-income families to public schools in order to gentrify particular neighborhoods in chicago. yet, once emanuel became mayor in 2010, he turned his eye to education immediately by demanding that the school day for chicago public schools be extended, with no additional compensation for school employees or any clear pedagogical rationale for the change. so, while black and brown parents had become accustomed to being marginalized and ignored by politicians and policy makers in chicago, these more privileged parents who saw a longer day as having adverse effects on their children were now experiencing the same feelings. this led quite a few of these parents to organize and to studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 getting to the core 153 protest against these cuts and the longer day. by doing so, they then came into contact with black and latino parents as well as teachers and the union (interview with author, january 2012). these newly active parents and community members would go on to form a new coalition in 2012 to fight for a democratically elected school board. this fight was deeply connected with organizing for education justice more broadly. in fact, it grew directly out of the ctu community board which was set up soon after core was elected to leadership of the union as a way to institutionalize and facilitate the union’s organizing with grassroots groups in chicago. this organizing resulted in a non-binding referendum for an elected board winning 87 percent of the vote in a sampling of 13 percent of the city’s approximately 2,500 electoral, which “spanned chicago—economically, racially, and geographically” (lipman & gutstein, 2013, p.8). thus, mayor emanuel’s attempt to impose a longer school day helped galvanize parent opposition to his education policy agenda. the longer school day proved to be a critical organizing opportunity because it was a genuine workplace issue that affected both teachers and other workers in the schools and allowed the ctu to more effectively dialogue with a broader spectrum of people in the city. as one core member reflected, “the longer schoolday piece got organizers in the schools and [ctu members] to understand more what the organizers do. i think that was an important thing. in a way, we had organizers going out to schools, but if you have no idea how a union structure works and you have this person coming in saying, ‘i’m not filing your grievances but i’m here for you,’ it is difficult to understand what else they would do” (interview with author, may 2011). in particular, the attempted imposition of the longer school day helped ctu organize in elementary schools. as one core member explained, “i actually think we can thank rahm for the longer school day stuff and trying to force it down our throats through these waiver votes in elementary schools. it forced us to get out to a ton of elementary schools and have discussions about why the union is important and why waiving your union rights is a bad idea” (interview with author, february 2012). not only did the longer school day issue help the union connect with a wider and more racially (and geographically) diverse population of parents and communities across chicago, it further helped the ctu to mobilize elementary teachers, who have historically been a greater challenge in chicago and elsewhere. this would become a major contributing factor to why the chicago teachers were able to wage an effective strike in september 2012. striking for the schools chicago students deserve ctu members would utilize and expand upon the strong workplace organizations they had built up over the past two years to secure a near 90 percent “yes” vote to authorize a strike, which was the strongest message they could send to the board of education and mayor emanuel that the union studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 154 peter brogan did not have any intention of backing down without a fight. of those ctu members who cast a ballot, 98 percent voted yes. only 482 teachers, or 1.82 percent of the membership, voted against a strike authorization. as a result of sb 7, those union members who did not cast ballots were counted as having voted against a strike. thus, of the 26,502 members eligible to vote, 23,780 voted to strike. this vote, which took place on june 4, 2012, came on the heels of the largest march of teachers and their allies in chicago’s history, a march that itself spilled over from a massive ctu meeting where over 4,000 ctu members had packed a downtown auditorium for one of the largest union meetings in recent history, organized to discuss negotiations. “it was excellent, very inspiring,” mayra almarez, a history teacher at taft high school on the city’s north side, said of the rally.” sometimes it’s really hard to continue when, in the media, you hear that we’re aggressive, we’re this, we’re that, we’re not in it for the right reasons—when in reality, we are. it was great to see we are supported by other people, by parents.” asked if teachers at taft were prepared to walk a picket line if necessary, she replied, “absolutely. we’re ready” (sustar, 2012, n.p.). prior to the ctu’s strike authorization vote, cps officials were so firm in their belief that the union would never be able to strike that they agreed to the negotiations’ timeline proposed by the teachers union which would allow a strike to occur in september. cps’s smugness, sustar explains, flowed from their mistaken belief that the new ctu leadership would not have the capacity to unite the union’s membership behind their program of transformation. a little over a month after the ctu’s exceptionally strong strike authorization vote, the appointed arbitrator (another new necessary step of the bargaining process that was added courtesy of sb 7) issued his report. this report would prove to be a big problem for cps and mayor emanuel’s austerity demands as it recommended wage increases of 35.74 percent over four years. needless to say, the city rejected this recommendation, as did the union. it is important to understand here that the ctu rejected these recommendations because the report did not speak to any of the broader demands and issues that the union had raised to improve the school system, a fact which would go a long way towards bolstering public support and serving as evidence that, despite cps and emanuel’s claims, the teachers and their union were not concerned with their own narrow economic interests. no amount of slick union advertisements could have achieved what this move did. seeing these immediate proposals as part of the wider assault on public education and teachers’ unions, the ctu would break with the accommodationist approach adopted by both national teachers’ unions, the aft, and the nea as well as with the previous leadership of the ctu. the core-led union went on strike from september 10 to september 18, 2012. this was the first strike launched by the ctu in 25 years. and while the economic gains were marginal, the broader improvements to schools that the union made its centerpiece (i.e. smaller class sizes, air conditioning, more social workers and services for students) effectively allowed them to hold the studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 getting to the core 155 line on many of the worst concessionary demands, including preventing the adoption of merit pay and a teacher evaluation system based on standardized test scores beyond the 25 percent mandated by state law. thus, because the ctu successfully pushed back against the worst of these concessionary demands—and because of the manner in which they organized to do so— they have reignited the democratic imagination for unionists and activist across the nation. the ctu secured a number of important improvements, including: a principal anti-bullying clause, greater freedom for teachers to develop lesson plans, the hiring of art, music, and physical education teachers to create a “better school day” for students as the school year grew longer, a cost-of-living increase, and short-term disability leave for pregnant teachers. rob bartlett (2013, p. 12) perceptively notes that “core and the ctu’s success was not due to replacing a weak leadership with a militant one willing to strike, but rather the creation of a layer of union members in the ctu who saw the struggle as one for what ctu president karen lewis calls ‘the soul of public education.’” this constituted a dramatic shift in the culture of the union which would have been impossible had the core leadership of the union and its activist base not built an organizing culture schoolby-school in the preceding four years, which was accomplished by getting members to take on workplace and community issues collectively. thus, rather than simply seeing the union as a service provider that exists to solve workplace problems, members began to slowly see themselves as the union, and thus as capable of tackling issues through organizing and action. equally as important was the development of a critical understanding of the new geography of what the ctu termed “education apartheid” and how union members, parents, and community allies had strong attachments to the places where they lived and worked which could be mobilized for the construction of a citywide and national fight for education justice. while state law in illinois technically prohibits the ctu from striking over issues other than wages and benefits, every member of the union i spoke to during the strike was clear that they were fighting not for any narrow economic improvements for themselves but for smaller class sizes, a rich curriculum, and wrap-around services like counseling for every student. many members suggested that fighting to improve the quality of life for their students was not simply a moral good or a cynical public relations tactic to garner public support, but would also create jobs for many experienced teachers who are currently out of work while at the same time building a high-quality, accessible public school system. indeed, these ideas were systematically developed in a unique and well researched document published by the ctu, entitled the schools chicago students deserve (2012), which was simultaneously the basis of a number of bargaining proposals and an organizing tool for union members, parents, and community allies. this document would also prove invaluable in helping the union and its members to fundamentally reframe the debate in the corporate media and public discourse more generally, which partially explains the widespread support that ctu enjoyed during the strike. not only did this studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 156 peter brogan report, and the way in which the union and its allies used it to organize across the city, put forward a critique of the racist nature of how chicago public schools are organized—and the ways the racist organization of schools has been a central facet of neoliberal urban development in the united states— but it put forward a more class-oriented transformative program for fixing the school system, including a more progressive system of taxation for funding schools and other municipal services. the schools chicago students deserve is an excellent illustration of how a union can put forward, and effectively organize around, an alternative urban policy that puts the values of social justice, equity and democracy at the center of its proposals. in this sense, it offers an alternative to the neoliberal policy framework of austerity, competiveness, and market solutions to the real and imagined failings of the public sector. similar reports have been produced by teachers’ unions in los angeles and st. paul, minnesota where they have been utilized in successful ways to flip the script in the public discourse about education reform. while ctu organizers and leaders proved quite adept at using their research and the research conducted by sympathetic academics to reframe the often one-sided reportage in the local media, one of the most significant ways in which the ctu addressed this propaganda campaign was through tireless neighborhood and workplace organizing which allowed the unions members, parents, and community members across chicago to develop a deeper grasp of the issues chicago teachers were fighting for. these efforts included well-attended and vibrant public forums organized by the ctu which took place across the city preceding the strike. these meetings revealed that many parents and community members were worried about the prospect of a strike and were not afraid to voice their fears, concerns, and questions to the leaders of the ctu that attended. while these forums themselves were not deliberative spaces and did not shape bargaining demands directly, they did go a long way in opening up the process of negotiation to the public and providing a space where those interested could turn for further information about both the issues and the process of negotiation. an equally important component of the ctu’s strategy before and during the strike involved targeting corporations like bank of america, hyatt hotels, and the chicago board of trade, all of which have benefited handsomely from the tax incremental financing (tif) scheme. tifs have functioned to siphon money from resource-starved, poor neighborhoods and the public institutions that serve them to be used as a slush fund in/for the mayor’s office (jorvarsky, 2009). while these corporate institutions and the particular model of urban economic development embraced by the city of chicago were targeted by the ctu prior to the commencement of the strike with direct actions that saw a number of ctu leaders arrested, the union continued to place the taxing of corporations, especially financial institutions operating in chicago, as the key mechanism for funding their proposals for improving public education. this attention to how governing officials (from mayor richard m. daley to mayor rahm emanuel) have aligned themselves with studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 getting to the core 157 corporations based in chicago in order to remake particular neighborhoods, so as to build chicago as a “world class” or “global” city, at the expense of institutions like public schools, mental health clinics and libraries that serve marginalized working class communities is further evidence of how vital a critical political economy and geographical analysis has been to the ctu under core’s direction. it shows how the socio-spatial contradictions of global city development can be leveraged by unions and movements for social justice. from the first day of the strike in 2012 picket lines were strong, lasting from 6:00 am until 10:30 pm. the vibrant picket lines functioned as organizing spaces within which ctu members could build relationships with each other as well as connect with neighbourhood residents. everyone on the lines wore what would become over the next seven days their iconic ctu red shirts. many chicagoans awoke to car horns blasting in solidarity with the teachers. and wherever you traveled during this period of the strike, if you were wearing a red t-shirt, you would be greeted with those same horns of solidarity and warm greetings of support from people of all walks of life in the city. the level of creativity and sheer joy that was expressed on the picket lines and throughout the city over the course of the strike were fantastic and would not have been possible had the ctu leadership not allowed members the autonomy and support to make the strike their own. regardless of outcome, this mode of joyful and creative political practice—where participants leave an action or meeting feeling happy and empowered, rather than frustrated and dejected—is worthy of emulation in all movement organizing. during the first three days of the strike, the ctu held massive rallies downtown, attended by an average of 30,000 people, including many children. mid-week of the strike, the ctu decided to move beyond the downtown core and hold their afternoon actions as marches through the west and south sides of the city, around the schools and neighborhoods that have suffered the most from economic neglect and marginalization. doing so represented a clear understanding on the part of the union’s organizers and leadership that it was vital for them to target not simply the center of power in global chicago but also to highlight the devastation that has been wrought by the uneven political and economic restructuring that has accompanied a global city development strategy. this turn to the marginalized neighborhoods was a further extension of solidarity with, and a way to deepen the unions’ support of, segments of the racialized working class who have been ignored and neglected by the ruling classes of chicago and the nation. this was the best possible way to counter the corporate education, anti-union propaganda that was being broadcast on african-american and latino radio stations. these marches and the neighborhood organizing that took place throughout the strike, some directed by the ctu leadership, some that happened more organically in different schools and neighborhoods, is evidence of the continued importance of place for movement building and urban politics more generally. while consolidating and expanding parent support were crucial for the chicago teachers, building labour solidarity during the strike was similarly studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 158 peter brogan important, both at the local and national levels. yet doing so proved complicated. as alter (2013, p. 22) observes, with 2012 being an election year, and the majority of the union movement having long abandoned an emphasis on organizing and action in favour of electoral politics, unions put the bulk of their energy into getting president obama elected to a second term. so for example, the chicago federation of labor (cfl) had not organized a labour day rally since 1998. thus again, in 2012, instead of trying to reignite a fire under the chicago labour movement, the leadership of the cfl opted to go to the democratic national convention in charlotte, north carolina. subsequently, the ctu decided to organize a rally themselves, which proved to be a wise tactical move. it attracted between 10,000-20,000 participants. it served as an energizing activity for the union and added to its momentum, increasing its base of support just prior to the start of the new school year and the proposed strike. on august 29th, only a few days prior to the labour day rally, the ctu filed the mandatory ten-day strike notice. the stage was set for the first teachers’ strike since 1987 and neither side in negotiations gave any indication that a settlement would be reached to prevent it. yet, while the two other unions with contracts with cps, unite here local 1 and service employees international union (seiu) local 73, have been supportive of the ctu, by the time the teachers went out on strike both unions had already settled their contracts. why they did so rather than bargain in parallel with the ctu is not an easy question to answer. indeed, their failure to do so surprised many labour activists in chicago because of the progressive reputation of these unions as well as their extensive support and collaboration with the ctu. karen lewis and a number of ctu members had turned out to each union’s respective rallies at cps when they were in negotiations, and had supported unite here workers while they were on strike at the city’s hyatt hotels in 2012. one possible explanation as to why both unite-here and seiu did not coordinate their bargaining with the ctu may be because of the power that cps has to contract out the work of their members, which in turn gives these workers and their unions significantly less leverage. as a result, members of these unions, including food service workers, custodians and school aides would have been contractually obligated to cross ctu picket lines in the event of a strike. although labour support for the ctu prior to, during, and since the strike has not been as strong as ctu leadership and core members would like, support among chicago residents more generally remains strong. and while the city’s official union leadership may not have actively supported the ctu, there were signs of support from rank-and-file unionists throughout the city. although lewis had given indications to the press on friday, september 14 that they were close to a deal and would likely end the strike so that school could resume on monday, union delegates voted at the saturday delegates’ assembly meeting to reject the offer until all of their members had a chance to read and discuss the employer’s proposal. so that monday, instead of calling off the strike, members went back to the picket lines and took the time to do just this, displaying an incredible new internal life of membership studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 getting to the core 159 engagement, whether that meant being active in their local chapter where they worked or on any number of the union’s committees that were created or given new life under core’s direction. the proposal showed significant gains, including: the creation of over six hundred new positions in art, music, and physical education; a freeze on healthcare payments; a seven percent wage increase over three years; a new teacher evaluation system (which was not so much an improvement as a mitigated concession); an important anti-bullying provision that would protect teachers from abusive principals; language to promote racial diversity in hiring; and an annual supply reimbursement increase from $100 to $250. in addition to the gains made by the ctu in this round of bargaining, lewis observed that, “we gained the ability to finally have due process in all discipline issues and the right to appeal evaluations. we also won a real right for teachers to follow students when schools close –which proved significant when cps closed 50 schools in a single year.” of course, this is only if students move to another public school, not a charter. reflecting upon the strike a year later, lewis also observed that: this union had survived an all-out attack on our very existence and our ability to advocate for our members, our students and their communities from a well-funded, well-orchestrated group of extremely wealthy people who saw themselves as the authorities on education. …we were vilified in the press and on paid radio ads, which attempted to paint us as greedy and unknowledgeable. our contractually agreed to raises were stolen to goad us into acting rashly. our members have been laid off, terminated and publicly humiliated all in attempt to turn public school educators and the public against us. none of it worked. post-2012 strike: moving toward an alternative politics? only a few months after the strike, the ctu had an election in which president lewis and other core elected leaders were re-elected by a margin of 4 to 1, with 79 percent of the membership voting them in. but, much like their initial election in 2012, core members did not have much time to breathe, much less celebrate their victory, because they needed to organize against the most recent and potentially largest round of school closures. this has provided core with the ability to continue to deepen the transformation of its union while at the same time building a stronger movement to push back against a city government that continues to advance savage cuts and austerity measures. core’s model of building a caucus that organizes both within and outside of the union has spread to other u.s. cities, most prominently new york city, newark (where reformers almost won leadership over the newark teachers’ union in 2013), and los angeles (where a progressive reform slate has won the recent executive election in the united teachers of los angeles). as the labour journalist david bacon (2013) recounts, in opposition to studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 160 peter brogan the most recent closure, “thousands rallied and marched on march 27 in opposition, organized by the ctu, unite here local 1, seiu local 1 and [gem]. they demanded that the district stop the closures and slow the expansion of charter schools and focus instead on investment in public schools in working-class neighborhoods.” and “on may 18, 2013 chicago students, parents, and teachers organized a three-day march for educational justice. following the march, the ceo of the chicago public schools, barbara byrdbennett, took four schools off the list, including marcus garvey elementary, asean johnson’s school.” beyond this organizing, the ctu collaborated with a number of their parent and community allies to launch lawsuits against the closures in june 2013. the suits argued that the board violated its own guidelines by disregarding the recommendations of independent hearing officers on more than one occasion; that the schools targeted for closure were highly concentrated in largely african-american and latino neighborhoods; and that the city’s plan utterly disregarded the needs of special education students. there have also been a number of different protests at the affected schools, as well as direct actions (e.g. sit-ins at the mayor’s office), which had been a major objective of the summer, trainings organized by the ctu, and the newly reinvigorated grassroots education movement. yet, despite all of this mobilizing and action, all 50 school closures were rubber stamped by the mayoral-appointed chicago board of education in, as the chicago sun-times observed, “less time than it takes to boil an egg.” karen lewis called it “a day of mourning for the children of chicago.” she continued by saying that “their [students’] education has been hijacked by an unrepresentative, unelected corporate school board, acting at the behest of a mayor who has no vision for improving the education of our children,” and that “closing schools is not an education plan. it is a scorched earth policy.” conclusion while the assaults have continued since the ctu strike concluded, this action should still be understood as a flourishing moment in the contestation of neoliberal education and austerity urbanism. this is not because the strike itself secured major concessions from the city, or simply because it was a militant act of defiance, but because it was a public sector strike done differently, with huge amounts of creativity, member engagement, joyous, creative action, public support, and participation. this mode of union praxis built at multiple scales—but rooted most strongly in the workplace—has been a deeply transformative experience for ctu members and workingclass chicagoans more generally. it has resulted in a deepening of collective capacities that are vital to ongoing struggle. the bulk of the union’s 26,000 members are now reinvigorated and proud to be part of a fighting union that is run by its membership. in other words, rather than simply engaging in militant job action without a political program, the ctu strike expanded the studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 getting to the core 161 democratic imagination and political capacities of its members and other workers in the city. it is this that is necessary for constructing a different kind of urban working-class politics. while i am in no sense claiming that the core-led ctu has all the answers for how public sector workers and their allies can push back against urban neoliberalism, the movement they catalyzed in chicago embodies a number of important lessons for how to transform and more effectively use the seemingly moribund organizations that most us and canadian unions have become over the past 30 or 40 years (reflected not only in a decline in union membership and density, but more generally in a lack of influence in society). and unlike many union reformers of the past, a key difference of these efforts in chicago is that they recognize4—to a greater extent every day—the need to push beyond the legal and institutional boundaries of the trade union form to advance a progressive agenda of systemic, transformative change in a deeply fragmented, exploited, and relatively demobilized global city (interview with author, august 2013). the four most important conclusions to be drawn from the case of the chicago teachers include, first, the need for unions to prioritize the development of strategic objectives at multiple scales with a broader working-class public and to democratize internal union structures and build a more activist culture inside the union in which members can take part. second, there is a huge amount of power that can be leveraged by taking struggles to the streets. the massive rallies that the ctu held downtown and in the neighborhoods of the south and west sides of chicago which have been largely left to rot if not gentrified, reflected not just the popularity of the strike, but an important embodiment of the union’s urban, place-based strategy that is not afraid to experiment and take risks. third, in order to challenge austerity urbanism and the devastating impacts it is having across north american cities, it is necessary to develop a class-oriented, social justice framework rooted in female, racialized and working poor workers that connects issues across workplaces and communities. in order to realize their contentious and transformative potential, however, rank-and-file workers will need to organize both inside and outside of their unions, and, in the process, completely reinvent them. it is only through such a process of reinvention that union members will be successful in pushing beyond the sectionalist, narrow limitations of the trade union form, which is crucial if they are to turn back the assault against what remains of the welfare state in both countries in north america. if unions are to be more effective vehicles of the working class and progressive actors in promoting social justice, the broader left will need to be revived so that unions can more easily adopt a class-struggle approach that pushes beyond the legal and institutional limitations inherent in the trade union form. and, it is imperative that, in forging this alternative politics, unions formulate a similarly different vision of public services and of society more broadly with the public, especially those sections of the working class that have been most marginalized and disorganized by neoliberalism. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 162 peter brogan in advocating for such an alternative working class politics, municipal unions have the potential to not only protect and enhance existing public services but advocate for improved jobs across the city, which requires democratic control over economic investment and new industrial policies. metropolitan areas will be more likely to thrive if there is greater equality among individuals and among communities, certainly, but also if workers have a stronger voice in how such services are produced, accessed, and governed. municipal unions in global cities are in a unique position to contribute to antisystemic struggles to remake the capitalist city into something more humane: a metropolis where working people not only have more access to collective consumption but are key players in urban governance and decision-making in the form of a different kind of city. notes 1 see amanda tattersall’s (2010) book, power in coalitions, for a critical examination of different experiences of community-labour coalitions and the problems/limitations of shallow and instrumental formations created by unions which allow little room for community allies to influence the direction of struggle and receive limited support for their own particular needs. 2 in many cases these workers provide services to others in the city, but are often also the users of those services. 3 while there was a constellation of forces that allowed core to win the executive election in such a short period of time since its foundation in 2008, the two biggest factors that explain its success is the membership’s loss of faith in the old guard upc leadership who had utterly failed to mobilize against neoliberal restructuring. and the second was the new movement-oriented, savvy and incredibly hard-working activists of core, who, with fewer than 200 people, managed to get out to all 600 schools in chicago to speak to teachers and convince them of the need for a change of leadership and a change of unionism. 4 while recent interviews conducted with ctu staff members and core activists support this claim, it should be made clear that while core members and ctu leadership might recognize these institutional and political limitations as they continue to face ongoing attacks and school closings, they have yet to figure out how to move beyond them. their inability to scale up their struggle more effectively or to develop a different, more radical tactical approach to electoral politics and state policy must be confronted and overcome. references alter, t. 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(2013). the future of our schools: teachers unions and social justice. chicago: haymarket books. emerson final before ts december 10 18 correspondence address: ann emerson, school of education & sociology, university of portsmouth, portsmouth, uk, po1 2hy; email: ann.emerson@port.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 educating pakistan’s daughters: girls’ citizenship education and the reproduction of cultural violence in pakistan ann emerson university of portsmouth, uk abstract this article draws from a case study exploring the link between girls’ citizenship education and identity-based violence. the research was conducted in a girls’ government secondary school in islamabad, pakistan. the data was collected through participant observation, qualitative interviews and a participatory workshop with 23 school staff, as well as focus groups with 33 students. the focus of this paper is on how school practice – the day-to-day activities that happen in and out of the classroom – reproduces a gendered and classed notion of citizenship. drawing on galtung’s (1969; 1990) violence triangle, i then link the findings to the implications for violence against women. the findings indicate that for the urban middle-class girls of the case study school, citizenship is entwined with historical constructions of nationalist and religious notions of womanhood. citizenship education teaches girls that their duty to the state is located in the private sphere of the home, as mothers and wives, while excluding them from the rights associated with citizenship that are located in the male dominated public sphere. these notions of unequal citizenship were evident in the responses from both teachers and students about the roles of women in creating a more peaceful pakistan. most of the teachers (all of whom are women) and students indicated that they had limited agency to affect change outside of an ability to influence their children and husbands. i argue that citizenship education in this school serves as a form of gendered cultural violence as it discourages girls from affecting change on the social structures that disempower them. keywords pakistan; girls’ education; citizenship education; school practice; education and violence; education and peacebuilding; social reproduction ann emerson studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 292 an introduction to critical education and the reproduction of gendered citizenship in pakistan critical educationalists view education as a micro-political site for the reproduction of inequities in society (apple, 2012; giroux, 1983). education also preserves and distributes economic and cultural power and often includes “patronage, gender inequality, violence and fear, cultures of passivity, and lack of freedom of speech” (davies, 2011, p. 35). citizenship education – educating students to perform their expected roles in society – is entwined in the inequalities that education reproduces through curriculum as well as in the day-to-day practices of the school. in curriculum, this is done through the use of language that separates, degrades or simply omits certain groups from textbooks, including women and ethnic or religious minorities; this negatively impacts how they are understood as citizens (jamal, 2006). for girls and women, the ways schools are structured also teaches them their role as subordinate to men. as kirk (2008b, p.11) discusses, schools are patriarchal establishments in which females are “conditioned to accept the naturalness of male domination.” school practice consists of the patterns of interactions children are exposed to while in school. it is defined by the shared beliefs, the relationships between individuals and groups in the organization, the physical environment, and the characteristics of individuals and groups at the school (giroux & penna, 1979). it is in part through this school practice that children learn how to relate to the structures of authority and the community to which they belong (apple, 2012). this article is part of a larger study that explored how education in one girls’ government school teaches citizenship that reproduces identity-based violence in pakistan. this in-depth qualitative case study was conducted in a girls’ government model school in islamabad. this article focuses on the gendered aspects of citizenship education and unpacks the ways in which citizenship education contributes to the reproduction of cultural violence that often relegates women to the private (domestic) sphere, away from the rights and protections from direct violence, which are understood as located in the public sphere. this study contributes to the widening literature that explores the multifaceted entanglement between education and violence by analyzing school practice as a reproducer of gendered norms that often affect the agency of women to impact the social structures that disempower them. educating pakistan’s daughters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 293 methodology the case study school, margalla girls’ college is an all girls’ school that offers classes from reception to masters’ degrees.1 as a model government school, it is more resourced than other government schools and teachers are more highly qualified. the majority of the 6,000 students come from lowermiddle and lower economic classes. most of the students’ fathers work as low-level civil servants and aspire to be part of the urban middle class. the teachers and administrators, all of whom are women, come from a wider spread of socio-economic family backgrounds, from the lower middle classes to some of the most influential families in islamabad. the only male staff, the clerks and finance officers, are spatially separated from the women and girls, as their offices are located in an administrative block, away from the main part of campus. this case study uses critical education and feminist citizenship theories, which problematize the positioning of women outside the protections of the state, to unpack the complex relationship between education and violence. it employs a historical and intersectional lens to situate citizenship education in the context of broader society, both as a product and reproducer of social and economic inequality. to explore the day-to-day activities of the school, school practice is analyzed, including school governance, teaching methods, student activities, teacher-student relationships, and visual messages in the school. this case study, conducted over three months in early 2014, included a participatory workshop and interviews with 18 secondary social science teachers, interviews with three administrative staff and the two viceprincipals, focus groups with 33 secondary school students, observations of social science classrooms, and informal discussions and observations throughout the school days. in the remainder of this article, i situate girls’ citizenship education in its broader historical context through a discussion of women’s citizenship in pakistan. i then illustrate how school practice reproduces gendered citizenship in the case study school, and discuss the limited space for agency that teachers and students faced in engaging as citizens of pakistan. finally, i link the limitations of agency reproduced through school practice to cultural violence. the construction of women’s citizenship in pakistan citizenship can be defined as the civil, political and social rights of an individual and the reciprocal duty of individuals to abide by the laws of the 1 the name of the school and of those of the teachers and students are pseudonyms used to protect the identity of the participants. ann emerson studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 294 state (carens, 2000). in liberal theories of citizenship, much of the interaction between the individual and the state occurs in public spaces, away from the domestic sphere (pateman, 1989) where much of women’s lives in pakistan are expected to occur. feminist scholars including pateman (1989), yuvaldavis (1997), and siim (2000) argue that liberal citizenship often promotes a (false) divide between the public and private spheres that excludes women and positions them outside the public, political lives of citizens. this has the potential to infringe upon the rights and the protection of women. yuvaldavis (1997, p. 5) argues, “much of the explanation of women’s oppression has been related to their location in a different social sphere from that of men.” women’s citizenship in pakistan is further complicated as it resides at the crux of the tension between liberal notions of citizenship and theocratic/islamist notions of the state. women’s identities as citizens are rooted in the idea that women are the protectors of traditional culture and the ideology of the state. yuval-davis (1997, p. 39) explains, “gendered bodies play a role as territories, markers and reproducers of the narratives of nations and the heart of cultural construction of social identities and collectivities.” this civic identity of women is reinforced through multiple spheres of the society, including the media, which reproduces stereotypes of “good” and “bad” women. in 1987, mumtaz and shaheed argued that women are shown in the media exclusively as self-sacrificing mothers who suffer without complaint at the hands of their husband and in-laws. this is consistent with a 1991 study discussed in naseem (2010), which analysed the portrayal of “good women” on pakistani television. they found that good women were portrayed as “self-sacrificing, self-abnegating, virtuous, domesticated, mother, daughter, sister, honest, in poverty, loyal, religious, emotional, and irrational” (naseem, 2010, p.78). naseem (2010) goes on to say that women on television who did not demonstrate these characteristics were portrayed as “bad women.” both studies were conducted prior to the influx of international media including the internet and wider access to international television and films; today women and girls are being exposed to global norms about women’s rights. this portrayal of women in media and the continued debate over women’s rights and changing legislation mean that women’s roles in pakistani society are in flux. views of purdah, women’s role in the socioeconomic sector, and legal rights, are all contested among pakistani citizens, their government and religious leaders. women are also understood as the preservers of culture and religion as a part of the national project to differentiate pakistan from india and the west. while men are expected to defend the state on the battlefield, women should defend the moral and religious character of the state, especially in their roles as mothers. rouse (2004, p. 100) explains the importance of this role to women’s citizenship: educating pakistan’s daughters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 295 women, in order to claim “citizenship” in the pakistani state must conform to cultural, social and sexual norms. should they protest and resist… they risk being accused of being “western” and culturally deviant, liable to rebuke and sanctions. according to jafar (2005) this contrasting between western women and the ideal of a muslim woman began during colonial rule in india. jafar (2005) argues that women’s bodies and their veiling were considered a symbol of resistance against colonial rulers. she noted that no matter how “western” the public (male) sphere became, people could take comfort in the knowledge that the private (female) sphere had remained “untouched.” the construction of women as protectors of the nation reinforces their position in the domestic sphere. saigol (2003, p. 132), argues that in pakistan, civic identity comes to be constructed in terms of [a man’s] rights as an individual citizen of the state, while female identity is predicated upon her duties to the nation/state as a mother. this kind of division of citizenship, based on women’s difference, ensure that women will be confined to the so-called ‘private sphere’ of home, family, and personal relations. the importance of women’s role in the domestic or private sphere is reinforced throughout the lives of girls. as children, girls are expected to contribute to the household by serving as caregivers to their siblings and contributing to domestic work including cleaning and cooking. as adults, pakistani women are often expected to be responsible for the life of the family within the home, while men are expected to be responsible for life outside the home, including engaging in the political sphere (weiss, 2015). of course, the expectations of the women of pakistan are not homogenous and are largely dependent on class, ethnicity, and geographical location, as well as a woman’s interests and the nature of her family. the practice of purdah (the seclusion of women from men, including women’s covering of their hair and face in the presence of unrelated men) serves as an example of this. in 1987, mumtaz and shaheed explained the historical use of purdah as a symbol of affluence. they state, “a veiled woman [became] a symbol of social status, which translated simply means: ‘i am so rich that my women don’t have to work in the fields’” (mumtaz & shaheed, 1987, p. 30). in the years since 1987, the upper classes have become more liberal and gender restrictions have become less severe for educated elite women, particularly related to participation in socioeconomic activities outside the home (weiss, 2015), and especially in the provinces of punjab and sindh. today purdah is most commonly practiced by middle-class women and women in rural areas. however, weiss (2015) also notes that nowhere do unrelated women and men mix freely. ann emerson studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 296 citizenship as cultural violence the positioning of women in the private sphere but under strict surveillance to protect the religious and cultural identity of pakistan can be understood as cultural violence. galtung (1990) defines cultural violence as any part of culture, exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, or empirical and formal science, that makes structural and direct violence acceptable in society. education often plays an important role in reproducing cultural violence, which leads to unequal citizenship. because cultural violence legitimizes other kinds of violence, it creates opportunities for direct violence against women. when this is coupled with situating women in the private sphere, which in liberal theories of citizenship is outside the realm of citizenship, violence against women becomes sanctioned by the state. stromquist (1995, p. 424) explains, “the state is not neutral towards women and its definition of gender tends to restrict women to the domestic sphere and to ignore how domesticity links with other forms of social control.” women’s positioning in the private sphere leads them to being thought of as minority groups who often face little protection from the state against direct and structural violence (naseem, 2010; yuval-davis, 1997). for example, violence against women by husbands and other family members is sometimes understood as a private matter (as it occurs in the private sphere), and therefore access to protection through state-sponsored agencies (i.e., police) is not always available. direct violence against women is often tied to traditional notions of honor and committed by male family members (patel, 2010), including about 1,000 honor killings each year (human rights watch, 2016). many of these cases of violence against women go unreported. the reasons for this silence, though many, are related to women’s exemption from the public sphere, where citizenship occurs. patel (2010) argues that by defining violence against women as domestic violence, it becomes understood as a private matter. she goes on to add that women often do not have access to legal services, and even if they do, they often fear that they will not be able to care for themselves or their children if a father or husband is convicted of a crime. girls’ education girls’ education sits at the crux of this debate about the role of women in pakistan, while serving as part of the nation-building project to teach children who they are as pakistanis (durrani & dunne, 2010). the cultural expectations assigned to girls often contribute to barriers to girls’ participation in education. for example, in some parts of pakistan, girls’ education is not understood as a priority, resulting in low enrollment rates. even when parents would like to send daughters to school, concerns of educating pakistan’s daughters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 297 maintaining purdah may discourage this, as girls may come in contact with men and boys (weiss, 2015). in extreme cases, opposition to educating girls has resulted in violence against girls’ schools by militant organizations (mujahid-mukhtar, 2011). even when girls are sent to school, boys’ education is often prioritized due in part to the expectation that male children will stay with their parents and provide for them, while daughters become the “property” of their husband’s family, therefore making a girl’s education seem like a financial loss (naseem, 2010). consequently, girls make up only 43% of children in school nationwide; in rural areas the percentage is much lower (academy of educational planning & management, 2015). in the federal administered tribal areas, for example, girls make up just 31% of children in school (academy of educational planning & management, 2015). in urban areas, however, especially among wealthy elites, more girls have access to education. in islamabad, 48% of students are girls (academy of educational planning & management, 2015). although more girls attend school in urban areas, there are different expectations for educating girls than boys, especially among the middle classes. for many parents, the purpose of educating girls is to improve the prospects of attracting educated husbands, rather than focusing on preparing for careers (weiss, 2015). these expectations, in turn, influence what girls learn about citizenship through schooling, which centers on ensuring that girls learn to fulfill their roles as wives, mothers, and protectors of the culture of pakistan (naseem, 2010; saigol, 2003). practice and the reproduction of gendered citizenship at margalla girls’ college the school, security, and the state margalla girls’ college must be responsive to the demands of parents and communities by providing an education that sits comfortably within traditional ideals of womanhood in pakistani society. girls’ education in the context of the urban middle class often must maintain a precarious balance between providing formal education while ensuring that social norms that regulate women, specifically in terms of freedom of movement, dress, and expected behavior, are strictly followed. one way that girls’ schools are expected to maintain the balance between social norms and education is by protecting girls and women from potential risks, including physical harm or the temptation of girls to behave in ways that are seen as inappropriate. weiss (2015) notes that several studies on girls’ education in pakistan indicate that concerns for the safety of daughters (from drastic acts like kidnapping, but also simply interacting with boys) and thus their honor (and the honor of the ann emerson studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 298 family) are the strongest arguments against sending girls to school, especially after they begin puberty. margalla girls’ college provides this safe atmosphere for girls. the campus itself is surrounded by a high concrete wall, which makes it impossible to see inside (a standard and important aspect of school design in pakistan). there are only a few entrances to the campus, which are watched over by chowkidars (gatekeepers). the chowkidar spoke of the importance of the safety provided at the school. he said, “[the school] is a good place for girls – the rules and regulations are strict. if anybody come to pick any student [from school] the headmistress asks who came to pick them.” the school prospectus (used as promotional material) also highlights the safety of the school for girls, especially through a section written from the perspective of a student, titled “why i chose [margalla college].” the section states, “it is an all girls’ institute and many parents prefer to send their daughters here because it caters to all levels of education.” the passage suggests that a girl may never have to leave the safety of the school’s walls while achieving up to a master’s degree. this may be appealing to parents who wish to keep their daughters safe from potential risks. the anonymous student writer of this section ends her letter about why she chose the school with, “most importantly the security is very good, providing a very reliable and safe atmosphere” (margalla school, 2014, p. 7). one political science teacher told me a personal story that illustrated how safety is valued for girls, even over the quality of education received. she told me, first, i have my boy. i try to give him the best education. i admitted him to [an elite private school chain] and my daughter, she studied over here [the case study school] …it was my husband, not me. i can fight for my son, but not my daughter. it’s because of 100% my husband. because he said she is not safe outside, she will go with you. by protecting the students and female teachers and ensuring that girls are safe inside the privacy of the walls of the school, the school upholds and preserves the dignity of the state. teachers’ experiences as gendered citizens teachers are an important influence on young girls in the school setting. smith (2010) emphasizes that teachers are the most important factor in determining the quality of learning, imparting values, and modeling behavior. teachers contribute importantly to developing and nurturing their students’ skills and values, including those related to citizenship. teachers’ values are then enacted through daily school practice, including teaching and learning, teacher-student relations, student activities, and school management. in contexts like pakistan, where women have been subjected to inequality and educating pakistan’s daughters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 299 violence, women teachers can be key to social change for the empowerment of women. kirk (2004, p. 50) states, “if women can experience personal and professional development through being teachers, they can be empowered as key agents of structural and societal transformation that is built on principles of gender equality.” however, for many of the teachers, the path to becoming teachers was constrained by gendered notions of womanhood. for those who came from middle or lower middle class backgrounds especially, teaching was often the only profession that their families (especially fathers) allowed for them. many wanted to pursue careers in other fields. one english teacher said, actually, i wanted to be a lawyer, but my father, being a judge, said that the environment is not good. i said i will go into practice with you and he said no. i was interested in english literature because i have an interest in reading. this contrasts with the teachers from elite classes who all claim to have come to the profession (often later in life) because of their passion, especially for supporting the greater good of pakistan. these results are consistent with kirk’s (2008a) findings about teachers in karachi, many of whom came into teaching by default because it is considered a respectable profession for women and it draws upon the ideals that women should be nurturing and support the greater good, both for their families and nation. teachers’ expectations of students as citizens the teachers, who themselves have come into this career under the confines of gendered expectations, are thus responsible for finding ways to pass this on to their students. teachers’ own perceptions of gendered citizenship performance were made evident through a participatory activity in which teachers were asked to brainstorm and rank the civic values they hoped to instill in their students (see table 1). their responses strongly reflected the notions of good and bad women found in naseem (2010) and mumtaz and shaheed (1987), including strong faith, purity, gracefulness, and not acting western. purity and cleanliness are monitored throughout the school every day. there are student union members whose job it is to ensure that other students’ uniforms are properly cleaned and worn, and according to the prospectus there is a fine for an untidy uniform. the importance of cleanliness for women can be understood from a cultural and historical perspective. first, women are expected to keep themselves clean in every sense of the word. they are expected to remain virgins until their marriage, and this is an important aspect of being a proper muslim woman. additionally, there is a colonial rhetoric of cleanliness that still impacts ann emerson studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 300 pakistani culture today. under british rule in the sub-continent, the education system used rhetoric around the “unclean” native who resisted british rule and the educated “clean” native who kept his or her place in society. according to saigol (2003, p. 136) “cleanliness became synonymous with good, modern citizenship. cleanliness was not only a bodily, but a political metaphor which meant a politically sanitized person incapable of mounting revolt or challenging colonial power.” the ideal of pakistani female purity and cleanliness is understood to have its opposite in hindu, and more recently western, women, who are positioned as immoral and unclean others (saigol, 2003). teachers’ ranking of civic values 1. strong faith 2. patriotism 3. truthfulness 4. purity/cleanliness 5. tolerance/democratic 6. disciplined 7. punctual/ regular 8. respect elders and teachers 9. gracefulness 10. helpfulness 11. modern, but not western table 1. teachers’ ranking of civic values. modern, but not western was a contested addition to the brainstorming part of the activity, and again represents the surveillance of women by women to stay within their boundaries. when one teacher suggested “modern” as a positively-valued attribute, another teacher added, “but not western.” and the other teachers were quick to agree and write that explanation down next to modern. the term modern is often used as a negative term for a woman who is considered to dress in an inappropriate way (e.g., wearing a sleeveless top) and who is considered to have loose morals; characteristics associated with western women. therefore, by adding this caveat, they could change the meaning of ‘modern’ to include a woman who perhaps works in a profession and is free to make her own life choices. nevertheless, all three groups ranked this last among the valued qualities they identified. teachers’ civic values were also reflected in the types of students who were favored. for example, two teachers, irum and aleeza, focused on cleanliness, which they link to good results. irum said her favorite student is one who is “confident, well-behaved, not rude, show good results and takes care of cleanliness.” aleeza said, “[my favorite student] … is always neat and clean. her copies are so good. copies are completed and behavior with every teacher is very good. she participates in the class.” educating pakistan’s daughters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 301 another teacher, faiza, was most concerned with obedience and linked it to religious duty. she said, she is brilliant in her studies, but it hit me that the thing i like most about her is that she is very obedient… and very cooperative to me in the recitation of the naut [reading of the holy quran] and whatever i say, she helps me out. however, aleeza, a political science teacher, had different ideas about students than many of her colleagues. she said that she likes students who ask a lot of questions, including questioning what they are learning. however, she notes that it is very unusual for students to ask questions. she said, “it’s my opinion that they are trained this way from class 1… you tell the student, ‘sit down, don’t ask.’ this has been the way in our country.” aleeza touched on the role of education in encouraging passivity among girls. the results are consistent with saigol (2003, p. 140), who argues that the purpose of girls’ citizenship education is to “create a ‘civilized,’ ‘obedient,’ ‘well-mannered,’ ‘honest,’ ‘truthful’ and ‘modernized’ citizen…” the views of the teachers relating to gendered citizenship are consistent with research on the notions of good and bad women discussed in naseem (2010) and saigol (2003). pakistan’s history of expectations of women strongly influenced teachers’ understandings of citizenship for women citizens. the ways that teachers understand citizenship combined with the official discourse of the curriculum come together to create aspects of school practice that encourage students to embody these gendered notions of citizenship. reproduction of gendered citizenship through school practice the gendered constructions of citizenship expressed by the teachers were played out in many aspects of school practice, including the types of classes and activities offered, visual messages (posters and signs) hanging in the school, and teaching methods. first, the types of classes offered in the school encouraged students to excel in areas associated with skills needed for homemaking. the home economics department and the art room were among the best resourced in the school. the home economics room was complete with ovens, microwaves, refrigerators and sewing machines. similarly the arts room was well stocked with art supplies and examples of students’ work. there is also a computer and science lab, but both are out of date and i did not see students using them. in addition to the classes offered, school practice extends into the activities, clubs, and events that schools offer students. giving students opportunities to participate in activities and civic projects helps teach them how to engage in civic life outside of the school (faour, 2012). many of the student activities ann emerson studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 302 (e.g., drama, fine arts, photography) were well suited to the gender norms for girls by including indoor and artistic activities that are acceptable for women to engage in as they prepare for middle class womanhood. one of the school’s major yearly events is union week. union week is an opportunity for students to engage in intermural competitions with students from other government girls’ schools in islamabad. like the clubs, most of these events seem quite gendered and include jewelry making, flower arranging, drama and debates in both english and urdu, computer graphics and art. this event contributes to the schools’ goal to groom girls as proper women. even events that are not inherently gendered have gendered themes. for example, the theme for the english speech was “love is blind, marriage is an eye opener.” the poster or powerpoint presentation for the computer section was based on the topic, “the importance of teachers in the lives of students.” there were also clear instructions that no political or controversial content was to be used in any debates or speeches. the rules also forbid indian music at the competitions. perhaps the most important and prestigious activity for students’ civic learning is the student union, which according to the prospectus (margalla school, 2014, p. 28), is responsible for, “… checking behavior, uniform, and discipline during college hours…” the student union members, who are selected by the teachers and principle (not elected by their peers), seemed to embody the ideals of good citizenship that teachers listed. they were all very polite, well spoken, obeyed their teachers and looked very put together in their immaculate school uniforms complete with sashes that stated their positions. the selection of these girls for the student union, which has prestige among students, rewards those girls who embody the traits that teachers said they valued. the visual images around the school emphasized the role of women as charitable and as supporters of men. the school code of honor, found displayed at the front entrance, is a verse from the quran that encourages all to “practice regular charity.” and the prospectus (margalla school, 2014, p. 4) states that “…[the school prepares] students for personal and professional success while contributing to the betterment of the larger community.” there were only two posters in the school that focused on women. one poster highlights the biography of fatima jinnah, the sister of mohammad ali jinnah (“father of the nation” and pakistan’s first prime minister), who played a major role in the pakistan movement. this description of fatima jinnah positions her as an extension of her brother, rather than her own person. she is also described as loving, loyal and a lifelong companion to her great brother, rather than as a dentist, political leader, and founding member of the pakistan movement. her work for the pakistan movement is described as selfless and sincere. the supporting role of women is also noted in the second poster about the role of women in the pakistan movement. here again, women are described as supporters of their famous male family members who did selfless work educating pakistan’s daughters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 303 including working as a secretary and taking no salary. the poster states that lady mohammad ali addressed large gatherings of muslims wearing a burqa (an outer garment which covers the wearer’s face and body). including this detail stresses that this woman ventured into the public domain, which is not considered appropriate for women, but wore a burqa thereby keeping her modesty (and therefore honor) intact. these two posters seemed to be the only visual messages in the school guiding girls about women’s roles as citizens of pakistan. the women discussed on these posters (and certainly most of the prominent women discussed in history and social studies classes) were upper class urdu speakers and often related to important men involved in the founding of pakistan (rouse, 2004). the role of women from other classes and backgrounds is wholly excluded from history taught in schools. therefore, these girls from the lower middle class, some of whom belong to ethnic or religious minorities, never have the chance to learn about women like them contributing to pakistan’s history. finally, the focus on indoctrinating students into a certain performance of gendered citizenship is supported by a lack of opportunities for students to engage critically in the classrooms. levine and bishai (2010) argue that teachers have the opportunity to model a positive balance between authority and citizen input that is critical in participatory political systems, like that of pakistan. this balance is achieved through student-centered learning and classroom management. however, in all of the classrooms observed, teachers used lecture methods that relied primarily on reading from the textbook. students were asked mainly memory-based questions, and there was little chance for students to critically engage with content, or offer their thoughts on a subject. most of the teachers emphasized an authoritarian model of classroom management, which rewards passive and silent students (levine & bishai, 2010), and attributed those characteristics to their favorite students this model does not encourage girls to engage critically with the world around them, but to accept what they are taught as unquestionable fact. limiting agency in the public sphere: implications of gendered education through the views of teachers and school practices, the school serves as a reproducer of historically and culturally constructed gendered citizenship. it also monitors adherence to these constructions through rewarding students who embody certain characteristics (e.g., student union membership) and punishing those who do not (e.g., fines for unclean uniforms). monitoring of gendered citizenship also extends to the teachers. for example, during the brainstorming activity (see table 1), once strong faith was mentioned as a civic value, a teacher said, “now that it has been said, we all must rank it ann emerson studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 304 first.” each of the three groups then ranked strong faith first on their lists. this monitoring of the teachers was also evidenced by one teacher’s experience as a member of the islamabad chapter of the women’s action forum, a political group focused on women’s rights (mumtaz & shaheed, 1987). the teacher revealed that she had been a member of the group, but didn’t feel she could continue because several of her colleagues felt that the group was too “western and anti-islamic.” this was a stark contrast to the lower class male school clerks who actively engaged in politics and advocacy through their unions. the different experiences of these men from that of the teacher suggest that gender is more powerful than class when engaging in the public political sphere. the implications of the reproduction of gendered citizenship learned through schooling were made evident through the two focus groups i conducted to explore how students understand themselves as citizens of pakistan. one group consisted of student union members, and the second was assembled from other students who volunteered to participate. there was a distinct contrast between the student union members and the other students in terms of their demeanors, aspirations, and expectations regarding women’s roles in society. for example, many of the student union members aspired to be teachers, lecturers or doctors. these are among the traditionally respectable positions for women to hold in pakistan and tended to fit within the ideals of women as nurturers and caregivers (jafar, 2005). the other students had slightly wider ideas about what they wanted to be when they grew up, although some did want to be doctors and teachers. a few of the girls wanted to work for ngos, be pilots, dentists, islamic scholars, and politicians. however, it should also be noted that all of the 33 students interviewed aspired to careers outside the home. the difference between the two focus groups illustrates how those students who demonstrate a form of gender that most closely adheres to the ideals of their school are rewarded by being selected for the student union. although all of the students in the focus groups aspire to these careers and some will train, many may not have the opportunity to work outside the home. for many parents, the purpose of educating girls is to improve their chances to find a husband who is also educated and from a good family (weiss, 2015). this sentiment was expressed by the pakistan studies teacher, abida, when speculating about the future of her students. she said, mostly the girls, after getting education have to be restricted at home… i see very good girls from very good families get married after education, because it is required islamically, as far as the religion is concerned the girls must be married… she must manage the home. the limited spectrum of career aspirations discussed by the students and teachers is consistent with weiss (2015), who argues that the emphasis on women’s roles as mothers, wives, and caregivers leaves little space for them to aspire to other occupations. educating pakistan’s daughters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 305 in addition to gendered aspirations, the limitations on agency that are imposed by gendered expectations of citizenship were evident in the ways that students and teachers felt they, as educated pakistani women, could contribute to a more peaceful pakistan. almost all limited their answers to raising children and “creating awareness” among children and male family members. one pakistan studies teacher focused on her role as a teacher and said, “through students you can create awareness and at home we can create awareness among our children.” another teacher focused on the role of women as mothers. she said, changing of the mind, because a woman, definitely, she is not strong as she can do anything. but she can change the mind of the kids. and to tell them what you are and be honest and do your best for your country. i think this the way… a mother can do this, a teacher can do this, a woman can do this because she cannot fight… but changing the mind is most important. some of the teachers also discussed the barriers they faced in contributing to social change in pakistan. sharmeela, an english teacher, felt that women needed to be more engaged in choosing a better government, which can then address the issues they are facing. she said, i am a warm-hearted person and i feel sorry for all the people dying in [pakistan]. all i can do is feel sorry for them. i cannot go to the border and shoot all the taliban… we can at least talk about it. we can discuss how can we be out of it and choose a proper mechanism for ourselves and that is choosing a better government, a better administration. her response also highlights the lack of space for women to exercise agency to affect change. she said she could only feel sorry for people being killed, but she herself could not act (“shoot all the taliban”). she then went on to discuss the importance of women in positions of power in the government. she added, “we the women need to have a say in the government.” she felt as though women’s exclusion from (meaningful) participation in the government stifled their agency to affect change. for most of the teachers, the most significant barriers to participating in change outside the home were the restrictions they face as women and their duties within their homes. abida said, “mostly the girls, after getting education have to be restricted at home… as far as the religion is concerned to handle the problem of a country, it is the matter of the boys.” for abida, there is very little agency for girls to choose how they engage in society, because of the religious and cultural expectations assigned to women. she points out that the problems of the country are the responsibility of the boys. faiza also emphasized the restrictions on women because of work they do within the homes and the negative impact it has on their engagement in social issues. she said, ann emerson studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 306 this is …a big problem, all the time women in society are thinking about their problems, they have to support their family, take care of their children, the inlaws, we have to make everyone happy… and she don’t even have time for the newspaper. the students in the focus groups had varying ideas of the ways that they could engage as educated women to help transform pakistan. the student union students answered in ways that were similar to many of the teachers. the president, anjum, said that they should “help educate the people in backward areas.” another student said, “we must do well in our careers and that will help make pakistan a better place.” however, the students in the other focus group had very different ideas about how they could help pakistan. their ideas strayed from the private sphere that the student union students embraced, and included working for women’s rights through ngos and women’s organisations (such as the women’s action forum that their teacher was pressured to quit). the students, like their teachers, were keenly aware of the issues faced in their country, but felt that their teachers and parents did not take the time to discuss these issues with them. sabina, age 14, told me, “[our teachers and parents] don’t want to talk to us about these things because we are girls.” despite the apparent resistance of adults to include them in discussions about their country, many of the girls felt it was important that they do something to help. ayisha, whose uncle had been a victim of political violence in karachi, told me, “i want to be an assassin… i just think it would be cool to kill the bad guys.” while it was clear that students and teachers wanted to work for change, many expressed frustrations with the lack of agency and the narrow spaces they can occupy to promote change without the risk of violence against them. as 13-year-old sunduz said, “it’s very difficult [to speak out] and can be dangerous, but we must speak out.” the historical and cultural notions of women citizens reproduced at margalla girls’ school serves as constraints to the space that they are allowed to occupy outside of the private sphere. this, in turn, limits women’s agential space to engage as citizens with the ability to affect change upon the (public) institutions that disempower women (saigol, 2003). conclusion: gendered citizenship education as cultural violence women’s citizenship as taught through this school’s practice is framed as duty to the family and support of the “greater good.” it was important for the school to provide an environment that balanced traditional ideals of middleclass womanhood with providing a quality education. this was done through the promotion of gendered civic values that were expected to be performed by students through student activities and in the classroom. students who were best able to demonstrate these ideals of feminine citizenship were educating pakistan’s daughters studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 307 rewarded through special appointments in clubs like the student union. therefore, schooling in this case serves to reproduce traditional gender expectations, which have developed through the complex historical, religious, and cultural positioning of middle-class women – maintaining schools, even girls’ schools, as patriarchal establishments (kirk, 2008b). the reproduction of gendered citizenship implications for the power dynamics associated with citizenship. the exclusion of women from the male-dominated public and political spheres reproduces civic and social inequalities based on gender. the resulting economic and political subordination of women are forms of structural violence that limit women’s agency to choose how to engage as citizens. so, for women who have an interest in resisting the status quo, there comes with it an inherent risk. shaheed (2010, p. 864) explains that this risk is contingent on the intersection of identities. she states, the ability of an individual woman to resist the negative impact of the religionpolitics nexus depends on factors such as class, economic resources, the community and family in which she is located and, of course, her own personal inclinations. by promoting specific gendered performances of citizenship, the school serves as a reproducer of cultural violence (galtung, 1990), through normalizing structural violence against women. rogers, malancharuvilberkes, mosley, hui and joseph (2005, p. 368) argue that “…one of the most powerful forms of oppression is internalized hegemony, which includes both coercion and consent.” fraser (1995, p. 73) suggests, “the result is often a vicious circle of cultural and economic subordination.” the school contributes to this vicious circle rather than allowing teachers to become agents of social change (kirk, 2004) to encourage girl students to develop the skills they would require to break the cycle of cultural and economic subordination of women. the limits of gender and class on agency for resistance was made clear by the ways teachers and students understood their roles in the improvement of pakistan. almost all felt that their space for resistance resided in the private sphere of the family and careers in teaching. both of these spaces have traditionally been acceptable for women’s participation. still, within these spaces there are barriers to resistance including the use of religion as a means of control, especially the notion of women as the protectors of the purity of the culture by maintaining their traditional gender roles. women are expected to contribute through influencing male family members while, as one teacher said, “the burden of the country is that of the boys.” ann emerson studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 291-309, 2018 308 references academy of educational planning & management. 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(1997). gender and nation. london: sage. anicha et al final june 18 18 correspondence address: cali l. anicha, forward program, office of the vice provost for faculty affairs and equity, north dakota state university, fargo, nd usa; email: c.mcdonaldmorken@ndsu.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 dispatch advocates and allies: the succession of a good idea or what’s in a meme? cali l. anicha north dakota state university, usa canan bilen-green north dakota state university, usa ann burnett north dakota state university, usa abstract in this two-part dispatch we first trace the evolution of three interdependent terms – advocacy, allyship, and accountability – as a means to highlight their changing roles in driving impactful social justice efforts, then explore how this triad is manifested in a gender equity advocacy program fashioned at a midwestern united states university, the advocates and allies (a&a) initiative. in part 1, we describe a memetic theory of culture to situate the findings of an internet term search that reveals a mutable progression of meaning(s) for our threesome. this framework provides grounding for discussion in part 2 of the wider social milieu reflected in the evolution of a&a. we then offer an outline of central features of the initiative along with reflections from the field, and point out resources for learning more about how the program is being utilized. by surveying the succession of a&a within this culture-as-memetic context we intend to acknowledge what’s been done by others whilst furthering the important and unfinished work of gender equity in academia. we close with interpretations and conclusions. keywords equity; allyship; advocacy; accountability; culture; memetic advocates & allies studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 153 this two-part dispatch is presented in response to the tsunami of domination culture reaching around the world in waves of increasingly blatant white nationalism, xenophobia, jingoism, misogyny, and disablism. bitter manifestations of racialized, gendered, and enabled/ableist entitlements have become common daily occurrences from the schoolyard to the national stage. how might we who seek social justice navigate the storms of political and relational turmoil unleashed and repeatedly provoked by the current powersthat-be? how do we keep our heads up or down as the changing currents require, buoy ourselves up, and persist at the work of cultural transformation necessary to establish the more just and humane world we intend? first, it is vital to examine our own beliefs about what constitutes justice and injustice. a clear and coherent grasp of what justice looks like is as crucial as a full and nuanced comprehension of the operations and influences of hegemony: the myriad social processes through which human beliefs and practices perpetuate injustice, re-instantiating domination through consent as much as through coercion (lash, 2007). our awareness of these two strands – the justice we are determined to engender and the injustices we are currently enmeshed within – must operate in tandem, an approach that allows us to unmask the social practices that contribute to each. to chart this course, in part 1 what’s in a meme? we unpack what we have come to understand as an indispensable and interdependent social justice trifecta: advocacy, allyship, and accountability. we deliberately scrutinize accountability as a vital driver of social justice advocacy and allyship. in part 2 advocates and allies we share details about the development of a program that applies this pivotal triad in the work of men faculty working for gender equity in academia.1 following part 2, we present interpretations and conclusions. this mini-series is offered in the hope that our theoretical exploration, paired with an exemplar, will support us all in continuing to establish a world in which justice flows, in the words of martin luther king, jr. “down like water” and domination culture ebbs and finally disappears. part 1: what’s in a meme? in this section we probe the cultural evolution of the interdependent concepts of advocacy, allyship, and accountability. we begin by briefly considering a theory of culture as memetic, then survey the history of the three concepts via cursory internet term searches. the search results reveal swelling networks of the use of all three terms, as well as a shifting progression of meaning(s) for this potent triad, and thereby provide a view into the wider social contexts that underlie the origin and formation of the gender equity program described in part 2. 1 see https://www.ndsu.edu/forward/advocates_and_allies/ cali l. anicha, canan bilen-green, ann burnett studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 154 a memetic perspective on culture human cultures develop via networks of relationships and shared ideas; persistent ideas become cultural conventions guiding individual and group behavior and actions. when cultural knowhow is shared (balkin, 1998) a meme operates as a “unit of cultural transmission,” (dawkins, 1989, p. 192) to leverage the inherent power of compelling ideas via social learning (bandura, 2006; marsden, 1998). memes and genes are theorized to operate similarly: via repetitions or replication, variation or mutation, and fitness value or survival selection (blackmore, 1999). thus, when an idea-meme is shared, it is taken up by the mind(s) of other individuals, perhaps slightly altered, then remains in the “meme pool” if it demonstrates sufficient goodness of fit. for example, over the past several decades analyses regarding what constitutes racism and antiracism have shifted from highlighting how people of color are oppressed through negative attributions purveyed via social institutions, to a focus on the underlying beliefs in white superiority that engender the unearned privileging of white people. the central recognition that the effects of racism are made possible through system-wide practices of racialized discrimination has remained. approaches for identifying and addressing racial injustice have, however, changed. these analyses have been articulated within networks of people of color, then shared with networks of white people, and have emerged within various antiracism projects to guide interpersonal and institutional practices. we believe that, although much of the information proliferating in today’s digital age appears transient and inconsequential, some concepts become iterative cultural memes capable of wide influence precisely because they are meaningful and consequential. such is the case with the three big ideas we find central to effective social justice efforts: advocacy, taking action in support of a cause; allyship, entering into relationships to pursue shared goals; and accountability to/with those with whom the advocacy and alliances are engaged, a perspective that includes concomitant expectations of responsibility for action on behalf of justice. while academics tussle over definitions and measurement (blackmore, 2010; mcnamara, 2011; situngkir, 2004), corporate groups and internet users are rapidly finessing the art of meme marketing (memevertizing) to share ideas in “clever, memorable, easily communicated and absurdly contagious” formats (markowski, 2013, para. 5). setting aside for the moment academic uncertainties, we adopt a memetic perspective as “a useful heuristic [for gaining] insight into the nature of the social world” (marsden, 1998, memetic stance section, para. 1). it is from this angle that we investigate, via internet term searches, advocacy, allyship, and accountability as social justice memes. advocates & allies studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 155 advocacy, allyship, accountability: a relatively recent history advocacy and alliances are ideas with ancient roots in human cultures; but their social meanings and applications have shifted in response to changing values and politics. in today’s global digitized information age, interactive explorations of social justice theory and praxis are yielding synergistic insights and practices. in many social justice-oriented organizations, advocacy and allyship have become nearly synonymous with accountability. wwws? what would the web say?: via term searches on the world wide web, we traced the histories of advocacy, allyship, and accountability. limitations of this search include that only english language results are reported, thus the findings primarily reflect cultural views found in the united states, canada, and the united kingdom. given that the internet has been available to academia only since the 1980s, and for commercial and personal use only since the 1990s, this account is necessarily a constrained chronology of the threesome. even so, the number of search engine query “hits” summarized in table 1 shows a memetic progression in the evolution of advocacy and allyship, with the attendant emergence of accountability as a vital partner (search completed july 22nd 2016). results for a verbatim search for “advocates & allies” included the institutions where a&a (see part 2) is being replicated. the advocates & allies pairing was initially seen with lgbt+ organizations and was also seen on sites addressing: a support community for nonprofit groups, a human rights’ day event, homelessness, disability, support for public schooling, healthcare programs, youth engagement, mental health awareness, veganism, and domestic violence. overall, the results summarized in table 1 show that in the 1980s advocacy links primarily reflected concerns regarding “vulnerable persons” along with legal, medical, and religious issues (48,200 hits). the 1990s showed similar foci with increasing mentions of human and civil rights associations with the term (450,000 hits). calls for cross-cultural knowledge and respect emerged at the turn of the century (25,000,000 hits), and explicit recognition of a need for collaboration with persons for whom the advocacy is meant began showing up post-2010 (58,400,000 hits for 2011-2016). cali l. anicha, canan bilen-green, ann burnett studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 156 search terms advocacy, advocate (most results used both terms) allyship advocates and allies/a&a time period total results 1980’s 48,200 1 1,110 1990’s 450,000 14 6,870 2000-2010 25,000,000 983 102,000 2011-2016 58, 400,000 20,100 1, 110,000 topical results 1980’s legal, medical/patients, religious and “vulnerable persons” advocacy single result associated with safe zone webpage at rutgers university, “awareness and allyship” training noted to have begun feb. 15, 1988 business/labor, military/defense, political, medical/health, disability; mention of national gay rights organizing 1990’s similar to previous decade with occasional mentions of human and civil rights – title ix and disability/special education primarily lgbt; also antiracism + some commentary on accountability business/industry, political, health; increasing instances of antiviolence and antioppression, pro diversity and environment citations 2000-2010 continue to see medical, legal, religious; add consumer, housing advocacy; state the need for crosscultural knowledge, respect lgbt, antiracism, diversity, cultural competence do’s/don’ts using both terms for legal and issues-based community organizing: environment, lgbt, antiracism, sexism, disability, education, includes accountability of those with power/advantage 2011-2016 [denotes a 5rather than 10-year span] focus on skillbuilding in advocacy work; explicit recognition of need for collaboration with persons for whom the advocacy is meant pitfalls and commoditization of allyship/ally identities; despair of marginalized folks due to ineffective/insincere allyship/claims lgbt primarily paired with accountability for education and action; forward a&a and wepan; homelessness, disability selfadvocacy, tribal sovereignty table 1. internet history term search from 1980’s through july 2016. (note: the lgbt advocate magazine began publishing in 1967.) advocates & allies studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 157 allyship followed a similar path, though with lower frequencies – from a fundamental awareness of the concept, to cultural competence within alliances. the single instance of allyship found in the 1980s was associated with an lgbt safe zone site; hits grew to 20,100 by mid-2016. concerns regarding insincere and ineffective ally behaviors are found frequently in more recent posts; however, explicit mention of accountability emerged concomitantly on sites exploring allyship as early as the 1990s. in the 1980s and 1990s accountability primarily appeared in relation to business, military, political, and medical concerns, though the term was also seen in association with disability and gay rights. by 2000 accountability was firmly rooted in analyses of the responsibilities of persons with power/advantage regarding community activism for the environment, lgbt+ rights, antiracism, antisexism, and disability justice. an exploration of the content found on the most recently developed sites revealed a prevailing community-based construal of accountability in which whites are understood to be accountable to/with people of color, men to/with women, straights to/with gender nonconforming individuals, and tabs (temporarily able-bodied) and neurotypicals accountable to/with people perceived as disabled, etc. accountability to/with marginalized “others” is identified as crucial because clear understandings about the behaviors and systems that perpetuate social (in)justices rarely emerge spontaneously in the minds of privileged individuals. rather, persons directly experiencing unearned disadvantages become cartographers of the privilege landscape. unfortunately, and much to the detriment of us all, current dominant culture hegemony conspires with our tendencies to avoid uncertainty and discomfort, and thus operates to maintain the invisibility (to the privileged) of unearned advantaging. to be genuinely accountable, it is crucial to first seek out and listen to those with whom allyship is sought. in that listening, we must learn to recognize when in-group bias/superiority or stereotyping influences or interrupts accurate perceptions and understandings, and thereby perpetuates disconnection, judgment, and conflict. when advocates engage in deep listening and enter into allyship with a clear recognition that each one’s liberation is equally at stake, then genuine accountability can be cultivated. in sum, accountability is essential for and central to respectful, genuine, and beneficial advocacy and allyship. when it comes to the socially constructed and sanctioned unearned privileging of whiteness, maleness, gender-conformity, and physicaland neuro-typicality, those among us to whom privileges accrue are too often unaware and undereducated. until those of us with unearned advantage hold ourselves accountable to/with persons experiencing unearned disadvantage, we cannot fully comprehend the injustices of the world, or hope to engender justice. cali l. anicha, canan bilen-green, ann burnett studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 158 part 2: ndsu forward advocates and allies in part 2 of this dispatch, we investigate the memes of advocacy, allyship, and accountability in relation to the development of a gender equity program at a midwestern united states university. we begin by recognizing that the advocates and allies program (a&a) is founded on the important work accomplished by multiple sociopolitically marginalized communities who have developed and shared critical analyses and organizing tools for social justice. after recounting the succession of campus equity efforts that prefigured and provided crucial grounding for the program, we outline central features of the a&a faculty gender equity initiative. next, we share the responses of men faculty and administrators to their engagement in gender equity work. a review of campus equity efforts circa 1980s to present day academics are neither separate from nor immune to cultural contexts, and academia is a veritable bastion of unearned advantaging and privileging (thomas, 2017). thus, although critical studies of race, gender (cis and lgbt+), and disability are acknowledged as transdisciplinary academic fields, their knowledge-bases have necessarily been generated from marginalized communities. an honest review of the lineage and social evolution of the central tenets of any intellectual activism (hill collins, 2013) must acknowledge the legions of organizers and activists who have imbued advocacy and allyship with a rich critical cultural reserve that supports us all in the ongoing project of social equity. by examining the succession of this particular university-based program within the broadened social context detailed in part 1, we wish to give appropriate recognition to communitybased activists, whilst furthering the important and unfinished work of gender-equity in academia. in the late 1980s, and through the next two decades, the accountability meme came to life at our university through two primary grassroots sources. first, antiracist education and organizing workshops were hosted by local community organizations, often in collaboration with our university. those trainings, provided by the people’s institute for survival and beyond,2 and crossroads antiracism and organizing,3 were grounded in systemic power analyses and a recognition of the accountability of white people to/with communities of color in the work to undo racism. although the initial focus of the workshops was an analysis of the myriad ways in which people of color experienced racism, an examination of the primary role(s) of 2 see http://www.pisab.org 3 see http://crossroadsantiracism.org advocates & allies studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 159 government, schools, and religious organizations in perpetuating racial inequities followed. the take-home message was clear: those institutions were run by recipients of unearned privileging based on beliefs of white racial superiority, and racial equity would only be realized when white people understood and acted on this knowledge. this early antiracism work led to the development of tocar (training our campuses against racism), a local multi-campus initiative that provided a continuum of introductory, intermediate, and advanced antiracism education and organizing activities until 2010.4 though our university-sanctioned antiracism team has been decommissioned, the lessons learned continue to inform the personal and professional lives of many campus and local community members. accountability is also reflected in the safe zone trainings that have been held continuously on our campus since 2001.5 workshops offered through the current safe zone program have been adapted from community-based ally networks in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual (lgbtqia) communities. similarly to antiracism work, safe zone programming is grounded in systemic power analyses; recognition of the accountability of straight people (cisgender hetero) to/with gendernonconforming communities is a central tenet. it is probable that there were influential social justice efforts on our campus that preceded our time, though we have not researched that question. what we can say from our current perspective is that the antiracism analyses shared with us by community organizers, in which white people are guided to seek out, listen to, and act with people of color, has stayed with us. we also learned that this is often difficult medicine for white people to swallow in the face of a social system that constantly represents white experience not only as the superior, but as the sole norm. similarly, safe zone trainings invite the cisgender heterosexual majority to recognize that their sexuality is presented as a sole and superior norm, and to accept accountability to/with gender nonconformists. although the ongoing educational and advocacy efforts of the safe zone program have been crucial in promoting a welcoming campus climate, local and regional politics continue to be less than welcoming. indeed, the recent rise in misogynistic rhetoric across the united states is allowing increases in gendered discrimination in all its forms (khazan, 2016). even so, our campus antiracism and safe zone efforts have borne fruit in the form of the a&a model. in 2008 the a&a program began as a signature project of advance forward,6 a national science foundation (nsf) funded gender equity initiative launched at our university. the program was distinctive in its focus on men faculty and offered an adaptable model for gender equity advocacy in academic workplaces (anicha, bilen-green, burnett, froelich & holbrook, 2017; anicha, burnett & bilen-green, 2015). unique aspects included that 4 see https://www.ndsu.edu/diversity/diversity_council_information/anti_racism_team/ 5 see https://www.ndsu.edu/safezone 6 see https://www.ndsu.edu/forward/ cali l. anicha, canan bilen-green, ann burnett studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 160 a&a was designed to address the gender equity education needs of men faculty while simultaneously leveraging their substantial social and university governance powers. to initiate the a&a model, tenured men faculty who had demonstrated engagement in gender equity efforts were recruited to establish a core group of advocates. the goal of the campus-wide program continues to be: (a) educate men faculty about gender inequity in academia; (b) introduce men faculty to strategies for bringing about positive change in their departments and colleges; and (c) build a supportive network of men advocates and allies to work to create a more equitable climate for women faculty. advocates are committed to increasing their understanding of gender bias and its impact on the academic careers of women. they educate themselves about issues of gender inequity, and they work to increase the number of women faculty, encourage the hiring and promotion of women faculty into administrative positions, and ensure the fair and equitable treatment of women within their institution. advocates develop and offer regularly scheduled ally workshops for men faculty who are interested in becoming allies, and follow up with informal meetings to discuss case studies with the intent of continuing to increase their and the allies knowledge about gender inequity in higher education. allies are men faculty who participate in gender equity (ally) workshops and are expected to take action primarily within their departments including by speaking up at meetings, inviting women colleagues to collaborate on research, and serving on committees in place of their women colleagues to reduce the inequity in service loads. allies can volunteer to become advocates as they become more familiar with the program. a comparison of the a&a program structures with equity approaches used in corporate spheres shows many similarities.7 however, the clarity with which a&a affirms and acts on the need to access direct support and guidance from women appears to be unique. rather than expecting men faculty to be knowledgeable about gender inequities, a foundational assumption of a&a is that all men, including highly educated academics, need multiple, iterative gender equity learning opportunities to become aware of the existing hegemony of noxious standards of what bell hooks has identified as patriarchal masculinity (2005). men faculty who participate in a&a accept responsibility for their own and other men faculty members’ (re)education and commit to taking corrective steps to overcome the patriarchal norms that shape them. to sustain awareness and inform action, men faculty in the a&a program consider inter/national, local, campus, and departmental data that reveal gendered inequities, and learn about the myriad ways implicit bias manifests in individual as well as institutional actions. importantly, maintaining formal advisory relationships 7 e.g., the national center for women and information technology comprehensive review of top 10 ways to be a male advocate for technical women at https://www.ncwit.org/resources/read-online-maleadvocate advocates & allies studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 161 with women faculty provides pathways for accountability and promotes effective advocacy and allyship. both of the sustained campus equity efforts, tocar and safe zone, reviewed above adopted a community-based social justice construal of accountability with slight variations to suit university contexts. several of the faculty members who developed the a&a program had also participated in those efforts and were well-grounded in analyses of accountability made there. if the forward a&a insistence on women faculty as advisors is understood as an accountability meme variant, then it appears to have demonstrated fitness value and successfully negotiated selection pressures to date. what do the men say? notes from the field although the a&a program was developed at our university expressly for men in academic settings, the approach is firmly rooted in the fundamentals of forming effective alliances for equity across sociopolitical differences. the effectiveness of the model relies on the approach being adopted by a stable network of advocates. we have recently garnered a second nsf grant to more comprehensively support the development and test the fidelity of a&a programs at other universities.8 since the inception of the model in 2008 we have gathered evaluation data from workshop participants; and in 2013 an external evaluator interviewed 15 advocates at our university to learn why they decided to join the initiative, what issues they hoped to address, and challenges they experienced.9 over the past year, interviews have been completed with men who are coordinating a&a programs on their commitment to accountability. informational sessions about the a&a model have been presented at a number of conferences, advocates and ally workshops have been held on 10campuses, and ethnographic notes describing attendees’ reactions were collected during recent advocate and ally workshops. these data show that men faculty participate in the a&a program for several reasons, the majority of which are internally motivated. reasons to participate include specific examples of inequities that were bothersome, distress about knowing that inequities exist, or simply a desire to be part of the solution to gender inequity. one advocate recalled a faculty search in his department in which a woman candidate was on the short list: “i remember a couple of my senior colleagues saying, ‘well, looks like maybe she’s been riding people’s coat tails.’ and you look at her record, and she had something like 50 publications and 35 first author publications. like, how can you look at that and say that she’s been riding coat tails?” another advocate remarked about the issues, “… in our engineering college, which 8 see https://www.ndsu.edu/forward/advocates_and_allies/about_advocates_allies/ 9 all internal and external evaluations are located at www.ndsu.edu/forward cali l. anicha, canan bilen-green, ann burnett studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 162 has struggled horrendously with gender representation, particularly at the faculty level. yeah, there’s problems and anybody sees it.” many respondents indicated that gender inequities observed for women family members had led them to desire to learn more and participate in gender equity efforts. one advocate explained, “because, you know, i have two sisters. so i know the difficulty, they talk at home.” others indicated that observing gendered discrimination or hearing information about gender disparities at their own university had led them to a&a involvement. one advocate noted that his department was “male-dominated” and after witnessing bias against women faculty, he wanted to “take steps to improve that and help more people understand the situation.” a few of the participants felt they were well-positioned to influence change, including one department chair who said, “i also thought that our department was a good example, and i could lead from that because we went from a department of two women and eleven men to now being seven women and six men, and i’d like to think i had something to do with that.” what do men faculty get from participation in a&a? advocates reported that a&a engagement provided them with opportunities to gain knowledge about social justice concerns and to take corrective actions; an ethnographic note taker reported, “participants highlight[ed] their commitment to diversity and gender equity/empowerment.” one interviewee noted that being an advocate “is as much a process of self-education as it is educating others, and so it’s both an advocacy group but also a study group.” on postworkshop surveys, a&a participants reported that the workshop had substantially increased their awareness of gender inequities and had provided them with useful tools and strategies for addressing gender equity. comments included on evaluations frequently indicated that participants especially appreciated talking through anecdotal scenarios that both described gender discrimination taking place and provided appropriate and effective responses. participants noted that having those conversations with other men was particularly beneficial. these data suggest that when men faculty are offered information, tools, and opportunities to work for gender equity, they are willing to do so. it may be that, when applied with critical analyses, using male workshop leaders and ensuring men-only dialogue is particularly wellsuited to disrupting patriarchal masculinity. as is true for social justice efforts in general, push-back is to be expected when a real threat to the status quo is underway (bishop, 2005).a recognition of the inevitability of such repercussions is one reason for recruiting tenured men faculty to act as advocates. nevertheless, even when protected by tenure, individual men acting on behalf of gender equity are likely to experience hostility and rejection from some of their colleagues; this is a concern in a workplace where collaborations and perceptions of collegiality can make or break a career. thus, anticipation of backlash also underlies the rationale for the development of interactive campus-wide support networks of advocates and allies. cohorts of men acting on behalf of gender equity may advocates & allies studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 163 be less vulnerable to backlash; however, meaningful institutional change requires tactical, thorough, and sustained efforts, meaning that men need to commit to the long haul (horton, kohl & kohl, 1990) and be prepared to meet resistance with persistence and creativity. so – what’s in a meme? interpretations and conclusions our cursory investigation of web content related to advocacy and allyship over the last 35 years indicates that the roles of advocates have morphed. overall, the essence of advocacy has shifted from political, legal, and economic foci, to the use of social power on behalf of vulnerable others, to expectations that unearned social power can be deployed to dismantle systems of unearned advantaging. similarly, the idea of allyship has shifted to express lateral rather than hierarchical “helping” relationships, and to expectations that allyship is an ongoing real-time behavior rather than a static identity. the forward a&a program took up the social justice memes of advocacy, allyship, and accountability that were central to the existing community-driven antiracism and lgbtq collaborations, and adapted them to advance gender equity in academia. accountability was centralized via formal processes for listening to the input of and acting with women faculty. this is no small contribution given the positioning of academics as “knowledge creators.” in the case of our institution, the community shared knowledge, ways of knowing, analyses, and lived experience with academics, and the academics translated those gifts into change processes for campus communities that had been hardwired to support privilege. reviewing our university history alongside evolving perceptions of advocacy, allyship, and accountability reveals that a&a is richly grounded in this social justice trifecta. in sum, our concern is that fidelity to the core meme of accountability is not lost. crucially, the gender-equity work of men must be grounded in a social justice construal of accountability lest it reflect no more than tired repetitions of unearned privilege. whether operating in academic, corporate, political, or community settings, recognizing this essential tenet will improve the effectiveness and integrity of social justice efforts. as this brief review of the conceptual terrain of advocacy, allyship, and accountability has shown, these are evolving ideas. with each iteration we come closer to the desired outcomes of equity and justice. if this contemplation on social justice has resonated with you, consider yourself memed. may you go forth and multiply! cali l. anicha, canan bilen-green, ann burnett studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 152-164, 2018 164 acknowledgements this research in part was supported by national science foundation grants # hrd-0811239 and # hrd-1500604. references anicha, c. l., bilen-green, c., burnett, a., froelich, k., & holbrook, s. (2017). institutional transformation: toward a diversity-positive campus culture. journal of women & minorities in science and engineering, 23(2). doi: 10.1615/jwomenminorscieneng.2017017021 anicha, c. l., burnett, a., & bilen-green, c. (2015). men faculty gender-equity advocates: a qualitative analysis of theory and praxis. journal of men's studies, 23(1), 21-43. balkin, j. m. (1998). cultural software: a theory of ideology. new haven, ct: yale univeristy press. bandura, a. (2006). toward a psychology of human agency. perspectives on psychological science, 1(2), 164-180. bishop, a. (2005). beyond token change: breaking the cycle of oppression in institutions. halifax, n.s.: fernwood. blackmore, s. (1999). the meme machine. new york: oxford university press. blackmore, s. (2010). memetics does provide a useful way of understanding cultural evolution. in f. ayala & r. arp (eds.), contemporary debates in philosophy of biology (pp. 255-272). malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. dawkins, r. (1989). the selfish gene. oxford: oxford university press. hill collins, p. (2013). on intellectual activism. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. hooks, b. (2005). the will to change: men, masculinity, and love. new york: washington square press. horton, m., kohl, j., & kohl, h. r. (1990). the long haul: an autobiography (1st ed.). new york: doubleday. lash, s. (2007). power after hegemony: cultural studies in mutation? theory culture & society, 24(3), 55-78. markowski, j. (2013). the best examples of meme marketing. sparks: insights into content, marketing, pr, and results [social media blog]. retrieved from http://sparksheet.com/thebest-examples-of-meme-marketing/ marsden, p. (1998). memetics and social contagion: two sides of the same coin? journal of memetics evolutionary models of information transmission, 2(2), 171-185. mcnamara, a. (2011). can we measure memes? frontiers in evolutionary neuroscience, 3(1), 1-7. situngkir, h. (2004). on selfish memes: culture as complex adaptive system. journal of social complexity, 2(1), 20-32. correspondence address: audrey l’espérance, school of political studies, university of ottawa, 550 cumberland street, ottawa, on k1n 6n5 canada. tel.: +1 (877) 868-8292, email: audrey. lesperance@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 6, issue 1, 147-149, 2012 review of becoming biosubjects: bodies, systems, technologies audrey l’espérance school of political studies, university of ottawa, canada becoming biosubjects: bodies, systems, technologies written by neil gerlach, sheryl n. hamilton, rebecca sullivan, priscilla l. walton toronto: university of toronto press, (2011), isbn 978-0-8020-9683-8 becoming biosubjects is a multidisciplinary collection of essays that provides an essential historical overview of canadian debates related to the social impacts of biotechnologies along with a conceptual discussion of the context-sensitive use of internationally established notions such as biopolitics, governmentality and biosubjectivity. gerlach (sociology/ anthropology), hamilton (law/communication), sullivan (communication/ culture), and walton (literature) anchor their theoretical arguments with accessible engaging empirical demonstrations and illustrate their case studies with popular culture techno-science representations (films, tv series, novels, etc.). following the influential work of nikolas rose (2007) and paul rabinow (1994), becoming biosubjects proposes an empirically driven study of biosociality in the canadian context. this book’s most notable strength is the historical overview of canadian national and provincial debates and legislation that the four case studies present. the introduction stresses the need for a cultural study of technology in canada. many studies were conducted in the united states and in europe on the social impacts of biotechnologies, bioscience, and biomedicine in the last decade. nevertheless, a lack of canadian literature on the issues contributes to the need for greater awareness of policy developments in these areas; the management of contemporary debates over technological advances and ethical questions they raise; and the routinization of medical, legal and research practices in the country. the studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 148 audrey l’espérance authors attempt to fill this gap by providing four wide-ranging case studies on dna identification, reproduction, biopatents, and biosecurity. the authors relate their canadian cases to the american, european and/or international experiences to be able to fully make their points and advance their arguments. far from being a disadvantage, the comparative nature of the book makes it all the more engaging and connects it to issues and questions that are not unique to the canadian experience. in addition, the authors remind us that canada has always been a player in the market of techno-science by revealing hidden or neglected events such as the germ warfare project of 1940, the first patent application for harvard college’s oncomouse in 1985 or the pioneer hi-bred case in 1989. further, the way it emphasizes the distinct moments that marked the slow but sure construction of biosubjects in canada is significant. drawing on the examples of david milgaard, henry morgentaler, monsanto’s canola seeds, the management of sars, smallpox, and the anthrax crisis among other cases, becoming biosubjects treats the reader to a comprehensive selection of cases from the genetically engineered and manipulated material to the technologically assisted real life situations and science fiction-like discoveries. this book also provides a detailed discussion of sociological notions that emerge and/or are redefined in this biotechnological era. foucault’s concept of biopower is omnipresent through the chapters in the way the four scholars present the notions of politicization, privatization, normalization, and responsibilization of selves, life and biological material. the authors also nuance their definition of these concepts to better fit the canadian cases, and accordingly provide a better understanding of the specific circumstances reported in the case studies. perhaps one of the greatest contributions of this book is the way they define biogovernance as a process of framing politics. throughout the book, gerlach and his colleagues argue that policy framing and reframing dynamics influence the debates and therefore the practices of biopolitics in canada. discourses are depicted as affecting institutions, norms and routines as well as the meaning of technology and its social application. however, the book also highlights the need for researchers interested in biogovernance to pay closer attention to two issues specific to canada. first, litigation is mentioned in each case study, but not formally discussed apart from the case of biopatents. courts have been central arenas in which new discourses have been mobilized in many of the debates taken up in the book’s respective chapters. the chapters talk about court cases as confirmations of new ideas, but not as milieus that produce meanings as well. second, the case study on sexual politics offers a strong illustration of the passage from the bodily integrity discourse of the 1990’s inherited from the abortion debate to the health and economic rationale that is widespread today. though, chapter 3 is unable to show the separation between issues of reproduction and embryo research steadily institutionalized after the royal commission on new reproductive technologies, leaving many questions unanswered. for instance, why was the feminist frame removed from the assisted human reproduction debate in the first place? studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 becoming biosubjects 149 above all, becoming biosubjects successfully shows how narratives and imagery combine unexpected possibilities with actual practices to create new representations of bodies and technologies. this book, therefore, will be of interest to all social science scholars concerned with the social effects of science and technology. references rabinow, p. (1994). the third culture. history of the human sciences, 7(2), 53-64. rose, n. (2007). the politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. princeton: princeton university press. ayyash final june 22 18 correspondence address: mark muhannad ayyash, department of sociology & anthropology, mount royal university, calgary, ab, t3e 6k6; email: mayyash@mtroyal.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 an assemblage of decoloniality? palestinian fellahin resistance and the space-place relation mark muhannad ayyash mount royal university, canada abstract this paper examines how fellahin resistance beginning in the early parts of the 20th century interacted with the zionist settler-colonial project, focusing on how this resistance operated on a complex understanding of the relation between the fixity of place and flux of space. thinking this resistance alongside theories of colonial occupation as well as deleuze and guattari’s theory of assemblage and the smoothstriated mixture of space, i argue that following the complex interplay between space (flux) and place (fixity), as opposed to resolving it, may yield a promising pathway in palestinian, and perhaps global, decolonial resistances today. this can be observed in the contemporary resistance of palestinian fellahin in the village of bil‘in, whose repertoires of action constitute an assemblage, both spatially and temporally. i argue that one of the important lessons found in the discourse and actions of bil‘in activists is that land is autonomous of human desires and plans, of ethno-national ideological projects. opening politics to the insight that the flux of space cannot be tamed within a bounded nation-state produces a decolonial resistance that sees the displacement of people from the land as the displacement of life itself. keywords assemblage; space-place; palestinian fellahin; decoloniality in 1989, edward said explained his support for the palestine national council’s (pnc) 1988 decision to accept united nations resolutions 181 (partition of palestine to form a jewish state and an arab state), 242 and 338 (enforcing the borders of pre-1967 war). said (1989, p. 15) characterizes the pnc’s decision as an “emphatic transformation from liberation movement to independence movement.” prior to this decision, the pnc officially held the goal of liberating all of palestine and allowing all palestinian refugees and exiles to return to the land from which they were expelled in the 1948 war. this “break with the past,” as said puts it (1989, p. 17), was a difficult decision to make, filled with uncertainty. yet, it was a sacrifice that was mark muhannad ayyash studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 22 necessary for the sake of advancing the rights of the palestinian people and the cause of peace and justice in the region (said, 1989, p. 19). in accepting the un resolutions, the pnc accepted the establishment of the israeli state, renounced “terrorism,”1 and declared the establishment of a palestinian state. aware of the complexities and subtleties of the conflict, said (1995) viewed the injustice of the palestinian case in clear terms: palestinians were and are struggling against forceful expulsion from their lands which rendered them exiles, refugees, second-class citizens, and occupied peoples. by calling the pnc’s decision a break – an emphatic transformation – said seems to assume that the pnc’s leadership (guided by yasser arafat’s fatah) shared his view of the struggle prior to the 1988 decision.2 but as rashid khalidi’s (1997) seminal work on palestinian identity and the nationalist movement indicates, various palestinian leaderships across history have never properly addressed the losses suffered by the palestinians. khalidi chronicles three stages in how palestinian identity came to be constituted in the nationalist movement (for a summary of the stages, see khalidi, 1997, pp. 193-194). his argument makes clear that, throughout these stages, palestinian identity came to be understood as essentially tied to a specific boundary that is, like that of other modern nation-states, relatively recent in the making (khalidi, 1997, p. 194). this approach to identity and the nation-state posits the two as essentially connected to one another in a symbiotic relationship where the nation-state supports and houses a fixed national identity, while this identity is seen to stretch simultaneously, in seamless continuity, to a historical point prior to the formation of modern boundaries (khalidi, 1997, p. 194). for khalidi (1997, pp. 205-209), this approach overlooks some of the important contradictions and complex questions surrounding palestinian identity, which mostly revolve around various internal struggles (socio-economic, political, and cultural) and the continuing dispersal of the palestinian people in the contemporary era.3 following khalidi, i do not suggest that the palestinian leadership – in all its varied forms – has consciously or intentionally betrayed the palestinian struggle. while khalidi (1997) focuses on distinctive features of the palestinian leaderships in explaining their failure to address palestinian losses – most notably, the discursive trope of “failure as triumph” – i want to 1 the pnc’s declaration made a distinction between legitimate violent resistance to defend against occupation and “terrorism” defined as an “indiscriminate violence whose aim is to terrorize civilians” (said, 1989, p. 18). 2 pnc members like george habash of the popular front for the liberation of palestine shared said’s viewpoint and opposed fatah’s strategies and visions. 3 ghanem (2013) attempts to trace the transformations within palestinian nationalism on the question of the state, most notably the move from an “ethnic” to a “secular” form of nationalism during the 1960s-1970s, and more recently towards the “two-state solution.” regardless of these shifts, palestinian nationalism always remained tied to a conceptual paradigm wherein national identity and the nation-state are symbiotically related. it is this paradigm itself that i want to critique from the outside as it were, even as i remain cognizant and appreciative of the differences (ethnic, secular, etc.) that exist within this paradigm. an assemblage of decoloniality? studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 23 explore whether the leaderships’ fundamental conceptions of space and place in the form of the nation-state and its concomitant essentialized identities have prevented them from speaking to the injustices and losses of the palestinian people. it is perhaps in their failure to present a decolonial alternative to the colonial conception of space and place that they were always bound to replicate the colonial system and indeed support it – just as said feared in 1989 (pp. 17-22) and then came to observe in the 1990s. one of the major pitfalls of many anti-colonial struggles is the tendency to oppose the colonial authority by repeating the colonial logic of occupation and state-building. such a dynamic can be observed in how the palestinian authority (pa), in its official position on the two-state solution, has centered its entire strategy of resistance on the creation of a bounded palestinian nation-state. although this is certainly an understandable foundation for struggle, i maintain that the centering of state-building has historically effaced, and continues to efface, the suffering and resistance of palestinians. to illuminate this point, the paper examines how fellahin resistance beginning in the early parts of the 20th century interacted with the zionist settler-colonial project.4 in their resistance, the fellahin operated on a conception of land that was very different from the zionist/israeli and palestinian nationalist conceptions, a conception that may be identified as decolonial. the term “decolonial” is understood here primarily as heeding mahmood mamdani’s (2001, p. 664) challenge for scholars to disentangle that symbiotic relationship between a fixed identity and the nation-state; or, to: …go beyond the conventional thought that the real crime of colonialism was to expropriate the indigenous, and consider that colonialism perpetrated an even greater crime. that greater crime was to politicize indigeneity, first as a settler libel against the native, and then as a native self-assertion. in challenging the settler-native distinction and the identification of either the “settler” or the “native” (as exclusive of one another) with the legal/political structures of the nation-state, a decolonial alternative to colonialism would break apart from the legacy, grammar and institutions of colonialism (mamdani, 1996). therefore, while the anti-colonial resistance of the palestine liberation organization (plo) or the palestinian authority (pa) rests on the statist project, the decolonial resistance of the fellahin rests on an alternative model of social organization, which challenges modernist conceptions of the state and its naturalizing of the relationship between the state and an essential/fixed national identity. this kind of decoloniality 4 as there are differences between european peasantry and the arab fellahin, i will use the term fellahin. as abufarha puts it, “a peasant in european culture is a farming worker with little or no land ownership. the fellahin of palestine are rural farming communities with communal shared ownership of the land, which they cultivated according to communal traditions. they owned the land and the means of production (working animals and tools)” (2008, p. 367). i later discuss the different notion of “ownership” within these communities. mark muhannad ayyash studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 24 (which i do not claim exhausts the definition of the decolonial and all of its potential paths and dimensions) can be observed in the contemporary resistance of palestinians in the village of bil‘in, where activists conceive of the land as autonomous of human desires and plans, of ethno-national ideological projects. these activists advance and employ what may be called a decolonial resistance that sees the displacement of people from the land as the displacement of life itself; that is, life is not something that occurs on the land, as separate from the land, and neither does the land exist in complete detachment from life. rather, even as the land exceeds our ability as human beings to understand and fathom it, our very life is viewed as part and parcel of the land: what i term land as life. in temporally and spatially tracing decolonial resistance through the notion of land as life, the paper employs assemblage thinking. the concept of assemblage serves as a theoretical alternative to “organic totalities,” the latter of which posits that the parts and the whole are guided by relations of interiority, a seamless totality whereby the component parts relate to one another only in so far as they belong to the whole and are primarily defined by the whole in which they exist (delanda, 2006, p. 9). in contrast, assemblages are “wholes characterized by relations of exteriority,” whereby parts can move across different assemblages without necessarily losing the autonomy of their terms or properties (delanda, 2006, pp. 10-11). the concept’s openness to the flux of social phenomena has made it appealing to the study of social movements, as the latter tend to be an ever-changing, fluctuating and unpredictable set of events and actions. but unlike efforts to qualify the application of assemblage thinking to the study of movements by affixing terms to assemblage, such as “global assemblages” (ong & collier, 2005) or “translocal assemblages” (mcfarlane, 2009), i prefer to follow gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s own articulation of assemblages as having both spatial and temporal dimensions. relations of exteriority already suggest a movement that can take place across small and large swathes of space and time, and consequently there is no need to delimit space and time when it comes to assemblage thinking. the main advantage of this approach is twofold: (a) it avoids binary distinctions between local and global, as well as the sharp distinctions of past-present-future across a continuum, which inevitably feature in attempts to qualify the concept of assemblage with delimited notions of space (e.g., global) and time (e.g., continuum); and (b) it proposes the co-existence of temporal and spatial dimensions within assemblages, thus allowing for an analysis of specific contemporary practices of resistance (in bil’in) within a much deeper temporal reading of that resistance, while concurrently expanding the spatiality of these temporal moments. the paper also demonstrates how assemblage thinking can be fruitfully combined with decolonial modes of thought and politics. as bignall and patton (2010, pp. 6-7, 9-10, 17) argue, the deleuzian emphasis on transformation, creation of alternative worlds, and horizontal conceptual an assemblage of decoloniality? studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 25 movements across plateaus (as opposed to theoretical frameworks that attempt to vertically capture things within concepts) can constructively engage with postcolonial attempts to counter the ways in which the colonial claims to fix the colonized. indeed, deleuze and guattari were particularly supportive of the palestinian decolonial struggle against colonial modes of capturing their territories, which is not surprising given that deleuze and guattari’s concepts of “movements of de/reterritorialisation describing a conceptual politics of capture and relative liberation…resonate with themes and issues pertinent to postcolonialism” in general and the palestinian case in particular (bignall & patton, 2010, p. 3).5 by horizontally moving across the insights generated in assemblage thinking, colonial occupation and dispossession, and the everyday theorizing that occurs in and emerges from resistance, the paper seeks to generate a novel perspective through which we can view and examine the decoloniality of resistance. this paper does not adopt the conventional approach of theoretical analysis, as it does not seek to (a) transcendentally apply a theory to a case, (b) test an existing theory against a particular case, or (c) develop a testable set of theoretical postulates and predictions out of sporadic case-specific observations. neither does it claim to offer an exhaustive look at the multiple dimensions of palestinian fellahin resistance. instead, the paper moves across varied theoretical insights generated in academic texts and resistance practices to locate and read a marker of decoloniality in the case of palestine. the analysis proceeds in three sections. first, the paper outlines the colonial conception of land that underpins the zionist settler-colonial project. combining said’s decolonial critique of the settler-colonial state and struggles against it with deleuze and guattari’s related concepts of assemblage and the smooth-striated mixture of space, this section draws out how these ideas can reorient scholarly views of fellahin resistance towards the question of decoloniality. the second section explores the temporal depth of fellahin resistance and outlines the decolonial alternative conception of land that this resistance operates on. the third section follows the movement of this conception across temporal and spatial dimensions in the contemporary resistance of the villagers in bil’in. the paper’s analysis situates this particular conception of land as life as a component part of an assemblage called fellahin resistance – and as a marker of decoloniality in the case of palestine. 5 see also burns & kaiser, 2012. the connections between deleuze, said, and the palestinian struggle are also examined by david huddart’s chapter in that volume (in burns & kaiser, 2012, pp. 76-95). mark muhannad ayyash studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 26 colonial occupation and dispossession a well known difficulty of decolonial struggles is to launch a countermovement that is already based in and constitutive of an alternative worldview; to counter colonialism without falling back into the colonial logic or grammar. in his discussion of “resistance culture,” said (1994) helps us understand this dilemma in terms of the question of nationalism. said (1994, pp. 209-210, 215-216) views decolonial resistance culture as vacillating across two general approaches: one that attempts to reconstitute and rebuild the destroyed and shattered community by reconstituting a fixed “precolonial” identity, and another where resistance to colonialism seeks to reconceive human history, liberation and community. the first approach is significant in raising a community’s consciousness of its own subjection to colonial power. however, according to said (1994, pp. 210-214) it suffers from a significant shortcoming in that it ends up essentializing the identity of the colonized along racial and ethnic lines established by colonial grammar and institutions. this shortcoming is addressed in the second approach of resistance culture, where the idea of resistance, “far from being merely a reaction to imperialism, is an alternative way of conceiving human history” (said, 1994, p. 216). most significant is how such cultural forms break down the barriers between cultures and traverse across not just “native” or colonized cultures but across european and colonizing cultures as well. here is found a sort of playful exploration of the interconnectedness between these cultures in a way that also highlights the features of domination, exploitation, and marginalization that mark the relationship between the imperial centers and the territories of the colonized. consequently, a significant feature of this approach “is a noticeable pull away from separatist nationalism toward a more integrative view of human community and human liberation” (said, 1994, p. 216). walking a tightrope that neither dismisses nationalism and the need for national self-determination nor places the establishment of a nationstate as the pinnacle achievement of decolonial resistance, said (1994) makes clear two integral points. first, the greatest promise of decolonial resistance is the realization that human liberty can only be achieved by people working in concert with one another contrapuntally, across the nationalistic divides that separate us, and for the sake of building a truly integrated community based on equality and justice. second, it is not nationalism as a whole that is problematic to decolonial resistance, but rather a certain kind of nationalism that arises out of an essentialized understanding of the national identity (said, 1994, pp. 216-220, 258-259, 276-279). from the insights generated by said, the question then becomes: how can decolonial movements claim and reclaim a people’s place without essentializing the people or the place, or the relation between them? in fixating on the establishment of a nation-state that is built on essentialist views of palestinian identity, the palestinian leadership fails to adequately an assemblage of decoloniality? studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 27 address this question (said, 1999). furthermore, as previously mentioned in relation to khalidi’s (1997) work, this question is complicated for palestinians by virtue of the people’s dispersal; the varied spatial standpoints of palestinians lead to sometimes radically different understandings of place (e.g. the differences in how palestinian citizens of israel and palestinian refugees in lebanon may view the lands of pre-1948). to account for this dispersal, i suggest that the question of place must be examined in its entanglement with a conception of space that is understood in this paper as flux, following deleuze and guattari. deleuze and guattari distinguish between nomadic speed in “smooth” space (absolute movement in-between points that subordinates the points to the autonomy of the in-between) and sedentary movement in “striated” space (where only reproducing established movements between rigid points occurs) (1987, pp. 380-831, 478). even though distinguished and opposed particularly in the state form, which is disposed towards absolute striation of space (deleuze & guattari, 1987, p. 386), the relation between smooth and striated space is one of mixture, as smooth space can sometimes be “translated” and “transversed” into striated space, and striated space can sometimes be “reversed” and “returned” to smooth space (deleuze & guattari, 1987, pp. 474-475). the mixture, which appears in diverse assemblages of metamorphosis, can be liberating and it can be oppressive, but the point for deleuze and guattari is that the opposite sides of the relation are always mixed in that neither side can ever exhaust or completely eliminate the other (1987, pp. 478-482, 500). this relation can thus be referred to as an agonism. taken as a whole, this discussion of assemblage thinking presents a useful conceptual apparatus as a starting point for the analysis of decolonial resistance against the settler-colonial state: i understand the space-place relation as one that consists of an agonism between the flux of space (à la nomadic smooth space) and the fixity of place (à la sedentary striated space). in this agonism, the flux of space is itself a danger to the state apparatus because it reveals the very foundation of the state, which is nothing other than the state’s translation of the flux of space. there is no absolute law or universal foundation operating underneath the formation of the state; there is no essential connection between the state and the space upon which it is founded. the flux of space is a constant reminder that the state was instead formed on brute relations of force, that the state must hide from itself in order to secure itself. and the state attempts to evade the flux of space by striating space, by making it predictable, governable, and ordered – in short, by fixing it as place. in relation to this smooth-striated mixture, i am specifically interested, first, in how the state attempts to settle the agonism once and for all by striating and fixing all space as place, and sees its survival as dependent on successfully achieving this settlement. this is especially acute in the case of the settler-colonial state where the founding violence of the state is mark muhannad ayyash studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 28 unconcealed at the moment of founding, and is thus more difficult to hide in subsequent periods of the state’s history, although concealing this violent founding is precisely what every settler-colonial state seeks to achieve (coulthard 2014, pp. 15-17). as glen coulthard (2014) asserts, the settlercolonial project first establishes, through force, a relation of domination that dispossesses indigenous peoples from their lands. it is then “structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority” (coulthard, 2014, p. 7, emphasis in original). the concealment of violence in the social, cultural and political arenas is simply the continuation of the effects of the brute violence of founding. both the concealment and the founding violence thus strive to striate the flux of space. what is perhaps unique about the zionist settler-colonial project is that this feature of striating the flux of space was present in the zionist movement at the moment of its inception, even before its founding violence. joseph massad’s (2006) work suggests that the zionist settler-colonial project emerged from the flux of the jewish diaspora for the purpose of striating that very flux (see also gorny, 1987; likhovski, 2010; salamanca, qato, rabie & samour, 2012). underpinning this settler-colonial project is what massad (2006) usefully formulates as a sort of space-time compression. according to massad (2006, pp. 39-40), the israeli colonial/“post-colonial” space-time is fundamentally concerned with transforming what are conceived as “weak” and “wandering” diasporic jewish bodies into “strong” and “nationalist” post-diasporic jewish bodies. in this compression, diasporic jewish bodies, as well as palestinian and mizrahi bodies that present a challenge to the hegemony of the israeli space-time are therefore viewed as mere glitches in the system that must be reprogrammed or else face expulsion and/or political and cultural extinction (see also lavie, 2011). to somewhat reformulate massad’s (2006) insights using the language of deleuze and guattari, his work highlights how zionism is fundamentally opposed to the flux of movement, to nomadic speed cutting across striated space. seen through this lens, the logic of occupation, as formulated in zionism, is posited as the response to the flux of space (and the violences endured in the diasporic condition; we should not discount the gravity of the context in which zionism emerged and attempted a response), a flux that is embodied in diasporic jewish existence. and it is in this response that we find a view of the land as a place to be captured, owned and governed, bounding space within a place called the nation-state, dispersing palestinian bodies and creating a compression in which these bodies in their dispersal, in their very flux, appear only as threats to the striation of space. during the early parts of the 20th century, the fellahin were at the forefront of palestinian resistance and sought to oppose the processes of their dispossession. i argue that, contra the discourse of palestinian nationalism, their resistance to the zionist settler-colonial project operated on a complex understanding of the relation between the fixity of place and flux of space. an assemblage of decoloniality? studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 29 this resistance presented and operated on a kind of smooth-striated mixture that was very different from nation-state building projects. this mixture is a critical component of the assemblage called fellahin resistance. following deleuze and guattari (1987, p. 406), i understand an assemblage as “every constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow” and acknowledge that an assemblage may group itself into “extremely vast constellations” which differentiate the phylum or the flow, thus “introducing selective discontinuities in the ideal continuity of matter-movement.” i do not view the fellahin as a homogenous group with identical/essential identities, worldviews, beliefs and values (thus avoiding the dangers that said raises). at the same time, i posit the resistance of the fellahin as constitutive of a large constellation that includes a set of interactions with zionist ideas, values, beliefs and projects. one of the main components of this constellation, of this assemblage that i call fellahin resistance, is that space never becomes the absolute boundary of itself within a bounded place. fellahin resistance in ottoman-ruled palestine, large parcels of land were owned by absentee landlords – mainly turkish officials and non-palestinian arabs (khalidi, 1997, pp. 111-114) – who were only interested in profit and treated the fellahin that had been there for generations as tenants that live on and cultivate the lands (yazbak, 2000, p. 95).6 beginning in the late 1800s, but especially gaining pace in the early 1900s, zionist organizations and groups started to purchase lands from the absentee landlords. these organizations did not buy the land as an investment, but for the sake of an ideological project that sought to displace the fellahin, remove them from the purchased lands and create a jewish state. when they were not expelled, the fellahin were often forced to become agricultural laborers (khalidi, 1997, pp. 98-99), and such activities led to the worsening of already dire economic conditions for the fellahin (yazbak, 2000, pp. 100-102). the displacement of the fellahin put them at the forefront of the conflict between the palestinian people who already inhabited the land and the zionist enterprise that sought to uproot them. this fundamental conflict over land led to the first cases of armed resistance against zionist settlers as early as 1886 (khalidi, 1997, pp. 102-106). with the mounting pressure of increased zionist settlement and the “hopeless ineffectiveness of [the palestinian elite’s] leadership of the national movement” (khalidi, 1997, pp. 186-189), the dispossessed set themselves on the path of active resistance: the arab 6 in the period from the 1900s to the 1930s, approximately 70% of the palestinian population consisted of rural communities, which largely identified as fellahin (swedenburg, 1990, p. 27). the majority of the fellahin held onto a fierce sense of autonomy from any authority that tried to interfere with their daily lives on the land, and they developed strategies against ottoman reforms of land ownership laws (see doumani, 1995, pp. 131-134, 149-181). mark muhannad ayyash studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 30 revolt of 1936-1939. this revolt consisted of armed and unarmed actions, and although it was promising, it was ultimately crushed by the british; this set the stage for the greatest palestinian defeat in the nakba (the catastrophe) of 1948 (khalidi, 1997, pp. 189-190). for khalidi, despite the clear fact that the violent acts of resistance simply led to massive loss of life and never accomplished much in terms of addressing the losses of the fellahin, the palestinian leadership consistently posed these violent acts as triumphs of the palestinian national cause and selfdetermination. this is especially the case in the years after 1948, when palestinian groups such as fatah, and the plo in general, began in the 1960s, to articulate past and present defeats as triumphs, arguing that historical acts of violent resistance showed the “‘correct’ path of popular armed struggle against the british and the zionists” (khalidi, 1997, pp. 195, 196, 199). such accounts, khalidi (1997) argues, worked to seamlessly connect the ongoing armed struggle of the plo with these past events of violent revolt, and consequently painted the plo’s own failures as triumphs. this discourse essentially masks “the poor political calculations, and the disorganization, confusion, and leaderless chaos on the palestinian side” that were the marked features of all palestinian defeats and setbacks, from the 1930’s onwards (khalidi, 1997, pp. 196, 199). khalidi (1997, pp. 177-209) concludes that a more accountable, organized and visionary leadership is needed to address the very difficult and multi-faceted palestinian problem. in a fanonian mould, khalidi (1997) argues that such a leadership would re-direct the energies of the people towards the creation of a strong democratic national state. but why hasn’t this leadership emerged in the case of palestine? it certainly is not due to a lack of creative, ethical, visionary, selfless and dedicated leaders in the palestinian community. scholars have put forth a number of answers to this question, which include the influence of external powers (e.g. sayigh, 1997/2007), the israeli strategy to create a chaotic political system (e.g. gazit & brym, 2011), deep internal divisions (e.g. swedenburg, 1990), and power-hungry corrupt palestinian leaders who try to eliminate and silence dissent (e.g. massad, 2006, pp. 104-113). i am not disputing these elements, but i argue that there is perhaps a deeper reason for the failure of this ideal, yet not impossible, palestinian leadership to emerge: palestinian nationalist discourse effaces the fellahin conception of space-place rather than leading the struggle through this conception. the national liberation discourse poses the fellahin less as social actors and historical agents than as a national signifier that denotes the loss of palestinian land and the inevitable loss of all palestinian lands should palestinians not unite under the banner of palestinian nationalism (swedenburg, 1990, pp. 18-19).7 7 the betrayal of the fellahin resistance by arab and palestinian political leaderships is an observation that is not lost on the fellahin, particularly to the generation that followed the nakba (sayigh, 1979/2007, pp. 4-5, 14). an assemblage of decoloniality? studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 31 such a signification effaces not just the agency of the fellahin, but also the idea that when the fellahin revolted, they held on to a notion of land that was very different from the ottoman authorities’ or zionist views of the land. the fellahin understood the land in the sense that they knew the land’s geographies, tendencies, fertilities, every rock and plant, its smell and taste, its very movement or flow (à la deleuze and guattari’s smooth space). simultaneously, they knew the land in the sense of hosting the birth of a child, the sights and sounds of festivals, of weddings and funerals, of stories of love, courage, cowardice, and various collective endeavors of success and failure (doumani, 1995, pp. 27-31, 52-53, 156-157). in short, they knew the land as a kind of receptacle of human life at the same time that this receptacle had a life and movement of its own. this is not at all a romantic view but one that is shown in oral traditions and in research on oral histories.8 most critical for this analysis is that for the fellahin nobody “owned” the land in the sense of individual ownership of property within a capitalist political economy, or within the bounded framework of a nation-state; most fellahin never comprehended such notions of land ownership (sayigh, 2007, pp. 27-28). instead, people had “rights” to the land in the sense that it belonged to a collectivity (on the village level) that knew the land, cultivated it, and held it “on a [hereditary] usufruct basis known as miri” (ruedy, 1971, p. 122; also see davis, 2011, pp. 113-121). life and land were inseparable for the palestinian fellahin, and only those who best knew the land lived on it, and they lived on it because they knew it best, were part of it, as it was a part of them.9 a brief illustration is found in the writing of village books, which attempt to record palestinian oral histories of destroyed villages so that they can be passed down to coming generations. in her analysis of interviews with authors of the village books, davis (2011) argues that authors often found lacking the official palestinian historiography, which consisted of british documents, political agreements, official statistics on land, demography, socio-economic class and so on. for the village books’ authors, and the villagers themselves who are largely of a fellahin background, these official accounts lacked “any sense of the people of the village, the village space, its social history, and the sentiments of those who lived and worked and married and raised children in the village” (davis, 2011, p. 70). it is not that statistical information is not useful for villagers and the books’ authors, but that state authorities, such as the british, collected such information about the villagers to satisfy and meet the state’s instrumental purposes (davis, 2011, pp. 135136). therefore, such information can never speak to what actually matters 8 see sayigh’s (1979/2007) classic study, and davis (2011) for how palestinians have in recent times recorded oral histories in the “village books.” 9 this view of land is not unique to the palestinian fellahin, or to the majority of palestinians, who continue to share it (abufarha, 2008, pp. 362, 366). for example, see coulthard’s examination of the anticolonial struggle of indigenous peoples against the canadian state (2014, pp. 14, 64-66, 77-78, 170-176). mark muhannad ayyash studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 32 for the villagers: life on the land. and just as this type of information cannot speak to the life lived on the land, it cannot speak to the loss of the land. the statistics on lands lost, villages destroyed, people displaced, wealth stolen, and so on cannot capture the loss that the fellahin experienced. the loss of land is unspeakable because it is the loss of life itself, because of the unspeakability of death itself; and it is this loss that the fellahin revolted against. over the years, the plo has morphed into the pa, which largely ignores the 1948 refugees’ right of return and in doing so does not represent the palestinians of pre-1948 (among others). the disenchantment with the pa over the question of representation and many other issues (e.g., the economy) has given rise to a fresh wave of grassroots politics that sunaina maira associates with “jil [generation] oslo,” which seeks to resist colonial occupation, not on the traditional models of political parties and established political entities like the nation-state, but rather on the basis of a decolonial view of the land in that it connects palestinian resistance to global indigenous struggles highlighting the refusal of the palestinians to disappear from the land (maira, 2013, pp. 31-63, 187-192). in the next section, i examine how the movement of what i am proposing is a decolonial conception of land carries within it a property or an element of decoloniality that reconstitutes a new assemblage of fellahin resistance in the village of bil’in. bil’in in their study of popular unarmed palestinian resistance, marwan darweish and andrew rigby (2015) illustrate the wide range of palestinian acts of protest over the last 100 years or so. they situate activism in the village of bil’in within the “resurgence of popular resistance” that occurred post-oslo, from roughly 2002 onwards. darweish and rigby (2015) trace this resurgence to the construction of the wall that acted as a physical barrier between the west bank and israel and led to the annexation of palestinian land, which many villagers resisted through a variety of unarmed actions (darweish & rigby, 2015, pp. 71-72).10 early in 2005, the village of bil’in became the focus of resistance against the wall, and although bil’in was not alone in its actions, it has garnered the greatest international attention. bil’in is a small village of 1,900 people, 12 km west of ramallah. the majority of the land is agricultural and is known for its olive trees. a large number of the villagers identify as fellahin. to respond to the annexation of nearly 60% of their lands and the uprooting of their olive trees, the villagers formed a popular committee to guide their unarmed resistance for freedom 10 i am not proposing that statist colonial and anti-colonial action is always violent and that decolonial non-statist action is always non-violent. unarmed action is simply the most accurate description of these actions (see darweish & rigby, 2015). an assemblage of decoloniality? studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 33 and liberty. the chair of the popular committee, iyad burnat, stated in a 2014 interview that the committee decided early on that a palestinian intifada is not going to be enough in securing their freedoms. instead, their goal was to create a “global intifada,” one that brings together people from across the world in the service of freedom and justice (kerr, 2014). in this sense, their repertoires of action open up to vast spatial dimensions that operate not only on the level of action, but also on the level of their goal, which is a decolonial and universal kind of freedom that connects disparate groups and struggles from around the globe without subsuming their differences. this gesture towards the universality of freedom helps explain bil’in’s international prominence. activists in bil’in creatively campaign through various new media outlets in order to create awareness and to develop local and international alliances in their struggle against land confiscation. for example, to counter israeli plans to uproot their olive trees, activists chained themselves to the trees using local support to secure the chains, invited international and israeli media to attend their action, and had them all witness israeli soldiers forcibly removing the chains and beating the activists. as one activist put it, the event displayed the “big contrast between our nonviolence and their violence!” (darweish & rigby, 2015, p. 77; see also pp. 89, 92-93). in addition, i believe that there are, contrasted here, different modes of relationality – a contrapuntal relationality that thirsts for freedom versus the relationality of occupation. on the one hand, the activists embody both their relation to the land and to a global community: the whole scene is one of assemblage in that the chains act as an extension of the body revealing the body’s connection to the olive tree which signifies a long-term rootedness to the land. simultaneously, the chains, the most visible human-made object in the act, reach out from the body to the cameras, communicating to israeli and global audiences that this image is about human relations. the chains signify the palestinian fellahin’s chained body under occupation at the same time that an invitation is offered for israeli and global audiences to join the resistance in acts of solidarity. in contrast, the soldiers embody the blocking of such relations. the forcible removal of the chains serves to confirm the forcible chaining of the body, revealing the soldiers’ efforts to disconnect the activists from the land (i.e., the chain symbolizes the shackles that restrict palestinian lives on the land) and from a global community (i.e., forcible unchaining that moves the body away from the cameras). in addition to these spatial dimensions, an assembling with the historical resistance of the fellahin is operative. when burnat (chair of the popular committee) was asked in an interview about support from the pa, his first reaction was laughter (kerr, 2014). maintaining a distance from the pa and official palestinian politics is not a dynamic that is unique to bil’in and is present in much of palestinian activism today (maira, 2013; darweish & rigby, 2015). what is most interesting about bil’in is that its distance from the pa is predicated on the desire to not lose sight of the land, and more to mark muhannad ayyash studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 34 the point, life on the land, or the land as life. there are countless examples of this dynamic, but it is best exemplified in the following action: when confronted with the building of an illegal settlement on their lands (ruled illegal by israeli law in this case), the committee decided to build their own crude illegal settlement on the land and place palestinian activists inside the illegal trailers. there are three interconnected elements in this action: (a) the placement of the palestinian body in the enclosure of the trailer, (b) the exposure of the groundless ground of the state’s authority, and (c) the affirmative construction of a decolonial alternative. placing the body in the trailer serves practical purposes, such as making it more difficult for soldiers to simply destroy/remove the structure. in a deeper sense, the enclosure of the occupied body communicates the chained and colonized condition of the village’s body politic in a manner that is reminiscent of ghassan kanafani’s men in the sun. in kanafani’s (1962/1999) novella, three palestinian men are being smuggled into kuwait in a small lorry. at each checkpoint the lorry passes, the three men are forced to move inside the empty water tank in the back of the lorry to evade the authorities. on the very last checkpoint there is a delay, which turns the tank into the three men’s grave as they all die of suffocation. in the last few lines of the story, the lorry’s driver asks a simple yet impossible question: “why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? why didn’t you say anything? why?” (kanafani, 1962/1999, p. 74) the simplicity of the question is self-evident; its impossibility lies in the fact that the addressees of the question are dead and therefore cannot deliver a final answer, instead opening the door for the “desert’s echo” of the question leading to an infinite multiplicity of answers (kanafani, 1962/1999, p. 74). in enclosing themselves in the trailer, the activists are, in effect, posing this same question but reversing its direction. they are asking the soldiers and the israeli audiences in particular: “why didn’t you knock on the sides of the walls?” again, the simplicity is self-evident, but the impossibility here lies in the fact that the addressees of the question are not dead but must conceal the condition of death (the nakba) upon which their very mode of life is founded. if the body of the palestinian can be eradicated without in a sense ever being touched – to go back to massad – then something must be placed in between the body of the colonizer and the colonized as a medium through which the palestinian body cannot but be touched. as the colonizer seems to lean towards the striation of space in the striated-smooth mixture (the settlement), then a mock striation of that very form (i.e., the palestinian illegal settlement on the land confiscated for israeli illegal settlement) can force the colonizer to touch, as it were, the colonized. to come face-to-face and witness what the mirror reveals becomes unavoidable: the concealed condition of the settlercolonial state’s founding, which – in addition to the nakba and because of the question’s openness to a multiplicity of answers and interpretations – also includes the flux of diasporic jewish existence. an assemblage of decoloniality? studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 35 the question – “why didn’t you knock?” – thus reveals the groundless ground of the state’s authority, which was not established on an absolute law or foundation but rather, to go back to coulthard (2014), through brute relations of force. this move to the foundation of the state connects the plights of the villagers in the first decade of the 21st century to the palestinian displacement that began in the first decade of the 20th century. by mocking the “legality” of their displacement, this simple action poses the problem of palestinian dispossession on the terms of early 20th century fellahin resistance: the displacement of life from land. this goes beyond the israeli state and indeed challenges the pa’s modus operandi of “legally” claiming the land for palestine, the nation-state. in doing so, the activists are taking actions that lie outside of the normal methods of protest practiced by the pa and its supporters, be they political, legal or diplomatic. in that sense, the activists create and construct the alternative world they want to inhabit. the crude rooms signify, in their contrast with the buildings that surround them, the absurdity of the colonial logic of occupation and the absurdity of launching a decolonial struggle that seeks to emulate this logic. there are of course multiple practical purposes in these displays such as garnering media attention and making present what is rendered absent. but i think that deeper than these effects, the stark contrast demonstrates that emulating and replicating the colonial logic will always favor the colonizer. but more so, even if the colonized reverse the hierarchical ladder, even if the palestinians manage one day to build the secure and comfortable building, the contrast itself, as contrast, will remain. and that raises another difficult question: is that a struggle worth waging or is there another path of struggle? a decolonial path that is truly different from the colonial world that palestinians and israelis inhabit, albeit very differently? i think one of the important lessons we learn when we open ourselves up to the flux of space is that land is no more palestinian or muslim or christian than it is jewish or israeli. in this sense, the fellahin embodied a certain insight into space: that land is autonomous of our desires and wanting, of our ideological projects; that no ideological project justifies the displacement of people from the land, the displacement of life itself. it is perhaps the case that the fellahin embodied the flux of space in a paradoxically very localized and sedentary manner. perhaps the decolonial alternative to the colonial state is not the often celebrated nomadic speed found in deleuze and guattari, but rather this complex relation between the fellahin’s type of settlement of space and the movement or traversal of space, a combination of a kind of fixity and flux. perhaps this is the direction of a decolonial politics that we need to engage with and better articulate, understand, and practice. and regardless of the outcomes in bil’in, perhaps this decoloniality will scatter and move only to resurface and metamorphose into a new assemblage called fellahin resistance, an assemblage of decoloniality. mark muhannad ayyash studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 36 acknowledgements i wish to thank the special issue editors for their critical comments, suggestions, and questions, as well as the participants at the global movement assemblages symposium for the vibrant and engaging discussions we had around this topic. thanks as well to studies in social justice for their editorial comments and corrections. finally, i wish to thank mount royal university’s writing space program for providing me with time and support to edit the article. references abufarha, n. (2008). land of symbols: cactus, poppies, orange and olive trees in palestine. identities: global studies in culture & power, 15(3), 343-368. bignall, s., & patton, p. (eds.) (2010). deleuze and the postcolonial. edinburgh, uk: edinburgh university press. burns, l., & kaiser b. m. (eds.) (2012). postcolonial literatures and deleuze: colonial pasts, differential futures. new york: palgrave. coulthard, g. (2014). red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. darweish, m., & rigby, a. (2015). popular protest in palestine: the uncertain future of unarmed resistance. london: pluto press. davis, r. a. (2011). palestinian village histories: geographies of the displaced. stanford, ca: stanford university press. delanda, m. (2006) a new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social complexity. new york: bloomsbury. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1987). a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. (b. massumi, trans.). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. doumani, b. (1995). rediscovering palestine: merchants and peasants in jabal nablus, 17001900. berkeley, ca: university of california press. gazit, n., & brym r. j. (2011). state-directed political assassination in israel: a political hypothesis. international sociology,26(6), 862-877. ghanem, a. (2013). palestinian nationalism: an overview. israel studies,18 (2), 11-29. gorny, y. (1987). zionism and the arabs, 1882-1948: a study of ideology. oxford: oxford university press. kanafani, g. (1999). men in the sun and other palestinian stories. (h. kilpatrick, trans.). boulder, co: lynne rienner. (original work published 1962) kerr, d. (2014, june 27). ‘our goal is to have our freedom’: interview with iyad burnat on popular resistance in bil’in. mondoweiss. retrieved from http://mondoweiss.net/2014/06/freedom-interview-resistance/ khalidi, r. (1997). palestinian identity: the construction of modern national consciousness. new york: columbia university press. lavie, s. (2011). where is the mizrahi-palestinian border zone? interrogating feminist transnationalism through the bounds of the lived. social semiotics, 21(1), 67-83. likhovski, a. (2010). post-post-zionist historiography. israel studies,15(2), 1-23. maira, s. (2013). jil oslo: palestinian hip hop,youth culture, and the youth movement. washington, dc: tadween publishing. mamdani, m. (1996). citizen and subject: contemporary africa and the legacy of late colonialism. princeton, nj: princeton university press. mamdani, m. (2001). beyond settler and native as political identities: overcoming the political legacy of colonialism. comparative studies in society & history,43(4), 651-664. an assemblage of decoloniality? studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 21-37, 2018 37 massad, j. a. (2006). the persistence of the palestinian question: essays on zionism and the palestinians. new york: routledge. mcfarlane, c. (2009). translocal assemblages: space, power and social movements. geoforum,40, 561-567. ong, a., & collier, s. j. (eds.) (2005). global assemblages: technology, politics and ethics as anthropological problems. malden, ma: blackwell. ruedy, j. (1971). dynamics of land alienation. in i. abu-lughod (ed.), the transformation of palestine: essays on the origin and development of the arab-israeli conflict (pp. 119-138). evanston, il: northwestern university press. said, e. (1989). intifada and independence. in z. lockman & j. beinin (eds.), intifada: the palestinian uprising against israeli occupation (pp. 5-22). toronto: between the lines. said, e. (1994). culture and imperialism. new york: vintage. said, e. (1995). the politics of dispossession: the struggle for palestinian self-determination, 1969-1994. new york: vintage books. said, e. (1999). afterword: the consequences of 1948. in e. l. rogan & a. shlaim (eds.), the war for palestine: rewriting the history of 1948 (pp. 206-219). cambridge: cambridge university press. salamanca, o. j., qato, m., rabie, k., & samour, s. (eds.). (2012). past is present: settler colonialism in palestine. settler colonial studies, 2 (1). (journal special issue) sayigh, r. (2007). the palestinians: from peasants to revolutionaries. new york: zed books. (original work published 1979) sayigh, y. (1997). armed struggle and the search for state: the palestinian national movement, 1949-1993. oxford: oxford university press. swedenburg, t. (1990). the palestinian peasant as national signifier. anthropological quarterly, 63(1), 18-30. yazbak, m. (2000). from poverty to revolt: economic factors in the outbreak of the 1936 rebellion in palestine. middle eastern studies,36 (3), 93-113. frauts final feb 7 17 correspondence address: meaghan frauts; email: meaghanfrauts@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 183-186, 2017 book review resilient life: the art of living dangerously evans, brad, & reid, julian. (2014). cambridge, uk & malden, ma: polity press. isbn 139780745671529 (cloth) us$76.95; isbn 139780745671536 (paper) us$26.95; isbn 9780745682839 (e-book) us$21.99. 208 pages. meaghan frauts resilient life: the art of living dangerously (2014) by brad evans and julian reid, interrogates the political consequences of the adoption of resilience discourse. they argue that new liberal regimes engender a type of politics that moves beyond security and community towards a “catastrophic imaginary that promotes insecurity by design” (p. 2). this neoliberal concept of insecurity by design, they argue, stems from ecological and biological theory, which suggests that living systems often survive because of their ability to adapt to their environment as opposed to securing themselves from the environment. this “insecurity” is reinforced by resilience discourse, which convinces people that there is risk in believing in security. under this conceptualization, instead of securing oneself from changes, one should instead accept that life is an unending process of surviving and adaptation in the face of change. thus, human capacities are expected to mimic other living systems which “develop not on account of their ability to secure themselves from danger, but through their abilities to absorb the perturbations on account of their necessary exposure to them” (p. 62). it is this application of the ecological to the realm of the social that is particularly disturbing for the authors because it suggests that this necessary exposure to risk prevents the subject’s ability to resist or demand security from the regimes that govern them (p. 62). in our contemporary neoliberal moment, resilience presents itself as the ideal mechanism that individuals must possess to survive a life of insecurity. this insecure life is one in which it is necessary for individuals, especially the vulnerable, to adapt to a continually-shifting baseline of acceptability of economic, social, cultural and environmental disaster. in short, insecurity is the new normal and resilience is the strategy for coping. meaghan frauts studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 183-186, 2017 184 in chapters 1 and 2, evans and reid contend that there is a new political present emerging and within it a “different kind of liberalism” (p. 1). where once it was integral to the modern liberal state to believe in the possibility of security, liberalism’s new belief in the “positivity of danger” and the “suspicion of security” has given rise to a new ideal: resilience (p. 2). in the age of the anthropocene and neoliberalism, they contend, humans must become more accustomed to living in complex and dynamic systems. what does this mean practically? for the authors, it means that the poor are “taught” how to be more resilient and more flexible. indeed, in the context of international organizations, the united nations (un) and world bank (wb) both use resilience in numerous ways, often through resilience programs that ensure market mechanisms are maintained. it is convincing to see why, in this context, evans and reid argue that the resilient subject is a neoliberal one. they assert that there is a “valorization of adaptability” among neoliberal policy makers, where resilience is “neoliberal interventionism” that places the “burden of the crises directly on the shoulders of the globally impoverished” (p. 47). they are careful to point out that connections between life and danger hold some validity (especially in biology and ecology) but when such connections are transferred into the human world, “the results are politically debasing” (p. 62). this is so because the subject is denied the ability to demand security from the regime that governs it (p. 62). as such, resilient (neoliberal) subjects accept the imperative “not to secure themselves from dangers they are faced with but instead adapt repeatedly” much in the same way that other life forms do (p. 63). in chapter 3 and 4, the authors’ concern is with sustainable development and resilience’s affective consequences. since the late 1980s, sustainable development has offered a neoliberal counter-critique of earlier modernization strategies that criticized state protectionism and regulation while advocating for community-based self-reliance. such skepticism of the state means that sustainable development policies and practices focus on individuals, namely the poor, learning to become rational, economic actors who must ensure their own self-sufficiency and survival (pp. 74-75). resilience discourse therefore becomes a necessary part of sustainable development, because actors must increase their capacity for resilience to survive. despite this, evans and reid do concede that there is a difference between the autonomy of the resourceful and the interventionist strategies of the resilient. in chapter 4, they argue that the “prevailing mode of contemporary affect is a state of normalized anxiety” (p. 92). in (normalized) unstable neoliberalism, anxiety and vulnerability are the default and necessary sentiments and positions. it is through one’s exposure to anxiety that one learns to cope with and even embrace the anxious state rather than rid oneself of it. however, they are not suggesting that anxiety and trauma are not results of life changing events, but question what it means to be anxious for events that have not yet materialized. they argue that “adaptation in the face of the catastrophic is not the same as political transformation” (p. 119). the former book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 183-186, 2017 185 accepts its vulnerable and insecure position “conflat[ing] resilience with resistance such that politics become a sheer matter of survivability” (p. 119). this argument is just one of a few that leave the reader wanting. surely those whose lived (everyday) realities include adapting in the face of catastrophes live more complex lives than simply “survivability.” in chapter 5 and 6, the authors look at how resilience fits into what they see as a new liberal biopolitics – one that is vulnerable and littered with catastrophes. in our contemporary catastrophic mode, to ensure resilience it is necessary to prepare for the catastrophes before they happen. climate change, for example, is a “slow catastrophe” as many scientists believe we have passed the tipping point of environmental sustainability. thinking in a time of catastrophes where liberalism dominates means that we live in fear and spend our lives adapting to the slow demise of human and ecological existence. they question what it might be like to live in a way that does not fear the end, but instead formulates new ways of being while accepting that an end is coming. however, they do not make clear whether or not this political trajectory will end up speeding up our “slow catastrophe” to our own demise. arguably, this slippery slope might be a risk one must contend with to think past (neo)liberal vulnerability. the book ends with chapter 7, where the authors contemplate what might be beyond the resilient subject. they argue that the debasement of the subject through resilience strategies puts death into question by removing death from the gaze. resilience, to them, is about surviving – not dying nor thriving – and thus threatens the ability to think beyond the catastrophic and conceive of different worlds (p. 170). they question how to revitalize the meaning of the political out of the catastrophic condition, and do so by looking towards art, poetics and the imagination. they argue that it will be necessary to learn to live with a disposition where instead of seeing the future as pre-conceived catastrophes to which we must adapt, we look to the future with the confidence to understand new ethical relationships between humans and the world. what they call the poetic subject “seeks to have a faith beyond that which arises simply from endangerment, as well as rekindling long diminished understandings of political subjectivity” (p. 195). their hope is that by revalorizing the imagination in tandem with political reason, we can announce the death of liberalism and “welcome with confidence a more poetic subjectivity” (p. 203). why they see the poetic as inherently positive, they do not say. evans and reid capture the consequences of resilience in a wide range of disciplines. social justice scholars might find this critique particularly useful given how dominant resilience features in the practices of international organizations like the un, world bank and the international monetary fund. however, such broadness inevitably will not be able to seize some of the complexities that surround the politics of resilience, its usage and meaning of the word, as well as resilience’s relationship to resistance. for instance, because the work’s focus is on western-centric and male-centric theory and meaghan frauts studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 183-186, 2017 186 criticism, it does not engage with the complicated and ambiguous understandings of resilience and resistance that are present in post-colonial or feminist theory. post-colonial scholars have, without necessarily focusing on the word resilience, discussed the ways in which adaptation to slavery, colonialism and contemporary neoliberalism and neocolonialism have affected and continue to affect black and indigenous lives. indeed, such an assumption that resilience rhetoric has the power to demand both an ethos and behavioral capacities of subjects seems to suggest little agency of the subjects themselves or the cultural politics that occurs on the ground in the specificity of context and place. it has been documented that both black and indigenous peoples utilize resilience as a form of survival and resistance to oppressive regimes from colonialism to neoliberalism. while evans and reid try to make the case that there are differences between resourcefulness and resilience, this distinction needs to fully investigated to be more convincing. left unexplored, the distinction appears to be a question of semantics, and as such ends up suggesting that different types of resilience at play may not be negative at all. indeed, there are numerous scholars who disagree with understanding resilience as wholly negative. some scholar, such as grove and adey (2015) and rogers (2015), posit that excluding different forms of resilience, especially in different contexts, universalizes resilience and the outcomes of being resilient. to be fair, some of these nuances are outside the scope of evans and reid’s work, but even so, acknowledgment of the multiplicities of resilience might strengthen their argument to show just how far nefarious liberal-driven regimes go to co-opt the meanings of resilience and resistance of the vulnerable and marginalized. this would provide more traction for those who engage with or study social justice movements and who must confront the complicated lived experiences of resilience. finally, there are some editorial challenges (copy-editing for one) that leave the work feeling rushed and unpolished. however, many of the authors’ criticisms of resilience are persuasive and provide pertinent contributions to both social justice and resilience studies. this text is most suited to upper level undergraduates and graduate students, as the subject matter is expansive, requires prior experience with theory, and at times is written in overly academic vernacular. references grove, k., & adey, p. (2015). security and the politics of resilience: an aesthetic response. politics, 35(1), 78-84. rogers, p. (2015). researching resilience: an agenda for change. resilience, 3(1), 55-71. studies in social justice volume 3, issue 2, 213-230, 2009 correspondence address: sylvie morel, département des relations industrielles, université laval, québec, qc g1k 7p4, canada. tel.: +1 418 656-2131 x 2477, email: sylvie.morel@rlt.ulaval.ca issn: 1911-4788 employment and economic insecurity: a commonsian perspective1 if a theoretical shift in economics is a prerequisite to the reorientation of public policies in a progressive way, one must admit that there is not a single alternative to mainstream economics. indeed, there are several varieties of “heterodox” economic theories, that is to say those questioning the dominant paradigm in economics. sylvie morel université laval, québec city, québec, canada abstract the principal concern of this paper is with the need of a theoretical shift in economics for analyzing and devising efficient and innovative policy reforms to combat employment insecurity. mainstream economics is unable to provide appropriate theorizing about economic phenomena, including economic insecurity. thus, we must turn to economic theories which radically question the dominant paradigm in economics. john rogers commons’s institutionalist theory accomplishes that. first, the author of this paper outlines the distinctive character of this theory by presenting some of its crucial methodological differences with neoclassical economics. second, she explains how economic insecurity is conceptualized as an “instituted” process with this theory of institution. a better mastery of this specific school of thought in economics appears to escape the problems met by mainstream economics by proposing a real theoretical alternative for the development of a truly evolutionary, trans-disciplinary and ethical economic theory. introduction the inadequacy of mainstream economics, or roughly speaking neoclassical economics, in conceptualizing its own research objects, which are economic realities, is a fact insufficiently known. indeed, this approach generates an economic analysis on the basis of concepts and models disconnected from the real-world economy. not surprisingly then, it cannot provide appropriate theorizing about key factors of economic life, nor strategic economic issues. because of their epistemological posture, neoclassical economists do not pay attention to the real problems of the malfunctioning of economic institutions, and the economic insecurity they generate. thus, to proceed to a theoretical reconstruction in economics is imperative. what is at stake is our ability to understand economic insecurity in all of its complexity, as well as to conceive creative solutions to it by means of innovative analysis of labour and employment. 214 sylvie morel studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 however, within these theories, priority must be given to the ones focusing on economic security, rights, and duties guaranteeing it. john rogers commons’s institutionalist theory accomplishes that. commons is one of the founders of what is called the original institutionalism, which was developed at the end of the 19th century and continued until the 1940s in the united states. commons’s theory, whose relevance to the world today is being rediscovered, provides a coherent interdisciplinary conception of economic facts, grounded in their cultural context, in which economics, law, and ethics are reconciled. this paper has been divided into two parts. first, we will outline the distinctive character of commonsian institutionalism by presenting some of its crucial methodological differences with neoclassical economics (section 1). second, we will briefly explain how economic insecurity is conceptualized as an “instituted” process with this theory of institution; note that we will focus on economic insecurity in the area of labour and employment (section 2). to demonstrate that commonsian institutionalism represents a real theoretical alternative to mainstream economics for the development of a truly evolutionary, trans-disciplinary and ethical economic theory is our general concern. j. r. commons’s institutionalism: a radical methodological shift from mainstream economics the theoretical wealth of original institutionalism2 is greatly underrated in the field of economics. indeed, the methodological and conceptual tools of this school of economic thought have been under-utilized in the analysis of the complex realities and major challenges of the 20th century (adams, 1994, p. 347).3 this situation is fully illustrated by the fate that was reserved for j. r. commons’s theory. indeed, it has been said of him that, within the institutional movement, he was “the least understood of its major theoreticians” (ramstad, 1986, p. 207). his seminal contributions to the field of labour history and industrial relations have been widely acknowledged (kaufman, 1998). but, for a long time, commons’s theoretical framework had little impact, despite its strength and originality. 4 fortunately, this situation is changing. for example, commonsian institutionalism until recently was generally ignored in france. 5 however, in recent years, the publication of a number of theses (bazzoli, 1994; dutraive, 1993b; maucourant, 1994; morel, 1996), books (bazzoli, 1999; chavance, 2007; morel, 2000) and articles, grouped in special issues of journals or published separately in french economic reviews, 6 commons’s institutionalism is increasingly being recognized as a fundamental theoretical contribution able to achieve a profound renewal of economic analysis, in all the fields of economics, and particularly, in labour economics and industrial relations (gislain, 2003b; ramstad, 1998). in addition, many economists think that commonsian institutionalism can open new opportunities for gender analysis; specifically, many feminist institutionalist economists think that both approaches would benefit to grow by building on one another, as argued by the economists who remain in favour of a “feminist institutionalism” (jennings, 1993; mayhew, 1999; nelson, 2003; peterson, 1990; waller & jennings, 1990; whalen & whalen, 1994). has helped to partially fill this gap. 7 employment and economic insecurity 215 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 all this interest comes from the fact that it completely breaks with mainstream economics, insofar as it proposes a logic of inquiry as well as conceptual and methodological tools which are radically different from those of mainstream economics. first, let us specify why we can speak about a mainstream or orthodox school of thought in economics. economic theory has developed since the end of 19th century under the label of “neoclassical.” this school of thought saw its influence grow gradually during the 20th century to become dominant in the 1940-1950s. now, for the majority of economists, “economic science” is synonymous with this school. neoclassical economists adopt a technical definition of economics as being the “science of choice,” that is to say “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses” (robbins, 1935, p. 16). the coordination of economic activities rests on the “market,” an imaginary theoretical construction represented by the confrontation of “supply” and “demand,” articulated around a concept of equilibrium (of prices and quantities). because the market is primarily an intellectual product of economists, a theoretical construct based on a series of assumptions and hypotheses; this sense of the term is to be distinguished from that which refers to the empirical reality of the place where economic transactions occur. another key element of neoclassical economics is its reference to a perfect competitive model. society is seen as the collection of autonomous individuals, conceptualized in accordance with the figure of homo œconomicus. neoclassical economists postulate that economic subjects, or “economic agents,” are equal, free, and rational. according to the rationality postulate, economic action is understood as a utilitarian behaviour of utility maximization (or profit maximization) under a budget constraint (or cost constraint). because of the key role of the rationality postulate and the systematic use of mathematical formalism, in line with the “hard sciences” paradigm, neoclassical economics is defined more by its methodology than by its subject matter. of course, neoclassical economics is more complex than what appears here. the basic model has been frequently revised. however, its basic foundations remain the same. for example, if the “economic agent” is studied in “strategic interactions,” such as in game theory, its action is still dictated by a utilitarian and optimizing logic; the same observation applies for current labour market theories (such as efficiency wage theory, implicit contract theory, or insider-outsider theory); if modern game theory has stressed “imperfect competition” and “information uncertainty,” it is increasingly focused on microeconomic behaviours (the principle of methodological individualism criticized below); if today’s mainstream economics seems to some people to integrate the issue of institution, and thus be concerned with institutional issues, its theoretical framework of analysis is still dominated by the concept of the market. from this perspective, the contrast between the orthodox economic current and commons’s heterodox approach is striking. indeed, while it is beyond the scope of this article to summarize the abundant literature demonstrating the radicality of the departure of the original, or commonsian, institutionalism from mainstream economics, or “new institutional economics” (dugger, 1996; dutraive, 1993a; gislain, 2003a; gislain, steiner, 1995; nelson, 2003; ramstad, 1986; tool, 1994), it is crucial to bear in mind that commonsian economics replaces the representation of the economy in terms of the market by one in terms of the institution. thus, it is fundamentally a theory of institution,8 one of its essential 216 sylvie morel studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 specific qualities being its articulation with a theory of action (gislain, 1999); this has nothing to do with the inclusion of “institutional influences” into a theory centred on the market. the same can be said of mainstream economics’ purported consideration of “evolution” which is based on methodological principles completely different from the evolutionary conceptions of institutionalist economists like veblen and commons (gislain, 1999) because, in the final analysis, due to its philosophical basis and the methodological choices they entail, commonsian institutionalism is completely extraneous to the basic foundations of mainstream economics. 9 indeed, one of the reasons why the theoretical contribution of commons has not been correctly appreciated until recent years, is that it rests on a philosophical foundation that is not well-known: pragmatism (bush, 1993; tool, 1994). as underlined by y. ramstad (1998), it “is difficult for most economists to discern the abstract structure of commons’s theoretical system because it manifests heterodox methodological presumptions and because commons, drawing mainly on peirce, defended it in the unfamiliar language of american pragmatism” (p. 309). pragmatism has been qualified as “the first great philosophical movement authentically american” (deledalle, 1995, p. 24).10 philosophical pragmatism appeared around 1870 in cambridge, massachusetts, and received its original shape from charles sanders peirce, william james, and john dewey. it was influenced by darwinism, in that both the knowledge and the logic of inquiry cannot be understood in static terms;11 they are inherently a process, a process of change, conditioned by the context of inquiry. commons refers explicitly to peirce’s and, above all, dewey’s “social pragmatism,” when talking about the method of investigation he attempts to apply to economics, “the pragmatism of human beings” participating in economic transactions (commons, 1934/1990, pp. 150, 156, 157).12 first, both schools oppose one another on the conception of objectivity in science. on the one side, neoclassical economists have a dualist conception of the knowledge process: they postulate that the objectivity of the scientific discourse rests on a clear distinction between “positive” (what is) and “normative” (what ought to be) dimensions, pretending that the latter can be excluded from economic science. economists must study “facts” separately from value judgments which belong to the domain of normative economics. in other words, they defend a view of economic science as a positive science that states universal scientific truths beyond any subjective bias concerning the objects studied. institutional economists, on the other side, consider that the normative dimension of scientific investigation cannot be extracted in order to produce a purely positive knowledge. values and judgments are an inescapable part of theory, an inherent and continuing part of the process of inquiry (tool, 1994, p. 205). furthermore, for dewey, “values are a form of knowing.” also, objectivity requires, not an ideal elimination, but the recognition of the importance of values in the reality to be studied at each phase of the process of thus, the profound originality of commonsian theory stems from the fact that, at the methodological level, pragmatism is radically different from the conception of knowledge inherited from cartesianism, which is the epistemological foundation of orthodox economic theory. to say that original institutionalists use methodological prescriptions, coming from the logic of inquiry of philosophical pragmatism, means that you can contrast neoclassical economists and institutionalist economists on many points, namely the following ones. employment and economic insecurity 217 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 inquiry. 13 second, in the neoclassical theorists’ view, an economic problem must be examined by means of deductive reasoning. thus, inferences regarding all concrete cases are made from an a priori conceived economic model defined with respect to natural law theory. in so doing, neoclassicists pretend to enunciate universal scientific truths. institutionalists, on the other hand, apply an abductive methodology. for them, knowledge and action are linked. the process of inquiry, in dewey’s terms, is not defined as a purely intellectual operation, but as an action on the world, a transformation of the inquiry subject, a main idea of dewey’s pragmatism. as for commons (1934/1990, p. 103), he asserts that a pure theory cannot be developed in economics as it can in physical science, “because physical materials have no purposes, wills, rights, or interests.” as scientific knowledge is “opinion,” in the sense of shared beliefs from those forming the scientific community, the “facts” studied by economists as for example, wages or prices, are not naturally derived from the “free interplay of market laws,” but the products of the socially constructed realities of money and value of work. thus, analysis of economic phenomena is situated in time and space, as they are integrated in their cultural context. the emphasis on culture implies “that social processes are not governed by universal laws and do not have universal meanings; rather, processes and meanings are mutually and historically determined” (jennings, 1993, p. 114). this also means that the pseudo-neutrality of science, as the aim to which neo-classical theory pretends, is in itself a social construct that must be closely scrutinized in order to identify the hidden ideological content, vested interests, and political agendas it carries. 14 neoclassicists adopt a methodology giving pre-eminence to mathematic formalism, thereby reducing the focus of analytical proposals and constructs to those materials that lend themselves to this treatment. according to a canonical methodological precept of mainstream economics, the validity of a theory rests upon its predictive power, and not its capacity to describe reality. in social inquiry, theory and facts are in permanent interaction. the instrumental logic of pragmatism rejects essentialism, that is to say “the formulation of eternal verities, first principles, or essences” (bush, 1993, p. 62). as outlined by bush, the approach is “contextualist,” to the extent that knowledge is developed out of consideration of the context in which facts are an inherent part, instead of being deduced from first principles totally disconnected from the experienced problematic situations inquired. this methodological procedure guarantees a theorization grounded in the reality of economic facts. 15 in contrast, institutionalists regard primarily the capacity of a hypothesis to offer coherence and causal understanding; in that sense, it is not to say that predictability is unimportant but, above all, that predictions do not serve to establish the warrantability of hypotheses (bush, 1993, p. 75). in fact, institutionalists are especially concerned with “institutional dysfunctions,” which cause social problems, such as unemployment, macroinstability, inequality of income, discrimination, environmental deterioration, and the like. they examine how inquiry can contribute to their resolution by remodelling the institutional structure in a progressive way (tool, 1994, p. 221). the theory is valid if it permits making a useful and creative diagnosis related to the identification and the resolution of real problems. this again relates to pragmatism, which is a “philosophy of the citizen”: “the essential task of the american philosopher is to serve society. it is in that sense that we use the word 218 sylvie morel studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 ‘citizen’: the citizen is the servant of the city. the philosopher is a citizen” (deledalle, 1954, p. 187).16 if we can say that the conception of a logical and fictitious time in neoclassical theory makes it disappear, so does society. indeed, society is reduced to the aggregation of its parts. in accordance with the principle of methodological individualism, the explanation of economic phenomena rests on the analysis of individual behaviour. human action is conceived in a very specific manner, that is, as previously stated, according to a theory of action centered on the homo œconomicus postulate. thus understood, the economic agent is an isolated individual whose actions are motivated by a purely introspective utility maximizing behaviour. for institutionalists, on the one hand, the individual is not examined as an isolated being, but as a social being whose individual action is based on logics that are socially regulated by the working rules the treatment of time is another main difference between the two schools of thought. mainstream economics is constructed around the notion of general equilibrium (guerrien, 1989) and, consequently, is static. more importantly, equilibrium implicitly conveys a normative dimension while it depicts a situation of harmony of interest. indeed, neoclassical equilibrium is optimal, when “we live in the best of all possible worlds, barring minor frictions” (dugger, 1996, p. 33). in contrast, institutionalists focus on dynamic change and the conflicts of interests which necessarily arise through it. institutionalism is described as a “processual paradigm” insofar as its subject is economic process, as it takes place in a specific, dynamic, cultural context (dugger, 1996, p. 31). to explain the process of continuous change, institutionalists use an evolutionary methodology. this term refers to a non-teleological and processual approach differing from the one “evolutionist” economists use in defending the idea of a law of progress (gislain, 1999). from that perspective, institutions are understood as being in continuous transformation in historic, unpredictable, and irreversible time. consequently, the researcher must go back to history to be able to grasp reality, especially the genesis of the customs which are crucial in the dynamic process of institutional change. 17 of custom and the going concerns to which his or her social groups belong. this refers directly to commons’s original theory of the institution whose essential characteristic is to be a theory of action (gislain & steiner, 1995; ramstad, 1993). the institution is defined as “collective action in control of individual action” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 69) expressing the fact that individual action is “embedded” in the broader logic of collective action, not least because of the mere fact of living in society. as shown by commons (1934/1990, p. 73), if “it be considered that, after all, it is the individual who is important, then the individual with whom we are dealing is the institutionalized mind.” this is consistent with the whole-part mode of apprehending reality, typical of the holist method endorsed by commons (ramstad, 1986). in commons’s words, to speak of a transactional economy, “we can rightly say, regarding the operations of the human will, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts” (1934/1990, p. 629). however, it must be noted that this holist approach does not result in any kind of determinism. indeed, on the other hand, commons defends a theory of action that leaves a wide scope for human will. thus, even if individual action is a social construction regulated by internalized rules in the institutionalized mind, the latter is at the same time an active subject in the process of transforming these rules, since his or her employment and economic insecurity 219 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 action informs their evolution. however, in the act of choosing, it is not introspection which dominates, as commons points out, but projection in the real environment. in accordance with philosophical pragmatism, the individual is an “acting” being whose willingness is shown in action depending on the “situation” and “opportunities” defined by collective action.18 but, let us come back to the definition of the institution, which is far more complex than it seems at first. as previously stated, commons defines it as being “collective action in control of individual action.” but he also presents what he calls a “derived” definition of it, “collective action in restraint, liberation, and expansion on individual action” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 73). commons proposes an extensive definition to stress the fact that, as he states, “collective action is more than control of individual action: in this way, institutions are social constructs in constant evolution which reproduce themselves under the influence of human will. thus, commons’s approach reconciles collective “control” and individual will, which are usually viewed as irreducible. institutionalist methodology goes beyond the sterile opposition of both determinism of methodological individualism and holism. …it is, by the very act of control, as indicated by the auxiliary verbs, a liberation of individual action from coercion, duress, discrimination, or unfair competition, by means of restraints placed on other individuals. and collective action is more than restraint and liberation of individual action – it is expansion of the will of the individual far beyond what he can do by his own puny acts. (commons, 1934/1990, p. 73) finally, in neoclassical theory, economics is depicted as a quasi-exact science, different by nature from other social sciences. the metaphor “hard” is applied to its science as the opposite metaphor “soft” is seldom used to depict the difference. the institutionalist way of thinking economics stresses the fact that it is, in reality, a social science. economics is characterized by its trans-disciplinary nature, involving an inescapable ethical dimension which stems from the fact that it deals with interactions of human beings among themselves. the commonsian concepts: economic insecurity as an instituted process economic insecurity, in the common use of the term, refers to the uncertainty and precariousness that affect individuals’ access to, and maintenance of, the means of existence. but it goes well beyond the pecuniary dimension. economic insecurity is also, to a large extent, a problem of confidence in the future. it is not only a question of having a low or irregular income, but also of being uncertain about receiving an income at all (gagliardo, 1949, p. 8). in commons’s view, this refers to the concept of futurity. all individuals and not merely capitalists (commons, 1934/1990, p. 618), commons stated, act in expectation of the future: “man lives in the future but acts in the present” (p. 84). as a purposeful going concern, so does a social institution (p. 619). this theory of the human will in action is even labelled by the author a “science of futurity.” 19 therefore, economic insecurity or its opposite, economic security, can be explained by stressing the strategic role played by the present expectations of the stability of collective action guaranteeing everybody a share of 220 sylvie morel studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 the social output. here we are led to the concept of citizenship by the issue of the “lien social,” i.e. the social cohesion necessary to preserve within the going concern of the society so that it can be maintained in operation, which requires that each of the “shareholders” be assured of the security of expectations concerning the part of social wealth which will be returned to them. in other words, it is through an economic theory of citizenship that commonsian institutionalism helps us to conceive economic insecurity in all its complexity, integrating, among others, the ethical dimension of justice. basically, this refers to the original representation of the economic subject in commonsian institutionalism. indeed, instead of examining, like orthodox economists, the action of disembodied, isolated economic agents, the commonsian economist deals with people as “citizen-individuals.” in other words, the economic subject is considered an individual, connected with various networks of social relations, and as a citizen endowed with rights and duties. in that perspective, the focus for the researcher is on the evaluation of the economic status instituted for individuals. citizen-individuals are people with rights and duties, freedoms and vulnerabilities. economic security, or the institution of working rules permitting economic vulnerability to transform into rights, is precisely what is called in commonsian economics an economic status. such a study of the economic positions occupied by individuals involves various concepts, such as those of social relation, transaction, negotiational psychology, rights and duties, opportunities, and, as noted futurity. without attempting to develop each of these innovative concepts, i will nevertheless briefly outline the problem of economic insecurity as an instituted process derived from them. our starting point can be commons’s definition of institutional economics, because it places us from the outset in the field of ethics. let us specify first that this definition goes beyond the notion of social provisioning put forward in institutionalist (dugger, 1996; mayhew, 1999; waller & jennings, 1990) and feminist literature (nelson, 1993, 1996; power, 2004) as an alternative to the neoclassical definition of economics as the “science of choices.” to define economics as the study of “social provisioning” is to emphasize the fact that, basically, economic activity refers to the ways people organize collectively to secure their standard of living (power, 2004, p. 6): “for institutionalists, and for feminists, economies are society’s organizations for provisioning [. . .] provisioning is the process of trying to assure culturally appropriate levels of food, housing, clothing and care” (mayhew, 1999, p. 480). institutionalism has been defined by a. gruchy as “the science of social provisioning” in order also to sketch out the processual nature of this paradigm (as cited in dugger, 1996, p. 31). veblen too “understood the real economy as a social provisioning process,” in which he included many of women’s domestic activities (jennings, 1993, p. 113). finally, j. a. nelson (1993, p. 32) indicates, from a feminist perspective, that the focus on how to ensure the provisioning of human life meets the requirement of a definition of economy which considers human beings in relation to the world. if we now turn to commons, we find the following definition: if the subject-matter of political economy is not only individuals and nature’s forces, but is human beings getting their living out of each other by mutual transfers of property rights, then it is to law and ethics that we employment and economic insecurity 221 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 look for the critical turning points of this human activity. (commons, 1934/1990, p. 57) for commons, political economy was not a technical issue, as is the case for mainstream economics. it dealt with human activity in its relation, not “of man to nature” and things, which is the standpoint of neoclassical economics, but “between man and man.” the focus then is put on human beings interacting in institutions whose function is to regulate property. these institutions evolve over time and space. this definition carries the interactional, legal, and ethical dimensions of economics. it gives a central role to conflicts of interests and power relations that surround the relations of ownership. economic insecurity is created by the difficulty faced by individuals in ensuring their survival in the ownership rights system of capitalism. here, the legal dimension of economics is fundamental. not only must we conceive economic insecurity as a central concern for economists, but we must also understand that this refers, as does any economic problem, to social realities instituted by the rule of law. according to commons, economists erred by focusing on the actual exchange or use of economic resources and outputs, and by failing to distinguish between the legal transfers of the rights to a thing and its physical transfers. the strategic element of economic life is legal control rather than physical control. from this viewpoint, economic life can be understood in “processual terms as an ongoing series of legal transfers of property rights” (ramstad, 1986, p. 234). rules defining property rights structure production and distributional processes. therefore “there is nothing ‘natural’ about the concrete character of those rules and the processes they effectuate” (ramstad, 1998, p. 311), whether these refer to the market or to any other economic entity. by centering on exchangeability, not of things but of property rights, economic analysis can focus on the evaluation of desirable behaviour in human beings in society which is ethics: “but legal control is not only an economic quantity, it is control of the future behaviour of individuals upon which the dimensions of that economic quantity will depend” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 87). but if “the ultimate unit sought in the problem of correlating law, economics, and ethics is a unit of conflicting interest of ownership,” this is an incomplete picture of economic interrelations: “the ultimate unit of activity must also be a unit of mutually dependent interests” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 57). in fact, mutual dependence is, as conflict, another basic fact of economic life. this, in turn, implies the maintenance of order. order is maintained by the working rules of collective action which govern the transfer of legal control of property rights, but also efficiency through cooperation (commons, 1934/1990, p. 6). cooperation is necessary to efficiency and to overcome scarcity, but it does not arise from a presupposed harmony of interests. cooperation must instead be seen as an “artificial” harmony of interests, coming from the necessity of efficiency and institutionalized through collective action. so, contrary to the principles of orthodox economics, according to commons, “harmony is not a presupposition of economics—it is a consequence of collective action designed to maintain rules that shall govern the conflicts” (p. 7). these working rules are precisely what ensure security of expectations: “the orderly expectations, assumed by all economists under the name of “security,” which is a special case of the general principle of futurity, we name, for our present purposes, simply order” (p. 58). 222 sylvie morel studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 this brings us to the concept of transaction, that is, for commons, “the smallest unit of institutional economics” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 58). the three principles of conflict, dependence, and order are contained in each transaction. (p. 92). transaction—trans-action—expresses the theoretical shift already mentioned that goes from exchange of commodities to relations between individuals. transactions are transfers of property rights: “transactions […] are not the exchange of commodities, in the physical sense of delivery, they are the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of future ownership of physical things, as determined by the collective working rules of society” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 58). these transfers of rights must be negotiated between the parties concerned, and consequently give place to a negotiational psychology. but, unlike the essentialist, physicalist, and one-dimensional standard analysis, which shows only the homo œconomicus, institutionalism offers a pluralist theory of instituted action (gislain & steiner, 1995). indeed, rather than a purely fictitious logic of action and applicable to all economic agents in all transactions, it illustrates the diversity of economic positions of actors. this comes from the fact that these positions and the logics of action implemented within them, depend namely on the characteristics of the types of transactions in which the actors are involved. as the commonsian theory of the transaction includes different types of transactions, in each one several types of actors’ positions are made possible by their specific working rules. thus, transactions resolve themselves into three types: bargaining, managerial, and rationing transactions. 20 these are the “ultimate units of activity into which all economic relations can be resolved” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 117). first, the bargaining transaction is the social relation covering the transfers of legal control of property rights and brings together parties, although deemed to be legally equal (as are formally the employer and the worker), “may be economically unequal (coercion) or economically equal (persuasion)” (p. 64) (such as what often happens during labour contract negotiations). its purpose is the distribution of wealth and the inducement to produce and deliver wealth. this transaction is instituted on the basis of at least five actors (two buyers and two sellers, meaning that there is almost always potential for another buyer or seller in a transaction). the negotiational psychology, or the psychology of action specific to the negotiation carried out in the transaction, by which the transactors mutually influence their conduct, is that of persuasion or coercion.21 thirdly, the rationing transaction is the social relation relative to the “negotiations of reaching an agreement among several participants who have authority to apportion the benefits and burdens to members of a joint enterprise” (like the activity of a board of directors of a corporation in making up its budget for the ensuing year, of a legislative body in apportioning taxes, or of collective bargaining between an association of employers and an association of employees) (p. 67-68). founded on the principle of sovereignty, this transaction constitutes a relation of “authority,” in ultimately, scarcity is the underlying principle of bargaining transactions. secondly, the managerial transaction is the social relation concerning the production of wealth and grows out of a relation between two persons instead of four: a superior and an inferior (such as the supervisor and the worker or the manager and the managed). command and obedience is the negotiational psychology of managerial transactions and efficiency is its principle (p. 64). employment and economic insecurity 223 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 which transactors are in a legal position of inequality, from superior to inferior. its negotiational psychology is that of pleading and argument. for commons, these three types of transactions are functionally interdependent, so that they together constitute what he calls a going concern, an expression designating all types of social organizations in which the individual member is controlled by the same set of informal (custom) and formal working rules, such as the family, the corporation, the trade union, the state, and so on (p. 70). in various transactions, individuals can occupy different economic positions that respectively endow them with a set of rights and duties towards other individuals and the collectivity (p. 81). the commonsian conceptualization of the actor’s status is thus developed. it is worth noting here that, for commons, security is primarily an economic concept (morel, 2003). indeed, it is one of the four economic statuses derived from social relations. first, for commons, an economic status is a social relation “consisting of the expectations towards which each party is directing his economic behaviour” (p. 70). the four types of economic status are security, conformity, liberty, and exposure. in commons’s institutionalism, the control of individual action by collective action can create four types of situations: power, disability, immunity, and liability. in accordance with the principle of relations reciprocity, these statuses are instituted in pairs. commons points out that they correspond, in the field of ethics and law, to social relations, which are conjugated in terms of rights and duties.22 then, we see that, instead of depicting the economy as a mechanism automatically oriented towards equilibrium and peaceful harmony where equal economic subjects meet, commonsian institutionalism focuses on economic inequality and power relationships between individuals and groups, and the reality of conflict in the distribution of income and wealth. the acknowledgment of these key issues is a big step for the understanding of real economic life. in fact, it means that economic analysis goes beyond an individual’s status of legal equality and draws attention to to institute an economic status of security—in other words to guarantee a position of “security of expectations” as to the means of existence of each citizen who, otherwise, would be in a position of exposure – means to create rights for those who have a power deficit in social negotiations – the source of their economic insecurity—and working rules to compensate for the effects of their position of economic inferiority. since the relation between the economic positions held by individuals are correlative and reciprocal, to institute rights for some means to simultaneously institute duties for others. by imposing duties on those who hold, relatively speaking, an excess of power, the rights of others can be protected. in theoretical terms, we can state that if collective action intervenes to support individual action, it creates a right for the individual, which corresponds, for his or her counterpart in the transaction, to a duty. this right/duty pair creates the economic status of security/conformity. the alternative option, where collective action does not provide any guarantee, is a case of non-right, and symmetrically of non-duty. the corresponding economic status is exposure/liberty. this means that one transactor is exposed to gain or loss equivalent to the exercise of liberty by the other, who can do as s/he pleases (p. 81). the identification of each element is relatively easy to the extent that we accept that, in an employment relationship, employers and employees are not in a symmetrical position: employers have a greater power of negotiation, with the option of holding back the product (employment). 224 sylvie morel studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 the different modes of transactional psychology as actually occurs in the negotiations: “the ethical psychology, or what we call negotiational psychology of bargaining transactions is, as we saw above, that of persuasion or coercion, depending on opportunity, competition, and bargaining power” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 64). therefore, according to the specific characteristics of each transactional relation and of the law regime concerning the conditions of competition, some situations of abuse of bargaining power and coercion may occur. to analyse economic insecurity as an instituted process means, first, that this reality of unequal bargaining power in the relation of employment is fully taken into account. second, it signifies that transactors’s economic positions are understood as social constructs: as the product of working rules of collective action, they are institutionally generated. commons viewed the economy as an “authoritatively instituted complex of intertwined working rules” (ramstad, 1998, p. 311). thus, economic status reflects the collective willingness or, conversely, lack of willingness, to set up the working rules necessary to compensate for deficits of power within society. in other words, there is no such thing as an unregulated economy. the current situation results, not from an absence of an actor’s intervention, but of specific kinds of it: income inequality, low wages, precariousness, reduced social security, and lack of public services, or macroeconomic instability come from collective actions reducing responsibility towards labour of, mainly, employers and the state. this is done by transferring the cost of economic adjustment to labour. in commonsian terms, it reflects the choice to institutionalize positions of non-duty, or economic status of liberty, which permit the development of management practices and state interventions defining non-right positions, or economic status of exposure for large segments of the population. commons thought that the insecurity of labour threatened western civilization. this is why he considered security the major “labor problem” of capitalism (commons, 1921b). in this context, fostering economic security of the majority was an economic objective at least as important as fostering security for investment (commons, 1921a). it is not surprising then that he devoted so much effort, not only to theorize economic insecurity, but to combat it also as a practitioner. in accordance with the pragmatist abductive method, throughout his life, commons developed theoretical analysis in conjunction with its research to solve real problems. this approach to inquiry was therefore systematically followed by the author until he developed his sophisticated theoretical framework: “commons’s theories were themselves continually tested and revised through their applicability to the innumerable concrete problems he wrestled with as a member of both state and federal commissions and as the author of several pieces of innovative legislation” (ramstad, 1986, p. 209). commons could therefore feed his theoretical analysis of his long experience as a practitioner in the field of arbitration in industrial relations and social policies (industrial accidents, unemployment insurance, etc.). speaking of the debates surrounding the draft program of unemployment insurance in wisconsin, 23 he said: “it was, indeed, through the aid of these ten-year discussions and my participation in them that i finally reached the formulation of the more abstract theory of “institutional economics” which i now learned to define as collective action in control, liberation, and expansion of individual action” (commons, 1934/1990, pp. 841-842); the latter is, as we said earlier, the extensive employment and economic insecurity 225 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 definition of the institution. thus, for commons, the pragmatist theoretician, theory, and practice were two dimensions of the process of social change: for commons, theory and practice should go hand in hand. his concern with how to alter economic theory so as to take proper account of the institutional factor and his practical concern with how to bring about a reasonable reconciliation of the conflicting interests of business and labor are simply different aspects of the same problem (rutherford, 1990, p. xxxii). it is by virtue of the principle of reasonableness that rules counteracting the effects of the position of economic inferiority of the greatest number should be instituted. it is precisely in these terms, that is to say as working rules compensating economic positions of non-power, that institutions favourable to wage-earners, such as employment policies, labour legislation, and social security programs, should be understood. the concept of reasonable value is the ethical principle used to guide the collective process of conflict resolution to a social order formed in reference to the preferred practices, for a given society and at a given period, that is for a given historical stage of development. 24 for commons, the meaning of reasonable value, or reasonable capitalism, is an attainable ethical ideal: it can be named pragmatic idealism in the sense that this “highest attainable regard for one’s social responsibilities” is an ethical goal “evidenced by the fact that it actually exists, and can be investigated and testified to as facts, in the practices of the best concerns that are able to survive in the then existing struggle for existence” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 741). thus, this is how working rules of collective action can guarantee to “citizen-workers,” who otherwise would be in a position of economic exposure, economic positions of security of expectations in relation to the behaviours of actors on which their livelihoods depend. thus, the citizen to whom we lend a hand in arranging counter-powers that will institute her or him in a position of right, will be empowered of “recognized capacity” to call upon the collective force of the concern to protect and assert for him all the claims against others which the rules of the concern recognize and enforce” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 688). and this, commons adds, “is the meaning of citizenship and membership.” because he anticipates that authoritative power will be instituted for him or her, the actor may have confidence in the future and, according to the concept of futurity, adapt correspondingly his or her current behaviour. as this confidence in working rules of collective action permits individuals, as well as groups, to go ahead without fear (p. 696), his present action will emerge transformed. 25 finally, the theory of reasonable value depicts an economic conception of justice. as explained by y. ramstad (1998, p. 317), it reflects a theoretical shift in economic theory, “from the practice of viewing allocative efficiency as the overriding economic problem to that of viewing economic justice—the realization of reasonable values—as the paramount problem.” as society means “the concerted action of all participants in a going concern,” a project of social justice must give importance to the shares of the total output which participants are able to command in order to be considered a part of the concern (commons, 1934/1990, p. 617). the best nation, stated commons, (p. 634), is “that where rights, duties, liberties, and exposures are best rationed among individual and classes.” a related point is that reasonable value thus is the meaning of the institution of economic status of security. 226 sylvie morel studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 is connected to industrial democracy. in fact, commons’s “citizenship theory of labour” (ramstad, 1998, p. 317), or “his theoretical demonstration that just labour market outcomes can emerge only if “collective action in control of individual action” in the labour market is effected through working rules jointly determined by the worker “citizens” of enterprises—provides a theoretical rationale for elevating workers to the role of equal partner in determining the working rules that structure bargaining, managerial, and rationing transactions directly affecting workers.” in that view, the strengthening of a tripartite institution, such as the international labour organization (ilo), to deal with contemporary labour problems by promoting labour rights and decent work, finds a theoretical legitimization (mcintyre & ramstad, 2003). conclusion commonsian general theory demonstrates that it is possible to respond to the inadequacy of neoclassical economics without rejecting a theorizing and sophisticated abstract framework analysis. to the contrary, in this article, we attempted to demonstrate that a crucial challenge confronting us now is to bring to the forefront theories which fundamentally question the dominant paradigm in economics. being radically different in the way to understand economic rules and processes at the ontological, methodological, and conceptual levels, commonsian institutionalism is a theoretical alternative to mainstream economics. commons’s theory owes its strength to its social investigation approach, its logic of inquiry rooted in philosophical pragmatism, and its original analytical categories which can be used in a highly flexible way. consistent with its pragmatist mode of inquiry according to which theory and experience cannot be separated, economic theory is enriched by confronting “facts.” while the continuity of human experience is understood as a real process to be closely scrutinized, theory is not a fictive abstraction of reality. in contrast, it is directly connected to the real economic problems that disturb the course of the experiment, whether they happen in the life of an individual or in the functioning of the economy. therefore, economic theory offers useful analytical framework for action, in particular at the political level of transforming the economic world. on the conceptual level, commons’s institutionalism is a rich and dynamic representation of human action in society, operating on the construction of an individual which contrasts sharply with the homo œconomicus of orthodox economics. the individual in commons’s institutionalism is characterized as a social being. he or she has a will that acts on collective action, and on which conversely, the latter has a direct effect. collective action delimits individual action, both in terms of imagined possibilities and individual room to manoeuvre. this institutionalized mind is a being with bounded reason, more reasonable than rational, living in the future, and whose actions largely draw their meaning from customary rules. he or she is a being whose logic is based on negotiational psychology, deriving from its embeddedness in transactions, that is its commitment to different networks of action, or going concerns. lastly, the commonsian individual is a citizen with rights and duties which evolve according to the changing rules of these going concerns. economic status, including that of employment and economic insecurity 227 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 security, is defined by social positions of rights and duties, which are socially constructed and governed by formal and informal working rules. all these elements fundamentally confirm an ethical question. they are tools used to imagine the rules of what is reasonable, which serve to establish the economic status of security. therein lies the power of commons’s institutional theory for the analysis of conflicts surrounding income distribution and redistribution, as well as the attendant insecurity and poverty. given its ethical concerns, commonsian institutionalism converges with analyses that seek to bring out issues of equality and justice, such as feminist theory. the democratization of economic knowledge, aimed at giving people more power on economic decisions that affect them, is another of its ethical dimension. all this should be kept in mind in a period where every government, party or organization is seeking to devise the means to resolve the economic crisis. we know that the current worldwide crisis reveals the structural problems of finance-led capitalism. this specific capitalist configuration characterizes itself, among others, by an over-developed sophisticated financial sector detrimental to sustained employment, due to the fact that labour has become the main adjustment variable in economic processes. if, as desired by the ilo, this crisis—which has now degenerated in many countries into a crisis of employment, jeopardizing the economic status of important segments of the population and primarily those who are the most vulnerable—is a turning point for the goal of achieving decent work and social justice, it is clear that platforms of action should be rooted in a sound theoretical basis. in this regard, j. r. commons’s institutionalism shows that economic theory still has an important role to play in the social sciences. notes 1 the author thanks the reviewers whose comments have helped improve this article, and the translator, lise m. douville. 2 the founders of american institutionalism are t. veblen, j. r. commons, and w. c. mitchell. 3 “only a comparatively small percentage of articles in the journal of economic issues is devoted to presenting research findings about actual institutions and economic behavior. (…) what is lacking is good application of that theory in order to explain how some bit of the economy works, in a manner that is interesting and meaningful, in the policy sense, to a wide audience” (adams, 1994, p. 347). 4 b. e. kaufman (1998) also shows that two other scholarly contributions of commons have been widely neglected: his role as a founding member of the field of law and law and economics, and in the founding and early development of the academic field of personnel/human resource management. 5 in this country, commons’s work remained virtually unknown to economists. gaëtan pirou was the only one who introduced commons in his lectures at the école pratique des hautes études from 1935 to 1938, which have been published as: les nouveaux courants de la théorie économique aux états-unis. however, institutionnalist tradition has remained alive in the united states within the association for evolutionary economics (afee) (1965) and the association for institutional thought (afit) (1979). the main institutionalist publications are the journal of economic issues (1967) and the journal of institutional and theoretical economics. 6 p. adair (1991), “l’institutionnalisme américain. un chapitre clos dans l’histoire de la pensée économique.” cahiers du gratice, 1, mai, p. 1-37; m. renault (1992) “l’économique institutionnaliste et la philosophie pragmatique: la nature humaine, les totalités et les valeurs.” economies et sociétés, série pe oeconomia, n°17-8, pp. 171-201; 228 sylvie morel studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 cahiers d’economie politique. histoire de la pensée et théories. lectures de john r. commons, n°. 40/41 (2001); cahiers du gratice, n°. 19 (2000); economie & institutions, n° 1 (2002) & n° 2 (2003). 7 on this question, see morel, 2007. 8 the same analysis applies in the case of t. veblen, whose theory of the institution is intended to replace the old political economy; on this question, see gislain & steiner, (1995). 9 and i have not talked about the hermeticism displayed by mainstream economics relative to feminist economics: despite its abundance, the impact of this literature developed since the early 1990s is absolutely negligible (ferber & nelson, 2003). 10 this translation is mine. 11 importantly, institutionalist economists use methodological darwinism, which is completely different from social darwinism. 12 on links between commons’s work and john dewey’s “pragmatic instrumentalism,” see albert & ramstad, 1997; rutherford, 1983; tool, 1994. 13 “thus, values as such are not contaminates of inquiry; instrumentally warranted values are the necessary standards by which choices are made in the process of inquiry” (bush, 1993, p. 90). 14 as outlined by p. d. bush (1993, p. 98), the term “instrumentalism” refers to the instrumental function of ideas in the process of inquiry, as their value is not appraised in terms of an approximation to an ultimate truth, but for the capacity they possess for the solution of problems. 15 it is worth noting that this has also been called “instrumentalism,” but in a very different sense than pragmatist instrumentalism. in mainstream economics, instrumentalism only means that a theory is an instrument for prediction; see friedman, m. (1953). the methodology of positive economics, in m. friedman (ed.), essays in positive economics, chicago, university of chicago press, pp. 3-43. 16 this translation is mine. 17 terms in italics refer to commons’s concepts. 18 choice involves, in one and each act, three dimensions: “performance, the exertion of physical or economic power in one direction; avoidance, the rejection of the next best alternative performance; and forbearance, the choice of a lower as against a higher degree of power in the actual performance” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 19). 19 on commons’s conception of futurity, see gislain, 2002. 20 there are also two other kinds of transactions in commonsian institutionalism: strategic and routine transactions. they refer to what commons calls the limiting and complementary factors, used to depict the “human will in action.” 21 negotiational psychology is a social psychology with fundamental communicational components; on the relationship between american pragmatism, commonsian intitutionnalism and communication, see albert & ramstad, 1997; albert & ramstad, 1999; renault, 1999; 2007. 22 commons points out the fact that his formula of “social relations” is derived from the work of professor hohfeld of the yale law school: “the “social relations” are derived from hohfeld’s “legal relations,” but are enlarged to include economic and moral concerns, as well as the state—his political or legal concern” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 77). 23 this program, for which commons was the main instigator, was the first of its kind in the united states. it served as a model to the american unemployment insurance system, originally introduced in the framework of the social security act of 1935. 24 on commons’s reformist ideal of reasonability, and its ethical dimension, see bazzoli, 1999. 25 a status is “an expectation within which the individual adjusts his present behaviour” (commons, 1934/1990, p. 412). employment and economic insecurity 229 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 2, 2009 references adams, j. 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(1990). on the possibility of a feminist economics: the convergence of institutional and feminist methodology. journal of economic issues, 24(2), 613-622. whalen, c., & whalen l. (1994). institutionalism: a useful foundation for feminist economics? in j. peterson & d. brown (eds.), the economic status of women under capitalism: institutional economics and feminist theory (pp. 19-34). aldershot, uk: edward elgar. the commonsian concepts: economic insecurity as an instituted process field final before ts correspondence address: sean field, department of social anthropology, university of st. andrews, st. andrews, uk, ky16 9aj; email: sf95@st-andrews.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 1, 166-170, 2021 book review poverty as ideology: rescuing social justice from global development agendas fischer, andrew m. (2018). london: zed books. isbn 9781786990457 (cloth) cdn$134.95; isbn 9781786990440 (paper) cdn$42.95; isbn 9781786990471 (e-book) cdn$31.38. 298 pages. sean field university of st. andrews, uk this is an excellent book. over the course of eight chapters, fischer outlines how global development agendas led by the world bank and imf, and cheered on by popular financial media like the economist, have and continue to be driven by capitalist ideologies and supported by unreliable statistical data. fischer’s analysis is sharp, thorough, and pulls few punches in his critique of amartya sen, intergovernmental institutions, and neo-classical economists whose voices ring loud in development and poverty study circles. the first chapter begins with fischer’s main contention: “it has become widely accepted, even among more critical scholars that global poverty has fallen over the last several decades” (p. 1). fischer calls this common assertion into question in the pages and chapters that follow. he asks: “but what does this actually mean, in particular for poor people?” conventional wisdom informed by world bank data has “settled on the narrative that income poverty had fallen” but deferring to this data “as if they are accurate”, he argues, “carries the risk of being co-opted into the political projects that they have been designed to serve” (pp. 2-3). fischer’s aim is to demonstrate that concepts and methods in poverty studies are “fundamentally political and ideological” (p. 22) and that measures and programs designed to identify and address poverty are largely inadequate. there are three central arguments in the book. the first is that poverty is inherently political because of the choices and norms that define its purported meaning and measurement. the second, which is less clear in its articulation, is that absolute poverty measures, which focus only on the very poorest, are minimalist in their thresholds (reducing poverty to absolute destitution) and book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 166-170, 2021 167 undermine more robust universalistic measures that would be more effective in reducing poverty in the short term and also in addressing its structural causes. the third argument is that money-metric, multidimensional, and social exclusion measurements of poverty underestimate or incorrectly measure poverty. the reductive abstractness of these measures, fischer argues, conceals the complexities of actually living in poverty in different places and times, favour urban-dwelling wage-earning commoditized lifestyles over agrarian and subsistence lifestyles, and reflect the liberal and neoliberal biases of relatively privileged poverty experts living in the global north. following the introduction, in chapter two fischer tackles the politics of representation, prioritization, and the production of social statistics in poverty studies. addressing the politics of representation, the author questions who controls narratives about the last 40 years of global capitalism, in particular, claims that globalization and free-market capitalism have lifted people out of poverty. he argues that the choice of 1990 as the benchmark year for the millennium development goals is a revisionist attempt to erase “the memory of previous gains and the damage that was done to development in the 1980s” (p. 31). latin american and sub-saharan african countries were arguably at their worst point in a generation after a decade of debt crises, austerity, and structural adjustment, so that “things could have presumably only gotten better” he argues (p. 30). since then, rampant inequality has been framed as “not a problem as long as poverty is falling” (p. 29) and countries have focused on growth-based strategies rather than distributive and redistributive strategies, side-stepping the problem of wealth polarization and leaving capitalist forms of exploitation intact. the best way for the poor to get out of poverty, following the ideology of growth-based strategies, is for the poor to work themselves out of poverty, give up subsistence farming, and take a wage-job in the city – an assertion that fischer rejects. in chapters three through five, fischer addresses money-metric, multidimensional, and social exclusion approaches to poverty. the “fundamental problem with money metric measures,” he argues, is that “they are biased by design against universalistic and de-commodified forms of social provisioning” (p. 62), because they focus on individual-level commodity exchange. money-metric measures of expenditure also “do not indicate how expenditure is financed” (i.e., through earnings, savings or debt), which is important to their interpretation (p. 71). comparing subsistence food provisions with food that is bought and consumed, money metrics tend to favour commodity-based food consumption relative to subsistence food means by ignoring or underestimating the value of the latter (p. 61). in the case of labour, calculating the value of domestic labour by multiplying the reference wage by the number of hours worked “is not necessarily appropriate” because of the vitalness of the labour in “achieving a minimum standard of consumption” he argues (p. 63). the well-known world bank purchasing power parity metric defining the poverty line, sean field studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 166-170, 2021 168 fischer contends, is “not clearly grounded on any social scientific approach to measuring basic needs” (p. 76), and measures such as $1.20 per day poverty lines are minimalist, whittled down, and “to a large extent meaningless” (p. 106) multidimensional and social exclusion measures of poverty are scarcely better, if not worse, he argues. while multidimensional measures attempt to address the money-oriented problems of money metrics, they “do not fundamentally resolve the problems associated with money-metric poverty lines” and in some cases add more confusion (p. 109). referring to the undp’s human development index and similar indices, he asks “what does the resulting number of the composite indicator mean?” (p. 117). social exclusion measures, meanwhile, distract “attention away” from actual poverty measures, he argues (p. 151). inclusion does not imply quality, equity or equality, and exclusion can be experienced by upwardly mobile middle and lower classes as well as elites, an argument for which he draws on his own research experience in tibet. more problematic, he argues, is the idea that exclusion from capitalism is the source of poverty, rather than exploitative forms of inclusion. in chapters six and seven, fischer returns to some of the overarching issues discussed in chapter two while drawing on examples raised in chapters three through five. it is here that he outlines his holistic two-bythree framework for addressing poverty. in these chapters, fischer’s marxian leanings come to the surface. he argues that “economic science… has not solved the question of how labour is fundamentally valued” (p. 204) and that “wages differences cannot be discerned through simple comparisons of labour productivity” (p. 205). addressing the terms of trade where labour is exchanged for wages is fundamental to transforming poverty, not reductionist productivity rubrics that suggest that if only the poor worked harder or smarter, then they would work themselves into prosperity. it is a myth, he argues, that “the rich are rich due to their greater productivity,” and this myth “lies at the heart of ideological efforts to legitimate the inequalities of the current world economic order” (p. 206). a critical structuralist institutional political economy approach, which he advocates for, must question “who creates value” and “who controls” value (p. 185), as well as scrutinize the “ideological assumptions… built into our paradigmatic conceptions of… poverty and development” (p. 186). shifting definitions of universalism from equal access to access regardless of quality, and development policies that segregate and target the needy rather than society as a whole, have done little to resolve poverty and have undermined efforts to address its structural causes, he contends. fischer concludes the book by arguing that deconstructing “prevailing poverty approaches is needed for instilling humility and a healthy dose of scepticism” (p. 259). global development agendas, he argues, need to be re-politicized and universalistic social policies advanced as viable options if we wish to address the causal sources of poverty (p. 274). book review studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 166-170, 2021 169 this book touched on, and deconstructed, many familiar topics from my graduate training in agricultural economics and international development studies. the book tackles many of the critiques that i heard, thought about, and discussed with others during this graduate training. what i really like about fischer’s analysis is his attention to detail, such as spelling out what he means by defining key terms. i also really liked that he seems to be addressing multiple audiences – economists, the international development community, practitioners, academics and students. there are a few relatively minor points that could have made the book stronger. first, the definitions in chapter six regarding how fischer uses the terms “structuralist” and “critical” could have been moved up into chapters one or two where he offers other key definitions that he deploys throughout. second, i am uncertain about the validity of his assertion that ambiguity in the social exclusion literature on poverty is a more serious criticism than eurocentrism (p. 165). while he contends that eurocentrism “can be dealt with by loosening institutional specifications of the concept” (p. 165), i remain unconvinced and would have like to have a bit more explanation. in his definition of profit in chapter six, fischer outlines a simple agrarian example of a farmer who plants 10 kilograms of grain and harvests 110 kilograms. after the landlord, the money lender and taxes are paid and after the grain eaten by mice or gone mouldy is deducted as depreciation “the grain left over is profit” he says (p. 195). i disagree that this constitutes profit, at least in the marxian sense. the “profit” in this example is instead retained value created by the farmer through their labour; profit is value retained from other peoples’ labour and extracted by paying them less (in wages for example) than the value they created through the product of their work. finally, i was struck by some of the vagueness in fischer’s two-by-three “holistic framework” for conceptualizing poverty (p. 188). the framework is composed of two dimensions, each with three constituent elements. the first-dimension is the creation and division of wealth, and its three elements are production, distribution and redistribution. the second-dimension deals with “secondary, indirect and aggregated factors influencing the first” and its three elements include supply-side factors, demand-side factors and the terms of trade and wages. the elements of the framework are each well explained, illustrated with key examples, and relatively easy to understand. however, the framework offers few specifics on how it might be implemented. perhaps this was intentional; by keeping his framework general it lends itself to adaption to a variety of places and contexts. the author could have included a section tying the dimensions and elements of his framework together in one example after laying out his framework, which i think would have clarified some of the vagueness around how all the elements of the framework fit together, and would have illustrated how it could be applied. there are many great arguments raised in this book, with ample examples, data, and literature to support them. amongst them is fischer’s engagement with sen, which features prominently but not exclusively in chapter four. sean field studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 166-170, 2021 170 while sen’s entitlement theory is centred on command over resources, his revised capabilities theory is more individualistic and neoclassical in its formation. fischer charges that sen’s “liberal theoretical stance and ontological individualism” made his theories “amenable to mainstream adoption” (p. 137), even though they side-step questions of systems, structure, and inequality by relying on neoclassical economic theory for explanations. i highly recommend this book. fischer is provocative, thorough, and thoughtful in his analysis. the book should be required reading for graduate students pursuing poverty or development studies and for practitioners engaged with designing, identifying, measuring, assessing and delivering poverty abatement and relief programs. the book might be a bit dense for firstand second-year undergraduate students, and may be more palatable for undergraduates if assigned in segments or selected chapters. johnston final correspondence address: caleb johnston, school of geography, politics & sociology, newcastle university, newcastle upon tyne, uk ne1 7ru; email: caleb.johnston@ncl.ac.uk isnn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 318-326, 2017 creative intervention an artful civic disruption in vancouver caleb johnston newcastle university, england introduction in 2011, i curated counter mapping, an interdisciplinary contemporary arts exhibition showcased in vancouver’s roundhouse community arts and recreation centre (figure 1). the exhibition was organized as part of the city’s annual push international performing arts festival, whose programming that year was arranged around the curatorial theme of happy birthday teenage city!, celebrating vancouver’s quasquicentennial anniversary. counter mapping brought together the work of 17 professional vancouver artists from varied creative practices: video, photography, textiles, soundscape and installation. it was an ambitious endeavor, the central impetus of which was to bring together creative work that (in some way) questioned and disrupted the routines and gestures, routes and structures of daily urban life.1 figure 1. exhibition gallery (photo: tim matheson) 1 see www.calebjohnston.ca/counter-mapping/. an artful civic disruption studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 318-326, 2017 319 curation began with two guiding questions. how might we produce and circulate a poetic and political cartography? and how might creativity and acts of imagination engage and take up questions and issues of social justice? this questioning seemed especially pertinent within the context of vancouver at that time (and beyond). the city was then reeling in the aftermath of hosting the 2010 winter olympic games, drunk on the promise of the grand spectacle. the event had come with a staggering cost, an overall price tag of seven billion dollars, with the government having spent nearly one billion on an elaborate security apparatus. social housing had been appropriated, the downtown area “cleaned up,” and many (rightfully) feared that the spectacle would lead to yet another round of hyper real estate speculation in a city already ravaged by successive decades of whole-scale gentrification. at the same time, in the aftermath, plenty of government cash appeared to be sloshing around to ensure the “cultural legacy” of the games, and we – as savvy artists – were keen to press the advantage while the good times lasted. the resulting collection drawn together for counter mapping was as varied as it was innovative, and the exhibition’s curatorial vision was steered by the well-worn admonishment that everyday life is often the setting for critical, subversive – even revolutionary – thought and action. it looked to doreen massey’s (2005) concern that all too often city space remains rendered static and inert, a container for action; what is needed, she argues, is greater attention placed on the dramatic possibilities of “spatial disruptions” and the underlying agency afforded and made possible in and through the crisscrossing and collision of ideas, bodies and experiences. this is not the place for a lengthy theoretical exposé. rather, here i present downtown ambassador, one example drawn from the exhibition that illustrates a creative, critical engagement with the city. it speaks to the possibilities of creative infiltration, disrupting everyday life, and draws us into imaginative ways of contesting and unsettling the urban. the work simultaneously offers a compelling site wherein visual-performance art enters directly into a material politics and the pursuit of social justice in rather surprising and unexpected ways. infiltration and urban camouflage exhibited as a 12-minute video installation framed by twin lcd tv screens and glass vitrine encasing a red uniform (figure 2), downtown ambassador was a site-specific performance-based project that began with artist jamie hilder’s participation in the 2006 world urban forum in vancouver. he emerged from the forum determined to move away from textual representations of the city in order to explore and animate how the city is (re)produced materially within everyday life. “the idea was if you could write a city”, he suggests, “then you could write back against a city in caleb johnston studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 318-326, 2017 320 the same way, recuperate that type of figure as a chronicler of the city as somebody writing a counter narrative.” figure 2. dta uniform (photo: jamie hilder) as a hybrid academic-visual-performance artist, hilder was keen to investigate how his practice might be mobilized to disrupt and recuperate the histories that police the ways in which vancouver is narrated, circulated and performed. eager to re-appropriate the “chronicling” of the urban, hilder focused his sights on inhabiting one particular figure, that of the downtown ambassador (dta). founded in 2000 as a self-described “community patrol,” the dtas are a private “hospitality” force funded by the downtown business improvement association (dvbia) and operated by genesis security, one of british columbia’s largest security companies.2 dtas are put to work to watch over private properties, as well as report on a range of transgressions: instances of drug use, graffiti and panhandling. these activities get recorded and mapped on the personal digital assistants that dtas carry as they patrol city streets. their mapping has been used by the dvbia to lobby municipal government for new policing measures and security initiatives. the dtas have been deployed on the front line of gentrification, especially in vancouver’s downtown eastside, and have been accused by civil rights organizations of forcibly removing “undesirables” (through various forms of coercion) from public and private spaces. 2 see www.downtownvancouver.net/about/activities-of-the-dvbia/downtown-ambassadors. an artful civic disruption studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 318-326, 2017 321 “so the idea was to do the job of the downtown ambassadors,” describes hilder, “but do it badly, which means, you don’t talk to homeless people, but talk to tourists. and you make them feel uncomfortable… or you talk to citizens and you make them uncomfortable about what happens in the city.” hilder initiated a covert performance, which first involved infiltrating the downtown ambassadors program. he applied for a job and was asked to attend an interview, before which he had to undergo a two-week training course with genesis security; training which included role-playing exercises, rehearsing various street encounters, instruction in the rigors of incident reporting, report writing, as well as training in safety and crime prevention techniques. he received detailed instruction in the tactical strategies and overall objectives of the dta program, namely to address “quality of life” issues such as panhandling, litter, theft, informal vending, and graffiti. throughout, hilder scripted a field journal that detailed the security training, and having successfully navigated security exercises and after two subsequent interviews, hilder was hired as an ambassador. shortly thereafter, equipped with a two-way radio, digital camera, maps, hat and uniform, he hit the streets. his employment was short lived; hilder soon quit but not before having an exact copy of his dta uniform replicated by a local tailor. his employment with genesis security was just a beginning, of sorts, and he quickly began plotting sites in the city where he would (re)appear as an unsanctioned ambassador. he planned to covertly videotape these performances, with conversations with the public discreetly audio recorded with a hidden lapel microphone. and yet, hilder’s preliminary foray into the streets as a covert ambassador was an admitted failure: i did a day of filming. i started filming at the waterfront station. and i stood outside and didn’t have anything to say to anyone, right? i didn’t have an opening line. nobody came up to me to talk, and i felt that i didn’t have enough research to speak confidently on the space… it went badly. not only did the initial performance go poorly but the whole project nearly collapsed during his first day at waterfront station, located in the heart of vancouver’s historic gastown area: i saw an ambassador on the other side of the street. and then i saw him walk back towards me on my side, with two other ambassadors. and they shouted, ‘hey! ambassador!’ and then i turned on my heels and walked, and had to run back through waterfront station and up some stairs, and over an overpass… i recognized them, i did my training with them, so they would have blown the whole project. at that point, i wasn’t sure about the legality of what i was doing. i was pretty sure it wasn’t a felony, but i thought it could be mischief or something like that. caleb johnston studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 318-326, 2017 322 rattled but unscathed from his close encounter, hilder retreated, resolute to hone the project’s intent and methodology. he busied himself with further research in order to gain greater familiarity with the particular histories of specific sites in the city. he determined the parameters of the engagement. he would not initiate conversation with bystanders; they would have to first ask him a question. and he determined that he would stage himself and anchor his interventions at specific sites: the totem poles and prospect point in stanley park, the steam clock in gastown, and along the sea shore at the ingnukshuk in english bay. these sites were not incidental, and were chosen in order to break silence and recuperate the absence of vancouver’s histories of colonialism and homophobic violence, the appropriation and aestheticization of aboriginal iconography, the commodification of frontierism, and the violence enacted by aggressive programs of urban renewal and the securitization of public space. these performative interventions were designed to circulate new stories, to bring greater visibility to often buried histories and struggles not widely circulated in the sanctioned narratives of the city, and his appearance as a dta was meant to lend authority to this re-scripting. with his performances covertly video and audio recorded, hilder spent four days in the summer of 2009 patrolling the city as a dta agent. figure 3. patrolling the city (photo: jamie hilder) an artful civic disruption studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 318-326, 2017 323 unruly performances hidler’s experiment ended dramatically during a performance in gastown: [a]nother ambassador came up, somebody that i had trained with, and saw me in uniform and was instantly aggressive and said, ‘what are you doing?’ and i said, ‘i’m a volunteer ambassador.’ and he said, ‘we don’t have those. it’s illegal for you to be in this outfit. this is the copyright outfit or uniform of genesis security and the downtown ambassador program.’ and i said, ‘can you quote me the law on that?’ because at this point, i had consulted a lawyer who told me that i would be doing nothing illegal. and i consulted a copyright lawyer who said i was breaking copyright but i would have had to profit from the project for them to win any damages. so i was pretty confident that i was, probably over confident, that i was doing nothing wrong. and so i came off kind of, kind of calm and even cocky and arrogant, saying, ‘i’m doing a performance piece. i’m giving people, visiting vancouver, histories that the dvbia wouldn’t necessarily want them to know’. the ruse was up. with his cover blown, genesis security resorted to calling the vancouver police to the scene of the crime. the police came and … ‘what’s going on here?’ and i told them i was doing a performance and told them my name. and they, ‘why are you doing this?’ i was like, ‘you know i wanted to intervene in the spectacle of the city and to reshape it. and it’s a performance. it’s for art’… one other constable went to the trunk of the car, at the command of the arresting officer, pulled out a big book, which was the canadian criminal code, and they spent about 15 minutes just flipping through the canadian criminal code. i guess trying to find out what they could arrest me for, like what i was doing wrong. and so they get out of the car, and they say, ‘well mr. hilder, i’m not a big art guy, you know, i don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but i’ll tell you what we’re going to do…we’re going to slap the cuffs on you and take you to jail.’ and i was shocked. and they said, ‘we know you’re not a bad guy. we know for instance that you go to stanford university. and if you were to be arrested, it would go on your record, you couldn’t travel. we’re not necessarily interested in doing that. but this is what we’re going to do, we’re going to take you to jail.’ and so i was a little nervous. hidden across the road, hilder’s video camera continued to document the “performance” that had – of a sudden – morphed into an arrest. “i was like, ‘are you sure? because i got legal advice before i did this project.’ and he was like, ‘yeah, impersonation with intent to deceive, it’s a law. i just looked it up.’ and i was, at this point, fuck! and i said, ‘well, i guess i got some bad legal advice’.” detained on suspicion of impersonation, it was an unexpected turn for the worse. hilder was handcuffed and marched through the downtown eastside to the central police station. he was then body searched, and after being briefly held in custody, was released without charge. caleb johnston studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 318-326, 2017 324 and yet, hilder’s action did not end on the threshold of the vancouver police department. in the events leading into his public performances, he had had a chance encounter with an activist who informed him that in july 2008, pivot legal society, 3 in partnership with the vancouver area network of drug users (vandu), had filed a legal complaint against the dvbia and its ambassador program in the british columbia human rights tribunal (bchrt) – an independent, quasi-judicial body empowered to mediate and rule on claimed human rights violations. pivot’s complaint was premised on alleged human rights abuses enacted by the dtas and their documented harassment of the homeless or hard-to-house people in vancouver’s downtown eastside. the litigation represented the latest chapter in pivot’s ongoing legal action that was taking place within an aggressive policy and security apparatus instituted in british columbia in advance of vancouver hosting the 2010 winter olympic games. the action was equally situated within the context of intensifying gentrification in the city’s downtown eastside, which has resulted in the ever greater presence of private security personnel in the area, as well as heightened police activity and surveillance measures (of which the dta program is but one example). pivot alleged that the dtas had for years been intimidating and forcibly removing the homeless and panhandlers from public streets and alleyways. while the homeless are not specifically safeguarded by human rights legislation in british columbia, vandu and pivot argued that the practices of the dta (as a private security force) were discriminatory given that the hard-to-house are disproportionately represented by indigenous people and/or those living with a disability, which are populations protected under the british columbia human rights code. hilder had landed unexpectedly in full-blown legal action. it was a serendipitous encounter wherein art fused with social justice activism. based on his undercover training with genesis security, hilder was deposed by pivot lawyers and his testimony was submitted as an affidavit detailing how the forced removal of “undesirables” was standard practice advocated by the dta program. “[i]t was my testimony”, argues hilder, “about the use of the term ‘removals’, you know, the practice of the ambassadors bragging about how many removals they had done, that constituted evidence for this practice of harassment.” critically, the field journal that he had scripted during his security induction was entered as material evidence, and proved important in pivot’s complaint proceeding to a full hearing in the bchrt, to which hilder was called as a material witness and testified for three hours in public tribunal. taking nearly three years to make its way through legal proceedings, the bchrt, citing a lack 3 pivot legal society is an advocacy organization based in vancouver’s downtown eastside. it is committed “to challenging laws and policies that undermine the dignity of those most on the margins or that intensify poverty and social exclusion” (see www.pivotlegal.org/). an artful civic disruption studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 318-326, 2017 325 of evidence, dismissed pivot and vandu’s complaint against the dvbia in 2011. art, city, social justice counter mapping received two weeks of exhibition in vancouver. it was free and accessible to multiple publics; in fact, i was keen to work in the roundhouse precisely because it is a lively hub of community activity in the city’s downtown area. in january 2011, hundreds of people moved through the exhibition space to experience an array of assembled works: faculty and students from the emily carr university of art + design; researchers from the british columbia women’s hospital; chinese seniors perusing art after games of mahjong; cultural planners from city hall; children after their karate classes; arty push festival audiences; the media, artists and many others. it is hard to say what effect the exhibition may or may not have had for these diverse publics. in one register, it was conceived as a “reflective space. a space of possibility,” following ian cook (2000, p. 342), “where connections can be seen. felt. thought through. perceptions that can make a difference. maybe. somehow.” of course, there is nothing new about artists getting spatial and moving well beyond the studio or theatre, gallery or workshop to engage the urban. alastair bonnet (1992, p. 77) reminds us that for the avant-garde, the everyday city has long offered a site for creative and political intervention, with the arts often serving as a means to “think about and engage physically with the possibilities of creating a new and radically stimulating kind of city.” situated at the intersection between the political and poetic, the here and not-yet-there, the works assembled for counter mapping sought to amplify rebellious views of and from within the everyday city. we looked to occupy a space that david pinder (1996, p. 421) describes as an oscillation between “actuality and the imaginary; between what exists and what might exist, and between the dead weight of past urbanism… and the possible for a new urbanism.” this short reflection has offered downtown ambassador as one compelling example gleaned from the exhibition that staged a creative engagement with the urban. as a performance-based visual art installation, it worked to bring to life largely untold accounts and histories that pushed back. it appropriated the authority of one particular urban storyteller, a fused tour guide/private security guard. hilder’s covert presence in city streets may have been fleeting but surely the project had effects that resonated well beyond its performed public disruptions. it became enmeshed in a broader struggle enacted upon a very different kind of stage, a site wherein art and politics converged in the pursuit of social justice. no doubt hilder’s creative intervention was rendered all the more meaningful by its contribution to a campaign contesting everyday violence. caleb johnston studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 318-326, 2017 326 you can view hilder’s video installation of downtown ambassador here: http://jamiehilder.com/ambassador.html. references bonnett, a. (1992) art, ideology, and everyday space: subversive tendencies from dada to postmodernism. environment and planning d: society and space, 10(1), 69-86. cook, i. (2000) social sculpture and connective aesthetics: shelley sacks’s ‘exchange values’. cultural geographies, 7(3), 337-343. massey, d. (2005) for space. london: sage. pinder, d. (1996) subverting cartography: the situationists and maps of the city. environment and planning a, 28, 405-427. trowbridge & wallace final june 18 18 correspondence address: terry trowbridge, department of socio-legal studies, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: terry.trowbridge.submit@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 creative intervention the northern edge of everything terry trowbridge1 york university, canada jade wallace2 canada for the first three of the four years that we lived in toronto together, we rented a condo next to the last stop on the northwest end of toronto’s subway system. then called downsview, now called sheppard west for reasons that have some unclear relation to a subway expansion that was locked in suspended animation for years, it is the station “at the lonely edge of everything, at the centre of nothing” (“the northern edge of everything”). it is located on the dividing lines of three neighbourhoods – downsview, bathurst manor, and york university heights – and it stands beside an industrial-looking downsview park and within view of the clamour of downsview airport. the neighbourhood is a contested space, as real estate developers, international investors, and immigrant communities move like tides across the greater toronto area. the geographical marginality of the space both mirrors and entrenches the marginalized identities of its inhabitants, many of whom are racialized persons, precariously employed persons, newcomers, recipients of social assistance, or seniors. 1 terry trowbridge is a phd student in socio-legal studies at york university. his poems have appeared in draft, cv2, the new quarterly, the dalhousie review, the nashwaak review, paperplates, untethered, carousel, briarpatch, the great lakes review, orbis, the broadkill review, (parenthetical), the prairie journal, subterrain, and elsewhere. he has five chapbooks from grey borders books. 2 jade wallace is a toronto legal clinic worker whose poetry and prose have been published in canada, the united states, the united kingdom, ireland, and new zealand, and have appeared in publications including the dalhousie review, the nashwaak review, in/words, draft, feathertale, a new ulster, acumen, and the antigonish review. jade’s work has also been featured in the anthologies pac’n heat: a noir homage to ms. pac-man from agp books and breakfast in a day from death cookie soup press, as well as seven chapbooks from grey borders books. terry trowbridge & jade wallace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 166 the neighbourhood is part of what is sometimes called north york, sometimes called toronto. it is legally regarded as both, even recognized as such by canada post, but the choice of name typically reflects how long someone has lived there. longstanding residents are likely to call it north york, in memory of the time when it was a city unto itself. newer residents who want to pretend that gentrification hasn’t pushed them to the periphery of the city they want to live in call it toronto. the streets are a combination of empty houses waiting several years to be demolished, ersatz villas and high-rise condo buildings replacing tiny affordable bungalows, intersections of heavy traffic that moves without attention to stop lights, lines on the road, or pedestrians, and an array of small businesses struggling to convince the locals to stay close rather than make the long trek downtown to locations more profitable for multi-million dollar corporations. it is a place “where a porsche parks next to a/ k-car on blocks” (“balcony birding”) and where “poverty is not hidden—/ it is in the decrepit houses right next to the expensive condos” (“no secrets”). such juxtapositions trouble the straightforward celebration of mixed-economicclass neighbourhoods so lauded in recent years by the toronto municipal government, and point to the uneasiness that characterizes neighbourhoods where “we know exactly what everyone’s income is” (“no secrets”) and there is significant economic disparity among residents. though resources and capital eventually follow the middle and upper class when they move in, there is also tension that results from dislocation and its resultant fractures of communities in which people once lived with others who shared many of their economic and social experiences. the fact remains that mixing economic classes in a building, or in a neighbourhood, even when it lowers crime, or increases social mobility, still does not end poverty; it is only a local improvement to some of the conditions of poverty for the residents allowed to remain. when we first moved to the neighbourhood from a much smaller, more intimate, city, we lived in a kind of denial and passed from our apartment to our distant destinations with minimal attention paid to the space through which we travelled. eventually, we realized we had lived for a couple of years in a place we hardly knew. and so we decided to get acquainted with our area of residence. we started walking our neighbourhood for at least an hour every weekday, in widening circles of suburban parks, back alleys, and strip malls. ethnographically examining the space quickly became part of our perambulatory conversations about our family life, jade’s work in a local legal clinic addressing tenancy law crises, terry’s ph.d. research at york university about the impact of legal consciousness on the creation of literature, the social media drama of our friends back in the niagara region that we still obstinately considered home, and other sundry subjects. on weekends, we walked other neighbourhoods of toronto. we noted how treed and quiet the most monied neighbourhoods were. our neighbourhood was a place characterized by “the steady drone of airplanes and traffic” the northern edge of everything studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 167 (“this human geography we inhabit”), where “you [could] look down on seagulls gliding/ within reach of the balcony” (“balcony birding”) but not hear them, and where the only auditory evidence of one’s neighbours was the sounds of their power tools and smoke alarms (see “the upper world”). by contrast, the strictly upper-class neighbourhoods were so insulated from heavy transit that, from the sidewalk, one could hear not only birds, but conversation. rather than the smog of vehicle exhaust, one could smell grass, and flowers blooming lushly in the boulevards. the homes there were not over-priced apartments made of “glass held on by glue” (“climate change denial”); they were older, and hardier, and offered a wood-and-brick privacy not afforded by the relentless transparency of the panopticondos. but we did not do anything with our observations until, in 2016, an experimental literary reading series called draft invited us to perform. the premise of the reading series is to publicly share works in progress, which builds a community of established and new writers by emphasizing a shared sense of creative process. we gamely decided to write some first drafts specifically for the reading. despite the reading being scheduled a year in advance, we still found ourselves at two weeks to the deadline with no drafts in hand. we sat on our balcony, looking out over all the southern, more beloved parts of toronto, and tossed around arbitrary, meaningless suggestions for topics. and then we decided it was time to try to love our own troubled neighbourhood a little in the most devoted way we knew how: by writing poetry about it. so we turned our critical imagination toward writing call-and-response poems about the economy and the social and political geography of it. we individually wrote seven poems each, then traded them and wrote reply poems. our original texts were a conversation with our neighbourhood, and our response texts were a conversation with each other. the poems are presented in their paired sets and the poets’ initials are marked at the bottom of the page of their respective texts. the eight poems that appear here were selected for their relevance to issues of social justice. it is perhaps obvious to say that it is important to write about toronto, as it is a city rapidly changing and those changes can have profoundly beneficial or profoundly damaging consequences for the approximately 2.9 million people who call it home. and accordingly, toronto has been written about extensively. but the more geographically and socially marginal the toronto neighbourhood, the less it seems to be written about, the less it is perhaps considered at all, despite the fact that its marginalization makes it all the more crucial for there to be sustained social engagement and good city planning to ensure the neighbourhood’s growth and its residents’ well-being. better planning, one hopes, would mean that a neighbourhood does not end up with long stretches where “there [are] no graveyard[s]/ but there are five psychics who speak with the dead” (“old money”). so it is that we have become convinced of the usefulness of writing poetry about the downsview-bathurst manor-york university heights intersection. terry trowbridge & jade wallace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 168 we see particular use for poetry which is attuned to the lacunae in the neighbourhood’s development and poetry which seeks to engender a shared experience of this place, especially as it feels so often like community here amounts to little more than “watching football [together] in a wordless dive bar” (“the secret park”). we do not claim to be the first or the best at achieving either of those objectives, but there is such a dearth of published literary work about these neighbourhoods that we feel any contribution can be meaningful. these poems provide a kind of snapshot of critical civic consciousness that might only last a moment in a very particular place. yet the forces that have shaped and are shaping the neighbourhoods of toronto have long-lasting and far-reaching consequences, as the gravitational pull of a huge population guides provincial, and even national, legislation and policy and warps the flow of people and money around lake ontario. the northern edge of everything studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 169 the northern edge of everything we live at the lonely edge of everything, at the centre of nothing. to the southwest is downsview, with its long flat stretches of green that belie its former life as a vast farm. now, it is a geographical identity crisis, trying to hold its park next to its airport, on the ground that used to be a canadian forces base. the former waiting ground for wars is now the training ground for circuses. a cynical person might ask what the difference is. to the east is bathurst manor, the name implying an aristocracy that doesn’t exist in either the public housing apartments or the apartments that look like public housing. the businesses are mostly restaurants or closed. the restaurants are a pastiche of ethnicities, from the kosher dairy to the jerk joint to the good mexican restaurant named guacamole that only lasted a few months and made me wonder if, somewhere far south of here, there is a burger bar called ketchup. we live at the place where the subway ends. on our northwest side, york university heights is home to the second largest school in the country, a school that has, nevertheless, been waiting decades for the subway line to reach it. the university of toronto has train tracks bordering it on three sides, and we might ask if we’re not old enough, or not good enough, to have the same, but we’re used to the way that toronto money runs like a river to the lake. jw terry trowbridge & jade wallace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 170 balcony birding seven storeys is the altitude where you can look down on seagulls gliding within reach of the balcony. if you’ve been fishing from a rowboat and looked down, you know what i mean. see, for your first time, the seagulls’ shoulders flex over urban currents. now you can be part of the inland scavenger ecosystem spotting the pavement with binoculars, hearing the regular beat of ttc announcements between the gulls, the crows, the cicadas. shuttling subways en route to vanishing points under yorkdale mall’s malachite consumer monument move thousands of people a day who could see us on the balcony counting them with our pointless notebooks, keeping record of colours, species, time of day. they would notice us but for, of course, their disinterested schedules circling on the ground. the guidebooks on our shelves make life interesting (jane jacobs, mariana valverde, jean-jacques audobon), in the undecided frontier between toronto and north york, where no particular economic class has control of billboards, or the driveways where a porsche parks next to a k-car on blocks, next to a park where a cute skull-painted juggalo family strollers past a lawyer briefcasing home. we think we are the only lake people here, us and the seagulls, niagara region expats with our canoe parked on the far-south shore of lake ontario, while we rent our basement parking garage space to the neighbours across the hall (since they asked and we take transit). this is the neutral zone, pure residential, where the most popular restaurant is a gas station staffed by constantly changing temporary foreign workers who define the neighbourhood the most; because we feel like we are also temporary, foreign, the northern edge of everything studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 171 only living here in order to go to work from convenient downsview, no home to come back to, rentiers investing only in circles that draw us farther away from wherever the subways go. tt terry trowbridge & jade wallace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 172 the upper world neighbours in a high-rise apartment, when they exist to us at all, are just single, hyperbolic traits, like a stable of cartoonish, allegorical horses. we hear each other only at our loudest, we see each other only in the halls. the horse that lives above us loves power tools. her drill runs eight hours on saturday, her hammer eight hours on sunday, her saw all through the week. i have never seen wood enter or leave the building. she must be a reclusive carpenter, smuggling in small and secret boxes of smaller and more secret boards to turn her cloister into a forest. her lonely quarters grow closer to her nightly, walls thickening with layers of screws and nails. the horses in the corner stall are grandparents. only grandparents. they draw two grandchildren, who never seem to grow older or taller, from their apartment to the elevator and back again. i have never seen them outside; i have never seen them on another floor. they are retired racers, restlessly pacing. there are horses, somewhere, who burn their dinner every night. as dusk flickers across the day, the alarm cries out like it thought it caught scent of a wolf. but there is only ever the smell of horses, eating grain that tastes of smoke without flame. in our apartment, we walk laps around the kitchen as the tv blares late into the night. we strike notes on a glockenspiel without ever reaching a melody. the cat pleads long and loud for someone we can’t see. an angel, perhaps. jw the northern edge of everything studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 173 climate change denial downtown toronto money is so stupid it hurts. for the first time, serious tornadoes are touching down south of vaughn. meanwhile, in kansas, houses are built with special metal bands that loop around the roof beams so that the roofs are shredded when a tornado blows them off. whole roofs, in one piece, otherwise fly for five, six, seven blocks before they land. toronto developers don’t give a shit. the city of north york has so little soil that the basements are flooding so often that the councillors will not be able to install backflow valves before the foundations crack. toronto developers don’t give a shit. for the first time, in north america, storms are entering high rise neighbourhoods because their winds are traveling faster than ever possible. toronto real estate developers are building the high rises out of glass. glass held on by glue. have you ever dropped a jar of spaghetti sauce into an indoor skydiving wind tunnel and watched it shatter on the fan, and dropped another, and another… the intercity buses drive into toronto past the lit-up beacons of the future: insurance companies next to the embassies of our biggest global trade partners. tt terry trowbridge & jade wallace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 174 the secret park when my friend from ottawa came to visit, i led us on a walk along the don river, not because i was convinced there would be anything much to see, apart from an unused ski lift, but it seemed better than roaming the aisles of the grocery store or watching football in a wordless dive bar. we followed the edge of the water, then scampered our way up a tangle of steep and unmarked trails. we were just breaching a field that looked empty, when we heard carnival music lilting over the hill. exchanging suspicious glances, we climbed to the crest and found ourselves unexpectedly surrounded by a crowd of families. children played lawless games of soccer, parents cooked hot dogs on portable barbecues. “what is this?” i asked. “where are we?” we passed through the crowd and then we were standing in a silver amphitheatre, gleaming in the sun like a crashed ufo. beyond was another long stretch of field. we crossed the grass and came out between nondescript apartment buildings on a street i never have reason to travel. from that side, the secret park stretched clear and wide for half a city block. jw the northern edge of everything studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 175 no secrets downsview is impossible, because everything is as it seems. which should be impossible in a democracy. there are no secret millionaires the millionaires are right there. poverty is not hidden – it is in the decrepit houses right next to the expensive condos. we know exactly what everyone’s income is because every week fliers arrive with condo and house prices and name the streets, and number the people who live there, and other advertisements for home and car loans let us do some quick math on the back of the mail. maps. statistics. brokers depict quantifiable details, tell us to move, tell us the distance from home to work, which tells us where everybody is supposed to be working; but in this economy it tells us where they have to be working to qualify for the loans to buy the condo which is decorated with either two hundred dollar toasters from yorkdale mall or not decorated at all. not one speck of personal flair, not even a poster or a unique lamp shade behind the statistically transparent, ironically named, blinds. tt terry trowbridge & jade wallace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 176 this human geography we inhabit after three years of living in this apartment, i still feel like we don’t belong to the neighbourhoods it touches. my work and my friends are elsewhere. this place is for sleeping and for buying groceries and for leaving. the glut of failing businesses suggests that other residents do the same. there was one time, though, when i felt myself almost a part of this human geography we inhabit. it was a mild evening in late summer. the screen door to the balcony was open for the cat. i was in the bedroom, which glowed pale blue like a cloud preparing for rain. over the steady drone of airplanes and traffic, the wind came in the door like a string joining tin cans and i could hear every proclamation made in the transit station down the street. jw the northern edge of everything studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 165-177, 2018 177 old money on the bus route between downsview and sheppard-yonge stations there is no graveyard but there are five psychics who speak with the dead. english family names appear on street signs honouring money. the grand orange lodge has a benefit fund headquarters on sheppard avenue. the gentrified real estate is too valuable to portion some of it to the dead. nobody wants to spend eternity next to the orange order. the ghosts won’t even haunt this place and nobody gathers to share their own grief which is probably why some things that should be buried still stand. tt martin fg july 14 16 correspondence address: eleanor martin, school of geographical & earth sciences, university of glasgow, glasgow, g12 8qq, scotland; email: eleanornicholamartin@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 116, 2016 creative intervention what she would have wanted eleanor martin university of glasgow, scotland polished toecaps shuffle, politely down the aisle. more or less bereft, pause to take of bread and wine. ordinarily i’d feel the blush of agnosticism. that prickling hotfacedness, is absent this time. like whispered hail marys, words so often mumbled, without consideration. i know them off by heart. but i still cannot fathom their meaning. schizoaffective, acutely psychotic, seems i’ve been cast a part. the service trundles on. i cannot stand this hymn. mournfully selected, with the best intentions. to all those well-meaning folks, on the bandwagon of empathy, not every soul needs saving. thanks, i’ll decline intervention. preaching about justice, with diagnostic fervour. it’s different jargon, same result. i never have control. can’t leave this place alone. appalled, i’m borne away by six lads, and i careen out of the door. cross me off the church roll. moniruzzaman final dec 13 16(2).pages volume 10, issue 2, 308-321, 2016 creative intervention spareparts.exchange: rahim and robert, stitched together in silence monir moniruzzaman michigan state university, usa camille turner york university, canada heather dewey-hagborg school of the art institute of chicago, usa jim ruxton subtle technologies, canada rahim sheikh, a 27 year old garment worker in bangladesh sold his kidney on the black market. at first, rahim noticed several newspaper advertisements promoting kidney “donation.” rahim did not know how the kidney functions, but he understood well that he could get out of poverty by “donating” one of his body parts. rahim contacted the newspaper advertiser, who was a 57 year old office executive seeking a kidney donor to save his life. the would-be recipient did not ask his family members to donate a kidney due to the health risks involved. he promised to pay rahim us$ 2,500 for the kidney, but not until after the transplant. the recipient produced counterfeit documents, including a passport and notary certificates stating that rahim was donating a kidney to his elder brother. rahim and the recipient traveled to india, where the transplant surgery was performed. they were both admitted to a hospital in southern india. rahim concealed his muslim religious identity, as his recipient was hindu. because muslims undergo circumcision but hindus do not, rahim lied to the doctor, stating that he needed to be circumcised due to a urinary tract infection. before the operation, rahim became fearful. he realized that he could die in the hospital. he continuously asked for the mercy of god. meanwhile, the recipient praised rahim for saving his life, and promised to support him correspondence address: monir moniruzzaman, department of anthropology, michigan state university, 655 auditorium dr., east lansing, mi, 48824, usa; email: monir@msu.edu issn: 1911-4788 spareparts.exchange 309 forever. rahim awoke with a rough incision, about 20 inches (50 cm) long, from his back to his belly. he experienced unbearably sharp pain and unsettling nausea. in a week, he was released from the hospital and returned to bangladesh with a damaged body. often, he experienced pain, fever, and headache. he could neither lift heavy loads, nor play cricket. after fainting twice, he believed that he would die soon. rahim received only us$ 300 for his kidney. the recipient claimed that he could not afford more due to the high cost of transplantation. rahim is now working 75 hours per week, earning only us$ 30. rahim has since married, but he hid the kidney sale from his wife, saying that his scar is from a past operation. eventually, rahim experienced social isolation and shame due to high stigma placed on selling his kidney. rahim’s recipient recently passed away. everyday rahim ponders how his body part has gone on to the afterlife, while he is alive. -on the other side of the globe, robert zurrer, a 53 year old entrepreneur from vancouver, canada, purchased a kidney from a daily laborer in lahore, pakistan. robert was 29 years old when he was first diagnosed with membranous nephropathy, an idiopathic kidney disease with no known cause. after a five year decline of his kidney function, robert was told he either needed a transplant or would have to start dialysis. his sister carol was discovered to be a match. as the donor, carol had an open nephrectomy in 1988 to remove her kidney, leaving her with a long scar. eighteen years later, the donated kidney began to fail. robert faced an 8year waiting list for a kidney from a deceased donor in british columbia, canada. robert refused dialysis. he searched the internet to find a kidney seller. in december 2007 he decided to travel to pakistan to purchase a kidney from 32-year-old mohammed yar. like robert, mohammed was a husband and father. he worked at a brick factory far from his family. he was also deeply in debt. robert met mohammed and was told that mohammed’s wife and children had been kidnapped and were being held until the debt was paid. robert paid a total of us$ 30,000 for his transplant at aadil hospital in lahore, including airfare for himself and his sister ann martin who is a retired nurse. us$ 2,000 of this went to the desperate organ seller. a johns hopkins-trained surgeon in pakistan successfully completed the two surgeries on december 9, 2007. robert spent 10 days in hospital in lahore and an additional 5 days in hospital in bangkok before returning home to canada for christmas.after the transplant surgery, robert suffered an infection and low blood pressure. he received medical attention in british columbia, canada. in 2015, eight years after his second kidney transplant, robert is healthy. he was the subject of a 2007 ctv television w-five segment about his transplantation experience, called “a new life.” studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 308-321, 2016 310
 monir moniruzzaman, camille turner, heather dewey-hagborg, rim ruxton trade in human organs the success of organ transplant, the globalization of healthcare, and the rising inequality between rich and poor have created an illegal but thriving market of human body parts. the human body has long been commodified in diverse forms (e.g., slavery, prostitution, the organ trade). however, the rapid growth of techno-medicine has created a high demand for spare parts, turning human cadavers and living bodies into a lucrative industry (kimbrell, 1993; sharp, 2000). currently, a human cadaver is worth more than us$ 230,000 on the open market, as about 150 of its parts can be reused (hedges & gaines, 2000). the living body is also fragmented into saleable vital organs (kidney, liver, and cornea), soft tissues (bone marrows, ligament, and skin), reproductive materials (sperm, ova, placenta, and fetal tissues), as well as other products such as blood, plasma, hair, and even the whole body (hogshire 1992; moniruzzaman, 2013; roach 2003). the emergence of human body commerce offered new hopes for rahim and robert, however the trade is highly questionable, both ethically and socially. from the inception of organ transplant, the demand for organs has outstripped the legal supply of donors. globally, more than 200,000 people are on the waiting list to receive a kidney. of that number, most people will likely die without receiving one (garwood, 2007). in the united states alone, 121,514 people are currently on the waiting list to receive an organ, however only 12,513 organs were procured between january and october, 2015 (unos, n.d.). as a result, the average waiting time for a kidney transplant is more than five years (gift of life donor program, n.d.). to bypass such long waiting times, many recipients purchase spare parts from the living poor, although the trade is outlawed in almost every country in the world. the world health organization (who) estimates that 10,000 organs are procured from the black market every year (campbell & davison, 2012). americans, canadians, europeans, japanese, australians, israelis, and middle easterners are the major organ buyers, who regularly travel abroad for organ shopping (organ watch, 2009). meanwhile, a number of developing countries, including india, pakistan, china, philippines, and egypt have been identified as “hot spots,” where poor people serve as bodily materials for wealthy transplant tourists (who, 2009). the most common way to obtain an organ from a living unrelated donor is through “medical tourism,” in which potential recipients travel abroad to buy live organs and undergo organ transplant in the host country (e.g., japanese recipients receiving transplants from chinese sellers in china). cases have also been reported of donors travelling to recipients’ home countries for the transplant surgery (e.g., american recipients receiving transplants from israeli sellers in the usa). in other cases, both recipients and donors travel to a third country for the transplant surgery (e.g. israeli recipients and eastern european sellers traveling to south africa for the surgery) (see ram, 2002; scheper-hughes, 2005; shimazono, 2007). studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 308-321, 2016 spareparts.exchange 311 south asia (india, pakistan, and bangladesh) is an epicenter of organ selling. india is one of the oldest and largest organ bazaars in the world, offering organs at low-cost and almost immediate availability. with the average monthly income for an indian worker at usd $11, and with a vast destitute underclass, 2,000 or more kidneys were changing bodies each year in india already two decades ago (chengappa, 1995; fox & swazey, 1992). although india outlawed organ trafficking in 1994, the law evidently fails to curb the illicit organ trade. the market still continues in major cities such as mumbai, jaipur, hyderabad, and chennai (bos, 2008). media reported in february 2008 that amit kumar, an indian doctor who masterminded an underground organ trafficking racket, allegedly harvested kidneys from approximately 500 unsuspecting indians, some of whom were coerced or abducted (brazao, 2008). pakistan is called the “new mecca” for organ trading. the world health organization rated this country as the world’s second-largest center for the organ trade (who, 2009). it is estimated that 2,000 kidney transplants are performed each year in pakistan; of these, two-thirds are for foreign patients, mostly from the middle east, india, and europe (naqvi, ali, mazhar, zafar, & rizvi, 2007). n early 80% of the residents of moninpura village in the central punjab have sold one of their kidneys (najam, 2008). after a long battle, pakistan passed an organ law in 2007 prohibiting organ transplants to foreign nationals, but the trade continues in various parts of the country (askari, 2009). in 2007, pakistani authorities broke up a gang of doctors, officials, and middlemen who were running the country’s organ business, by recruiting poor donors and removing their kidneys in exchange for $1,000, and then selling the organs on the black market for thousands of dollars (rehman & grisanti, 2007). in 2008 a pakistani auction website advertised “a kidney for sale” on its front page, despite organ laws prevailing in pakistan (najam, 2008). bangladesh serves as an emerging but thriving organ bazaar. the absence of a cadaveric organ donation program, the everyday publication of organ classifieds in major bengali newspapers, and the widespread networks of organ brokers have promoted the trade in human organs in bangladesh. the recipients are both domestic and diasporic residents (bangladeshi-born foreign nationals) who purchase organs in bangladesh and then obtain the surgery abroad (mostly in india, as well as in pakistan, sri lanka, singapore, thailand, and taiwan) or sometimes in bangladesh. the sellers are poor rickshaw pullers, petty farmers, and slum dwellers, who sell their body parts to try to escape poverty and debt. in 1999, the government passed the organ transplant act to outlaw this trade, yet the organ market is thriving in various parts of bangladesh. in 2011, the local police busted an organ trafficking racket that allegedly sold organs from 50 villagers from kalai, a sub-district of northern bangladesh. the average price of a single kidney is 100,000 taka (us$ 1,250) and a liver lobe is 300,000 taka (us$ 3,750) in studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 312
 monir moniruzzaman, camille turner, heather dewey-hagborg, rim ruxton bangladesh, a country where 78% of the people live on less than $2 a day (moniruzzaman, 2012, 2014, 2016). the trade in human organs is embedded in a larger system of exchange and extraction across differences of wealth, and encompasses the broad dynamics of both the developed and the developing worlds. as nancy scheper-hughes (2000) notes, the flow of organs follows the modern route of capital: from south to north, from third world to first world, from poor to rich, from black and brown to white, and from female to male. the historical relationship of conquest, colonization, and extraction has shaped the transformation of living third world bodies into raw materials in their own right. it has led to the development of a novel form of exploitation of the third world, where malnourished bodies of marginalized populations become sites for organ harvesting (moniruzzaman, 2012). spare parts: an art exhibit spare parts (www.spareparts.exchange) is an art installation created collaboratively by heather dewey-hagborg, jim ruxton, camille turner, and monir moniruzzaman.1 based on monir moniruzzaman’s ethnographic research on the illicit organ trade, spare parts explores the ethics of organ trafficking and the emergence of bodily inequality in times of transplant tinkering. in this installation, the viewer is confronted with life-sized video projections of rahim sheikh, a bangladeshi kidney seller, and robert zurrer, a canadian kidney transplant buyer and recipient, whose stories were presented earlier in the text. the video projections are installed so that the individuals sit in silence facing each other. the installation was presented in conjunction with the social justice research institute symposium, consuming intimacies: bodies, labour, care, and social justice, held on october 15-16, 2015, at brock university, st. catharines, canada. spare parts highlights the intimacy of spare parts, the economy of the global marketplace, the perils of techno-medicine, and what is means to be human in the 21st century. in the video installation, we are confronted with a temporal and spatial construction of a bidirectional gaze. an impossible encounter is fabricated between two men who have never and would never see each other in this way: the illicit seller of a kidney and the illicit buyer of a kidney. they are two symbols of a black market, the commodification of flesh and the instrumentalization of life itself. as their unflinching stares meet, the camera acts as a portal, giving a face and a body to what is so often discussed in the abstract, bringing these two men to face each other, and to 1photos: www.spareparts.exchange/?page_id=1544; video: www.spareparts.exchange/?page_id=1553 studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 http://www.spareparts.exchange http://www.spareparts.exchange/?page_id=1544 http://www.spareparts.exchange/?page_id=1553 http://www.spareparts.exchange http://www.spareparts.exchange/?page_id=1544 http://www.spareparts.exchange/?page_id=1553 spareparts.exchange 313 face each of us as we stand between them, metaphorically implicated in the interaction. spare parts was created by artists, academics, and activists to reflect on this contemporary, complex, and challenging act of harvesting “a pound of flesh” and transplanting it into the body of another. the installation reminds us that the buying and selling of body parts, either from those who are living or dead, is not just a market transaction: it captures the desperation, dis/connection, and inequality that exists in the trade. in the following section, spare parts collaborators describe their experiences and what inspired them to work on the project. camille turner, curator as an artist and curator, i work mainly with digital media and socially engaged artistic practices. curating, for me, is a vehicle for catalyzing the development of hybrid forms of expression at the intersection of art, science and technology. unveiling the legacy of colonization underlying contemporary life is at the core of my concerns. when i first met monir, his work fascinated me. he had succeeded in unveiling stories of people who, desperately poor, were lured by promises of money to sell their body parts. the subjects monir interviewed are often framed by the biotechnology industry as the supply end of a growing market in human organs. my desire to work with monir stemmed from my interest in bringing these stories into the realm of art, where as embodied experiences they could engage the senses and expand discussions beyond the page and beyond the academy. i have had two opportunities to work with monir to transform the stories he gathered into art projects. the first project was entitled rough cut. it was created in 2007 for whose body is it anyway, an exhibition i curated at interaccess gallery for subtle technologies, a festival that straddles the boundaries between science and art. for this exhibition monir’s work was paired with genital embryogenesis and fatemap, two installations by jack butler. monir and i began our work together with the idea that art can emerge from conversations. my strategy was to bring together theorists, practitioners and researchers to form a collaborative team to create the work. this interdisciplinary and experimental approach demands openness, flexibility, respect and a willingness to share. to create a project to embody monir’s work i brought designers and artists into conversation with monir. through a series of meetings, we conceptualized an idea that took shape as a video installation, entitled rough cut.2 2 documentation of rough cut can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgogalsfzlq studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgogalsfzlq http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgogalsfzlq 314
 monir moniruzzaman, camille turner, heather dewey-hagborg, rim ruxton as visitors entered the gallery they encountered a translucent white tent accompanied by a soundscape of the busy streets of dhaka, bangladesh. a painting of a kidney on fabric adorned the doorway of the tent. inside, large comfortable, jewel-toned cushions were strewn on the floor beckoning visitors to sit. slides of slowly dissolving images of men and women, their clothing raised to reveal long scars, were projected on a screen inside the tent. a story narrated by various voices accompanied the slides. told in the first person, the narrative implicated the viewer as it described the life of a bangladeshi man who was compelled to sell a kidney on the market in an attempt to escape poverty. after the operation, his health deteriorated and he was unable to work. as the trade is illegal, he had no way of collecting the money he was promised. this narrative was an amalgam of stories monir gathered from people he interviewed. the photographs were of their actual bodies. the second time i worked with monir was in 2015 when i was invited by lindsey mckay and robyn lee from brock university to curate an exhibition for the consuming intimacies symposium. monir and i discussed how we could tease out new dimensions of his research in this iteration of the project. this time we wanted to work with a smaller team. we decided to invite one of my long time collaborators, founder of the subtle technologies festival jim ruxton, to join us. jim’s expertise as an electrical engineer and electronic media artist was instrumental in working through both technical and creative issues. the three of us searched for an artist whose work focused on similar issues, and we found heather dewey-hagborg. based in chicago, heather engages with issues such as dna tracking and genetic surveillance. her work probes the entangled issues of race and power by posing questions about how our genetic information can be harvested and used against us. heather agreed to work with us. as the four of us live in different cities in canada and the usa we held our brainstorming meetings via skype. heather posed thought-provoking questions that moved us towards defining our agenda and goals for the project. bringing the stories of the sellers to the audience was of utmost importance to us. the biotech industry presents the idea that there is a shortage of organs and that buyers are suffering from this shortage. the lives of buyers can be saved if they can acquire organs. sellers, in this unequal framing, are a means to alleviate the suffering of buyers. in a market driven economy the sellers’ lives are not valued, but their organs are. we wanted to respond to the way the issue of organ shortage is framed by bringing the presence and stories of the sellers into the same conversation as the presence and stories of the buyers. we mulled over various approaches such as using humour and satire. we thought about literally creating a human organ marketplace or launching a mock biotech company catalogue of human body parts. one of our most powerful ideas, however, was to contact actual sellers and skype them into the gallery as life sized projections to give them the opportunity to tell their own stories and to interact with the audience. this would require a complex studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 spareparts.exchange 315 plan for translators and internet service, which would be difficult to secure in bangladesh. the idea also brought up questions about (re)commodifying the sellers. realizing that the essence of what we wanted to do was to address the unspoken inequities at the heart of the term shortage of organs, we decided to bring a seller and buyer together on equal ground to face each other as bookends in the same story. we do this by presenting life sized video projections of an actual buyer and seller along with their written stories to the audience. framed in a similar way, the two men are presented on equal terms. each subject looks intently at the other. fragile humanity. breathing. each trapped by their circumstances. there is a table between the projections. a one page summary of the story of rahim, the seller, is placed on one end of the table and a summary of the buyer robert’s story is placed on the other side of the table. viewers can sit at the table looking into the faces of buyer and seller, contemplating their stories. heather dewey-hagborg, artist for the past several years my artistic work has focused on critical biological art: artistic inquiry that utilizes the techniques of biotechnology and also serves as a medium of reflection on the societal implications of this type of research. it is art that involves a level of deep engagement with the ideas or materials of biotechnology, and further, which is politically, socially, ethically, or analytically engaged with the larger impact of the technologies it employs. the first project i worked on following this model was stranger visions. an artwork in which i collected forensic artifacts strangers left in public, things like hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum and fingernails. i extracted dna from these items and then analyzed it to create full color life-sized portrait sculptures of what these individuals might look like. the project was meant to call attention to the vulnerability of our messy human bodies as we constantly shed genetic information that can be interpreted to “reveal” incredibly personal information about our traits, ancestry, disease risks, inclinations, and family ties. further, the piece was meant to call attention to an emerging practice of forensic dna profiling (fdp), the generation of portraits, mugshots, from forensic samples, a technology that is now proliferating in police stations around the us and beyond, and which draws upon problematic assumptions about race, gender, and the genetic determination of traits. it relies on what amount to stereotypes to generate its output. my most recent dna portrait is a commission of chelsea manning who is incarcerated in the military prison at fort leavenworth, and cannot be seen or photographed. this work considers specifically the forensic conflation of gender and biological sex, presenting a diptych of two portraits to represent studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 316
 monir moniruzzaman, camille turner, heather dewey-hagborg, rim ruxton chelsea, one with an algorithmically neutral gender, and the other assigned female. the exhibition of both these possible faces side by side draws attention (i hope) to the forensic issue of utilizing biological sex to assign gender, as well as to the larger issue of what it means to rely on stereotyped ideas of what a female face is supposed to look like. not only are the portraits produced by fdp potentially inaccurate and invasive, but the use of this technology in policing also reifies the seeming infallibility of dna a new form of racial profiling. allowing the generation of generic racialized portraits from dna to represent specific suspects amounts to an affirmation of the widely-rejected idea that race is biological rather than cultural (see dewey-hagborg, n.d.). in my follow up project, invisible, i created a tactical dna counter surveillance kit, a suite of two sprays, “erase” and “replace,” which can be used to remove or cover up traces of dna. invisible is a real working product available for sale at the new museum in new york city. it is also a set of open source protocols anyone can use to create their own dna invisibility sprays. in addition to further addressing the surveillance concerns raised by stranger visions it points to another vulnerability as well, that of the dna “gold standard.” if it is relatively simple and inexpensive to remove, hack, or forge dna traces, does it really deserve the kind of unmitigated authority we offer it culturally, in investigations, courts of law, and popular culture? finally, all of this work has informed my effort to create a community i call biononymous.me, a gathering place for artists, scholars, activists and scientists interested in sharing research and discussion around the topic of biological surveillance – the means by which biological science is used to track, monitor, analyze, and turn bodies into data (see http://biononymous.me/). the commodification of the body is structurally tied into these issues through the harvesting and instrumentalization of cells and fluids for research, and further through the creation of massive biobanks and databanks that archive and reproduce the body as a product for sale, a resource to be exploited, and a point of vulnerability, as anyone’s cells or dna can be de anonymized, allowing their genetic information to be made available for interpretation. when camille contacted me to collaborate on what would become spare parts i was just beginning to unpack these ideas about commodification to understand how they connect to the issues of visibility, knowability, and surveillance i confronted in my previous works. interested in digging into this research further, i immediately jumped at the opportunity to work with this group and to learn from them about the details of the organ trade. i wondered how it is similar and different from the harvesting of cells and dna? i embarked upon this collaboration with very little previous knowledge, and a keen interest in finding out more. although i still consider myself far from an expert on the subject, camille quickly got me up to speed with a hefty reading list, including articles by studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 http://biononymous.me/ http://biononymous.me/ spareparts.exchange 317 monir. from there we began our virtual meetings, hashing out what we wanted to say, who the audience should be, and how to communicate most effectively. there was a feeling of wanting to confront the viewer, to make them feel implicated, and beyond this to make them feel something different from what an essay or documentary would accomplish. after considering several ideas, some of which were quite powerful but infeasible, we arrived at the idea of larger-than-life video portraits, inspired by andy warhol’s screen tests, which i had the pleasure of experiencing in person over this past summer. in the screen test series, warhol invited his friends, often celebrities, to sit in front of the film camera silently for an uncomfortably long period of time. the resulting films are incredibly intimate, awkward, vivid portraits of their subjects. we adopted this form and pushed it one step further, to have not only two intimate moving portraits in this style, but to have the subjects, a buyer and a seller, two individuals who would never sit face to face, oriented towards each other, on an equal level. the resulting installation derives its strength from placing the viewer in the middle of an impossible power dynamic. jim ruxton, technical director i was introduced to monir’s work in 2007 when, as director of programs for subtle technologies, i worked with camille to introduce his work on the organ trade to an audience of artists, scientists and the general public. i was eager to work again with monir and the other collaborators on this project in helping to stage an installation that further explores his research. my background as an electrical engineer and media artist leads me to collaborate on many interesting projects in dance, theatre, film and installation. in this particular installation i was tasked with working out the technical details of implementing the installation. we very much wanted the viewer to experience life sized images of the buyer and seller and wanted to use rear projection so that viewers of the installation were affronted as little as possible by the projection system. in order to get the size of images we desired we used two short throw projectors behind two portable rear projection screens. this setup allows us to easily reconfigure the installation for other locations in the future. as media players we used the recently released raspberry pi 2 model b. these were very low cost and allowed us to reliably loop hd videos of the buyer and seller on the two screens for the duration of the exhibition. monir moniruzzaman, researcher as a medical anthropologist, my work centers on human organ trafficking, focusing on the bioviolence against malnourished bodies of marginalized studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 318
 monir moniruzzaman, camille turner, heather dewey-hagborg, rim ruxton populations. based on challenging ethnographic fieldwork spanning more than a decade, my research reveals how organ buyers (both brokers and many recipients) deceived the bangladeshi poor into selling their body parts. in the end, these sellers were only partially paid, and their suffering was extreme. in the post-vending period, sellers’ health, economic, and social condition significantly deteriorated, yet none of them received the promised post operative care – not even one appointment. i concluded that organ trade constitutes profound bioviolence against the poor, at the cost of severe suffering to them. when camille first approached me to create an art project out of my research, i was absolutely delighted. i deeply value art as a creative tool to document violence and promote social justice. as i have been witnessing embodied violence rooted in grinding poverty, i engaged in the art installation, rough cut, to disseminate how poor bangladeshis are selling their organs to wealthy patients, not out of choice but as necessity. drawing on my first-hand accounts, including interviews and documents along with photos of sellers’ scarred bodies as well as advertisements for organs from daily newspapers, rough cut was created by a dozen artists to recount the stories of 33 kidney sellers, and many transplant recipients, brokers, and doctors who advance this trade. sound, images, video, text, narration, artifacts, and symbols were also used to highlight this extremely hidden but basic human rights violation that blurs the boundaries between right and wrong (grande, 2007). spare parts is our second collaborative art installation that is also based on my longstanding research and resonates with paradoxical ethical questions about organ shopping. in this piece, we addressed how the economic inequality and power disparities between the global north and south have inflicted violence, exploitation, and suffering on the poor. at the same time, the market capitalizes on the desire, desperation, and vulnerability of the wealthy few, who can prolong their lives at the crossroads of global capitalism, technological advancement, and medical tourism. one may ponder in silence: how do the recipients’ act of organ buying bypass the tenor of human rights issues? in spare parts, we highlight how such ethical questions are answered differently depending on which side of the development fence one stands. since technology increasingly tries to convince us that the body is a machine and its parts can be replaced to enhance human capacity, the boundaries between individual rights and public rights are criss-crossed, and bodily interests and commodity fetishism move into the realm of the marketplace (grande, 2007). reflections the trade in spare parts raises profound ethical, social, philosophical, and legal questions about the exploitation and dehumanization of the poor, who studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 spareparts.exchange 319 sell their organs out of desperation, but in the end experience extreme suffering. such trade does not speak to the lives of the economic underclass, but rather seriously discriminates against them. since the poor are already subject to everyday violence, we need to ensure justice for them rather than harvesting organs from their malnourished bodies. at the very least, they deserve to keep their body parts intact; they are essential for their physical survival. in addition, the trade in solid organs causes severe damage to self, infringement of bodily integrity, and violation of human dignity. it has serious implications for the definition of what is means to be human, and more generally for life as it should be lived (fox & swazey, 1992). it threatens the integrity of species, of humanity itself, and of individual bodies (sharp, 2006). commodifying organs raises an ultimate question: how far can we go? can we cut off a leg or a hand from the poor, assuming that one of these body parts is sufficient for them? spare parts demonstrates the power of art “to activate imagination and a broader understanding of injustice, its consequences, and the range of alternative possibilities” (bell & desai, 2011, p. x). as hardt and negri (2009, p. x) point out, “not only can art expose the norms and hierarchies of the existing social order, but it can give us the conceptual means to invent another, making what had once seemed utterly impossible entirely realistic.” art is therefore a potent instrument to document and disseminate the inequality and injustice that are exerted in everyday life. spare parts unearths rahim and robert’s concealed stories, and the power structure, liminality, desire, and desperation that stitch them together in silence. however, their silence raises questions of their economic transaction and confronts their ethical positions on the calculus of life and death. the installation (de)constructs the normalized body trade and embraces invisible resistance against the dominant discourse. spare parts thus advances social justice by exposing how power plays and penetrates in bodies, turning the poor into mere bags of spare parts. spare parts connects artists, academics, and activists who present an alternative platform where audiences can construct meaning and confront the ethical questions of organ shopping. it illustrates how academic research can be translated into an art project. both fields speak against the violence, exploitation, and suffering of the poor. spare parts is also distinctive for its methodological innovation, critical reflection, and friendly collaboration. it is a first step, an initial gesture and part of what we hope will be an ongoing and far ranging collaboration between us all. it is our wish that this piece will add to the conversation, and will reach out to a variety of communities across the globe. there is a wise african saying: “if you want to go fast, go alone. if you want to go far, go together.” studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 320
 monir moniruzzaman, camille turner, heather dewey-hagborg, rim ruxton acknowledgements we are indebted to michael alstad, brahm rosensweig, katrin bowen, and molla sagar for participating in the project. our sincere thanks go to lindsey mckay, robyn lee, andrea doucet, alana cattapan and david butz for their time, encouragement, and interest in our work. stuart reid was enthusiastic and supportive from planning to installing the work. one could not have hoped for a better crew of research assistants: crystal adams coons, mark omiecinski, and alaina interisano were excellent in caring for the project. spare parts was sponsored by the social justice research institute and brock studio for narrative, visual, and digital methods at brock university, st. catharines, canada. references askari, s. j. (2009, april 25). health experts hail fsc verdict on organ sale. the nation. retrieved from http://nation.com.pk/karachi/25-apr-2009/health-experts-hail-fsc-verdict on-organ-sale. bell, l. a., & desai, d. (eds.). (2011). imagining otherwise: connecting the arts and social justice to envision and act for change. equity & excellence in education, 44(3), 287-295. bos, m. a. (2008). an update on global organ trafficking. elpat forum, tts sydney, 1-22. brazao, d. (2008, february 3). gta home to “dr. horror.” the toronto star. retrieved from www.thestar.com/news/2008/02/03/gta_home_to_dr_horror.html campbell, d., & davison, n. (2012, may 27). illegal kidney trade booms as new organ is “sold every hour.” the guardian. retrieved from www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/27/kidney-trade-illegal-operations-who chengappa, r. (1995, july 31). the great and bloody organs bazaar. down to earth. retrieved from http://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/the-great-and-bloody-organs-bazaar-27703 . dewey-hagborg, h. (n.d.) sci-fi crime drama with a strong black lead. the new inquiry. retrieved from http://thenewinquiry.com/sci-fi-crime-drama-with-a-strong-black-lead/ fox, r. c., & swazey, j. p. (1992). spare parts: organ replacement in human society. london: oxford university press. garwood, p. (2007). dilemma over live-donor transplantation. bulletin of the world health organization, 85(1), 5-6. gift of life donor program. (n.d.). understanding the waiting list. retrieved from www.donors1.org grande, j. k. (2007). the duality of human dignity: two short essays on monir moniruzzaman and jack butler. subtle technologies festival. interaccess, toronto. retrieved from http://interaccess.org/exhibition/whose-body-it-anyway hardt, m., & negri, a. (2009). of love possessed. artforum international, 48(2), 180-264. hedges, s. j., & gaines, w. (2000, may 21). donors bodies milled into growing profits. chicago tribune, may 21, a1, a16-17. retrieved from http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-05 21/news/0006170024_1_usable-tissue-body-parts-national-organ-transplant-act hogshire, j. (1992). sell yourself to science: the complete guide to selling your organs, body fluids, bodily function and being a human guinea pig. port townsend, wa: loompanics unlimited. kimbrell, a. (1993). the human body shop: the engineering and marketing of life. san francisco, ca: harper collins. moniruzzaman, m. (2012). living cadavers in bangladesh: bioviolence in the human organ bazaar. medical anthropology quarterly, 26(1), 69-91. studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 spareparts.exchange 321 moniruzzaman, m. (2013). parts and labor: the commodification of human body. in a. quayson & g. daswani (eds.), a companion to diaspora and transnationalism (pp. 455-472). malden: wiley-blackwell. moniruzzaman, m. (2014). domestic organ trafficking: between biosecurity and bioviolence. in n. chen & l. sharp (eds.), bioinsecurity and vulnerability (pp. 195-215). santa fe, nm: school of advanced research press. moniruzzaman, m. (2016). spare parts for sale: violence, exploitation, suffering. in p. brown & s. closser (eds.), understanding and applying medical anthropology (pp. 277-285). san francisco, ca: left coast press. najam, a. (2008, september 4). selling your kidney in pakistan. all things pakistan. retrieved from pakistaniat.com/2008/09/04/kidney-sale-pakistan-siut/ naqvi, s. a. a., ali, b., mazhar, f., zafar, m. n., & rizvi, s. a. h. (2007). a socio-economic survey of kidney vendors in pakistan. transplant international, 20, 934-39. organs watch (2009). organ watch. berkeley, ca: university of california. retrieved from http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/biotech/organswatch/ ram, v. (2002). international traffic in human organs. frontline, 19(7), n.p. retrieved from www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1907/19070730.htm. rehman, f., & grisanti, c. (2007, september 5). pakistan’s kidney bazaar. nbc news. http://worldblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2007/09/05/4376238-pakistans-kidney-bazaar roach, m. (2003). stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers. new york: norton. scheper-hughes, n. (2000). the global traffic in human organs. current anthropology, 41(2), 191-224. scheper-hughes, n. (2005). organs without borders. foreign policy, 146, 26-27. sharp, l. (2000). the commodification of the body and its parts. annual review of anthropology, 29, 287-328. sharp, l. (2006). strange harvest: organ replacements, denatured bodies, and the transformed self. berkeley, ca: university of california press. shimazono, y. (2007). the state of the international organ trade: a provisional picture based on integration of available information. bulletin of the world health organization, 85(12), 955-962. unos (united network for organ sharing). (n.d.). waiting list for organs in the u.s. retrieved from www.unos.org who (world health organization). (2009). medical tourism and the illicit trafficking of human organs (pp. 1-8) beirut: una-usa’s global classrooms. w-five. (2007). a new life. television news documentary. toronto: ctv. studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 309-321, 2016 smith-gilman final before ts december 5 18 correspondence address: sheryl smith-gilman, department of integrated studies in education, mcgill university, montreal, qc, h3a 1y2; email: sheryl.smithgilman@mcgill.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 dispatch developing a pedagogy of listening: experiences in an indigenous preschool sheryl smith-gilman mcgill university, canada preface: in the footsteps of jackie kirk i was honoured to receive the jackie kirk fieldwork fellowship award in 2010 in the course of my doctoral research. kirk’s scholarship has impacted and motivated me in my research and teaching. i am inspired by her activism and commitment to the improvement of education for communities in conflict (kirk, 2007). her creative practices in participatory visual research methodologies (kirk & winthrop, 2008) encouraged me to take on challenges when facing the unknown. i have attended mindfully to her charge, to engage in the process of reflexivity (kirk, 2004) in my research and in my teaching. jackie exuded commitment to quality and meaningful education, probing into conundrums of the marginalized (kirk & winthrop, 2007) and bestowing messages that spoke to the world. i have prepared this dispatch to illustrate how kirk’s legacy has resounded and will continue to resonate into the future. my story, therefore, shadows the footsteps of an honourable and notable scholar, taken much too soon. introduction in the field of early childhood education, there has been consistent scholarly interest in the matter of listening to young children (dahlberg & moss, 2005; lansdown, 2005; rinaldi, 2006). dewey (1916) suggested that listening embraces the art of communication, generating people’s participation with goals of making meaning and breaking down social barriers. the notion of a pedagogy of listening first emerged from the world-renowned reggio emilia approach to early childhood education (edwards, gandini, & forman, 1993). sheryl smith-gilman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 346 it focuses on careful listening to children and their theories to provide insight into how young children think and how they make connections that are meaningful to them. in this arena, the pedagogy of listening relates to teaching and learning in that it involves the child’s and adult’s pursuit of meaning and understanding through project-based approaches combined with careful listening to one another (rinaldi, 2001). reggio emilia’s belief in a pedagogy of listening gives rise to a learning methodology; it is an evolving process whereby teachers further develop theories about children and their ideas through collegial dialogue, sharing and listening. from the years 2010-2014, i led a research project in partnership with a first nations early childhood center (the step by step child and family center) in kahnawake, mohawk territory. the study detailed an indigenous community’s quest to find innovative ways of reflecting culture in their programs by placing culture at the forefront of teaching and learning. in our work, we were guided by the following key questions: what components might support a paradigm shift to promote quality early education within a culturally relevant context? how could the arts expand children’s cultural experiences, and how might first nations culture be woven seamlessly into daily practice? in the course of our study, a devotion to listening emerged organically. upon reflection, it has become clear that the pedagogy of listening happened because the core value of genuine partnership was continually central to all discussions. we were committed to listening to each other and learning from one another. while the research aimed to shed light on the way culture and learning might be conceptualized in early education, it was listening that arose as significant. the plethora of documentation i collected over the phases of research illustrated and underscored how interactions amongst participants prompted the pedagogy of listening. remarkably, a pedagogy of listening happened on many levels: within culture (e.g., educators listening to each other, teachers and children listening to each other, children listening to children), between cultures (e.g., myself and the community at step by step), and intrapersonal considerations (e.g., listening to myself). a methodology called “listening” research corroborates that culture can profoundly influence children’s approach to learning (ball, 2005; battiste, 2000; brooker, 2002; espinoza, 2010; kirk, 2007; li, 2001; méjía-arauz, rogoff, & paradise, 2005; rogoff, 2003). some young children come to school accustomed to learning practices from their communities that have guided them since birth. moreover, preston, cotrell, pelletier and pearce (2012) have claimed that the structures of early childhood programs in indigenous communities need to match the values of the community. developing a pedagogy of listening studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 347 for these reasons, i realized that my research would have to attend to a methodology of listening: a way or method of hearing, reflecting on, and attending to multiple perspectives in the research process. these perceptions included indigenous perspectives, my own, and those of the educators and the children. i attended to indigenous awareness of meaningful relationships when positioning myself as a researcher involved in the mohawk cultural context. building relationships impacted the epistemological approaches brought forward throughout my course of study. my practices toward such considerations were comprised of active listening. i began with selfreflection, contemplating my own strengths and weaknesses when engaged in particular situations that involved listening attention (kirk, 2004). such thinking had to be reiterated during pivotal moments of the research when directions were altered. my listening also included being thoughtful about what was being shared, and i worked hard at deferring judgement and reflecting in my journal. throughout the research, my skills developed in gaining information and perspectives that are critical to attending to trustworthiness and building relationships with the community. importantly, as an “outsider” within a research situation in an indigenous context, the pedagogy of listening took on a new and important meaning. smith (1999) emphasizes that outside researchers need to re-position methodologies in order to know, comprehend, and research from indigenous perspectives and for indigenous purposes. culturally sensitive approaches needed to go beyond western research practices; relationships, conversation and listening have to take on significant roles. smith (1999) underscores how effective communication gathers the skills of talking and listening in order for a researcher to receive privileged knowledge and to develop significant relationships. i took smith’s message to heart throughout my journey, and along the way i too developed the indigenous value of listening. significantly, my reflections respected kirk’s (2007) in-depth contemplation on appropriate education when dealing with places in “fragile states.” kirk revealed how, in renewal situations, education often does not meet the needs of the community and is instead designed and carried out without significant consideration of the people involved. while her gaze planned for organizations and agencies to act, i extracted from her understanding to help position myself and situate my work within the community of kahnawake. i had to be mindful in my contemplation of the people of kahnawake and of their efforts to maintain cultural identity. kirk (2007, p. 180) defined fragility as occurring in “failing, failed and recovering states.” her definition helped me frame my experiences in a similar way; i likened my research partners, a progressive mohawk community, to a recovering state. they were trying to release themselves from ineffective practices that had been historically imposed on them through settler culture and praxis. this community focused on advocating for learning that would sustain their own ways of knowing and cultural values (canadian sheryl smith-gilman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 348 council on learning, 2007). therefore, nothing in our approach deviated from a focus on cultural relevance, adhering to kirk’s (2007) cautionary stance that “renewed education” does not always provide what is best for the community. i had to work hard at my research within an indigenous paradigm that embodied the perspectives and knowledge held in this particular first nations community. for three and a half years i acted as “participant observer” (giltrow, 1995, p. 46), interacting with 10 teachers, two administrators, and 10 classrooms of children who are first nations (aged 18 months to five years old; approximately 160 children each year) to create a collaborative research community. i established my role as a qualitative researcher through a meaningful relationship of collaboration and trust with the community at step by step child and family center. in the first stage of research, the focus was on implementing a phased approach to developing teachers’ skills in undertaking meaningful projects, as seen in the reggio emilia approach. documentation practice and thoughtful reflections were objectives so that teachers could ponder what they were learning about their young students and how they engaged in a culturally grounded curriculum. this phase served as a starting point to understand where intersections of reggio and mohawk principles happened. it was a phase dedicated to learning: a venture that would focus on teachers becoming familiar with a project-based approach to teaching and learning using cultural topics. the arts were used as a vehicle, or as children’s language, to interpret and build understandings. additionally, it was an educational phase for me as i developed a better comprehension of mohawk culture and tradition. new practices of careful observation, transcribing conversations, recording and selecting photos, along with sharing sessions of each other’s documentation, began the educators’ listening. in the second phase of study, my role in the research context changed. i transformed from teacher to mentor and model, actively guiding educators and children in their experiences. during this phase, attention went deeper to focus on an arts-based curriculum grounded in mohawk culture. over the summer months, step by step initiated the construction of four ateliers, providing distinct places and spaces for small groups of children to engage in their experiences. the questions during that phase looked at what role the atelier played in developing mohawk culture. would the offering of art as a mode in which to express ideas and learning expand the children’s cultural experiences? this phase of research emerged as significant because reggio emilia philosophies were being better practiced using the methods of projectbased learning through the arts. then, a disturbance in the research occurred that set me back as a researcher, yet upon reflection supported the rising significance of a pedagogy of listening. to be exact, on march 16, 2012, administrators nancy and gail invited me to a meeting over lunch. during that meeting, my two colleagues directed the conversation. they expressed that they, and their teams of teachers, had learned a great deal from the reggio emilia approach i had “brought” to developing a pedagogy of listening studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 349 them. however, they wanted to look at the way learning could be expressed as mohawk culture. with gratitude to how reggio thinking awakened the process that resonated with mohawk values, the administrators felt the objectives needed to be re-focused. in particular, they wanted to put an end to associating teaching and learning as a reggio emilia approach, and to utilizing the phrase “from reggio-thinking.” as stated by gail, “it has to be our thinking; that was the goal from the beginning.” as the conversation continued, i sensed the importance of removing the control from the reggio emilia approach, of my theoretical approach, and realized i was being invited to revisit the objectives of the research. i left the meeting that day feeling odd and concerned that my reggio foundations had come across too powerfully. the excitement i was feeling about the reggio work being carried out in the ateliers may have transcended the intentions of strengthening and localizing cultural meaning and… i had to listen. my journal that day expressed it all: my drive home that day was just as uncomfortable as my meeting. the mercier bridge, again under repair, was down to one lane and a narrow one at that! i had to concentrate well to stay within the boundaries. my car and i shared an analogous experience of attending to the journey, a route that somehow was being detoured and there were no choices. this is a road that had to be taken. what was clear was the fact that being culturally sensitive was a raw and intense experience, and i had to always try to be mindful of that to honour the participants and the road ahead. feeling out of sorts at that time, i eventually began to acknowledge that this juncture was significant as it added unique pieces to the map of my study. that day, i conquered the narrowing cones alongside the railings of the bridge, keeping me in line as i crossed over to the other side. would i be able to overcome the diversions when i had to return the next day? (journal reflection, march 16, 2012) step by step ended the school year by showcasing children’s work at an inhouse museum. teachers titled the exhibition: “tsi niionkwarihó:ten; our culture/our ways: inspired by our kanien’kehá:ka culture and teachings.” the title showed an intentional direction of our study from then on. i came to accept that the adaptation of the reggio emilia approach had transformed into an appreciation of reggio principles, and that this synergy had rekindled mohawk values in this community. from that moment on listening would help the community search further for their culture, their ways. released from prioritising reggio emilia as the guiding philosophy, we returned to the ateliers inspired by an arts-integrated approach during phase three of study. however, this time it was different. while teaching and learning had advanced, we also cycled back to keep cultural objectives central. listening allowed me to follow this new direction; mohawk culture would lead the way. sheryl smith-gilman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 350 understanding a pedagogy of listening. listening was central to my research design and methodology and unexpectedly emerged as a significant theme in my own learning journey; a pedagogy of listening arose from this research journey and my data. i emphasize that the theme of a pedagogy of listening was an authentic value that emerged, and not a predictable one. my focus on understanding a pedagogy of listening has been driven by the unfolding of the research, the relationships built with my associates in kahnawake, and my attempts to unearth relevant themes from the data, alongside those themes that illuminated the questions being investigated. mays and pope (2000) maintain that depth and breadth of qualitative research lie in examining and identifying essential themes that may offer additional space for augmenting theories. i place understanding a pedagogy of listening in such a category. from this longitudinal study, significant subthemes emerged: how the teachers listened to the children; how teachers listened to each other; and how i learned to listen to myself and others, or reciprocal listening. teachers’ listening to children teachers’ thoughtful listening to children emerged, well-illustrated by the educators’ interactions and documentation of the children’s experiences and ideas (see figure 1). the environmental and psychological changes that came with the establishment of new kinds of learning spaces foreshadowed the careful listening that followed. phases of the study brought about the transformation of the environment within the classrooms and with the additions of the ateliers. the inventory of materials and thoughtfulness to creating a space that “spoke” mohawk culture were elements that set the stage for meaningful interactive experiences. as educators became more accustomed to working with small groups and focused intently on arts experiences, their skills developed in careful and tender listening, as is reflected in the following: she told me she needed time to reflect on the conversation. monique would only take smaller groups into the atelier now. it was challenging for her to listen to more than 3 or 4 children at a time when in an activity. (field notes, march 10, 2012) the administrators also seemed to appreciate the careful listening that occurred between teachers and children, as gail described: also, it’s about reflecting, the documentation; a whole other meaning. it’s made teachers aware. they said it, especially during our meetings. it made them listen. developing a pedagogy of listening studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 351 they actually saw the children differently. they learned from them. they’re all better listeners. (interview, gail (administrator), june 23, 2012) figure 1. teachers’ documentation highlighted the children’s active engagement with the natural world (photo by carina deer). the concept of teachers’ careful listening was further emphasized by the vigilant documentation that the educators produced, gathered, studied and discussed throughout the phases of research. photo sharing sessions underscored how teachers collaborated and listened carefully to their students when transcribing their thoughts. teachers described photos that told the stories of children’s active learning because of the arts experiences. nancy (administrator) remarked that teachers “talked less and listened more,” thereby appreciating that listening allowed for an improved understanding of how children were making meaning. significantly, teachers took on the responsibility of listening intently to the voices of children. their careful attention helped to build a culturally responsive program for their young students. sheryl smith-gilman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 352 teachers listening to each other the evolution of the ateliers coincided with teachers’ growing abilities to listen to each other. from this pedagogy of listening, a true learning community emerged. the educators shared knowledge and were open to feedback (see figure 2). i was able to note recurring indications of professional teamwork that arose from such careful listening: there is more collaboration as we as a team ventured into this journey together – all the staff. we shared ideas and kept notes to remember. videos were taken for sharing and teacher reflection. (field notes, teacher meeting, june 2, 2012) i see that we can sit together in an academic fashion and have a discussion that deepens knowledge. it helps to move us forward by expanding our minds and our thinking. (interview, melissa (teacher), june 22, 2012) pidgeon, munoz, kirkness and archibald (2013, p. 5) call for first nations communities to re-establish ownership of their education to “…ensure the protection of the next seven generations’ rights to good quality education that truly honours indigenous ways of knowing, being, languages and values and culture.” the step by step teachers developed their understandings as a result of careful listening and working alongside their students and colleagues. figure 2. educators discussing photo documentation (photo by sheryl smithgilman). developing a pedagogy of listening studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 353 reciprocal listening cultural long-term projects showed how the child and teacher interacted in a pedagogy of reciprocal listening. this sub-theme emerged due to the strength revealed in mutual and communal listening amongst all participants (e.g., children, teachers, administrators, community, and researcher). i listened carefully to comments, and in reflection, those remarks supported the importance of a pedagogy of listening. as i place more and more emphasis on the appearance of reciprocal listening, i have become intimately aware of how i too am implicated. it was my intention from the beginning of collaboration that this research would belong to the mohawk community. my ongoing review of field notes and journal entries helped to show the message of mohawk ownership and culture, a message that required mindful listening. i had a responsibility to listen and act on what was being communicated. listening informed me to step aside, move away from my role as “expert” and make way for culture to find its place. my understanding of a pedagogy of listening revealed the value in listening. it comprises taking hold of one’s personal and professional beliefs, disclosing them, and then being able to take the time to understand that there may be differences in the interpretation of what is valuable and what counts as knowledge, and therefore being responsible for taking action and moving in different directions. my relationship with the community was grounded in respect, understanding, and sharing mutual goals for the education of their young children. i felt a deep and ethical responsibility to move forward in the collaboration, but to do so within the thinking parameters of my partners – appreciating the provocation of the reggio emilia approach, but leaving aside some of my own ways of thinking about curriculum (kirk, 2004). the primary direction had to come from the ways of mohawk thinking. listening was difficult but proved to be an indispensable exercise. i recall patricia hill collins’ message to the researcher who takes on the role of “the outsider within” – “indigenous research is a humble and humbling activity” (hill collins, 1991, as cited in smith, 1999, p. 5). battiste (2010, p. 17) explains that the research process is an “untangling of knowledge knots.” for me, this meant untangling myself from preconceived ideas in order to think about what was important to this community. the curriculum had to be theirs because it is critical for first nations communities to affirm ownership of their vision of education (oskineegish & berger, 2013). i struggled with that message on march 16th as i listened to the administrators reclaiming the research and distinguishing reggio and indigenous approaches to education. eventually, i also had to surrender my role as mentor and coach to the educators and administrators as they had become the researchers and were ready to move forward along their own paths. sheryl smith-gilman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 354 i learned to step aside as mohawk culture took the lead and to take the opportunity to follow and learn to listen. my long process of gathering data and months of analysis has shown my growing understanding of a pedagogy of listening. the participants and i have come together as co-producers of knowledge (davidson-hunt & o’flaherty, 2007) to acquire a new and deeper understanding of each other and the research outcomes. i have learned that listening, if open, shared and reciprocal, can help facilitate and construct the integration of cultural identity and curriculum. a pedagogy of listening gave rise to purposeful dialogue and shared knowledge, as well as novel ideas and collaborative considerations whereby new thinking about cultural identity in the early years of schooling was approached. it was with this contemplation that my study unfolded and – surprisingly to me – illuminated a pedagogy of listening. references ball, j. (2005). early childhood care and development programs as hook and hub for intersectoral service delivery in first nations communities. journal of aboriginal health, 1(2), 36-50. battiste, m. (2000). reclaiming indigenous voice and vision. vancouver, bc: ubc press. battiste, m. (2010). nourishing the learning spirit: living our way to new thinking. education canada, 50(1), 14-18. brooker, l. (2002). starting school: young children learning cultures (pp. 1-40). buckingham, uk: open university press. canadian council on learning. (2007). the state of aboriginal learning in canada: a holistic approach to measuring success. ottawa: canadian council on learning. retrieved from www.afn.ca/uploads/files/education2/state_of_aboriginal_learning_in_canadafinal_report,_ccl,_2009.pdf dahlberg g., & moss, p. (2005). ethics and politics in early childhood education. london: routledge. davidson-hunt, i. j., & o’flaherty, r. m. (2007). researchers, indigenous peoples, and placebased learning communities. society & natural resources: an international journal, 20(4), 291-305. dewey, j. (1916/1944). democracy in education. new york: mcmillan. edwards, c., gandini, l., & forman, g. (1993). the hundred languages of children: the reggio emilia approach to early childhood education and care (pp. 40-80). norwood, nj: ablex. espinoza, l. (2010). getting it right for young children from diverse backgrounds: applying research to improve practice. washington, dc: naeyc. giltrow, j. (1995). academic writing: writing and reading across disciplines (pp. 35-50). peterborough, on: broadview press. hill collins, p. (1991). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment. london: routledge. kirk, j. (2004). starting with the self: reflexivity in studying women teachers’ lives in development. in c. mitchell, s. weber & k. o’reilly-scanlon (eds.), just who do we think we are? methodologies for autobiography and self-study in teaching (pp. 231-240). new york: routledge. kirk, j. (2007). education and fragile states. globalization, societies & education, 5(2), 181200. kirk, j., & winthrop, r. (2008). home-based school teachers in afghanistan: teaching for tarbia and student well-being. teacher & teacher education, 24, 876-888 developing a pedagogy of listening studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 345-355, 2018 355 lansdown, g. (2005). can anybody hear me? the rights of young children to participate in decisions affecting them (working paper 36). the hague: bernard van leer foundation. li, j. (2001). expectations of chinese immigrant parents for their children’s education: the interplay of chinese tradition and the canadian context. canadian journal of education, 26(4), 477-495. mays, n., & pope, c. (2000). assessing quality in qualitative research. bmj, 320(7226), 50-52. mejía-arauz, r., rogoff, b., & paradise, r. (2005). cultural variation in children’s observation during a demonstration. international journal of behavioral development, 29, 282-291. oskineegish, m., & berger, p. (2013). the role of the non-native teacher in remote first nations communities in northern ontario. canadian journal of native education, 36(1), 113-125. pidgeon, m., munoz, m., kirkness, v. j., & archibald, j. (2013). indian control of indian education: reflections and envisioning the next 40 years. canadian journal of native education, 36(1), 5-35. preston, j. p., cottrell, m., pelletier, t. r., & pearce, j. v. (2012). aboriginal early childhood education in canada: issues of context. journal of early childhood research, 10(1), 3-18. rinaldi, c. (2001). the image of the child and the child’s environment as fundamental principle. in l. gandini & c. p. edwards (eds.), bambini: the italian approach to infant toddler care (pp. 45-53). new york: teachers college press. rinaldi, c. (2006). in dialogue with reggio emilia: listening, researching and learning. new york: routledge. rogoff, b. (2003). the cultural nature of human development. new york: oxford university press. smith, l. t. (1999). decolonizing methodologies: research an indigenous peoples. london: zed. mac lorin & schall final july 3 correspondence address: nikolas schall, irtg diversity, universität trier, dm 240, 54286 trier, germany; email: schall@uni-trier.de issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 acknowledging strength in plurality: the world social forum 2016 through the prism of assemblage thinking carminda mac lorin university of montreal, canada nikolas schall university of trier, germany abstract in this article, we contribute to debates regarding the nature and role of the world social forum (wsf) in the post-2010 period by employing the prism of assemblage thinking. by using the wsf 2016 held in montreal, canada as a case study, we outline the political potential of the assemblage approach, which allows activists and researchers of social justice and contemporary contentious spaces to address some of the intrinsic paradoxes in such mobilizations. the observation of some paradigmatic moments from the wsf 2016 offers a glimpse into the heterogeneity that shapes it. we address elements as diverse as actors’ intentionalities, migration policies, urban landscapes, power relations, contents, and absences, arguing that assemblage thinking opens up innovative possibilities for analyzing multidimensional phenomena such as the wsf. keywords world social forum; assemblage; social movements; canada; diversity introduction montreal, tuesday august 9th, 2016, 3pm it is the 9th of august 2016. i arrive by bicycle at the intersection of roy street and park-la fontaine avenue. i see a vast crowd composed of multiple, diverse groups of people. maybe a couple of thousand? i see the waving flags of big unions, and numerous people huddled together wearing orange and blue, obviously belonging to the same organization. while i wander along, i see them rehearse some kind of performance, while others make cardboard signs. coming closer to sherbrooke street, i spot the white registration tent and continue to make my way toward the march, accompanied by the familiar tunes of bob acknowledging strength in plurality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 57 marley playing on a nearby stereo. on the way, i spot a group of people wearing feathers: some bare chested, others wearing sneakers, jeans and sweaters. near them i see “hiawatha belts” and a mohawk warrior flag. i try to overtake the march to observe its entirety. i see pro-chavez posters as well as a sign reading “i am a victim of chavez;” i see the handmade cardboard signs in the shape of silhouettes representing the people from other countries whose visa applications were denied; i see a huge palestinian flag carried by dozens of people; i see steelworkers, rainbow flag bearers, and many more. (vignette from participant observation by n. schall) this short ethnographic vignette introduces the opening march of the 12th edition of the world social forum (wsf), which took place from august 9th to 14th, 2016 in downtown montreal and hosted roughly 35,000 people. the wsf has often been referred to as the largest gathering of global civil society. every one to two years, up to 150,000 people have met for five or six days in different locations around the world to take part in the wsf, as participants or organizers of its countless activities (e.g., conferences, round tables, workshops, artistic happenings, and assemblies). in the last 15 years, the literature on the wsf and social forums more generally has grown significantly (conway, 2013, pp. 16-21). it has introduced various analytical tools and perspectives to capture the complexity of this phenomenon, as well as distinct ideas and aspirations concerning its future developments. the purpose of this article is twofold. first, we contribute to these reflections by interrogating the analytical potential of the assemblage concept to enhance our understanding of the world social forum as a socio-political phenomenon in the post-2010 period. second, we scrutinize the ability of assemblage thinking to address practical challenges in the wsf process, namely the seemingly dichotomous positions on its nature and purpose (i.e., as a space or as an actor), thereby addressing the concept’s usefulness for social justice struggles. we achieve these ambitions by first outlining how the wsf emerged within the alter-globalization movement. we then provide an operational overview of assemblage thinking and deploy it as a heuristical framework to analyze our ethnographic material. we thereby illustrate the heterogeneity of the wsf and elucidate different components of the 2016 wsf’s multiplicity: actors and their intentionalities, places, and policies. at specific points, we combine the assemblage approach with perspectives from actor-network theory (müller & schurr, 2015, p. 7) and performativity studies (butler, 2015) to address inherent tensions and contradictions, as well as processes of negotiation, in our analysis. we show that the heterogeneity of the wsf animates contestation between those who think the wsf should be a “space” and those who want it to become an “actor.” we conclude by discussing the potential we think assemblage thinking holds for organizers and activists on a broader scale, in additional to its analytical usefulness. the article is a collaboration between two activist-researchers with varying experiences and backgrounds. we share an academic education in anthropology, which informs our understanding of the assemblage concept, carminda mac lorin & nikolas schall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 58 but we had different introductions to the wsf 2016 and have since forged distinct relationships with it. carminda mac lorin was involved in the coordination of the wsf 2016, as well as in the nomination process for holding the event in montreal. nikolas schall encountered the wsf while pursuing participatory action research on practices of cosmopolitan solidarity. the paper draws on our activist engagement as well as more traditional qualitative research practices, including interviews conducted during the wsf 2016 and thereafter. alhough we grew up in different places and contexts and are positioned dissimilarly regarding common categories of difference (i.e., gender, nationality, first language, and ethnic background), we both follow educational routes in western educational institutions. we articulate this positioning in order to critically situate our perspective; we believe this is especially important in relation to discussions about the wsf, which has been understood as an attempt to create an epistemology of the south capable of challenging occidental modernity and its science (see de sousa santos, 2004, p.13). the world social forum: from its context of emergence to the wsf 2016 in montreal alter-globalization and post-2010 movements the alter-globalization movement or global social justice movement emerged in the late 1990s, bringing together very diverse social actors (e.g., indigenous activists, ecologists, feminists, non-governmental organizations, trade unionists, anti-militarists, and political parties of the left) in formal and informal national and transnational networks. far from establishing a single model or a precise set of objectives, alter-globalization instead proposes plurality as its most important quality. over the last two decades the alterglobalization movement has mobilized hundreds of thousands of people through counter-summits such as those protesting the world trade organization in seattle in 1999, the summit of the americas in quebec in 2001, and through various social forums. recently, several protest movements have been discussed against the backdrop of alter-globalization, including the so-called arab spring, indignados, and occupy. these are designated as post-2010 protests or “movements of the crisis” (della porta & mattoni, 2014). their continuities and discontinuities with previous waves of activism have been outlined by other scholars (della porta & mattoni, 2014). as we will demonstrate, both the alter-globalization movement and a constellation of post-2010 movements served as models for organizing within the wsf 2016, and continue to influence how the forum deals with questions of process, procedure, and inter-group communication. acknowledging strength in plurality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 59 the world social forum the first wsf was held in porto alegre, brazil in 2001. it was intended by its organizers to be a counterweight to the davos economic forum. the slogan of the wsf (“another world is possible”) and its main guidelines were stated in its charter of principles (wsf, 2001), a normative document that was adopted after the first wsf to define the forum's key principles. the charter outlines the forum’s identity as a space where opposition “to neo-liberalism and to domination of the world by capital” is expressed with the following characteristics: openness to plurality in civil society (thus excluding political parties and armed organizations), non-hierarchical relations, democracy and anti-discrimination, and encouragement of networking and collaboration (wsf, 2001). as chico whitaker (2004, p. 116), one of the first proponents of the wsf points out the forum became a platform for the plurality of alterglobalization; it proposes an initiative that translates into a concrete space of encounter for those around the planet who seek to counter imperialisms, proposing alternatives to current economic and social systems. although the wsf’s field of action is described in its charter, its scope and the way participants deal with its intrinsic diversity are still matters of debate and negotiation. the wsf 2016 in montreal in 2016 the wsf for the first time took place outside of the global south, in montreal, quebec. the wsf 2016 collective that proposed montreal to the international council of the wsf based its argument on the need to address the apparent division between the global north and south. the wsf collective stated that solidarities need to transcend boundaries in order to address the pitfalls of aggressive and hegemonic global neo-liberalism. the 2016 collective was initially constituted by people who had been involved in the quebec social forums (2007, 2009), the occupy mobilizations (2011), the quebec spring (2012),1 and other civil society groups or organizations. the collective distinguished its posture from that of previous wsf organizers by trying to bring together the perspectives of citizens and organizations through a prefigurative organizational process (gordon, 2018, p. 3; leach, 2013, p. 1), instead of relying mainly on large institutions (e.g., the biggest local unions or non-governmental organizations). their understanding of the political scope of the wsf recalled 1 the quebec spring is also referred to in french as the maple spring ("printemps érable"), a name inspired by the arab spring and the importance of maple trees to quebec’s economy and culture. in 2012, students in quebec started massive mobilizations against the rise of tuition fees that the provincial government was planning for the years to come. it was the longest student strike in canadian history, lasting almost seven months. carminda mac lorin & nikolas schall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 60 that of the post-2010 mobilizations, as articulated by marina sitrin (2012, p. 62) referring to occupy wall street: “part of this politics, as described by people all over the world, is the need to come together, do so without hierarchy, and do so in open spaces, where not only all can look at one another, but where a space in society is opened up and changed .” reading the wsf through assemblage theory the concept of assemblage offers the possibility of considering complex phenomena that emerge through the interaction of multiple autonomous components that can include human perspectives, discourses, and agency, but also material and other contextual and non-human elements. it originates in the work of deleuze and guattari (1988) and was especially developed in a thousand plateaus. since then it has been employed, developed and shaped in a range of disciplines, in different ways and to different ends (conway, thorburn, & osterweil, 2016, p. 5; müller & schurr, 2015 pp. 218-219). delanda’s systematization of assemblage thinking has become an important analytical tool to structure contemporary research fields, and is often used to frame messy, inconsistent, complex and entangled phenomena (collier, 2006; hess, moser, & schwertl, 2013; marcus & saka, 2006; ong & collier, 2005; rabinow, 2011). the concept’s application hints at one of its core potentials: to conceptualize the relationship of heterogeneous parts and wholes, or (selfsubsisting) fragments and multiplicities (nail, 2017, p. 23). we deploy the concept of assemblage to enrich conceptualizations of the wsf with regard to its inherent tension between diversity and unity. our understanding of assemblage thinking is based notably on delanda’s a new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social complexity (2006), as well as assemblage theory (delanda, 2016) and its subsequent critique by thomas nail (2017). the multiplicity of the wsf assemblage: heterogeneous parts in a fragmentary whole one of deleuze's basic descriptions defines an assemblage as “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them” (deleuze & parnet, 2007, p. 69). the relationships between the elements that compose an assemblage are understood as “relations of exteriority,” meaning connections of selfsubsistent elements that can be related to one another, detach and exist by themselves, or even be re-combined (delanda, 2006, p. 19). “multiplicity” here refers to an alternative logic to that of organic unities. the wholes are only fragmentary and never complete, as they are always emerging, changing acknowledging strength in plurality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 61 with added and subtracted elements, as well as through the constantly shifting relations between them. the concept of assemblage can be effectively applied to the wsf as a phenomenon assembling highly heterogeneous components in a fragmentary whole. a myriad of diverse elements constitute the wsf: 13 world events since 2001 (and countless regional, local and thematic events); local contexts shaping important elements of each wsf; constantly evolving methodologies in the application of the principles of the charter; and hundreds of thousands of people around the world observing, living and interpreting a wsf. each wsf in its specificity (and the continuous process constituted by all its editions) emerges as the aggregation of all these different elements, which are already assemblages themselves, and even assemblages of assemblages (delanda, 2006, p. 6). the wsf as a "fragmentary whole" is assembled around the principles announced in the charter and is embodied in each iteration at a specific time and place, thereby reinforcing a symbolic sense of unity and strength of a so-called global civil society. to illustrate the usefulness of the assemblage concept to encompass the intrinsic diversity of the wsf phenomena, we will explore key moments of the wsf 2016. drawing on the methodological reflections of maria schwertl (2013), we focus our attention on ethnographic experiences including the one offered at the beginning of this article. the wsf as an assemblage of assemblages: the indigenous opening ceremony montreal, tuesday august 9th, 2016, 6pm at around six in the evening, we arrive at “place des arts,” a square surrounded by skyscrapers at the heart of montreal’s city centre. tens of thousands of people assemble in front of the main stage. five people walk up on stage. one is bare chested, wearing a headdress consisting of antlers and feathers, another a leather jacket, the third a blouse, a vest and a medicine wheel displaying the slogan “idle no more.” another holds a cardboard sign showing the hashtag mmiwg, and the final person proudly displays a hiawatha beltflag. the elder begins a speech in kanien'kehá:ka language. he is followed by the bare chested man, who welcomes everyone in english “all of you from all around the world, here on turtle island, and especially on kanien'kehá:ka territory.” his speech is translated into french and spanish. one of the speakers from idle no more takes the microphone and speaks to the audience about first nations struggles. she addresses the problem of visa restrictions for the wsf, and compares those barriers to state policies that exclude and discriminate against first nation peoples. she ends by saying that “canada is a country that is changing and that needs to change under the pressure of its citizens.” after the opening ceremony, my friends and i take a much-needed dinner break, which we spend in a nearby vegan restaurant chain. it is filled with the participants wearing orange and blue, whom i saw earlier on. we then carminda mac lorin & nikolas schall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 62 head back to “place des arts.” as we arrive, i turn around and take in the skyscrapers that wear the emblems of financial institutions and global hotel chains, set against the dark sky. (ethnographic vignette from participant observation by n. schall)2 the ethnographic vignettes from the opening day of the wsf 2016 hint at a central feature of the venue: the unceded status of montreal, which means that there has never been any agreement or treaty that has transferred land title from indigenous nations to settler ownership or control. the wsf opening started with an indigenous opening ceremony by representatives from the kanien’kehá:ka nation (mohawk), which – despite the fact that the territory of today’s montréal has been inhabited and used by many different indigenous peoples, communities and nations – is widely recognized as the custodian of the territory.3 this opening must be understood against the backdrop of the historical positionality of indigenous people in the wsf process (conway, 2011, pp. 224-225; 2013, pp. 151-157) and vis-à-vis the montreal organizing process, which took place in the context of the aforementioned idle no more movement (kino-nda-niimi collective, 2014), the people’s forum in 2014 that highlighted the importance of first nation voices (o’keefe, 2014), and a more general change in the quebec societal climate regarding first nations people, sometimes referred to as “era of reconciliation” (see taiaiake alfred, 2016, for a critical analysis of this “era of reconciliation”). the ethnographic vignettes also enables an appreciation of how local struggles in different places can relate and collectively put forward a stronger message. they come together in an assemblage “composed of pre-existing things that, when brought into relations with other pre-existing things, open up different capacities not inherent in the original things but only come into existence in the relations established in the assemblage” (rabinow, 2011, p. 14). the first person who got on stage after the ceremonial opening was bertita cáceres, daughter of berta cáceres, an internationally known environmental and indigenous rights activist from honduras who was murdered in 2016. bertita was holding a cardboard sign calling for “justice for berta” (see figure 1). she joined melissa mollen-dupuis from idle no more and maïtée labrecque saganash, an activist from the indigenous cree nation, who were already on stage. the latter was holding a cardboard sign in support of a twitter campaign that had been drawing attention to the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in canada. thus, gathered on stage 2 idle no more is a grassroots indigenous movement that emerged in december 2012 as a response to legislative changes that removed protection from waterways. it developed into a more general movement struggling for indigenous sovereignty and indigenous rights. first nation is used as a term for the diverse indigenous nations in canada. first nations, metis and inuit people form canada's indigenous population. 3 see e.g., the territorial acknowledgement of concordia university: https://www.concordia.ca/about/indigenous/territorial-acknowledgement.html acknowledging strength in plurality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 63 were representatives of struggles from different places that connected in their specificities and commonalities. figure 1. the opening ceremony (photo: world social forum 2016 [@fsm2016wsf; august 10, 2016]) paradigmatically, the images in figure 1 illustrate transnational solidarities and connections in the indigenous rights movements, which themselves form a specific assemblage that was highly visible on this opening day. they demonstrate the aspiration of globality within the wsf without neglecting plurality at local levels, while acknowledging and making explicit their mutual interconnectedness. this global-local nexus can be recognized as the conjunction of unity and plurality that characterizes the wsf. this perspective is also highlighted in ong and collier's (2005) use of assemblage thinking, where they break down the supposed opposition between the local carminda mac lorin & nikolas schall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 64 and global, a common issue in debates about globalization (collier, 2006, p. 400). another telling scene unfolded during interviews with the first nations representatives of the opening ceremony, who represented divergent positions even within a seemingly similar struggle. the bare-chested man, stuart junior, is a member of the the mohawk traditional council, which has been a prominent critic of the organizing and protest practices of the idle no more movement that melissa mollen-dupuis, standing close to him on stage, represented (see mohawk traditional council, 2013). the different perspectives presented here point to different assemblages that together create what we can interpret as “an indigenous opening assemblage,” being in itself a distinctive element of the wsf 2016 assemblage. this example illustrates that the juxtaposition of the different elements of assemblage does not erode their specificity. instead, they maintain relations of exteriority, which delanda (2006) underlines as being fundamental when addressing linkages between different parts of an assemblage (in this case, diverse indigenous perspectives and local struggles). each element is selfsubsistent (its identity not defined by the link to others) and can be detached and joined with other assemblages (delanda, 2006, p. 19). heterogeneous intentionalities: the organizers’ perspectives on unifying plurality another significant element of this wsf that can be looked at through the prism of assemblage thinking is intentionalities. having interviewed different people involved in the wsf 2016 collective and collaborated with many of them, it was clear that people get involved for diverse reasons. the wsf had a strong symbolic appeal by itself as a meeting space, offering the possibility of connecting many different perspectives. carminda mac lorin’s experience participating for three years in the organizing process and eventually becoming a coordinator of the wsf 2016 collective revealed on a day-to-day basis the constant need to deal with the tensions between diversity and unity. in different contexts, it became crucial to present the wsf as a unified and coordinated whole (e.g., for those who joined the organizational process, to plan logistics, to build mobilization tools, for the partners, for the media). the charter of principles of the wsf (which acknowledging the forum’s essence as a space open to diversity), complemented by the charter of the wsf 2016 collective (which emphasizes the organizational process as being open, horizontal, transparent, independent, and self-organized), guided this quest for coherence. however, the intention to build a a sense of unity contrasted with explicit willingness to encourage a horizontal plurality (e.g., amongst organizers and participants, between cultural perspectives, genres, generations, struggles), seen as one of the main intended purposes of the wsf. acknowledging strength in plurality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 65 returning to our example of the opening ceremony, an interview with one of its main organizers indicated that because plurality was conceived as the strength of the wsf, it was therefore intentionally staged. the opening day was imagined as the assembling of different people, positions and struggles, who together made up the wsf 2016. this coming together was in flux – never stabilized and disassembled directly afterwards – but one could speak of a moment of symbolic unity of the many positions. the public representation of this heterogeneity – as a performance of human diversity – was considered by the organizers as itself a politically coherent action. place as a constitutive element of the wsf assemblage delanda (2016) states that the components of an assemblage can be read on a continuum, from expressive to material. the ethnographic vignette used previously illustrates this material/expressive continuum paradigmatically: the opening ceremony of the wsf was held in the material space of montreal’s sky scraper-dominated city centre, at the “place des arts,” which is also a regular site for large commercial music shows, festivals, cultural events, and other kinds of consumption. reflecting on the words of javier auyero, we argue that delanda’s perspective on the socio-material world has a consonance with the significance of place regarding protests: places are thus at once the terrain and the stakes of the politics of protest. collective actions take place in physical places, which already have a special meaning. in turn, collective actions contribute to the transformation of meaning attributed to certain places. (auyero, 2005, p. 130; authors’ translation) the expressive dimension of place can be identified in the organizers’ intention to transform its meaning, in this case by putting in question the norm of settlement at the heart of colonial cities such as montreal. one such acknowledgement of colonization and the unceded status of territory occurred during the opening ceremony. the act of renaming the areas where the wsf took place the “world social territory” can be understood as a second attempt to shift the symbolic and representational character of the places. although this transformation of meaning was attempted by groups who attended the wsf and appeared in some media reports,4 it never achieved a scope comparable to those longer-term protests that consistently transformed the meaning of places such as taksim meydanı, puerta del sol, and platia syndagmato. while these locations now seldom appear in international media without mention of the post-2010 mobilizations, place des arts has not come 4 see e.g., reports by the world fair trade association (http://wfto.com/news/world-socialforum-2016) and cision (http://www.newswire.ca/fr/news-releases/forum-social-mondial-2016--journee-du-12-aout-2016--derniere-chance-pour-les-grandes-conferences-589904301.html). carminda mac lorin & nikolas schall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 66 to be widely associated with the wsf 2016. nevertheless, following judith butler (2015), one could see the impacts of this event on another level if we consider that a concrete experience of momentary and incomplete transformation in and of a place like this durably affects imaginative potentials: gatherings are necessarily transient, and that transience is linked to their critical function. one could say, ‘but oh, they do not last,’ and sink into a sense of futility; but that sense of loss is countered by the anticipation of what may be coming: ‘they could happen at any time!’ gatherings such as these serve as one of democracy’s incipient or ‘fugitive’ moments. (butler, 2015, p. 20) building on these explorations of the expressive dimension of the place, we now focus on the material, “non-human” elements that shape the place (see müller & schurr, 2015, p. 7). the skyscrapers mentioned above hint at the embeddedness of the wsf 2016 in a neoliberal surrounding. the vignette suggests that many participants went to nearby restaurants. this shows how important the surrounding capitalist infrastructure was to literally sustaining the protesters, and thereby points to moments when a reproduction of exclusions is taking place. the material non-availability of food demonstrates economic exclusions and privileges intrinsic to the place. what happened to those who couldn’t spend their time in downtown montreal or afford to sustain their physical needs there? how would the opening ceremony have been different, had it taken place in a less privileged northern neighbourhood? assemblage thinking, with its equal consideration of expressive and material dimensions, illuminates diverse aspects of the significance of place for the wsf. the attempted transformation from a neoliberal space into one of dissent was a transient phenomenon that nevertheless carried more durable imaginative potentials. it was also only a partial transformation, as the wsf did not become (and never aimed to be) independent from the surrounding economic and social structures. it remained necessarily embedded in certain social and economic structures and thereby reproduced certain exclusions. policies and absences as elements of the wsf assemblage analyzing the wsf 2016 through the prism of assemblage thinking invites us to pay attention to other “more-than-human” constitutive elements. one of these is government policies. we are following an understanding of policies developed by shore, wright and però (2011) who, referring to bruno latour, understand policies as “actants.” they write, “policies have agency; they shift action; and, like machines, they perform tasks and are endowed with certain competencies” (shore, wright & però, 2011, p. 3). canadian migration policies must in this way be understood as an integral element of the wsf 2016. hundreds of participants were unable to attend the forum because their acknowledging strength in plurality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 67 visa applications were rejected. this absence was materialized in the form of cardboard silhouettes during the opening march, as seen in the ethnographic vignette and in figure 2. figure 2. silhouettes of absent persons (photo: world social forum 2016 [@fsm2016wsf; august 10, 2016]) in the context of the wsf 2016 the visa issue was widely publicized by media reports, which highlighted restrictive visa policies of a country that is so often seen as a model for immigration policies.5 this making visible of what often stays unremarked illustrates what the portuguese sociologist boaventura de sousa santos (2004) argues to be one of the characteristics of social and political processes such as the wsf. “absences” emerge through processes of exclusion and marginalization: “what does not exist is in fact actively produced as non-existent” (de sousa santos, 2004, p. 14). the sociology of absences appears to us a useful analytical tool, as it aims to confront the logics and dynamics of hegemonic rationalities that disqualify or make invisible certain entities or processes. combined with an awareness of more-than-human elements, a sociology of absence allows us to see that exclusions become a property of the wsf 2016 assemblage. understanding those exclusions as the product of interacting heterogeneous elements helps move beyond an understanding of exclusion as existing either on an individual or structural level. it allows us to recognize the paradox of a desired non-hierarchical, democratic and non-discriminatory space that simultaneously reproduces oppression (e.g., as we previously illustrated regarding space). acknowledgement and awareness of this property of the assemblage enhances possibilities to deal with these contradictions. 5 an overview of the media reporting on the 2016 world social forum is available at https://fsm2016.org/en/revue-de-presse carminda mac lorin & nikolas schall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 68 finding coherence through processes of negotiation as we saw above through the examples of the opening ceremony assemblage, intentionalities of the organizers, place, policies and absences, assemblage thinking opens possibilities to grasp the constitutive heterogeneity of the wsf. however, deploying assemblage theory and following rabinow (2011, p. 14), we could critically ask, what are the “different capacities not inherent in the original things” of this assemblage? framed differently, what resulted concretely from assembling these heterogeneous elements and what were the consequences of tensions between the assembled elements? if plurality is evident within the wsf assemblage, where can we recognize the coherence of these elements? we are not able to provide a general overview of what resulted from this bringing together of heterogeneous elements, due to the huge scale of the event (tens of thousands of participants) and the characteristics of our qualitative approach. nevertheless, the thousands of people from around the world who gathered during each wsf confirm its significant symbolic unifying appeal. this symbolic function of the wsf is reinforced by its pragmatic capacity to encourage interactions between its constitutive elements that would not exist otherwise. to illustrate interactions motivated by the wsf, we use a third ethnographic vignette originating from the agora of initiatives that took place at the end of the 2016 forum. it shows how elements that were central in the opening ceremony made connections and entered into negotiations. saturday, august 13, jarry park on the second-to-last day of the 2016 wsf, an agora of initiatives, as it’s called, takes place in jarry park. it is raining, so two huge white tents have been set up. there are several hundred people present in the two tents, discussing eleven different topics simultaneously. after a while, the members of the mohawk traditional council who performed during the formal opening arrive. one of them interrupts a group discussion on the subject of “struggles and visions of indigenous peoples.” he criticizes the attendees for the lack of first nations representatives and starts to take the lead of the round circle discussion by setting certain discussion rules and procedures, such as “do not interrupt,” “only the one who is holding the feather has the right to speak,” etc… at a certain point, some people from the organizing collective want to finish with the discussion circles in order to continue with a next step in the planned agenda. they grab a microphone and call for attention. a sudden tension becomes noticeable. activists beside me stand up, approach the organizers, and tell them not to interrupt stuart junior. people go back and forth between the stage with the microphone and the discussion circle with stuart. finally, the people from the circle move to the other tent and continue their discussion, while the program in the first tent continues. (ethnographic vignette from participant observation by n. schall) as this example shows, the heterogeneous elements (i.e., various actors with diverging intentions and aims, and non-human elements such as the acknowledging strength in plurality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 69 weather and the limitation of space in the tent) enter into processes of negotiation and conjunction. although some of those processes were imagined and anticipated by the organizing collective and therefore factored into the program methodology of the wsf 2016, many others, such as the situation described in the vignette, were unexpected; these occurred spontaneously. the vignette illustrates a negotiation of what it means to concretely recognize mohawk sovereignty in that specific moment and place. it raises the question of how to deal with indigenous struggles as crucial – but still as specific ones among others – during a forum held in montreal. this negotiation process and others can be read as resulting from assembling such heterogeneous elements, and illustrates an inherent capacity of the wsf. the solution that was found (i.e., round circle discussions in one tent, continuation of the wsf methodology in the other) can be understood as the transient coherence between the elements, or the emerging multiplicity. although at some moments it seems as if the heterogeneous elements were standing side by side and were only symbolically united by the fact that they came together during the wsf, often these elements joined in processes of negotiation and conjunction. dealing with intrinsic diversity: how assemblage thinking contributes to the “space-movement” debate as we have shown above, assemblage thinking enables a nuanced understanding of a fragmentary whole built around the negotiation or conjunction of a diversity of perspectives, intentionalities, specific places, policies, exclusions, etc. it therefore raises a compelling potentiality for enhancing comprehensions of the wsf. this seems particularly true in light of the existing debate on how unity and plurality should be articulated to increase the forum's political impacts. this discussion, considered by many as “the most discussed issue between organizers and forum participants,” (whitaker, 2006, p. 37; authors’ translation) is often referred to as the “spaceactor debate”. in the following pages, we will describe the main ideas of this controversy, before explaining how assemblage thinking can offer a key to addressing it. on the one hand, as mentioned before the charter of principles of the wsf (wsf, 2001) affirms its specificity as a plural, open meeting space that encourages horizontality and autonomy, fosters association of actors, and does not intend to represent the organizations that gather within it, nor to deliberate on their names. people who defend this conception of the wsf maintain that it should not aim to take one single position, as this would necessarily devalue the strength of its heterogeneity. in their opinion, this would not be compatible with its horizontal, plural and inclusive nature, which represents for them the intrinsic specificity of the wsf, as well as its potential as a new political process. carminda mac lorin & nikolas schall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 70 on the other hand, since the beginnings of the wsf it has been questioned if such an open space can produce concrete political results that will contribute to change in the world, and how these results would look. many participants as well as critics expressed fundamental doubts about the political impact of the wsf as a space, suggesting that it should become instead a political actor or movement. they argue that it is necessary to create a unified global entity representing the wsf as a whole, taking clear stands against crises and violations of human rights (teivainen, 2004, p. 126) and defending democratic values (de sousa santos, 2004). according to de sousa santos (2004, pp. 99-100), an advocate of this view, the plurality of political positions, struggles, and demands should come to common standpoints and engage in joint actions, in order to make the wsf stronger. figure 3. the two poles in the “space-actor debate” we recognize in this debate two ontological and strategic perspectives regarding how unity and plurality should be articulated in order to increase the forum's impact. figure 3 represents these two perspectives graphically. on the left, we depict the approach that considers the wsf as a space. this perspective understands the construction of a renewed political culture (based on prefiguration, cooperation, co-construction and mutual recognition) and the horizontal coming together within plurality as fundamental outcomes of the wsf. on the right, we depict the perspective of the wsf as an actor, for whom plurality must be consolidated into common positions, with a view to carry out effective struggles against capitalist imperialism. these dichotomous positions at times translate into vivid arguments, which we witnessed during the meeting of the international council (ic) at the end of the wsf 2016 in montreal. indeed, the depth of the disagreement became apparent through the interventions of individuals (from within and outside of the ic) demanding that the ic should take clear positions on struggles in acknowledging strength in plurality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 71 brazil, kurdistan and palestine. this initiated a heated debate in which others defended the wsf as a space, and categorically rejected calls to issue such position statements. at times, the possibility of a pernicious split along these lines seems likely: this would be a fatal blow to the wsf. in this context, various questions arise: is it possible to speak in the name of the whole wsf without disarming the political potential of its plurality? can the wsf as an open space mediate enough concerted actions, develop an impact and contribute to profound changes in the world? is it possible to reconcile the perspectives of the wsf as actor, or space? these questions evidently do not have simple answers, but we think assemblage thinking can contribute to addressing them by offering an understanding of the wsf that allows for the coexistence of both perspectives: the forum as space and actor. figure 4. assemblage model of world social forum figure 4 illustrates our perspective on how assemblage thinking, with its particular ontology of holding plurality in provisional and dynamic unity, can offer a path to move beyond the space-actor impasse. this is particularly pertinent in our view, as neither the space approach nor the actor approach alone seem sufficient to grasp the full potential of the forum. on the one hand, the issues of denied visas, the wsf’s embeddedness in a capitalist context, and restrictive migration regimes, show that the space approach does carminda mac lorin & nikolas schall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 72 not keep its promise of horizontality: the wsf is not a power-free space. on the other hand, the example from the agora of initiatives mentioned above suggests that centralised procedures of decision-making – advocated for in the actor approach – are not the only way of developing shared positions. the heterogeneous, human and non-human elements coming together in this specific place and time enabled a situational shared understanding. we propose that the quest for profound and diversified political impacts can include different approaches. common positions and actions can be developed among its heterogeneous constituting elements, while also actively establishing a prefigurative interaction that eventually contributes to the consolidation of a renewed political culture. by acknowledging this, we agree with glasius (2005, p. 248) who argues that, “in fact, it is to be hoped that it will not be resolved in one way or another,” and thinks that it is the forum’s character as “both a locus of open deliberation and a meeting place for real world counter-hegemonic campaigns, that makes it such an interesting experiment, that has managed to attract so many” (glasius, 2008, p. 249; see also conway, 2013; schröder, 2015; teivainen, 2004). acknowledging strength in plurality: the political potential of assemblage thinking beyond paradoxes in this article, we used the prism of assemblage thinking to introduce an actualization of the debates around the nature and role of the wsf in the post-2010 period. the observation of paradigmatic moments of the 2016 forum provided a glimpse into the heterogeneity that shapes the wsf, which is composed of actors and their intentionalities, but also of elements such as migration policies, urban scapes, contents, and even absences. our analysis of the interactions between these different elements also illustrates how a sense of coherence dynamically emerges from the wsf as a whole. assemblage thinking opens an innovative possibility to analyze this multidimensional yet consistent phenomenon. we suggested that in addition to its analytical value assemblage thinking can also provide an empowering perspective for activists and mobilizers who struggle for global justice, as it allows them to acknowledge and face certain contradictions and paradoxes that emerge in their contexts of plurality. this was first addressed by offering a reading of the 2016 wsf in which we explored how durable forms of power (e.g., north/south inequalities) interact and are articulated in specific situations while coexisting with the agency of the event’s participants. an intrinsic paradox of the wsf is seen in the production of an aspired non-hierarchical, democratic and non-discriminatory space, which simultaneously reproduces power relations, exclusion and oppression, as we illustrated when describing the embeddedness of the “place des arts” in the structures surrounding it. the assemblage concept as a framework that focuses on heterogeneity and inherent tensions thereby allows acknowledging strength in plurality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 73 us to underline the importance of acknowledging and thematizing structural inequalities and the reproduction of power relations, potentially encouraging activists to recognize their existence and keep fighting them. the presentation of the space/actor debate pointed to another fundamental paradox within the wsf, highlighting seemingly opposed opinions: the coincidence of plurality and unity. we argue that assemblage thinking offers a mode of conceptualization that addresses this apparent contradiction. this important characteristic of the wsf (and other contemporary contentious phenomena) appears as the engine of a creative utopia and contributes to creating new political paradigms on a global scale, especially in the post 2010-period. it seems fundamental to us that activists and scholars recognize the existence of these paradoxes to be able to address some limitations they might pose, as well as their potentialities. the article’s reflection on the theoretical, analytical and political potential of assemblage thinking makes explicit our desire to find ways to articulate the perspectives of those striving to achieve more ecologically sustainable and socially just societies. following the view of conway, thorburn and osterweil (2016, p. 5), we maintain that “opening spaces and strengthening capacities to see the in-breaking of other possible/emergent/actual worlds is a critical epistemological and political task in the present moment.” therefore we join these scholars in the call for reflection on paradigms that acknowledge strength in plurality. references auyero, j. (2005). l’espace des luttes. topographie des mobilisations collectives. actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 160(5), 122-132. butler, j. (2015). notes toward a performative theory of assembly. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. collier, s. j. (2006). global assemblages. theory, culture & society, 23(2/3), 399-401. conway, j. (2013). edges of global justice. the world social forum and its “others.” new york: routledge. conway, j. (2011). cosmopolitan or colonial? the world social forum as “contact zone.” third world quarterly, 32(2), 217-236. conway, j., thorburn, e., & osterweil, m. (2016). concept paper on assemblage thinking. unpublished paper circulated in advance of global movement assemblages symposium, st. catharines, on. de sousa santos, b. (2004). the world social forum: a user’s manual. retrieved from http://www.boaventuradesousasantos.pt/documentos/fsm_eng.pdf delanda, m. (2016). assemblage theory. edinburgh, uk: edinburgh university press. delanda, m. (2006). a new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social complexity. london: continuum. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1988). a thousand plateaus:ccapitalism and schizophrenia. london: athlone press. deleuze, g., & parnet, c. (2007). dialogues ii. new york: columbia university press. della porta, d., & mattoni, a. (2014). spreading protest. colchester, uk: ecpr press. glasius, m. (2005). deliberation or struggle? civil society traditions behind the social forums. ephemera, 5(2), 240-252. carminda mac lorin & nikolas schall studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 56-74, 2018 74 gordon, u. (2018). prefigurative politics between ethical practice and absent promise. political studies, 66(2), 521–537. hess, s., moser, j., & schwertl, m. (2013). europäisch-ethnologisches forschen. neue methoden und konzepte. berlin, de: dietrich reimer verlag. kino-nda-niimi collective. 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(2001). charter of principles. retrieved from https://fsm2016.org/en/sinformer/a-propos-du-forum-social-mondial/ rogers final correspondence address: matthew rogers, faculty of education, university of new brunswick, fredericton, nb e3b 5a3; email: mrogers2@unb.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, x-xx, 2017 volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools: tensions between critical representation and perpetuating gendered and heterosexist discourses matthew rogers university of new brunswick, canada abstract although participatory media practices are often adopted to address social issues with youth in school and community contexts, there is a lack of critical analysis of the visual and discursive representations that organize student-produced participatory films. to respond to this concern, i employ critical discourse analysis to examine a series of films that were created for a new brunswick school-based participatory filmmaking program that i coordinate, called what’s up doc? since the project’s inception in 2009, students have produced over 60 films that have raised institutional critiques, troubled inequitable discourses, and addressed social justice issues. drawing attention to discourses that framed students’ films, i show how the work may perpetuate, rather than fully resist, marginalizing discourses, narratives, and visual representations. in particular, i show how the films may reproduce and authorize sexist discourses, demeaning narratives, and heteronormative assumptions. youth may have undertaken filmmaking to generate social commentary and resist inequity, but critical engagement with the what’s up doc? program demonstrates how discursive power operates on, in, and through participatory media texts. keywords participatory video; critical pedagogy; education; critical discourse analysis; critical filmmaking pedagogies introduction although participatory media practices are often adopted in educational contexts to address social issues, there is a lack of critical analysis of the visual and discursive representations that organize student-produced participatory films. more generally, as low, brushwood rose, salvio and palacios (2012, p. 50) suggest, when participatory media practices are matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 196 adopted to address social justice issues, scholars often examine them using “celebratory and uncritical” narratives, which construct participatory video as a socio-political intervention strategy that is unquestionably empowering for marginalized groups. for the scholars above, and others like walsh (2012, 2016), these dominant narratives tend to forestall critical analysis of participatory video approaches, projects, and products, and reduce the likelihood that practitioners and researchers will attend to how oppressive power relations operate on and through even the most self-reflexive participatory media project. consequently, there is still a dearth of research that critically analyses the visual representations produced in these types of projects and the discursive patterns that organize youth participatory films (kindon, 2003; milne, mitchell & de lange, 2012). in this spirit, this paper employs critical discourse analysis (krzyżanowski & forchtner, 2016; van dijk, 1993) to examine a series of social justice oriented films that were created for the 2012 iteration of an annual new brunswick school-based participatory filmmaking program called what’s up doc? i have been the coordinator of the what’s up doc? program since 2009. the program emerged out of an earlier participatory filmmaking project i coordinated in a new brunswick alternative education center, and formed the empirical focus of my phd research (rogers, 2014). i collaborated on the first project with my research supervisor, dr. linda eyre, and the muriel mcqueen centre for family violence research at the university of new brunswick. following the initial collaboration, the regional school district literacy coordinator invited me to organize a larger participatory filmmaking initiative for grade 11 youth in english eleven-3 classrooms – a streamed literacy program for students who are deemed non-academic. the schools involved in the initiative are in the new brunswick anglophone school district-west and represent rural and urban contexts. working closely with teachers and administrators, the program has provided me with an opportunity to explore the intersection of critical theories and pedagogies (agger, 1998; freire, 1970; giroux, 1981, 2011; kincheloe, 2008), arts-based inquiry (barone & eisner, 2012), and participatory video (milne, mitchell & de lange, 2012) with youth in school contexts. through a combination of critical and participatory filmmaking pedagogies (mitchell, 2011), the what’s up doc? program is designed to create opportunities for students and teachers to engage with collaborative filmmaking as a way to address issues of equity and social justice in their schools and communities. the pedagogies adopted in classrooms are intended to create spaces for youth voices and agency. further, the pedagogies aim to open up possibilities for teachers and students to collaboratively address equity issues in schools and to inform institutional and social change from their perspectives. the program includes an annual what’s up doc? film festival that is held once the films have been produced. the program provides openings for youth to mobilize critical social commentary to generate schoolbased and public dialogue on issues that affect their lives. since the program participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 197 began in 2009, students and teachers have produced nearly 70 diverse films that have raised institutional critiques, troubled inequitable discourses, and addressed social justice issues. although i have worked collaboratively with teachers and students in what’s up doc? from its inception, the scope of this paper is limited to an analysis of elements of the third year of the program (2012). that year, teachers, students, and i collaborated on the production of seven short films on a range of social justice issues, including intersecting dimensions of class, gender, and dis/ability. at the 2012 film festival, the seven films, including a behind the scenes documentary, were screened to an audience of over 300, including youth, educators, administrators, the students’ family, and the public. in this paper, engaging critically with the discourses that structure some of the what’s up doc? films demonstrates how the program, and the participatory student documentaries, do not escape the effects of power. for participatory media approaches to live up to the promise of promoting social justice, these types of representations, and their implications, cannot be assumed to have social justice outcomes simply because they adopt a participatory framework. by drawing attention to the discourses that organize students’ films, i ask how participatory video projects with youth, which are intended to address social inequities in school contexts, might also perpetuate marginalizing narrative and visual representations. in particular, i address how three of the seven 2012 what’s up doc? films reproduce sexist and heteronormative discourses. as what’s up doc? films perpetuate systems of marginalization despite of their social justice orientation, an approach that attempts to understand the complex and contradictory discursive effects of these films is essential to pedagogical social justice practice; simply adding participatory media production to classroom pedagogies does not guarantee social justice outcomes. although the students’ films may have created spaces to address critical issues related to equity, youth voice and agency, and institutional change, without critical engagement with these texts, educators and students may overlook how dominant discourses, marginalizing power relations, and institutional forces organize and are perpetuated by them. to begin, i elaborate on the theoretical and pedagogical contexts of our work in the what’s up doc? program. specifically, i speak to the influence of critical pedagogy and participatory video on our collaborative filmmaking initiatives. next, i discuss my pedagogical and methodological collaborations with teachers and youth, focusing on how we use the context of participatory video projects as opportunities to explore social justice themes in the classroom. i then discuss critical discourse analysis, and use this approach to reflect on gendered and heterosexist representations in the films. i conclude with a series of reflections and suggestions for educators intending to use participatory media pedagogies with youth to address social justice issues. matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 198 critical pedagogy and participatory video critical pedagogy applies critical social theories to the field of education to understand and resist systems of power and marginalization in schools and society (kincheloe, 2008). although the field has been shaped by various theoretical influences, it is generally accepted that it emerged from the postwwii neo-marxist theories of the german institute for social research, more popularly known as the frankfurt school (darder, baltodano & torres, 2009). embracing a critical pedagogy requires resisting the notion that education is apolitical (giroux, 2011; luke & gore, 1992; mclaren, 2009, 2017). critical educators see schools as playing a role in both maintaining and resisting social inequalities through practice and discourse (giroux, 1981, 2007; lather, 1998). the what’s up doc? program is grounded in this thinking (rogers, 2017) and is inspired by paolo freire’s (1970) critical pedagogical theories that oppose “banking” models of education. according to freire, banking practices constrain youth agency by requiring students to passively ingest the politically sanctioned curricula of the day. when banking models are adopted, students are presented information with few opportunities for inquiry or critical reflection. for freire, the paucity of agency and critical analysis in education practice encourages students to accept status-quo thinking, customs, and systems that maintain social and political inequity. critical educators seeking to counter the dehumanizing implications of banking require classrooms that provide students with opportunities to raise questions and identify the workings of power within schools and society. to work toward socially just schooling practices, freire argues, more participatory models of education in which power relations are renegotiated in classroom contexts, educators relinquish aspects of their authority, and students are recognized as active agents in learning processes are essential. for those who take up freire’s works, these approaches have the potential to be emancipatory because they address inequities in broader societal contexts. our work in the what’s up doc? program is also informed by other critical theories (see rogers, 2017), including anti-racist (dei, 2006, 2010), decolonizing (tuhiwai smith, 1999), and critical disability (goodley, 2010). in this paper, feminist, gender, and queer theories (butler, 1990; connell, 2005, 2009; lather, 1991, 1992; launis & hassel, 2015; plummer, 2011; schilt & westbrook, 2009) receive close attention. these critical frameworks provide the theoretical backdrop for my analysis of student projects. feminist scholars have mounted compelling critiques that trouble the field of critical pedagogy’s scarce attention to themes of gender, patriarchal societies, and women’s knowledge (lather, 1998; launis & hassel, 2015). in a similar vein, queer theorists concerned that heteronormativity, homophobia, and transphobia remain unaddressed are pushing the terrain of the field (graham, treharne & nairn, 2017). in recent decades, poststructuralist work in critical pedagogy (e.g., darder, baltodano & torres, 2009; giroux, 2011; porfilio & ford, 2015) has critiqued the positivist and structuralist logic participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 199 embedded in early marxist critical theories, thereby contributing to the development of feminist, queer, and disability theories (plummer, 2011; scherer, 2016). for those adopting poststructuralism, a singular focus on economic structures does not adequately capture the many forms of power and inequity at work in society. the grand narratives of marxism and early critical theorists, and applications of freire’s critical pedagogies that romanticize the emancipatory potential of participatory education models, often neglect other systems of privilege and marginalization. in developing an analytical approach that traces multiple and intersecting forms of social inequity, poststructural theorists propose a nuanced and complex understanding of power. for example, foucault (1995) and lather (1991) argue that, beyond economic and organizational structures of societies, power operates through discourse and the construction of knowledge. poststructuralism thus marks a turn away from the structural and ideological focus of critical theory, toward the power/knowledge relation (foucault & gordon, 1980). for foucault, knowledge, and the process of its construction, is tied to the power relations that organize the context of its production (foucault & gordon, 1980; rogers, 2012). institutional power relations give rise to a set of epistemological rules that shape how knowledge is negotiated in a given context. foucault (1970) refers to these foundational rules as discourse (i.e., the grammatological foundations of truth of a society), and the historical set of rules that structure and organize discourses of a given society as the épistémè. for foucault, the rules a society uses to distinguish true and false statements are arbitrary because societies can adopt different truth-making practices. this means that discourses and épistémès are never neutral; rather, they are tied to the power relations in an historical epoch and place/society. social institutions produce and perpetuate knowledge, and the rules governing its production, in ways that maintain their social positioning. by endorsing or rejecting the rules through which a society produces knowledge, discourses and the épistémè retain power, structuring the possibilities of how people can think, behave, rationalize, and talk in a social context (cook, 2007; mills, 2004). discursive regulations of knowledge production can include those related to who is permitted to be a knowledge producer (e.g., experts, scientists, the able-bodied, men), what methods must be followed to produce truth (e.g., scientific, quantitative, or qualitative), or what institutions are authorized to be knowledge producers (e.g., church, governments, schools, business). the strength of discourses and the épistémè are ensured by excluding and delegitimizing knowledge that is not produced through sanctioned discursive systems. for foucault, bertani, fontana, ewald and macey (2003), this powerful exclusion leads to subjugated knowledges, meaning, the positioned knowledges of those who are marginalized by the organization of the épistémè. poststructuralist notions of power/knowledge and discourse have influenced feminist and queer theorists (e.g., lather, 1991, 1998; kirsch, 2000), who matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 200 have shown how patriarchal power shapes and operates through the construction of knowledge of gender and identity, and how heterosexist/homophobic/transphobic societal power relations are connected to essentialist binary discourses of gender and sexuality. in the field of critical pedagogy, the theory of power/knowledge has drawn attention to the necessity of resisting discourses that contribute to systems of privilege and marginalization (fairclough, 2013; haddow, 2017). for example, feminist and queer critical educators have mounted compelling critiques of the knowledge systems of mainstream education, showing how they are often shaped by patriarchal and heteronormative discourses (plummer, 2011; robinson, 2005; rodriguez, martino, ingrey & brockenbrough, 2016). feminist, queer, and foucauldian theories of discourse have been influential in the what’s up doc? program, and are particularly important for my analysis below. the films produced by students in the 2012 iteration of the program critique gendered and heteronormative discourses and call for institutional action and change that will support more equitable social practices associated with gender and sexuality. the films strive to represent subjugated knowledges and borrow from feminist and queer theories to resist inequity, the institutional practices that support it, and the discourses through which it is maintained. specifically, the films discussed here show how youth produced narratives and visual representations that exemplify and/or directly critique sexist and homophobic discourses. although some films highlight youth agency and students’ successes with social critique, my analysis reminds us that power does not cease to operate simply because a film adopts critical discourses and representations. before addressing this contradiction more fully, i discuss the particular critical pedagogical method that underpins the what’s up doc? program: participatory video. participatory video methods tend to encompass collaborative video-based inquiry pursuits by grassroots groups and researchers, practitioners, or mediaproducers (milne, 2016; rogers, 2017). as collaborative approaches, these media-based methods are also informed by, and build on, participatory action research (whyte, 1991). in participatory research, inspired by the work of freire (1970), community-based research partners are typically involved in identifying themes for social inquiry, planning and implementing research processes, and sharing the knowledge produced through the study. historically, feminist scholars have played a key role in designing and implementing participatory research and pedagogical approaches as a way to challenge power relations and the politics of knowledge production (maguire & university of massachusettes at amherst, 1987; rogers, 2016). elaborating on how participatory research presents opportunities for more equitable approaches to inquiry, oliver, de lange, creswell and wood (2012) argue that participatory methods support social justice by creating spaces where the agency and knowledge of marginalized people and groups can be fostered, rallied, and mobilized. participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 201 like participatory research more generally, participatory video is often used to challenge traditional inquiry practices by privileging multiple interpretive perspectives and validating the voices of research and filmmaking participants. participatory video also tends to be implemented in community contexts as a media-based vehicle to address social and political inequalities (milne, mitchell & de lange, 2012; white, 2003). when participatory video projects are undertaken, practices tend to value dispersed control over the direction of film narratives, and non-hierarchical media collaborations that run counter to traditional filmmaking structures. this shift in filmmaking power dynamics is intended to encourage the representation and mobilization of subjugated knowledges of individuals and groups who are marginalized in public policy and institutional discussions. elaborating on this point, plush (2012, p. 79) suggests that participatory video “can be especially valuable for marginalized groups that are often shut out of policy debates and decisions that affect their lives.” although participatory video tends to embody a collaborative spirit (mitchell, 2008; mitchell & de lange, 2011), it is important to remember that, like all educational or interventionist strategies, this approach is influenced by social power dynamics (mookejea, 2010; plush, 2012; shaw, 2012; walsh, 2012), and therefore requires critical and nuanced analysis of its methodological complexities and representational politics. for example, when mitchell, de lange, and moletsane (2016) propose that adopting cellphone technologies might help practitioners negotiate questions of power, ownership, and sustainability in participatory video projects, they temper their argument by suggesting that cellphones may also open up projects to a whole new set of ethical complexities and political tensions. similarly, walsh (2016, p. 405-6) raises critical questions about how participatory video projects often rely on unquestioned discourses of neoliberal empowerment. she reminds us that when projects are understood in individualistic ways, “systemic power relations often continue to be overlooked … [and] personal empowerment [is emphasized] over broader social and political forces.” shaw (2016) introduces another issue by complicating the politics and the role of participatory video project coordinators. although she agrees that facilitators should avoid paternalistic approaches, shaw argues that complex power dynamics exist within groups involved in participatory video projects, and that hands-off approaches may not always be appropriate or ethical. these examples echo kindon’s (2016, p. 501) view that, although participatory video has the “ability to facilitate participant empowerment … [this assumption] must be tempered by greater critical engagement with the complexities of power” that structure the process and representational outcomes of participatory video. as milne (2016, p. 402) suggests, these critical voices provoke much needed “debate and encourage readers to critically reflect on their own research and participatory video practices.” this paper contributes to such critical reflection by showing that whereas participatory video production may support youth agency, it can matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 202 simultaneously perpetuate marginalizing discourses and systems of power, and therefore undermine, rather that support, broader projects of social justice. the “what’s up doc?” program the what’s up doc? program, teachers, and administrators – myself included – were motivated by the idea that participatory pedagogies have the potential to support social justice by making room for student agency and critical social and institutional commentary (rogers, 2017). a student who i interviewed in 2012 expresses this sentiment when he describes the what’s up doc? program as an action-oriented process that signifies a shift in youth agency and school power dynamics: “we get to voice our own . . . opinions, whereas, if we were just in like regular class, we wouldn’t have the opportunity . . . in this we actually get to say [and do] … something about it.” his observation echoes our assumption that classroom-based participatory video is a good starting point from which to make space for marginalized voices and subjugated knowledges in this institutional context. each year, students choose topics for critical inquiry and engage with documentary filmmaking to generate dialogue on a range of social justice issues. in a collaborative setting, they are encouraged to explore their topics through different theoretical lenses. in this spirit, the what’s up doc? program attempts to adopt participatory critical filmmaking pedagogies to engage youth in “building and mobilizing knowledge from their perspectives; [examining] power relations between individuals, institutions, and societies; generating important societal and institutional critique; and spurring and mobilizing reflection, dialogue, and informed social action” (rogers, 2017, p. 232). we view participatory video as an opportunity to raise critical dialogues that could address marginalizing discourses and social practices. during the 2012 iteration of the program, i collaborated with five high school teachers (three women and two men) in three literacy classes to implement a series of seven filmmaking projects. in the what’s up doc? program, we used participatory video as a critical pedagogy (rogers, 2017) to • explore questions of power, equity, privilege, and marginalization in education and society, • introduce students to analysis that is informed by an intersection of, and debates between, multiple critical social theories (e.g., marxist, feminist, anti-racist, post-colonialist, dis/ability studies, and queer theories), and, • question and move beyond individualizing discourses (i.e., discourses that locate analysis, critiques, or action at the level of the individual, and fail to incorporate a focus at the level of discourse, institutions, or social organization). in introducing the program to students, we proposed that they would have the opportunity to share their voice and generate social commentary on issues participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 203 they deemed important to their lives. we also suggested that the projects would include a participatory classroom dynamic, which would allow them to speak back to social and institutional power. in 2012, the program involved one grade 10 and four grade 11 english language arts classes. the students in these classes were between 15 and 18 years old, and the group represented a mix of male and female-identifying students, with a slightly larger population of male-identifying students. over a 12 week period, i split my time between the five classrooms. i provided professional development sessions and workshops on the conventions of filmmaking, and i collaborated with the teachers to develop filmmaking pedagogies for their classrooms. through critical reflection, the teachers and i engaged in frequent modifications of our filmmaking pedagogies. ongoing informal planning sessions occurred daily, before and after school, at lunchtime, and via email correspondence. i also used this time to work with the teachers on critical approaches to social commentary. for example, we discussed how the themes students were exploring in their films could be analyzed with different forms of social criticism (e.g., feminist, marxist, queer, anti-racist, dis/ability). whereas the filmmaking procedures carried out during what’s up doc? were planned systematically, the approach the teachers and i used in introducing students to critical theories and social justice issues was far less structured. at no point did we have formal lectures or lessons on marxist, feminist, queer, anti-racist, or dis/ability studies perspectives. rather, critical theories were introduced through discussion, workshops, or feedback when they became relevant to the themes, issues, and circumstances that the students presented in their films. the decision to introduce topics in this way relates to an attempt to negotiate the participatory elements of the program. students were in charge of choosing their themes for the films, and the teachers and i used the participatory context as a springboard for discussions about discourse and power. the most explicit discussions of critical theories occured in class activities, when the teachers and i asked the students to analyze visual media texts. for example, we sometimes asked students to critique media for gendered, homophobic, or racialized representations. critical discussions of representations were mostly addressed on an ad hoc basis with students during writing, production, and post-production activities. for instance, the students’ scripts gave us an opportunity to pose questions related to issues of sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and homophobia. because what’s up doc? occurs in a classroom/curricular context, it is important to consider how institutional practices of schooling shape the program and influence how students react to, or work through, the experience. for example, school assessment practices may have some influence on how students negotiate their work and collaborations. although the program places value on resisting inequitable institutional practices, locating this work in a curricular context presents a contradiction: what if students resist the pedagogies associated with participatory filmmaking projects? although the matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 204 program is designed with a participatory framework, implicitly coercive schooling practices encourage students to engage in the work whether or not they want to participate. there can be academic, assessment-based, and institutional consequences if students resist the what’s up doc? program. for educators taking on these kinds of projects, this contradiction is important to consider (milne, 2012). any agentic expression of resistance that students express through non-participation points to how power is being negotiated in these collaborations. it also provides a glimpse into how participatory video practices, when implemented in school contexts, are still an instrument of institutional power. the coercive power of assessment also raises ethical questions. assigning a grade to participatory projects put the onus on students to participate without fully recognizing the potential repercussions of their involvement. it is quite likely that some students feel uncomfortable participating in large group discussions about social justice issues. public expressions could appear to be overly personal, contentious, and even dangerous (ellsworth, 1992; roman & eyre, 1997), and the recognition of its potentially threatening nature just begins to point to some of the complexities associated with adopting participatory video projects in schools. i elaborate on a few more complexities below by examining gendered and heterosexist representations in the students’ 2012 films. first, however, i discuss how i employed critical discourse analysis in the film analyses. critical discourse analysis drawing on foucauldian theories of power/knowledge (foucault & gordon, 1980; foucault et al., 2003; rogers, 2016), critical discourse analysis is used to examine how language and texts are structured by discourse and power. as discussed above, foucault describes discourse as the regulatory framework that shapes knowledge and gives language and text meaning in a given sociohistorical context. discourse can be understood as the negotiated sets of epistemological rules that a given society uses to produce and endorse truth claims and normative behaviours (mills, 2004). for foucault, knowledge, truth claims, and discourse are never neutral, but are culturally negotiated based on power. as he states: truth is a thing of this world . . . and it induces regular effects of power. each society has its regime of truth, its general politics of truth: that is, the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (foucault & gordon, 1980, p. 133) the sanctioned discursive rules of a society render what is deemed intelligible and what counts as truth. therefore, discourse is a force that limits “what can participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 205 be said and not said” (locke, 2004, p. 34), and even what can be thought in a given social context. for mills (2004, p. 10), discourses do not only shape knowledge in a socio-historical context, but they are also a productive force that ensures power relations in that context are maintained. or, as she puts it, discourses “are enacted within a social context, which are determined by that social context and which contribute to the way that social context continues its existence.” providing further elaboration on theories of discourse, cook (2007) reminds us of foucault’s view that power and discourse are not fixed, immutable, or stable, but, rather, contested and constantly in a state of negotiation and collision. cook (2007, p. 17) writes: discourses structure meaning, thought, and action in all realms of social life. but they are not unified or unchanging. there is a multitude or regime of competing, converging discourses circulating in every society, each relevant to a particular realm of social action and subject to challenge and transformation. it is this frailty and fallibility of discourse that those who adopt critical discourse analysis to advance social justice find most promising and productive. in this respect, they take up the method to consider how power discursively organizes speech and text, and disrupt discursive formations that give rise to social inequity (krzyżanowski & forchtner, 2016; rogers, 2004). for example, my choice to use critical discourse analysis to examine how heteronormative discourse structured some of the what’s up doc? films is tied to my belief that this mode of inquiry can interrupt, contest, and help to renegotiate some of the discursive social foundations that marginalize lgbtqia+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning/queer, intersexed, asexual, “+” those who identify with non-heteronormative sexual identities) people and communities. my view relates to foucault’s (1978, p. 101) argument that “discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling bloc, a point of resistance, and a starting point for an opposing strategy.” following this perspective, i recognize how politicizing discourse can open possibilities for re/imagining knowledge and circumstances to support equity and social justice (van dijk, 1993). in this research, critiquing heteronormative and homophobic discourses that structure some of the narratives in the what’s up doc? films gives students, teachers, and me a “starting point” from which to attempt to disrupt taken-for-granted heteronormative powers. this paper represents one element of my critical analysis of discourse and representation in the what’s up doc? program. here, i show how three of the seven 2012 what’s up doc? films were influenced by gendered, sexist, and heterosexist discourses. because what’s up doc? is envisioned to support youth agency, it is vital that we, as the educators and practitioners involved, develop deep understandings of how discourse shapes our work and collaborations. during production of the films, teachers, students, and i would often have conversations about discourses that might be influencing the films matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 206 and representations. i pursue an analysis of these elements in my doctoral research, examining how competing discourses produce meaning and shape representations in the students’ final film texts. for this, i consulted field notes and footage for examples of discourses that teachers, students, and i identified during the program. i also completed a number of close readings of students’ scripts and viewings of the final films. my analysis of narrative representations in the films includes considerations of dialogue and utterances, text title cards, and the selection of shots, camera angles, editing, and character choices. for example, to analyze how discourses around gender and sexuality structure the films, i examine how representational choices in the films can be understood through mulvey’s (1975) concept of the “male gaze.” i also draw on connell’s (2005, 2009) theories on gender, sexuality, and power to articulate how essentialist discourses structure dialogue. the work of scholars who analyze representations of gender in advertising and media texts was also helpful (e.g., giannino & campbell, 2012; schroeder, 2007; schroeder & borgerson, 1998). this type of work helped me explore how the positioning of men and women, and the camera angles through which they are represented, are shaped by discourse. my analysis also considers the films in light of critical concepts like heterosexism and heteronormativity (robinson, 2005) to show how the work may have been structured by, and contributed to, systems of heterosexual privilege. while my analysis here problematizes some representations in the films, many of the discourses that organize the films are critical in nature and support social justice knowledge. for example, the films authorize subjugated knowledges and resist discourses that perpetuate systems of privilege and marginalization in terms of gender and sexuality. however, contradictory representations in the films complicate these emancipatory possibilities. by critiquing the students’ films, i do not mean to undercut the agency or knowledge of the youth involved. rather, my analysis is intended to offer a reminder that all educational practices, even those intending to enact subjugated knowledge and support social justice, are shaped by and cannot escape power. i am also aware that problematic power dynamics limit and shape my analysis. in future projects with youth, i will incorporate time for participatory discourse analyses with youth participants – an approach that may prove to be a better way to represent their voices and contributions and co-construct detailed analyses of their films. my analysis here draws on van dijk’s (1993) insight that making power visible can open important spaces for resistance and discursive re-negotiation. i hope this work can be helpful in identifying and subverting some of the inequitable discursive patterns that influence the what’s up doc? program. participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 207 the films in 2012, seven films were screened to an audience of over 300 at a theatre at the university of new brunswick. the films tackle a range of social justice issues, including the stigma of mental illnesses, the cost of healthy eating in schools, and ability and intelligence. to draw out some of the complexities and tensions involved in using participatory video approaches in schools, my analysis raises questions about discourses of gender and sexuality that structured three of the 2012 films: challenging the norm; that girl: one little heartbeat; and step back, move ahead (table 1) film description challenging the norm this film addresses how sexist and heterosexist discourses and essentialist thinking can be marginalizing in schools. as one student put it, the film challenges thinking like “girls are not supposed to play sports” or “guys are not supposed to be interested in fashion.” that girl: one little heartbeat as a student explained, the film centers on “the struggle that teen parents go through.” it addresses the personal, social, and economic implications of the absence of in-school daycare provisions for teen parents. through interviews with former teenparents the filmmakers suggest that discourses around teen parenting influenced the decision to halt daycare services in their school. step back, move ahead this film explores the economic sustainability of rural communities. in particular, the filmmakers focus on how gas prices increase the cost of living for people living in rural areas. as one student explained: “everyone is moving now, because of the gas… they just can’t afford to live out here the way things are going.” table 1. brief synopsis of student 2012 what’s up doc? films. gendered, sexist, and essentialist discourses both challenging the norm and that girl focus on how essentialized discourses of femininity and masculinity constitute social systems of privilege and marginalization. they trouble determinist and essentialist perspectives that divide men and women into rigid gender categories and draw attention to how patriarchal and heteronormative discourses structure western societies. they also resist gender dichotomies, and show how hierarchal gendered discourses are confining, marginalizing, and lead to violent situations. challenging the norm employs a critical tone by celebrating high schoolaged youth whose performance of gender resists essentializing discourses and practices. feminist scholarship has long demonstrated how essentializing discourses structure a bifurcated view of men and women as having natural, matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 208 opposing, and fixed characteristics that dictate temperament and behavior (launis & hassel, 2015). connell (2009) illuminates the connection between essentialist discourses and power in discussing how these discourses have historically disenfranchised women in the western world. as she states: women are supposed to have one set of traits, men another. women are supposed to be nurturant, suggestible, talkative, emotional, intuitive and sexually loyal; men are supposed to be aggressive, tough-minded, taciturn, rational, analytic and promiscuous. these ideas have been strong in western culture since the 19th century, when the belief that women had weaker intellects and lacks capacity for judgment than men was used to justify their exclusion from universities and from the vote. (connell, 2009, p. 60) as connell and feminist theorists have demonstrated, the dominance of essentializing discourses maintain inequities, patriarchal social systems, and gender-based violence. challenging the norm resists essentializing discourses by taking audiences through four vignettes that show how these discourses contribute to genderbased marginalization. the first vignette involves a young man who applies for a position at a women’s clothing store; the second portrays a female hockey player who encounters sexist gendered assumptions; the third tells the story of a young woman who is ridiculed for her competence in online video games; and the last tells the story of a male football player whose peers degrade him for his interest in fashion. each vignette in the film includes a device the students called a “power statement.” these statements “break the fourth wall,” meaning the characters look directly into the camera to address the audience. through their statements, the young filmmakers question representations of appropriate gender performance and advocate for equitable social acceptance for youth who perform gender in ways that do not reflect essentialized understandings. by challenging essentialized gendered binaries and celebrating an array of gendered expressions, the film relates to butler’s (1990) view of gender as performative. although gender is actively constructed based on the discourses available in a given context, butler’s theory of performativity incorporates agency in relation to how one practices a gendered identity. butler argues that subjects are not passive, but actively involved in producing gender on a moment to moment basis through embodied action. in this way, gender is a verb and not an adjective. the notion of performance creates space to resist and disrupt dominant gender discourses, and leaves room for individuals to explore agency in their performances of gender. although that girl adopts a different theme – the closure of a school daycare program – it also engages in critiques of essentialized gender discourse. specifically, the film examines how dominant discourses of femininity support oppressive social practices that marginalize teen mothers. as the filmmakers explain, teen mothers, and young women who engage in sexual activity, more generally, are often shamed by being represented as participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 209 “sluts” and “whores.” the film shows how discourses of femininity function to mark teen mothers as deviant, thereby legitimizing their social marginalization. these aspects of the films demonstrate how student filmmakers used their work to critique sexist, hierarchal, and essentialist gender discourses. nevertheless, to develop more critical and nuanced understandings of the work associated with what’s up doc?, it is important to recognize how these films, and others in the series, can also authorize marginalizing gendering discourses and practices. step back, move ahead is one example. to address issues of rural poverty, the film employs a series of caricatured fictional vignettes to show how increases in the cost of living disproportionately affect people living outside urban communities. although each of the vignettes is meant to satirize economic structures and classing practices, taken-for-granted elements support demeaning gender discourses. for example, the film positions male characters as dominant and rational, and females as irrational and childlike. young women serve solely as plot devices and objects for men, or they are altogether absent. there are no female protagonists in any of the vignettes. in the first, the protagonist is a young man who wants to borrow his father’s car; in the second, it is a young man who has to sell his truck; in the third, it is the rural male landowner. even a song written for the film, riverbend, tells a story of a man who faces economic hardship. as i have briefly discussed in another text (rogers, 2017), unreflexive casting and character choices in step back, move ahead highlight the structuring influence of patriarchy in the what’s up doc? films. in this paper, i provide additional theoretical analysis of these choices, and of the representations of men and women in step back, move ahead that are organized by discourses of women’s subordination. one vignette in the film foregrounds two teens, whose plans to go on a date are thwarted by the young man’s father. two elements in the scene perpetuate marginalizing gender discourses, the first being the initial exchange between the two teens (one male-identifying and one female-identifying). the young man is depicted as composed and self-confident when he asks the young woman on the date. however, this cool performance is not mirrored in the young woman’s response. after hanging up the phone she screams, “he’s coming at eight!” her reaction in this scene is structured by patriarchal gender discourses that also organize most popular culture media texts. understanding how the male gaze influences media representations is useful to this discussion. for mulvey (1975), dominant western cinematic conventions function to support patriarchal assumptions. in theorizing mulvey’s notions of the male gaze, in relation to reality television, giannino and campbell) (2012, p. 62) citing (gamman & marshman, 1989), explain that: mulvey contends that film serves the political function of subjugating female bodies and experiences to the interpretation and control of a heterosexual male gaze. according to mulvey, any viewers’ potential to experience visual and matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 210 visceral pleasure from watching hollywood movies is completely predicated upon acceptance of a patriarchal worldview in which men look and women are looked at; men act and women are acted upon. she further contends that this distinctly male-oriented perspective perpetuates sexual inequality by forcing the viewer, regardless of gender, to identify with and adopt a perspective that dehumanizes women. on the screen, this translates into constructions of heterosexual men as active doers and constructions of women as objects for men’s pleasure. in recent years, mulvey (interviewed in sassatelli, 2011) and her contemporaries have interrogated some of the initial, deterministic conceptualizations of male gaze (abbott, wallace, & tyler, 2005). unquestionably, the concept of the male gaze can support the view that audiences have no agency and are ”forced” to accept patriarchal worldviews, but i acknowledge the agency of the viewer to support or resist discourse. nevertheless, i remain troubled by demeaning gender discourses in popular visual texts and in step back: move ahead. evolving perspectives on the concept of male gaze help me recognize how elements of the vignette that depict the budding relationship between the two teens can perpetuate oppressive social conditions through dominant gender discourses. the contrasting performance and positioning of the characters perpetuates representations of subordinate femininity. this means that the scene, as i have previously stated (rogers, 2017, p. 234), “has the potential to validate problematic discourses that suggest that young women’s value is only related to their relationship with young men.” in the film, the young man enjoys a position of authority, while the young woman is constructed as a passive sexual object for his consumption. the text constructs the female character as if she is utterly fulfilled by the male character’s attention. the young man is in control, whereas at the prospect of a date, the young woman is represented as animated, emotional, irrational, and almost childlike. in clear contrast, the young man does not reciprocate the sentiment and behaves like the relationship is inconsequential. in reflecting on how the young man is represented as dispassionate, and the young woman as if she thinks she is fortunate to be able to date the boy, it becomes possible to garner how male gaze and patriarchal discourse structure the scene. specifically, the narrative is structured by a discursive arrangement that suggests that women hold a subordinate societal position, and that their social worth is tied to their ability to establish romantic bonds with men. in terms of gender discourses, the exchange between the boy and his father in the next scene is also troublesome. although the scene is satirical and intended to provide an absurd comedic example of the consequences of economic conditions, elements of the vignette are structured by sexist discourse. for example, degrading and objectifying discourses organize the father’s stern reply to the boy’s request for the family vehicle. like his son, the father’s demeanor, and his disregard for the young woman, are shaped by patriarchal discourse when he says, “why don’t you date a girl from participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 211 williamsburg?” – as if the boy’s current love interest is an object he can simply discard and replace with another girl who lives nearby. in this way, the father positions women as objects for men’s pleasure and supports a patriarchial social system. heteronormative, heterosexist, and homophobic discourse gendered discourses and hierarchies in what’s up doc? films are also perpetuated through heterosexist discourses and narrative representations. although some of the students sought to use their films to explore feminist and lgbtqia+ themes, attention to elements of their narrative work shows how some films are also structured by essentializing heteronormative discourse that tacitly support homophobic or transphobic assumptions. queer theories, drawing on poststructuralist and feminist perspectives on gender, have shown how essentializing discourses not only maintain patriarchal privilege, but also co-constitute heteronormativity, heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia (launis & hassel, 2015; eyre, 1993; payne, 2010; rich, 1980). queer theory, as plummer (2011, p. 197) states, “is the postmodernization of sexual and gender studies. ‘queer’ brings with it a radical deconstruction of all conventional categories of sexuality and gender.” by elaborating on theories of gender and sexuality, queer theorists have demonstrated how the dominance of essentializing discourses in societies propagates an assumption that appropriate sexual behavior is based on binary biological sex categories. for queer theorists, this has meant that taken-forgranted essentializing discourses have long constituted heteronormative societies that privilege heterosexual people and marginalize everyone else. as schilt and westbrook (2009, p. 443) explain: heterosexuality – like masculinity and femininity – is taken for granted as a natural occurrence derived from biological sex. heterosexual expectations are embedded in social institutions, “guarantee [ing] that some people will have more class status, power, and privilege than others” (ingraham 1994, 212). the hierarchical gender system that privileges masculinity also privileges heterosexuality. its maintenance rests on the cultural devaluation of femininity and homosexuality . . .the gender system must be conceived of as heterosexist, as power is allocated via positioning in gender and sexual hierarchies. in other words, societies structured by heteronormative privilege, afforded through taken-for-granted essentialized understandings of sexuality, contribute to systems of marginalization and abuse of lgbtqia+ people, or those who do not neatly fit into supposedly natural gender dichotomies. in some ways, all of the films produced through the 2012 what’s up doc? program perpetuate heteronormative and heterosexist discourses, despite the recent prevalence of critiques of homophobic and transphobic violence in schools. in the years leading up to 2012, lgbtqia+ themes were never matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 212 explicitly addressed in the what’s up doc? films, which points to implicit heterosexism and heternormativity. 2012 marked a shift in how explicit students were about sexuality themes. however, a critique of discourses that structure theses films shows how lgbtqia+ themes may have been addressed in ways that perpetuate heterosexist privilege. for example, even though challenging the norm critiques some gendered discourses, it simultaneously perpetuates gendered hierarchies, heterosexism, and homophobia. in one vignette, two boys tease the protagonist – a male football player – for wearing a shirt from the gap, calling him effeminate for having shopped at the store. they articulate “i got it at gap” by elongating the emphasis on the letter “a” in the store name and kinking their hands at the wrist, implying that his clothing choice is inappropriate for a heterosexual male and therefore open to ridicule. although the scene might not explicitly condone the homophobic assumptions presented by the two antagonists, it perpetuates sexist, heterosexist, and homophobic discourse by endorsing pejorative associations to characteristics considered feminine or gay. the heterosexist power in the scene provides an opportunity for critical engagement; however, this opportunity is never seized by the performers. after the two boys hurl insults and leave the frame, the protagonist’s girlfriend offers him support saying, “don’t listen to him, he’s stupid. you are more of a man than he will ever be.” rather than challenging the pejorative notion that his clothes signify gayness, her comment affirms the homophobia of the two boys. she implies that being a “man” (i.e., conforming to hegemonic masculinity that is unquestioningly heterosexual) is a good thing, with heterosexist and sexist discursive implications. her argument reaffirms the homophobia articulated by the two boys. read this way, the young woman’s comment, rather than seizing an opportunity to challenge homophobic discourses, questions the idea that wearing particular clothing is a signifier of homosexuality. in this way the film is organized by a pejorative heteronormative discourse. a similar situation arises in another vignette in challenging the norm, where the filmmakers attempt to disrupt sexist and homophobic discourses that marginalize women in sport. a title card in the film reads, “gender doesn’t influence skill level, gaining confidence and skill doesn’t make you butch.” although this may not have been the students explicit intention, the suggestion that success in sport “doesn’t make you butch” pejoratively construct lesbian, bisexual, or trans women who participate in sport. this exercise of power is reiterated elsewhere in the film. the opening scene depicts the protagonist, a female hockey player, applying makeup and lipstick – signifiers of heterosexual femininity – while dressing in hockey gear. although the vignette challenges gender discourses that associate athletic women (a process of masculinization) with lesbianism, the film simultaneously perpetuates notions that behaviours associated with butchness should be moderated by practices of “emphasized femininity” (connell, 2005). as with the previous vignette, this story presents instances when participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 213 heterosexist discourse could be challenged. for example, comments that the female hockey player “must be butch or something,” and the title-card “being good at sports doesn’t make you butch” present an opportunity to challenge heteronormativity. unfortunately, the critical opportunity was missed. implications and suggestions for educators as this analysis has shown, some of the 2012 what’s up doc? films draw on critical theories to challenge inequitable discourses. the students’ critical intent to create change on social and institutional levels is evident in their efforts to use their films to incite dialogue about topics like gender, class, sexuality, and ability. according to advocates of participatory video, critical and political dialogue among youth peers, and between youth and people in positions of institutional power, can be the roots of political action and social change. the video project, therefore, supports mitchell et al.’s (2010, p. 220) view that “critical awareness and (arguably) empowerment [can] result when media production [with youth is] encouraged.” the what’s up doc? program provided a space and opportunities for critical dialogue among students, teachers, and school administrators during the program, and when the films screened at the film festival. in 2012, this was exemplified when we held a panel discussion after the film screenings to allow the filmmakers to address questions about their films. during the conversations, the students had a chance to continue the critical discussions and institutional critiques they raised in their films with the audience – made up of teachers, administrators, friends, family, and local policy makers. these conversations focused on issues of power, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. all of the films, the inclass discussions, and the festival panel discussion carved out space for critical perspectives on discourse, status quo conditions, and the contemporary social practices that create them. however, this analysis also reaffirms that power does not cease to operate simply because critical or participatory pedagogies have been implemented (ellsworth, 1992; lather, 1991; lather, 1992; rogers, 2016; wheeler, 2012). because many of the discourses that structure the what’s up doc? films contribute to systems of marginalization, there is a need to engage in deep analysis about issues of representation when undertaking participatory video pedagogies with youth. although there are many ways that this analysis can inform practice, curriculum, and policy, below i identify a few of the most important. first, for educators, this analysis demonstrates the need for vigilance in challenging marginalizing discourses that structure participatory filmmaking and critical pedagogy initiatives, as well as the productions themselves. a critical analysis of what’s up doc? reminds practitioners that all texts, even those intended to support social justice, can perpetuate systems of marginalization and power. as educators committed to social justice, we must matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 214 reflect on why and how this happens. at the same time, however, to negotiate practices that are based on collaborative democratic participation, we must also find ways to challenge problematic representations without relying on authoritarian pedagogical approaches that seek to control the direction of students’ work. second, when critical participatory filmmaking pedagogies are adopted, it is vital that projects are not rushed or implemented without opportunities for critical self-reflection. for critical reflection on work to be meaningful, educators and students require structured and consistent opportunities to problematize all texts produced. during our collaborations in the what’s up doc? program, many opportunities for critical analysis were missed or overlooked, which was often a result of our efforts to navigate the politics and complexities of participatory video work in a public school context. had schedules been more flexible and schools open to interdisciplinary programs that permit the exploration of critical themes in more rounded ways, perhaps these politics would be quite different. in the what’s up doc? program, institutional constraints, disciplinary boundaries, and the fact that specific curriculum outcomes had to be addressed by the end of the term, influenced how much time we had and how frequently we were able to engage in critical reflection with students. the rushed context, especially during production and editing phases, usually produced superficial discussion at best. during the early months of the project, we were committed to critical analysis, but as deadlines loomed, our priorities often shifted toward completing a finished, aesthetically pleasing final product for the festival. our preoccupation with production value echoes thomas and britton’s (2012, p. 215) concerns about participatory video aesthetics. they suggest that the value of participatory video work is often framed in a “process/product binary.” for those adopting participatory video methods, it is sometimes favorable to assume that the collaborative process, rather than the media product, is of most value in terms of advancing social justice. this emphasis on process relates to the claim that, as a “tool for social change” (p. 214), participatory video projects can support agency, critical consciousness, and collective action amongst grassroots groups. during the what’s up doc? program, teachers, students, and i had to negotiate how much value we placed on the creative/reflective process or on achieving a final product for the festival. as much as it is favorable to assume (especially in an educational context) that the process is always more important than the final product, it was important for us to remember how these products exist within powerful social and institutional contexts. this recognition relates to thomas and britton’s (2012, p. 216) view that a sole focus on process is problematic, because this overlooks how the media texts that get produced are shaped by and “embedded in social relations. these relations are between facilitator and participants, participants themselves, and participants and audiences.” in the what’s up doc? program, the process of critically analyzing our own film work, particularly nearing the time for the festival, was sometimes participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 215 deprioritized because of concerns related to social, institutional, and audience responses to the work. for example, students had to negotiate how they were creating films to satisfy their teacher’s academic expectations and curriculum outcomes structured by the provincial government. students may have had to think about how their films, and the messages embedded in them, could create tensions or consequences for them in the classroom, or at school. this might have meant that some critical lines of analysis and dialogue were halted before they were even initiated. furthermore, concluding the what’s up doc? program with a formal public event also means that social relations beyond the classroom must be considered. the public festival puts the eyes and ears of peers, parents, teachers, and administrators on these projects. this broader attention adds a layer of pressure and ethical complexity for students and teachers. nearing the time of the festival, teachers and students often begin to consider how their work will be received by a larger audience. in these instances in 2012, priorities sometimes shifted away from content and process, to trying to achieve a high quality aesthetic in the final product. as some students expressed, this was because they wanted to create products they would feel comfortable sharing with audiences. in hindsight, it is apparent how these concerns shifted our attention towards production and aesthetic qualities and away from critical analysis of the aesthetic representations. perhaps bypassing a formal event, like a film festival, at the conclusion of the program could create more opportunities to deconstruct visual representations. had the experience with producing step back, move ahead been less rushed, or if students had been able to discuss the film in other classroom contexts, we could have engaged in discussions about representations of gender in the film during production and post-production processes, rather than simply after the film was complete. had we structured adequate time, or thought more deeply about process and product negotiations, we could have found space for group screenings of footage and discussed questions such as what gender discourses are supported? how might this text perpetuate heterosexism? how does this comment take gender and heteronormativity for granted? even when projects are finished, educators still have great opportunities to challenge discourses that structure texts. teachers and students can explore how the narrative and visual representations might perpetuate hateful notions or inequitable discourses, and generate ideas about what could be done differently next time. in a program focused on social justice, time must be devoted to critical reflection on video products. finally, this analysis demonstrates the value of critical literacies and social justice education in school curriculum, which is currently a significant gap in educational discourse and practice. without such skills and understandings, students will likely reproduce oppressive discourses, as was the tendency in what’s up doc? films. some critical discourses, while subtle and insufficiently nourished, are highlighted in the curriculum document that matthew rogers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 216 influenced the what’s up doc? program. the document, the atlantic canada english language arts curriculum (new brunswick department of education, 1998, p. 134), recommends that literacy programming should encourage students to “explore, respond to, and appreciate the power of language, literature, and other texts, and the contexts in which language is used.” in this way, concepts of power and the social implications of language are given some focus. critical perspectives are also highlighted when the document tasks teachers to have students “respond critically to complex print and media texts” by exploring “the diverse ways in which texts reveal and produce ideologies, identities, and positions” (p. 30). although these words provide space to explore critical themes, explicit reference to critical social theories (e.g., feminist, queer, anti-racist, marxist, dis/ability theories) are completely omitted. this means that the theoretical tools that students and teachers need to engage in critical media analysis are obscured. including curriculum outcomes that focus on critical media literacy explicitly informed by feminist, marxist, queer, anti-racist, post-colonial, and dis/ability theories might better educate students and teachers about how all media texts are structured by discourse and power. furthermore, in the context of participatory media projects like the what’s up doc? program, the inclusion of specific critical theories in the curriculum might encourage students to be more attuned to how power operates within their own media projects and better equip students and teachers to edit or amend their work to make stronger, more inclusive arguments for equity and social justice. this analysis has expanded understandings of the limits and possibilities of critical participatory video projects with youth. the fact that marginalizing and oppressive discourses structured what’s up doc? films affirms loiselle’s (2007) view that video work with youth can foster counter-hegemonic discourses but, at the same time, reinscribe oppressive power relations. this contradiction reminds critical practitioners, like myself, to temper celebratory assumptions and proceed reflexively when engaging with this praxis. the analysis here provides important reminders and examples of how power and institutional and discursive contexts shape and constrain critical pedagogy programs like what’s up doc? it also shows the importance of being attentive to how these initiatives may contribute to the marginalization of the students involved and draws attention to the importance of being constantly vigilant in challenging marginalizing discourses that may surface in the context of critical pedagogy initiatives. it also highlights the importance of developing new critical literacy strategies designed to enable students and teachers to explore how social conditions, issues, and perceived realities are connected to power structures. participatory critical filmmaking pedagogies can be productive tools in educational projects for social justice. however, reflecting on the what’s up doc? program suggests that these pedagogies are complex, ethically intricate, implicated in school power relations, and filled with tension. i hope this discussion has contributed to the growing chorus of critical voices in the field participatory filmmaking pedagogies in schools studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 195-220, 2017 217 of participatory video making. like low, brushwood rose, salvio and palacios (2012), mookerjea (2010), and shaw (2012), i agree that it is important to trouble romantic, celebratory, and non-critical constructions of these approaches. participatory video, on its own, will not bring about youth empowerment; that can only be maximized if the practice is part of broader, critically reflective projects for social justice (plush, 2012; rogers, 2016; walsh, 2012). acknowledgements this research was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada, the new brunswick anglophone school district-west, dr. linda eyre, rina arsenault, and the muriel mcqueen fergusson centre for family violence research. the author would like to thank all students and teachers involved in the what’s up doc? program, the editors of this special edition of ssj, and the anonymous referees for their feedback, suggestions, and criticism. references abbott, p., wallace, c., & tyler, m. 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(1991). participatory action research. newbury park, ca: sage. microsoft word dedication.doc iris marion young, professor in political science at the university of chicago and a pioneering feminist philosopher who made groundbreaking contributions to political philosophy and phenomenology died on august 1, 2006. her work bridged divides between analytic and european philosophy and between high-level theory and grassroots activism. in addition to her contributions as a social theorist, dr. young was a committed political activist who marched with picketing workers in chicago. dr. young died a few months after agreeing to serve on the editorial board of studies in social justice. we dedicate this first issue to the memory of dr. young. jones et al final before ts correspondence address: chelsea temple jones, department of child & youth studies, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: cjones@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 1, 145-154, 2021 dispatch “giving voice” in research: critical community reflections chelsea temple jones brock university, canada bonnie cummings-vickaryous big sky centre for learning and being astonished! inc., canada katherine taylor big sky centre for learning and being astonished! inc., canada this dispatch reflects a series of short back-and-forth dialogues between a postdoctoral researcher, an executive director, and a program coordinator working toward a community-based research project for social justice at the university of regina. through snapshots of our weekly discussions from january to november 2019, we grapple with transforming community-based programming into research, and the potentially unresolvable structural inequalities at work in the research-based studio space known as the vocally oriented investigations for communicative expression (voice) lab. the purpose of this space, established in 2018, is to make room for youth with complex disabilities to explore arts-based storytelling using digital technology that usurps rehabilitative and therapeutic ideals of “giving voice.” our job was to turn this storytelling activity into research. here, we draw on snippets of conversations to show readers some tensions around formalizing our community programming into academic research. we each move away from an unfinished project carrying fears about who is – and is not – listening to the people with disabilities involved in this research, and we make recommendations on what is needed for other academic and community hybrid groups embarking on lab-based community projects. c. temple jones, b. cummings-vickaryous & k. taylor studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 145-154, 2021 146 introduction: setting the scene a campus coffee shop, morning. three white working-age women sit at a square table, tea or coffee in hand. this is our regular, weekly meeting space. two of us staff the big sky centre for learning and being astonished! inc., – better known here as astonished! – and we regularly squeeze into a small office space stuffed with papers, baskets, markers, and other miscellaneous fundraising and program supplies. on one side of the table is bonnie cummings-vickaryous, the executive director of astonished!, a charity that draws on the expertise and knowledge of young adults with complex physical disabilities “to build inclusive communities based on their strengths, dreams, and needs” – as is the group’s often-repeated mandate. cummings-vickaryous is part of a four-person research team that, in 2018, established a new space on campus called the vocally oriented investigations for communicative expression lab – better known as the voice studio. she oversees the programming for the seven disabled people who make up astonished!’s “core members.” also at the table is katherine taylor. as astonished!’s program coordinator, taylor knows the core members intimately. her engagement with these people, who are potential research participants, is crucial to the social justice work at hand, for katherine can communicate with those who do not communicate verbally. many core members communicate with eye movements, sounds, and smiles. finally, the third person at the table is chelsea jones, the postdoctoral researcher who has been getting to know bonnie, katherine, and all of the core members over the past year. january 2019: is research desired or obligatory? it’s mid-winter, and the voice lab has just opened. astonished! core members are slowly settling into a routine that involves weekly studio time with chelsea where they make podcasts, soundscapes, and play around with recording gear and ipad apps. unfortunately, the voice lab is inaccessible by design – it was built with narrow door frames that are a tight squeeze for core members, who all use wheelchairs. only one person can fit into the studio at a time, so the core members have opted for individual creative projects rather than group-geared storytelling. chelsea (postdoctoral research fellow): alright, so, our goal so far has been to acquaint folks with the technologies in the voice lab – ipads, a looper, desktop computers, microphones, and speakers – so that they can get a feel for arts-based research without having to commit to being part of a research project. but now we’ve gotta hatch a research project. “giving voice” in research studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 145-154, 2021 147 bonnie (astonished! executive director): yeah, we do. we, as a community based organization (cbo), have a memorandum of understanding with the u of r that says we must work with the university to develop research opportunities, and to create opportunities for students and faculty to work with people with disabilities. chelsea: so, you already have a pre-ordained agreement with the university that core members will be involved in research from time to time, if they’re up for it? bonnie: yes. and our funders expect that we will do research. programming, as we’ve done so far, isn’t enough to satisfy the funders. chelsea: how do core members feel about that? is engaging in research what they want? katherine (astonished! program coordinator): we know that some members of our community will be interested in research, others not. but i expect that they’ll be more open to research ideas coming from you, chelsea, because you’ve been at “coffee time” for the past several months. february 2019: laying foundations for research at “coffee time” in the early days of our programming, we found that rather than thinking in terms of how the community might get involved with the voice lab, one of the first things we had to figure out was how chelsea – as an outsider researcher – might get involved with the community. the most straightforward path toward the community was via regular “coffee time” hang outs. coffee time takes place regularly at a plain campus food court, where core members bring packaged snacks and to-go drinks to an hour of conversation around a table lit by overhead florescent lights. this “hanging out” was a method of immersing oneself as an outsider in a social experience on an informal level (walmsley, 2018, p. 277). for chelsea, this immersion felt like participant observation and lasted for about five months. she spent coffee time learning people’s names and learning how to communicate with people who do not speak verbally (pfaelzer, 2010). though chelsea was welcomed in many ways, she was also being tested – people asked about the voice lab, about her research question, and about her purpose (jones, 2019). chelsea: okay, so one of the biggest take-aways i have from spending coffee time with folks is that sometimes core members’ experiences with research kind of suck. bonnie: yeah, i know. that’s why we made sure you, as a researcher, spent time with people before beginning research was a good idea. c. temple jones, b. cummings-vickaryous & k. taylor studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 145-154, 2021 148 katherine: eventually we can begin inviting people to the voice lab for research, not just for fun. these invitations will rely on the trust-building that took place during coffee times. rebecca caine and her fellow researchers (2016) reminds us: “each project has a life of its own that is often unpredictable” (p. 35) – and this has proven true. it’s much easier to handle unpredictability when there’s trust already built into what we’re doing. chelsea: it’s clear that i’m an outsider to this world. even though i have a background in critical disability studies, nobody else shares that perspective. stepping away from the books for a while and just sitting, listening, and responding to questions helps. it doesn’t make me an insider, but at least i’m not a stranger. katherine: people trust you. this is good for the university because it means folks are more likely to buy into whatever research you pitch. chelsea: sure, but the purpose of research should never be buy-in for the sake of buy-in – that would be a shitty violation of any trust that’s been built. bonnie: moving forward, we need to design a research approach that’s actually worthwhile for core members. break from discussion: “more conversation, less inspiration” here, we take a break from the dialogue between the astonished! executive director, program coordinator, and the post-doctoral researcher to showcase an emergent example of voice lab work. below is a transcript of an excerpt of core member kelsey culbert’s podcast, “less inspiration, more conversation.” here, culbert tells a story about self-identity. the episode goes on to discuss how, if people would just listen to her, it would make everyday things like getting coffee more accessible. kelsey shares the recordings on facebook to solicit feedback from her community. [podcast transcription] chelsea: so kelsey, what’s new? kelsey: i’d like to start off by telling a story about a research interview i had just last week. the interview was about resiliency and how society views me as a person. however the [interviewer] was very nervous and felt a lot of pity on me. me being the interviewee was like, was like, what are you so nervous about? because the interviewer kept saying, ‘oh my god i feel so bad for you, i feel so bad for you.’ like, i mean, what is there to feel bad about? really? chelsea: let me get this straight. you were being interviewed by someone who wanted to research resilience, and they kept saying that they feel bad for you? “giving voice” in research studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 145-154, 2021 149 kelsey: i, i’m really not interested in your pity, and i really don’t need help. because his follow-up question was, ‘can you drink by yourself?’ and my response was, ‘yeah, i sure can.’ and i took another sip and he became more nervous. march 2019: becoming entangled in institutional agreements in 2017, the astonished! board of directors reached an agreement with the research team: if astonished! was to be the community-based organization named in grant applications about the voice lab, the voice lab would provide core members an opportunity to create arts-based projects. in part, this agreement was made on the premise that community-based arts research projects present opportunities for artistic expression and descriptions of place or environment, as photovoice and digital storytelling projects have demonstrated many times over (dassah et al., 2017; povee et al., 2014; rice et al., 2015). here, we return to that agreement and try to imagine what core members’ creative activities can look like when they become research activities entangled in institutional agreements. bonnie: it’s been months, and we’re still asking: how will this research serve core members? chelsea: well, we might think about whether or not the groundwork we’ve done so far has served the community. for instance, there are two podcasts in production in the voice lab. do these things serve the community? bonnie: yeah, the podcasts serve us because they provide a meaningful opportunity for those who are interested in creating arts-based projects as part of their programming. but we can take this further. we can research how the voice lab serves some people and not others. for example, none of the core members can access the voice lab without a key or without someone to operate the technology. so, the place is only usable to disabled community members when a researcher is there. katherine: why do we have to do research at all? the voice lab already serves the astonished! community without a research component. the same way that our weekly yoga sessions serve everyone, but nobody’s researching it! in some ways that’s the nice thing about the voice lab – that nobody has had to do their creative work under a research gaze… bonnie: from our perspective, the sole purpose of the voice lab shouldn’t be research – but it is. we need to do research to secure our funding. chelsea: one thing we need to think about is that we can’t continue doing all of this in our regular programming without the voice lab being staffed. i mean, we can’t assume that someone can just roll up to the voice lab and make a podcast or build a song on their own. astonished! staff do not have the c. temple jones, b. cummings-vickaryous & k. taylor studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 145-154, 2021 150 technological expertise required to support the astonished! core members. and because the space isn’t accessible, we aren’t properly set up to continue the programming. may 2019: “more conversation, less inspiration” in the months following the voice lab’s opening, several projects emerged: podcasts, mixtapes, soundscapes, ink art, video documentaries, and other expressive forms of communication. we attempted to work on the premise that community-based arts research helps people convey thoughts and feelings in a more accessible way (richards et al., 2019, p. 207). our hope was that our research can do something similar, with a critical focus on audiobased creative expression as a method for resisting ableist tropes around “voice” and “giving voice” (alper, 2017). chelsea: okay, so, here’s the research question i keep coming back to: ‘what does “voice” mean in the context of a burgeoning, but underrepresented, disability art and activism movement on the canadian prairies?’ this is an interesting question to ask in a problematic space like the voice lab. the space got this name before any of us arrived, and it’s a somewhat ironic name because many of the people working there are not using vocal modes of expression – such as talking – as a primary mode of communication. katherine: still, some people are talking as they make their creative projects. think of kelsey’s podcast, for example. can we fold this into the research somehow? bonnie: sure. the plans for how these projects unfold are intentionally very flexible – we want to make sure there’s lots of space for folks to experiment, change their minds… and just be involved in the iterative process of content creation at their own pace. may 2019: competing research goals five months following the voice lab launch, we realized that the community based organization (cbo) and the university had different goals for the research. astonished!’s goals are to: (a) expand access to and build opportunities for young adults with complex physical disabilities to engage in meaningful arts-related activities according to their strengths, dreams, and needs; (b) increase knowledge on assistive technology, software and adapted equipment needed to fully support adults with complex physical “disabilities” to be active artists; and, (c) cultivate cross-disciplinary learning skills and attitudes with collaborating partners and volunteers meanwhile, part of the purpose of the voice lab, from the university’s perspective, is to: (a) make space for and support people who are not “giving voice” in research studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 145-154, 2021 151 professional artists in making art/engaging in creative/crip work in ways of their choice; (b) provide opportunities for community engagement in research; and (c) mobilize regional academic and non-academic audiences with the potential to impact disability communities, researchers, and policy makers concerned with the ways in which disability art and its production are represented locally and nationally. with these realizations at hand, our conversations began to focus on how to reconcile these competing research goals. bonnie: we need to think about ways to grapple with the competing expectations of the research and the expectations of the cbo. we have to curb our practice and think about how what we’re doing can be research that is oriented toward core member’s strengths, dreams, and needs. chelsea: i think we also need to pause and consider what it means for researchers and community members to be accountable to one another’s work in the iterative, co-constructed process of community based arts research at its emergent stages. this is a co-learning process – one that has to emerge over time. bonnie: yeah, but if our goal is to work toward research that meets core member’s needs, we need to focus our activities around our core members’ strengths, dreams, and needs. all of astonished!’s work is grounded in the strengths perspective, which puts a focus on “what people want their lives to be like, and what resources and strengths they have or need to get there” (saleebey, 2009, p. 12). chelsea: okay, but even if both the cbo and the university can find some common ground by focusing on participants' strengths, dreams, and needs, the methodology may be contentious. but, epistemologically, i think we’re coming from the same place: following the work of meryl alper (2017), who ties communication technology to digital equity and reminds us that voice “is an overused and imprecise metaphor – one that abstracts, obscures, and oversimplifies the human experience of disability” (p. 5). katherine: so, we can try to make clear from the get-go that we are not in the business of “giving voice.” chelsea: and, to keep the work critical, we need to tease out the ways in which questions of “voice” and disability crop up at the intersections of class, race, and rurality among others. we also need to uphold “voice” as politically significant. indigenous, critical race, and feminist scholars have cautioned against “giving voice” for some time. it also matters that we’re white and non-disabled, and that most of the core members participating are white. we’re operating in a very white-washed space. c. temple jones, b. cummings-vickaryous & k. taylor studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 145-154, 2021 152 june 2019: anticipated challenges in june 2019 katherine and chelsea are preparing to present on the voice lab research at the canadian disability studies association/association canadienne d’etudes sur le handicap annual conference. we gathered notes from our conversations, with the intention to talk about the process behind the emergent research. our conversations are rife with competing themes: the inaccessibility of the space goes against core principles of disability arts, yet core members are resiliently producing creative content; relationships have been established through coffee time, but these relationships somehow seem at odds with the entanglement of institutional agreements we find ourselves bound within; and, astonished!’s goals and the university’s goals still do not fully align. other challenges are more straightforward, and we present these to our audience: overlapping features that must inform our future methodology in an ongoing way are crip time, access, and diversity. below is part of the conversation leading up to the presentation. bonnie: this research is taking a long time. we need to tell the audience this. katherine: it takes so long! it’s been months and we are still talking about research rather than really doing it. chelsea: some of the delay is around crip time. we need to make extra time for people to account for things like accessible transportation and equipment malfunctions (kafer, 2013). we also need to account for waiting. this might mean waiting on the university to download an app we need for the ipad or waiting for decisions around grant funding for required technology or waiting for someone to let us into the studio – bonnie: – and without automated door openers, core members need to wait for another person to open the doors so they can enter the space. chelsea: we can also point out to a national audience that on the prairies, access exists at the intersections of race, class, and rurality, pointing to the importance of place in our incipient understandings and articulations of disability art here. i mean, sometimes it’s just too damn cold for anyone to make it into the studio, especially if it means waiting for a bus. katherine: also, the studio is still not accessible, and there’s no indication that it ever will be – there’s no budget line for access. so, if people want to engage in research in a collaborative way, and make decisions as a group, that’s hard. it’s important to note that we are expected to do community-based research, but we are not working in a space designed to include everyone. chelsea: while we’re at it, there is no bipoc representation in this research. because we are beginning this project with people who are already on campus and working with astonished!, there has not yet been an opportunity to recruit “giving voice” in research studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 145-154, 2021 153 additional folks. even if we reach a moment where we have time for this kind of recruitment, what can we offer bipoc folks? that’s a rhetorical question, because i suspect the answer may be, “nothing.” the space was seemingly not built with bipoc folks in mind, and it will be difficult to recruit without tokenizing them. katherine: we also face some clear challenges around collaboration and communication. for many people using the studio, part of accessing the studio means keeping your community in the loop. for example, people can also take technology out of the studio. often when people take technology home there’s a learning curve – someone might take a voice recorder or an ipad – and families are left wondering what to do with this stuff. november 2019: recommendations as we grapple with unresolved methodological problems related to crip time, access, expectations around technology and other challenges, we are left wondering how, exactly, we ought to move forward. crucial to the future research planning is the question of presence. it has taken so long to get the research off the ground in inaccessible conditions that our respective time with the core members is coming to an end. in the months leading to this conversation, each woman made an announcement: bonnie told us about her plans for maternity leave; katherine was accepted to nursing school and said goodbye to core members; and chelsea found another job in a different province. we move away from this truncated project with little resolution. we have fears about who will complete this research when we step away, and if the participants we’ve come to know over time will have a say in what happens going forward. in an effort to offer some closing remarks, below is one of our last conversations as a group, which focuses on recommendations for future research of this type. that is, research that involves disabled folks with complex physical disabilities for whom speaking is not always the most effective way to communicate, the university, and a cbo. bonnie: my recommendation is: “go for it,” even though it’s complicated. the benefits outweigh the troubles. doing a project still helps people get a taste of art, so they can go into the community in different ways. katherine: i agree, and if we can add to the literature by doing that, then great. if not, that’s okay too. bonnie: research can help with the larger mission of building inclusive communities, but it is clear that these projects rely on an interdependent approach to research. one lesson we are learning is that we have to collaborate on communication plans for each person’s community, so everyone involved in supporting the artistic creation. c. temple jones, b. cummings-vickaryous & k. taylor studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 1, 145-154, 2021 154 chelsea: i would recommend making sure access is built into the planning of this type of research. a lab space for disabled people isn’t really for disabled people if access isn’t part of the planning. i think it’s okay that the research moved slowly – after all, we value crip time (kafer, 2013) – but there was a lot we couldn’t do simply because the physical space was not accessible, and because bipoc people were not invited to participate. those would be my recommendations for other folks: make the space accessible from the get-go. references alper, m. (2017). giving voice: mobile communication, disability, and inequality. mit press. caine, v., mill, j., jackson, r., & masching, r. (2016). essentials of community-based research. left coast press. dassah, e., aldersey, h. m., & norman, k. e. (2017). photovoice and persons with physical disabilities: a scoping review of the literature. qualitative health research, 27(9), 14121422. jones, c. (2019). that time i punched a boy in the forehead: sibling stories ahead of research. disability & society, 34(4), 657-662. kafer, a. (2013). feminist, queer, crip. indiana university press. pfaelzar, j. (2010). hanging out: a research methodology. legacy: a journal of american women writers, 27(1), 140-159. povee, k., bishop, b. j., & roberts, l. d. (2014). the use of photovoice with people with intellectual disabilities: reflections, challenges and opportunities. disability & society, 29(6), 893-907. rice, c., chandler, e., harrison, e., liddiard, k., & ferrari, m. (2015). project revision: disability at the edges of representation. disability & society, 30(4), 513. richards, m., lawthom, r., & runswick-cole, k. (2019). community-based arts research for people with learning disabilities: challenging misconceptions about learning disabilities. disability & society, 34(2), 204-227. saleebey, d. (2009). the strengths based perspective in social work practice. allyn & bacon. walmsley, b. (2018). deep hanging out in the arts: an anthropological approach to capturing cultural value, international journal of cultural policy, 24(2), 272-291. arat-kocfinal before ts correspondence address: sedef arat-koç, department of politics & public administration, ryerson university, toronto, on, m5b 2k3; email: saratkoc@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 decolonizing refugee studies, standing up for indigenous justice: challenges and possibilities of a politics of place sedef arat-koç ryerson university, canada abstract, this paper interrogates the challenges and potentials for solidarity between refugees and indigenous peoples by bringing decolonial, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist critiques in different parts of the world, including in white settler colonies and in the third world, into conversation with each other and with refugee studies. the first section of the paper offers two analytical steps towards decolonizing mainstream refugee studies. the first step involves identifying, analyzing and problematizing what we may call “an elephant in the room,” a parallax gap between refugee studies and studies of international politics. the second analytical step is problematizing and challenging the popular discourses of charity and gratitude that dominate refugee discourses and narratives in the global north. the second section of the paper engages in a more direct and detailed discussion about challenges to and possibilities for solidarity between refugees and indigenous peoples. articulating historical and contemporary parallels between refugee displacement from land and indigenous dispossession of land, this section demonstrates that there are nevertheless no guarantees for political solidarity. it argues that potentials for solidarity are contingent on a politics of place, as articulated by indigenous and non-indigenous scholars; and also possibly on a reconceptualization and reorientation of refugee identity different from the ways it has been constituted in colonial discourses. keywords refugee studies; international politics; imperialism; indigenous justice; politics of place despite their disparate histories and geographies, and variations in their positionalities, refugees and indigenous peoples share experiences of displacement as well as a problematic, subordinate relationship to the nationstate. in recent decades, the expansionary, predatory nature of global capitalism and a planetary crisis of climate change have posed additional economic and environmental threats to dispossess and displace peoples. these threats, as well as the global rise of nationalism, militarism, sedef arat-koç studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 372 authoritarian populisms and white supremacy mean that solidarities between and among marginalized peoples and groups have gained a new urgency. in recent years, the term decolonization has been used most commonly to address and undo processes of indigenous colonization in white settler colonies. historically, however, the term has been used in relation to a variety of anti-colonial struggles and processes in africa and asia.1 by applying the term decolonization to refugee studies and dominant refugee discourses, this paper attempts to recover and develop a wider transnational analytic, to bring decolonial, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist critiques in different parts of the world, including in white settler colonies and in the third world, into conversation with each other. relying on critical, anti-imperialist observations made in the post-cold war period that have largely escaped attention in academic and political discussions, i suggest that currently there are obstacles to such conversations, primarily rooted in the ways mainstream refugee studies and dominant refugee discourses approach refugee issues and construct refugees. as an essential analytical step towards reflecting on the relations and tensions between refugee and indigenous justice issues, therefore, the paper starts with proposing ways to decolonize refugee studies. bhupinder chimni (1998, 2009) has argued that refugee studies, and more recently forced migration studies, have been largely euro/north centric in their institutional structure and orientation. ironically, even as the vast majority of the world’s refugees live in neighbouring countries in the global south, major research centres and key journals in the field are located in the global north, most theorizing is done in western/northern countries, and solutions are articulated in “north-dominated international governmental and non-governmental organizations” (chimni, 2009, pp. 16-17). based on chimni’s observations, it is possible to elaborate that one of the most important implications of this north centrism in refugee studies has been that the issues discussed and solutions offered are connected to the politically and geopolitically defined interests, priorities and concerns of northern countries: their “security,” their sovereignty, their resources (or lack thereof), their policies and institutions, their “culture,” their labour market needs, and their “refugee crises.” in contexts where there is partial, selective or conditional acceptance of refugees from the global south, the issue is once again presented as western compassion, generosity or “hospitality to strangers.” at the analytical level, i argue that the north centrism of refugee studies has two major implications that lead to colonization of refugee studies and refugee discourses. the first is an “elephant in the room,” an unacknowledged, unproblematized, but ubiquitous presence of international 1 see fanon (1966) for the early conceptualization of the term “decolonization.” in recent years, we continue to see the term used in relation to the independence struggles of formerly colonized states and regions in africa and asia. see, for example, bogaerts and raben (2012) and hargreaves (2014). decolonizing refugee studies, standing up for indigenous justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 373 politics and international political economy, and a curious parallax gap between refugee studies and studies of international politics,2 which lead to implicit presumptions of innocence regarding the role of powerful northern states in the making of refugees. of course, international relations and imperialism are not the only factors in refugee production. exclusionary and authoritarian nationalisms in post-colonial states and the comprador bourgeois relationship of third world elites to global capitalism play very important roles in forced migration. this paper, however, focuses on international relationships, as it is the focus missing in the academic literature and in popular discourses. another implication of this bias has been the tendency in northern discourses to approach refugee protection in a charity framework, one that enables not only an evasion of accountability regarding the conditions of refugee production, but also the expectation of gratitude from refugees, as wards of western states if they are given protection. in parts of my discussion problematizing the charity discourses regarding refugees, i rely heavily on critical refugee studies scholars, specifically those who have been writing from the vietnamese diaspora. as opposed to tendencies in mainstream refugee studies to conceptualize “refugee lifeworlds… as a problem to be solved by global elites” and to be blind to and to take international power relations for granted, critical refugee studies approaches refugee studies as a “site of social, political and historical critiques that when carefully traced make transparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement” (critical refugee studies collective, n.d.). as i try to demonstrate below, challenging the analytical gaps and biases in mainstream refugee studies and discourses has the potential to bring refugee studies into closer discussion with, and more likely to learn from, indigenous knowledge and politics. engagement with indigeneity could potentially inform and enrich refugee studies and discourses in two major ways. first, it could help push the focus in conceptualizations of refugee justice to go beyond policies, practices and experiences of protection or exclusion in migration and diaspora, to also address displacement and injustices in the international politics of refugee production. second, indigenous knowledge could inform a place-based episteme that helps to challenge the logic and discourse of the grateful refugee and also to inspire and inform alternative political subjectivities and collective political visions of another world beyond colonialism, imperialism, interventionism, war, capitalist expansion and environmental degradation. these would be decolonial collective visions that would help people imagine “how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly 2 i borrow the term “parallax gap” from harald bauder (2011). bauder mentions that even though “in settler societies like canada the aboriginal and immigration narratives are factually closely related” (p. 517) they are separated in public and academic discourses. drawing on zizek, bauder names this separation a parallax gap and proposes to close it. sedef arat-koç studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 374 nonauthoritarian, non-dominating, nonexploitive manner” (coulthard & simpson, 2016, p. 254). the paper is organized into two main sections. the first section addresses steps towards decolonizing refugee studies and refugee discourses in order to challenge the parallax gap and the charity framework, and to bring refugee justice into conversation with indigenous justice. the second section directly engages with challenges to and possibilities for solidarities between refugee and indigenous justice. articulating parallels between factors contributing to production of refugees and indigenous dispossession, this section argues that there are nevertheless no guarantees for political solidarity. potentials for solidarity are rather contingent on a politics of place, as articulated by indigenous and non-indigenous scholars; and also possibly on a reconceptualization of refugee identity and experiences different from the ways they have been constituted in colonial discourses. the paper focuses on refugees and forced migrants, as opposed to all migrants, immigrants, “arrivants,”3 or settlers in settler colonies. this is different from the tendency in the recent literature to discuss im/migrant – or specifically, racialized im/migrants – more generally. even though a rigid and dichotomous distinction between forced and voluntary migration is not valid in relation to real life experiences of many migrants, a general category of im/migrants, even non-white im/migrants, is very diverse in their class status (also including business class investors), their motivations for migration, their privileges in transnational mobility, and chances and conditions of belonging in diaspora. for this reason, i suggest that a focus on refugees may be particularly relevant and advantageous in attempts to bring indigenous and migrant justice issues into conversation with one another. by definition, refugees are people who have been forced to leave their place of origin. it can be argued that compared to other groups of migrants, the category of refugee more clearly and profoundly represents a sense of loss, an unresolved and grievable relationship to the places they come from, similar to experiences of land dispossession of indigenous peoples. while this focus is specific, my use of the concept is also wide and flexible, going beyond the narrow boundaries of “refugee” in international law and conventions, and including those forced out of their lands due to economic deprivation, “development” projects, climate change, etc. 3 the term is jodi byrd’s. she uses the term in her transit of empire (2011) to distinguish between white settlers and racialized settlers. decolonizing refugee studies, standing up for indigenous justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 375 decolonizing refugee studies i: naming the “elephant in the room” and addressing the parallax gap between refugee studies and international politics bhupinder chimni (1998, 2009) has argued that there has been a paradigm shift in refugee studies in the post-cold war period. one of the dimensions of this paradigm shift has been the tendency to underestimate the significance of external factors and to rely only on “internalist interpretations of the root causes of refugee flows which la[y] the blame at the door of the postcolonial societies and states” (chimni, 1998, p. 351). what is especially ironic about the post-cold war period is how the tendency to keep analysis of international political economy, international politics, and specifically imperialism, out of refugee studies precisely corresponds to a world context that has witnessed an intensification of corporate globalization and escalation of western political and military interventions. since the early 1990s, northern nations and nato have been conspicuously present on the world stage, actively intervening in the politics of southern nations and contributing to destabilization of vast regions. especially consequential for several southern countries since the 1990s have been so-called “humanitarian interventions” – typically, military operations – used as a pretext for regime change. curiously, in this very context, critical analysis and reaction to some imperialist interventions has been rather mute, most notably in cases of yugoslavia, haiti, libya and syria.4 the changes since the early 1990s have been legitimized through what has been called the “new ideology of imperialism” (furedi, 1994) that started to gain force right after the end of the cold war. whereas an explicit defence of imperialism had lost moral and intellectual legitimacy for the decades following wwii, there were efforts by western ideologues since the 1980s to “morally rehabilitate imperialism” by “discredit[ing]” the third world, “intellectually annihilat[ing] third world nationalism“ (furedi, 1994, pp. 101, 110). it is interesting how this ideology became influential even among respectable mainstream organizations. emerging in the mid 1980s as an offshoot of the highly respectable humanitarian organization médecins sans frontières (msf), liberté sans frontières (lsf), for example, attacked third worldism in two ways. it rejected northern responsibility for third world poverty and underdevelopment and challenged anti-colonial notions of selfdetermination as a foundational human right (whyte, 2019). by the 1990s “the ever strengthening consensus” in the west was that “the problems of the third world stem from its moral and cultural limitations” (furedi, 1994, p. 4 the mutedness, or at times, the confusion, in responses to these cases constitute a stark comparison with the reaction to the 2003 iraq war which was interpreted by most critics as an imperialist war. anti-imperialist critiques of interventions in the former yugoslavia, haiti, libya and syria, however, have been very few and far between. some exceptions are analyses provided by ali (2000) and johnstone (2002) on yugoslavia; engler and fenton (2005) and gordon (2010) on haiti; and engler (2012) on libya. sedef arat-koç studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 376 98). it was, therefore, “not colonialism but decolonization that [was] likely to be treated as problematic” (furedi, 1994, p. 98; italics in original). the perspective that has dominated northern interpretations of some of the southern conflicts of the last few decades is not just “internalist,” but also one that emphasizes the “irrational and uncontrollable” nature of conflict, assumed to be based (only or mainly) in ethnic and “cultural” differences. using a colonial, or what we may specifically call an orientalist lens on third world conflicts, this perspective sees the countries and peoples in the south as unable to govern themselves. 5 the recent proliferation of a vocabulary in international politics which speaks of “failed” and “rogue states” in the global south and “humanitarian interventions” and a “responsibility to protect” by the global north,6 suggests that countries and regions in the global south are perceived as the main source of violence in the world – both in relation to the people living there and as a threat towards the global north – while imperial violence is invisibilized, normalized and legitimized. as james paul, the former executive director of the new yorkbased global policy forum expresses, the official discourse in europe frames the civil wars and economic turmoil leading to the exodus of refugees from africa and elsewhere on “fanaticism, corruption, dictatorship, economic failures and other causes for which they [the europeans] have no responsibility” (deen, 2015). as this official discourse stays “silent about the military intervention and for change in which europeans were major actors, interventions that have torn refugees’ homelands apart and resulted in civil war and state collapse,” paul offers the term “regime change refugees” as a corrective to the dominant perspective on refugees (deen, 2015). in academic and popular narratives of international politics in recent decades, some stories of civil war, genocide and displacement have been widely circulated, but others have hardly been mentioned. whereas specific narratives about rwanda, (former) yugoslavia and syria, for example, have been repeatedly told, there has hardly been any attention paid to the genocide going on in the democratic republic of the congo since the 1990s. in relation to the countries whose stories of genocide and displacement have been told, there is only one narrative that overwhelmingly dominates the interpretations of what has happened and why. this narrative carefully omits any possibility that western countries or north-dominated international institutions may bear responsibility for the root causes and tensions leading to or the exacerbating the conflict. thus, if there are scant references to belgian colonialism in the making of hutu-tutsi tensions in rwanda, there is hardly any discussion of the more recent role that international financial institutions have played in creating and perpetuating the conditions for ethnic tensions (chimni, 1998; collins, 2002). the latter has also rarely been mentioned in 5 see said (1978, p. 33). also see andreasson (2005), on how orientalism has been used in relation to africa. 6 the “responsibility to protect” is a doctrine that has been part of international law since 2005. decolonizing refugee studies, standing up for indigenous justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 377 the case of the ethnic conflict in the former yugoslavia (chimni, 1998). also rare have been narratives that focus on the active political and military roles that nato and individual western states have played in the continuation – rather than peaceful resolution – of civil wars in yugoslavia (ali, 2000; chimni, 1998; gibbs, 2009; johnstone, 2002) libya (engler, 2012), and syria. despite the existence of a parallax gap, references to international politics are not altogether missing in refugee studies. there are indeed a few collections in the discipline of international relations that specifically focus on the relationships among forced migration, refugees and international relations (betts, 2009; betts & loescher, 2011; münz & weiner, 1997). informed by the realist perspective in international relations, however, many of the contributions in these volumes reflect and perpetuate a northern securitization bias in their approach to refugee issues. rather than assuming responsibility for the emergence or exacerbation of conflicts, this perspective assigns and advocates for a central role for the north to “solve” the problems through various interventions, including militarized “humanitarian interventions” for regime change and “economic reconstruction” integrating the country further into global capitalism. when refugees are mentioned in this perspective – as in the foreign policies informed by them – they are treated as “pawns and not concerns,” using violations of their human rights to “justify violence and naked exercise of power” (chimni, 2000, p. 253). in many cases, the claims to “humanitarianism” in foreign interventions go side by side with the rejection of refugees at the borders of the same countries that participate in “humanitarian” missions. the contradiction between these two positions is not problematized, but is often taken for granted in the mainstream of academic research and public discourses. commenting on the afghan war and the “humanitarian” concern in britain for afghan women, gary younge in the guardian exposes the ironies of this concern: so we murder and maim in the name of the common good – not so much a war as a humanitarian effort with the unfortunate side effects of death and destruction. and should those who we seek to protect [by our international military actions] arrive on our shores, all apparent concern evaporates in a haze of xenophobic bellicosity. whatever compassion may have been expressed previously is confiscated at the border. as soon as they touch british soil they go from being a cause to be championed to a problem to be dealt with. we may flout international law abroad, but god forbid any one should breach immigration law here… we love them so we bomb them; we loathe them so we deport them. (younge, 2002) critical voices that see and problematize the ironic connections and contradictions between foreign policy and refugee policy have often been marginalized in public discourse. one could argue that the parallax gap enables, as it also disguises, the irony in a period of (reconfigured and reemboldened) imperialism that there are, on the one hand, no borders for northern foreign policy, its economic policies, and political and military sedef arat-koç studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 378 operations around the world, but absolute borders when it comes to decisions regarding acceptance or rejection of migrants and refugees, who are often themselves displaced and dispossessed by no border foreign policies. decolonizing refugee studies ii: challenging discourses of charity and gratitude the second step in decolonizing refugee studies and refugee discourses would involve interrogating the kinds of subjectivities and relationships imposed on refugees. in the absence of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist perspectives in international politics and international political economy, refugees are perceived either as threats and burdens, or as helpless victims dependent on northern charity. in fact, there is a direct relationship between the absence of critical perspectives on western foreign policy, economic policies and wars, and the dominance of a charity framework in discourses of refugee protection. based on implicit assumptions of a manichean world neatly divided between “refugee producers and refugee havens” (nguyen, 2018, p. 469) – conceptualized in a south-north axis – even “refugeefriendly” liberal-humanitarian perspectives do not see the so-called “refugee crisis” as related to foreign policy. they rather see it as one of inevitable difficulties and shortcomings in adjusting policies, institutions and resources in countries facing sudden, unexpected, large influxes of refugees (belanger & saraçoğlu, 2019).7 the charity discourse posits the global north as absent and innocent in the production of refugees, and as benevolent and generous if – and to the extent that – it may choose to provide any protections. in the logic of charity, benevolence is discretionary and may therefore be extended, as it may also be equally “legitimately” denied. several researchers have pointed out a serious deterioration in the image and status of the typical refugee figure in the post-cold war period. during the cold war, european refugees escaping from the other side of the “iron curtain” were depicted as heroic individuals exercising political agency. perceived as people who had “a past, a story and a voice all of which were used to validate the west in its ideological war” (johnson, 2011, p. 1020), they were seen as ideal subjects for resettlement and naturalization in western countries (johnson, 2011; pupavac, 2008). even though the attitude toward third world refugees ranged from welcoming to ambiguous and outright exclusionary, there seemed to be some ideological value to refugees for most of the cold war period. the post-cold war era witnessed not only 7 belanger and saraçoğlu (2019) focus on a non-western case of imperial aspirations, that of turkey in relation to syria. they point out that turkey’s interventionist “neo-ottoman” policies in the syrian civil war have meant that turkey cannot simply be characterized as a benevolent “passive recipient” of syrian refugees. based on turkey’s political and geopolitical interests and goals, they argue that the “refugee crisis” in turkey needs to be understood also as crises of turkish politics and foreign policy. decolonizing refugee studies, standing up for indigenous justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 379 the loss of the ideological value of refugees (castles, 2003; johnson, 2011), but also increasingly racialized, victimized and feminized depictions of third world refugees as faceless, nameless, undifferentiated masses of humanity, lacking political agency and political voice (johnson, 2011). new discourses associated refugees from the global south with “mass movements, economic opportunism and threats to security,” helping generate and legitimize concerns about “the sanctity of borders” (johnson, 2011, p.1023). along with the diminished humanity, or even outright criminalization of refugees, it has not been surprising that refugee policies in the global north shifted in this period from enabling resettlement and integration to tolerating detentions and deportations, or at best emphasizing “preventive protection,” or temporary protection and repatriation (chimni, 2009; johnson, 2011). i argue that the charity discourse constructs refugees as colonial subjects, and re-colonizes them in a second way, after the violence of their displacement and dispossession. the charity framework denies responsibility for production of refugees – and can therefore legitimatize denial of protection – and defines for the recipient what the nature and conditions of “protection” will be. typically, it demands from refugees a confirmation and legitimization of power relations. this framework creates an enormous societal “appetite for refugee gratitude often leav(ing) no room [among refugees] for other emotions such as bitterness, resentment and anger” (nguyen, as cited by gallagher, 2016). gratitude is perhaps the main affect expressed in post-war refugee narratives (nguyen, 2013), often ironically towards the very state that has waged the war. the charity framework makes the expectation and compulsion to express gratitude so powerful that even for refugees whose displacement has been caused by imperial wars, such as vietnamese refugees in the u.s., “war sufferings remain unmentionable and unmourned” (espiritu, 2006, p. 329). there is, however, an additional element of colonization about the charity logic and the expectation of gratitude following from this logic, something more sinister than simply silencing and patronizing refugees. perhaps most negatively consequential in terms of the potential for solidarities with indigenous peoples is that the charity framework demands that refugees internationalize and celebrate the national myths and ideologies of the receiving state. as powerfully expressed in critical refugee studies, “the refugee’s thankfulness could be dangerously appropriated to justify american neo-imperial ambitions in the past, present, and future” (nguyen, 2013, p. 201). in what she calls “‘we-win-even-if-we lose’ syndrome,” yen le espiritu (2006) demonstrates how, decades after the vietnam war, the u.s. media has manipulated the figure of the “good” and “grateful” refugee to turn the humiliating and difficult memories of “a controversial, morally questionable and unsuccessful” war (espiritu, 2014, p. 1), where the u.s. was “neither victorious nor liberator,” into a war that was “necessary, just and successful” (espiritu, 2006, p. 329). sedef arat-koç studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 380 in 2015, the harper government, not otherwise known for refugee-friendly policies, passed the journey to freedom act to commemorate “the exodus of vietnamese refugees and their acceptance in canada.” analyzing the parliamentary debates preceding the passing of the bill, ang ngo (2016) argues that the discourse of the grateful refugee employed in these debates emphasized narratives of refuge and refugee success, and avoided any emphasis on the violence of the vietnam war and canada’s role in it that led to the exodus of refugees in the first place (p. 71). what vinh nguyen (2018) observes in relation to the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the “fall of saigon” in canada are articulations simultaneously of gratitude for freedom (here) and condemnation of communism. as a “migration narrative that charts the movement from communist oppression to capitalist freedom,” this narrative revises history and passes “as an explanation for the [vietnamese] diaspora” (nguyen, 2018, p. 466; emphasis in original) of the 1970s and 1980s. also writing on vietnamese refugees in the u.s., mimi thi nguyen discusses how the liberal discourse of freedom functions both as a form of subjection and subjectivization (2012, p. 17); how ‘the “gift of freedom” has subjected the vietnamese to the violence of war in the name of freedom; and how, as refugees, it continues to constitute them as racialized – but enthusiastic – subjects of liberal empire. focusing on three vietnamese refugees, nguyen demonstrates the ironical positioning of refugees in relation to the imperial state. first discussed is kim phuc, the vietnamese girl whose photograph of having been burned by napalm became one of the iconic images of civilian suffering during the war. as a refugee, the adult phuc became an ambassador of forgiveness, “whose pardon absolves an empire of the criminality of war,” and whose “grace becomes that which she recompenses liberal empire for the gift of freedom – even napalm” (nguyen, 2012, pp. 86-87; emphasis in original). the other two figures nguyen discusses represent a more direct participation in u.s. national and imperial projects. these were vietnamese refugees who became prominent in the media during the “war on terror,” one as the architect of the patriot act and the other as a weapons designer for the u.s. military (nguyen, 2012). critical refugee studies reveals how refuge is often “employed by the state to legitimize its nationalist projects of violence – of colonial and capitalist accumulation – at home and abroad” (nguyen, 2019, pp. 126-127). contrary to refugee narratives that celebrate upward mobility and assimilation into the nation-state, this kind of analysis offers valuable steps towards decolonization of refugee studies and dominant refugee discourses. when combined with critical, anti-imperialist perspectives on international politics, such an analytical and political project of decolonization has the potential to bring refugee and indigenous issues and politics into closer affinity. decolonizing refugee studies and refugee discourses brings them into a discussion with indigenous politics, partly because it helps define the refugee experience in more holistic terms, beyond one limited to the diaspora – decolonizing refugee studies, standing up for indigenous justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 381 focusing on what happens after the escape, on issues of refugee agency and survival as well as challenges of legal status, labour market status, racism, etc. – to also emphasize displacement from land. this approach addresses the root causes and injustices of refugee production, and the mournability of the loss – of homeland, popular sovereignty, peace, and overall relationship to the place from which one has been displaced. even as he warns against the problems of collapsing indigeneity and diaspora, daniel coleman (2016) emphasizes their relationship, especially when diaspora is interpreted to be a space of forced displacement: these two cultural formations – indigeneity and diaspora – are deeply related to one another because the scandal of diaspora arises from people’s displacement from nativity and natality. that is to say, our sense of the injustice that occurs when people are forcibly displaced arises from the principle of priority, that people should have the right to govern themselves on their ancestral lands. (p. 62) refugees and indigenous justice: challenges and potentials for solidarity meaningful commonalities and parallels in the experiences of displacement, colonization and racialization by indigenous peoples and refugees mean that there are grounds for a politics of solidarity between them. in recent decades, the accelerated threats of climate change, capitalist and imperial expansionism, and politics of authoritarian nationalist populisms and white supremacism, have added to the necessity, urgency and desirability of solidarities across their disparate histories and geographies. in this section, i discuss the potentials for and challenges to solidarity. my argument is that potential affinities and solidarities between groups cannot simply be treated as academic or intellectual matters, guaranteed by objective observable parallels between (some of) their experiences. solidarity is rather contingent on politics, a transformative, anticolonial politics of place which can both address common problems and enable dreams of a collective future based on new principles, radically different from the ones established by settler colonialism. after discussing challenges to solidarity the following section elaborates on the potentials for solidarity between refugees and indigenous peoples: through a politics of place as articulated by indigenous and nonindigenous intellectuals, and reorientation of refugee identity. historically, we can identify a number of meaningful parallels and relations between developments in europe and colonization of the americas. commenting on the commemorative events marking 500 years of columbus’ arrival in the americas, ella shohat (1992) points out that there has been no acknowledgement, even in the counter-quincentenary events, of the relation between two important events that took place in 1492. reminding us that 1492 was the year when approximately three million muslims were defeated and around 300,000 jews were expelled from spain, shohat argues that the sedef arat-koç studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 382 correspondence between the two 1492s was not accidental, but rather politically, economically, and ideologically linked. the “discovery” of the americas, according to shohat, was made possible largely by the wealth confiscated from jews and muslims in spain. clarifying that she is not suggesting an exact equivalence between the treatment of muslims and jews in spain and of indigenous peoples in the americas, shohat nevertheless argues that there was a significant relationship between the two. in addition to the economic linkages between the two events, she discusses how “european christian demonology pre-figured colonialist racism” (shohat, 1992, pp. 96-97), and how the discourses about muslims and jews constituted some of the elements of the racism against indigenous peoples. some historical scholarship discusses how the “enclosure movement” which involved capture of the commons and the dispossession, impoverishment and eventual proletarianization of the peasantry, first took shape in britain and then became the model for colonization in north america, africa, india and oceania (greer, 2012; thompson, 1993). however, historical experiences of oppression in europe (e.g., for the irish during the potato famine, the dispossessed peasantry or the working classes) have not translated into a solidaristic relationship to indigenous peoples among europeans migrating to the colonies. rather, those oppressed in europe have turned into settler colonizers, invested in the settler colonial project as both an individual and collective solution to the social and economic crises they faced in europe. even for recent refugees from the third world, acknowledging their own colonial or post-colonial experiences in the countries of origin and experiences of exclusion and racism in diaspora provide no guarantees that they would necessarily identify with an indigenous project of decolonization. daniel coleman (2016) suggests that the goals of refugees and migrants are often expressed in a “politics of inclusion,” whereas those of indigenous peoples are expressed in a “politics of separatism and sovereignty” (p. 62). he specifically mentions tensions between indigenous commitments to literal places as compared to “diasporic distrust of nativism and its reputed essentialism” (coleman, 2016, p. 61). settler colonialism often involves complex and contradictory relationships between colonialism and racialization, placing racialized groups in a precarious continuum of racial hierarchy, rather than in a simple dichotomy against white settlers. eve tuck and k. wayne yang (2012) observe that in settler colonial states, “the refugee/immigrant/migrant is invited to be a settler in some scenarios, given the appropriate investments in whiteness, or is made an illegal, criminal presence in other scenarios” (p. 17). we can think about the “model minority” discourse as one of the ways in which racialized groups may be seduced to adopt settler subjectivity. as nishant upadhyay (2016, 2019) demonstrates, myths of “model minorities” are typically constructed against a backdrop of unmodel-others. whereas some authors emphasize the presence of the black-other in the making of model minorities in the u.s., decolonizing refugee studies, standing up for indigenous justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 383 upadhyay underlines the ubiquitous presence of the native-other in canada and the u.s. he suggests that “complicity and opportunistic alliances between whites and non-indigenous and non-black racialized communities (re)produce not just anti-black racism and white supremacy but settler colonialism and anti-native racism as well” (upadhyay, 2016, p. 252). however, as tuck and yang’s (2012) statement above suggests, processes of racialization operate in ways that never guarantee safe and equal belonging, even for “model minorities.” bonnie honig (1998) argues that dominant american discourses on immigrants often contain expressions of xenophilia side-by-side with expressions of xenophobia. she demonstrates how the figure of the “good” immigrant is often used to celebrate the virtues and values attributed to the nation, to show the disenchanted that the regime is worthy, and to discipline the poor, domestic minorities, and unsuccessful immigrants, by showing them that the system is fair. honig also argues, however, that “nationalist xenophilia tends to feed and nurture nationalist xenophobia as its partner” (p. 3, emphasis in original). we could argue that in the absence of an antihegemonic project of solidarity, a dance of xenophobia and xenophilia in nationalist discourses may potentially work to spread and strengthen the hegemony of settler colonialism, through the insecurity, anxiety, and desire for belonging it produces among racialized immigrants. despite tensions and challenges to solidarity, there have been a number of individual and collective attempts – with varying degrees of success – by some migrant justice activists in the canadian context to build solidarity with indigenous activists (fortier, 2015). 8 migrant justice activists who have attempted these initiatives of solidarity often come from open borders and no borders perspectives.9 as we see in the development of a canadian debate, however, some formulations of no borders have led to specific tensions with indigenous politics. in 2005, indigenous scholar bonita lawrence and anti-racist scholar enakshi dua published a co-authored article that critiqued anti-racist theory and practice for excluding indigenous peoples and perspectives. they argued that one of the main tensions between the two was based on “the postcolonial emphasis on deconstructing nationhood” (lawrence & dua, 2005, p. 131), which negatively impacted indigenous politics. lawrence and dua warned that the tendency of these theories of nationalism to “denigrate nationalism as representing only technologies of violence,” or to ‘reif(y)… categories that can degenerate into fundamentalism or “ethnic cleansing”’ (2005, p. 131) 8 fortier (2015) demonstrates how migrant justice activists have changed their slogans in order to make linkages to indigenous politics and establish alliances with indigenous activists. it seems, however, that none of the slogans have resonated successfully with indigenous activists. 9 it is important to recognize that open borders and no borders positions are theoretically, philosophically and politically informed and inspired by a variety of perspectives, including political and economic liberalism (bauder, 2015). only some of these perspectives prioritize a politics of anti-racism and migrant justice. sedef arat-koç studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 384 have particularly negative ramifications for indigenous peoples living under colonialism. a response to this article by nandita sharma and cynthia wright (2008/2009) reiterated a rather over-general(ized) and absolute critique of nationalism and sovereignty and argued for “decolonization without nationalism” (pp. 121, 128). stating that naturalizing indigenous connection to the land constituted autochthonic thinking (assuming being native to a specific area), they critiqued indigenous claims to belonging and ownership of a place. arguing that this thinking is (always and necessarily) embedded in and in turn fosters capitalist globalization (p. 124) and “neoracist politics,” they suggested that it hinders more egalitarian and universalistic visions of redistribution. this rather generalized, absolute critique of any and every form of nationalism denies any liberatory potential to (any kind of) nationalism and any notion of sovereignty. conceptual equation of imperial, anti-colonial third world and indigenous nationalisms implies that they are all (equally) delegitimized. not only does this position overlook the nuances and sophistication of indigenous debates on sovereignty, it also potentially silences and disarms some of the contemporary critiques and politics against imperialism in the third world. while it is of utmost importance to exercise caution and vigilance against potential tendencies in nationalism towards “violent nativism” and “essentialist sovereignty” (coleman, 2016, p. 73), these dangers are not present in the approaches current indigenous theorizing and activism take in relation to land and sovereignty. what we can observe instead are elements that open the way towards a solidaristic politics of place. contrary to fears of particularistic, parochial and xenophobic expressions of identity based in ethnicity, conceptions of indigenous identity and visions of indigenous politics and sovereignty articulated by leading indigenous intellectuals and activists emphasize an oppositional, anti-colonial political identity. there are no simple or exclusive references to either ethnicity or “tradition” in the way two leading indigenous scholars in canada, taiaiake alfred and jeff corntassel, for example, define indigenousness. openly arguing against ethnic and indigenous identities as artificial and state-created identities, alfred and corntassel (2005) use the term indigenousness in clearly contextualized and political terms, defining it as “an identity constructed, shaped and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism” (p. 597): it is this oppositional, place-based existence, along with the consciousness of being in struggle against the dispossessing and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign peoples, that fundamentally distinguishes indigenous peoples from other peoples of the world. (alfred & corntassel, 2005, p. 597) glen coulthard (2014) and andrea smith (2011) vigorously criticize essentialist conceptions of indigenous identity. coulthard (2014) articulates a scathing critique of the false promise of recognition in the colonial politics of reconciliation recently dominating settler-indigenous relations in liberal decolonizing refugee studies, standing up for indigenous justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 385 canada. smith (2011) criticizes the approach to native studies, popular among some native and non-native scholars alike, that is preoccupied with identity and cultural representation. she agrees with sandy grande who finds this approach to be “obscur[ing] the social and economic realities facing indigenous communities, substituting a politics of representation for one of radical social transformation” (smith, 2011, p. 56). glen coulthard (2010) clarifies that the conception of land or place in indigenous politics and ethics is very different from a thing or object over which indigenous peoples would claim exclusionary rights. instead, it ought to be understood as a field of “relationships of things to each other.” place is a way of knowing, experiencing, and relating with the world… this, i would argue, is precisely the understanding of land and/or place that not only anchors many indigenous peoples’ critique of colonial relations of force and command, but also our visions of what a truly post-colonial relationship of peaceful co-existence might look like. (coulthard, 2010, pp. 79-80) glen coulthard and leanne simpson (2016) call for a politics informed by the ethical frameworks of “grounded normativity” and “place-based solidarity”: grounded normativity teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitive manner. grounded normativity teaches us how to be in respectful diplomatic relationships with other indigenous and non-indigenous nations with whom we might share territorial responsibilities or common political or economic interests. our relationship to the land itself generates the processes, practices, and knowledges that inform our political systems, and through which we practice solidarity. (p. 254) elaborating on “grounded normativity,” simpson (2017) clarifies that it generates alternative conceptualizations of nationhood and governmentality that “aren’t based on enclosure, authoritarian power and hierarchy” (p. 22). taiaiake alfred (2010) envisions decolonization as a common future of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, which would be based on a radical imagination, a different set of values and principles than the ones canadians and americans have and continue to live with: would it be possible for people cultured in the north american mainstream to reimagine themselves in relation to the land and others and start to see this place as a real, sacred homeland, instead of an encountered commodity destined to be used and abused to satisfy impulses and desires implanted in their heads by european imperial texts?… in order to decolonize, canadians and americans have to sever their emotional attachment to their countries and reimagine themselves, not as citizens with the privileges conferred by being a descendent of colonizers or newcomers from other parts of the world benefitting from white imperialism, but as human beings in equal and respectful relation to other human sedef arat-koç studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 386 beings and the natural environment. this is what radical imagination could look like. (pp. 5-6) as the above discussion clarifies, there are strong perspectives and arguments in indigenous thought that address and counter what coleman (2016) calls “diasporic distrust of nativism and its reputed essentialism” (p. 61). non-indigenous scholars have also articulated thoughts on a politics of place. arif dirlik (2001) argues that a politics of place can be an alternative to what he problematizes as the two dominant and competing political logics of the present: essentialist identity politics and ethnic nationalism, on the one hand; and placeless politics of neoliberal imperial cosmopolitanism and globalism, on the other. advocating for a form of politics informed by places, dirlik and roxann prazniak (2001) distinguish “place-based politics” from essentialist “place-bound” nativism or ethnicist politics (p. 11). their notion of place parallels coulthard’s (2010) notion of place as “a way of knowing, experiencing, and relating with the world” and as “a field of ‘relationships of things to each other’” (pp. 79-80). defined as a metaphor for groundedness, rather than as geographic location, dirlik’s (2001) notion of place defies parochial boundaries and reified identities: “place as a metaphor suggests groundedness from below, and a flexible and porous boundary around it, without closing out the extralocal, all the way to the global” (p. 22). place-based thinking allows for a political consciousness that is based on a historicized and contextualized understanding of the relationships between people and the environment, and among and between different peoples who have co-existed and interacted in places over time. place-based politics may bring people together not only around various shared concerns – ecological, social, economic and political – but also on the basis of “recognition of a common destiny at the local level” (dirlik & prazniak, 2001, p. 10) and a desire to resolve issues democratically. dirlik and prazniak (2001) explain that the reason they prioritize placed-based politics is “not to close out options for action at the level of national or global spaces, but merely to reassert the priority of place-based practices for any democratic resolution of the problems of livelihood and social coexistence” (p. 11). as articulated by indigenous and non-indigenous scholars, intellectuals and activists, place-based thinking and politics allow for ways to remember, acknowledge, and address historical tensions and injustices among peoples, while also enabling an imagination of a just and peaceful co-existence and a different relationship to land. the kinds of visions offered by indigenous scholars for decolonization and sovereignty summarized earlier provide glimpses into what a politics of place in settler colonies may potentially look like. these visions are radically different from those of (neo)liberal multiculturalism which promises reconciliation and peaceful co-existence, but leaves existing socio-economic structures and power hierarchies unquestioned and intact. decolonizing refugee studies, standing up for indigenous justice studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 387 the possibility and will on the part of refugees to participate in a politics of place with indigenous peoples may depend partly on a reconceptualization and reorientation of their identity as refugees. vinh nguyen (2019) offers the notion of refugeetude as a potential pathway to solidarity. “[c]halleng[ing] conventional understandings that confine refugee to a legal definition, short time frame, and pitiful existence,” “a cloak that can easily be shed with the coming of refuge,” nguyen (2019, p. 111) suggests that the notion of refugeetude, referring to “a continued state of being and a mode of relationality” offers “a critical reorientation, an epistemological shift in how we think about and understand the category refugee.” with the “intensified production and criminalization of refugees” (p. 111) in the present conjuncture, nguyen emphasizes that many refugee stories are not about “successful integration and gratefulness towards the nation-state,” but rather about “socioeconomic and affective precarity” (p. 123). acknowledging that many refugees may indeed yearn for national belonging and therefore accept assimilation, nguyen nevertheless sees refugeetude as not “subscrib(ing) to what arendt calls a ‘false’ or ‘insane’ optimism, in which refugees hold out hope for total assimilation into a national body politic” (pp. 121-122). instead, he suggests that refugeeness may be “a catalyst for thinking, feeling, and doing with others – for imagining justice” (p. 111). drawing and building on hannah arendt, for nguyen “the keeping of refugeeness affords the refugee a more expansive vision of history and politics.” (2019, p. 123). it is through this vision that “refugee subjects can make crucial linkages between themselves and others who have undergone and are undergoing similar experiences within the ‘national order of things,’ including migrant, undocumented, racialized, and indigenous groups” (nguyen, 2019, pp. 123124). the concept of refugeetude can contribute to a reconceptualization of the identity and experiences of refugees in a direction that decolonizes them, potentially freeing them from the discourses of charity and gratitude discussed earlier. the complexities and contradictions offered by refugeetude provide some potential – without any guarantees – to start conversations and acts of solidarity around visions of justice among various groups in settler colonies who have various complicated histories and contentious relations with the imperial and national state. conclusion: the “right to escape” and the “right to stay put” i have suggested that engagements between refugee and indigenous notions of justice would benefit from an analytical perspective (and politics) that challenges compartmentalization and binary thinking, bringing experiences of anti-colonialism in the americas and other white settler colonies into conversation with the third world. such engagements would need to be done not through “colonial equivocation,” as an immigrant or refugee “move to sedef arat-koç studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 388 innocence” (tuck & yang, 2012, pp. 17-19), but rather by recognizing the specificity of decolonial thought and struggles in different contexts, avoiding “collapsing the different systems of colonialism [and contemporary imperialism], their distinct histories and racial formations” (tabar & desai, 2017, p. xii). refugee studies separated from international politics and international political economy, deprived of a critical (and specifically, anti-imperialist) analysis of international politics, would at best produce a liberal approach to refugee movements emphasizing individual freedoms, rights to mobility and a “right to escape” (mezzadra, 2004). unproblematizing and perhaps normalizing escape, this approach fails to connect with and address indigenous concerns about land and sovereignty. i suggest that decolonizing refugee studies also needs to involve analysis that engages with causes of refugee flows and a politics about changing the world in a positive direction to prevent the urgent need for such flows. the latter would need to be a transnational, but also a place-based politics. as dirlik and prazniak’s (2001) grounded but also porous notion of place suggests, there is no contradiction between the two. this is a politics that can confront colonialism and ongoing imperialism, as well as inequalities and environmental catastrophes at local, national and global levels. it would also need to be a politics that engages with rights to self-determination and inclusive popular, democratic sovereignty. this means that, as much as a “right to escape,” a decolonized refugee studies also needs to insist on what we may call a right to stay put. in expanding their notions of justice, and envisioning, imagining alternative futures of co-existence, refugee discourses have a lot to learn from, and be inspired by, indigenous thought and politics. references alfred, t. 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(2014). body counts: the vietnam war and militarized refugees. university of california press. fanon, f. (1966). the wretched of the earth. grove press. fortier, c. (2015, september 21). no one is illegal, canada is illegal! negotiating the relationships between settler colonialism and border imperialism through political slogans. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society. https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/no-one-is-illegal-canada-is-illegalnegotiating-the-relationships-between-settler-colonialism-and-border-imperialism-throughpolitical-slogans/ furedi, f. (1994). the new ideology of imperialism: renewing the moral imperative. pluto press. gallagher, b. (2016). the thinnest line: when does a refugee stop being a refugee? university of waterloo magazine. https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/spring-2016/feature/thinnest-line gibbs, d. (2009). first do no harm: humanitarian intervention and the destruction of yugoslavia. vanderbilt university press. gordon, t. (2010). imperialist canada. arp books. greer, a. (2012). commons and enclosure in the colonization of north america. the american historical review, 117(2), 365-386. hargreaves, j. (2014). decolonization in africa (2nd ed.). routledge. honig, b. (1998). immigrant america? how ‘foreignness’ solves democracy’s problems. social text, 56, 1-27. johnson, h. (2011). click to donate: visual images, constructing victims and imagining the female refugee. third world quarterly, 32(6), 1015-1037. sedef arat-koç studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 371-390, 2020 390 johnstone, d. (2002). fool’s crusade: yugoslavia, nato and western delusions. pluto press. lawrence, b., & dua, e. (2005). decolonizing antiracism. social justice, 32(4), 120-143. mezzadra, s. (2004). the right to escape. ephemera, 4(3), 267-275. münz, r. & weiner, m. (1997). migrants, refugees and foreign policy. berghahn books. ngo, a. (2016). “journey to freedom day act”: the making of the vietnamese subject in canada and the erasure of the vietnam war. canadian review of social policy, 75, 59-86. nguyen, m. t. (2012). the gift of freedom: war, debt, and other refugee passages. duke university press. nguyen, v. (2013). our hearts and minds: (post) refugee affect and the war in vietnam. [doctoral dissertation, mcmaster university]. macsphere open access dissertations and theses. nguyen, v. (2018). commemorating freedom: the fortieth anniversary of “the fall of saigon” in canada. canadian review of american studies, 48(3), 464-486. nguyen, v. (2019). refugeetude: when does a refugee stop being a refugee? social text, 37(2), 109-131. pupavac, v. (2008). refugee advocacy, traumatic representations and political disenchantment. government and opposition, 43(2), 270-292. said, e. (1978). orientalism. pantheon. sharma, n., & wright, c. (2008/2009). decolonizing resistance: challenging colonial states. social justice, 35(3), 120-138. shohat, e. (1992). staging the quincentenary: the middle east and the americas. third text, 6(21), 95-106. simpson, l. b. (2017). as we have always done: indigenous freedom through radical resistance. university of minnesota press. smith, a. (2011). against the law: indigenous feminism and the nation-state. affinities, 5(1), 5669. tabar, l., & desai, c. (2017). decolonization is a global project: from palestine to the americas. decolonization: indigeneity, education and society, 6(1), i-xix. thompson, e. p. (1993). customs in common. the new press. tuck, e., & yang, k.w. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education and society, 1(1), 1-40. upadhyay, n. (2016). “we’ll sail like colombus”: race, indigeneity, settler colonialism, and the making of south asian diasporas in canada. [doctoral dissertation, york university]. yorkspace institutional repository. upadhyay, n. (2019). making of “model” south asians on the tar sands: intersections of race, caste and indigeneity. critical ethnic studies, 5(1-2), 152-173. whyte, j. (2019). morals of the market: human rights and the rise of neoliberalism. verso. younge, g. (2002, august 19). under a veil of deceit. the guardian. www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/19/afghanistan.immigrationandpublicservices mahrouse final feb 7 17 correspondence address: gada mahrouse, simone de beauvoir institute & women’s studies, concordia university, 1455 de maisonneuve blvd. w., montreal, qc, h3g 1m8; email: gada.mahrouse@concordia.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 160-169, 2017 dispatch from knowledge consumers to knowledge producers: a project in decolonizing feminist praxis gada mahrouse concordia university, canada soon after idle no more emerged in canada in 2013, the faculty and students of the simone de beauvoir institute of concordia university in montreal released and circulated a statement declaring our feminist solidarity with the movement.1 the statement emphasised that we regard idle no more as an extension of a long history of initiatives by inspiring women who have been on the frontlines of first nations and indigenous organizing in canada. as members of a canadian university built on mohawk/anishnaabeg territory, we felt compelled to address how educational systems and structures are complicit in the ongoing state violence against indigenous people, by committing to supporting the struggle for indigenous sovereignty through our curricula, teaching, and community involvement. i was proud of the commitment we made. i had been teaching an advanced undergraduate level “post/de-colonial feminisms” course at this women’s studies institute for many years and was pleased that the subject matter would now be included in my colleagues’ syllabi as well. our institute’s explicit solidarity with the idle no more movement also motivated me to renew my course by using pedagogical approaches that would more actively support struggles for indigenous sovereignty at the community level. after all, praxis, or turning theory into practice, is the cornerstone of feminist teaching and learning. to me this meant that a course on colonialism being offered in canada would not only present students with a comprehensive understanding of the systemic violence that indigenous women here face, it would also offer opportunities to engage with the issues in concrete ways. 1 the statement was released on january 28, 2013, the “global day of action” with idle no more (see http://wsdb.concordia.ca/about-us/official-position-on-issues/documents/idle_no_more.pdf) from knowledge consumers to knowledge producers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 160-169, 2017 161 this dispatch describes and reflects on a project that i developed to achieve this goal. specifically, it describes a semester long campus-community partnership with a grassroots solidarity collective working to raise awareness on the “missing and murdered” indigenous women in canada. the project simultaneously sought to teach undergraduate students about (a) the violence facing indigenous women in canada and the disgraceful state indifference to it, and (b) feminist praxis, especially vis-à-vis the power relations embedded within knowledge production and solidarity practices. drawing from students’ work and reflections on the campus-community partnership, as well as my perspective as the course instructor, i conclude that despite some significant challenges, the project succeeded at helping students understand the complexities of knowledge production within colonial relations of power. reconciling “post”-colonial theory with “de”-colonizing practices the overall objectives of the course are to offer students (a) an understanding of the historical and contemporary ways in which gendered and sexualized violence and dominance is enacted through colonialism; (b) the theoretical and methodological tools to critically apply post and decolonial theories; and (c) opportunities to learn about resistance to colonialism, and decolonizing activist strategies and movements. to meet these objectives, i frame the course through derek gregory’s (2004) notion of “the colonial present,” and explain that the course will be comprised of a series of discussions on what the legacies of colonialism have to do with present-day challenges. i also explain that a central aim of the course is to interrogate the “post” in the field of postcolonial studies vis-à-vis neo-colonial social, economic, and political relations. when i introduce the course to students, i define postcolonialism as a set of perspectives and tools for examining knowledge, representations and power. borrowing from tuck and yang (2012), i define decolonization as fundamentally concerned with land, space, sovereignty, reparations, and selfdetermination – that is, physical, economic and legal demands. the required readings that i assign correspond with these two conceptual orientations. one set of readings is comprised of seminal postcolonial theorists including gayatri spivak (2006), frantz fanon (2007), edward said (1978), stuart hall (2007), lila abu-lughod (2007), and sara ahmed (2000). the second set addresses settler colonialism, especially in canada. these readings include the works of patricia monture-angus (1995), linda tuwahi smith (2007), winona stevenson (1999), kiera ladner (2009), glen coulthard (2007), eve tuck (2013), leanne simpson (2011), and margaret kovach (2013). as a method of bringing postcolonial and decolonising perspectives together, the course is structured so that the readings move us back and forth between theories and practices, from the global to the local, and from the past to the present. given the fraught politics of knowledge production vis-à-vis gada mahrouse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 160-169, 2017 162 colonialism, the course devotes a significant amount of time to discussing research ethics and policies that have been developed to restrict research, to ensure that research on indigenous communities must be conducted by or with indigenous peoples in canada (government of canada, 2014; schnarch, 2004). in sum, i have taken a critical feminist approach to teaching about colonial power relations in ways that make students aware of the complex ethics and politics of representation, solidarity, and knowledge production. to this end, i insist on an awareness of positionality, a critique of liberal helping and rescue narratives, and a heightened sense of the subtle ways in which racial and patriarchal dominance is re-enacted to continually favour settlers and disenfranchise indigenous peoples. the course has worked well over the years that i have taught it and course evaluations indicate that students find it rewarding. nonetheless, i wanted to find a way to connect it more directly to the immediate and local reality of missing and murdered indigenous women. drawing on the long-standing activism and advocacy of indigenous women who have fought to place this racialized gendered violence in the mainstream of canadian public discourse, and who have worked tirelessly to document some of the underlying causes of this violence (i.e., widespread and entrenched racism and misogyny, ongoing settler colonialism, police neglect and violence, poverty and marginalization), my desire was to bridge the theories of this course with concrete efforts to end the systematic violence experienced by indigenous women living in quebec and canada.2 that is, as a feminist educator who is committed to community engagement and praxis, i was determined to find a way of teaching about this topic that would be both impactful at a community level while remaining rigorous in its scholarly and pedagogic approach. at the same time, i was concerned about reifying both rescuer and victim positionings, and with the problem of researching the situation of indigenous women while attempting not to speak for them or turn them into spectacles. 3 after consulting writings on “feminist-infused” participatory action research (lykes & herschberg, 2012), and social action curriculum (schultz, baricovich & mcsurley, 2010), i decided to approach missing justice (mj), a local feminist collective that works in accordance with the needs and initiatives expressed by indigenous communities and organizations in québec.4 members of mj work in solidarity with indigenous women’s groups towards ending systemic violence against indigenous women and their communities. the mj collective focus much of their efforts on offering “teach-ins,” and therefore seemed especially appropriate for a university partnership. as they explain, “we recognize that the discrimination and 2 see, e.g., amnesty international (2004, 2009); hunter (2005); anderson, kubik, hampton, et al. (2010); kubik, bourassa, & hampton (2009); mcivor (2004). 3 none of the students that year had self-identified as indigenous. 4 in montreal, there is a community university research exchange program (cure) that facilitates these types of partnerships with the local movements and activist organizations (www.qpirgconcordia.org/cure/). from knowledge consumers to knowledge producers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 160-169, 2017 163 violence that affects indigenous people in quebec has roots in the miseducation of our young people. we are interested in demanding changes in the education provided in the quebec education system” (missing justice, n.d.). in conversation with some members of this collective,5 i proposed the idea of students in the course developing a collection of resources that can be used for the teach-ins that mj offer. as i needed students’ buy-in, on the first day of class i presented students with two options. either we could follow the conventional syllabus i had been using in previous years, or we could embark on this campus-community partnership with mj. i explained that the latter would involve a lot of uncertainties, because their work would be collaborative and produced collectively. i also cautioned that as the project strives toward reflecting ongoing and active processes of decolonization, the work undertaken would have to be approached with an awareness of each participant’s individual relationship to this systematic and many-layered violence. the students unanimously agreed to develop the social action curriculum partnership. they were especially enthusiastic about the idea that their coursework would have a practical application for the community partner. integrated learning and the creation of decolonial feminist knowledge the semester-long project resulted in what has been described as “learning in the making” insofar as it allowed the students to determine what is most important and relevant to them (ellsworth, 2005, in schultz, baricovich, & mcsurley, 2010 p.370 ). in all, students produced five modules based on each of the pillars mj uses in their teach-ins to raise awareness on violence against indigenous women in quebec and canada: (1) the federal and provincial governments, (2) the police/rcmp (3) the courts/legal system, (4) corporate/mainstream media, and, (5) the education system. the modules were created so that they can be modified and presented in various formats depending on the facilitator and the audience. overall, this undertaking was tremendously successful and exemplary of feminist praxis. it harnessed the academic and creative forces of approximately 25 students who shared their work with an under-resourced grassroots organization. indeed, it helped me to satisfy students’ strong desire to produce knowledge that contributes to community partners. however, pedagogically and practically it also presented some significant difficulties and challenges, not least of which was having to submit individual grades and evaluations for students, when all the work they did was in groups. furthermore, in terms of process, the project was onerous insofar as it required that class time be devoted to creating student work groups and 5 i am especially grateful to alisha mascarenhas for taking on the role of intermediary between the class and missing justice. gada mahrouse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 160-169, 2017 164 coordinating various aspects of co-authorship, formatting, design, and editing of resources they created. as a collaborative effort, the project demanded ongoing discussion in order to avoid duplication, ensure relevance, rigour, and result in meaningful contributions. it also required conscientious communicative practices within and outside of the classroom, and between the students and our community partner. nevertheless, the resources that the students developed were remarkable and inspired. they incorporated visually rich images, stories of individual women, statistics and facts, and research histories of land dispossession and resource exploitation, and they showcased indigenous-led initiatives. most significantly, students integrated the postcolonial course readings with the decolonizing ones in the work they submitted. in other words, the project succeeded at helping students read postcolonial texts while engaging in decolonising praxis. while it is not possible to describe the richness of the work they produced in detail, the following summary of the educationfocussed materials (i.e., the fifth module) produced by the group illustrates some of the integrated learning that was achieved through this project. the group presented an analysis of a textbook entitled panorama: history and citizenship education (horguelin, ladouceur, lord & rose, 2007), which is used for mandatory third and fourth level high school history and citizenship education courses in québec.6 this particular textbook was chosen because it was approved for use in english secondary schools by the quebec ministry of education and is therefore the basis of what the majority of students in english language schools in quebec would be taught. moreover, since it was written with the explicit intention of increasing content about indigenous histories and cultures (mels, 2007, pp. 11-28), the students were curious about how that information would be presented. in keeping with the original goal of producing user-friendly materials that the mj collective could use in their “teach-ins,” the students decided to create a colorful and engaging zine that captured their analysis of the textbook. although the students did draw from theoretical course readings on discourse, ideology, power, and knowledge production for their analysis, creating a zine allowed them to present the information through images, illustrations and diagrams, thereby making it more accessible. the combination of complex analytical approaches and creativity led to an incisive and dynamic resource. specifically, in addition to drawing attention to an overall decontextualizing of references to indigenous peoples and stereotypical visual representations, the group conveyed six important points in the zine. first, they noted that throughout the textbook, students are repeatedly brought back to the “official” timeline of québec history and its omissions. they explain: 6 the textbook was developed as part of new quebec history and citizenship education curriculum by the ministry of education in 2007 (see di mascio, 2014). from knowledge consumers to knowledge producers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 160-169, 2017 165 the textbook timeline states that women received the right to vote in 1918 federally and 1940 in québec, but neglects to add to the timeline when indigenous people received the right to vote. …what does not appear on the timeline will not be considered an important part of history. by omitting information, the textbook neglects to reveal how indigenous women were discriminated against twice as women and as indigenous. second, in their examination of the language used in the textbook, they observed that it is largely written in the passive tense (e.g., “these treaties were signed;” “assimilation was happening”). the effect of this, they propose, is that european settler economic and political interests in canada are celebrated and indigenous people appear as passive receptors of these exploits. third, they noted that the textbook uses the past tense in its descriptions of the societies, and includes images of archaeological digs, or traditional hunting or village scenes instead of present-day imagery: one of the only current representations of the textbook is found in a small section entitled socio-economic reality, with the heading that “the often-difficult economic conditions in aboriginal communities have direct consequences on the quality of life”. this line is followed by poverty, suicide and education statistics in contemporary first nation’s communities. these facts are de-historicized and there are no explanations given as to why these circumstances exist. fourth, focusing on a chapter-end exercise entitled “a colonization game,” which asks students to design a video game that follows the european timeline from contact in the 1500’s to present day, they commented on the book’s overall tendency to trivialize and downplay colonial violence. moreover, they pointed out that this is one of the only uses of the word “colonial” or “colonization” in the entire chapter. fifth, examining a summary section titled “aboriginal peoples’ demands and the state,” they noted that the textbook acknowledges the fact that indigenous people have less access to official power because many were prohibited from voting until the 1960s. however, the students noted that this section of the textbook failed to elaborate on how indigenous women were impacted by the indian act as well as other colonial policies and actions, which often rendered indigenous women dependent on their fathers and husbands.7 lastly, they discussed the limited availability of alternative textbooks. for example, the group showcased seven generations (blanchard, 1980), a textbook currently in use in a high school in kahnawake to teach mohawk history through an indigenous framework.8 the students explained that unlike the panorama textbook, seven generations does not purport to represent an 7 the indian act refers to federal law that authorizes the canadian government to regulate and the lives of registered indians and reserve communities. 8 a first nations reserve of the mohawk nation on the south shore of the st. lawrence river in quebec. gada mahrouse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 160-169, 2017 166 all-encompassing overview of canadian history. it is explicit in its objective to represent a solely mohawk perspective. they also provided a list of additional alternative textbooks that can be used by high school history teachers. the work this group prepared clearly demonstrated how colonial relations continue to be legitimized by the “scientific” knowledge presented in the textbook. they also persuasively illustrated the racialized basis of the representations in panorama, by drawing attention to the authority granted to dominant anglo/franco european culture, law, and languages. moreover, their analysis raised questions about how this history comes to be known, narrated, and by whom. their work was especially effective at merging post and de-colonizing theories to reveal that knowledge is always ordered and structured in particular way and that this ordering is not neutral or objective. reflections on “what it means to study and learn” also evident in the students’ work was a second, perhaps more significant level of understanding. in addition to giving a careful analysis of the text book, the students also grappled mightily with, as one put it, “how to research and speak for indigenous people as a non-indigenous person.” indeed, to ensure that the students did not lose sight of asymmetrical knowledge production relationships, they were asked to constantly reflect on their role as researchers based in an academic institution, in light of the larger systems of power between settler-allies and indigenous groups in quebec and canada. at the end of the term, they were asked to submit an individual two-page reflection evaluating the partnership and their participation in it.9 some of the reflections they wrote included the following: when preparing the script for our presentation, careful and deliberate wording became paramount to avoid perpetuating stereotypes or including alienating assumptions about the teach-in audience or even relegating colonialism to part of the historical past. all of these issues surrounding the use of particular language in our project were central to our group discussions and made a lasting impression on me about the necessity for careful and deliberate wording that could empower, rather than disempower people. [student f] the project was an opportunity to struggle intensely with the challenges presented by the information presented in class – how to work in solidarity with aboriginal women in a conscientious, responsible, and meaningful way. i felt, time and time again when trying to write my content, that i was challenged by trying to speak in a way that was clear, understandable, accessible to a multitude of audiences, and attempting to disrupt colonial projects that are continuously perpetuated through the language in representing the realities of indigenous people. [student c] 9 these reflections were not shared with their peers and were marked as pass/fail as part of their course participation grade. from knowledge consumers to knowledge producers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 160-169, 2017 167 as i reflect back on this project, i see that this experiment in praxis facilitated my desire to teach in ways that deepen students’ understandings of institutionalized colonial power as well as their commitments to disrupting them. requiring students to produce materials that would be used in grassroots popular education efforts made the course more relatable and relevant for them, and the collaborative process made it easier for them to complexly examine colonial power relations. indeed, this project helped to expose the struggles of knowledge production and solidarity, all the while making clear that they are symptomatic of larger political and historical structures. moreover, it led the students to see how – as teachers and students – we are implicated in predetermined hierarchies of knowledge and power. in sum, the careful negotiation of the roles of students as knowledge producers and the indigenous communities as subjects of the knowledge produced, helped them to understand what it means to foster a decolonizing approach to teaching and learning. one of the many successes of the idle no more movement is that it shone a spotlight on how little the average canadian settler knows about treaties, residential schools, and indigenous histories. this community-campus partnership project is one small example of the rich opportunities university classrooms afford to push this learning – not just so that students learn, but also so they unlearn and question how their learning happens, and in turn, attempt to teach it differently. acknowledgements i am grateful for the missing justice collective for their collaboration with this project. i am also grateful to each of the following students for approaching this project with openness and respect: sarah aldridge, irmak bahar, noah cannon, frances enyedy, charline fallu, jessica glavina, emilie jacob, molly langill, hepzibeth lee, nampande londe, alisha mascarenhas, maude matton tremblay, sabrina maxfield, sarah morris, teeanna munro, charlene nkondjock, e. pietrangelo, allysha porter, jael roy, miriam sherwin, alexandra turski, pamela vrabel, rebecca way, and tess wilkens. references abu-lughod, l. 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(2010). beyond these tired walls: social action curriculum induction as public pedagogy. in b. j. a. sandlin, b. d. schultz & j. burdick (eds.), handbook of public pedagogy: education and learning beyond schooling (pp. 368-380). london: routledge. simpson, l. (2011). dancing on our turtle's back: stories of nishnaabeg re-creation, resurgence and a new emergence. winnipeg: arbeiter ring pub. smith, l. t. (2007). imperialism, history, writing, and theory. in t. das gupta (ed.), race and racialization: essential readings (pp. 328-338). toronto: canadian scholars' press. spivak, g. c. (2006). can the subaltern speak? in b. ashcroft, g. griffiths & h. tiffin (eds.), the post-colonial studies reader (pp. 28-37). london: routledge. from knowledge consumers to knowledge producers studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 160-169, 2017 169 stevenson, w. (1999). indigenous voices, indigenous histories, part 3: the social relations of oral history. saskatchewan history, 51(2), 29-35. tuck, e. (2013). decolonizing methodologies 15 years later, a commentary. alternative: an international journal for indigenous peoples, 9, 365-372. tuck, e., &yang, k. w. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 1(1), 1-40. mckay final dec 19 16 322 correspondence address: lindsey mckay, department of sociology, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: lindseymck@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 generating ambivalence: media representations of canadian transplant tourism lindsey mckay brock university, canada abstract this article addresses transplant tourism as one facet of the international organ trade. it asks whether mainstream media portrayals of canadian transplant tourist journeys convey messages supportive of stronger efforts to stop extraterritorial organ purchase. a postcolonial theoretical approach using mary louise pratt’s study of travel writing is employed to conduct a discourse analysis of canadian media and cultural representation from 1988 to 2015. the public learns that transplant tourism is “bad” but understandable, and either not our problem or a symptom of another problem. three forms this message takes are: the broader organ trade is a distant and insurmountable problem; transplant tourists are innocent victims; and, resolution of a larger, national organ scarcity problem will end transplant tourism. i conclude that the media generates ambivalence towards the issue of transplant tourism. reader attention is drawn away from health outcomes and human rights, especially of organ providers – reasons canada might do more to stop transplant tourism – towards the challenges faced by transplant tourists, with the effect of eclipsing public discussion of whether and how to stop canadians from buying organs in other countries. keywords transplant tourism; organ trade; postcolonialism; canada; media introduction transplant tourism is one facet of a diverse, transnational organ trade. patients who travel out-of-country to avoid prohibitions on the exchange of money for an organ are considered transplant tourists.1 patients who travel out-of-country to avoid prohibitions on the exchange of money for an organ are considered transplant tourists. since the mid-1990s, a small number of 1the definition excludes “travel for transplantation,” which is legal and does not involve organ trafficking (coercion, deception, or abuse) or commercial transaction (see participants in the international summit on transplant tourism and organ trafficking, 2008). generating ambivalence studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 323 canadians with end-stage organ failure have become transplant tourists by traveling to india, pakistan, china, the philippines, and other countries to purchase “transplant packages” from clinics that broker organs (one centre records 69 canadian transplant tourists from 1998 to 2013; see prasad et al., 2016; skelton, 2007).2 through buying from or coercing donors, these transactions are implicated in the violation of the human rights of organ providers, are illegal in host countries (with market bans now in 100 countries), are condemned by every organization of global governance, and are advocated against by an international anti-transplant abuse campaign led by the 2008 declaration of istanbul (amahazion, 2016). there is evidence of negative health outcomes for organ recipients (prasad et al., 2016; yakupoglu et al., 2010) and live organ providers (see e.g., budiani-saberi & delmonico, 2008; lundin, 2012), including reports of death (thakur, 2013), and of statesanctioned systematic use of prisoners’ organs in china (delmonico, 2011; matas & trey, 2012; shimazono, 2007; united states, 2016). social science scholarship on the organ trade has shifted over time from documenting transactions and health outcomes to surveying and comparatively analyzing efforts to stop the organ trade (bagheri & delmonico, 2013; budiani-saberi & columb, 2013; cohen, 2013; kelly, 2013; lavee, ashkenazi, stoler, cohen, & beyar, 2013; scheper-hughes, 2000). although reproductive and medical tourism studies (e.g., markens, 2012; snyder, crooks, johnston, & kingsbury, 2013) can provide insight, there is a paucity of empirical research on public understanding of transplant tourism in client countries. recently, martin et al. (2015) asked “what more can be done” to stop the organ trade and identified extra-territorial legislation extending domestic market bans to individuals’ actions outside the country as promising. to date, canada has taken a deterrence approach, and three parliamentary bills for extra-territorial legislation criminalizing transplant tourism have failed. public attitudes towards transplant tourism in canada have yet to be analyzed (for the united states, see bhalla & takooshian, 2011). based on the premise that dominant media framings and the extent of press coverage help shape public attitudes and policy (gerlach, hamilton, sullivan, & walton, 2011; jameson & entman, 2005), this study examines canadian mainstream media (predominantly newspapers), films and books. through qualitative analyses of journalistic accounts of transplant tourist travel, i ask: what do canadian media audiences learn about canadian transplant tourism? the study aims to uncover whether messages in mainstream media and cultural productions are supportive of stronger action against transplant tourism. using a postcolonial theoretical lens inspired by mary louise pratt’s (2008) scholarship on travel writing, i argue that canadian media generate ambivalence towards transplant tourism; what the public learns is that 2 systematic data collection in canada on international transplants in the canadian organ replacement register does not capture whether transactions were commercial or legal. lindsey mckay studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 324 transplant tourism is “bad” but understandable. ambivalence is fostered through three common themes in canadian media: that the broader organ trade is a distant and insurmountable problem; that transplant tourists are innocent victims; and that changes to domestic policy are key, based on the claim that the resolution of a larger, national organ scarcity problem will end transplant tourism. these messages are likely to generate ambivalence among canadians towards transplant tourism, and deprioritize legislative action by shifting public concern away from protecting organ providers towards solving the organ shortage. the article proceeds in five sections: background, theory, data and methods, findings, and discussion. background an international anti-transplant abuse campaign coalesced in 2008 with the declaration of istanbul, supported by the united nations, the world health organization, and the world medical association (participants in the international summit on transplant tourism and organ trafficking, 2008). after years of establishing legislation and enforcing prohibitions on the organ trade in host countries, attention is turning to buyer countries. canada enforces a market ban on trade in human organs, but only within its territory, and experts continue to disagree on the best policy mechanism to eradicate transplant tourism. when initial reports of canadian transplant tourists emerged in 2001, then ceo of the british columbia transplant society, bill barrable, told a reporter, “it’s a no-brainer… it’s clearly illegal in most parts of the world” (priest, 2001). the society lobbied the federal government to introduce extraterritorial provisions. between 2008 and 2013, two members of parliament introduced three different private member bills in canada’s house of commons, each seeking to amend the criminal code by “imposing penal sanctions for persons who, in canada or outside canada, are involved in the medical transplant of human organs or other body parts obtained or acquired as a consequence of a direct or indirect financial transaction or without the donor’s consent” (house of commons parliament of canada, 2008).3 other clauses in the bills established certification and mandatory health care professional reporting to ensure that source organs for out-of-country transplant surgeries were legally donated (matas, 2014). all three bills died on the order papers when the legislative session adjourned. meanwhile, in 2010, a policy statement was released by the canadian society for transplantation and the canadian society of nephrology advising physicians to deter canadians from buying organs abroad (gill et al., 2010). recommended techniques include denying pre-transplant testing, informing 3 in february 2008, mp borys wrzesnewskyj introduced bill c-500, and later bill c-381 in may 2009. then, former mp irwin cotler introduced bill c-561 in december 2013. private member bills have a high rate of failure. generating ambivalence studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 325 transplant candidates of potential harms to themselves and vendors, conveying ethical objections, and withholding follow-up care for patients referred and accepted by another physician (wright, zaltzman, gill, & prasad, 2013). there are no studies to date that measure the effectiveness of deterrence, nor could this be easily assessed. there is evidence that canadians continue to buy organs in other countries (prasad et al., 2016). it is important to note that although this study focuses on mainstream media, films, and books, contestations to their dominant messages do exist in less accessible documentaries, books, and artwork that foreground the experiences of organ providers and advocate on their behalf. for example, two canadian public art installations, rough cut (turner et al., 2007) and spare parts (turner, dewey-hagborg, moniruzzaman, & ruxton, 2015), present the perspective of bangladeshi organ providers, based on monir moniruzzaman’s (2012, 2013) research. there are also several documentaries (lee, 2014; stone, 2015) and books that seek to end organ provision from prisoners in china (gutmann, 2014; matas, 2009; matas & trey, 2012). i would also put rama rau’s film, the market (2010) – a transplant tourist story with a twist – in this category. after a lengthy meeting between a canadian buyer and indian organ provider, the buyer aborts her quest, returning home to continue dialysis treatment with a new perspective on suffering. theory to interpret the cognitive maps written by the media to make sense of transplant tourism, the analysis draws on postcolonial theory, specifically the theoretical tools developed by mary louise pratt (2008). early on transplant tourism was conceptualized as neocolonial with human organs viewed as the latest commodity to be extracted from less developed countries to benefit the metropole (harrison, 1999; scheper-hughes, 1998, 2000, 2003). physicians concur with the objection that transplant tourism undermines national resources (organs, professionals and transplant centres) serving their own population (participants in the international summit on transplant tourism and organ trafficking, 2008). within postcolonial theory, the approach and key concepts pratt (2008) develops in imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation remain seminal to analyzing lingering ideologies of colonialism, especially in studies of tourism and travel writing (johnson, 2010). pratt examines how “people sought to depict the changing global order to themselves through stories” (pratt, 2008, p. 238). for pratt, the social construction of knowledge of the world beyond europe – especially race difference – does not produce an accurate account of other people and places. rather, an imperialist gaze, by and for europeans, generates stories for home audiences that constitute and exalt their subjecthood in relation to others. pratt’s data and methods compare lindsey mckay studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 326 18th and 19th century travel writing genres using autobiographical accounts of travel. in a 2008 additional chapter, pratt broadens her dataset to third person accounts to analyze press coverage as a contemporary form of travel writing. one genre pratt identifies is sentimental dramas she calls “survival stories.” rather than dry accounts of observations from another land, authors paint colourful stories of danger and heroic encounters with the unknown in which the protagonist returns to tell the tale. the “death dramas” of migrants at borders are, in pratt’s view, contemporary survival stories of globalization that “grip and resonate in the metropolitan public imagination” (pratt, 2008, p. 240). i postulate that mainstream media stories of transplant tourism can be seen in the same light. transplant travel tales fascinate canadian audiences. readers of these stories, like those of pratt’s texts, are interpolated to adopt the position of organ buyers, not providers, and what matters most in making sense of voyages is what is happening at home. pratt’s analyses occur in what she calls the “contact zone… where peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other” and where there are “radically asymmetrical relations of power” (2008, p. 6). although the material reality is one of unequal relations, survival stories tend to assert protagonists as innocent and social relations as fair. one concept pratt uses to capture claims of innocence is reciprocity. drawing on marx, reciprocity rhetoric projects a “win-win” image of fair exchange epitomized by the values of freedom, equality, property, mutual selfishness emphasising free will in the exchange contract, and trading equivalent for equivalent. pratt describes reciprocity as “capitalism’s ideology of itself” arguing that it suppresses the difference between equal and unequal exchange (2008, p. 84). in her analysis, claims of innocence play a central role in how european travel writing justified imperialism to the european reading public. data and method the data search strategy created two datasets. first, canadian major dailies and cbca complete were searched using the terms: transplant* and canada* and organ and (tourism* or traffick* or sales* or harvesting). this resulted in 395 articles, the earliest in 1988 and most recent in 2015. after removing exact duplicates (syndicated articles carried in multiple newspapers remain) and applying inclusion criteria, 233 items remained. inclusion criteria were: news media, non-fiction books and films, with the key words “organ trade” and “canada.” blog posts, social media and fiction were excluded. this dataset informs the quantitative analysis of article volume per year (included to indicate the extent of press coverage of the organ trade). a second culling process removing syndicated articles resulted in a sample of 74 unique newspaper and online news articles that were entered into qualitative data analysis software (atlas.ti). a limitation was the exclusion of broadcast news from available databases. a google search was generating ambivalence studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 327 conducted with the same search terms, leading to the inclusion of eight film and television documentaries and one book, for a total yield of 83 items. data on viewership were not available, and estimating readership for all newspapers was beyond the scope of the analysis. the study draws on constructionist approaches. i interpreted the data using postcolonial theory, specifically pratt, and employed critical discourse and framing analysis as the method (entman, 1993; garrison, 1988; van dijk, 1993). the analytical process entailed first reading the book and a 2007 film documentary transcript, watching the most recent film, and reviewing notes made after watching two films released in 2004 and 2010 (the 2003 film was not available) (see table 1). i then analyzed the 74 newspaper articles by cycling through iterative and integrated processes of data segmentation (coding) and refining, using (quantitative and qualitative) analysis functions to assess relationships, and identify patterns (noted in comments and memos) in atlas.ti (contreras, 2015). segmentation isolated the problem, its causes, solutions, and how key actors are described (organ providers, recipients and brokers). themes emerged from working through these steps while continually revisiting pratt’s imperial eyes. this process was done for the full dataset, with a closer reading of 12 articles covering single transplant tourist journeys. year title type home destination director/auth or 2003 transplant tourism documentary canada turkey, philippines david paperny 2004 organs for sale documentary denmark pakistan steen jensen 2007 a new life television documentary canada pakistan sandie rinaldo 2009 larry’s kidney book u.s.a. china daniel asa rose *2010 the market documentary canada india rama rau 2013 tales from the organ trade documentary u.s.a., canada kosovo, turkey, moldova, philippines ric esther bienstock * classified as part of the anti-transplant abuse campaign in the background section. table 1: transplant tourist stories in documentaries and books available in canada lindsey mckay studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 328 findings distant problems: the organ trade context transplant tourism is situated within the context of the organ trade. it was in the early 2000s that canadians first learned about the trade, its different manifestations, and its canadian connections. press coverage of the organ trade was low but steady from 1988 to 2014, aside from a peak between 2005 and 2009 (see figure 1). source: canadian major dailies; n = 233 figure 1: media stories in canadian newspapers on the organ trade (includes syndicated articles carried in multiple newspapers). the overarching discursive framing of the organ trade, based on a qualitative analysis of 74 unique newspaper articles, is sensationalist and presents the trade as distant and insurmountable. canadian connections – predominantly through transplant tourism – were compelling but infrequent hooks for canadian journalists.4 far more media articles on the organ trade discussed forms of trafficking, global law enforcement challenges, or china’s state-led systematic abuse. the cognitive map drawn through these analyses delineates a “geography of difference” (harvey, 1997) – a simplistic “here” versus “there” framework – that presents the organ trade as an unfamiliar “modern horror” beyond our borders (boy's eyes gouged out in horror attack, 2013) and also elevates canada and the canadian organ donation system.5 as such, 4 other connections are rare reports of canadian organ brokers and the involvement of canadian lawyers. 5 fearful imagery is also conjured through media-created monikers: “dr. horror” for amit kumar and “dr. vulture” for dr. yusuf sonmez, a turkish transplant surgeon wanted by police for illegal surgeries. 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 articles generating ambivalence studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 329 the organ trade is not seen as “our” problem, and its solution lies elsewhere; we are primarily spectators of what may simply be another insurmountable “chilling reality” of globalization (chung, 2008). information about new legislation criminalizing the organ trade in various countries (primarily as a facet of human trafficking) was less commonly published during this period, often in stand-alone reports or as passing references within narratives about an organ trade beyond control. the peak period of canadian press coverage between 2005 and 2009 coincided with the flourishing of the organ trade and greater international policy attention.6 one-third of 233 articles covered the case of amit kumar, a suspected organ broker wanted by police in india in 2008, who was alleged to own a home in brampton, ontario.7 sensationalist reports identified the organ trade as a problem in and for india (e.g., wattie, 2008), yet kumar’s canadian home was often highlighted, perhaps because his potential proximity disrupts the comfort of typical “beyond our borders” framing of the organ trade. with half as many articles in the next five-year period, 2010-2014, the press reported on more extreme cases, such as that of a teenager in china who allegedly exchanged a kidney for an iphone and ipad, and that of a child whose corneas were egregiously and forcibly removed and sold (“five charged after teenager sells kidney to buy iphone, ipad,” 2012; talaga, 2013). reports about two organ trafficking rings in kosovo were also frequent between 2010 and 2014, including coverage related to the case of a transplant tourist from toronto, raul fein, who bought a kidney in kosovo in 2008. fein testified at the trial leading to the conviction of two men on charges of human trafficking and organized crime in 2014 (kosovo organ traffickers jailed, 2013). the organ trade problem is presented as an accepted reality mired in the complexity of global issues. opening lines such as, “it is now possible to order an organ on the internet,” (bindel, 2013, a25) convey a sense that the organ trade is now normal – simply part of the new biomedical realities of globalization. the geography of difference is evident in some articles. one states: it’s illegal to buy or sell human organs in canada. heartbreaking as this may be for patients who will die unless a diseased body part is replaced, their desperate families and the agencies struggling to manage swelling waiting lists for donor organs, the law is firm. 6 there were eight websites posted by hospitals explicitly offering transplant tourism packages in 2007 (three in china, four in pakistan, and one in the philippines), and experts estimated 30 to 50 canadians engaged in the trade as buyers per year (shimazono, 2007). host countries began acknowledging the organ trade as a problem, and a key turning point was reached at the supranational level with the declaration of istanbul. 7 kumar was convicted in 2011 (thakur, 2013); this endpoint was not reported in canada, and his canadian connection was never confirmed. lindsey mckay studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 330 outside canada, however, it’s a free-for-all, as reports in the star by julian sher make clear. patients can buy an organ from anyone who is willing to sell one or from organ trafficking rings that recruit impoverished people with promises of big money or snatch inmates from prisons, youngsters from orphanages and refugees from camps. (curb trade in human organs, 2012, p. a12) this passage from a condemning toronto star editorial titled “curb trade in human organs” nevertheless conveys, with its claim that outside canada “it’s a free-for-all,” that the organ trade problem is beyond our borders and reckoning. extra-territorial legislation is dismissed because, “it was never clear how this would be enforced. that difficulty continues to impede efforts to come up with a legislated solution” (curb trade in human organs, 2012, p. a12). the only proposed answer is to increase organs in canada. in another article, the argument that the organ trade is insurmountable takes the form of blaming (legislative) failure in host countries: “despite prohibitions, an underground market thrives in nations such as china, egypt and brazil” (anderssen, 2011, n.p.). using the “word cruncher” quantitative tool in atlas.ti, “china” is the most frequently mentioned country in the dataset, at 23%, compared to the next most frequent, the philippines, at nine percent. at around 20% each, “trafficking,” “kidneys,” “donor,” and “rights” are also frequently used words. reports about china cycle between claims of forced organ harvesting of executed falun gong and minority prisoners, of chinese authorities admitting most organs come from executed prisoners (starting in 2006) (laogai research foundation, 2011), and announcements of changes or continuity related to voluntary donation by non-prisoners. common themes in these articles include violations of donors’ human rights, the organ shortage, and trafficking. with few links to canadians or canadian foreign policy, they tell readers about a problem happening somewhere else in the world. wrongdoing implied and absolved: transplant tourists as innocent victims journalistic accounts of transplant tourists’ voyages are contemporary biomedical, neo-colonial examples of the type of colonial era survival stories analyzed by pratt. typically third person narratives, five documentaries and one book follow a transplant tourist from denmark, canada, or the united states on their journey overseas (see table 1). through a dominant discursive frame, transplant tourists are absolved of responsibility for potential harms to organ providers and public understanding is channeled towards challenges faced by transplant tourists. ethical controversy is consistently noted by narrators in the abstract, and inconsistently as a concern of transplant tourists, and organ providers make only brief if any appearance in these stories. three sub-themes of the discursive frame are examined: condemnation and the standpoint of generating ambivalence studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 331 transplant tourists; innocence generated through organ scarcity and ignorance; and reciprocity. each of these is discussed in turn below. condemnation and the standpoint of transplant tourists of 74 media articles, only a few op eds (e.g., kilgour & matas, 2010; somerville, 2008) clearly condemn transplant tourism. most ethical claims are isolated passages within texts that carry one or all of the three overarching themes identified as generating ambivalence. a good example is a reuters news service article, “global trade in body parts,” that ran in saskatoon’s star-phoenix: paul lee got his liver from an executed chinese prisoner; karam in egypt bought a kidney for his sister for $5,300; in istanbul hakan is holding out for $30,700 for one of his kidneys. they are not so unusual: a dire shortage of donated organs in rich countries is sending foreigners with end-stage illnesses to poorer places like china, pakistan, turkey, egypt, colombia and the philippines to buy a new lease of life… according to surveys compiled by the coalition for organ-failure solutions, which combats the trafficking of human organs, 48 to 86 per cent of kidney donors in egypt, iran, india and the philippines reported a deterioration in their health, such as being tired more easily and not being able to carry heavy loads as before. most regretted their decision. (tan, 2007, p. l1) many articles only acknowledge that transplant tourism is considered “controversial” and “critiqued” by ethicists (jimenez, 2004). others directly express ambivalence; the headline “organ trade cuts both ways” cites tales of the organ trade filmmaker ric esther bienstock, who refers to “realizing there was a lot of moral ambiguity” (turnbull, 2013). such references imply wrongdoing but quickly return the focus to what is at stake for transplant tourists. as such, ethics primarily adds intrigue. although it is standard in policy literature to characterize transplant tourists’ decision to travel as a dilemma (garwood, 2007), the media examined in this study did not generally attribute moral qualms to transplant tourists. ethical unease is, however, inadvertently implied in the few cases where tourists are described as trying to supplement organ provider compensation. the common narrative is a sympathetic account of transplant tourists’ point-of-view; they are heroes “forced” to travel abroad, who survived the journey. the front page of the globe and mail published the story of twotime transplant tourist, matin khan, with the headline, “organ transplant abroad: one person’s ordeal” (priest, 2003). a decade later, the media again emphasized khan’s two-year struggle before and after acquiring a kidney through transplant tourism in pakistan (canadians desperate for transplants turn to illegal organ trade, 2013). although “one-way” information is a feature of all travel writing, media representation of the organ trade contact zone is characterized by the public learning almost nothing about how organ lindsey mckay studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 332 providers come to, experience, and depart from the experience, especially in their own words. in khan’s case, we learn that she’s troubled about leaning on her family for money to pay for surgery, not about the organ purchase. a good example of the transplant tourist narrative as a survival story is a new life, a 2007 television documentary aired nationally about robert zurrer’s 2006 journey to pakistan to buy a kidney. narrator sandie rinaldo opens by inviting audience intrigue: with all his faith in foreign hands, what exactly is this canadian in for? facing life on dialysis, rob is buying a kidney. he’d have to wait years and years in canada, but not in pakistan. it’s expensive, about $30,000 for the operation and travel. (zurrer & rinaldo, 2007) the film crew follows zurrer and his sister as they arrive at aadil hospital in lahore, pakistan. marking a geography of difference, the narrator announces: the hospital’s success rate may meet international standards, but anne is horrified by what she sees. ann says, “i’m not impressed. it’s dirty. it’s not finished in places. it’s got washrooms that don’t look right.” (zurrer & rinaldo, 2007) other films similarly show canadian organ tourists unimpressed with standards abroad (rau, 2010), and viewers are thereby encouraged to adopt the transplant tourist’s perspective. the audience then follows zurrer as he meets his donor and learns bits of information about him. when surgery is delayed because the donor has a fever, how this affects the transplant tourist is what matters: their difficulty, anxiety, sleeplessness, and concerns about the health of the organ. the drama deepens after the surgery when zurrer’s health fluctuates. rinaldo asks the audience, “will he make it back home?” (he does, after a stopover for medical care in thailand). by contrast, the donor has disappeared. another example is daniel asa rose’s memoir, larry’s kidney, which humourously recounts a quest for a kidney in china, focussing on the relationship between two cousins (rose, 2009). ethical concerns about organ donors are absent in the book. as anti-transplant abuse advocate ethan gutmann states (stone, 2015), rose and his recipient cousin are “wilfully and shamefully ignorant” of the source of the kidney. media accounts invite audiences to adopt the standpoint of the transplant tourist, imagining themselves or their family member in need of an organ and embarking on a difficult journey of survival. transplant tourists are always shown to be successful, overcoming fears of the risks, discomforts, and financial barriers of foreign surgery. they are portrayed as victims, complicit in an unethical act but deserving of empathy. generating ambivalence studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 333 innocence 1: victims of scarcity and ignorance as columb (2015) found in policy reports, transplant tourism is invariably cast by journalists and experts alike as a symptom of organ scarcity. somerville writes: there is now a serious worldwide shortage of organs, including here in canada. that’s a life-and-death crisis for people in need of organs. desperate people engage in desperate measures, including transplant tourism, organ trafficking and the sale of organs across international boundaries. (somerville, 2008, p. a15) following a common pattern, the article about matin khan presents statistics about average wait times and deaths for those awaiting transplant. it describes how she “endured an anxious wait for the organ that never arrived,” being told: “seven years later, you may not be able to get your kidney” (priest, 2003, n.p.). the figures support the assertion that as a victim of a dangerously inadequate healthcare system, “for ms. khan, travelling to… pakistan… was a risk worth taking” (priest, 2003, n.p.). similarly, the documentary about zurrer concludes by endorsing the transplant tourist’s decision based on organ scarcity: “if he hadn’t gone to pakistan he’d still be on a waiting list in canada” (zurrer & rinaldo, 2007). multiple effects flow from positioning organ scarcity as the larger problem and cause of transplant tourism. the discourse of organ scarcity situates transplant tourists as innocent victims of a healthcare problem; they are reluctant travellers, compelled to take radical action. a frequent claim prominent in the film tales of the organ trade, is that buyers “have no choice” (bienstock, 2013). organ purchase is thus an understandable, rational, even necessary step taken to alleviate suffering, avoid dialysis, and delay death. empathy towards buyers is also generated through claims of ignorance, as in press coverage of thanh nguien’s kidney purchase in china. nguien and her daughter (who arranged the transplant) are portrayed as underdogs: a family who “gambled and won” by trusting a canadian company, the kidney group, and traveling to “a dangerous place” to relieve the “worry” that ms. nguien would not live long enough to get a kidney at home (jimenez, 2004). twice, the article mentions the daughter being aware of the “controversy” of foreigners buying organs in china, but no mention is made of human rights violations or potential harms to organ providers. the broker reassured the daughter “that the kidneys were free,” and, at second hospital of guangzhou, “they requested that we not ask about the circumstances about where the kidney came from. but they said all kidneys were from traffic accident victims. and there are so many traffic accidents in china, it’s believable” (jimenez, 2004, p. a6). the nguien article then refocuses on the organ shortage, describing how the daughter met americans at the hospital who were frustrated with the long wait for organs in the u.s. (jimenez, 2004). implying a right to an organ, this lindsey mckay studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 334 piece presents transplant tourism as an imposition on recipients caused by their home country’s failure to provide adequate health care. innocence 2: reciprocity the third sub-theme identifies claims of mutual benefit as a basis for ideologically structuring transplant tourists as innocent. here, differences between the buyer and organ provider are bridged through commonalities of desperation and beneficial outcome from the trade. as in pratt’s imperial eyes (2008), the reciprocity claim is that the exchange of money for an organ is fair; it lifts the burden faced by both parties equally. with respect to matin khan’s organ provider, it was reported that, according to ms. khan, donors in pakistan “are poor people and they need [the] money… they can’t make that much money their whole lives.” in that way, she said, “every one was left better off” (priest, 2003, n.p.). this is the only sentence in the article mentioning the organ provider. in this use of reciprocity rhetoric, the public is assured that the trade is equal and deserves no further thought. moreover, the declarative phrase that “every one was left better off” constructs the exchange as a time-bound point-of-contact such that knowledge of, and therefore responsibility for, the organ provider’s post-operative health is erased and absolved. in 2001, a feature length article, “organ trade: anatomy of a deal, how a wealthy canadian businessman bought a new kidney in a manila slum” created and implicitly critiqued transplant tourist innocence and reciprocity (jimenez & bell, 2001). the piece opens by pointing to gross economic inequality between the two men involved in the exchange, symbolized by contrasting views from their homes. vancouver millionaire and organ buyer, mr. eng’s view is described as “heaven,” the impoverished manila organ provider, mr. osite’s, as “hell” (jimenez & bell, 2001). a kidney in exchange for money is implied to be wrong but the canadian transplant tourist is somewhat absolved by his ignorance. eng “says he didn’t know how much money his donor received… [he was] certainly unaware it was a mere fraction of what he paid for the procedure” (jimenez & bell, 2001, p. b1). finally, two stories of transplant tourists trying to give organ providers additional money convey an ironic admonition of wrongdoing. for example, when robert zurrer meets his donor, the narrator announces: in lahore, rob discovers the man who wants to sell his kidney is in debt and will use the $3,000 he’ll receive to pay this off. rob wants to top this up with a monthly allowance. “if my money can improve their lot in life, then i don't view that as a bad thing,” he says. (zurrer & rinaldo, 2007) generating ambivalence studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 335 mr. eng is similarly reported to have tried, unsuccessfully, to encounter his organ provider to give him a monetary gift. in the toronto star, reporter barbara turnbull quotes filmmaker ric esther bienestock, who, focusing on explaining transplant tourists to canadians and generating sympathy for them, says: “they want to believe they’re helping the donor. they have to rationalize, because they are not evil people” (turnbull, 2013, p. l1). presenting money and organs as commensurable objects mitigates any need to analyze the outcome of these exchanges; this is the mechanism through which claims of reciprocity contribute to the commodification of organs. transplant tourist narratives in the media become survival stories in three ways: by limiting condemnation while taking the standpoint of transplant tourists, by suggesting recipient innocence based on prevalent fears about canadian organ scarcity or ignorance of organ origins, and by relying on convenient ideas of reciprocity. the effect is to draw audiences into the subject-position of transplant tourists and absolve buyer, intermediary, and reader of responsibility for potential harms to organ providers. the solution: from international human rights to national health care among numerous unknowns that are emphasized in characterizations of the organ trade, journalists and experts cited in the media agree on one point: that transplant tourism is caused by organ scarcity. this leads to the final theme of the dataset, which is that the problem of transplant tourism is often blamed on the collective – especially the state – for failing to provide transplant tourists with an organ within a reasonable timeframe. attributing fault for transplant tourism on the state not only supports the reasonableness of buying abroad and diminishes transplant tourists’ blameworthiness, it also absorbs the challenge of stopping transplant tourism into existing efforts to increase organ donation. claims that canada has a particularly acute organ shortage further justify looking inward to increase domestic organ supply as a solution to transplant tourism. with this ideological framework, the issue at stake is not one of upholding international human rights to protect organ providers from potential harms; the issue is fixing the canadian health care system, in spite of the absence of evidence that the organ shortage will ever end. standard examples of transplant tourism found throughout media reports include claims that, “a worldwide shortage of organs has forced many people with end-stage illnesses to rely on living donors – either relatives or strangers from poorer countries who are so desperate for money they will sell their organs” (tan, 2007, p. l1; emphasis added). readers are also told that the scarcity problem is particularly bad here, as “canada has a chronic organ shortage” (cutting out transplant tourism, 2010, a14), and canada has “one of the lowest rates of organ donation in the industrialized world” (immigration agents aim to prevent sales of organs, 2006, p. a6). the lindsey mckay studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 336 canadian government is specifically found to be at fault in some articles, but is also seen as the solution. for example, lowi writes: the problem is that the canadian system of organ donation for transplantation is burdened with bureaucratic hurdles, such that every two days in canada, a patient dies waiting for an organ donor... no wonder desperate patients go overseas to buy organs on the black market... if our governments would assist our health professionals and provide our terminally ill patients with life-saving organs from willing donors, the ethical dilemma would be resolved and the black market for organs would dry up. and more lives would be saved. (lowi, 2008, p. aa5) the alternative to buying an organ outside the country is framed as being within reach if the government takes action to generate more organs. columb (2015) found that in public policy reports, as in the media, transplant tourism is incorporated into a common scarcity discourse (see also, brassolotto & daly, 2016). on two occasions, policy leaders added to this discourse by publicly identifying organ donation as a means to curb transplant tourism. dr. graham sher, ceo of canadian blood services, was quoted in the calgary herald stating: transplant tourism is a symptom of countries not being self-sufficient… if there are more organs and shorter waiting lists, people are less inclined to take the very difficult step of going outside the country and buying an organ, which is the unethical practice of transplant tourism. (inwood, 2010, p. a9) similarly, the president of ontario’s organ and tissue donation agency wrote in a letter to the editor of the globe and mail that, “if canadians find the idea of transplant tourism repugnant, as i hope they would, they can do something about it by registering their wish to be an organ or tissue donor when they die” (markel, 2010, p. a14). what canadians learn through the media is that a foreign policy and international human rights problem is caused by a domestic organ shortage problem. the questions raised are not “how can we protect organ providers against potential harms?,” or “should we address canadian complicity legislatively?” instead, the question is “how can we resolve the organ shortage?” the orientation of solutions is therefore inward facing, with organ donation put forward as the primary answer to the transplant tourism problem. discussion: generating ambivalence responding to the call for extra-territorial legislation prohibiting canadians from participating elsewhere in what is illegal at home requires considering public understandings of transplant tourism. the analysis has shown that the generating ambivalence studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 337 media generate ambivalence, conveying the message that transplant tourism is “bad” but understandable, and either not our problem or a symptom of another problem. readers are informed about the difficulties of buyers with minimal to no information about donors, their experiences, human rights, or the health outcomes of either party. on this basis, i conclude that media messages about transplant tourism do not support stronger efforts to prevent canadians from buying organs abroad. it is also notable that the analysis identifies a gap in knowledge between what experts learn compared to what the canadian public learns about transplant tourism. a postcolonial theoretical lens using the approach and concepts of mary louise pratt is only one possible interpretation of press coverage; additional data, especially broadcast news and visual images, would help further examine how the canadian media frame canadian transplant tourism. the link between media representations, public perception, and public policy must also be considered in drawing conclusions from the findings. we do not know the extent to which alternate frames aligned with the international antitransplant abuse campaign are reaching canadians. to summarize, the research found three themes in mainstream media representations of transplant tourism. first, transplant tourism is presented as part of a distant and insurmountable organ trade “horror” that is not “our” problem to solve. the discursive framing of the organ trade as complicated, elusive, and happening elsewhere, distances canada and situates canadian transplant tourists as small players in a larger drama over which we have no influence. second, transplant tourists are portrayed as innocent victims of national organ scarcity, excused by ignorance, and through claims of reciprocity. despite implicit condemnation of the practice, transplant tourists are not seen as blameworthy; buying organs is instead presented as undesirable, but understandable. third, canadian transplant tourism is positioned as a symptom of an underlying, larger problem of organ scarcity, which canada is already trying to solve. the message is that, as leslie sharp (2014) puts it, “if only” the domestic organ supply can be raised, transplant tourism will end. together the three themes generate ambivalence towards stronger measures such as extra-territorial legislation extending the domestic market ban to canadians’ international actions. as critical literature on the organ trade and transplant tourism advance the terms “bioviolence” (moniruzzaman, 2012), and “cannibalism” (rainhorn & boudamoussi, 2015), it is appropriate to turn to postcolonial scholarship. the analysis demonstrates that some of the same ideological framings of colonialism identified in mary louise pratt’s analysis of 1750-1830 european travel writing apply to media representations of contemporary canadian organ purchase through transplant tourism. a key theoretical implication is that claims to innocence and organ scarcity are central facets of lindsey mckay studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 322-341, 2016 338 the ideological moral economy (kopytoff, 1986) that commodifies organs and tolerates violations of human rights. for social justice efforts seeking stronger human rights and health protection for organ providers, the findings provide some direction. several themes of mainstream media need to be dislodged and addressed to gain traction: first, the abdication of responsibility implied in the discourse of the organ trade as insurmountable and not a canadian problem; 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[w-five: television series episode]. mcintyre media inc., ctv television network. wiebe final galley mar 14 16 correspondence address: sarah marie wiebe, department of political science, institute for studies and innovation in community university engagement, university of victoria, victoria, bc, v8w 2y2; email: swiebe@uvic.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 decolonizing engagement? creating a sense of community through collaborative filmmaking sarah marie wiebe university of victoria, canada abstract the visual medium has the potential to be a creative avenue for enhancing awareness, critical thought and social justice. through the prism of collaborative filmmaking, academic-activists can enrich textual analyses while creating what jacques rancière calls a “sense of community” among participants. this article reflects on the process of co-producing an indigenous youth-driven documentary film, indian givers, which is publicly available on youtube. it discusses the applied practice of engaging in a collaborative process with the aim of countering western models of knowledge. the film and this article each draw into focus the experiences and stories of indigenous youth who live in a highly polluted place commonly referred to as canada’s “chemical valley.” informed by chantal mouffe’s notion of agonism, i contend that collaborative filmmaking contributes to anti-oppressive and community engaged scholarship by facilitating intercultural dialogue, offering a reflexive and relational approach to research, co-creating knowledge and contributing to social action. this paper reflects on some of the challenges of collaborative filmmaking in order to contribute to academic-activist research. as an anti-oppressive research tool, collaborative filmmaking provides a forum for resistance to dominant colonial discourses while creating space for radical difference in pursuit of decolonization. keywords indigenous peoples; community engaged scholarship; collaborative filmmaking; intercultural dialogue; environmental justice politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (rancière, 2004, p. 8) collaborative filmmaking is an artistic practice with the potential to help transform knowledge production and enhance dialogue. this type of artsbased intervention is often geared toward what peter nyers refers to as “radical equality” (2010, p. 131), where individuals speak and contribute to decolonizing engagement? studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 245 political life in unexpected ways. indeed, as jacques rancière (2004, p.8) highlights, art can disrupt “the sensible,” acting as an aesthetic intervention into the “general distribution of ways of doing and making” in order to create space for situated modes of being and forms of visibility. in this article i argue that collaborative filmmaking can be used to create such a disruption, thereby providing an opportunity for community engaged scholarship. this form of scholarship draws upon principles of participatory action research (par), which include community relevance, equitable participation, action and change, and research design (cahill, 2007; ochocka & janzen, 2014; pain, 2004; wiebe & taylor, 2014). community engaged scholarship can thus be viewed as an anti-oppressive, anti-hierarchical research approach that shifts power relations away from an authoritative expert. reflecting on my experience co-producing indian givers, 1 a documentary film created with indigenous youth from the aamjiwnaang first nation community in southwestern ontario to address issues related to racism and ongoing environmental injustice, i contend that collaborative filmmaking can create a “sense of community” among its participants (rancière, 2009, p. 26). by involving indigenous youth as equal participants in the co-creation process, the film revealed knowledge about their everyday lives and experiences. in the discussion that follows, i examine some of the opportunities and challenges we encountered during the filmmaking process and conclude by suggesting that this creative methodology can be a useful and productive approach for academic-activists wanting to conduct collaborative research initiatives, particularly in the colonial present. creating a forum for intercultural dialogue i want to give an understanding of first nations issues today, and talk about why everything is the way it is. to show that we aren’t, you know, this extinct species of people. we’re not just in museums and textbooks. we are actually living people today. (jake rogers, indian givers, 6:18) indian givers is a 60-minute documentary film that is publicly available on youtube. the film takes viewers on a journey through the eyes of young indigenous people living on the aamjiwnaang first nation’s traditional territory. it offers a glimpse into their ongoing struggles as they seek to 1 to access indian givers, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pot411gjzdm. timestamps from the film are provided throughout the text (e.g., 6:18). ‘indian’ is a term that appears in canadian law, policy, and discourse and is charged with contested meaning. its use in the film is in response to language from canada’s colonial indian act, which came into effect under section 91(24) of the 1867 constitution act, and gave the federal government the exclusive authority to legislate in relation to “indians and land reserved for indians.” despite the explicit language in the indian act referring to canada’s indian peoples, in this article i use the term indigenous peoples, as the concept of the ‘indian’ in canada is an ill-informed colonial creation, which indian givers addresses. sarah marie wiebe studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 246 maintain a connection to their indigenous identities in a now polluted landscape. the traditional lands of the aamjiwnaang first nation are occupied today by canada’s chemical valley, a heavy industrial complex located in southwestern ontario, and home to approximately 62 petrochemical and polymer facilities on both sides of the canada-u.s. border. this situation affects the local atmosphere, water, and soil, as well as residents’ health and wellness. it compromises both their physical and cultural survival, thus connecting issues of environmental and reproductive justice (ecojustice, 2007; hoover et al., 2012; wiebe & konsmo, 2014; wiebe, forthcoming). the film follows the narratives of three indigenous youth as they fight for physical and cultural survival, and confront mainstream canadian society while living in an environmentally stressed setting. throughout the documentary, these three youth interview community members who discuss the realities of coping with everyday environmental assaults on their homes, bodies, and territories. accessing and bringing to light this experiential knowledge through an artistic medium can rupture oppression and open up space for alternative stories, experiences, and truths to emerge. through this visual medium, young indigenous people were able to challenge social exclusion and stereotypes by making their existence visible and knowable. the film gave voice to something they felt had been silenced. in doing so, indian givers emerged as a serious attempt to engage with indigenous peoples, identities, and cultures – to highlight the meaning of indigeneity, or being indigenous today – in order to interrupt stereotypes and open up a forum for intercultural dialogue. my definition of interculturalism is informed by chantal mouffe’s (2005) notion of agonistic pluralism and inspired by québec’s consultation commission on accommodation practices related to cultural diversity (bouchard & taylor, 2008). from my view, intercultural dialogue moves beyond multicultural policies by cultivating conditions that allow for creative tensions in the spirit of respect for differences. in other words, interculturalism is a philosophical approach to difference that does not seek to eliminate differences while seeking a common identity. in practice, it entails an iterative dialogical process that creates space for exchange, negotiation, and dis/agreement rather than confrontation and division. informed by this approach, and based on the principles of community engaged scholarship, our collaborative film initiative in aamjiwnaang aimed to both visualize and contextualize participants and their lived experiences. similar to rancière’s claims about community theatre, collaborative filmmaking is a vehicle that has the potential to create a “sense of community” among participants who are involved in the process (2009, p. 16); it brings individual bodies together as a collective for which non-hierarchical relationship-building is crucial. building relationships is central to actionoriented, intersectional, and indigenous research, which explore and emphasize complexities, while acknowledging entanglements between decolonizing engagement? studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 247 researcher and researched, facilitator and participant (banister, leadbeater & marshall, 2011; clover, 2011, 2014; kindon, 2003; kovach, 2009; mullin, 2003; thomas & britton, 2012, p. 212; tuhiwai smith, 1999). from this perspective, relationships matter more than results (miller & smith, 2012, p. 332). ethical relationship-building that is respectful of indigenous ways of knowing can challenge mainstream western forms of extractive knowledge production, which clearly delineate between ‘the researcher’ and ‘researched.’ from a collaborative approach, scholars must respect the agency of communities, which entails looking alongside the subject, issue, or context under examination, rather than “looking at” passive research participants (kindon, 2003, p. 143). collaborative film thus brings all involved members into the process and makes them co-producers. a relational, reflexive and anti-oppressive approach situating myself and questioning my inherited social and geopolitical context illuminates the vantage point i bring to this study. awareness of social location – of the researcher’s place – in relation to the research context is a crucial aspect of action-oriented, community engaged, intersectional scholarship (hankivsky, 2012; wiebe & taylor, 2014). originally from the west coast of canada, and raised just outside of vancouver, b.c., on tsleilwaututh territory, i have always been passionate about social justice issues and the environment. as someone with mixed western/european settler ancestry, my training as a graduate student at the university of victoria and the university of ottawa instilled in me a way of thinking critically about settlement, ongoing conditions of colonization, and the significance of place to indigenous ways of life. understanding the lasting impact of colonization is critical to any conversation or research methodology oriented toward decolonization. my doctoral studies took me from canada’s west coast to the nation’s capital, ottawa. prior to commencing my dissertation research, i viewed a canadian broadcast corporation film, the disappearing male (de guerre, 2008), which featured citizens of aamjiwnaang and their ongoing reproductive health concerns. the film drew attention to the community’s recent discovery of a declining rate of male births, considered to be a result of noxious endocrine-disrupting chemicals released into the surrounding atmosphere (mackenzie, keith & lockridge, 2005). during my studies at the university of ottawa, i began a research assistant position through york university’s faculty of environmental studies in toronto, which sought to support the aamjiwnaang first nation health and environment committee in its efforts to raise environmental awareness within the community, and to support youth efforts to defend their culture and land through creative modes of expression. during this experience, i worked alongside the faculty’s research team on a photovoice project that provided aamjiwnaang youth sarah marie wiebe studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 248 with a lens through which they could shed light on their surroundings (flicker, savan, kolenda & mildenberger, 2008; scott & smith, 2012). in january 2011, following several conversations, ceremonial invitations, and established protocols, i relocated from ottawa to the city of sarnia, situated at the southernmost point of lake huron, canada, on aamjiwnaang land and next to canada’s ‘chemical valley.’ in the final stages of my doctoral field research in 2011, at the request of then high school student jacob rogers (jake), i began to work with youth leaders from the young people’s council within aamjiwnaang, as well as with an environmental youth group called the aamjiwnaang green teens, on what came to be indian givers. although my role as an informal advisor, consultant, and member of the research team was to examine how the community mobilized to seek recognition and redress for their ongoing health concerns, including a skewed birth ratio, as an academic-activist volunteer i supported youth activism within the community. once my pre-determined phase of fieldwork and data collection came to a close in 2011, plans to leave sarnia shifted when jake approached me with a request to work together to disrupt misconceptions about indigenous peoples in his local high school. we reached out to his peer leaders and together began to meet weekly, brainstorming a vision for how best to combat stereotypes and educate western youth about indigenous values and beliefs. so began our collective disruption. together, we discussed various issues that concerned these peer leaders, ranging from balancing their indigenous identity with ‘modern’ society to protecting their increasingly polluted environment. throughout the process, members of our newly formed kiijig collective – a name referring to “young people of the land” – began to find confidence in their voice (see lindsay gray, 15:00). in addition to giving visibility to the often invisible issue of racism, youth involved in the project were able to interview public figures in sarnia, ask probing questions and document responses through the visual medium (see film scene with sarnia mayor mike bradley, 26:45). we chose filmmaking as the vehicle to advance intercultural dialogue for radical action and social change, because it offered a way for young people to raise their concerns with authority figures and address misinformation about indigenous peoples, while collectively working toward decolonization. co-creating knowledge: a prismatic process the key thing here is raising awareness. (travis stonefish, nmaachihna indigenous enviro-education centre, moraviantown, indian givers, 39:45) collaborative filmmaking unsettles, challenges, and ultimately seeks to change universal perspectives. it does so by refusing to gaze at an ‘other’s’ lived reality with curiosity, detachment, professionalism, and neutrality; decolonizing engagement? studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 249 instead, it aims to interrupt a monolithic gaze with the views of the participants themselves (sontag, 1997, p. 55). in doing so, it moves beyond a voyeuristic, distanced, touristic, objective mode of looking at research subjects and instead looks alongside participants of a community. by bringing indigenous and non-indigenous youth together to work collectively, our kiijig collective attempted to create space for us to see and interpret injustice together. as a result, change occurred for both the youth who gained confidence in expressing their voices on screen and in terms of my own personal transformation as i learned about relational indigenous values and beliefs. this informed our internal governance structure throughout the filmmaking process, and prompted us to move away from a hierarchical, linear research model of engagement. as we came together, our group created a sense of community and a community of resistance. 2 we sought to challenge dominant discourses “through group agency” (shaw, 2012, p. 227). evidenced by scenes in the film that show indigenous youth in their everyday environments, this medium offers a glimpse into some of the ongoing challenges confronting the youth in their struggle for cultural survival. by working together, we hoped to raise awareness about the ongoing realities of canadian colonization, including the persistent legacy of residential schools and the “60s scoop” (sucharov, 2015; truth and reconciliation commission of canada, 2015). as discussed in the film at 17:45, 24:00 and 25:20, both of these state-sanctioned policies entailed the mass removal of indigenous children from their families by the canadian child protection system. throughout our collaborative project, we continually revisited the kiijig collective’s governance structure, roles, and responsibilities, as well as the overall message of the film. such an iterative, rhizomatic, and non-linear communicative process signifies how film can function as a kind of prism for radical aesthetics and knowledge production (deleuze & guattari, 1987; lynes, 2013, p. 10). at the same time, we never entirely erased a hierarchical governance model. early in our group’s formation, we discussed and assigned respective roles and responsibilities. i was nominated the role of ‘executive producer’ given my position as a researcher familiar with how to leverage funding from various sources. during our discussions, we reviewed various duties associated with film production. participating youth felt that given my presence in the community as a doctoral student and researcher, i would provide leadership as a liaison between indigenous and non-indigenous supporters. this role was crucial to securing funding from a range of sources 2 angela davis used the term “community of resistance” in her remarks during the wall street occupation in washington square park, october 30, 2011 (see http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=hlvfpizooii; accessed december 17, 2013). similar to questions posed by davis (e.g., so how can we be together? how can we be together in a unity that respects and celebrates the differences among us?), the kiijig collective asked questions about how to work across differences to build a cultural understanding that is not simplistic or oppressive, but multifaceted, prismatic and complex. sarah marie wiebe studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 250 (including the band’s education department, lambton-kent school district, and the city of sarnia), maintaining accountability to our funders (both indigenous and non-indigenous), and facilitating dialogue among all participating members of the kiijig collective. within a few months, we secured funds to finance pre-production, production, and post-production of the film. most of our budget went to hiring local non-indigenous filmmakers for each of these phases, as well as to costs associated with production, including gas, food, and accommodation for the crew to attend conferences and events as deemed necessary for the production process. as the only member of our production team with a vehicle, i often assumed the role of ‘line producer’ and ensured that group members had transportation to various shooting sites. we interviewed members of the aamjiwnaaang first nation, elders, policy-makers and activists and wove together their stories with the broader narrative about the youth’s struggle to reclaim their indigenous identities, lands, and traditions. production took place during an eight-month period in 2011-2012, followed by a series of iterative shooting/reviewing/editing meetings to discuss the overall scope and message of the film. as noted above, our collective intended to make marginalized experience visible and knowable. in so doing, the film facilitated awareness about the community’s “fleshy” and “situated knowledge” (campbell, 2007, p. 379; gabrielson & parady, 2010; haraway, 1988, 1991; mouffe, 2005; yanow, 2003). similar to other creative visual methodologies, filmmaking strives to create an atmosphere of engagement that is both emotional and transformative. the playful, collaborative filmmaking process can thus be an “affective vehicle” (tremblay & jayme, 2015), which is experienced through the body (bloustein, 2012, p. 121). during our interactions throughout the indian givers production process, for example, the ability to reflect back on oneself with a sense of humour, enabled by a relaxed and engaging atmosphere, provided space for ample learning moments. the resulting rapport allowed participating group members to enter some complex and difficult conversations about lived challenges pertaining to racism. as a relational, reciprocal, and affective tool, this approach made learning about difficult topics more inviting to young people who were brought into the process as co-learners and co-producers. in so doing, this process challenged existing societal power imbalances, while making knowledge accessible to communities beyond the academy. as a group production, collaborations evoked deep connections among participants of the collective, thus disrupting conventional patterns of scholarly enterprise, which often operate under the guise of value-free, objective, and emotionless research. throughout the filmmaking process, both indigenous and settler group members (including the hired filmmakers) confronted and reflected on their own positions, beliefs, and perspectives. at the same time, perfect reconciliation of diverse worldviews was not the objective of our project. chantal mouffe’s notion of agonistic pluralism decolonizing engagement? studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 251 resonates; it questions unanimity and homogeneity while awarding a positive status to difference, highlighting how perfect reconciliation is an impossibility (2005, pp. 5, 9, 19, 98). for mouffe, although deliberation may not always achieve consensus, deliberative tensions can be harnessed in productive ways to cultivate awareness. the closing scenes of indian givers draw into focus the importance of agonistic pluralism in two ways. first, the action of indigenous youth reclaiming their high school hallways while dressed in clothing traditional to their culture articulates their desire to make themselves visible and known, although their (predominantly) non-indigenous peers demonstrated awe, dismay, or indifference. while no consensus was achieved between indigenous and non-indigenous peers, the film provides a forum for selfexpression without imposing one particular worldview on the viewer. second, as aamjiwnaang elder mike plain articulates in the film’s final frame, the mere existence of indigenous peoples is an everyday act of survival and resistance. although the film may not immediately lead to reconciliation between indigenous and western worldviews, it is a relational research tool that creates space for intercultural dialogue beyond the lifespan of the film, when used in a classroom setting to facilitate discussion. in this respect, academics teaching about topics pertaining to race and environmental justice can continue to be “together, apart” with community members while addressing common concerns in different contexts (rancière, 2009, pp. 52, 57). as i discuss in greater detail below, by serving as a critical tool for social reflection and action, the film provided valuable lessons about intercultural encounters for both indigenous and settler collaborators. learning from community, reaching beyond the academy film, video art, photography, installation and all forms of art can rework the frame of our perceptions and the dynamism of our affects. as such, they can open up new passages towards new forms of political subjectivation. (rancière, 2009, p. 82) cultivating awareness about how all canadians are implicated in ongoing processes of colonization is a first step toward addressing injustice. doing so is not, however, a licence for researchers to speak for indigenous peoples or to attempt single-handedly to solve apparent injustices without community consultation and input. although “we must understand these relationships to understand ourselves and politics” (shaw, 2008, p. 6), scholars attempting to decolonize engagement must be mindful of the danger in appropriating voice and assuming a leading role in organizing for justice (tuhiwai smith, 1999). as donna haraway (1991, p. 193) states, a researcher committed to social justice is obliged to respectfully join together with communities of difference “without claiming to be one another.” indeed, respect for difference does not sarah marie wiebe studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 252 entail erasing distinguishing features of one’s identity; rather, a commitment to decolonization involves a willingness to open up the possibility for intercultural “engagement across difference” (lynes, 2013, p. 20; tuhiwai smith, 1999). within our collective, this translated into facilitating dialogue and cocreating knowledge without fundamentally reconciling differences. however, while we learned from one another, we struggled to find a consensus on issues pertaining to funding, governance, ownership, and film distribution. we realized that developing a shared funding model that builds in a component for skills development amongst participants is crucial. to produce, shoot and edit the film, the kiijig collective hired ian alexander and sadie mallon, two independent sarnia-based filmmakers from western/european backgrounds. although we applied for additional funding for capacity building and training for the indigenous participants, we did not receive it. as a result, the filmmakers provided training on a volunteer basis by including the youth in all stages of the process. this is a limitation of the project. in order to be more thoroughly collaborative, participatory, and communitydriven, initiatives like this must develop skills and training among all participants and build them into the funding model from the outset. we also struggled to find the most culturally appropriate governance model for our group and did not always reach a consensus about ownership of the footage gathered; moreover, some members were uncomfortable with entering the film into a festival circuit. the film certainly has the potential to contribute to meaningful discussion about indigenous-settler relations, environmental justice, and reconciliation, but our collective continues to debate the best process for translating the content into concrete policy outcomes. we agreed that it would be inappropriate to profit from the film, and decided to make the entire feature publicly accessible on youtube, where it is available for use as a teaching tool for public education. as a courtesy, any member of the kiijig collective who screens the film lets the other members know. we determined that we all share responsibilities as equal spokespersons for the film. from the outset, the collective agreed that the film would be a collaboratively produced product and not ‘owned’ by any member, and therefore came to an agreement that decision-making must be conducted collectively among the group by consensus. this was a challenge in the final stages, because not all participating youth could attend each post-production meeting. the final film was reviewed by all members and then screened at their high school in june, 2012. additional screenings were subsequently held at several environmental justice conferences in ontario, although not all youth had the support or funding to travel to these events. it is now clear to us that collaborative film initiatives must build in funding for dissemination. at all stages of filmmaking, we sought advice and mentorship from the education and environment departments in aamjiwnaang, as well as from an elder. broadly speaking, the film proved to be well-received within the decolonizing engagement? studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 253 community, although a few of the youth involved in the project reported some strained relations in the immediate aftermath among their peers at school and with authority figures in the community. we addressed this issue in several sharing circles with our elder advisor. this serves as a reminder that one cannot approach such processes with naiveté about the uncertainties, tensions, and frictions that inevitably emerge during creative collaborations. power relations are always present in any democratic process, no matter how rational, reasonable, or consensus-based. indeed, collaborative initiatives, like democratic deliberation, are “far from smooth” processes (mouffe, 2005, p. 3). nevertheless, power relations cannot simply be erased, and controversies and conflicts can be conduits for social change. concluding reflections on the art of engagement grounded in relationships and informed by community engaged scholarship, collaborative filmmaking has much to offer the practice of academic-activist research that is oriented toward decolonization. as indian givers reveals, collaborative, community engaged processes can focus on diverse knowledges and experiences in order to shed light on the lived realities of those living with and ‘sensing’ the adverse effects of environmentally unjust public policies (wiebe, forthcoming). by involving young people as conduits for translation, storytelling, and representation in their own words, terms, images, and emotions, film served as a compelling medium to “democratize experience” (sontag, 1997, p. 3). for example, in the concluding scene of indian givers, the youth reclaimed their high school hallways wearing clothing traditional to their culture. these images served to “shock” viewers and offer them something different to see (sontag, 1997, p. 19). by affecting the viewers and opening them up to seeing something anew, this emotional charge may prompt new thinking and novel insights. working toward social change in a contemporary context of ongoing colonization is no simple feat. decolonization is a large challenge, requiring significant systematic and structural change. co-creating knowledge about the lived effects of colonization is a starting point, and collaborative filmmaking is one small step toward the broader aim of decolonization. scholars committed to addressing and interrupting injustices will need to think carefully about ‘so what?’ and ‘what’s next?’ after provoking these artistic interventions. with respect to our collaboration in aamjiwnaang, indian givers is, as noted, a publicly available film, which is now used in high school and university classrooms as a teaching tool. going forward, to influence social change and support meaningful policy development, scholars and public officials must invest time and effort into relationship-building between community members, educators, and policy officials. connecting experiential knowledge to policy-making processes requires both imagination sarah marie wiebe studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 254 and translation as academic-activists consider how best to inject this knowledge into systemic legal and policy processes. as an academic-activist committed to the practice of community engaged scholarship, i continue to employ visual tools in ongoing research projects that work closely with indigenous communities who seek to co-create knowledge by identifying problems, research approaches, and viable solutions together. for example, to fish as formerly is a short film i coproduced with members of the tsawout first nation on vancouver island (british columbia), 3 which the community screened as part of their aboriginal oral evidence before a national energy board hearing in victoria on november 28th, 2014 (neb hearing order oh-001-2014: 11565). through these types of creative, collaborative interventions between indigenous and settler communities, arts-based research can complement existing academic-activist scholarship by creating space for difference and dialogue. although these processes can create safe spaces and culturally appropriate contexts for knowledge sharing, as researchers entering and departing this terrain we must be mindful of our responsibilities to and relationships with the people and places encountered in our research. mouffe’s notion of agonistic pluralism accentuates how the task of democratic politics – and by extension democratic academic-activist research projects – must not “eliminate passions from the sphere of the public” (2005, p. 103). to be clear, the research process is not free from friction, but friction can also be productive for dialogue. rather than erasing difference, dialogical initiatives informed by mouffe’s notion of radical democracy bring conflicts to the fore, “to make them visible so that they can enter the terrain of contestation” (2005, p. 34). collaborative filmmaking as an anti-oppressive research tool is both radical and relational: it brings into focus opportunities for community building through site-specific struggles on an iterative, ongoing basis. at the same time, this prismatic process does not seek to erase difference but sheds light on dissenting voices, while making space for and facilitating the expression of diverse perspectives. acknowledgments this research benefitted from a social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc)-funded joseph-armand bombardier canada graduate scholarship, an ontario graduate scholarship (ogs), and a population health improvement research network award. i wish to express very special thanks to all members of the aamjiwnaang green teens, young people’s council within aamjiwnaang, and kiijig collective, for their continued openness and contributions to the production of indian givers. 3 access to fish as formerly at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtqk1ir9ibc decolonizing engagement? studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 255 funding from the lambton-kent school district, the city of sarnia, and the aamjiwnaang first nation education and environment departments made this film possible. this article benefitted from feedback during the community filmmaking & cultural diversity conference at the british film institute in january 2014. i am also grateful to have benefitted from numerous conversations with affiliates of the institute for studies and innovation in community university engagement at the university of victoria who helped me craft these ideas. comments and feedback from my dear friend, boreal collective photojournalist and constant creative source of inspiration laurence butet-roch, significantly enhanced this paper. finally, i would like to say thank you to the external reviewers and special issue editors for creating a productive space to flesh out academic-activist scholarship. this opportunity helped to sharply hone my contributions to the field, both in the community and in the academy. references banister, e., leadbeater, b., & marshall, a. 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(2014). indigenous body as contaminated site? examining reproductive justice in aamjiwnaang. in f. scala, s. paterson & m. sokolon (eds.), fertile ground: exploring reproduction in canada (pp. 325-358). montreal & kingston: mcgill-queen’s university. wiebe, s., & taylor, m. (2014). pursuing excellence in collaborative community-campus research: 2014 cccr national summit backgrounder. (background paper prepared for the 2014 cccr national summit, november 3-4, 2014.) community-based research canada. retrieved from: http://www.communitybasedresearch.ca/resources/677%20national%20summit/participant %20backgrounder%20oct%2029.compressed.pdf decolonizing engagement? studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 244-257, 2015 257 wiebe, s. (forthcoming). everyday exposure: indigenous mobilization and environmental justice in canada’s chemical valley. vancouver: ubc press. yanow, d. (2003). assessing local knowledge. in h.m.a. wagenar (ed.), deliberative policy analysis: understanding governance in the network society (pp. 228-246). cambridge: cambridge university press. cook, doucet & rowsell final correspondence address: nancy cook, department of sociology, brock university, st. catharines, on l2s 3a1; email: ncook@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 187-194, 2017 visual research and social justice – guest editors’ introduction nancy cook brock university, canada andrea doucet brock university, canada jennifer rowsell brock university, canada traditionally, the sources of data in qualitative methodologies have been overwhelmingly linguistic, relying on the written and spoken word (crang, 2010; holliday, 2000; pauwels, 2010). ethnographic research in particular has seldom incorporated visual methods of data collection and analysis, although anthropologists and geographers have long used photographs, maps, sketches, and paintings to portray “native informants” (spivak, 1999), “the field,” and the practice of fieldwork (crang & cook, 2007; edwards, 1992). margaret mead (2003), for example, used visual “salvage anthropology” as a mechanism for “preserving” vanishing cultures by producing a permanent photographic record of them that scholars could study once those cultures disappeared entirely. perhaps this hesitance to engage with visuals in qualitative methodological repertoires is related to the crisis of representation, specifically to epistemological critiques of visual knowledge that foreground the role the “visual gaze” played in colonial appropriation and other projects of domination (gilman, 1986; gregory, 2003; lewis, 1996; said, 1993). it may also be linked to overdrawn claims for the representational facticity and verisimilitude of visual materials, for the “obviousness of vision that allows one to imply a transparency about the world and picture, that can suggest the visual offers ‘raw data’ as if bypassing troublesome issues of constructing knowledge” (crang, 2010, p. 212). the imperialist histories of visual knowledge and disputes about its epistemological status have, until recently, clouded our sense of how visual methods might be put to critical use in qualitative research as a way to understand and make sense of various aspects of social life. because visual nancy cook, andrea doucet, jennifer rowsell studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 187-194, 2017 188 representations have the potential to communicate important dimensions of people’s everyday lives and depict significant life events, they can be framed as engaging forms of seeing that create intimate representations of the social (pink, 2007; rose, 2012). and because visual awareness and engagement feature prominently in people’s everyday lives, qualitative researchers also have come to understand the importance of attending to the visual organisation and saturation of social life. consequently, as leading visual researcher gillian rose (2014, p. 24) has noted, “one of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials” that offer such analytic advantages by operating in a critically reflexive register. indeed, visual research methods (e.g., emmel & clark, 2011; margolis & pauwels, 2011; mitchell, 2011; pauwels, 2010; rose, 2012, 2014; spencer, 2011; tinkler, 2013) and visual ethnographies (e.g., harper, 2003; pink, 2007, 2008; winddance twine, 2006) have flourished during this time period, employing a diverse range of visual materials for exploring research questions. they now constitute rapidly emerging subfields within the vast field of qualitative methodologies. these subfields embrace exciting creative, affective, epistemological, ontological, and methodological entanglements that emerge from research that explores photographs, film, memories, digital stories, and other visual artefacts (e.g., doucet, 2015; kuhn, 2007; kuhn & mcallister, 2006; langford, 2008; mcallister, 2011, 2012). the growth in these subfields is demonstrated by the steady rise of conferences, scholarly associations, publications, journal special issues, journals themselves (e.g., visual studies, visual anthropology, visual anthropological review, journal of visual culture), and handbooks on visual research methodologies, mainly in the united states and the united kingdom, but also across europe and scandinavia, and more recently in canada. we set out to explore visual research through our role as organising team members of the 2016 meeting of the annual qualitative analysis conference (also known as “the qualitatives”), which is attended annually at different canadian universities by canadian and international qualitative researchers. the conference theme was “visual research methods and visual ethnographies.” it was the first major research conference in canada to highlight creative intersections between qualitative research and photographs, filmmaking, visual artefacts, and visual representations, and to illuminate research outcomes that feature documentary films, photographic exhibits, and digital storytelling. presenters also explored transdisciplinary methodological, epistemological, and ontological issues in visual methodologies. we are grateful for a sshrc connections grant and funding provided through brock university’s social justice research institute, the centre for research in the social sciences, and the internal sshrc research grant system that allowed us to launch such an initiative. we had four objectives for the conference: (1) to expand canadian capacity visual research & social justice studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 187-194, 2017 189 in the burgeoning transdisciplinary and international fields of visual methodologies and visual ethnographies; (2) to establish a national, international, and transdisciplinary network of scholars and non-academic practitioners in visual research methodologies; (3) to mentor newly established and novice researchers in visual methods, visual ethnographies, and qualitative research practice; and (4) to produce high-quality peerreviewed publications that offer canadian and international scholars, students, and non-academic qualitative research practitioners guidance on, and examples of, innovations in visual research methodologies and ethnographies. the conference presentations charted new directions and highlighted transdisciplinary approaches to visual research mainly from the social sciences, but also from the humanities and life sciences. conference contributors embraced a wide number of visual methodological approaches: digital storytelling, photovoice, autophotography, filmmaking, video inquiry, archival and historical photographs, arts-informed narrative inquiry, and theatre. and their thematic foci included indigenous communities, masculinities, disabilities, hiv/aids, social housing, families, memory, urban spaces, mental health, refugee and immigrant women, eating disorders, marginalised youth, schools and education, and teaching with art, music, and film. this range of topics demonstrates the strong link that scholars are establishing between visual research and social inequalities; over the last decade they have increasingly employed, in critically reflexive ways, visual methodologies that explore a broad variety of social inequalities from the perspectives of socially marginalised and excluded groups (e.g., delgado, 2015; gubrium, krause, & jernigan, 2014; joseph, 2017; mannay, 2010; mitchell, 2006; sensoy, 2011; shah, 2015; singhal & rattine-flaherty, 2006; zehle, 2015). many of these scholars claim that beyond their empirical and theoretical benefits, participatory visual methods, like photovoice, politically empower subjugated research subjects through a shift of representational control from researchers to participants (for a critique of this claim, see butz & cook this issue; kothari, 2001). despite this deepening connection between visual methods and the analysis and subversion of social inequalities, little work has been published that explicitly relates visual research, methods, and ethnographies to social justice theorising (but see garber, 2004; keifer-boyd, 2011; kurtz, 2005; powell & serriere, 2013). this special issue of studies in social justice (ssj) emerges from the 2016 qualitatives conference as a contribution to qualitative studies in visual research, but also as a reflection on transdisciplinary conversations about the relationships between visuality and social justice in its theoretical, epistemological, methodological, and substantive forms. it focuses, therefore, on visual research that explores a range of intersections among filmmaking, photography, graphic novels, and social justice processes and interventions, including the issue of epistemic justice in visual ways of knowing. like the content of all ssj volumes, this special issue consists of three types of nancy cook, andrea doucet, jennifer rowsell studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 187-194, 2017 190 contributions: standard peer-reviewed research articles; dispatches, which are shorter commentaries about social justice praxis related to research activities, social movement experiences and practice, and social justice events from the vantage point of academic and non-academic practitioners; and creative interventions that explore social justice issues in an aesthetic (in our case, visual/textual) register. the article section of this special issue includes four research-based papers. matt rogers focuses on participatory media production by secondary school students as a critical pedagogical tool in social justice education. as the coordinator of the new brunswick school-based participatory filmmaking project what’s up doc?, matt has organised the production of over 60 student films since 2009, which have raised institutional critiques, troubled inequitable discourses, and addressed a wide range of social justice issues that students relate to their school experiences. he notes that participatory media practices such as these are usually heralded in the academic literature as social justice intervention strategies that necessarily empower marginalised groups within the larger student population. however, his experience with the what’s up doc? project suggests that a critical analysis of the visual/discursive representations that organise student-produced participatory films is required to achieve a more robust understanding of their complex social justice outcomes. his discourse analysis of seven films that were screened during the 2012 iteration of the project shows that many of them perpetuate as well as challenge marginalising social narratives and visual representations. for example, he demonstrates how sexist, racist, and heteronormative discourses organise these films, producing ambivalent participatory media texts that complicate and often undermine the social justice goals of the project. courtney donovan and ebru ustundag develop a connection between visual research and social justice theorising by focussing on graphic novels. they claim that graphic novels are an innovative visual/textual mechanism for representing socially marginalised subjectivities and experiences, especially experiences of trauma, which provide new insight into social justice theorisations. in contrast to legal or clinical approaches to trauma that focus solely on textual testimony and therefore limit insight into the complex, multifaceted nature and experience of trauma, the combination of visual and textual representation in graphic novels, they argue, provides a platform for communicating trauma experiences that are usually “unreadable,” unrecognisable, and inaccessible through text alone. they contend that graphic representations of trauma produce an opening to more complex and inter-relational understandings of trauma, offering social justice possibilities beyond legal and clinical institutions, and shifting the institutional emphasis on the politics of redistribution to one of recognition at various social scales. david butz and nancy cook situate their visual research contribution in the critical mobilities literature, particularly the debate about effective methods for mobilities research. many mobilities scholars are turning to a visual research & social justice studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 187-194, 2017 191 critical use of visual methods as a means of apprehending mobile cultures, practices, and meanings. the authors focus on how they used a specific visual/narrative method – autophotography – in a study of the social implications of road construction in shimshal, a northern pakistani mountain community, offering an assessment of its usefulness for mobilities research. the starting point for this assessment is rooted in the concept of epistemic justice, in which ethics and epistemology are mutually constitutive. they argue that a method’s effectiveness needs to be assessed on both of these grounds, in the specific research context in which it is employed. they develop the notion of an “autoethnographic sensibility” as an appropriate epistemological framing for their transcultural research context in which the persistent effects of colonialism systematically impede epistemic justice. autophotography, they demonstrate, meets the ethical/epistemological requirements of an autoethnographic sensibility, but it also allows them to understand how mobilities are socially instanciated and emplaced in shimshal, making autophotography an empirically and theoretically productive, as well as epistemologically ethical method for mobilities research. jennifer rowsell and emmanuel tabi examine the power and potential of visual methods coupled with sensory-led approaches to ethnographic fieldwork with racially diverse young men across different social contexts. important to their work are issues central to social justice, such as racial equity and the funds of knowledge that are so often marginalised or invisible when young people apply them in formalised school-based learning. reflecting on their many conversations with young men, rowsell and tabi explore these men’s relationship with literacy, their sense of failure, and the deficit language and framings they have experienced related to their literacy repertoires. rather than emphasising young men’s lack of conventional literacy skills, the authors focus on the ways they employ alternative literacy practices that are visual in nature, often accompanied by words and moving images. interrogating their visuals and talking through their stories and agentive qualities in collaborative ways has given both researchers an awareness of young men’s emotional worlds and the ability of the visual to allow for sense-laden, agentive meaning making. our issue also contains three dispatches. the first – by katherine boydell, chi cheng, brenda gladstone, shevaun nadin, and elaine stasiulis – focuses on the use of digital storytelling (dst) by healthcare professionals and advocates as a participatory visual method that has socially inclusive and just effects, such as engaging marginalised groups in shared experiential storytelling processes that promote social connection among participants, challenge power imbalances, and initiate social change. they draw on a study of rural youth who experience psychosis to develop this argument about the social justice potential of dst, describing how their participation in a dst research project fostered a sense of social inclusion and individual agency that affected their social experiences. nancy cook, andrea doucet, jennifer rowsell studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 187-194, 2017 192 second, patti fraser, flick harrison, and lynn fels contribute what they call a “video thought experiment” that responds to a question posed to participants at the 2016 performing the world conference in new york city, in conversation with the art for social change research project conducted at simon fraser university. it consists of discussions with artists about the relationships among performance, power, and place. in the third dispatch contribution, matthew hayes reflects on his ma research, which explored the corporate takeover of the north american funeral industry. during the course of his research, he met a funeral director in vancouver, tom, who then became the subject of his thesis, which combined textual exegesis with a co-produced documentary film. tom was already actively resisting the corporatisation of his field, and saw the film as a mechanism for furthering his fight for social justice rather than as an aspect of academic practice. matthew found his project hijacked by tom’s political agenda, which produced conflict regarding their aesthetic and conceptual visions for the film. matthew uses this experience to reflect on the ethical and practical challenges of using visual methods, and on intersections between ethnographic filmmaking involving academic and non-academic collaborators and social justice. the five creative interventions that conclude our special issue include a video called “water ethics: think like a watershed” in which jessica hallenbeck interviews scholars and artists to develop a framework for the ethical use of water that shifts away from a supply and demand model to one based on ethics, rights, responsibilities, and relationality. caleb johnson presents “downtown ambassador,” an example drawn from a 2011 art exhibition called counter mapping that speaks to the ways people are using visual art to creatively disrupt everyday life and imaginatively contest urban spatial design as a material politics and mechanism for the pursuit of social justice. manal aldowayan, a contemporary saudi arabian artist, contributes “i am,” a series of photographs that respond to a 2005 speech given by king abdulla al saud that called for all saudis to unite in building a better country, including improving women’s employment opportunities. aldowayan’s photographs critically reflect on the conservative questioning of what kind of jobs are appropriate for women by exploring the history of women’s economic contributions to saudi society, and by representing contemporary women whose paid employment intervenes in debates about the nature and suitability of women’s paid labour. “unmasking racism” is the visual/textual product of bharati sethi’s combined use of photovoice and poetic transcription. she explores how immigrant and refugee women in canada experience racism that structures their work opportunities and health outcomes; she does this by inviting these women to document their experiences in diary, pictorial, and conventional interview forms, and then she draws on this material to construct two poeticised photos. finally, andrew zealley presents “infecting mbembe,” which consists of visual text 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(2013). using photographs in social and historical research. london: sage. winddance twine, f. (2006). visual ethnography and racial theory: family photographs as archives of interracial intimacies. ethnic and racial studies, 29(3), 487-511. zehle, j. (2015). investigating life stories: the photovoices of young people with disabilities in northern ethiopia. in s. miles & a. howes (eds.), photography in educational research: critical reflections from diverse contexts (pp. 21-35). new york: routledge. studies in social justice volume 3, issue 1, 79-97, 2009 correspondence address: alice hills, school of politics and international studies, botany house 2.07, university of leeds, leeds, ls2 9jt, uk, tel.: +44 (0)113 343 6822, email: a.e.hills@leeds.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 security as a selective project alice hills school of politics and international studies, university of leeds abstract security is a selective project that is typically understood, produced and expressed in terms of differentiation and exclusion; it is rarely for all. this is notably so in post-conflict cities such as baghdad and basra, where the principal political weapons are coercion and intimidation, territoriality is a significant facet of security’s physical dimension and exclusionary tendencies, and security’s referent object is an ethnic or sectarian identity or group. friction exists between the multiple perspectives and interests concerned, and concessions and trade-offs are essential. even so, it is probably not possible to develop citywide security, or, indeed, a comprehensive understanding that integrates state, sub-state (that is, factional) and individual security. trends in iraqi policing support this interpretation. international efforts to use a reformed public police to rebalance the provision of security more equitably are accordingly unrealistic. anyone considering post-conflict cities is struck by the extent to which security is the central point around which debate and competition take place. security’s absence or fragility dominates the lives of all those living or operating in cities such as baghdad and basra in the aftermath of the u.s.-led invasion of 2003, while the recruitment and responsibilities of those expected to restore, enforce or maintain security are manipulated by international actors and indigenous strongmen alike. at the same time, security is a multi-faceted social phenomenon, incorporating individual and public aspects and spaces, and its meaning accommodates multiple interpretations. international militaries impose minimal levels of street-level security in order to protect their own forces, and because they want to hand over responsibility to an indigenous public police as soon as it is practically or politically appropriate to do so. meanwhile local strongmen and sectarian militia use physical security to shape the conduct of individuals and groups in furtherance of personal or exclusionary objectives. the poor or vulnerable are more aware of security’s physical dimension: security means that they are not forcibly displaced, raped, robbed, kidnapped, mutilated, tortured or killed. common security projects, or projects that can be extended to all inhabitants, are rare, if not impossible. typically, security is enjoyed by a few in isolation, or by specific groups in certain neighbourhoods. this may be a short-term solution, which creates the conditions for insecurity in the long-term, but the strongmen, sectarian militia and gangs seeking to access city resources do not think in the long term. they 80 alice hills studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 are more concerned about manipulating security as early as possible. neither do they share liberal democracies’ inability to decide whether security is a common or selective project. they are more aware that in the long-term security can be defined only in terms of the system of political competition that has grown up inside the city or country concerned (lee, 1969, p. 9). hence the selective and manipulative nature of security provision, and the mosaic of insecurity and injustice that results. it makes analytical sense to explore these issues in the context of cities, for security is a relational issue (it cannot exist in isolation), and cities are a uniquely human environment built on networks of relationships. this is not to suggest that the dynamics of urban security provision are sufficiently different to justify treating urban and rural security as separate categories. rather, it is to argue that cities have a political, cultural and physical value that rural areas lack, so the presence or absence of security takes on a special significance. further, urbanization is associated with demographic change, which typically leads to the emergence of the youthful but alienated populations commonly linked to instability and insecurity. in other words, cities’ known history means that they offer a laboratory in which to trace the social and political continuities moulding the provision of security. cities offer discrete case studies of security, of who provides it, and how, and whose needs are prioritized. based on the paradigmatic examples of baghdad and basra, i argue that security is rarely (if ever) for all. in iraq, security is, as in most post-conflict cities, based on relations of domination and coercion, rather than shared norms, and is typically produced and expressed in terms of differentiation and exclusion. the time frame used runs from april 2003, when u.s. forces took baghdad and uk forces occupied basra, to 2007, and the emphasis is on the early months of the occupation, when the coalition provisional authority (cpa) sought to ensure its own security. but iraq’s chronic insecurity makes it impossible to tell whether the post-conflict period ended in june 2004, when the us formally handed sovereignty to an interim government, or in may 2005 when the first democratically elected iraqi government was sworn in, or in late 2007, when a surge in u.s. troop numbers dramatically reduced insurgent attacks. there were improvements throughout this period, but they tended to be local; the presence of u.s. troops damped down violence, which then migrated to areas with fewer troops. damningly, johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health estimated that some 655,000 people died in iraq between 2003 and 2005 (johns hopkins, 2006). this suggests that the nature, shape, functions, and dynamics of urban security are determined by cities being a uniquely human environment, in which the most significant threats tend to be manmade. consequently, the greatest insight into the meaning of security in an urbanizing world is not via notions relating to long-term concerns such as human security. rather, it is to be found via the classic question: when and where do i feel safe? the case of iraq is for such reasons significant. it enables us to explore classic empirically-based questions concerning security in terms of for whom and from what; about whether the concerns of the state should be prioritized over those of individuals or of groups based on religious or sectarian divisions, and individuals over groups or vice versa; and whether or not the various approaches may be combined into a coherent and meaningful whole, or whether one is dependent on the other. iraq makes clear, too, that international efforts to rebalance security provision security as a selective project 81 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 by using public police as a tool for social engineering are unrealistic, for police behaviour reflects the friction existing between multiple indigenous (as well as international) perspectives and interests. this argument is developed in five sections, which address three basic questions: how is security understood? how is it produced? how is it expressed? the first section notes how crosscutting environmental issues affect the understanding, production and distribution of security. of these, exclusion and territoriality are key. the second section considers the provision of security by police, while the third identifies ways in which crime and policy incoherence affect security provision. the fourth section discusses two dominant responses evident in iraqi cities, which are ghettoization in baghdad, and sectarianism in basra. section five concludes that the only certainty is that security (both for those who provide it, and often for those who want it) means whatever powerful actors make of it. understanding security security is a multi-faceted and fetishized concept (neocleous, 2000, p. xii). there are always marked differences between the security priorities and practices of military forces, international police advisers, indigenous police and the populace in post-conflict cities, but definitions of security are now commonly stretched to incorporate a range of meanings that include food, water, health and environmental issues for both individuals and communities. this is to some extent reasonable, for security is often defined situationally and contextually. hence the american troops who drove around baghdad “announcing in a loudspeaker ‘security for us in return for electricity for you’” (abdelhadi, 2003). even so, it downplays three of the most significant characteristics of security: its relational, physical and territorial aspects. security cannot exist in isolation; it is always defined in relation to something or someone. it is not a resource that can be banked, but must be manipulated and managed. further, security’s meaning is defined broadly or narrowly, according to context. coalition authorities publicly defined security broadly in the sense of it being developed for “the iraqi people,” and in 2003, dyncorp received $50 million for the first year of a contract to create a new iraqi police. but the coalition’s understanding of security was really about force protection, the safety of coalition officials, and exit strategy. additionally, while security provision was localized by indigenous sectarian militia, it was fragmented by coalition authorities that subcontracted it to organizations and groups ranging from private security companies (pscs) such as dyncorp to sheiks or sunni groups capable of securing their own areas against insurgents. the resultant ambiguities ensured that security became a politically flexible notion. thus pscs were used to provide security for the head of the cpa, escort supply convoys, defend key locations in baghdad’s green zone, and also to interrogate prisoners. twenty-seven of the 37 interrogators involved in the abuse of prisoners at abu ghraib prison belonged to caci international, a virginiabased private contractor, and 22 of the linguists who assisted them were from the california-based titan international. such civilian employers were effectively unaccountable, for they were not subject to military law or the geneva conventions, and bremer had issued an order protecting them from local prosecution. 82 alice hills studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 nonetheless, while this suggests that security’s meaning may shift to reflect political contingencies, or, indeed, renewed fighting, inadequate food supplies, or the looting of hospitals, all of which refocus priorities, its primary meaning refers to something more physical, territorial and exclusionary. western democracies may favour universalizing and inclusionary definitions, but security in the post-conflict city at least means that suicide bombers do not mutilate coalition troops, and the local population is not forcibly displaced, raped, robbed, kidnapped, tortured or killed. the application of broad notions such as community, “human security” and social justice (let alone emancipation, as in booth, 1991, p. 318) are of limited value in cities such as baghdad (“where the strong,” 2002) because the principal political weapons available are intimidation and violence. threats are usually physical, or to do with the elusive notion of “survival,” especially when cities are divided into ethnic or sectarian areas, and security’s referent object is an identity or group (compare ayoob, 1995; krause, 1998, p. 25). at a meeting between the un and the governor of afghanistan’s kandahar province in december 2002, the un’s officials spoke of building a civil society and a state, but the governor talked only of securing power in a continuing conflict (“where the strong,” 2002). connected to this is territoriality. territoriality is nowadays neglected, yet it is an integral facet of security’s physical dimension and exclusionary tendencies. it is about asserting control over specific localities in order to expand a dominant group’s space or restrict that of an adversary, and it tends to result in ghettoization (compare caldeira, 2000; hoffman, 2007; seekings, 2001). territoriality expressed sectarian ambitions and fears in baghdad, just as it prompted the use of communal terror to remap vukovar, sarajevo, and mostar after the balkan wars. its influence is equally evident in the actions of conventional security forces. it drove the u.s. seizure of iraq’s symbols of regime power (including police headquarters) in 2003, just as it underpins the israel defence force (idf)’s attempts to control palestinian movement by the destruction of palestinian houses, infrastructure, and cultural and administrative facilities. territoriality emphasizes that security’s meaning, production and provision are linked. understood in this sense, production may be as critical as understanding. paradigmatic cases of baghdad and basra baghdad, iraq’s capital, and basra, its strategically important second city, provide paradigmatic cases of these characteristics from several perspectives. first, security in both cities was ghettoized. just as the coalition authorities were walled off in baghdad’s green zone, so baghdad’s districts were purged, divided into isolated neighbourhoods by concrete walls, barriers and checkpoints, and guarded by factional militia and gunmen. similar trends are identifiable in basra. second, in both cities security was a symbol and a signal that had sense at many levels and referred to different things, but it was always understood in a brutally pragmatic fashion. it could not be otherwise. after four years of insurgency and civil conflict, a national government existed in name only, three million iraqis were internally displaced, some 3,000 were murdered each month, and many more were subject to security as a selective project 83 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 kidnapping, rape, extortion, and robbery. the iraqi police service (which was responsible for day-to-day policing) was little more than a sectarian militia, many of whose members were responsible for torture and extrajudicial killings (mccaffrey, 2007). this, despite receiving significant aid and support in kind from members of the u.s.-led coalition. the us alone spent $194 million on rebuilding the police and military during its year of occupation (barker, 2007), and by july 2006, the uk had disbursed £533 million to projects that included police training and mentoring (hansard, 2006). meanwhile japan had given about $1.5 billion in grant aid for comparable programs (“iraqi police,” 2005). iraq shows how the coalition’s neo-liberal ideals of co-operation and democratization collided with iraqi realities: greater baghdad’s estimated seven million inhabitants (and basra’s one million) understood security to mean the physical safety of themselves and their property. pragmatic modes of manipulation, negotiation and accommodation amongst and between factional leaders, international agents and the populace soon developed into consistent patterns of domination and exclusion. this led to a ghettoization of security whereby specific groups are secure only in specific areas. indeed, citywide security is rare because security (which is localized, superficial, and often temporary) is essentially the sum of myriad local arrangements. as baghdad and basra show, it is usually decided by mutually suspicious interactions between indigenous strong men, external agents, and influential sections of the populace (stewart, 2007). it is a web composed of myriad groups, some of which understand the cultural rules guiding iraqi (or american) behaviour and outcomes, and some of which do not. the key fact about security is that its provision is a practical business. coalition troops treated policing with a mix of ideology and pragmatism, especially once insurgency developed. the creation of a new police may have been part of the coalition’s strategy to bring democratic security to the iraqi people (and thereby allow troops to depart), but the impassive and taciturn troops concerned combined casual acceptance of u.s. military power with an inexperience and lack of interest in the region that dehumanized iraqis in their eyes (etherington, 2005, pp. 196, 208, 219). at the same time, coalition authorities consistently misunderstood the populace’s concerns. under saddam security had been enforced by special units, heavy armour and checkpoints, arbitrary mass arrests, blackmail, torture and execution by brutal and unpopular security forces. in contrast, the cpa implemented programs on human rights, free markets, feminism and constitutional reform (stewart, 2007, p. 82). but iraqis talked only of their own physical security. and insecurity was made worse by the cpa’s inability to control carjackings, kidnappings and the gangs smuggling diesel, and by the crumbling of traditional means of social control as young urban elites rejected sheiks who tried to reassert themselves (stewart, 2007, p. 7). but it is easy to overstate the significance of this, for (as etherington notes) one thing u.s. troops shared with iraqis was a practical understanding of security and policing. inevitably, many iraqis failed to see advantages in democracy, especially when it failed to provide protection, for their assessments were governed by “economic, social and local considerations, rather than national ones” (etherington, 2005, p. 85). almost all iraqis thought that the biggest economic problem—and a major source of insecurity in that addressing it required them to venture out into unsafe streets—was unemployment; at least half of working age men were out of 84 alice hills studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 work. iraqis were, however, unfazed by the abu ghraib scandal because that is how they thought the west always behaved. stewart notes the iraqis’ standard response to insecurity: “employ five times as many new policemen. get heavier weapons. impose curfews. set up checkpoints . . . establish secret services . . . be more brutal” (stewart, 2007, p. 87). security’s multiple meanings insecurity was partly caused by many iraqis being heavily armed, and partly by the stores of weapons and ammunition (including rocket-propelled grenades [rpgs], mortars and katyusha rockets) left behind by the ba’athist government. but it was worsened by the coalition’s inconsistent policies, which failed to control the deteriorating situation. one reason for the inconsistencies was that security had different meanings for the various actors involved. coalition forces defined it in terms of their own physical safety, military objectives and operational success; security was about force protection and minimal own casualties, and iraqi regulars, irregulars, and the urban terrain threatened it. to paraphrase ayoob, security was defined in relation to the vulnerabilities that threatened danger and disorder (ayoob, 1997, p. 130). but iraqis had a different understanding based on their functional needs; baghdad’s inhabitants understood security to mean the physical safety and protection of themselves and their possessions. shaping and managing this environment so as to achieve the coalition’s strategic objectives called for robust but consistent and non-inflammatory forms of policing. in theory, the coalition recognized its need to persuade iraqis to do what it wanted but in practice its approach to policing failed to achieve this. despite the rhetoric of freedom and liberty, the bush administration’s political vision and set of security practices were given public meaning and enabled by a specific and assertive rationality expressed in terms invoking punishment and pacification, or by appeals to democracy or the “iraqi people,” which failed to achieve its objectives. incoherence on the part of coalition authorities increased the exclusionary nature of security provision. the cpa treated democracy and capitalism as integrated concepts, and the cpa’s philosophy was that the iraqi police service (ips) would be democratically accountable, run according to modern principles of managerial efficiency and contemporary methods and technologies, and would ensure democratic forms of public order. however, policing was actually seen as secondary to economic development and a free market. also, washington assumed that conventional security could be provided independently of the relationship in which it was to be exercised. thus police were recruited regionally on the basis that this would match the ethnic and religious balance of a region, rather than (as was the case) allegiance to local political leaders. and there were deep differences of opinion between military advisers from u.s. forces and civilian advisers from the state department and department of justice (doj), too. assumptions about the transferability of training programs were similarly controversial. military advisers wanted to create a force capable of counter-insurgency, whereas civilian trainers wanted a lightly armed civilian police service that used western investigative standards and community-policing techniques to remove terrorists and criminals. security as a selective project 85 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 at the empirical level washington’s misunderstanding of the nature and potential role of policing and security governance as a strategic tool for managing its relations with iraqis contributed to its use of provocative policies that increased the insecurity it sought to manage. admittedly, washington repeatedly emphasized its need to develop formal and informal partnerships with iraqis so as to manage the prevailing insecurity (only then could the handover of sovereignty to iraqi authorities in june 2004 be permitted), but it consistently misunderstood the relationships underpinning meaningful security. so did its troops, especially in the early days. that they misunderstood the situation is not in itself surprising. they were war fighters who were neither trained nor equipped to perform police functions or to manage public security. however, baghdad was not the first time u.s. forces were confronted by a breakdown in public order, to which they responded heavy-handedly. outbreaks had occurred in the aftermath of u.s. interventions in panama, haiti, bosnia, and kosovo, where the american response had been similarly heavy-handed. also, u.s. forces posed a risk to police, whose security was not their concern. u.s. spokesmen referred to troops acting in self-defence when police were killed, but many international commentators took a less charitable view of the response pattern that continued throughout the occupation. a representative case concerned the 10 iraqi police who were killed in falluja in july 2003 when the cars in which they were chasing robbers ran into american soldiers who opened fire in a gun battle that lasted 45 minutes. this came at a time when the us was emphasizing the value of iraqi police co-operation in improving security across iraq. but u.s. forces were widely perceived to have adopted a provocative approach that led to a cycle of iraqi revenge attacks, retaliatory searches and mutual recrimination. in this way, u.s. actions were corrosive; troops were perceived to have killed or injured bystanders, accidentally or intentionally, while inadvertently or deliberately destroying property. the existence of multiple understandings of security affected the british response in basra too. the indifference of british forces to local politics, and their toleration of looting and sectarianism mean that security could never be more than partial as far as basrawis were concerned. there was no common understanding of what security meant, and there were matter-of-fact limits as to how it was interpreted. human rights watch recorded an extreme example in 2003: a christian woman begged british soldiers for protection after religious militia threatened to kill her: “tell her it’s not our jurisdiction,” they said (“life in basra,” 2003, p. 56). understanding was in this way tightly linked to production and provision, usually to the disadvantage of the insecure. providing security there is nothing new about insecurity and incoherent policies. what is new is today’s debate about who should provide city-wide security in the aftermath of international interventions, and the models on which it should be based. troops are often used, but the objective of most militaries is not security as such. rather, it is force protection and population identification and control. also, urban operations are notoriously challenging, so troops normally avoid cities whenever possible, and when they cannot they focus on a city’s terrain and density, and are suspicious of non-combatants, who may be hiding fighters. this may be a reason for the common 86 alice hills studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 western assumption that police are best placed to provide long-term security, for in the west, the police role is oriented to answering two questions: “how safe am i in the here and now?” and “how well ordered is my immediate environment” (innes, 2004). admittedly, indigenous police tend to be static and inert, and are most aware of threats to their own safety, ethnic tensions and local power relations, but cities are police’s workplace and livelihood. even so, retaining or controlling territory or key points is less important for police than for militaries, though police stations are useful as fortresses in which to hide or to keep prisoners. admittedly, many associations and factional groups offer policing in post-conflict cities. in maysan, for example, heavily armed militia known as emergency brigades had, along with other militia acting as islamist vigilantes, established their own security organizations as the war ended, and were soon the only effective security presence in the province (stewart, 2007, p. 423). nonetheless, the role of state police is most significant because it is qualitatively different in its symbolic power, residual position and regulatory potential (crawford, 2006, p. 137). police resources (and their parent ministries) are desirable prizes for local strong men, but also police are thought to facilitate control and monitoring, signal credibility for international and national regimes, and offer benefits and sanctions for the population at large that may ensure a city’s loyalty or acquiescence. against that, policing is shaped by the social realities of its host society: corrupt, brutal or criminalized cities produce corrupt, brutal and criminalized police. legacy issues matter, too, for they often mean that certain police cannot operate in certain areas, or that certain ethnic groups have never been recruited. despite this, liberal democracies think public police should, whenever possible, be responsible for functional security, and that policing models that respect the rights of all “citizens” and are responsive to their needs should be promoted. iraq tests such assumptions. it tests the extent to which inclusive forms of security can be provided, and also, whether democratic policing based on a close relationship between respectfulness, responsiveness and effectiveness has meaning in violent cities. for in iraq, as in most of the world, the police’s primary purpose is not crime fighting, reassurance or protection for the populace at large. it is regime representation and the regulation of social order. additionally, anecdotal evidence suggests that many iraqis believe that police must be allowed to violate rights if they are to ensure security. this belief is reinforced by the widespread conviction amongst police that there are certain criminal or dangerous classes that represent a threat to the broader social order, and which therefore deserve fewer rights. yet most international police advisers failed to question the transferability of their usual practices. ignoring iraqi realities, british police advisers argued that crowds could be controlled effectively but humanely by a small well trained lightly armed and citizen-friendly police service. they refused to allow the police to set up secret units or carry heavy weapons, and discussed instead the prospects of psychometric testing and genderawareness workshops for all (stewart, 2007, pp. 83, 324, 335). stewart tells how by the time the coalition authorities left the provincial capital of maysan (to the northwest of basra), the police had quadrupled in size, acquired heavier weapons, and, by establishing checkpoints every 500 yards up the highway, had brought some form of security. some large tribal gangs had lost power, and there were fewer carjackings, kidnappings, smuggling and protection rackets. only two security as a selective project 87 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 forces—the iranian-linked badr militia and the sadrists—remained outside the law. but “they were now the elected government” (stewart, 2007, p. 423). police as producers the first question paul bremer asked when he arrived in baghdad as head of the cpa a month after the 2003 war ended was: where are the police? (bremer, 2006). like most westerners, he expected the police to act as a cornerstone for democracy, and provide inclusive security, but this was never likely. there were no police in baghdad because officers had cast off or hidden their uniforms during the war, and the bureaucracy, buildings, procedures and political relationships on which the police institution was based were destroyed. nevertheless, many officers responded to u.s. appeals that they return to work, and by mid-april some manned joint patrols with u.s. soldiers. in may a former interior ministry official and ba’athist loyalist was appointed as baghdad’s police chief, though he was forced to resign a week later for refusing to implement procedures required by u.s. authorities (rai, 2003). the formal remit of the new ips was crime control, order maintenance, and assisting coalition forces (which retained responsibility for investigations involving terrorism and military crimes). bremer thought that it would be unacceptable to use police agencies associated with saddam’s regime, and one of the cpa’s first acts was to dissolve the ba’ath party and purge ba’athists from government positions. this left the police leaderless, with all that this implied for security provision. also, bremer underestimated the degree to which effective police depend on institutional structures. the ba’ath party permeated every level of iraq’s administration, and public and private life, so the policy of killing or detaining even local ba’ath leaders deepened the public security vacuum. so too did the policy of dismissing the many civil servants needed to support the police. insecurity appeared to deepen and widen, religious vigilantes soon created alternative local security systems, and looting and street crime were subsumed into a more pervasive security crisis. vetting ensured that ba’ath party members were purged, and international attention focused on “professionalizing” the new police, but little really changed. former senior and mid-level officers were removed, but most officers stayed in their stations, beating suspects and extorting bribes just as before the war, and, by 2007, sectarian militia groups infiltrated every level of policing. the interior ministry reputedly supplied militiamen with police uniforms and vehicles. sectarian groups fought for control of the police because it enabled them to augment their power, impose a particular morality, entrench factional or sectarian practices, and secure funds and weapons (herring & rangwala, 2006, p. 268). and the police, in iraq as elsewhere in the world, were content to be used. regardless of rhetoric, regime, and resources, senior officers rarely build power bases comparable to those of the military. some seek to preserve a minimal degree of operational and professional autonomy, but most are typically adjuncts to groups that control resources more directly. most have personal patrons with whom reciprocal exchanges of favour are made. an additional factor in iraq was that, while some officers may have claimed to represent the state, all shared the personal, tribal, or sectarian loyalties of their peers. democratic accountability meant little because 88 alice hills studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 iraqis valued appointments for the opportunities for patronage they offered; the primary task of individual clan members was to ensure the ascendancy of his group (tribe, family, or friends), and the dismissal of one officer meant dismissing a swathe of others too. the problems presented by incompetent or corrupt police were thus social, political, and institutional, with the police being not only a problem in its own right, but also one that exacerbated others (etherington, 2005, p. 113). the civilian police could not have managed city-wide security even if they had wanted to. by 2004 they were a faction in need of allies. they were not only ineffective and unreliable, but also were a symbol of pro-government forces and as such were targeted by sectarian militia and insurgents. in baghdad as in cities such as maysan in the south-east of the country, “no one was frightened of the police and the police were frightened of almost everyone” (stewart, 2007, p. 83). when etherington became head of a small cpa team in al-kut (a provincial capital to the southeast of baghdad) in october 2003, he found: police clustered in small groups on the steps of their stations and nearby fences like crows. there appeared to be thousands of them, in almost comical disarray. the police had no infrastructure, rules, leadership or staff worth the name; most had no weapons and few officers appeared to do any work though it was clear that many were directly implicated in widespread and systematic corruption if not criminal activity (etherington, 2005, p. 27). most police could not run their own stations, let alone carry out security tasks (etherington, 2005, pp. 137, 155). poor leadership resulted in low morale that made the lower ranks lethargic and easily intimidated. when, for example, fuel shortages meant that they were sent to keep order in al-kut’s petrol stations, officers confined themselves to taking bribes from the queuing motorists in return for offering preferential treatment. they were then beaten up by motorists and fled (etherington, 2005, p. 136). on the other hand, they were unarmed in the face of militia’s iranian kalashnikovs and rpgs. police stations were frequently attacked, and factional fighting quickly increased as local power brokers forged or broke political and economic alliances. when this happened, some police shed their uniforms and joined the rebels while others put themselves under the protection of pro-rebel clergy; in late 2004, almost all of mosul’s police fled when insurgents attacked their stations, while shia police in najaf joined rebels from the mahdi army and handed over their weapons. as general martin dempsey (who led the multi-national security transition command) admitted to a congressional hearing in 2007, more than 32,000 of the 180,000 newly trained and equipped police generated under coalition schemes were no longer in the police. approximately 8,000 had been killed in action, 6,000-8,000 were seriously wounded, 5,000 had deserted, and 7,000-8,000 were unaccounted for (“us general warns,” 2007). numbers were impossible to determine since local chiefs inflated numbers to get funding, and individuals drifted in and out of service. but recruitment was never a problem. forty percent unemployment meant men applied regardless of the dangers of the job. suicide bombings and roadside explosive devices aimed at recruiting stations, police convoys or military convoys escorting police account for many of the casualties, especially once the insurgency security as a selective project 89 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 emerged in the summer of 2003. most officers were unarmed and patrolling was suicidal, but men joined because the starting salary of an ips officer in 2003 was 90,000id ($60) per month, with an additional 130,000id ($87) per month in hazardous duty pay (chandrasekaran, 2007, p. 328; herring & rangwala, 2006, p. 197). police had no incentive to provide security for anyone except themselves. expressions of security it is difficult to map accurately the provision of security because so much is unknown. despite their sophisticated technologies, american forces knew little about iraqi police, let alone about trends in the localities in which their adversaries were based. the cpa’s vision of security was, in any case, developed in isolation from iraq’s existing patterns of social and political domination and subjugation. it was rarely seen to address the concerns of most of the population, and when it did, the result was often incoherence and insecurity. within weeks of the occupation, swathes of baghdad (which was strategically the critical city) were out of international control. much of the burden of policing fell to u.s. troops, but they were neither trained nor equipped for it. infantry complained they had not been trained in arrest procedures, tank crews were not equipped for foot patrols, m-1 tanks and bradley fighting vehicles were too large to move through baghdad’s streets, and the imperatives of force protection meant troops could not engage with iraqis even if they wanted to. some 4,000 u.s. military police were eventually deployed in june, but there was little they could achieve; a force smaller than many u.s. metropolitan police departments was responsible for a looted city of several million inhabitants (perito, 2003). also, while security often improved when troop numbers increased, it declined when they left. by mid-2004, when the cpa was dissolved, iraq was divided into fiefdoms and factions, of which the u.s.-led coalition was only one, albeit the best resourced in material terms. the situation never improved. according to a review of security operations in baghdad in february 2007, u.s. and iraqi forces controlled 146 of baghdad’s 457 districts; that is, fewer than one-third of its neighbourhoods (“most of baghdad,” 2007). the review vividly illustrates the results of four years of coalition operations: iraqi police and army units failed to provide the forces necessary to carry out basic security tasks including manning checkpoints and conducting patrols; almost daily bombings caused misery in flashpoint districts. sectarian violence remained serious in west baghdad, and shiite death squads continued to operate. in february 2007, for instance, most of the 100 bodies found dumped on rubbish dumps and street corners were sunni who had been tortured before being shot. the deployment of more than 20,000 u.s. reinforcements temporarily halted the murders, but by may 2007 dozens of bodies were found in baghdad every day. may also saw the third highest death toll of american soldiers (127) since the invasion. as ever, police melted away before incidents occurred. the selective and practical nature of security—and the difficulty of making it more inclusive—is evident from this overview. it is also evident in crime levels. there had been low-level non-organized crime in the 1990s as sanctions and economic stagnation reduced living standards and encouraged the middle classes to emigrate, but this could not be compared to the situation from 2003 onwards. the 90 alice hills studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 disappearance of regime authority, the emptying of prisons, and the failure to control looting encouraged criminal violence. home invasions, muggings and murders increased dramatically, together with carjacking, kidnappings, rapes, revenge killings, drugs trafficking and prostitution. from being almost non-existent in prewar iraq, street crime became the primary concern of most iraqis. murder and kidnapping were especially problematic, not least because victims included more children, females, and the elderly than is usual in non-war environments. additionally, kidnapping was about economics as well as retribution or sectarian hatred. as a shia man said: “they kidnap 10 sunnis, they get ransoms on five, and kill them all, in each big kidnap operation they make at least $50,000, it’s the best business in baghdad” (abdul-ahad, 2007a). many crimes went unreported because there was no one to report them to. militia and groups subcontracting protection required payment. it was also difficult to distinguish between criminal violence, gang violence, political violence, and violence as a response to coalition violence. crime was subsumed into an all embracing security crisis. differences of understanding resulted in lost opportunities to develop more inclusive forms of security. arguably, there was a short window of opportunity in the first days of the occupation when the cpa, as the temporary but lawful government could, perhaps, have facilitated or imposed (symbolically or genuinely) a framework conducive to, or reflecting a more democratic form of security. but the moment was lost, and each passing week created more spoilers. groups vying for political resources, turf control or profits quickly exploited potential security gaps. and the u.s. forces allowed them to gain the initiative. this was most evident in the coalition’s approach to looting. its troops concentrated on defending selected public buildings, and they looked the other way as iraqis engaged in wholesale looting in coalition-controlled areas. many iraqis profited, but many more saw the looting as a symbol of the insecurity the coalition tolerated or was thought to encourage. crucially, the omission or failure by coalition forces to control looting or ensure public safety reinforced the conviction of iraqis that their security was not a coalition priority. coalition authorities in both baghdad and basra sometimes allowed looting because it was thought to send a powerful message that the coalition was in control. but this ignored the fact that disorder and insecurity primarily affected ordinary iraqis who were already angry about water and electricity shortages, angry about civilian deaths from coalition bombing, and resentful of foreign invasion. many workers lost their source of livelihood because factories and shops were looted. the situation was admittedly different when seen from the perspective of coalition forces who, as the de facto occupying power, were obliged by international humanitarian law and convention to restore public order and safety. when questioned as to why forces stood by, senior officers usually argued that they lacked sufficient troops to protect cities and therefore focused on protecting vital infrastructure such as oil facilities and food warehouses. other (low-ranking) troops thought looting was tolerated or encouraged as a cathartic reaction to the fall of saddam’s government. what was clear was that the combat troops in iraq’s cities at the end of the war were not trained to ensure civilian security; they were untrained for policing duties and by their actions often increased a sense of exclusion and insecurity, thereby exacerbating the security gap that emerged (dziedzic, 1998). security as a selective project 91 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 exclusionary security in baghdad and basra ironically, the desire for security was both a cause and result of the two dominating features of security in iraq. it was ghettoized and sectarian. ghetto security in baghdad journalists such as the new yorker’s jon lee anderson provide the best overview of how exclusionary security emerged in the days immediately after april 9, 2003, and what it meant in a city such as baghdad. no soldiers or police were visible, no one observed traffic regulations, everyone was in a great hurry, buildings burned, and bombs and gunshot could be heard as gangs staked out their turf (anderson, 2007, pp. 294, 315). less than 24 hours later, most of the eastern side of central baghdad had been looted. defence secretary rumsfeld dismissed looting with the comment that “freedom is untidy” (loughlin, 2003), while general tommy franks, commander of u.s. forces, said that “people just go wild” when autocratic regimes fall, and that the true measure was how quickly the lawlessness was controlled (alden & mcgregor, 2003). there were pockets of heavy fighting and it “was not entirely clear which parts of baghdad were in american hands and which were not” (anderson, 2007, p. 311), but ghettoization began early, with armed vigilantes stopping cars, and residential streets barricaded and guarded. localized order re-emerged, as when neighbourhoods, acting on the instructions of the shia religious leader ayatollah ali sistani, set up armed roadblocks to stop looters and retrieve stolen property. anderson records how he went through a checkpoint manned by marines on the outskirts of saddam city, a slum of 2.5 million, before driving into areas defended by roadblocks of zigzagged oil drums, furniture and cement blocks, which were guarded by “rough-looking youths . . . holding iron bars” (anderson, 2007, p. 317. compare clover 2004). by april 14 baghdad was divided into 55 to 60 zones, of which some 40 were under coalition control. the u.s. officers in charge of civil administration met iraqi police chiefs to discuss the “restoration” of law and order, by which time u.s. humvees and armoured vehicle were on guard outside most of the main hospitals, and iraqi police were (according to u.s. calculations) due to start patrolling. but such arrangements proved to be a veneer overlaying an increasingly localized and fragmented order, for when anderson returned in the third week of july it was no longer safe to walk around. increasingly, security provision reflected baghdad’s web of tensions, insecurities and violence. the us resisted calls to re-employ most police because it suspected their loyalties, while police wishing to return to work distanced themselves from the occupiers: “we came to protect the people, not to work with america” (alden & mcgregor, 2003). the cpa’s dissolution in june 2004 made little difference. in the first month after the handover of sovereignty, the new government was under pressure to ensure security. but its claim to do so was rapidly undermined by innumerable incidents of violence, assassinations, kidnappings and explosions, many of which targeted the police. on july 28, 2004, for example, a massive car bomb exploded near a line of would-be police recruits in a centre of anti-government opposition north of baghdad, killing 68. the government increased police patrols and checkpoints and mounted 92 alice hills studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 crime crackdowns, but internal politics meant that it failed to activate the emergency powers it had assumed after the transfer. the war may have finished some 15 months previously, but jihadists and nationalists fought an escalating battle for local control. streets in baghdad (as elsewhere) were under the control of rival militia competing to control territory and revenue sources such as oil and weapons smuggling. three linked elements or expressions of baghdad’s forms of security deserve note, each of which promoted exclusion. first, crime played a significant role in everyday life, while control of the black market and access to protection money helped to finance turf wars (negus, 2004). for example, petrol stations were a desirable prize because they made money, were symbols of territorial control, and acted as recruiting stations, as they were gathering points for unemployed youths. second, the boundaries between criminality and sectarianism became increasingly blurred. by 2006, most killings were done by a handful of armed bands, vying for turf control or kidnapping members of other sects for profit (“holding the ring,” 2006, p. 51). some groups were not members of the mahdi army or sunni insurgency groups so much as street gangs. iraqi officers said that in the suburb of adhamiya, for instance, the most dangerous were teenagers or in their early 20s, often drug addicts in it for thrills and prestige. the gangs were safe in their own districts, and had powerful protectors outside. this was evident from the way in which local sunnis avoided using baghdad’s largest hospital complex a few kilometres to the south even though their own district had few resources. the reason was that the health minister was a radical sadrist, and the medical complex used hundreds of mahdi army militants as security guards. in other areas, children banded together in 50-strong gangs to throw stones at u.s. troops, or they collaborated with sunni kidnappers and robbers. one 13-year old told the un that his family were unemployed so “i decided to help a gang specialized in kidnapping. for each kidnap i get us $100 and it is enough to help my family with food for the whole month” (“iraq youth”, 2007, p. 51). third, the role played by the growing and politically active group of young, bored and urban slum dwellers was significant—and 40% of iraqis were under 15. of these groups, the 10,000-strong mahdi army was the most noteworthy, not least because it policed its sphere of influence. created by the shi’ite cleric moqtada al-sadr, the mahdi army originated as a small group in sadr city where it provided security and welfare services, dispensing aid and preventing looting; mahdi fighters patrolled on foot and in commandeered police vehicles. formalized in june 2003, in some areas it amounted to a shadow government. inspired by sadrist themes of political marginalization, unequal suffering and exploitation, members claimed that the militia was a group of pious youths supporting their religion and clergy, rather than a military structure. in fact, it repeatedly clashed with coalition forces. armed with assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades, mortars, strela anti-air missiles, and other light weapons, and using ieds (improvised explosive devices), it seized control of public buildings and police stations. later, its activities illustrated the role of security as a means to a political end: in june 2004, al-sadr declared an end to operations in sadr city, and sought to turn the mahdi army into a political party capable of contesting the 2005 election. al-sadr was seemingly co-opted by the authorities, but in fact agreeing a truce security as a selective project 93 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 spared him from intrusive american raids while allowing his militiamen to act as roughly as ever in the suburbs. sectarian security in basra similar dynamics accompanied the re-emergence of order in cities such as basra, 420km south east of baghdad, where the uk was the responsible power, and the sectarian infiltration of the police was particularly noteworthy. by early 2006, the british approach to managing basra’s policing was to combine the prospect of improved training for the police with the threat of arrest in an attempt to create a more professional non-sectarian police. enhancing the police’s status was seen as a key factor in transferring security responsibility to iraqis, and thereby allowing british withdrawal. according to lt. gen. sir robert fry, the most senior british officer in iraq, the process of handing over more control to iraqis would provide an incentive to depoliticize the police, and ensure security for all. this was unrealistic, for by then basra belonged to militia, death squads and organized crime, and the british were merely one faction amongst many. indeed, the temporary nature of their stay made them one of the weakest. for militias had seized the initiative in april 2003, when, immediately after the invasion, sadrist mosques organized lorries to bring in water and used vigilantes to patrol the streets against looters. they then used the allawi government’s 2004 efforts to increase police numbers to embed militiamen into police. the result was that by october 2006, some 20 security and police groups operated with impunity; they ranged from a dozen religious militia, and the governor’s 200 armed guards to the directorate of education police and the justice police (abdul-ahad, 2007b). indeed, the appearance of a public police was illusory because the police comprised militiamen, and, in any confrontation between political parties, officers splintered according to party lines and fought one another. by may 2007 no one could be appointed to the police without a letter of support from a militia or political party. there was a rule of law, but it was militia law (abdul-ahad, 2007b), the main characteristics of which were sectarian division and physical violence. the extent of sectarian brutality is evident in the activities of the so-called jameat, a group of officers drawn from police intelligence departments and representing all the major factions. it was named after the police station its members were alleged to use as a base. when 1,000 british forces demolished the station in december 2006, they discovered 127 prisoners in the basement. some had had their kneecaps shot off while others had electrical or cigarette burns, or crushed hands or feet. but most iraqi police thought that torture was justified as a way of obtaining confessions and deterring retribution (negus & rasan, 2005). by then, the police were the equivalent of a sectarian militia. the ability of the 24strong team of british police advisers who, supported by 70 civilian private security staff employed by armor holdings (under contract to the foreign office), sought to influence them was minimal. nominally british trained, the police were out of the control of both british and iraqi authorities. as a senior general in the interior ministry said, “most of the police force is divided between fadhila which controls the tsu [the tactical support unit, its best trained unit] and moqtada which controls the regular police . . .” (abdul-ahad, 2007b). this meant that “fadhila control the oil 94 alice hills studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 terminals, so they control the oil protection force . . . moqtada controls the ports and customs, so they control the customs, police and its intelligence. commandos are under the control of badr brigade”. inevitably, officers who were not part of a militia joined in order to protect themselves. as a commander told a british journalist, once a policeman “affiliated with a militia then as a commander you can’t change him . . . because then you are confronting a political party” (abdul-ahad, 2007b). police cars openly carried pictures showing their factional allegiance. other officers were politically neutral but had no interest in policing. general hassan alsade, basra’s secular-minded chief of police admitted on may 30 that he had lost control of most of his 13,750 officers, and trusted only a quarter of them. a further complication arose from the fluid relationship between militias and the units they infiltrated. whenever there was a clash between militias, the police split and units fought other units, switching identities according to whoever paid the most. by the time british forces withdrew from central basra in late 2007, the main factions had reached an understanding about sharing out basra’s resources; that is, running the police, controlling the revenues from oil smuggling, and the distribution of political power in the city. conclusion iraq tests the extent to which inclusive forms of security can be provided in postconflict cities, and it emphasizes the extent to which security is “a means of modelling . . . society around a particular vision of order” (neocleous, 2008, p. 4). the coalition’s vision of inclusive security was expressed in an assertive rhetoric appealing to freedom, democracy and the “iraqi people,” but the reality was chronic insecurity, barricaded neighbourhoods, and a web of sectarian power relations that reflected a different rationale and vision. but this is not unusual. post-conflict cities differ in location, culture, population, regime, significance, and experience, and the range of contextual factors and outcomes makes direct comparison of questionable value. yet most, if not all, share certain features such as the fragmented, localized, and temporary nature of security provision, and ineffective or incompetent police. based on developments in iraq, two general trends are identifiable. first, security is the central point around which discourse and competition take place. at the same time, it is as much a means to power and aggrandizement as it is to stability, personal safety or democratization. in other words, personalities, politics, and contingencies determine when and how security is understood, produced, and expressed, and the resultant exclusionary strategies are often rational. that there was tension between the various meanings was not a fundamental problem per se—military and/or individual security often have separate dimensions—but it was politically and practically significant. this implies that the notion of security can accommodate multiple interpretations, but in practice it cannot be understood in isolation from the political context in which it is to be employed. second, in the absence of city-wide security, factional groups provide localized arrangements. but there is little evidence to suggest that institutional structures such as the police in which international hopes are vested can ever provide security for all. indeed, police typically operate according to sectarian or political imperatives. in security as a selective project 95 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 other words, the provision of security depends on myriad environmental factors, and is often little more than a reconfigured complex of old elements and relationships, only some of which are revised and reoriented by new pressures and new or modified contexts. empirically, security depends on agreements on rules, behaviour and predictability, many of which are inaccessible to external actors, and it is managed by coercion, manipulation and exclusion, as much as by negotiation and reform. the successful introduction in 2007 and 2008 of a new u.s. strategy based on a “surge” of force and more police training does not refute this assessment. it is true that the strategy was heavily influenced by the argument of u.s. general david petraeus that it was not enough for coalition forces to provide a sustained military presence in volatile neighbourhoods, destroy insurgent sanctuaries, and hold cleared areas. they must also increase the capacity of the iraqi government to create inclusionary employment projects, support tribal militia such as the so-called awakening councils, develop the role of the “sons of iraq” (a sunni tribal militia that had turned against the jihadists linked to al-qaeda in mesopotamia), and improve everyday life for ordinary iraqis (“general petraeus,” 2007). it is true, too, that the us’s agenda shifted to accommodate some of the security concerns associated with sub-state groups and individuals, and its tactics increasingly balanced intimidation with inducement, yet the long-term significance of the resultant improvements in the security situation—let alone our theoretical understanding of security—is unclear. in may 2009, for instance, ginger cruz, the u.s. deputy inspector-general for iraqi reconstruction, warned that many of the sons of iraq were rejoining the insurgency, and shi’ite strong men (such as the prime minister, nuri almaliki) were re-emerging, with all that this implies for the selective emphasis of security (rifat, jaber, & baxter, 2009). comparable trends emerged in southern iraq after u.s. forces assumed control from british authorities in march 2009. it is true that bombings and assassinations are still common, insurgents continue to operate in the provinces of diyala and ninevah (jihadists remain influential in ninevah’s main city, mosul), the mahdi army remains a potential threat, politics is tainted by corruption and fraud, and the police are ineffective, yet basra is relatively peaceful. indeed, in january 2008 a coalition of parties won landslide electoral victories at the expense of shia militia known as the badr brigades, which have ties to iran (british forces had tolerated the badr brigades’ activities, but iraqi and american forces had earlier attacked and defeated them). the implications of this for understanding security are uncertain. it may mean that international actors should intervene forcefully, rather than accept the reality of factionalized security arrangements, or it may mean that international expectations are now more realistic than they were in 2003. whatever the case, there are few grounds for assuming that recent developments will facilitate the emergence of a coherent and comprehensive security concept. questions remain even at the empirical level. for example, it may be that the new strategy effectively offered basra’s provincial council an opportunity to mitigate the exclusionary practices associated with previous security provision. it theoretically provided a space in which the council could provide electricity, potable water, sewage, employment, and education to all, thereby making a major improvement to everyone’s quality of life, and enhancing the prospects for meaningful security and stability. alternatively, it 96 alice hills studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 2009 may be that violence declined due to the emergence of ethnically homogenous neighbourhoods; that is, illiberal forms of ethnic cleansing facilitated and/or enhanced security. in other words, the strategies of concession and accommodation made by state, sub-state and community actors have resulted in a form of security based on acceptable levels of selection and exclusion. more generally, iraq suggests that while today’s broad definitions of security have normative, and also analytical, value, they ignore the discrimination common to post-conflict cities while assuming that the police can or should manage exclusionary tendencies. and they ignore also that reassurance, crime prevention and community policing are not what most police do. in other words, police cannot solve the social problems that broad definitions of security prioritize or act as moderating agents, even if they wanted to. security (both for those who provide it, and often for those who want it) is a literal, rather than theoretical, construct, and the only certainty is that it means 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(2006, october 11). updated iraq survey affirms earlier mortality estimates. retrieved from http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2006/burnham_iraq_2006.html visser final galley mar 5 16 correspondence address: anna m. visser, school of social policy, social work and social justice, university college dublin, belfield, dublin 4, ireland, d04 e8n8; email: anna@annavisser.ie issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 2, 231-243, 2015 state-funded activism: lessons from civil society organizations in ireland anna m. visser university college dublin, ireland abstract civil society organizations (csos) in ireland receive significant state funding and institutional support according to the logic that they are important contributors to democratic governance, with the effect that the cso sector has expanded and become more embedded in formal decision-making processes over the past several decades. at the same time, dependency on government funding exposes csos to three important challenges: to stay true to activist mandates in the face of pressure from state funders to focus on service provision; to maintain accountability to constituents while also satisfying the vertically oriented accountability requirements of the state; and to nurture collaboration among csos in a context of competition for state funding. university-based activists, who are also reliant on (increasingly scarce) government funding, face similar challenges, and therefore should pay more attention to debates regarding state funding in the cso sphere. by working together to overcome common challenges associated with state funding, activists in both spheres can more effectively contribute to progressive social change. keywords civil society; democracy; activism; state funding introduction over the 15 years i have worked in irish civil society organizations (csos), state funding – and especially the strings attached to it – has been a frequent focus of criticism from inside and outside the cso sphere, as well as a dominant theme for self-reflection within csos. therefore, when i returned to university for doctoral studies, i looked forward to engaging with scholarly perspectives on state funding for cso-activism in order to deepen my own understanding of how, as activists, we can balance the allure of state funding with a rigorous assessment of its risks. i was surprised to discover that – despite studies detailing how such funding can support pro-democracy anna visser studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 231-243, 2015 232 activism (geller & salamon, 2007; minkoff, 2002; sawer & jupp, 1996) – the academic literature as a whole dismisses the possibility that csos can maintain their independence or critical voice in the context of financial reliance (e.g., diamond, 1999; snowdon, 2012). much of the literature takes a dim view of csos’ pro-democratic potential more generally, representing it as corrupted through various forms of complicity with state and private interests (edwards, 2009, p. 94; fernando & heston, 1997; lang, 2013, p. 5; mair, 2005, p. 4; pyles, 2009). the literature seems not to be sufficiently aware of the nuanced perspectives on state funding within the cso world, nor of the irony that authors’ capacity to develop their critique (also a form of pro-democracy academic activism) is itself enabled by state funding through the public university system, and therefore vulnerable to the same critique. as i explored the literature further, i discovered that academic analyses of public funding for cso-activism have developed in relative isolation from a sizable literature on the implications of state support for academic-activism (butler & mulgan, 2013; calhoun, 2009; croteau, 2005; flood, martin & dreher, 2013; suzuki & mayorga, 2014), as well as from relevant debates within the cso sphere. this strikes me as a missed opportunity, as the two spheres of activism encounter similar challenges with regard to their dependency on state financial support and – i would argue – share potential to learn from each other. in light of this missed opportunity, and in the context of my own background as a cso-activist, my aim in this article is to outline some key insights from the experience of state-funded cso-activism in ireland, which i think can help academic-activists negotiate their own conflicted reliance on public funding. the irish case may be especially instructive for this purpose, because domestic csos are widely understood as having an important democratizing function, and many of them receive substantial state funding. my argument unfolds in three sections. in the first section i summarize the main ways that activists contribute to strengthening democracy in ireland, thereby justifying public funding for their activities. i then outline the manner and extent of the government of ireland’s formal recognition of and support for the democratizing role of csos. the second section identifies three challenges that attend irish csos’ significant reliance on funding from the public purse, including (a) the risk that strings attached to state funding may divert csos from core activist mandates, (b) the risk that accountability will flow upward to government funding agencies, rather than downward to the constituencies csos are designed to serve, and (c) the risk that the progressive impact of the cso sector as a whole will be diminished as organizations compete with one another for funding rather than collaborate to support social change. the third and concluding section argues that these challenges are also relevant to the sphere of university-based activism, and that both csoand university-based activists are likely to be more effective agents of social change if they recognize their common challenges and work together to overcome them. state-funded activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 231-243, 2015 233 the democratic case for state-funded cso-activism in ireland activists operating in – and often collaborating across – the parallel spheres of academia and csos share the key objective of promoting fundamental social change (croteau, 2005, p. 38), often by contributing to the conditions in which political equality and democracy can flourish. in ireland, activists in each of these spheres attempt to achieve this democracy-nourishing contribution in four main ways: (a) by monitoring the state, its democratic practices, and the implementation of its domestic and international commitments; (b) by raising awareness about broader societal conditions, such as inequality, which may impact the quality of democratic participation by stifling the involvement of some social groups (shaver, 2014, p. 1; wampler, 2008, p. 72); (c) by providing the public with information and analysis, and creating opportunities for citizens to debate and reflect on issues of concern (butler & mulgan, 2013; dahl, 1989, p. 339; post & rosenblum, 2002, p. 498), thereby empowering citizens to engage with and challenge the government; and (d) by contributing their expertise regarding the circumstances of marginalized communities to policy debates (coelho & von lieres, 2010, p. 11; shaver, 2014, p. 9). given the significant challenges facing all democratic states in terms of legitimacy and accountability to their citizens (carter & stokes, 2002; keane, 2012; smith, 2009), these are arguably goals that merit state financial support. indeed, in a situation where political and economic elites can use their significant financial resources to influence political decision-making, it is difficult to imagine how marginalized groups can be fully or equally integrated into democratic processes without social activism being supported substantially by the state, including via funding csos that work with specific marginalized communities (baker, lynch, cantillon & walsh, 2009, p. 116). of course, state funding presents both academic and cso-activists with the challenge of maintaining operational independence in the face of economic dependency, especially in contexts like ireland where many activists are highly reliant on public funding (inkex, 2012). in recent decades, there has been significant growth in the number of csos (commonly referred to as community and voluntary organisations) in ireland as well as in their degree of formalization (donnelly-cox & cannon, 2010), which parallels similar trends globally (edwards, 2009).1 growth of the irish cso sector has been accompanied by increasing dependency on public funding (daly, 2007; keenan, 2008; meade, 2012), as well as greater 1 social partnership is an example of this. in ireland, the term ‘social partnership’ generally refers to the national pay agreements between government, employers, trade unions, and since 1996, the so-called ‘community and voluntary pillar’ (cvp). the cvp is a governmentselected grouping of initially eight, national level csos ( allen 1998, p. 293). in ireland csos are commonly referred to as community and voluntary organizations, hence this pillar’s title. when the employers withdrew in 2009, social partnership effectively ended (popplewell 2013, p. 7). anna visser studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 231-243, 2015 234 involvement in political decision-making through formalized partnerships with government agencies (larragy, 2006).as the number of csos multiplied, state funding gradually displaced personal giving as their main source of income (daly, 2007; keenan, 2008; meade, 2012). a 2012 survey of domestic ‘charities’ found that 60% ranked government and local authorities as their most important funding sources (grant thornton, 2012, p. 14), even though long-term growth in state funding of csos was followed by a sudden decrease with the onset of the 2008 economic crisis (prizeman & mcgee, 2009). harvey (2012, p. 43) calculates that government funding of the community and voluntary sector in ireland contracted by 35% from 2008 to 2013 (compared to a decrease of just 2.28% in total government expenditure during this period). csos now find themselves dependent on public funding, which has since 2008 become less generous and less reliable. despite the recent austerity-induced claw-back of state cso funding, the longer-term picture appears to be of a deepening political commitment to csos as vehicles for fostering inclusive democratic decision-making (airey, 2006, p. 7; keenan, 2008, p. 6). this commitment is most emphatically articulated in the irish government’s 2000 white paper on a framework for supporting voluntary activity and for developing the relationship between the state and the community and voluntary sector, which provides “formal recognition of the role of the community and voluntary sector in contributing to the creation of a vibrant, participative democracy and civil society” (2000, p. 3), and asserts that “the state and the sector each recognize their mutual right to constructively critique each other's actions and policies” (2000, p. 109). importantly, the white paper uses the language of state/cso partnership in fostering democracy to justify government funding of csos: this government is making it clear by publication of the white paper that we have moved far beyond the attitude that statutory agencies fund voluntary organisations merely for utilitarian reasons, i.e. to provide services that the state cannot or will not deliver directly itself because of resource constraints. we see the community and voluntary sector as essential partners in economic and social development. (2000, p. 5) problems with implementing its vision notwithstanding (see hughes, clancy, harris & beetham, 2007, p. 441), the white paper remains the core government policy statement on csos (see department of the environment, community and local government, 2015, p. 20). several other policy documents reinforce its articulation of the role played by csos in nourishing democratic governance including, for example, social partnership agreements titled programme for prosperity and fairness (2000) and towards 2016 (2006), as well as the government’s formal guidelines for how state bodies should engage with civil society, titled reaching out guidelines (2005). together, these policies emphasize the importance of cso involvement in political decision-making and the convention of financing csos using state-funded activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 231-243, 2015 235 government funds (harvey, 2014). 2 inclusion of the community and voluntary pillar (cvp) as a partner in various social partnership agreements that were formalized after 1996 has been particularly significant, especially as from the early 2000s cvp members received government grants specifically to resource their involvement in partnership processes (harvey, 2014, p. 12). not surprisingly, much of the irish cso literature examines the cvp’s involvement in and experience of social partnership (adshead, 2011; larragy, 2006; meade, 2005; murphy, 2002). some commentators argue that the price of partnership has been too high for csos in terms of dependency on volatile state funding and loss of autonomy to pursue independent activist agendas (kirby & murphy, 2009; meade, 2005; murphy, 2009). according to kirby (2010, p. 16): it is in the terrain of funding that … state control is most clearly exercised... the growth in state funding for the community and voluntary sector over the past two decades and the ever greater dependence of the sector on such funding comes therefore at great cost to the sector and to the quality of irish democracy. from this perspective, and as discussed in greater detail below, state funding may prevent certain core activities from happening, either directly by contractual limitations or indirectly by incubating self-censorship. it may also undermine internal democratic governance by shifting accountability away from the cso’s constituency, and constrain the potential for collaboration across csos by creating competition for funds and access. other authors maintain that csos have been able to sustain an effective and relatively unconstrained working relationship with the irish state, as evidenced by a variety of achievements vis-à-vis democratic inclusion and governance (larragy, 2014). mike allen, for example, dismisses arguments that state funding interferes with activism: “some of the commentary around this is, i believe, a little simplistic and assumes a simple trade-off between state resources and the abandonment of radical demands” (2013, p. 72). recalling his involvement running a national organization working with the unemployed, allen states, “i do not believe that there is a single point from 1987 to 2000, where we made a significant decision which would have been different if we had not been in receipt of state money” (2013, p. 72). drawing on a study of four state-funded irish organizations involved in social partnership arrangements, larragy (2014) similarly concludes that public 2 it is worth noting that other important policy documents – including the 2003 social partnership agreement sustaining progress, the national economic and social council’s (nesc) developmental welfare state (2005) report, and the report of the forum on philanthropy (2011) – neglect fully to address these commitments to csos. moreover, the charities act 2009 formalizes a permissive but limited approach to advocacy by charities, allowing them to promote political objectives only insofar as they relate directly to the advancement of their charitable purpose (breen, 2012, p. 1). anna visser studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 231-243, 2015 236 funding of csos helps to generate effective working relationships between csos and the state, which have resulted in significant policy wins. the ongoing debate between these two perspectives indicates a healthy awareness within the cso sector of potentially negative implications of both receiving and losing state funding, and offers insights for those involved in state-funded activism in other contexts, including the academy. in the following section i summarize some of those insights in the form of three key challenges that emerge from irish cso-activists’ experiences of public funding. a cautionary tale thrice told regarding state-funding of cso ‘activism’ challenge #1: defending core activist roles a prominent concern in much of the analysis regarding public financing of csos is that the state will use funding as leverage to prevent organizations from fulfilling what they identify as their core activist roles. at its most overt, this may involve the government explicitly directing the csos it funds to concentrate on service provision at the expense of activism (clark, 2011; edwards & hulme, 1996), a phenomenon that several authors have identified in the irish context (adshead, 2011; harvey, 2013; kirby, 2010; murphy, 2009). for example, harvey documents how section 2.8 of the service level agreement of the health service executive (hse), ireland’s state body that provides all publicly funded health services, “prohibits the use of funding for any attempt at persuasion in matters of policy or practice” (2014, p. 4). crowley (2013) suggests that government reluctance to support the activist mandate of csos has been particularly evident in reductions of funding for organizations that work with ireland’s indigenous minority traveller community by 63.6% between 2008 and 2012, with the effect that “the voice of travellers has been undermined and their ability to resist these cutbacks has been diminished” (crowley, 2013, para. 9). more subtly, state funding may create an environment of ‘chilling’ or selfcensorship, in which csos pre-emptively avoid certain types of activist work for fear that they will jeopardize funding (balassiano & chandler, 2009). hulme & edwards express this chilling effect by way of a medical metaphor: rather than a rapid deterioration in the patient’s condition, we are witnessing a gradual hardening of the arteries in the ngo world as organisations become more bureaucratic and less prone to take risks or bear the costs of listening to those who they seek to assist. (1997, p. 278) this too seems evident in the irish context (crowley, 2012; hughes, clancy, harris, & beetham, 2007). in the same study regarding the hse’s agreements cited above, harvey (2014) finds that even where cso funding did not come state-funded activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 231-243, 2015 237 from the hse, health sector organizations became more hesitant in their public campaigning and advocacy because of hse prohibitions on certain types of activism. harvey (2014, p. 34) cites one activist as saying, “it chills and makes you cautious. it promotes behind-closed-doors approaches”. it is important for csos to resist this ‘chilling effect’ by choosing funding sources carefully and, if necessary, by refusing certain types of state funding. challenge #2: protecting accountability to cso constituencies a second risk of state funding is that it will distort the internal democracy of csos by directing accountability upwards toward the relevant state body and away from the organization’s membership (baur & schmitz, 2011; kamat, 2004). not only do government funding agencies require upward accountability, but according to mccarthy and zald (1977, p. 1235), a cso is likely to be less invested in maintaining accountability to an engaged and supportive membership when it is not reliant on that membership for its financial resources. o’dwyer and unerman’s (2008) examination of amnesty ireland is one of several irish studies to describe how organizations have become more concerned with reporting to their external funder than to their membership base. cox is another author to express concern that existing irish civil organizations have become funding-driven rather than mobilization-driven. in addition, according to cox (2010, p. 15; italics in original), from the 1990s new organisations have emerged “not on the basis of popular mobilisation around issues but on the basis of funding streams created by the european union, different government departments or more recently private foundations.” indeed, a recent report commissioned by the irish cso sector to consider the future of its public policy advocacy work identifies sustaining a meaningful connection to the social groups it represents as one of the sector’s key challenges (walsh, 2014, p. 30). according to this report, rigorous accountability requires “an ongoing and two-way process where the organisation’s agenda is set by the group(s) it represents, and the organisation in turn relays information back to its support base in order to support participation, empowerment and mobilization of those most affected by the issues” (walsh, 2014, p. 30). it is important for the legitimacy, credibility, and efficacy of cso-activism that state funding not undermine organizations’ accountability to the vulnerable constituencies they serve. challenge #3: working together, not against each other a third risk that emerges from the experiences of irish cso-activists is that competition for state funding can negatively impact relationships among organizations, thus impeding possibilities for effective collaboration across anna visser studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 231-243, 2015 238 csos (mccarthy & zald, 1977; wallace, 2004). collaboration is identified by irish cso-activists as a significant ongoing challenge (walsh, 2014, p. 31), and state funding has been linked to a diminution of collaborative capacity in the irish context. for example, mary murphy writes that “as groups became reliant on statutory funding schemes, civil society became increasingly marked by an intense sectoral fragmentation” (2013, p. 115). effective collaboration among organizations is important for cso-activism because it enables the sector to emphasize particular shared activist themes or issues, allows organizations to maximize impact by pooling resources, and helps to protect individual activists or csos from potential state or public censure. moreover, wallace (2004, pp. 2-3) argues that campaigning (a core activist activity) is weakened by lack of collaboration between organizations as the cso sector struggles to move beyond specific sectoral issues toward a broader analysis of social change. the irish experience suggests that building collaboration among csos and nurturing cooperative activism are key challenges in a context of competition for resources, particularly where those resources are decreasing. the moral of the story: lessons for academic-activists harvey’s 2014 report on state-funded advocacy in ireland concludes that “the documentary record uncovered a range of experiences from the positive to the negative, with many points along that spectrum, with the state’s behaviour often inconsistent” (2014, p. 10). it seems, therefore, that there are no simple answers to the question of what impact state funding has on activism. nevertheless, as i hope to have shown, the engagement of irish cso-activists in self-reflection and dialogue with academic commentators has identified three key challenges. activists who are aware of the risks that attend state funding will be in a better position to manage the potential pitfalls and to know when to avoid such funding altogether. in particular, activists need to (a) defend the mandates given to them by their constituents, and avoid being driven toward activities that betray or distract them from those mandates; (b) maintain accountability to the groups on whose behalf they are working as well as to the state agencies that are funding them; and (c) foster collaborations with other activists in pursuit of progressive social change. these challenges are relevant to all activists, but have particular salience for those whose activism occurs in a context of public funding, including academics. in ireland (and canada) university teaching and research remains largely funded by the public purse (butler & mulgan, 2013; lynch, 2014). in the academic literature on university funding, public financial support is generally regarded as enabling rather than hampering academic freedom, including the autonomy to engage in activist activities of one’s choosing. in this context, two recent changes to irish university funding formulas are state-funded activism studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 231-243, 2015 239 alarming to many scholars. first, the irish state is in the midst of a process of reducing the percentage of university operating costs it is willing to bear. this means that while universities continue to depend on state funding, they are now also increasingly reliant on other sources of funding, including from the corporate sphere. according to lynch (2014, p. 150), this threatens to create a situation where the “interests of the university become synonymous with powerful vested interests”, thereby undermining the broader public purpose of universities and making certain types of activist scholarship less possible. the second cause for alarm to activist scholars is that state funding of university-based research is becoming increasingly targeted to narrowly focused research agendas related to innovation, commercialization, and the ‘knowledge economy’ (lolich, 2011). as lolich (2011) contends, in this neoliberal funding context, “education is framed in economic terms while ignoring other important aspects of educating for affective citizenship” (p. 282), including “criticality, solidarity and social engagement” (p. 271). scholar activism in support of progressive social change is disadvantaged in such a funding climate. both of these developments – greater reliance on non-government sources, and greater government control over how public funding to universities is targeted – increase the extent to which university-based activism is threatened by the same challenges outlined above for the cso sphere. yet, academic literature has been slow to recognize these commonalities, either in its critique of state-funded cso-activism or in its analyses of universities’ evolving funding circumstances. just as cso-activism is more effective when organizations collaborate to achieve progressive social change, so csoand university-based activism is likely to be more effective if these two activist spheres learn from each other’s experiences and work together to overcome common challenges, including the challenges implicit in government funding. although i have been surprised by the tone of much of the academic commentary regarding state funding of cso activism, i acknowledge that my own activist experiences shape my knowledge formation (hanrahan, cooper, & burroughs-lange, 1999, p. 405). in particular, i come to the issues addressed in this article with two overarching convictions. first, i do not accept that the inequalities we face today are inevitable or necessary; rather, inequality is a consequence of how we choose to organize society. for me, a more participatory and inclusive democracy is an expression of and route toward greater equality. second, i am convinced that csos make an important contribution to democracy; however, in order to do so they need resources that enable them to build relationships, expertise, and know-how. pragmatically, state funding is likely to continue to play role in responding to this resourcing dilemma. a further question of positionality is the impact of my own direct experiences of state funding. on the one hand, i have seen state funding explicitly support the four activities that i identify in this article as nourishing democracy. on the other, i have also experienced the negative consequences anna visser studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 231-243, 2015 240 of ‘qualified’ funding and funding cuts. in paid staff roles, and as a volunteer board member, i have been given specific direction from state funders with regard to permissible activity, experienced the challenge of balancing the burden of funder accountability while trying to remain accountable to my organizations’ constituents, and have seen first-hand the tensions that arise between csos as they compete for diminishing financial resources. as director of the advocacy initiative (a privately funded project) i managed research on the relationship between state funding and cso advocacy and spoke to many actors within csos, as well as within political institutions, who had a broad range of experiences vis-à-vis both the positive and negative implications of state funding. consequently, i am convinced that the relationship between state funding and democratic contribution is an important one, but it is complex and evades simple conclusions. acknowledgements i wish to sincerely thank the special issue editors, sandra smeltzer and sara cantillon, for their ongoing support during the development of this article. i would also like to thank david butz, the journal’s editor-in-chief, for his guidance and insight. the energy and commitment that each brought to this process is encouraging to me both as an activist and as an aspiring academic. references adshead, m. 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(2014). pulling together: a synthesis of the work of the advocacy initiative 20102014. the advocacy initiative. retrieved from http://www.advocacyinitiative.ie/resource/pulling-together-synthesis-work-advocacyinitiative-2010-2014 wampler, b. (2008). when does participatory democracy deepen the quality of democracy? lessons from brazil. comparative politics, 41(1), 61-81. anderson & grace final before ts december 17 18 correspondence address: emily anderson, international and intercultural education, florida international university, modesto a. maidique campus, 11200 sw 8th street, ecs 450 miami, fl 33199; email: emanders@fiu.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 from schoolgirls to “virtuous” khmer women: interrogating chbab srey and gender in cambodian education policy emily anderson florida international university, usa kelly grace lehigh university, usa abstract chbab srey (code of conduct for women) is an important piece of khmer literature outlining expected behavior for girls and women in cambodia. pieces of the poem are taught in secondary school and interwoven into the educational experiences of girls and female teachers, yet there is little research on chbab srey in education. using discourse analysis, this article considers the influence of chbab srey on gender-related education policy in cambodia. this research highlights the juxtaposition of chbab srey and gender mainstreaming in education policy and in the curricular experiences of girls and teachers in cambodia, and introduces an unexamined and culturally coveted piece of cambodian curriculum to the fields of teacher-related policy and girls’ education. keywords chbab srey; girls’ education; female teachers; cambodia; policy discourse analysis introduction this article investigates the ways in which the chbab srey, an important piece of khmer poetic literature, contradicts cambodia’s incorporation of gender mainstreaming within its education policy agenda. aligned with the special issue’s thematic foci, this article centers chbab srey as an important context for teachers’ lived experiences and girls’ access to “genderredistributed” curriculum (kirk, 2004, p. 394). we apply policy discourse analysis (allan, 2008; anderson, 2016; 2017; monkman & hoffman, 2013) emily anderson & kelly grace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 216 to describe how chbab srey is embedded in policies that affect girls and female teachers in cambodia. chbab srey is a poem that was orally passed down from the 14th to 19th centuries, and then codified in written form. it details a mother’s advice to her recently married daughter. the mother, as narrator, advises her daughter to maintain peace within the home, walk and talk softly, and obey and respect her husband. the poem survived recent cambodian history, which saw the complete destruction of the cambodian education system at the hands of the communist party of kampuchea, or khmer rouge, and mass genocide that targeted teachers, monks and those considered the educated elite. during this time, all educational activities were banned, teachers were outlawed and killed, and illiteracy increased (chandler, 2007; ogisu & williams, 2016). the persistence of chbab srey in khmer culture, despite the khmer rouge’s attempts to wipe out khmer culture through mass genocide and banning khmer cultural expression, and the inclusion of chbab srey in the newly rebuilt education system and curriculum, are indications of the poem’s importance in cambodian society. until 2007, students were expected to memorize the entire chbab srey as part of the secondary school curriculum in khmer literature. in 2007 the ministry of education, youth and sport (moeys) substantially reduced the number of verses taught in schools, though copies of the poem are usually found in school libraries. currently, cambodian girls in grades 8 and 9 use textbooks and lessons that include a truncated version of the poem highlighting important verses as prescribed in the national curriculum (derks, 2008; ledgerwood, 1990). the decision to remove most of chbab srey from the school curriculum stemmed from concerns regarding whether it supported gender equity in schools (derks, 2008). in addition to socializing women to accept the dominance of men, brickell (2016; 2017) argues that the influence of chbab srey contributes to silencing domestic violence victims and normalizing domestic abuse. according to jack and astbury (2014, p. 220) chbab srey “represents a profound obstacle to gender equality and the reduction of violence against women.” we apply a feminist discursive institutional approach (kangas, niemelä, & varjonen, 2014; kulawik, 2009; mackay, kenney, & chappell, 2010; schmidt, 2008) to policy document and curriculum analysis in order to interrogate gender-related policy and agenda-setting in cambodia, using chbab srey as context for our analyses. we consider the policies themselves, as well as the social and cultural contexts in which they exist. our feminist discursive institutional analysis centers gender and constructions of genderrelated policy as both meaning and messaging that inform the lived experiences of female cambodian teachers and the girls they teach. there has been limited research on the role of chbab srey in women’s and girls’ lives, and none investigating how chbab srey informs educational policy and curriculum, despite, or perhaps as a result of, its status as a representation of khmer culture and literature. we center chbab srey to investigate its from schoolgirls to “virtuous” khmer women studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 217 intersections with gender equality in girls’ education policy and practice. inspired by kirk’s (2004; 2008) work on the lived experiences of female teachers, we consider how chbab srey informs teachers’ work and the contexts of girls’ education in cambodia as policy and as official curricula. chbab srey and “virtuous womanhood” chbab srey is considered an important piece of khmer culture and is thus taught in schools as khmer literature by teachers of khmer language and literature. chbab srey is attributed to krom ngoy, who is acknowledged as the “father” of khmer poetry; however, it existed in oral form long before it was codified in writing. the writer’s voice alternates between the perspectives of a third-person narrator and of a recently married women’s mother, and instructs girls and women to obey their husbands, walk and talk quietly, and keep family matters in the home by maintaining the boundary between home and community (brickell, 2011; derks, 2008; ledgerwood, 1990; smith-hefner, 1999). chbab srey codifies women’s status in the home, reminding them that married women should show deference and subservience to their husbands. khmer women are expected to perform domestic duties within the household, and to model accommodating, submissive, virtuous and demure behaviors when interacting with men (ledgerwood, 1996; smith-hefner, 1999). for example, the poem instructs girls to “turn around the cooker” (“sut trey voel jong krann min chum”), translated as to “stay at home,” while boys are expected to move out into the world and earn a living for their families (velasco, 2001). chbab srey explicitly instructs girls to “forgive and be fearful” of their husbands, not to “say anything that treats him as your equal,” and to “instead keep silent in order to have peace.” these directives are culturally embedded and reinforced at the family and school levels. that is to say, expectations for girls and young women in the home, and in khmer culture generally, reflect chbab srey’s influence (derks, 2008; ledgerwood, 1990; 1996). chbab srey as cultural context for education policy and reform in the discursive analysis that follows, we describe the ways in which chbab srey is embedded in official curriculum and policy documents. we hope our study will inform future research that purposefully interrogates teachers’ identities and girls’ experiences in school. we begin with an overview of the gendered-conditions of teaching as a profession in cambodia in order to introduce the policy contexts that inform teaching and learning. following these policy document analyses, we focus attention on the policy contexts of girls’ education. together, these discursive analyses show the ways in which emily anderson & kelly grace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 218 chbab srey is embedded in the policies that inform female teachers’ professional identities and girls’ educational experiences in cambodia. according to the ministry of education, youth and sport (moeys, 2016) just over 20% of secondary teachers identify as female. according to data collected as part of moeys's 2015 analysis of capacity for technicalvocational education, teachers in upper-secondary schools can expect to earn 60% less on average than professionals in other fields with commensurate levels of education and training (moeys, 2015a, p. 24). low salaries coupled with the low status of teaching as a career have necessitated policy attention on how to recruit, retain, and professionally develop female teachers in secondary schools. further, preliminary evidence from an ongoing study of gender equity within the teaching profession in cambodia suggests teachers believe strongly that chbab srey is an important part of the curriculum (grace & eng, 2015). however, teachers determine how those lessons are taught and the extent to which they engage students with the meaning of chbab srey. teacher training centers (ttcs) briefly address how to teach chbab srey for pre-service teachers, however teacher manuals are limited and rarely available once teachers are in the classroom (grace & eng, 2015). existing scholarship suggests that curriculum and instruction in cambodia relies largely on memorization (ogisu, 2016). how and to what extent teachers engage in critical consideration of chbab srey as curriculum is currently underexplored. what is known, however, is that students are exposed to chbab srey through official curriculum as embedded in literature lessons about the structure of poetry. data and analytical approaches our analysis uses an original khmer-to-english transcription of chbab srey as the primary source of evidence. chbab srey has significant cultural value and meaning in cambodian society. as white, female scholar-practitioners engaged in this research, our distance from the cultural and identity contexts of chbab srey inherently limits our ability to fully understand the ways in which it informs the lived experiences of female teachers and the girls they teach. as former classroom teachers ourselves, we were drawn to this work because of the ways that teachers’ lives and practices are intimately tied to the cultures and contexts of the children they teach and the communities they serve. neither author has direct experience teaching in cambodia, where – as our findings show – chbab srey influences expectations for female teachers and girls’ education. drawing from our experiences as former classroom teachers, and now as scholars in comparative and international education, we undertake this work with care and concern for how our cultural distance from chbab srey may affect our conceptual and methodological approaches and the conclusions we derive therefrom. from schoolgirls to “virtuous” khmer women studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 219 the poem was transcribed by one of the authors with two native khmer speakers over a six-week period in 2017, with the support of a khmer language and literature secondary teacher to ensure accurate translation and interpretation. transcribed lines were organized as discrete analytical units and categorized by theme. thematic categories were then derived from the transcribed text to maintain the narrative features of the poem and to reflect their “situated meaning,” described by gee (2004, p. 160) as, “cases where words and phrases are being given situated meanings that are nuanced and quite specific to the speaker's worldview or values or to the special qualities of the context the speaker is assuming and helping to construe or create.” cross-sections of text were audited to ensure intercoder agreement (creswell, 2018). lines were further refined using descriptive and pattern codes to contextualize the text within and across each thematic category (miles, huberman, & saldaña, 2013). limitations an important limitation of this research is that neither co-author is a native or fluent khmer speaker. one author has extensive field experience working in cambodia and participated in translating the text to english. with the support of two fluent khmer speakers, we were able to clarify specific terms in use as they appeared in the transcript. keeping the text structure intact when applying first and second-cycle codes shaped our reading and analysis of the poem as education policy discourse. consequently, if we had instead applied descriptive first-round codes to the entire text and not by narrative section, the analysis would have resulted in different findings than those identified here. we tested this approach when first working with sections as they were transcribed and found that the narrative and rhetorical elements of the poem were lost. ultimately, we segmented our analysis by sections of the text’s original poetic form. keeping related lines of text together enabled us to interrogate the poem’s embedded and “situated” meanings (gee, 2004, p. 160) in their original narrative contexts. this manner of examining textbooks is both a limitation of the study as well as a potential line of further inquiry that expands textbook analysis. policy documents the document corpus was created using publicly available reports, white papers, and policy guidance on girls’ education and teacher education, recruitment, and retention policy in cambodia. our analysis of the document corpus applied the same descriptive and pattern codes derived from our work with the translated version chbab srey. we used a date filter to search for all publicly available policy documents published between 2005 and 2015 on the emily anderson & kelly grace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 220 moeys website to construct the corpus. it was then further refined to 12 documents to reflect policies affecting lower secondary grades (6 to 9), girls’ education, and teacher-centered policies, and to reflect the grade levels where chbab srey is implemented as official curricula. table 1 lists all documents included in the corpus. publication year document title authoring institution 2006 school health policy moeys 2007 educational law moeys 2008 strategic and operational plan for hiv 2008 2012 • sub-decree on the organization and functioning of ministry of education youth and sport royal government of cambodia • sub-decree on the ethics code for the teaching profession moeys 2009 kingdom of cambodia education strategic plan moeys 2014 cambodia gender assessment • chapter 2: gender relations and attitudes • chapter 7: gender relations and violence mowa 2015 master plan for technical education at upper secondary level (2015-2019) • teacher policy action plan moeys table 1. document corpus textbook excerpts to further contextualize chbab srey as implemented curriculum, we applied the same descriptive and thematic codes to translated textbook excerpts used in grades 7, 8 and 9. the textbook corpus was constructed using convenience sampling (creswell, 2018), from those textbooks available to the authors through colleagues working in girls’ education in cambodia. as with the translated text, we cross-checked randomly selected sections of the document corpus and textbook sample to support intercoder agreement. table 2 describes the textbooks included in these analyses. of the four nationally-issued khmer language and literature textbook excerpts examined, two contained passages taken directly from chbab srey, two contained passages from the corresponding code for boys, chbab pro, and one contained biographical information regarding the author. sections of from schoolgirls to “virtuous” khmer women studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 221 chbab srey are included in the eighth and ninth grade textbooks of khmer literature and language. publication year document title authoring institution 2011 khmer studies book grade 7 moeys 2011 khmer studies book grade 8 moeys 2011 khmer studies book grade 9 moeys table 2. textbook corpus ninth-grade students are presented with six lines from the chbab srey. this short presentation of chbab srey is followed by an equally truncated version of chbab pro, which warns boys against impolite behavior towards their elders, lest their parents be subjected to gossip and their family be seen as “poorly educated.” the eighth-grade excerpt from chbab srey includes 33 lines directly from chbab srey. this excerpt introduces warnings against “babbling childishly” and “laughing flirtatiously,” warning that this will bring the unwanted advances of ill-intentioned men. girls are instructed that girls and women who participate in such behavior are “bad,” lacking value, character and self-control and will be a “dishonored” woman. the excerpt urges girls to work hard and complete any work that they begin, to take care of their body while they are single, as later they will be “busy with crying children and will rarely have the chance to work hard” (translated, line 29), and “you will be worried and short sighted with a baby, one after another, crying for food; suffering in your heart to find something for your one or two children so that they are quiet” (translated, line 31). finally, the excerpt references the “three flames” that women must keep in order to ensure harmony in the home: respecting their parents, respecting their husbands, and controlling the spread of gossip. findings in the sections that follow, our analysis shows how girls and female teachers are targeted as specific populations of interest in the policies used to advance gender equality in cambodia. the analysis then moves to interrogate the juxtaposition of chbab srey and the teachers’ code of conduct as policy contexts for teaching, and of girls’ education in cambodia. our findings suggest an alignment between chbab srey and education policies that are targeted at cambodian girls and their female teachers. this alignment, however, conflicts with cambodia’s gender-mainstreaming policies. we emily anderson & kelly grace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 222 integrate direct passages from chbab srey in policy analysis to highlight the poem’s influence on the contexts of teaching and learning in cambodia. gender mainstreaming in education policy and reform in cambodia in 2000, the millennium development goals (hereafter, mdgs) and education for all (hereafter, efa) converged through their shared goal to achieve gender parity in primary education by 2005 and at all levels of schooling by 2015. during the mdg era and into the sustainable development goal (hereafter, sdg) transition, cambodia addressed issues of gender equity in education through a gender mainstreaming approach to policymaking. the most salient of these policies is the neary rattanak: five year strategic plan for gender equality and women’s empowerment (ministry of women’s affairs, 2014a). it outlines the government’s gender mainstreaming strategic plan, which has provisions for the promotion of gender equity in education, reducing violence against women, and supporting education for women and girls. the neary rattanak includes only a single reference to educational rights, but offers specific provisions for women and girls’ social and civic entitlements. the neary rattanak articulates cambodia’s inter-sectorial approach to gender mainstreaming; this approach is also represented in the country’s education development agenda. the policies described in the document corpus reflect a holistic, inter-sectorial approach to gender mainstreaming as a strategy to achieve the targets set through efa, the mdgs and the sdgs. in addition to these policy areas, gender mainstreaming is also used to promote teacher retention and hiv/aids prevention education. as an example, the technical vocational education (tve) plan explicitly frames gender as a “cross-cutting issue” (moeys, 2015a, p. 24), which involves capacity building, incentives (mcdonnell & elmore, 1987), and advancement of female teachers, as strategies to improve tve upper secondary education. building from cambodia’s efa commitments, the 2009-2013 education strategic plan promotes children’s schooling access, retention and transition at all levels. training and retention and evaluation of preand in-service teachers and training programs for students in rural, remote, and economically disadvantaged areas are provided (moeys, 2010, p. 56). population targeting women and girls are targeted as two specific target populations (schneider & ingram, 1993) across the document corpus. the social construction of target populations rely on normative, often stereotypical, constructions of identity that are reified through policy language. the education strategic plan targets girls as a discrete population of interest and explicitly focuses on their from schoolgirls to “virtuous” khmer women studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 223 schooling access as a policy priority. girls are discussed in distinction from “marginalized students,” who are described in the policy guidance as “children from poor families, child labor, children in disadvantaged areas, children with disabilities, children affected by hiv/aids and other communicable diseases” (moeys, 2010, p. 15). overall, the education policy guidance included in the document corpus narrowly and purposefully constructs target populations to identify the policy needs of both girls and female teachers. this narrow construction enables girls’ educational needs and the barriers that restrict female teachers’ professional status, development, and retention to be aligned with the policies themselves. the focus on female teachers in cambodia’s education policy agenda is apparent throughout the 2015 teacher policy action plan (moeys, 2015b). the action plan articulates the kingdom’s priorities for recruitment, retention, and professional development for teaching staff. as with the strategic plan’s focus on girls as unique and distinct from other “marginalized” student populations, the action plan differentiates women from other targeted groups including those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, differently-abled persons, and those from ethnically marginalized communities. cambodia’s approach to gender mainstreaming within education policy extends to improving teachers’ living and working conditions. the action plan articulates policy goals for improving housing and sanitation facilities for teachers as a way to improve retention. female teachers are not the explicit population of interest in the document, but they are identified as the primary population of interest, who require dedicated pathways to become school leaders and are integral in the effort to “strengthen” the “effectiveness of school leadership mechanisms” (moeys, 2015b, p. 18). the commitment to teachers’ professional development and training is also referenced in the 2008 sub-decree on the organization and functioning of ministry of education youth and sport royal (moeys, 2008a). girls are not identified in the sub-decree as a unique or distinct population from children; nor are female teachers differentiated from or within educational personnel as a targeted population. the 2008 sub-decree provides additional guidance on moeys’s focus on teacher education and training within its overall strategy to improve the contexts of teaching and learning. it includes specific language supporting the inclusion of gender-responsive approaches to education policy and development by integrating “gender management work” (moeys, 2008a, p. 6) into how teachers and other educational personnel are recruited, evaluated, and retained. the department of teacher training is established in the sub-decree (article 27), which also mandates teachers’ access to professional development through the creation of regional training centers and inter-sectorial engagement with private and community-based providers. while the sub-decree references an accountability and datasharing mechanism between the regional and national providers, it does not identify how these interactions will be supported. further, there is no emily anderson & kelly grace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 224 reference to how these centers are funded or regulated. the lack of targeted funding to support teachers’ training and professional development is also apparent in the teacher policy action plan’s (2015b) attention to female teachers. despite the direct attention to female teachers as a population of interest within cambodia’s gender-mainstreaming efforts, these mandates are largely unfunded, thus distinguishing them from the other actionable policies detailed in the action plan and sub-decree. the ethics code for the teaching profession teachers’ rights are expressed in the policy documents included in the corpus under study. our document analysis unveils similarities between teachers’ rights and the behavioral expectations for girls communicated through chbab srey. teachers’ rights to professional status, development, and respect are all explicitly guaranteed under the education law of 2007, although the gendered-dimensions that shape their work are not addressed. for example, the 2007 law guarantees teachers’ “right to achieve career value dignity and social high respect” (moeys, 2007, p. 14). teachers’ obligations under the law require that they respect their professional code of ethics and the law, and obliges them to “undertake and develop their work with due high diligence and responsibility” (moeys, 2007, p. 14). the absence of chbab srey in the 2007 education law is consistent with the other policy documents sampled in the document corpus. chbab srey is not discussed explicitly as a context for teachers’ work or the ways it informs teachers’ engagement with parents/caregivers. it does emerge as an implicit context for teachers’ professional roles and responsibilities as articulated through the ethics code for the teaching profession (moeys, 2008b). the ethics code for the teaching profession, also referred to in policy as the teachers’ code of conduct, was created in 2008 and fully implemented in 2011. the 2009 education strategic plan, discussed previously in relation to cambodia’s gender-mainstreamed approach to teacher recruitment, training, and retention, also references the code of conduct. while the code is referenced explicitly, the 2009 education strategic plan does not provide inducements or targeted funding to professionally develop current teachers under the code. the explicit focus of the teachers’ code of conduct is to “improve” the morale and dignity of teachers, as well as the “quality and effectiveness of education” (moeys, 2008b, p. 2). teachers’ duties are outlined in the code and range from providing support for activities and processes as directed by education managers, prohibiting financial gain through or as part of their teaching assignment, and requiring they uphold the law as part of their professional role. chapter 2 of the code specifies teachers’ duties and dispositions. table 3 highlights the behavioral dispositional expectations noted in chapter 2, articles 5-14, of the code. we focus on these articles from schoolgirls to “virtuous” khmer women studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 225 because they detail behavioral expectations for teachers that mirror the expectations communicated to girls and women in chbab srey. article 5 teachers shall respect the life, body, psyche, and dignity of people in their teaching profession. teachers shall strongly hold the morale in their teaching profession. article 6 teachers shall keep their profession as confidential in case it is restricted by law or regulation in order to protect the beneficiary of learners. teachers shall strongly hold liberation during teaching profession such as: independence, freedom, and prosperity. article 7 teachers can be a guardian of learners and shall listen, monitor, and give advices to learners fairly and equally. teacher shall not discriminate by age, sex, language, race, nationality, color, disability, gender, belief, religion, political view, or social status, resource, or others situation in education and educational service. article 8 teachers shall strongly hold the conscientiousness in their profession. teachers have duty to prepare the lesson plans and define good explanation in order to achieve the quality and effectiveness in teaching. article 9 teachers shall be self-study and do more research for selfdevelopment; and teachers shall regularly attend every training activity. teachers shall do self-evaluation and evaluate their own performance during the teaching profession. article 10 teachers have duty to support every education activity and education service in all management level of education authority. article 11 teachers shall speak carefully and think of their own speech’s repercussion to students and publics when they release any information related to (public + private) education through media myths. teachers shall not do the demagoguery to the learners. teachers shall not reveal the result of disciplinary judgment of administration and people in the educational circles as well as public circles. article 12 teachers shall not conspire to ruin the benefits of students in education service. teachers shall not punish the students physically and psychologically which they will be affected. article 13 teachers shall not raise the money or collect informal fees or run any business inside the class. teachers shall avoid doing others job in the education institution. article 14 teachers shall avoid doing anything to disgrace their profession. teachers shall not provide several facilities that make them be illegal. table 3. (chapter 2 of the sub-decree on ethics code for the teaching profession; moyes, 2008b, pp. 1-2) emily anderson & kelly grace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 226 as referenced in table 3, the code specifies teachers’ conscientiousness and service to the profession as expectations. it provides that, “teachers shall strongly hold the conscientiousness in their profession” (moeys, 2008b, p. 2) through lesson planning and delivery. the concept of teachers’ conscientiousness as a professional domain is also referenced in a subsequent section of the code, stating, “no matter what the circumstance is teachers shall not lose the conscientiousness of their duty and obligation in the teaching profession which is covered by the contract or statute of public and private education institutions” (moeys, 2008b, p. 4). service to the profession is discussed as preserving the honor and status of teaching as a profession. the code operationalizes service to the profession as supporting “every educational activity and service” (article 10, p. 2). the code specifically references the importance of upholding “good relationships” with school personnel and parents (articles 34; article 3.18). the code’s attention to service and servitude to the teaching profession mirrors chbab srey’s expectations for women in the household. the convergence of the code of conduct with chbab srey extends and institutionalizes women’s service at work and at home. the convergence of the code and chbab srey illustrates how ingrained traditional gender norms are in khmer culture; these norms continue to be reflected in contemporary policies despite the aim to achieve gender equality in educational, social, economic, and political spheres. next, our analysis turns to how girls are targeted as populations of interest in cambodia’s gender mainstreaming policies. we focus on the contradiction between chbab srey’s implementation as official curriculum and girls’ education policy in cambodia. “the disgraced ones”: chbab srey and girls’ education in cambodia these girls are called the disgraced ones, who are not afraid of rules of conduct for women. chbab srey (translated, line 20) like the teachers’ code of conduct, chbab srey is a directive that demands adherence to the rules for virtue, character, and ideal khmer girlhood and womanhood. in the discussion that follows, we describe how chbab srey is implemented as official curriculum and evidence the ways girls’ schooling access, opportunity, and mobility are informed by the implementation of chbab srey as official curriculum. building on these findings, we draw parallels between chbab srey and the code of conduct for teachers to further highlight the disconnection between cambodia’s education policy agenda and the poem’s implementation in girls’ education. although cambodia has reached near parity in primary schools, girls continue to drop out of secondary schools at high rates and are less likely to from schoolgirls to “virtuous” khmer women studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 227 enroll in tertiary education (moeys, 2016). cambodian women’s traditional roles are located in the home as wives and mothers. girls’ responsibilities to home and family, conceptually and materially, are perceived to interfere with their educational attainment, and subsequently diminish their ability to work outside the home to support their own school fees (escamilla, 2011; ministry of women’s affairs, 2014b; velasco, 2001; velasco, 2004). the 2009 education strategic plan specifically targets children’s equal access to quality schooling as a strategic priority to promote national economic and social development (moeys, 2010), reflecting a rights-based approach (tomasevski, 2003) to ensuring children and youth’s full access and participation through all levels of schooling, and the explicit prohibition of discrimination. the plan highlights gender differences in students’ enrollment and retention as an ongoing challenge across all school levels, with emphasis on girls’ transition to secondary school. it also includes protections for children from ethnic minority groups and those with disabilities (p. 13), and incentives to support girls’ retention and transition in grades 7 to 9 through scholarship and food subsidy. it includes, “increasing the supply of teachers, providing houses to teachers and building dormitories for students in disadvantaged areas, especially girls” (moeys, 2010, p. 13) as policy priorities. the focus on girls as a population of interest extends from linking their educational opportunities with increasing the numbers of female teachers, to establishing a scholarship program to support secondary enrollment and retention. interestingly, the plan links teacher recruitment and capacity building with these barriers to girls’ schooling access and persistence, but does not reference chbab srey as a potential barrier to girls’ schooling opportunity or mobility, or teachers’ professional development. because chbab srey is implemented as official curriculum, girls are explicitly taught how to become virtuous wives through their embodiment of the characteristics described in the poem. chbab srey includes 225 lines dedicated to the need for careful vigilance regarding women’s societal, family and marital duties and obligations. service and conscientiousness are discussed throughout these sections of the poem and exemplified in a description of virtuous women as vigilant and careful keepers of “the three flames.” the flames further characterize what it means to be a virtuous khmer wife. the first flame describes preventing bringing gossip or bad news into the house as well as keeping unpleasant events from spreading outside of the house. these sections are translated as directives to, control the flames; don’t let them spread by blowing on them. otherwise they will scatter and spread, and burn everyone. (translated, lines 37-38) don’t bring an outside flame into (the family), and stubbornly blow on it and let it start a fire. carelessly controlling an inside flame (in the family), brings it out to start a fire outside. (translated, lines 39-40) emily anderson & kelly grace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 228 one flame you must keep is the good deeds of your parents who took care of you. and girl, commit to the path, serve your parents and do them no wrong. (translated, lines 45-46) one flame is to respect your husband and regularly have sex with him. and definitely serve him. don’t upset and disappoint him. (translated, lines 50-51) as exemplified in these sections of the poem, service and conscientiousness are central to the tenets of “the three flames” and the role of women in society, family and at home. these tenets extend to the profession of teaching through directives and language in the teachers’ code that reflect those prescribed in chbab srey. conscientiousness also implies that teachers are careful and vigilant of their behavior and their duty and obligation. here again, the implementation of chab srey as curriculum contradicts the national policy framework to improve teachers’ professional status as well as girls’ schooling access, opportunity, and mobility. this mixed-messaging communicates that girls are meant to develop themselves both to fulfill the roles of virtuous wives and mothers as an outcome of schooling, and to persist in schooling to fulfill social and economic demands outside, or in addition, to their responsibilities to home and family. speaking up and speaking out (don’t) use strong or mocking language without considering that you are a girl. chbab srey (translated, line 70) both chbab srey and the teachers’ code of conduct reinforce the expectation that speech is a dangerous act that will result in the loss of status. these risks are heightened for girls and female teachers because they extend from the home and are reinforced in the classroom. the rules for girls’ and teachers’ speech are explicit; speaking out or out of turn is strictly prohibited and, if violated, will result in consequences that bring shame to the family or to the profession. both the teachers’ code of conduct and chbab srey outline expectations related to speech. the code details moral and ethical behavioral expectations for teachers, which communicate the obligation that they refrain from public or private acts that may reflect poorly on the profession. article 11 (2008b, p. 2) states, teachers shall speak carefully and think of their own speech’s [sic] repercussion to students and publics when they release any information related to (public + private) education through media myths. teachers shall not do the demagoguery to the learners. teachers shall not reveal the result of disciplinary judgment of administration and people in the educational circles as well as public circles. articles 14 and 20 continue in this vein, requiring that teachers “avoid doing anything to disgrace their profession” (article 14, p. 2) and “maintain good from schoolgirls to “virtuous” khmer women studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 229 interpersonal relationship with others in order to be a good model or pattern for students and in order to protect teachers’ honor and dignity” (article 20, p. 2). here, the code cautions teachers from speaking freely or in ways that may conflict with moeys’s authority. the code’s focus on expectations for teachers’ speech acts closely aligns with how chbab srey articulates expectations for girls’ speech. in the example that follows, girls are cautioned from speaking and from speaking out of turn; “if you must speak, as a woman, do not say something silly” (translated, line 14) and warns, “don’t be fickle, my dear, if your words are not (strong), you should be ashamed” (translated, line 18). along with shame, other consequences are also implied as outcomes for speaking out or out of turn. chbab srey identifies shame as a consequence of girls’ failure to abide by her husband’s wishes. chbab srey gives specific advice for girls, as future wives, to ensure harmony in their marriage. a wife’s deference to her husband and expectations for speech are noted in the following excerpt (translated, lines 79 83): even though your husband curses you, go to bed and think it over. come back to him and use gentle words to rectify his mistake. even though your husband admonishes you, remember to keep it to yourself. if something goes wrong, don’t forget the advice which you were given. if you are not afraid and don’t listen to the advice which has been given to you, (you will) create only arguments. the preparation for “good” girls to become “good” wives continues in the section detailing the “seven characteristics.” the first line of this section states, “a wife like an enemy does not have the seven good characteristics” (translated, lines 168). “bad” wives are framed as those who do not fear or obey their husbands. here, like in the example above, girls are cautioned to follow their husband’s word. the first of the seven characteristics is that “good” wives should listen to and obey their husbands. the following stanza characterizes girls who do not listen and obey as “insolent and reticent:” “her husband tells her three words, but she does not reply” (translated, line 170). the next line continues by further describing “bad” wives as those who do “not like to listen when her husband advises (her) regarding some rules” (translated, line 171). although these pieces of the poem are not taught in the classroom, chbab srey often can be found in libraries in primary and secondary schools, with lessons taught and developed by librarians (grace, 2017). conclusion cambodia’s use of gender mainstreaming as a framework to achieve the shared goals of efa and mdgs 2 and 3 is evident throughout the document emily anderson & kelly grace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 230 corpus, particularly in the policy language used to construct populations and goals. girls and female teachers are named as specific populations of interest for achieving the goals and targets set throughout the policy documents under study in this article, with few exceptions. both groups are constructed as separate and distinct populations of interest in these two important policies. naming girls and female teachers as discrete populations is a rhetorical extension of the gender-mainstreamed approaches to policy making. the focus across the document corpus on female teachers’ retention and salary, as well as their need for improved access to professional development and training, highlights cambodia’s inter-sectorial approach to gender mainstreaming during the mdg-era and provides a framework for ongoing education development through the sdgs. although naming is not enough on its own, our findings illustrate the ways in which policy language can enable more narrowly targeted policy guidance. chbab srey prescribes a model for women’s marital and maternal behaviors, which has been passed down as oral tradition, and contemporarily through official curricula. our findings identify the diffusion of chbab srey within the policies that inform female teachers’ professional and girls’ schooling experiences. as we conclude our analysis, we identify limitations in document and artifact selection, as well as the transcription used in our analyses. we also highlight opportunities for future research that continues jackie kirk’s legacy of scholarship in the areas of female teachers’ work and girls’ education. future research on female teachers and the girls they teach is important and necessary and will, we hope, come as an outcome of the analysis presented here. contributing to jackie kirk’s legacy: interrogating the “conditions” and “approaches” of gender-mainstreamed education policy in cambodia our analyses of the policy and curricular contexts of teaching and girls’ education in cambodia is inspired by jackie kirk’s body of work. we attempt to embody her commitment to understanding the cultural and contextual conditions of teachers’ lives and girls’ schooling experiences. the “symbolic power” (winthrop & kirk, 2008, p. 648) of schooling in cambodia is intertwined with chbab srey’s value as a cultural artifact. as posited in her collaborative work with winthrop, kirk asserts, “under certain conditions and with certain approaches, schooling can support children’s well-being” (winthrop & kirk, 2008, p. 639). by questioning the normative expectation that formal schooling can be a catalyst for all things from peace to development, kirk, with her collaborators, called into question the conditions of and approaches to formal schooling that influence children’s experiences and outcomes. our contribution to this special issue of studies in social justice aims to extend dr. kirk’s work in fields of comparative and from schoolgirls to “virtuous” khmer women studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 231 international education and girls’ education, particularly by centering chbab srey as a “condition” that shapes girls’ education and female teachers’ engagement with formal schooling. chbab srey holds significant symbolic and cultural value in cambodian society and communicates expectations and consequences for women and girls’ behavior at home and at school. these values are further reified through chbab srey’s diffusion as curriculum and embodiment in the teachers’ code of conduct. the codified and normalized conditions of girls’ education and female teachers’ work informs individuals’ schooling experiences as well as the approaches used to implement curriculum. as noted by kirk & winthrop (2007) in their work on education in refugee contexts, teachers play an instrumental role in girls’ protection at school. by locating girls and female teachers as populations of interest within cambodia’s education policy agenda, our analysis reflects kirk’s inquiry (2008) into how girls and their teachers experience schooling, and the ways that culture and experience intersect with policy implementation. chbab srey is unique to cambodia and the cambodian education system and forms a codified description of patriarchal expectations for girls and women that is handed down through educational channels and solidifies girls and women’s place within cambodian patriarchal society. while cambodia’s patriarchal society is not unique, khmer culture supports the socio-cultural expectations of women through chbab srey (derks, 2008; ledgerwood, 1990; ledgerwood, 1996). the findings presented here provide an initial attempt to empirically and theoretically examine the implementation of chbab srey as a culturally-coveted, written poem in the national curriculum that remains an active force in the lives of female teachers and the girls they teach. as cambodia seeks gender equity in education, future research is needed to consider how this influential text is embedded and contested in policy documents and curriculum artifacts, as important contexts of teachers’ and girls’ educational experiences. acknowledgements the authors thank mr. bunny kheng and mr. ratha chhum for their translation support. references allan, e. j. 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(2003). education denied: costs and remedies. new york: zed books. velasco, e. (2001). why are girls not in school? perceptions, realities and contradictions in changing cambodia. phnom penh, kh: unicef cambodia. retrieved from: http://119.82.251.165:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/183/why%20are%20girls %20not%20in%20school%20perceptions%2c%20realities%20and%20contradictions%2 0in%20changing%20cambodia.pdf?sequence=1 velasco, e. (2004). ensuring gender equity in education for all: is cambodia on track? prospects, 34(1), 37-51. emily anderson & kelly grace studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 215-234, 2018 234 winthrop, r. w., & kirk, j (2008). learning for a bright future: schooling, armed conflict, and children’s well-being. comparative education review, 52(4), 639-661. petrick final galley nov 18 15 correspondence address: kamilla petrick, department of communication studies, york university, 3004 tel building, 4700 keele st., toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: kamilla@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 fast times in hallowed halls: making time for activism in a culture of speed kamilla petrick lakehead university, canada abstract this article examines the implications of the social acceleration of time for the capacity of activist-scholars to engage in collective action. drawing on interdisciplinary literature on time and temporality, the article argues that the neoliberal university is driven by the same speed imperative that underpins the capitalist mode of production, and that the resulting and growing time pressures inhibit academics' (and others') involvement in social movements in profound and deleterious ways. to explore this argument empirically, i draw on insights gleaned from semi-structured interviews with canadian activist-scholars. despite the manifest diversity of temporal experiences and challenges faced by scholar-activists in contemporary high-speed society, it is clear that academics today face severe time pressures that apply across individual differences and across disciplines. these pressures, which can only be properly explicated with reference to the ruling politicaleconomic paradigm, militate against the capacity to engage in reflexive thought (for both scholarly and activist purposes) and also against a higher level of involvement of ‘public intellectuals’ in social movements. the article's conclusion offers a few tentative thoughts about tempering the speed imperative for the purpose of self-care and by extension, for the common good in the long run. keywords social acceleration; time; neoliberal university; social movements; collective action; activist-scholars “extreme busyness” (scheuerman, 2005, p. 449) – or, to use the language of social movement studies, the shortage of time as a resource of collective action – is frequently proffered by self-identified progressives, including scholars, as a major reason for their lack of more active involvement in social activism. although it may now be widely accepted as a given, the widespread condition of acute time scarcity has a profound impact upon the character and extent of academics’ (and others’) social movement participation. without wanting to diminish the contribution of individual volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 fast times in hallowed halls studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 71 activist engagements, in this article i focus on the importance of collective action as constitutive of social movements, classically defined (i.e., tilly, 2004). i contend that, insofar as action taken in tandem with civil society actors at large constitutes a vital and integral element of the academic vocation, the impact of social acceleration on academics’ civic engagement needs to be (re)examined critically and made strange again, so that we might become better equipped to resist the pervasive “culture of speed” (tomlinson, 2007, p. 8) and the related pernicious productivity paradigm that plagues both activism and academia. the article utilizes three main sets of research sources. it proceeds by first drawing on the insights of a growing interdisciplinary body of literature concerning the process of so-called social acceleration, and its impact and implications for activism, as well as for the university as an enterprise. second, my analysis is informed by a broader project investigating the impact of social acceleration on the temporal tendencies and orientations of ‘new media activism.’ this project was based on over 70 semi-structured interviews i conducted (primarily in 2011), with leading organizers affiliated with the canadian alter-globalization movement. finally, given the article’s specific focus on politically engaged academics and the intersectional experience of time and acceleration from their vantage point, supplementary semi-structured interviews with canadian scholar-activists were carried out between december 2014 and february 2015, and constitute the main material upon which the latter, more substantive, half of this article is based. in this latter section, i identify and discuss several themes that emerged over the course of the interviews that have shaped individual academics’ trajectories of activist involvement. i focus in particular on the specific temporal structure of academic work, the crucial matter of cycles (of life, movements, and the academic year), the important question of academic hierarchy and rank, as well as the role of various biographical factors, identity, and social ties. despite the manifest diversity of temporal experiences and challenges faced by scholar-activists in contemporary highspeed society, the respondents’ answers confirmed that academics today face tremendous time pressures that apply across individual differences and across disciplines. these pressures, which can only be properly explicated with reference to the ruling political-economic paradigm that operates both on and off campus, militate against the capacity to engage in reflexive thought (for both scholarly and activist purposes) and also against involvement by public intellectuals in social movements. capitalism and the speed imperative social scientists have long recognized that the sense of time and space as experienced by human beings is largely a social construction. thus, temporal orientations – that is, the relative cultural value placed on different kamilla petrick studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 72 dimensions of time: the past, present, and future – are also historically and culturally contingent (hall, 1983; levine, 1997). historically, pre-modern societies were ruled by a cyclical view of time, as shaped and dictated by natural rhythms (day/night, harvest times, etc.), as well as by a cultural emphasis on the past and tradition (rifkin, 1987; nowotny, 1994). this temporal outlook changed with the rise of the modern capitalist era and the enlightenment, which served to eventually displace the tradition-bound, hegemonic past orientation with a future outlook based on a strong faith in social progress. technological developments, together with the onset of industrialization and taylorism, further displaced the focus on natural cycles by ushering in a new hegemonic temporality predicated on the growing need for more precise time measurement and scheduling – what scholars have termed the ascent of “clock-time” (adam, 1995; reith, 2004; porter & stockdale, 2015). beginning in the 20th century, the dominant temporal orientation (at least in post-modern societies penetrated by instantaneous communication technologies) started to shift yet again, away from clock-time and increasingly toward what robert hassan has termed “network time,” a powerful new temporal order predicated on instant and constant connectivity, and spurred on by the nexus between neoliberal globalization and the penetration of daily life by time-compressing communication technologies (hassan, 2003, 2009). german sociologist hartmut rosa conceptualizes shifts in the hegemonic temporal orientation as stemming from a process that he calls “social acceleration” (see rosa, 2003, 2005, 2013). according to rosa, social acceleration is the fundamental process of modernity, which takes three analytically-separable forms: technological innovation, the rate of change, and the pace of life. he further identifies three motors as responsible for driving this complex process: cultural, structural, and economic. among them, he sees the latter , specifically capitalism, as the “most obvious source of social acceleration” (2009, p. 91). this argument is supported by a swelling body of research on the link between social acceleration and the basic dynamics of capitalism involving competition, and the need to commodify (labour) time and to accelerate the turnover time of capital (e.g., adam, 1995; agger, 2004; harvey, 1989; eriksen, 2001; postone, 1993; manzerolle & kjøsen, 2012; martineau, 2015). although workers initially resisted the capitalist speed imperative inside the workplace, as documented by e.p. thompson in his seminal 1967 essay “time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism,” following the so-called ‘post-war compromise’ between employers and the labour movement, the working class largely abandoned the fight for more free time in exchange for higher wages and improved purchasing power (hunnicut, 2013). the amount of available leisure time seems to have shrunk substantially since then, yielding what linder (1970) famously termed the harried leisure class (see also schor, 1991). bolstered by the hegemonic culture of speed in which busyness has come to be widely equated with social status and importance fast times in hallowed halls studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 73 (and is accordingly often seen as a badge of honour of sorts), today the tendency for work time to colonize leisure time continues unabated. it is particularly strong among ‘knowledge workers’ – as noted recently by the economist, with a nod to linder: for the past 20 years, and bucking previous trends, the workers who are now working the longest hours and juggling the most responsibilities at home also happen to be among the best educated and best paid. the so-called leisure class has never been more harried. (the economist, 2014) it seems safe to assume that this predicament applies in full force to the academic class; indeed, a growing number of empirical studies attest to the intensification of work in the academic sector (e.g., schuurman, 2009; jacobs & winslow, 2004), which has given rise to a greater sense of an increased pace of life and time pressure among academics. ‘fast academia’: the speed imperative inside the university to properly understand the ever-increasing demands of academic life, it is necessary to grasp the basic dynamics that are driving the degradation of the university into a ‘knowledge factory’ oriented toward ever-faster output. as has been by now well-documented by alarmed scholars (e.g., readings, 1996; hearn and hanke, 2012; slaughter and rhoades, 2004; shantz and vance, 2000), the process that slaughter and leslie (1997) have famously termed “academic capitalism” began in the 1970s, and has proceeded apace since then. it has imbued with the “entrepreneurial spirit” the ranks of administrators keen to enact “new public management” in order to boost “accountability, efficiency, productivity, quality control and costeffectiveness at all levels of academia” (ylijoki, 2013, p. 242). commonly referred to as the neoliberal restructuring of the university, this process has entailed drastic cutbacks to funding for post-secondary education, and a correspondingly higher financial dependency of universities on the private sector and tuition fees. the university has consequently shifted away from serving the community as a collegially governed public institution, moving instead toward corporate-managerial approaches to decision-making and efficiency involving increased administrative burdens on professors and an overarching imperative toward accelerated knowledge production. the institutional pressure to accelerate one’s academic ‘output’ is a common target of critical accounts addressing the university’s neoliberal restructuring in the contemporary era. from a temporal perspective, one of the most commonly lamented casualties of this development is what ylijoki and mantyla (2003) termed “timeless time,” namely the time in which academics feel they can slow down enough to engage in truly critical and creative thought required to produce high quality scholarship. in interviewing kamilla petrick studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 74 canadian academics, menzies and newson (2007, 2008) discovered a widely shared criticism of the disturbing tendencies to which academics themselves were contributing: “the drift toward shorter, more superficial and taskoriented engagement with colleagues and a subtle shift toward producing knowledge rather than engaging in the kind of reflection and critical dialogue traditionally associated with creating truly original knowledge” (2008, p. 518; see also levy, 2007; vostal, 2015). the authors’ interview research also substantiated with empirical evidence an argument advanced by a handful of interdisciplinary scholars (e.g., harvey, 1989; hassan, 2003, 2009): that there exists a significant dialectical dynamic between evolving communication technologies and shifting temporal norms and orientations. more specifically, and pertinent for our purposes, menzies and newson’s investigation confirmed that time-accelerating technologies of communication are at least partly to blame for the increased sense of time pressures experienced by academics, particularly vis-à-vis the expectations of instant responsiveness (from students as well as from administrators). the penetration of daily life by these technologies can thus be understood as exerting a negative impact on the availability of time for reflection, and we might add, for civic engagement. to be sure, the problem of time scarcity predates digital media, as does the speed imperative itself. it was bemoaned as early as the mid-20th century by canadian communication scholar harold innis, who warned that western civilization was becoming dangerously preoccupied with the present and with short-term concerns at the expense of the relatively slow oral tradition and critical dialogue (1951; see also watson, 2006). but, while the process of social acceleration and the associated sense of speed-up might not be new, the penetration of daily life by instantaneous communication technologies is arguably unprecedented, with troubling implications for the capacity for deep thought and for active citizenship. in a cultural milieu shaped by the nexus between neoliberal globalization and these technologies, social actors (including activists and academics) tend increasingly to espouse a mode of reasoning that hassan (2009) termed “abbreviated thinking.” insofar as it tends to prioritize short-term, instrumental goals and other ‘deliverables,’ this myopic mode of reasoning threatens “academic culture and the continuation of the university as a space for critical reflection and creative intellectual endeavour” (menzies & newson, 2008, p. 505). ‘fast activism’ in addition to its impact on the quality of scholarship, the hegemonic imperative toward speed has important consequences for the patterns and tendencies of collective action in contemporary society. american political scientist william scheuerman was among the first to argue that “social acceleration…clashes fundamentally with the temporality of citizenship” fast times in hallowed halls studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 75 (2005, p. 457). he highlighted in particular the fundamental tension between the imperatives of high-speed society and the inherently slow pace of democratic decision-making and critical reflection (see also levy, 2007; hassan, 2009; comor, 2006). this line of critique has thus far been largely speculative and not grounded in an empirical analysis of social activists. in an effort to address this gap in the ‘time studies’ literature, i set forth to investigate with greater empirical rigour the implications of social acceleration for contemporary activism. to this end, i conducted over 70 in-depth interviews with core organizers of the canadian alter-globalization movement, including a dozen academics. the alter-globalization movement emerged around the world in the late 1990s in opposition to neoliberalism, corporate power, and unfettered free trade. my goals were systematically to document the history of this movement, and to examine the impact of social acceleration on the alter-globalization movement as the example par excellence of new media activism. i examined activists’ temporal practices pertaining to the past (preservation and dissemination of collective memory), as well as to the future (long-term strategic planning), and to durability (building sustained social movement infrastructure). i found that the value of all three practices was generally upheld by the majority of my respondents, yet it largely failed to translate into practice, as “fast activism” tends to prioritize short-term tactics and objectives at the expense of the longue durée (pietrzyk 2013). in the discussion that follows, i turn to additional interviews carried out with canadian scholar-activists in order to provide preliminary insights concerning the factors, challenges, and obstacles that impinge on or variously facilitate their active participation in social movements. although they also clearly valued the longue durée in both their academic work and their activist endeavours, these scholar-activists too feel the pressure to engage in ‘fast’ academic and activist work, for the reasons outlined above and explored in more depth below. the work-life boundary: an academic quandary the canadian scholar-activists interviewed for this study are well-recognized and respected for their involvement in social movements; as personal acquaintances and comrades of the author, they were also readily reachable. these six individuals – three men and three women, representing both precariously and securely employed academics – gave generously of their time (between 60 and 90 minutes) and did so within the time-frame of this special issue’s production schedule (indeed, the irony was not lost on either side as potential interview subjects apologetically cited a lack of time when politely declining the invitation to participate in this study). though relatively few in number, these qualitative interviews were in-depth and proved very insightful. they were conducted either by phone or face-to-face, then kamilla petrick studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 76 transcribed and inductively coded to reveal several themes. while the limited size of the sample precludes me from making generalizations or drawing empirically robust conclusions about the time experiences of canadian scholar-activists, the observations articulated below do shine new light on the largely unexplored subject matter, and should be helpful in guiding related inquiries in the future. a good way to proceed is by acknowledging the distinctive temporal structure of academic work. in a study of finnish academics and their conceptions of time, yliyoki (2013) found that as the academic profession is widely regarded as a calling, it becomes harder to demarcate periods of academic work from periods of leisure. the latter appears to be never truly available to academics, who profess that research is a way of life rather than a nine-to-five sentence to be endured. ylijoki’s study revealed that academics did not typically delineate a boundary between work and personal time; instead, they were more concerned with another temporal duality, namely the fault line between productive time and wasted time. while the former is spent researching one’s freely chosen interests, the latter referred primarily to time spent in meetings or performing what are seen as relatively mindless administrative duties. in other words, right from the outset, an attempt to figure out how much free time academics have at their disposal that they could allocate to citizen engagement is fraught with an industry-specific challenge. this challenge was articulated by one of my respondents, who noted that: for many of us who are academics, we love our work. some of my friends always argue that almost all of us are borderline autistic or something, we’re obsessed with the stuff that interests us... we’re always working because we’re always thinking about the world and i think that makes it harder for us too. (individual interview, january 7, 2015) likewise, an associate professor of sociology and well-respected activist, pointed out: the nature of academic work is insidious, and it can take over and colonize all kinds of time because it’s not something that can only be performed in a particular place, and the time-bounds of the work are less defined. the very freedom of academia is in some ways what makes it so insidious in terms of taking over your other time. (individual interview, january 20, 2015) in short, as the comments above suggest, an inquiry into the temporal experiences of academics cannot ignore the difficulty that academics face in carving out time for civic engagement when the expectations defining of one’s profession militate against the very category of ‘free time.’ fast times in hallowed halls studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 77 of movement, life, and other cycles as the insights gleaned from the interviews made clear, the extent of academics’ active involvement in social movements is also alternatively constrained or facilitated by various temporal cycles that intersect and overlap in specific ways. while additional such cycles can likely be identified, in this section i examine the implications of three: the cycles of contention/protest, of life, and of the academic year. first, what has been variously called the “cycles of contention,” or “waves of protest,” is a core concept in social movement studies that refers to periods of heightened conflict across the social system, in which tactics diffuse rapidly among groups of activists and new alliances take shape (see tarrow, 1998; mcadam & sewell, 2001). the 1960s, the global justice movement, or the occupy movement are all good examples of such periods. from our perspective, the cyclical patterning of social protest matters because of the power of ascendant waves of dissent to encourage engagement on the part of those who, for a lack of time or other reasons, remain otherwise largely on the peripheries of social movements. when movement cycles are on the rise, more active participation in them suddenly becomes more appealing. implicitly suggesting that the lack of time is at least in part a matter of personal perception and priorities, a professor of sociology from toronto noted that when movements are strong and cycles are on the upswing, people (including academics) who normally do not have the time for activism, make time for it. regrettably, he added, the progressive left is quite weak at this point in time (at least in canada) and thus not very enticing. this means that going to organizing meetings tends to feel like just more work rather than an exciting way of spending one’s precious spare time. as his comment made clear, the ups and downs of movements clearly impact the willingness of individuals (both inside and outside academia) to make or find time in which to participate in social movement activism.1 second, life cycles – or to put it in the language of social movement studies, the element of biographical availability – emerged as another vital dimension of time with implications for academics’ level of movement involvement. in her recent study of the trajectories of protest participation, canadian sociologist catherine corrigall-brown (2012) found that marriage and child rearing (especially in the early years) act as significant barriers to movement participation. as corrigall-brown and other scholars have noted, parenting in particular is heavily gendered, with female academics reporting a greater sense of time pressure (see menzies & newson, 2008; wolfinger, 2013), not unlike professional women in society at large (see wajcman, 2015; leccardi, 1996; odih, 2003). given this situation, if female academics choose                                                                                                                           1 there is a problematic quality of self-gratifying, myopic opportunism to this mode of engagement, but it does not diminish the beauty or attraction of an emergent wave of collective action. kamilla petrick studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 78 to have children, it is likely that many of them will drop out of activism. this “individual abeyance” as corrigall-brown has termed it (2012, p. 40), proves to be permanent in some cases and temporary in others. the decision to eventually return into the activist fold is motivated by a host of factors including, but not limited to, the ones discussed in this article.2 the age of the scholar-activist in question is not insignificant in this respect insofar as it is indicative of generation, and by extension the individual’s exposure to, or experience with, historically specific cycles of contention. this point was articulated by a toronto-based sociologist, who noted that “it’s complicated a little bit because of the interaction between the lifecycle and the ups and downs of movements, so that some of the more active politicos i know in academia are older…simply because we were politicized at a time when movements were more exciting in certain ways, so it got deeper inside us…” (individual interview, january 20, 2015). likewise, a retired professor in a faculty of education attested to a big generational divide among scholar-activists. her own generation of fellow feminist scholars was very actively involved in women’s issues in the community, she noted, whereas today the junior faculty in the field seem largely disconnected: i watch my younger colleagues who often have very good politics in the abstract but who don’t enact those politics in their behaviour inside the university. they haven’t resisted the university, they haven’t exercised agency, they’ve just really bought into a lot of the rhetoric and the neoliberal bullshit that goes on in universities now and haven’t challenged it, and their excuse is, ‘well you know they have get these articles out,’ because they need to get tenure, and i’m not someone who says ‘no, no, don’t go for tenure,’ but i am someone who thinks that as professors we are supposed to be the governance structure of our university and we’ve completely let that out of our grasp… (individual interview, january 7, 2015) finally, the third cycle i wish to briefly discuss that shapes and structures academics’ involvement in social movements is the cycle of the academic year. as every scholar knows, there are predictable periods of heightened activity in each academic year, during which there is less time available for activism and other activities. this insight was conveyed by a tenured professor of global studies, who noted that his level of activist involvement shrinks and expands in keeping with this cycle: it grows during the summer and shrinks during the fall and winter terms. “even within the term there’s a certain cycle,” he added, referring to the months of september and january, during which there is relatively less grading work to be done, allowing for                                                                                                                           2 corrigall-brown (2012) finds that individuals who have more education and more political knowledge are less likely to disengage permanently from activism and instead follow the abeyance pattern of participation; scholar-activists can be presumed to satisfy both criteria.   fast times in hallowed halls studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 79 greater activist engagement, given the inclination (individual interview, january 16, 2015) . in short, as this section has sought to make clear, a multiplicity of temporal cycles carry significant consequences for patterns of collective action among academics; hence any attempt at a holistic, nuanced account of scholaractivists’ temporal experiences must consider their intersecting and overlapping character. time pressures and the academic hierarchy in this section, i turn to the question of academic rank and status and its role in shaping the capacity of academics to become engaged in social movements. recent scholarship (e.g., gutiérrez y muhs & niemann, 2012; müller, 2014; mendick, 2014) demonstrates that the experience of acute time scarcity depends to a large extent on social status and differentiation, including academic hierarchies. thus, being a female adjunct professor entails different time pressures than those faced by a male tenured professor, for example. in an influential article about the “conflicting time perspectives in academic work,” oili-helena yliyoki and hans mantyla (2003) conceptualize “contract time” as the short-termist mode of eking out a living as a ‘sessional’ faculty member, term by term. although tenure-track faculty have to subjugate various areas of their lives in keeping with the tyranny of the ‘tenure-clock,’ contract faculty members endure high levels of uncertainty and precarity as they pursue employment opportunities wherever and whenever they may arise, most often on a temporary basis. moreover, to become or remain competitive in the academic labour market, ‘sessional lecturers’, as they are alternatively dubbed, are confronted with the expectation to engage in research and to publish, just like their tenure-stream counterparts; however, not being part of their job description, research performed by these individuals is not remunerated. instead, it must be done in their spare time, which is typically next to nil, being consumed by the extra heavy teaching loads necessitated by the low rates of pay afforded contract faculty. as a result, not only do the research agendas of contract faculty tend to suffer, but also their ability to devote time to contentious collective action. as noted by one of the interview respondents: often the people going through the system now – because of all those pressures – tend to lose the habit of having a self outside of the one that gets consumed by the neoliberal academic institution. and that makes it harder both personally in terms of actually having a personal life, but also politically. (individual interview, january 20, 2015) for those lucky enough to have a tenure-track position, tenure does make activist engagement a little easier. a tenured professor of global studies made this point: kamilla petrick studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 80 it’s a completely different kettle of fish to be tenured because there’s so much more freedom, so much less pressure, and so much more capacity to delay completion of a project without immediate, practical consequences. so it’s very freeing in that sense. (individual interview, january 16, 2015) the pressures on tenured academics at his institution are less than tenuretrack faculty face, but, he added, this too varies from school to school, one presumes in line with the specific expectations set at the departmental and institutional level, including what can sometimes be increased expectations to play a larger administrative role or supervise more students. although it would be inaccurate to assert that all pressures are lessened, to the extent that the demands on one’s time imposed by the tenure clock cause scholaractivists to cease social movement involvement, securing tenure can facilitate a re-engagement by permitting greater temporal autonomy. the tyranny of the tenure clock is a readily recognized predicament among academics; indeed, anecdotal and empirical interview-based evidence (ylijoki 2013) shows that some contract faculty perceive a bright side to their precarious predicament, namely a certain freedom from the temporal demands of administrative work placed on their tenure-stream colleagues (again, typically viewed by academics with resentment as a waste of time; see ylijoki, 2013). this is not a universal condition or sentiment. as noted by one of my precariously employed respondents, contact faculty may face implicit pressure to engage in administrative tasks, stemming from the imperatives of competition and the drive for ‘excellence.’ as she pointed out, many contract faculty “are actually attending the endless administrative service meetings because they want to be seen and respected and to build their reputation in their department.” (individual interview, december 22, 2014). to the extent that they do so, they have less time for other pursuits, including participation in collective political action. making time for activism: the role of identity and social ties while the preceding discussion has shed some light on the differential participation of academics in activism, we would be remiss to overlook two additional and important pieces of the puzzle: the role of identity and social ties in shaping academics’ trajectories of social movement engagement. social movement scholars have long recognized the power of collective identity and social ties in motivating contentious collective action (e.g., mcadam, 1988; downton & wehr, 1997). self-identification as an activist likewise has been found to factor into decisions regarding whether to exit or sustain one’s engagement. as noted by corrigall-brown (2012), social ties created in voluntary groups make individuals both more likely to participate in forms of collective action and less likely to disengage permanently over time. fast times in hallowed halls studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 81 the significance of activist identity and social ties was emphasized emphatically by one of my respondents, a long-time activist and social movement scholar in toronto. first, she confirmed corrigall-brown’s insight regarding identity by noting the following: if you see yourself as an activist, it’s a pretty dominant identity (…) how you define yourself really affects the logic with which you decide, well, it’s much more important for me to go to that meeting or go to that demonstration than do the research. but then it’s really, really hard to get the research done, which is why i don’t have a massive research agenda a lot of the time because i don’t have time for it. now i’ve managed to get tenure regardless [laughs], but i think a lot of people who are very committed to movements still, for sure your academic productivity rate…is going to be lower. (individual interview, january 8, 2015) she also underlined the salience of having strong interpersonal connections with other activists as key to remaining engaged. “my relationships are very supportive of activism,” she observed with respect to her friendships, housemates, and romantic ties, “and they are much more tied to activism than academia… so when i go through periods of withdrawal from fully engaged activism, i get called on it.” her comments help us better understand why some scholar-activists, when confronted with comparable time pressures attached to the profession, are more inclined to make time for social movement involvement, than some of their like-minded colleagues – and the potential costs of such choice. time, activism and the long haul as part of the collective enterprise driving this special issue, namely to critically examine in order to transcend the various constraints standing in the way of collective action, this article’s aim was to shed light on the vital importance of time as a resource of contentious collective action. time is a resource perceived to be increasingly scarce and ‘at a premium’ in today’s high-speed society and inside the ‘high-speed university’ by extension. this pervasive sense of time scarcity is experienced differently depending on individual scholars’ circumstances, academic status, gender, and other factors; yet, the sense of aggravated busyness cuts demonstrably across these distinctions, impacting detrimentally the perceived capacity to devote time to political activities ‘above and beyond’ competing, ostensibly more pressing elements of the academic profession. additional participant research and analysis is, however, necessary to produce empirically robust insights into social acceleration’s impact on scholar-activists. the more modest aim of this article has been to initiate this discussion in a serious way, first of all by shattering the commonsensical character of the condition of extreme busyness that is so widely cited as a central reason for one’s lack of active involvement in social movements. kamilla petrick studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 82 to be sure, the real and perceived lack of time is far from the only hurdle preventing academics from being more actively involved in social activism. as my respondents observed, in many cases there are more-or-less subtle ways in which a scholar-activist might be penalized for being too politically radical, including unfavourable top-down decisions regarding hiring, promotion, grants, etc. however, a growing body of scholarship, including my research into the temporal tendencies of scholar-activists, suggests strongly that the time pressures experienced by academics today are more powerful than ever in both the objective and subjective sense. this means that academics at all tiers of the academic system find themselves feeling hardpressed to find the time for constitutive activities associated with their vocation, notably research, which might at first blush suggest that their inability to find the time for anything else, including activism, represents merely a logical extension of this condition. at this point it would behoove us to remember that, like research, social activism constitutes an integral element of the academic vocation (at least in the social sciences and the humanities). in the famous words of karl marx, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. the point, however, is to change it”(marx & engels, 1969). indeed, the need for academics to serve the society-at-large as public intellectuals has arguably never been greater, as the world confronts burning, potentially catastrophic problems in urgent need of thoughtful and socially just solutions. yet, it will also come as no surprise that there are no simple fixes to the pervasive problem of social acceleration and its negative implications for both critical thinking and active social movement participation. echoing vostal (2015) in eschewing simplistic calls for the (unrealistic) return to a slower time, i wish to conclude by harkening back to the aforementioned distinction between a temporary versus permanent abeyance from movement activity. my own experiences as a scholar-activist, borne out by much anecdotal evidence collected over the years, confirm that even the most committed, hard-core activist will experience moments when withdrawal is inevitable and perhaps even necessary, either because of burnout or due to biographical and life-cycle reasons. what matters above all, i would argue, is that the person eventually returns within the fold of social justice activism, because to do otherwise is just not possible. thankfully, life-long activists are not an uncommon breed, and from them we may draw our inspiration. notably, the deceased parents of one of my respondents were recently mourned and celebrated in equal measure for their outstanding contributions to social justice. the vital lesson they taught him, my respondent informed me, was the importance of balance and self-care for the long haul, because the revolution is not around the corner (quite yet) (individual interview, december 22, 2014). this lesson is captured brilliantly in a quotation paraphrased from bertold brecht, which was invoked at my participant’s father’s funeral, in loving recognition of his and his spouse’s life-long commitment to activism: fast times in hallowed halls studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 70-85, 2015 83 there are those who struggle for a day and they are good. there are those who struggle for a year and they are better. there are those who struggle many years, and they are better still. but there are those who struggle all their lives: these are the indispensable ones. 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(2013). boundary-work between work and life in the high-speed university. studies in higher education 38(2), 242-255. ylijoki, o. & mantyla, h. (2003). conflicting time perspectives in academic work. time & society 12(1), 55-78. fraser et al final correspondence address: patti fraser, international centre of art for social change, simon fraser university, burnaby, bc v5a 1s6; email: pattiafraser@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 305-306, 2017 dispatch a walk, a question, and missives from the west coast video dispatch patti fraser simon fraser university, canada flick harrison simon fraser university, canada lynn fels simon fraser university, canada http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgdmgl7ynly&feature=youtu.be the video thought experiment accessible at the url above seeks to navigate a question posed in the call for the performing the world conference held in new york city in the fall of 2016. the conference invited presenters to respond to the question: can we perform our way to power? this question was inspired by the growing appreciation for performance as an alternative modality to knowing in human development and social justice issues. the question itself, however, became a point-of-departure for a narrative walk and reflection into the possible understandings of performance as it relates to power and place. the video unpacks this troublesome question in the light of research conducted for the art for social change research project at simon fraser university.1 through this research project, which was funded by the social science and humanities research council of canada, patti fraser conducted of a series of conversations with socially engaged artists in the west coast of british columbia. 1 art for social change research project is the short title for art for social change: an integrated research program in teaching, evaluation and capacity-building, a five-year sshrc partnership grant involving six universities across canada: simon fraser university, university of british columbia, university of toronto, lethbridge university, university of calgary, and concordia university, funded by the social sciences and health research council of canada. patti fraser, flick harrison, lynn fels studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 305-306, 2017 306 as an artist who shared a long history of practice in this field, patti wanted to know if there was anything from these artists’ past experiences that they could offer future practitioners. conversations between patti and individual artists were filmed by videographer flick harrison, a mid-career arts activist. they were guided by an initial question that was borne out of a brainstorming session between patti and lynn fels, a scholar in performative inquiry and arts education, which was inspired by our reading of scholar hannah arendt (1958): what needs to be preserved or held as a responsibility as socially engaged art is re-imagined in the future? each artist interviewed brings to her or his community work particular values, perspectives, means of collaborative engagement, and arts execution that recognize the importance of individual and collective voice. what is shared in common among these artists is (a) a deep commitment to social justice; (b) a pedagogical and aesthetic stance that the arts should be accessible to all; (c) the notion that we can identify, address and create art that expresses individual and collective narratives, and makes visible social injustices at individual and collective levels; and (d) an understanding that all citizens have a right to creative expression and meaning making. all of the artists featured in this video, as well as the researchers, live and work in the unceded territories of the musqueam, squamish and tsleilwaututh first nations located in and around vancouver, british columbia. references arendt, h. (1958). the human condition. chicago, il: university of chicago press. works cited in video butler, j. (2014). performing the political. first supper symposium, oslo, norway. www.youtube.com/channel/ucofigru2lo03tlcpp7hcn6q/feed couture, s. (2015). χway’χwey’ and stanley park: performing history and land (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of british columbia, vancouver, b.c. fels, l. (1998). in the wind clothes dance on a line. journal of curriculum theorizing, 14(1), 2735. taylor, d. (2003). the archive and the repertoire: performing cultural memory in the americas. durham, nc: duke university press. mellifont2 final feb 20 20 correspondence address: damian mellifont, centre for disability research & policy, the university of sydney, new south wales 2006, australia; email: damian.mellifont@sydney.edu.au issn: 1911-4788 volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 non-disabled space invaders! a study critically exploring the scholarly reporting of research attributes for persons with and without disability damian mellifont university of sydney, australia abstract social justice requires that the “nothing about us without us” disability inclusion mantra not be rejected or watered down in knowledge production activities. appreciating the need for a greater representation of disability in these activities, this investigative study aims to (a) determine if there is a statistically significant difference in the median research attribute reporting scores between articles whose content refers to the term “researchers with lived experience” and articles whose content refers to “non-disabled researchers,” and (b) to critically discuss how the scholarly literature reports on the attributes of researchers with and without disability. enabling this exploration, this study has applied the mann-whitney u test and thematic analysis to a purposive sample of 20 articles that were retrieved from a scopus database search. findings reveal that the median score of reported research attributes was statistically significantly higher in the group of articles whose content referred to the term researchers with lived experience than in the articles that referred to non-disabled researchers. results also highlight attributes of empathy, ability, rigor and activism that are reportedly shared across the two groups of articles. crucially, attention is given to a theme reported as unique to the researchers with disability group. this is the attribute of having firsthand knowledge of disability (i.e., lived experience). the study concludes by recognising that lived experience, when incorporated throughout the research process, can help to redress deficiencies that might otherwise be present. keywords researchers with disability; lived experience-led research; emancipatory research; social inclusion non-disabled space invaders! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 305 introduction the lived experiences of people with disability should not be undervalued. indeed, a need for the significant participation of people with disability is progressively being acknowledged throughout areas of research, policy, and service development (sin & fong, 2010). recognising a need for such inclusion, it is appropriate to firstly differentiate between “disability studies” and “disability research.” clarifying the term disability studies is not straightforward. ferguson and nusbaum (2012) advise that coinciding with increasing use of the term is a growing confusion as to its meaning. söder (2009) offers both narrow and wide definitions of disability studies. defined narrowly, disability studies refers to research conducted in deliberate support of political activism by people with disability (söder, 2009). this research often challenges the traditional medical model of disability, and attempts to reduce the medicalisation of persons with disability and the “pathologizing of difference” (linton, 1998, p. 527). the wider field of disability studies – often called disability research – is less motivated by political activism, and more concerned with developing a social sciences-based understanding of disability (söder, 2009). it is steeped in medical model ideology and influence (strandberg, möller, & widén, 2017). for example, barnes (2001) suggests that the majority of disability research in the uk was funded by government agencies, including the medical research council and the department of health, which were controlled by medical interests and adhered to medical model assumptions concerning disability. it is reasonable to infer, therefore, that non-disabled researchers and medically endorsed topics have historically dominated the disability research agenda. disability studies, as a sub-field within disabilities research, emerged from criticisms by members of the disability people’s movement (barnes, 2001) of this medical orientation toward disability within the wider field of disability research. disability studies – narrowly defined – endorses a shift away from medically-dominated research and towards research inclusive of researchers with disabilities. disability inclusion involves a participatory or emancipatory approach to conducting studies. sohng (1996, p. 81) describes participatory research as “a means of preventing an elite group from exclusively determining the interests of others, in effect of transferring power to those groups engaged in the production of popular knowledge.” a key strength of participatory methods is their capacity to investigate local perceptions and knowledge (cornwall & jewkes, 1995), and enable participants to become co-researchers (balcazar, keys, kaplan, & suarez-balcazar, 1998). according to martin (2015, p. 211), “emancipatory research is achieved when the social relations of research production are more enabling or ‘emancipatory’.” this style of research moves away from performing studies on people to doing studies with people (department of health, 2005, cited in doody, 2018). in keeping with the values of inclusive research, all researchers including those with damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 306 disabilities need to be involved from the start (strnadová, cumming, knox, parmenter & welcome to our class research group, 2014). woelders, abma, visser and schipper (2015) note that emancipatory research has a political objective in addition to knowledge production. in this context, beresford (2002) argues that emancipatory research developed from concerns by service user groups about the purpose of research and who controls it. within the rubric of emancipatory research, studies should be co-produced with participants, and opportunities should exist for researchers with disability to take on leadership roles across a range of study activities (beresford, 2002; voronka, 2016). unfortunately, despite ample capacity for disability researcher participation in user-led and co-produced studies, such studies are seldom conducted. banas, magasi, the and victorson (2019) caution that there is an overall shortage of people with disability operating in the research establishment. mellifont et al. (2019) also note that lived experience expertise has not received the authority that it warrants. notable barriers challenge ambitions to conduct more lived experience led and co-produced research: even highly qualified disabled persons may find it difficult to obtain academic positions that would allow them to conduct research (kirkham, webster, chen & vines, 2016; harsh rejection criteria might exclude persons with complicated disabilities from joining study teams (banas et al., 2019); mobility of prospective disabled researchers is complicated by transport and building inaccessibility; participation of persons with emotional, social or cognitive impairments can be impeded by crowds and noise (banas et al., 2019); and “research skills training still remains mostly ignored in inclusive disability research literature” (strnadová et al., 2014, p.14). more broadly, solis (2006) recognises the need to challenge ableism-driven prejudice, discrimination and exclusion in order to facilitate inclusive disability research. denying persons with lived experience access to research activity might on occasion be “deliberate and strategic” (moore, beazley & maelzer, 1998, p. 59 cited by bricher, 2000). mladenov (2016, p. 1228) makes the important observation, “a society is just only when it enables all of its adult members to interact with each other as peers, and this necessarily includes disabled people.” recognising that the barriers to research inclusion inhibit social justice (in the form of epistemic justice – “nothing about us without us”) and appreciating that a greater representation of lived experience is required in order to combat this injustice, it is a timely research exercise to explore how the scholarly literature reports on the attributes of researchers with and without disability. this investigation explores the ways in which scholarly articles report about research attributes in relation to researchers with and without disability. collectively these attributes of researchers, as derived from the literature, include: researcher abilities to conduct studies; knowledge stemming from lived experiences with disability; empathy for disability; capacity to support disability activism; and the contribution of research rigor (birken & harper, 2017; callus, 2019; mellifont et al., 2019; strnadová et al., 2014). i non-disabled space invaders! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 307 investigate possible differences between the median research attribute reporting scores as recorded for two groups of articles (the first group primarily focusing on researchers with disability and the second on nondisabled researchers). the term “research attribute reporting score” is simply a count of researcher attributes as derived from a scholarly article. the median research attribute reporting scores are thus the median values of researcher attribute counts for each of the two groups of articles. the mann whitney u test is used to test for differences in the medians of these two groups. crucially, in addition to undertaking this quantitative assessment the study critically examines each of the researcher attribute themes in terms of their alignment with disabled and non-disabled researcher groups. hence, the study aims to: (a) determine if there is a statistically significant difference in the median research attribute reporting scores between articles whose content refers to the term researchers with lived experience and articles whose content refers to non-disabled researchers; and (b) critically discuss how the scholarly literature reports on the attributes of researchers with and without disability. method in order to identify the groups of articles referring to the attributes of researchers with and without disability, two scopus database searches were conducted. the search term used to populate the first group of articles was: (“researcher* with disability” or “researcher* with lived experience”) and not (“non-disabled researcher*”). the second search term applied was “non-disabled researcher*” and not (“researcher* with disability”). the inclusion criteria applied for both searches was: years = all years; document type = article; fields = search all fields; article is accessible (i.e., a full version of the article is available for download); and article describes attribute(s) of researchers with or without disability respectively. findings of these searches were recorded in two analytical tables (see table 1 and table 2). details of each relevant article include: the article id; the group to which the article is uniquely aligned (i.e., groups discuss research attributes of researchers with or without disability respectively); the count of attributes identified; the attribute labels; and supporting quotes. reflecting the application of thematic analysis, coding rules were created and used to assign quotes to illustrate their respective themes (i.e., attribute labels). the search strategy was purposefully designed to provide a sample that, while modest in size, would meet the analytical needs of this exploratory study. the study design also met assumptions for conducting the mann-whitney u test for differences between groups of data. specifically, there was one dependent variable (i.e., research attribute reporting scores), one independent variable that contains two independent groups (i.e., articles whose content refers to the term researchers with lived experience and articles whose content refers to non-disabled damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 308 researchers), and the groups were unique in the sense that an article could not belong in both groups. the mann-whitney u test is appropriate for determining if differences exist between two groups as based upon a continuous dependent variable (laerd statistics, 2018). in order to achieve the first of the study aims, the nonparametric mann-whitney u test was undertaken to test whether the median scores of the dependent variable were different for two independent groups. nonparametric tests are statistical enquiries that do not require a normal distribution of data (university of new england, 2000). group 1 was represented by articles whose content referred to the research attributes of researchers with disability, and group 2 was confined to articles referring to the research attributes of non-disabled researchers. a spss data file mirroring the fields and content of the analytical tables (i.e., article id, group number and attribute count) was then created and populated. finally, the mann-whitney u test was run in spss statistics version 24 and the findings recorded. results the first search term identified 11 possibly relevant articles with 10 of these remaining after applying the inclusion criteria. the second search term revealed 124 possibly relevant articles with the first 10 relevant articles purposefully selected to enable matching group sizes. thematic analysis results for articles reporting on the attributes of researchers with and without disability are displayed in tables 1 and 2. each table describes the article id, group number, count of unique attributes reported, and quotations to support the attributes that were captured. to promote data transparency and research rigor, table 3 provides readers with the attribute coding rules that were applied. a mann-whitney u test was conducted to determine if there is a statistically significant median difference in the reporting of research attributes between article groups 1 and 2. the test revealed that group 1 (i.e., articles whose content explicitly referred to the terms researcher(s) with disability or lived experience had a mean score of 13.80). group 2 (i.e., articles whose content referred to the term non-disabled researchers) had a mean score of 7.20. the result was statistically significant as the exact pvalue (p= .011) is less than .05. non-disabled space invaders! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 309 article id group count attributes supporting quotes 1.00 1 2 ability knowledge “a third account, from a neurodiverse researcher, described how their accommodated anxiety, rather than constraining their performance, was a driver of their academic achievements (mellifont et al., 2019, p. 12). “one narrative spoke about how their lived experience with a neurological condition that provided them with ‘extensive’ knowledge in an area of importance to research was being overlooked” (mellifont et al., 2019, p. 12). 2.00 1 2 empathy activism “indeed, this co-researcher took the responsibility to care for herself and other invitees with lived experiences” (groot, vink, haveman, huberts, schout & abma, 2019, p. 294). “i noticed that some co-researchers with a lived experience felt a moral duty to solve problems in health care for one’s peers” (groot et al., 2019, p. 297). 3.00 1 1 activism “he was a highly vocal advocate of disability rights and was becoming a successful researcher and budding entrepreneur” (kirkham et al., 2016. pp. 71-72). 4.00 1 2 knowledge empathy “peer researchers were important for this study as their shared experiences of homelessness provided expert insider knowledge and access to a ‘hard to reach’ population group in a short period of time (elliott, watson & harries, 2002)” (massie, machin, mccormack & kurth, 2018, p. 344). “the use of peer researchers (compared to academic researchers) can offer a more equal power balance between researcher and participant, thus participants may feel more comfortable to provide open and honest accounts (burns and schubotz, 2009)” (massie et al., 2018, p. 344). damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 310 5.00 1 3 knowledge ability rigor “having an interviewer with lived experience has advantages as they are familiar with the realities of the topic being examined, unlike researchers without lived experience, who may have blind spots regarding the context of the topic (devotta et al., 2016)” (birken & harper, 2017, p. 410). “both authors have extensive experience of carrying out interviews in the context of research and have received training in interviewing skills” (birken & harper, 2017, p. 410). “entwhistle and colleagues (1998) recommend this approach of involving service users at this stage of the research process to enhance the robustness of both the implications and conclusions of the study” (birken & harper, 2017, p. 410). 6.00 1 2 rigor ability “peer participation in research increases relevance, and assists in more culturally appropriate data collection, analysis, and dissemination (coser et al., 2014)” (mitchell, durante, pellatt, richardson, mathias & buxton, 2017, n.p.) “two peer researchers with lived experience of thn were recruited from icy and were involved in all phases of the study” (mitchell et al., 2017, n.p.) 7.00 1 2 ability knowledge “a co-researcher with lived experience took part in all stages of the study” (biringer, davidson, sundfør, ruud & borg, 2016, n.p.) “however, active participation by the coresearcher with experience as a service user during the interviews and analysis helped the researchers with professional backgrounds to better understand what participants were trying to communicate” (biringer et al., 2016, n.p.) 8.00 1 1 knowledge “they did not refer to my impairment during the present interviews, but this knowledge may have facilitated their statements about the importance of functional recovery” (tagaki, 2016, p. 4) non-disabled space invaders! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 311 9.00 1 5 knowledge ability rigor activism empathy “at least half the questions used in the final protocol did not occur to the academic researchers, as they did not have the lived experience that their colleagues had.... the researchers with intellectual disabilities also added more specific questions to those developed by the academic researchers.” (strnadová et al., 2014, p. 19). “...each team member’s unique skills and contributions came to light over the course of time” (strnadová et al., 2014, p. 16). “gradually, the researchers with intellectual disabilities began to contribute to the research with their own research agenda” (strnadová et al., 2014, p .17). “the researchers with intellectual disabilities mentioned diverse reasons for becoming a part of research team, ranging from wishing to learn something new to a desire to help others” (strnadová et al., 2014, p. 17). “rid2 is very empathetic, polite and caring to others, which positively influences the whole group’s atmosphere” (strnadová et al., 2014, p. 20). 10.00 1 3 activism ability knowledge “i have discovered that many of my conversations with other doctoral students about disability center on hope and support for disabled people” (solis, 2006, p. 151). “their perception of me as a productive and contributing member of society automatically negates my disabilities” (solis, 2006, p. 151). “to be meaningful and informative, disability narratives should be based on the experiences of disabled people, rather than on the imposition of normalizing, medically-based values, for example... the professionalization of disability studies should not overlook the fact that there is a damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 312 distinction between those who speculate about what it means to be disabled and those of “us” who actually live as disabled individuals. this distinction is important because people with disabilities should speak for themselves about their own experiences.” (solis, 2006, p. 153). table 1. researchers with disability attribute(s) article id group count attributes supporting quotes 11.00 2 1 activism “using research to stimulate change in societal perceptions of women with disabilities, and raising awareness of their situations, especially their experiences of gbv, requires action from both disability and non-disability sectors” (van der heijden, harries, & abrahams, 2019, p. 745). 12.00 2 2 activism empathy “as a non-disabled academic, i am also aware that my work in disability studies is like that of an activist working for disabled people’s rights” (callus, 2019, p. 1). “among the challenges faced by the academic researcher who is trying to be inclusive are the control exerted by nondisabled adults on the lives of people with intellectual disability and the provision of support for people with intellectual disability to engage with research” (callus, 2019, p. 6). 13.00 2 1 ability “disability scholars contribute ability to this list of systems perpetuating inequalities of power...” (mitchell, boettcher-sheard, duque & lashewicz, 2018, p. 674). 14.00 2 1 rigor “...the accountability of the disabled researchers to the non-disabled researchers and vice versa...” (stone & priestley, 1996 cited in chow et al., 2017, p. 723). non-disabled space invaders! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 313 15.00 2 1 empathy “recruiting people with intellectual disabilities as participants in research is increasingly recognised as important by people with intellectual disabilities themselves as well as by academics” (mcdonald & kidney, 2012; walmsley, 2004 cited in carey & griffiths, 2017, p. 202). 16.00 2 1 rigor “however, i do believe that there is also value in research when non-disabled academics (such as myself) reflect on these viewpoints and interpret them from their own position” (callus, 2019, p. 2). 17.00 2 1 empathy “this paper argues that the principles of emancipatory research can apply to research that involves a non-disabled researcher working alongside service users” (martin, 2015, p. 209). 18.00 2 1 activism “‘nothing about us without us’ is a perfectly legitimate rallying call and principle of political participation. but it should not end up in disqualifying all nondisabled voices” (sherlaw & hudebine, 2015, p. 15). 19.00 2 1 empathy “from the research tradition, there has been a growing interest in emancipatory and participatory approaches...” (walmsley, 2001 cited in sin & fong, 2010, p. 13). 20.00 2 2 empathy ability “he argues in favour of non-disabled researchers engaging ‘as allies to disabled people in disability studies’ (duckett, 1998, p. 627)” (macbeth, 2010, p. 479). “this argument is even more pertinent to disability research in sport and leisure settings, which is underdeveloped and currently conducted by a relatively small number of disabled and non-disabled researchers” (macbeth, 2010, p. 482). table 2. non-disabled researchers’ attribute(s) damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 314 attribute coding rule ability articles describe the abilities of either individuals with lived experience or non-disabled persons to conduct research. knowledge articles describe the knowledge benefits to research that comes from personal experience with disability. empathy article describes capacity for either individuals with lived experience or non-disabled persons to display empathy for disability. rigor article describes capacity for either individuals with lived experience or non-disabled persons to contribute to research rigor. activism article describes capacity for either individuals with lived experience or non-disabled persons to support disability activism. table 3. attribute coding rules discussion this research reveals that the median score of reported research attributes was statistically significantly higher in articles whose content referred to the term “researchers with lived experience” than in articles referring to “nondisabled researchers.” this finding is important as it indicates that the scholarly literature is recognising the various capabilities of researchers with disability. nonetheless, it is also appropriate to acknowledge that most of the attributes reported are not unique to any one group. in this section, i discuss how shared attributes of empathy, ability, rigor and activism were reported for researchers across each of the two groups of articles. i focus on the single attribute that was uniquely reported in the researchers with disability group: having firsthand knowledge of disability (i.e., lived experience). researchers with disability are reported as having capacity to display empathy towards researchers with lived experiences and other team members (groot et al., 2019; strnadová, et al., 2014). this attribute of empathy offers practical research benefits. burns and schubotz (2009), as cited in massie et al. (2018, p. 344), suggest that the application of peer researchers (as opposed to “academic researchers”) can help to balance the power between researcher and study participants and potentially encourage more truthful responses. however, it should not be assumed that all researchers with disability will necessarily be empathic in nature or inevitably hold any other attribute as reported in this paper. further, when reporting about researchers with disability, care should be taken to avoid making assumptions about lack of formal qualifications. comparing peer researchers to academic researchers overlooks the possibility that peer researchers (i.e., researchers who have lived experience with the disability study subject at hand) might also be highly qualified academically (e.g., qualified at a phd level). in reporting about the empathy displayed by researchers without disability, topics focused on inclusion and the co-production of research where non-disabled and non-disabled space invaders! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 315 researchers with lived experience work together as partners (callus, 2019; duckett, 1998 cited in macbeth, 2010; martin, 2015; walmsley, 2004 cited in carey, 2017). this academic support for co-produced studies is welcome, but greater scholarly emphasis is nevertheless needed on the capacity of researchers with disability who are qualified through formal education or experience to lead research teams. scholarly reporting highlights the abilities of researchers with disability. for example, mellifont et al. (2019) raise the prospect of accommodated neurodiversity (e.g., anxiety) driving rather than limiting academic performance. moreover, the literature indicates that scholars with lived experience have capacity to participate across all stages of research (biringer et al., 2016; mitchell et al., 2017), even though particular abilities are not always immediately recognised. strnadová et al. (2014) notes how the research skills and offerings of team members can eventually surface. critically, occasions where these skills might be initially absent should not be used as an excuse to dismiss lived experience research participation; researchers with disability can receive training in research skills such as interviewing (birken & harper, 2017). reporting on the underdeveloped field of disability studies in sport and leisure, macbeth (2010) recognises the contributions of researchers, including those without disability. even so, another article from group 2 commented, “disability scholars contribute ability to this list of systems perpetuating inequalities of power...” (mitchell et al., 2018, p. 674). academic reporting, as indicated above, suggests that people with lived experience can have research abilities or develop these skills if needed to actively participate and contribute to disability literature. such ability and potential should not be dismissed or downplayed, but rather recognised in promoting a greater investment in lived experience-led and coproduced studies. future research is needed to examine the possible extent to which ableism, sanism or other types of disability discrimination (e.g., audism) are contributing to a perverse status quo of lived experience underrepresentation in knowledge production about disability. these “isms” might contribute to the social and economic exclusion of researchers with disability from participating to their full potential in the academy and elsewhere. researchers with lived experience can add to the rigor of academic investigations. in this regard, one of the articles commented on how the inclusion of service user researchers in the analysis stage can improve the strength of study propositions and conclusions: the first author, who did the analysis, has experience of and training in the use of qualitative research methods, including data analysis. the second author was involved in interpreting the findings. entwhistle and colleagues (1998) recommend this approach of involving service users at this stage of the research process to enhance the robustness of both the implications and conclusions of the study. (birken & harper, 2017, p.410) damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 316 the contributions of researchers with disability to academic rigor and integrity is not confined to the analytical phase of the research lifecycle. the participation of peer researchers enhances research relevance as well as promoting the collection, analysis and diffusion of culturally appropriate data (coser et al., 2014, cited in mitchell et al., 2017). strnadová et al. (2014) recognise that researchers with lived experience (intellectual disabilities in this case) can further investigations through their specific study agenda. future research is required to examine the degree to which research integrity is advanced by empowering more researchers with lived experience to set and control the direction of research enquiry. concepts of academic rigor and control are also included in the scholarly reporting of non-disabled researchers. however, qualifications appear to be attached to the level of control that is awarded to lived experience researchers through notions of reciprocated accountability and non-disabled reflection and interpretation. in terms of reciprocated accountability, stone and priestly (1996) as cited in chown et al. (2017), speak of the accountability of researchers with disability to non-disabled investigators as well as the answerability of non-disabled researchers to those with lived experience. with regard to non-disabled reflection and interpretation, callus (2019) supports the value of non-disabled researchers considering perspectives and understanding them via their personal outlook. acknowledging this position, it is vital to recognise that the considerations of non-disabled researchers do not occur in an ideologically or politically-free vacuum. included among the articles reporting on researchers with disability was the concept of activism-oriented research (aor). for example, particular coresearchers with disability were depicted as feeling morally obliged to resolve health service issues for peers (groot et al., 2019). strnadová et al. (2014) also describes an aspiration to assist others as one of the motives for investigators with intellectual disabilities to join a research team. further, solis (2006) reports on conversations of a doctoral candidate with disability with other doctoral students, which focus upon supporting people with disability. aor was also present in articles reporting on non-disabled researchers. van der heijden et al. (2019) wrote about how studies to encourage a change in social perceptions concerning women with disability needs involvement from disability and non-disability areas alike. in addition to collective action, support for non-disabled aor is evident at a personal level: given the centrality of disabled people’s perspectives and actions in matters concerning them, the role of the non-disabled person in activism and academia has been much debated. i myself am a non-disabled academic, and my main area of interest is means of empowerment for people with intellectual disability, including through self-advocacy and inclusive research. (callus, 2019, p. 2) the literature also attempts to qualify the disability inclusion motto of “nothing about us without us” from an aor perspective. sherlaw and non-disabled space invaders! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 317 hudebine (2015, p. 15), in recognising this motto as a genuine call to rally, nonetheless note that the call should not disqualify all non-disabled opinions in disability politics. one attribute was identified as unique to the researchers with disability group. seven out of the 10 articles from this group revealed the attribute of lived experience knowledge. mellifont et al. (2019) spoke of how lived experience with a neurological disability can offer vast knowledge. furthermore, lived experience with disability can inform questions that might not be apparent to academic researchers without disability (strnadová et al., 2014, p.19). while assisting to set research direction and inform study design, lived experience can also be beneficial across the data collection and analysis phases. peer researchers can support swift access to a difficult-to-reach study population (elliott, watson & harries, 2002 cited in massie et al., 2018). interviewers with lived experiences have advantages in being aware of the realities of the research topic under investigation (devotta et al., 2016 cited by birken & harper, 2017). moreover, according to biringer et al. (2016, n.p.), the active involvement of service user co-researchers throughout data collection and analysis can assist researchers who have professional backgrounds to gain an improved understanding of what study participants are attempting to convey. recognising the good intent of such reporting, researchers with lived experience and professional or academic researchers should not be simplistically referenced as mutual exclusive groups. these references are disrespectful to the persons who have lived experience and who also have experience in undertaking and successfully completing a phd. the following words challenge stigmatising, medical model ideology as applied to the field of disability research: to be meaningful and informative, disability narratives should be based on the experiences of disabled people, rather than on the imposition of normalizing, medically-based values, for example. second, the professionalization of disability studies should not overlook the fact that there is a distinction between those who speculate about what it means to be disabled and those of ‘us’ who actually live as disabled individuals. this distinction is important because people with disabilities should speak for themselves about their own experiences. (solis, 2006, p. 153) with these statements in mind, there needs to be a greater representation of phd-qualified, lived experience researchers leading the way in knowledge production about disability. limitations being exploratory in nature, this unfunded study is limited to the search strategy that was purposefully applied. this strategy, broadly targeting articles referring to researchers with and without disability, does not explicitly seek out articles that might focus on particular types of disability damian mellifont studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 318 (e.g., blind, deaf, neurodiverse). investment is therefore needed in future research that utilises different search terms or additional databases. such modifications to study design might identify attributes for researchers with and without disabilities that are not discussed in this initial investigation. possibilities for other study designs to yield different median research attribute reporting scores to those revealed by this exploratory research is also acknowledged. another limitation relating to the search strategy is that while each group of articles is confined to identifying research attributes of researchers with and without disabilities respectively, overlapping discussion of attributes involving these two groups was not possible. for example, it is recognised that an article discussing the attributes of non-disabled researchers might broadly reference researchers with lived experience (without referring to any of their research attributes). conclusion contributing to social justice literature, this research supports a message of inclusion. this message should be of particular interest to persons who are interested in advancing a greater involvement of researchers with disability. crucially, this study reveals evidence challenging an ableist dismissal of lived experience in knowledge production activities. scholarly reporting suggests that the research attributes as assigned to researchers with lived experience in no way falls short of those aligned with non-disabled academics. importantly, researchers who have lived experiences with disability are reported as holding a distinct edge. for it is this attribute of lived experience that, when incorporated throughout the research cycle, can help to redress deficiencies that might otherwise be present. reflecting the political nature of disability studies (söder, 2009), research contributions by persons with lived experience can also target social justice outcomes. there needs to be a far greater representation of persons with lived experience who have the qualifications and abilities (or who can develop the necessary abilities) to lead or otherwise actively participate in research projects to their fullest extent. such increased involvement reflects the true spirit of the “nothing about us without us” disability inclusion mantra. references balcazar, f. e., keys, c. b., kaplan, d. l., & suarez-balcazar, y. 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(2000). nonparametric tests. retrieved from https://webstat.une.edu.au/unit_materials/c6_common_statistical_tests/nonparametric_test. html van der heijden, i., harries, j., & abrahams, n. (2019). ethical considerations for disabilityinclusive gender-based violence research: reflections from a south african qualitative case study. global public health, 14(5), 737-749. voronka, j. (2016). the politics of 'people with lived experience': experiential authority and the risks of strategic essentialism. philosophy, psychiatry, & psychology, 23(3), 189-201. non-disabled space invaders! studies in social justice, volume 13, issue 2, 304-321, 2019 321 walmsley, j. (2001). normalisation, emancipatory research and inclusive research in learning disability. disability & society, 16(2), 187-205. walmsley, j. (2004). inclusive learning disability research: the (nondisabled) researcher's role. british journal of learning disabilities, 32(2), 65-71. woelders, s., abma, t., visser, t., & schipper, k. (2015). the power of difference in inclusive research. disability & society, 30(4), 528-542. hall final dec 12 16 correspondence address: rebecca hall, department of political science, york university, 4700 keele st., toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: becked@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 caring labours as decolonizing resistance rebecca hall york university, canada abstract this article brings feminist theories of social reproduction in conversation with decolonizing feminisms. it takes up indigenous women's social reproductive labour as enactments of creative expansion. in approaching social reproduction as a site of struggle, it identifies three processes of expansion and resistance at this site: the expansion of care and intimacy into subsistence production; the expansion of the “family” beyond the nuclear through community and kin networks; and the expansion of relations of care to include the land. keywords gender; social reproduction; indigeneity; decolonization introduction this piece is concerned with the intimate labours of indigenous women living in the northwest territories (nwt) in the land that is now called canada, and with the ways that attention to these labours elevates care and social reproduction as a site of struggle and decolonizing creation. specifically, i take up indigenous women’s role in social reproduction, by which i refer to biological reproduction, the physical and emotional labour involved in the day-to-day reproduction of people, and the interpersonal, cultural, and community-based educative labour involved in intergenerational reproduction. approaching northern indigenous women’s labours as a site of decolonizing struggle, i look to acts of creative expansion at the site of social reproduction. i elevate the creative labours indigenous women deploy in resisting white settler capitalist oppression, restructuring, and exploitation; in the protection and strengthening of communities and intimate relations between people and the land; and in the enactment of forms of being and knowing that expand outside and beyond western capitalist ideologies. in the past forty years, feminist theorists from a range of disciplines have worked to expose the power relations, the agency, and the struggles at play in social reproductive labour (also approached as the private realm, domestic caring labours as decolonizing resistance studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 221 labour, caring labour, and intimate labour). while work on these labours has challenged the capitalist, masculinized privileging of wage labour as “real” labour, in feminist political economy, social reproduction is often articulated largely in opposition to capitalist production, or, to put it another way, through the assumption of a capitalist economy. there has been less attention to other forms of non-capitalist labour, including indigenous non-capitalist labour. it is often presumed that social reproduction takes place through the structures and sets of meaning of the western nuclear family. rather than attempting to freeze the complex and shifting labours of diverse peoples in any sort of fixed category, like “indigenous social reproduction,” in this piece, i engage with the labours and relations of indigenous women in the nwt with the aim of elevating the ways in which these women challenge and expand eurocentric notions of what it is to “care,” to reproduce, or to be intimate. locating my analysis in the mixed economy of the nwt, i focus on two expansions: the expansion of the “family” beyond the nuclear and through community and kin networks; and the expansion of relations of care to include the land. in so doing, i take up indigenous women’s social reproductive labour as a site of creative resistance – resistance to white settler patriarchal ideology and the presumed totality of capital. this characterization is rooted in indigenous feminist theory and activism that has named indigenous women’s caring labours, their relations to people and the land, and their bodies as primary sites of de/colonizing struggle. these are sites of colonial violence and decolonizing creation; it is the latter characteristic that is the focus of this piece. i begin with a brief overview of the methods used in this research. i then engage with feminist analyses – indigenous and not – of care and social reproduction, asking what it means to take a decolonizing approach to social reproduction and to make indigenous women’s labour the centre of analysis. i then build upon this analytical foundation by engaging with insights and narratives shared with me by indigenous women in the nwt, arguing that their labours and their relations exemplify an expansion of the powerful place-based imperatives of care to the realm of production, outside of the imagined nuclear “home,” and to the land. i present this analysis as a white settler whose ancestors come from england, ireland and scotland, who lives through the structural privileges of being a white settler, and who is committed to the ongoing project of acting as an ally in decolonizing struggle. i write with a commitment to honour the narratives shared with me – and the generosity of the women who shared them – and with an understanding of the distortion and imperfection inherent in listening to and retelling stories. the knowledge, experiences and wisdom shared with me by the women who agreed to participate in the research and by the staff at the native women’s association of the nwt, who guided and supported this project, are what inform the following discussion. any gaps or misrepresentations in this analysis are my own responsibility. rebecca hall studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 222 methods in taking up research in an indigenous community as a white settler who lives with the privileges of the white settler state (razack, 2002), i am, of necessity, engaging in and confronting historical and contemporary colonial research. as linda tuhiwai smith (1999, p.79) notes, as it relates to indigeneity, “the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to european imperialism and colonialism. the word itself, ‘research,’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary.” today, the concept of “decolonizing research” has entered the canadian academy; this is a progressive development, to be sure, but not without its dangers. as eve tuck and k. wayne yang (2012) note, decolonization must not lose its potency by being subsumed as metaphor. indigenous communities in canada have seen western research deployed for colonial purposes over the past two centuries (smith, 1999). from explicit attempts to deny and eradicate subsistence economies through social research that denied indigenous socioeconomies as legitimate, to more “well-meaning” anthropological and historical accounts that reproduce objectifying and othering approaches to indigenous communities in the north, research in itself is a project of extraction. as such, if research is to occur, it must be able to account for itself; or, to put it another way, it must respond to the concerns, needs, or goals of the community with which it engages. as andrea doucet (2008, p. 75) writes, it is not enough to reflect on one’s own subject position in relation to research, or to confess away responsibility or privilege; rather, one must think through the political motivations guiding the research. i position my research goals within a place-based social justice orientation, one that acknowledges the power relations through which academic research is enacted and that aims to challenge inequality and injustice. this work comes out of a broader research project examining the impact of diamond mines in the nwt. 1 in collaboration with a wide range of community groups, including the centre for northern families, the status of women of the nwt, the nwt coalition against family violence, and the ywca, i conducted 33 interviews with women living in yellowknife, ndilo, dettah, and behchoko about their experiences with the diamond mines. recruited through the snowball method and existing relationships, the majority of these women were indigenous. interviews were complemented by two open community talking circles, and one community worker focus group.2 in developing and planning fieldwork, i reached out to the native 1 this broader research is my doctoral dissertation, which examines the impact of diamond mining in the nwt on indigenous women. it was funded by a joseph-armand bombardier canada doctoral scholarship. 2 interviews, focus groups and talking circles received ethics approval from the aurora research institute and the human participants review sub-committee, york university’s ethics review board and conform to the standards of the canadian tri-council research ethics guidelines. caring labours as decolonizing resistance studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 223 women’s association of the nwt,3 asking whether and how they would like to be involved in this research. they were interested in the research and its potential implications for community organizing, and offered to house the project. we worked out a reciprocal arrangement, wherein i was given unused office space and access to their resources, and i helped with office activities over the three-month period.4 the native women’s association of the nwt staff provided invaluable support and expertise to this research. they offered ongoing advice and insight as the fieldwork proceeded, they supported outreach by contacting their community networks to recruit research participants, and they helped to organize, design, and facilitate talking circles. perhaps more than anything, the ongoing exchanges in the office as we discussed the research brought a rich reflexivity that informed the shifting research design and analysis of the data. sharing office space over the months of fieldwork gave me the opportunity to engage in ongoing informal discussions about the research with the the native women’s association staff, discussions that shaped both my methods of data collection and analysis. for example, below i draw upon a story shared with me by della green. this story emerged in the context of a shared work project, rather than a formal interview, but deeply informed my expansive approach to social reproduction, which guided me in conducting interviews and in later analysis. as another example, in developing fieldwork methods, i originally planned to conduct focus groups solely with community workers, as i was concerned that focus groups with women who had been affected by the diamond mines may involve sensitive material and put research participants in uncomfortable positions. however, upon my arrival, the native women’s association of the nwt and other participating community groups expressed the potential for community learning and development that could come from hosting community talking circles, so we coordinated two circles.5 the talking circle is an indigenous tool for bringing community members of all ages together for shared learning and listening (wolf & rickard, 2003). more than a focus group, these events were spaces for community members (mostly women, but also some men) to come together to share their experiences of the diamond mines. the native women’s association of the nwt staff and i cooked lunch for the talking circle participants, with the aim of creating a warm and inclusive atmosphere. because talking circles are led according to indigenous tradition and by a 3 my collaboration with the native women’s association of the nwt came out of relationships developed when i worked for the association from 2008–2010 in violence prevention and intervention. 4 this included helping to organize an outreach event on missing and murdered indigenous women, helping to organize an outreach event on residential schools, and assisting in report writing. 5 the native women’s association of the nwt has a history of using talking circles as a way of discussing important and difficult community issues – most commonly, talking circles about residential school experiences. rebecca hall studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 224 community leader, it was agreed that it would be appropriate for the talking circles to be led by della green, according to her traditions. della is from namgis first nation, alert bay, and worked as the victim services coordinator at the native women’s association of the nwt at the time. rather than verbally contributing to facilitation, i made poster board questions, which were displayed for the talking circle. in talking circle tradition, participants are not called upon, but rather are given time to reflect and contribute when and if they desire. displaying the research questions on a poster board rather than posing the questions orally and consecutively allowed the participants to respond to one another freely while personally reflecting upon the questions and voicing their thoughts at the time of their choosing. the community talking circles proved to be highly effective, sometimes in unanticipated ways: the dialogue between participants led to richer insights and learning, as people were able to build on one another’s reflections. research participants shared tactics for managing hardships they had experienced, and discussed community-building strategies to move beyond (material and cultural) resource extraction dependency. many participants expressed satisfaction and solidarity in learning about one another’s stories. approximately 15-20 people joined in the talking circles. ten of those people chose to speak in the first talking circle, and eight chose to speak in the second. contributions by participants in these two talking circles, as well as interviews, inform the analysis of this piece. i analyzed data through a reflexive coding process, aligned with feminist methods of reflexive re-readings of transcripts and multiple codes (brown & gilligan, 1993; mauthner & doucet, 2003), and with sandra kirby and kate mckenna (1989, p. 23), who write that interpretation is “not something which occurs only at one specific point in the research after the data has been gathered; rather, interpretation exists at the beginning and continues throughout the entire process.” because of my methodological commitment to narratives as guiding and informing analysis, i undertook analysis at multiple stages, so that theory and data (in the form of narrative) could inform one another. the interview process itself, combined with transcription, offered the first opportunity to reflect upon themes and insights that emerged. i developed a coding scheme based on a combined reading of my theoretical framework and my interview and transcription notes, and sharpened the codes through two rounds of pilot coding. i used this iterative method of coding interviews to account for themes that emerged outside of my initial research questions. in so doing, i asked myself how these new themes shifted the analytical assumptions and tools through which my analysis was proceeding. caring labours as decolonizing resistance studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 225 politicizing care, decolonizing care in order to ground the discussion of social reproduction that follows, i begin with a story shared with me by della green.6 this story speaks to the power of intimate labours as a site of both decolonizing and colonizing processes. della’s mother attended residential school, and this story emerged as della was preparing a presentation on the intergenerational impacts of residential schooling. when i asked della for permission to share her story in this venue, she agreed and wrote it out for me in her own words, which i share here: i was preparing a presentation for the residential school survivors, and my coworker and i were searching for some photos to use for our presentation, and i came across this photo of six students. my heart stopped when i saw the photo, as i recall my mother having a photo on her wall in the dining room of her home. it was of the six oldest of her children (that included me). it was actually almost the same as the one i saw on the computer screen. all three girls [in the residential school photo] had the same haircut as the photo [in my dining room], and we all dressed the same. the boys all had checkered shirts on, and blue jeans with suspenders, and they also had the same haircuts in the photo. i asked my husband to send me that photo, as i recall him taking a photo of that photo at our mother’s house, so he did. and sure enough, there we were! we could have been the same students in that photo! i knew right then and there, even though my mother said she was not affected by the residential school, she dressed us just like the students in that photo! i felt sad and emotional about the whole ordeal, for my mother who is gone now. i often wonder if she really knew. (personal correspondence 2015) for della, the pictures struck a nerve: they reminded her of the complex, and sometimes contradictory, experience of being raised by survivors of residential school, of the difficult labour her mother enacted as she engaged in the daily and intergenerational reproduction of a home and community that they had been taught was wrong. indeed, the two pictures della showed me were a powerful illustration of how the most intimate of labours – parting your child’s hair to the side and securing it with a barrette, or ironing the collar on their dress – are tied up in the ongoing colonial contestation at the site of social reproduction in indigenous homes. indigenous women – their lives, their bodies, and their labour – are at the centre of this struggle. residential school, violence against indigenous women, forced sterilization of indigenous women, the starkly 6 the excerpts in this piece emerged from interviews, talking circles, and, in this case, personal correspondence. research participants’ contributions are anonymized; however, della green asked that her name be attached to this story. rebecca hall studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 226 disproportionate rates of incarceration of indigenous people in canada,7 and the even more disproportionate rates of apprehension of indigenous children into foster care all manifest as a continuity of the white settler state’s (razack, 2002) colonial interventions into the social reproduction of indigenous communities (anderson, 2003). these interventions demonstrate the ways that patriarchy is embedded in white supremacy (moretonrobinson, 2009; simpson, 2014). today, there are more indigenous children in foster care than there ever were in residential schools (christensen, 2014). these processes – these markers of violence – all demonstrate that the profoundly gendered (anderson & lawrence, 2003; smith, 2005) assault on indigenous bodies, labours, and relationships is not a past “mistake” that demands an apology, but a present crisis that demands action in the form of decolonizing resistance. indeed, colleen hele, naomi seyers and jessica wood write: the intergenerational legacy of residential schools, violence against indigenous women and girls, and the impact of colonial policies – including the criminalization of indigenous people – all reveal the true intent of the colonial state: to get rid of the indian problem. (hele, seyers, & wood, 2015, n.p.) indigenous feminist literature powerfully marking the caring labours of indigenous women as a site of de/colonizing struggle has emerged parallel to – and sometimes in conversation, sometimes not; sometimes complementary, sometimes not – the many strands of feminist thought that have politicized care. as early as the 1950s, claudia jones urged her comrades to think through the ways in which race, gender, and class intersect to facilitate the exploitation of black women across the lines of production and reproduction, so-called work and so-called care (boyce davies, 2008). in the decades that followed, feminists of different social locations and theoretical groundings expanded on the idea of intersecting gendered exploitation and oppression at the site of “care work.” in liberal theory, the initial intervention – both in terms of scholarship and politics – was the struggle to make the “private realm” public. for second-wave feminists, the liberal reification of a divide between the public and private was deeply pernicious because it assumed a perfect equality between men and women in the private sphere, and insulated the supposedly apolitical private sphere from political critique (mackinnon, 1989; olsen, 1983). thus, the feminist response must be to explode this erroneous binary, and demand public (state) responses to what were previously deemed private (and therefore un-punishable) injustices.8 7 a 2013 report found that 23% of the inmates in canadian federal prison are indigenous, a number vastly disproportionate to the four percent indigenous people make up of the canadian population, as a whole. furthermore, this is a number that has been steadily and steeply on the rise since the early 2000s (cbc, 2013). 8 it is worth noting anti-racist and anti-colonial interventions into this project. theorizing the public/private divide – even a theorization that seeks to abolish the divide – is one that implicitly includes only those people whose lives have been allowed to exist within that framework. anticaring labours as decolonizing resistance studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 227 in the discipline of feminist political economy the categories taken up and problematized are production and reproduction, rather than a focus on the public/private binary.. within marxist feminist, socialist feminist, and feminist political economy traditions, this includes debates in the 1970s over whether to conceptualize production and reproduction as dual systems or a unitary system (young, 1980); the domestic labour debates of the 1970s and 1980s that challenged revolutionary thought on its exclusion of the so-called “domestic sphere” and asked whether domestic labour can be conceptualized as productive labour, in the marxian sense (dalla costa & james, 1972; federici, 2012; fee, 1976); anti-racist interventions that challenged marxist and socialist feminists to think through how racialized relations of power structure gendered modes of reproduction and production (bannerji, 2005; davis, 1981; james, 2012); and feminist political economy interventions of the 1990s and 2000s that moved analysis to the level of social formation (jenson, 1986; vosko, 2002) and developed contemporary theories of social reproduction (bezanson & luxton, 2006; ferguson, 2008). as leah vosko (2002) notes, social reproduction theory emanates from acknowledging the necessity of reproduction for production and the interconnectedness between the two. the research presented here takes a social reproduction approach insofar as it is rooted in an inquiry into the paid and unpaid labour performed by northern indigenous women for the purpose of daily and intergenerational reproduction (bezanson & luxton, 2006). i suggest that the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of “social reproduction,” which endorse a politicized and historicized approach to caring labours and an attention to the ways in which place, “race,” and gender shape specific social relations of reproduction and production, offer fertile ground for a discussion of indigenous women’s caring labours. however, most social reproduction theory is rooted in an analysis of the relationship between social reproduction and capitalist production.9 this imbues an implicit totality to capitalist ideology and materiality. racist and anti-imperialist feminists from the global south and north have argued that the public/private divide does not represent their experience of the world, in general, or of violence in particular. anannya bhattacharjee’s (1997) work in south asian communities in new york demonstrates that the experiences of family, community, and culture in these communities go beyond simple binaries of what is public and private. andrea smith (2005) argues that mackinnon’s formulation, calling for greater state action, obscures the centuries of state violence inflicted upon indigenous women in the americas. similarly, cyndi baskin’s (2003) discussion of violence in aboriginal communities in canada advocates a holistic conception of “family violence” that transcends public/private borders, encompassing a cognizance of the ways in which individuals are tied to communities, to spaces, and to histories of colonialism and resistance. 9 there are, of course, important exceptions to this gap. for example, maria mies and veronika bennholdt-thompsen (1999) linked feminist materialist critiques of patriarchy with theories of subsistence; rauna kuokkonen (2011, 2008) links indigenous women’s labours and violence to global political economy; and feminists from the global south, like vandana shiva (1988), have long been bringing non-capitalist socio-economic formations into conversations with feminist concerns with global capital. rebecca hall studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 228 furthermore, as mentioned above, there is a tendency in some mainstream feminist theories of care and reproduction to assume western nuclear family arrangements. conversely, northern indigenous women live and labour in a mixed economy, built through indigenous and settler social relations, wherein subsistence production persists alongside capitalist production, and indigenous households are shaped through multiple and competing de/colonizing typologies. in this context, indigenous women’s social reproduction is a site of de/colonizing struggle. thus, in what follows, i draw upon the insights of research participants to take up indigenous women’s social reproductive labour as it relates both to capitalist production and subsistence production, and as it is enacted through place-based indigenous social relations and systems of meaning. i elevate the ways that this labour expands western conceptions of care, reproduction and the intimate as it transgresses and reshapes categorical boundaries. indeed, indigenous women’s social reproductive labour is a space that holds within it both violent colonial oppression and exploitation, and the creative labours of resistance, growth, and possibility: production and reproduction of indigenous, non-capitalist, non-patriarchal forms of caring, living, and working. in what follows, i take up research participant narratives to discuss processes of creative expansion at the site of social reproduction. sites of decolonizing expansions of care one of the powerful contributions of the feminist literature discussed above is the linking of reproduction and production; that is, the general assertion, expressed diversely across theoretical traditions, that capitalist production relies upon social reproduction – that the two are fundamentally linked. notwithstanding this shared theoretical grounding, theorists diverge on how, and the extent to which, they conceptualize the mutability of the divide between production and social reproduction. certainly, the relation between production and social reproduction, and the quality of labours that transcend this divide, is a subject that shifts through time and place. indigenous women in the nwt, for example, engage in social reproductive labour through the contemporary mixed economy, 10 a potent corrective to the notion that capitalism is a total economy. indeed, the power of indigenous social relations in the mixed economy is a demonstration of the ways that an orientation toward the well-being and reproduction of community and kin can transcend the realm of social reproduction and shape engagement with production, capitalist or not. 10 the northern mixed economy refers to the ways in which the northern economy has developed through both subsistence production and capitalist production (see e.g., abele, 2006; asch, 1977). caring labours as decolonizing resistance studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 229 social reproductive work is located in relation to both capitalist production and subsistence production in the mixed economy. i am using the term subsistence here as a category of labour-power that is performed in both the traditional economy and the mixed economy for the purpose of acquiring or producing the needs of a household or community. frances abele (2006) points to ways an analysis of the mixed economy shifts traditional western conceptions of the economic. she reminds us that “understanding the mixed economy means accepting, for heuristic purposes, that the basic unit of analysis is not the individual worker (as is the case for neo-classical economic theory) but rather the household” (abele, 2006, p. 186). furthermore, like social reproductive work, which can be at once labouring and emotive, exhausting of labour-power and interpersonally enriching, subsistence and traditional work is understood as much more than a necessary activity for biological or economic sustenance. she writes, “‘going on the land’ is physically arduous and sometimes risky, but it is not typically understood as ‘work.’ rather it is recognized as an activity that contributes a great deal to physical, emotional and mental well-being” (abele, 2006, p. 187). within this context, the reach of the imperatives of social reproduction are extended, and become more potent. maria mies and veronika bennholdtthomsen (1999) suggest that the fact of capitalist production is not necessarily followed with a capitalist orientation, and that a “subsistence perspective” (that is, labour oriented toward the reproduction and well-being of the collective, rather than the profit of the one) is a powerful site of anticapitalist, feminist resistance. for mies and bennholdt-thomsen (1999), a subsistence perspective “insists on the priority of use-value production” (p. 58) and prioritizes the “creation and maintenance of life on this planet” over “the accumulation of dead money” (p. 7). in what follows, i outline two ways that indigenous women resist the imperatives of capitalism and colonialism through the orientation, structure, and enactment of their care labour, first, in the extension of intimate caring relations beyond the imagined “nuclear family,” and second, in an extension of relations of social reproduction to the land. beyond nuclear care social reproductive labour performed in northern indigenous communities involve strong kin and community networks wherein care and other reproductive and subsistence activities are undertaken interdependently across nuclear family units (usher, duhaime, & searles, 2003). as alica, a young dene woman living in yellowknife, said, describing her own extended family, “i grew up around little kids, helping take care of the family. but that’s pretty common. and that’s a big part of aboriginal culture, too, family raising the family” (personal interview, 2014). many indigenous and nonrebecca hall studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 230 indigenous scholars have discussed the non-nuclear structure of care in indigenous households (see e.g., anderson & lawrence, 2003) – a structure that the canadian state has attempted to undermine with varying levels of success through policies and practices of surveillance, rupture, and punishment. this includes the forced relocation of nomadic communities into permanent settlements with single-dwelling homes, welfare policies that require nuclear families, and the contemporary surveillance of indigenous families through social service programming (anderson, 2003; martin-hill, 2003). indeed, one worker in social services described the racialized, classbased process of surveillance in the following way: whereas my client, they live in low-income housing, so they get in a fight and someone calls the cops. he goes to jail, there’s a charge laid, and child welfare gets involved. right? i’m not investigating very many upper-middle class families. we don’t get those calls. so you’re under a microscope. (personal interview, 2014) however, throughout the canadian state’s persistent attempts to restructure indigenous processes of care, kin and community networks have remained a powerful space of social reproduction and resistance for many of the women who participated in this research. in the interviews i conducted, indigenous women consistently explained the ways that their extended kin and community networks worked together in times of strain and made it possible to pursue particular desires or goals. the strength and value of extrahousehold community links are not, by any means, unique to indigenous communities in northern canada, and have been well documented by feminists (collins, 1991; morris, 1985), and doucet (2000, p. 178) has pointed to the need for family research to shift toward these wider community relations. how then do northern indigenous community and kin networks, in particular, decolonize western assumptions of family and expand conceptions of the intimate? i suggest that in the context of a mixed economy characterized by an ongoing material and ideological struggle between capitalist, statesanctioned modes of reproduction and place-based, indigenous modes of reproduction and production, extended networks of intimacy and care are a space through which the latter can be supported and nurtured outside of the confines of the former. extended community and kin networks support and facilitate community cohesion, intergenerational knowledge transmission, and engagement in subsistence production. in the best of both worlds (harnum et al., 2014), a study examining the mixed economy in the sahtu region of the nwt, engagement in subsistence production and consumption was described by research participants as labour undertaken in interdependent ways across households that contributes to the well-being of the whole group. usher et al. (2003) describe this as “supra-household interaction” determined, primarily, by kinship networks. they write that these connections are “celebrated, consolidated, reinforced and reproduced caring labours as decolonizing resistance studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 231 by sharing, feasting, ritual observance, and associated ethical norms. there is much incentive to maintain the system, little to disrupt it” (usher et al., 2003, p. 179). just as the women i interviewed described extended networks as a source of joy, stability, and strength, they also described these networks as a space of responsibility and labour – labour that often conflicted with roles they might hold in wage-labour, most notably their work in the canadian diamond mines.11 women who had worked at the diamond mines discussed their community and kin-level work as directly in conflict with their work at the diamond mines just as often as they discussed their labour involving their own children. for example, iris, an inuit woman, left her work at the diamond mines to look after her sister and her sister’s child in a time of need. her work history at the mines was consistently interrupted by responsibilities in the home or community, or by illness. when we spoke, she wanted to reapply to the mines and she joked: this time, i’m gonna stick with it. i tell all my relatives and my friends, you guys can’t die, i’m gonna go to work. and they say, “okay, we won’t die.” and i say, “let’s see how long you can hold out.” i say, “something can happen, but not while i’m working.” but i know that won’t work. (personal interview, 2014) iris’s work history is an example of a common theme expressed by research participants: that prioritizing care work over wage-labour included not just ongoing reproductive labour, but community-level labour required in times of crisis, stress, or need. as one community worker said: the expectation is that if anything tough happens in the community, that the women have to be there. like, if there’s a sick parent or an older person, the men in the community are really not expected to take on the extra roles. women need to take them on. so that makes it really difficult for women [to work for the diamond mines]. (personal interview, 2014) my aim is not to romanticize these labours or responsibilities or diminish the difficult and sometimes constraining roles these women take up; rather, it is to demonstrate the ways that deep care commitments to extended kin and community are tied up in an orientation away from the demands of capital and towards the daily and intergenerational reproduction of indigenous communities and people. this, certainly, is transgressive. marx (1976) and many theorists following him have noted that capitalism requires people who require capitalism. as feminist theorists have added, this includes a requirement for reproductive labour oriented towards the needs of capital. while it has taken different forms in different times and places, there is a continuity in the capitalist, patriarchal, and white supremacist exploitation of 11 there are four diamond mines in the nwt. the first one opened in 1998, and since then, diamond mines have dominated the territorial economy, accounting for more than 50% of the gdp (gnwt, 2015). rebecca hall studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 232 women’s reproductive labour across time and place (anderson, 2003; davis, 1981; hill collins, 2006; mies, 1986). silvia federici (2004, p. 2) argues that the accumulation of capital requires the appropriation, not just of land, but of women’s control over their roles in production and reproduction. the contemporaneous de/colonizing struggle at play at the site of indigenous women’s social reproduction is a visceral demonstration of the embodied character of this conflict, an argument that is apt in the face of the rates of violence against indigenous women in canada (government of canada, 2015; sisters in spirit, 2010) and the past and present state tactics to survey and restructure indigenous women’s reproductive labours (anderson, 2003; simpson, 2014; smith, 2005). by making the care and reproduction of their communities primary, these women – in their relationships and through their labour – are challenging the totality of capital; they are reproducing resistance and fostering the continuity of a subsistence orientation that values placed-based practices of care and intimate relations to people and places over the atomized separateness so conducive to the neoliberal order. it is to the enactment of relationships to place that i turn in the final section of this piece. de-alienating the land land claims, and other forms of contestation over land and resources, are the most visible form of contemporary colonial contestation in canada. when framed within a settler logic, struggles for land emerge in legalistic terms, as discrete claims of power over specific bounded territories and resources. a decolonizing approach to land, however, is one that recognizes land relationally (simpson, 2007; smith, 2011). indeed, glen coulthard writes: it is a profound misunderstanding to think of land or place as simply some material object of profound importance to indigenous cultures (although it is this too); instead it ought to be understood as a field of “relationships of things to each other.” place is a way of knowing, experiencing, and relating with the world – and these ways of knowing often guide forms of resistance to power relations that threaten to erase or destroy our senses of place. (coulthard 2010, p. 79) coulthard offers an expansion of relational analysis to the land such that the land is not something to be acted upon, but rather something (or some things) with which to act. as regards an analysis of indigenous women’s reproductive and care labours, this means that a decolonizing approach requires, first, a spatial specificity (and a specificity toward the plants, animals, rocks, and water within that space), and second, an inclusion of land in relational analyses of social reproduction. by spatial specificity, i mean grounded analyses that look to the histories, materialities, and meanings of caring labours as decolonizing resistance studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 233 particular relations between people and the land.12 by including land in analyses of social reproduction, i am evoking a shift from approaching land as the object/resource upon or through which, biological and social reproduction takes place, to a relational approach wherein both people and land are the subject of social reproduction – an approach expressed below by research participants. indeed, in interviews and talking circles, there was a fluidity in how northern indigenous women expressed their relationships to the land, their relationships to their children and loved ones, and the structures of meaning that threaded through all of these relationships. when i asked questions about the diamond mines – as sites of physical displacement – many women began their response with a discussion of their children, their responses coloured with broad concerns about the ways that resource extraction will impact future generations, but also driven by contemporary proximities between care, intimacy, and the land. a number of women brought up concerns for the caribou, the traditional meat for the dene, and their shifting migration patterns and depleting numbers as a result of the mines. sarah, a dene woman living in a small indigenous community, put it this way: the diamond mines also changed the caribou migration. and because they changed the caribou migration, the caribou don’t go as far as they used to. they don’t go where they used to because their habitat is being taken over. their numbers are obviously decreasing. and so that is impacting my family, my community, my culture. where a lot of us don’t have access to caribou, our traditional meat. my daughter, who’s now 21, she just found out she’s diabetic. she’s borderline diabetic. she’s not obese, she exercises a lot, and when we found that out, we were surprised.13 we said, how could that be? but that’s because our food and our cultural way of living has changed. our food has changed. our diet has changed. so, she has to eat a strict diet now and that’s just how it is. (talking circle, 2014) debbie, a metis woman participating in the same talking circle, held the same concern, and told this story of resistance, which got a good laugh from the group: and i no longer have a food source. i remember one time we were out hunting and we used the road. we were grateful for the road. but right in front of us, a group of hunters that went out and, honest to god...boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. and this whole herd of caribou was hunted, slaughtered. and this group of hunters was standing around, not knowing what to do now. because they’d never 12 see, for example, brittany luby’s (2015) analysis of anishinabek mothers’ responses to hydroelectric flooding and the impact this had on traditions of breastfeeding and water-based food consumption in their community. 13 that sarah felt the need to explain that her daughter’s diabetes was not the result of obesity (which is often read as the consequences of poor individual choices, particularly upon indigenous bodies) speaks, i would argue, to the intensity of the disciplining, blaming, and surveying of indigenous bodies and health. rebecca hall studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 234 hunted before. but they see an animal and they kill it. so my husband jumped out and showed them how to harvest the animal. and he took all the delicacies, and said, “oh, this part’s no good.” [laughs] so we benefited, thankfully. but, you know, lots of times we went out on that road and people aren’t even seeing caribou anymore (talking circle, 2014). for many of the women interviewed, the health of the land is directly related to the health and well-being of the people in the physical sense of traditional food sources, and also in emotive, interpersonal, and cultural ways. alica, whose grandfather’s trap line once ran through the space where a diamond pit now lies, explained that she was physically ill when she visited the diamond mines (personal interview, 2014). when i asked shayna, a young indigenous woman living in yellowknife, about bringing her child to visit family in small communities, she related spiritual, emotional, and interpersonal health with visiting the land to which her family is connected. she said: with the land, you hear aboriginal people, and for me, talking about our relationship with the land. i feel like it’s something that i’m not even fully aware of. my soul, unconscious, my body, anytime i go see my aunty and my uncle at their camp or do any kind of cultural activities, my connection to the land, it’s not even something that’s in my mind, like the forefront of my mind. it’s just such a release there. (personal interview, 2014) the intimate relationship between land and people, and care and subsistence in northern indigenous communities is a thread that tightly winds between different times and places. in discussing the intimate corporeal, caring, and symbolic relationship indigenous communities hold to the land, i aim to elevate the day-to-day acts of decolonizing resistance enacted in the commitment to these relationships. just as much as large-scale battles for land, the daily labours of reproduction, subsistence and care – a woman showing her daughter the plants that are medicine, or the hunting paths of their ancestors, or how to fish, cook, sew, and dry meat – all of these labours, at once intimate and transgressive, expand the possibilities of ways of being and knowing. conclusion in this piece, i have suggested that the intimate labours of indigenous women are a site of decolonizing struggle, a space of both violence and creative resistance. as a contribution to a decolonizing approach to social reproduction theory, i have elevated the ways that indigenous women’s dayto-day caring labours extend the space of “caring,” and challenge the totality of western capitalist patriarchal social relations. indeed, indigenous women’s reproductive labour extends beyond the sphere it has been allotted caring labours as decolonizing resistance studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 220-237, 2016 235 by settler ideologies and materialities (that is, the “nuclear family”) and thus, in both theory and practice, expands decolonizing enactments of care and intimacies. it is my contention that these labours are transgressive, hopeful, profoundly challenging, and profoundly meaningful. acknowledgments sincere thanks to the staff at the native women’s association of the northwest territories, and to the many women who shared their stories. this piece was originally presented at the consuming intimacies symposium at brock university. thank you to andrea doucet, robyn lee, alana cattapan and lindsey mckay for your organizing work, and to the participants of the symposium. finally, thank you to andrea, robyn, the anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff at studies in social justice for your thoughtful comments on this piece. references abele, f. 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(2006). new commodities, new consumers: selling blackness in a global marketplace. ethnicities, 6(3), 297-317. james, s. (2012). sex, race and class, the perspective of winning: a selection of writings 19522011. oakland: pm press. jenson, j. (1986). gender and reproduction or babies and the state. studies in political economy, 20, 9-46. kirby, s., & mckenna, k. (1989). experience, research, social change: methods from the margins. toronto: garamond press. kuokkanen, r. (2008). globalization as racialized, sexualized violence: the case of indigenous women. international feminist journal of politics, 10(2), 216-233. kuokkanen, r. (2011) indigenous economies, theories of subsistence, and women. american indian quarterly, 35(2), 215-240. luby, b. (2015). from milk-medicine to public (re)education programs: an examination of anishinabek mothers' responses to hydroelectric flooding in the treaty #3 district, 1900 – 1975. canadian bulletin of medical history, 32(5), 363-389. mackinnon, c. 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(2014). the chiefs two bodies: theresa spence and the gender of settler sovereignty. keynote address at the annual critical race and anticolonial studies conference. edmonton, ab. sisters in spirit. (2010). what their stories tell us: research findings from the sisters in spirit initiative. native women’s association of canada. retrieved from www.nwac.ca/sistersspirit-research-report-2010 smith a. (2005). conquest: sexual violence and american indian genocide. cambridge: south end press. smith, a. (2011). against the law: indigenous feminism and the nation-state. affinities: a journal of radical theory, culture, and action, 5(1), 56-69. smith, l. t. (1999). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. london: zed books. talking circles. (2014). conducted between june 1, 2014 and august 30, 2014 by della green and rebecca hall through the support of the native women’s association of the northwest territories. tuck, e., & yang, k. w. 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(1980). socialist feminism and the limits of dual systems theory. socialist review, 50(5), 169-188. stasiulis final feb 17 20 correspondence address: daiva stasiulis, department of sociology & anthropology, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: daiva.stasiulis@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 elimi(nation): canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour daiva stasiulis carleton university, canada abstract this article utilizes the lens of disposability to explore recent conditions of low-wage temporary migrant labour, whose numbers and economic sectors have expanded in the 21st century. a central argument is that disposability is a discursive and material relation of power that creates and reproduces invidious distinctions between the value of “legitimate” canadian settler-citizens (and candidates for citizenship) and the lack of worth of undesirable migrant populations working in canada, often for protracted periods of time. the analytical lens of migrant disposability draws upon theorizing within marxian, critical modernity studies, and decolonizing settler colonial frameworks. this article explores the technologies of disposability that lay waste to low wage workers in sites such as immigration law and provincial/territorial employment legislation, the workplace, transport, living conditions, access to health care and the practice of medical repatriation of injured and ill migrant workers. the mounting evidence that disposability is immanent within low-wage migrant labour schemes in canada has implications for migrant social justice. the failure to protect migrant workers from a vast array of harms reflects the historical foundations of canada’s contemporary migrant worker schemes in an “inherited background field [of settler colonialism] within which market, racist, patriarchal and state relations converge” (coulthard, 2014, p. 14). incremental liberal reform has made little headway insofar as the administration and in some cases reversal of more progressive reforms such as guaranteed pathways to citizenship prioritize employers’ labour interests and the lives and health of primarily white, middle class canadian citizens at the expense of a shunned and racialized but growing population of migrants from the global south. transformational change and social justice for migrant workers can only occur by reversing the disposability and hyper-commodification intrinsic to low-wage migrant programs and granting full permanent legal status to migrant workers. keywords migrant labour; disposability; decolonizing settler colonialism; intersectionality canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 23 introduction societies now treat migrants less as a sustaining resource than as temporary hyper-extractive labor, potential nuisance, moral challenge, burden, or threat. there is little reason…to show social commitment, loyalty, or responsibility. citizenship is a far-off consideration. (goldberg, 2015, p. 120) during much of this century, canada has engaged in a profound transformation in its migration and citizenship policies, evidenced particularly strongly in its rising reliance on temporary migrant workers. precarity, conditionality and illiberal norms have diluted and supplanted permanence and the promise of inalienable citizenship in how large numbers of migrants are selected and governed.1 among the most significant reforms, offsetting decades of settler-style immigration has been the shift in the relative importance of temporary migrant workers vis à vis immigrants granted permanent residence upon entry, with the sharpest increases occurring among low-wage, “low-skill” temporary workers in an expanding range of economic sectors and occupations (faraday, 2014; walsh, 2014).2 in 2008, for the first time, a greater number of temporary foreign workers (tfws) came to canada than new permanent residents; in some provinces, this shift occurred earlier (e.g., 2006 in alberta; see alberta federation of labour, 2007).3 while permanent migration and citizenship have long been 1 precarious citizenship status refers to a range of non-citizenship or less-than-full legal citizenship statuses in a given nation-state. on the one hand, citizenship status, like pregnancy, is an either/or proposition. but citizenship and non-citizenship “exist on a spectrum, involving a pool of rights that are variously offered, denied, or challenged, as well as a set of obligations that are unequally demanded” and are a product of active negotiation involving numerous state and non-state, individual, collective and institutional actors (stasiulis & bakan, 2003, p. 2; see also goldring & landolt, 2013, p. 3). “conditionality” as defined by landolt and goldring “denotes the material and discursive conditions that must be met to acquire and exercise the formal or substantive right to remain present within a national territory and/or to access entitlements and social goods, including the labor market” (2015, p. 857). 2 according to the parliamentary standing committee whose mandate it is to examine the temporary foreign worker program, “the high-wage stream is comprised of positions where the wage rate offered to the temporary foreign worker is at or above the provincial/territorial median wage, while the low-wage stream encompasses those positions with wages that are below the provincial/territorial median wage” (standing committee on human resources, skills & social development & the status of persons with disabilities, 2016, p. 3). “low wage” is often conflated with “low skill” occupations that were earlier (in 2002) defined as those occupation classified as noc ‘c’, requiring no more than high school education or two years of job-specific training, and noc ‘d’, requiring no prior training or education (foster, 2012, pp. 25-26). 3 the numbers of tfws entering canada (at all skill levels) reached a historic high in 2012, with just under 200,000 new entrants, before plummeting in 2015 to 90,000 (office of the auditor general of canada, 2017, p. 4). major reforms and steep application costs were introduced to the tfw program in 2014, in response to criticisms of conservative tfw policies that displaced precarious (e.g., older, female) canadian workers in the service industries, and which substantially deterred employers from hiring temporary, and especially low-wage migrant workers. thus, the numbers of approved low-wage tfw positions tumbled from 58,502 in 2013 to 10,980 in 2015 (standing committee on human resources, skills & social development & the status of persons with disabilities, 2016, p. 7). nonetheless, the “stock” or number of daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 24 considered a “cornerstone of canadian immigration policy since confederation” (pendakur, 2000, p. 3), temporary recruitment of foreign populations, regarded as unfit to settle and mingle with or assimilate to the culture, values and institutions of bona fide “white” settlers has also a long history in meeting canada’s labour market demands (stasiulis & jhappan, 1995, p. 97). in the first decades of the 21st century, such non-settler migrant labour, whose undesirability as settlers is co-constituted through intersections of race, class and gender, as well as other social and political identifiers, frequently exceeds permanent settler migration. this article explores low-wage temporary migrant labour through the lens of disposability, an analytical framework that frequently informs indigenous scholarship on the continuous and devastating violence and neglect of indigenous lives, health and well-being under white settler colonialism. a central contention is that “disposability” or rendering into “human waste” is a form of discursive and material relation of power underlying settler colonialism that creates and reproduces invidious distinctions between the value of “legitimate” canadian settler-citizens (and candidates for citizenship), and the lack of worth of indigenous peoples and undesirable migrant (and racialized) populations residing in canada, often for long periods of time. intrinsic to settler colonialism is a “logic of elimination,” a drive to reduce indigenous peoples who are regarded as an obstacle to the appropriation and settlement of land (wolfe, 2006; see also coulthard, 2014; day, 2015). however, this eliminatory project also pertains to the racialized migrant populations from the global south sought for their capacity to provide flexible, malleable and cheap labour, yet deemed unfit for settler citizenship. as will be briefly discussed later in this article, there are parallels as well as important distinctions in the technologies of disposability applied to temporary migrants as compared to indigenous peoples.4 drawing upon the “european truism” about guest workers, who despite state intentions, proved that they were “here for good” (castles & kosack, 1984), siematyicki suggests “there is nothing more permanent than a temporary foreign worker” (2010, p. 63). in this article, i refine this argument in discussing how the permanency of temporary worker programs in canada, constituting a significant and permanent labour market tool (foster, 2012), is built on the assumption that there is nothing more indispensable and disposable than a temporary worker. the hyper-exploitation and disposability of low-wage, migrant labourers is consistent with canada’s foundation as a white settler colonial society wherein the fitness for national membership is migrant workers present in canada (on december 1st, including those whose stay extends beyond a single year), climbed steadily from 89,746 in 2000 to 310,000 in 2015 (alini, 2018). 4 as the topic of this article is temporary low-wage labour migrants from the global south, i acknowledge that i do not do justice to the distinctive character of the settler colonial eliminatory project as linked to land, sovereignty and culture of indigenous peoples and the powerful resistance to which it has given rise, which is compellingly conveyed in the writings of indigenous scholars. canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 25 based on proximity to certain norms that are associated with european settlers and that are racialized, gendered and class-bound. the question of “who benefits” from the recruitment of highly exploited and yet disposable migrants is complex, but includes employers in food production and a growing number of sectors facing barriers in recruiting labour locally, the state, a host of profit-making intermediaries, white middle and upper class citizens, and also wealthier segments of canada’s multi-racial citizenry, some of whom represent the successful, “bootstrap” good-immigrant narrative (kwak, 2018). as evelyn nakano glenn (2015, p. 60) submits, “settler colonialism’s response to undesirable exogenous others has often swung…between the poles of ‘elimination’ and coercive ‘exploitation’.” both exploitation and elimination are intrinsic to low-wage temporary migrant worker schemes, with the pernicious consequence that low-wage migrant labour is disposable yet indispensable. while migrant activists and critical scholars have long sought to strengthen the employment protections and rights (e.g., to health and social benefits and family reunification) of temporary migrant workers, my contention is that the oft-mentioned yet under-analyzed disposability of low-wage tfws has lent an inherent instability to the very partial and often unattainable rights and employment protections of tfw programs. legislated protections for migrant workers are rendered inaccessible through regulatory neglect or blatant violation by host and sending states and employers, and because of migrants’ overriding fears of potential dismissal and repatriation. unlike citizen-workers, migrant workers are not a canadian electoral constituency or priority among canadian politicians, making whatever gains they have made more easily reversible and expendable according to the government of the day. this article is organized into three analytical sections and a conclusion. first, i provide some background on shifts and emerging patterns in the recruitment of temporary workers to canada. second, i engage with theoretical perspectives that examine the disposability of humans, with an eye to producing a synthetic framework that can deepen our understanding of the conditions that generate temporary (low wage) migrant labour, particularly as it has been recruited and organized during the 21st century in canada. marxian and other political economy theories of forced labour and the impact of neoliberal globalization on the mobility of populations are key to understanding the dynamics of human disposability as applied to migrant labour. zygmunt bauman’s chilling analyses of the production of human waste frames such disposability as “an inevitable outcome of modernity” (2004, p. 5) with racialized national borders serving as a key site where authorized violence against those marked as disposable occurs (razack, 2017, p. 3). the dynamics of human disposability in canada are also illuminated by its own historical “logic of [human] elimination” as a white settler society (wolfe, 2006). thus, rather than seeing the proliferation of low-wage temporary migrant labour forms of recruitment as a departure from daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 26 or the end to settler immigration (dauvergne, 2016), i contend that it represents a recent reiteration of the “dual logic” of settler colonialism – driven to dispossess indigenous peoples and to develop mixed settler/disposable labour systems (coulthard, 2014; day 2015, p. 113; galabuzi, wallis & sunseri, 2010). i conceptualize “human disposability” as a settler colonial technique of governing indigenous peoples and unfree racialized migrant labour, with a focus on elaborating its applicability to the latter. the recruitment of select racialized and gendered groups as indispensable yet disposable labour to develop infrastructure and specific economic sectors and to aid in social reproduction has a long history, which will be briefly touched upon here. in the third section, i suggest that like parallel concepts developed by scholars to understand migrant labour – e.g., their cheapness, flexibility, precarity, and unfreedom – the disposability of migrant labour is multidimensional and processual involving several sites, technologies, and actors populating the “space of flows” that contribute to inhumane conditions that hasten injury, chronic illness, deportability and even death of migrant workers (castells, 2001; sargeant & tucker, 2009). much of the documentation of migrant disposability has occurred in live-in caregiving and particularly agricultural work, which has recently expanded in numbers of tfws even during periods where there has been a contraction in other program streams.5 it is here that many migrant labour activists, journalists, academics, and a film-maker have sought to bring attention to the dehumanizing work and living conditions that waste away the bodies, minds and souls of migrant workers from countries such as mexico, jamaica, guatemala, and barbados (hennebry, 2010; lee, 2016). the medical repatriation of ill and injured workers, absence of subsequent, postemployment health care, and deaths of some of these workers resulting from hazardous workplace and living conditions, comprise important steps in rendering waste to these migrant workers (orkin, lay, mclaughlin, schwandt & cole, 2014). under the trudeau liberal government, there have been new measures introduced to uncover and impose fines on employers found to be non-compliant with the regulations of temporary migrant programs. my analysis of government data on non-compliant employers indicates how priority is given to the assumed adverse impact of migrant worker employment on jobs for canadian citizen workers and to maintaining employer access to a vulnerable and disposable migrant labour force, rather than to addressing the root causes of these vulnerabilities. in the conclusion, i address how the disposability of tfws, which is at the core of low-wage migrant worker programs, has implications for the framing 5 thus, while the number of tfw positions approved through a labour market impact assessment (lmia, a type of labour market screening) decreased from 163,035 position in 2013 to 90,211 positions in 2015, the number of approved positions in the area of “primary agriculture” increased from 45,366 to 53,303 (standing committee on human resources, skills & social development & the status of persons with disabilities, 2016, p. 7). canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 27 of justice and human rights campaigns undertaken in migrant worker selfadvocacy and by migrant justice organizations. reforms to temporary migrant worker programs while contemporary “temporariness” in migrant status intrinsically suggests the possibility of disposability regardless of migrant skill level (stasiulis, 2008), temporary employment-related migration is highly hierarchized. the criteria by which migrants are judged to be fit candidates and on probation for future citizenship as opposed to temporary and expendable labour reflects their positionality in a matrix of social relations that includes north-south divisions in the global economy, race, gender and class, and the kinds of capitals they possess. thus temporary migrant worker schemes in canada include, at one extreme, highly valorized knowledge workers and other bearers of prized cultural capital who have the means to take advantage of opportunities in the global economy and whose permanent residence is supported by employers and state authorities (prokopenko & hou, 2018, p. 9). at the other extreme, propelled by employer demand for greater access to low-wage, low-skill workers, it embraces those who are recruited solely for their ability to withstand exhausting, and often dehumanizing working and living conditions but who are socially unwelcome and deemed unfit, and/or lacking in key attributes such as education credentials and official language fluency as entrance fees for joining the “inner circle of national membership” (walsh, 2014, pp. 597-598). the dramatic increase in the numbers of tfws relative to permanent immigrants has been accompanied by a reversal in the relative proportion of high skill to low skill migrants. whereas in the 1990s, migrant worker programs favoured high-skill occupations, such that in addition to the longstanding (purportedly low-skill) streams for seasonal agricultural workers (sawp) and live-in-caregivers (lcp), roughly two-thirds of tfws were high-skilled workers. 6 since 2002, with the introduction and substantial expansion of the “stream for lower-skilled occupations” in the temporary foreign worker program (tfwp) (prokopenko & hou, 2018), employerdriven recruitment of workers with time-limited visas have been channelled to food processing plants, the hospitality and tourist sectors, fast food restaurants, construction, and nursing homes, joining the longer-standing schemes for seasonal agricultural workers and private family caregivers. this has substantially increased their presence in economic sectors “at the sharp 6 thus in 2005, the top occupational groupings for which lmos (labour market opinions, then a requirement for granting employers leave to import tfws) favoured high skill occupations in the arts (musicians, film producers, directors, technical film-related occupations), and specialist physicians. in contrast, by 2008, the top occupations had shifted to low wage occupations involved in food production and service, construction and cleaning; only the fifth highest remained higher skilled (musicians and singers) (foster, 2012, p. 29). daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 28 end of de-regulated labour markets in jobs characterized by low wages, insecurity and obfuscated employment relations” (anderson, 2010, p. 300). the intensification in the employment of low-wage migrant workers has led to the proliferation of what legal activist-scholar fay faraday terms “zones of exceptionality” within a quilted labour market with patchworks of differential rights and pockets of permanent precarity (faraday, 2016, pp. 7, 31). low-wage migrants who move into the most precarious forms of lowpaid work originate from countries in the global south, and they enter labour market sectors that are both racialized and gendered (e.g., female caregivers from the philippines, predominantly male mexican and caribbean seasonal agricultural workers; see foster, 2012, p. 29).7 low-wage workers, also designated as “low-skill,” play fundamental roles in the canadian economy and society, such as caring for children, the elderly, and the chronically ill, and harvesting crops and processing food. a great many also perform work in harsh, nasty and often debilitating conditions rejected by canadian workers and their living situations are often equally hazardous to their health as their working conditions (hennebry, 2010, p. 74). employers in sectors such as agriculture frequently complain that they are unable to find local workers willing to undertake the dirty, difficult, and often dangerous work on offer and that their preference is to hire temporary foreign workers (alberta cattle feeders’ association, 2017; vanraes, 2018). the latter often become the only workforce to remain in these jobs, albeit largely driven by fear of job termination and resulting loss of legal status. while protected by employment standards in most (provincial/territorial) jurisdictions, these protections in many cases exist in name only, so significant are the barriers to access them and the pressures placed on fearful workers to refrain from reporting their violation (mclaughlin, hennebry & haines, 2014). protective measures in all jurisdictions are accompanied by lax oversight. migrant worker contracts enforce an inordinate dependence of workers on single employers to whom they are tied through exclusive work permits and on unscrupulous recruiters, immigration consultants and employment agencies who exact illegal and financially crippling fees from workers (faraday, 2014, p. 36; 2016, p. 47; tomlinson, 2019). language and cultural barriers, enforced physical isolation, chronic indebtedness, and fear of deportation increase this dependence (foster, 2012, p. 25). the precarity created among low-wage migrants by the laws and policies of canadian and provincial governments begs “the fundamental question of why broad classes of workers who have historically played a significant role in building canada 7 while in 2000 prior to the expansion of the tfwp, almost 58% of tfws originated in developed countries (united states, australia, the united kingdom, japan), by 2009, lessdeveloped countries (philippines, india, china and mexico) made up almost 54% of the tfws’ origins (foster, 2012, p. 29). by 2018, the top five source countries for tfws to canada by labour market impact assessments (lmias, that had supplanted the lmos) were mexico, jamaica, guatemala, india and the philippines (employment & social development canada, 2019a). canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 29 are now, in law, generally ineligible for pathways to permanent residence and citizenship” (faraday, 2012, pp. 15-16)? so striking is this trend that in a recent book, immigration law scholar catherine dauvergne (2016, p. 2) nostalgically opines that along with other restrictive reforms, the shift to temporary labour migration in canada spells the demise of “settlement” and the end of an “era of settler societies.” such nostalgia for past permanent residence immigration policies, while critical of the unsettling effects on migrants of restrictions on permanent residence, also renders immigrant settler policies “innocent of the violence and dispossession” that led to the establishment of the settler colonial state (simpson, 2014, p. 25). in seeking to make sense of this dramatic (albeit volatile, tap-on, tap-off) policy shift, normalizing temporary migration to canada, many migration scholars apply a “precarity” lens to define the specific vulnerability and exploitability of low-wage migrant workers in terms of a nexus between precarious legal/immigration status and precarious employment conditions (faraday, 2014; 2016, pp. 31-32; fudge, 2012; landolt & goldring, 2015; marsden, 2011). others have turned to marxist political economy frames to describe the proliferation in canada of “unfree labour” schemes whose chief politico-legal mechanisms are temporary migratory status and employerspecific permits (bakan & stasiulis, 2012; choudry & smith, 2016; sharma, 2006; walia, 2010). in contrast to these highly elaborated analytical frameworks that have deepened our understanding of the specific assemblage of structural forces, abject material conditions, discourses, institutions, policies and actors that have created and justified the hyper-exploitation experienced by temporary low-wage migrant workers, the “disposability” of migrant labour appears in most scholarship as a descriptive term (byl, 2011; choudry & smith, 2016, p. 5; walsh, 2014, p. 585). little analytical attention has been devoted to how low-skill migrant workers, multiplying across economic sectors and swelling in numbers, are rendered “disposable” through the policies and practices of a network of (receiving and sending) governments, employers, and an industry of third-party recruiters. similarly, scant analysis exists of how such disposability may mark them as distinctive from or similar to other groups of vulnerable populations, either in close proximity (e.g., indigenous communities) or occupying the contemporary global economy. disposability of migrant workers theorized different theoretical literatures – marxist-inspired analyses of labour and specifically unfree labour, bauman’s (2004) “outcasts of modernity,” and settler colonialism as an ongoing rather than merely historical structure (glenn, 2015) – provide distinctive and overlapping lenses through which to view an under-analyzed aspect of the conditions of low-wage, temporary daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 30 migrant workers in canada.8 each of these frameworks, while insufficient in themselves, offer important insights into the rendering of temporary migrant workers into redundant “human waste” – a process that is antithetical to the “permanency,” successful integration, and “contributions” to the nation of its immigrant population of highly diverse origins that form strands of the official narrative about canadian multiculturalism and nation-building. marx’s critique of capitalism and his labour theory of value provide a key starting point for understanding the contemporary disposability of low-wage migrant workers (yates, 2011). under capitalism, value is rooted in labour, specifically its unique capacity to produce value. but labour also takes on the form of a commodity and as such is consumed and can be disposed like other commodities when it is no longer needed. indeed, disposability, a process whereby workers can be hired and fired – individually and en masse – to meet the demand of capital accumulation, is at the core of marx’s notion of the industrial reserve army of labour (marx, 1990, pp. 784-785). mechanization reduces necessary labour time even as it increases the pace and intensity of work; the new efficiency means less labour is required, thus reducing formerly active labour into a “kind of waste excreted from the system of production and wages” into unemployment and underemployment, and also “separated partially or fully from domains of capitalist exchange and social life” (yates, 2011, pp. 1688-1689, 1679). disposability in marx’s and contemporary marxian writings thus refers to two distinct processes – expendability (producing the reserve army of labour) and the wasting away of the health, bodies and lives of workers. for marx, capitalism “squanders human beings, living labor, more readily than does any other mode of production, squandering not only flesh and blood, but nerves and brain as well” (marx, 1991, p. 180, cited in yates, 2011, fn. 11). marxian perspectives such as yates (2011) posit the disposability of labour as immanent to capitalism as a totalizing mode of production, pointing to the necessity of human labour and the rendering of humans into waste as 8 this is not an exhaustive survey of literatures that might assist in enriching our understanding of different dimensions of disposability of migrant workers. thus, perry (2012, p. 197) draws upon foucault’s analysis of biopower and state racism to illuminate the bio-political significance of the canadian seasonal agricultural workers wherein racialized workers from the global south, deemed the “inferior race,” cultivate life-giving, health-enhancing food for the canadian population, considered a population whose lives are worthy of sustaining. another literature that contributes to an understanding of human disposability in migrant labour migrations focuses on what kevin bales (2004) refers to as the “new slaves” who constitute “disposable people” in the globalized neoliberal economy. the significance of bales’ framing for analysis of temporary migration to canada is not to deem all “low-skilled” temporary worker programs as equivalent to the “new slavery.” nonetheless, clear instances of enslaved temporary workers in canada exist; duped by and indebted to unscrupulous recruiters by the promise of good jobs and permanent residence, many such workers are without status or money and sometimes imprisoned by traffickers (tomlinson, 2019). rather, the same forces (e.g., boundless supply) that render modern slaves vulnerable to slavery and disposability, also severely curtail the costs of maintaining temporary migrant workers and augment their deterioration and disposability. canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 31 contradictory yet necessary dynamics for continued capital accumulation. marxian perspectives have also offered incisive analyses of the various phases of global capitalism – particularly in the global south – that have led to the contemporary worldwide prevalence of temporary contract migration. especially significant has been the now common wisdom that much migrant labour, designated as “low skill,” is “unfree labour” and does not conform to the legally autonomous, formally non-coerced labour that marx identified as the labour form upon which capitalism is quintessentially dependent (bakan & stasiulis, 2012; choudhry & smith, 2016; miles, 1987; sharma, 2006). this has led to fertile analyses of the assemblage of political upheaval, neoliberal economic policies, and financial, military and environmental conditions that have “freed” from sustainable livelihoods an estimated one billion plus people in the global south to function as a burgeoning “relative surplus population” (davis, 2006; united nations human settlements programme, 2003), a small portion of whom are then recruited as “unfree” migrant labour by wealthier states only to be made vulnerable to retrenchment and expulsion. 9 indeed, the tfwp can be understood as exploiting the broader context of cataclysmic economic, social, environmental and political changes in the global south pushing people out of rural livelihoods into urban slums and then out of their home countries, leading to “the internationalization of what marx called the ‘reserve army of labour’” (calugay, halhaire & shragge, 2016, p. 154). in a second and highly influential framework of human disposability – zygmunt bauman’s analysis of the production of “wasted lives” – attention is paid to the production, culture and flow across borders of “impoverished human waste,” as an inescapable outcome of modernization, “order-building” by states, and capitalist economic progress “that proceeds through degrading and devaluing older ways of making a living” (2004, p. 5). whereas previously, and coinciding with colonialism, superfluous people would be transported from colonizing countries to (e.g., settler) colonies, the reverse traffic of the “flotsam and jetsam of planetary tides of human waste” epitomizes modernity. in a developed-society context where economic security of citizens has eroded and with the shrinking and disappearance of the “social state” and the social safety net, new “legitimation formulas” emerge (bauman, 2004, p. 90). unauthorized migrants and asylum seekers (from distant parts of the globe unloaded into “our own backyard”) are an easy target for demonization that accompanies nationalist campaigns promoting security and safety of citizens through mobilization of feelings of public anxiety, risk and insecurity (bauman, 2004, pp. 55-56). they “provide governments with an ideal deviant other”; indeed, bauman “is tempted to say 9 i am unable to do justice of this large body of scholarship on the conditions rife for human disposability in what is often blandly described as “migrant-sending countries.” for a recent illustrative analysis of the ongoing devastating effects of neo-liberal globalization that have resulted in a sustained process of production of unfree migrant labour in the philippines, see spitzer and piper (2014). daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 32 that were there no immigrants knocking at the doors, they would have to be invented” (bauman, 2004, p. 56). while the rendering into waste of “excessive, redundant” mobile populations is the outcome of complex social processes involving many actors (public and private interests including smugglers and traffickers), bauman gives priority to the (destination) nation state, which holds exclusive monopoly, based on its “fictional” and even “phantom-like” claims to sovereignty over performing the task of “sifting out, segregating and disposing of the waste of order-building” (bauman, 2004, p. 33). drawing on agamben’s (1998) ancient roman legal notion of homo sacer, which empties human and divine value from the lives among those so designated, bauman contends that under modernity, it is the uncontested monopoly of the contemporary nation-state that presides over the construction and regulation of distinctions between “citizen and homo sacer, belonging and exclusion, useful (=legitimate) product and waste” (2004, p. 33). realizing the central role of the state (in sending, transit and destination countries) in the active oversight, rejection, incarceration, deportation and speeding up of the biodegradation of bodies is important in recognizing states’ culpability in human rights violations and in the destruction of human beings. while bauman’s analysis has been insightfully utilized to convey the callous disregard for or invisibility of the deaths of “irregularised travellers” and asylum seekers at borders (spijkerboer, 2017) and in immigration detention centres (razack, 2017), it is notable that bauman himself includes economic migrants in his analysis of the flow across borders of “impoverished human waste.” he suggests that economic migrants who manage to land on affluent shores are met by such accusations as “sponging,” holding to “disreputable habits and creeds,” and more recently (especially if they are muslim), charges of terrorist conspiracy. it is possible that some theorists have paid scant attention to the disposability of economic migrants because they hold to a distinction between a population that serves an economic purpose (e.g., as a reserve army of labour) and the “redundant,” whose only purpose is to make modernity possible through their disposability and who are “always on their way to becoming waste” (razack, 2017, p. 3). this is where the marxian insight of the double-nature of labour under capitalism is germane – the necessity of human labour and the relegation of humans as waste as contradictory yet necessary dynamics for continued capital accumulation. as bauman argues, states seek to “find a balance between two blatantly contradictory yet equally vital postulates of airtight borders and of access to cheap, undemanding docile labour” (p. 61).10 10 although the notion of “airtight borders” is a myth, it serves a key ideological function of dehumanizing the “flotsam and jetsam of planetary tides of human waste” (bauman, 2004, p. 57) and of justifying governance centred on securitization. this has seen european and north american governments supplementing tightened border control regulations with a frenzied construction of border walls, barbed wire-topped fences, and the deployment of militarized surveillance, including drones (stasiulis, 2018). canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 33 disposability in canada’s white settler colonialism canadian social justice scholarship has seen a notable resurgence in interest in the framework of settler colonialism (stasiulis & yuval-davis, 1995) for illuminating “ongoing colonialism, the dispossession of indigenous lands, and the actual/attempted elimination of indigenous peoples” in order to inform and support movements for indigenous resurgence (snelgrove, dhamoon & corntassel, 2014, p. 2; see also simpson, 2014). key to understanding the concepts of “white settler society” and “settler colony” is their status as historical constructs and hegemonic myths about the nation, “consigning distinctive roles in production, reproduction and nation-building to indigenous and different groups of european and non-european women and men” (stasiulis & yuval-davis, 1995, p. 8). the generative power of these myths includes “their utility for multinational corporations who have profited immeasurably from the appropriation of indigenous lands and from the cheap and divided labour of racially, ethnically and gender-segmented labour markets” (stasiulis & yuval-davis, 1995, p. 8). as glenn (2015, p. 67) aptly argues, settler colonialism is not merely a past historical event, but rather serves as an ongoing structure that can reveal the “underlying systems of beliefs, practices, and institutional systems that undergird and link the racialization and management” of indigenous peoples and subjugated racialized migrant populations and their descendants. it is also “a framework that is amenable to intersectional understanding because it is widely understood that colonial projects simultaneously structure, race, class and sexual relations between colonists and the colonized” (glenn, 2015, p. 55). the template for disposability of humans in white settler colonial states such as canada was set by the eliminatory projects of colonial authorities and settler elites to reduce, remove, assimilate and erase indigenous peoples, with appropriation of land rather than proletarianization serving as the primary motive (coulthard, 2014) for “eliminating the native” (snelgrove et al., 2014, p. 13). 11 decimation of indigenous peoples by various forms of still unprecedented genocidal violence, as well as the repeated refusals of indigenous peoples to be assimilated to settler colonial ways (simpson, 2014), meant that colonial and capitalist elites had to look elsewhere for labour. indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their lands and confined to reserves, wrested from their sovereign administration, and presumed through various racist, patronizing tropes to hold dispositions unsuited to work the land or take up work in urban areas. in this sense, indigenous peoples were treated as disposable and ultimately in an expanding capitalist economy not indispensable. settler colonial elites were thus compelled to seek bulk foreign 11 it is important to acknowledge, however, that in canada for two centuries (1670-1870), settler colonialists also sought and depended upon indigenous labour for their successful exploitation of natural resources and survivability. indeed, the knowledge and labour of indigenous (both male and female) peoples proved decisive to profitability during two centuries of the fur trade (stasiulis & jhappan, 1995, pp. 101-104). daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 34 labour to build transportation infrastructure, and for the development of multiple and successive natural resources for export, and eventually, industrialization through import substitution (stasiulis & jhappan, 1995, p. 97). from the beginning, however, the recruitment of populations from abroad was bifurcated between those whose assumed moral character, civilization, and physical appearance, judged through specifically white british and northern eurocentric lenses, made them “exalted subjects” fit to populate the nation (thobani, 2007), and those prejudged (through a variety of often sexualized orientalist, anti-black, etc., racisms, each with their own distinctive genealogy) as being “unassimilable” – i.e., not merely embodying serious deficits but rather lacking the innate capacity to be remolded into acceptable settler-citizens. in the second category, and at the bottom of an implicit racial/ethnic ranking, were various groups of migrant men and migrant women (rarely both and rarely family units) who were recruited solely for low-wage, back-breaking labour and under conditions that ravaged the health and well-being of workers. the epistemic exclusion from the process of building and joining the “canadian nation” rendered these migrants deemed unfit for settlement both cheaper than euro-canadian workers and expendable. as “settler culture valorized the heteropatriarchal [white] family as the moral foundation” of canadian society (glenn, 2015, p. 65), the refusal of family migration to migrants from caribbean and asian countries acted both as a form of negative eugenics and another marker of their disposability. the assumption here was that if their families were not granted access, these migrants would be more likely to return to their country of origin once their labour was no longer required. the supposition that some migrants with civilizational deficits were unfit and would not settle made it easier to justify the imposition upon such workers of multiple forms of political, cultural, and spatial exclusion, and methods of labour discipline rejected by settler-workers. reinforcing the othering of those recruited solely for their flexible labour was the exclusion from tangible benefits accorded by the state to the national citizen-subject “in the form of proprietorial access to land, citizenship, mobility, employment [options], social citizenship” (thobani, 2007, p. 21) and other (e.g., civil and political) rights, including the right to mobilize, dissent and struggle against inhumane and illegal conditions. historical precedents for disposable migrant labour the entry into what is now western canada beginning in 1858 of thousands of chinese peasants and workers, driven from rural china by war, rebellion and poverty, bore many of the hallmarks of a temporary migrant labour movement. some of this army of male labourers took up a variety of types of work on the canadian west coast, toiling as labourers, cooks, laundrymen, canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 35 teamsters, domestic servants, and providing auxiliary services to mining communities (chan, 1983, 2013; creese, 1988). like contemporary foreign workers, chinese labourers were governed by discriminatory legislation and employer practices: the head taxes imposed upon them, reaching a historic high of $500 in 1923, followed by an almost complete ban on immigration; the prohibitive costs and ultimate ban against bringing in spouses and children; restrictive covenants in some cities such as vancouver, with respect to purchase of property; indenture with specific employers and debt bondage to recruiters; wages significantly (sometimes 50%) lower than for white workers; and barriers imposed to citizenship acquisition and access to professions. all of these measures clearly demarcated the chinese as cheap, unfree and disposable labour, rather than as permanent residents or national subjects. the logic of disposability was wretchedly transparent in the high numbers (600) of estimated deaths among the 15,000 chinese railway workers in 1880-1885, and eugenics-informed legislation “protecting” white women from workplace interaction and intimacy with chinese men in the isolated male bachelor societies.12 the bulk labour of male chinese workers is but one of several significant historical precedents for temporary migrant worker schemes in canada, that established niches in the labour market, filled through recruitment of foreign workers made vulnerable and considered disposable through their positioning as poor, racialized, from the global south, and often gender-segregated. black caribbean female domestic workers were another group that historically were treated as hyper-exploitable and disposable migrant labour. as summed up by agnes calliste (1994, p. 132), canada’s immigration policy regarding blacks “was structured by a dialectic of economic, political and ideological relations: employers’ demand for cheap labour to do unskilled and domestic work was set in tension with the state’s desire to exclude blacks as permanent settlers.” nonetheless, unlike many affluent states (e.g., in europe), canada for the most part “eschewed guest worker programs for most of the twentieth century, [recruiting] migrants as permanent settlers and future citizens” (walsh, 2014, p. 584). the contemporary shift in immigration policy from a policy of overwhelmingly permanent immigrant settlement toward increasing reliance on unfree, temporary workers can be traced to the 1973 precursor to today’s temporary work programs known as the non-immigrant employment authorization program (nieap). the nieap relied on legal differences 12 while these early chinese migrants frequently remained in canada and are part of canada’s historical narrative regarding early “settlers,” the legal scaffold of tight controls and restrictions governing their work and lives, and sometimes a total disregard for the conditions that were to protect their health and lives, are strikingly similar to modern-day policies and practices governing contemporary unfree, racialized migrant workers. so too are the discourses and emotive responses from white canada that blocked integration of this so-called “yellow peril” with an admixture of “intense fear, hatred and demonization” (pon, coloma, kwak & huynh, 2017, pp. 5-6). daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 36 organized among citizens, immigrants (permanent residents) and migrant workers to ensure employer access to an unfree migrant workforce. migrants were regulated in this program through a foreign work visa assigning them to a specified employer, stipulating the workers’ occupation, residence, length and terms of employment in canada, and the expectation of immediate exit from the country upon expiration of the labour contract (sharma, 2006, p. 19). elaborating on the sites and technologies of “disposability” inherent in the burgeoning in temporary migrant schemes and numbers of workers, especially in low wage sectors of the labour market, is important to elucidate the obstacles to achievement of rights and equality with citizen-workers. once disposability alongside hyper-exploitability are accepted as the underlying principles driving canada’s low-wage temporary worker programs, the idea that significant and long-lasting change can occur merely or primarily through lobbying and incremental reform processes is seriously brought into question. sites and technologies of migrant disposability while all nation-building involves forms of exclusion of populations deemed as unqualified for national subjecthood and citizenship, there is an inherent dynamic of elimination of indigenous peoples and disposability of racialized migrant bodies in canadian nation-building, linked to canada’s foundations as a white settler colony. the technologies of disposability are not identical for indigenous people and migrants. for instance, the “technology of erasure” through cultural assimilation practiced on indigenous peoples (glenn, 2015, p. 68) is not executed for temporary migrant workers who unlike (permanent resident) immigrants are ineligible for settlement or integration services (stasiulis, hughes & amery, 2011; alberta federation of labour, 2007). similarly, migrant workers but not indigenous peoples may face legal deportation (see below on “medical repatriation”), although both populations are subject to forms of spatial containment. migrant workers may be spatially confined and hidden or invisibilized (e.g., in private family households or on farms), whereas many indigenous peoples are confined on reserves, rendering both populations as out of sight and out of mind. both types of confinement are also frequently linked to exposure to waterand air-borne harmful toxins. rather than moving toward some form of “post-settler” form of governmentality, the normalization and expansion in recruitment of temporary low-wage migrant labour renews and reproduces the white settler colonial logic of dividing populations between worthy settler-citizens, and disposable subhumans. in the construction of migrant disposability, the role of law, especially canadian immigration law, but also provincial employment law, is critical here in securing the link between temporary status and disposability (fudge, canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 37 2012; marsden, 2011, 2018). the disposability of temporary migrant labour is constantly reproduced in law: a wobbly legal scaffolding of migrant worker temporariness, protections, omissions and implicit threats, reflecting the interests of receiving and sending states (intent on migrant remittances), and often masking the free reign given to employers and unregulated intermediaries such as labour recruiters and immigration consultants. one way of outlining the processes of disposability that shape and constrain every aspect of migrant workers’ lives is to examine the sites, technologies, and discourses of migrant labour disposability. for instance, razack (2017) documents how “waste disposal” of immigrant detainees occurs in prisons that serve as immigration detention centres, while spikjkerboer (2017) argues that the border and security laws of states compel unauthorized migrants to evade border controls, resulting in deaths. for legally employed temporary migrants, there are several sites, technologies and corresponding sets of powerful stakeholders that contribute to their disposability. these sites include, first, the transborder space of recruitment, migration and contract employment, where the chief actors are various authorities in sending and receiving states (including sub-national states), labour brokers, and employers. as discussed below, the workplace, accommodation, transportation modes, inadequate health care system, and the repatriation to sending countries all constitute additional key sites for disposability of temporary migrant workers. both an excess of action (tight regulation of workers) and deliberate inaction (in protection of workers’ safety and rights, tracking and punishment of non-compliant employers) reproduce the disposability of migrant workers. inherent in the admission and legal status of all temporary worker programs is the notion of “temporariness,” which is typically understood as a residency of short duration and limited rights, carrying with it an implicit possibility of removal.13 as rajkumar, berkowitz, vosko, preston & latham (2012, pp. 485-486) point out, temporariness in migrant worker schemes exists along a continuum, offering “privileged forms of temporariness” to the “high skilled” and “restricted forms of temporariness” for the “low skilled.” the former may be “temporarily temporary” while the latter are “permanently temporary.” this means that regardless of time spent working in canada, the vast majority of low skill workers entering through temporary work schemes remain tied through their work permits to individual employers. they never attain the status of permanent residents and are denied such rights as security of presence, family reunification, eligibility for 13 in april 2011, under the harper conservative administration, temporary residence and removal became institutionalized in the “four-in, four-out” rule for temporary migrant workers. under this rule, temporary foreign workers who worked in canada for four years were not eligible to become temporary foreign workers again unless they are out of canada for four additional years. under the trudeau liberal government, this rule was rescinded, which lengthened the time workers could legally be in canada, yet provided no pathway to permanent status. daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 38 settlement and access to most social welfare services. the circumstances of their work and housing conditions (e.g., caregivers “hidden in the household,” agricultural workers housed far from main roads) render them concealed and segregated, and shape their exclusion from integration in the local communities where they work and live (basok, 2002; binford, 2013; hennebry, mclaughlin & preibisch, 2016; stasiulis & bakan, 2003). the living conditions for low-wage migrant workers are by no means uniform and conditions of residence, within the discretionary control of employers vary. factors such as the very limited non-work hours for migrants, the material deprivation and unhygienic conditions of much employer-provided accommodation (particularly for seasonal agricultural workers), predispose neighbours living in the same communities to fear and avoid social interaction with migrant workers. in a 2013 open letter to the mayor of leamington, the activist group justicia for migrant workers (j4mw) remarked upon the open hostility from members of the city council shown towards jamaican migrant workers, disparaging their use of public libraries, alleging that too many “loiter” downtown and are “lewd” to local women, and criticizing the growth of “ethnic businesses” catering to migrant workers. j4mw argued that these negative and fearful attitudes of city councilors reflect forms of racial stigmatization, and familiar racialized, sexualized tropes of dangerous black men, that are designed to segregate migrant workers as much as possible from “the white citizens” of the community (j4mw, 2013). disposability, while frequently undefined, is linked to temporary migrant worker deportability. harsha walia, for instance discusses how these two conditions of migrant workers are interlinked in arguing that, “[t]he condition of being deportable assures that migrant workers can be super-exploited, as well as being readily disposable, especially during moments of labour unrest or economic recession” (2010, p. 79, emphasis added). in other words, disposability is here regarded as carrying through with termination of employment and actual removal of workers to their country of origin when migrants resist deplorable conditions or when structural conditions worsen. deportability, endemic among migrant workers who are “permanently temporary” pertains more to the overriding threat of involuntary removal to sending countries than to the actual practice of deportation (basok, bélanger & rivas, 2014, p. 1394). deportability constitutes “one of the main disciplinary techniques” assuring compliance among workers to accept harmful and inhumane conditions in working and living conditions and to surrender their autonomy and endure injury and illness, pain and fear (basok et al., 2014, pp. 1395, 1405). as basok et al. argue, many migrants fear deportation regardless of whether they are legally in the country on a temporary worker visa or contract or if they are working without authorization, but this deportability is experienced in a variety of ways and also variably enforced (2014, p. 1399). notably, they suggest that “it is not the frequency of deportation, but its canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 39 possibility that keeps unauthorized migrants anxious, fearful and disciplined” (p. 1399). citizen-workers by contrast are conspicuously free of this particular source of fear, anxiety and discipline, although they may experience many sources of employment precarity. as i suggest below, disposability permeates many other sites in migrant journeys that exemplify and heighten the disposability of temporary migrant workers. as (live-in) caregivers and seasonal agricultural workers together account for about twothirds of all low-wage migrant workers, virtually all from global south countries such as mexico, the philippines, and jamaica, examples are drawn from these two sectors to illuminate the logic of migrant disposability (faraday, 2016, p. 30). health deterioration linked to job, transport, and living conditions the job site offers an array of sector-specific conditions that hasten the physical and mental health deterioration of temporary migrants. among those most often noted in scholarly and community-based research on live-in caregivers, where the workplace and housing are combined and provided by the employer are: non-payment of earned wages and overtime; long work hours and being on call 24 hours a day; exhaustion; substandard and unhealthy housing (e.g., unventilated laundry and basement rooms or sharing a child’s room), insufficient and poor quality food; lack of privacy; employer surveillance; sexual abuse; inability to take sick leave; isolation and loneliness linked to separation from family; sexual and racial harassment; and vulnerability to false accusations of theft (spitzer & torres, 2008, pp. 15-16; stasiulis & bakan 2002, pp. 252-253; vahabi, wong & lofters, 2018, pp. 592, 596). live-in caregivers experience an absence of control and autonomy in most aspects of their lives, stemming from the curtailment by employers of their movements, family life, visitors, time off, cooking, and use of space. conditions affecting caregivers’ physical and mental health show variation across employing households, and it is difficult to generalize on the basis of small samples of research interviews or self-reporting questionnaires (carlos & wilson, 2018; vahabi, wong & lofters, 2018). nonetheless, the evidence is strongly suggestive of a high prevalence of physical and mental health decline among caregivers since arriving in canada (e.g., 43% of 30 respondents working in the greater toronto area (gta) reported a decline in physical health and 30% reported poor mental health; vahabi et al., 2018, p. 595).14 another study that interviewed 21 lcp filipina migrants in the gta 14 the most common conditions reported as post-arrival health issues in vahabi et al.’s study were: “urinary tract infection, high blood pressure, intestinal/stomach problems and respiratory illnesses” (2018, p. 595). the literature (oddly) refers to such health decline as the “healthy immigrant effect,… i.e., migrant workers arrive healthy as indicated during [mandatory] predeparture medical screening; [subsequently] their health status declines” while they are working daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 40 (carlos & wilson, 2018) discusses the prevalent violation of the federal government lcp requirement of employer-provided third-party health insurance in the first three months prior to lcp migrant eligibility to join the (ontario) provincial health plan. in this study, only one-quarter of participants were provided such mandated health care. those not covered by insurance jeopardize their health by failing to seek medical care when injured or ill until their provincial insurance kicks in. given the hazardous conditions and punishing pace of work associated with agricultural work,15 it is unsurprising that local residents routinely reject jobs on farms because of health and safety concerns (preibisch & hennebry, 2011, p. 1034). cattle industry and other farmer associations regard temporary foreign workers as a “lifeline” filling vital positions rejected by canadian candidates in the “midst of an acute labour crisis” (alberta cattle feeders’ association, 2017). as hennebry (2010, p. 73) observes, the significant increase in seasonal agricultural workers in the last 25 years has meant that a growing share of occupations linked to the canadian food system with high rates of workplace injury, work-related illness and death are taken up by racialized migrant workers from the global south. among the most serious health risks facing migrant farm workers are: viral, respiratory, neurological and physical illnesses stemming from unprotected handling of and exposure to pesticides and chemicals, musculoskeletal injury, contact with food and water-borne diseases associated with fertilizers, repetitive stress injuries, gastroenterological issues, sexual health conditions, and mental health concerns (hennebry, 2010, p. 75; mclaughlin, hennebry & haines, 2014, p. 2; orkin et al., 2013; pysklywec, mclaughlin, tew & haines, 2011). while farm workers, regardless of their citizenship status, experience many of these agricultural health risks, the level of risk is greatly amplified in the case of migrant workers. in ontario, where roughly half of agricultural migrant workers are recruited, protection under the occupational health and safety (ohs) act came late to agricultural workers, introduced only in 2006. in their 2010-2012 interviews with 100 migrant (primarily mexican and jamaican) farmworkers with self-reported health issues or injuries, and 64 stakeholders (e.g., employers, government officials and migrant advocates), mclaughlin et al. (2014, p. 8) found that while there were reported improvements in the health and safety of some workplaces since the adoption of the ohs, there was limited evidence of improved training and protection in many agricultural worksites. echoing earlier (pre-ohs coverage) studies that found that less than one-quarter of migrants working in ontario and bc with pesticides and farm machinery had received formal training (hennebry & preibisch, 2012; russell, 2003), only 13% of the 100 migrant mexican and and residing in canada (vahabi et al., 2018, p. 596). agricultural seasonal workers recruited into the sawp must also pass such medical screening prior to arrival in canada. 15 “between 1990 and 2012, there were 2,324 agriculture-related fatalities in canada, an average of 101 fatalities each year” (united food & commercial workers union canada, 2018, p. 1). canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 41 caribbean workers had received training in safe pesticide use. while 75% were given gloves, less than five percent were provided with a mask or other personal protective equipment. in a scene starkly illuminating the divide between non-citizen workers and citizen workers in documentary film maker min sook lee’s (2016) migrant dreams, shot in leamington ontario, unprotected migrant workers are spraying pesticides in a greenhouse while a supervisor walks in, completely suited-up and masked. migrant farmworkers commonly work 63-65 hours per week (in contrast with the standard canadian 40 hour week), at a punishing pace, in extreme weather, with exposure to toxic chemicals, and under pressure to exceed digitally monitored targets (mclaughlin et al., 2014, p. 5; hennebry et al., 2016, p. 529). earlier studies have found illness and injury rates to be approximately 25% for mexican workers and jamaican workers, with onethird of the jamaican workers reporting a long-term disability as a result of illness or injury from working in canada (binford, 2013; russell, 2003). researchers identify a myriad of reasons for the intensified risks of injury, illness and death doing farm work among agricultural migrant workers. they include the jurisdictional quagmire stemming from joint governance through federal immigration programs and provincial legislation, wherein certain protections such as health insurance and ohs are promised by the federal sawp but are within the purview of the provincial jurisdiction, where they are most often poorly administered or completely ignored. in addition, researchers cite the multiple barriers that exist to seeking health care and worker’s compensation including: fear of termination; loss of wages or other punitive consequences from employers; lack of independent transportation; language and cultural-related barriers; absence of knowledge of the health care system, insurance coverage or worker’s compensation claim system; long work hours and limited clinic hours; and worker reluctance to lose paid work hours (orkin et al., 2014). seasonal agricultural workers are covered by provincial health insurance upon entry in ontario, yet only about 20% carry an ohip card; those who enter through other low-wage migrant programs, such as migrant caregivers, have a three-month probationary period. in their survey of nearly 600 migrant farm workers in ontario, hennebry et al. (2016, pp. 529-530) found that, despite the ubiquity in debilitating health problems, with over half of workers citing exhaustion, back pain and muscle fatigue, less than one quarter reported seeing a doctor or indeed receiving information about use of the health care and insurance system, and 93% did not know how to access workplace safety insurance. most of those who were injured or ill postponed medical visits (hennebry, 2010, p. 76). mclaughlin et al. (2014, p. 13) argue that a major barrier to structural and policy reforms that might promote long-term migrant worker health is the ease with which employers can replace older, injured and ill workers with “younger, fitter, healthier workers at the beginning of each season” – in other words, their disposability. as discussed below, fear of deportation following injury or illness has a real substantive basis in the daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 42 practice of medical repatriation from canada to the migrants’ home countries (orkin et al., 2014). a high level of carelessness for the safety of agricultural migrant workers on the part of employers and farmworker intermediaries (such as farm labour contractors) is evident in road transport – another common site for injury and deaths among migrant agricultural workers. in 2012, 10 peruvian farmworkers were killed in a collision near stratford, ontario, between a van carrying the workers and a flatbed truck (barnes, 2013, p. 656). barnes (2013) reports on a spate of transportation-related deaths and injuries of migrant farm workers from the global south. particularly notable were the rising number of bicycle deaths (many hit-and-run) among mexican workers in the leamington area, with its “lack of adequate bike paths along the rural roads between farms and commercial centers” (barnes, 2013, p. 654). living conditions of migrant farm workers, usually on employers’ property, have repeatedly been identified in migrant surveys and media reports as hazardous to health (hennebry, 2010, p. 74). housing is regularly described as “dilapidated, unsanitary, overcrowded and poorly ventilated” (preibisch & hennebry, 2011, p. 1035). hazards of deplorable living conditions and toxic workplaces merge as workers are provided untreated water, inadequate toilet facilities and living quarters in close proximity to pesticides and fertilizers (hennebry, 2010, p. 74). as hennebry suggests (2010, p. 75), while not all migrant worker housing is inadequate, a lack of consistency exists because of a dire under-regulation and absence of federal guidelines regarding accommodation and amenities for migrant farm workers, a conclusion similarly reached in a “primary agriculture stream review” commissioned by the canadian government (employment & social development canada, 2019b). employers resist the suggestion of standardized housing requirements, however, worrying that a potential national standard would increase their costs, leaving the federal government resigned to accepting that this matter is too “complex” to be nationally regulated (employment & social development canada, 2019b). medical repatriation the practice of “medical repatriation” of migrant farm workers, who develop health problems or injuries that prevent them from continuing work, crystallizes the disposability of low-skill migrant workers. through rare access to canadian government records related to repatriation for medical purposes of injured and ill migrant farm workers during 2001-2011,16 orkin 16 records on the repatriation of migrant farm workers are administered by “foreign agricultural resource management services, a federally incorporated non-profit corporation authorized by employment and social development canada” (orkin et al., 2013, p. 193). such records are not normally available for public or academic examination, but were brought to light when they were canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 43 et al. (2014) found that 787 repatriations to barbados, mexico and other home countries occurred among 170,315 migrant farm workers in ontario (4.62 repatriations per 1000 workers). the most commonly identified diagnostic reasons for repatriation were for medical or surgical reasons, including musculoskeletal (strained, broken or severed upper and lower extremities), gastrointestinal-related illnesses and external trauma, including poisoning. while approximately 97% farm workers are male, three medical repatriations were attributed to pregnancy of female migrant workers. only a tiny fraction (1.3%) of medical repatriations resulted from migrant workers’ requests. many migrant workers, fearing termination or repatriation, continue to work with serious health concerns, while others leave their workplaces but resist deportation in the fear that they will be unable to access health care in their home countries (orkin et al., 2014). migrants who have fallen ill or are injured face pressure to return home by representatives of their sendingcountry government agencies. when they seek medical care, time off to recover, or are hospitalized, many migrants are fired and sent home or not invited back the following season (hennebry et al., 2016, p. 531). as orkin et al. (2014, p. 196) argue, medical repatriation is “at once an occupational health event, an international deportation and a termination of employment” that is uniquely imposed upon migrant workers: “[t]here are perhaps no other canadian occupational settings where workplace injuries and illnesses…[ ]…result in employment termination and deportation without further medical care or income security.” indeed, the canadian labour congress “has identified repatriation provisions in [sawp] contracts as the employer’s bluntest tool to suppress workers’ rights” (orkin et al., 2014, p. 196) the disposability of migrant workers continues once they have been deemed too ill or injured to work. their provincial health care expires when their employment is terminated or their contracts expire, and they are normally shipped home to deal with under-resourced health care systems in their home countries. common outcomes such as chronic illnesses, terminal conditions and deaths are unmonitored and far from canadian public consciousness. the case of sheldon mckenzie, a jamaican farm worker who in january 2015 sustained an ultimately fatal head injury at work in a tomato farm in leamington illuminates this end-stage of the disposability cycle for low-wage migrant workers. his relatives in toronto fought pressure from a jamaican consulate liaison officer to ship him home and began the process of application of a humanitarian visa to permit him to remain until his untimely death in a windsor hospital (marchitelli, 2016). his cousin remarked of the prevalent practice of medical repatriation of injured migrant farm workers: “it’s worse than slavery – they dispose of them” (marchitelli, 2016). the indifference and absence of monitoring by the canadian government regarding health outcomes following medical repatriation and the absence of entered into evidence during a human rights tribunal of ontario hearing concerning the death of ned peart, a migrant farm worker. daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 44 inquests into migrant deaths are further indicators of the routine treatment of racialized migrant workers from the global south as disposable sub-human units of production. such deaths are deemed unworthy of investigation, and at least within canada’s borders, the loss of migrant lives is rendered invisible, ungrievable and undeserving of memorialization (butler, 2004). holding non-compliant employers accountable? until recently, employers of temporary workers faced few consequences for non-compliance with labour and health-and-safety laws. a 2017 report by the federal auditor general chastised the tfwp for its lack of oversight. as a result, in 2018 the trudeau government stepped up employer inspections and the online naming and shaming of non-compliant employers (wright, 2018). 17 while immigration, refugees and citizenship canada’s website “list of ineligible employers,” established to identify employers in breach of provincial laws protecting tfwp workers had listed only one employer in august 2017 (wright, 2018), this number jumped to 168 as of time of writing (may 2019; see immigration, refugees & citizenship canada, 2019). of these 168 non-compliant employers, 11 of whom were identifiably in the primary agriculture section, the reasons for non-compliance were not listed for 52 employers, most of whom faced a oneto two-year ban on hiring temporary workers. the most commonly listed provision breached by employers was the reported failure to provide the inspector with documents (57); the next most common (47) was failure to match pay or working conditions or actual job listed on the offer of employment. while monetary penalties varied in amount, ranging from $500 to (the second highest amount of) $16,000, the median monetary penalty was a paltry $1000 imposed upon 36 employers. the highest fine of $54,000 (plus a one-year ban) was levied against cape breton-based kameron coal management ltd., whose breach of the tfwp program was over-paying american workers in comparison to the rates that had been advertised locally. interestingly, here the severest punishment was meant to protect local canadian workers, rather than exploited migrant workers. this concern with the impact of the tfwp on citizen-workers is consistent with a major focus of the federal auditor general’s report, where the program is critiqued for allowing (usually lower-paid) international workers to take jobs that out-of-work canadians could fill (press, 2017). thus, canadian government efforts to deter the use of foreign workers as a preferred workforce have been accompanied by polarizing nativist discourses 17 on-site inspections by employment social development increased seven-fold in one year, with 1,340 on-site inspections reported to have been launched and in various stages of completion by may 2018 (wright, 2018). canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 45 that pit canadian settler-citizens against temporary and non-status foreign workers. an important instance of this was the harper government’s 2014 clampdown on temporary migrant workers through its “putting canadians first” rhetoric, that not only involved significant set-backs for migrant worker rights but also legitimized the hostility and suspicion of migrant workers on the part of canadian workers. under the liberal trudeau government, the federal auditor general’s report criticized the caregiver stream of the tfwp for providing “an immigration loophole for families to reunite in canada, rather than fill a labour shortage” (press, 2017), reiterating the portrayal of migrant live-in caregivers as “system cheaters,” first voiced by former conservative immigration minister jason kenney (gaucher, 2019), and conveniently ignoring an explicit, long-standing objective of the former livein caregiver program – namely to provide a pathway to permanent residence for those who had fulfilled two years of live-in caregiving (stasiulis & bakan, 2002). while two of the 17 reasons for non-compliance listed on the non-compliant employer website spoke directly to breaches of the live-in caregiver program, including the non-provision of “private and furnished living space in the home,” none of the 168 non-compliant employers were identifiably participating in the migrant caregiver program and there were no breaches listed under the two explicitly caregiver non-compliance breaches. thus, the recent increased monitoring and public visibility given to employers who are seen to violate provisions of the tfwp have reinforced rather than undermined divisions between canadians and disposable others and done little to foster equitable conditions in the treatment of the two workforces. conclusion: implications of migrant disposability for migrant worker justice kristina torres, 28, came to canada from the philippines under a federal live-in caregiver program that she said has left her feeling “disposable” and less than human. (thompson, 2016) commenting on the sea change in government migration policy favouring temporary migration, byl (2011, p. 96) remarks that the astonishing rise in tfws “indicates a clear shift in government policy, which has occurred without public debate, without a clear analysis of tfw programs or the outcomes of such programs. canada has acquired a guest worker program that rivals those of the united states and europe and it appears that most canadians are completely unaware of this fundamental change in how we deal with people wishing to come to canada” (2010, p. 96). given that lowwage migrant workers are tied to employer-specific permits, threats of termination and repatriation are powerful disciplinary strategies. these daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 46 migrants endure painfully long separations from their families and often cannot return home because of the debt bondage to unscrupulous recruiters and because of the compulsion to send home remittances (vahabi et al., 2018, p. 592). ill health, injury, and pregnancy result in termination or non-renewal of work permits, denial of or delay in medical treatment (as provincial health insurance is dependent upon valid work visa) and repatriation. the assumed disposability of low-wage migrant workers has led to a growing and deep divide between “two canadas”: the first populated in the majority by white, middle class canadians, governed by a combination of liberal democratic and neo-liberal principles (in tension with each other); and the second (the proliferating “zones of exceptionalism”) governed by illiberal and neo-liberal principles. socially and sometimes physically segregated from the first canada, an entirely different and inhospitable canada is experienced by lowwage migrant workers from the global south. the expanded preference for “permanently temporary” labourers from the global south over immigrants with pathways to citizenship reflects the status of temporary labour schemes as an enduring labour market tool intended to provide maximum flexibility and profitability for employers in a growing number of sectors in the canadian economy (keung, 2017). this trend is in keeping with a shift in global north countries “from macroeconomic policies to multiple micro programmes directed at specific labour market niches” relying piecemeal on increasing the number of temporary foreign workers to fill permanent labour shortages (barnes, 2013, p. 657). the augmented receptivity among employers and public officials towards expanding temporary foreign worker programs is not accompanied, however, by a welcoming environment in the wider community for those recruited through these programs. unlike permanent residency, temporary migrant schemes rely upon the endless supply in poorer countries of younger, fitter and healthier workers, who undergo pre-migration health screening, permitting employers to regularly terminate, repatriate and rehire new workforces. every site in the multiple phases of the circular migratory process and work sojourn of lowwage temporary workers (pre-departure, travel, workplace, living conditions, return) has been associated with health vulnerabilities, inordinate stress and degradation of the physical and mental well-being of workers, resulting in a high incidence of chronic injuries, terminal illnesses and uninvestigated deaths. fear of termination by employers for daring to show human frailties and seeking treatment for injury or illness further hastens the likelihood of deportation to sending countries. migration scholars and advocates have suggested the inappropriateness for vulnerable migrant workers of the one-size-fits-all canadian health care system designed for permanent residents and citizen workers and the need for more transnational forms of migrant health and safety, and health care through coordinating access to information, training, and year-round insurance between sending and receiving countries (hennebry et al., 2016, p. canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 47 535). the continuous stalling and lax administration of reforms that would free workers to seek more beneficial paths to workplace safety and health (such as delinking employment contracts from individual employers) reflects the historical foundations of canada’s contemporary migrant worker schemes in an “inherited background field [of settler colonialism] within which market, racist, patriarchal and state relations converge” (coulthard, 2014, p. 14). intrinsic to nation-building in settler colonial states is a “logic of elimination,” that continues to draw upon racialized, north-south, class and gendered stereotypes regarding migrant fitness for and exclusion from citizenship and justifies a revolving door of disposable labourers. the human degradation within the seasonal agricultural worker program, now in operation for over half a century, is less a “relic of canada’s racist and colonial past” (perry, 2012, p. 189) than a contemporary iteration of this settler colonial logic. migrant activists have fought for decades to make small gains in the iniquitous conditions of temporary migrant work with respect to wages, benefits, worker autonomy, and right to family life, and to stem and reverse the deterioration in some of these legislated conditions and de facto exemption from worker and human rights protections. 18 the marked expansion in temporary migrant work sectors and numbers, and the narrowing of paths to permanent residence over the last couple of decades raises significant social justice flags. as sarah marsden has argued “the effects of less-than-permanent residence on migrants should be of concern to a liberal democracy that purports to maintain equality rights for those within its territory” (2011, p. 2l1). greater visibility, recognition, and democratic scrutiny of the inhumane conditions that literally degrade and destroy migrant bodies and lives may bring much needed and more urgent pressure to examine the very premises of government temporary worker programs that deem it appropriate to use and discard human beings for the sake of corporate profit, and cheaper food and privatized care for canadian citizens. various organizations seeking change on behalf of migrant farm workers, migrant caregivers and other low-wage temporary workers advance different frames (e.g., combatting precarity, ending unfree labour) and employ a rich array of practices and strategies to advocate for the labour and human rights of migrant workers, including public protests, legal education, assisting individual cases, and (federal and provincial) legal and policy reform. the most far-reaching demand sought over several decades by coalitions of self 18 in 2014, under the harper conservative government, the right of migrant caregivers to apply for permanent residence in canada was restricted, as a cap of 5,500 permanent residents annually among migrant caregivers was imposed, introducing new uncertainty and vulnerability among all those admitted into this program. the trudeau liberal government has introduced new requirements (e.g., application for a lmia) for migrant caregivers to remain in canada following expiration of two-year work permit, adding new costs and time to seeking permanence in canada (mckiernan, 2019). daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 48 organized migrant worker groups and their allies continues to be permanent residence status for all migrant workers upon arrival. in the interim, the migrant worker alliance for change seeks “the creation of open or occupation specific work permits that are not reliant on employers and that would allow workers to move freely between jobs and workplaces and work for any employer in a sector” (migrant worker alliance for change, 2019). the implicit premise of much advocacy is that lobbying governments will incrementally and eventually reduce or eliminate the hazardous conditions of temporary migrants; this evinces a faith in liberal democratic institutions that from time to time bears fruit, but about which many migrant justice organizations are legitimately skeptical, even as they engage in such advocacy in tandem with other strategies seeking in effect to end temporary migrant worker schemes. incremental reform strategies fail to recognize the changed market conditions in canada and globally wherein precarious work has been on the rise since the 1980s in the form of temporary, seasonal, casual and contract labour, and the so-called “gig economy” (kalleberg, 2009). provincial conservative governments are riding the tides of antiimmigrant and racist sentiments in canada, especially prevalent among conservative voters, to impose punitive and exclusionary (“canadians first”) policies against migrants and asylum seekers.19 recent shifts towards more disciplinary and less justice-based migrant worker policies illustrate how unwarranted is the assumption that the deeply racialized and eliminatory dynamics of settler colonialism are a thing of the past, rather than an ongoing reality not only for indigenous peoples but also for poor racialized migrant women and men from the global south. as one instance of recognition of the limited impact on migrant social justice of liberal democratic reform, the framing of activism of leamingtonbased justicia for migrant workers (j4mw), a non-profit activist collective that fights for space for workers to articulate their concerns without fear of repatriation, appears implicitly to reflect the notion that temporary migrant schemes are built upon the total control, disposability and dehumanization of migrants. j4mw’s demands for transforming deeper structural inequalities tied to neoliberal globalization in sending countries that produce a surplus of labour, and canada’s neo-colonial and racist treatment of migrant workers, suggest a transnational framework of “migrant as human” that links the disposability of migrants to processes of ongoing settler colonial violence (barnes, 2013, pp. 662-663). while some government analysis of the 19 according to a poll conducted by ekos in april 2019, 40% of canadians said that they believe there are “too many “visible minorities coming to canada,” with a whopping 71% of conservatives voicing this opinion in contrast to only 19% of liberal supporters (domaise, 2019). among recent punitive policies and laws imposed upon migrants and racialized/religious minorities are the slashing of legal aid for refugees and migrants by doug ford’s conservative ontario government (gray, 2019), and the so-called “secularism law” that prohibits judges, police officers, government lawyers and teachers from wearing “religious symbols” (such as hijabs and turbans) in quebec introduced by the caq government of françois legault (authier, 2019). canada’s “post-settler” embrace of disposable migrant labour studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 1, 22-54, 2020 49 shortcomings of temporary migrant labour schemes pit migrant workers (portrayed as “taking the jobs that out-of-work canadians could fill”) against marginalized populations in canada with high unemployment rates such as indigenous peoples, a disposability lens suggest that the two populations have in common their targeting for exclusion, demonization, dehumanization and elimination. a disposability lens helps account for the obdurate resistance of government migrant worker schemes to lasting progressive transformation, and in particular the refusal of the federal government to grant permanent residence and the civil freedoms of canadian citizens (such as the right to change employers and occupations) to all migrant workers. it also suggests the potential for fruitful alliances among groups enmeshed in a neo-settler colonial logic of elimination in seeking more fundamental and decolonizing structural change.20 in many instances, those migrants at the “sharp end of deregulated labour markets” (anderson, 2010, p. 300) remain segregated and stigmatized, their exclusion and disposability constituted through immigration law and a host of sites in their work sojourn and migrant journeys that consign them to a zone of exceptionality in the second, less visible canada. as temporary workers are recruited in ever expanding sectors of the economy, however, they are less likely to be in “hermetically sealed communities” (de genova, 2002, p. 422) than in the past, and instead more likely to be coworkers, neighbours, clients, intimate friends and members of households engaged in social relations with citizens and permanent residents. this expanded range of social relations with “ordinary canadians” offers opportunities for greater visibility, education, alliances and activism. such activism would be informed by an utter rejection of “permanently temporary” migrant worker programs that are premised on the inherent wasting away and disposability of human beings. acknowledgements a version of this paper was presented to the “canada program” at the weatherhead centre for international affairs, harvard university, on november 18, 2019. i gratefully acknowledge the insightful and critical comments on an earlier draft of this article i received from salina abji, megan gaucher, zaheera jinnah, jamie liew, augustine park, blair rutherford, and two anonymous reviewers. 20 the question of whether racialized migrants or people of colour should be considered “settlers” by virtue of living and owning land appropriated by indigenous peoples is an important question for social justice struggles (see lawrence & dua, 2005; snelgrove, dhamoon & corntassel, 2014). while this complex debate is beyond the scope of this paper, my hope is that the foregrounding of the “disposability” of both indigenous peoples and racialized, low-wage temporary migrants offers new understanding for some of 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(2010). transient servitude: migrant labour in canada and the apartheid of citizenship. race & class, 52(1), 71-84. wolfe, p. (2006). settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387-409. wright, t. (2018, may 13). liberals step up monitoring for temporary foreign workers program. cbc news. retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-temporaryforeign-workers-audit-1.4661312 yates, m. (2011). the human-as-waste, the labor theory of value and disposability in contemporary capitalism. antipode, 43(5), 1679-1695. capurri final feb 7 16 correspondence address: valentina capurri, department of geography & environmental studies, ryerson university, 350 victoria street, toronto, on, m5b 2k3, email: vcapurri@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 170-173, 2017 book review issues in social justice: citizenship and transnational struggles basok, tanya & ilcan, suzan. (2013). don mills, on: oxford university press. isbn 9780195437751 (paper) ca$64.95. 208 pages valentina capurri ryerson university, canada issues in social justice is an excellent overview of core concepts that inform the debate on social justice within an increasingly global context. authors tanya basok and suzan ilcan, both sociologists, combine a strong theoretical analysis with more of an “on the ground” perspective that makes this text accessible not only to academics and professionals but also to students and the general public. in the introduction, the authors clarify that their study is intended to answer the three basic questions what, who, and how: what is relevant within a social justice context, who is included or excluded within the social justice discourse, and how decisions about the content of social justice are made (p. 4). they also define the meaning given throughout the text to the concept of social justice, understood as a process of change rather than a fixed status, a process that is not linear, but rather proceeds with advancements and reversals. chapter 2 provides a comprehensive and clear outline of social justice in relation to social inclusion and its three fundamental dimensions: equal access, democratic political participation, and cultural diversity. the discussion highlights how struggles for social justice do not necessarily encompass everyone, but rest on the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others. it is therefore essential to ask not only what kind of rights, benefits, and privileges should be provided to people in a socially just society, but also who is allowed to claim these rights and who is excluded from them. book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 170-173, 2017 171 the concept of citizenship and its relation to social justice is the focus of chapter 3. beginning with a discussion of the westphalian system and the primacy of the nation-state, the authors elucidate how in today’s world, social justice principles do not yet have universal application, but remain tied to citizenship status. a good summary is provided with respect to the evolution through time of the idea and practice of citizenship. references are made to t. h. marshall’s contribution to the notion of citizenship as well as to its limitations. throughout the chapter, the authors define citizenship both as a status that some people have and others lack, and as a set of practices shaped through social struggles. the welfare state developed after the second world war; its decline and the rise of neoliberalism are the subject of chapter 4. basok and ilcan offer a good analysis of the welfare system and its limitations, including the way “it produced exclusion, inequalities, and social divisions” (p. 85). they also provide a clear picture of what the rise of neoliberalism (with its emphasis on free-market solutions, entrepreneurialism, and individual responsibility) and the consequent displacement of social citizenship have meant for those people who are in a socially and economically marginalized position. chapter 5 represents a continuation of the discussion that began in chapter 4. here the authors discuss how, within the current system dominated by neoliberalism and characterized by the decline of a welfare approach, voluntary organizations have acquired a critical role in the delivery of public services to marginalized populations. in fact, voluntary organizations have assumed responsibility for a job that was in the past done by the state and have become “de facto agencies of the state” (p. 97), since the latter is largely responsible for their financing and does in effect ends up determining policy. after a brief history of voluntary organizations since the second world war, the chapter explains how the downsizing of the public sector under neoliberal agendas has left voluntary organizations, whose initial mandate was advocating for policy changes, scrambling to fill a void in service provision. by developing an unequal partnership (unequal because they do not control funding) with the state or the private sector, voluntary organizations have lost their independence as the state or private sector can now control how these organizations operate, how their policies are implemented, and how effectively their tasks are carried out. the practice of auditing that has become common among voluntary organizations and is a prerequisite to obtain funding has resulted in the transformation of these organizations into market-oriented and less politicized entities. this loss of independence and depoliticization might significantly imperil the ability of voluntary organizations to effectively advocate for social justice. the sixth chapter shifts the focus to human rights, and questions whether human rights norms and institutions can really provide universal protection and therefore address the social exclusion inherent in the concept of citizenship, a concept that remains under the purview of nation-states. overall, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the human rights valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 170-173, 2017 172 system, and highlights its strengths as well as its limits, particularly a still unresolved tension between “social and economic rights, on the one hand, and civic and political rights on the other” (p. 114). the authors also address the challenge of reconciling the idea and practice of universal human rights with the respect for cultural diversity. transnational activism is the topic discussed in chapter 7. here basok and ilcan distinguish between transnational activism “from above” and transnational activism “from below.” the first refers to activism carried out by international organizations, such as amnesty international or various united nations agencies, whereas the latter refers to advocacy efforts by transnational activist networks operating at the local or national levels and having a global reach. the chapter aims to demonstrate that transnational activism has the potential to bring forward social justice demands on a global scale, irrespective of the resistance of individual states, private agencies, or international organizations such as the international monetary fund (imf) or the world bank (wb). chapter 8 expands the discussion to the global sphere by focusing on “global social justice” and “global justice networks” (p. 168), as a way to assess whether a more socially just world can be reached. the world social forum is used as a model for creating a space where various individuals, social movements, and organizations from all over the world can develop alternative visions to the current neoliberal reality. while the authors appreciate the importance of the world social forum, they also maintain that there is a need to further expand spaces of democratic participation. overall, this is an excellent academic textbook largely addressed to undergraduate students that provides a valuable contribution to the discussion surrounding social justice in an increasingly globalized world. by adopting a thematic focus, the authors have been able to examine core concepts animating the social justice debate, from citizenship to human rights to transnational forms of activism. most of the limitations of the text are inevitable when trying to cover such a multifaceted and complex topic in a necessarily limited space. nevertheless, i would have liked at least a mention in chapter 5 of local voluntary organizations that have refused to be coopted by the state and that have successfully demonstrated how to maintain an advocacy orientation. the ontario coalition against poverty (ocap; see www.ocap.ca) in toronto, canada, would have been one excellent example worth mentioning. the discussion of human rights in the text correctly notes how their enforcement is severely limited by the dominance of national sovereignty, yet it fails to recognize that nation-states are organized globally along a very precise power hierarchy. clearly, some states can get away with repeated violations of human rights much more easily and frequently than others (for instance, few states but the united states would have been able to survive unscathed the scandal that has been the guantanamo bay detention camp, a place where human rights have been systematically and continuously violated). in the chapter discussing transnational activism, it would have been book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 170-173, 2017 173 helpful to point out a number of limitations with the activism of international and national organizations that have increasingly developed close partnerships with state actors and become part of a trend usually identified as “revolving doors,” whereby those working for various non-government organizations (ngos) move back and forth throughout their professional career between the ngo and government sectors (see, e.g., hilton, crowson, mouhot & mckay, 2012). this is certainly a worrying trend that should have us critically question the impartiality of several major ngos. finally, whereas the text offers an effective analysis on how economic decisions and shifts impact on social justice, it is largely silent on how geopolitics also plays a significant role in the maintenance of a world that is still socially unjust to many. a brief discussion of imperialism and neoimperialism would have made the analysis more complete and convincing. each chapter is accompanied by several text boxes that provide the reader with a more in-depth look at authors or concepts mentioned throughout the text. at the end of each chapter, readers can also find some provoking questions for critical thought, useful annotated readings on the topics discussed, and a short list of related websites. overall, this is a well structured and effective text that should be read by scholars and students in the social sciences, those involved in policy making, activists, and all those readers interested in social justice and the possibility to achieve a more socially just world. references hilton, m., crowson, n., mouhot, j., & mckay, j. (2012). a historical guide to ngos in britain: charities, civil society and the voluntary sector since 1945. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. correspondence address: isolde daiski, school of nursing, faculty of health, york university, toronto, 344, health, nursing & environmental studies building, 4700 keele street, toronto, ontario m3j 1p3, canada, tel.: (+1) 416 736 2100 ext. 66616 , email: idaiski@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 6, issue 1, 103-123, 2012 homelessness in the suburbs: engulfment in the grotto of poverty isolde daiski school of nursing, faculty of health, york university, toronto, on, canada nancy viva davis halifax critical disabilities studies, faculty of health, york university, toronto, on, canada gail j. mitchell school of nursing, faculty of health, york university, toronto, on, canada andre lyn united way of peel region, (formerly social planning council of peel) peel, on, canada abstract this paper describes findings of a research inquiry into the lived experience of homelessness in peel, a suburban region located in the greater toronto area in ontario, canada. it is based on the data from a collaborative project undertaken by members of the faculties of health and education of york university with two local community organizations. the dominant theme of the narratives was that suburban homelessness is similar to being engulfed in a grotto of poverty, isolated from the rest of the community and invisible to it. once entrapped in the grotto, it is almost impossible to escape from it. there were four sub-themes: (a) falling into the grotto, (b) living/struggling in the grotto, (c) envisioning escape routes from the grotto, and (d) beauty, community and hope in the grotto. following a discussion of the findings, researchers describe strategies to address homelessness through promotion of social justice for all. this paper describes findings from a research inquiry into the lived experience of homelessness in peel, a suburban region located in the greater toronto area in ontario, canada. it is informed by a collaborative project undertaken by members of the faculties of health and education at york university, one studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 104 isolde daiski, nancy viva davis halifax, gail j. mitchell, andre lyn member of the social planning council of peel (spc peel) and in consultation with the peel poverty action group (ppag). the spc peel had requested the research collaboration. their goal was to study homelessness in their region and to prepare a video for use by ppag to inform and educate policy leaders, politicians, social and public service workers, healthcare workers, and educators, and to draw attention to suburban homelessness. we approached the project as a research inquiry focused on the participants’ perspectives of living in extreme poverty. in addition to the creation of a video, the findings which emerged from the narratives of participants are described in this paper. readers can view the video at: http://ppag.wordpress. com/spaces-and-places-video/ background historically, homelessness has been considered a problematic phenomenon of large urban centres, places that attract diverse groups of people searching for employment, housing, or other resources for life and survival. in contrast, the suburban areas of cities have been regarded as more stable communities of families with a large concentration of middle-income earners. massey’s (1996) prediction of increasing class segregation alongside growing densities of urban poor communities and intense unrest between those who have and those who have not has not unfolded as anticipated. rather, the years from 2000 to 2010 have been marked by growth of global poverty in both suburban and urban areas (berube & kneebone, 2006). “poverty is becoming ever more widespread, and persons without sufficient resources are surfacing in suburban and rural communities where issues of homelessness mostly remain hidden and unaddressed” (hulchanski, 2007, p.20). preston, murdie, d’ addario, sibanda, et al. (2012) found that recent immigrants to toronto increasingly settle in suburban areas, due to lack of affordable rental housing in the city core with its upscale condominium developments. these newcomers constitute the new hidden homeless living in overcrowded conditions in the suburbs. homelessness in this project was broadly defined as: an extreme form of poverty characterized by inadequate housing, income and social supports. people defined as homeless include those who are absolutely homeless (i.e. temporary, intermittent or ongoing), as well as those who are at risk of homelessness (underhoused). the absolutely homeless may be living in shelters, outdoors in public or semi-public spaces, with friends or relatives (couch surfing). those who are “at risk” of homelessness may be precariously housed, living in hotels, rooming houses or apartments, and transitional housing, but who may potentially lose their housing due to eviction, inadequate income or because they are fleeing violence. (gaetz, 2008) homelessness and poverty in urban areas are well researched, particularly their impacts on health, (bryant, 2004; cheung & hwang, 2004; frankish, hwang, & quantz, 2005; hwang, 2001; layton, 2000; levy & o’connell, studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 homelessness in the suburbs 105 2004; o’connell, 2004; the street health report, 2007; woolf, 2007). we know that morbidity and mortality rates are significantly increased for those lacking stable housing and other associated social determinants of health, such as secure access to food and healthcare (hwang, 2001; hwang, martin, tolomiczenko, & hulchanski, 2003; mikkonen & raphael, 2010; o’connell, 2004; raphael, 2003). some literature also describes the lived experiences from the perspectives of those who are homeless (acosto & toro, 2000; daiski, 2008; 2007; lafuente, 2003; davis halifax, 2010, davis halifax, meeks, yurichuk, & khandor, 2008; davis halifax & yurichuk, 2007). and, further, we know that local and regional politics and race/gender issues impact how homelessness is experienced, emphasizing the need to bring multiple stories of homelessness and poverty to light (berube & kneebone, 2006). allard (2009) reported that social services in american cities are seldom located in the downtown areas, where the poorest citizens live, and therefore effectively out of their reach. he called for service agencies locating closer to those who use them. this contrasts with canadian cities where major charitable, social, and healthcare services are mostly located in densely populated downtown cores where upscale condos now prevail. both allard (2009) in the us, and hulchanski (2007) in canada also observed a recent shift of poverty and homelessness into the suburbs where social services are ill-equipped to keep up with the increasing demands. for the suburban area of peel region with a current population of 1,159,400 the last available statistical data clearly show a disturbing trend of growing poverty and homelessness: in 2010 shelters in peel served 11,920 individuals, including 1,974 families, 696 youth and 3,134 dependents (region of peel, 2011). between 2001 and 2006, the rate of low income families with children under 17 years of age grew by 4.7 percentage points, almost 5 times that of the rest of ontario combined. in 2006, 20% of children under 6 years of age were living in low income families, up from 14 per cent in 2001 (region of peel, 2011). between 2005 and 2006 the use of services to prevent evictions rose by 14%. finally, in 2007 over 14,000 families were on the waiting list for affordable public housing, for which the average waiting period for an individual or family was more than 17 years (spc peel, 2009). with the recent recession it can be assumed that the needs would have increased further. in march 2010 alone more than 14,500 separate individuals used local food banks (region of peel, 2011). in spite of the above statistics, the growing numbers of homeless persons in peel remain largely unnoticed. not surprisingly, anecdotal reports from ppag members suggested that because the general public is not aware of or prefers to ignore homelessness in their suburban community, politicians who tend to respond to the public’s interests and visible problems also pay little attention. as the invisibility itself seems to be a major contributor to the hardships of suburban homelessness, we believe that exposure and public education are required urgently. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 106 isolde daiski, nancy viva davis halifax, gail j. mitchell, andre lyn method before starting, the ethics review of the larger project had been carried out by the university’s office of research administration. the data for this paper were taken from the transcripts of the audio and video recordings interviews of the larger project. this paper is focused on the lived experiences of persons who were previously or who currently are homeless in peel region and who are considered experts of their own lives. our goal was to obtain an in depth record of the experiences of homelessness in this community. a gadamerian hermeneutic approach best fit our collective intentions and research purposes; specifically, this means that understanding emerges out of a circular relationship of the engagement between what is known and unknown while always influenced by context, history, values and meanings (gadamer, 1990). this approach focuses on the wholeness of lived experience and the co-constituted nature of knowledge and understanding, the in-between of familiarity and unfamiliarity. emergent understanding thus involves a movement to new meaning. since all four researchers had previously conducted research with homeless people in urban areas, we were able to draw on the familiar by connecting to the unfamiliar of homelessness in a suburban context to discern the uniquenesses of these latter experiences. recruitment and interviews in community-based research, collaboration with community members and groups is essential (minkler & wallerstein, 2008). with the mediation of local charitable agencies we spent the early months of this project walking the streets, ravines, and wooded areas with men and women who knew homelessness from first-hand experience. we discovered a community that lives in the margins of the larger community: in alleys, doorways, staircases, abandoned vehicles, and clothing boxes, mostly hidden from public view. we posted flyers with an invitation to participate in the project in local soup kitchens and shelters. fifteen participants were eventually recruited for this study, which we designed purposively to include as many diverse individuals as possible. as in-depth interviews generate large amounts of data, the intent was to focus on depth and quality rather than breadth, with the aim to increase understanding rather than providing facts (munhall, 2012). the primary research question was: what is the lived experience of homelessness in suburbia? to better understand homelessness in this context and in keeping with research guided by hermeneutic phenomenology, our role was to listen, discern, and illuminate the meanings persons gave to their experiences of homelessness. at the end of the interviews, which were either recorded on video or audio-taped and lasted between 40 and 90 minutes, each participant received an honorarium of $15 canadian. the members of the research team created the interview guide and conducted the interviews with the participants. questions began with an studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 homelessness in the suburbs 107 open-ended invitation to speak about the experience of being homeless. further questions were: from the participants’ perspectives, what led them to becoming homeless? what are their day-to-day lives like? what strategies are required in order to prevent homelessness or, once homeless, to get out of it? what is helpful, what hinders? prompts, such as tell me more about this or please go on, were used whenever we felt they were necessary to obtain as much depth as possible in participant description. data analysis the interviews were transcribed verbatim, and we employed diekelmann, allen and tanner’s (1989) seven-stage collaborative process of analysis. we, the researchers met regularly to review transcripts and discuss the meanings embedded in the individual texts. each of us created stories from several transcripts depicting the experience of homelessness from each person’s perspective. we then shared and explored identified meanings and repeating ideas emerging from the analysis. once we agreed on the core ideas, we discussed and refined their meanings within the context of the emerging overarching theme called a constitutive pattern (diekelmann et al., 1989). as homelessness in the suburban context is mostly invisible and unacknowledged, it seemed to entrap the persons who fell into it and, once there, it seemed nearly impossible to escape from it. the over-arching experience of homelessness emerging from our research was that it was like being engulfed in a grotto. we then finalized the sub-themes and their emergent relationships with the over-arching constitutive pattern. the four related sub-themes found in the narratives were: 1) falling into the grotto; 2) living struggling in the grotto; 3) envisioning escape routes from the grotto; 4) beauty, community and hope in the grotto. historically and structurally grottoes have been associated with underground locations. the many connotations of grotto include: earthiness, fertility, darkness, and death (connelly, 2003). therefore, the idea of the grotto inspires scary imagery of dangerous underground chambers. the nuances of engulfment connoted by the grotto include being swallowed, lost, “to disappear underground” or “to plunge deeply and inextricably into a surrounding medium” (oxford english dictionary, on-line version). this sense of being “disappeared underground,” relates to the effects of poverty and homelessness; of feeling invisible and unable to escape. it refers to the lack of a presence on the landscape, in contrast to downtown areas where people sitting and sleeping on the street visible to all are a common sight. however, it needs to be mentioned that, even in cities, those who are visibly homeless are only a small percentage of the overall numbers. in 2009, for example, the city of toronto reported the number of those visibly homeless in the downtown area only, those easily counted in the shelter systems and by street outreach, as 4,390 (the wellesley institute, 2009, p. 4). this number represented a snapshot as the hidden homeless, estimated at up to 69 % of studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 108 isolde daiski, nancy viva davis halifax, gail j. mitchell, andre lyn total numbers, are staying out of sight for various reasons, including survival strategies. thereby they are left out of the count, under-representing the phenomenon. finally, there is also another side to grottoes: they can be located amidst beautiful gardens and landscapes (miller, 1982). as engulfment depends on the media in which one is engrossed it also can mean being immersed in friendship and love or communities, therefore offering hope and possibilities, which is reflected in the last sub-theme. the various meanings were present within the data collected. findings we begin by reporting on the participants and their perspectives on suburban homelessness. pathways into poverty are then discussed. daily life and institutional barriers to escaping poverty are described. finally, what participants believe would help them effectively and permanently leave homelessness is presented. emerging patterns of community and cohesion are then identified, followed by discussion, our conclusion, and our recommendations. demographics the participants represented a diverse group of people living in the alleys, door ways, staircases, abandoned vehicles, clothing boxes, shelters, and substandard rooming houses of the suburban terrain. there were seven women and eight men. ages ranged from early 20s to 70s and included ethnic groups of caucasians, african canadians, first nations peoples, persons of south asian origins and some of mixed heritage. most were canadian born, with about one third having immigrated. some were former professionals, others former trades persons, while others had little work experience. several persons were employed in casual labour as well as social services. almost all volunteered currently or previously in the local drop-in centres or food bank. one participant ran for local councillor at the time. three pensioners were included. some participants were single, some had children, and most were divorced or widowed. few had any family support. they identified as heterosexual or queer. almost all were in poor health and suffered from a variety of acute and chronic health conditions. two engaged with the arts, one a visual artist and another was writing poetry. the common bond they all shared was extreme and lasting poverty. in order to protect the participants’ identities pseudonyms, not real names, will be used with the quotations below to illustrate the themes. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 homelessness in the suburbs 109 engulfed in the grotto the concept of engulfment in the grotto emerged as the central metaphor representing what it is like to live in poverty without sufficient housing or resources and became the overarching, constitutive theme of the stories we heard and recorded. all participants described an overwhelming sense of being swallowed, trapped and invisible as in the following quote: we’re going round and round and round . . . so, we don’t pull out of the situation we’re in. we stay in that same hole. we can’t crawl out of it because...we can’t get the help. somebody to pull us out of that hole . . . (art, living in a rooming house, formerly on the street for many years) further we learned how life in a grotto is physically hidden from most eyes, pinpointed by the following quote: people say there is no homeless in peel. when you walk down the street here you don’t see people sleeping on a bench in the daytime or sitting on the streets [like] you do if you were in toronto. [here homelessness] is tucked away. (beth, an older woman previously couch-surfing with friends when on widower’s pension alone; now receiving old age security she affords a room in a rooming house) in time one’s sense of dignity gets eroded and what can become a homeless identity is shaped and further contributes to the sense of entrapment with no possibility for escape. one participant shared this sentiment with us: when you are chronically homeless there is a certain sense of resignation and accepting this as your lot in life . . . . it means . . . existing in terms of where is my next meal? where is my next bed? this is who i am . . . (long silence). so, when you resign yourself to that, you give up and you exist . . . 25 years in the capacity of a homeless man full time, chronic health issues . . . . (norm, a middle aged man, previously homeless in many different places after being sexually abused as teenager; now lives in a rooming house; volunteers for community outreach and receives welfare) life in the grotto with its sense of desperation seems to change the self perceptions of those who are homeless as being/becoming the “other.” they also described diverse ways of falling into the grotto—the first sub-theme. falling into the grotto like, you don’t plan to be homeless . . . you’ll be paying your mortgage and things collapse. you come home from work one evening; your door is locked with the sheriff there, you wonder, what happened? (diane, mother of five, unemployed, living with her children in her mother’s apartment) and, i am not homeless but one of my greatest fears is becoming homeless. i live studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 110 isolde daiski, nancy viva davis halifax, gail j. mitchell, andre lyn on cpp (canada pension plan) and old age security, which equals about $720 a month. i don’t have any money for transportation and i do not get a bus pass. my rent is $600 a month. i have had my name in for subsidized housing for years but there is a long waiting list. i only have $120 for the month to cover food, medications, clothing, toiletries, etc. i use food banks once a week to get through each month. (ethel, a pensioner, lives in small apartment) the following story of sam, a man who immigrated to canada is also quite typical. after he arrived in canada, he started working in a small grocery store for minimum wage while supporting a wife and four children: i was never out on the street but i live in constant fear of homelessness, which means “sleeping under a tree or on an air duct.” when i first immigrated to canada 20 years ago, we bought a beautiful, big house we could not pay for on my modest salary. after we exhausted all savings we had to declare bankruptcy. you buy a home out of emotions rather than practicality . . . immigrants fall into this trap. the family was evicted, and they continued to experience inadequate and insecure housing. for five years they lived without gas heating and hot water; as they were unable to pay for both, they chose to pay the electricity only, which meant they had to use the oven for heat in the winter. “to take a bath we had to heat the water and carry it upstairs or bathe in icy cold water . . . my wife eventually left me and the children. poverty put a strain on our family” (sam). betrayal and theft can also lead to homelessness. william, a former professional now a pensioner, was defrauded by a “friend” he trusted. he now lives in a shelter and currently uses a wheelchair: i have become homeless since retiring. i met someone that needed some help so i helped them out, lent them some money and somewhere along the line they got hold of my interac (bank account access) card and cleaned out my bank account so that i was completely broke. i . . . didn’t have any money to go anywhere . . . . i’ve slept in tents. i’ve slept up in trees. i spent a couple of nights under the bushes over at the church. the overhang there was dry and you didn’t get wet. i put my knapsack down, i put my head on it and went to sleep. (william) fleeing domestic violence is another door-way into the grotto of homelessness and poverty. beth, cited above, described her experience of isolation and entrapment in poverty while in her abusive marriage, which also affected her children: i lived in an abusive relationship for 28 years. i had four children and we were very poor . . . never had enough money for food. my husband would never give me any money and he took the child benefit cheques from me as well. i lost two children while pregnant probably because i was starving. i lived in fear and so did my children and i have a lot of guilt about that. i felt very alone and i felt like there was no one i could trust. we all have scars from that experience. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 homelessness in the suburbs 111 besides spousal abuse, child abuse is also a frequent pathway to homelessness. several participants reported physical or sexual abuse in their own families, while others described unhappy experiences in a string of foster homes. most of the time, these events led them to run away as soon as they could, only to encounter more abuse and violence on the streets. several participants related losing their jobs and then their homes. even though some participants were casually employed and worked for minimum wage, they noted how hard it was to save for the required first and last months’ rent and to keep up the payments; this economic precariousness entraps them in poverty. people in extreme poverty therefore live at the brink, at best, in constant fear of losing their housing, or at worst, they actually lose their housing and cycle in and out of living with relatives/friends, in rooming houses, on the streets and in shelters. the grotto might have different recesses in which one may live and often move about, but no exit. living in the grotto means struggling in the grotto—the second sub-theme of the engulfment pattern. living struggling in the grotto the following quotes typify the subtheme of living/struggling in the grotto: i was sleeping in the bus terminal, and the alleyway . . . in a van seat, but it blocks the wind so it’s just like, dark and dingy...just scary. i had garbage thrown at me. i had beer bottles thrown at me, well...this is my home so please don’t disturb me . . . it’s dark and lonely and it’s full of bugs (karen, 21 years old, lives with addiction and frequent abuse on the street; she had just found a room in a rooming house). and, “to be homeless means to be unnumbered and unidentified. it also means an unaccounted citizen living outside your constitutional rights; a nobody” (alex, middle-aged, living with bi-polar disorder, cycling between street and shelters). entrapped in poverty, there are ever-present dangers when struggling in the grotto. like the woman above almost every person talked about experiencing violence on the street or in shelters, ranging from having belongings stolen to being assaulted, physically and/or sexually. one man related his experiences of sexual exploitation as a homeless youth, which was similarly represented in the narratives of several other participants, both women and men: here i was, 16 years old and naïve . . . there was this guy who told me how much god loved me and how god had brought me to him so he could teach me what love was all about. having won my confidence and my trust, he went on to sexually abuse me over a three month period. i spent the next 25 years running away from that shame and guilt. i became dysfunctional . . . huge amounts of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal ideation. (jean, describes himself as chronically homeless and drifting for many years, now has small apartment) studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 112 isolde daiski, nancy viva davis halifax, gail j. mitchell, andre lyn karen, cited above, described how she once was violently attacked: the knife went in and then through and then out. and he stabbed me . . . and i had both my arms pinned together . . . for 24 hours i couldn’t literally move my arm because the knife was right through it. despite these dangers, some participants who were absolutely homeless preferred to stay on the street rather than in shelters. “shelters here are packed. a couple of years ago a lot of people lost their jobs, they lost their houses. a lot of houses went under. and where do they [people] have to end up? in shelters” (diane, previously cited). shelters are avoided due to overcrowding, insect infestations, and perils associated with sleeping in close quarters, including health and safety concerns: “so, you’ve got a dorm full of 20 guys, you don’t know who is doing crack, who is doing speed, who is doing heroin, you don’t know who is an alcoholic” (art, previously cited). violence, however, is often also perpetrated by those who are supposed “to serve and protect.” norm, cited previously, who lived on the street for years, described his experience with law and order agents: “can’t sit too long or they [police] chase you off. better to keep walking. also, if they see you hanging around the park or sleeping on a bench and if there has been a break and enter in the area they assume it was you.” the following is a vivid portrayal of encounters with police similar to several others’ experiences: i avoid the police like a plague. well, my experiences with the police have been pretty rough, pretty bad. i’ve been on the underside of society since i was a teenager . . . police when they deal with stuff on a regular basis they become very cold. there are good police officers but there are ones that just.., i’ve been handcuffed for sleeping on [someone’s] property so hard that my wrists swelled up . . . they bend the wrists and put you to the ground and say all sorts of nasty stuff in your ear, (graham who was episodically on the street, now lives in rooming house, works casually and receives welfare) finally, more subtle forms of violence, such as lack of respect, dehumanize as this woman explains: most people think you are just a bum, you are a street person. they [we] are actually “real people.” maybe [our] money is not enough. people should know i am “me,” i have certain morals i’d like to live by and to keep. (diane, cited previously). the ultimate existential violence is denial of personhood, being called a nobody. art, cited earlier, related that when a young child looking at him asked his mother, “‘who is that man?’ the mother answered: ‘nobody dear, he’s homeless.’” (art). when people with low incomes can afford housing on the private market, the only available option is substandard houses in the suburbs. some of the rooming houses were described as “crack houses.” all were overcrowded, with small rooms, frequently without windows and lacking proper cooking studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 homelessness in the suburbs 113 and food storage facilities. the shortage of affordable housing, and a lack of oversight, means landlords can exploit the situation with impunity, as norm, who was previously cited, explained: i call these guys scumlords, not slumlords, scumlords because they take advantage of the poor and use it to their advantage to get monetarily ahead, which is all right but when you do it to the detriment of somebody else’s wellbeing it’s wrong. alex, cited previously, spoke of “mice all over the kitchen” in his rooming house. graham, also previously cited, described his housing and living conditions in a typical fashion: i live in a rooming house. i pay $400 per month for a room and shared kitchen with 11 other adults. two out of the four burners work on the stove. the fridge door falls off. some people do not have windows in their rooms. after my rent i have $120 to live on for the month. i go to the soup kitchens and the food bank every week. beth, previously cited, talked about how living in her apartment is extremely difficult due to her poor health: i live in a very small, very crowded apartment. there is no bathtub. the laundry is downstairs and i can’t always get there. i find it too difficult physically to get back up to my apartment. i have a bad back: herniated disc and scoliosis as well as a small hip fracture. i also need medication for my kidneys. my knees are bad and i have a bad infection in one of my toes. there are days i just can’t get out of bed because i am not feeling well enough. day to day challenges were often met with ingenuity and defiance, allen, has a physical disability due to work related injury he previously lived on the street. he now receives a “small pension,” works casually, and lives in rooming house. he discussed some innovative strategies: staying clean is the hardest thing! even though i have a bus pass nobody wants you in the washrooms at the bus station. i sometimes see people putting paper towels on the floor and giving themselves a sponge bath. to keep clean i use baby wipes. i can clean my whole body with one wipe. he went on to describe his strategy for sleeping on the bus during the long suburban routes: when i was on the street, welfare cut me off. i had nothing. on the buses during the day i would sleep all the way out on a route, get off and then walk around for an hour and get on another bus and sleep all the way back. i can get a good hour of sleep on a bus. the bus shuts down around one or two in the morning. from then until five or six i walk to keep warm. it is pretty hard to stay warm at nights until march, april. i carry newspapers to keep me warm when sitting on a park bench. (allen) studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 114 isolde daiski, nancy viva davis halifax, gail j. mitchell, andre lyn karen, cited earlier, talked about the recent closing of the only women’s shelter in the area, forcing her and other women who cannot afford the fare to the closest women’s shelter, a long bus ride away, to sleep on the street. she also related that the food bank/soup kitchen was recently moved to the outskirts of the city, which she believes to be a deliberate strategy to make life difficult, inciting defiance: trying to get us, all bums and alcoholics and crack-heads, they’re just trying to get rid of us so we can move to different places. but, as we all said, we’re not leaving. you can’t make us leave. this is where we were born and raised. this is where we were growing up, we’re not leaving. i’ll put up a fight to stay in my area. (karen) coexisting with this persistent sense of space and right to stay were imaginings of escape routes from the grotto. envisioned escape routes from the grotto participants made several recommendations that they thought would be helpful to escape the grotto. consider the following quotation by jean, a long-time street survivor cited previously, referring to social agency workers. “[workers need] to have the capacity to build empathy. not sympathy, empathy. you have to create an alliance with the people that you’re dealing with...” (jean). the social support agencies such as ontario works were frequently described as insufficient, while the workers’ large workloads and job stress were acknowledged. the following statement captures this sentiment: most of the ontario works [employees] . . . they should be...a little bit more compassionate . . . and then you wonder why their turnover of staff is . . . constant . . . because . . . each worker, roughly, has 160 to 300 people per month . . . some of these workers cannot take the stress and leave the job. and they transfer you almost every 3 to 6 months to a new worker. so, you get used to that worker . . . they want to help you and you’re getting ahead and what happens? they introduce you to somebody else that has no compassion at all. and then you start from scratch. (graham) alex, who lives with bipolar disorder, also shed light on how hard it is to negotiate social support. he is currently on welfare, trying to get disability pension: i put in over 40 years of work, off and on. i have a good trade but i’m getting to a point . . . the doctor says my working days are over. nobody is listening . . . i’ve been actually declared . . . unfit to work, mentally-wise . . . all these problems are starting to build up...i have to let it out, i have to speak to somebody who is going to listen . . . (alex). studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 homelessness in the suburbs 115 a lack of addiction treatment centres represents a barrier for those wanting to quit their addictions. treatments provided often are thought to be too short in duration and therefore ineffective. they are usually not available at the time the person is ready: putting somebody in a detox for a week and then kicking them out on the street does not work because two days later they’ll be back on booze and/or drugs or whatever the problem was. they’ll promise somebody when they think they’re ready, they’re going to go for treatment and you can’t get them in a treatment centre because there are not enough spaces available. (tina, a middle aged woman, now housed, volunteers for outreach work and receives welfare) jean, who is divorced, lives in small apartment where his young son visits on weekends. he explained: anything that will improve the environment . . . to [help with] addiction. like i said, you don’t become an addict for nothing, you don’t say one day, “you know what? i’m going to become an addict today” . . . there are reasons why and those reasons have to do with your early childhood, the way you’ve been treated...i’ve been an addict since i was 11 . . . you’re raped and you’re molested and you do fourteen foster homes between the age of three and 11. (jean) most participants stated they did not want to receive government handouts. finding stable employment was seen as most important and more job counselling and regulations to prevent exploitation through casual insecure employment were recommended: need to be in a stable job to provide for my family and a roof over my head. that’s help. because that’s the main thing of life right now. and...at the moment it seems like there is no door opening . . . i have the key but no door . . . (diane, cited previously, had taken courses for community work) oversight of “slum landlords” was a strong recommendation by participants to prevent the exploitation in rooming houses. building affordable public housing was named a priority with several participants making recommendations to convert vacant buildings into housing. the fourth subtheme is a reminder that human beings have ways of seeing and believing in beauty, community and hope, despite struggle and despair. beauty, community and hope in the grotto there were many tales of friends helping friends--providing a place to sleep till they get back on their feet, or lending money, and of dedicated workers that make a difference. several participants looked for ways to create a community as this person explains: “my biggest fear [is] loneliness. you know what i mean...not being accepted...so i’m trying to get involved in the community itself” (alex, cited earlier). “helping others helps, that is why many of us volunteer to ‘give back’,” diane, cited earlier, explained. she studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 116 isolde daiski, nancy viva davis halifax, gail j. mitchell, andre lyn continued, “i now volunteer at [a drop-in centre]. i want to work, not stay on social service . . . helping other people straightening out their lives, it helps me to cope with mine, deal with my own stress.” several participants talked about ingenuous strategies to be and share with family and friends. graham saved every penny to be able to take his daughter to a movie every saturday. jean took his son to the airport to ride the escalators for fun and enjoyment together on his birthday, because that is all he could afford. many helped each other out, letting friends stay with them in their rooming houses. hope was described by many as what kept them going. william, who lives in a shelter, despite having been defrauded by those he helped stated: “i still have hope that, one day, i will get an apartment and a black cat – this hope is what keeps me going” (william). and lorna (who also volunteers in the community and lives in rooming house, expressed: “i’ve always had hope. i spend a lot of time hoping and praying that everything is going to work out” (lorna). hope is also expressed by karen who writes poetry in the evening and by alex in painting landscapes. lastly karen stated: “i am all by myself. since 13, living on the streets. i have been suicidal, i’ve been in mental wards; i have been raped five times, but i’m still here and i hope to become a nurse one day.” engulfed in the grotto of poverty was the overarching theme or pattern researchers identified in the descriptions from the participants. we now turn to the literature to discuss the theme and subthemes with some additional detail discussion comparing urban and suburban homelessness we found many commonalities with urban homelessness in our suburban project. people seem to become homeless following several pathways into poverty: loss of job, disabilities, addictions, loss of housing due to inability to afford the rent, divorce and domestic abuse of women and / or children are amongst the main reasons (clapham, 2003; daiski, 2008; 2005; klodawsky, 2010; wellesley institute, 2009). once they fell into poverty, our participants described the difficulties they experienced, such as when applying for social assistance. the canadian welfare system is inherently punitive through measures such as low welfare rates, which steadily declined over the past two decades, and which have restrictive eligibility criteria (national council of welfare, 2010, [recently axed by the federal government]; organisation for economic co-operation and development, 1999). moreover, in hard times social services are typically the first to be cut (craig, 2010), which forces people to choose between essentials, such as paying rent, having electricity, or buying food (allard, 2009; scanlon & adlam, 2008). when accessing social service agencies, like their urban counterparts, participants talked about how hard it is to qualify and how easily social benefits are lost altogether due to minor irregularities (daiski, 2007, 2008; street health, 2007). just like in studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 homelessness in the suburbs 117 urban areas (daiski, 2007) addiction treatment facilities, long underfunded, were reported not being available for people ready to quit. congruent with allard’s (2009) and hulchanski’s (2007) observations we discovered that as poverty moves progressively to the suburbs the already scarce resources there are increasingly unable to keep up, overburdening those who work there. social agencies in the suburbs are greater distances apart than downtown and hard to access without transportation. the few existing shelters were described as packed, unsafe and unable to meet the needs. that shelters are unsafe and have strict and oppressive rules, such as early curfews and lack of privacy, has been widely reported (acosta & toro, 2000; daiski, 2008; 2007; lee & schreck, 2005; miller & keyes, 2001). to make things worse, in the suburb of brampton discussed here, the nearest shelter for women is a long bus ride away in the mississauga area. as no drop-ins or soup kitchens exist at the shelter location, the women have to come back to brampton each day for food and social services. those unable to afford transportation are forced to sleep on the street, risking assault and rape, as described by karen in our project. while social housing is scarce in downtown toronto, in the suburbs it barely exists at all, as the long wait times for admittance to shelters proves, such as an average of 17 years in peel region (spc peel, 2009). when people finally found housing in the private sector, it was usually substandard and environmentally unsafe, as well as exploitative. while lack of safety in housing had been reported in downtown toronto too (daiski, 2007, 2008), in suburban areas due to the scarcity of social housing there, the problem seemed even worse. jacobs (2011) described how substandard housing conditions lead to social inequity and disproportionately ill health. we found this to be true with our participants who almost all reported major health problems. in peel region soup kitchens and drop-ins exist in but a few places. one of the soup kitchens combined with the only food bank, located at the outskirts of brampton is difficult to reach, as it is several kilometres from the city centre. we also heard about the adversities participants faced performing daily rituals of personal hygiene where apart from two faith-based drop-ins, no shower facilities exist. with fewer public places in the suburbs, where those who are homeless can gather, trespassing on private property leads to more violence by authorities. as lee and schreck (2005), gaetz, o’grady and buccieri (2010) and gaetz (2004) have described, behaviours which are necessary for survival, socalled nuisance behaviours are criminalized. laws against loitering in public places give the police the power to remove and arrest people, making them targets of institutional violence, as the participants described. as there is no alternative place for them to go they are forced to hide in unsafe locations to escape the authorities, putting them at increased risk for violence from criminals. valuable police time handing out tickets which can never be paid and incarcerations of the poor are other consequences of living on the street (gaetz, et al. 2010). overall, suburban and urban homelessness seem mostly alike, but the studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 118 isolde daiski, nancy viva davis halifax, gail j. mitchell, andre lyn degree of hardship appears even more intense outside of the city core, as suburbs lack resources and adequate, affordable public transportation; after all, suburban areas were never designed around the needs of the poor. the most important difference between the urban and suburban homelessness experiences is that the latter is much more effectively hidden. social stigma and safety concerns encourage the homeless to stay invisible by hiding in ravines and woods and blending in with their surroundings as much as possible. this makes it easy for passers-by to overlook whatever signs of homelessness are around them. the suburban homeless person effectively disappears underground in the grotto of poverty. homeless identity and social justice our participants, feeling excluded from the rest of the community, deplored the lack of respect they felt should be shown to them as humans “who live by their own values.” noddings (2002) writes about society viewing housing as an “extension of oneself” (p. 445). lacking housing therefore challenges a person’s identity. how interpersonal isolation and self-alienation of people who are homeless is fuelled by the stigma society attaches to homelessness was described by rokach (2005). her participants, like ours, felt shunned by society and they too considered themselves “unidentified and un-numbered.” lafuente (2003) discussed how these attitudes led to feelings of powerlessness amongst her participants who internalized the meanings of “bum” and “street person,” the same terms used by our participants to describe how they believe to be seen by others. referring to a homeless person as a “nobody,” as some of our participants had related, is an example of ultimate denial, as “nobody” then is homeless; it also represents an extreme form of dehumanization. if the existence of homeless persons by members of society is acknowledged at all they are, at best, becoming the “other” (boydell, goering, & morrell-bellai, 2000; johnson, bottorff & browne, 2004). kearney (1986) discusses “othering” as scape-goating of individuals thought undeserving and responsible for society’s ills. this moral component of othering acts as a strong barrier to the public’s will to prevent and abolish homelessness and is also present in the neo-liberal discourse of individuals’ responsibility for their own situations. accepting a common humanity in all and recognizing our individual situations as inherently unequal is an imperative of social justice. craig (2010) believes that looking beyond the neo-liberal discourse of “equal opportunities for free independent individuals” towards achieving outcomes of equity for all, a redistributive type of justice must be developed. klodawsky (2010) advocating for “rights to the city” for all, claims that cities (and other places) should be “inhabitated” by all citizens rather than becoming the “private properties” of a few. while the context might change, homelessness and poverty emerge from social inequities and are inherently unjust in any environment. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 homelessness in the suburbs 119 recommendations for change we believe that being homeless is a denial of social justice. padgett (2007) found that housing first approaches work even for those living with addictions and mental illness: those who were housed experienced themselves as ontologically secure; having a place of their own allowed for daily routines, privacy and provided a secure base. coldwell and bender (2007) too showed that, even for those who experience severe mental illness, proper support systems helped to reduce clients’ symptoms and kept them housed. feeling secure was deemed the determining factor. similarly, a new city-run program streets to homes is currently operating in toronto and preliminary evidence suggests it is effective (falvo, 2008). this program subsidizes private housing for people on the street and initially provides support and counselling to make the transition to a housed life easier. however, no such capacity for support exists in the suburbs so far. as this program targets the visibly homeless on the street, which neo-liberal governments might see as embarrassing and as interfering with business agendas, there is less money left for upgrading and maintaining existing public housing, which precipitates a trend towards privatization (klodawsky, 2010). the danger is that without oversight market based housing can lead to exploitation and neglect, as we have seen. in addition, as long as suburban homelessness remains invisible it will not be on the political agenda. therefore awareness-raising is the first important step. feeling excluded, many of our participants were trying to create ties in the community by volunteering their services to help others. hilfinger messias, dejong, & mcloughlin, (2005) reported that homeless women who volunteered were seeing themselves as empowered, possessed deeper insights and understanding and were better able to empathize and win the trust of those currently homeless. however, there is a caution attached to volunteering: work provided by people in extreme poverty for free, can easily lead to further exploitation. they should be reimbursed justly. to abolish homelessness in any environment, we agree with zlotnick, robertson and lahiff (1999) that a stable, adequate income is a prerequisite to stable housing and food security. it is also the most effective strategy to attain equity as individuals then can choose how to spend their money according to their needs (kirkpatrick & tarasuk, 2009; woolf, 2007). current social assistance programs, including pensions, as well as minimum wage, should be raised to a level where recipients can pay for basic necessities (daily bread foodbank, 2012). safe and secure housing, in turn, is a crucial prerequisite to health (krieger, 2007; raphael, 2007) and could go a long way in improving health and healthcare costs (frankish et al., 2005; padgett, 2007). it might decrease incarcerations (gaetz, 2004), reduce violence and assaults (gaetz, et al., 2010) and generally improve health and quality of life (orpana, lemyre & gravel, 2009). further prevention of homelessness through timely interventions such as counselling for family violence, job retraining and emergency funds should be priorities. as our participants suggested, more public housing and oversight of studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 120 isolde daiski, nancy viva davis halifax, gail j. mitchell, andre lyn private rooming houses are needed, and addiction treatment facilities should be readily available. police and security personnel need education about serving and protecting all citizens, including those who are homeless and efforts should be directed to create public spaces where people can stay safely without fear of being attacked and raped rather than criminalizing those who have no place to go. public washrooms and shower facilities would also make life easier, such as already exist in downtown toronto. it seems that societal attitudes and ignorance, silos of complicated bureaucracies and neo-liberal ideologies are barriers “to crawling out of the hole” and must be overcome. limitations of the study this study took place in the suburban region of peel of the greater toronto area and with a relatively small number of participants. it was not meant to be exhaustive but to begin to shed light on homelessness in the suburbs, which is mostly hidden. while the findings might be specific to this particular place, the dearth of resources and social institutions outside of city cores, as well as the relative invisibility, we believe are quite typical and help to understand the meaning of suburban homelessness. conclusion the aim of this research was to obtain an in-depth view of the lived experiences of 15 diverse persons who were homeless in the suburban context. whether our participants were living on the street, in shelters, or in substandard rooming houses, extreme poverty and the accompanying stress prevented them from eating and sleeping properly, and from regaining secure housing. lacking income security, many cycled between living on the street and substandard housing. engulfed in the grotto of poverty they struggled, unable to escape. as suburban homelessness and poverty remain mostly invisible, public awareness needs to be raised so that effective social policies can be developed to help people to get out of the poverty cycle. while important, something more than empathy is needed for them to escape poverty (morse, bottorff, anderson, o’brien, & solberg, 2006; zufferey & kerr, 2004). policies that advance equity and support from all levels of community are required. based in principles of redistributive social justice which focus on outcomes meeting human needs, all citizens deserve adequate housing and to be treated with dignity and respect (craig, 2002). the rights of all, including the poor, to inhabit the city should be upheld (klodawsky, 2010). a community-based approach with those who are/have been homeless sitting on the table when policies are developed is essential for success (minkler & wallerstein, 2008). raising awareness about homelessness in the suburbs, we hope, will therefore be a first step towards achieving rights-based social justice. we studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 homelessness in the suburbs 121 need to build a compassionate community in which all citizens have equitable opportunities, enabled by adequate resources, that will prevent them falling into or help them escape from grottoes of poverty. therefore we believe it is imperative to ensure that the hopes our participants shared with us for a better future can be realized. references acosta, o., & toro, p. a. 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(2011). peel regional council report: provincial poverty reduction strategy update, march 14, 2011. retrieved from http://www.peelregion.ca/council/agendas/pdf/rc20110428/report-hs-a1.pdf rokach, a. (2005). private lives in public places: loneliness of the homeless. social indicators research, 72, 99–114. scanlon, c. & adlam, j. (2008). refusal, social exclusion and the cycle of rejection: a cynical analysis. critical social policy, 28(4), 529–549. social planning council of peel. (2009). portraits of peel 2006 report. retrieved from http:// ppag.wordpress.com/ street health report. (2007). toronto: http://www.streethealth.ca/downloads/the-street-healthreport-2007.pdf wellesley institute. (2009). toronto homeless street count: lots of heat, but little light (backgrounder). toronto: author. retrieved from http://wellesleyinstitute.com/files/homelesscount2009.pdf woolf, s. h. (2007). future health consequences of the current decline in u.s. household income. jama, 298(16), 1931–33. zlotnick, c., robertson, m. j., & lahiff, m. (1999). getting off the streets: economic resources and residential exits from homelessness. journal of community psychology, 27(2), 209–224. zufferey, c., & kerr, l. (2004). identity and everyday experiences of homelessness: some implications for social work. australian social work, 57(4), 343–353. http://www.ncw.gc.ca http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/view/entry/62331 http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/view/entry/62331 smith final correspondence address: jackie smith, department of sociology, university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, pa 15260; email: jgsmith@pitt.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 local responses to right-wing populism: building human rights cities jackie smith university of pittsburgh, usa abstract today economic vulnerability, heightened inequality, and reduced government capacities have fueled nationalist and xenophobic movements in many countries. such movements threaten democracy and human rights within countries and globally. less visible amid these disturbing trends – but no less important for the future of democracy – is the simultaneous expansion of locally-organized human rights initiatives around the world, especially since 2000. a proliferation of placebased movements claiming “rights to the city” is becoming increasingly visible and trans-locally networked. after outlining some of the global dimensions of this development, i discuss work happening in the u.s. city of pittsburgh, pennsylvania and explore the broader possibilities for locally based human rights initiatives to address contemporary threats to social justice and peace. keywords human rights cities; local activism; democracy; globalization; social polarization the recent growth and electoral success of right-wing populism can be attributed to economic insecurity resulting from the competitive, marketoriented processes of economic globalization and consumerist culture. global economic policies, known as neoliberalism, emphasize global trade and finance over local and national economies, reduce government regulation and welfare spending, and privatize state functions. such policies have encouraged the redistribution of wealth from working people and communities to global corporations and a growing transnational capitalist class, exacerbating economic inequality both within and between countries (evans & sewell, 2013; harvey, 2005; robinson, 2014). the privileging of economic expertise and the lack of transparency and public engagement in trade negotiations further undermines the democratic legitimacy of states and jackie smith studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 348 international institutions (da costa & mcmichael, 2007; evans, 1997; markoff, 1999). changes in the global economy, communications, and the practice of warfare have thus fundamentally altered the structural and cultural bases of national identities and notions of belonging. globalization has produced what kaldor calls “spectacle nationalism,” which “requires passive participation, watching television or joining a crowd but its capacity to mobilise active participation such as paying taxes or risking one’s life in wars is greatly weakened” (kaldor, 2003, p. 168). citizenship thus mirrors other forms of consumption, emphasizing individual gratification over social responsibility and group solidarity. this undermines the democratic values and empathy that help generate social cohesion and support effective governance, and it sets the stage for the kinds of exclusionary mobilizations we see today. in the early 1990s benjamin barber argued that the consumerist and market emphasis of neoliberal globalization would render democratic institutions meaningless and fuel movements defending traditional values and nationalist identities against perceived global threats (barber, 1992; see also moghadam, 2012). kaldor and her colleagues likewise anticipated that neoliberal globalization would encourage a variety of “anti-globalist,” nationalist, and xenophobic backlashes while hollowing-out democratic institutions (kaldor, 2003). since the persistent advance of neoliberal policies has fueled inequality and widespread corruption in government and business and prevented the emergence of responsive political leadership to address urgent social crises, today’s surge of right-wing populism should come as no surprise. seeking to fill this governance vacuum are populist movements advancing parochial defenses against economic globalization. at the same time other actors, many emerging from earlier human rights and global justice movements, are also organizing locally to advance a more inclusive and progressive form of globalization grounded in widely recognized values of human rights and dignity. mobilizing around claims of the “right to the city,” growing numbers of people in cities and communities around the world are seeking to defend peoples’ and communities’ access to basic needs such as water, housing, a healthy environment, and access to food, health care, and transportation. these movements for social inclusion have been less visible than those on the right, in part because of their incompatibilities with the discourses of capitalism and consumerist culture and their marginalization from mainstream media and politics. in addition, much of the work of these movements happens outside the realm of what is typically defined as “politics” – that is, outside the sphere of political parties and electoral politics. or their emphasis is on municipal and local politics, which are marginalized in the worldviews of neoliberal globalizers. yet, in the aftermath of the election of donald trump, more are paying attention to these local initiatives, recognizing their potential to challenge the dangerous rhetoric and policies of the right (see, e.g., barber, 2016; gerken, bollier, local responses to human rights populism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 349 gerstle & alperovitz, 2016; goodman, 2016; heinberg, 2016; hoxie, 2016; katz, 2016; norberg hodge & read, 2016). this paper documents the emergence and spread of local human rights initiatives and considers their potential role in helping communities address pervasive problems of economic stagnation and the polarizing and exclusionary politics they have generated, while helping build local capacities for addressing basic human needs and strengthening community resilience. i begin by discussing the global emergence of place-based efforts to realize human rights in localized settings. i then provide a more in-depth look at one such initiative, the human rights city initiative in pittsburgh, pennsylvania to show how this sort of project can counter the critical threats from right wing populism by promoting cross-cutting ties in communities, cultivating human rights and democratic values, bringing structural racism and violence into public consciousness and debate, and advancing human rights-oriented practices and policies. the methodology i employ is “observant participation,”1 stressing my role as an active participant in this movement as well as a researcher. this method draws heavily from critical feminist scholarship, emphasizing reflexivity and “strong objectivity” (see, e.g., harding, 1992) to engage in what santos (2014) refers to as the sociology of absences and emergences. in other words, this method can help uncover the people and experiences as well as the subaltern transformative practices and projects that are silenced and made invisible by mainstream culture and institutions. here the researcher is not seen as an outside observer, but rather as a social being whose identity and involvement in a social context impacts the questions asked, the methods of analysis used, and the content of the observations or responses obtained. i use practices of “active listening” to uncover the various ways that power relations manifest themselves in individual and group behavior (see, e.g., doerr, 2009). my involvement in this social context results from particular relationships with people and with a community, and i am attentive to these relationships – and to status and power imbalances they represent – in my analysis. my fellow-activists, moreover, are also co-investigators. i actively involve them in my ongoing questions about our work, we discuss emerging ideas or hypotheses about what actions might move us towards the changes we’re seeking, we generate thoughts about the institutional changes required to remedy the failures of existing arrangements, and i share conclusions and results of my study in varied formats that are accessible to diverse audiences. such methods make visible the knowledge that grows from activists’ work for social change. they also illuminate complex dynamics of coalitionbuilding and social struggle amid long-standing social divisions of race, class, gender, ethnicity, etc. this movement is explicitly attempting to transform these social identities and the conflicts they manifest, and i am able to use my 1 i am grateful to jeffrey juris for introducing me to this concept. jackie smith studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 350 own positionality and experience to try to better understand the various ways individuals might respond – through their thoughts, feelings, as well as actions – to new perspectives or challenges to their pre-existing conceptions of self and community. i first became familiar with this emergent movement while doing research on the world social forums. there, i saw that many groups were using human rights language in their efforts to build coalitions to resist economic globalization. despite some academic critiques that have dismissed the transformative potential of human rights, i saw activists embracing this language in an emancipatory way (see santos, 2007; rajagapol, 2006). moreover, the use of human rights framing did not seem to be linked to a particular place or issue-focus; activists from both the global north and south and groups working on trade, environment, or other issues seemed just as likely to be speaking in human rights terms. what stood out, however, is that it was the people and groups who were most harmed by economic globalization who were leading the effort to mobilize around human rights and dignity. to understand activists’ strategies in the world social forums and to learn how groups build and manage coalitions across national, cultural and other differences, i began engaging in more local work to implement ideas from these global movement spaces where i lived, including south bend, indiana and later pittsburgh. when i moved to pittsburgh and learned that the city had just passed a local proclamation naming it the fifth human rights city in the united states, i became engaged in work to build a coalition of groups to help actualize the proclamation. co-organizers and i formed the human rights city alliance in 2013, and the observations i report here are made as a leader in this effort. i do not attempt here to evaluate the actual impacts and effectiveness of the work we are doing, but rather to demonstrate how activists use the idea of “human rights city” to expand political and legal imaginaries and to make possible conversations and relationships that would otherwise be unlikely. in doing so, i argue that such initiatives help address the highly polarized ideological divisions that plague our society today and counter dynamics that encourage right-wing mobilization such as social segregation and dehumanization of marginalized groups. documenting how local groups are working to overcome divisions and to transform public discourses in their communities can help us identify policies and strategies that can reduce the appeal of reactionary leaders and help strengthen social cohesion and democratic institutions. rethinking urban governance: social movements and political imagination neoliberal globalization has remade cities and fundamentally altered local power structures in ways that favor transnational corporations and investors local responses to human rights populism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 351 over local residents. around the world, capitalists and corporate elites are increasingly influential in urban planning (sklair, 2017). as capitalists seek new opportunities for profit-making, they are increasingly acquiring urban land and property and financializing real estate markets (sassen, 2014). this process has fueled growing tensions between residents – for whom the city is home and community – and entrepreneurs, who view the city as a commodity desired for its exchange value rather than use value (logan & molotch, 1987). thus, in cities worldwide we see similar processes of dispossession and social exclusion of poor and working class people – especially people of color – as development for elite consumption transforms urban landscapes (harvey, 2012). many analysts privilege states and other elite actors as the central players in governance. yet, most analyses of conflict and transformative social change point to the essential roles that civil society plays in promoting effective governance, such as catalyzing policy change; monitoring governments’, parties’, and corporations’ compliance with the law; and mobilizing public support for government programs (appadurai, 2002; bell & o'rourke, 2007). studies of post-war settings show that civil society participation in governance is essential to building lasting peace; as such participation helps with intermediation between citizens and the state, advocacy for marginalized groups, monitoring powerful actors such as states, political parties, and corporations for accountability, socialization for a culture of peace, and fostering social cohesion (paffenholz & spurk, 2010; paffenholz, 2010). such functions are central to reducing polarization and building stable communities even where large-scale violence has not (yet) occurred. thus, greater attention to how civil society actors mobilize and carry out these functions is needed so that these efforts can be better supported. i argue that human rights cities are an example of locally-rooted initiatives to mobilize community residents into the work of local governance and to help overcome the polarizing tendencies reinforced by national and global politics. human rights cities are distinctive in that they advance a conscious political project that re-envisions and re-orients the social order around principles of human rights, rather than globalized markets. this involves a fundamental transformation of social relations in order to ensure that the means of survival are available to all human beings and protected for future generations. they stress an attachment to place that directly counters globalization’s footloose logic. whereas the dominant ideology holds that globalized markets are best at producing economic growth that then produces other social goods, activists advocating for human rights point out persistent failures of this logic. they argue that policies should be crafted with the primary aim of protecting and advancing human rights, rather than treating rights as a by-product of growth. thus, these initiatives activate residents’ political and legal imaginations – that is, their ability to envision possibilities and strategies for achieving a society very different from what exists in jackie smith studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 352 practice and in prevailing discourses and imaginaries.2 for if a group cannot imagine such a community, it will never realize it. given the entrenched political and economic power of corporate and financial elites and the (related) increasing marginalization of growing numbers of people from access to secure livelihoods, it is clear that those seeking to protect and advance human rights must somehow radically alter the larger political and economic order if their needs are to be met. of course, the rise of right-wing movements reflects one response to growing economic inequality. but to challenge prevailing power arrangements, those wanting a more inclusive society need to come together around a different social and political project that provides a distinct counter-narrative to the competitive individualism and consumerism of market-based globalization. i argue that human rights can provide the language and inspiration for such a political project. existing representative democratic institutions and economic policies that privilege markets and large corporations systematically exclude the voices of people most harmed by corporate globalization. structural unemployment, displacement and criminalization of communities of color, and anti-immigrant policies marginalize and exclude globalization’s “losers,” while the “winners” amass more wealth and translate that into political influence – corrupting democratic institutions (see, e.g., sassen, 2014). to address the underlying forces polarizing societies and undermining the viability of institutions and communities, activists are calling for efforts to “change the music,” or “flip the script,” and engaging in forms of “insurgent citizenship” to demand basic rights and social inclusion (holston, 2009; see also harvey, 2012). human rights cities advocates are trying to counter “spectacle nationalism” and its exclusionary and violent tendencies by helping redefine public discourse to include the voices of marginalized groups and articulating inclusive collective identities, values, and priorities that counter those of mainstream culture and institutions. for instance, rights advocates argue that “no human being is illegal,” and that human rights have no borders in response to today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. by organizing public activities where such ideas can be articulated and where people can discuss ideas for making change, these movements engage residents as active participants in advancing this political vision. the human rights city model might be seen as a form of what fetherston (2000) calls transformative peacebuilding, which targets the underlying power relations and exploitative, competitive relationships that fuel conflict and violence. transformative peacebuilding focuses on conflict as a system, and works to address its root causes by fundamentally confronting power inequities in ways that alter existing relationships and identities and that generate shared projects that support more equitable and just social relations. for instance, by mobilizing residents around claims to the right to housing or 2 on political and legal imagination, see, e.g., khasnabish (2008) and desai (2015). local responses to human rights populism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 353 the right to water, these initiatives point to the contradictions between market logics that drive economic policies and widely shared assumptions about what it means to be human. such discourse can undermine the legitimacy of the system, or at least impede further efforts to marketize basic human needs. shifting the discourse in this way challenges the privileged position of capitalism and corporate elites in democratic policy making. this work is advanced in part through what habermas (1981) calls communicative action, which involves intersubjective dialogue between a community of actors which enables [people] to reconstruct common understandings of their lifeworld and, therefore, renew the shared basis for culture, social integration, and socialization that underlie a mutual existence…. communicative action does provide a means of renegotiating the bases of mutual existence distorted by […] cultures of violence. (fetherston, 2000, p. 212) communication and transformative relationship-building across major social divides is at the core of the work of human rights cities.3 as the following examples illustrate, human rights city organizers work to bring diverse groups together and challenge prevailing politics, discourses, and agendas. the practices of human rights city activists nurture relationships that are obstructed by prevailing policies, helping overcome the segregation of affluent from poor communities and the sorting out of cities by race and ethnicity and other divides. the human rights framework provides an alternative normative foundation that can unite residents around collective identities and projects and foster mutual understanding, respect, equity, and cooperation while actively contesting the hegemony of capitalist principles of individualism, exploitation, hierarchy, and competition. human rights cities movements a “human rights city” is a municipality that refers explicitly to the universal declaration of human rights and other international human rights standards in its policies and programs. there are growing numbers of such cities since 2000 (oomen, davis, & grigolo, 2016; van den berg & oomen, 2014). barcelona is a leading human rights city in europe, and san francisco became an early u.s. human rights city with its 1998 adoption of a city ordinance reflecting the principles of the convention for the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (grigolo, 2011). below i explore another kind of human rights city, namely those that are explicitly designated as human rights cities under a growing global initiative launched by the 3 i use the word “transformative” here because the aim is not to simply create new friendships based on prior inequalities and assumptions, but to reconstruct social relations in ways that acknowledge past harms and put forward new bases for reconciliation. jackie smith studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 354 peoples decade on human rights learning (pdhre) following the un human rights conference in vienna in 1993. according to pdhre’s website: a human rights city is a city or a community where people of good will, in government, in organizations and in institutions, try and let a human rights framework guide the development of the life of the community. equality and nondiscrimination are basic values. efforts are made to promote a holistic vision of human rights to overcome fear and impoverishment, a society that provides human security, access to food, clean water, housing, education, healthcare and work at livable wages, sharing these resources with all citizens – not as a gift, but as a realization of human rights. (pdhre international office, 2006, p. 3) pdhre organizers have worked to promote human rights city initiatives in different parts of the world, including at the world social forums and in other movement and un venues. rosario, argentina became the first human rights city of this kind in 1997, and since then at least two dozen more cities have followed.4 there is no single pathway to a human rights city: some cities, like barcelona and san francisco, incorporate elements of international human rights law into local legislation. others adopt formal human rights city ordinances. some of these initiatives have involved cooperation between public officials and civil society groups, but the key leadership and impetus is typically from non-governmental human rights advocates. formally designated human rights cities are bottom-up, civil society-led efforts to re-envision communities’ role in local governance and to prioritize human rights in local policies and practices. rather than looking to national governments to enforce human rights or confining themselves to conventional political discourses and tactics, human rights city advocates seek to change the entire frame of policy reference. they begin with the radical assertion that the point of governance is not to promote the interests of business, but rather to protect and advance all human rights (including economic, social and cultural rights) for all residents (including noncitizens). this form of “insurgent citizenship” (holston, 2009) points to the often significant gaps between human rights ideals and community realities, and engages in various forms of action to reduce those gaps. as the growth model exacerbates problems of structural unemployment, gentrification and other forms of forced displacement, declining social services, and environmental damage, the notion of a human rights city offers residents a chance to reclaim and re-build community as they address deepening crises that are most keenly felt in local settings. it provides an opportunity that is lacking in conventional political spaces for residents to engage in explicit thinking and 4 among these are alexandria, egypt; nimamobi, ghana; korogocho, kenya; mogale, south africa; nagpur, india; gwangju, south korea; edmonton, canada; washington d.c., usa, and jackson ms, usa (for a full list see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/human_rights_city, a wikipedia site i created with my students when we realized that no entry had yet been written). local responses to human rights populism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 355 discussion about shared goals, values, and notions of place, identity and belonging. these kinds of conversations reflect work to expand residents’ “political and legal imaginations” and they directly challenge hegemonic notions of politics, citizenship, and economy, which privilege national and global sites of power. by mobilizing and engaging residents around notions of place, human rights city activists are offering a radical alternative to globalizing forces that require the subordination of local and national communities, economies, and ecosystems to globalized markets. such conversations also generate uncomfortable realities as they expose what are often vast inequalities in the experiences of residents from diverse racial and economic backgrounds. to the extent that such conversations are successful at fostering empathy while altering people’s social relationships and understandings of place, they open the way for new models of politics and creative insights that can generate support for redistributive solutions that strengthen social cohesion and local democracy. below i provide selected examples from my work with pittsburgh’s human rights city alliance (hrca) of how human rights city initiatives can help reduce social polarization and strengthen communities’ capacities to address social, ecological and financial crises. i focus on how the hrca has worked to address structural racism in a highly segregated city with a history and present of racial tension and exclusion. racism in the region’s steel mills and unions confined african american workers to the most dangerous and low-paying jobs, and the effects remain today in the large and persistent racial inequities in income and other measures of well-being. pittsburgh has among the highest rates of black poverty (33%), infant mortality (13.7%), and unemployment (16.6%) in the united states. african american median household income is less than half that of white residents (smith, 2017; center on race & social problems, 2015). the political marginalization of african americans, moreover, has led to repeated displacements, and pittsburgh has seen more than 20,000 african american residents pushed out of the city since the 1980s (fullilove, 2016).5 as in other u.s. cities, pittsburgh police have also been implicated in numerous killings, maimings, and other discriminatory practices violating the basic human rights of african american residents. yet, the city’s revitalization around the higher education, health care, and technology industries has enabled public officials to celebrate the claim that pittsburgh is a “most livable city.”6 activists and many low-income residents have countered, “livable for whom?” 5 while white residents were also displaced as pittsburgh’s steel industry declined, they had more resources to allow them to move to new economic opportunities outside the region. displaced african americans, in contrast, tended to move to neighboring suburbs of pittsburgh, where they have had less access to jobs and public services. 6 the designation of “most livable city” has been given to the city by numerous commercial media entities, including forbes in 2010, and most recently the economist’s intelligence unit jackie smith studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 356 in response to these conditions, hrca and its allies have made it a priority to address racial inequalities as a first step towards making pittsburgh a true human rights city. a key aim of the hrca is to help create spaces for diverse organizations and community members and leaders to come together to engage in dialogue and creative thinking – communicative action – about how to address the gaps between human rights ideals and practices in our city and region. at the same time, the alliance works to amplify the language of human rights in the public discourse by communicating with public officials, encouraging activists and organizations in various sectors to frame their struggles in human rights terms, and supporting varied opportunities for human rights learning. a human rights city action plan outlines major priorities and proposals for changes, drawing from work by groups around the city and from other human rights cities (human rights city alliance, 2014). below i describe some of this work to provide a foundation for further comparative research on how local movement initiatives like this can help address critical social conflicts. promoting a human rights constituency and culture one of the biggest challenges for human rights advocates in many u.s. cities is to convince political activists and leaders to view human rights as a useful organizing framework. our experience has revealed an “american exceptionalism” where many see the language of human rights as referring only to places outside the united states – not to situations in this country (finnegan, saltsman & white, 2010). most u.s. residents don’t know much about how international institutions and treaties operate and what prospects these mechanisms offer for local activists. this is changing, however, in light of the new u.s. administration, which promises to deny the traditional strategy activists used of mobilizing federal entities to enforce human rights against state and local authorities (escr-net, 2016). in addition, the u.s. political system encourages a focus on electoral politics and an issue-based orientation to advocacy that marginalizes human rights principles and dismisses or stigmatizes internationalism. thus, much of the work in the early years of the hrca has been to help translate information about global processes for grassroots audiences. the aim here is to increase local knowledge, demonstrate how a human rights framework can facilitate organizing, and highlight connections across issues and intersecting human rights. by inviting people to visualize how our city could look if it was organized around human rights, we were asking them to imagine a very different place. participants quickly learned about the intersecting nature of human rights, ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 2014 livability survey. city officials often celebrate this label as they advance policies and projects that displace poor residents. local responses to human rights populism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 357 and recognized that we needed to change people’s mindsets as well as public policy and government practices. for instance, politicians and the public are accustomed to thinking of local politics as mainly about attracting new revenues for the city and limiting taxes, and in the process they ignore – or simply pay lip service to – questions about equity, quality of life, and community. in our work to advocate for the right to housing or the right to healthy food, we have sought to engage a larger public in thinking about what these rights mean and whether market-oriented policies can achieve them. if large segments of voters hold local politicians accountable to human rights as opposed to market standards, these public officials will find new ways to address the lack of affordable housing or the presence of food deserts in our city. one general observation from this work is that all of hrca’s activities have been explicit in their intention of creating spaces for building crosscutting connections across social divisions – especially race, class, and gender. each of our events has helped connect people of different backgrounds, providing spaces for learning and strategizing as we strengthen the local constituency demanding and supporting human rights claims. in this work to build bridges across groups, we have found that despite the radical implications of human rights, the language appeals to both mainstream and radical groups as well as politicians. while the vagueness of human rights can lead to its co-optation by elites, if used right, it can be a political advantage. very quickly people have tended to see (if they hadn’t already) that the privileging of economic growth in public policy meant that human rights would always be neglected. the human rights lens helps clarify how economic growth systematically undermines the ability of some groups in the city – in pittsburgh, as elsewhere, this is especially african americans, immigrants, people with disabilities, and youth – to enjoy even the most basic rights. from here, we can invite residents to consider not just different policies but also new practices and institutions that could better accomplish the aims of our human rights city. the major activities of the alliance have included work to spread human rights values in our community and to inspire people to take action. annual celebrations and mobilization around international human rights day, participation in a locally organized summit against racism, and celebration of indigenous peoples day on october 12th each year have been central to our organizing strategy that seeks to shape a human rights culture and to build and activate a broad human rights constituency. i describe each of these activities briefly to illustrate how they can contribute to transforming social conflicts by highlighting democratic values, building shared local identities, and advancing cooperative actions centered on human rights. the hrca uses the annual international human rights day celebration (december 10) to raise consciousness in the city about our human rights city status and about the gaps between this vision and the experiences of residents. such work promotes a human rights culture that supports mutual jackie smith studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 358 understanding, respect, and empathy among residents. many residents remain unaware of our status as a human rights city, and like cities everywhere, physical segregation often prevents residents from appreciating the experiences of less privileged residents. such separation contributes to the silencing and dehumanization of marginalized groups, which in turn enables the rise of politicians promoting racist and exclusionary policies. as one of the only explicit human rights groups intentionally seeking to mobilize a broad base of residents, the hrca has organized annual press conferences and rallies with representatives from diverse human rights groups in the city to reflect on the state of human rights in our city and to lift up some of the leading struggles of the time. in the last two years we have expanded the work to mobilize human rights days of action in the days surrounding international human rights day. we invited various activist, community, and church groups around the city to take some action recognizing international human rights day. we listed these events on a shared calendar on our website and social media as a way to show the connections among our diverse struggles. this activity has helped build connections among activist groups, show the intersectionality of human rights, and encourage a wider range of groups to consider their own work within a human rights framework. it expands human rights discourse and supports the growth of a human rights culture in our region as more activists and residents use explicit human rights language. in addition to annual activities around international human rights day, the hrca has worked to promote a human rights constituency and culture through network-building. for instance, in 2016 we worked with a coalition of activist groups coming together to fight displacement of poor and largely african american residents to organize a housing summit at a local university. this event aimed to shift the public discourse around housing from one based on market logics, which focused on negotiating with policy makers and developers to allocate affordable units in planned developments, to one based on the human right to housing. summit content – including keynote speakers, workshops, and a website with films and other learning resources – was designed to help residents understand the global factors shaping pittsburgh’s housing market and to enable residents who did not experience housing insecurity to learn about how the affordable housing crisis impacts families and neighborhoods as well as the larger city.7 an important emphasis here was on how global economic forces contribute to the “serial forced displacement” of communities of color (fullilove, 2016), which helps link conceptually today’s widespread urban housing crises with international migration and the genocides against indigenous peoples. the summit also provided opportunities for networking and for residents to learn about the work happening in pittsburgh and other cities for housing justice. 7 see http://housingsummit.wikispaces.com/ local responses to human rights populism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 359 most voluntary coalitions flounder where there are no resources to support basic communication and coordination work across groups that are not organized to work together. the housing summit is one important example of how coalitions like the hrca can provide such resources, drawing from universities and local expertise and volunteerism to nurture and sustain relationship-building among diverse groups in the city. but this project was only possible because key leaders (myself included) could devote extensive time to building relationships in the community. in addition to work with activist groups, and to help expand the base of resources available for human rights work, the hrca has been working to engage faculty and professionals at the city’s numerous universities in work to promote human rights and human rights education. we created a university human rights network to connect university faculty, staff and students interested in human rights and to help link pittsburgh’s activist community with researchers and centers that can provide information and other resources to support human rights advocacy, education, and organizing in our region. the network also works to support advocacy for human rights on the city’s college campuses. building a human rights city requires changes in more than city government, and the university network seeks to press universities to engage in policies consistent with human rights norms. universities affect the region’s labor practices and economic development plans, including the displacement of low-income and african american residents from neighborhoods near campuses. this network helped support a student neighborhood tour on universities and affordable housing in pittsburgh to follow-up our housing summit and enable students to connect with local organizations. the university network itself grew from collaboration between hrca and the university of pittsburgh’s global studies center to convene local, national, and international human rights city leaders for a conference to explore how the human rights cities model has been used in other communities. the conference generated ongoing connections, a follow-up meeting hosted by washington dc’s human rights city steering committee, and led to the development of a national human rights cities alliance within the framework of the largest grassroots human rights organization in the united states, the us human rights network. these national connections link pittsburgh with other human rights city leaders and with the global human rights movement, inspiring and informing our local activism. fighting institutionalized racism the alliance’s work has benefitted from pre-existing efforts of pittsburgh residents to fight racial injustice, which include most notably an annual summit against racism where hundreds of participants learn about the jackie smith studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 360 priorities and concerns of african americans and other people of color, learn about the work being done by existing groups, organize panels, identify allies, and build networks to support the human rights city initiative and its racial justice component in particular.8 in keeping with the intentionality of our “people-centered human rights” agenda,9 we have sought to organize panels with african american leaders in the city, jointly identifying key priorities for work to address the needs of residents who have been denied the ability to enjoy all their basic human rights. our panels have sought to reinforce working relationships with different groups in the community and to highlight local human rights struggles as they relate to racial inequalities and discrimination. participants had the opportunity to learn about how institutionalized racism impacts the daily lives of fellow pittsburghers, reproducing racial inequalities in education, working conditions, neighborhoods, housing, and civil liberties. they also met organizers working to change these conditions, often gaining new information about their city and about activism within it. panels we organized thus helped raise consciousness about the forms of institutionalized racism in pittsburgh and local strategies for addressing it. in the 2016 summit against racism, we built upon our prior work and our networks with other activist groups to more explicitly engage residents in thinking about how international human rights treaties can be used as a tool for advancing human rights locally. specifically, our collaborative panel highlighted work being done by several local groups as part of the national “cities for cedaw” initiative, which encourages cities to adopt legislation that implements the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (cedaw). we also helped educate participants about the convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (cerd) and its review process, which encourages grassroots participation in local monitoring efforts to inform the us human rights network’s shadow reports. the panel helped connect pittsburgh groups with the larger human rights movement and to familiarize residents with international legal mechanisms that can become part of our local human rights strategies. these sessions also help strengthen relationships and build support for other collaborative initiatives, including the annual may day march for immigrant rights and the housing summit described above. they help raise 8 our website – www.pghrights.org – includes a report from the 2015 18th annual summit against racism. the report may be accessed directly at https://pghhumanrightscity.wikispaces.com/file/view/summit%20against%20racism%202015%20repo rt%20and%20agenda%20priorities.pdf/539653736/summit%20against%20racism%202015 %20report%20and%20agenda%20priorities.pdf. 9 the hrca draws from previous antiracism organizing through its work with the us human rights network. the ushrn promotes a “people-centered human rights movement” that emphasizes lived experiences and leadership on those most directly affected by human rights violations, rather than a strictly legal approach to human rights. another key document in this tradition is the jemez principles for democratic organizing (see www.ejnet.org/ej/jemez.pdf). local responses to human rights populism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 361 consciousness in a larger activist community and reinforce a human rights framework for thinking and discourse. while it is difficult to assess the quantitative impacts at this early stage in the hrca’s work, over time, repeated exposure to sessions like these have increased the responsiveness of local residents to the human rights messaging we use, and more community leaders have become engaged in our work. for instance, leading organizers who were part of the various projects described here have agreed to join the hrca steering committee. since the human rights city model doesn’t fit prevailing conceptions of politics, it is often difficult for people to fully understand how to participate. these gatherings enable repeated exposure to human rights language, helping expand the human rights constituency in our city while deepening working relationships among antiracism activists. historical truth-telling another example of local work to translate global human rights thinking into local contexts is our effort to confront historical and ongoing human rights violations through public recognition of indigenous peoples day. the idea for this day first arose in 1977 at the international conference on discrimination against indigenous populations in the americas. a handful of cities in the united states have recognized the day, but in 2014, the human rights city of seattle became the first large city to do so. it adopted a resolution renaming october 12 indigenous peoples day in that city, explicitly linking the decision to that city’s status as a human rights city. one of our group members attended a rally organized by local activists honoring indigenous peoples day in october of 2014, and he brought ideas from that rally to an hrca meeting. given the recent news about seattle’s indigenous peoples day, the group was especially enthusiastic about the idea of moving this initiative forward in pittsburgh.10 we reached out to relevant groups in our community and drafted a text to submit to city council. the text was based on seattle’s resolution and it incorporated a demand made by local activists for “the teaching of indigenous peoples’ history as recommended by indigenous communities in our public schools.”11 the city council of pittsburgh passed a non-binding will of the council recognizing the 12th of october as “indigenous peoples’ day” on the eve of human rights day in 2014, and residents continue to refer to this legislation as we recognize indigenous peoples day each fall. 10 organizers in seattle were likewise elated to hear that their work inspired action elsewhere (personal communication with seattle human rights commissioners, august 18 2016). 11 the text of the legislation is available at: http://pghhumanrightscity.wikispaces.com/file/view/indigenous%20peoples%20day%20will%20of%20th e%20council.pdf/533004498/indigenous%20peoples%20day%20will%20of%20the%20counci l.pdf. jackie smith studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 362 subsequently, we have continued to work with the local native american council and native american student organizations as well as other local organizations and activists to organize celebrations of indigenous peoples day, and to raise public consciousness about the violent history of western colonization and its lasting impacts on people of color. one innovation introduced in 2016 is to encourage participants to reach out to educators, congregation leaders, and other community groups to encourage them to take some action to recognize indigenous peoples day. in 2017, we built upon this idea to encourage residents to read and organize neighborhood or larger group discussions of a book by a native american activist, and we provided a discussion guide to support such action. this draws from a recognition of our group’s limited capacity as a volunteer organization as well as of the need to decentralize the work of building a culture of human rights. hrca provides educational resources to support this on our website and via regular communications with participants, as well as through the events it organizes. indigenous peoples day challenges the celebratory accounts of christopher columbus’s encounter with the americas and the subsequent european settlement. pittsburgh does not have a large population of indigenous peoples given its history of forced migration, relocation and genocide against the people who initially lived on this land. thus, the voices of those displaced from this region are not prominent in the public discourse and consciousness. but our principled commitments to the people-centered human rights approach sensitized us to the work of indigenous social movements and human rights organizers around the world, convincing us of the centrality of historical “truth telling” about this country’s imperialist, colonial, and genocidal history as a key initial step in our work to build a city based in human rights. such truth-telling both acknowledges the enduring impacts of past human rights abuses – including the erasure of indigenous histories and voices from public discourses – and creates space for healing and for the rebuilding of more just relationships and communities. indeed, as we witness the rise of right-wing populism and the spate of hate crimes following the recent u.s. election, it is clear that such truth-telling about history is critical to fostering a more cohesive, inclusive, decolonized democratic culture here and elsewhere. by supporting annual indigenous peoples day celebrations, hrca helps create spaces for more public scrutiny of the prevailing accounts of u.s. history. as we know from other human rights work around the world, truthtelling is essential to promoting healing, to address ongoing trauma and its consequences for individuals and communities, and to realizing a broader culture of human rights. thus, the transformation of consciousness and culture we are seeking with the human rights city initiative requires that we tell new stories about our past so that we can imagine a different future that advances “dignity and justice for everyone.” indigenous peoples day work and related historical truth-telling – such as the un’s international decade of people of african descent and the international day of remembrance of local responses to human rights populism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 363 victims of slavery and the trans-atlantic slave trade – is a form of communicative action and an “exercise in retrospective radical imagination” (santos, 2007, p. 29) that enables a re-orienting of relationships in our community by making visible the history of systematic violence that reinforces difference and denies some groups’ full enjoyment of human rights. discussion and conclusion the growing political influence of right-wing populist movements indicates a broader “crisis of legitimacy” for prevailing political and economic institutions linked to economic inequality, financial instability, and ecological crises (chase-dunn, 2013). fundamental changes in the economy and labor markets as well as in communications have undermined national identities and diminished the meaning of citizenship. this destabilizes social cohesion and local community resilience. exclusionary movements have arisen within this leadership vacuum, as those excluded from the benefits of globalization seek alternative policies that will address individual and social needs. nevertheless, especially since 2000, movements for “the right to the city” have been growing around the world as people face growing threats to their individual and community well-being. i have argued that these locally-based, rights-claiming movements offer a model of politics that can counter the divisive tendencies of capitalism and reduce the appeal of exclusionary populist rhetoric. they do so by actively engaging residents in constructive work to redefine citizenship and transform their communities to prioritize human rights over material wealth. in their latest annual report, human rights watch (2017) focused on the global threats from rising authoritarian populism. these authors conclude that the only way to stop the spread of demagoguery and defend basic human rights principles is to build broad popular constituencies that are organized to defend and demand human rights: civil society organizations, particularly groups that fight to uphold rights, need to protect civic space where it is threatened, build alliances across communities to show the common interest in human rights…. the demagogues [build] popular support by spinning false explanations and cheap solutions to genuine ills. the best antidote is for the public to demand a politics based on truth and the values on which rights-respecting democracy has been built. populists thrive in a vacuum of opposition. a strong popular reaction, using every means available…is the best defense of the values that so many still cherish despite the problems they face. (roth, 2017, p. 13-14) such work to transform public discourse and consciousness has been happening largely outside the broader media coverage, through a growing global movement that is building human rights culture and demanding the jackie smith studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 364 actualization of human rights principles. movements for human rights in cities and communities are helping connect diverse groups and deepen analyses of the intersections of economic and other human rights and of how economic globalization impacts these rights. in doing so, they are cultivating the broad popular constituencies for human rights that are necessary to defend and enhance democratic governance. i have argued that the human rights city model provides a framework for a political and institutional culture fundamentally different from globalized capitalism. human rights cities are attempts to re-define community identities, priorities and values and to re-design local institutions in ways that help achieve those. using various strategies to enhance community dialogues, translate ideas and models across locales, and build relationships across diverse groups, they seek to “flip the script” of economic globalization subordinate market ideologies to the values of human rights, inclusion, dignity, and community well-being. expanding political and legal imaginations, building networks among community groups and neighborhoods, and making visible the impacts of economic policies on the human rights of residents is critical to changing the political culture from one that fuels competition, conflict, and violence to one that privileges well-being and equity. the global expansion of human rights treaties, norms, and institutions is a resource for transforming national identities and notions of citizenship, effectively re-defining citizenship and governments’ obligations regarding human rights (koenig, 2008). by examining the work of local human rights activists, we can better understand both the mechanics of how such global-local transformations can occur and the potential of human rights as a foundation for a more just and peaceful society. by building connections, consciousness, and platforms for collective action, human rights cities initiatives can help communities address deep structural inequities of race and class segregation while fostering social cohesion and building broad bases of support for collective identities and projects centered on human rights. working to change the language and priorities of politics in ways that de-emphasize the city as an economic “growth machine” (logan & molotch, 1987), and instead accentuate the city as a place where residents live lives sustained by vibrant neighborhoods and healthy communities, human rights city initiatives make space for residents to engage in building a different kind of city. yet, the challenges to this work are significant. globalization’s corporatefriendly policies contributed to media monopolies that limit the media space and public attention available for critical analyses and perspectives. this is where work in the “sociology of absences” is key for reversing the omissions and silencing that helps legitimate an unjust social order. and a chronic problem all voluntary groups face is the challenge of recruiting and sustaining active volunteers. fatalism in the face of today’s enormous crises and trying daily struggles for survival makes apathy and consumerist escape a preferable option to activism for many (eliasoph, 1998; schor, 1992). local responses to human rights populism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 365 my observant participation in this work convinces me that academic workers can – and i believe we must – use our privilege in reflexive and strategic ways to support these kinds of transformative social movements. scholars can help inform a “sociology of absences and emergences” – by attending to people and processes marginalized by mainstream academic and other institutions. we can, for instance, provide our time, expertise, organizational support (such as note-taking and report writing), and access to university resources such as space and financial support. by helping tell the stories of these movements in both scholarly and more general audience writings, we can help bring legitimacy to residents’ human rights claims and broaden the audience attentive to human rights issues. scholars can also contribute to the important work of critical public education by organizing public events and building websites that nurture community scholars who understand the complex global forces impacting their communities. we can help train residents to do research on and write about urban policies and their disparate outcomes and to expose corporate human rights violations. we can help local residents learn about activism in other locales and cultivate both intersectional and translocal connections among activists and groups. finally, we can support the critical work of documenting and broadcasting the vital local knowledge that is emerging from the work of people who are striving to transform our world. acknowledgements i am grateful to my fellow human rights organizers for their contributions to this ongoing research experiment. special thanks to vickie casanova willis for her careful review of this text and for the many conversations we’ve shared, which have shaped this project immensely. the global studies center at the university of pittsburgh provided financial and intellectual support for this research, and i’m grateful to michael goodhart, roger rouse, and joshua mcdermott for their intellectual and practical contributions to this work. references appadurai, a. 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(2014). towards a decentralization of human rights: the rise of human rights cities. in t. van lindert & d. lettinga (eds.), the future of human rights in an urban world: exploring opportunities, threats and challenges (pp. 11-16). amsterdam: amnesty international netherlands. retrieved from jackie smith studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 347-368, 2017 368 http://amnesty.nl/content/uploads/2016/12/the_future_of_human_rights_in_an_urban_worl d_0.pdf?x44743 microsoft word evans.docx studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 108 disciplining global society1 tony evans, university of southampton abstract one of the puzzles of the current era is the divide between optimists and pessimists on the question of human rights. the prominence of human rights on the international political agenda sustains the optimist’s hopes for the future, while pessimists point to continued and widespread reports of civil, political, economic, social and cultural violations. this article looks at the tensions and apparent contradictions between these two approaches. following a discussion on the construction of global human rights discourse(s), the article concludes that the pretensions of law act to mask the socioeconomic normative framework that acts to discipline global society. one of the puzzles of the current era is the divide between optimists and pessimists on the question of human rights.2 both optimists and pessimists within the human rights discourse begin by noting significant changes in the spatial reach and intensity of networks of social relations. the increasing activity of social movements, nongovernmental organizations, interest groups, corporations, financial institutions, indigenous peoples’ organizations and citizens groups engaged in global discourses on every aspect of our social, economic, political and cultural lives testifies to these changes.(cox, 1999; held, et al., 1999; linklater, 1998) however, having accepted this general observation, optimists and pessimists part company; optimists asserting that the new freedoms found in the processes of globalization offer ever greater opportunities for protecting human rights and pessimists asserting that globalization provides a new context for further exploitation and subsequent violation of rights (scholte, 1996; spybey, 1996) for optimists, the intensity and ubiquity of social networks promises to increase the demand to secure human rights, democracy and environmental protection for all. while in the post-world war ii period of political realism arguments over sovereignty and the national interest often stood in the way of making progress on human rights, optimists argue that, today, such arguments are untenable. the greater interconnectedness characteristic of globalization, and increasing demands for transparency, mean that the demand for human rights cannot be circumvented. the vast body of international human rights law created in the last few decades is seen by optimists as the formal expression of normative changes that place human rights at the centre of global political life. for 1 this paper was developed from a keynote address delivered at the conference “human rights in a globalizing era?,” organized by the centre for studies in social justice, university of windsor, ontario, canada, 4-6 august 2005. i am grateful to the conference participants who made useful comments following the address. 2 the author gratefully acknowledges the support of the leverhulme trust, which partially funded the research for this article. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 109 optimists, the new order represents “power to the people” in as far as human rights offer the oppressed, the excluded, the victims of tyrannical governments, and those engaged in the politics of identity an opportunity to gain the “moral high ground” in the struggle for emancipation and freedom. for pessimists, on the other hand, conditions of economic globalization offer an opportunity to exercise “power over people,” by promoting particular modes of thought and practice that support the interests of global capital. from this perspective, the freedoms described and “normalized” within the practices of globalization accentuate processes of inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, to the detriment of human rights (undp, 1997; undp, 1999). pessimists feel vindicated, for instance, when a leading member of a prominent investment corporation, commenting on the possibility of human rights within the current global order, remarks that the “great beauty of globalization is that no one is in control” (hormats, 1998). while the international legal regime of human rights includes a wide spectrum of rights, the values associated with globalization remain the dominant mode of thought that guides political, social and economic action. the discourse of human rights may have stimulated the creation of international law, but the context in which rights must be promoted denies the possibility of achieving any significant and lasting progress. this article argues that the hegemony of international law obfuscates the practice of human rights as a discourse of both freedom and oppression. it begins by looking at the structure of modern human rights discourses: legal, philosophical, and political. through this analysis, it is argued that the philosophical and political discourses of rights have been largely displaced by legal discourse, leaving the impression that all the major philosophical and theoretical arguments have been resolved. the argument then turns to look at the context in which human rights discourses and practice are conducted in the current period, arguing that the context of economic globalization is largely overlooked in the legal discourse of rights. as a third section argues, this is because the legal discourse privileges rights associated with “market-discipline” and the interests of those most closely associated with economic globalization. finally, some conclusions are drawn. the discourse(s) of human rights the starting place for seeking an understanding of the tensions between optimists and pessimists is to recognize that the modern human rights discourse is predominately a discourse of international law. ngos, international organizations, and states all accept that the human rights regime is a legal construct. while the philosophy of rights and the politics of rights do retain some foothold within the literature, the overwhelming focus remains on legal instruments, practices and institutions. further evidence of this is seen in the predominant legal approach adopted in university curricula, where human rights is taught mostly within departments of law. (freeman, 2002). this justification for presenting the promotion and protection of human rights as a legal discourse has attracted little comment (chimini, 1999; mieville, 2006). this could, of course, be explained as mere oversight. however, given repeated claims that human rights are the “idea of our time,” and widely voiced assertions that human rights represent a universal and eternal truth which is now recognized by international society, the lack of studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 110 reflection on the authority, relevance and hegemony of international human rights law remains a puzzle. this is not to argue that the literature consistently fails to engage in criticism of the international human right regime. on the contrary, criticism is not hard to find, particularly criticism that is aimed at the failure of international society to solve the problems associated with compliance and implementation. however, these criticisms are commonly concerned with refining, polishing, and elaborating accepted norms, standards, and practices in an attempt to make the regime more elegant, sophisticated, imposing and magisterial. as one commentator has observed, it is criticism undertaken by committed human rights experts, resolutely “advancing the faith” (chandler, 2002). what this approach conceals is a lack of critique. while criticism is confined to arguments about particular theories, philosophies, beliefs, ideologies, and regimes, critique is more concerned to investigate the ways in which these claims to truth are achieved, legitimated, and presented as the authoritative guide for action. if criticism is thought of as part of a technical debate, a debate intended to refine particular truths, critique is concerned with the “politics of truth” itself (foucault, 1996). as such, critique is concerned to expose the interests served by the production and maintenance of particular truths, and the processes that enable some forms of knowledge to be accepted as complete and legitimate while other forms are labelled partial and suspect. in this sense, critique occupies a limited space within the literature (rouse, 1994; taylor, 1995). the dominant legal discourse of universal human rights circumvents critique by avoiding contextual questions, particularly those concerning economic globalization. the term “discourse” refers to the argument that language is not merely a way of describing external reality – a technique for labelling objects – but acts to signify generalized, socially constructed categories of thought to which important social meanings and values are attributed. discourses promote particular categories of thought and belief that guide our responses to the prevailing socioeconomic environment. in this sense, discourses lend structure to our experiences, and the meanings we give to our experiences. an example of this can be seen when we use the term “lawyer,” which does not simply describe an individual by professional category but also invokes a bundle of other meanings, expectations and understandings that go far beyond mere empiricism. included among these are assumptions about authority, fairness, social class, punishment, justice, legitimacy, erudition and notions of social order. discourses therefore provide sets of values and beliefs that inform our social responses and actions, although not always selfconsciously. professional and intellectual discourses are among the most influential in this respect. crucially, as professional, intellectual and interest based groups move to “privatize” and institutionalize discourse – through the introduction of specialized language, images, concepts, and the institutionalization of knowledge – the veracity, reliability, integrity and authority of discourse “experts” is reinforced, while other voices from outside the discourse are marginalized, derided, excluded and sometimes prohibited (hunt 1993). the most prominent voices within the human rights discourse are lawyers, ngos, and academics, whose authority ensures that the “true” discourse is maintained. discourses, therefore act as the meeting place for power and knowledge (foucault, 1977). while neoliberals assume that knowledge can flourish only in the absence of power, from the perspective of discourse, there can be no knowledge without power or power in the absence of knowledge (cozens hoy, 1995). any investigation into studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 111 the truth-claims emanating from discourse must therefore include an enquiry into power. however, such an investigation does not imply that the generation of truth is necessarily corrupted by power but, rather, that the social world described by discourses always involves power relations. in this sense, neoliberal concerns that power can be defined in terms of legitimacy and illegitimacy misses the important point that even the legitimate exercise of power also excludes, marginalizes, silences, and prohibits alternatives. mutua illustrates this clearly in his discussion of the human rights discourse, which he argues is often expressed through images of the “saviour” overthrowing the “savage” to restore human rights to the “victim” (mutua, 2002). while the image of good triumphing over evil to save the wretched may inspire a sense of moral righteousness, it fails to acknowledge that the wretched may aspire to an alternative view of dignity, rights and the good life than that promoted by the saviour. within the context of the current global order, the saviour is concerned to promote the values, norms and principles of the dominant discourse of human rights, which is associated with the neoliberal project for economic globalization. the victim, on the other hand, may harbour other expectations, perhaps group rights and the right to cultural identity, which the neoliberal project finds difficulty in accommodating (evans, 2000). three discourses of universal human rights following this approach to discourse suggests that human rights are better understood as three overlapping discourses – the philosophical, the legal and the political – each with its own language, concepts and normative framework. at the centre of the philosophy of rights discourse is the project to discover secure foundations upon which universal claims for human rights might be sustained. this project has seen investigations into many possibilities, including the existence of a deity, human need, self-evidence and theories of justice. in the most recent period, where the values of liberalism have achieved a global reach, the tradition of natural rights has accomplished an unchallenged, though often unspoken, place as the rationale for building the post-world war ii global human rights regime. claims that all rational nations now subscribe to the “settled norm” of human rights (frost, 1996), and that “amazing progress” has been achieved in recent decades (opsahl, 1989), reinforce this view. together, the idea of the “settled norm” and the still prevalent naturalist account of human rights, suggest the discovery of a final “truth,” making all further foundationalist enquiry redundant. indeed, the president of the united nations general assembly once noted that the “quest for the basis of human rights to which philosophers, jurists and politicians devoted their interest and concern in the past … [has] lost its significance” (chandler, 2002). for critics, this conclusion is part of a “culture of contentment” that assumes discourse “closure” is possible and desirable, rather than an alternative understanding of discourse as inexorable process (gill, 1995). for some commentators, this error marks the contemporary philosophy of rights discourse as “as much round and round as ever forward” (evans, 2003; vincent 1986), as a point of “arrival” for neoliberal cosmopolitanism, rather than a point of “departure” towards new ways of conceptualizing rights and social order (raphael, 1966), and as a conservative rather than a radical project (carver, 1998). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 112 in contrast to the moral abstract nature of the philosophical discourse, the legal discourse focuses upon a large corpus of international human rights law, mostly generated under the auspices of the united nations. the legal discourse focuses upon the internal logic of the law, its elegance, coherence, extent, and meaning, which the application of legal reason is said to reveal (vincent, 1986). a second aspect of the legal discourse investigates questions concerning the extent to which human rights law can be said to have transformed the principles of international law into a system perhaps more appropriately labelled transnational law (cassese, 1990). the purpose of this move is to resolve the contradictions between the cosmopolitan claims of human rights and the principles of sovereignty, non-intervention and cultural difference, upon which the international system and international law is built. although this move may have noble motives, critics argue that it “impedes the application of basic international legal doctrine to human rights law; impedes its conceptual and academic development and obscures conflicts between the two” (chinkin, 1998). in common with natural rights foundationalism, which, reason reveals, stands above the values that describe any particular society, culture or civilization, international human rights law claims to articulate a set of “neutral” values to which all reasonable people should subscribe (marks, 1998). lastly, the political discourse seeks to contextualize the prevailing values expressed in law and philosophy. it is, therefore, concerned with questions of power and interests associated with the dominant conception of human rights and the expression of those interests as legal and philosophical “truths” (evans, 1996; stammers, 1993). while the application of reason and claims of neutrality have tended to legitimate the historic contribution of philosophy and international law, the political discourse is often seen as a value-laden, ideological project; a potential cause of conflict over human rights rather than a source of further “progress”. from both the philosophical and legal perspective, to take account of power and interests in the human rights discourse raises the spectre of old conflicts over foundationalism, fosters doubts about “settled norms” (frost, 1996), offers comfort for cultural relativists, raises questions over the legitimacy of international law, and thus threatens to bring down the whole post-world war ii project for universal human rights. the political discourse is, therefore, treated with suspicion. in response, those engaged in the political discourse argue that the failure to include an account of power and interests obstructs further investigation into human rights within a changing world order. mutua, for example, argues that the “end of history” thesis promoted by fukuyama and others (fukuyama, 1992), which proclaims the triumph of particular truths over all previous heretical doctrines, fails to understand the dynamic nature of social formation: mutua argues that the human rights movement is still young a; its youth gives it an experimental status, not a final truth. the major authors of human rights discourse seem to believe that all the most important human rights standards and norms have been set and that what remains of the project is elaboration and implementation. this attitude is at the heart of the push to prematurely cut off debate about the political and philosophical roots, nature, and relevance of the human rights corpus (mutua, 2002). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 113 put simply, it can be argued that the legal discourse plays the dominant role, while the philosophical discourse has atrophied and the political discourse is marginalized. the often stated assertion that the “major deficiency of the regime in the eyes of many professional observers is poor compliance to the purposes of a treaty” reflects a commonly held perspective that the failure of human rights is a failure of international law (dunér, 2002, emphasis original). when failures are identified the normal reaction is to create more international law, rather than question the wisdom of focusing so singly on the legal approach itself. although continued reports of gross violations of human rights arouse some feelings of pessimism, the dominance of the international law brings many commentators to the conclusion that a rights based international order is not only possible but has already made considerable “progress”. while there is still much work to do, the literature reflects a view that the normative power of rights, together with the development of an extensive system of international law on human rights, provides a clear indication of steady “progress” towards achieving the aims of the regime. while there is still much work to do, the literature reflects a view that the normative power of rights, together with the development of an extensive system of international law on human rights, justifies this conclusion. the habit of assuming that human rights are best understood as a singular, legal discourse, a discourse upon which general agreement has been achieved, therefore conceals important and continuing disagreements that are seldom confronted. most importantly, the substitution of legal norms for human rights norms, reinforced by drawing a line under the philosophical discourse and denying the political discourse, offers an illusion of concord that is often inconsistent with political struggles associated with identity and difference. disciplining global civil society if the assertion that there actually exists a global consensus on human rights is correct, theory and practice would be in harmony, assuming that international law represented an accurate reflection of that consensus. questions of power and interest would not arise because the human rights regime, through the medium of international law, would express the interests of all, rather than the interests of particular groups. however, an increasing number of scholars argue that it is no longer acceptable that we view the human rights discourse as a straightforward articulation of moral evolution in the twentyfirst century, as those who evidence the universal declaration and the major covenants are prone to assert (langlois, 2001). if this assessment is apposite, and claims of global agreement are indeed premature, then the privileging of the human rights regime as a solution to an imagined consensus raises many questions. what, for example, is the role of international human rights law in the global order? why is international law so privileged within the discourse of human rights if no consensus exists? what interests does the privileging serve? an insight into these questions can be gained through the concept of “discipline,” which is closely related to that of discourse. discipline refers to a mode of social organization that operates without the need for coercion. it is a form of modernist power studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 114 that imbues the individual with particular ways of thinking, knowing and behaving, thus instilling modes of social consciousness that make social action predictable. discipline is learned and practiced in the day-to-day complex of social life, through institutional training received, for example, in the school, the university, the workplace, the church and the socioeconomic institutions found within civil society, where notions of correct and incorrect behaviour and thought are clearly delimited. the epithet “common sense” is achieved when a particular mode of thought and conduct is unquestioningly accepted as normal (gramsci, 1996) this is not to argue that the disciplines cannot be defined as systems of rules, but these are not necessarily the rules articulated within the pages of international law. instead, these rules are concerned with “norms” and the generation of “normalization” (foucault, 1994). in this sense, the disciplines, which are the domain of global civil society, operate without need of compulsory obligation, but nevertheless exert a collective pressure that brings objective results in the form of customs and ways of thinking, knowing and acting (gramsci, 1996). the maintenance of disciplinary power is conducted through processes of data collection, through the observation, recording, measuring, inspecting, reporting, and monitoring, which today are more easily facilitated by systems of electronic data collection. data accumulated from the observation of large numbers defines the “normal,” opening the possibility of specifying the attributes of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” behaviour within the values, terms and language of dominant discourses of truth. those who violate the norms of acceptable behaviour are therefore identifiable, enabling appropriate sanctions to be applied, while those who conform are rewarded. foucault argues that the form of disciplinary power operating within the contemporary world order emerged during the eighteenth century, noting ironically that “the enlightenment, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines” (foucault, 1977, p. 222). while the idea of discipline may suggest a social order rife with ideological intent and conspiracy, such a conclusion would be a mistake (prado, 1995). instead, the conceptualization of discipline is an attempt to understand the ways in which knowledge is accumulated, and truth and rights established as the foundation for legitimate social action. from the perspective of discipline as social knowledge, power is not located within governments or particular factions, classes, institutions or cadres, but is instead exercised in the actions of everyday life. in contrast to the pre-modern period, where the exercise of power was associated with a readily identifiable agent, who operated irregularly and intermittently, modern forms of disciplinary power operate continuously and without agency. the distinctive nature of disciplinary power is that it replaces violence and the threat of violence with more temperate modes of action associated with visibility through surveillance (fraser, 1995). this is not to argue that we can expect violence and the threat of violence to play no further role in the contemporary world order. as robert cox has observed, there may still be times when disciplinary power breaks down: to cope with the excluded and potentially disruptive, the institutions of global governance have devised instruments of global poor relief and riot control. humanitarian assistance (the poor relief component) has become a top priority of the united nations and a major activity of a vast range of studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 115 nongovernmental agencies. where poor relief is inadequate to prevent political destabilization, then military force (the riot control component) is evoked by the international community. together, they help to sustain the emerging social structure of the world by minimizing the risk of chaos in the bottom layer (cox, 1997). from the perspective of disciplinary power, critics of neoliberal notions of power have argued that the institutionalization of discourse, which produces and promotes truthclaims, obscures and conceals the processes of domination that lie beneath normal social practice (ivison, 1998). gill refers to the most prominent of the disciplines within the current global order as “market discipline,” which stresses economic growth and development, deregulation, the free market, the privatization of public services and minimum government (gill, 1995). market discipline describes a set of normative relationships with a global reach, supported by discourses of truth, and widely accepted as “common sense”. these relationships are manifest at both the domestic and global level, for example, in national and international economic planning, market-based solutions for environmental degradation, the move to privatize social welfare provision, and the move to privatize life itself, seen in the scramble to patent the genes of both human and non-human life forms. surveillance is undertaken by international and regional agencies, for example, the world trade organization (wto), the world bank, the european union (eu) and the north american free trade agreement (nafta). each of these is understood as the authentic voice of market discipline and each exercises systems of surveillance and data collection on a global and regional scale. within the remit of market discipline, as opposed to that of international law, human rights are conceptualized as the freedoms necessary to maintain and legitimate particular forms of production and exchange. these are a set of negative rights associated with liberty, security and property, which offer a moral and normative foundation for justifying actions within the current global political economy. although the global human rights regime is said to embrace the unity of all rights, market discipline pursues only those rights necessary to sustain legitimate claims for neoliberal freedoms. the catalogue of rights associated with market discipline therefore describes human beings as individuals and agents of a particular kind and type. for critics, the human rights regime is partial. it represents the “eden of the innate rights of man” where free will, equality within exchange relations and property converge to create social relations characterized by selfishness, gain and private interests, rather than the pursuit of human dignity and community (marx, 2002, p. 492). following from this, several authors have argued that human life is valued as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself (watkins, 1996). this is seen in the greater attention given to trade, property and finance, compared to that concerned with humanitarian issues, for example, poverty, the environment and socioeconomic rights. for critics, market discipline implies that “profit for investors [is] the supreme human value, to which all else must be subordinated,” so that “[h]uman life has value as far as it contributes to this end” (chomsky, 1994). the creation of authoritative international organizations provides the professionalized voice for truth-claims, performs the task of surveillance, ensures adherence to market disciplinary norms, and acts to maintain a particular set of rights and freedoms that are integral to sustaining a particular order. if studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 116 human rights have any significance within the contemporary global order, they offer a set of values delimited by an assumed normative consensus that legitimates activities associated with market discipline, specifically, negative rights and those associated with property. the poor social conditions characteristic of subordinating human rights to economic interests leads the disadvantaged, dispossessed, marginalized and excluded to organize politically, perhaps by creating independent trade unions and citizen groups to resist the harsher consequences of market discipline. in such cases, violence and the threat of violence is often used against those daring to voice a contrary view that challenges market disciplinary principles and the neo-liberal rationale for economic development (evans, 2001). since all governments take neoliberal notions of economic growth and development as a central policy objective, the deprivations suffered by those whose environment is degraded, culture devastated, freedom to protest peacefully suppressed and traditional ties with the land forcibly severed are seen less as the victims of human rights violations and more as the generation who must bear the cost of economic progress for the good of the wider, future community (kotheri, 1994; tomasevski, 1993). those who continue to protest are referred to pejoratively as insular, conservative, traditionalists, clinging tenaciously to a cultural past, and resolutely denying the benefits of modernization to the next generation. market discipline, normalization and the human rights regime market discipline may now be seen as “counter-law”; as a guide for action that stands above the international human rights regime. however, it does not follow that international law is of little consequence for market discipline. on the contrary, the regime legitimates claims that human rights are now at the centre of the new global order. international law, and international human rights law in particular, plays a central role in an emerging “constitutional” global order, which seeks to normalize a common identity (gill, 1995). the dominance of the human rights regime, and the marginalization of the philosophical and political discourses of rights, provides a sense of “closure” that discourages further investigation. thus, while criticism is commonly found in the literature on human rights, such criticism is confined to disagreements within a framework of rights that seldom attract critique. in short, in as much as the politics of rights is considered at all, what passes for politics is framed within a set of rules that are incontrovertibly accepted, while the framework itself remains unquestioned. the tension between the formal/legal human rights regime and the norms of market discipline are at their most visible within global civil society. in particular, the notion of “civility” emanating from global civil society narrows the political agenda, excludes some groups from full participation, and acts as a focus for further political struggles. stressing this point, pasha and blaney argue that the effort to promote particular notions of civility, for example, by attempting to universalize a particular conception of democracy or human rights, adds to the sense of injustice, and generates a politics that challenges the rules of civility (pasha and blaney, 1998). in other words, the more vigorously global civil society promotes market discipline, and its associated human rights values, the greater the resistance, creating a “periodic and irresolvable studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 117 problem of policing the non-civil in civil society” (pasha, forthcoming). those who adhere to the norms of civility, and aspire to the ends promoted by global civil society, are included, while those who offend against the “normal,” perhaps through critique, reflective alternatives or a stubborn refusal to abandon the cultural traditions of the past, are excluded. disapproval may be registered by the agencies of global civil society in a number of ways, for example, by including aid conditionalities that emasculate government decision-making powers, by threatening intervention, by simply labelling alternative voices “mad” (keeley, 1990), or by asserting that the excluded do not possess the moral capacity to engage fully in decision-making processes about their own best interests (hindess, 1992). at the forefront to the shift towards a singular notion of civility are transnational professional, business and financial organizations, which have grown in number and power under conditions of globalization. these groups are mindful that the interests of global production, trade and finance depend as much upon the capability to influence the rules governing the market as it does on competition and good business planning. for example, in 1997 the chief executives of ten major transnational corporations met with un leaders, and high ranking government officials from several countries, to discuss appropriate ways for corporations to engage with un agencies in planning new rules and institutions for global governance. a further example is seen in the activities of the international chamber of commerce, which has identified environmentalist, human rights and social protection groups as a possible threat to the further expansion of corporate activities and has moved to gain as much influence at the un as possible to counter these forces (millen, et al., 2000). similarly, the australian delegation at the uruguay round of talks on world trade included eight representatives of business but rejected all attempts by nongovernmental organizations with an interest in human rights to gain a seat (christianaid, 1999). a final example is seen in cargill’s involvement in developing the usa’s negotiating position during the uruguay round. christian aid reports that the corporation, which controls half the global trade in grains, was given responsibility for the final draft of the policy document (christianaid, 1999). the history of corporate-government relations is therefore one characterized by corporate pressure to expand corporate rights, not those rights expressed in the human rights regime. conclusion the human rights regime therefore supports competing understandings that give focus to deep-rooted political struggles. while the formal, institutionalized and legal regime is presented as guaranteeing the protection of human rights, the informal, privately motivated and extra-legal activities associated with “normal” global practice suggest that the values of market discipline take precedence. several conclusions might be drawn from this discussion on the relationship between the global political economy and human rights. first, within the complex of global governance and market discipline, the human rights regime plays an important role by defining a broad set of civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights. the inclusiveness that this broad spectrum of rights offers is, however, chimerical. the rules and norms that act to guide action at the global level are not to be found within the pages studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 118 of international human rights law, as the assertions of lawyers, political leaders, ngo activists and many scholars assume. rather, global action is guided by the norms defined by “market discipline”. these norms have achieved widespread acceptance as “common sense” within the populations of advanced economies, and are widely accepted by influential decision-makers in less developed countries. international human rights law, which dominates the global human rights discourse, serves to obfuscate the real power relations characteristic of the current, globalizing world order. in short, historically the interests associated with neoliberal economic expansion trump human rights interests and will continue to do so. second, the legal human rights discourse assumes that a global consensus on a particular conception of rights already exists. despite the popular belief that in most regions of the world the objective of human rights and democracy is accepted as a desirable and achievable policy objective (conley and livermore, 1996), little evidence is offered for such assertions. the rights referred to in these claims assume a particular conception of rights, defined as the freedom of the individual to invest time, capital and resources in processes of production and exchange (tetrault, 1988). however, while it may be possible to claim that all regions of the world now embrace the concept of human rights, there can be no certainty that the conception of human rights associated with market discipline has achieved universal acceptance. while there may now be a clamour for human rights globally, we might ask how do we know that this is the same conception of rights currently expressed in international law? third, the emphasis on the legal discourse acts to mask the causes of human rights violations. the professional and intellectual discourse of law provides the “authentic voice” in human rights talk, although this voice has little to say about power and interests. as the dominant voice, the legal discourse also subordinates alternative voices with an interest in exposing the causes of human rights violations, many of which are attributable to global structures that are sustained by market discipline. in this way, international law plays an important structural role within a global order that increasingly stresses freedoms associated with business, finance and trade. the structures and practices that flow from these norms produce patterns of inclusion and exclusion peculiar to market discipline, including patterns of human rights violations. many examples of this phenomenon are offered in the literature on globalization. but, as roy bhaskar has argued, human rights and human emancipation “depends upon the transformation of structures rather than just the amelioration of states of affairs” (bhaskar, 1991), which is a task most suited to international law. similarly, both katerina tomaseviski and christine chinkin have stressed that while international law may have a capacity for redressing consequences, it cannot address causes (chinkin, 1998; tomasevski, 1993, p. 222). this is to argue that structures cannot be judicial persons with intentions and capabilities, nor can they be arrested, put before a court, punished for their crimes or subjected to sanctions. the dominance of the legal discourse, therefore, masks the real power structures that lie at the heart of many human rights violations. put another way, we should exercise caution if we are to avoid confusing the “sites” of violations with the “causes” of violations. one issue should be made clear. the argument here should not be seen as opposed to the idea of universal human rights. rather, the purpose of the discussion has been to place the discourse(s) of human rights within the context of the global political economy. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 119 perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn from this discussion is that the discourse of human rights is not a singular discourse of freedom, but is also one of oppression. it is a discourse for emancipation and for disciplining global society. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 120 references bhaskar, r. 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(1996). the oxfam poverty report (p. 250). oxford: oxfam. watson final dec 8 16 correspondence address: amanda watson, department of sociology & anthropology, aq 5054, simon fraser university, 8888 university dr., burnaby, bc, v5a 1s6; email: adwatson@sfu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 quelling anxiety as intimate work: maternal responsibility to alleviate bad feelings emerging from precarity amanda watson simon fraser university, canada abstract this article brings feminist literature on anxiety and wellness to bear on the responsibilities of mothers as they are represented in a series of popular editorial publications. it seeks to deepen the interdisciplinary dialogue between these theories of affect and theories of care work by examining how popular representations of maternal responsibility reflect a contemporary “affect of motherhood” and indicate specifically that mothers might be “coming undone” under the weight of a shared, political anxiety that they are encouraged to feel individually. it is argued that the newly complex and competing labours of mothers, and mothers’ complicity in and resistance to these labours, can only be understood in the context of public anxiety. it asks what is at stake for the most disenfranchised women when it comes to recognizing and resisting today’s intensified forms of maternal responsibility. keywords motherhood; care; affect; anxiety; responsibility; gender; race; class; labour; reproduction in april 2014, the institute for precarious consciousness (with the crimethinc. ex-workers' collective) published a zine called “we are all very anxious,” which argued that the dominant affect of contemporary capitalism is anxiety. the authors posited that in the prewar era the dominant affect was misery, as the working class struggled to achieve social minimums, but by the mid-twentieth century misery was replaced by boredom. job security, welfare provision, and the strength of the labour movement quelled misery for many workers but repetitive jobs had resulted in workers lacking a sense of purpose. in contemporary capitalist society, the authors argued, “anxiety has spread from its previous localized locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field” (institute for precarious consciousness, 2014, n.p.). as a response to precarity, the authors asserted, anxiety serves to limit resistance by inciting “generalized hopelessness” without escape (despite amanda watson studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 262 empty promises of release through capitalist consumption). for the zine authors, anxiety is the combined result of precarity and omnipresent surveillance – together making for the constant examination and classification of bodies inculcated with neoliberal versions of success. although the way that the institute for precarious consciousness generalizes periods of capitalist history means that its assertions apply unevenly to already disenfranchised folks like women, people of colour, lgbtq folks, and people living with disabilities, the idea that allencompassing anxiety is “today’s public secret” is echoed in feminist and queer theories of affect. queer theorists of affect, in particular, have intervened in popular psychology’s understanding of anxiety as an individual psychological disorder characterized by “worried thoughts” (american psychological association, n.d.) and often blamed on “poor adaptation” (institute for precarious consciousness, 2014). instead, they have presented anxiety as a shared, political, and “ordinary feeling” embedded in the “ordinary circumstances” of the current neoliberal moment (cvetkovich, 2012). feminist critiques have also drawn attention to how public anxiety, understood as symptomatic of contemporary “risk culture” or our “insecure times,” disproportionately affects mothers and creates unattainable cultural expectations of motherhood (villalobos, 2014; wolf, 2010). with the understanding that there exists a shared, public anxiety that is often misconstrued as private, i am interested in the labours of contemporary mothers as an issue of social justice. mothers are understood as having a social responsibility to care for and about the well-being of others in addition to resisting the effects of their own anxiety. in this article, i bring feminist literature on anxiety and happiness to bear on the responsibilities of contemporary mothers as they are represented in a series of popular editorial publications. by analyzing these publications, i aim to deepen the interdisciplinary dialogue between theories of affect and theories of care work by examining how popular representations of maternal responsibility reflect a contemporary “affect of motherhood” and indicate specifically that mothers might be “coming undone” under the weight of a shared, political anxiety that they are encouraged to feel individually. to this end, i define “coming undone” as the experience of struggling with feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression in the face of multiple labour burdens and the pursuit of happiness; an unraveling that is due to competing demands that are nearly, if not entirely, impossible for most women to achieve. i posit that the uniquely complex, competing labours of contemporary mothers, and mothers’ complicity in and resistance to these labours, can only be understood in the context of public anxiety – responsibility for which is unequally distributed among social groups. further, i consider what is at stake for the most disenfranchised women when it comes to recognizing and resisting today’s intensified forms of maternal responsibility. following a word on method, i begin with an overview of affect theory, expounding sara ahmed’s (2010) work on “happiness objects” and the quelling anxiety as intimate work studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 263 relationship between happiness and productivity. responding to this special issue’s aim to “re-think concepts and practices of intimacy and embodied care through a wide spectrum of twenty-first-century intimate labours and their associated economies” (lee & doucet, 2016, n.p.), i use ahmed and her contemporaries to examine how theories of affect that underscore the climate of anxiety illustrate a precarious affective terrain for both privileged mothers and already disenfranchised mothers, including racialized women, women with disabilities, women in conflict with the law, and queer and trans women. i follow by mapping a particular discussion of women’s feelings around work-family conflict and reproduction as it has appeared in editorial content in the popular press beginning in the early 2000s. this brief historical tracing sets the stage for my analysis of two popular discourses of maternal responsibility: “opting out” and “leaning in.” linking anxiety and happiness, i show how, in the governance of motherhood, incitements to opt out of or lean in to various forms of labour precipitate anxiety – since no arrangement of labour guarantees a happy future. finally, i conclude by arguing that these irreconcilable and often incoherent provocations provide evidence for a contemporary “affect of motherhood” as a social justice issue, as mothers are coming undone by their multiple, competing labours. method i explore representations of mothers’ affective terrain at the site of news media following media studies scholar colleen cotter (2001, p. 423), who demonstrates how the news is increasingly consumable and widely distributed, and thus provides a “natural data source” for researchers exploring discourse and culture. the popular editorial articles sampled in this paper are drawn from my doctoral research (watson, 2016), in which i performed critical feminist discourse analysis of an archive of media reports published over six years (2007-2013) in canada and the united states.1 using the keyword “motherhood,” i examined four national print newspapers (usa today, the new york times, the toronto star, and the globe and mail) for their representation of maternal responsibility.2 following title and content analyses of thousands of articles, three broad themes emerged: women’s 1 i relied primarily on feminist approaches to critical discourse analysis (cda), which aim to unpack complex ideologies sustaining gendered, racialized, and classed social hierarchies (see lazar, 2007). my research built on qualitative methods of feminist theorizing by jasbir puar (2007), ann cvetkovich (2003), sara ahmed (2010), and cultural theorist stuart hall (1997), as i studied media representations for their statements “about a particular topic at a particular historical moment” (foucault, 1990, p. 291). 2 the toronto star and the globe and mail are canada’s two widest circulating daily newspapers, both of which feature stories about motherhood and family life. the new york times and usa today have the second and third highest daily circulation rates in the united states, after the wall street journal. i omitted the latter because of its emphasis on business and international affairs and its tendency to not run stories about motherhood or family. amanda watson studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 264 work-family conflict or role strain, infant feeding, and the relationship between reproduction and women’s sense of well-being. to underscore the affect of motherhood, in this paper i have selected a series of representations from the third theme that highlight women’s responsibility for good feelings in the context of public anxiety. the primary texts featured here were not only circulated and evaluated by numerous major mainstream news media outlets at the time of publication, but have served as pivoting points for other subjects of editorial coverage long after the representations themselves ceased to be circulated. they include editorials drawn from the the new york times, harvard business review, the atlantic, the washington post, and time, as well as several best-selling books from commercial presses. i stage the contributions in a conversation spanning over a decade among the following ten authors: sylvia ann hewlett (2002a, 2002b), lisa belkin (2003), claudia wallis (2004), caitlin flanagan (2004), judith warner (2005, 2013), lori gottlieb (2008, 2010), hanna rosin (2010, 2012), sheryl sandberg (2013), brigit schulte (2014), and anne-marie slaughter (2012, 2015). this sampling is selective and not intended to be exhaustive, but rather aims to juxtapose particular messages within the theme of the affect of motherhood to show its various competing, incoherent discursive threads and their disciplinary effects. tracing the discourses of opting out and leaning in allows me to unfold the gendered duty to resist anxiety by performing multiple competing labours. for this reason, i am drawn to a selection of editorial publications dating back to 2001, when a conversation surged around census data showing that highly educated women were staying home with children. these texts have received attention from other scholars and from major publication vehicles, and i present them here as flagship moments, or “snapshots,” following the genealogical analytical strategy of jean carabine (2001). from a critical feminist perspective, these representations have ideological consequences for particular groups, and their presentation alongside feminist theories of affect, anxiety, and motherhood reveal new meaning about the affect of contemporary motherhood. thus, for this analysis, i underscore specific references to both the responsibilities or expectations and the affective experiences of mothers, and highlight which mothers are presumed part of this discussion and which mothers are necessarily excluded. public anxiety, unequally distributed in her acclaimed book, depression: a public feeling, ann cvetkovich (2012) presents a way of thinking about feelings as public rather than private. cvetkovich seeks in part to provide systematic accounts of power by describing “how capitalism feels” (2012, p. 11; emphasis in original), framing sensation and feeling as “the register of historical experience.” taking up “depression” as her “keyword” in order to describe the affective dimensions quelling anxiety as intimate work studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 265 of contemporary everyday life, cvetkovich follows queer cultural theorist lisa duggan, who suggests that as neoliberal economic policy shrinks the public sphere, the affective life of the private family bears an increasing burden. similarly, cvetkovich’s theory of depression describes what neoliberalism feels like from the vantage of ordinary life: rife with feelings of despair and anxiety that are barely discernable because they structure “just the way things are” (2012, p. 14). going beyond a general description of the feelings resulting from neoliberal economic policy, feminist theorists of affect (ahmed, 2010; berlant, 2011; cvetkovich, 2012) have illuminated how public feelings – and specifically responsibility for these feelings – are unequally distributed by race, gender, disability, and class. accepting that public feelings may be experienced differently across social groups, of particular interest here is how social groups may be disproportionately charged with responsibility for producing and alleviating the public feelings associated with neoliberalism. as sara ahmed (2010) explains in the promise of happiness, negativity comes to characterize or stigmatize bodies that cannot or will not appear willing to “inherit the future” through reproduction and the pursuit of future happiness. if women are promised future happiness by having children – at the “right” time and under the “right” circumstances (watson, 2016) – then women who are seen as failing or refusing to reproduce, or mothers who fail at self-care or fail to generate happiness for their children through care, are in some ways akin to the stigmatized queer or disabled body: queer to the ideal of a neoliberal futurism, thus rendered “unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (edelman, 2004, p. 4). in this context, maternal bodies are disproportionately impelled to pursue and reproduce happiness for themselves and others as a way of subduing the effects of the private secret of public anxiety. growing public interest in measures of well-being and popular media preoccupation with the causes of physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being are part of what ahmed (2010) has termed the “happiness turn.” ahmed explains that the proliferation of books and courses containing self-help discourses and therapeutic cultures, particularly since 2005, has created a “happiness industry” where “happiness is both produced and consumed through these books, accumulating value as a form of capital” (ahmed, 2010, p. 3). the happiness turn is also seen in changing governance frameworks, as governments increasingly turn to well-being indices as goals to supplement, or in some cases supplant, gdp-based measures of national development (ahmed, 2010; kemp, 2012). ahmed is suspicious of this shift, explaining that the quest for happiness is a futurist orientation. she writes: “to pin hopes on the future is to imagine happiness as what lies ahead for us” (2010, p. 160). future happiness thus becomes the moral guideline for how to live in the present, and there are negative consequences for individuals who seem disinclined to reach their potential happy life. that is, the promise of future happiness is tied to the endless labour of resisting anxiety in the present, and amanda watson studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 266 this obsession with future happiness overshadows the anxiety produced in its wake. for women, an obvious investment in the future is through responsible reproductive and care work. mothers are compelled to secure their future well-being and that of their children through their individual reproductive behaviours. in the happiness turn, mothers whose behaviours are judged as failing to provide their children with the most favorable opportunities for future health and well-being are deemed ignorant, stubborn, or naïve. by the same token, if mothers’ devotion to paid labour suffers as a result of their care responsibilities, mothers risk being cast as undeserving of participation in paid labour, and thus unworthy of economic sustainability. in these fraught circumstances, the way mothers must uniquely navigate the cultural expectation to secure well-being for their children and for themselves through their multiple competing labours reveals how the affective life of the private family is an increasing burden in precarious, neoliberal times. one of ahmed’s key conceptual contributions in the promise of happiness is her notion of “happiness objects.” happiness objects are culturally sanctioned assets or goals that signal the correct way to pursue good feelings and a good life. these “objects” might be normative institutions like marriage or the family, and they come to represent the good, moral way of living. as ahmed notes, citing popular psychologist martin seligman’s work on “authentic happiness,” we now have “guideposts” for the “good life,” which for ahmed means the gratification promised to be delivered at the end of a path of striving – an end where anxiety and depression promise to melt away. this is a cruelly optimistic relationship to the future (see berlant, 2011) because the good life is elusive and always out of reach; still, the happiness literature of positive psychology insists that we have indicators of well-being, often referred to in terms of “wellness,” for which to strive. the conditions resulting from the confluence of neoliberal welfare policies, general economic instability, and the gendered labour contract (vosko, 2010) that unfairly distributes the burdens of paid and unpaid labour among men and women, virtually guarantee that there is no respite from pursuit of some version of the good life. even if families recognize and resist frenzied pressure toward happiness in the happiness turn, they are insecure and thus they must keep resisting public anxiety and its effects by striving for their own well-being. ahmed’s happiness objects also pertain to the consumption of intimacies as they are couched in the rhetoric of choice. as ahmed notes, the ideals of “freedom” (to make “choices”) and happiness are commonly linked, so making a “choice” is in fact a happiness object itself. there is evidence of this ideal throughout the happiness industry, as consumers are instructed to make particular choices now to guarantee their future happiness. for example, a 2009 article in psychology today asks, “has the happiness frenzy of the past few years left you sad and anxious? herein we report the surest ways to find well-being” (flora, 2009, n.p.). here, the non-attainment of happiness is the quelling anxiety as intimate work studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 267 very source of anxiety. the article includes almost no surprises as it lists various guideposts for the good life: acting toward goals, confronting negative feelings, practicing mindfulness, living your values, and – in a strangely material twist – having enough money to live comfortably. although the latter is rarely a matter of individual choice, in this literature, if income is a happiness object, we should be able to (choose to) pursue it. related to the notion of happiness objects, another of ahmed’s key tenets is the relationship between happiness and productivity. happiness, she explains, is an individual responsibility and a life project, as well as an instrument for achieving greater happiness: “a way of maximizing your potential of getting what you want, as well as being what you want to get” (ahmed, 2010, p. 10). if happy people are more optimistic, altruistic, adaptable to change, and physically and mentally healthy, as social psychology studies find (see ahmed, 2010), it follows from a capitalist perspective that happy people are better workers. not surprisingly, reported happiness intersects with markers of affluence and privilege, or as ahmed says, “the face of happiness…looks rather like the face of privilege” (2010, p. 11). for example, happy people are typically found in wealthy countries, are married, have healthy social networks, are part of “majority groups,” are mentally and physically healthy, and are experiencing control of their lives (veenhoven, 1991, as cited in ahmed, 2010). thinking about happiness as a capitalist asset, then, it follows that workplaces would not favour mothers’ coming undone with feelings of anxiety or depression when pursuing their responsibility to juggle competing labour burdens. put another way, mothers who come undone with bad feelings, or simply mothers who “take care” at home, are understood by employers and the state more broadly as liabilities to capitalist productivity. the invisible, emotional labour of managing or disguising feelings of coming undone with multiple labours in pursuit of happiness partly characterizes the affect of motherhood and must be visibilized as essential to today’s “public secret” as a matter of social justice. the happiness turn can be understood as a capitalist response to the shared public secret that everybody is anxious. ahmed’s theory of happiness rests on the logic that happiness is the pursuit of something that is always out of reach. it is never something that exists in the present, but something that we are pursuing; even the happiness experienced through nostalgia is past-oriented, leaving the present to be filled with other feelings like anxiety or anticipation. considering the subject position of mothers in these conditions, who are incited toward responsible reproduction and particular anti-risk parenting practices, mothers are tasked with resisting precarity in unique ways. in her chapter on “happy futures,” ahmed briefly addresses how the pursuit of happiness intersects with maternity and cultural expectations around reproduction. this idea is consistently echoed in popular editorial work on women’s fertility, childbearing “choices,” and work-life balance maneuvers. beyond considering how affective responsibilities are gendered and sexualized, ahmed (2010) also shows how affects are distributed unevenly by amanda watson studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 268 race and migrant status. she argues that “others,” or those who fall outside of the national imaginary (thobani, 2007), are stuck with the negative affect of fear, disgust, or hate – in refusing to pursue the happiness ideal in recognizable ways, they not only fail happiness, they cause unhappiness. drawing on bell hooks, ahmed (2010) gives the example of how the mere presence of black women in feminist circles is understood as killing the joy of white feminists, as their black bodies serve to remind white women of violent colonial legacy and white supremacy. therefore, the happiness duty disproportionately falls on racialized women. similarly, puar (2007), halberstam (2011), and cvetkovich (2003), among other affect and queer theorists, theorize the various ways in which bodies become understood as threatening to nationhood at least in part due to their refusal to take on the cultural project of pursuing well-being. for puar, negative and positive affect both infuse and come to define the cultural project of patriotism, as she views good and bad feelings in the context of the “twin mechanisms of normalization and banishment that distinguish the terrorist from the patriot” (2007, p. 37). in his work on queer temporality, halberstam imagines negative affect as implicated in a queer temporality where queer bodies threaten futurist orientations to productivity, the reproduction of nuclear family, and the intergenerational passing of wealth. for cvetkovich, negative affect is an aftermath of trauma and an ongoing struggle against speed-up and the neoliberal demand to be productive. a common thread here is the understanding that those who do not pursue the ideal – in this case happiness, or at least not-anxiety, and productivity – are marked as outsiders who threaten the stability of already established ideals. this responsibility to pursue orientations to both capitalist productivity and the heteronormative nuclear family fall disproportionately on mothers, or women who are expected to have children. it is in this context that popular editorials on maternal affect and responsibility make sense as an ongoing disciplining of gendered labour. anxiety, “opting out,” and “leaning in” mothers have long been understood as objects of state action intended to reproduce a healthy society (albanese, 2006; finkel, 2006; lister, 1997) and women’s responsibilities for social reproduction are well-documented in feminist research (tronto, 1993, 2013; vosko, 2010; yuval-davis, 1997). social scientists have also shown how mothers and pregnant women are uniquely made responsible for the curing of social ills beyond their control through their individual behaviours, including, for example, solving problems of infant mortality and “obesity” through breastfeeding (nathoo & ostry, 2009; parker, 2014; watson, 2016). it is said that a mother’s work is never done, and this is becoming truer in precarious circumstances. as adult women are encouraged and disciplined into paid labour under ableist neoliberal quelling anxiety as intimate work studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 269 conditions (daly, 2011; giullari & lewis, 2005; lister, 2003), as public panic circulates around the reduced fertility rates of some women and not others,3 as middle-class domestic labour is increasingly outsourced (glenn, 2010; hochschild, 2012; tronto, 2013) – often to underpaid migrant women (mohanty, 2013; vosko, 2010; williams, 2006) – the sexual division of labour and dated models of welfare provision remain stubbornly entrenched (hochschild, 2012; kershaw, 2005; lister, 2003). in these unwinnable circumstances, women’s labour burden remains complicated, invisibilized, and inadequately understood, and women’s responsibilities remain riveted to a responsibility for care. contemporary representation of mothers’ feelings around their multiple labours frequently point to the “choice” – itself a happiness object and condition of the affect of motherhood – to either “opt out” or “lean in.” the discussion of women opting out of the workforce to have and care for children is not new, but was reinvigorated in the united states following the fertility of american women report published in 2001, which found that the us fertility rate hovered just below replacement. the report also found that, for the first time since women entered the workforce in large numbers in the 1980s, married women with college degrees were staying home with young children. in response to this finding, economist sylvia ann hewlett, founding president of the center for work-life policy in new york, published her landmark book, creating a life: professional women and the quest for children (2002a),4 to largely positive reviews (see vanessa g., 2002). the author and her book were profiled widely in time and the new york times, and on 60 minutes, and the today show (see walsh, 2002). hewlett, citing census bureau data, described declining birth rates among predominantly affluent white women as a crisis, and advised women to get married and have children before it is too late and regret takes hold – an incitement which sounds precisely like ahmed’s description of pursuing happiness objects, and which was repeated in the popular media by several of her contemporaries for years to come (caplan, 2008). in a condensed version of her argument for the harvard business review, hewlett (2002b) examined the “age-old business of having babies,” pointing to the struggles of the “top 10% of women measured in earning power,” the “painful well-kept secret” of childless, highachieving women, and their “creeping nonchoice” wherein “reality and regret” collide. 3 douglas todd for the vancouver sun bolstered racist anti-immigration sentiment, warning readers about the relatively high fertility of muslim, hindu, and sikh women in metro vancouver compared to their christian counterparts. see, “high birthrate among immigrant women has implications for canada” (todd, 2013a). this sentiment mirrors that of the white supremacist fringe publication, the new observer, which echoed racist anti-immigration sentiment in, “if white americans don’t start having babies, the us will vanish by 2011” (todd, 2013b) 4 released in the united kingdom as baby hunger: the new battle for motherhood (2002). amanda watson studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 270 hewlett’s work presents maternal affective terrain as imbued with pain and regret, through the familiar profiles of mothers with the considerable economic privilege to make choices. at stake in this conversation are the guideposts for the good life, if the “reality” for even the most privileged mothers is “nonchoice” when it comes to their labours. hewlett’s observations point to a relatable and potentially worsening social problem of gender asymmetry in the workplace and the home, and have the potential to form radical critique of both women’s responsibilities and public anxiety; her description of women’s reported anguish over career-versus-family calculations could be used to advocate structural change like universal childcare or reduced workweeks. instead, hewlett concludes with advice for combatting the “crisis of childlessness,” which we know is implicitly about white women since women of colour in the us have fertility rates above the replacement. the idea that women should get married and have children to be healthier and happier, and that they should do so before the age of 35, was advice for white, heterosexual, able-bodied women, disguised as universal advice for all women. for hewlett, marriage and reproduction before a certain age are the happiness objects when freedom to make other choices wanes. women who do not desire children or cannot have children are effectively erased, and the task to reverse this fertility “crisis” is again assigned to individual women. opting out a year later, in 2003, when well-known new york times columnist lisa belkin’s “opt-out revolution” ran to an outpouring of polarized commentary, “career-women-go-home” articles were already fifty years old (graft, 2007). but belkin’s piece (and newly-coined “opt-out revolution”) signaled an energized public discussion. by presenting the new (2000) census data and building on hewlett’s take on childless (white) women, as well as the work of other social scientists (hochschild, 1989; hrdy, 2000; williams, 2000), belkin crafted a cautionary tale about executive women leaving the workforce. belkin’s essay told the stories of a few exceptional princeton graduates who stayed home to raise children instead of pursuing high-income careers. it was the most e-mailed piece in the times that year, and the language of “opting out” has remained part of the popular discussion of women’s labours. here again, women are tasked to choose happiness over anxiety by prioritizing reproductive and care labour “before it’s too late.” in belkin’s sample, quitting paid labour is the happiness object, which allows us to see how the affect of motherhood is at least partly characterized by the feelings involved in managing opposing directives – making an impossible “choice.” the question of how women should navigate their dual responsibility to their family’s well-being and the workplace may have been well-worn in quelling anxiety as intimate work studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 271 journalism and in scholarly writing at the time (see hattery, 2001; hochschild, 1989, 2012),5 but with new evidence of more educated women staying home with children than before, these works have increasingly presented women’s “choice” to stay home with children in affective terms: as a combined effect of job dissatisfaction and a presumably innate and affective “pull to motherhood.” recalling ahmed’s (2010) notion of happiness objects and cvetkovich’s (2012) positioning of feelings as public but secret, belkin’s interpretation is such that individuals are expected to resist public anxiety through their individual reproductive and care choices. the princeton graduates whose stories belkin told (2003, n.p.) affirmed the emotionally disparate terrains of paid work and unpaid care work, as they connected paid jobs to power, status, and machismo, while they associated maternity with feelings of grace, escape, “sanity, balance, and a new definition of success.” “sanity” and “balance” sound like perfectly reasonable desires, as does the affective “pull” presumably responsible for a group of exceptionally privileged women prioritizing motherhood. but this description, as it hinges on a subgroup of women who elect to pursue care work over paid work, fails to challenge the disparate experiences of public anxiety in relation to privilege and the disproportionate responsibility of different social groups to quell public anxiety, or to make maternal affect visible as a matter of social justice. in 2004, award-winning journalist claudia wallis made “the case for staying home” in time magazine.6 explaining the first-ever drop-off of white married women from the workplace and the increase of stay-at-home mothers with graduate degrees, wallis describes a “reluctant revolt” by professional and managerial-class women who are “less willing to play the juggler’s game,” especially under “high-speed mode.” wallis also notes the affective sensation of “speed-up,” and a social will (and individual “unwillingness”) for mothers to optimize a combination of incongruent activities. for wallis, highly educated stay-at-home mothers choose family over career responsibilities in an effort to reject bad feelings of stress. the women are presented as not regretting leaving the workplace. instead, they are shown to be resisting public feelings of anxiety by securing happiness through the guidepost of care work, where they find “expected delights” and “enormous relief” at home. in line with the broader (neoliberal) tendency to frame women’s labours in terms of individual women’s choices, wallis does not address the impossibility of responsible reproduction under individualist welfare regimes, or what is at stake for women who cannot afford to reject the incitement to juggle career and motherhood. instead, wallis concludes optimistically by surmising that corporate culture might eventually become more flexible to combat the “brain drain,” allowing women to exit and reenter the workplace around the time when they are having children. 5 for an example of what popular writing on this same topic looked like in 1986, see george guilder, “women in the workforce” (guilder, 1986). 6 this essay was widely circulated and is still highly cited. see, for example, day & downs (2009), herr (2009), smith (2014), warner (2013). amanda watson studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 272 the idea of the choice, either to refrain from or to engage in the pursuit of good feelings, is echoed in wallis’s affect of motherhood; she describes a sensation of being overwhelmed, stressed, or anxious in striving for balance that is paired with a choice to seek relief. her work also avoids challenging the foundations of the capitalist economy because the market is seen to undergird women’s choice to opt-out in the first place. wallis, like many eminent voices in popular discussion of women’s labour, criticizes the social pressure placed on women to pursue demanding careers and birth and raise children at the same time. her position (following from popular feminist works that universalize the experiences of privileged women), was actively contested in feminist editorials outside the mainstream, particularly after the rise of sheryl sandberg and anne-marie slaughter as purported spokeswomen for feminism. wallis is not, nor do we expect her to be, interested in the question of what happens when capitalist ventures fail, nor is she interested in the families for whom capitalism consistently fails. the popular conversation in the early 2000s suggested that most women could choose to prioritize family, following the guideposts of the good life, and they would not regret it; they would feel relieved. as well, women were encouraged to have faith that corporate interests will align with their own interests: that corporations will look out for their future interest as their goals collide – by providing “on-ramps,” or flexible options for upgrading skills and getting back to work. the successful individual mothers in wallis, belkin, and hewlett’s stories might be experiencing negative affect in pursuit of balance, but they are seen as having options within the status quo, which they reproduce by making a “choice.” this story of choices repeatedly erases deeper feminist critique. “an existential discomfort” this discussion of the feelings wrought by women’s career and family conflict continued in the commercial press with judith warner’s perfect madness (2005). warner (2005, p. 3) explores that “caught-by-the-throat feeling” that mothers are always failing, drawing on interviews she conducted with wealthy women married to men in high-earning positions before the financial market crash. through discussions of the minutiae of these women’s daily lives, warner (2005) and her interviewees arrive at a structure of feeling that they refer to as this mess: “it’s not depression. it’s not oppression. it’s a mix of things, a kind of too-muchness. an existential discomfort” (p. 4; emphasis in original). with the spotlight on affect, the lines between affective motherhood and guideposts for the good life are necessarily blurred. while the women in warner’s account distinguish their feelings from depression or oppression, it is helpful to think of this “too-muchness” in the context of cvetkovich’s (2012, p. 1) notion of depression as a cultural and social phenomenon in which it feels as though things are “no longer working.” quelling anxiety as intimate work studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 273 cvetkovich further suggests that it might be possible to contend with these structures of feeling in order to understand social problems and pursue political activism. warner’s “too-muchness” might suggest a confluence of fear and despair, a symptom of public anxiety, where “juggling” labours is not serving the promised good life, and instead has left a “mess.” the stories chronicled in warner’s (2005) book question what these women call their “neuroses” (p. 38) and general sense of feeling worried and overwhelmed. noting a combination of maternal “promise with politics, feminism with ‘family values,’ science and sound bites and religion and, above all, fear,” (warner, 2005, p. 8; emphasis in original) it seems increasingly clear that these bad feelings are the direct inheritance of precarity and the neoliberal intensification of family responsibilities (duggan, 2004). warner even uses the language of “promise,” reminiscent of ahmed’s “promise of happiness,” to describe how following cultural expectations of juggling labours ultimately fails to provide good feelings. caitlin flanagan (2004) put maternal affect plainly in an article in the atlantic about “staking out her turf” as a stay-athome mother. she writes: “i felt anxious about the whole thing – very, very anxious” (flanagan, 2004, n.p.). the debate over women’s labour and emotional well-being continued along similar analytics – of choice, stress, regret, and “what’s best” – through the financial market crash of 2007-2008, with some of the scholarly and mainstream media responding to changes in the demographics of the labour force. not all authors were sympathetic about the subject position of women in the face of public anxiety. for example, lori gottlieb intensified the conversation about women’s labours with her inflammatory and heterosexist article and book of the same name, marry him (2008, 2010), which advised career-successful young women to marry less successful men they do not love in order to reproduce “before it’s too late,” presumably because avoiding regret about not having children is key to women’s sense of fulfillment. clearly absent from gottlieb’s perspective are reproductive access issues like the accessibility of sperm banks for lesbians, trans men and women, queer couples, single women, and heterosexually-partnered women whose male partners do not produce sufficient levels of sperm for conception. she simply directs all women to choose the path of least regret by settling for a man and having children. making a related argument among widespread discussion of new male unemployment after 2008, hanna rosin’s the end of men (2012) contends that since modern economies show preference to women’s (piecemeal, parttime, “flexible,” precarious) labour over men’s labour, traditional gender order is now reversed to the detriment of not only men, but all of society. these arguments about an upside-down gender hierarchy are not supported by statistical evidence on metrics like income inequality, gendered violence, access to leadership positions, or bodily autonomy, and they are rooted in a sense of apprehension when conditions are precarious – with respect to labour, the traditional family, and the future of the economy. rosin expresses amanda watson studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 274 discomfort with white women’s success in post-secondary education, an influx of education that is stratified by race, and with middle-class white women pursuing higher education, getting married later, having children later, and having fewer children. but rosin only points to racial division in her argument using racism – the common demonization of black men – when she threatens that if this trend continues: the whole country’s future could look much as the present does for many lowerclass african americans: the mothers pull themselves up, but the men don’t follow. first-generation college-educated white women may join their black counterparts in a new kind of middle class, where marriage is increasingly rare. these changes are not merely spreading around the fringes; they are fundamentally altering the core of middle-class life… middle america is starting to look like high-school-drop-out america. (rosin, 2012, pp. 101-102) some contributors to this discussion attempted to nuance the notion that women are doing better than men, but the guideposts for the good life – in this case a less anxious life for everyone – include women getting married, reproducing in good time, and “opting out” (or perhaps more aptly put, backing down). rosin and gottlieb wax nostalgic for the promise of happiness for middle-class white women, and rosin adds that this traditional social arrangement is also necessary for (heterosexual, white) men’s ability to pursue the trappings of traditional masculinity. (not) “having it all” affective stories about women’s competing labours, what jolynn shoemaker (2012) dubbed the “new problem with no name,” continue to circulate. when anne-marie slaughter, well-known academic and former director of policy planning for the us state department, published “why women still can’t have it all” (2012) in the atlantic, it led to the magazine’s widest circulation ever. in her article, she considers the complicated nature of women’s feelings about their role in social reproduction via career, childbearing, and childrearing. she argues that the current organization of paid work is a problem for women who have families, even if they have significant economic and social resources. although slaughter’s essay was criticized for its narrow representation of most women’s circumstances, it signaled a conceptual shift in the discussion – from being about individual women choosing to opt out to focusing on the possibility of women and men “having it all” as families with equitable co-parenting partnerships, if american society and economics would just modernize. critically, slaughter (2012, n.p.). dispels the myth that “‘having it all’ is a matter of personal determination.” she parlayed her initial success into a 2015 book called unfinished business: women, men, work, family, in which she accepts the main feminist criticism of her first essay without defensiveness, writing: “i’ve quelling anxiety as intimate work studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 275 been called a privileged, wealthy, liberal white woman who cannot imagine the lives of the vast majority of women across the united states” (slaughter, 2015, p. 99). here, slaughter advocates de-gendering care, and insists that child rearing must be granted higher social status in order for family and work life to change. still, her work relies on the rhetoric of choice as a happiness object, and even though she acknowledges the lack of choice for women in the low-wage economy, she too-often advises relying on a (male) partner to share lead-parenting duties, side-stepping potential marxist feminist critiques. while an important interruption of “lean in” rhetoric, slaughter’s critique is only new in the context of the us commercial press. she echoes decades of feminist scholarly critique, often without attributing her views to radical sources, like sylvia federici or simone de beauvoir; as guardian reviewer helen lewis (2015, n.p.) notes, slaughter uses the “language of corporate empowerment seminars rather than marxist critique.” in the context of the growth of widespread public anxiety in response to precarity, and the constant surveillance and classification of bodies, critiques that fail to undermine status quo individualism do not serve those women and mothers who are most disenfranchised, despite acknowledging their existence. on the heels of slaughter’s 2012 piece, journalist judith warner (2013) published a response to belkin’s (2003) essay, arguing that “the opt-out generation wants back in.” following up on perfect madness, warner argued that the double burden is too much for women to manage, and further, that the focus on fertility rate trends and the “small demographic” of higher-income women who “opt out” of broader labour obscures both the struggles of poor women and the affect of “balancing” care work and paid work that is necessary for survival. 7 yet, warner failed to challenge foundational assumptions about women’s bodies, about their desire for (heterosexual) partnership and children, and even their desire to “balance” anything. examining only class as an indicator of exclusion from pursuing balance, warner calls for flexibility through “focus-on-the-family” legislation (a troublesome term, given the sexist, homophobic, and racist christian charity of the same name) to help workplaces become more “flexible” in an effort to retain women. this call, as it reflects the neoliberal expectation that both workplaces and workers remain flexible in order to keep up with changing markets and diverse corporate needs, advocates improving women’s positions within status quo political structures. in her 2014 op-ed for the new york times, “to reduce inequality, start with families,” warner restates her claim that the nuclear family is the means to escape the double burden, and with it, anxiety. far from queering kinship structures, problematizing the nuclear family unit, as feminists have done for decades (de beauvoir, 1972; collins, 1990; firestone, 1970; friedan, 1963; hooks 1992), or even considering children’s emotional development as 7 warner has recently been joined by slaughter (2015), who points to the myth of choice for most parents. amanda watson studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 276 important for something other than their future performance as workers, and despite being one of the most critical voices in popular discussion, she leaves intact the systems that structure the most basic inequalities. warner criticizes the conditions of women’s double burden and argues for their subtle adjustment within the status quo by invoking a familiar liberal feminist strategy that socialist feminists and transnational feminists (mohanty, 2003; 2013) have long overturned on the grounds that the status quo involves colonial legacy and white supremacist, patriarchal hierarchies of power.8 the opt-out discussion exalts women’s choice to opt out of paid labour as a happiness object, leaving the organization and distribution of paid work under-examined. similarly, the competing directive to lean in to work and outsource care, as i present below, leaves the organization of care work unchallenged. in the context of women’s various labour choices depicted as happiness objects, the very decision to opt out or lean into competing labours causes the anxiety it promises to alleviate. leaning in the directives to opt out for the sake of good feelings stands in stark contrast to facebook coo sheryl sandberg’s lean in philosophy that suggests women break through the glass ceiling by masculinizing their career personas. in her 2010 ted talk, “why we have too few women leaders,” sandberg framed women’s underrepresentation in executive offices as an injustice, calling for women to step up and “lean in.” even though sandberg’s talk addressed women’s squeezed position between work and family responsibilities, and the associated emotional burden women inherit, she neglected to address structural oppression and institutionalized inequity, or the complicated and often precarious work status of mothers in paid employment. like those arguing that women should “opt out” of paid labour, sanders identified the double burden as a problem of many individual women that requires individual women’s solutions. sandberg’s recommendations were taken seriously in the popular press, despite decades of feminist research and activism around women’s disproportionate labour burdens and mothers’ career disadvantages. sandberg’s subsequent book, lean in: women, work, and the will to lead (2013) became an instant bestseller, with reviews and commentary in major newspapers and talk shows across the continent. in 2013, sandberg launched leanin.org, a powerful non-profit organization that “encourages women to continue to be active and ambitious in their careers even as they start their families” (2013, n.p.). 8 for a recent discussion, see madeleine schwartz’s (2013) review for dissent magazine of nancy fraser’s (2013) fortunes of feminism. schwartz opens with a critique of lean in, arguing that “white, professional women’s work is at the center of contemporary feminist discourse” (n.p.) to the detriment of real, progressive, structural change. quelling anxiety as intimate work studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 277 the discussion of maternal affect has been taken up in journalistic and scholarly literatures respectively. brigit schulte (2014), a journalist for the washington post, authored a partial memoir: overwhelmed: work, love, and play when no one has the time. in it, schulte maps the sense of racing time and corresponding anxiety, depression, and stress that characterize contemporary maternal care work. whereas schulte argues that contemporary motherhood is characterized by anxiety, sociologist ana villalobos (2014) broadens the sphere of anxiety by framing motherhood in the context of insecure times in general, identifying how the push to engage in intensified forms of mothering occurs in pursuit of national security. in her book, motherload: making it all better in insecure times, villalobos (2014) argues that women are encouraged to rely on the mother-child relationship for a sense of security because modern motherhood is characterized by insecurity; this leads to a deflection of real threats and encourages mothers to become preoccupied with how best to structure the mother-child relationship for their own well-being and the future health of families. villalobos provides evidence of the intensification of mothering practices, which, in conversation with feminist theorists of affect, illustrates how the shared public secret of anxiety is disproportionately felt by and has disparate consequences for different social groups. the “affect of motherhood” and the “undone mother” i use the term “undone mother” to describe women and mothers who are faced with affective expectations that are culturally sanctioned by the popular discourse of responsible reproduction. women who might be destined to become mothers, in the eyes of the commercial press (and, arguably, the state), are faced with a disproportionate responsibility for shared public anxiety. navigating conflicting labours and insecure conditions while managing a smile is the “undone mother’s” responsibility, and her ability to perform this juggling act intersects with class, race, body, and sexuality. editorial discussions of the emotional toil of balancing labour and care work, which are entwined with expectations of women’s reproductive labour, present an avenue through which women receive cultural messages about their responsibility to cure social ills.9 9 this critique is particularly vital in the context of renewed directives by the state that further responsibilize individual women for the future well-being of a society in precarious conditions. for example, in february 2016, the us centre for disease control and prevention (cdc) released an infographic directing health practitioners to “assess a woman’s drinking,” “recommend birth control if a woman is having sex (if appropriate), not planning to get pregnant, and is drinking alcohol,” and “advise a woman to stop drinking if she is trying to get pregnant or not using birth control with sex.” similarly tasking women with curing a widespread public crisis, upon the outbreak of the zika virus in 2015, the cdc advised women, and pregnant women in particular, to abstain from sex or otherwise protect themselves using contraceptives if their male sexual partner had travelled to areas with active zika virus transmission. amanda watson studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 278 because mothers are encouraged to be optimistic about their children’s future health, they “come undone” at the realization that it is out of their control. that is, the ways in which mothers are disproportionately induced to hope and strive toward well-being and security for their families is cruel because it is unattainable (berlant, 2011), making their relationship to their reproductive labour stressful, ambivalent, and ultimately depressing. it is also cruel because the more mothers try to attain well-being for their children, the busier they become and the more money they spend, thus moving their attainment of happiness with their families even further away. hints of the consideration of anxiety as a public feeling are emerging in popular and scholarly literature. in 2002, hewlett (2002a, p. ix), for example, framed her discussion of women opting out by remarking that in the “postseptember 11 world, we may be better able to appreciate how much we need our children.” repeating her call to situate care at the centre of democratic political theory, care theorist joan tronto (2013, p. x) also couches the responsibility for care in an anxious culture defined by “deepening insecurities wrought by terrorist attacks and continued globalization under the conditions of neoliberalism.” in these precarious times, tronto warns that citizens have lost sight of their roles as intimate carers in households, which negatively impacts how citizens care for, about, and with each other, and about democracy. feminist theorist joan wolf (2010) also situates responsibility in anxious times, referring to a “risk culture” that women are induced to navigate through their infant feeding behaviours. scholars, journalists, and others point to structural concerns with women’s “time crunch” between market labour and child bearing (blair-loy, 2005; dempsey, williams, & slaughter, 2014; dowd, 2005; hirshman, 2005; slaughter, 2012; stone, 2008; williams, 2000; 2012). there is evidence that a public conversation about women’s affective experiences, particularly related to their ability to strike a balance of activities or “stay sane,” ensues among and often about affluent white women – quite apart from discussions of the lives of women who are struggling to survive without financial security or access to basic needs such as health insurance or secure housing. recalling ahmed’s reflections on happiness, even women who have the presumed requirements for a happy life are not free from anxiety. perceptions of the causes of a “madness” or “mess” experienced by some mothers – namely, the co-existing demands of high-powered jobs and intensified care directives from state-sponsored health agencies – do not probe the foundations of what it means to care in this contemporary moment. they do not consider the “madness” of demanding jobs that pay very little, that are precarious, that are unsafe, and that require long hours and commutes on public transit at irregular hours. they also do not consider what it means to not work for reasons other than choice – due to chronic pain, depression, disability, or incarceration, for example. instead, most explanations of maternal anxiety, stress, and “too-muchness” are imbued with assumptions about mothers’ whiteness, fitness, heteronormativity, and affluence. quelling anxiety as intimate work studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 279 exclusive reliance on such women’s stories not only constructs an ideal woman who is positioned to, at minimum, navigate the demands of capitalism without threatening her children’s immediate safety, but indicates that even mothers with the most race, class, sexual, and bodily privilege are toiling under an affective burden. thus, the unique affective consequence of public anxiety for mothers, as represented in popular discussion, is that some women are coming undone by the promise of happiness. whereas some women might be granted a “pass” by relying on a spouse for financial or parenting support, mothers who cannot pursue responsible reproductive care labour in the face of competing labour demands are left alone, with negative implications for their social inclusion if they fail to pursue and identify with the guideposts for the good life. conclusion affect and queer theorists have long criticized the idea of futurist investments in social and biological reproduction to secure good feelings. in her critique of the cultural promise of happiness, ahmed (2010, p. 184) argues that children “bear the brunt of this fantasy,” and that women who do not have children become the subject of blame for denying hope for a utopian future. she explains that, “however we read this idea of a pointless existence without children, the anxiety expressed is that the future as an idea has been lost” (ahmed, 2010, p. 184). in this discourse, reproductive care labour (by some) is connected to hope, and at the same time, women’s good feelings are connected to reproduction. public anxiety or insecurity, though tied here to women’s responsibility for human reproduction, is hardly the product of stories about declining fertility rates alone. yet, as popular editorial discussions of women’s labour “choices” imply, to pursue career ambitions at the expense of having children, or to increase maternity and infant risks by “delaying” childbearing, equates to a supposed “refusal to be optimistic about the ‘right things’ in the right kind of way” (ahmed 2010, p. 162). if we are not seen as concerned enough about the survival of the species through reproductive labour, nor, for example, by campaigning against climate change by boycotting corporate power, or by protesting government inaction on matters of social justice, we are seen as stubbornly against it. whether women resist the maternal responsibility for alleviating society’s anxiety or are complicit in the maternal pursuit of happiness effects, the distribution of both good and bad feelings in a society that continues to assign blame for a shared public secret to individuals based on their choices, the most disenfranchised women will continue to bear the brunt of precarity, with negative consequences for the survival of themselves and their families. amanda watson studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 261-283, 2016 280 references ahmed, s. 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(1997). gender and nation. london: sage. introduction studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 48 engendering justice: constructing institutions to address violence against women shannon drysdale walsh, university of notre dame abstract: this paper addresses how states improve their responsiveness to violence against women in developing countries with little political will and few resources to do so. one key to engendering justice and improving responsiveness is building specialized institutions within the state that facilitate the implementation of laws addressing violence against women. why and how do states engage in institution-building to protect marginalized populations in these contexts? i propose that developing countries are more likely to create and maintain specialized institutions when domestic and international political and legal frameworks make the state more vulnerable to women’s demands, and when civil society coordinates with the state and/or international organizations to take advantage of this political opportunity. this coordination brings necessary pressure and resources that would be difficult, if not impossible, to deliver otherwise. this interinstitutional coordination is necessary for building and maintaining new state institutions and programs that help to monitor the implementation of laws, develop public policies, provide services for victims, and improve responsiveness of the justice system. this fills an important lacuna in the literature, which focuses on women’s state institutions as an important catalyst for responsiveness to violence against women, but does not explain how these institutions are initially constructed. guatemala city, guatemala: "my 15-year-old daughter maría isabel was a student and worked in a shop in the holidays. on the night of 15 december 2001, she was kidnapped in the capital. her body was found shortly before christmas. she had been raped, her hands and feet had been tied with barbed wire, she had been stabbed and strangled and put in a bag…when her body was handed over to me, i threw myself to the ground shouting and crying but they kept on telling me not to get so worked up…the case has been passed to two prosecutor’s offices but those responsible are still at liberty" [as of june 9, 2005]. 1 violence against women has escalated in many latin american countries, and continues to go unchecked and unpunished. the brutal sexual violence inflicted on maría isabel is characteristic 1 testimony of the mother of maría isabel veliz franco, aged 15, who was abducted and murdered in december 2001. amnesty international. 2005. “guatemala: no protection, no justice: killings of women in guatemala.” ai index: amr 34/017/2005. http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engamr340172005. http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engamr340172005 studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 49 of many hundreds of cases that have been reported in latin american countries, including guatemala, mexico, and peru (paterson, 2006; frühling, 2003). victims‟ suffering is compounded by the state‟s failure to adequately respond to cases of violence. many latin american states lack an effective rule of law (diamond, 1999; mendez, o‟donnell & pinheiro, 1999; o‟donnell, 2004b), leaving women with formal legal rights but without legal remedies. practicing one‟s rights as a democratic citizen, even an act as simple as leaving the house to vote or to attend a political meeting, can be unthinkable when living in fear of violence at home or on the street. when the state systematically fails to protect women from violence, it truncates their potential to engage fully in political citizenship. although guatemala is profoundly lacking in terms of political will, rule of law, and justice for women in particular, there have been several important institutional developments aimed at addressing violence against women. although a lot of progress has been made in the past decade to try to ensure women‟s basic rights to security, this process has been very slow and many obstacles remain to making women‟s lives safer. guatemala remains a “killer‟s paradise,” with one of the highest levels of homicides of women and one of the highest levels of impunity for violence against women in the world (portenier, 2007). this paper aims to understand both the advances and continuing obstacles in guatemala to addressing violence against women. in this country, which is generally hostile to the creation of institutions that improve the rule of law, how and why have they supported any institutions that address violence against women? understanding how this institutional development has happened in a context that is so resistant to change also offers us the opportunity to understand how these same patterns might apply to countries that are less resistant, yet still constrained by a lack of political will or resources. one of these developments has been the creation and development of the national coordinator for the prevention of intrafamiliar violence and violence against women (conaprevi). this is an institution that, among other things, develops public policies and monitors implementation of the intrafamiliar violence law. i propose that developing countries are more likely to create and maintain specialized institutions when domestic and international political and legal frameworks make the state more vulnerable to women‟s demands, and when civil society coordinates with the state and/or international organizations to take advantage of this political opportunity. this coordination brings necessary pressure and resources that would be difficult, if not impossible, to deliver otherwise. this inter-institutional coordination is necessary for building and maintaining new state institutions and programs that help to monitor the implementation of laws, develop public policies, provide services for victims, and improve responsiveness of the justice system. this fills an important lacuna in the literature, which focuses on women‟s state institutions as an important catalyst for responsiveness to violence against women, but does not explain how these institutions are initially constructed (lovenduski, 2005; weldon, 2002; elman, 1996; stetson & mazur, 1995). most state institutions that address violence against women in developing countries are not initiated by the state. instead, they are initiated by local women‟s organizations who work in partnership with the state and international organizations that provide expertise and funding to create specialized institutions that states can adopt. existing models fail to explain how these institutions emerge in countries with a less developed state bureaucracy, with low state capacity, or where women in politics lack the necessary bargaining power to significantly impact institutional structures. this is a model which could be applied across many developing contexts studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 50 to explain how states construct institutions to protect marginalized populations and become more responsive to their needs. conceptualizing state response to violence against women grassroots and worldwide women's movements have been working for decades in order to reveal violence against women as a form of discrimination as well as a mechanism in order to perpetuate it. the idea of women's rights as human rights, and of violence against women as a form of discrimination, has formed an important basis upon which to obligate states to come into compliance with international norms. an appropriate state response to violence against women involves an entire array of changes in the law, public policies, institutions, and especially practices within the justice system and the educational system. the united nations has provided several guidelines for states to implement measures to protect women from violence, and to conform with international and regional legal norms (un, 2006). according to these norms, states have several obligations to respond to violence against women, including the following: full investigation of cases; judgment and punishment for those responsible for acts of violence; creation of procedural norms; reparation for damage to victims; access to shelters and other services such as medical and psychological services; modification of discriminatory socio-cultural patterns of conduct by state functionaries; modification of legal practices that tolerate the persistence of violence against women; strengthening of the state capacity and training for state agents that address violence which includes a gender perspective; and documenting and compiling data on victims and aggressors (un, 2006, pp. 87-91). while guatemala fails to meet most of these guidelines, this paper investigates how the state has managed to make some important advances. as sally engle merry (2006) brings to light in her study, human rights law on violence against women must be framed in local terms in order to be accepted and effective. the women‟s movement in guatemala has been pressing for years to institutionalize these norms in a way that attends specifically to the realities on the ground. in conceptualizing the state, i draw on o‟donnell„s (2004a) idea of the state as more than a set of bureaucracies, but also a “legal system that is enacted and normally backed by the supremacy of coercion held by state institutions…this legal system embraces and constitutes qua legal persons the individuals in the state‟s territory” (o‟donnell, 2004a, pp. 31-32). he also argues that democraticness is an attribute of states, not only of regimes (mendez et al, 1999; o‟donnell, 2001). to the extent that it “upholds the democratic wager as well as a regime consisting of fair and institutionalized elections and some surrounding freedoms, the state and its system are democratic” (o‟donnell, 2004b, p.32). the state‟s failure to protect women from violence through appropriate development and use of its legal system, and continued engagement in discriminatory practices that undermine women‟s rights and agency, is indicative of an undemocratic state. the state can advance toward greater democratization, as well as regress. feminist scholars correctly view the state as an evolving site of struggle which represents gender relations as well as reconstructs them (e.g., alexander, 1991; rai, 1996; schild, 1998; molyneux, 2000; waylen, 2007). incorporating women‟s basic rights into the legal system through the appropriate creation and implementation of laws is a way of reconstructing power relationships between men and women, and a way of advancing democracy. violence against women studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 51 undermines women‟s agency and capacity to engage in democratic citizenship. appropriately addressing this problem is crucial for advancing a democratic state. for the purposes of this paper, “violence against women” refers to physical violence, including assault, sexual violence, and homicide both within and outside of a domestic context. “state response” refers to two things. first is that the state is re-allocating human and/or monetary resources in order to build specialized institutions or programs that address violence against women. second is that state agents throughout the justice system are responsive to victims. more often than not, specialized institutions addressing violence against women are working toward improving justice system practices. in a responsive state, regular practices would include police responding quickly and effectively to emergency calls, enforcing protection orders, properly investigating cases, and state agents behaving in a manner that is respectful to victims. specialized institutions that focus on mitigating violence against women help to improve responsiveness to victims in significant ways. there are several institutions that have been incorporated into state structures. one type focuses on public policy (such as women‟s policy agencies). these institutions help to modify and monitor laws to improve implementation. another type includes specialized institutions within the justice system, such as special prosecutor‟s offices for women. these help to reshape institutional incentives such that attending to women victims is integral to a successful career. macdowell santos (2005) notes that, while far from ideal, women‟s police stations in brazil have been a vast improvement in police responsiveness to violence against women. later in this article, i discuss how it was possible to create conaprevi, one of the specialized institutions in guatemala that focuses on creating and implementing public policies. this story is an example of broader patterns of how interinstitutional coordination (at the local and international level) are necessary for the creation and proper functioning of specialized women‟s institutions. please see table 1 (below) for a list of specialized institutions and programs that have been developed to address violence against women in guatemala. this is not a comprehensive list, but a sample of some of the principal institutions which have been created to address violence against women in guatemala since the 1990‟s. all of these institutions were initially proposed by women activists. table 1: specialized institutions addressing violence against women in guatemala public policy instituitons justice system institutions the first lady‟s secretariat for social work (sosep) (1991) institute for the defense of indigenous women (demi) (1999) the program for prevention and eradication of intrafamiliar violence (proprevi) presidential secretariat for women (seprem) (2000) national coordinatorfor the prevention of intrafamiliar violence and violence against women (conaprevi) (2000) special prosecutor for women (1995) unit of homicides against women within the national civilian police (2004) pilot project providing free legal assistance to victims of intrafamiliar violence in the public defender‟s office (2007) studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 52 the guatemalan women’s movement contextualized in 2007, i conducted an interview in guatemala with a woman working in a state institution, who preferred not to be identified. i asked her a question about the women‟s movement in guatemala, to which she retorted “what women‟s movement?.” she noted that there were women activists and women‟s organizations, but that there was so much in-fighting and fragmentation that they had a hard time coming together over anything, yet that violence against women was one of the few issues they could agree upon. several other women in guatemala, nicaragua, and el salvador had also noted conflicts among women activists. some mentioned interpersonal conflicts, but most of time people said they were fighting over limited resources. drawing on ferree (2006), i refer to the women‟s movements as activism which organizes women explicitly as women to make political change. this is distinct from feminism, characterized by activism aimed at challenging women‟s subordination. although i would argue there is a women‟s movement in guatemala, it is very diverse. women‟s movement activists and feminists agree on the gravity of violence against women, but at times disagree on particulars of how to address it. though this article is focused on how these activists managed to coordinate to construct state institutions, it is worth noting that there is a lot of variation within the movement, even over generally agreed-upon problems. the character of the women‟s movement in guatemala (however fragmented) and its struggle to address violence against women is embedded in broader national, regional, and international politics and activism regarding feminism, gender, justice, and globalization which have presented numerous obstacles as well as opportunities for advances. throughout the 1980‟s and 1990‟s, the women‟s movement in latin america became increasingly institutionalized and incorporated into the state (alvarez, 1999). regional meetings, or encuentros, among feminists helped to “forge „imagined‟ latin american feminist communities” (alvarez, friedman, beckman, blackwell, stolz, chinchilla, lebon, navarro, ríos, 2002, p.539). guatemala was negotiating the end to a civil war, and undergoing a process of democratization and globalization at the same time the women‟s movement was forming. susan berger (2006) notes that the movement in guatemala has shifted from protest politics and progressively “ngoized, professionalized, and self-authorized with legal breakthroughs” (1). berger describes how women working on development issues were constricted by weaknesses in the conceptualization and practices of development in an era of globalization. women activists in guatemala working as development professionals worked within institutional cultures that were not always in accord with women‟s movement objectives, and limited the transformative impacts of their work (p.104). similarly, although the institutionalization of women activists within the state working on issues of violence against women has offered opportunities for change, these women risk co-optation, and are restricted in what they can say and do. in a personal interview conducted with the author on june 7, 2006 in guatemala city, norma cruz notes that is a very difficult balance to be in a position of assisting the state, being funded by it, but at the same time critiquing it. another difficulty with ngoization are the delicate and sometimes unstable relationships among donors and recipients. in her personal interview with the author, conducted in 2006, giovanna lemus, director of grupo guatemalteco de mujeres (ggm), notes that her women‟s organization, guatemalan women‟s group, refused to seek funding from international organizations early on because they had seen that these organizations interfere with local studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 53 organizational goals and activities. interviewees throughout central america noted that there was a lot of territorialism among women activists, with individuals or groups protecting their specialty area so that they could have continued access to funding. the focus on funding shortterm contracts for projects with measurable results also makes it extremely time consuming to manage, as activists are usually engaged in activist work and seeking donor support at the same time. working within the context of these broader processes of transnational activism and domestic transitional politics provided local activists in guatemala with many opportunities for bringing international pressure and assistance for addressing the problem of violence against women. gender justice and violence against women increasingly became international priorities. at the u.n. international conference on human rights in 1993, feminists began to popularize the idea of “women‟s rights are human rights.” this undermined the idea that women‟s rights may be subject to cultural or religious conditions (moghadam, 2005, pp.199-201). in the upcoming sections, i describe some of the realities these activists faced on the ground in attempting to address violence against women and pressure the state to engender justice in guatemala. specialized institutions and improving responsiveness norma cruz is the director of survivors (sobrevivientes) in guatemala, one of the first and only organizations that offered direct services and assistance to female victims of violence. when i asked her what she thought were the most important obstacles for changing what she called the culture of impunity there, she quickly replied that the current state of institutions were the biggest obstacle. “we have to try to transform the institutions. we are not saying that we have to improve them. we have to recreate them from scratch. so, this is the principal obstacle. i think that when we achieve advances in reforming these institutions and make them responsive, this wall of impunity is going to collapse. that is the challenge that we have as a society because you cannot have the rule of law nor democracy with weak institutions. really, it should be an effort made by all of us to make these institutions change. i think that this is…the biggest challenge we have. from that point on, we can transform the mentality of the population and i think that we should now direct our campaigns along these lines, so that people are able to recuperate their morale…i cannot ask them [society] to defend anything that they do not love…so we have to teach them to love life, to love justice.” institutions, as expressed here by norma cruz, are the main obstacle, but also the principal opportunity for transforming attitudes and practices in society. as expressed here, transformation of institutions and society are interactive. while activists work toward changing institutions and attitudes, institutional advances themselves help to shape state behavior, and also transform societal norms and values. this study contributes to understanding the conditions under which it is possible to build stable democratic institutions specifically targeted toward protecting women from violence. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 54 (lack of) responsiveness to victims in guatemala women across central america rightly complain that the response of police to emergency calls is often slow. however, in guatemala, the police sometimes never show up. when they do show up for a case of domestic violence, for example, they are commonly cited as saying there is nothing they can do, that domestic violence is a private matter. guatemalan police (and other state agents) are in the habit of not only not applying, but consistently undermining, the laws that protect women from violence. an activist in guatemala shares a story of the police refusing to apply the intrafamiliar violence law, which allows them to enter a scene of domestic violence. this account demonstrates how vulnerable women are to violence in the first place, as well as how vulnerable they continue to be when the state offers them little or no protection: there is one of the most dramatic cases, where the man hit her everywhere, he threw her from the second floor, he grabbed her and said “you are going to die.” he hit her up against the stairs, and when he saw that she was not dead he went and grabbed a knife and the police were outside saying that they could not enter because if they entered it would violate the human rights of the man. even though the intrafamiliar violence law says that they can enter, they say that “if we enter, later they are going to denounce us because we violated his human rights and in a while the lady will be happy with the man because that is how women are.” with a protection order, you have to wait 15 days for them to make it effective, or even one month. and, in these 15 or 30 days he can kill you, because the protection order does not protect you from an aggressor, nor does it protect you from being intimidated, nor from threats. the system does not respond, it does not respond (interview with norma cruz, director of survivors in guatemala, conducted on june 7, 2006). shortly after the creation of the intrafamiliar violence law in 1996, hilda morales trujillo worked with the network of non-violence against women and conducted a study of the court system about knowledge, interpretation, and implementation of the 1996 intrafamiliar violence law. they found several sources of resistance and outright refusal to implement the new law. this study confirmed that people working in the justice system were applying many stereotypes against women in the course of their work. in a personal interview with the author, morales quotes individuals within the courts as saying that “women themselves cause the [intrafamiliar] violence. “they provoke violence because they do not cook well, because they don‟t do the house chores, and because they do not obey their husbands.” in these statements, individuals in the justice system revealed their views that violence against women is an appropriate method of keeping women subordinated to the will and preferences of their male partners. when these attitudes interfere with the proper application of the law, it serves to reproduce and reinforce the subordination and violence that female victims are asking the state to help ameliorate. victims of violence are “sent home” to a place where their status as a blameworthy victim has been given the state stamp of approval, and where aggressors have been able to re-assert their dominance and demonstrate that even the laws will not protect her. in a democracy, “an individual is not, and should never be seen as a subject, a supplicant of the good will of the government or the state. this individual…has a legally grounded claim to be treated with full consideration and respect…and this treatment must be based on the application studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 55 of laws and regulations that are…enacted in ways that accord with democratic procedures” (o‟donnell, 2004a, p.38). the attitudes and practices that have prevailed in the guatemalan justice system have made social justice for women impossible and have consistently undermined the rule of law by refusing to appropriately apply it. many of the women who have been murdered in guatemala have had multiple protection orders taken out against the individual most likely to have murdered them. victims i have talked with in guatemala understandably view the state as a “last resort” when confronted with violence. keeping in mind that state responsiveness is still profoundly lacking, what explains how guatemala has been able to improve its state responsiveness to violence against women from the 1990‟s onward? in the upcoming section, i review several explanations that have been proposed in the literature and explain why they are insufficient for answering this question. background. literature, and alternative explanations: in many countries, rates of violence against women are rising faster than the rates of violent crime in general (amnesty international 2006). democracies are failing to represent and address the basic interests of women (phillips, 1991; alvarez, 1990; jaquette & wolchik 1998; bystydzienski & sekhon, 1999; lovenduski, campbell & sampson-jacent, 2002). by understanding how these new democracies have begun to meet the challenges of implementing laws to protect women, we can learn how some states have managed to overcome obstacles to the rule of law. for example, certain types of pressure or assistance may improve responsiveness to violence against women, and may improve state capacity to respond to crime in general or to the interests or needs of marginalized groups in general. in this section, i review some possible alternative explanations for why states engage in institution-building and improving responsiveness to victims of violence against women. this includes explanations that have been previously proposed in the literature on this topic, as well as ones that could be proposed. women’s movement presence. one consensus in the literature is that women‟s movements are necessary for articulating the problem of violence against women as a public issue and prompting enactment of legislation worldwide (e.g., busch, 1992; elman 1996; heise, raikes, watts & zwi, 1994). however, these studies do not address what strategies, in particular, may be more or less effective for prompting the state to respond to the issue. also, most studies do not discuss whether or not states take further steps to implement laws, or whether the women‟s movement has a role in the implementation process (with the exception of elman, 1996; weldon, 2002). structure of state bureaucracy. the two studies that do address the issue of implementation of violence-against-women policies focus exclusively on developed industrial democracies, which limits the universe of cases to countries with a great deal of state capacity (elman, 1996; weldon, 2002). both of these studies demonstrate that the structure of the state bureaucracy is important for determining the extent of policy implementation regarding violence against women. elman (1996) compares sweden and the united states and argues that centralized, corporatist states prevent women from making claims about women‟s issues that do not directly relate to workforce participation; by contrast, federalist states are more permeable to women‟s interests that are not economically determined. weldon (2002) examines 36 industrial studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 56 democracies and argues that states are most responsive to violence against women when they have an effective women‟s policy machinery 2 working in coordination with a strong, autonomous women‟s movement. the underlying logic of both of these studies is that, in order for states to effectively implement policies on violence against women, institutional structures must prevent cooptation of women‟s issues that are exclusively related to gender, such as gender-based violence. institutions must allow for the implementation of women‟s issues as women’s issues rather than as a subset of a broader policy issues (such as labor). however, many developing countries do not have effective or well-funded women‟s policy machineries. also, the development of institutions that address violence against women in these developing contexts deserves explaining. women‟s policy machineries almost always address violence against women, but states can develop other institutions that address this issue as well, such as women‟s police stations or domestic violence courts. in order to explain responsiveness to violence against women across different levels of development, it is necessary to understand how and why the state develops institutions that address violence against women in the first place. this article helps explain this process in developing countries. percentage of female elected representatives. the literature on women in politics addresses the impact of female elected representatives on raising awareness and enacting laws addressing women‟s issues in general (e.g., duke, 1996; flammang, 1997; dodson, 2006), though not much of this investigates responsiveness to the issue of violence against women in particular or policy implementation (with the exception of carroll, 2001). several feminist scholars argue that increasing the percentage of female elected representatives is necessary for achieving substantive representation of women‟s interests (e.g., phillips, 1995; mansbridge, 1999). in particular, female representatives can represent the views of their groups at the policymaking table, bring new issues to the agenda, and pursue the vigorous level of advocacy that members of a group bring to their own concerns (mansbridge, 1999). however, women in politics in latin america may face several obstacles that prevent them from effectively advocating for women‟s issues. studies of female representatives in advanced industrial democracies indicate that there were few differences in policy proposals between male and female representatives in the 1970‟s, although females held more liberal attitudes toward women‟s issues. [this failure to translate] their attitudes into policy priorities has been attributed to the “lack of acceptance of women in the political arena [that] made them unwilling to risk their standing in the legislature to pursue issues that were not viewed as legitimate by their male colleagues” (dolan, deckman & swers, 2007, p.248). women also lacked the tenure or were denied positions on powerful committees, and had lower levels of participation than men on other policy-oriented activities including speaking on the floor and bargaining with fellow legislators. these historical obstacles for female representatives in the u.s. resemble current obstacles in guatemala today. no matter how much a representative cares about women‟s issues, she may not have the tenure or may be denied the policy-making power to advance her agenda. this is not to deny that female representatives are instrumental in enacting laws addressing violence against women. however, they may need other sources of pressure to legitimate their 2 weldon (2002) defines a women‟s policy machinery is defined as “one or a set of government institutions with the main purpose of promoting the status of women.” studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 57 case for passing new laws and may have their hands tied when attempting to implement further measures to make these laws effective. engendering justice: explaining the development of specialized institutions women have been, and continue to be, marginalized within the legal system. stemming from the history noted earlier in this article of violence against women being viewed as primarily a “private” issue. integrating an appropriate legal response requires that states engender justice: that they create gender-specific institutions and procedures to address the problem in order to break with practices that systematically deny women justice. developing specialized institutions is one part of this broader goal. as previously noted, existing literature on state response to violence against women or women‟s issues in general has focused primarily on actors within the state as sources of pressure for implementing laws, but does not address how these institutions are created in the first place. creating and maintaining specialized institutions in contexts where there is little political will or resources to do so is challenge. all developing countries in latin america have managed to build at least some such institutions, with varying degrees of effectiveness. these institutions are part of a broader struggle to increase state capacity to address women‟s issues in general and, specifically, violence against women. that these states have developed specialized institutions at all is somewhat of a puzzle, given their historical tendency to ignore women‟s issues and to treat domestic violence as a personal problem. i propose that developing countries are more likely to create and maintain specialized institutions when domestic and international political and legal frameworks make the state more vulnerable to women‟s demands, and when civil society coordinates with the state and/or international organizations to take advantage of this political opportunity. political opportunity structures are positive opportunities and obstacles provided by a specific political and social structure (ferree, 2006). while globalization has presented many obstacles to advancing women‟s rights, it has also offered opportunities for women to coordinate on a transnational level (moghadam, 2005). domestically in guatemala, transitional politics and the opening of the state to civil society has provided another opportunity, with its concomitant limitations. civil society coordination brings necessary pressure and resources that would be difficult, if not impossible, to deliver otherwise. the construction and maintenance of conaprevi in guatemala is an example of this process, but this explanation is intended to help us to understand the development of specialized women‟s institutions throughout developing countries in latin america. though the development of specialized institutions represent an advance toward improving responsiveness to violence against women, taking this pathway toward institutionbuilding has its dangers and pitfalls. in guatemala, and throughout developing countries in latin america, new political opportunities presented themselves which made states more vulnerable to women‟s demands. on the international level, the u.n. held international conferences and created international conventions specifically addressing violence against women. snyder (2006, p. 24) calls the u.n. the “unlikely godmother” to a variety of local feminist initiatives by providing venues with fruitful interaction between women from the global south who raised the consciousness of more privileged women and changed the priorities of the u.n. to address these concerns. regionally, women in latin america also held conferences and created the inter-american convention on studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 58 the prevention, punishment, and eradication of violence against women (belem do pará) in 1994. these international and regional norms were shaped in part by local women who returned home, and pressured states to comply with the conventions by changing domestic legislation and the shape of state institutions. in guatemala, as in many other countries, the 1990‟s was a time of transitioning away from military authoritarian rule. the signing of the peace accords in 1996 marked the end of a brutal 36-year civil war. the process of negotiating the peace accords opened the state up to demands from civil society, including women‟s organizations. international, regional, and domestic norms all constituted a political opportunity structure which made the state more vulnerable to demands from women‟s organizations. activists took advantage of this opportunity to engage in what keck and sikkink (1998, p.18) termed “accountability politics,” or the “effort to hold powerful actors to their previously stated policies or principles.” one thing that women began to demand was the creation of specialized institutions to address violence against women. another condition increasing the likelihood that states will create or support institutions is inter-institutional coordination among civil society and the state and/or international organizations. scholarly literature on transnational advocacy networks (e.g., keck & sikkink, 1998; fox, 2002) stresses the importance of linkages between international and national organizations, in part because international organizations working in coordination with national organizations can often exert more effective pressure on unresponsive states than (often underfunded and under-staffed) national organizations working autonomously. when women‟s organizations are coordinated with international networks, they can more easily engage in leverage politics, which is the “ability to call upon powerful actors to affect a situation where weaker members of a network are unlikely to have influence.” in the next section, i describe how conaprevi was able to call upon the u.n. special rapporteur on violence against women in order to pressure the guatemalan government to increase their responsiveness. coordination with international organizations can help to provide pressure to increase responsiveness, but also provide funding that is often necessary to create or sustain specialized institutions. international cooperation in latin america is often engaged in projects aimed at strengthening the state. when states do not provide sufficient funding for programs, local women‟s movement organizations often seek support for the creation of state institutions from international donors. finding funding is always necessary in order for women‟s institutions to operate. however, partnering with international organizations and gaining funding independent of the state is a tactic that women‟s organizations use in order to strengthen state institutions and make them more independent when the state is hostile to women‟s interests. also, obtaining outside funding for a state institution is a way to make the institution itself more valuable to the state, because elected representatives get “credit” in the public eye for developing institutions that in fact cost the state very little. even though politicians may not be interested in women‟s issues, making institutional advances that address violence against women is good for politicians who can claim these as “their” advances in order to gain women‟s electoral support. coordination between civil society and the state can make the idea of specialized institutions more palatable and practical, as activists often have the expertise (and access to financial resources) needed to design these institutions. when civil society actors seek and obtain allies within the state, they often put themselves in a position of providing assistance, but also continuing oversight and monitoring to try and ensure that the institution carries out its mission. this is a precarious relationship that can be fraught with problems, as women‟s movements can studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 59 be institutionalized and de-radicalized in the process of forming a working relationship with the state (berger, 2006; alvarez, 1999). at the same time, if institutions were created without the input of civil society, there is the risk that they would never be created and, if they were, they would risk being ineffective and unaccountable to the demands of civil society. states are most likely to build new institutions and programs when political opportunities make states more vulnerable to women‟s demands, and when there are coordinated efforts to bring pressure and resources to the state. when women‟s movement organizations can expend their own energy planning for the creation of a new institution, and bring international support to the project in terms of pressure and/or funding, states often comply because it reduces the cost to creating them (and increases the political costs of ignoring these demands). this model of civil society coordination demonstrates a new route through civil society to building state capacity to serve marginalized groups. in guatemala, several state organizations have followed this same pattern, including the presidential secretariat for women (seprem, created in 2000) and the institute for the defense of indigenous women (demi, created in 1999). however, coordination is not without its pitfalls and perils, which will be discussed after the following section describing the experience of constructing conaprevi. conaprevi: institutional creation through opportunity, pressure and coordination during the course of conducting fieldwork in central america between 2006-2008, i found that what at first appeared to be a state response to violence against women was almost always an institution or program initiated by the local women‟s movement and supported by international funding. this is a pattern across several state institutions, including women‟s police stations in nicaragua, and the national coordinator for the prevention of intrafamiliar violence and violence against women (conaprevi) in guatemala, which was originally initiated by local ngos to address violence against women, then approved as a formal office of the state in 2000. the creation of conaprevi was the result of years of struggle and activism, as is true of all women‟s institutions that successfully gain status as state institutions. one of the key actors in this process was hilda morales, who has worked since the 1970‟s as an activist for women‟s rights in guatemala and internationally as well. she was the recipient of amnesty international‟s ambassador of conscience award in recognition of her lifelong work (amnesty international, 2004). another key actor was giovanna lemus, director of the guatemalan women‟s group (ggm, grupo guatemalteco de mujeres). founded in 1988, this is one of the oldest women‟s organizations in guateamla. in 1991, a broad range of organizations working on women‟s issues formed a country-wide network called the network of non-violence against women (red de la no violencia contra la mujer, hereafter, the network). in 2006, both women kindly took the time to explain the process and struggles for the creation of conaprevi. there were several political opportunities opening up in guatemala beginning in the late 1980s for women activists in guatemala to mobilize and pressure the state to create legal norms, and then to implement them. the guatemalan women‟s group worked hands-on with women victims of violence. lemus notes that, in this work, they saw that laws protecting women did not exist, that there were not efficient forms of attention to victims, and it was very difficult to find appropriate responses to the problem. in the early 1990s, women fought for the creation of a law to protect women from violence. the ratification of the interamerican convention to prevent, studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 60 sanction, and eradicate violence against women in 1995 allowed them a political opening. in addition, the peace accords, signed in 1996, required “revising national legislation…to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women…and to give effect to the government commitments deriving from the ratification of the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women” (peace accords, 1996). in addition, the peace accords recognized the importance of the active participation of women in politics, civil society, and as laborers. this provided a further tool to use the peace accords as a basis to press for implementation. hilda morales and giovanna lemus both worked with the network in order to pressure the state to create what became the 1996 intrafamiliar violence law to come into compliance with their 1995 ratification. they were engaging in accountability politics by using this international convention to hold the state responsible for the principles they signed onto when they agreed to ratify the convention. lemus mentions that, unfortunately the law is very limited by focusing on intrafamiliar violence and they would have preferred a much broader law on violence against women. however, the law did give them an opportunity to pressure for further changes in policies, institutions, and practices. after the law was created, they continued to pressure, monitor, provide expertise, and seek funding for their initiatives to implement this new legislation. in the 1990‟s, ggm began to seek direct coordination with the state. lemus says that “as a group, having had the experience of assisting women, we noted that it was necessary to have an interlocutor with the state.” they presented a strategy on how to communicate with the state, and presented it to the network. lemus notes that ggm proposed the idea of denouncing the state, and also combining forces. they formed the november 25 coordinating group (coordinadora 25 noviembre), which, among other things, has organized annual activities for the international day for the elimination of violence against women. this broad-based group of women‟s organizations worked together to pressure the state. morales describes the variety of strategies they attempted for pressing to implement the new law. they were sending letters, and asking the state to meet with them. when the state refused to meet with them, they stood outside the offices with banners and demanded the state to meet with them. they marched, they had press conferences to explain what it was they expected from the state. finally, she explains, the state began to receive them. at first, they were just pressuring for the state to apply the intrafamiliar violence law, and later for the state to create regulations and procedures to develop the content and specify how state agents should apply the law. one key to advocacy was gaining enough access to the state to gather information on problems with implementation. one of these studies, cited earlier in this paper, was conducted by morales and the network, and found grave problems with the court system refusing to apply the law or applying it in a way that reinforced discrimination against women. this documentation helped them to convince state and international actors to address these problems. the network organized a proposal for the state to create an institution that would coordinate state and nonstate actors working on implementing the law. after many years, they finally reached an agreement with the president to create this institution, which came to be conaprevi. conaprevi was successfully approved in november of 2000 (by government accord number 831-2000) and created on january 5, 2001 (diez & herrera, 2007, p. 135). among its many functions, conaprevi is in charge of coordinating, recommending, and advancing public policies to reduce intrafamiliar violence and violence against women. morales noted that studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 61 it was not easy to create conaprevi. they were able to create the institution as a part of the new procedural law that implements the intrafamiliar violence law in 2000. two years earlier, a member of the network talked with president arzú‟s wife and gave a detailed explanation of their proposal to create conaprevi, but this attempt was unsuccessful. the network waited until their next political opportunity opened up in 1999, and got the future president portillo to sign a campaign promise that he would sign a law to create conaprevi if he gained office, and he did. morales noted that it was portillo‟s wife who wanted to create the institution, because she wanted to sit as a member. the political “alliances” with these president‟s wives were weak from the beginning and were not long-lasting. however, finding support from portillo and his wife ended in successfully creating conaprevi. conaprevi allows the network to have a direct impact on implementation of the intrafamiliar violence law through their formal coordination with the state. conaprevi began with three representatives of the network and representatives from four different state institutions: a women‟s policy agency called the presidential secretariat for women (seprem, secretaria presidencial de la mujer), the special prosecutor for women (fiscalía de la mujer), the judicial branch (organismo judicial), and the national institute of statistics (instituto nacional de estadística). conaprevi was very underfunded and fairly ineffective in the beginning. it was placed institutionally in an awkward position, depending upon the presidential secretariat for women (seprem, secretaría presidencial de la mujer) for their budget. conaprevi and seprem were both doing similar work, and had conflicts with one another about how to divide up the tasks and the money. civil society representatives in conaprevi had, by that time, worked for years in coordination with international organizations. this allowed them opportunities to find out about available funding sources and they were already familiar with the standards for funding applications. in 1996, the state provided approximately $6800 in operating funds for conaprevi, and they were fighting to double this. in the end, they were successful at procuring funding from unicef, the undp, as well as the dutch embassy. this gave conaprevi the necessary funding and independence for them to start having a political impact. conaprevi was in charge of creating planovi, which was the national plan for non-violence against women, and sought funding for this and their other work. as part of their work, they continued to build relationships with people working in government. in order to create planovi, they met with the minister of government and the public prosecutor‟s office. now the network has a within-state institutional basis for coordinating with state actors. although progress has been very slow, conaprevi has been successful at creating new policies and procedures, overseeing training programs, and bringing pressure to the state. civil society representatives used their position in conaprevi to invite the u.n. special rapporteur on violence against women to visit guatemala and pressure the state to respond to violence against women, and in particular, the alarming increase in homicide of women. having civil society representatives in this state institution gave them the authority to be able to make the invitation. yakin erturk, the u.n. special rapporteur, made a historic visit to guatemala in 2004, and met directly with president oscar berger and other high-level representatives in government and civil society. berger was known for blaming the victim and publicly minimizing the problem of homicides of women and, in 2004, had publicly stated that “in the majority of cases, women [victims of violence] had links with juvenile gangs and organized crime” (cgrs, 2006). although it is unclear if the visit itself made a real difference to his attitude, it did force studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 62 him to address the violence as a serious issue. berger more recently publicly indicated that femicides are the product of societal inequalities and discrimination (cgrs, 2006). the u.n. produced several recommendations for guatemala, that conaprevi can now utilize as a further pressure point to compel the state to implement measures to protect women from violence. through the process of building a broad base of allies in the state and in international organizations, conaprevi grew from an idea in 1997 to an institution in 2000 to one with fairly substantial resources a few years later. how was the network able to be successful in placing this explicitly feminist institution within the state structure? first, they offered a blueprint to the state of how they thought the institution should operate. secondly, they were willing to operate at first with a very small budget. third, they coordinated with international organizations to provide substantial outside funding. although the advances have been slow, they are significant. before this, women in the network were fighting for the opportunity to meet with government officials, and now coordination between the state and civil society is an institutional requirement. this coordination allowed conaprevi to complete a much broader range of tasks to help implement the intrafamiliar violence law, and create policies to address violence against women in general. opportunities and potential perils of coordination although it offers many potential rewards, civil society coordination with the state and with international organizations has several potential drawbacks as well. several of these have already been discussed, but one of these is dependence upon donors. no matter who is funding civil society, they are always subject to the concerns, directives, and limitations of donors. when civil society operates on a shoestring budget, they risk not being able to do much. when they partner with the state or with international organizations, they risk co-optation and financial instability. there is also a bias in the type of activists who tend to get funded and limitations on who may be represented by that activism. as berger (2006) discusses, civil society itself is characterized by unequal relations of power (3). and, even more pronounced are the unequal relations of power that prevail when donors are selecting and working with recipients. through discussions with a representative of the dutch embassy who partially funds conaprevi, i found that this coordinating body is a good example of the type of project that international donors like to support – one with a clear mission, well-educated members who speak english and understand how to work with international donors, relatively few overhead expenses, broad enough mission to make a somewhat measurable political impact, yet with few enough people involved so that it is not a bureaucratic headache. in short, this conaprevi is the type of organization international donors can easily manage and justify to their clients back home, who want to see the measurable impacts of their projects abroad. donor funding patterns have profound implications for how well laws and programs on violence against women will be implemented. finding international funding is more often than not a necessary condition for creating new state institutions. however, if international donors move to other priorities, these programs can stagnate or, at worst, close altogether. progress in state response is always fragile, precarious, and dependent upon constant monitoring, funding, and vigilance. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 63 conclusion guatemala is one of the most dangerous countries in latin america, and increasingly so for women. i argue that states are more likely to create state institutions when women‟s movement organizations work in coordination with state and international actors in order to apply pressure and bring resources to the state. in order to create and strengthen new state institutions that address violence against women, women‟s organizations must first come up with the blueprint for that institution, and coordinate with both state and international actors in order to apply pressure and provide resources to move it forward. guatemala is one of the least responsive countries in the region, in part because women‟s organizations had a very late start organizing themselves and coordinating with the state and international organizations due to a protracted civil war from 1960-1996. although many advances have been made in a relatively short time, these advances have been slow and hard-won in a general socio-political context of widespread impunity that systematically discriminates against women. however, when women‟s organizations are able to effectively coordinate with state and international actors in order to bring pressure and resources toward their efforts, the state is much more likely to make advances. acknowledgments this research was made possible through the generous support of the fulbright-hays doctoral dissertation research abroad fellowship, kellogg institute seed money grant, and the zahm travel grant. i am profoundly grateful to all of the individuals in my life who assisted me with this field research, and made it safe and delightful, especially rafael campos, edgar menchú, fernando us, and sean walsh. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 64 references alexander, m. j. 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(2002). protest, policy, and the problem of violence against women: a cross-national comparison. pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh press. introduction studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 102 just above the fray interpretive social criticism and the ends of social justice andrew gibson, mcgill university abstract: the article lays down the broad strokes of an interpretive approach to social criticism. in developing this approach, the author stresses the importance of both a pluralistic notion of social justice and a rich ideal of personal growth. while objecting to one-dimensional conceptions of social justice centering on legal equality, the author develops the idea of there being multiple “spheres of justice”, including the spheres of „care‟ and „merit‟. each of these spheres, he argues, is subject to historical interpretation. he furthers this view by arguing that the social basis for these different spheres is best understood against the canvas of an ideal of self-fulfillment and individuality. based on the elaboration of these two sets of premises—a pluralistic conception of social justice and a collective ideal of personal self-fulfillment—the article outlines the basis for and challenges inherent to the practice of interpretive social criticism. introduction just recently, while talking with some of my university colleagues, i attempted to come up with a defense of free post-secondary education. running short on arguments about how lower tuition means greater accessibility to more canadians, i spontaneously mentioned something about how education strengthens the social fabric and increases general well-being. a rebuttal then came from one of my colleagues, who, with great enthusiasm, claimed that education is only worth supporting because it permits ―insurrectionary activity, procrastination, revolt and random displays of poetic terrorism‖. while taking the comment with a grain of salt, i was reminded of the palpable confusion that presently reigns in the university world with regard to the rationale behind social criticism. it is tempting to link the confusion surrounding the practice of social criticism to changes in the political landscape that came about in the late 1980s, after the fall of the great ideological divisions of the post-war period. my feeling, however, is that the problems of social criticism run deeper than this. the big issue has to do with the way in which university intellectuals relate to the morality and politics of the people they are criticizing. of the various critical programs and approaches that we see in the humanities and social sciences today, there exist important discrepancies between what is being thought up by professors and students, on the one hand, and the lived experience of the everyday morality on the other. the move towards ‗subversive‘ and ‗transgressive‘ intellectual contestation so popular on campuses in the 1990s is an example of the type of gulf i am talking about. while widespread in some university departments, its oppositional esoteric vocabularies have limited application studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 103 outside the university environment. 1 there is a different sort of critical approach, however, that also contributes to maintaining the gulf between intellectual labour and the democratic unfolding of a country‘s everyday morality and political life. this is the prestigious area of philosophy known as ‗normative critique‘. while the purpose of this paper is to outline the basis for a socially contextualized, interpretive approach to social criticism—one that is less detached and formulaic than normative critique, and thus more attuned to the plural and contradictory aspects of the historic morality of specific communities—the article proceeds in this task by first casting an eye on the shortcomings of the normative approach. in looking at the normative approach, i use the influential work of jurgen habermas as a focal point. there are other prominent philosophers who are much less attuned than habermas to the social contexts of moral expression and political organization. consider for example richard dworkin‘s emphasis on de-contextualized ―abstract justice‖ or john rawls‘ appeals to morality as it emerges from behind an ahistorical ―veil of ignorance‖. habermas is, indeed, perhaps one of the more empirically-sensitive philosophers of justice. and yet it would seem that even he succumbs to the pull of a universalistic, one-dimensional theorization of the moral world. when he is theorizing in this mode, he cannot but distance himself from the way in which people relate to the ideals and injustices of their respective political communities. 2 the interpretive approach to social criticism sketched below is largely a rehearsal of ideas put forth by other scholars—most importantly, perhaps, the american philosopher michael walzer and the german critical theorist axel honneth. their ideas are put together here in such a way that a particular kind of interpretive critique is brought to light. if we take social criticism, generally, to mean critical insight directed towards cultural affirmation, elaboration and betterment, its interpretive form can be understood as a matter of developing such insight based on the moral sensibilities and practices which have already gained a foothold in a specific time and place, in a specific country or ―community of experience‖. in the second part of the paper, i argue that instead of singularly focused, one-dimensional theorizations of social justice, we need to develop an historical, pluralistic view that starts from the premise that any one society will encompass a diversity of moral dispositions—what walzer (1983) calls multiple ―spheres of justice‖. this fits nicely with the complex formulation that honneth gives to the notion of social justice. in his reformulation of some old hegelian themes (1995, 2003, 2006), honneth sketches a broad yet historically specific interpretation of social justice involving not only the sphere of legal equality, but two other moral spheres as well—that of labour based ‗merit‘ and that of the more privatized morality of ‗care‘. one of the premises of the paper is that the scholarly interpretation of these different spheres of social life should form part of the bread and butter of social criticism. yet the manner of their historical patterning also suggests that social critics might do well to look to the greater purposes and goals that the morality of these different spheres can be understood to facilitate. in liberal democracies, one such purpose is frequently glossed as that of personal freedom or individual autonomy. the aspiration being referred to here is, i argue, best understood in terms 1 richard rorty (1991) provides an interesting, if schematic summary of an approach he caricatures as that of ―advanced literary theory‖. 2 habermas is also the author of excellent ―journalistic‖ work. see for example his sur l‟europe (2006), une époque de transitions (2005) and his ―crossing globalization‘s valley of tears‖ (2000). interestingly, the orientation of this work feels almost like the opposite of his normative philosophy. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 104 of an ideal of ‗personal growth‘ or ‗self-fulfillment‘. stanley cavell (2004) describes it as an ideal which centers on the discovery of what a person is made of and on the cultivation of what that person is ―meant to do, or to be‖ (p. 446). the ideal has been worked out in a fairly comprehensive manner in the literature on the romantic notion of ―authenticity‖ (trilling, 1972; taylor, 1991; nehamas, 1999). this is not to say that it is an ideal that is simply accepted without contestation. it is considered, for example, to play an important role in the motivational basis of contemporary consumer society (campbell, 1987; illouz, 1997). still, it would seem that much of this contestation is directed toward debased forms of authenticity and not toward debunking the ideal itself. even the relentless criticism of michel foucault (1984) calls attention to the promise of authenticity, or ―care of the self‖. the point of referring to authenticity is to show the important interplay between this personal growth ideal and the different spheres of justice, insofar as the latter may be understood as preconditions to the former. in the third section of the paper, i say a little more about what is meant by this ethics of personal growth. at the same time, i paint a rough picture of how such an ethics might be defended as a collective project within the context of liberal democratic states. this requires balancing off liberalism‘s ‗political neutrality‘ with the institutional structures that citizens of liberal democracies have historically sought to provide for themselves, as means to maximizing the possibilities of self-development and full individuality. in the last section of the paper, i return to the more practical aspects of interpretive social criticism. while emphasizing the importance of the social immersion and connectedness of the critic, i fend off the charge of critical circularity that is often held against interpretive critique. problems of relevance and breadth what may be seen as a current of cynicism in academia, perhaps even in society at large, has led to an abandonment of grand, utopian narratives. this being said, there still remain forms of social critique that hold horizons of collective betterment as their measure. we see some such critical programs in social science departments, but given the developmental path of sociology and other social scientific disciplines, it is difficult for such programs to come up with critical evaluations that go much beyond suggestive empirical description. 3 as a consequence, social criticism is often confined to debates within philosophy departments. the problem with this, if we‘re to believe walzer‘s (2002) caricature of the critic who has left the cave to go and ponder after truth on the philosopher‘s ledge, is that philosophical forms of critique seldom take seriously the moral orientations developed throughout the history of specific communities. 3 such empirical descriptions are, of course, invaluable indicators of what is going in large-scale societies, but their moral and political significance is not always obvious, neither to the sociologist, nor to the relevant political community. as adam swift (2004) notes, many sociologists ―regard what they do as relevant to matters of social justice in general, and of equality of opportunity in particular. they often acknowledge that their research is motivated, at least in part, by a normative interest in such matters. but that interest tends to be rather vague and diffuse. masters of precision when it comes to measuring and analyzing the empirical phenomena they study, they are, typically, less sure in their analytical control of concepts such as ‗equality of opportunity‘ or ‗life-chances‘. moreover, they are sometimes suspicious of attempts by others to treat normative issues with similar seriousness, holding – less or more consciously – that such issues are not amenable to intellectually respectable investigation‖ (p. 1). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 105 inquiries into the nature of ―justice-in-itself‖ that aim to elaborate a set of universally applicable moral rules are, according to walzer, not likely to hold much sway beyond the intellectual milieu in which they are thought up. keeping walzer‘s contention in mind, i want to briefly look at jurgen habermas‘s ―philosophical anthropology‖, as i believe that it shares some of the same problems. the goal of most forms of philosophical anthropology is to bring together different genres of academic inquiry in such a manner as to offer a set of coherent and convincing arguments about human nature (honneth & joas, 1988). this is undoubtedly an important exercise, if for no other reason than to debunk one-sided assumptions about ―the way humans are‖, which are often carried into the political arena and which serve to back this or that policy initiative. but the problem that besets this form of inquiry from the start is that it is notoriously difficult to substantiate any kind of human nature argument whatsoever (honneth, 2007). and we can assume that this is doubly the case for arguments that have as their aim a deep set of political reforms. the understanding that habermas (1984, 1990, 1998) has of his research on the ―pragmatics of communication‖ has brought him to question the democratic conditions of free and fair public debate. the basis of his critique rests an image of human nature that is fundamentally linked to our capacities as language-users. to summarize crudely, his position holds 1) that there are pragmatic presuppositions which language-use entails and 2) that we must respect these if we are to live up to the inbuilt standards of human sociability. habermas‘s portrayal of the social dynamic that these language-based presuppositions entail can be glossed as the unconstrained exchange of ―validity claims‖. in laymen‘s terms, the argument claims that the anthropological foundations of language-use point the way to an ideal configuration of public debate in which every individual is able to freely express their opinion on matters of common concern. habermas reasonably assumes that more just modes of public debate will bring about more socially just societies. on the basis of his anthropology of language, habermas posits the need for substantial political reforms in decisionmaking processes, which he believes will lead to a substantial revision of commonly accepted norms and practices. such predictions notwithstanding, the study of the pragmatics of human language-use allows habermas (1990) to postulate the following moral maxim: that ―every valid norm must satisfy the condition that all affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone‘s interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities)‖ (p. 65). this prescriptive formulation is an eloquent one and it has indeed been seductive for a large, if mostly western, intellectual audience. of course, the implementation of any such view is really only conceivable in democratic societies. and even in the most democratic of actually existing democracies, the policies stemming from such a proposal would be considered quite radical. my point is not that such a program of reform should be dismissed because of how radical it is. nor is it to say that habermas‘ ―discourse ethics‖ is without historical grounding in western democracies. rather, i am simply making the (perhaps trivial) point that the political relevance of any such program is not likely to stem from appeals to tenuously far-reaching anthropological claims related to universal criteria of human conduct. for the likelihood that any such relevance will be gained is highly dependant on the argument being made in a vernacular that speaks to the shared understandings of a particular political community (walzer, 1993, 2002; rorty, 1998). this would, in turn, require drawing persuasive links between the aims of free and fair public studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 106 debate, and the repertoire of moral sensibilities and practices that are already part of the social fabric. if taken as a form of social criticism capable of addressing the full scope of social injustices, habermas‘ approach suffers from another kind of weakness. the moral core of his contribution, which essentially requires that each person affected by a collective decision be in equal acceptance of it, emerges from a one-dimensional conception of social justice. it is onedimensional in the sense that it limits itself to a singular view of justice centering on a notion of equality as equal treatment. habermas‘s ‗ethical formalism‘ shares this limited egalitarian focus with other prominent schools of thought. the utilitarian logic of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, for example, also suffers from a restrictive egalitarian thrust coming from the central emphasis it places on the equal dignity of each person. the intuitive core of each of these dominant approaches to moral thought is, as taylor (1985) puts it, that ―everyone ought to count and all ought to count in the same way‖ (p. 231). 4 it is no secret that there is this sort of egalitarian emphasis in habermas‘ discourse ethics, as well as within his broader critically oriented anthropology of human communication. without trying to account for the motivation behind this style of egalitarianism, it seems fairly clear that if his approach were more society-specific and historical in character it would have to account for a wider breadth of moral sensibilities and practices. the discourse ethics approach provides the possibility of leaving each historically situated democracy to sort through this moral morass on its own terms—as long as it does so by way of the unconstrained exchange of validity claims. but this presumes that one can separate out the area of human communication as the linchpin of moral concern. it also presumes, as i have been arguing, that this linchpin is subject to both authoritative intellectual prescription and moral universality. certainly, there is a kind of intellectual intensity that is brought about through resolutely focused approaches to social justice. and when one considers the scandalous discrepancies that exist between the highly defendable ideal of equal treatment, on the one hand, and the manner in which certain groups and individuals are actually treated on the other, it is obvious that there is much work to be done. still, the perspective taken here is that social injustices are best addressed, not by appeal to overly abstract one-dimensional theories of justice focusing solely on equal treatment, but rather by appeal to the diverse moral standards and shared collective purposes that citizens hold in common. before being able to persuasively appeal to these, the critic must of course have an idea of what these in fact are. i have mentioned the collective ideal of personal self-fulfillment, but have not yet expanded on the moral understandings and practices that we might see as facilitating this ideal. 5 4 taylor‘s point is that each of these theories has a tendency to reduce the complex plurality of the moral world to a one-dimensional variation of moral universality. he argues that ―one of the big illusions which grows from either of these reductions is the belief that there is a single consistent domain of the ‗moral‘, that there is one set of considerations, or mode of calculation, which determines what we ought ‗morally‘ to do . . . we could easily decide that the universal attribution of moral personality is valid . . . but there are also other moral ideals and goals . . . which cannot be easily coordinated with universalism, and can even enter into conflict with it‖ (1985, p. 233). 5 there are, of course, many ways in which the purpose of self-fulfilment is supported and sustained in liberal democracies. while the paper focuses on three different spheres of justice, i am not making any claims about these being the only relevant spheres, or about them being ―systematically‖ related to an ideal of personal growth. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 107 equal treatment and what else? i will say more about the morality of equal treatment below, but i first want to draw a contrast between this moral domain and another, which until recently has drawn much less attention. this contrasting realm of moral practice exists at what sociologists call the ―micro‖ level of social interaction— in those seemingly unorganized moments of interaction between friends and loved ones. i am referring here to the moral outlook which has taken root over the last several centuries with the institutionalization of a privatized domain suited to modern family life. there is a distinctive moral sensibility at the heart of this realm of activity that has often been passed over in liberal egalitarian conceptions of social justice, where the focus is on each man and woman being treated with the same anonymous principle of equality. feminist scholars have, in recent decades, done the most to describe the precise nature of the sensibility that is woven into private relations of intimacy and family life. 6 an affectionate morality of ―care‖ has since been taken as the guiding sensibility of domestic life—that cherished private realm which has come to exist in juxtaposition to the instrumental demands of public life. in the caring environment of the family, the romantic partner, child and parent will each have their own unique set of vulnerabilities, needs and wants. the morality of equal treatment is not sufficient to meeting these highly personal demands. the moral feelings that guide this social realm move, somewhat oppositely, in the direction of a type of differential treatment requiring that attention be paid to the idiosyncratic needs and irreplaceable characteristics of the ―concrete other‖ (benhabib, 1986; baier, 1994). there are fairly straightforward links that can be made between this caring form of justice and the personal growth ideal mentioned above. ever since the middle of the 18 th century, the affectionate ties of marriage and family life have been increasingly protected from public demands of a more impersonal sort (ariès, 1962). the historic upshot has been the organization of a realm of social life infused with the supportive heightening effects of romantic and familial love. it is a realm where childhood has come to be lived out freely, in a largely self-exploratory manner, away from the burdens of toil. it is also a realm in which marriage, or romantic couplehood, has come to be lived out with greater equality and emotional freedom. 7 the developmental history behind the emergence of this realm of caring activity overlaps in many ways with the history of struggles for social justice. take for example the succession of 19 th century campaigns that aimed to alleviate children form the duties of labour, or later campaigns to reduce the number of working hours for adults in the hope that private relations would become a meaningful part of the social life of all citizens (parr, 1982). there have also been the various feminist waves that sought to free women from the constraints of domestic labour and from the limiting role-expectations that went along with this (luxton, 1980). it is only 6 the issue of this unacknowledged moral register was first brought to light in the kolhberg-gilligan debate in developmental psychology. carol gilligan (1982) made the argument for a distinctive yet largely neglected form of moral expression, which she, at first, thought to be more prominent in women. regardless of the psychological validity of her original findings, the door had been opened to another moral dimension, the importance of which has since been emphasized by feminist political thinkers, such as benhabib (1986) and baier (1994). 7 stanley cavell (1981) offers a stimulating analysis of how this newfound freedom was exemplified in hollywood movies from the 1930s and 1940s. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 108 in gradually liberating themselves from these patriarchal cultural expectations that women could imagine fully partaking in the expression of their personal needs and wants. this historical snapshot opens a window onto a moral realm that is often overlooked in hyper egalitarian conceptions of social justice. in addition to the important differences that exist between the morality of equal treatment and that of care, i want to draw yet another contrast with the ‗morality of merit‘. the distinction may be less obvious at first, since the registers of merit and equality are both institutionalized at the ―macro‖ level of social interaction. both forms of moral expression are woven into the cultural fabric of large-scale institutions, such as bureaucracies, legal systems and markets. 8 there are, however, fundamental differences between the two. while equality is woven into the practices of democratic citizenship, merit is as parkin (1971) and parsons (1971) argued some time ago, a moral standard which is part and parcel of the occupational division of labour. citizenship has to do with the way in which each person lives out their rights and responsibilities as a member of a self-governing polity. merit, on the other hand, pertains to the contribution in labour that each individual makes to the collective. the major, if paradoxical, difference between the two forms of moral expression is that while the first stems from a fraternal equality between citizens, the latter implies felt differences of worth between these same men and women (dubet, 2006). it will likely be fairly straightforward to convince the reader that the fraternal bonds of citizenship are pertinent to the building of a more socially just society. this fraternal ethos is commonly thought of in terms of 20 th century attempts to institute a basic set of ―social rights‖. the underlying rationale for securing these sorts of rights is that all citizens, as participants of a common democratic project, should be provided with the cooperatively instituted means to material security and social opportunity (marshall, 1950). in a similar manner, it might be argued that the project of securing social rights for each and all is both a ‗means‘ and a ‗due‘ for collectively sustaining just and democratic social conditions (taylor, 1985, chapter 11). there are also other ways of picking up the thread of collective selfunderstanding that is manifest in expressions of moral equality. after the great depression and into the post-war period, the institutionalization of social rights was, as canadian historian james struthers (1983) describes it, a matter of expressing group solidarity in the face of the vagaries of the market. if we return further back in time to the period of the canadian enlightenment we find yet another strand of the egalitarian ethos. in the first quarter of the 19 th century, the equality question was debated as a matter of ―intellectual equality‖ in public life. the argument which won the day was that it was not only those few that the monarchy selected for office which had ―the capacity to judge‖ (mcnairn, 2000). rather, it would eventually come to be seen that all citizens had the capacity, or at least the potential, to partake fully and responsibly in public life. this collective realization can be taken as a bridging point connecting the call for greater equality with the fastening of a foothold for the romantic ideal of personal growth. such a bridge was significant in that it provided an important steppingstone towards dignified self-presentation in public life. increasingly, men and women would, in conversation with their peers, be able to cultivate what they were to make of themselves as freethinking individuals. 8 jeffrey alexander‘s (2003) ―cultural sociology‖ offers a comprehensive grasp of the complex ways in which seemingly invisible ―cultural structures‖ are woven into societal institutions and practices. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 109 as mentioned above, the links between social justice and the egalitarian dimension of the everyday morality will surely seem obvious enough. what is likely to be more problematic is the manner in which the morality of merit can, it too, be understood to have a place in the landscape of social justice. we can link such reticence to a tension within the morality of merit itself. it is on the one hand a form of moral expression which demands that fellow citizens be recognized for the work they accomplish within the context of a cooperative political community. on the other hand, the more specific understanding at play is that some forms of work are worth more than others and need to be recognized as such. what comes about with this register of collective understanding, then, is a hierarchy of worth. it is not impossible to imagine a future society in which any such monolithic hierarchy of worth has ceased to exist. 9 from a contemporary perspective, it is plausible to conceive of the particular shape this hierarchy has come to assume as the outcome of a series of emancipatory steps forward. we can only grasp things in this light, however, by comparing the current hierarchy with that which came before it. to get a rough sense of this, we must look to the social life of medieval christendom, which was also made up of a hierarchy of worth, albeit of a radically different sort. there isn‘t the space to get into the manner in which this hierarchy was set up, except to say that it was based on a highly complex system of orders, ranks and titles, which were fixed by birth and blood but were also tied into an entire cosmological worldview (lovejoy, 1957). in the 17 th and 18 th centuries, this cosmological outlook took root on the shores of new france and british north america (miquelon, 1987; burley, 1997). but just as in europe, this age-old cultural structure was beginning to shift and change under the pressures of modernity. with the profound and enduring influence of the democratic revolutions of the late 18 th century, along with trends in industrialization and urbanization, the christian hierarchy of worth would eventually be so radically transformed as to give birth to a new moral order. the key element of this new order was that one‘s overall social status was to be tied to the sort of life one led and, more specifically, to one‘s efforts and contributions in this-worldly, productive activity. the process can be taken as one in which the question of where one stood in the eyes of others came increasingly within the sphere of one‘s own power, in the sense of resulting from one‘s own efforts and abilities. as such, one‘s social standing was progressively loosened from the grip of outside factors such as social lineage, nepotistic relations and property assets. at the same time, higher forms of social standing, which have always been covetously guarded by the elite, were, with the turn of the 20 th century, broadened to include a wider spectrum of occupations (keller, 1963; hartmann, 2007). this isn‘t to say that the new hierarchy stopped pitting the worth of some groups and individuals against that of others, but rather to say that any such hierarchy was increasingly subject to democratic pressures and influences. 9 walzer elaborates such a position in his spheres of justice. he speaks of multiple hierarchies of worth, where none would be predominant over others. in such a situation of ―complex equality‖, there would as he puts it be no more bmocs (―big men on campus‖). 10 in referring to this broadly western historical process, honneth (2003) notes that ―the extent to which something counts as ‗achievement‘, as a cooperative contribution, is defined against a value standard whose normative reference point is the economic activity of the independent, middle class, male bourgeois. what is distinguished as ‗work‘, with a specific, quantifiable use for society, hence amounts to the result of a group-specific determination of value—to which whole sectors of other activities, themselves equally necessary for reproduction (e.g. household work), fall victim‖ (p. 141). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 110 it is important not to exaggerate the magnitude of such influences. for there were democratic injustices in the very occasions through which a new schema of worth was being progressively worked out—injustices in impressing upon the public mind which people and professions would be worth what. 10 still, the injustices were themselves to become the subject of historic contestation. if we consider that the single most important indicator of social worth is the remuneration that individuals receive from their employment (swift, 1995; honneth, 2003), then the history of collective bargaining for higher wages becomes an important instance of a meritocratic struggle for social justice. the politicization of domestic labour, though more complicated, can also be understood as a struggle against an abysmal lack of social merit. 11 returning now to the ideal of self-fulfillment and individuality, there are some important parallels to be made between it and the merit sphere of activity. while the mastery of an occupation or pursuit of a career is but one avenue through which men and women may find an avenue of fulfillment, it is nonetheless a socially predominant one. it is of historic significance that each person today is in principle free to choose which occupation they should like to learn and practice. such life changing choices are of course not easy ones to make. an excellencebased hierarchy of publicly recognized worth may help to confirm, guide and inspire individuals in their choices. this does not preclude the need for equalizing democratic pressures concerning the nature and degree of differences in worth. rather, it in fact reinforces it. for it is essential, in light of the diversity implied by the very idea of individuality, that men and women have access to a broad base of rich and rewarding fields of work. i have been arguing in this section that social justice must encompass more than the sphere of justice as equal treatment. there are other types of sensibilities and practices which have had profound effects in recent centuries and which have led to the development of multiple, mutually irreducible spheres of justice. this argument takes for granted that such ideals developed within the context of nation-state communities. it is certainly relevant to question whether moral sensibilities are not in fact much more flexible and pluralistic than suggested by any notion of a homogenous national community. this is especially true given current global trade and immigration patterns. but as much as national communities in europe, for example, are beginning to open onto one another, there are persuasive accounts which suggest the nation-state still functions as the primary, if ―banal‖ nexus of political socialization (billig, 1995; kupchan, 1995). from the standpoint of social criticism, it is fruitful to conceive of each of the spheres of justice discussed above in relation to the support they provide for the romantic ideal of personal growth. but stating things in this manner poses the question of the extent to which it is in fact desirable to conceive of political reforms in relation to an ideal of human development—what is known in political theory as an ideal of the good life. 11 without equating domestic labour with non-domestic forms of gainful employment, a strong argument gain can be made for considering the historical devaluation of women‘s work, both inside the home and in the public realm, as variations on the theme of meritocratic injustice (rossler, 2007). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 111 “human development in its richest diversity” the standard position among defenders of liberalism is that states should never get involved with the promotion of any particular mode or style of living on the pretension that it is better than others. rather, political communities should be neutral with regard to the way in which individuals choose to lead their lives, at least with regard to state legislation. so long as particular styles of life are not harmful to others, the state should have nothing to do with the ends that individuals choose to pursue. the rationale behind this position of ‗political neutrality‘, which has flowed historically from the position of religious tolerance, is that any such stateinterference risks opening the way to violent oppression. 12 the 16 th century wars of religion are an historic case in point. more recently, nationalistic versions of ―the good‖ have tended to pit one ethnic mode of life against another, often with disastrous consequences. even when conceptions of how individuals should best lead their lives assume more seemingly benign forms, such as the deliberative citizen engaged in collective decision-making processes, defenders of political neutrality caution against it. aside from the danger of slippage towards greater manifestations of state-based authority, there is also the danger of paternalism, that among the diversity of purposes that individuals may hold, the promotion of any particular one will undermine the happiness of those men and women who simply do not share it. as ronald dworkin (1993) argues, ―no life is a good one lived against the grain of conviction. it does not help someone else‘s life but spoils it to force values upon him he cannot accept but can only bow before out of fear or prudence‖ (p. 168). many critics today argue that neutrality and ―tolerance talk‖ can be pushed too far, such that the excesses of the doctrine begin to mandate new forms of intolerance and state-based coercion. 13 others argue that neutrality is but a cultural artifact—that liberal democracies cannot avoid promoting a particular, if loose knit conception of the good life. the position taken up here is that there is indeed a moderate manner in which western democratic states should rightly be understood as promoting the good of a particularistic form of life. honneth and anderson (2005) describe this as state endorsement of a ―weak idea of the good‖. the ‗weak idea‘ they are referring to is that of an ‗intersubjectively‘ enhanced notion of individual autonomy. this, in turn, has much in common with the ideal of self-fulfillment referred to above. contrary to what might be assumed, the ‗weak‘ criterion does not refer to the habit that most western democracies have of routinely excluding the less privileged of their members from the hope of an autonomous existence. it refers, rather, to the fact that even the most egalitarian state can only go so far in promoting the way of life in question. for one of the very premises of autonomous self-fulfillment is that it can take shape in a great diversity of forms. it is true that at the heart of this way of life there lies an ethics of personal cultivation that opposes ―ascribed‖ and ―conformist‖ lifestyles. but there is nothing in the way of a detailed program as to how this cultivation should be pursued, nor is there any predetermined notion of what such cultivation will amount to for any one individual. certainly, there are men and women who serve as admirable examples of such a mode of life, whether in the mastery of a field of human activity or 12 the founding text here is perhaps john locke‘s (1689) a letter concerning toleration. 13 see, for example, wendy brown‘s (2006) study of the excessive rhetoric of tolerance and its implications in domestic and international contexts. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 112 the fashioning of a strikingly original selfhood. but any one of these examples will likely only be admirable in the eyes of a particular kind of person or audience (nehamas, 1999, chapter 4). in a sense, then, the most we can say about this particular mode of the good life is that it must be discovered for oneself. but if this is the case, the question then becomes: how can the political community get involved in supporting this mode of life without simultaneously undermining the premise of self-discovery? without getting into the details of this paradox, one can argue that the answer lies in the requirement that the state only ever promote this way of life to the extent of ensuring the conditions needed to make it a real opportunity for each and all (honneth & anderson, 2005). this would, among other things, require attending to the moral adjudication of the different spheres of justice—of, for example, care in the family, equal treatment under the law and merit in the world of work. as long as greater social justice is sought after in the organization of the different moral spheres, then the question of whether and how the life of personal growth is pursued need not be anything more than a matter of private concern. the cultural aspiration behind this way of seeing things—the aspiration, that is, towards ―human development in its richest diversity‖—is not something that is entirely new. 14 if it is an aspiration that we can agree is at the heart of many of our liberal democratic institutions—from the nuclear family to the institutionalization of the idea of ‗careers open to talent‘, from the fundamental freedoms to the flourishing of the arts, from the welfare state to the universal education system—then it is also something that social critics must be attuned to in speaking of the deficiencies and injustices of their respective societies. but how exactly should the interpretive critic go about speaking of such an aspiration and of the conditions present or lacking in the different spheres of justice? how, in other words, should she understand the art of her own practice? social criticism in an interpretive mode i began the paper by suggesting that one way of lessening the confusion surrounding social criticism would be to move away from overly abstract, one-dimensional approaches to the problem of social injustice. i mentioned that interpretive criticism constitutes just such a move, for it calls on social critics to look to the history and to the full breadth of contradictory tendencies in the everyday morality that permeates their respective political communities. such an interpretive exercise requires coming to terms with the pluralistic moral sensibilities that infuse collective practices. this exercise will be met with greater success, i have been arguing, if it also pays attention to the more encompassing purposes that citizens share in common, such as the self-development ideal mentioned above. 15 while these moral sensibilities and collective purposes may well constitute the bread and butter of social criticism, i have yet to say anything regarding the manner in which critics can be 14 john stuart mill uses this phrase, which he burrows from the prussian linguist wilhelm von humboldt, as the epigram to his famous on liberty. 15 certain other collective purposes shared by canadians are what might be described as more immediately social in nature. consider, for example, the aspirations behind the ―multicultural mosaic‖. charles taylor (1993) offers a powerful account of the relevant sense of collective purpose by outlining the potential of a ―deep diversity‖, by which he means a social diversity that enables multiple modes of civic belonging. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 113 understood to proceed in their interpretations. the first thing to consider in this regard is what walzer (1993) identifies as the requirement of ―closeness‖ or ―social connectedness‖. this seemingly commonsensical requirement is that a proper interpretation of moral sensibilities and purposes must be based on an intimate knowledge of their particular social meaning and texture. this requires rich insight of an historical or sociological sort into how the different moral understandings have developed, or even somehow failed to develop. it also requires a lived appreciation of what these understandings can mean in the context of a specific society. a second element of interpretation, which can really only stem from social connectedness and attachment to a common way of life, is a capacity for ‗prophetic idealism‘—the critic‘s ability, that is, to call upon social changes of a morally and politically progressive sort. now, in order to properly situate this issue of prophetic idealism, i want first to grapple with the main charge that is laid against interpretive criticism: the charge of critical circularity. simply put, the claim is that interpretive criticism is too close to the political fray, such that it will inevitably fail to gain the critical distance required to provide a non-redundant critique of the current social order. it is easy to grant that the social critic can be too close to the political fray, to the point of being unable to offer a properly critical perspective. typically, what this will mean is that the critic is too close to certain types of relationships, too close to the seats of political and economic power. this kind of proximity would certainly make it more difficult to see society whole. as walzer (1993) puts it, the ―actual wielding of power and the machiavellian ambition to whisper in the ear of the prince… are real obstacles to the practice of criticism, because they make it difficult to look with open eyes at those features of society most in need of critical scrutiny‖ (p. 60). but this practical issue has in fact little to do with what is really meant by the charge of circularity. for what is usually being referred to is a different sort of blindness, coming not from egoistic selfinterest but rather from the lack of an external viewpoint. the worry is a fairly straightforward one, as expressed by dworkin (1983) and then more pointedly by cohen (1986). if the critic is supposed to assess the question of social justice on the basis of ethical standards and practices that are already in existence, then how can the outcome be anything other than a condoning of the status quo? cohen poses the problem more acutely by confronting walzerian interpretive criticism, which he sees as inherently ―communitarian‖, with a fundamental dilemma. this ―simple communitarian dilemma‖ arises with the interpretive predicament of having but two methodological options for gaining critical leverage: gleaning collective values from existing practices, or gleaning them form the stories we tell of ourselves and then applying them to social practices. the dilemma is seen to arise because of the redundancy of criticizing the status quo on the basis status quo values, on the one hand, and from a problem of proof of evidence on the other (the problem here being that it is impossible to know which concrete ethical standards are carried in the stories we tell of ourselves). the way out of this dilemma requires an argument supporting the very existence of such things as common sensibilities and shared understandings. it also requires an argument about how we can move towards greater comprehension of the shape and substance of such diffuse cultural formations. finally, it requires an argument for how there inheres within the spectrum of shared understandings a ―surplus of validity‖ that reaches beyond the status quo. i do not have the space to defend the sociological claim that citizens of liberal democratic states share certain moral understandings in common. it will have to suffice to say that, while we rarely come upon uncontested terrain as to what these understandings actually are, it is quite studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 114 plausible to assume a spectrum of meanings, if only in the framing of recurring public debates, that are more or less representative of a particular political community. there need not be a consensus regarding these common understandings. for the condition of there being either consensus or cleavage is, as taylor (1985) argues, ―a certain set of common terms of reference‖ (p. 36). still, the possibility of effective social criticism requires that the critic take a step further onto this interpretive terrain and identify, among these terms of reference, those which are most representative of the community in question—those, that is, which the community would consider to be its finest, most admirable qualities (walzer, 1993). this move will inevitably be political in nature, in the sense of being subject to the sensibilities of left and right. for this sort of politicization is an inevitable part of the practice of social criticism in modern democratic contexts. there can be no final ―objective‖ critical intervention that will reconcile all differences within the pluralistic spectrum of collective meanings. what we see, rather, is a consistent yet diffuse and evolving set of meanings. and it is within such historical continuities of meaning that there inheres a ―surplus of validity‖ or ―validity overhang‖, which points towards the shared standards and collective images needed to move beyond the status quo (honneth, 2004). once a political community‘s finest, most admirable qualities are critically portrayed, whether with reference to practices, traditional stories or other moral artifacts by which a society would do damage to itself to disavow, it then becomes possible to persuade those in power of the need for reform in those areas of social reality which betray those very same qualities. such a betrayal might have sources in changes to the institutional structure of a society. consider, for example, the prospect of a country whose occupational institutions have been incrementally transformed such that the conditions of working life are no longer rewarding, not even for well-to-do middle and upper class professionals. more to the point, however, with regard to social injustices suffered by specific groups and individuals, the betrayal may be ―cultural‖ in origin. 16 by this, i mean that the gap between collective standards and the lived experience of social reality can be traced back to a hypocritical, moral lopsidedness. taken within the context of plural spheres of justice, moral lopsidedness looms when one dimension of the social morality comes to degrade or undermine another. 17 with respect to the spheres of care, equal treatment and merit, this slippage would constitute a betrayal of the moral logic of the spheres themselves, but also in the sense that the wearing down of any one sphere would stunt the social hope of human development and romantic freedom. 16 honneth (2006) picks up on this distinction with reference to two different genres of social criticism: one linked to the diagnosis of civilizational ―pathologies‖ and the other to the identification of changes linked to social injustices. 17 walzer (1983) describes this as a process of ―invasion‖, where the agents of authority and argumentative tactics of one sphere invade that of another. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 115 conclusion the article sketches a framework for a mode of social criticism that has not yet been sufficiently accounted for in the humanities and social sciences. the very premises of this interpretive form of criticism call into question the divergences that currently exist between the university milieu and the everyday world of morality and politics. the article begins by alluding to the withdrawal of the ―postmodern‖ critic into an esoteric campus politics. it then turns to the normative approach of jurgen habermas‘ critically oriented philosophical anthropology. i note, first, that his universal discourse ethics, while tenuously far-reaching in its empirical claims, tends to distance his critique from actually existing moral sensibilities, thus depriving it of much of its political relevance. habermas‘ approach falters in another sense insofar as it fails to account for the breadth and plurality of moral expression in the western world. indeed, given his discourse ethics methodology, habermas makes no attempt to account for the relevant diversity of moral standards that exists in, for example, germany, canada and most other western democracies. the second part of the paper juxtaposes the morality of equal treatment with two other spheres of justice, those of ‗care‘ and ‗merit‘. this provides a window onto the historical dynamics that have come to shape these different spheres. i draw affinities between each of the spheres by situating them within the context of a collective ideal of human development and self-fulfillment. in the third part of the paper, i suggest that this loose knit personal growth ideal can be defended as a way of life fit to liberal democracies. finally, the last section addresses the method and manner of interpretive social criticism. i pick up on the importance of the social immersion and connectedness of the critic and on her capacity for prophetic idealism. while i emphasize the need for a degree of critical distance from the political fray, i argue the importance of there being a close relation to the moral culture of the relevant political community—if not a closeness to its ―core values‖ then at least to its common terms of reference. it is by interpreting such common reference points that a ―validity overhang‖ rises to the fore. by defending this view, i am also able to defend the coherency of the interpretive approach against the charge of circularity. this allows me, finally, to discuss the implications for the critic of there being different forms of validity relevant to each of the different spheres of justice. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 116 references alexander, j. c. 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(1993). interpretation and social criticism. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. waltzer, m. (2002). the company of critics: social criticism in the twentieth century. new york: basic books. doucet et al final dec 9 16_2 correspondence address: andrea doucet, department of sociology, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: adoucet@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 2, 194-198, 2016 consuming intimacies: bodies, labour, care, and social justice – guest editors’ introduction andrea doucet brock university, canada robyn lee university of alberta, canada alana cattapan dalhousie university, canada lindsey mckay brock university, canada the lines between care, paid work, and consumption are increasingly blurring, both conceptually and in everyday practices. more and more people are paying others – often less advantaged persons – to perform personal, often deeply intimate labours that include caring for children, the elderly, and disabled persons; cleaning houses; acting as surrogates; and providing eggs, sperm, and breast milk to create and sustain families. in addition to the growing repertoire of intimate labours, the intimate exchange of body parts is also on the rise as bodily fluids, tissues, and organs are being transformed into consumer products through “body shopping” (dickenson, 2008). these processes are simultaneously global and local, public and intimate, economic and affective, oppressive and empowering; they create new forms of intimacies but they also offer a great potential for exploitation and social injustice. the title of this special issue, consuming intimacies, has a double meaning. intimacies are “consuming” in that many people care deeply about connecting with and caring for others, yet, increasingly, intimate labours and exchanges are commodified and treated as consumer products. moreover, there are wide disparities between the geographical location, gender, race, and class of those who provide and those who receive intimate labours, as well as between those whose bodies are commodified and those who can afford to purchase organs, consuming intimacies: bodies, labour, care & social justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 194-198, 2016 195 tissues, and fluids. this special issue is produced from a symposium of the same title that was held at brock university in october 2015, which brought together 47 leading and emerging canadian and international scholars and artists to present, debate, and explore a wide spectrum of 21st century intimate labours and their associated economies. the symposium was supported by and connected to the social justice objectives of the social justice research institute at brock university. the symposium and outreach activities explored a broad range of critical questions and social justice issues that have arisen from interconnected concepts and practices of intimate labours and exchanges, care, social reproduction, bodies, consumption, and commodification. symposium participants examined correspondences and divergences between movements and transactions of care work and reproductive labour, on the one hand, and the exchange and sale of body tissues, fluids, and organs, on the other. they explored ways to protect vulnerable individuals and populations from exploitation by asking, for example, when, where, and why forms of intimate labours and exchanges are contentious (hoeyer, 2013), exploitative (dickenson, 2013), or “bioviolent” (moniruzzaman, 2012), who they affect, and in what ways. the symposium featured three internationally renowned keynote speakers: donna dickenson (emeritus professor of medical ethics and humanities at the university of london), monir moniruzzaman (assistant professor, michigan state university), and rhacel salazar parreñas (professor, university of southern california). all three have contributed to this special issue in ssj’s themed sections: dispatches and creative interventions. dispatches provide reports and commentaries on social justice practice, discourse, and contestation while creative interventions reflect on social justice issues using an aesthetic mode. two of the organizers of the symposium – cattapan and lee – produced dispatches through interviews that they conducted with our keynote speakers. cattapan’s interview with dickenson is captured by a co-authored dispatch titled “on bioethics and the commodified body: an interview with donna dickenson” while lee describes her experiences of engaging with and being inspired by the work of rhacel salazar parreñas in a dispatch based on their interview. moniruzzaman not only gave one of our keynote presentations, but also contributed to the production of a multimedia art exhibit, spare parts, which was displayed at the rodman hall art gallery in st. catharines ontario during the symposium. an online version of the exhibit is now posted at http://www.spareparts.exchange. through this publicly accessible website, the spirit of the symposium lives on and reaches a wider audience. this special issue features a creative intervention (a regular feature of ssj) entitled “spareparts.exchange: rahim and robert, stitched together in silence,” by monir moniruzzaman, camille turner, heather dewey-hagborg, and jim ruxton. this creative intervention highlights how artistic intervention brings together methodological innovation, critical reflection, artist-scholar andrea doucet, robyn lee, alana cattapan, lindsey mckay studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 194-198, 2016 196 collaboration, and social justice aims and potential impacts. the authors write, “spare parts connects artists, academics, and activists who present an alternative platform where audiences can construct meaning and confront the ethical questions of organ shopping. this contribution illustrates how academic research can be translated into an art project” with both fields speaking against “violence, exploitation, and suffering.” like the symposium, this special issue addresses two distinct yet connected streams of scholarship and creative thinking. the first focuses on intimate labours as “work that involves embodied and affective interactions in the service of social reproduction” (boris & parreñas, 2010, p. 7) – interactions that entangle production, social reproduction, and consumption. this work comprises a wide array of paid and unpaid labours, including new and reconfigured forms of intimate and commodified labours, done mainly by women, but increasingly by men, which have arisen in contexts of neoliberal restructuring and within “global care chains” (hochschild, 2000), “care diamond(s)” (raghuram, 2012), and the “international division of reproductive labour” (parreñas, 2000, 2012). the first stream is represented in four articles, by kendra coulter, rebecca hall, esther ignagni and ann fudge schormans, and amanda watson, as well as the dispatch written by lee. coulter’s article entitled “beyond human to humane: a multispecies analysis of care work, its repression, and its potential” focuses on interspecies solidarity as a form of care work, an ethical commitment, and a critical component in social justice theories and projects. in “caring labours as decolonizing resistance,” hall brings attention to the intimate labours of canadian indigenous women living in the northwest territories (nwt) and argues that these labours are sites of violence, creative resistance, and decolonization; her work contributes a decolonizing approach to social reproduction theories. in “reimagining parenting possibilities: towards intimate justice,” ignagni and fudge schormans describe the process of collaboratively creating a script and forum theater piece that they performed at the symposium. their article grapples with the eugenic legacy that shapes the contexts and experiences of contemporary parenthood and highlights the connections between parenthood, labels, disability, and intimate justice. finally, watson’s article entitled “quelling anxiety as intimate work: maternal responsibility to alleviate bad feelings emerging from precarity” widens meanings and practices of the care labour by 21st century north american mothers to include their responsibility for anxieties that, while often misconstrued as private, are actually forms of public care labour. through an analysis of popular editorial publications, she deepens interdisciplinary connections between affect theories and care theories. the second stream of articles presented at the symposium, and explored here in this special issue, concentrates on intimate labours and their economies, including exchanges involving organs, body tissues, and body fluids (e.g., milk, sperm, blood, kidneys). these corporeal exchanges fuse consuming intimacies: bodies, labour, care & social justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 194-198, 2016 197 intimacies and economies, serving to both reify and contest notions of altruism, exploitation, and commodification (dickenson, 2007). this stream interrogates how value is created in intimate labours and examines how these exchanges entail a “pushing back at the limits between production and social reproduction, production and consumption, production and circulation, to turn even the most intimate of bodily functions into exchangeable commodities and services” (cooper & waldby, 2014, p. 5). in this second stream we include journal articles by carla lam and lindsey mckay; two dispatches – one by alana cattapan and a second by katayoun chamany; and the creative intervention by moniruzzaman, turner, dewey-hagborg, and ruxton. lam’s article entitled “thinking through post-constructionism – reflections on (reproductive) disembodiment and misfits” navigates feminist post-constructionist theories to explore the epistemological significance of technologically assisted (reproductive) gendered embodiment and disembodiment (i.e., in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and egg donation), drawing connections between gendered and maternal embodiment, technoscience, ontologies, agency, inequality, power, and social justice. in “generating ambivalence: media representations of canadian transplant tourism” mckay writes about commodified corporeal exchange. using a postcolonial theoretical lens, she shows how media accounts of transplant tourism generate ambivalence: a discourse not conducive to making what is unlawful at home unlawful abroad. her findings point to new political directions for those seeking social justice, human rights, and health protection for organ providers. chamany’s dispatch – “critical pedagogy: stem cell research as it relates to bodies, labor and care” – is based on her presentations at the symposium, which demonstrated the social justice impact of transdisciplinary curriculum development connecting the biological and social sciences. her contribution brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars and activists and details their production of an open access educational resource, stem cells across the curriculum (scac), that highlights the transactional nature of life science through an integrated framework fusing biological and social dimensions and social justice concerns. it is our hope that this special issue on consuming intimacies engenders more debate, dialogue, conversation, and action on social justice issues around care, intimacy, embodied exchanges, social reproduction, consumption, and commodification. references boris, e., & parreñas, r. s. (eds.). (2010). intimate labors: cultures, technologies, and the politics of care. stanford, ca: stanford university press. cooper, m., & waldby, c. (2014). clinical labor: tissue donors and research subjects in the global bioeconomy. durham, nc: duke university press andrea doucet, robyn lee, alana cattapan, lindsey mckay studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 194-198, 2016 198 dickenson, d. (2007). property in the body: feminist perspectives. cambridge: cambridge university press. dickenson, d. (2008). body shopping: converting body parts to profit. oxford: one world. dickenson, d. (2013). exploitation and choice in the global egg trade: emotive terminology or necessary critique? in m. goodwin (ed.), the global body market: altruism's limits (pp. 2143). new york: cambridge university press. hochschild, a. r. (2000). global care chains and emotional surplus value. in w. hutton & a. giddens (eds.), on the edge: living with global capitalism (pp. 14-38). london: random house. hoeyer, k. (2013). exchanging human bodily material: rethinking bodies and markets. basel, switzerland: springer. moniruzzaman, m. (2012). "living cadavers" in bangladesh: bioviolence in the human organ bazar. medical anthropology quarterly, 26(1), 69-91. raghuram, p. (2012). global care, local configurations – challenges to conceptualizations of care. global networks, 12(2), 155-174. parreñas, r. s. (2000). migrant filipina domestic workers and the international division of reproductive labour. gender & society, 14(4), 560-580. parreñas, r. s. (2012). the reproductive labour of migrant workers. global networks, 12(2), 269275. croft, gray & rimke fg july 28 16 correspondence address: heidi rimke, department of sociology, university of winnipeg, 515 portage avenue, winnipeg, mb, r3b 2e9; email: h.rimke@uwinnipeg.ca isnn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 1-3, 2016 mental health and distress as a social justice issue: guest editors’ preface and acknowledgments lacey croft york university, canada mandi gray york university, canada heidi rimke university of winnipeg, canada when we conceived this project in january 2015, we decided to focus on pulling together critical research to examine, document, and problematize the pathological approach to human being by interrogating the increasing psychiatrization of human life and social problems. the biomedical or “psychocentric” approach has proliferated throughout society and can be seen in popular cultural expressions, organizational cultures, and academic discourse alike. the hegemony operates on different levels and through multiple mechanisms that blame the individual and thus erase the social context and social bases of many individualized problems in neoliberal society. thus, in neoliberal culture, the forces of pathological individualism proliferate while social structural factors at play in mental, emotional, physical and social lives are expunged or downplayed. implicit in our approach is the view that the struggle for mental health justice is a significant yet still largely unaddressed and unrecognized public health concern. it is our hope that this special issue will initiate a larger discussion about the mental and emotional problems and needs in our communities as a basic human right. it is in this vein that these essays seek to provide critical poststructuralist frameworks that interrogate the assumptions and certainties embedded in our extremely psychocentric cultural attitudes, beliefs, desires, and practices concerning the normal and the pathological. our objective is to examine mental and emotional health and distress/difference as a social justice issue by examining the ways in which lacey croft, mandi gray, heidi rimke studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 1-3, 2016 2 the dominant biomedical approaches emphasize individualized flaws or deficits understood here as psychocentrism. psychocentrism refers to the dominant western view that pathologies are intrinsic to the person, promoting an individualistic perspective at the expense of social, political, economic, historical and cultural forces that shape human experience. in the early 21st century, the psy complex and industry continue to roll out powerful forms of victim-blaming, double standards, and stigmatization due to being categorized as “mentally ill” – and therefore a delegitimated subject. this set of articles thus shifts focus and analysis from individual to social explanations, and examines the different ways in which psychocentricity operates. each analysis seeks to analyze the social relations, social structure, social systems, social practices, social organization, and so forth, as inextricably intertwined with human struggle, suffering and pain – or mental and emotional distress. drawing on the concept of psychocentrism, this special issue will problematize and critique the increasing pathologization of human life. we argue that the proliferation of psychocentrism should be understood within a broader social, economic, historical and political framework of neoliberalism that hyper-responsibilizes the modern individual as the source of their own suffering (and redemption) as social provisions are increasingly reduced. psy discourses are so taken-for-granted today that it has become compulsory to think of one’s self or others as normal or abnormal, sick, or disordered in some way. the question of mental and emotional health/distress/difference will be examined within critical theoretical frameworks that seek to interrogate the medical and psychiatric models promoted by the human sciences broadly conceived. papers chosen to be included in this special issue explore how the growth of psychocentrism has formed a basic cornerstone of contemporary western society, seen in the colonization and domination of the culture of therapy. the objective of this issue is thus to examine mental health and distress as a social justice issue by examining social rather than individual deficits that underlie human difficulties. the articles and artistic representations in this issue thus shift the focus and analysis from pathological individualism to critical social analysis. the papers utilize critical conceptual frameworks derived from poststructuralism, as well as feminist, anti-capitalist, anticolonial, mad studies, and critical race theory. when we sent out our call for papers for the special issue on mental health and distress as a social justice issue last winter, we were pleasantly surprised and also unprepared for the overwhelming response, having received 46 submissions from 63 scholars and practitioners representing 35 universities in 13 countries from around the world. clearly, we had touched upon an urgent international matter that demanded and deserved closer attention and analysis. given the unexpectedly high volume of submissions, in the end we were forced to make difficult choices, restricting final acceptance to six articles that directly applied the concept of psychocentrism mental health & distress as a social justice issue studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 1-3, 2016 3 to problematize the taken-for-granted, biomedical paradigm of mental illness to study mental and emotional distress as a significant, and often overlooked, social justice issue. we have structured and organized the special issue for a wide audience, including academics, students, practitioners, researchers, survivors, users, community organizations, clinicians, policy analysts, counsellors and anyone else interested in matters relating to issues of mental health and distress in contemporary society. we would like to acknowledge and thank the many colleagues who took the time to write and send proposals, as well as the talented, hard working, dedicated authors and artists whose contributions are included here. also, as is usually the case, the special issue would not have been possible without the indispensable work of the many reviewers who so generously provided expert evaluations of the manuscripts. in no small measure, their time, expertise, and collective labour helped to improve the quality of manuscripts singularly and as a whole. we are grateful. also, we would like to thank the many artists who submitted work to be considered for inclusion in this special issue. in particular, we would like to thank the following artists for sharing their critical and provocative artwork using different kinds of media. we chose michelle barron’s “of brass and twine” for the cover image as it speaks directly to the chasm between mental and emotional distress/differences and the lack of adequate social and economic resources, support, and options for many of those struggling with mental and emotional pain. other creative interventions that we chose to include are: eleanor martin’s poem, “what she would have wanted;” two images from alexis kinloch’s, “anatomical atlas;” artwork by hana shafi, entitled “anxiety – don't think;” and, bryony kimmings’ and tim grayburn’s, “fake it ‘til you make it” excerpt of a play script. we would also like to thank david butz, the editor-in chief of studies in social justice, for his kind-hearted support, for sharing his expert editorial talents, and for providing otherwise helpful guidance as we worked on crafting this special issue over the last 18 months. lacey croft and mandi gray would like to thank lorna weir and alison howell for encouraging this project, and heidi rimke for her ongoing mentorship while working on the special issue. heidi rimke would like to thank mandi gray and lacey croft for their enthusiastic initiation of this project and for their endurance in seeing it through to the end, which took much longer than we anticipated. we hope that this special issue of studies in social justice in some way helps those who struggle with mental and emotional distress and difference as an ignored social justice issue, and that it will shine a new light on an old set of social, political, historical and economic problems. stevenson final correspondence address: shaun a. stevenson, department of english language & literature, carleton university, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: shaun.stevenson@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 400-403, 2017 book review redefining genocide: settler colonialism, social death and ecocide short, damien. (2016). london: zed books. isbn 9781842779316 (paper) £20.00; us$25.00. 272 pages. shaun a. stevenson carleton university, canada in his 2016 book, redefining genocide, damien short aims to bridge what he calls the “genocide-ecocide nexus” in order to offer a more robust conception of genocide in our current moment of global climate change. short further seeks to broaden the category of genocide to include “cultural genocide” (p. 3), which he asserts cannot be separated from the destruction of a social group, especially in relation to the ongoing genocidal effects of settler colonialism. drawing heavily on the work of raphael lemkin, often referred to as the founder of the united nations genocide convention, short structures his book around highlighting “genocide’s inherently colonial character” (p. 3), and the ways in which genocide is often enacted through environmental destruction, by which vulnerable, disadvantaged, and colonized social groups are most affected. he positions his work in relation to the fields of genocide studies, indigenous rights, environmental justice, and green criminology. redefining genocide is organized around a series of case studies, which explore a broad range of settings from palestine, sri lanka, and australia, to the tar sands and first nations peoples in northern alberta. the text opens with two chapters dealing with what short refers to as “definitional conundrums.” the first of these chapters offers substantial context on the field of genocide studies, including the legal scholarly history around the united nations convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide 1948, and subsequent contributions to the field of genocide studies by sociologists. where legal scholars tend to focus on the un book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 400-403, 2017 401 convention’s rigid emphasis on the “intentional mass killing of certain groups under the direction of the state,” sociologists are more involved in debates over whether to broaden “the meaning of genocide” (p. 13). according to short, however, even much of the sociological work on genocide has downplayed or ignored the relationship between colonialism and its genocidal structures, which target the eradication of culture as a way to enact social death. the second of the introductory chapters introduces the concept of ecocide as a key element in both settler colonialism and its genocidal processes. drawing on settler colonial studies theorist patrick wolfe and lemkin’s more encompassing conception of genocide, short’s project is thus twopronged. first, he asserts “we should view cultural genocide as central to our understanding of genocide itself” given “that the concept is an appropriate term to describe the current experiences of many indigenous peoples living under settler colonial rule” (p. 17, emphasis in original). second, and relatedly, short mobilizes the concept of ecocide to expand genocide’s legal definition, which tends only to be attributed to environmental destruction during wartime activities, rather than the ongoing processes of settler colonialism. short attempts to include broader definitions of ecocide within international law, ultimately asserting that “ecocide should be incorporated into the rome statute as an international crime against peace under the jurisdiction of the international criminal court” (p. 64). in order to make his case for this more encompassing definition of genocide, short offers several wide reaching, and sometimes collaborative case studies (see contributions by haifa rashed, vinay prakash, and jennifer huseman). short’s writing is exceptionally accessible and so each case study, while fairly broad in scope, offers a pithy introduction to several distinct complex global settings, from the struggles of palestinians within and around israel, and the violent conflicts between sinhalese and tamil populations in sri lanka, to the quite general setting of settler colonialism writ large in australia. his final case study, and perhaps the most convincing for the relationship between settler colonialism, environmental destruction, and genocide, examines the effects of the tar sands on the first nations of treaty 8 territory in northern alberta. each case study is well-researched and mobilizes what short calls a “lemkin-inspired lens” on genocide, in conjunction with environmental theory, to draw important links between ongoing genocide in settler colonial contexts and corresponding environmental destruction, leading to cultural and social death, or complete attempted eradication of a culture’s genos (p. 92). although it is difficult to disagree with short that the sites he examines are important examples of genocide and ecocide, or at least salient examples of the destructive nature of settler colonialism, it remains equally difficult to imagine where this broadened definition might take us. to be sure, short’s project of redefinition is a controversial rhetorical move; that is, it is his aim to describe everyday processes of settler colonialism using a word that has shaun a. stevenson studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 400-403, 2017 402 come to represent something very specific and exceptionally powerful on the international stage and within our common imaginaries. in a discursive context in which genocide tends to conjure images of the holocaust or atrocities in rwanda, for example, calling out as genocidal the entire settlement and social organization of australia or israel, or what are now commonplace neoliberal approaches to energy extraction, is contentious. and yet, short draws from a long and well-researched history of the legal genesis of the meaning of genocide, illustrating that his examples are relatively commensurate with its definition in international law. this conundrum, where settler colonialism may indeed represent genocide by another name, begs a larger question not adequately addressed in redefining genocide: who gets to define the meaning of genocide? put another way, what registers as social death in the international, and more importantly, largely western lexicon? if, as short states toward the end of his text, “a global economy is extractive, it gives nothing back, but follows the ecocidal pattern of a genocidal machine converting raw materials into power at the expense of living things and living systems”(p. 193), and if this is the global economy that structures modern life as we know it, then where does genocide begin and end? if the tar sands in alberta are genocidal and ecocidal, then who do we identify as the perpetrator of this atrocity on the first nations peoples of treaty 8? is it the oil and gas companies on the ground? the government bodies that embolden them and enmesh this kind of energy extraction within the national economy? the shareholders? all settlers, who benefit from the comforts and conveniences of access to an abundance of energy without directly experiencing its destructive qualities? for short, the answer to all of these questions seems to be “yes.” and so, although such a rhetorical assertion might have some effect on how we understand these processes intellectually, and perhaps even on a larger subjective level, its possibilities within international law, which is largely influenced by the very nations that short draws our attention to, is decidedly limited. short himself recognizes the limitations of his position in the final chapters of the book. he writes, “a genuine process of decolonization would offer . . . peoples far more hope than international legal protections because, as we have seen, colonization, dispossession, exploitation, cultural assimilation and control are the greatest threats to the survival of such social groups as have been considered in the case studies of this book” (p. 190). despite my scepticism – that which is also echoed in moments by short – that his expanded definitions of genocide will make its way into international legal orders, a nuanced understanding of the many forms that genocide might take is surely one means toward the decolonization of settler colonial societies. short’s argument is perhaps strongest in relation to indigenous peoples, largely because indigenous peoples themselves have for decades been calling colonial imposition on their lands and cultures to be recognized as genocide. within the canadian context, indigenous peoples are consistently at the front book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 400-403, 2017 403 lines of settler colonial genocidal policies whether through the effects of the indian residential schools system, the sixties scoop, the indian act, countless land grabs through failed treaties or official land claims policy, and the ongoing environmental and cultural destruction of indigenous territories. these issues were brought to the fore on the canadian national stage several years ago when the recently-constructed canadian museum for human rights determined it did not have the authority to declare colonialism against indigenous peoples in canada an act of genocide. indeed, there remains a long way to go in terms of shifting who gets to define the meaning of genocide, and what these definitions might offer in terms of social justice. through its diverse and wide-reaching case studies, redefining genocide offers a substantial contribution to this endeavour, perhaps illustrating that we ought not seek recourse in the international orders that benefit from ongoing processes of settler colonialism, but instead turn to the affected communities themselves, fostering decolonization from the ground up. redefining genocide will benefit anyone interested in environmental justice, indigenous rights, or settler colonialism. its substantial research on the development and history of genocide within international law makes it an important contribution to the field of genocide studies. its useful case studies serve as well-organized primers for anyone interested in the complex global conflicts they address. most importantly, i think that redefining genocide makes an important, if implicit, assertion for the increasing limitations of international law under neoliberal global capitalism, and the necessity of grounding decolonial politics in community action and support. gazso final feb 1 16 correspondence address: amber gazso, department of sociology, 2060 vari hall, york university, 4700 keele st., toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: agazso@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 being homeless and becoming housed: the interplay of fateful moments and social support in neo-liberal context jason webb york university, canada amber gazso york university, canada abstract this paper presents a qualitative analysis of stories of adults who transitioned from being absolutely homeless to becoming housed. participants’ stories are particularly salient for what they reveal about this transition in the midst of other challenges including substance use, criminalization, and violence, and within a neoliberal social policy context. through strategies of narrative analysis, two interconnected processes of becoming housed are discovered: (a) experiencing fateful moments; and (b) perceiving and creating social supports. the main conclusion is that fateful moments in individuals’ lives intersect with the push and pull of instrumental and expressive supports from family, community, and the state to culminate in an exit from absolute homelessness. the implications of these findings for understanding and responding to homelessness are also discussed. keywords homelessness; becoming housed; narrative analysis; fateful moment; social supports in this paper, we present findings from a qualitative analysis of interviews with previously homeless adults to explore their stories of becoming housed in toronto, ontario in the midst of multiple personal and structural challenges. beyond lack of shelter, these included drug use, violence on the streets, and weakened state provisions for income security. through stories, we see the interplay between fateful moments and social supports. specifically, becoming housed occurred when moments of epiphany in individuals’ lives intersected with the push and pull of instrumental and expressive supports from family, community, and the state. this main finding permits us to critically engage with some assumptions of the current neojason webb, amber gazso studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 66 liberal social policy context (mckeen & porter, 2003; rice & prince, 2013), such as the ideas that individuals are self-sufficient, personally motivated, and reject social or public intervention in their lives in their conformity to a strong market ethos (harvey, 2007; howard, 2007). for example, we note that individuals’ experiences of fateful moments can be seen to invoke feelings of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility necessary to their becoming housed. however, we argue that because these fateful moments intersect with socially supportive relations, this disturbs the assumption that the adoption of these and other neo-liberal imperatives are the sole reasons for leaving the street. our research therefore offers an opportunity to theorize the difficulties inherent in responding to homelessness and implementing a housing strategy in the neo-liberal era of the late welfare state. the social policy context in canada, an estimated 35,000 people are absolutely homeless, living “rough” on the street or in shelters, and another estimated 50,000 people are precariously housed (e.g., couch surfing at family and friends’ homes) (gaetz, 2010; gaetz, gulliver & richter, 2014). although there is considerable diversity among persons who are homeless, aboriginal peoples and queer youth are disproportionately represented (belanger, awosoga & head, 2013; city of toronto, 2013). in some cities and regions such as the greater toronto area and peel region, the number of persons absolutely homeless continues to grow (city of toronto, 2013; daiski, halifax, mitchell & lyn, 2012). according to the 2013 street needs assessment survey, over 5,000 homeless people in toronto (population approximately 2.9 million) spent the evening of april 17, 2013, outdoors or in city-administered shelters or treatment or correctional facilities (city of toronto, 2013, p. 13). homelessness in canadian cities is attributed to social and structural change (gaetz, donaldson, richter & gulliver, 2013). a labour market characterized by an increase in employment that is part-time, contractual, seasonal and low-waged has contributed to financial insecurity or poverty in many households (lewchuk, 2013; shier, jones & graham, 2010). while the wealthiest in canada have become wealthier, persons of lower and middle incomes have experienced stagnating incomes or greater income insecurity (organization for economic co-operation & development, 2008; broadbent institute, 2014), and the withdrawal of welfare state protection through neoliberal restructuring. as a policy framework, neo-liberalism favours individual freedom of choice, responsibility, self-sufficiency, and correspondingly, reducing the role of the state in people’s lives and encouraging market competition being homeless & becoming housed studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 67 (brodie, 2007; larner, 2000).1 problems of income insecurity are attributed to individual failings at being risk taking, market citizens (i.e., employed), rather than to political, economic, and structural conditions (dolson, 2015; harvey, 2007; larner, 2000; mckeen & porter, 2003). scholars generally agree that the neo-liberal policy framework in canada has meant a decline in the social safety net (rice & prince, 2013), and, specifically, the restructuring of policies and programs that could prevent homelessness or support homeless people. the post-1960s deinstitutionalization movement, for example, removed persons with mental health problems from institutions out of respect for their rights and autonomy, but placed them in communities where services that would provide safe, adequate care and affordable housing were underfunded (armstrong & armstrong, 2010; niles, 2013; snow & anderson, 1993). second, eligibility for social assistance has tightened and become conditional on employability efforts post-1990. while receipt of social assistance was always to be “a last resort” and never meant to replace income from paid work, the introduction of stricter welfare-to-work program requirements has represented a distinct shift away from social citizenship and entrenchment of market citizenship as a basis to claim income support (gazso, 2012). third, in the 2000s, neo-liberalism has become linked with criminalization of the homeless in the name of public safety (gaetz, 2013). when the provincial governments of ontario and british columbian enacted the safe streets act, in 1999 and 2004 respectively, police officers were given the power and authority to ticket street-involved homeless people for panhandling and squeegeeing in public (gaetz, 2013; o’grady, gaetz & buccieri, 2013). finally, the lack of a long-term, affordable housing strategy has long been cited as a major explanation of homelessness. between 1989 and 2009, the federal government’s investment in affordable housing declined 40% in relation to total gdp expenditures (lewchuk, 2013). in 1996, the responsibility for provisions of affordable housing was devolved to the provinces (hulchanski, 2009). between 1991 and 2006, household demand for affordable housing in ontario increased by 200,000, with 627,535 households in need in 2006 (ontario ministry of municipal affairs & housing, 2014). in the city of toronto, the average waiting time for affordable housing is 8.4 years (monsebraaten, 2016). the ontario provincial government has yet to release its own strategy to deliver affordable housing. 1 we acknowledge that neo-liberalism as a coherent project is contested in canada and elsewhere (larner, 2000; peck & tickel, 2002). jason webb, amber gazso studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 68 transitions in homelessness: the current literature the current literature on homelessness is heavily concentrated on reasons for becoming homeless and the experience of homelessness. becoming homeless can be explained through the metaphor of a pathway (chamberlain & johnson, 2013; mallet, rosenthal & keys, 2005). for example, unemployment, poverty, housing crisis, family break-down, mental and physical health challenges, substance use, and problematic contact with the child welfare system have been found to lead to homelessness (belcher & deforge, 2012; coates & mckenzie-mohr, 2010; chamberlain & johnson, 2013; gaetz, 2013; karabanow, 2008; thompson, bender, windsor, cook & williams, 2010). pathways into homelessness can also differ by gender, race/ethnicity, and indigeneity (anderson & collins, 2014; tutty, ogden, giurgiu & weaver-dunlop, 2013. p. 1505). the causes of the overrepresentation of indigenous peoples among canada’s homeless are argued to additionally include the nation’s history of colonial policies and practices (e.g., residential schools) and ongoing discrimination (anderson & collins, 2014). the everyday life experience of being homeless is understood to be compounded by many of the same factors that led to homelessness. homeless women have been found to experience higher levels of mental health problems than homeless men (nemiroff, aubry & klodawsky, 2010). substance use has been studied as an effect, not just a cause of homelessness (duneier, 1999; grinman et al., 2010). research into work-family dimensions of homelessness has been a particularly important contribution to the literature. scholars find that people who are homeless engage in a variety of subsistence activities, including paid employment (karabanow, hughes, ticknor & kidd, 2010; shier, jones & graham, 2010; persaud, mcintyre & milaney, 2010). and whereas research of the past assumed that the homeless experience was one of social isolation, more recent research reveals that diverse interpersonal relationships among homeless people develop in response to their circumstances (dordick, 1997; irwin, lagory, ritchey & fitzpatrick, 2008; karabanow, 2008; rokach, 2004, 2005; stablein, 2011; sterk-elifson & elifson, 1992; toro & oko-riebau, 2015; toro, tulloch & ouellette, 2008). for example, bourgois and schonberg’s (2009) ethnography on homeless intravenous substance users in california revealed that they develop a moral economy of mutual support to endure the criminalization of their substance use engendered by the united states’ war on drugs. questions around how homeless individuals becoming housed have perhaps been better answered with regard to the experiences of youth. qualitative studies have found that homeless youth are more likely to exit the street if they are personally motivated, have supportive relationships with family and community service providers, and access affordable housing and income support (karabanow, 2008; wilks, hiscock, joseph, lemin & being homeless & becoming housed studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 69 stafford, 2008). for youth who have experienced trauma before and during homelessness, access to services like therapeutic counseling is important for transitioning off canadian streets (coates & mckenzie-mohor, 2010). studies that have focused on adults’ exits from homelessness all point to access to affordable housing as a primary reason, but are mixed in their findings on the importance of other factors. klodawsky, aubry, nemiroff, bonetta and willis’s (2007) mixed method and longitudinal study of adult homelessness in ottawa led them to conclude that economic factors, interpersonal supports and conflicts, health problems including substance use, and access to housing and community services can both impede and facilitate exits. focusing on homeless canadian women, nemiroff, aubry and klodawsky’s (2010) quantitative study showed that exits were more likely for those with dependent children, which they attribute to women’s personal motivation to be caregivers and their access to subsidized housing. for persons with a history of mental illness and housing instability, developing strong relationships with others was crucial to their “gaining stability” and therefore maintaining housing (forchuk, ward-griffin, csiernik & turner, 2006). zlotnick, tam and robertson’s (2003) quantitative study based in alameda county in the united states found mixed support, however, for whether family, friends, and community services facilitate exits from the street. for those with substance use problems, social networks had little impact on leaving the street. we now turn to our own qualitative research which afforded us an opportunity to consider to what extent several of the above factors mattered to the re-housing of absolutely homeless adults, especially in view of how this transition occurred in the neo-liberal social policy context we described earlier. methods the narratives we analyze were extracted from a larger qualitative, crosssectional study of which the second author was the principal investigator. this study explored how families create networks of social support to manage low income in the greater toronto area by drawing on informal and formal sources of instrumental and expressive support.2 in the larger project, 70 participants aged 16 and older and representing 20 “families by choice” (kin and fictive kin relations) participated in semi-structured interviews with 2 our research distinguishes between source and type of social support. whereas informal sources of support include family and friends, formal sources of support included community supports like foodbanks and state supports like social assistance. and whereas instrumental support includes financial or material assistance and physical aid, expressive support includes affection and guidance. jason webb, amber gazso studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 70 the second author or a research assistant between 2009 and 2010.3 the design of this larger study integrated insights from the life course perspective, which understands events over a person’s life course (e.g., high school graduation, child birth) to be agentially, structurally, and historically constituted and to further shape specific trajectories (e.g., family or career) and relationships with others (elder, 1994, 1998). single-point-in-time, semi-structured interviews with members of each family by choice raised questions about events that prompted participants’ creation and use of social support networks, and how types and sources of support changed over time.4 interviews lasted on average an hour and a half and were audio recorded. all 70 transcribed interviews were coded using the qualitative software nvivo, first by common words and ideas, and then for common themes, following grounded theory principles of coding (e.g., open and axial coding) (strauss & corbin, 1998). in our later reflections on data collection and initial analyses, we were intrigued by the stories that 15 participants shared with the second author. these 15 participants were part of five families by choice.5 some of the experiences of these 15 participants were shared with the entire sample (e.g., the creation of families by choice because of distinct life course events, such as immigration and family conflict) (see, e.g., gazso & mcdaniel, 2015). their transitions into and out of absolute homelessness, however, further set these 15 participants apart from the larger sample. the 15 participants included six lone mothers, three common law couples (both partners interviewed), two single men, and one single woman. all lived in subsidized housing at the time of the interview and accessed ontario works (social 3 the second author completed interviews with 55 of 70 participants; 15 participants were interviewed by a research assistant. participants were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling at non-profit organizations targeting low-income families. the initial participant had to be over the age of 16, experiencing low income and parenting a child; the participants who were subsequently interviewed made up their family as the initial participant defined it. participants ranged in age from 18 to 84 and “families by choice” ranged in size from two to seven people including kin and fictive kin. that is, families by choice included biological or marital relations (kin) and people unrelated by blood, marriage, or adoption but perceived as family (fictive kin). 4 we acknowledge the limitations of single-point-in-time interviews, such as those articulated by briggs (1986). as well, we recognize that a life course perspective may be perceived as most rigorously applied and theorized through longitudinal research in general, and through ethnographic methods in particular. in this paper, our approach follows research in sociology that draws on insights from a life course perspective to interpret cross-sectional quantitative (prus, 2004), mixed methods (cooke & gazso, 2007; mcdonald, 2011), and qualitative data (allen & picket, 1987; mcdaniel, gazso & duncan, 2016). such cross-sectional research is thought to reflect the life course perspective in the design of (open or close-ended) questions written to enable participants to provide an overview of life course events and transitions retrospectively, in the present, and prospectively. this orientation was embedded in interview questions, which were designed by the second author in consultation with other, collaborating researchers in the original, larger study. 5 given our use of purposive and convenience sampling, note that not all members of these five families by choice experienced homelessness. hence, ours is not a paper about homeless families. being homeless & becoming housed studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 71 assistance) for income. they ranged in age from 21-54 years. all were parents but only 10 had children in their care; the remaining participants’ children were in the care of others or the child welfare system. eleven of the participants were in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction. each told stories of becoming housed in the midst of variable experiences of substance use, criminalization, and violence. we were compelled to try to understand their stories and found we could do so through narrative analysis. narrative analysis celebrates the diversity of individual experience and is particularly adept at revealing lives considered marginal (bischoping & gazso, 2016; benjamin, 1968; jackson, 2002). through the act of storytelling, participants are understood to develop a sense of agency, articulate purpose, and create their belonging in their social context (jackson, 2002); a narrative retains “traces of the storyteller” and may also bestow wisdom onto others (benjamin, 1968, p. 367). in narrative analysis, the story produced or collected is understood to be co-constituted by the interviewer and participant (see also briggs, 1986; mishler, 1991). the analyst particularly focuses on participants’ recounting of their life experiences over time, with emphasis on the meanings therein. as well, as previous research has established, a small sample (<20) is not unusual in analysis attuned to a rich understanding of unique cases (crouch & mckenzie, 2006), the plot of each narrative and the narrator’s evaluation of it (ahmed, 2013), or how transitions and turning points shape a life course in opposition to traditional work-family trajectories (mykelbust & solvang, 2006). our analysis strategies were informed by those used in the study of narratives from the life course perspective. we explored participants’ narratives for reference to the events or transitions that precipitated or were linked to their homelessness, as well as perhaps their addiction and criminalization. we did so under the assumption that some participants would contextualize their stories of becoming housed, the recent past, by “back stories” about becoming homeless or life on the street. we also endeavored to discover the turning points or fateful moments that prompted participants to dramatically alter the course of their lives, understanding these as culturally and institutionally contextualized (berger, 2008; giddens, 1991; goodey, 2000; macknee & mervyn, 2002). we were sensitive to gasker’s (1999) insight that epiphanies are symbolic events in a life course that individuals will define as such. finally, we analyzed narratives about becoming housed for what they revealed about how participants perceive and make sense of changes in their identities and self (see also linde, 1993).6 each author re-visited the interview transcripts and coded them according to these interests. we analyzed stories for each participant alone and then 6 for this strategy, we understood identities to emerge from relations with others (mead, 1984), including to whom an individual is accountable, and perceived that these relations further result in individuals’ creation, reproduction, or revision of their identities (e.g., from child to street youth) (adams & marshall, 1996; kroger, 2000; raskin, 2006). jason webb, amber gazso studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 72 considered the interviews as an ensemble. throughout, we compared our coding and re-coded our data to achieve a shared perspective. upon completion of our analysis, we found we were able to categorize the thoughts, actions, interactions with others (e.g., friends, caseworkers), and changes in self behind leaving the street according to two interconnected processes: experiencing fateful moments; and perceiving and creating social supports. although each process describes the stories of all 15 participants, we focus on only the stories of five participants in this paper due to limitations of space. these five participants represented family 19 in the original project and included amy and her partner isaac, and amy’s close friends elijah, jennifer and andrew; the latter two friends are a couple.7 when we met them, all were housed, receiving ontario works entitlements, recovering from addiction, and identified each other as family. amy and isaac shared the raising of their son with isaac’s mother, isabel. jennifer, andrew, and elijah all had children but these children did not live with them and were either in the care of an ex-partner or grandparents, or had been adopted by others. amy and isaac self-reported their race as “mixed” (e.g., caucasian, black, aboriginal), andrew and elijah identified as black, and jennifer as métis. below, we briefly sketch out some highlights of the “back-stories” of members of family 19. these back-stories begin to suggest the significance of absolutely homeless persons becoming housed given multiple challenges, including the neo-liberal social policy context. • amy (age 30) grew up in and out of foster care because of her mother’s addiction and never achieved a feeling of security or home. she steadily increased her use of crack cocaine throughout late adolescence and eventually ended up on the street. • isaac (age 32) began to use drugs as an adolescent. after his parent’s divorce, he had a tumultuous relationship with this father who also experienced addiction; he recalls engaging in substance use with him. eventually isaac dropped out of high school and started “running the streets.” following his placement in foster care by child welfare services and his continued drug use, he became homeless. • elijah (age 49) witnessed the murder of his father before he immigrated to canada at age six. he experienced feelings of isolation and inability to conform to the norms of his mother’s household during his young childhood and adolescence. his greater attachment to his peers and drug use in young adulthood contributed to his homelessness. as he recalled “slowly over the years the character started to change. so now i started to become a street person. instead of like a decent guy that dresses up nice. and then i started dressing like a bum…” • jennifer (age 36) remembers her life growing up in manitoba as one of moving back and forth between her mother and grandmother’s house. she left her grandmother’s home at the age of 15, the first of many entrances 7 the participants’ names were changed to ensure anonymity and confidentiality. being homeless & becoming housed studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 73 onto the street, because her grandmother’s boyfriend sexually abused her. in her words, “i didn’t really have much of a childhood… i was really young. i think my first drink i had when i was eight, started drinking heavy at 12, 13, left home at 15. i was like a full-blown alcoholic by then probably.” • andrew (age 39) dropped out of high school in adolescence. he met his father for the first time at age 17 in hospital when he became severely ill. his homelessness was connected to his gang-related crime, incarceration, addiction, and the subsequent strained relationships he had with his mother and other family members. findings experiencing fateful moments as we have observed, participants’ experiences of absolute homelessness were marked by hardships. beyond absolute poverty, these variously included addiction, violence, and criminalization. our participants’ experiences are common to those of other adults who are absolutely homeless, according to the current literature. our participants, however, also told stories of a fateful moment or series of moments that triggered feelings of resiliency, isolation, grief, or fear that underscored their motivation to become housed. fateful moments changed participants’ perceptions and experiences of their homelessness, and thus their sense of their present self and a future self as housed. during her 20s, amy’s life was characterized by drug use, sex work, mothering, bouts of homelessness, and violence. it was while living with a partner who was a drug dealer that amy decided to relinquish the care of her children to child welfare services. so i called and they [children’s aid society, hereafter cas] came and got my two sons. and, ah, and their father was like, ah, he was very resentful that i had done that. and, ah, you know, i didn’t see him giving up the selling drugs… i had basically crushed us with my relapses. so now there’s no money to pay the rent, you know and, ah, the kids are gone. so there’s not really any reason to stay in the apartment… and he can run drugs from anywhere, right. so yeah, we kind of broke up. and without the stability or anybody to account to, i just went off the deep end... you know, i could just see this dragging out, like i’m staying in the shelter… it’s an argument with them [cas] just to get our weekly visits put back together so they see mommy and daddy one time. and i was like, ‘no, this is not going to happen.’ so i went back out on the streets. the fateful moment of fracturing intimate ties with her children seemed to set amy adrift from her identity as mother and more attuned to that of a drug jason webb, amber gazso studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 74 using homeless woman. this fateful moment also echoed some of amy’s earlier experiences of family trauma. it was later in her life on the street that a man soliciting for sex attacked her with a knife. this violence became the defining moment from which amy re-considered her lifestyle: three times, he sliced me, three. and like that, ah, really showed me like, you know, either i’m getting older or i’m getting stupider, or i’m just willing to put myself in more risky situations. and i don’t even realize that i’m doing it because i’m all about the drugs. you know what i mean? so, if i keep going this way, if i keep going this route, what’s going to be the next situation that i get myself into? and i have to stand back… the next situation i may not be able to stand back and go, you know. so, yeah, i think that was a big one for me. in her early 20s, jennifer migrated to toronto from manitoba with two children and the father of her second child. her eventual entrance into homelessness was shaped by her drug use and sex work. when i moved downtown toronto, it was the first time ever [being homeless] since i was 15. like i’d lived on the street, but i’d always had… some roof over my head. but when i hit downtown toronto, it was just different. and so i was living in a hotel… but these people would take over my room and would make it impossible for me to do what i had to do [sex work] to make money to pay it. and i was like five days behind now… because of what i was doing [drug use], i didn’t sleep every night anyways. so i just decided i would, you know, when i’m tired, i’ll just lay my head down wherever. so i did do that… downtown there, so probably for about eight months i did the sleeping outside and wherever. jennifer did not tell a story of a specific fateful moment but rather several that spurred her desire to become housed. she spoke at length of how certain events prompted her growing self-awareness and of her feeling the need to seek out treatment for her addiction especially in order to reconnect with her children. she too had relinquished her children to outside care once on the street: “i always said to myself before i had my children that i would never put my children through what i had to go through growing up, being in that environment. because it led to where i went.” whereas amy’s story was of constructing an identity as a street person and addict over her identity of mother, jennifer’s story of giving up of her children was in order to preserve her mothering identity. this act was both contradictory and conforming to a core principle of the contemporary ideology of intensive mothering: mothers selflessly care for others more than themselves (hayes, 1996). drug use, crime, trauma, violence, and loss characterized elijah’s life on the street. from 1989 to 2010, elijah experienced chronic, absolute homelessness and repeated incarceration. sleeping outdoors led him to be vulnerable to violence: “i’ve been stabbed a few times. i’ve been stabbed in my lung, and my abdomen… near my heart with a bottle, cut in my face, stabbed in my eye, stabbed in my kidney.” elijah was also devastated by multiple deaths in his family: “the loss of my son… the loss of my mother. being homeless & becoming housed studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 75 like they both died when i was in jail. my son was murdered.” these experiences further alienated him from his family and his sense of self: i was starting to get distant… from all my family. so now it’s just me. so then there was no real emergency to change my life, like there was no real input from nobody to say ‘pull yourself up, do this or do that.’… and, ah, the sense of value was lowered, extremely… i wouldn’t look at myself and say ‘well, i’ve got to pull up or change the way i’m living or whatever.’ i just kept going, going, go to jail, come out of jail, go right back to the block. the sheer number of elijah’s traumatic experiences can be interpreted as a series of fateful moments. the beginnings of elijah’s transition into becoming housed, however, can be pinpointed down to his epiphany: “i started getting tired of going to jail.” amidst a two decade cycle of homelessness, drug use, crime, and violence, elijah became tired of elijah – of the self he was on the street. perceiving and creating social supports like other researchers of adult homelessness, we find that receipt and exchanges of instrumental and expressive supports, from both informal and formal sources, shaped participants’ exits from the street. however, our participants’ stories additionally reveal how becoming housed occurs through the intersection of individual, fateful moments with these social supports, especially the creation of fictive kin relations. some participants were pulled off the street by kin or fictive kin (informal support), and then further supported through community programs and services, and income assistance (formal support). this pull was effectively felt when it connected to experiences of fateful moments and subsequent individual motivation. isaac implied his motivation to become housed by his story of social isolation and feeling unloved on the street for the person he was: a man hustling, and being hustled, for money or drugs. like on the streets, not having nowhere to go, just realizing like nobody loves me out there, and like everybody just wants one thing from me you know. the money or drugs. and i went home to my mom’s [isabel]… yeah, like my relationship with my mom is like if, and you’re not on no drugs, you can come home, you want to try, you can come home you know. isabel’s (isaac’s mother) encouragement of isaac to leave the street also intersected with a series of fateful moments in his life: five close friends died in his last two years on the street and he found out a past girlfriend was pregnant. as he put it: jason webb, amber gazso studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 76 i’m going to die out here, the way how my life is going… and then on top of that amy getting pregnant and, you now, hearing ‘oh, it’s yours.’ so that was an event. and i seen amy still on the streets. i was kind of like at my mom’s. and i just said, ‘you know, that doesn’t look right.’ you know, you running around on the streets, homeless, pregnant. ‘if you want to come to my house or whatever, we can work from here. we can start from here.’ that’s what we did. we started making plans for the baby, yeah. isabel’s offering of both instrumental and expressive support encouraged isaac to pursue an identity as a recovering addict – not a drug user – and a father. isaac became housed by first living with and rebuilding family relations with his mother, partnering with amy, and then accessing formal social supports including treatment for addiction, social assistance, and subsidized housing. amy lived with isaac in subsidized housing at the time of our interviews with them. isabel had guardianship of their son since amy and isaac were seeking treatment for addiction; she lived part-time the home of amy and isaac to support their parenting while sober. we see amy’s experience of extreme violence as a fateful moment that prompted her to entertain leaving the street but also observe that she was pulled off by isaac and isabel’s offering of instrumental and expressive supports. she explained how this support facilitated her sobriety and her becoming housed: from isaac, i just need him for affection that’s about it… he’s always there for, you know. …but also she’s [isabel] a role model for me. and she’s, i think she’s very, very aware of that and she doesn’t mind to like, you know, bring over things and show me what i should be cooking. … and like, you know like ah, tips on financial, like budgeting and stuff like that… amy’s friend jennifer also offered crucial expressive support of her becoming housed: so it’s like, you know, when she [jennifer] started to steer her life in another direction, i didn’t even know she was gone. you know, and so we met back up out there [subsidized housing]. i wouldn’t say that we were tight or anything [on the street]… because we know each other and it’s like a new situation for both our couples… if there’s something you guys need, you got it and vice versa. ... [she is] somebody i look to in my sobriety, you know, somebody who i would go to for advice…like just somebody to stay connected in that network…of sobriety, of being clean and sober. besides solidifying family ties with jennifer, amy’s exit from homelessness was further buttressed by a strong relationship she developed with a caseworker at a homeless drop-in centre. the caseworker, according to amy, is “like a mom and like a police.” she counseled amy on boundary making in order to develop self-esteem and an identity as a sober and housed mother, partner, and friend: “she’s just there to make me know that anything being homeless & becoming housed studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 77 is possible.” significantly, the caseworker is the godmother of her and isaac’s child. other participants’ experiences of fateful moments pushed them off the street. they first reached out to formal, community programs and developed strong relationships with front-line caseworkers, and then expanded their informal, family sources of instrumental and expressive support. for example, jennifer’s story of leaving the street is one of personal motivation shaped by not one but a series of fateful moments over time. she sought out support to become housed through a shelter in her community, relying on knowledge she had gained from her earlier experiences of being homeless and becoming housed. she then supplemented her support from community with those she thought of as family: her partner andrew, as well as amy and isaac. whereas she felt she was simply “passing through” amy and isaac’s lives when they were all homeless, jennifer’s sobriety and maintenance of a home was supported by family-making with them. in her words, “living in a city you don’t have any family right? so, ah, you find, to tend to find family…they’re like part of the family… we actually know them from downtown [on the street]. that’s where i met them.” for still other participants who experienced criminalization, the interplay between fateful moments and social supports was more complex. andrew and elijah’s stories illustrate this complexity. andrew became housed through a fateful moment created by the criminal justice system: he could agree to treatment for addiction under judicial supervision (via drug treatment court) or go to jail. andrew’s commitment to becoming housed and sober was later buttressed by the instrumental and expressive support he received from his treatment program, his partner jennifer, and friends isaac and amy. as part of his recovery, andrew was also renewing close relationships with his non-custodial children. a rather quiet and reserved man throughout the interview, andrew was animated when he described his efforts at reembracing his identity as a father: “and now i’m starting to reunite with them… it’s going really good... i’m supposed to be seeing her [his daughter] sometime this weekend. i spent last weekend with her…” elijah’s desire to become housed was pushed by his epiphany about jail time, but similar to andrew’s experience, he was also pulled off the street by the criminal justice system, and specifically, his choice to participate in an out-patient treatment program for addiction in lieu of jail time. as he explained: i don’t want to go out and be dirty again, i don’t ever want to be homeless and camh [centre for mental health and addiction] helps. the program really helps because even though it’s not a volunteer thing, it’s a requirement because if you don’t do the program, you go to jail. so that’s a big thing and the main thing is i don’t want to be on the streets anymore. jason webb, amber gazso studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 78 as well, elijah’s motivation to become housed and stay sober was distinctly tied to a change in self-perception, facilitated by an unexpectedly supportive fictive kin relationship with the peer support worker in his treatment program. she’s like a good friend, she’s really close to me. and i go and i see her. even days that i don’t have to…go connect to the group, i still go… because if you want help, you can go, right. so i go because i want the help, i want to get strong right. and i spend time with her. and you know it’s inspiring because, you know, she’s like my big sister, say. right, cause we’re the same age group but she’s ahead of me in recovery so i look up to her… and she sort of looks at me and says ‘don’t fuck up’ you know. and she makes me feel guilty if i do, you know. finally, elijah observed that his transition from the street was further made possible through expressive support received from amy and isaac: “when they [amy and isaac] heard that i was doing okay, they were so proud of me. like, they invited me over to their house for dinner… they’re my friends.” his feelings of isolation in the past were replaced by supportive fictive kin relations, which we perceived to have had a transformative effect on his sense of self. discussion our analysis of participants’ stories reveals that becoming housed occurs through the interplay of fateful moments with family, community and state support. we see this main finding as offering an opportunity to critically engage with how this interplay unfolds in the neo-liberal social policy context. specifically, our participants’ stories of the processes of becoming housed offer a strong counter-narrative to some neo-liberal assumptions. on the face of it, the importance of participants’ experiences of fateful moments to their becoming housed appears to conform to the neo-liberal principles of individual responsibility, freedom of choice, and selfsufficiency. through our strategies of narrative analysis, we were able to pinpoint the fateful moment or series of moments that seemed to prompt participants’ contemplation about leaving the street (see also karabanow, 2008) or varying feelings (e.g., fear, isolation). when participants defined fateful moments as suggesting their life off the street was possible, there were distinct elements of personal choice and motivation involved in the subsequent laboring to become housed and often sober. our participants’ stories were layered with evaluations of their agency and responsibility in becoming housed (see also labov & waltezky, 1967). and yet, through participants’ stories, we found that becoming housed could not have been achieved through individual contemplation, motivation, and action alone. participants’ exits from the street were further facilitated by the ways in which fateful moments intersected with informal and formal sources of instrumental and expressive support. to briefly review, some being homeless & becoming housed studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 79 participants (e.g., isaac and amy) appeared to be pulled out of homelessness by informal (family) supports, and their choice to accept this support intimately tied to their experience of fateful moments. formal sources of support were initially important to other participants who pushed themselves to become housed in response to a fateful moment or series of them, and were soon supplemented by informal sources of support. for still others, a complex mix of informal and formal – family, community, and state – sources of instrumental and expressive support pulled and pushed participants into housing following opportune moments in their lives. our finding of the importance of fictive kin relations also counters what we term “conventional” familialism, an ideology underscoring the neo-liberal policy framework. conventional familialism rests on the notion that individuals should first and foremost turn to kin for instrumental and expressive support rather than the state; care is to be provided by family first, the state second. the kin imagined, however, are largely relations formed through heteronormative, nuclear family dynamics. recall that in our study, each of the 15 participants who became housed were members of families by choice, which were an integral component of networks to manage low income. amy, isaac, elijah, andrew and jennifer were members of family 19. thus, it is particularly noteworthy that many participants in our study sought out instrumental and expressive support from people they defined as family – not simply family determined by blood or marital relations – in the transition to becoming housed. not all participants who were homeless could just go home or re-unite with kin. traumatic relations with kin were sometimes the reason participants were on the street. overcoming homelessness was therefore facilitated by forming intimate partnerships or inventiveness in constructing fictive kin relations. for some participants who became housed and pursued sobriety, the importance of creating and sustaining fictive kin relations could even emerge after supportive relations were developed with community service providers. this creation of family dovetailed with receipt of other formal supports such as social assistance benefits and access to subsidized housing. however, access to shelter and receipt of income benefits did not mean an escape from income insecurity for our participants; total ontario works’ incomes did not raise participants above low income cut offs (tweddle, battle & torjman, 2013). community supports for low income families (e.g., food banks, dropin centres) were necessary to participants’ meeting the challenges of maintaining housing or sobriety. the meeting of shelter and food needs was further complemented by community treatment for addiction in many cases. especially when community caseworkers became perceived as family, the distinction between informal and formal sources of support could disappear and ideas about who counts as family significantly blur. additionally, all participants told stories of how their renewal or creation of kin and fictive kin relations distinctly influenced their construction of postjason webb, amber gazso studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 80 homeless identities (e.g., of parent, friend, and recovering addict). in their stories of becoming housed, participants were also unravelling and mending tears in the fabric of their self and making sense of their current identities (linde, 1993). for example, to be a mother for jennifer meant not mothering her children the way she herself was, and the pursuit of sobriety through family and community supports. elijah’s stories were layered with his deconstruction and reconstruction of who he was, how his character changed on the street, and how his relations of accountability to others while housed mattered to who he wanted to become. isaac constructed his self as constantly evolving in interactions with others: as moving from the identity of a street person to that of an addict in the past, to being a recovering addict and a father at the time of the interview. policy implications and recommendations as we observed earlier, the neo-liberal policy framework has translated into provincial and municipal responsibility for provisions of affordable housing. thus far, however, the common political response to homelessness in toronto continues to be providing and managing emergency shelters at the municipal, city level. emergency shelters are not a long-term, sustainable plan. they simply move people on and off the street in the short-term. while they provided much needed temporary housing, they do little to correct the limited availability of affordable, permanent housing in the city. as well, the onus of responsibility for finding affordable housing still rests with the individual. our research suggests a multi-pronged response to homelessness, involving multi-level governance and coordination of federal, provincial, and municipal policies and programs and community is, at minimum, the strategy we need to imagine. such a housing strategy, however, cannot be just about increased spending on existing social policies and programs and greater accessibility of affordable housing. indeed, broader, structural level changes in perspective and interpretation of homelessness are needed. an adequate response to homelessness would begin with a two-fold paradigm shift. first, a concentrated effort that defines housing as a legal (section 7) and equality (section 15) right under the canadian charter of rights and freedoms. equal access to affordable housing would facilitate social inclusion and social justice (pomeroy & evans, 2008; rawls, 1971; united nations, 2006). second, a realization that people require more than just shelter in order to exit homelessness; they require instrumental and expressive support from multiple sources in order to meet their other health and economic needs. in terms of the latter, we recommend a specific response to homelessness that has the potential to encourage exits from the street. given our findings, we argue that existing municipal and community programs for the homeless in toronto and elsewhere, could improve and expand client-centered service by creating being homeless & becoming housed studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 81 designated time and space for peer networking and peer mentoring. peer networking has the potential to recalibrate the power dynamics between service providers and adults who are homeless, in that homeless individuals identify their needs and develop their strategies to meet them through collective exchange. furthermore, peer mentoring respects homeless individuals’ knowledge base and the capacity to exercise a social right of citizenship – the right to be cared for and to care for others. this specific recommendation particularly challenges the neo-liberal ideology that promotes self-reliance and self-care among citizens to resolve market inequalities (wilson, 2007). instead, we advocate for an active partnership between the state and citizens that protects and honours citizens’ selfdetermination through social relations. in our view, we learn from our participants that responses to homelessness that overlook how becoming housed is a life course transition entangled with personal and structural challenges, and mediated by intersecting fateful moments and available social supports, are simply bound to fail in creating social inclusion and housing justice. conclusion the purpose of this paper was to explore the processes by which absolute homeless adults become housed in the midst of multiple barriers, including their social location within a neo-liberal social policy context. we used strategies of narrative analysis to explore these processes. our analytic strategies allowed us to attend to the events and interactions linked to becoming housed, and the changes of self that occur in the midst of them. in doing so, we closely followed amy, isaac, elijah, jennifer, and andrew’s stories to find that it is the interplay of fateful moments and social support that culminate in becoming housed. though ours is cross-sectional research focused on a small sample of stories of adults (and so not generalizable), our findings contribute to our understanding of the processes of becoming housed. our study also encourages us to seriously consider the difficulties in responding to homelessness in a neo-liberal social policy context. to quote larner (2000, p. 21): “in acknowledging the complexity of neo-liberalism we stand a better chance of identifying possibility to advance social justice aims in a new context.” acknowledgements we are grateful for the time and knowledge participants shared with us. we are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which improved the quality of this paper. finally, we thank katherine bischoping jason webb, amber gazso studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 65-85, 2017 82 and benjamin christensen for their supportive reads of an earlier draft of this paper. the study referred to in this paper was 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(2013). i built my house of hope: abused women and pathways into homelessness. violence against women, 19(12), 14981517. tweddle, a., battle, k., torjman, s. (2013). canada social report: welfare in canada, 2012. ottawa: caledon institute for social policy. retrieved from www.canadasocialreport.ca/ twigger-ross, c. l., & uzzell, d. l. (1996). place and identity process. journal of environmental psychology, 16, 205-220. united nations. (2006). social justice in an open world: the role of the united nations. new york: united nations. retrieved from www.un.org/development/desa/socialperspectiveondevelopment/2015/08/20/social-justicein-an-open-world-the-role-of-the-united-nations/ wilks, n., hiscock, e., joseph, m., lemin, r., & stafford, m. (2008). exit this way: young people transitioning out of homelessness. social alternatives, 27(1), 65-70. wilson, b. m. (2007). social justice and neoliberal discourse. southeastern geography, 47(1), 97-100. zlotnick, c., tam, t., & robertson, m. j. (2003). disaffiliation, substance use, and exiting homelessness. substance use & misuse, 38(6), 577-599. vance final july 5 18 correspondence address: carter vance, institute of political economy carleton university, 1125 colonel by dr., ottawa, on k1s 5b6; email: carter.vance@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 towards a historical materialist concept of asexuality and compulsory sexuality carter vance carleton university, canada abstract this paper seeks to expand the work of marxist-feminist scholars rosemary hennessy and nancy fraser by placing it into conversation with the emerging work of scholars of asexuality and asexual identity. in resisting the tendency to reify the identity category of “asexual” as a newly emerging and dialogically structured identity which stands in opposition to the “allosexual,” this paper will rather attempt to determine its nature as a historically structured and contingent emergence of a particular moment in neoliberal capitalism. from this, it will argue that there need not be a tension between the notions of “compulsory sexuality” and “sexusociety” developed by scholars such as elizabeth emens and ela przybylo. it will be demonstrated that asexuality can be used as a positional tool in order to illuminate the totality of sexuality as a reified and commodified entity under late capitalism, one which is useful for understanding and resisting the capitalist historical (re)organization of human potentials for sensation and affect. keywords sexuality; gender; asexuality; political economy; social reproduction speaking asexually in recent years, asexuality has emerged as both a defined social identity and a field of scientific and social research, most prominently in north america and western europe. some researchers recognized the phenomenon as early as the 1940s (kinsey, 1948) and conducted a few scattered studies in later decades (e.g., johnson, 1977; wellings, 1994). bogaert (2004, 2006) investigated asexual identity and experience from psychological and selfreported physiological perspectives, examining questions such as physical sexual arousal and sexual fantasy in the lives of self-identified asexuals. bogaert’s influential work inspired research on asexuals’ romantic (hinderliter, 2013), relationship formation (carrigan, 2011), and masturbatory habits (yule, brotto, & gorzalka, 2014). current scholarship carter vance studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 134 focuses mainly on the biological and sexually-based behavioural aspects of asexuality. the sociological and political-economic aspects of asexual identity and its formation have drawn considerably less academic attention. however, a wealth of anecdotal evidence – much shared through online communities such as the asexuality visibility and education network – points to social discrimination and lack of recognition of asexuality as a valid identity relative to more commonly recognized sexual identities. in one of the few studies of social attitudes towards asexuality, macinnis and hodson (2012) found substantial evidence of cognitive social bias against asexuals among non-asexuals. building on these findings, emens (2014) describes a discourse of compulsory sexuality, a vector of social oppression conceptually comparable to heteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality. uncovering these largely invisible forms of discrimination has immense importance, but formal legal (in)equality is insufficient to explain social inequality without analysing the social structures underlying these legal systems (mackinnon, 1983). a crucial research gap, therefore, is knowledge of the economic and social basis of compulsory sexuality, particularly how narratives of compulsory sexuality sustain capitalist modes of production. feminist and queer theorists who have become interested in asexuality have noted the lack of “literature on the subject” and observed that “feminist and queer sexuality studies certainly have [yet] not caught on” to whether asexuality relates to existing theories and frameworks (bishop, 2013, p. 200). without directly referring to asexuality, the growing emphasis on the notion of the sexual self as a productive individualist within mainstream sexual liberation narratives aligns with the changing face of compulsory sexuality within late consumer capitalism. this notion in some ways diverges from the classical marxistfeminist analysis of sexuality as socially reproductive labour and the female body as a site of primitive accumulation, but can also be seen as emblematic of neoliberal approaches to sexuality. companies such as tinder and okcupid reap massive profits from this conception of the human adult self as necessarily sexual, particularly through applying neoliberal subjectivities to areas of life previously considered beyond the purview of the market (brown, 2015). moreover, radical groups’ political articulation of asexuality as an anti-capitalist strategy in the 1960s and 1970s has largely been forgotten, leading to a view on asexuality as a purely personal identity without political or economic implications (fahs, 2010). i seek to expand hennessy’s (2000) and fraser’s (2013) work on social reproduction and place it in conversation with the emerging scholarship on asexuality and asexual identity. i critique fraser’s work, in particular, for its positioning of queer sexuality – and, implicitly, asexuality – as separate from economic distributional struggles. resisting the reification of the identity category of asexual as a new, dialogically structured identity opposed to the allosexual, i attempt to determine its nature as the historically structured and historical materialist concept of asexuality & compulsory sexuality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 135 contingent emergence of a particular moment in neoliberal capitalism. from this, i argue there need be no tension between the notions of compulsory sexuality and sexusociety (e.g., emens, 2014; przybylo, 2011), and social reproduction analysis (e.g., federici, 2014; fraser, 2013; hennessy, 2000).1 instead, asexuality can be used as a positional tool to reveal the totality of sexuality as a reified, commodified entity under late capitalism, which is useful to understand and resist the capitalist historical (re)organization of “the human potential for sensation and affect” (hennessy, 2000, p. 72). according to hennessy (2000, p. 72), “the extraction of surplus value requires that workers alienate themselves from their human potentials, including their sex-affective potentials.” through the purchase of various products and services, capitalism inevitably facilitates alienation through the expressive externalization of the sexual self. in this sense, the system of compulsory sexuality facilitates production and exchange by channelling affective impulses into the creation of new social needs. with proper valence, asexual positionality can be used to expose the distinctly capitalist nature of compulsory sexuality and the modern sexusociety it undergirds, and to examine these components of the totality of social reproduction. a review of the theoretical literature: three lenses asexuality-as-theory in addition to studies on asexuality within established disciplines such as psychology, academics have increasingly begun to construct a discursive framework for its study outside these frames. if this movement can be termed asexuality studies, however, it remains in an embryonic stage, and works falling under this loose umbrella often lack common terms of reference and agreed-upon study frameworks. this makes the field uniquely exciting and dynamic but also demands several cautions before examining its specific contribution to my analysis. first, the emerging field of asexuality studies draws on queer and feminist theory frameworks in some respects but often questions their relevance to asexuality. it seemingly settles on using modified versions of these frameworks as the best available tools for critically discussing sex and sexuality. queer and feminist theorists’ contributions to this paper’s analysis are outlined below, but their relevance to asexuality is very much an open, contested question. although “more women than men appear to be asexual” (with women making up 60-73.5% of the asexual population in various 1 przyblo (2011) proposed the term “sexusociety” to describe the perception commonly held by individuals identifying as asexual, that social organization is based on an assumed sexuality. its use is explicated later in the paper. carter vance studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 136 studies) (van houdenhove, gijs, t’sjoen & enzlin, 2014),2 some have argued that the cause lies in the relatively greater cultural acceptability of a lack of interest in sex among women. consequently, asexual women are more likely to be open about their identity and willing to participate in a study. that said, if more women actively choose to self-identify as asexual per se (rather than merely remain privately uninterested in sex), this points to at least the potential relevance of feminist theory on women’s relationship to sexuality, and more specifically, the concept of the sexualized body vis-à-vis asexuality. second, those working in this emerging field tend to use the word asexuality to describe the field’s subject matter, but are far from reaching consensus on the term’s definition and scope. whereas most work in existing fields define asexuality as the “absence of sexual attraction,” researchers in asexuality studies attempt to trouble the implied binary between sex and not sex in this statement, and offer differing examples of asexuality, emphasising its adoption as an active identity (and what this means) rather than as a strict clinical definition. this difference occurs because “identification as asexual cannot be divorced from either the subjective meanings which that identification holds for individuals, nor the processes of intersubjective negotiation through which such meanings emerged” (carrigan, 2011, p. 464). third, this self-chosen identification can exist only within a wider social intercommunicative space, in this case the space surrounding sexual identity where asexuality is juxtaposed with not only heteronormative sexuality but also, to some extent, queer sexualities. this status as self-definition is especially important, because more than other “deviant” sexual identities “asexuality is a category largely constructed by those identifying as such” (hinderliter, 2013, p. 175). it must be remembered that the act of selflabelling as queer is fundamentally a reclamation project of an originally often violent and hostile epithet. the construction of queer and other lgbtq identities has had as much to do with this experience of active exclusion and external perception as the choice to identify as asexual does. moreover, active misperceptions, hostile and otherwise, of queer sexualities are relatively common (e.g., a man might be perceived as gay due to mannerisms or clothing when he does not identify with this label), whereas misperceptions of a person as asexual are rare (i.e., others do not perceive those identifying as asexual as such). these ambiguous definitions and identifications have led some to suggest that “asexuality might be a metaconstruct, analogous to sexuality and encompassing similar kinds of subcategories” (van houdenhove et al., 2014, p. 187). 2 according to statistics from these same studies, trans* and other non-binary gender identities are over-represented in the asexual population. this might be due to selection bias if such individuals are more likely to be open about and willing to discuss their asexual identification than those who identify with binary gender identities. nevertheless, this overrepresentation is worth further study. historical materialist concept of asexuality & compulsory sexuality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 137 however, the major commonality among “researchers of asexuality [is a] general commit[ment] to depathologizing asexuality, to separating it categorically from ‘disorder’” (przybylo, 2013, p. 193). these researchers actively interrogate medicalization discourses on asexuality (and sex more broadly) and the underlying cultural construction of the so-called sexual imperative. the idea that to desire, if not have (frequently, if possible), sex is a universal experience “construct[s sex’] in the sexual imperative as synonymous with the self” (cerankowski & milks, 2014, p. 229). in certain ways, this analysis of the assumed rather than existing nature of the sexual imperative recalls the “well-established critical practice to remark on heterosexuality’s supposed invisibility” within queer theory (mcruer, 2006 p. 1). regarding asexuality, two terms have come to be used to encapsulate this sexual imperative system, albeit from slightly different perspectives: compulsory sexuality and sexusociety. legal scholar elizabeth emens (2014, p. 305) prominently employed the latter to discuss how “ours is arguably a sexual law, casting asexuals on the outside in a range of ways.” similar to using a lens of queerness to critically interrogate law and legal systems, utilizing the lens of asexuality “as a diagnostic tool or heuristic for identifying the ways that law’s interactions with sexuality affect the broader society” reveals several facets legally enshrining the sexual imperative (emens, 2014, p. 307). for instance, the possibility to void unconsummated marriages constitutes a major vulnerability for asexuals and results in a lack of legal status for asexual relationships that might otherwise be accorded the legal and social policy benefits of marriage. furthermore, non-discrimination laws and other human rights instruments designed to protect sexual identities leave out asexuality as a category, except for a few municipalities in the united states and the state of new york. arguably, asexuals face little risk of discrimination based on their sexual identity, which is not visible in the way homosexuality is, but this might be due only to its relative lack of visibility at this time. beyond the strict confines of the legal system, przybylo’s (2011, p. 446) sexusociety is “very much akin to what patriarchy is for feminists and heteronormativity is for lgbtq populations, in the sense that it constitutes the oppressive force against which some sort of organizing and rebellion must take place.” here, she refers to a set of social practices and discourses broader than strictly compulsory sexuality. sexusociety has larger reach and holds that “it is not enough to simply have sex, but there is also pressure for the sex to be immensely enjoyable” (przybylo, 2011, p. 448). much effort, time and money ought to be invested in the pursuit of sex. “to be asexual, for a subject of sexusociety, is to be ‘afun,’ to be boring, to be a prude” (przybylo, 2011, p. 452). as such, the asexual identity becomes viewed primarily as seeking a sense of safety and belonging apart from social pressures, even as long-term safety requires that identity to be normalized within society. “the asexual body [thus] attests to the possibility of a carter vance studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 138 localized space of safety within sexusociety’s bounds” (przybylo, 2011, p. 455), although its transgressive and political elements are only potentialities depending how it is employed as both a self-identity and a valence of critique. insofar as “the discovery of an asexual identity involves accurately identifying and articulating desires” (scherrer, 2008, p. 636) without drawing on normative scripts, the articulation of this identity position is consistent with queer and feminist critiques of heteronormative and patriarchal sexual norms. however, in some ways, asexuality stands outside and beyond these theories’ categorical frameworks and articulates new subject positions. the potential radicalism of these subject positions is determined by both internal and external factors and so far has had mostly limited impacts. that said, an asexual heuristic tool could “revitalize [the] queer critique of naturalized gender and sexual identities and heteronormativity” by illuminating compulsory sexuality and the resulting sexusociety (gressgard, 2013, p. 180). in other words, the asexual, like the queer, has the potential to be “the subject who practices critique [and] interrogates the limits of what is can ‘be’ and, concomitantly, follows the system’s breaking points” (gressgard, 2013, p. 187). queer theory the relationship of queer theory to critiques of capitalist social accumulation regimes has been highly contested, and it has been criticized for offering cultural critiques divorced from material economic realities (butler, 1997). in this telling, queer theory, with its postmodern emphasis on identity acquisition and formation processes, and notions such as judith butler’s performativity of gender and sexual identities, has moved social struggle closer to issues of representation than redistribution. as a result, the social notion of “the queer” may be quite compatible with a neoliberal form of subjectivity and with the personalization of a politics that does not actively challenge structural social injustices, but instead seeks to normalize that identity within the existing system. precisely on these grounds, socialistfeminist thinkers like fraser (1995) have said that queer theory presents a dead-end for transformative left thinking. however, this critique ignores that the emergence of the queer was “a floating signifier to acknowledge the manifold ways in which [queer] interests, voices and identifications stood in opposition to the construction of the essentialized gay identity of the mainstream movement” (valocchi, 2017, p. 323). in other words, queer theorists and their leftist critics generally agree that the mainstream gay rights movement has taken an overly accommodating stance on capital and social power, but they differ on what form the critique of this accommodation ought to take and how to best counter it. it should be acknowledged that “neoliberalism produced a market-mediated and historical materialist concept of asexuality & compulsory sexuality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 139 consumer-driven visibility that moved gay identity in the direction of a niche market,” while not believing the existence of this niche market necessarily invalidates queer positionality as a potentially revolutionary subjectivity (valocchi, 2017, p. 326). queer theory arguably has acknowledged the political ambivalence of queer identity from its very beginnings; for example, bersani’s (1987) classic article states that “to want sex with another man is not exactly a credential for political radicalism (p. 205).” however, the label queer commonly is interpreted to refer to sexual identity, so it is important to note that theorists in the field of queer theory often intentionally do not use it to refer to sexual attraction patterns. rather, “queerness is an ideality” (muñoz, 2009, p. 1) that troubles and challenges social norms and binaries. moreover, within the social order, “queers ... are people without a future” (muñoz,, 2009, p. 98) who “name the side not fighting for the children” (edelman, 2004, p. 3), thus questioning the hegemonic idea of futurity and social continuity extending from conservative to progressive political circles. this conception of futurity and the active rejection of its hegemonic variations stating that things must be done for “the child” as “telos of the social order” (edelman, 2004, p. 11) renders queer and by extension asexual bodies defective, incapable of reproducing that vision of the social future. “compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness and vice-versa” (mcruer, 2006, p. 21), so unsurprisingly, those bodies unwilling or unable to perform their notionally “proper” social reproduction function are subject to medicalization and pathologization to either correct or exclude them from the social world. regarding sex more specifically, queer theorists have tended to follow foucault’s insights, seeing “sex is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time” (butler, 1993, p. 1). the sexual then is a socially determined construct that includes and excludes a variety of behaviours and has limits and contours determined through discursive and material assertions of power. according to butler (1993, p. 107), “sex is always produced as a reiteration of hegemonic norms”; therefore, non-normative sexual practices have the potential to threaten power systems only if they actively confront the prohibition mechanisms surrounding sex that exist in terms of active confrontation. under the widely recognized “legislation of compulsory heterosexuality at the level of the symbolic and bodily” (butler, 1993, p. 74), simply exiting heterosexual sexual activity does not necessarily move away from heteronormativity. “the heteronormative paradigm set[s] the terms even for queer desire” (hennessy, 2000, p. 102), whose expressions are increasingly molded to existing normative forms, particularly monogamous marriage. the links between marriage, property and public policy are well documented, but crucially, there is not necessarily anything particular to marriage as a commodification of sexual and otherwise affective desire. it may be the most normative and socially encouraged, but it is far from the only type of sexual expression incorporated into exploitative capital circuits. the push for samecarter vance studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 140 sex marriage might be “another step in the monetization of all human encounters” (johnson, 2018, n.p.), but is merely a subset of the broader, “epistemological objectification of sexual desire” (floyd, 2009, p. 45) endemic to post-sexual revolution neoliberalism. nor is it necessarily true that a golden age of queer sexuality existed beyond these tenets before the mainstreaming of the marriage push. as muñoz (2009, p. 34) recalled, the “pre-aids days of glory were also elitist, exclusionary and savagely hierarchical libidinal economies,” which adopted elements of the broader capitalist society in which they were embedded, even as they resisted the conservative sexual norms of the time. the revolutionary possibilities of sex, particularly queer sex, therefore, exist only insofar as “the self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power” (bersani, 1987, p. 218). if the queer sexual no longer has the power to shatter this existing, power-defined self, then does it become possible to ask, “can someone be gay without being queer” and vice-versa? (johnson, 2018, n.p.). the moderate expansion of the socially acceptable forms of relationship types and sexual activities should not be viewed as merely an inevitable or hollow achievement, because many fought and bled for it. however, it must also be acknowledged that these changes have created new social divisions within the queer community. “the expansion of the concept and increasing use of queer, grounded in a shared resistance to the dominant model,” is troubled by a shifting, fluid definition of that very dominant model (johnson, 2018). certain identities once represented genuine threats to the status quo insofar as “there was general agreement within gay liberation thinking that capitalism was oppressive” (hennessy, 2000, p. 45) – but no longer, because they are not theorized in this way. to examine the causes of this shift, it is necessary to look closely at the left critics and sometime fellow travelers of the queer theory movement within marxist-feminism and theories of social reproduction. marxist-feminist and social reproduction theory as briefly noted, the relationship between queer theory and the marxistfeminist analysis framework, sometimes grouped as social reproduction theory,3 has been characterized by collaboration and confrontation at different times. hennessy (2000), whose writings straddle the boundary between the two frameworks, explained that “queer theory presented itself in the late eighties as an emphatically post-marxist critique of sexual identity politics” (p. 52), with a natural affinity for social reproduction framings. given that 3 it should be noted that the term “social reproduction” primarily refers to a specific subset of theories within the general marxist-feminist framework on women’s role in capitalist production systems. some marxist-feminist theorists do not specifically address or use the term social reproduction in their analysis. historical materialist concept of asexuality & compulsory sexuality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 141 “the gendered division of labour has historically secured sexual identities to the family and consumer culture” (hennessy, 2000, p. 67), an intellectual project aimed, at least initially, at troubling normative assumptions of sexual expression and gender logically would have potential to shed light on the labour division upon which they rested. however, political circumstances changed some identified affinities, albeit in a limited fashion, between interpretations of queer identity and the neoliberal political economy. although “struggles against heterosexist misrecognition do not automatically threaten capitalism but must be linked to other (anti-capitalist) struggles” (fraser, 2013, p. 12), it became less and less clear whether queer theory was willing and able to link to them. simultaneously, there was a tendency on the part of some on the social margins to “‘retreat’ into alternative communities and ‘particularistic’ identities” (fraser, 2013, p. 42) focused more on building internal community solidarity than reaching beyond themselves.4 it therefore can be reasonably asserted that “affirming sexual agency and non-reproductive sexualities also often came to mean that pleasure and sexuality were unhinged from the social structure that organizes them” (hennessy, 2000, p. 178), and thus seen as purely positive, ahistorical phenomenon. this strain of theory stressed the question of sex and sexuality in relation to women and female bodies and therefore might not have applied equally to the whole asexual community. nevertheless, it offered insights highly important for understanding how the economic organization of sexuality was deeply linked to underlying tenets of capitalism. expressed in a single sentence, these insights declared that “the construction of female sexual agency has never been autonomous” (hennessy, 2000, p. 197), and has always been subject to complex, varying, often contradictory social forces. at the most basic level, the sex–gender dichotomy between “male” and “female” assignments “in capitalist society... bec[omes] the carrier of specific work-functions” (federici, 2014, p. 14), broadly pictured as the paid public work of male workers in factories and the unpaid private labour of women in the household. of course, this crude conception was never entirely accurate and excluded a variety of crosscutting variations according to class and “race,” amongst other factors. however, the claim that “the body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers” (federici, 2014 p. 16) does indicate that in the sphere of social reproduction, capitalism’s primitive accumulation and exploitation functions have been targeted primarily at women. when moving to the specific reproduction of the sexual, it should be born in mind that “social production entails making the means to meet human 4 it is important to note the scare quotes in fraser’s original text, lest she be interpreted as stating that such identities are inherently non-political. rather, they are not necessarily politically active in an anti-capitalist manner. carter vance studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 142 needs as well as the production of new needs” (hennessy, 2000, p. 84). insofar as sex is socially produced, it is concerned with both functions. it may be said that human nature has certain drives for connection and affection, but “the human capacity for sensation and affect is the basis for pleasure and it is always historically organized” (hennessy, 2000, p. 72). since the 1960s, the major trend regarding sexuality has been to open “the position of desiring subject… to women who would eventually be recruited as the ideal and consummate consumers” (hennessy, 2000, p. 99). in other words, female sexual desire could be legitimate, and women might be expected to be more than mere vessels for male desire – but only when staying within certain boundaries and channeled in certain ways. the free love movement within the 1960s counterculture “turned the meat market of dating into a free market” (weigel, 2017, p. 134), appearing to promise infinite satisfaction to those who joined and cast off the grey conformity of contemporary modes of sexual access. however, like the social model of coupled heteronormativity it ostensibly pushed against, free love contained deep assumptions about human nature reinforcing conformity to ideal types. “while free market evangelists dressed differently from free lovers, they shared certain deep similarities” (weigel, 2017, p. 159), particularly the belief in individuals as essentially autonomous, rational actors who negotiated contracts with equal partners for both business and pleasure. such a belief ignored, first, the failure to overcome deeply gendered power structures by simply claiming to do so, and second, individuals’ different expressions of affective needs. within free love and the broader culture of what could be termed sexual neoliberalism, “psychological health meant having to embrace a form of sexuality much like the one that playboy purveyed” (weigel, 2017, p. 152). consequently, sex became seen merely as a pleasurable interaction that, although highly pursued, did not necessarily have any greater social meaning than shocking a sexually conservative society. the term compulsory heterosexuality, coined by rich (2003, p. 27), can be roughly defined as the “enforcement of heterosexuality for women … [to ensure the] male right of physical, economic and emotional access.” although rich used this term in the specific context of the denial of lesbian existence, it can similarly describe asexual women’s experiences of being socially pushed into heterosexuality. “heterosexuality may not be a ‘preference’ at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized” by a variety of social, economic and legal forces (rich, 2003, p. 26). the conceptual leap between compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory sexuality more generally is not terribly large, especially when considering the changes in the social recognition of lesbianism since the publication of rich’s original article in 1980. the preference for asexuality remains subject to much social erasure and stigma and may be cross-cut in the case of women, particularly by the ostensibly progressive perception that the asexual woman is the unliberated, conservative, prudish historical materialist concept of asexuality & compulsory sexuality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 143 woman. moreover, rich’s (2003, p. 14) claim that “the economics of prescriptive heterosexuality go unexamined” within progressive rhetoric on sexuality can be fairly extended to the notion of prescriptive (sometimes literally medicalized) sexuality as a whole. it is important to keep in mind that, “when desire is understood as lust… equated with a basic human drive, its historical production becomes invisible” (hennessy, 2000, p. 185). the designation as either biological reality or purely individual choice has shielded certain phenomena from full social investigation. the limits of existing frames: a combined approach to asexuality the interaction of marxist and feminist theories within the analytical framework of social reproduction has long been fraught. marx’s writings neglected questions of male power over women, only occasionally hinting at the need for elaboration by future scholars and activists. indeed, “marx never acknowledged that procreation could become a terrain of exploitation and by the same token a terrain of resistance” (federici, 2014, p. 91). his colleague fredrich engels analyzed the origins of family structure in an economic context, but he tended to view questions of patriarchy and women’s subjugation as ancillary to private property arrangements in general, a perspective that many have found lacking. later feminist scholars, most prominently gayle rubin (2011), challenged the applicability of marxism to women’s position. they suggested that marxism’s historical materialist analysis of the capitalist mode production as the primary site of exploitation could not adequately explain the forms of women’s oppression that existed in non-capitalist societies or seemed to actively impede, rather than facilitate, the acquisition of private profit. in response, rubin (2011) and other scholars developed modes of analysis that decentered historical materialism and production, and focused on identity standpoints involving the creation of new subject identities not specifically tied to or determined by their space within the production system. in feminist analysis, what rubin (2011) termed the sex-gender system formed the central point of analysis, organizing the social roles and categories of male and female subjects. as well, other forms of analysis based on “race,” ethnicity and sexual identity centered on other vectors of social injustice. in one sense, this framework is a justifiable reaction to a purely economic analysis tending to “marginalize, if not wholly obscure, other dimensions, sites and axes of injustice” (fraser, 2009, p. 101). together, however, the increased centrality of these forms of analysis, and the shift in the nature of capitalist production to a transnational, flexible, neoliberal form, have eliminated a properly contextualized analysis of capitalism’s role in shaping the form of social and identity reproduction. this is not to say that capitalism requires or is the root cause of patriarchy, racism or homophobia in a deterministic sense, or that if capitalism were overthrown those other forms carter vance studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 144 of oppression would simply cease to exist. as hennessy (2000, p. 30) states, “capitalism has both made use of and broken down traditional kinship structures and forms of family” and thus acts in complex, often seemingly contradictory ways. however, as fraser (2009) makes clear, the neoliberal turn in capitalism has found common cause with certain aspects of feminist analysis, even if unwittingly on the part of the latter.5 with this said, one should not retreat into a purely economic analysis of the problem of identity for both tactical and analytic reasons. tactically, it must be recognized that a movement or organization does not choose the terrain on which it fights social and political battles. instead, the social and political understandings of the current historical moment deeply shape this terrain. the stated opinions and beliefs of those with whom one is ostensibly trying to build a coalition for social transformation should not be disregarded, even recognizing their historical contingency. analytically, an exclusively economic analysis tends to recenter an unspoken, white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered subject as the social “default,” even if this is not the intent (rivers-moore, 2013). what is needed, therefore, are forms of analysis and action that attempt not to paper over the real, lived divisions of gender, “race” and sexuality, but rather to expose and disrupt their reified nature. both fraser and hennessy identify queer theory as a potential example of such analysis as it attempts to “deconstruct the homo-hetero dichotomy” (fraser, 2000, p. 109). hennessy (2000), however, cautioned about the use of queer theory in this context, seeing it as “a site of struggle, not a monolithic discourse” (p. 53), and critiquing the notions of some gender and identity scholars as “radically performative” (p. 56) rather than historically contingent. a recent trend in sexuality studies and queer theory has been an interest in asexuality as an emergent mode of self-identification rather than a medical or psychological label of pathology (gressgard, 2013). it should be noted that in this analysis asexuality is not defined absolutely but exists as a spectrum of identity. it nevertheless plays a similar role for an assumed, compulsory sexuality as the figure of the queer does for heteronormativity. queer theory attempts to use asexuality as a tool to decenter the sexual self and deconstruct the dichotomy between sexual and asexual persons and bodies. at the same time, there is the risk of reifying the asexual identity like other identity categories within what can be called gay-identity politics (fraser, 1995). this might help affirm and revalue the identity of those identifying as asexual previously considered to be psychologically or medically dysfunctional, but it leaves the door open for an asexual group identity to become increasingly rigid and enforced, eliminating its initial exploratory potential. 5 one can critique neoliberalism as a concept distinct from capitalism in general, but i follow fraser’s (2009) use of the concept. historical materialist concept of asexuality & compulsory sexuality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 145 the new left and neoliberalism the strain of analysis fraser (2000) terms identity politics,6 which largely originated from the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, needs to be placed in a particular historical context: the era of state-organized capitalism or the golden age of capitalism. this era was characterized, at least in western europe and north america, by significant state involvement in the market economy, increased union density and organized labour power, and an expanded system of state welfare service and benefits. second-wave feminism, as fraser (2000) describes, emerged as a critique of several underlying tenets of this overall context. second-wave feminists sought to name and address injustices, mostly but not exclusively directed at women, outside the analytic framework of state-organized capitalism. for instance, they located sites of oppression in the family structure and culture beyond the narrow confines of the economy as conceived by both capital and mainstream labour and left organizations. these feminists also responded to what they viewed as the overly controlling, bureaucratic nature of social arrangements by embracing new organizational practices, such as consciousness-raising groups, and generally favouring grassroots organizations over professional ethos. it is important to acknowledge the many gains made by second-wave feminism, even if they are more cultural than institutional, but the historical context in which many of its ethos were formed has passed away. in the late 1970s, state-organized capitalism gave way to the neoliberal, post-fordist organization of the economy. feminist organizations have generally opposed the socially harmful consequences of these changes, but a “perverse, subterranean elective affinity” between feminism and neoliberalism has persisted (fraser, 2009, p. 108). much of the cultural and rhetorical legitimation of neoliberalism “was fashioned from the new left’s ‘artistic’ critique of state-organized capitalism, which denounced the grey conformism of corporate culture” (fraser, 2009, p. 109). from a feminist perspective, this should be understood in the context of the critiques of traditional authority in both feminism and neoliberalism (fraser, 2009). this critique gains importance when considered in the context of asexuality in particular, due to the persistence of the assumption that women lack sexual desire within traditional social forms.7 at a certain point in the evolution of capitalism, it was relatively more useful to perpetuate than discard the model of the monogamous, male-dominated household and its underlying cultural 6 i use this term in the same sense as fraser (2000), recognizing that its definition is far from settled in both scholarship and colloquial discourse. 7 this should not be interpreted as a universalistic construct to imply that all societies have had the same or similar restrictions on female sexual agency. rather, i use it to point to the distinctive turn in capitalism’s relationship with restrictions on sexuality as highlighted by fraser (2009). carter vance studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 146 assumptions. this model provided stability to property arrangements, for instance, and the family wage of the post-war era propped up a system of relative social protection, which also reinforced male dominance. however, at a certain historical moment, as discussed by fraser (2009), these old forms became barriers rather than facilitators to capital. individualist feminist rhetoric, the neoliberal reorganization of production forms and the attempt to commodify more aspects of life have furthered “the cultural production of this desiring subject” (hennessy, 2000, p. 69). again, this is not to deny that many have experienced this change as liberating, but it also tends to create a new, normalized ideal sexual subject rather than challenging the fundamental notion of the ideal subject. furthermore, this ideal desiring subject is configured in a way strikingly similar to the homo economicus of liberal economics: a rational, self-directed, self-possessing actor, a kind of sexual free agent. as “social production entails making the means to meet human needs as well as the production of new needs” (hennessy, 2000, p. 84), the subject is also construed to need new products and services to perform as the ideal. to investigate these questions, however, the exact nature of what the category of asexual can be said to constitute in this social reality must be teased out. how do you solve a problem like asexuality? in the analytic model of ideal-type groups on a spectrum from those requiring purely redistributive to purely recognition-based remedies to achieve justice, fraser (1995) populates the first with the exploited class and the second with despised sexuality. asexuals would seem to fall into the second category, first because their social devaluation is rooted in “an unjust culturalvaluational structure” rather than the political economy (fraser, 2000, p. 110), and second because asexuals have consistently received more hostile responses than all other sexual orientation groups on attitudinal quizzes (macinnis & hodson, 2012).8 furthermore, as seen in emens’ (2014) work, legal systems have various built-in privileges and assumptions related to sexuality, particularly the question of property in relationships, that can be seen as analogous to legal discrimination against homosexuals. from this perspective, redress for asexuals could be as simple as reforming legal and cultural systems to not devalue asexuality or privilege allosexuality as an identity. however, these identities do not exist in a free-floating sense, detached from their historical and economic circumstances, so this assumption needs to be further queried. 8 that is, persons of all sexual orientations consistently gave asexuals more hostile ratings than any other group. historical materialist concept of asexuality & compulsory sexuality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 147 in a political economy history of dating in the western world, weigel (2017, p. 32) found that the purpose of much of the dating industry has been to “take basic human needs for sex and attention and affection that can never be sated and turn them into engines of potentially endless demand.”9 the dating industry has achieved this through a variety of mechanisms depending on the overall economic organization at the time. the culture of “pick-youup-at-five” dating, for instance, was based on the assumption of stable, 9-to-5 jobs, while the current use of tinder and other dating apps mirrors the “justin-time” organization of work under neoliberalism. examined from this perspective, it becomes impossible to define a strict separation between the operation of business and personal lives. although we attempt to erect barriers between them, they almost inevitably begin to mirror each other. the vision of the self-possessing individual labourer so beloved by liberal and neoliberal economic theory finds a curious partner in the free-love ethos of the new left. both are atomized and removed from potential ties to others, pleasure-seeking and self-gratifying above all. for both, “the point of living in the free world [is] to pursue happiness, as you defined it, without interference” (weigel, 2017, p. 159). the conceptualization of this new, liberated sexual self also involves a kind of bio-politics, with people who exhibit resistance often diagnosed with medical or psychological disorders. most prominently, inhibited sexual desire (isd) was included in the dsm-iii in 1988 (weigel, 2017, p. 180).10 around the same time, much medicalized and highly profitable discourse and technology around sexuality was released, with the aim to enhance desire or gain greater pleasure from sexual activity (herzig, 2009). an obvious analogy exists between the emergence of isd and the former inclusion of homosexuality as a disorder in the dsm,11 but this should not be taken at face value. rather, given the intense linkage between the forms of sexual and romantic expression and work organization, asexuality can be seen as a barrier to capital accumulation, which capitalism in general and neoliberalism in particular attempt to eliminate. in capitalism, “the extraction of surplus value requires that workers alienate themselves from their human potentials, including their sex-affective potentials” (hennessy, 2000, p. 217). through the purchase of various products and services, capitalism inevitably facilitates alienation in the form of the expressive externalization of the sexual self. in this sense, the system of compulsory sexuality, reinforced by culture and law, serves production and exchange by channeling affective 9 this statement has an embedded assumption of compulsory sexuality, although in much of the book, it is clear weigel intends something closer to hennessy’s (2000) “potential for sensation and affect.” 10 the dsm-iii is the third iteration of the american psychological association’s diagnostic and statistical manual. 11 this is not to equate the concrete effects of isd with the marking of homosexuality as a disorder, which were markedly worse. carter vance studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 148 impulses into the creation of new social needs. from this perspective, asexuality can be – but is not not necessarily – a kind of great refusal of at least part of the late capitalist project. certainly, radical groups, most prominently a number of anarchist-feminist collectives in the 1970s and 1980s, have made this claim (fahs, 2010). with proper valence, asexual positionality can be used as a tool to illuminate the distinctly capitalist nature of compulsory sexuality and the modern sexusociety it undergirds and to examine this part of overall social reproduction (przybylo, 2011). transformation is a team sport the risk opened by the creation of asexual as an identity category, flexible though its limits might be, should be obvious from the experiences of the new social movements in relation to neoliberalism. moving from social theory to cultural theory is a significant temptation, and doubtless many, including myself, have found comfort and safety in claiming an asexual identity and obtaining others’ recognition of it. it would no doubt be of great benefit, for instance, to see more authentic representations of asexual characters in culture and media, with the aim to reduce interpersonal animosity and confusion about asexuality. however, if the incorporation of asexuality into the left’s discourse ended here, this would undersell the greater potential of asexuality. its emerging link to queer theory shows promise to disrupt the artificial divide between sexual and asexual identities, although caution is still needed because such analysis could neglect the political economy of compulsory sexuality in favour of a notion of performative identity. the asexual then would become, “the bad subject ... who rejects convention, but [whose] rebellion does little to change the existing social system” (hennessy, 2000, p. 230). instead, hennessy’s (2000) suggested strategy of disidentification seems to be a better response method. this “critical practice de-reifies identity by opening the identity from ‘i am’ to history” (hennessy, 2000, p. 230). regarding asexuality, this involves examining its emergence as a distinct, recognizable identity category within the context of late capitalism typified by a hegemonic sexuality both compulsory and commodified. although in some sense an identity resisting these facts, it is nevertheless shaped by and contingent upon them. furthermore, “disidentification makes visible the ways the dominant organizations of sexual desires and identities are real sites of affective investment” (hennessy, 2000, p. 231). this highlights that such affective investments need not be expressed through reified, commodified sexual action, but instead frequently result from political-economic structures that can be subjected to transformative change only through collective action. insofar as “we might even say affective potential is included in what marx means by labour” (hennessy, 2000, p. 215), we need to think about its decommodification in the same manner as we would other forms of labour. historical materialist concept of asexuality & compulsory sexuality studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 149 the category of asexuality disrupts the reification of the sexual, particularly its commodified form linked to the productive self in neoliberal capitalism, simply by saying that there exist alternate possibilities for the organization of affective impulses and investments outside those set by marketized culture. in this sense, much as other critical lenses operate as heuristic tools undermining the assumed cores of other social realities, asexuality operates to expose compulsory sexuality as a socially organized, not innate, phenomenon. conclusion: openings for an agenda this investigation of compulsory sexuality as a historical materialist phenomenon is not intended to be a definitive account. the discourse on asexuality has only recently been taken seriously in both academia and broader society, so at the least it is premature to pronounce a definitive word on it. this investigation of various discourses of the social production of sexuality has sought to combine their insights into a consistent accounting of compulsory sexuality, but much more work on this front remains. further research should focus on the relationship between asexuality and gender expression, in particular, trans* identities. scholars should also examine the expressions, political and otherwise, asexuality has taken on within nonwestern social and political contexts, particularly given the use of sexuality as an oppressive instrument in colonial and post-colonial spaces. in addition, asexuality probably interacts with racialization in ways that modify its subjectivity, particularly given the hypersexualization of certain racial identities and the default assumption of others as asexual. from a more direct political perspective, “hegemony designates a process wherein cultural authority is negotiated and contested” (fraser, 2013, p. 142), rendering sexuality a space where hegemony is exercised and negotiated. both activism and theory have doubtless expanded and changed the bounds of what is hegemonic within that sexual sphere in recent history. however, one of capitalism’s greatest self-preservation features is its ability to incorporate and subsume that which once opposed it in a shifting and dynamic manner. under what can be defined as a hegemony of the sexual, asexuals are “denied the status of a full partner in social interaction and prevented from participating as a peer in social life” (fraser, 2013, p. 176), because under this hegemony the basis for claims to humanity, and therefore social organizing and resistance is inherently sexual. the lens of asexuality helps expose this hegemony in compulsory sexuality and sexusociety. whether these tools can be harnessed to reinvent the queer, expand its terms or develop an entirely new political critique of sexuality under neoliberalism is yet to be determined. in the worst-case scenario, asexuality as an identity will become a niche category of accepted social “difference” in the same manner as identities contained within lgbtq have been to some extent. although a carter vance studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 1, 133-151, 2018 150 success on some level, providing relief to many currently deeply marginalized, this creation of social recognition for a niche identity category would seem to underrate the power and possibility asexuality holds from what its existence throws into question. if, indeed, we can have our affective needs met in a manner beyond the socially hegemonic sexual, how can these needs be further transformed to meet other ends? if we can exist beyond the commodification of the body, what does this ability do to the concept of the productive self and capitalist time under neoliberalism? these are questions asexuality compels, and it is in these questions – these troublings – that a future beyond capital can be glimpsed. references bersani, l. 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(1994). sexual behaviour in britain: the national survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles. london: penguin. yule, m., brotto, l., & gorzalka, b. (2014). sexual fantasy and masturbation among asexual individuals. the canadian journal of human sexuality, 23(2), 89-95. jones et al final before ts correspondence address: chelsea jones, department of child & youth studies, brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; email: cjones@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 representing disability, d/deaf, and mad artists and art in journalism: identifying ableist fault lines and promising crip practices of representation chelsea temple jones brock university nadine changfoot trent university kirsty johnston university of british columbia abstract this paper revisits the dynamic discussion about journalism’s role in representing and amplifying disability arts at the 2019 cripping the arts symposium. chronicling the dialogue of the “representation” panel which included artists, arts and culture critics, journalists, and scholars, it reveals how arts and culture coverage contributes to the cultivation of disability, d/deaf, and mad art. given that the relationship between journalism and disability communities continues to be fractured in canada, speakers were invited to reflect on journalism and disability arts in relation to their own engagement with media as subjects, authors, and critics of disability arts reviews. the methods for presentation were cripped in multiple ways to provide the fullest access possible. the panel concluded with examples of ableist fault lines in representation practices where the disabled figure is an absent “ghost” in journalistic representation, warnings against journalistic reliance on traditional and objective narratives, and a call for artists to claim and write their own stories. ultimately, disabled, d/deaf, and mad artists need both control over artistic endeavours and output and influence over representation. this article reconnects journalism and disability communities, ultimately demonstrating that representation is a critical, co-constitutive process that can become more aesthetically and politically oriented toward social justice in its focus on disability, d/deaf, and mad arts. keywords disability arts; journalism; representation; crip; panel chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 308 figure 1. members of the “representation” panel at cripping the arts (photo: michelle peek photography courtesy of bodies in translation: activist art, technology & access to life, re•vision: the centre for art & social justice at the university of guelph). image description: five members of the cripping the arts “representation” panel sit on a stage. in the foreground of the image a blurred audience faces the panellists, who each have a microphone near their seats. in the background is a colourful, abstract illustration projected onto a screen. from left to right, the panellists in the image are michael orsini, leah sandals, shay erlich, peter owusu-ansah, and nadine changfoot. introduction in this panel exchange from the 2019 cripping the arts symposium in toronto, canada, six speakers and one moderator reveal how journalistic arts and culture coverage contributes to current shapings of disability, d/deaf, and mad art. the speakers, introduced individually below, come from a range of backgrounds with often overlapping roles – they are artists, arts and culture critics, journalists, and scholars. the purpose of this panel was to increase the rigour and cultural competency of critical disability, d/deaf, and mad arts in journalism by critically responding to journalistic coverage of disability arts. the launching point for this panel was a well-established understanding in disability communities that media representations have the potential to shape the attitudes of audiences toward disability (haller, 1999; longmore, 2003). journalism has historically coded disability coverage through negative tropes (clogston, 1991; haller, 1993). although the medical model forms a persistent storyline in much news media (bendukurthi & raman, 2016, p. representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 309 143), alternative themes such as social inclusion, solidarity in the disability community, and the treatment of disabled people have emerged in news reporting, such as in that of the 2015 new york disability pride parade (mellifont, 2017). notably, though, much of the literature on disability and representation in news media focuses on canada, the united states, australia, and other english-speaking contexts, leaving significant gaps in our knowledge about disability and representation elsewhere (bendukurthi & raman, 2016; parent, 2020). further, media representations also offer chances for us to think through the normative assumptions that ground these representations (titchkosky, 2020, p. 13). journalism – as both an industry and an individual practice by journalists – plays an important and complex role in educating audiences about social justice, including the rich, creative energies of crip arts, its effects, including aesthetic exploration, accessibility, presentation, and the growth of the disability, d/deaf, and mad arts sector. following the editors of this special journal issue, we use the term “crip” as a descriptor drawn from current discourse around disability arts in canada, including appeals to crip the arts through events such as the 2019 cripping the arts symposium, a university course taught by eliza chandler, and a special issue of canadian journal of disability studies (2019) each covering the topic of cripping the arts,. for the purpose of this writing, we simply follow christina myers’ (2019) explanation in canadian art of what it means to crip the arts: “to ‘crip’ the arts is to embrace the ways that disability can disrupt the status quo and lead with difference” (para. 7). aiming to bridge a gap between disability arts and media representation, we also note the adoption of crip in disability media discourses. consider, for example, the u.s.-based hashtag #cripthevote on twitter, which sought to raise awareness of disability issues during the 2016 presidential election. disabled folx producing their own media are beginning to insist that they are cripping representation – a sentiment that was ultimately urged onward by the panelists in the “representation” session.1 for example, mobile filmmaker laurence parent (2020) uncovers compulsory able-bodiedness in media representation by making her wheelchair an integral part of her filmmaking, and describes her work as crip and cripping (p. 202). following jonathan bartholomy (2020), we can think of cripping in a media context as “the act of revealing the overarching norms within a society that reinforce the dominance of the non-disabled perspective and its exclusionary practices (p. 59). layering together artistic and media crip ontologies that aim to disrupt and reveal oppression allows us to think through the fractured relationship between disability, d/deaf, and mad arts and media in ways that demonstrate that there is common ground among the fields. although “crip” does not yet 1 we use the term “folx” to be inclusive of black, indigenous, people of colour, non-binary, and trans persons. chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 310 grace the pages of traditional media style guides, to crip representation is a creative, critical, co-constitutive process that can become more aesthetically and politically oriented toward social justice through its engagement in disability, d/deaf, and mad arts. introduction to panellists to open the panel, each speaker sat on stage overlooking the audience, and was asked to introduce themselves to the audience by describing themselves. to avoid generalizations and to forefront the words of the panellists, we will introduce them individually, pulling on transcription excerpts of their own words (which, at times, were playful and met with laughter from the audience), in the order they sat on stage from right to left: peter owusu-ansah is a d/deaf visual artist working in toronto: “i am a black ghanaian. i am wearing a dark grey t-shirt, i’m wearing light grey pants, and my shoes are sort of a blueish-green with a brown stripe around the bottom. i’m a visual artist.” shay erlich is a wheelchair dancer, a performance art critic, and an accessibility consultant: “i am a white, queer, genderqueer, multiply disabled person. i am a wheelchair user, my wheelchair has lots of colours on it, it has purple highlights, green spokes, and yellow wheels. currently, i am wearing grey socks, skipped the shoes because they were bothering me, black pants with black polka dots, a blazer that is beige with red plaid on it, and a bright green shirt that says, ‘my other disability is a bad attitude.’ today i’ll be mostly speaking from my experiences as a disability arts critic, but [i wear] lots of hats.” leah sandals is an editor at canadian art magazine: “i am a white settler, cisgender woman, and i have greying brown hair. i am wearing black pants, black cardigan, black shirt with white polka dots because that’s so whimsical of me [laughter], and i have black boots and black glasses.” michael orsini is a former journalist and a professor in the school of political studies at the university of ottawa: “i am a white, cisgender, able-bodied male. i am wearing a purplish sweater, grey pinstripe pants, and new shoes that were on sale [laughter].” sarah jama is a community organizer based in hamilton, ontario, and co-founder of the disability justice network of ontario (djno): “i am a somali canadian, black woman, cisgender, um, i have cerebral palsy, which means i use my walker sometimes, but today i am in my electric chair. i’m from hamilton, ontario, which is territory of the haudenosaunee and anishinaabe people, and is governed by the dish with one spoon wampum agreement. my hair is in braids, i am wearing a dress with a really ugly red-and-white pattern which i wasn’t a fan of, but i’m running out of options [laughter].” representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 311 kirsty johnston described herself as a white, settler, cis-gender woman dressed mostly in black. “i have freckles and red hair that is going grey. let’s not dwell on that.” the panel moderator was nadine changfoot. she described herself as having “silver hair” that her salon is encouraging her to colour. the panel organizer was chelsea temple jones, who sat in the audience in order to communicate time signals to changfoot. jones is a white settler with shoulder-length blond hair. methods there is a backstory to this panel that involved jones and changfoot’s attempt to crip a panel format, and to move outside of traditional panel presentations. the work began with direct recruitment strategies, wherein jones worked in collaboration with event organizers to reach out to speakers, with the intention to ensure that disabled people of colour were represented. in effort not to overrepresent whiteness, jones ultimately stepped away from the panel, taking a backstage role. both jones and the moderator, changfoot, conceptualized their roles as connecting and supporting panelists through the entire process. therefore, between november 2018 and january 2019, jones and changfoot hosted two online meetings via zoom, which included an american sign language (asl) interpreter. the purpose of these meetings was to create time and space for panelists to meet one another and share ideas. in the meantime, jones checked in with the group regularly via email. during these group check-ins, the group’s desire to disrupt, or crip, traditional panel formats became clear. we were offered 60 minutes to speak. in a traditional panel this might amount to an equal division of time for each speaker – around five to seven minutes each. instead, we collectively decided that because people express themselves in varying modes and at varying paces, we would divide time based on the amount of time each speaker felt they might need to complete their thoughts. in other words, some speakers got more or less time than others. and, in effort not to privilege orality, panelists were invited to make a video or sound recording, bring an object, or offer some other form of creative expression to share with the audience. jones took notes on these preparatory conversations and shared these notes with the group using google docs so that panelists could add their thoughts and questions, facilitating dialogue between each other in between meetings and prior to the presentation day. during the symposium, changfoot deliberately sought out and spoke with each panelist prior to the panel. when the panel began, changfoot invited each panelist to introduce themselves by offering a visual description for access. jones sat in the audience, within view of changfoot. because this was a large-scale event with stage direction coming from venue staff, this chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 312 direction was streamlined to jones who communicated with changfoot through simple hand signals, indicating, most importantly, when it was time to wrap up the conversation. our decisions to this end were informed by a critical understanding of the risks involved in the chosen panel format of storytelling, the importance of recasting a panel presentation through crip time, and a concerted effort to develop arts-based panel questions, described below. avoiding “share your story” requests notably, in an initial online meeting via zoom in november 2018, three months prior to the cripping the arts event, panellists gathered and deliberated together online about the ways they wished to share their thoughts. the decision to focus on the relationship between journalistic representation and disability, d/deaf, and mad arts intended to provide panellists and symposium participants an opportunity to consider representational concerns from a range of perspectives shared by artists, scholars, and activists – that is, perspectives from the “lots of hats” panellists wear, to borrow erlich’s later words. these perspectives, uniquely shared by people who engage in both artistic production and media representation in a myriad of ways, mark the co-constitutive process of representation: both the creation and engagement with disability, d/deaf, and mad arts and journalism are factors in achieving social reform (burns & haller, 2015, p. 263). as panel moderator and organizer, respectively, changfoot and jones were also aware of the rampant casting of disabled people as “experts” on disability, and the tokenization risks, which are described here and in later sections of the writing. anticipating that the task of speaking on this panel would include speaking to the disability arts community's fatigue around journalistic and other requests to "share stories," the group opted not to focus on expertise or story-sharing entirely. the often-repeated request for experts to share stories has been described by jijian voronka (2015), who recalls being approached to speak – or perform – her consumer narrative at conferences and other events in paid and unpaid capacities. she explains that mad people’s lived experiences have “generated a commodity of plenary presentations” (p. 255). and, in her book care work (2018), leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha describes the risk of making public commentary on disability culture and disability justice: i have thought a lot about what i wanted to do to intervene in the very likely reality that, as i am a light-skinned, non-black, ambulatory, often verbally communicative person, mainstream media would want to cast me as “the face of disability justice” and thrust me into the spotlight as the one “expert” on this wacky new movement – erasing all of my comrades and fellow artists, thinkers, and organizers, particularly those who face certain kinds of ableism that are more overt and killing than some that i face. (p. 25) representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 313 certainly, part of being an artist and an activist involves speaking publicly about the work. however, drawing on piepzna-samarasinha’s point, offering stories of disability art to mainstream audiences is a complicated process that privileges some narratives over others and can put speakers’ stories in compromised positions. and, once disabled folx’ stories are released into the world, they are at risk of being co-opted by long-held mainstream tropes, such as recovery or success stories that bolster neoliberal notions of resilience (voronka, 2015) and supercrip stories that represent disabled characters as “superhuman” for overcoming adversity or simply living a normal life (clogston, 1991). the panel organizers anticipated that panelists had been asked, elsewhere, to rehearse the suspect, inclusionist narrative of disabled people gaining entry into a mainstream art world as the marker of their success – and we tried to avoid it. organizing a panel for crip time given the 60-minute timeframe for this panel, the group queried how aiming for even allotments of time among the panellists rested on ableist assumptions and ignored the principles of crip time. crip time is a relational phenomenon that reflects the temporal variations needed to accomplish everyday activities that are often confined to normative timelines (katzman et al., 2020). alison kafer (2013) describes crip time as a flexible way of thinking that challenges us to reimagine “our notions of what can and should happen in time... recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies” (p. 27). we understood the irony of using crip time to highlight the inequitable distribution of temporal and other resources that go into participating on a tightly scheduled panel. still, we tried to compose a panel discussion that would “[bend] the clock” and take a “flexible approach to normative time frames,” even given the one-hour time limit (kafer & price in samuels, 2017). with six panellists, the group decided to facilitate a collective ethos within the panel whereby a consensus was forged for each panellist to have varying timelines to share their thoughts/answers to two questions, recognizing that some may take less time and others a little more. in these ways, crip time was a key element of the panel’s construction. arts-based panel questions with the risks around disability-related storytelling in mind, and with the intention to move through the hour-long panel in ways that honour crip time, the group reached a mutual decision to focus less on the old tell-your-storyagain request and instead to shape their responses around two arts-based questions: chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 314 question 1: given your practice, what word, image, feeling, sound, object, or colour comes to mind when you are faced with the word “journalism”? question 2: share your responses to journalists’ reviews of either your or other’s work. what would you like to see done differently in journalistic coverage of disability, d/deaf, and mad art, to grow all the dimensions that artists want to grow, as well as the culture? following each person’s introduction, including a visual description, panellists spoke to each question for varying amounts of time. the themes that emerged from this conversation are analysed below. panel discussion analysis pet peeves: journalists are getting it wrong with the disability rights movement in the 1980s in north america following and coinciding with the disability rights movement in the united kingdom, disabled, d/deaf, and mad artists took to self-representation as a way of resisting and disrupting cultural misrepresentations that were premised upon able-bodied and ableist norms to create and “establish disability as a valued human condition, shift control to disabled people so they may shape their narratives and bring this disability controlled narrative to wider audiences” (abbas et al., 2004, p. 1). the power of self-representation is inherently political in that disabled, d/deaf, and mad artists want to be seen on their own terms and this involves changing “the way society sees us” (chandler et al., 2018, p. 252). d/deaf, disability and mad arts and culture have grown, recently becoming a priority area for the canada council for the arts in 2008 and the ontario arts council in 2014 (ontario arts council, 2015). despite the over 40-year history of the disability movement, longstanding ableist representations of disability, d/deafness, and madness continue, evoking such descriptors of journalistic representations from panellists: “frustration” (shay erlich), “white fragility and mechanical monolith” (sarah jama), “crisis” (leah sandals), “history and ghosts” (johnston), “story narrative” (michael orsini), and “blank canvas” (peter owusu-ansah). notably, erlich’s frustration was expressed in their “top three disability arts criticism pet peeves,” which relate to ableist perspectives and disabling arts and journalistic practices. the first pet peeve is critics’ ignorance of d/deaf, disability and mad language and culture. when referring to sector artists, critics continue to use language that orients toward able-bodied norms instead of the conventions of disability, d/deaf, and mad culture. for example, in a review of d/deaf artist, d. j. demers, the comic was described as having a “hearing disability” (sumi, 2018), instead of the reviewer using the preferred cultural terms, from erhlich’s perspective, of either d/deaf or hard of hearing. erlich shared this disability cultural practice, representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 315 identifying as hard of hearing and fluent in asl. there is also a tendency toward “diagnoses-dropping,” an ableist practice whereby an artist’s biomedical diagnosis becomes a focal point, instead of the artist and their work, thus revealing both a hegemonic biomedical view of disability and an ableist compulsion to disclose disability (roman, 2009), both of which are irrelevant when it comes to the work. erlich’s second peeve is the focus by journalists on accommodation as the performance by describing it in detail and providing commentary on the accommodation, instead of concentrating on the artist and artistic practice itself. this is not to say that accommodation for accessibility purposes is not important. accommodation in arts venues through relaxed performance (rp) has been growing. originating in the united kingdom to provide access elements to theatre presentations for persons living with autism and tourette’s syndrome, rp has grown and continues to develop to make arts presentations more accessible for a wider range of disability and audience experiences (see kempe, 2015, lamarre et al., 2019). access elements of rp can include asl interpretation, live audio description, a visual and described guide to the theatre space (e.g., accessible washrooms, parking) and the presentation (e.g., allowing for soft talking about the presentation in process, cues for loud or startling noises, changes in presentation such as lights and noises for the rp itself), and guidance to patrons to be scent-free. the intention of rp is to create access to the art, not for the rp access elements to become an ableist focal point especially by a non-disabled audience or journalist. in the case of d. j. demers, the review (sumi, 2018) made the asl interpreter a focal point for non-d/deaf audience instead of focusing on the artist, content of the comedy, or the experience of d/deaf, disabled and non-disabled audience members attentive to the accessibility of the performance. in these instances, there is, for erlich, a “fetishization of accommodation” where the accommodation itself becomes the audience object, remaining within a biomedical understanding of disability. erlich’s third pet peeve is the acceptance by journalists, as well as audiences, of “disability mimicry” or “cripping up,” which refers to the problematic western tradition of non-disabled actors playing disabled characters and draws a parallel between this kind of entrenched ableist practice and the racism of blackface minstrel performance traditions (from o’reilly in sandahl, 2019; komporály, 2007). sometimes, these storylines follow a disabled character who becomes spontaneously able-bodied at different points of a performance, including at the end where, in one play given as an example, there is a huge celebration at which the wheelchair user, who is arthritic, gets up with the entire cast to dance. the reviews for this play were silent on the ableist perspective of an arthritic wheelchair user who is miraculously cured at apparent will. this kind of plot and character where disability becomes, as panellist michael orsini put it, “the punchline or the inspiration and uplift” of a story narrative, are also made and reported on for a primarily non-disabled audience. disabled characters become chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 316 “melodramatic devices” (longmore, 2003, p. 133) to relieve primarily nondisabled audiences of their anxieties around issues of loss of bodily autonomy. plots that end in cure and overcoming but also can feature death, saving the disabled character, or revaluation are, for mitchell and snyder (2000, p. 10), “narrative protheses” because they signal “something out of place” serving as metaphorical problem from the able-bodied gaze to be solved and disappearing disabled persons as subjects. refusing disappearance and being sidelined, disability, d/deaf, and mad artists create their own art and crip aesthetic. making crip aesthetic as disability, d/deaf, and mad arts and culture flourish, so does crip aesthetic – an aesthetic that emerges from disabled, d/deaf, and mad lived experiences that are valid in and of themselves (chandler & rice, 2013, chandler et al., 2018), bringing into cultural consciousness new and multiple spaces and narratives, orienting audiences to new perspectives and artistic presentations. erin ball’s performance at “crip shorts,” a performance event that took place at cripping the arts, is an example of a promising crip aesthetic for the plural ways she presented her acrobatic art form with and without different prostheses, with and without a wheelchair. she provided beautiful renderings of sculptural form, using both fluid and strong body movement with technical precision – for example, through many handstands up and down her wheelchair, including her body positioned in the splits with stilts, leg-length prostheses, shorter-leg prostheses, and without prostheses. to the audience’s delight, she fired confetti from her prosthetic legs upward into the air and toward the audience as the finale. ball made her body, her prostheses, and her wheelchair sites of unique aesthetic creation in ways that contained surprise elements. through combining multiple visual perspectives of her body and the technologies that were also entwined with it, a new kind of crip aesthetic emerged that included, but was not limited to, connective tension – beauty, delight, joy, and suspense – between ball herself and the audience. ball’s performance also invited the audience into the creation of new vocabulary specific to and experienced co-constitutively with her body, movement, and technologies as a disability circus artist, evoking haraway’s cyborg (2006), and reaching into crip futurities (rice et al., 2017) in a disability-prideful way. representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 317 figure 2. erin ball performs in “crip shorts” (photo: michelle peek photography courtesy of bodies in translation: activist art, technology & access to life, re•vision: the centre for art & social justice at the university of guelph). image description: shown in profile, erin ball is sitting sideways in her wheelchair facing the audience. her wheelchair faces stage left and she holds her right prosthesis upward toward the ceiling while she leans back and looks up. red, purple, and pink confetti is shooting skyward out chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 318 of her right prothesis. the stage lighting is orange, purple, and pink and it bathes her face and dangling ponytail as she gazes up. accessibility creation (rice et al., 2019), which refers to technologies such as written descriptions, access guides, live audio description, and recorded audio description that provide access for those living with disabilities to art and art events, has its own aesthetic specific to each event. through the work of artists, artistic producers, and curators, access documents themselves, such as the “cripping the arts access guide” (2019), become aesthetic outputs. when artists co-create access, a new aesthetic emerges that defies traditional aesthetic expectations. the live audio description, provided by kat germain, became an integral part of erin ball’s performance. germain’s descriptions and voice accompanying the performance created a warm and intimate soundscape, enhanced by the darkened venue, and brought the viewer into closer proximity to the intricate balances and manoeuvres executed by ball. as stimulating as ball’s work is in its live, immediate, sensual, and highly impactful constitutive elements, it is also clearly connected to longer histories of circus arts performance, disability performance (in and outside of circus contexts) (carter, 2018), as well as her own particular performance history and artistic oeuvre. one critically important way that journalists can engage with disabled, d/deaf, and mad artists is by locating them in these rich and important histories. when a disabled, d/deaf, and/or mad artist, such as erin ball, is centred, their artistry and crip aesthetic emerge as agential and prideful, liberated from biomedical markers that impose ableist norms and conventions, bringing the audience into an aesthetic realm of experience and sensation that requires new vocabulary and also inquiry into disability, d/deaf, and mad arts and culture. just as crip aesthetic is created by and emerges through disabled, d/deaf, and mad artists, it is also a thoughtful labour on the part of the audience to centre the artist(s) and disability, d/deaf, and mad arts and culture in the interpretive process and representation of the art. this description is also an example of representation called for by panellists to situate disability, d/deaf, and mad artists and their work within their own contexts. further, it exemplifies the panellists’ call for widening the interpretive possibilities. in one direction this widening should attend to the artists’ specific practices as they embody a range of technologies for the performance, including accessibility elements of relaxed performance (i.e., in this instance live audio description). in another key direction, however, the panellists also seek critical appreciation for and interpretive competence in the new aesthetic experiences as they arise from the totality of these diverse visual, and aural elements. this expansive labour is also historical, as will be discussed next. representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 319 isolating artists from history in connection with their curation of the touring exhibit “out from under: disability history & things to remember,” leading disability scholars and curators catherine frazee, kathryn church and melanie panitch (2008) have argued for the importance of situating “disabled actors and activists as the protagonists of their own history” by asserting that, there was – and is – much at stake in this enterprise. the claim to history is a declaration of self, place and solidarity at the same time as it is an articulation of new ground for debate. it is the brazen insurgency of outliers taking centre, refusing periphery. it is an announcement that we know, along with an affirmation that our knowledge matters. to make a claim to history is to count as author and social actor, to reach the tipping point from which entitlements to dignity, respect and the protection of human rights will be unstoppable. (p. 5) panellists at this cripping the arts panel also emphasized how journalists have both rich opportunities and responsibilities to locate disabled, d/deaf, and mad artistic work in relation to these histories. building cultural competency in these histories, languages, and cultures is an important step in avoiding erlich’s first pet peeve (that critics ignore disability language and culture). however, because non-disabled journalists covering disability, d/deaf, and mad arts are sometimes wholly new to the field of practice, there has often been an overemphasis on the work’s novelty, its origins in the individual artist’s biography, and the mistaken sense of disability, d/deaf and mad art as only very recently emergent. while some of these factors may well be relevant to understanding a specific exhibit or performance, overemphasizing them risks occluding critical dimensions of crip aesthetics as they relate to a specific artist’s choices in a particular historical moment. indeed, erlich’s arguments and those of other panellists resonate with those shared by u.s. disability performance scholar carrie sandahl in her 2018 article “using our words: exploring representational conundrums in disability drama and performance”: in a 2010 national endowment for the arts study, my colleague, dr. carol gill, and i found that artists are frustrated by critics who write in limiting ways about their work, often focusing on biographical information about the artist’s impairment, reducing complex works to a discussion of stereotypes, or using the unfamiliarity of being in the presence of disabled people performing as an occasion to work out their own anxieties about the nature of disability and thereby the nature of art itself. (p. 129) knowledge of and engagement with the histories of disability, d/deaf and mad cultures is one way to avoid such journalistic pitfalls. many contemporary disability, d/deaf, and mad artists recognize that their current work builds upon the profoundly difficult work of the field’s early activists and artists. over the past decades, these predecessors in a range of chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 320 different artistic fields have laboured to form and grow canadian capacity for the development of disability, d/deaf, and mad arts and culture. indeed, current identification of the need to support this vibrant arts sector and the creation of a disability arts officer position at the canada council of the arts, came only after decades of disability, d/deaf and mad arts practice, activism, and successful demands for change. for example, the past two decades of regular disability arts festivals in major cities across the country and the concomitant generation of formal reports from within the community concerning the disability arts sector’s canadian and international development were critical capacity-builders. journalistic coverage that seems unaware of the difficult and sustained work of cultural activists over time to address the profound systemic barriers facing disabled, d/deaf, and mad performers risks erasing this profoundly generative work. it also typically promotes retrograde exceptionalist, individualizing disabled superhero narratives over narratives that are critically engaged with the core tenets and debates of disability, d/deaf, and mad arts and cultures. in short, extending erlich’s argument above, it can be tremendously frustrating and disenfranchising if journalistic coverage isolates a single disability, d/deaf, and mad artist or audience from these histories, communities, aesthetics, and oeuvres. instead, as owusu-ansah argued, there is tremendous value in listening closely to the precise and nuanced insights proffered by disability, d/deaf, and mad artists and audiences. further, as jama has argued, there is authority and experience in such voices that should not be elided. akin to church, frazee and panitch above, jama and owusu-ansah underline how disability, d/deaf, and mad artists and audiences’ particular knowledges matter and are essential ingredients in the claim to history from which “entitlements to dignity, respect and the protection of human rights will be unstoppable” (frazee et al., 2008, p. 5). “ghosting” of crip aesthetics in theatre with regard to disability, d/deaf, and mad theatre, for example, building awareness of how any specific performance is haunted by these histories is a key means for generating more nuanced, detailed, and grounded journalistic engagement. in his influential book the haunted stage: theatre as memory machine (2003), theorist marvin carlson builds from the insights of many past theatre theorists to emphasize the role of ghosts in theatre production and reception. marking theatre as a site wherein audiences and performers routinely come into material contact with the very bodies, seats, sets, lights, costumes, properties, words, and narratives that they have encountered before, he emphasizes the profound power of “ghosting” in theatre. for any theatre journalist, then, awareness of such ghosts is critical. for example, if this is the third time a lead performer has been seen on a city’s stages in a particular play, either always playing the same character or representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 321 this time playing the parent when decades earlier they played the child, a journalist will likely remark upon such ghosting and the way it shapes the performance. if the moon in the set and the wheelchair on stage in this production are the same as those that have been used in all of a theatre-going community’s productions that season, audiences and journalists will notice this and make connections across productions. similarly, concurrent or successive productions of the same play are regularly compared by journalists for how they “ghost” one another in performance. theatre critics typically become aware (and are often expected to be aware) of these hauntings through regular and attentive theatregoing as well as reading related contemporary press, historical research, and interviews. equally importantly, theatre artists of all kinds can foster stronger engagement from disability, d/deaf, and mad journalists by ensuring all of these means for “ghostgathering” are accessible. for journalists, carlson’s concept of theatrical ghosting might also help clarify some of the challenges contemporary d/deaf, disability and mad theatre performers confront. on the one hand, the profound inaccessibility of so much theatre practice over time has meant that most d/deaf, disabled and mad theatre performers have not yet been featured on stages in ways that have allowed them to accrue ghosts at the same scale as non-disabled performers. as leading disability performance scholar carrie sandahl (2008) and others (longmore, 2003; mitchell & snyder, 2000) have demonstrated, stereotypical and profoundly inaccessible and ableist training, casting and professionalization practices have limited the number and range of ways d/deaf, disabled and mad performers have been able to take the stage. to build from an earlier example, there are as yet few d/deaf, disabled and mad performers on professional theatre stages who might be cast as the parent in a play after their well-known turn many seasons ago as the child. moreover, the kinds of ghosts that disabled performers have had to contend with regularly are those generated by the legions of disabled mimicries alluded to by erlich in their third pet peeve above; among these, for example, are the many performances of d/deaf, disabled and mad characters by nondisabled people whose turns have garnered mainstream artistic awards or other kinds of popular acclaim (oscar winners eddie redmayne for playing stephen hawking in the theory of everything, daniel day-lewis for playing christy brown in my left foot, and dustin hoffman for playing a fictional character described as having autism, raymond babbitt, in rain man). to make sense of the social injustices inherent in this longstanding practice, disability artists, scholars and journalists have gained from drawing parallels with critical race and performance artists and theorists who have demonstrated the systems of white supremacy and exploitation behind the longstanding practice of “blacking up.” for example, sandahl’s research cites blacking up to illustrate the fronts of two key kinds of ghosting battles facing d/deaf and disabled actors: chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 322 in the disability arts and activist communities, casting non-disabled actors as disabled characters is called pejoratively ‘cripping up,’ referencing the outdated practice of white actors ‘blacking up’ to play african american characters. in ‘cripping up,’ … an actor is cast to play a character from a less dominant social position. rarely is an actor of color, a woman, or a disabled person cast against type to play a character from a more dominant social position. actors from marginalized groups must battle on two fronts, then: to be cast in roles that resemble their own identities and to be cast in roles that do not. (2008, p. 236) journalists who are aware of these battles will be more easily able to discern a d/deaf, disabled or mad performer’s specific aesthetic choices or interventions with ableist traditions and ghosts. for example, they will have a stronger context for reflecting on the political and artistic impact of the alltoo-frequent theatre production moment noted in the panel when a nondisabled actor steps out of their character’s wheelchair to take a curtain call at the end of the performance. as several panellists noted, however, it is important to explore productions from a disability justice framework interested in how the parallels between blacking up and cripping up are merely one example of the myriad ways in which art and performance practices, traditions and ghosts have been shaped by intertwined systems of racism, classism, sexism, and heteronormativity. when she writes about disability justice in care work, lakshmi piepznasamarasinha cites the term’s coinage by the “black, brown, queer, and trans members of the original disability justice collective, founded in 2005 by patty berne, mia mingus, leroy moore, eli clare, and sebastian margaret” (2018, p. 15). in her definition and history of the movement she cites extensively sins invalid co-founder and executive director patty berne (2015) who explains that, disability justice activists, organizers, cultural workers understand that ablebodied supremacy has been formed in relation to other systems of domination and exploitation. the histories of white supremacism and ableism are inextricably entwined, both forged in the crucible of colonial conquest and capitalist domination. late performer, playwright and activist lynn manning has demonstrated how an awareness of intersectionality can help journalists understand and convey the many ways the show might connect with audiences. speaking with sandahl (2004) in reference to his acclaimed solo, autobiographical performance weights, a show in which he connected his black civil rights activism to his disability activism after becoming blind, manning explained: generally speaking, african americans respond most strongly to the stories and poems about my experiences growing up impoverished in south-central los angeles; disabled audience members are most raucous when i recount the tribulations of seeking services from the state department of rehabilitation; and visually impaired audience members make their presence known when i describe representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 323 rediscovering the world as a blind man. the demographic population whose response to weights has surprised me most is that of emancipated foster children. even though i summarize my foster home years in just a couple of sentences, former foster children are often effusive in their thanks for my sharing that aspect of my life with the world and being a positive role model. (p. 31) while manning’s account risked separating audience responses into siloes, his one-man autobiographical performance centered these narratives in his singular body and, akin to lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha and other disability justice activists, emphasized the interconnectedness of ableism, racism, and classism. manning’s awareness of the multi-directional resonances of his performance demonstrates the value for journalists in searching out and signalling for their own audiences the myriad ways disability art and performance can resonate with diverse audiences and help communities find one another. near the end of care work, lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha notes that she is “haunted by the question of, will all our work and lives be remembered and by who and how?” (2018, p. 254). journalists can play a profound role in helping artists and audiences to find, witness, appreciate, challenge, archive and remember. beyond supporting these critical acts of cultural connection and remembrance among people, journalists might also seek out the haunted histories of the particular sites in which they do so. for example, the cripping the arts “representation” panel took place in the same space as the 2003 performance of “in the room,” a collaborative performance involving an international complement of artists who identified as having lived experience with mental illness. the show was produced as part of the firstever madness and arts world theatre festival established and produced by workman arts, an over 40 year old company that has played and continues to play a complex role in the local and international development of disability, d/deaf, and mad arts and culture.2 considered by many to be the festival highlight, “in the room” was the culmination of months of long-distance preparations and 10 days of intensive in-person work bringing together artists from toronto’s workman arts, australia’s rag theatre troupe, and denmark’s billedspor. there were thus many ghosts “in the room” at harbourfront centre during cripping the arts in 2019 as we gathered in the same space which evoked many lingering questions: where would mad arts and culture fit in the 2019 moment? how were the contemporary discussions stretching, challenging, and bridging with debates and ideas of the past? what did it mean that these histories were available to some but not others now in the room? how might journalists play a role in making historical connections between such events 2 the madness and arts world theatre festival was a 10-day large-scale international performance event produced by toronto’s workman arts in partnership with the centre for addiction and mental health and the harbourfront centre that drew together and showcased the theatre of individual and company-based artists with lived experience of mental illness. chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 324 in order to strengthen the sense of disability history? further, what are the histories of people, performance, and culture of harbourfront centre itself? harbourfront centre is located on a site covered by treaty 13 between the mississaugas of the credit and the canadian government. cripping the arts organizers acknowledged this land and its history and in doing so they invited thinking about the kinds of disability, d/deaf, and mad people, lives and performances that have existed on these territories over time. how have colonialism and de-colonizing efforts shaped experience, understanding, art production and reception for disability, d/deaf, and mad people? these questions seek to remind researchers, artists, and journalists alike that disability, d/deaf, and mad theatre art and performance are created in specific historical contexts haunted by past cultural production that has shaped and been shaped by ableism, racism, colonialism, sexism and heteronormativity. when engaging with contemporary crip aesthetics, it can be meaningful for both performers and audiences if journalists ask about and consider the kinds of ghosts that are present with performers and audiences. what are the histories of the performance sites, roles, costumes, and props? how have the performance materials been featured, recycled and reimagined over time? what related roles and performances precede this current one? indeed, as it is a kind of performance, we could ask how the panel at the centre of this article might also be read for its ghosts of past discussions of crip aesthetics. what changes are evident in such panels over time? are there echoes of innovations in the discussions? journalists who invest their time in thinking about such questions and building their own capacity to answer them will be of tremendous value to disability, d/deaf, and mad artists, as well as the broader cultures they seek to engage, challenge, and shape. making art under a “regime of objectivity” in canada, there is a fractured relationship between disability communities and journalists (boyer, 1988; jones, 2014, 2017). these groups have struggled to communicate with one another, and debates about misrepresentation of disabled people characterize much of this relationship (jones, 2020). concerns about how disabled people ought to be represented by media emerged again during this panel, followed by warnings against traditional journalistic approaches to objectivity – including depoliticized angles that would frame disabled, d/deaf and mad people as tokenized experts, erasing collective movements and meaning-making. when asked to share responses to a journalist’s review of his work, owusu-ansah offered an example of his experience as the subject of a recent media article: i met the author of the article and they seemed pretty excited to meet me, and i was excited to meet them and sit down with them as well. as we had our conversation, it seemed to go fairly well, and when i read the published piece … i felt that it reflected the journalist’s perspective, not mine. representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 325 owusu-ansah’s account points to ongoing questions about the nature of disability representation in mainstream media: how can journalists best represent disability, d/deaf and mad arts, and who should make these decisions? should media reporting reflect the perspective of the journalist, or that of the story’s subject(s), or that of a wider movement or community? traditionally, journalism has responded to such questions by forefronting the value of objectivity. working with objectivity in mind, it can follow that stories which remain true to artists’ self-representations, contexts, and contextual histories while decentring journalists’ own personal views have merits for democratic communication. for instance, objectivity can serve both publics and counterpublics, such as when journalists employ neutrality as they hold politicians accountable. in other contexts, objectivity has been connected to journalism for social justice (hackett, 2010, p. 174). panelist jama reminded the room of news coverage of kent hehr, a disabled federal politician who, in 2018, was accused of sexual harassment. jama spoke to the audience about the value of having, and maintaining, unwavering objectivity: i’m thinking back to...when [hehr] was being talked [about] and covered in the media about having a disability, and his harmful terminology and his harmful behaviour towards women. people from the disability community were lashing back saying, ‘no, he didn’t do those things; he’s disabled. like, you can’t really attack him, that’s ableist.’ no! where is our clear stance on being steadfast and hard front, taking stances against sexism ... no matter who is saying it? even so, objectivity also strives for a normative ideal; the utility of stories that meet normative news values and translate relatively easily to the public is up for debate (hackett, 2010, p. 195). assuming the journalists’ perspective to be unbiased and apolitical and forefronting it aligns with journalism’s long-held episteme of objectivity, or what robert hackett and yeuzhi zhao (1998) have called journalism’s governing “regime of objectivity” (p. 20). hackett (2010) posits that “what objectivity means in practice, however, and whether it is a desirable and achievable goal for reporting in a democratic society, are debatable questions” (p. 180). we might extend hackett’s thought to ask what purpose objectivity serves if, as teodor mladenov (2016) points out, social justice can only be achieved when disabled, d/deaf and mad people have a say in the local and global policies that affect them. as such, there are current calls to dismantle the regime of objectivity in favour of journalism practices which might position journalists as people within their communities, knowledgeable of their histories and politics rather than as objective onlookers. this sentiment emerged in owusu-ansah’s thoughts later: “that individual who interviewed me, i wish they had been able to pick up more, to really hear more, to listen more to what was being said by the community.” though this was not owusu-ansah’s experience, the notion of listening more to what is being said by a collective is one that journalism praxis has taken up elsewhere for decades. journalism takes on different, chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 326 social justice-oriented forms that go by many names: citizen journalism, radical journalism, alternative journalism, participatory journalism, and community journalism, among others (hackett, 2010, pp. 186-187). by contrast with mainstream notions of objectivity, in alternative forms of journalism the roles of journalist and source become less distinct: rather than sources as experts whose thoughts are safely filtered through the “objective journalist, people like owusu-ansah can become conduits for journalists digging deeper into the marginalization and concerns of their own communities (robinson, 2017). yet, even when the media seeks to humanize marginalized groups it is possible for reporters to fall into stereotypical tropes. for example, in their analysis of disability representation in indian news media, nookaraju bendukurthi and usha raman (2016) detect a theme of “goodwill building” among stories that bridge marginalized groups and society – and the market. “in this context,” they write, “journalists often bear the responsibility of creating demand for and acceptance of [disabled people]” by emphasizing disabled people’s capabilities and readiness for work (p. 140). bendukurthi and raman explain this phenomenon as journalists’ attempts to “negotiate with society” while also helping the corporate world within which they are embedded (p. 140). indeed, the reality that news outlets are both sources of democratic information sharing and agents of the market economy demonstrates that journalistic representation is political, despite its attempts to be apolitical. this tension spills over into journalists’ praxis and speaks to the unresolved issue of how journalists can best represent disability, d/deaf, and mad arts. journalism in “crisis” owusu-ansah is not alone in his dissatisfaction with journalistic representation and the overall epistemology of objectivity. yet, changing the traditional ways journalism is done relies on changing the economies in which journalism is practiced. fiscal uncertainty continues to stymie systemic change within the field of journalism. with this in mind, panellist sandals explained that the word “crisis” struck her when she was asked to think about the word “journalism,” and that this word also has a particular way of impinging on the way disability art is covered: before and after the internet there was a certain crisis in journalism, a crisis of exclusion and bias. that is, people who work in journalism, especially before the internet but also after, did not realize how white, straight, abled, and cis the media industry is or was. ‘was and is’ would be a better way to say it. and therefore ... one of the ways this impinged, i think, on disability arts coverage was, ‘well if it doesn’t matter to a white, abled, straight, cis, and primarily male audience, we’re not interested.’ it doesn’t exist for us. we don’t even perceive it. representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 327 sandals described the working conditions for journalists both before and after the internet emerged as a major industry intervention: quick deadlines, conventional narrative storytelling expectations, and protocols that relied on colonial approaches rather than collaborative consensual approaches. “this is often in the name of objectivity,” sandals explained, suggesting that the regime of objectivity continues to hold a strong grip over storytelling traditions. yet, in her arguments against the journalistic, factory-like reliance on objective reporting, sue robinson explains that “today’s journalists must be trained to understand their complicities in what can be toxic struggles and they must be given the knowledge to help rebuild them” (2017, p. 303). or, put another way by anita varma (2019), journalists can be positioned for solidarity. positioning journalists in this way means making space for diversity awareness in journalism classrooms and curriculums, particularly through teaching disability studies (burns, 2016). and for practising journalists, this positioning means imagining more “vibrant, expansive, and complex representations of disability” (titchkosky, 2020, pp. 12-13) and a refusal to reduce social injustice to individual problems with a single source or story, for this approach can “stunt” social change (varma, 2019, p. 117). rather, varma appeals, “journalism that seeks to humanize marginalized communities often begins by symbolically transforming faceless swarms into human beings” (p. 117). humanization, as varma describes it, happens when journalists resist traditional, dehumanizing representations of certain groups as deviant (i.e., homeless people) instead of recognizing larger, social injustices (i.e., income inequality). it is perhaps the humanization of social injustices experienced by disabled, d/deaf and mad people that owusuansah’s story is missing when what is published seems to reflect the journalists’ perspective rather than his own. still, sandals cautioned that the crisis at hand goes beyond practices of inclusive representation and is deeply embedded in the economic trajectory of the field of journalism itself, which relies on a resolute business model: the journalism industry goes, ‘well now we understand we are faced with biases, but we are in a crisis with no resources’... even if we care about it and even if we can pay for it, the coverage we do of disability arts can’t be collaborative, consensual, slow, nuanced, or take unconventional or alternative narrative approaches – and it can’t be untangled with the art itself. indeed, woven into this panel, beyond questions of how journalists can best represent disability, d/deaf, and mad arts and their story subjects, is a bleak reminder that the work of representation is deeply linked to political and economic conditions. as journalists become increasingly disempowered in their attempts to do social justice work, disabled artists and their communities are left with the task of representing themselves. further and importantly, their means, energies and capacities to do this are, as both jama and manning chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 328 remind us, determined in relation to their intersecting experiences with race, class, gender, and sexuality. recommendations for journalists and disabled, d/deaf, mad artists a clear message from this panel is that, frustratingly, the recognition of disability, d/deaf, and mad art as a wide-ranging and diverse movement and practice is long overdue. when this context is included in journalists’ stories, understandings of art creation by disabled, d/deaf, and mad people broaden to include understandings and interpretations distinct from a non-disabled positioning. broadly speaking, panellists recommended to journalists that they aspire to become informed, and more importantly, enter into a critical disability politic (gorman, 2011). this means not only recruiting disability, d/deaf and mad journalists to write reviews, but also learning of the multi-faceted and rich complexities and histories of critical disability arts and culture. this also means learning about the current debates or politics within disability arts and culture that comprise the diverse parts of the movement, and recognizing these movements not as what jama referred to as a “mechanical monolith.” disabled, d/deaf and mad artists need to be asked for their preferred pronouns, identifiers, and terminology when being referenced. in so doing, opportunities for better understanding of the culture and the nuances, including productive tensions around self-representation and cultural norms of specific localities and communities, especially of bipoc (black, indigenous, people of colour) communities, will emerge. artists and journalists can agree for artists to read the copy prior to publication or even have the copy reviewed by the artist as part of the reporting process. this is already an informal practice experienced by the co-authors,3 and it builds trust and accuracy in reporting. journalists and disabled, d/deaf, and mad artists can engage in reciprocal communication to ensure that questions, answers, and copy are satisfactory, especially for disabled, d/deaf, and mad artists. for others working outside of the crisis-riddled industry of journalism, panellists ultimately explained that artists need both control over artistic endeavours and output and influence over representation. this can mean selfpublishing, withdrawing writings that are “edited to oblivion” (in sandal’s words), and supporting disability, d/deaf and mad arts organizations in putting out their own stories. jama expanded on these suggestions: 3 when interviewed by journalists, changfoot often asks to see the copy prior to publication or have the copy read to her as part of the journalistic process. her practice developed from being misquoted or having her meaning inaccurately presented in print, and realizing the importance of finding a process for building trust and understanding; she finds journalists have been obliging. representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 329 we live in an era where it’s so much easier to build social capital online. information is not such that people hold power now through the holding of information; it’s very hard to hold onto it. so, reach out to people online who are wanting to write similar stuff that you are; don’t succumb to people wanting to edit your crap. keep it for yourself. jama’s call is powerful, and we would be bereft to ignore the reality that disabled, d/deaf and mad folx belong to groups that are most likely to be digitally excluded (sourbati, 2012). gerard goggin (2016) points out that the exploration of disability mobilities has much to do with where we live, and those in the urban “smart city” may live with “promises that the coming hyper-digital urbanity will bring major steps forward for accessibility, usability and denizens with disability” while those in rural areas remain left behind (p. 539). yet, like race, gender, and sexuality among others, rurality is increasingly acknowledged as yet another intersectional marker concomitant to disability (pini et al., 2017; soldatic & johnson, 2017). and, even though internet access is an issue facing some communities, research into rural journalism suggests that local content stemming from small communities may be more resilient than that. for example, rural journalism in the united states has been shown to be quite participatory when local residents can share their stories with local media (wenzel, 2019). what’s more, as daniela stehlik (2017, p. 78) points out, place identity is significant, and is often marginalized by urban dominant culture and its assumptions about rural “isolation” as undesirable and absolute. that is to say that although digital exclusion exists, storytelling may be supported in different and rich ways outside of urban centers and, for some, maintaining place identity may trump the prospect of digital inclusion. while jama’s specific recommendation to reach out and engage in online storytelling may not prove accessible to all, it is reflective of the panellists’ general sentiment: a hope that disabled, d/deaf and mad folx will take back some control in the co-constitutive process of representing themselves in ways that align with their communities. conclusion: ableist fault lines and promising crip practices the methods for presentation during this panel on representation were cripped in multiple ways to provide fuller access. notably, considerations around representation began with a collective curation of the panel itself, a curation that allowed folx to step outside of tokenized expert narratives and some semblance of crip time to take precedence. together, all participants were clear to make clear and direct the panel against the ableist tropes of journalism they were all too familiar with, “the supercrip,” or serving as “the definitive representative disabled, d/deaf, mad voice,” or object of and for the journalist’s ableist gaze, instead privileging panellists’ interpretations of the relationship between journalism and disability, d/deaf, and mad arts chelsea jones, nadine changfoot & kirsty johnston studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 330 through open-ended questions and co-constitutively creating intersecting disability, d/deaf, and mad representational considerations. this public discussion reconnects journalism and disability communities, ultimately demonstrating that representation is a critical, co-constitutive process that can become more aesthetically and politically oriented toward disability, d/deaf, and mad artists and art. we – the panel participants who authored this paper – also understand that providing fuller access is an iterative process and have learned the importance of connecting with each panelist individually prior to the presentation in a way that begins with a crip ethos within the specific panel itself. while the panel was held within a more conventional time limit of 60 minutes, panel organizers and panellists co-created it according to a calibrated crip time, making efforts towards enacting crip community within the panel. speakers on the “representation” panel of the 2019 cripping the arts symposium reflected on the lines between journalism and disability, d/deaf, and mad arts in relation to their own engagement with representation. these lines – drawn mainly through panelists’ frustrations over the current, fractured state of affairs as one wherein disabled, d/deaf, and mad artists need both control over artistic endeavours and output and influence over representation – speak to many faults, or fault lines that were felt in the discussion. panelists expressed frustration with how disability, d/deaf, and mad arts are usually represented, as in erlich’s “peeves.” they argued for less journalistic reliance on framing disabled, d/deaf, and mad artists as singular experts that results in tokenizing and erasing of their communities with the accompanying risk of apoliticization. instead, they advocated for greater engagement with rich and meaningful disability, d/deaf, and mad histories and communities that shape their contemporary works. panellists also found affinity in the metaphor of ghosts and the action of ghosting the disabled d/deaf, and mad figure and its histories, particularly in the realm of theatre. the panel also revealed an ongoing battle between storytelling that nurtures a crip aesthetic and disrupts the dominant and obligatory regime of objectivity within which journalists are systemically subject. generally, panellists’ ideas rubbed up against dominant, traditional understandings of journalism that favour timely events, news hierarchies, detached reporting, a consumerist worldview, and the overarching paradigmatic value of objectivity (hackett, 2010, p. 185). however, comments from this panel also reveal representation to be a twoway street with disability, d/deaf, and mad artists struggling to be represented accurately, while journalism, and the people taking up this topic, work in what sandals chillingly calls a crisis. ultimately, panellists warned against journalistic reliance on traditional narratives and instead issued a call for artists to claim and write their own stories – to keep pushing forward the promise of crip practices. this call came with a hopeful closing comment from orsini: representing disability, d/deaf & mad artists & art in journalism studies in social justice, volume 15, issue 2, 307-333, 2021 331 i think there’s hope in understanding [what] moving away from a kind of identity politics necessarily, and thinking about what a focus on non-normative bodies and non-normative minds, brings to artistic practice. that gives me, i hate to use the word ‘hope,’ but that gives me hope. acknowledgements we thank the panelists who generously gave their time and deep sharing. thank you, as well, to cripping the arts for the opportunity to explore, rectify, and advance journalistic representations of disability, d/deaf and mad arts. references abbas, j., church, k., frazee, c., & 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(2019). engaged journalism in rural communities. journalism practice, 13(6), 708722. houston & morse final jan 23 17 correspondence address: serin d. houston, departments of geography and international relations, mount holyoke college, 50 college street, south hadley, massachusetts, 01075, usa; email: shouston@mtholyoke.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 the ordinary and extraordinary: producing migrant inclusion and exclusion in us sanctuary movements serin d. houston mount holyoke college, usa charlotte morse mount holyoke college, usa abstract this article analyzes the sanctuary movement for central americans and the new sanctuary movement, two united states faith-based social movements, to think through the ways in which these pro-immigrant efforts paradoxically render migrants figuratively mute and often excluded from conceptualizations of the nation and its inhabitants even as they advocate for legal inclusion. we examine this tension of inclusion and exclusion through the frequent representation of migrants’ histories and christianity as extraordinary in the sanctuary movement for central americans, and migrants’ lives as ordinary in the new sanctuary movement. we identify two key processes by which this framing of migrants as extraordinary or ordinary limits the enactment of full social, political, and economic inclusion: (a) public support is principally granted to certain stories, religions, identities, and experiences; and (b) migrants are consistently positioned, and often celebrated, by sanctuary activists as “others.” the discourses of migrants as extraordinary or ordinary effectively generate broad involvement of faith communities in sanctuary work. yet, as we argue, this framing comes with the cost of limiting activist support only to particular groups of migrants, flattening the performances of migrant identities, and positioning migrants as perpetually exterior to the us. reliance on discourses of the extraordinary and ordinary, therefore, can truncate opportunities for making legible a range of migration experiences and extending belonging to all migrants, outcomes that arise in contrast to the purported inclusionary goals of the faith-based sanctuary social movements. keywords sanctuary; migration; religion; social movements; united states serin houston, charlotte morse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 28 introduction in march 2012, members of the southside presbyterian church in tucson, arizona gathered to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the church’s public declaration as a sanctuary for central american refugees. to honor this involvement in the broader social movement known as the sanctuary movement for central americans (what we – like purcell (2007) and others – refer to as the sanctuary movement [sm]), congregation members watched footage of the movement’s actions, listened to stories from sanctuary activists, and learned about current immigration policy in the united states (paniagua, 2012). this was a day of honoring faith-based, pro-immigrant activism. in june 2014, a mexican family, comprised of daniel and karla neyoyruiz and their teenaged us-born son carlos,1 sought sanctuary in this very same church due to daniel’s deportation orders. decades had passed since the church offered a safe space for central american asylum seekers, but the symbol of the sanctuary provision remained potent. the family stayed at the church for a month while they awaited an appeal to daniel’s deportation ruling. he ultimately received a one-year stay of removal and a work permit (dickson, 2014). in june 2015, the family moved into sanctuary again in tucson because daniel’s one-year grace period had expired. after about ten days in sanctuary, daniel received another one-year stay of removal (taracena, 2015). such acts of advocating for and providing sanctuary to mixed-status families facing deportation underscore a primary purpose of the new sanctuary movement (nsm). although the sm and the nsm have differences given each movement’s distinct socio-historical contexts, they share a foundation in christian beliefs and practices. for instance, drawing upon liberation theology, both sanctuary movements emphasize bearing witness to atrocities and responding to a higher moral authority (abramsky, 2008; marfleet, 2011; nawyn, 2007). the ethos of “welcoming the stranger” (abramsky, 2008, p. 28) and “responding to your neighbor, [the] christ in each one of us” (willis-conger quoted in fife, corbett, merkt, & willis-conger, 1987, p. 21) are core tenets of the movements and reflect that faith-based social movements frequently anchor their decisions and actions in religious ideals. in the sm and nsm, the expressions of “loving thy neighbor” and welcoming the stranger help faith communities recognize that “living as a person of faith requires action” (hondagneu-sotelo, 2007, p. 11) and that immigration issues pertain to them even if they are white, middle class and us-born. the religious commonality and focus among movement members provides a connective tissue for activist work, which can then intensify the commitment to religious 1 we use actual names for people and places of worship involved in the sanctuary movements because we are analyzing the public narratives of sanctuary, and we want to acknowledge the work of activists and migrants as we examine the prominent narratives about migrants and sanctuary. the ordinary & the extraordinary studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 29 beliefs and the enactment of what is called by activists social justice. although social justice can vary in definition, it generally pertains to a deep concern with persecution and injustice (hondagneu-sotelo, 2007; marfleet, 2011; pirie, 1990). the fusion of social justice ideals and religious beliefs in the sanctuary movements is important for the activism and for our interpretations of the movements. specifically, we take seriously the point that “religion is a human practice” (hondagneu-sotelo, 2007, p. 7), and think through how proimmigrant sanctuary efforts undertaken in the name of social justice can paradoxically render migrants figuratively mute and often excluded from conceptualizations of the nation and its inhabitants even as these efforts advocate for legal inclusion. we examine this tension of inclusion and exclusion through the frequent representation of migrants’ histories and christianity as extraordinary in the sm, and migrants’ lives as ordinary in the nsm. we identify two key processes by which this framing of migrants as extraordinary or ordinary limits the enactment of full social, political, and economic inclusion: (a) public support is principally granted to certain stories, religions, identities, and experiences; and (b) migrants are consistently positioned, and often celebrated, by activists as “others.” the discourses of migrants as extraordinary or ordinary effectively generate broad involvement of faith communities in sanctuary work. yet, as we argue, this framing comes with the cost of limiting activist support only to particular groups of migrants, flattening the performances of migrant identities, and positioning migrants as perpetually exterior to the us. reliance on discourses of the extraordinary and ordinary, therefore, can truncate opportunities for making legible a range of migration experiences and extending belonging to all migrants, outcomes that arise in contrast to the purported inclusionary goals of the faith-based sanctuary social movements. examining the exclusions that emerge alongside efforts for inclusion demonstrates how social justice in theory can depart from social justice in practice. to unpack the narrative of the extraordinary migrant and its influence and impact, we first analyze the sm and illustrate how the repeated focus on the extraordinary hardship and christianity of migrants abbreviated opportunities for migrants to articulate their identities on their own terms. in the second half of the paper, we demonstrate how the discursive framing of the ordinariness of migrants’ lives in the nsm excludes many migrants from consideration of sanctuary, and makes the supported migrants visible in limited capacities. such a reading of the sanctuary movements illustrates the power of narrative framing and the delicate balance between crafting archetypes for activist purposes and negatively simplifying complex life experiences. serin houston, charlotte morse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 30 extraordinary hardship and devoted christians: the sanctuary movement for central americans the sanctuary movement (sm) of the 1980s and 1990s emerged in response to the migration of people from central america – primarily el salvador and guatemala – into the us as a result of political violence and oppression. the motivation for this movement, as described by sanctuary activists themselves, stemmed from a personal violation of a sense of morality and justice, and a desire to help people who had been persecuted (chinchilla, hamilton, & loucky, 2009; fife et al., 1987; golden & mcconnell, 1986; marfleet, 2011; pirie, 1990). the ways in which these impulses translated into a discursive framing of migrants is what we analyze here. in particular, we focus on how the repeated emphasis on the extraordinary hardship and extraordinary christianity of migrants helped garner support for the sm. at the same time, we suggest that this framing excluded migrants from narratives of the us as a nation and limited the representational space available for articulating migrants’ experiences and identities. before we develop our analysis of the sm, we briefly contextualize the movement. the united states’ cold war policy of containing communism caused the us government under president ronald reagan to fund and otherwise support authoritarian regimes in central america that were opposing communist revolutionaries (booth, wade, & walker, 2010). as a result, many central american citizens fled their home countries and sought political asylum in the us. despite the refugee act of 1980, which should have eliminated geographical and ideological biases in asylum acceptance, the us government classified many central american applicants as economic migrants rather than possible refugees fleeing from a “wellfounded fear” (unhcr, 2010, p. 14) of persecution. on this basis, the us government rejected the asylum claims of many central americans (crittenden, 1988, p. 23). outrage about the us government’s role in the central american wars, the constant flow of migrants attempting passage into the us, and the deportation practices that followed helped set the stage for the public formation of the sm (bau, 1985; crittenden, 1988; davidson, 1988; fife et al., 1987; van ham, 2009). specifically, on march 24, 1982, the second anniversary of salvadoran archbishop oscar romero’s assassination by a rightist death squad, southside presbyterian church in tucson, five san francisco east bay congregations, and several other churches openly and publicly declared themselves sanctuaries for central american asylum seekers (coutin, 1993; lorentzen, 1991; ridgley, 2010). these declarations drew attention to the sm as a growing forum of political activism. sanctuary activists assisted migrants across the us-mexican border, housed migrants in places of worship and safe houses, provided material, religious, and legal support, and publicly spoke out about the plight of fleeing central americans and the injustices of us immigration policies. from the beginning, the the ordinary & the extraordinary studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 31 movement had strongholds across the us-mexico border region and california. over time, the sm extended to include tens of thousands of people and comprised a sanctuary network spanning 34 states. lorentzen (1991, p.14) describes it as the “largest civil disobedience movement in north america since the 1960s.” the practice of providing sanctuary to central americans in religious spaces, depicted as harboring illegal aliens in section 274 of the immigration and nationality act (ina), happened enough times that the federal government began to take serious note of the sm. as a result, in 1985 the immigration and naturalization services (ins, now the us citizenship and immigration services) implemented operation sojourner. during this covert operation, federal government employees entered sanctuary communities in arizona to gather information about the evasion of federal law (mccartney, 1985). among the most notable outcomes of these infiltrations were the sanctuary trials in which members of the movement were accused, and a few convicted, for “alien smuggling” charges (carro, 1989). subsequent federal and legal battles led to some gains for migrants. most significantly, in 1990 the us congress introduced temporary protected status (tps), and in 1991 the settlement of the class action lawsuit american baptist churches v. thornburgh created abc status, so named after the plaintiffs. tps granted salvadorans who had entered the us before september 19, 1990, 18 months of legal residency, and abc granted an impartial interview and adjudication for salvadorans and guatemalans present in the us. combined, the two statuses entitled all salvadoran and guatemalans already present in the us to a fair adjudication of asylum petitions (coutin, 2011, p. 581; nawyn, 2007, p. 143). although these designations did not secure full political asylum, tps and abc recipients did achieve temporary legal status in the us. these legal cases illustrate how the sm gained national traction and recognition. the movement focused conversations at the federal scale on immigration policy reform and revealed the power of social movements in helping migrants secure some safety and possible legal status. although we recognize the significance of temporary protective measures and do not want to minimize the crucial role that sanctuary provided, we now draw attention to dominant descriptions of migrants within the sm. perla and coutin (2012, pp. 80, 88) discuss how the ascription of refugee identity to salvadoran migrants by sanctuary activists provided a sense of legal legitimacy and a forum through which to connect with us audiences. simultaneously, they acknowledge that the refugee label constrained migrants’ lived experiences and their recognition as important activists in the movement, as they were expected to perform the role of refugee in ways that fit dominant us expectations. similarly, we argue that the concerted focus on telling stories about the extraordinary hardships endured by migrants and their extraordinary christianity reduced the possibilities for other stories to emerge and for migrants to feel included in the sm. a key part of movement serin houston, charlotte morse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 32 mobilization rested on stories (chinchilla et al., 2009), so the potency of the extraordinary migrant narrative is important to consider. founders of the sm quickly realized the power of stories to stimulate support and used that power as a tool for movement building. consequently, migrants, often described as “prophetic witnesses” (pirie, 1990, p. 382), delivered testimonials to faith communities about perilous border crossings and violence and injustice in their home countries, in order to raise awareness about their situations and expand the reach of the sm (chinchilla et al., 2009; cunningham, 1995; golden and mcconnell, 1986). migrants “provided direct and tangible evidence of conditions most parishioners were otherwise aware of only indirectly and constituted a direct link between the humanitarian and the educational goals of the movement” (chinchilla et al., 2009, p. 107). pirie (1990, p. 381) explains that sanctuary activists experienced a “traumatic awakening” to the brutalities of the wars and the us government’s involvement in such violence primarily through hearing migrants’ stories. john fife, one of the founders of the sm, recalls that prior to meeting central american migrants, he could not have placed el salvador on the map. yet, once he “had to hear about death squads, and churches being machine-gunned, and about priests being murdered” (fife et al., 1987, p. 22), he learned about the region and was called to action in sustained and extensive ways. places and people became visible to him and others through stories of trauma and violence. the repeated and personalized recitation of trauma and persecution by migrants was an important tool for the awareness raising and mobilizing efforts of the sm. yet, such public narratives required migrants primarily to identify themselves vis-à-vis their own trauma and locate themselves as thusly distinctive from their audiences. such practices reveal how efforts made to generate inclusion and make migrants knowable, so as to prompt empathy and support from a broader faith community, also ironically reinscribed migrants as traumatized others. the use of personal accounts of trauma to inspire social activism in other people raises concerns about what gets circulated and publicly consumed in the name of a wider mission. stacey merkt, another early member of the sm, states that hearing the stories from migrants enabled people of faith to show their courage, overcome their fears, and live out their faiths (fife et al., 1987, p. 27). such an assertion indicates that migrants’ stories of extraordinary hardship were often mobilized to give us citizens a chance to deepen their faiths. this practice of capitalizing on a typecast of trauma makes us question the extent to which the goal of advocating for migrant inclusion was undermined by the desire to extend activists’ faiths through encounters with migrants. we surmise that such outcomes do not bear out social justice aspirations. migrants could be subject to deportation if they made themselves physically visible (juffer, 2009), so sanctuary activists often shared migrants’ stories on their behalf (caminero-santagelo, 2012). this marks another venue within which migrants became primarily symbolic and useful for what the ordinary & the extraordinary studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 33 they represented through their experiences. literally muting the voices of migrants themselves, albeit important for safety concerns, points out how othering can happen through material practices. although the discursive framing of the migrants as extraordinary due to their hardships held sway in meetings within faith-communities, the physical hiding and silencing of migrants also situated asylum seekers as extraordinary. if their personal biographies had not been as they were, migrants might have been able to stand and tell their own stories, in the varied and multi-faceted forms that a citizen enjoys. caminero-santagelo (2012, p. 102) suggests that this kind of appropriation and dramatization of migrants’ personal narratives became, on the one hand, a strategic “way of speaking, as the subaltern, that could for once be heard by the american public.” on the other hand, this abstraction of stories from embodied experiences positioned migrants as silent others. the practice of speaking on behalf of others also reduced the literal voice that migrants had within the movement. migrants noted “objectification” and “hierarchies between those who defined and those who were defined” (coutin, 1993, p. 126) in such encounters. the repetition of stories about the extraordinary adversities that migrants suffered further entrenched normative assumptions within the sm about whose stories were profound enough to stimulate support and recognition for the movement. migrants who did not fit the script were often excluded from the movement. for instance, in october 1982, tucson sanctuary workers sent a pair of mayan adolescents from guatemala to sanctuary activists in chicago to receive sanctuary. however, the next week the tucson sanctuary group received a letter from chicago explaining that the pair “had no understanding of the political conflict in central america and were therefore not useful” (crittenden, 1988, p. 91). the teenagers did not convey the narrative of migration that underpinned much of the sanctuary work. their personal stories, though riddled with trauma, did not follow the anticipated script of extraordinary horrors and violence. furthermore, they were mayans who did not speak spanish, so the translation needed to communicate with english-speakers was more complex than activists accustomed to spanishenglish translations could easily orchestrate. purportedly, the adolescents were put back on a bus to tucson, but never arrived. sanctuary workers in tucson assumed that they had been deported, as they never heard of these teens again (crittenden, 1988). the tucson activists deemed the narratives and experiences of these adolescents extraordinary and worthy of sanctuary. in contract, the chicagobased activists heard the testimonials of these teens differently, and did not see the adolescents as useful representations of the need for sanctuary. therefore, the teens, as not extraordinary enough to be given the chance for sanctuary, were sent back. as this example shows, the narrative of the extraordinary migrant shrank the space available for describing migration, one’s life experiences, and the need for safety. consequently, exclusions emerged alongside efforts for inclusion. serin houston, charlotte morse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 34 another key avenue through which migrant exclusion unfolded alongside aspirations for migrant inclusion was the sanctuary activists’ descriptions of migrants’ christianity. as we explain below, migrants’ devotion to christianity was seen as more pure and authentic than that of us-born activists. we understand this emphasis on migrants’ christianity as another channel through which the narrative of the extraordinary migrant surfaced. the sense of awe articulated by sanctuary activists about migrants’ christianity carried particular weight because of the centrality of religion to the sm. as with the descriptions of migrants’ hardships, the celebration of migrants’ christianity helped generate support for the sm and perpetuate notions that migrants were different (i.e., other) than the christian us activists engaged in the sanctuary movement. therefore, even though accolades about the purity of migrants’ christianity were meant to support and include migrants, they also worked to position migrants as outside the parameters of us christian practices. in this way, the esteemed extraordinary christianity of the migrants drew activists to them and their cause and excluded migrants from the us-based faith communities. the migrants’ extraordinariness in terms of religion prompted both support and exclusion. john fife explains that after he went to central america for the first time in 1982, he became “converted”: “i discovered a new way of reading scripture, of seeing the community of faith under enormous pressure and persecution respond with courage and faith” (fife et al., 1987, p. 26). he further notes that “covenant communities” throughout the us experienced “spiritual reformation,” akin to the 16th century reformation, through encounters with migrants gaining assistance in the sm (fife et al., 1987, p. 26). fife is not alone in his depictions of the religious practices of central americans as prompting conversions and spiritual reformation, descriptions that we understand as proxies for the extraordinary. many sanctuary activists experienced a “conversion” (coutin, 1993) or “baptism” (purcell, 2007) through the figurative and literal border crossings necessitated by their participation in the sm. activists claimed that migrants were closer to god than the white, middle-class activists, and therefore were sources of knowledge and inspiration (coutin, 1993, p. 71). sanctuary activists further named faith, truth, life, spirit, courage, and strength as attributes the central americans could teach them, while saying they (i.e., the activists) only offered tangible items, like material aid, technology, and nutrition to the migrants (coutin, 1993, p. 155). as witness to this perspective, bob, an involved activist, explained, “i’m not there to minister to [the central americans]. they minister to me” (as quoted in purcell, 2007, p. 127). from our vantage point, this representation of migrants’ christianity both homogenized migrants and positioned them as others. it also situated migrants as vehicles for encountering and then mimicking profound christian devotion. migrants served as the terrain through which sanctuary activists could rekindle and expand their religious practices and give purpose to their days. possibilities for political solidarity, and the recognition of a the ordinary & the extraordinary studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 35 plurality of experiences, were minimized when such perceptions and practices prevailed, because of the uneven relationship created between activists and migrants. the need for migrants to fulfill the role of providing conversion experiences meant that there were incentives for migrants to perform christianity in ways that enabled activists to extend their own faith practices. we contend that a commitment to such a framing of migrants as extraordinary christians promoted othering and reduced chances for coalition building and agency, key components of social justice. the sanctuary movement for central americans arose from the concerns about systemic violence and injustices expressed by us-born, primarily white, people of faith. drawing upon religious ideals to guide and compel this movement, sanctuary activists assisted migrants in crossing the us/mexico border, getting out of detention, and gaining access to the us legal system. stories of extraordinary horror and violence inspired support for and grew the movement. at the same time, the repeated narratives of trauma reduced migrants to their experiences of atrocities, and diminished the possibility for articulating other identities, for forging commonality with citizen activists, and for claiming self-authorship and voice. public support was principally granted to people who shared a particular narrative of trauma, one that became more normative and entrenched over time. additionally, the celebration of migrants’ christianity and the associated experiences of conversion paradoxically further positioned migrants as others. migrants were perceived as religiously different than sanctuary activists, even though most identified as christian, and therefore served as sites for deepening activists’ christianity. moreover, although migrants were celebrated for their religious beliefs and devotion, this status situated them as exterior to us-based faith communities. a key stated goal of the sm was greater migrant inclusion within the us; yet, by analyzing the narrative of the extraordinary migrant put forward in the sm, it becomes evident that exclusions materialized alongside efforts for inclusion. these examples from the sm collectively raise questions about what non-reductive frameworks social movements could use to gain support, build solidarity, and achieve political and social change. these questions persist in the case of the nsm and the narrative of the ordinary migrant. another ordinary american: mixed-status families and the new sanctuary movement the new sanctuary movement (nsm) strives “to defend, protect, and advocate for immigrant families’ rights – lifting up their humanity and spotlighting the immoral and, some would argue, illegal immigration policies that would rip families apart” (purcell, 2007, p. 4). through this focus, the nsm principally advocates for granting legal status to unauthorized migrants, particularly parents of us citizen children, by highlighting the serin houston, charlotte morse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 36 hardship and trauma induced by “unauthorized existence, familial separations, and living in fear of deportation” (caminero-santagelo, 2012, p. 93). in drawing attention to specific families as symbols of the horrors of deportation-caused family separation, the nsm aims to humanize immigration debates, call for comprehensive immigration reform, and enable religious conversion through changing us-born faith communities’ “hearts and minds” (yukich, 2013a, p. 43) about immigration. much like members of the sm, nsm activists express faith-based motivations and often justify their participation in the movement with religious language (abramsky, 2008; kotin, dyrness, & irazábal, 2011). descriptions of and justifications for the nsm state the need to “welcome the stranger” as described in leviticus 19, “love thy neighbor as thyself” as outlined in luke 10, and “learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (new sanctuary movement, 2015, p. 3) as stated in isaiah 1.2 despite the significant shared religious foundations, an important discursive difference exists between the sm and nsm. specifically, while the sm focused on the extraordinary hardship and christianity of central american asylum seekers, the nsm rationalizes its advocacy and builds support for the movement through an emphasis on the stated ordinariness of unauthorized migrants in mixed-status families. migrants living in sanctuary are routinely framed as just like every other american. they are depicted in public stories and media coverage as the average (and reified) us resident: heterosexual, married, with children, and employed (salvatierra, 2007, p. 3; yukich, 2013a). the power granted to the narrative that migrants are analogous to ordinary citizens means that migrants are encouraged to emphasize their roles as workers, husbands or wives, and parents. consequently, there is limited space available for plural and alternative narratives of the self to emerge and for migrants who may not fit into these categories to be seen. setting up the evaluative metric of who is ordinary and thus worth supporting, and who is not (yukich, 2013b), illustrates how othering practices unfold through such framing. although such labeling effectively distinguishes migrants represented as ordinary from those who raise concern, the categorical ordering also demonstrates how migrants are persistently located as exterior to the us and within a constrained representation. even though caminero-santagelo (2012, p. 93) notes that the nsm is an “effort to challenge the exclusion of the undocumented from the nation-state,” the use of the ordinary migrant frame does not wholly advance this political ambition. indeed, as we show in this section, the narrative of unauthorized migrants living in sanctuary as ordinary simultaneously contributes to exclusionary practices and creates calls for inclusionary measures. before we 2 leviticus and isaiah are books in the old testament bible; luke is a book (one of the gospels) in the new testament bible. the ordinary & the extraordinary studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 37 examine the ordinary migrant frame, we offer some context for this contemporary sanctuary movement. the wider political anti-immigration climate and the rise of the religious right had significant impacts on the formation of the nsm (yukich, 2013a). within this broad ambit, different origin stories of the movement exist. yukich (2013a), for example, explains that a december 2005 letter to president george w. bush from cardinal roger mahoney, archbishop of los angeles, awakened the “moral imagination” (salvatierra, 2007, p. 2) of people in the us and initiated conversations about the development of a renewed sanctuary movement. in contrast, in an interview with alternative news site truthout, a national grassroots coordinator for immigrant rights at church world service traces the nsm’s origins to the swift raids of 2006,3 and the subsequent activist responses (bader, 2014). highlighting a different place and year, irazábal and dyrness (2010) identify the nsm’s origin as a january 2007 meeting of various faith organizations in washington dc to listen to testimonies of mixed-status families grappling with the threat of deportation. bell (2010) suggests that the movement actually began in chicago in 2006 when elvira arellano, an unauthorized mexican migrant with a us citizen son, sought sanctuary in the adalberto united methodist church after receiving deportation orders. arellano, often described as “the [eventual] poster child for the movement” (abramsky, 2008, p. 26), lived in sanctuary with her son for a year. when she was deported in august 2007 after attending an immigrant right’s event in los angeles, outrage about her experiences sparked further growth of the movement (abramsky, 2008). she returned to the us to seek asylum in 2014 and sought sanctuary in the adalberto church once again (engler, 2014). her persistence in protesting immigration laws that separate mixed-status families has caused people to liken her to rosa parks (thayer, rodriguez, & perez jr., 2014). irrespective of the precise beginning of this faith-based social movement, the focus on mixed-status families facing separation due to deportation orders, and the mandate to expand public and personal understandings of religion through political activism, underpin the nsm. faith communities partner with migrants as a way to personalize immigration and help congregants realize that immigration questions are religious and moral ones (yukich, 2013a). as of 2016, the nsm consisted of over 300 faith communities in twelve cities throughout the us (sanctuary2014, 2016). the specific manner in which mixed-status families interface with nsm activists around sanctuary has changed somewhat over the last ten years. for instance, in the early years of the nsm, activists focused on hosting in sanctuary “representative families who would become the face of the immigrant reality” (salvatierra, 2007, p. 2). these families usefully 3 the swift raids refers to the coordinated immigration and customs enforcement (ice) raids on six meat-processing plants owned by swift & company in six states. about 1,300 unauthorized migrants working at the plants were arrested during these raids (bader, 2014). serin houston, charlotte morse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 38 embodied the struggles for mixed-status families that compelled the nsm, and therefore served as figureheads. as dyrness and irazábal (2007) explain, “by showcasing the circumstances of a few individuals who voluntarily come forward to claim sanctuary, it [the nsm] hopes to call attention to the plight of the millions of immigrants who live in fear of arrest and separation from their families.” members of these initial representative families occasionally lived in sanctuary at a place of worship because immigration and customs enforcement (ice) seldom enters schools or places of worship to complete arrests (us immigration and customs enforcement, 2011, p. 2). more commonly, nsm activists welcomed unauthorized migrant parents facing deportation into a community of sanctuary, where congregants would accompany migrants to detention hearings, advocate for stays of removal, take care of children, and offer emotional and spiritual support during trying times (yukich, 2013a). the 2014 resurgence of the nsm still values the practice of providing sanctuary, but the sanctuary seekers are seemingly more self-selecting, rather than hand-picked as was the case earlier. for the most part, these individuals seek sanctuary in places of worship in an effort to resist deportation orders. although the representative families profiled in the early days of the nsm had national origins from all over the world (yukich, 2013a), the people living in sanctuary since 2014 have predominantly identified as latino/a. as a 2015 organizing pamphlet circulated to congregations and faith communities considering or engaging in sanctuary explains, “sanctuary can be utilized as a way to protect central american children and families from being deported back to violence and persecution” (new sanctuary movement, 2015, p. 4). this regional focus stems from noted concern about the rise in unaccompanied minors from central america coming into the us and the growth in raids in many latino/a communities (new sanctuary movement, 2015). the places of worship now affiliated with the nsm predominantly identify as christian (yukich, 2013a). despite some of these variations between the early years and current expressions of the nsm, the frame of the ordinary migrant remains. the ordinariness of migrants matters both in the public representations of mixed-status families and in the process of securing sanctuary. as a nsm organizing pamphlet from 2007 indicates, not all families are appropriate for sanctuary. the pamphlet recommends recruiting families with the following characteristics: …a good work record and a history of contributing to their community. it is also helpful when families can speak from the heart about their love for their children, their neighborhood, their community and this country, as well as their religious faith. (new sanctuary movement, 2007, p. 2) the underlying assumption in this description is that families who possess such qualities are easier to help because they are ultimately more legible to members of the faith communities that would support sanctuary. as one of the ordinary & the extraordinary studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 39 the early goals of the nsm was to build compassionate relations between us-born, predominantly white, members of faith communities and unauthorized migrants, relatability between the groups was key. not just any unauthorized migrant would do. anyone entering into sanctuary should be ordinary enough (i.e., married, heterosexual, parent, and employed as indicated in the description above) to be familiar as a proto-neighbor or community member for the us-born activists (houston, 2016; see also yukich, 2013a). put differently, “it is critically important for the average american to hear the stories of immigrants that break negative stereotypes” (new sanctuary movement, 2007, p. 2). ensuring that families in sanctuary could perform such work through their ordinariness was therefore crucial for the movement. to further build bridges between migrants and citizen activists, the pamphlet cites the importance of selecting families for sanctuary who have clean legal records (or at worst, distant and minor infractions), and families who have a high likelihood of gaining a stay of removal (new sanctuary movement, 2007, pp. 2-3). the nsm legal briefing advises that families with a possible avenue for circumventing deportation may “need sanctuary for a shorter time period than families without potential relief from deportation, and the end result of granting sanctuary may be less traumatic than offering sanctuary to a family that inevitably faces deportation” (center for human rights and constitutional law, 2007, p. 3). in other words, the recommendation is to offer sanctuary to individuals for whom a stay of removal is fairly likely. similarly, an updated 2015 organizing pamphlet recommends individuals who face deportation, but have a strong chance of securing prosecutorial discretion, as preferable sanctuary dwellers. indeed, migrants who “have a reasonable potential of receiving a stay of removal, order of supervision or some other form of administrative relief” (new sanctuary movement, 2015, p. 6) are especially welcomed into sanctuary. only a handful of families met these stringent criteria and lived in sanctuary during the initial years of the nsm (dyrness and irazábal, 2007). one key participant and representative member of early sanctuary was liliana “santuario” who, with her infant son, moved into sanctuary at an united church of christ in simi valley, ca in may 2007 to avoid deportation and separation from her us citizen children and husband (abramsky, 2008, p. 26). her residence in the church caused sustained and vocal counter-protest. in the midst of cries that she was “illegal” and a “criminal,” liliana and her supporters sought to demonstrate her humanness to the opposition. put differently, they sought to blur the distinction between citizen and noncitizen by highlighting her ordinary – and recognizable – identities as a mother, a wife, and a long-standing community member (jcfjcjcfjcf, 2011). drawing on religious tenets, activists emphasized that liliana and her family were all children of god (jcfjcjcfjcf, 2011; yukich, 2013a). indeed, this mixed-status family was similar to any other family except that they faced the devastating prospect of separation due to serin houston, charlotte morse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 40 deportation. after three years of living in sanctuary, liliana was granted deferred action status. for the following five years, her attorney and supporters worked to transform her status into something more permanent. they were successful, and in late 2015 liliana received a green card (larkman, 2016). liliana’s story is one that shows how sanctuary can lead to changes in individual legal status and can transform communities’ understanding of and personal commitment to immigration reform. through tireless advocacy and support, liliana gained formal inclusion within the us. she can now narrate her own story of self and more fully and publicly perform her range of identities. yet, this was not always the case. abramsky describes the early days of liliana’s journey in sanctuary: liliana, a beautiful young woman, is always surrounded by handlers. she claims to be keeping a diary, in english, designed to help her learn the language, but the diary, which her handlers urge her to read to me, has clearly been written by a publicist. “this is a country of opportunity,” she reads aloud, her handler correcting her pronunciation. “but where is the love and compassion? when i think of the united states, i think of the statue of liberty. give us your poor and free and huddled masses. i yearn to breathe free.” liliana’s handler looks at her. “very good. excellent,” she tells her. (abramsky, 2008, p. 27) this depiction of liliana illustrates our central point about the exclusions that surfaced alongside efforts at inclusion. the representational space available for liliana to tell her own story in her own language and to describe her reasons for seeking sanctuary was virtually non-existent when she lived in sanctuary. instead, she became visible within the public sphere principally through a script, which drew upon cultural referents, such as the statue of liberty and the trope of the land of opportunity, that may have carried more weight with the citizen audience than liliana herself. this management of public image ultimately constrained the discursive space available for narrating her story and explaining migration through an individualized and intersectional lens. additionally, even though liliana moved into sanctuary in hopes of securing long-term legal inclusion within the us, being in sanctuary required her to repeatedly identify – and become known as – an unauthorized migrant, which situated liliana as exterior to the nation. this positionality and praxis incited vocal opposition to liliana and her sanctuary, which further marked her as other. after many years, liliana’s goal of political inclusion reached fruition. yet, the process of securing this inclusion also produced exclusions, both for liliana herself and for the wider community of unauthorized migrants who remained invisible due to the nsm’s concentration on representative mixed-status families with specific characteristics. the positioning of migrants’ lives as ordinary is still prevalent in the nsm. for example, arturo armando hernández garcia, husband of ana and father of two daughters (the youngest of whom is a us citizen), lived in sanctuary in the first unitarian church of denver, colorado, from october 2014 the ordinary & the extraordinary studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 41 through july 2015 (mcghee, 2015). public storytelling by journalists and sanctuary activists alike underscored that hernández garcia was an ordinary person who worked hard, cared for his family, and contributed to society. for example, melanie asmar wrote the following in a story about hernández garcia: he got a driver’s license the last year it was legal for undocumented immigrants to do so before the law changed again in 2014, and renewed it regularly. he paid his taxes and never used false documents or a stolen social security number. he learned english and eventually started his own flooring business, negotiating to win jobs installing tile and ceramic floors in big apartment complexes. (asmar, 2015) articles about hernández garcia emphasize that a 2010 felony charge of menacing with a weapon at a workplace altercation resulted in a jury verdict of not guilty (asmar, 2015). bridging the distance between citizen and noncitizen through explaining and rationalizing any tarnish on a record is important for acquiring support. narratives of ordinariness help with this project as a groundswell petition on hernández garcia’s behalf indicates: “arturo is a loving husband, father of two children and small business owner who has lived in the us for 15 years” (groundswell, 2014a). the stories about hernández garcia underscore his ordinariness as heterosexual, married, a father, and a business owner to draw attention to the unfairness of his deportation situation (houston, 2016). similarly, the minor traffic violation that brought rosa robles loreto, who lived in sanctuary for 15 months in tucson, arizona, at the southside presbyterian church (prendergast, 2015), into the sightline of authorities is downplayed in her public narrative. advocacy on her behalf stresses, “rosa has two beautiful boys, a loving husband, and has lived in tucson since 1999. she is an active member of the community, volunteers at her church, her sons’ school, and their baseball teams” (groundswell, 2014b). according to these narratives, she is basically an ordinary citizen in every way except legal status. the dimensions of her life that become visible do so principally through the sanctioned and selective typology of the ordinary migrant. the current mobilization around jose juan federico moreno, who moved into sanctuary in chicago in april 2016, echoes this narrative pattern. descriptions of moreno highlight his roles as a “loving husband and father of five us-born children” (groundswell, 2016). his charge of an aggravated dui (driving under the influence of alcohol) is explained away within the context of his unauthorized status. emphasizing moreno’s identities as a dad and husband works to elicit empathy for his case. as all of these examples make plain, the narratives of migrants living in sanctuary “are less about violence and terror than about the quotidian, ordinary life they have built … we have been here for years; we have contributed to the society, our communities, and the national economy; and we have raised our children here” (caminero-santagelo, 2012, p. 96). throughout the nsm, the focus on serin houston, charlotte morse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 42 sanctuary seekers as ordinary community and family members who embody moral lives in the us, but now confront potential devastation, or death, through deportation, has been persistent. when living in sanctuary, migrants and their families are offered up for public consumption through scripted sound bites. the ordinary frame becomes a largely depersonalized rendition of individuals because migrants are primarily described as married, employed, heterosexual, and with children. other family constellations and life histories do not achieve recognition in such public storytelling. consequently, each person and case sounds the same. even though the nsm works with a few families as representatives of a wider group, this handful becomes ubiquitous in their depictions of ordinariness. this leads us to question the primary purpose of providing sanctuary – is it mostly to grow the nsm and raise awareness about unfair immigration policies through assisting particular migrants with relatively uncomplicated (and presumably successful) cases? or, perhaps it is to provide a venue for white, politically progressive, and religious citizens to become more informed about immigration issues? where is the concern for the unauthorized migrants facing deportation who do not fit the sanctuary criteria? admittedly, the focus on the ordinariness of migrants has been effective in certain cases; robles loreto and hernández garcia learned they were low priorities for ice, so felt safe enough to leave sanctuary, and liliana got a green card. still, we argue that the use of the ordinary motif also curtails the possibilities for expressing the self in multiple ways and enacting inclusion and belonging for the dynamic and multi-faceted millions of unauthorized migrants residing in the us. even though the nsm works to include unauthorized migrants, the primary way of doing so (i.e., by emphasizing ordinariness) also excludes many people and life experiences. much like the use of the extraordinary in the sanctuary movement, this approach ultimately minimizes the space available for articulating a plurality of identities (beyond heterosexual, married, employed, and parent) and sets up boundaries around who is worthy of advocacy and inclusion within imaginaries of the nation. this strikes us as detrimental, since migrants are pushed further to the margins of public recognition if they do not fit the anticipated script, and migrants’ own sense of agency and autonomy is significantly diminished when they have to adhere to the predetermined narrative of the ordinary migrant. conclusion in this paper, we critically examine the narrative frame of the extraordinary and ordinary migrant within the sm and nsm to unpack how these two faith-based social movements worked to advance, and in the process also constrained, the goal of expanded legal status for unauthorized migrants. by the ordinary & the extraordinary studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 43 paying particular attention to the underlying logics and assumptions of these narratives, we reveal how experiences of otherness for migrants are instantiated and how support for unauthorized migrants is principally granted to people who fit within the categories (and associated expectations) of the extraordinary or ordinary migrant. this analysis, therefore, demonstrates how the sanctuary movements produce inclusion and exclusion for migrants, and shows how pressures to have viability and longevity as a movement can undermine the goals of contesting discrimination and marginalization. highlighting how the narratives of the extraordinary and ordinary migrant emerge in the sanctuary movements helps explain why and how inclusionary social justice ambitions do not always unfold as intended. the formation of the sanctuary movements stemmed from overarching concerns with persecution and injustice. yet, efforts made to remedy these situations often relied on narrow typecasts of migrants that were not necessarily beneficial to individuals or migrant communities more broadly. as a result, it is unsurprising to us that few immigrants or people of color participate in the nsm as activists (yukich, 2013a). yukich (2013a) reports that many immigrants and immigrant activist groups feel unwelcome because of the few people of color in the nsm, the particular christian overtones, and the commitment to evolving the faith of us-born people through interactions with unauthorized migrants. the desire to deepen the faiths of us-born activists illustrates once again how priorities of the us-born often supersede the needs of migrants and direct the mechanisms for social change. using the ordinary and extraordinary to analyze the sanctuary social movements also raises questions about activism and social change tactics. an organizing pamphlet from the nsm stresses that, “we are not the leaders of this movement, those in sanctuary are. … we should always remember that sanctuary is not something that we do for our undocumented brothers and sisters, it is something we do with them” (new sanctuary movement, 2015, p. 7, emphasis in the original). although this sentiment hints at a solidarity approach, in practice sanctuary seekers are very beholden to the faith communities supporting them financially, emotionally, legally, and spiritually and do not have much latitude in the narratives of their life experiences, as our many examples attest. bagelman (2016, p. xvi) depicts people living in sanctuary as occupying a “suspended state” as they are neither here nor there and instead are waiting for some sort of adjudication on their case. she, along with others, describes living in sanctuary as a “sometimes prison-like form of protection” (bagelman, 2016, p. xvii), as people are physically constrained within the boundaries of the safe sanctuary space. in such a setting, where questions of power and access are dramatically skewed, it is easy to understand how the practice of charitable helping adopts a more prominent role than solidarity. still, we question what sanctuary activism could look like if a solidarity ethos of working together and a commitment to self-reflexivity came to the fore. how might a default to easy depictions of the extraordinary or ordinary migrant fade away with serin houston, charlotte morse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 44 such an approach? what might social justice mean, and what form would it assume in such instances? although we cannot predict what a reconfigured sanctuary movement based upon equity and solidarity would look like in practice, we can identify patterns wherein sanctuary is reductive even when applied in secular settings, such as the case of sanctuary legislation, “local immigration policies, resolutions and/or ordinances that counter exclusionary state or federal legislation” (houston & lawrence-weilmann, 2015, p. 101). many of the provisions offered to migrants in sanctuary legislation are legitimized because of the economic contributions of migrants or the ways in which migrants physically embody multiculturalism within a city (houston & lawrence-weilmann, 2015). the dependence on such “neoliberal logics” (houston & lawrence-weilmann, 2015, p. 103) within sanctuary legislation demonstrates that both faith-based and secular engagements with sanctuary paradoxically rely on typecasts of migrants in their efforts to produce broader support for migrants themselves and for immigration reform. thus, we believe that sanctuary as a currently practiced form of governance or social movement limits the extent of political, social, and economic inclusion of migrants. dynamic social change will require refashioned approaches and narrative frames that cultivate solidarity and belonging in policy realms and social mobilizations. such transformations could help reshape the terrain of immigration reform debates and the daily material realities for many migrants in the us. these transitions would be worthy, in our estimation, of the description “extraordinary,” and they would qualitatively remake ordinary daily life. acknowledgments the authors would like to thank olivia lawrence-weilmann, kiana lussier, and quinn wallace for many inspiring and fascinating conversations about sanctuaries. they also extend their thanks to ned houston and richard wright for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. the anonymous reviewers and editor david butz supplied incredibly helpful and extensive feedback, which made this paper much stronger. the authors are grateful for the constructive comments and support. finally, dean of faculty research assistantship grants from mount holyoke college enabled the collaboration that sparked this paper. the authors are very appreciative of this funding. references abramsky, s. 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(2010). the sanctuary movement: how broken immigration policies affect cities. los gatos, ca: smashwords. booth, j. a., wade, c. j., & walker, t. w. (2010). understanding central america (5th edition). boulder, co: westview press. caminero-santagelo, m. (2012). the voice of the voiceless: religious rhetoric, undocumented immigrants, and the new sanctuary movement in the united states. in r. lippert & s. rehaag (eds.), sanctuary practices in international perspectives: migration, citizenship, and social movements (pp. 92-105). new york: routledge. carro, j. (1989). municipal and state sanctuary declarations: innocuous symbolism or improper dictates? pepperdine law review, 16(2), 297-328. center for human rights and constitutional law. (2007). new sanctuary movement legal toolkit. los angeles: center for human rights and constitutional law. chinchilla, n., hamilton, n., & loucky, j. (2009). the sanctuary movement and central american activism in los angeles. latin american perspectives, 36, 101-126. coutin, s. (1993). the culture of protest: religious activism and the us sanctuary movement. boulder, co: westview press. coutin, s. (2011). falling outside: excavating the history of central american asylum seekers. law & social inquiry, 36(3), 569-596. cunningham, h. (1995). god and caesar at the rio grande: sanctuary and the politics of religion. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. crittenden, a. (1988). sanctuary: a story of american conscience and the law in collision. new york: weidenfeld & nicolson. davidson, m. (1988). convictions of the heart: jim corbett and the sanctuary movement. tucson, az: university of arizona press. dickson, c. (2014, november 6). this church is reviving the sanctuary movement to shelter undocumented immigrants from deportation. the daily beast. retrieved from www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/11/this-church-is-reviving-the-sanctuarymovement-to-shelter-undocumented-immigrants-from-deportation.html dyrness, g., & irazábal, c. (2007, september 2). a sanctuary for immigrants. the los angeles times. retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-op-dyrness2sep02-story.html engler, r. (2014, april 1). elvira arellano the illegal alien returns to chicago. american thinker. retrieved from http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/04/elvira_arellano_the_illegal_alien_return s_to_chicago.html fife, j., corbett, j., merkt, s., & willis-conger, p. (1987). the sanctuary movement: conspiracy of compassion. in j. wallis (ed.), the rise of christian conscience: the emergence of a dramatic renewal movement in the church today (pp. 17-29). london: macmillan. golden, r., & mcconnell, m. (1986). sanctuary: the new underground. maryknoll, ny: orbis books. groundswell. (2014a). ask the department of homeland security: ‘where’s the discretion? grant arturo a stay!’. groundswell. retrieved from https://action.groundswellmvmt.org/petitions/tell-the-obama-administration-save-arturo-from-beingdeported?source=facebook-share-button&time=1414081587 groundswell. (2014b). tell the obama administration: save rosa from being deported. groundswell. retrieved from https://action.groundswell-mvmt.org/petitions/tell-theobama-administration-save-rosa-from-being-deported serin houston, charlotte morse studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 46 groundswell. (2016). tell chicago ice: don’t deport jose juan, father of 5. groundswell. retrieved from https://action.groundswell-mvmt.org/petitions/tell-chicago-ice-don-tdeport-jose-juan-father-of-5?bucket=&source=twitter-share-button hondagneu-sotelo, p. (2007). religion and a standpoint theory of immigrant social justice. in p. hondagneu-sotelo (ed.), religion and social justice for immigrants (pp. 3-15). new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. houston, s., & lawrence-weilmann, o. (2015). the model migrant and multiculturalism: analyzing neoliberal logics in us sanctuary legislation. in h. bauder & c. matheis (eds.), migration policy and practice: interventions and solutions (pp. 101-126). new york: palgrave macmillan. houston, s. (2016). sacred squatting: seeking sanctuary in religious spaces. in s. chattapadhyay & p. mudu (eds.), migration, squatting, and radical autonomy (pp. 183188). new york: routledge. irazábal, c., & dyrness, g. (2010). promised land? immigration, religiosity, and space in southern california. space and culture, 13, 356-375. jcfjcjcfjcf. (2011). new sanctuary movement with liliana. video retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypkehvgqtvo juffer, j. (2009). compassion and rage: the face of the migrant. south atlantic quarterly, 108(1), 219-235. kotin, s., dyrness, g., & irazábal, c. (2011). immigration and integration: religious and political activism for/with immigrants in los angeles. progress in development studies, 11(4), 263-284. larkman, c. (2016, may 16). a california congregation celebrates sanctuary. united church of christ. retrieved from http://www.ucc.org/news_california_congregation_celebrates_liliana_s_sanctuary_051520 16 lorentzen, r. (1991). women in the sanctuary movement. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. marfleet, p. (2011). understanding ‘sanctuary’: faith and traditions of asylum. journal of refugee studies, 24(3), 440-455. mccartney, s. (1985, october 24). the governments’ ‘operation sojourner.’ the lewiston daily sun, p. 4. retrieved from https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zcpaaaaibaj&sjid=gggfaaaaibaj&pg=1266%2c4599628 mcghee, t. (2015, september 5). in metro denver illegally, arturo garcia worked and lived in shadows. the denver post. retrieved from http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28766138/metro-denver-illegally-arturo-garciaworked-and-lived nawyn, s. (2007). welcoming the stranger: constructing an interfaith ethic of refuge. in p. hondagneu-sotelo (ed.), religion and social justice for immigrants (pp. 141-156). new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. new sanctuary movement. (2007). new sanctuary movement tool kit. interfaith movement for immigrant justice. retrieved from http://static1.squarespace.com/static/56948ad40e4c11c98e2e1871/t/56cba7574c2f85d6f12 4b4c9/1456187224346/new+sanctuary+toolkit.pdf new sanctuary movement. (2015). sanctuary not deportation: a faithful witness to building welcoming communities. retrieved from http://sanctuary2014.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/10/sanctuarytoolkit-updated-final.docx paniagua, t. (2012). sanctuary movement: 3 decades of activism. arizona public media. retrieved from https://www.azpm.org/s/8379-sanctuary-movement-3-decades-of-activism/ prendergast, c. (2015, november 11). rosa robles loreto leaves sanctuary of tucson church. arizona daily star. retrieved from http://tucson.com/news/local/rosa-robles-loretoleaves-sanctuary-of-tucson-church/article_2e0ae3c4-8891-11e5-b998-173e7444fbbf.html perla, h., & coutin, s. (2012). legacies and origins of the 1980s us-central american sanctuary movement. in r. lippert & s. rehaag (eds.). sanctuary practices in international perspectives: migration, citizenship, and social movements (pp. 73-91). new york: routledge. the ordinary & the extraordinary studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 27-47, 2017 47 pirie, s. (1990). the origins of a political trial: the sanctuary movement and political justice. yale journal of law and the humanities, 2(2), 381-416. purcell, e. (ed.). (2007). the public sanctuary movement, a historical basis of hope: oral histories, book i. san francisco: sanctuary oral history project. ridgley, j. (2010). cities of refuge: citizenship, legality, and exception in u.s. sanctuary cities (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of toronto, toronto. salvatierra, a. (2007). sacred refuge: with comprehensive immigration reform off the congressional agenda, the new sanctuary movement steps into the breach. sojourners magazine, 36(9), 12-14. sanctuary2014. (2016). sanctuary movement. retrieved from www.sanctuary2014.org/ taracena, m. (2015, june 18). undocumented father gets another one-year stay, leaving sanctuary at tucson church. the range. retrieved from http://www.tucsonweekly.com/therange/archives/2015/06/18/father-re-enters-sanctuaryat-tucson-church-after-one-year-deportation-stay-granted-by-ice-expires thayer, k., rodriguez, m., & perez jr., j. (2014, march 23). immigration protester back at chicago church that sheltered her. chicago tribune. retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-elvira-arellano-immigrationchicago-20140323-story.html unhcr (united nations high commissioner for refugees). (2010). convention and protocol relating to the status of refugees. geneva: united nations. us immigration and customs enforcement. (2011). policy 10029.2: enforcement actions at or focused on sensitive locations. retrieved from https://www.ice.gov/doclib/erooutreach/pdf/10029.2-policy.pdf van ham, l. (2009). sanctuary revisited: central american refugee assistance in the history of church-based immigrant advocacy. political theology, 10, 621-645. yukich, g. (2013a). one family under god: immigration policies and progressive religion in america. new york: oxford university press. yukich, g. (2013b). constructing the model immigrant: movement strategy and immigrant deservingness in the new sanctuary movement. social problems, 60(3), 302-320. correspondence address: cemal burak tansel, school of politics and international relations, university of nottingham, b111 law and social sciences, university park, nottingham, ng7 2rd, united kingdom. tel.: +44 (0)115 951 4862, email: ldxcbt@nottingham.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 161-163, 2013 review of global justice networks: geographies of transnational solidarity cemal burak tansel university of nottingham, united kingdom global justice networks: geographies of transnational solidarity. by paul routledge and andrew cumbers (2009), manchester: manchester university press, 224 pp. a decade ago, resistance to neoliberal globalization was understood as a concrete global phenomenon, marked by the emergence of a loosely affiliated alternative globalization movement and registered through multifarious acts of opposition across the world. fast forwarding to the present day, resistance has substantially lost its projected image as an unprecedented “global” political entity; yet its multiplex currents are still maintained by a plethora of movements, groups and individuals at different social and spatial levels. following a decade of declining visibility and the erosion of the claim for global representation of grassroots dissent, what once was termed “the second superpower” needs to be reconceptualized and recontextualized. global justice networks: geographies of transnational solidarity engages with the above necessity and attempts to provide a conceptualization of resistance that is grounded in the material realities of opposing subjects, attuned to the questions of place and space and conscious of the existing forms of dissension, collaboration and power relations within the movements of resistance. as the authors underline in the first pages, the book portrays resistance to neoliberal globalization not in the form of a homogeneous, monolithic movement, but as the interconnection of various networks that emerge from “place-specific forms of political agency that coalesce across space at particular times, in specific places and in a variety of ways” (p. 2). the authors label these networking bodies “global justice networks” (gjns) and position them as “convergence spaces” wherein movements can communicate with each other, design joint actions and campaigns, build studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 162 cemal burak tansel interpersonal linkages and forge mutual solidarity. within this framework, particular emphasis is given to the role of the local scale and place from which tangible resistances originate, without neglecting the wider structures of socioeconomic interconnectivity. accordingly, place-based struggles form the nucleus of wider networking patterns. through the recognition of commonalities and “common frames of reference” (eschle, 2005) between these hitherto separate struggles, movements rescale their fronts of resistance by instrumentalizing what the authors term ”imagineers” and ”networking vectors” and construct ”collective visions” based on a global justice agenda (p. 197). in line with their theoretical proposition, routledge and cumbers critically engage with two prevalent theoretical resources that have been widely utilized in the study of resistance to neoliberal globalization: network theory and global civil society discourse. it is maintained that the former “insufficiently theorizes the social context from which networks emerge” (p. 63), while the latter overlooks “the entangled operational logics, differential power relations and dilemmas surrounding the grassrooting of network imaginaries” (p. 214). in lieu of a widely accepted hyperglobalist conceptualization which locates international agency at an extremely abstract global level, the authors highlight the significance of local subjectivities that emerge concomitant with their rootedness in their respective places. this does not, however, restrict agency to the particular place in which resisting subjects exist. on the contrary, resisting subjects/movements coordinate and cooperate with similar struggles through the construction of networks. on this point, routledge and cumbers tread very carefully to distinguish their position from the network argument they initially criticize. they manage to do so by pointing out the relational aspects of networking and revealing the contentious processes which constitute the forms of relationships within networks. the strongest aspect of the book is the cohesion between its theoretical structure and the thoroughly conducted empirical studies. routledge and cumbers present three different case studies (people’s global action asia, international federation of chemical, energy, mining and general workers, the social forum process) to outline their hypotheses. while the extent to which these networks and processes resist neoliberal globalization varies significantly, the authors delineate several common characteristics. the uneven social and spatial relations between the constituent parts of the networks are visible in all three cases. contrary to the acclaimed representation of global resistance in the form of a decentralized, horizontally assembled opposition, routledge and cumbers repeatedly underscore the emergence of particular actors that claim implicit or explicit leadership statuses and the persistence of verticalist organizational elements. furthermore, convergence spaces are problematized with respect to their inclusiveness and heterogeneity. as many interviewees testify, networks themselves are not inherently progressive spheres and they constantly need to be reconstructed to accommodate the needs and demands of grassroots members. the authors conclude the book with a similar statement, claiming that transnational solidarity is not studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 review of global justice networks 163 an end point, but a process; hence, global resistance is best understood in a processual manner in which resisting subjects and collective visions are constantly reworked in accordance with material conditions and particular localities. routledge and cumbers successfully provide a balanced perspective on resistance without resorting to “spatial fetishism” (massey, 2001) and turning a blind eye to the uneven relationships and contested power relations within the movements of resistance. the synthesis of theory and practice in the book creates a critical approach with which the contours of movements of resistance can be drawn accurately by paying specific attention to social and spatial relations that produce them. references eschle, k. (2005). constructing “the anti-globalisation movement.” in k. eschle & b. maiguascha (eds.), critical theories, international relations and “the anti-globalisation movement”: the politics of global resistance (pp. 17–35). abingdon: routledge. massey, d. (2001). geography on the agenda. progress in human geography, 25(1), 5–17. royster fg july 4 16 correspondence address: michael d. royster, division of social work, behavioral and political sciences, prairie view a&m university, prairie view, tx, 77446; email: mdroyster@pvamu.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 191-193, 2016 book review crucified people: the suffering of the tortured in today’s world neafsey, john. (2014). maryknoll, ny: orbis. isbn 9781626980686 (paper) us$18.00. 176 pages. michael d. royster prairie view a&m university, usa crucified people interprets the crucifixion of the historical jesus as more than a mere act of execution, but also as a means of lethal torture in the ancient world. the author wrote the book in order to invoke compassion for those who are treated inhumanely. he describes this compassion as “holy anger” (p. xviii), which he claims will lead to an individual and a collective repentance against a collective guilt for the production of vicarious trauma and lack of sustaining material resources to minimalize unwarranted suffering. throughout the text, neafsey references modern forms of inhumane treatment against human creatures in order to provide an empathetic glimpse for privileged populations whose basic human rights seem to be secured. thematically, neafsey implies that whenever human creatures endure torture, inhumane treatment, or even symbolic and substantive disrespect, then an element of “the cross” becomes revisited. throughout the book, the author argues that cruel methods of execution from the ancient world have modern manifestations such as lynchings, mutilations, martyrdom of prominent public figures, prison abuse, and high tech forms of torture. in 2004, the public exposure of tortured prisoners of abu ghraib “triggered the most striking and controversial connections between the crucifixion of jesus and victims of torture in the contemporary world” (p. xii). the ultimate purpose of such extreme tactics is to incite chaos and deter any form of protest, uprising, or assertiveness. michael d. royster studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 191-193, 2016 192 the author presents the suffering and death of the historical jesus as the most extreme of all possible acts of human torture and as the ultimate cost for living with unyielding integrity. he says, “the assertiveness of jesus is often played-down in one-sided-portrayals of him that highlight his meekness, gentleness, and pacifism” (p. 7). within the christian tradition, jesus has been metaphorically portrayed as a “lamb,” but also as “the conquering lion,” which emphasizes courage and strength in the midst intense danger. with the intent to provide a 20th century comparison to jesus’ “lamb-like” vulnerability to suffering and death, neafsey revisits the martyrdom of archbishop oscar romero of el salvador, which illustrates how religious leadership has frequently experienced strain due to conflict between the interests of aristocratic power and the needs of the marginalized poor. the author draws a similar parallel with martin luther king’s assassination, noting that king’s death ironically occurred exactly one year following his speech entitled “beyond vietnam,” which denounced the conflict as an unjust war and a means to draw resources away from fighting domestic poverty. over the course of the book, neafsey references a variety of events around the world and across multiple eras of human history to illustrate the inhumane and impractical aspects of the use of torture. techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, and prolonged shackling have been unjustly rationalized with claims that they may expedite a confession or facilitate the acquisition of information that is needed in order to administer justice for the greater good. however, such techniques of torture call into question the utility of the suspect’s information as such conditions often result in coerced “false positive” confessions. despite this, foreign policy decisions are often informed by such forced confessions. the author could have further highlighted how broad and subtle forms of torture have been used on the state and local levels as means to prosecute innocent suspects. for example, in the case of the “central park five,” detectives used deception, isolation, yelling, and sleep deprivation to coerce a confession among five innocent minors. in this instance, the false positive confession was given greater credence than dna evidence that proved their innocence. the resilience of political institutions poses challenges to the possibility of creating a more just foreign policy. in this context, “guantanamo remains a global symbol of injustice and cruelty” (p. 33). neafsey argues that establishing innocence or guilt within the context of guantanamo contains multiple political complications due to the existence of hyper-partisanship and ideological polarization in the u.s., with the world watching. the author emphasizes that there is no easy solution to the guantanamo dilemma due to the possible unintended consequences of granting amnesty to terrorist suspects, granting constitutional rights by transferring the suspects stateside, acquitting detainees of charges due to lack of evidence, using international money to fund the defense, and fluctuating public support. furthermore, such a dilemma exposes flaws in the institution of justice systems, while book review studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 191-193, 2016 193 acknowledging the existence of security risks with irreversible consequences if actions go wrong. the book’s central message is that opposition to torture does not equate to sympathy for terrorist suspects, but rather addresses the ethics of torture as an act that dehumanizes and desensitizes “the perpetrators and it damages the moral fabric of societies that endorse or tolerate it” (p. 40). as a concise volume with minimal jargon, crucified people should appeal to a broad audience ranging from peace and justice studies scholars, liberation theologians, and social activists. in addition, the book makes a contribution to the sub-discipline of victimology, as it presents torture survivors as vulnerable to continuous anxiety, emotional numbness, and reexperience of trauma by way of intrusive memories. neafsey states that individuals who work with such victims become at-risk for vicarious traumatization. crucified people also draws attention to the role that consumerist societies play in contributing to the suffering of many. according to neafsey, western consumerism promotes a climate of indifference to the suffering that the majority of the earth’s population experience through extreme poverty. the book’s greatest strength lies in drawing from both the social sciences and moral theology to raise ethical questions such as the appropriateness of the rhetoric of forgiveness in cases of extreme violations of human rights, the unjust element of impunity for perpetrators of gross atrocities against humanity, and the possibilities and limits of love, forgiveness and reconciliation. the author concludes that while individuals must not underestimate the negative effects of injustice, such effects can be overcome through love. coulter final dec 2 16 correspondence address: kendra coulter, centre for labour studies. brock university, st. catharines, on, l2s 3a1; kendra.coulter@brocku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 beyond human to humane: a multispecies analysis of care work, its repression, and its potential kendra coulter brock university, canada abstract this paper approaches care work through a multispecies and interspecies lens, and challenges readers to expand both their analysis and their ethical considerations in order to include animals. first i present a conceptual framework to help illuminate and unpack the care work animals do in the wild, in homes, and in formal workplaces. i then highlight the complex ways animals’ bodies, minds, and families are involved in the production of commodities for human consumption, and the implications of such practices for animals’ own forms of caregiving. unfortunately, the fact is that for many animals, their primary experiences of care work are its repression. as a result, in the final section, i offer food for thought about the potential for care work to not only involve more empathetic embodied interactions and labour processes, but to be a springboard for expanded visions and projects of social justice which include humane jobs and recognize that “the social” is multispecies. keywords care work; human-animal relations; critical animal studies; gender and work; humane jobs care is integral to social justice. diverse scholars have theorized care, debated its conceptual and practical ethics, and explored how care is and could be interwoven with social and political praxis. as maría puig de la bellacasa (2012, p. 197) reminds us, care is “inseparably a vital affective state, an ethical obligation and a practical labour.” most research focused on care work has concentrated on people. in this paper, i expand the care work lens in order to include animals and to encourage scholarship and political action that takes their experiences seriously. care work is understood to be tasks, interactions, labour processes, and occupations involved in taking care of others, physically, psychologically, and emotionally. care work can be kendra coulter studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 200 proactive or reactive, formal or informal, and, when done by people, it may be paid or unpaid. much of the care work people do with/for animals has commonalities with human-focused care work, including the daily labour processes required, its feminization, its low pay or lack of pay, its precariousness, and its uneven physical and emotional risks and rewards (hamilton, 2013; hamilton & taylor, 2013; irvine & vermilya, 2010; miller, 2013; parreñas, 2012). at the same time, additional social and economic devaluation, distinct emotional complexities, and less workplace-based organizing further complicate the realities of care work undertaken with/for animals (bunderson & thompson, 2009; collard, 2014; miller, 2008; sanders, 2010; taylor, 2010). a handful of scholars are also beginning to analyse the interconnections among political work with/for animals and ideals and dynamics of care (coulter, 2016; donaldson & kymlicka, 2015; winter, 2016). a full and thorough examination of the intersections of animals and care work is a significant undertaking, one which is beyond the scope of this paper. here i offer a conceptual contribution that i hope will help propel further analysis and strengthen multispecies intellectual and political work. there is good reason to illuminate, interrogate, and critique the cultural and material processes of many kinds of human labour, particularly if interested in fostering multispecies justice; people’s actions (or a lack thereof) have beneficial, harmful, or fatal effects within and across species. in this paper, humans are considered, but i place animals’ work-lives at the heart of the discussion. to do so, i build from and expand on labour and care work literatures, feminist political economy, and human-animal and critical animal studies. i also enlist pertinent insights from animal ecofeminism, cognitive ethology, animal welfare research, and some animal rights theories. i consider animals’ involvement in formal, human-focused care work, as well as animals’ own caregiving processes. first i present a conceptual framework to help highlight and unpack the care work animals do in the wild, in homes, and in formal workplaces. i then illuminate the intersections, entanglements, and ruptures that come into focus when recognizing care work as more-than-human, and highlight the complex ways animals’ bodies, minds, and families are involved in processes of social, economic, and biological production, reproduction, and consumption, particularly in industrial agriculture. indeed, when we expand our conceptual lenses to include animals, the complexities of commodification and disposability figure in significant and unsettling ways. on the one hand, there is increasing interest in engaging animals in the provisioning of care work for people. yet, on the other hand, animals’ own forms of caregiving are rarely recognized as a kind of care work. moreover, many animals are also physically prevented from providing care to fellow animals and, in particular, to their own offspring. there is a conceptual denial occurring alongside institutionalized daily practices of literal denial. unfortunately, the fact is that for many animals, their primary experiences of care work are its repression. as a result, beyond human to humane studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 201 in the final section, i offer food for thought about the potential for care work to not only involve more empathetic embodied interactions and labour processes, but to be a springboard for expanded visions and projects of social justice which recognize that “the social” is multispecies. jocelyne porcher (2014) has also argued for “recognizing” animals’ work, but i conceptualize recognition in a different way, and see this as only one part of a broader intellectual and ethical project. i borrow, expand, and reshape nancy fraser’s (1995) intertwined concepts of recognition and redistribution as both an organizing framework for this paper, and as a kind of political engine for approaching the complexities of animals and care work. the crux of fraser’s argument is that neither a cultural or identitybased politics which seeks to counter discursive and symbolic erasure and legitimize diverse experiences (recognition), nor a political project concentrating on tangible valuation and compensation (redistribution) is sufficient on its own, but rather that both threads are necessary for justice and that they ought to be interwoven. fraser’s analysis stems from examination of human-focused social justice struggles (and particularly those in the united states in recent decades). she does not write about animals or employ a multispecies lens. moreover, although some animals are materially compensated for their labour in certain ways (through food, affection, tangible rewards, etc.) they do not receive monetary pay, nor would they be interested in that kind of literal financial redistribution. yet i wish to enlist the spirit of this argument – the need to see and to change what is provided to whom – as part of thinking about the intersections of animals, care, and work. accordingly, this paper will begin to illuminate and unpack the different kinds of care work performed by animals to recognize their labours as work. this means confronting the presence and absence of care work, including what thomas van dooren (2014, p. 91) calls “regimes of violent-care.” such processes can include the withdrawal or highly constrained and merely instrumental provisioning of care or partial care, or the active suppression and prohibition of caregiving labours. then to conclude, i will explore the complexities and possibilities of thinking about what redistribution might mean if animals are taken seriously as sentient beings, as social actors, as workers, and as providers of care. given the focus of this discussion, a brief comment on language and categories is in order before delving into the substantive material. humans evolved on earth and are also animals. as a result of this fact and for political reasons, within the growing body of human-animal studies and related literatures, there are scholars who consistently refer to other animals as nonhuman animals. for linguistic efficiency, to recognize heterogeneity among both humans and animals, and to avoid continuously identifying others in relation to but one of the species they are not, i use terms like people, humans, women, men, and so forth for homo sapiens, and refer to nonhuman animals as animals, or by their species or common name. i consider wild, farmed, and companion animals to varying degrees throughout kendra coulter studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 202 the paper, and raise particular concerns about farmed animals. crucially, in all cases, animals are still understood to be sentient beings who possess consciousness and an ability to think and feel, physically and emotionally. consequently, sexed pronouns are used for all who are considered in this paper; terms like “it” are not relevant, regardless of species membership. recognizing animals’ care work i propose three organizational categories as a starting place to highlight the breadth of animals’ work: (a) subsistence work; (b) voluntary work; and (c) work that is mandated by humans (coulter, 2016). subsistence work is that which is done by animals for themselves and often for/with others in order to survive. voluntary work refers to that which is usually done for humans in homes, although there are also animals who voluntarily assist other animals, even across species lines, including those who are physically disabled. the work mandated by humans includes a broad range of formal tasks and occupations. given the focus of this paper, here i will concentrate on how care work is involved in each of these three categories of work. subsistence work is the life-sustaining labour that living beings must perform in order to subsist. even though human societies were dependent on subsistence work for the large majority of our history (and many people still are), much contemporary labour research downplays its importance, or fails to see it as work, an omission challenged by historical, anthropological, feminist, and other cross-cultural scholarship. therefore by building on my anthropological training, enlisting a feminist political economy lens, and recognizing the realities of many animals’ lives, i challenge this overly narrow perception of work. for wild animals, daily life involves rigorous and multi-faceted challenges – from finding food and water sources in all seasons and regardless of the weather, to avoiding or escaping predators. these processes require and are work. i do not refer to these animals as “workers” but subsistence labour is nevertheless labour. the details are context-specific, and shaped by human behaviour and infrastructure, environmental factors, and animals’ position within their multispecies community and ecosystem. the work needed for mice in canada to subsist has similarities as well as differences with what elephants in tanzania need to do, for example. moreover, even within these geographic spaces, different regions would involve distinct hurdles and dangers. human actions, including “sport” and livelihood patterns (hunting, trapping, etc.), the erection of buildings, cities, and dams, and the creation and use of roads, train tracks, and so forth all affect animals’ abilities to engage in subsistence work. the effects of climate change, including dried-up rivers, droughts, and floods also create significant and increasing challenges for animals’ abilities to engage in life-sustaining subsistence work. subsistence will always include some care work, particularly intergenerational care work. of course, beyond human to humane studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 203 competition for resources and carnivorous or omnivorous animals’ subsistence work (including hunting or scavenging from nests) infringes on other animals’ abilities to survive and care for their young; this is driven by biological necessity not profit or greed, however. the (often but not exclusively unpaid) work done by people to ensure the wellbeing and future of younger generations can be understood as social reproduction. social reproduction is a set of tasks and a process, a daily and a generational dynamic, and an individual and collective project (bezanson, 2006; luxton & bezanson, 2006). specific tasks are continuously required: cooking, cleaning, laundry, and so on, to care for others as they are educated, empowered, entertained, healed; care work is one component of social reproduction. the cumulative effect of these individual and localized efforts is the larger social process of reproducing people, and of ensuring present and future generations of workers. in other words, social reproduction makes all other forms of economic and social activity possible. although most analysts of social reproduction have theorized it within a capitalist economic context, arguably, social reproduction has been essential to all human societies and forms of social organization, including subsistence-based foraging and farming communities. so far, social reproduction has been used to highlight and understand people’s work; i posit that the concept is also applicable to animals and helps us to see both domesticated and wild animals’ forms of care work (coulter, 2016). in the wild, animals engage in individual and collective strategies to sustain themselves, their offspring, other family members, friends, and their entire species. animals’ subsistence work in the wild is not only about basic survival, but also about health, safety, and as the growing body of cognitive ethology suggests, social and cultural practices as well. animals teach others and youngsters are socialized into their families and communities as they learn how to interact, resolve disputes, and understand social patterns. animals in the wild are not reproducing future workers for a capitalist economic system, yet they too engage in a kind of social reproduction. moreover, they engage in what i call ecosocial reproduction: wild animals’ subsistence and caring work is necessary for the reproduction of ecosystems (coulter, 2016). at the same time, it is important to note that humans benefit economically from certain wild animals’ social and ecosocial reproductive work, as is the case with bees. as bees collect nectar to feed their young, they pollinate over two thirds of all flowering plants, which allows those plants to reproduce. many of these plants are used by humans for food and other products. bees also make honey to serve as food for their hives during the winter, and some humans also take that honey to consume and sell. animals who live in people’s homes and as part of human families are the recipients and beneficiaries of humans’ care work and social reproductive labour. domesticated animals may also perform different kinds of voluntary labour in such contexts; some of it is a form of informal care work. animals can choose to provide care work for the people with whom they share homes kendra coulter studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 204 thereby illustrating my second category: voluntary labour. many companion animals continuously assess the people with whom they live, physically and emotionally, and proactively or responsively provide care of various kinds, especially emotional support, through their presence, behaviours, interactions, and touch. it will not surprise most dog lovers to learn that ethological research has found that dogs experience a physiological response and even “emotional contagion” when hearing or seeing people cry, and that they seek to express empathy and provide comfort in response by approaching and touching those in distress (custance & mayer, 2012; yong & ruffman, 2014). much of this is informal and may not widely be conceptualized as work. at the same time, such labour is increasingly being recognized and formalized through the employment and certification of emotional support animals. the care work animals do providing joy, kindness, and comfort is extensive and often crucial. this kind of interactive care work is especially important for seniors, marginalized or vulnerable people, and women who are confronting domestic violence, are homeless, or are precariously housed. dogs in particular can provide life-sustaining emotional support and motivation, companionship, as well as literal protection (fitzgerald, 2007; irvine, 2013a, 2013b; labrecque & walsh, 2011; lem, coe, haley, stone, & o’grady, 2013). care work is also implicated in the broad cross-section of work animals do that is mandated by humans. across space and time, humans have required that animals perform various kinds of work. animals’ labour was essential to the ascendancy of societies, the erection and functioning of communities, and the lives of individual people. although not called care work, such expectations were commonplace even in war zones; some animals were regularly used for hauling labour or weaponized, while others were kept specifically for companionship and emotional support. as noted, today there is growing use of animals for therapeutic and service work that benefits people. animals’ abilities to guide, assist, comfort, calm, and detect physical challenges like seizures before they happen are being enlisted in a range of places, including in homes, schools, libraries, long term care facilities, and courthouses. animals may be tasked with care work round the clock, or brought into the pertinent site for shorter shifts. there is a growing body of evidence documenting how different (human) individuals and groups benefit in physical, psychological, and emotional ways from animal-assisted therapy, service, and other activities. people often identify the animals and their contributions as life-saving, transformative, and essential (e.g., burgon, 2011; fine, 2010). the work necessary for the delivery of care in these ways requires great skill and multi-faceted communication work, which includes understanding, reacting, and conveying many kinds of information (coulter, 2016). it is psychologically and emotionally challenging for animals, and they are required to suppress their personal feelings, reactions, and instincts in order beyond human to humane studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 205 to behave in the proper way regardless of what is going on around them. for example, a service dog providing care to a person with a disability must not become distracted by people, other animals, or food. similarly, equineassisted therapy programs are noteworthy for a number of reasons, including because horses are sensitive animals who read feelings that people communicate intentionally or implicitly by their bodies (such as through an increased heart rate). yet even though the people involved may be anxious, especially initially, the horses are required to maintain a sense of calmness. i posit that this illustrates animals’ performance of the internal emotion work necessary to successfully perform the emotional labour requirements of their jobs (see also coulter, 2016). we ask a lot of furry and even some feathered care workers in such contexts, and these jobs require particular kinds of temperaments, intelligences, and attitudes. some animals excel, but not all are able or willing to engage in this kind of care work. whether and to what degree animals are able to express their disinterest or to refuse to participate is affected by people’s choices and attentiveness, the structures of the workplaces or programs, and the specifics of the animals in question – and their socially-constructed roles. i propose a continuum of suffering and enjoyment as a concept and framework for seeking to understand animals’ work from their perspectives, across contexts (coulter, 2016). where the work fits on the continuum is affected by the occupation and labour required, the co-workers or employers, the species, social relations and interactions, and individual animals’ own personalities, moods, health, preferences, and agency, among other factors. indeed when talking about animals and care work, it is important to note that “animals” refers to a very heterogeneous group, and that there are vast differences among the lives and labours of distinct species, and individual members of the same species (coulter, 2014). care work and its repression farmed animals are the largest group of land animals on earth (excluding invertebrates), and their experiences raise crucial questions for understanding care work within and across species. notably, some of the concepts and processes discussed here can be relevant to other contexts and industries, including animal experimentation and testing facilities. because many people currently choose to consume products made by or from animals’ bodies, this means that animals are being required to physically produce babies, milk, and eggs for human use. the increasing industrialization, corporatization, and consolidation of agriculture has affected human workers’ experiences, conditions, and health in significant ways, as well as the work they are required to do or prevented from doing. industrialization also has serious and intense impacts on animals. of course, regardless of the size or structure of a farm raising animals for food, those animals will be killed. farmed animals kendra coulter studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 206 are trapped within a perpetual cycle of disposability, the specifics, degree, and length of which vary. the patterns endemic to industrialized agriculture have exacerbated and changed a number of practices, however, many of which have a substantial and deleterious effect on the animals’ engagement with care work at every stage of their shortened lives. farmed animals’ bodies and parts thereof are used to create meat, leather, fur, food for companion animals, and other commodities, generally within one to a few years of birth. the practices on many contemporary farms and especially industrialized facilities have been well-documented by researchers and investigators, and i offer only a brief synthesis of the larger patterns here. human provisioning of care work is often instrumentalized, minimized, or fully eliminated in industrial animal agriculture. for example, in a barn with a thousand pigs or more (a common size today), if one becomes ill, the likelihood of a farm operator paying money for the animal’s medical care is low, particularly if she or he is scheduled to be slaughtered within a few months anyway. instead, the animals may be allowed to die, killed immediately and thrown out, or put onto the truck bound for the slaughterhouse in poor health. it is not uncommon for animals to arrive at slaughterhouses dead, ill, or with broken bones or other injuries. some kinds of animals are also deemed disposable very quickly simply because of their sex. some farmed animals are killed mere hours after their births, in fact. for example, in the mainstream egg industry, male chicks are killed promptly after birth because they cannot produce eggs. male calves within the dairy industry face a similarly dire future. in order for cows to physically produce milk, females must be impregnated regularly; like all mammals, cows only produce milk prior to and after giving birth as it is intended to feed their offspring (not be consumed by other species). in general, calves born will be 50/50 male/female. female calves are usually kept to become future milk producers. males, however, are not useful for the production of milk, so they are used to create veal. they are thus kept largely immobile, usually in individual crates or small hutches, for only three to four months, after which they are sent to slaughter. notably, whether the calves are male or female, they are normally taken away from their mothers within a few hours of birth so the milk can immediately begin being collected for human consumption. cows used for milk production are usually able to interact with other adult females to some degree, but prohibited from interacting with and raising their own babies. cows used to produce milk are also usually slaughtered for meat after a few years as their bodies become exhausted from repeated impregnation and milking, so they are seen as no longer useful. a similar process is true for hens, whether their eggs are nonfertilized and eaten or hatched then consumed as meat, and many are only kept alive for one to two years. chickens born to become meat are kept alive on average for eight to ten weeks and 600 million chickens are killed for meat each year in canada alone. cows’ natural life expectancy is 15 to 20 years; chickens’ would range from six to15 years. beyond human to humane studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 207 overall, both female and male animals face dire fates, and have common as well as distinct experiences in such contexts. as carol j. adams (2010), karen davis (1995), and lori gruen (1993) rightly point out, animal agriculture involves the particularly intense use and manipulation of females’ bodily processes and emotions.1 virtually all domesticated animals born under human control will be “weaned” by humans, as mothers and offspring are separated; such processes are trying for dogs and horses, too, unless allowed to proceed naturally and at animals’ own pace. yet, in most cases, companion animal mothers are first permitted to provide care work for their own babies for multiple weeks or months. the ability for farmed animals to provide care to their own offspring varies, but is often deeply constrained or entirely eliminated through literal separation and physical structures, some of which prevent all forms of social interaction. on farms raising cows for beef, females raise their own offspring before they are sent to slaughter after one to two years. yet many other animal mothers (such as cows and goats used for dairy production) are normally prevented from interacting with their infants for more than a few hours. female pigs on most north american operations are kept in gestation crates for most or all of the time they are used as breeders (i.e., for two to three years) within which they can only stand up or lie down. similarlydesigned farrowing pens house mothers who have recently given birth. piglets can nurse and be beside their mother for a few weeks or months (before being sent to a “finishing barn” to fatten for slaughter), but the mothers cannot turn or move to interact with and care for their piglets. instead, they are kept largely immobilized as mere milk providers. of this process, dave wager, the communications director for the national pork producers council in the united states, said the following: “so our animals can’t turn around for the 2.5 years that they are in the stalls producing piglets. i don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around” (friedrich, 2012, n.p.). the crates are often justified as “protecting” the piglets from their mothers who may accidentally lie down on them in cramped quarters (a few months before they will be sent to slaughter), yet are not used everywhere, are banned or being phased-out in many countries, and are restricted in future barn construction within canada. animal mothers (and often fathers, siblings, aunts, and so on) wish to interact with young individuals through many kinds of touch as well as oral communication, in order to provide sustenance, affection, warmth, reassurance, healing, protection, correction, and instruction, when they are allowed to do so. farmed animals engage in care work, when they are not isolated, separated, immobilized, or otherwise prevented from interacting with their own offspring and own kind. the fact remains, however, that many animals are not permitted to provide care to others. 1 for a larger exploration of the potential and challenges of using the term body work in such contexts, see coulter (2016). kendra coulter studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 208 given these realities, barbara noske (1989, 1997) enlists marx’s concept of alienated labour and applies it across species lines in a compelling way (see also stuart, schewe, & gunderson, 2013). alienated or estranged labour highlights the process through which workers are materially and spiritually separated from the products, results, and/or rewards of their labour, as well as from their own desires. noske (1989, pp. 18-20) argues that animals in industrial agriculture are alienated labour, kept estranged from (a) the product (their own offspring or parts of their body); (b) productive activity (not being able to turn around, move, or spread their wings); (c) fellow animals and their social nature; (d) surrounding nature; and (e) their species life. indeed, these animals are required to produce babies, milk, and eggs, not for their own or species-specific reasons, but entirely so that these can be taken and transformed into commodities for human profit and consumption. many of the animals are both literally and figuratively locked into processes of social dislocation, dis-aggregation, and estrangement. by enlisting the term alienation, we are forced to not only consider physical harm, but to recognize emotional and psychological effects. the growing bodies of cognitive ethology and evolutionary cognition research reveal that animals of all kinds have rich and complex social, emotional, and even moral, lives. humans are just beginning to understand the depth of animals’ innerworlds, relationships, and experiences. pigs, for example, are cognitively and emotionally complex and share many traits with widely loved and respected species like dogs (see e.g., marino & colvin, 2015). chickens are socially dynamic, exploratory, and intelligent, and, as barbara j. king (2013, p. 6) explains, they “grieve… like chimpanzees, elephants, and goats” (among other animals). only recently have researchers learned that cows have a broad range of context-specific calls for their offspring (de la torre, briefer, reader, & mcelligott, 2015). some of those calls express sorrow, and mothers are forced to use those calls often, because of human choices. it is difficult to overstate the physical, psychological, emotional, and intergenerational suffering perpetuated behind such terms as “factory farms” and “industrialized agriculture.” indeed, noske (1989) proposes the term animal-industrial complex to capture the larger political economic structures which fuel such patterns, and which have been exacerbated in the “necroeconomic” realities of the neoliberal capitalist context (drew, 2016). there is now a simultaneous institutionalized and industrialized exploitation of the processes of reproduction, alongside the repression or complete elimination of the caring and social reproductive labours that should follow once babies are born. to add insult to injury, the suffering animals experience as a result is widely denied, ignored, or simply condoned. beyond human to humane studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 209 confronting repression, fostering multispecies care the realities of animals’ care work are complex and diverse. animals are not widely recognized as providers of care work, yet the formal programs that task animals with providing care (through therapy, physical and emotional assistance, etc.) are gaining more attention and being expanded in many places. the research that has been done on such programs suggests that most scholars and people outside the academy alike accept that animals are providing care work in these cases, and there is greater interest in and comfort with these kinds of therapeutic and presumably positive dynamics. moreover, the effects and benefits of these forms of care work for human patients are of most interest to researchers. animals’ experiences and working conditions within human-focused care programs are not wellstudied. encouragingly, however, there is a growing awareness of the need to take these animals’ wellbeing seriously and to employ a multispecies lens in both research and practice (evans & gray, 2011; matsuoka & sorenson, 2013; ryan, 2014; rock & degeling, 2015; serpell, coppinger, & fine, 2006; weisberg, 2014; zamir, 2006). further work is needed to develop the most accurate, effective, and ethical multispecies standards for such contexts. i believe that some animals can justifiably be engaged in the provisioning of care work in these kinds of ways if relationships and daily labour are characterized by respect and reciprocity, and if both human and nonhuman workers are afforded protections and positive entitlements underscored by interspecies solidarity (coulter, 2016; donaldson & kymlicka, 2011). most animals are not engaged in these kinds of formal care work occupations, however. far more animals are kept in agricultural contexts where the realities of care work are more complex. animals’ animal-focused caregiving work is rarely recognized as such regardless of where it takes place, and it is often constrained or prohibited, particularly when the animals are to be physically consumed as commodities. animals’ pain, misery, and socially-constructed disposability in a number of human-controlled settings are widely rendered invisible to those outside, and are viewed in different ways by the people directly involved ranging from disciplined concern to dispassion to cold indifference (ellis, 2013, 2014; wilkie 2010). rhoda wilkie (2010) argues that farmers place animals on a commodity-companion continuum, which is usually shaped by the animal’s role and time on the farm (breeder, offspring, etc.). she also proposes the concept of “sentient commodity” to capture the tension that some farmers feel who recognize that the animals are simultaneously considered property and products to be bought, sold, killed, and consumed, yet also individuals with personalities and feelings. wilkie (2010, p.135) rightly points out that people in these kinds of work experience ambivalence “not because of their idiosyncratic history or their distinctive personality but because the ambivalence is inherent in the social positions they occupy.” they are not exclusively or specifically care workers; kendra coulter studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 210 they are farmers and farm workers, and care is to be provided within the specific expectations and determinations of their material conditions. agency is always possible and this must be recognized, but the structure of multispecies spaces directs perceptions and actions in specific ways and influences what is done and not done (arluke & sanders, 1996; blanchette, 2015). as peter dickens (1996) argues, industrialized capitalist reorganization of agricultural practices and labour has fundamentally changed the way people understand and know nature. workplaces that hold thousands of largely immobilized chickens in battery cages within which they cannot even spread their wings, or pigs in gestation crates where they cannot turn or move, create and perpetuate not only suffering but intense commodification and devaluation. turnover rates are high, as many people are unable to tolerate the daily practices and work requirements, and are unwilling to participate in such patterns. it is especially those with few options who must stay, although certain people are comfortable with these hierarchies, conditions, and workplace requirements for a number of reasons, including their perceptions of animals as unfeeling commodities unworthy of basic dignity. there is some heterogeneity among agricultural approaches and more considerate farming does exist, though any farm raising animals for consumption will ultimately mean death for the animals, and likely lead to limits on how animals are permitted to interact with and care for their offspring. animal agriculture is increasingly industrialized however, and the physical placement and construction of buildings, alongside the discursive obfuscation perpetuated through mass nouns like “meat” mean individual animals and their personal and shared experiences are pushed out of public view, and are infrequently considered worthy of consideration or care (adams, 2010). indeed, the strategic allocation or withdrawal of human caregiving labours, and the repression of animals’ abilities to engage in care work, both result from human choices and actions. these dynamics are socially-constructed; they stem from humans’ political, economic, and ethical choices, not from innate, automatic, or essential processes. they will be continued or changed based on people’s decisions. repression is an active process. many of the patterns that harm animals also endanger humans and the environment, and these interconnections are particularly salient when exploring the intersections of care work and social justice. claire jean kim’s (2015) call for multi-optic vision is particularly relevant. indigenous peoples and indigenous wildlife are both affected when rainforests are cleared for palm oil production or to make fields for cattle to graze before they are killed for meat. there is alarming public health research on the risks that stem from the live animal trade and industrialized agriculture, among other practices, and the risks are inequitably distributed along racialized, national, and classed lines. dangers include water, air, and soil pollution, increased greenhouse gas production, zoonoses (diseases spreading from animals to humans), and beyond human to humane studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 211 antibiotic and microbial resistance (e.g., akhtar, 2012; cutler, fooks, & van der poel, 2010; landers, cohen, wittum, & larson, 2012; world health organization, 2010). moreover, factory farming is one of the largest contributors of climate change-propelling greenhouse gases (caro, davis, bastianoni, & caldeira, 2014; gerber et al., 2013; lin et al., 2011; steinfeld et al., 2006). in factory farming and similar industries, animals suffer the most, but among humans, it is working class communities and people, women, racialized workers, indigenous peoples, and poor people who are disproportionately harmed (halley, 2012; nibert, 2014). as the effects of climate change deepen and expand, it is also these very people who will continue to be most seriously affected. by employing intersectional and multi-optic vision, it is clear that there are persuasive multispecies ethical, environmental, and political reasons for anyone who cares about social justice to take these entangled oppressions seriously. indeed, although driven by powerful economic interests, people of all kinds are implicated in these animal-worker-environmental harming processes in different ways. some are directly involved as workers who have varying degrees of control over their jobs and where they work (see e.g., blanchette, 2015; nibert, 2014; stull & broadway, 2013). other people are passively complicit, but make active choices about their consumption. an uncomfortable but undeniable fact is that, at present, so much human caregiving and social reproductive labour includes the purchasing, preparation, and consumption of commodities made from the bodily processes and dead bodies of animals who have been denied the opportunity to engage in their own care work, prevented from having autonomy over their lives and families, and given no opportunity to decline to participate in processes that cause them harm and death. humans choose to consume the very milk produced by animal mothers’ bodies that is intended to feed their own young. correcting these injustices requires questioning some of the most normalized hegemonic processes and beliefs about who is included in our ethical deliberations and webs of care (donovan, 2007; fitzgerald & taylor, 2014). animal advocates enlist the slogans “someone not something” and “friends not food” in order to challenge the commodification and desubjectivization of animals. indeed, if interested in thoroughly understanding care work, we ought to first acknowledge the social, economic, cultural, and interpersonal contributions animals make by working to improve the lives of others. we ought to recognize their labours, and that they are both sentient beings and social actors (see also cochrane, 2016). yet recognition of the repression of care and the troubling facts about how animals are seen and treated in the production of unnecessary commodities for human use is as essential, if not more important. moreover, the conditions of animals’ – and many people’s – lives also demand that we move beyond seeing, and even beyond critique; we need to develop solutions and alternatives. here the principle of redistribution i am adapting from nancy fraser comes into play. kendra coulter studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 212 if recognizing animals’ care work and its widespread repression is the first step, what is to be done? the answers to this question are many, and a rich and heterogeneous collection of animal studies and critical animal studies literatures offer different insights, viewpoints, and arguments about animals’ rights, property status, and the best routes forward, which i cannot effectively synthesize here. what i offer is complementary, and at times divergent, food for thought about the place of animals and care work in the present and future of not only our scholarship, but also our communities and lives. towards interspecies solidarity and humane jobs i propose the concept of interspecies solidarity as an idea, a goal, an ethical commitment, and an essential addition to theories and projects of social justice (coulter, 2016). solidarity is the political expression of empathy and compassion, and involves support despite differences. as val plumwood (2002, pp. 200-202) writes in her call for solidarity with nature, “both continuity with and difference from self can be sources of value and consideration, and both usually play a role.” in other words, someone does not need to be the same as you in order for you to feel and foster solidarity. there are clear connections among the exploitation of women, racialized peoples, and nature, including animals, and these can help forge connectivity, as well as bolster the case for change (e.g., adams, 2010; gaard, 2011; halley, 2012; kim, 2015). interspecies and multispecies solidarity should be promoted not simply because animals are like us and we are like animals, however, but because it is the ethical thing to do. others should not have to be like us for us to care about their wellbeing. interspecies solidarity can and should intersect with care, and care work. joan tronto compellingly argues that care can become “a tool for critical political analysis when we use this concept to reveal relationships of power” (1993, p. 172). this argument challenges us to move beyond instrumental approaches to care, into a more politicized, holistic vision. caring, empathy, and compassion can mobilize feelings and projects of solidarity, but solidaristic sentiments cannot remain internalized or individualized. as josephine donovan argues: understanding that an animal is in pain or distress – even empathizing or sympathizing with him [or her] – doesn’t ensure, however, that the human will act ethically towards the animal. thus, the originary emotional empathetic response must be supplemented with a political perspective . . . that enables the human to analyze the situation critically so as to determine who [or what] is responsible for the animal suffering, and how that suffering may best be alleviated. (donovan, 2007, p. 364) beyond human to humane studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 213 sally scholz (2008, p. 61) points out that solidarity encourages “not just personal transformation but social transformation.” put concisely, caring can be and can become political (briskin, 2013; cobble, 2010; herd & meyer, 2002) and can be the basis for creating more caring societies (e.g., glenn, 2000; tronto, 2013). this argument is not rooted in a naïve romanticization of caring, and without question dynamics of care can be coercive or contradictory. as thom van dooren (2014, p. 92) argues, “caring is not achieved through abstract well-wishing, but is an embodied and often fraught, complex, and compromised practice.” both recognition and redistribution are needed. thus, more ambitious visions which foster a political expansion of care cannot exclude other animals. animals are inextricably and intimately interwoven with our work, lives, and futures. a just and caring society cannot condone the exploitation and oppression of others, and cannot be built atop a mass, unmarked animal graveyard. as claire jean kim writes: most social justice struggles mobilize around a single-optic frame of vision. the process of political conflict then generates a zero-sum dynamic . . . a posture of mutual avowal – an explicit dismissal of and denial of connection with the other form of injustice being raised. this posture . . . is both ethically and politically troubling. (kim, 2015, p. 19; emphasis in original) interspecies solidarity and a multispecies approach to care work and social justice challenge us to strengthen and expand our thinking to overcome alleged divides, including species membership. humans are but one species on this planet. moreover, our actions have significant, lasting, and often fatal effects on other beings and on our shared world. accordingly, the idea of interspecies solidarity is not a monolithic blueprint, but rather it is an invitation to broaden how labour as a daily process and a political relationship is understood and approached, by emphasizing empathy, dignity, and reciprocity, and by seeing care as not only a practice or type of work, but also as the lifeblood of society and of this earth. how interspecies solidarity is used will be shaped by multispecies social actors and their contexts. in fact, in some communities, interspecies solidarity or comparable principles already exist (see rock & degeling, 2015). indigenous cultures are diverse, as are the views of people within them, yet many envision different kinds of multispecies interconnectedness. it is important to recognize these approaches and actors, what lessons they offer and wish to share, as well as how human-animal relations are being actively debated, adapted, and remade in indigenous communities today (e.g., beckford, jacobs, williams, & nahdee, 2010; robinson, 2010, 2014; robinson & wallington, 2012). moreover, there are non-indigenous communities, including in rural spaces, committed to visions and practices of multispecies respect (including for migrant workers), and these too can offer insights for alternate paths forward. indeed, as melanie j. rock and chris degeling argue, “many people care deeply about places, plants and nonkendra coulter studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 214 human animals, to the extent of offering assistance, expecting others to provide assistance, and codifying this expectation in contracts, policies, and laws” (2015, p. 4). scandinavian and nordic sociopolitical models can also offer lessons about the potential of social solidarity (lister, 2009; sandberg, 2013), and these ideals could be strengthened and expanded across species lines through the thoughtful use of interspecies solidarity. the respectful and the many damaging ways animals are conceptualized and treated are all instructive if seeking to cultivate interspecies solidarity and foster a more holistic approach to care work. sue donaldson and will kymlicka write: the challenge to developing non-exploitative cooperative relationships is most acutely posed by the case of domesticated animals who are significantly dependent on humans for basic care. . . . [people] must foster the circumstances and trusting relationships within which animals can exercise agency, and then interpret the signals that animals give regarding their subjective good, preferences, or choices. (donaldson & kymlicka, 2012, pp. 2-4) by understanding both normalized oppression and relations of genuine care, we can glean insights about how to end suffering, improve humans’ and animals’ lives, and foster humane action. in this crucial task, lori gruen’s (2014) concept of entangled empathy is particularly instructive and helpful. she defines it is as: [action] focused on attending to another’s experience of wellbeing. [it is] an experiential process involving a blend of emotion and cognition in which we recognize we are in relationships with others and are called upon to be responsive and responsible in these relationships by attending to another’s needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and sensitivities (gruen 2014, p. 3). gruen conceptualizes entangled empathy as a multispecies process, one underscored by active, ongoing intellectual, emotional, and political engagement within and across species. succinctly, we must strive to consider our actions and patterns from the perspectives of other animals. in this spirit, perhaps what we should redistribute to many animals is autonomy over their own bodies and lives, and the right to engage in their own social reproductive and caregiving labours. health care researchers and practitioners have begun developing an approach called the one health model, which recognizes and promotes the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health (see, for example, fitzgerald, 2010; lerner & berg, 2015; mackenzie, jeggo, daszak, & richt, 2013; woldehanna & zimicki, 2015). this approach may offer conceptual and practical lessons for worlds of work and could serve as another foundational axis for a more ambitious, holistic approach to care work. indeed, the concept of interspecies solidarity ought to be expanded and integrated into both spheres of practice and into political projects. reciprocal beyond human to humane studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 199-219, 2016 215 relationships along with political economic structures that help cultivate an ethically-rigorous multispecies approach to care work are necessary. essential to this challenge are what i call humane jobs: jobs that benefit both people and animals (coulter, 2016, forthcoming). in order to move workforces and economies away from damaging and destructive practices and industries, humane alternatives must be created which are about helping, not harming others. some existing jobs can be strengthened and expanded. others cannot be, and should be replaced with more empathetic and ethical areas of work; new humane jobs and employment sectors should be created. care work occupations and programs, particularly in health care for animals and in health care with animals (therapeutic engagements with nature and animals), offer good possibilities that warrant more examination and thoughtful consideration. without question, care work and workers are at the heart of a future with humane jobs. at the same time, there is potential in other areas as well, including in cruelty investigations and prevention, humane education, conservation, recreation, and agriculture and food production. we can create more humane jobs to grow, create, make, sell, and serve nutritious, sustainable food that does not involve violence, the exploitation of humans or animals, or the denial of care work. this discussion is only beginning to illuminate and interrogate the intersections of animals and care work. more thought, work, and care are sorely needed. some types of animals such as farmed animals are among the most oppressed social groups on earth. if we pay attention to spaces and relations of work, what should be changed and what should be nurtured both become clearer. animals are sentient beings who think and feel. they have minds, bodies, personalities, feelings, desires, and relationships that matter. we have an ethical obligation to think seriously about care work, its repression, and its potential and possibilities, from their perspectives. animals deserve to receive care and provide care – and they want to live. acknowledgements feedback from anonymous reviewers and thoughtful suggestions from andrea doucet helped strengthen and refine this article. i am grateful for the financial support of the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. references adams, c. j. 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(2006). the moral basis of animal-assisted therapy. society and animals, 14(2), 179199. microsoft word fraser.doc studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 23 feminist politics in the age of recognition: a two-dimensional approach to gender justice nancy fraser,1 new school for social research abstract in the course of the last thirty years, feminist theories of gender have shifted from quasi-marxist, labor-centered conceptions to putatively “post-marxist”cultureand identity-based conceptions. reflecting a broader political move from redistribution to recognition, this shift has been double-edged. on the one hand, it has broadened feminist politics to encompass legitimate issues of representation, identity, and difference. yet, in the context of an ascendant neoliberalism, feminist struggles for recognition may be serving to less to enrich struggles for redistribution than to displace the latter. i aim to resist that trend. in this essay, i propose an analysis of gender that is broad enough to house the full range of feminist concerns, those central to the old socialist-feminism as well as those rooted in the cultural turn. i also propose a correspondingly broad conception of justice, capable of encompassing both distribution and recognition, and a non-identitarian account of recognition, capable of synergizing with redistribution. i conclude by examining some practical problems that arise when we try to envision institutional reforms that could redress gender maldistribution and gender misrecognition simultaneously. feminist theory tends to follow the zeitgeist. in the 1970s, when second-wave feminism emerged out of the new left, its most influential theories of gender reflected the stillpotent influence of marxism. whether sympathetic or antagonistic to class analysis, these theories located gender relations on the terrain of political economy, even as they also sought to expand that terrain to encompass housework, reproduction, and sexuality. soon thereafter, chafing under the limits of labour-centred paradigms, additional currents of feminist theorizing emerged in dialogue with psychoanalysis. in the anglophone world, object-relations theorists began to conceptualize gender as an “identity.” on the european continent, meanwhile, lacanians rejected the term “gender relations” as too sociological and replaced it with “sexual difference,” which they conceptualized in relation to subjectivity and the symbolic order. in neither case was the initial intention to supplant marxism per se; rather, both currents saw themselves as enriching and deepening materialist paradigms that too often lapsed into vulgar economism. by the 1990s, however, the new left was only a memory, and marxism seemed to many a dead letter. in that context, lines of thought that had begun by presuming marxism’s relevance took 1 nancy fraser, henry a. and louise loeb professor of political and social science at the graduate faculty of new school university, frasern@earthlink.net studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 24 on another valence. joining the larger exodus of intellectuals from marxism, most feminist theorists took “the cultural turn.” with the exception of a few holdouts, even those who rejected psychoanalysis came to understand gender as an identity or a “cultural construction.” today, accordingly, gender theory is largely a branch of cultural studies. as such, it has further attenuated, if not wholly lost, its historic links to marxism and to social theory and political economy more generally. as always, the vicissitudes of theory follow those of politics. the shift, over the last thirty years, from quasi-marxist, labour-centred understandings of gender to culture and identity-based conceptions coincides with a parallel shift in feminist politics. whereas the sixty-eight generation hoped, among other things, to restructure the political economy so as to abolish the gender division of labour, subsequent feminists formulated other, less material aims. some, for example, sought recognition of sexual difference, while others preferred to deconstruct the categorial opposition between masculine and feminine. the result was a shift in the center of gravity of feminist politics. once centred on labour and violence, gender struggles have focused increasingly on identity and representation in recent years. the effect has been the subordination of social struggles to cultural struggles, the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition – this was not, once again, the original intention. cultural feminists and deconstructionists alike assumed that feminist cultural politics would synergize with struggles for social equality. but that assumption, too, has fallen prey to the larger zeitgeist. in “the network society,” the feminist turn to recognition has dovetailed all too neatly with a hegemonic neoliberalism that wants nothing more than to repress socialist memory. feminism is hardly alone in this trajectory. on the contrary, the recent history of gender theory reflects a wider shift in the grammar of political claims-making. on the one hand, struggles for recognition have exploded everywhere–witness battles over multiculturalism, human rights, and national autonomy. on the other hand, struggles for egalitarian redistribution are in relative decline–witness the weakening of trade unions and the co-optation of labour and socialist parties in “the third way.” the result is a tragic historical irony; the shift from redistribution to recognition has occurred just as an aggressively globalizing u.s.-led capitalism is exacerbating economic inequality.2 for feminism, accordingly, this shift has been double-edged. on the one hand, the turn to recognition represents a broadening of gender struggle and a new understanding of gender justice. no longer restricted to questions of distribution, gender justice now encompasses issues of representation, identity, and difference. the result is a major advance over reductive economistic paradigms that had difficulty conceptualizing harms rooted, not in the division of labour, but in androcentric patterns of cultural value. on the other hand, it is no longer clear that feminist struggles for recognition are serving to deepen and enrich struggles for egalitarian redistribution. rather, in the context of an ascendant neoliberalism, they may be serving to displace the latter. in that case, the recent gains in gender theory would be entwined with a tragic loss. instead of arriving at a 2for a fuller discussion, see nancy fraser (1995). "from redistribution to recognition? dilemmas of justice in a 'postsocialist' age," new left review 212 pp. 68 93; reprinted in fraser, (1997) justice interruptus: critical reflections on the "postsocialist" condition. new york: routledge. see also fraser, "social justice in the age of identity politics: redistribution, recognition, and participation," in nancy fraser and axel honneth, redistribution or recognition? a political-philosophical exchange. (london: verso and frankfurt: suhrkamp, 2003). studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 25 broader, richer paradigm that could encompass both redistribution and recognition, we would have traded one truncated paradigm for another–a truncated economism for a truncated culturalism. the result would be a classic case of combined and uneven development; the remarkable recent feminist gains on the axis of recognition would coincide with stalled progress if not outright losses on the axis of distribution. that is my reading of present trends. in what follows, i shall outline an approach to gender theory and feminist politics that responds to this diagnosis and aims to forestall its full realization. what i have to say divides into four parts. first, i shall propose an analysis of gender that is broad enough to house the full range of feminist concerns, those central to the old socialist-feminism as well as those rooted in the cultural turn. to complement this analysis, i shall propose, second, a correspondingly broad conception of justice, capable of encompassing both distribution and recognition, and third, a nonidentitarian account of recognition, capable of synergizing with redistribution. fourth and finally, i shall examine some practical problems that arise when we try to envision institutional reforms that could redress maldistribution and misrecognition simultaneously. in all four sections, i shall break with those feminist approaches that focus exclusively on gender. rather, i shall situate gender struggles as one strand among others in a broader political project aimed at institutionalizing democratic justice across multiple axes of social differentiation. revisiting gender theory: a two-dimensional analysis to avoid truncating the feminist problematic, and unwittingly colluding with neoliberalism, feminists today need to revisit the concept of gender. what is needed is a broad and capacious conception, which can accommodate at least two sets of concerns. on the one hand, such a conception must incorporate the labour-centred problematic associated with socialist-feminism; on the other hand, it must also make room for the culture-centred problematic associated with putatively “postmarxian” strands of feminist theorizing. rejecting sectarian formulations that cast those two problematics as mutually antithetical, feminists need to develop an account of gender that encompasses the concerns of both. as we shall see, this requires theorizing both the gendered character of the political economy and the androcentrism of the cultural order, without reducing either one of them to the other. at the same time, it also requires theorizing two analytically distinct dimensions of sexism, one centred on distribution, the other centred on recognition. the result will be a two-dimensional conception of gender. only such a conception can support a viable feminist politics in the present era. let me explain. the approach i propose requires viewing gender bifocally, simultaneously through two different lenses. viewed through one lens, gender has affinities with class; viewed through the other, it is more akin to status. each lens brings into focus an important aspect of women’s subordination, but neither alone is sufficient. a full understanding becomes available only when the two lenses are superimposed. at that point, gender appears as a categorial axis that spans two dimensions of social ordering, the dimension of distribution and the dimension of recognition. from the distributive perspective, gender appears as a class-like differentiation, rooted in the economic structure of society. a basic organizing principle of the division studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 26 of labour, it underlies the fundamental division between paid "productive" labour and unpaid "reproductive" and domestic labour, assigning women primary responsibility for the latter. gender also structures the division within paid labour between higher-paid, male-dominated, manufacturing and professional occupations and lower-paid, femaledominated "pink collar" and domestic service occupations. the result is an economic structure that generates gender-specific forms of distributive injustice. from the recognition perspective, in contrast, gender appears as a status differentiation, rooted in the status order of society. gender codes pervasive cultural patterns of interpretation and evaluation, which are central to the status order as a whole. thus, a major feature of gender injustice is androcentrism: an institutionalized pattern of cultural value that privileges traits associated with masculinity, while devaluing everything coded as "feminine," paradigmatically—but not only—women. pervasively institutionalized, androcentric value patterns structure broad swaths of social interaction. expressly codified in many areas of law (including family law and criminal law), they inform legal constructions of privacy, autonomy, self-defense, and equality. they are also entrenched in many areas of government policy (including reproductive, immigration, and asylum policy) and in standard professional practices (including medicine and psychotherapy). androcentric value patterns also pervade popular culture and everyday interaction. as a result, women suffer gender-specific forms of status subordination, including sexual harassment, sexual assault, and domestic violence; trivializing, objectifying, and demeaning stereotypical depictions in the media; disparagement in everyday life; exclusion or marginalization in public spheres and deliberative bodies; and denial of the full rights and equal protections of citizenship. these harms are injustices of misrecognition. they are relatively independent of political economy and are not merely "superstructural." thus, they cannot be overcome by redistribution alone but require additional, independent remedies of recognition. when the two perspectives are combined, gender emerges as a two-dimensional category. it contains both a political-economic face that brings it within the ambit of redistribution and also a cultural-discursive face that brings it simultaneously within the ambit of recognition. moreover, neither dimension is merely an indirect effect of the other. to be sure, the distributive and recognition dimensions interact with one another. but gender maldistribution is not simply a by-product of status hierarchy; nor is gender misrecognition wholly a by-product of economic structure. rather, each dimension has some relative independence from the other. neither can be redressed entirely indirectly, therefore, through remedies addressed exclusively to the other. it is an open question whether the two dimensions are of equal weight. but redressing gender injustice, in any case, requires changing both the economic structure and the status order of contemporary society. neither, alone, will suffice. the two-dimensional character of gender wreaks havoc on the idea of an either/or choice between the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition. that construction assumes that women are either a class or a status group, but not both; that the injustice they suffer is either maldistribution or misrecognition, but not both; that the remedy is either redistribution or recognition, but not both. gender, we can now see, explodes this whole series of false antitheses. here we have a category that is a compound of both status and class. not only is gender “difference” constructed simultaneously from both economic differentials and institutionalized patterns of cultural studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 27 value, but both maldistribution and misrecognition are fundamental to sexism. the implication for feminist politics is clear. to combat the subordination of women requires an approach that combines a politics of redistribution with a politics of recognition.3 rethinking gender parity: a two-dimensional conception of justice to develop such an approach requires a conception of justice as broad and capacious as the preceding view of gender. such a conception must also accommodate at least two sets of concerns. on the one hand, it must encompass the traditional concerns of theories of distributive justice, especially poverty, exploitation, inequality, and class differentials. at the same time, it must also encompass concerns recently highlighted in philosophies of recognition, especially disrespect, cultural imperialism, and status hierarchy. rejecting sectarian formulations that cast distribution and recognition as mutually incompatible understandings of justice, such a conception must accommodate both. as we shall see, this means theorizing maldistribution and misrecognition by reference to a common normative standard, without reducing either one to the other. the result, once again, will be a two-dimensional conception of justice. only such a conception can comprehend the full magnitude of sexist injustice. the conception of justice i propose centres on the principle of parity of participation. according to this principle, justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers. for participatory parity to be possible, at least two conditions must be satisfied. first, the distribution of material resources must be such as to ensure participants’ independence and “voice.” this “objective” condition precludes forms and levels of economic dependence and inequality that impede parity of participation. precluded, therefore, are social arrangements that institutionalize deprivation, exploitation, and gross disparities in wealth, income, and leisure time, thereby denying some people the means and opportunities to interact with others as peers. in contrast, the second condition for participatory parity is “intersubjective.” it requires that institutionalized patterns of cultural value express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem. this condition precludes institutionalized value patterns that systematically depreciate some categories of people and the qualities associated with them. precluded, therefore, are institutionalized value patterns that deny some people the status of full partners in interaction—whether by burdening them with excessive ascribed “difference” or by failing to acknowledge their distinctiveness. both conditions are necessary for participatory parity. neither, alone, is sufficient. the first brings into focus concerns traditionally associated with the theory of distributive 3gender, moreover, is not unusual in this regard. "race," too, is a two-dimensional category, a compound of status and class. class, also, may well best be understood two-dimensionally, contra orthodox economistic theories. and even sexuality, which looks at first sight like the paradigm case of pure recognition, has an undeniable economic dimension. thus, it may well turn out that virtually all real-world axes of injustice are two-dimensional. virtually all perpetrate both maldistribution and misrecognition in forms where neither of those injustices can be redressed entirely indirectly but where each requires some practical attention. as a practical matter, therefore, overcoming injustice in virtually every case requires both redistribution and recognition. for a fuller discussion, see fraser, "social justice in the age of identity politics,” op. cit. studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 28 justice, especially concerns pertaining to the economic structure of society and to economically defined class differentials. the second brings into focus concerns recently highlighted in the philosophy of recognition, especially concerns pertaining to the status order of society and to culturally defined hierarchies of status. yet neither condition is merely an epiphenomenal effect of the other. rather, each has some relative independence. thus, neither can be achieved wholly indirectly via reforms addressed exclusively to the other. the result is a two-dimensional conception of justice that encompasses both redistribution and recognition, without reducing either one to the other.4 this approach suits the conception of gender proposed earlier. by construing redistribution and recognition as two mutually irreducible dimensions of justice, it broadens the usual understanding of justice to encompass both the class and status aspects of gender subordination. by submitting both dimensions to the overarching norm of participatory parity, moreover, it supplies a single normative standard for assessing the justice of the gender order. insofar as the economic structure of society denies women the resources they need for full participation in social life, it institutionalizes sexist maldistribution. insofar, likewise, as the status order of society constitutes women as lessthan-full partners in interaction, it institutionalizes sexist misrecognition. in either case, the result is a morally indefensible gender order. thus, the norm of participatory parity serves to identify, and condemn, gender injustice along two dimensions. but the standard also applies to other axes of social differentiation, including class, “race,” sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and religion. insofar as social arrangements impede parity of participation along any of these axes, whether via maldistribution or misrecognition, they violate the requirements of justice. the result, as we shall see shortly, is a normative standard that is capable of adjudicating some of the hardest political dilemmas feminists face today. these dilemmas arise at the intersection of multiple axes of subordination, when, for example, efforts to remedy the unjust treatment of a religious minority seem to conflict head-on with efforts to remedy sexism. in the following section of the present essay, i shall show how the principle of participatory parity serves to resolve such dilemmas. first, however, let me clarify my use of the term “parity,” as it differs from recent french uses of that term. four points of divergence are especially worth noting. first, in france parité designates a law mandating that women occupy half of all slots on electoral lists in campaigns for seats in legislative assemblies. there, accordingly, it means strict numerical equality in gender representation in electoral contests. for me, in contrast, parity is not a matter of numbers. rather, it is a qualitative condition, the condition of being a peer, of being on a par with others, of interacting with them on an equal footing. that condition is not guaranteed by mere numbers, as we know from former communist countries, some of which came close to achieving parity in the french sense while remaining very far from achieving it in mine. to be sure, the severe under-representation of women in legislative assemblies and other formal political institutions usually signifies qualitative disparities of participation in social life. but numerical quotas are not necessarily, or always, the best solution. thus, my conception deliberately leaves open 4for a fuller argument, see fraser, "social justice in the age of identity politics,” op. cit. studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 29 (for democratic deliberation) the question of exactly what degree of representation or level of equality is necessary to ensure participatory parity. the reason has to do with the second difference between my view of parity and the french one, a difference concerning scope. in france, the requirement of parité concerns one dimension of justice only, namely, the dimension of recognition. there, accordingly, it is apparently assumed that the chief obstacle to women’s full participation in political life is an androcentric value hierarchy in the party structure and that the principal remedy is the constitutional requirement that women occupy half the slots on electoral lists. for me, in contrast, the requirement of participatory parity applies to both dimensions of social justice, hence to distribution as well as recognition. and i assume that the obstacle to parity can be (and often is) maldistribution as well as misrecognition. in the case of gender disparity in political representation, then, i assume that what is required is not only the deinstitutionalization of androcentric value hierarchies, but also the restructuring of the division of labour to eliminate women’s “double shift,” which constitutes a formidable distributive obstacle to their full participation in political life. the third key difference is also a matter of scope, but in a different sense. in france, parité applies to one arena of interaction only: electoral campaigns for seats in legislative assemblies. for me, in contrast, parity applies throughout the whole of social life. thus, justice requires parity of participation in a multiplicity of interaction arenas, including labour markets, sexual relations, family life, public spheres, and voluntary associations in civil society. in each arena, however, participation means something different. for example, participation in the labour market means something qualitatively different from participation in sexual relations or in civil society. in each arena, therefore, the meaning of parity must be tailored to the kind of participation at issue. no single formula, quantitative or otherwise, can suffice for every case. what, precisely is, required to achieve participatory parity depends, in part, on the nature of the social interaction in question. the fourth key difference concerns scope in yet another sense. in france, parité applies to one axis of social differentiation only, namely, the axis of gender. thus, the law does not mandate proportional representation of other categories of subordinated people, such as racial/ethnic or religious minorities. nor, apparently, are its supporters concerned about its impact on such representation. for me, in contrast, justice requires participatory parity across all major axes of social differentiation; not only gender, but, also, “race,” ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and nationality.5 as i shall explain in the following section, this entails that proposed reforms be evaluated from multiple perspectives, and hence that proponents must consider whether measures aimed at redressing one sort of disparity are likely to end up exacerbating another.6 5thus, i reject the essentialist accounts of sexual difference, invoked by some french feminist philosophers to justify parité. 6there is also a fifth difference, which concerns modality. the french law mandates parité of actual participation. for me, in contrast, the moral requirement is that members of society be ensured the possibility of parity, if and when they choose to participate in a given activity or interaction. there is no requirement that everyone actually participate in any such activity. to take an example from the united states: separatist groups such as the amish are perfectly entitled to withdraw from participation in the larger society. what they cannot do, however, is deprive their children of the chance to acquire the social competences they would need to participate as peers in case they should later choose to exit the amish community and join the social mainstream. studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 30 in general, then, my notion of justice as participatory parity is far broader than the french parité. unlike the latter, it provides a normative standard for assessing the justice of all social arrangements along two dimensions and across multiple axes of social differentiation. as such, it represents a fitting counterpart to a conception of gender that encompasses not only the status-oriented dimension of recognition, but, also, the classlike dimension of distribution. rethinking recognition: a non-identitarian feminist politics now, let’s consider the implications of these conceptions for feminist politics, beginning first with the politics of recognition. usually, this is viewed as identity politics. from the standard perspective, what requires recognition is feminine gender identity. misrecognition consists in the depreciation of such identity by a patriarchal culture and the consequent damage to women’s sense of self. redressing this harm requires engaging in a feminist politics of recognition. such a politics aims to repair internal self-dislocation by contesting demeaning androcentric pictures of femininity. women must reject such pictures in favour of new self-representations of their own making. having refashioned their collective identity, moreover, they must display it publicly in order to gain the respect and esteem of the society-at-large. the result, when successful, is "recognition," a positive relation to oneself. on the identity model, then, a feminist politics of recognition means identity politics. without doubt, this identity model contains some genuine insights concerning the psychological effects of sexism. yet, as i have argued elsewhere, it is deficient on at least two major counts. first, it tends to reify femininity and to obscure cross-cutting axes of subordination. as a result, it often recycles dominant gender stereotypes, while promoting separatism and political correctness. second, the identity model treats sexist misrecognition as a free-standing cultural harm. as a result, it obscures the latter’s links to sexist maldistribution, thereby impeding efforts to combat both aspects of sexism simultaneously.7 for these reasons, feminists need an alternative approach. the concepts of gender and justice proposed here imply an alternative feminist politics of recognition. from this perspective, recognition is a question of social status. what requires recognition is not feminine identity but the status of women as full partners in social interaction. misrecognition, accordingly, does not mean the depreciation and deformation of femininity. rather, it means social subordination in the sense of being prevented from participating as a peer in social life. to redress the injustice requires a feminist politics of recognition, to be sure, but this does not mean identity politics. on the status model, rather, it means a politics aimed at overcoming subordination by establishing women as full members of society, capable of participating on a par with men. let me explain. the status approach requires examining institutionalized patterns of cultural value for their effects on the relative standing of women. if and when such patterns constitute women as peers, capable of participating on par with men in social 7for a fuller critique of the identity model, see nancy fraser, “rethinking recognition: overcoming displacement and reification in cultural politics,” new left review 3 (may/june 2000): 107-120. studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 31 life, then we can speak of reciprocal recognition and status equality. when, in contrast, institutionalized patterns of cultural value constitute women as inferior, excluded, wholly other, or simply invisible--hence as less than full partners in social interaction--then we must speak of sexist misrecognition and status subordination. on the status model, therefore, sexist misrecognition is a social relation of subordination relayed through institutionalized patterns of cultural value. it occurs when social institutions regulate interaction according to androcentric, parity-impeding norms. examples include criminal laws that ignore marital rape, social-welfare programs that stigmatize single mothers as sexually irresponsible scroungers, and asylum policies that regard genital mutilation as a “cultural practice” like any other. in each of these cases, interaction is regulated by an androcentric pattern of cultural value. in each case, the result is to deny women the status of full partners in interaction, capable of participating on par with men. viewed in terms of status, therefore, misrecognition constitutes a serious violation of justice. wherever and however it occurs, a claim for recognition is in order. but note precisely what this means. aimed not at valorizing femininity, but rather at overcoming subordination, claims for recognition seek to establish women as full partners in social life, able to interact with male peers. they aim, that is, to deinstitutionalize androcentric patterns of value that impede gender parity and to replace them with patterns that foster it.8 in general, then, the status model makes possible a non-identitarian politics of recognition. such a politics applies to gender, to be sure. but it also applies to other axes of subordination, including “race,” sexuality, ethnicity, nationality and religion. as a result, it enables feminists to adjudicate cases in which claims for recognition posed along one axis of subordination run up against claims posed along another. of special interest to feminists are cases in which claims for the recognition of minority cultural practices seem to conflict with gender justice. in such cases, the principle of participatory parity must be applied twice. it must be applied, first, at the intergroup level, to assess the effects of institutionalized patterns of cultural value on the relative standing of minorities vis-à-vis majorities. then, it must be applied, second, at the intragroup level, to assess the internal effects of the minority practices for which recognition is being claimed. taken together, these two levels constitute a double requirement. claimants must show, first, that the institutionalization of majority cultural norms denies them participatory parity and, second, that the practices whose recognition they seek do not themselves deny participatory parity to others, as well as to some of their own members. consider the french controversy over the foulard. here, the issue is whether policies forbidding muslim girls to wear headscarves in state schools constitute unjust treatment of a religious minority. in this case, those claiming recognition of the foulard must establish two points: they must show, first, that the ban on the scarf constitutes an unjust majority communitarianism, which denies educational parity to muslim girls; and second, that an alternative policy permitting the foulard would not exacerbate female subordination—in muslim communities or in society-at-large. the first point, concerning french majority communitarianism, can be established without difficulty, it seems, as no analogous prohibition bars the wearing of christian crosses in state schools; thus, the 8for a fuller account of the status model, see fraser, "social justice in the age of identity politics,” op. cit. studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 32 current policy denies equal standing to muslim citizens. the second point, concerning the non-exacerbation of female subordination, has proved controversial, in contrast, as some republicans have argued that the foulard is a marker of women’s subordination and must therefore be denied state recognition. disputing this interpretation, however, some multiculturalists have rejoined that the scarf’s meaning is highly contested in french muslim communities today, as are gender relations more generally. thus, instead of construing it as univocally patriarchal, which effectively accords male supremacists sole authority to interpret islam, the state should treat the foulard as a symbol of muslim identity in transition; one whose meaning is contested, as is french identity itself, as a result of transcultural interactions in a multicultural society. from this perspective, permitting the foulard in state schools could be a step toward, not away, from gender parity. in my view, the multiculturalists have the stronger argument here. (this is not the case, incidentally, for those seeking recognition for what they call “female circumcision”— genital mutilation clearly denies parity in sexual pleasure and in health to women and girls.) but that is not the point i wish to stress here. the point, rather, is that the multiculturalists’ argument is rightly cast in terms of parity of participation. this is precisely where the controversy should be joined. participatory parity is the proper standard for warranting claims for recognition (and redistribution). it enables a nonidentitarian feminist politics that can adjudicate conflicts between claims centred on gender and those focused on other, cross-cutting axes of subordination.9 integrating redistribution and recognition in feminist politics now, let’s consider the broader implications for feminist politics. as we saw, a feminist politics for today must be two-dimensional, combining a politics of recognition with a politics of redistribution. only such a politics can avoid truncating the feminist agenda and colluding with neoliberalism. yet devising such a feminist politics is no easy matter. it is not sufficient to proceed additively, as if one could simply add a politics of redistribution to a politics of recognition. proceeding in that manner would be to treat the two dimensions as if they occupied two separate spheres. in fact, however, distribution and recognition are thoroughly imbricated with one another. claims for redistribution and claims for recognition cannot be insulated from each other. on the contrary, they impinge on one another in ways that can give rise to unintended–and unwanted–effects. consider, first, that feminist claims for redistribution impinge on recognition. redistributive policies aimed at mitigating women’s poverty, for example, have status implications which can harm the intended beneficiaries. for example, public assistance 9this standard cannot be applied monologically, however, in the manner of a decision procedure. it must be applied dialogically, rather, through democratic processes of public debate. in such debates, participants argue about whether existing institutionalized patterns of cultural value impede parity of participation and about whether proposed alternatives would foster it. thus, participatory parity serves as an idiom of public contestation and deliberation about questions of justice. more strongly, it represents the principal idiom of public reason, the preferred language for conducting democratic political argumentation on issues of both distribution and recognition. this issue is discussed in fraser, "social justice in the age of identity politics,” op. cit. studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 33 programs aimed specifically at “female-headed families” often insinuate the lesser value of “childrearing” vis-à-vis “wage-earning” and of “welfare mothers” vis-à-vis “tax payers.”10 at their worst, they mark single mothers as sexually irresponsible scroungers, thereby adding the insult of misrecognition to the injury of deprivation. in general, redistributive policies affect women’s status and identities, as well as their economic position. these effects must be thematized and scrutinized, lest one end up fuelling sexist misrecognition in the course of trying to remedy sexist maldistribution. redistributive policies have sexist misrecognition effects when a culturally pervasive androcentric devaluation of caregiving inflects support for single-mother families as “getting something for nothing.”11 in this context, feminist struggles for redistribution cannot succeed unless they are joined with struggles for cultural change aimed at revaluing caregiving and the feminine associations that code it. in short, no redistribution without recognition. the converse is equally true, however, as feminist claims for recognition impinge on distribution. proposals to redress androcentric evaluative patterns have economic implications, which can work to the detriment of some women. for example, top-down campaigns to suppress female genital mutilation may have negative effects on the economic position of the affected women, rendering them "unmarriageable" while failing to ensure alternative means of support. likewise, campaigns to suppress prostitution and pornography may have negative effects on the economic position of sex workers. finally, no-fault divorce reforms in the united states have hurt some divorced women economically, even while enhancing women’s legal status.12 in such cases, reforms aimed at remedying sexist misrecognition have ended up fueling sexist maldistribution. recognition claims, moreover, are liable to the charge of being “merely symbolic.” when pursued in contexts marked by gross disparities in economic position, reforms aimed at affirming distinctiveness tend to devolve into empty gestures; like the sort of recognition that would put women on a pedestal, they mock, rather than redress, serious harms. in such contexts, recognition reforms cannot succeed unless they are joined with struggles for redistribution. in short, no recognition without redistribution. the moral here, is the need for bifocal vision in feminist politics. this means looking simultaneously through the two analytically distinct lenses of distribution and recognition. failure to keep either one of those lenses in view can end up distorting what one sees through the other. only a perspective that superimposes the two can avoid exacerbating one dimension of sexism in the course of trying to remedy another. the need, in all cases, is to think integratively, as in campaigns for "comparable worth." here a claim to redistribute income between men and women was expressly integrated with a claim to change gender-coded patterns of cultural value. the underlying 10see nancy fraser, "clintonism, welfare, and the antisocial wage: the emergence of a neoliberal political imaginary," rethinking marxism vol. 6, no. 1 (1993) pp. 9-23. 11this was the case with aid to families with dependent children (afdc), the major means-tested welfare program in the united states. claimed overwhelmingly by solo-mother families living below the poverty line, afdc became a lightening rod for racist and sexist anti-welfare sentiments in the 1990s. in 1997, it was “reformed” in such a way as to eliminate the federal entitlement that had guaranteed (some, inadequate) income support to the poor. 12lenore weitzman, the divorce revolution: the unexpected social consequences for women and children in america (new york: the free press, 1985). the extent of the income losses claimed by weitzman has been disputed. but there is little doubt that some losses have resulted. studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 34 premise was that gender injustices of distribution and recognition are so complexly intertwined that neither can be redressed entirely independently of the other. thus, efforts to reduce the gender wage gap cannot fully succeed if, remaining wholly “economic,” they fail to challenge the gender meanings that code low-paying service occupations as “women’s work,” largely devoid of intelligence and skill. likewise, efforts to revalue female-coded traits such as interpersonal sensitivity and nurturance cannot succeed if, remaining wholly “cultural,” they fail to challenge the structural economic conditions that connect those traits with dependency and powerlessness. only an approach that redresses the cultural devaluation of the “feminine” precisely within the economy (and elsewhere) can deliver serious redistribution and genuine recognition. conclusion elsewhere i have discussed other strategies for integrating a politics of redistribution with a politics of recognition.13 here i shall conclude by recapping my overall argument. i have argued that gender justice today requires both redistribution and recognition, as neither, alone, is sufficient. thus, i have rebutted arguments that cast the concerns of socialist-feminism as incompatible with those of newer paradigms centred on discourse and culture. putting aside the usual sectarian blinders, i have proposed conceptions of gender, justice, and recognition that are broad enough to encompass the concerns of both camps. these conceptions are two-dimensional. spanning both distribution and recognition, they are able to comprehend both the class-like aspects and status aspects of women’s subordination. the concepts proposed here are also informed by a broader diagnosis of the present juncture. on the one hand, i have assumed that gender intersects other axes of subordination in ways that complicate the feminist project. and i have suggested ways of resolving some of the resulting dilemmas–especially for cases in which claims to redress cultural and religious misrecognition seem to threaten to exacerbate sexism. on the other hand, i have situated my approach to feminist politics in relation to the larger shift in the grammar of claims-making “from redistribution to recognition.” where that shift threatens to abet neoliberalism by repressing the problematic of distributive justice, i have proposed a two-dimensional political orientation. this approach keeps alive the insights of marxism, while also learning from the cultural turn. in general, then, the approach proposed here provides some conceptual resources for answering what i take to be the key political question of our day: how can feminists develop a coherent programmatic perspective that integrates redistribution and recognition? how can we develop a framework that integrates what remains cogent and unsurpassable in the socialist vision with what is defensible and compelling in the apparently “postsocialist” vision of multiculturalism? if we fail to ask this question, if we cling instead to false antitheses and misleading either/or dichotomies, we will miss the chance to envision social arrangements that can redress both the class-like and status aspects of women’s subordination. only by looking to integrative approaches that unite redistribution and recognition can we meet the requirements of justice for all. 13 see especially fraser, "social justice in the age of identity politics,” op. cit. studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 35 references fraser, n. (1993) clintonism, welfare, and the antisocial wage: the emergence of a neoliberal political imaginary," rethinking marxism 6(1), 9-23. fraser, n. (1997). from redistribution to recognition? dilemmas of justice in a 'postsocialist' age. in fraser, n, justice interruptus: critical reflections on the "postsocialist" condition. new york: routledge. (reprinted from new left review 212, 1995, 68 – 93) fraser, n. (2000). rethinking recognition: overcoming displacement and reification in cultural politics. new left review 3 (may/june 2000), 107-120. fraser, n. (2003). social justice in the age of identity politics: redistribution, recognition, and participation. in n. fraser and a. honneth, redistribution or recognition? a politicalphilosophical exchange. london: verso and frankfurt: suhrkamp. weitzman, l. (1985). the divorce revolution: the unexpected social consequences for women and children in america. new york: the free press. microsoft word harvey.doc studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 2 neoliberalism and the city1 david harvey, city university of new york it’s great to be here and, particularly, to celebrate the beginning of a journal with such an auspicious title. i have long been interested in questions of social justice; one of my first books was social justice and the city. for me, it was a revelatory book to write and i hope that it will one day be a revelatory book to read; but sometimes, as in this instance, you learn far more by writing than by reading. my book was about the city and i would like to start with one of my favourite quotations about cities, which is by robert park, a sociologist writing in chicago in the 1920s. park put it this way about cities, he said: the city is man’s most consistent and, on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in, more after his heart’s desire. the city is the world which man created; it is the world in which he is therefore condemned to live. thus indirectly, without a clear sense of the nature of his task, in remaking the city, man has remade himself. you'll have to forgive the gender bias in that quotation, it was written in the 1920s. for me, the significance of this statement is something that needs to be reflected upon; because i can be accused of liking it but also because in some ways it parallels a famous statement by marx. in capital, marx talks about the process of human labour and he makes the dialectical point that we cannot change the world around us without changing ourselves and we cannot change ourselves without changing the world around us. and so marx sees the whole of human history as being the working out of the dialectic of transformations of who we are and what we are, along with the transformation of the world around us, the environment and everything else. park, of course was not a marxist, i doubt if he ever read marx, but park is making the same argument. the implication of park’s argument is that the question “what of kind of cities do we want to live in” cannot be divorced from the question of “what kind of people do we want to be,” “what kind of humanity we wish to create amongst ourselves,” and “how do we want to create it?” it is that mutual constitution of the city, of who we are and what we are, that is something which i think it is very important to reflect upon. particularly since we look back historically and ask, were we ever conscious of this task? were we ever conscious that we were doing this? i think the answer is that as the cities changed, we changed without us really being very conscious of it. occasionally someone would come along, a utopian usually, and say; “hey, we should make a different kind of city. and this different kind of city is going to be the kind of city where we are going to be wonderful people, instead of the all the evil nasty people we see around us.” so there is a utopian tradition which tries to answer park’s argument, by becoming conscious of the task and making proposals about city forms and city 1 this is a transcript of a lecture given at the university of windsor on september 25, 2006. studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 3 functions and city growth which is somehow connected to the idea of creating an ideal human community, an ideal world in which we can live. most utopian schemes have never worked very well, for reasons that i will not go into here. but when we look back historically and geographically about the way in which new york was built, toronto was built, birmingham was built, moscow was built, shanghai was built, it isn't as if those places were built with the very distinct idea about what kind of people we wanted to be. but the result of that urbanization has been the creation of a certain kind of human society, and we have to pay attention to what kind of human society this is. there is a very old saying from the medieval periods, it says the “city air makes one free,” and it is here that the idea of the freedom of the city starts to be important historically. a question i want to reflect upon today is “what kind of freedom do we have in the city?” right now, if we say “city air makes us free” what kind of freedom is being constituted by the urban processes that are going on around us? these questions lead immediately to the questions “what do we mean by freedom,” “who is in a position to tell us what this freedom is,” and “how do we designate what this freedom is?” of course we have a tremendous ethic for this idea called freedom. south of the border, a man called george bush has actually done a lot of writing, many speeches, on this theme about liberty and freedom. i am so curious about this so i actually took time off and re-read all of george bush’s speeches and they’re very interesting. he says a number of different things. on the anniversary of 9/11, he said: we are determined to stand for the values that gave our nation its birth, because a peaceful world of growing freedoms serves america’s long term interests, reflects enduring american ideals, and unites america’s allies. humanity has the opportunity to further freedom's triumph over its age-old foes. he goes on to say that the “united states welcomes its responsibility to lead with this great nation.” these sentiments could be found before 9/11 in some of george bush’s speeches—they were not new. there is an interesting addendum. when tony blair came to address congress, in july 2003, he proposed a friendly amendment to george bush’s emphasis on american values. he said: there is a myth that, though we love freedom, others don’t, that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture, that freedom, democracy, human rights, rule of law, are american values or western values. members of congress, ours are not western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit. bush accepted this amendment. in his next speech which was delivered in westminster in answer to blair’s speech, he said: the advance of freedom is the calling of our time. it is the calling of our country from the 14 points [and here he is referring back to woodrow wilson], to the 4 freedoms [referring to roosevelt], to the speech of westminster [here talking of ronald reagan]. america has put its power studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 4 in service of the principle that we believe that liberty is the design of nature, we believe that liberty is the direction of history. we believe that human fulfillment and excellence come with the responsible exercise of liberty. we believe that the freedom we prize is not for us alone, but the right and capacity for all mankind. at his acceptance speech at the republican national convention in 2004, george bush said: i believe america has been called to lead the cause of freedom in a new century. i believe that millions in the middle east plead in silence for their liberty. if given the chance they will embrace the most honourable form of government ever devised by man. i believe all these things because freedom is not americans' gift to the world, but the almighty’s gift to every man and women in this world. in his inaugural speech in january 2005, he said: we can afford complete confidence in the eventual triumph of this world. not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability—it is human choices that move, advance—not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation—god moves and chooses as he wills. while history has an air of justice it also has visible direction set by liberty and the author of liberty. there is an interesting set of transitions in these speeches. from the idea that freedom and liberty are american values, to the idea that they are universal values, to the idea that they are values imbedded in nature, to the idea that they are, of course, part of the intelligent design of the almighty for the earth. what is interesting about this rhetoric is that it is persistent in the bush administration. we can take two approaches to it. one is to say this is just hot air, it is hypocritical nonsense. when we look at guantanamo bay or abu ghraib, when we look at all the things that are going on on the ground, we are horrified that there is an incredible mismatch between this rhetoric about liberty and freedom and the facts of what is occurring in the actual policies as they are unfolding. even in the patriot act in the us, the authoritarianism that we are seeing at all levels of government—this rhetoric is completely false and hypocritical and this is the wrong way to interpret it. i think it is wrong for a number of reasons. bush sticks very much to his claims of liberty and freedom. the conservative columnist david brooks of the new york times made this comment and i think i partially agree with him, he says: we should not assume that america is the money grabbing, resource wasting, tv drenched, unreflective bimbo of the earth and all this hightoned language is just a cover for the quest for oil, for the desire for riches, dominion, or war. i actually think america is all those things, but what brooks is quite right about, is to say that it is not just all of those things. the ideals of bush are, in fact, deeply embedded in american history and are very, very significant to the way in which people in the us studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 5 construe their positionality in the world. we need to find the power of this rhetoric, the significance of this rhetoric, and the tradition of this rhetoric. when for example, bush referred back to woodrow wilson he made a very, very powerful connection. woodrow wilson (a liberal) was concerned with liberty and freedom in the world. at the same time, he was up against somewhat more grubby concerns. for instance, woodrow wilson put it this way when he was president: since trade ignores natural boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him and the doors of the nation which are closed against him must be battered down. the concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, i.e. the military, even if the sovereignty of an unwilling nation has been outraged in the process. colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that any useful corner of the nation does not go overlooked or is left unused. roosevelt had similar global designs. reagan of course, also similar. now i want to make this point because there is an erroneous view that bush is an aberration in the american tradition. he is not; he is firmly implanted in that tradition. therefore we cannot entertain the notion that simply voting bush out of office and putting somebody like clinton back in is going to solve the problem. now this idea of freedom is very important, but we have to put some tangible meaning to it. the way that bush set up the tangible meaning is by simply associating again and again in his speeches the idea that freedom is represented by the freedom of the market and freedom of trade. what bush meant by freedom is best signalled by what paul bremer, head of the coalition of provisional authority in iraq, did before the handover of government. there was a complete reconstruction around the institutional arrangement of the iraqi state. the privatization of everything was mandated. there should be no barrier to private ownership. there should be no barriers to foreign investors coming in and doing as they please, no barriers on the properties of the country, no barriers to trade. in effect what paul bremer did, before he handed over authority, was to lay out a whole set of provisions in the iraqi institutional arrangements which were consistent with a neoliberal state apparatus. a perfect fit with the wto and also the theory of how a neoliberal state apparatus should look. there were something like 70-80 provisions, decrees that bremer left with the iraqis. when they handed over government to the iraqis, it was a condition of handing it over that they could not change anything. so, the iraqis were invited to take this idea of freedom in a certain vein. the critic matthew arnold made a comment a long time ago, “freedom is a great idea, it is a great horse to ride, provided you know where you’re riding it to.” what the iraqis were invited to do was to ride the horse of freedom right into the neoliberal corral. the iraqi constitution that was set up in 2003 was almost identical to the constitution that was arrived at 30 years ago, in 1975 to be exact, in the wake of the coup in chile which got rid of salvador allende and put pinochet in charge. there was a two year hiatus in chile because the question was, what kind of economic program would revive the economy? what they did in chile was bring in the chicago boys who said, “privatize everything, open up to foreign investment, foreign trade, no barriers to repatriation of private property, have an export studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 6 led growth model.” of course they didn’t have to discipline labour because all the labour leaders were dead, all trade unions were dismantled. all healthcare clinics where radical opposition had fermented were dismantled. there was a completely neoliberal regime implemented in chile in 1975, which was absolutely identical to the one the us imposed upon iraq in 2003. so, again, there is a certain conception of freedom that is emphasized. i think what happened after the chilean coup and what happened in iraq brackets a whole historical theory in which strong processes of neoliberalism have transformed the world, transformed us to the point that all of us are neoliberals, whether we like or not. all of us have absorbed the ethos of neoliberalization, and, as a result, we relate to each other in very different ways. we see this change most spectacularly in the ways that cities have been transformed during this period. for me, one of the most fascinating things has been to track neoliberalization back to new york city in 1975. this is exactly the same time that the coup was occurring in chile. new york city went bankrupt in 1975. the bankruptcy of new york city was a singular event that had dramatic global consequences. to begin with, new york city’s budget was one of the largest public projects in the world. it was either the 14th or 15th largest public project in the world. so bankrupting something of this kind would be tantamount to bankrupting a country like italy or france. the idea was so potentially damaging, that the west german chancellor and the french president both appealed to the ford administration and said “you can’t let this happen.” but it did happen and what happened after it was absolutely crucial. why and what happened? during the 1960s new york city had been losing jobs and companies had been moving out to the suburbs or out to the american south (not yet going to mexico, taiwan, or china, but they were moving out). as a result, industrial employment was declining in new york city. of course, this was going on in many american cities at the time. the result was that the centre of cities was occupied by disaffected, unemployed, marginalized and very often racially marked populations. these rose up in a variety of crises in the 1960s and it became known as the urban crisis of the 1960s. riots, particularly the ones that followed the assassination of martin luther king in 1968 created mayhem in many of the central cities. the federal government was determined to do something about it. it decided it would try to help central cities recover; it set in place a recovery program. the recovery program largely rested on the expansion of the public sector. the public sector expanded because federal funds were flying into the cities, very fast, and municipal governments could start to expand their workforces and expand the services they offered. there was expansion of education, expansion of healthcare, expansion of garbage collection, and expansion of transit workers. the new york city municipal sector expanded very rapidly during the late 1960s and early 70s as part of this stabilization program. this program also involved integration of racial minorities into the labour force through public employment. the whole program depended on the city having adequate finances. the city did not have adequate finances and therefore started to borrow heavily in the late 1960s and early 1970s. the investment bankers loved it because, new york city had a big budget therefore it was a secure investment. the investment bankers were very happy to fund all of this. in fact, they even taught new york city slippery games, creative accounting and all those kind of things, so studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 7 they could get financed in more “sophisticated” kinds of ways. but, in 1973, things started to go bad. the city started to lose money, property taxes were in decline, and incomes were declining. and in 1973, the federal government found itself in a financial crisis. i will always remember the day when president nixon came on the radio for his state of the union address and said, “the urban crisis is over.” i looked out the window and said, “wow, baltimore looks the same to me.” i thought people would be dancing in the streets. it was the same kind of grubby, messy, horrible kind of place, declining as it always had been. what nixon meant by this was, “we are not going to give you any more money.” they stopped giving money to new york city. budgets were cut back without federal money coming in. so new york city started borrowing even more. in 1975, the investment bankers said “no, we are no going to lend you any more.” it was a dramatic moment when the city administration said, “what? what are we going to do?” the investment bankers said, “we don’t know.” so this is part of the story. the second part of the story is this, during the 1960s and 1970s, there had been a program of what i call “surplus capital.” there was too much capital around and no one knew what to do with it. a lot of went to real estate speculation. there was a huge building boom in many american cities and particularly new york city. this is the time that produced the world trade center, which was an economic disaster because nobody ever wanted to locate in them and they could never be filled with regular tenants at all. there was a building boom and the most incredible overbuilding, particularly in the office sector. the city was also doing all kinds of things such as forgiving property taxes. it was a real game being played with developers around the property market. the property market crashed in 1973. there were all these empty buildings around, not paying taxes, and this was a part of the problem for new york city. so between the shortage of employment and the lack of property taxes, you had this crisis. but there is another issue, why did the investment bankers suddenly decided not to lend? if you look at an economy that is grossly in debt, is being fiscally managed in an appalling way, where all of the indicators suggest that you shouldn’t lend to them anymore, you are looking at the contemporary united states. the aggregate data on new york city back then is no worse than the aggregate data on the whole us economy right now. and the equivalent right now would be the chinese central bank, japanese central bank, and the south korean central bank, suddenly deciding “we are not going to lend you any money anymore.” there would be no money in the united states to fight the war; no money to spend on this property boom, all this consumerism; no money to run the huge deficit which we are running. the question is why did the investment bankers in new york city suddenly decide not to lend? it seems to me, that this is the real story of the fiscal crisis of new york city. clearly new york city was vulnerable, what was new york city doing that the investment bankers didn’t like? what they were doing was playing nice to the unions, they were actually spreading the money around, and they were engaged in all kinds of philanthropic projects, actually being nice to minorities, black people, and all the rest of it. the city was doing all kinds of things that stood in the way of the ambitions of men like david rockefeller who wanted new york city to be an island for bourgeois affluence. at the same time that the monies were being pushed, there was a lot of antibanker sentiment in the city and a lot of anti-corporate sentiment in the city. remember, this was a time when students in santa barbara actually buried a chevy in the sand and burned down the bank of america building. there was a lot of studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 8 radicalism, a lot of anti-corporate politics. big businesses were getting nervous at the beginning of the 1970s. they started to work together to try to recreate a viable corporate capitalism that would have significant power. new york city was heading towards becoming a social democratic, almost socialist, kind of municipality. the big businesses were terrified politically. so they launched a financial coup against the city. my argument is that this financial coup against new york city was just as effective as pinochet’s military coup in chile. but, what now had to happen was new york city had to be disciplined into a new kind of economic future. how are you going to do that democratically? one of the things that happened immediately was that all authority over the budget was taken away from the elected officials and given to the municipal assistance corporation (mac), later called the emergency financial control board. the mac was run by the investment bankers, a couple of representatives from the state, and a couple of representatives from the city. what they did, in effect, was take all of the receipts coming into the city, all the taxes, and they said, “we’ll take all this money and the first thing we'll do is pay off all the bondholders; pay off all those holding the debt. whatever is left goes into the city budget.” well you can imagine what that meant for unemployment and cuts in services. it was a catastrophe. they even insisted that the municipal unions put their all their pension funds into the debt. so, if the municipal unions created any kind of problem and new york city went bankrupt they would lose all their pensions. it was a very clever move for that time. it was here, i think, that an extremely important principle that became a global principle was first enacted. if there is a conflict between the well being of financial institutions and the well being of the population, the government will choose the well being of the financial institutions; to hell with the well being of the population. this of course became the gospel of the international monetary fund (imf) and their structural adjustment programs (saps) that began in the 1980s; one of the first ones was mexico. the mac disciplined the city, it attacked the workforce, and it attacked social expenditures of all kinds. but, the investment bankers had a problem; their problem was that they had all this property. so they couldn’t walk away from the city and say “the hell with it,” they had to revive the city and discipline it at the same time. this situation was really hitting the services. garbage was not being picked up; they had to come up with a strategy to revive the city so that the value of all those properties that had been negative in the 1970s would come back online. how did they do this? they did it in two ways. the first was an international ploy. one of the things that happened in 1973, if you recall, was a huge rise in oil prices as opec kicked in and there was an oil boycott. the price of oil shot up resulting in petrodollars accumulating in the gulf states. saudi arabia suddenly found itself with tons and tons of dollars, as did all gulf states. the big question was what were they going to do with all that money? stick it under the mattress? what we now know from british intelligence reports which were just released last year, is that british intelligence reckoned that there was a strong possibility that the us was going to invade saudi arabia in 1973, in order to occupy the oil wells and bring the oil prices down. we know that is how far planning went. we don’t know if this was just a contingency plan, or how serious it was. nobody knows; we likely won’t know for a long time. what we do know, is that the us ambassador to saudi arabia went to the saudis and raised the question of what they were going to do with their petrodollars. they negotiated an exclusive arrangement studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 9 with the saudis that saudi arabia would recycle their petrodollars through the us investment banks. whether the saudis knew they were going to be invaded or not, or whether they knew they were going to be bombed to the stone age, i don’t know. but, we do know that the saudis agreed to take all of those petrodollars, give them to the new york investment banks, which gave them a tremendously privileged position, in terms of global finance. it assured that new york city became the financial capital of the world. and we often think that new york city is the financial capital because it seems natural. well it’s not natural; it’s partly us military power that assured it. so, the new york investment bankers had the money, they had the business. they were going to have lots of employment in financial services in new york city. manufacturing in the city didn’t matter. they had to remake the city around financial services and all the things that come with it. so at that time, the investment bankers and the corporations got together, around the idea of reviving the economy of new york city. they set up something called the downtown business partnership. that partnership decided that they are going to sell new york city as a destination for anyone interested in culture; they really pushed the cultural institutions like the museum of modern art, broadway, and other institutions as a destination for consumption, as tourist destinations. this is the moment that they came up with the logo, which you have all seen, “i love new york.” they were going to sell the city; this is how they were going to revitalize it. but how could they do that at a time when nobody was picking up the garbage? why would tourists come to the city when there was garbage on the streets? so, they had to start to actually deal, hands on, with how city government was working, in the process they came across serious resistance. the police and fire unions were outraged that their wages were being diminished, their contracts were being revoked, and a lot of them were being laid off. so they launched a campaign against the “i love new york” idea. they produced a pamphlet called “fear city.” they went to kennedy airport and gave it to tourists. it said things like “don’t go to the city, because if there is a fire in your hotel, you will have to jump out the window because there are no fire people to get you out,” “don’t walk in the city,” “you can only use the buses between 9 o’clock in the morning and 5 in the afternoon,” and “never go on the subway because you’re going to get mugged.” so they launched this “fear city” campaign that actually got back to europe and european travellers were kind of saying “i don’t think i can go to new york.” this was the time when other things were going on like the summer of sam, grisly murders, and things like that. clearly the downtown business partnership had an image problem. so it negotiated with the police and fire unions and said “call off this campaign and we’ll re-hire a bunch of you.” so they said “ok” and called off the campaign and a bunch of them were rehired. but they were assigned to work in manhattan. so the bronx burned down, a lot of the queens garbage was never picked up, and a lot of crime was going on all over the place. but they sealed off manhattan and made it a privileged place. manhattan was as safe as they could possibly make it. it wasn’t very safe in the 1980s, it was really pretty rough, but bit by bit there was a reoccupation of manhattan. so this was the second principle: the municipal government was no longer about benefiting the population, the municipal government had to address creating a good business climate. that was the goal, create a good business climate. and if there is a conflict between creating a good business climate and the well being of this or that studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 10 segment of the population, then to hell with this or that segment of the population. new york city became a divided city in the 1980s; an incredible crime wave took over. if you are going to privatize everything, why not privatize redistribution through criminal activity. that, in effect, is what began to happen. the only problem was, given the way in which the defences were being set up, that it became increasingly difficult to privatize the very rich. they could only do it with poor people, or middle class people. the other problem was, of course, that the other new york, the one that was not being privileged, had a crack epidemic, an aids epidemic and a public health crisis. so half of the city was suffering miserably, while the other half was being steadily built up by business partnerships and a privileged notion of “this is a manhattan we know and love.” now we come to an end point of that, right now in the bloomberg administration. here is a man who is a billionaire, who’s basically bought his way into the mayoralty, and actually he is not a bad mayor. he’s not as bad as some of the mayors who have been around and he really is concerned about trying to make new york city competitive in the global economy. but, competitive for what? one of the first things michael bloomberg did was say “we’re not going to offer any subsidies to corporations to come here.” he went on record as saying, “if a corporation needs a subsidy to locate, in this high cost, high quality, wonderful location of new york city, if they need a subsidy to come here, then we don’t want them. we only want corporations that can afford to be here.” he didn’t say that about people, but, in fact, that policy carries over to people. there is an out migration from new york city of low income people, particularly hispanics. they’re moving to small towns in pennsylvania and upper new york state because they can’t afford to live in new york city anymore. conditions of life for them in new york city are appalling. meanwhile, the conditions of life for the very, very rich are absolutely wonderful. this is the kind of city i now live in. on the one hand, you can appreciate living in an environment like manhattan, which is relatively safe now, where services are not bad at all. you can appreciate that, but the trouble is that for middle class people such as myself it is becoming impossible to live in manhattan anymore, and part of that has to do with the trajectory that neoliberalization has taken. i mentioned investment bankers getting all this money from saudi arabia, the question is, what were they going to do with it? the us economy was depressed, where were they going to lend the money? they couldn’t put it into new buildings in manhattan; there were too many buildings around anyway. there was a real problem of surplus capital in 1975. where on earth they were going to put this surplus money? walter wriston, one of the investment bankers, said “its simple, we lend to countries, because countries don’t go away, we can always find them.” so they started lending massive amounts of money to places like mexico, brazil, argentina, even poland. they lent on relatively low interest rates because interest rates were very low in the 70s. then paul volcker suddenly raised all the interest rates because of the higher rate of inflation in 1979. when the interest rate rose, suddenly mexico had to pay back at a higher rate of interest and they couldn’t pay. so mexico went bankrupt in 1982. the right wing neoliberals don’t like the imf. in the first year of the reagan administration, james baker drew up a plan to effectively abolish the imf and the reagan administration was going to do it. except that mexico went bankrupt. there was a real problem, if you let mexico go bankrupt, then whose loans are going to be hit, citibank, chase manhattan, all the new york banks were really going to be seriously hit studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 11 by the bankruptcy of mexico. so it was at this point that they decided that they were going to rescue mexico. they had to rescue mexico. well, the us treasury stepped in and at that point james baker suddenly said, “ah this is where the imf can help and they can do the dirty work for us.” the trouble was that at that time the imf was constituted by keynesian thinking people. so the first thing baker said was, “let’s appoint someone who is a true blue monetarist neoliberal and put them in there.” so they had what joseph stiglitz calls a “purge of all the keynesians out of the imf and world bank in 1982.” they brought in all these other economists who were thinking in terms of monetarism and neoliberal principles. then they said “let’s do the mexico thing.” what the imf started to do was to engage in this process by saying “the way to get the money back from the mexicans is to put the squeeze on the mexican people. again, it is that principle which was established in new york city that if there is conflict between the financial institutions and the well-being of the people, hit the well-being of the people of mexico, hit the well-being of the people of brazil, hit the well-being of those in ecuador, hit the well being of wherever it is. structural adjustment does exactly that. at the same time it also insists on institutional reform, “get rid of strong unions, introduce flexibility into the labour market, and reform your pension structures,” so that structural adjustment becomes the name of the game. this is the way in which the imf started to work globally and the new york investment banks, at the centre of that, have, of course, become incredibly affluent. what’s more, they have become engaged in the process of financialization on a global scale. new instruments, some of them quite astonishing, have begun to emerge. hedge funds for example, there were about 300 of them 15 years ago, now there are something like 3000 of them. we’ve seen recently one of them going belly up and things like that but, still, the leading hedge fund managers last year personally took 250 million dollars each. that is, they each had a personal income of 250 million dollars in one year. now i know you are all going to have ambitions of becoming hedge fund managers, but watch out, watch out. that’s not uncommon in the financial services industry. in manhattan we have lots of people like that living in the place, a privileged centre, for a trans-national capitalist class, if you want to call it that—i don’t like that term though—to enjoy itself, to manipulate monies which are fictitious. this last weekend in the new york times there was some data on some interesting aggregates that are coming out recently. there are things called interest rate and currency derivatives. we can talk about what they are, and if you know what they are fine, and if not what you need to know is that in 1988, these were zero. now they are 250.8 trillion dollars. there is something called “credit default swaps” and the volume of them outstanding stood at zero in the year 2000 and now its 26.0 trillion dollars. equity derivatives outstanding in 2002 were about 2 trillion dollars, now there about 6.4 trillion. the article comments that the total of all these outstanding swaps and derivatives at the end of june was 283.2 trillion dollars. the combined gross domestic product of the united states, the european union, canada, japan, and china is 34 trillion dollars. these people are making masses and masses of money out of playing these games, these fictitious games and it’s all over the city. the city of new york is now dominated by that kind of wealth which is generated out of this kind of activity. of course a lot of that wealth trickles down, not to people like me, but it trickles down to financial services in general; it trickles down to the legal services, tax avoidance. i know someone who just retired who is getting 400,000 dollars a year, studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 12 working part time. what does he do? he advised people how to play the tax game, internationally. this is, of course, what neoliberalization has been about. when you look at the aggregate data, and it’s absolutely astonishing, the top one percent of the us population has doubled its share of the national income over the last twenty years. this has happened in britain too, and other places where neoliberalization has taken hold. the top 0.1 percent has quadrupled its share of the national income over the last twenty years. but when you go to the top 0.01 percent, they have increased their income by 497 percent over the last twenty years. all you have to do is start looking at this data and you will realize there is an incredible concentration of wealth occurring in any country that goes neoliberal, part neoliberal, or major neoliberal. china, right now, has gone a peculiar kind of neoliberal. the amount of wealth that is being concentrated in a few hands in china is absolutely astonishing also. what this leads to is the general idea that neoliberalization, from its very inception, was about the restoration of class power and, in particular, the restoration of class power to a very privileged elite, i.e. the investment bankers and top corporate chiefs. the data show that again and again and again. at this point you have to say that this was a conscious policy, this was not an accident. it is kind of funny, you read all these accounts of people like stiglitz in the 90s, and he said, “well we did this policy and that policy and it’s interesting that the rich got richer and poor got poorer by accident, but that was just a by-product of what was happening.” no, that’s what these policies were designed to do all along, that’s exactly what they were doing in new york city. since mexico went really neoliberal after the imf had done several rounds of going after it, the world bank also, it went really neoliberal between 1988 and 1992. five years later, there are something like 20 mexicans on the world's wealthiest list. i believe that the third or fourth richest man in the world is a man called carlos slim, who is mexican. mexico has more billionaires than saudi arabia. for those of you who have been to mexico, have you noticed that there is poverty there? have you noticed there is a lot of unemployment there? have you noticed there is a lot of misery there? a lot of ill health and no public services, the water is dirty. this is what neoliberalization is all about and what it does to cities is really fascinating. in the new york case, neoliberalization was followed by an enormous crime wave and ill health wave, which was followed by the giuliani repressions. actually if you look at all latin american cities in the neoliberal period, all of them have had an increase in the absolute level of poverty, except santiago. all of them, including santiago, have had an incredible increase in social inequality. the result of that is that we now have divided cities; gated communities here, impoverished communities there. the city is being dissolved into micro-states of rich and poor. we have that in new york city, with manhattan vs. the boroughs still. the other thing the data show about latin american urbanization is an enormous crime wave that has racked the cities to the point where criminal gangs have taken over the streets of sao paulo periodically over the last few months and shown that they can run the city. you find criminal activity, armed robberies. i go to argentina regularly because my wife is from argentina. last christmas we had the pleasure of lying on the floor face down, guns pointed at us, while they took everything. and this is normal, this is not abnormal, this is normal. this is the privatization of redistribution of income; i think you have to understand it that way. studies in social justice, volume 1, number 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 13 so the big concern is, through the evolution of these cities look at what’s going on. there is literature now like mike davis' planet of slums, and we are talking about that. we have to get a grasp of the process, where it’s coming from, who’s doing it and what’s doing it. in order to get a grasp, we have to come back to some simple strategies. if it looks like class struggle, feels like class struggle, then it is class struggle for god’s sake! and the only way you’re going to deal with it is to fight back in class struggle terms. but, i’m told by my academic friends that class is no longer a valid category. i’m told by others of old, that it’s disruptive. if you talk about class, you “rock the boat.” the wall street journal sneers at anybody who talks about this redistribution and says “oh they want to launch a divisive class struggle,” as if we are all together in the same boat. we are not all together in the same boat. i am not in the same boat as those that take home 250 million dollars in a year. so this, it seems to me, is where we’re at. in order to do something about it i think we have to recognize that cities have always been centres of conflict, change and transformation. there are, actually, movements at work in different cities trying to change things. you can look at stuff that is going in various brazilian cities and what’s going on in some european cities. cities can be crucibles where new politics can be constructed and emerge. the biggest difficulty right now is that cities are being divided into microstates. so that even now i’m told that “the city” is not a valid concept either. my answer to that is we have to regain some notion of the city, in the way that park is talking about, as some kind of body politic through which we can reconstruct, not only cities, but can reconstruct human relations and ourselves. we have to think about it in those terms, and we have to understand that this is a political project, a class project. otherwise we will simply go through the next round of restructuring and find ourselves passively agreeing to what is going on. it is with that idea that i’d like to leave you and hope that this will be one of the big themes that you will take up in your new journal. sullivan final correspondence address: michael sullivan, department of international relations, st. mary’s university, san antonio, tx 78228; email: msullivan6@stmarytx.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 defending family unity as an immigration policy priority michael sullivan st. mary’s university, usa abstract in this article, i make a policy argument defending family-based immigration preferences in u.s. immigration law given recent calls by some labor economists, political philosophers, and now, the trump administration to move from a family-based immigration system to a skills and education based selection process. i begin by tracing historical policy arguments for limiting family-based immigration. i then challenge the view that family-based immigration is a fiscal burden on the nation as a whole and acts against the interests of disadvantaged u.s.-born workers. finally, i respond to objections to family-based immigration by disadvantaged citizens who believe that they are suffering from competition with immigrants not selected for their education or skills, including those sponsored by family members. keywords family; immigration; labor; race; class; intersectionality introduction in this article, i make a policy argument to current u.s. citizens and legal permanent residents in defense of family-based immigration programs. family-based immigration programs currently allow citizens to sponsor a non-citizen spouse, children, parents, and siblings to enter and live in the united states as legal permanent residents. legal permanent residents can sponsor their spouse or minor children to enter and live in the united states. these sponsorship claims are controversial, especially when they extend beyond the sponsor’s immediate family to include the siblings, adult children, and elderly parents of citizens. the trump administration has recently proposed scaling back these extended family-based immigration programs (miroff, 2018). all family-based immigration programs are politically contentious because they have potential costs for immigrants and citizens michael sullivan studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 370 who are already in the u.s. (galston, pickus & skerry, 2009, pp. 4-5, 10-14). public policy restrictionists who self-identify as progressives affiliated with the center for immigration studies (cis) and the federation for american immigration reform (fair), with a prominent role in immigration policymaking in the trump administration, want to both cut legal immigration levels and escalate enforcement (kulish, 2017). they argue that immigrants not specifically selected for their high levels of education and training – including family-based migrants – undermine the wages and working conditions of disadvantaged citizens (briggs, 2003). there is also a vigorous academic debate among political theorists and economists about the impact of family-based immigration on the well-being of u.s. citizens. political theorist stephen macedo (2011, p. 305), political philosopher philip cafaro (2015) and labor economist george borjas (1999, p. 193) have expressed concerns about the impact of family immigrants who are not selected for their education or skills on the relative economic standing of the poorest americans. they support limiting extended family immigration to address these problems. in response, i contend that family-based immigrants contribute to the vitality of u.s. cities, provide support to and receive support from their sponsors, and strengthen the u.s.-born working class by investing in businesses that hire u.s. workers, and by acting in solidarity with u.s.-led labor organizing efforts. to this end, i argue for extending existing family immigration quotas to allow more relatives of current immigrants to enter or adjust to legal status, including those who are currently in the country without authorization. to support this view, i counter claims that extended family members are a drain on public resources and that they pose unfair competition to american workers. i first trace the historical sources of the policy arguments for increasing skills based immigration at the expense of family immigration, and show how minority families would be impacted by this change. second, i scrutinize the economic arguments that are being made to cast the existing family-based immigration program as a threat to the employment opportunities of disadvantaged u.s. citizens. finally, i argue that since perceptions are as important as economic evidence in political debates about immigration reform, the beliefs of citizens that there is zerosum competition between immigrants and disadvantaged citizens must also be combated through efforts by organized labor groups to mobilize immigrants and citizens to work towards shared wage gains and labor protections. family immigration in the context of recent u.s. immigration policy debates most new immigrants to the united states obtain legal permanent resident status because they are sponsored by an eligible u.s. citizen or legal defending family unity as an immigration policy priority studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 371 permanent resident family member. legal permanent resident status allows an immigrant the right to live and work in the united states with few restrictions. to provide some context into the issue of legal family-based immigration, in 2015, 64.6% of all persons obtaining lawful permanent resident status did so through direct sponsorship from a u.s. resident or citizen family member. by comparison, 13.7% of new lawful permanent residents obtained their status through employment-based preferences (u.s. office of immigration statistics, 2016, p. 18). these latest figures are consistent with a pattern stretching back to the 1965 u.s. immigration and nationality act which made family-based immigration the cornerstone of u.s. immigration policy (gubernskaya & dreby, 2017, p. 418). it is difficult to separate legal and unauthorized family migration in either the u.s. policy debate or the lived experiences of family migrants. a complete account of family immigration to the u.s. also includes unauthorized immigrants deported and barred from returning to the u.s., resulting in family separation, and those who fall outside the narrow categories of relatives (child, parent, sibling) that can be sponsored by a u.s. citizen for lawful permanent residence (sullivan, 2016, pp. 265-267; boehm, 2017, pp. 409-411; gubernskaya & dreby, 2017, pp. 421-423). to simplify the u.s. policy debate regarding legal family-based immigration, i will begin by breaking it down into two poles along a continuum: restrictionists who favor decreasing legal family-based immigration quotas and more rigorous enforcement of immigration laws, and inclusivists who favor a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants and maintaining or increasing legal family-based immigration quotas. restrictionist interest groups have many reasons for advocating for less legal immigration and more enforcement. these range from the desire to protect a traditional conception of u.s. national identity that is often associated with the u.s. right, to a concern for the impact of low-skilled immigration on wages and working conditions associated with the u.s. center-left (tichenor, 2002, p. 276). there are three u.s. major national public policy groups that are devoted exclusively to the project of lobbying for lower immigration levels: the federation for american immigration reform (fair), the center for immigration studies (cis) and numbersusa (freeman & tendler, 2012, pp. 333-334). key personnel from fair and the cis are shaping the trump administration’s immigration policies. in april 2017, president donald trump appointed cis legal policy analyst jon feere as an adviser on enforcement within the bureau of immigration and customs enforcement. trump also appointed fair’s former executive director julie kirchner as adviser to the customs and border protection (cbp) (kulish, 2017). these interest groups share many of the same policy objectives as current restrictionists in congress (who now tend to be conservative republicans). however, the broader political ambitions of restrictionist public policy groups and their underlying motivations for reducing both legal and unauthorized michael sullivan studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 372 immigration levels are in tension with u.s. social conservative views (on population policy) and some u.s. business conservative views (on economic growth and environmental protection). in particular, the founders of fair are committed to zero population growth by curtailing legal family immigration, deporting unauthorized immigrants, and limiting the birth rate among u.s. residents, the latter stance deviating from current social conservative republican policy priorities (cafaro, 2015, pp. 136-141, 168, 173). the higher fertility rates and traditional family values of family-based immigrants were deemed as a threat to the goal of zero population growth espoused by fair’s founding generation, including john tanton (1986). concerns about environmental degradation and overpopulation remain a key component of the self-described “progressive” critique of current immigration levels. in keeping with this view, philosopher and cis writer philip cafaro (2010, 2015) urges that as part of a “comprehensive solution” towards “defusing america’s population bomb,” “we will need to continue to have small families, fund family planning services, and keep abortion safe and legal. and we will need to reduce excessive immigration rates” (cafaro, 2015, p. 173). this view has critics on the political left who argue that the “anti-immigrant movement has a clear goal: to reduce the fertility of immigrant women of color,” given the “eugenic origins and population control history of the anti-immigrant movement” (huang, 2008a, p. 386). meanwhile, u.s. nationalist social conservatives who otherwise self-identify as “pro-life” are willing to overlook fair, numbersusa, and cis’s population control policies, bringing together these strange bedfellows to oppose inclusive immigration reforms (lopez, 2012; derrick, 2013). the mix of ideological motivations in the restrictionist camp is politically useful for congressional republican leaders, who regularly call on witnesses from fair, numbersusa or the cis for “progressive” talking points on issues such as civil rights, labor rights, and environmental protection in hearings on immigration policy, while overlooking their disagreements about family planning policies (deparle, 2011). fair, cis and numbersusa’s immigration policy preferences can be summarized as follows: by controlling the scope and character of immigration, citizens, powerful interests and legislators can control the growth of the population and resource utilization, slow cultural, ethnic and social change, enhance the nation’s human capital and drive economic growth. representatives of fair argue that even legal family-based immigration allows too many migrants into the united states who are not selected specifically for their educational attainment and skills (garling & mehlman, 2010, pp. 10-14). numbersusa describes the impact of current u.s. legal family-based immigration policies as a “chain migration process” that multiplies the number of new immigrants, encourages unauthorized immigration by family members ineligible for a visa, and attracts newcomers who compete with less educated citizens for work (numbersusa, 2015). president trump and attorney general jeff sessions defending family unity as an immigration policy priority studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 373 have joined numbers usa in condemning “chain migration” as a “threat to american workers and national security” (miroff, 2018, n.p.). in contrast to trump and sessions’ view, other u.s. policymakers, including conservative republicans like jeb bush, favor an approach to comprehensive immigration reform that legalizes unauthorized immigrants who are already here, and trades lower family-based immigration visa quotas for higher employment-based quotas (bush & bolick, 2013, pp. ix, x, 13, 20-23). however, this policy position is difficult to maintain in the face of u.s.specific evidence that migrants will take greater risks and are more likely to attempt to reunite with family members in the u.s. than to migrate without authorization to find a job there, absent previous connections (cardoso, hamilton, rodriguez, eschbach & hagan, 2016, p. 207). the u.s. immigration policy context – with the largest unauthorized immigrant population in the world, and where anti-immigrant policy groups oppose both legal family and unauthorized immigration as a source of “low-skilled” competitors for american workers – makes it difficult to uncouple the issues of addressing family immigration quotas and unauthorized immigration (numbersusa, 2015; cafaro, 2015, pp. 136-141; akbari & macdonald, 2014, pp. 809, 817). if one’s goal is to decrease unauthorized immigration to the u.s., it is easier to do so by raising family immigration visa levels than by raising employment visa levels. setting the terms of recent debates regarding u.s. family immigration in the united states, the terms of the debate about family immigration levels occuring today has been shaped by an unresolved debate about the impact of the expansion of family immigration levels provide for by the immigration act of 1990. the immigration act of 1990 capped a decade of expansive immigration reforms, raising annual legal immigration quotas by 40% (tichenor, 2002, pp. 244-245). the 1990 immigration act also authorized a commission to investigate the impact of these reforms (u.s. commission on immigration reform, 1997, p. ii). under a new presidential administration, the u.s. commission on immigration reform called the expansive 1990 family immigration quotas into question. president bill clinton appointed former congresswoman barbara jordan (d-tx) to chair the commission in december 1993 (martin, 2011, p. 255). two of the commission’s issues of concern had a bearing on the principle of family unity in u.s. immigration law and policy. first, the commission had to respond to charges that inclusive immigration policy reforms undermined the position of disadvantaged u.s. citizen workers (simpson, 1988, pp. 224-225). the work of the u.s. commission on immigration reform came to be identified with barbara jordan’s leadership, and it is often also referred to as the jordan commission. the jordan commission’s reports repeatedly expressed serious concerns about the employability and skills profile of family-based immigrants to the united michael sullivan studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 374 states. its commissioners argued that provisions for family-based immigration require humanitarian or compassionate exemptions from the general idea that immigration should serve the national economic interest. the commission’s recommendation to scale back family-based immigration continues to be an influential part of the immigration debate. a “nuclear family priority act” limiting family migration to spouses and children has been introduced in every session of congress since 2001 (numbersusa, 2015). two major comprehensive immigration reform proposals in congress in 2007 and 2013 incorporated this recommendation (pallares, 2015, pp. 2829). today, influential policymakers continue to question whether extended family-based immigration is in america’s economic interest, raising concerns that need to be addressed by those who seek to retain or expand the current preference system (bush & bolick, 2013, pp. 21-24; duleep & regets, 2014, p. 825). second, the commission’s mandate required its members to address the lengthening waiting list for family members of u.s. citizens and lawful permanent residents (lpr) to immigrate to the united states. the commission was charged with the task of considering whether the 1990 expansion of family-based immigration was in the national interest (immigration act of 1990, para.141). critics of the extended family unity principle in u.s. immigration policy have long argued that america’s economic interests would be better served by reallocating visas from noncitizen family members of u.s. citizens and lpr’s to skills-based immigrants (simpson, 1988). the commission’s members were clear elsewhere that they wanted to both reduce the absolute number of immigrants admitted to the united states each year, and distribute the remaining visas to skills-based employment immigrants. to redistribute lpr visas to skills-based migrants and clear the backlog of spouses and children of lpr’s awaiting visas, the jordan commission recommended ending the practice of allowing citizens to sponsor their adult children and siblings for a spot in the queue for a permanent residence visa. in its final report, the commission briefly acknowledged the “valuable assistance provided by many extended families in setting up businesses and providing child care and other supportive services” (u.s. commission on immigration reform, 1997, p. 65). but ultimately, its members agreed that “whatever the cultural and economic values attached to each family relationship, however, the far stronger responsibilities to one’s spouse and minor children are well established in the u.s.” (u.s. commission on immigration reform, 1997, p. 65). reassessing the skills and contributions of family-sponsored immigrants the jordan commission’s view that immigrants must set aside their economic and emotional ties to their extended family members to better defending family unity as an immigration policy priority studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 375 integrate into american society is in tension with the elder and child care arrangements and family life of minority groups that are deeply rooted in u.s. society, including latinos and asian-americans. as a result, latino and asian american interest groups that view adult children, siblings, cousins and grandparents as essential family-care providers and recipients have united in opposition to policy initiatives aimed at eliminating extended family reunification provisions in the u.s. immigration and nationality act (huang 2008b; pallares, 2015, pp. 23-37). incidentally, the three leading countries of origin of family-based immigrants as listed in the 2015 u.s. yearbook of immigration statistics by country of birth are mexico (20.5% of all familybased immigrants to the u.s.), the dominican republic (7.4% of all familybased immigrants to the u.s.), and the philippines (6.7% of all family-based immigrants to the u.s.) (u.s office of immigration statistics, 2016, pp. 2730). the prevalence of family immigration from these source countries also helps to explain why some latino and asian communities in the u.s. advocate for higher family immigration levels. here, it is important to fully consider what we mean by “skilled immigration,” and what “skills” are needed by u.s. employers. first, the common use of narrow “low-skilled” and “high skilled” worker classifications in the labor economics literature devalues the capabilities and on-the-job experience of many workers. further clarification about what separates these narrowly defined categories is rarely analyzed in any detail in the labor economics literature, although there are occasionally perfunctory discussions about educational attainment (i.e., a bachelor’s degree) and occupational status separating “high-skilled” and “low-skilled” workers (card & peri, 2016, p. 4; islam, islam & nguyen, 2017, pp. 465, 481). however, so-called unskilled immigrants who do not possess high levels of education can be very productive in their area of specialization based on their work experience, life skills, and occupational training (hagan, hernándezleón & demonsant, 2015, pp. 9, 202-203). a restaurant server or warehouse worker with substantial experience in their profession may be very proficient with practical skills that are difficult to replicate or replace by an employer or in a broader economic niche, despite their lower levels of formal education (draut, 2016, pp. 43-46).1 thus, they are more accurately and humanely defined as mixed-skilled workers. the term “unskilled worker” unfairly devalues the occupational experience and economic contributions of manual workers and service-sector laborers with a limited formal education. it understates the contribution that homecare providers – including both paid caregivers who work outside the home 1 some countries explicitly reward educational attainment and occupational status with preferential status for immigration purposes (i.e., canada’s points system). in absence of canadian job market experience, social capital, and acceptance of foreign credentials by employers, these “highly skilled” immigrants experience difficulties obtaining employment and contributing to economic growth in canada (mcmahon, 2013; larochelle-côté & hango, 2016, pp. 2, 7). michael sullivan studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 376 and unpaid kin caregivers – are providing to society at large. home-care providers perform essential services on behalf of families that allow more affluent, educated “skilled” immigrants and citizens to spend more time working and earning outside the home (tronto, 2013, pp. 110-113; poo, 2015, pp. 84-99). immigrant women who are working outside the home support the re-entry of female workers into the labor market following periods of parental leave, though their care work is not recognized as “highly skilled” for the purposes of immigration policy (boucher, 2016, pp. 28, 70). women who are sponsored as family-based immigrants are less likely to be employed in the paid workforce (sainsbury, 2016, p. 429). instead, these family-sponsored immigrants occupy roles as caregivers for dependents in low-income immigrant families who could not afford to hire an outside caregiver, allowing other family members to work longer hours to support their households and businesses (hyde, 2014, pp. 378-384; boucher, 2016, p. 70). in short, many “unskilled” immigrants – including family-sponsored immigrants – play a necessary supporting role in increasing the productivity of citizen workers. the common presumption among those who want to replace family immigration preferences with skills or employment preferences is that “immigrants selected by job matching criteria are more likely to be successful than family immigrants” (jasso & rosenzweig, 1995, p. 86). in a series of studies from 1996 to 2014, harriet duleep and mark regets have found that family-based immigrants initially enter with lower educational levels, occupational status, and incomes than their employment-selected counterparts. however, kinship based immigrants experience higher skills acquisition and earnings growth than their employment-selected counterparts within 10 years of entry (duleep & regets, 1996, p. 586; 2014, pp. 829-831). one reason why family-based immigrants are able to increase their earnings and integrate into the u.s. labor market at a greater rate than their employment-selected counterparts is that family-based immigrants are more likely to invest in human capital, for instance, by hiring workers, than employment-selected immigrants who enter to perform a specific job with skills that may fall out of demand in a changing job market (duleep & regets, 2014, p. 832). their u.s. citizen family members, who made a contract with the government to support the immigrants they sponsored, have a vested interest in their success over time (gubernskaya & dreby, 2017, p. 424). unlike unrelated employers, family members are less likely to simply hire and fire their sponsored immigrants as market conditions dictate, and the enduring nature of this relationship of trust means that they are more likely to invest in their acquisition of u.s. specific skills (duleep & regets, 1996, p. 578; duleep, 2015, pp. 138-139). this finding in labor economics is supported by sociological research suggesting that family immigrants are able to rapidly acquire u.s. specific training and employment through close family social networks (waldinger & lichter, 2003; hagan, hernández-león & demonsant, 2015, pp. 91-97). defending family unity as an immigration policy priority studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 377 less educated immigrants are not perfect substitutes for unemployed bluecollar u.s.-born american citizens, who have advantages over immigrants in the job market. in a 2013 study, ethan lewis found that on average, there is up to a 21% wage premium for speaking english fluently in the united states, providing u.s. english speakers with an advantage in most u.s. job markets (lewis, 2013, p. 67). however, in a spanish-speaking work force or bilingual labor market in the u.s. (e.g., miami), immigrants with occupational experience and language proficiency in spanish can be more qualified to serve as supervisors than monolingual citizens with equal or greater education (lewis, 2013, p. 72; holzer, 2011, pp. 5-7). u.s.-born citizens without specialized skills and training also have an advantage over immigrants in the public sector of the mixed-skilled labor market since they can more readily obtain security clearances to work at government jobs with citizenship restrictions (apetkar, 2015, pp. 71). u.s. citizens do not always compete for non-u.s. citizens for work, and u.s.-born citizens have advantages based on their citizenship for government work that requires security clearances. addressing perceptions of competition despite evidence that u.s. citizens are not competing with non-u.s. citizens for the same jobs, the perception of economic competition between u.s.-born citizens and mixed-skilled immigrants persists. labor economists george borjas, jeffrey grogger and gordon hanson (2010) suggest that less educated african-american u.s. citizens are more vulnerable to labor market competition with all immigrant categories that are not selected for skill than other u.s. citizens. using data from the 1960 to 2009 censuses, they found that “a 10% immigration-induced increase in the supply of workers in a particular skill group reduced the black wage of that group by 2.5%,” lowered the employment rate by 5.9%, and increased the incarceration rate by 1.3% (borjas, grogger & hanson, 2010, p. 256). other labor economists, led by david card (2009) dispute whether the employment prospects of african-american u.s. citizens would have been any different in the absence of unskilled competition from abroad. card (2009, pp. 18-20) emphasizes that immigrants and u.s.-born workers are not perfect substitutes for one another in the workplace, owing to the differences between immigrants and u.s.-born unskilled workers in their linguistic and vocational skills, cross-cultural capacities and mobility. card’s study also finds that immigration can only account for a small share (four to six percent) of the overall rise in wage inequality over the past 25 years, with the remainder accounted for by technological change and global trade (card, 2009, pp. 1, 5, 21). this facet of card’s study can also be used to substantiate the argument that outsourcing has done more than increased “low-skilled” migration to diminish job opportunities for u.s.-born workers. giovanni peri michael sullivan studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 378 finds that immigration had a poverty-reduction effect between 0.07 and 0.12% for u.s. citizens overall, and a more significant 0.20% reduction for african-americans and 0.24% reduction for black women in particular (peri, 2013 p. 43). a further study by sociologists martha crowley, daniel lichter and richard turner (2015, p. 80) finds that opportunities arising from u.s. citizenship status and english-language ability protect black u.s. citizens from low-wage immigrant labor market competition. with respect to the borjas, grogger and hanson (2010) study, we should note that they aggregate all immigrants of a given skill group together to arrive at the conclusion that “low-skilled” immigrants reduce citizen wages and employment rates. but there are different subsets of immigrants within any “skill” group, each of whom have different vulnerabilities by law, in the labor market, and in terms of their connections to citizens or lack thereof. immigrants who are not pre-selected for skills are a diverse group in terms of their legal status and bargaining power. the subset of immigrants who are most susceptible to being hired for a wage lower than what u.s.-born american citizens will accept are unauthorized immigrant workers. employers exploit their status-based vulnerability and pay them less than legal immigrants and citizens. they are also less capable of negotiating for raises or leaving for a higher-paying job (hall, greenman & farkas, 2010, pp. 495, 499). by contrast, as compared to other immigrants, legal family-based immigrants enjoy a base cushion of financial support. their sponsor is required to file an affidavit of financial support that is binding until the family member either becomes a u.s. citizen, or can be credited with 40 quarters of work (uscis, 2015). the affidavit of support requires the sponsor to have an income exceeding 125% of the u.s. poverty line, unless the u.s. sponsor is active-duty military, where the threshold is lowered to 100% of the poverty line (uscis, 2015). this income requirement is a serious burden on legal residents and citizens who want to sponsor family members to come to the u.s. (waters & pineau, 2015, p. 129-130). it is particularly onerous for the 37% of hispanic families in households that do not earn enough income to sponsor a family member to come to the united states under current laws (as compared to 20% of immigrants overall) (enchautegui & menjívar, 2015, p. 43). from the perspective of citizens fearful of the costs to taxpayers of familybased immigration, the sponsorship requirement makes legal family-based immigrants less likely to be a financial burden on their fellow citizens than other immigrants. moreover, the objection that family-based and other immigrants who do not require a job offer or specific educational qualifications to come to the u.s. are a burden on means-tested social services is moot in light of changes in the law that have taken place since the mid-1990s. most new family-based immigrants to the u.s. are no longer eligible for means-tested benefits since the enactment of the affidavit of support provisions and social benefit restrictions in the 1996 restrictionist defending family unity as an immigration policy priority studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 379 immigration legislation signed into law by president clinton (martin, 2011, pp. 265-269). instead, most immigrants have to wait at least five years after they become a permanent resident to receive sources of federal social assistance including food stamps, children’s health insurance (chip), and medicaid. veterans and their families are a notable exception to this rule (u.s. department of health and human services, 2009). with legal status, more family immigrants can build businesses that employ citizens those who oppose prioritizing family unity in immigration policy contend that it burdens the country with a “surplus of low-skilled workers, increasing job competition and driving down wages and conditions to the detriment of american workers” (ruark, 2011, p. 1). according to president trump, the current “low-skilled” family immigration system places substantial pressure on american workers, taxpayers, and community resources (trump 2017). conversely, former mexican american legal defense and education fund (maldef) president antonia hernandez argues that family migration helps to establish strong economic networks (hernandez, 1995, p. 104). these networks transmit both seed capital and labor from the sending country to the united states, which allows for the formation of new businesses that contribute to the local economy and create employment opportunities for u.s.-born and immigrant workers (bankston, 2014, p. 81). by eliminating extended family preferences and making it difficult for poor families to sponsor their relatives to come to the u.s., the country would lose immigrant entrepreneurs and employers, and family-based businesses would be forced to close down. unauthorized immigrants also occasionally start family businesses in the u.s., which is a perilous undertaking when one can be removed from the country at any time (brosher, 2017; washington, 2017). expanding the legal family immigration system to include more contributing family members who cannot currently be sponsored and are in the country without authorization would help to address this challenge. the network-building aspect of family-based immigration has been studied in considerable detail by sociologists of immigration led by waldinger and lichter (2003, pp. 100-120), massey (2008), and hagan, hernández-león and demonsant (2015, pp. 91-97). massey (2008, p. 5) argues that chain migration is a key catalyst for network building, both between immigrants and their countries of origin, and between immigrants and their adopted communities. immigrants who follow kinship networks to the u.s. rarely make use of state assistance even when it is available to them, as they rely on members of their extended family who are already established in the u.s. to find employment, transitional economic support, and assistance in navigating an unfamiliar cultural and linguistic environment. kinship-based hiring and social support networks diminish the possibility that family-based immigrants michael sullivan studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 380 will be public charges, easing their integration into the broader community (van hook & bean, 2009, p. 440). opportunities for family-based immigration facilitate immigrant investment, which is often concentrated in economically depressed urban centers owing to legal incentives, a lack of competition and low start-up costs (min & kolodny, 1999, pp. 131-144; bogan & darity, 2008, p. 2010). unlike immigrants with advanced degrees or specialized vocational training, who tend to live and work among middle and upper-class u.s. residents, family network-based immigrants often initially settle and invest in low-income urban centers alongside u.s.-born minority residents (thorp, 2004, pp. 3-10). at the outset, immigrant entrepreneurs rely on their own ethnic and kinship networks for seed capital and labor (sanders & nee, 1996, p. 233; valdez, 2016, pp. 1620-1621). but once their businesses expand to serve customers outside their ethnic community, immigrant family-owned businesses often hire u.s.-born workers from the communities they serve to act as “cultural brokers” with their clientele (lee, 2001, p. 185; skrentny, 2007, pp. 126130). this strategy has been especially important for korean entrepreneurs who have sought to defuse tensions with their inner-city u.s.-born africanamerican customers and neighbors, which escalated into violence in new york and los angeles during the early 1990s (yoon, 1997, pp. 176-179). in this manner, family-based immigration and investment has created job opportunities for u.s.-born african-americans in economically depressed urban areas, which would not have existed otherwise. family-based immigrant investment and settlement has also been responsible for reversing the depopulation and abandonment of inner-city neighborhoods in chicago, new york and boston, which resulted from deindustrialization and “white flight” a generation earlier, thereby improving the living standards of the u.s.-born minority residents who remain there (thorp 2004, pp. 5-7). detroit’s failure to attract new immigrants (until very recently) is still being blamed for the lack of economic growth and continued depopulation of this african-american majority urban center, which has the smallest immigrant population of the nation’s 25 largest cities (tobocman, 2014, pp. 5-6). to head off further urban decline and support the region’s aging population, the southeast michigan council of governments is actively working to attract working-age immigrants and their families to settle in detroit (tobocman, 2014, pp. 2, 10). in her 2004 report for the welcoming center for new pennsylvanians, evangeline thorp argued that philadelphia’s and detroit’s failure to attract new immigrants was the main reason why these urban centers failed to grow as fast as other post-industrial u.s. cities (thorp, 2004, pp. 5-6). one of the main reasons that she cited for philadelphia’s failure to attract immigrant settlement and investment was “the elephant in the living room: the sometimes tense relationship between immigrants and african-americans” (thorp 2004, pp. 34, 39). this trend appears to be reversing in recent years, as impoverished neighborhoods in north and west philadelphia experienced defending family unity as an immigration policy priority studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 381 rapid growth in immigrant settlement through the establishment of ethnic community bases that encourage subsequent family-based settlement and investment. in majority african-american neighborhoods, immigrant settlement and investment is being facilitated by religious, civic and economic groups, fostering social and economic ties between the u.s.born and immigrant populations (osirim, 2010, pp. 246-249). mixed-skilled immigrants and citizens are achieving gains by organizing together the center for immigration studies claims that if “low-skilled” immigration were curtailed, american businesses would offer higher wages and increase labor standards in order to attract u.s.-born workers (camarota, 2008). but in the absence of trade barriers, u.s. businesses will still outsource laborintensive manufacturing operations to non-citizens living abroad when faced with rising domestic labor costs. conversely, in occupational sectors that are not readily outsourced because they need to be provided to u.s. residents by workers in the united states, like home care, multiracial coalitions of immigrant and citizen workers must organize together to demand higher wages and benefits. immigrant workers have played a critical role in organized labor’s resilience in the service sector. they helped to secure one of the only major victories for organized labor during the 1990s through the successful justice for janitors campaign in los angeles, a multiracial and transnational movement that brought immigrants and citizens together to organize for better wages and working conditions (milkman, 2015, pp. 165). the justice for janitors movement’s victory helped consolidate union support for comprehensive immigration reform during the 1990s (milkman, 2015, pp. 166-167). a vanguard of service workers (seiu), hotel workers (here) and home health care workers (seiu and afscme) is continuing to organize workers in the service and manufacturing industries without regard to their legal status, to improve wages and labor conditions for immigrants and u.s.born workers alike (fine & tichenor, 2009, pp. 106-107). but organized labor still faces challenges in convincing rank and file members that inclusive immigration reform is in the best interests of both immigrant and citizen workers (milkman, 2015, p. 172). and organized labor’s influence is limited in areas of the u.s. southeast where union density is low and latino immigrant settlement is on the rise. there, economic tensions persist between black u.s. citizens and new latino immigrants competing for low-wage “dangerous, dirty and dead-end” work (crowley, lichter & turner, 2015, p. 80). in this context – as in earlier eras of mass immigration to the united states – employers and labor contractors are using racial stereotypes and encouraging intergroup competition to quell organized workplace dissent and mobilization (steusse, 2009, p. 104). in sum, workingclass african-americans are still receptive to the view that immigrants take blue-collar jobs from u.s. citizens and drive down wages in those michael sullivan studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 382 occupations. this perception has an exaggerated influence in the immigration policy debate (hero & preuhs, 2013, p. 204; zamora & osuji, 2014, p. 441). progressive african-american leaders have attempted to move the debate beyond economic self-interest, arguing that their community has a moral obligation to improve the lot of all disadvantaged minority groups as leaders and heirs to the u.s. struggle for civil rights (wong, 2006, pp. 33-38). black congressional leaders like sheila jackson-lee (d-tx) do not dispute that high levels of “low-skilled” immigration may have somewhat undermined the position of their constituents (jackson-lee, 2007). african-american immigration inclusivists also want to highlight that anti-immigration voices do not speak for their community or represent the majority opinion of their constituents (hero & preuhs, 2013, pp. 202-204). rather, they argue that an undue focus on this factor distracts attention from the many other challenges that black policymakers need to address, and on the whole provides little in exchange for the high cost of dividing african-americans from their allies in the latino and asian communities. civil rights leaders who advocate for legalization and inclusive family immigration policies continue to argue that their community’s interests are best served by working alongside other disadvantaged u.s. residents regardless of their immigration and nationality status, to improve labor conditions. for this reason, national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp) president cornell william brooks supported president obama’s immigration executive actions “to establish an immigration system that protects all u.s. workers and guarantees the safety and security of our nation without compromising fundamental civil rights, human rights and civil liberties” (naacp, 2014). brooks also urged other african-americans to see family immigration as their community’s issue, in that “from haiti to honduras, from senegal to st. croix, family members hoping to reunite with loved ones and refugees working to build a new life in the united states deserve our attention” (naacp, 2014). the naacp’s message is consistent with the american federation of labor-congress of industrial workers’ immigration policy objectives in this regard (minchin, 2017, pp. 299, 309). the dichotomy between family immigration and economic protections for vulnerable citizen workers is misleading. instead, immigrants and citizens need to organize together on the job to demand fair wages and labor standards for all workers regardless of immigration or nationality status. conclusion in this article, i have considered why the family reunification provisions in u.s. immigration policy are controversial, and how defenders of the principle of extended family unity in immigration policy might respond to economic and demographic arguments against current admissions and appeals defending family unity as an immigration policy priority studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 383 provisions. in public policy debates, the principle of family unity is often framed in a way that sets the interests of mixed-citizenship status families against the interests of citizens without immigrant family members whom they wish to sponsor to enter the united states. policymakers argue that it is in the best interests of citizens without immigrant family members to sponsor to enforce existing immigration laws and prioritize legal immigration policies that will attract individuals who can immediately and directly contribute to economic growth. i have called into question the restrictionist view that there is a necessary tension between an inclusive family-based immigration policy and the economic interests of the community of citizens at large. the most persuasive argument in favor of curtailing family-based and other so-called “unskilled” immigration inflows to the united states is that this is a necessary step towards fulfilling the nation’s moral obligations to historically disadvantaged u.s. citizen communities. this includes the duty to provide black u.s.-born citizens greater access to employment and fair working conditions. this moral obligation is compelling, but the economic evidence offered by duleep and regets (2014, pp. 831-833) suggests that restricting family or other forms of mixed-skilled migration is unlikely to lead to this desired outcome. as a pressing social justice issue, the task of building coalitions between immigrants and racialized u.s.-born citizens has become all the more imperative with president trump’s simultaneous attacks on family immigration and the countries in central america, the caribbean and africa that he described disparagingly (davis, stolberg & kaplan 2018). advocates for shifting the quota of family-based immigration visas to employment or skills-based visa categories have long argued that their proposal was about economic prosperity for all americans, rather than the latest in a century-old effort to limit immigration from certain racial or ethnic groups. president trump’s recent language, which describes sources of family and diversitybased immigration as “shitholes,” echoes the views of racially motivated advocates of national origins quotas in the early twentieth century like madison grant (yee, 2018). president trump has established a racialist argument against family and diversity immigration along with temporary protected status categories, preferring workers to family members and those seeking shelter. this is not just a social justice issue for the united states. the united nations human rights office condemned president trump’s attacks on family and diversity-based migrants as racist and xenophobic, asserting that “it legitimizes the targeting of people based on who they are . . . against the universal values the world has been striving so hard to establish since world war ii and the holocaust” (schmidt, 2018). as a matter of social justice, it is important that we resist attacks on any immigration program that are motivated by racial and ethnic animus, like the trump administration’s attacks on family and diversity immigration as well as temporary protected statuses. michael sullivan studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 369-388, 2017 384 all citizens who want to sponsor an immigrant family caregiver or recipient will suffer if legal family-based immigration is restricted. instead of advocating new immigration restrictions and more enforcement, a diverse coalition of political, labor, and civil rights leaders are increasingly choosing to join forces to argue for progressive labor and social welfare reforms that will benefit disadvantaged citizens and immigrants alike. disadvantaged u.s.-born workers have little to gain from decreased legal immigration and increased immigration enforcement. they have more to gain by standing in solidarity with asian and hispanic-americans in an area of key concern to their communities, and gaining new allies that can in turn help them when their interests are at stake. beyond self-interest, the communities in question feel that they have a moral obligation to stand up for the civil and human rights of other disadvantaged minority groups. this type of coalition shows great promise as a means of defending and extending the principle of family unity in u.s. immigration policy in a way that serves the interests of existing members of the community. these coalitions of mutual interests can also challenge the zero-sum arguments that pit humanitarian interests against economic interests in the formation of u.s. immigration policy. acknowledgements i would like to thank elizabeth cohen and cyril ghosh for their helpful comments on an earlier conference draft of this paper, as well as suzan ilcan, david butz, and the anonymous reviewers for studies in social justice for their constructive feedback, which i have incorporated into this article. references akbari, a. h., & macdonald, m. 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(2014). mobilizing african americans for immigrant rights. latino studies, 12(3), 424-448. chamany final dec 12 16.pages volume 10, issue 2, 352-362, 2016 dispatch critical pedagogy: stem cell research as it relates to bodies, labor and care katayoun chamany the new school, usa as biomedical research has come to depend on human bodies, tissues, and cells, students pursuing life science education need to navigate ethical issues associated with biospecimen collection. these biological resources are valued differently depending on characteristics such as race, class, and gender. for instance, people with unique biological or physical characteristics can provide cord blood in exchange for educational scholarships or housing subsidies. in egg-sharing schemes the “donation” of a portion of one’s human eggs to human embryonic stem cell research can result in reduced costs of assisted reproductive services (dickenson & idiakez, 2008). as a consequence of these public contributions of biospecimens, a delicate relationship between the public and private sector is evolving, raising questions about ownership, compensation, access, and privacy. additionally, as genetic factors influence the value of these biospecimens, they also pose concerns about eugenics (klitzman & sauer, 2015). to address this changing landscape, an interdisciplinary team of scholars and activists embarked on a curriculum development project to promote scientific innovation and socially just practices. the product of this effort is stem cells across the curriculum (scac, n.d.), an open access educational resource that highlights the transactional nature of life science research by integrating the biological and social dimensions using a social justice framework.1 1 stem cells across the curriculum (scac) may be accessed at www.stemcellcurriculum.org. to view scac modules select “curriculum and cases.” to view artwork, infographics or presentations select “media and infographics.” specific urls for web materials are provided in the reference list. correspondence address: katayoun chamany, chair and mohn professor of interdisciplinary sciences, department of natural sciences and mathematics, eugene lang college of liberal arts, the new school, 65 west 11th street, new york, ny, 10011, usa; email: chamanyk@newschool.edu issn: 1911-4788 http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org stem cell research as it relates to bodies, labor & care 353 teaching biology in context two decades have passed since critics first challenged the pedagogy associated with science education. in 1990, sheila tobias demonstrated that scientific content devoid of interdisciplinary connections is lost on science non-majors who fail to see the relevance in their daily lives (tobias, 1990). at around the same time, two educators and social activists, paulo freire and myles horton, discussed the problems associated with decontextualized science learning. in we make the road by walking: conversations on education and social change they conclude that teaching biology without any social context is a fallacy (horton & freire, 1990). today, the intersection of reproductive and regenerative biotechnologies creates an opportunity for bringing social context to the fore (ikemoto, 2009). educators can teach basic biological principles and concepts through topics such as in vitro fertilization, embryo screening, and cell transplant therapies. in a traditional undergraduate curriculum these topics would span a series of courses only accessible to the life science major, and rarely address issues of procedural or distributive justice. this approach widens the gap between the scientifically literate and illiterate, and reifies the exclusionary nature of science. conversely, by hanging these topics onto the central theme of human development, all students are able to see science as central to the challenges that emerge during everyday life including life course events such as reproduction, disease, and aging. because the material is relevant and familiar, students’ confidence builds, allowing them to critically think about how life science research is conducted and in which direction the field should go. using a contextualized approach gives students the permission to pose questions regarding scientific investigation, thereby dispelling the misconceptions that science is about remembering facts, obtaining the “right answers,” and remaining separated from the general public. rather, by viewing science as an evolving process that is not only informed by scientists, but other members of society, they receive a more authentic learning experience. by dismantling the exceptional status of science as authority, students are better able to demythologize experts, recognize whose expertise and which voices are missing from the conversation, and become more comfortable with ambiguity. with this approach, students learn that paradigm shifts can prove challenging, and that sometimes the answers to complex problems involve multiple disciplines and methods. moreover, because biomedical research requires new forms of experimentation and technological development, issues of distributive and procedural justice become more relevant in this context. studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 352-362, 2016 354 katayoun chamany development of stem cells across the curriculum the development of the stem cells across the curriculum (scac) curriculum was informed by learning theories that underpin case-based teaching and learning, critical pedagogy, and infographic thinking. we intentionally designed flexible modules that could be used on their own, or in combination, in academic programs spanning biology, ethics, gender, race, and disability studies. the modules contain teaching notes and alternative implementation strategies that support customization, allowing instructors to dial the level up or down, depending on their course and student body. thus, this collection of modules supports the development of socially responsible scientists as well as non-scientists capable of making informed decisions regarding science and health policy. because of this civic component, new york state stem cell science (nystem) and new school university financially supported the development and dissemination of the project. by involving faculty steeped in the biological, ethical, political, and social dimensions of stem cell research (scr) we were able to unpack complex problems and develop curricular resources that do not allow a segregation of the biological from the social. our team consisted of six faculty members from new school university, one bioethics scholar from yeshiva university, and one learning sciences scholar from georgia tech university. no two faculty members were in the same discipline, though some collaborators had overlapping interests related to scr and its social dimensions. for instance, three of the faculty members were feminist scholars whose work spanned health psychology, literature, and philosophy. two faculty members were drawn from the humanities, literature, and religious studies, and four worked in more applied fields such as clinical psychology, health policy, bioethics, and communication design. with respect to social justice teaching, scholarship, and activism, four were active members in community engagement, government appointed committees, and/or grass roots scholarly groups focused on controversial issues regarding biopolitics and emerging biological and reproductive technologies at the local, national, and international level. all were actively teaching in the classroom. the student researchers were treated as junior scholars and had similar dimensional profiles. social justice framing as a first step in developing our project, we used a social justice framework to reorganize topics related to scr that we found disaggregated across courses offered by the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. topics such as committee composition, recruitment of research participants, funding schemes, informed consent, and clinical trials were organized under the heading of procedural justice, encouraging students to ask: who gets to studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 352-362, 2016 http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org stem cell research as it relates to bodies, labor & care 355 participate and direct scr, whether as a policy maker, scientist, tissue donor, or human research subject? topics such as public and private biobanking, registries and licenses, patents and commercialization, and disability discrimination were organized under the heading of distributive justice. this latter category collectively addresses access to the knowledge and products generated by the scr field and the potential marginalization of social models of health at the expense of investment in the biomedical approach to address disease and disability (see figure 1). figure 1. using a social justice framework to make biology relevant. topics related to stem cell research are deliberately organized to consider issues of procedural and distributive justice. having reorganized the content of the curriculum to encourage active questioning, we turned our attention to pedagogy. specifically because life science courses are known to be content heavy, lecture-based, and focused on defining terms and explaining processes, we explored student-centered learning approaches that encourage students to take risks, challenge the status quo, and develop higher order thinking skills. many of our teaching and learning materials reflect paulo freire’s model of pedagogy of the oppressed (freire, 1970). the learning activities meet students where they are and honor learners’ prior life experience, skills, and knowledge. this social justice framing in content and pedagogy is integrated throughout the project, and can be recognized in: 1) the list of learning resources; 2) information designs that present counter narratives; 3) assignments that incorporate multiple points of view; 4) assessments that cater to multiple intelligences; and 5) the diverse range of stakeholders represented in our materials. our approach is intended to attract and maintain the interest of students who may not always see how science plays a role in their lives and communities (harding, 1998). studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 352-362, 2016 356 katayoun chamany as concrete examples of the ways in which scac uses a social justice framework, we can look to the curricular modules and consider not only the selection of topics but resources that support social justice frameworks in these contexts. although many campuses have adopted the book the immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot (2010), a critical pedagogy would caution against using this book as a singular anchor (kumar, 2012). though it provides a rich narrative for teaching the history of tissue culture and human subjects research, both of which are essential components of scr, it tells only one narrative, and more importantly, that of an outsider. our approach in the hela cells & hpv genes: immortality & cancer module incorporates resources that offer alternative narratives, providing a more diverse view of the events associated with establishing the first human cancerous cell line. we couple this text to research articles authored by anthropologists and sociologists who tie this story to those who have been historically marginalized by science and to artwork (see scac, n.d.: artworks) that presents counter narratives (javitt, 2013; landecker, 1999; weasel, 2004). for this reason we also recommend the inclusion of ruha benjamin’s book people’s science as it analyzes government investment in scr using perspectives from gender, race, and disability studies, to imagine ways that we can simultaneously invest in science and social equity (benjamin, 2013). similarly, the debates surrounding allocation of public health resources towards a social or biomedical approach to health is deeply analyzed in the disease, disability & immortality: hope & hype module. the voices of those that live with disability are brought forward as a way to broaden students’ views on advances made in the name of “cure” (shakespeare & watson, 2002). the goal of cure is further analyzed within the context of a growing number of companies purporting to cure individuals of a variety of neurodegenerative and genetic diseases with no data to support these claims. students view popular media, research articles, and activist actions that address the challenges associated with therapeutic misconception. a closer look at stem cells, accessible from the international society for stem cell research’s website, provides students with an example of socially responsible science put forth by a professional society (see isscr, n.d.). in line with our choice of resources, our learning activities also promote alternative interpretations of topics or terms that are often assumed to be value-neutral or commonly understood. in two modules, hela cells & hpv genes: immortality & cancer and disease, disability & immortality: hope & hype, we revisit the definition of “health,” and in the eggs & blood: gifts & commodities and stem cell & policy: values & religion modules we reflect on the definitions of words like “religion,” “sacred,” “secular,” and “dignity.” in these activities students begin to learn that though we speak the same language, these terms hold very different cadence for each individual. similarly, in the eggs & blood: gifts & commodities module we are careful to avoid gendered language, and opt to use phrases such as “individuals who studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 352-362, 2016 http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/hela-cells-hpv-genes-immortality-cancer.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/artworks.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/disease-disability-immortality-hope-hype.html http://www.closerlookatstemcells.org http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/hela-cells-hpv-genes-immortality-cancer.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/disease-disability-immortality-hope-hype.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/eggs-and-blood.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/stem-cells-policy-values-and-religion.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/eggs-and-blood.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/hela-cells-hpv-genes-immortality-cancer.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/artworks.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/disease-disability-immortality-hope-hype.html http://www.closerlookatstemcells.org http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/hela-cells-hpv-genes-immortality-cancer.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/disease-disability-immortality-hope-hype.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/eggs-and-blood.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/stem-cells-policy-values-and-religion.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/eggs-and-blood.html stem cell research as it relates to bodies, labor & care 357 provide eggs.” our decision is based on the fact that not everyone who can produce eggs identifies as female, and because some ovarian stem cell research was conducted on individuals seeking sex-reassignment surgery. by dedicating time to explore how language and differently lived experience place value on our practices and beliefs, scac questions our assumed shared values and creates space for open dialogue and acknowledgment of different points of view. because scac incorporates issues of social justice using student-centered learning activities, it demonstrates how diverse populations must negotiate differences in ways that move toward inclusiveness. because we are moving through a variety of topics and drawing on the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, we turned to infographic thinking to integrate all of these perspectives (pavlus, 2012). we chose to focus on the nature of different stem cell sources in our radial infographic as this is one of the most contentious issues in scr, raising several social justice issues. we were intentional in having our design address the movement of cells across space and time as they transit from bodies, to labs, to clinics and markets. our sources of stem cells radial infographic (see scac, n.d.) contains 55 hyperlinks to multimedia spanning blogs, artwork, film, news, and research articles in an effort to promote integrated learning. thus, this infographic empowers learners to explore the linked resources based on their interests and familiarity and encourages movement into novel areas by catering to what cognitive science research has revealed as multiple intelligences (kinesthetic, textual, visual, auditory, tactile) (northern illinois university). critical case pedagogy to provide a more contextualized view of scr and to help students develop mental schemas necessary for understanding and later retrieval of content, we felt it was important to provide a thematic focus to the curriculum in the form of case study modules. case-based learning (cbl) in the sciences has become a popular approach to interdisciplinarity because the story of the case requires students to view science through a wider, more humanistic lens. a case is “an account of real events that seems to include enough intriguing decision points and provocative undercurrents to make a discussion group want to think and argue about them” (barnes, christensen, & hansen, 2000). using case studies in the classroom has a long tradition in higher education, especially in the areas of medicine, business, and law, and was originally pioneered in the kennedy school for government and public policy. the premise of cbl is that the cognitive conflict offered by complex real world problems stimulates learning and initiates inquiry and collaboration by students. moreover, case studies that incorporate a role-play format support constructivist learning in which students are responsible for building their knowledge base collectively and collaboratively. to that end, the selection of studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 352-362, 2016 https://www.fastcodesign.com/1668987/why-infographic-thinking-is-the-future-not-a-fad http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/infographics.html http://www.tecweb.org/styles/gardner.html https://www.fastcodesign.com/1668987/why-infographic-thinking-is-the-future-not-a-fad http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/infographics.html http://www.tecweb.org/styles/gardner.html 358 katayoun chamany real-world characters in the scac case studies are intentional and deliberate, representing diverse members of society with respect to values, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and ability. the use of cbl has been bolstered by research in cognitive neuroscience, which reveals how story telling and narratives improve learning retention as they help individuals make sense of the world. by crafting a story that includes diverse points of view and a range of different lived experiences, students are presented with opportunities to embody the lives of those that they may never encounter in their every day life, offering them a chance to develop a broader worldview. in general, cbl has advantages for underrepresented minority students and those who may not learn best through lecture and textbook readings. indeed, cbl has been considered a promising teaching approach to help overcome the barriers that are rooted in cultural and preparatory differences, especially if combined with intergroup dialogue (igd). additionally, creating “brave spaces” where conflicting viewpoints are discussed with civility, and individuals are not permitted to opt out of discussion by “agreeing to disagree,” promotes learning for personal and social responsibility towards social justice (arao & clemens, 2013). each scac case module reviews basics biological principles and ethical, legal, and social dimensions as can be seen at the table found on the scac website (scac, n.d.: about the modules). each case module can be used on its own, or in combination, and all cases emphasize the value of counter narratives that challenge the “dominant” narrative. by seeing the case study from different vantage points, students recognize that depending on one’s context, the “dominant” narrative varies. they identify areas of conflict among stakeholders who hold different values and use ethical reasoning to propose policies that promote scientific innovation and socially responsible practices. collectively, the case modules move from the history of tissue culture research, to the identification and isolation of embryonic stem cells, to the identification and manipulation of adult cells to enhance cell plasticity, to policies regarding cloning, embryo creation and destruction, biospecimen and egg provider compensation, and biobanking in the public and private sectors. within the case modules are stories that present an opportunity for roleplay. here, students are asked to adopt a role and engage in a simulated dialogue based on one that took place among researchers, activists, and policy makers at a real-world conference session or symposium. we were deliberate in emphasizing dialogue, as we found that students often stop listening to each other during debates (nagda, gurin, rodriguez, & maxwell, 2008). when students are more concerned about winning the debate they are unwilling to negotiate compromise, or amend their position, shifts that can only come from gaining a broader understanding of an opposing position. our emphasis on dialogue allows students to grapple with the full complexity of a case analysis and an opportunity to experience shades of grey. we offer studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 352-362, 2016 http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/about-modules.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/about-modules.html http://www.lwsd.org/sitecollectiondocuments/about-us/study-sessions/2015.06.22/comparing-debate-discussion-and-dialogue.pdf http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/about-modules.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/about-modules.html http://www.lwsd.org/sitecollectiondocuments/about-us/study-sessions/2015.06.22/comparing-debate-discussion-and-dialogue.pdf stem cell research as it relates to bodies, labor & care 359 students a more authentic learning experience by crafting a case narrative that involves real people and events negotiating complex issues for which there are no easy answers. an example of applying a critical pedagogy to cbl can be seen in the eggs & blood: gifts & commodities module where various views on egg provision for embryonic scr are presented in an effort to craft a policy proposal regarding compensation. some stakeholders argue that autonomy to participate in egg provision is critical if gender equity is to be realized, while others raise concerns about the nature of “choice” given the lack of information on longterm health risks, existing economic inequities, and the lack of genetic diversity in existing stem cell lines (roberts & throsby, 2008; roxland, 2012). this module is a good example of how we refrain from considering the non-biological aspects of scr as simply downstream issues. it is not only the implications of scr that engage the ethical, legal and political, but rather the very nature of conducting the research in the first place. if the cell lines are not diverse, then fewer people will be able to use products from this research. yet, by expanding who can provide eggs for escr we may intentionally exploit vulnerable populations. in this module, we have juxtaposed the biological and technical processes involved in egg provision and egg procurement with discussions regarding: 1) compensation; 2) equity and access to medical research and treatments; 3) health risks for young oocyte providers; 4) informed consent; and 5) the role of regulatory bodies such as the human fertilisation and embryo authority, institutional review boards, and new ethical oversight committees such as embryonic stem cell oversight committees and the most recently proposed embryo research oversight committee (emanuel & menikoff, 2011; isscr, 2016). future directions components of scac have been used in multiple institutions and programs including general education, bioethics, and biology courses at san francisco state university, a minority serving institution; bioethics and reproductive biology course at vassar college; an anthropology course at fordham university; and multiple courses at the new school including a summer program serving students from under resourced backgrounds and a university lecture course (see presentations on the scac website). scac was also selected as a model sencer course (science education for new civic engagements and responsibilities) (ncsce, 2016). these models are chosen based on their ability to engage students with complex issues that require a rigorous understanding of basic scientific principles and methodologies, connect to issues of civic importance, and provide instructors with appropriate teaching and learning resources that address clear learning outcomes (see sencer, 2015) studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 352-362, 2016 http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/eggs-and-blood.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/presentations.html http://www.sencer.net/resources/models.cfm http://www.sencer.net/resources/models.cfm http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/eggs-and-blood.html http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/presentations.html http://www.sencer.net/resources/models.cfm http://www.sencer.net/resources/models.cfm 360 katayoun chamany we are presently analyzing student learning outcomes data from the course implementations of scac. initial directed content analysis of student policy proposals and exams have revealed that we were able to achieve many of our goals. one such goal was broadening students’ views of the ethical issues associated with scr. at the start of each course we ask students to reflect on this and, not surprisingly, they are able to describe the debates surrounding the moral status of the embryos that may be terminated for embryonic scr. at the completion of a course in which scac was implemented students are able to read case studies and move beyond this singular ethical issue, providing detailed and nuanced descriptions. their responses speak to issues of economic and health equity, care versus cure dichotomies, vulnerable populations, just participant selection in clinical trials, compensation for biospecimens, and access to downstream medical therapies. case study assignments reveal that students are developing ethical reasoning skills as described by educational psychologist william perry. the progression of assignments track their development from dualistic thinking to more relativistic thinking, with many able to provide an evidence-based argument to put forth a committed position on a specific scr-related policy (see the perry network, n.d.). we have begun to map students’ comments regarding their own learning in response to the curriculum design and intended learning outcomes. these include: 1) an appreciation for an interactive infographic that allows for the navigation of large amounts of information with ease; 2) a recognition that people need to draw on biology to inform their decisions regarding scr; and 3) a tolerance for multiple points of view. we will continue this mapping project and plan to publish our results in future publications focused on life science and interdisciplinary education. the curriculum is freely available and we intend to refine our materials based on these data and user feedback. as research on stem cells, climate change, data science, and nanotechnology expands, we will need to address the ethical, legal, and social dimensions in ways that bring the complexity of these fields to the fore. educational resources that can integrate the scientific and social dimensions provide students with opportunities to develop the skills necessary for interdisciplinary exploration and problem solving. the cases studies found on the data & society research institute (n.d.) and the u.s. based national center for case study teaching in science (nccsts, n.d.) sites are a step in that direction. case studies that bring the voices of the marginalized to the center highlight the need for a responsive justice approach dependent on interdisciplinary learning. stem cells across the curriculum and the enduring legacies case collection developed by evergreen college extend standard case-based teaching and learning to issues of social justice (see enduring legacies, n.d.), but more efforts like these are needed if we are to meet the challenges of twenty-first century education. studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 352-362, 2016 http://perrynetwork.org/?page_id=6 https://datasociety.net/ http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/ http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/presentations.html http://nativecases.evergreen.edu/collection/ http://perrynetwork.org/?page_id=6 https://datasociety.net/ http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/ http://www.stemcellcurriculum.org/presentations.html http://nativecases.evergreen.edu/collection/ stem cell research as it relates to bodies, labor & care 361 acknowledgements the author would like to acknowledge lianna schwartz-orbach, alexa riggs, and nancy pokrywka for their review of this manuscript. references arao, b., & clemens, k. 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(2004). feminist intersections in science: race, gender and sexuality through the microscope. hypatia, 19(1), 183-193. studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 352-362, 2016 landis final before ts december 10 2018 correspondence address: debbie landis, cpc learning network, mailman school of public health, columbia university, new york, ny, 10032; email: dl2056@tc.columbia.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 violence, well-being and level of participation in formal education among adolescent girls in eastern democratic republic of the congo: the role of child marriage debbie landis columbia university, usa kathryn falb international rescue committee, usa ilaria michelis international rescue committee, uk theresita blackomere international rescue committee, democratic republic of the congo lindsay stark washington university in st. louis, usa abstract child marriage is a well-recognized barrier to education, and exposes girls to an increased risk of violence along with other negative health and developmental outcomes. a quantitative survey was conducted with girls selected from 14 communities in south kivu, democratic republic of the congo (drc). data from 350 girls (ages 13-14) were analyzed using mixed effects logistic regression models. findings revealed that child marriage was associated with lower levels of participation in formal education as well as higher rates of physical, sexual and emotional violence. in particular, when adjusting for age and girls’ level of participation in formal education, being married was associated with more than a three-fold (or: 3.23) increased risk of experiencing sexual violence (p<0.001). married girls were also significantly more likely to affirm the belief that they would be forced to marry their perpetrator in the event that they were raped (p=0.017), suggesting that a portion of girls within this sample may have experienced this occurrence. although higher levels of participation in formal education were associated with a reduced risk of violence among non-married girls, these differences debbie landis et al. studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 274 were not observed for girls who were married. findings reveal that child marriage has a significantly negative effect on the relationship between girls’ level of participation in formal education and experiences with violence. taken cumulatively, findings from this study suggest an overall harmful relationship between child marriage and girls’ safety, education and well-being, and that efforts to prevent its occurrence in the drc and beyond are urgently needed. keywords child marriage; education; violence; adolescent girls; democratic republic of the congo introduction promoting the protection, equality and education of adolescent girls in conflict-affected societies epitomized the life and work of jackie kirk (kirk, 2005; 2007; kirk & garrow, 2003). perhaps no issue places these ideals more under threat than child marriage. as kirk emphasized, prevention and response initiatives to address child marriage and other forms of discrimination against girls are urgently needed, along with further research to understand its implications on the lives of girls (kirk, 2003; 2004; 2008). informed by kirk’s legacy, the following study examines the linkages between child marriage, violence and education among a sample of adolescent girls in the democratic republic of the congo (drc). background child marriage, defined internationally as a marital union in which at least one of the parties is below the age of 18, is a health and human rights issue of global concern (nour, 2009; united nations population fund, 2012). child marriage disproportionately affects girls from rural areas and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (erulkar, 2013a; mathur, greene, & malhotra, 2003). in societies impacted by armed conflict, child marriage and other forms of violence against girls often increase (kirk, 2003; 2007). in many cases, families resort to child marriage for their daughters in response to the financial and security challenges created by war (lemmon, 2014; schlecht, rowley, & babirye, 2013). child marriage is associated with negative health consequences, including an increased risk of contracting hiv or other sexually transmitted diseases (clark, bruce & dude, 2006; erulkar, 2013a). married girls are also more likely to become pregnant at younger ages, subjecting them to the numerous potential health complications associated with adolescent pregnancy (devienne, creveuil, & dreyfus, 2009; gibbs, wendt, peters, & hogue, 2012; muleta, 2006). further, child marriage exposes girls to an increased risk of experiencing intimate partner violence (erulkar, 2013b; kidman, 2016; raj, saggurti, lawrence, balaiah, & silverman, 2010). child marriage & formal education in eastern drc studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 275 child marriage has a direct relationship to girls’ education, and is widely considered a barrier to girls’ school attendance and educational attainment (field & ambrus, 2008; nguyen & wodon, 2014; chandra-mouli, raj, travers, & sundaram, 2015). married girls are more likely to drop out of school or attend irregularly due to pregnancy or other household obligations (arends-kuenning & amin, 2004; wodon, nguyen, & tsimpo, 2016). outof-school girls are also more likely to marry at early ages due to financial difficulties or prevailing gender norms (lee-rife, malhotra, warner, & glinski, 2012; mathur et al., 2003). as a result, keeping girls in school longer has been recognized as a way to prevent child marriage (erulkar & muthengi, 2009; glick, handy, & sahn, 2015; raj, mcdougal, silverman, & rusch, 2014). child marriage is a prevalent issue in the democratic republic of the congo (drc), which has been impacted by armed conflict for more than 20 years (male & wodon, 2016). it is estimated that 10% of females in the drc between the ages of 20-24 were married before the age of 15, and 37% were married before the age of 18 (unicef, 2016). it is also common in the drc for marriage to be used as a form of out-of-court settlement in the event that a girl is raped (freedman, 2016; mansfield, 2009). although child marriage is widely reported to be a problem in the drc, there are no known peerreviewed studies that rigorously examine its occurrence within the drc context, or its impact on affected girls. existing knowledge has been largely based on findings from demographic and health surveys (dhs), grey literature, or policy papers connecting the issue in the drc to global trends (unicef, 2016; male & wodon, 2016). in particular, prior research in the drc has yet to systematically examine the associations between child marriage, participation in formal education, and girls’ exposure to violence. in light of these issues, as well as their crucial importance to the health, wellbeing and development of girls, this analysis seeks to examine the association between child marriage and key outcomes related to girls’ education, wellbeing, and experience with violence. further, a primary focus of this study is to investigate the potential moderating effect of child marriage on the relationship between education and violence among girls in south kivu, democratic republic of the congo (drc). due to these significant knowledge gaps, as well as the crucial importance of these issues to the safety, well-being and development of girls, this analysis seeks to examine the following primary research questions: 1. how does child marriage interact with girls’ level of participation in formal education, exposure to violence, and well-being? 2. how does child marriage moderate the association between level of participation in formal education and exposure to violence among girls in south kivu, drc? in addition, this study explores the following hypotheses: • hypothesis 1: child marriage is likely to expose girls to higher rates of violence, and lower levels of participation in formal education; debbie landis et al. studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 276 • hypothesis 2: while increasing levels of participation in formal education are likely to be associated with lower rates of violence among non-married girls, child marriage is likely to moderate this relationship; • hypothesis 3: measures of hope and self-esteem are likely to be lower among married as compared to non-married girls. methods study design this paper is based on an analysis of data from a baseline survey carried out in the democratic republic of the congo (drc) from may-july 2015 by columbia university and the international rescue committee (irc) as part of a two-arm, wait-list cluster-randomized control trial to investigate the incremental effectiveness of a caregiver component to an ircrun violence prevention and response program for adolescent girls (falb et al., 2016; stark et al., 2017a). the program utilized “safe spaces” in community locations to provide group-based life skills training and mentorship for adolescent girls between the ages of 10-14 along with monthly sessions for primary caregivers. program sites were selected from conflict-affected communities in south kivu where irc had an established presence. in total, 14 sites were selected, including eight in the territory of kabare and six in the territory of uvira. informed consent was gathered from caregivers of all girls prior to their girls’ enrollment in the study, as well as informed assent from participating girls. detailed ethical safeguards were developed for the study, on which the research team received in-depth training. ethical approval was received from columbia university medical center and the ministry of gender in south kivu. quantitative survey methods were used with girls to evaluate attitudes towards a host of topics related to physical and financial assets, health-related behaviors, and experiences with violence. survey data were gathered using computer-administered personal interviews (capi) for non-sensitive questions, while audio computer-assisted self-interview (acasi) software was used to collect data for questions on the most sensitive issues. the youngest girls (10-12 years old) completed an abbreviated version of the questionnaire with certain questions removed that were deemed too sensitive based on consultation with local experts. data from the analysis presented in this paper is restricted to girls within the older age range (13-14 years old), in light of the fact that questions on marriage and other sensitive issues were not asked of younger girls. all survey measures were tested and validated in south kivu in non-study locations prior to the start of data collection. child marriage & formal education in eastern drc studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 277 research measures outcome variables: sexual violence against girls was measured in terms of whether girls reported experiencing any of the following acts in the last 12 months: unwanted sexual touching, sexual coercion, sex in exchange for favors, or forced sex. in order to summarize girls’ overall exposure to sexual violence, a composite variable was derived to include girls who reported experiencing any of the individual violence types (unwanted sexual touching or sexual coercion or sex in exchange for favors or forced sex). physical violence was measured in terms of a single question in the girls’ survey, which asked girls to report whether anyone has “hit or beaten” them in the last 12 months. emotional violence was measured in terms of three individual questions that asked girls to report on whether they had experienced any of the following in the last 12 months: “loud or aggressive screaming”; being “called bad things or having someone saying mean things to them”; or feeling “not cared for by the person who should care for them.” a composite form of emotional violence was also derived to reflect girls who answered affirmatively to any of the three possible forms of emotional violence in the last 12 months. the violence measures used in this study were adopted from those used in other violence against children surveys (vacs) as well as the ispcan child abuse screening tool children’s version (icast) (reza et al., 2009; zolotor et al., 2009). predictor variables: girls’ age was measured as a continuous variable. girls’ marital status was measured based on a “yes/no” question that asked girls if they were “currently married or living with someone as if married.” girls’ level of participation in formal education was measured using a four-level ordered variable that was derived to include the following levels: 0: never attended school; 1: attended school, but missed all of last year; 2: attended school last year, but missed one or more days in the last week; and 3: attended school last year, and missed no days in the last week. girls’ well-being was measured in terms of hope and self-esteem. girls’ hope was measured using the children’s hope scale (chs) (snyder et al., 1997), a six-item questionnaire that examines hope, agency and future orientation. responses were coded so that potential scores ranged from 1-6, calculated as a mean of the total score. girls’ self-esteem was measured using the rosenberg self-esteem scale (rosenberg, 1965), which includes 10 questions designed to assess self-perception. responses were coded so that potential scores ranged from 10-40. girls were also asked a “yes/no” question regarding if they felt that they would “be forced to marry” a male perpetrator in the event that they were raped. debbie landis et al. studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 278 data analysis all statistical analyses were conducted using stata 14.1 descriptive statistics were generated to determine potential variation among married versus non-married girls. for continuous measures, means and standard deviations were estimated separately by marital status, and a mixed effects regression model was utilized to test differences in the mean levels for girls by marital status, adjusted for site as random effects.2 for categorical variables, the frequency and prevalence of each selected binary measure was estimated separately by marital status, and a mixed effects logistic regression model was utilized to test differences in the frequency of each selected binary measure for girls by marital status, adjusted for site as random effects since participating girls were nested within 14 communities included in the study. the next step in the analysis involved investigating the association between girls’ level of participation in formal education and exposure to each of the violence outcomes. a trend test for potential decreasing levels of violence by increasing levels of participation in formal education was used to examine potential differences in this relationship based on girls’ marital status. sequential models were used to investigate the potential moderating effect of child marriage on the association between girls’ level of participation in formal education and sexual violence as the outcome variable, using an interaction between marriage and level of participation in formal education, adjusted for site as a random effect. models also tested the potential confounding role of selected covariates on the association between girl’s level of participation in formal education and sexual violence as the outcome variable. the akaike’s information criterion (aic) was used in the sequential model process to examine the incremental predictive ability of each additional model, as well as to select the final predictive model (akaike, 1973). results this manuscript is based on an analysis of data from 350 girls to investigate the relationship between child marriage and girls’ level of participation in formal education as both relate to girls’ exposure to violence. from this sample, 24.9% (87/350) of girls reported being married or living with a partner as if married. of these 87 girls, 46 reported being married and living with their husband, 25 reported being married and not living with their husband, and 16 reported living with a man as if married. the majority of girls who were married reported being with significantly older men. of the 78 1 information on the stata 14 statistical software package is available at www.stata.com/stata14/ 2 the logistic regression modeling approach included a random variable for site to account for potential variation across the 14 sites from which girls in the sample were selected. child marriage & formal education in eastern drc studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 279 married girls who provided information on their husbands’ ages, 75.7% reported being married to men who were 18 years old or older, including the following breakdown across adult age groups: 44.9% (18-29 years old); 21.8% (30-49 years old), and 9.0% (50 years old or older). demographic factors and characteristics of girls are reported in table 1, which compares these measures between married and non-married girls. all older girls (ages 13-14) (n=350) married (n=87) not married (n=263) p-value+ mean (standard deviation) girls’ age 13.543 (0.499) 13.471 (0.502) 13.567 (0.496) p=0.119 girls’ highest grade completed 3.509 (2.634) 3.322 (2.721) 3.570 (2.607) p=0.017* n (percent) girls’ level of participation in formal education never went to school 64 (18.3) 17 (19.5) 47 (17.9) p=0.209 some school, but missed all of last year 142 (40.6) 39 (44.8) 103 (39.2) p=0.390 missed 1+ days in the last week 59 (16.9) 18 (20.7) 41 (15.6) p=0.234 missed 0 days in the last week 85 (24.3) 13 (15.0) 72 (27.4) p=0.011* mean (standard deviation) girls’ hope 2.300 (1.01) 2.202 (0.957) 2.332 (1.027) p=0.225 girls’ self-esteem 32.766 (4.834) 29.587 (6.601) 33.719 (3.677) p<0.001*** n (percent) girls who feel they would be forced to marry male perpetrator if raped 107 (34.3) 37 (48.1) 70 (29.8) p=0.017* n (percent) reported violence (last 12 months) sexual violence unwanted sexual touching 37 (11.4) 13 (16.9) 24 (9.6) p=0.079 sexual coercion 30 (9.4) 14 (18.9) 16 (6.5) p=0.004** sex in exchange for favors 30 (9.6) 15 (20.0) 15 (6.3) p=0.001** forced sex 58 (18.6) 28 (36.4) 30 (12.8) p<0.001*** sexual violence composite 97 (28.1) 40 (47.6) 57 (21.8) p<0.001*** physical violence beaten or hit 118 (35.7) 31 (40.3) 87 (34.3) p=0.408 emotional violence loud or aggressive screaming 131 (40.2) 31 (42.5 100 (39.5) p=0.721 verbal insults 120 (36.5) 40 (50.6) 80 (32.0) p=0.003** felt not cared for 138 (43.3) 40 (54.1) 98 (40.0) p=0.039* emotional violence composite 215 (67.0) 61 (82.4) 154 (62.4) p=0.002** *p < 0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001 + adjusted for age and site table 1. characteristics of married vs. not married girls. debbie landis et al. studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 280 girls’ demographics and personal characteristics by marital status the average age of girls was 13.567 years, and there was no significant difference based on girls’ marital status. girls’ highest grade completed was lower among those who were married (3.322) as compared to those were not married (3.570), and this difference was statistically significant (p=0.017). similarly, girls who were not married were more likely to report perfect attendance in school in the last week, with a rate of 27.4% compared to a rate of 15% among married girls (p=0.011). girls’ self-esteem also showed a highly significant difference based on marital status (p<0.001), with married girls reporting lower scores on the rosenberg self-esteem scale (29.587) than girls who were not married (33.719). although girls’ scores on the children’s hope scale (chs) did not differ significantly based on girls’ marital status alone, preliminary analysis examining the relationship between girls’ hope and level of participation in formal education found that higher levels of participation were associated with higher scores on the chs among girls who were not married, and that this trend was statistically significant (p=0.029). among married girls, however, there was no significant difference in girls’ hope based on their level of participation in formal education (p=0.747). regarding the belief that girls would be forced to marry their perpetrator in the event that they were raped, rates varied significantly according to girls’ marital status (p=0.017), with 48.1% of married girls believing this to be true, as compared to 29.8% of girls who were not married. violence outcomes by marital status for each type of violence examined in this study, the rates among married girls were higher than among non-married girls. as noted in table 1, these differences were statistically significant for the majority of violence types. for example, the reported rate of the sexual violence composite type was more than twice as high for married girls (47.6%) as compared to girls who were not married (21.8%), and this difference was highly significant (p<0.001). similarly, the rate of forced sex in the last 12 months was nearly three times as high among married girls (36.4%) as compared to non-married girls (12.8%), which was also highly significant (p<0.001). among the forms of violence measured, the highest reported rates were observed for emotional violence, with a rate of 82.4% among married girls and 62.4% among nonmarried girls for the composite type of emotional violence (see table 1). child marriage & formal education in eastern drc studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 281 univariable models investigating the moderating effect of child marriage on the relationship between education and violence outcomes in examining the association between education and violence for all girls regardless of marital status, significant trends were found for forced sex and the sexual violence composite type, whereby increasing levels of participation in formal education were associated with lower rates of violence (forced sex: p=0.015; sexual violence composite: p=0.008). however, when considering married and non-married girls separately, these trends were significant only for non-married girls. for girls who were not married, increasing levels of participation in formal education were associated with lower rates of sexual violence, and significant trends were seen for forced sex (p=0.034) and the sexual violence composite type (p=0.029). in addition, the odds ratios showed progressively lower risk of experiencing these forms of sexual violence as girls’ level of participation in formal education increased. in contrast, in the case of married girls, there were no significant differences in rates of violence based on girls’ level of participation. emotional and physical violence did not vary significantly across level of participation in formal education for either married or non-married girls. sequential multivariable models for sexual violence composite type the next step in the analysis involved testing a series of sequential multivariable models to examine the potential association between marriage, education, and girl’s risk of exposure to the composite form of sexual violence in the last year, and to adjust for potential confounders (see table 2). as rates of emotional and physical violence were not significantly associated with levels of participation in formal education and marital status, only sexual violence was investigated further as an outcome variable through this process. in model 1, which explores the potential relationship between girls’ age and level of participation in formal education on girls’ risk of experiencing sexual violence, girls’ level of participation in formal education was significant, and associated with an odds ratio of 0.84, reflecting a 16% reduced likelihood that girls would experience sexual violence for each increasing level of participation (p=0.008). in model 2, girls’ marital status was incorporated along with previously included components. when examined together, marriage became highly significant, and was associated with more than a three-fold increased likelihood (or: 3.08) of sexual violence for girls who were married as compared to non-married girls. in the presence of marriage, level of participation in formal education was attenuated (p=0.065), suggesting a potential interaction between marriage and participation in formal schooling (see table 2). debbie landis et al. studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 282 p re di ct or v ar ia bl es m od el 1 m od el 2 m od el 3 m od el 4 m od el 5 c on tr ol v ar ia bl e g ir ls ’ a ge 0. 90 (0 .5 5, 1 .4 5) 0. 94 (0 .5 7, 1 .5 3) 0. 91 (0 .5 5, 1 .5 0) 0. 55 (0 .2 6, 1 .1 4) 0. 59 (0 .2 5, 1 .4 0) p re di ct or v ar ia bl es l ev el o f p ar ti ci pa ti on in f or m al e du ca ti on (t re nd ) 0. 84 (0 .7 5, 0 .9 6) ** 0. 89 (0 .7 8, 1 .0 1) 0. 86 (0 .7 4, 1 .0 0) * 0. 80 (0 .6 4, 0 .9 9) * 0. 77 (0 .6 0, 1 .0 1) m ar ri ed 3. 08 (1 .7 8, 5 .3 2) ** * 3. 23 (1 .8 5, 5 .6 2) ** * 2. 79 (1 .1 9, 6 .5 5) * 1. 98 (0 .6 9, 5 .7 0) l ev el o f p ar ti ci pa ti on in f or m al e du ca ti on (t re nd ) x m ar ri ed 1. 13 (0 .8 6, 1 .4 8) 1. 39 (0 .9 2, 2 .1 2) 1. 31 (0 .7 7, 2 .2 3) g ir ls ’ s el fe st ee m 0. 93 (0 .8 5, 1 .0 1) 0. 84 (0 .7 4, 0 .9 4) ** g ir ls ’ h op e 0. 57 (0 .3 7, 0 .8 7) ** 0. 54 (0 .3 3, 0 .8 8) * g ir ls ’ b el ie f t he y w ou ld b e fo rc ed to m ar ry m al e pe rp et ra to r of fo rc ed s ex 2. 92 (1 .3 8, 6 .2 0) ** 1. 34 (0 .5 3, 3 .4 0) c oo cc ur ri ng v io le nc e m ea su re s (l as t 12 m on th s) b ea te n or h it 5. 97 (2 .3 3, 1 5. 30 )* ** e m ot io na l v io le nc e (c om po si te ) 6. 70 (1 .9 3, 2 3. 27 )* * in fo rm at io n c ri te ri on a ka ik e’ s in fo rm at io n cr it er io n (a ic ) 42 7. 53 39 6. 22 39 7. 47 21 6. 14 17 5. 93 df 4 5 6 9 11 *p < 0 .0 5, * *p <0 .0 1, * ** p< 0. 00 1 ta bl e 2. s eq ue nt ia l m ul tiv ar ia bl e m od el s fo r se xu al v io le nc e c om po si te 2 ( l as t 1 2 m on th s) b y l ev el o f pa rt ic ip at io n in f or m al e du ca tio n, m ar ita l s ta tu s, g ir ls ’ a ttr ib ut es a nd c oo cc ur ri ng f or m s of v io le nc e a ga in st g ir ls : a dj us te d fo r a ge a nd s ite . child marriage & formal education in eastern drc studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 283 model 3 built upon the previously included factors, and incorporated an interaction term between girls’ level of participation in formal education and marriage, aimed at detecting separate trends between married and nonmarried girls in the prevalence of sexual violence by level of participation. when examined in this way, girls’ level of participation in formal education for non-married girls was significant, and associated with an odds ratio of 0.86, reflecting a 14% decreasing risk of sexual violence for non-married girls for each increasing level of participation. in contrast, level of participation in formal education for married girls (as evidenced by the interaction term), was not significant and did not play a protective role vis-à-vis sexual violence for married girls. marriage itself remained a highly significant predictor of sexual violence, associated with an odds ratio of 3.23, suggesting more than a threefold increased likelihood of sexual violence among married girls as compared to those who were not married. as depicted in figure 1, the model-based predicted probabilities of sexual violence for level of participation in formal education are illustrated separately for married and non-married girls, demonstrating the significant protective effect of education for non-married girls. figure 1. adjusted predicted probabilities of sexual violence with 95% confidence intervals (table 2: model 3). in model 4, girls’ self-esteem, hope, and girls’ belief that they would be forced to marry their perpetrator in the event that they were raped were introduced along with previous measures. girls’ hope was significant, and debbie landis et al. studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 284 associated with an odds ratio of 0.57, reflecting a decreased likelihood that girls would experience sexual violence for increasing levels of hope. in addition, belief among girls that they would be forced to marry their perpetrator if they were raped was significant, and associated with nearly a three-fold increased likelihood (or: 2.92) of experiencing sexual violence. marriage remained significant, and was associated with an increased likelihood of experiencing sexual violence that was nearly three times as high (or: 2.79) for married as compared to non-married girls. the education variable for non-married girls remained significant, and was associated with an odds ratio of 0.80, reflecting a 20% decreased risk of experiencing sexual violence for each increasing level of participation in formal education. similar to previous models, education for married girls (as reflected by the interaction term) was not statistically significant, reflecting an absence of the protective relationship between education and violence observed among nonmarried girls. the final phase of this analysis examined the potential added risk of sexual violence that may be associated with girls’ exposure to other forms of violence (physical and emotional). in model 5, both emotional and physical violence were introduced into the model, along with all previously included variables. both co-occurring forms of violence were highly significant, and associated with an increased likelihood of experiencing sexual violence that was nearly six times as high for physical violence (or: 5.97) and nearly seven times as high (or: 6.70) for emotional violence. girls’ hope and selfesteem remained significant, with higher scores of each measure associated with odds ratios of 0.84 (self-esteem) and 0.54 (hope), reflecting decreased likelihoods that girls would experience sexual violence for increasing levels of these measures. girls’ level of participation in formal education was of borderline significance (p=0.056), although it was attenuated for in the presence of the highly significant added risks of physical and emotional violence. as demonstrated by the aic fit criteria, model 5 provided incremental predictive ability as compared to previous models (see table 2). discussion findings from this research suggest child marriage to be an issue of grave concern. notably, findings reveal a significant association between child marriage and a higher occurrence of violence. as previously described, reported proportions of physical, sexual, and emotional violence were higher for married as compared to non-married girls. in addition, findings suggest that marriage interferes with the potential protective role that higher levels of participation in formal education can play with regard to certain forms of violence. in a previous publication based on this study, which did not account for marriage and drew upon the larger sample of girls (ages 10-14), higher levels of participation in formal education child marriage & formal education in eastern drc studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 285 were significantly associated with lower reported proportions of physical and sexual violence (landis et al., 2018). in the case of this analysis, however, higher levels of participation in formal education were associated with lower proportions of sexual violence among non-married girls, while this protective benefit was not present for girls who were married. these findings suggest that the dynamics of being married not only interfere with girls’ access to education and expose them to a greater likelihood of experiencing violence, but being married makes the potential protective role of education vis-à-vis violence less pronounced. these findings are supported by existing research documenting the ways in which child marriage can potentially moderate – and thereby diminish the effect of – supportive interventions for married girls (falb et al., 2015.) this study also highlights an association between girls who were married, and lower levels of participation in formal education. for example, the proportion of marriage was nearly double among girls who never went to school (26.6%) as compared to those who were in the highest level of participation in formal education (15.3%). in a prior article examining education among the broader sample of girls in this study (ages 10-14), the highest grade completed by participants was an average of three years behind what would be expected according to their age (landis et al., 2018). building on these findings, the fact that married girls in this study have completed less education than their non-married peers is even more concerning, as the sample as a whole was affected by disrupted participation in formal schooling. these findings are consistent with existing literature on child marriage as a barrier to girls’ attendance and completion in formal schooling (field & ambrus, 2008; glick et al., 2015). national data in the drc also suggest that rates of child marriage are the highest among girls who have never been to school, and decline as girls complete higher levels of education (male & wodon, 2016). the role of co-occurring forms of violence also emerged as significant in this research, as both physical and emotional violence were associated with an increased risk of girls experiencing sexual violence. it was also only when these added forms of violence were incorporated into sequential models that marriage was attenuated for, suggesting that girls’ marriages likely involved multiple forms of violence. this notion is further supported by the fact that among the total sample reflected in this analysis, girls identified “husband or boyfriend” as the perpetrator type for the violence they experienced the vast majority of the time (at a rate of 95% or higher). these findings are consistent with existing research documenting the increased risk of intimate partner violence that child marriage often entails (kidman, 2016; raj et al., 2010). research on child abuse and household violence also suggests that survivors often experience multiple forms of violence within the context of abusive relationships, and that the cumulative effect of co-occurring forms of violence is likely to be more severe than if a single type of maltreatment occurred debbie landis et al. studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 286 (finkelhor, omrod, & turner, 2007; soler, kirchner, paretilla, & forns, 2013; turner, finkelhor, & omrod, 2010). it is notable that married girls in the study were predominately partnered with men outside of their own age range, often to a substantial degree. although the conditions that led to these marriages are unknown, wider age discrepancies between husbands and child brides have been associated with higher risks of violence (svanemyr et al., 2015). instances in which girls are married to significantly older men are also more likely to be associated with power differentials that discriminate against girls (kopelman, 2016; machel, pires, & carlsson, 2013). in light of the documented practice in the drc for marriage to a male perpetrator of sexual violence to be used as a potential solution in the event that girls are raped (freedman, 2016; mansfield, 2009), it is also likely that a portion of the girls in this sample who reported being married had experienced this type of arrangement. although the extent of these types marriages within the study sample is unknown, it is notable that married girls were significantly more likely to affirm the belief that they would be forced to marry their perpetrator in the event that they were raped (p=0.017), suggesting a potential relationship that warrants further exploration. the final area that this study elucidates is the relationship between child marriage and girls’ hope and self-esteem. as previously described, married girls in this study had self-esteem scores that were significantly lower than non-married girls. although non-married girls experienced higher levels of hope with increasing levels of participation in formal education, the association between schooling and hope was not seen for married girls. these findings suggest a potentially negative relationship between child marriage and girls’ psychosocial well-being, which aligns with a limited, but evolving body of research (gage, 2013; lestrat, dubertret, & le foll, 2011). it is also notable that girls who had higher levels of hope and self-esteem were significantly less likely to experience sexual violence, even in the presence of marriage and co-occurring forms of violence. the notion that girls’ hope can be associated with lower rates of violence was identified in a previous manuscript based on the larger sample of girls (ages 10-14), and not in reference to girls’ marriage (stark et al., 2017b). although the temporal sequence of this relationship cannot be determined from this study design, findings suggest that additional research is needed to explore these dynamics in greater depth in the drc and beyond. limitations a limitation of this research can be seen in the fact that questions about marital status and other sensitive issues were only asked to girls between the ages of 13-14. as such, it was not possible to analyze the issue of marriage across girls from the larger study sample (ages 10-14; n=866). this smaller child marriage & formal education in eastern drc studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 287 sample size reduced power to detect multivariable associations, so it is possible that additional model effects with borderline significance levels still warrant further investigation. conclusion ultimately, as a result of the multiple risks to girls’ safety, well-being and level of school participation associated with child marriage identified by this study, findings from this research suggest an urgent need for efforts to address the root causes of child marriage in the drc and in conflict-affected societies more broadly, and to work with girls, families and communities to prevent this practice. interventions are particularly needed to combat harmful social norms that contribute to child marriage, and that sanction its use as a form of settlement for young survivors of rape. further, in light of the association between child marriage and high rates of intimate partner violence (ipv), findings suggest a need to develop approaches to prevent and respond to ipv against adolescent girls. as current ipv programming has largely focused on the situation of adult survivors, these findings have important implications for potential ways in which humanitarian actors can seek to adapt existing interventions to more adequately address the needs of adolescent girls. in addition, in light of the limited access to education experienced by married girls, program interventions are also needed to increase educational opportunities for girls who become married, and to address other potential barriers to school attendance. these objectives are also in line with the sustainable development goals, which seek to address child marriage as well as gender disparities in education by 2030 (united nations, 2015). findings from this study also suggest a need to further investigate the impact of child marriage on girls’ psychosocial well-being, as well as potential ways in which personal attributes such as self-esteem and hope may interact with girls’ risk of experiencing violence. in light of the multiple factors that can contribute to early marriage, such as poverty, lower education, armed conflict or humanitarian events, additional research is also needed to further explore the factors that contribute to early marriage within the drc, and to develop prevention and response initiatives accordingly. as emphasized by jackie kirk, combatting child marriage along with all forms of violence and discrimination against girls is crucial in order to help them reach their full potential and realize the benefits of education in conflictaffected societies and beyond. references akaike, h. 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(2015). differential impacts of an intimate partner violence prevention program based on child marriage status in rural cote d’ivoire. journal of adolescent health, 57, 553-558. field, e., & ambrus, a. (2008). early marriage, age of menarche and female schooling attainment in bangladesh. journal of political economy, 116(5), 881-930. finkelhor, d., ormrod, r., & turner, h. (2007). poly-victimization: a neglected component in child victimization. child abuse & neglect, 31, 7-26. freedman, j. (2016). gender, violence and politics in the democratic republic of congo. london: routledge. gage, a. (2013). association of child marriage with suicidal thoughts and attempts among adolescent girls in ethiopia. journal of adolescent health, 52, 654-656. gibbs, c., wendt, a., peters, s., & hogue, c. (2012). the impact of early age at first childbirth on maternal and infant health. pediatric & perinatal epidemiology, 26. 259-284. glick, p., handy, c., & sahn, d. 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(2011). child marriage in the united states and its association with mental health in women. pediatrics, 128, 524-530. machel, g., pires, e., & carlsson, g. (2013). the world we want: an end to child marriage. the lancet, 382, 1005-1006. male, c., & wodon, q. (2016). basic profile of child marriage in the democratic republic of congo. washington, dc: world bank group. mansfield, j. (2009). prosecuting sexual violence in the eastern democratic republic of the congo: obstacles for survivors on the road to justice. african human rights law journal, 9(2), 367-408. mathur, s., greene, m., & malhotra, a. (2003). too young to wed: the lives, rights and health of young married girls. washington, dc: international center for research on women. muleta, m. (2006). obstetric fistula in developing countries: a review article. journal of obstetrics & gynecology canada, 28(11), 962-966. nour, n. (2009). child marriage: a silent health and human rights issue. reviews in obstetrics & gynecology, 2(1), 51-56. nguyen, m., & wodon, q. (2014). impact of child marriage on literacy and educational attainment in africa. paris: unesco institute for statistics & unicef. raj, a., mcdougal, l., silverman, j., & rusch, m. (2014). cross-sectional time series analysis of associations between education and girl child marriage in bangladesh, india, nepal, and pakistan, 1991-2011. plos one, 9(9), e106210. raj, a., saggurti, n., lawrence, d., balaiah, d., & silverman, j. (2010). association between adolescent marriage and marital violence among young women in india. international journal of gynecology & obstetrics, 110, 35-39. reza, a., breiding, m., gulaid, j., mercy, j., blanton, c., mthethwa, z., … anderson, m. (2009). sexual violence and its health consequences for female children in swaziland: a cluster survey study. lancet, 373, 1966-1972. rosenberg, m. (1965). society and the adolescent child. princeton, nj: princeton university press. schlecht, j., rowley, e., & babirye, j. (2013). early relationships and marriage in conflict and post-conflict settings: vulnerability of youth in uganda. reproductive health matters, 21(41), 234-242. snyder, c., hoza, b., pelham, w., rapoff, m., ware, l., danovsky, m., … stahl, k. (1997). the development and validation of the children’s hope scale. journal of pediatric psychology, 22(3), 399-421. soler, l., kirchner, t., paretilla, c., & forns, m. (2013). impact of poly-victimization on mental health: the mediator and/or moderator role of self-esteem. journal of interpersonal violence, 28(13), 2695-2712. stark, l., asghar, k., yu, g., bora, c., baysa, a., & falb, k. (2017a). prevalence and associated risk factors of violence against conflict-affected female adolescents: a multicountry, cross-sectional study. journal of global health, 7(1), 010416. stark, l., asghar, k., meyer, s., yu, g., bakemore, t., poulton, c., & falb, k. (2017b). the effect of gender norms on the association between violence and hope among girls in the democratic republic of the congo. global mental health, 4(e1). svanemyr, j., chandra-mouli, v., raj, a., travers, e., & sundaram, l. (2015). research priorities on ending child marriage and supporting married girls. reproductive health, 12(1), 80. turner, h., finkelhor, d., & omrod, r. (2010). poly-victimization in a national sample of children and youth. american journal of preventive medicine, 38, 323-330. unicef. (2016). state of the world’s children: 2016. new york: unicef. united nations. (2015). transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development (a/res/70/1). new york: united nations. united nations population fund. (2012). marrying too young: ending child marriage. new york: unfpa. debbie landis et al. studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 273-290, 2018 290 wodon, q., nguyen, m., & tsimpo, c. (2016). child marriage, education and agency in uganda. feminist economics, 21(1), 54-79. zolotor, a., runyan, d., dunne, m., jain, d., péturs, h., ramirez, c., … isaeva, o. (2009). ispcan child abuse screening tool children’s version (icast-c): instrument development and multi-national pilot testing. child abuse & neglect, 33, 833-841. gosine final before ts correspondence address: andil gosine, faculty of environmental & urban change, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: andil@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 14, issue 2, 526-527, 2020 creative intervention untitled (2019) andil gosine york university, canada the broken clay is of a deeya, a vessel i grew up using in trinidad every divali. oil would be poured into each, then a cotton wick dipped in and lit. over the years, this act has become akin to putting up a christmas tree – religious for some, a secular cultural act for others, available to all. this lighting of deeyas has travelled throughout the world with various attachments and effects. when deeyas are lit in trinidad and tobago, regardless of the lighter’s religion or ethnicity, it feels like an untitled (2019) studies in social justice, volume 14, issue 2, 526-527, 2020 527 acknowledgment of the history of indentureship, the system that brought indians to become replacement plantation workers in the caribbean following the abolition of slavery. because of the persistence of acts of racialized violence we encountered after migrating to canada, i remember being scared of what lighting the deeyas on the steps of our oshawa home might incite. (nothing ever happened.) i broke the deeya with the intention of making the two parts fit to resemble a ship or, rather, a shipwreck. that is the story of caribbean peoples’ history; we are working from/with wreckage.1 the glass beads reference the long-established art of beadwork developed in many first nations communities, and i’ve chosen red, pink and yellow – “coolie colours” that are intentionally used in my other work to refute the derision of them as evidence of rural indians’ poor taste. the action in the image is literal – stitching together futures from the shared wreckage of colonization. the people shipped to do plantation labour in the caribbean (including the waves who then migrated to canada), and the first peoples whom have been systematically displaced and exploited since the beginning of the colonial project: our past, present and futures are entwined. reference gosine, a. (2016). “my mother’s baby: wrecking work after indentureship. in g. hosein & l. outar (eds.), indo-caribbean feminist thought: genealogies, theories, enactments (pp. 49-60). palgrave macmillan. 1 in “my mothers baby: wrecking work after indentureship” (gosine, 2016), i use the metaphor of the shipwreck to also underline the productive possibilities of wreckage as well. keto final correspondence address: miranda j. brady, school of journalism and communication, carleton university, ottawa on k1s 5b6; email: miranda.brady@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 478-485, 2022 creative intervention words, thoughts, actions, and congruence in autistic social justice kate keto1 introduction originally written as a poem, “words” was created in response to “person with autism” and other such pathologizing labels and stigmas being projected onto my neurotype during a working group of parents and caregivers of neurodivergent children, which will remain unnamed. believing my participation could contribute to conversations and actions enabling better understandings, acceptance, accessibility, and support for autistics in our community in self-guided, meaningful, and humane ways, i eagerly joined the working group with open heart. as the lone autistic parent in the room, it soon became apparent that my voice was only needed or wanted if it was in alignment with the non-autistic majority. alienated and feeling spoken over and gatekept on issues directly related to me, every meeting was an exercise in patience. when the topic of “autism” arose, it was difficult to hear the sympathies parents felt for each other over having to “manage” their autistic children, but when i tried to explain or present the experience from an autistic perspective, i was told that my voice was better off silent or that i “took up too much space.” i departed that committee dejected, and any bits of my voice or suggestions that remained were co-opted and appropriated, but not necessarily for the right reasons. it was not my first experience of being silenced, and of oppression and appropriation, and it was certainly not the last. these experiences inspired me to write the piece “words.” soon afterwards, it quickly became apparent “words” were not enough. and so began the journey of “words, thoughts, actions and congruence.” i hope you enjoy. 1 editor’s note: kate keto is a pseudonym. the author is an autistic mom to an autistic child, and a social justice advocate. in this case, studies in social justice respects the author’s preference to remain anonymous. any correspondence may be sent to the address below, from where it will be redirected to the author. words, thoughts, actions, and congruence in autistic social justice studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 478-485, 2022 479 kate keto studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 478-485, 2022 480 words, thoughts, actions, and congruence in autistic social justice studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 478-485, 2022 481 kate keto studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 478-485, 2022 482 words, thoughts, actions, and congruence in autistic social justice studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 478-485, 2022 483 kate keto studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 478-485, 2022 484 words, thoughts, actions, and congruence in autistic social justice studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 478-485, 2022 485 acknowledgments referenced words used to describe autistics, as listed in “thoughts” were identified by meghan ashburn in her public facebook group, not an autism mom, which can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/notanautismmom/photos/a.323348721443783/92 7102087735107/ (retrieved june 26, 2020). the graphic design for this piece was created by kennedy ryan. introduction studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 119 review of la via campesina: globalization and the power of peasants ruth reitan, university of miami la via campesina: globalization and the power of peasants annette aurelie desmarais london, pluto press, 2007, (pb) isbn 0745327044 three-quarters of the world’s poor are subsistence farmers. a significant minority have forged one of the largest transnational activist networks of our time in order to ensure that peasants, indigenous, and other rural people are not erased from the global equation and instead to demand that their voices be taken into account. they have also articulated an alternative path to development centered on “land, food, dignity, and life.” annette desmarais’s la via campesina: globalization and the power of peasants is at once an authoritative and authentic treatment of this remarkable surge in peasant activism at the dawn of the 21 st century. la via campesina means the “peasant road” or “peasant way.” it is a global network of small and medium farmers, agricultural workers, fisherpeople, and rural organizations encompassing women’s and indigenous agricultural groups, claiming to represent tens of millions across the planet. thus, it is probably the largest single organization resisting neoliberal globalization today, and particularly those targeting the free trade regime. desmarais demonstrates, however, that the via campesina is much more than just a reactionary or defensive protest movement. these activists have collectively articulated a rural, socially-embedded, counter-hegemonic alternative to growth-obsessed liberalism. this program aims to preserve and revalorize peasant ways of life and identities while simultaneously proposing alternative peasant roads to sustainable development wherein the peasantry would be a vital socio-economic class. the book begins by situating the via campesina within the current globalization debate and juxtaposes their brand of grassroots, democratic, and direct activism to the more staid, ngo-led “civil society” organizations. the author credits this global peasant network with putting the concept of food sovereignty on the international and many domestic agendas. she then analyzes the enclosure of agriculture under the most recent round of capitalist expansion, and asks “which way forward” for development praxis in this anti-peasant terrain where, until very recently, globalization’s losers have been largely ignored or, when they question the subsumption of all societal values to that of market efficiency, were chastised with thatcher’s mantra “there is no alternative” (tina). the rest of the book answers the question of which way forward by descriptively analyzing the via campesina and their challenge to the tina’s hegemony. it shows how diverse strands of rural activists and organizations forged common ground and solidarity as “people of the land”, and how they have carved out an autonomous space independent of those who had studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 120 paternalistically claimed to represent them, namely the church, conservative political parties, and non-governmental organizations (ngos). it traces how the via campesina has constructed itself from the local to the regional and finally to the global level in opposition to its main target, the world trade organization. by devising an organizational structure that promotes democratic participation and mass mobilization, in addition to forging strategic alliances with ngos willing to play a supportive, not directive, role, the via campesina has remained locally embedded while at the same time flexing its muscle globally at protest events and in ngo and inter-governmental organization (igo) fora. desmarais concludes with a candid yet sympathetic treatment of how these activists incessantly work to expose, challenge and address power disparities and oppression within their own body with regard to gender, race, economic wealth, and nationality. on this score, the via campesina is an innovative experiment yielding potentially important lessons for other transnational social movements, ngos, and igos alike. desmarais’ book is an exemplary work of critical globalization scholarship. it is researched and written by a truly organic intellectual: the author has transitioned from conventional to organic farmer, to international peasant activist, and finally to scholar-activist. this insider’s vantage point is not only ethically-consistent with her emancipatory and feminist methodological approach, it is also pragmatic and probably necessary if one is to understand or explain marginalized and under-studied social classes and movements such as rural campesinos. although the risk of bias certainly accompanies a “committed insider” position, in this particular case, the benefits outweigh those of striving to be an “objective” outsider. desmarais worked as technical support for the via campesina for a number of years. furthermore, her mutuallyarrived-at decision to pursue a doctoral dissertation (on which this book is based) in consultation with the via campesina’s elected leadership gave desmarais the much-needed access to organizational resources and key informants and helped her gain trust and establish rapport with her partners in—not objects of—inquiry. finally, this insider position provided the scholaractivist with an opportunity to support and accompany a movement in its efforts to bring about social change. at a more general level, the work challenges intellectuals, activists, ngo workers and policymakers across the political spectrum to confront their deeply-rooted biases against peasants and rural people—be they that when it comes to producing food, “bigger is better,” that the peasantry is a backward and disappearing class, or that urban professionals know what is best for rural people, the environment, and creating sustainable societies. in each of these ways, la via campesina: globalization and the power of peasants is a model for critical, challenging, socially-engaged and purposeful scholarship. correspondence address: william carroll, department of sociology, university of victoria, cor a338, 3800 finnerty rd., victoria, bc v8p 5c2, canada. tel.: (+01) 250 721 7573, email: wcarroll@uvic.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 165-167, 2013 review of the evil axis of finance: the us-japan-china stranglehold on the global future william carroll university of victoria, canada the evil axis of finance: the us-japan-china stranglehold on the global future. written by richard westra, atlanta, ga: clarity press, (2012) isbn: 9780932863904 this provocatively titled study takes up a topic, international finance, whose opacity often induces a trance-like state in readers. written in an engaging, even breezy style, westra’s book follows in the tradition of marx’s capital, as both a critical analysis of the contemporary capitalist system and a critique of the liberal economic theories that make that system appear rational and inevitable. the book is intended for an educated, non-specialist readership, including undergraduate students in the social sciences and related fields, as well as progressive policy makers and activists. it presents a cogent analysis of the long-term underpinnings of the 2008 global financial meltdown and the emergent form of capitalism whose logic became acutely visible in the subsequent fallout. westra holds that the us, japan and china have come to form an “evil axis” of finance that places a stranglehold on the world’s future. in this post-imperialist scenario, wall street comprises the “new command center from which the us, supported by evil axis partner dollar holdings, manages the world economy by ‘remote control’ for its own selfaggrandizement,” with japan, china, the eu and select other states “feeding at the trough” (p. 20). the axis is evil—a moral judgment upon which westra insists—for two main reasons. on the one hand, it portends a retrograde mode of accumulation: capitalism’s progressive mission is long past. with the hypertrophy of financial studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 166 william carroll capital into derivatives, hedge funds, bundled assets and the like, productive capital is disarticulated and decays as a source of employment and revenue, particularly in the us but also more generally. with the eclipse of productioncentered capitalism, enormous quantities of idle money metastasize into an ”evil force” that resembles ancient usury—extracting its “pound of flesh” from whosoever falls into its clutches, whether the people of greece or the millions suffering under a global agricultural regime in which food prices are set by speculative churning on derivatives markets. capitalism’s increasingly retrograde character is also visible in the shift of productive capital to places like china, whose brutal authoritarian regime subtends “dark modes of labor control [underwritten by a massive, elastic supply of displaced rural workers] that in part hark back to bondage-like work forms existing at the dawn of the capitalist era” (p. 146). on the other hand, the axis is evil in its indifference to the impending food, energy and climate change crises. in westra’s view, global ecological crisis “is likely to be the foundation for the final economic bubble” as wall street gorges itself “before the deluge” (p. 208). the core of westra’s historical analysis is a nuanced account of how the “golden age” of post-war fordist consumer-capitalism morphed into the contemporary degenerate form. in the 1980s, as us global industrial dominance visibly eroded (the result of offshoring and insourcing practices of us tncs in search of cheap labour), the us parlayed its unique position as issuer of world currency into a “substitute source of global supremacy” (p. 74). the new accumulation regime retains the ideology of consumerism so central to the golden age, even as four-fifths of americans are walmartized while the top fifth of enjoys the lifestyle of overconsumptionism, fueled by imports of high-end goods. indeed, it is only by running massive deficits— trade, budget, capital account, near-zero savings—that the us economy is able to register “growth”: the asset bubbles and rotating meltdowns which now constitute “the surrogate us economy” of speculative casino capitalism (p. 142). within the evil axis of finance, surplus earnings from industrial production in japan and especially china are funneled into the us treasury bill purchases that keep the dollar afloat, with the entire system of investment and trade relations “guaranteeing the malignancies of each economy [american hyperconsumptionism, chinese authoritarian labour control] will spread to infect the world” (p. 146). westra sees no hope of rescue via conventional political and economic practices. in the wake of the 2008 collapse, state largesse to us and european banks has created a “doom loop” as socialized bank losses encourage more reckless risk-taking, setting the table for the next meltdown. the remedy he offers in conclusion—rejuvenation of local economies under democratic community control—seems to apply specifically to the us, whose political left has for decades been in a deep abeyance that limits possibilities for transformative change beyond the local level. this is consistent with the book’s focus on wall street/washington as the evil axis’s ground zero, but it may underestimate the potential of social forces located elsewhere, as in latin america’s “pink tide,” with its alternative regionalism (including studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 review of the evil axis of finance 167 the bank of the south) and its emphasis upon participatory democracy and food sovereignty. this pessimistically realistic book’s strength lies in laying bare the deeply dysfunctional logic of capitalism in the early 21st century. scholars and activists interested in social justice will have to draw their own place-specific practical conclusions. donovan and ustundag final correspondence address: courtney donovan, department of geography & environment, san francisco state university, san francisco, ca 94132; email: cdonovan@sfsu.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 graphic narratives, trauma and social justice courtney donovan san francisco state university, usa ebru ustundag brock university, canada abstract in this paper, we explore the relevance of graphic novels to understanding and responding to the complex nature of traumatic experiences. we argue that graphic narratives of trauma, which combine visual images and written text, significantly differ from biomedical and legal accounts by presenting the nuances of traumatic experiences that escape the conventions of written testimony. building on the literature that integrates social justice concerns with visual methods and graphic medicine, we contend that graphic narratives effectively convey the complexities of traumatic experiences, including embodied experiences that are not always apparent, intelligible, or representable in written form, leading to greater social recognition of the dynamics and consequences of trauma. to illustrate this claim, we analyze una’s becoming unbecoming (2015), a graphic novel that explores themes relating to trauma and social justice. una relies on the graphic medium to explore the interconnections between personal and collective experiences of gender-based violence, and to show how physical embodied experience is central to her own experience of trauma. graphic narratives like becoming unbecoming also offer a space for addressing the emotional, physical and financial costs of survivorship that usually are not available in legal written testimonies, potentially leading to better justice outcomes for trauma survivors in terms of social intelligibility and recognition, and access to social resources for healing. keywords graphic medicine; graphic narratives; una; trauma; social justice; visual methods courtney donovan & ebru ustundag studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 222 introduction qualitative researchers have identified visual methods as powerful tools that can productively represent the complex lives of a diverse range of individuals and social groups (hill & azzarito, 2012; lorenz, 2010; rose, 2014). participatory visual methods such as photo-voice and photo-elicitation have been particularly popular as collaborative methods that decenter the research process by producing knowledge about the lived experiences of marginalized subjects from their own perspectives (castleden, garvin & huu-ay-aht first nations, 2008; power, 2014). rapid developments in digital technologies have expanded the variety of visual tools available to researchers in collaborative projects with under-represented and marginalized populations. digital storytelling and personal mapping approaches, for example, are newer visual methods that disrupt conventional modes of knowledge production, and deepen understandings of the complex operations of social inequalities and struggles for social justice (hidalgo, 2015; nanackchand & berman, 2012; ulmer, 2017). no matter which visual approaches are used, scholars argue for their value as modes of communication that enable vulnerable groups to articulate difficult and complex personal experiences in ways that text-based approaches often frustrate, opening possibilities for enhanced social recognition and claims for justice (lorenz & chilingerian, 2011; ogston-tuck, baume, clarke & heng, 2016). in this paper, we contribute to the growing literature on social justice and visual methods through a focus on graphic narratives, a relatively new form of visual qualitative methodology. graphic narratives, which are sometimes referred to as comics or sequential art, present written text and visual imagery within a series of juxtaposed panels to convey a story (mccloud, 1994). this interplay of visual imagery and text enables authors to produce narratives that communicate a range of experiences that are not always socially discernible and intelligible (squier, 2015; williams, 2015). we explore the potential of graphic narratives to convey the complexity of trauma as a particular type of social experience. our interest in trauma centers on the psychological distress or injury that is disproportionately experienced by low-income individuals, people of color, lgbtq individuals and women due to their social marginalization. we argue that graphic narratives are tools that effectively communicate what are often unrepresentable and unspeakable traumatic experiences. graphic narrative depictions of trauma move beyond traditional legal and clinical frameworks that provide limited understandings of trauma, and therefore hamper possibilities for justice for those who have experienced it. legal approaches, for instance, require traumatized subjects to provide “valid” and “measurable” evidence of trauma upon which judgments about justice are made. these evaluations of trauma are informed by formal textual testimony, as well as technical and specialized forms of knowledge, that are unable to capture the nuance and complexity of traumatic experience (brown, graphic narratives, trauma & social justice studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 223 2008). legal frameworks also focus on moral binaries or clear-cut distinctions – right/wrong or good/bad – that cannot accommodate complex, situated and experiential forms of knowledge. consequently, these institutional frameworks simplify the realities of trauma, and silence personal experiences (brown, 2008, p. 130), thereby creating a barrier to social recognition and justice (crawley & van rijswick, 2012). by intertwining written text and visual imagery, graphic narratives effectively accommodate the nuances of traumatic experiences that written testimony alone cannot fully capture. for example, much social justice work that focuses on trauma demonstrates that individual and collective traumatic experiences are shaped by various interconnected forms of violence and oppression. graphic narratives, which incorporate multiple modes of communication, provide more robust platforms for articulating these experiential complexities. they also offer a space for conveying the emotional, physical and financial costs of survivorship that is usually not available in legal written testimonies (cvetkovich, 2008). scholars and social justice activists argue that symbolic and physical violence is systematically perpetuated by legal and other administrative systems as they fail to understand these aspects of trauma, resulting in inadequate responses and allocations of resources (incite, 2006; spade, 2013, 2015). in this respect, graphic narratives that communicate traumatic experiences in their fullness and complexity call into question the justice system’s notion of a “fair” distribution of social rewards and burdens by highlighting the disproportionate physical, emotional and financial costs of survivorship, potentially leading to better justice outcomes for trauma survivors in terms of social intelligibility and recognition and access to social resources for healing. in sum, we argue that representations of trauma in the space of graphic narratives provide openings for more complicated understandings of trauma, which in turn offer possibilities for justice that extend beyond what can be achieved within institutionalized legal and biomedical frameworks. these openings and possibilities are even more realizable and compelling when graphic narratives on trauma are presented as memoirs that attest to the lived experience of trauma (gilmore, 2011), because they highlight the limits associated with text-based representations of testimony. we demonstrate these claims through an analysis of una’s becoming unbecoming (2015), a graphic narrative related to the traumatic issue of sexual assault and genderbased violence. our argument unfolds in three sections. first, we draw on work in the burgeoning field of graphic medicine (e.g., czerwiec et al., 2015) that employs graphic narratives to convey the complexities of health experiences, and to provide individuals the tools to make sense of their own health experiences, which can then be communicated to doctors and other health professionals. graphic medicine provides alternative ways to understand health and medical experiences that are not readily perceptible to most courtney donovan & ebru ustundag studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 224 people. this practice is particularly helpful in the context of trauma, when symptoms like anxiety often manifest through embodied sensations that are difficult to describe. graphic medicine literature shows how graphic narratives can communicate complex health experiences, thereby disrupting clinical and legal representations that tend to simplify experiences like trauma. second, we explore how trauma is framed in legal and biomedical contexts. we address existing institutional approaches for responding to trauma and the limitations of these approaches for achieving justice. third, we analyze the graphic narrative becoming unbecoming by una (2015), which focuses on both the personal experience of sexual violence and the collective experience of gender-based violence to illustrate how the two are connected. embodiment, or the physical embodied experience of trauma, is central to una’s experience of trauma, and to her combination of written and visual representations of that experience. she frequently references her somatic experience of trauma to demonstrate how that experience shapes the complexities of her everyday life, producing a complex and alternate form of testimony. una aims to make clear the nuance and complexity of trauma that is often missing from formal legal testimony, opening the possibility for social recognition, healing and justice. her graphic narrative demonstrates that comics and graphic novels are powerful visual approaches to social analysis; it artfully and effectively articulates the traumatic experiences of socially and politically marginalized individuals, including women, people of color and the disabled, that are often overlooked. this graphic narrative also represents a significant departure from the individualization of trauma characteristic of legal and clinical approaches by demonstrating how the collective is embedded in individual experiences. seeing and representing through graphic medicine scholarly and popular interest in graphic narratives is growing, and has recently extended into the realm of health and medical scholarship and practice; a growing number of health researchers, professionals and patients have turned to comics and graphic novels to understand and communicate the complexity of health experiences (e.g., chast, 2014; dahl, 2009; donovan, 2014; fies, 2006; forney, 2012; leavitt, 2012; small, 2009). health-related graphic narratives, broadly described as graphic medicine, are receiving widespread scholarly attention because of the ways they mobilize images and other visual codes to convey the nuances and intricacies of health and medical experiences (cohn, 2014; groensteen, 2007; mccloud, 1994). graphic medicine manifesto, for instance, offers a comprehensive overview of the productive uses of comics in medical education and pedagogy, their relevance to personal accounts and experiences of illness and the deployment of comics as a strategy for social change (czerwiec et al., 2015) graphic narratives, trauma & social justice studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 225 cartoonist and physician ian williams, who coined the term “graphic medicine,” addresses the important visual contributions made by sequential art in representing illness when he argues that this “graphic medium facilitates a complex visual layering of subjective and objective experiences, bridging the gap between clinical facts and personal experiences” (williams, 2014, p. 64). he demonstrates how graphic narratives on health, or graphic pathographies, deploy visual elements to create nuanced and accessible explanations of health and medical issues that contest accounts characteristically produced by medical knowledge. relatedly, he argues that sequential art is an avenue through which individuals can claim representational control over their health and medical experiences. written as memoirs, graphic narratives enable a person who has experienced a challenging health issue to reflect on identity, and destabilize the ways in which illness comes to define one’s identity. williams (2015, p. 119) writes, “making autobiographical comics is a type of symbolic creativity that helps form identity – a way to reconstruct the world, placing fragments of testimony into meaningful narrative and physically reconstructing the damaged body.” williams contends that the act of representing the body is significant for people who are experiencing different forms of illness that manifest in different ways. he identifies three embodied expressions of illness that comics help to convey: manifest, concealed and invisible. manifest illnesses are clearly visible as scars and other physical signs on the body. concealed illnesses are not readily apparent to the casual observer. symptoms present occasionally, and often create psychological stress for the affected person. invisible illnesses, like mental illness, leave no physically discernible symptoms or signs on the surface of the body. like concealed and invisible illnesses, trauma produces psychological and physical symptoms that may not be readily apparent. to represent the complexity of concealed and invisible illnesses, graphic medicine authors must rely on a variety of graphic and textual strategies to make the illness and its effects apparent, including the narrative techniques of metaphor and exaggeration. authors likewise may emphasize imagery and physical space to convey a mood or the feeling of isolation. as we demonstrate below, in becoming unbecoming (2015) una successfully relies on these strategies to convey to the reader the complex and overwhelming experiences of trauma. representations of health experiences in sequential art contrast sharply with other visual media and technologies traditionally used by health professionals in medical practice and public health initiatives to depict health, illness and disease (ostherr, 2013; serlin, 2011). these techniques include imaging technologies like mammograms, sonograms and x-rays (weir, 2006; woliver, 2002), as well as health brochures and pamphlets produced for clinics and public health offices that depict a narrow understanding of health and medical experiences. in contrast to the visual representations mediated by medical practitioners, patient portrayals of health related issues in comics and courtney donovan & ebru ustundag studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 226 graphic narratives radically recast the narrative of health and disease. the most important change in the narrative concerns the ability of patients to selfrepresent the immediate, lived experience of health and illness (charon, 2008). the issue of self-representation has been central to the study and production of graphic medicine narratives (czerwiec et al., 2015), because many graphic narratives are written in autobiographical form. the opportunity to speak for oneself about personal health and medical experiences includes the ability to “communicate immediate visceral understanding” (green & myers, 2010, p. 574), which is more achievable using sequential art that extends representational repertoires beyond written text and words alone. the visual/textual interface creates a hybrid form amenable to portraying an author’s personal health story, including the complex processes and experiences that shape their body, history and memory. in the space of the graphic narrative, an author constructs knowledge of the self. when an individual represents their experience of a particular health issue, a proximate relationship between the author and reader is established. the author speaks directly to the reader about their intimate experiences. the absence of an intermediary in the relationship minimizes the potential that readers will misunderstand an author’s experience of a particular health issue, which is especially significant for concealed and invisible illnesses that may be poorly understood or go unrecognized, contributing to significant psychological and physical suffering. for a person experiencing mental illness, for instance, the ability to speak for oneself about health and medical concerns is a political act. in the space of a graphic narrative, individuals can address and disrupt normative yet misleading ideas about mental illness. autobiographical graphic medicine narratives allow individuals with firsthand experience to depathologize and reinterpret what it means to live with a particular illness, providing them a sense of agency and empowerment (myers, 2015). this is an important step towards realizing social justice by rendering these experiences socially intelligible and recognizable. for those experiencing illness, the ability to counter normative and pathologizing discourses of biomedicine using the tools of graphic medicine is significant. other social groups that are perpetually misrepresented or rendered invisible by dominant discourses, like those who have experienced trauma, may also find graphic narratives useful in challenging totalizing discourses. trauma does not always present in ways that fit clinical diagnoses, which creates confusion and potentially compromises the physical and mental health of the person who has experienced a traumatic event. the graphic medium can be used to disrupt such a narrow and totalizing biomedical framing. in the section that follows we elaborate on the ways in which trauma tends to be framed in legal and biomedical contexts. we then address existing approaches for responding to trauma, particularly in relation graphic narratives, trauma & social justice studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 227 to sexual assault, and the limitations of these approaches for achieving social recognition and justice. traumatic complexities and limitations to justice biomedicine identifies trauma as intense emotional reactions to catastrophic stressors, harms caused by something external to the individual. this understanding of trauma focuses on how individuals assimilate different forms of injury or harm caused by external stressors, and how emotional and behavioral outcomes take shape following a traumatic incident. it also frames trauma as reactions that individuals have in the aftermath of situations believed to be beyond the realm of normal human experience (scaer, 2007; van der kolk, 2014). symptoms of trauma include re-experiencing the original traumatic event(s) through flashbacks or nightmares, avoiding situations associated with the original trauma and experiencing heightened arousal after the traumatic event, such as hyper vigilance, anger and sleep difficulties. the legal system has difficulty recognizing the emotional and psychic manifestations of mental illnesses, some of which are rooted in trauma. personal injury litigation has operated on a strict definition of bodily harm, contending that bodily injury can only be claimed when physical manifestations of trauma are apparent on the body. shen (2013) discusses cases in which courts dismissed the emotional stress of trauma and ptsd because of the lack of visible bodily injury. this tendency to differentiate between physical and emotional harm and to insist on physical evidence can have significant consequences for victims. without legal recognition of emotional harm, victims may feel that they are culpable for their experiences. trauma studies scholars identify other limitations of biomedical and legal framings of trauma that negatively affect survivors (e.g., joseph, 2013). in medicine and law, trauma is approached primarily as an individual experience, ignoring the ways in which traumatic events often affect many people (cvetkovich, 2008; gilmore, 2011). the widespread and normalized nature of gender-based violence and sexual assault exemplify how women’s collective experience is often isolated into individualized traumatic events. trauma studies scholars maintain that this division between individual and collective experience renders invisible the structural conditions and social events that give rise to collectively experienced violent acts. feminist arguments about rape culture aim to connect individual and collective experiences of sexual violence, which helps to minimize survivors’ feelings of shame and guilt. graphic narratives, such as maus (spiegelman, 1986), lighter than my shadow (green, 2013), a child’s life (gloeckner, 2000), and the courage to be me (burrowes, 2014), have been at the forefront of linking individual and collective trauma as outcomes of broader social conditions and events (caruth, 1996; craps, 2013). courtney donovan & ebru ustundag studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 228 legal understandings of trauma are limited beyond their definitions of trauma, bodily harm and victims. for example, trauma cases often do not make it to court, due in part to problematic processes related to reporting and investigating claims, which exacerbates the harm experienced by trauma survivors. a recent report on sexual assaults found that 79% of investigated cases did not end up in courts in canada (rizvic, 2018). ywca canada claims that 460,000 sexual assaults occur in canada every year, but very few of these crimes are engaged by the criminal justice system (johnson, 2012). their data show that of every 1,000 sexual assaults, 33 are reported to the police, 29 are recorded as a crime, 12 have charges presented, six are prosecuted, three lead to conviction and 997 assailants walk free. the personal shame of experiencing assault can explain why so many women do not make initial reports. this hesitancy is exacerbated by low conviction rates in cases that are reported. underreporting has significant ramifications for the social recognition of victims and their access to social, health and legal services, including compensations, funded-counseling and other healthcare services (craig, 2018). when cases do end up in courtrooms, sexual assault prosecutions rely on written and oral testimonies as evidence, which are often inadequate tools for conveying the complexity of trauma (buelens, durant & eaglestone, 2014; caruth, 1996; craps, 2013; lacapra, 2014). craig (2018) contends that when survivors of sexual assault bring claims to the legal system, they are required to construct victim impact statements, an extremely limited opportunity to describe their experiences. therefore, miller (2013) and balfour, du mont and white (2018) argue that victim impact statements frustrate procedural fairness, contribute to post traumatic distress, aggravate emotional distresses like shame and self-blame, silence survivors and render their experiences socially unreadable (craig, 2018). survivors consequently experience going to trial as an additionally abusive, humiliating and discriminatory trauma. this situation is especially traumatic for women with mental disabilities (benedt & grant, 2007), and racialized and indigenous women (razack, 2002). in the next section, we address how graphic narratives can overcome some of these legal limitations, with a particular focus on the incommunicability of trauma via written text. we analyze una’s becoming unbecoming (2015) to illustrate these claims. like other graphic narratives on trauma, it demonstrates that a combination of visual and textual narrative provides a more robust hybrid platform for documenting, describing and recognizing the experience of trauma as a foundation for claims to social justice. witnessing and embodiment in graphic narratives comics scholar hillary chute (2010, p. 2) claims that “today’s most riveting feminist cultural production is the form of accessible yet edgy graphic graphic narratives, trauma & social justice studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 229 narratives,” including persepolis (satrapi, 2007), fun home (bechdel, 2007) and hark! a vagrant (beaton, 2011). these graphic narratives compellingly communicate and make sense of the challenges women face in relation to traumatic experiences. questions concerning the body and embodiment are at the heart of these autobiographic narratives on trauma. women artists suggest the graphic form is productive because it helps to capture the nuances of an embodied experience that are often invisible and hard to articulate through words alone. una, an anonymous yorkshire author, is especially sensitive to the invisibility of traumatic experience. her graphic memoir becoming unbecoming (2015) explores her story as a victim of several sexual assaults in the 1970s. una positions her story in relation to the contemporaneous search for the yorkshire ripper, a serial killer who murdered 13 local women and attempted to murder seven more. by interweaving these stories, una considers her own embodied experience of trauma in the larger social context of gendered violence, demonstrating the link between her own painful experiences and those of other sexual assault victims. becoming unbecoming, therefore, troubles the dominant distinction made between individual and collective experiences of trauma. figure 1. (source: una, 2015, p. 7) a critical focus of becoming unbecoming is rendering accessible the confusion and pain of trauma, and the effects of experiences of sexual assault on a victim’s sense of self and personal development from an early age. on the very first page, una presents a haunting graphic of her younger self carrying a heavy, empty speech balloon over her shoulder as she climbs a steep hill (figure 1). the absence of words in the balloon foreshadows the cumulative effects of unspoken trauma, the victim-blaming culture that is courtney donovan & ebru ustundag studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 230 associated with it and the possibilities of justice that are never realized. the emptiness of the speech balloon conveys both the personal and social silences related to trauma. revisiting her early childhood later in the book, una acknowledges how these isolating experiences affect many young girls: “too many girls have to fight in silence” (2015, p. 169). una’s body is another prominent feature in this opening illustration, which ties her experiences of sexual assault as a youth to the murders and attempted murders of other women in yorkshire. she depicts her small frame moving slowly through the pages of her narrative, constantly encumbered with the weighty word balloon. she struggles forward, through her assaults and a wider world of sexual violence. her body bows down under the weight of repeated personal and systemic gendered injustices. una relies on the graphic medium to articulate how these injustices contrast to positive experiences in her youth. she references the pop culture and music that figured prominently in everyday life in 1970s yorkshire, specifically the artists that inspired her to learn to play the guitar. however, by identifying it as “a strange musical era” (2015, p. 11), she references the climate of sexism that informed her favorite rock music and television programs like top of the pops, in which male stars performed music while scantily clad, buxom women silently smiled and posed in the background. una conveys the sense of confusion she feels as she comes to understand this sexism and gendered expectations for women. although one of her favorite musicians advocated for her to walk tall with confidence, her own experiences suggested she should instead “lower my gaze” (2015, p. 14). pop culture may have presented a world of possibilities, but una realizes the limitations society placed on her as a girl. figure 2. (source: una, 2015, p. 1) graphic narratives, trauma & social justice studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 231 throughout the narrative, una stresses that her experience is not unique. she acknowledges that no female is truly “safe,” regardless of whether or not she is a “good girl,” and that rape culture leads to profound physical and emotional trauma, changing a person permanently. she achieves the latter by showing herself going through a full metamorphosis. in two illustrations, she has an insect’s body, which contrasts sharply with earlier representations of her youthful self, innocently playing with paper doll cutouts. figure 2, for instance, depicts una transformed into a hybrid human-insect, with antennae and translucent wings that help her navigate a world that continually alters her. repeated visual depictions of personal metamorphosis capture invisibilized traumatic experiences that leave a lasting effect, and may be difficult to articulate in words. figure 3. (source: una, 2015, pp. 34-35) una is able to speak directly to readers of the complex reality of her experiences and perspectives, implicating them in the narrative (squier, 2015). the lack of an interpretive intermediary positions the reader as a confidante and witness to unfiltered events and the emotions they invoke. una skillfully draws the reader into the pain and confusion experienced by her younger self. for instance, in a two-page spread she recalls her earliest experiences with sexual assault (figure 3). the first page depicts a young courtney donovan & ebru ustundag studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 232 una seated in profile as if observing the page that follows, her arms folded, leaning against a small opaque tree. she is seated on what appears to be a small hill, many times smaller than the steep one shown on the first page of the book. the small hill represents struggles that are not yet insurmountable. she is at the starting point of her struggles, which become larger over time. words follow the contours of the hill, una’s body and the tree, communicating the thoughts running through her mind prior to the assault: “i hadn’t really understood the situation” (2015, p. 34). on the opposing page, una depicts two scenes, moments before the assaults occur. in one scene we see young una about to walk alone into a field with an older boy. she recalls that he said he wouldn’t hurt her. in the other, una and her childhood friend sit smiling under a canopy of trees that is fashioned into a den. a sign announces “the den. keep out,” but it will offer no protection from two older boys who are approaching. both scenes emphasize her naivety and youth. readers are witnesses to una’s apprehension and anxiety about events that will leave a lasting effect on her sense of self. adjacent to the second scene, una recalls how one of the boys was able to get her trust and separate her from her friend. she confides, “i’m sure the same thing happened to my den-making friend, though we never spoke of it” (2015, p. 35). here, she references the ways in which trauma creates an isolating effect that frustrates women’s ability to share their experiences, even with those close to them. figure 4. (source: una, 2015, p. 120) graphic narratives, trauma & social justice studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 233 una suggests that the struggle to articulate experiences of trauma extends beyond interpersonal relationships to the ways in which administrative and legal systems deal with trauma. she notes that even when assault is brought to court, justice does not necessarily take place. she specifically asks, “where is justice?” (2015, p. 120), criticizing the lack of legal interventions into acts of violence against women (figure 4). her critique addresses more than the justice system’s failure to redress harms: “we can’t blame the justice system for the things it thinks and does, if it just thinks and does the same things as everyone else” (2015 p. 165). figure 5. (source: una, 2015, p. 165) courtney donovan & ebru ustundag studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 234 in figure 5, una points to the systemic failure of many institutions to respond to instances of trauma. below a group of policemen and barristers, she draws a reporter writing feverishly at a computer, alongside news cameramen that surround an attorney who is giving a briefing. she depicts the disparate individuals and institutions that are complicit in perpetuating the inequities of the justice system, and identifies how they are shaped by the same society that perpetuates sexism: “the words and images we use are all a part of the same landscape” (2015, p. 165). lawyers, police, the courts and popular media cannot impart justice when they convey to women that they must be passive, modest objects. una highlights the impossible feat women like her face in responding to this message and changing the culture of shame. she depicts this impossibility using a scale, one side weighed down by the word “slut,” the other holding una, slumped over, her wings bent down. justice has not been served; she is defeated. una’s narrative provides many visually stimulating yet heartbreaking depictions of her daily struggles living in the aftermath of sexual violence. we have drawn on only a small selection of them to support our arguments. our goal in analyzing them is to demonstrate how graphic narratives are a unique hybrid narrative form that relies on both visual imagery and text to convey the complexities of trauma and the opportunities to achieve justice for victims of trauma. conclusion becoming unbecoming (2015) offers a starting point for considering the ways in which graphic narratives can be utilized as visual methodologies that represent the complexity of trauma and traumatic experiences. it demonstrates how the hybrid form of written text and visual imagery can convey complex aspects of trauma that escape the conventions of biomedicine and law. graphic narratives are especially compelling as alternatives to text-based representations of testimony. they present opportunities for a more complicated understanding of trauma, which in turn enhances possibilities for achieving social intelligibility, recognition and justice for survivors. una’s work also demonstrates the ways in which explanations of trauma can extend beyond the limits of biomedical and institutional frameworks. graphic representations of trauma provide a space for articulating the ways in which individual and collective experiences of violence and repression are interconnected, and for the self-representation of those experiences, which helps to avoid the simplification of trauma to fit into existing institutional practices (giddens, 2015; gomez romero & dahlman, 2012), and to convey experiences, sensations and perceptions, like confusion and isolation, that are difficult to describe and perceive. she effectively uses the format of the graphic narrative to emphasize the centrality of the body to collective and graphic narratives, trauma & social justice studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 221-237, 2017 235 individual instances of trauma, and the structural conditions and social events that link individual experiences of sexual assault to prevailing conditions of sexism and widespread violence against women that produce collective experiences of trauma. becoming unbecoming also calls attention to the limits of the legal system in helping survivors achieve justice. legal systems are constrained by dominant evidentiary, reporting and investigating practices and moral binaries that are employed to understand and evaluate events like sexual assault. it also is restricted by its reliance on broader sociopolitical framings of gender and gender expectations to understand and adjudicate acts of sexual violence. justice cannot be achieved for trauma survivors when these limitations accrue to render traumatic experiences socially unreadable and unrecognizable. una’s work demonstrates the potential of graphic narrative as a space through which individuals may counter institutionalized approaches that present a barrier to achieving justice. in contrast to legal and clinical approaches to trauma that focus solely on textual testimony and therefore limit insight into the complex, multifaceted nature and experience of trauma, una’s effective combination of visual and textual representation provides a platform for communicating more complex and inter-relational understandings of trauma than is possible with through text alone, offering social justice possibilities beyond legal and clinical institutions, and shifting the institutional emphasis away from physical, valid and measurable “proof” of trauma to one of social recognition and justice at various social scales. acknowledgements we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback, as well as nancy cook for her generous and insightful editorial support. we would also like to thank una for permission to reproduce images from becoming unbecoming. we presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2017 graphic medicine conference in seattle, and would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to that community for their constructive feedback on our work. references beaton, k. 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(2002). the political geographies of pregnancy. champaign., il: university of illinois press. fobear final galley nov 18 15 correspondence address: katherine fobear, liu institute for global issues, university of british columbia, 6476 nw marine drive, vancouver, bc, v6t 1z2; email: kfobear@mail.ubc.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 “i thought we had no rights” – challenges in listening, storytelling, and representation of lgbt refugees katherine fobear university of british columbia, canada abstract storytelling serves as a vital resource for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* (lgbt) refugees’ access to asylum. it is through telling their personal stories to the canadian immigration and refugee board that lgbt refugees’ claims for asylum are accessed and granted. storytelling also serves as a mechanism for lgbt refugees to speak about social injustice within and outside of canada. in this article, i explore the challenges of storytelling and social justice as an activist and scholar. i focus on three contexts where justice and injustice interplay in lgbt refugee storytelling: the canadian immigration and refugee board, public advocacy around anti-queer violence and refugee rights, and oral history research. i describe how in each arena storytelling can be a powerful tool of justice for lgbt refugees to validate their truths and bring their voices to the forefront in confronting state and public violence. i investigate how these areas can also inflict their own injustices on lgbt refugees by silencing their voices and reproducing power hierarchies. keywords lgbt refugees; forced migration; queer studies; community activism; activist-scholar; oral history; storytelling i remember writing down my story for my hearing. i remember at the end, the file that i was presented was like bigger than a bible in thickness, it was a big, big file. there was a lot of stuff in there, i basically empty my heart in that, you know. and again my whole story was that i really thought that nobody cared about homosexuals. i thought that we had no rights. (interview with hector, june 2013)1 stories matter for refugees. refugees make sense of their past and present experiences, interact with each other, and participate in cultural, political, and 1 hector is a gay cisgender refugee from south america. he claimed asylum in the early 2000s and is now a canadian citizen. as with all interview participants quoted in this article, hector’s real name and country of origin are kept confidential. “i  thought  we  had  no  rights”   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 103 social conversations through sharing their stories. it is through telling and retelling their stories to the canadian border service agency (cbsa) and the canadian immigration and refugee board (irb) that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans* (lgbt) refugees work to gain asylum in canada . 2 the significance of lgbt refugee stories continues long after claimants receive a positive decision on their refugee claim, as their stories are powerful tools to bring attention to larger issues around anti-queer violence and provide a counter-narrative to anti-refugee sentiments in mainstream canada (murray, 2014). 3 for lgbt refugees, being able to share their stories and thus contribute to critical policy issues around inequality and immigration is an important step toward social justice about refugee protection and settlement in canada. in recent years, refugees have emerged as powerful political actors in canada, using their stories to challenge stricter immigration controls by canadian federal and provincial governments (de genova, 2010; nyers, 2010; naples, 2009). lgbt refugees across the country contribute to this discussion by sharing their stories with the irb, the media, via public events, and by participating in community-based research projects. their stories serve as a crucial source of knowledge around the intersection of gender and sexuality in immigration. growing awareness in the media around persons seeking protection in canada from anti-queer persecution abroad has brought attention to underlying heteronormativity in the canadian asylum process and the need to offer protection to lgbt refugees (jenicek & wong, 2009; jordan, 2009; murray, 2014). valerie janesick (2010), sharene razack (1996), and alan wong (2009) remind us that storytelling is not, however, a neutral process. activists and researchers must be critical of how stories are used and who is allowed to tell another’s story. lgbt refugees’ stories are a critical component to their claim for asylum and are important to their sense of self. these individuals are active storytellers in the sense that they work hard to construct their narratives, choose what to reveal and what to elaborate. for many who have lived in silence most of their lives because of homophobia and transphobia, being able to share their story with outsiders can induce a sense of pride and accomplishment. at the same time, lgbt refugees can also experience 2 i use the phrasing ‘lgbt refugees’ to refer to individuals who file a refugee claim based on fear of persecution because of their sexual orientation or gender identity (jordan, 2010; mule & gates-gasse, 2012). ‘trans*’ refers to individuals who do not associate or identify themselves with the gender assigned to them at birth; it is an umbrella term for gender nonconforming and gender variant individuals (roen, 2001; stryker, currah, & moore, 2008; spade, 2008). according to westbrook & schilt (2009, p. 461), “cisgender refers to individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity. this term is a complement to trans* or gender nonconforming individuals who may not associate their assigned gender at birth with their personal identity or body”. 3 ‘queer’ refers to non-heterosexual and/or gender-variant individuals (phelan, 2001; valocchi, 2005; luibhéid & cantú, 2005), as well as an anti-essential theoretical and political approach to sexuality and gender (epprecht, 2008). a queer perspective to migration in particular emphasizes sexuality and gender as a critical component to processes of migration (luibhéid & cantú, 2005). katherine fobear studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 104 silencing, and the appropriation and misuse of their stories if their narratives are coopted to serve nationalist agendas and support systems of power that marginalize racialized and indigenous queer individuals inside and outside canada. it is therefore important to be critical of the ways in which storytelling is used for social justice (north, 2006, 1995). i work with lgbt refugee stories on a daily basis as an oral history researcher and as a volunteer for rainbow refugee, a vancouver-based organization assisting persons claiming asylum in canada on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and hiv status (see http://www.rainbowrefugee.ca). as a volunteer for rainbow refugee, i help lgbt refugee claimants tell their stories at their irb hearings. i also facilitate public speaking opportunities for lgbt refugees to share their stories with policy makers and media. in my oral history research, i interview and analyze lgbt refugees’ life stories in order to understand their experiences of home and belonging in canada. the potential efficacy of storytelling as a social justice resource informs my commitment to record lgbt refugee stories and to ensure that refugees voices and concerns are at the forefront of social change. as valerie janesick (2007), bell hooks (2009), and lee anne bell (2010) argue, storytelling is an important social justice tool for marginalized communities. when members of oppressed communities are able to tell their stories, they can challenge norms and speak directly to the social, economic, and political forces that marginalize them (janesick, 2010). their knowledge is based on everyday experience, granting them authority as storytellers and critical knowledge-producers. in this article, i explore the challenges of storytelling and social justice as an activist and scholar. i focus on three contexts where justice and injustice interplay in lgbt refugee storytelling: the canadian irb, public advocacy around anti-queer violence and refugee rights, and oral history research. in each arena, i explore how storytelling can be a powerful tool of justice for lgbt refugees that validates their truths and brings their voices to the forefront in confronting state and public violence. i investigate how these arenas can also inflict their own injustices on lgbt refugees by silencing their voices and reproducing power hierarchies. at the forefront of my exploration are questions around voice, representation, and ownership of lgbt refugees’ stories. justice and injustice: working with lgbt refugee stories as a volunteer and activist i remember the judge [irb member] at my hearing. i felt connected to her. i felt that i was speaking to a human being, to an authority figure that has a very sound understanding of a single soul individualized in many complex forms. our bodies were connected. i felt that i was speaking to her heart. i spoke my truth, my heart’s truth, to her. (interview with jordan, july 2013) “i  thought  we  had  no  rights”   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 105 the excerpt above comes from an interview i conducted with a gay refugee from south asia who is an active volunteer for rainbow refugee and has shared his story publically several times. his description of the hearing expresses the powerful and intense feelings many lgbt refugees experience in sharing their stories with the irb.4 for many of these individuals who have been oppressed and silenced in their home country, telling their story to a representative of the canadian state and having their story taken as credible and valid is a source of personal justice.5 at the same time, the refugee board hearing can also serve as a place of silencing and injustice. claimants are under intense scrutiny by irb members for credibility and proof of legitimate fear. in this atmosphere, refugees face significant pressure to tell their story that is intelligible and compelling. consequently, as david murray contends, lgbt refugees’ stories are often forced into particular scripts that reproduce ethnocentric ideas around gender and sexuality, as well as support ongoing colonial structures of power (murray, 2014; morrissey & jordan, 2013; fobear, 2014). in order to make a refugee claim in canada, claimants must write a detailed story about their lives and the reasons they fear returning to their countries of origin. these stories are submitted as their basis of claim and used as primary evidence for their refugee hearing. in preparing for their hearing, claimants must gather evidence that proves their identity and supports their story. evidence may include birth records, hospital records, and police reports, as well as letters and photographs from family or friends corroborating a person’s story. these documents are reviewed by the deciding irb member prior to the refugee hearing. at the hearing, which can last up to eight hours, the claimants are asked a series of questions regarding the evidence presented and why they are seeking refugee protection. during this stressful ordeal, claimants are under intense scrutiny for any inconsistencies in their stories. a mixed-up date or inconsistent telling of an event may be sufficient for a case to be rejected as not credible. the fate of claimants is in the hands of the irb, which does not have to ask critical questions of itself regarding its regulation of refugees’ bodies; nor are members held directly accountable for their decision-making or their actions during the hearing (colaiacovo, 2013). refugees do have the opportunity to appeal a negative decision to the immigration appeals court, but the success rate is very low (heller, 2009; morgan, 2006; jordan, 2009; laviolette, 2009, p. 438; miller, 2005; murray, 2014; fobear, 2014; shari & ou jin lee, 2011). refugees may not lodge an                                                                                                                 4 the immigration refugee board (irb) is an independent administrative tribunal that is responsible for making decisions on immigration and refugee matters in canada. irb members, who are public servants nominated into the position by the irb, are given the authority to determine a claimant’s eligibility for convention refugee status (immigration and refugee board of canada). 5 in 1991, canada became the first western nation to grant refugee status on the basis of sexual orientation. since 1991, canada has had the world’s highest acceptance rate for asylum based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and hiv/aids status (fobear, 2014, p. 52). katherine fobear studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 106 official complaint directly against irb members’ actions. sharing intimate stories with strangers and state officials can be difficult and traumatizing for refugees (hopkins, 2009; cabot, 2014; lacroix, 2006). for lgbt refugees, there is the added fear and shame of talking openly about their sexuality and/or gender identity (jordan, 2010). moreover, they must tell their story under a hostile political and social environment in mainstream canada that frames a large majority of incoming refugee claimants as ‘queue jumpers’, ‘bogus,’ and a threat to canadian society (hari, 2014; diop, 2014; jantzi, 2014). there is ever-present fear of being misheard, or perceived as not being consistent or credible. this is a serious risk, often due to cultural differences in storytelling and because of the irb members’ own biases or stereotypes regarding gender and sexuality (murray, 2014; jordan, 2010; laviolette, 2014). claimants also run the risk of being rejected if they do not appear to be gay or trans* enough (lewis, 2010; murray, 2014; shuman, 2014; bieksa, 2011). as queer scholars have argued, there is a wide variation with regard to sexuality and gender that is often culturally, socially, and location-specific (walks, 2014; boellstorff, 2007; gorman-murray, 2009; luibheid, 2008; manalansan, 2003; knopp & brown, 2003; altman, 1997; binnie, 2004; chao, 2000; oswin, 2006; valdes, 1998). these differences are often not taken into account at refugee hearings. lgbt refugees frequently have to act as cultural translators around sexuality and gender to the irb, especially because western sexual or gender identity categories and lifestyles do not easily or exactly translate across cultural differences (oswin, 2006). the hearing can be validating experiences (as in the case of jordan), where irb members take into account claimants’ particular circumstances and work with them to make sure they are comfortable telling their story. however, i have also witnessed several instances where claimants were not accepted as being homosexual by the deciding irb member because they did not look ‘gay’, did not have a relationship with a person of the same sex, or did not feel comfortable talking about their sexuality. the deciding irb member disregarded the cultural and socio-political context in which these claimants lived, failing to take into account the internalized homophobia that comes from living every day in fear of being discovered as a sexual minority by strangers, loved ones, and state officials. for many, this fear of discovery not only causes shame and trauma that makes it very difficult to talk about sex and sexual preference, but also limits opportunities to find same-sex partners. my primary concern as a volunteer is to make sure that lgbt refugees are prepared as much as possible for their hearing, which means helping them tell their stories to potentially biased irb members. together, we talk about their experiences in their home country and the fears they have if forced to return. i answer questions about the hearing process and specific concerns they have about their case. when we identify parts of their story where an irb member may request more clarification, i work with the claimants in explaining their story in a clear and straightforward manner. we talk about their everyday social reality as persons who are gender nonconforming or attracted to “i  thought  we  had  no  rights”   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 107 members of the same sex. in this process, the claimants can feel a sense of relief in being able to tell their story to an outsider, gaining confidence in their case by taking charge of how they want to share their experiences to the irb. it is through this work that i assist lgbt refugee claimants maintain the integrity and truth of their stories. i make an effort to instill confidence in them that their stories matter and deserve to be listened to by the irb. during the period that refugees are undergoing the asylum process, getting through the hearing and receiving a positive decision is the most important goal in maintaining their safety and freedom from persecution. claimants learn quickly, however, that the refugee process is just one in a series of obstacles that must be overcome to have a safe and comfortable life in canada. economic, political, and social inequalities remain long after refugee claimants have been accepted as convention refugees6 into the country. as much as canada offers a place of protection, freedom, and relative acceptance for lgbt refugees, it can also be a place of discrimination and isolation. after moving to the country, refugees often continue to experience racial and ethnic discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, and income inequality. these forms of marginalization hinder access to adequate housing, medical care, education, and employment, which refugees must work through as they build a home for themselves in canada (brotman & lee, 2011). being able to publically address these inequalities through the telling of their stories to a wider canadian audience can be one source of social justice for lgbt refugees. yet, as i describe in the next section, public advocacy comes with its own forms of justice and injustice. telling your story as an act of social justice: working with lgbt refugees’ storytellers in public advocacy being able to talk about my experience as a transwoman and as a refugee was such a great experience. i was so nervous standing up there on the stage. there were many people from immigration organizations and even people from my home country. but, i just kept reminding myself that these people are there to listen to you. i told them the difficulties i experienced as a transwoman in my country. i am still with difficulties here as a transgender refugee in canada. it felt like a big achievement for me to go out there as a woman and talk. a year ago, before i got my refugee, i never would have been able to do this. i gained more confidence in myself as a woman and a refugee. (interview with tiffany, january 2015) over the past ten years, immigration and asylum in canada have gone through a dramatic overhaul. what once was a system that actively                                                                                                                 6 ‘convention refugee’ is the official term for individuals who have been accepted as refugees and are given asylum in canada and in other countries. the definition comes from 1967 united nations protocol to the 1951 refugee convention (united nations high commission for refugees, 2010, p. 15-16). katherine fobear studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 108 encouraged immigration has transformed into a system that limits immigration to individuals of wealth and privilege (root, gates-gasse, shields, & bauder, 2014; abu-laban, 1998). of particular concern, visa restrictions for countries outside of the united states and western europe prevent many individuals from legally entering canada. without a visa, refugees may be arbitrarily detained for several months in county jails and prisons throughout the country (silverman, 2014). moreover, the canadian border services are under increasing pressure by the federal government to deport failed refugee claimants and undocumented migrants (silverman, 2014). in order to prevent ‘bogus’ and fraudulent refugee claims, canadian citizenship and immigration shortened the refugee process from one year to three months (diop, 2014; hari, 2014; vinokur, 2015). the short processing time creates significant stress for refugee claimants and their service providers, limiting the time available to meet with lawyers and other support personnel to help prepare for hearings. the shortened time period also creates obstacles to collecting important evidence, such as medical documents or police reports. in addition to these immigration constraints, funding for instate refugee health care and services was cut across canada in 2012 (marwah, 2014; warmington & lin, 2014). as a result, refugees are no longer able to access provincial medical service plans and must pay out-ofpocket for most of their medical services (hari, 2014; ratkovic, 2013; dawson, 2014).7 in the current conservative immigration climate, refugees and undocumented persons have emerged as powerful public advocates in canada (nyers, 2010). peter nyers writes that one of the key ways that undocumented persons and refugees have asserted their autonomy as political actors is by reclaiming the discourse that defines their existence (2006). refugees have worked to challenge negative labels of their asylum claims being bogus through sharing their stories publically (nyers, 2010). they have made a significant contribution to challenging public perceptions around gender, sexuality, and asylum by speaking in a variety of forums, ranging from vancouver city councils to the office of citizenship and immigration, from public rallies to talking with the media (the early edition, 2015; logan, 2014). it is through telling their stories that audiences see the complexity of lgbt refugees’ lives. social justice cannot happen with just one voice; it takes a cacophony of different voices engaging with each other in respectful dialogue to make a difference. as a volunteer and activist for rainbow refugee, i work with our lgbt refugee members to share their stories with a wider public audience in order to raise awareness about the issue and to situate their voices in the center of                                                                                                                 7 under the new refugee health care plan, in-state refugees receive restricted federal health coverage across canada that includes basic emergency care and treatment for illnesses that are a risk to public health (for example, hiv/aids, tuberculosis, and malaria). thus, illnesses that are not considered a public threat are not covered under the in-state refugee health plan, nor are hormone replacement, anti-anxiety, and anti-depression medications (marwah, 2014). “i  thought  we  had  no  rights”   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 109 social and policy discussions around immigration and inequality. my work involves advocating and creating opportunities for lgbt refugees to be speakers and contributors at workshops, panels, and events on asylum, immigration, homophobia, and transphobia. as a volunteer for rainbow refugee, i am not permitted to share the stories we hear from the lgbt refugees we work with unless they give explicit permission. when our members want to share their stories and participate in public actions, i connect them with organizers, policy makers, and journalists, with whom i then work to help develop a respectful mode of engagement. although several of our members have experienced a sense of justice in being able to use their stories to advocate for others, thereby providing a critical voice against hierarchy and oppression, this is not always the case. similar to the ways in which lgbt refugees’ stories can be confined to certain western and colonial scripts in the refugee hearing process, they can also be used to dismiss ongoing violence against queer individuals within canada. with the recent rise in anti-homosexual legislation in places like india, russia, uganda, and nigeria, as well as the increasing attention being paid to the persecution of sexual and gender minorities in parts of the middle east and elsewhere in africa, lgbt refugees are often invited to be interviewed by newspapers and attend public speaking events around homophobia and transphobia in a global context. however, focusing only on lgbt refugees’ experience and knowledge of anti-queer violence outside of canada ignores the violence that many marginalized communities face inside the country. as i have argued elsewhere (fobear, 2014, p. 53; see also razack, 1996; jenicek & wong, 2009): this is not to suggest that persecution against sexual and gender minorities in other countries is not a serious issue. the difficulty arises though when lgbt refugees’ search for freedom from homophobic and transphobic persecution in their countries of origin becomes the only element of their story addressed in the canadian public sphere. in other words, instead of focusing only on where lgbt refugees come from, it is important to create spaces that allow them to talk about their experiences living in canada and to connect these lived realities to larger discussions around social justice for migrant, racialized, and indigenous lgbt persons (haig-brown, 2011). as ann cunliffe and geetha karunanayake argue, social justice organizing needs to link local and global movements together in dialogue (2013). racialized, immigrant, and indigenous lgbt and two-spirit persons face significantly more violence in canada than their white citizen counterparts (lamble, 2008; harper, jernewall & zea, 2004; giwa & greensmith, 2012). 8 this violence is historically situated in the context of canada as a white settler colonial state                                                                                                                 8 ‘two-spirit’ is a spiritual and cultural term used by first nations and native americans to describe individuals who have both male and female spirits within them (driskill, 2010). katherine fobear studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 110 that has worked to remove indigenous communities’ sovereignty and restrict immigration on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and class (haig-brown, 2011; fobear, 2014). connecting the dwindling social support for refugees and stricter asylum processes to the historic and ongoing marginalization of indigenous and racialized persons in canada is an important step toward dismantling larger structures of power and toward challenging political, economic, and social injustice. yet, state funding and institutional support to create spaces for dialogue and community engagement is scarce. as a person who has one foot in academia and one foot in community activism, i try to use my hyphenated position of activist and scholar to circumvent institutional barriers to funding and support for community-based initiatives. social justice in research: working with lgbt refugee stories as an oral historian devran: coming here, leaving everything behind, coming here making a refugee claim and then facing all the isolation, stress, and fear…well difficult is not enough to explain it. katherine: i can only imagine. devran: no, you can’t. you can’t imagine what it is like. that’s okay. but, you can’t understand what it is like. (interview with devran, june 2013) oral history has become popular as a way for refugees’ histories and experiences to be preserved and critically explored. it is a methodology that is accessible to both academic and non-academic persons, as it requires relatively little equipment and expertise. oral history has the potential to connect communities together in order to preserve their stories and provide counter-narratives to mainstream historical knowledge. it is because of its radical potential to bring forward alternative or nuanced versions of history and social life that many feminist, anti-oppression, indigenous, and civil rights scholars and activists have taken up oral history as both a methodology to record voices of the oppressed and marginalized, and also as a political means to insert these voices into popular historical consciousness, to challenge oppressive systems, and to promote radical change (abrams, 2010; brown, 2006; frisch, 1990; jessee, 2011; yow, 1995; aql, 1995). over the past 20 years, oral historians have turned a self-reflexive and critical lens on their own research practice, examining how – in addition to challenging power relations and inequalities through participatory knowledge-building (abrams, 2010) – oral history research can also reproduce inequalities between oral historians and participants. building from the work of feminist, postcolonial, queer, and critical race theories, oral historians are challenging positive assumptions about the objectivity and neutrality of oral history (abrams, 2010; gluck, 2008; bornat & diamon, 2007; yow, 1995; plummer, 1994; ramirez & boyd, 2012; armitage & gluck, 1998; best, 2003; jessee, 2011; day, 2009). oral historians have come “i  thought  we  had  no  rights”   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 111 to recognize that they are not neutral listeners, but rather come into interviews with their own biases, sympathies, assumptions, and positionalities (abrams, 2010; gluck, 2008; reay, 1996), which may lead them to treat refugees and their narratives insensitively or use them exploitatively (horsley, 2007; jessee, 2011; mackenzie, mcdowell, & pittaway, 2007; nygreen, 2006; rosinska, 2011), particularly in a context where researchers occupy multiple positions of privilege vis-à-vis the latter, especially in terms of citizenship status, education, and employment (nygreen, 2006). the relationships oral historians have with the communities they work with are multiple and constantly changing (gluck, 2008). oral historians must be reflexive regarding how their presence affects their participants, and the lasting impact of their research (nygreen, 2006; cunliffe & karunanayake, 2013; wagle & cantaffa, 2008). as an oral historian recording the life histories of lgbt refugees, it is difficult to separate my roles of activist and scholar. most of the persons i interviewed know me in my role as a volunteer and activist for rainbow refugee. in many ways, i “work the hyphen” (fine, 1994, p. 70) by not separating these positions; instead, i use them as a bridge between the lgbt refugees i work with and myself. as much as my activism, volunteerism, and research affects the people i work with, their stories, actions, and authority affect me and influence my outlook on the world. indeed, the borders between researchers and participants can be blurred (but not erased) as we work to understand each other (chatterton, fuller & routledge, 2007). it is a dialectical relationship that requires a commitment to discussion and shared authority over both research and praxis. for me, this has meant using my position in academia and rainbow refugee to hold public events where lgbt refugees can speak directly with the public and people in positions of power, to work with other service providers on housing and employment for lgbt refugees, and to disseminate articles that are both academic and publicly accessible. conclusion: lgbt refugees, storytelling, activism… and the academy all of the storytelling initiatives i’m involved with take time and require effort that are not generally supported by academia, in part because, as charles r. hale writes, activist research in academic institutions is understood as controversial (2008). the intense and competitive economic atmosphere of higher education has meant that academics must sacrifice valuable time and energy with local communities in order to produce a high quantity of academic work and be eligible for research grants (downs & manion, 2004; maxey, 1999; autonomous geographers collective, 2010; askins, 2009). moreover, state and private sector funders discourage activist work that disrupts hierarchical power structures and “police activist scholarship when it approaches issues those in power would prefer to leave unexamined” (greenwood, 2008, p. 335). academic institutions also sometimes do not recognize work outside of the limited confines of peerkatherine fobear studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 112 reviewed articles, books, dissertations, and conference presentations. until academia as a whole recognizes and values different forms of knowledge production as a necessary means for social justice, there will always remain the danger of an unproductive separation and relationship of inaccessibility between researchers and the communities with which they work (hale, 2008; frey, 1998; lorenzetti, 2013; burnett, 2003). despite these limitations, i have sought alternative avenues outside of academia to disseminate the knowledge given to me by my participants. art has been one mechanism for me to ‘work the hyphen’ between activist and scholar. i was granted funding to support collaboration between local queer artists and lgbt refugees in vancouver, in order to create “the painted stories project”,9 a series of leadership and painting workshops for, and led by, lgbt refugees. the workshops provided refugees with a vehicle to share their stories through painting and digital media (barsotti, 2014); they created a mural that was publicly displayed in the 2014 queer arts festival in vancouver, and produced a documentary that is available on youtube (seeking protection is not a crime, 2014). lgbt refugee activists later used the finished mural and documentary as an advocacy tool at several public events. as these examples illustrate, art can provide meaningful ways of engaging with lived experiences that can affect us deeper than through written text alone. this process is ongoing and will continue after my current research is ‘officially’ over. it is through my continuing engagement with refugees’ stories that i challenge myself to go beyond the limitations of power relations and seek new areas of creativity and dialogue for social justice. acknowledgements i would like to thank the editors and reviewers for helping me to develop this article. without their guidance and patience this article would not have come to fruition. thank you to the volunteers and members of rainbow refugee for helping me to learn and grow as an activist and academic. i will always be learning from them. i would also like to thank brandon cirillo and edward chinevere for their much-appreciated copy-editing work. references abrams, l. 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(2014). refugee health care cuts in canada: system level costs, risks and responses. toronto: wellesley institute. maxey, i. (1999). beyond boundaries? activism, academia, reflexivity and research. area, 31(3), 199-208. miller, a. (2005). gay enough: some tensions in seeking the grant of asylum and protecting global sexual diversity. in c. epps, k. valens, & j. gonzalez (eds.), passing lines: sexuality and immigration (pp. 137-188). cambridge, ma: harvard university press. morgan, d. (2006). not gay enough for the government: racial and sexual stereotypes in sexual orientation asylum cases. law and sexuality, 15, 135-160. morrissey, c., & jordan, s. (2013). “on what grounds?” lgbt asylum claims in canada. forced migration review, 42, 13-15. mule, n., & gates-gasse, e. (2012). envisioning lgbt refugee rights in canada: exploring asylum issues. toronto: york university. murray, d. (2014). real queer: “authentic” lgbt refugee claimants and homonationalism in the canadian refugee system. anthropologica, 56(1), 21-32. naples, n. (2009). crossing borders: community activism, globalization, and social justice. social problems, 56(1), 2-20. north, n. (1995). narratives of cambodian refugees: issues in the collection of refugee stories. oral history, 23(2), 32-39. north, c. (2006). more than words? delving into the substantive meaning(s) of “social justice” in education. review of educational research, 76(4), 507-535. nyers, p. (2006). rethinking refugees: beyond states of emergency. new york: routledge. nyers, p. (2010). no one is illegal between city and nation. studies in social justice, 4(2), 127143. nygreen, k. (2006). reproducing or challenging power in the questions we ask and the methods we use: a framework for activist research in urban education. the urban review, 38(1), 126. oswin, n. (2006). decentering queer globalization: diffusion and the ‘global gay’. environment and planning d: society and space, 24, 777-790. phelan, s. (2001). queer politics, queer theories, sexual strangers: gays, lesbians and dilemmas katherine fobear studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 116 of citizenship. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. plummer, k. (1994). telling sexual stories: power, change and social worlds. new york: taylor & francis. ramirez, h., & boyd, n. (2012). introduction: close encounters. the body and knowledge in queer oral history. in h. ramirez & n. boyd (eds.), bodies of evidence: the practice of queer oral history (pp. 1-19). new york: oxford. ratkovic, s. (2013). the location of refugee female teachers in the canadian context: “not just a refugee woman!” refuge, 29(1),103-114. razack, s. 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(2010). convention and protocol relating to the status of refugees. united nations high commission for refugees. retrieved from http://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.html valdes, f. (1998). beyond sexual orientation in queer legal theory: majoritarianism, multidimensionality, and responsibility in social justice scholarship or legal scholars as cultural warriors. denver university law review, 75(4), 1409-1464. valocchi, s. (2005). not yet queer enough: the lessons of queer theory for the sociology of gender and sexuality. gender and society, 19(6), 750-770. vinokur, d. (2015). institutional independence and bias in the context of the immigration and refugee board of canada. canadian journal of administrative law & practice, 28(2), 169-201. wagle, t., & cantaffa, d. (2008). working our hyphens: exploring identity relations in qualitative research. qualitative inquiry, 14(1), 135-159. walks, m. (2014). we’re here and we’re queer!: an introduction to studies in queer anthropology. anthropologica, 56(1), 13-20. warmington, r., & lin, d. (2014). healthcare is political: case example of physician advocacy in response to the cuts to refugees’ and claimants’ healthcare coverage under the interim federal health program. university of ottawa journal of medicine, 4(1), 45-48. westbrook, l., & schilt, k. (2014). doing gender, determining gender: transgender people, gender panics, and the maintenance of the sex/gender/sexuality systems. gender & society, 28(1), 32-57. “i  thought  we  had  no  rights”   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 102-117, 2015 117 wong, a. (2009). conversations for the real world: shared authority, self-reflexivity, and process in the oral history interview. journal of canadian studies, 43(1), 239-258. yow, v. (1995). ethics and interpersonal relationships in oral history research. oral history review, 22(1), 51-66. kelly final feb 7 16 correspondence address: erica kelly, lambton college, 1457 london road, sarnia, on, n7s 6k4; email: erica.kelly@lambtoncollege.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 174-177, 2017 book review the fifth element: social justice pedagogy through spoken word poetry endsley, crystal leigh. (2016). albany, ny: suny press. isbn 9781438459851 (cloth) us$75.00; isbn 9781438459868 (paper) us$20.95. 184 pages erica kelly lambton college, canada crystal leigh endsley’s the fifth element: social justice pedagogy through spoken word poetry (2016) explores the potential of spoken word poetry to build relationships and to initiate change. endsley employs “fictionalized autoethnography” (p. 137), weaving together recollections of her experiences with a collective of spoken word artists, creative writing (both her own and students’), and personal critical reflections and theoretical interpretations of the art they created together. the goal is to produce a text that is intentionally disruptive and to argue that “spoken word poetry can be a powerful agent of change” (p. 66). she draws on the work of bell hooks and many others to theorize the connections between activism and art. endsley’s work often slips out of easy definitions, circling back and building throughout, a style that is clearly part of her strategy (and as is fitting for a book in suny press’s praxis: theory in action series). early on, she traces spoken word’s debt to hip hop, its “rowdy ‘cousin’” (p. xvii), and explains that her title comes from this realm: the fifth element is understood within the hip hop community as “knowledge of self” (p. xvii), and in both hip hop and spoken word, self-knowledge is a central “social responsibility” (p. xvii) for poet and for audience. both hip hop and spoken word poetry, endsley maintains, create communal “spaces for the creative and energetic pursuit of social justice” (p. xviii). spoken word performance can increase self-knowledge in both poet and audience, a process that ideally leads to challenge and growth, both individual and collective. book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 174-177, 2017 175 collective energy is the case study at the heart of this book. a group of nine spoken word artists at penn state university, collective energy was born through a “need felt on campus by students of all colors to have a venue for creative expression in relationship to their pressing cultural, historical, and social issues” (p. 139). the group held weekly meetings to workshop and rehearse, and its members performed together at venues on campus, and later, internationally. endsley is both a member of the group and its leader (a role she complicates throughout), and she records the group’s weekly meetings as well as culminating interviews with each of its members. she builds her analysis on these experiences, incorporating both poetry and interviews from members of collective energy. she also recounts details from several of their performances, and the active role of an audience in performance poetry is central to endsley’s argument. in her description of the interaction between the poet and the audience, the book’s relevance to pedagogy becomes clear. much like the teaching experience, performance poetry is a “process focused on relationships rather than a final product” (p. 38). she frames performance poetry as “an invitation” (p. 92) to reimagine reality; the audience’s responsibility is to “co-construct” (p. 116) meaning during the process of performance. but what happens when the audience fails? one of the most interesting tensions of the book surfaces when endsley describes the confrontation that occurs between two groups of students. besides her work with collective energy, endsley taught a literacy methods class to a group of pre-service teachers at penn state. she relates that, as the “only identified person of color” (p. 61) in that literacy class, she often felt placed in the role of spokesperson for otherness. she invited the literacy students to attend one of the spoken word performances for extra credit. these literacy students hadn’t attended spoken word performances before “because they did not think the programs applied to them personally… since they were the majority on campus” (p. 62). their reactions in the performance’s aftermath make for some of the most interesting moments of the book. endsley explains that part of the challenge is the genre, which upends some of the conventions of audience: the literacy students weren’t treated as passive recipients of entertainment but were instead implicated and held responsible, spoken to and called on directly. the veil of fiction they’d expected had been removed. but the content, too, troubled the students: because the goal of these performances is to challenge privilege and to involve the audience directly, friction surfaces between audience and poet. the performances mark a struggle for territory, threatening the stability of a privileged audience (p. 61). many of endsley’s literacy students perceived this confrontation as hate (p. 62), and they were angry at having been made to feel uncomfortable through both the style and the content of the performance. of course, the angry reactions that endsley fielded in the days following the performance are testimony of the students’ learning: the “power was shifting” for the audience (p. 64), which was uncomfortable and upsetting, erica kelly studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 174-177, 2017 176 and also vital. part of the goal of performance poetry is to spotlight the “friction between discourses” (p. 132), and staging such confrontation is challenging for all involved. endsley briefly recounts her strategies for follow-up with these students, but this story of discomfort could have been developed into an even fuller consideration of audience: performance poetry attempts to open up new spaces of possibility for audience members to step into, but what happens when the audience refuses the invitation to responsibility? this brief window into a frustrating experience could also have opened up a reflection on what happens when the performance itself fails. spoken word poetry is tied directly to activism here. endsley argues that, because performance poetry showcases the gaps between the real and the imagined (p. 107), it’s a revolutionary medium. the performer is positioned as teacher, enacting “a political critique of injustice” (p. 116) for the audience as student. while endsley admits that “no singular outcome can be guaranteed” (p. 5), the implication seems to be that the performance is always productive. spoken word challenges audiences by bringing into the spotlight the power relations that are intentionally veiled. it’s dangerous, and for these same reasons, endsley argues, it’s productive and it’s essential. some of the book’s discussions, however, remain unfinished, perhaps in part because it’s the process of the poetry instead of the content that is endsley’s focus. when some of the collective energy members resist the attempt to label their poetry as activist or political, one of the group’s mentors insists that “everything is social justice” (p. 89). while a definitive answer isn’t possible here, the equation of performance poetry with activism could be interrogated more thoroughly, and endsley could more fully explore complex terms like “social justice.” endsley argues throughout for the potential of spoken word performance to create space for powerful societal change, and her argument is convincing. her pedagogical circumstances, however, are quite specific: she's teaching to a "hand chosen" (p. 41) group of promising artists who have self-identified as being interested in social justice, student artists who are now volunteering their time in the interest of growth and collaboration. the group's foundational contract cited maulana karenga's theories on the responsibilities of socially-committed art. and while the members of collective energy sometimes questioned the applicability of labels like "activist" and "political" to their performances, it’s clear that all members were interested in exploring such possibilities. few of us enjoy such circumstances; because i often find myself teaching reluctant learners, i was skeptical that endsley's reflections would resonate with my own teaching experiences. this book is useful for understanding spoken word as a form of activism, but is it useful as a pedagogical tool to those of us who don’t teach performance arts? is it useful for those of us whose students aren’t committed to activism on the way in? endsley’s honest reflections on the process of learning, both students’ and her own, make her book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 174-177, 2017 177 work relevant to those outside of her specific field. in her work with collective energy, she learns about engaging and connecting diverse points of view and teaching students to do the same; respectful and generous listening and thoughtful response are shared goals for most teachers interested in social justice pedagogy, and endsley self-reflectively explores her process of attempting to instill these practices in her teaching. at its heart, endsley’s mission seems to be teaching students about speaking and listening. she focuses on building a relationship – a solidarity that “values difference” (p. 112) – between performer and audience, but it’s clearly one that can be created between any willing speaker and listener. endsley states that this is not a “handbook that will end with clear outlines for best practices” (p. 96) but an honest exploration of a lived experience. in its deliberate confounding of easy categorization, the book itself is a form of activism. performance poetry is meant to throw audiences off balance, and the book employs a similar strategy; the text “demands the coperformance of the reader” and “challenges traditional boundaries” (p. 138). in its mix of academic and personal, creative and analytic, this is a challenging and destabilizing text; it’s also rewarding and affirming. endsley demonstrates that a shared space of productive dialogue – whether a stage or a classroom – can create at least the “courage to act against and reimagine the things that bound us” (p. 57). rouillard et al final galley mar 7 16 correspondence address: dalie giroux, school of political studies, university of ottawa, ottawa, on, canada, k1n 6n5; email: dalie.giroux@uottawa.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 between the managerial and the democratic university: governance structure and academic freedom as sites of political struggle dalie giroux university of ottawa, canada dimitrios karmis university of ottawa, canada christian rouillard university of ottawa, canada abstract in this article we argue that the university cannot fully contribute to democratic life without being both an institution whose governance is collegial and based on principles of equality, equity, inclusion, transparency, and accountability, and a vector of critical thinking closely linked to academic freedom. based on this understanding of the ‘democratic university,’ we seek to highlight some of the key tensions between the ‘managerial university’ and the democratic university, as reflected in institutional structures, regulations, legal frameworks, and principles. in order to achieve this objective, we identify two sites of political struggles from which it is possible to examine the interaction between a managerial and a democratic conception and practice of the university. the first of these sites is the bicameral governing structure, membership, rules, and regulations of the university of ottawa. the second site is academic freedom in canada, which we will discuss by comparing the canadian association of university teachers’ (caut) statement on academic freedom (caut, 2011) with the association of universities and colleges of canada’s (aucc) statement on academic freedom (aucc, 2011). by stressing the necessary link and positive relationship between democratic governance and academic freedom, the article offers a normative evaluation of the impact the managerial reengineering of canadian universities has had on the possibility and practice of a more democratic university. keywords university governance; academic freedom; managerialism; democratic university between the managerial and the democratic university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 143 over the past ten years, contemporary universities have gone through major conflicts, including the strike initiated by teaching and research assistants at new york university in 2005-2006, the student strike of vienna in 2009, the opposition movement against the loi relative aux libertés et responsabilités des universités (lru) in france in 2009, and the student strike in quebec in 2012. each of these protests has advanced simultaneously a critique of the ‘neoliberal university’ and the claim for a ‘democratic university.’ corporatization is at the heart of the neoliberal conception of the university, which has become dominant since the 1990s (chan & fisher, 2008; côté & allahar, 2011; côté, day & de peuter, 2007; ginsberg, 2011; giroux & karmis, 2015; mills, 2012; readings, 1996; turk, 2000). managerialism – here understood as the ideological proposition that articulates practices of corporatization (rouillard, 2003) – would have universities reproducing practices and cultures found in the corporate world. these include, as examples, the centralization of decision-making, the hierarchical professionalization of administrative positions and relations (including those typically held by professors; see ginsburg, 2011), an organizational culture of secrecy, and superficial consultations with faculty, staff, and students about the direction of the university. managerialism also comes with a strong focus on international growth and rankings, an increased reliance on private funding, massive investments in advertising campaigns, and the use of normative markers such as “excellence” (readings, 1996, pp. 21-43) and “best practices” (ginsburg, 2011, p. 12; bissonnette & porter, 2013, p. 27) to describe goals and the means to achieve them. consequently, a rift has widened within the university between senior management on the one side, and ‘employees’ and ‘clients’ on the other. in this article we argue that the university cannot contribute effectively to democratic life without being both an institution whose governance is collegial and based on principles of equality, equity, inclusion, transparency, and accountability (i.e., democratic governance), and a vector of critical thinking closely linked to academic freedom. based on this understanding of the democratic university, and rooted in critical managerial studies (cms) (hudon & rouillard, 2015), this article seeks to highlight some of the key tensions between the ‘managerial university’ and the democratic university, as reflected in institutional structures, regulations, legal frameworks, and principles. it offers a normative evaluation of the impact the managerial reengineering of canadian universities has had on the possibility and practice of a more democratic university. in order to achieve this objective, we identify two sites of political struggle from which it is possible to examine the interaction between a managerial and a democratic conception and practice of the university. the first of these sites is the bicameral governing structure, membership, rules, and regulations of the university of ottawa, focusing on the limited and circumscribed presence of professors and students, as well as the strong presence of administrative (internal) and corporate (external) representatives on both the board of dalie giroux, dimitrios karmis, christian rouillard studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 144 governors and the senate. based on this case, we argue that the managerial turn of the university has been made possible in part by top-down methods of appointment that make these two key decision-making bodies highly unrepresentative. the lopsided character of these bodies enables the rise of authoritarian governance in universities, and therefore represents a serious challenge to the influence of collegial governance. the second site of political struggle between the managerial and democratic modes of university governance we wish to examine is academic freedom. we do this by comparing the canadian association of university teachers’ statement on academic freedom (caut, 2011) with the association of universities and colleges of canada’s statement on academic freedom (aucc, 2011).1 the two statements differ significantly in their perspectives, reflecting a serious gap between how a confederation of faculty associations and the body representing university administrations view academic freedom. we exemplify some of these differences briefly with recent canadian cases that raise questions about university management’s treatment of academic freedom. we argue that academic freedom is a central component of a democratic university and explain how it is threatened by managerialism. we explain how asymmetrical bicameralism, in the context of managerialism, fosters the stranglehold of financial management over academic administration, further marginalizing professors, students and support staff, as well as posing a growing threat to democratic and collegial governance. none of these developments is unavoidable or unstoppable, as a university’s central decision-making bodies, namely its board of governors and senate, are the locus of ideological tensions and political struggles, both within and amongst themselves. before investigating our specific cases, we turn to a brief description of the managerial turn in university governance. the university and the managerial turn in recent years, universities in ontario, as well as elsewhere in canada and around the world, have called into question not only their modes of operation, but also their mission and raison d’être. this questioning has taken shape within a socio-political context of fiscal austerity and is articulated through the prism of public spending reduction under the guise of innovation, performance, and efficiency. over the past 25 years, ontario universities have seen a significant reduction in public funding,2 which has necessitated alternative sources of revenues in order to maintain and strengthen current levels of teaching and research. these revenues have come primarily in the 1 aucc changed its name to universities canada on april 22, 2015. 2 according to the ontario confederation of university faculty associations (ocufa, 2015), after the 2015 ontario budget per-student university funding in ontario reached its lowest level since the 1960s. see heqco (2015, 6) for the evolution of government grants as a share of operating fund revenue for ontarian universities, from 1970-71 to today. between the managerial and the democratic university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 145 form of private funding, such as tuition fees, philanthropy, and corporate donations (council of ontario universities, 2012). despite reductions in public funding, universities are required to fulfill ever-expanding responsibilities, as outlined in the multi-annual agreements initiated by the government of ontario in 2006. similar to the core public sector in many industrialized countries during the 1980s (pollitt & bouckaert, 2011), universities fell under the influence of managerialism during the late 1990s. managerialism is first and foremost an ideological movement: a set of beliefs, preferences, attitudes, actions, and values, articulating the idea that individual relations, issues, and resources of all kinds need to be properly managed in order to achieve the optimal output (enteman, 1993; exworthy & halford, 1999; rouillard & giroux, 2005). within managerialism, communities, citizens, and in the case of universities, students, have all become clients whose specific needs and desires need to be shaped and managed by a cast of ‘experts.’ increasingly, these experts are permanent career managers, not faculty holding a temporary administrative position. performance management and measurement are at the forefront of managerial organizations. importantly, managerialism’s emphasis on quantitative goals and results (i.e., output), understood in this context as an accountability mechanism, can only come at the expense of procedural fairness, and transparency, whose qualitative nature excludes them from being quantified. the ‘managerialization’ of universities, which continues unabated in ontario, is reflected in the proliferation of planning, control, measurement, and evaluation activities,3 occasionally combined with more or less credible consultation processes. paradoxically, however, this managerial process marginalizes the role of teaching and research in the daily lives of those who actually give life to the university, namely fulland part-time professors. the ‘community service’ component of faculty members’ jobs, which occupies an increasing part of their typical workload, seems to have less and less to do with any community per se, and more and more to do with control, measurement, and evaluation tasks and responsibilities. at the centre of the canadian managerial university are its main decisionmaking bodies, the senate and board of governors. in the following section we examine the context of appointments to these bodies at the university of ottawa, to show how it enables the rise of managerialism in academia. 3 as an illustration amongst many others, a 2011 report from the council of ontario universities (cou), innovative ideas – improving efficiency at ontario universities, has proposed five managerial actions to increase efficiency in ontario universities: (1) streamlining operational processes, (2) innovation and partnerships, (3) managing facilities efficiently, (4) making smart purchasing decisions and (5) planning for safety (council of ontario universities, 2011). dalie giroux, dimitrios karmis, christian rouillard studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 146 the university of ottawa’s bicameralism: a sober second look at the board of governors and senate founded in 1848 under the name college of bytown, the university of ottawa as it exists today was created through an act established by the ontario government in 1965. this organic law,4 the 1965 university of ottawa act (government of ontario, 1965), established the institution’s bicameral governance structure and set out its functional division of responsibilities and separation of powers between the board of governors (financial and budgetary function) and the senate (academic function). this bicameral system is based on a dichotomy between financial management and academic administration, which supposes the existence of easily identifiable and sealed boundaries between the two spheres. in practice this is not the case, as academic decision-making inevitably has budgetary impacts, and most budgetary decisions have consequences for academic life. nevertheless, the dichotomy as it is practised results in the overrepresentation of administrative, corporate, and financial representatives on both the board of governors and senate. the member profile of these two decision-making bodies and their respective methods of appointment reinforce this binary between the academic and financial management spheres. according to the organic law of the university full-time professors are guaranteed representation in the senate (at least one professor per faculty), but not on the board of governors; faculty involvement is not considered essential to the university’s financial decision-making. no rule prevents adequate or even majority representation of full-time and part-time faculty members, support staff, or graduate and undergraduate students on the board of governors, as (a) by regulation and law the board of governors is responsible for appointing 12 of its members, and up to 4 additional individuals to reach its maximum of 32 members; and (b) the senate nominates 2 members (from among its members) to the board of governors. the remaining 14 members are appointed by the government of ontario (4 members), the alumni association (2 members), and the council of administration of saint paul university (8 members). in practice, however, the presence of faculty, staff, and students on the board of governors and its financial sub-committees is severely limited. unlike the board of governors, the senate is composed mainly of exofficio members, and according to the organic law of the university there is no limit to the number of members it can appoint.5 however, the method of nominating professors is key: each professor is appointed by the council of his/her faculty (which consists of the dean, vice-deans, the secretary, all 4 put simply, an organic law is the foundational law of an organization such as a university, and encompasses its main functions, attributes, and responsibilities. constitutions and by-laws are examples of organic laws. 5 there are currently 82 members on univertisy of ottawa’s senate. see: http://web5.uottawa.ca/admingov/senat-membres.html (last accessed august 31st, 2015). between the managerial and the democratic university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 147 department and school heads, as well as a fixed and limited number of professors), rather than elected by peers. this affects the senate’s legitimacy in terms of democratic representation, and creates potential obstacles for prospective candidates should they be assessed negatively or be in conflict with their dean or vice-dean. for professors, this is a barrier to organizational commitment, as a professor cannot become a member of the senate through election by his or her peers. following the adoption of new regulations in 2008, the number of senate members was considerably increased in order to include undergraduate students (one per faculty) and two graduate students from across the university, as well as four associate vice-presidents, two deans, one vicedean, the registrar, the chief librarian, and the directors of various learning support services. any impact the appointment of students may have had was diluted by the proliferation of new administrators. the 2008 regulations also add to senate one professor per faculty, to be elected by their respective faculty council, except in faculties where an associate dean or vice-dean exists to fill the position. increasing the number of students and faculty has not been sufficient to change their minority status – and therefore reduce their marginalization – on senate, even though it is the decision-making body responsible for academic matters. managerial control over the appointment process also means that neither the association of professors of the university of ottawa (apuo) nor any other union or student association can appoint a representative to the board of governors or senate. while this is the norm in ontario universities, there are notable exceptions: st. thomas university, laurentian university, university of hearst at timmins, and ryerson university. in these four ontarian universities, the faculty association (i.e., the union that represents faculty members and academic librarians) can directly appoint one or more member to the senate. while one can argue as to which is preferable, being appointed by the union or being elected by peers, the point is that neither of these two methods of appointments has ever been possible in most universities in ontario and, as far as we know, in canada. the challenges of the university’s bicameral governance do not stop there. under current interpretation the university’s organic law (government of ontario, 1965), the board of governors and senate are linked through a highly asymmetrical relationship, where the financial management prerogative of the former curtails the academic administration of the later. with the exception of awarding degrees and diplomas, and adopting its own rules of governance, all of the attributes and powers of the senate have a direct financial impact, which means that the resulting decisions are subject to approval by the board of governors. in others words, through its financial management prerogative, the board of governors directly influences academic administration, which has de facto become a shared responsibility between the board of governors and the senate. academic administration is dalie giroux, dimitrios karmis, christian rouillard studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 148 no longer the prerogative of the senate, as initially intended by the sharing of responsibilities that comes with bicameral assemblies. the current makeup of the university of ottawa’s board of governors is certainly reflective of managerial influence; in addition to the president and chancellor, two-thirds of its members (20 out of 31) are managers and senior executives within the private, public, and semi-public sectors, whereas only four members are professors, two are support staff, and two are undergraduate and graduate students. the makeup of the executive committee of the board of governors, which exercises the board’s powers between meetings, also reflects the rise of managerialism in academia. eight out of 12 members are external to the university, while only three are internal members (one administrator from the office of the vice-president, external relations, a graduate student, and one professor), along with the president. among these eight external members, five come from the private sector, including lobbying, management consulting, and media companies.6 despite the senate’s academic mission, faculty are again heavily outvoted: only 16 of 82 members are faculty. in other words, the two main decisionmaking bodies of the university of ottawa are beyond the control of those who contribute directly to teaching and research (part-time and full-time professors, and support staff), and those who are directly affected by the quality of teaching and research (undergraduate and graduate students). control of these bodies is given by design to individuals who, regardless of their commitment to quality postsecondary education, cannot make decisions based on direct knowledge of academia. moreover, they come predominantly from the business sector. this overrepresentation of external members seems to arise from the misconception that positioning external to the core functions of the university is synonymous with independent thinking. however, whether members are external or internal does not speak to whether they are truly independent, or have the ability to focus on the common good of the university. the naïve assumption that professors, students and support staff represent specific interests, and are therefore incapable of seeing the general interest of the organization as whole, both demonizes internal members and idealizes external ones. in fact, this marginalization of professors, students, and support staff appears to be antagonistic to the very idea of collegial governance that is understood as characteristic of the academic environment. such a misguided viewpoints rests on the contested premise that management is a set of technical instruments, practices, and knowledge that are universal and timeless, regardless of the specifics of a given organization (alvesson, bridgman & willmott, 2009). management becomes generic, and disconnected from its organizational context. this perspective authorizes managers to focus on abstract categories, financial ratios, performance target and indicators, all articulated through balanced scorecards, which are no 6 see: http://web5.uottawa.ca/admingov/comite_3.html between the managerial and the democratic university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 149 longer understood as partial and subjective representations of the organization’s complexity, but considered to be the comprehensive and objective expression of organizational performance. in the end, managerialism and professionalization go hand in hand. harney & moten (2013) explain this logic as part of the “professionalization” specific to contemporary universities: “the university works for the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the trouble of labor. it will then be able to reproduce a labor force that understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of capitalism” (harney & motten, 2013, p. 29). needless to say, all of this is in sharp contrast to the democratic university, which will be addressed in the next section. the democratic horizon of the contemporary university according to amy gutmann, the democratic university provides “an institutional sanctuary against repression” that may help to counteract attempts at “controlling the creation of politically relevant ideas” (1987, p. 179). by searching for and disseminating ideas and knowledge independently, the university provides the public with resources essential for critique, debate and mobilization.7 it is crucial to the democratic university’s mandate to provide the public with these critical resources that faculty have the academic freedom to think and express themselves independently, critically, and without interference.8 it is therefore worth examining academic freedom as a site of contestation between managerial and democratic perspectives on university governance. we do this by comparing the canadian association of university teachers’ (caut) statement on academic freedom (2011) with the association of universities and colleges of canada’s (aucc) statement on academic freedom (2011). caut’s mandate is “to promote the interests of academic staff, including, but not limited to, professors, professional librarians and researchers, to advance the standards of their professions, and to seek to improve the quality of post-secondary education in canada” (caut, 2014). aucc aims to be “the voice of canada’s universities.” it is comprised of “97 public and private not-for-profit canadian universities” and is “governed by a board of directors consisting of university presidents” (aucc, 2015). although the 7 this is even more important in contexts where governments shut down major research facilities and muzzle government scientists for ideological reasons. for examples of the canadian federal government doing this under stephen harper’s conservatives, see turner (2013). 8 of course, as noted by richard hofstadter, “academic freedom is a modern term for an ancient idea […] its continuous history is concurrent with the history of universities since the twelfth century” (hofstadter, 1955, p. 3, quoted in horn, 1999, p. 4). however, with variations among states, it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that academic freedom became more solidly institutionalized. the progress of academic freedom was largely dependent on the institution of tenure and the unionization of professors. in canada, this progress mostly appeared in the second half of the 20th century (horn, 1999), but is increasingly under assault. dalie giroux, dimitrios karmis, christian rouillard studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 150 caut’s statement conforms to the idea of a democratic university, that of the aucc has far more to do with the hierarchical perspective of the managerial university. caut’s statement is divided into six sections, which are worth reviewing individually. the first section defines the primary mission of post-secondary institutions: they “serve the common good of society through searching for, and disseminating, knowledge and understanding and through fostering independent thinking and expression in academic staff, and students,” and are an essential condition in establishing “robust democracies” (caut, 2011). the section concludes by stressing that “these ends cannot be achieved without academic freedom” (caut, 2011). two key points need to be emphasized. first, academic freedom is crucial in ensuring that colleges and universities can fulfill their basic missions to support research and the dissemination of knowledge and understanding via teaching and community service, and thus advance the common good of society, including a strong democracy. second, institutions must do more than merely tolerate academic freedom; they also have a responsibility to foster “independent thinking and expression” (i.e., promote and protect academic freedom against infringement by dominant powers) (caut, 2011). the second section of caut’s statement defines academic freedom as follows: academic freedom includes the right, without restriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom to teach and discuss; freedom to carry out research and disseminate and publish the results thereof; freedom to produce and perform creative works; freedom to engage in service to the institution and the community; freedom to express one’s opinion about the institution, its administration, and the system in which one works; freedom to acquire, preserve, and provide access to documentary material in all formats; and freedom to participate in professional and representative academic bodies. academic freedom always entails freedom from institutional censorship. (caut, 2011) the definition makes four main points. first, it indicates that academic freedom is a right “without restriction by prescribed doctrine” (caut, 2011) – a right that must be interpreted broadly. second, it emphasizes that academic freedom encompasses all activities that are part of the three overarching missions of post-secondary institutions: teaching and discussion; research and creative works; and community service beyond the institution. in this sense, academic freedom encompasses the right to “fulfill one’s professional obligations” (turk, 2014b, p. 11). by contrast, the aucc’s (2011) statement gives a narrower and more individualist definition of academic work by omitting any mention of community service. third, caut’s definition lists freedoms that are complementary to the first freedom, including the “freedom to express one’s opinion about the institution, its administration, and the system in which one works” (caut, 2011). such freedom allows for debate and criticism relating to the direction between the managerial and the democratic university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 151 educational institutions take. here again, the aucc (2011) statement provides a narrower definition by not including such complementary freedoms. fourth, caut’s definition emphasizes that academic freedom “always entails freedom from institutional censorship” (caut, 2011), reminding us that colleges and universities are power structures that can threaten academic freedom. by comparison, the aucc’s statement (2011) does not recognize that colleges and universities themselves can be a danger to academic freedom, suggesting that threats could only be external. in the managerial university attacks on academic freedom often come from its administration, especially when the public image of the business-oriented institution is assumed to suffer from criticisms expressed by professors. for example, in may 2014, robert buckingham, dean of the school of public health and full professor at the university of saskatchewan, was expeditiously fired for publicly criticizing changes announced by the senior management of his university. in a letter titled “the silence of the deans,” buckingham revealed that he was threatened with dismissal if he publicly criticized the reform plans or the decision-making process at his institution: in december 2013 the president of the university of saskatchewan called a meeting of the senior leadership team (deans and vice-presidents) to discuss the transformus process. her remarks were to the point: she expected her senior leaders to not “publicly disagree with the process or findings of transformus”; she added that if we did our “tenure would be short.” with that meeting there was the ‘silence of the deans.’ never in my 40 years of academic life have i seen academics being told that they could not speak out and debate issues. although the initial publicly released transformus documents were vague, behind closed doors the president and provost planned major changes to our school of public health, all the while warning me against discussing any of these proposals with my faculty and students. deans were also told that when the final recommendations were released we had to support them with faculty, students and the public, even if we disagreed with them. (robert buckingham, quoted in cbc news saskatoon, may 14-15, 2014) in the dismissal letter signed by the university’s vice-president academic, we learn that among the reasons buckingham was fired was for having “damaged the reputation of the university” (cbc news saskatoon, may 1415, 2014). judging by the outcry over this decision and by the revelations made by buckingham, it is arguably the behaviour of the senior administration of the university that tainted the reputation of the institution. senior management later reinstated buckingham as full professor, but not as dean of the school of public health. the message is clear: professors who assume major administrative responsibilities ought to relinquish their freedom to debate and criticize the decisions of their institution. this is a hierarchical and authoritarian view of the university, with senior management making key decisions, controlling information, and standing together in order to limit debate and contestation. in such a context, it is not only robert buckingham’s academic freedom that was infringed upon, it is the freedom dalie giroux, dimitrios karmis, christian rouillard studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 152 of all faculty, students, and staff who were denied a well-informed debate over major transformations taking place at their institution. this example illustrates how academic freedom can be threatened in two distinct ways: through the decision-making process and by the decisions taken via this process. section three of the caut statement stresses that “academic freedom does not require neutrality on the part of the individual”; rather “academic freedom makes intellectual discourse, critique, and commitment possible” without fear of “reprisal or repression by the institution, the state, or any other another source” (caut, 2011). this should be the case regardless of whether academic freedom is explicitly or implicitly included in collective agreements or employment contracts. by comparison, a managerial view tends to confine professors to the role of neutral experts. the fourth section of the caut’s statement emphasizes that academic staff “must not be hindered or impeded in exercising their civil rights as individuals including the right to contribute to social change through free expression of opinion on matters of public interest,” and they should not suffer institutional reprisals for exercising such rights (caut, 2011). again, there is nothing about this in the aucc’s statement on academic freedom. section five addresses the link between academic freedom and institutional governance. it states that “academic freedom requires that academic staff play a major role in the governance of the institution” and “shall constitute at least a majority on committees or collegial governing bodies responsible for academic matters including but not limited to curriculum, assessment procedures and standards, appointment, tenure and promotion” (caut, 2011). as we discussed earlier, academic personnel are a minority on the university of ottawa’s senate, its governing body responsible for academic matters. although stating that “it is a major responsibility of university governing bodies and senior officers to promote and protect academic freedom,” the aucc’s statement on academic freedom (2011) is silent about professors’ participation, as well as about the principle of collegiality that should be the driving force of such governing bodies. we will return to the participatory dimension of academic freedom below. the sixth and final section of the caut’s statement insists that “academic freedom must not be confused with institutional autonomy” (caut, 2011). having defined the autonomy of institutions as the ability to “set policies independent of outside influence,” the statement emphasizes that such autonomy is a double-edged sword: it can indeed “protect academic freedom from a hostile external environment, but it can also facilitate an internal assault on academic freedom” (caut, 2011). furthermore, section six reminds readers that “academic freedom is a right of members of the academic staff, not of the institution” and that “the employer shall not abridge academic freedom on any grounds, including claims of institutional autonomy” (caut, 2011). by comparison, the aucc’s statement (2011) embraces a one-sided view of institutional autonomy as protecting academic between the managerial and the democratic university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 153 freedom against external threats. despite recent examples like robert buckingham’s, the aucc’s statement has not been modified to recognize that post-secondary institutions themselves may constitute a threat to academic freedom. notwithstanding the six sections described above, the caut’s statement does not cover all angles of the debate on academic freedom. for example, it does not say much about the academic freedom of students, on potential conflicts of freedoms, or on the limits of academic freedom.9 nevertheless, an analysis of the caut’s statement helps emphasize that any weakening of academic freedom lowers the capacity of the university to significantly contribute to democratic debate. by contrast, the aucc’s statement neglects to mention the university’s democratic role as a vector of critical thinking. another major difference between the caut and aucc statements is that, while the former does not mention anything explicit about the limits of academic freedom, the latter stresses “the responsibilities of academic freedom” (aucc, 2011). indeed, the aucc’s statement emphasizes that faculty must follow “the professional standards of the relevant discipline” and claims that it is the university leadership’s responsibility to ensure “that academic freedom is exercised in a reasonable and responsible manner” (aucc, 2011). in the current context of the managerialization of postsecondary institutions, the aucc’s focus on the responsibilities of academic freedom is more a reflection of senior management’s hierarchical view and willingness to control faculty – and to punish them when they do not comply – than a response to unreasonable and irresponsible exercises of academic freedom by academic staff. moreover, the heavy emphasis on disciplinary norms is problematic in many ways. first, as mark gabbert (2014) points out, strict adherence to disciplinary norms is necessary to gain membership in academia. from the beginning to the end of their quest for membership, aspiring academics must please “undergraduate teachers, graduate advisors, and dissertation committees; followed by hiring committees and tenure committees; and promotion committees; and peer reviewers of work; and all this in synergistic combination with the norms of granting agencies” (gabbert, 2014, p. 96). in such a context, “there is little danger of producing too many closet enthusiasts of intelligent design” in the academia; the result is more likely to be “the production of anxious careerists who, to paraphrase past aaup [american association of university professors] president cary nelson’s complaint, are too preoccupied with meeting the norms to participate in collegial governance” (gabbert, 2014, p. 96). this is especially likely in a context in which all university strata “have grown accustomed to the saturation of university life by neoliberal rationality, metrics, and principles of governance” (brown, 2015, p. 198). second, as joan scott emphasizes, the relationship between disciplinary norms and academic freedom is a complex 9 for more on these questions, see menand (1996), nelson (2010), and turk (2014a). dalie giroux, dimitrios karmis, christian rouillard studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 154 and paradoxical one: “disciplinary communities provide the consensus necessary to justify academic freedom as a special freedom for faculty. but the inseparable other side of this regulatory and enabling authority is that it can suppress innovative thinking in the name of defending immutable standards” (scott, 2014, p. 115). in light of this, the aucc’s emphasis on the responsibility to follow disciplinary norms is at best ill-advised. at worse, it may be a way to use disciplinary norms for controlling and punishing ‘disobedient’ professors. finally, it is important to note that the caut’s statement establishes a strong link between academic freedom and the democratic governance of universities. section five of the statement emphasizes that “academic freedom requires that academic staff play a major role in the governance of the institution” (caut, 2011), meaning that academic freedom contains a dimension of democratic participation that guarantees its integrity. the bearers of these rights to academic freedom should normally be those who are best qualified to respect and defend academic freedom through a collegial governance model in which they have a strong presence. in contrast, managerialism prioritizes centralized decision-making, hierarchical and authoritarian management, the proliferation and professionalization of administrators, a culture of secrecy and superficial consultations. in the latter model of governance, academic freedom and the voices of professors and students are considered impediments to the ‘normal’ operations of the organization – and are usually poorly dealt with by professionalized administrations, as exemplified by the buckingham case – rather than as vital components of a democratic institution. the quality of discussions and decisions, as well as their legitimacy, are significantly depleted (fearon, 1998). this vision has a trickle-down effect on hiring processes, types of preferred research, career paths of professors, and even educational content. academic managerialism, which first implies a top-down management practice related to particular values (profitability), is gradually established as a mode of subjectivization that tends to fundamentally transform the nature of the university community. by not even mentioning the principle of collegiality and the participation of academic staff in the governance of postsecondary institutions, the aucc’s statement on academic freedom (2011) supports the managerial university model. conclusion: a possibility for change? over the last decade, the canadian university has been under siege from managerialism, to the point of eroding its democratic and collegial governance, as well as challenging the very foundations of academic freedom. in the case of the university of ottawa, the method for appointing members to the board of governors and to the senate is itself conducive to managerialism, and helps explains the lack of representation from many between the managerial and the democratic university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 155 stakeholders in the university community. unicameralism and multicameralism, when it comes to a university’s main decision-making bodies, are neither a guarantor of improved representation of stakeholders, nor can they ensure an effective, fair, and equitable decision-making process. such a process is also shaped by many other variables, including the composition and number of members of the assembly, the method in which they are appointed, the term of their mandate, their re-eligibility, the frequency and dynamics of meetings, and the transparency and accessibility of information relevant to deliberation and the decision-making process. by comparing the canadian association of university teachers’ (caut) statement on academic freedom (2011) with the association of universities and colleges of canada’s (aucc) statement on academic freedom (2011), we have seen how the managerialism inspiring the latter leads to a narrow view of academic work and academic freedom. for example, while the caut’s statement stresses the collegial participatory dimension of academic freedom and establishes a strong link between academic freedom and the democratic governance of universities, the aucc’s statement is silent about professors’ participation, as well as about the principle of collegiality that should be the driving force of democratic governance. similarly, while the caut’s statement emphasizes academic freedom as freedom to think critically and freedom from institutional censorship, reprisal, and repression (caut, 2011), the aucc’s statement fails to recognize the university’s democratic responsibility as a vector of critical thinking, puts heavy emphasis on disciplinary norms, and does not consider that post-secondary institutions may themselves be a threat to academic freedom. as long as fulland part-time professors, support staff, and students remain marginalized on the board of governors and the senate no change of vision or strategic direction seems possible. the overrepresentation of university administrators and a business-oriented clique, which fails to represent the diversity of the university’s community or the context of teaching and research, can only maintain and extend the managerialization of the institution. moreover, lack of faculty representation and participation in university governance is detrimental to academic freedom, denying the collegial participatory component that is an essential part of the principle. in other words, the ‘de-managerialization’ of the university of ottawa, like other ontario universities, clearly represents a long-term mission. we think that building the conditions for appropriate representation for faculty, staff, and students in universities’ decision-making bodies is a crucial site of political struggle for a democratic university. since representation is closely linked to academic freedom, which is the backbone of the democratic university in practice, we think that unions, associations, departments, and individuals in university communities need to mobilize in order to make targeted and concrete gains on this terrain. although the experience of rising managerialism during the 1990s in the canadian federal and provincial public sectors can teach us some lessons for dalie giroux, dimitrios karmis, christian rouillard studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 142-158, 2015 156 managerialism’s implementation in academia, it is not a substitute for critical social research on the university sector itself. in particular, we should seek to build critical knowledge of the contemporary university by (a) studying academic managerialism’s influence on pedagogy and on student experience more broadly, (b) assessing the evolution of working conditions in relation to participation in the governance of canadian universities in the past 30 years, and (c) documenting and analyzing the frequency and types of academic freedom incidents in canadian universities in the last decade. we think that the case of the university of ottawa is a telling example of the ongoing managerialism at play in canadian universities. we also believe that change in academia can only come through a better and more critical understanding of universities’ governance, beginning with (but not limited to) the central institutions of the board of governors and the university senate. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, which contributed helpfully to the final version of the paper. they would also like to thank the editors for their generous comments and support during a highly constructive review process. references alvesson, m., bridgman, t., & willmott, h. 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(2013). the war on science: muzzled scientists and wilful blindness in stephen harper’s canada. vancouver: greystone books. abdelbaki final correspondence address: rawan abdelbaki, department of sociology, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: rawan88@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 389-393, 2017 book review expose, oppose, propose: alternative policy groups and the struggle for global justice carroll, william k. (2016). black point, ns: fernwood publishing. isbn 9781552668344 (paper) ca$25.00; isbn 9781552668351 (e-book) ca$25.99. 224 pages. rawan abdelbaki york university, canada in an era where terms like “alternative facts” and “post-truths” have become prosaic, william k. carroll’s book, expose, oppose, propose: alternative policy groups and the struggle for global justice, is a timely intervention in a plethora of debates on the politics of knowledge production vis-à-vis transformative and sustainable praxis. the book is comprised of eight chapters, three of which are co-authored: chapter 2 (with elaine coburn) and chapters 3 and 5 (with j. p. sapinksi). written for scholars, students, and activists, the book offers a strong theoretical and empirical account of transnational alternative policy groups (tapgs) as new epistemic agents of change in the current transnational neoliberal historical bloc. in essence, this work can be read as a defiant conversation against the spectres of the infamous thatcherite maxim, there is no alternative, through which she had declared the eternal victory of neoliberal capitalism. carroll posits that while much scholarly production has revolved around recent waves of episodic popular resistances, little attention has been paid to the actual work that is being done within global civil society to both produce and mobilize alternative knowledge and policy. it is precisely this gap that carroll sets out to address in his book, as well as the extent to which tapgs are able to unite an incipient global left. the text straddles a number of themes that have occupied multi-disciplinary social scientific research, including transnationalism, social movements and solidarity, critical development studies, civil society, and the politics and social organization of knowledge. the book addresses these themes by distinguishing the work done by tapgs rawan abdelbaki studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 389-393, 2017 390 from the activism of social movements, right wing think-tanks’ alternative knowledge production in service of the state, the master-frames used by various states, and ngos’ counter-hegemonic engagements with various issues across north-south divides. theoretically, the book is firmly grounded in the political thought of scholar-activist and italian communist antonio gramsci, whose key concepts are creatively woven through the whole of carroll’s analysis. empirically, the book is based on rigorous data collected over four years of field research, and comprised of interviews with 91 participants who serve as the protagonists in carroll’s expansive study. carroll’s investigation focuses on 16 tapgs from across the world.1 selected from a larger sample, these 16 groups fit three overarching criteria. first, their primary mandate is to expose existing injustices and contradictions within global neoliberal capitalism, oppose its legitimating narratives and propose viable alternatives to it. second, they all take up transnational issues and seek to address transnational counterpublics. third, they engage with a wide range of issues rather than specializing in a niche problem. as important civil society actors, tapgs are “groups that, in dialogue with transnational publics and movements, produce evidence-based knowledge that critiques hegemonic practices and perspectives, and promotes alternatives” (p. 7). they are collective organic intellectuals and interlocutors of an emergent counter-hegemonic bloc against the dual crises of global neoliberal capitalism and rapid ecological degradation. in reference to these mutually constitutive crises, carroll asserts that the “left” has failed to seize capitalism’s moment of crisis, particularly in light of the great recession of 2008. capitalism triumphs in a socio-cultural and political vacuum that is devoid of sustained and persuasive alternatives, a historical moment of stasis and paralysis of a truly global resistance. although not concerned with identifying the specific weaknesses of today’s left, carroll argues that tapgs’ promise for resisting neoliberal capitalism lies in their ability to 1 these 16 tapgs include the following: transnational institute (tni), established in 1974 and based in amsterdam; third world forum (twf) founded in dakar in 1975; tricontinental centre (cetri) which was created in 1976 and based in belgium; centre de recherche et d’information pour le développment (crid) initiated in 1976 and headquartered in paris; delhibased participatory action research in asia (pria) which was started in 1982; third world network (twn) born in1984 in penang, malaysia; development alternatives with women for a new era (dawn) also created in 1984, initially in bangladesh but now based in manila; third world institute/social watch (item/sw) which started in 1989 and based in montevideo, uruguay; rosa luxemburg foundation (rosalux) established in berlin in 1990, now with several international offices; international forum on globalization (ifg) formed in 1994 and based in san francisco; focus on the global south (focus) founded in bangkok in 1995; network institute for global democratization (nigd) formed in helsinki, finland in 1997; also established in 1997 is people’s plan study group (ppsg) in tokyo; centre for civil society (ccs), created in 2001 in durban. south africa; alternative international (alter-inter) born in montreal in 2005; india institute for critical action: centre in movement (cacim) formed in 2005 in new delhi. book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 389-393, 2017 391 propose global and plausible alternatives to destabilize its hegemony in an increasingly recalcitrant social, economic, and political milieu. although not entirely dismissive of recent modes of popular resistance, the author is critical of the omnipresence of anarchist currents of episodic, smallscale, single-issue movements, arguing that such anarchist stances misconstrue “the state as simply an instrument of oppression, rather than a complex terrain of struggle” (p. 24). disparaging in his views on localism and the “politics of exit” – a vision of a new emergent society “blossoming from a decentralized counterculture created by those who have escaped capitalism” (p. 26) – carroll does manage persuasively to assert that such modes of organizing and their revolutionary momentum could not reverberate globally. localized forms of resistance are limited in their reach because they fail to counteract the dispossession and displacement of communities who lack the resources to combat the very power structures that manufacture subalternity. in this critique of anarchism, carroll nonetheless eschews overly statecentric approaches to social change, and instead argues that the state is only one of many terrains of struggle and transformation. resistant protest politics are significant, for they reveal localized grievances, but counter-hegemonic politics elaborate on those articulations by “clarifying what is at stake” within them (p. 211). following gramsci, carroll coveys that it is precisely within the co-constitutive fields of both civil society and the political state (which together form the integral state, or the “state” as we know it) that tapgs work to realize a vision of justice globalism. here, justice globalism is conceptualized as restorative and redistributive social justice, equality and equity, universal economic, social, and cultural rights, global solidarity of social movements, participatory democracy, transnational transformative change “from below,” and sustainable ecologies. contra conventional (right-wing) think tanks whose role it is to advise political and corporate entities, tapgs engage in strategic, long-term construction of a counter-hegemonic vision supported by viable, persuasive alternative policies. as political agents that move beyond the centre-left position in the war of position, tapgs can thus be conceived of as “think tanks of the left” (p. 8). unlike transnational social movements whose tactical knowledge production practices emerge in tandem with their collective action, tapgs operate dialogically within networks of critical social movements and subaltern peoples and communities, and at a distance from states and corporate elites (p. 8). the counter-hegemonic work and translation of theory into practice by tapgs is what carroll refers to as alternative knowledge production and mobilization (alt kmp) or cognitive praxis. yet, the distance that tapgs maintain from the state is not absolute, as carroll and elaine coburn elucidate in the second chapter of the text. tapgs must rely on “master frames” that shape the ways in which they work with social movements, counterpublics, subaltern communities and general publics, as well as their communicative strategies with “targets” such as the mainstream media, the state, and intergovernmental bodies. this is especially rawan abdelbaki studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 389-393, 2017 392 the case for tapgs that tend to be heavily involved with existing hegemonic institutions (such as un-sponsored and intergovernmental initiatives), and thus have to operate within what carroll refers to as the “critical liberal” frame. in this discursive frame, abstinence from offering a critique of capitalist relations enables some tapgs to speak the language of the mainstream while retaining a deep connection to grassroots movements; they remain critical, however, as they expose the differential distribution of supposedly university human rights. conversely, those that operate with a frame that lies “to the left of liberalism” engage in a direct critique of capitalism, with some confining their radical political economic critique to a national scope, and others taking on the inherent injustice of global transnational capitalism. carrol’s discussion of framing is particularly compelling as it reveals the challenges that tapgs must confront when they engage in alt kpm which must necessarily entail a “double address” to both counterpublics and the mainstream general public; that is, they are “intermediary dialogical spaces” (p. 45). through the use of master frames, tapgs can thus begin to build ideological convergence towards the realization of justice globalism, which can then enhance their ability to form a “movement of movements” within a global civil society network. carroll’s book illustrates that the constitution of a global counterhegemonic bloc hinges on the degree to which tapgs are embedded within the global civil society network, and their ability to spatially mediate between global north and global south. carroll and sapinski’s network analysis in the third chapter of the book reveals that while tapgs are not yet central actors within a geographically-dispersed global civil society (which includes international ngos), they serve a key integrative role. this mapping of global civil society actors also reveals that northern-based tapgs tend to be more regionally “introverted” and less likely to create north-south linkages (with the exception of tni and rosalux). conversely, southern tapgs are both extroverted when they work towards bridging the north-south divide, and introverted when they actively solidify south-south connections. this latter move, carroll avers, is “integral to any postcolonial global left” (p. 82). within this global network, tapgs must also work to avoid the risk of ngoization and take preventative measures to keep from becoming subsumed by and within hegemonic institutions when confronted with the precarity of funding for their counter-hegemonic praxis. the taming effect of the professionalization of activism that takes place particularly within mainstream “service-ngos” – whose work is delimited by what funders deem to be the most popular at a given time – is something many of carroll’s protagonists reject. one way some of them attempt to overcome the facile binary between ngo/movement is by viewing the global network of civil society as a mosaic left “composed of many movements and organizational forms” (p. 132). in so doing, tapgs may choose to align with “citizenbased” ngos that take on stronger political stances and analyses. book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 389-393, 2017 393 one of the most compelling findings of carroll’s analysis is how tapgs serve as vehicles of cultural diffusion or spaces of encounter that link otherwise unacquainted sets of subaltern principles across various communities in variegated geographical spaces. one such example is the principle of beun vivir, which enshrines a commitment to harmony with nature, and that originates in latin america, but finds a counterpart in indigenous communities in the philippines (p. 160), a discovery that tapgs activist-scholars are able to mobilize in order to create a healthy degree of convergence around common goals. not to be confused with homogenization, carroll relays tapg protagonists’ commitment to subsidiarity wherein the contents (or the what) of a movement need not to engulf the how (or the form) through which transformation may occur. implicit within carroll’s analysis is a subtle and potentially controversial critique of the ways in which subalternity has been taken up within postcolonial literature, asserting that the simple inversion of the colonial epistemic hierarchy that uncritically valorizes non-western knowledges ultimately fails to capture the concrete reality of tapgs’ cognitive praxis, and more importantly, the injustices and exploitation that the excluded and the repressed continue to endure (p. 210). thus, as tapgs create new conditions of possibility that genuinely incorporate local subjugated knowledges, the subaltern can and does speak. a close reading of carroll’s text also reveals that the heavy reliance of tapgs on indigenous epistemologies – including aforementioned buen vivir and ubunto (a south african ethic of mutual reciprocity) – form a formidable part of a counterhegemonic politics that necessarily entails a decolonization of knowledge. though written with a cautious optimism and a realistic idealism, what remains wanting in carroll’s analysis is the role of the state – a terrain of struggle that he rightly refuses to cede – and its contemporary technologies of surveillance and other forms of violence that target the subalterns, including the multiplicity of the vulnerable as well as the activists with whom tapgs dialogical practices take place. the violence of labour, citizenship, and border regimes, as well as the rise of the carceral state and its subsequent expansion of immigration detention centres that confine bodies (specifically those of migrant workers) to zones of permanent precarity, immiseration, and unfreedom are some examples of the state’s ability to effectively eviscerate the communities with which tapgs’ operate dialogically. ultimately, it will be up to the reader to decide whether and how the war of position that is waged by tapgs can protect their own existence and shield their constituents and grassroots partners from the potential of the state’s war of manoeuvre. correspondence address: liza mügge, faculty of social and behavioural sciences, university of amsterdam, oz achterburgwal 237, room: 3.51, 1012 dl amsterdam, netherlands, tel.: (+31) 20 525 2173, email: l.m.mugge@uva.nl issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 65-81, 2013 women in transnational migrant activism: supporting social justice claims of homeland political organizations liza mugge university of amsterdam, netherlands abstract this article studies the conceptions of social justice of women active in transnational migrant politics over a period of roughly 20 years in the netherlands. the novel focus on migrant women reveals that transnational politics is almost completely male dominated and directed. two of the exceptions found in this article include a leftist and a kurdish women’s organization supporting the communist cause in the 1980s and the kurdish struggle in the 1990s in turkey, respectively. in both organizations, gender equality was subordinated to broader ideologies of political parties in their homeland. leftist activists in the cold war era supported a narrow definition of the “politics of redistribution,” while kurdish activists, combined classical features of the latter with those of traditional identity politics. introduction since the fall of the berlin wall in 1989, the demise of communism and the continuing ascendance of free-market ideology, claims for social justice have shifted from redistributive issues to the “politics of recognition” (fraser, 1996, pp. 3). while the first type of social justice claims seeks a more just distribution of resources and goods, the goal of the second type is a difference-friendly world. in the latter view, “assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price of equal respect” (1996, pp. 3). examples include claims for the recognition of ethnic minorities and gender differences. globalization has increased the potential of such identity politics to become transnational. while there has been ample attention given to the transnationalization of women’s activism and women’s claims for equality— both distributive and difference-friendly (naples & desai, 2002)—as well as to migrant transnationalism (vertovec, 2009), little research has focused on transnational claims of migrant women. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 66 liza mügge this article examines how turkish and kurdish migrant women in the netherlands had and have been involved in transnationalism before and after the fall of the berlin wall. which conceptions of social justice do they advocate? in what forms of transnational activism are they involved and to what extent are they influenced by factors related to organizations and politics in the country of origin? the next section points to the absence of gender in the literature on diaspora, transnational, and migrant politics. it is followed by a contextual section on the migration process of turks and kurds to the netherlands and the development of the transnational organizational political infrastructure there. in particular, it shows that transnational politics is almost completely male dominated and directed. subsequently, i present the only two exceptions to such male domination in my sample: one leftist and one kurdish women’s organization, supporting the communist struggle in the 1980s and kurdish resistance in the 1990s in turkey, respectively. the analysis confirms a shift in social justice claims after the demise of communism, in line with fraser’s argument. intriguingly, however, although both organizations work with and for women, gender equality is subordinate to the political paradigms of marxism and ethnic nationalism adhered to by the political parties they sympathize with. gender: a lacuna of diaspora, transnational and migrant politics scholarship despite a widespread scholarly agreement that gender matters in all social, economic and political spheres, research addressing gender outside typically “female” spaces, like the household, are scarce (al-ali, 2002; levitt & jaworsky, 2007, pp. 137-139; mahler, 1998, pp. 82-87; vertovec, 2009, pp. 64-66). for instance, in most recent “state of the art” and “taking stock” special journal issues and edited volumes on migrant transnationalism and diaspora, full contributions or chapters on gender are absent (e.g. bauböck & faist, 2010; ben-rafael, sternberg, liwerant, & gorny, 2009; fibbi & d’amato, 2008; khagram & levitt, 2008; martiniello & lafleur, 2008; pries, 2008; vertovec, 2009). not surprisingly, gender goes unnoticed in empirical studies on diaspora and transnational migrant politics (brand, 2006; esman, 2009; ögelman, 2003; østergaard-nielsen, 2003; shain, 1999; sheffer, 2003; for an exception see aliefendioğlu, 2004). confirming this pattern, gender is not considered in studies on migrants’ political participation and their organizational networks in the receiving country (schrover & vermeulen, 2005; van heelsum, 2002; vermeulen, 2006; yurdakul, 2009). there are, however, good reasons to bring gender into the study of diaspora, transnational and migrant politics. existing scholarship suggests that migrant men’s and women’s involvement in social networks and transnationalism take very different forms (de tona & lentin, 2011; fouron & glick schiller, 2001; hagan, 1998; itzigsohn & giorguli-saucedo, 2005, p. 896; menjívar 2000, pp. 157-193). the general finding is that migrant men play a role in public, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 women in transnational migrant activism 67 formal and institutionalized domestic networks of migrant organizations and the transnational ties these maintain with homeland-based actors. in contrast, women seem to play an important role in informal networks consisting of friends and family. in other words, migrant women do not (manage to) get out of the transnational “private sphere.” transnational politics is about getting a transnational public role (salih, 2007). it is the institutionalized and public nature of migrants’ organizational and transnational ties, which exceed the levels of the private sphere and the individual, that structures transnational politics (mügge, 2010). a gendered analysis of the institutional level, therefore, provides a first impression of the women’s organizations or organizations directed by women that have a public role in transnational politics. before proceeding to that step, however, the following section provides background information on the emigration process from turkey to the netherlands and the gendered nature of the migrant organizational landscape. gendered emigration and migrant organizations migrants from turkey are the largest non-western migrant group in the netherlands (388,967 in 2011).1 as kurds are not registered on the basis of ethnicity or self-identification but on the country of birth (of at least one of the parents), which in this case is turkey, official numbers for the netherlands do not exist. their estimated number is 100,000 (moors, van den reek vermeulen, & siesling, 2009). significant migration from turkey was concentrated between 1964 and 1974, facilitated by a labour agreement between the dutch and turkish governments. labour migration predominantly included turkish men, but when they opted for permanent stay in the netherlands, their wives and children followed quickly. already in 1972, half of the turkish migrants were women (schapendonk-maas, 2000, p. 26). a similar pattern is observed in germany (aliefendioğlu, 2004), and as figure 1 shows, it still holds today. kurds were underrepresented in the first wave of labour migration in the 1960s as recruitment took place mainly in western and central turkey, where few kurds lived. this changed in the early 1970s when labour was increasingly recruited from eastern turkey (van bruinessen, 1999). many kurds arrived in the netherlands after the 1980 coup in turkey (bakker, vervloet, & gailly, 2002, pp. 162-167). compared to other migrant groups in the netherlands, migrants from turkey are extremely well organized; they have at their disposal a number of organizations that are connected in dense networks, and isolated organizations are rare (fennema & tillie, 1999; van heelsum, tillie, & fennema, 1999). moreover, their organizational structures are more stable than those of other groups (mügge, 2011a). many organizations established in the 1970s and 1980s still exist. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 68 liza mügge figure 1 turkish population in the netherlands, 1996-2011 source: statline, central bureau for statistics, http://statline.cbs.nl/statweb/ between 1998 and 1999, the institute for migration and ethnic studies (imes) of the university of amsterdam found 1,125 organizations among turks (including kurds); only five per cent of those (61) focused on women. the study also collected more detailed data, including the names of the organizations, their addresses, and the names of their board members from the dutch chamber of commerce. this information was available for 69 per cent (773) of the turkish organizations. using the original database, i established that only five per cent of those organizations (40 out of 773) were directed by women, and the grand majority of this subset specifically targeted women rather than the migrant group as a whole (see table 1). table 1 female director and type of organization type of organization number women 35 religious 2 cultural 2 unknown 1 total 40 the imes analyzed turkish organizational networks on the basis of the interlocking directorates of organizations: organizations were connected when one person was on the administrative board of two or more organizations. turkish population in nl 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 19 96 19 97 19 98 19 99 20 00 20 01 20 02 20 03 20 04 20 05 20 06 20 07 20 08 20 09 20 10 20 11 in th ou sa nd s year total men women studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 women in transnational migrant activism 69 none of the organizations directed by a woman have a central position in the overall network of turkish organizations (see figure 2 in van heelsum & tillie, p. 20). this means that the turkish organizational network is almost completely male-dominated. that said, some organizations, such as the conservative islamic milli görüş, organize activities specifically by and for women (for examples in germany see sökefeld, 2008). mirroring the position of women in islamist political movements in turkey, this work has largely remained informal (white, 2002). gendered institutionalized transnational migrant politics using the imes migrant organizational network as a starting point, i identified the key persons in migrant organizational networks who maintained institutionalized ties with political actors in turkey or the diaspora. as noted earlier, the imes network was constructed exclusively using interlocking directorates. since administrative boards are seldom transnational in the sense that people from both the netherlands and turkey are formal members, additional research to expand and update the imes network was needed. between 2003-2005 new data was collected in the netherlands and turkey through interviews with organizational leaders and elites, through my own observations during activities, by reading newspaper articles, websites, organizations’ brochures and reports.2 the new national and transnational ties i found were based on structural or sporadic cooperation, advice, memberships (among organizations and individuals), and kinship. during the interviews i asked interviewees to provide me with the contact details of homeland organizations with which they maintain ties (for full methodology see mügge, 2010). compared to the original data, the more qualitative approach only led to a very small increase in the number of organizations directed by women. similarly, this additional work confirmed that the transnational ties maintained between migrant organizations in the netherlands and collective actors in turkey are by and large run by men. throughout my fieldwork, however, i had many conversations with women in both the netherlands and turkey. during two fieldtrips i spent a whole day in each at the side of a female member of a cultural organization involved in radical transnational politics, one radical leftist, and one kurdish—both members of political parties which are illegal in turkey. the conversations i had with them gave me an inside perspective on the role of women in their organizations. in both cases the women were very active, but did not belong to the administrative board. they had their own female networks within the organization and seemed no less radical than their male colleagues. yet they had no formal authority.3 studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 70 liza mügge figure 2 national and transnational ties of turkish and kurdish organizations square: political party circle: migrant organization/ngo black: turkey grey: the netherlands/europe source: mügge (2010, p. 104). figure 2 visualizes the national and transnational ties of the turkish and kurdish migrant organizations. only two organizations directed by women in the largest two clusters of the turkish and kurdish organizational network have been transnationally active in the past or in the period under study: the turkish women’s federation in the netherlands (htkb) and the international free women’s foundation (ifwf) founded in 1977 and 2001, respectively (see the circled organizations in figure 2). in the 1970s htkb united eight women’s organizations. although the federation still exists, its transnational activities and ties have diminished over time. in the period under study (2003-2005), it maintained rather strong ties with other turkish migrant organizations in the netherlands, facilitated through membership in the consultative council of turks in the netherlands (iot). the iot was founded by the dutch government in 1985 to represent the general interests of turkish migrants in the netherlands and provides the htkb with a central position in the network (in figure 2 located in the cluster on the right). the htkb is the only women’s federation in the council, since iot member federations unite general organizations, often with separate women sections. the fact that kurdish organizations are not members of the iot explains aabf aadd abkbf adutdf akp anaf atib bahadin bbp birgun chp cumhuriyet dehap dehap-eu didf didf-de diyanet dsdf emep ernk evrensel fed-kom hadd hak-der hdf hdv himv htf htib htkb htkib htr htskf ifwf igmg ihd iot karatay kgk kncca kon-kurd mg-nn mhp nif nmr odk odk-a odp pir sultan pm rmn shp siyaset sp this tikf turk evi u-cami uetd ulku vtskmv wtcyanyana y-chp yek-kom studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 women in transnational migrant activism 71 why the cluster of kurdish organizations and political parties is not attached to the centre. instead, they form a separate sub-cluster of european kurdish diaspora organizations and the kurdish party dehap based in turkey in which the ifwf is well embedded (in figure 2 left of the centre). both the transnational activities of the htkb in the past and the ifwf in the period under study related to violence of the turkish state against the left, kurds, women or an intersection of these. the different eras in which both organizations were transnationally active—the htkb in the 1970s and early 1980s and the ifwf in the 2000s—have in common that state repression of their counterparts in turkey reached its high point. moreover, both organizations have been politicized by political refugees fleeing prosecution in turkey. the following sub-sections describe their transnational ties and actions and analyse them in the context of the struggle for social justice of the leftist and the kurdish movements in turkey. redistributive social justice claims: women and the turkish communist party the htkb was established as the women’s organization of the association of turkish workers (hti̇b). hti̇b was founded in 1974 by a group of turkish workers and refugees who had fled the turkish military repression of 1971 (can & can-engin, 1997, p. 66). the federation was unambiguously marxist and sympathized with the turkish communist party (tkp), which had been illegal in turkey for most of its existence. initially, hti̇b had a homeland directed goal: to include turkish workers in the netherlands in the struggle of the turkish people for a “democratic” turkey. between 1975 and 1979 hti̇b became a national umbrella with different branches in the netherlands. on a supranational level it established close ties with other turkish organizations in european countries that supported the tkp. the influence of the tkp on hti̇b increased when tkp leaders fled to the netherlands and became members of the organization (nell, 2008). initially the mission of the htkb was to “emancipate” turkish women in the netherlands. along with the political developments in turkey and hti̇b, it started to support the progressive women’s movement (i̇kd) in turkey (see santing, 1987). the i̇kd was founded in 1975 on the directive from the turkish communist party (tkp) and was closed by constitutional law in 1979, just before the coup d’état in 1980. by then it had grown to 30 branches across turkey and had 50,000 members. one of i̇kd’s founding members found refuge in amsterdam and became involved with the htkb.4 in exile she continued her political activities for the i̇kd and the tkp together with several leftist parties and trade unions which were outlawed in turkey. the leadership of those leftist parties equally found a home in migrant organizations across europe and started solidarity movements against the junta (mügge, 2013). there was little, but some, clandestine contact with actors in turkey. “our friends were under police interrogation, we didn’t like studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 72 liza mügge to write letters because they could be used against them.”5 (in the mid-1980s, when the political conflicts in turkey cooled somewhat, htkb activities gradually shifted to the integration of turkish women in the netherlands. they closely cooperated with leading organizations and persons in the dutch feminist movement and with female leftist politicians. this experience inspired a htkb board member and i̇kd founder to support the initiative to establish the association for the support and training of women candidates (ka-der) upon her return to turkey in the 1990s.6 ka-der unites members of all major political parties and aims to strengthen the position of women in politics at all levels of decision-making and to fight discrimination against women in politics (tekeli, 2010, p. 119). although ka-der maintains some contact with individual turkish feminists in european countries, often former political exiles, there are no structural ties with turkish migrant organizations.7 transnational ties with the htkb served for i̇kd activists as a temporary residence to continue their class struggle. when the turkish communist movement fell apart in the mid-1980s, those ties dissolved. former i̇kd exiles returned to turkey to support the women’s movement there, whereas the htkb intensified its endeavours to stimulate the emancipation of migrant women in the netherlands. the organizational structure of the htkb and hti̇b was copied from the i̇kd and tkp in turkey. as a consequence of the military coups of 1971 and 1980, htkb and hti̇b became interwoven with the i̇kd and the tkp and replaced some of its functions. i̇kd and the tkp cadre in exile entered the board of administration of htkb and hti̇b. the i̇kd was established in response to a top-down initiative to strengthen the tkp with a women’s organization. the tkp leadership considered the i̇kd “a rich source for the tkp of young woman communists who [had] been tested in action” (as cited in ozcurumez & cengiz, 2011, p. 26). as a former i̇kd member put it, “the membership period was considered as a process consisting of several stages leading to party membership” (as cited in ozcurumez & cengiz, 2011, p. 26). the i̇kd did not directly address gender equality, but associated “its raison d’être with the ideological conviction of class identity and struggle” (ozcurumez & cengiz, 2011, p. 24-25). publications originating from moscow, rather than feminist writing from western countries, were the main inspiration for i̇kd members: “we found solutions to everything in those publications” (as cited in ozcurumez & cengiz, 2011, p. 27). the aim of the organization in its statutes was described as: all women, but first of all working class women, should be able to use fully their legal rights in the family and the society. the priority of the organization is therefore rearranging the laws that harm women’s rights and freedom [and] defending women’s labor in accordance with equal pay principle in the factories, fields, bureaus. (as cited in ozcurumez & cengiz, 2011, p. 25) i̇kd references to everyday women’s problems were limited to demanding kindergartens in factories. such demands have led to accusations of studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 women in transnational migrant activism 73 “feminism” and weakening the socialist front, something i̇kd members naturally tried to avoid (as cited in ozcurumez & cengiz, 2011). within the ideological pressure of the orthodox left, feminism was branded a bourgeois deviation (sirman, 1989). the “woman question” was …simply an introductionary [sic] question intended to recruit women to join the communist cause and become activists. [i̇kd’s] existence is related to a political organization with massive political objectives; the particular objective of arriving at solutions to women’s problems is, at best, subsidiary. (ozcurumez & cengiz, 2011, p. 26) the i̇kd was heavily criticized by second wave feminists “for subordinating women’s issues to the cause of socialism and the labour movement” (tekeli 1990 cited by ozcurumez & cengiz, 2011, p. 24). in the 1980s, however, women who had been active in leftist political organizations such as i̇kd became the key actors of the independent women’s movement. they started to criticize the male domination in the leftist movement. in small consciousnessraising groups they paved the way for the second feminist wave in turkey (al-rebholz, 2010; çubukçu, 2004). first-wave feminism, claiming the extension of citizens’ rights for women, had ended already in 1935, with the official closure of the turkish women’s organization. it was argued by the state that with the newly founded turkish republic in 1923 legal equality between all citizens, irrespective of gender, had been achieved (berktay, 2004). the new civil code (1926), based on swiss law, replaced islamic law and polygamy was officially outlawed (mango, 2002, p. 438). furthermore, women were granted suffrage rights and education became compulsory for both girls and boys (pusch, 2000, p. 483). the downside of those changes was that this “state feminism” created the myth that turkish women had full equal rights with men; consequently, there was no more need for women’s organizations: “kemalist [state] ideology was the only option available to women” (tekeli, 1992, p. 139). surprisingly, the second feminist wave evolved just after the 1980 coup when all political parties were closed except those few founded and controlled by the military; many political leaders, labour unions and political organizations were banned from politics (diner & toktaş, 2010, p. 45). violent confrontations between radical leftist and right-wing groups that had led to political instability served as the main justification for the military’s intervention in politics, and spawned a “depoliticized” environment in the 1980s (diner & toktaş, 2010; also see pope & pope, 1997). it was at this moment, when civil society was severely restricted, that an independent women’s movement flourished. some scholars have argued that this momentum in 1980 was partly due to the opportunities presented by the imprisonment of many male political activist and leaders (diner & toktaş, 2010, p. 45). in the post-coup period women’s organizations defined themselves as “feminist” for the first time (as cited in ozcurumez & cengiz, 2011). the number of women’s organizations rose from ten in the late 1970s to 64 in studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 74 liza mügge the 1980s and early 1990s (diner & toktaş, 2010, p. 47). second-wave feminists fought against the patriarchal gender roles and relations “so that the rights granted by law could be put into practice in social, cultural, political and economic domains” (çubukçu, 2004, p. 56). in addition to the leftist feminist groups, islamic activists, and secular nationalists, also known as kemalists, started to organize. whereas kemalist women represent the officially dominant ideology of the state (arat, 2010; arat-koç, 2007), the leftist or “new” feminists and islamic women put forward counter ideologies (sakaranaho, 2008, p. 50-51). the i̇kd and the htkb clearly did not challenge patriarchy; they operated between the first and second feminist waves in turkey. it was a period in which the “state feminism” of the early republican period largely turned into a “party feminism” (eslen-ziya & korkut, 2010, p. 320). the claims of party feminists for social justice can be characterized as “redistributive” in its narrow sense, encompassing only class-centred orientations in line with the dominant ideologies of the cold war period. their remedy for injustice is economic restructuring (fraser, 1996, p. 7). the politics of recognition and redistribution: the kurdish struggle in contrast to the htkb, the ifwf does not present itself as a migrant organization but as an international women’s foundation fully committed to supporting social and humanitarian projects for women and children in the middle east. the foundation is carried by women “who personally experienced the devastating effects of war and men’s violence,” and it “struggles against all forms of militarism, fascism, nationalism and discrimination … by taking peaceful solutions of social questions as its basis.”8 they mainly focus on kurdish women in turkey and female kurdish refugees in europe, but simultaneously aim to bridge human rights with the kurdish question.9 ifwf particularly opposes the policy of assimilation and discrimination against the kurdish people. the organization cooperates ad-hoc with international women’s organizations as well as with kurdish organizations in the diaspora that sympathize with the pkk, women’s organizations in turkey and the kurdish political party (which was dehap at the time of my research in 2004). for instance, they provided support to a feminist organization with a large kurdish membership, katagi, in istanbul.10 like ifwf, they consider themselves “anti-patriarchal,” “anti-militarist,” and continuously address the salience of the kurdish question by sending press releases to leftist parties, syndicates and other relevant actors in civil society in turkey. ifwf’s broad cooperation came to the fore in supporting the protests against the rape and torture of gülbahar gündüz, who was an executive member of the women’s section of the kurdish party dehap in istanbul. gündüz was abducted from the street in june 2003, possibly by policemen. she was interrogated, sexually abused and tortured: “the men told her that studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 women in transnational migrant activism 75 she should not be leading political activities because she is a woman and that this would be a lesson to her” (cf. fidh, 2003; khrp, 2003).11 the gündüz case was broadly interpreted as a frontal attack against the peace struggle of kurdish women. it received ample attention on kurdish websites, hosted from both europe and turkey itself.12 following the gündüz case an ifwf delegation was invited to the women’s branch of dehap in istanbul. dehap informed the delegation about gündüz and other cases of female members of the party who had been tortured and raped.13 ifwf called on women’s institutions “to express their solidarity with gulbahar gündüz and to show their protest against the practices of the turkish security forces.”14 the objectives of ifwf resemble the activities of the kurdish women’s movement which evolved out of the kurdish nationalist movement, fuelled by the establishment of the kurdistan worker’s party (pkk) in 1977. the pkk initially was marxist-leninist oriented. it opposed “turkish imperialism,” which, it argued, was prevalent in “turkish kurdistan” (güney, 2002, p. 123). the organization held kurdish landlords primarily responsible for collaborating with the turkish ruling classes (taspinar, 2005, p. 94). the pkk strategy was to mobilize destitute social classes, the uprooted smalltown youth and poor peasants against these landlords and traditional chiefs cooperating with the central government in ankara (taspinar, 2005, p. 95). for the pkk, the intensity of kurdish national feeling was accentuated by the loss of spoken kurdish among its founding members (mcdowall, 1996, p. 419). the 1980 coup has been crucial for kurdish women’s awareness; the detention of tens of thousands of kurdish men forced women to take a more active role in society and politics. kurdish women’s groups started to pinpoint the multiple “exploitation” that they experienced because of their gender and ethnicity. first, they criticized the patriarchal system dominant in kurdish culture and endorsed by the nationalist movement. second, they felt oppressed through the “imperialist” system that the central state imposed on kurdish people. at the same time, these women condemned mainstream and state feminists for being “ethnocentric” and exclusionary of other identities (diner & toktaş, 2010, pp. 41, 47). gradually, kurdish women became active in political parties like dehap and gained public visibility in a number of organizations (diner & toktaş, 2010, p. 49; yüksel, 2006). the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the rise of kurdish nationalism and an increasing militaristic response by the turkish state (ilkkaracan, 2001). the leader of the pkk, abdullah öcalan, began to insist that the kurdish movement’s “basic responsibility [was] to … liberate women” (as cited in marcus, 2007, p. 173). he stressed that the pkk’s revolutionary fight would be impossible without the presence of women. among pkk members, however, it was frequently argued that the time was not right for women’s rights and that priority should be given to national self-determination (kirişçi, 2009). according to marcus, (2007) it is unclear whether öcalan truly believed in gender equality, “but he certainly understood that he could gain a powerful ally if he defended their rights” (p. 173). it seemed to work: studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 76 liza mügge women comprised a third of the pkk’s armed forces by 1993. but joining the pkk may simply have been the better of two options. many young women saw the pkk as an acceptable form of escape form their daily lives: a kurdish father could block his daughter from working … from going to high school … but it was not easy to criticize her decision to fight for kurdish freedom. doing so could raise questions about a family’s real loyalties, which in turn could put the family at odds with the pkk. . . . such comments could raise questions inside the pkk about the loyalties of the girl who had joined, possibly endangering her life. besides, the pkk was said to protect a girl’s virginity with the same zeal as her family, something that helped shore up support for the pkk. (marcus, 2007, p. 174) the explicit attention to gender equality was largely part of a strategy to strengthen the movement, which very much resembles the working style of the turkish communist party in the 1970s. since the early 1990s, kurdish political parties have taken part in parliamentary elections under different names, since all of them at one point or another had been closed by constitutional courts. in the period under study hadep had just closed and its work was continued by dehap.15 the parties have had and still have active women’s branches and women on the executive level. indeed, one of the heroines of the kurdish struggle is a woman, leyla zana. it could be argued that the aims and activities of the kurdish organization ifwf, as well as their transnational ties with pro-kurdish women’s organizations and parties, are a part of the third feminist wave in turkey. similar to third-wave feminisms in western countries, third-wave feminism in turkey is characterized by its religious and ethnic diversity (kerestecioğlu, 2004). however, in contrast to deconstructive feminists or queer activists, kurdish women do not challenge the essentialism of traditional identity politics. the redistributive elements of the social justice conception of kurdish women are not surprising since the kurdish national movement has its origins in the leftist movement of the 1970s in turkey (white, 2000). kurdish women emphasize multiple exploitation on the basis of gender and ethnicity. therefore, their conception of social justice contains elements of both the politics of redistribution as well as of the politics of recognition. following fraser, those are “dimensions of justice that can cut across all social movements” (emphasis original fraser, 1996, p. 6). such a blurred conception of social justice is clearly reflected in the transnational activism of the ifwf. conclusion this article has analyzed the conceptions of social justice of women active in kurdish and turkish transnational migrant politics in a period of roughly studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 women in transnational migrant activism 77 20 years. the historical perspective has allowed us to study whether the shift in conceptions of social justice from the politics of redistribution in the cold war period to the politics of recognition in a neo-liberal context observed among traditional social movements also applies to transnational migrant politics of women. inspired by fraser (1996), this article has asked to what extent both dimensions of social justice are mutually exclusive or can be combined. so far, gender outside typical female spaces has been understudied in research on migrant transnationalism. a gendered analysis shows that transnational politics is almost completely male dominated. women’s role in transnational politics is mostly invisible and private. in a period of roughly 20 years, only two organizations directed by women had a central position in the network of transnational politics: the leftist women’s organization htkb and the kurdish women’s organization ifwf. in both transnational programmes, “the woman question” has clearly been subordinated to a broader political programme, in these cases marxism and kurdish nationalism. additionally, women seem to acquire a more central role in transnational politics when political movements in the homeland are outlawed and many of their male members are detained. their support, either to the general movement or to the women in the homeland, then becomes vital for the organization. in the case of htkb, its transnational orientation diminished when the turkish communist party (tkp) fell apart and the political climate in turkey cooled. in contrast, the ifwf was created to support kurdish women in exile or in turkey who faced oppression by the turkish state due to their own political activities and convictions or those of their male relatives. due to this “supportive” working style, the transnational politics of migrant women did not develop its own conceptions of social justice, but adopted the ones of male-dominated political organizations. the transnational ties of htkb and ifwf mirrored the ideologies and activities of the leftist women’s movement in the 1980s and the kurdish women’s movement in the 1990s and 2000s. questions on gender equality, therefore, have been addressed in rather instrumental ways to strengthen the homeland party. in these cases, gender hierarchies from the homeland were not challenged, but rather reproduced. in that sense, migrant women do not really “go public” in transnational politics. the conception of social justice in transnational activities and ties observed during the cold war period fit the narrow definition of the “politics of redistribution,” as its remedy for injustice is economic restructuring. in the neo-liberal context of the 1990s and 2000s, the kurdish movement combines both elements of justice of the politics of redistribution and recognition. emphasis on the first form of social justice is an obvious result of the marxist heritage of the kurdish movement. while elements of the latter are defined more narrowly, kurds do not aim for the deconstruction of categories, as queer activists or migrants might do. their struggle is based on recognition of the category “kurd” as a distinct ethnicity. the organizations in the sample studied were mostly led by first-generation migrants. in those organizations women’s roles were predominantly private. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 78 liza mügge over the past decade, secondand thirdgeneration turks and kurds have gradually entered the boards of administration of mainstream organizations or established their own alternatives. the question is how this generational change will play out for the extent to which women get a more public role in migrant politics or the mainstream politics of the receiving society. unless new conflicts evolve in the homeland, or old ones regain intensity, it is unlikely that they will continue transnational political activities; instead, their struggle for social justice will focus on discrimination in the receiving societies. acknowledgements an earlier and shortened version of this article has been presented at the conference “men and masculinities moving on again! transnationalising flows, technologies, institutions, theory,” linköping (2011) and is published as a conference proceeding (mügge 2011b). i thank anja van heelsum for sharing the database on turkish organizations, the studies in social justice reviewers for their constructive feedback and the harvard centre for european studies for hosting me as a visiting scholar in spring 2012. notes 1 statline, central bureau for statistics, http://statline.cbs.nl/statweb/. 2 this study was part of a phd project on transnational politics of surinamese, kurds and turks in the netherlands, completed at the institute for migration and ethnic studies at the university of amsterdam in december 2008. 3 it is noteworthy that the migrant organizations figure 1 are for the great majority established and directed by the first generation. by the late 1990s second generation youngsters started to become part or administrative boards, and in leftist organizations i also observed females. it is thus possible that today the picture looks different. 4 interview with a founding member of ikd and former htkb member, istanbul, 19 november, 2005. 5 ibid. 6 ibid. 7 interview with the director of ka-der, istanbul, 1 august 2003. 8 for the full mission statement see http://www.freewomensfoundation.org 9 interview with ifwf board member, amsterdam, 27 october 2004. 10 interview with a volunteer of katagi, istanbul, july 15, 2003. 11 see http://www.omct.org/violence-against-women/urgent-interventions/ turkey/2003/10/d16566/, accessed 10 may 2011. 12 see for instance http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/isku/, http://www.kwahk.org/ articles.asp?id=18, http://ydicagri.org/ingilizce_sayfalar/gulbahar.html, http://www. kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=9213, all accessed 10 may 2011. 13 interview with a board member and member of dehap istanbul, istanbul, 8 august 2003. 14 see http://www.freewomensfoundation.org/english/news/press%20statements/ pressreleases%20ifwf%2001.htm and http://www.enawa.org/scripts/wwwopac.exe ?database=brief&isutf8=1&%250=100383, accessed 10 may 2011. 15 at the time of writing the name of the party is the bdp. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 women in transnational migrant activism 79 references al-ali, n. 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(2009). from guest workers into muslims. the transformation of turkish immigrant associations in germany. newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing. microsoft word craig.doc studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 93 social justice in a multicultural society: experience from the uk gary craig1, university of hull abstract social justice is a contested concept. for example, some on the left argue for equality of outcomes, those on the right for equality of opportunities, and there are differing emphases on the roles of state, market and individual in achieving a socially just society. these differences in emphasis are critical when it comes to examining the impact that public policy has on minority ethnic groups. social justice should not be cultureblind any more than it can be gender-blind yet the overwhelming burden of evidence from the uk shows that public policy, despite the political rhetoric of fifty years of governments since large-scale immigration started, has failed to deliver social justice to britain’s minorities. in terms of outcomes, in respect for and recognition of diversity and difference, in their treatment, and in the failure of governments to offer an effective voice to minorities, the latter continue to be marginalised in british social, economic and political life. this is not an argument for abandoning the project of multiculturalism, however, but for ensuring that it is framed within the values of social justice. social justice in the uk: current political discourse social justice is a concept that has been debated--in different guises--for thousands of years. it is only since the 1970s, however, and particularly in the past fifteen years, that it has re-emerged into political discourse, most notably amongst governments which have characterized themselves as social democratic or “third way.” as miller argues (2001), in the context of the development of liberal democratic societies, “the quest for social justice is a natural consequence of the spread of enlightenment” (p. 4). in this article, we examine the meaning of the term “social justice,” particularly in a uk context, deriving a wide-ranging definition which draws on literature, policy and practice. we then apply its principles to the position of minority ethnic groups within the uk, to see the extent to which the policy framework of government and the outcomes of that policy framework for minorities can be said to be socially just. the concept itself remains a contested one, adopted from a variety of political positions, and linking to wider arguments about the roles of the state, the market, and the individual. although contemporary social democratic governments appear to “own” the approach of social justice, it has also been espoused from the political right in the uk and in australia, where, for example, the government argues that social justice is achieved best through an approach which privileges individualism when individuals are able to 1 professor of social justice, centre for social inclusion and social justice, university of hull, hull, hu6 7rx uk tel 00 44 (0)1482 465780 email g.craig@hull.ac.uk studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 94 compete in the market place, unconstrained by the action of the state. current arguments about social justice also expose the tensions with other overarching political goals of economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability (jrf, 2004). the concept of social justice received prominence within the united kingdom with the work of the commission for social justice established by the, then leader, of the labour party (csj 1994). in a context of deepening inequality and poverty--the uk was then, in income terms, amongst the most unequal countries in the developed world--the commission suggested that the elements of social justice would include: ♦ the equal worth of all citizens ♦ the equal right to be able to meet their basic needs ♦ the need to spread opportunities and life chances as widely as possible ♦ the requirement that we reduce and, where possible, eliminate unjustified inequalities. this list begged important political questions. the policy programme of uk new labour governments, and similarly disposed governments elsewhere--continue to beg some of them; for example, questions of what basic needs are. social democratic governments provide systems of social assistance of varying levels of generosity, but have not effectively defined the adequacy of that assistance to meet “basic needs” (as defined by a range of participatory research studies, see ex. in gordon et al., 2000). the uk government’s programmes to address social exclusion and reduce poverty are titled opportunity for all (e.g. dwp, 2005); however, most such governments do not go beyond goals related to equality of opportunity to promote equality of outcome, which many would argue is a more robust indicator of a socially just society. critics of social democratic governments argue that the state has to intervene more strongly to promote social justice, both in terms of the process by which it is achieved and by constructing redistributive policies. the market – covering all the institutions of society which operate to deliver goods and services – distributes those goods and services, as well as opportunities (or life chances) unfairly. therefore the state should have a key role in correcting those deficiencies. governments focusing only on the poor and disadvantaged are also failing one key test of social justice, which is to ensure the fair distribution of the good and bad things across the whole of society and not just amongst the poor. redistribution between different groups of poor people is not socially just redistribution and a socially just agenda would need to confront the huge disparities in income and wealth which remain within the uk and in many other countries. in the uk, the adoption of the goal of social justice--with a stated commitment to an agenda of equalities--has been used to mark off the policy agenda of the scottish executive as being more radical and redistributive than that of the uk parliament (scottish executive, 2003). however, the scottish executive, again, goes only some way towards a position of fairness to all: its 2003 spending manifesto argued that “scotland must be a society of strong inclusive communities where everyone can live with dignity … every policy we introduce … will be measured against success in closing the gap between the most disadvantaged and the average.” recent commentary suggests however that scotland too, despite its rhetoric, has some way to go to grasp the thistle of social justice (goodlad, 2005). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 95 ideas of social justice a key modern protagonist for the concept of social justice was john rawls (rawls, 1971). drawing on aristotle, hume, hegel, kant and other moral philosophers, he argued that (social) justice meant “fairness ... the principle subject of justice is the basic structure of society … the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation...,” (p. 6) -that is, he was not concerned with the benefits to be derived for individuals from private association. a “well-ordered society” was one in which “everyone is presumed to act justly ...” (p. 8), where vested interests are put to one side. rawls’ assertion of the idea of social justice as incompatible with a society oriented towards individual gain is echoed in donnison (1998) who argues that “standards and values cannot be developed privately” (p. 186), i.e. within one institution, or in relation to one practice. what, donnison suggested, “we apply to others we must apply to ourselves.” these approaches are grounded in the traditions of a redistributive modern welfare state. rawls then derived two basic principles: 1. “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others … 2. social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all” (p. 53). social justice thus has a clear inter-relationship with the concept of inequality. these principles were specific formulations of a more general position, that “all social values liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these values is to everyone’s advantage” (p. 59). the obverse concept, injustice, thus becomes in rawls' view, “simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all” (ibid). much inequality is unacceptable but some areas of inequality are acceptable where they are of wider benefit. for example, one might consider people who have undergone long periods of training, such as doctors, teachers or lawyers--or who are placed in more risky situations--such as firefighters, deep sea fishers or train drivers--to undertake key roles in society. it is reasonable that they should be rewarded but, at the same time, important also to recognize that the obscene disparities in income and wealth which characterize most societies are not socially just, particularly as much of that income and wealth is earned at the expense of others’ poorly-paid labour. this approach also highlights distinctions between equality of opportunity or access, equality of outcome, and equality of status. as noted above, most contemporary uk politicians promoting the concept of equality tend to argue for equality of opportunity; however, those on the political right emphasize simply equality of rules and processes, the state’s role being merely to ensure free market exchanges for all (equally). those broadly on the left, argue for equality of outcome – or at least sufficient equality of outcome to prevent injustice. technically, all full citizens in the uk have equality of status; however, equality of opportunity and access, and of outcome, say, for black and minority ethnic groups or for women or disabled people, are clearly not present, as we will demonstrate. it is clear from educational statistics, that equality of opportunity – in the sense that everyone starts studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 96 school more or less at the same point – is not itself enough to achieve social justice. for example, the impact of racism in educational systems means that many minority ethnic children fall far behind the average in attainment by the time they leave school (gillborn and mirza, 2000; craig, 2003; craig, 2006). this is but one example of lister’s critique that “what is not yet acknowledged is that genuine equality of opportunity and recognition of the equal worth of all our citizens is incompatible with the savagely unequal society we now live in. equality of opportunity in the context of economic and social structures that remain profoundly unequal is likely to remain a mirage” (quoted in nicf, 2001). this perspective is echoed in a recent analysis of the performance of new labour since it came to power in 1997, which argues that the uk still has a poor record for reducing levels of child poverty and that, despite new labour’s rhetoric on combating inequality, the gap between rich and poor has grown in the past few years (paxton and dixon, 2004). rawls then observed that if there were to be inequalities, they could only be justified on the basis that everyone had equality of opportunity to compete for the most desirable positions, regardless of their class or status. of course, most posts in society are not open equally to all because of the cumulative impact of disadvantages such as “race,” gender and social class. rawls’ famous test of social justice was through what he called the “veil of ignorance,” through which “no-one knows his place in society, class position or social status … they know that their society is subject to the circumstances of justice and whatever this implies” (op. cit., pp. 118-119). people, thus, would act without any sense of personal advantage. miller argues that social justice—which he regards as interchangeable with the concept of distributive justice—provides the political and philosophical basis for deciding “how the good and bad things in life should be distributed among the members of a human society” (2001, p. 1). these things incorporate, in his view, the familiar material dimensions of a “good life” – income, wealth, education, housing, health and so on. miller identifies three key principles which connect strongly to the concept of social justice: desert (i.e. what we deserve; need; and equality). in relation to desert, a just society is one “whose institutions are arranged so that people get the benefits they deserve.” (ibid. 155) this principle must not however become a rigid formulation contingent simply on institutional arrangements within a society, but allow concepts of need to come into play (i.e. resources cannot be committed solely on the basis of desert but also of need). we may imprison people because of their crimes but that does not mean that we may starve them at the same time. the concept of need is “not merely idiosyncratic or confined to those who hold a particular view of the good life … it must be capable of being validated on terms that all relevant parties can agree to” (ibid. 205). this validation is a political process, but one from which many parties have hitherto been excluded because of their lack of power, both in a formal and informal sense. in particular, as we will again argue, black and minority ethnic groups in the uk have hitherto been excluded from decision-making and most significantly from determining their own conceptions of need. indeed, black and minority ethnic groups are increasingly becoming resistant in the uk to research done “on” them without either their involvement in determining what the questions are which are to be asked or some sense that the research leads to demonstrable policy change (butt and o’neil, 2004). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 97 miller also argues that the notion of equality relevant to social justice is distributive in its nature: “it specifies that benefits of a certain kind – rights, for instance – should be distributed equally because justice requires this” (op. cit. pp. 232). to achieve social justice, we must have “a political community in which citizens are treated in an equal across-the-board way, in which public policy is geared toward meeting the intrinsic needs of every member, and in which the economy is framed and constrained in such a way that the income and other work-related benefits people receive correspond to their respective deserts” (ibid. 250). the concept of social justice is thus linked closely to other key concepts such as need, citizenship, and rights. marshall’s historic exposition of citizenship and social class (marshall, 1950) advanced taxonomy of rights by which one could identify the characteristics of citizenship. these incorporated: ♦ civil rights: property rights, legal guarantees and freedoms; ♦ political rights: right to vote, rights of association, constitutional participation; and ♦ social rights: entitlements to basic standards of education, health and social care, housing and income maintenance. many contemporary commentators on citizenship, such as lister (2003) and dean and melrose (1999) do not regard these rights as of equal weight. dean and melrose for example, argue that “civil rights underwrite the operation of the market economy and are entirely consistent with class inequality” whereas “political rights and social rights tend to challenge such inequality” (p. 180). thus citizenship and class, to a large extent, can embody opposing principles. from this perspective, there, again, remains a major political question about the degree to which social justice is compatible at all with the operation of a market economy; the model of economic relations strongly promoted by new labour and other social democratic governments. doyal and gough (1991) argue that social justice “stands against fanatics of the free market economy ... but also demands and promotes economic success” or, conversely, that “social justice is an ideal in its own right but economic success also demands a greater measure of social justice” (130). plant (2000), however, a key theoretician for the new labour project, argues that social justice requires governments to work with the grain of the market. for many commentators, however, the market is increasingly seen to be the fundamental cause of much injustice, both social and economic, and the goal of social justice as fairness demands that governments confront the inequities of market systems. most contemporary liberal conceptions of social justice generally place social and political rights far ahead of civil rights in the sense in which marshall used them. confusingly, civil rights have come in the past forty years, most of all through the political activism of blacks in the southern united states of america, more to mean social and political rights such as freedom to attend racially mixed (‘integrated’) schools than the more narrow meaning ascribed them by marshall. earlier analyses of social justice are also limited in their understanding of the way in which the dimensions of gender and culture need to be built into a framework of values; to marshall’s typology we would need to add, following castles (2000), lister (2003) and others, the categories of cultural rights and gender rights. for minority ethnic groups, this means the right to be studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 98 culturally different within a society--within certain parameters2--which provides the same social, civil and political rights to all. social justice in multicultural societies this raises the important theoretical and political agenda of exploring the nature of social justice within multicultural societies and particularly those characterized by institutional and individual racism. multicultural societies have increasingly been struggling with the difficulties of incorporating respect and recognition for cultural diversity and difference within a framework of universal rights: respect and recognition for minorities might be seen as ways in which equality of status, of common citizenship, are put into operation. at present, within the uk, arguments about cultural and ethnic diversity have moved away from the notion of multiculturalism and are increasingly couched in terms of debates about social integration, assimilation and cohesion rather than about social justice. social injustice might however be said to emerge not just from the unconstrained workings of institutions, groups and organisations through the mechanisms of the market, which lead to significant differences in income, wealth and the opportunities and outcomes these bring, but also because of cultural and socially-constructed differences based on, for example, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability (fraser, 2001). we will return to the question of multiculturalism below. social justice is also about the non-material aspects of life. these incorporate critical dimensions of respect and recognition between different groups and individuals (and not just the poor). for miller, the distributive notion of social justice is not to be confused with “the ideal of a society in which people regard and treat one another as equals … [which] … is not a distributive ideal in itself but does have distributive implications” (op. cit., pp. 232, 241). for example, such a conception can influence our attempts at distributive justice. this latter concept he terms social equality, which “is a matter of how people regard one another and how they conduct their social relations’. (op. cit. 239). this complementary “recognition” or “relations of respect” aspect of social justice has been strongly argued in recent years by e.g. young (1990). for her, social justice as a distributive issue has to be set within a relational and cultural context, in particular “the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression” (p.30). individuals, as well as the state and the market, have a key role to play in supporting the goals of social justice and answering the sorts of deceptively simple question posed by miller in relation to social justice between the genders: “is it fair that women should perform more domestic labour than men?” (2001, p. 5) or, to link more closely to the theme of this article, is it fair that certain minorities should end up in particularly exploited sections of the labour market? miller argues that the major challenge posed by multiculturalism is that it widens the notion of the closed political community within which concepts such as need, rights, and desert are usually contested. however, this is not an argument for “the elimination of cultural differences but the opening up of national identities so that they become accessible to the members of many (ideally all) cultural groups within existing 2 in most multicultural societies, there are lively political debates now about what these parameters should be (see parekh, 2002); increasingly, they are being more tightly drawn at present. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 99 democratic states” (2001, p. 263). the political task, then, is to ensure that all cultural groups are, first, recognized and secondly, fully engaged in the process of determining the principles of social justice and acting on those principles. it is clear, as miller argues, that there is little empirical evidence which supports the view that cultural differences translate into differing conceptions or principles of social justice, although the way those principles are reflected in differing practices may vary. the important point is that social justice cannot be blind to issues of culture but this is, in any case, an area which has yet to be explored in any depth. we do know that the achievement of equally socially just outcomes, in terms of meeting need and so on, is markedly variable from one so-called multicultural country to another. to some degree this variability is a reflection of the structural constraints under which governments operate; in terms, for example, of the historical development of formal political constitutions or informal political settlements. government’s preparedness to tolerate--or reject—structural racism, however, plays an equally important part. in france, for example, ethnicity is not regarded as a legitimate factor in the determination of citizenship because of the republican constitution of 1789. minorities are thus effectively “written out” of the policy process to a large degree3 and, for example, from research which describes the level and type of disadvantage that they face. in germany, jus sanguinis, basing citizenship on the rights of blood ties rather than on jus solis, of residence, has meant that the aussiedler returning to germany from poland and russia have greater rights to citizenship than, say, migrants of turkish origin who have lived and worked in germany for thirty years and have children born in germany.4 in malaysia, whose population is very roughly divided equally between people of malay, chinese and indian origin, economically successful chinese people and academically successful indian people find their advancement through many avenues blocked because the malay constitution enhances the rights of malays and discriminates in their favour. in new zealand, despite the provisions of the treaty of waitangi which provided legal protection for the maori, at least in terms of land rights, they are still to be found most strongly amongst those who are unemployed, in the prison population and in areas marked by social and economic deprivation. and in australia, the treatment of the aboriginal kuri people has been even more shameful as their relatively weak land rights are now under threat; indeed, social and economic policy towards them might be regarded as a legacy of the ethnic cleansing of the nineteenth century, carried on by other means. in canada, the federal government has at least publicly apologized to the inuit for its oppressive treatment of them over the past two hundred years although, more generally, there is strong evidence that poverty, ill-health and poor social and economic conditions are strongly racialized (galabuzi, 2006). 3 the “hidden” nature of poverty and poor housing conditions experienced by many migrants living in paris, and their exclusion from much social policy, has been used to explain the disturbances which took place in the autumn of 2005. 4 belatedly, this injustice is being recognized with the children of long-settled migrants being offered german citizenship: for further discussion, see craig, 2003. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 100 other dimensions of social justice most major conceptions of social justice fail to consider the role of those most disadvantaged by social injustice, as actors rather than simply victims in the search for social justice. the united nations (see e.g. undp, 1997) points to the many ways, including organizational, informational, developmental, constitutional and legal, political and economic ways, in which participation by the disadvantaged themselves may promote social justice. many governments have now also acknowledged the importance of processes which empower the disadvantaged to act and speak on their own behalves. an additional dimension to social justice might thus be the role of community development as the means by which the excluded and the marginalized can act in the search for social justice. this action incorporates the dimension of “voice,” of being able to articulate one’s own needs and desires through participation at all levels in the policy process. to put it another way, social justice is not simply about achieving forms of human welfare--of whatever kind--but the means by which that welfare is obtained. process is as important as outcome. this has been one of the major contributions which community development and the activities of social movements--for recognition of rights in relation to disability, sexuality and so on--have made to the search for social justice. voice is also, as lister argues, a way in which those who are materially poor can challenge the way in which much of the rest of society exploits the poverty of those on low income to imply an inferior status--their “othering”--as human beings (lister, 2004). it has also been argued (see e.g. jrf, 2004) that geography has an important influence on the achievement of social justice. differential equality of opportunity, poverty, access to rights and so on, may be accentuated, for example, for those in rural areas as compared with their urban counterparts, (e.g. the costs of accessing goods and services and their frequently poorer quality), or those living in deteriorating neighbourhoods compared with those in well-resourced communities. social justice has a spatial dimension and, in thinking about this, we need to think carefully about different conceptions of poverty and need in different contexts--and for different groups--in the population. the position of many medical consultants of indian origin working in rural areas in the uk is a good example of the need for careful analysis. whilst rural areas are often portrayed as comfortable, higher income areas, the reason why many indian doctors end up working in rural areas is because they have faced racial discrimination and barriers in accessing the higher profile and status posts in teaching hospitals in urban areas, and are thus directed towards posts of lower status, including in rural areas. their higher profile in rural areas – where the proportion of minorities in relatively small – exposes them to further racism (see e.g. henderson and kaur, 1999). drawing on these analyses, one wide-ranging definition of social justice might thus be as follows: a framework of political objectives, pursued through social, economic, environmental and political policies, based on an acceptance of difference and diversity, and informed by values concerned with ♦ achieving fairness, equality of outcomes and treatment; ♦ recognizing the dignity and equal worth and encouraging the self-esteem of all; ♦ the meeting of basic needs; ♦ reducing inequalities in wealth, income and life chances; and studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 101 ♦ the participation of all, including the most disadvantaged. finally, of course, in thinking about social justice conceptually, we have to acknowledge that we can no longer think about it in the context of one country. it is increasingly necessary to consider how the process of globalization--that is, the impact of economic groupings which have no allegiance to particular political entities--affects this approach. in miller’s and earlier writers’ analyses, it was possible to define social justice within the context of a closed political community in which all relevant actors could be identified and encouraged to engage politically with the debates about social justice. globalization, according to many commentators, has generated increasing divisions, in terms of income and wealth, both between and within all nation states (see e.g. hirst and thompson, 1999; venters, 2002) and we have to respond to this analysis by thinking about how social justice can be understood at a transnational level. this idea is largely beyond the scope of this article but two more limited political scenarios might be advanced to protect the claims of social justice in this context: one is that each nation state can continue to argue the merits of social justice, the other that a transnational community and its institutions might emerge (which the european union, for example, might represent within the context of europe) which can constitute the new closed political community. alternatively, those concerned with issues of social justice between states and regions could choose not to retreat within such a closed community but use it as a base for advancing political, economic, social and environmental arguments for global (social) justice. this is a major political project for the future. social justice and britain’s minorities we can now review whether these principles of social justice operate to the practical benefit of black and minority ethnic groups in the uk, which has been regarded as a multicultural society for many years, particularly since the large-scale immigration of the 1950s-1970s. there is not space within this article to review the fairly extensive research evidence in detail but some pointers to the key literature will be provided. first of all, let us look at the issue of equality of status, and the particular dimensions of respect and recognition. technically, as noted earlier, all citizens of the uk, of whatever ethnicity, have an equal status as citizens. the minority ethnic population in the uk is now 8% as a whole5 but this population is not equally distributed: there are two london boroughs which have a minority population which is now actually in a majority and many urban areas have minority populations of more than 15% of the total population. migration to the uk over the past 60 years, largely from former colonies, has been and continues to be predominantly driven by the labour market needs of the british economy, together with consequent family reunion. the minority population has grown more recently partly through natural population growth (about half of the current minority population was actually born in the uk) and partly in recent years through the growth of refugees (although their numbers are much smaller than is claimed by government or by rightwing media commentaries which provoke occasional panics over immigration).6 britain 5 as of the 2001 census but the figure is probably now nearer 10% 6 for example, recent press coverage in the uk claimed that between 600,000 and 1 million migrant workers per annum from east and central europe had arrived in the uk since the accession of former studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 102 now has a very diverse population – it is not unusual, for example, for cities with relatively small minority populations to accommodate more than fifty different languages and there are settled minorities in every local authority area in the uk. individual and institutional racism – that is abuse and assault by individuals or the maintenance of structures, mechanisms and processes which disadvantage people because of their ethnic origins – however, are continuing and, according to official statistics7, growing problems. in the last five years, the uk has seen a number of high level enquiries into aspects of the welfare state which have pointed to systematic racism; for example, the enquiry into the death of steven lawrence, a black teenager, and the failings of the police to respond effectively was just one of about thirty racially-motivated murders in the past ten years (mcpherson, 1999); the enquiry into the death of michael bennett, a black man killed whilst being restrained in a psychiatric hospital (blofeld, 2004); the enquiry into the racist murder of zahid mubarek, whilst in a prison cell, which is shortly to report but has attested to widespread racism in the prison service; the knifing and murder of firsat dag, a turkish refugee, in a deprived housing estate in glasgow; and a total of 69 racialized murders in the past ten years. immigrants detained in government reception centres are now widely known to have been subject to systematic abuse and assault; police at a training centre have been recorded by an undercover tv reporter engaging in widespread racist abuse; and other enquiries into structural racism are ongoing. despite the fact that far-reaching legislation was introduced in 2000 to confront racism in public institutions, progress has been very slow and the uk home secretary has now called (again) for all public bodies to address racial discrimination within their services, backed by firm action, ethnic monitoring, public service agreements and inspection. meanwhile, the police service records tens of thousands of incidents of racist abuse and attacks each year (a number which is recognized to be an underestimate of the real extent of the problem, the british crime survey reporting three times as many such incidents annually); the number of anti-semitic attacks has reached a peak in recent years; and the fascist british national political party, whose political platform has been based in part on repatriating immigrants, fielded a record number of candidates in the 2005 general election. a mori poll for the british council revealed in 2000 that young people in other countries perceived britons to be “arrogant, xenophobic ... racially intolerant ... and frequently drunk” (cited in craig, 2003). a second poll found that roughly one-third of the uk population admitted that they had racist attitudes and that figure has apparently grown substantially in the past few years, in part because of the hostile government and media treatment of asylum-seekers and refugees, in part because of the growing islamophobia generated by the so-called global “war on terror’. one consequence of the 9/11 attacks in new york has been the introduction of legislation which has allowed suspected terrorists to be imprisoned for years without trial, and stopping and searching of suspects which, the home office admits, will disproportionately disadvantage people “of muslim appearance” (whatever that might be). more recently, in the wake of bombings and attempted bombings in london, people soviet bloc states to the european union in 2004. the true figure, over two years, was 447,000, i.e. roughly 200,000 per year. 7 see for example home office statistics www.homewoffice.gov.uk/rds/stats and the outcomes of the uk british crime survey. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 103 of “unusual” dress and appearance have been apprehended on buses, trains and airplanes leading one senior police officer of asian origin to say that a new offence, of “travelling whilst asian,” had been introduced by the police. none of this can be regarded as an approach which privileges respect to those who happen to dress or look differently. at a more modest level, there are a number of struggles being carried forward by minorities over aspects of their culture which, they argue, should be recognized and accepted within a multicultural society in which they also are, in theory at least, full citizens. examples of this are the right for young women and girls to wear particular forms of clothing – the hijab and the jilbab – at school and at work, for respect for traditional forms of food preparation (there is currently a discussion about humane ways to kill animals in keeping with the principles of halal food preparation), and the right to open faith schools (the uk has had christian schools for hundreds of years but government has recently argued that single faith schools when maintained by muslims undermine community cohesion). in this context, it would be difficult, therefore, to argue that social justice – in a relational sense – is available to members of minority ethnic groups in the uk. equality of status is clearly, beyond the rhetoric of citizenship, unequally offered within the uk. the struggles by minority groups to assert their cultural rights have occasionally taken a violent form. in 1989, salman rushdie’s book the satanic verses led to a fatwah, or implied sentence of death, being placed on him by orthodox islamic clerics and he had to go into hiding for many years. more recently, tensions between what is described as the british culture of free speech and respect for other religions and cultures has been tested when performances of a play, behtzi, which portrayed murder and abuse within a sikh temple, were abandoned as a result of a vigorous street protest by members of the sikh community, a community which is incidentally in many ways one of the highest achieving minority groups within the uk. to date, however, no acts of violence have led to the deaths of those testing the boundaries between different cultures – as happened in the netherlands when the filmmaker theo van gogh was killed allegedly by a member of an islamic radical group because he satirized the treatment of women by muslims. the converse – racist deaths of black and minority people – however, is, as noted, a frequent occurrence. this is not to argue that there are not tensions in determining the parameters of acceptable behaviour or speech within the uk – indeed the events since 9/11 have brought these tensions into sharper focus. the point here is that minorities feel that their ability to assert their cultural rights are not being formally recognized, particularly in the current climate and that resorting to more strident or even violent protest is the only way in which they can have their viewpoint acknowledged.8 in terms of equality of opportunity, for example in terms of opportunity of access to goods, services, and, in particular, welfare provision the situation is no better. it is this situation which, as noted earlier, provides the basis for the state to compensate for the failure of the market to deliver goods and services on an equitable and socially just basis. reviews of the entire provision of welfare and specific aspects of it (modood et al., 1997; craig, 1999; craig, 2001; parekh, 2002: craig, 2003; platt, 2003) within the uk suggests that access to welfare provision is unequally available. indeed, racism in state welfare has a long pedigree, going back to the sixteenth century when the first queen elizabeth, at a time of economic depression within the uk, ordered all “negroes and blackamoors” to 8 martin luther king argued that “riots are the language of the unheard.” studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 104 leave the country rather than allow them to receive poor law welfare support. these reviews show that opportunity to access the various aspects of welfare – housing, education, the labour market, social services, the health service – is shaped strongly by the dimension of ethnicity. although this is not an iron law in the sense that some minority groups are now beginning to achieve well despite the obstacles placed in their way, certain minority groups – particularly those of african caribbean, bangladeshi and pakistani origin and those from the more recently arriving groups – continue to be concentrated in the most deprived housing neighbourhoods and thus have access only to the schools with the worst conditions, poorest staffing provision and least good records of attainment (gillborn and mirza, 2000). they have greatest difficulty in accessing appropriate health provision (often because of the failure of health services to respond to specific cultural needs such as for interpretation, by ethnically-matched provision, or by providing female doctors for women patients), they are obstructed in terms of advancement in the labour market and their careers and often end up in the workplaces with the poorest working conditions, poorest pay and least security (craig, 2003; cabinet office, 2003) and they are concentrated amongst those with the lowest incomes (craig, 1999; platt, 2003) . the failure of the state welfare system to respond to the needs of minority groups is, in part, also a reflection of their failure to offer them the opportunity to participate adequately in important decision-making mechanisms – another aspect of the definition of social justice given above. black and minority ethnic people have rarely had a formal voice in a wide range of policy initiatives such as neighbourhood renewal or voluntary sector development and funding streams to autonomous black and minority ethnic organizations remain marginal to most large-scale mainstream policy initiatives. where government does consult minorities, there is an increasing sense that it tends to deal with what younger minorities now regard as the generation of older “community leaders” who are no longer regarded by many minorities as representing them (jan-khan, 2003). for example, at a recent muslim summit called by prime minister blair, no one under the age of 40 was present. the definition of social justice drawn together earlier in this paper is also concerned, most crucially, with equality of outcomes. if one looks again across the whole range of welfare provision, outcomes for black and minority people – with a very few notable exceptions – are disproportionately poor compared with the population at large. for example, if we look at the pinnacle of political decision-making, the house of commons, there are currently only 19 black and asian mps out of a chamber of 630 mps--that is barely 3% compared with a black and minority ethnic population of 8%--and there has never been an asian female mp although asian women have been settled in the uk for more than two hundred years. educational attainment--in terms of school qualifications, entry to higher education, achievement at the highest level of higher education--is, with some exceptions, far lower than the national average for most minority groups (for example there are very few black or asian professors in uk universities – about 2% in all – and there are no black or asian vice-chancellors or principals in the 110 uk universities). even in those areas where some minorities do well – such as medicine – there is a glass ceiling which stops them achieving the highest honours. thus, as noted earlier, black and asian hospital consultants often find themselves working in the poorest or most isolated hospitals because they are unable to studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 105 secure posts in the more prestigious teaching hospitals. in the police force, barely 2% of the uk force nationally is from black and ethnic minorities and there is only one black chief constable. there are no black directors of social services in the more than 150 local authority social services departments. whilst about 5% of social services staff are from minorities, that figure drops to less than 2% in social services management posts. in education, the area where advantage and attainment might best be promoted, disadvantage and discrimination are built into the education system from a very early age. despite the fact that each of the main ethnic groups has achieved higher standards than ever before, a report commissioned by ofsted, the government’s inspection body, found a few years ago that black and ethnic minority pupils are disadvantaged systematically by the education system (gillborn and mirza, 2000). most strikingly, the researchers concluded that one ethnic group (black young people) actually entered school 20 percentage points in advance of the average but left it 21 points behind the average, a deeply disturbing reflection on racism within the formal educational system. ironically, for one outcome, young black people scored highly – but this was for the number of permanent exclusions from school. these were the result, it appears, of a complex range of factors but included racist responses from schools which disproportionately label and exclude black school pupils (cooper, 2004). in the field of health, a recent survey of pay awards in the nhs found them riddled with racism. in terms of mental health, black service users are more likely to be (mis)-diagnosed as schizophrenic, contained in psychiatric institutions and treated with electroconvulsive therapy (rai-atkins, 2002). this--and a much wider range of evidence--demonstrates that in terms of equality of outcomes, black and minority groups do not achieve anything like social justice. this is not an argument that every person, every structure, or every policy in the uk concerned with the provision of welfare is racist, far from it, but institutional and individual racism remain prevalent to a large degree and, for most minorities, have a determining effect on their life chances. faced with this lack of equality of status, of opportunity, of outcome, and of respect and recognition, what should be the political strategy pursued by the uk’s minorities – and those in other countries for that matter, to achieve social justice? the gradualist strategy of parliamentary and political representation--at every level, from central government to local government, the voluntary sector and so on--has clearly not succeeded in helping minorities get more effective control of the conditions under which they live. some minority groups have pursued a separatist strategy through the creation of autonomous organizations, faith schools and separate welfare agencies such as black housing associations. these might have given a degree of control to such groups but are often situated in a broader context of a lack of resources and a struggle to survive. ironically, in some areas, minorities have been accused of pursuing a policy of segregation in relation to housing; a classic example of blaming the victim since for many minorities, there is no question of choice. because of limited access to social housing, to mortgage finance and so on, it is only in the poorest quality housing areas that they have been able to access accommodation at all. as susan smith (1989), puts it, this concentration in certain areas does not explain why minorities “should pursue this [choice] in the more run-down segments of the housing stock [with poor quality housing, dangerous neighbourhoods and inadequate health and education provision], rather than in studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 106 areas where they could secure the symbolic and economic benefits associated with suburban life” (p. 130). over the past forty years, there have been increasing outbreaks of interracial violence in some cities, most recently in northern cities three years ago. whilst some of these disturbances – or riots, as the media like to call them – have been prompted by single events, such as the arrest or death of a black individual, increasingly some minority commentators are viewing them as a political response to the cumulative disadvantage faced by britain’s minorities over the past sixty years or more (jan-khan, 2003). in many parts of britain, particularly rural areas and areas where there is only a relatively small population of black and ethnic minorities, there is still a significant level of denial that racism is a problem (darr et al., 2005). this suggests that these disturbances will continue to erupt until the uk government, and the population as a whole, recognize the claims of social justice for its entire people. it also suggests that the process of negotiation over the way in which social justice can be achieved for britain’s minorities has hardly started. at present, the language of the government – of integration and assimilation – often tends towards the language of the 1950s, where minorities were expected to surrender most aspects of their culture (perhaps being left with “just drumming and dancing” to assert their heritage) as a condition of achieving the status of full citizens. as we have seen, becoming legal citizens does not guarantee equality of status, opportunity or outcomes because of the impact of racism and this is a wider struggle which needs to be engaged with in order to promote social justice for all. social justice, as defined in the first part of this article, then is not a reality for britain’s minorities. in the current political climate, the tendency is increasingly to deny minorities effective expression of their cultural and religious rights. the wider agenda of ensuring equality as citizens – in terms of status, opportunity and access – has, despite legislation and political rhetoric – hardly begun to be addressed. new labour’s political project has barely scratched the surface of social justice for britain’s minorities and indeed, for that matter, despite gains in a few areas, the poorest and most marginalized in the uk as a whole. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 107 references blofeld, sir j. (2004). report into inquiry into the death of michael bennett. london: department of health. butt, j. and o’neil, a. (2004). let’s move on: black and minority ethnic older people’s views on research findings. york: joseph rowntree foundation. cabinet office (2003). ethnic minorities in the labour market. london: cabinet office. castles, s. (2000). ethnicity and globalisation. london: sage. cooper, c. (2004). understanding school exclusion. nottingham: education now. craig, g. (1999). ‘race’, poverty and social security in j. ditch (ed.). an introduction to social security. london: routledge. craig, g. (2001). ‘race’ and welfare. inaugural lecture as professor of social justice, hull: university of hull. craig, g. (2003). ‘ethnicity, racism and the labour market: a european perspective’ in j-g. andersen and p. jensen, (eds.). citizenship, welfare and the labour market, bristol: policy press. craig, g. 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(2003). citizenship: feminist perspectives (2nd edition). basingstoke: palgrave. lister, r. (2004). poverty, cambridge: polity press. marshall, t.h. (1950). citizenship and social class, in t.h. marshall and t. bottomore, (1992) citizenship and social class, london: pluto press. mcpherson, sir w. (1999). inquiry into the death of steven lawrence. london: hmso. miller, d. (2001). principles of social justice. cambridge, mass and london: harvard university press. modood, t., berthoud, r. et al. (1997). ethnic minorities in britain. london: policy studies institute. nicf (2001). annual report. belfast: community foundation for northern ireland. parekh, b. (2002). commission of enquiry into the future of a multi-ethnic britain. london: runnymede trust. paxton, w. and dixon, m. (2004). the state of the nation: an audit of injustice in the uk. london: institute of public policy research. plant, r. (2000). social justice in r. walker (ed.) ending child poverty. bristol: policy press. platt, l. (2003). parallel lives? london: child poverty action group. rai-atkins, a. (2002). best practice in mental health advocacy for black, caribbean and south asian users. york: joseph rowntree foundation. rawls, j. (1971). a theory of justice. oxford university press, oxford. scottish executive (2003). social justice: a scotland where everyone matters. edinburgh: scottish executive. smith, susan j. (1989) the politics of race and residence. cambridge: polity press. undp (1997). human development report: 1993. oxford: oxford university press. venters, g. (2002). globalisation: contested meanings and alternative futures. concept, 12(1): 5-10. young, i.m. (1990). justice and the politics of difference. princeton: princeton university press. correspondence address: jessica shaw, faculty of social work, professional faculties building, 2500 university drive nw, calgary, ab, t2n 1n4, canada. tel.: +1 (403) 220-5942, email: jcashaw@ucalgary.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 143-159, 2013 full-spectrum reproductive justice: the affinity of abortion rights and birth activism jessica shaw, university of calgary, canada abstract: this paper argues that not only is there a relationship between birth activism and abortion activism, but that if empowering women is the goal, the two cannot be separated. by understanding how women’s bodies have been controlled and their reproductive lives appropriated, the current pro-choice and birth activist frameworks that are used to advocate for women can no longer be understood to address women’s needs. it is by working through the framework of full-spectrum reproductive justice that women may become truly empowered to regain control over their reproductive lives. “reproductive justice” is a term used to describe the link between reproductive health and social justice (luna, 2010). it is based on the full realization of women’s human rights, of which reproductive health is central (ross, 2006). the recognition of the various intersecting identities that women have, such as race, class, sexual orientation, ability, language, religion, relationship status, age, national origin forms the basis for understanding reproductive justice (ross, 2006; silliman, fried, ross, & gutiérrez, 2004). the lack of sexual and reproductive rights for women is as related to these various identities as it is to gender inequality. this immediately separates it from other women’s rights movements which have traditionally grown out of white, middle-class rhetoric. reproductive justice highlights the inequality that exists regarding who can control their reproductive destiny and advocates for an end to structural power differences that prevent the empowerment of women (ross, 2006). in order to accomplish this, colonization, industrialization, capitalism, and the imposition of patriarchy must be addressed. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 144 jessica shaw typically, in canada, the language of reproductive justice is used primarily in relation to abortion, but activists must recognise the need for both abortion advocates and birth activists to work together. opposing abortion and normalizing overly medicalized births are both rooted in the subjugation of women. in order to emancipate women from sexist oppression and promote women’s empowerment, activists in westernized countries need to support both abortion rights and the de-medicalization of childbirth. however, the current pro-choice and birth activist frameworks, through which these arguments are generally discussed, are not sufficient in addressing the realities of women. in order to end reproductive oppression, activists must work collectively under a full-spectrum reproductive justice framework. in order to fully understand reproductive justice, concepts such as reproductive oppression, medicalization, women’s rights, abortion activism, and birth activism will be discussed in this paper. it is important to identify that these discussions will be specifically relevant to westernized countries. while the focus of this paper is on women’s reproductive health needs and the accompanying activism that is carried out in industrialized nations such as canada, it is not my intention to downplay the significance of working towards ending maternal morbidity and mortality worldwide. the topics of concern regarding women’s reproductive health needs may be different cross-culturally, but the goal of empowering women is the same. i have chosen to use the term “activist” to refer to both individual advocates and to those who work at an organizational level. while there are many activists who work on reproductive justice issues, not all of them will use the language or subscribe to the principles of reproductive justice (luna, 2010). this paper addresses activists who work on issues related to reproductive oppression, but do not yet subscribe to the language and ideology of reproductive justice. as a whole, reproductive justice encompasses much more than is presented in this paper, with the scope of this paper being limited to bridging the gap between abortion and birth activists. reproductive justice in the context of canada reproductive oppression is defined as “the control and exploitation of women, girls, and individuals through our bodies, sexuality, labour, and reproduction” (ross, 2006, p. 2). women’s various identities, especially their racial and socioeconomic identities, will have an impact on how they experience reproductive oppression. both abortion activism and birth activism seek to end reproductive oppression by restoring the control of female reproduction to women. in many parts of the world, abortion activism and birth activism revolve around the need for women to be able to access medical facilities, legal abortions, and skilled birth attendants. worldwide, it is estimated that more than 358,000 women die (connors, 2010) and between 15 20 million are injured and disabled every year from pregnancy and birthrelated studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 full-spectrum reproductive justice 145 complications (chowdhury, koblinsky, moran, & ronsmans, 2012). having access to emergency medical services, safe abortion care, and sanitary birthing conditions is absolutely critical to protect the health and lives of women and their families (international planned parenthood federation, 2006). womancentered care needs to be the focus of abortion and birth services worldwide, but each country will have different issues that need to be addressed within the culture-specific context of women’s rights. in canada, and for the purpose of this paper, arguments around abortion are framed in relation to reducing stigma and increasing access to services, while arguments related to birth are framed around de-medicalization and the restoration of woman-centered practice as normal perinatal care. especially when considering how having access to medical tools and skilled professionals can be extremely beneficial for women with complicated births, it may be confusing as to why women`s health advocates argue so strongly for the de-medicalization of women`s health. to clarify: de-medicalization is not advocating for the complete removal of medical knowledge and services from women`s health care (silliman, fried, ross & gutiérrez, 2004). activists recognize that emergency medical care needs to be available for all women. the call for the de-medicalization of women`s health is more a call for both the recognition of how women’s bodies have been appropriated through patriarchal ideology and the desire for the control of women’s bodies to be returned to women (ross, 2006). birth is an area where overly medicalized perspectives and interventions continue to harm women (harper, 2005; wolf, 2003). the control of the birthing experience is often placed unquestionably into the hands of medical professionals (ehrenreich & english, 2005). when this happens, women are no longer considered experts of their own needs and become bodies that have things done to them rather than full participants in the birthing process. birth activism: normalcy versus illness currently in canada, birth activism refers to a movement that promotes woman-centered care and believes that women are capable persons who are able to competently make choices about their pregnancies and births. birth activism generally promotes natural, unmedicated childbirth as leading to the optimal birthing experience, advocates for the ability of women to have control over their labour and birth in hospital settings, and promotes breastfeeding as normal and natural. many birth activists have careers that revolve around their passion for woman-centred reproductive healthcare. these people are midwives, doulas, mothers, community members and sometimes physicians. in order to understand birth activism, it is important to understand the impact that the medicalization of birth has had on women’s lives (bergeron, 2007; brodsky, 2008; ehrenreich & english, 2005; harper, 2005; janssen, hendersen & vedam, 2009). the medical model of childbirth, under which nearly 95% of women in studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 146 jessica shaw north america give birth, is based on the medicalization of birth and the control of women’s bodies (harper, 2005; janssen, hendersen & vedam, 2009). medicalization can be defined as the “biomedical tendency to pathologize otherwise normal bodily processes and states... [it] leads to incumbent medical management [and is] a social process whereby an expertbased biomedical paradigm dominates discussion of health and frames it in negative ways, usually as illness” (parry, 2008, p. 785). when natural physical processes are framed as illnesses, they become defined on a scale that ranges from normal to pathological, which can alienate people from regular experiences such as aging, death and birth (bergeron, 2007). the history of the medicalization of women’s bodies, especially as it relates to their reproductive lives, is well documented. entire books chronicle the various ways in which women have been subjugated in their roles related to pregnancy and birth (see for example, brodsky, 2008; ehrenreich & english, 2005; wolf, 2003). the medicalization of childbirth is a process that took place over much of the nineteenth century and continues today (harper, 2005). in an attempt to discredit female healers and midwives, the medical profession promoted technical births as an indicator of class status (brodsky, 2008; ehrenreich & english, 2005). by the early twentieth century, the superiority of physicians who promised “civil births” in the name of science and the desire for women to prove their class status by being able to have “high-class medicalized births” became the norm (harper, 2005, p. 33). as the fad of hospital-based births continued, the credibility and knowledge of midwives and traditional healers were forcibly lost. narratives, hospital records and memories document how labour was appropriated as something to be medically managed and controlled by typically male physicians who operated according to their schedules and perceptions about the need for efficiency (brodsky, 2008; ehrenreich & english, 2005; harper, 2005). unfortunately, once medical interventions became routine, the concept of what a normal birth looks like changed. whereas for millions of years, normal or natural birth for women generally consisted of a non-medicated vaginal delivery, over the past few decades in north america, birth has become more medicalized and less reliant on women’s innate birthing abilities (brodsky, 2008; ehrenreich & english, 2005; harper, 2005). as birth stories and prenatal classes began to discuss birth in medical terms and medical interventions as common procedures that are required for the normal progression of labour, the concept of what a normal birth ought to be like changed. for example, it appears to be a current, commonly held belief that it is normal for a woman to labour and give birth lying down. the reality is, this position works against gravity and against the body’s natural urge and desire to labour in a position that promotes the downward movement of the baby through the birth canal (simkin, 2001). this position, called the supine position, literally means, “lying face upwards...inert, indolent, morally or mentally inactive” (barber, 2004, p. 1562) and was likely introduced and promoted as the best position to give birth in order to facilitate the comfort of the physician who could just sit at the end of the bed, see everything and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 full-spectrum reproductive justice 147 extract the baby. the loss of confidence that women can experience over their lack of control when birthing is a contributing factor to the disempowerment of women (bergeron, 2007; lothian, 2006; lowe, 2004). since medicalization has led to women’s pregnancies, labours and births being viewed as conditions to be treated rather than as natural processes, a defining characteristic of birth under the medical model is that there are often many medical interventions that are used (bergeron, 2007; munro, kornelsen, & hutton, 2009). some of the most common interventions currently used during labour and birth in north america include: ultrasound, amniocentesis, electronic foetal monitors, induction, intravenous hook-ups, spinal analgesia, general anaesthetic, episiotomy, forceps, vacuum delivery and caesarean section (lothian, 2006; parry, 2008). these interventions continue to be routinely used despite the fact that their use was decried as generally unnecessary in a 2008 joint policy statement by the society of obstetricians and gynaecologists of canada, the association of women’s health, obstetric and neonatal nurses of canada, the canadian association of midwives, the college of family physicians of canada, and the society of rural physicians of canada (society of obstetricians and gynaecologists of canada et al., 2008). furthermore, restrictions on eating, drinking, movement and positioning are often imposed on women birthing in hospitals (klaus, kennell, & klaus, 2002). the safety of the woman in labour and her infant is affected when routine medical interventions and controlling restrictions compromise the woman’s ability to labour naturally. studies show it is often the seemingly benign initial medical intervention that leads to complications which, in turn, lead to the purported need for further medical interventions (cohain, 2007; lothian, 2006). often, these interventions are suggested to women by medical professionals who have trained under the medical model and may have never seen a natural birth (harper, 2005; klaus, kennell, & klaus, 2002). the literature highlights that even when a woman desires a birth without medical intervention, caregivers working under a medical model may favour and promote a medicalized approach to birth (baker, choi, henshaw, & tree, 2005; lahood, 2007) . a common example of how the introduction of an intervention can lead to a highly medicalized, surgical birth is when a woman’s labour is induced or augmented with pitocin, a synthetic drug that simulates oxytocin and causes contractions (brodsky, 2008). unfortunately, the contractions caused by pitocin are generally longer and stronger than natural contractions (cohain, 2007). women who have pitocin are less likely to be able to cope with the pain of their contractions and often request pain medication. when the ability to feel contractions is dulled, women may be unable to vaginally birth their babies and a caesarean section is often recommended as a necessary intervention (brodsky, 2008; cohain, 2007). although they are common, caesarean section births are major abdominal surgery. as a result of medicalization, and in spite of the fact that the world health organization and other medical professional organizations suggest that no more than 10-15% of births be by caesarean delivery, currently in studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 148 jessica shaw north america the caesarean rate is around 30% (chaillet et al., 2007; munro et al., 2009; parry, 2008). this is problematic because complications arise for both women and babies when unnecessary caesareans are performed. citing reports from amnesty international, the center for disease control, the california public health department, and a longitudinal study on maternal morbidity in the united states, roth and henley (2012) reveal that, “dramatic rises in caesarean rates have coincided with increasing maternal deaths, a significant portion of which are connected to unnecessary caesareans” (p. 207). if women were allowed to labour naturally, without the introduction of unnecessary medical interventions, the rate of caesarean births would significantly decline (cohain, 2007). having control over one’s health care decisions is critical, and numerous authors have documented how important it is that women have absolute control over their pregnancies and births in order to have positive birthing experiences (see for example, baker, choi, henshaw & tree, 2005; goldberg, 2009; hardin & buckner, 2004; janssen, henderson & vedam, 2009; lothian, 2006; parry, 2008). working from the premise that “a satisfying birth will have a lasting positive effect, just as a traumatic or unsatisfying birth will have a negative one” (lothian, 2006, p. 297), it is understood that giving birth is a powerful, life-changing event that affects women and can either empower or disempower them about their ability to care for their families in the future (carlton et al., 2005; jordan & murphy, 2009; lowe, 2004). goldberg highlights that there is a positive correlation between how women feel about being in control of their birthing experience and how they feel about their babies in the postpartum period. having control over one’s birth experience can lead to an increased sense of responsibility for the health of oneself and one’s baby, a shorter recovery period, enhanced emotional wellbeing, a sense of empowerment and boosted self-esteem (goldberg, 2009). the ability of pregnant women to control the environment that they labour in, the caregivers who tend to them, the people who are present during labour and birth, the positioning that they labour in, and the interventions that are used is documented in birthing literature as being critical for the empowerment of women through childbirth (carlton et al., 2005; hardin & buckner, 2004; janssen et al., 2006; lothian, 2006; price, noseworthy, & thornton, 2007). another aspect of maternal health that has been medicalized and stigmatized is breastfeeding. the benefits of breast milk over formula have been welldocumented and suggest that breastfeeding is indisputably the optimal way to provide infants with all of their nutritional needs and to promote bonding between a mother and her baby (huggins, 2005; klaus et al., 2002; minister of public works and government services canada, 2002; simkin, 2001). in fact, studies have found that, especially in developing countries, infants are twenty-five times more likely to die when they are fed infant formula over of breast milk (harper, 2005). breast milk is perfectly designed to meet the nutritional needs of infants, and to provide protection against illness both during and after the breastfeeding years (huggins, 2005). furthermore, breastfeeding promotes bonding and healthy attachment between mothers studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 full-spectrum reproductive justice 149 and their children, and leads to healthier childhood mental and physical developments (harper, 2005; huggins, 2005; klaus et al., 2002; simkin, 2001). health canada, and other national and international organizations, recommend exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of an infant’s life, and then sustained breastfeeding for approximately two years after that (minister of public works and government services canada, 2002). in most parts of the world, breastfeeding is the only way to nurture an infant. yet in canada and other westernized countries, breastfeeding is framed in terms of being a mother’s choice rather than in terms of nutrition. it is for this reason that anthropologists deem the discontinuation of breastfeeding as a negative indicator of how immigrant families acculturate to westernized standards (agnew, gilmore, & sullivan, 1997). with all of the benefits of breastfeeding, it may be difficult to understand why some women choose not to breastfeed. for some women, not breastfeeding may be related to illness or disability, or because it would impede their ability to work outside of the home (huggins, 2005). for other women, not breastfeeding is a choice unrelated to ability or necessity and is more related to the ways in which formula feeding has been promoted as normal in society (huggins, 2005). this normalization is directly related to the medicalization of women’s bodies to support consumerist based capitalism (ehrenreich & english, 2005). current publicized examples show how breastfeeding is still considered taboo in canadian culture. in 2008, a woman was ushered out of a clothing store in vancouver, british columbia after she started breastfeeding her baby. apparently a store staff member told the mother that she was offending other customers. at the time, the mother did not know that she had the legal right to breastfeed in public, and was quoted as saying she felt “humiliated” (cbc news, 2008b). of the incident, dr. verity livingstone of the university of british columbia’s vancouver breastfeeding centre said, “whenever a woman is told breastfeeding is offensive or indiscreet, it’s shaming new mothers for doing what’s right” (cbc news, 2008b). similarly, even though it is well established that breastfeeding helps relieve infant discomfort caused by the change in pressure during the take-off and descent of a flight, women have reported being asked to cover their breasts with a blanket while breastfeeding onboard airplanes (cbc news, 2008a). the problems that exist related to women breastfeeding in public stem from the objectification of women’s breasts as objects of sexual attraction rather than as a natural food source. this is clearly evidenced in the media and on social networking sites such as facebook. facebook is a social networking tool where people create public profiles about themselves and can post notes, send messages and display photos. consistently on facebook, photos of women breastfeeding are deemed “obscene” and removed by the website managers, whereas highly sexualized images of women remain (muir, larner, bee, joseph, calvert, slamen, & muir, 2010). groups have been formed to protest this practice, the largest of which is called “hey facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” (muir et al., 2010). this group states, “nursing moms everywhere have a right to show pictures of their babies eating, just like bottle-fed babies have studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 150 jessica shaw a right to be seen” (muir et al., 2010). by the end of 2010, over a quarter of a million facebook users had joined this group. breastfeeding activists and birth activists advocate that breastfeeding be viewed as a natural and normal component of motherhood and infant wellness. the goal is to de-stigmatize public breastfeeding and recreate a culture where both breastfeeding, and seeing women breastfeed, are once again common experiences. overall, birth activists maintain that in order to restore the dignity that has been taken from women by colonization and the historically male-dominated medical institution, it is important that women understand the myths, concerns and realities surrounding both natural birth and breastfeeding. normal childbirth needs to be redefined to reflect women having complete control over decisions related to their births. activism to promote the demedicalization of birth and breastfeeding is needed in order for women to be able to resist birthing under an oppressive guise of care that is patronizing and disempowering (ehrenreich & english, 2005). one way that women resist the medicalization of their bodies and their births is through midwifery care. midwifery care differs from physician-based care in that it looks beyond the need for physical wellness only and promotes the importance of facilitating births that are both empowering and celebratory (cohain, 2007). whereas 53% of canadian women rated their births with a physician as “very positive,” 71% of women under midwifery care rated their births this way (shaw, ormiston & weeds, 2008). furthermore, the health outcomes of women and babies under midwifery care are excellent, with fewer caesarean sections and a lesser need for medical interventions (shaw, ormiston & weeds, 2008). midwifery care seeks to honour and empower women to have control over their birthing experiences, thus freeing them from the patronizing care that often exists under the medical model. unfortunately, midwives are not uniformly covered by health care benefits, and many women in canada still have to pay for their midwifery care (canadian association of midwives, 2012). since the secondwave feminist movement, health advocates have supported the resurgence of midwifery as an important aspect of women’s reproductive health (craven, 2010; spoel & james, 2006). while discrepancies in care still exist, women are taking action to secure reproductive justice through birth choice (craven, 2010). while women are vocal about the need for midwifery care in order to regain control over their bodies, there is an aspect of reproductive health that many birth activists are silent about: the importance of women having access to abortion services. in focusing so strongly on the ways in which women are oppressed during labour and birth, activists often fail to recognize that it is the same social and medical structures that stigmatize natural birth and breastfeeding that also stigmatize abortion (ross, 2006). this is a huge gap in a movement that purports to be entirely focused on woman-centered care. midwives, doulas, and other birth activists have the responsibility to understand how abortion rights are maternal rights; and to advocate for awoman to be able to control all aspects of her pregnancy, beginning with whether to continue it or terminate it. currently, it appears that advocating studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 full-spectrum reproductive justice 151 for anything related to abortion is left for the abortion rights movement to address. abortion activism: normalcy versus stigma it is estimated that between 20,000 and 120,000 illegal abortions occurred annually in canada prior to the decriminalization of abortion (the childbirth by choice trust, 1998). as highlighted by the childbirth by choice trust, many of these were performed by persons without medical knowledge or the proper tools, and it was common for women to be injured or die from abortion-related complications. in hospitals, entire wards were dedicated to treating women who had complications related to unsafe abortion. we know from our own history and from looking at countries where abortion is still illegal that women will always seek abortion services, regardless of its legality, regardless of its safety, and regardless of whether or not it is considered a moral choice (shaw, 2006). when abortion is illegal, women are forced to have abortions in secrecy, often in clandestine conditions and without proper medical attendants or tools (shaw, 2006; the childbirth by choice trust, 1998). in many parts of the world, unsafe abortion is still the leading cause of death for women, with annual numbers estimating that over 70,000 women die from abortionrelated complications worldwide (international planned parenthood federation, 2006). the medicalization of the abortion procedure is an important step in preventing the potential infection and death of thousands of women. in canada, where medicalized abortion care is now the norm, abortion rights activism focuses on the need to address the other barriers that women still face in trying to access abortion services (shaw, 2006). in 2010, the most recent year with national abortion statistics, 64,641 were provided in canada (canadian institute for health information, 2012). this number can be considered a low approximation because the data is incomplete for british columbia and statistics were not collected for the province of québec (canadian institute for health information, 2012). furthermore, the national survey does not account for medical drug-induced abortions, self-procured abortions, or abortions done in the united states for canadian women (flaherty, 2003). in the previous national report, where québec abortions were included, the national abortion rate was 96,815 (statistics canada, 2008). this is likely closer to the actual number of abortions done in canada. as one of the most frequent outpatient procedures performed on women, and as something that nearly 1 in 3 women will experience at some point in their lives, abortion is extremely common (guttmacher institute, 2010). however, despite its, abortion is highly stigmatized. as the research coordinator at canadians for choice, i spent three months “undercover,” pretending to be a pregnant woman seeking abortion care. i called every hospital in canada and documented the information that i was given and the studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 152 jessica shaw way that i was treated. through this exercise, i learned of the many myths, misconceptions, and scare tactics about abortion that are often propagated by misinformed or judgemental people. i also learned of the compassionate care that many abortion providers offer. through these experiences, i have been able to connect and converse with many people who fight for abortion rights, both those who identify as pro-choice and those who identify as advocates for reproductive justice. the ensuing report on the research project that i did with canadians for choice was published as “reality check: a close look at accessing abortion services in canadian hospitals” (shaw, 2006). in it, some of the most prevalent barriers that women in canada face in relation to abortion are discussed. some of these include an insufficient number of abortion providers, long wait-times to access services, cost and travel difficulties, and anti-abortion pressure. women in marginalized communities, such as aboriginal and coloured women, immigrant women, rural women, and poor women are disproportionately affected by the laws that surround abortion. in canada, fewer than 16% of hospitals provide abortion services, and there are only 33 abortion clinics across the country (shaw, 2006; wu & arthur, 2010). although any hospital equipped with an obstetrics ward is capable of performing abortions, there are few physicians trained and willing to offer the service (shaw, 2006). this may be based on a combination of a fear of harassment, as anti-abortion extremists continue to target abortion providers and their families, and on the lack of training available in canadian medical schools. one study found that nearly 40% of canadian medical schools do not teach any aspect of abortion in the pre-clinical years and that more class time was spent discussing viagra than abortion law, policy, procedures, and pregnancy options counselling combined (koyama & williams, 2005). not having enough abortion providers can lead to long waiting periods for women. as abortion is a time-sensitive procedure, this can be a huge and distressing impediment. for some women, the option of travelling to another community to obtain an abortion may be appealing, but this can be costly in both time and money (shaw, 2006). the cost and travel difficulties related to obtaining abortion services are issues for many women who do not live near an abortion provider or for women who do not have healthcare coverage. given that in canada, most abortion clinics and hospitals that provide abortion services are located within 150 kilometres of the canada-united states border, having to travel to access abortion services is often a reality (shaw, 2006). although travel grants may be available for some women, they are generally offered as reimbursements rather than as funding that is provided in advance. women who must travel to access abortion services may have to take time off of work or school, arrange for childcare or eldercare, and explain to family and friends why they need to go out of town for a few days. for those who live in a community where abortion services are available, costs may be related to their not having healthcare coverage, as is the case for many immigrant women and visitors to canada. furthermore, although abortion is covered under provincial and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 full-spectrum reproductive justice 153 territorial healthcare, some provinces have strict requirements about how the abortion must be accessed in order to be eligible for coverage, and many provinces exclude abortion as a medical service eligible for interprovincial reciprocal billing (shaw, 2006). in new brunswick, for instance, abortion services are only covered when done at a hospital, after the referral of two physicians (shaw, 2006). on prince edward island, abortion services are non-existent, and all women requiring abortions, currently over 115 per year, must travel out of province (cbc news, 2010). arranging travel to access a healthcare service is something that often requires a person to go through several people. whenever a woman is forced to go through multiple gatekeepers in order to access abortion services, they run the risk of encountering anti-abortion sentiment. anti-abortion protesters and organizations are a dangerous force when it comes to attacking women’s rights (arthur, 2003; shaw, 2006). the antiabortion movement believes that the foetus has a right to life that supersedes a woman’s right to control her reproduction. as part of a movement, followers often engage in activities that condemn abortion and stigmatize women who have abortions. some of these activities include: protesting outside of abortion clinics and hospitals, operating “crisis pregnancy centres” that deceive pregnant women about the abortion procedure, setting up graphic displays on university campuses and in public spaces that compare abortion to genocide, and lobbying politicians to create laws that would recriminalize aspects of abortion (arthur, 2003). arthur, an abortion rights advocate, asserts that anti-abortion supporters are often religious, and can be found in practically every sector of society. in most countries, there are entire organizations that dedicate themselves to ending abortion. these organizations are effective in propagating myths about abortion and in using skilled public speakers to try to discredit the abortion rights movement. a common argument used by anti-abortion advocates is that a foetus is a human being and therefore has a right to life (canadians for choice, n.d.). if one agrees to the terms of this argument, it can still be argued that abortion needs to be a viable choice for women, based on a person’s right to self-determination. i would argue that until birth, a foetus primarily impacts the woman who is pregnant with it. the foetus relies on the woman for nourishment and life. in no other circumstance would we argue that if a person needs to be attached to another person in order to survive, then the individual rights of the supporting person are forgone. for example, if a person requiring dialysis twenty-four hours a day could only survive if attached to someone else, it would be understood to be completely within the rights of the supporting person to decide whether or not they would sacrifice their individual autonomy to help someone else. it is the same with abortion. even if a foetus is a human being, because it relies on a pregnant woman to survive, it is at the discretion of the pregnant woman to decide whether supporting another life is possible or desirable at that time. the woman-shaming that the anti-abortion movement promotes is centered on devaluing the rights of women and discrediting a woman’s ability to make choices that intimately affect her life (arthur, 2003; canadians for choice, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 154 jessica shaw n.d.). the justification for such misogyny is based in patriarchy and is only countered by fearlessly supporting all aspects of women’s rights. abortion rights activists advocate that a woman must have control over her reproductive health in order to be able to fully function as a self-determined person. abortion rights activism is based in valuing women, valuing children and motherhood, and valuing the right to self-determination (canadians for choice, n.d). typically, abortion activists advocate from a pro-choice perspective, a perspective that although based on the ideals of women’s rights, is problematic. the pro-choice perspective is problematic because of the language of “choice.” whereas rights are understood to be benefits that all people ought to have access to choices are connected to having resources and being able to exercise status (solinger, 2001). when things, including abortion, are framed as choices, a hierarchy is created that determines who ought to be able to make choices (smith, 2005; solinger, 2001). in the case of abortion, poor women and women of colour continue to be discriminated against because proponents of the pro-choice movement often “do not take into consideration all the social, economic, and political conditions that frame the so-called choices that women are forced to make” (smith, 2005, p. 127). for instance, when considering some of the barriers to abortion access, it is evident that women will be impacted differently. a woman living in an urban centre, with healthcare coverage and a supportive partner, will have a very different experience accessing abortion services than a woman who must spend time and money travelling from a rural location, a woman without healthcare coverage, or a woman without social support. the way a woman’s racial, geographical and socioeconomic identities intersect can impede her ability to access abortion services. when this happens, “choice” becomes a statussymbol limited to white, middle class women. the pro-choice perspective is not relevant to those who do not fit into this narrow category. the solution to the limitations that exist within the current pro-choice perspective may lie in the paradigmatic understanding and advocacy of reproductive justice. an intersectional call to action the theoretical framework of reproductive justice originated as an intersectional theory and call to action in response to the reproductive oppression of women (ross, 2006). motivated by the international conference on population and development in cairo in 1994, it was women of colour at the illinois pro-choice alliance in chicago who first coined the term “reproductive justice,” and since this time it has been members of the sistersong women of color reproductive health collective that have made it a popular and growing movement (luna, 2010; ross, 2006). the ideas behind reproductive justice are based on the historically valued womancentered reproductive practices and shared knowledge that was destroyed through colonization, industrialization and the imposition of patriarchy. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 full-spectrum reproductive justice 155 although the concepts embedded in the definition of reproductive justice are old, the popularization of the term signifies a renewed movement towards integrating reproductive health into social justice. as a principle, reproductive justice recognizes the need for full-spectrum reproductive health care activism (silliman, fried, ross & gutiérrez, 2004), yet in canada, most of the work done in the name of “reproductive justice” seems to be abortion related. in order to truly combat reproductive oppression, the reproductive justice movement needs to universally advocate for abortion rights, equal access to reproductive health services, maternal rights and for understanding the relationship between reproductive health and women’s empowerment. as a framework, reproductive justice provides the language, understanding and collectivity to bridge the current divide between abortion activism and birth activism. traditionally, abortion rights activists may have recognized the need for the de-medicalization of birth, and birth activists may have recognized the need for abortion rights, but to date, i would argue that each activist group has been relatively self-serving. the reason for this is understandable; by being exclusive in their focus on only select reproductive health issues, activists become experts in their area of concern and well versed in articulating their key points. however, in a culture that is often blind to the multiple ways in which women continue to be oppressed, there needs to be a convergence of abortion and birth activists who understand and support each other’s concerns and commit to working towards full-spectrum reproductive justice. the affinity between abortion activism and birth activism is striking and centres on the fundamental belief that a woman ought to have complete control over her body and over her reproductive life. unfortunately, women are rarely given the freedom to make reproductive choices that are free from pro-foetus, paternalistic rhetoric which places the value of a woman as secondary to the value of a foetus or to the beliefs of a physician (wolf, 2003). a woman who has an abortion and a woman who chooses a less medicalized birth both face the possibility of social stigma and harassment. for example, a woman who has an abortion may face harassment by people who believe in the value of the foetus over the value of the woman, and a woman who chooses to have an unmedicated home birth may also face social stigma that extends from the mistaken belief that home births are less safe than hospital births. in reality, studies show that women who carry low-risk pregnancies fare well, if not better, when they are able to birth outside of a hospital (ehrenreich & english, 2005; harper, 2005; janssen et al., 2006; klaus et al., 2002). in both cases, the concern of those who disagree with the woman’s choices is based on a standpoint that favours the health and wellness of the foetus over the health and wellness of the woman. abortion activists and birth activists support a woman’s right to make choices about her reproductive life in a context where she is informed, safe, and free from coercion (klaus et al., 2002; shaw, 2006). furthermore, both abortion and birth activists work to promote the concepts of choice and informed consent and to help de-stigmatize the attitudes and judgements that studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 156 jessica shaw surround reproductive health (canadians for choice, n.d.; harper, 2005). for instance, abortion activists try to normalize abortion as a common experience that many women have. de-stigmatizing abortion means opposing the belief that abortion is shameful , in spite of its being a personal aspect of life that is normal and often necessary. normalizing abortion does not mean that it ought to be considered insignificant due to its prevalence, and respect for a variety of emotions surrounding abortion experiences is key to supporting women (canadians for choice, n.d.). i would argue that normalizing abortion simply means that, as a procedure that many women go through, it needs to be recognized and respected as a potential part of any woman’s life. similarly, normalizing childbirth and breastfeeding is important to birth activists. the ability that women have to give birth is highlighted by birth activists, and the benefits of having an unmedicated birth are thoroughly discussed (harper, 2005; klaus et al., 2002). the natural benefits of breastfeeding are also promoted, and by emphasizing the normality of feeding a baby in public, activists and mothers work to deconstruct the social taboo of public breastfeeding, and promote the wellness of mothers and babies. challenging the stigmatizing and oppressive attitudes that surround abortion and demedicalized birth in society is not an easy task, but it is a necessary one. like many reproductive justice activists, i too would argue that there are inherent problems with each activist group. the current pro-choice movement often fails to recognize how it is exclusive, marginalizing, and does not address the realities of many women. the current birth movement often fails to emphasize the importance of women having control over all aspects of their pregnancy, beginning with whether or not to continue it. working through these dichotomized frameworks does not address the needs of women (ross, 2006; silliman, fried, ross & gutiérrez, 2004). in fact, if empowering women is the goal, abortion rights and birth rights must be recognized as inseparable. abortion rights activists and birth activists seek to end reproductive oppression. by combining women’s knowledge about pregnancy and birth with woman-centered medical care that is used appropriately and through informed consent, women can regain control over their reproductive health and lives (harper, 2005). reproductive rights are human rights, and it is unethical to support only some of the rights that are so important for all women. in order for women to experience true emancipation from reproductive oppression, supporters of the abortion rights movement and supporters of birth activism must work together to sustain a movement that advocates for full-spectrum reproductive justice (silliman, fried, ross & gutiérrez, 2004). to continue to work as though abortion and birth are separate issues divides the women’s rights movement and allows for the continuation of reproductive oppression. full-spectrum reproductive justice is the only movement that fully recognizes women’s intersecting identities and respects the full range of women’s reproductive health needs. women can regain control over their reproductive lives, but need the support of a unified movement. in a culture where colonization, industrialization and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 full-spectrum reproductive justice 157 patriarchy have appropriated women’s knowledge and women’s rights, it is time for a reproductive revolution. references agnew, t., gilmore, j., & sullivan, p. 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(2005). beyond pro-choice versus pro-life: women of color and reproductive justice. national women’s studies association journal, 17(1), 119-140. society of obstetricians and gynaecologists of canada, association of women’s health, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 full-spectrum reproductive justice 159 obstetric and neonatal nurses of canada, canadian association of midwives, college of family physicians of canada, and society of rural physicians of canada. (2008). joint policy statement on normal childbirth. journal of obstetrics and gynaecology of canada, 30(12), 1163-1165. solinger, r. (2001) beggars and choosers: how the politics of choice shapes adoption, abortion, and welfare in the united states. new york, ny: hill and wang. spoel, p., & james, s. (2006) negotiating public and professional interests: a rhetorical analysis of the debate concerning the regulation of midwifery in ontario, canada. journal of medical humanities, 27, 167-186. doi: 10.1007/s10912-006-9016-7 staggenborg, s. (1991). the pro-choice movement: organization and activism in the abortion conflict. new york, ny: oxford university press, inc. statistics canada. (2008, may 21). induced abortions. the daily. retrieved from http://www. statcan.gc.ca the childbirth by choice trust (eds.). (1998). no choice: canadian women tell their stories of illegal abortion. toronto, on: the childbirth by choice trust. wolf, n. (2003) misconceptions: truth, lies, and the unexpected on the journey to motherhood. new york, ny: anchor books. wu, f., & arthur, j. (2010). a survey of anti-choice protesting activity at canadian abortion clinics. vancouver, bc: abortion rights coalition of canada. boydell final correspondence address: katherine m. boydell, black dog institute, hospital road, prince of wales hospital, randwick nsw 2031; email: k.boydell@unsw.edu.au issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 298-304, 2017 dispatch co-producing narratives on access to care in rural communities: using digital storytelling to foster social inclusion of young people experiencing psychosis katherine m. boydell black dog institute, australia chi cheng centre for applied health research, canada brenda m. gladstone university of toronto, canada shevaun nadin lakehead university, canada elaine stasiulis the hospital for sick children, canada arts-based research is a powerful method through which to advance social inclusion and justice (rice, chandler, harrison, liddiard & ferrari, 2015) by empowering and engaging vulnerable individuals in dialogue and shared storytelling directed to initiate social change (boydell, gladstone, volpe, allemang & stasiulis, 2012). within the health and more recently, the mental health field, digital story telling (dst) is emerging as an arts-based participatory research method to enhance understanding of “lived experience,” promote social connections and address power imbalances. in this paper, we draw on our study with young people living with psychosis in rural communities to describe how participating in a dst research project can attend to their sense of social inclusion, contributing to their agency and possibly also to a more socially just experience of the world. we highlight the co-producing narratives on access to care in rural communities studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 298-304, 2017 299 potential of dst as an engaging social research process and describe participants’ experience of being involved in dst. early psychosis and pathways to care in rural communities comprehensive, accessible and equitable mental health care is the gold standard; however, rural youth experiencing psychosis are often disadvantaged by virtue of their age and geographical context (starfield, 2002 minore, hill, pugliese & gauld, 2008). of particular concern are significant barriers to equitable and appropriate mental health care that young people with psychosis face, including the isolation they experience in their pathway to mental health care, which results both from their illness and the rural environment mediating their isolation and access to care (boydell et al., 2006). this paper addresses issues of access to mental health care by generating new knowledge about help seeking by young people who have experienced a first episode of psychosis in a rural community. digital storytelling we used dst, an innovative arts-based research methodology using multimedia consisting of images/segments of video with background music and voice over narrative (gubrium, 2009), in a workshop-based process whereby participants created their own brief autobiographical videos. dst can be understood as a media form as well as an area of cultural practice, “a dynamic set of relations between textual arrangements and symbolic conventions, technologies for production and conventions for their use; and collaborative social interaction (i.e., the workshops) that takes place in local and specific contexts” (burgess, 2006, p. 207). a common aim of dst is to highlight the ordinary voice; this form of storytelling is posited as enabling the “ethics of democratic access” (burgess, 2006, p. 207). digital stories are two to five minutes in length, and pair audio recordings with visuals such as photographs, short videos, artwork, etc. (rice et al., 2015). these stories are created during immersive workshops designed to help participants develop and share their stories with one another through story circles, where they are also encouraged to receive feedback. talking about their personal stories in this way is integral to the dst process and a key consideration in its transformative potential (cunsolo willox, harper & edge, 2013). dst productions enable policy-makers to understand the experiences of young people with psychosis in a way that enables them to make more effective policy (devecchi, kenny, dickson-swift & kidd, 2016). there are commonalities between the dst process and group-based research methods. both methods are reported to redistribute power katherine m. boydell et al. studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 298-304, 2017 300 differentials between adult researchers and younger participants, allowing for a level of safety and comfort amongst peers, and they provide a multifaceted description of participant beliefs, perspectives and experiences as they build on interactions with each other over time (hennessy & heary, 2005, in gladstone, 2010, pp. 71-72; rice et al., 2015). conceptual framework participatory inquiry involved young people sharing their experiences of seeking help (langhout & thomas, 2010). we were informed by the work of heron and reason (1997) who note that knowledge is built on meaningful partnerships between (often vulnerable) individuals and groups, practitioners and academic researchers. our work builds on repeated calls to engage young people meaningfully in research (see, for example, mendenhall, gagner & hunt, 2015) because they are recognised as socially competent and engaged actors who have much to contribute to the creation and dissemination of new knowledge (gladstone, boydell, seeman & mckeever, 2006; macdonald et al., 2011). involving youth in research generates valuable knowledge for individuals and communities and provides opportunities for the empowerment of young research participants, leading to benefits at the micro, meso and macro level (clarke, 2015; powers & tiffany, 2006). our participatory design was intended to counteract the isolation and marginalization often associated with first episode psychosis, rurality and age. our understanding of participation as a theoretical and methodological construct has emerged via a political-cultural agenda that underlines the importance of listening to and celebrating the “voices” and perspectives of those most fundamentally affected by the circumstances in which they are placed (gardner & lewis, 1996). we intentionally work from an ontological perspective that claims the social world “does not consist of separate things but of relationships we co-author” (reason & bradbury, 2001, p. 10) and which views truth as “not a matter of static fact, but a quality of relationship” (reason, 1998, p. 165). methods participants: young people diagnosed with psychosis and affiliated with an early intervention clinic serving a northern, rural region, attended a dst workshop session to produce individual digital stories describing how they manage psychosis in everyday life. participants worked together over the course of the study, guided by experienced dst facilitators and research team members to clarify study objectives and research questions, produce helpseeking narratives using dst, analyse the digital stories together, and discuss potential audiences for the stories. following the workshop session, the co-producing narratives on access to care in rural communities studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 298-304, 2017 301 completed digital stories were collectively viewed and celebrated by participants. two weeks later, participants re-convened and participated over three consecutive days in the analysis of the stories through a series of guided analytic group discussions and exercises. setting and data collection: the research took place in a rural community in northwestern ontario, with only one early psychosis intervention program for the entire region. the area served approximates the size of france at 406,820 km2, or 45% of ontario’s landmass. project activities were documented using participant observation and informal interviewing, formal group discussions, and detailed observational and reflexive field notes. results our nine participants ranged in age from 16 to 23 years; five were female and four were male. in this section, we focus on participants’ experience of being involved in the participatory dst research project. reflections on story creation overall, young people found the story creation process both challenging and rewarding. for instance, although creating the story was emotionally difficult and “scary” for participants, they reported feeling better and a sense of relief when it was completed. the most challenging aspect was the time constraints imposed by the script directives that forced them to create “partial stories.” participants found it difficult to make decisions about what part of their story to tell. luke expressed his desire for a longer script so that he could explain things better and noted that capturing “four years in four minutes” was a challenge. this concern was echoed by taylor, who spoke about the difficulties associated with deciding what to fit in and what to leave out. niece wanted to put “way more stuff in there” and anna felt it hard to choose what her message was about. on the other hand, michael and brendan countered that it was not necessary to put everything in the digital story and that it was good that it was short as the powerful effect is lost if too much time is taken. young people also highlighted the many rewards they experienced as participants in the research process. they identified the positive impact creating their stories had on them and saw the potential effect it could have on others. both anna and luke described the freedom of being allowed to “open up,” a stark contrast to their previous experiences of feeling mistrustful of mental health professionals. young people appreciated sharing their experiences with others who had similar stories that they could “vent to” and “who won’t judge you.” taylor shared that she was now less afraid to open up about mental illness with others and that she would write more songs katherine m. boydell et al. studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 298-304, 2017 302 about her experiences. michael supported this with his commentary on the process, “i’m trying to think of the word but it was just like, just like opening up and everything, just made you feel good. i just learned that the videos can have a really big impact.” john agreed with michael’s statement and added that it was “pretty cool making the story as i got to learn more about myself.” in addition to being allowed to be expressive in ways they had not previously experienced, young people highlighted how the actual creation of the digital story was an accomplishment. elyzia stated that creating a video enabled her to put her past behind her. she now felt that she could be productive with her ideas as she learned how to write and tell stories and realized that she is worthy. feeling better about themselves after creating, showing and talking about their stories in front of a group was significant for participants as exemplified in taylor’s comment, “it feels good knowing that like even though, like, i went through shit it’s going to help someone else, you know like even though i suffered it will help someone. that feels good.” conclusion digital stories are a powerful medium for young people experiencing psychosis to tell stories about issues they identify as important. we concur with consolo willox, harper and edge (2013), who indicate that dst has the potential to become a narrative method that represents a participatory and potentially more democratic form of social research, with an attendant focus on highlighting and sharing individual lived experiences via a multimedia digital format. dst serves as a method for participants to generate something substantial out of their experiences, thus providing a forum for advocacy on issues of concern. arts-based participatory research can foster critical awareness and facilitate understanding for those who participate in studies (conrad, 2006; kontos & poland, 2009). lack of engagement and social isolation are central issues for youth seeking help for a first episode of psychosis. the arts-based methods we used in this study are seldom used in the mental health field and have the potential to counter these experiences by increasing youth involvement in research and by contributing more broadly to the evidence base that influences how they are cared for according to needs they identify as important. acknowledgements this research was supported by a canadian institutes of health research grant awarded to boydell and team, grant frn (file reference number) 126240. co-producing narratives on access to care in rural communities studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 298-304, 2017 303 references boydell, k.m., gladstone, b.m., volpe, t., allemang, b., & stasiulis, e. (2012). the production and dissemination of knowledge: a scoping review of arts-based health research. forum qualitative sozialforchung/forum: qualitative social research, 13(1), art. 32. boydell, k.m., et al. (2006). family perspectives on pathways to mental health care for children and youth in rural communities. journal of rural health. 21(2),182-188. burgess, j. (2006). hearing ordinary voices: cultural studies vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. continuum: journal of media and cultural studies, 20(2), 201-214. clarke, s. (2015). a "child's rights perspective": the "right" of children and young people to participate in health care research. issues in comprehensive pediatric nursing, 38(3), 161180. conrad, d. (2006). entangled in the sticks: ethical conundrums of popular theatre as pedagogy and research. qualitative inquiry,12(3), 437-458. cunsolo willox, a., harper, s. l., & edge, v. l. (2013). storytelling in a digital age: digital storytelling as an emerging narrative method for preserving and promoting indigenous oral wisdom. qualitative research, 13(2), 127-147. devecchi, n., kenny, a., dickson-swift, v., & kidd. s. (2016). how digital storytelling is used in mental health: a scoping review. international journal of mental health nursing, 25(3), 183-193. gardner, k., & lewis, d. (1996). anthropology, development and the post-modern challenge, london: pluto press. gladstone, b.m. (2010). “all in the same boat”: an analysis of a support group for children of parents with mental illnesses (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of toronto, toronto, on. retrieved from https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/24755/5/gladstone_brenda_m_201006_p hd_thesis.pdf gladstone, b. m., boydell, k. m., seeman, m. v., & mckeever, p. d. (2011). children's experiences of parental mental illness: a literature review. early intervention in psychiatry, 5(4), 271-289. gubrium, a. (2009). digital storytelling as a method for engaged scholarship in anthropology. practicing anthropology, 31(4), 5-9. hennessy, e., & heary, c. (2005). exploring children's views through focus groups. in s. greene & d. hogan (eds.), researching children's experience: methods and approaches. (pp. 236-252). london: sage publications. heron, j., & reason, p. (1997). a participatory inquiry paradigm. qualitative inquiry, 3(3), 274294. kontos, p., & poland, b. (2009). mapping new theoretical and methodological terrain for knowledge translation: contributions from critical realism and the arts. implementation science, 4(1), 1. langhout, r. d., & thomas, e. (2010). imagining participatory action research in collaboration with children: an introduction. american journal of community psychology. 46, 60-66. macdonald, j. a., gagnon, a. j., mitchell, c., di meglio, g., rennick, j.e., & cox, j. (2011). include them and they will tell you: learnings from a participatory process with youth. qualitative health research. 21(8), 1127-1135. mendenhall, t. j., gagner, n. e., & hunt, q. a. (2015). a call to engage youth in health research. families, systems & health, 33(4), 410-412. minore, b., hill, m. e., pugliese, i., & gauld, t. (2008). rurality literature review: building ‘rurality’ into health systems funding formulas. thunder bay, on: centre for health and northern health research. retrieved from www.ontla.on.ca/library/repository/mon/24003/299628.pdf powers, j. l., & tiffany, j. s. (2006). engaging youth in participatory research and evaluation. journal of public health management & practice, 12, s79-s87. reason, p. (1998). political, epistemological, ecological and spiritual dimensions of participation. studies in cultures, organizations & societies, 4, 147-67. katherine m. boydell et al. studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 298-304, 2017 304 reason, p., & bradbury, h. (eds.). (2001). handbook of action research: participative inquiry and practice. sage. rice, c., chandler, e., harrison, e., liddiard, k, & ferrari, m. (2015). project re-vision: disability at the edges of representation. disability & society, 30(4), 513-527. starfield, b. (2002). equality in health. journal of epidemiology and community health. 56, 483-484. maki final correspondence address: krystle maki, institute of feminist & gender studies, university of ottawa, on, k1n 6n5, email: kmaki@uottawa.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume11, issue 2, 394-399, 2017 book review the healing journey: intimate partner abuse and its implications in the labour market deriviere, linda. (2014). black point, ns: fernwood publishing. isbn 9781552666548 (paper) ca$21.00. 176 pages. krystle maki university of ottawa, canada few studies have focused on women’s workforce experiences during and after they leave an abuser. what are the impacts of abuse on women’s work, productivity, careers, and aspirations? how does trauma effect their earnings, education, and training opportunities? linda deriviere (2014) tackles these questions and concludes that work precarity, poverty and intimate partner abuse are interconnecting and reinforcing. the healing journey demonstrates that “intimate partner violence influences women’s location in the labour market over their entire working life,” while abuse and control can curb women’s independence and career advancements long after a separation (p. 16). women who have experienced abuse are less desirable for employers, argues deriviere, and the persistence of mental health and chronic illness directly related to abuse frequently disrupts women’s ability to stay employed as well as pursue training and education. coordinated by the family violence research centre, resolve, deriviere’s tri-provincial survey of the prairie provinces collected data in a seven-wave longitudinal study. results are based on surveys of 414 women who have experienced domestic violence. in addition to statistical analysis, deriviere conducted interviews after each wave of the study. deriviere hopes her contribution will encourage policy changes that would provide women access to various supports to participate successfully in paid work, including transportation, adequate and stable housing near employment book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 394-399, 2017 395 opportunities, living wage employment and benefits, and access to affordable high quality childcare (p. 53). one of deriviere’s most significant contributions to violence against women (vaw) literature is her discussion about the impacts of mental illness related to abuse on employability. almost two-thirds of participants reported that mental health struggles undermined their ability to thrive in an already precarious labour market (p. 96). post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), a mental illness widely shared among deriviere’s participants, undermined their information retention, concentration and basic coping skills. the “psychosocial aftermath of violence – the evidence of which manifested in high rates of depression, anxiety and ptsd” are important realities that must be considered before employment (p. 114). additionally, deriviere notes that workfare (work for welfare) policies that include mandatory job placements or vocational training may cause more harm for women impacted by trauma – some women may never be able to work again due to debilitating health effects of trauma (ibid). the physical, emotional and psychological effects of abuse directly impact women’s goals for future employment or education – not a lack of ambition, a common misconception amongst social policy makers (p. 116). responding to the ways employers and state employment policy often resort to victim-blaming for inconsistent work performance, deriviere suggests policy reforms to social assistance workfare policies as well as a guaranteed annual income for women who are unable to re-enter the workforce. in other words, social assistance policies must recognize the gendered impacts of violence and facilitate supports and accommodations for abused women. deriviere employs institutional theories of the labour market to explain how individuals who have multiple obstacles to employment or education may not follow a typical career or vocational path. women who have experienced abuse and trauma, for instance, “become trapped in a particular segment of the labour market” categorized by precarious, low paying, nonunionized, temporary work with limited opportunities for advancement (p. 18). additionally, human capital theory and segmented labour market theory are used to understand what is required to secure well-paying jobs with benefits (education, training and experience) and the continuum of good and bad jobs in the labour market. deriviere notes the weaknesses in human capital theory by demonstrating that increased education and training opportunities do not necessarily remove the barriers that abused women encounter when trying to establish economic independence as, even with these opportunities, they often end up in part-time, non-unionized service sector jobs (p. 66). feminist political economic conceptualizations of why and how gender inequality persists in the labour market and in the creation of welfare regimes would have strengthened deriviere’s discussion of labour market inequalities as well as her critiques of market driven policies (bezanson & luxton, 2006; breikreuz, 2005; caragata, 2003; coulter, 2009; evans, 2007; krystle maki studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 394-399, 2017 396 fuller & vosko, 2008; gavigan & chunn, 2007; little, 2012; mckeen, 2004). deriviere notes that market-driven policies “perpetuate the feminization of poverty by segregating women into occupations with low pay” (p. 22). however, the role that neoliberal economizing has played in welfare reforms and its impacts on the vaw sector, specifically cut backs and restrictions on advocacy work for women’s shelters, is absent from the discussion. drawing on feminist research on vaw and the role of neoliberal policy changes would have strengthened deriviere’s critiques of market driven policies such as workfare as a one-size-fits-all program that tries to move people as quickly as possible back into the labour market. although i agree with deriviere’s critique of gender neutral policies, i question why the author does not expose the myriad of other ways neoliberal values and economic reforms have undermined the welfare state and how policies like workfare, which were previously prohibited under the canadian assistance plan, coerce recipients of welfare to work for their benefits. instead, deriviere often inadvertently mimics the discourse that has led to the massive rollbacks of social services. by claiming that welfare reliance is “unproductive,” for instance, deriviere adopts the very neoliberal logic that supported the introduction of workfare and recast labour precarity as an individual problem (p. 22). an uncritical assessment of single mothers on welfare as “unproductive” also ignores the social reproduction that occurs in the home, such as cooking, cleaning, caring for children, paying the bills, organizing budgets, and the transmission of societal and cultural norms (bezanson & luxton, 2006). it is this unpaid labour that neoliberal welfare policies have neglected in their budget-cutting gender-neutral workfare policies (little, 2012). a significant percentage (45.7%) of participants in the study identified as indigenous women. in the introduction, deriviere briefly notes the ongoing impacts of colonization and residential schools on indigenous women’s selfworth and confidence and how this has shaped their labour market experiences, education achievements and careers goals (p. 20). yet the intersection of gender, race and colonization is not integrated throughout the text nor is there discussion of how the capitalist labour market and state policy systemically marginalizes and discriminates against racialized and indigenous peoples (bannerji, 2000; dua & robertson, 1999; galabuzi, 2006, 2010; incite!, 2006; razack, smith & thobani, 2010). deriviere states that “women of aboriginal heritage value their traditional culture in terms of the role of women. the safety of their children, as opposed to employment [or workfare], may be their immediate concern” (p. 23). although the cultural differences that deriviere highlights are crucial to understanding indigenous women’s experiences of motherhood, absent from this analysis is discussion of the disproportionate rates of indigenous children removed from mothers fleeing abuse and placed in child welfare agencies and the detrimental consequences this has on indigenous mothers and their families (blackstock, 2007). additionally, deriviere’s analysis of labour book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 394-399, 2017 397 market inequalities for racialized abused immigrant women is insufficient. racial exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination within the labour market are factors that impact racialized immigrant women’s ability to secure and maintain good jobs. derivieres’ neglect of social exclusion and structural racism within capitalist economies problematically assumes that all abused women experience the same barriers within labour markets; however, as anti-racist and feminist political economy scholars have argued, “precarious employment is a highly gendered and racialized phenomenon” (das gupta, 2008, p. 143; vosko, 2000). despite deriviere’s contention that policy must be “grounded in the realities of poverty and violence” and accommodate a “bottom up” approach that appreciates the lived experiences of women survivors, the actual grassroots organizing and advocacy of vaw activists, feminists and survivors is conspicuously absent in the healing journey. instead, by directing her findings and recommendations to policy makers and government officials, deriviere supports a top-down approach to dealing with the labour problems that arise from intimate partner abuse. if the longterm impacts of abuse incur serious “personal losses” in terms of lifetime employment earnings for abused women, deriviere also insists that “the health care, child welfare and justice systems, as well as other social services” are financially burdened (p. 111). similarly, in chapter 7 deriviere presents a micro based analysis of the costs of partner abuse to demonstrate that intimate partner abuse is a public health and social issue. deriviere strategically employs market-based arguments to solicit dialogue with policy makers, even though these approaches tend to individualize violence against women and perpetuate the stigma that abused women are a drain on the system. the costs of domestic abuse to the welfare state should never be prioritized over the impacts such abuse has on its survivors. there is little in this study of the ways vaw activists and workers have developed in-house methods to deal with work precarity amongst survivors or have organized political lobbies to deal with government policies that tend to exacerbate that precarity and fail to appreciate the personal struggles of survivors in their appeals for social assistance (beres, crow & gotell, 2009; bumiller, 2008; cnwsth, 2014; mosher et al., 2004; ready, 2016). for those of us doing social justice work within the vaw movement this omission is disheartening. deriviere’s recommendations to policy and government officials are in line with liberal reform strategies including the need to provide a living wage (regardless of sector), social assistance benefits, childcare, transportation, stable housing, and employment and workfare exemptions. these are clear and concrete steps towards supporting survivors of abuse; however, feminists in the vaw sector as well as antipoverty scholars and activists have long noted the tensions and negotiations that arise between vaw services and the state (brodie, 1996; bumiller, 2008; evans & wekerle, 1995; oaith, 1998; snider 2006). appealing to governments to reform social assistance to assist those in need has been krystle maki studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 394-399, 2017 398 limited and frequently undermined under successive conservative and neoliberal governments. if we want to make meaningful change from the bottom up then we need to engage with the community and the grassroots activists and survivors who are already lobbying, advocating and fighting for and alongside abused women to demand recognition of vaw as a systemic problem, and challenge the state in their gender neutral policies that discount the impacts of violence against women. references bannerji, h. 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(2004). money in their own name: the feminist voice in poverty debate in canada 1970-1995. toronto: university of toronto press. mosher, j., evans, p., little, m., morrow, e., boulding, k., & vanderplats, n. (2004). walking on eggshells: abused women’s experiences of ontario’s welfare system. final report of research findings from the women and abuse welfare research project. retrieved from: http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1159&context=reports oaith (ontario association of interval & transition houses). (1998). falling through the gender gap: how ontario government policy continues to fail abused women & their children. toronto: ontario women’s justice network. razack, s., smith, m., & thobani, s. (eds). (2010). introduction. in s. razack, m. smith & s. thobani (eds.), states of race: critical race feminism for the 21st century (pp. 1-19). toronto: between the lines. ready, c. (2016). shelter in a storm: revitalizing feminism in neoliberal ontario. vancouver, bc: ubc press. snider, l. (2006). making change in neo-liberal times. in g. balfour & e. comack (eds.), criminalizing women (pp. 323-342). black point, ns: fernwood. vosko, l. (2000). temporary work: the gendered rise of precarious employment relationship. toronto: university of toronto press. manning et al final galley nov 24 15 correspondence address: kimberley ens manning, department of political science, concordia university, 1455 de maisonneuve west, montreal, qc, h3g 1m8; email: kimberley.manning@concordia.ca issn: 1911-4788   volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 fighting for trans* kids: academic parent activism in the 21st century kimberley ens manning concordia university, canada cindy holmes simon fraser university, canada annie pullen sansfaçon université de montréal, canada julia temple newhook memorial university, canada ann travers simon fraser university, canada abstract in this article we explore some of the affective and ethical dimensions that we have faced as parent academic-activists seeking to understand and undo some of the structural transphobia that currently exists in canadian society. informed by critical feminist, critical race and black feminist thought, trans* scholarship, queer theory, and anti-oppression analysis, we discuss how our academic-activism assumes complex configurations of privilege and vulnerability. keywords transgender; children and youth; autoethnography; parental activism; academic activism; social action when we apply the insights of queer and feminist theory to the work of raising children, we become invested in providing all children – not just those who show the signs of gender non-conformity – with the social, cultural and political tools they can use to simultaneously work with and against the gender binary. (ward, 2013, p. 47) fighting for trans* kids   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 119 introduction gender expression and gender identity, understood as binary concepts, that is, either male or female, are vivid examples of the very structure of domination upheld in western society. as academic-activists we have allied with our children and with many others to better understand, explain, and undo structural transphobia within broader contexts of ageism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and the ever-increasing criminalization of poverty (hodgson, 2013; kumashiro, 2002; snorton & haritaworn, 2013). in this article we explore some of the affective and ethical dimensions we have faced as parent academic-activists fighting for our trans* children.1 many academic parents are familiar with the competing demands of parenting children while trying to complete book chapters, course lectures, and grant applications. it is almost an understatement to say that these demands are stressful, if not at times totally overwhelming.2 as the primary caregivers of transgender children, our academic work has, however, taken on a whole new layer of meaning that we could never have imagined prior to becoming parents. the allyship we undertake in relation to our children does not comprise a form of “courtesy stigma” (goffman, 1990, pp. 41-45), or the allyship of sympathetic individuals who become “courtesy members” of a marginalized group, as has recently been suggested of parents who publicly support their adult gay and lesbian children (johnson & best, 2012). rather, we occupy a position of liminality; most of us are not trans* but given our desire to ensure the well-being of our children, and the discrimination we face advocating for and with them, we live a commitment to our children that cannot be picked up or put down as we like.3 at the same time, our struggles are also shaped by our commitment to finding ways for our children and other children to safely speak their truth and self-advocate at a moment when they are perceived to lack the capacity for self-determination. informed by critical feminist, critical race and black feminist thought, trans* scholarship, queer theory, and anti-oppression analysis, we explore some of the anxieties and privileges that give rise to and shape our allyship. in particular, we consider how the economic, cultural, and social capital                                                                                                                 1  transgender or trans* is an umbrella term that describes a wide range of people whose gender identity or gender expression differs from what they were assigned at birth. it may include those who identify as transsexual, two-spirit, transitioned, bigender, genderqueer, cross-dressers, gender variant, gender fluid, or simply man or woman (grant et al., 2011; forge, 2012). in some contexts, an asterisk is used (trans*) to actively include non-binary and/or non-static gender identities. ‘gender creative’ is one of many terms that describe “children whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from what others expect of their assigned (natal) sex. others include ‘gender independent’, ‘gender non-conforming’, ‘gender variant’, ‘transgender’, and in the case of aboriginal children, ‘two-spirited’” (pyne, 2013, n.p.). 2 see castañeda & isgro (2013); mason, wolfinger, & goulden (2013); and o’brien hallstein & o’reilly (2012) for three thoughtful recent explorations of gender and family in academia. 3 our reference to liminal allyship draws upon the work of ryan & runswick-cole (2008), who are academic parents of disabled children. kimberley ens manning, cindy holmes, annie pullen sansfaçon, julia temple newhook, ann travers   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 120 inherent in our academic positions enables us to support trans*-positive scholarship about gender independent children both within and outside of our university contexts. yet, even as we maximize these relations of power, we also recognize their limits; our power is conditional on secure academic appointments and tenure (circumstances disproportionately associated with whiteness and class privilege), on activist-positive and parent-positive academic cultures, and on our own finite energies to manage the many demands of teaching, research, parenting, and activism as they blur together, sometimes productively and sometimes problematically. as white scholars and teachers we also recognize our power to silence non-academic communities and epistemologies and thus work to build anti-racist strategies into our activism and scholarship. we begin with a brief discussion of some of the collective work by academics, practitioners, and community activists underway to create a more gender-expansive society. after an introduction to research methods, the main section of the article will focus on five short analytic autoethnographies. cindy explores the interplay between lived experience, queer and feminist community work, and the analyses of critical trans* academic-activists, and how these various facets shape her parenting, activism, and research; annie discusses how her background in ethics deeply informed her decision to accept her transgender daughter; kimberley reflects on how the intersecting processes of grant preparation, research, and writing propelled her into activism and provided her with new tools to understand and engage in social movement activism; julia uses insights from black feminist theorists to explore the pressures of silence and disclosure when parenting, activism, and academics overlap; and ann draws on her own scholarship in critical race theory and necropolitics to discuss the raced and classed dimensions of supporting a transgender child. as will be evident in the following discussion, academic work, activism, and parenting have become intensely ‘blurred’ in our lives. while the theoretical frameworks that have guided our scholarship have helped us navigate parenting our trans* children and provided us with resources and platforms from which to advocate for change, we all struggle with the costs of advocating for our children. background over the last five years, a small number of canadian educators, lawyers, academics, community activists, physicians, and youth have sought to educate the public about childhood gender diversity and to create new gender expansive possibilities in educational, social, and medical support and care for children and youth. disregarding theories that childhood gender nonconformity could be ‘fixed’ by altering parental behaviour, these individuals sought to challenge the systems of gender normativity not only affecting trans* children, but all children and youth; an approach that travers (2014, fighting for trans* kids   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 121 pp. 54-68) calls a “transformative gender justice perspective.” it was not until the national conference on gender creative kids held in october 2012, however, that some of us met together for the first time (manning, pullen sansfaçon & meyer, 2014; annie, ann and kimberley attended the conference). spurred on by that gathering, and a subsequent workshop held by rainbow health ontario a year later,4 many new academic collectivities have taken shape in the country, including the preparation of several large team grant applications. at the same time that all five of us have been involved in drafting grant applications, publication projects, and presentations focused on transgender children and their families, we have simultaneously become increasingly involved in public activism beyond the academy. in 2014, we participated in various forms of activism: annie filed a human rights complaint in quebec in the hope that her child might change her gender identification documents; ann and cindy worked hard with others to apply anti-racist ethics to found the british columbia safer schools coalition in support of the vancouver school board’s trans*-positive update to their gender and sexual diversity policy (see bc safer schools coalition, n.d.); julia began to offer training in children’s gender diversity to professionals who work with young children and founded both a local support group for parents of gender diverse children, as well as a national social media-based support group that now has nearly 300 members; and kimberley, as a founding member of gender creative kids canada, co-facilitated workshops on gender identity and expression at the english montreal school board. given our strong on-going commitments, all five of us have member research status in communities and projects supporting transgender children and their families. these experiences have provided us with a basic starting point for employing analytic autoethnography, the methodology we have adopted in writing this article. the value of analytic autoethnography is that it attends to narrative visibility of the researcher’s self, and incorporates a strong commitment to theoretical analysis and thereby engages in a larger enterprise of social science debate (anderson 2006, p. 378). the following five autoethnographies were written by each author and are based, in part, on semi-structured interviews – conducted in person or via skype – that kimberley undertook with annie (may 9, 2013), julia (november 21, 2014), ann (november 25, 2014), and cindy (january 12, 2015), and that annie undertook with kimberley (january 5, 2015). ann decided not to reflect on her interview per se, but rather to focus her autoethnography on a family crisis that emerged after the interview had already taken place.                                                                                                                 4 rainbow health ontario “works to improve the health and well-being of lgbtq people in ontario, and to increase access to competent and lgbtq friendly health care services across the province” (rainbow  health  ontario,  n.d.). kimberley ens manning, cindy holmes, annie pullen sansfaçon, julia temple newhook, ann travers   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 122 cindy – interdisciplinary studies (sociology, social work, geography): “not a problem of identity, but of discrimination.” my activism and scholarship about gender and sexual diversity and the marginalization of trans* and gender non-conforming people was already part of my life before i became a parent, with connections to my own lived experiences of hetero/cisnormativity and sexism as a queer femme partner of a masculine woman, combined with my community work in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirit, queer (lgbt2sq) feminist, and other social justice movements. i became politically active in the late 1980s when i got involved in feminist activism on my university campus and worked as a frontline advocate in community-based feminist anti-violence organizations. through intensive dialogue with other activists (many of whom were lesbian feminists of colour and indigenous women) i was introduced to the writings of academic-activists audre lorde (1984), bell hooks (1989), chrystos (1988), leslie feinberg (1993, 1996), kate bornstein (1994), and others. i began to develop a critical analysis of the harmful interlocking effects of sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, racism, and classism in society, which in turn became the focus of my community-based and academic work. i worked with feminist nonprofit organizations and social justice movements addressing social and health inequalities and my subsequent academic research, which focused on colonial violence and violence in the lives of lgbt2sq people, grew directly out of these experiences. since welcoming our child into the world twelve years ago, my partner and i have consciously tried to bring a critical social justice approach to our parenting and family life. we embraced queer and anti-racist feminist politics; my partner expressed her masculine parenting identity as a ‘lesbian dad’ (fleming, 2011; holmes & fleming, 2009). our queer feminist values meant that we changed the words while reading children’s books, bought a diversity of clothing styles and colours for our child, avoided referring to ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ clothes, and in so many other ways tried to resist the gender binary by challenging sexist, racist, and heterosexist assumptions about what it means to be a girl/boy. but when our child began to experience discrimination based on their gender expression at age four and five, i developed a deeper understanding of the regulation of gender and the impact of gender-based violence and discrimination on gender non-conforming children’s health and well-being. [our child’s] gender non-conformity was not… something where i turned to anyone or anything about…until [child’s name] began to encounter discrimination from the outside world....but when they started to experience discrimination and harassment….i guess we started to really have problems at school when [child’s name] was in kindergarten because they were having problems accessing bathrooms and being harassed in the bathroom and being told they were in the wrong bathroom, being harassed on the playground… (cindy, individual interview, january 12, 2015) fighting for trans* kids   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 123 my partner and i had numerous meetings with the teacher, the viceprincipal, and the counselor at our child’s school. although they were caring, they did not know what to do beyond assigning a bathroom buddy (which was not enough). on the whole, we felt that the seriousness of gender-based violence in the lives of young gender non-conforming children was not understood and that the school lacked training and policies to create safe learning environments for gender diverse kids. i turned to support from transgender activist aiden key, who founded the gender odyssey family conference in seattle washington in 2007 for families of trans* and gender non-conforming children. here, i found the validation and concrete support i was looking for from someone with a critical analysis of the impact of gender-based and transphobic harassment and discrimination on the lives of young children like my own. i also turned to handbooks for families and professionals that address the experiences and needs of transgender and gender creative kids (brill & pepper, 2008; ehrensaft, 2011). however, i found it necessary to ground my understanding of my child’s experiences of discrimination and threat of violence in the work of critical trans* academic-activists (bauer et al., 2009; namaste, 2000; spade, 2011) and grassroots trans* community groups (e.g. forge, 2012; sylvia rivera law project, 2012). the theorizing and organizing by these critical trans* scholars and grassroots trans* community activists offers an intersectional framework to understand the broader cultural and political contexts of erasure that structure gender non-conforming and trans* children’s lives. namaste’s analysis of erasure has been critically important for theorizing and documenting the way trans* people are made invisible–through discourse and institutionalized practices–and excluded from health care, social services, and anti-violence organizing (see, for example, bauer et al., 2009). this work can help us more deeply understand the intersecting systemic and structural relations of power that marginalize trans* and gender non-conforming children. through my experiences as a parent i entered into new forms of advocacy and activism, including building a coalition to mobilize support for policies to support gender non-conforming and trans* children and youth in schools and developing new relationships with other parent activists of trans* and gender creative children. these forms of activism overlap with, and blur the boundaries between, my past and present academic research about violence in the lives of queer and trans* adults. they have also led to new research trajectories and academic collaborations centered on the health of trans* children and youth. this work, as a cisgender queer parent academic-activist, has been transformative on many levels. i had academic knowledge, i had community social work experience, i had my partner’s experience. but this is a…deeper level of understanding in seeing how my child navigates the world. i understand the policing of gender and its impact on their body on such a deep, deep level. (cindy, individual interview, january 12, 2015) kimberley ens manning, cindy holmes, annie pullen sansfaçon, julia temple newhook, ann travers   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 124 as a parent academic-activist of a gender creative child i am always learning. my learning is shaped by the complex intersections between our lived experiences (as a queer parent, my child and partner’s experiences), my past and present community work, critical scholarship and trans* activism, and the way my fear for my child’s safety and my fierce love for their happiness and well-being propels me toward further activism and research. annie – social work: “talk the talk, walk the walk.” values of social justice, self-determination, and human dignity, understood through anti-oppressive and critical lenses, have always been pivotal to my articulation of professional ethics in teaching, research, and professional practice in social work. from an early stage of my career, i have been driven by a desire to develop a deeper understanding of, and develop tools to facilitate, ethical practice and conduct in professional social work. to do so, a virtue ethics framework (macintyre, 1985; 1999) has led me to argue that ethical practice can be achieved through the development of character traits anchored in collectively agreed upon professional values that would lead a person to act ethically in any given moral situation, and to display those traits in every sphere of his or her life. virtue ethics is a form of moral philosophy proposed by aristotle that challenges the use of moral principles for ethical life and, instead, claims that one needs to develop character or personality traits that, once acquired, will always influence the person to act rightly. those traits, which are developed through habituation by drawing on practical reasoning abilities, have to strike a balance between vice and excess, and promote human flourishing of self and others. courage, which is neither recklessness nor cowardice, is often cited as a virtue (see pullen sansfaçon and cowden 2012 for further discussion). when i found myself parenting a trans* child, applying an analysis of gender and age discrimination5 with regard to broader social justice issues similarly helped me to accept my daughter as a transgender person who deserves my respect and support. furthermore, a virtue ethics framework has helped me in my journey to become an academic-activist, and to reflect on the way forward for us as a family when we moved to a new neighbourhood in 2009. at that time, my child was seven and increasingly persistent about her gender identity. as her mother, i had always been supportive of her true self, but perhaps because of worries about her security and what others might think of her, i was still a little reluctant to allow her to display her gender non-conforming behaviour outside of our home. i was also finalizing a book on social work ethics (pullen sansfaçon & cowden, 2012) that stresses the importance of critical                                                                                                                 5 in the province of quebec only adults can change their gender marker on official documents (e.g. birth certificate, health card, driver’s license). because transgender children and youth cannot obtain a civil status that matches their gender identity, many experience discrimination in their day-to-day lives. fighting for trans* kids   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 125 and ethical reasoning during deliberations about ethical issues and dilemmas. i vividly remember writing a case study about a gender non-conforming child, and thinking “my gosh, i have been off the track the whole time with my child!” accepting your child, despite his/her differences with others is fundamental to the value of human dignity and self-determination, but mobilizing oneself to challenge constraining environments is also essential to confronting oppression, furthering human rights, and defending the concept of social justice. integrating virtue ethics into my reflection on parenting therefore brought my understanding of gender identity and expression to a new level. my scholarly work has, in this sense, contributed to my reflection on, and understanding of, ethical approaches to parenting. however, embedding this theoretical framework into every sphere of my life has also led me to realize that ‘talking the talk’ was not sufficient: i needed to ‘walk the walk’ and to begin to challenge those inequalities and experiences of oppression in the life of my family. to do so, i needed to develop and draw on important character traits, such as critical thinking, courage, and righteous indignation. it is from this moment that i started working more proactively to make my daughter’s environment a safer place by challenging oppressive structures of our environment, rather than only trying to keep her safe inside the home. my position as a faculty member was definitely helpful in the process as it enabled me to network with other academic parents. indeed, being a professor played a key role in building my confidence and allowed me to move from advocate (supporting and defending my daughter's needs in her social environments such as school, health centre, etc.) to activist by attempting to challenge broader injustice through political and social action.6 it also gave me direct access to current scholarship, which i slowly began to draw upon to assert myself. to this end, being a scholar provided me with the legitimacy to take positions on the care of transgender children. yeah, so i think people around me are okay [with her being gender nonconforming]. i had some people who were not so keen on us facilitating [child’s name]’s transition, but then again it comes back to values and virtues. for me you know if i want to be coherent with who i am, then i’m not going to say ah yeah you know of course i understand what they’re saying, i understand its destabilizing, but it’s … in the end i always say it’s my way or the highway, for that [supporting my child] is non-negotiable. (annie, individual interview, may 9, 2013) also, as an academic, i could begin to engage in research and contribute to knowledge production on the topic of transgender children. however, i had to re-orient my research career and enter the field of gender studies with a phd in ethics. furthermore, the decision to engage in knowledge generation                                                                                                                 6 according to piven (2010) and flood, martin & dreher (2013), generating supportive networks of like-minded scholars is an essential component of undertaking academic activism.   kimberley ens manning, cindy holmes, annie pullen sansfaçon, julia temple newhook, ann travers   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 126 about transgender children and families also created new challenges, such as being a parent and a researcher engaged in the same issues that i experienced at home as a parent, in a world that seems to mostly value research production that is disinterested. i moved into a perplexing phase of my academic career when i first started to speak out as an activist. it’s about that balance between disclosing what i do for work and what i do for life. that’s the main challenge for me. because if i was not in my position, it’s like a bit of a vicious circle, because my position gives me access to resources to be able to advance the cause but i think if i didn’t have that position, i would be able to get out even more. it’s constraining and enabling. (annie, individual interview, may 9, 2013) it took me a long time to come to terms with the idea that i could undertake research on a topic so close to my heart without being biased. with time, however, i came to accept that research can be situated and critical. despite both its constraining and empowering possibilities, scholarship was central to my becoming an activist insofar as it provided me with access to knowledge and resources. if one is to integrate values into every sphere of one’s life, one must start by reflecting on one’s own possible relationship with the broader society, and how one would act if driven by social justice, human dignity, and self-determination. adherence to these values, which came through critical reflection and scholarship, was central in the early years of supporting my child as she affirmed her gender non-conformity, and will continue to be central in my scholarly activism on transgender children in the future. kimberley – political science: “the grant proposal as manifesto.” but the activism for me is really thinking about the more global changes that need to happen. we need to change society, not the child, right, and so that’s kind of been the approach since we prepared the first grant application. (kimberley, individual interview, january 5, 2015) for the past 20 years, i have focused much of my scholarship on the gender dynamics of social movements in the people’s republic of china. it thus came somewhat of a surprise to my tenure review committee in january 2011, when i submitted a social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc) insight development grant application on the topic of the social and political worlds of gender non-conforming children and their families in canada, great britain, and the united states.7 the decision to write this team grant had been last minute. up until that point, i had struggled to see how my scholarship could be translated into an arena in                                                                                                                 7 the sshrc insight development grant is designed to support scholars who are choosing to depart from their previous area(s) of expertise to pursue a new focus of research. fighting for trans* kids   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 127 which i had carried out no previous work and about which i felt i understood so little. in part, my struggle can be attributed to the fact that i was still beholden to a view that the study of transgender children was the exclusive domain of physicians, psychologists, and educational specialists, not parents or political scientists. academic activism was not something unknown to me; in fact, my master’s thesis focused on the work of chinese women academic-activists in the early 1990s. in the heady two years leading up to the 1995 fourth world conference on women (a moment when the term gender, shehui xingbie, was first being used in the people’s republic of china), i sought to understand how women intellectuals were striving to change conditions in china through their researching, speaking, and organizing efforts. but it was not until i realized that my child’s gender expression was likely going to be a lightning rod for discrimination and violence that i felt propelled to resituate my own scholarship in more political terms. writing the grant would play a key role in this process. over the course of three weeks of intensive research and writing, something quite unexpected happened: my fairly isolated journey as a parent advocate began to shift into being part of a larger community, and my own understanding of the issues affecting trans* children and their families began to politicize. on the one hand, colleagues immediately stepped forward to provide the ideas and research support necessary to craft a strong grant application. on the other hand, the process of reading and writing rapidly transformed my own consciousness, helping me to begin the hard work necessary to understand the intersecting origins of trans* oppression. in particular, i drew upon the work of judith butler (1990; 1993) to make sense of the pathologizing literature that still dominated the north american study of childhood gender non-conformity and viviane namaste (2000) to understand the erasure of trans* lives in canada. by the time my coapplicants and i finished and submitted the final draft of the proposal we not only had a template for a research project, but a powerful blueprint for social action. although we did not understand it then, we helped lay the conditions for the emergence of our own activism. four years and a conference, website, community-based organization, and several media events later, i have just finished writing a paper on the recent explosion of parental advocacy in canada (manning, 2015). similar to annie, i have abandoned the idea that my ability to contribute to new thinking in this arena requires me to work from a place of ‘detached neutrality’. instead, i have fully embraced analytic autoethnography as a central methodology in my work, a concept i was first introduced to in the context of collectively working on this article, “fighting for trans* kids.” at the same time, i have found my understanding of the gender dynamics of social movements immeasurably enriched by my academic parent activism. indeed, even with an open academic culture, extensive social support, and a feminist partner, i have encountered tremendous challenges to ‘undo gender’ kimberley ens manning, cindy holmes, annie pullen sansfaçon, julia temple newhook, ann travers   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 128 as a parent activist – challenges that were not unfamiliar to many chinese revolutionaries who struggled to juggle pregnancy and parenting with their activism. to cite just one example, my child ‘came out’ to her peers at school (an extremely emotional process that included a facilitated class discussion by a professional psychologist) just days after my family moved into a partially renovated house and the same day i opened the gender creative kids conference. on maternity leave and caring for an eight-month old baby, it is unsurprising that i collapsed with bronchitis less than two weeks later. for me, there is little question that the embodied and affective processes of ‘mother-as-activist’ have at times pushed me to the limits of my endurance and health, a critical struggle that continues to shape my understanding of social movements to this day. julia – sociology: “silence.” your silence will not protect you. (audre lorde, 1984, p. 41) fear can be silencing. for parents of transgender children, silence about our children’s gender diversity may also feel like the only protection we can offer from a world that poses significant dangers to their safety and well-being. at the same time, our silence serves to construct gender diverse children as an invisible population (hellen, 2009), further contributing to their marginalization. as activists and academics we constantly have to weigh the risks and benefits of silence as we advocate for our children and seek to educate others about gender diversity. while there were incredibly difficult personal moments when my child transitioned, i was fortunate that my academic background provided me with a framework to question the pathologization of children’s gender diversity and come to terms with my child’s identity. the work of ann fausto-sterling (2000; 2012) made clear for me the complex inseparability of social and biological explanations of gender. my background in feminist theory, particularly black feminist and queer theories, helped me to understand how dominant discourse can silence the experiences of marginalized groups. i’m a sociologist working in health. so […] it’s not a big leap for me to see transgender people’s lives as being medicalized and how transgender people have been defined and continue to be defined by the medical system. it disturbs me sometimes how much, still, transgender people have to depend on the medical system for legitimacy. (julia, individual interview, november 21, 2014) in contrast, family, friends, educators, and health care providers were much less comfortable with the concept of gender diversity. many reacted initially to our child’s identity with shock and confusion, and we experienced outright hostility and rejection from a close friend who viewed transgender children through the lens of pathology. fighting for trans* kids   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 129 there’s so much fear […] there’s so many myths and misunderstanding. i think unfortunately sometimes when people are driven by fear, that’s when it gets the scariest. that’s when people have these almost violent reactions […]. (julia, individual interview, november 21, 2014) for a time i felt immobilized and silenced by the loss of my friend, by the reactions of disbelief and disgust we encountered, and by fear for my child’s future. however, i came to realize that the only way i could cope with that fear was to fight to change this transphobic world that sees my child as a threat. pain does not have to be stifling, but can be a catalyst for social change. just as bell hooks (2010) writes about turning passion into action for political change, i realized that my love and desire to protect my child could be funneled into a powerful force for activism and advocacy. i also recognized that i could draw on my privilege as an academic health researcher in order to be seen as a legitimate advocate for the well-being of trans* children. today, i regularly give training sessions on children’s gender diversity, and my academic privilege provides a safe ‘mask’ from behind which i can educate and advocate while still protecting my child’s privacy. however, a recent experience made me realize that this mask of silence can also render me unexpectedly vulnerable to the emotional work (hochschild, 2012) of advocacy. i was asked to give a workshop on children’s gender diversity to the staff of a junior high school. the response to this presentation usually involves many questions and considerable skepticism, but in the end the experience has been almost entirely positive. however, on this day, just as i began, one of the educators in the audience stood up, banging the desk in front of him. he loudly identified himself as “conservative” and opposed to the “progressive agenda” that “these parents are trying to push.” throughout the presentation, he interrupted over and over again, ranting against transgender children and their parents with anger and derision. this individual confronted me as an academic; i believe he would not have spoken so aggressively had he realized he was attacking me personally. externally, i remained calm, but internally i was shaking with the overwhelming fear and anger of a parent defending her child. it took immense emotional effort to maintain my professional academic mask. by the end of the workshop, i was physically and emotionally exhausted. it is a well-known feminist saying that the personal is political and, equally, the political can be deeply personal. when your activism is connected to your parenting, and you bring your activism into your academic work, all three overlap until the boundaries are so blurred as to be almost non-existent. this blurring of boundaries creates a constant tension: are my actions to try to change the world and to make it safer for my child simultaneously making her unsafe? when i give an academic presentation to fellow researchers or a training session to health care providers, i have to make a judgment about how much to reveal or hide about my child and our family. will this information help create awareness and understanding? how safe is it for kimberley ens manning, cindy holmes, annie pullen sansfaçon, julia temple newhook, ann travers   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 130 these people to be aware that my child is transgender? even my participation in this article, identifying myself as an academic parent of a transgender child, is a risk, and not one that i have taken lightly. i constantly second-guess myself on the risks and benefits of silence. in the darker moments, when facing an audience who would see my child as aberrant or ill, and my support for her as misguided or even abusive, the mask of silence feels safer. but silence also creates shadows, creates fear, and creates shame. as audre lorde so wisely reminded us, silence may appear safe, but its protection can only ever be a precarious illusion. ann – sociology: “that grinding feeling in my gut.” i am a sociologist who works primarily on issues relating to sex and gender while working hard to integrate critical race and class analyses into my scholarship and activism. i am the leader of a research team that is working to develop a video game model of the life experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming children and youth in the greater vancouver area, and i engage in social action research and participate in local, national, and international initiatives on behalf of transgender and gender non-conforming children and young people. i am also queer and trans* myself and experienced a childhood of abuse, gender oppression, and self-hatred. i became as invisible as i could to survive adolescence, but university gave me a safe place to come out of hiding. since coming out of that first closet, i keep striving for greater authenticity and accountability. my efforts are grounded in my own privilege as i enjoy a charmed life as a white, middle-class professor and habitually comport myself with a sense of polite entitlement and self-confidence. i am the white trans/queer parent of two black children, one of whom is transgender and i am working out much of my and their lived reality through my academic work. the current manuscript i am working on situates transgender and gender non-conforming children in the radical critical race theory of necropolitics. as mbembe (2003) defines in his groundbreaking piece on the subject, necropolitics represents state power over who lives and who dies. some members of society are awarded with life and life-sustaining resources while others are not. though mbembe focuses explicitly on state atrocities on a large scale (e.g. colonialism, the nazi concentration camp, apartheid, gaza), queer and trans* necropolitical analyses (haritaworn, kuntsman & posocco, 2014; puar, 2007; snorton & haritaworn, 2013) identify systemic racism, classism, and the power of the state as axes of precarity that shape which categories of queer and transgender members of the social body live and which either die or suffer a ‘slow death’ (berlant, 2007). my own trans/queer identity, the blackness of my children and the transgender being of my daughter means that i have ‘skin in the game’ and a fighting for trans* kids   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 131 sense of urgency around the ways in which race and gender place my children at risk. while i have been an anti-racist ally since childhood, i notice how easy it is, in some ways, to relax into the comfort of the whitestream (denis, 1997; krebs, 2012) as a shaping force of my world, 8 or to expect to be congratulated for resisting racism. but, for the past 10 years, anti-black racism has been deeply personal to me. my 10-year-old child is a transracially adopted african-american, 9 transgender citizen of canada, with white queer parents, one of whom identifies as trans/non-binary (and both of whom have demanding full-time jobs), a white older sister, and a younger brother who is african-american but lighter in colour and for whom it seems everything comes easier. while i am currently on study leave with book project deadlines, my partner and i have made the difficult decision to remove our 10-year-old from the school she has known and loved since kindergarten, and where her transgender transition and status has been almost entirely nontraumatic. i have worked so hard to find safe spaces for our black transgender daughter, including investigating various schools from the time she was threeand-a-half and wearing dresses ‘as a boy’. until recently, the school our daughter has attended has provided a warm climate. since the fall of 2014, however, she has been explosive at home and talking about self-harm. she also became engaged in a hostile dynamic with a newly arrived child in her class who has experienced trauma of his own. the ongoing challenges resulting from our daughter’s learning disabilities, combined with being targeted by this student (behaviour that has been stopped but that has had a residual effect on my daughter’s sense of comfort), has pushed our vulnerable child over the edge. the solution for children like mine, recommended by the professionals we have consulted with (and paid for out of pocket), is some form of home schooling until an appropriate alternative school is found. i may just be the most reluctant home schooler in the world, but pulling her as closely into my orbit as i can right now while seeking out a range of professional and social support for her, feels like the only right thing i can do. and i am not sure it is right at all: our daughter is incredibly upset to be kept out of school. this, not my book project, has me up at five in the morning with that grinding feeling in my gut. the kind of support our daughter needs requires wealth and maternal resources and this rankles me. in addition to the personal wealth necessary to support her, it requires a bank of maternal caregiving (messner, 2011). that                                                                                                                 8 for example, i arrived at the u.s. border recently to realize that i had left my passport at home. although i was worried, i knew my race and class privilege meant there was a good chance my drivers’ license would be accepted as sufficient identification. as i expected, the whitestream operated as a magic carpet; i was allowed to proceed with a warning to “remember to bring my passport next time.” 9 the term “transracially adopted’ refers to circumstances where child and adoptive parents belong to different racialized groups.   kimberley ens manning, cindy holmes, annie pullen sansfaçon, julia temple newhook, ann travers   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 132 grinding feeling in my gut is there because my partner and i, with all the cultural and material resources that we have and are able to muster, are unable to protect this child from harm. according to dean spade (2011), gender, race, class, and immigration status are vectors of vulnerability and security that impact life chances. add systems of normative ability to that list. parents of children who are made vulnerable by these vectors fear for their children’s well-being in deep ways. i see our daughter’s future as a black transgender woman or as an effeminate man (she is still deciding) and want her to excel in school as a way to limit her vulnerability, but this is not happening and i am extremely worried about her. when our daughter was a baby and i thought of her as a boy, i would resist comments from white people such as “oh, i bet he’s going to be a great football player,” with “whatever he decides to do after medical school is up to him.” this was an effective way of interrupting racist stereotypes of physicality and embodiment but it traded on wealth and cultural capital. that my partner and i may fail to protect our daughter from exposure to future ‘risk’ is behind that grinding feeling in my gut. how are we ever going to protect her and give her the resources she needs not just to survive but thrive? i would do almost anything. closing thoughts in an era of “intensive mothering” (hays, 1996, pp. 6-9) and in the face of the contradictory institutional pressures that comprise academia, our liminal allyship assumes affectively complex and, at times, contradictory configurations. underlying all five narratives is our fierce desire, paraphrasing cindy, to protect our children from harm and to give them the resources they need to survive and to thrive. our need to protect our children is a strength, pushing us forward to actively fight for the rights of all trans* kids. but it is also what renders us vulnerable to the emotional strain of liminal allyship, no matter the resources we are able to access. in the attempt to counter the gendered and racialized discrimination that our children and so many other children face, we have all deepened in our understanding of the queer, trans*, feminist, and anti-oppression scholarship that has so long stood as a basis for making sense of our own identities and for guiding our research. for the three of us who are tenured professors, the academy has provided more than theoretical resources; it has supported our professional decision to begin to research, write, publish, and speak publicly about the challenges facing trans* children in canada today. the 2012 conference on gender creative kids, and the website that was designed in its wake, for example, would never have transpired without the support of colleagues and funding from sshrc. in a post-recession era of fiscal austerity, it is heartening that grant review boards have recognized this work as valuable and worthy of significant funding resources. for the two of us who hold postdoctoral fellowships and are currently seeking permanent fighting for trans* kids   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 133 tenure track positions, the future is less certain. without the institutional security that tenure affords, our capacity to continue to engage in academic activism remains in flux. at the same time, we are also gendered as ‘mothers’ (although ann’s transgender non-conformity creates a queer fit for this category). more specifically, we are gendered as white, middle class, academic ‘mothers’; a privileged site of economic, cultural, and social capital. indeed, we are ethically accountable to our scholarly and activist communities. and to our children and families, in the context of this privilege. a central challenge to our liminal allyship thus not only entails interrogating the costs of silence versus speech and the deep imperative to protect our children, but also interrogating the limits of methodologies, including the autoethnographic method, in which speech itself is weighted with power and thus requires vigilant theoretical interrogation.10 we recognize that even as we advocate for our trans* children and for the realization of gender justice more broadly, we often find ourselves crashing ashore on the racialized, classed, and gendered landscape that is early 21st century academic motherhood. acknowledgements this research was supported by a social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc) insight development grant. file number: 6112012-0078. cindy acknowledges funding from michael smith foundation for health research. references anderson, l. (2006). analytic autoethnography. journal of contemporary ethnography, 35(4), 373-395. bauer, g. r., hammond, r., travers, r., kaay, m., hohenadel, k., & boyce, m. (2009). "i don't think this is theoretical, this is our lives": how erasure impacts health care for transgender people. journal of the association of nurses in aids care, 20(5), 348-361. bc safer schools coalition. retrieved may 27, 2015, from http://bcsaferschools.com berlant, l. (2007). slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency), critical inquiry, 33(4), 754-780. bornstein, k. (1994). gender outlaw: on men, women, and the rest of us. new york: routledge.                                                                                                                 10 for a discussion of allyship in the context of decolonization and queer/trans loved ones, please see hunt and holmes (2015). kimberley ens manning, cindy holmes, annie pullen sansfaçon, julia temple newhook, ann travers   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 134 brill, s., & pepper, r. (2008). the transgender child: a handbook for families and professionals. san francisco: cleis press. butler, j. (1990). gender trouble. new york: routledge falmer. butler, j. (1993). bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’. new york: routledge. castañeda, m., & isgro, k. (eds.). (2013). mothers in academia. new york: columbia university press. chrystos. (1988). not vanishing. vancouver: press gang publishers. denis, c. (1997). we are not you: first nations and canadian modernity. peterborough, on: broadview press. ehrensaft, d. (2011). gender born, gender made: raising healthy gender-nonconforming children. new york: the experiment. fausto-sterling, a. (2000). sexing the body: gender politics and the construction of sexuality. new york: basic books. fausto-sterling, a. (2012). sex-gender: biology in a social world. new york: routledge. feinberg, l. (1993). stone butch blues. san francisco: firebrand books. feinberg, l. (1996). transgender warriors: making history. boston: beacon press. fleming, a. (2011). a dad called mum. in z. sharman & i. coyote (eds.), persistence: all ways butch and femme (pp. 43-52). vancouver: arsenal press. flood, m., martin, b., & dreher, t. (2013). combining academia and activism: common obstacles and useful tools. australian universities’ review, 55(1), 78-96. forge. (2012). transgender rates of violence. retrieved from http://forge-forward.org/wpcontent/docs/faq-05-2012-trans101.pdf goffman, e. (1963/1990). stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. new york: penguin books. grant, j., mottet, l., tanis, j., harrison, j., herman, j., & keisling, m. (2011). injustice at every turn: a report of the national transgender discrimination survey. washington: national center for transgender equality and national gay and lesbian task force. haritaworn, j.a., kuntsman, s., & posocco, s. (eds.). (2014). queer necropolitics. abingdon, england: social justice. hays, s. (1996). the cultural contradictions of motherhood. new haven, conn: yale university press. hellen, m. (2009). transgender children in schools. liminalis: journal for sex/gender emancipation and resistance, 2009(3), 81-99. hochschild, a. r. (1983/2012). the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. berkeley, ca: university of california press. hodgson, l. (2013). childhood of the race: a critical race theory intervention into childhood studies. in j. joseph, s. darnell & y. nakamura (eds.), the children’s table: childhood studies and the humanities (pp. 38-51). athens, ga: the university of georgia press. holmes, c., & fleming, a. (2009). the move. in r. epstein (ed.), who's your daddy? and other writings on queer parenting (pp. 251-261). toronto: sumach press. hooks, b. (1989). talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. boston: south end press. hooks, b. (2010). feminism is for everybody: passionate politics. brooklyn, ny: south end press. hunt, s., & holmes, c. (2015). everyday decolonization: living a decolonizing queer politics. journal of lesbian studies, 19(2), 154-172. johnson, j. l., & best, amy l. (2012). radical normals: the moral career of straight parents as public advocates for their gay children. symbolic interaction, 35(3), 321-339. krebs, a. (2012). hockey and the reproduction of colonialism in canada. race and sport in canada: intersecting inequalities. toronto: canadian scholars press. kumashiro, k. (2002). troubling education: queer activism and anti-oppressive pedagogy. new york: routledge falmer. lorde, a. (1984). sister outsider: essays and speeches. new york: crossing press. macintyre, a. (1985). after virtue (2nd ed.). london: duckworth. macintyre, a. (1999). dependent rational animals -why human beings need the virtues. london: duckworth. fighting for trans* kids   studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 118-135, 2015 135 manning, k., sansfaçon, a. p., & meyer, e. j. (2014). introduction. in e. j. meyer & a. p. sansfaçon (eds.), supporting transgender and gender creative youth: schools, families, and communities in action (pp. 1-12). new york: peter lang. manning, k. (2015). attachment politics and the rights of the trans child. 2015 law and society association conference, seattle, wa, usa. mason, m., wolfinger, n. h., & goulden, m. (eds.). (2013). do babies matter? gender and family in the ivory tower. new jersey: routledge university press. mbembe, a. (2003). necropolitics. public culture, 15(1), 11-40. messner, m. (2011). gender ideologies, youth sports, and the production of soft essentialism. sociology of sport journal, 28, 151-170. namaste, v. (2000). invisible lives: the erasure of transsexual and transgendered people. chicago: university of chicago press. o'brien hallstein, d. l., & o'reilly, a. (eds.). (2012). academic motherhood in a post-second wave context: challenges, strategies, and possibilities. toronto: demeter press. piven, f.f. (2010). reflections of scholarship and activism. antipode, 42(4), 806-810. puar, j. (2007). terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times. durham, nc: duke university press. pullen sansfaçon, a., & cowden, s. (2012). the ethical foundations of social work. new york: routledge. pyne, j. (2013). rainbow health ontario fact sheet: supporting gender independent children and their families. retrieved from http://www.rainbowhealthontario.ca/wpcontent/uploads/woocommerce_uploads/2012/10/rho_factsheet_gic_e1.pdf rainbow health ontario. retrieved june 22, 2015, from http://www.rainbowhealthontario.ca/ ryan, s., & runswick-cole, k. (2008). repositiong mothers: mothers, disabled children and disability studies. disability & society, 23(3), 199-210. snorton, c., & haritaworn, j.a. (2013). trans necropolitics: a transnational reflection on violence, death, and the trans of colour afterlife. in s. stryker & a. aizura (eds.), transgender studies reader 2 (pp. 66-76). new york: routledge. spade, d. (2011). normal life: administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law. brooklyn, ny: south end press. sylvia rivera law project. (2012). systems of inequality: poverty and homelessness. retrieved from http://srlp.org/files/disproportionate_poverty.pdf travers, a. (2014). transformative gender justice as a framework for normalizing gender variance among children and youth. in e. j. meyer & a. p. sansfaçon (eds.), supporting transgender & gender creative youth: schools, families, and communities in action (pp. 5468). new york: peter lang. ward, j. (2013). get your gender binary off my childhood! towards a movement for children's gender self-determination. in m. friedman & f. j. green (eds.), chasing rainbows: exploring gender fluid parenting practices (pp. 43-51). bradford, on: demeter press. monkman final before ts november 26 18 correspondence address: karen monkman, college of education, depaul university, chicago, il, 60614; email: kmonkman@depaul.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 educating girls: complexities of informing meaningful social change karen monkman depaul university, usa abstract jackie kirk devoted her career to trying to bridge the relationships among research, policy and practice for the purpose of making the world a better place for children, teachers, and communities. reflecting her priorities, we examine herein how research, policy and practice interact to enable a robust and dynamic program that educates girls for purposes far beyond typical policy priorities of access and parity. to do so, we rely on interviews and focus group discussions that involved over 130 individuals who were involved with one girls’ education program in a remote region of a southeast asian country. their narratives reveal that the program was flexible and responsive, yet guided by clear ideas about gender equity. this work is not prescriptive or predictable; it evolves through dynamic interactions. global policy priorities of access and parity became means toward more important goals including community sustainability in the face of environmental and economic challenges. structures that enabled this robust program included space, time, funding, and a dynamic conceptual lens. keywords gender equity; girls’ education; education policy; development education policy, global education policy introduction jackie kirk devoted her career to trying to bridge the relationships among research, policy and practice for the purpose of making the world a better place for children, teachers, and communities. she worked with development organizations to improve educational experience while paying attention to gender inequities. she informed this work with solid research on the nuances and complexities of lived realities in particular locations and times (e.g., kirk, 2004, 2007; kirk & sommer, 2006). this balancing of commitments continues for many of us who want policy agendas to better reflect the priorities of people who are the intended beneficiaries of global education and development projects and programs while also taking into account social karen monkman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 196 structures that perpetuate inequities. this article was inspired by ongoing conversations with jackie kirk during the 2000s, as we collectively sought to deepen the meaningfulness of work we do in education. in this article we examine how research, policy and practice interact to enable a robust and dynamic program in southeast asia that educates girls for purposes far beyond typical policy priorities of access and parity that have dominated international policy and programming. we focus on one girls’ education program in southeast asia that moved beyond the access and parity goals for girls’ education. this program – the story of which is told in this article – was not prescriptive or predictive; it evolved through dynamic interactions over time. structures that enabled this robust program include space, time, funding, and a dynamic conceptual lens. conceptual grounding this research is situated in two primary conceptual realms – one that focuses on the interactions among research, policy and practice, and the other that is particular to gender and education, with a specific focus on girls’ education. research, policy and practice the integral relationship of policy, research, and practice is thought to have synergistic potential in strengthening educational work (levinson, sutton, & winstead, 2009), yet we continue to see more autonomous approaches to each, as neoliberal agendas strengthen their influences. global education policy makes assertions that schooling will solve complex social problems (kendall, 2007), while devoting increasing energy instead to measuring outcomes and accountability concerns (monkman & hoffman, 2013). practitioners and organizations are pressured to demonstrate impact, often narrowly defined, to justify their programs and projects; furthermore, research, especially qualitative research, is thought by some as irrelevant to the applied concerns of policy and practice, yet it is through research that we can understand more complex dynamics. without integral dialogue among these three domains in international development education, efforts are likely to fall short of their potential. many of us – jackie kirk included – have sought to engage in international education work in ways that bridge this divide, by doing research to strategically inform policy and practice; by generating or influencing policy so it can support worthwhile educational improvement; and by engaging in practice to create meaningful and impactful experiences for girls and boys, women and men, teachers and administrators, and local communities, and to inform policy and motivate research. while synergistic interactions among practitioners, policy makers and researchers are important in overcoming those siloed domains, divergent educating girls studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 197 conceptual frames and ideological orientations also point us in different directions. human rights as a policy frame, for example, in education and development policy and practice has been taken on by many organizations (including unicef, oxfam, care, and others), in part to counteract the human capital orientation of development in earlier decades (and still by the world bank). human rights shifts our focus to people’s lives, and to education as a right (as opposed to education as a vehicle to getting jobs or for economic development). how human rights is conceptualized in policy varies, and so there are different approaches to it; in addition, there can be tensions or resistance in practice (bajaj, 2011; coysh, 2014; zembylas, 2017). also, human rights and gender empowerment are sometimes used as partially overlapping concepts that are synergistic yet difficult to disentangle, as is the case in this program and our research. with respect to girls’ education, unterhalter, heslop and mamedu (2013) identify two trends – one that conceptualizes gender disparities as a question of distribution inequalities, and another that points to structural inequalities that constrain capabilities. the first seeks to get more children into school (and sometimes to improve quality of the educational experience), and the second prioritizes deeper social structural change that would not only increase access and parity but also alter relations of power so that changes are deeply grounded and sustainable. the first is more prevalent in policy, practice, and assessments, although it is the second that has more dynamic potential for long-term change and is often the focus in academic research. embedded in these perspectives one can also see divergent conceptualizations about gender and education, in which sex is conflated with gender, and schooling with education (mccormick, 2016). learning that takes place outside school and program settings is often ignored in initiatives informed by a distributive orientation, and knowledge gained from living life is devalued compared to school-based knowledge. similarly gender, when it is conflated with sex, confuses biological categories of male and female (sex categories) with a more fluid and malleable understanding of gender as socially constructed (lorber, 1994). this essentialist thinking precludes the more interesting and influential consideration of how the social construction of gender is embedded in assumptions about education (not merely schooling) for boys and girls, or women and men, and how education influences the meaning systems embedded in locally constructed gendered social relations. all people – not just girls and women – participate in the social construction of gender, so everyone needs to be involved in and committed to changes in how gender is socially constructed. gender and education as a global policy priority gender has become more prominent on global education and development policy platforms, spurred by esther boserup’s (1970) analysis of gender and karen monkman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 198 development, king and hill’s (1993) analysis of women and girls’ education, and strengthened by the 1995 women’s conference in beijing (along with many other influential scholars, activists and movements; see for example, kabeer, 1997; mohanty, 2003; and overviews in monkman & webster, 2015; unterhalter & north, 2011). education for all (efa) and the millennium development goals (mdgs) then became the guiding policy forces for education globally; they included recognition of the education of girls as integral to broader development interests by making access and parity major goals. however, while they tried to push beyond access and gender parity, “the meanings of gender that were invoked remained limited” (unterhalter & north, 2011, p. 2), thereby narrowing the scope of girls’ education initiatives. enrollment rates (access) and gender parity are relatively easy to measure (counting bodies in seats). global funding increased to support countries’ progress toward meeting efa goals and the mdgs which enabled more children to attend school. girls’ enrollment rates were increased, and parity has been reached in about two-thirds of the world’s countries at the primary level (unesco, 2017). in some countries more girls than boys now attend schools, although the reasons are not always clear and are often not reflective of situations characterized by social justice. sometimes they are left behind in school due to lack of opportunities outside school (kendall & silver, 2014). reaching gender parity does not mean full enrollment of either girls or boys, despite progress made in the past couple of decades. by 2010, 61 million children of primary school age were still not in school, 53% of whom were girls (unesco, 2012; lewis & lockheed, 2006). some organizations shifted their focus to post-primary education, as the numbers of girls (and boys) in primary school increased (unicef/mwai, 2007). in 2015, 264 million school-aged children were not in primary or secondary school; more alarmingly, 17 million children are unlikely to ever enroll in school (unesco, 2017). while gains have been made in increasing school enrollment overall, there is variation across regions and localities. furthermore, getting girls into school does not necessarily mean they will remain, or even learn much (chisamya, dejaeghere, kendall, & khan, 2012; unesco, 2018). beyond access and parity, more attention to quality has been increasingly advocated (aikman & unterhalter, 2005; herz & sperling, 2004; sutton, 1998), yet progress has been uneven. in approaches that view distribution as the problem (unterhalter, heslop, & mamedu, 2013), what constitutes quality tends to be understood in ways that are easily measurable; this likely limits the ways that quality is conceptualized, thereby limiting strategies to improve it (aikman, unterhalter & challender, 2005). while gender has entered the development education policy priorities, the continuing focus on access and parity has prompted research on practices, strategies and other concerns that are relatively easy to measure (to reveal progress toward access and parity). at the same time, scholarly research on lived experience, material realities, and discursive framing of understandings has increased. we now turn to a educating girls studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 199 more focused look at educating girls. educating girls strategies commonly employed in girls’ education programs in locations with very different histories, cultures, and conditions of life include stipends or bags of rice (to offset the direct and opportunity costs of attending school), activities designed to change how people think (e.g., convincing families to send girls to school), and life skills classes for young women (often to make up for limited formal education and to address assumed needs of adolescents). some ngos also build schools in communities to reduce commuting time and increase safety for girls in their commutes to school, while unicef and others advocate for “girl friendly” schools (herz & sperling, 2004). while many of these strategies were initially recognized through research, and while such strategies can increase numbers of girls in schools, they are often perceived to be limited in scope, sociocultural relevance, sustainability, and in creating meaningful social change (chisamya et al., 2012). higher enrollment rates can be short-lived when other pressures subsequently take children out of school (kendall, 2007). pressure to scale up or uncritically borrow strategies from other programs can work against fitting strategies to local realities. a recent donor shift in accountability promotes payment for outcomes as a supposed motivator for producing results – the more girls who enroll in school the more money schools or ngos receive (unesco, 2017). at its worst, this can put pressure on providers to seek quick outcomes, even if not lasting or meaningful. in addition, this dance between policy and practice (often driven by accountability pressures) largely ignores what we know about the contextualized experiences of children, families, and teachers. beyond the policy and practice domains, a different set of literature examines lived experience within the contexts of particular histories, cultures, sociopolitical and economic structures, and life conditions. these tend to be more qualitative in approach, less interested in solely measuring access and parity, and often revolve around community-defined or locally relevant concerns. a few examples reveal a wide range of complex issues and their structural underpinnings. kendall and silver (2014) reveal how efa has created an elite discourse about education in malawi which draws boys of means out of school into jobs, leaving poor girls behind, in school, with limited opportunities for their futures. research focused primarily on access and parity (distributive inequalities) would miss questions about why and how (structural inequalities) and consequences of schooling. vavrus (2002) unpacks various understandings of tradition in tanzania and how they shape historical orientations toward gender and education, which in turn shape policies for girls’ schooling. she also reveals how structural adjustment policies in tanzania affect the lives of secondary students, particularly girls karen monkman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 200 (vavrus, 2005). murphy-graham (2008) focuses on complexities of secondary schooling in honduras, showing how attending schooling does not automatically produce empowerment; this finding challenges policy assumptions that attending school results in empowerment. in india, the careful creation of a unique space for girls enabled an empowerment process to develop (shah, 2011). varying conceptualizations of empowerment (monkman, 2011) reveal more nuanced understandings while complicating the concept’s usefulness in policy and practice that seeks quick and easily measurable results. nuanced research has also been done with a focus on teachers, including women teachers’ differential access to income relative to male teachers in uganda, which diminishes their professional social status and the economic foundations for their personal lives (molyneaux, 2011); juxtaposed with delayed payment of salaries, women teachers’ lives are further constrained. the “impossible fictions” of women teachers in karachi situates them in “a constant tension between possibility and impossibility” (kirk, 2004, p. 379) due to the oppositional binaries that undergird notions of gender and work. the lives of teachers affect the learning experiences of their students, while also reinforcing or challenging gendered social structures. research related to gender based violence is also notable (e.g., kirk, 2007; leach & mitchell, 2006; parkes, 2016). while these are just a few examples, the point is that what we know from research of this type is much more nuanced than what is implied in global policy discourses (monkman & hoffman, 2013; kendall, 2007) or in narrow approaches to implementing policies. methods this article relies primarily on data collected in 2015 during a program evaluation which was structured not as an impact study but as an opportunity to tell the story of the program. we collected data in six villages, by conducting 50 interviews and focus groups and involving 138 students, teachers, community members, policy makers, ngo staff and partners (see table 1). most of the interviews and focus groups were audio-recorded and transcribed, but several took place in a setting where ambient noise levels were too loud for audible recordings (i.e., in a metal roofed building during heavy rain in one village). on this day we took notes by hand. each interview lasted 30 to 60 minutes, with most lasting about 60 minutes. each focus group, which involved two to 10 participants, lasted 60 to 100 minutes. interpreters were used in the villages during data collection; often two interpreters were needed, one to interpret from local languages to the national language and another to english. only the english translations in the recordings were transcribed, although the transcribers were fluent in the national language, so they could check the english translations as they educating girls studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 201 transcribed. names of individuals, villages, and organizations have been omitted for privacy reasons. number/sex of participants number of interviews and focus groups conducted participants female male total interviews focus groups ngo staff, consultants, and partner institutions (e.g., other ngos and unicef) 5 6 11 6 2 government officials at national, provincial, district and sub-district levels 7 3 10 8 1 women’s committee members 15 0 15 0 3 parents, grandparents, and village elders 9 16 25 2 3 youth (students) 28 16 44 6 6 teachers 8 8 16 4 4 school board members 5 12 17 0 5 total: 77 61 138 26 24 table 1. participants and data collection data were coded separately by two researchers, each in multiple rounds and with searches for negative cases. analysis followed conventional qualitative methods which allow themes to bubble up from the data (rossman & rallis, 2003). two themes that represent the core story of this program are educating girls and informing change. the third theme, infusing gender, emerged as a salient pattern across the other themes. these three thematic findings are presented below as local narratives, with analysis presented under the heading meaningful social change through education, where we focus on the conceptual ideas that emanate from the findings. first, however, we describe the context within which this program took place. context this girls’ education program grew out of the global priorities related to educating girls, and was funded with private donations to an international ngo. the funding source encouraged innovation, and the ngo built on their history of making gender a priority, which is grounded in empowerment and human rights frameworks. the in-country staff included a few expatriates who have lived in the country for several years; a few locals who come from nearby indigenous communities; and other nationals, some of whom have been challenged to karen monkman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 202 rethink their attitudes toward ethnic minorities. the indigenous communities in which the ngo works are in a remote area where most of the residents have low levels of educational attainment (if any), speak local languages, and engage in subsistence farming. historically, political tensions and geographical isolation have created suspicion and prejudices between the national majority and indigenous groups. economic exploitation and environmental challenges are recent and severe, and have pushed subsistence farmers farther from villages to less fertile land, and destroyed much of the nearby forests. like many very poor communities worldwide, there are few opportunities for paid employment in the villages, and often schools and health-related services are not nearby. the median age in this region is about five years younger than the country as a whole, and life expectancy is about 20 years less than the national average of about 60. internal migration is also increasing, with people from the dominant ethnic group moving into the region, now comprising about one-third of the population. the net school attendance rate in this remote province is 20-30 percentage points lower than other provinces, hovering just above half the school age population, although this is also changing quickly. the ngo’s girls’ education program was an integrated program whose primary goal was to increase access of ethnic minority children, particularly girls, to quality education. the girls’ education components were integrated with multilingual education (mle) in grades 1-3, and early childhood education (ece). both mle and ece attracted more girls and boys to the school initially, and helped children to transition to monolingual (national language) state schools. the ngo had also built community schools for the lower primary grades, and recruited local high school leavers and trained them as bilingual teachers. the ngo had previously been engaged in a host of specific development projects such as digging wells and building toilets in the same villages. the ngo conducted extensive research in the communities prior to designing the girls’ education program; this was possible due to the ten-year funding period. this research led to replacing some of their initial assumptions with more nuanced understandings (explained later) of why girls were not in school, how educating girls fits within local concerns, and how education of indigenous children (boys and girls) relates to social change writ large, and cultural beliefs, values and processes. this was a turning point. the ngo also engaged villages in creating or reinvigorating supportive structures for the community schools, including the local school boards, to oversee budgets and teacher attendance, and village women’s committees to actively engage with a broader range of gender-related issues. the ngo has also worked extensively and strategically with local, regional and national government entities, unicef, and other local and international ngos, and has established dynamic working relationships, so much so that the national policies related to ece and mle have been informed by the ngo’s successful work in this region. several villagers had also taken on the educating girls studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 203 language of human rights and women’s rights, reflecting the ngo’s orientation. through the building of intentional and meaningful relationships and a deepening understanding of local realities and concerns, and informed by flexible conceptual frameworks, the ngo staff and participants came to recognize and re-think gender relations, and to link girls and schooling with other important priorities including multilingual education and cultural pride. educating girls in this program was not merely about meeting efa goals and the mdgs, but became an integral part of a multi-faceted approach to community survival. local narratives here we tell the story of this girls’ education program in southeast asia, with an eye to understanding underlying local gendered structures and other complexities. we begin with how villagers articulate their rationale for educating girls; then move to the basis of enabling or informing change. finally, we examine changes in gendered priorities integral to educating girls, namely, infusing gender into the discursive understandings, which in turn shape local policy and practice. educating girls a young woman school board member gave the following reason for supporting the girls’ education work of this ngo in her village: i chose to do this work because i would like all the indigenous children, especially girls, to join school and get knowledge. this is because we need to avoid being cheated, and we need to be able to find work. in my experience, if we can’t read or write, we are unable to do work or have a small business. (village a, interview) she went on, using a plant metaphor to highlight her role in supporting the process of change involving the next generation: “i am an older [reed] now, so it’s my responsibility to encourage these new [reeds] to grow, to grow in education. my role is to encourage younger [reeds] to grow in school.” members of one village’s women’s committee explained that previously, only boys went to school in their village, but more girls are in school now, due in part to the partnership work of the ngo and the women’s committee. they realized that decreasing girls’ workloads and educating parents about the importance of sending girls to school is important. they were proud to report that “in the village we have schools, teachers, and students learning” (village b, focus group). karen monkman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 204 the initial vehicle for increasing enrollments in village schools included building community primary schools and developing mle as the curricular base. locally recruited teachers were trained and hired for jobs in the community schools, which created cultural cohesion among teachers, students, and the communities. the addition of ece then served as a conduit to primary school by providing learning experiences to build on as children move on, and a daycare space for siblings of older children – typically girls’ younger siblings – so they could continue their own schooling. the outcomes went far beyond access; even though access to schooling was an integral part, access was just the beginning. narratives suggest that villagers became more engaged as active citizens, welcomed public discussions about gender and human rights and embraced a commitment to change behaviors related to domestic violence and sharing chores. in one school board focus group a discussion ensued about how the village has changed as more children attend school. in another village, a woman noted a connection between educational equality and access, and women’s equality and quality of life in general: i saw in my village … – in the past when they woke up, [the children] just sat in front of the house. nowadays when they get up, they clean their teeth, bodies, and get their bags for going to school…. in the past when we woke up, we just went to the farm. but nowadays when we wake up, we have a discussion with the men about what we are doing…. it has changed our life. we can make plans to discuss with each other. (village b, women’s committee focus group) young people, both boys and girls, described how their families were increasingly sharing work among their members. one girl captured the common perspective well: [the ngo] is working to educate the elders in the community about sharing housework, to know about rights, and to send children to school. in my family, my parents are sharing the housework, like my father helps my mother. and for boys and girls, my younger brother helps me collect the water. (village c, girls’ club focus group) a boy described the change in his family in this way: “[we] can divide work with each other, … not … much work [is put] on only one person. [we] share the work together” (village c, boys’ focus group). another girl explained how work was now distributed more evenly among siblings in her family: my younger brother and sister study in the afternoon. i study in the morning. when i go to school, they do housework. when i come back, i do housework and they go to study. my parents want us to learn and want us to go to school, so they push us to go to school. (village b, girls’ focus group) educating girls studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 205 sharing household chores was mentioned by almost all participants, and reflects a major change in the gendered division of labor. the ngo had initially thought that life skills training for adolescent girls would be the main focus of their work in this program, but after learning more from the initial research they did about the communities’ priorities and ways of living, they realized that girls, relative to boys, did not attend school due primarily to heavy work loads which left no time for school. through discussing this in communities, villages decided to share work more equitably so that chores did not remain a deterrent to attending school for girls. having a strong research base and a participatory process informed strategies and policy decisions, making the program more integral to how the villagers lived their lives and to their own communal priorities. attending school was talked about by villagers not only as a right of girls, but as necessary to village survival. part of the ngo’s framing of equality for girls was the grounding in a human rights paradigm, which they have worked actively to refine over time. this framing guides the ngo’s work generally. they also shared it with, but did not impose it on, the communities. their approach is one reflective of participatory action research, although they did not use that term; they introduced ideas and generated reflective discussion, while letting the communities take them up or not. while not everyone used the term, as we will see later, many villagers embraced this human rights perspective as it relates to educational access for girls, and also in areas beyond schooling. domestic violence was named by many of the adults as something that has decreased as villagers increasingly recognized it as a human rights issue for women. the conceptual underpinnings, like the early research, served as a guide and a meaningful basis for social change. furthermore, adequate time and space to authentically dialogue, and a deep trust of the ngo, likely facilitated acceptance and application of the concept of gender equality by the communities in supporting more equitable work loads, which increased school participation. informing change what, from the perspective of the villagers, motivated or influenced the changes? community members described a combination of factors, including changing social norms (as suggested above) and technological advances that have led to decreased workloads and increasing gender equality in their villages. in the following quotes, three members of one school board, who are also grandfathers and fathers of local schoolchildren, respond to a question of how life for girls in their village is different from life for girls when they were young boys: karen monkman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 206 when i was young, girls had many tasks each day. [girls] had to pound the rice by themselves before they could cook it – they had to leave home to collect water, wood, to look for vegetables – many, many tasks. now there are machines to help pound rice, for example, and men also carry firewood from the forest. but now a husband will bring firewood, especially by using motorbikes. we didn’t understand about advocacy for girls. we didn’t understand about domestic violence or equal rights between boys and girls and men and women. and now we understand about how to reduce domestic violence. and we know about human rights, how other people have equal rights. (village a, school board focus group) again, we see influence of a human rights orientation, as it applies to gender and recognition of human rights shaping how life is lived, from gender based violence to a gendered division of labor. when asked what kind of impact the re-distribution of workload had on men, one man responded: we’re very happy for the women, too – we understand that it was very difficult for women. they have to do many things, like have children and do a lot of hard work, look after animals, and prepare cooking for the family, and go to the forest. so life was too hard for them. (village a, school board focus group) we tried hard to get under the surface in the interviews and focus groups, knowing that it is often challenging to get privileged groups (men, in this case), to do more work or share responsibilities with others. structures such as a gendered division of labor often situate men in social positions of unearned privilege (mcintosh, 2013). challenging those structures can feel like a reduction of that advantage. even though we asked men why they would want to share chores (as their work load would increase), their responses always pointed to the common good: sharing chores and enabling girls to attend school was best for the community. none of their responses focused on their experience as individuals. understanding the life experience of others is necessary for those advantaged by social structures – men and boys in this case – to become invested in change that benefits the whole community. indeed, girls’ education initiatives that solely target girls often have limited success, restricted by narrow policy targets and reflecting distribution priorities (e.g., increasing enrollments). it is the complex intertwining of societal processes that creates structures of inequities. solutions must be equally complex if they are to be meaningful and sustainable. men and boys must be part of changes in gendered social relations in order for changes to be structural. it educating girls studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 207 would appear that a communal cultural orientation was key to facilitating this shift in thinking about chores and educating girls, as these were seen to benefit the whole community. another key influence in enabling change was making learning accessible through languages of instruction understood by villagers and recruiting and training locals as teachers, which made the community schools a valued and integrated part of the villages. when schooling is relevant and in a language children understand, they are more likely to like school, which reduces dropping out. a 14-year old girl explained: “i like going to school because the schools are good, and modern. i have classmates and friends who are good and kind – we are close. and my teachers are good at explaining and educating us” (village d, interview). wanting to go to school often relies on school providing a good experience. improving quality requires more than using prepackaged curricula or learning new pedagogical strategies. infrastructural changes increase desires to attend school. another 14-year old girl in village b identified what the ngo has done in their community: “[they] build schools, they support children, support students’ learning, and also they build toilets in the school and provide materials for our studies” (village b, interview). she continues: [the ngo] supports children to make them feel school is nice so they want to come to school. [the ngo] provided interesting materials for the children, the children want to go to school, and other children follow them to school because of the interesting material. indeed, we heard several stories of non-enrolled children, some too young for school, following school children to school because they were anxious to be part of what was happening in the classrooms. other children mentioned the wells dug by the ngo, which provided easier access to water, as another technology that made attending school easier. this, of course, relates to household chores as the location of wells reduced the distance children travelled to find water. when chores become easier, it is undoubtedly easier for boys to agree to do them. engaging classroom materials and caring relations between teachers and children, along with toilets and water, were all valued and drew children to school. addressing gender disparities in school entailed attention to a wide range of issues that on the surface seem unrelated. the program staff understood the myriad influences that encourage and discourage children from attending school, including gendered issues such as the need for toilets and privacy for personal hygiene (kirk & sommer 2006; sommer, 2013). they also recognized local cultural knowledge and logic that situated girls’ schooling as a community benefit. strategies as diverse as providing a high quality educational experience, redistributing responsibility for chores, digging wells and building toilets, and creating structures of shared power over educational decisions were meaningful because they make sense in a larger and more complex sociocultural, economic, and environmental context. the karen monkman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 208 intertwining elements of this program emerged out of these particular villages in a specific region, and is unlikely to be as successful if simply replicated in other contexts – programs should grow out of the particulars of the contexts in which they are situated. infusing gender throughout these varied and intertwined influences we see a consistent prioritizing of gendered awareness. girls’ educational experience and gender equity are positively affected by having wells and toilets, which help to make school accessible to adolescent girls. recruiting local teachers, many of whom are young women, helped to elevate women’s and girls’ status in communities: the young women teachers had high status jobs and became role models for younger girls. ece deepens a sense that school is for everyone; it freed up older girls to attend school themselves, as their younger siblings (or children) are cared for in a safe and stimulating space, which also created an early habit of going to school. the gendered human rights frameworks that guide this ngo’s work bring out more awareness of gendered social structures. this awareness evolved over time, sometimes unpredictably. a long-time consultant with this ngo reflected in his interview on how a focus on gender became infused into the program: so i think there were a number of things that happened in the project that were important – and because of this focus on girls [reflecting the funding parameters], one of the unexpected outcomes was that it actually raised the awareness of gender at the community level. he went on to describe an early research project in two schools that had two classrooms for each grade: they separated boys and girls into separate classes. for one year there were single-sex classrooms for grades 1 and 2. he continued: [t]hen we looked at the academic achievement after 12 months in terms of math and language – and the outcome. it did show that girls were advantaged by singlesex classrooms. but what was really the best outcome of that little project, is that it really made the community school boards and teachers and parents start thinking about gender and girls and boys and education and what their needs might be in a way that they’d never done before. so it really raised the profile of gender at the community level, and i wasn’t really expecting that – i thought, okay, we’d get academic achievement outcomes, but in fact, there was this other outcome which was much more important. this realization informed the ngo’s work in the villages and with local and regional governments, including the women’s committees, to reflectively and critically examine, as the consultant stated, “the place and educating girls studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 209 role of women in society, and what their plans were and what their vision was for the future.” this is what led to the realization that the time it took girls to do their chores prevented them from attending school. the consultant explains: [r]eally it was just about raising the level of awareness of the community, and getting them to make action plans of what they’re going to do to achieve what their vision [is] for the place of girls and women in their community – it was an action-research model actually, though we never used that word. over the 10 years of this program, through the building of intentional and meaningful relationships in the villages, and informed by flexible conceptual frameworks and the preliminary research in the villages, this program came to recognize and re-think gender relations, fine-tuning and refocusing their guiding gender-related policy agenda. the ngo developed strategic relationships with other ngos, a un agency, and local government officials – they realized that this broader support structure would be necessary to sustain the work in the communities, and expand it to other villages. educating girls was built on recognizing gender relations in communities (not merely counting girls in school), and working to make those social structures more equitable. again, we see the intertwining of policy on multiple levels, practice, and research. recognizing gendered social structures can bring to view barriers to girls attending school and can also become a motivation to transform gendered social practices to address broader community concerns, whether school access, extending human rights to girls and women, or confronting rapidly changing socioeconomic and political conditions. the arguments for educating girls were not simplistic. restructuring the household division of labor, for example, enabled girls to join boys in helping communities transition from subsistence farming to integrating additional and alternative means of income generation, and to engage in a critical politics related to land use, environmental degradation, and economic exploitation. educating girls was not merely about meeting efa goals and mdgs, but became an integral part of a multi-faceted approach to community survival. meaningful social change through education across the multifaceted narratives about this girls’ education program, and intertwined with the research-policy-practice nexus, we see four elements that seem integral to making discursive shifts from broad global policy priorities of access and parity, and sometimes quality, to highly contextualized and complex explanations about why girls should be educated. the four elements are space, time, funding, and conceptual underpinnings. space – physical, social, and curricular space especially – is where things happen. the ngo built early childhood centers in the villages; these are twokaren monkman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 210 room buildings that house an early childhood classroom, and another room that can serve as a classroom or meeting space. many of our focus groups met in these buildings or in the village meeting hall; the ngo also used these spaces in their work in villages. physical spaces such as these enable social interaction and collective discussion in neutral locations about local priorities. social space for initiating, developing, and engaging in relationships was key to the ngo’s work. they carefully yet strategically developed open, valued, and meaningful relationships with unicef, government entities from the national to the local levels, other ngos, and people in the villages. they visited villages frequently, and responded to requests from the villages. these interactions are where social relations were built and managed, negotiated and deepened. they listened to local priorities and changed their own understandings of their concerns as they learned more. they also relied on sociopolitical structures already in place, such as the women’s committees, engaging them as support conduits. curricular space is conceived here as space where knowledge is engaged, both in and outside of schools, in ways that alter thinking. the ngo’s approach to working with communities was not rigid or bureaucratically imposed. villagers recounted many stories about how children’s and teachers’ engagement with the curriculum in the schools promoted thinking differently about the structures that shape lives; recall the consultant’s description of their action research approach. the substance or content of teaching and learning, and of broader engagement in communities, when it can take on a life of its own (e.g., evolve organically), is a curricular space where responsive, reflective and reflexive transformative processes occur. this takes time. time and space work hand in hand. the meaningful development of social relationships takes time, as does working through challenges such as listening to varying perspectives or resolving disagreements. this program was funded for 10 years, which enabled a more intentional process of engaging in informed and sustained change. the ngo staff had time to become deeply informed – to learn more about local life and national and regional politics, for example – and to engage communities in participatory approaches to change that were solidly grounded in village priorities and perspectives. when things needed to change, they had time to change them. some staff were already well embedded in local communities. others needed staff development so they could rethink their assumptions about ethnic relations and prejudices in this country. this is hard work that requires sustained engagement. funding to support programs such as this can constrain or enable creativity and adaptation. the funding was substantial, and came from a private donation. the strings attached to the funding were not rigid and encouraged innovation and locally-relevant flexibility in doing meaningful gender and education work. the same funder also funded several other countries’ initiatives through the same ngo. each of these programs developed in very educating girls studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 211 different ways, demonstrating that context matters. with funding cycles in development projects more typically three to five years, it was clear that having 10 years provided a much richer experience and one that saw a dramatic boost in school enrollments and attainment (thereby meeting global education policy priorities and targets such as efa and the mdgs), while moving beyond them to make a difference in people’s thinking, ways of learning, and lived experience. funding that is restrictive or prescriptive would likely not enable these kinds of outcomes. there are no shortcuts or silver bullets in doing development education work. this program’s duration enabled a deeper basis for sustainability built on high levels of relevancy and integral local involvement. funding that pays for results (unesco, 2017) (which is not the model followed in this program) would seem to constrain potential for deeply grounded change. access and parity, when assessed as an outcome, may preclude their roles as necessary means toward bigger goals such as community sustainability. conceptual underpinnings, embodied in the ngo’s frameworks and in the early research they did, also helped to inform and guide their work. these conceptual ideas were not translated into prescriptions for practice; they generated an authentic and dynamic internal dialogical process. conceptual ideas that informed thinking and social change included a human rights orientation and an empowerment framework, an understanding of language acquisition and pedagogy (benson & kosonen, 2013), and also an understanding of local culture, village priorities, and social structures related to politics, economics, and the environment. the critical orientation of this work enabled a program that was not constrained by narrow global policy goals (i.e., access and parity), but was responsive to changing understandings of local realities, open to considering broader (and more structural) conceptual ideas about gender and education, and able to evolve over time. in conclusion, when time (enough time to adapt approaches along the way), funding (with limited strings attached), space (to enable valued social relations to develop), and conceptual ideas (that guide without being prescriptive) come together to enable dynamic engagement in addressing social problems and promoting social justice, we see meaningful change that has a good chance to grow and evolve after the program is formally over. while a few villages had ongoing or new challenges, overall we saw the confluence of these four elements in this region in ways that have changed people’s thinking about gender relations, giving girls more chances to pursue a future that situates them as valued members of their communities. conclusion although it is the work done on the ground that makes a locally discernable difference, global policy is also important: it names the education of girls as a karen monkman studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 212 global priority, it likely helps attract funding, and provides some legitimacy to projects that prioritize gender. in addition, the reflective processes undertaken by the ngo internally (with staff) and with the villagers and their partners (including government entities) made their work responsive to both local villages’ priorities and attractive to the state as they moved to take over after the program funding ended. this work is not simplistic. embracing complexity is necessary and can be difficult and unpredictable. engaging gender as a social structure embedded in social relations and cultural meaning systems – not just counting bodies in seats – enables a richer understanding of gendered disparities in education, and a much more dynamic approach to moving toward gender equity. participatory pedagogies enable this flexibility and dynamism. when policy, research, and practice work together to inform how we think about development education and how we approach it, and when this nexus is overlaid by sufficient time, space, funding, and supportive conceptual ideas, we can more clearly (a) make changes to underlying inequitable gendered and other social structures, (b) meaningfully apply global policy agendas to local realities and priorities, and (c) situate educational practice in a wellinformed and policy guided (not rigidly dictated) context. in this paper we have tried to examine one initiative that was committed to think complexly through these kinds of interactions. while this program was not perfect, it demonstrates the value of active engagement in thinking deeply and doing critical and multifaceted work in educational practice, policy, and research. acknowledgements this work could not have been done without the willingness of the participants to share openly their experience and perspectives. i deeply appreciate shirley miske for enabling my participation in this project designed to “tell the story” rather than impose a more traditional evaluation. thank you to the two graduate students i worked with – laura wangsness willemsen (now dr. willemsen) for her energy and insight during the data collection and initial analysis process, and carmela lopriore with her often astute observations as we worked through the data again. ngo work is so important and it was an honor to learn about this project from the ground up. depaul university provided a research leave that freed up time for the development of this paper. i also am deeply grateful to jackie kirk’s clear vision of what matters in our work, as that has served as a lasting inspiration. references aikman, s. & unterhalter, e. (eds.). (2005). beyond access: transforming policy and practice for gender equality in education. oxford: oxfam. educating girls studies in social justice, volume 12, issue 2, 195-214, 2018 213 aikman, s., unterhalter, e., & challender, c. (2005). the education mdgs: achieving gender equality through curriculum and pedagogy change. gender & development, 13(1), 44-55. bajaj, m. (2011). human rights education: ideology, location, and approaches. human rights quarterly, 33, 481-508. benson, c., & kosonen, k. (eds.). (2013). language issues in comparative education: inclusive teaching and learning in non-dominant languages and cultures (pp. 283-301). rotterdam: sense publishers. boserup, e. (1970). woman’s role in economic development. new york: st. martin’s press. chisamya, g., dejaeghere, j., kendall, n., & khan, m.a. (2012). gender and education for all: progress and problems in achieving gender equity. international journal of educational development, 32, 743-755. coysh, j. 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(2017). accountability in education: meeting our commitments. global education monitoring report 2017/2018. paris: unesco publishing. unesco. (2012). reaching out-of-school children is crucial for development. policy paper 04, june. education for all global monitoring report and unesco institute for statistics. unesco, paris. unicef/miske witt associates inc. [mwai] (2007). transition to post-primary education with a special focus on girls. nairobi: unicef. unterhalter, e., heslop, j., & mamedu, a. (2013). girls claiming education rights: reflections on distribution, empowerment and gender justice in northern tanzania and northern nigeria. international journal of educational development, 33, 566-575. unterhalter, e., & north, a. (2011). girls schooling, gender equity, and the global education and development agenda: conceptual disconnections, political struggles, and the difficulties of practice. feminist formations, 23(3), 1-22. vavrus, f. (2002). uncoupling the articulation between girls’ education and tradition in tanzania. gender & education, 14(4), 367-389. vavrus, f. (2005). adjusting inequality: education and structural adjustment policies in tanzania. harvard educational review, 75(2), 174-201. zembylas, m. (2017). re-contextualising human rights education: some decolonial strategies and pedagogical/curricular possibilities. pedagogy, culture & society, 25(4), 487-499. hamilton et al final correspondence address: leah k. hamilton, department of general management and human resources, bissett school of business, mount royal university, calgary, ab, t3e 6k6; email: lhamilton@mtroyal.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 1-8, 2022 editors’ introduction borders, boundaries, and the impact of covid-19 on immigration to canada leah k. hamilton mount royal university, canada victoria m. esses western university, canada margaret walton-roberts wilfrid laurier university, canada although canada has long been regarded as a global leader in immigration policies and practices (esipova et al., 2020), the covid-19 pandemic revealed and exacerbated existing challenges and vulnerabilities in canada’s immigration system (esses et al., 2021). border closures restricted who was able to travel, favoring temporary foreign workers who were deemed essential, while also creating lost cohorts of international students (brunner, this issue) and weakening refugee rights (abu alrob & shields, this issue). considering employment specifically, the covid-19 pandemic created and amplified disparities between workers who are required to physically attend work versus those who can work remotely, and it highlighted the issue of who has access to safe working conditions, paid sick leave, alternative childcare options, and other work-related resources and benefits (dobusch & kreissl, 2020). as brunner (this issue) explains, highly uneven (im)mobility has been illuminated throughout the covid-19 pandemic. between nations, border closures and restrictions were applied unevenly, impacting who was permitted to travel. canadian borders closed in march 2020 to all categories of immigrants (economic, family, refugees and protected persons), resulting in a significant reduction in admissions to only 184,370, 46% short of the targeted 341,000 for that year (el-assal, 2021). in the midst of these border closures, certain temporary foreign workers (tfws) were deemed leah k. hamilton, victoria m. esses & margaret walton-roberts studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 1-8, 2022 2 “essential” – particularly temporary agriculture workers and those working in healthcare – and thus were exempted from the canadian government’s border restrictions (kachulis & perez-leclerc, 2021). at the same time, the precarious nature of tfws’ employment conditions (including persistent lack of access to safe, uncrowded housing and universal healthcare) was revealed by the pandemic, and advocates heightened their calls for increased financial, healthcare, and settlement supports for these migrants (canadian labour congress, 2021; esses et al., 2021). within canada, the implementation of local “lockdowns” varied dramatically between jurisdictions. as rabiah-mohammed and colleagues (this issue) and banerjee and colleagues (this issue) highlight, these lockdowns led to intense feelings of social isolation for recent refugee families who had minimal access to green space and were still forming social connections in canada. of note, these lockdowns were particularly triggering for refugees who had spent time in captivity (banerjee et al., this issue). for refugee families, the covid-19 pandemic exacerbated existing structural inequalities, effectively eliminating progress in employment, social connections, language development, and access to suitable housing they had made since arriving in canada. moreover, covid-19 increased existing social inequalities between workers who are required to physically attend work (despite potentially unsafe working conditions) and those who are permitted to work from home (dobusch & kreissl, 2020). as mensah and williams (2022) describe, racialized groups, and black immigrants in particular, were overrepresented among frontline workers during the covid-19 pandemic. in toronto, for instance, black neighbourhoods and black people experienced disproportionately high rates of covid-19 infections (city of toronto, 2020). additional evidence suggests covid-19 related deaths were at least two times higher among individuals living in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods (subedi et al., 2020). ultimately, during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic, immigrants were more likely than non-immigrants to die of covid-19 (statistics canada, 2021). overview of the contributions this special issue includes six articles resulting from an open call for proposals about emerging research and perspectives on the effects of covid-19 on canada’s immigration and refugee system. both original empirical studies and theoretical papers that include a specific social justice focus (substantively, theoretically, or methodologically) were invited from scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives. using a critical social theory perspective, rabiah-mohammed and colleagues examined how the covid-19 pandemic impacted syrian government-assisted refugee families’ experiences of housing instability. borders, boundaries & covid-19 studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 1-8, 2022 3 many of these refugee families experienced a profound sense of social isolation during the pandemic, made worse from spending months in small housing units with minimal access to green space, isolated from the social connections they had begun to build before the pandemic. moreover, these families felt they were faring much worse than the general population in canada due to limited employment opportunities, coupled with increased family expenses related to the lockdowns. families already experiencing significant financial stress and instability prior to the pandemic felt that potential opportunities for employment and financial growth had been eliminated. this led to a growing sense of hopelessness about improving their housing situation. ultimately, the covid-19 pandemic intensified existing structural inequalities, thwarting families’ housing stability goals, and negatively impacting their likelihood of improving their housing situation. to mitigate these negative outcomes during and beyond canada’s post-covid19 pandemic recovery period, the authors recommend key policy changes related to housing, employment and social integration. banerjee and colleagues show how, similar to the syrian refugees in rabiah-mohammed et al.’s paper, the conditions of social, economic and affective inequities experienced by yazidi families (mostly women) in calgary were exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic. using a feminist refugee epistemological framework, banerjee at al. demonstrate how the pandemic pushed yazidi refugee women “back to square one,” meaning the language and employment gains they had made since arriving in canada disappeared as a result of the pandemic. moreover, the lockdown was triggering for many of these refugees who had spent time in captivity after being captured by isis in iraq. this emotional distress was intensified when mass graves of yazidis were found in iraq during the initial lockdown, but people were prohibited from traveling to iraq to mourn these victims. despite these negative impacts of covid-19, banerjee et al. showcase these women’s agency, providing examples of how yazidi women used their domestic caretaking responsibilities to advocate for their children even during the pandemic. the authors describe how participating in the “land of dreams” urban farming project in calgary became a place for healing and community for yazidi women, helping them create a decolonial, agentic future. banerjee and colleagues argue that social justice-focused solutions to the inequities experienced by yazidi refugees during the pandemic must be framed through a world-centered approach (focusing on the majority world or the global south) and consider issues of gender and kinship. continuing on the theme of how the pandemic has amplified the vulnerabilities of migrant groups, abu alrob and shields compare the experiences of three groups of migrants – refugees, asylum seekers and temporary migrants – and detail how border restrictions have led to a weakening of refugee rights. for instance, political narratives employing words like “essential” and “survival” were used to distinguish temporary migrants and admit them to canada despite border restrictions that limited the leah k. hamilton, victoria m. esses & margaret walton-roberts studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 1-8, 2022 4 admission of refugees and asylum seekers. the authors argue that selective bordering practices that deny access to refugees and asylum seekers but allow access to temporary migrants depart from international norms regarding human rights and refugee protection. at the nexus of border studies, security resilience and migrant rights, abu alrob and shields analyze the many challenges that covid-19 has created. they employ a social resilience lens to explicate how rights-based strategies can be used to reconcile public health concerns with migrant rights during times of crises like the covid-19 pandemic, and during post-pandemic recovery and policymaking. they also demonstrate how a social resilience lens demands that policy responses mitigate the types of societal discrimination and inequalities that emerged in canada’s border and immigration policy response to the global pandemic. using a mobility justice framework, brunner examines how the covid-19 pandemic affected education-migration – the recruitment and retention of international students – in canada. prior to the pandemic, in 2019, canada was second only to australia in its proportion of international to domestic postsecondary students, admitting just under 500,000 international students (canadian bureau for international education, 2020). brunner considers how the pandemic impacted this system using an intersectional, multi-scalar analysis (sheller, 2018). brunner describes how canada’s covid-19 travel restrictions led to a “lost cohort” of international students who remained abroad as post-secondary institutions moved courses entirely online. to address this and other implications of the pandemic’s effect on physical international mobility related to international students, policy decisions were made such as loosening post-graduation work permit (pgwp) eligibility. additional policy decisions (e.g., opening 40,000 permanent resident spots to recent english-speaking graduates with lowered selection criteria in may 2021) affirmed the government’s increased focus on international students as a primary source of permanent residents via two-step migration. throughout her analysis, brunner invites reflection on the ethics of canada’s educationmigration system, grappling with questions such as who gained versus lost as borders closed, and the future sustainability of the education-migration system. the experiences of south asian immigrants during the covid-19 pandemic are considered by das gupta and nagpal. they use critical discourse analysis to analyze how conservative politicians represented higher covid-19 infection rates among south asians (specifically punjabis), attributing infection rates to religious and cultural practices. the authors draw on several forms of media (radio talk shows as well as national, provincial, and local online media) that circulated and reinforced these discourses of danger associated with south asians in covid-19 “hot spots” such as brampton and northeast calgary. they describe how discourses around south asians, punjabis and covid-19 reveal continuities in culturalist understandings of south asian immigrants. further, they explain how a counter-narrative that attributes high infection rates to systemic issues like borders, boundaries & covid-19 studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 1-8, 2022 5 precarious employment, over-crowded housing, racism, and lack of healthcare access emerged from other groups including medical experts. these counter narratives represent critical discursive resistance that advances a structural analysis of health in immigrant communities. their discursive analysis of the political and media presentation of covid-19 infection and south asian communities in canada can be read as part of a longer process of decolonial resistance emerging from diverse sections of canadian society, including not just legal, but now medical experts who draw attention to the structural determinants of health. like south asian immigrants in canada, black individuals and neighbourhoods were overrepresented in frontline occupations during the covid-19 pandemic, and experienced disproportionately high rates of covid-19 infections (e.g., comprising 24% of covid-19 cases in toronto despite representing less than 10% of the population; city of toronto, 2020). in this context, mensah and williams analyze data on income, employment rates, housing, covid-19 infection rates and deaths to examine how covid-19 has impacted black immigrants and non-immigrants in toronto. using a social justice lens, mensah and williams reveal how the racial status quo in canadian society has allowed for the externalization of risk to be disproportionally borne by black communities. to address these inequities, they propose that material improvements are needed in terms of employers being prepared to pay essential workers (including undocumented immigrants and temporary labourers) wages that are commensurate with the essential nature of their jobs. mensah and williams encourage employers to provide humane working conditions, paid sick leave, and incentives such as reduced hours. finally, they urge authorities to distribute vaccines and other resources in ways that prioritize the most vulnerable. while these six papers employ different theoretical and methodological perspectives, they all shed light on three important issues. the first is the differential (im)mobilities experienced by refugees and immigrants to canada, and the rights and resources they are able to access. in part because of the economic contributions they make to canada’s economy, during the pandemic international students were able to continue to enrol in educational programs, even if their studies were remote, and temporary essential workers were prioritized for entry to canada. refugees, on the other hand, who have the greatest need for the protection offered by mobility, were effectively stalled (macklin, 2022). the diversity of entry categories used by those coming to canada has resulted in inequities in the rights and supports available to them. those most affected include international students who do not receive federally funded integration supports, temporary workers whose primary connections and resources are provided by their employers, and refugees who at times receive insufficient resources to manage the first year of arrival. the second issue this special issue highlights is how the pandemic exacerbated already existing problems experienced by migrants and minority leah k. hamilton, victoria m. esses & margaret walton-roberts studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 1-8, 2022 6 communities in canada. intersectional disadvantage in housing and employment and in accessing other services became more acute as the pandemic raged. understanding the degree of disadvantage newcomer populations face, and how this disadvantage may be worsened by crises such as a pandemic, is necessary for developing effective policy responses. the third issue the articles highlight is that of agency and resilience. despite the enormity of the challenges faced, newcomers often demonstrate effective agency and resilience, and there are a number of examples of community led approaches that can support these vulnerable individuals. identifying and analyzing these examples and then creating policies that effectively support promising practices will build community resilience and enhance individual, family and community agency. moving forward as we write this introduction (in january, 2022), omicron has become the dominant covid-19 variant. once again, borders are closing (marcus & neild, 2021). in early december, canada closed its borders to any noncanadian who had been in south africa, mozambique, and several other countries in southern africa. some countries (e.g., israel and japan) have closed their borders to all non-citizens (marcus & neild, 2021). twenty-two months after the covid-19 pandemic arrived in canada, lockdowns are once again being imposed, including strict curfews in quebec (government of quebec, 2021), and many provinces and territories are delaying students’ return to in-person learning (wong, 2022). vaccine inequities are again being revealed through slow booster roll-outs, low rates of childhood (ages 5-12) vaccinations, etc. moreover, access to pcr testing is exceedingly limited in some regions, while pricing and access to rapid tests has created additional covid-19 inequities (somos, 2021). altogether, it seems that many of the inequities that were illuminated in this special issue have yet to be resolved. even political rhetoric (see das gupta, this issue) has changed very little, with alberta premier jason kenney stating during an interview with rick bell of postmedia on december 22, 2021, “and what’s the next bat soup thing out of wuhan?” (ritchie, 2021). despite the challenges canada continues to face during the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, there is no doubt that immigration will continue to be an important part of canada’s post-covid-19 recovery strategy (esses et al., 2021). rabiah-mohamed and colleagues (this issue) argue that the government needs to consider sustainable solutions to canada’s housing crisis, including creating more affordable housing units. this issue is of particular concern for refugees and immigrants, but it is also a structural factor for all canadian residents; during the pandemic real estate prices have ballooned and in 2021 canadian housing affordability deteriorated the most it has in decades (national bank of canada, 2021). relatedly, refugees and borders, boundaries & covid-19 studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 1-8, 2022 7 other vulnerable groups should be given special consideration when it comes to financial support, employment programs, and the like. this must include fair working conditions and pay for essential workers on the frontlines (mensah, this issue). innovative programs that promote healing (e.g., the “land of dreams” program described by banerjee et al., this issue) should also be prioritized. as abu alrob and shields argue, meaningful engagement with migrant groups in the development of these policies will increase the effectiveness of these strategic responses. moving forward, governments are encouraged to enact covid-19 socio-economic recovery responses that address the disproportionate burden covid-19 has placed on migrant groups. as the articles in this special issue have revealed, policy responses that create structural reforms to reduce inequalities will be essential. acknowledgements the guest editors would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers whose insightful comments strengthened the manuscripts. we would also like to thank journal editor david butz for his invaluable support throughout the development of this special issue. references abu alrob, z., & shields, j. (2022). a covid-19 state of exception and the bordering of canada’s immigration system: assessing the uneven impacts on refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers. studies in social justice, 16(1), 54-77. banerjee, p., chacko, s., & korsha, s. (2022). toll of the covid-19 pandemic on the primary caregiver in yazidi refugee families in canada: a feminist refugee epistemological analysis. studies in social justice, 16(1), 33-53. brunner, l. (2022). towards a more just canadian education-migration system: international student mobility in crisis. studies in social justice, 16(1), 78-102. canadian bureau for international education. (2020, february 21). international students in canada continue to grow in 2019. https://cbie.ca/international-students-in-canadacontinue-to-grow-in-2019/ canadian labour congress (2021, december 10). federal government must take immediate action to protect migrant workers from covid-19. https://canadianlabour.ca/federalgovernment-must-take-immediate-action-to-protect-migrant-workers-from-covid-19/ city of toronto (2020). covid-19: status of cases in toronto. retrieved september 30, 2020 from https://www.toronto.ca/home/covid-19/covid-19-latest-city-of-toronto-news/covid19-status-of-cases-in-toronto/ das gupta, t., & nagpal, s. (2022). unravelling discourses on covid-19, south asians and punjabi canadians. studies in social justice, 16(1), 103-122. dobusch, l., & kreissl, k. (2020). privilege and burden of im/mobility governance: on the reinforcement of inequalities during a pandemic lockdown. gender, work & organization, 27(5), 709-716. el-assal, k., (2021). canada welcomed 184,000 new immigrants in 2020. cic news [online]. retrieved february 28, 2020 from https://www.cicnews.com/2021/02/canada-welcomed184000-new-immigrants-in-2020-0217133.html#gs. t9h61k leah k. hamilton, victoria m. esses & margaret walton-roberts studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 1-8, 2022 8 esipova, n., ray, j., & tsabutashvili, d. (2020). canada no. 1 for migrants, u.s. in sixth place. gallup [online]. https://news.gallup.com/poll/320669/canada-migrants-sixth-place.aspx esses, v., mcrae, j., alboim, n., brown, n., friesen, c., hamilton, l., lacassagne, a., & walton-roberts, m. (2021, march). supporting canada’s covid-19 resilience and recovery through robust immigration policies and programs. report prepared for the royal society of canada. https://rsc-src.ca/en/research-and-reports/covid-19-policybriefing/supporting-canada%e2%80%99s-covid-19-resilience-and-recovery government of quebec (2021, december 30). measures in force in quebec – starting december 31. https://cdn-contenu.quebec.ca/cdncontenu/sante/documents/problemes_de_sante/covid-19/mesures-en-vigueuranglais.pdf?1640978711 kachulis, e., & perez-leclerc, m. (2021, february 21). the temporary foreign worker program and covid-19. library of parliament, hill notes. https://hillnotes.ca/2021/02/15/the-temporary-foreign-worker-program-and-covid-19/ macklin, a. (2022). (in)essential bordering: canada, covid, and mobility. in a. triandafyllidou (ed.), migration and pandemics (pp. 23-43). springer. marcus, l., & neild, b. (2021, december 4). travel restrictions by country following the omicron variant outbreak. cnn travel. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/coronavirusomicron-variant-travel-restrictions/index.html mensah, j., & williams, c. j. (2022). socio-structural injustice, racism, and the covid-19 pandemic: a precarious entanglement among black immigrants in canada. studies in social justice, 16(1), 123-142. national bank of canada. (2021, november 9). housing affordability monitor. https://www.nbc.ca/content/dam/bnc/en/rates-and-analysis/economic-analysis/housingaffordability.pdf rabiah-mohammed, f., hamilton, l. k., oudshoorn, a., bakhash, m. z., tarraf, r., arnout, e., brown, c., benbow, s., elnihum, s., el hazzouri, m., esses, v., & theriault, l. (2022). syrian refugees’ experiences of housing stability during the covid-19 pandemic: barriers to integration and just solutions. studies in social justice, 16(1), 9-32. ritchie, j. (2021, december 24). alberta premier facing criticism for wuhan bat soup comments in year-end interview. calgary citynews. https://calgary.citynews.ca/2021/12/24/kenneycriticism-wuhan-bat-soup/ sheller, m. (2018). mobility justice: the politics of movement in an age of extremes. verso. somos, c. (2021, december 14). price, access to rapid tests creating pandemic inequities for canadians, advocates say. ctv news. https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/priceaccess-to-rapid-tests-creating-pandemic-inequities-for-canadians-advocates-say-1.5707058 statistics canada (2021, june 9). study: covid-19 deaths among immigrants. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210609/dq210609c-eng.htm subedi, r., greenberg, l., & turcotte, m. (2020, october 28). covid-19 mortality rates in canada’s ethno-cultural neighbourhoods [online]. statistics canada: statcan covid-19: data to insights for a better canada. retrieved 28 february 2021 from https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/45-28-0001/2020001/article/00079eng.pdf?st=qwm7a_r7 wong, j. (2022, january 4). parents frustrated as some schools shift online, others plow ahead amid rising covid-19 cases. cbc news. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/parentsfrustration-schools-covid-1.6303239 stevens final feb 7 16 correspondence address: andrew stevens, faculty of business administration, university of regina, 3737 wascana parkway, regina, sk, s4s 0a2; email: andrew.stevens@uregina.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 178-182, 2017 book review global capitalism and the crisis of democracy harris, jerry. (2016). atlanta, ga: clarity press. isbn 9780986085321 (paper) us$23.95; isbn 9780997287042 us$19.00 (e-book) 285 pages andrew stevens university of regina, canada jerry harris’ book orbits a central question: “can the power of democracy overcome the power of global capitalism?” (p. 11). the monograph is a meaningful treatment of today’s debates about globalization, political economy, and most importantly, political alternatives. it functions both as a primer on economic history and as a careful analysis of “green capitalism,” china’s role in the global economy, and the implications of russia’s growing hegemony in eastern europe. for harris, these developments hinge on the emergence of a transnational capitalist class (tcc), which he suggests marks a new era of the world capitalist system. this period, he argues, is one of political centralization and growing repression. the book’s introduction canvasses a range of concepts that will be familiar to readers. neoliberalism, of course, is a staple of anti-capitalist texts. defined by harris as an “attempt to organize society by elevating market relations to the center of human existence and values,” the definition aptly captures the term as both a process and configuration of social and economic relations (p. 12). citing greek scholar and activist andreas karitzis, neoliberalism is further explained as “an ambitious strategy of fundamentally transforming the physiognomy of modern societies and subjectivities” (p. 51). anarchism is also summoned as a category of alternatives, but ultimately harris disassembles the prospects of this tendency. more on this later. chapter 1 tackles the decline of democracy as a constituent element of transnational capitalism. to do so harris deploys adam smith’s political economy as a straw man, which he suggests uniformly endorses a libertarian, elitist notion of government as an institution servicing the interests of book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 178-182, 2017 179 society’s economic power brokers. a careful reading of smith, however, would have revealed a more complex and nuanced historical figure, one who recognized the ironies of capital’s opposition to the combination of labour whilst it collectively clamored for the protection of the state. but the first chapter’s strength is really its survey of political economic developments that have transpired over the last 50 years. here, the current manifestation of the transnational capitalist class takes shape. the hyper mobility of capital lends to the current iteration of globalization, specifically the shaping of international production and service supply chains. a global division of labour emerges as a result. although harris’s text does not offer a rigorous assessment of works that have come to define theses of how the global south factors into the world capitalist system, the chapter still offers a meaningful treatment of transnational production. by invoking the work of guy standing, notably his reference to industrial citizenship and the precariat, harris connects work and labour to the lived realities of an emergent global order. a crucial part of this narrative involves subcontracting within the global flows of capital. the fragmentation of work and work processes has been enabled by the growth of massive temp and recruitment agencies, like adecco, which facilitate the globalization of labour. indeed, part of the post-2008 economic recovery was made possible by the acceleration of labour process fragmentation and the moving of work to the global south. as harris reflects, american transnational corporations added some 2.4 million jobs abroad between 2000 and 2010, while the u.s. economy shed nearly three million jobs over that same period (p. 32). meanwhile, economies like the philippines have come to depend on the globalization of labour markets, notably the remittances they contribute to the home country’s gdp. reported remittances reached half a trillion dollars in 2011, according the world bank (p. 31). harris’s introductory chapter also elucidates the interventions of world powers and nation-state configurations that have shaped the world system. in this conversation, the technocratic and “authoritarian” bureaucracies of the european union are contrasted with the intensification of reactionary movements that have leveled attacks on “immigrants, international labor, and global capitalism itself” (p. 41). the recent inauguration of president donald trump adds to the frightening relevance of this tendency. at the extreme, this is nothing less than a fascist renaissance. and, as harris describes, fascism “is the failure to maintain the historic democratic dialectic, a crushing of the bourgeois democratic compromise in favor of outright dictatorship and coercion” (p. 49). gramsci is invoked as a crucial fixture in this analysis, namely because of the italian marxist’s capacity to makes sense of how hegemonic interests are secured through consent and coercion. the tcc’s rule over global governance structures, harris reminds us, is part of this narrative. the book’s second chapter on class power is wisely entrenched in an analysis of finance capital, which manifests itself as a constellation of andrew stevens studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 178-182, 2017 180 offshore tax havens and an algorithm-enabled mechanism of accumulation. but the sensational growth of finance and informational technology capitalism is contrasted with the dystopian realities of permanent deindustrialization, fittingly represented by detroit. the development of underdevelopment is furthered by harris’ reflections on nafta, which has devastated mexico’s agricultural sector while enriching auto-manufacturing in the country’s north. such are the vicissitudes of global capitalism. harris’s most captivating and arguably most important chapter is the third, “global capitalism and social justice.” the author commences by showcasing al gore’s symbolic transition from lone political figure in the climate change battle to part of a growing chorus of economic elites espousing a similar message. this has revealed contradictions within the tcc, between climate change deniers and economic power brokers who recognize the need to fear a climate-induced catastrophe. yet, this sensitivity to environmentalism is motivated by the same logic that drives global capitalism: expansion and profit. “there is nothing in their strategic vision that questions low-wages,” writes harris, “third world sweat shops, the transnationalization of capital, and social austerity as the primary method to pay off financial debt” (p. 108). for the economic elite, green capitalism is an opportunity to re-establish their hegemony by forging new opportunities for growth. contradictions, harris insists, run deep in this vision. as the green infrastructure market matured, the production of solar panels proliferated through a network of subsidiaries and subcontractural relations. much of this work is now done in china. this surge of output from lower wage economies depressed the cost of renewable technologies, prompting a plunge in green energy stocks. “from the market’s perspective,” harris argues, “there is over capacity” (p. 122). only in a market society would the abundance green energy technology be responded to as a problem, suggesting that a green new deal is required to coordinate the design and production of technology, along with the establishment of local green energy networks. for harris, the challenge is not one of technology, but of creating the appropriate social conditions capable of making full use of innovation (p. 138). the book progresses to examine the interconnectedness of capitalism and the tcc using two case studies: the conflict in ukraine and china’s growing economic influence. harris returns to his analysis of a right-wing renaissance in the commentary on neo-fascist threats surfacing in eastern europe. this comes at a time when economic turmoil and nationalist sentiments resurface in the wake of capitalist development in the former soviet union. much of this originates, for harris, with the legacy of post-soviet privatizations, and the securing of a post-communist political and economic elite through a looting of state property. what makes chapter 4 of particular value is its capacity to chart the specific connections that bind u.s. and russian capitalism. as peculiar as this might seem as tensions escalate between the world powers, harris helps to make sense of bonds between senior u.s. officials, like john kerry and his book review studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 178-182, 2017 181 family, with economic counterparts in russia. german interests are similarly intertwined, with about us$30 billion in fdi and another us$30 billion in exports wrapped up in russia. the uk’s relationship is somewhat unique, as it is a source of prized education and real estate for the russian elite. even major u.s. defense contractors have forged connections with their former cold war adversary. china’s connection within global capitalism dates back to the reforms of the 1980s; this tendency accelerated throughout the 1990s and 2000s as the country benefited from the astronomical growth of offshored production. the 2008 economic collapse further brought to light china’s financial connections in the world market by way of that economy’s ownership of u.s. debt. now, the author contends, u.s. and chinese capital are virtually inseparable. but harris rightly shifts his attention to the dilemma this poses for china in the long term, as its low-cost labour advantage slowly erodes. here the problem is not the broader, political economic benefits china has reaped, but the pace at which this wealth is reaching the millions of manufacturing workers that define the country’s comparative advantage. basically, harris attributes this to china’s failure to follow american’s post-war success, when the modern u.s. middle class was born as a consequence of rising incomes alongside gains in productivity. china’s future in the global economy is laden with possibilities and contradictions. from this examination of the capitalist world system, harris turns his attention to alternatives. the chapter that follows is deeply rooted in history and age-old debates about socialism, anarchism, and soviet communism. at one point, however, the reader is left questioning the need to rehash these dated conversations about the early years of the revolution in a text about today’s global capitalism. where there is value is in harris’s lessons for educators and his conclusions about discussing economic justice and the appetite for democratic socialism with post-secondary students. his interruption of political economic analysis with pedagogical notes about how this narrative should and can be translated for the purposes of social justice mobilization is most welcome. harris’s chapter on “failed alternatives” also takes aim at variants of anarchism, namely michael albert’s theory of parecon, and its viability for future movements. his main criticism lays with the absence of a rigorous sociological examination of work in albert’s thesis, which he then claims will fail to pose a serious threat to the tcc. from here, the book attempts to usurp the notion of mutual aid from anarchism by characterizing this rich, historical practice as a feature of most radical movements, including the maoist black panthers. harris then punctuates the chapter by charging occupy with squandering an opportunity to build a national organization of broad unity, making clear the author’s commitment to party-based politics and insurgency. global capitalism concludes with a chapter dedicated to “democracy beyond capitalism,” bringing the reader back to the central premise. harris’s objectives are twofold: first, recognizing the role of social contradictions in andrew stevens studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 178-182, 2017 182 creating a dynamic political society, and second, the need for economic democracy and workplace empowerment. it is with the latter that counterhegemonic institutions can be forged. for harris, lessons from argentina’s 2001 economic collapse are instructive. factory takeovers, the formation of cooperatives, and a rejuvenated social solidarity provide lessons on both strategy and tactics for the left. syriza’s rise, too, offers guidance. there, the greek party’s victory was restrained by its inability to summon national resources to fund social programs and change. progress, in other words, was tempered by the political economic tools, or lack thereof, syriza had at its disposal. not to mention the country’s subordination to european union financial interests and indebtedness. overall harris’s text is a worthy read and a useful primer for courses on global political economy. most importantly, it speaks to how a transnational capitalist class has shaped and is shaped by international capitalism, as well as the logic of resistance to this reality. his treatment of green capitalism is compelling, if only because it forces progressive readers to think about the social conditions under which climate change exists and how alternatives are, in some instances, inhibited by market forces. this chapter alone captures the central premise of the book beautifully. lee final dec 9 16 correspondence address: robyn lee, department of sociology, university of alberta, ab, t6g 2h4; email: robyn5@ualberta.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 2, 284-288, 2016 dispatch intimate labour and social justice: engaging with the work of rhacel salazar parreñas robyn lee university of alberta, canada rhacel salazar parreñas university of southern california, usa although work and care have received substantial attention from academics and activists, and so have bodily exchanges for the purposes of remediating injury or illness and providing for reproductive needs, it has only been recently that the intersections of care, labour and bodily exchanges have been addressed. rhacel salazar parreñas’ understanding of intimate labour was formative in understanding the intersections of bodies, labour, care and social justice in the consuming intimacies symposium, which explored care work and social reproduction, reproductive labour, and the role of affect and care in exchanges of bodily tissues, fluids, and organs. parreñas’ work was integral to the conceptualization of the symposium and this special issue, and she participated as a keynote speaker and conference attendee. i have long been familiar with parreñas’ work, and over the course of the symposium and afterward, i reflected extensively on the role played by the concept of intimate labour on the development of the consuming intimacies project and the impact of parreñas’ work on my research on breastfeeding as care work and emerging transnational markets in breast milk. recognizing the important role intimate labour plays in connecting the often divided fields of work and care, in this brief reflection i draw on an interview i conducted with parreñas, our conversations throughout the conference, her work, and her keynote address to identify what it means for scholars to work on social justice, and to share thoughts on future opportunities for social justice work on intimate labour. drawing on our mutual interest in foucault’s understanding of technologies of the self, i examine how our work on intimate labour & social justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 284-288, 2016 285 transnational markets in intimate labour intersects in exploring both risks of exploitation and also potential for transforming gender practices and identities. parreñas defines intimacy as a particular type of association or relationship between two or more individuals, one that involves the sharing of knowledge and attention that are not widely available to third parties. the work of tending to the intimate needs of individuals encompasses a vast array of labour. by combining care work, sex work, and domestic work, she examines intimacy as a material, affective, psychological, and embodied state. intimate labour refers to the work of forging, sustaining, nurturing, maintaining and managing interpersonal ties, as well as the work of tending to the sexual, bodily, health, hygiene, and care needs of individuals (parreñas & boris, 2010). the concept of intimate labour brings together the oftenseparated categories of care work, domestic work and sex work, calling attention to the labour involved in tending to the intimate needs of individuals inside and outside their home. although intimate relations are often thought to be limited to the private sphere, in fact intimacy has always inhabited the market and public settings. not only does intimate labour blur the divisions between productive and reproductive labour, the work itself simultaneously entails both production and reproduction. parreñas’ theorization of intimate labour in ways that encompass commonly discrete categories such as private and public, productive and reproductive labour, has been integral to my research on breastfeeding and human milk exchange. this is because the work involved in producing and exchanging human milk crosses various conventional categories of work and care. producing breast milk may be variously understood as a physiological or sociocultural process, as care or labour. the lines between bodily exchange, care, and economy are increasingly blurred in the intimate labour involved in milk sharing, milk banking, and the buying and selling of human milk. as parreñas defines it: [intimate labour] entails touch, whether of children of customers; bodily or emotional closeness or personal familiarity, such as sexual intercourse and bathing another; or close observation of another and knowledge of personal information, such as watching elderly people or advising trainees. such work occurs in homes, hospitals, hotels, streets, and other public as well as private locations. it exists along a continuum of service and caring labor, from high-end nursing to low-end housekeeping, and [as noted earlier] includes sex, domestic, and care work. (parreñas & boris, 2010, p. 2). various groups of feminists have divergent views on the intersections of love and money, and thus competing views on intimate labour. parreñas follows viviana zelizer (2007) on the commercialization of intimacy, in her argument that all monetary transactions – including those most intimate in our society – are embedded in social relations. in short, the social meanings robyn lee, rhacel salazar parreñas studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 284-288, 2016 286 of intimate monetary transactions depend on the relations and the context, resulting in their multiple meanings. the study of “markets of intimacy” examines the firms (e.g., surrogacy clinics, sperm banks, adoption agencies, marriage brokering firms, long term care facilities), product markets (e.g., surrogacy, sexual reassignment surgery, care), and niche labour markets (e.g., of health care, sex work, and domestic work) that produce and reproduce intimate relations and identities with scholars attuned to the cultural meanings, and social-economic processes. parreñas’ research has been tremendously influential in the areas of globalization, migration, gender, and care. she has investigated how care operates at a distance and how family relations and consumption are being transformed in an era of globalization (parreñas, 2005, 2011, 2015). her research has been important to the work of many scholars in the fields of transnational migration, precarious labour, domestic and care work, the commodification of intimacy, reproduction labour, and transnational families. increasingly, markets in care work and bodily exchanges are transnational in scope. in her widely-cited books servants of globalization: women, migration and domestic work (parreñas, 2015) and children of global migration: transnational families and gendered woes (parreñas, 2005) she explores transnational markets in intimate labour and the impact of these exchanges of intimate labour on the workers and their families. parreñas describes how migrant domestic workers act as “servants of globalization,” leaving their own children behind in order to care for the children of families in the global north. parreñas investigates the effects this has on the children left behind, in the philippines particularly, and how mothering is redefined in the process. she finds that the gendering of parenting roles remains resistant to change, even as mothers take on the role of providing financial support for their families by working overseas. state policies, religious constitutions, educational institutions, and community groups in the philippines all react negatively against transnational, breadwinning mothers, influencing children to view their mothers as having “abandoned” them. fathers are viewed much more positively when they leave the family in order to act as breadwinners, in line with traditional gender roles. as well, when mothers leave, fathers are less likely to take on caregiving responsibilities, instead often leaving care of their children to other women: aunts, grandmothers, close friends, and sisters. the act of migration enables fathers’ fulfillment of masculine responsibilities, while mothers are predominantly viewed as having abandoned their children. although foucault is well known for his attention to power and domination, in his concept of technologies of the self he explores how individuals work on themselves, their bodies, thoughts, and behaviour in order to transform themselves (foucault, 1988). technologies of the self are not merely invented by individuals: they are the result of broader social intimate labour & social justice studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 284-288, 2016 287 forces and practices of power. however, they represent opportunities to creatively engage with power structures. foucault’s concept of technologies of the self is useful in capturing the ambivalence and tensions inherent in feminist attention to markets in intimacy, as these markets involve both possibilities for challenging norms of gender, embodiment, and intimacy, while also posing risks for exploitation and harm. parreñas’ keynote address at the consuming intimacies symposium drew on foucault’s notion of technologies of the self in order to explore how practices of intimate labour forge identities, enable self-actualization, and allow self-growth. she argued that intimate labour, although embedded in relations of inequality, is not just a mechanism of reproducing inequality but can also be considered an instrument of self-actualization and self-valuation. parreñas notes that sociologists often look at how people are subjugated, without recognizing the pleasures, the self-growth, and the improvements people feel that they make when they relocate. it is essential to also look at how people actually grow in carrying out transnational practices of intimate labour. for instance, when a filipino domestic worker in the middle east was asked what she had gained from this experience, her response described exposure to new cuisines that wouldn't have occurred if she had just stayed in the philippines. in carrying out research on transnational markets in intimate labour, parreñas believes it is important to look at the broad range of workers’ experiences, in terms of both exploitation and potential growth and transformation. parreñas found that women's moral boundaries expanded through migration and exposure to intimate labours. in our interview, parreñas described how during fieldwork she met some nuns whose primary job is to carry out “apostolic work” with migrant filipino hostesses. one nun told her: before i came here, and i got assigned here, i thought that god was punishing me because he was taking me to the land of sodom and gomorrah. but after being here for a while, i realized these women were not like all bad, right? that each has their own reason for being here and that each, you know has their own you know standards of what's acceptable to them about using their sexuality to get ahead. the nuns came to realize that the women performing sex work they didn’t approve of were doing it for a greater good: sending their kids to school, feeding their family, sending a sibling to school, and social mobility. parreñas found it striking that even nuns became a little bit more tolerant of work that's usually dismissed as immoral, through their social interactions with the women who performed it. in turn, the women working as hostesses would turn to the nuns for help when they had difficulties. parreñas’ current work calls attention to the unfree labour of migrant workers, and the associated social justice intervention she considers to be most pressing is the greater recognition of the humanity of migrant workers. she notes that in effect they are working in servitude as a result of being contractually obligated to work, unable to leave until the end of their robyn lee, rhacel salazar parreñas studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 284-288, 2016 288 contract. she points to the united arab emirates, saudia arabia, and singapore as being the worst, as in these countries it is not possible to quit your job without permission from your employer. in other places, like hong kong, you can leave your job at any time, but you need to find a new job within two weeks or else you have to leave the territory. for a long time parreñas thought what migrant workers needed was personal autonomy and the freedom to control their situation. however, she ultimately realized that this view represented an overinvestment in the neoliberal project of “the self,” drawing on foucault’s critique. she consequently came to believe that the workers’ humanity must be recognized: employers need to realize that as humans, workers have certain needs to sleep and rest as well as for freedom and bodily autonomy. unfortunately many people working in servitude find that their humanity is not recognized. parreñas argues that this needs to change. the social justice work of examining intimate labour continues to spark debate among academics and activists. the commercialization of intimate labour poses risks of exploitation for workers, particularly along racialized, classed, and global lines of inequality. however, it also produces possibilities for challenging and transforming gendered norms of embodiment and conventional morality. in order to critically assess transnational markets in intimacy, it is necessary to examine the particular circumstances of the labour, in order to distinguish between exploitation and potential for resistance. as well, it is essential to recognize the ongoing influence of hierarchies of race, class, culture, and geography, as they have profound effects on practices of intimate labour. references foucault, m. (1988). technologies of the self: a seminar with michel foucault. (l. h. martin, h. gutman, & p. h. hutton, eds.). amherst, ma: university of massachusetts press. parreñas, r. (2005). children of global migration: transnational families and gendered woes. stanford, ca: stanford university press. parreñas, r. (2011). illicit flirtations: labor, migration, and sex trafficking in tokyo. stanford, ca: stanford university press. parreñas, r. (2015). servants of globalization: migration and domestic work. (2nd ed.). stanford, ca: stanford university press. parreñas, r., & boris, e. (eds.). (2010). intimate labors: cultures, technologies, and the politics of care. stanford, ca: stanford social sciences. zelizer, v. a. (2007). the purchase of intimacy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. correspondence address: alejandro velázquez, centro de investigaciones en geografía ambiental, universidad nacional autónoma de méxico. antigua carretera a pátzcuaro no. 8701, col. ex-hacienda de san joséde la huerta. c.p. 58190. morelia, michoacán, méxico.tel. (443) 322-38-65, desde df 56232865; fax (443) 322-38-80, desde df 56-23-58-80. issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 169-171, 2013 review of revolutionary parks: conservation, social justice, and mexico´s national parks, 1910-1940. alejandro velázquez universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, mexico revolutionary parks: conservation, social justice, and mexico´s national parks, 1910-1940. written by emily wakild, tucson, us: university of arizona press, 2011, isbn 978-0-8165-2957-5 parks represent a remarkable cultural construct targeted towards maintaining functional ecological integrity and biodiversity regardless of the cost and consequence. in revolutionary parks: conservation, social justice, and mexico’s national parks, emily wakild tackles the subject of national parks as a cultural construct by initially reviewing how the original perception of parks evolved directly from a science-oriented understanding of nature. in contrast to this understanding of nature, native rural communities have regarded national parks as overbearing, colonial symbols of wealth and, therefore, have contested their creation vociferously. in her latest book, wakild defies the understanding of parks as icons of sound conservation, citing as examples the establishment of yosemite (1864) and yellowstone (1872) national parks. she advances some arguments to demonstrate that other cultural perceptions about parks have evolved and matured as well. one of them was the notion of revolutionary parks, here understood as communal property lands devoted to strengthening the cultural identity of rural stakeholders who fought in the mexican revolution. with a thorough review of the historical literature on parks at the time, the author documents that by 1940 mexico had established more national parks studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 170 alejandro velázquez than any other country. yet, how could a nation emerging from a devastating revolution afford to do so? according to wakild, mexican president, lázaro cárdenas del rio, promoted an understanding of parks as symbols of pride and established the largest number of them in a short period of time in a somehow troublesome, poorly developed rural environment. the book focuses on the administration (1934-1940) of lázaro cárdenas del río, who expressed his willingness and devotion to the principles of revolution and advanced a vision. wakild shows that cárdenas regarded parks as environmental stakes, symbols of national pride, and icons of identity. moreover, he saw parks as tools to be used to promote landowner (latifundistas) dispossession, thereby legitimizing the empowerment of rural people (pueblo). the establishment of the first parks in mexico was legally based on the expropriation of land for public interest act within the land reform law of 1917 (article 27). however, as new parks were established, land tenure conflicts emerged and the original decree of land expropriation was contested. without changing the law, cárdenas recommended that the establishment of parks should guarantee communal land tenure. thus, “ejidos” (communal lands) recently empowered by the revolution would maintain land rights, but land use within park boundaries would adhere to principles of sustainable conservation (understood as suitable and durable land use practices with low impact on pristine conditions). the expropriation act was meant to be used under extreme circumstances, i.e. when non-conservation land use affected public interests. consequently, the establishment of mexican parks represented a strategy employed to avoid disputes between communities and to preclude international claims. this is illustrated by the establishment of suchiate river park in chiapas, which was regarded as a corridor of peace between the governments of guatemala and mexico. this initiative was further developed into transboundary protected areas or peace parks (www. peaceparks.org) and implemented largely in africa, asia, and latin america. the author takes readers through remarkable moments that occurred during the establishment and management of four national parks: izta-popo (1935), zempoala (1936), tepozteco (1937), and malinche (1938). izta-popo was envisioned as an engine for development, given its capacity to provide water, energy, and wood. nowadays, according to daily and matson (2008),1 these types of benefits are regarded as ecosystem services. at izta-popo, the term “conservation” was understood as the challenge to maintain productive landscapes where nature and culture intermingle. zempoala, in turn, was launched as an experiment to enhance environmental awareness, promoting the idea of kindergartens as educative terrains for children just as parks were educative terrains for adults. this was the genesis of the numerous centres of environmental education which now exist and which developed out of ecotourism.2 the establishment of tepozteco was first regarded as an impulsive measure, yet this park eventually became a model of communal property stewardship, whereby areas comprising rich archeological, colonial, cultural, and natural elements were to become common national patrimony. lastly, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 revolutionary parks 171 malinche was the first national park to challenge the idea of expropriation (an understanding mainly espoused by urban and private social sectors) versus appropriation (for and by local social groups). the book’s concluding section contrasts the prevailing understanding of national parks with the concept developed in mexico. in mexico, during the 1940s, parks were established to achieve social dignity, maintain national landscapes, and serve as symbols of sovereignty, patrimony, and inheritance for future generations. the vision of the emerging modern mexican state was to ensure the longterm coexistence of nature and culture that would recognize both emerging as well as customary use systems as strategies for governance. not all experiences in park creation in mexico were without problems. in fact, the innovative understanding that led to the construction of revolutionary parks was abandoned after cárdenas left office in 1940. over the next several decades, disagreements prevailed among those foresters who regarded the creation of parks as a means to conserve temperate ecosystems and those who favoured the introduction of exotic species (eucalyptus and casuarinas, for example). these disagreements took place amid ongoing urban-rural confrontations. ecological-oriented attitudes were in vogue for many years, attitudes which put biodiversity conservation at the top of the mexican political agenda and disregarded the socio-cultural nature of mexico. unfortunately, these historical and relevant facts related to park establishment are not covered in this book. nevertheless, the book does provoke a deep reflection on what it means to be mexican, a mexican politician, and a mexican conservationist. it invites readers to reconsider the concept of sustainability, ecosystem services,3 conservation, and parks. furthermore, the vision described by the author turns out to be quite relevant in the 21st century in light of the world´s most urgent needs to implement actions without delay where both nature and culture should be maintained and nourished to ensure human survival. the lessons learned from the mexican park experience are relevant to a worldwide audience. leading conservationist nations, with their belief that there is only one way to perceive and understand parks, would do well to pay attention to this book and to mexico’s long experience in this domain. notes 1 daily, gretchen c.; matson, pamela a. 2008. ecosystem services: from theory to implementation. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america, volume: 105, issue: 28 pages: 9455-9456. 2 a term coined later in mexico by h. ceballos-lascurain (ecotourism as a worldwide phenomenon. 1993. in ecotourism: a guide for planners and managers; k. lindberg, d. hawkins, eds. ecotourism society, alexandria, va, usa: 1-3). 3 ecosystem services defined by daily and matson (2008) as natural capital assets that provide live-support services of tremendous values. brady et al (intro) final correspondence address: miranda j. brady, school of journalism and communication, carleton university, ottawa on k1s 5b6; email: miranda.brady@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 300-307, 2022 editors’ introduction autism_media_social justice miranda j. brady1 carleton university, canada kelly fritsch carleton university, canada margaret janse van rensburg carleton university, canada kennedy l. ryan carleton university, canada autism_media_social justice in recent years, there has been a growing fascination with autistic characters in popular media. from hollywood action thrillers like the accountant to sia’s bizarre, misguided musical drama music (luterman, 2021), to netflix dramadies such as atypical and amazon’s as we see it, there are now more overt and implied depictions of autism than ever before. many of these depictions have little to do with the actual lived experiences of autistic people. rather, they have more to do with ableist imaginaries and are primarily driven by and for allistic (meaning non-autistic) people. at the same time, autistic advocates themselves harness a plethora of communication forms in the active construction of their own identities and communities, building their worlds on their own terms. alongside growth in hollywood fascination, much of which infantilizes or treats autism as spectacle (luterman, 2021; milton, 2012; murray, 2008; smith, 2021) neurodivergent communities challenge stereotypical and ableist representations (kapp, 2020; davidson & orsini, 2013). this special issue offers a window into the powerful work done by autistic advocates, scholars, artists, and creative thinkers. the contributors turn a critical eye on damaging 1 co-editors are listed alphabetically; each co-editor contributed equally. autism_media_social justice studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 300-307, 2022 301 and misguided media constructs while noting the capacities of media in creating collective autistic worlds. this is where autism, media, and social justice meet. autistic advocates and scholars have highlighted how autism discourses frequently serve to reinscribe and naturalize medicalization and violence against autistic people (asan, 2018; mcguire, 2016; yergeau, 2018). such discourses target autistic people as objects to rehabilitate without considering the ways in which social shifts might enable autistic people to thrive. pushing back against biomedical and deficit-based discourses, autistic advocates instead challenge the media production norms that rarely include autistic people or consider them as audiences, and tokenize them when they do (luterman, 2021). centering autistic lives can help to “re-story” autism as a welcome difference that does not require cure or assimilation (douglas et al., 2019, p. 2; gillespie-lynch et al., 2017). it instead requires participatory autistic-produced and co-produced knowledge (waltz, 2014; woods et al., 2018). this special issue was created in part out of our understanding that there is insufficient critical scholarship addressing autistic creative expressions and in response to representations of autism in popular culture and discourse. collective action by autistic advocates and allies can point out the most problematic and ableist attitudes toward autistic people, while drawing attention to the pleasure, catharsis, and escapism of media creation and consumption which resonate with autistic lives. while there is a lot to be concerned about in popular culture, media can also bring great joy, connect autistic communities, and inspire a stim or intense interest. the creativity of these endeavors is limitless. as such, this special issue is dedicated to autism_media_social justice. we use underscores as we aim to illustrate the interconnectivity of these concepts and the utility of employing media for social justice, especially where autistic voices lead the way and are meaningfully included. this special issue seriously engages questions around how media and the process of making it can both disallow social justice imperatives for autistics and act as a vital catalyst for social change. it traces the relationships of power that construct autism in particular ways, challenges ableist approaches, and builds emancipatory autistic and disability culture toward more socially just futures. themes emerging from contributions the contributions included in this special issue were created by autistic advocates, allies, and academics, and the issue’s call for proposals particularly welcomed contributions from autistic authors. importantly, contributions by autistic thinkers continued behind the scenes in the editorial process, helping the collection take shape and offering insightful guidance to add depth and nuance to each piece. miranda j. brady, kelly fritsch, margaret janse van rensburg & kennedy l. ryan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 300-307, 2022 302 while scholarly in nature, we encouraged various forms of expression from creative interventions like drawings, poetry, fanfiction, and performances to long-form academic articles. the response to the call for contributors was overwhelmingly positive and assumed a variety of methodological, theoretical, analytical, and activist frameworks, making unique contributions to the existing literature and creative terrain. authors and media makers both reflected on their process and the ways in which their collective social and individual identities informed their works yielding the collection offered here. the views of each contributor are distinctly their own and may or may not reflect those of other contributors and the editorial team. however, one common working assumption from the start required that contributors assume affirmative rather than deficit models of autism, and by extension autistic people. the special issue took shape over much of 2020 and 2021 and ultimately includes eight academic articles, one dispatch, one interview, and four creative interventions. various media forms are explored from fan fiction to television shows, live performance, government press releases and podcasts. several contributors also illustrated how the reach and accessibility of social media such as twitter, blogs, and youtube have made them important spaces where autistic advocates can build community and assert their perspectives. others provide responses to autistic experiences of marginalization as well as how to neuroqueer media and communication technologies toward better autistic futures. autistic othering and inclusion authors in this special issue work toward the goals of unravelling stigma and abuse by posing questions around autistic othering in the media and beyond. for example, sobey’s fanfiction rewrite (this issue) about the dr. seuss character, the grinch provides an apt metaphor for the profound alienation and cruelty imposed on those deemed other to or outside of normative society. ultimately, while sobey’s short story helps us reimagine the world through the perspective of the grinch (and explains why he became so jaded), it invites us to turn a critical lens on the saccharine, and indeed compulsory, homogeneity of the whos. whose voice counts is also of central concern in the promotion of political economic initiatives surrounding autism. janse van rensburg (this issue) questions how press releases by provincial governments reflect and impact societal perceptions and priorities. as janse van rensburg points out, particular framings of autism shape policy discourse, which can have real, material consequences for autistic people and contribute to ongoing power imbalances and social injustice. finally, christie-white (this issue) and keto (this issue) touch on the ways in which autistic voices may technically be folded into, but still othered in autism_media_social justice studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 300-307, 2022 303 institutional processes. christie-white describes this as acceptance versus inclusion. in their creative intervention, christie-white notes that true inclusion means providing the proper supports rather than expecting autistic people to manage in neurotypical and ableist institutions on their own once they are finally invited. similarly, keto notes the tokenism and co-optation they experienced while being consulted but marginalized on issues related to autism, and recommends congruence in words, thoughts, and actions as necessary in order for autistic social justice to take place; in other terms, true inclusion. questioning media, production, and conventions similarly, the omission of autistic people from various stages of media production reflects broader social exclusions. media forms like television shows hold promising avenues for better representations of autism. moreover, some autistic audiences relate to shows that overtly include autism as a theme (aspler et al., this issue) or read autistic codes onto their favourite characters and enjoy them immensely (gaeke-franz, this issue). however, autistic exclusion in production can also mean that shows inadvertently reproduce stereotypes and problematic ideological conventions (brady & cardin, 2021). as dodman’s creative intervention (this issue) notes of the tv series, the good doctor, their experiences differ drastically from the autistic character depicted by an allistic actor. at the same time, allistic expectations beyond the screen are shaped by such dramatic enactments. as dodman (this issue, p. 476) states: autistic people do not get to tell their stories or shape their truth be it on tv, or in politics, or on committees. the truth we wear – the truth we are made to shoulder – is shaped by parents, by service providers, by people with letters after their names – and sometimes a non-autistic man on tv who gets paid very well to wear my skin without ever having to live a day in it. similarly, gaeke-franz (this issue) examines the sitcoms the big bang theory and community, identifying the need for writers to understand how audiences read characters as autistic in order to enable representative, nonstereotypical, and socially just depictions of autism. pushing further, aspler et al. (this issue) ask writers and media-makers to engage with intersectionality and diverse representations of autistic, disabled, and neurodivergent characters, paying particular attention to the assumptions of class that emerge with different representations of neurological difference. for example, they compare the relatively affluent depiction of autism in atypical with that of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder in the show shameless. questioning the ways in which television shows use quick stereotypical associations for rapid character development helps to point out miranda j. brady, kelly fritsch, margaret janse van rensburg & kennedy l. ryan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 300-307, 2022 304 longer cultural patterns that are of concern to many neurodivergent people. in order to avoid this, autistic voices must be central in autism-content creation rather than being an optional participant in autism stories. as dodman argues, going beyond convenience, autistic-created and co-created content holds potential for nuanced and strengths-focused constructions of autism. while often excluded in larger productions, one avenue where autistic people can be found thriving is in live performance, as evidenced by the comics not otherwise specified (cnos) stand-up comedy troupe, who in addition to performing onstage also produce their own podcast. cnos uses various media to platform issues of autistic experience as well as labour rights issues for comics in canada more broadly, utilizing their sharp, humourous approach (see interview with cnos, this issue). similarly, through the hoops for hope campaign, christie-white (this issue) has become a leader who bridges the art of dance with a passion for indigenous and autistic communities. finally, brady (this issue) demonstrates how young autistic performers use their work onstage and behind the scenes to challenge deficit-narratives of autism and showcase their talents in every aspect of performance and media production. whereas autism has often been treated as spectacle in performance, the stage is now an important site of social-justice advocacy. autistic inclusion and parenting allistics have shaped narratives about autistics for far too long, leading to cultural deficit-focused constructions of autism rife with misunderstandings. liang (this issue) explores such discourses in the context of parenting autistic children. by comparing blogs of autistic parents of colour to non-autistic white parents, they identify the discrepancies in experiences shared, and the lack of intersectional perspective in publicized priorities surrounding autism. similarly, questions around what parents should share about their autistic children online is explored in ryan’s (this issue) dispatch, which provides commentary on the youtube family vlogging channel fathering autism and the ecosystem of fame related to family influencers. they question whether it is ethical for parents to create content that centres heavily on the participation of a non-speaking autistic child, discussing surveillance, the capacity to consent, education, and entertainment. fletcher-randle (this issue), by contrast, forefronts the lived experiences of autistic parents through a review of online parenting content. they challenge professional perceptions of autistic caregivers as unable to parent by highlighting stories of capacity and capability, bringing awareness to the strengths of autistic parenting. autism_media_social justice studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 300-307, 2022 305 envisioning multimodal autistic advocacy and futures autistic advocates have established their space online, and over the last decade, there have been many digital communities developed for and by autistics. egner (this issue) explores the virtual learning communities on twitter created by autistics through the hashtags #actuallyautistic and #askingautistics. they find that twitter is a site of advocacy for autistics, which provides an avenue for new ways of understanding autism, autistic expertise, and autistic experiences. finally, while envisioning a more accessible and supportive future, rauchberg (this issue) identifies that there are limits to media and communication technologies so long as these are designed without the benefits of autistic expertise. rauchberg argues for a neuroqueer technoscience, underscoring the need for neurodivergent users and design teams to determine the future of assistive information and communication technologies. in calling for “ways of knowing, doing, and making that do not rely on allistic, harmful technologies to stylize neuroqueer communication supports,” rauchberg “positions neurodivergent communication styles as valid and worthy in mediated spaces, regardless of individual access needs” (this issue, p. 381). this special issue offers only one small window into the rich, creative, and intellectual landscape of autistic social justice as it intersects with media. we hope it will crack open some of the underlying assumptions and stereotypes that currently populate the ableist cultural imaginary about autism. moreover, as a model of truly collaborative co-creation, we hope it will build a future where meaningful autistic inclusion is the place from which we start. acknowledgements there are many people who helped make this special issue possible. first, we would like to thank each of the contributors for their energy, passion, and thoughtfulness in their submissions. behind each, there was a team of peer reviewers, and we would like to acknowledge their helpful guidance and insights; peer reviewing can sometimes be thankless and invisible work, but we could not have done it without you. we extend our gratitude to studies in social justice editor-in-chief david butz, who was exceedingly generous in time and patience. creative interventions editor caleb johnston and dispatch editor vanessa farr were also helpful throughout the process. thank you to christine jenkins and to doug mccreary and michael mccreary who lent their guidance and good humour to the project. finally, we would like to thank the autistic advocates who continue to advance strength-based perspectives and on whose shoulders we now stand. miranda j. brady, kelly fritsch, margaret janse van rensburg & kennedy l. ryan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 300-307, 2022 306 references asan (autism self advocacy network). (2018). before you donate to autism speaks, consider the facts. retrieved july 17, 2018, from https://autisticadvocacy.org/wpcontent/uploads/2021/04/autismspeaksflyer2021.pdf aspler, j., harding, k. d., & casco m. a. (2022). representation matters: race, gender, class, and intersectional representations of autistic and disabled characters on television. studies in social justice, 16(2), 323-348. brady, m. j. (2022). onstage and behind the scenes: autistic performance and advocacy. studies in social justice, 16(2), 429-446. brady, m. j., & cardin, m. (2021). your typical atypical family: streaming apolitical autism on netflix. topia: canadian journal of cultural studies, 42, 91-116. brady, m. j., ryan, k. l., janse van rensburg, m. g., fritsch, k., mccreary, m., tiffin, p., dobbs, c., & schwartz, a. (2022). a conversation with comics not otherwise specified. studies in social justice, 16(2), 498-517. christie-white, r. (2022). acceptance v. inclusion: reframing the approach to helping individuals with disabilities in social settings. studies in social justice, 16(2), 496-497. davidson, j., & orsini, m. (eds.) (2013). worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference. university of minnesota press. dodman, e. (2022). an autistic letter to a neurotypical friend. studies in social justice, 16(2), 474-477. douglas, p., rice, c., runswick-cole, k., easton, a., gibson, m. f., gruson-wood, j., klar, e., & shields, r. (2019). re-storying autism: a body becoming disability studies in education approach. international journal of inclusive education, 25(5), 605-622. egner, j. (2022). #actuallyautistic: using twitter to construct individual and collective identity narratives. studies in social justice, 16(2), 349-369. fletcher-randle, j. e. (2022). where are all the autistic parents? a thematic analysis of autistic parenting discourse within the narrative of parenting and autism in online media. studies in social justice, 16(2), 389-406. gaeke-franz, b. (2022). rejection or celebration? autistic representation in sitcom television. studies in social justice, 16(2), 307-321. gillespie-lynch, k., kapp, s. k., brooks, p. j., pickens, j., & schwartzman, b. (2017). whose expertise is it? evidence for autistic adults as critical autism experts. frontiers in psychology, 8, 438. janse van rensburg, m. g. (2022). representations of autism in ontario newsroom: a critical content analysis of online government press releases, media advisories, and bulletins. studies in social justice, 16(2), 407-428. kapp, s. k. (2020). autistic community and the neurodiversity movement: stories from the frontline. palgrave macmillan. keto, k. (2022). words, thoughts, actions, and congruence in autistic social justice. studies in social justice, 16(2), 478-485. liang, b. (2022). divided communities and absent voices: the search for autistic bipoc parent blogs. studies in social justice, 16(2), 447-469. luterman, s. (2021, february 12). sia asked critics to watch her controversial new movie before judging it, so i did. slate. https://slate.com/culture/2021/02/sia-movie-music-autismgolden-globes-review.html mcguire, a. (2016). war on autism: on the cultural logic of normalized violence. university of michigan press. milton, d. e. m. (2012). on the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem.’ disability and society, 27(6), 883-887. murray, s. (2008). representing autism: culture, narrative, fascination. liverpool university press. rauchberg, j. s. (2022). imagining a neuroqueer technoscience. studies in social justice, 16(2), 370-388. ryan, k. l. (2022). stim, like, and subscribe: autistic children and family youtube channels. studies in social justice, 16(2), 470-473. autism_media_social justice studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 300-307, 2022 307 smith, i. (2021). conversations with ivanova: mental age theory [video]. youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8owhx_q70f8 sobey, s. (2022). the grinch 2. studies in social justice, 16(2), 486-495. waltz, m. (2014). worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference. disability & society 29(8), 1337-1338. woods, r., milton, d., arnold, l., & graby, s. (2018). redefining critical autism studies: a more inclusive interpretation. disability and society. 33(6), 974-979. yergeau, m. (2018). authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. duke university press. hayes final correspondence address: matthew hayes, the frost centre for canadian studies & indigenous studies, trent university, peterborough, on k9l 0g2; email: matthewhayes2@trentu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 167-176, 2016 volume 11, issue 2, 307-315, 2017 dispatch the funeral director and his film matthew hayes trent university, canada for several years i was obsessed with the corporate takeover of the north american funeral industry. i’d encountered mortality studies during my ba in anthropology, and continued this work into my ma. it began with a basic interest in the relationship between funeral director and client. but then i met tom crean, a funeral director in vancouver. he became the subject of my thesis, as well as a 20-minute documentary film i made as a companion piece. tom is a third-generation, independent funeral director in vancouver, bc. he was in his last term at ubc studying for a philosophy degree when he received a fateful phone call. it was 1975 and his uncle, the owner of the family funeral business, had died suddenly of a heart attack. his mother called him up and told him that if he didn’t take over the business she would sell it. tom quit school the next day and has never looked back. tom is a man who draws you in. he can be caring, professional, sympathetic, and has a deep, authoritative voice. he’s also an experienced activist and community organizer, full of fire and passion. i first approached his funeral home to ask if i could do some ethnographic fieldwork within its walls. by the end of my first meeting with him, i had been recruited. tom wasn’t interested in my academic theorizing. i told him i was also a filmmaker, and so he decided that we would make a film together. he wanted me to help fight back against the corporate takeover of the funeral industry, which he’d been resisting for years. this was a matter of social justice, he told me, not academic requirements. and the power of film would be our medium. the film was eventually titled tom quixote. it was as much a biopic of tom and his fascinating history as it was about the rise of corporate “deathcare” and the movement to fight its encroachment into the industry. tom was engaged in legal battles with service corporation international (sci), the world’s largest provider of deathcare services. under the moniker of “dignity memorial,” sci has acquired thousands of previously matthew hayes studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 307-315, 2017 308 independent funeral homes in north america. tom related to me how sci has attempted to run him out of business, using a variety of tactics such as cutting off his supply sources. he’d also weathered attacks from the loewen group, another deathcare corporation that attempted to buy him out, which in turn went bankrupt and was absorbed by sci. he told me all of this, and i was hooked. my project became a social justice-driven filmmaking collaboration. it had started as an ethnography of a funeral home, guided by experimental ethnographic methods which recognize the fundamentally performative (castañeda, 2006; culhane, 2011) and improvisational (cerwonka & malkki, 2007) nature of ethnography. the project was also meant to explore the nature of methodology. this was to be done by keeping the project as open-ended as possible, attempting to allow for it to follow an iterative path. and in fact it did. but there was tension from the beginning. i was a relatively inexperienced filmmaker at the time. tom was experienced with mainstream media (e.g., ward, 2009; white, 2008; johnson, 2002), but had never worked with someone like me, a student trying to gain a credential while helping with his campaign. thus, the beginning of our relationship was marked by an ambiguous power dynamic. it climaxed in a tense moment – a disagreement over aesthetic vision – during the final phases of producing the film. it is from this disagreement that i eventually understood, at a more visceral level, the challenges of using visual methods in the pursuit of social justice. filmmaking requires certain things – story arcs, character development, emotional resonance – that activism doesn’t always handily provide. george marcus, in his proposal to revitalize the notion of “complicity” in ethnography, has written about taking positions. one can do this by engaging not its usual meaning of “partnership in an evil action,” but instead the “state of being complex or involved” (1998, p. 105). he refers to the need for a “multi-sited imaginary,” a strategy of constructing the field of study from an assemblage of sites, any of which may demand a particular allegiance, or “circumstantial activism,” from the ethnographer (marcus, 1998, p. 6). these different allegiances, exacted “to greater or lesser extents” at each site (reddy, 2009, p. 96), necessarily transform the ethnographer into an activist, in the sense of developing a dedication to a particular person in the field, namely the participant(s) of one’s study. in my case, i became an activist both in the more intangible sense of my dedication to tom as the sole participant of my ethnographic study (and my film), as well as in the more concrete sense of helping him spread the word about the undertakings of corporate deathcare. as marcus also notes, this kind of complicity runs both ways: what complicity stands for as a central figure of fieldwork within this multi-sited context of research…is an affinity, marking equivalence, between fieldworker and informant. this affinity arises from their mutual curiosity and anxiety about their relationship to a ‘third’ – not so much the abstract contextualizing world system the funeral director & his film studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 307-315, 2017 309 but the specific sites elsewhere that affect their interactions and make them complicit (in relation to the influence of that ‘third’) in creating the bond that makes their fieldwork relationship effective. (marcus, 1998, p. 122) i quickly became complicit in the making of the film with tom. i established this bond with him and felt with it an obligation to him, one that by the end of the project i struggled to fulfill. upon my first visit to tom’s house, i noticed in his living room a full suit of armour and various axes and swords bracketed on the wall behind. they came from toledo, tom said. he had bought two sets on vacation in the 70’s, had them shipped back to vancouver and sold one to a museum. he loved the tale of don quixote. we ended up using the helmet and sword as props for a press photo for the film. i was at tom’s house so we could begin writing a script for the film. tom’s time was precious, and i spent a large portion of the project simply waiting for correspondence and meeting times. we felt scripting his lines would be the best way forward, despite the fact that we were making a documentary. that way he could say exactly what he wanted to, and the day of the shoot for the interview, as well as the editing, would go more quickly. at the time, he had been looking for a publisher for his memoir. he gave me a copy of his manuscript, which i then used to build the script for tom quixote. tom would perform it, as if it were an interview. performance in documentary film is, as thomas waugh writes, “the selfexpression of documentary subjects for the camera in collaboration with [the] filmmaker/director” (1990, p. 71). waugh traces a long tradition of documentary performers acting “in much the same way as their dramatic counterparts” (1990, p. 67), despite the expectation that documentary film “implies the absence of elements of performance, acting, staging, directing, etc.” (1990, p. 66). it was taken for granted in the early days of documentary that the people cast in the film would be acting – acting in the sense of “playing themselves and their social roles before the camera” (1990, p. 67). tom acted out the role of himself, as funeral director/activist. yet, this version of himself was not entirely artificial. tom assumed a voice and character that he had used many times before when speaking as a funeral director. scripting interviews is a method i’ve since used on almost every documentary film i’ve made. it’s both expedient and ensures that the film’s message has a better chance of coming across more clearly. social issue documentaries can become run-away trains if not controlled. participants and events in an unfolding activist struggle rarely conform to scripts, and so it sometimes becomes necessary to constrain them in certain ways. although i appreciate the integrity of observational documentaries, it’s also important to recognize that objectivity is an illusion, and in the case of tom quixote, we were more interested in producing a film that clearly portrayed our message than one that was ostensibly more true to the perceived rules of the genre. it ultimately became a question of balancing artistic and activist interests. matthew hayes studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 307-315, 2017 310 as williams writes: “documentary is not fiction and should not be conflated with it. but documentary can and should use all the strategies of fictional construction to get at truths” (1993, p. 20). she further writes that while truths are “not guaranteed,” they “nevertheless matter as the narratives by which we live” (williams, 1993, p. 14). writing a script ahead of time, drawing on this fictional strategy, in order to make the film look spontaneous and “truthful,” was how tom and i thought it would have the most impact. we recognized that while we were only telling tom’s side of the story – both of us were sceptical about the chance of getting an interview with anyone from sci – the particular and very constructed truths we were presenting might still resonate with the audience in ways we might not even imagine. we were hoping to draw the viewer in, to have the film “demand the viewer bear the weight of knowing responsibility” (nunn, 2004, p. 421) for what tom was telling them. we hoped to convince the audience to engage with the film as a truth, relevant to their own lives. as renov writes, “how else to persuade viewers to invest belief, to produce “visible evidence,” and even induce social action?” (2004, p. xvii). one of the commitments i made to tom was to show him the finished film before it was released. this is an obligation i’ve since fulfilled with all my documentary subjects, as a basic part of our collaboration, yet there is tension and danger in this approach. what if the subject doesn’t like the film? what if they demand changes? how does a filmmaker reconcile artistic vision with the foundation of complicity? this is the point at which the relationship between filmmaker and subject can become particularly muddy, and this is exactly what happened with tom quixote. once i’d finished the edit, i dropped off a dvd copy of the first cut at tom’s funeral home. it took tom several days to get around to watching it, as he picked it up and immediately left town for a conference. the days spent waiting were nerve-wracking. and when he finally had the chance to watch it, my anxieties were confirmed. he came back and asked for changes. one was to the credits, and these changes were not entirely finished until several weeks later, after much negotiation. tom, referring to his years of campaigning, wrote to me in an email: “a ton of people have helped me do all of this but i have cut the list down to just the folks who were essential.” despite this, the list was very long, and wasn’t just a list of names. it included a significant amount of text that explained who the people were and for what they were being thanked; the text was just as long, if not longer, than the list of people. such a change would have added at least a couple of minutes to the film’s run time, not a small matter considering, for example, some film festivals charge higher submission fees for entries over twenty minutes, and the longer a short film is the less likely it is to be programmed. not to mention that the people themselves weren’t involved in the making of the actual film. i sent an email back to tom saying: the funeral director & his film studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 307-315, 2017 311 hi tom, this is good stuff, but it's too much. this is far beyond any realistic expectations for the film. this strikes me as something more suited for your book, for instance. it's not the kind of material that translates well into film there's too much of it and it's too intricate...too much history behind it that needs explication…if anything, this kind of stuff would work as part of any written followups or accompaniments to the film (or as part of your own press for the film), rather than be in the film itself. ultimately, we compromised: i edited in all the names in alphabetical order, without any of the extra explanatory text. in hindsight, this rings as a trivial matter and not something to become overly concerned about; but as a grad student racked with anxiety about embarking on my first major ethnographic research project, paralyzed by my positioning and authority, it was stressful. there was one request tom made, however, that was significant. although the film mentions other people involved in tom’s efforts, it is really about tom himself. this decision was both pragmatic and stylistic. as macdougall (2006, p. 272) has noted, film has an affinity for exploring individual agency and identity, and i felt tom’s personality was strong enough to carry the whole film. character studies are attractive, especially in activist film. watching an individual work through challenges and succeed is very powerful, and i wanted this for tom quixote. yet there was an opportunity to include others in the film. tom asked at one point if it would be possible to include interview footage of priests, who would further testify to the gravity of the situation. he wrote in an email, “in a court of law, having a witness is only everything!” tom wanted to include these extra talking heads as expert commentary, to ensure his message came across. my reluctance to do so came from reading about the american filmmaker errol morris, who has said: the traditional idea of how documentaries are to be put together is that you talk to some twenty people and you inter-cut the interviews. “a” says such-and-such, and then “b” contradicts “a” and then “c” says something else altogether. supposedly you gain perspective on an issue by listening to this interplay of characters, in effect, arguing with each other. well, what if you tried something completely different? what if you created a movie about one character’s perception of history, about one character’s attempt to understand himself through history? (bloom, 2010, p. 111) when only one person is presented in the film, only one voice and one version of history, “the interviewee [becomes the] primary guarantor of experience and knowledge” (nunn, 2004, p. 418). this is what i had wanted to do with tom quixote since the plan changed from making an observational film to one based on tom’s story. however, i was afraid that this disagreement would blow up much larger than it started, and would cause the project to grind to a halt. what if tom matthew hayes studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 307-315, 2017 312 refused to continue working with me? what if he told me he did not want the film to go ahead if the extra interviews were not put in? we had previously agreed to work at this project as best we could, with limited experience and resources on both our parts. we had established in our first meeting that his participation was voluntary, and that he could leave the project whenever he wanted. what if, because of this disagreement, this was that moment? tom felt very passionate about having the support of the clergy, with whom he works every day. he told me he spent many years building up relationships with them, in a time when they often feel threatened by secular funeral services. in the end, i tried to assert my authority as the filmmaker. i responded to his concerns by emphasizing the value of the singular voice in the film. i pushed back, and was afraid i was breaking my obligation to him. tom had sent the email saying “having a witness is only everything!” he then capitulated, and wrote: “but i defer to your more informed judgement.” and in an email sent later the same day, he had apparently moved on from the issue altogether to the matter of bringing his guitar to the interview shoot, so that i could record him singing a song (specifically, “the undertaker blues,” which plays during the film’s credits). kazubowski-houston experienced a similar situation during her work in poland, on the production of a play exploring violence in the lives of roma women. the actors and the roma women with whom she worked expressed differing opinions about how the play they were producing should be put on and what the content should include. the roma women wanted the play to have the feel of a soap opera – “characterized by an emphasis on the melodramatic and the use of realism and cultural verisimilitude” – whereas the actors wished to put on a more avant-garde production, clinging to a more “abstract, non-realist, metaphoric” artistic vision (2011, p. 234-235). kazubowski-houston herself did not favour the roma women’s ideas, because she was afraid they would not adequately represent the reality of violence in their lives, and so ended up convincing them of the need to create a production based more on the actors’ visions, much as i ended up convincing tom that the interviews with priests would not work in the film. this was because my aesthetic tastes differed from tom – as bourdieu has indicated, a case of “instituting and authorizing one’s own aesthetic tastes over those of others” (kazubowski-houston, 2011, p. 237). i assumed i knew what was best for the film, and how tom’s message was to be put out, and was concerned with building my reputation as a filmmaker. as kazubowskihouston wrote of her experience: “…it would be misleading of me to deny that the artist in me was also, to some extent, concerned about creating a theatrically compelling event that would validate the actors’ and my reputations as theatre artists” (2011, p. 236). creating the film was about becoming a “juggler of power” (2011, p. 236), negotiating and compromising personal visions. some editing decisions in tom quixote were made in favour the funeral director & his film studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 307-315, 2017 313 of my personal motivations, at the expense of tom’s vision, whereas at other times tom’s ideas were implemented. kazubowski-houston writes of the “inconsistent nature of fieldwork” to describe the differing motivations she encountered, how they clashed and how this resulted in her asserting her authority over the final product (2011, p. 239). she had to negotiate competing demands. the roma women wanted one thing, the actors much the opposite. i had to do something similar. i think there was somewhat of a contradiction in tom’s expectations of my role. on the one hand, he had agreed to work with me because i had the technology and experience to make a film about him and his story – he recognized my role as the filmmaker, and deferred to my judgement. on the other hand, he also had an articulate vision of what should be done, and how it should play out, and so sometimes viewed me simply as a “resource person, technician or facilitator” who was working to craft his vision (waugh, 1990, p. 83). the moments during which i ended up asserting my authority were partly a result of the clash between these two expectations. i had to try to juggle all of this, and ultimately some balls were dropped in order to keep others in the air. what this relationship is ultimately about is the “problem of representation,” which is found “in the power dynamics between any filmmaker and her subjects” (elder, 1995, p. 96). as marcus writes: the inequality of power relations, weighted in favor of the anthropologist, can no longer be presumed in this world of multi-sited ethnography. the fieldworker often deals with subjects who share his own broadly middle-class identity and fears, in which case unspoken power issues in the relationship become far more ambiguous than they would have been in past anthropologist research; alternatively, he may deal with persons in much stronger power and class positions than his own, in which case both the terms and limits of the ethnographic engagement are managed principally by them. (1998, p. 121) this quotation would work equally well if i replaced “anthropologist” and “fieldworker” with “documentary filmmaker.” there were various moments during the making of the film when tom demonstrated his power, just as there were moments when i did. our relationship was a tug-of-war. for elder, the ideal collaboration is one whereby “accountability is formally built into the filming relationship, where basically a filmmaker cannot film without meeting community accountability” (1995, p. 97). sarah pink refers to such collaborative work as “applied visual anthropology,” an approach she defines as “using visual anthropological theory, methodology and practice to achieve applied non-academic ends” (2007, p. 6). by non-academic ends, she specifically refers to “social intervention…a problem-solving practice that involves collaborating with research participants and aims to bring about some form of change” (pink, 2007, pp. 11-12). however, this approach, like any other, poses challenges, which helps to account for the tensions tom and i encountered during the editing process. matthew hayes studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 307-315, 2017 314 although these tensions were not insurmountable, they do raise uncomfortable questions about the way such relationships can develop. i wrote of how, for instance, my motivations shifted to include, in addition to helping tom spread his message, creating an aesthetically pleasing film that could enhance my reputation as a filmmaker. lassiter writes of how “agreements often shift in new contexts where the power of original discussion becomes compromised by other factors beyond our direct control and beyond our vision of what the project can and will become” (2005, p. 96). of course, my motivations were not beyond my direct control, but i certainly did not anticipate that my focus would change and develop like it did. doing collaborative ethnography is also about recognizing that “promises, agreements, and commitments are temporal” (lassiter, 2005, p. 91). they change, because people and the situations in which they work (together) change. i did not anticipate as well as i could have the changes that would occur during the project, which led to the moment at which i authorized my own artistic vision over tom’s. this acknowledgment led me to reflect further on the way in which commitments like the ones i was trying to make must be continually negotiated to account for the vagaries of fieldwork. during my research, my ethical commitments ran into roadblocks, and i was unable to satisfactorily navigate them all. in response to the exchanges tom and i had, which were often quite engaging and fruitful – if also sometimes stressful – i began to reconceptualize the ethical engagement i had been hoping for. instead of an ongoing obligation to tom, i now think of our experience as a mutual negotiation, one that was never finished because our relationship will never be finished, despite how remote we may become from one another. my project was always going to be based on a great deal of negotiation. i always knew that because of the people i was originally hoping would participate, i would have to do a great deal of negotiating needs, desires, restrictions and refusals. subjects’ obligations inevitably meet and crash, especially over time. compromises have to be made. but there is nothing necessarily wrong with this. it is just a matter of negotiating all of these factors as a project evolves. working out our differences actually ended up requiring more collaboration, more contact. and the film was stronger as a result. references bloom, l. (2010). errol morris: interviews. jackson, ms: university press of mississippi. castañeda, q. (2006). the invisible theatre of ethnography: performative principles of fieldwork. anthropological quarterly, 79(1), 75-104. cerwonka, a., & malkki l. (2007). improvising theory: process and temporality in ethnographic fieldwork. chicago, il: university of chicago press. culhane, d. (2011). stories and plays: ethnography, performance and ethical engagements. anthropologica, 53(2), 257-274. the funeral director & his film studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 307-315, 2017 315 elder, s. (1995). collaborative filmmaking: an open space for making meaning, a moral ground for ethnographic film. visual anthropology review, 11(2), 94-101. johnson, e. (2002, january 16). funerals [television broadcast]. cbc news: marketplace. kazubowski-houston, m. (2011). “don’t tell me how to dance!”: negotiating collaboration, empowerment and politicization in the ethnographic theatre project “hope”. anthropologica, 53(2), 229-243. lassiter, l. (2005). the chicago guide to collaborative ethnography. chicago, il: university of chicago press. macdougall, d. (2006). the corporeal image: film, ethnography, and the senses. princeton, nj: princeton university press. marcus, g. (1998). ethnography through thick and thin. princeton, nj: princeton university press. nunn, h. (2004). errol morris: documentary as psychic drama. screen, 45(4), 413-422. pink, s. (2007). visual interventions: applied visual anthropology. oxford: berghahn books. reddy, d. (2009). caught! the predicaments of ethnography in collaboration. in j. faubion & g. marcus (eds.), fieldwork is not what it used to be: learning anthropology’s method in a time of transition (pp. 89-112). ithaca, ny & london: cornell university press. renov, m. (2004). the subject of documentary. minneapolis, mn: university of minneapolis press. ward, d. (2009, march 17). life among the dead. vancouver sun. retrieved from www.pressreader.com/canada/vancouver-sun/20090317/281638186121862 waugh, t. (1990). “acting to play oneself”: notes on performance in documentary. in c. zucker (ed.), making visible the invisible: an anthology of original essays on film acting (pp. 64-91). metuchen, nj: the scarecrow press. williams, l. (1993). mirrors without memories: truth, history, and the new documentary. film quarterly, 46(3), 9-21. white, p. (2008, march 12). grim reaping. globe and mail. retrieved from www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/grim-reaping/article18446847/?page=all rimke fg august 8 16 correspondence address: heidi rimke, department of sociology, university of winnipeg, 515 portage avenue, winnipeg, mb, r3b 2e9; email: h.rimke@uwinnipeg.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 introduction – mental and emotional distress as a social justice issue: beyond psychocentrism heidi rimke university of winnipeg, canada keywords psychocentrism; psychiatrization; medicalization; mental distress; neoliberalism; social inequalities; social injustice; victim-blaming introduction this special issue of studies in social justice critically explores the complex relationship between social injustice, mental and emotional distress/difference, and the pathologization of individuals in contemporary neoliberal society. our primary focus, as outlined in the “guest editors’ preface and acknowledgments,” is placed on critical theoretical and methodological approaches to studying and analyzing the power of medicine and psychiatry in modern society. the collective research trajectory aims to analyze the significant, and yet often overlooked, link between mental and emotional health/distress (private troubles) and social injustice (public issues) (mills, 1959). the essays in this issue interrogate and challenge dominant “psy” discourses and practices with an emphasis on poststructuralist and intersectional approaches to social inequalities and social injustices. the special issue highlights the importance of the relationship between embodiment, social inequalities, the pathologization of difference and psy truths (rimke, 2003). contemporary society has been colonized by the “psy complex” defined here as a hegemonic formation comprised of a loosely defined group of experts connected through their professional and social status, particularly psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and social workers. it is conceived as a heterogeneous network of agents, sites, practices, products and techniques for the production, dissemination, legitimation, and utilization of psy truths. mental & emotional distress as a social justice issue studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 5 historically, the emergence of the psy complex occurs through the medicalization of morality in the 19th century (rimke & hunt, 2002). also, it is important to note that from the perspective employed here, the historical formation of the psy complex is inextricable with the emergence and maintenance of neoliberal culture where individuals are taken to be free and autonomous consumers responsible for their own health and illness or distress. additionally, the psy complex produces the psy industry that emerged in concert with the rise of capitalist industrialization in north america. the psy complex is problematized in this special issue by applying the notion of “psychocentrism,” the view that human problems are due to a biologically-based flaw or deficit in the bodies and/or minds of individual subjects. psychocentrism is itself a form of social injustice, where individual reformation rather than social and economic justice is promoted. mental and emotional distress are thus taken here to be the consequence of societies built on systemic social inequalities that reproduce social injustices while profiting from them. the articles in one way or another analyze the adverse and growing reach of the psy complex. before defining neoliberalism and social injustice, and outlining a short theoretical history of the concept of psychocentrism, a brief note on the politics of language is necessary. understanding the interrelationship between language, culture, power and social injustice is of paramount importance given that contemporary poststructuralist analyses examine the constitutive role discourse and knowledge play in the exercise of power and ab/normalization of human life. thus, to move towards a social justice model of mental and emotional life, it is vital to examine the ways that language can contribute to, or counteract, social inequalities. following the important sociological work of david pilgrim (2003, 2005), the language deployed throughout this special issue prefers to use “mental distress” over “mental illness,” the latter being stigmatizing, and therefore largely counterproductive. the term mental illness is also problematic because it gives the appearance of scientific proof and medical consensus, which has not (yet) been achieved. critical approaches to the psy complex have rejected the psychocentric hypothesis on theoretical, empirical and ethical grounds since the 1950s (foucault, 1954; goffman, 1963; kirk, gomory & cohen, 2013; smith, 1990). a now significant body of scholarship argues and demonstrates that the concept of mental illness is of dubious scientific validity. many scholars have argued that tautology, not science, is invoked regularly to warrant the legalized and unethical control of people who are seen to offend, threaten, and frighten. all efforts to date to define mental disorder have been flawed on a number of counts (kirk et al., 2013; pilgrim, 2005; turner & edgley, 1983). it is in this critical vein that the articles in the special issue challenge rather than fortify the psy complex and psy industry. following the pioneering feminist sociology of dorothy smith (1987, 1990), these critical heidi rimke studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 6 analyses are on guard against eurocentric, androcentric, masculinist, positivist social thought that serve the interests of dominant social groups at the expense of the dominated group. neoliberalism can be understood as a series of pro-market and procorporate policies that seek to integrate state and market operations to benefit the interests of transnational corporations and the wealthy. increasingly, neoliberal governmentality manages human subjectivities as an ensemble of social forces that both construct and reinforce individualization and privatization. evaluated on the basis of self-control expressed through a market rationality where health and illness are commodified, depoliticized and individualized, modern subjects are treated and viewed as either successful or failed consumers of mental and emotional health. as this special issue establishes, the early 21st century is defined by pathological individualism, where health is seen as something to be attained or managed by industrious, virtuous, and productive neoliberal citizen-subjects. social justice can be understood as the extent to which a society ensures an equal distribution of resources and opportunities in the political, economic, institutional, and social realms. further, social injustice should be understood as having undeniable mental and emotional dimensions. the focus of a social justice approach is based on the conviction that all individuals and groups within a given society have universal human rights, including an equal opportunity to participate in the educational, economic, institutional, and social freedoms and responsibilities valued by the community. those concerned with social justice work for structural change to increase social opportunities and improve social conditions of those who are politically, economically and socially disadvantaged and marginalized. psychocentrism: historical and theoretical summary the conceptual career of psychocentrism began to emerge in 1996 as part of my master’s work, which critically analyzed self-help literature as a form of neoliberal governmentality (rimke, 1997, 2000). my doctoral dissertation continued the study of psy discourses by documenting and analyzing the invention of normality primarily through the doctrine of moral insanity (rimke, 2005). the dissertation argues that medicalization and psychiatrization of immoral desires and conduct should be understood as shaped in the 19th century by a hybridization of christianist morality and enlightenment positivism, forming the spring-board for what eventually came to be referred to as abnormal psychology specifically, and psychiatry more generally. over the course of time, my conceptualization and use of the notion continued to develop in different social and intellectual contexts. its purpose is to provide an alternative or counterhegemonic reading to dominant psy approaches by providing a critical analytical tool. it thus offers a conceptual mental & emotional distress as a social justice issue studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 7 approach to critically examine and analyze psy discourses and practices in their intricate, specific, and universalized machinations. a key aim of applying the concept in this special issue is to attend to and emphasize the broader structural factors at play in the relationship between mental and emotional distress and social injustice. in the last 10 years of research and writing, i have applied the concept of psychocentrism to different social problems and discourses in contemporary society: individualistic theories of crime and criminality (rimke, 2011); cannibalism and the not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder (ncrmd) defense (rimke, 2010a, 2010b); the criminalization and pathologization of terrorism (rimke, 2012, 2016); and, the growth of the culture of therapy in neoliberal capitalism (rimke & brock, 2012). while the concept initially encompassed six basic characteristics, it has been expanded to include a total of 10 characteristics (which may or may not operate simultaneously) as follows: 1. reductionism: reducing the complexity of human experience and problems to simplistic explanations, usually by advancing the modernist view of the self-contained body-mind model; 2. determinism: claiming that human conduct and experience are determined by their “natural” bodily make-up (genetics, hormones, neurochemical, etc.); 3. essentialism: the view that humans are essential categorical or personality types; that groups of individuals possess an innate characteristic or essence that is permanent, unalterable, stable, static, etc.; 4. presentism or ahistoricism: historical amnesia or the analytical disregard for history and its role in constituting our present understandings of our selves individually and collectively; 5. naturalism: viewing humans as natural rather than social or socially located, shaped, and produced; 6. ethnocentrism: the assumption that one’s cultural practices and beliefs are normal and thus superior than other cultural practices and ways of being in the world; 7. double-standards: a set of principles unequally applied to two or more different groups. an example is the gendered double standard of sexuality where women are cast negatively while men are represented positively for the same sexual conduct; 8. victim-blaming: holding individuals and groups responsible for their own fates or negative outcomes, including their experience of mental and emotional distress or traumatic life experiences, usually by placing themselves in high risk situations; 9. positivism: using the prestige and veneer of science to construct mental illness as analogous to the same physical markers found in physical illness; heidi rimke studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 8 10. pathological individualism: the modern master status of the person defined in terms of ab/normalization and/or self-categorization and/or expert classification. the notion of psychocentrism provides a framework to investigate the ways in which neoliberal populations are governed according to psy knowledge. it also draws our attention to expert discourses that minimize or negate the deleterious effect of social inequalities. psychocentrism is based on on the human deficit model, while obscuring societal deficits and social relations of power that often underlie and contribute to human struggles and difficulties. it is important to study and deconstruct the ways that social injustices such as sexism, classism, racism, heterosexism, colonialism, ableism, ageism, adultism, sanism, and so forth, operate in, and intersect with, mental health problems. the interlocking axes of oppression and inequalities are inimical to human life and thus need to be taken into account when analyzing contemporary mental health in/justice. psychocentrism largely rests upon the epistemological prestige of positivism derived from the prominence of natural sciences. in particular, the claim that abnormality can be explained scientifically by isolating causal evidence for differences amongst individuals is especially problematic. psy discourses are contentious and problematic for many reasons: classificatory ambiguity, lack of physical/organic medical evidence, the highly subjective nature of notions such as normal and abnormal, the long, political and controversial use of psychiatric practices and interventions (electroconvulsive shock therapy, lobotomy, leucotomy, drugs), and conflicting empirical data, render the ethical and intellectual status of the psy complex scientifically and socially problematic. another problem of the dominant biomedical paradigm is that it remains strictly at an individualistic level, whether the abnormality is conceptualized as the result of faulty thinking, biochemical failures, or defective genes. personal deficits are explained as the by-product of any one, or a combination of, heredity, neurotransmitters, hormones, and so forth. constructing a science of psychiatry has proven problematic and elusive, yet billions of dollars each year are spent researching, promoting, consuming and advertising it. after over 100 years of the hypothesis that abnormal function and activity in specific brain circuits are the cause of mental illness, not one single biological marker for a single psychiatric disorder has been identified to validate mental illness as a medical disease (epstein, 2016). the assumption that the brain secretes mental illness like the kidney secretes urine (noll, 2011, p. 68), and that the right scientific tools can unlock such hidden secrets in the individual body or mind, have yet to be proven. no etiology or cause has been determined for any so-called psychiatric illness or disease as catalogued in the diagnostic and statistical manual, also referred to as the psychiatric bible, now in its fifth edition (apa, 2013). mental & emotional distress as a social justice issue studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 9 the cumulative pain and suffering due to inequalities takes its toll on individual minds, hearts, bodies, communities – and far more on some social groups than others. this special issue acknowledges the violent practices of patriarchal, colonialist, capitalist society that result in trauma, pain, and harm both directly and indirectly, primarily or vicariously. the opposite of oppression is not only feelings of peace, stability and support, it is also the privilege to be oblivious to others’ social and economic problems. to quote ursula franklin, “peace is not the absence of war. peace is the absence of fear. peace is the presence of justice” (2014, p. 36). psychocentrism, neoliberalism and the culture of therapy: a critical social analysis modern individuals face a multitude of social challenges and problems. supra-individual factors at the root of human struggles include: precarious employment or joblessness; lack of secure housing; mental, emotional, physical, sexual, spiritual, racial, and digital violence; financial problems; and the trauma and complication of climate disasters. the failure of connecting social structural forces in people’s lives at best results in a weak theoretical link between mental and emotional distress and social injustice. at worst, it uses psy discourses to blame the marginalized and underprivileged for their socially produced suffering. viewed from the depth and magnitude of global human suffering, psychocentrism promotes naive or superficial fixes to macrological social and economic problems. furthermore, the intersection of multiple social factors that structure access to resources, assistance and support, arguably, are key components in feelings of security, peace and a sense of well-being, the lack of which often lie at the base of human problems. in the current historical period, the “neoliberal self” is encouraged by a market-driven, consumer culture that normalize the notions of health, happiness, well-being, etc., as accomplished only or primarily through consumption practices. another indication of psychocentricity is the overuse of the word “normal” itself – historically we would have used words and terms such as “usually,” “typically,” or “on average.” we see the promotion of neoliberalism in our cultural and economic systems, which assume that all people are motivated by “rational self-interest” as homo economicus, defined in terms of money and resources. such an assumption disproportionately benefits the interests of corporate elites and the privileged classes. psychocentricity dovetails seamlessly with the values of neoliberalism by giving the appearance that “normalcy” is desirable, concrete and attainable. from this perspective, personal success is marketed as readily accessible to everyone and anyone, regardless of income level, educational background, geographical location, sexual identity, religious affiliation, and so on. from a critical social scientific perspective this is very problematic. pathological heidi rimke studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 10 individualism encourages us to close ourselves to others. it is done partly for protection out of fear and partly for expediency, but it is a decision to see ourselves as cut off from others as a basic social fact of life. psychocentrism prevents compassion, empathy and connectedness, and it prevents us from feeling a sense of ethical responsibility to those without voices, networks, and resources. the imperatives of governmental policies to ensure basic essentials for healthcare, education, and retirement security or legislation to protect consumers, environment and workers thus falls to the wayside as psychocentrism increasingly colonizes neoliberal culture. the growing material, mental, physical, and emotional tensions and struggles of contemporary society are expressed in multiple ways. the many harmful effects of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy result in isolation, violence, anxiety, anger, apathy, repulsion, depression, and suicide. although individually experienced, such human experiences must be placed within the context of social life and structures. human lives are affected by growing economic deterioration and austerity, as well as social conflicts based on axes of age, sexual orientation, class, gender, physical appearance, familial ties, educational attainment, religious status, racialization and ethnicity, political repression, and other socially created insecurities. these include the lack of affordable and stable housing, growing underand unemployment, the erosion of pensions, rising food and energy prices, and toxic work environments, which negatively affect too many members of society in numerous troublesome and troubling ways. yet, the resounding messages provided by psy experts imply that people’s struggles are strictly personal – internally produced – as though our experiences in the world were somehow separate and distinct from the social conditions that shape, produce, and order those experiences. today, the psy industry is very big business with mass marketing for drugs and self-help strategies that encompasses all aspects of human life. this is a massive and growing industry, with estimates ranging from 35 to 50 billion dollars in profits annually for the self-help, and mental health and addictions fields alone. clearly, the industry of pathological individualism is the leading and best-selling genre in north america. although it is very difficult to obtain exact numbers from the corporate drug industry, several scholars have documented the dramatic rise of psychopharmaceutical prescriptions as the stock response to mental and emotional distress. in 2010, the top 10 fortune 500 companies – all pharmaceutical – made more profits than the other 490 companies combined (rimke & brock, 2012). the practice of polypharmacy has increased substantially over the past two decades, creating its own set of problems and consequences where “big pharma” is an economic and social empire (moncrieff, 2009). other intellectuals have critiqued the rise of a “pharmacracy” (szasz, 2003) or “pharmageddon” (healy, 2012) as a result of the psy industry. therapeutic culture has created an enormously profitable economic sector, from self-help books to the dramatic growth of pharmaceutical companies. mental & emotional distress as a social justice issue studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 11 many critics argue that pharmaceutical companies – rather than evidencebased research – are the modern day driver behind growing psychiatric diagnosis. it is thus no coincidence that the psy complex has become the most lucrative industry on the planet. further, when psychocentric research is funded by those pharmaceutical companies themselves, significant ethical and epistemological dilemmas arise, yet fail to be addressed by the state (rimke, 2010c). given its staggering commercial profits, the social influence and effects of the psy industry in wider society cannot be overstated. the increasing focus placed on individual responsibility has been occurring simultaneous to the dismantling of public health care and social services, forcing individuals to absorb structural deterioration. presumably, such therapeutic acts are equally available to all people, everywhere regardless of socioeconomic position or geographical location? what appears personal is socially proscribed and either internalized as a good citizen-subject or resisted as a bad, ungovernable citizen-subject. for, after all, even the most private self-examination is tied to social systems of valuation, imposition, judgement, and regulation (foucault, 1988). psychocentrism presupposes a very specific type of individual – primarily one with the economic means and cultural competence to own, use and have the time and resources to engage with psy expertise. as a result, many are systematically excluded from this form of health management as not all can be competent or capable “consumers” of health and wellness given the rampant poverty in neoliberal society. human health and illness involve social factors that are dismissed or marginalized within contemporary biomedical approaches, which therefore fail to fully capture the complexities of human being, subjectivity, injustice and social life. research indicates that there is an indisputable social dimension to health/well-being that cannot be reduced to, and explained at, the individual level alone. quality of life is likely the best indicator for mental and emotional health – secure housing, stable income, leisure time, social networks, community membership, meaningful relationships – thus demonstrating the social bases of human life. overview of contributions to the special issue the authors contributing to this special issue apply the notion of psychocentrism to frame and analyze different aspects or problematics of the contemporary psy complex. critical of dominant claims that lack evidence and/or ignore social inequalities, these articles emphasize and examine social relations of power and inequality that underlie human suffering. using psychocentrism as a critical epistemological framework to challenge dominant psy assumptions and discourses, the authors use a social justice lens or analytic to produce critical mental health scholarship. this necessarily entails an analysis of the ways that stigmatization, discrimination, heidi rimke studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 12 inferiorization, and dehumanization are explicitly tied to the problem of social injustice. the overall aim of the special issue is to chart and analyze the social and political relations at the heart of pathological individualism that is maintained and reproduced through psychocentrism. the articles provide critical, reflexive, interpretive, qualitative methodological approaches to critical research, theory, and analysis (rimke, 2010c). each analysis draws on critical theoretical and methodological approaches, such as performance ethnography, critical discourse analysis, content analysis, participant and naturalistic observation, interviews and focus groups, and therefore this issue provides multiple frameworks for critically analyzing the place and effects of psychocentricity. what is typically or normatively seen and represented as individualistic and pathological, is instead understood as historically constituted, culturally produced, politically oriented, and socially maintained. the essays demonstrate that experiences of emotional suffering and mental distress manifest within wider historical, economic, cultural and political contexts both locally and globally. critical mental health research examines not just how mental health issues are framed, named and studied, and how mental health treatment, care and supports are conceived and implemented. it also questions the psy logic of advanced neoliberal, patriarchal, and postcolonial societies, with its noxious effects on individual and collective mental and emotional health. the contributions examine the problematic bases and effects of traditional psy discourses and practices of power in six substantive areas in critical mental health research: the growing popularization of mental health first aid discourses; autism and opposing social movements to either fix or accept autistic people as they are; sanism or discrimination against those diagnosed as mentally ill as a form of unjust research; racism, incarceration and indigenous youth suicide; problematic eating patterns, sexism and female body image; and, homelessness and poverty as pathology. all of these approaches apply the concept of psychocentrism in their own ways. these articles also reject the neoliberal pluralist notion of social power as equally exercised by all individuals and social groups. further, they challenge the view that positivist knowledge production is socially neutral and universally beneficent. jan defehr provides a timely, critical analysis of the popularization of mental health first aid (mhfa) discourses, which are increasingly applied to define social catastrophes, such as the suicide crisis in indigenous communities, as psychiatric emergencies. the article shows that the globalized movement to pathologize human distress ignores or occludes social and historical sources of pain and suffering. she outlines the highly problematic mhfa model that seeks to train everyday people or non-experts to recognize the so-called signs of mental illness, providing further support for the spread of neoliberal psychocentric styles of thought. this is expressed forcefully in the conclusion where defehr points out that the training of mental & emotional distress as a social justice issue studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 13 neoliberal subjects as “citizen-diagnosticians” creates a new form of moral policing, which undermines social structural change that would ameliorate much social injustice. julia gruson-wood’s article examines the politics of the dominant behavioural therapy (aba) used to train and discipline both therapists and people with autism. she addresses the disagreement between those who seek to cure autism and those who seek accommodation for those who have a diagnosis or self-identity as autistic. the psychocentric suggestion that autistic people have a “natural” way of being fails to understand that all people are socialized or socially shaped, disciplined, normalized and subjectified. gruson-wood critiques the dominant biomedical approach by analyzing the aba framework, philosophy and strategies. she highlights the exceedingly controlling and self-governing aspects of aba training and aba experts/trainers. stephanie leblanc and elizabeth anne kinsella’s article provides an important discussion and analysis of the problem of sanism, a serious form of epistemic injustice. they challenge as highly questionable any type of psy knowledge that does not take into account the views and experiences of service-users, survivors and ex-patients as integral sources of information. traditional, expert psy approaches objectify and subjectify those who struggle with mental and emotional distress. drawing on feminist research and mad studies scholarship, they provide an important theoretical analysis of the relationship between sanism, epistemic injustice, and psychocentrism. mandi gray’s essay analyzes an inquest into the suicides of two indigenous female youth while they were imprisoned at the manitoba youth centre. her paper challenges the view that the inquest is a neutral and objective factfinding project designed to help or protect incarcerated youth. the official legal or medical texts treat the suicides as a consequence of mental illness, rather than the result of a matrix or intersection of multiple social inequalities due to social factors. viewing suicide as an individual pathology conveniently ignores the social, political, economic, and colonialist violence underlying indigenous children’s desire to die or to escape the helplessness, powerlessness, and pain due to incarceration itself. the suicidal deaths of c.j. and c.b. are a serious indictment of the institutionalized violence children face as prisoners of the canadian state. it is disgraceful that in 21st century north america, children are locked up in cages, far away from their families and communities, and punished and brutalized with inhumane treatment. that the prison environment itself is suicidogenic is erased in the inquest, which positions the institution, system and its agents as blameless. the article highlights the need to examine criminal justice practices and policies, if indigenous and youth justice is to be addressed and achieved. nicole schott, lauren spring and debra langan examine how performance ethnography is an important tool for critiquing – and extending the conversation about the pathologization of girls and women who identify as pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia (ana/mia) on internet websites. the so-called heidi rimke studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 14 mental illness of eating disorders is linked to the social promotion of gendered body images; yet, in the psy literature it is reduced to the individual failings of women and girls. the pathologizing of pro-ana and pro-mia identities unfairly ignores the influence of social structural factors in the relationship between feminization, embodiment, eating patterns and body image in patriarchal culture. the authors argue against psychocentricity that privileges the expert view. they advocate for a social justice approach that acknowledges the collective meanings of eating and body image issues for those who identify as anorexic or bulimic and for women and girls more generally who are immersed in a fat-phobic culture. the article on homelessness written by erin dej provides an important case study of some of the ways psychocentrism manifests among a socially oppressed and excluded population. she demonstrates that homeless individuals are simultaneously pathologized and responsibilized through psychocentric discourses. according to her research, homeless individuals are expected to exhibit signs of shame, gratitude, deference, atonement and guilt in order to present the self as remorseful to their superiors, the agents of the homeless industry. narratives provided by those struggling with economic inequalities displayed self-criticism rather than social criticism, and little selfcompassion. their status as economically and materially poor becomes individualized as a symptom of mental illness and/or addiction seen as personal rather than social failures. certain analytical threads are woven throughout the special issue: first, psy experts exercise power in the construction of knowledge that medicalizes and pathologizes what are ultimately social and cultural values and practices; second, expert discourses encourage users or subjects to locate “pathologies” inside themselves rather than a result of social processes, structures and experiences; third, expert discourse denies, trivializes or minimizes the importance of social factors and social relations at play in pathologies; and fourth, expert psy discourses distract from wider structural issues of social injustice. conclusion social inequalities lead many to experience marginalization, inferiorization and stigma, all of which are bad for human health and thus counter to living a healthy, meaningful and rewarding life. it is thus incumbent upon us to become aware of discourses and practices operating within and across systems of domination that blame individuals rather than highlight the many socially-based mental and emotional problems experienced by members in our communities. social justice approaches to mental health call on us to imagine and work towards alternative approaches to dominant biomedical discourses and practices as a public health issue and basic human right. mental & emotional distress as a social justice issue studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 15 neoliberal societies justify retrograde social policies that were meant to provide a safety net for the vulnerable, but which are facing systematic dismantling today. this can be witnessed in minimal or decreasing investments to education, housing, healthcare and social services, while increasing public spending in support of militarism, corporate welfare, the formation of a police state, deepening local and global inequalities, and ecocidal industrial practices. psychocentricity prevents, omits, erases, and negates the ability to understand how political and social structures, discourses and practices impact individual lives physically, materially, emotionally, mentally – and crucially – unequally in modern society. this special issue hopes to make these explicit and implicit connections between the personal and the social. the appeal of psy promises and fixes are the effects of an inescapably therapeutic culture that pacifies the population by promoting individualized explanations for socially-based problems. the imperatives of governmental policies to ensure basic essentials for the vulnerable would be a good starting point for improving mental and emotional health of the population. provisions of universal healthcare, educational opportunities for all, and social housing thus fall to the wayside as psy hegemony increasingly colonizes neoliberal culture. consequently, if one experiences mental and emotional distress, one is compelled to find the problem within the self. analyzing psychocentricity entails critiquing the psychiatrization of everyday life that often produces or masks the social, economic, political and historical bases of human pain, trauma, and struggles. it also means attending to mental and emotional distress as a significant public health issue. the problem of psychocentrism is a key challenge to addressing contemporary pain, suffering and vulnerability, as it is difficult to imagine how human wellbeing can ever be promoted in a meaningful manner without addressing the larger social, cultural, economic, and political factors that shape human relations and experiences. it is my hope that the articles presented herein will assist in starting the long overdue conversation on mental and emotional distress as a significant social justice problem. acknowledgments i would like to thank guy normand, kimberley ducey, and elly van der zande for their mental and emotional support while working on this special issue. references apa (american psychiatric association). (2013). diagnostic and statistical manual (dsm-5). washington: american psychiatric association. heidi rimke studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 16 epstein, r. (2016). the empty brain. aeon. retrieved june 3, 2016, from https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer foucault, m. (1954). mental illness and psychology. berkeley, ca: university of california press. foucault, m. (1988). madness and civilization. new york: vintage books. franklin, u. m. (2014). ursula franklin speaks: thoughts and afterthoughts. montréal: mcgillqueen’s university press. goffman, e. (1963). stigma: notes of the management of a spoiled identity. toronto: simon & schuster. healy, d. (2012). pharmageddon . berkeley, ca: university of california press. kirk, s. a., gomory, t., & cohen, d. (2013). mad science: psychiatric coercion, diagnosis, and drugs. new brunswick, nj: transaction publishers. mills, c. w. (1959). the sociological imagination. new york: oxford university press. moncrieff, j. (2009). the myth of the chemical cure: a critique of psychiatric drug treatment. london: palgrave macmillan. noll, r. (2011). american madness: the rise and fall of dementia praecox. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. pilgrim, d. (2003). critical concepts in mental health. new york: sage. pilgrim, d. (2005). defining mental disorder: tautology in the service of sanity in british mental health legislation. journal of mental health, 14(5), 435-443. rimke, h. (1997). (re)constructing the ethical self: self-help literature as a contemporary project of moral regulation (unpublished master’s thesis). carleton university, ottawa, canada. rimke, h. (2000). governing citizens through self-help literature. cultural studies, 14(1), 61-78. rimke, h. (2003). constituting transgressive interiorities: 19th century psychiatric readings of morally mad bodies. in a. arturo (ed.), violence and the body: race, gender and the state (pp. 403-428). bloomington, in: indiana university press. rimke, h. (2005). ungovernable subjects: a radical genealogy of moral insanity (unpublished doctoral dissertation). carleton university, ottawa, canada. rimke, h. (2010a). consuming fears: neoliberal in/securities, cannibalization, and psychopolitics. in j. shantz (ed.), racism and borders: representation, repression, resistance (pp. 95-113). new york: algora publishing. rimke, h. (2010b). beheading aboard a greyhound bus: security politics, bloodlust justice, and the mass consumption of criminalized cannibalism. the annual review of interdisciplinary justice research, 1, 172-192. rimke, h. (2010c). remembering the sociological imagination: transdisciplinarity, the genealogical method, and epistemological politics. international journal of interdisciplinary social sciences, 5(1), 239-254. rimke, h. (2011). the pathological approach to crime: individually based theories. in k. kramar (ed.), criminology: critical canadian perspectives (pp. 78-92). toronto: university of toronto press. rimke, h. (2012). securing injustice: the psychocriminalization of resistance as ‘political violent extremism.’ the annual review of interdisciplinary justice research, 3, 26-39. rimke, h. (2016). pathologizing resistance and promoting anthropophobia: the violent extremism risk assessment (vera) as case study. in h. ramadan & j. shantz (eds.), manufacturing phobias: the political production of fear in theory and practice (pp. 17-26). toronto: university of toronto press. rimke, h., & brock, d. (2012). the culture of therapy: psychocentrism in everyday life. in m. thomas, r. raby & d. brock (eds.), power and everyday practices (pp. 182-202). toronto: nelson. rimke, h., & hunt, a. (2002). from sinners to degenerates: the medicalization of morality in the 19th century. history of the human sciences, 15(1), 59-88. smith, d. e. (1987). the everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology. boston: northeastern university press. smith, d. e. (1990). texts, facts, and femininity: exploring the relations of ruling. london: routledge. mental & emotional distress as a social justice issue studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 4-17, 2016 17 szasz, t. (2003). pharmacracy: medicine and politics in america. new york: first syracuse university press. turner, r. e., & edgley, c. (1983). from witchcraft to drugcraft: biochemistry as mythology. social science journal, 20(4), 1-12. microsoft word harvey interview.rtf studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 14 an interview with david harvey stephen pender, university of windsor introduction “there is a far, far nobler prospect of freedom to be won than that which neoliberalism preaches. there is a far, far worthier system of governance to be constructed than that which neoliberalism allows.” so ends david harvey’s a brief history of neoliberalism (oxford, 2005), a book in which he historicizes neoliberal thought, pillories neoliberal policy, and excoriates neoliberals themselves for celebrating social and economic practices that fail the vast majority of people. on september 25, 2006 david harvey visited the university of windsor to speak about “neoliberalism and the city.” harvey (b. 1935) was educated at cambridge and has taught at several institutions, notably oxford, johns hopkins university, and now the graduate centre at the city university of new york. his publications include social justice and the city (1973), the limits to capital (1982), the condition of postmodernity (1989), considered one of the most important works of non-fiction published since 1945 and, more recently, the new imperialism (2003) and a brief history of neoliberalism (2006). over dinner and wine, though it was not quite vinum daemonum, harvey spoke with stephen pender, director of the humanities research group and associate professor of english, university of windsor. stephen pender: what is the relationship between activism and the academy? david harvey: i start with a material base, which is that i have a job in the academy that is my point of production. what do i do there? i engage in the production and reproduction of knowledge. this site, the academy, is contested; increasingly, the academy is being subjected to neoliberal disciplinary apparatuses of various kinds. it is also becoming a place where neoliberal ideas are being spread. so the first point i want to make is that i have a crucial role to play in trying to resist the neoliberalization of the academy, which is largely about organizing within the academy. i think that it is really very wrong for people to think that just because you are organizing with the academy, you are just an academic and you are not politically active. in fact, a lot of my political life has been given over to creating spaces within the academy, where things could be said, written, discussed, and ideas promulgated. right now those spaces are more under threat then they have been in many years ... so part of my activism is dedicated to that. sp: the university is often figured as immured from “external” politics, at least by those on the outside looking in. is the academy somehow separate from its social context? is academic work political work? dh: if you want to open spaces in universities, one of the things you have to do is to studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 15 acknowledge that they set the rules, so you have to play by their rules. to some degree, this does compromise you, no question about it. when i started out, most of the people i knew as radicals got fired from academia because they did not follow the rules. so i played by the rules to some degree. some people would say, my radical students would say, “you compromised far too much,” and maybe that’s true. on the other hand, i did open up spaces, partly by being academically respectable as well as radical. that is a compromised position, i know, but it is strategically adopted for certain political purposes. i’m fighting this battle inside academia, others are fighting it in healthcare, and others still are fighting it in the steel works. so, to me, we have to think about constructing alliances, between people who are struggling at all the different points of production. we have to articulate what we have in common and the ways in which we might support each other. now, i’ve never taken the idea that just because i am an academic i know better than they do; i’ve never accepted that idea. i’ve always taken the idea i want them to help me organize and i can help them organize, at the same time i can help them see things that they don’t see. since i know how to write, how to do things, i want to use that power, not to represent what people say, but to magnify their voice, in a way that other people are going to hear it. so one becomes a kind of echo chamber, for what you hear from people in a living wage campaign, or whatever. you want to become an echo chamber by sending it out to a larger audience. for me, political activism is being very active where i’m at, but also about establishing alliances and having the possibility to magnify the voices around me. i am not a good organizer, i am not a good militant in the sense that i can be out on the streets. i am good at certain things, and i try to use those skills in a very specific way to be as active as i can. i treat it as part of a much larger process, and i hope people will see it as a significant part. i would never make the claim that this was somehow the heart of the process; it is just a part. sp: with that in mind, has your conception of social justice changed from your early excursions and interventions in the 1970s to now? if so, how? dh: well there’s one sense in which it hasn’t changed, which is that i always saw social justice not as a universal or absolute, but as something that was always contingent upon the circumstances in which you were working; of course, the circumstances in which i was working in the early 1970s are very different from now. therefore, you have to articulate ideas about social justice now in ways which are very different from 30 years ago. on that, i think i would argue that we made certain suppositions 30 years ago about the political situation; we even believed we would actually transform the world in a radical kind of way — we actually believed we could construct a socially-just society. we thought there was a revolution around the corner — and it’s very hard to say to people now, that that was the situation in which we were formulating our ideas. at that point, we could take ideas that seemed almost like absolute ideals because we felt the contingent situation was such that we could realize it. sp: praxis, as one might say. dh: yeah, now that’s all gone. i mean, you talk to many people, and most will figure that there is no alternative to things as they are. so what you are trying to do is use the idea of social justice to mobilize people, to understand the world in a different way. so it becomes a strategic idea, the idea of justice becomes part of trying to studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 16 awaken thoughts, rather than complete them, as was the case in the early 1970s. from that standpoint, injustice becomes the topic of conversation; now, injustice is what we talk about. we don’t have a positive conception of justice; we have a negative conception of lack of justice — injustice. that is a very important mobilizing idea. so i think that’s a big, big, difference about how we use the idea. however, the circumstances are such that none of us imagine that we are going to take power tomorrow, whereas in the 1970s, a lot of people in social movements, political movements really thought that power was within our grasp and i think one of the things we need to talk about is what did we do wrong in the 1970s, when power in some respects was indeed within our grasp, and we let it slip. and why did we let it slip? how did we let it slip? sp: was it apocalyptic thinking? was it millenarian thinking? was it too much of the “liberate our desire and we shall be free?” what was the mistake? dh: i don’t know; i think “the mistake” was a multitude of things. let’s face it; in the 1970s the communist party was near to power in france and italy, there was a revolution in portugal, and revolutions throughout much of the developing world. as an urbanist, for a model, i always go back to red bologna, a great example of how communism can really work on the ground. we were beginning to break loose of the soviet union, so you had euro-communism, things like that. but i think the left at that moment actually became very conservative; many hung on to the gains of the 1960s rather than say “we’re prepared to give that up, for a higher purpose” — but nobody actually knew what that purpose was, which is what the labour party ran into in britain in the mid-1970s. what was the corporatist response to the crisis on the left? so i think there were many things that went wrong and, again, i think that we need to evaluate that period; and without such detailed evaluation, i don’t have a clear answer. we are moving towards a point of crisis ourselves in the next five to ten years, and i think the left has to know that we’re not going to do that again, we are not going to loose it that way again. sp: in part, i think, the new left underestimated the rise of neo-conservatism in the us. as us hegemony is challenged by the spatial and economic orders you are at pains to identify and describe, neoconservatives turn to morality as a form of hectoring, and as means of justification for both internal and external coercion. as the us economic power, and its ability to wield such power, wanes, its leadership turns to the comforting panaceas of liberal democracy to underwrite its efforts; is this the future for what might be called “moral imperialism” or mitigated imperialism? is democracy the final stick with which to beat those the us cannot bring to heel with capital? are these moral as well as political questions? dh: perhaps i should go back and show how i define the neoconservative project, which is not only about the mobilisation of moral authority; it’s also about the imposition of order, a militaristic sense of order. i don’t think democracy is what they are about at all. i think the only democracy they have in mind is the kind of democracy that exists in the us, which is the democracy of money and raw military power. my view of them is best described, i think, by karl rove’s dream, to have the us follow china. we have a one party system called the “republucrats”; beneath it you have a raging, completely unregulated capitalism. this is generating enormous studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 17 amounts of wealth, which is being accumulated by a few people at the top of the system. that is what is happening in china to some extent with the authoritarian structure there and this is what i think they have in mind. to mobilize that, i think neoconservative morality is not just simply an abstract morality; it is hierarchical. and since it is hierarchical, then it is always therefore about the hierarchal imposition of order. i think you have to ask yourself, what is the big distinction between the bush administration and the clinton administration? clinton for me was the quintessential neoliberal; what bush objected to was the lack of moral principle and lack of order. sp: and this is what distinguishes neoconservativism from neoliberalism? dh: yes. neoconservatives are not against the market system, but they want it to be like china. underneath this, i think, is their hatred of clinton; and this is what always bothered me — i could never understand why the right was so apoplectic about clinton when he was doing all the right neoliberal things. he came in promising universal healthcare and he gave us nafta, the wto, and welfare “reform.” he did all the things we would expect a good neoliberal to do. but the right loathed him still, and i think it is because their utopian vision of the world is order, morality, and then the crazy market can do what it wants. so i think that is how i would conceptualize the problem. sp: you have made sophisticated arguments about the relationship between capitalism, space, and imperialism, particularly in your oxford lectures on “the new imperialism.” you write with vigour about us hegemony, particularly in the middle east, and specifically in iraq; in that context, you mention potential us aggression against iran. can you explain your current perspective on what you have called the us’ “own distinctive form of imperialism,” perhaps with specific reference to iran? dh: i think the us was very concerned to dominate not only iraq, but iran. but this is the point where i must introduce some simple geography: i don’t think bush thought that the distinction between sunnis and shiites was any different than that between methodists and baptists. i don’t think bush understood anything about the dynamics of that region. i think bush had the fantasy that you invade iraq and everybody greets you with great pleasure and immediately the population of iran will clamour to be liberated also. i think we have to understand that the geographical world these people inhabit has not necessarily anything to do with the reality. my analogy is christopher columbus. columbus arrived in the americas, not knowing where he was, and having no idea about the world he encountered. he totally messed up almost everything in the americas. celebrated as a great explorer, columbus was a lousy geographer, and bush and cheney are lousy geographers, and anthropologists. they don’t know what is going on, why it is going on, or where it is going on. so i think we should not always attribute to them some grand design with perfect knowledge of the situation. they have a grand design, but almost no knowledge about the situation. i met somebody once who went down to the state department over the iranian issue, because he knew a lot about iran. he sat down with the so called experts in the state department — it was a high level meeting — and he asked them, “how long have you spent in iran?” two weeks. “do you know the language?” no. “what do you know of the history?” well i know about the shah. at this point, i think we need to recognize that actually a lot of these things are profound studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 18 geographical mistakes. behind them lurks the idea that if they can democratize the region, neoliberalize the region, not only will the oil flow freely, they will have huge markets. there are 50 million people in iran; this is a big potential market, and a sophisticated, educated populace there, with a lot of potential to develop. so you can see it as a potential entrepreneurial paradise for global capitalism ... they probably had that idea about it too, but they didn’t understand these complexities. they even forgot that iran and iraq fought a war for eight or nine years, in which there were a million casualties on the iranian side. everybody knows that iraq was supported by the us; everybody knows in iran that iraq waged germ warfare and the us never uttered a sound. they are only doing it now in order to go after saddam; this is the sort of thing you need to look at. sp: certain strains of post-war anglo-american marxism have attempted to think through problems of base and superstructure, and the problems with that ossified metaphor, by attending to culture as a constituent element of material life [i have raymond williams in mind, for example]. what is the role of culture in your work? how should contemporary marxist and marxian intellectuals envision culture? was williams right about the role of culture in the production and reproduction of material life? how might, as williams put it, literature teach feeling? dh: there is as raymond williams would say “a lot of confusion about the word culture.” it conveys an enormous amount of differential roots and meanings. i happen to work in an anthropology program, where the concept of culture is very different from literary studies and the rest of the humanities. so i have to signal that problem from the onset. having said that, i want to say something which to me is very important; this is a line from gramsci in the prison notebooks: “when political questions are transformed to cultural issues, they become unanswerable.” i think williams and stuart hall and the like, attempted to find political content in cultural questions, that is, to take gramsci at his word, and try to find the politics. i think in a lot of cultural studies it’s been read the other way — that you can’t go anywhere unless you’re prepared to take the political issue and make it cultural. from an anthropological perspective, i would say that that is a ridiculous manoeuvre on the part of people in the humanities, because from an anthropological or geographical perspective, you try to work through the whole nature of material culture, symbolic culture, and all the rest of it. if you’re really political, what you are looking for is the political way in which this comes together so programmatically, in some sort of attempt to transform the world. so i take this as part of what i would consider my mission: what i try to do, for instance in the condition of postmodernity, is argue that everybody is talking about the cultural world, but what i want to talk about is “what is the political economy that lies behind all of this?” when we get to the political economy, we ask ourselves a question, “are you simply about changing the culture, or are you about changing the political economy?” on that point, i would go back to what we were talking about earlier; i think the big failure of the left over the last 200 years has been to define an alternative political economy to capitalism. i am told frequently that our big failure is that we didn’t take culture into account. i’m saying, “no,” we can take that into account as much as we want, and i think some of us use some very sophisticated ways to take it into account. until we come up with an alternative political economic system, we’re studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 19 badly off. we have never been able to define that; so, instead of more cultural analysis, we need more solid political economic analysis. sp: what do you say, then, to activists and revolutionaries who argue that a particular political order depends on the exigencies of that particular moment? they argue that such a system cannot be envisioned, organized in advance — we cannot simply materialize william morris’ news from nowhere, nor we cannot return to the soviets — that the future political and economic order must emerge from a contingent historical moment in contact, as it were, with revolutionary practice. dh: they’re dead right, but then we must understand the nature of the moment. this is where cultural analysis is very critical: we must understand how political questions are being disguised by cultural issues. in the united states right now, politics has become impossible, because of the cultural fog in which we are surrounded, and the right wing is deliberately rolling out that fog. also, we ourselves on the left are enjoying the fog and actually making a lot out of the fog, in my view. so i am very concerned that the left, until it faces the question of what is the political economic transformation that we are after, won’t be able to say anything significant politically. i always liked the distinction between reformists and revolutionaries. in a particular historical moment, in a particular situation, we can both do the same things, reformists and revolutionaries. the difference is that we have a different aim; i always have, in my mind, a long-term goal. so, for instance, when i’m working with a living wage campaign in baltimore, i know this is a reformist project; i know that the gains to be made from this are relatively trivial in relation to what has to be done in the long run. but i’m still willing to work on it, and am very concerned that we do not give up working on such projects at that level. we have to make our commitments very clear, very strong, even about something as simple as that. at the same time, when i was talking to people on the living wage campaign in baltimore, i was saying, “well, do you have the ear of the mayor of baltimore” — there is something called a conference of mayors — “why aren’t you actually telling the mayor to make this…?” and they would do it. subsequently, living wage campaigns have caught on in all these cities and have gone this way. so, i think that we’re looking for pragmatic shifts right now, we’re looking for mitigating effects right now, but what we should have in mind is: which one of these projects or campaigns has the capacity to create an opening towards a grander future? if you loose the idea of a revolutionary project, then actually you’ve lost politics. i think right now we have a real problem, we’ve lost politics. i don’t know if you know the work of the french philosopher alain badiou. he basically says, “we’ve lost politics and we’ve got to regain politics,” and it’s not in terms of what i do at this particular moment that defines whether we are doing politics or not; it’s how we are doing it and where we imagine we are headed and how we are going to do it. so we need, i think, a different vision, and that is what concerns me. that different vision, to return to our earlier discussion, is a different political economy. it has to be a different political economy that is the necessary condition for a radical transformation of human relations, absolutely a necessary condition — it’s not a sufficient condition, it’s a necessary condition sp: that said, how do you, how does your work engage with social movements? this is a political question, of course, and strikes at the heart of various conceptions of studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 20 “public” — or “organic” or “specific” — intellectuals. dh: my answer may surprise you ... i value immensely what i learn from working with social movements. but at the same time, if you said, “is it my mission to somehow or other integrate with them?” my answer would be “no.” i think my mission is of a different sort. i am intellectually trained in the ways they are not. fredric jameson, for example, is intellectually trained in ways i am not and most of us are not. i think our obligation is to tell it how we see it; it may be entirely wrong, it may be entirely crazy, but until somebody is prepared to stand there and say “given our intellectual training and the fact that i’ve read political economy in the depth i have, the fact that i’ve read marx in the depth i have, and the fact that i’ve worked in urban history in the way i have, i have an obligation, given those understandings, to tell it how it is.” that is how i wrote the condition of postmodernity; i took all of my learning and said, “i’m going to use this.” that political learning does not exist in the social movements, it exists in my training. now, one of my big fights within marxism is that most marxists do not understand spatiality, space and time, and i think i do. i want people who work in that tradition to understand the importance of uneven geographical development, the importance of urbanisation and environmental dynamics. i want people to have a framework in which they can grasp what is happening to them. you can say this is arrogant, avant-gardist, or whatever you want, but i think that i have an obligation to say it as i see it. in so far as i have had any impact in the world, it’s not because of i was some minion involved in this or that; it was because i was prepared in these texts, like the condition of postmodernity, to say it as i saw it — given what i knew, part of which came out of the social movements. so i have great respect for what i learned from those social movements, so if you look at a book like spaces of hope i could not have written that without the living wage campaign in baltimore and the social movements. but, on the other hand, they could not have written it either, because they didn’t have the equipment. it’s like i said to you earlier, we have an obligation, you and i, to magnify what they’re saying. not only magnify it, but turn it into something which is as grand as they want, but on a different scale. i’m very concerned about that. frankly, i get angry when people somehow or other come at me and say “you’re just an academic.” i am not interested in that kind of discussion. i am not just an academic: i am an academic, i have worked as an academic, i work in academia, i have skills and i am certainly going to use those skills. i want to practice in a way that opens possibilities. that’s what i think my mission can be and i’m passionately committed to that. but a lot of my inspiration comes out of the social movements. if i wasn’t connected to social movements, i would not have been able to do the things i’ve done, i would not have written many of the things i’ve written. so i’m deeply, deeply indebted to the social movements, but i am not constrained by the idea that somehow or other i have to tell them what they want. no more then i am constrained by the idea that somehow or other i should tell the world bank what it wants. sp: are constrained by the notion that you have to speak for them or with them? dh: no, i have to speak in a way that is an expansion of what it seems to me their saying and i may misinterpret them and they should call me on it, and they do. when they call me on it, i’m frequently wrong and that’s fine, that’s how it should be. i need, always, to have the freedom and liberty in my work. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 21 sp: in my own, limited experience, the one thing that being engaged with social movements teaches academics is to avoid the tendency to imagine the past, present, and future as inactive, inert, finished. williams’ work addresses this question, in marxism and literature, for example. one of the things that being involved in social movements have taught me is that the questions we’re after, the questions and the problematics that we’re after, even some of the so called solutions that we’re after, must embrace this conception of social, cultural, political, and economic practices as active and unfinished. this notion came through clearly in your talk today, especially in that wonderful quotation with which you began: “as we make cities, as we imagine spaces in which to live, as we imagine a building that might offer us some certain ensemble tasks, we are imagining and re-imagining, making and remaking ourselves.” to be sure, social movements do not exist to keep academics in check; but the constant pressure keeps one’s work active, alive, engaged. to suggest a parallel in my own work, the seventeenth-century writers and thinkers i study and teach were always involved in active struggles — i have milton in mind, for example. to make the past come alive aesthetically is to make it similarly alive politically. dh: my favourite line from balzac is “hope is a memory that desires” and that was how i wrote spaces of hope, around that idea. everybody has a memory, but memory can become nostalgia when it’s left on its own; nostalgia is not hope. hope is memory that’s mobilized around desire. so the question is what do we desire and how do we want to desire it? for me, that is the crucial aspect of everything we do. so if i focus on balzac, to whom i return again and again, i might conclude, “wow, yeah, that’s what’s it about, i desire things, but i can not do this absent of the memory.” as walter benjamin says about memory, “memory is not history, its something that flashes up, in moments of danger,” it somehow or other animates things. and actually that’s where revolutions come from — that is my theory of revolution if you want to put it that way. take ground zero, for example; it’s about a kind of dialectic. what is the memory which is incorporated there now and what desire is going to be connected to it? actually, what you see is what the authorities want to corral memory into a monument; they wish to memorialize and monumentalize in some way or other. they don’t want it to be alive, they want t it to be dead. i want it to be alive. the most dangerous thing in the world, benjamin is right, is memory — which is not contained in memorialisation, monumentalization, and all the rest of it, he’s dead right. things flash up; i could tell you a little story about this, about when i started to write the new imperialism, before the invasion of iraq. on the day of the invasion, i arrived in madrid with my daughter, then sixteen years old. the first thing we did was to go to the american embassy; we joined a large demonstration. my daughter quite reasonably said to me, “why did we go to madrid to go to the american embassy for a demonstration?” i had a hard time explaining it to her; i went back to the hotel, turned on cnn, “shock and awe,” and i was outraged because i immediately thought, “who thinks about the kids?” it’s partly because i was there with my kid, but partly because it brought me back to world war ii, and the first night of rocket attacks. i was terrified because my mother came in and seized me and threw me under the stairs, so i had been through shock and awe in my childhood and it had a terrible impact on me. i thought, “cnn is reporting all this stuff, how come studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 22 none of them are saying, this must be terrible for the kids in baghdad?” who thought about the kids in baghdad? no one thought about the kids in baghdad. i was so outraged that i wrote the new imperialism in six weeks. this was my memory that suddenly came back, about actually being thrown into this cellar from this violent attack, which was completely incomprehensible to my mind and to everyone else around me. living this moment of danger again, i was thinking about the sheer terror of the invasion of iraq. i was thinking, “this is not how we should be talking about this event.” “oh, spectacular, the green flashes are going off here and bangs are going off here,” but their kids. i mean how many kids in iraq lived through this? how many are permanently marked in a way, like i was permanently marked by what happened to me in 1944? i don’t know if you remember this thing, but there was this incident where a family was driving and soldiers shot everybody. the soldiers realized they just killed a family and they went and comforted the kids. your response can only be “what?” this was presented as a story about how good the soldiers were, because they comforted the kids. you say again, “what?” are those kids going to be grateful to the soldiers for comforting them? what about killing their families? my historical memory about world war ii had a very important role in completing that book. i was so angry, i had never written a book so fast and so precisely. along with hope, anger desires too. introduction studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 67 a socially-just internet: the digital divide, cybercultural agency, and human capabilities david toews, university of windsor abstract: this article argues that while modes of scholarship stressing structural insights into the digital divide and ethnographic insights into online communities each give us important information about current uses of the internet, for the sake of a unified social justice principle it is necessary to interpret these forms of knowledge in terms of what could be. marx’s formula ‘the development of each as a condition for the development of all’ is put forward as the principle of a socially-just internet actualized from the ground up. it is argued that the most rapidly emerging and important form of constraint upon ‘the development of each’ is the for profit online social media industry in which moments of human communicative creativity become packaged as commodities for commercial purposes. creative, cultural agency becomes an imposition rather than a liberation as represented in the industry ideology. it is argued therefore that groups that use the internet for serious play – the use of avatars in virtual worlds is discussed as an example – present us with a form of online subjectivity that is rising in importance as a form of cultural agency inasmuch as the play component is premised upon the rejection of pre-packaged forms of agency. support for a socially-just internet would thus mean supporting the online communities formed in this process. thus the argument is put forward that the importance of serious online play groups is not due to their potential for forming communities per se but is rather due to their potential for resisting the imposition of agency. inasmuch as online communities in the midst of such groups can bolster that goal, they can represent the development of human capabilities in a way that expands the theme of social justice. how can we incorporate the goals of peace and social justice into the theory and research methods of someone who is interested in the critical cultural analysis of the internet? i would begin by reminding us of an old, seminal principle. despite all the events that have intervened in the last one hundred and fifty years, and the histories that have cast alternating favorable and unfavorable lights on this foundational document for socialism and communism, one of its core principles remains, at the very least an unavoidable issue: in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all (marx & engels, 1948, p. 31). the principle embedded here, i think, is that claims of social justice only make sense if they have some kind of universal relevance in human affairs. i once made an interesting discovery, however, about this particular quote when i was teaching the communist manifesto to students studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 68 in a sociological theory class. i stated the quote in question from memory as „the free development of all is the condition for the free development of each‟, and rather quickly a sharp student pointed out that i had gotten it backwards, implying that my error distorted its meaning. she was quite right: substituting „each‟ and „all‟ for each other in the phrase really does change the meaning, and the more i have reflected on this difference, the more i have wanted to write about it. essentially, this little experiment in practical logic highlights the term „the condition‟ and makes one realize how important this term is and how, i have come to believe, marx‟s principle should be interpreted. the question is not: what are the conditions, involving all of us, that would permit the building of a socially-just world that would, in principle, benefit each of us? rather, the question is: what are the conditions, involving each of us, that would permit the building of a socially-just world that would, in principle, benefit all? marx‟s condition for social justice raises an uncannily contemporary bottom-up, not top-down, vision of the future. this new interpretation was obscured from my view in previous readings, i now think, because i had assumed that marx‟s laundry list of socialist reforms (abolishing private property; extension of factories owned by the state; obliging everyone to work; and so on) had to first be in place before any actor could hope to have an impact. hence my pessimism. now i see that if we take the idea seriously that „the conditions‟ are such that they have to, from the very beginning, involve „each of us‟ (as distinct from the more abstract notion of „all of us‟), it still involves a lot of people but it now means that there can be, and we ought to learn ways to recognize and appreciate, different speeds and different contexts, different ideas and different acts, in the world of those that are seeking to promote social justice. there is, indeed, room to think of our internet tools in a new way. i used to do little more than fret over the monopoly of corporations like microsoft over the possible ways we can think and communicate, and i still do not like that form of proprietary control over software, but now i am beginning to understand it in a different light. first ibm, then microsoft, and now the new web 2.0 companies, have all along been trying to provide „social utility software‟, as the chairman of facebook likes to put it (johnson, 2007). they are commodifying social relationships, ideologically promoting but in practice distorting and stunting the „free development of each‟. this is typically characterized by the aggressive extension of regimes of surveillance to the context of consumerism (andrejevic, 2002). the interactivity of communication on the internet is further exploited by blurring the line between consumers and producers in order to extract labour from our most ordinary ways of interacting. a typical context for this exploitation is the „start-up‟ company; the process of individuals, small groups and companies taking risks to introduce innovations in personal computing and networking technology has for some time now been slotted into a narrative of capitalism. the ideal hero of this narrative is the freewheeling, innovative individual or group willing to translate their life lessons into marketable products. these entities are seen as existing for the purpose of finding ways to profit from the fragile communities, unstable habits, and even the anti-corporate sentiments of internet users. an interesting example well advanced on this curve is common craft, a website devoted to producing videos that „explain‟ various topics to „ordinary people‟. common craft cultivates a folksy, populist, left-leaning image. based in seattle, in the early 2000s its founders were inspired by the cluetrain manifesto (www.cluetrain.com). on its home page this document/website sets out its basic premise that “learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about „listening to customers.‟ they will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on http://www.cluetrain.com/ studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 69 their behalf” (www.cluetrain.com). common craft has accordingly fashioned for itself not just an ideology of the corporate voice become more human, but an ideology of the ordinary person as „owner‟ of the process of the production of value. 1 ostensibly to render the knowledge industry more grass-roots and democratic this conception places an accountability upon each person/producer that turns the collective components of their identities and needs into market engines to be exploited for enterprise and profit. the free development of each is distorted and stunted by a form of creative „ownership‟ which is merely a pretense for the process of harvesting of workers‟ productive capacities. the false ideology of the sovereign autonomy of the individual internet user, whether as producer or consumer, is all too often the organizational principle backing the „social opportunities‟ of the internet which act as the fuel for these myriad engines of the capture of human creativity and communication. in this context, the notion of the internet as affording opportunities for „the free development of all‟ has been far from helpful. arguably, it has only disarmed and placated those who are attracted to these voluntary online sweatshops. if it is to make sense, the „free development of each‟ (at least in my view of the significance of marx‟s formula) cannot not be reduced to the mere notion that each actor should be able to live in a society structured to provide opportunities for their development. this is because it is only possible to imagine such a state of affairs if we conflate the principle of the „free development of each‟ with a state of affairs that we imagine as the „free development of all‟. the rhetoric of helping humanity figures large in the self-justification of proponents of common craft and other start-ups in the social media sector. the capture of workers‟ creativity is presented as the realization of this social imaginary. the contemporary popular notion of an „open source‟ movement (see, for instance, www.opensource.org) feeds this wishful expectation. but such notions all too often merely function to allow companies like apple to outsource their problems at their leisure, stringing along contract developers who can‟t wait to serve them (vaughannichols, 2006). precisely by using the term „is the condition of‟ marx meant to avoid, not encourage, the conflation of his terms. it makes sense that he would do so, for it is regrettable when the principle of the „free development of each‟ turns into an abstract ideology that merely enables a new kind of voluntary servitude. there is no commitment to social justice there. i for one at least, would favor any interpretation that maintained the actuality, the here and now, of „the free development of each‟. what i take from marx is that all is lost if we do not create that condition. what would it take to create the condition of „the free development of each‟? certainly we would not know in advance what the outcome would be, though we would want to set out some goals, and we would want to examine our tools that we think we can use to promote those goals to make sure those tools do not have an in-built bias towards a limited consensus revolving around a pre-conceived conception of the „all‟. as john stuart mill put it, „better to be socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied‟ (2002, p. 397). our goals will of course have to be constantly adjusted as different problems of social injustice and different aspects of those problems are identified, and there is probably a set of criteria that underpin the term „social‟ in the term social justice, so we need to examine, as a matter of urgency, what that list would be and why their being „social‟ is so central for human development. at the same time, though, we need to 1 own it | common craft explanations in plain english. retrieved october 16, 2008, from http://www.commoncraft.com/own-it#comment-form. http://www.cluetrain.com/ http://www.commoncraft.com/own-it#comment-form studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 70 examine our tools. if you support the top-down perspective, any tools can be used to create the „all‟ to „manufacture consent,‟ as herman and chomsky put it (herman & chomsky, 2002). if the job is to build social justice from the ground up, to attain first of all the free development of each, then tools must be fashioned or appropriated in a way that allows the user to create something unique to him or her. this is the double problem, and the double solution, we have with the internet at the present moment of history. we are encouraged to set goals for peace and social justice because we can, but these calls are often irresponsible and not followed through. we seem to have the tools to communicate this message. but „the message‟ slides into an abstract sense of the globalization of communication. the tools are skewed in favour of the development of an abstract concept of the all and do not permit the actual development of each. we have placed a principle of globalization as our highest value and then assumed that education, for example, would trickle down to the grassroots. it‟s the classic administrator‟s dream, like that of urban planner robert moses to transform new york into an expressway world for the benefit of „all‟, at the expense of real neighborhoods and the actual practices of people (berman, 1988). we should work to prevent the internet from being conceived as another expressway world. for me this is exactly why the critical cultural and social study of the internet is so important today. the perspective of critical cybercultural studies examines the internet as a potential space of social justice and democratic politics for users who are already engaged with computer-mediated communications. it is a valuable perspective that is generating new data and insights every day. we also need to engage with studies of the digital divide, of course, to understand the disparities in the current global systems. these studies inform us of current actualities. we need to go further though, and look at this information from the point of view of „what could be‟. we need to reclaim the utopian ground that is being appropriated by google earth, myspace and windows live messenger. my point of view, as i have tried to justify above, stresses an interpretation of current actualities to the extent that they are already actualizing „the development of each‟, or providing obstacles thereto, as the condition of understanding and promoting social justice. however, i am also proposing to effect this interpretation without reducing this condition to mere abstract notions of individualistic liberty, since the key criteria of social justice is, after all, that it is a social and cultural construction. essentially, then, i am interested in a discussion that bridges the gap between „what is and what could be‟ in internet practices and research, from an over-arching social justice point of view which stresses the „ground up‟ actualization of social justice. a discussion, then, needs to take place that bridges structural and ethnographic analysis of internet practices from the standpoint of a normative, processual conception of social justice. to achieve a satisfactory depth of understanding one would have to examine the problems that have historically divided ethnographers and structural theorists and the many solutions that have been proposed as ways of synthesizing micro and macro, structure and agency theoretical orientations. here i am going to limit myself to pointing out a problem with the present state of internet research that gets in the way of this undertaking. this problem consists in the assumptions of researchers and theorists about „what could be‟, or about an ideal social justice outcome. for the sake of simplicity of argument let me for the time being reduce the approaches to digital divide (structural) vs. cybercultural (ethnographic) points of view. i am going to interrogate these positions on what they assume „could be‟, and examine their implications for research that is motivated by the problems of social injustice. my ultimate aim is to ask: how can studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 71 the goals of peace and social justice be incorporated into the theory and research methods of someone who is interested in the critical cultural analysis of the internet? the most well-developed approaches to online social justice to date have been those dealing with the problem of the digital divide. the digital divide encompasses all the social stratifications, political conflicts, economic inequalities, and infrastructural developmental delays that have prevented the internet from reaching vast numbers of users. 2 the proponents of the digital divide perspective generally assume that members of different societies and cultures around the world need or want to be users of the internet. this kind of assumption is fair in social science research that examines structures that prolong inequality and injustice in the traditional, offline world. it is fair to assume that members of societies would need or want access to all the goods of societies that are rightfully theirs. it is fair in that context because the actors in the traditional, offline world have no choice but to be and act in that world. in contrast, imagine a group of actors who came together and created a space for themselves in which they built an environment, which they could use from time to time, in which they expected to avoid harming each other but the main positive expectation was that social interactions therein would experiment with communication and usually involve some kind of creative expression. let us call them the serious play group. let us assume, for the sake of argument, all the members of the serious play group agreed with these expectations and faithfully tried to stick to their spirit for the time they were within that space. they could use the space for any kind of expressions or learning, to dramatize and learn about any kinds of real world conflicts or cultures. these are highly motivated participants in a social group, and they have chosen to enter their group‟s space. what we should note is that this would not be for everyone. not every actor would choose to be, or even know that they could be, involved in such a group. not every actor in today‟s world chooses to use the internet as a means to address their needs and wants. moreover, significant groups of users have entirely different schemas that guide their online practices. 3 the notion of a serious play group highlights a form of agency, along with attendant cultural schemas, tactics, and strategies of action that is very specific to online computer-mediated communication. one way to draw the contrast with the agency that the digital divide perspective generally deals with is to note how the latter perspective has its strength in illuminating problems of institutions and social interactions represented online which operate in the context of current trends towards globalization and networked individualism (wellman, 2002; hackworth, 2007). new social networks are enabled by computer-mediated communication. they are creations of actors who are highly selective as to with whom and where they associate. they form new kinds of communities with non-traditional spatial formations (wellman, 2002). the flipside is the mass of people who lack these means of selective association and spatial control, and hence lack increasingly important means of social, economic, and cultural capital. a key point to remember is that this whole problem of social transformation and accessibility to networked communities 2 norris has developed an interesting way of understanding this with the concept of information poverty (norris 2001). 3 i would add the caveat that if government agencies, corporations, employers, or other global institutions were to come along and disrupt groups like the serious play group, undermining the „play‟ aspect by creating conditions whereby offline social functions can only be accomplished on the internet, under these circumstances the digital divide perspective grows in relevance. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 72 by social networking cannot be accurately described in terms of group dynamics since it operates according to a logic of interest-driven contextual embedding and disembedding. if i see myself as a member of a community of lexus owners, i am going to jump across various socio-cultural, geographical, economic, and political contexts in order to interact in networks of like-minded others. in contrast, a group is an assembly of actors who do not need to be more than incidentally interested in each other. wellman sees a fundamental intransigence in the sociological conception of group that gets in the way of seeing the new realities of social networking (2002). i would see the concept of group as quite important as a means of describing some social assemblages such as those meant for serious play. i agree that groups are not necessarily, or even usually, communities. i would suggest we define a group as an event of assembly. the point i want to make here is if serious play groups are groups as such then the digital divide problem is not well set up to account for their formation. a serious play group is an event of assembly meant to explore creativity with communication and therefore cannot be defined as a social network or a community since the latter depend on communication taking defined, functional, and relatively stable forms. a serious play group defined from the perspective of a social network or community would appear as dysfunctional, and we would get the wrong idea about it. the members of the serious play group – let us say they are well-off westerners though they do not have to be – could certainly be said to be responsible for helping to solve the problem of the digital divide, but i would hold this to be true only qua members of their broader societies, not qua members of the serious play group. this in no way diminishes the intensity of the responsibility of those actors, of course, it just clarifies its source, and it permits us to appreciate the autonomy of the serious play group, and to explore what the latter could be a source for instead. i am concerned that the digital divide may very well entrench people‟s thinking about the internet in terms of generalizations relating to the power relations involved in actual institutional appropriations of the net. it is all too easy to rely on some vague narrative about the spread of the internet as some kind of abstract impersonal force like what weber called rationalization, an inevitable outcome of „our western logos‟, leading to an inexorably widening institutional iron cage that traps us all into employing its ways of thinking, being and acting. in actuality, the internet‟s history has always been related to large powerful institutions, but also to serious play groups (turner, 2005). when we want to think of where the internet came from and „what it could be‟, the digital divide perspective has no answers and instead we need ethnographic research in order to understand the actual use of the computer-mediated communication on the net and the directions implied by this actual use. it is a crime if actors are prevented from participating online because they do not understand the internet and are worried about how glocal and impersonal and conspiratorial it feels. it is sad if people think that all they can do as individuals is to click on a few preferences and banners set up well in advance by big companies. the digital divide perspective just does not have its strength in helping us to know what could be, with respect to the social justice dimensions of the net. it is unlikely that the net would resemble its present incarnation if it really was adopted even by a clear majority of the world‟s populations. we cannot, and should not rest our understanding of the internet on information about „what is‟ the case with respect to unjust distribution of access at the present moment. we should use that information to work toward a more equal distribution, for those that need or want the internet. we do not waste our time fighting to distribute prosthetic limbs to every person on the planet, but only those that need or have a good case for wanting one, and we want to make studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 73 sure that we understand how the technology is going to be used. working towards a better understanding of the use of the net by serious play groups will at least enable us to gain a clearer conception of a form of online subjectivity that is not based on narrow interests. the proponents of a critical cyberculture are well positioned for this task. they have a valuable perspective, to begin with, because they are able to avoid the problematic assumption that everyone desires to be an internet user. 4 an anthropologist studying an aboriginal tribe in australia can accomplish a great deal without in any way presuming that the ways of life of that tribe should be adopted by all human beings. this is because the main task of the anthropologist is the thick description of a culture, and their indifference to the interests of the rest of the world is actually a source of the objectivity of the anthropological, or in the case of the internet, the ethnographic voice. however, that does not mean there are not circumstances in which one might want to ask if certain specific cultures can be adopted more widely, to bring some wisdom to the world, and what the consequences of this might be. one also, of course, should at some point ask the question of development, of whether certain specific cultures have taken on their specific cultural features because they have been isolated from the world and its vaster resources, and to what extent and under what circumstances calls for the importation of western ways and means should be encouraged. it should be obvious that many social justice scholars and activists who do excellent and worthy work are involved precisely in these questions and in seeking culturallysensitive modes of the recognition of problems and identities, and of the distribution and delivery of basic resources. here i am just pointing out that such questions go well beyond what a traditional ethnographer will tend to deal with. the proponents of a critical cyberculture, as ethnographers, avoid the uncritical universalization of the subjectivity of internet, but are not equipped to analyze the digital divide. they have to work on the assumption that their methods are permitting them to accurately critically analyze what the internet and its actual usage in the social context is. but there is a more unique problem that only ethnographers of the internet have to face on a daily basis. the problem is not the heavy involvement of technology per se, since technologies have always come into the equation in traditional, offline communities. the problem is the norm of creative collaboration among internet users, particularly in the serious play type of use. ethnographers of traditional, offline communities can practice thick description and social justice activists can work for the development of those communities, and they will debate among themselves, as they ought to, about the consequences of intervention in a culture to distribute aid or promote education and the nature of the impact on various subjectivities and their identities. however, they prosecute this debate on the shared common understanding that the members of those communities are more or less committed involuntarily to their communities. they do not have to deal, primarily and on a daily basis, with subjects who have a voluntary, experimental relationship with their communities based on its potential for collaborative creative expression. at the same time, within internet research, there is a curious parallel between the digital dividers and the ethnographers insofar as they both tend not to explore whether a wider social usage of the net would alter its functions. in the scholarly mode that they have to employ, they both tend to discuss how the net „is‟ rather than what it „could be‟. in contrast, in the actual practices of 4 some notable internet ethnographic studies include the pioneer studies of howard rheingold (1993) and sherry turkle (1995), and many more recent studies, including baym (1998); markham (1998); danet (2001); howard and jones (2004). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 74 those who use the net, among bloggers for example, the norm is to constantly tease out the implications of all practices to make sure they fit the future. 5 the condition of online social justice would have to be a universal perspective, and not primarily in the sense of the theorist‟s perspective of looking down upon a great digital divide. this universal perspective must somehow be embedded in the plurality of online activities, including organizations and practices. 6 the phenomenon of serious play groups voluntarily using the internet for their own purposes is a significant form of internet activity which has played an important role at the beginning and continuously during the historical evolution of the net, and has always displayed an inherent resistance to corporate co-optation of online activities. to be sure, we will only fully understand the significance of serious play groups if we support the advancement of internet ethnography. but in the meantime the question becomes: in what sense might the voluntary nature of serious play groups using the internet constitute the kind of plural yet universal perspective we are looking for? might serious play groups be a source of inspiration for the advancement of online social justice? while we need to continue to research the social structures and ethnography of the internet, if these projects are to be steered in a way that renders them mutually supportive of social justice activism, one of the greatest tasks that lies ahead is the theoretical enterprise of critically examining the possible social justifications of promising internet activities. it is an enterprise of seeking common ground, and it is also becoming more and more urgently a critical enterprise as corporations have been moving faster to promote certain „social software‟ concepts of the internet than social theorists and social justice activists. for the companies promoting their products, a key problem is understanding how technical innovation allowing for greater flexibility and usability can be translated and promoted as a kind of agency, or expansion of the agency of the human user. take for example the „avatars‟ that users employ in order to interact in virtual worlds like second life (secondlife.com). in the technical design of systems that support avatars, it is a vital question of concern to social software developers to determine how an avatar can be deliberately designed to be technically flexible in terms of the contents of its identity. social software developers in general want to play, of course, to their companies‟ desires to promote mass personalization (miceli, ricotta, & costabile, 2007). attentions are much less focused, if at all, on the cultural dimension in which this flexibility comes to be, in actual practices, manifested as cyberplay that expresses the peculiar self-understandings, stories and symbols that come to be grouped around the identities of avatars and the online communities they inhabit. a central question for theorists addressing social injustice has been the problem of how to defend and implement human rights. the online context, in which humans use avatars which in turn expand human reality to a new level of sociable interaction and serious creative play, complicates this question, requiring that we explore the human meanings of avatars in relation to the meanings generated in avatar-to-avatar interactions. we must not dismiss the small but significant plurality of ways inhabitants of virtual worlds and participants in all kinds of online communities are using these tools every day, since very often their methods were not intended or conceived by their primary developers. serious cyberplay is play with the form of communication in the online context, and outcomes of play are impossible to predict. play inherently resists the imposition of agency. it does connect with 5 see for example http://lifehacker.com/ 6 the new media consortium (www.nmc.org) is notable for encouraging excellent work in this spirit. http://lifehacker.com/ studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 75 the more mundane issues surrounding the internet. resistance to corporate attempts to impose agency functions in the context of concerns over who can and should have access to technology. the recent rapid expansion of virtual worlds for children is a case in point. it is the rare family now who does not have a child using her avatar (the 3d graphic characters that move about in virtual worlds) to make points and build an online presence in sites like club penguin or stardoll. these sites seriously discipline and channel the agency of child actor-avatars. this is ostensibly due to their users‟ tender ages, but the disney executives who run club penguin will tell their boards that it is to train new consumers to accept their digital products. the appropriate institutions for the inculcation of good online habits in children, such as families and schools, are facing a cultural and ethical struggle which depends, like all social justice movements, upon participation and community. some social justice thinkers who have thought deeply about computer technology continue to be informed by the traditional view that „if anything, technology aids in the reduction of the other into an object or means‟ (walters, 2001, p. 22). however, at the same time it is recognized that „community protects and fulfils rights‟ (walters, 2001, p. 22). thus, the question of whether the virtual world can be a space of social justice is naturally understood, as a kind of default approach, as a question of whether it constitutes a real, effective community. ethnographers of the internet have worked diligently to prove that such communities can exist, albeit often in a fragile way (baym, 1998). however, the problematic of community needs to be re-shaped as we gain more accurate ethnographic information about serious play groups. to begin with, there are important differences between online and offline communities. online communities tend to be oriented to play. let us take, for example, the use of avatars in virtual worlds like second life, an area in which i am presently developing a long term ethnographic research project. 7 one of the debates that i have had with my internet research colleagues surrounds the ontological status and agency of avatars. 8 we have debated, for example, the analogy between avatars and puppets. like avatars, puppets are controlled by puppeteers, and can thus be considered within the world of the direct representations of the puppeteer. employing the model of the puppet/puppeteer relationship, the ethical considerations of avatarto-avatar interactions in second life would be similar those in studying offline interactions. puppets interact with other puppets. they do so as expressions of their puppeteers' intentions, or as vehicles of the puppeteers and/or audience's symbolic interpretations of those (on stage) interactions. thus, one could well argue that a dramaturgical theoretical framework, like that proposed by goffman (1973), would be an interesting way of studying second life interactions. traditional social interactionist theories work well in studying traditional offline social interactions, are time tested, and are a useful theoretical starting point. however, problems crop up in the online context. one finds, in practice, a significant disanalogy between avatars and puppets. second life avatar interaction is not like a puppet show because it is not a 'show' in the sense of a definite dramatic performance with a beginning, middle, and ending and a set of actors that are guided by a director. in second life there is no director. there is an orientation process 7 i acted as principal investigator in a pilot study that took place in 2007, „the impact of communicative creativity on human needs and social justice‟, humanities and social sciences research grant (hssrg), university of windsor, ontario, canada, 2007. 8 these discussions have taken place in march of 2008 on the listserver of the association of internet researchers (aoir). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 76 in which one learns the movements and communication functions of one‟s avatar, but once the basics are learned, the individual subscriber is left completely to his or her devices, to go and join or form groups for business, pleasure, education, or whatever. to use the language of the social psychology of george herbert mead (1967), this means that one avatar has to respond to the other avatar according to the way the first avatar's human user imagines is the attitude, not of the second avatar's human user, but of the second avatar, since there is no way to check the attitudes of the human user without disrupting the immersive quality of the virtual world. analogous to the need for concentration and immersion in a game as a condition of getting the most out of a game, immersion in second life is the whole point for the vast majority of its users. 9 adding to the difference from human-to-human interaction in the offline world, in second life avatars, of course, compared to humans have a different repertoire of possible movements and expressions with different in-built limitations (e.g. second life avatars can fly and teleport). so the human user of an avatar has to interpret the meaning of the other avatar‟s actions without being able to check the attitudes of the human user (or at least with an in-built discouragement in the world from doing so and a drastically-reduced ability to do so) in a context that is qualitatively different than a human context. and all of this takes place in an environment in which it is quite possible for an avatar to be harmed by another avatar. the capabilities of one avatar can be impaired by that of another, quite independently of the relative states of the human users. creativity and experimentation – serious cyberplay – is arguably the norm online, and avatarbased virtual worlds give a glimpse into where this world is heading. the quality of one‟s experience in second life depends on a distinct set of norms and values of its user community, and injustices within the virtual world can and do occur. all communities, whether online or offline serve a variety of functions of social integration and social regulation. a serious play group is not the same as a community. but when an actor in a group is recognized by a community they are then able to legitimately struggle for their right to the kind of life experiences they expect, and the capability to pursue them. in the online context, in which creativity is an over-arching norm, the serious play groups have need for community in order to support a struggle for a key primary right: the right to develop one‟s online technical and social capabilities. thus, groups, including serious play groups, depend on communities to nurture and protect the new conceptions of social justice they might develop. for other kinds of rights, of course it is appropriate and necessary for human beings to fall back on offline communities for recognition and support. but this new kind of right has emerged: the right to be able to develop one‟s abilities online. „wilde cunningham‟ is an actor-avatar and resident of second life. he is the creation of nine disabled people, who control their avatar by democratic vote and the help of their caregiver. in traditional computer-mediated formats, the standard unit of analysis is the „computer user‟. this is a thin description that does not capture the complexity of the actoravatar, as they are an in-world invention of individuals and groups. a key consequence of the radically different forms of social interaction that avatars enable is that they pose a theoretical problem for understanding the nature of sociability and unsociability in the virtual context. from 9 of course, however, second life is not a „game‟ since there is a plurality of activities of all different kinds with no general object and no quest. one must differentiate the non-gaming nature of second life with virtual online gaming worlds like world of warcraft. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 77 an outsider‟s point of view actors heavily involved in virtual worlds often appear unsociable due to the technical knowledge involved, a tendency towards technical elitism, a preoccupation with constant innovation, and fears of internet addiction. indeed, among those attracted by the numbers of subscribers to second life and to the idea of establishing a regular presence in-world – including individuals and private and public institutions – there have been concerns raised over a perceived inconstancy, fragility, and shallowness of participation levels in the virtual environments. the actors that operate avatars like wilde, however, believe second life permits them to sidestep stigmas and release creative and collaborative energies. in second life, users have gone beyond mere entertainment and utilitarian uses of communication, raising hopes for expanding the possibilities of human reality through their serious cyberplay. in the future, those struggling for rights-based social justice will have to recognize the centrality of these processes of virtual social reality in no less an urgent way than past societies based on print media communication espoused freedom of conscience. being free to develop each individual or group actor‟s abilities online means being free from obstacles to creativity, being free, for example to alter the source code for the software one employs for communication. martha nussbaum argues that social justice is a situation in which human capabilities are maximized (nussbaum, 2006). nussbaum‟s theory of human capabilities as the object of social justice develops a sense of the need of the engaged actor to be involved in activities in order to flourish. similarly, online capabilities, in which creativity is the foremost value, are not static assets or rights to be „accessed‟, or passive „liberties‟, but are a socially-needed, dynamic and constituent part of the socially-constructed identities of online actors. i have presented the digital divide perspective and the cybercultural perspective as structural and ethnographic traditions of internet research that are useful, though inherently limited, sources of documentary information about how the net is used. this is admittedly an over-simplification of the varieties of internet research, but my task here was not to outline this rich variety. the point i have wanted to stress in this paper is that online social justice depends on internet practitioners making a qualitative leap by actually performing social interactions that necessarily involve a more urgent question of „what could be‟ in terms of the „free development of each‟. the maximization of human capabilities, a promising theory, in the context of the net surely depends on strengthening online communities and encouraging the separation of corporate control and serious play on the internet. we also need to remember and be aware of the social structures that bind the offline and online worlds into a broader society which does break down into unfortunate stratifications that prevent equal access to technology. working towards internet social justice partly involves this broader social struggle. however, our struggles should be informed and guided, not by a negative sentiment of „well, if these are the paltry tools that are imposed on us today, at least i want my fair share of access to those tools‟. rather, we should take on a cognizance of the peculiar necessities of online interactions by recognizing, appreciating, and critically-scrutinizing the experience, norms, and values of communities who are actually in the process of developing and practicing what the net „could be‟. it is not just a case of understanding the serious play structuring the intensely sociable culture of online interaction better by supporting the advancement of internet ethnography, though the latter is important. what is crucial is seeking a basis for understanding the complexities of social justice in the virtual community. let us be critical, wary agents concerned to defend the gains and wellbeing of our broader societies, but let us be open to what virtual community actors are showing us „could be‟ – the free development of each as a condition for the free development of all. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 78 references andrejevic, m. (2002). the kinder, gentler gaze of big brother: reality tv in the era of digital capitalism. new media & society, 4 (2), 251-270. baym, n. (1998). the emergence of online community. cyber society 2.0: revisiting computermediated communication and community. thousand oaks, ca: sage. berman, m. (1988). all that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. new york, n.y: viking penguin. danet, b. (2001). cyberpl@y: communicating online. oxford: berg. goffman, e. (1973). the presentation of self in everyday life. new york: the overlook press. hackworth, j. r. (2007). the neoliberal city: governance, ideology, and development in american urbanism. ithaca: cornell university press. herman, e. s. & chomsky, n. (2002). manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media. new york: pantheon books. howard, p. n. & jones. s. (eds.) (1998). society online: the internet in context. thousand oaks, sage johnson, b. 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(1993). the virtual community. reading, ma: addison wesley. turkle, s. (1995). life on the screen: identity in the age of the internet. new york: simon and schuster. turner, f. (2005). where the counterculture met the new economy: the well and the origins of virtual community. technology and culture, 46, 485-512. vaughan-nichols, s. (2006). open darwin shuts its doors. linux-watch. retrieved on march 14, 2008 from http://www.linux-watch.com/news/ns walters, g. j. (2001). human rights in an information age. toronto: university of toronto press. wellman, b. (2002). little boxes, globalization, and networked individualism. in m. tanabe, p. besselaar & t. ishida (eds.), digital cities ii (pp. 11-25). berlin: springer-verlag. sethi final correspondence address: bharati sethi, school of social work, king’s college, western university, london, on n6a 2m3; email: bsethi3@uwo.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 2, 333-337, 2017 creative intervention unmasking racism bharati sethi king’s university college, canada as a social worker, i am committed to promoting social justice by challenging implicit racial bias and overt racism that structure private and public spheres of life. conversations about racial injustice are particularly important in societies that characterize themselves as multicultural, such as canada. by integrating two novel arts-based methodologies – photovoice (wang & burris, 1994, 1997; wang, yi, tao & carovano, 1998; wang & redwood-jones, 2001) and poetic transcription (richardson, 2002; sjollema, hordyk, walsh, hanley & ives, 2012) – this work attempts to unmask some of the racism that economically and politically organizes canadian society. the two photos featured here were taken by immigrant/refugee women in the context of my doctoral research (sethi, 2014). the purpose of that study was to understand immigrant/refugee women’s employment and health related experiences in a mid-sized region of ontario. i employed a qualitative photovoice methodology to understand how 17 immigrant/refugee women were experiencing work opportunities and health outcomes in the postmigratory context. participants documented their experiences in written form in a diary, as well as pictorially using a camera. they also participated in individual interviews about the photos they took, and a focus group, in which they shared their perspectives on work factors that impacted their health and overall wellbeing (sethi, 2014; wang & redwood-jones, 2001). i selected these photographs – the toilet (by rudo) and the tool (by harmony) – because they address participants’ experiences of racism as zimbabwean refugee women of colour, and demonstrate their resilience in the face of such racism. i used “poetic transcription” to create “poemlike compositions from the words of interviewees” (glesne, 1997, p. 202). because poetic transcription “approximates poetry through the concentrated language of interviewee shaped by researcher to give pleasure and truth,” this methodology has the potential to reveal “the ‘small t’ truth of description, representing a perspective or experience of the interviewee, filtered through the bharati sethi studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 333-337, 2017 334 researcher” (glesne, 1997, p. 213). however, “it may not reach the large ‘t’ truth of seeing ‘with the eyes of the spirit’ for which poetry strives” (glesne, 1997, p. 213). to foreground participants’ voices, experiences and meanings of racism, i drew on direct quotations from interview transcripts to construct the poems. i paid particular attention to repeated words and phrases. for example, rudo used the phrase “they call me nigger” several times during the interview, which became a key aspect of the poem associated with her photo. rudo used a photograph titled the toilet to represent the everyday racism she faces as a refugee in canada. in her words, “the toilet is a place of filthiest excretion.” when she was called a “nigger” by a resident at the nursing home where she is employed, she felt filthy and dirty. she also felt dehumanized by some white colleagues and clients. however, she does not allow racist experiences to define her. with pride in her eyes and a smile on her lips, she announces, “i am beautiful.” she continues to work with dignity, and eventually received the employee of the year award. in the tool, harmony also experiences dehumanization, by her employer, who expects her to perform like a machine because of her status as a refugee woman of colour. at work, she is viewed as “less than” a human being, a tool that is expected to be perfect and shiny. her employer expected her to work incessantly like a machine, without considering the impacts this amount of work had on her physical and mental health. further, she was expected not to show any emotions, and perform her work with perfection, remaining “perfect” and “shiny.” but, like rudo, she refuses to be defined by these racist experiences. she continues to do her work with dignity and pride. both women demonstrate remarkable resilience as they find a way to value their immigrant identity and self-worth despite their experiences of dehumanization and racism. as arts-based research methodologies are participant driven, they entail a “bottom-up” rather than “top down” approach to research. such an approach offers marginalized individuals, who are often objects of research, more control over the research process. by producing and narrativising their own photographs, participants have an opportunity to communicate to policy makers in their own terms the social inequities that impact their lives, thereby advocating for social change in their communities (wang & redwood-jones, 2001). by using photovoice and poetic transcription, i hope to convey the racerelated concerns of the participants in this study in their words and images. these pieces provide symbolic evidence of racism in their working lives. when viewed in non-academic settings, they may affect how service providers, health practitioners, policy makers and social workers understand everyday racism in canada, thereby promoting social justice outcomes through altered social service practice. unmasking racism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 333-337, 2017 335 the toilet (photo: rudo) “they call me nigger. they spit on me” some co-workers and residents in the nursing home. i took this picture of the toilet to explain how i feel deep within my soul. the toilet is a place of the filthiest excretion it has the sting of the word “nigger” of insult and humiliation. of being dehumanized. i want to flush it down the toilet the shame that i feel oh! i feel dirty so dirty! white residents don’t want my black skin to touch their white bodies even when i am trying to help them, the frail, the aged and the lonely. i am skilled. i am smart. but all they see is my black immigrant body my blackness is regarded as ‘dirty’ sometimes i want to flush it down the toilet. this racist attack on my beautiful body. i am tired of the ‘war on colours’ which is more beautiful – black or white? “they call me nigger. they spit on me,” some of my co-workers and residents at the nursing home. “they shove their fist at me. they see me as a useless dirty thing.” they make me feel that i am nothing. nothing just like the toilet. i smile at the face of racism. i am beautiful. bharati sethi studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 333-337, 2017 336 the tool (photo: harmony) i was brought up to be a strong and intelligent woman in my country. i have the ability to flourish even when the road is long and the path is filled with thorns. i am resilient. post-migration i am reduced to a piece of tool. at work i am expected to function like a piece of tool. i am expected to perform to perfection just like the piece of shiny perfect tool. my black skin is expected to be shiny at all times. i am human. yes! i am human. i am not a machine i am not perfect i am not just a piece of tool. i am a strong and intelligent woman. i am a refugee woman. unmasking racism studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 2, 333-337, 2017 337 references glesne, c. (1997). that rare feeling: re-presenting research through poetic transcription. qualitative inquiry, 3(2), 202-221. richardson, l. (2002). poetic representation of interviews. in j. f. gubrium & j. a. holstein (eds.), handbook of interview research: context and method (pp. 887-891). thousand oaks: sage. sethi, b. (2014). intersectional exposures: exploring the health effect of employment with kaajal immigrant/refugee women in grand erie through photovoice. theses and dissertations (comprehensive). paper 1659. retrieved from http://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2737&context=etd sjollema, s. d., hordyk, s., walsh, c. a., hanley, j., & ives, n. (2012). found poetry finding home: a qualitative study of homeless immigrant women. journal of poetry therapy, 25(4), 205-217. wang, c., & burris, m. (1994). empowerment through photo novella: portraits of participation. health education & behaviour, 21(2), 171-186. wang, c., & burris, m. (1997). photovoice: concept, methodology and use for participatory needs assessment. health education & behavior, 24(3), 369-387. wang, c., yi, w., tao, z., & carovano, k. (1998). photovoice as a participatory health promotion strategy. health promotion international, 13(1), 75-86. wang, c., & redwood-jones, y. (2001). photovoice ethics: perspectives from flint photovoice. health education & behavior, 28(5), 560-572. brady et al final correspondence address: miranda j. brady, school of journalism and communication, carleton university, ottawa on k1s 5b6; email: miranda.brady@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 interview a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) miranda j. brady carleton university, canada kennedy l. ryan carleton university, canada margaret janse van rensburg carleton university, canada kelly fritsch carleton university, canada michael mccreary comics not otherwise specified, canada pat tiffin comics not otherwise specified, canada curran dobbs comics not otherwise specified, canada adam schwartz comics not otherwise specified, canada on june 24, 2021, the canadian comedy troupe comics not otherwise specified (michael mccreary, pat tiffin, curran dobbs, and adam schwartz) participated in an interview with the autism_media_social justice editors (kennedy ryan, margaret janse van rensburg, miranda j. brady, and kelly fritsch). our conversation, both awkward and profound, ran the gamut from labour rights and funding, to bombing, autistic stereotypes on tv, and importantly, racoons. bios for the comics not otherwise specified follow the transcript below. a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 499 listen to the podcast online through the web link below: https://mediaspace.carleton.ca/media/cnos+final_+26+nov.+2021/1_52k1 oxvu pictured from left to right, top to bottom: margaret janse van rensburg, miranda j. brady, kennedy ryan, kelly fritsch, curran dobbs, doug mccreary, adam schwartz, michael mccreary, and pat tiffin. miranda we’re having a conversation about comedy and the experiences of autistic people with the canadian stand-up troupe comics not otherwise specified. our discussion is part of a special issue for the studies in social justice journal out of brock university. i’m miranda and i’m joined by my coeditors, kennedy, margaret and kelly as we talk to four autistic comedians. michael mccreary, adam schwartz, pat tiffin and curran dobbs chat with us about comedy and how we can think of media as a matter of social justice. they also talked about their new podcast, comics not otherwise specified or cnos, and the many different forms of media they work with. kennedy got us started by asking the comedians about their name. michael like most things, if they’re in a medical journal, there is “not otherwise specified,” refers to something that can be identified but not formally diagnosed. so, i think that what this is saying is that it’s like they’re technically comedians. miranda j. brady et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 500 pat if we were a jeopardy category, we’d be potpourri. curran i personally believe when i describe myself as a comedian to include air quotes. adam but pat came up with a longer extended named “comics, not the world’s most awkward boy band…” pat i was i was sort of looking at all sort of we all sort of fill that void in each category that we’re in. so, it’s just like [long pause] and now i lost my train of thought. michael [with sarcasm] yeah, we’re an improv troupe folks! adam michael’s the corporate bro, curran is the indie darling, i’m the fringe sweetheart, and pat is the club underdog. michael and the twist is we’re all the sensitive one… that’s the dynamic. pat i’ve called us a band full of ringos a couple of times. curran and, you know, it works as a name because it sounds like s.o.s, so that made the theme song kind of easy. michael so, yeah, no, i said, what’s copyright law in canada? and, curran’s like, doesn’t matter. i’ve already, i’ve already recorded it. margaret do you mind singing it for us? because i don’t think my coeditors here know. curran it’s basically me going, sending out an nos. sending out an nos, and then i do that a few times. pat with a ukulele under it. michael i feel really bad because curran was like, you can cut that whatever you want, and it was just like a raw that was like a 90 second file and i’m pretty sure our producer, god bless him, put the whole thing in. you can just hear curran running out of oxygen as he says this one joke for like… curran well, you know, i figured giving you guys too much is better than giving you guys too little. and i just assumed i’d go on a bit too long, and that way in that way… and you guys could cut it down to four or however many seconds… michael it does. it gives us time to buffer well, like it gives us time to not research our guests so we can have a distraction. margaret you know, you don’t have to worry because everybody listens a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 501 to podcasts on 1.5 or 2.0 speed. so, it is only 40 or 30 seconds, right? michael i didn’t know this. you can do that? you can get through stuff so much faster. kennedy ok, and i’m also wondering, how do you guys approach the production side of it? like you said that curran will send you stuff, so mike, do you do the post-production, or do you all collaborate on that? pat we have a wonderful producer by the name of christian who does that. i sort of take on the guest and research produced portion, sort of something i been able to cruise through my time like volunteering over at rodgers here in london and something i have a knack for. michael you can tell them you run the london comedy festival. you don’t have to be… pat yeah, i was going to get to that at some point mike. michael yeah, i did co-op in high school, so i know how to pick up a phone. pat yeah, i did that in my 20s, so that’s a major chunk of time. curran and they send us a raw copy of the audio just to give us the option of vetoing any bits, where, we like, we say something that we don’t want to get out in public. michael don’t tell them that curran. just so you know, we never said anything that would get us in trouble. it’s fine. curran it’s not that anything that would get us in trouble, but if i go too far on my foot fungus issue, the audience doesn’t want to hear that. adam yes, they do. curran kennedy exactly. this one is a bit, i mean, we could go long on this, i’m assuming. but what do you love about comedy? all of you. pat it’s community for the most part. i find as being in the autistic community, my scene, that i have my own lane and i find that other people have their own lane. so when hanging out with professional comedians, they’re used to people being super competitive. i’m just like, ok, i’m somewhat down to earth, i’m somewhat weird, i have asperger’s, so that that makes me miranda j. brady et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 502 interesting. so i think both sides benefit from that experience. kennedy it’s very important, i think, to know your niche. like, there’s a lot of power in that. what do you say? adam mm hmm. i would agree. margaret it’s interesting because a lot of your guests, they bring in their own niches, and autism comes up, but it’s not like the focus, right? and i think that’s really interesting how it is like a niche. however, at the same time, like, you’re able to riff about other things. and just like… michael the funny thing about that is that there are so many podcasts of neurotypical comedians talking about autism. the irony is, though, i just… i guess we can i mean, it’s our… pat so, our gimmick is in the reverse. so, when i was kind of pitching this to the guys like, i was like, you know how in any situation where we’re in the green room, we’re the only autistic person in that green room? this podcast would be the reverse of it. so, you’re going to have four autistic comedians talking to one neurotypical person, see how that works out. adam then make sure that we’re going to talk at them and over each other. so, it’s funny that you mention that we do a good job of giving each other the chance to talk because our whole gimmick is that we talk over each other. michael yeah, it’s like an audio documentary of like just a person being fed to lions. like, what i mean is that it’s just it’s just someone who has like spent their lifetime accruing social skills and taking things for granted, like eye contact and waiting your turn to talk, being in a room with four men who have never learned how to do that. and it makes for i think it makes for good radio. it’s fun. kennedy i like that point, i’m also wondering, like, for someone who’s never heard your podcast before, could you tell us a little bit more about what they could expect? michael sure. it’s really like, um, and this is really thanks to pat, who just gets these incredible guests for us. it’s just a long form interview, but also semi roundtable discussion about, about comedy, just about like the last several episodes, especially the ones with like mike wilmot. and when we recorded with sandra battaglini, who used to run casc the canadian association for stand-up comedians. a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 503 adam the mayor. michael yeah, exactly, the mayor of comedy. like a lot of those episodes, sort of turned into the political where we’re talking about really trying to platform people that are making a case for the canadian stand-up comedy scene and how right now financially compromised people are. i mean, i couldn’t say this, sandra would do a better job or monty scott, who’s their current president, would do a better job articulating this. but we want to platform a lot of comedians who are very vocal about sort of championing getting comics, among other things, unionized and getting heard and even getting them recognized for things like canadian arts grants, which and again, until very recently and this is my ignorance showing, i didn’t even know we couldn’t apply for an arts grant. if, you’re a circus performer, but you can’t if you’re if you’re a comic. pat there was this one guy who was from somewhere and he was originally from northern ontario, moved to bc, and sort of spent some time in southwestern ontario. but i hear he was one of the only people i’ve ever met who actually figured out how to get a fringe grant to do stand-up. and got that fringe grant, and it’s possible, but rare. michael was he a ventriloquist or a magician? pat just, just normal. michael just normal. adam fringe shows are usually, are more like what? mike biblio, biblio or… michael birbiglia, his name is mike birbiglia. pat it’s ok. it’s like mike trying to say the word. adam so, where it’s more storytelling and that’s the art form where there’s jokes worked in. but it’s not, premise, punch line. i’m not sure how familiar you are with comedy jokes… like, when i was 12, my mom, i thought i was autistic so i must be an artist. so that’s just a quick joke. but it’s not really a story versus like a long form storytelling, which is a different art form. michael so basically, if you have a stand-up set that isn’t funny, you can get a grant. it’s really easy. curran you can get one of those… i’ve never applied for a grant, but i was able to qualify to apply for a grant by applying for miranda j. brady et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 504 deferral… but i had to put myself down as like a different kind of professional artist than i identified as because i technically have done professional theater work, and i had to kind of lean on that more, although i personally see myself as more of a comedian, and that’s because most of my theater work were friends or co-workers or whatever, getting me involved in their thing. rather, as opposed to me doing comedy, which is something i have actively pursued myself on my own initiative. adam he did beat out a few mimes in a… contest. curran yeah. oh yeah. but a mime is a terrible thing to waste. margaret i think it’s really interesting how you use your podcast as a way to kind of promote workers’ rights and in a way like which is a broader issue. and you use comedy as a way to really like promote this change that you want to see in society. do you have any hopes about when things hopefully reopen, about the state of on stage performing and stand up? adam people have articulated that. michael pat, you had something on that. pat i was going to i was going to jump in on that one. sorry, guys. i think as far as like on stage, i think they’ll come back in london here. we sort of had like those two or three gaps of like solid yellow and orange time, it was like. being able to hang around the comedy club during that, because as far as the comedy goes in london, it became a little bit easier because we didn’t have enough budget so a lot of us got extra time. but you could see people once we got to the yellow areas and the orange areas, people want to get out, people want to see live again. and also, people want to actually be out and about. i like to call this like period of time like the golden age of babysitting because you just kept parents with their kids for a year and a half now. they’re going to need some time away, post-haste as quickly as possible. michael just to jump in here. my dad is on the call right now and we are recording from the same room. so i’m just letting you know there is credence to pat’s observation. curran but one thing i like about the live shows, you get immediate, honest feedback. if you’re doing well, the audience lets you know and you can believe them. and if you’re doing poorly, same deal usually. a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 505 michael yeah, i had a question here actually asking if you guys like how you handle bombing. and like curran was saying, i would rather like bombing than like polite sort of sort of forced laughter because at least, you know, there’s clarity there. i mean, for an autistic person, it’s not like you are incapable of inferring the thoughts and emotions of other people. but you need people the to to to play it up a little bit, ham handedly, if that makes sense. like because like the problem for me when i’m trying to infer where people are at. right. i understand that there’s usually a conflict of interest between verbal and body language. right. like people are people are saying one thing, but the body is demonstrating something else. and usually that’s not always the case. people just have like people just have like a face that just that just looks mean all the time. so you don’t know. it’s nobody’s fault it’s just what it is sometimes. but in a stand-up format, what’s really great is if people don’t like you, they’ll let you know by just rejecting you outright. and as horrible as that’s not like booing, but just by simply not laughing, by not smiling or enjoying you and as painfully… it’s a rip off the band-aid kind of thing. it’s one of those like it’s not good for me because i want you to like this, but at least i know this doesn’t work and now i know i’m the problem and i can fix it. right. adam there’s some joy in bombing. like if people will laugh at everything, you don’t really know what works, and you don’t really feel constructive if everything works, because you are like, okay are you just being polite? or…because some of these jokes are really weak, so you can’t really be enjoying everything so won’t keep putting out weak jokes… if people bomb. but, i was going to go back to margaret’s question. i don’t know if we answered your question, the advocating for the political unions… michael right. that was put kind of by happenstance, it just sort of came up because most things, like if you talked to any canadian comedian usually about people like what’s on your mind, what’s going on, and they go, well, like rob pue has that great joke where he was talking about being as loved as he is within the comedy world. and he’s like, and you know what? i’m still on financially shaky ground. so, like, it doesn’t matter if you have guest spots on the debaters, if you’re well-liked, at least domestically, you’re not making what the american comics who are flown out to jfl [just for laughs] are making. and a lot of the sort of animosity that comes up in the canadian comedy scene is from the prioritization of american miranda j. brady et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 506 acts. the sad thing is sometimes the american acts are canadian acts coming back because they found success abroad, because it was the only way they could get work. that’s just what happens. and so the fact that the show got a little bit political was incidental to the fact that just it’s what’s on everybody’s mind, especially now during the pandemic projects. adam can i interject something? so i was going to say that a weak american act can do better in canada, than the strongest canadian act. and that just by being american, you have a better chance of getting on jfl than the strongest home grown talent. we’ve got amazing canadian comedians who will never be household names outside of just the people part of the comedy community like kathleen mcgee and rob pue. michael kathleen does have a wikipedia page that shocked us. pat we found a few wikipedia pages so that that’s a step. that’s a half step. adam unless you’re even then, the top comic canadian comic can be a million times better. but you’re never going to be as big until you’ve gone to america. and then you can come back and it’s a lot easier to do. than come back to the american comedian and make a lot of money than it is to just stay in canada the whole time, which is ridiculously terrible. and that is unfair and lots of adjectives, but, yeah, it’s something that canadian comics often think about. michael adam’s in winnipeg, so sorry if he sounds like he’s in a bad mood, that’s just a constant. pat he’s been stuck in in quarantine for way too long. curran you asked about bombing and whatnot… i think the one time i got the most perverse pleasure about bombing a joke is when i was doing my set and i was doing great until like one joke smack dab in the middle of my set where just no one laughed. and then i moved on to my next bit and the second half afterwards they were back laughing with me and there was like that weird one isolated joke right in the middle of my set where no one laughed… i don’t even remember what joke it was, i just that i just remember, like, i had a great set except for one joke in the middle, like. adam curran, you’re great at that. you have that joke with your song where you just end right in the middle of the song and then you a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 507 walk off. michael the thing i’m going tell you the thing i love about both adam and curran is they have something that i could never do, which is because the majority of my shows have been corporates like like since i lucked out when i was like 15. and and i’ve never had a forum where i felt courageous enough to just make an audience feel uncomfortable because then i wouldn’t get paid… adam i think everyone feels uncomfortable. michael but with curran, he has that song where he says you won’t see the end coming. and then he just leaves immediately after that. adam, however, at his fringe show, i don’t even know he even has like a preamble to that, just like the light comes up at some point while he’s talking and then he just stands there and you just starts looking at people and gets like annoyed with them because you can go now, like, take a hint. like i could never do that. margaret so there’s no difference… or there’s no audience when you’re podcasting, do you find that difficult? michael yes. pat yeah, but but but for me, it’s just like the audience is going to hear this later. so just like try to be as funny in the moment. then the audience gets the joke from me when they listen to it. adam i don’t think of podcasting as trying to be funny. i think for me it’s much more organic work instead of i’m trying to get things to get laughs. to me, it’s just hanging out with four of my buddies and i don’t even really like listening to the episodes afterwards because it’s like, all right, we’ve done our thing. we had our hour hanging out. when do we get to hang out again? kennedy with the podcast one of the nice things is that like you can what you guys talked earlier about the difficulty of getting exposure. like, have you found it to be different when doing podcasts versus doing comedy on stage? adam because though right now our podcast has like 30 followers. and if you go to pat’s tiktok he’s got like a 129,000 followers. pat 124.8 michael pat’s the oldest guy in the group. he’s the one with the miranda j. brady et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 508 tiktok. adam michael has like the like four million followers on facebook. michael no, that’s not true, though. adam i’m always getting annoyed that we don’t have more followers. i’m like, what’s going on? michael but i think adam’s lonely and he wants to talk to people. miranda the cats get all the attention. michael yeah, pat, do you have a cat? pat i had a cat. it died 10 years ago… sorry, it was about 15. michael sorry. i realized i sounded really laissez faire when i said, ok, like, that’s fine. that i didn’t mean that. i’m really sorry. adam i mean, it’s not like with the raccoons like michael’s racoons that he adopts randomly. michael i don’t adopt them. we have we have a friend up the road… a really nice german lady. she takes in raccoons for, like the local wildlife protection agency. and sometimes she has more than she can handle. and she said, yeah, i know, sorry. margaret’s making a face like. right. what’s going on? it’s like it’s like welcome to the podcast. where we talk about civil rights issues. and this guy… coming up next, a raccoon fashion show. pat well, in the daytime. michael yeah, it’s like this is a serious bit of journalism. now we’re going to interview an autistic 25-year-old with four raccoons living in his bedroom. pat we have basically dr. evil. michael yeah, well, no, no, it’s more of a dr. doolittle like we had upwards. i think the last batch we had was like six. this time around it was just three. but we have sorry, margaret’s making faces. i got to turn off speaker view. it’s very good. but basically i again, we have a local wildlife protection agency. sometimes they have more raccoons than they can handle. and so, this german lady gives us three gives us a couple of raccoons we can look after and they’re great. we usually keep them for like we usually keep them for like three to four months. and then we give them what they call a soft release where we give them like a little sort of like a nest, like we set a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 509 up a little nest in the middle of nowhere. we kind of make sure that nobody messes with them, no hunters doing illegal hunting or anything. and then we and then we and then we send them on their way. but anyways, my mom does most the work… adam i hope we answered your question, whatever it was. kennedy that can be your mascot of the podcast. i feel like every, you know, every troupe needs their mascot. pat you see my eyes. yeah, i’m pretty much the mascot at this time. michael yeah well, i feel bad because, like i remember, everyone is going into every recording session for like half a year. everyone was going, so how are the raccoons doing? and then i got rid of the raccoons. and a week later adam was like, i didn’t know michael had raccoons. we should have… we should have had them on the show. like no one’s going to see a raccoon. adam mike should have done a live show with the racoons and give them one of our names… that’s mike mccreary. michael no, you never you never relinquish… you never relinquish control to a raccoon… kennedy is comedy a good vehicle for talking about autism and social justice? pat i found it when i started doing comedy. it sort of like fits the autistic way of doing things like. you write something. you’re super scripted while doing so, it’s repetitive, it’s a one-sided conversation and you’re doing routines. so so kind of how blind people somehow know how to play music, if you have a certain brain when you have autism like this goes with this, this goes with this, this goes with this. michael now, i know he sucks now, but but this is a really good quote, i’m going to paraphrase john cleese one time said once said, if you want your audience to remember something couch in a joke and he was referring to exposition like it just if you want people to remember something later on in like a movie, like you get to a point in life of brian, you go, oh, right. they set this up earlier with a joke. that’s why i remember this. but i think that can be applicable to to to to broaching the subject of things like politics or… adam or autism. miranda j. brady et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 510 michael exactly, or any or any subject. adam comedy, is a great way. you can’t really change people’s minds through a hostile way, but by making people laugh, you can slowly get them to think different ways about things, by using stories and by making them laugh and getting them in a place where they’re approachable. kennedy i’m wondering if you can all speak more to this question, what what do you think is so funny about autism? michael sure. do you mind if i fill in? kennedy go ahead. michael so, one of the characteristics of autism that at least the average person knows or is familiar with is like the really intense fixations on a very specific subject. and so, to me, anyone who prioritizes something really innocuous over something that actually matters is just funny. so so, again, it’s like people that build their day around, like i’m building a gundam, i got a gundam set, i’m going to build a gunpla like thing and they don’t eat or sleep. that’s funny to me. it’s like they’ve built their day around something that’s like a single use like high effort, low reward thing. it doesn’t feed or guarantee them shelter like that’s funny and i’m guilty of that too. so, it’s like i love watching movies. those don’t help me survive. so, it’s like yeah i get it, it’s it’s fun. pat i always find that when it comes to comedy and autism, the reason the comedy works on a very surface level. the fact that we, we actually like… nothing’s funnier than breaking the pattern. especially if breaking the pattern is quite odd. so just like you’re like neurotypical person, neurotypical person, neurotypical person, me just standing at a corner. margaret do you find that you’re able to break some of the myths that people traditionally think about autism as well? pat i think especially with club work you can sort of play into that, especially with autism, we’re socially inept… so relationships, sort of goes out the window for some of us. normal life goes out the window for some of us. so just like. but you’ve got to make people realize, we’re like everybody else. michael i think more going beyond, sorry, adam. i’ll let you speak in a second, but kind of going beyond content… he knows i’m not going to let him speak… but going to like subject matter. i think what’s even more important is the idea of an autistic a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 511 person in an entertainment forum in itself is subversive just because when we think of autistics, we stereotypically think of them as introverted or academic primarily. so to see someone not even necessarily looking confident, but being in an atypical format like that’s enough to make people kind of perk up their ears. and actually, i remember it surprised employers i’ve had in the past, like i did a show in alberta years ago where like i was just out pacing. they didn’t have a green room, which is fine. so. so i was just pacing in a hallway and like this woman who worked for the event, who was like a first responder, she came and found me. and i was like i told the organizers, i said, hey, by the way, just so you know, i’m not i know you said you want to be in the room before i go on stage. i’d like to be outside just because i and this is not an autism thing. it’s just a comedian thing. it’s like i just want to run my first two minutes so i can kind of get my rhythm so i could just do that. and i run on stage and then i’m going into it. and so, before, one second, i swear to god it’s coming. and so, this first responder, a woman trained to deal with autistic people, comes out into the hallway and she grabs me first. first, she touched me without asking so that was the first sign. and so, she touched me without asking and she goes, “we go on stage now.” and on the one hand, and on the one hand, i was like, that is the most condescending thing i’ve ever experienced. but on the other hand, i was like, thank god. i don’t know where the stage is back there. pat kudos to mike for not going full racoon on that woman. michael oh, i’m serious. like sometimes like ableism sucks, but sometimes it helps you find where you need to go. anyways. adam doing stand-up comedy for autistics is subversive in itself. people think we’re supposed to be into the sciences and just misunderstanding. it’s hilarious how we view the world in a different way. and this is where i plug my book and do a cheap plug for promotional purposes, even though… i’ve got a book, i’ve got asperger’s, so i’m better than you, shhh…don’t tell mom, where i make the argument that having autism is better because we’re more consistent because we can’t read body language. so we have to follow the rules and rules that we make up, which are arbitrary and just how… it’s hilarious because we don’t understand body language, so we have to approach situations based on words and other signals and there’s just too many misunderstandings. hilarious. miranda j. brady et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 512 michael just to recap for the listeners. adam was really upset that i rudely interrupted his shameless plug to talk about like a really upsetting thing that happened to me a couple of years ago. adam i know. i’m horrible. pat hey mike, are you going to promote your book now? michael well, i might as well. you know, it wasn’t my idea, but since you’ve asked, you can’t see it because this is a podcast, but i’m holding in my hand a copy of my book, funny you don’t look autistic. adam i got more exposure from michael mentioning my name in his book than from my own book. michael well, just to clarify, i mentioned adam in my book only because he was mean to me at the time i met him. well, just a quick story. it’s really funny. adam so there’s a reward to being mean. michael oh, yeah, it worked out, adam’s been adam’s living in his mom’s house, too. it’s worked out for both of us. we’re all living in our parents’ house except curran i think. pat i’m i’m shooting for my mom’s place, but i live separately. curran ok, i’m a 45-minute bus ride away, so. michael ok, so you’re really you really moved out like. curran yeah, my own apartment. michael you have to shell out $3.75 to talk to your mom. curran pretty much. michael basically, adam and i met in winnipeg while i was on tour in 2014 and before the show i was excited to meet him and he came up to me before the show and he just said, hey, i’m looking forward to doing the show. i saw you have a set online. and i said, yeah, you know, that was a really fun show. and he said, well it didn’t sound like the audience was having too much fun. he’s like a 25-year-old man ruffling a teenager’s feathers. he’s just like, oh man. you sure? adam you know, i’m going to live off of that fame. for those of you who can’t see, adam’s rubbing his hands together maliciously. pat get adam some hand sanitizer… a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 513 michael he washes his hands and he rubs his fingers together more than the raccoons i had. pat ok, miranda, your question was... miranda sorry, it’s a bit of an awkward segue, but i’ll bring it up nonetheless. michael we won’t tolerate that. adam we love awkward. miranda and so, adam, i was wondering, since we were all talking about books, i was wondering about your kid’s books, your children’s books. so anna and the substitute teacher, for example, and then jonathan and the big barbecue, is that the other one? adam yeah. and then there’s also no school today: an autistic’s guide to covid, which you can find on my website, adam schwartzcomedy.com. i’ve got amazing news that i’m actually in talks with a film animation company in vancouver and we’re talking about turning my anna into a children’s cartoon about a young bipoc girl on the autism spectrum whose strength is that she’s autistic and that she’s able to accomplish great things because of her autism. miranda that’s excellent. so why was it important for anna to be the protagonist in your story? adam growing up on the autism spectrum, there weren’t that many strong characters in plays or on tv, other than like the rain man who i can relate to growing up. and so i want to make a strong character. and i dealt with depression and anxiety because i couldn’t i had a hard time coming to terms with autism and i was constantly in denial and i struggled because i did have autism. and so i… to be easier for children, future generations of autistic children and for other children to have an easier time understanding autism. so i wanted to create a picture book and then a play with a strong autistic character. i decided that she was going to be a girl because it, as hard as autistic guys have it, autistic females have it even harder, and they have a really hard time getting diagnosis and everything. and so then there’s still also a huge misunderstanding that autism is a white male problem. and so i want to create anna, a bipoc person of color and a female who struggles with finding her voice and her own strengths. so that’s how anna came to being. miranda j. brady et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 514 miranda that’s very cool. i can’t wait. adam thank you. miranda i actually have the book for my kids, and i can’t wait to see the animation. that’s awesome. kennedy i’m wondering… that feels like a good place to get to this question. do you think that most people really know what autism is? michael you know, so i think that’s a great question, kennedy, i don’t think they do, but i don’t think it’s their fault. most things that are like most groups of people that are marginalized, what people understand of them comes, i would say, and this this is a b.s. statistic, but it’s like about 75 to 80 percent from popular culture. right. like, if you asked anybody, it’s kind of like for the longest time. this is a very weird segue right here. but if someone said, like, why they just go, oh, so-and-so is a furry, they would go like csi? like that. they know it from popular culture. right. so in the case of autism, people would they would go to rain man or whatever popular culture they’re consuming of the moment. i think the issue with most depictions of asd in popular culture is that they’re trying to conform to a neurological framework that can’t be applied to a single person, because autism being a spectrum disorder means that no one person is a checklist of diagnostic criteria. they are an autonomous person with things that are stereotypically autistic and things that might be disarmingly allistic. right. so the problem with most movies is that you have a character who is like, ok, we got it. we got the… we got the hyposensitivity. we’ve got the hypersensitivity. we got things that cancels out each other. you know what i mean? exactly. like, good. you’ve done your research and the character’s completely unbelievable. and so by happenstance, a lot of people with asd do tend to gravitate towards characters that are noncanonical or rather “fanonically” autistic. right. so you end up with characters like an example being like one of the oldest, arguably the oldest serialized characters and most beloved serial characters, sherlock holmes, who has never been canonically identified as being autistic. as far as any cannon is concerned, the recent bbc series called him a high functioning sociopath subject to interpretation has never been identified. exactly. he’s never been identified as being autistic. however, a lot of people with asd identified with that character because they exhibited characteristics that they found relatable, that they found even admirable or heroic, if eccentric. and i think a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 515 that that’s why a lot of characters like that, or in my case, barry egan, the adam sandler character from punch drunk love stick in my mind because me and my friend, every friend i’ve showed that punch drunk love to. they’re like, oh, he’s just an autistic guy and goes, yeah. complete accident. p.t. anderson was trying to find sort of a a dissonant context to place the adam sandler comic persona into. so it’s like you put the adam sandler comic persona in an snl sketch or in one of his movies. you have something that’s like very sort of accessible, lowest common denominator, kind of a silly manchild. but you put them in the real world and suddenly he has like a lot of pathos and he’s even kind of scary and alienating at times, but ultimately very fragile and human. and for a lot of my friends, they heard the the elaborate sound mixing in the movie. they heard the score that was lock step with the camera movements in the way the characters would move. and they kind of went like that, that entire set piece where excuse the excuse, the term, but the the phone sex operator is trying to, like, coerce money out of him. and he’s also trying to, like, do his job and explain to his sister why he has so many pudding packets because he’s collecting them for to exploit a frequent flyer miles scam. while everything’s going wrong. and even though that scene is meant to sort of emulate the flow of a classic musical in a non-musical context, i’m sitting there going, oh, dude, i love this. like, this is like i’m getting stressed out of familiarity, of just seeing it’s not that autistic people are oblivious. for me. it’s like you’re everything. your entire life is just watching a car wreck in slow motion that you don’t have the executive function to stop. adam now, there’s seven minutes left. so i hate this part where we have to be like decide which joke you’re going to tell when you don’t have that time to tell that many jokes. so, the the researchers have the pressure of six minutes left. what question you want to…knowing… michael now they have five minutes left because of your introduction. pat if i’m the person saying this, it actually means we have time left, but if it’s adam saying it, it’s just like, oh hey… that’s four minutes. curran ladies ask you questions but make them count… count like an autistic person counts. margaret i just wanted to reflect on something that you said about the popular depictions. i think that it’s it’s interesting that you you miranda j. brady et al. studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 516 as four autistic comedians are able to raise awareness to autism, can look like a bunch of different things. and especially, adam, you have the the children’s books. right. and that that’s. a new media form as well, having the podcast, having stand up, and in my work, i’ve come across a lot of people who self-diagnose and like that, that being a really important validation for a lot of people who don’t actually know what’s going on in their life. so i want to thank you for for raising awareness and in your work. right. and raising awareness to autism isn’t like what a lot of programs and policies or organizations may also paint it as. you know, it’s something to be fixed or something that needs to needs to be dealt with. right. it’s something that you live with. and that is it’s a strength. and i really appreciate, adam, that’s something that you really brought up today. adam thank you and thank you for your wonderful answer and doing the important work that you guys are doing, because it’s great that we’re self-advocates, but without our allies. also, even like that, we have a hard time reaching an audience and getting our voices out… pat a few of us have a hard time getting to the stages, mostly because of bus schedules… adam but thank you for all your work. michael love you guys, you know, it was nice… pat kumbaya [singing] michael i mean, adam, that’s so sweet. pat nobody’s crying so, we kept our autistic license. michael you guys are the best. we’ll let you get on with your day. and it’s… we came up just under 3:50 [pm]. that’s pretty good. all right. miranda ok, bye, guys. good to see you. bye bye. comics not otherwise specified biographies michael mccreary is an autistic comedian, author (funny, you don’t look autistic) and tedx speaker who has been performing stand-up comedy since age 13. in the past six years, he has performed stand-up shows and keynote addresses across canada (plus the yukon) as well as the united states. he has been featured on the national and on cbc radio’s laugh out loud! a conversation with comics not otherwise specified (cnos) studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 498-517, 2022 517 michael gives you permission to laugh at his act “does this make my asperger’s look big?” https://www.aspiecomic.com/ curran dobbs is an autistic comedian from victoria. his dry delivery has entertained audiences in bc, at the winnipeg comedy festival and at the anca world autism festival in edinburgh, scotland. curran was a finalist in vancouver’s yuk off (2019). he has also appeared in films, including a starring role in the short film godhead, which has been featured at, among others, the toronto international film festival and the cannes film festival. @currandobbs adam schwartz is a stand-up comedian and author. adam is a finalist for winnipeg’s wackiest comedian with a day job and has appeared in the winnipeg comedy festival and is a regular on the fringe festival circuit. his show aspergers: a tale of a social misfit has sold out in many cities. adam’s books include i have aspergers so i’m better than you, and shh... don’t tell mom, as well as a children’s book “anna and the substitute teacher”. https://www.adamschwartzcomedy.com/ pat tiffin is a comedian, blogger, and comedy show producer from london ontario. he spent the last 10 years honing his craft all over southwestern ontario. in 2012, he won the funny 1410 so you think you’re funny? contest. in 2019, pat was selected as one of the top 100 for cbc’s next up. later that year, pat helped co-found the london laughs comedy festival. when he’s not on stage, you can find him on the weekends at yuk yuk’s london and producing shows under 340 comedy collective moniker. microsoft word kofman.doc studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 122 issn: 1911-4788   the knowledge economy, gender and stratified migrations eleonore kofman, middlesex university abstract the promotion of knowledge economies and societies, equated with the mobile subject as bearer of technological, managerial and cosmopolitan competences, on the one hand, and insecurities about social order and national identities, on the other, have in the past few years led to increasing polarization between skilled migrants and those deemed to lack useful skills. the former are considered to be bearers of human capital and have the capacity to assimilate seamlessly and are therefore worthy of citizenship; the latter are likely to pose problems of assimilation and dependency due to their economic and cultural “otherness” and offered a transient status and partial citizenship by receiving states. in the european context this trend has been reinforced by the redrawing of european geopolitical space creating new boundaries of exclusion and social justice. the emphasis on the knowledge economy also generates gender inequalities and stratifications based on skills and types of knowledge with implications for citizenship and social justice. one of the issues that has intrigued me in my research on skilled migration has been the way in which discourse on the knowledge-based economy (kbe) and knowledge-based society (kbs) has been increasingly transposed in immigration policies in many developed countries. although the role of knowledge in transforming economies and societies began to be discussed in the late 1950s and aired more widely in the 1960s, it was not established as a key plank of public policy until the 1990s. most of the immigration receiving states have discussed at great length the knowledge economy, how to expand it and use resources such as migrants to do so. countries such as australia and canada have, since the 1990s, oriented their immigration policies towards skilled migrants. in europe, the uk has pursued this strategy even further by privileging the globalized financial and information technology and communications (itc) sectors. in this article i argue that the dominant and unreflective notions of what constitutes a knowledge economy and society have become closely associated with hyper or optimistic discourses of globalization. these discourses emphasize the rapid circulation of knowledge, conceived largely as science and technology, and its propensity to transform employment and social structures. the assumption in much of the dominant thinking about the knowledge economy is that managerial, scientific and technological knowledge is the driving force of globalization, productivity and wealth creation, and must therefore be promoted. the corollary is that what does not fit into this model of technologically driven change cannot benefit the economy of the receiving state, and hence must be prevented from entering its territory. or if allowed to enter, cannot enjoy the same rights as those who are useful to the growth of the knowledge economy. hence immigration policy, especially in europe, is increasingly based on stratified rights and pathways to citizenship. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 123 issn: 1911-4788   the conceptualization of knowledge economies is also profoundly gendered, though gender issues are rarely discussed. kbe and kbs are presented in gender neutral terms. in recent years, a number of feminists have begun to address the implications of the knowledge economy for gender inequalities. sylvia walby et al. (2006) are examining how gender transforms the conventional understandings of kbe in different gender regimes and varieties of capitalism. the comparative european project from welfare to knowfare considers the impact of kbs on gendered power and subordination structures and asks to what extent kbs is leading to greater gender equality (primarily in the work place). “knowfare” is defined as “providing policies promoting education and lifelong learning in order to stimulate employment participation throughout the lifecycle as opposed to welfare policies ensuring the standard of living via a benefit system” (mosesdottir, 2006, p. 17). this research concludes that women’s jobs involve less complexity and autonomy and that there is extensive gender segregation in the high tech sector. furthermore, the wage gap between skilled and less-skilled women is widening and the remuneration for education and skills is higher for men than women. the journal gender, work and organization held its fifth international conference in june 2007 on the theme of gendering the knowledge economy. a special issue on this theme will examine the different ways in which the knowledge economy is gendered and question the implications of knowledge seen as being embedded in machines and codes rather than embodied in human beings. however, while addressing the gendered dimensions of the knowledge economy, these discussions assume, as with the more traditional ungendered analyses, a nationally bounded and constituted labour force. the role of migrant women, and men, and how they are positioned in the knowledge economy and society, are not considered. yet migrants have been prominent in skilled and less-skilled sectors of the economy, contributing to high tech work as well as work which has relatively low levels of informatization, such as construction and domestic and care work. the conception of the knowledge economy has significant implications for immigration policies. while the knowledge economy has been promoted by the eu in recent years, we see it most clearly enunciated in the immigration policies of the uk, the state which has embraced most vigorously neoliberal and globalist agendas. its recent proposed changes to managed migration closely correspond to the exemplary knowledge economy candidate – an individual working in the financial sector or itc expert, or combination of both, who can earn high salaries and is young and promising with many years of work to offer the british economy. those in the regulated sectors, associated with welfare professionals and social reproduction, are more likely to earn lower salaries and will have their movements more restricted and subject to confirmation of good conduct by the sponsor. this distinction has the effect of differentiating bearers of different forms of human capital and skills and a hardening of the boundaries between those with and without useful skills. in this article, i shall firstly outline earlier discussions of the knowledge economy in the 1960s, highlighting the more expansive and embodied social conceptions of knowledge. in contrast, as the notion of kbe and kbs came to form a public policy paradigm in the 1990s, and became closely linked with globalization and the information society, kbe and kbs increasingly focused on a narrower interpretation in which technology not only drives the economy but also shapes human beings and social studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 124 issn: 1911-4788   relations. secondly, i seek to show how immigration policies transposed the priorities of the knowledge economy and society. in turn, the privileging of certain forms of expertise within the knowledge economy had, as i shall outline, implications for gendered migrations and rights. lastly, i schematically map out a system of stratification based on gender, nationality, and skills and their associated rights and entitlements, in particular in the eu. the development of a managed migration schema reflecting the objectives of a narrow conceptualization of a knowledge-based economy is most clearly discerned in the uk. though not adopting the emphasis on the financial and managerial elites of kbe to the same extent as in the uk, the european commission is seeking to orient its immigration policies towards attracting the highly skilled (european parliament, 2007; frattini, 2007)1 knowledge economy the role of knowledge in economic growth and society was initially raised by economists and management experts in the late 1950s and early 1960s and subsequently developed by sociologists such as daniel bell (1973) and alvin tofler (1970). though popularized by peter drucker (1969), the term “knowledge economy” was coined by fritz machlup (1962) in the production and distribution of knowledge in the united states, in which he argued that knowledge formed a major part of production in the united states (cortada, 1998). he defined knowledge as “any human (or human-induced activity) effectively designed to create, alter or confirm in a human mind – one’s own or anyone else’s – a meaningful apperception, awareness, cognizance or consciousness (p. 30).” knowledge had come to play a dominant role in creation of national wealth (29% of us gross national product in 1958) through its application to a wide range of economic activities. it takes place both through the creation of new knowledge as well as its communication and transmission. thus commodification can result from repackaging existing information for new markets and consumers as much as from the creation of new products and services. significantly there were multiple types of knowledge which extended well beyond scientific knowledge determined by technological transformations and which were not necessarily based on educational level. these included: • practical knowledge e.g. professional, business, politics and in the household • intellectual knowledge, that is, general culture and the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity • pastime knowledge, that is, knowledge satisfying non-intellectual curiosity or the desire for light entertainment and emotional stimulation • spiritual or religious knowledge • unwanted knowledge, accidentally acquired and aimlessly retained (machlup, 1962, pp. 21-22). at the same time, michael polanyi (1958, 1966) in his critique of positivism, explored the personal and emotional dimension of knowledge creation and drew the distinction between “codified knowledge”, defined as rule based knowledge that can be 1 the commission announced on 23 october 2007 its proposal for a blue card for the highly skilled. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 125 issn: 1911-4788   written down and stored, and “tacit knowledge” which is acquired on the job and resides with the individual as know-how and experience.2 drucker (1969), on the other hand, a business and management consultant, focused on the application of knowledge to product innovation i.e. application of management. daniel bell (1973), another exponent of the knowledge society emphasized the role of universities in transmitting knowledge that would advance economic development and thus the growing importance of the symbolic analyst or the managers and controllers of information and knowledge systems. in occupational terms this included both high tech industries and non-profit services, such as education, health and government. by the 1990s the notion of the knowledge economy was taken up as a core element of public policy, involving measurement and comparison between states. the organisation for economic cooperation and development (oecd) proposed a generic definition of the term in developing national strategies for individual countries: [a knowledge economy] is one that encourages its organisations and people to acquire, create, disseminate and use codified and tacit knowledge more effectively for greater economic and social development. the european union saw globalization and a new knowledge-driven economy presenting it with a major challenge (lisbon european council, 2000). digital technologies were transforming the old industrial society into an information society. the lisbon agenda (2000) announced that it intended to make the eu “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010”. it spoke of the need for “social and institutional modernization” as inevitable and kbe was presented as technical management (neoliberal governance) and not a political choice. each member state had to be at the cutting edge of a knowledge-based and innovatory economy and society. though vigorously promoted, operationalizing the concept has not been straightforward or unproblematic. on the one hand, it privileges science and technology but finds it difficult to measure the effects of its application in different industrial sectors. hence the process is reliant on a more comprehensive definition of knowledge workers including all professional, managerial and scientific occupations. originally the oecd focused on: high and medium-tech manufacturing high value added “knowledge-intensive” market service industries such as finance, insurance and telecommunications 2 this distinction has been extended considerably. williams (2006) applies a complex typology to the transfer and creation of knowledge in the context of international migration. the five types are: embrained – dependent on conceptual skills and cognitive abilities embodied results from experience of physical presence, practical thinking and learning in doing encultured – meanings are shared understandings arising from socialization and acculturation embedded embedded in contextual factors and not objectively pre-given. shared language generated in different language systems, cultures and groups encoded embedded in signs to symbols to be found in traditional forms such as books, manuals, codes of practice and website. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 126 issn: 1911-4788   business services subsequently the oecd (eurostat definition) added education and health but these seem to be marginal to discussions of knowledge-based economies despite the fact that in occupational terms the educational, health and cultural sectors contribute the single largest source of employment compared to market services in the eu (15.3%). high tech-based manufacturing (which is actually primarily medium rather than high) employs 6.9% (brinkley, 2006). a recent basic definition captures, in a nutshell, the dominant role of the itc revolution hitched to the market i.e. “the knowledge economy is what you get when firms bring together powerful computers and well-educated minds to create wealth” (brinkley, 2006, p. 3). ideological connotations are clearly reflected in the desirable sectors of growth. in the uk, a state that has promoted a neo-liberal globalist agenda, kbe is seen to require economically valuable skills and increased employment in financial services, high technology and the itc sector, media and the broader cultural economy (walby, 2002). these sectors generally have global reach and, hence, were seen as crucial components of the knowledge economy. the latter was thought of as global because the supply of knowledge products was not bounded by geographical location with a natural marketplace that is ‘immediately global”. technology as the key factor of production had transformed physical production. it could be transported and transferred instantaneously around the world such that the tyranny of distance had been vanquished forever. such was the hyper globalist discourse that was adopted in the notion of the knowledge economy and its societal corollary, the informational or network society (castells, 1996). informationalism, as a new technological communication characterized by “information generation, processing, and transmission” have become “the fundamental source of productivity and power” (castells, 2000, p. 21). in contemporary society dominant functions and processes are increasingly organized around networks that constitute the new social morphology of society and the “diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture” (castells, 2000, p. 500). castells vision is highly spatialized in that he postulates several disconnected worlds, that of the managerial elites, masters and beneficiaries of the information economy and network society who exist in timeless time of spaces of flows. these new elites of the informational society are the drivers of the new global economy, who make it happen and manage it. discourses of globalization extolled unfettered mobility, cultural consumption of others and the decline of the nation-state. it is a world in which these elites are able to partake of high degrees of mobility and untrammelled circulation. such “citizens” of the world in the frequent traveller category (calhoun, 2003) are able to consume the world at their pleasure, probably more than at their leisure since many of them are time poor and resource rich. these are the individuals whom migration policies are keen to attract to advance the knowledge economy. thus, on the one hand, the tendency is to privilege the kind of skills and expertise which can circulate easily and rapidly through global networks, relatively unfettered by national regulations and easily absorbed by those in other cultures. on the other hand, the tendency is to marginalize those types of knowledge which are more nationally bounded studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 127 issn: 1911-4788   and/or relational and context dependent. the former sectors are often relatively unregulated (e.g. credentials do not have to be verified by a professional body) with skills circulating through business and the market, that is practice-oriented rather than codified knowledge. men are far more likely to be employed in the business sector with few women to be found in the higher levels of business or of itc. because it is interest in the globalization of production and flows of capital that has fuelled the literature on skilled migration, the entrepreneurial class (both those employed in private sectors and those who have used entrepreneurship as a route to migrate) became the focus of the skilled migration literature (mahroum, 2001; lavenex, 2002; oecd, 2002). the feminized skilled sectors (education, health, social work) fared badly in the 1990s. as sectors of reproduction, they supposedly did not contribute to productivity and growth of the economy. in an earlier period from the 1950s and 1960s nurses had migrated in large numbers to developed countries which saw them as cutting health care costs and ironing out fluctuations in labour shortages (stasilius and bakan, 2003, p. 107). in the period 1960 to 1972, 5% of nurses were estimated by the world health organization (mejia et al., 1979) to be working outside of their home countries. in contrast in the 1990s, under neoliberal attempts to reduce the cost of social reproduction, states such as australia (iredale, 2001), canada (stasiulis and bakan, 2003) and the uk (raghuram and kofman, 2002) reduced their investment in the numbers being trained as doctors, nurses and teachers. at the same time they also ceased to recognize, to varying degrees, these occupations as shortage areas eligible for points towards temporary and permanent migration, leading to a drop in migrants in these sectors. immigration schemes such as the canadian, which stressed occupational shortages, largely favoured the heavily male it and finance sectors. the upshot was that by the late 1990s severe labour shortages had emerged in education, health and social work, especially in inner city and remote rural areas, which were then addressed through global recourse to labour both from the third and first world (rosewarne, 2001). in addition these reproductive sectors are highly regulated by corporate bodies and have developed nationally codified knowledge. they are not seen to be wealth creating but closely tied to the nationally bounded, non-profit or public sector. the marginalisation of this category in the knowledge economy literature, ideologically associated with the market (hudson, 2006), corresponds to a similar marginalization of these groups in many analyses of globalisation. feminists in different disciplines (beneria and sen, 1981; laslett and brenner, 1989; mitchell et al., 2004; petersen, 2003); have for a long time underscored the lack of attention paid to reproductive labour, which though traditionally consigned to the domestic sphere, supports so-called productive activities and is also an important dimension of welfare regimes. despite the lack of attention paid to reproductive activities, labour shortages at all skill levels in these sectors have led to the growth of globalized migrant labour (ehrenreich and hochschild, 2003; moya, 2007). both skilled (doctors, nurses, teachers and social workers) and less-skilled (carers, domestic workers) are heavily feminized occupations. furthermore, as nikolas rose (2000) notes, the contemporary forms of reinventing politics include displacing the substantive knowledge of welfare professionals (i.e. those involved in social reproduction by the knowledge of examination, scrutiny and review undertaken by accountants and consultants). professional fields have been reconstituted at the same as services have been privatized. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 128 issn: 1911-4788   this has resulted in more highly paid professionals being replaced by lesser paid, in some cases, by those with reduced security and career prospects. for example, doctors have been replaced by nurses for certain tasks and nurses by carers. apart from the privileging of market-led development and the occupations connected with it, the analysis of knowledge-based economies allocates a declining role for less-skilled labour based on the (unfounded) belief that manual and non-knowledgebased labour has disappeared in developed societies (castles, 2006). less-skilled labour was equated with manufacturing which had increasingly been decentralised to third world countries and was in decline. it was, therefore, argued that there would be no use for the kind of labour demands that had previously been necessary in developed societies because technology would replace sheer physical labour and routine administrative work. not all globalization theorists have shared this view of the disappearance of lessskilled labour. saskia sassen’s conceptualization of global processes has always maintained the close relationship between the expansion of producer services and global elites, especially in global cities (2001) and the need for less-skilled and flexible labour to service them. her analysis of counter geographies of globalization (2000) highlighted an alternative narrative of globalization in which those performing less-skilled work played a crucial role in receiving and sending societies. the growing demand for less-skilled labour has become more acute in sectors such as personal services, hospitality and care, which have expanded compared to routine administration which has declined. the problem is that productivity in the care sector cannot match gains in manufacturing or higher level service work (himmelweit, 2005; folbre, 2006). the relative cost of care is rising as demand outstrips supply but technology and informatization cannot be applied to what remains a labour-intensive sector. hence the search for and marked expansion of low-paid, and often insecure, informal globalized labour. thus middle and higher income countries are benefiting from the migration of domestic and care workers, many of them only enjoying partial citizenship (parrenas, 2001; stasilius and bakan, 2003) with few or reduced economic and social rights. as feminists have also pointed out, skills are socially constructed and valued differently, depending on how and where they are acquired (jenkins, 2004). having been supposedly acquired in the household, female skills of caring and cleaning, are seen as innate and maternal dispositions. for example in social care work tacit knowledge or practice wisdom, derived from personal qualities and experiences, is often presumed to derive from the worker’s experiences with her own family rather than rely on generalized scientific or codified knowledge (cameron and boddy, 2005). yet in the knowledge economy paradigm, tacit knowledge is largely seen as complementary rather than in opposition to scientific or codified. it adds value to scientific knowledge. the tacit knowledge of the carer, however, is not of the kind celebrated in literature on knowledge transfer amongst globalized and mobile business elites for whom it adds to their value and earning power (williams, 2006). moreover, there is evidence of deskilling and under utilization of qualification in many low skilled sectors. women migrants in low skilled sectors are likely to have higher qualifications than men (dumont et al., 2007). in the uk, for example, there is an increased use of degree level staff in the personnel services drawn from students (national and migrant), working holiday makers, deskilled migrant labour, including young people studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 129 issn: 1911-4788   from other european union countries (recchi, 2006) who use their period in the uk to accumulate cultural capital, for example, linguistic skills. percentage change in use of degree labour in the uk 1995-2005 percentage distribution in 9 major occupational groups 1995 2005 % change managers and senior officials 32.69 42.90 10.21 professional occupations 79.10 81.65 2.54 associate prof and technical 49.85 52.70 2.85 administrative and secretarial 13.79 20.06 6.26 skilled trades 7.00 9.51 2.51 personnel service 10.12 17.98 7.86 sales and customers 6.10 10.16 4.07 process plant 2.86 4.80 1.94 elementary occupations 3.42 5.56 2.15 source: fauth and brinkley (2006, p. 38) the knowledge economy and managed migration by the beginning of the present decade, the lisbon agenda, as we have seen, announced europe’s intention to promote a dynamic knowledge economy based on the market and technology. while the us epitomised the dynamic economy europe wished to emulate and compete with, it was the immigration systems of australia and canada which supplied the model of countries which had attracted large numbers of skilled migrants. the european union published a green paper (european commission, 2005) on a common approach to economic migration and is increasingly adopting policies of managed migration based on a common framework of rights for all third country nationals in legal employment including less and highly skilled. facing strenuous opposition from france and germany, these proposals were withdrawn and replaced by a more limited proposal for a blue card for the highly skilled announced in september and then confirmed on october 23, 2007 (european parliament, 2007). the development of a new governance regime of managed migration is based on economic calculus (cost/benefit) of stratified entry, rights and entitlements linked to utilitarian considerations. the disciplining and surveillance of migrants is also to be achieved through partnerships with other agents, such as sponsors and transport agents (lahav and guiraudon, 2000), and the off-shoring and displacement of borders to enlarge the protective borders of the state. managed migration demonstrates the ability to regulate and orient in a context of uncertainty and risk produced by globalization. being able to manage gives the idea of control to the benefit of the nation-state and of a capacity to measure benefits against costs. in recent years, and in particular since 2001, agendas of national identity, multiculturalism, and social cohesion have become more prominent. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 130 issn: 1911-4788   the classification, differentiation, selection and stratification of migrants in order to filter, as far as possible, welcome from unwelcome strangers has been pursued most vigorously in the uk. here, migration is seen to be driven by globalization which, though not new, has increased in scale (home office, 2005). globalization is inevitable and structured around “scientific and technological progressivism in which the interests of the business entrepreneurs are privileged” (finlayson, 2003). immigration policies must promote british interests. like other developed states, the uk competes for the skilled, especially those connected with the driving force of globalization, (i.e. the scientific, financial and managerial sectors, which has clear resonances with much thinking about the knowledge economy). the uk launched a highly skilled migrants programme in january 2002 and in 2005, over three-quarters were issued to four occupational categories – medical (largely trained doctors), financial, business and information technology (salt, 2006). only a quarter of applicants were women in 2004 (kofman et al., 2006) due in good measure, we have argued, to the earnings criteria which distinguishes the british scheme from the australian and canadian conditions of entry for skilled migrants. with the rolling out of the new managed migration scheme, the gender bias will become even more pronounced given the further emphasis on earnings and educational level. the high level of earnings being demanded exclude many of the middle ranks of the welfare professions (nursing, social workers, and teachers, those working in ngos) in which women are concentrated. youth demonstrating aptitude rather than experience are desired by employers and this has been accommodated through additional points, especially for those in their 20s just at an age when many women may be wanting to have children. by 2006 the uk had come to depend on skilled labour from across the globe. since then a number of developments have altered the openness to a broad range of skilled occupations and led to geographical and occupational restrictions. in particular it was the health sector which was affected by the financial crisis in the national health service leading to loss of jobs and non-replacement and the expansion of medical places at universities post-graduate medical training, which had for many years been the mainstay of junior positions in british hospitals, has consequently been severely restricted, especially in relation to rights to a long-term career. most significantly, the enlargement of the european union in may 2004 (eight eastern european countries, cyprus and malta) and then in january 2007 (bulgaria and romania) has reshaped the geopolitics of european immigration. the substantial inflows of eastern europeans (home office, 2007) have primarily filled less-skilled jobs, resulting in the reduction and subsequent withdrawal of the sectorbased scheme for less-skilled labour. the new five tier points scheme, outlined in 2005 (home office, 2005), and to be progressively introduced from 2008, envisages the european union providing all the required less-skilled labour. for those outside the eu, only the skilled tiers (1 for the highly skilled and 2 for other skilled) will be available. both of these tiers have the right to apply for settlement and eventual citizenship. however, even the highly skilled need to demonstrate that they have found employment at a commensurate salary that is no lower than a prescribed level in order to renew their residence permit and achieve long-term settlement (borders and immigration agency, november 2006). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 131 issn: 1911-4788   elsewhere in northern europe, the opening up to skilled labour has been far more timid and limited, largely restricted to itc and research, as in germany or france where corporatist professional bodies still retained considerable influence. in germany, only 1000 highly skilled migrants entered in 2005 following the provisions of the 2004 immigration act (von weizsacker, 2006). given continuing shortages in electrical and mechanical engineering sector, the government has opened up this sector to the 12 new member states and students who have obtained their degree in germany (http://www.workpermit.com/news/2007-08-25/germany/germany-new-eu-engineersallowed-to-work-graduates-three-years.htm). france is currently trying to limit family migration considered to be largely unskilled so as to encourage more skilled labour migration (durand and lemaitre, 2007; kofman and meetoo, 2007). in southern europe there is virtually no recruitment of skilled labour as such. in northern european states, including the uk, the politicization of immigration has ensured that the entry and rights of less-skilled migrants are severely limited. the less-skilled are deemed to compete with internal labour forces, especially amongst ethnic minority youth, pose pressures on welfare expenditure and likely to undermine national values and identities through their cultural practices and difficulties in assimilating. for example, in the uk tier 3, which replaces the sector-based schemes for agricultural and food processing, precludes the right to settlement and citizenship. non-eu migrants are only offered a transient passage and cannot build up any rights which accumulate with period of residence. transience also means they cannot effectively challenge exploitation and injustice. in southern europe, where the need for less-skilled labour has been recognised, quotas and repeated regularisations have been deployed in a context of an expanding informal economy (reyneri, 2003). indeed, between 1995 and 2005 spain received the largest number of immigrants (3.3 million) and in 2005 regularized 600,000 undocumented workers (docquier and marfouk, 2007, p. 10). hence the key divide, which the ec effectively leaves up to states to decide, is between the skilled and the lesser skilled. castles (2006) has recently noted the return of the guest worker regime and increasing use of temporary workers. as he comments “the eu and its member states still seem to be trying to import labour but not people (his italics) – just as the western european countries did 40 years ago” (p. 760). the hardening of attitudes to settlement and greater surveillance mean that less-skilled labour migrants will only be able to remain undocumented and in the informal labour market, at least in northern european states. the enlargement of the eu eastward (including bulgaria and romania from january 2007) and the diminished restrictions against labour mobility in an increasing number of eu states, especially in southern europe, have meant that less-skilled labour can be largely obtained from within the eu, rendering the notion of “fortress europe” probably more accurate than it had been in the past. conclusion as i have shown in this paper, over time the notion of the knowledge economy has become narrower. in the 1960s, the notion of knowledge, and thus what counted as the knowledge economy, extended well beyond the codified scientific dimension and examined the significance of tacit and personal knowledge. this was, of course, a period studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 132 issn: 1911-4788   prior to internet connectivity or national and international deregulation of economic activities. as the concept was taken up in management and business, and in particular deployed as a key objective of public policy, knowledge came to be defined as scientific and managerial. the knowledge economy was thus equated with scientific research, information technology and management, including finance, which were seen as the productive sectors of the economy. though research itself might be subsidized by the state, the bulk of these activities were market-based and increasingly deregulated and globalized. and, of course, these were, and remain, male dominated sectors. although, some definitions of kbe encompass a broader occupational distribution to include all those with higher educational qualifications, and, thus, professional employment in welfare sectors, the latter are reproductive rather than directly contributing to production, and hence subordinate. the welfare professions are heavily regulated by national corporate bodies as well as the state which determines the numbers to be trained, and, therefore, to some extent entering the profession. in many instances, especially where the points system of entry includes an occupational element, the state decides upon the numbers and conditions under which foreign professionals may enter, as in australia, and prior to the present decade in canada. subsequent to entry, corporatist bodies also play a major role in limiting and filtering entrants. equating this narrow understanding of kbe with productivity and growth has meant that even states with highly restrictive labour migrations, as in the european union, seek to attract the highly skilled (by which they generally mean information technology, science and engineering). in the uk, the distinction between highly skilled, (primarily finance and it with some higher levels of welfare professionals), on the one hand, and the skilled, with large numbers of middle level welfare occupations, on the other, demonstrates the gendered outcomes of immigration criteria. the highly skilled do not have to have a job offer, the “ordinarily”’ skilled do. what it also highlights is the vicissitudes that the welfare professions face to a much higher degree than those in finance and it. the state, as it did in many countries in the 1990s, and as is happening in the uk once again, is closing avenues to entry for certain welfare professionals, especially in the health sector (doctors and nurses). the differential treatment of skilled and less-skilled has been noted and critiqued but we should also bear in mind the differential classification within the skilled category, their opportunities for labour market incorporation and hence gendered stratification. the relationship between the conceptualization of the knowledge economy and globalized migrations varies between states and over time. and while more attention is being paid to gender equality and the knowledge economy, i would suggest we should in addition address the issue of international migration in our understanding of gender and the knowledge economy and society. we should also examine the relationship between diverse codified and tacit knowledge and the way they play out in different sectors and occupations. it would enable us to move away from the simplistic and technologically driven models of knowledge formation and transferability. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 133 issn: 1911-4788   references bell, 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(eds) gendering the knowledge economy comparative perspectives. london: palgrave williams, a (2006). lost in translation? international migration, learning and knowledge. progress in human geography, 30(5), 588-607. introduction democracy and social justice studies in social justice volume 5, issue 2, 145-147, 2011   correspondence address: bob brecher, faculty of arts, university of brighton, grand parade, brighton bn2 0jy, united kingdom. tel.: +44 (0) 1273 600900; email: r.brecher@brighton.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 introduction democracy and social justice bob brecher faculty of arts, university of brighton, united kingdom in the wake of the arab spring it may seem perverse to ponder the rights and wrongs of democracy: however imperfect, surely it is at least the least bad system of government yet devised. and yet democracy, or what is described as democracy, has been, and continues to be, more often imposed on peoples than freely chosen. iraq and afghanistan are not the only examples. that, surely, suggests a tension, if not a paradox. nor is that the only tension around democracy. on the one hand, to take just one example, democracy is what distinguishes israel from its neighbours (or more recently, from most of its neighbours), regardless of who is democratically elected and what they do; on the other, however, when democracy is exercised in gaza and produces a hamas government, the palestinians of gaza are punished for having made the wrong choice. two interrelated questions have therefore to be faced, even if they cannot be definitively answered. first, what actually is it about democracy that makes it valuable; or what amounts to very much the same thing, are the qualities generally assumed to inhere in democracy, or to be absent from it, in fact inherent in it, or, as the case may be, absent from it? second, just what is to count as democracy and who is to decide what counts? these two questions are of course interrelated in complex ways, as well as being difficult even to approach, let alone to answer. perhaps it is on account of their difficulty that these questions are rarely addressed directly, writers understandably preferring to deal with the minutiae of theories of democracy rather than with the more taxing matters of the principles at stake in theorizing about democracy. perhaps. or perhaps not. i rather think that that is not the whole story, nor even what is most important about all too many contemporary treatments of democracy. the real problem, it seems to me, runs deeper and it is this: since we—whoever and wherever “we” are—are all democrats now, to attempt to subject democracy to serious analysis is to cast doubt on what we ourselves believe and thus, in turn, on who we are. for it could turn out that in the final analysis we are not all democrats, or that our different conceptions of what counts as democracy, let alone our different convictions about who should decide what counts and on what sorts of ground, are so different that we cannot tell whether or not we are in fact democrats—let alone whether we ought to be. 146 bob brecher   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   it is in the spirit of attempting at least to face some of these underlying issues that the following essays have been brought together. they are all very different in the specificities of their particular concerns; and different, too, in their responses, whether explicit or implicit, to some of the difficulties adumbrated above. there is no particular line being advocated here. what they do all have in common, however, and what is being advocated in bringing them together is that willingness to face, rather than to avoid, the critical underlying issues. both individually and collectively, then, the essays represent at once a conviction that democracy neither can nor should be taken for granted, whether normatively or structurally, and an attempt to begin to uncover some of what democracy does in fact take for granted. in the actually existing world, a democracy is assumed to be one with a propertyowning democracy: indeed, the “property-owning” element of that reality may on occasion be thought to trump whatever notion of democracy may inhere within it. mark devenney’s essay, in “insisting that a properly political theory must contend with the politics of property,” asks us to remember, first, that democracy is indeed a political concept and not the name of some set of natural properties and, second, that any notion or practice of democratic politics must therefore deal with the question of property, and deal with it as also a specifically political construct. vivienne matthies-boon reminds us of an issue all too infrequently addressed: is democracy—or, perhaps, should it be—inherently cosmopolitan? and if so, if “democracy in one country” is no more sustainable than “socialism in one country,” does that not too easily legitimate a trotskyist neoconservatism? habermas’s struggles to avoid “being appropriated by precisely the camp he opposes” provide an important lesson for us. gideon calder turns to look inside, arguing that, while “democracy is crucially about inclusion,” it cannot be democracy itself which provides a solution to the problem of who is to be included and on what terms. that fundamental issue is, so to speak, a pre-democratic one— which suggests that democracy names a means of putting into practice normative decisions made elsewhere. nonetheless, and this is what keith sutherland is concerned to have us think about, the particular form that such a means takes will in turn impact on the extent to which, and the manner in which, those initial norms are instantiated. starting with madison’s “functional distinction between ‘parties’ (advocates for factional interests) and ‘judgment’ (decision-making for the public good),” he urges us to abandon our party political form of democratic decisionmaking in favour of having randomly selected citizens making these judgements, having collected the requisite argumentative evidence from the various factions (parties) concerned. finally, we are invited to reconsider our too easy assumption that democracy offers a way (preferable to the various forms of authoritarian rule that are its alternatives) of avoiding the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” lives of a hobbesian state of nature. through the lens of the so-called war on terror, mark mcgovern argues that terrorism is “a problem of and not for democracy”; that it is the state of exception which historically gives force to, and is paradigmatic of, actually existing democracy—that is, of liberal democracy. again, it is the political norms out of which democracy historically emerges, rather than anything specific to “democracy itself,” that determine its shape. nick mansfield takes this argument one step—or perhaps several steps—further. far from democracy’s being a paradigm of peace, and whatever particular shape a democracy might historically introduction democracy and social justice 147 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 1, 2011   take, it is ineluctably rooted in violence, a violence that “springs from its inextricable if denied relationship to revolution, the drive to re-found the political order properly and definitively.” if he is right, then, in short, “democracy is violence.” suppose democracy is violent, and, more importantly, that it is violent because it has its roots in revolution. then, since revolution is the only alternative to actually existing, neo-liberal democracy, does that suggest an infinite pessimism about the possibility of justice (to put far too much weight on a single word); or merely a sobering realism about our chances? correspondence address: brian phillips journal of human rights practice, oxford university press, great clarendon street, oxford ox2 6dp, united kingdom, email: briandphillips@yahoo.co.uk issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 2, 311-313, 2013 review of the violence of victimhood brian phillips independent human rights consultant and co-editor, journal of human rights practice the violence of victimhood written by diane enns. university park, pennsylvania: the pennsylvania state university press. 2012 a man or woman adopted by amnesty international as a prisoner of conscience may not always be someone you would wish to invite for dinner. that was the seemingly obvious truth that i nevertheless found myself needing to repeat to amnesty members on a number of occasions during the years that i worked for the human rights organization. for, as any experienced human rights campaigner knows, the general public tends to prefer committing their energies, their time and their cash to assisting indisputably worthy victims of violation. it is relatively easy to mobilize interest in, and support for, the poet or trade unionist behind bars whose nobility of spirit and impeccable character match the template of victim as paragon of virtue. it is more difficult to convince a wary public that the struggle for human rights also means coming to the defence of individuals whose ideological orientation or core beliefs may in some way appear less than admirable to us. this widely shared bias toward a conception of victimhood as a badge of irrefutable moral stature is a phenomenon that will be familiar not only to human rights practitioners, but also to journalists, academic researchers, legal practitioners, and others whose work brings them into direct contact with those who have suffered oppression, injustice, or violence. in her beautifully crafted and immensely stimulating book, diane enns urges us to rethink narrow conceptions of victimhood that close off intellectual argument and that require an almost automatic suspension of judgment. she asks us to consider carefully “why victims are currently invested with a moral authority that many feel unable or unwilling to challenge.” in particular, enns studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 312 brian phillips rigorously questions the frequent invocation of a discourse of “otherness” that may distort our relationship to the victim of violation or atrocity—a reflexive “veneration” of any such individual which ultimately “render(s) the other a pure victim, beyond moral and epistemic reproach, a good other.” enns argues powerfully here for what she calls, “the concept and practice of merciful judgment,” a compassionate but critical engagement with those wronged or disfigured by injustice or violence that avoids stripping that individual of all “moral agency and responsibility.” in contexts as diverse as israel/palestine, rwanda, and bosniaherzegovina, enns skillfully examines some of the many complexities of the experience of victimhood and underlines the dangers of identities rooted exclusively in claims to “the pure innocence of the victim relieved of the burden of historical responsibility on the ground of injury.” in this regard, the book’s chapters on victims turned perpetrators and the public reception of accounts of former child soldiers will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners alike working in the human rights and humanitarian fields. in her interrogation of contemporary understandings of victimhood, enns draws on an impressive range of thinkers and authors: from emmanuel levinas to franz fanon to jean améry. her reflections on the controversy generated by the publication of hannah arendt’s eichmann in jerusalem—with enns asserting along with arendt that, “each historical event, each experience of victimization, must be investigated and analyzed within its own historical context”—make for especially compelling reading. enns also contributes helpfully to vital debates about contemporary approaches to peacebuilding and takes a healthy, questioning stance in relation to that boom industry in the worlds of academic publishing and ngo activity—transitional justice. in her chapter on “mercy for the merciless,” enns argues that “to criticize justice mechanisms does not mean that we are indifferent to injustice or care little about the lives of victims. it means that we throw into question the effectiveness of the law in dealing with the aftermath of conflict.” in assessing the impact of judicial mechanisms such as the international criminal tribunals for rwanda and for former yugoslavia (ictr and icty, respectively), enns expresses a concern that a mainly “retributive sense of justice . . . underlies the current discourses informing global responses to atrocity, despite recent attempts to define an alternative kind of justice as restorative or reparative.” the argument for a plurality of responses to atrocity (including non-judicial ones such as “. . . a sustained commitment to . . . reinventing politics and rebuilding civil society”) and a focus on the prevention of future violence rather than the punishment of wrongdoing is indeed a crucial one. but one might still ask whether an institution like the icty—flawed as it is can be said to be wholly retributive in its workings and therefore always an impediment to the building of lasting peace. beyond securing the convictions of those responsible for particular crimes, surely that body’s contribution to the attempt to establish a detailed, authoritative historical record of what happened in that region in the 1990s (an accounting still rejected by many in the countries of the former yugoslavia) studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 review of the violence of victimhood 313 is also an important, constructive function in the much longer term effort to “reinvent a community that refuses violence.” in a region where the deliberate use of bad history became a key strategy for the escalation of fear and hatred, isn’t the icty’s role in the writing of good history for the future—however imperfectly—in itself a positive endeavour? in this chapter, i would also have liked to see enns address the fact that other critics of the icty (including victims from each of the communities affected by the region’s multiple conflicts) would insist that far from being representative of “victim-centred approaches to justice,” the institution has in fact brought little in the way of “catharsis and empowerment” to many of those seeking such a process. for them, the sentences handed down by that body have been insultingly light and therefore an insufficient punishment for the crimes committed. in their view, the problem with this particular judicial mechanism is that it is has consistently refused to be retributive enough. undoubtedly, enns is right to encourage us to consider the potential in alternative approaches to “dealing with the past” and post-conflict reconstruction, including the option of what she describes as a kind of “merciful forgetting.” but even as we wonder if post-conflict societies might be better off without costly, potentially divisive, institutions like the icty and the ictr, we also need to engage the awkward question sometimes raised by those on the receiving end of our well-intended recommendations of the benefits of various alternatives to judicial mechanisms. how receptive would many of us living in our highly developed, affluent, and politically stable societies that we set aside our expectations that those who have harmed us will be brought to justice in a court of law in favour of some kind of alternative process? the way in which enns’s book precipitates this kind of much needed reflection on these issues is a mark of its real accomplishment. enns’s impassioned, at times almost conversational writing style—an urgent, inviting authorial voice—is most welcome throughout and will help make the violence of victimhood accessible to a much wider readership than would normally be the case with a work of academic philosophy. reading lists in university courses on human rights, conflict transformation, political thought, and ethics will be greatly enriched by the addition of this genuinely thoughtprovoking volume. basok final correspondence address: tanya basok, department of sociology & anthropology, university of windsor, windsor, on, n9b 3p4; email: basok@uwindsor.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 531-533, 2022 book review the precarious lives of syrians: migration, citizenship, and temporary protection in turkey baban, f., ilcan, s., & rygiel, k. (2021). mcgill-queen’s university press. isbn: 978-0228008033 (cloth) cad$130.00; isbn 978-0228008040 (paper) cad$37.95; isbn 978-0228008034 (e-book) cad$37.95. 384 pages. tanya basok university of windsor, canada the book the precarious lives of syrians: migration, citizenship, and temporary protection in turkey came out in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic when travel restrictions made it all but impossible for people forced to abandon their homes for reasons such as wars, protracted conflicts, political or sexuality-based persecutions, or gender violence, to seek in other countries access to social justice, that is, safety, security, inclusion, and physical and mental well-being. yet, covid-19 merely exacerbated the exclusions that have become entrenched in the global governance of migration. many states have adopted a multiplicity of techniques to prevent asylum seekers from reaching their borders. these measures include the increased surveillance of borders, seas, and national territories and the imposition of new visa restrictions, to name a few. for countries of destination, keeping refugees out has also meant making deals with the countries en route. it is these transit countries that are now responsible for detaining the migrant flows, deporting migrants, or as is the case of turkey, providing protection, albeit temporary, to asylum seekers. however, as the precarious lives of syrians clearly demonstrates, these temporary forms of protection leave displaced people insecure and vulnerable. this captivating book offers a poignant, scrupulous, and provocative analysis of what baban, ilcan and rygiel call the “architecture of precarity” composed of three layers, namely, precarious status, precarious space, and precarious movement. it provides a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the impact of this tanya basok studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 531-533, 2022 532 “architecture” on the lives of syrian asylum seekers in turkey, as well as the way these uprooted people confront exclusions. the analysis of the ethnographic research presented in the book is framed with respect to three inter-connected areas of study: postwar humanitarian emergency responses, including temporary protection; the nexus between humanitarianism and precarity; and counter-responses to precarity. to begin with, the authors explain how the 2016 eu-turkey statement (commonly known as the eu-turkey deal) has made it possible for european union countries to hedge their responsibility towards asylum seekers, as outlined in the 1951 un convention on refugees. in its turn, turkey accepted the responsibility to host and extend humanitarian protection to forced migrants. this statement is one reason why the movements of refugees attempting to seek protection in eu countries have become even more precarious recently than before the eu-turkey deal was reached. as the authors elucidate, unlike many other asylum seekers in turkey, syrian refugees were granted “temporary protection,” a status that effectively deprives them of opportunities for third country resettlement. at the same time, for most syrians in turkey, temporary protection status is not a pathway to a more secure long-term legal status in turkey either. in fact, as the authors document, the citizenship application process is informal, obscure, and arbitrary. syrians are legally precarious in turkey in yet another way. the application process for an identity document to which syrians are entitled in turkey, known as kimlik, is confusing to many. furthermore, while kimlik restricts their rights to domestic mobility, without it or with a kimlik granted in a city different from their place of residence, syrians face the risk of deportation to syria. the temporary protection status grants certain rights to displaced people from syria. yet, as the authors reveal, their access to health care, housing, education, and secure employment is severely restricted by lack of adequate information on how to access services, language barriers, prejudice and discrimination by turkish service providers, prohibitive costs (particularly in the case of medication or some medical procedures), and uncertain legal status. the authors refer to these exclusions as precarious space, and they illustrate that this form of precarity is particularly severe for women and lgbtq people. yet, measures taken by charitable organizations, local district administrators or the turkish government to increase access to health care, housing or education reinforce the uneven and arbitrary distribution of social support among syrian refugees in precarious spaces. as we learn from the book, status precarity also forces syrians to accept informal jobs that lack security or job protection, and it is not uncommon for employers in agriculture, garbage and textiles to employ child labour. the precarious legal status, precarious movements, and precarious spaces deprive syrian migrants residing in turkey of dignity, health, and well-being, and preclude most of them from seeking social justice elsewhere. yet, as the book informs readers, syrians in tukey resist their precarity through book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 531-533, 2022 533 activities of daily life and cultural engagements to force a sense of belonging and demand recognition as subjects with rights. despite rampant xenophobia, many syrians in turkey claim spaces in turkish cities when they organize centres for community support, build ties with locals, engage in artistic productions, set up centres for learning about their rights, particularly women’s rights, receive schooling, exchange information, and organize social and cultural events. moreover, despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, some syrians exercise their right to escape from precarity in turkey by undertaking perilous and difficult journeys towards some eu countries or by seeking acceptance by such countries as canada. the three stories presented in chapter 6 attest to migrants’ determination, ingenuity, and resilience. in sum, in the precarious lives of syrians, baban, ilcan and rygiel offer a sophisticated analysis of the architecture of precarity for migrants forced to escape from syria and reside in turkey that is built on three inter-connected pillars, namely, status precarity, space precarity, and movement precarity. it elucidates complex ways in which this architecture of precarity shapes the lives of syrian migrants who, despite all adversity, continue to demand their rights to social justice by forging belonging, solidarity, support, recognition, mobility, and the right to dignified lives. as someone who teaches courses in migration and refugee studies at the graduate and undergraduate level, i am convinced that this book would be of tremendous value to my students. by covering a diversity of topics and concepts, such as the birth of the refugee protection regime and its limitations, humanitarianism and governance, bordering practices, “liminal legality,” social protections for refugees, human rights violations, agency, resistance, and citizenship, this book will help students to relate abstract conceptual issues to specific government policies and initiatives and refugees’ daily experiences. as someone who conducts research on migrants and asylum seekers in mexico, the externalization of the u.s. border controls into the territory of its southern neighbours, the precarity of legal statuses granted to asylum seekers in mexico, and the precarity of their journey through mexico towards the u.s. border, i was inspired by the analytical framework elaborated in this book that links precarity at three different levels and elucidates the connection between them and the rich ethnographic research. this book is a great read and i highly recommend it for researchers, policy analysts and policy makers, and students. correspondence address: irina velicu, spiru haret university, strada doamnei 13, bucharest, romania. email: irinavelicu@hotmail.com issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 6, issue 1, 125-141, 2012 the aesthetic post-communist subject and the differend of rosia montana irina velicu spiru haret university, romania abstract by challenging the state and corporate prerogatives to distinguish between “good” and “bad” development, social movements by and in support of inhabitants of rosia montana (transylvania) are subverting prevailing perceptions about central and eastern europe (cee)’s liberal path of development illustrating its injustice in several ways that will be detailed in this article under the heading “inhibitions of political economy” or balkanism. the significance of the “save rosia montana” movement for post-communism is that it invites post-communist subjects to reflect and revise their perception about issues such as communism, capitalism and development and to raise questions of global significance about the fragile edifice of justice within the neo-liberal capitalist economy. however, resistance to injustice (and implicitly affirmations of other senses of justice) is an ambiguous discursive practice through which rosieni make sense as well as partake their sense of rosia montana. the movement brings about a public dispute which may be compared with a differend: (in lyotard’s words), a conflict that cannot be confined to the rules of “cognitive phrases,” of truth and falsehood. this article argues that while post-communist events of “subjectification” are unstable and thus, are to be viewed aesthetically, this same ambiguous multiplication of political subjectivity may facilitate the creation of social spaces for imagining alternative possibilities of development. introduction to rosia montana: context and brief history the following conversation took place between two inhabitants of rosia montana, transylvania. b: to me, those who have sold their houses, taken away their dead because they have received money, cannot be considered human. for someone to sell their dead, now that’s an odious, unacceptable thing! don’t you think that one day studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 126 irina velicu there will be no more gold left? and don’t you think that you may die before reaching my age?! look how sick the mine has made me! e: it isn’t in my power to decide what the future will be like. for this there are other people, who have the knowledge to do this. anyway, what future? you simply don’t have an alternative to mining. alburnus maior told us to pick berries, but that’s a one-month job! then there was the idea of a milk processing plant and a sawmill, but with whose cows and what wood?! alburnus has only been giving me words for five years. with words i can’t feed my family. gold gives me something real (szombati, 2007, p. 20). this conversation is not peculiar to the small semi-urban village called rosia montana in transylvania (romania). in the last twelve years there has been an increasing perception of anxiety regarding the possibilities for development within post-communist societies: business elites with the support of the state are being perceived as having the power to define the conditions of possibility for romania to exist as a space of valued raw resources and cheap human capital. in the case of rosia montana, the years after the anti-communist revolution brought the verdict of a future of mono-industrial mining to be realized by foreign companies which own the resources and the know-how to valorise what the state can only sell. in the 1990s, the gold temptation incited a canadian corporation to propose the project for one of the largest mines in europe. ever since, rosieni (the population of rosia) are torn between the choice of selling their land and the struggle to preserve it. in 1997, the romanian government granted the right of exploration and exploitation to euro-gold resources (later on named rosia montana gold corporation, rmgc, and referred to by rosieni as the “gold”) while the terms of this contract were classified as secret information. declaring the area “mono-industrial” and allowing rmgc’s land exploration brought the village to a deadlock: from the outset, alternative possibilities of development were nullified. the history of gold exploitation in romania has generally been described as a history of hardship for the miners, be they ancient slaves (prisoners of wars), feudal iobagi (servants) or later on in modern times, workers and private entrepreneurs. the resource of gold has been among the main reasons for romans’ domination and other ruling powers. mining has, therefore, been the main activity of rosieni and it has both made them rich and alienated them. however, for the first time in its history, the place seems condemned to annihilation. the new corporate mining project is not only suspected of bringing elusive and unsustainable wealth but also the community’s death because of the new technology, i.e., cyanide open cast mining. in a press conference organized on august 22, 2008 in bucharest, nadia mezincescu, coordinator at the romanian academy in bucharest spoke about the paradox of rosia montana: despite being the oldest village of romania, with historical and cultural heritages to be valued, the romanian government preferred to let it “die” and sell it, “how could a community exist for two-thousand years and then gradually die in tenyears? something extremely wrong is happening in rosia, a malefic synergy, a programmed and systematic crime to impoverish studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the aesthetic post-communist subject 127 and kill a community!” rosieni have become aware of this danger since 2000, when over 300 subsistence farming families from rosia montana and 100 families from the neighbouring area of bucium decided to form the alburnus maior organization to oppose the rmgc. for alburnus maior and its supporters, the project would mean relocation of 910 households, displacement of about 2,000 persons from 740 houses and 138 flats, demolition of four mountains, a lake of cyanide and toxic waste covering over 1800 hectares of land, demolished houses and buildings (many of them being of cultural patrimony such as the famous roman galleries) and, last but not least, the exhumation of ancestors through the destruction of nine cemeteries and eight churches. developing one of the largest movements with the support of national and international ngos as well as other institutions, rosieni’s protests echoed the “not for sale” discourse of the global justice movement, criticizing corporate conduct, the social and environmental costs of economic development and the corrupt complicity between the state and the corporation. however, despite strong opposition and its capacity to block the corporation for more than ten years, the majority of rosieni have gradually accepted to sell their land and properties to the corporation for various reasons: lack of jobs or profit (by declaring the area mono-industrial, different economic investments or activities were banned), desires for a different lifestyle away from the perpetually stressed situation, children’s needs to attend different schools etc. depopulation is now haunting the area, with political pressures for project implementation being resuscitated in the context of the economic crisis. currently, after the strong advocacy of the basescu’s administration in support of the corporation, the new social-democrat government is proposing a new approach to the evaluation of the mining project, as to fulfil respect for laws, environmental protection, social care, and also to offer relevant benefits for the state-budget. travelling to rosia, i often overheard: “we will sell our country . . . we will be the new slaves.” although former communist countries do not share the (anti)colonial discourse, i started to think of what prompts these comparisons. i visited rosia montana four times during the summers of 2007 and 2008; firstly, i participated in a few public events such as the hay festival and other protests. my later work as a volunteer/project coordinator with a few ngos helped me access a network of environmental activists and supported my research within the tension-ridden community. after meeting some of the most outspoken leaders of the movement both from the village and from other cities, i conducted fifteen semi-structured interviews while having informal discussions with around ten more rosieni. i also informally talked with six rosieni who had sold their land. the selection of interviewees was random— while walking on the streets of rosia i met people who were curious and/or suspicious about my presence and started conversations—and through the snowball sampling technique—few of the known activists i contacted directly led me to other people. interviews were taken at the person’s household or in the plaza of the village. they usually lasted from thirty minutes to two hours studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 128 irina velicu depending on the individual case. i used a semi-structured interview protocol that was marginally adjusted according to circumstances. my own presence in rosia emerged from a commitment to a larger struggle for social justice for marginalized peoples in the developing world. despite my recognized sympathy for the opponents of the project, some of the leaders insisted on remaining anonymous. others agreed to give their names and signed my university protocol for the phd dissertation, being proud to be supporting the cause by any means possible and encouraging me to “tell the world” about them. they also offered me poems and gifts of spiritually symbolic meaning. in my fieldwork i often realised that it is close to impossible to make an accurate distinction between “my story” (i.e. my interpretation of the situation) and the stories of rosieni—the interactive transformations were inevitable while our language reproduces a social pattern and a pre-established set of possibilities (terdiman, 1985). there is no naive primary understanding of field data that one can conceptualize only afterwards (barthes, 1974). we always operate with a narrative in the mind even before the data gathering process. i chose to talk about the social harm made by the current neo-liberal trend in post-communist societies through the reification of market relations; that “something real” which the corporation, and not the state, is supposed to be able to offer, being promoted as the “success” story despite opposition and ambivalence towards it. interviewing key protagonists in this globally relevant struggle concerning freedom of choice, property rights, indigenous rights and environmental rights, i argue that “save rosia montana” has transformed the invisible into a visible centre of democratic struggle bringing together people of all ages, genders, professions, and ethnicities to denounce injustice in its various forms. the “save rosia montana” movement is one of the most enduring and largest movements in romania which managed to place on the political agenda the importance of critique and ambivalence with regard to the liberal developmental path. the movement that expanded beyond the local has been an opportunity for the post-communist romania to address and debate its ethical dilemmas and critically examine the spread of the market and foreign capital, the role of the state and the transformation of social interests, ideas and feelings. the following sections of this article will show how, in a context of what i call balkanism or the new inhibitions of political economy, rosieni supported by ngo activists from romania and other countries have made their voice heard with regard to the intrusive and destructive effect of corporate economic monopolies promoted as state policy. talking about justice is, first of all, talking about what ranciere (2004) calls the “partitioning of the sensible world” (p. 65). for the last twenty years rosieni and romanians were told how to feel about the present, the new political economy and communism; they were often denied the right to remember the past other than by denying it. through this movement, rosieni discovered they can tell others about the other feelings and sensibilities they have. peasants and/or miners, rosieni broke their habitual sense of self and life, reinventing themselves in multiple studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the aesthetic post-communist subject 129 ways as entrepreneurs, ngo activists, tourist guides, marketing persons, poets, or actors. the 2010 hay festival mirrored these desired alternatives: entitled “rosia montana, as a big stage,” it gathered people from all over romania as well as other countries for workshops, debates, eco-entertainment activities, tour-visits etc. these acts of subjectification constitute illustrations of an aesthetic post-communist subject, whose political subjectivity is hereby multiplied and pluralized. this article also argues that post-communist events of “subjectification” are unstable and thus, are to be viewed aesthetically. the significance of the “save rosia montana” movement for post-communism is not just that it invites post-communist subjects to reflect and revise their perception about issues such as communism, capitalism, and development as well as to raise questions of global significance about the fragile edifice of justice within the neo-liberal capitalist economy of our world. resistance to injustice (and implicitly affirmations of other senses of justice) is an ambiguous discursive practice through which rosieni make sense as well as partake their sense of rosia montana. the movement has also furthered the idea that the pursuit of social justice is not a matter of simplistic dualism—good or bad development, profitable or not, positive or negative—but rather that it has to become a process of negotiation (open and on-going). we are not speaking here of justice as if we know exactly what it means (for any of the parties); surely activism has secured a (limited) sense of justice for some just as the corporation has done for others. more importantly here is the unsettledness of any of these senses of justice and resistance to injustices, which sets the alarm for a differend about social justice. as the second section of this article will show, the movement brings about a public dispute which may be compared with a differend: (in lyotard’s words), a conflict that cannot be confined to the rules of “cognitive phrases,” of truth and falsehood. inhibitions of political economy: post-communism, balkanism and developmentalism after 1989, economic, social or environmental problems in eastern europe have mainly been attributed to a lack of capitalism, other critical alternatives being inhibited by communism’s institutionalized narratives about the misdeeds of capitalism (tamas, 2009). the “inevitability” and desirability of the capitalist market and liberal democracy has not generally been questioned. even the shocks of privatization, the social and economic insecurities, and the new forms of poverty have been presented as inevitable and conducive to a better life. rosia montana is an illustration in this sense: it was meant to become a globalized place, dependent on extra-local centres of power, integrated into a network of investments and information. this has been the liberal vision shared by international financial institutions which shaped romanian industrial policy after 1990. the liberal reforms in the mining industry took place under the auspices of the european union, studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 130 irina velicu the imf and the common “wisdom” (among elites) was that mining, like other industries, had to be fundamentally restructured, which, in most cases, involved closures and privatizations. the world bank was to provide the expertise and the financial means for alleviating the social effects of mine closures (larionescu, 1999).in this context, romania, like other eastern european countries, has been one of the many bargains to be exploited for cheap labour, soft environmental and social/labour standards, where the corrupt bureaucracies could function as a facilitator. much of the literature on post-communism has, therefore, focused on the region’s need to transition to a liberal democracy and capitalism. the process of transition was often seen as “corrupt” which merely meant, insufficiently capitalist: venture capitalists were supposedly contaminated through dubious deals with the former communist elite (nomenklatura) which would explain the tainted nature of the “new capitalism.” the “real” capitalism has been “yet to come” after an extensive hunt for (and cleansing of) communists, scapegoats for most problems. it is no surprise that shortly after the arrival of rmgc in rosia, its representation as a unique “saviour” has been perpetuated through institutional settings (state, media and corporate) creating a feeling that without this project the region can slip into the new periphery, excluded from investment and development. however, the tendency to label opposition to corporate globalization in romania as anti-modern or extremist could be seen as a perpetuation of the balkanist or balkanization legacy. by “balkanist” we refer here to the historical tradition of describing central and eastern europe as never quite developed, never quite civilized, semi-oriental, quasi-colonial, and a periphery of europe. the east has historically been portrayed as such, destabilizing yet reinforcing the identity of the west. it is identified as industrially backward, lacking the advanced social relations and institutions of the developed capitalist world, irrational and superstitious, basically unenlightened, “ignorant, poor and sick people, over whom already europe is planning ‘spheres of influence’” (du bois, 1945, p. 58). broadly, one can argue that there is no difference between orientalism—as colonial cognitive techniques of governance—and these balkanist discursive practices applied to central and eastern europe, with the exception of scale: central and eastern europe (cee) is not quite down in the abis of barbarism but rather, in between civilization and barbarism (wolff 1994, p. 13). however, it is still a “striking resemblance to this ethos of colonial discovery” (borocz 2000, p. 870). balkanism is used in the media and in literary studies to indicate not only fragmentation and eternal strife but also dehumanization and lack of civilization, the status of being not quite ready for the blessings of democracy and liberal development. this state of ambiguous in-betweenness, at the gates, on the bridge, never quite inside either west or east, never quite free from “the vices of the east, nor acquired any of the virtues of the west” (ehrenpreis, 1928, pp. 11-13) is perceived as a dangerous road—its vacillation and ambivalence cannot be relied upon to authentically praise the new capitalist regime. in other words, it (cee) studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the aesthetic post-communist subject 131 should prove its commitment to western values, “not because ‘they’ are totally different, but rather because “they” have fallen into difference over time . . . the categorical orientalist holds out the possibility of redemption for the fallen through capitalism, democracy, civil society, privatization and the like (kideckel 1996, p. 30). this form of balkanism has been internalized and perpetuated by rosieni also, who are ready to internalize this visitor’s (imagined) normative gaze assuming that perceptive (mainly western) travellers can see through their thin veils of self-pride to their darkest secret, i.e., ethnic stigma: “we are the last, the worst, the most hopeless; . . . unable to create an endogenous model they voluntarily ‘colonize’ themselves with an exogenous model” (antohi, 2005). while not focusing here on the development of a critical concept of balkanism (opposed to balkanization), the implication of the above ideas is that there is a tendency to oversimplify the representation/ discourse and identification/subjectivity of an entire region as well as of a movement in an attempt to freeze/fix or arrest their ambiguities, uncertainties, and contradictions. this aspect of ambiguity and uncertainty, contradiction and disagreement is of special relevance for an aesthetic post-communist subject and the discourse on social justice. as igor kyotoff was arguing, this is the type of society in which “a person’s social identities are not only numerous but often conflicting,” where one is likely to encounter a “drama of identities,—of their clashes, of the impossibility of choosing between them . . . the drama, in brief, lies in the uncertainty of identity . . . ” (kyotoff, 1986, p. 89). it is with these ambiguities, that one may start thinking critically and re-imagining alternative futures. in this sense, neo-liberal globalization and its developmental projects operate within this framework of balkanism. its imposition of truth and power has been a violent act, exercised by the ruling elites as well, and pushed as the ideal thought especially in periods of crisis: “an increasing volume of information that is continually coded and recoded to meet the interests of corporate capitalism” (white, 1991, p. 120). moreover, popularizing the idea of modernization as upgrading, these forms of rationalization will supposedly “treat” the illness that caused the region’s backwardness and help the miserable people. balkanism/balkanization has become a neo-liberal tool in the attempt to inhibit differences that might, otherwise, inform alternative critical discourses meant to adjudicate issues of social justice. balkanist (and implicitly developmentalist) overtones have haunted the rosia montana movement, being used and abused to perpetuate the image of an illiberal society whose desire to protect cultural values signifies a perilous historical tradition of anti-modernism. the corporation has instrumentally used the concept of balkanism to trivialize and lock the movement into dichotomies: traditional versus modern, nationalist versus liberal, communist versus capitalist: “in romania and hungary, groups opposed to the rosia montana project play on old resentments of foreign companies and of capitalism in general” (rmgc, 2007). any form of opposition to the liberal capitalist economy is inhibited and accused of complicity with old dangerous studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 132 irina velicu forces while eventually manipulating these inhibitions to manufacture and capture consent for “the only alternative.”as the corporation argues, “our project is the only viable development for the rosia montana valley. by opposing our project, the ngo alburnus maior is preventing any opportunity, and any choice, for the development of the community in rosia montana” (rmgc, 2007). moreover, the leitmotif of “facts” has been used by rmgc as a means to discredit the opposition. whether it was about the “true story” and the “facts” about the situation of the area or about the nature of the arguments or the ethnicity of the opponents, the corporation has been articulating the narrative of modernity to discredit not only a certain target group but also the mindset of centuries inscribed in the culture of the area, a culture whose baggage of emotional attachments (to nature and mountains) and archaic superstitions have been devalued and stigmatized. while the “real” story of the corporate project has been many times articulated in the modern language of scientific and technological discourse, one that is obviously the appanage of a few, the choice to take a stance out of other beliefs and emotional attachments has been considered anachronistic, hilarious, and dangerous. however, the current nationalisms of the balkans are reactions that serve the beautification of capitalism and democracy (zizek, 1993). when talking of resistance in balkanist terms, the spectrum for the examination of resistance is limited to bolstering the mainstream liberal discourse. rosieni do understand what the newly anti-communist capitalists wish to hide, “that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.” (zizek, 2009). in other words, the stories of the rosieni remind us of zizek’s invitation: “perhaps the disappointment at capitalism in the post-communist countries should not be dismissed as a simple sign of the “immature” expectations of the people who didn’t possess a realistic image of capitalism” (zizek, 2009). the, differend, as a conflict over justice, is evident in rosia/romania in the pondering between resistance and acceptance of the market logic of expansion that portrays itself as uniquely superior: those who preferred the corporate project (supposedly in line with western liberal values of development) do not form a homogeneous group of corporate supporters just as the oppositional group has never been a unitary one but complexly gathering environmentalist or liberal-rights claims as well as more nationalist or socialist ones. the conflict of rosia is a conflict over the existence of particular spheres of experiences, which makes it (and its protagonists) political in ranciere’s understanding of aesthetic politics: “politics is first the conflict about the very existence of that sphere of experience, the reality of those common objects and the capacity of those subjects” (ranciere, 2004, p. 65). when talking about “aesthetics” one can think about the way in which the sensible world can be partitioned and re-partitioned. what are the feelings one “should” or “should not” feel? what is the “normalcy” of certain feelings or beliefs? studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the aesthetic post-communist subject 133 responding to legal illegalities in post-communist transitions one of the most frequent phrases in the controversy is a strong belief of the rosieni’s ‘home is not for sale’ and particularly, their parents’ home and their ancestral inheriting is not to be commercialized. for many corporate supporters this belief sounds archaic and hilarious mirroring incapacity to adapt to the mobility of capital economy. but “home” has a special meaning for the moti, the inhabitants of the apuseni mountains of transylvania. petru is a 61 year-old retired person who decided to live away from his family (living in a village close to rosia) and come back to his old parents’ home in rosia montana. for him, this return symbolized a return to a meaningful life after decades of work. however, his surprise was that he could not enjoy a peaceful life because of the corporation’s presence. he has opposed the corporate project from the beginning and considers himself to be an active citizen in the village, participating in all the events of the local opposition. petru told me his feelings about the situation and explained to me his motivation for not selling his land; as in other testimonies, we find out that the selling of a home and of a community with ancestral spiritual bonds is “inappropriate”: it is not appropriate to sell the parent’s home; then it is not appropriate to sell and destroy churches and cemeteries because these are fundamental for life; then comes our nature . . . it is a psychological war . . . we are stressed all day by this company . . . it is hard to watch them around here every morning. it was better before the revolution, more peaceful. we have been stressed in the last 13 years . . . our whole life is all too nerve-racking ever since the company has come here. what is conveyed is a special perspective on the nature of the distribution of social goods, the rules/norms/mental models of socially acceptable behaviour in the specific role of “rosian” (inhabitant of rosia montana). discursive practices involve ways of being in the world that signify specific and recognizable social identities: rosieni throughout centuries have learned to “be” miners, rosieni, romanians, moti, christians; now they are learning to become activists and tour-guides. my host in rosia, lucretia, talks with great love about her family and does not feel poor just because they do not have enough money; she rather seemed frustrated because of the present societal neglect of their possessions as being outside of what “wealth” is. she used to say that “she has all she needs in rosia” and could not understand why the value of her life-style is shamed as “poor” and “backward.” similarly, one of my interlocutors is questioning development as promoted by the corporate supporters and generally by actors such as the world bank, the european union or the corporations as marginalizing the power of local poorer people who do not have access to the resources needed to meet the standards of these global actors. he, thus, thinks that all politicians are puppets in the hands of people with money. he openly talks about his preference for alternative development that comes from common decision-making and consultations at the local level: studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 134 irina velicu a long time ago people were making a living with two cows; i now have fifteen cows and they say my farm is not large enough for european standards. why the hell do you tell me that i’m poor? why do i need to consider your standards? so i’ll be under your control? i don’t want any type of development . . . don’t want just anyone to come here to change the area. i tell people openly “you have to grow up, you cannot be dependent on the gold (corporation) or whoever comes, dependent on others just as drug addicts. we can read the above as the thought that, in order for the “new poor”— destitute by globalization’s processes—to become agents of their own destinies they need to regain a policy space where they can articulate and make visible their own narrative. this is what the movement in rosia tried to do. it revealed, facilitated the expression of and encouraged the rosieni way of thinking about their future developments as having to do with quality of life and people’s choice to live productive and creative lives according to their needs and interests. the arrogance of corporate conduct, however, fuels the inability to listen to the poor as equals not only in dignity as humans but in imagination (of the world to live in). with the money from a house with seven rooms some just managed to buy an apartment with two rooms in the city . . . . and the corporation replies: well, you are a peasant, why are you so demanding? as if we are mentally retarded because we are from the mountains here and we do not know life and we do not think: “we will tell you what to do, we know better,” the corporation was saying to them. the consent of the rosieni to individual negotiations as initiated by the corporate representatives has been fragile; as one local man confessed to me, “what ‘negotiation”? they tell us what the terms and the money offer is and we can only accept or not.” in addition, financial packages were only offered periodically and secretly (offers were strictly confidential and made from time to time when the political situation seems more favourable to the project), which made the corporate tools of normalizing behaviour even more efficient: people sometimes sold their properties for lower prices just because they were afraid the corporation might stop buying land and they will be left alone and isolated. the gold’s agents started to say: ‘be careful because it is something international! you will have to leave!’ others said: ‘you must sell while you still have an offer because after a while money will be finished and you will be left without land and money’. unable to avoid the individualized negotiation process (most rosieni, even if they refuse negotiation, had been periodically visited, if not harassed, by corporate representatives presenting their offer), the rosieni had no choice but to let the corporation set the rules; it has, thus, had the power to fragment and tear not only the opposition movement but also families themselves. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the aesthetic post-communist subject 135 in rosieni words, divide et impera (divide and conquer) was the corporate strategy: they started to break up families, buying the younger ones, convincing the older, the parents . . . through intimidation, blackmail, trying to oblige them to withdraw from alburnus. they closed rosiamin, the state factory, so that people become unemployed, another form of intimidation. instead of our cultural centre they made their own information point (or better i should say disinformation). they even wanted to take the school building so that we send our kids away. even the town doctor left. they do everything in their power to make us leave and give up. the stories of rosia remind us that the enlightenment model persists through balkanism and liberal developmentalism: in post-communist romania, within the context of globalization, the tendency to homogenize lifestyles can be observed and along with it, the tendency to devalue and marginalize as inefficiently old and poor, traditional means of being. stripped of non-monetary values, it is no surprise the rosia becomes, in the corporate story, a desert land that must be interfered with and exploited to extract material value for commercial purposes. the differend of rosia montana and the aesthetic post-communist subject on the one hand, for many rosieni as well as romanians, what is at stake in rosia’s conflict is life itself as existence within a historical aboriginal territory: the corporate mining project means the removal of a village, a community with homes and values: “the village will be removed together with all its history and its churches, to leave room for a place that could not be inhabited” (turcanu, 2002). on the other hand, the “bread and butter” arguments are widespread as well, because of the lingering scarcity of (financial) resources; these indeed, make resistance to economic development projects unpalatable. hence, the majority of the inhabitants in rosia eventually agreed to sell their possessions. sharing the corporation’s discourse, some of the former rosieni believe in the possibility that the corporate project can bring progress and better their lifestyle. should the corporation carry out the project as they say, both the people and the environment would benefit. therefore, there are people in rosia who present their self-displacement as a new happy beginning regarding their former home as a devalued land; as one displaced person declared, “things have changed for me ever since the corporation came here. my sons are both working for it now. they graduated in it and accounting studies respectively.” selling one’s land in rosia montana has often been presented as a “smart move,” an intelligent choice to negotiate a good price and access a different opportunity for a life outside the deadlock of a periphery village. according studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 136 irina velicu to the corporate propaganda, those who sold are to be seen as “normal” people looking for modern lives, moving on to a different lifestyle instead of being incapable of adjusting to the new realities. the “seller” is, hence, a citizen who understands the global economy, who upgraded himself from the old, and does not fall into the trap of old-fashioned ideological activism. however, buying land for utopias may be the new “enslavement” i first heard about when travelling to rosia—the dependence of the majority on the “wage” in the context of resource alienation. rosieni feel uncomfortable with the perception that they are just commodities, and they will end up with selling only their own labour in order to make a living. this market seems beyond their control and thus they internalize it as natural and inescapable while also criticizing and revolting against such a narrow-minded ideology. this subjective uneasiness is however, pushed to the margins and hidden though corporate ads in an attempt to simplify representations: “people from rosia montana just want to work” (rmgc, 2011-2012). but talking with few of the people who sold their land one would notice that contentment goes hand in hand with disappointment. memories of “home” and of the past are a daily companion of an anguished present and displacement appears as a nonauthentic choice; moving from rosia was something one “had to do” for the sake of a future that sounds different, a future where rosia and its lifestyle become a thing for an anachronistic past: if there is no gold (corporation), no other company would come here anyway. peace and recreation in rosia are long gone. in time, rosia will become just a legend. we all had jobs during communism. it was safer. now, with investors, one day you work the next day you are unemployed. while the ideological and political propaganda of the corporation has found the right soil to grow the seeds of co-option into the fantasy of capitalist liberation and prosperity, the prevailing feeling in rosia is that nothing/no one can offer solutions to ease the pains of these disruptions (“the state is silent and corrupt,” “capitalists only want money in their pocket”). neither the market nor the state is trusted to address grievances. one can read a permanent vacillation between acceptance, seduction, and internalization as well as critique and opposition to the market ideology and developmentalism, which offers us the framework to think about the case in terms of a differend: who are the “victims”? who is the “common enemy”? as my host lucretia was saying, “one morning i say “to hell with them”; the next day i think of selling”; her sadness about potential abandonment/ displacement was mixed with joy about showing a visitor her home, cattle and garden, accompanied by the request to tell the world about them. there are scenes and images i witnessed that undermine the verbalized selfunderstanding, the stories rosieni express and the stories they think they are in, making any judgment about facts and feelings unstable. although the various “isms” may be invoked, they can also be easily ridiculed without studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the aesthetic post-communist subject 137 the fear of looking contradictory, in private conversations or over a glass of wine. by telling and discovering various and often conflicting “truths” about themselves, rosieni are resisting the fixity of power regimes. this subjective ambivalence brings contradiction into a discursive space (that of post-communism) which desired no contradiction. in other words, community’s tensions as well as personal inner conflicts may be seen as a differend in lyotard’s words, namely, a conflict that cannot be confined to the rules of “cognitive phrases,” of truth and falsehood (lyotard, 2007, p. xii).from this perspective, both parties seem stuck in “playing the victim’s game.” rosieni that wish to preserve their land accuse the corporate supporters of being “materialistic” and interested in short-term financial gains. supporters of the mining project accuse the opponents of being hostile to job-creation and modern development. convincing evidence for both the “victims” can always be provided within the borders of their respective genre of discourse. but either selling or preserving land, one cannot appraise the probity of these choices because there is no universal “moral” framework to adjudicate them. many people ask: so, what now? the corporation has been blocked for more than ten years but what about “us” and the village? displaced rosieni often appear in the media lamenting their loss. there is overwhelming uncertainty about what “success” or “change” means, and widespread frustration that romania has no leadership that can produce “responsible” development in support of the people. therefore, awareness about the impossibility of naming a “real” victim/traitor/enemy/community has been growing. dichotomies have gradually been loosened and blurred. the complex legal and environmental problems associated with the mine and the opposition emerging has postponed any political/legal decision while other economic activities were banned. this may be seen as a disruption, a “break,” a silence following a search for answers not yet found by humanity about what development/prosperity could be all about and the alternatives to industrialism. the situation mirrors the hole in the national flag that the “revolutionaries” in 1989 were happily waving as a symbol for another order that has not yet been “homogenized by any positive ideological project” (zizek, 1993, p. 1). personal stories show that representations are blurred by the ambiguities of everyday life. reluctant to be called “activists,” their everyday struggle is both reinforcing and subverting the “truths” of this controversy by introducing the variable of ambiguity. personal stories and perception show that both national feelings of rootedness and the support for corporate mining are not forms of closed ideological engagement (of nationalism or neo-liberalism) manipulated towards some programmatic ends. the narratives of people do not simply reveal anti-modern/anti-industrial sentiments just as they do not reveal some blind credulity in the mantra of the market; they do not simply display allegiance to one ideology or another. therefore, self-identification is volatile and unstable. as the interviews show, there is a strong sense of living the “drama of uncertainty” both at the macroand micro-level which studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 138 irina velicu makes their feelings unstable and difficult to understand or label. here, both cognitive and emotional “attachments” are blurred by the uncertainty of structural changes. when the current director of rmgc, dragos tanase, was asked what will happen to those residents of rosia montana who refuse to sell their properties. tanase’s answer was illustrative: “we will discuss with the local community to find solutions to convince everybody” to sell their properties (hotnews, 2010). his answer first contains a presupposition of a (homogeneous) community; to establish the “reality” of rosia on either side has meant to extend a certain protocol to the whole of rosia and imply that there is some sort of generally accepted “national ego” or sensus communis. second, it also presupposes that (or ignores the fact that) “convincing everybody,” i.e. achieving (near)-consensus on selling properties could be possible without repression of differences. in other words, inventing a “real” community and purging it of all ambiguity assumes the role of a single, unique option rather than constitute only one possible road satisfying one regime of truth and power and the sense of justice of some while inevitably alienating others. suppressing the ambiguity and the elements of disharmony implicit in it by demonizing what is constructed as “abnormal” mirrors the rationalist project of the enlightenment which constructed its own social “ontology of concord” in order to give an appearance of natural predominance to fabricated concepts such as rationality, justice and self-fulfilment (connolly, 1988). the story of rosia is, therefore, multiple, contradictory, fractured and complex, an illustration of counteraction to the violence of a monopoly of discourse of truth about selves, justice and development. portraying the corporate version of the “truth” about rosia as the only one would otherwise become a totalizing practice, produced and reproduced continuously in language and action—as opposed to one practice among other possibilities. as shapiro argued, “no representation is innocent of practice” (shapiro, 1988, p. 97) and there is violence in the conviction that one possesses the truth. the differend reveals rosia as both an object of cognition (to be observed) and the object of an idea (to be imagined). in the former case, rosia is an object of commodification, marketization, exploitation, that is, subject to a protocol established by a power-authority (be it the state, the corporation or the ngos); in the latter case, rosia is an idea/concept imagined by a heterogeneous group of people living and contesting the objects of cognition; here, no protocol of judgment could be established without committing wrongs to some parties and without appeal to a sort of totalitarian adjudicating. ideas such as community, prosperity/poverty, labour, rights, proletarian, peasant, are in themselves discursively represented and hence contested. despite attempts to transform the differend into a multitude of litigations over objects of cognition subjected to the protocol of economics and law, “truths” about rosia are still to be imagined. finding a new idiom to settle this differend would require imagining/creating an “alternative” predicated on the multiplicity of disordered subjects and spaces. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the aesthetic post-communist subject 139 ambiguity and unsettled internalization is here relevant for an aesthetic resistance and sense of justice predicated on disagreement (discord), multiplicity and heterogeneity. the aesthetic reveals this situation of fractured interpretations of what is meaningful and valuable. these attitudes are to be seen aesthetically because they deny certainty. without a sense of certainty, individuals such as the rosieni can be political in an open and critical sense of subjecthood (ranciere, 2006) and not merely ideological, in any programmatic sense, thus remaining open rather than producing closure. we, therefore, argue that an important insight for ethics and politics is to see that “subjects are best understood not as static entities . . . but as beings with multiple possibilities for becoming” (shapiro, 2008, p. 8). conclusions: on aesthetic justice movements this article is an invitation to the possibility of seeing the rosieni as ‘aesthetic post-communist subjects’ given the fact that there is no single fixed intelligible (ideological) discourse to their feelings. challenging (fixed) representations, rosia’s campaign has eventually stimulated a different kind of thinking about subjectivity. the encounter between the moral and market economy has been such that it prompted rosieni to substitute recognition of self as a proletarianminer into multiple imagined possibilities for reinvention of self (including the migrant self). this rupture (often difficult and unpleasant) has created the conditions of possibility for multiple affirmations. rosieni are both considering and resisting multiple discursive positions in the construction of their own reality and identity, collectively and individually. rosia montana is, thus, investigated here as an “object of discourse”: how it becomes spoken of, and under what conditions this is made possible. discursive formation is “a space of multiple dissensions” (foucault, 1972): resistance to injustice (and implicitly affirmations of other senses of justice) is an ambiguous discursive practice through which rosieni make sense as well as partake their sense of rosia montana. this aesthetic space of uncertain subjectivity is, by its nature, incompatible with domination as it often stands outside the realm of the “politically relevant.” it is in this space of culture that hybridization becomes relevant as a micro-practice: neither one thing nor the other, neither communist nor capitalist both before and after the fall of the wall. the unreliable commitment of the east of europe to prevailing regimes of power/truth/justice can be seen as a drifting sand of any hegemonic platform. this ambiguity, seen as merely a “dangerous incompleteness” on the drawbridge towards the ideal capitalist society, may offer other venues for political and ethical understandings. as the rosia montana case also reveals, human consciousness may be the host of multiple ideologies interacting and competing for meaning-making and practice-development: the aesthetic ambivalence of the everyday subject. subjectivities reproduce social orders of the present, the past and the imagined future while no homogeneous knitting of these is absolute or definitive. the studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 140 irina velicu “seduction” of various ideologies is often the object of consciousness for the individual agent while the capturing of his or her consent is an on-going struggle not only for the programmatic elites themselves but for the self’s own consciousness. the ideological seduction of our consciousness is often transitory, temporary, and contextual rather than absolute. a crucial element for ethical reflection here is not the subject or his or her consciousness but the conditions of possibility for such ideological seduction or under which speech becomes meaningful and prevailing, which are in themselves historically contingent. the economic mode of production may be an aspect of the power relations, but it is not the only one. power is a particular hierarchy of classifications through which the social world order becomes constituted. change of, and resistance to injustices is made possible through the very nature of the social dimension as complex, indeterminate, incomplete and open to chance. an aesthetic approach to resistance and justice movements requires a suspension of judgment and accusations that can consume us, an awareness of partialities of truths, the making of choices out of distinctions and reflective detachments or strategic disengagements. references antohi, s. 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(2007). the differend: phrases in dispute. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ranciere, j. (1999). dis-agreement, politics and philosophy. minnesota university of minnesota press. ranciere, j. (2004). the politics of aesthetics. new york, ny: continuum. ranciere, j. (2006). hatred of democracy. london: verso, rmgc’s press release. (2006, march 27). the rosia montana project will not go forward http://www.c3.hu/scripta/scripta0/replika/honlap/ http://www.c3.hu/scripta/scripta0/replika/honlap/ studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the aesthetic post-communist subject 141 without the support of the community. retrieved from http://www.rmgc.ro. shapiro, m. j. (1988). the politics of representation: writing practices in biography, photography, and policy analysis. london: university of wisconsin press. shapiro, m. j. (2008). cinematic geopolitics. new york: routledge. svasek, m. (2006). postsocialism: politics and emotions in central and eastern europe. new york: berghahn books. szombati, kristof. (2007). the spell of gold: affective politics and the will to hegemony in a transylvanian mining community. master’s thesis submitted to darwin college. tanase, d. (2010). eu am venit in companie ca sa construiesc mina. [i came to build the mine]. hotnews.ro, retrieved from http://think.hotnews.ro/dragos-tanase-director-general-la-rosia montana-gold-corporation-raspunde-marti-de-la-ora-1200-la-intrebarile-cititorilor.html/ comment-page-1#comments terdiman.r. (1985). discourse/counter-discourse: the theory and practice of symbolic resistance in nineteenth-century france. new york: cornell university press scholte, j. a. (2000). globalization: a critical introduction. london: palgrave. todorova, m. n. (2009). imagining the balkans. new york: oxford university press. turcanu, h. (2002). motii, pe picior de razboi [motii, on the verge of war], formula as. 501, retrieved from http://www.formula-as.ro/articol.php?nrrev=501&&idart=2997&&numecap =societate&&cc=rosia%20montana zizek, s. (1993). tarrying with the negative: kant, hegel, and the critique of ideology. durham, n.c.: duke university press. zizek, s. (2009, november, 9). 20 years of collapse. the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html?_r=4&scp=1&sq=slavoj+zizek &st=nyt white, s. k. (1991). political theory and postmodernism. new york: c.u.p. wolff, l. (1994). inventing eastern europe. the map of civilization on the mind of enlightenment. stanford, ca: stanford university press. http://www.rmgc.ro http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html?_r=4&scp=1&sq=slavoj+zizek&st=nyt http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html?_r=4&scp=1&sq=slavoj+zizek&st=nyt walby final before ts correspondence address: kevin walby, department of criminal justice, university of winnipeg, winnipeg, mb, r3b 2e9; email: k.walby@uwinnipeg.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 652-656, 2022 book review human rights issues in tourism hashimoto, a., härkönen, e., & nkyi, e. (2021). routledge. isbn: 9781138491038 (cloth) us$128.00; isbn: 9781138491069 (paper) us$37.56; isbn: 9781351033862 (e-book) us$37.56. 444 pages. kevin walby university of winnipeg, canada human rights issues in tourism is a book that pushes people to think about the justice implications of travel, leisure, entertainment, and tourism. the purpose of this book is to advocate for more justice agencies and organizations to think of tourism as an issue that intersects with their own mandates. hashimoto, härkönen and nkyi examine social justice, environmental justice, and indigenous justice over 14 chapters. the introduction familiarizes the reader with the idea of human rights, including the existence of human rights organizations, the evolution of human rights as a concept, and core international human rights instruments such as the un charter and the international bill of rights, among other pieces of international law (p. 10). the authors argue these laws face the challenge of negotiating a line between the universalism of law and cultural specificities and relativism, which is an important subject that recurs throughout the book. in an interesting conceptual discussion, the authors differentiate between human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties (p. 18). they also provide context by elaborating on the challenge of navigating international law when it contrasts with domestic or national law. the next few chapters continue to address conceptual issues. in chapter 2, the authors consider the relationship between tourism enterprises and human rights by examining the evolution of human rights guidelines for corporations and state agencies. they argue that while human rights are somewhat legally enforceable, the jurisdiction for who is responsible for human rights can sometimes be a bit messy. in chapter 3, the authors situate the issue of book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 652-656, 2022 653 human rights in relation to sustainable development and sustainability, arguing there is a link between the protection of human rights and the discourse of various policies on sustainability (p. 65). the authors do not simply consider these matters from a human-centred point of view but also take the environment into consideration. in chapter 4, the authors suggest these matters are made more complex by the political dimension of tourism and policy. nation-states often have laws that run counter to human rights, norms, and guidelines. the question of whether tourism is ethical or abides by human rights in a particular country always needs to be empirically situated. for example, one could consider tourism boycotts as a response to domestic or state policies or laws running against human rights trends (p. 91). these are difficult facets of the political landscape for tourism operators to navigate. then, beginning with chapter 5, hashimoto, härkönen, and nkyi begin to examine specific human rights issues emerging in relation to tourism. in chapter 5, this takes the form of a focus on human security in relation to human rights and tourism, suggesting there are a number of ongoing security issues and conflicts in numerous tourism regions that perhaps contravene un resolutions and reports, and yet tourism continues. this raises questions about whether a country should advocate against said tourism or whether tourists should make an ethical choice to avoid such locations (p. 124), which raises the question of whether responses to human rights issues should be individual or collective. in chapter 6, the authors consider the issue of the right to privacy in relation to tourism, which pertains to the information that tourists share when they do travel, who they share it with, and to whom that information is then circulated. the authors suggest the issue of privacy is related to human rights (p. 143), although this argument is underdeveloped in the book. in chapter 7, the authors consider the issue of displacement in tourism, or how people are made to be mobile or removed from their homelands for tourist enterprise. for example, mega-events such as the olympics often displace local people and create more inequality through gentrification (p. 164). given that such events may have no regard for issues of equality, traveling to them has ethical and human rights implications that many tourists ignore. another example could be airbnb, which has become a part of tourism networks. one could argue that airbnb is not good for local businesses (decreasing available long-term housing in rental markets, driving up costs of living in general). in some places, neighborhoods have organized against airbnb or gentrification, and even adopted anti-tourism discourses and practices, recognizing the justice implications of these issues in ways that perhaps tourists do not. these practices also have a colonial dimension, as the authors note, insofar as travel and tourism have long been associated with colonialism and the imperialist tendencies of colonial countries. another sort of displacement is a cultural displacement that occurs through the kevin walby studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 652-656, 2022 654 globalization of capitalist commodities. all of these aspects of displacement raise important questions about justice. in chapter 8, the authors look at the issue of discrimination against tourists, which can reveal racial and ethnic dimensions of international travel and the persistence of racism (p. 191). the authors point out that discrimination can also occur due to perceptions of sex and gender, gender identity, ability or disability, and religious orientation. this shows that power relations in the landscape of tourism are not unidimensional. in chapter 9, the authors suggest that an important issue in tourism is mobility. they suggest it signals the exercising of some kind of right to the extent that voluntary mobility could be conceived of as a human right. the authors also point out that forced mobility could reflect the violation of human rights. this intersects with surveillance insofar as mobility requires documentation to gain access and acceptance in certain jurisdictions. the authors also raise the question of the use of migrant labour in tourism practices and how forced mobility for some may intersect with voluntary mobility for others in ways that create injustice. building on this discussion in chapter 10, the authors assess labour conditions in tourism and how labour standards connect to the idea of human rights. they raise the issue of child labour, especially in the creation of tourism products or souvenirs. in doing so, they highlight the labour that goes into the production of souvenirs as a key consideration when talking about the justice implications of tourism. in chapter 11, hashimoto, härkönen and nkyi expand the scope of the book beyond the merely human to consider the environment and the issue of environmental degradation. they argue that tourism can have an impact on the natural world in ways that may contravene principles of sustainability, leading to anthropogenic climate change and loss of biodiversity. people may travel to a region to view said biodiversity and in the process end up contributing to negative environmental changes (p. 272). thus, the environmental movement, the authors suggest, should be concerned about tourism as a potential cause of climate change and global warming. corporations and polluters also have a responsibility to protect the environment, and perhaps tourism could be an avenue for raising awareness about pollution and politicizing pollution. in chapter 12, the authors look at the rights of indigenous peoples in relation to tourism, arguing tourism can impede indigenous rights and sovereignty. the issue of settler colonialism is front and center in this chapter as is the un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples (undrip). hashimoto, härkönen and nkyi suggest that undrip is not often a major concern for tourism operators, but tourism operators could do more politically and economically to address indigenous sovereignty and rights to promote the empowerment of indigenous peoples. at the same time, there are many forms of tourism that involve the stereotyping of indigenous peoples. the authors examine the ethics and power relations of these kinds of events and spectacles. book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 652-656, 2022 655 in chapter 13, the authors investigate sex tourism, or travel to certain destinations for consumption of sexual and erotic work. the authors discuss a variety of topics related to sex, tourism, commerce, and violence. they argue that issues of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse are ones tourism scholars should take seriously. to conclude the book, the authors argue covid-19 is raising issues regarding tourism and rights insofar as tourists and travelers may convey the virus in certain settings, in ways that are damaging to human life and lead to death and suffering (p. 357). the authors are able to show this focus on human rights and tourism is one that has a lot of resonance, as well as applicability even at the time of writing when covid-19 emerged. these authors were able to pivot and show their focus on human rights, justice, and tourism applies even when the whole world seems like it has changed. human rights issues in tourism is a must-read for anyone engaged in tourism studies, leisure studies, travel studies, mobility studies, or the sociologies and geographies of these issues. however, the book does have a few gaps. for example, the authors do not focus much on dark tourism or penal tourism and their ethical implications. these are forms of tourism that entail travel to sites such as places of genocide, killing fields, places of war, and battle and death, sometimes for entertainment and amusement or perhaps for education. such places have a lot to do with human rights, from learning about human rights to enacting human rights, and even advancing the discourse of human rights. the authors have missed an opportunity here to extend their argumentation by not looking at dark tourism and penal tourism. chapter 13 focuses on youths involved in sex tourism, which would be more accurate to frame as sexual exploitation of children. i found that chapter 13 conflated sex tourism with child sexual exploitation (pp. 332-333), although the point that much sex tourism exploits youths is an important justice issue. i also thought the authors could have done more to look at the issue of sanctions and tourism. the focus of the book is legal or law-centric insofar as the un and the human rights instruments they offer are the focal point. however, sanctions are used a lot in countries from cuba to iran, and examination of the intersection of tourism, sanctions, and justice could have been interesting and important. canadians love going to cuba to lay on the beach but how many of these same tourists have protested the us-led blockade and sanctions against cuba, which has lasted for 60 years? this highlights another striking absence in this book, namely justice groups and movement organizations that engage in advocacy for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against countries like israel over human rights violations of palestinians, for example. this is another crucial area to explore under this umbrella of human rights and tourism. despite these gaps, human rights issues in tourism is an excellent book. there are numerous concept boxes and case study boxes that help guide the reader and show the usefulness and applicability of the book’s ideas. the case study boxes bring the argumentation of the authors to life. i recommend kevin walby studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 652-656, 2022 656 this book and i will definitely be using it in my research and teaching on tourism and the issue of justice. mcguire final jan 26 17 correspondence address: john thomas mcguire, school of liberal arts, siena college, 515 loudon road, loudonville, ny, usa, 12211; email: jmcguire@siena.edu issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 social justice feminism and its counterhegemonic response to laissez-faire industrial capitalism and patriarchy in the united states, 1899-1940 john thomas mcguire siena college, usa abstract this article uses the hegemonic/counter-hegemonic framework of italian scholar and activist antonio gramsci to explain how a movement known as social justice feminism emerged as a counter-hegemonic response to two hegemonic concepts established in and continued, respectively, the post-civil war united states: laissez-faire industrial capitalism and patriarchal dominance. in four stages from 1899 through 1940, social justice feminists pursued the promotion of an “entering wedge” labor legislation strategy and the increasing participation of women in national politics, particularly in the democratic party. while substantially successful in its goals, social justice feminism failed in two important aspects: its inability to work independently of a patriarchal political system, and, most significant, its apparent refusal to include women of color. keywords social justice feminism; antonio gramsci; hegemony & counterhegemony; historical sociology; feminist agency introduction words constitute so natural a part of our everyday discourse that some can become devalued through overuse. such is the case with “hegemony.” originally derived from the greek ἡγεµονία hegemonia, meaning “leadership” and “rule” (oxford english dictionary, 2015), the mass media constantly uses the word to express either the continuing superpower dominance of the united states or the rising power of the people’s republic of china.1 yet 1 for examples of the long-term use of “hegemony” in its overall terms of “great power” definition, see kelly (2014), and hayes (1988). social justice feminism & its counter-hegemonic response studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 49 “hegemony” encompasses a deeper meaning than just a ready moniker for global or regional domination. one of the persons who helped ground the word in multifarious meanings died after being released from a fetid italian fascist prison in 1937. antonio gramsci’s posthumously published publications have become extremely influential, particularly in his discussion of cultural hegemony and its ramifications in advanced capitalist societies. gramsci argued that the conceptualization and implementation of ideas in social discourse help to create either new inclinations or disinclinations among common populaces. his most important concern lay in how societal elites may establish cultural hegemonies that both placate non-ruling classes and simply reinforce existing economic orders. in response, gramsci advocated for the formulation of a set of political and cultural ideas, or “counter-hegemony,” from the non-elite classes, that would eventually establish a marxian, classless society (adamson, 1983; gramsci, 1971, 1987, 2007). using gramsci’s work as a framing device, this article argues that social justice feminism acted as a counter-hegemonic movement from 1899 through 1940 against two dominant strands in the united states’ cultural hegemony after the civil war: laissez-faire industrial capitalism and patriarchal dominance. 2 social justice feminists used a strategy of promoting and passing women’s labor legislation as an “entering wedge” for the eventual inclusion of all workers under state protection, and strengthening of women’s political participation. this counter-hegemonic movement, moreover, went through four stages from its creation to its final efforts in the late 1930s. in the first two stages, which lasted from roughly 1899 through 1918, social justice feminists defended the constitutionality of gender-specific labor laws in court litigation and created an alliance with new york’s factory investigating commission (fic) to promote and pass the most extensive labor legislation agenda in the united states until the new deal. in the third stage, which lasted from 1918 through 1933, the second counterhegemonic aim took precedence as further attempts at a gender-specific labor legislation agenda encountered limited success and the ncl legal network disbanded solved after the u.s. supreme court declared women’s minimum wage legislation unconstitutional. thus, from 1921 through 1928 eleanor roosevelt and mary williams (molly) dewson created a new partnership between social justice feminists and the new york state democratic party. in the final, most important, stage, which occurred from 1933 through 1940, the movement encountered its greatest successes, ranging from the passage of the fair labor standards act (flsa) of 1938, the united states” first maximum hours, minimum wages law, and the rise of the women’s division of the democratic national committee (dnc). yet social justice feminism still failed to become a true counter 2 the term “social justice feminism” comes from sklar, schuler & strasser (1998). for an extension of the term into contexts other than historicism, see kaslem & williams (2010). john thomas mcguire studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 50 hegemonic movement because it failed to both work independently of the patriarchal establishment and to include women of color. this article does not assume to be a groundbreaking gramscian analysis in terms of gender; over the past three decades feminist scholars have successfully reinterpreted and extended the italian scholar’s insights into such germane issues as paid work, sexuality, and violence (see e.g., ledwith, 2009; kenway, 2002). but it does intend to make a fresh contribution to the field of historical sociology (lachmann, 2013; skocpol, 1984, p. ix), and most importantly, it also emphasizes the pertinence of gramsci to the current global social and political situation. the once-dominant doctrine of neoliberalism, which focused on capitalistic markets and private property rights, sustained a significant decline after the severe economic effects of the great recession of 2007-2010 (synamon, fazzari & setterfield, 2013; domenic & levy, 2016). moreover, the ensuing, growing worldwide demands for social justice are further deepened by the growing climate control crisis (see e.g., held & young, 2011). gramsci’s hegemonic discussions therefore can provide new theoretical and practical bases for societies seeking to meet these new demands. gramscian hegemony and counter-hegemony while the ideas of antonio gramsci have been extensively used in fields ranging from sociology to feminist studies (see e.g., letherby, 2003), with nearly 400 academic papers based on his work in the last quarter of the 20th century (van der pijl, 2003, pp. 508-509), a full elucidation of his theoretical framework is necessary before using it in a historical context. what gramsci proposed, within the marxist ideological structure of rebellion and ultimate triumph against advanced capitalistic societies, was a polymorphous approach which saw the complex interplay of everyday living and discourse as something more than economic determinism. in the straightforward marxist methodology, economic developments totally initiate historical inclinations, especially in the hoped-for creation of a new, classless society (marx, 1977, 1989). while not all subsequent marxists followed this one-dimensional approach – vladimir lenin, for example, looked at how capitalism affected noneconomic areas such as culture and jurisprudence (lenin 1960a, 1960b) – gramsci, in the words of one commentator, used a “larger contextual process that managed to break with more rigid formulations of marxism” (harootunian, 2015, p. 115) by examining how ideas and their subsequent societal influences help create new predispositions, or lack of predispositions, among the common populace. part of gramsci’s formulation concerned the very fluidity of ordinary cultural discourse, which he saw not as a rigid system of class-restricted beliefs, but as an amorphous, uncertain process constructed from a threelayered interaction: the “spontaneous philosophy” of individuals, which social justice feminism & its counter-hegemonic response studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 51 encompassed language, conventional wisdom, empirical knowledge, and folklore; the “world views” of societal groups united by cultural and economic solidarities, and most important, the “dominant hegemonic view” of the ruling class (gramsci, 1971, p. 323). in order to maintain long-term societal stability, gramsci argued, a capitalist ruling class cannot frequently use violent coercion as a means of consensus; instead, the elite must convince the other, “subaltern” classes of the inherent validity of the system’s values and norms. thus dominant cultural hegemony relies on voluntarism, participation, and the apparent “common sense” that guides the society’s everyday understanding of the world, and relies on institutions such as schools and churches to disseminate the apparent traditions (gramsci, 1971, p. 333; gramsci, 1996, p. 91). but the ruling class’s constant need to justify its cultural hegemony therefore allows room for the development of counterhegemonies (gramsci, 1971, p. 323; adamson, 1983, pp. 170-179, 174; simon, 1982, pp. 58-79; bates, 1975, pp. 353-357). gramsci labelled the continual battle between the prevailing cultural hegemony and counter-hegemonic views in a society a continual “war of position,” in which the subaltern classes would need to formulate political and cultural ideas to overcome the prevailing common cultural consciousness. such counter-hegemonic forces, moreover, would encompass two agents: “class forces” which confront the processes of capitalist accumulation, and “popular democratic currents,” which encompass movements or identities involved in civil society (gramsci, 1971, p. 328; gramsci, 1992, p. 169; urry, 1981; femia, 1975, p. 34). gramsci did not see the war for position as an easily won conflict; instead, as the scholar lawrence freedman elegantly analogizes, “[t]he ruling classes” intellectual domination of civil society could be understood as a series of trenches and fortresses that could only be undermined by a relentless war” (freedman, 2015, p. 331), a conflict that would need the enlistment of the “elementary passions of the people” (gramsci, 1987, p. 418; see also reed, 2012; aronowitz, 2009). gramsci knew only too well the costs inherent in such a counterhegemonic conflict, for he vainly tried in the mid-1920s to unite the italian workers and peasants into an effective counter-hegemonic coalition that could overturn italian capitalism (gramsci, 1993, pp. 20-43; harootunian, 2015, pp. 115-120). as will be seen in the following pages, counterhegemonic efforts to counter advanced capitalistic systems in other countries also encountered difficult obstacles, even in the midst of economic dislocations that seemingly showed serious flaws in the prevalent hegemony. cultural hegemony in the post-civil war united states, 1865-1899 human history often concentrates on the violent upsurges that constitute revolutions against the established political order. but non-violent societal transformations can be equally significant. like the information revolution john thomas mcguire studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 52 which firmly established a postindustrial world after the late 1970s, the second industrial revolution, which most scholars mark as occurring between 1865 and 1920, produced similar effects in the united states and the rest of the western world. the world’s oldest republic found itself an urbanized, industrialized power, with new centralizations and refinements in communication and transportation (scranton, 1997; hounsell, 1984). a nation which encompassed ideologies of individualism and small societal structures now saw those ideologies dramatically transformed in the new industrial order (wiebe, 1967). part of this transformation incorporated the laissez-faire principles first eloquently enunciated by adam smith in his 1776 publication, the wealth of nations, in the cultural hegemony of the united states. the idea of social darwinism, or the idea incurred from darwin’s nascent theory of evolution that only the “fittest” of any species survived and applied to societal conditions, found an especially congenial base of support from the second industrial revolution’s beneficiaries such as john d. rockefeller and andrew carnegie, who only needed to point to their own humble origins to show how, through hard work and sacrifice, any man in the united states could rise to their status of financial scionship (hawkins, 1997; hofstadter, 1992) as women’s organizations in the united states encountered the ramifications of the second industrial revolution, social justice arose as a concept in the ongoing quandary of reconciling industrial and technological advancements with the dignity of working people. the term’s social and religious implications appealed to an american middle class firmly committed to its victorian bourgeoisie ways. in addition, reformers in the late 19th century took the term “justice,” which previously arose in legal contexts, and redefined it in terms of the social gospel so as to question social and economic inequities stemming mostly from, they believed, the cultural hegemony of laissez-faire economics and its corresponding rationales (mcgerr, 2005; fox & kloppenberg, 1998; diner, 1998; dawley, 1991). but even as women reformers challenged laissez-faire industrial capitalism, they also confronted another, formidable obstacle continued by the post-civil war cultural hegemony in the united states: patriarchal dominance. despite acquiring certain, limited rights such as the retention of property rights after marriage, white women in the mid-to-late 19th century confronted the paradox that, although citizens through the united states constitution and the bill of rights, they still could not exercise the right that most represented a citizen’s exercise of his or her power – the right to vote (cott, 2000). this bifurcated system of citizenship did not immediately deprive women of all possible social power, for as scholars such as estelle freedman note, women, in their “separate sphere” of civil voluntary organizations, managed to mount considerable agency in the abolitionist, temperance, and suffrage movements (freedman, 1979). but such agency did not resolve another, equally important question – how to create effective alliances with male politicians so as to create legislative means to not only protect industrial workers, but also social justice feminism & its counter-hegemonic response studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 53 to counter the prevailing cultural hegemony about state involvement in the new economic system. social justice feminism as a counter-hegemonic movement, 1899-1940 by the 1890s a counter-hegemonic movement against the tenets of laissezfaire industrial capitalism, known as progressivism, arose in the united states. this movement, which eventually gave its name to an era occurring between 1890 and 1920, originated from a desire to re-establish order in a society still absorbing the new societal presences of urbanization and industrialization, and a general dissatisfaction with the industrial revolution’s negative effects, such as unsafe labor conditions and noisome residential accommodations (diner, 1998; mcgerr, 2005). social justice feminism came out of this burgeoning counter-hegemony, and its main initiator, florence kelley, came from an interesting mixture of ideological, cultural, and practical origins. born in 1859, kelley graduated from cornell college in 1882. denied entry into the graduate school at the university of pennsylvania, she subsequently traveled to europe and enrolled at the university of zurich. while in switzerland, kelley joined the burgeoning socialist movement and undertook an english translation of friedrich engels’ the conditions of the working class in england in 1844. returning to the united states as the wife of an eastern european medical student, lazare wischnewetzky, kelley settled in new york city. but when wischnewetzky turned abusive, kelley and her children moved to chicago in 1891, securing a new home in jane addams’s hull house settlement (sklar, 1995). kelley soon established herself as a leading reformer in the nation’s second largest city. when john peter altgeld became illinois’s governor in 1893, he appointed kelley the state’s factory inspector. kelley’s proudest accomplishment in her four years as a state official centered on the passage of an eight hours law for working women. but she soon discovered the limits of progressivism in the united states when in 1895 illinois’s supreme court declared the law unconstitutional (sklar, 1995). altgeld’s controversial pardon of the convicted haymarket square rioters cost him re-election in 1896, and kelley lost her position. in 1899 she accepted an offer to become general secretary of the national consumers’ league (ncl), a newly created national federation of women’s consumer organizations. until 1907 kelley coordinated the league’s activities and encouraged the creation of new ncl branches throughout the united states. but a landmark case soon prompted her to enter the field of legal litigation. in muller v. oregon (1907), an oregon bakery owner challenged the state’s new hours law for women workers. kelley and her research secretary, josephine goldmark, worked with famed boston attorney louis brandeis to defend the statute when the case came before the u.s. supreme court. the team wrote what became known as the “brandeis brief,” a legal document that used not john thomas mcguire studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 54 only judicial precedents but also sociological evidence, especially industrial reports from european sources. the supreme court agreed with this new approach, declaring the law “reasonable.” no longer could the united states’ court system take comfort in the abstract realities of contractual obligation between employers and employees; instead, judges began to recognize that the messy realities of industrialism warranted serious consideration (mcguire, 2004; woloch, 1998). after its success in muller v. oregon, the ncl legal network next worked on passing and then defending a night work law before the new york court of appeals. in a rare reversal, the state’s highest court in people v. schweinler press (1915) overruled its previous decision against night work legislation, conceding that the ncl and the factory investigating commission had now demonstrated that overnight work proved cumbersome for working women. the legal network also continued its successful defense of labor legislation before the nation’s highest court. in bunting v. oregon (1917), for example, the supreme court ruled that men’s working hour limitations did not violate the 14th amendment’s “freedom of contract” principle, under which the employer–employee relationship could not be interfered with by the state (mcguire, 2004; urofsky, 1992). in addition to using the court system, social justice feminists also sought support for their counter-hegemonic aims through cross-class and crossgender support, which reflected gramsci’s ideas of “class” and “popular democratic forces.” two leading social justice feminists demonstrated the cross-class nature of the movement. in 1926 rose schneiderman, a former garment worker and president of the new york women’s trade union league (nywtul), argued that the quest for social justice included “the right to be born well, the right to a carefree and happy childhood, the right to education, [and] the right to mental, spiritual, and physical growth and development.” without these rights of industrial justice, schneiderman continued, full participation in the american political process by women would be impossible (schneiderman, 1926). three years later, frances perkins, an upper-middle-class, college educated woman, stated upon becoming new york state’s industrial commissioner that “social justice is possible in an industrial society” (perkins, 1929, n.p.). in addition, when the new york state legislature created the factory investigating commission after the triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 killed 141 workers, kelley and the then-head of the nywtul, mary elizabeth dreier, quickly formed alliances with factory investigating commission (fic) leaders such as alfred e. smith and robert f. wagner, sr., who also served in important positions within the new york state legislature. from 1911 through 1915 the fic proposed over fifty labor legislation laws that received enactment, the largest successful program of its kind before the 1930s (mcguire, 2006). these necessary cross-gender coalitions with male politicians, moreover, would inspire future social justice feminists such as social justice feminism & its counter-hegemonic response studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 55 eleanor roosevelt to undertake the movement’s second counterhegemonic aim of increasing women’s direct involvement in the political process. social justice feminists expanded their networks to include such public administrators as mary van kleeck and mary anderson. after 1918 van kleeck and anderson pursued an alternative view of public administration that focused on social justice, not on the seemingly dominant “administrative orthodoxy” of efficiency and objectivity (mcguire, 2012a; mcguire, 2011). academic figures as sophonosiba breckinridge at the university of chicago also provided key motivation in sociology and social work (costin, 2003). thus the counter-hegemonic aims of social justice feminism received strong support from a variety of social nexuses. but, as with national progressivism, social justice feminism’s energy began to wane after 1917. the advent of the united states’ involvement in world war i, and the subsequent disillusionment concerning the war’s resolution and the treaty of versailles’ rejection by the united states senate, considerably dampened any impulse towards progressivism after 1920 (dawley, 2003). moreover, despite the formation of the women’s joint legislative conference (wjlc), a coalition of over twenty organizations in new york state, the wjlc’s attempt to continue the counter-hegemonic “entering wedge” strategy ran into the opposition of both conservative business interests and women who opposed gender-specific legislation because of their support of the proposed equal rights amendment. while hours and minimum wage legislation for working women eventually received passage through the new york state legislature in 1927 and 1933, respectively, these actions required long, hard years of lobbying and organizing. most important, the ncl legal network’s efforts came to a devastating halt when the u.s. supreme court declared women’s minimum wage legislation unconstitutional in adkins v. children’s hospital, 261 u.s. 525 (1923). in declaring that such a law violated the sanctity of the “freedom of contract” principle – in which no outside agency could intervene in the contractual employer-employee relationship – the united states’ highest court confirmed that the traditional laissez-faire industrial capitalistic order remained the national hegemony, despite the previous twenty years of progressivism (mcguire, 2001, 2014). because of the obstacles facing the continuation of promoting and passing gender-specific legislation, social justice feminists now centered on the establishment and extension of their second goal: providing increased participation for women in the national political system. this goal became the primary aim of two new social justice feminist leaders, eleanor roosevelt and dewson. from 1921 through 1928, roosevelt worked to make the women’s section of the new york state democratic party a stronger, more effective part of the party’s electoral activities, through a combination of lobbying, campaign organizing, and installing a strong network of women leaders within the party leadership. she therefore not only increased women’s participation within the democratic party, but also united social justice john thomas mcguire studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 56 feminists with party officials. dewson, a former social activist, entered politics in 1926 at roosevelt’s behest and quickly established herself as a shrewd, hard-working political organizer. by 1932 she became the head of the women’s division of the democratic national campaign committee, a significant harbinger of her future national political career (mcguire, 2014; ware, 1987). in his discussion of hegemony and society, gramsci discusses “organic crises,” which he saw as crises where the structures and practices that constitute and reproduce a hegemonic order fall into chronic and visible disrepair, creating new political and cultural contentions and allowing for the possibility of total societal transformation (gramsci, 1971, pp. 275-276). this organic crisis apparently occurred with the onset of the great depression in the united states after 1929, which, for the time being, soured many citizens on the idea of laissez-faire industrial capitalism (mcelvaine, 1993). it also provided the best opportunity for social justice feminism to promote its counter-hegemonic aims since the end of world war i, particularly when franklin d. roosevelt defeated herbert hoover in 1932 for the presidency. not only did roosevelt pledge to use government actively as a force not only to combat the economic crisis, but he also promised to undertake effective reform to both ameliorate and to prevent future capitalistic cataclysms. moreover, three important social justice feminists now assumed top positions in the new presidency: eleanor roosevelt, ostensibly “just” first lady, wielded considerable unofficial power not only as the president’s wife but also because of her formidable political skills; frances perkins received an appointment as the first female cabinet officer as united states secretary of labor; and dewson eventually became the chief organizer of women for the democratic party. the major counter-hegemonic force for social justice feminism within the federal government eventually became the women’s division of the democratic national committee (dnc). originally created in 1924, the women’s division remained underfunded and headed by a part-time director for the next nine years. but by the fall of 1933 eleanor roosevelt and dewson convinced both the president and the new dnc chairman, james a. farley, to establish a permanent, sizable budget for the women’s division and to make its directorship a full-time position. assuming the new directorship in october 1933, dewson spent the next three years increasing the women’s division’s power through campaign organizing, public speechmaking, and intra-divisional publications; by organizing regional conferences for members of the women’s division and informing them of new party and governmental developments through a reporter plan; and, most significant, by making the division an effective proselytizer for both the goals of social justice feminism and the new deal (mcguire, 2004; mcguire, 2012b; mcguire, 2014). by the mid-1930s both counter-hegemonic aims of providing an opening for the governmental protection of workers and increasing women’s social justice feminism & its counter-hegemonic response studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 57 participation in national politics became substantially fulfilled. in 1935 the united states congress passed the social security act, providing old-age assistance, and three years later enacted the flsa. by 1936, moreover, the women’s division became an effective part of the increasing democratic political gains in the united states. in the 1934 congressional elections, the democratic party countered usual political trends by increasing its congressional seats, and two years later president roosevelt received the largest-ever presidential mandate in united states history. thus the years 1933 through 1940 represented the most successful stage of social justice feminism as a counter-hegemonic movement. it did not mean, however, that the counter-hegemony totally removed the two societal hegemonies of laissez-faire industrial capitalism and of a patriarchal society (mcguire, 2014). the failure of social justice feminism as a counter-hegemonic movement social justice feminism failed as a counter-hegemonic movement in two ways: it could not become fully independent of the prevailing cultural hegemony, particularly in its patriarchal aspects, and most important, it did not include women of color. but one must be careful not to entirely assess blame to social justice feminists for their failure to fully divest themselves of the prevailing political hegemony. one of the central weaknesses of gramsci’s discussion of the formation of counter-hegemonic movements centers on his apparent inability to fully confront a central quandary in the war of position: how much of the prevailing political and social structures can be used in the implementation of a counterhegemonic vision? to totally divest a society of its traditional structure, especially one established over a period of 50 or more years, may be seeking to court disaster, as became clear with the attempted radicalism of the french revolution, which destroyed the bourbon monarchial system, but failed to replace the centuries-old system with a satisfactory alternative. the resulting chaos and disorder merely led the french back to a semi-monarchial system headed by napoleon bonaparte, who eventually declared himself french emperor. gramsci evidently did not include this seemingly inherent contradiction in his work. in social justice feminism’s case, women such as dewson and roosevelt needed to work very carefully with the overwhelmingly patriarchal leadership of the national democratic party. this proved especially important in upgrading the women’s division from a weakly funded and staffed part of the dnc to a strongly funded organization headed by a full-time director. even when dewson became the women’s division’s full-time director, she still needed to collaborate closely with the dnc chairman (and close collaborator with president franklin d. roosevelt) james a. farley from john thomas mcguire studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 58 1933 onwards. farley recognized the importance of democratic women to maintaining the party’s national control of the political process, but he still did not refrain from sometimes condescending to dewson. the normally feisty massachusetts native needed to restrain her natural impatience – at least until she wrote her 1949 memoirs, which, significantly, remained unpublished among her personal papers left at the franklin d. roosevelt presidential library (mcguire, 2014). even with this natural difficulty, social justice feminism cannot totally escape blame from failing to further secure support for its counter-hegemonic vision, particularly when it came to the question of race. this does not mean that all of the movement’s leaders failed to consider the issue in its full ramifications; florence kelley, for example, served as a board member of the national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp) after the organization’s creation in 1909 (sklar, 1995). but in arguably the largest, most successful stage of social justice feminism, the central organization for such an effort – the women’s division of the dnc – did not embrace the inclusion of all possible democratic women voters, particularly africanamerican women. the situation proved a most complicated one, for three reasons. first, as scholars have demonstrated, while african-american women did begin to realign in large numbers to the democratic party by the mid-1930s, such new recruits did not abandon their traditionally instituted dual strategy of pragmatism and critical detachment, particularly given that the united states’ oldest political party’s history not only incorporated a traditionally contentious attitude towards the institution and expansion of minority rights, but also because southern democrats, major controllers of congressional committees, continued to block major initiatives such as anti-lynching legislation from enactment (materson, 2009; white, 1999, higgenbotham, 1990). second, while dewson and eleanor roosevelt, in particular, demonstrated no overt hostility to african-american women, the two politically pragmatic women needed to keep in mind the ever-cautious attitude of the franklin d. roosevelt administration, which feared antagonizing the formidable southern congressional scions into blocking major parts of the administration’s new deal agenda (mcguire, 2013). finally, three of the women’s division’s leaders from 1933 through 1940, harriet elliott, gladys avery tillett, and mary thompson evans, came from the south, and their natural propensity therefore lay in disregarding, if not overtly rejecting, any approaches to african-american women (mcguire, 2012b). thus, ironically, the counterhegemonic movement of social justice feminism indirectly assisted the continuing racist hegemony in the united states by ignoring women of color. this internal contradiction can be most clearly seen in the example of crystal bird fauset. a philadelphia native, fauset established herself as a social and political activist in her native city during the 1920s and early 1930s, and then established a national presence through her burgeoning social justice feminism & its counter-hegemonic response studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 59 friendship with eleanor roosevelt. in 1936, fauset became the dnc’s first director of colored women’s activities at the start of that year’s national political campaign. but in the next four years, fauset became increasingly isolated in her relationships with social justice feminists in the women’s division, and even unable to interest eleanor roosevelt in direct efforts to encourage black voters. after the 1940 campaign, fauset left her directorship, and although she continued to participate in democratic party activities for the next four years, her frustrations finally boiled over during the 1944 campaign. finally breaking from her longtime party and her friendship with eleanor roosevelt, fauset announced her support for republican presidential candidate thomas e. dewey in september 1944. not only did fauset’s defection become the most significant sign of social justice feminism’s counter-hegemonic failure to include women of color, but it also symbolized a continuing failure of the democratic party to institute any true inclusion until the 1960s, when urban black women such as shirley chisholm and barbara jordan began to continue the advances undertaken by fauset two decades previously (mcguire, 2013). a major question that results from a consideration of social justice feminism’s counterhegemonic failures is whether the movement’s efforts led to what gramsci calls in his other writings a “passive revolution,” where the ruling class, confronted with the “sporadic, incoherent responsiveness of the popular masses, accedes to some part of the popular demands and thus institutes some partial amelioration or reform which it calls ‘progress,’ but is actually simply a pacification measure” (gramsci, 2007, p. 3:257). what one could say is that social justice feminism helped contribute to the main point of modern-day liberalism in the united states – to provide a balance between the persistence of the old order and the emergent new forces made possible by the nation’s capitalist development (harootunian, 2015, p. 132). in addition, one must also consider the following question: do passive revolutions, or the balancing of liberalism, defer a full consideration of systematic difficulties? (harootunian, 2015, p. 133). as some historians have argued since the end of the new deal, the reform efforts of the franklin d. roosevelt administration modified, but did not entirely eliminate, the possible excesses of a capitalistic system geared primarily on profit considerations. in fact, one could argue that any attempts at modification of capitalism ended with the advent of world war ii, and definitely disappeared after world war ii for two reasons: the unprecedented economic expansion that occurred between roughly 1947 and 1975, and then the increasingly antistatist policies of administrations, beginning with the highly popular rhetoric of the ronald reagan administration (cohen, 2003; chafe, 2003). thus the seeming permanent changes of the new deal order only modified, but did not fully replace, the hegemonic economic system that controlled, and still controls, the united states, just as the risorgimento of the 1860s did not change the elitist control of italian culture that existed before italian john thomas mcguire studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 60 unification. but such a failure at total change did not stop contemporaneous attempts at modifying gender barriers. social justice feminism gradually concluded by the end of the 1930s. the advent of world war ii, and the increasing likelihood of the united states’ involvement, meant that a federal government already wearied of domestic reform in the late 1930s became more apathetic towards a continuation of the new deal (mcguire, 2012b). perhaps what we can say is that social justice feminism helped pave the way for subsequent counter-hegemonic challenges. as demonstrated by such scholars as dorothy sue cobble and landon r.y. storrs, labor union and federal government feminists continued the fight initiated by social justice feminism, expanding the aims to include such things as equal pay and day care for the children of working mothers (cobble, 2005, 2014). in addition, the activism demonstrated by social justice feminists, particularly in forming new centers of political power within the national democratic party, helped prompt the formation of feminist organizations such as the national organization for women in the 1960s (collins, 2009). thus while counter-hegemonic movements do not always succeed in their immediate time period, long-term success can come through their slow yet sure infiltration of the always-fluid social, cultural, and political forces contained in the always-fluid cultural hegemony. conclusion karl marx’s explanation of the importance of economics in considering historical context still remains pertinent today. yet one must hesitate before accepting economic causes as the sole factors spurring on the course of present events eventually historicized into societal memories. reality seems too fluid, too multifarious to be encapsulated into a neat schema of upperclass dominance and lower-class exploitation. more complex causes need examination before we can accept a fully rounded picture of history (if such a goal can ever really be accomplished.) antonio gramsci’s elaboration of cultural hegemony with marxist roots stands as a welcome corrective to any tendency towards monocausality. the elucidation of cultural hegemony by gramsci, particularly in its discussions of how a societal elite seizes upon ideas and makes them tools to ensure conformity between classes, certainly becomes apropos to the consideration of social justice feminism and its counter-hegemonic movement against the prevailing concepts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. by 1900 the tenets of laissez-faire capitalism seemed firmly in place, through which government barely registered as a presence on the capitalist maneuverings of a rapidly expanding economy, and the middle class, although at times discomfited by the changes inherent in the transformations of the second industrial revolution, nonetheless readily accepted the adage that with hard work and determination a man could still social justice feminism & its counter-hegemonic response studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 61 rise to the apex of society. seeming exemplars such as john d. rockefeller and andrew carnegie – men who started with modest means and who became the capitalist scions of the gilded age – exemplified this new cultural hegemony. in addition, the cultural hegemony continued after the civil war the idea of a patriarchal society that could dominate the affairs of women within the united states, particularly in a political context. social justice feminists such as florence kelley countered these two prevailing hegemonic ideas by using the promotion and passage of women’s labor legislation as an “entering wedge” for the eventual inclusion of all workers within the state’s protection, and by increasing women’s power within the existing patriarchal political party system. the first aim achieved substantial success by the end of the 1930s, as major laws such as the social security act of 1935 and the fair labor standards act of 1938 received congressional enactment. in addition, through the long-term efforts of eleanor roosevelt and molly dewson, women’s power increased within the national democratic party through the efforts of the democratic national committee’s women’s division. but even with these substantial successes, social justice feminism failed as a counter-hegemonic movement in two important ways. first, it never totally removed itself from the patriarchal political system prevalent in the united states, and second, it never made serious efforts to include women of color within its ranks. perhaps the most effective legacy of social justice feminism thus lies in its long-term participation in what gramsci would term a “passive revolution” in not only helping to refute laissez-faire economic concepts by making the state a more substantial counterforce in terms of worker protection and regulation, but also in instilling in the united states’ patriarchal political system a sense of feminist self-realization and power, however limited, this agency not only received revival and continuation by post-world war ii labor feminists, but also prompted dramatic realization by the rights movement initiated in the 1960s by such organizations as the national organization of women (now) (cobble, 2014, 2005; collins, 2009). finally, gramsci’s theories about counter-hegemony may seem outmoded or déclassé in a society where social fragmentation becomes even more marked as each year of the early 21st century passes. but if we look closer, we can conclude that the means of maintaining a cultural hegemony have actually increased, even in the supposedly destabilizing wake of continued globalization. as previously noted, the dominance of neoliberalism’s free market and individual property emphases now seems increasingly ineffective in an era of increased economic dislocation, surging outcries for social justice, and burgeoning environmental issues. governments can no longer easily repress popular discourse in return for the seeming surcease of economic mobility. such efforts can only result in failure, like the shipwrecked outlier robinson crusoe trying to escape the constant surveillance of drones in the firmament. gramsci’s theories, and their practical realizations in events such john thomas mcguire studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 48-64, 2017 62 as the ones described above, demonstrate both the potency of dominant cultural hegemonies and their counter-hegemonic responses. acknowledgements this is my first academic writing in the areas of interdisciplinary studies and historical sociology. i accordingly wish to thank david butz, monique deveaux and the three anonymous reviewers for making this initial effort better. references adamson, w. 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(1929). address at testimonial luncheon in [frances perkins’s] honor …, typed copy in frances perkins papers (box 44, “speeches, 1929–1930”). rare book and manuscript collection, butler library, columbia university, new york. reed, j. p. (2013). theorist of subaltern subjectivity: antonio gramsci, popular beliefs, political passion, and reciprocal learning. critical sociology 39(4), 561-591. schneiderman, r. (1926). extracts from address delivered by miss rose schneiderman before the women’s industrial conference … jan. 20, 1926: the right to citizenship. mary van kleeck papers (box 71, folder 1171). smith college, northampton, ma. scranton, p. (1997). endless novelty: specialty production and american industrialization, 18651925. princeton, nj: princeton university press. simon, r. (1982) gramsci’s political thought: an introduction. london: lawrence and wishart. sklar, k. k. (1995). florence kelley and the nation’s work: the rise of women’s political culture, 1830-1900. new haven, ct: yale university press. sklar, k. k., schuler, a., & strasser, s. (1998). introduction. in k. k. sklar, a. schuler & s. strasser (eds.), social justice feminists in the united states and germany: a dialogue in documents, 1885–1933 (pp. 4-5). ithaca, ny: cornell university press). synamon, b., with fazzari, s. m., & setterfeld, m. (2013). after the great recession: the struggle for economic recovery and growth. cambridge: cambridge university press. urofsky, m. (1992). bunting v. oregon. in the oxford companion to the supreme court of the united states. new york, london: oxford university press. urry, j. (1981). the anatomy of capitalist societies. london: macmillan. van der pijl, k. (2003). gramsci and left managerialism. critical review of international political & social ideology, 8(4): 499-511. ware, s. (1987). partner and i. new haven, ct: yale university press. white, d. g. (1999). too heavy a load: black women in defense of themselves, 1894-1994. new york: norton. wiebe, r. (1967). the search for order, 1877-1920. new york: scribners. williams, r. (1977). marxism and literature. new york: oxford university press. woloch, n. (1998). muller v. oregon: a brief history with documents. new york: bedford. lam final dec 13 16 correspondence address: carla lam, department of politics, po box 56, dunedin, 9054, new zealand; email: carla.lam@otago.ac.nz issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 thinking through post-constructionism: reflections on (reproductive) disembodiment and misfits carla lam university of otago, new zealand abstract in this article, i draw together feminist research on the distinct areas of assisted human reproduction (or new reproductive technology) and postconstructionist theory to examine some common methodological and epistemological issues fundamental for reproductive justice. i revisit the notion of technologicallyassisted (reproductive) disembodiment (e.g., in vitro fertilization, surrogacy and egg donation) in light of theoretical developments in feminism, in particular postconstructionism. specifically, i ask what light is shed on the paradox of reproduction (in particular disembodied reproduction) by feminist post-constructionism? keywords feminism; feminist theory; new materialism; post-constructionism; embodiment; disembodiment; misfits; politics of reproduction in previous work on new reproductive technology and disembodiment (lam, 2015), i was concerned with the paradox of reproduction, or women’s reproductive experiences, as a source of both profound power and vulnerability in patriarchal cultures based on liberal individualism. theorizing the epistemological dimensions of new reproductive technologies, which remove conception from women’s bodies (hence disembodying reproduction), i claimed they magnified this paradox, offering both greater control and vulnerability to women as potentially pregnant and birth giving. in cultures underpinned by descartes’ privileging of mind over body, pregnancy and birth are powerful reminders of the material origins of human life, but not often in its true complexity. women’s bodies in particular, as markers of material reproduction, are predominantly portrayed in terms of vulnerability, rather than as part of the continuum of vulnerability and power all bodies encompass over the life course. such representations betray a greater struggle with the reality of human (inter) dependency or “the facts of corporeal vulnerability” (whitney, 2011, p. 554), because as embodied agents carla lam studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 290 we all are reliant on others, especially as infants, and when we are ill, elderly or dying. such cartesian dualism echoes through time and remains in contemporary social and political theory as the nature/nurture or biology/society debate, which mis-portrays matter as passive biology rather than as a complex biosocial process. my work engages the biology/society debate, tracing how discourses surrounding biotechnology conform to restatements of an ultimately false dichotomy of (biological) determinism/(social) constructionism. in other words, the biology/society division plays out as what is given (biology) versus what is constructed (society and culture) and is ubiquitous in social and political thought, including in feminism. my approach attempts to mitigate this polarization and its effects by complicating the overly simplistic and longstanding dualistic patterns of thought on which the biology/society opposition is based. this is not a new endeavour in feminist theory. the renegotiation of nature and culture can be found in, for example, mary o’brien’s (1981) notion of biosocial reproduction and more recently in transdualistic approaches emerging as new material feminisms (see, e.g., alaimo & hekman, 2008) or post-constructionism (lykke, 2010a). indicative of these approaches, rosemarie garland-thomson’s (2011) materialist concept of “misfits” demonstrates recent feminist thinking about biosocial embodiment, highlighting how bodies in the world are best understood as intra-active processes rather than preexisting, distinct, biological or social entities. in this article, i draw on such post-constructionist ideas to make sense of the epistemological significance of reproduction as an instance of gendered embodiment, in its complex relation to techno-science, inequality and social justice. i revisit the notion of technologically assisted (reproductive) disembodiment (e.g., in vitro fertilization, surrogacy and egg donation) in light of theoretical developments in feminism, in particular postconstructionism. specifically i ask, what light is shed on the paradox of reproduction (specifically disembodied reproduction) by feminist postconstructionism? new reproductive technologies and disembodiment elsewhere i have argued that new reproductive technologies (nrts), which disembody and disaggregate the female reproductive process, largely represent a new manifestation of an old paradigm of birth appropriation (lam, 2015, p. 3). this view, stemming from mary o’brien’s political theory and somer brodribb’s excellent elaboration of o’brien’s work (e.g., brodribb, 1986, 1993), is based on the idea of men’s and women’s differing reproductive biologies (or consciousnesses in o’brien’s terms), and the erasure of women’s reproductive roles through patriarchal representations in techno-science, medicine, culture and politics. for example, men become thinking through post-constructionism studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 291 “fathers” of democracy, and the church, and are seen to create life as scientists, thereby eclipsing women’s reproductive roles and contributions figuratively and otherwise. yet nrts can be seen to reveal the paradox of women’s reproductive experiences in patriarchal society as both, and often simultaneously, experiences of power and vulnerability. conceptive technologies, like their predecessors, are contradictory in their ability to both challenge women’s control over reproduction and offer reproductive freedom and justice for many including lesbians, gay men, and those with congenital diseases. conceptive technology is like contraceptive technology in creating a division between sexuality and reproduction for women; but what is new about conceptive, reproductive technologies is that they take conception outside of women’s bodies, which changes their reproductive experiences. while contraceptive technologies let women choose not to bear children, at least in ideal circumstances and for some women, the new reproductive technologies take this for granted and add whether to have children, when and how to have those children and increasingly what kind of children to have. moreover, conceptive technology is paradoxical: that is, on the one hand, it offers a greater degree of technological control over reproduction, which can be perceived as a threat to pregnant women’s autonomy over their bodies, operating within techno-medical norms that render opting out of its use difficult. on the other hand, it can also potentially liberate them from the toils of traditionally conceived reproduction and sexuality, including biological timelines and heteronormative family building. o’brien’s work does not constitute a return to biological essentialism, (although it is often categorized as such) once her understanding of reproduction as a biosocial process rather than brute biological event becomes clear. such a complex understanding is key to a grasp of any materialism, including forms emerging under post-constructionism. her political theory constitutes a thorough feminist reworking of marxist materialism, best described as dialectical reproductive materialism that bears the marks of its particular ideological and historical moment, but if we can look past such signifiers most critical scholars would readily accede to her ideas: that at the level of embodiment, itself a process, reproduction has been normatively inscribed and hence experienced as fundamentally binary along the lines of the largely imaginary, but nonetheless embodied, experience of the binary norms of “the feminine” and “the masculine.” while the exercise of assigning theoretical (and historical) pedigree to the kind of materialism that post-constructionism engages is important (åsberg, koobak, & johnson, 2011, p. 222; hinton & liu, 2015, p. 134; van der tuin, 2008, pp. 414-415), and i have begun such work elsewhere (lam, 2015), here i highlight the biosocial conceptual mediation that i see as common to postconstructionism and my theory of women’s disembodied reproduction, which involves o’brien’s philosophy of birth. put differently, the emphasis of my investigation is not into the specific theoretical foundations of various carla lam studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 292 articulations of feminist materialism, but on the body and its sensibilities as “an old concern of materialist feminism as it ranges from historical (dialectical) materialisms to new (non-dialectical) materialisms” (åsberg et al., 2011, p. 222; see also lam, 2015). from this focus on gendered embodiment, and its political and epistemological significance, emerges a common transdual negotiation of the biology and society tension from across feminist theoretical and historical frames of reference (lam, 2015). reproduction the significance of nrts’ disembodiment of reproduction was its constitution of a new material reproductive process reflected in profound, radically new social relations, and new reproductive consciousnesses: a new reproductive praxis. this idea was based on o’brien’s (1981) demonstration of the way historical changes in reproduction provided the material grounds for new configurations of the human condition at the levels of ideas and society; but it was her student, somer brodribb, who first applied o’brien’s reproductive consciousness to new reproductive technologies and their legal and other ramifications in the 1980’s. in o’brien’s feminist marxist analysis, biological processes are not fixed but dialectic, involving the mediation of social, material and ideological realms. o’brien substituted birth/reproduction for production as the foundation of social life. she grants reproduction ontological and epistemological primacy over production in a feminist reconfiguring of dialectical materialism. the result of o’brien’s integration of reproductive process and dialectical materialism is a thoroughly dialectical understanding of reproduction as the substructure of history best described as “reproductive dialectical materialism” (hearne, 1999, pp. 62, 15). o’brien’s considerable revisioning of marx remains dialectically materialist, in the sense that things do not “exist outside of or prior to the processes, flows, and relations that create, sustain, or undermine them” (harvey, 1996, cited in hartsock, 1999, p. 64). more broadly, this “profound” restructuring of base and superstructure is what o’brien calls the philosophy of birth (burfoot, 2014, p.177). it is the notion of reproduction as a biosocial process, not a “thing” – a dialectical reproductive materialism as captured in her notion of reproductive consciousness – that is most important for understanding the paradox of reproductive disembodiment. o’brien believes that men share a reproductive consciousness shaped by alienation from pregnancy and birth, and women share a disjunction between sexuality and reproduction (at least in the developed world) because of contraceptive technologies. but women’s “natural” (non-technologically mediated) embodied reproductive experiences are of connection rather than alienation because they end in birth rather than ejaculation. o’brien’s insights about men’s “second natures” as coming from their thinking through post-constructionism studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 293 mediation of reproductive experiences (of alienation) are unique and widely recognized in feminist studies. that this way of seeing the world effects a masculinist denial of birth, or “first nature,” evident in a death impulse, is attributed to brodribb (1993) who traces such in the denial of matter (considered the feminine principle) and its significance by comparison to form (presented as masculine principle) from classical greek texts through to postmodern psychoanalysis. especially pertinent to the paradox of reproduction, or women’s embodied experiences of their reproduction as a source of both profound power and vulnerability, is o’brien’s conceptualization of two moments of significant change in reproductive process, the second of which is important here. for her, contraceptive technology (the birth control pill) signified great change in the social relations of reproduction, as it allowed women to separate heterosexual intercourse and reproduction for the first time: an experience that without technology is only men’s. this entails a change in women’s experience of reproduction, in its overlapping biological, psychological, and sociocultural dimensions. significantly, the advent of mass contraceptive technology, by enabling women to reliably separate sex from reproduction for the first time on a mass scale enabled radical new understandings of the self as an autonomous sexual and reproductive agent, including behavior visà-vis potential sex partners, not just co-parents. since contraceptives go back to pre-christian egypt, the key distinction with the pill is its potential for women’s reproductive control (as opposed to, for example, condoms), as well as its mass production, widespread use, and groundbreaking effectiveness. for these reasons, o’brien believed that mass contraceptive technology had the promise of liberating women, not just of furthering patriarchal control over women’s sexuality and reproduction. in short, modern contraception constituted a “world historically” significant change in reproductive process because it provided a previously nonexistent material basis for gender equality (o’brien, 1982, p. 110). before the advent of mass contraception, the only way for women to reliably choose parenthood was to be celibate or homosexual. similarly, i’ve argued that the paradox of women’s reproduction in the age of nrts is that with increasing material disembodiment of reproductive processes, men’s and women’s physiological differences are potentially mitigated, which can have progressive effects, but only where patriarchal practice is similarly altered. although these changes may “free” women from embodied reproduction (and its associated roles) they also further naturalize men’s embodied reproductive experiences of the separation between sex and reproduction, and pregnancy and parenthood; in essence, of bio/physiological act and social role. with nrts and dna testing, for example, men’s and women’s differences in reproduction are radically altered; men can technologically mediate their paternal uncertainty, and women’s reproductive processes (and maternal certainty) can be disembodied by nrts (see e.g., burfoot, 2014, p.177). androcentric dualism is not automatically challenged carla lam studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 294 in the development and use of nrts and has a significant reinforcing role in a continuous history of birth appropriation. o’brien never resolved the contentions and quarrels that surrounded her radical theory. most significantly, o’brien’s universalist claims, for example in her attribution of “world historical” significance to the changes in birth process she theorized, were challenged as essentialist. but although the open parameters of her theory need attention, her work highlights male and female reproductive experiences of normative and epistemological significance related to the differentiated corporality of sex/reproduction which nrts erode. furthermore, her complex understanding of the relationship of ideas, society and biology in reproduction (or consciousness, social relations, and biological process in her terms), is relevant and critical to the feminist movement today, and indeed to the unresolved nature/nurture (or sex/gender) tension in western culture more broadly (see harstock, 1998, p. 66). ultimately, o’brien’s focus on women’s reproductive commonality is sorely needed in contemporary feminist theory, especially when it is paired with a substantive understanding of diversity and difference and genuine strategies to address intersectionality, or the way multiple social locations fundamentally shape one’s experience of reproductive consciousness. reproductive justice is yet to be achieved; the benefits and disadvantages of nrts are unevenly distributed amongst women, as revealed by debates ranging from the provision of free contraception to welfare beneficiaries in new zealand, to discrimination concerning access to ivf throughout liberal democracies. to better understand the biosocial dialectic at play in o’brien’s philosophy of birth as relevant to contemporary reproductive politics, it is helpful to revisit nancy hartsock’s (1983) feminist standpoint theory in which such a complex negotiation of biology and society is also evident. standpoint epistemology socialist feminist nancy hartsock (1983) developed feminist standpoint epistemology as the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism that is implicit in o’brien’s biosocial theory of reproductive consciousness. o’brien may not have framed her contribution in terms of feminist epistemology generally, nor of standpoint epistemology specifically, but her work implicitly proposes a specific standpoint from men’s and women’s differing reproductive consciousnesses. as hartsock recognizes: “[o’brien’s] argument for a superior understanding which has not had power is more nuanced than my own in my feminist standpoint essay, but the impulse and conclusion are similar” (1999, p. 66). following from the sentimentalization of an underclass in marxist inspired standpoint theories are assumptions about the notion of women’s critical consciousness as essentialist, not unlike in critiques of o’brien’s reproductive consciousness. hartsock’s theory advocates a feminist thinking through post-constructionism studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 295 standpoint, rather than a woman’s perspective; the former is won by struggle and activity conscious of complicity and complexity in multiple (and even contradictory) consciousnesses. although standpoint privileges the epistemic position of the oppressed insofar as it can give rise to an improved, counterhegemonic, not just a different kind of knowledge, it does not essentialize the source of such awareness. as sandra harding clarifies, “standpoint theory does not require feminine essentialism but rather analyzes the essentialism that androcentrism attributes to women; nor does it assume that women are free of participation in racist, classist, or homophobic social relations” (1998 p. 233); “rather it is to note that marginalized groups are less likely to mistake themselves for the universal ‘man.’” (1998, p. 236). hartsock addressed the claims that she (and o’brien) were similarly biologically determinist, emphasizing misunderstandings of marx’s more subtle than recognized biosocial dynamic in dialectical materialism. this is addressed in hartsock’s explanation that in her use of sex rather than gender, she meant to imply nature as never outside sociality in marx’s sense. the claims that her work was essentialist stem from a lack of familiarity with this fundamental marxist principle; there may be no outside to “nature” in marxist theory, but such nature is fundamentally social and historical – that is, our nature is a social process. as a standpoint is implicated in a process involving critical awareness of difference and its political and epistemic implications, it is linked to the other claim of standpoint theory that such knowledge is “less partial and distorted, and hence more objective” (grasswick, 2013, n.p.). this is a new kind of objectivity associated with feminist philosopher of science, donna haraway, in the history of feminist science and technology studies whereby objective doesn’t mean the view from nowhere, but the critical awareness of the view from as many somewheres (especially marginal ones) as possible. hence objectivity takes on a democratic dimension, and is seen as a “social process” whereby the inclusion of as much diverse experience (not just interests or values per se) as possible is a fundamental feature of reliable knowledge (grasswick, 2013, n.p.). this is where the ethical and political aspects of the epistemological come into view. knowing as a social practice rather than a purely solitary activity which happens through engagement with others requires ethical accountability. feminist post-constructionist theorist karen barad’s “ethico-epistemontology” is shorthand for this rather complex idea (2007, p. 23). there is, in fact, a “complex network of epistemic relations between knowers” which requires us all, especially those engaged in research and knowledge production to take responsibility for patterns of ignorance and illumination of some ways of knowing and not others (as per haraway) (grasswick, 2013, n.p.). in other words, we must strive for an inclusive reproductive justice that acknowledges reproductive experiences outside mainstream reproductive norms like heterosexuality and coupledom. in a time when reproductive lives play out in the context of advanced reproductive technology that disembodies carla lam studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 296 reproduction, and in theory gives women more choices and control over their reproductive lives, it is important to consider what may be lost or forgotten in their wake. dis/embodiment at the heart of my, and many, feminist critiques of nrts is that they disembody women and can thus de-subjectify them on at least two levels: by taking female reproductive processes outside of women (for example by physically taking conception out with in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer) and presenting the embryo as a “free-floating” entity (with ultrasound and imaging technologies). both are linked to the displacement of women’s epistemological standpoint as potential birth-givers. the subject position associated with women’s embodied reproduction as one of interconnection with another developing corporeality, is delegitimized and displaced with other logics, specifically that of the individual at the foundation of liberal narratives of personhood. the term “embodiment” conveys the boundaries of human corporeality that are the condition of possibility for one’s relative autonomy and community. i draw from lisa mitchell’s useful discussion of “embodied perception” where she distinguishes between the “body…defined as ‘a biological, material entity,’” and “embodiment as ‘the existential condition of possibility for culture and self’” (2001, p. 15). embodiment also signifies the interplay of biological and social forces in the construction of gendered selfhood, identity, and agency. to be an embodied self, or subject, acknowledges the rootedness of subjective experience in bodies that are lived out materially, but never wholly determined by their biological features. this suggests that embodiment involves a conscious self, inseparable from its body in any complete sense (out of body experiences aside) and as the condition of possibility for autonomous agency. although the body in liberal cultures that emphasize individualism implies at least partial autonomy of a self-legislating and self-governing being, embodiment is an irreducibly social process. subjectivity arises in awareness of this separation and connectedness, but it also defies cartesian dualism because there is no meaningful separation between one’s body and one’s self. mitchell notes that “a central assumption of this approach is that ‘our bodies are not objects to us…[rather] they are an integral part of the perceiving subject’” (2001, p. 15). this perception affects self and other in an interconstitutive fashion. moreover, others’ bodies are an integral part of our own, not only materially (as hereditary genetics and pregnancy make clear at one extreme) but also psycho-socially as, for example, with inherited lifestyle, beliefs, and culture. sara ahmed aptly challenges “the body” as a concept of the singular, privatized/individualized self with the claim that “the lived experience of thinking through post-constructionism studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 297 embodiment is always already the social experience of dwelling with other bodies” (2000, p. 47). our embodied experiences, she argues, are fundamentally social as a necessary condition for experiencing ourselves as separate and unique, something many feminist theorists and other contemporary philosophers such as charles taylor have explored (1991, 1992). such relational theories of autonomy are at the heart of feminist ethics of care and feminist standpoint epistemology, as critiques of individual autonomy in liberal theory. women’s reproductive potentialities put them in a counter-hegemonic subject position, both as actual and as potential birthgivers in patriarchal cultures built on gender binaries. women, as those who hold the potential to be other than individual (literally, “one who cannot be divided”) are de facto epistemological outsiders in western cultures rooted in liberal political thought (see franklin quoted in mitchell, 2001, p. 13; see also eisenstein, 1988; tyler, 2000; vickers, 1994) though the larger point is that none of us are discrete individuals. the inter-constitutive relationship of bodies and selves is a cornerstone of western feminism. for instance, one of the most internationally successful anglo-american feminist texts was the boston health collective’s our bodies ourselves (1969), which, as the title implies, promotes a view that for women the body is an “intrinsic part of the self” (woodward & woodward, 2009, p. 63). announcing the women’s health movement in second wave feminism, it came with the politicized message that having control over your body was synonymous with being in control of yourself. wendi hadd rejects the discourse of women’s “control,” over their bodies adopted by feminists in reproductive debates, because it perpetuates a mind/body dualism that is inimical to their aims. she writes, “the body is not only a physical manifestation of the self but an integral component of the self, it is not just where we live but an element of our living” (hadd, 1991, p. 173). this argument, properly understood, performs a trans-dualistic understanding of the body that combines mitchell’s concepts of body and embodiment or the “body…defined as ‘a biological, material entity,’” and “embodiment as ‘the existential condition of possibility for culture and self’” (2001, p. 15). furthermore, its most important implications stem from insisting on the agency of the biological body, which is common to o’brien’s biosocial understanding of reproduction, and recent articulations of embodiment in post-constructionist feminisms. many feminists theorize the body from the perspective of social epistemology, the philosophical study of the nature of knowledge that emphasizes the inseparability of individual knowers and communities of knowers. feminist social epistemology, then, recognizes sex/gender as a feature of embodiment (or corporeally mediated subjectivity) that is always (socially) situated. embodiment is best understood in contrast to cartesian dualist theories, based on the mind/body division, which sees the thinking mind as separate from the physical body. as the educational theorist madeleine grumet wrote, “‘it is not i think therefore i am,’ rather it is carla lam studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 298 because i am embodied and situated that i think in particular ways” (cited in mooney & evans, 2007, p. 76). feminist standpoint theory is materialist in a marxist sense because it is based on the idea that what we do shapes who we are (rather than the other way around). moreoever, standpoint posits that all knowledge is partial because it is constituted of life experiences which differ, and that sex/gender shapes women’s and men’s experiences as distinct. in addition, the epistemological position of the feminist subject gives her an epistemically privileged knowledge, compared to men’s, because in theory it is a historically subjugated way of seeing less invested in upholding the patriarchal status quo (van der tuin, 2008, p. 51). importantly, hartsock’s original notion of standpoint emphasized its status as something “struggled for” rather than simply one’s unreflective point of view. a standpoint comes about through the recognition of more than one view of the world, which originates in a discord or misfit between one’s own experience and the mainstream discourse about the world. this can, in theory, lead to the more complex and broader understanding of situated knowledges and multiple subjectivities, and a critical epistemology. this view contradicts the major critique of feminist standpoint theory as universalist narrative based on a sex-linked essentialism, but hartsock’s response to such critiques, especially in her reflection on the original argument 15 years after its publication, enable us to get deeper into the biosocial negotiation relevant to feminist studies from o’brien, through hartsock, to the post-constructionist material feminisms. nina lykke’s (2010a) term “post-constructionism” references a deeply entrenched debate in anglo-western feminist theory. the history of such feminist theory from at least as early as simone de beauvoir’s the second sex (1989; first published in 1949) can be seen as a constant negotiation of the bio/social dualism, in terms of the sex/gender debate. more recently, this tension has resulted in an impasse between feminist approaches that fall (more or less) on one or the other side of a biological essentialism or social constructionism division. one key dimension of the sex/gender debate in feminism is the rift between biological determinism and social constructionism, whereby those arguing the former emphasize biological characteristics (often considered permanent or fixed) in sex difference, while those advocating the latter highlight the influence of social conditions or constructions (perceived as changeable). however, both positions attribute certain essential features to women as a category, specific characteristics that a person must possess to be defined as a woman; hence both arguments can be considered essentialist. but essentialism and determinism are often mistaken for each other when it comes to biological descriptions of women as distinct from men, something which gave rise to feminist social constructionist theories as a corrective to biological determinism in the first place; however, many feminist theorists have revealed that the problems associated with determinism are not limited thinking through post-constructionism studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 299 to rooting sex/gender difference in biology. for instance, lykke demonstrates that categorizing people on the basis of essences or defining characteristics, regardless of their foundations in social or biological realms, can be limiting; she calls this tendency “gender conservatism in the shape of biological determinism and cultural essentialism” (2010a, p. 132). in other words, there is ground to challenge the essentialism/constructionism split as a false dichotomy. more positively, feminist biologists like birke show how biology can be “a feminist ally” (åsberg & birke, 2010, p. 416) if understood transdualistically – that is, through challenging biology’s determinist connotations, as i’ve discussed with biosocial reproduction and embodiment (lam, 2015). even though many feminist theorists throughout history have posited a biosocial or material body that challenges determinism regardless of its origin in social or biological theory (birke, 1986, 1999; fausto-sterling, 2000, 2005; kirby, 1997, 2008), this complex notion of biology is arguably experiencing a renaissance. in 2011, feminist philosopher iris van der tuin characterized the “new feminist materialisms” as a multidisciplinary phenomenon in western academia that “feminist theory is at the cutting edge of….” (2011, p. 271). i prefer to use lykke’s (2010a) term postconstructionism, but include in this phenomenon “new materialisms” (coole & frost, 2010) “new feminist materialisms,” (van der tuin, 2011) or simply “material feminisms (alaimo & hekman, 2008) in recognition of authors’ choices. post-constructionism is an umbrella term for the diverse and numerous theories that are critical of the limits of constructionism, without falsely categorizing them dualistically; that is, in a chronological history or as simply imbricated in one or another theoretical dispute (lykke, 2010a). the prefix “post” which can be taken to imply beyond or after, can be misleading in this regard because she intends to subvert any sense of chronology and the valorization of “new” forms of body theory over what has come before. instead, the term post-constructionism is intended to showcase how feminist theories that take matter as a starting point constitute a new methodological tool, or ‘thinking technology’ (lykke, 2010b, p. 134), which provides a crucial platform of exchange to discuss trans-dualistic theory developments. this presentation also delineates a workspace where a set of theoretically and disciplinarily diverse approaches to a similar topic converges to compare notes. as such, post-constructionism (and especially feminist studies as part of it) is “committed to a process of intense transdisciplinarity” (lykke, 2010b, p. xi), because it questions the taken for granted distinctions between the humanities, the social sciences and the medical, technical and natural sciences. because its features are often characterized as new, with a connotation of replacing and bettering, post-constructionism has been met with controversy amongst feminists. arguments about the newness of approaches that subvert biological determinism and social essentialism through a focus on biological carla lam studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 300 materiality have focused particularly on biology in feminism, and whether “the call to bring biology into feminism really is new” (irni, 2013, p. 41). some of these arguments claim that feminist academics, especially many feminist science and technology scholars like donna haraway and anne fausto-sterling, have previously dealt with biology in a similar manner to post-constructionism; others argue that the notion of biology in earlier feminist theory was largely a critique of biological determinism, rather than an account of biology that acknowledges its positive agency. the point of difference between post-constructionism and previous approaches is that biology or matter has agency. in other words, postconstructionist theory views biology as an active agent in a reconceptualized notion of becoming that undoes the biology/society dualism. postconstructionist feminist theories make use of feminist thought from across disciplines and historical moments, looking beyond binary constructs to address the biosocial body “in ways that neither push feminist thought back into the traps of biological determinism or cultural essentialism, nor make feminist theorizing leave bodily matter and biologies ‘behind’ in a critically under-theorized limbo” (lykke, 2010a, pp. 131-132). the postconstructionist material turn understands its object of analysis (the “material”), as itself an active participant in the processes of life, rather than something that precedes human life activity in its complex natural-sociality. post-constructionism breaks through the essentialist/constructionist binary by taking matter seriously as a starting point, but without approaching matter as either natural or sociocultural. when matter is seen as agential it becomes possible to interact with matter in a way that affects both nature and sociality; furthermore, what is classified as “matter” is opened up to include almost anything. post-constructionist terms and concepts like transcorporeality, the material-discursive, and posthuman (ities) undermine dualistic paradigms of thought and practice. in the case of the biology/society division, such transdualism means that what matters is placed in the moment of (material) interaction between various subjects and objects (for example, human and non-human “nature”), which is happening everywhere – all of the time – and allows such differences to be seen as active processes between elements previously understood as distinct. put differently, lived embodiment, or the biosocial body, is a process of movement and change, simultaneously entailing freedom and possibility, restraint and limit. for instance, the concept of the material-discursive, rather than suggesting the solidity of subjects or agents in the world, independent of each other and their relationship with other “things” in the world, signifies that agents are made in the sense of defined and reinforced through their process of inter-relation. feminist scientist karen barad’s (2003) concept of “intra-action” is important because it signifies difference as enacted everywhere, all of the time, through each engagement with the environment. intra-action marks a “profound conceptual shift” in the subject/object relationship, making thinking through post-constructionism studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 301 bounded and autonomous subjects/objects not the precondition of relationality, but rather its outcome. these bounded and autonomous subjects, in other words, are made such only in interaction with others. for example, in each daily interaction in the world, we act but are also acted upon or changed. eating, moving, absorbing heat, cooling down, or exercising are all intraactions – or engagements with the material world of which we are irreducibly a part – and in which we are changed by, and effecting change on, the environment. thus, in an important sense, we both make and are made by our daily, even mundane, biosocial or material engagements with the world. feminist theorist stacey alaimo’s notion of transcorporeality (alaimo & hekman, 2008, p. 238) similarly explodes the nature versus culture separation by breaking down the notion of the human as neatly separate from the greater environment. some good examples of how fitting this concept is in contemporary global life include issues of environmental health (e.g., how human use of antidepressants and birth control pills change aquatic life, including fish dna, which is then recycled in human consumption); environmental justice (e.g., surrounding hurricane katrina); and genetic engineering (e.g., tomatoes with fish genes, and xenotransplantation that involves growing human hearts in pigs for human transplantation) (alaimo & hekman, 2008, p. 239). in summary, post-constructionist feminist theories are dedicated to elaborating upon a complex materiality that refuses to separate biology and society, or to make one prior to the other. these new material feminisms are associated with the notion of the post-human as a major paradigm shift within (western) academia, which undermines taken-for-granted boundaries between human and non-human nature, body and environment, and mind and matter by focusing on material life as biosocial process, or materiality, which dissolves the duality in its multiple manifestations. this radical move encompasses the macro (institutional), and the micro (genetic or sub-cellular). the term “post-humanities” refers to highly transdisciplinary fields which subvert the nature/culture dichotomy by subjecting to analysis the notion of the human (understood as separate from the non-human) in the various disciplines constituting social and human studies. such undoing of humanism also questions the meaning of separating social and natural sciences. significantly, cecilia åsberg and colleagues (2011) include materialist feminist theorizing under post-humanities or post-human studies. similar to lykke’s use of the prefix in post-constructionism, post-humanities signifies no simple breakage, but an ongoing and productive reworking of the defining features of the human subject at the foundation of social sciences, especially in the wake of highly technologized contemporary life in the affluent world (åsberg et al., 2011, p. 225). carla lam studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 302 disembodiment, the post-human, and misfits the post-human can be seen as a way to make sense of disembodied, disaggregated subjectivity, facilitated by the hyper techno-permeated lives of those in affluent northern and western worlds. furthermore, the post-human is a concept that informs post-humanities, but more broadly and deeply challenges the “anthropocentric imaginary” (åsberg et al., 2011, p. 219) in arguing that not even our (human) bodies are our own. given that at the genomic level human and non-human animals significantly overlap, and “bacteria outnumber by at least a thousand times the number of human cells in the body (!), we incorporate more bacterial than human genes into that which we consider our body” (åsberg et al., 2011, p. 219). in a clear reference back to a key feminist text, the non-human world challenges the assumed grounds of “our bodies, ourselves” the assumed coherent aggregated self as an accurate starting point for any social research or practice, including that of feminists, and my own. this brings us back to the original questions driving the article: what light is shed on the paradox of reproductive disembodiment by feminist postconstructionism? is disembodiment, which i elsewhere associated with new reproductive technology, and the dream to transcend the limits of human bodies (“transhumanism”) one and the same with the post-human? the argument i made regarding women’s disembodied reproduction as a result of the advent of conceptive technology has a similar sounding logic, but is actually quite different. the post-human doesn’t advocate moving beyond the confines of the human body, so much as grounding subjectivity in the face of increasingly dis-unified human subjects, which braidotti (2013, p. 11) calls the “post-human predicament”. more positively, she clarifies the post-human nomadic subject as: “materialist and vitalist, embodied and embedded” and as “firmly located somewhere” (2013, p. 188). at least one dominant feature of disembodiment in patriarchal technosociety is the view from nowhere (for example, gender neutral and without race): haraway’s (1991) “god trick” or the disavowal of privileged subject positions (see åsberg et al., 2011, p. 223). i have critiqued new reproductive technology as an example of such disembodiment because it undermined women’s unique reproductive epistemologies by reference to a hegemonic liberal individualism, further privileging normative masculinity (men’s experiences as representative of the human). but post-constructionist new materialism seems to enable and require a more radical reconsideration of the post-human (and techno-mediation by association) as, at best, epistemically advantageous, and perhaps, in any case, unavoidable in contemporary life. ironically, such new material thinking with its complex theorization of biosocial entanglements in contemporary technosociety draws me back to the universally human experience of embodiment as constituted of independence and dependence, vulnerability and strength, surpassing gender norms. what i previously critiqued as women’s precarious (reproductive) embodiment, now thinking through post-constructionism studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 303 seems associated with the grounds for commonality amongst not only women, nor women and men, but ultimately all embodied creatures. what more fitting base could there be for equality, including reproductive and other kinds of justice i advocate? the post-human highlights the untenable notions of not only the body as containment of a unified subject, but even its singular or unmixed human-ness. the post-human thinking tool undoes the binary code which places the human as a reinforcement of the wearied biology/society frame, and offers a way to re-embody disaggregated subjecthood in light of the messy tangle of material-discursive elements that constitute human embodied life. dis/ability theorist rosemarie garland-thomson’s (2011) concept of “misfits” allows us to revisit the paradox of reproduction in light of postconstructionist or new material embodiment. a misfit, as part of postconstructionist feminist materialism, radically re-conceives the ground of normative embodiment, because it focuses on the moments of interaction between “flesh and environment,” rather than placing disability in particular bodies. consider, for instance, a flight of stairs versus an elevator, and someone in a wheelchair trying to get to an upper floor meeting. in addition, misfits contextualize moments of fit as precarious in ever-changing and universally human, daily, material encounters with the world. garlandthomson (2011, p. 600) writes, “a misfit occurs when world fails flesh in the environment one encounters – whether it is a flight of stairs, a boardroom full of misogynists, an illness or injury, a whites-only country club, subzero temperatures, or a natural disaster.” the phenomena of fitting or misfitting with the world, places the experience of vulnerability in the material situation, the spatiotemporal location of the event and is a happening, rather than a fixed characteristic of the body. whether one fits or misfits in any given moment is contingent on fluid bodies in a lifelong and constant process of intra-action with an equally changeable material environment. in linking vulnerability to constant and ever-changing material intra-actions, garland-thomson opens up disability as an area of human concern/significance and engages power relations in situations that are unavoidable as part of the embodied life course (we will all age, get sick, and eventually die). at the same time, the concept of misfits is an invitation for analytic approaches rooted in the nexus of gender, disability and other axes of marginalization and power, as a basis for more equitable social practice. undermining the misrepresentations of human corporeality has implications, for example, to recognize women as reproductive misfits in patriarchal cultures and aim toward social and economic policies to correct for the disadvantage that pregnancy, birth and lactation typically present in androcentric societies founded on liberal individualism. misfitting applies particularly well to women as reproductive misfits in patriarchal cultures in spite of the androcentric nrts which offer women the chance to reproduce like men. i would add that a misfit occurred when, as charlotte witt has exemplified, a mother in 1939 quit her job because the carla lam studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 304 norms of maternity in that place and time “precluded women from working outside the home” (2011, p. 131), or a pregnant woman in 1946 was denied access to graduate school because harvard university didn’t admit pregnant women. in an ongoing sense, women’s reproduction creates ontological and epistemological, or “onto-epistemological” (barad, 2003) discord when, for example, would-be mothers forego childbirth altogether because of the particular misfits of professional and corporeal lives. annette burfoot (2014, p. 185) similarly discussed, with tongue in cheek, how joint custody in the age of technocapitalist reproduction might mean hiring a surrogate mother as well as a housekeeper and nanny. garland-thomson’s misfits concept is material in the sense of a concern with the lived body, and also materialist in recognizing the socio-economic (and other) structures that must be navigated in our daily lives, but which we also have a role in sustaining, or making anew. the concept of misfit nicely builds on o’brien’s biosocial reproduction and post-constructionist, new material feminisms because it emphasizes interactive material/social dynamics rather than positing biological or social determinism; in lykke’s terms, it is a post-constructionist corpo-materialist feminist theory. it remains focused on the interface of (performing) material-discursive agents in moments of misfitting and fitting without reifying either: “the dynamism between body and world that produces fits or misfits comes at the spatial and temporal points of encounter between dynamic but relatively stable bodies and environments” (garland-thomson, 2011, p. 594; emphasis added). moreover, misfits demonstrate social attitudes as barriers but also material structures, and the concrete effects of this phenomena, namely the privatization (or exclusion from the public sphere) experienced by those who misfit in an ongoing daily way. furthermore, misfitting is a universal experience: an ever-present and, in fact, unavoidable situation that affords a unique and beneficial onto-epistemic standpoint (garland-thomson, 2011, p. 603). it highlights the embeddedness of human life as never outside the frame of particular bodies in their unique biosocial entanglement. this simply stated but rather complex idea brings together social epistemology, or the social element of knowing and being, and draws attention to the privileged “view from nowhere” as androcentric reproductive consciousness in new reproductive technologies. we can frame androcentric dualism as a complicated form of epistemic imbalance or “epistemic injustice,” indicating the complex, political nature of the interrelationship between knowers. although “strategic ignorance” or not knowing the marginal perspective is undoubtedly a position of privilege, it is also an epistemic disadvantage, as garland-thomson (2011) shows. rather, the “epistemic status” that misfits confer is necessary and practical for everyone as a way of being and engaging the world and others in it who all, at one point or another, will misfit with the world and experience disability as a result. this radically extends the scope and status of traditional, gendered understandings of the embodiment of vulnerability, including the thinking through post-constructionism studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 305 feminization of care. misfitting also brings with it distinct advantages – just as reproduction holds enormous epistemological (and other) richness in patriarchal cultures – that can inform politics and culture (even on a global level), as disability theorists and feminist care ethicists show (garlandthomson, 2011, p. 604). for example, sophisticated language cultures have developed from the experience of hearing “disabilities.” among garlandthomson’s examples are claude monet’s development of a more impressionistic style as he became blind, and jurgen habermas’s revelation that having multiple surgeries positively influenced his intellectual development. if we take the misfit concept to heart we are always intra-acting with the environment on a micro-level; hence, such theorization leads to the complex ontology associated with post-constructionist feminisms. garland-thomson (2011, p. 594; emphasis in original) writes, “misfit…reflects the shift in feminist theory from an emphasis on the discursive toward the material by centering its analytical focus on the co-constituting relationship between flesh and environment.” the profound and transformative insight related to this theoretical proposition has to do with embodiment that does not amount to another “wounded attachment” (brown, 1993), but is a real negotiation of the terms of dualism (including corporeal vulnerability and power) in a sensuous material sense. in this view, existence is a function of a constant process of interaction and change. agency is fundamentally reconceptualized as in barad’s notion of intra-action rather than inter-action, arguing that we are constantly becoming a part of the world and in co-creation with it, rather than merely placed in it (2003, pp. 827, 829). perhaps most importantly, fitting comes at a distinct cost: “complacency about social justice and a desensitizing to material experience” (garland-thomson, 2011, p. 597). this is reflected in a patriarchal society that values control over the body (in its material processes, including reproduction) based on the biology/society or cartesian mind-over-body dualism. at the same time, i am in agreement with disability theorist susan wendell (1988) who reminds us that bodies are not only sources of pleasure to be simply “reclaimed” for women, and debunks the myth of western medicine that we can “control” our bodies. this is precisely why attending to differential embodiment, especially those reproductive bodies associated with pure nature, body (instead of mind), and vulnerability (instead of power) is needed, especially at a time when it is technologically possible to mediate such differences. furthermore, as i have argued using o’brien’s theory, embodied reproduction is a uniquely female experience of transmogrification of the body: an experienced transduality with profound psychological, sociopolitical and philosophical ramifications if seriously engaged. by recognizing the value in the fluctuation of bodily states (our own and others, and over the life course), we also access the powers inseparable from vulnerabilities that women’s embodied reproduction symbolizes in patriarchal cultures, seeing them as the world-transforming insights they are. carla lam studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 289-307, 2016 306 references ahmed, s. 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(2009). why feminism matters: feminism lost and found. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. ignagni final dec 14 16 correspondence address: esther ignagni, school of disability studies, ryerson university, 350 victoria st., toronto, on, m5b 2k3; email: eignagni@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 reimagining parenting possibilities: towards intimate justice esther ignagni ryerson university, canada ann fudge schormans mcmaster university, canada abstract at the heart of this paper is a collaboratively created script representing a line of analysis from the reimagining parenting possibilities project. the script is performed as a forum theatre scene used to disseminate findings from this ongoing research project. forum theatre, an exemplar of augusto boal’s “theatre of the oppressed,” invites audience members into a scene, inventing through embodied performance and improvisation analyses and interventions in shared social dilemmas (boal, 2006). the project rests upon our joint investments in exploring how the denial and containment of parenthood for people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities stems from enduring ableist views as to who is deemed “fit” to raise future citizens, and related efforts to erase disability. we introduce this work with a prologue – offering context for the ableist dynamic and intimate injustices that unfold in the scene. we also provide some background on how we developed the scene, attending to the democratizing and transformative potential of our methodology. finally, by way of an epilogue, we sketch a number of questions about the scene’s potential to promote intimate and disability justice. keywords disability; parenthood; forum theatre; co-production; ableism prologue there has been long, contested, and complicated legal debate over human rights to procreation and parenthood for disabled persons, relative to topics such as abortion, involuntary sterilization, marriage, and residency (saxton, 2013; turner, 2006); of fundamental concern is the accessibility of parenthood possibilities. for disabled people, “right to parenthood” has been framed as a human right, and was formally enshrined in article 23 of the un convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (crpd) (un, 2006). reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 239 consonant with the general thrust of the crpd, and responding to a violent history of the denial of parenthood rights (or perhaps more expansively, rights to building family), the article seeks to protect negative freedoms by limiting state restrictions of disabled people’s freedom to marry, to enter relationships, to cohabitate, and to exercise reproductive choice and control (anderson & phillips, 2012; shakespeare, 2014). the crpd also sets out positive rights by requiring “active measures aimed at supporting and enabling (disabled) persons and their communities” to access the opportunity for intimate life, including parenthood (anderson & phillips, 2012, p. 1-2). for disabled people, possible aspirations towards parenthood have been systematically foreclosed – as evidenced by a eugenic history of state regulation of and intrusion into almost every area of their intimate lives, including their friendships, sexual expression, marriage, and reproductive choice and control (kevles, 1985; malacrida, 2015; mclaren, 2015). in canada, segregated institutionalization, restrictive marriage laws, and forced sterilization were all part of a social policy response to the inaccurately assumed threat of inherited mental, physical, and moral deficiency (dowbiggin, 1995; malacrida, 2015). although traditional eugenic legislation has since been rescinded, its legacy continues to reverberate among disabled people in canada and elsewhere through informal means and through newgenic legislation. indeed, as some have argued, eugenics may have simply changed form, finding new expressions – newgenics – as it continues to interrupt and disqualify disabled people’s efforts and aspirations to create families of their choosing (duster, 2003; malacrida, 2015).1 one way this reverberation is felt is through the continued denial of disabled people’s positive rights and resources to pursue parenthood; increasingly inadequate support for families is seen, for example, in the insufficient of social housing, restricted childcare subsidies to parents who are not in paid employment, social assistance rates that maintain families in poverty, the loss of disability assistance for disabled parents upon marriage, the limited availability of accessible child and family-centric spaces (play centres, parent-child drop ins, daycares), limited accessible information on family and reproductive health, and so forth. while family forms and parenthood arrangements are undergoing profound social transformation (national council on disability, 2012), disabled people continue to be uncelebrated as parents, viewed as unacceptably transgressive, even when they attempt to approximate the most historically conventional family forms, let alone when they agentively elect to remain “child-free.” underpinning the denial of disabled people’s intimate rights to parenthood are the ableist assumptions about who counts as a good citizen. parenthood is 1 “newgenics is a term that recognizes a broad range of medical, political and social practices related to ‘improving’ human kind on the one hand, and erasing disability and difference on the other. newgenics moves beyond biological and medical interventions, to encompass systematic gaps and barriers to education, services, policy and supports for disabled people in terms of their sexuality and reproduction” (eugenics to newgenics, n.d., n.p.). esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 240 normatively a marker of adult citizenship (plummer, 2003; turner, 2006). while this does not mean that only those who parent are viewed as “adult citizens,” the many barriers to parenthood experienced by disabled people can be felt as a manifestation and a perverse justification of their continued infantilization. further, according to feminist disability scholar alison kafer, disability is culturally threatening because it cannot easily align with the curative imaginary: “an understanding of disability that not only expects and demands intervention, but cannot imagine anything beyond this intervention” (2013, p. 27). disabled lives at “the convergence of class, moralized gender and race locations” have been imagined as unlivable and granted no claim to shaping the future (kafer, 2013, p. 27). this is particularly pronounced for people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities (from here forward referred to as “labeled people”). since the figure of the child buttresses normative futures for the state and the human, disabled people are specifically barred from reproductive futurity. to do otherwise, would be to risk exposing the future child and thus all of our futures to disabled parents’ pathological nature and nurture (kilkey & clarke, 2010). at this point a definition of dis/ableism may be helpful. ableism and disableism (dis/ableism) are not always familiar terms. analogous to racism, sexism, or heterosexism, dis/ableism refers to “pervasive systems of discrimination and exclusion” (campbell, 2001, p. 43), but impacts people with cognitive, emotional, sensory, and physical impairments or differences. dis/ableism emanates from a “culturally embedded network of beliefs, processes and practices about the perfect, typical, fully human, bodily standards” (campbell, 2001, p. 43). these are reflected in normative ideas about what constitutes health, productivity, beauty, intelligence, and competence, against which disabled, mad, deaf, and labeled people are understood to be “diminished humans” (campbell, 2001, p.43). by dehumanizing and devaluing disabled people, these beliefs fuel the restriction and containment of disabled people’s activity and the “socially embedded and engendered ways” in which we undermine their physical and emotional wellbeing (thomas, 2007, p. 73; goodley, 2014). to summarize, disabled people’s imputed failure to meet cognitive, social, and physical ideals means they are actively disqualified from parenting (through sterilization, lack of sexual health education, denial of opportunities for intimacy, child apprehension, etc.). eugenic ideals of a good birth, proper home, ideal family, and proper parenting continue to surface in contemporary assessments of who is or isn’t fit to be a citizen and to produce future citizens. background of the project reimagining parenting possibilities (rpp) grew out of the work of the community organization strength-based parenting initiative (spin). spin is reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 241 a user-led provincial network (ontario, canada), created and operated by and for parents and prospective parents with disabilities. spin provides education and advocacy around experiences and concerns related to parenting and disability. committed to inclusion, equity, affordability, and justice around parenting resources, spin operates from anti-oppression and anti-ableism philosophies as it strives to re-imagine parenting and family life for all disabled, mad, deaf, and labeled people. in its work, the group has repeatedly confronted how people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities are acutely marginalized with respect to parenting and parenthood. it was these observations that led to the establishment of rpp, an ontario-wide, community-based, participatory research initiative. using a co-researcher model, the project attempts to privilege the voices of labeled people. we begin with the experience of disability to re-imagine what we think of as parenting, family, intimacy, and reproductive justice in non-normative and inclusive ways. we acknowledge the ways in which “intellectual and developmental disability” and “parenting/parenthood” are culturally constructed and socially, economically, and politically mediated. thus, in this project we (as a research team) are trying to move beyond a phenomenological account towards a critical interpretation. our project is not framed as therapeutic, but as a means of taking part in the ongoing debates about intellectual and developmental disability and parenting/parenthood in the cultural realm. the co-researcher teams one of our first tasks in the project was to establish a core group of six selfadvocate co-researchers – rpp co-researchers – who have been working alongside academic and community team members on all aspects of the project (for instance, in developing interview guides, training other coresearchers, conducting interviews and data analysis, and disseminating findings).2 in addition to the core group, groups of three or four self-advocate co-researchers in five other communities across ontario were put into place to implement the project in their region. working with local facilitators, they interviewed service providers and policy makers in order to develop a sense of the resource context in their region. significantly, they also interviewed labeled people about their parenting experiences, aspirations, and disappointments. 2 self-advocate refers to a labeled person who advocates for social and political change to improve the life conditions for disabled people and themself. esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 242 our methodology at the direction of the co-researchers we decided to use forum theatre both as a form of analysis and as a means of knowledge and story sharing. forum theatre is based on augusto boal’s (1995, 2002) “theatre of the oppressed” framework for popular education and social change. boal describes this framework as follows: a system of physical exercises, aesthetic games, image techniques and special improvisations whose goal is to safeguard, develop and reshape this human vocation, by turning the practice of theatre into an effective tool for the comprehension of social and personal problems and the search for their solutions. (boal, 1995, pp. 14-15) forum theatre, itself, is intended to generate collaborative and critical dialogue among the audience members. scenes about a social or political situation are created and presented to audiences. actors’ and audience members’ roles are interchangeable – audience members can join the scene and are invited to stop the action and suggest alternative actions that will lead to more desirable results. these spect-actors (boal, 2002) thus become active transformers of the scene. consistent with boal’s work, in our use of forum theatre, the scenes are not intended to culminate in a single solution or play out to a single “correct” conclusion. instead, the involvement of audience members may generate multiple possibilities or follow different trajectories. thus, we hope that audience members and we, as researchers, might “become more conscious of the other person’s possibilities” (taussig, schechner, & boal, 1990, p. 62). creating the scene we derived our forum theatre scenes through a process of collaborative analysis. we began by working in small groups of academic, community, and self-advocate co-researchers. we read interview transcripts together, making note of what seemed important, what questions were generated for us, and what we thought was “going on” in the interviews. after we had worked through about ten interviews, we paused to take stock of our salient learning to that point. among the most compelling revelations were the institutional and family responses to labeled people considering parenthood. team members were particularly moved by the responses to expectant parents. focusing on these, we spent considerable time thinking and talking about the key responses labeled people received with respect to parenting – the underlying assumptions, motivations, content, tone, and individual and collective effects of these responses on labeled people. at that point, the academic researchers (ignagni and fudge schormans) returned to the transcripts to identify various excerpts that exemplified the reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 243 responses. these were compiled and reviewed again by the larger team. then, working with a few interviews, we began to devise our scenes. through brainstorming and considering our own experiences with families, co-researchers settled on dinner scenes with family and friends, and from that point began to improvise and work the situations until we had four loosely scripted scenes. returning to the transcripts, academic team members re-worked the scripts again to integrate exemplary and analytically significant participant quotations into the scenes, checking with the larger research team to make sure they fit with team members’ initial analyses and ideas. throughout the process we tried to make the narratives presented in individual participant interviews more complex, weaving in other responses as much as possible. our objective was to develop scenes that would render visible and juxtapose subjugated, dominant, dis/ableist, resistant, and other perspectives. the questions raised in the scenes deal with value and ethics (professional and societal), and with power and privilege. our hope is that through repeated workshopping of these and other scenes, we can reveal many other experiences and meanings of intellectual and developmental disability, parenting/parenthood, and intimate life. below we present the script for one scene. making lemonade by: christine austin, joanna drassinower, kareem elbard, rainbow hunt, ashley judge, renee morin, romeo pierre, tania jivraj, kate peters, sarah wren. characters: narrator; mary; tyrone; christine johnson; joe johnson; gladys (the social worker); father murphy (the priest); uncle bob; aunt sarah seating arrangement: esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 244 narrator: hello, i am part of the reimagining parenting possibilities selfadvocate parenting working group. i’ll be your narrator for this afternoon. we’re going to present a four act play. we ask that you save your questions until the end. in our first act, we will be joining the johnsons for dinner. let me introduce you to the family. here at the head of the table is joe johnson – the family patriarch. at the other end of the table is his wife christine johnson. among the friends and family present there are a couple people we should pay attention to. this is father murphy, the local priest. here’s uncle bob – he’s never really fit into the family. here’s his partner aunt sarah, she has a heart of gold. and here is gladys, the neighbor. she just happens to be a worker at children’s aid. and finally, here’s tyrone and mary – both of whom have been labeled with developmental disabilities. mary is joe and christine’s daughter and tyrone is her current boyfriend. they have a big announcement to make! (everybody fusses and makes comments about how good the roast beef was. people around the table are all talking to each other. mary and tyrone are sitting close together and whispering to each other – they are nervous and excited.) mary: (clinks her glass, excitedly) excuse me, excuse me. christine: everybody, mary is trying to get our attention. mary: thanks mom. everybody, tyrone and i have something we’d like to share with you. christine: which is? mary: (very happy) tyrone and i are having a baby. i’m six weeks pregnant! (a collective gasp from everyone except tyrone) dad: you are???!!! christine: oh my god! what are we going to do now?! we have to fix this somehow! gladys: (calmly) well, christine, joe, don’t worry. there’s lots we can do to help out. dad: like what? reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 245 gladys: well, these two (pointing to mary and tyrone, speaking sarcastically) can come down to the office and they can complete some paperwork. we have a lot of forms for them to fill out. then at a later date, you and christine can come and fill out some forms. then one of my colleagues can come here for a home visit and you can fill out some more forms. now if you all come to these meetings and fill out the correct forms, we can be finished by the time the baby is about 4 years old. christine: (talking to mary and tyrone, speaking angrily) hold on a minute! you two think you’re going to be parents? there’s part of me that wants to say you made your bed, you sleep in it. mary: we’re prepared to take on that responsibility. we want to raise this child just like you raised me. we’re excited about being a family. dad: well that’s great, that’s what we would want you to do… but that’s not very realistic. christine: oh my, this is all such a shock! uncle bob: (gruffly) oh calm down christine. it’s still early. the girl said it was only six weeks along. she could (whispering) terminate. you know get rid…. mary: (upset) but i don’t want to! the priest: (interrupting, indignant) excuse me; the johnson’s are an upstanding catholic family. their faith forbids them from taking a life! a life, even at six weeks, is a life. if the johnson’s had those kinds of values, mary would not be with us today. mary: i really want to have this baby…. tyrone: mr. and mrs. johnson, since we’re having this baby, i would like to ask for mary’s hand in marriage. (takes mary’s hand and speaks lovingly) (silence) dad: well young man, mary’s mother and i will have to think about that! christine: yes, at this point, i can see us helping mary raise the baby. but you tyrone…… esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 246 the priest: i’m not sure i can actually marry you both tyrone. marriage is a sacrament. i can only marry people who understand the sacred bond they’re about to enter. gladys: and you’re getting way ahead of yourself tyrone. of course you might be able to have supervised visits with the child, but just because you are the biological father, doesn’t mean children’s aid will think you can be an active parent to this child. in fact, before either of you can seriously think about parenting this child, you will need to have a parenting capacity assessment and a risk assessment. and i’m not at all sure about the outcome…. aunt sarah: (to gladys) so are you suggesting that we bring them into children’s aid. i’ve known these two for a long time – they wouldn’t intentionally hurt a child! gladys: not intentionally… tyrone: (upset) but why should i have supervised visits? it’s our kid. we created a baby out of our love. and we will love this child – not hurt it. uncle bob: (interrupting) but really, do you think those two can do it. (to tyrone) do you two have jobs? mary: well we have part-time jobs. they are supported employment but we do have jobs! tyrone and i love each other and we have so much love to give this baby! uncle bob: do you make enough money to live on? mary: well, we do get odsp.3 it’s not a lot. but we want to raise our child just like mom and dad did…. uncle bob: well, do you have a place to live? tyrone: well, yes. we live in a nice assisted living building. it’s a sil.4 uncle bob: can you raise a family there? tyrone: (shakes his head) 3 odsp (ontario disability support program) is an income transfer program aimed at people with disabilities in the province of ontario, canada. 4 sil (supported independent living). reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 247 narrator: tyrone is feeling like he has been shut out of this family and out of his baby’s life. mary: well, no, i don’t think so… but mom and dad, tyrone and i want to learn how to support this child, just like you raised me. uncle bob: do you know how to change a diaper? dad: do you know how to take care of a colicky baby? the priest: do you know how to soothe a teething baby? aunt sarah: do you know what to do if the baby cries all night? mary: (pleading) i promise, we’ll take parenting classes. we can…. christine: well, somebody has to take control of this mistake. don’t you agree joe? aunt sarah: but listen, you both will get more odsp if you have a baby, right? i heard that you can get nursery furniture, a stroller, extra money for diapers and formula. maybe an agency like children’s aid can help with extra support? gladys: (sarcastically) oh yeah, mary has hit the jackpot! no seriously, the odsp increase is minimal. and the agency is concerned with getting families to raise their children independently. joe: (to christine) oh, yeah. it took two of them to do it, but i think at this point, you and i will need to take over. they don’t have the finances, they don’t have a house… narrator: tyrone and mary understand that they will have no say in their baby’s life. they start moving away from the table, crying and holding each other for comfort. (here tyrone and mary start moving back, away from the table and the rest of the family. they are holding each other and clearly upset.) aunt sarah: well, maybe that’s the answer. maybe, joe and christine, you can raise the baby. it pains me to think of that little bairn alone in the world. you always wanted a second child. esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 248 the priest: with your faith, the way you value life. you see every child as a blessing – how wonderful that you might consider raising this child in this faithful home. gladys: and you’re so well resourced as a family. and you are still young enough to raise your grandchild. the priest: what a lucky child this will be! christine: i’m feeling a little better about this. joe, what colour should we paint the bedroom? joe: i should go out to the garage and see if we have anything stored away from when mary was young. maybe this one will be a boy. i could teach him woodworking. aunt sarah: oh, i can start my knitting again – i love making booties. uncle bob: this family amazes me in the way it can make lemonade out of any lemon of a situation! the end at this point, the narrator goes around the table and asks each character what they want. while responses are not tightly scripted they generally reflect the following sentiments: joe: i just want to play golf. father murphy: i want morality to prevail – and it has. uncle bob: i want people around this table to be sensible! let’s be realistic, they can’t parent a child. aunt sarah: i just want everyone to get along. gladys: i’m so close to retirement; i just want this situation to get resolved without too much work or complication. christine: i want to make sure my new little grandchild is safe. tyrone: i want to be part of my child’s life. mary: i want to raise my baby with tyrone and i want my family to support my decision! reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 249 the narrator then opens conversation to the audience, asking them what they think of the outcome, what feelings and thoughts it raises for them, and how they think the dynamic might have played out differently. after some discussion, audience members are invited to become spect-actors and the scene is re-enacted with audience members moving in and out of the action. epilogue to date, making lemonade has been presented 16 times, with plans to integrate it and other scenes into more structured educational workshops. well-received by most audiences, we are struck by some of the ways its performance both opens up and precludes the possibilities for re-imagining parenting and intimate justice for labeled people. below we introduce some emerging questions. how do we reach different audiences? our audiences have, for the most part, been comprised of academics and students (from various disciplines including social work, disability studies, midwifery, history, law, philosophy, and gender studies), although we have had several opportunities to reach out to general communities. initially, our audiences reflected our desires to elicit feedback on our research methodology and its potential for knowledge mobilization and exchange. working with university-based audiences also allows us to reach future practitioners directly and indirectly through those currently in positions to challenge dis/ableist discourse within curriculum, research, and policy consultation. we have been only moderately successful in reaching practitioner audiences, especially child welfare workers. this matters because many of our participants’ stories recounted hurtful experiences with child welfare, including child apprehension. many child welfare social workers are trained and committed to an anti-oppression analysis, but this does not always extend to disability, which tends to be viewed as a clinical matter. thus our work, which positions disability as a social construct, may not be viewed as relevant to or consistent with child welfare values. in fact, if disability is viewed as “naturally” contributing to the risk of child neglect and maltreatment, as an understandable source of parental or caregiver stress, the conflict and oppression within the scene may not be recognized. more significantly, we are less able to access labeled people. while labeled people have been in our audiences, their numbers have been low. this difficulty speaks to the extent to which labeled people’s lives remain heavily monitored and contained. given the very high number labeled interviewees in the larger project who told us they had never previously voiced their parental esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 250 desires, our hope is that these scenes can serve as a vehicle to begin such conversations. we also hope that theatre workshops can become a place to share practical resources to help labeled people realize their parenting dreams. we continue to struggle with how to reach labeled people. what sorts of narrative interventions emerge? many audiences remark that making lemonade is the first time they have witnessed labeled people in a position of providing expert and legitimated knowledge. some go as far as to admit that the workshops are the first time they have met a labeled person. among those who work directly to support families, the scenes provided a sobering insight into the disabling and demeaning responses received by labeled prospective parents. the ways in which dis/ableism is systemically embedded are illuminated for audiences through the characters of father murphy and gladys, the social worker. by entering the scene, some audience members begin to think about how to resist and transform the system. for instance, the priest is often the first character to be replaced by a spect-actor, his dialogue transformed to celebrate the disabled couple’s right to and desire for loving commitment. audiences seem to trouble the priest’s moral authority, by removing scripted moral pronouncements and replacing them with words of comfort and validation. in other instances, audience members are quick to invent new characters, such as lawyers, who would help mary and tyrone claim their parental and intimate rights – creating a systemic enhancement of sorts. audiences also clearly worried about interpersonal dis/ableism, crystallized in the silencing and spatial distancing of both expectant parents. spect-actors took on the role of kindly aunt sarah to offer assistance instead of recrimination. indeed, spect-actors challenged other characters (for example, uncle bob) on their “bullying” and “close-mindedness.” other audience interventions have been less transformative. we focus on three consistent responses here: default to dominant models of disability, magical thinking, and the reiteration of competence. audiences’ possibilities for mary and tyrone often follow one of the major models of disability: charity or rights. of the pair, the charitable responses to disability emerge more readily. audience members eagerly offer to lend a hand – offering advice, time, a basement apartment, a call to the congregation to donate money and baby gear – offers of assistance that rarely emerged from mary and tyrone’s expressed concerns or wants. we suspect these responses are well-intended efforts to care and show support for the young couple. rarely however, do audiences account for how these offers are ad hoc and contingent on the benefactor’s resources and immediate priorities. we are grappling with how audiences could be supported to explore the possibility that these offers are extended on the assumption that mary and tyrone will ultimately enact some form of normative parenthood. equally reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 251 troubling, audience members never consider the thresholds to their own “giving” – what they need or expect in exchange for their goodwill. a challenge for us is to help audiences consider these questions and to reflect on the impact of charitable responses to disabled people. the charity model positions disabled people as dependent: passive recipients of others’ beneficence. disability is understood as an individual misfortune, which underpins and explains all the troubles experienced by the disabled person. what is called for in the charity model is a gesture of assistance directed at the individual, rather than any broader social enhancement to redress exclusions from or deterrents to parenthood (stiker, 1999; longmore & umansky, 2001). audiences may not be conscious of this broader framing of their interventions in the scene. in times of government social spending restraint, communities, families, and individuals are called upon to assume care for one another. we are enjoined to form strong social bonds and collective care to prevent vulnerable others from slipping through an unraveling social safety net. thus, the impulse to informally share individual resources comes in part from a practical appraisal of mary and tyrone’s precarious material conditions (no job, low income, inadequate housing). this impulse might be fueled by a sense of active citizenship (commitment to taking responsibility for one’s family/neighbours/community through civic engagement and participation), or conversely, by a disability commons (a sphere of reciprocity and mutual support outside of and contra the market) (e.g., runswick-cole & goodley, 2015). our task within workshops is to prompt audiences to note and guard against slippage between these two positions, keeping the structural forces shaping family making in mind. charitable interventions have an enduring impact on labeled people’s lives. while doing little to change their social and material life conditions, charity responses tell labeled people that they are objects of sympathy and pity. labeled people may, and often do, internalize these messages, eroding their sense of worthiness and capacity to care for others. charitable responses can be understood and felt as dis/ableist micro-aggressions, fueling psychoemotional distress (campbell & oliver, 2013; reeve, 2006). because many disabled people’s access to helpful resources and community integration is so precarious, many feel they cannot draw attention to the violent dimensions of charity. instead they find themselves assuming a posture of deference and gratitude that keep them locked in as needy subjects. in sharp contrast to the charitable model of disability, audiences sometimes evoke rights models of disability. this too takes different routes – sometimes as appeals to intimate human rights as articulated in the crpd. at other times, audiences are calling for social rights; the state supported services afforded to citizens of the global north’s (former) welfare states. disability rights have had an undeniably helpful impact on many disabled people, leading to more meaningful integration to work, education, and community life (shakespeare, 2014). rights have helped to spell out a minimum standard esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 252 of treatment and promises of freedom from harm (ignatieff, 2008). however, rights approaches have recently been criticized for creating new social divisions (kafer, 2013; mingus, 2011). rights interventions depend on a pre-given knowledge of entitlements. yet as our research findings indicate, many labeled people do not have access to rights information. when such information is at hand it is not always in an accessible format. as such, when spect-actors bring in rights-based interventions we must stop the scene to provide a clear explanation of these rights in order for labeled people to keep pace with what is being proposed. other times, it is audiences themselves who raise questions about rights approaches. audience members whose identities and histories are not tied to privileged western nations, question the continued turn to the state, querying how intimate rights can be pursued in the context of serious material deprivation or failed governments (ignagni, fudge schormans, liddiard, & runswick-cole, 2016). even among north american and european audiences, social rights such as education, social assistance, or healthcare, might be understood as precarious. for instance, under conditions of austerity social policy, such as in the united kingdom, disabled people have been among the hardest hit, subject to a host of benefit clawbacks (runswick-cole & goodley, 2015). and while our human rights, as represented in the crpd, are meant to help resist the erosion of hard-won entitlements, the social infrastructure enabling these claims has been dismantled and defunded (see, for example, the removal of the canadian federal charter challenges program in 2006). still more unsettling were the responses of aboriginal participants and audience members who did not necessarily see themselves as rights-bearing canadian “citizens,” but as being in treaty relationships with the canadian state; they were frustrated in their attempts to join in such alternate imaginings. deepening their sense of disengagement was their understanding of disability as a colonialist category on par with gender (see also evans, hole, berg, hutchinson, & sookraj, 2009). while our thoughts about these interactions and responses are evolving, we wonder about the new exclusions that might be created by these ostensibly empowering interventions. marta russell, late disability activist and scholar, argued that the majority of those who have benefitted from rights victories have been middle-class and otherwise privileged. consequently, the existing rights frameworks do not reflect the life circumstances of the majority of disabled people (russell, 1999). how can the complicated and contradictory dimensions of the ostensibly emancipatory promise of rights be surfaced with audiences? how can we teach audience members about disability rights, even as we articulate their limitations and normative underpinnings? a second set of questions emerges when the scene’s narrative plays out along a magical vein. boal describes magical thinking as the moment audience members move the action of the scene from reality to “the realms of magic or fantasy” (2002, p. 37). perhaps the clearest instances of this were reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 253 audience members’ efforts to convince others around the table that mary and tyrone could raise their child independently. this is not in itself fantastical, but the dialogue in these interventions seems to inevitably slip into playful pronouncements; the audience introduces romantic ideas about tyrone’s impending debut as a hip-hop artist, for example. to contextualize this imaginative turn, it is crucial to know that tyrone was portrayed by a black self-advocate (who chose the name tyrone for the character). although project self-advocates have found recent news reports about a young labeled father who embarked upon a rap music career, we have all agreed that the scene would not practically play out along these desirable lines. moreover, the intervention evokes black culture in ways that seem to narrow the possible avenues to paid work and “success” to options that can only be accomplished by a very privileged few. another less whimsical example of magical thinking occurs when spectactors, in taking on the gladys role, and abandon all the concomitant responsibilities of a child welfare worker. the new gladys offers unconditional, compassionate support, much like those audience members enacting the charity model of disability. often, one of the research team actors must challenge this intervention, noting that no child welfare worker could work in this manner, due to state-based professional practice regulations and resource realities. we try to work together to imagine how gladys might support the johnson family, especially mary and tyrone, within the constraints of her position. we appreciate the audiences’ attempts to hold onto dreams that offer more hope for justice than the inadequate solutions we have at hand. at the same time, we continue nudging audiences towards more reflexive positions that unpack the interpersonal and structural dis/ableisms shaping the dinner table interactions. finally, we have noted that many interventions try to inculcate and assert mary and tyrone’s ability to competently parent their future child. sometimes this looks like skills training – offers of classes and mentoring to help mary and tyrone acquire and perfect the essential tasks of parenting. other times, the interventions are more general, focusing on their (imagined) alternate areas of competence (e.g., emotional intelligence). in every presentation of the scene, a non-labeled parent in the audience will share their own knowledge gaps with the birth of their first child. audiences suggest that “no one knows what to do” when it comes to parenting a first child, but imply that parenting knowledge is there for the taking. the assumption is that, like non-labeled first time parents, mary and tyrone can become “competent subjects” and competent parents. this turn toward the issue of competence troubles the intersection of parenthood and intellectual and developmental disability. as with other interventions, education or knowledge acquisition serve to individualize the parenting problems faced by mary and tyrone in the scene. the approach assumes that their problem lies in a knowledge and skills deficit. presumably this deficit can be overcome by submitting the pair to new forms of adult esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 254 education, despite the fact that many labeled people experience education and training as arenas of extreme disempowerment (erevelles, 2005; watts & erevelles, 2004). when the scene begins to play out along these lines, we wonder how to avoid reiterating the very ground upon which labeled people are marginalized. then our challenge in the scenes is to prompt audiences to consider why labeled people have lacked the opportunities to develop parenting knowledges and practical skills in the first place. how can we reveal the normative demands connected with any discrete body of parenting knowledge? how can we begin to de-link human value from notions of competence? how might audiences be inspired to think about alternatives to competence? ethical dilemmas of performance in the prologue of this paper, we cited alison kafer’s observation that those marked “feebleminded” were located “at the convergence of race, moralized gender, class and disability” (2013, p.27). as rpp members, many of us – like many of our participants – live at those intersections, and wove them into the script when we could. thus, mary and tyrone reflect the embodied and biographical experiences of several co-researchers and interview participants. in other scenes, aboriginal and queer identities are reflected in the characters and their dialogue. very specific experiences, such as inducements to voluntary sterilization; the push for termination of pregnancy; the denial, interruption, and discrediting of intimate relationships; and the separation from children are also reflected in the dynamics that play out in the different scenes. given that the dinner table scene involves nine characters, we have sometimes found that we did not have enough actors to occupy the available roles. early on, we decided to invite audience members to take on a scripted role. volunteers are quickly apprised of the character’s attitude, motivations, and wants in the scene. this has meant that a volunteer actor may embody a character that has little bearing on their personal experience, raising some ethical questions. for instance, there is always a risk of enacting a sort of “cripface” with the problems that flow from non-disabled actors taking on the role of a disabled character (harris, 2014). our aesthetic goals for our scenes are, in practice, modest, but we do aim for actors to attempt to convey disability in ways that do not reproduce shallow stereotypes. more significantly, when labeled people represent themselves in the scene they powerfully challenge their dis/ableist characterization as voiceless, incompetent, and incomplete persons. inevitably, there are fewer opportunities for this when labeled people are not in the scene in some substantial way – particularly when portraying a labeled character. in a related vein, we have struggled with cross-racial representations. tyrone is a character who appears in several scenes, always reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 255 as an expectant father. in each case, non-disabled characters are skeptical about his suitability for fatherhood, assuming that his intimate, parental motivations are rooted in sexist exploitation and are an expression of hegemonic masculine sexual prowess. these dynamics reflect a strong racist and ableist discourse about labeled men’s illegitimate paternal subjectivities, and were encountered across service provider and participant interviews. racialized co-researchers identified the discourse immediately from transcripts and were eager to integrate it into scripts, remarking that it “felt real,” while also critically acknowledging its power to constrain parenthood for all racialized men. audiences’ response to tyrone’s role within scenes depends upon the actor. as noted above, typically tyrone has been played by a black coresearcher. audiences generally responded warmly to him, inviting him to take a more active role with his current partner and asserting his capacity to be a “good father.” working with his stated desire to be part of his child’s life, they repeatedly sought to bring him into the family fold. when we performed more than one scene in which tyrone appeared, audiences speculated that his efforts to “settle down” must have been impeded by others. without variation, audiences bestowed a type of “respectability” upon tyrone’s intentions and actions. in the rare instance when the regular co-researcher has not been able to perform this role, non-racialized volunteers have been substituted. these instances have always provoked the audience into a more critical stance – calling out the research teams for engaging in such racist stereotypes. specifically, we are asked why we chose a name associated with black identity for the young father. rather than being viewed as an effort to decentre the whiteness of families, citizenship, and fatherhood through active engagement with oppressive discourses, the scene is understood as promulgating those very discourses. ultimately, audiences recognize that racism intersects with disability and gender in the scene, although not necessarily recognizing that it also intersects in the lives of labeled people. these different audience responses feel unsurprising, but deserve further interrogation. we wonder if tyrone’s portrayal by a black co-researcher somehow naturalizes the racist/ableist/gendered representation of masculinity and fatherhood. while audiences do try to redress tyrone’s exclusion from his future child’s life, they privilege a monogamous, involved fatherhood. we are currently working with audiences to consider how tyrone might be able to sustain multiple connections with children and (former) partners without deferring to typical constructions of the “good father.” we wonder about how to move audiences to reflect on the power relations involved in remaining silent when tyrone is played by a black actor. in a variation, we notice that mary’s mother christine, almost always played by a co-researcher, is almost never replaced or assertively challenged despite her negative responses to the news of mary’s pregnancy. we wonder if this is an attempt at political correctness. for instance, as a mother of a esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 256 disabled young person, the character of christine johnson may be viewed as engaging in greater and more arduous caring labour than do other family members and mothers of non-disabled children. perhaps audiences can sympathize with her distress about supporting her daughter through a pregnancy. perhaps they think that to critique her is to de-legitimate the intense caring labour she presumably performs. complicating this is the fact that christine johnson has, to date, always been played by a co-researcher who also uses a wheelchair. typically, audiences greet the replacement of “mean” characters by “spect-actors” with cheers, laughter, and applause. with rare exceptions, the mean characters are portrayed by non-disabled actors. perhaps audiences are disinclined to put co-researchers through this experience of being replaced. in a sense this reflects a larger finding from our research. in the overall study we found that non-disabled practitioners were reluctant to articulate the terms “intellectual disability/developmental disability/impairment” for fear of causing offence (ignagni & schormans, 2016). other times, we worry audiences are responding with a sort of disableism toward this co-researcher, enacting the assumption that she may not appreciate that her words and responses were offensive. that said, christine johnson was one of the least empowered characters around the dinner table – caught in webs of patriarchal and institutional power along with mary and tyrone. replacing her may have made little difference to the overall trajectory of the scene. finally, we are currently grappling with the ethics involved in asking people to repeatedly embody dis/ableist violence in the scenes. this is as true for the co-researcher who is performing a parent’s distress at losing custody of her child, as it is for the co-researcher voicing ableist, sexist, and racist slurs. how do we care for one another within and after each performance? and, going further, who might be precluded from embodying these characters because of their performative and rhetorical violence? we find ourselves struggling with an ethical dilemma previously raised by ross gray and christina sinding in their performance work with women living with cancer: “how carefully people should or can be ‘held’ in such a project” (2002, p. 134). in this paper we have presented the script of a forum theatre scene, highlighting the eugenic legacy that shapes the current context in which labeled people consider parenthood. while the project raised many issues (including voice, the neoliberalization of research, the cultural construction of the good parent, and child welfare policy and practice), we have focused here on some questions emerging from this scene’s performance. we present questions that may help us begin to map out intimate justice for labeled persons. reimagining parenting possibilities for labeled people is not simply important political work; it is necessary for survival. normative understandings of parenthood fail to contest its current neoliberal formulations (self-sufficient, self-contained, competent, efficient, productive, reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 257 and so forth). all parents are encouraged to “join the ranks of the privileged” (mingus, 2011), which threaten to leave behind those of us who cannot easily be folded into normative structures – structures that, when they remain intact, continue to oppress (chandler & ignagni, n.d). normative parenthood fails to break with the devaluation of difference – whatever form that difference may take – and does little to loosen the knot of disability, race, gender, class, sexuality, and colonial relations that shape and maintain the marginalization and exclusion of so many who seek to build families. as the rpp team captured in making lemonade, when labeled people begin to imagine their parenting possibilities, they are perceived as disruptive and are quickly contained. within this context the difference of disability can only be seen as undesirable, a site of “no future.” this cultural failure to desire, welcome, and embrace disability enacts kathleen lynch’s idea of “affective injustice” towards disabled people as articulated by shakespeare, and may lead to disabled people being deprived of love in their everyday lives (lynch, 2009, as cited in shakespeare, 2014). we understand intimacy as close connections with others that are produced in the spaces of our lives that we consider warm, safe, and protective (liddiard, 2016). intimacy is private, and can involve affectionate, loving, and sexual relations. because intimacy always involves others, it necessarily entails negotiation and reciprocity, and always blurs with our public lives (ignagni et al., 2016). intimacy is mediated by our material circumstances, by government policy, our human rights context, our histories, and our social locations. rights protecting our intimate lives, such as those outlined in article 23 of the un crpd, certainly make our intimate lives a matter of citizenship and, therefore, subjects of public dialogue. but rights approaches only go so far because they are difficult to enforce, they create new social divisions, they require significant material and symbolic capital to enact, and they cannot adequately address the complexity of our relationships with our partners, our children, and the other social relations that constitute our lives. turning to disability justice activist mia mingus (2011), we can heed her assertion that we must, “mov[e] away from an equality-based model of sameness and ‘we are just like you’ to a model of disability that embraces difference, confronts privilege and challenges what is considered ‘normal’ on every front” (n.p.). intimate justice may attend to the sorts of questions emerging from the forum theatre scenes that we have delineated above. it demands that we attend to who has (and who does not have) access to an intimate life; whose lives are free(er) from surveillance, intrusion, and containment; and who are able to access the material and social resources that support an intimate life. we must open up space for people to build intimate lives, such as lives within families, in different ways. and we must attend to the privilege, marginalization, and violence that patterns these intimate differences such that they might be transformed to allow labeled people to partake in family making and the re-making of our worlds. disability, then, helps us move towards intimate justice, by troubling our esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 258 notions of parenthood. disability always heralds the arrival of difference and, in turn, that difference is always disruptive (chandler & ignagni, n.d.). the arrival of disability in parenthood might help us imagine new ways to collectively raise children, to further de-link biology from kinship, to re-think the gendered division of caring labour, or to foster new forms of redistributive competence in family making across communities. these sorts of reimagined parenthood possibilities centre on the embodied and “enminded” experience of disability,5 move towards interdependence, and disrupt taken-for-granted notions of “canadian parenthood.” the disruption the difference of disability makes can help us interrogate what is meant by parenthood, family, and care, and can gesture to myriad new ways we might make family differently: more expansively and in ways that desire disability and the difference it makes. acknowledgements this project was supported through a research grant from the ontario ministry of community and social services, developmental services branch and ryerson university, and through faculty of community services project funds. we wish to acknowledge the tremendous time and energy the rpp coresearchers devoted to the research, script writing, and performances. special thanks go to christine austin, joanna drassinower, kareem elbard, rainbow hunt, renee morin, and romeo pierre. thanks as well to our community partners, melanie moore, lynda roy, and ashley judge from spin, as well as springtide resources and the centre for independent living toronto. our research assistants, kim collins, tania jivraj, and sarah wren were integral throughout many stages of the research and forum theatre performances, as was the project’s assistant kate peters. finally, we would like to thank the many labeled people and those who support them for sharing their stories with us. references anderson, j., & phillips, j. (eds.). (2012). disability and universal human rights: legal, ethical and conceptual implications of the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (sim special 35). utrecht: netherlands institute of human rights, universiteit utrecht. boal, a. (2002). games for actors and non-actors. london: routledge. boal, a. (2006). aesthetics of the oppressed. new york: routledge. boal, a. (1995). rainbow of desire. (a. jackson, trans). new york: routledge. campbell, f. k. (2001). inciting legal fictions-disability's date with ontology and the ableist body of the law. griffith law review, 10(1), 42. 5 enminded is a term coming into use in critical disability studies. here we use it to gesture to the countless epistemological and ontological debates about the status of the mind, consciousness, and mental representations. reimagining parenting possibilities studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 259 campbell, j., & oliver, m. (2013). disability politics: understanding our past, changing our future. new york: routledge. chandler, e., & ignagni, e. (n.d.). strange beauty: aesthetic possibilities of sustaining disability into the future. unpublished manuscript under review. dowbiggin, i. (1995). “keeping this young country sane”: ck clarke, immigration restriction, and canadian psychiatry, 1890-1925. canadian historical review, 76(4), 598-627. duster, t. (2003). backdoor to eugenics. new york: psychology press. erevelles, n. (2005). understanding curriculum as normalizing text: disability studies meet curriculum theory. journal of curriculum studies, 37(4), 421-439. eugenics to newgenics. (n.d.). key terms. retrieved from https://eugenicsnewgenics.com/keyterms/#newgenics evans, m., hole, r., berg, l. d., hutchinson, p., & sookraj, d. (2009). common insights, differing methodologies: toward a fusion of indigenous methodologies, participatory action research, and white studies in an urban aboriginal research agenda. qualitative inquiry, 15(5), 893-910. goodley, d. (2014). dis/ability studies: theorising disablism and ableism. new york: routledge. gray, r., & sinding, c. (2002). standing ovation, performing social science research about cancer. walnut creek, ca: altamira press. harris, s. j. (2014, january 14). why the theory of everything’s depiction of disability is disappointing. [web blog post]. retrieved from www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/01/20/the_theory_of_everything_and_disability_why _eddie_redmayne_shouldn_t_get.html?wpsrc=fol_fb ignagni, e., & schormans, a. f. (2016). reimagining parenting possibilities: the experiences of people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities. international journal of birth and parenting education, 3(3), 1-4. ignagni, e., fudge schormans, a., liddiard, k., & runswick-cole, k. (2016). “some people are not allowed to love”: intimate citizenship in the lives of people labelled with intellectual disabilities. disability & society, 31(1), 131-135. ignatieff, m. (2008). the rights revolution. toronto: house of anansi press. kafer, a. (2013). feminist, queer, crip. indianapolis, in: indiana university press. kevles, d. j. (1985). in the name of eugenics: genetics and the uses of human heredity. boston, ma: harvard university press. kilkey, m., & clarke, h. (2010). disabled men and fathering: opportunities and constraints. community, work & family, 13(2), 127-146. liddiard, k. (2016, february). what’s love got to do with it. paper presented at the disability and the human symposium, manchester metropolitan university, manchester. longmore, p. k., & umansky, l. (2001). the new disability history: american perspectives. albany, ny: new york university press. malacrida, c. (2015). a special hell: institutional life in alberta's eugenic years. toronto: university of toronto press. mclaren, a. (2015). our own master race: eugenics in canada, 1885-1945. toronto: university of toronto press. mingus, m. (2011, august 8). leaving evidence. [web blog post]. retrieved from http://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/ national council on disability (2012, september 27). rocking the cradle: ensuring the rights of parents with disabilities. washington, dc. retrieved from www.ncd.gov/publications/2012/sep272012 plummer, k. (2003). intimate citizenship: private decisions and public dialogues. seattle, wa: university of washington press. reeve, d. (2006). towards a psychology of disability: the emotional effects of living in a disabling society. in d. goodley & r. lawthom (eds.), disability and psychology: critical introductions and reflections (pp. 94-107). basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan runswick-cole, k., & goodley, d. (2015). disability, austerity and cruel optimism in big society: resistance and “the disability commons.” canadian journal of disability studies, 4(2), 162-186. esther ignagni, ann fudge schormans studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 238-260, 2016 260 russell, m. (1999). beyond ramps: disability at the end of the social contract. new york: common courage press. saxton, m. (2013). disability and selective abortion. in l. davis (ed.), the disability studies reader (4th ed.) (pp. 87-99). new york: routledge. shakespeare, t. (2014). disability rights and wrongs revisited (2nd ed.). new york: routledge. stiker, h. j. (1999). a history of disability. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. taussig, m., schechner, r., & boal, a. (1990). boal in brazil, france, the usa: an interview with augusto boal. tdr (1988-), 34(3), 50-65. thomas, c. (2007). sociologies of disability and illness: contested ideas in disability studies and medical sociology. new york: palgrave macmillan. turner, b. s. (2006). vulnerability and human rights. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press. un (united nations). (2006). convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. un web services section, department of public information. retrieved from www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml watts, i. e., & erevelles, n. (2004). these deadly times: reconceptualizing school violence by using critical race theory and disability studies. american educational research journal, 41(2), 271-299. da costa final before ts correspondence address: jade crimson rose da costa, department of sociology, york university, tkaronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: jdacost5@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 649-651, 2022 creative intervention re: what is wealth inequality? jade crimson rose da costa york university, canada context in may 2022, i was invited to participate in a small community-based panel about wealth inequality that was hosted by thriveyouth (then known as dareart), a community youth group based in tkaronto that provides a platform for children and young adults to pursue creative expression, learn and think critically,1 and “develop the skills and confidence needed” to promote transformative action (thriveyouth, n.d., para 1). bringing together community leaders and social justice-minded high school students, the panel was organized around the question “what is wealth inequality and why does it exist?” the question immediately struck me as the type of question students might ask during a lecture or tutorial, or which a keen peer might pose after a conference presentation. however, i had been invited into the panel not as an academic but as a community organizer, and so i answered as such. i felt a great pedagogical and creative liberty in that space, and in response i was inspired to write down my thoughts, as a poem, one which wove together my multidimensional experiences with wealth inequality as both person and organizer. the result was a very full, very alive description of wealth inequality (or, as i prefer, wealth inequity) that i would have never expressed if i had been constrained to academic jargon and rhetoric. whereas academia often requires us to “prove” and “validate” all our thoughts and feelings, typically by using three-dollar words, poetry allows us to embody and express them as is, free of citations and structured analyses. i performed the poem, found below, to the youth who then attended the 2022 panel in toronto (followed by an equivalent event in vancouver). 1 tkaronto is the original name of the colonially known city of toronto. as shared by indigenous creatives selena mills and sara roque (2019), “toronto itself is a word that originates from the mohawk word ‘tkaronto,’ meaning ‘the place in the water where the trees are standing,’ which is said to refer to the wooden stakes that were used as fishing weirs in the narrows of local river systems by the haudenosaunee and huron-wendat” (para 6). jade crimson rose da costa studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 649-651, 2022 650 re: what is wealth inequality? i understand wealth inequality for what it isn’t. it isn’t just working-class white people yelling in the streets. it isn’t just something that dead white men wrote about during the industrial revolution, or the black and white films they made about factories. wealth inequality isn’t just the great depression or assembly lines, or even capitalism. wealth inequality is covid-19; it’s amazon; it’s white supremacy. it’s going to bed hungry and waking up the same. it’s working paycheck-to-paycheck, and taking on more shifts, just to keep up with price inflation. it’s taking three bus transfers, just to get somewhere a few kilometres away. it’s raiding tent cities, and paying $2500 in rent. it’s reusing every single yogurt container you’ve ever bought, so that you never have to buy tupperware. it’s being haunted by poverty, even when you are no longer poor. wealth inequality is being the immigrants, the white people in the streets, are yelling at. the same immigrants, who were pushed out of their homes, in service of canadian nationalism. it’s the migrants and refugees, who pick the fruits and vegetables, that fill our grocery stores – the same migrants, who pay for health insurance, they can’t access, re: what is wealth inequality? studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 649-651, 2022 651 but who break their backs, to feed our children – well, some children. wealth inequality is criminalizing sex work, it’s conflating being ‘queer’ with being ‘rich’ and ‘white’. it’s trans youth ‘house surfing’ it’s never going to the dentist, it’s defunding harm reduction, it’s thinking that “aids is over”, while black and indigenous folx, continue to live through a pandemic. it’s thinking “covid is over”, when disabled people can’t leave their homes, or access their fundamental needs or stay alive. wealth inequality is not the root, but the symptom of a world that is haunted, haunted by settler colonialism, by anti-black racism, by imperialism, by ableism, by sexism, by queerphobia, by fatphobia, by whorephobia, by transphobia, by islamophobia, by xenophobia, by all the isms and ophobias we live every-single-day; by the systematic death, designed for profit. references mills, s., & roque. (2019). land acknowledgements: uncovering an oral history of tkaronto. local love. retrieved october 13, 2022. https://locallove.ca/issues/landacknowledgements-uncovering-an-oral-history-of-tkaronto/#.yapalndmi2w thriveyouth. (n.d.). thriveyouth development canada. https://thriveyouth.ca/ mcmurry final correspondence address: nicholas mcmurry, faculty of law, griffith college cork, ireland; email: nicholas.mcmurry@griffith.ie issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 a human rights-based approach to participation nicholas mcmurry griffith college cork, ireland siobhan o’sullivan griffith college cork, ireland abstract this article proposes a systematic approach to designing and assessing participatory processes, built from principles in the field of human rights. it argues that participatory processes should be organised around human rights principles which provide detailed but flexible guidance on participatory processes. drawing from wellestablished human rights principles and the commentary of human rights bodies on participation, the article outlines a framework that can be used to advocate for, establish, implement, and evaluate participatory processes. it addresses four normative questions relating to participation: what decisions require participation, who should participate, how should participation be implemented, and what consequences should it have on subsequent decisions with human rights norms informing each of these questions. keywords democratic innovations; human rights; deliberative democracy; participatory democracy in an era of multiple challenges to democracy from populism, elitism and the impotence of democratically elected governments in the face of international pressures, one response has been to develop democratic innovations to ensure public participation in decision-making. since universal suffrage has been achieved in many countries across the world, debates on democracy are no longer only about who participates, but also what participation means – how, when and where citizens should participate (vitale, 2006) and the quality of such participation. in the 1990s some local governments initiated participative budgeting (e.g., porto alegre, brazil) and since then some states have initiated citizens’ assemblies to discuss constitutional issues or issues of general concern (e.g., british columbia, ireland, france, iceland), and a global citizens’ assembly has been held in 2021 on climate change. other states have a human rights-based approach to participation studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 555 legislated to ensure participation in the development of policies (e.g., the community empowerment (scotland) act, 2015) and in some countries there have been developments in constitutional law, such as the requirement of “meaningful engagement” in south africa (occupiers of 51 olivia road v. johannesburg, 2008, para. 9). while there are some high profile examples of democratic innovations, they are but a small sample of innovations from the local to the transnational that aim to seek direct citizen input into public decisions (geissel & newton, 2012; smith, 2009). however, governments sometimes engage in marginal and fragmented participation and thus the term itself may be subject to concept slippage, enabling superficial adherence to the concept without any lasting impact on people’s lives (leal, 2011, p. 70; rahnema, 1992). concerns over the lack of efficacy of participatory procedures relate to issues of power, lack of trust between the public and democratic authorities, and ensuring representativeness and inclusion in deliberative and participatory fora (young, 2000). gaventa (2002, p. 1) has highlighted deficiencies in participatory processes that can result in “voice without influence,” which can lead to “participatory fatigue” (parés et al., 2012, p. 259) while warren (2009, p. 9) has criticised “governance-driven democratization” initiatives where participation is subject to elite discretion (see also fung, 2015, p. 5). how to ensure more empowered forms of civic participation and “real” stakeholder engagement in decisionmaking is crucial, and this article provides a framework organised around human rights that can inform the design, implementation and conceptualisation of participatory processes to ensure that those who are potentially affected by decisions have a genuine and effective say in those decisions. public participation is frequently linked to human rights. for example, gould (2004) argues that the spread of democracy relies on a human rights framework and sen (1999, p. 6) states that “political and civil rights give people the opportunity to draw attention forcefully to general needs and to demand appropriate public action.” along with emphasising civil and political rights, habermas (1996, p. 123) also stresses the importance of socio-economic rights for democratic participation. participation itself contributes to human rights by providing a means for establishing legal rights (habermas, 1996, p. 127). studies have also shown that swiss cantons with higher levels of direct participation in governance achieve more in terms of efficiency of service provision and the fulfilment of welfare goals (geissel, 2012) and participatory budgeting in porto alegre has had an impact on poor living conditions (smith, 2009). this article builds on the links between participation and rights to propose a systematic approach to designing and assessing a wide range of participatory processes, based on principles in the field of human rights. the first author (mcmurry, 2018) has previously proposed the adoption of a human rights-based approach to participation. this article develops this approach. it argues that participatory processes should be organised around human rights principles which provide detailed but flexible guidance on participatory processes. we do not argue here that participation is a human nicholas mcmurry & siobhan o’sullivan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 556 right either from a legal or philosophical perspective. for an argument on the extent to which participation is mandated by international law, see mcmurry (forthcoming 2023). this article draws from well-established human rights principles and the writings of authoritative human rights bodies on participation to outline a framework that can be used to advocate for, establish, and assess participatory processes. applying the legally established norms of international human rights law to participation has a number of strengths. human rights have been universally accepted in the world’s states since the collapse of apartheid, and have strong acceptance within civil society notwithstanding many arguments about their application (donnelly, 1984), meaning that they have strong universal legitimacy. through legal application in the international arena for more than 50 years, human rights have developed considerable detail and although the content and application of the norms themselves are often contested, they can provide coherent and, in some cases, comprehensive criteria for the development and evaluation of programmes (mowbray, 2012; saul et al., 2014; schabas, 2019). their linkage to a well-established context of legally enforced norms means that they are strongly anchored and resistant to concept slippage. human rights principles are therefore ideally suited to guide the design of participatory programmes, to provide indicators for evaluating such programmes, and to suggest concrete demands for the reform and improvement of such programmes. nevertheless, human rights provide some flexibility in how they are applied. the margin of appreciation principle (arai-takahashi, 2001) allows authorities to decide for themselves how best to realise rights. the proposed approach gives guidance on many factors relating to participation, but does allow considerable discretion as to how these can be institutionalised. the human rights principle of proportionality (arai-takahashi, 2001) means that the realisation of rights must be balanced against the rights of others, and other relevant considerations, in contrast with dworkin’s (2013) understanding of rights as trumps. for the principle of proportionality to work, considerations must be categorised as being either more or less important. the approach outlined here therefore identifies priorities within the points being made. an outline of the human rights-based approach to participation the human rights-based approach to participation in this article is built on (1) requirements and recommendations identified by established legal bodies for participation, and (2) human rights principles developed by established legal bodies in other contexts that can be applied to participation. the principles come from bodies with authority to interpret international treaties, particularly the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (icescr), and from some sources of domestic law. the icescr, which elaborates on many of the rights contained in the universal declaration of a human rights-based approach to participation studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 557 human rights, has been ratified by 171 states representing the vast majority of the world’s population (see http://ohchr.org). the approach adapts the obligations within human rights law to identify responsibilities for decision-makers regarding participation. these decisionmakers include national and local government bodies, private service providers who adopt the responsibility to provide rights either for profit or voluntarily, and others whose actions have an impact on rights such as extraction industries and employers. following saxena (2011, p. 31) who identifies several essential components of participation, including the potential for citizens to initiate action, who participates, the outcomes of participation, and when to participate, this article identifies principles that can be used to determine (a) what decisions will trigger a requirement for participation, (b) the identification of human rights stakeholders, (c) how participation should be implemented, and (d) what consequences it should have on the decisions ultimately made. in order to address the problem of capacity, and the balancing of different needs, interests and perspectives, the approach identifies priorities with regard to (a) and (b), and identifies different degrees of responsibility for the decision-maker in (c) and (d), which will depend on the priorities identified. identified according to priority identifying factors (a) trigger for participation (b) human rights stakeholders identified according to the degree of responsibility decision-makers’ responsibilities (c) in implementing participation (d) in following up on participation table 1. framework for the human rights-based approach to participation. four normative questions in the human rights-based approach to participation what decisions trigger a requirement for participation? the un committee on economic, social and cultural rights (cescr) asserts that participation is required in relation to “the formulation, implementation and review of the relevant policies” (cescr, 1989, para. 5). these policies can relate to decisions that have an impact on work, to just and favourable conditions of work, to form trade unions, to social security, to protection of the family, to an adequate standard of living including food, clothing, housing and nicholas mcmurry & siobhan o’sullivan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 558 water, to the highest attainable standard of health, to education and free primary education in particular, to take part in cultural life, and to benefit from scientific progress and other issues such as the use of resources (icescr, 1966), legal systems, regulation of media and libel, etc. (international covenant on civil and political rights, 1966). however, human rights are more directly impacted by some decisions than others, for example, environmental policies may have a tenuous link with human rights where they do not have an impact on health or other human rights. there will continue to be strong moral and political grounds to demand participation on these decisions, and other principles of the human rights based approach may be pertinent for these decisions, but the approach does not provide guidance on how to identify and prioritise the stakeholders in them. the cescr have identified negative obligations to respect rights, and positive obligations to protect and to fulfil rights. the negative obligation to respect rights requires the state “to refrain from interfering directly or indirectly with the enjoyment” of rights (cescr, 2000, para. 33). this requires the state, for example, not to evict persons from their homes without providing adequate alternative housing (cescr, 1997, para. 16). legal bodies have found that in the event of such evictions there is a requirement for “genuine consultation” (cescr, 1997, para. 13; occupiers of 51 olivia road v. johannesburg, 2008) by those affected in order to determine the alternative to be offered. in the context of other rights, the committee has established that any retrogressive measures can only be carried out with the participation of those affected (cescr, 2007, para. 42). in some cases, for example a proposed development that involves evictions, or an amendment to regulations on employment protection, the threat to rights will be very clear. in others, for example decisions on planning, the negative impact may be less clear. as the removal of access to one’s rights forms a potential violation of human rights, a decision that poses a clear threat to human rights will be prioritised with regard to participation. the positive obligation to protect requires the state to “ensure that enterprises or individuals do not deprive individuals of their access” to rights (cescr, 1999, para.15). the obligation to protect rights from a specific threat is only applied where the decision-maker knows “of the existence of a real and immediate risk” to rights (osman v. united kingdom, 1998, para. 116). under a human rights-based approach to participation, the decision-maker should engage in participation with regard to measures that it can take to mitigate external threats to the enjoyment of rights. the obligation to fulfil requires the state “to adopt appropriate legislative, administrative, budgetary, judicial, promotional and other measures towards the full realization” of rights (cescr, 2000, para. 33). where socio-economic rights are not fully realised, this does not immediately signify a violation of rights, but does imply a responsibility to further their realisation. under the icescr the state has considerable discretion to choose the most appropriate means to realise rights. many decisions may be addressed towards the a human rights-based approach to participation studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 559 realisation of human rights but the state must have a core strategy with regard to achieving each right mentioned in the covenants, and the cescr has frequently stated that this strategy must be developed through participation (e.g., cescr, 2006, para. 42; 2007, paras. 69 & 72; cescr, 2009a, para. 36; cescr, 2009b, paras. 29, 49(e) & 55(e)). the cescr has in some cases held that such participation is part of the core obligation of states (cescr, 2000, para. 43(f); cescr, 2003, para. 37(f); cescr, 2006, para.31(c); cescr, 2016, para. 49(b)), and therefore participation is prioritised with regard to such policies. reviews of human rights policies should take place periodically (cescr, 2000, para. 43(f); cescr, 2003, para.37(f); cescr, 2006, para.34) and require participation. the development of other policies may have an impact on rights, and can thus give rise to a responsibility for participation but with a lower priority. under a human rights-based approach, therefore, a responsibility to engage in participation can arise in relation to any decision that may have a negative impact on rights, that is designed to protect rights from third parties, or that is designed to fulfil rights progressively. in particular, priority must be given to participation where there is a clear potential for a negative impact on the enjoyment of rights, and with regard to the development, implementation, monitoring and review of core human rights strategies. the next section identifies the stakeholders who may be entitled to participate, either directly or through representation, and how these stakeholders may be prioritised. who are the human rights stakeholders? democratic theorists are very concerned about who may participate. for habermas (1996) it is important that the process of deliberation be open with no restriction. however, other theorists have argued that such an approach can lead to the de facto control of participatory programmes by dominant groups and argue that inclusion of the marginalised is very important (fraser, 1992; young, 2000). identifying the demos for participation has presented considerable problems in that the number of people involved is often too large for effective coordination (held, 1996, p. 267). the human rights-based approach identifies human rights stakeholders who have some case for participating, and gives priority to certain individuals and communities who have a stronger case. where large numbers of stakeholders have been identified, participation can be legitimately restricted through less intensive means of participation as explored below. the participation of prioritised human rights stakeholders cannot be restricted to a greater degree than less prioritised groups and may require specific inclusive measures to be taken. human rights stakeholders will potentially include all those whose rights may be affected, either positively or negatively, by the decision being made (cescr, 2009b, para. 54(a)). these may include those whose existing enjoyment of rights is under threat by a decision, or those who hope to progress nicholas mcmurry & siobhan o’sullivan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 560 towards full enjoyment of their rights. as well as those whose rights are explicitly at stake, stakeholders can include civil society in general, and this is particularly appropriate where a policy or programme is being developed that will potentially apply to the rights of everybody within the community (cescr, 2000, paras. 11 & 17). in relation to a decision that may reduce the enjoyment of rights, the cescr is of the opinion that those affected should be enabled to give their prior consent to any measure to compensate (cescr, 2009b, para. 55(e)). the cescr have applied the principle of “free, prior and informed consent” beyond its original context of indigenous peoples to other situations where communities are negatively affected by development (cescr, 2012, para. 8(d)). those whose existing enjoyment of rights is under threat therefore have the highest priority when it comes to participation. those who are most vulnerable or marginalised must, according to the committee, be prioritised in any policy (cescr, 1989, para. 3). these include those who are furthest from enjoying the right in question and who cannot achieve them without assistance (r. bernard v. enfield lbc, 2002), such as the homeless or the long-term unemployed. these vulnerable persons should have priority in any participatory programme. non-discrimination is also a general principle of human rights law that requires that persons should not be treated differently on the basis of “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” (icescr, 1966, art. 2.2). indirect discrimination refers to apparently neutral factors in organisation that prevent the full involvement of certain groups (cescr, 2009a, para. 10(a-b)). mitigating discrimination requires special consideration of those who can be distinguished according to these characteristics and can require specific measures to be taken on their behalf (cescr, 2009a, para. 8). human rights norms require not just that persons can access their rights but that they can do so in an effective manner (airey v. ireland, 1979, para. 24). under the principle of non-discrimination, the decision-maker has a responsibility not only to ensure the participation of those suffering discrimination, but to secure their effective participation, fulfilling young’s (2000) principle of inclusion. for this reason, it may be necessary to provide separate processes of participation to these persons, or to provide them with support in the form of advocacy, legal representation or technical assistance. for example, in a social situation in which women do not often have the opportunity to represent the community, decision-makers should specifically involve affected women, if necessary in a separate proceeding. more detail on the requirements of non-discrimination under human rights law can be found in the jurisprudence of the various bodies (e.g., mowbray, 2012, pp. 815-839; saul et al., pp. 173-213; schabas, 2019, pp. 738-794). the representation of groups should adhere to the principle of freedom of association (iccpr, 1966, art. 22). this requires the decision-maker to respect how communities choose to represent themselves when making their case. a human rights-based approach to participation studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 561 they can choose to be represented through an advocacy organisation or through a professional such as a lawyer, they may accept structures that are provided by the decision-maker, or they may have their own forms of representation. the detailed content of freedom of association developed over decades of adjudication in international courts (e.g., mowbray, 2012, pp.731785), can guide its application on specific issues that may arise. it may also be appropriate to invite others to participate who are not human rights stakeholders, such as experts, advocacy organisations, or private service providers such as employers or landlords (cescr, 2006, para. 31). if we understand one of the purposes of participation to be the gathering of information that is important for the fulfilment of rights, such persons and groups can be vital to determine, for example, the resources that are available for fulfilling rights. however, a human rights-based approach will prioritise the participation of those whose rights are specifically at stake, followed by the whole community, followed by others. under a human rights-based approach to participation, therefore, human rights stakeholders include all those whose rights are specifically affected by a potential decision or the community at large where a general policy is being developed or reviewed. in addition, it may be appropriate to include others who may provide resources or information that will be useful in fulfilling rights. the approach, however, also prioritises individuals on various bases: (a) that their existing enjoyment of rights is under threat, (b) their vulnerability (i.e., their remoteness from realising their rights), and (c) non-discrimination, prioritising groups marginalised on the basis of gender, ethnicity, and other listed characteristics. how should participation be implemented? as described earlier, the implementation of participatory programmes has been the subject of many theoretical proposals and empirical studies. many suggestions have been made to overcome the problem of scale such as citizens’ assemblies. many forms of participation have been advocated by participatory theorists including holding referendums, accepting submissions, organising conferences, sponsoring participatory research, engaging in direct meetings, accepting community representatives onto boards, or supporting communities in running their own services. in contrast, human rights bodies have not identified in any detail how participation is to be implemented. human rights principles allow considerable discretion in choosing the means to pursue any policy (cescr, 2003, para. 53), but some human rights principles can be applied to guide the development of participatory programmes and to reinforce existing processes. participation can be initiated either by decision-makers or by human rights stakeholders. in the latter case, contribution by stakeholders, whether made through petition, protest action, or other means, must be recognised as a form nicholas mcmurry & siobhan o’sullivan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 562 of participation (mcmurry, 2020). this contribution may need clarification through further participation and can have an impact on the subsequent responsibilities of decision-makers as described in the next section. decisionmakers also have a responsibility to initiate participatory programmes with regard to decisions that are prioritised according to the principles developed above, such as when a human rights policy is being adopted, or rights are under threat (cescr, 2003, paras. 37(f) & 56(a); cescr, 2006, para. 31(c); cescr, 2007, para. 78(a)). under a human rights-based approach, the design of participatory programmes should take into consideration a number of factors: the priority of participation within the decision, the identified human rights stakeholders and those who have priority, and the information that is required from the participation for the fulfilment of rights. some forms of participation are more thorough than others and some encourage more deliberation while others lead to a definite conclusion. some are more appropriate for wide consultations while others are more appropriate when a small number of human rights stakeholders can be identified. human rights allow restrictions to be made, particularly where resources must be expended, and thus allow participation to be less than complete, but restrictions should abide by the principle of proportionality. a lack of resources available can limit the scale of participation, but according to human rights principles, cannot prevent the application of certain principles such as nondiscrimination (cescr, 1990, para. 1). whole communities cannot participate en masse but can participate through representation, through mini-publics or through less thorough forms of participation, such as inviting submissions. the participation of smaller demoi may be legitimately restricted through similar measures where a lack of resources prevents full participation. the restriction of participation will require stronger justification where it involves prioritised decisions and stakeholders. in particular, those prioritised should not be put at a disadvantage with regard to other participants. the principle of proportionality inevitably involves a degree of judgement, and this is therefore an area where independent oversight would be very helpful, but there is considerable guidance in the application of the principle in human rights law (arai-takahashi, 2001). for example, a person’s right to participate should not be completely denied, and should not be restricted where the restriction is not necessary, for example where it would not save scarce resources. the responsibility to engage in participation can be seen as part of a wider responsibility to gather information and monitor the realisation of rights, and this information can also guide the form of participation required. the dynamics of different socio-economic rights have been spelt out in detail in the cescr’s general comments and these indicate the information that is required. the committee understands rights not as rigid, but as having a number of flexible features. for example, water must be “sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable” (cescr, 2000, para. 2), and these features have both objective and subjective elements. the objective elements include the quantity and scientifically determined quality of the a human rights-based approach to participation studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 563 water, while the subjective elements relate to the acceptability of water services to the target population. with regard to the latter, decisions should be “formulated and implemented in such a way as to be acceptable to the individuals and communities involved,” and that this requires consultation or participation (cescr, 2009b, para. 16(c)). indeed, participation can be important for establishing the objective elements, and is intrinsic to determining the subjective elements (cescr, 2009b, para. 16(c)). as well as features of the rights themselves, it is also important to determine the resources and strategies available. other information that can be identified through participation includes a community’s priorities with regard to the realisation of rights, and any interim measures that may affect rights in the short term (cescr, 2000, para. 54). information on available resources and strategies available may be obtained from various participants, but information on subjective features of rights and on prioritisation may only be obtained from human rights stakeholders. human rights can provide guidance in the actual functioning of the participatory process, whatever its form. as habermas (1996, p. 368) has emphasised, freedom of speech, assembly, and association must be protected and these rights have all been developed in some detail and can be applied to participatory processes (mcmurry, 2019). all parties to a participatory process should approach the process in a spirit of good faith, a basic legal principle, and should aim to achieve agreement (occupiers of 51 olivia road v. johannesburg, 2008, para. 20). this will assist in the fostering of positive and trusting relationships between decision-makers and participants as crucial to the success of the process (parker et al., 2008). human rights bodies emphasise the importance of transparency (cescr, 1999, para. 23). the decision-maker should ensure that accurate, up-to-date information on the decision to be made and on the participatory process is available in an accessible form throughout the process and that prioritised groups are specifically informed. any restrictions will need to be publicised and justified to those whose participation is restricted. there is also a responsibility to prevent persons from imposing obstacles to participants, engaging in corrupt practices, presenting misleading information, or otherwise interfering in the process (human rights committee, 2014, para. 21). human rights norms imply considerable discretion in choosing how participation can be achieved. however, decision-makers should respond to those who communicate their needs, and should establish specific programmes to enable wider participation with regard to prioritised decisions. the process should be designed to ensure thorough engagement with the participants, and to encourage agreement. prioritised groups must be specifically protected in any participatory process. participation may be restricted through less thorough forms of participation, but must be justified according to the doctrine of proportionality. it is important that this justification is made in an open transparent manner before the restriction is imposed. a large number of other nicholas mcmurry & siobhan o’sullivan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 564 human rights principles such as freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and transparency should be observed throughout the process. what consequences should participation have? while participatory processes can be initiated by decision-makers, community involvement can sometimes be seen as an irritant by decision-makers. meaningful participation can enhance well-being but tokenistic consultation “can be manipulative and disengaging for the individual, leading to lower levels of well-being through feelings of disengagement and marginalisation” (woolrych & sixsmith, 2013, pp. 217-218). if participants are to be genuinely empowered and participation meaningfully implemented, it is necessary that participants have real influence on decisions (adamson & bromiley, 2013). it is thus essential that decision-makers’ responsibilities take account of the contributions of participants. one potential output of participation is a formal agreement, which is encouraged within a human rights-based approach and should preferably be made with the agreement of as many human rights stakeholders as possible, written up clearly, formally agreed, subject to objection from other participants, and monitored subsequently with parties made accountable (occupiers of 51 olivia road v. johannesburg, 2008, paras. 27-30). there is no limit to the aspects that may be covered in such agreements, which are entirely up to the parties, but they can cover many aspects relating to service delivery, time-scales, temporary expedients, and the conduct of the participants (occupiers of 51 olivia road v. johannesburg, 2008, paras. 24-26). an example of such a formal agreement in respect to conditions of work is a collective agreement where workers, whose rights are at stake, make a binding agreement with employers as to the future regulation of their rights. voluntary agreements can be made during participation, or there can be a prior arrangement to abide by the outcome of a particular process such as a referendum. however, such an agreement cannot undermine existing substantive rights, either of the participants or of others and if it does, then it should be regarded as void, just as collective agreements that violate minimum standards should be disregarded (opinión consultiva oc-27/21, 2021, para. 5). nevertheless, while all parties should enter the process in good faith, and therefore seek to arrive at an agreement, this can be very difficult to achieve because of many different factors, and there is a danger that agreements made may be inappropriate for the needs of vulnerable minorities. in addition, an agreement may be possible with some participants but others may refuse to become party to them. the example of a collective agreement is pertinent here: employers are under pressure to make collective agreements because of the threat of potential industrial action. the influence of such a threat does not depend on the importance of the rights at stake, but on the irreplaceability and a human rights-based approach to participation studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 565 economic importance of the workers’ labour. such a threat is not available to many categories of vulnerable human rights stakeholders. while a voluntary agreement may be the ideal outcome of participation, participants will need reassurance that their input will have some influence even in the absence of such an agreement, or where they do not consent to the agreement made. under a human rights-based approach to participation, the information that is gathered through participation affects the future responsibilities of decisionmakers whether or not an agreement has been reached. under the icescr, the state does not have an obligation to immediately fulfil all socio-economic rights, but is obliged under article 2.1 to progressively realise them using the maximum available resources. the information gathered through participation can be critical to outlining the detail of this responsibility. decisions made should aim ultimately to achieve the rights according to the features identified by participants (cescr, 2000, paras. 12, 37(ii) & 43(f)). this implies that, for example, a community which has made a reasonable assertion that the adequacy of their housing is dependent on the availability of land for traditional subsistence farming should not be permanently housed anywhere where they do not have access to such land. as mentioned before, this does not imply that they have an immediate right to be provided with housing that they would consider adequate, but that their legitimate aspirations should be considered the end goal which should be progressively realised. any decisions should make use of resources identified and should follow the priorities of the human rights stakeholders unless there is a strong reason not to. the recording of this information and these priorities is vital to monitoring whether subsequent action is in keeping with the human rights-based approach. in order to be transparent, all deviations from the priorities or requirements of participants should be publicised along with the justification for these. this reinforces the efforts of those working on participation to “close the feedback loop” to ensure effective communication between stakeholders in participation (gigler et al., 2014, p. 3). special care should be taken when there is a strong responsibility, such as where the enjoyment of a right is being removed, where there is discrimination in the enjoyment of rights, or where communities are particularly vulnerable. any deviation should be understood as a restriction on rights, and must be justified according to the principle of proportionality. some participants may have different needs and perspectives from others. where possible, all perspectives should be accommodated, particularly of the marginalised and vulnerable, but where this is impossible, the rights at stake need to be balanced against each other and those whose aspirations are not met should have this restriction justified to them according to the principle of proportionality, bearing in mind the priority that needs to be accorded the perspectives in question. one consistent challenge in fulfilling human rights and in ensuring the effectiveness of participation (cescr, 2000, para. 30) is the lack of resources for fulfilling the wishes of participants. socio-economic rights should be realised using the “maximum… available resources” (icescr, 1966, art. 2.1) nicholas mcmurry & siobhan o’sullivan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 566 but there is considerable difficulty in identifying these. this allows decisionmakers to use an alleged financial restriction to justify the failure to implement decisions. the human rights-based approach cannot solve this difficulty entirely, but resources can at times be identified through a process of participation (gaventa, 1998, p. 159). the prioritisation of decisions and stakeholders can also constrain the subsequent actions of decision-makers. there is promise that progress being made in human rights budgetary analysis (nolan et al., 2013) and participatory budgeting (shah, 2007) will be able to inform the allocation of budgets in more detail in the future. the decision-makers therefore are encouraged to make transparent and binding agreements with participants. in the absence of such agreements, they have a responsibility to use the information gathered from the process to inform their future strategy with regard to rights. this can include objective information but also subjective information such as priorities and goals for the participants. while the decision-maker is not required to immediately deliver these, their strategy must adopt these as their aim, and make use of identified resources. any deviation from these requirements should be justified, and this justification should be communicated to the relevant participants. conclusion participatory approaches to democracy have been prominent for several decades, and they have been officially endorsed by international and national bodies, including by human rights authorities. this article proposes a human rights-based approach to designing participatory programmes which can apply to state policy and also to initiatives of ngos and private bodies. it provides a coherent basis for advocating the establishment of participatory programmes rooted in universal principles and for developing benchmarks for evaluation of such programmes. the approach can be further developed and adapted to apply to other contexts and in response to developments in jurisprudence, participatory theory, and empirical data that indicates what works in practice. the framework for participation that emerges from this approach is summarised in the table below (table 2). it indicates priorities in identifying triggers for participation, the stakeholders to be included, and responsibilities with regard to conducting and following up from participation. these responsibilities are listed according to degree of responsibility that arise from the identified priorities. a human rights-based approach to participation studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 567 identifying factors trigger for participation human rights stakeholders high ↑ priority ↓ low • decisions and developments potentially disrupting enjoyment of rights • core human rights policies • protection of persons from immediate threat to their rights by others • decisions and policies more distantly linked to the enjoyment of human rights • those whose existing enjoyment of rights is at risk • the vulnerable • those experiencing discrimination • those whose rights are specifically at stake in a decision • the community as a whole in relation to a core human rights policy • other stakeholders (i.e., those with access to resources and expertise) decision-makers’ responsibilities in implementing participation in following up on participation for decisions and stakeholders of higher priority ↑ responsibilities ↓ for all decisions and stakeholders regardless of priority • thorough participation • less thorough participation for general policies • restrictions permitted according to the principles of proportionality • allow freedom of association and freedom of speech and abide by nondiscrimination • accept submissions initiated by human rights stakeholders • prioritisation of realisation of rights according to wishes of prioritised stakeholders • use of resources identified through participation • adopt the aspirations of participants as the ultimate goal of policy • binding agreements between parties are always encouraged • transparency of decisions, providing justification for any restrictions table 2. elaborated framework for the human rights-based approach to participation. nicholas mcmurry & siobhan o’sullivan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 568 for the sake of simplicity and clarity, this article assumes that participatory processes are taking place within a national, or even local context. it does not address questions of global democracy or universal human rights accountability. these questions are addressed elsewhere both by democratic theorists and by human rights scholars, and their insights may enable the extension of the approach advocated here to address questions of transnational democracy and accountability (held, 1996, pp. 353-360; skogly & gibney, 2002). the approach provides a flexible and adaptable framework rather than a fixed blueprint. it can be applied to a multitude of different participatory processes including referendums, consultations, and deliberative fora. it can be applied to the development of state policy but also to the decisions of private service providers, both businesses and ngos, and to economic activities that may benefit or cause harm to local people. further insights can enhance the approach through exploring other factors necessary for successful participation (such as the development of the skillset of those managing and participating in participatory processes). the approach systematically identifies principles that can inform which decisions require participation, who should participate and how they should be prioritised, how participation should be implemented, and how subsequent decisions should be informed by participation. it can thus be of use to decision-makers, whether public or private, in designing, evaluating and adapting participatory programmes, to civil society in demanding participation and in criticising existing programmes, and to scholars interested in studying, evaluating, and advocating participation. acknowledgements this research was part-funded by the irish research council and the national university of ireland, galway, school of law fellowship. references adamson, d., & bromiley, r. 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(1996). models of democracy (2nd ed.). blackwell. human rights committee. (2014). concluding observations on the fifth periodic report of sri lanka, u.n. doc. ccpr/c/lka/co/5. icescr (international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights), dec. 16, 1966, 999 u.n.t.s. 3. international covenant on civil and political rights, dec. 16, 1966, 999 u.n.t.s. 171. leal, p. a. (2011). participation: the ascendancy of a buzzword in the neo-liberal era. in a. cornwall (ed.), the participation reader (pp. 70-81). zed books. mcmurry, n. (2018). a human-rights based approach to participation: outline and assessment. in t. pirc (ed.), participation, culture and democracy: interdisciplinary perspectives on public engagement and social communication (pp. 133-151). cambridge scholars publishing. mcmurry, n. (2019). applying human rights to enable participation. international journal of human rights law, 23(7), 1049-1073. mcmurry, n. (2020). a right for protest to be heard. seton hall journal of diplomacy and international relations, 21(2), 93-108. mcmurry, n. (2023, forthcoming). participation and iemocratic innovation under international human rights law. routledge. nicholas mcmurry & siobhan o’sullivan studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 554-570, 2022 570 mowbray, a. (2012). cases, materials, and commentary on the european convention on human rights. oxford university press. nolan, a., o’connell, r., & harvey, c. (eds.). (2013). human rights and public finance: budgets and the promotion of economic and social rights. hart publishing. occupiers of 51 olivia road v. johannesburg and others (cct 24/07), zacc 1 (south african constitutional court 2008). opinión consultiva oc-27/21 solicitada por la comisión interamericana de derechos humanos, series a, no. 27 (inter-american court of human rights 2021). osman v. united kingdom, 29 ehrr 245 (european court of human rights 1998). parés, m., bonet-martí, j., & martí-costa, m. (2012). does participation really matter in urban regeneration policies? exploring governance networks in catalonia (spain). urban affairs review, 48(2), 238-271. parker, s., spires, p., farook, f., & mean, m. (2008). state of trust: how to build better relationships between councils and the public. demos. r. on the application of bernard v. enfield lbc, ewhc admin 2282 (the administrative court, queen’s bench division 2002). rahnema, m. (1992). participation. in w. sachs (ed.), the development dictionary (pp. 116-131). zed books. saul, b., kinley, d., & mowbray, j. (2014). the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights: commentary, cases, and materials. oxford university press. saxena, n. c. (2011). what is meant by people’s participation. in a. cornwall (ed.), the participation reader (pp. 31-33). zed books. schabas, w. a. (2019). nowak's ccpr commentary: u.n. international covenant on civil and political rights (3rd ed.). n. p. engel verlag. sen, a. (1999). democracy as a universal value. journal of democracy, 10(3), 3-17. shah, a. (ed.) (2007). participatory budgeting. world bank. skogly, s. i., & gibney, m. (2002). transnational human rights obligations. human rights quarterly, 24(3), 781-798. smith, g. (2009). democratic innovations. cambridge university press. vitale, d. (2006). between deliberative and participatory democracy: a contribution on habermas. philosophy & social criticism, 32(6), 739-766. warren, m. (2009). governance-driven democratization. critical policy studies, 3(1), 3-13. woolrych, r., & sixsmith, j. (2013), placing well‐being and participation within processes of urban regeneration. international journal of public sector management, 26(3), 216-231. young, i. m. (2000). inclusion and democracy. oxford university press. froc fg july 4 16 correspondence address: kerri a. froc, department of law and legal studies, carleton university, c473 loeb building, 1125 colonel by drive, ottawa, on, k1s 5b6; email: kerri.froc@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 185-190, 2016 book review poor justice: how the poor fare in the courts lens, vicki. (2016). new york: oxford university press. isbn 9780199355440 (paper) cdn$39.95; isbn 9780199355464 (ebook) cdn$33.99. 256 pages. kerri a. froc carleton university, canada poor justice (2016), written by lawyer turned social justice scholar, vicki lens, shows the aptness of raymond chandler’s description of the law, at least as it relates to poor people’s experiences of the justice system. in the long goodbye, chandler (1992, p. 56) wrote, “the law isn't justice. it's a very imperfect mechanism. if you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer.” having years of experience “in the trenches” conducting public interest litigation and then becoming a social work professor, lens gives a detailed, interdisciplinary analysis of how public interest lawyers and sometimes poor people themselves have managed to press the right buttons to effect justice. in essence, she argues that the luck of which chandler spoke is often dependent upon whether litigants draw a judge who is willing to give them an opportunity to express their legal dilemmas in their own voice, whether their lawyers are able to use legal levers in creative ways and transcend classbased paternalism to challenge vigorously government evidence and experts, and which judges’ personal ideologies predominate when their cases reach the us supreme court. each chapter begins with a vignette taken from the legal stories of poor people; these animate her analysis. in evocative prose, lens provides a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the legal system, providing a clear-eyed evaluation of the successes and frailties of legal strategies to effect change, and documenting the trajectories of doctrinal developments in areas of law important to historically marginalized groups. kerri a. froc studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 185-190, 2016 186 in part i, lens turns to ethnography to analyze welfare “fair hearings” (administrative proceedings conducted by judges to review the termination of welfare benefits) and child maltreatment hearings held in formal courtroom settings to adjudicate charges of abuse and neglect and monitor parental “rehabilitation” (p. 46). the author uses both types of cases to assess whether the poor achieve not only procedural, but substantive justice in these fora. her analysis is based on an impressive collection of primary research, namely her observations of over two hundred of the latter and almost a hundred of the former, and supplemented by participant interviews. in her study of these hearings, she describes the significance of a judge’s “style” in managing the hearing process (pp. 14, 61), either drawing those affected into the hearing process and treating them as the “experts” in their own case or discursively (and sometimes literally) excluding them from the room. these aspects affect the litigants’ perception of justice, as their treatment in court is sometimes as important to them as the outcome, or even more important. (p. 15). however, they also bear upon substantive justice, in that they influence the extent to which litigants are able to make submissions and prove their case. while appropriately lauding those extraordinary judges who, with seemingly small changes in demeanour and language, are able to educate and elicit necessary information to effect justice and change lives, lens’ discussion is equally an indictment of “objective” judges who, in following a script and enforcing “the rules,” often make rulings laced with impatience, and larded with arbitrariness and their own ego. a vignette called “stop speaking” particularly resonated with my own experiences in family court a little more than a decade ago. in one instance, a judge, who no longer wished to entertain the submissions i was advancing vigorously on behalf of my client seeking support, stated that unless i stopped talking he would make an award against her. part i also illustrates, often in the rarely-heard words of the poor and marginalized themselves, the yawning chasm between what the law fixates upon as indicative of due process (e.g., receipt of a letter, proof of sickness on the date of a hearing, court decorum, legal representation), and what is critical for those caught up in the system themselves (e.g., being able to tell their story, what is at stake for them personally, the legitimacy of their underlying claim). however, the idea that due process is quite dependent on decision-makers is not new; neither is the diversity between judges who value “voice” and those who value process and rules (i.e., philips, 1998). nor is research documenting the disjuncture between legal facts and what lens calls “social facts” and the bureaucratized silencing of the poor in administrative hearings (i.e., white, 1991), although lens’ qualitative research provides an important and needed substantiation of this phenomenon beyond the anecdotal. i had hoped lens would expand her analysis toward a discursive analysis of the transcripts she collected, which would have enriched and complicated these findings. for instance, lens indicates that child protection hearings book review studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 185-190, 2016 187 were unable to address systemic issues of social, racial and economic inequalities because, while they formed the “subtext” in such cases, “the focus is on the individual family, not the system” (p. 52). i question, however, whether it is simply the transparent and neutral “nature of the case” that impeded such interrogation (p. 52). could it be that the discursive moves of judges during the hearings assisted in producing the gendered, racialized and classed figure of the neglectful parent (read: mother), and the nuclear family who, to paraphrase tolstoy, is unhappy in its own individualized, idiosyncratic way? could it also be that the “style” of individual judges, silencing or directing the voices of parents during the hearings, is also reflective of ideology (philips, 1998)? yet, while lens repeatedly decries the absence of systemic considerations, she steers clear of interrogating whether the discursive frame established by the judges made such considerations an impossibility. in part ii, lens undertakes an analysis of lower court proceedings instigated by social justice lawyers and organizations on behalf of persons with mental disabilities facing non-consensual commitment or treatment, and homeless individuals and families denied adequate shelter. she presents these two case studies as a primer to show how cases are won or lost through the ability of lawyers to use broadly worded statutes and precedents creatively, as well as to develop strategies based on their knowledge of how social institutions work and how far courts are capable or willing to go in effecting justice. from a canadian legal perspective, perhaps the most fascinating element of the book is the author’s description of the successful litigation concerning the right to shelter and emergency housing for the homeless. canadian courts have been decidedly tentative in this regard. judges have recognized only the modest, “negative” right of individuals to erect, without interference from the state, temporary shelters in public spaces to avoid exposure to the elements (and possible death), under section 7 of the canadian charter of rights and freedoms guaranteeing life, liberty and security of the person (abbotsford (city) v shantz, 2015; victoria (city) v adams, 2009). disappointingly, when it came to a broader systemic claim to a right to shelter and impugning government action that undermined the accessibility of affordable housing and increased homelessness as constitutional violations, the ontario court of appeal pronounced that the issue was a political, “nonjusticiable” one (tanudjaja v. canada (attorney general), 2014). it is the case that the public interest lawyers whose efforts lens describes were able to unearth more helpful – albeit generally worded – legislation to support the imposition of duties upon the state to provide assistance to the indigent than exist in the canadian context. nevertheless, their strategies remain instructive. one lawyer started with a class action to establish a simple right to (temporary) shelter for homeless men, forgoing a request for more complex supports or long-term housing that would have triggered the courts’ concerns about justiciability. then, most significantly, he focused on kerri a. froc studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 185-190, 2016 188 a winnable preliminary injunction given the onset of winter and the available proof that homeless men without shelter risked death from exposure during past new york winters. other lawyers expanded on the preliminary injunction win through class actions to achieve the right to shelter for women and homeless families. because of the lawyers’ decisions to confine the remedy, courts were willing to engage in long-term supervision over the implementation of the orders, sometimes for decades, to ensure the adequacy of the shelter, resulting in further legislative changes in other jurisdictions according to the standards courts set. lens rightfully points out the limitations of the outcomes achieved, including that they simply nibbled around the edges of the more systemic causes of homelessness and that they had negative financial consequences for resources expended in other areas of the system; they nevertheless seem extraordinary and a lesson on harnessing the possible within law to achieve justice for the poor. in the last part of the book, lens conducts a doctrinal analysis of us supreme court’s fourteenth amendment (“equal protection”) cases in the area of school segregation and “stop and frisk” jurisprudence under the fourth amendment (unreasonable search and seizure). she characterizes the segregation cases as showing the courts as “unreliable” interpreters of precedent, using the emancipatory dicta from the court in brown v board of education (1954) to thwart contemporary attempts at integration, and the stop and frisk cases as “tone deaf,” facilitating racial profiling and a degradation of the rights (primarily) of african american males (p. 206). such cases, she says, illustrate the tendency of courts to “dive too quickly into the ideological currents of the day or reflect the views of the dominant and affluent rather than the poor and disenfranchised” (p. 206). lens justifies the inclusion of these two jurisprudential areas in a book on “poor justice” because of “the nexus between race and poverty,” with school integration cases representing “one route out of poverty, through education,” and because criminalization represented by the stop and frisk cases “illustrate[s] a route to greater poverty” (p. xii). yet, she does not attempt to connect the themes from these cases to judicial treatments of poor people’s rights in previous chapters. in fact, in the chapter on stop and frisk cases, lens herself seems to suggest that the phenomenon of police pretext stops of african american males and the resulting jurisprudence weakening constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizure, affects poor and affluent racialized men alike (p. 195). commentators debate and courts deliberate on whether there is a sufficient basis in the us constitution to recognize socioeconomic rights, in the sense of some type of state duties to ensure certain “social outcome targets” related to “adequate of subsistence, housing, health care, education, and safety or to the means of obtaining the same” (michelman, 2008, p. 667). but the us supreme court has certainly confronted issues with redistributive implications (michelman, 2008, pp. 677-679), and addressed the treatment of the poor under the fourteenth book review studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 185-190, 2016 189 amendment (rose, 2010). the author missed an opportunity to broach directly the subject of “how the poor fare” in the highest court of the land qua poor people, if only to show whether and how the segregation and stop and frisk cases are illustrative, or at least, connected to, the court’s ideologies concerning poverty and state responsibility for citizens’ wellbeing more generally. further, when it comes to these cases, lens suddenly changes her analytic frame. whereas she chooses to explain the behaviour of judges in her ethnographic studies as matters of “style,” distinctions between opinions by the various us supreme court judges are characterized as ideological. i share her assessment that ideology is at work when a nation’s highest court interprets the constitutional rights of the marginalized and poor (froc, 2012, p. 141). however, she explains the role of ideology only by indicating that the jurisprudence she studies generally tracks the “changes in the court’s composition” (p. 170), noting the popular recognition of certain courts (such as the warren and burger courts) as conservative or liberal, and that the room for discretion in interpreting precedent and applying legal analysis means “it is inevitable that ideology will influence the results” (p. 171). the author then goes on to note the vast areas of disagreement amongst various members of the court in interpreting precedent and setting legal doctrine to the detriment of marginalized groups. while lens prefaces her chapters by explaining the different interpretive approaches to the constitution seen as markers of conservativism and liberalism,1 she scarcely alludes to them in her analysis. the conclusions that ideology has the potential to seep into judgements because law is subject to interpretation, that supreme court judges have in practice interpreted precedent and doctrine differently (sometimes dramatically so), and that judges are of diverse backgrounds and political proclivities, does not seem to be particularly revelatory. perhaps the more important questions are what ideology is employed by court majorities in various opinions, why a particular ideology becomes dominant at a certain moment in constitutional jurisprudence, and what that ideology enforces about our conceptions of marginalized groups and social subordination. in relation to the school segregation cases particularly, constitutional theorists have provided compelling explanations of the jurisprudence subsequent to brown as reflecting societal struggles arising out of its enforcement (e.g., siegel, 2004). these elements of lens’ doctrinal analysis, are, in my view, undertheorized. lens’ book nevertheless makes an important contribution. law is often resistant to the insights from other disciplines; in turn, other disciplines often look upon law as hide-bound, excessively doctrinal and uniformly predisposed towards retrenching the social status quo. her ethnographic studies powerfully demonstrate how, for poor people, justice is not only what 1 notably, her explanation of the interpretive approach of originalism, identified with conservatism, as based exclusively upon “framers intent” is dated and no longer correct. kerri a. froc studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 185-190, 2016 190 is written or decided in the name of law, but what is said to them and the manner in which it is said. her studies benefit both those who study law by revealing the limitation of traditional doctrinal analyses, and practitioners of the law (both judges and lawyers) by showing the workings of justice in the smallest details, such as how affected persons are addressed in court. in turn, her analysis of social reform litigation provides a more complex and complete picture of law as a means of social change than what many commentators are willing to acknowledge, something to which critical studies scholars ought to pay heed. law is indeed an imperfect mechanism, but better understandings of when justice does or does not “show up” for the poor are critical. references abbotsford (city) v. shantz, 2015 bcsc 1909, 392 dlr (4th) 106. brown v board of education, 347 u.s. 483 (1954). chandler, r. (1953/1992). the long goodbye. new york: vintage books. froc, k. (2012). will watertight compartments sink women’s charter rights? the need for a new theoretical approach to women’s multiple rights claims under the canadian charter of rights and freedoms. in b. baines, d. barak-erez & t. kahana (eds.), feminist constitutionalism (pp. 132-148). cambridge: cambridge university press. michelman, f. (2008). socioeconomic rights in constitutional law: explaining america away. international journal of constitutional law, 6(3&4), 663-686. philips, s. (1998). ideology in the language of judges: how judges practice law, politics and courtroom control. oxford: oxford university press. rose, h. (2010). the poor as a suspect class under the equal protection clause: an open constitutional question. nova law review, 34, 407-421. siegel, r. (2004). equality talk: antisubordination and anticlassification values in constitutional struggles over brown. harvard law review, 117(5), 1470-1547. tanudjaja v. canada (attorney general), 2014 onca 852, 379 dlr (4th) 467; leave to appeal to scc refused, 36283 (25 june 2015). victoria (city) v adams, 2009 bcca 563, 313 dlr (4th) 29. white, l. (1991). subordination, rhetorical survival skills and sunday shoes: notes on the hearing of mrs. ‘g’.” in m. fineman & n. thomadsen (eds.), at the boundaries of law: feminism and legal theory (pp. 40-58). new york: routledge. microsoft word brodie.docx studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 93 issn: 1911-4788 reforming social justice in neoliberal times janine brodie, university of alberta1 abstract this article unfolds in three stages. first, it locates the emergence of modern conceptions of social justice in industrializing europe, and especially in the discovery of the “social,” which provided a particular idiom for the liberal democratic politics for most of the twentieth century. second, the article links this particular conception of the social to the political rationalities of the postwar welfare state and the identity of the social citizen. finally, the article discusses the myriad ways in which this legacy of the social and social justice has been disrupted, although not yet fully displaced, by the economic orthodoxies and individualization that inform the contemporary neoliberal governing project in canada. the result, the article concludes, has been the institutionalization of insecurity, which demands the renewal of a social way of seeing and a politics of social justice on local and global scales. silenced and deflected for many years, rallying calls for social justice are growing everlouder in the politics of the early-twenty-first century. the critical necessity of reviving an ethics of fairness and just distribution in the popular imagination and in governing practices, on local, national, and global scales, could hardly be more pressing. after more than two decades of experience, it has become abundantly clear that, while the neoliberal project has stimulated economic growth and flows of trade, finance, and peoples across borders, it also has rapidly deepened the gulf between the rich and the poor both within countries and across the north-south divide. the neoliberal project has taken on many different configurations across national settings, ranging from european third wayism to the primitive capitalism of emerging economies. everywhere, however, this mode of governance has concentrated incomes and wealth among a few, squeezed the middle income strata, and fuelled unparalleled inequalities in income wealth, and life chances. if there is one consistent indicator of neoliberal governance, it is stalled, if not declining human development and well-being amidst unprecedented economic growth and wealth creation. it is a governing formula that is ripe with all manner of social injustices. if we paint the history of capitalist development with very broad strokes, it is apparent that the 19th century was marked by the creation of wealth, the 20th century by its redistribution, and the early 21st century by its concentration and polarization. canada has not been immune to this progressive polarization of the social fabric, although social and fiscal policies did cushion this process somewhat until recently. in fact, in the late 1990s, after more than a decade of cutbacks, canada’s federal government began to reinvest in social policy and to explore new conceptual and policy frameworks, especially the new social-isms of social in/exclusion, social capital, and social economy (brodie, 1 this research was supported by the canada research chair program in which i hold a tier 1 chair in political economy and social governance. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 94 issn: 1911-4788 2007). since the election of the harper government, however, this exercise in rethinking canada’s social architecture has simply grounded to a halt. key federal policy units, which were immersed in research on social inclusion and social capital such as the policy research initiative (pri), have been redeployed to other projects, while social policy making has been either further fiscalized or devolved to the provinces. all of this is very much in keeping with prime minister harper’s long held conviction that the federal government should get out of the social policy field altogether – this despite the fact that the national council of welfare, the federal government’s own reporting body, has recently described social welfare policy in canada as “an utter disaster” (quoted in calderhead 2006, p. 7). this inaction is especially puzzling given the mounting weight of evidence demonstrating that the life conditions and chances of canadians are increasingly polarized into haves and have-nots. statistics canada data, for example, indicate that, in 2004, the average earnings of the richest 10% of families with children was 82 times that of the poorest 10% of families with children: in 1976, the ratio was 31:1 (yalnizyan 2007, p. 3). moreover, statistics canada reports that household wealth is also rapidly evaporating for the vast majority of canadian families. in 2005, the poorest 20% of canadian families owed more than they owned and the net worth of the bottom 40% of families was negligible, while the top 10% of canadian families accounted for 58% of the total household wealth in canada (kolkman 2007, p. a15).2 one half of canadians now indicate that they are one or two pay checks away from being poor (hennessy 2006, p. 6). yet, despite growing inequalities and insecurity, in the last decade alone, canadian governments have collectively reduced program spending from 41% to 31% of the gdp and transfers to individuals from 11.5% to 7.8% of gdp (scott, et al., 2006, p. 58). these trends contrast markedly with what canadians think that their governments should be doing. an environics poll, conducted for the canadian centre for policy alternatives in the fall of 2005, for example, showed that 76% of canadians thought that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, 67% believed that the majority are not benefiting from economic growth, and 86% wanted the government to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor (yalnizyan, 2007, pp. 1-2; hennessey, 2006). similarly, a strategic council poll, conducted for the globe and mail and ctv prior to the release of the 2007 federal budget, indicated 50% of canadians thought increased spending on social programs was the most important priority for the government, in contrast to 19% that endorsed tax cuts and 13% that favoured debt reduction (globe and mail 2007, p. a4).3 in another poll, conducted in 2004, 74% of canadians agreed that it was possible to fight social inequalities, with 28% indicating that income inequalities were the most serious (leger 2004, p. 3). these data obviously raise disturbing questions about the relationship between citizenship and social justice in these neoliberal times. and, indeed, there have been revived philosophical debates about how we might rethink and recover the emancipatory 2 revisiting wealth inequality was released in december 2006. 3 strategic council poll of 1000 canadians conducted for the globe and mail and ctv. according to pollster allan gregg, “normally [a strong economy] creates a sense of optimism and very buoyant mood, but that’s not there ... people believe wealth is being shared unequally plus we’ve allowed our social safety net, our health care, educational system, the quality of our cities to unravel.” studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 95 issn: 1911-4788 and ethical promise of citizenship equality and social justice in the contemporary era (see for example isin, 2008; fraser and honneth, 2003). this article follows a different track, examining the ways in which our ideas about citizenship and social justice have been historically configured by previous governing orders and by ongoing transformations in dominant political rationalities. political rationalities, most simply, are shifting and always contested “procedures for representing and intervening” (miller and rose, 1990, p. 7) particular ways of seeing that privilege specific vocabularies, styles of truth telling and truth tellers (foucault, 2003, rose, 1999; dean, 1999). the following explores three themes. first, the idea of social justice is traced back to industrializing europe and the discovery of the “social,” which, i argue, has provided a particular idiom for liberal democratic politics for more than a century. next, this particular idea of the social is linked to the rationalities embedded in the postwar welfare state and the identity of the social citizen. and, finally, the article outlines how this legacy of the social is disrupted, although not submerged, by economic orthodoxy and individualization, both of which are at the heart of the neoliberal governing project. the social way of seeing the concept of social justice is frequently deployed, if not as a universally intelligible and applicable term, then, at least, as an imperative of social organization that can trace its lineage back to aristotle’s ideas about distributive justice or the moral teachings of thomas aquinas (jackson, 2005, pp. 356-359). the term “social justice,” however, entered our collective vocabulary far more recently, emerging out of the social and political landscapes of laissez-faire capitalism (barry, 2005; jackson, 2005). indeed, the first book bearing the title “social justice” did not appear until 1900 (miller, 1999, p. 5). the general consensus is that our modern understanding of social justice emerged in the late 18th century “as a child of the industrial and french revolutions” (jackson, 2005, p. 367), was popularized in the 19th century as western thinkers and societies became increasingly animated about the ethical foundations of modern societies and the role of the state in advancing social goals, and entered into mainstream politics in the midtwentieth century, when advanced liberal democracies, variously informed by social liberalism and social democratic politics, embraced some form of the welfare state. it is probably safe to say that the preponderance of writing about social justice focuses on the principles of justice rather than the origins and content of the social. we tend to take this term as a given. social historians, however, tell us that our contemporary understanding of the social, as being synonymous with society and the collective, was shaped during the multiple transformations associated with the emergence of industrial capitalism. although in early modernity, the social conveyed the ideas of sociability and fashionable living, the term was subsequently and progressively used as “a vital descriptor” of human uniqueness, community, and agency, and attached to the decidedly modernist projects of progress and the perfection of the human condition (schwartz, 1997, p. 277). as karl polanyi described in the great transformation, the idea of the social grew in complexity in response to laissez-faire governance and its inherent incapacity to comprehend, let alone ameliorate the human costs exacted by early industrial capitalism. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 96 issn: 1911-4788 according to polanyi, laissez-faire liberalism, similar to contemporary neoliberalism, promoted an “uncritical reliance on the alleged self-healing virtues of unconscious growth” (1957, p. 33). but, this strategy of enabling “the market mechanism to be the sole director of human beings and their natural environment” invited “the demolition of society” (1957, p. 73). market driven governance, according to polanyi, was a unique political construct, never before encountered in the productive or reproductive organization of human societies (1957, p. 69), and its consequences forced people, in effect, to “discover” society “behind the veil” of the market economy. in particular, pauperism and the rampant poverty associated with early industrialization “fixed attention on the incomprehensible fact that poverty seemed to go with plenty” – a revelation, polanyi argued, was “as powerful as that of the most spectacular events of history” (1957, pp. 84-85). these newly realized juxtapositions between economy and society and wealth and poverty informed a particular form of politics that would animate western democracies for the next century, leading polanyi to conclude that “social not technical invention was the intellectual mainspring of the industrial revolution” (1957, p. 119). by the mid-nineteenth century, radical thinkers had fused the adjective “social” with the noun “problem”. in early nineteenth century europe, the social problem was unequivocally cast in the singular and attributed to the unconstrained and unequal distribution of wealth and power of early industrial capitalism (schwartz, 1997, p. 279). indeed, the idea of le probleme social quickly spread across europe, animating the 1848 revolution in france, the essays of such leading thinkers as british liberal john stuart mill, and the policy platforms of continental social democratic parties (rose, 1999, p. 117; schwartz, 1997). also deeply invested in the political struggles of the time, marx was adamant that le probleme social was and should remain exclusively understood as the exploitive relationship between capital and labour. marx worried that the phrase would be pluralized as a raft of social problems and co-opted by the middle class, indeed, by “any man who has a sympathetic heart for the misery of his brothers” (quoted in schwartz, 1997, p. 279). for marx, the political mutation of the social problem into social problems promised only to conceal the fundamental realities of class exploitation, and, thus, erode its revolutionary potential. despite marx’s anxieties, the social problem was soon redefined and pluralized, both as competing interpretations of the social, and as a proliferating field of social problems. during these years, modern society developed, as conservative social historian gertrude himmelfarb explains, its “moral imagination” (1984). a plethora of voluntary organizations sprung up in civil society, offering hope and help to those deemed to have a problem, and were worthy of help, among them, the addicted, poor, abandoned, prostituted, insane, delinquent, and morally and spiritually impaired. quite independently from the state or the rule of law, this movement for social reform created its own discourses, apparatuses of knowledge, modes of intervention, and fields of expertise. social reform was understood as the mark of a civilized society because, as was often repeated, only modern societies were sufficiently advanced morally and technologically – the only ones “modern enough” – to care about the marginalized and to devise strategies for intervention to change their condition (schwartz, 1997, pp. 282, 288). in the process, studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 97 issn: 1911-4788 the social way of thinking, representing, and intervening was embedded as a “distinctive idiom” in western politics (rose, 1999, pp. 26-27). the idea of social justice provided the critical moral and philosophical underpinnings for this new language of politics. by the end of the 19th century, social justice had become the rallying call for social democratic parties across europe (barry, 2005, p. 5), which had gained political force as civil and democratic rights were progressively extended to the working classes and their organizations. the social justice project revolved around several key assumptions, beginning with the liberal promise of citizen equality. more fundamentally, however, the idea of social justice rested on the premise that justice was a virtue that could be applied both to the collective and the individual and, moreover, that social institutions and social positions could and should be assessed as being just or unjust (jackson, 2005, p. 358). as barry puts it, “the justice of unequal relations between employers and employees could be called into question, as could the distribution of income and wealth arising from capitalist institutions” (2005, p. 5). in contrast to liberalism’s promise of individual dignity, autonomy, and rights, the economic inequalities generated by unregulated market forces were deemed as being unjust, the product of structural flaws that modern “just” societies could ameliorate through redistribution (barry, 2005, p. 5). social justice thus had a “substantial political content,” which recommended the alleviation of poverty and the reduction of inequalities “as a matter of justice rather than charity” (jackson, 2005, p. 360). this critical distinction between justice and charity rested on the identification of structural or systemic inequalities, which, in turn, demanded redistribution of collective resources by society as a whole, and most obviously through the state (raphael, 2001, pp. 233-236). various principles of justice might be evoked to justify this commitment – for example, social need, the assertion of collective over individual interests, compensation for structural changes, or the pursuit of citizen equality (jackson, 2005, p. 360; williams, 1989, p. 32). the point to be underlined here is that dominant constructions of social justice required that the state rather than individuals or charitable organizations “had the responsibility for shaping and enforcing the chosen distribution of social resources” (fleischacker, 2004, p. 7). the social citizen in the early decades of the 20th century, these principles were embraced by ever-wider segments of the political spectrum, and, following the great depression of the 1930s, embedded in the ethos and ambitions of social liberalism, the technologies the welfare state, and constructions of the iconic social citizen. while postwar welfare states differed widely in the ways that they implemented the prescriptions of social liberalism, all embraced three foundational principles that marked a radical departure from the political rationalities of laissez-faire liberalism, which, by the 1940s, was widely condemned as a failed experiment in governance. first, social liberalism redefined the relationship between the state and the market. postwar welfare states operationalized the idea that the state was responsible for the just distribution of social resources and that the market could and should be regulated in order to maximize economic and political stability and the collective wellbeing of all citizens. moreover, the ideals of social justice and citizen studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 98 issn: 1911-4788 equality prescribed that certain goods – for example, education and health care – should not be entrusted to the capitalist market because it was incapable of ensuring fair distribution. second, and importantly, social liberalism prescribed that all citizens could make claim to a measure of equality, social security, and collective provision as a right of citizenship, independent of their status in the market or their personal character. social citizenship required positive obligations from the collective to provide resources for the welfare of individuals. finally, social liberalism demanded that public administration be infused with a new ethos of planning, impersonal procedures, and new technologies of governance, among them progressive taxation and the pooling of resources and risk through social insurance (young, 1990, p. 67; plant, 1998, p. 58; brodie, 1997) – what lord beveridge described a “new type of human institution” (quoted in lund 2002, 110). the social citizen was an historical icon, the product of over a century of discursive and political struggles around the inherent gap between liberalism’s promise of citizen equality and the structural inequalities of capitalism. for citizenship theorists, t. h. marshall foremost among them, social citizenship rights enhanced the practical worth of liberal political and civil rights, which could only be hollow promises if citizens were hobbled by the indignities and insecurities of poverty. the extension and protection of the full range of citizenship rights, in turn, nourished “a direct sense of community membership based on loyalty to a civilization which is a common possession” (marshall, 1964, pp. 40-41) – in other words, social rights provided the foundations for national solidarity and cohesion. in canada, in particular, social citizenship discourses were interwoven with an emerging narrative of pan-canadian nationalism: postwar social programs were represented as the glue of commonality among canadians, which distinguished them, at least according to the nationalist myth, from their less caring and less sharing american neighbours (brodie, 2002). of course, the practices of liberal welfare regimes such as canada’s fell far short of the moral and substantive aspirations of social liberalism. if there is one universal in politics, it is precisely that “reality always escapes the theories that inform programs and the ambitions that underpin them” (miller and rose, 1990, pp. 10-11). critics of the welfare state have generated a long list of fault lines, among them: the promise of universal social citizenship rights eluded most citizens, except perhaps the white male breadwinner (esping-anderson, 1990); an almost singular focus on economic redistribution veiled other systemic barriers to citizen equality such as racism, sexism, heterosexism, and able-ism (williams, 1989); little discursive space was available for equality claims-making grounded in recognition of cultural difference (young, 1990); the radical potential of social justice was diffused by alternative formulations such as equality of opportunity (armstrong, 2006); process was prioritized over outcome, leaving structures of inequality unchallenged; and, perhaps most critically, the ethos of social justice was displaced by the bureaucratic technical performances of keynesian economics (dean, 1999). paradoxically, these performances would later give legitimacy to professional economists to colonize the policy making process (fine, 2001). yet, as accurate as these and other critiques undoubtedly are, they underestimate or miss entirely what is perhaps the most critical innovation and legacy of social liberalism and a century of popular struggles around the idea of social justice – notably the myriad ways in which the social way of seeing and the social idiom was embedded in identity formation, including the social citizen, the framing of political legitimacy and studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 99 issn: 1911-4788 claims-making, and the practice of advanced liberal democratic politics. social liberalism’s promise of citizen equality, its promotion of collective intervention to mediate structural inequalities, and its commitment to social planning and social justice informed a particular performance of liberal-democratic politics – one which was “dependent upon the identification of a group with a shared identity,” which could be shown to have been “denied their full and proper legal and/or human rights.” this kind of politics, moreover, presumed the existence of a welfare state because it assumed immutable linkages between social rights, social equality, and social progress (smart 1995, p. 107). despite, its omissions and exclusions, then, the universal and moral framing of the social and, especially the construction of social citizenship opened discursive space and granted legitimacy to the practice of immanent critique, constituting a moral and political “lever that was later used by a variety of the social movements of the excluded” (yuval davis 1999, p. 121). social liberalism, in other words, provided language for the systemically disadvantaged to talk back to the state, to make claims as citizens who had been actively denied its promise of social justice, and to mandate the state to regulate and ameliorate structural assaults on individual and collective wellbeing. as the next section describes, neoliberal governing practices, and especially neoliberal social policy reforms target precisely this social way of representing and intervening. the neoliberal social imaginary contemporary political life in canada, and, indeed, across advanced liberal democracies, is riddled with gaps, disconnects and ruptures. there are gaps between what canadians want government to do and what it actually does, between policy prescriptions and social needs, and between our national narratives and our lived experience. citizens are treading water in a sea of uncertainty, which is agitated by a collision of world views and a struggle over the very meaning of such politically grounding concepts as the public, citizenship, equality, and justice. this is an era of conjunctural politics in which one political rationality, one way of seeing, representing, and intervening, is attempting to submerge and exceed another. this is a prolonged politics, where change is neither complete nor achieved without contestation, and often yields only partial victories or unsustainable ambiguities. over the course of a generation, the ascendancy of the neoliberal governing project in canada and elsewhere has systemically eroded the foundational assumptions of social liberalism and overhauled the governing technologies of the postwar welfare state. one canadian government after another has abandoned the vision of social citizenship, social security, and social justice, offering in their place a new social imaginary that pinpoints the market, one buoyed by the logics of neo-classical economics, as the primary, if not “natural” source of both individual wellbeing and freedom, and political legitimacy. although neoliberalism is often likened to laissez-faire liberalism, it is in many ways far more radical and invidious than its predecessor (so much so that one wonders whether the “liberal” part of this label is warranted). two arguments inform this claim. first, laissez faire rested on the early liberal construction of separate spheres – a societal pluralism that understood the public, the market, and the private sphere of domestic studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 100 issn: 1911-4788 relations and individuation as having distinct functions, hierarchies, rules and value structures (walzer, 1984; bowles and gintis, 1986). laissez-faire understood that the state, however minimalist, had a different mandate than the other two pieces of the liberal puzzle. the liberal state was uniquely challenged to intervene in economic and domestic life, and to provide public goods that either did not conform to market logics, or could not be entrusted to market mechanisms, including market failure. in contrast to laissez-faire, neoliberal fundamentalists envision a state that both elevates the market over all else and adopts market logics to guide its own conduct. the state, in other words, is expected to ask what is efficient, itself a contestable term, instead of what is right, fair, or possible. in theory and practice, the neoliberal state is implored to engage in a continuous process of auto-critique “centred on the question of whether it is possible to govern less or more economically” (armstrong 2006, p. 57). this utopian conceit demands that government, in effect, repeals itself by constructing and disciplining self-governing and self-sufficient individuals who live in the mythical econometric space where all other things are equal. second, the neoliberal social imaginary strives to embed market logics into the everyday calculations of who we are and how we should live our lives. as brown argues, “neoliberal rationality, while foregrounding the market, is not only or even primarily focused on the economy.” it extends and disseminates market values to all institutions and social action, and rewards individuals and institutions for enacting this vision (2005, pp. 39-40). this too is a radical departure from laissez-faire. adam smith and the enlightenment theorists “could never have conceived of a society in which the sphere of individual economic calculation has expanded into the whole domain of social relationships” (jordan, 2005, p. 164). as jordan further explains, they would all have taken for granted that the context of social life would remain a set of institutions (families, communities, nations) with a collective logic of independence and sharing. they would not have expected individual autonomy and choice to construct or sustain that order…. (ibid.) the transformations envisioned by neoliberalism are mirrored in, among other things, the new public management, risk assessment, outcome-based policy, fiscalized social policy, active welfarism and so on, but their reflection in these and other policies is only partial. it is invariably impeded, challenged and distorted by the residuals of the descending governing order. previously cultivated identities, political consensus, and cultural ideals, which are deeply embedded in social life, and tell us who we are and what we stand for, constitute obstacles to the promotion of a new governing order, and its particular way of representing and intervening (clarke, 2007). raymond williams further explains: the residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. thus certain experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 101 issn: 1911-4788 and practiced on the basis of the residue … of some previous social and cultural institution or formation (1977, 122; quoted in clarke, 2007). in addition to residues, an ascendant political rationality is also challenged by emergent risks, frictions, and ruptures that neither it nor its predecessor projected or imagined. as john clarke explains, the dominant, residual and emergent “exist in a dynamic interrelationship with each other … the dominant is always engaged in processes of trying to sustain and extend its dominance through diverse strategies – demobilizing, marginalizing, incorporating, and reworking alternative possibilities” (2007). clarke enumerates several ways in which contemporary neoliberal governance subordinates the previous performances of the social. among them, erasing involves the simple elimination of many postwar social programs while privatizing and subjugating consists of assigning formerly public goods and services to private market providers and imposing the market logics of private profit and supply and demand on previously decommodified public goods. other strategies of subordination include: narrowing or downsizing and targeting social programs to specific groups that are identified as being at risk; functionalizing or redesigning social programs so that they primarily address the needs of neoliberal labour markets rather than personal wellbeing; and fiscalizing or transforming social policies that required program planning and service providers into tax credits and deductions, which purportedly allows citizens “choice” in meeting their social needs. the latter strategy of subordinating the social is closely linked to both reinventing the ethos of public management to better reflect the alleged efficiencies of markets, and economizing, or encouraging citizens to identify as consumers of public services, and to embrace market logics in their everyday calculations with the goal of becoming selfsufficient (clarke, 2007; brodie, 2008). there are numerous examples of the diverse and mutually reinforcing strategies of subordinating the social in neoliberal times, many of which have met widespread public condemnation and resistance. there are, however, two neoliberal ways of representing and intervening, neoclassical economic doxa and individualization, which are pivotal. the rest of this article examines how these governing strategies systematically disarticulate the historical and political interface between citizenship, social provision, and social justice. (ong, 2006, p. 161). neoclassical economic doxa as already noted, political rationalities embody particular styles of truth-telling, which harness identities to specific social imaginaries, legitimize certain truth tellers, and delegitimize others. indeed, the ascendancy of any political project hinges on whether or not its foundational assumptions its way of seeing achieve the status of doxa – “an unexamined frame for all further cognition” (bauman, 2000, p. 30). political identities, styles of politics, and governing aspirations are formed and re-formed, that is given new shape and meaning, through doxa. the neoliberal project is grounded in the doxa of classical economic theory, which is commonly understood as being antagonistic to the social broadly defined, not the least because of its unwavering commitment to methodological individualism, which reduces humanity, in all its diversity, historicity, studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 102 issn: 1911-4788 and complexity to a singular and abstract formulation of individual utility maximization. this style of truth telling is “based on an initial act of abstraction” that “dissociates a particular category of practices, or a particular dimension of all practice, from the social order in which all human practice is immersed” (bourdieu, 2005, p. 1). it requires, as an article of faith, that we accept “all other things as being equal” when our lived experiences tell us precisely the opposite (rose, 1999, p. 30). this chasm between economic orthodoxy and the social is not new. it has propelled movements for social reform and social justice as well as the politics of redistribution for the past two centuries. what is distinct to this era is the extent to which economy orthodoxy has spilled over its academic and disciplinary boundaries, progressively enlarging “the territory of economic theory by a series of redefinitions of its object” (gordon, 1991, p. 43). until quite recently, economics, both in theory and application, has tended to live a life quite apart from the other social sciences which, in turn, were content to leave it alone to talk to its world of hypotheticals and formal models. increasingly, however, orthodox economics has itself taken a social turn, progressively colonizing the social sciences, especially at the point where they intersect with public policy. while it is widely recognized that neoliberal economists conquered finance ministries and central agencies some time ago, social policy making also has progressively fallen under economics’ seductive claims to “scientific” certainty, neutrality, and universalism (clarke, 2004, p. 89). economic orthodoxy now informs the very conceptualization of social problems and the generation of public policy solutions (fine, 2001). as a result, economic orthodoxy is no longer positioned in opposition to the social but, instead, presents itself as the preferred intellectual apparatus to frame our thinking about the social and government. in particular, we are increasingly implored to assess governmental institutions and policies in terms of their costs and benefits to individuals (jordan 2005, p. 158) and to eschew previous formulations of social justice or citizenship equality as being ideologically driven or economically inefficient. economic orthodoxy invests its pedlars with the legitimacy of scientific neutrality, simultaneously positioning its challengers as being as spurious, self-interested, and partial. as social policy advocates can readily attest, one can either accept the terms of economics’ narrow conceptual framework (and thereby confirm its legitimacy and reinforce its hegemony) or be relegated to the sidelines of the debate. this doxa, however, is a performance of a particular way of seeing – it is not so much a description of how the world is, as an image in which the world is being made (massey, 1999, p. 40). economic orthodoxy demands allegiance to a series of profoundly political corollaries that have been progressively embedded in the ethos of contemporary policymaking. these include, but are not limited to the ideas that policy should be oriented toward: the withdrawal or abstention of the state, especially in economic regulation; a shift into the private sector of public services (e.g. contracting out); the conversion of public goods into commercial goods and citizens into consumers or clients; a renunciation of the power of the state to reduce inequalities; a glorification of individual self-help and responsibility; and undermining representations of the state as a collective authority and an agent of social solidarity (bourdieu, 2005, p. 11). these prescriptions for governance are profoundly political and thus comprise the fault lines for resistance and revisionings of the social from the perspectives and studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 103 issn: 1911-4788 commitments of the residuals and the emergent. this counter-politics, however, often fails to appreciate that the neoliberal project gains its force, not only from the performances of powerful economic and political actors and the demoralization of popular forces, but also from its promise of individual freedom and empowerment, which has proven seductive even to those most abused by this conceit. neoliberalism, in a sense, promotes its own vision of social justice – one which, following from economic doxa, brackets out the influence of structure and systemic barriers to citizen equality and social justice, revolving, instead, around the primacy of individual choices and open systems that empower people to make their own choices about how they will live their own lives. justice, within this context, demands that economic rewards and societal resources are linked to ambition, effort, and the prudent exercise of individual choice, rather than, for example, to citizenship status (armstrong, 2006, p. 71). this model also assigns personal, rather than collective, responsibility to those who, through their own imprudent choices, have forfeited their claims to individual choice and freedom. in sum, neoliberalism’s model of justice endeavours to supplant the residual political goals of social equality, social security, and social wellbeing with makers of social progress that are only intelligible when viewed through the lens of neoclassical economic doxa. individualization the infiltration of the postwar terrain of social governance with neoliberal political rationalities reaches into individual conduct, and prescribes the citizen-subject of a neoliberal order (brown, 2005, p. 42), largely through discourses and strategies of individualization. while commensurate with the methodological and ontological individualism of orthodox economics and classical liberalism, individualization, or what beck characterizes as part of a broader contemporary compulsion “to live a life of one’s own,” is a distinct process that is quite unique in the practice of modern governance (beck and beck-gernsheim, 2002, pp. 22-26). as he explains, individualization has a different meaning than individualism, which lies at the heart of the neoliberal conception of social justice, and is more broadly understood as self-actualizing or self-seeking behaviour. individualization is a disciplinary and dividing practice that places steeply rising demands on people to find personal causes and responses to what are, in effect, collective social problems. in beck’s view, we are all now compelled to find a “biographic solution” to systemic contradictions (ibid, xxii). responsibility for social crises, which find their genesis in such macro processes as the globalization of production, geopolitical and environmental displacement, racism, or unequal gender orders to name a few, is shifted onto the shoulders of individuals. living a life of one’s own interpolates the entrepreneurial self who takes personal responsibility for her successes and her failures, most critically the failure of not being able to go it alone (brodie, 2007). individualization is increasingly embedded in strategies for social policy reform, which both promote the illusion of choice and are designed to shape citizens into selfsufficient market actors who provide for their needs and those of their families (brown 2005, p. 42). these innovations represent a fundamental shift in thinking that subordinates, if not explicitly rejects two critical assumptions that informed social studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 104 issn: 1911-4788 governance for much of the twentieth century: first, social structures systematically advantage some groups of citizens and disadvantage others; second, social policy appropriately corrects for systemic barriers and inequalities. yet, the individualization of contemporary social and political life is also rife with a series of paradoxes that undermine the legitimacy and stability of the neoliberal project and open space for re-forming social justice in a neoliberal era. first, as beck notes, individualization invites people “to constitute themselves as individual: to plan, understand, design themselves as individuals and, should they fail, to blame themselves. individualism thus implies, paradoxically, a collective lifestyle” (1998, p. 28). this invitation extends to members of groups, which by all indicators are structurally disadvantaged; they are collectively individualized with the expectation that they elect to rise above systemic barriers or, in the words of canada’s policy research initiative, depart the “identity markers” that confine them to the ranks of the “persistently poor” (brodie, 2008). however, these prescriptions are a mirage. as bauman explains, “how one lives becomes the biographical solution to systemic contradictions – or rather, this is what the hapless individuals are authoritatively told and come to believe to be the case (in fact, a ‘biographical solution to systemic contradictions’ is an oxymoron: it may be sought, but cannot be found” (2002, 68). beyond, this logical fallacy, the language of choice, which underpins individualization strategies, not only exceeds the grasp of the possible for most of us, but is itself illusory. again, bauman refines this point – “the factors that constitute [one’s] individuality – confinement to individual resources and individual responsibility for the results of life choices – are not themselves a matter of choice … more often than not, control over life is the way in which the story of life is told, rather than the way in which life is lived” (2002, p. 69). finally, and importantly, individualization strategies are often couched in the language of epochal necessity as a singular and necessary response both to the present postmodern and post-industrial moment that no longer corresponds to the one-size-fits-all identities and life courses of previous eras and to the relentless pressures of technological change and economic globalization. these conditions, we are repeatedly told, demand that people find expression and security through flexibility and adaptation. yet, without some pooling of the risks that collectively challenge us as flexible actors, the individualized life is an extremely risky and insecure life. there is a palpable difference between flexibility and precariousness, between being empowered to adapt to structural change, and being abandoned to devise personal strategies to survive forces beyond our control. by denying the language and legitimacy of collective claims-making, grounded in our shared experience of systemic vulnerability, individualization, in effect, represents the “institutionalization of insecurity,” and, for bauman, “a mode of domination grounded in the precariousness of existence” (2002, p. 68). conclusion the ultimate paradox of our neoliberal times is that the historically unprecedented human capacity to enhance and secure human wellbeing, locally and globally, should generate such degrees of precarious existence for the vast majority of humanity, indeed for all studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 105 issn: 1911-4788 things living. this elevation of “social insecurity into a positive principle of collective organization” (bourdieu, 2005, p. 12) is neither inevitable nor, for that matter, productive or efficient. rather, it is grounded in an unsustainable fundamentalism that must be contested as such. echoing polanyi’s indictment of laissez-faire, ronald wright observes in his short history of progress that “the idea that the world must be run by the stock market is as mad as any other fundamentalist delusion – islamic, christian, or marxist” (2006, p. 22). it is a fundamentalism that has not displaced the residuals of over two centuries of struggles for citizenship equality and social justice. it is also a fundamentalism that is unable to comprehend and actively fuels the emergent crises of the early 21st century, among them, global warming, rampant insecurity, the polarization of the north and the south, and pervasive antagonism to neoliberalism’s imperial designs. and, it is a fundamentalism which, having failed to deliver on its core promises of wealth, wellbeing, and freedom, increasingly governs as if we live in a “state of exception” (agamben, 2005). by raising the spectre of alien threats to our physical safety, it attempts to bypass the critical questions of justice, relying instead on secrecy, surveillance, and coercion. in the face of all of this, the necessary task of reforming social justice may very well hinge upon our collective insistence on putting the social back into our way of seeing and contesting neoliberal times. contemporary politics invite us to seriously reflect upon a time-worn adage: if you wish peace, care for justice (quoted in bauman, 2007, p. 5). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 106 issn: 1911-4788 references agamben, g. 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(1999). “the multi-layered citizen.” international feminist journal of politics, 1:1, 11936. capurri fg july 5 16 correspondence address: valentina capurri, department of geography & environmental studies, ryerson university, 350 victoria street, toronto, on, m5b 2k3, email: vcapurri@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 omar khadr, hannah arendt, and the racialization of rights’ discourse valentina capurri ryerson university, canada abstract in this paper, i focus on the story of omar khadr, a canadian minor who was held captive in guantanamo bay for a decade, to demonstrate that, at times, neither citizenship nor human rights offer any protection to those who, like khadr, are citizens of a country and are certainly human beings, yet have been deprived of the rights associated with those statuses. by drawing on hannah arendt’s argument in the origins of totalitarianism, as well as some of her subsequent work, i critically assess the debate regarding whether the rights conferred upon citizens are the only true barriers against abuse, or whether human rights have become a more effective protection. i suggest that this debate is sterile as it fails to recognize that the issue is not which set of rights offers a better guarantee of protection, but how the discourse around citizenship and human rights remains racialized, to the point where certain individuals are considered neither citizens nor humans, and therefore are potentially subject to abuse. focusing on canada’s treatment of khadr, i argue that racialization is the root cause of his denial of rights. my analysis aims to contribute to existing literature by refocusing the “rights debate” to demonstrate that any discussion around abstract rights fails to address the experiences of those racialized subjects whose rights have been denied. keywords citizenship; human rights; racism; racialization; khadr; arendt; canada; islamophobia few in canada are unaware of omar khadr, the story of his capture in afghanistan on july 27, 2002, and the subsequent ordeal that brought him back to canada in 2012. in fact, khadr’s case has polarized the canadian public for over a decade, between those who believe in his innocence and those who consider him to be a terrorist (angus reid poll, september 2, 2009). this paper goes beyond recounting once more the story of a 15 yearold canadian citizen who was imprisoned in guantanamo bay for most of his life, nor do the following pages discuss his culpability or innocence. instead, valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 148 i use khadr’s story to demonstrate that, at times, neither citizenship rights nor human rights offer any significant protection to those who, like khadr, are citizens of a country and are certainly human beings, yet have been deprived of the rights associated with those statuses. by drawing on hannah arendt’s argument in the origins of totalitarianism, as well as some of her subsequent work, i critically assess the debate regarding whether the rights conferred upon citizens are the only true barrier against abuse, or whether human rights have become a more effective protection. i suggest that this debate is sterile as it fails to recognize that the issue is not which set of rights offers a better guarantee of protection, but how the discourse around citizenship and human rights remains racialized, to the point where certain individuals are considered neither citizens nor humans, and therefore are potentially subject to abuse. my use of the term “racialization” is drawn from the definition of the concept provided by backhouse (1999, p. 148): “the process by which attributes such as skin colour, language, birthplace and cultural practices are given social significance as markers of distinction.” focusing on canada’s treatment of khadr, i argue that racialization is the root cause of his denial of rights. my analysis aims to contribute to existing literature by refocusing the “rights debate” to demonstrate that any discussion around abstract rights fails to address the experiences of those racialized subjects whose rights have been denied. several scholars have tried to use geopolitics to explain the lack of involvement shown by the canadian government in khadr’s case, arguing that canada refused to protect one of its own because of a need to maintain good relations with the united states (us) (badhi, 2007; khan, 2012; pardy, 2012). although such geopolitical considerations may have played a substantial role in determining canada’s response, i argue that racialization was a much bigger factor in shaping the behavior of canadian institutions and the canadian public. as macklin (2012, p. 225) points out, the large majority of the canadian public “knew it [his incarceration and mistreatment] was illegal and did not care.” there was a deeply rooted understanding in the canadian psyche regarding who was worthy of belonging and who may be considered disposable. as i will demonstrate in the following pages, the canadian government’s response rested on a racialized understanding of citizenship and human rights. i begin with a brief overview of khadr’s ordeal, questioning the refusal of the canadian government to protect his rights as a canadian citizen and exposing the inefficacy of human rights in providing a valid alternative. i then analyze arendt’s argument in the origins of totalitarianism, and her subsequent work, with respect to the failure of both citizenship and human rights to protect certain individuals. i reflect on whether arendt’s work remains valuable today, in light of the supposed erosion of state power due to globalization and in the face of repeated calls to substitute the concept of citizenship rights with the seemingly more encompassing concept of human rights. i suggest that neither set of rights have achieved their intended outcome because they operate within a historical and social context omar khadr, hannah arendt, & the racialization of rights discourse studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 149 dominated by racialized thinking. my conclusion revisits the khadr case and connects it to the wider discussion around the significance of a citizenship and/or human rights discourse both in canadian and international contexts. omar khadr omar khadr is the son of ahmen said khadr and maha elsamnah. he was born on september 19, 1986 in toronto, canada. his name acquired notoriety after he was captured in afghanistan in 2002 and accused of having thrown the hand grenade that killed u.s. sgt. 1st class christopher speer. in october 2002, khadr was transferred from the us bagram airforce base detention facility in afghanistan to guantanamo bay, cuba, and held in captivity throughout the following decade. on october 25, 2010, he pleaded guilty to the five war crime charges of killing christopher speer, spying, attempted murder, provision of material support for terrorism, and conspiracy (andy knight & mccoy, 2012). under a diplomatic agreement between the american and canadian governments, he was granted repatriation to canada after an additional year in guantanamo. khadr was transferred to canada on september 29, 2012 and initially held at the millhaven maximum security facility in ontario. after being threatened by another detainee, he was moved to the edmonton institution in alberta at the end of may 2013 (shephard, 2013). in december of the same year, khadr was reclassified as “medium security” and transferred to bowden correctional institution (free omar khadr committee, 2013). on may 7, 2015, omar khadr was released on bail and is currently living with his lawyer’s family in edmonton, alberta. while the previous government of stephen harper had initially appealed the alberta court’s decision to grant bail, the current liberal government has recently announced it will drop that appeal (perkel, 2016). there are two main reasons why khadr received sustained media attention. the first was his age – 15 years at the time of capture – and the us government’s insistence to prosecute him as an adult rather than a juvenile, in disregard of the 1989 united nations convention on the rights of the child (crc), as well as the 2000 optional protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict. the us is a signatory of the crc but has not ratified it. the second reason was that khadr is a canadian citizen, and although canada ratified the crc in 2001, the canadian government stood “virtually alone in its support of guantanamo bay, while other western governments have condemned the prison and managed to bring their citizens home” (shephard, 2008, p. xiv). canada was in fact complicit in the detention of one of its citizens, as canadian security intelligence service (csis) agents were sent “to interrogate khadr under the pretext of aiding him and then turned the contents of that interview over to the us” (engler, 2012, p. 183). through its cooperation with the us government, canada violated khadr’s rights as a citizen. valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 150 this paper touches only tangentially on the debate around the juvenile status of khadr at the time of his capture. whereas the issue was debated in canada, particularly after being publicized by then senator romeo dallaire, a long-time advocate on behalf of child soldiers, it is not my objective in this paper to discuss whether omar khadr should be considered a child soldier. whether he was considered a child or an adult, the canadian government would still have an obligation to uphold his rights as a citizen. furthermore, i consider the notion of child soldier to be extremely problematic as it rests on a westernized understanding of childhood, and it has been increasingly used as a colonial tool adopted by western powers to intervene in those parts of the world, mainly the african continent, where inhabitants are not considered to be “civilized enough” to value and protect their children (hyndman, 2010). in this paper, the issue of child soldiering is only mentioned for its significance in highlighting that any united nations (un) convention or document is unenforceable unless it receives the support of individual states. the fact that canada refused to demand adherence to the convention as it applied to one of its citizens demonstrates the unenforceability of international human rights agreements. the complicity of the canadian government, under both the liberals and the conservatives, in the persecution of omar khadr and his confinement in guantanamo bay was exposed in 2005. in granting khadr’s lawyers an interim injunction halting csis visits to guantanamo, federal court justice konrad von finckenstein concluded that “conditions at guantanamo bay do not meet charter standards” (shephard, 2008, p. 167). the court ruling was a further reminder that, guilty or innocent, omar khadr should have enjoyed inalienable charter rights that were being violated in guantanamo. this injunction did little to prevent comments such as those expressed by ezra levant (2011, p. 79) that “the united states, omar khadr’s jailer, hardly qualifies as a country unable to fairly dispense the rule of law” and it is therefore a jurisdiction where canada has no legitimate reason to intervene. this argument deserves only a passing mention as the guantanamo bay military complex is outside the legal jurisdiction of the us, and that is why it was chosen by the bush administration as a detention camp for enemy combatants. reports prepared by the red cross and other witnesses indicate that guantanamo detainees are regularly abused and tortured (edney, 2012). by refusing to intervene on khadr’s behalf, successive governments acted unconstitutionally as, the charter establishes that canadian citizens are entitled to the right to counsel, protection from torture and a fair trial. the argument that canada had little authority in deciding the fate of khadr also lacks substance. as i discuss in the following sections, even in the global age, states retain substantial authority in controlling their own population. while nathalie des rosiers (2012), general counsel of the canadian civil liberties association, is correct in pointing out that canadian law is unclear when it comes to the government’s exact responsibilities towards its citizens who are arrested, tried or incarcerated abroad, it should be acknowledged that omar khadr, hannah arendt, & the racialization of rights discourse studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 151 other western governments have been successful in putting pressure on the us to release their citizens from guantanamo. for instance, michelle shephard recounts the “fair go for david” campaign that was started by the father and military lawyer of david hicks, an australian held in guantanamo. the campaign forced then prime minister john howard, a strong bush ally, to intervene on hicks’ behalf with us vice president cheney. the result was a swift deal that saw david hicks plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of nine months in an australian jail (2008). in canada, neither the liberal nor conservative governments cared enough to repatriate a canadian citizen locked in the legal limbo that is guantanamo bay. it also did not help that the supreme court of canada refused to force any remedial action on the government (davidson, 2012). while the canadian government failed to uphold khadr’s citizenship rights, the international community was equally unsuccessful in protecting khadr’s human rights. despite the public advocacy of several human rights organizations, such as amnesty international, human rights watch, unicef, coalition to stop the use of child soldiers, and lawyers against war, little changed in omar khadr’s life behind bars (khan, 2012; williamson, 2012). this suggests that human rights remain ineffective due to the international community’s refusal to enforce restrictions and hold accountable violators of those rights (blau & moncada, 2009; davidson, 2012). in the case of khadr, neither citizenship nor human rights offered any protection from forced confinement and abuse. how did it happen that canadian governments of different political orientations were given carte blanche to abandon their own citizen for over a decade? how could it be that, in the age of human rights, no one has been held responsible for the lives that were lost and forgotten in guantanamo? what set of rights should we appeal to in situations such as the one discussed in these pages? are human rights more or less effective than citizenship rights? what if neither proves to be of any help? over 60 years after the publication of the origins of totalitarianism, arendt’s (1976) discussion of citizenship and human rights might still provide some guidance in answering these questions. hannah arendt and the origins of totalitarianism hannah arendt’s the origins of totalitarianism (1976) was first published in 1951. the book is divided into three parts: “antisemitism,” “imperialism” and “totalitarianism.” in the first two parts arendt focuses on the constitutive elements of antisemitism and imperialism, in the belief that those elements were at the root of the totalitarian movements that emerged in the 20th century (kohn, n.d.). in the third part, she analyzes the phenomenon of totalitarianism. as arendt (1976, p. viii) explains in the preface to the first edition, her effort aims at comprehending not by simplistic recourse to causation but by “examining and bearing consciously the burden which our valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 152 century has placed on us” (1976, p. viii). her going back to the origins of totalitarianism is an attempt to resist a reality that should never have been yet was. in “the decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man,” which concludes part two of her book, arendt discusses the decline of the nation state in europe and its consequences for those who, before or after world war ii, were dispossessed of their rights as citizens and left stateless and rightless, “the scum of the earth” (1976, p. 267). when pointing out the failure of the nation state system, arendt was also skeptical of the notion of human rights and its efficacy in protecting either groups or individuals (thobani, 2007). omar khadr was born in canada; accordingly, he has legal citizenship status. despite this incontrovertible reality, he has been practically deprived of some of his rights as a citizen by successive canadian governments. by leaving him in guantanamo bay, canada ignored its obligation to protect canadians abroad (pardy, 2012). as argued by audrey macklin, “canada effectively renounced its relationship to omar as citizen” (2012, p. 233) and only took him back under pressure from the obama administration. for all practical purposes, canada considered omar khadr as an alien. rather than indicating a weakening of state power in the age of globalization, this ability to pick and choose which citizens are worthy of the status and which are unworthy and therefore remain citizens in name only, reinforces the state’s power to control its population. the conservative government of stephen harper went one step further when it introduced bill c-24, strengthening canadian citizenship act, which established that canadian citizenship can be rescinded for dual citizens who are convicted of terrorism-related offences. bill c-24 became law on june 20, 2014, officially empowering the government to revoke the citizenship status of those dual citizens accused of “bad behavior” (bahrami, 2016). not surprisingly, those who have been targeted by this legislation are all muslim canadians (the canadian press, 2015). the newly elected government of justin trudeau has already tabled legislation to repeal the bill (legisinfo, 2016). arendt’s definition of citizenship as “the right to have rights” (1976, p. 298) confirms that today as in the past, human rights are largely ineffective as a barrier against abuse. humanity in itself is not enough to guarantee the protection that only a state can demand for its citizens. when people become stateless or, as in the case of omar khadr, the state refuses to recognize them as citizens, there is no protection left. omar khadr is one example of a pattern emerging in canada that, particularly since the 9/11 (september 11) attacks in 2001 in the us, has witnessed the government systematically ignoring the rights of its own citizens; maher arar, abdullah almalki, ahmad el maati, muayyed nureddin, and abousfian abdelrazik are all canadian citizens who have faced torture abroad with canada’s complicity (khan, 2012). in none of these cases has canada willingly provided any support nor has the international community effectively intervened. if we also consider the violations of rights on canadian soil, from the daily harassment omar khadr, hannah arendt, & the racialization of rights discourse studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 153 of muslim and arab canadians to the detention under security certificates of immigrants with the use of secret evidence, a pattern of abuse emerges that targets specific individuals whose only commonality is their religious or ethnic background. canada’s failure to protect its own citizens confirms the validity of arendt’s argument that human rights, “defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments,” (1976, p. 291) are revealed as unenforceable the moment that no government steps forward to guarantee them. for arendt, the moment the world population got divided into national groups, each one located within the territorial boundaries of a nation state, human rights became “only meaningful and attainable within the context of citizenship rights” (rygiel, 2010, p. 48). andrew vincent (2010, p. 166) notes that for arendt, “outside the framework of states human rights were largely otiose.” giorgio agamben concurs that within the system of the nation state, human rights reveal their uselessness “precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state” (2000, p. 20.0). agamben exemplifies this assertion by recalling how the nazis made a point of sending jews and “gypsies” to extermination camps only after they had been denationalized. the steadfast commitment nazis showed to this rule was no small bureaucratic directive but essential to the entire edifice of the final solution, since “when their rights are no longer the rights of the citizens, that is when human beings are truly sacred, in the sense that this term used to have in the roman law of the archaic period: doomed to death” (agamben, 2000, p. 22.2; see also arendt, 1976; agamben, 1998). in homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life, agamben (1998, pp. 132-134) went back once again to arendt’s analysis and concluded that when “the rights of man” get separated from “the rights of the citizen,” they lose their connection to the field of politics and are relegated to the nebulous category of “humanitarianism,” that is to perpetual irrelevancy. today, as in 1951, a huge hiatus persists between “the efforts of wellmeaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inalienable’ those human rights . . . and the situation of the rightless themselves” (arendt, 1976, p. 279). from afghanistan to palestine, from rwanda to guantanamo bay, from burma to saudi arabia, human rights violations continue unabated. despite the protocols, treaties and covenants signed at the un, international law continues to be limited to the good will of sovereign states to implement them since “for the time being, a sphere that is above the nations does not exist” (arendt, 1976, p. 298). in on revolution, first published in 1963, arendt reiterated her belief that human rights amount to little more than wishful thinking unless they are translated into citizenship rights by their incorporation into state laws. according to arendt (2006, p. 140), the problem inherent to human rights is that they inevitably have less authority than “the rights of nationals, and that they were invoked only as a last resort by those who had lost their normal rights as citizens.” and yet, even as a last resort, human rights have been revealed to be quite futile. valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 154 in the following section, human rights are examined in light of arendt’s (1976, p. 300) claim that “the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human” has had little use for people across the world. the analysis also focuses on the inaccuracy of arguments that imply that processes of globalization have weakened citizenship while injecting new life into human rights. following rygiel’s (2010) analysis, i maintain that the opposite is true and that, rather than challenging citizenship, globalization is strengthening it, thus making it a more powerful tool in controlling populations within and across borders. although my argument supports the notion that citizenship is still relevant despite (and because of) the spread of globalization, i suggest moving beyond the debate around citizenship versus human rights, as i consider it unhelpful in addressing situations in which neither citizenship rights nor human rights have provided any protection. in particular, i claim that, as pointed out by sherene razack (1998), an exclusive focus on rights is misleading insofar as it centres on the notion of the abstract individual while failing to take into account that individuals are always part of groups that are in evolving power relations vis-à-vis each other. human and citizenship rights must be understood as operating within a political and social reality of racialization that remains a defining characteristic of organized human life. while both sets of rights might have strengths and weaknesses of their own (something that is beyond the scope of this paper), the problem is that they are applied within racialist dynamics that position some individuals as citizens and human beings, and others as neither citizens nor humans. the “citizenship rights versus human rights” debate the debate around whether we should privilege human rights over citizenship rights, or vice versa, is a recurrent one. paulina tambakaki (2009) identifies the basic differences between citizenship and human rights. among these differences is the fact that human rights are by definition universal, insofar as they apply to all human beings, while citizenship rights are the exclusive preserve of “members of nationally and territorially delimited communities” (tambakaki, 2009, p. 9). citizenship rests on the premise of the “stateterritory-identity axis” (painter & philo, 1995, p. 111). as a consequence of its connection to a delimited physical space, citizenship is therefore inextricably tied to the concepts of inclusion and exclusion. human rights are instead untied to a specific political unit or territory. this universality, which for arendt rests on the notion of “an ‘abstract’ human being who seemed to exist nowhere” (1976, p. 291), is among the reasons for the popularity of human rights as well as its failure. the notion of human rights is attractive. the issue for arendt was not the appeal of the notion but its efficacy. this has been the case since its appearance in the american declaration of independence in 1776 and the french declaration of the rights of man and citizen in 1789 (agamben, omar khadr, hannah arendt, & the racialization of rights discourse studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 155 1998; see also arendt, 1976; heater, 1999). despite claims that the articulation of these rights in the universal declaration of human rights, adopted by the un general assembly in 1948, and in subsequent supporting covenants and protocols, has given a boost to human rights by bringing a certain level of enforceability through the creation of international law and a plethora of judicial institutions (faulks, 2000; heater, 1999), for many people all over the world human rights remain an ideal that has not materialized. as noted by amy ross (2008), the expansion of the human rights discourse since the late 1940s has been matched by an even greater expansion in the violation of human rights across the world. several of the arguments in support of replacing citizenship rights with human rights rest on the belief that individual states are becoming irrelevant, as economic processes, international migration and “new security dilemmas associated with cross-border threats such as nuclear annihilation or ecological disaster” (faulks, 2000, p. 150; see also zizek, 1993) are beyond the reach of national policies and laws (vincent, 2010) and signal the “unstoppable decline of the nation-state” (agamben, 2000, p. 16.6; see also thobani, 2007). the role played by the un and the permeability of states to the theory and practices of human rights are also presented as signs that state sovereignty is declining (bosniak, 2001; faulks, 2000; heater, 1999; joppke, 2001; levy & sznaider, 2010). and yet, it is worth recalling that the international law that is supposed to implement these rights is a “soft” law (joppke, 2001), unenforceable as long as it is administered by states (fossum, 1999; vincent, 2010). even advocates of the human rights discourse such as david kennedy must concede that “in the end rights are enforced, granted, recognized, implemented, and their violations remedied by the state” (2004, p. 16). whereas states with little power can be held accountable for ignoring human rights, powerful states are free to set their own standards of accountability. the claim that the un can guarantee the protection of human rights on a worldwide scale is fictitious because, as arendt (1976) observed in 1951, the world system operates on the basis of treaties of reciprocity and international agreements. while the protection of human rights is dependent on the will of individual states, albeit through the mechanisms envisioned by the international community as represented by the un, these states are positioned on an unequal playing field, some enjoying more power than others. powerful states are guaranteed impunity for their human rights violations, while weaker states are prosecuted and eventually punished (falk, 2009). noam chomsky (2012, p. 161) comments that “throughout history, few principles of international affairs apply generally. one is the maxim of thucydides that the strong do as they wish while the weak suffer as they must.” the consequence of discriminating among states based on their de facto power is the watering down of the significance of human rights. among the states that are systematically granted impunity, the case par excellence is the us, whose government has, throughout history “done little valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 156 but obstruct progress of the international human rights framework” (blau & moncada, 2009, p. 5; see also hitchens, 2012). the us has never ratified any human rights treaty without the qualifier that the treaty is not “selfexecuting,” meaning it does not apply to the us. in terms of accountability, the us has put itself outside the reach of the international criminal court (icc) (blau & moncada, 2009). a similar level of impunity is also granted to us allies. richard burchill (2008) notes that the current system of international human rights law continues to prioritize state interests over the promotion and preservation of human rights. certain states can and do act as they please without incurring any legal consequences. with respect to the claim that globalization is weakening the state, it is worth noting that, although globalization might force individual states to review and adjust the way in which they operate, “the individual overwhelmingly continues to be caught in a statist web of rights, duties, and identities” (falk, 2009, p. 72). as rygiel points out, globalization has increased rather than diminished citizenship as a “regime for governing individuals, populations, and their movement between and across borders” (2010, p. 12). national governments are allowed to select who, within their populations, is worthy of recognition as a political subject with rights and who should be, as in the case of omar khadr, deprived of those rights. the state maintains its ability to exercise power over and above any international institution devoted to the protection of human rights. the ability of the sovereign state “to shun a person from the political community” (rygiel, 2010, p. 105) remains entirely preserved. sunera thobani (2007, pp. 238239) shows how, after the events of 9/11, “the muslim strangers within, even if claiming the legal status of citizens, come to be construed as … the threat to the nation.” this perceived threat allows the state to selectively pinpoint certain muslim citizens as dangerous and to practically suspend some of their rights as citizens. the moment individuals are deprived of “the rights that should be theirs by virtue of citizenship” (rygiel, 2010, p. 157), they end up losing their political subjectivity and are, according to agamben (1998, p. 142), reduced to bare life “which may be killed but not sacrificed.” guantanamo bay, khadr’s home for over a decade, is among the principal theatres where citizens have been systematically “unmade,” their identity as political subjects erased, recognition as citizens of a particular country denied, and their ability to claim rights under international law as prisoners of wars (pows) lost (gregory, 2007; rygiel, 2010). globalization has strengthened rather than weakened the power of the state. whereas citizenship has always been defined in gendered and racialized terms (faulks, 2000; thobani, 2007), current processes of globalization have increased the state’s ability to manipulate racial categories to deprive citizens of some of their rights. omar khadr is among those individuals who the state has decided do not belong, and have therefore been transformed into what jasmin zine (2012, p. 392) defines as “disposable citizen[s].” the rights of these citizens are precarious at best. despite their legal status, some are omar khadr, hannah arendt, & the racialization of rights discourse studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 157 assumed guilty by reason of their race or ethnicity, and are left with the task of proving their innocence in order to be recognized as citizens. the above points indicate that, while human rights are an appealing concept, they are largely unenforceable. on the other hand, whereas citizenship rights constitute a more reliable source of protection, they continue to depend on the willingness of the state to recognize the individual as a worthy citizen. this recognition is caught within a racialized framework that assesses as unworthy those individuals who are perceived as racial “others.” in the following section, i discuss how human and citizenship rights have been subjected to racialist dynamics that have resulted in their irrelevancy for a significant number of groups and individuals in canada and across the globe, particularly but not exclusively in the climate of post-9/11 hysteria. the racialization of human and citizenship rights the racialization of the other is not a new phenomenon. in the origins of totalitarianism, arendt (1976, p. 158, 160) argues that race-thinking, which developed throughout the 18th century, “emerged simultaneously in all western countries during the 19th century” as “the main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics.” by emphasizing the connection between racethinking and political needs, arendt (1976, p. 159) reclaims ideology as a “political weapon” rather than a “theoretical doctrine,” thereby distancing it from the realm of the abstract and re-immersing it into the historical and political context. race was the tool that imperialism adopted in order to deny a common humanity between the white man and those he colonized. from the beginning, the nation “conceived of its law as an outgrowth of a unique national substance which was not valid beyond its own people and the boundaries of its own territory” (arendt, 1976, p. 127), and therefore did not apply to the less-than-human colonized overseas. over time, the immigration of the colonized other forced nations to face the problem of a population that could still be considered beyond its own people but was certainly no longer beyond the boundaries of its own territory. the response to this problem was a reassessment of the concept of citizenship so that it applied differently to nationals and outsiders, irrespective of legal status. michel foucault (2003, p. 257) concurs with arendt that the emergence of a racialist discourse goes back to colonization, where it found expression in “colonizing genocide.” although foucault (2003, p. 256) defines racism as the “precondition for exercising the right to kill,” he specifies that the term “killing” is not exclusively in reference to “murder as such” but also to “political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.” these actions were justified with the introduction “within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior” valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 158 (foucault, 2003, pp. 254-255). foucault’s insights into the origins of racism are helpful in understanding why a discourse on human and/or citizenship rights cannot escape being situated within a context where individuals are automatically defined as belonging to particular races. foucault’s analysis details how race is at the core of the political structures that were built on the exploitation and colonization of other people. such colonization and exploitation could not have occurred without a pre-existing race discourse that allowed some individuals and groups to be considered as less-thanhuman. even before the events of 9/11, nation states used nationalism as a tool to create “narrow perimeters around community” through processes of exclusion and inclusion (davis, 2012, p. 73). in canada, racism has been at the core of the nation, and as noted by constance backhouse (1999, p. 15), “resonates through institutions, intellectual theory, popular culture, and law.” despite national mythologies that portray canada as a “nation innocent of racism,” dua, razack and warner (2005, p. 1; see also jiwani, 2005) point out that the country has been built on a long “history of colonization, slavery, and discriminatory immigration legislation.” the indian act of 1876, for example, stated that the word “person” did not include someone who was “indian” (backhouse, 1999, 2005). racism is also central to the country’s relationship with individuals coming from outside of its borders. canada has relied on the racialized category of immigrant in order to “sustain the myth of the nation as homogeneous, by constructing as perpetual strangers those to whom the category is assigned, even when they are second or third generation canadian-born citizens” (thobani, 2007, p. 76). reem bahdi (2007, p. 81) maintains that throughout canadian history, what demarcates the distinction between “those who are imagined to belong to the community” and foreigners is not citizenship but racialism. an example of this is the suspension of citizenship and the internment of japanese canadians during world war ii. for seven years, from 1942 to 1949, the racial identity of japanese canadians became “more significant than their citizenship status” (bahdi, 2007, p. 94). citizenship had, therefore, been transformed into a category that had meaning for certain groups and individuals but not for others. racialization dynamics work within an ideological context that understands the nation as a possession that some people have and which others want and threaten to steal. zizek (1993, p. 201) points out that this “nation-thing,” which is often erroneously reduced to a “way of life,” gets conceived of “as something accessible only to us, as something ‘they,’ the others, cannot grasp; nonetheless is something constantly menaced by ‘them’.” in canada, “the historical racialization of the category of citizen” has resulted in a situation that allows some citizens to “claim nationality while others are denied such claims, even when they share the legal status of citizenship” (thobani, 2007, p. 100; see also razack, 2010). by looking at the situation of muslim canadians in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, jiwani omar khadr, hannah arendt, & the racialization of rights discourse studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 159 (2005) details how they were given no opening in the media to demonstrate their commitment to their new country, but were instead consistently identified as others who came here to take advantage of better economic conditions. their being canadian was therefore framed, not as a matter of belonging or loyalty, but as simple opportunism. far from providing equality, multiculturalism, one of the core canadian myths, has been used to obscure “the relations of racialized power and privilege that shape the nation” (zine, 2012, p. 399). citizenship is therefore subordinated to a racialization process that can either offer legitimacy (for whites) or different degrees of exclusion (for everybody else), and seems to matter very little “when it comes to the colour line” (jiwani, 2011, p. 18). if we look at the definition of killing offered by foucault, this is what racialization has done to those citizens who were not perceived of as nationals. in fact, we are increasingly witnessing those citizens’ political exclusion from the national body, irrespective of the legal status they continue to possess. racism has a long history, but it “is not static. it changes. it mutates. it gets altered by historical circumstances” (davis, 2012, p. 99). after world war ii and the horrors of nazism, the variant of racism resting “on the notion of biologically based inferiority” was no longer popular (although it did not disappear altogether) and was reinvented into what sherene razack (1998, p. 60; 2008) calls the “culturalization of racism,” whereby non-white groups are no longer blamed for their biological make-up but for their cultural and acquired traits. evan and giroux (2015, p. 113; see also gilroy, 1991; jiwani, 2005, 2011) note that “the concept of race as biologically determined has been subsumed within religious and cultural narratives.” this form of racism is no less damaging than its former version. dominant groups no longer exclude others based on a presupposed constitutional inferiority, but instead because their culture is perceived of as being deficient and unable to adequately fit within the national environment. the nation is presented as multicultural, yet it must be understood that such multiculturalism is accepted and maintained only insofar as its structuring hierarchical power relations remain unchallenged. the events of 9/11 in the us represent another juncture where racism “gets altered by historical circumstances” (davis, 2012, p. 99). the aftermath of 9/11 witnessed racism being “fundamentally reconfigured” so as to incorporate “ideologies of terrorism,” with the result that people profiled as arabs or muslims were expelled from the “circle of the nation” (davis, 2012, pp. 94-95). far from representing a departure, this reconfiguration continues to rely on “the historical processes of racialization associated with colonialism, imperialism, eurocentrism” (dua et al., 2005, p. 6). whereas the targeting of muslims in the west is an old phenomenon, as indeed edward said (1981) pointed out well before the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon (i.e., 9/11), the discourse about the threat islam represents to western civilization has been entrenched into the national psyche in the aftermath of those events. arab, south asian and muslim men have been valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 160 represented as coming from a foreign culture that “produces individuals with an inherent capacity for violence” (razack, 2008, p. 29; emphasis added), who therefore must be contained, under surveillance, and repressed. the war waged against islam, “the quintessential other of the west,” has reconfigured the muslim as a category that is not only religious and political but, above all else, racialized (thobani, 2007, p. 235). the reason for this racialization is that, as foucault (2003) noted back in 1976, racism is the precondition for exercising the right to kill. the killing of the person as a political subject is what we have witnessed in the case of omar khadr. because of the way canada has chosen to racialize khadr’s body, he has been presented to the canadian public as dangerous and unworthy of those rights that are legally his by birth. as zine suggests, “the corporeality of belonging is colour coded” (2012, p. 393). it is therefore apparent that citizenship does not offer equal protection to all citizens, certainly not to muslim citizens, who have been cast out as a threat to the survival of the nation and continue to be portrayed as not belonging. the “war on terror” started by george w. bush after the attacks of 9/11 has a clear racial character. the us and the other countries that joined in (including canada) have dismissed accusations of racism by bringing into the national fold those same citizens who have been historically criminalized, oppressed and marginalized. as noted by eric n. olund (2007, p. 71), one of these attempts to disempower claims of racism has been the us military’s proud display “of african-americans and hispanic americans in its ranks.” the myth of multiculturalism in canada has played a similar role in disputing accusations of racism. and yet, race and racism are at the core of the war on terror, and integral to the policies and practices developed in western countries to regulate, contain, and marginalize certain populations. it is racialization that has allowed the invasion of countries inhabited by nonwhite populations and the targeting of persons of middle eastern or south asian background back home (olund, 2007). lisa marie cacho (2012, p. 5), for example, discusses how racialized persons in the us (this also applies to canada) are “differently included” within the legal system in that “although they are excluded from law’s protection, they are not excluded from law’s discipline.” this refusal to protect yet willingness to punish under the law therefore sanctions and legitimizes “the state’s monopoly on violence” at the expense of “justice, empowerment, or equality” (cacho, 2012, p. 142). racialization is also apparent in the infamous pictures of abuse of iraqi prisoners by us soldiers at abu ghraib, pictures that, as many commentators have noted, were meant as souvenirs and were shockingly reminiscent of pictures taken by white americans who lynched blacks on us soil in the decades after the civil war (evans & giroux, 2015). in canada, racialization appeared to underlie operation thread, which in august 2003 led to the arrest of 22 pakistanis and one indian national in the greater toronto area as potential terrorists only “because of their ethnic and religious backgrounds” (odartey-wellington, 2009, p. 35). as odartey-wellington (2009) claims in omar khadr, hannah arendt, & the racialization of rights discourse studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 161 his analysis of operation thread, the events of 9/11 reactivated the old trope of “muslim terrorism,” by creating a moral panic that spread to canadian society, from the media to the public to the security apparatus. this moral panic generated unfounded fears of terrorism solely “based on the racial profiles of the suspects” (odartey-wellington, 2009, p. 29). if citizenship rights fail to offer protection, human rights have not performed any better for exactly the same reasons. as discussed in the previous section, human rights are predicated on the belief of a common humanity. however, the rhetoric around a common humanity is an abstraction. racialization systematically and pervasively breaks down that commonality. an essential part of the racialization dynamics we see at work in western societies is “the denial of a common bond of humanity between people of european descent and those who are not,” and the consequent inapplicability of any law, whether international or national, to “those marked outside humanity” (razack, 2008, p. 6). non-westerners are described as “animal-like, and hence as implicitly less-than-human,” while westerners are perceived of as “fully human” (thobani, 2007, p. 235) and deserving of the protection of the law. in canada, for instance, razack (2000) has shown how the events that followed the canadian peacekeeping mission to somalia in 1992 – events that saw canadian soldiers beat, torture, and murder at least three somalis on two different occasions – illustrate the racialist understanding those soldiers and the canadian public back home applied to the notion of human life. in the somali affairs, razack uncovers the way the canadian mythology of innocence and tolerance was opposed to constructions of somalia and its inhabitants as inherently dirty, violent, and dangerous, and was employed to morally absolve canadian troops of their brutality and criminality. who could point the finger at innocent peacekeepers sent unprepared to withstand the chaos of an inhospitable land? “our” soldiers were human beings in a difficult situation, while the murdered somalis were others to whom the concept of humanity didn’t seem to apply. if human rights and citizenship rights are revealed as ineffective, is there any alternative? i do not have an answer but i think that, once again, arendt might offer some guidance. as discussed above, arendt (1976, p. 293) believed that the “rights of man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable.” her critique of human rights stems from the conviction that rights are not given to individuals the moment they are born but can only “be found within the context of a polity” (butler, 2012, p. 143). what should this polity look like? according to arendt, it must be something other than the nation state, since the citizenship rights conferred by the nation state have been proven to only work for some. arendt understood that, within the system of the nation state, non-nationals and minorities were inherently excluded from the enjoyment of citizenship rights. i believe this is true for states, such as canada, which claim to be multicultural. as noted by judith butler (2012, p. 145), arendt, in the origins of totalitarianism, never really addresses what the alternative to the nation state valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 162 might look like, but in some of her subsequent works she “offers us a few comments on ‘federations’ that suggest she thought something might come of them.” in men in dark times (1068, p. 93), for instance, arendt writes that for karl jasper, her mentor and friend, the only political solution that could bring salvation to the world rested on “a framework of universal mutual agreements, which eventually would lead into a world-wide federated structure” (arendt, 1993, p. 93). this new political structure would replace the nation state and its reliance on sovereignty, in order to bring forward a new mutual understanding among all people that “would be renunciation, not of one’s own tradition and national past, but of the binding authority and universal validity which traditions and past have always claimed” (1993, p. 84). for arendt, this federated structure was not simply a way to distribute sovereignty among different nations but to get rid of sovereignty altogether. in the summer of 1970, in an interview with german writer adelbert reif, arendt (1973, p. 230) suggested again the need for a “new concept of the state,” one that not only distances itself from the sovereign state but also from “a new league of nations,” the latter being destined to be either ineffective or “monopolized by the nation that happens to be the strongest.” explaining what such a new polity might look like, she came back to jasper’s idea of a federation where “power moves neither from above nor from below, but is horizontally directed so that the federated units mutually check and control their power” (arendt, 1973, p. 230). this federated political structure was inherently different from the nation state, insofar as it was constituted on the idea of equality among members irrespective of their national belonging, as belonging, although a “requirement of human life . . . can never serve as a legitimate basis for a polity” (butler, 2012, p. 149). arendt (1973, p. 233) was aware that the chances for such a new system to be realized were “very slight, if at all” (p. 233). and yet, almost a half-century later, faced with the failure of the supranational authority of the un and with a state power that does not necessarily leave people stateless but can take away their rights, we might want to reconsider her suggestion of a new polity. it might still be an unlikely outcome, but the risk might be worth taking. conclusion in this paper, i began by examining the ordeal of omar khadr, a canadian citizen captured in afghanistan and held for a decade in guantanamo bay by the us with the complicity of the canadian government. i used the khadr case to delve into the debate around the primacy of citizenship or human rights as effective tools for the protection of individuals. drawing on the analysis provided by hannah arendt in the origins of totalitarianism, i claimed that this debate is sterile, and attempted to move the discussion beyond the abstract human rights versus citizenship rights framework, omar khadr, hannah arendt, & the racialization of rights discourse studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 163 repositioning it instead in a political, social and historical context that racializes any understanding of rights. in order to validate my argument, i demonstrated that, as revealed in the case of omar khadr, neither citizenship nor human rights have any significant impact in protecting the lives of racialized persons. human rights, as appealing as the notion might be, are largely ineffective in a world where the principle of state sovereignty continues to be given unquestioned priority. international law remains a “soft law” that only gets applied vis-à-vis weaker states. more importantly, i have shown that the concept of human rights, based on the ideal of a common humanity that we all share, is bound to fail unless we address the reality of a world where people are not born equal and with the same rights, but are instead always situated within a racialized framework that considers some individuals as humans and others as lessthan-human. with respect to citizenship rights, the discourse is more complicated yet the conclusion is similar. whereas i agree with arendt that, as a political tool, citizenship enjoys greater authority than human rights, we must acknowledge that citizenship increasingly offers protection on the basis on nationality rather than status. in this paper, i first addressed recent claims that globalization has resulted in a weakening of state power. i argued that the opposite is true: notwithstanding the need for some adjustment, the state has kept unaltered the ability to control its own population. whereas state power has remained intact, the state does not necessarily protect its citizens because of an abstract notion of rights associated with citizenship status. evidence indicates that state power is increasingly used to enable states to decide who is worthy of recognition as a deserving citizen and who, despite having the legal status of a citizen, is not. as my analysis has shown, this decision is made on the basis of racialist considerations. omar khadr is a classic example of a citizen by birth, who because of the racialist dynamics at work in canada has been branded as undeserving. this indicates that although in the international system state sovereignty continues to remain a priority, there is no guarantee that citizenship rights will be able to protect those who enjoy the legal status of citizen. following arendt’s argument, i believe it is time to move beyond the abstract human rights versus citizenship rights debate, and start analyzing how both sets of rights remain trapped within racialist dynamics that allow some of us to be considered as human beings and some of us as undeserving of that title. if, as i think, this racialist framework is our current reality, an alternative could be found, as arendt suggested, in developing a new political structure that is separate from both the state and supranational organisms such as the un. this new structure would instead look like a federation made up of different people with equal rights. if, as arendt argued, we accept that “we may not choose with whom to cohabit” this world, “but that we must actively preserve the unchosen character of inclusive and plural cohabitation” (butler, 2012, p. 151), we might still have a chance to create a global valentina capurri studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 1, 147-166, 2016 164 community that shares one, interconnected, interdependent planet. 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(2008). casting out: the eviction of muslims from western law and politics. toronto: university of toronto press. razack, s. h. (2010). abandonment and the dance of race and bureaucracy in spaces of exception. in s. thobani, s. razack, & m. smith (eds.), states of race: critical race feminism in the 21st century (pp. 87-107). toronto: between the lines. ross, a. (2008). the body counts: civilian casualties and the crisis of human rights. in a. bullard (ed.), human rights in crisis (pp. 35-48). hampshire, uk: ashgate. rygiel, k. (2010). globalizing citizenship. vancouver: ubc press. said, e. w. (1981). covering islam: how the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. new york: pantheon books. shephard, m. (2008). guantanamo’s child. mississauga, on: john wiley & sons. shephard, m. (2013, may 29). omar khadr segregated from other inmates after death threats in canadian prison. toronto star. retrieved from http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/05/29/omar_khadr_segregated_from_other_inma tes_after_death_threats_in_canadian_prison.html tambakaki, p. (2009). from citizenship to human rights: the stakes for democracy. citizenship studies 13(1), 3-15. the canadian press (2015, september 26). toronto 18’s zakaria amara among 1st to lose citizenship under bill c-24. cbcnews canada. retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-18-ringleader-citizenship-1.3245319 thobani, s. (2007). exalted subjects: studies in the making of race and nation in canada. toronto: university of toronto press. vincent, a. (2010). the politics of human rights. oxford: oxford university press. williamson, j. (2012). introduction: the story so far. in j. williamson (ed.), omar khadr, oh canada (pp. 3-48). montreal & kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press. zine, j. (2012). stolen youth: lost boys and imperial wars. in j. williamson (ed.), omar khadr, oh canada (pp. 390-411). montreal & kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press. zizek, s. (1993). tarrying with the negative: kant, hegel, and the critique of ideology, postcontemporary interventions. durham: duke university press. correspondence address: randy johner, faculty of social work, university of regina, 3737 wascana parkway, education building 452 regina, sk s4s 0a2, canada. tel.: (+1) 306 585 4549, email: randy.johner@uregina.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 2, 315-317, 2013 review of from transmitted deprivation to social exclusion: policy, poverty and parenting randy johner university of regina, canada from transmitted deprivation to social exclusion: policy, poverty and parenting. written by john welshman. bristol, uk: policy press, 2012, isbn 978-1-44730-586-6 this book is an intellectual history that traces the impact of sir keith joseph’s “cycle” speech, the direction taken by the subsequent research program at that time, and how the new labour government of the 21st century had arrived at their understanding of social exclusion and poverty, particularly in relation to that of families and children. the broad themes of this book comprise thirty five years of government and research community debates that focused on policy, poverty, and parenting in the uk. this book is framed by two speeches: one on june 29, 1972 by sir keith joseph, the then conservative government secretary of state for social services; and the other on september 5, 2006, by then new labour government prime minister tony blair. sir keith joseph’s speech focused on the phenomenon of “transmitted deprivation” or a “cycle of deprivation” and why “deprivation and problems of maladjustment” persist. prime minister blair’s speech focused on tackling “social exclusion,” as he called it, and a “hard core underclass.” although both of these speeches used different language, the reference to “problem families” or “intergenerational continuities,” and “cycle of deprivation” has been consistent over time. what is particularly disquieting about welshman’s book is his ample evidence that affirms the consistent policy focus on so-called problem families who, for a multitude of reasons, are perceived as not “measuring” up to societal norms studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 316 randy johner of acceptable behaviour. as a social historian, john welshman has astutely utilized archival documents (e.g. minutes of meetings and correspondence between ministers and civil servants), published documents and oral interviews with key players from sir keith joseph’s research program in the 1970s, to document the connections between the conservative government and the research community’s debates in understanding exclusion and intergenerational disadvantage. the unresolved issue of how to balance behavioural and structural causes of deprivation dating back to the 1970s continues to challenge 21st century researchers and policy-makers. in addition, the perpetual focus on “problem families” remains unverified empirically. what ensues for the reader in this book is a fascinating intellectual history from the decade of the 1970s to 2007 of examining human behaviour and development through either a psychological lens or an economic lens but with little connection between these two lenses, and how scientific research, rigorous or otherwise, with its various personalities, lends itself to policy formation. this book is divided into three sections: with the development of sir keith joseph’s cycle of deprivation; the direction of the governmentfunded research program that followed; and the many linkages between the conservative government’s research and analyses of the 1970s, and the new labour government’s approach to addressing poverty, exclusion and family maladjustment. the book methodically and skillfully presents an historical perspective of why the new labour government adopted the 1970s research program thesis, “cycle of deprivation” in relation to “problem” families. almost 35 years later, a largely behavioral deterministic approach in government policy to address social exclusion and poverty is still evident: problem families are the root cause of anti-social behaviours and thus should be the primary targets for intervention. other approaches, such as a family ecological-systems approach that looks at the complex relationships between the individual, family and the environment, have only become relevant to the understanding of social exclusion in addition to the role of structural causes and agency in human behavior and development in recent years. this is a well-written book, and welshman establishes his expertise as a social historian in the area of current policy debates on policy, poverty and parenting. he provides the reader with ample historical evidence that the “cycle of deprivation” thesis is alive and well in contemporary society. this intellectual history of the “cycle of deprivation” encourages readers to critically re-think about current government policies that aim to promote inclusion and social justice as current policies may reveal little if any new insights from their predecessors. most of the chapters detail sir keith joseph’s analysis of the “cycle of deprivation,” and the research program that followed, with only a few chapters highlighting the research and political debates that framed the social exclusion agenda in the uk. however, numerous detailed analyses of the social exclusion agenda in the uk and elsewhere have been well-documented in the 21st century. this book is suitable for (but not limited to) undergraduate and graduate level courses studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 review of from transmitted deprivation to social exclusion 317 in social work, sociology, public policy, political science, family studies and human justice programs. although it is definitely a methodical read it will be of particular interest to those readers who have some knowledge of the current social exclusion policy debates. 404 not found christie-white final correspondence address: river christie-white, hoops for hope; email: hoopsforhope@icloud.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 496-497, 2022 creative intervention acceptance v. inclusion: reframing the approach to helping individuals with disabilities in social settings river christie-white hoops for hope, canada river christie-white is an indigenous youth from oneida nation of the thames who uses his cultural dance styles and teachings to promote inclusion. he is the founder of hoops for hope, an organization that promotes anti-bullying, suicide prevention, cultural and disability inclusion (versus acceptance). river has won many awards for his work to build inclusive communities across turtle island and has presented on many platforms. click on the link below to see river’s hoop dance performance at the 2018 chippewa of the thames pow wow: https://youtu.be/s5onybjlple - before i get into the nitty-gritty of this piece, i want to thank the guest editors for allowing me to be part of this special issue of studies in social justice on autism_media_social justice, and i would like to introduce myself. my name is river christie-white, and i am a musician studying professional music at xu (formerly known as ryerson university). i am in my first year. i am also the founder of an organization i started about seven years ago called hoops for hope.1 i created the organization to address the lack of understanding and resources within my local community for those with disabilities, especially ones as complex as autism spectrum disorder (asd). at the age of two and a half, i was diagnosed with what was called 1 learn about hoops for hope at https://www.facebook.com/groups/673378056087485/media acceptance v. inclusion studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 496-497, 2022 497 asperger’s syndrome,2 and my understanding of autism has helped me develop services alongside the community and my colleagues. my main point in this piece is how as a community we have used acceptance and inclusion interchangeably when they mean very different things. many people advocate for the acceptance of those with disabilities, but acceptance only goes so far. i argue that we should start pushing for inclusion rather than general acceptance, the reason being that you can accept someone within a space without ever having to include them. unfortunately, not many support programs offer ways to help truly include people with disabilities in most activities. this is especially apparent within the education sector and job support. there are many people with disabilities i have encountered throughout the years who have gone through job support programs that have got them jobs or helped them gain the knowledge necessary to enter post-secondary education, but failed to then help with support and accommodations, leaving many of them to leave those positions or be neglected. this is compounded by people’s misunderstanding of how to approach people with disabilities, which leaves employers and educators with little useful knowledge of how to support their employee or student. by focusing on inclusion, our community can take these programs to the next step, not only helping with finding a job, or accessing post-secondary education, but making sure that disabled and autistic people are fully supported and thriving within those institutions. 2 asperger’s syndrome has since been removed from the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders in its fifth edition (dsm–5). das gupta final correspondence address: tania das gupta, school of gender, sexuality and women’s studies, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: tdasgu@yorku.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 unravelling discourses on covid-19, south asians and punjabi canadians tania das gupta york university, canada sugandha nagpal o. p. jindal global university, india abstract this article uses critical discourse analysis to examine how the higher covid-19 infection rates among south asians in general, and punjabis more specifically, have been represented by conservative politicians and their representatives as a consequence of cultural and religious practices. two counternarratives are discussed. the first substitutes the negative image of the sikh punjabi canadian community with a celebratory and positive view of sikh humanitarianism and community service. the second attributes the high numbers to class attributes such as precarious jobs, poverty-level wages, employment insecurity, lack of sick days, over-crowded housing, racism and lack of access to healthcare. we argue that the conservative explanation as well as the first counter-narrative reveal continuities in culturalist understandings of south asian immigrants, albeit in slightly different ways. the second counter-narrative represents a discursive resistance by advancing a structural analysis of health and disease in immigrant communities. keywords race; media; covid-19; canada; south asian introduction the covid-19 pandemic has intensified deeply entrenched racial, class and gendered inequalities in canada and beyond (block & dhunna, 2020; wu et al., 2021). anti-asian hate crimes and discrimination related to covid-19 in north america have risen exponentially (neustaeter, 2021). mental health and domestic violence have risen (miller, 2021; statistics canada, 2021) as a result of lockdowns, quarantines and social distancing (women’s shelters canada, 2020). south asians in canada have been hard hit by covid-19 and are highly vulnerable in terms of unemployment, poverty and number of infections (cassa et al., 2020; colour of poverty, 2020). unemployment in tania das gupta & sugandha nagpal studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 104 this community surged to 17.8% in the 15-69 age group, the highest among all ethnic groups, between july 2019 and july 2020 when the national rate was 11.3% (subramaniam, 2020). in january 2021, south asians and indocaribbean people had the highest proportion of covid-19 cases in toronto at 27%, while comprising only 13% of the population falling to 23% by march 2021 (city of toronto, 2021).1 in addition, south asians have come under the scanner for not following covid-19 protocol. in this paper we draw on media narratives about sikh punjabis during the pandemic in the “hot spots” of calgary, alberta and brampton, ontario to illustrate the discourses around south asians, punjabi sikhs and covid-19. we argue that these discourses reveal the continuities in culturalist understandings of south asian immigrants and the counter-hegemonic value of a structural analysis of health and disease in immigrant communities. while there are many subgroups among south asians that have been subjected to discrimination and racialization during the pandemic, we are attending to sikh punjabis due to their visibility, size,2 and the extensive media reports about brampton,3 as well as north east calgary, which house large punjabi populations. media coverage will be interrogated to delineate three strands of discourses. the first strand, which reflects continuity with racialized discourses about the cultural other, explains the higher infection rates in the south asian community as a cultural and religious issue related to traditional practices. this is reminiscent of orientalist tropes of immigrant cultural susceptibility to disease in the late 19th century. these tropes were an important tool of nation building, as it allowed officials to banish those deemed racially undesirable (mawani, 2003). this discourse of health threat will be explored as an indication of new racism, also referred to as neoracism (barker, 2002). there are two counter-narratives in media accounts of sikhs and south asians. the first one relies on a celebration of sikhism, particularly its concept of seva, and the sikh community’s resilience, humanitarianism and sacrifice. this narrative has been articulated by both liberal and conservative national and provincial newspapers, and city-based dailies. we assert that while this is a counter-narrative to the racialization of south asians as culturally predisposed to covid-19, it also relies on a culturalist paradigm. the second counter-narrative asserted by members of working class south asians and their advocates has attributed the high levels of covid-19 to 1 east asians, who also comprised 13% of the population, had the lowest proportion at seven percent of covid-19 cases. blacks who made up nine percent of the population had 13% of covid-19 cases. whites, on the other hand, who made up 48% of the population comprised 26% of covid-19 cases (city of toronto, 2021). 2 comprising 1.6% of the population of canada. 3 brampton reported 29,500 as being punjabi and 110,655 speaking punjabi as their mother tongue, the leading non-official mother tongue in brampton with 54.36% of residents among non-official mother tongue speakers of punjabi, urdu or gujarati (statistics canada, 2016b). discourses on covid-19, south asians & punjabi canadians studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 105 their disproportionate concentration in precarious jobs, poverty-level wages, employment insecurity, lack of sick days, racism and inaccessible healthcare. this argument has been amplified by non-south asian members of the more liberal political establishment and the media. we argue from a gramscian perspective that this counter-narrative based on class precarity serves as a form of discursive resistance. the next section will provide a context for our discussion. south asians, punjabi canadians and sikh politics the category of south asian references immigrants who trace their origins to the south asian region, but scholars have pointed out its social constructedness and exclusions (ameeriar, 2017; ashutosh, 2008; bannerji, 2000). while the canadian state uses the term in a reductive way homogenizing south asians, there is greater heterogeneity in how members of the community identify themselves. we find that media narratives about covid-19 in the south asian community do not always explicitly name them. they refer instead to coded geographical areas like brampton in ontario and surrey in b.c., which have a higher concentration of punjabis. other times they talk more specifically about sikhs or describe cultural practices such as “large family gatherings,” which when mentioned along with the geographic area can be ascribed to south asians and punjabis. in this paper we also fluctuate in our use of the terms south asian, punjabi,4 and sikh, depending on how the material we are analysing has described the community and relatedly, the community’s selfidentification. in order to understand the discursive resistance to cultural racism or to neo-racist ideas of certain conservative politicians, it is important to link the counter-narratives utilized by the sikh community during the pandemic to the long history of sikh and south asian resistance to racism and colonialism. migration from indian punjab to canada dates back to 1903, when punjabi sikh workers arrived as immigrants to british columbia. while there were a handful of non-sikhs from south asia, sikh punjabis came in larger numbers from more prosperous rural families and later on engaged extensively in family reunification forming close-knit communities in canada. they remain physically and numerically more visible not only due to their religious practices, but also their increasing political importance (johnston, 1989, 2005; nihjawan, 2014; tatla, 1999). sikh strongholds like malton and 4 the term punjabi can be exclusionary as it is often used to reference sikh punjabis, thereby excluding hindu and muslim punjabis. walton-roberts (2011) points to the reification of a singular sikh identity, as a militia race tied to five symbols (uncut hair, kirpan, comb, underwear, bracelet) which was actively cultivated by the british (fox, 1985). tania das gupta & sugandha nagpal studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 106 brampton, which used to be split between liberals and conservatives, have seen a landslide towards the new democratic party (ndp) currently led by jagmeet singh, a second generation sikh punjabi. in addition, there are 18 sikh mps in the house of commons. the increasing political and numerical visibility of the sikh punjabi canadian community has meant that canadian politics has come to reflect the concerns of this sizeable constituency (nijhawan, 2014; shukla, 2019).5 moreover, sikhs in canada have had a long history of resistance and protest movements. this resistance dates back to gurdit singh organizing the ship komagata maru to challenge the racist canadian requirement of continuous journey to canada.6 thereafter, the sikh canadian community has organized multiple times against social injustices and to demand equality before the law, for example for asylum seekers in the late 1980s. baltej singh dhillon successfully contested the rcmp’s prohibition of the turban and beard in 1989, later upheld by the supreme court of canada and the canadian human rights commission. in 1993, when four sikh veterans were denied entrance to the remembrance day parade in surrey due to their turbans, they refused to comply and contested their exclusion by circulating reports of other legions accepting turbaned sikh members (bains, 2019; jakobsh & walton-roberts, 2016; johnston, 2005; nihjawan, 2014; nijhawan & arora, 2013; tatla, 1999; walton-roberts, 2011). despite staging sustained protests against exclusions, the inclusion of turbaned and “racialized kirpan-carrying sikhs” within canada is continually contested (dhamoon, 2013 p. 15; puar & rai, 2004), most recently in quebec under bill 21 which prohibits some public officials from wearing religious symbols. along with their muslim counterparts, sikhs in north america were racially profiled following 9/11 and seen as political threats. mosques and gurudwaras (sikh temples) were vandalized (dhamoon, 2013; nihjawan, 2016; puar, 2008; puar & rai, 2004; sian, 2017; thobani, 2012). sikhs have responded to this situation through political engagement and activism (ahluwalia, 2019; jakobsh, 2017; luthra, 2018, 2021; nihjawan, 2014, 2016; singh 2008). a common method has been to conduct outreach and education about sikh history and culture with the general public, government, law enforcement and media (murphy 2004, pp. 358-360). this has given rise to a new image of the sikh community associated with humanitarian work, social justice and the ethic of seva or selfless service. various organizations like the sikh activist network, the sikh coalition for the media and united sikhs, among others, have emerged to fight for the rights of sikhs but also other marginalized communities (jakobsh & waltonroberts, 2016; nijhawan & arora, 2013). this remaking of the sikh 5 their numbers increased by 36.5% between 2006 and 2016. 6 in order to deter migrants from india, canada passed an order-in-council in 1908 which required migrants to land in canada through an unbroken journey, a stipulation that was impossible for indians to fulfill. the ship was turned back. discourses on covid-19, south asians & punjabi canadians studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 107 community draws on the precepts of sikhism and integrates it with secular ideas of social justice (luthra, 2021; nihjawan, 2014). thus, media reports that reflect resistance to neo-racist ideas of certain conservative politicians has to be seen in relation to the history of sikh resistance to racism in canada. culturalist discourses on immigrant health and neo-racism there is a long history of the racialization of immigrant bodies and their health (mawani, 2003; reitmanova et al., 2015; ward, 2002). immigrants have historically been represented as inherently uncivilized and diseased, posing a threat to white settlers (ward, 2002). in the context of covid-19, many of asian origin in north america have been subjected to hate activity (li & nicholson, 2021). during a public health threat, white settler-citizens often scapegoat racial minorities deemed “other” (eichelberger, 2007; li & nicholson, 2021). othering entails blaming the immoral behaviour and cultural norms of the out-group for the origins and spread of disease (briggs & mantini‐briggs, 2003; nelkin & gilman, 1988). during the ebola crisis, africans and african cultures were blamed (kapiriri & ross, 2020). such culturalist discourses about immigrant health leave unexamined structural factors such as post-migration unemployment, poverty, lack of access to health and social services that compromise the health of immigrants (beiser, 2005; reitmanova & gustafson 2012; reitmanova et al., 2015). we rely on this literature about the pathologization of immigrants to understand the discourse around covid-19 and south asians as part of the narrative of stigma attached to immigrant bodies. in unravelling issues of race and media in the canadian context, we are critical of the official multiculturalism framework, which is the state sanctioned approach to managing racial difference in canada (bannerji, 2000; haque, 2012). this official policy of multiculturalism denies or underplays settler colonialism and upholds culture rather than race, class and gender inequality. in this paradigm, racism is construed as isolated acts rather than as foundational to nation-building. while state multiculturalism celebrates diverse cultures, there is a tendency to essentialize and ossify them while exalting english and french cultures as “official.” thus, cultural diversity is “tolerated” and even celebrated in normal times under multiculturalism, but it can easily deteriorate into neo-racism under a national crisis such as a pandemic. in neo-racism (balibar, 2007; bannerji, 2000; barker, 2002), the racial discourse does not necessarily utilize a discourse of biological inferiority of the migrant non-national other, but rather, their incommensurability with dominant national culture. indeed, this culturalist racism is based on a notion tania das gupta & sugandha nagpal studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 108 of “national separatism [as] natural and inevitable” (barker, 2002, p. 82). neo-racism or culturalist racism is not new to the south asian community in canada. dua (2000) shows that while white immigrant women were admitted to canada in the beginning of the 20th century as “mothers of the nation,” south asian women were depicted as a danger because of their fertility, nontraditional marriages and family formations. although such blatant expressions of neo-racism would be unacceptable today, the suggestions of cultural essentialism and inassimilability of south asian families, cultures and practices remain. in this paper we will use critical discourse analysis to examine neo-racist representations and resistances to such representations in media reports about south asians and sikh punjabis during covid-19. media representations and resistance: critical discourse analysis canadian media representations of minority communities have been critiqued for reinforcing their racialization by selectively highlighting the negative traits of minority communities and constructing them as threatening, deviant and irrelevant to nation-building (bannerji, 1987; jiwani, 1993, 2010). these representations not only exclude minority communities from the mainstream but also affect how white canadians understand and interact with them. in the context of multiculturalism in canada, there is often a concurrence of more subtle forms of stereotyping and prejudice alongside more explicit forms of discrimination (mahtani, 2001). contemporary representations of minority groups have also evolved in keeping with ideas of new racism, which allows for racist statements to be formulated without bringing into awareness the racist assumptions on which these statements are grounded (jiwani, 2009). in order to unravel the underlying racist assumptions of minority community representations, it is crucial to make visible the relations of power so that one can, “disrupt, dislodge, and recast the colonial narrative(s)” (jiwani, 2011 p. 334). in making explicit the power relations that underlie racialized representations, marginalized groups often engage in “making do” where they use the tools they have access to in order to launch their resistance. this can take the form of contesting claims of truth-telling, subversions of dominant narratives, articulations of counter-narratives, reframing and creating new or alternative meanings (jiwani, 2011). hall (1997) points out three ways in which a dominant regime of representations gets challenged. he draws on the movies shaft and superfly to illustrate the strategy of reversing stereotypes by bringing black actors to the centre of the mainstream. the second strategy entails replacing negative images of racialized populations with positive images. the third strategy is locating oneself within the representation and trying to contest it from within. in addition, as demonstrated by jakubowski (1997) and others (fairclough, 1992; van dijk, 1987), critical discourse analysis is particularly useful in revealing racist assumptions that underlie media representations. critical discourses on covid-19, south asians & punjabi canadians studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 109 discourse analysis lays bare how strategies of talking and communicating about race, immigration, crime, poverty and other social issues frame reality, thereby reproducing racism. this cognitive and ideological control at microlevels allow racist actions, structures and institutional processes at the macrolevel to be continued. in fact, based on her critical discourse analysis of canadian migration policy text and talk jakubowski (1997) identifies “ideologically deracialized” discourse which has been sanitized of a language of race or racism, but which nonetheless perpetuates racist tropes and has exclusionary effects on people of colour. various rhetorical strategies are utilized in furthering a deracialized discourse around immigration, such as sanitary coding, equivocation and pro bono arguments. sanitary coding happens when privately racist ideas are expressed, although the public message is de-racialized. an example is using the phrase “immigration control” instead of “stopping immigration” (jakubowski, 1997, p. 44). this example can also characterize equivocation when the public message is vague and ambiguous so that it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, including a racist one. the pro bono argumentation appeals to benefitting people (i.e., we should control immigration in order to benefit canadians and lessen racism). these rhetorical strategies are evident in premier kenney’s radio interview which we discuss in the next section. in this paper, we focus on media texts where discourses of difference and danger vis-à-vis south asians became evident during the pandemic. we begin with a south asian radio talk show in which premier jason kenney of alberta was interviewed in november 2020. in addition, we examine stories that were reported in national, provincial and local media accessible online between april 2020 and january 2021, such as global & mail, national post, toronto star, calgary herald, the leader post (regina), vancouver sun, brampton guardian, south asian daily, the voice and weekly voice. in deconstructing the words of premier kenney and the counter-narratives to the racialization of immigrant health, we engage in a critical discourse analysis. jason kenney’s “wake up call” on radio talk show united conservative party (ucp) member and premier of alberta, jason kenney, appeared in november 2020 on a south asian radio station red 106.7 fm hosted by rishi nagar (redfm, 2020). the interview was streamed live on facebook and generated numerous tweets on social media. in response to rishi’s question about whether restricting activity while limiting the disruption to people’s lives will work to prevent the spread of covid-19, the premier said: well, only if people comply with the rules and do the right thing… let me be absolutely blunt. the largest spread in the province is in north-east calgary and tania das gupta & sugandha nagpal studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 110 we see a very high level of spread of covid-19 in the south asian community. i don’t say that to blame or target anyone. the fact of the matter is this, one of the beautiful, wonderful things about my friends in the south asian community is a strong, strong sense of family and hospitality. and, people have very often in the community have, you know, large families, multi-generational families and i have great respect, great respect for how so many south asian families care for their seniors, their grandma and grandpa at home, and sometimes 3-4 generations and we know that it’s a tradition to have big family gatherings at home… i’m calling your program with a wake-up call. we must, must have people understand the new law is, no social functions at home. no indoor social functions. no family or friends visiting at home, who are not part of your immediate household who don’t sleep there at night… and we have given the police the power to enforce this with a $1000 fine. (redfm, 2020) in the course of the interview, premier kenney connected rising covid-19 numbers in calgary’s north-east region to “big family gatherings” and “social functions” (mason, 2020). when the host, rishi, pointed out that there are people who cannot stay at home due to the nature of their jobs, premier kenney responded by emphasizing that it was not the workplace that was the source of spread but rather “private social functions and at home gatherings” (redfm, 2020). he also reiterated the challenge of compliance posed by areas that are associated with a larger south asian population namely, “peele region in ontario around brampton and surrey and fraser valley in b.c.” (redfm, 2020). in the context of calgary, premier kenney mainly referred to north east calgary where the largest minority group is punjabi-speaking (15%) and there are smaller segments of urdu-speaking (5%) and cantonese-speaking people (2%) (city-data.com, 2012). through premier kenney’s characterization of north-east calgary as being predominantly south asian, having disproportionately high numbers of covid-19 infections and having large family gatherings, the area was constructed as a bounded community with essentialist features (bannerji, 2000; walton-roberts, 1998). in constructing the south asian community, kenny relies on the idea of tradition as attached to multi-generational family life, associated with premodern gendered patriarchal relations, in contrast to modern nuclear families of white mainstream canada where gender relations are assumed to be more egalitarian (bannerji, 2000). kenney insists that his remarks are meant to benefit all calgarians with his “wake-up call” laced with the coercive power of law when he remarks that it is “not a suggestion, it is not a recommendation, it is the law” (redfm, 2020). it was, after all, presented as “a public health necessity” (redfm, 2020). there was an immediate outcry to premier kenny’s racialization on social media, by south asian community members from across the country. kenney’s message of large family gatherings as being the chief cause of rising covid-19 numbers ignored other socio-economic reasons, including the community’s concentration in precarious employment, such as truck driving, warehouse, janitorial and discourses on covid-19, south asians & punjabi canadians studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 111 cleaning work, which lack paid sick days, job security and living wages. in these occupations, workers do not have the luxury of operating from their homes, observing social distance and staying home when they are starting to feel ill. a day away from work often translates to lost wages and causes them to lose their jobs or legal status in canada. however, when the host of the program challenged the premier, the latter dismissed the challenge by saying, “generally speaking, workplaces are pretty safe. if it was just a question of workplace transmission, we would not be in this crisis right now” (redfm, 2020). by saying this, he excuses employers of any culpability in the spread of the virus and also relieves them of responsibility for its control. he also appeals to the authority of scientific evidence by saying “based on eight months of contact tracing and data, we have identified that about 40% of the spread of covid-19 in alberta goes back to private social functions, gatherings at homes” (redfm, 2020). when premier kenney said, “we see a very high level of spread of covid-19 in the south asian community, and i don’t say that to blame or target anyone” (redfm, 2020), it is a pre-emptive denial of an anticipated accusation of racism (van dijk, 1992). he is levelling an accusation at south asian families and their purported lifestyles while denying that he is doing so. he displays ambivalence about cultural diversity when he says he has friends in the south asian community with a “strong, strong sense of family and hospitality” and defines them as “beautiful” (redfm, 2020), but asks that provincial restrictions be respected (amato, 2020). this also enables a discourse of denial. what is interesting is that some journalists made the facebook interview of kenney accessible to the public by embedding it in their online articles (press progress, 2020; mason, 2020) and highlighting counter-arguments. following the outcry from the community, kenney’s office issued a statement reinforcing what he had said before: “the premier went on red fm specifically to increase awareness among affected communities that may not consume traditional media” (villani, 2020), ironically referring this time to mainstream media as “traditional.” this statement reiterates his commitment to public service and concern for the rights of all people to be informed. matt wolf, the premier’s issues manager, took to twitter selectively pointing to news stories from ontario to reinforce the premier’s emphasis on family gatherings as the chief cause of the spike in covid-19 spread in north-east calgary. he first referred to an opinion piece written in the toronto star (chagla et al., 2020) on the eve of diwali by three south asian physicians: dr. zain chagla, dr. sumon chakrabarti and dr. tajinder kaura. in this piece they acknowledge that south asians are being infected and dying at higher numbers than other groups for a variety of reasons, including social gatherings, multi-generational households, higher rates of underlying health conditions, precarious occupations, financial instability, stigmatization tania das gupta & sugandha nagpal studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 112 and language barriers. they urge the development of culturally and linguistically sensitive public health education, creating virtual support networks and temporarily stopping indoor gatherings. matt wolf also tweeted a link to a cbc (2020) program “canada’s south asian community facing a higher risk of covid-19,” which showed how south asians were modifying their diwali festivity by using online technology and restricting their functions. in addition, wolf tweeted a statistics canada report (subedi et al., 2020) to establish that south asian families were comparatively larger than other groups. but, wolf failed to include the more balanced and nuanced reporting of both chagla et al. (2020) and the cbc (2020) program, instead zeroing in on the parts which supported the premier’s message. kenney’s comments on the south asian community, when juxtaposed with his silence on predominantly white anti-maskers’ rallies in the same city, showed a discourse which had been deracialized and sanitized of racial coding and stripped of using an overt language of race, but nonetheless created differential representations of the south asian other. counter-narratives: celebrating sikhism and seva during this same period, stories about the positive contributions of the sikh community during the pandemic also emerged. these are seen as counternarratives that discursively replaced the negative stereotypes about the community. in national newspapers across the political spectrum, there have been news pieces that have celebrated the kindness, generosity and sacrifice of sikhs in canada. on 6 may, 2020, the national post (bill, 2020) ran a story about the “existential crisis” faced by a sikh doctor, singh-saluja who had to decide between the precepts of his faith and commitment to his profession, as well as the principle of seva. he eventually decided to shave his beard so that he was able to wear the n95 mask and serve his patients. singh-saluja articulated his dilemma in the following words: it was an extremely difficult decision for us, but one we felt was absolutely necessary in this time of need… it has left me with much sadness. this was something that had been so much part of my identity. (bill, 2020) the tone and content of the article convey the immense sacrifice the physician was willing to undertake as a doctor, something that inspired his team members to also shave their beards in solidarity (bill, 2020). a number of articles point to how the sikh tradition of seva, which entails the provision of langar or community kitchens in gurudwaras, has been adapted to provide food aid during the pandemic. due to the covid related restrictions around religious gatherings, various sikh community centres across north america have mobilized their resources for langars. these discourses on covid-19, south asians & punjabi canadians studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 113 newspaper articles represented langar services as a successful demonstration of community support and solidarity (melnychuk, 2020; salmaan, 2021). on january 21, 2021, the globe and mail ran a story about sikhs expanding their community kitchens in response to covid-19 hardships. the article cites that the dashmesh culture centre in calgary began offering delivery and takeout during the pandemic. volunteers delivered up to 50 meals a day to people in isolation, some as far as an hour’s drive away (salmaan, 2021). these articles, published across varied platforms and written by differently positioned people, presented a positive image of sikh canadians. this projection of sikh canadian community as linked to the idea of seva and humanitarian work is aligned with the diasporic community’s own project of re-making its identity in the aftermath of 9/11. the concept of seva discussed in many of these articles speaks to an ethical framework that is central to sikhism (hirvi, 2014; murphy, 2004). seva entails selfless acts for fellow human beings that allow an individual to overcome the egoistic self and transcend individuality (singh 2011). in the context of the current movement among diasporic sikhs, seva is seen as a political act that allows young sikhs to connect with secular ideas of humanitarian work and is tied to serving the interests of the larger community, including non-sikhs, thereby subverting boundaries of caste, class, ethnicity and religion (murphy, 2004; nippoldt 2018). this entails a form of humanitarianism, activism and resistance to the subjugation of subaltern groups, for instance by expressing solidarity with the black lives matter protestors through delivering food for them. while diasporic sikhs make an important link between seva and resistance, the reviewed articles use the discourse of seva to make sikh practices legible to white audiences. this can be linked to the community’s concern with refashioning their image in the aftermath of 9/11. in most of the articles reviewed above, seva appears as a way of projecting the “goodness” and “model minority” attributes of the diasporic sikh punjabi community. in an april 5, 2020 article in the leader post (melnychuk, 2020) about community kitchens being run in regina, prime minister justin trudeau lauds the efforts of the sikh community. he says, every day sikh canadians make our cities and our neighbourhoods stronger. and right now, when people need help most, you’re stepping up once again. in regina you’re delivering supplies to your neighbours, while in mississauga, you’re donating to the seva food bank. it just goes to show that we are all stronger together, supporting each other. (melnychuk, 2020) this discourse about seva, while it can be linked to forms of communitybased resistance, also feeds into positive media representations and makes the community amenable to the mainstream white community. specifically, the newspaper reports point to the accessibility and mainstreaming of the community kitchens run by diasporic sikhs, through tania das gupta & sugandha nagpal studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 114 discussions about the type of food available which includes “canned food, almond milk, fruit, chips and rice” (melnychuk, 2020). these foods are dissociated from south asian cultures and more closely tied to mainstream white culture, and thereby rendered neutral. in addition, the articles mention obstacles to the uptake of langar, indicated by low demand from hospitals, shelters and other charitable organizations due to concerns about the hygiene of the cooked food (melnychuk, 2020; salmaan, 2021), alongside the fact that many of the beneficiaries of langar had never heard of sikhism and “for many, daal, roti and vegetarian curries have never before been part of their diet” (salmaan 2021). in each of the articles, there is an explicit effort to respond to these concerns and persuade the mainstream community to engage in the langar service. for instance, almost all of the articles cite the compliance with health and safety protocols, like the volunteers wearing masks, using gloves and sanitizing their hands (melnychuk, 2020; salmaan, 2021). salmaan (2021) talks about a method of food distribution that is more culturally aligned with white mainstream ideas about food and safety protocol. he says: volunteers handed out plastic bags, which were then filled in a trick-or-treat-like fashion with items like bananas, dried chick peas, lentils and potatoes. orange circles and arrows were spray painted on the pavement to indicate direction and help maintain proper physical distancing. hot pasta and soup were also being handed out as recipients quietly, but graciously made their way past the foodfilled tables. a bread delivery came around 2:30 p.m. after the line had died down to a slow trickle. in this description, the mention of bags filled in trick-or-treat fashion is a cultural marker that is familiar to a white mainstream audience. moreover, the reference to non-punjabi foods and maintenance of social distancing appear targeted at assuaging the concerns of the white mainstream community. these media reports communicate that the diasporic sikh community is adapting its food and its distribution to suit the needs and concerns of the white mainstream community. these efforts position the sikh canadian community in direct contrast to kenney’s claims of the south asian community as defying covid-19 protocol and placing their culture above the requirements of the mainstream community. instead, these discourses show how the sikh canadian community is able to leverage their cultural capital to serve the needs of the larger mainstream community, while ensuring compliance with covid-19 protocols. it is not clear if the celebratory narratives reflected in media reports are also echoed by punjabi sikh and south asian community members. but a number of articles cite the views of prominent south asian community members and the participation of sikh community members in the food distribution. discourses on covid-19, south asians & punjabi canadians studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 115 this media messaging uses culture in a productive way and challenges kenney’s arguments, but it remains at odds with the idea of resistance because it is attempting to appeal to mainstream consumers rather than launching a form of protest. while this does not discount the potential for seva to be a form of resistance, in the media discourses discussed seva appears as a projection device targeted at the mainstream white community and contributes to the image of the punjabi sikh community as commensurable with the dominant white mainstream culture. hall (1997) points out that adding positive representations does not necessarily do away with negative stereotypes; it only adds to the diversity of representations. these positive representations of sikh canadians coexist alongside the negatives ones that reiterate the violence, backwardness and threat represented by south asian and sikh punjabi cultures. in remaining within the culturalist paradigm, these alternative media images also reinforce the logic of neo-racism and are able to perpetuate a reductive view of punjabi sikhs, as defined primarily through their culture and religion. it prevents an engagement with the other social, economic and political relations in which sikh punjabis are embedded. counter-narratives: structural effects of class among south asian and punjabi communities another counter-discourse is similar to what was heard when premier kenney racialized the rise of covid-19 infections in north-east calgary. this alternative message emphasizes the working-class character of the sikh punjabi canadian community, and how many of its members are putting themselves at risk to make sure that essential services remain available to the general population. on 20 november, 2020, toronto star ran an opinion piece by jaskaran sandhu, a senior consultant with crestview strategy, previously the executive director for the world sikh organization of canada and a senior adviser to brampton's office of the mayor. in this piece, she says, brampton is proud and we are tired of people pointing and laughing while we hustle and die doing the essential jobs that no one else wants to perform. we are tired of people blaming us for allegedly not taking covid-19 seriously and proclaiming ‘it's always brampton’ without ever taking a minute to think about what is actually happening here. (sandhu, 2020) the tone and content of this article serve as a backlash to the culturalist rhetoric and present a counter narrative. in her article, “covidiots come in all colours. using race-based data to demonize south asians is a cruel twisting of the evidence,” paradkar (2020) tania das gupta & sugandha nagpal studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 116 points out that it is, “easier to berate people for parties and ‘multi-day weddings’ than to examine if there are adequate testing sites, if they are easily accessible by public transit and if there are adequate supports for those who do test positive.” this article points out the misplaced effects of blaming people and communities of brampton in ontario for their irresponsible socializing practices, rather than considering the precarity of their employment, the multi-generational residential units due to high costs of housing, crowding in public transit and lack of adequate testing sites, which are contributing to the disproportionately higher infection rates among south asian populations. similarly, the article by dimanno (2020) asserts that while it may not have been the intention of peel public health to stereotype any community, they have inadvertently attributed covid-19 spread to cultural factors. according to the peel report on social determinants of health: race and occupation (region of peel, 2020),7 “the coronavirus was being spread, to some extent, by people living in multigenerational households and individuals who’d travelled to severely struck countries such as india” (dimanno, 2020). in pointing out some of the structural factors at play, dimanno cites dosani, a palliative care physician and health justice activist who mentions that people residing in such communities are using public transport, living in multigenerational homes as a way to cope with their finances, and take care of their relatives. dimanno (2020) points out that the peel report shows that visible minorities make up 63% of peel’s population and 77% of the region’s covid-19 cases, but she asserts that one needs to delve deeper to understand the complex factors contributing to these numbers. the most frequently reported occupations among positive cases were healthcare, trade, transport and equipment operators and manufacturing and utilities, all defined as “essential.” she concedes that there are cultural factors involved such as large gatherings or weddings, but these must be balanced with the impact of race, language, health, literacy, income, housing and eldercare. she calls for a public health response that understands that health care should vary across communities (dimanno, 2020). in one of the sharpest critiques of the culturalist discourse, sabina vohramiller (vohra-miller foundation and global health activist), dr. amanpreet brar (a surgery resident doctor) and dr. ananya tina banerjee (assistant professor in dalla lana school of public health at university of toronto) point out in a toronto star article on november 19, 2020, that it is not diwali, but “racial segregation and over-representation in precarious employment” which is raising the level of infections in ontario’s peel region (vohra-miller, et al., 2020). brar, a general surgery resident doctor at university of toronto and former warehouse worker in brampton, points out 7 peel public health, which is a part of the municipal government of peel region, has been collecting socio-demographic data since april 2020 in response to community demands. as a data gathering unit, its capacity to provide critical analysis is limited. discourses on covid-19, south asians & punjabi canadians studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 117 that lack of sick days makes workers vulnerable to being fired for calling in sick. the authors quote a statistics canada report (vohra-miller et al., 2020) that says 18% of canada’s roughly 181,000 truck drivers are south asian immigrants (vohra-miller et al., 2020) who regularly drive in and out of covid-19 hotspots, thus exposing them to infections. mayor patrick brown was quoted as saying that brampton receives less healthcare funding per capita than other regions in the province (vohra-miller et al., 2020). in addition, multi-generational and over-crowded housing is often a result of poverty as opposed to familial affinity as it is portrayed to be. thus, each of these articles point to the need for class and institutional analysis to inform sensitized public health responses. inequities of public health information, education, contact tracing and vaccinations on the basis of class, race, immigration status and living arrangements have been pointed out by activists. community organizations and spokespersons have consistently advocated for six paid sick days per year for all workers,8 for the prevention of cuts to the canada emergency response benefit (cerb) payments, and for pre-empting the announced cuts by the federal government to the canada recovery benefit (crb), measures that precarious workers have relied on during the pandemic. while public health officials at the municipal level have responded to these advocates by calling for paid sick leave for all workers, monitoring of workplace breakouts of covid-19 infections, orders to shut down such workplaces, and the prioritization of vaccinations for essential workers in hot spots (like brampton), conservative governments in both alberta and ontario have been intransigent, resorting instead to neo-conservative strategies of individual responsibility, restricted household gatherings, enhanced policing powers, fines and the like. in capturing a structural competency perspective (metzl, 2012 p. 216), which recognizes disease and health as inherently shaped by social and economic forces, the counter-narrative emanating from frontline practitioners, physicians and activists in the south asian and punjabi sikh community emphasizes the need to probe the underlying class factors that make south asians more vulnerable to covid-19. in creating this alternative framework, it is also laying bare the limitations of the culturalist narratives. conclusion the preceding discussion highlights a discursive battleground to explain the high numbers of covid-19 numbers among working class south asian 8 workers’ action centre (wac) and justice for workers are two examples of such community groups. tania das gupta & sugandha nagpal studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 118 canadians, many of whom are sikh punjabis. from the united conservative party, alberta premier kenney’s remarks invoked neo-racist assumptions about why south asian family gatherings, religious practices and lifestyles were posing a special danger to public health. some journalists from national and provincial papers presented a counternarrative emphasizing the selfless service, sacrifice and humanitarian values of the sikh community. this was later amplified by the prime minster and liberal party representatives who acknowledged that diverse cultures were the strength of the nation-state. although this view is a counter-discourse to the neo-racist one expressed by premier kenney, the positive media representation of sikh culture and seva is nonetheless a continuation of the trope of the tradition-bound south asian. this image also reinforces a colonially constructed image of a “true sikh male” who is loyal to the powerholders but who presents a potential threat to colonial dominance (walton-roberts, 2011). in this media discourse, the core of multiculturalism, in particular the more conciliatory aspects of culture, were reinforced rather than the ones that can be mobilized to fight colonial oppression, gender and class injustices. it is from advocates of local south asian communities, including physicians, academics, health activists and some journalists, that we saw the most critical counter-narratives emerging. they pointed out the classed and racialized reasons, as well as structural disparities, leading to the rising numbers of infections. local politicians sometimes reflected these same critical perspectives. this discursive resistance points to the crucial role of south asian community members in articulating critical counter-narratives. this can be further explored in relation to the increasing demographic, political and economic clout of south asians in canada. moreover, when viewed in the longue duree of sikh resistance against social injustices, this form of discursive resistance points to new directions for understanding and broadening our conception of diasporic resistance. given the increasing political importance of the sikh community in canada, it is particularly useful to move beyond the usual focus on explicit forms of resistance, such as legal activism, to also attend to more discursive forms of resistance and subversion. acknowledgements we are grateful for the suggestions made by three anonymous reviewers whose insights helped to strengthen the article. we would also like to thank harkit bhandal for her expert research assistance. finally, we would like to acknowledge financial support by social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc), partnership engage grant (peg), which made this research possible. discourses on covid-19, south asians & punjabi canadians studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 119 references ahluwalia, p. 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(2020, september 16). spike in peel covid-19 cases shows the need to dig deep for an effective public health response. toronto star. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/starcolumnists/2020/09/15/spike-in-peel-covid-19-cases-shows-the-need-to-dig-deep-for-aneffective-public-health-response.html dua, e. (2000). ‘the hindu women’s question’: canadian nation building and the social construction of gender for south asian-canadian women. in a. calliste & g. j. sefa dei (eds.), anti-racist feminism: critical race and gender studies (pp.55-72). fernwood publishing. eichelberger, l. (2007). sars and new york’s chinatown: the politics of risk and blame during an epidemic of fear. social science & medicine, 65(6), 1284-1295. fairclough, n. (1992). discourse and social change. polity press. fox, r. g. (1985). lions of the punjab: culture in the making. university of california press. hall, s. (1997). the spectacle of the ‘other’. sage. haque, e. (2012). multiculturalism within a bilingual framework: language, race and belonging in canada. university of toronto. hirvi, l. (2014). civic engagement and seva: an ethnographic case study of a sikh gurdwara in yuba city, california. journal of punjab studies, 21(1), 55-68. jakobsh, d. (2017). tragic violence, hate crimes and grieving within sacred geographies of faith: sikhs and the oak creek gurdwara shootings, 2012. journal of religion and culture, 27, 103-131. jakobsh, d., & walton-roberts, m. (2016). a century of miri piri: securing sikh belonging in canada. south asian diaspora, 8(2), 167-183. jakubowski, l. m. (1997). immigration and the legalization of racism. fernwood. jiwani, y. (1993). by omission and commission: ‘race’ and representation in canadian news [unpublished doctoral dissertation]. simon fraser university. jiwani, y. (2009). report race and the media: a retrospective and prospective gaze. canadian journal of communication, 34, 735-740. jiwani, y. (2010). doubling discourses and the veiled other: mediations of race and gender in canadian media. in s. razack, m. smith, & s. thobani (eds.), states of race: critical race feminism for the 21st century (pp. 59-86). between the lines. jiwani, y. (2011) pedagogies of hope: counter narratives and antidisciplinary tactics. review of education, pedagogy, and cultural studies, 33(4), 333-353. johnston, j. h. (1989). the voyage of the komagata maru: the sikh challenge to canada's johnston, j. h. (2005). group identity in an emigrant corker community: the example of sikhs in early twentieth-century british columbia. the british columbian quarterly, 148, 3-23 kapiriri, l., & ross, a. (2020). the politics of disease epidemics: a comparative analysis of the sars, zika, and ebola outbreaks. global social welfare, 7(1), 33-45. li, y., & nicholson, l. h. 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(2003). the ‘island of the unclean’: race, colonialism and ‘chinese leprosy’ in british columbia, 1891-1924. law, social justice & global development journal. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/lgd/2003_1/mawani/ discourses on covid-19, south asians & punjabi canadians studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 121 melnychuk, m. (2020, april 5). the helpers: regina sikh community distributes free groceries during pandemic. leader post. https://leaderpost.com/news/local-news/the-helpers-reginasikh-community-distributes-free-groceries-during-pandemic metzl, m. j. (2012). structural competency. american quarterly, 64(2), 213-218. miller, j. (2021). peel police are joining forces with social services agencies in a ‘radical’ experiment to curb intimate partner violence. toronto star. https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/03/16/peel-police-are-joining-forces-with-socialservices-agencies-in-a-radical-experiment-to-curb-intimate-partner-violence.html murphy, a. (2004). mobilising seva ("service"): modes of sikh diasporic action. in k. a. jacobsen & p. kumar (eds.), south asians in the diaspora (pp. 337-372). brill. nelkin, d., & gilman, s. l. (1988). placing blame for devastating disease. social research, 55(3), 361-378. neustaeter, b. (2021, january 27). ‘raise your voice’: campaign targets anti-asian racism heightened amid covid-19 in canada. ctv news. https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/raise-your-voice-campaign-targets-anti-asianracism-heightened-amid-covid-19-in-canada-1.5283974 nijhawan, m. (2014). 1984 and the diasporic politics of aesthetics: reconfigurations and new constellations among toronto’s sikh youth. diaspora: a journal of transnational studies, 17(2), 196-219. nijhawan, m. (2016). the precarious diasporas of sikh and ahmadiyya generations. palgrave macmillan. nijhawan, m. & arora, k. (2013). ‘lullabies for broken children’: diasporic citizenship and the dissenting voices of young sikhs in canada. sikh formations, 9(3), 299-321. nippoldt, l. (2018, february 17). transformed through seva: personal and community experiences of sikh service [conference presentaton]. sikholars conference, stanford, ca, usa. paradkar, s. (2020, november 18). covidiots come in all colours. using race-based data to demonize south asians is a cruel twisting of the evidence. toronto star. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/11/18/covidiots-come-in-allcolours-using-race-based-data-to-demonize-south-asians-is-a-cruel-twisting-of-theevidence.html press progress. (2020, november 30) jason kenney under fire over radio interview linking spread of covid-19 with south asian ‘traditions’. https://pressprogress.ca/jason-kenneyunder-fire-over-radio-interview-linking-spread-of-covid-19-to-south-asian-traditions/ puar, j. (2008). the turban is not a hat: queer diaspora and practices of profiling. sikh formations, 4(1), 47-91. puar, j., & rai, a. (2004). the re-making of a model minority: perverse projectiles under the spectre of (counter)terrorism. social text, 22(3), 75-104. redfm. (2020, november 25). good morning calgary with rishi nagar [web video]. retrieved june 12, 2021, from https://www.facebook.com/redfm1067/videos/435088651218061/ region of peel. (2020). covid-19 and the social determinants of health: race and occupation. https://www.peelregion.ca/coronavirus/_media/covid-19-race-and-occupation.pdf reitmanova, s., & gustafson, d. l. (2012). rethinking immigrant tuberculosis control in canada: from medical surveillance to tackling social determinants of health. journal of immigrant and minority health, 14(1), 6-13. reitmanova, s., gustafson, d. l., & ahmed, r. (2015). ‘immigrants can be deadly’: critical discourse analysis of racialization of immigrant health in the canadian press and public health policies. canadian journal of communication, 40, 471-487. salmaan, f. (2021, january 21). sikhs expand their community kitchens in response to covid19 hardships. the globe and mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/britishcolumbia/article-sikhs-expand-their-community-kitchens-in-response-to-covid-19/ tania das gupta & sugandha nagpal studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 1, 103-122, 2022 122 sandhu, j. (2020, november 20). brampton should be celebrated, not stigmatized. toronto star. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2020/11/19/brampton-should-be-celebratednot-stigmatized.html?rf shukla, s. ( 2019, november 1). how are sikhs so powerful in canada? it’s not about their numbers. the print. https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/sikhs-so-powerful-in-canada-itsnot-about-numbers/314036/ sian, p. k. 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(2002). white canada forever: popular attitudes and public policy toward orientals in british columbia (3rd ed.). mcgill-queen’s university press. women’s shelters canada. (2020, november). the impact of covid-19 on vaw shelters and transition houses. retrieved june 5, 2021 from http://endvaw.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2020/11/shelter-voices-2020-2.pdf wu, c., qian, y., & wilkes, r. (2021) anti-asian discrimination and the asian-white mental health gap during covid-19. ethnic and racial studies, 44(5), 819-835. correspondence address: laura camfield, school of international development, university of east anglia, norwich research park norwich, norfolk nr4 7tj, united kingdom. tel.: +44(0)1603 591885, email: l.camfield@uea.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 6, issue 1, 143-146, 2012 review of global child poverty and well-being: measurement, concepts, policy and action laura camfield school of international development, university of east anglia global child poverty and well-being: measurement, concepts, policy and action. edited by alberto minujin and shailen nandy bristol, uk: policy press, 2012, (pb) isbn 978-1-84742-481-5 child poverty—in both absolute and relative forms—is omnipresent. there are 3.6 million children living in poverty in the united kingdom (department for work and pensions, 2012), one of the richest countries in the world, and worldwide at least 25 per cent of children live below the international poverty line of us$1.25 per day (unicef, 2012). yet despite this little attention is paid to child poverty within mainstream international development policy and practice (jones and sumner, 2011). this substantial volume—23 chapters—brings together most of the key authors in the field of global childhood poverty research and multidimensional measurement. its aim is to use national and regional level case studies to show how work on the measurement and alleviation of child poverty has developed over the past two decades in relation to how child poverty is conceptualized and the availability of data to monitor its effects. after a brief introduction, the second chapter by pemberton et al examines the potential of international human rights frameworks and conventions as a means to hold “duty bearers” such as governments to account if children’s needs are not met. the importance of having a universal architecture underpinning the design of anti-poverty policies is returned to by levitas (chapter 18) and townsend (chapter 20) in relation to the provision of universal child benefit and a guaranteed basic income. in the third chapter vandermoortele addresses the failings of growth-focused approaches to development and the potential of childstudies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 144 laura camfield focused policies to increase attention to equity. the equivocal impacts of rapid economic growth can be seen in the case study of vietnam (roelen and gassman, chapter 13) and the overview of sub-saharan africa and south asia by nandy in chapter 17. the fourth chapter by gordon and nandy outlines the ‘bristol approach’ to poverty measurement which, as i discuss below, underpins the majority of the chapters in this book, including the chapter that follows it (chapter 5). chapter 4 also provides a useful critique of poverty measures, including problems inherent in the united nations development programme’s celebrated multidimensional poverty index (undp mpi, pp.75-78). the limitations of existing data are returned to in chapter 10, which critically reviews the types of data available to policy makers on child-related policies and outcomes. chapters five to seventeen present examples of poverty measurement in south africa, united states of america, europe, tanzania, congo brazzaville, vietnam, iran, haiti, latin america, caribbean, south asia and sub-saharan africa. the remaining five chapters address conceptual and methodological issues, for example, the implications of different measures for the prevalence of child poverty in morocco. these chapters are discussed below, following a brief account of the volume’s history. the volume was initiated at an international event in new york in 2007 to launch the united nations children’s fund’s (unicef) global study on child poverty and disparities. the global study ran from 2007-2009 in over 50 countries (chapter 21). it aimed to produce comparable data on child poverty and methodological reflections on the challenges of engaging with a range of stakeholders1. while the global study was an interesting initiative and its data collection fortuitously spanned the global food and financial crises2, the implicit linkage of the global study and unicef with the volume has shaped its focus in particular ways. due to the time lag between inception and publication almost all of the chapters have been published elsewhere, and some are slightly out of date (e.g. young lives, chapter 20, is now planning its fourth round of data collection). however, this enables the book to act as an authoritative reader and would be particularly beneficial for independent practitioners/ researchers who do not have institutional access to journals. the book starts from the united nations general assembly definition of child poverty in 2006 which notes particular absences in children’s lives such as nutrition and sanitation and outlines their impact both now and in the future. specifically, the majority of children worldwide are unable to enjoy their rights, reach their full potential, or participate as full members of their societies. the definition has moral and methodological implications—in terms of measurement, which is the main focus of this volume, children’s experiences should be separated from those of their households and the focus of poverty assessment should extend beyond income. the editors observe that there were no global estimates of child poverty prior to the development of the bristol approach by peter townsend and david gordon in 2003. there were also few social indicators collected in developing countries that could capture the impact of systemic shocks such as structural adjustment. the volume studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 review of global child poverty and well-being 145 exemplifies the changes in discourse and practice over the past twenty years, albeit that these are not yet reflected in improvements in children’s lives. although the title of the volume refers to measurement, concepts, policy and action, more than half of the chapters relate to measurement. they present a range of measurement models, the most popular of which are the alkire and foster method, which underpins the undp mpi (chapters 5 and 13), the child wellbeing index used in the unicef innocenti report card (chapter 8 and 9), and, of course, the bristol approach which is used by unicef (chapters 4, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17). chapters 14, 16 and 17 make good use of national household survey data to provide snapshots of child poverty in iran, latin america and the caribbean, and south asia and sub-saharan africa. other chapters draw on the unicef-sponsored multiple indicator cluster survey (www.unicef. org/statistics/index_24302.html), often in sophisticated and rigorous ways (e.g. chapter 13 on multidimensional child poverty in vietnam). the concepts in the title are less well-served and action is barely touched upon, due to the predominance of academics and consultants in the author list. notably, two of the four conceptual chapters (chapters 2, 3, 18 and 21), addressing respectively rights, equity, the history of child poverty eradication, and universal child benefits, use theoretical frameworks from uk social policy analyses. this suggests there could be useful cross-fertilisation between social policy, international development, and development economics, and between northern and southern researchers. one example of this is barnes and wright’s use of townsend’s “socially perceived necessities” approach to capture what children and adults in south africa regard as an acceptable standard of living (chapter 6). the optimal conditions for child development is a theme implicit in every chapter, however, the volume does not provide a summary of current thinking in this area in the style of, e.g. the lancet early childhood development series (2007, 2011). it is also relatively silent on recent child-focused interventions such as conditional cash transfer schemes in latin america, child support grants in south africa, promotion of universal primary education, early childhood development interventions (e.g. integrated child development services in india), etc. all of these have affected child poverty to some degree, albeit that their impacts are complex and not always positive (e.g. the effect of increases in access to schooling on its quality). while the volume’s focus on measurement reflects the preoccupations of mainstream poverty research, even here there are critical voices (ansell, barker, & smith, 2007; du toit, 2009). there are also calls for more nuanced understandings of the relational dimensions of poverty (harriss, 2009; mosse, 2010; sumner, 2010). these sophisticated understandings of how people become and remain poor cannot be captured solely through measures (no matter how accurate!) and so are not reflected here. finally, although all chapters acknowledge the importance of children as the main stakeholders in child poverty research and action, only chapter 6 uses data generated by children themselves. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 146 laura camfield notes 1 half of the participating countries have produced reports, accompanied by policy analyses and advocacy materials, which are available on https://sites.google.com/site/ finalreportsglobalstudy/ 2 see also a recent special issue in development policy review 29(5), 2011. references ansell, n., barker, j., & smith, f. (2007). unicef child poverty in perspective report: a view from the uk, children’s geographies 5(3): 325-330. department for work and pensions (2012). households below average income: an analysis of the income distribution 1994/95-2010/11. dwp, uk. du toit, a. (2009). poverty measurement blues, in t. addison, d. hulme & r. kanbur (eds.), poverty dynamics: interdisciplinary perspectives (pp.225-46). oxford and new york: oxford university press. harriss, j. (2009). bringing politics back into poverty analysis: why understanding of social relations matters more for policy on chronic poverty than measurement. in t. addison, d. hulme, & r. kanbur (eds.), poverty dynamics: interdisciplinary perspectives (pp.205-224). oxford and new york: oxford university press. jones, n., & sumner, a. (2011). child poverty, evidence and policy: mainstreaming children in international development. policy press, uk. mosse, d. (2010). a relational approach to durable poverty, inequality and power. journal of development studies, 46(7). 1156-1178. sumner, a. (2010). child poverty, well-being and agency. journal of international development, 22(8), 1064–1075 unicef. (2012). state of the world’s children: children in an urban world. unicef, new york. yoshizawa final before ts correspondence address: rebecca scott yoshizawa, department of sociology, kwantlen polytechnic university, surrey, bc, v3w 2m8; email: rebecca.yoshizawa@kpu.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 666-668, 2022 book review anti-racist scholar-activism joseph-salisbury, r., & connelly, l. (2021). manchester university press. isbn 9781526157959 (cloth) us$120.00; isbn 9781526157966 (paper) us$21.95; isbn 9781526157942 (e-book) us$21.95. 280 pages. rebecca scott yoshizawa kwantlen polytechnic university, canada despite experiencing the various rocky and rockier bottoms that seem to be the institutional norm of a path to someday “arriving” at the permanent academic job destination, academia overall has felt good to me. i think i genuinely love and champion it, want to see it grow, and want to see my undergraduate students see themselves as graduate students with future careers in academia. but i am a white settler for whom academia is supposed to be welcoming; notwithstanding that i am a woman, academia has always encouraged me to dedicate my life to “being a scholar.” anti-racist scholar-activism, by remi joseph-salisbury and laura connelly, is an intervention in my sentiment. i was uncomfortable reading this book; white fragility, articulated by robin diangelo (2018) as the expectation of “racial comfort,” was underlying this experience. in that context, it took me a long time to write this review, because i wanted to do the book justice by sitting with my discomfort and by taking lessons and insights into the ongoing stuff of academia i was doing at kwantlen polytechnic university (kpu) in the lower mainland of british columbia, canada, on unceded traditional and ancestral lands of the kwantlen, musqueam, katzie, semiahmoo, tsawwassen, qayqayt and kwikwetlem peoples. i acknowledge the occupation of this land particularly as a genuine reminder of why reading this book was important for me in my roles at kpu. as stated of the book’s intent and purpose, it does not prescribe how to be an anti-racist scholar-activist, which would ironically undermine the resistance, contradiction, and struggle that the authors argue is fundamental to anti-racist scholar-activism; rather the book presents a “live text” (p. 204) “manifesto” (pp. 5, 202-221) of principles to crystalize “collective reflection, conversation, and praxes” (p. 204). yet this book also cleverly appealed to me book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 666-668, 2022 667 as “a scholar” in its approach to research, showing the very best that qualitative methods have to offer. chapter one highlights tensions, contradictions, and opportunities inherent in the concept of anti-racist scholar-activism, ultimately arguing for a praxis of doing over being, or action over identity politics. it highlights the disconnect between universities and communities, as well as the privileged and sometimes pretentious positionality of being a scholar protected by institutions in ways community activists are not. chapter two elaborates “working in service,” describing accountability, usefulness, and accessibility, challenging the idea “that academics work for the university” (p. 86). chapter three is a very provocative read on “reparative theft: stealing from the university,” asking, “how can we exploit the pockets of possibility the university presents to us?” (p. 90). here, exploitation of university resources in service of radical movements is presented as a higher form of justice and a challenge to the criminalization of resistance. for instance, because academic freedom is (in theory) protected, it can be safer for academics to publicly engage in radical work. using salaried time for activism “not only bolsters communities of resistance [but]… also rubs against – or seeks to undermine and redress – a neoliberal capitalist system that steals all of our time” (pp. 98-99). chapter four details backlash and surviving backlash, including the concept of “struggling where we are” (p. 139) and being strategic – for instance, doing what is needed to achieve tenure to be enabled to do anti-racist activism. regarding struggling where we are, chapter five elaborates two approaches: fostering “a classroom-to-activism pipeline” (p. 144), and then resistance in the wider university, particularly in labour union involvement and in meetings. the authors write, “we introduce the pipeline metaphor here to think about how our classroom praxes can create routes that enable students to move from the classroom into activism” (p. 154).1 finally, chapter six looks at the reflexivity required to acknowledge the institutional complicity of working within the university, and the reality that scholar-activists, with their proximity to power, personally benefit from their connections to the communities in which they do their activism. “surviv[ing] with these contradictions,” as one of the authors’ informants put it (p. 184), cannot “lead to a passivity of guilt” (p. 185), yet it raises a tougher question: do the benefits to communities of resistance outweigh the necessary complicity of scholar-activists? clearly finding they do, the final “manifesto” chapter offers 10 points of action to cohere and conclude the book. i was doing teaching, research, committee work, hiring, curriculum design, and leadership while reading this book. our institution and its members were and are engaging in various forms of transformative work, some which the 1 my colleague, seema ahluwalia, leads a “service learning” course in our program where students are taught, trained, encouraged, and assessed on their ability to be of service to nonprofit organizations in their communities. her approach foregrounds their humility and learning in their placements, as opposed to the idea that the students bring expertise from the university to the organizations and communities in which they work. rebecca scott yoshizawa studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 666-668, 2022 668 frameworks of this book might recognize as anti-racist scholar-activism, and others as co-optation or overclaiming, as described in the first chapter. to the extent that i am a part of certain corners of decision-making and power, the book influenced kpu. for example, members of the department of sociology, of which i am the collegial chair, are advocating to change our minimum qualifications for new faculty, to recognize experience and knowledge equivalent to credentials. this, in turn, will reformulate our approach to hiring new faculty, including how we assess applications and conduct interviews. of course, this is not directly serving communities, and to consider it anti-racist activism is overclaiming; it is cooptation if i claim it serves communities instead of the maintenance of the neoliberal university in a context of increasing anti-racist critique from activists, scholars, and internal and external scholar-activists, such as the authors of this book. that being said, the book’s data and analysis particularly reflect the uk context, wherein “impacts” and metrics of performance are much more central than they are where i am situated. kpu is canada’s only polytechnic university,2 having traditional academic training that is occurring in the same institution as vocational training, which is often cutting-edge and timely (e.g., the brewing program and the farm schools).3 kpu also offers a certificate in non-governmental organizations and non-profit studies.4 the university is also primarily undergraduate, with open enrollment for many programs. it is a non-residential commuter school, and a teaching institution where “scholarly” output of its faculty is not rigorously required or measured. because of these factors, faculty at kpu are necessarily connected to communities and industries in ways that might not be as common in the context to which the authors of the present book refer; certainly this varies across faculties at kpu. even so, the connection to industries seems to be deepening and flourishing. in this context, what is the institutional connection to struggling communities and communities of resistance? clearly, our individual faculty members and their networks are doing work that is represented as anti-racist scholar-activism in this book. in sum, i found the book to be readable, timely, thoughtprovoking, and action-provoking, particularly action on the part of academics to serve marginalized communities and communities of resistance. references diangelo, r. (2018). white fragility: why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism. beacon press. 2 see: https://www.kpu.ca/sites/default/files/downloads/kwantlen_polytechnic_university_overview779 3.pdf para.1 3 see: https://www.kpu.ca/brew; https://www.kpu.ca/farmschools 4 see: https://calendar.kpu.ca/programs-az/arts/non-governmental-organizations-nonprofitstudies/non-governmental-organizations-nonprofit-studies-certificate/ landriault final before ts correspondence address: bryson landriault, department of sociology, toronto metropolitan university, toronto, on, m5b 2k3; email: blandriault@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 657-661, 2022 book review living in indigenous sovereignty carlson-manathara, e., with rowe, g. (2021). fernwood press. isbn 9781773632384 (paper) cdn$29.00; isbn 978-1773632636 (e-book) cdn$28.99; isbn 978-1773634517 (pdf) cdn$28.99. 320 pages. bryson landriault toronto metropolitan university, canada informed by the perspectives of prominent indigenous scholars, knowledge holders and other community members, living in indigenous sovereignty (2021) offers a decolonial framework for how canadian settlers can repair their relationships with indigenous peoples and land within the settlercolonial state of canada. although intended for all settlers, this book is most concerned with providing an anti-colonial and decolonial foundation for white settlers (or occupiers) of traditional indigenous lands, whose ancestors were complicit in the colonization, genocide, and widespread displacement of indigenous peoples across turtle island (north america). these terms – anticolonialism and decolonization – are central tenets of the framework provided to readers, with anti-colonialism being defined as an indicator of opposition to colonization, and decolonization as radical social justice involving the systemic reversal of colonization. the question authors elizabeth carlson manathara and gladys rowe ponder throughout this book is how white settlers can come to terms with their role in indigenous-led decolonization, and gain a sense of accountability for the ongoing exploitation of indigenous peoples and lands by settlers. guided by a decolonial framework that maintains indigenous sovereignty, they explore this question through the experiences of white canadian settler activists who have engaged with decolonization in their own lives and work. carlson-manathara and rowe’s purpose in writing and researching this book is to respond to calls from various indigenous scholars and community members for active engagement of euro-canadian settlers in decolonization, underlining their importance in making colonial governments accountable to bryson landriault studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 657-661, 2022 658 indigenous worldviews and perspectives. moreover, the lack of decolonial literature addressing non-indigenous peoples is the gap this book and its authors posit as necessary to address for true reconciliation with indigenous communities, as well as for settlers to begin working in good relations with indigenous peoples. their main argument throughout the book is that settlers must process the tensions that exist between indigenous peoples and themselves, including the generational privilege and wealth stemming from occupying land and exploiting its resources, the violence their ancestors enacted on entire communities through genocide, and enduring the forthcoming guilt and accountability. being a white, european settler herself, author carlson-manathara understands what it is like to confront these tensions, given her years of decolonization research and time as a social worker. she began her career as a social worker at an indigenous alternative school in minneapolis (p. 18), eventually pursuing and achieving a master’s of social work (msw) with a focus on anti-oppression, clinical social work, and intergenerational and cultural trauma. she admits to making a lot of mistakes throughout her life, claiming she likely did more damage than good throughout her years in social work, due in part to some of the colonial beliefs she had held onto growing up in a rural “canadian” town. indeed, living in indigenous sovereignty is about coming to terms with colonial guilt and understanding what living in indigenous sovereignty could look like for a european settler, reimagining the colonial lifestyles settlers are accustomed to. these lessons cannot be learned without the guidance of indigenous worldviews; therefore a majority of this book includes advice from indigenous community members who the author befriended through her years of working in canada and the united states. one of these close-friends is gladys rowe, co-author of living in indigenous sovereignty (2021), with whom carlson-manathara has worked on various academic research projects and pursuits. rowe, who is of cree and mixed european ancestry, uses her background in social work and her perspective as an indigenous woman to reinforce what the transformation to living in indigenous sovereignty should include. moreover, rowe emphasizes the need for centring indigenous knowledge and epistemologies – recognizing the importance in our interconnectedness to other people and the land. their collaboration makes the book a deeply compelling and essential read for settlers, who the authors believe desperately need more guidance in understanding how to live alongside indigenous peoples, on traditional indigenous land, while being respectful and good relatives. the book starts with a breakdown of the indigenous scholarly research, which emphasizes the importance of having these conversations with european settlers, followed by a diverse set of arguments debating the role settlers play in decolonization and indigenous resistance. contextualizing the topic with a well-rounded discussion from members of indigenous communities is important in guiding this discussion, as the book mostly consists of a collection of accounts from white settlers based on interviews book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 657-661, 2022 659 with author carlson-manathara, documenting their journeys as settlers who have participated in decolonization work and social justice activism. these settlers vary in age and location across turtle island, but they share similar feelings, experiences, and sentiments on their relationship to indigeneity. for example, steve heinrichs, who is featured in chapter six, explains his curiosity about indigenous peoples and culture while growing up as a russian mennonite on unceded coast salish territory in vancouver (p. 88). this curiosity has forced heinrichs to confront his identity as a practicing mennonite, coming to terms with his status as an occupier of indigenous land and his commitment to the religious community that raised him and with whom he now works closely. much of his identity has been shrouded in the belief that this land, which was presumed “empty” by his ancestors, was a gift to the russian mennonite community for their hard work and commitment to their faith. heinrichs has since learned how his family has benefited from the exploitation and displacement of indigenous peoples, and has educated his family, friends, and community members about this history as well. adam barker, another white settler, born in hamilton, ontario, who studied in the indigenous governance program (igov) at the university of victoria, shares a similar experience (p.153). barker has been committed to learning more about indigenous systems of governance and politics, but he has struggled with justifying working in decolonial spaces as a white canadian settler. barker has felt an overwhelming sense of guilt for his attachment to colonialism and how, similarly to heinrichs, he has benefitted from the colonization of indigenous land and nations. the stories of heinrichs, barker, and other settlers interviewed in the book help enrich this discussion, highlighting the experiences of non-indigenous people who have confronted some of the feelings and discomfort that have come with being a colonizer on indigenous land. generally, the settlers interviewed all feel a sense of guilt for the actions of their ancestors, the ways they continue to benefit from colonization, and the knowledge of the injustice towards indigenous peoples that has formed the basis of their privilege and wealth in canada. many of those interviewed expressed discomfort with their status as a colonizer, where they have experienced the economic advantages of capitalism and colonization at the expense of indigenous peoples. understandably, land was a massive topic of conversation throughout the interviews. for instance, how should a settler, who has purchased or inherited property, think about their relationship to the land? is the responsibility of "landowners" to give land back to indigenous peoples? these are difficult questions for settlers, but the authors understand them as necessary to explore when attempting to decolonize and disrupt a settler-colonial lifestyle. overall, living in indigenous sovereignty (2021) contributes something unique to academic conversations surrounding decolonization and indigenous-settler relations. the book’s biggest strength is the authors’ ability to map a discussion for settlers to think about the tensions embedded bryson landriault studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 657-661, 2022 660 in their relations with indigenous peoples, while maintaining a sense of accountability. the reader is reminded that settlers need to be aware that the lands on which they currently live and from which they benefit are stolen lands that are inextricably connected to indigenous cultures, practices, and nations that existed long before colonization. readers may understand this history, but the book pushes them to deeply reflect and analyze what decolonizing really means and requires as we look towards the future. these strengths make this book more than just a jumping off point for readers; it also is a place for even the most aware individuals, indigenous and nonindigenous, to explore their relationships to colonization. anyone who wants to engage in decolonial conversations in a critical, academic manner will discover something new, either about themselves or the perspectives of others, in this book. the novelty of carlson-manathara and rowe's work is what truly makes this book a must-read, as there is little literature on indigenous-led decolonization from a settler’s perspective. these discussions can at times be awkward and undesired by settlers, because they involve deconstructing the colonial lifestyle in which everything in their lives – family, school, and work – is entrenched. despite the importance of engaging with these perspectives, carlsonmanathara and row’s research does neglect a few key areas of the conversation surrounding decolonizing settler perspectives. the first is that by limiting interviews to only white settlers, the book ignores settlers from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. although the authors acknowledge that this is intentional, focusing solely on the complicated perspectives of settlers from european backgrounds, this limitation does leave something to be desired. identity is intersectional and diverse, making the discussions around it and what it means to be a settler all the more important. there are settlers from black, south-asian, and other racialized communities who are left out of these conversations and could benefit from the lessons in this book. for example, how should black canadian settlers approach these same questions surrounding indigenous land and peoples? how might immigrants transition to living in indigenous sovereignty? although the stories of white canadian settlers are relevant to many people, ignoring the diversity of identity and settler experiences limits this discussion in ways that might not be completely necessary or beneficial. instead of approaching the topic in this way, the intersectionality and nuance of identity could have been reflected in interviewing racialized individuals as well, who have also adopted a colonial lifestyle. a second limitation is the strictly academic scope of the conversations surrounding decolonizing settler perspectives. the lessons from living in indigenous sovereignty (2021) have tremendous importance for improving settler relationships to indigenous peoples and land, but are presented in a way that is irrelevant to those without an academic or activist background. as such, this criticism posits that there should have been a broader discussion of book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 657-661, 2022 661 the ways decolonization strategies are addressed pedagogically. for instance, there could have been a chapter discussing how these decolonization exercises and theories can be better integrated in public education curricula and schools, ensuring they are being taught to children and teenagers. in not having these discussions with everyone, its benefits and knowledge only become accessible to academics and social activists who already have an interest in the issues. when truly attempting to decolonize canadian settler lifestyles in practice, access to decolonial knowledge must also be considered for there to be any meaningful social justice or action. in closing, living in indigenous sovereignty (2021) is an important read for anyone looking to critically reflect on the responsibilities settlers have in the process of decolonization. there are some issues with limiting the scope of the book to white settlers, and framing it for academics and activists, but they do not overshadow the importance of this book to discussions surrounding the future of settler-indigenous relations. with the guidance of indigenous academics and other community members, these authors are well-intentioned and provide space for canadian settlers to deeply reflect on their status as occupiers of indigenous land. this book compels readers to reckon with their colonial legacy and how they benefit from the displacement of indigenous peoples, while still finding a love for themselves and their ancestors. moreover, the process of reflecting upon these situated histories is an important takeaway from reading this book. indeed, it paves the way for settlers to live a life that respects and operates within indigenous sovereignty. o'flynn final galley nov 23 15 volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 activism and the academy in ireland: a bridge for social justice micheal o’flynn university college dublin, ireland aggelos panayiotopoulos university of limerick, ireland abstract this article is concerned with the working relationships between progressive academics, students, left activists, and trade unionists in ireland, and with the apparent division between theory-led and action-led perspectives. we reflect on our efforts to draw progressive forces in ireland together through a number of initiatives: reading groups, conferences, educational seminars, workshops, the publication of a quarterly paper, and the organization of precarious workers in higher education. we argue that although activism and academia are sometimes treated as separate spheres, there are spaces for academia in activism and for activism in academia. finding and filling those spaces means resisting efforts to limit academia to interpreting the world, and finding ways to demonstrate the emancipatory potential of education among activists whose time is taken up with struggling against immediate structural inequalities and attempting to mobilize people into a political force. we argue that scholar-activists should play an important role helping to assemble the collective resources of the working class, as well as organising for longer-term social transformation. we call on scholar-activists to collaborate in constructing a counter-hegemonic narrative and developing a collective strategy for social justice. keywords scholar-activism; emancipatory education; academia; social justice introduction it could be argued that while academics focus on interpreting the world, activists mobilize people to change it, but there is no strict dichotomy. correspondence address: micheal o’flynn, irc post-doctoral scholar, ucd, belfield, dublin 4. email: micheal.oflynn@ucd.ie issn: 1911-4788 activism and the academy in ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 55 activists engaging in scholarly work realize that successful campaigns invariably see the value in research-based activism. likewise, professional scholars who move beyond interpreting the world can play important parts in progressive social change. some academics are quite visible in the class struggle, as greece’s program for social salvation demonstrated in early 2015 (wall street journal, 2015). however, as scholars and as activists we are concerned that the increasing corporate influence in the management of colleges and universities, together with a shift in academic discourse to suit “vested interests with a great deal of power” (tadajewski et al., 2014, p. 1760), threatens scholars’ ability to engage in initiatives geared toward social change. prevailing institutional practices are creating an environment of intolerance toward anything that is potentially disruptive to existing power relations (within or outside of academic life), generating a culture of deference and silence, particularly among the growing number of precariously employed educators (gill, 2009). drawing on our own involvements as academics and activists in ireland, we argue that there remains a space for activism within academia, as well as for radical education and scholarship within activism (freire, 1996). scholar activism has been defined as scholarly work that resists dominant discourses, and questions social, political, and economic power relations (fuller & kitchin, 2004). scholars such as russell (2015), mcalevey (2012), gill (2009), mason (2013), hearne (2015), and the autonomous geographies collective (2010) have demonstrated that a link bridging academia to activism is not only possible, but necessary.1 one of the key problems facing progressive forces in ireland is the lack of on-going working relationships between left academics, left activists, and the organized working class. to help remedy this, we are concerned with rebuilding the institutions that make possible some degree of self-rule among the working class – the first step being to develop a continuing dialogue between workers, trade unionists, academics, independent researchers, activists, and the general population. in this article we focus on the reciprocal relationships that have developed between left scholars, trade unionists, and activists, through our own scholarship and activism. an interesting realization we derived from writing this reflective article is the extent to which our activism (re)shapes our scholarship and vice versa. our long-standing relationship with the trade union movement in ireland led us to bring trade union activism into our own academic workplace with the specific aim to raise awareness about conditions of temporary, part-time, and hourly-paid workers in higher education. in so doing, we discovered that the task of building relationships of solidarity, or of “raising expectations and raising hell” (mcalevey, 2012, p. 12), is increasingly difficult as neo-liberal university governance uses insecurity, fear, and isolation to exploit and deter                                                                                                                 1 the autonomous geographies collective is a group of academics collaborating and supporting the development of scholar activism with the view to progressive social transformation. michael o’flynn, aggelos panayiotopoulos studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 56 resistance (courtois & o’keefe, 2015). this realization was brought home to us when we started agitating on the issue of hourly-paid teaching contracts at the university of limerick (ul). inspired by third level workplace watch (https://3lww.wordpress.com/about/) a campaigning group organized by and for precarious staff in irish universities, we formed ul workplace watch with the purpose of organizing and campaigning for better working conditions for precarious faculty and staff. we discovered that of the 30 hourly-paid lecturers who contacted ul workplace watch in the first few months of its existence, only one felt confident enough to claim for the hours s/he spent preparing for class; none were claiming for all of the hours worked. moreover, apart from one (the same colleague), none were prepared to publicly express dissatisfaction about their conditions of employment to the wider campus community. this inspired us to further examine the experiences of precarious employment among academics, and to incorporate precariousness into our own research agenda. drawing on the work of the autonomous geographies collective (2010), mason (2013), and russell (2015), this article reflects on our actions and standpoints as scholar-activists working collectively to resist the further neoliberalization of third level education in ireland and abroad. we hope that it will encourage others who are trying either to incorporate activism into their academic lives or strengthen their activism through individual or collaborative academic work. our experiences/stories are presented narratively in chronological order, to demonstrate the development of our efforts, and to consider them in their relevant socio-political and economic contexts. our narrative unfolds as follows. we begin with a ‘marxist reading group’ we organized at university of limerick between 2010 and 2013 to create a space for an alternative reading of the post-2008 austerity crisis. in our efforts to open up a dialogue that extended beyond the academy, we included trade unionists and members of various activist groups who were attempting to resist the austerity measures imposed by the government, the european union, and the international monetary fund. this led to collaboration with the limerick council of trade unions (lctu), focused on designing educational activities with emancipatory potential. our work with the lctu is discussed in the second part of our narrative. we then turn to a quarterly publication that resulted from that collaboration, called the bottom dog, which endeavours to provide an independent voice for workers and activists. the dialogue that developed through our involvement with the trade union movement led us to begin organizing precarious workers in our own workplace within the university setting; this is the focus of the final part of our narrative reflection. activism and the academy in ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 57 reading group: the early days the background to our activism at university of limerick was the collapse of the irish economy in 2008. in the initial years of the crisis it was generally accepted that a relatively small number of developers, speculators, financiers, and politicians had ruined the economy (o’toole, 2010). conditions worsened when, as mccabe (2011, p. 169) explains, the government put up “the entire irish state as collateral for the crushing liabilities of six private banks ... approximately €400 billion in leveraged loans.” it was not long before the politicians, economists, and media pundits who had facilitated the expansion of the preceding property bubble stepped back into the limelight to mis-educate the population about the nature of the crisis. they developed the narrative of ‘we all partied’ to legitimize the neo-liberal attack on public services, and to redirect blame toward the general population, including the most vulnerable groups in society, such as the long-term unemployed and single mothers (o’flynn, monaghan & power, 2014; mercille, 2014). experiencing life and work amidst the austerity measures, we, as scholaractivists, felt compelled to take a position; howard zinn’s (2002) dictum “you can’t be neutral on a moving train” appeared more and more apt. control of the narrative of ireland’s economic collapse has been more-orless ceded to the interests of economic and political elites. in retrospect, it is perhaps not surprising that efforts by academics to alter the narrative or challenge austerity measures vis-à-vis higher education and in society at large have been weak, especially given increasing pressures on those hoping to secure permanent contracts or promotion to conform to the dominant neoliberal agenda (great lakes feminist geography collective, 2015). in pursuit of their careers, even radical scholars are likely to be transformed into conformists. in an attempt to highlight the apparent absence of a thorough critical academic discourse on britain’s political economy, guardian journalist aditya chakrabortty (2012) searched for the terms “finance”, “economy”, and “markets” – as well as for “any articles dealing with the financial crisis in even the most tangential sense” – in the abstracts of three main sociology journals from 2000-2012. according to chakrabortty (2012), the relevant articles totalled “nine in the american sociological review, three in sociology (‘the uk's premier sociology journal’), and one in the british journal of sociology.” chakrabortty (2012) put it simply: “look at those numbers, and remember that the bsa [british sociological association] has 2,500 members – yet this is the best they could do.” he was similarly unimpressed with the discipline of political science, having searched the program of a conference in belfast attended by britain's top political scientists (held in the weeks before chakrabortty published his article). chakrabortty expected to find in-depth, critical analyses of the crisis, debates about the technocrat governments installed in southern europe, or the political implications of the banking crises in britain and ireland, “[b]ut no: over the course of three days, michael o’flynn, aggelos panayiotopoulos studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 58 they held exactly one discussion of britain's political economy. there was more prominence given to a session on how academic research could advance dons' careers” (chakrabortty, 2012). implicit in these observations is an apparent disinclination among many academics to openly challenge relations of power, question prevailing orthodoxies, or play a role in democratizing debates around crisis and austerity, at least in academia’s preferred venue: the refereed journal. in order to address the lack of irish academic response to the crisis we set up a reading group in university of limerick at the beginning of 2010, hoping to facilitate a free and open dialogue among the progressive forces of the academy. the reading group provided an opportunity for students, academics, and non-academic staff to come together once a week to consider the work of various marxist writers and their relevance to current events. the meetings revealed a widespread unease about the neo-liberalization of higher education, and concerns that the increasingly conservative ethos of academic life is suppressing critical thought; many participants suggested that they were finding it increasingly difficult to develop critical scholarship or to devote themselves to the public good within an academic setting. nevertheless, the group agreed that scholar-activists must actively defy the neo-liberal agenda that university administrations impose on them, specifically the practices of researching for audit and conforming to research agendas and activities that are most likely to yield large numbers of publications. instead, our discussions concluded that scholar-activists should focus on producing research that actually makes a difference: consciously committing to public discourse, along with political and organizing work; and engaging in slow scholarship (the recognition that intellectual growth and personal freedom are crucial scholarly processes that require time) (great lakes feminist geography collective, 2015). we regarded slow scholarship as a political act in the sense that it refuses to facilitate the neo-liberal transformation of higher education, or at least to submit to the self-auditing culture that characterizes it. looking back at the activity of our group, we realize that we were fumbling in the dark, attempting to break through neoliberal assumptions, and somehow realize “the emancipatory potential of education, research and publications” (autonomous geographies collective, 2010, p. 263). galloway (2012, p. 165), building on the ideas of freire and ranciere, suggests that the aim of emancipatory education should be that of exposing power, rather than socializing people “into what is considered to be an intrinsically oppressive society.” elsewhere she argues that emancipatory education should be based on trust and equality between teachers and students (galloway, 2015). to succeed it needs to build on people’s capacity to think and act collectively, which means creating an environment of dialogue that is as free and open as possible. with these principles in mind, we worked toward creating a space in which the distinctions between support staff, various levels and categories of faculty, and students were relatively activism and the academy in ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 59 unimportant. we attempted to develop a space that could facilitate radical understandings of the workings of power; one that could lead to developing alternative ways to think and act. our efforts led us to organize a two-day conference in october 2010, which saw significant numbers of activists and scholars from ireland and the uk drawn to university of limerick to discuss papers that used a marxist perspective to critique the status quo in higher education, as well as in the national and international political and economic systems. we produced an edited publication from the proceedings, demonstrating that there are alternative ways to think about irish political economy, irish history, irish society, and possibilities for the future (o’flynn, clarke, power & hayes, 2012). the group continued its work in the area of marxism and radical education. two years later, in april 2012, we organized a second conference (again at university of limerick) under the title crisis, austerity and resistance, providing further opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to exchange views and test their ideas against the knowledge of trade union activists, community groups, and leftist political organizations. these events helped participants to build the networks necessary to inform each other’s struggles and to pool resources that would make organizing more efficient (autonomous geographies collective, 2010). the limerick mechanics institute: linking activism and the academy the aforementioned activities focused on opening up discussions on campus. while this was occurring, the limerick council of trade unions was beginning to seek a more active role in opposing austerity (e.g., they organized a rally against austerity in february, 2013), as well as in making efforts to organize workers’ political education in limerick (e.g., by facilitating a mayday/summer school that focused on irish labour history and political economy).2 after some discussions, and a decision to coordinate a seminar series for local activists, we began to question the suitability of the university as a space that could attract trade unionists and activists, given that audiences outside academia sometimes see the academic environment as distant or even hostile. if there was any emancipatory potential in the kind of education we were attempting to practice, we reasoned that it should find its right audience. this was the start of our collaboration with trade unionists at the mechanics institute, home of the lctu. in a talk we gave to the council, we made it clear that our main aim was to discover how to facilitate the development of confidence among workers in terms of their abilities to                                                                                                                 2 the limerick council of trade unions (lctu) is composed of trade union activists living in and around the limerick area, who join together to promote and implement the policies of the trade union movement in the local community and with local authorities (see http://www.limerickctu.com/who-we-are). michael o’flynn, aggelos panayiotopoulos studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 60 generate analyses and strategies, and to see if we could play some role in helping to strengthen the labour movement more generally. adhering to the idea of emancipatory education as a practice, as well as a theory (galloway, 2012), we hoped that participation in workshops at the mechanics institute would encourage workers to take control of their own education. furthermore, we found that open dialogue between academics, trade unionists, and activists was critical in order to better understand the world and to develop viable alternatives to neo-liberalism.3 in our discussions with the lctu at the mechanics institute, we put forward the view that the workers’ movement could only progress concurrently with the self-education of the working class. originally established to facilitate training and education for workers, the mechanics institute has been central to every movement of the organized working class in limerick for over a hundred years (cahill, 1991). moving our activities to the institute (and thus away from university venues), and assisting in the facilitation of educational activities, including seminars, workshops, and public talks appeared to be the next logical step toward developing a network and opening space for dialogue between scholar-activists, trade-unionists, and activists (autonomous geographies collective, 2010; mason 2013). we hoped that this network would allow participants to collectively decide the content of their education, to produce knowledge and understanding of relevant issues, to develop tactics to build their struggle, and to encourage each other to take part in campaigns and joint actions (autonomous geographies collective, 2010). the politicization (particularly the radicalization) of the workers’ movement is of course no straightforward matter. the irish economy’s collapse left in its wake an environment in which people’s time is spent simply trying to survive. full-time employment has steadily declined in ireland since the start of the millennium (loftus, 2012). in the year 2000, seven in ten workers had at least 35 hours of work a week; by the end of 2011, this number had fallen to six in ten (loftus, 2012). although workers’ lives are being impacted, they get little education about what is really happening in the local and national economic and political spheres, and instead receive much mis-education from mainstream media, as well as from the political establishment and academia (particularly from the economics profession) (chakrabortty, 2012). in an attempt to reverse this trend we began to develop participatory forms of education, with workshops geared toward the requirements of the activists and workers involved. to this end, the content of the workshops was partly determined by the participants themselves. after the first series of seminars and workshops on political economy, the participants asked that the group continue to meet and proposed a series of topics they wanted to address.                                                                                                                 3 according to friere, this kind of dialogue is the driver of emancipation (1996, p. 53; galloway, 2012). activism and the academy in ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 61 among the events that followed, a workshop on collective bargaining, a talk on the eu crisis and the euro, a discussion with peace activist margaretta d’arcy on neutrality, and a talk on palestinian political prisoners, were among those best attended. each meeting was organized to facilitate the development of counter-hegemonic narratives and unity among progressive labour and social movements. although we found the seminars, talks, and workshops very valuable in terms of creating a space for dialogue, we saw that there was little outlet for the analyses and perspectives developed. as a result, again in collaboration with the lctu, we revived the bottom dog, a historic newspaper of the organized labour movement. the bottom dog: dissemination of academic and activist work to the labour movement the bottom dog was a publication of the lctu, first issued in 1917-18, and later revived in the 1970’s and 1980’s under different editorial teams. throughout its history, ‘the dog’ worked to expose social injustice and to highlight the plight of those whose stories are generally hidden. an early editorial for the newspaper insisted that the “bottom dog would only come into his own when every worker, male and female, was thoroughly organised” (flynn, 2013). consequently, the publication always attempted to give voice to the oppressed, highlighting issues such as bad housing, low pay, unemployment, and poor working conditions. as described above, our involvement with the bottom dog derives from the workshops, seminars, and talks that we helped to organize at the mechanics institute. it had not been published since the mid-1980s, but we decided that it should be resuscitated when the attacks on the working class appeared relentless. out of respect to the quarterly’s history and spirit, the new editorial team took the 1975 editorial statement as our starting point: the bottom dog is not a platform for any political party or faction. it is rather a forum open to all workers who wish to contribute articles or ideas etc. the paper covers issues where the working class is under attack or on the advance e.g., redundancies, unemployment, wage freezes and attacks on workers’ rights, repression, sex discrimination and women’s rights, strikes, sit-ins and tradeunionisation, especially when they relate to, affect, teach lessons or show the way forward for workers in this country. (flynn, 2013) we envisaged a publication that would be a voice of and for the working class; a space where workers, activists, scholars, and all others committed to furthering the interests of the working class as a class, could develop and disseminate ideas, and prepare for the struggles ahead. the publication hosts articles and analyses on various matters, and from a range of perspectives. given that radical ideas are routinely dismissed or demonized by the dominant media, we think it is necessary to continue to create new spaces for michael o’flynn, aggelos panayiotopoulos studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 62 alternative perspectives from activists and trade unionists, as well as to disseminate research conducted by progressive academics in a language and an outlet that is more accessible to the labour movement than are academic publication venues (primarily peer-reviewed academic journals). this engagement with the mechanics institute and the bottom dog brought us closer to the trade union movement and helped us create additional networks within the academy, as well as with activist groups. our sense became stronger that something apart from academic discourse needed to be done in our workplace. as precarious lecturers, we started looking into what being a precarious worker actually meant to us and to our peers in the same position. it also led us to question more deeply what a shift toward greater reliance on precarious labour in the academy meant for the organized labour movement and for universities. organizing precarious workers in higher education: activism within academia the more involved we became with the trade union movement the more we were able to appreciate that the entire working class was being restructured for the benefit of employers, with permanent full-time jobs being increasingly replaced by precarious forms of employment. as guy standing (2011, p. 32) argues: [people] on temporary contracts can be induced to labour harder, especially if the jobs are more intense than regulars have been doing ... [temporary workers] can also be put in forms of underemployment more easily, paid less for fewer hours in down periods …[and] controlled through fear more easily. if they do not put up with demands placed on them, they can be told to leave, with minimal fuss and cost. standing (2011, p. 183) also points out that the traditional working class is in decline everywhere, suggesting that the rising ‘precariat’ – a portmanteau combining precarious with proletariat is actually a new class in the making. standing’s legitimate insights about precarity notwithstanding, it is important to note that precarious employment has been the norm throughout the history of capitalism; the three decades following second world war are a noteworthy anomaly (kalleberg, 2009). since the 1970’s, the return to precarious employment has resulted in greater desperation, which often leads workers to tolerate exploitative conditions in their attempts to earn a living (kalleberg, 2009). this disciplinary process is not confined to low-skilled jobs (lynch & ivancheva, 2015). much of the work carried out in universities, for example, is being proletarianized, performed on a temporary, part-time, or casual-hours basis by academic labourers with little or no job security (courtois & o’keefe, 2015). activism and the academy in ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 63 academics resisting the neo-liberalization of higher education are motivated by several concerns: declining job security; inadequate support for teaching; greater responsibilities (e.g., increasing student/teacher ratios); restrictions on the development and free expression of ideas; expectations of monetizable and quantifiable outputs; and, for some, attacks on their very existence as scholars (apple, 2005; karran, 2007; autonomous geographies collective, 2010; loxley, 2014). the struggle for social justice is therefore not just about promoting egalitarian values; it is also about identifying and acting on immediate material concerns. with respect to higher education, this struggle is bound up with the values of emancipatory education, scholar activism, the development of collective knowledge and collective strategies, and producing “tools you can fight with” (russell, 2015 p. 1). universities in ireland are publicly funded and are expected to operate in the public interest. however, they are increasingly dependent on private funds and increasingly compelled to accommodate the educational needs of the corporate world. this circumstance has led lynch & ivancheva (2015) to pose the question, “if academics can only study, research and teach subjects that are corporatively funded, and can only educate those who work for, or service the commercial sectors, how free are they?” there is a lack of transparency and accountability in this regard. university administrations make much of the pursuit of ‘excellence’, but the elite group of managers entrusted with operating universities in the public interest increasingly apply market principles in their governance. consequently, there is a diminution of collegiality, integrity, trust, care, and solidarity. education is increasingly treated as a commodity, and academic freedom is increasingly subordinated to regulation and control (lynch, grummell & devine, 2012). the struggle for academic freedom, however, does not mean we should romanticize the past. unfortunately, as gill (2009, p. 231) has pointed out, much of the critical work on the neo-liberal transformation of academia is merely “nostalgic for the era of elitist values”, which is problematic given that historically faculty and students have been overwhelmingly wealthy, male, and white. the neo-liberal transformation of university life is characterized by a democratic deficit, and in terms of working conditions irish universities have become leaders in the race to the bottom. cuts to funding for higher education have been introduced yearly (2005-2014), and precarious academic positions have increased commensurately (courtois & o’keefe, 2015). with fewer funds available and the number of students entering higher education continuing to rise, there has been an increasing emphasis on ensuring that departments and schools are self-funding. in this context, university management attempts to justify on-going efforts to normalize short-term and casual-hours contracts in third-level institutions, while the public interest role of higher education continues to be eroded for the sake of corporate interests (apple, 2005; ivancheva, 2015; lynch, grummell & devine, 2012). michael o’flynn, aggelos panayiotopoulos studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 64 realizing that third-level institutions are leaders in the shift toward precarious employment, and that these precarious conditions were part of our own lives, we began to consider why it was so difficult for non-permanent academic staff to recognize and organize around their common interests. in our initial attempts to organize precarious workers at university of limerick, we took part in in-depth discussions with our peers. these meetings revealed some difficulties around status identification; those working precariously did not appear to see themselves as fitting neatly into the categories of ‘professional’ or ‘worker’. many of those on short-term and casual-hours contracts did not feel that they were fully part of the faculty to which they contributed. they described how this isolation, sometimes including exclusion from departmental meetings, undermined their professional identity. in the hope of gaining the acceptance of their peers and a secure position, they continued to accept unpredictable conditions and poor pay. we realized that through our silence we were part of this process, inadvertently condoning the exploitation of ourselves and our peers. we felt compelled to form a campaigning group for precarious workers in university of limerick to demonstrate that by thinking and acting on a collective basis we, as academics, could develop a strategy for resisting precarious conditions in higher level education. we acted in the hope that we would encourage others to act. we had been inspired by an acceptance speech given by the 2012 irish secondary school teacher of the year. a young teacher named evelyn o'connor accepted the award, but used the opportunity to speak out about the attacks on the pay and conditions of teaching staff in second-level (o’connor, 2012). she pointed out that on “receiving this award for teacher of the year, i have no idea if i'll have a job in a year’s time.” in addition to noting the obvious stresses of precarious employment, she stressed that the government was doing real damage to education. according to o’connor (21012), by cutting career guidance teachers, abolishing language support for foreign nationals, and reducing special needs hours for students with learning difficulties, the government’s actions could only make teachers like her worse at their job: when we elected this government they proclaimed that ‘even in our country’s crisis, we can make progress in education and protect frontline services’. they promised to ‘recruit, train and support the highest calibre of teachers’. well i don't feel very supported and nor do the talented and experienced teachers up and down the country whose jobs are disappearing. not to mention the new entrants to the profession who thanks to pay cuts will become like second class citizens in our staff rooms. o’connor’s speech rang a lot of bells for those of us precariously employed in higher education, as did her challenge to others to speak out. she spoke of being “afraid that if we make ourselves visible we might lose our jobs”, but then went on to say that she was “tired of saying nothing and ... tired of being afraid. non-permanent teachers have to stop going quietly because our activism and the academy in ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 65 students and our schools are suffering” (o’connor, 2012). when we raised the issue of precarious employment at university of limerick, we found that many others were likewise ‘tired of being afraid’. these were faculty and staff without any collective voice (very few of the non-permanent employees in university of limerick are unionized). we considered it necessary to organize people into a group, and to work in collaboration with unite the union to highlight the impact of precarious work on individuals and on academic life more generally.4 as we worked to establish ul workplace watch we found that although people had real grievances (e.g., not being paid for all of the hours they work), they were hesitant to organize. the majority of our peers believed that if they were seen to join a union it could have negative consequences. we discovered that the non-permanent faculty and staff who did join unite were unlikely to be active or even to voice concerns about issues that directly impact them. when we raised the issue of precarious employment on university of limerick’s campus, it was mostly permanent faculty and staff who took part in the ensuing discussions. the non-permanent staff claimed that there was no “safe place” for those exploited in the university to express their views freely. when we set up a clandestine group to co-ordinate a campaign on the issue, there was still reluctance to participate. many nonpermanent staff expressed a desire to speak out, but would not do so due to fear of victimization. we proceeded in the hope that if we became more vocal ourselves, and generated enough discussion around the issue on campus, then more people might be willing to express their views openly. we understood that conditions would not improve until these workers realized that they were not alone, that the university could not function without them, and that the way forward was to organize a collective voice and act on a collective basis. a consequence of lacking collective voice is a lack of respect for one’s work. many precariously employed staff in university of limerick described the lack of recognition and general disrespect that they face from administration and faculty as “soul-destroying.” a study carried out by third level workplace watch, with which ul workplace watch remains affiliated, found that feelings of isolation were widespread among precariously employed academics throughout ireland. when referring to their working experiences, respondents to the group’s nationwide survey regularly used negative descriptors like “depressed”, “frustrated”, “worried”, “despondent”, “hopeless”, “disillusioned”, and “exploited” (courtois & o’keefe, 2015, p.58). among respondents who are paid by the hour for their academic labour, one individual felt that “departments do not see you as their colleagues”; another said that “colleagues don’t feel that they need to greet you.” another respondent stressed that “it is not just about money. it is about                                                                                                                 4 unite the union is the only union recognized in the university as having the right to collective bargaining. it represents both faculty and staff. michael o’flynn, aggelos panayiotopoulos studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 66 treating hourly-paid workers as colleagues, providing support, including them in meetings, treating them with respect” (courtois & o’keefe, 2015, p.58). our group, ul workplace watch, continues to highlight and organize around the issue of the casualization of labour. our efforts in limerick were initially geared toward highlighting deteriorating conditions, and showing that these conditions were damaging teaching, research, and morale. we argued that the prevalence of precarious employment in higher education should be a concern to permanent members of staff as precariously employed lecturers would eventually be used to undermine conditions for everyone. as soon as we began to hold regular meetings, working groups were formed to concentrate on specific issues and propose actions. we elected a representative to the union on campus (unite) so we could have a voice. the group was unanimous that its involvement with the organized labour movement was important for collectively organizing this struggle and making our voice heard (irish times, 2015). the task of uniting people around these issues is made more difficult by the government’s policy of continued reductions in public funding to higher education, which leads to intensification of competition for a job in a declining labour market (loftus, 2012; courtois and o’keefe, 2015). the shortage of funding plays a key part in legitimizing the expansion of labour casualization, and the increasing pressures on both casual and full-time staff to work harder for less (o’flynn, monaghan & power, 2014). furthermore, re-shifting almost every political discourse to ‘fixing the economy’ allows very little space for critique of the dominant austerity narrative, and helps to account for the relative absence of strong dissenting voices. a bridge for social justice the activist work we have discussed in this article has aimed to forge strong links between the academy and activism, and open up new possibilities for real progressive change both in third-level education and society at large. it has been motivated by our conviction that there is space for academia in activism and space for activism in academia, in which one informs the other, challenging power structures, removing obstacles to open dialogue, and challenging inequalities in a direct way for the benefit of those immediately concerned and for the sake of progressive social transformation. ireland needs a movement of workers and activists, capable of drawing on every available resource to think, organize, and act on a collective basis. it is ever more necessary to shift away from our compulsory individualities (cronin, 2000; gill, 2009), and toward thinking and working collectively. to facilitate such a transformation, progressive academics must defend their existence as activists, regardless of the pressures and expectations of academic life; as “someone critical of the status quo, who possesses intellectual autonomy” (wacquant, cited in tadajewski et al., 2014, p. 1758). activism and the academy in ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 67 we endorse tadajewski et al.’s (2014) call on academics to form bonds with groups like the occupy movement or the zapatistas or, in our case, the right2water campaign,5 and the organized labour movement. the different strands of our work, especially our efforts to harness the emancipatory potential in education, dovetail with the autonomous geographies collective’s (2010) strategy for scholar activism. our reading group meetings and conferences, the publication of the bottom dog, and the workshops/seminars held at the mechanics institute are all part of one process, which involves drawing scholars, social movements, and organized workers together to facilitate a more collective understanding of the particular conditions and challenges that we now face. to us it appears obvious that for the workers’ movement in ireland to take its destiny into its own hands it must take control of its education. it is necessary to develop a wider educational infrastructure with a focus on activist/worker education, linking together the various isolated educational initiatives that have emerged in recent years. as a first step this means forging links between these groups, and determining what might be done to facilitate worker/activist education on a nationwide basis.6 there are certainly more steps to be taken in the coming years. we have started working toward establishing a pool of scholar-activists willing to take part in educational activities designed for, and controlled by, local workers and activists. we hope this will be done in collaboration with other councils of trade unions, and with groups dedicated to activist/worker self-education, such as trade union left forum7 and trademark belfast8. the emerging links with precarious academic groups and with the trade union movement have yet to lead to coordinated action, or even to a workable strategy for the coming year(s). nevertheless, some of the foundations have been laid, and being part of an organized collective of precarious workers, sharing knowledge and helping each other, is helping us develop new strategies. it is now time to build a bridge for social justice.                                                                                                                 5 the right2water campaign is a campaign against the privatization of water in ireland, comprised of trade unions, political organizations, and community groups; it is the largest resistance movement since the beginning of the crisis in 2008. 6 see autonomous geographies collective (2010), for their related discussion of a global knowledge commons. 7 the trade union left forum operates aims to stimulate class-based critical debate within the trade union movement and to foster trade union and community organizing for a meaningful transformation of ireland towards socialism (see http://www.tuleftforum.com/about-us/). 8 trademark belfast offers a range of education and training courses for trade unionists and activists (see http://www.trademarkbelfast.com/training-and-education) michael o’flynn, aggelos panayiotopoulos studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 68 references apple, m. (2005). education, markets and an audit culture. critical quarterly, 47(1-2), 11-29. autonomous geographies collective (2010). beyond scholar activism: making strategic interventions inside and outside the neoliberal university. acme: international e-journal for critical geographies, 9(2), 245-275. cahill, l. (1991). forgotten revolution – limerick soviet 1919: a threat to british power in ireland. dublin: o'brien press. chakrabortty, a. (2012, april 16). mainstream economic models have been discredited. but why aren't political scientists and sociologists offering an alternative view? the guardian. retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/16/economics-hasfailed-us-alternative-voices courtois, a., & o’keefe, t. (2015). precarity in the ivory cage: neoliberalism and casualisation of work in the irish higher education sector. journal for critical education policy studies, 13(1), 43-66. cronin, a. (2000). consumerism and compulsory individuality: women, will and potential. in s. ahmed, j. kilby, c. lury & m. mcneil (eds.), thinking through feminism (pp. 273-287). london: routledge. flynn, m. (2013, october 24). the bottom dog bites back. irish left review. retrieved from http://www.irishleftreview.org/2013/10/24/bottom-dog-bites-callarticles/http://www.irishleftreview.org/2013/10/24/bottom-dog-bites-call-articles/ freire, p. (1996). pedagogy of the oppressed. london: penguin books. fuller, d., & kitchin, r. (2004). radical theory/critical practice: academic geography beyond the academy? in d. fuller & r. kitchin (eds.), radical theory/critical praxis: making a difference beyond the academy? (pp. 1-20). vernon and victoria, bc: praxis press. galloway, s. (2012). reconsidering emancipatory education: staging a conversation between paulo freire and jacques ranciere. educational theory, 64(2), 163-184. galloway, s. (2015). what's missing when empowerment is a purpose for adult literacies education? bourdieu, gee and the problem of accounting for power. studies in the education of adults, 47(1), 49-63. gill, r. (2009). breaking the silence: the hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia. in r. flood & r. gill (eds.), secrecy and silence in the research process: feminist reflections (pp. 228244). london: routledge. great lakes feminist geography collective (in press). for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. acme: international ejournal for critical geographies. hearne, r. (2015, april). the irish water war, austerity and the ‘risen people’. department of geography, maynooth university, ireland. retrieved from https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/sites/default/files/assets/document/theirishwaterwar_0 .pdf irish times. (2015, february 16). university of limerick under fire over ‘casual-hours contracts’. irish times. retrieved from http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/university-oflimerick-under-fire-over-casual-hours-contracts-1.2105000 ivancheva, m. (2015). the age of precocity and the new challenges to the academic profession. studia ubb. europaea, lx(1), 39-47. kalleberg, a. l. (2009). precarious work, insecure workers: employment relations in transition. american sociological review, 74(1), 1-22. karran, t. (2007). academic freedom in europe: a preliminary comparative analysis. higher education policy, (20), 289-313. loftus, c. (2012). decent work? the impact of the recession on low paid workers: a report for mandate trade union. mandate trade union. retrieved from www.tuleftforum.com/wpcontent/uploads/2012/10/decent-work.pdf loxley, a. (2014). measures and metrics and academic labour. in j. walsh, a. loxley & a. seery (eds.), higher education in ireland: practices, policies and possibilities (pp. 123145). london: palgrave mcmillan. activism and the academy in ireland studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 1, 54-69, 2015 69 lynch, k., grummell, b., & devine, d. (2012). new managerialism in education: commercialization, carelessness and gender. london: palgrave macmillan. lynch, k., & ivancheva, m. (2015, forthcoming). academic freedom: a critical commentary. ethics in science and environmental politics, 15(1). mason, k. (2013). academics and social movements: knowing our place, making our space. acme: international e-journal for critical geographies, 12(1), 23-43. mcalevey, j. (2012). raising expectations and raising hell: my decade fighting for the labour movement. london: verso. mccabe, c. (2011). sins of the father: tracing the decisions that shaped the irish economy. dublin: the history press. mercille, j. (2014). the role of the media in the european economic crisis: the case of ireland. london: routledge. o’connor, e. (2012, june 29). teacher of the year criticises the “injustice” of system and “teacher-bashing”. thejournal.ie. retrieved from http://www.thejournal.ie/teacherspermanent-non-permanent-evelyn-oconnor-teacher-of-the-yea-502993-jun2012/ o’flynn, m., clarke, o., power, m.j., & hayes, p. (eds.). (2012). marxist perspectives on irish society. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing. o’flynn, m., monaghan, l. f., & power, m. j. (2014). scapegoating during a time of crisis: a critique of post-celtic tiger ireland. sociology, 48, 921-937. o’toole, f. (2010). ship of fools: how stupidity and corruption sank the celtic tiger. london: faber and faber ltd. russell, b. (2015). beyond activism/academia: militant research and the radical climate and climate justice movement(s). area, 47, 222-229. standing, g. (2011). the precariat: the new dangerous class. london: bloomsbury. tadajewski, m., chelekis, j., deberry-spence, b., figueiredo, b., kravets, o., nuttavuthisit, k., penaloza, l., & moisander, j. (2014). the discourses of marketing and development: towards ‘critical transformative marketing research’. journal of marketing management, 30(17-18), 1728-1771. wall street journal (2015, january 23). syriza’s rise fueled by professors-turned-politicians. wall street journal. retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/syrizas-rise-fueled-byprofessors-turned-politicians-1422045127 zinn, h. (2002). you can't be neutral on a moving train: a personal history of our times. boston: beacon press. basok et al final correspondence address: tanya basok, department of sociology & anthropology, university of windsor, windsor, on, n9b 3p4; email: basok@uwindsor.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 ambivalent resonance: advocacy for secure status for migrant farm workers in spain, italy and canada during the covid-19 pandemic tanya basok university of windsor, canada ana lópez-sala spanish national research council, spain gennaro avallone università degli studi di salerno, italy abstract drawing on insights from scholarship on contentious action frames, this article examines the framing of demands for social justice for migrant farmworkers in spain, italy and canada during the covid-19 pandemic. we focus particularly on how activists in each country aligned their action frames with prevalent public discourses on the essential contribution migrants make to agricultural production, the need to guarantee “health for all,” and “increased vulnerability” of migrants’ lives during the global health crisis. using these diagnostic frames, activists in the three countries called for secure legal status for all migrants. drawing on the literature on contentious action frames, we then analyze if action frames advanced by activists during the covid-19 pandemic “resonated” with the understanding of these issues by policymakers. we challenge an approach to understanding resonance in binary terms as either present or absent. instead, we introduce the notion of “ambivalent resonance” to draw attention to the fact that some frames are accepted only partially or only by some policymakers but not the others, as was the case in the three countries under study. we then situate this ambivalent resonance in the context of immigration priorities and recent trends in immigration policy development in these three countries and suggest that activists can build on ambivalences to advance migrant rights to status. keywords migrant farm workers; secure status; advocacy; frames; ambivalent resonance; covid-19; spain; italy; canada ambivalent resonance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 69 in the last half century, global food production has grown reliant on the cheap and readily available labour of migrants and asylum seekers, some of whom are recruited on an employer-tied temporary contract, while others may be employed without legal authorization to reside and work in these countries (palumbo et al., 2022). in spain, italy, and canada, the three countries discussed in this article, reliance on migrant labour in agriculture has become a structural element, with migrant workers constituting between 25 and 35% of the total labour force (casella, 2021; spanish national institute of statistics, 2022; statistics canada, 2022). in most countries, migrant farmworkers who are denied permanent residency are excluded from rights and protections in the countries that receive them (e.g., palumbo et al., 2022). the covid-19 pandemic exacerbated many preexisting problems these migrants faced (e.g., lópez-sala, 2022; lópez-sala & molinero, 2022; molinero & avallone 2021; vosko et al., 2022), while simultaneously revealing how indispensable these workers were for the economic survival of the agricultural sector. the health crisis made visible what had been previously hidden from the public eye: the deplorable working and living conditions among migrant farm workers, which were further exacerbated by the new challenges. highlighting the deteriorating working environments for migrant farmworkers and the growing number of covid-related deaths and illnesses among them, activists pressed for change, underscoring the structural embeddedness of these conditions, particularly, migrants’ insecure legal status either as temporary guest workers (whose stay in the country is contingent on their ability to comply with employers’ demands, no matter how excessive or unfair) or as “deportable” migrants living in irregular migratory conditions. at the same time, the visibility that migrant farmworkers acquired during the covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for these migrant rights activists to call for change by aligning their understanding of these issues with the representations that seemed to have gained acceptance in the general public, and to a certain degree, among the policymakers. in this article, we offer illustrations from three countries, namely spain, italy, and canada, where each of the co-authors has conducted research on migrant farmworkers, agriculture, and migrant and pro-migrant activisms (e.g., lópezsala, 2022; lópez-sala & molinero, 2022; molinero & avallone 2021; vosko et al., 2022). each country employs workers with precarious legal statuses (e.g., undocumented migrants, asylum seekers awaiting decisions on their claims, or guest workers on a temporary visa), and their working and living conditions are seen by many grassroots activists as socially unjust. during the covid-19 pandemic, activists used social media to voice their concerns and organize action. drawing on insights from research on contentious action frames (both “diagnostic” and “prognostic”; see snow et al., 2019, discussed below), we examine how during the global health crisis, activists articulated specific demands for social justice for migrant farmworkers (particularly, demands for secure legal status) by aligning their frames with the main concerns and issues tanya basok, ana lópez-sala & gennaro avallone studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 70 that emerged at that time in public discussions. in particular, activists articulated three action frames that were particularly relevant at that time, namely, “essentiality,” “health for all” and “increased vulnerability.” using these three themes in their diagnostic frames, activists in these countries framed some of their demands for change (or their prognostic frames) as status for all migrants. however, as we illustrate below, advocacy for status for all migrants who are illegalized or without secure status has not resonated fully with the ways policymakers understood these issues, although certain debates and policy initiatives seemed to indicate some congruence between advocates’ demands and policymakers’ views. critical of binary depictions of persuasive resonance characteristic of some analyses of contentious action frames, we introduce the notion of ambivalent resonance to highlight both agreements and disagreements in how the two sides view certain issues. we then explain why this resonance is ambivalent at best by situating state responses in the context of specific trends in immigration policies in these countries, namely the strong preference for “orderly” and “regular” migration, especially when geared towards certain economic sectors, as well as temporary, rather than permanent, admissions for workers in “lower-skilled” occupations, such as farm work, while simultaneously recognizing the essential contributions that migrants make to these economic sectors and the advantages of having a stable labour force in them. the analysis presented in this article relies on extensive research that draws on reports, public statements, websites, the press and secondary literature. in the case of spain a thematic analysis of press articles published in the newspapers el país, el diario, público and el salto was conducted. these newspapers provide consistent coverage on migration issues and especially on seasonal migrants working in agriculture. the analysis covered all the news published between april and september 2020 and march and july 2021, the periods of greatest intensity in the seasonal harvests of the agricultural sector and during which the highest information intensity occurs. in the case of canada, analysis was based on news articles related to migrant farmworkers published by the canadian broadcast corporation (cbc) online. additionally, a search was conducted on the newspaper database on proquest.com using such keywords as “migrant farm workers” and the names of three main advocacy organizations, namely, the mwac (migrant workers alliance for change), j4mw (justicia for migrant workers), and ufcw (united food and commercial workers union). the database search covered the period between march 2020 until may 2022. furthermore, tweets by mwac, j4mw and #statusforall on twitter.com were reviewed to identify main advocacy campaigns. in the case of italy, three sources were analyzed: online archives of the daily newspapers la repubblica, il fatto quotidiano and il manifesto focusing on articles published between march and september 2020, that is, the period of intense debate on status regularization; official online sources listing national laws and european directives on migration issued during 2020; and ambivalent resonance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 71 the melting pot europa website (www.meltingpot.org) that posts announcements by migrant and pro-migrant advocacy organizations. triangulating insights from media analyses with in-depth interviews with the activists could have made the analysis richer, although it would have been extremely difficult during the covid-21 restrictions on face-to-face research. for instance, we could have asked the activists to provide insights on the reasons why particular frames were adopted. similarly, instead of relying on the media coverage of political debates and new regulations, we could have sought views and reflections by policymakers on debates, agreements, and disagreements that occurred during the debates on these issues. however, recognizing that migrant activists, grassroots activists, and policymakers were facing extraordinary demands and challenges during the first year of the pandemic, we chose not to impose an additional burden on these actors by requesting virtual interviews. the article starts with the discussion of migrant farmworkers’ conditions in spain, italy, and canada. it highlights the increasing dependence on migrant workers employed in agriculture and the measures taken by the three states during the health crisis to ensure the provision of workers to farms. following a brief outline of the concepts of framing and persuasive resonance, the article turns attention to activism and, particularly, the way advocacy for secure legal status for migrant farmworkers (status for all) was framed by activists in the pandemic context by drawing on three prevalent discourses, namely the essentiality of the migrant labour, the need to secure health for all, and the increasing vulnerability of migrant farmworkers. we then outline government responses to these claims, demonstrating that the resonance between activists’ framing of the issues and the government understandings of them was ambivalent. finally, we situate this ambivalent resonance in the context of immigration policy priorities in these three countries. migrant hands in agriculture: pre-pandemic activism for migrants’ access to social justice in each of the three countries under study, agricultural production has grown dependent on migrant labour. harsh working conditions, insecurity, seasonality and low wages, as well as the low status of agricultural work has produced the progressive exit of native-born populations from the sector, which have been to a large extent replaced by migrant workers, whether those brought to the country on temporary contracts or working in agriculture without authorization (avallone, 2017; basok, 2002; corrado et al., 2017; lópez-sala, 2016; satzewich, 1991). in spain, seasonal production relies heavily on migrant labour composed of some migrants from the european union (mainly from romania) who require no legal authorization to work in spain, temporary migrants mainly from morocco and recruited through bilateral agreements between spain and the tanya basok, ana lópez-sala & gennaro avallone studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 72 sending countries who are tied to specific employers and are required to return to their home countries at the end of the season, as well as migrant farmworkers without legal status, mainly from sub-saharan african countries and morocco (basok & lópez-sala, 2016; guell & garcés, 2020; hellio, 2014; lópez-sala, 2016; moreno-nieto, 2012). with the exception of eu migrants, all other farmworkers find themselves in insecure status, with their presence in the country being contingent on employers or immigration authorities. in italy, migrants have been employed in agriculture since the 1980s (colucci, 2022); today, 10.5% of the agricultural labour force are migrants from eu countries and 23.5% are from non-eu countries (casella, 2021). migrants from eu countries (particularly romania, poland and bulgaria), as well as some non-eu migrants employed on a work visa (decreto flussi) from such countries as morocco, india and albania, have been working in italian agriculture for many years, often on the same farms. in addition, contingent workers including sub-saharan asylum seekers and other immigrants who lack residency permits are widely recruited to work in agriculture, and they constitute the most unprotected component of the migrant agricultural workforce exposed to the worst working and housing conditions and informal labour brokering (caruso & lo cascio, 2020; dines & rigo, 2015; peano, 2021). in canada, the vast majority of migrant farmworkers are recruited through the temporary foreign workers program (tfwp). tied to specific employers by temporary work authorization visas, these migrant workers are precluded from circulating freely in the labour force and without this mobility they are deportable (basok et al., 2014; vosko et al., 2022). in each of these three countries, academic researchers have provided ample evidence that documents difficult conditions, characterized by low wages, workplace harassment, occupational health risks, pressures to increase productivity, widespread irregularities, deplorable living conditions and social marginalization among these workers (basok et al., 2014; güell & garcés, 2020; hennebry et al., 2015; lópez-sala & molinero, 2022; palumbo et al., 2022; pedreño et al., 2022; perry, 2018; pugliese, 1993), and grassroots activists have called for change, including status regularization. in spain many civil society organizations have been calling since the 1990s for an improvement in the living conditions of seasonal migrant workers and have called repeatedly for status regularization (ambrosini, 2015; gabriel & macdonald, 2011; lópez-sala & molinero, 2022). as we will demonstrate below, during the pandemic the calls for secure legal status were often framed in relation to three themes that emerged during the pandemic, namely the essential nature of the work that migrant farm workers provided (or what we call the essentiality frame), the link between the health of these workers and the health of the entire community (or what we call the health for all frame) and the increasing vulnerability of these workers (or the vulnerability frame). prior to discussing these frames, we will review main contributions of the framing perspective to understanding contentious action. ambivalent resonance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 73 mobilizing for change: the framing perspective contentious action can be analyzed from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including organizational and financial resources, political opportunities, the role of leaders, or diffusion of ideas, to name a few (see e.g., della porta & diani, 2014). emphasizing interpretive meaning constructions, some analysts hone on the manner in which demands for change are framed by activists (benford & snow, 2000; snow & benford, 1988; snow, et al., 2019). to be effective, a call for change must be rooted in the analysis and interpretation of social conditions deemed to be unjust. diagnostic framing therefore transforms material conditions into grievances. prognostic framing, on the other hand, advances a solution to the social injustice by identifying specific changes that need to be made to improve the situation of the disadvantaged people (snow et al., 2019). the purpose of collective action frames is to motivate action, solicit support from bystanders, neutralize opponents (snow et al., 2019), and ultimately, we would argue, convince those responsible for reproducing injustice at the structural level, such as policymakers, to enact change, as promigrant activists attempted to do in spain, italy, and canada. analysts of contentious action underscore the dynamic nature of frame construction. often collective action frames draw on the principles and values embedded in such master frames as human rights, civil rights or environmental justice (snow et al., 2019), and at times, activists consider it necessary to modify their frames and align them with specific interests, values, and interpretations of social events by potential adherents and resource providers, as happened during the covid-19 pandemic. collective action frames are regarded as effective if they resonate with the framing of the issues in question by the intended audience (snow et al., 2019) whether it be ordinary citizens or policymakers. in analyzing migrant rights advocacy campaigns, in particular the relevance of resonance between the way activists frame issues and the interpretations of these issues by the broader society, the media and the political actors has been underscored. frames employed in advocacy for migrant rights, including the human (or civil) rights, economic contribution, and family unity frames have been highlighted in the literature, and the degree to which they resonate with the views and opinions of the general public or policymakers has been assessed (e.g., basok & piper, 2013; bloemeraad & voss, 2020; cook, 2010; fujiwara, 2005; voss et al., 2020). drawing on this literature, in this article we examine the framing of the issues by activists who organized to improve working and living conditions of migrant farmworkers in spain, italy, and canada during the covid-19 pandemic. we show how at that time, activists aligned their diagnostic collective action frames with specific issues, concerns, and interpretations with the themes that were prevalent in public discussions. three themes in particular tended to surface frequently in both the media and discourses put forward by activists demanding change, namely, the essential contribution migrants make tanya basok, ana lópez-sala & gennaro avallone studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 74 to agricultural production, the need to protect migrant workers from the spread of the covid-19 virus as a way of protecting the health of all citizens, and the deterioration of the migrant workers’ living and working conditions. employing these three themes in their diagnostic frames, many activists then advocated for secure legal status for all migrants (or what we call the status for all prognostic frames), as discussed in the section that follows. we then demonstrate in the section that follows that their prognostic frames produced an ambivalent resonance with the understanding of the issues by the policymakers. we thus question the binary portrayals of resonance, prevalent in the literature mentioned above as either present or absent, and argue that it can be both, as the concept of ambivalent resonance we employ in this article captures. framing demands for secure status: essentiality, health for all, increased vulnerability to contain the spread of the covid-19 virus, at the onset of the global pandemic most countries, including spain, italy, and canada, closed their borders to travelers. however, agricultural producers soon warned that these measures would lead to labour shortages in agriculture. to guarantee the supply of workers for this economic sector, exceptional measures were deemed necessary. in spain, following the march 30, 2020, declaration by the european commission on waving restrictions for seasonal agricultural workers (molinero, 2021), the government deemed these workers “essential” and took specific action to recruit farmworkers. in april 2020, the spanish government issued a decree to encourage migrant workers whose residence permit expired between march 13 and june 30, 2020, unemployed people that could combine unemployment benefits with a job contract in the agriculture, and asylum seekers to take jobs in agriculture (güell & garcés, 2020). other special measures included the renewal of work permits granted before the pandemic to some seasonal workers, such as those from morocco, and temporary permits for unaccompanied migrant minors and young workers between the age of 18 and 21 willing to do agricultural work. finally, mobility restrictions on romanian seasonal workers were also removed (güell & garcés, 2020. the italian government also took action to guarantee the supply of migrant farm workers, including the so called cura italia (save italy) decree, approved on march 17, 2020, that extended to december 31, 2020, all residence permits for seasonal work that had expired or were due to expire between february 23 and may 31, 2020. in addition, article 103 of the law-decree 34/2020 (the socalled relaunch decree, issued on may 19, 2020) provided a six-month renewal of the residence permits that expired on october 31, 2019, or later. in fact, according to data reported by idos (2021), in comparison with 2019, total working days in agriculture in 2020 decreased by 0.6% (p. 282). the working days of italian agricultural workers decreased by 1.6%, while the working days ambivalent resonance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 75 of foreign-born agricultural workers increased by 1.8%. recognizing the essential contribution of migrant labour to some “essential sectors,” the relaunch decree also authorized the regularization of undocumented workers, as discussed below. even though canada closed its borders on march 16, 2020, just four days later, migrant farmworkers were exempted from the travel ban under pressure from the canadian growers who claimed that without migrant farmworkers the food industry would not survive (basok & george, 2020). by exempting migrant farmworkers from travel restrictions in march, 2020, the canadian government (similarly to the governments of spain and italy) affirmed that these workers were of vital importance to the wider society (harris, 2020). activists in these three countries seized the opportunity that the global health pandemic presented to argue that being essential for the economy was one important reason why these workers deserved to receive secure legal status. the essentiality frame appeared in many statements made by the activists in these countries. the awareness of migrants without legal status as essential subjects crystallized into a political struggle around access to a full legal status through the #regularizaciónya movement in spain. this social movement viewed the health crisis as a historic opportunity to present demands for status on the basis of the migrants’ indispensability. during the spring of 2020, the press reported multiple statements from agricultural migrant workers demanding regularization not foreseen in the government's measures. as an agricultural worker employed in the province of huelva stated, “they consider us of little use and if we don't pick fruit, there is no food for anyone. we are indispensable” (sánchez, 2020a). the spokesman for irregular agricultural workers in huelva seydou diop linked their indispensability to the demand for status regularization: during this pandemic, the agricultural sector has been essential for everyone in this country who wants to access food. spain has no right to deny us regularization. i do not understand why the current progressive government does not want to accept the fairness of this campaign. i think it is a disgrace and has no legal justification. (diop, 2020) by emphasizing the essentiality of the workers in framing calls for status regularization, spanish activists are thus realigning their earlier frames based on human rights and on their economic contributions (santi, 2018) to the themes that became prevalent during the pandemic. in canada, activists similarly lobbied the canadian authorities to grant permanent residency status to non-status migrants by framing their advocacy in relation to the workers’ indispensability. in her interview with the press, evelyn encalada grez, a founder of justice for migrant workers (j4mw), underscores the vital contribution of migrant farmworkers to the canadian society when she questions why the government has not granted these workers status: tanya basok, ana lópez-sala & gennaro avallone studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 76 what we see now [is that] migrant workers are part of the dialogue around essential workers… i don’t know what it’s going to take. if it’s not a pandemic, what else is it going to take for the canadian government to recognize migrant farm workers and their families who have been part of our communities? they’re the ones that put their lives at risk constantly to feed us. (baylon, 2021). the second frame, health for all, was an outcome of pervasive debates on the adequacy of health measures and protections. arguing that the health of all depended on the health of migrant workers, activists suggested that status regularization was a way to improve the latter’s access to health. in spain, social organizations such as caritas, one of the organizations that works the most in supporting migrant seasonal workers, advocated for the regularization of migrants and emphasized that seasonal workers were victims, not the cause of the spread of the virus (caritas, 2020). as fernando garcía-benavides, professor of public health at the pompeu fabra university and former president of the spanish society of epidemiology, put it, “the pandemic has highlighted the problems of irregular immigration, which cannot continue as irregular.” he therefore concluded by saying, “giving them an identity and papers is urgent and we are behind schedule” (ramón, 2020). as blanca garcés, an expert in migration, also indicated to the newspaper público, “public health policies cannot be implemented to control a pandemic when thousands of people excluded from the system are sleeping on the streets” (vargas, 2020b). similar discourses were prevalent in italy. for instance, intersos, an italian ngo active in health care in rural ghettos in apulia, and the association for juridical studies on immigration sent a letter to the regional administrations calling for inclusive health measures to be put in place to prevent the spread of covid-19 in this region (asgi, 2020). italian migrant rights advocates linked the need to include migrants in protection measures to their legal status. on march 20, 2020, a network of ngos, joined by hundreds of grassroots activists, researchers, academics and others, appealed for amnesty for migrants without legal status framing this demand in relation to health for all (lasciatecientrare, 2020). as activists pointed out: the coronavirus makes government intervention all the more necessary and urgent, because now in addition to other good reason to offer an amnesty, there is the need to protect collective health, including that of the hundreds of thousands of migrants without residence permits, who have no access to public health. (lasciatecientrare, 2020) as was articulated in the appeal, it was necessary “to 'engage' these hundreds of thousands of people as well: to contain their risk of contracting the virus, so that they can access public health services without fear when they experience symptoms, so that they do not become vectors for transmitting the virus despite themselves” (lasciatecientrare, 2020). ambivalent resonance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 77 in naples, using the slogan “no more amnesty swindle” (il mattino, 2020), activists within the immigrant and refugee rights movement clearly articulated the connection between status and the need to protect the health of all citizens and migrants when they argued: faced with a pandemic, the government has failed to protect the collective health of italians and foreigners; it has focused mainly on providing labour for certain economic sectors, particularly the large-scale food distribution industry, while forcing some people to become clandestine and invisible; it does not think about the collective health of citizens. we think this is very serious. the health of italian and foreign people should come before profits. (pupia campania, 2020) in canada, similar arguments were voiced by activists calling for immigration reforms. for instance, in their may 26, 2020, presentation to senate standing committee on social affairs, science and technology, mwac characterized a status regularization program as the only effective response to the covid-19 crisis (mwac, 2020). the third theme that was adopted in migrant activists’ diagnostic frames was the increasing vulnerability of migrant workers during the pandemic. ignored for many decades through a policy of indifference (lópez-sala & molinero, 2022), the deplorable conditions under which migrant farmworkers toil the land and live came into the spotlight in the three countries during the pandemic, triggering broad social and political debate. despite regulations put in place to protect labour from the spread of the virus in workplaces (e.g., government of ontario, n.d.; ministerio de sanidad, 2020), the pandemic posed severe risks to the lives of the migrant workers. in spain and italy, for example, many farmworkers were forced to live in informal settlements in substandard accommodations or abandoned facilities where they were particularly vulnerable to the spread of the virus (güell & garcés, 2020; lópez-sala & molinero, 2022; tagliacozzo et al., 2021). even though the spanish ministry of health and the national institute for workplace accident insurance in italy introduced health protocols and guidelines that applied to all workers, including farmworkers (casorri et al., 2021; ministerio de sanidad, 2020), these measures proved to be insufficient, and outbreaks among migrant workers became rampant (e.g., corrado & palumbo, 2022). in spain, many covid-19 outbreaks among migrant farmworkers were attributed to the difficulties of maintaining hygienic conditions in the settlements and on farms in such provinces as lleida, huesca, huelva or albacete (calzado et al., 2020; güell, 2020; pedreño et al., 2022; vargas, 2020a). social tensions between migrant and local residents that resulted from these outbreaks were denounced by grassroots activists who underscored the link between the outbreaks and chronic conditions of legal and social precariousness, compounded by the indifference to migrants’ misery by the administration and employers (garcésmascareñas & güell, 2021; molinero, 2021). although there have been no cases of covid-related deaths among migrants working in agriculture in spain, the deterioration of their working conditions, attributable for the tanya basok, ana lópez-sala & gennaro avallone studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 78 pandemic, did gain prominence in the press, especially after the death of an irregular nicaraguan worker in murcia (garcés-mascareñas & güell, 2021). in july 2020, the ombudsman called on all administrations, agricultural employers and agricultural organizations to seek a coordinated and urgent solution to put an end to “the situation of degradation in which seasonal agricultural workers live in various areas of spain” (defensor del pueblo, 2020). in italy, journalists, activists, and grassroots organizations also highlighted the appalling health conditions in the so-called rural ghettoes especially in calabria and apulia during the pandemic (e.g., camilli, 2020). quoting francesco piobbichi of mediterranean hope, a project for migrants and refugees implemented by the federation of evangelical churches, a redattore sociale article highlights “a total absence of a public response to an issue that risks becoming an emergency within an emergency from the point of view of health, namely, living in tent cities and ghettos means living in precarious and highly vulnerable conditions” (camilli, 2020). in its report, the research centre for agricultural policies and bioeconomy of the council for agricultural research and economics, a department within the ministry of agriculture, food and forestry, laments that the government failed to consider the realities of the migrant workers’ living conditions in their covid-19 health emergency measures, pointing out the lack of “any specific preventive action on the part of institutional bodies in these highly risky contexts” (macrí, 2020, p. 114). similarly in canada, the coverage of deplorable living conditions of migrant farmworkers was widespread (e.g., baum & grant, 2020; nolan 2021). despite certain measures adopted on farms, such as masking, disinfecting, and distancing, outbreaks soon followed. in ontario, the province that receives the largest number of migrant farmworkers, 12% of the migrant labour force tested positive for the covid-19 virus, and three migrant farmworkers died in 2020. in 2021 and 2022, despite testing, vaccinations, and other precautionary measures, both infections and deaths continued (caxaj, 2022). the spread of the covid-19 virus among migrant farmworkers was attributed mainly to overcrowded housing conditions in employer-provided compound housing, as well as poor enforcement of health regulations (mojtehedzadeh, 2020; tasker, 2021). critical of these conditions, activists used the “increasing vulnerability” frame to call for status regularization. in different parts of spain, migrant agricultural workers protested the terrible living conditions they had suffered for years and the dangers to their lives and health during the pandemic, arguing that a legalization process would allow them to improve their living conditions and continue to perform their essential work with dignity. for example, in the province of albacete, protesting the confinement of 400–500 workers in perilous conditions in an abandoned factory in response to a covid-19 outbreak (with at least 23 migrants testing positive), african workers called for status regularization (espinosa, 2020a, 2020b). similarly, in the town of lepe ambivalent resonance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 79 (huelva) following the fire that destroyed accommodations in a shantytown that housed hundreds of migrant workers in summer 2020, protesters voiced demands for status regularization (pedreño et al., 2022; sainz, 2020a). in italy, a network of ngos and trade unions called for “an amnesty against the coronavirus” (la repubblica, 2020) citing exploitation and the illegal intermediation of farmworkers as the main reasons why an amnesty for irregularized migrants was urgently needed: the institutions can finally give substance to the will to leave no one behind in this emergency. the amnesty for all irregular foreigners is indispensable to allow them access to care and work, at a time when ghettos are a potential health bomb and agriculture is facing labour shortages. but this must not be an opportunity to supply the primary sector with cheap labour at a time of economic shock: alongside regularization measures, we call for a stronger commitment to combat undeclared work and caporalato [labour brokerage mafia]. (la repubblica, 2020) in canada, at rallies for status for migrants and other public events, promigrant activists frequently highlighted the apparent contradiction between being “essential” yet “expendable” (carter, 2021). syed hussan and karen cocq from migrant workers alliance for change, and chris ramsroop from justicia for migrant workers appeared frequently on radio and television highlighting deplorable conditions of the workers during the pandemic, calling for stronger protections from the virus in workers’ compound dwelling and at work, income replacement supports for workers injured at work and those unable to return to their homes due to the pandemic, among other issues. in most cases, having exposed specific problems, these activists called for permanent residency status for migrant farmworkers (e.g., tymczyszyn, 2020). summarizing their position in their may 26, 2020, written submission to senate standing committee on social affairs, science and technology, mwac stated: migrants are doing essential work now, and always have been. but they are unable to access decent work, equal rights or family unification because they do not have full immigration status. this is why we are calling for a regularization program to immediately extend full immigration status to all non-permanent residents in the country without exclusions. (mwac, 2020) by aligning their diagnostic frames with three burning issues relevant to migrant farmworkers during the pandemic, activists then called for status regularization as the only viable solution to these problems. in the next section, we will explore how status regularization was viewed by policymakers in spain, italy, and canada, and the initiatives that were introduced to grant status to some migrants, showing that at best the prognostic frames advanced by the activists resonated only partially with the understanding of these issues by the state, producing no more than what we call an ambivalent resonance. tanya basok, ana lópez-sala & gennaro avallone studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 80 state discourses and measures: dissonances, resonances and in-between in each of the three countries, spain, italy, and canada, granting secure status to migrants was discussed at the political levels, but the resonance between migrant activists’ demands and the positions adopted by government officials was ambivalent, that is, both present and absent. in spain, this issue provoked an internal debate producing what we call horizontal ambivalence. in italy and spain, initiatives to regularize status were launched, yet by far, these measures were short of what activists proposed. we call it vertical ambivalence. in spain, broad sectors of civil society, the majority of trade unions, as well as several political parties of the parliament, supported the demands for status regularization of seasonal workers. in multiple statements to the press, pablo echenique, spokesman for unidas podemos in congress, clearly defended a regularization for migrants in an irregular situation and sought different parliament supports to be able to carry it forward (díez & casqueiro, 2020). many of the most important social organizations working in the field of migration not only advocated for status regularization, but also made an explicit demand to the government during their participation in the so-called commission for economic and social reconstruction of the congress, a commission created in parliament in 2020 to generate policy proposals in response to the health crisis (europapress, 2020a). this demand was also supported by several mayors, such as miquel pueyo, mayor of the city of lleida, a city located near the agricultural enclaves of the segriá region that receives thousands of foreign seasonal workers every summer (congostrina, 2020). in fact, when the #regularizaciónya movement drafted and submitted a non-legislative proposal for regularization in the spanish parliament in june 2020, several political parties of the parliament, including unidas podemos, a member of the coalition government, spoke in favour these changes. yet, despite the recognition of the essential nature of migrant’s farm work and support by some parties, the government ruled out “papers for all” and the implementation of a status regularization campaign as a solution (sainz, 2020b). as can be seen, the issue of irregular immigration produced wide tensions within the government with some politicians supporting this measure and others expressing strong opposition. despite the support by others in government, the ruling socialist party refused to carry out a status regularization campaign. the minister of social security and immigration, the government spokeswoman, as well as the secretary of state for immigration, reiterated repeatedly their opposition to this proposal (europapress, 2020b). in italy, as mentioned earlier, the government introduced a regularization program through the relaunch decree in 2020 (perrotta, 2022). this regularization was defended by the minister of agriculture, teresa bellanova, as a measure to make “the invisible less invisible.” as she explained, “those who have been exploited in the countryside… will not be invisible, they will have access to a residence permit for work, and we will help them to regain their identity and dignity” (adnkronos, 2020). however, this program was ambivalent resonance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 81 highly selective. the interior minister, lamorgese, a proponent of this policy, explained his rationale for this measure at a hearing before the chamber's constitutional affairs commission as follows: “we are not talking about regularizing all irregular migrants present in the country, but those who are needed and can meet requirements” (il fatto quotidiano, 2020). in other words, the government responded mainly to the fears raised by agricultural entrepreneurs about the expected labour shortages, and not to the calls for status for all framed by the advocates in relation to health for all, migrants’ essentiality, or increasing vulnerability (ippolito et al., 2021). in fact, only a few agricultural workers without status were able to obtain a residence permit under this program. of the 220,000 migrants who applied for amnesty, only 15% were employed in agriculture (the remaining 85% were employed in personal care). regrettably, the vast majority of migrant farmworkers without status (estimated to be 150,000 workers) were not able to improve their legal conditions (human rights watch, 2020). in the case of canada, many of the criticisms launched by academics and activists against the canadian temporary workers’ program are recognized by the general public or the federal government, and certain initiatives (alas, insufficient or inadequate) have been put in place to protect migrant workers (vosko et al., 2022). however, whereas many activists call for status for all, the canadian government, similarly to the government of italy, chose an approach that grants status to some migrants who meet certain criteria that, in the eyes of the canadian state, would make them more deserving of canadian citizenship. in 2019, a three-year agri-food pilot project offered a pathway to residency for some migrant workers employed in this industry. however, the ceiling was set low: a maximum of 2,750 principal applicants employed in the canadian agri-food industry and their family members were to be granted status. furthermore, successful candidates were to be non-seasonal workers (that is, those employed in 12-month operations or food processing) who could meet relatively high education and language proficiency requirements (immigration refugees and citizenship canada, 2019). on april 14, 2021, canada announced a new pathway to permanent residency for over 50,000 essential workers (20,000 in healthcare and 30,000 in other selected essential occupations, such as construction, transportation, and agriculture) and 40,000 for international students who graduated from canadian institutions who were actively contributing to canada’s economy. all candidates had to meet requirements for proficiency in one of canada’s official languages and general admissibility requirements, in addition to holding an authorization to work in canada and working at the time of the application (government of canada, 2021). the spots for international students were filled within days of the announcement, while very few applications were submitted by health care workers and other essential workers (nolan, 2021). in fact, according to a survey of 3,000 migrants conducted by the migrant rights network, almost one-half said they would not be able to meet the requirements, tanya basok, ana lópez-sala & gennaro avallone studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 82 including the high costs of application and language proficiency testing, as well as proficiency in official languages and a certain length of work in essential jobs in canada (baylon, 2021). while migrant advocates continued to rally throughout 2021 and 2022 in support of status for all upon arrival as the only socially just solution to address migrants’ vulnerabilities, the canadian government took a step in the opposite direction by announcing a program on april 4, 2022, that makes it easier for employers to hire migrant workers under the tfwp and allows longer contracts for more workers. it is noteworthy that the announcement of the new program includes promises related to employment and social development canada’s (esdc) intentions to strengthen the tfwp compliance regime to protect the workers through an improved inspection regime, a tip line to allow workers to report situations of abuse, and some pathways to permanent residency (esdc, 2022). however, given fear on the part of abused workers to report abuses given their insecure status in canada, and the limitations of previous initiatives to grant permanent residency to temporary workers, these promises may not be sufficient. discussion and conclusions as the discussion presented in this article illustrates, migrant activists in spain, italy, and canada articulated their demands for secure status for migrants (or what we called the status for all prognostic frame) in relation to one or two of three main diagnostic frames, namely essentiality, health for all, and increasing vulnerability. in including these themes in their diagnostic of the problems, activists aligned their frames with the topics that received broad coverage in the media and public debates. yet, their prognostic frame that called for status for all remained somewhat misaligned with the prevalent visions among government administrators and policymakers, although in each of these countries certain debates took place, and measures were taken to address the need to grant permanent residency to migrants without status. while italy and canada introduced some small-scale or temporary status regularization programs, their main objectives were to meet urgent demands for labour in agriculture (and other sectors), instead of improving the rights of migrants. as such, these initiatives were restricted only to some migrants and not others, short-lived, and poorly executed. they were far from the visions put forward by the activists. thus, these measures revealed that a utilitarian approach to migration (that is, ensuring that the labour demand for low-wage jobs was met) by far prevailed over concerns for these migrants’ rights to live in dignity. the three cases analyzed highlight the importance of visualizing resonance (both its presence and absence) in relative, rather than absolute terms or as binary opposites. in the case of spain, the resonance was ambivalent because it revealed tensions, conflicts, and disagreements among policymakers representing different political parties as well as within the coalition ambivalent resonance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 83 government itself. in the case of italy and canada, the resonance was ambivalent because certain status regularization initiatives corresponded to the demands of the activists; however, they did so only partially. the first type of ambivalent resonance may be characterized as horizontal and the second as vertical. seeing the first type of resonance as only partial, we concur with other studies that postulated that a frame that resonates with only some policymakers but not others may not be sufficient to bring about policy changes (basok & piper, 2013, p. 259) and that analyses of policy outcomes must “be sensitive to the cleavages and divisions in power structures and recognize those internal divisions" (basok & piper, 2013, p. 268). with respect to the second type of ambivalent resonance, we suggest that when resonance between activists’ and policymakers’ visions is partial or ambivalent, some political discourses and administrative changes may appear to correspond to activists’ demands; yet this semblance may be illusionary, and in fact, many policies based on ambivalent resonance with the advocate’s demands generally fail to address fundamental causes of social injustice, as we saw in the case of the three countries under study. our analysis reveals that even in exceptional times characterized by serious social and health crises, states have been largely reticent, and in some cases openly opposed to expanding the rights of migrants with precarious statuses, thus consolidating the approaches toward managing migration that are blind to social justice concerns articulated by activists. in the case of migrant farmworkers, the health crisis revealed a social justice paradox: without secure status these workers are simultaneously recognized as essential yet condemned to the worst social and economic conditions that put their lives in danger (pedreño, 2020; torres & pérez, 2022). these responses are in line with the recent trends in immigrant policy developments in these countries. in both spain and italy, the anti-regularization rhetoric has been prevalent in public debates on migrants without status in the last few decades. this rhetoric reflects the centrality that the fight against irregular immigration has acquired on the political agenda in both countries. their location at europe’s external border means that both are the countries of first arrival for migrants travelling by sea. the discourse around a regular, safe and orderly migration is an expression of an implicit opposition to irregular migration. this discourse has shaped migration policies in these countries and is responsible for the reluctance by these states to address the needs of migrants without status (lópez sala & godenau, 2017; molinero & lópez-sala, 2022). both countries draw a line between deserving migrants (i.e., those who arrive in the country through legal channels) and undeserving migrants (those using irregular channels). both adopt policies that (re)produce illegality by denying access to membership and benefits to those who have arrived through irregular channels, thus reinforcing on a daily basis the distinction between legal and illegal migrants (palidda, 2009; quassoli, 2013). the official intolerance toward irregular arrivals was amplified during the pandemic, when states adopted measure to further secure their borders from any new arrivals. if tanya basok, ana lópez-sala & gennaro avallone studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 84 anything, spain reconfirmed its preference for regular recruitment channels for the sectors experiencing labour shortages by strengthening extant channels (e.g., the employment of romanian and moroccan migrants; see sánchez, 2020b) and expanding its labour mobility schemes to other geographic areas. a new pilot seasonal labour program for farmworkers from ecuador and honduras, introduced in 2021, is another step towards diversifying the sources of recruitment for agricultural work (españa & sainz, 2021). these seasonal migrant labor schemes are widely supported by the public and by various governments as a preferred strategy for securing labour for the agricultural sector on a seasonal basis. in canada, temporary, contract-based migration has been displacing permanent residency migration in the last few decades (lenard & straehle, 2010; nakache & kinoshita, 2010). since 2007, temporary migrants have been on the rise and today temporary visa arrivals outnumber the number of immigrants with landed immigrant status (akbar, 2022). canada’s priority has been to supply the labour force to the sectors that face labour shortages by recruiting flexible and mostly cheap workers from other countries (akbar, 2022). these trends are detrimental to migrant lives, and as such they have been opposed by migrant rights activists. however, given the deeply entrenched intolerance toward irregular migrants in southern europe (and elsewhere) and the strong preference for managed migration in canada, spain and other countries, the governments of these countries are likely to show little sympathy for demands by activists to grant status to all migrants, and if any measures are taken, they are not likely to benefit migrant farmworkers in any significant fashion. and yet, as we argued in this article, some of the actions taken by governments demonstrate some resonance between demands put forward by the activists and state policies. what these actions illustrate is that governments in these countries do recognize that migrant labour is essential, at least in some sectors such as agriculture, and a more stable labour force may, in fact, be advantageous. activists can build on these small openings and lobby for more changes. the challenge for activists in the migrant rights movement is to advance diagnostic and prognostic frames that employ the language that would resonate more fully with the interpretation of these issues by policymakers. as struggles for migrant farmworkers’ rights continue, additional research, using diverse methodological approaches, is needed to enrich our understanding of action needed to bring about social justice for migrants working in the agriculture sector. references adnkronos. 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(2020, may 26). presentation to senate standing committee on social affairs, science and technology. https://migrantworkersalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/presentation-tosoci_migrant-workers-alliance-for-change-2.pdf ministerio de sanidad (2020). guía para la prevención y el control de la covid-19 en las explotaciones agrarias que vayan a contratar temporeros. madrid. mojtehedzadeh, s. (2020, may, 11). a study urged better standards for migrant workers’ housing. nothing was done. now covid-19 has struck. toronto star. https://www.thestar.com/business/2020/05/11/a-study-urged-better-standards-for-migrantworkers-housing-nothing-was-done-now-covid-19-has-struck.html molinero, y. (2021). the problem is not covid-19, it's the model! industrial agriculture and migrant farm labour in the eu. eurochoices, 20(3), 69-74. molinero, y., & avallone, g. (2021). covid-19 legitimando el utilitarismo migratorio en la agricultura mediterránea. transfronteriza, 11, 9-14. molinero, y., & lópez-sala, a. (2022). los trabajadores inmigrantes en el sector agrícola europeo en tiempos de covid-19. reglamentos, condiciones de trabajo y nuevos (in)movilidades. estudios geográficos, 83(293), e106. https://doi.org/10.3989/estgeogr.2022112.112 moreno-nieto, j. (2012). movilidad transnacional, trabajo y género. temporeras marroquíes en la agricultura onubense. política y sociedad, 49(1), 123-140. nakache, d., & kinoshita, p. j. (2010). the canadian temporary foreign worker program: do short-term economic needs prevail over human rights concerns? irpp study 5. nolan, s. (2021, july 30). essentials: we relied on these workers through the worst of the pandemic. will canada let them stay? toronto star. https://www.thestar.com/news/atkinsonseries/2021/covid-19-essential-workersimmigration.html?rf palidda, s., (2009). insertion, integration and rejection of immigration in italy. in e. guild, k. groenendijk & s. carrera (eds.), illiberal liberal states: immigration, citizenship and integration in the eu (pp. 357-372). ashgate. palumbo, l., corrado, a., & triandafyllidou, a. (2022). migrant labour in the agri-food system in europe: unpacking the social and legal factors of exploitation. european journal of migration and law, 24, 179-192. ambivalent resonance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 89 peano, i. (2021). within and against racial segregation: notes from italy’s encampment archipelago. lateral, 10(2), n.p. pedreño, a. (2020). la cuestión jornalera entre dos crisis: condición inmigrante, desafiliación y riesgo de contagio. sociología del trabajo, 96, 1-15. pedreño, a., sánchez, m., & de castro, c. (2022). la pandemia como oportunidad política. visibilidad mediática y movilización de los jornaleros migrantes en españa. revista internacional de organizaciones, 29, 161-179. perrotta, d. (2022). the minister’s tears and the strike of the invisible: the political debate on the ‘regularisation’ of undocumented migrant farm labourers during the covid-19 health crisis in italy. in p. pospěch, e. m. fuglestad, & e. figueiredo (eds.), politics and policies of rural authenticity (pp. 60-76). routledge. perry, j. a. (2018). living at work and intra-worker sociality among migrant farm workers in canada. journal of international migration and integration, 19(4), 1021-1036. pugliese, e. 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(2021). the interplay between structural and systemic vulnerability during the covid-19 pandemic: migrant agricultural workers in informal settlements in southern italy. journal of ethnic and migration studies, 47(9), 1903-1921. tanya basok, ana lópez-sala & gennaro avallone studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 68-90, 2023 90 tasker, j. p. (2021, december 9). in scathing report, auditor general says feds failed to protect foreign farm workers from the pandemic. cbc news. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/agforeign-farm-workers-pandemic-1.6279572 tymczyszyn, b. (2020, june 14). caravan draws attention to migrant workers’ plight. st. catherines standard. https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news/niagararegion/2020/06/14/caravan-draws-attention-to-migrant-workers-plight.html torres, f., & pérez, y. (2022). essential but forgotten. migrants picking fruits during the covid-19 pandemic in valencia. estudios geográficos, 83, 294, 1-12. vargas, j. (2020a, may 20). ¿por qué españa no puede regularizar migrantes como italia o portugal? público. https://www.publico.es/sociedad/regularizacion-migrantes-covid-19espana-no-regularizar-migrantes-italia-portugal.html#analytics-noticia:contenido-enlace vargas, j. (2020b, july 13). la explotación de migrantes, origen del rebrote en lleida. público. https://www.publico.es/sociedad/explotacion-migrantes-origen-rebrote-lleida.html vosko, l., basok, t., & spring, c. (2022). transnational employment strain in a global health pandemic: migrant farmworkers in canada. palgrave macmillan press. voss, k., silva, f., & bloemraad, i., (2020). the limits of rights: claims-making on behalf of immigrants. journal of ethnic and migration studies, 46(4), 791-819. murphy final galley mar 816 correspondence address: mary p. murphy, department of sociology, maynooth university, maynooth, co. kildare, ireland; email: mary.p.murphy@nuim.ie issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 reflections of an irish pracademic: mixing public advocacy, teaching and research? mary p. murphy maynooth university, ireland abstract this article reflects on the challenges of mixing public advocacy, teaching, and research in irish third level education. it explores the concept of academic activism and introduces concepts of ‘public sociologist’ and ‘pracademic’ to contextualize my own academic trajectory and activism. having reflected on general academic activism in the context of challenges facing irish civil society, the focus then shifts to a personal case study. the conclusion addresses the ambiguities and tensions of pursuing a particular approach to academic life. the need for academic activism is intensifying in the context of the neoliberalization of irish universities, a weakening civil society, and a more precarious academic life. keywords academic activism; ireland; civil society; managerialism; pracademic ever tried. ever failed. no matter. try again. fail again. fail better. (beckett, 1983, p. 1; emphasis in original) introduction in this article i critically explore the relationship between scholarship and activism with regard to the challenges of incorporating a commitment to social justice into pedagogical and research work both inside and outside an irish university. from the safety and perspective of secure tenure, i draw on concepts of ‘public sociology’ and ‘pracademic’ to help make sense of my own experience, and then reflect on contemporary irish academic activism within the broader literature on academic activism, civil society, and democracy. i describe my journey into academic activism in three areas: public engagement and advocacy, pedagogy, and research. i then discuss key challenges facing irish academics engaged in activism in the context of significant trends in irish civil society and the emerging policy context for mary p. murphy studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 216 civic engagement in third level education. the conclusion reflects on how tenure is necessary to make the mixing of advocacy, policy work, and academic labour a sustainable option. pracademic or activist? scholar-activists, for the purposes of this article, are academics working as both teachers and researchers in third level institutions, while also being activists striving for progressive or more radical social change. various literatures define and unpack the concept of scholarly activism with subtle differences in their emphasis and level of ambition for the term. here i attempt to situate my own academic trajectory and circumstances in the literature on scholarship and activism. sudbury and okazawa-rey (2009, in mitchell, 2009, p. 98), for example, see scholarly activism as the “production of knowledge and pedagogical practices through active engagements with, and in the service of, progressive social movements.” the autonomous geographies collective ( 2010) makes use of pain’s (2003) categorisation of three approaches for the public intellectual interested in making change. the first approach “fuses politics and academic research agendas into one coherent strategy and methodology and works closely with resisting others and social movements” (2010, p 248), the second approach stresses forms of participatory research, and the third approach is based on more critical forms of policy-oriented research (2010, p. 249). these conceptualisations of scholarly activism are useful and reflect to some degree my own approach to academic work. in another significant contribution, croteau (2005) distinguishes between different styles of activism: scholar-activists who, although genuinely concerned about the contributions of their scholarship to emancipatory goals, primarily prioritize the academic value of their work; scholar-activists who stress activism over scholarship; and scholar-activists who keep such roles separate and unintegrated. what i find most useful about croteau’s configurations is that they are not understood as mutually exclusive. over time, academics move between categories and may keep some aspects of activism separate whilst choosing to more fully integrate other forms of activism into their academic life. i can identify with this experience of moving between approaches and integrating some, but not all, activist campaigns into academic life. piven (2010, p. 806) is less interested in politically-oriented ‘public intellectuals’ who manage to be relevant without damaging their scholarly success (i.e., croteau’s scholar-activist category), and is more concerned with scholarly action committed to advancing the interests and ideas of groups at the margins of public life (i.e., scholar-activists). this is a type of dissident activism that, piven argues, creates substantial tension with academic careers. i cannot characterise my work in terms of this more radical definition of dissident scholar-activism. reflections of an irish pracademic studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 217 apple (2011, pp. 46-48) helpfully outlines how he thinks scholar-activists should position themselves in the university. to paraphrase apple, an activist must not only open up the university to society, but must also struggle against unequal power relations on and off campus, highlight spaces of possible action within and beyond the university, redefine research toward transformative reforms, challenge the content of elite knowledge, engage in critical traditions of radical work, seek to develop skills and work at many levels with multiple groups, collaborate with those struggling, and blend such activism with excellent research. acknowledging that one cannot engage in all nine of these fronts simultaneously or evenly, he argues that scholaractivists must at least attempt to practice them. apple’s framework offers inroads to reflexively and critically examining academic labour. applying it to my own labour, i find i fall short in meeting his expectations to the degree that i am somewhat wary of self-identifying as a scholar-activist. although chatteron and pickerill (2010) stress the importance of avoiding exclusive use of the label and promote accommodating a wide range of approaches within the terminology of scholar activist, i am nevertheless reluctant to use the term scholar-activist to describe my approach. this may be in part because of my own path into academic life. in ireland, the term activist and the expression ‘academic activist’ is often used in the social movement domain and within particular political and intellectual traditions and discourses. although approaches to activism originate from different theoretical traditions, most self-described scholar-activists appear to be explicitly informed by praxis, combining theory or analyses and practice to achieve intentional change. inspired by freirean approaches to education (mayo, 2012), these individuals base their politically engaged pedagogy on freire’s belief in the potential of education to liberate through problemposing rather than problem-solving (freire, 1996). freirean activist-oriented strategies grounded in communities are often contrasted with those that focus on working through non-governmental organizations (ngos) and institutional policy processes (e.g., taskforces, commissions, expert groups), which are often viewed as perpetuating the status quo or advancing neoliberalism (townsend, porter & mawdsley, 2002). hearne (2014, p. 4), for example, argues that irish ngos are dependent on the ideology of the elite system and resist opportunities to “unleash the popular resistance that radical change requires.” while such a sharp line cannot be drawn between freirean activist-oriented strategies grounded in communities and the institutional-oriented work of many ngos, there is nonetheless an important question of how and where academics locate themselves in different intellectual and political traditions of struggle, and how this then manifests in their workplace. smeltzer and cantillon (2015, p. 12), commenting on the “revolution to reform spectrum,” argue that “many individuals occupy viewpoints in the middle of the spectrum and alter their approach depending on myriad factors, including the issue at hand, personal obligations, and professional commitments.” while their observation reflects my own mary p. murphy studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 218 experience it is still the case that, as someone who has tended to work from more reformist positions and who has at times tactically chosen to be inside institutional sites of power (as well as being often outside), i want to avoid making false claims in describing myself as an scholar-activist. to make sense of my own experience as an academic committed to the pursuit of social justice who sometimes works through institutional routes, i first explore burawoy’s concept of ‘public sociology,’ and then volpe and chandler’s (2001) understanding of ‘pracademic.’ the first category i draw on comes from within my own discipline, for which burawoy (2005, p. 259) differentiates between public, policy, professional, and critical sociologies. while public sociology is committed to engaging in multiple public “dialogues around issues raised in and by sociology” (2005, p. 266), policy sociology is “sociology in the service of a goal defined by a client,” which aims to “to provide solutions to problems that are presented to us, or to legitimate solutions that have already been reached” (2005, p. 266). the third approach, professional sociology, provides the underlying framework for other forms of sociology by supplying “true and tested methods, accumulated bodies of knowledge, orienting questions, and conceptual frameworks” (2005, p. 267). critical sociology confronts and addresses institutionalized “biases” and “silences” within professional sociology and promotes “new research programs built on alternative foundations” (2005, p. 268). burawoy further differentiates the traditional public sociologist, whose work “instigates debates within or between publics, although he or she might not actually participate in them” (2005, p. 264), from the organic public sociologist. the latter works in a process of mutual education and dialogue with various publics and “in close connection with a visible, thick, active, local and often counter-public” (2005, p. 264). the overarching goal of the organic public sociologist is to contribute to transformative change and promote a critical imagination about the world and possible alternatives to the status quo. examining my own work, i find elements of at least three of these approaches – the critical, the policy, and the organic public sociologist – and agree with burawoy’s (2005) observation that although these approaches can at times be complementary, they are also in tension with each other. i have found that while “policy sociology can turn into public sociology” (burawoy, 2005, p. 267), it is also often resistant to a more politicized critical sociology or the public work of an organic public sociologist. the term ‘pracademic’ describes scholars who have professionally bridged the academic and practical world, particularly those who go into academia having already established a career as a practitioner (volpe & chandler, 2001), which in my case constituted a 20-year career in anti-poverty and equality ngos, and a six-year period as an elected dublin city councillor. my role as a ‘pracademic’ can be distinguished from the voluntary role of the ‘activist’ to the degree that as a pracademic i crossed professional or workplace boundaries between the university and another sector. this mixed experience of working in ‘insider’ sites of institutional power means i am reflections of an irish pracademic studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 219 sensitive to the difficulty of achieving meaningful or transformational change, and have gained critical insight into the use and operation of power whilst also experiencing the dangers of co-option (lewis, 2008). this work experience brings valid knowledge to bear on my academic research work and civil society activism. i explore later how this route of entry into academia impacts my approach to and experience of scholar-activism. the academic in irish civil society having situated my own academic trajectory and circumstances in relation to some prominent literature on scholarship and activism, i now turn to where scholar-activists fit into irish civil society, which has been overshadowed by a weak but controlling state that in the last two decades has tried to inhibit advocacy and activism (murphy, 2012). kirby and murphy (2011, pp. 143148) identify four trends that characterize recent irish state and civil society interaction: (a) the state has co-opted, disempowered, and attempted to lock irish civil society into narrow understandings of what is possible; (b) the state has imposed ever more disciplinary funding regimes; (c) civil society has shifted from advocacy about redistributive justice and social change to more managerialist service provision models; and (d) there is a more restricted public sphere with less capacity for public debate and political discourse. the resultant loss of proactive energy in civil society over recent years is evident in the relatively muted irish societal responses to austerity,1 a trend that is also apparent in other countries. as fraser (2014) argues, across the globe we are living through a crisis of great severity and complexity, but we lack the critical theory or conceptual frameworks necessary to interpret it or resolve it in an emancipatory way. our capacity, she contends, is undermined by an absence of solidarity and the tendency to treat crises in the realms of political economy, ecology, and social reproduction as unconnected. this lack of solidarity is indicative of “fragmented imaginations” that are caused in part by the degree to which the media separately analyzes and reports different parts of our political and economic worlds (preston & silke, 2011, p. 11). concomitantly, elites conjure up circumstances that fragment society and limit the possibility of social solidarity on such issues as pay cuts and taxation (e.g., creating discourses that divide public and private sector workers; see allen, 2012, p. 428). moreover, as carney, scharf, timonen & conlon (2014) maintain, family solidarity in ireland trumps societyor community-based solidarity. in ireland, as elsewhere, critical scholarship can play an important part in ‘joining the dots’ and offering new possibilities for political imagination that might, in turn, trigger new solidarities and foster the critical consciousness 1 but note the 2014-2015 irish water protests, which are evidence of a reignited form of political advocacy (hearne, 2015). mary p. murphy studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 220 necessary to help generate social change (fraser, 2014; mayo, 2012). to thrive in this fashion, civil society needs resources that are independent of the state, as well as the capacity to organize itself in state-free spaces. lynch (2010) argues that academics clearly have a leadership role to play in forging and creating these spaces, and in supporting civil society to resist threats. in a similar vein, mayo (2012) asserts that universities can be emancipatory, and he celebrates the long tradition of intellectuals resisting corporate values, and promoting social justice and human dignity (mayo & borg, 2007). however, elsewhere mayo (cited in juha, 2010, p. 121) is more cautious about the university’s emancipatory potential, recognising the degree to which it is “a site of struggle in which relations of hegemony are consolidated or challenged with a view to renegotiation.” exploring whether academics can offer new possibilities for political imagination, lynch (2010) is also realistic about the degree to which the university’s cultural reproduction of the elite, and its legitimation of hegemonic common sense, limits its possibility as a site for emancipatory change. in other words, the contemporary university has to be understood in the context of contemporary financialized capitalism where democracy has been captured by the financial elite (rajan, 2010). moreover, over the last two decades, the capacity of academics to contribute to the public sphere has increasingly been inhibited by the global development of a more managerialist style of public university (lynch, grummell & devine, 2012). slippage in the potential role of universities as sites for transformation is a feature of an increasingly silent irish society where recent policy shifts have resulted in the loss of a transformative focus for irish higher education (murray, grummell & ryan, 2013). lynch, grummell & devine (2012) and loxley (2014), for example, point to how commercialization and new public management mechanisms and metrics, such as ranking and outcome indicators, create regimes that stifle sociopolitical activism. these regimes require more onerous accountability, productivity, and administrative demands in ever-compressed time frames, thereby producing working conditions that deny autonomy, creativity, collaboration, and care (lynch, grummell & devine, 2012; mountz et al., 2015). as a result of such trends, irish academic social activism has decreased over recent years (o’shea & o’brien, 2011). it is notable too that irish academics have not engaged in the same level of anti-austerity electoral politics as is the case in other eu states such as greece and spain (scarpetta, 2014). nevertheless, many irish academics continue to use the academy to promote equality and social justice, and as the evidence in these special issues of studies in social justice attest, do so in different forms and styles of liberal, critical, emancipatory, and radical scholarship, as well as in other methods of on-the-ground action. having set this wider context of irish academics and civil society, the next section attempts to make sense of my own experience of irish academic activism as i examine in turn my approach to public advocacy, pedagogy, and research. reflections of an irish pracademic studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 221 personal trajectory i entered academic life in my mid-40’s, having spent two decades working in ngos and in political society. the factors motivating entry into an academic position have a significant bearing on how any scholar negotiates the rewards and challenges, successes and drawbacks of pursuing activist endeavours in the academy. since the 1980’s, my working life has been essentially linked to activity in civil and political society, and connected to social justice-related campaigns and projects. when i graduated with a phd in 2006, i had no significant academic career ambition or concept of a preferred sector; rather, i sought to position myself somewhere with “levers” to contribute to social change (lewis, 2008, p. 570). in 2007, i had to choose between two public sector job offers: a tenured academic position and a permanent research management position in a statutory national anti-poverty agency. the independence and flexibility offered in the academy won the day; the academic world appeared to me to be a place with “levers” and a workplace “where i can do the stuff i want to do” (lewis, 2008, p. 570) in terms of public engagement and advocacy, teaching, and research. public engagement and advocacy since the mid-1990’s, i had been a regular commentator on income policy for national radio and television news and current affairs programs. entering irish academic life with this clear orientation, my appointment coincided with the 2008 economic crisis. as a new professor (i.e., permanent lecturer grade in ireland) and an emerging organic public sociologist, i continued to provide public commentary in the new context of austerity. this public-oriented role requires a thick skin. although my perspectives are welcomed by various publics, my work has been both dismissed as biased by those who publicly identify me as a female left-wing commentator, and critiqued by various commentators on the left for insufficiently promoting radical alternatives to austerity or capitalism. moreover, my motivation is questioned by those who suspect that such engagement is prompted by desire for the limelight or connection with elite media networks. i am also ambivalent about my own participation; although i believe my contribution has at times broken some silences, offered solidarity, and promoted political imagination, i often find participation futile, regret decisions to participate, and more recently tend to decline such invitations. at the same time, i remain conscious as a public academic that the media are a key site of power where irish women’s voices and gendered analysis are too infrequently heard. over time, i have offered to mentor and support new women’s voices, and in 2015 worked with claiming our future to co-design and co-deliver ‘cap the gap,’ an eight-day activist mary p. murphy studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 222 training workshop for 25 people interested in publicly campaigning for income equality (claiming our future, 2015).2 having joined the academy in 2007, i continue my participation in various civil society equality networks. this includes a significant level of “back office” work (smeltzer & cantillon, 2015, p. 12), collaborating with various ngos in housing, social welfare, taxation, and labour market campaigns. as an organic public sociologist, i also contribute to developing new spaces for public engagement, including claiming our future and new budget campaigns that promote the values of solidarity, equality, and sustainability (murphy, 2012). although i am motivated primarily by the end goal of such campaigns, i also enjoy the sense of collaborative collective action and endeavour involved – a feeling that is often absent in the more individualized practice in the academy. reflecting on what i gain from such work i am reminded of piven’s (2010, p. 810) advice to be mindful of the “joy political work gives us,” because, she says: even when we fail, working to make our society kinder, fairer, more just, gives a satisfaction like no other, because the comrades we find in the effort are friends like no other, and also because our activist efforts illuminate our social and political world in ways that scholarship alone never can. (piven, 2010, p. 810) pedagogy although there is growing pressure on academics to produce research outputs, our fundamental role is still to educate. in the context of this mandate, edwards contrasts what he calls “university factories” with what he poetically describes as “a social science of love,” which promotes “an intelligence of the heart” and “personal transformation” of the learner into a civic actor with “deep respect for others” (2007, p. 20-21). engaging in emancipatory forms of education and putting social value into learning directly challenges the neoliberal idea of the university as an institution that solely serves the so-called knowledge economy (coate & maclabhrainn, 2007; lynch, 2010; o’shea & o’brien, 2011). in 2006, the maynooth university department of sociology developed an undergraduate degree program in politics and active citizenship, which employs a critical pedagogical approach to exploring politics ‘beyond the usual.’ in 2007 i was employed, with others, to develop the degree, including delivery of an innovative experiential learning module that aims to offer students an opportunity to observe the contestation and preservation of power 2 claiming our future was founded in 2010 as a national non-party-political network of individuals and civil society organizations; “it aims to promote and make real the values of equality, environmental sustainability, participation, accountability, and solidarity” (claiming our future, 2015). reflections of an irish pracademic studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 223 in the ‘real world,’ and so fosters the development of students as critical active citizens. since 2008, approximately 20 political science students per year have undertaken this module in the second semester of their second year, and almost 150 students have participated since its inception. over one semester, these students choose ‘power actors’ in political worlds outside the university. they spend 30 hours over the course of two months shadowing these actors while keeping a learning journal documenting their experience. they then theorize and reflect on their learning experiences in 12 facilitated workshops. students find their own placements, with academic support as necessary. after eight years, the module is now well-embedded as a mandatory component of a politics undergraduate program, delivered by the department of sociology. the department of sociology, which houses the module, is committed to the type of “public sociology” described above (burawoy, 2005). the module therefore focuses on an active learning experience for students, but does not incorporate an ambition for community service; indeed, there is wariness of active citizenship concepts that promote volunteering as an alternative to critical public and political debate (geoghegan & powell, 2007). the aim is for students to have an opportunity to experience and reflect on power and democracy in the external world. this is consistent with boland’s (2013, p. 214) advocacy to promote an “affective domain” – a teaching and learning environment that provides students with “opportunities to explore and interrogate their own values and preconceived ideas about the nature of the social world.” class readings and discussion vary considerably depending on which instructor leads the module. my pedagogy, for instance, is informed by kolb’s cycle of active learning, reflection, theorizing, and experimentation (kolb, 1984). drawing on kolb’s framework, i use the module to promote collective learning, where the educator has authority but does not engage in authoritarian top-down teaching (freire, 1996; mayo, 2012). workshop sessions are “a series of dialogues” (burawoy, 2005, p. 266), which are ideally led by the students’ own reflections about what they observe, and thus only work with their active participation. this dialogical approach is challenging for many students who have become accustomed to rote learning, and as a result a small number of them have not thrived in such an experiential learning environment. on the whole, however, feedback about the module is very positive. students’ evaluations stress that they enjoyed having an opportunity to apply theory to reality. students have told me that the module is the learning experience they think they will remember most from their degree. students are proud of their individual learning outcomes, such as their first argument with a politician, a public presentation, becoming a candidate in local elections, securing employment working in policy processes, joining campaigns, or speaking in a public meeting. there is clear evidence of activist flowering amongst some students, which we hope will continue in the long-term. mary p. murphy studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 224 this type of critical pedagogy needs to be protected from wider national and university aspirations for a more shallow and instrumental form of ‘community engagement,’ which has been endorsed as part of ireland’s national strategy for higher education (department of education and skills, 2011, p. 77). according to campus engage ireland, a national network which aims to promote civic engagement as a core function of irish higher education, ‘community engagement’ is “a mutually beneficial knowledgebased collaboration between the higher education institution and the wider community, through community-campus partnerships including the activities of community-based learning, community-engaged research, volunteering, community and economic regeneration, capacity building and access/widening participation” (campus engage, 2014, p. 3). this instrumental approach is compatible with neoliberal managerialism, with some champions of community engagement also advocating performancerelated funding, and accountability metrics including key performance indicators for community engagement (campus engage, 2014, p. 26-27). such an approach is also consistent with the overall liberal communitarian approach to democracy and active citizenship as outlined in the irish national policy statement, supporting voluntary activity (dsfca, 2000), which conflates critical civic engagement with volunteering (geoghegan & powell, 2007). critical pedagogy also has to be protected from students’ demands for employment-oriented internships, a common and legitimate feature of instrumental university education, but one not to be confused with experiential education aimed at social transformation (craig, 2015; smeltzer, 2015). research my research activity includes participation as a policy sociologist in a number of policy forums, including the national advisory group on taxation and social welfare (2011-2014), and since 2013, the irish human rights and equality commission (ihrec). responding to government invitations to participate in policy forums is of course never straightforward, especially considering that many are ‘smoke screens’ to legitimate elite agendas. without parallel campaign strategies to mobilize agency, working though institutional channels rarely generates transformative social change. at the same time, such work has relevance. as mccabe argues, “the current battle over the resources of the state needs to be engaged with” (2013, p. 55), and policy participation can yield valuable insights, data, and opportunities (albeit limited) to advance arguments. as a critical sociologist i have been commissioned by women’s organizations and trade unions to work with them to research labour market and social security policy and develop campaigns. however, i have not pursued commissions from statutory bodies with restricted terms of reference that limit the form of knowledge that might be reflections of an irish pracademic studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 225 created. nevertheless, there are compromises in maintaining a critical and organic public sociology role, and in preserving access to elite policy spaces. although i straddle three of buroway’s (2005) four types of sociology, over time i feel i have been transitioning from policy sociology toward critical sociology and organic public engagement. my research focus is shifting away from generating instrumental policy knowledge focused on problem solving, and toward the more reflexive knowledge associated with critical and public sociology (burawoy, 2005, p. 269). it is not clear to me whether or how such a transition in roles might interact with my academic career. more than one well-meaning mentor has advised me that i will not be credited for activist work in promotion applications. although i am not averse to promotion, my definition of academic success is not confined by its parameters. to some extent, i still have some choices in how i prioritize my academic time. there are opportunity costs: activism can impinge on time to publish, to pursue academic networking and research funding, and to contribute to internal university service commitments. but this does not mean research activity and funding opportunities are sacrificed or that academic endeavours are neglected. indeed, in relation to promotion and career advancement there are also positives to engaging in activist pursuits. as well as contributing to collective endeavours, i benefit personally and professionally from such work. these experiences help inform and test my theoretical and conceptual frameworks and enhance my teaching, as well as my students’ learning experiences. the university likewise benefits from such work in terms of reputation and exposure. indeed, it is somewhat ironic that in the new academic marketplace, where academics compete for external resources and publications, even transformative research can be commodified as a realistic target for academic capitalism (lynch, 2010; slaughter & leslie, 1997). nevertheless, there are practical difficulties and ethical compromises involved in translating organic public or critical sociology work into academic outputs and publications. acknowledging the ethical and practical difficulties involved, i have to a limited extent been able to draw on knowledge secured through policy and campaign work to contribute to academic publications. activism has also enabled access to research networks and funding opportunities. i have applied for pan-european and european union funded research programs, and in 2015 was part of a successful consortium awarded a 2.5 million euro funding grant under the horizon 2020 euro (3) european societies after the crisis funding program. our project is using a participatory research approach involving a merging of knowledge between academics, civil society, and citizens experiencing poverty. my collaboration in this project emerged in part through my activism and organic public sociology; specifically, my involvement with claiming our future opened the door to the eu level alliances against poverty activist network from which the application originated. mary p. murphy studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 226 conclusion: reflecting on activist scholarship this article has sketched my journey into an academic career, a trajectory driven in part by a pursuit of social justice and motivated by the opportunities the academy offers for activism and public engagement. as noted above, the university “is where i can do the stuff i want to do” (lewis, 2008, p. 570). the process of interrogating my structural location as a pracademic and as a critical, policy, and organic public sociologist has been challenging, and has highlighted for me the complexities and contradictions of my choices, as well as the need for persistent reflection. as mentioned earlier, maintaining a presence as a policy sociologist in relatively elite institutions does not sit easily with critical sociology or the role of an organic public sociologist. while there are clear advantages to engaging in some aspects of policy sociology, such as policy innovation and rich networking opportunities, there are also risks of co-option into old roles and power relationships (lewis, 2008, p. 569). that said, my life and work experience, as well as my relatively late entry into the academy, means less prospect of loyalty to the elite academy or its dominant hegemonic values, and some ability to cope with myriad practical challenges associated with activist scholarship. some of these challenges involve managing the ambiguous feedback or opinions of colleagues. although many are supportive and offer practical assistance, some are uneasy with public forms of scholarship and advocacy. some dislike or distrust such engagement, fearing it compromises the academic environment or the perceived neutrality of academic research (wickham, 2012). a further tension exists between academics who traverse the different traditions of left activism and are often each other’s most ardent critics. in addition, there are challenges posed by increased managerialism, and the risk that regardless of entry point or age, institutional capture can over time divert original ambitions and aspirations (croteau, 2005). mountz et al. (2015), loxley (2014), and lynch, grummell & levine (2012) describe how the growing administrative and professional demands of fast-paced, metric-oriented, neoliberal universities disrupt intellectual growth and personal freedom, as well as hinder collaborative and communal work. indeed, virtually all aspects of academic life are vulnerable to institutional capture, commodification, marketization, and academic capitalism (lynch, grummell & levine, 2012), and academic freedom is also increasingly under threat in this context (docherty, 2015; karran, 2007; lynch, 2010; russell, 1993). over eight years i have experienced this intensification of a culture of individualism that feeds into ever more stringent promotion criteria, which reward research funding and a narrow range of publications, as well as other forms of academic activity that are less than conducive to activism. civic participation may be tolerated, and in some cases encouraged, but the valid form of knowledge it generates is under-valued. piven (2010, p. 809) thus advises fellow scholars to think “carefully about where we place ourselves in a complex and variegated academic world,” and to be mindful of reflections of an irish pracademic studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 227 how where we are “will affect our ability to do the political work to which we are committed.” maynooth university, while subject to the intensification of managerialism, remains a relatively collegial space. a critical mass of academics at the institution is committed to working for social transformation and there are spaces which offer the potential for solidarity and collegiality, including a relatively new research cluster called social justice, participation and human rights, which focuses on “addressing social justice, participation and human rights through research, learning and professional practice” (maynooth university, 2015). as ryan observes, “stamina is required of the educator as critic, commentator, activist, engager, and visionary; the traps associated with each of these roles can derail the educator from the project of justice” (2011, p. 99). reflecting on my own experience i realise how little i have sought or utilised opportunities to reflect with other academics. the cluster and other spaces provide opportunities for individual and collective reflection, and for highlighting possible action within and beyond the university. there is also the practical issue of time. as goldrick-rab (2014, p. 1) attests, “it takes time, energy, emotional labour, and a thick skin” to maintain scholarly activism. the challenge of combining academic commitments and public sociology must be integrated with the everyday reality of caring, especially in female academics’ lives. from a feminist “ethic of care” perspective, mountz et al. (2015) discuss the need to claim time for slow scholarship, and to maintain collective collaborative action informed by feminist politics. similarly, petrick (2015, p. 10) discusses “how the availability of time, as well as intellectual and emotional space, to engage in academic or activist work is often determined by the ebbs and flows of one’s personal life.” as a middle-aged female feminist academic, i find myself in the ‘pincer’ moment where time for activism not only competes with academic pressures, but also has to be reconciled with the complex needs of teenage children and an ageing parent. i struggle in this context to find room for competing priorities. in 2015, three well-respected irish middle-aged female academics resigned from tenured positions, privately acknowledging their ambition to work in ways that are both more socially transformative and accommodating of care in their lives. although security of tenure allows me some room to manoeuvre through these challenges and contradictions, those on precarious contracts face multiple barriers to engaging in any form of academic activism. those of us fortunate enough to have tenure can choose to some degree how to negotiate this terrain, and for me the university remains a viable workplace where i can fulfil different roles and ambitions (lewis, 2008, p. 570). however, there is a whole new generation of irish scholars who have to pursue academic activism in the context of precarious short-term or low-hour contracts. the precarity of this rising class of academic labour leaves little space for academic activism (courtois & o’keefe, 2015). this loss is not just a concern for young academics but for mary p. murphy studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 215-230, 2015 228 the academy more generally, for civil society, and for anyone who aspires to a more equal and sustainable world. acknowledgments i would like to acknowledge the support i get from various colleagues in academic, community and personal settings, and also thank the various reviewers of this article for generous feedback and for alerting me to a wide range of literature. i particularly want to thank the editors of the special issues, sandra smeltzer and sara cantillon, for the opportunity to reflect on the challenges and contradictions of the triple shift of scholarship, activism and care, and for their support, guidance and above all patience through the publication process. references allen, k. 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(2012, may). the role of sociology in understanding the current crisis. presentation at the sociology association of ireland annual conference, maynooth university, ireland. . correspondence address: alexa degagne, department of political science, university of alberta, 12-4 henry marshall tory building, university of alberta, edmonton, ab t6g 2h4, canada, tel.: (+1) 780 492 7489, e-mail: adegagne@ualberta.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 107-124, 2013 queer bedfellows of proposition 8: adopting social conservative and neoliberal political rationalities in california’s samesex marriage fight alexa degagne university of alberta, canada abstract on november 4, 2008 california voters passed proposition 8, and accordingly same-sex marriage was banned under the state constitution. proposition 8 is now being considered by the supreme court. the proposition has sparked national debate about the nature of the relationship between the state and citizens’ sexuality and corresponding rights; calling into question the practice of allocating rights and privileges on the basis of sexuality and family form. proponents of the proposition, who can be classified as predominantly socially conservative, want to maintain the status and privileges of marriage for heterosexuals; arguing that allowing same-sex marriage threatens the legitimacy, sanctity and strength of traditional heterosexual marriage. this article examines the extent to which three californian pro-samesex marriage organizations (equality california, join the impact, and the courage campaign) have challenged and/or appropriated social conservative and neoliberal discourses in their effort to gain access to the rights and privileges that are currently administered through marriage. introduction on november 4, 2008, californians voted on proposition 8 which would ban same-sex marriage under the state constitution. with a 52.24% majority, proposition 8 passed and, accordingly, formally expanded rights were retracted through instruments of direct democracy (grodin, 2009). proposition 8 has sparked national debate about the nature of the relationship between the state and citizens’ sexuality and corresponding rights. it calls into question the practice of allocating rights and privileges on the basis of sexuality, sexual conduct and family form. opponents of proposition 8, for the most part members of the mainstream studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 108 alexa degagne gay and lesbian movement, argued that homosexual citizens deserve the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts (no on proposition 8, octobernovember 2008). both sides agreed that there are many rights and privileges attached to marriage, and mainstream same-sex marriage advocates wanted the equal status and rights that come with marriage, including: employment benefits, adoption rights, access to reproductive technology, immigration and travel rights and protections, parental leave benefits, and health benefits (josephson, 2005). proponents of the proposition, who can be classified as predominantly socially conservative, have wanted to maintain the status and privileges of marriage for heterosexuals, arguing that allowing samesex marriage threatens the legitimacy, sanctity and strength of traditional heterosexual marriage (protect marriage: yes on proposition 8, octobernovember 2008). for both groups marriage is understood, among other things, as a vehicle for social and political inclusion wherein the family is championed as the primary unit of society and marriage as an institution through which the state should allocate certain rights and privileges. as angus cameron states, the boundaries of social exclusion and inclusion occur according to the normal/abnormal binary. he says: “the social exclusion/inclusion debate is an exercise in normative boundary setting—a means of distinguishing between a form of social being characterized by normality, morality, responsibility, independence and competitiveness and a form of social being marked by difference, redundancy, pathology, immorality and obsolescence” (cameron, 2006, p. 401). identities, be they racial, gendered or sexual, are categorized and valued as either normal or abnormal. if individuals want to move into a space of inclusion, they have been required to assimilate to a normal, and therefore valued, identity. in liberal regimes, practitioners of identity politics have long stood on the premise of seeking to move from positions of social and political exclusion to positions of inclusion in order to gain the attendant statuses, rights, protections and privileges. accordingly, minorities and excluded subjects have had to wrestle with whether it is beneficial and productive to acquiesce to their societies’ and governments’ terms of inclusion (goodin, 1996; peace, 2001). barriers to social and political inclusion come in the form of government law and policy and institutional regulations and restrictions. in the united states, marriage has historically been one such institution, as inclusion is granted to those who can conform to the idealized heteronormal family, complete with designated normalized gender and sexual identities. the inclusion in the institution of marriage offers state political and economic benefits and protections, social status and legitimacy. political rationalities and their discourses have defined the criteria for what is normal and abnormal, legitimate and illegitimate, and therefore define the terms of inclusion and exclusion. i contend that in the contemporary american political landscape, social conservative and neoliberal political rationalities and their discourses have complicated and conditioned the terms of inclusion and exclusion with regard to marriage, ultimately defining the criteria for studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 queer bedfellows of proposition 8 109 citizens’ normal and abnormal, legitimate and illegitimate, acceptable and unacceptable sexual identities and family forms. thus, when making claims for political and social inclusion, same-sex marriage advocates have had to consider and navigate, embrace or reject neoliberal and social conservative political rationalities. this article investigates how specific political rationalities and their discourses determine the criteria for social and political inclusion. specifically, i examine the extent to which californian gay and lesbian social movement organizations, which were involved in proposition 8, have adopted, challenged or appropriated social conservative and neoliberal discourses and political rationalities in their effort to gain social and political inclusion through same-sex marriage. in the first half of the article, i outline my theoretical framework that explores the connections between political rationalities, discourses, social and political inclusion. i consider these concepts in relation to the current preoccupations of american social conservatism, the current neoliberal and social conservative citizenship models, and the political and social goals of the american gay and lesbian movement. in the second half of the article, i examine the websites of three opponents of california’s proposition 8: the courage campaign, join the impact and equality california. language, logic and truths comprise political rationalities and ultimately determine the criteria for social and political inclusion. as such, i will analyze the language, ideas and arguments used on these websites to determine the degree to which these gay and lesbian organizations are challenging or capitulating to the dominant social conservative and neoliberal political rationalities and citizenship models in their attempt to gain social and political inclusion. theoretical framework 1. political rationalities and their discourses i hold that the criteria for social and political inclusion are determined by political rationality. elaborating on foucault’s early formulation, brown (2006) defines “political rationality” accordingly: a political rationality is not equivalent to an ideology stemming from or masking an economic reality, nor is it merely a spillover effect of the economic on the political or the social. rather, as foucault inflected the term, a political rationality is a specific form of normative political reason organizing the political sphere, governance practices, and citizenship. a political rationality governs the sayable, the intelligible, and the truth criteria of these domains. (p. 693-694) within a political rationality, certain knowledge and truths are championed, valued and legitimated (apple, 2000; fisher, 2006). according to foucault, discourse, a means of disseminating a political rationality, is productive. “discourse is, with respect to the relation of forces, not merely a surface of inscription, but something that brings effects” studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 110 alexa degagne (foucault, 1997, p. xx). discourse is not merely the linguistic representation of power relations, but a constitutive element of power relations. discourse produces and conditions the dynamics, interpretations and reactions within different power relations. discourse is not external and superfluous to power and knowledge (or “truth”) coming together; rather, power and knowledge are joined in discourse (foucault, 1978; sedgwick, 2008). thus, discourse forms, conveys, and perpetuates a political rationality. political rationality, constituted of discourses, constructs and conditions dominant governance practices, and determines the boundaries of citizenship and inclusion. there are various political rationalities that define the landscapes of citizenship exclusion and inclusion. the concept of political rationalities has been explored in terms of programs of governance, but i argue that political rationalities also condition understandings and ideas about sexuality and family. accordingly, i have identified neoliberalism and social conservatism as being dominant (at times intertwined and/or combative) political rationalities that shape contemporary american criteria for inclusion and exclusion in relation to issues of marriage, sexuality and the family. i will define these two rationalities and their sexual politics in this section. i will also define the mainstream gay and lesbian and queer theories and politics that are forced to function with, within or outside the dominant neoliberal and social conservative political rationalities and corresponding sexual citizenship model in order to gain social and political inclusion. 2. social conservative and neoliberal political rationalities and sexual citizenship models america’s current social conservative movement finds its roots in the new right and the religious right groups that were birthed in the mid-1970s. new right and religious right groups emerged in the 1970s as, among other things, a christian-based social conservative backlash against the feminist and gay and lesbian movements that had been, respectively, fighting for full citizenship rights for women and homosexual americans. by 1975, the political and social influence of the gay and lesbian movement was apparent as cities and counties were adopting gay rights ordinances, legal challenges to state sodomy laws were underway, and homosexuality was removed from the american psychiatric association’s list of mental disorders (fetner, 2001). in the last three decades, however, there has been a surge of homophobic legislation in the form of state ballot initiatives to ban same-sex marriage (soule, 2004; witt & mccorkle, 1997) and restrictions on adoption by homosexual couples (stacey & biblarz, 2003). with regard to its political rationality, george lakoff states that social conservatism is based on several generalized beliefs about human nature and society. social conservatives believe that humans are naturally selfish and imperfect. social conservatives argue that religion and tradition should be used to teach individuals to be unselfish, cooperative and loyal members of studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 queer bedfellows of proposition 8 111 society, and to teach individuals proper moral conduct. moreover, humans need higher authorities to teach individuals how to act in society, and to regulate or punish individuals who do not conform to so society’s rules or morals codes (lakoff, 1996). historically, social conservatives have depended on churches, community organizations, families and the government to teach and reinforce moral order and community loyalty. the family, in particular, is foundational to society, according to social conservatives, because it instills tradition, morality, responsibility, proper gender roles and religious devotion. brenda cossman (2005) explains: “individuals are first and foremost members of communities, united by common morals, values and traditions. within this vision, the family is the basic unit of society, forging individuals together through its moral authority, instilling children with moral values and traditions” (p. 433). the social conservative ideal family is heterosexual and patriarchal. social conservatives believe that proper moral families must have a mother and a father who are married (heterosexual), and that the father should be the economic and moral head of the household while the mother assumes a subservient role as the nurturer of their children (patriarchal). this heterosexual and patriarchal model is based partially on tradition that has developed since the industrial revolution and partially on religious doctrine. since the 1970s, social conservatives have argued that marriage is simultaneously being abandoned by heterosexuals through divorce, women’s economic independence, single-parenthood and multi-generational systems of care (faludi, 1991; marecek, 2003), while also being attacked by feminists and denigrated by homosexuals (duggan & kim, 2006). social conservatives, therefore, embarked on campaigns to both promote the benefits of marriage for heterosexuals and guard marriage from homosexuals (stacey, 1997). this climate was particularly hostile for gay and lesbian activists as social conservatives were working, as they are today, to not only deny the privileges to homosexuals, but also to fortify heterosexual marriage by amassing a larger population of married heterosexuals. as a result, social conservatives have attempted to defend marriage by fortifying the boundaries of exclusion and by strengthening heterosexual marriage by offering privileges to a growing population of “deserving,” “good” and “moral” citizens. it has also been argued that neoliberalism is the dominant discourse shaping contemporary political rationality and mode of citizenship. since the end of the second world war until the 1970s, the relationship between the state and citizens occurred within the ideological parameters of the welfare state (isin, et al., 2008). social justice was defined in terms of the economic equality of citizens and the state was responsible for regulating and assuring the redistribution of capital and resources (brodie, 2008). although the degree and effectiveness of this redistributive social citizenship has since been criticized by feminists and conservatives alike, the definition of citizenship was expanded under this economic regime. specifically, the citizen acquired social rights, at least in terms of a minimum standard of living, and the state assumed a new role as supporter of the most destitute citizens (isin, et al., studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 112 alexa degagne 2008). neoliberalism dismantled this model by espousing the following tenets: reduced public expenditure, deregulated markets and delegitimization of claims-making. harder applies foucault’s theory of neoliberalism which stresses self-sufficiency and individualism (foucault, 2008; harder, 2009). the individual, not the state, takes on the economic, political and social risks of living. with no welfare safety net, the state has no responsibility toward the individual except to assure that there is a “free” market within which individuals can interact and support themselves (foucault, 2008). thus neoliberal citizenship is based on self-reliance and respect for limited state intervention (brodie, 1994). hesford (2006) and brown (2009) argue that in america’s neoliberal system, families, in their bourgeoisie form, have replaced other forms of political participation and have become a means for economic survival. the family is presented as an economically stable unit and marriage is promoted accordingly. political participation and belonging now come in the form of private consumer consumption and economic self-sufficiency. as hesford (2009) warns, this privatization of citizenship silences citizens and impairs their political engagement. both social conservatism and neoliberalism are promoting a particular model of citizenship. specifically, the concept of sexual citizenship has emerged to explain the relationship between the state and citizens’ private sexual lives and “intimacies” (plummer, 2003). plummer (2003) defines intimacy accordingly: intimacy exists within the doing of sex and love, obviously, but also in the doing of families, marriages, and friendships, in child bearing and child rearing, and in caring for others. in these instances, intimacy is likely to have close links to particular kinds of gender, body projects, and feeling work. bodies, feelings, identities, relationships, interactions, even communities—all are central elements in doing intimacies. (p. 13) the benefits of citizenship, attained through movement into inclusive spaces, are doled out according to an individual’s public and private conduct. the performance of citizenship becomes connected to the performance of intimacies. sexuality is seen as a site of power both precious and dangerous that must be protected and/or harnessed in a particular way and to particular ends. there is power in the creation of truth and sexuality becomes immersed in a struggle about who can create the truth about sexuality and then harness its power (foucault, 1978). citizenship extends beyond the political arena and very much occurs within individuals’ private lives. under this citizenship model, the criteria for inclusion and belonging change depending on the contemporary needs of the state. individuals modify their own behavior according to social norms for fear of punishment, certainly, but also for fear of isolation, demonization, and the denial or loss of privilege. individuals do resist discourses and truth regimes in their everyday lives, in the banal and in the extreme, subtlety and unknowingly or consciously and overtly. individuals, and groups of studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 queer bedfellows of proposition 8 113 individuals are constantly pushing against and testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. and while there is room for experimentation and evolution, as foucault argues in abnormal, there are always clear and untraversable boundaries of what is socially acceptable or in need of reprimand, regulation or ostracization (foucault, 2003). rubin, warner and foucault agree that the current understanding of acceptable sexuality is dependent on multiple criteria which are predominantly divided according to normality and abnormality (foucault 1978; rubin 1993; warner 1999). for rubin, the binary criteria are ranked according to the configuration of partners (whether same-sex, multi-generational), number of participants (whether in pairs or otherwise), and according to location (whether public or private). rubin summarizes that monogamous heterosexuality is at the top of the hierarchy where it redeems all the associated privileges and, predictably, homosexuality, particularly non-monogamous homosexuality, is at the bottom and is punished accordingly (rubin, 1993). because the criteria for acceptable sexuality are based on a normal/ abnormal binary, scholars have recognized that the content of the binaries are not unchanging. rubin states that heterosexuality can be good/normal or bad/ abnormal but is rarely the latter, while homosexuality has been predominantly bad/abnormal until recently (rubin, 1993). as will be discussed in more detail in the next section, warner argues: “‘queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than heterosexuality” (warner, 1993, p. xxvi). queer theory scholars therefore question the validity of judging sexuality according to normalcy in the first place by constantly pushing back against the everchanging criteria of normal privileged sexuality. 3. possibilities for resistance and transgression robert goodin (1996) has critiqued “social exclusion” scholarship, arguing: the true source of our anxieties, i shall argue, lies not in the practice of exclusion but in that of inclusion. the problem is not—not just, not even principally—that too many people, or the wrong people, have been “left out”; nor is the proper remedy more “inclusive” communities. instead, i argue, the problem of exclusion is that there is an inclusive community, be its catchment broad or narrow. and if that is the problem, then the solution is not to make our communities more inclusive but rather to change their nature—making them at one and the same time both less exclusive and less inclusive. (p. 344) according to goodin, oppressed or excluded groups should neither seek to expand the boundaries of inclusion to accept their people nor attempt to change themselves in order to gain acceptance. pursuing either political strategy only reinforces the legitimacy of the division between inclusions and exclusions. likewise, young argues that those involved in identity politics should actually question and challenge the very notion, worth and effects of exclusionary and inclusionary social and political boundaries (young, 2002). studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 114 alexa degagne challenges to the inclusions and exclusions of sexual citizenship models are simultaneously moments of transgression and assimilation. according to foucault, resistance (or transgression) occurs when subjects question, challenge and resist their socially constructed identity (foucault, 1978). pickett (1996) explains foucault’s theory of resistance and transgression: transgression is now conceived as an implicit affirmation of difference . . . the various rules, limits, and norms history has placed upon us, which are often seen as natural, are the sources of exclusion, marginalization, and the resulting solidification of identity for those who “confine their neighbors.” through transgression it is possible to undermine these limits, although new ones will always arise. this affirmation of difference is thus a permanent agonistic stance. (p. 450) as foucault, and later butler argue, expanding the criteria and boundaries of inclusion merely redefines the populations that are excluded (butler, 2002; foucault, 1978). butler (2002) states: it is important to mark how the field of intelligible and speakable sexuality is circumscribed so that we can see how options outside of marriage are becoming foreclosed as unthinkable, and how the terms of thinkability are enforced by the narrow debates over who and what will be included in the norm. (p. 18) subjects must thus push back against their negatively constituted identities while remaining conscious of, and attempting to avoid, the ostracization of others in the process. in the case of same-sex marriage, it appears that some gay and lesbian individuals and couples are willing, in fact insisting, that they can and will assimilate to the criteria of state belonging through their kinship structure, roles and responsibilities in order to gain social and political rights and privileges. instead of challenging the fact that these rights and privileges are allocated according to state sanctioned kinship formation, some, definitely not all, gay and lesbian activists have decided to simply ask to be included in the institution of marriage (butler, 2002). accordingly, polikoff argues that some same-sex marriage advocates are positioning themselves on the “wrong side of the culture war over acceptable family structures,” as they engage in debates about privileging particular family forms, thus emulating the social conservative’s hierarchal valuing of sexualities and family forms (polikoff, 2008). some radical queer scholars, such as dean spade and craig willse, nancy polikoff, judith butler, mark blasius and michael warner, hold that any state legitimization of any relationships will always exclude segments of the population who are not involved in recognizable relationships (blasius, 1994; butler, 2002; polikoff, 2008; spade and willse, 2010; warner, 1993). these queer activists and scholars argue that this push for same-sex marriage is a capitulation to an institution that has historically been patriarchal, racist, and has ostracized and punished non-heterosexual citizens including homosexual, polyamorous, polygamous, single, transgender and genderstudies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 queer bedfellows of proposition 8 115 non-conformist people (bell & binnie, 2000; butler, 2002; warner. 1999). with the expansion of marriage to homosexuals, other deviants are free to be heterosexual or homosexual, but never non-monogamous, polyamorous or polygamous. thus, by asking for marriage rights, same-sex couples are effectively redrawing the lines of exclusion and abandoning other sexually “deviant” individuals. cooper goes on to explain that when gay and lesbian advocates ask to be included into institutions, such as marriage or the military, in order to gain rights and equalities, they are actually causing inequalities in resources, entitlements, freedoms, authority and discursive/cultural recognition (cooper, 2002). in choosing to marry, and enter the institution, gay and lesbian individuals will have an interest in maintaining the strength, meaning, privileges, and protections of the institution and its participants (lehr, 1999). and the gay and lesbian fight for same-sex marriage assumes an interest in maintaining the legitimacy of the institution, and the boundaries between rights-bearing and rights-denied individuals, both of whom are still under the regulation of the state. accordingly, some queer theorists resist the normalizing and exclusionary nature of this current sexual citizenship model by arguing that social and political rights and privileges should not be attached to family form, sexuality and sexual conduct. otherwise, social justice, in terms of voices heard and needs met, is shallow, as large segments of the population are denied political representation, social rights and economic protections. social and political inclusion is reserved for the few who lead morally acceptable gendered, sexual and familial lives. two main political rationalities have been presented, each with a different understanding of the nature and boundaries of belonging through sexual citizenship and marriage. first, social conservatives argue that marriage is necessarily privileging and should be reserved for heterosexual couples, as they are the most natural, moral and traditional family form. further, heterosexual couples are needed to reproduce desired and ‘good’ future citizens (cossman, 2005). second, neoliberals hold that economic dependence and risk should be privatized and preferably reinforced through the permanence of a marriage (or marriage-like) contract. still, neoliberals are hesitant to extend marriagelike rights to a broader population as it will require private corporations and the government to provide health and other employment benefits to more citizens. in both cases, inclusion is reserved for a select portion of the population. in the presence of these political rationalities, mainstream gay and lesbian marriage advocates accept marriage as an acceptable exclusionary space and a means to gain rights and protections. as is seen in the next section, some gay and lesbian activists have even appealed to social conservative and neoliberal political rationalities by arguing that marriage will enable homosexuals to fulfill their responsibilities to society as normal and selfsufficient consumers, producers and reproducers (bell & binnie, 2000). studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 116 alexa degagne case study three gay and lesbian organizations of proposition 8 i use the recent vote and passage of proposition 8 in california as a case study to analyze the degree to which californian gay and lesbian activists are subscribing to social conservative and neoliberal political rationalities pertaining to sexual citizenship. the initiation and passage of proposition 8 actually retracted social inclusion as gay and lesbian californians were granted marriage rights by the state supreme court in may 2008 only to have them taken away in november 2008 via popular vote. as stated, there are several economic and social rights and privileges that are allocated through marriage, including access to partner employment and health benefits, welfare bonuses, medical information and decision rights, adoption and second parent rights, parental leave benefits, and immigration and travel privileges (josephson, 2005). before, during, and after the passage of proposition 8, various gay and lesbian organizations emerged in support of the “no” campaign. i have identified three of the most prominent groups on this side of the fight including: equality california, join the impact, and the courage campaign. the three organizations are california based, focusing predominantly on issues of concern for the gay and lesbian citizens and communities in the state. equality california was founded in 1998 to fight for legal protections and rights on a state and national level for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender californians. equality california touts itself as the leading organization in the ‘no on proposition 8’ battle as it raised 14 million dollars for the campaign, 11 million dollars more than any other organization (equality california, 2009). join the impact was created in the days following the passage of proposition 8 in november 2008. join the impact defines itself as a grassroots organization pursuing the goal of full equality for gay and lesbian citizens through education, outreach and protest. among their accomplishments, join the impact coordinated protests against proposition 8, and similar propositions in other states, in three hundred cities inside and outside the united states on november 15, 2008. although join the impact seeks to challenge its opponents, the founders of the organization are adamant that they do not want to demonize, blame or attack opponents to same-sex marriage; doing so will only close lines of communication and extinguish any possibility for understanding and compromise (join the impact, 2009). as can already be seen, these two organizations are interested in legal protections, formal equality and rights for gay and lesbian californians. further, both are interested in dialoguing and compromising with oppositional and undecided voters. the other main group, the courage campaign, argues that extending marriage rights to homosexuals will not compromise the sacred, moral, and healthy nature of marriage. the courage campaign is an online organization that works to connect leftleaning grassroots organizations and individuals studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 queer bedfellows of proposition 8 117 around issues including education policy, health care, taxation, and most relevant to this study, gay and lesbian rights and protections. courage campaign is comprised of over 700, 000 members. these members are mobilized under the “courage campaign equality program” which organizes volunteers in each of the state’s counties and sends volunteers to go doorknocking in order to speak one-on-one to californians in an attempt to open dialogue, put a “human face” to the same-sex marriage struggle, and convince opponents and undecided voters that proposition 8 seeks to deny “normal,” “average” citizens access to the rights currently associated with marriage (courage campaign, 2009a). for this project i surveyed the websites of these three organizations, paying particular attention to their mission statements, press releases, daily or weekly updates, blog entries (of the founders and/or leaders of the organizations), emails, and published reports, papers or documents. for two of the websites, i was able to recover information dating as far back as may 2008 when the california supreme court ruled that restricting marriage to heterosexual couples was unconstitutional in re marriage cases (supreme court of california, 2008). the third organization, join the impact, was created in november 2008 and i was able to access their archives dating back to their founding. this research unearthed two main ways in which these organizations have adopted, challenged, or appropriated social conservative and neoliberal discourses in their attempts to gain equal rights through same-sex marriage. first, these organizations promote the “normalcy” of homosexuality in order to fit into the social conservative criteria of acceptable sexuality. second, they claim that heterosexual and homosexual couples share common form and function as they practice monogamy, child bearing and economic selfsufficiency. ultimately, these groups have made a case for why gay and lesbian californians should be granted marriage rights, without questioning why rights are allocated through private sexual relationships. each of these themes will now be addressed in turn. 1. normalizing homosexuality three of the californian gay and lesbian organizations, the courage campaign, join the impact and equality california, are not practicing foucault’s theory of resistance (foucault, 1978). these groups are attempting to deny social conservative discourses that constitute homosexuals as deviant and abnormal. but equality california in particular is trying to normalize certain homosexuals by demonizing others. equality california calls the deviants “san francisco gays,” referring to flamboyant, leather-wearing, sadomasochistic, promiscuous homosexuals. thus, these groups are trying to gain social acceptance and inclusion, not by showing that homosexuality is not scary or monstrous, but by arguing that specific homosexuals are not a threat. these groups are denying their negatively constituted identity by studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 118 alexa degagne negatively constituting and excluding others. as mentioned, the courage campaign’s primary form of protest and mobilization against proposition 8 was to dispatch volunteers into their communities to knock on their neighbours’ doors and engage them in conversation about issues, concerns, truths and lies surrounding same-sex marriage. the courage campaign used this strategy of resistance, they explain, in order to demonstrate the “human face” of homosexuals and homosexuality. they hoped that in doing so opponents and undecided voters would realize that homosexuals are not abnormal or scary but rather that they are neighbours, co-workers, and fellow citizens who want to protect and provide for their children and partners (courage campaign, 2009a). equality california promotes the same tactic, focusing on the stories of the 18,000 same-sex couples that were married before the passage of proposition 8. equality california states: we also will ensure that californians really get to know the 18,000 samesex couples whose marriages are recognized by the state, as well as their family members, friends and loved ones. the truth of their lives belies the misconceptions our opponents propagate. as these families simply live their lives, they will demonstrate to all californians that same-sex couples want to be civilly married because they have the same hopes, dreams, concerns and sense of responsibility as any other family. (equality california, 2009) rather explicitly, equality california is seeking to demonstrate that the homosexual couples that were married before proposition 8 are normal, healthy and harmless. these couples do not wish to dismantle the institution of marriage from the inside, rather they respect the institution and support the accompanying values of personal responsibility and commitment. join the impact also initiated a similar campaign as they asked their followers to engage ten people, be they family, friends, acquaintances or strangers, in conversation about the need for a same-sex marriage law and the implications of its denial. join the impact argued that initiating these conversations would be effective as the conversation would be brought down to a personal and intimate level, ultimately detaching individual homosexuals from the stereotypical and demonized characterization that is promoted by religious and social conservative groups (join the impact, 2008, november 15). it can be argued that homosexuals are humanized through this individualization because homosexuals become defined by more than their “deviant” and “unhealthy” sexuality. in this instance, homosexuals become family members, parents, workers, consumers, religious followers and taxpaying citizens, despite their sexuality. admittedly, this is a very thin line to tread. gay conservatives such as andrew sullivan and bruce bawer claim that the erasure of sexuality is a necessary and positive outcome of the legalization of same-sex marriage. the institution of marriage, they argue, will serve to civilize and regulate homosexuals according to the heterosexual values of monogamy, life-long commitment, private dependence and economic self-sufficiency (bell & binnie, 2000; josephson, 2005). thus, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 queer bedfellows of proposition 8 119 through the structure of marriage, homosexuals can and will assume the same civil responsibilities of their heterosexual counterparts and sexuality will become a matter of private concern. yet, as cossman contends, this privatization and silencing of sexuality obscures the ever-present relationship between sexuality and social justice in terms of economic opportunities and prosperity, political rights and equality, and cultural discrimination (cossman, 2005). this attempt to demonstrate the “normality” of homosexuality and homosexuals is accompanied by a subtle call to distance the same-sex marriage movement from extreme, overt and scandalous expressions of homosexuality, represented by the “san francisco homosexuals.” mainstream same-sex marriage advocates define the san francisco homosexuals in the same fashion that social and religious conservatives do, as promiscuous, drugtaking, parade performing, leather wearing, sadomasochistic, irresponsible, childish, selfish and diseased individuals. in their document, “winning marriage back: report and analysis,” equality california argues: we also make sure there are stories in the local newspaper and on television about couples who live locally who are married, or who want to marry. voters see that marriage equality is not just those gays in san francisco, but the couple that lives down the street in bakersfield, or the daughter of their close friends, or the parents of their kid’s school friend. (equality california, 2009, p. 15) join the impact similarly pleads: we beg to be given a right that requires responsibility and commitment, yet we, as one strong community, have not proven to this nation that we deserve to be taken seriously! the gay pride parade has become a great party, but it has lost the memory of stonewall and therefore given the nation another reason to cast us aside as irresponsible. it’s time we come together for debate, for public recognition, and for love! (join the impact, 2008, november 10) these same-sex marriage advocates are finding a common enemy with religious and social conservatives: the abnormal, un-assimilable homosexual. as foucault and butler argue, these populations are portrayed as being un-assimilable and are thus delegitimized (butler, 2002; foucault, 2003). mainstream gay activists are essentially pushing the san francisco gays outside of the inclusive realm of the normal, legitimate and acceptable in order to bring the taxpaying, monogamous, childrearing homosexuals into the realm of legitimacy and privilege. as fraser argues, injustice occurs when a particular group of citizens is not permitted to participate in the political process or have equal access to economic and social benefits (fraser, 2005). instead of questioning the logic of inclusions and exclusions, the strategies of these californian gay and lesbian organizations are enabling injustice to occur against citizens who cannot or will not marry. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 120 alexa degagne 2. the form and function of same-sex marriage in tandem with their strategies of proving that homosexuals and homosexuality are non-threatening and normal, join the impact and the courage campaign have also tried to demonstrate that homosexual couples are identical with heterosexual couples in function if not in form as well. co-founder of join the impact, nik maciejewski argues: in the movement for lgbtq rights, specifically that of legal recognition of same sex relationships, activists and others place heavy emphasis on “marriage” being the only possible title to achieve full equality. equality can’t exist until lgbtq and straight people alike fill out the exact same form for the legal binding of two people. (join the impact, 2009, may 28) maciejewski believes that homosexual couples’ equality is dependent on their replication of the “exact same form” of married heterosexual relationships. similarly, amy balliett, co-founder of join the impact, argues that homosexual couples are similar to heterosexual couples in form as they are comprised of two parents with children and possibly extended family dependents. further, homosexual couples value and engage in monogamous, consensual, life-long relationships. the only difference is, of course, the gender of the two parents (join the impact, 2009, january 29). the contract remains between two adults and the state: the state needs only modify the gender criteria for belonging. to prove they are worthy of social inclusion, some same-sex marriage activists present homosexual couples as similar to heterosexuals in every valued category except for their sexuality (duggan and kim, 2006). join the impact, equality california and the courage campaign are more than willing to prove that homosexuals can and do fulfill the neoliberal criteria for the functions and responsibilities of marriage including the bearing and rearing of children, care for dependents, economic self-sufficiency, and augmented and constant consumer consumption (join the impact, 2009, january 29; equality california, 2009; courage campaign, 2009a). organizations on both sides of the proposition 8 debate launched video campaigns that were released on their respective websites and circulated through youtube and the other social media outlets. most pertinently, the courage campaign created two video series in support of the same-sex marriage effort in california: “13 love stories,” “fidelity: don’t divorce us” (courage campaign, 2009b). the series “13 love stories” is comprised of documentaries on the love stories of 13 non-heterosexual couples. the couples tell the story of how they met, why they love each other, how their families are structured and why they want the right to marry (courage campaign, 2009b). these couples are presented in their homes, often surrounded by their children. there is no denying the attempt to create affect through these videos. the message presented is that these couples’ families are as normal and their love as sacred as those of heterosexuals. the second video series, “fidelity: don’t divorce us,” was created by courage campaign but is promoted by join the impact as well. “fidelity” is studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 queer bedfellows of proposition 8 121 a collection of pictures of some of the 18,000 couples and their families and friends who were married in california before proposition 8. the couples and their families are photographed holding signs saying “please don’t divorce us,” “please don’t divorce our friends and family,” “please don’t divorce my moms,” “don’t divorce love” and so on. in addition, pictures are presented featuring the marriage ceremonies of gay couples. many of the marriage ceremonies mimic traditional heterosexual marriages. both christian and jewish traditions are showcased. as with “13 love stories,” emphasis is placed on affect as couples are shown with their children and extended families. finally, some of the pictures in the video cite the longevity of relationships as proof of their legitimacy. in some cases, captions read, for example, “been together for 18 years, married july 07, 2008” (courage campaign, 2009b). thus, these videos present californian gay couples as loving, monogamous, two-parent, child-bearing, and religious, propagating the way in which gay couples can assume the form of normal marriages. with emphasis placed on the economic benefits of same-sex marriage for the families involved, the state and business, these same-sex marriage advocates also argue that same-sex couples perform the necessary functions of marriage as required by neoliberal and social conservative ideologies. as stated, johnson et al. claim that neoliberals and social conservatives share the belief that the family becomes the default financial support as individuals live, consume, and procreate as family units (johnson, et al., 2005). social conservatives promote this arrangement as it assures the propagation of a gendered family form wherein mothers are not supported by the state in child bearing or rearing and thus must depend on their husbands who assume financial responsibility. neoliberals likewise propagate familial dependence because it assures the privatization of economic dependence, taking onus off the state (isin, et al., 2008). employing this neoliberal and social conservative discourse, join the impact, of the three organizations studied, made the most references to the economic benefits of same-sex marriage. a co-founder of join the impact has argued that homosexuals contribute to the economy as taxpayers and consumers and deserve state protections allocated to their heterosexual counterparts. as stated: “we are taxpaying citizens who contribute to this economy. we deserve legal protections from our government and marriage provides 10,000+ legal protections that are not awarded to our families!” (join the impact, 2008, november 14). this comment is referencing the “december 10, 2008: day without a gay” campaign, promoted by join the impact, calling homosexuals to take the day off work and avoid consuming for a day. join the impact argued that this boycott would demonstrate the economic power of the gay community across the united states. ultimately, join the impact is drawing a clear connection between the economic value of homosexual citizens and the need for their inclusion in the institution of marriage. in these campaigns, they have not questioned the privatization of economic dependence or the social conservative and neoliberal justifications for rewarding citizens based on their sexual, familial and intimate decisions. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 122 alexa degagne conclusion it has been shown that the three ‘no on proposition 8’ organizations studied here have adopted certain elements of social conservative and neoliberal political rationalities and their discourses in order to gain social and political inclusion through same-sex marriage. these organizations have tried to prove that homosexuality is normal and that the homosexual family is economically and socially beneficial for society. practitioners of identity group politics have focused on moving from spaces of exclusion to spaces of inclusion. when trying to move to spaces of inclusion, however, identity groups risk essentializing the voices or perspectives of the members of the group. this essentialization occurs as there is a tendency for excluded groups to assimilate to criteria of inclusion in order to gain acceptance. those who cannot easily assimilate are ignored, or worse yet, actively silenced by their supposed allies. the only excluded voices that are heard are of those members that can most easily conform to the criteria for inclusion. in the fight for same-sex marriage, these easily assimilable members are predominantly white, affluent men. therefore, while identity groups are usually established to protect the needs and rights of minorities, they can also serve to further marginalize, silence and therefore deny social justice to members of their groups who cannot or will not assimilate in order to move into the space of inclusion. the american gay and lesbian movement is not a monolithic entity wholly concerned with attaining same-sex marriage rights. despite the fact that popular media and discourse have focused on the gay and lesbian citizens and political organizations that are attempting to gain social and political inclusion through same-sex marriage, there is a substantial and vocal contingent that wants and needs to fundamentally challenge the political rationality of granting social inclusion, including allocating rights and status, through state-sanctioned 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(1990). justice and the politics of difference. princeton: princeton university press. microsoft word teeple.doc studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 136 honoured in the breach: human rights1 as principles of a past age2 gary teeple, simon fraser university abstract rights define the prevailing relations that constitute a community. they are in turn defined by the character of a given mode of production, and as that changes so too the system of rights. the rights that comprise “human rights” evolved in the transition from feudalism to capitalism and represent the principles of the emerging world order in the 18th and 19th centuries. only in the aftermath of world war ii with the exhaustion or defeat of the european states and japan was it possible to declare these same principles as belonging to the whole world equally and as intrinsic to all humans yet within national frameworks. the accumulation of capital on a global scale, however, soon began to undermine the national practice of these human rights. by the end of the 1980s the construction of regional or global “enabling frameworks,” quasi-states for capital, detached from any formal or legitimate means of countervailing political leverage, made human rights appear increasingly like anachronisms. an increasingly violent usurpation of the universal declaration of human rights and other forms of rights around the world followed. in the absence of a legitimizing set of principles for this new global economy, a growing need for a rationale to govern by fiat becomes the central problem of the day. property relations define the nature of all communities; they constitute the rights or claims or entitlements to the use and disposal of the goods and services that are essential to the reproduction of the social unit. as a relationship, property is synonymous with rights, the socially legitimated relations that members of a social unit have to each other with respect to the social product. the distribution of power over the means of production and share of the social product are expressed in the form of prevailing rights. appearing in a wide variety of forms, these rights may be possessed by a whole community as a collective, or by smaller social groups such as families, clans, bands, classes, or other social aggregates. in a system of private property, the prevailing form of right is that possessed by the individual exclusive of others (blackstone, 1765; macpherson, 1978; macpherson, 1985). all rights are socially sanctioned; in stateless social formations, however, the sanction will be informal or customary, while in systems with a state it will be formal 1 human rights discussed here refer to those rights found in the universal declaration of human rights and associated conventions and covenants. the term is also used loosely to refer to many other claims and demands made by various groups, but this broad use makes the concept ‘human’ redundant, because all rights in this sense are human rights. the udhr refers to specific rights declared as human in un forums and accepted as such by wide international agreement. 2 paper presented at the human rights in a globalizing era? conference, university of windsor, ontario, august 2005. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 137 and legally enforceable. customs or states, then, merely ratify or confirm the legitimacy of the rights; they provide a seal of authority; but they are not the source of the character or content of the rights. if rights are at one with the distribution of power and the share of the social product, then, the origin of rights lies where this distribution arises in the mode of production and accompanying social division of labour, the set of relations that obtain in the process of material reproduction. for every variation in the mode of production, there is then an alteration in the rights that reflect these changes and the consequent differential access to the social product. the history of rights, it follows, is the reflection of the history of changing modes of production and their respective social relations.3 the breakdown of feudalism with the advent of the rise of private property took place over several centuries, but at each stage of the transformation there were demands for a growing number of rights for "free men” whose “freedom” lay mainly in the individual possession of certain means of production and accumulated wealth unencumbered by feudal obligations. when wealth, as capital in moveable form, has accumulated sufficiently to challenge the totality of feudal rights (which rested on landed wealth in a non-monied economy) those demands necessarily took on a revolutionary character.4 having grown to the point at which feudal property relations significantly frustrated further private accumulation, capital precipitated the so-called “age of revolution” in which new property relations reflecting a capitalist mode of production were proclaimed in one country after another. their principles were placed at the centre of their new constitutions. the american and french revolutions were the first to overturn completely the remaining feudal property relations that had culminated in monarchical absolutism. in their place, the french “declaration of the rights of man and citizen” (1789) and the american “bill of rights” (1791) proclaimed coherent sets of rights that made the relations of commerce into the definition of a new society. the principles of the marketplace had become the defining characteristics of the new “community” (hobsbawn, 1968; hobsbawn, 1996; de toqueville, 1953). in these declarations, there is no vision of genuine community; there is only the mutual interdependence of buyers and sellers. members of society are related to each other, not as social beings deriving meaning from each other, but as isolated individuals with mutually exclusive and competitive interests – their interdependence guided by the tenets of commercial exchange. with the atomized individual as the basic social unit, human relations were transformed into relations mediated by money; humans were defined as embodiments of private exclusive rights. the role of the state was defined mainly as protector of the sanctity of these private rights in this society as marketplace. all the rights asserted in these declarations have as their foundation the individual as private property incarnate; this was the basis of the new societies born in the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. such rights were compelling because they rested on an empirically obvious fundamental unit of community, the individual (albeit not as a social being), and liberating because they freed whole strata and classes from the life-long restrictions, oppression, and arbitrariness of feudal relations by 3 this argument is taken from k. marx and f. engels (1845). 4 for an interesting class analysis of political change, see: c. a. beard (1957). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 138 providing the framework for the power of moveable capital to expand more or less without restraint. as the principles of a new mode of production with a long course to run, they were proclaimed as universal and absolute, and inspired the ruling classes of both france and the united states to expand their revolutions with all the confidence of forces backed by the truth. these principles were far from universal or absolute, however. above all, they were national declarations whose practical reach did not extend beyond the limits of the nation-state. even within national boundaries, they did not extend to women, certain racial and religious groups, particular strata and classes, or colonized peoples. despite these contradictions, the principles of private property continued to find widespread support, particularly among aspiring bourgeois classes in nations or colonies suffering arbitrary rule (james, 1963) because they offered a promise of freedom from oppression, albeit the “freedom” of moveable capital.5 the circumstances that arose in the aftermath of world war ii allowed for a change to some of the national limitations to these rights of “man” and citizen. the united states was the only real victor in the war, emerging as the chief military power over western europe and asia, the most industrially advanced with a home “front” undamaged by the war, and as the main creditor to britain and the european powers, while all the other industrial powers were economically devastated – their industries and infrastructure worn out or destroyed and their populations exhausted by years of war and/or occupation. for these reasons, the us was in a position to model the postwar capitalist world in its own image. in 1944, even before the war ended, the us began to set the stage for a transformed postwar world. at a conference in bretton woods, the basis of the postwar international economic system was established in which the american dollar was made central and the world bank and the imf, among other institutions, were created to oversee international trade and commerce. in 1947 these institutions were complemented by the formation of gatt, a mechanism to negotiate the progressive removal of national barriers to world trade and to establish global regulations for freer commerce. at another conference in san francisco, the united nations was established as the political foundation of a “new international world order.” throughout its early years, the un oversaw much of the process of decolonization, and was used to contain the demands for socialism throughout the colonial world and to advance the principles of liberal democracy and private property. to complete this remaking of the world, the us promoted the creation of larger markets (a “united states of europe,” among other regional units); it financed the rebuilding of capitalism in europe (unrra and the marshall plan); and it set out to subordinate the military forces of capitalist nations through treaties and pacts that it dominated (in particular, among others, nato). 5 the ravages of industrial capitalism and the rise of the working class gave rise to another concept of freedom, as first formulated in the communist manifesto. here, the notion of freedom was grounded in the unity of the majority class and to be realized in democratic, critical, class control over the means of production and distribution of the social product. freedom in this sense is to be realized within social relations; it is the right that follows from membership or inclusion in a community; it is not a private right arising from exclusive, individual relations to the social product and whose realization is necessarily antisocial. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 139 although these changes greatly benefited us corporations, their import lay in the fact that they facilitated the extension of the principles of private property. in other words, what the us was demanding for the world would benefit capital in general, notwithstanding the dominance of us capital and the continuing competition between national capitals. to create a global capitalist regime, the us was the only power in a position to dismantle the colonial empires yet retain the new nations within the orbit of capital, to work for “free trade” within the same compass, and to promote and protect capitalist relations throughout the “free” world. simultaneous with these developments, the united nations began to formulate the set of principles that would reflect this new world order, justify the imposition of capitalism in the post-colonial world, confront the widespread demands for socialism, and yet seem universal, absolute, and unassailable. the civil and political rights of liberal democracies were by and large unquestioned as the definitive or essential rights belonging to all humans. there was very limited philosophical critique of the principles of private property underlying these rights, and no existing alternative to point to. the constitution of the soviet union closely approximated a model republican system, in which representatives of the people purportedly exercised sovereign power through elections. its main difference with liberal democracy in the west was that actual power rested with those who controlled state capital rather than those who controlled large private corporations. after considerable debate amongst the drafters, certain principles (belonging to liberal democracy, a historically particular system) were agreed upon, systematized, and proclaimed as universal and extended to the whole world in the form of the universal declaration of human rights (udhr). the soviets made a difference during the formulation of the udhr, it should be mentioned, by insisting on the inclusion of the so-called “economic, social and cultural rights” (articles 22-27 in the udhr) that reflected parts of their own constitution (articles 118-122 in 1936) that were, and still are, for the most part absent in capitalist constitutions. given the vagueness of these rights, the general postwar circumstances, and the fact that the udhr was meant more as statement of principles than a basis for policies and programs, the inclusion of these articles was not deemed by the us or other western powers as overly problematic6 (though undesirable and inconsistent with civil and political rights). proclaimed in 1948, the udhr contains three sets of rights civil, political, and social (commonly referred to as “economic, social, and cultural rights”). often overlooked, one of the most significant achievements of the declaration is that it stands as the first international authoritative affirmation that all humans are human. coming remarkably late in history, this recognition nevertheless represents a milestone in the development of human consciousness. that we are all fully human is now accepted as a self-evident truth, which was far from the case before 1948. because the udhr was 6 the udhr itself carries no obligation by un members to enact or enforce the contents; the preamble calls merely for ‘teaching and education to promote respect for these rights…and by progressive measures…to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance.’ only in 1966 were covenants devised to cover the three sets of rights and oblige the signatories to enact and enforce them. these covenants -the international covenant on civil and political rights and the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights – ‘entered into force’ only in 1977. the united states signed the former in 1977 and the later only in 1992, but has not ratified either of them. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 140 the first international proclamation and embodiment of this truth, it carries enormous weight as a general statement of human absolutes. but this assertion is really a halftruth. the human in the declaration is a particular vision of the human; it is the human as a self-sufficient atomized individual, the human as possessor of exclusive private rights. such is the conception of the human because the rights proclaimed are the principles of the marketplace, which assume as their foundation the individual as the embodiment of private property. that the human in the first international declaration that all humans are human should come in the form of a historical particular is a paradox. to put it another way, that the rights of the individual as private property incarnate are defined as human rights is a paradox. this contradiction in the udhr, however, has begun to be exposed in the growing demands for various collective rights by classes, groups, strata, women, children, regions, nations, and indigenous peoples. not to mention rights in the name of all humanity claims for all as all that may extend to a global redistribution of wealth, cooperative self-determination, environmental protection, world peace, and the expansion of the global commons – rights that strictly speaking are not in accord with the human rights of the udhr. the definition of human in human rights is challenged and transformed by these growing struggles for broad sets of collective countervailing rights. there are very few rights in the udhr that do not reveal similar contradictions arising from the changing political economy of the late twentieth century. just as the civil, political, and social rights that evolved through several centuries changed in concert with developments in the mode of production and class conflict, so now these same rights are undergoing dramatic changes because of globalization. we understand globalization as the shift of the process of capital accumulation from the national to the transnational level, grounded in massive technological changes primarily based on computer development. the construction of global and regional enabling frameworks (quasi-states for capital, detached from any formal or legitimate means of countervailing political leverage) greatly facilitated this transfer. several of these regulatory structures were created at bretton woods in 1944. at the same time that the global framework for a global economy was being established, a set of universal rights wedded to the nation state was being formulated. it was inevitable, then, that the shift to a global economy would gradually and necessarily subordinate all rights at the national level to the rights of transnational corporations. the whole structure of human rights in the udhr, evolving over several centuries and belonging to the national configuration of capital, comes into question as the national state loses its sovereignty. states find it increasingly difficult to uphold these rights in the face of the demands of transnational corporations (tncs), which are defined and asserted by supra-national agencies, not to mention the corporations themselves. under these circumstances, civil rights in the udhr become increasingly a question of corporate versus individual civil rights. corporate civil rights, exercised by global or regional corporate oligopolies in every sector, progressively usurp individual civil rights at the national level. the rights of freedom of assembly and association, for example, are restricted in the world-wide circumscription or denial of trade union rights, nationally and globally, and in the “enclosure” of public spaces by means of private ownership. freedom of speech and thought and cultural expression are studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 141 increasingly limited by growing concentration of global corporate media (mcchesney, 2000; winter, 1997; schiller, 1989). freedom of movement is restrained by the privatization of the means of transit. corporate patents, moreover, on seeds and other biological or genetic material and on pharmaceutical drugs have been upheld by the wto as more important than the rights of non-corporate entities or even of any human or environmental consideration. in general, global intellectual rights are intended to override all similar rights at the national level (drahos and mayne, 2002). legal rights are also usurped by increasing costs of lawyers and judicial proceedings and the decline of state legal aid. these are only some examples of similar usurpations across the entire range of civil rights (hartmann, 2002; mander and goldsmith, 1996). political rights are also being undermined. the right to be elected, for instance, has always depended on the amount of money available to spend on the campaign, but now this is so more than ever. electoral office increasingly becomes the preserve of the rich or of those who, for a price, do the bidding of the corporations (hertz, 2003; palast, 2002; parenti, 1983). national political office, moreover, provides jurisdiction over territory limited by national boundaries, a jurisdiction increasingly overridden by transnational agencies and organizations. the more self-evident these restrictions to political power become, the more the right to vote seems pointless – an attitude that would appear to be reflected in voter apathy, where voting is not a legal obligation. universal suffrage has always presented a dilemma for large corporations; political rule in the name of the majority represents opposing principles and practices to the “market” in the allocation of social resources. the principle of “majority rule,” furthermore, holds the possibility of the majority actually taking control of its own affairs, or at least protecting its interests via the state. the “threat” of universal enfranchisement is today, however, constrained by the content of much legislation determined by global organizations and agencies. all capitalist governments, in the face of global agencies, have effectively relinquished much of their sovereign right to promulgate laws for the protection of their citizens or even to defend what they may consider to be national interests.7 the practice of competing political parties which is central to liberal democracy also loses its meaning. competing political parties in capitalist governments have generally represented the interests of one division of national capital or another and advocated more or less reform to the system. when the corporate sector, however, becomes structured as monopolies, oligopolies, or cartels and is organized transnationally and represented by agencies at the global level, there is no need from their point of view for competing political parties. certain differences between sectors of capital may remain, but these are now fought out, increasingly, in global forums. liberal democracy progressively descends into “coalition” governments, single dominant party systems, or the sham of competition between political parties with more or less the same agenda. social rights have, most obviously, come under attack because they provide a certain respite for the working classes from the terror of an unmitigated labour market 7 demands, conditions, recommendations, and rules and regulations from supra-national bodies are more the source of national legislation today than national interests. market consolidation in the form of the european community or multinational trade agreements (nafta, mercosur), and wto regulations are just some of the supra-national constraints facing all national and regional or local governments. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 142 and the dictates of the workplace and because they create “spheres” in civil society (in education, health, social security) that are not directly subject to so-called market principles and the unmitigated pursuit of private profit. from the point of view of transnational capital, however, all social rights present barriers to capital accumulation. they represent political choices rather than “market” mechanisms as a means of resource allocation. they “tie up” vast amounts of capital outside the realm of private accumulation. for these reasons, neo-liberal and structural adjustment policies have been aimed at limiting state-provided entitlements and have obliged broad changes to national control over social reproduction by means of de-regulation and privatization. these now obvious contradictions between human rights and the changing global political economy confirm at least a couple of critical assessments of the udhr. first, the declaration reflects principles that are far from absolute. in fact, they appear to be from a past era, a period in which national sovereignty had a certain validity grounded in national configurations of capital, in which political choice was possible as long as the dominance of private property was not challenged, and in which economic conditions allowed for or necessitated compromise in the expansion of social rights to address class conflict. second, these contradictions reveal that human rights are not, and never were, a coherent, consistent, or integral set of rights. principles marked by irresolvable inconsistencies can make no claim to being permanent, conclusive, or universal. even in the period in which these principles were first proclaimed and hailed as absolute they were never fully realized in the countries that promoted them. the system that gave rise to them at no point fulfilled the promise embedded in the udhr. in fact, in the early 1970s there was sufficient concern amongst the powers that be about the realization of these rights that they were made the object of special study. the trilateral commission authorized research into the “problem.” the results were published in 1975, entitled: “the crisis of democracy.” the crisis was not about too little democracy but an “excess of democracy.” too many demands were being made on the state, an obvious reference to the growing realization of social rights through political means and the “high” expectations of the citizenry that had to be curbed. the report made recommendations on how to limit these demands, pointing out that for the system to function in a “balanced” way “some measure of apathy and noninvolvement” was required. a passive citizenry was necessary to the operation of liberal democracy (wolfe, 1980; crozier, huntington and watanuk, 1975). by 1977, when the two covenants covering the udhr had “entered into force,” obliging signatory governments to respect these rights and ensure their fulfillment, they were already suffering criticism and under assault. the elections of margaret thatcher (1979) and ronald reagan (1980) introduced systematic attacks on the whole range of human rights. human rights are increasingly subordinated to corporate civil rights which are, now established and advanced at the transnational level. they come into question because they were largely established, and are, by and large, only enforceable, within the nation-state. the national state, however, has lost much of its traditional role as the embodiment of national corporate property relations. it increasingly represents global property relations, and, as such, it is reduced to a “local” state mechanism to advance these relations. the sovereignty of liberal democratic industrial nation-states, that at studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 143 best afforded the working classes a measure of social reform as ‘welfare states’ through political leverage, now becomes, increasingly, an illusion. the agencies of the “enabling frameworks” are anything but democratic. they are staffed by bureaucrats and appointed officials, and decisions about policies and practice are often determined by the relative weight of national economic power. there is no meaningful access to the decision-making process other than by career bureaucrats and representatives of governments and tncs. most of their business, moreover, is conducted in camera, out of view of the world’s public. the working classes and other subordinate groups and peoples have little or no recourse to decisions and policies at the global level other than extra-parliamentary or extra-legal action. there is, then, a contradiction between the persistence of national governing systems that pretend democracy and an adherence to human rights and a global or regional economy organized and overseen by transnational agencies representing transnational corporate rights. although the world’s populations have come to believe in the rights embodied in the universal declaration of human rights (udhr), and similar regional declarations, the practice and enforcement of these rights8 and the popular belief in them only hinder the exercise of transnational corporate rights. the very system that gave rise to these rights is no longer able to respect them. to replace a political system of competing parties and a certain reality of human rights with openly arbitrary rule, however, is to make oppression or subordination or unfree conditions more transparent, and opens the door to increased resistance. resistance to despotism is never a matter of choice but of obligation arising from the human condition. the preamble the udhr warns: “…it is essential, if man [the authors meant to say ‘humans’] is not to be compelled to have recourse…to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.” there is no long-term future in a globalized economy for the nationally based liberal democracy that reached its zenith of achievement for working people in the 1960s and early 1970s. if, however, arbitrary rule or military dictatorship are problematic because they discredit the imposition of global corporate rights on the nation-state, the political options that remain are limited: democracy can reduced to, more or less, a formality or a plausible reason can be found to circumvent constitutional processes or a measure of both. in the industrial nations, the constitutional systems are becoming increasingly more a question of form than content, choices of wrapping for a single set of permitted policies, elections without meaning, mechanisms to “let the people do it to themselves,” thereby obscuring the real power relations. when ruling illusions become unconvincing, however, a probable reason to govern by fiat is needed. seen in this light, the attacks on september 11, 2001, take on a new meaning. they can be taken as the denouement of the process of globalization, the point at which 8 besides the udhr, there are several regional declarations, namely, the european convention for the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms (1953), the american convention on human rights (1969), the helsinki agreement (1975), african charter on human and peoples’ rights (1981), universal islamic declaration of human rights (1981), the cairo declaration on human rights in islam (1990), and arab charter on human rights (1994). it is important to note that none of these documents contains genuinely effective mechanisms to protect or enforce these rights. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 144 the illusions of a world of sovereign states come to an end, and the power of a single global authority is asserted as preeminent.9 it marks the moment that the many contradictions of a world of declining national powers are resolved into a single set of dominant oppositions the demands of tncs in the shape of global and regional frameworks and other blocs, largely overseen by washington, confront the rights of all other sectors, classes, and peoples. the contradiction can be seen in the growing shift from the rule of law (articles 6-12, udhr) to political arbitrariness, in the corporate usurpation of individual civil rights, in the increasing meaninglessness of political participation, and in the dismantling of the welfare state. violations and abrogations of the whole range of human rights – breaches of what were once the system’s very principles – become continuous and increasingly tolerated and justified as means to counter the threat of terror, the source of which remains a question mark (daniels, et al., 2001; olshansky, 2002; chang, 2002; cole and dempsey, 2002; leone and anrig, 2003; schulhofer, 2002; brown, 2003; hentoff, 2003; deller et al., 2003; mandel, 2004). the concept of terror has been so broadly defined as to include almost all acts of resistance and all criticism of the status quo. yet, state terrorism (in the form of assassinations, disappearances, death squads, arrest and imprisonment without habeas corpus, restrictions on civil and political liberties, retrenchment of social rights, land seizures/dispossession, small arms trade, sanctioned torture, and so on), justified as counter-terrorism, is everywhere vastly more significant than terror perpetuated by non-state actors. terror appears, for now, to be the rationale to govern increasingly by fiat in a world in which the foundation of national liberal democracy is rapidly disappearing. 9 this is not to say that this power is left unchallenged by other blocs of capital (europe, the shanghai cooperation organization, the mercosur nations) but those blocs are no more interested in human rights than the us. the real challenger has yet to come as an organized force from the people of the world. for similar interpretations of 9/11, see: n. m. ahmed (2002); n. chomsky. (2001); m. chossudovsky. (2002). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 2, 2007 issn: 1911-4788 145 references beard, c. a. (1957). the economic basis of politics. new york: vintage press. blackstone, w. (1765). commentaries on the laws of england. brown, c. (ed.). (2003). lost liberties: ashcroft and the assault on personal freedoms. new york: the new press. chang, n. (2002). silencing political dissent: how post-september 11 anti-terrorism measures threaten our civil liberties. new york: seven stories. cole, d. & dempsey, j. (2002). terrorism and the constitution: sacrificing civil liberties in the name of national security. new york: the new press. crozier, m., huntington, s.p. & watanuki, j. (1975). the crisis of democracy: report on the governability of democracies to the trilateral commission. new york: new york university press. daniels, r.j., macklem, p., & roach, k. (eds.). the security of freedom: essays on canada’s antiterrorism bill. toronto: university of toronto press. deller, n., makhijani, a. & burroughs, j. (eds.). (2003). rule of power or rule of law? an assessment of u.s. policies and actions regarding security-related treaties. new york: the apex press. drahos, p. and mayne, r. (eds.). (2002). global intellectual property rights. new york: palgrave/macmillan. james, c.l.r. (1963). the black jacobins: toussaint l’ouverture and the san domingo revolution. new york: vintage books. leone, r. c. & anrig, g. (eds.). (2003). the war on our freedoms: civil liberties in an age of terrorism. new york: the century foundation. hartmann, t. (2002). unequal protection. the rise of corporate dominance and the theft of human rights. rodale: st martin’s press. hentoff, n. (2003). the war on the bill of rights and the gathering resistance. new york: seven stories. hertz, n. (2003). the silent takeover: global capitalism and the death of democracy. new york: harperbusiness. hobsbawn, e. j. (1996). the age of revolution 1789-1848. new york: vintage books. hobsbawn, e.j. (1968). industry and empire. harmondsworth: penguin books. macpherson, c.b. (1985). problems of human rights in the late twentieth century. the rise and fall of economic justice. oxford: oxford university press. macpherson, c.b. (1978). the meaning of property. property. toronto: university of toronto press. mandel, m. (2004). how america gets away with murder: illegal wars, collateral damage and crimes against humanity. london: pluto press. mander, j. & goldsmith, e. (eds.), (1996). the case against the global economy. san francisco: sierra club. marx, k. and engels, f. (1845). the german ideology mcchesney, r. w. (2000). corporate media and the threat to democracy. new york: seven stories press. olshansky, b. (2002). secret trials and executions: military tribunals and the threat to democracy. new york: seven stories press. palast, g. (2002). the best democracy that money can buy. london: pluto press. parenti, m. (1983). democracy for the few. new york: st. martins. schiller, h. i. (1989). culture inc., the corporate takeover of public expression. new york: oxford university press. schulhofer, s. (2002). the enemy within: intelligence gathering, law enforcement, and civil liberties in the wake of september 11. new york: the century foundation. teeple, gary. (2005, august). human rights in a globalizing era? paper presented at the centre for studies in social justice conference, university of windsor, ontario. toqueville, a. de. (1953). the old regime and the french revolution. garden city: doubleday and co. winter, j. (1997). democracy’s oxygen: how corporations control the news. montreal: black rose books. wolfe, a. (1980). capitalism shows its face: giving up on democracy. in h. sklar (ed.), trilateralism: the trilateral commission and elite planning for world management. montreal: black rose books. correspondence address: david harper, school of psychology, the university of east london, stratford campus, water lane, london, e15 4lz united kingdom. tel.: +44 (0)20 8223 4021, email: d.harper@uel.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 6, issue 1, 9-25, 2012 uncovering recovery: the resistible rise of recovery and resilience david harper school of psychology, university of east london, united kingdom ewen speed school of health and human sciences. university of essex, united kingdom abstract discourses of recovery and resilience have risen to positions of dominance in the mental health field. models of recovery and resilience enjoy purchase, in both policy and practice, across a range of settings from self-described psychiatric survivors to mental health charities through to statutory mental health service providers. despite this ubiquity, there is confusion about what recovery means. in this article we problematize notions of recovery and resilience, and consider what, if anything, should be recovered from these concepts. we focus on three key issues, i) individualization, ii) the persistence of a deficit model, and iii) collective approaches to recovery. through documentary analysis we consider these issues across third sector organizations, and public and mental health policy. firstly, definitional debates about recovery reflect wider ideological debates about the nature of mental health. the vagueness of these concepts and implicit assumptions inherent in dominant recovery and resilience discourses render them problematic because they individualize what are social problems. secondly, these discourses, despite being seen as inherently liberatory are conceptually dependent on a notion of deficit in that talk of “positives” and “strengths” requires the existence of “negatives” and “weaknesses” for these concepts to make sense. we argue that this does little to substantially transform dominant understandings of psychological distress. thirdly, these issues combine to impact upon the progressive potential of recovery. it comes to be seen as an individualistic experiential narrative accompaniment to medical understandings where the structural causes of distress are obscured. this in turn impacts upon the potential for recovery to be used to explore more collective and political aspects of emotional distress. drawing on the work of fraser, we use this critique to characterize “recovery” as a “struggle for recognition,” founded on a model of identity politics which displaces and marginalizes the need for social, political and economic redistribution to address many of the underlying causes of emotional distress. we conclude by stating that it is only when the collective, structural experiences of inequality and injustice are explicitly linked to processes of emotional distress that recovery will be possible. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 9 david harper and ewen speed introduction people who experience psychological distress also experience social injustice. this injustice impacts upon their social, economic and political lives. for example, the social patterning of distress reflects broader social inequalities (mirowsky & ross, 2003) as does people’s experience of mental health services (pilgrim, 2009; rogers & pilgrim, 2003). furthermore, the acquisition of psychiatric diagnoses may also present barriers to full time employment, or create barriers to housing (social exclusion unit, 2004). these barriers to full social, political and economic participation can be characterized as a problem of redistributive justice (fraser, 2000). mental health service users and survivors also experience devalued identities through the acquisition of psychiatric diagnoses. fraser (2000) identifies this as a problem of recognition, whereby a normatively framed negative aspect of identity stigmatizes a particular group. one of the sources of such devaluation is the way in which psychiatric terminology is deficit-laden and pathologizing (gergen, 1990). however, in recent years, the popular and professional literature has become increasingly dominated by concepts that appear to reject a deficit-based approach. in this article we focus on two of these concepts in more detail: recovery and resilience. we consider the possibilities these concepts offer people in the mental health field, in particular, in terms of struggles around the politics of recognition and redistribution. we provide a perspective from the uk, where the recovery approach has been gradually appearing in mental health policy over the last decade (perkins & slade, 2012). that the notion of recovery has moved from being a marginal to a central concern in mental health services in the uk (pilgrim, 2008), north america (anthony, 1991, 1993), australia and new zealand (australian health ministers, 2003; o’hagan, 2001; ramon, healy, & renouf, 2007) and elsewhere in a relatively short amount of time is striking. although proponents argue that the focus on recovery and resilience is a uniformly positive development, in this article we problematize this stance. as with many taken-for-granted concepts, there are a number of unintended consequences that flow from their use in a policy context—consequences that may not be obvious to many survivors and professionals and which may even be inconsistent with the stated aims of authors. moreover, these developments have tended to be framed within a broad framework informed by identity politics. this has significant implications for issues of social and distributive justice in terms of mental health service users and survivors. in this paper, we will critique three aspects of discourse related to recovery and resilience as they are utilized in policy frameworks. firstly, we argue that these concepts are individualistic, based on medicalized and neoliberal notions of individual responsibility. this individualism is commensurate with the rise of neoliberal identity politics, focused on individualizing disparate group struggles of recognition rather than collective struggles around redistribution. secondly, we contend that, rather than banishing deficit, recovery and resilience discourse simply reframes deficits as strengths and studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 uncovering recovery 10 is thus implicitly reliant on deficit-based models. this failure to challenge the underlying deficit inherent in contemporary notions of recovery results in a situation whereby recovery can be seen to present barriers to social and political participation. in turn this can be seen as extending (rather than limiting) the stigmatization of the identified group (i.e. perpetuating their status subordination, see fraser, 2000, 2005, 2007). finally, we note how important structural factors (health and social inequalities) are de-emphasized and backgrounded within a neoliberally informed framework of identity politics. these three aspects of recovery and resilience obstruct rather than facilitate efforts to improve the situations of mental health service users/survivors, obscuring the social and political links between distress and structural injustice. moreover, the focus on the individual means that the collective responses to injustice seen in the activities of the broader survivor movement are downplayed. finally, the failure to escape deficit-laden discourse means that there is a restricted conceptual repertoire available to problematize these inadequacies. the paper includes both a documentary and conceptual analysis of these notions, focusing primarily on recovery (since this concept is founded on an assumption of resilience). first we define the concepts. defining resilience and recovery the nature of resilience resilience refers to an ability to respond to and cope with adversity. evidence to support the notion of resilience as an aspect of mental health includes a consistent research finding that rates of mental distress vary between people from apparently similar backgrounds. similarly, goldberg and huxley, (1992) discuss the notion of spontaneous restitution whereby a proportion of people experiencing mental distress spontaneously improve without external intervention. resilience was promoted by the humanistic psychotherapies in the 1940s and 1950s, and the human potential movement of the 1960s promulgated the notion of self-healing human beings. in terms of the historical development of “resilience,” these approaches combined with libertarian professional movements (such as the 1970s radical non-interventionist social work). by the late 1980s there was a move towards solution-focused therapy (de shazer, 1988) and, within mainstream psychology, towards positive psychology (seligman, 1998). this entailed creating a research paradigm where the emphasis was on psychological processes that were deemed to be protective or ameliorating rather than those which were deemed to focus on deficits. it is in these broad therapeutic contexts that the problematic notions of resilience and recovery developed. one important distinction to be made is between the term recovery and the notion of recovery. many commentators conflate the two, which can studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 11 david harper and ewen speed lead to confusion. thus chamberlin’s groundbreaking on our own (1978) is sometimes credited as part of the history of the recovery movement. however, the actual term recovery only appears twice in the whole book, both times mentioned only in passing. as davidson, o’connell, tondora, lawless, & evans (2005) note “the only thing about which most stakeholders seem to be able to agree, in fact, is that the notion of recovery has become the focus of a considerable amount of confusion and debate between and among various constituencies within the mental health community” (p. 480). the origins of the recovery model in mental health lie in the work of william anthony (1991, 1993). broadly speaking, it is a highly individualized and experiential concept, which proposes a framework for recovery from “mental illness,” based on individual changes to attitudes, behaviours and beliefs by the psychiatric patient. anthony notes that the work of survivors like deegan (see deegan, 1998) was one of the inspirations for this approach and deegan does, indeed use both the concept and the term recovery. in the context of this paper, it is worthy of note that survivor groups tend to place more emphasis on the work of deegan and other survivors, in their use of recovery. pilgrim (2008) delineates three competing versions of the recovery approach: a biomedical version focused solely on an improvement in symptomatology; a more socially-oriented model, in the tradition of psychiatric rehabilitation, focused on improvements in symptoms and quality of life; and a psychiatric survivor movement approach focused on liberation rather than cure. for example, for those survivors who popularize notions of recovery—like deegan (1998)—their main concern is, arguably, to critique the narrow limits of traditional notions of rehabilitation and with developing narratives of hope, rather than delineating a model per se. moreover, some survivors see the notion of recovery as the antithesis of a reductive professional-led model. coleman (1999) explicitly advocates a political notion of recovery, contrasting it against a psychiatric conceptualization. dillon (2011) also outlines a political and collective approach to recovery, contrasting it with a biomedical approach, arguing that “improving all of our personal experiences means that we must collectively address oppressive political structures. this for me is why the personal is political” (2011, p. 157). we return to this issue later. within the literature, anthony’s is not the only model (see, for example, jacobson & greenley, 2001). in their review of recovery models leamy, bird, le boutillier, williams, & slade (2011) examined 97 separate contributions. in addition, there have been attempts to clarify, through qualitative research with service users/survivors, key elements in accounts of recovery from distress (adame & hornstein, 2006; adame & knudson, 2008; cohen, 2005; ochocka, nelson, & janzen, 2005; young & ensing, 1999). this range of competing versions means that specific concepts of recovery are often vague. we present some analysis of policy documents to offer some empirical grounding to the ways in which recovery is being used in a practical context. we identify three key problems. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 uncovering recovery 12 three problematic aspects of recovery and resilience discourse we now proceed by demonstrating the three elements of this critique through documentary analysis, before relating this analysis to wider concerns around social justice. 1. individualization no health without mental health (department of health, 2011) is a uk “crossgovernment mental health outcomes strategy” intended to establish parity of treatment between services for people with mental and those with physical health problems. in one sense, it can be regarded as an attempt to redress some of the status subordination experienced by mental health service users. it is selected for analysis here because it offers a governmental narrative of how recovery is defined and operationalized in a policy context. recovery is explicitly defined in section two of the strategy, under the heading of “guiding values and principles.” these are listed as “freedom, fairness, and responsibility,” (2011, p. 16). the definition of recovery is listed under the first of these values (freedom). within this definition, recovery is outlined through reference to a detailed footnote that describes recovery as follows: the term “recovery” has developed a specific meaning in mental health. it has been defined as: “a deeply personal, unique process of changing one’s attitudes, values, feelings, goals, skills and/or roles. it is a way of living a satisfying, hopeful and contributing life, even with limitations caused by the illness. recovery involves the development of new meaning and purpose in one’s life” (anthony, 1993) . . . although the term is not used in relation to children and young people, the underlying principles of the recovery approach are equally applicable. this quote from anthony offers the most frequently used interpretation of what recovery is, and how it relates to a person’s mental health. the onus for recovery is on the individual, whereby that individual must change their attitudes, values, feelings, goals, skills and roles, in a deeply personal way, in order to effect change within their own life. rather than effecting social change, the marginalized other is required to change their personal outlook. by failing to problematize the medical model, anthony’s model requires that the person accept that they have an illness (i.e. that they endorse the medical model). recovery is thus framed as the need for the service user to acknowledge the inappropriateness of their negative beliefs, values and behaviours and to rethink these “inappropriate” cognitions and behaviours into a set of more satisfying, hopeful and contributory values and behaviours. this model of recovery makes emotional distress an explicit problem of individualized identity, rather than for example, an effect of structural inequality. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 13 david harper and ewen speed the individualized personal nature of recovery is a central theme across another uk policy document, this time from rethink, a leading uk mental health membership charity. the document is entitled 100 ways to support recovery (slade, 2009). like the cross government strategy this document draws from the work of anthony to provide a framework for recovery but adds a distinction between “personal recovery” (seen as within the domain of the “expertise of people with lived experience of mental illness”) and “clinical recovery” (seen as within the domain of the “expertise of mental health professionals”). clinical recovery is concerned with the eradication of symptoms, the restoration of “social functioning” and other ways of “getting back to normal,” (p. 4). this distinction functions to effectively locate “personal recovery” as an adjunct to clinical recovery, and this complementarity avoids recovery being seen as inherently contested. the document outlines four “personal recovery tasks” (p. 4). these are listed as: i) developing a positive identity; ii) framing the “mental illness”1; iii) self-managing the mental illness; and, iv) developing valued social roles. we focus on the third task, which illustrates an important aspect of an individualistic approach to recovery: responsibilization. neoliberal policies invite people to see certain problems as the responsibility of the individual rather than, for example, the state. as a result, taking personal responsibility (through self-management) of the “mental illness experience” (p. 4) entails, as lemke argues “shifting the responsibility for social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty, etc., and for life in society into the domain for which the individual is responsible and transforming it into a problem of ‘self-care’” (lemke, 2001, p. 201). for example, the document states, “framing the mental illness experience provides a context in which it becomes one of life’s challenges, allowing the ability to self-manage to develop. the transition is from being clinically managed to taking personal responsibility through self-management,” (p. 4). this program of self-care, lemke argues, is tightly aligned with neoliberal forms of government, which “characteristically develop indirect techniques for leading and controlling individuals without at the same time being responsible for them,” (p. 201). an example of this can be seen in the document where it notes that self-care “does not mean doing everything on your own. it means being responsible for your own well-being, including seeking help and support from others when necessary” (p. 4). elsewhere in the document there is a direct comparison between traditional approaches and recovery approaches. under a section entitled “goals of the service” (p. 6) traditional approaches are defined as “anti-disease” whereas recovery approaches are defined as “pro-health.” similarly, “compliance” is contrasted with “choice,” and a traditional “return to normal” is contrasted with a recovered “transformation.” this demonstrates a clear attempt to studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 uncovering recovery 14 “positivize” recovery-oriented services. self-management and patient choice are key elements of neoliberal health policy. these ascriptions are of a piece with other ideological processes that seek to define service users as responsibilized consumers. this idea is further iterated in the fourth criterion. previously traditional services sought a return to normal, whereas, recovery services, we are told, seek transformation. this transformation is construed in terms of the individual service user, not in terms of the wider structural conditions of inequality. this obviously has implications for the shape of policy initiatives to reduce mental health service users and survivors experience of social injustice. the championing of practices of choice, selfcontrol and personal transformation are compatible with neoliberal forms of healthcare provision intended to produce responsibilized individualized service users. one way in which this has been manifested in traditional service approaches has been in linking distress with internal deficits and recovery with internal strengths. it is to the centrality of the notion of deficit that we turn next. 2. the persistence of deficit the second element of our critique is that recovery and resilience discourse continues to be implicitly reliant on a model of deficit. consider again the 2011 strategy document, no health without mental health. the strategy is organized around six key strategy goals. each goal has an accompanying explanation that identifies specific examples of the overall goal. limitations of space mean we can only focus on one goal here: “more people with mental health problems will recover.” the accompanying explanation identifies seven indicative examples: more people who develop mental health problems will have a good quality of life—greater ability to manage their own lives, stronger social relationships, a greater sense of purpose, the skills they need for living and working, improved chances in education, better employment rates and a suitable and stable place to live. (p. 6) this extract contains a number of features that clearly imply a particular underlying aetiology of emotional distress. implicit in this model is an assertion that people who develop mental health problems have a poor quality of life, are unable to manage their own lives, lack strong social relationships, have a lesser sense of purpose, lack necessary skills for living and working, have lesser opportunities for education, employment and poorer access to secure housing. all of these characteristics are predicated on existing negatives (deficits) being reframed as potential positives. a deficit model persists in that, although framed in positive terms, each positive term is dependent for its meaning on the opposite negative term. billig, et al. (1988) note how this is a common feature of thinking and talking. a focus on strengths does not do away with the notion that there are studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 15 david harper and ewen speed deficits; indeed they are predicated upon an underlying and enduring deficit model. this model is normative, accentuating the positive aspects of deficits, rather than challenging the ontology of the deficit model. as such, it reifies difference and sustains the subordinated status of mental health service users. this approach to recovery does not offer an alternative means of understanding the nature of emotional distress; it simply reframes existing understandings of mental illness. this is problematic when the point of origin of much recovery work was about challenging existing notions of mental health and proposing alternative notions of emotional distress. next, we focus on the third element of our critique, the backgrounding of structural injustice and collective responses to it. 3. de-emphasizing structural causes of, and collective responses to, distress earlier, we identified four “personal recovery tasks” (p. 4) in 100 ways to support recovery (slade, 2009), the fourth of which was “developing valued social roles.” a clear emphasis in this fourth criterion is put on relationships with others and the support that this might bring: “working with the person in their social context is vital, especially during times of crisis when support usually received from friends, family and colleagues can become most strained” (p. 4). crucially, the social context is defined in terms of what it might add to the interpersonal context. this reduction of the meaning of “social” to the “interpersonal” prioritizes a very narrow view of the social (predicated on personal interaction), and limits the potential for consideration of issues of social injustice within such a narrow context. this is not to say that inequality is ignored in discussions of recovery. for example, jacobson and greenley’s (2001) model of recovery includes a concern with empowerment but this is framed as “a sense of empowerment” (p. 483), a psychologized and individualized reading of empowerment, rather than an actual redistribution of power. thus, inequality is not ignored but it is addressed in a narrow individualized form. this prioritizing allows for a backgrounding of many of the key issues of social inequality that are known to contribute to poor mental health (such as the community-wide impacts of living in areas of poverty, see dorling, 2011). the rethink document appears to accept a priori that social inequality will be present, but places the onus on the service user to rearticulate the effects of social inequality in terms of their individualized, responsibilized self. this is redolent of the spoiled identity of the service user implicitly evoked by anthony, (1993). this model (directly or indirectly) has the effect of minimizing the role and import of social inequality in population level rates of emotional distress. it functions to make mental illness an individual problem with personal solutions. this model draws from an individualized rights-based form of identity politics, which, as the social perspective network argues, does “not focus enough on the need for society to change as well,” (slade, 2009, p. 56). studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 uncovering recovery 16 for white (2004) these kind of accounts obscure context—the opportunities or material conditions which facilitate people getting through adversity. smail has made a similar point—that the extent to which people can make changes in their lives will depend on their access to powers and resources (e.g. educational, physical, social, political and suchlike). although, he argues, these originate in the external material environment “possession of or access to such powers will often appear superficially as personal characteristics or qualities” (1990, p. 8). these manifestations of responsible individuals speak directly to neoliberal models of the service user. in our analysis of these documents we have seen a number of recurring themes. the focus on individual journeys, whilst to some degree welcome, also leads to practices of atomization (where social processes are reduced to individual elements), individualization and responsibilization. moreover, the dominance of medical understandings of emotional distress is perpetuated, since the recovery model does not challenge them. the recovery model does not erase the notion of deficit; more accurately it reframes it, limiting the potential for developing truly alternative models and understanding of the nature of emotional distress. finally, social inequality, whilst acknowledged, is backgrounded and there is a tension between the personal and political in that recovery is seen as an individual and personal practice, which simultaneously downplays the role of collective and political aspects of distress. individualization, deficit, inequality and social justice our argument here is not that the personal should be secondary to the political, more that an awareness of the need for balance between the personal and political needs to be acknowledged by practitioners and service users. there is a need to rebalance the tension between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution such that they complement rather than contradict each other. to do this, we utilize fraser’s framework founded on notions of status (rather than identity) as a means of contextualizing and explaining the implications of recovery-based individualization, deficit and inequality in relation to questions of social justice (see fraser, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2007). we consider how these three factors combine to marginalize consideration of more macro level contributors to emotional distress, such as conditions of economic inequality (fraser describes this marginalization as a “problem of displacement”). also, we consider how a focus on identity underscores rather than disavows differences between the pathologized “other” and the normative “mainstream” (fraser describes this as a “problem of reification”). we accomplish this through a consideration of processes of power and domination in the mental health field, particularly in terms of the continuing dominance or hegemony of biomedical approaches. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 17 david harper and ewen speed recovery and hegemony we have argued that dominant norms of medicine and indeed government are embedded in, and perpetuated by, the mainstream recovery model. consequently, it offers survivors little in the way of alternatives to the present medical and politically dominant ways of making sense of emotional distress. the recovery model clearly engages with an “identity model” of recognition. this model characterizes any negative judgment of a social group as a problem of “misrecognition,” whereby the majority regards an element of the groups’ identity as negative. the task within this frame (for members of the minority group) becomes one of making the negative trait positive, such that the misrecognition might be redressed. the solution to this misrecognition is that members of minority groups …reject such images in favor of new self-representations of their own making, jettisoning internalized, negative identifies and joining collectively to produce a self-affirming culture of their own—which publicly asserted will gain the respect and esteem of society at large. (fraser, 2000, p. 110) the recovery model clearly fits into this political project. the question it begs is where the critique of social inequality, or medical power might fit in these self-affirmed representations. the recovery model directs attention to the positive group identity whilst simultaneously failing to problematize the conditions (beyond the group) that contributed to the situation; it is blind to the wider social and political struggle. it also displaces the political nature of the struggle between different power elites and the psychiatric patient that were such a central feature to the history of the psychiatric survivor movement. notions of equivalence and difference allow us to bring consideration of this political struggle back into the discussion. equivalence and difference laclau and mouffe (1985) assert that political struggles can be characterized in terms of “logics of equivalence” or “logics of difference.” the former relate to those struggles where the differences between groups are downplayed to create a united front against a common enemy, whereas the latter relate to struggles where differences are accentuated. an example of equivalence would be a social movement against psychiatry, where differences of class, gender, ethnicity etc. would be backgrounded (but not denied) and similarities between groups would be accentuated (thus creating a collective banner behind which to mobilize—e.g. as psychiatric survivors). however, this dynamic is problematic. the logic of equivalence must seek to build a broad based movement against a hegemonic power, in a dynamic context that acknowledges and embraces difference rather than reifying the collective identity; fraser describes this as an “affirmative recognition of difference” (2000, p. 116), perhaps characterized as a broad coalition. if the movement studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 uncovering recovery 18 does not recognize this difference then the collective equivalence between actors risks becoming atrophied. fraser (2000) touches upon this dynamic when she discusses the reification of identity politics. for fraser, there is a tendency for equivalences to become a singular, simplified group identity. the promotion of recovery, within the mainstream, as a user-led process for dealing with emotional distress, lends recovery discourse an authenticity that it does not command and imposes a singular “simplified group identity which denies the complexity of people’s lives,” (fraser, 2000, p. 112). this singular identity (e.g. as recovering service users) does not pay sufficient attention to other ongoing political struggles across different groups of actors, such as the dominance of psychiatric pathology or economic inequalities and the impact these factors have in perpetuating emotional distress. relatedly, logics of difference are those strategies intended to amplify dissimilarities between and within groups. this logic seeks to break down chains of equivalences and to foster differences in order to maintain a position of dominance in the field. consider again the problems of misrecognition. identifying specific groups as deficient or inferior locates them within “institutionalized relations of social subordination” (fraser, 2000). institutionalized subordination limits opportunities for participatory parity, and therefore marks a clear case of social injustice. somewhat paradoxically, the recovery “model” could be argued to be seeking to redress this disparity, by rearticulating this “deficit” within a normative “strengths” framework. however, it fails in this regard; by seeking parity through a valorized individualized identity, whilst ignoring the need for institutional social change. the focus on a “recovered” identity supports dominant norms, and constructs an “unrecovered identity” as intrinsically negative. it ignores the need for transformations of “institutionalized value patterns” (fraser, 2000), that themselves block opportunities for participatory parity. in this context, the focus on individual change alone is always doomed to failure in a social justice context. the collective survivor movement offers an alternative focus for progressive politics. the survivor movement as a social justice movement historically, the survivor movement represented an attempt to transform medical dominance. it sought to offer a counter-hegemonic strategy, based on non-medical understandings of emotional distress, informed by social justice and equality. in this sense, it sought to create a logic of equivalence. we do not intend to homogenize the survivor movement; like any other movement, it comprises cross-cutting currents of thought and action but, we would argue, a dispassionate observer of the movement in the 1970s and 1980s would not have said that its main concern was recovery per se. rather, the main demands of the movement were to call for the ending of coercive practices and the development of “patient-controlled alternatives.” part of this project involved developing a focus on the survivor’s individual experience as a studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 19 david harper and ewen speed counter to the totalizing, pathologizing discourse of medicine. this resistance against universalistic medicine built on the 1960s counter culture (such as assertions that the personal is political, see hanisch, 1970), the women’s movement and other civil rights campaigns and the anti-psychiatry legacy (such as laing’s 1967 work on the politics of experience). in this contemporary context we suggest that the experiential, personal biography element of the survivor movement has been co-opted by mainstream politics and medicine, and that the radical redistributive element has been marginalized and displaced. within this co-opted model, recovery is concerned with inward transformation as a solution to individual problems, whilst the social and political context is backgrounded or ignored. by extension, these accounts also privilege professional-led interventions to help recovery. this is problematic as survivors’ accounts show that their journeys are extremely diverse with professional involvement playing a part only in some narratives (e.g. adame & hornstein, 2006; adame & knudson, 2008; cohen, 2005; ochocka, clare & may, 2005; young & ensing, 1999) whilst many survivors report “experiencing recovery” only after freeing themselves from professional intervention (thornhill, et al., 2004). that the recovery movement has not, for example, led to any serious challenge to the medicalization of distress is further evidence of this co-option. the focus on individual, rather than collective, experience functions to accentuate differences between survivors and indeed organizations. by focusing on individuals the role and potential of collective approaches is obscured. by co-opting recovery, and focusing on individuals, there is clearly a neglect of the social and material context of emotional distress and, in neglecting the impress of power, there is a tendency to voluntarism—the idea that people can simply change through force of will despite countervailing structural factors (smail, 2004). similarly, many of the real demands of the survivor movement have been obscured. as trivedi (2010) notes, what does the recovery approach have to say about professional power? one of the striking things about the survivors movement has been just that—it is a collective social movement (crossley, 2005; speed, 2006). harper (2010) notes the 24 demands made by the mental patients union (mpu), set up in the uk in late 1972 following an occupation of the paddington day hospital by patients and staff (spandler, 2006). only nine of these demands have been met, many only partially. the 15 outstanding demands include: the abolition of compulsory treatment and seclusion; the “abolition of irreversible psychiatric ‘treatments’ like ect, psychosurgery and medication; and that ‘all patients should have the right to have any ‘treatment’ which they believe will help them” (roberts, 2008). claims like these from the survivor movement can be regarded as attempts to mobilize a collective campaign, to identify those aspects of psychiatric practice that are political, or that speak to a common experience. developing a campaign around these issues would enable service users to identify their collective similarity (or equivalence) rather than focusing on a politics of misrecognition. it would allow service users to draw attention to, and problematize, processes of, social injustice, studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 uncovering recovery 20 economic, political and social inequality that are so prevalent in the incidence of emotional distress. there is clearly a need to return to the some of the key demands of the survivor movement and to consider how to maintain an explicitly transformative agenda in mental health research, policy and practice. beyond recovery and resilience: alternative conceptualizations given the problems with recovery and resilience discourse what are we to do? can it be reclaimed and used differently in order to achieve greater social justice for those in distress? or, is it so inherently limited that we need to move beyond it and use an entirely different vocabulary? there are a number of things in favor of the first approach. firstly, the term recovery is in wide use in the general population. secondly, the recovery model is widely known and may provide a vehicle for addressing issues of injustice and making certain demands, for example that services reorganize so they are consistent with political notions of recovery. however, there are also things in favor of the second approach. for example, whilst the term recovery is in wide use, many understand it as a medical term, implying recovery from an illness or disease (wallcraft, 2005). although there are other non-medical definitions of recovery, the issue is that the term itself has an ambiguous meaning. because of this, on what basis can we say that a mental health service is or is not “recovery-oriented”? how do we deal with conflicts between models (e.g. clinical recovery versus personal recovery)? does it simply become a case of arguing for one’s own definition of recovery: “this is what recovery really means …” or “this is what recovery means for me”? rather than seeking a consensus view of what recovery is, it is, perhaps, more useful to think about the ways in which some of the underlying principles of the survivor movement might lead to a re-invigorated debate about how the personal can be made political, such that struggles of recognition can complement struggles of redistribution, to effect progressive social change. moreover, if we are to try to move beyond recovery and resilience discourse, it is important to consider ways of holding on to elements that are likely to be helpful in leading to more socially just outcomes. in proposing a way forward, it is necessary to identify an approach that combines the progressive elements of a politics of recognition with a struggle for redistribution. in a mental health context, redistribution would involve engaging with the social, political and economic processes that created processes of status subordination for service users, across all aspects of social, political and economic participation. fraser (2000) proposes a solution that rejects the identity mode of misrecognition and instead argues for a politics of status. this alternative neither reifies subordinated identity nor does it displace struggles for redistribution. instead it seeks to undermine notions of group specificity, arguing that it is not a misrecognized studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 21 david harper and ewen speed identity that is the endpoint of any political struggle, but rather the struggle should seek “institutional remedies for institutionalized harms” that are a consequence of misrecognition. a recovery model based on an implicit notion of deficit clearly does not accomplish this. but the recovery model is not alone in this regard. fraser argues that any struggle that relies solely on issues of recognition will fail. moves for redistributive justice must be coupled to issues of recognition. the economic impact of being identified as a psychiatric patient must be considered in conjunction with the social and political impacts of this identification. it is only when redistribution and misrecognition are considered together that the extent of the social injustice can be gauged in line with the best means of addressing it, such that parity of participation can be considered. what should we recover from “recovery”? firstly, the focus on the individual biographical narratives of survivors seems genuinely helpful, as does the notion of each individual going on a personal journey. secondly, the optimism about the possibility of healing, of engaging in a process of change in a person’s relationship to distress is to be welcomed. there is an assumption that all these elements exist because of the recovery approach or model but, in fact, they pre-existed the wide use of this term. neither biographical journey narratives nor optimism necessarily entail the other conceptual and policy baggage that recovery and resilience bring with them as we have described. indeed, the way these concepts have been implemented in services has led to a number of unintended consequences in that the “personal” has become disconnected from the “political.” thus, within the recovery and resilience literature there is little emphasis on the importance of survivors getting together and sharing experiences, even less, that they might seek to act on insights gained in this process. however, in the context of the women’s movement, for example, this link between personal and collective understanding and action was key (hanisch, 1970). it is necessary that the link between individual narratives and wider social, political and economic struggles are strengthened and maintained. possible alternatives need to value individual narratives but place them in a collective context, developing explanatory accounts that are not located intra-psychically but rather, which are attentive to the structural conditions which might facilitate “coming through” adversity or “moving forward” (ochocka, et al., 2005) and which also acknowledge the impact of social inequalities on aetiology and the ability to change in relation to distress. in focusing on the power of individual survivor narratives it is important not to simply appropriate them so as to insert them into professionally derived conceptual frameworks. instead more socially just frameworks are required, more fully grounded in everyday experience. these might include not only accounts of their distress but also problematic relationships with health services. or address power disparities in relation to professionals and studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 uncovering recovery 22 clashing viewpoints on the nature of that distress, or indeed broader issues of inequality around class, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. in understanding distress there is a need for more sophisticated understandings of experience (trivedi, 2010), framed in people’s own words, using the language that survivors themselves use (wallcraft & michaelson, 2001). however, these narratives need to be understood in a collective and political and economic context. it is no surprise that some of the most inspiring personal accounts occur at survivor-run conferences like intervoice’s2 annual international hearing voices conference attended by equal numbers of survivors and professionals. at such events, the individual is not simply relating a biographical narrative, rather they are giving a public testimony, often intended to lead to changes in services—here, the personal is indistinguishable from the political. in this regard, boyle (2003) suggests a focus on aetiology that examines the social and societal causes of distress. in her discussion of another individualized and psychologized concept—that of “vulnerability,” boyle suggests that one alternative is to focus on the external causes of things to which people are supposedly vulnerable: then, rather than simply naming the damage, we might gradually name the systems or people who do the damage, eventually making them the subject of our sentences … [w]e might also take up paul gilbert’s recent suggestion (2002) and have a “defeat abuse,” rather than “defeat depression” campaign. (2003, p. 30) such a focus might lead us to identify the structural facilitators of recovery (e.g. stable income, good housing, employment etc.). another way of examining the social context is to look towards approaches that firmly locate the individual in their social and societal context. hagan and smail (1997a, 1997b) for example, introduce the notion of power-mapping. this is a process of identifying with a service user what access they have to a whole range of resources (e.g. personal, bodily, interpersonal, social, financial etc.). burton and kagan’s (2008) societal case formulation provides another way of doing this. the aim in these kinds of approaches is a form of collective conscientization (freire, 1974) where people come to understand the structural causes of their oppression. smail talks of the related notion of “outsight” which he contrasts with what he terms “magical voluntarist” forms of therapeutic help—that is, approaches which are based on the assumption that, perhaps with the expert help of a therapist, a person is able to change the way they think about the world through sheer force of will, rather than attempt to change the world that causes them distress. if the aim of magical voluntarist psychology is to achieve the kind of “insight” that allows the person to see the error of their ways and adjust their conduct accordingly, the aim of a social environmentalist psychology is more or less completely the opposite: to help the person achieve “outsight,” such that the causes of distress can be demystified and the extent of their own responsibility for their condition put into its proper perspective. (smail, 2005, p. 32) studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 23 david harper and ewen speed conclusion—challenging the binary? our critique leads to two key conclusions. firstly, there is a need for the implications and limitations of recovery and resilience discourse to be much more fully elaborated by different proponents. the one size fits all approach to recovery and resilience is not adequate nor is it appropriate in the context of a progressive politics of emotional distress aimed at greater social justice for those who experience it. indeed, we would argue that positive psychology does little to move the debate on, as it continues to be constituted by the ghost of psychological deficits. talking about strengths simply privileges the other side of the binary opposition of deficit-strength. we need, instead, to challenge this opposition. secondly, one way of distinguishing different approaches to recovery and resilience is how they conceptualize the political (and the social and the economic) in the experience of emotional distress (both individually and collectively). we do not discount the need for recovery and resilience approaches to give a central importance to individual experience but it is absolutely vital that the conceptualization of individual experience is one that can be tied back to collective and structural experiences of distress, inequality and injustice. notes 1 possible alternate meanings for the “illness” are offered in the context of “spiritual, cultural or existential crises.” however, although other frameworks are alluded to, the lack of a sustained analysis of structural factors risks those identified factors being regarded primarily as lifestyle factors. 2 http://www.intervoiceonline.org/ references adame, a.l., & hornstein, g.a. 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(2004). escape, enlightenment and endurance: narratives of recovery from psychosis. anthropology & medicine, 11, 181-199. topor, a., borg, m., di girolamo, s., & davidson, l. (2011). not just an individual journey: social aspects of recovery. international journal of social psychiatry, 57, 90-99. trivedi, p. (2010). a recovery approach in mental health services: transformation, tokenism or tyranny? in t. bassett & t. stickley (eds.), voices of experience: narratives of mental health survivors (pp. 152-163). chichester: wiley. wallcraft, j. (2005). recovery from mental breakdown. in j. tew (ed), social perspectives in mental health: developing social models to understand and work with mental distress. london: jessica kingsley. wallcraft, j. & michaelson, j. (2001). developing a survivor discourse to replace the “psychopathology” of breakdown and crisis. in c. newnes, g. holmes, & c. dunn (eds.), this is madness too: critical perspectives on mental health services (pp. 177-190). ross-onwye: pccs books. white, m. (2004). narrative practice and the unpacking of identity conclusions. in m. white, narrative practice and exotic lives: resurrecting diversity in everyday life (pp. 119-147). adelaide: dulwich centre publications. young, s.l., & ensing, d.s. (1999). exploring recovery from the perspective of people with psychiatric disabilities. psychiatric rehabilitation journal, 22, 219-231. mahrouse final before ts correspondence address: gada mahrouse, simone de beauvoir institute, concordia university, montreal, qc, h3g 1m8; email: gada.mahrouse@concordia.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 637-640, 2022 dispatch “refugee” as metaphor in tripadvisor reviews gada mahrouse concordia university, canada while reading through tripadvisor travel reviews for an article i was writing on the temporary housing of refugees in hotels, i made a curious – if not disconcerting – discovery. i noticed that when i searched the english language tripadvisor.ca site with the keyword “refugee(s)” in any hotel review, without applying any filters to geographic regions, the term was most frequently used metaphorically. wanting to consider this further, i loosely measured this occurrence and its usage. specifically, i read through 680 reviews and identified four general categories for the ways in which the word refugee was used: 1. positive proximity describes reviews in which being in proximity or encountering refugees was depicted in a positive way. in some of these instances, reviewers sought to challenge or quell travellers’ concerns about the danger that refugees in the area pose. in others, the reviewers wrote about liking being close to refugee organisations or camps where they went to visit or volunteer. 2. negative proximity captures the reverse sentiment, where encountering or being in close proximity with refugees was described as undesirable. in one example of a hotel in paris, france, a reviewer wrote, “unfortunately, this hotel [is] surrounded by [a] bunch of refugee tents.” 3. miscellaneous refers to reviews that had misspelled the word refugee when it was evident that what they meant was “refuge.” this misspelling could be because english is not a first or fluent language for many of those posting in english on tripadvisor. this category also accounted for all reviews that were irrelevant or for which it was not possible to infer any of the other themes. 4. metaphor applied to 380 of the 680 reviews, thereby representing more than half of all instances of the word refugee (see figure 1). according gada mahrouse studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 637-640, 2022 638 to the oxford english dictionary (oed online, 2022), a metaphor is defined as follows: 1. a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable; 2. something regarded as representative or suggestive of something else, esp. as a material emblem of an abstract quality, condition, notion, etc.; a symbol, a token. figure 2. four general categories of the use of the word refugee. although reviews that used the terms refugee or refugee camp metaphorically ranged widely in terms of location and included all types of accommodations ranging from luxury resorts to hostels, the terms were consistently used to communicate a dissatisfaction with the accommodations reviewers were provided. some of the reviewers indignantly likened the facilities or the treatment they received to the ways in which refugees are treated. for example: if you’re a 3rd world refugee, you’ll love it. (austria) …wasn’t looking for a 5 star treatment but i wasn’t expecting to be treated like a refugee. (saudi arabia) i was treated like a criminal or an unwelcome refugee. (kenya) i felt like a refugee. (thailand) “refugee” as metaphor in tripadvisor reviews studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 637-640, 2022 639 …no point in making all the way to come here for living worse than a refugee. (germany) often the term refugee camp was used as a way disparagingly to describe accommodations, other guests, or the surroundings that reviewers disliked: a post 2nd world war refugee camp has better facilities. trust me. (antigua) i have seen many budget hotels this one is worse than refugee camps. (india) un refugee camps are better in the gaza strip. (u.s.) it is like a refugee internment room. (italy) breakfast in the morning was a horrific scene, like a refugee camp. (china) frankly i have seen nicer refugee camps on television. (u.k.) discussion what do we make of this publicly circulated metaphorical use of the term refugee? while some scholarly attention has been paid to what has been referred to as “dehumanizing” and “inundation” metaphors of “floods” of refugees coming in “swarms,” etc., (taylor, 2021; frouws, 2021), i believe that the metaphors i draw attention to here are operating at a more banal and therefore insidious level. according to sharma (2009), these metaphors reveal how the notion of relegating some to bare life in order to maintain the lifestyles of others has become commonplace. drawing from marc auge’s (1995) work on the difference between places that are “relational, historical, and concerned with [individual] identity” and “non-places” where anonymous groups of people pass through (i.e., the refugee camp) (p. 131), sharma argues that the latter tend erroneously to be seen as exemplary of biopolitical regulation. certainly, one can see how this metaphor serves to inform other travellers of the proper space and place for refugees, and in contrast the spaces such as hotels that ought only cater to exclusive and particular lifestyles (fregonese & ramadan, 2015). the mere fact that this metaphor was so frequently and widely used demonstrates its discursive salience. as defined above, metaphors are used when something is regarded as representative or suggestive of something else. in this case, the term refugee is used a symbol to denote environments that are unacceptable for most, but not all. in other words, associating unfavourable, crowded, and poor conditions with refugees has become so normal that the word suffices to convey a clear message. these reviews reveal how refugee has become an accepted neologism that naturally distinguishes legitimate travellers and tourists from those who do not belong, whereby the comfort and gada mahrouse studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 637-640, 2022 640 entitlement of the former are measured in direct relation to the distress of the latter. such metaphors do not remain at the discursive level; rather, they have clear material implications. as pugliese (2009) reminds us, in the second half of the nineteenth century “africa” became the governing metaphor for making intelligible the differences between the “primitive” south and the “civilised” north which directly resulted in policies and practices of racial segregation. indeed, i propose that the prevalent use of this metaphor coupled with tripadvisor’s wide reach (jamerson, 2017) highlights its efficacy at shaping and reproducing racial logics, especially in terms of how it articulates a boundary-making through spatial discourses around race and class. in sum, the terms refugee and refugee camp work as a short and simple way of establishing a racialised marking of identity and space that divides those who are entitled to clean, proper, safe accommodations and decent food, from those who are not. if the governing metaphor for the free and entitled travelling subject has become its antithesis, the refugee, then it can be taken for granted that other readers of tripadviser would agree that the conditions deemed suitable for refugees are insulting to the rest of us. references auge, m. (1995). non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. verso. fregonese, s., & ramadan, a. (2015). hotel geopolitics: a research agenda. geopolitics, 20(4), 793-813. doi:10.1080/14650045.2015.1062755. frouws, a. (2021, march 8). op-ed: negative narratives, mistaken metaphors. the need for careful language on migration. mixed migration centre. https://mixedmigration.org/articles/op-ed-negative-narratives-mistaken-metaphors-theneed-for-careful-language-on-migration/ jamerson, t. (2017). digital orientalism: tripadvisor and online travelers’ tales. in j. daniels, k. gregory & t. mcmillan cottom (eds.), digital sociologies (pp.119-137). policy press. oed online. (2022). oxford university press. accessed october 26, 2022 from www.oed.com/view/entry/117328 pugliese, j. (2009). civil modalities of refugee trauma, death and necrological transport. social identities, 15(1),149-165. sharma, s. (2009). baring life and lifestyle in the non-place. cultural studies, 23(1), 129-148. taylor, c. (2021). metaphors of migration over time. discourse and society, 32(4), 463-481. microsoft word carroll with tables.doc studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 36 hegemony and counter-hegemony in a global field1 william k. carroll, university of victoria abstract social justice struggles are often framed around competing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects. this article compares several organizations of global civil society that have helped shape or have emerged within the changing political-economic landscape of neoliberal globalization, either as purveyors of ruling perspectives or as anti-systemic popular forums and activist groups. it interprets the dialectical relation between the two sides as a complex war of position to win new political space by assembling transnational historic blocs around divergent social visions – the one centered on a logic of replication and passive revolution, the other centred on a logic of prefiguration and transformation. it presents a sociological analysis of the organizational forms and practical challenges that their respective hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects entail. since the spectacular announcement of the new politics of global justice in the 1990s – in chiapas (1994), paris (1995) and seattle (1999) – a good deal of sociological attention has been placed on the networks, communication technologies, nongovernmental organizations, and discourses through which these politics have been constituted and the transnational political terrain on which they move (e.g. keck and sikkink, 1998; olesen, 2004; smith, 2001, 2002; smith and wiest, 2005). in the same period, a literature has accumulated on the formation of a neoliberal transnational historic bloc, an assemblage of elite policy-planning organizations, transnational corporations, and global-governance organizations that has promoted, and to some extent consolidated, a hegemonic project of neoliberal globalization (gill, 1995; sklair, 2001; carroll and carson, 2003; robinson, 2004; nollert, 2005). on the premise that these phenomena are dialectically related, this paper traces the war of position between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces in the current era; a struggle in which conflicting visions of justice clash within a global field. globalization-from-below is diverse in its conceptions of social justice, yet its minions are agreed that injustice is rooted in contemporary social arrangements and structures that can be transformed through collective action. as globalization accentuates both human interdependencies and the awareness of those interdependencies, this “movement of movements” appears to be converging around a counter-hegemonic vision that integrates struggles against “maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation” 1 presented at the joint rc02/rc07 session on alternative visions of world society: global economic elites and civil society in contestation, world congress of sociology, durban, july 2006. an earlier version of this paper was presented at the institute for global political economy, simon fraser university, vancouver, march 2006. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 37 within a dialogical framing of social justice in terms of parity of participation and the allaffected principle (fraser, 2005, pp. 79, 82-4).2 such an holistic project is not easily posited, let alone pursued, yet it gains shape and form as “activists create spaces, both physically and emotionally, that promote ideas of social justice in explicit opposition to the injustice enacted by the global institutions of neo-liberalism and global capital” (lacey, 2005: 405). globalization-from-above has trumpeted unfettered capitalism as the harbinger of individual liberty and material abundance, creating optimal consumer choice in the marketplace and a rising tide of affluence that lifts all boats. the neoliberal doctrine informing this vision locates “plain justice” in the market mechanism itself and denies that “social justice” is anything but “a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no real reason for it” (hayek, 1976, p. 90). notwithstanding hayek’s faith in the plain justice of the marketplace, by now we are painfully familiar with the logic and consequences of neoliberalism: the policies of fiscal retrenchment that degrade social programs, the accumulation by dispossession (euphemized as privatization) and “commodification of everything” (harvey, 2005), the harmful impact of deregulated global market forces on workers and communities, as exchange value reasserts itself at a centre of life (teeple, 2000). this triumph of “plain justice” over social justice has been a global phenomenon – hence the currency of the term transnational neoliberalism. if, as jessop (2002 113) holds, globalization is the complex and emergent product of various forces operating on many scales, in the economic field its most salient impact has been to strengthen the structural power of capital vis-à-vis agents enclosed within national states, as the circuitry of accumulation becomes more internationalized (gill and law, 1989). neoliberalism is the political paradigm that converts that structural power from a contingent and contestable accomplishment to a seemingly permanent reality, within which market-driven politics holds sway (leys, 2001). there can be little doubt that the power of neoliberal concepts “goes hand in hand with the changed orientation of an increasingly internationalised business community – industrial tncs [transnational corporations], big banks, financial conglomerates and other investment-related firms – or as some call it, of an ‘expanding transnational managerial class’” (bierling, 2006, p. 211). united through the ideological practices of various international forums and policy groups which have become venues for promoting a consensus around the cosmopolitan vision of a borderless world of friction-free capitalism, this transnational bloc of social forces is more extensive than its strict class base might suggest (bierling, 2006, p. 221). it encompasses public officials in international and national agencies of economic management, and a great range of specialists and experts who help maintain the global economy in which the tncs thrive – “from management consultants, to business educators, to organizational psychologists, to 2 as fraser goes on to explain, justice defined as parity of participation “requires social arrangements that permit all to participate as peers in social life. overcoming injustice means dismantling institutionalized obstacles that prevent some people from participating on par with others, as full partners in social interaction” (fraser, 2005, p. 73). the all-affected principle is what enables development activists, environmentalists, trade unionists, international feminists and indigenous peoples to make claims against the structures that harm them, “even when the latter cannot be located in the space of places” (2005, p. 84). this principle holds that “all those affected by a given social structure or institution have moral standing as subjects in relation to it” (2005, p. 82). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 38 the electronic operators who assemble the information base for business decisions, and the lawyers who put together international business deals (cox, 1987, p. 360; sklair, 2001). as a hegemonic project, however, transnational neoliberalism poses great problems. its basic mechanisms – market liberalization, accumulation by dispossession, densification of capital circuits – do not allow for the wide ranging material concessions that, at least in the global north, stabilized class relations during the national-keynesian era (carroll, 2006). if hegemony is secured by constructing and maintaining a historic bloc whose constituent elements find their own interests and aspirations reflected in a shared project, neoliberalism’s bloc is thin, and made incrementally thinner by widening economic disparities world-wide and within national societies. the pervasive social injustices attendant upon neoliberal policy have been well documented by bourdieu and accardo (1999) and chossudovsky (2003), among others. in turn, they are accompanied by looming ecological issues, which neoliberalism seems incapable of seriously addressing, and a worrying record of economic instability, evident particularly since the 1997-8 financial crisis. neoliberal hegemony, to say the least, is far from secure. it is subverted not only by its own contradictions, which have inspired a movement for global justice, but by the territorial logic of states – most evidently expressed in the new uscentred imperialism (amin, 2005; harvey, 2005; stokes, 2005). it is in this context that we can understand the challenges facing neoliberalism’s organic intellectuals as they advance the project in an incipiently global civil society. global civil society as an emergent field organized policy planning behind the scenes has long been “a form of the socialisation of the conduct of class struggle on the part of the bourgeoisie” (van der pijl, 1998, p. 108). although “global civil society” entered the lexicon of social science only recently, kees van der pijl (1998) has traced the formation of imagined international communities for a developing cosmopolitan bourgeoisie back to the networks of freemasons in the late 17th century. as inter-imperialist rivalry and revolution tore apart that transnational brotherhood in the late nineteenth century, the rhodes-milner round table group emerged as a british empire-centred network of elite planning, to be joined in 1919 by the international chamber of commerce. since the founding of the mont pelerin society in 1947, but especially since the corporate offensive of the 1970s, strategized in the trilateral commission’s report on the crisis of democracy (crozier et al, 1975), neoliberal policy-planning groups have played a signal role in building, consolidating and bolstering this bloc, along with its norm of plain justice. they have conducted a war of position to shift “the balance of cultural and social forces” (femia, 1981, p. 53), and thereby to win new political space in a global field. if initially the bourgeoisie held sway in global civil society, from the late 19th century onward international labour organizations and left party organizations entered the field. since the 1990s, a wide range of subaltern groups opposed to neoliberal capitalism has begun to mount a concerted struggle for position, constituting a potentially counterhegemonic bloc of aligned social forces. certainly, the thousands of international ngos that now have “consultative status” with the united nations’s economic and social studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 39 council confirm the arrival of global civil society, and indeed of a global civil societystate complex. civil society, however, is not a unified “agent” (olesen, 2005), nor is it a collection of politically progressive groups (as implied in lipschutz, 1996), but a field within which interests and identities take shape vis-à-vis each other (urry, 1981); and, at that, it is hardly a level playing field (swift, 1999). from the neo-gramscian perspective taken here, global civil society appears as the terrain for both legitimizing and challenging global governance. ... further, global civil society is not just a sphere of activity, but a discursive space, which helps to reproduce global hegemony. ...[s]ocial movements must recognize they are positioned within this hegemonic constellation, and … that there are structural and discursive forces at play, of which the very framework of global civil society is itself a part, and which social movements themselves may actually be actively reproducing, rather than challenging (ford, 2003, p. 129). global civil society is, in short, profoundly tilted to the right by the dominance of capital in national politics, in international relations, in global governance and in mass communications. in these circumstances, movements for global justice face an ongoing challenge to find openings that do not lead into co-optative capture while building constituencies at the grassroots. but neoliberal groups, in spite of their greater resources and central locations within the ruling historic bloc, also face the challenge, mentioned earlier, of legitimating their practices and positions in a crisis-ridden era in which social injustices sharpen while the margin for dispensing concessions narrows. finally, it is helpful to understand global civil society as a multiorganizational field (klandermans, 1992) wherein diverse groups championing (or challenging) globalization, from above or below, take up specific niches in an organizational ecology that is itself substantially networked (carroll and shaw, 2001; fisher et al, 2005). global civil society comprises not only a terrain of struggle, not only a discursive space, but also a rich variety of organizations, with distinctive structures, projects and interrelationships, addressing transnational publics – whether privileged or subaltern (olesen, 2005). in examining some of these organizations, below, we open one window on the struggle for social justice in a global field. paired comparisons my focus here is on four key groups on each side of the complex relation between dominant class and subalterns. groups struggling within global civil society are diverse in their organizational structures, constituencies and modi operandi, making the task of comparative analysis quite complicated. to facilitate the process, i will use a method of paired comparison across four aspects of the struggle for hegemony: 1) the relation between capitalism’s “fundamental classes” (gramsci, 1977, p. 5), 2) the exercise of intellectual/ideological leadership, 3) the ecological question, and 4) construction of public spheres for forming consensus. for each aspect, a key neoliberal organization is paired with its counter-hegemonic counterpart -for instance, the world economic studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 40 forum and its antithesis, the world social forum. some pairings might be arguable, and the analysis is hardly exhaustive. the point of the exercise is not to satisfy some sort of multifactorial research design but to highlight the role certain organizations have played and the niches they have taken up in global struggles for hegemony. the four pairs of organizations are listed in table 1, along with sketches of core membership, organizational form and action repertoire/strategy in table 2. with this small, purposive sample we can glimpse some of the dynamics of hegemony and counterhegemony in a global field. comparing year of formation alone, it is clear that groups promoting neoliberalism attained positions of early influence in the global field, expressing the material, organizational and intellectual advantages that accrue to the dominant class, with defensive responses, on a global terrain, coming later, as in polanyi’s (1944) “double movement” of capitalist disembedding and social reembedding. on economic matters, intellectuals of the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie took the lead in the early decades of the 20th century, promoting market liberalization as a philosophical principle – already inscribed in the international chamber of commerce’s 1919 constitution, and given more rigorous definition in the work of the mont pèlerin society following world war ii. in both instances, liberalization received impetus from world wars, in the wake of which an open world economy – extending what van der pijl (1998) has called the lockean heartland, progressively dissolving hobbesian regimes committed to statist developmental logics – was trumpeted as a premise for peaceful international relations. yet despite the us open door policy, after the second world war consolidation of a corporate-liberal paradigm pushed neoliberalism to the margins. the same paradigm limited prospects for global oppositional politics. the keynesian class compromise marked the apogee of the westphalian political imaginary: it cleaved “domestic” from “international” political space (fraser, 2005), and in particular contained labour politics within national, reformist frameworks whose counter-hegemonic potential was further drained by a trade-union imperialism ideologically aligned with cold war anti-communism (munck, 2002, pp. 141-4). despite the more recent successes of thatcherism and reaganism and the triumph in the 1980s of the washington consensus, the struggle to neoliberalize the world has been far from straightforward. in the 1990s it met with major setbacks, including recession, crises, and the emergence of new forms of civil resistance to the incursions of capitalist globalization. international chamber of commerce, international confederation of free trade unions let us proceed to the first of our paired comparisons by considering two global organizations that encompass large memberships on each side of the divide between capital and labour. the paris based international chamber of commerce (icc) is the oldest global business policy group and from its inception has maintained a resolutely free-market conservative strategic vision. it is also the largest, claiming some 7,000 member companies and associations from over 130 countries. as a forum for transnational capitalist consultation, launched by investment bankers in the shadow of world war i, the icc has functioned as the most comprehensive business forum studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 41 committed to the plain justice of liberal markets. it has “long been a triumphant lobbyist for global economic deregulation in fora such as the wto, the g8 and the oecd” (balanyá et al, 2000, p. 166). as stated in its constitution (available online), the icc’s fundamental objective is “to further the development of an open world economy with the firm conviction that international commercial exchanges are conducive to both greater global prosperity and peace among nations.” this basic goal implies three aims – to promote 1) international trade, investment and services, 2) a market economy based on the competitive principle, and 3) global economic growth. the aims, in turn, are met via two principle means: 1) “political advocacy and lobbying” directed at international organizations such as the wto and un and at national governments, and 2) “provision of a range of practical services to business,” such as the international court of arbitration (kelly, 2005, p. 259). the icc provides a forum where capitalists and their organic intellectuals can forge a common international policy framework. since the mid-1990s its efforts to institutionalize an agenda of corporate self-regulation have fostered close working relationships with international institutions such as the wto and the un general secretariat (ibid, 166-174). finally, and importantly, the icc knits national chambers throughout the world into a single global network through its world chambers federation (wcf), which provides a vertical organizational link between the network of transnational capitalist interests carried by the icc membership and the untold numbers of smalland medium-sized businesses affiliated with local and national chambers of commerce. it is the combination of the group’s free-market vision, its institutionalization of transnational business practices, and its incorporation of local-level business into a global capitalist perspective, that gives the icc a unique niche within the organizational ecology of transnational neoliberalism (carroll and carson, 2003). the chamber reaches deeply into regional and national contexts, and mobilizes capitalists themselves as organic intellectuals engaged in business leadership. this organizational form gives impetus to a social bloc that extends from the global to the local. beyond its contribution to class formation per se, the council reaches into global political processes.3 although its ties to the un weakened during the years in which a keynesian developmentalism held sway, by the 1990s, on the other side of the reagan/thatcher era, the icc “pushed to the forefront of international affairs,” in the process expanding its membership and overhauling its identity, rebranding itself in 1998 as the “world business organization” (kelly, 2005, p. 263). in its recent efforts, the icc has targeted the un, entering in 2000 into a global compact for peaceful development and poverty alleviation and taking active roles within a host of un agencies (kelly, 2005, pp. 267-9) – all with the effect of securing legitimacy as an organization of both global governance and global business. if the icc has become the “world business organization,” perhaps what is most striking is the lack of any counter-hegemonic labour organization that could credibly make a parallel claim. factionalized into social-democratic and communist centrals at the 3 as kelly recounts (2005), the icc has been particularly proactive in times of crisis – as in the reconstruction following both world wars – helping to shape the global field in the direction of unimpeded market relations. the icc played a role as the only ngo granted the chance to address sessions at the united nations session on trade and employment in 1947-48, and thus in the still-birth of the (keynesian) international trade organisation. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 42 very time that the icc emerged as a source of transnational capitalist unity, organized labour would become largely contained within national states in the middle decades of the twentieth century, striking up social accords under the aegis of the kws or being absorbed into the party-state, and showing little interest in international organization or action – at the very time that capital, under the hegemony of the us open door policy, was rapidly transnationalizing. this meant that labour’s initial response to the neoliberal offensive would be mounted largely within national (or sub-national) fields and would be tinged with nostalgia for restoration of the status quo. although the international confederation of free trade unions (icftu) was formed in 1949, at least until the departure of the labour-imperialist afl-cio in 1969, and arguably until its 1996 world congress, which recognized the need for transnational action in response to capitalist globalization (munck, 2002, pp. 151, 13), it could hardly be considered a candidate for counter-hegemonic leadership of any sort. in a post-cold war context of neoliberal ascendance, the world’s largest international labour central finally took up the call for a global keynesian regime of social and environmental rights based on international regulation (munck, 2002, pp. 156). the icftu remains bureaucratic in structure, and skewed in its leadership toward a minority of unions from industrialized countries. still, it is the world’s largest, most representative trade union body, claiming 155 million members and 236 affiliated organization in 154 countries. organizationally, the icftu is structured as a confederation of national trade union centrals. its professional staff are tasked with organizing and directing campaigns on issues such as the respect and defence of trade union and workers' rights, eradication of forced and child labour, promotion of equal rights for working women, the environment, education programs for trade unionists worldwide, and organizing young workers.4 one can see in this list, a basis for alliances with a wide range of contemporary social movements, and indeed, since its 2000 congress in durban the icftu has been committed to building “alliances with ngos and civil society around shared values of human rights” (davis, 2004, p. 124). yet in the same year, the icftu signed on to the same global compact as endorsed by the icc – a purely voluntary framework that brings business, labour and environmental representatives together under the auspices of the un (munck, 2002, pp. 169). the icftu’s quest for global regulation has engendered a vicious circle – “a lack of mobilizing capacity, modest objectives, equally modest achievements, limited recognition by and relevance for rank-and-file trade unionists on the ground” (hyman, 2005, p. 148). the elite and grassroots “sides” of icftu’s action repertoire are potentially complementary strategic elements in a war of position, but only if the former does more than provide an ethical cover to the tncs and if the latter helps mobilize workers in ways that build alliances with other democratic movements. with membership from the global south (half of its total in 1999) rapidly increasing, the challenge is “to integrate the struggles and concerns of workers both north and south” (jakobsen 2001, p. 370), to create a “new internationalism” that moves beyond elite-level deals at the wto within the logic of neoliberal global governance (waterman 2005, p. 200). 4 go to: http://www.icftu.org/displaydocument.asp?doctype=overview&index=990916422&language=en, accessed 21 feb 2006. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 43 peter waterman (2001, p. 313) has put his finger on the biggest task: to break free of “the ideology, institutions and procedures of ‘social partnership.’ [which] have become hegemonic….” the icftu continues to express the national, industrial, colonial capitalism that gave it initial shape and form. two massive challenges reflect its disadvantageous position in the global field, both institutionally and culturally: one major challenge has to do with the role of a literally international confederation in times of globalisation. the icftu … is at the peak of a pyramidal structure several removes … from any flesh-and-blood workers. it is also an institution heavily incorporated into a traditional world of the inter-state institutions, with much of its energy addressed to lobbying these. the second major challenge … is the virtual invisibility of the icftu. here is an organisation with 155 million members and rising that has no presence at all in the global media or culture, whether dominant, popular or alternative (2001, p. 315). in comparison with the icc, whose aggressive drive for market liberalization has paid political dividends to its constituency, the icftu has cautiously sought global accords, clauses, and protections against the ravages of the market. whether this key organization is capable of leading, or at least actively participating in, a transition to the kind of new social unionism envisaged by waterman5 is a central question in the future of counter-hegemony. if, as hyman (2005) argues, the icftu has served primarily a “diplomatic” function for labour within the machinery of international institutions, its counter-hegemonic prospects hinge on going beyond that carefully circumscribed role, to participate in globalization from below. icftu’s recent involvement in the world social forum is a hopeful sign, to be placed alongside the major structural trend that favours a formative role for labour in any global counter-hegemonic bloc – the expanding size of the world’s working class and the sharpening class contradictions associated with neoliberal accumulation. the mont pèlerin society, the transnational institute the struggle for hegemony involves production and dissemination of ideas. in this, the mont pèlerin society (mps) has been distinctively in the vanguard of neoliberalism, serving “a more militant intellectual function than an adaptive/directive role in the background,” as has been the case with elite groups like the bilderberg conference or the trilateral commission. for mps, “the neo-liberal intervention was of a much more ‘willed’ than organically hegemonic nature” (van der pijl 1998, p. 130). when the society was founded in 1947, keynesian corporate liberalism was becoming a hegemonic policy paradigm; hence the task was to create, under less than felicitous conditions, a 5 to wit, a unionism struggling for increased worker control over the labour process and investments, intimately related to movements of such nonunionised categories as peasants and housewives and to other democratic allies, struggling against hierarchical and technocratic working methods and relations, favouring shopfloor democracy, active on the terrain of education and culture, and opened to networking and flexible coalitions (2001, p. 316-17). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 44 hegemonic project that could ultimately contribute to a neoliberal counter-revolution. in his paper “the intellectuals and socialism” (1949), which can be read as a founding document of mps, friedrich von hayek drew two conclusions from his analysis of the influence of socialism in post-war policy and media circles. first, the right lacks such rising stars as keynes, hence the need “to rebuild anti-socialist science and expertise in order to develop anti-socialist intellectuals” (plehwe and walpen, 2005, p. 33). second, the socialist filter in the knowledge-dissemination institutions – universities, institutes, media – has to be attacked by establishing anti-socialist knowledge centers able to filter, process, and disseminate neoliberal knowledge (plehwe and walpen, 2005, p. 33). the mps set itself directly upon the first task and indirectly upon the second, with impressive results over the long haul. although the society laboured in relative obscurity for more than two decades, as the post-war hegemonic bloc dissolved it emerged as a major centre for neoliberal propaganda and informal policy advice, whether to pinochet’s chile or thatcher’s britain (van der pijl, 1998, p. 129). its membership grew from an initial group of 38 to a total membership of 1025 (48 women), with almost equal numbers from the us (458) and europe (438) and with a smattering of members in 27 non-euro-north american states. many members established or became active in 100 national-level right-wing think tanks, constituting a global network of neoliberal knowledge production and dissemination (plehwe and walpen, 2005, pp. 34-40). by periodically assembling “scientists” (mainly economists) and “practical men” (including corporate capitalists, politicians and journalists) committed to neoliberalism’s core principles of the minimal state and the rule of law, by fostering a worldwide network of neoliberal advocacy think tanks, the mps has not only provided neoliberalism with a durable anchor point within the space of economic doctrines (denord, 2002). it has managed to build capacity in global civil society for neoliberal culture, securing in the process the conditions for its own continued relevance. perhaps the closest left analogue to the mps is the transnational institute (tni), “a worldwide fellowship of committed scholar-activists,” as its website proclaims (http://www.tni.org).6 funded initially as a branch of the washington dc-based institute for policy studies (with which it continues to have close relations), the tni was one of the first research institutes to be established as a global organization – transnational in name, orientation, composition and focus. founded in amsterdam late in 1973, just as neoliberalism was beginning to find political traction, the tni has been a consistent critic of the new right. its first conference, "the lessons from chile," attended in 1974 by about 50 people including ralph miliband, andré gunder frank, herbert marcuse and johan galtung, helped build a political response to the coup that brought the first neoliberal regime to power. the conference established the tni’s presence on the european radical left, as did its first book-length publication, world hunger, causes and remedies (1974). 6 the san francisco-based international forum on globalization (ifg), established in 1994 in the heat of the nafta debates, also merits mention here, as a more north american based group (http://www.ifg.org), organized along more traditional think-tank lines. its 17-member board includes walden bello and john cavanagh, both tni fellows, as well as canadian activists tony clark and maude barlow. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 45 according to its own website account, the tni’s mission is to provide “intellectual support to those movements concerned to steer the world in a democratic, equitable and environmentally sustainable direction.” the institute has assembled an international network of hundreds of scholar-activists which is strategically mobilized to locate the most appropriate people to design and participate in study groups, international conferences, and the production and dissemination of working and policy papers and accessible books, often translated into several languages. at the centre of the network are the amsterdam-based staff and a couple dozen fellows, appointed to three-year renewable terms. they include journalists, independent researchers, and senior scholars from similar institutes in africa, asia, latin america, europe, and the us. the fellows meet annually in amsterdam, in a small-scale answer to mps’s annual retreat. but many of them are also actively engaged in specific tni programs and projects, summarized in table 3, where we see a wide-ranging yet coherent framework for counter-hegemony, organized along the themes of new politics, global economic justice (including extensive ecological elements), peace and security, and shadow economies. the knowledge that tni produces is both critical of dominant institutions and proactively oriented to creating or strengthening democratic alternatives, as in new politics’s emphasis on participatory governance. despite its meager resources (a budget of us$ 1.1 million in 2003 and a staff of 10), the tni engages in a multi-frontal war of position and gains energy from active collaboration with other ngos, institutes and movements throughout the world.7 one tni initiative worth highlighting is the “social forum process” that falls under the rubric of new politics. an active participant in the wsf and the european social forum (esf), the tni has reflected critically on the process in play at these events – the innovative developments and the nagging problems. at the designated web page one can find varied analyses by tni fellows.8 at a certain level of abstraction, and despite vast differences in scale, the mps and tni are kindred organizations. both engage proactively in knowledge production and dissemination to inform effective political practice; both have strategically built global networks and have collaborated with like-minded groups. but while the mps’s hegemonic project places the market at the centre of human affairs, the tni arises both as 7 there are currently eight continuing partners, namely, alternative information & development center, somo centre for research on multinational corporations, focus on the global south, institute of globalisation studies, institute for policy studies, institute for popular democracy (ipd), red pepper, and workgroup on solidarity socio-economy. tni programs sometimes entail collaboration with quite a range of groups (e.g., alternative regionalisms lists 21 project partners), reaching extensively into global civil society in various contexts. 8 go to http://www.tni.org/socforum/index.htm. hilary wainwright, editor of red pepper and senior research fellow at the center for labour studies at the university of manchester, provides a particularly acute interrogation of the new methodology for composing the program of the 5th world social forum. the new methodology was based on “dissolving a centrally decided programme and involving participating organisations fully in setting the framework of the forum's activities,” bringing the wsf’s organization to social-movement aspirations to join autonomy with horizontal connectedness while also testing “the potentiality of the new technologies to facilitate popular participation, share knowledge and develop dense networks of resistance and alternatives” (wainwright, 2005). as a representative of both the tni and the esf at the 2004 wsf, wainwright was tasked with evaluating the new methodology, with an eye toward its possible adoption by the esf. her detailed report, based on participant observation and extensive interviews with wsf participants, exemplifies the reflexive approach to praxis that characterizes the work of the tni, especially in its new politics programme. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 46 a critic of neoliberalism and an advocate for participatory democracy, social justice and ecology. the knowledge they create circulates, in the former case, among right-wing think tanks, academics, politicians and journalists mainly in the us and europe, and in the latter case, among left-wing think tanks and ngos, scholar-activists, social movements and alternative media, often in the global south. concretely, the two projects are embedded in opposing historic blocs, as each group develops and deploys knowledge with the strategic intent to make its bloc more coherent and effective. this entails quite different practices: the mps, firmly committed to hierarchy as a principle of social and political organization, fits easily into existing elite structures: its messages need carry no further than a relatively small circle. the tni, on the other hand, as a collective intellectual of the left, faces the challenge of reaching a massive, diverse potential constituency and creating new political methodologies that go against the grain in giving shape to emergent oppositional practices. world business council for sustainable development, friends of the earth international if on economic matters the global oppositional groups have been cast as respondents to neoliberal initiatives, the reverse is the case on the ecological question. capital is largely inured to ecological degradation (kovel, 2002), at least until it registers in value terms as threats to profits. the ecological movement that was inspired in the 1960s by critical texts such as rachel carson’s silent spring met largely with corporate stonewalling until the rio earth summit of 1992. yet already in the 1970s, ecological groups like friends of the earth international and greenpeace international were organizing and acting globally, and developing wide-ranging critiques of the devastation of nature by industrial civilization, even if they lacked a critique of capital. on ecology, the transnational capitalist class fought a rear-guard battle until its intellectuals developed an eco-capitalist response, to win back lost legitimacy. on its information-rich website (http://www.foei.org), amsterdam-based friends of the earth international (foei) describes itself as “the world's largest grassroots environmental network,” challenging the current model of corporate globalization and promoting solutions that will help to create environmentally sustainable and socially just societies. our decentralized and democratic structure allows all member groups to participate in decision-making. we strive for gender equity in all of our campaigns and structures. our international positions are informed and strengthened by our work with communities, and our alliances with indigenous peoples, farmers' movements, trade unions, human rights groups and others. in this framing we can see a project that transcends 1970s environmentalism. the description highlights the organization’s global scope, the close connection it draws between ecological and social issues, the direct challenge it mounts to capitalist globalization and its commitment to participatory democracy, gender equity and building studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 47 alliances through grassroots organizing. foei’s global social ecology has evolved from a project limited to specific concerns over whaling and nuclear power. the group’s membership was at first entirely euro-north american; only in the 1980s did its southern membership expand. foei’s global profile received a boost at the 1992 earth summit in rio de janeiro, “where a vocal mosaic of foe groups critiqued the business-as-usual approach of governments and corporations attending the meeting.”9 two years later, the agm adopted an explicit 'agenda', which has been developed further in the form of the sustainable societies programme, whose basic principles combine ecology with radical democracy: our vision is of a peaceful and sustainable world based on societies living in harmony with nature. we envision a society of interdependent people living in dignity, wholeness and fulfilment in which equity and human and peoples' rights are realized. this will be a society built upon peoples' sovereignty and participation. it will be founded on social, economic, gender and environmental justice and free from all forms of domination and exploitation, such as neoliberalism, corporate globalization, neo-colonialism and militarism. structurally, foei is highly decentralized. it is composed of autonomous organizations that must agree to open, democratic and non-sexist practices, to the pursuit of environmental issues in their social and political context, and to campaigning, educating and researching while cooperating with other movement organizations. the international serves to coordinate collective action globally, within the framework provided by six designated campaigns: climate change, corporates, genetic modification, forests, public finance, and trade. what is noteworthy in this list, and in the sketches of each campaign’s priorities in table 4, is the extent to which foei organizes its praxis in conscious opposition to neoliberalism and global capitalist domination. even in matters such as climate change, where a technicist discourse might easily prevail, the group frames its politics in opposition to powerful corporate interests and institutions such as the wto and wef. not surprisingly, the group has participated actively in the world social forum, hosting sessions in 2005 on four of its campaign themes and participating with other ngos in projects on forests and on the commodification of nature. the impressive global linkages that foei has forged since the 1980s and its social-ecological vision make it an important agency of counter-hegemony within global civil society. if the 1992 un earth summit helped catapult foei onto the global scene, it also catalyzed the global business elite to enter the debate. the world business council for sustainable development (wbcsd), formed in 1995 as a merger of two europe-based business councils, instantly became the pre-eminent corporate voice on the environment. currently the membership is 180 corporations as represented by their ceos, with members drawn from more than 35 countries. not surprisingly, membership is heavily skewed toward the developed capitalist core.10 council members co-chair wbcsd 9 the source for this quotation, and for the account in this paragraph is http://www.foei.org/about/25years.html. surprisingly little academic analysis of foei has been published. 10 of 177 member companies listed on its website (accessed 25 february 2006), 74 were based in the european core states, 44 were based in the us (39) or canada (5), 26 were based in japan and six were studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 48 working groups, act as advocates for the wbcsd’s policy positions, and oversee adoption of sustainable management practices within their own companies. these topflight global capitalists are complemented by a regional network of 54 bcsds – an informal confederation of organizations that, following the icc model, reach into civil societies to promote green capitalism in their respective countries or regions. finally, and as a measure of the degree of its commitment to broadening the eco-capitalist bloc, the wbcsd has developed what its website describes as “strong relationships” with 47 partners (see table 5). these include international and intergovernmental organizations, eco-capitalist news and information organizations, foundations, business organizations (notably, the icc and wef), and ngos (equally notably, world wildlife fund international and earthwatch institute). apart from its successful cooptation of wwfi into the cause of green capitalism, the list of partners is remarkable for its location in the euro-north amercan north: only two of the 47 groups are based outside of the triad, and only one partner is based in japan. as colin carson and i have noted elsewhere (2003), the wbcsd reflects a maturing elite awareness that transnational corporate enterprise must be coupled with consensus over environmental regulation. what makes the wbcsd unique in the global policy field are its efforts to surpass the prevailing dualism of “business versus the environment.” it presents a comprehensive vision of capitalist social and moral progress – anchored by its central axiom of “eco-efficiency.”11 within this retooled version of sustainable development, business, governments and environmental activists make concessions around a general interest in sustaining both the health of nature and the “health” of the global economy. in this way, gramsci’s (1977) formula for ruling class hegemony – that concessions granted in organizing consent must not touch the essential nucleus of economic relations – is satisfied. as one might expect, wbcsd serves as a forum for its member corporations, whose ceos meet annually, and carries out an elite lobbying function vis-à-vis institutions of global governance. but it directs much of its energy at educating its business constituency to adopt eco-efficient practices, a program of moral reform that aims to preempt coercive state regulation. its 225-page learning module on eco-efficiency, launched in 2005,12 is exemplary. it introduces the concept of eco-efficiency through an elaborate series of exercises. by working through dilemmas and case exercises, learners deepen their understanding and skills; in an “implementing” section they are taught how to appraise current performance and how to incorporate eco-efficient decisions into their business. as a hegemonic trope, eco-efficiency intends to reach well beyond the top tier of management, into “the hearts and minds of employees. demonstrating the value of an based in australia/new zealand. the rest of the world contributed a total of 38 corporate members, with three based in africa, 14 in asia (five of them in south korea and three in china), 10 based in latin america (three in mexico and three in brazil) and 11 on the european semi-periphery (five based in portugal and three in russia). 11 “eco-efficiency is achieved by the delivery of competitively priced goods and services that satisfy human needs and bring quality of life, while progressively reducing ecological impacts and resource intensity throughout the life-cycle to a level at least in line with the earth’s estimated carrying capacity.” in short, it is concerned with creating more value with less impact.” see the wbcsd co-efficiency module at http://www.wbcsd.ch/plugins/docsearch/details.asp?type=docdet&objectid=mtgwmjc . 12 available at http://www.wbcsd.org/docroot/zjuk9v12u48uxlww5mzd/eco-efficiency-module.pdf. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 49 eco-efficient approach will help employees recognize why it is important to implement and motivate towards action [sic]” (wbcsd, 2005, pp. 5) the discourses and strategies of the wbcsd advance a global self-regulatory perspective, emphasizing benchmarking and “best practices” as voluntary means toward green capitalism. its reflexive discursive and organizational frameworks draw realms liberal economists call ‘externalities’ — from employee relations to the health and safety of consumers — into an inclusive regulatory regime. the practices and discourses of corporate environmentalism, now employed by a range of tncs, are vital in this regard, and have in their own right contributed to a persuasive globalizing capitalist ideology (sklair, 2001). what the wbcsd furnishes is a reflexive orchestration of these corporate initiatives into a class-wide hegemonic project. world economic forum, world social forum founded in 1971 to mark the 25th anniversary of the centre d’etudes industrielles, a geneva-based business school associated with europe’s post-war managerial revolution, the world economic forum (wef) convened europe’s ceos to an informal gathering in davos, switzerland to discuss european strategy in an international marketplace. although the first meeting of ‘world economic leaders’ took place in 1982, on the occasion of the annual meeting in davos, it was not until 1987 that the forum changed its name to world economic forum. its inception as a truly global collective actor may be dated from that year. in the subsequent decade the number of participants grew from less than a thousand to over three thousand, about half of whom are invited as guests of the core membership. the guests – political leaders and officials, journalists, executive officers of research foundations and academic forum fellows – animate many of the panels and provide the forum with reach into civil society and a strong media profile (graz, 2003, pp. 330). like the wbcsd, the wef is organized around a highly elite core of transnational capitalists (the ‘foundation membership’) – which it currently limits to ‘1,000 of the foremost global enterprises.’ like the icc, the wef actively extends its geopolitical reach and influence. it has done so primarily through yearly meetings apart from davos and beyond the triad, with meetings in turkey, china, india, etc., and recently established a distinct operating body called the centre for regional strategies (crs) to “advance regional development and cooperation in the global economy.” indeed, in recent years the wef has sought to “shift away from an event-oriented organisation towards a knowledge – and process-driven organization,” as founder klaus schwab has remarked (quoted in graz, 2003, p. 334). in the months between the yearly extravaganza at davos, its members and ‘constituents’ populate a hodgepodge of policy work groups and forums, including the interacademy council, the business consultative group and the global leaders of tomorrow (graz, 2003, p. 334). the move to a more outcome-oriented institutionalization has coincided with a broadening of ideological discourse. in the 1980s and early 1990s, the forum promoted a free-market conservative agenda, closely aligned with the washington consensus, but by the mid-1990s persistent capitalist crises obliged it to adopt a more regulatory tack (van der pijl, 1998, p. 134). beginning in 1997, a project on ‘human social responsibility’, studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 50 followed by a litany of ‘social issue’ task forces, culminated in the un-affiliated global governance initiative (2001). with the wef, as with the wbcsd, we see an organization adapting to challenges from below and to crises associated with global capitalism, retooling neoliberal hegemony for changing times. if the wef can be described as “the most comprehensive transnational planning body operative today, … a true international of capital” (van der pijl, 1998, pp. 132, 133), it nevertheless faces major challenges in the form of responses from below that highlight a structural limitation of the elite club as a collective agent of global hegemony. such organizations “rely on a total cleavage between those sufficiently powerful to interact behind closed doors and those having no place in such exclusive arenas. the mobilization of creative forces takes place in a confined space cut off from the public sphere” (graz, 2003, p. 326). while exclusionary practices intensify elite unity, and even create a powerful social myth of capitalist consciousness, the retreat from the public sphere puts the wef and other elite organizations at a strategic disadvantage. “divorced from society at large … paradoxically their influence emphasizes their lack of legitimacy and therefore their inability to compete in the public debate. sooner or later this situation will foster the development of contending forces disputing their very existence” (graz, 2003, p. 337). enter the world social forum, a counter-hegemonic “open space” that was first convened in january 2001, as the progressive-democratic antithesis to the wef (teivainen, 2004, p. 123). although both groups may be seen as sites for wide-ranging discussion on issues of globalization, its promise and its discontents, the contrast between the wsf and global elite institutions like the wef is acute: while meetings at the world economic forum, un, wto and other global institutions are often closed and maintain top-down hierarchies, the wsf promotes a transparent organizing structure for its events. all workshops, seminars, round tables, panel discussions and testimonials are openly posted and participants are free to attend whichever event they want. there is no special entrance for different delegates, no excessive scrutiny as one enters a certain venue. (byrd, 2005, p. 156) although european activists were engaged from the planning phase forward, the wsf has local roots in the labour and other progressive movements of brazil, and particularly porto alegre, whose municipal and state governments allocated substantial human and material resources to launch the forum. after 2004 the forum moved to a decentralized, radically democratic mode of organizing its annual meeting, with participating organizations setting the agenda. in this and other respects, the wsf is “a new kind of political space created by and helping to consolidate a transnational subaltern counterpublic” (conway, 2004, p. 376) that in its diversity contains multiple public spheres. in contrast to the world-wide protest symbolized by 1968, which entailed parallel movements, each bounded by national borders, the protest against neoliberalism that is at the core of the wsf is organized globally (waterman, 2004, pp. 60-1). a dilemma built into the forum process is that between its mission as “an open meeting place” (stated as the first clause in its charter of principles) and the aspiration of many activists to transform it into a global social justice movement. in the former conception, the wsf’s “open, free, horizontal structures” enable a process of studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 51 prefiguration, bringing into being new forms of participatory democracy that incubate movements. to instrumentalize the forum would be to sacrifice prefigurative potential for tactical gains in the immediate conjuncture (whitaker, 2004, pp. 112-3). yet the absence of a “final document” at the conclusion of each forum has led to criticisms that the wsf is little more than “one huge talking shop” (keraghel and sen, 2004, p. 487). at the close of the 2005 forum, 19 high-profile thinkers, including tariq ali, samir amin, walden bello and immanuel wallerstein, issued a 12-point “consensus manifesto” that would pull the wsf in the direction of a meta-movement – foregrounding the ends to which the forum should direct its energy and the (state-centred) means for reaching them (see table 6). in june 2006 the forum took a step closer to an action orientation when it invited participating groups to indicate “the actions, campaigns and struggles” in which each is engaged, as a basis for the 7th forum, held in nairobi in january 2007.13 this shift, from organizing the forum around themes for discussion to organizing it around actions and their interconnections, is of great potential importance. whether the wsf can constitute itself as a hybrid of actor and arena, without devolving to either a tool for conventional political mobilization or a talking shop, remains unclear. notwithstanding this issue and emerging concerns as to whether the forum is becoming neither arena nor actor but logo and world franchise (sen, 2004, p. 223; huish, 2006), it is fair to say that the wsf comprises a signal development in global justice politics. it has struck directly at the level of meaning, countering the central premise of neoliberal hegemony since thatcher – that “there is no alternative” (sen, 2004, p. 213) – with “there are many alternatives” (de angelis, 2004). this claim “opens up a problematic of empowerment and defetishization of social relations, the two basic ‘ingredients’ for the constitution of a social force that moves beyond capital.” the wsf is indeed a site for prefiguration, for welding the present to alternative futures. as de angelis surmises, it is open to “alternative ways of doing and articulating social cooperation, at whatever scale of social action”; and thus serves “to recompose politically the many diverse struggles for commons that are already occurring” – suggesting alternative, de-commodified ways to fulfill social needs (2004, pp. 602-3). the wsf’s ongoing war of position within transnational civil society complements and extends the episodic wars of manoeuvre that have disrupted the summits of the wef, wto, g8 etc. the wsf and its regional and local offshoots “offer the liberal antiglobalisation and radical anti-capitalist movement a summit of their own, able to devise alternative strategies of globalization, … to make ‘another world possible” (farrer, 2004, p. 169). in nurturing the convergence of movements, the wsf produces “unprecedented coordinated action on a global scale” while embracing diversity – a paradoxical deepening of democracy (conway, 2004, p. 379). as a springboard into an alternative discursive and organizational space, the wsf embodies the “distinguishing mark” of the global justice movement: the commitment “to build solidarity out of respect for diversity” (patel and mcmichael, 2004, p. 250). one can see in the six thematic axes for the 2006 world social forum in caracas (table 7) a rich social vision that includes within its ambit the aspirations of a great range of contemporary movements. at caracas these themes were addressed in conjunction with 13 from wsf bulletin june 27th, 2006, available at http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/dinamic.php?pagina=consulta_fsm2007_ing. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 52 two “transversal axes” – gender and diversities – that introduced an intersectional analysis of power and empowerment into the discussion. still, the wsf faces great challenges in maintaining and enlarging the space it has opened. if, as graz (2003) claims, the wef’s growth has subverted its founding myth that the world’s elite can be brought into one place for content-rich networking, the wsf’s phenomenal growth may subvert its promise of open dialogue, if most participants become relegated to the role of spectators (huish, 2006, p. 4). conclusions our paired comparisons allow a few guarded inferences about the dynamics of hegemony and counter-hegemony in a global field, and their implications for social justice. on both sides, groups have become more institutionalized, complex and networked. the mps, wbcsd, wef and wsf have moved from the simple and non-cumulative practice of holding periodic meetings to more continuous and cumulative knowledge production, campaigns and outreach; the icc, icftu, tni and foei have extended their organizing activities to broader constituencies – reflecting a process of historic bloc formation. within each historic bloc, groups take up complementary niches in an organizational ecology. the intellectual/ideological leadership that the mps has exercised, for instance, is distinct from the contributions of the icc, the wbcsd and wef. it is their combination – ramifying through the multiplex networks of media, academe, business and states – that advances neoliberalism globally. of course, there is much more to a transnational bloc than a few peak civil-society organizations. we have only glimpsed the “tip of the iceberg”; indeed, a crucial component of the various groups’ praxis is in the connections they foster with national and local organizations. moreover, although reference was made earlier to “global governance,” this study has not directly considered the panoply of transnational quasi-state apparatuses (e.g., world bank), most of which articulate with, or form part of, neoliberalism’s historic bloc (cammack, 2003). national states also matter, not only as complexes whose relations to transnational bodies and treaties can encourage citizens’ participation in global politics (smith and wiest, 2005), but as crucial agents in those politics. the bolivarian alternative for the americas (alba), a transnational extension of the venezuela-based bolivarian project, presents a state-centred aspect of historic-bloc formation no less important than the activities of the groups examined here. alba poses a radical alternative to “free trade,” raising “the possibility and hope of development driven by the needs of the poor and the marginalized” (kellogg, 2006, p. 2). from origins in a venezuela-cuba mutual-aid arrangement, alba has expanded to include bolivia as a partner as of april, 2006 (kellogg, 2006: 7-8). our analysis has focused on global civil society, but agreements like alba and its hegemonic counterparts, the ftaa and wto (hatt and hatt, 2007), are integral to the formation of transnational historic blocs. intriguing comparisons await further investigation. in the conduct of a global war of position, the dominant class and its allies have several obvious advantages, which translate themselves into effective and distinct forms of organization. neoliberal civil-society groups are resource-rich, and they form on the sturdy basis of a transnational business elite – an organized minority that is already studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 53 ideologically cohesive, politically active and extensively networked. business activists are well positioned to influence policy and culture, via established political and mass communication channels. their action repertoire – a combination of producing and disseminating knowledge via elite channels and corporate media, lobbying key institutions such as the un and facilitating consensus formation among global and national elites – reflects this advantaged location. understandably, dominant forces organized themselves in the global field early. the story of globalization-from-above recounts their successful construction of a transnational historic bloc, including civilsociety groups as well as tncs and institutions of global governance, around a vision of plain justice and possessive individualism (neufeld, 2001). however, this historic bloc does not reach very deeply into the social infrastructure; for the most part it is restricted to the higher circles of the organized minority that is its real constituency: a north atlantic ruling class. its lack of reach into the global south, as revealed by our paired comparisons, is striking. for groups promoting global justice the situation is exactly reversed. constituencies are dispersed across many sites and networks, and issues of translation – from language to language, from culture to culture, from local to global – are central (santos, 2005). groups have scant resources and are generally positioned on the margins of political and cultural life, although the information revolution has opened opportunities for low-cost communications across distant places, and for the production of alternative media that now form a key component of global counter-hegemony (hackett and carroll, 2006). the action repertoire of these groups is unavoidably skewed toward mobilization at the grassroots through dialogue within and across counter-publics, consciousness-raising and building capacity to act collectively – using volunteer labour as the prime resource. conjunctural wars of manoeuvre, such as the 1999 battle in seattle, are only feasible on this organizational and cultural basis. the labour intensivity of counter-hegemony is rooted in a basic difference between capital and its other: … the atomized form of living labor that stands in conflict with the integrated, or liquid, form of "dead" labor causes a power relationship; the capital ("dead" labor) of each firm is always united from the beginning, whereas living labor is atomized and divided by competition (offe and wiesenthal 1980, p. 74). if this microeconomic reality underlies the structural power of international financial markets, tncs and institutions such as the imf, it also explains the resource richness of groups like the icc and wef. subalterns can only compensate for the dominant bloc’s inherent advantage in the control of vast pools of dead labour by building associations of living activists, armed with a willingness to act. given the power differential, globalization-from-below occurs in response to the social and ecological dislocations and crises that follow in neoliberal capitalism’s train. however, the bloc that is forming, as indicated by our four groups – all of which participate in the social forum process – penetrates much more extensively into humanity’s manifold lifeworlds, and increasingly includes the global south as a majority force. finally, from our paired comparisons we can distinguish between a logic of replication and a logic of prefiguration. the deeply structured relations that ground studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 54 neoliberal hegemony – the market, the capital-labour relation, the liberal state – are already regnant in the global formation. the neoliberal project is primarily to rework, to repackage and to reform, to validate, to demonstrate global capitalism’s continuing viability, to deflect calls for social justice by insisting on the plain justice of the market, to suggest pragmatic solutions that add up to a passive revolution – as in the wbcsd’s notion of eco-efficiency. the groups comprising the neoliberal bloc follow a logic of replication. for counter-hegemonic groups, the social relations that might sustain an alternative way of life are immanent, emergent, or need to be invented. as history shows, this is no mean feat. although abstract principles such as parity of participation or cosmopolitanism14 can provide theoretical guideposts, the challenge is an eminently practical one. the prospects for social justice in a global field hinge significantly on discovering political methodologies that activate democratic social learning as to how we might live differently, as in foei’s social-ecological vision of a peaceful and sustainable world of “interdependent people living in dignity, wholeness and fulfilment.” this involves a logic of prefiguration. 14 callinicos (2006, p. 241) submits that cosmopolitanism is a stance that can bring together the various strands of global justice politics without sacrificing the specificity of different groups’ claims. he borrows the principle from barry (1999, p. 36), who defines it as “a moral stance consisting of three elements: individualism, equality, and universality. its unit of value is individual human beings; it does not recognize any categories of people as having less or more moral weight; and it includes all human beings.” on parity of participation see note 2 above. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 55 references amin, s. 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(2005). labour and new social movements in a globalizing world system: the future of the past. labour history 46(2), 195-207. whitaker, c. (2004). the wsf as open space. in j. sen, a. anand, a. escobar & p. waterman (eds.), world social forum: challenging empires (111-21). new delhi: viveka foundation. world business council for sustainable development. (2005). eco-efficiency learning module. five winds international. available at <http://www.wbcsd.org/docroot/zjuk9v12u48uxlww5mzd/eco-efficiency-module.pdf> studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 59 appendix table 1 a judgment sample of eight key organizations for paired comparisons paired comparison name est’d international chamber of commerce (icc) 1919 capital / labour struggle international confederation of free trade unions (icftu) 1949 mont pèlerin society (mps) 1947 intellectual / ideological leadership transnational institute 1973 world business council for sustainable development (wbcsd) 1995 ecological politics friends of the earth international (foei) 1971 world economic forum (wef) 1971 (1987) global public spheres world social forum (wsf) 2001 studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 60 table 2 eight key organizations: constituencies, organizational forms, action repertoires name core membership organizational form action repertoire/ strategy icc corporations large and small, increasingly global membership federation, including companies and c of cs from 130+ countries consensus formation, lobbying, services to members, engagement with un, wef, etc. icftu 155+ million, us dominated until 1960s, recent shift to southern constituency confederation of national labour centrals elite diplomacy until recent shift to international labour solidarity and engagement with wsf mps economists, capitalists, thinktank directors, plus a few politicians and journalists from europe and us annual retreat, with close links to neoliberal advocacy think tanks worldwide constituting a global network of neoliberal knowledge production and dissemination transnational institute two dozen activist scholars, allied with many ngos, including wsf vanguard of fellows spearheads programs and projects attuned to a multifrontal war of position. facilitation of / critical reflection on praxis, outreach to partners in a range of targeted priorities. wbcsd 180 global corporations (as represented by ceos) committed to eco-efficiency, mainly based in triad council of ceos, subdivided into working groups chaired by ceos and reaching further via a regional network of bcsd and 47 partners serves as a forum, educates its business constituency on the virtues of eco-efficiency, promotes its vision as ecologically sufficient foei 1.5 million members, in national and local activist groups striving for environmentally sustainable and socially just societies decentralized network of autonomous organizations, coordinating collective action globally within six campaigns activist campaigns, popular education and communication, research wef initially european, increasingly global organization of 1000 ceos with other elite interests arrayed on the margins massive annual elite meeting, recent shift to more continuous engagement of members in task forces increasingly outcomeoriented, diffused into various regional activities, and interested in coopting the opposition. wsf many thousands of liberal anti-globalization and radical anti-capitalist activists, facilitated by an international council with delegates from 136 national and global nonparty organizations annual meetings: “open space” in which movements might converge without sacrificing autonomy, membership by organizational affiliation dialogical forum process (now polycentric and selforganized), spreading from porto alegra to regional, national, local and thematic forums studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 61 table 3 programs and projects at the transnational institute, 2006 source: http://www.tni.org program project description new politics considering how to achieve substantive democracy and participatory development in the context of current trends of globalization. three working groups: empowered participatory governance reviewing existing, emerging and past experiences (both successful and failed) of progressive and participatory governance developed by leftwing organisations around the world. new political thinking analysing the current situation of the left across regions and the ideological debates taking place in different social, cultural and political contexts. new forms of political engagement and collective action deals with the new identity of social movements at different levels of action (local, regional, and global) and the changing relations among movements, ngos, parties, trade unions and other socio-political actors engaged in national struggles against neo-liberalism and in the global justice movement global economic justice to help sustain the momentum of the transnational movement for global socio-economic justice by translating the vision implicit in the critiques of neo-liberalism into a workable alternative around which a new consensus can be built. seven projects: the wto and the threat to equitable public service provision to demystify trade and investment liberalization issues for ordinary people, and to support peasant, small farmer, small business, worker, consumer, environmental and other citizen movements in challenging the exclusive right of big business to shape the global economy in their own interest. the energy project coordinated by tni since 1999, a global association of progressive ngos and civic coalitions from latin america, africa, asia and eastern europe, focusing on research and advocacy activities on liberalization of energy and related services, etc. carbon trade watch a research and monitoring group producing in-depth information on the carbon economy from an holistic perspective. sustainable energy & economy network a joint project of tni and the ips, set up in 1996 as a loose network whose aim is to shift global energy policy away from non-renewable energy sources towards policies promoting renewable energy (ie. wind, solar) and priorizing the energy needs of the world's 2 billion rural poor people. alternative regionalisms a consortium of activist research organizations rooted in social movements struggling against the effects of neo-liberal globalization in their regions asia-europe relations: a people's agenda with partner organizations in asia, aims to provide critical analyses of significant developments in asia, including the impact of eu policy on the region, to strengthen people-to-people solidarity between europe and asia and to develop joint advocacy strategies on issues of common concern to constituencies in both regions. towards water justice highlights the role of european transnational corporations in the water privatization experiences of the south and showcases alternative water management models. peace & security challenges conventional militaristic and nuclear approaches to security with broader conceptions that encompass civilian rather than solely state or geo-political notions of security. failed states studies failed or failing states in the context of the post-cold war shift in global relations; challenges the idea that failed states can be technically rehabilitated without a reshaping of the international system of governance itself. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 62 program project description globalisation & militarisation this pilot project aims to map and further explore the linkages between globalization and war, between neo-liberal economics and the escalation of armed conflicts around the world, between failed economics and 'failed states'. shadow economies looks at the underbelly of globalization: on the one hand, the illicit survival economies of many parts of the marginalized south and, on the other, the ways in which organized crime profits both from neoliberal globalization. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 63 table 4 campaign themes, friends of the earth international, 2006 campaign theme description climate change “we call for urgent action to stop humans intensifying climate change. we demand climate justice, with emission reductions in the industrialised world, protection of the most vulnerable who already suffer the effects of climate change & legal challenges against the worst polluters.” corporates “we call for rights for communities & citizens to choose their local economies & to hold corporations legally accountable for bad practices. we challenge the powerful role of corporations in institutions like the world trade organization, the world bank, the un system & the world economic forum.” gm “we support the right of countries to ban or restrict the introduction of geneticallymodified organisms (gmos). we believe that countries have the right to decide what they want to eat, & we support sustainable agricultural practices & food sovereignty in order to avoid food crises in the first place.” forests “we want a halt to machine-intensive corporate logging & the conversion of forests to agriculture & pastures. we oppose "carbon sinks" & other schemes that replace diverse forests with tree plantations. we want local communities & indigenous peoples control to their forests in their traditional sustainable way.” finance “we want to see an end to taxpayers' money being used by public institutions like the world bank & export credit agencies to subsidize destructive oil, mining & gas projects & to stop public money being used to finance privatization of water & other essential services.” trade “we campaign to replace corporate globalization with fair & sustainable economies, based on democracy, diversity, reduced consumption, cooperation & caution. we work with others to curb the power & scope of the world trade organization & other regional & bilateral trade liberalization agreements.” source: http://www.foei.org/campaigns/index.html studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 64 table 5 partners of the world business council for sustainable development, 2006 international organizations • intergovernmental panel on climate change, geneva • organization for economic cooperation and development, paris • united nations commission on sustainable development, new york • united nations development programme, new york • united nations environmental programme, division of technology, industry and economics, paris • united nations global compact, new york • world bank, washington, d.c. news & content • partnerships with 10 news and analysis organizations (5 in uk, 3 in us, 2 in belgium), which support the business case for sustainable development. institutes • centre for applied studies in international negotiations, geneva • international institute for environment & development, london • international institute for sustainable development, winnipeg • stockholm environment institute, stockholm • the energy and resources institute, new delhi • world resources institute, washington, d.c. foundations • bellagio forum for sustainable development, osnarbrück, germany • development gateway, washington, d.c. • foundation for business and society, hovik, norway • rockefeller foundation, new york ngos • asia pacific roundtable for cleaner production, manila • earthwatch institute (europe), oxford, uk • iucn the world conservation union, gland, switzerland • wwf international, gland, switzerland initiative • global reporting initiative, amsterdam universities/training programs • five programs based in prominent universities and institutes of the triad. business organizations (outside wbcsd regional network) • ten groups based in europe (8) and us (2), including international chamber of commerce and world economic forum. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 65 table 6 porto alegre consensus manifesto, january 2005 end means 1) cancel the public debt of countries in the south. 2) apply international taxes/rates to financial transactions, to direct foreign investment, to consolidated profits of transnational corporations, to the sale of arms, and to activities that emit gases that contribute to global warming. 3) progressively dismantle all kinds of fiscal, legal and banking havens. 4) ensure that each person has a right to work, to receive social security and to retire, respecting the equality between men and women. 5) promote all forms of commercial justice by rejecting the world trade organization free-trade regulations, and by implementing mechanisms that permit the processes of production that bring goods and services more progressively to a new level of social norms. the convention on cultural diversity that is being negotiated in unesco should explicitly claim the right of culture over the right of commerce. 6) guarantee the right of each country to nutritional sovereignty and security by promoting rural agriculture. this assumes complete suppression of the subsidies on the exportation of farm products by the north, and the possibility of taxing imports in order to stop dumping practices. countries should have the right to prohibit genetically-altered foodstuffs. new economic regulations that respect every person’s right to life 7) prohibit all “patents on the mind” and on living things (be they people, animals or plants), as well as the privatization of people’s common goods, namely water. 8) above all, fight for different public policies against all kinds of discrimination, sexism, xenophobia, anti-semitism and racism; fully recognize the political, cultural and economic (including the regulation of natural resources) rights of indigenous communities. 9) take urgent measures to put an end to the destruction of the environment and to the threat of serious climate change, exacerbated by the excessive use of individual transportation and non-renewable energy. begin to instate another model of development rooted in energy conservation and the democratic control of natural resources. a just and peaceful life for all of humanity 10) demand the dismantling of foreign military bases and the expulsion of their troops except those serving under an official united nations mandate. 11) guarantee the right to information for all citizens by means of legislation that: a) puts an end to the concentration of resources among a few exclusive communication giants; b) guarantees autonomy for journalists before shareholders; c) favors not-for-profit press outlets, particularly alternative and community-based ones. democracy of all kinds, from local to global 12) profoundly reform and democratize international organizations, among them the un, insuring the upholding of human, economic, social and cultural rights in concordance with the universal declaration of human rights. this implies the incorporation of the world bank, the international monetary fund and wto into the decision-making system of the un. source: http://opendemocracy.typepad.com/wsf/2005/02/previous_posts_.html studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 66 table 7 thematic axes for the world social forum 2006 americas venue (caracas) 1. power, politics and struggles for social emancipation new global power patterns: relations among social movements and organizations, parties and the state. relationship between politics and economics. the role of the state: public and private spheres. struggles for democracy. social practices of resistance: new political cultures and new forms of organization. the world social forum: processes and perspectives. political projects and program proposals. solidarity and new internationalism. women’s movements, struggles against patriarchism and against all forms of violence. perspectives and political struggles of peoples and indigenous nationalities. youth struggles. horizons for change and transformation: are other types of socialism possible? 2. imperial strategies and peoples’ resistance neoliberalism of war and imperial order. militarization, criminalization of struggles and poverty, terror, terrorism and the culture of fear. the “war of civilizations” as a new strategy for imperial expansion. commodification of life and its legal-institutional instruments: “free trade”, foreign debt, international financial institutions; wto, the ftaa and ftas; multinational corporations. crisis of the institutions within the united nations system and international law. the struggle for human rights, and the rights of peoples. sovereignty and the struggle against colonialism. south-south relations. new perspectives for regional integration and people's integration. the debate on development. resistance, civil disobedience and struggles for peace. 3. resources for and rights to life: alternatives to the predatory model capitalism and threats to life: global warming and ‘natural’ catastrophes, loss of biodiversity, desertification. imperial appropriation and privatization of resources. struggles for access, redistribution and protection of resources: land, biodiversity, water, seeds and energy sources. indigenous lands and autonomy. urban crisis, social apartheid and violence. struggles for new urban spaces and relations. patterns of hegemonic knowledge and construction of anti-hegemonic knowledge. dialogue between knowledges. intellectual property and appropriation of knowledge. right to health. alternative health practices. sexual and reproductive rights and decriminalization of abortion. 4. diversities, identities and world views in movement plurality and inter-culturality. indigenous peoples and nationalities and people of african descent. racism and colonial legacy. latin-american and regional identities. local identities. knowledge, spirituality and interreligious dialogue. sexual identity and diversity. youth cultures and identities. spaces and rights for people with special needs. gender identities and sexual diversity. 5. work, exploitation and reproduction of life precariousness, exclusion, inequality and poverty in the north and in the south. work and gender inequalities. labor, unions and social organizations. migrations and new forms of exploitation. child labor. human trafficking. resistance and new social arrangements in labor. nonmercantile forms of reproduction of life: reciprocal treatment, indigenous communities, solidary economy, family-based agriculture, cooperatives and self-management. care economy. 6. communication, culture, education: alternative and democratizing dynamics right to information and communication in order to strengthen citizenship. resistance to the concentration of ownership of the media. social agenda in communication for building alternatives. democratization of access to new technologies. social appropriation of communication and information technologies, and on-line resistance (internet and mobile telephone systems). artistic production and de-commodification of culture. socio-cultural movements as forms of peoples' resistance. linguistic diversities and critical languages. right to education and student struggles. anti-hegemonic educational models and experiences of popular education. source: http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/noticias_01.php?cd_news=1910&cd_language=2 correspondence address: aziz choudry, department of integrated studies in education (dise), mcgill university, room 314, education building, 3700 mctavish street, montreal, quebec h3a 1y2, canada, tel.: (+1) 514 398 2253 email: aziz.choudry@mcgill.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 7-25, 2013 struggles against bilateral ftas: challenges for transnational global justice activism aziz choudry mcgill university, canada abstract the past decade has seen major movements and mobilizations against the newer crop of bilateral free trade and investment agreements being pursued by governments in the wake of the failure of global (world trade organization) and regional (e.g. free trade area of the americas) negotiations, and the defeat of an attempted multilateral agreement on investment in the 1990s. however, in spite of much scholarly, non-governmental organization (ngo) and activist focus on transnational global justice activism, many of these movements, such as the major multi-sectoral popular struggle over the recently-concluded us-korea free trade agreement, are hardly acknowledged in north america and europe. with a shift in emphasis pushing liberalization and deregulation of trade and investment increasingly favouring lowerprofile bilateral agreements, this article maps the resistance movements to these latest shifts in global free market capitalist relations and it discusses the disconnect between these (mainly southern) struggles and dominant scholarly and ngo conceptions of global justice and the global justice movement as well as questions of knowledge production arising from these movements. introduction on november 13, 2011, tens of thousands of workers belonging to the korean confederation of trade unions (kctu), farmers, and others took to the streets against the ratification of the us-south korea free trade agreement (fta) by korean lawmakers after us congress approval (hankyoreh, 2011). the agreement, which some view as the most far-reaching of its kind to be signed since the north american free trade agreement (nafta), was finally passed in the korean national assembly later that month, amidst continuing protests. yet despite major mass mobilizations sustained over several years by korean social movements, there was little awareness of this studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 8 aziz choudry in north america in media or activist networks associated with the “global justice movement” which had emerged over the past two decades from rising opposition to free trade and investment agreements. as a korean activist had noted five years earlier, it seemed that “for the world trade organization (wto) resistance, it is easier to gather people across countries to mobilize together. but with ftas, we are struggling on our own.” (participant of fighting ftas international strategy workshop, july 2006, bangkok). this article critically discusses the spread of ftas following the breakdown of multilateral (wto) and regional (e.g., ftaa) negotiations, and the rise in social movement activism against these agreements. a considerable body of scholarship (e.g., bandy & smith, 2005; day, 2005; eschle & maiguashca, 2010; goodman, 2002; juris, 2008; mcnally, 2002; novelli & ferus-comelo, 2010; polet & cetri, 2004; reitan, 2007; starr, 2000) has investigated popular struggles against capitalist globalization, including campaigns against the world bank, international monetary fund (imf), wto and free trade area of the americas (ftaa) which are often referred to as the global justice movement. yet relatively little attention has been paid to numerous mass movements against bilateral free trade and investment agreements (ftas) which have emerged more recently. moreover, despite a multitude of such movements and mobilizations against ftas, particularly (though not exclusively) in the third world, the transnational ngo/activist networks that have actively contested the wto and ftaa have largely failed to connect such struggles with each other, and are largely inconsequential in relation to anti-fta activism. there has been a disconnect between major mobilizations against ftas and established ngo networks on globalization, which have generally been slow to react or seriously address the bilateral deals. indeed, some of these ngos have issued triumphalist statements responding to the state of wto talks suggesting that neoliberalism is on the defensive, thus overlooking the commitments being made in fta negotiations (e.g., iatp, 2008; menotti, 2008). however, as i outline, connections are slowly being made between movement activists fighting ftas, and an important feature of such linkages is the production and sharing of knowledge arising from social movements themselves. i illustrate the importance of building upon, learning from, and sharing knowledge produced incrementally in these social struggles against global capitalism. the 1999 mobilizations in seattle confronting that year’s wto ministerial meeting which had aspirations to launch a new round of global trade negotiations was viewed by many in the north as the birth of the global justice movement. direct action-oriented groups and people’s movements such as peoples’ global action (pga) (juris, 2008; reitan, 2007; wood, 2005), the international small and peasant farmers’ movement network la via campesina (desmarais, 2007; reitan, 2007), and the ngo-dominated our world is not for sale network arose during the 1990s or the start of this century to coordinate and network transnational1 opposition to the wto (reitan, 2007). yet claims of newness surrounding “globalization” and “anti-globalization” obfuscated the fact that in many contexts, particularly studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 struggles against bilateral ftas 9 in the third world, longstanding resistance to neoliberalism in its different manifestations has spanned several decades (choudry, 2008, 2010; flusty, 2004; mcnally, 2002; motta & nilsen, 2011) including opposition to free trade agreements. this article is informed by bevington and dixon’s (2005) notion of “movement-relevant research,” as well as the author’s engagement in activism, education and research in struggles against bilateral ftas since the 1990s. bevington and dixon note that just as few activists read social movement theory, so too important debates inside movement networks often do not enter the scholarly literature about social movements. they contend that social movement scholars do not have a monopoly on theory about movements. they call for recognition of existing movement-generated theory and of dynamic reciprocal engagement by theorists and movement activists in formulating, producing, refining and applying research. they hold that: “[m]ovement participants produce theory as well, although much of it may not be recognizable to conventional social movement studies. this kind of theory both ranges and traverses through multiple levels of abstraction, from everyday organizing to broad analysis” (p. 195). in situating my analysis in this way, i concur with flacks (2004) and bevington and dixon’s (2005) critiques of the shortcomings of much social movement theory as being driven by attempts to define and refine theoretical concepts which are likely to be “irrelevant or obvious to organizers” (flacks, 2004, p. 147). in his work on knowledge and learning in social activism, holst (2002) uses the term “pedagogy of mobilization” to describe the learning inherent in the building and maintaining of a social movement and its organizations. through participation in a social movement, people learn numerous skills and ways of thinking analytically and strategically as they struggle to understand their movement in motion . . . . moreover, as coalitions are formed people’s understanding of the interconnectedness of relations within a social totality become increasingly sophisticated. (pp. 87-88) scholars who seek to understand social movement and ngo networks need to attend to questions coming out of social movements and activist research in regard to power dynamics and the valuing of certain forms of knowledge. these questions are often based on sophisticated macro and micro analyses of what, to an outsider, might seem a baffling network of relations, and shifting power dynamics. this is not to argue that evaluation and analysis from the standpoint of being embedded in activism is necessarily rigorous or adequate. reflexivity is crucial when starting from, engaging with, and analyzing activist knowledge(s). in a similar vein, foley (1999) writes that the process of critical learning involves people in theorizing their experience: they stand back from it and reorder it, using concepts like power, conflict, structure, values and choice. it is also clear that critical learning is gained informally, through experience, by acting and reflecting on action, rather than in formal courses. (p. 64) studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 10 aziz choudry many scholarly, ngo and activist accounts pay inadequate attention to the significance of low-key, long-haul political education and community organizing work, which goes on underneath the radar, as it were. yet, as i will argue, the knowledge being produced in social movements resisting bilateral free trade and investment agreements constitutes an important conceptual resource for contemporary and future struggles for social and economic justice. challenges for opponents of bilateral free trade agreements mobilizations against bilateral ftas have taken place in many countries, yet the relatively well-known transnational ngo/activist networks which have formed around the wto such as our world is not for sale, and regional networks such as the hemispheric social alliance (in the americas) have not played significant roles in these. indeed, for the most part, there appears to be a knowledge, strategic, and action disconnect between these networks and recent/current struggles against ftas. the trajectory of transnational networks contesting free trade that has accompanied mobilizations against the wto operates on a different track from the locally grounded struggles against ftas, which have often been quite isolated from each other. despite the commonalities of these agreements, and the fact that activists in, for example, thailand, south korea, and colombia have simultaneously campaigned against deals with the us, there has been little opportunity to learn from each other’s struggles. given the fact that the us essentially modifies its deals from a template, and yet details are shrouded in secrecy during negotiations, analysis of texts of already concluded agreements has been important in generating critical understandings of the exact nature of the disciplines in current fta negotiations. because of their very nature, bilateral deals pose some specific challenges for educating, sharing knowledge, and mobilizing transnational networks and alliances against capitalist globalization. this article will also outline specific challenges for education, knowledge production/sharing and mobilization campaigns against bilateral free trade and investment agreements in comparison to activism targeting more established global agreements and institutions such as the wto, the world bank and the imf. 9/11 and the “war on terror” have been used to justify renewed militarization and war, as well as various forms of domestic state intervention in the us economy. meanwhile, repressive domestic national security and immigration legislation is being ratcheted up in many countries, north and south (boron, 2005; flesher fominaya & wood, 2011; mathew, 2005; petras & veltmeyer, 2003; thobani, 2007; tujan, gaughran & mollett, 2004). a number of major political and economic figures, such as former us trade representative (now world bank president) robert zoellick (2001) disingenuously suggested intellectual connections between “terrorists” and opposition movements against neoliberalism, while insisting that further trade and investment studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 struggles against bilateral ftas 11 liberalization (by the usa’s trading partners, at least) was the most effective way to fight “terror.” this has had worldwide consequences for the political space in which ngos and global justice movements exist. some ngos, particularly in north america and europe, urged people to abandon direct action tactics and more confrontational positions. debates within networks in north america and europe regarding diversity of tactics and the parameters of direct action in mobilizations continued, but often with an air of caution and self-censorship after 9/11 (kinsman, 2006; mcnally, 2002; petras & veltmeyer, 2003). in june 2010, this dynamic again played out in the major mobilizations and state repression around toronto’s g-20 protests. the momentum behind major mobilizations against meetings of the world bank/imf, g8, wto, the summit of the americas2, the world economic forum and other conferences of economic and political elites, mainly in the north, that carried from seattle into late 2001 faltered somewhat after 9/11. for petras and veltmeyer (2003), after 9/11, the divisions between ngos and labour unions calling for moderate reform of the system, and anticapitalists or anti-imperialists seeking radical changes “seriously deepened, creating a fundamental rift within the [antiglobalization movement], with an increasing intolerance for radical change and confrontationalist politics” (p. 228). nonetheless, such mobilizations—and the cycle of alternative ngo/ civil society summits have continued, often on a smaller scale, as have questions as to how connected these mobilizations were with mass social movements or everyday resistance against capitalist exploitation, and just how representative they were of the most marginalized voices of the societies for whom they sometimes claimed to speak (hewson, 2005; incite! women of color against violence, 2007; martinez, 2000; prashad, 2003). in the north, much of the momentum and focus directed against the institutions (and their cyclical meetings) most closely identified with the promotion and maintenance of capitalist globalization has been channelled into anti-war movements (solnit, 2004; wood, 2004). global geopolitics, faster and deeper free trade and investment while attempts to link commitments to further advance economic liberalization under the wto with support for the war on terror failed to translate into tangible results in that arena since 2001, the bilateral fta strategies, in particular, those of the us and eu, have clearly been as geopolitically driven as they have been motivated by narrow economic concerns. the eu’s current ftas based on the 2006 “global europe” vision insists that parties (e.g., india, korea and asean) sign a political cooperation agreement before an fta. ftas often have little to do with trade and much to do with securing spheres of political influence and control. access to natural resources such as oil, gas, agrofuels, minerals and biodiversity can be seen as significant in terms of both economic aspects as well as their geopolitical implications. energy security is emerging as an important element in the fta strategies of studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 12 aziz choudry countries like japan, china, the eu and the usa, with separate chapters of ftas between japan and indonesia and japan and brunei guaranteeing the japanese government a supply of gas and oil, for example. as sidney weintraub (2003), of the centre for strategic and international studies in washington, d.c., puts it: the sense that is now being conveyed around the world is that us policy is to sign free trade agreements with other countries only if they are prepared to adhere to us foreign policy positions. an fta, in other words, is not necessarily an agreement in which all parties benefit from trade expansion, but rather a favor to be bestowed based on support of us foreign policy.” there are few signs that the current us administration is taking a substantively different direction on trade policy. the latest global economic crisis has led many people, perhaps most recently symbolized by the occupy movement/ mobilizations, to question the claimed benefits of free market capitalism. initially seen as a default for slow-moving wto negotiations, observers and activists came to see the bilateral ftas as a preferred option. transnational capital has always forum-shopped to get what it wants in terms of international regulatory frameworks enforcing protection of investment and property rights (kelsey, 1999). through ftas, it is possible to isolate and divide governments outside of a forum where they could on some level band together to resist demands of northern governments within the wto. critics often suggest that the fta process constitutes more of an imposition by a larger power than a real negotiation. like wto agreements, and given their lower profile, perhaps more so, they are negotiated in virtual secrecy, with negotiating texts routinely unavailable for public scrutiny in either country until it is much too late, or, in some cases, not even available for a significant period of time after the agreement has taken effect. governments of smaller countries face negotiations fatigue when overstretched and underresourced officials have to deal with agreements with multiple countries, bilaterally, regionally, and multilaterally. former eu trade commissioner and current director-general of the wto, pascal lamy said of eu trade policy: “we always use bilateral ftas to move negotiations beyond wto standards. by definition, a bilateral trade agreement is “wto plus.” whether it’s about investment, intellectual property rights, tariff structure or trade instrument, in each bilateral fta we have the “wto plus” provision” (jakarta post, 2004). bilateral agreements typically allow for deeper and faster levels of liberalization and deregulation than could be achieved in the wto, (“wto-plus” provisions) and specific measures and policies could be targeted with more precision. ftas often break new ground. as governments commit to standards of liberalization that go further than the wto through ftas, this has implications for negotiating positions in multilateral trade talks should wto talks get more momentum: countries will not be able to stand up to demands from northern governments for wto expansion when they have already signed onto wto-plus commitments bilaterally. bilaterally, it is sometimes easier studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 struggles against bilateral ftas 13 to set precedents on a range of issues which can then at some point be taken into multilateral arena. compliance with wto agreements has been hard for many countries, but bilateral deals with wto-plus provisions are even tougher. through ftas and bilateral investment treaties (bits), eu and us trade negotiators push governments into going further and faster in adopting what are essentially corporate wish lists on areas such as intellectual property (further endangering access to treatment to millions of people living with hiv/aids and other life-threatening diseases, undermining traditional agriculture by imposing agribusiness monopoly rights on areas such as seeds, and expanding patent protection over all life forms), financial liberalization, and issues (e.g., government procurement and investment) which have been kept out of wto negotiations or severely limited in their scope due to third world governments’ opposition to industrialized government demands. us agribusiness and pharmaceutical corporations are both the scripters and cheerleaders of trips-plus provisions. for example, monsanto (2004) urged us trade negotiators to seek an end to thailand’s moratorium on large-scale field trials of genetically-modified (gm) crops either “in a parallel fashion with the fta negotiations or directly within the context of the negotiations.” monsanto (2004) said that in the current context of free trade…it is imperative that the us work with thailand to eliminate the current barriers to biotechnology-improved crops and establish a science-based regulatory system—including field trials of new crops—consistent with their international trade obligations in order to bring the benefits of these products to market in thailand and to further promote consistent access to american agricultural technologies and products. former thai prime minister thaksin shinawatra announced his intention to reverse thailand’s moratorium on gm field trials (which came into effect after pressure from farmers and consumer groups in april 2001). while he and his cabinet were forced to uphold the moratorium after thai farmers, buddhist organizations, consumers and anti-gmo activists protested, us and monsanto officials,who seek to make thailand its regional base for gm roundup-ready corn and bt corn, continue to have the moratorium in their sights in the context of a potential renewal of fta talks. businesseurope (formerly the union of industrial and employers’ federations of europe—unice) states: given the increasingly important role of services in eu exports, all future ftas must ensure comprehensive liberalization of key sectors including financial services, telecommunications, professional and business services and express delivery services…the eu has a comparative advantage across the board in services and needs to ensure that this advantage is pressed home in future ftas. (unice, 2006) studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 14 aziz choudry bilateral investment threats: popular resistance against corporate power as south korean activists and commentators have noted, a major concern for the newly-minted us-korea fta is its investor-state dispute system. many ftas and bits contain broad definitions of “investment” which throw the door wide open for disgruntled corporations based in one signatory country to take a case against the other signatory government to a binding disputes tribunal. such disputes are fought out behind closed doors in arbitration proceedings at the world bank’s international centre for the settlement of investment disputes (icsid). thus far, these have often related to conflicts after the privatization of state-owned enterprises and public utilities such as water, but could extend to include almost anything. these have already become flashpoints for popular resistance. azurix, a former subsidiary of enron won a bid to run the privatized water and sewage system for 2.5 million people in parts of buenos aires province, argentina, in may 1999. bahia blanca residents complained that their water smelt bad and looked brown, while regulators considered sanctions against azurix for very low water pressure. after the water supply was found to be contaminated, health authorities warned people not to drink or bathe in the water. the local regulating agency forced the company to deliver free bottled water to those affected, not to charge for a period when the water was of poor quality, and fined azurix for breach of contract. in october 2001, azurix stated that it would withdraw from the contract, complaining that the province would not let it charge rates according to the tariff specified in the contract and would not deliver infrastructure. the province rejected the termination notice. then, under a 1991 us-argentina bilateral investment treaty, azurix took argentina’s bankrupt government to binding arbitration at icsid, seeking us $550 million. azurix said that the authorities’ actions amount to interference with its investment. in july 2006, icsid awarded azurix us $165 million against argentina, although the government has thus far refused to pay, despite threats from the current us administration. the popular struggle against the privatized water system of cochabamba, bolivia, is a potent symbol of resistance against neoliberalism and privatization. this followed aguas del tunari (affiliate of us water corporation bechtel) sharply increasing prices. but after the privatization was reversed, the water system handed back to the public, and it was forced to leave bolivia, aguas del tunari/bechtel lodged a request for arbitration against bolivia at icsid. it sought us $50 million, claiming as expropriated investment the millions of dollars in potential profits it had hoped to make. (for the same amount, 125,000 bolivian families without access to water could have been connected.) the company turned to a 1992 bit between holland and bolivia. while it was establishing its operations in cochabamba, bechtel was filing papers to shift its subsidiary’s corporate registration to holland from the cayman islands. after international protests and pressure, at the end of 2005, bechtel abandoned its claim against bolivia. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 struggles against bilateral ftas 15 challenges for resistance movements against ftas although these bilateral deals are being signed and implemented in many countries, the focus of many international development and advocacy ngos and trade union networks critical of free trade often seems to remain on the multilateral talks at the almost moribund wto. there has been some belated focus on epas being signed between the eu and african, caribbean, and pacific countries among european and australasian ngos but relatively few connections have been made with local grassroots struggles against these agreements (canterbury, 2010). it has been difficult to coordinate nationallevel opposition to eu epas, and much of the international campaign work on this has been driven by northern-based ngos which have had varying levels of connection with social movements. conceptually, this weakness can partly be attributed to these organizations’ overemphasis on the wto, and a failure to take a clear stance against neoliberal capitalism, with a spectrum of platforms calling for anything between mild reform to complete rejection, coupled with a funding and institutional focus which tended to prioritize these institutions which were traditional targets of mobilizations. while many of the stronger campaigns against ftas build upon and draw from the experience of mobilization against the wto, ftaa, and other neoliberal reforms at international and domestic levels, the lower profile of these deals has allowed negotiations to take place well under the radar of many activist movements and organizations. some of the largest and most militant mobilizations against capitalist globalization in recent years have been anti-fta protests, for example in korea, where street protests against the recently concluded fta with the us numbered in the tens of thousands regularly, and in cafta (us-dominican republic-central american free trade agreement) countries (for example, 200,000 demonstrated in san jose, costa rica on february 26, 2007 against cafta). and yet in spite of the growth of the global justice network, these mobilizations have attracted relatively little awareness or solidarity in north america. the question is often asked how to maximize leverage/opposition against these agreements by cooperating with activists in the other signatory country, but there has been very little sustained joint activism in this regard, notwithstanding the scale and political impact of anti-fta movements outside of europe and north america. in at least two cases, in ecuador (guttierez) and thailand (thaksin shinawatra), anti-fta movements and sentiments have contributed to overthrowing governments. subsequently, after popular pressure led to the cancellation of occidental petroleum’s oil extraction contract in ecuador, the proposed fta with the us was effectively scuttled. the geopolitical aspects of these deals, such as the us-korea fta, and us foreign policy in latin america, both influence and become important mobilization targets in themselves. in korea, opposition was related to older struggles (and the knowledge/conceptual resources which they generated) against us domination and military bases. by comparison with multilateral talks, such studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 16 aziz choudry aspects have been in clearer focus in bilateral fta struggles because of the close attention paid to other aspects of foreign affairs linkages with the other signatory government. in many ways popular resistance to the chile-korea fta set the stage for an even larger phase of mobilization against korea’s fta with the us. even before the fight against the chile and us ftas, korean social movements had mobilized against the imposition of neoliberal reforms since the 1980s, whether imposed by seoul, or, after the 1997-1998 economic crisis, by the imf. korea-chile fta negotiations began in 1998 and a deal was eventually concluded in 2003. although the agreement was quite comprehensive (including services, investment, and other areas), it was its agriculture provisions, and particularly the implications for korea’s domestic fruit growers, that were the focus of opposition in korea. protests were frequently met with police violence, but helped to repeatedly delay ratification. while over 50% of korea’s lawmakers promised that they would oppose the fta, they ratified it. from this experience, the farmers’ movement, the korean peasant league (kpl) drew two lessons for future fta fights: firstly, a struggle by small farmers alone (10% of korea’s population) would not lead to victory. the majority of the population were made to believe that sacrifice of the farmers was a necessary evil to achieve economic growth. secondly, one cannot rely solely on parliamentarians, since despite all the mobilizations, the government ratified the deal anyway. so kpl learnt that it is vital to build a mass struggle with other sectors to defeat current and future ftas. korean farmers, unsurprisingly, were at the forefront of struggles against the fta with the usa. the korean resistance against the us-korea fta has been a major multisectoral struggle, illustrating the importance of strong national movements in the context of cross/binational networks against a deal. while there has been a strong movement in korea, there has been far less social movement activism in the us. there were some joint actions and statements by korean and us unions against the fta, and korean protest expeditions to the usa during negotiating rounds, but little sustained focus in us. closer to the ratification dates by the two respective governments, there was some campaigning in the us, including by progressive korean-americans, to stop the agreement, but no major movement mobilizations as had been seen in opposition to nafta, the ftaa or the wto. similarly a small symbolic protest action in brussels was held against the eu-korea fta, but was more or less a one-off action. just as there is a great diversity in positions, ideologies, perspectives and tactics among opposition movements against the wto, so too, we can find among opposition to bilateral ftas those who call for reform of these agreements (largely major trade union bureaucracies and ngos in north america, europe and australasia) and those who reject these agreements altogether. ngo technical policy analyses of these agreements, along with the bretton woods institutions and other processes are often detached from political economy/geopolitical factors, and lack a systemic critique of capitalism and imperialism which views that all of these institutions, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 struggles against bilateral ftas 17 agreements and processes—global regional, subregional, bilateral, national and subnational (i.e. state/province/municipal level) necessitate oppositional responses. compartmentalized approaches to addressing capitalist globalization which do not confront the systemic nature of capitalism can only be of limited effectiveness. for many ngo campaigns, this compartmentalization occurs around issues (e.g. agriculture, services), regional or countryspecific priorities, sectors (women, workers, farmers, indigenous peoples) and institutions and agreements (wto, ftaa, etc.) without a broader underlying framework of analysis necessarily informing action against global capitalism per se. this tends towards a rather fragmented analysis. certainly, in some anti-fta struggles, particular aspects of these agreements attract more attention than others, such as intellectual property provisions of the us-thailand agreement, and the toxic waste dumping provisions of the japan-philippines economic partnership agreement, but the most vibrant and sustained anti-fta mobilizations have seen broad fronts of opposition grow through an understanding of the comprehensive threats posed by these agreements. for example, movements of people living with hiv/aids in thailand found common cause and forged alliances with farmers because of the intellectual property chapter in the proposed us-thai fta. meanwhile, the korean government’s removal of the film quota (to promote korean films) as part of fta negotiations, and commitments to further liberalize korean agriculture brought film actors, directors, and producers together with farmers and trade unionists in the streets against the us-korea fta. on the other hand, in north american and european campaigns on ftas, there has been relatively little mass mobilization or awareness. although a somewhat more broadly-framed ngo/trade union campaign against the canada-eu comprehensive economic and trade agreement (ceta) picked up some momentum in 2011, positions of ngos and trade unions have tended to focus on rather narrow platforms such as the canadian autoworkers union focus against the proposed canada-korea fta because of threats to the ontario auto assembly sector and canadian labour/ngo framings of the canada-colombia fta agreement around human rights in colombia. such conceptualizations of these agreements run the risk of obscuring broader and deeper instruments of neoliberalism which impact the lives of peoples in both signatory countries, and do not prioritize building broader understandings and movements against these agreements. building campaign resources to support movements against ftas given the challenges to organizing cross-nationally, a major concern among some opponents of ftas has been facilitation of the sharing of knowledge, research, analysis and experience. in 2004, a number of organizations3 initiated a collaborative website to support peoples’ struggles against bilateral free trade and investment agreements http://www.bilaterals.org. http://www.bilaterals.org/ studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 18 aziz choudry bilaterals.org is an open-publishing site where people fighting bilateral trade and investment agreements exchange information and analysis and build cooperation. those campaigning against bilateral deals had found it hard to connect with others around the world to share analysis and develop broader and complementary strategies. by early 2008, the website was attracting around 200, 000 hits a month. it has been used to leak draft negotiating texts which have otherwise not been made public, such as a draft ipr chapter of the us-thailand fta (the nation, 2006), which was important for thai activists to highlight. it is also a forum for activists to directly alert others about developments in their struggles, not least during intense periods of mobilization and state repression in korea and costa rica in 2007 and 2008, mass mobilizations in peru against proposed ftas with the eu and the usa, and a wave of anti-fta protests in india in 2009-2010. people’s movements to stop ftas are often isolated from each other, a direct reflection of the divide and conquer strategy that bilateralism thrives on. a number of anti-fta movements have made it a priority to break the isolation and link with others fighting such agreements in order to share analysis and learnings from each other’s struggles. the thai anti-fta movement has been quite proactive in this respect, organizing several events which have brought activists from different countries together to strategize on ftas (similar collaboration has also taken place in latin america among movements fighting bilateral deals). fta watch, a thai coalition, invited bilaterals.org, and grain, a small international ngo with strong relationships with many social movements, to help co-organize a global strategy meeting of anti-fta activists. the three-day “fighting ftas” workshop was held in july 2006 in bangkok, bringing together around 60 social movement activists from 20 countries of africa, the americas and the asia-pacific region to share experiences in grassroots struggles against ftas and to build international strategies and cooperation. for many, it was the first time they had been able to physically sit down with other movement activists fighting ftas and discuss strategy and experiences. in february 2008, grain, bilaterals. org, and biothai (biodiversity action thailand) produced a collaborative publication and launched a multimedia website called “fighting ftas: the growing resistance to bilateral free trade and investment agreements” which provides both a global overview of the spread of ftas and maps the growing resistance and learning’s from people’s experiences of fighting ftas. this resource was merged into a relaunched and redesigned bilaterals.org website in 2009 which is continuously updated. the website is a collaborative information tool that also has a public and political persona. this has been a useful (though unintended) impact because it allows people to identify bilaterals.org as a collective support to social movements: no one group is behind it, it has a critical view and voice, and is an initiative people can work with and through. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 struggles against bilateral ftas 19 spreading resistance against bilateral free trade agreements several significant international movement networks have drawn attention to the importance of opposing bilateral free trade and investment agreements. in november 2006, the asian peasant coalition (apc) issued a critique of the japan-philippines economic partnership agreement (jpepa) which denounced it as “a very onerous deal … worse than the impositions by the wto itself,” and called upon the philippine government to scrap it. predicting that filipino farmers would be hardest hit by the deal, the statement predicted that jpepa would “further sink the philippines into being a beggar state” (asian peasant coalition, 2006). starting in october 2006, militant filipino farmers, led by the kilusang magbubukid ng pilipinas (kmp), launched several protest actions at the japanese embassy. members of the apc have joined filipino farmers in protest actions against jpepa. la via campesina has also made a number of statements explicitly opposing bilateral ftas. a number of its member organizations, particularly in central america, korea and africa are engaged in struggles against (mainly) us and eu-driven ftas. in a january 2008 statement, via campesina members from asia, europe, africa and latin america stated that all bilateral and bi-regional free-trade agreements, be they called “tratados de libre-comercio” (tlc), “free-trade agreements” (fta) or “economic partnership agreements” (epas), are of the same nature. they lead to the plundering of natural resources and only serve transnational companies at the expense of all the world’s peoples and environment. these are not partnership agreements but economic plundering agreements (via campesina, 2008). the organizations demanded “that governments not sign or withdraw from these agreements.” knowledge production, social movement learning, theory and struggle fta struggles highlight the importance of resistance firmly grounded in local and national contexts, but which connects to regional and global perspectives. strategies that emerge from strong local organizations are the ones most able to map the terrain of struggle, to identify key local and international players pushing specific agreements and specific provisions of agreements to know their weak points, histories, styles of operating and how they are connected, and to oppose, expose and challenge those pushing ftas and their strategies. alongside this, technical policy analysis—something which so many advocacy ngos prioritize needs to be informed by and connected to the realities of people’s struggles, not the other way round. these forms of knowledge are increasingly important as potential resources for other movements which find themselves confronting the same strategies and players in different countries. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 20 aziz choudry as kelley (2002) puts it: “social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. the most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression” (p.9). participation in social activism offers activists and the wider movement(s) opportunities to learn and create knowledge, through informal activities that take place in the daily life of organizations/movements. as choudry and shragge (2011) note, this happens if the place created is not overly controlled by professionalism and offers social interaction. this “social learning” is embedded in social interaction between participants in social movements and organizing, or between organizations/movements. this learning is often unanticipated, incidental (though not insignificant), and dynamic in nature. holst (2002, 2011) notes how the importance and nature of learning in social movements tends to be dismissed in the literature. for him, social movements, through public protest that can take various forms, attempt to educate and persuade the larger public and politicians. second, there is much educational work internal to social movements, in which organizational skills, ideology, and lifestyle choices are passed from one member to the next informally through mentoring and modeling or formally through workshops, seminars, lectures, and so forth. a wealth of knowledge can be brought forth from social struggles which in turn can inform strategy and theory. yet relatively few attempts have been made to theorize informal learning through involvement in social action. one exception is foley (1999), who validates and analyzes the importance of the incidental learning in a variety of social struggles. foley argues that to do this analysis “one needs to write case studies of learning in struggle, making explanatory connections between the broad political and economic context, micro-politics, ideologies, discourses and learning” (p. 132). such forms of knowledge can directly challenge professionalization and technicism which permeates ngo-dominated global justice advocacy, and can help to inoculate organizations against disconnection from potential movement sites of contestation and building opposition. novelli (2010) highlights the dialectics of strategic learning through struggle and contestation which includes incidental, formal, informal, and nonformal education. this implies an engagement in “strategic analysis, which in turn leads to strategic action, and then to intended and unintended consequences of action, and to further reflection/analysis and action” (p. 124). foley (1999) emphasizes the importance of “developing an understanding of learning in popular struggle” (p.140). his attention to documenting, making explicit, and valuing incidental forms of learning and knowledge production in social action is consistent with others who understand that critical consciousness and theory emerge from engagement in action and organizing contexts, rather than ideas developed elsewhere being imposed on “the people” (bevington and dixon, 2005; choudry and kapoor, 2010; kelley, 2002; kinsman, 2006). studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 struggles against bilateral ftas 21 conclusion mcnally, (2002; 2010); petras and veltmeyer (2003, 2005), boron (2005), chun (2009), desmarais (2007), reitan (2007), and motta and nilsen (2011) illustrate that people’s struggles against neoliberalism, including peasant movements, indigenous peoples, and militant trade unionists in latin america and asia, have continued to vigorously challenge states and transnational capital, notwithstanding increasing militarization and the use of anti-terror legislation against activists and communities of resistance over the past decade. with few exceptions, often lobbying campaigns by ngos such as those on epas in europe (canterbury, 2010; dür and de bièvre, 2007), there has been relatively little activism addressing ftas in europe and north america. the responses of movements to bilateral ftas in the post-9/11 climate illustrate a growing disconnect between anti-neoliberal activism in europe and north america and the rest of the world. in many northern activist networks, campaign focuses around the connections between imperialism, war and links to questions of political economy and neoliberal capitalism have often been limited to articulating us oil interests in the middle east with the invasion of iraq. yet for many on the frontlines against ftas in thailand, south korea or the philippines, these links are often identified and articulated in a far more sophisticated manner (bilaterals.org, biothai and grain, 2008; choudry, 2009, 2010; mathew, 2005; mcnally, 2002; petras & veltmeyer, 2003). the current wave of bilateral free trade and investment agreements represent an intensification of capitalist globalization. the comprehensiveness of many ftas has engendered the building of common fronts of struggle at national levels in many countries, but this has largely occurred outside of north america and europe. internationally, however, there is a tendency of ngo campaigns to be compartmentalized around individual institutions and issues (agriculture, human rights intellectual property rights, labour, women, etc). there is another tendency for a rather standard formulation or platform of opposition to be mounted by many advocacy ngos (mainly, although not always, with actual or de facto headquarters in europe or north america) against the wto, the imf and the world bank but still relatively little focus placed on ftas although these arguably impose more immediate threats. there remains a reticence to reconceptualize globalization to include threats outside of the global institutions such as the wto, world bank and imf, and to see dangers inherent in apparently smaller deals. the question remains how to conceptualize capitalist globalization equally driven by a web of smaller agreements and to target this process in a concerted manner. in understanding the significance of many of these anti-fta movements, the question of their success may hinge on whether they can build long-term alliances against neoliberalism rather than stopping an fta, and sustain a critique of capitalist globalization in whatever form it may take, and as we can see with nafta, the us-korea fta and other agreements, the social struggle does not necessarily end when the deal is signed. as mcnally (2002) studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 22 aziz choudry and katsiaficas (2002) contend, within “anti-globalization” networks, a disproportionate focus and awareness about the modalities of mobilizations and activism in north america and europe lends itself to overlooking what are often far more complex, mass-based and sustained forms of resistance to capitalism and colonialism in the third world, including new fronts of struggle against bilateral free trade and investment agreements. since most of these mobilizations have taken place in asia and latin america, and with little sustained major mobilization against such deals in northern countries, these struggles have also escaped attention in both activist and broader public circles, and scholarly attention. in examining the knowledge being produced and shared in grounded struggles against bilateral ftas, we can discern different forms of knowledge production and learning in struggle that can trouble disconnected transnational professionalized ngo forms of knowledge, and contribute to building a body of knowledge and resources for struggle. the fact that so much of this antifta resistance has happened without strong connections to transnational ngo networks is undoubtedly a factor in its relative absence from both ngo and scholarly purview. in the context of transnational social movement/ ngo networks, as thayer (2000) notes, “barriers to south-north conceptual migration are both economic and discursive. on the one hand, the periphery and its intellectual products are constructed as both exotic and specific, while the center and its discourses and theories enjoy all-embracing, universal status” (p. 229). the privileging of western, professionalized epistemologies of knowledge manifests itself within ngo and activist networks with the reification of “experts” and the dominance of professionalized forms of knowledge such as technical policy analysis of official texts which are decontextualized from the political and economic structures of power in which they exist. it positions certain kinds of knowledge, individuals and organizations as authoritative, and devalues or ignores others. the extent to which scholarship will attend to, arise from, and/or engage these movements and mobilizations against ftas is unclear; yet it seems probable that, with little sign of a substantive change in today’s international trade and investment policy-making to prioritize bilateral over multilateral agreements, many more such struggles will emerge. notes 1 see http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org 2 initiated in 1994, the summit of the americas has met a number of times to lay groundwork for a (stalled) us-led proposal for a free trade and investment agreement covering all the nations in the americas except for cuba – known as the free trade area of the americas. 3 the initiators included the asia-pacific research network, gatt watchdog (new zealand), global justice ecology project (usa), grain, ibon foundation (philippines), xminy solidariteitsfond (netherlands). http://www.aprnet.org/ mailto:notoapec@clear.net.nz http://www.globaljusticeecology.org/ http://www.grain.org/ studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 struggles against bilateral ftas 23 references asian peasant coalition. 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(2007). exalted subjects: studies in the making of race and nation in canada. toronto: university of toronto press. tujan, a., gaughran, a., & mollett, h. (2004). development and the “global war on terror.” race and class, 46(1), 53-74. unice. (2006, december 7). unice strategy on an eu approach to free trade agreements. brussels. retrieved from http://bilaterals.org/spip.php? article7265 weintraub, s. (2003, september 3). the politics of us trade policy. retrieved from http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3169649.stm wood, l. (2004). organizing against the occupation—us and canadian anti-war activists speak out. social movement studies, 3(2), 241-257. wood, l, (2005). bridging the chasms: the case of peoples’ global action. in j. bandy & j. smith (eds.), coalitions across borders: transnational protest and the neoliberal order (pp.95-117). lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. zoellick, r. (2001, september 24). american trade leadership: what is at stake? speech to international institute of economics, washington d.c. retrieved from www.petersoninstitute.org/publications/papers/zoellick 1001.pdf http://bilaterals.org/spip.php? article7265 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3169649.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3169649.stm http://www.petersoninstitute.org/publications/papers/zoellick 1001.pdf yi final correspondence address: ran yi, school of humanities & languages, the university of new south wales, high street, kensington, sydney, nsw 2052, australia; email: ran.yi@unsw.edu.au issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 1, 146-151, 2023 book review translation as social justice: translation policies and practices in non-governmental organisations tesseur, w. (2022). new york: routledge. isbn 9780367646882 (cloth) us$170.00; isbn 9781032331317 (paper) us$48.95; isbn 9781003125822 (e-book) us$36.71. 196 pages. ran yi the university of new south wales, australia for decades, a convincing body of scholarly literature has elicited the deeply embedded value of non-governmental organisations (ngos) in upholding social justice, ensuring equity and access, and achieving sustainable development, which traverses geographical boundaries, language, and cultural barriers. however, the link between ngos’ use of language translation and interpreting (t&i) and their operational goals of social justice has been “largely overlooked” (p. 2). such disregard may magnify the potential gaps in communication when the default use of the dominant language (e.g., english as lingua franca) silences less-heard local language communities, particularly in peace-building and other post-conflict scenarios. the neglect of local or minority language communities may further impinge on the principles of inclusion and human rights in international development and humanitarian settings, despite the overarching mission to leave no one behind (united nations, 2015, 2022). to bridge potential communication gaps, tesseur’s insightful monograph is written with two key guiding questions: (1) what can international non-governmental organisations (ingos) do to embed a more linguistically attuned approach in their translation work? and (2) what can translation researchers do to ensure more socially just language and translation practices? with these questions in mind, tesseur highlights traditionally ignored aspects of ngos’ language work as a tool of empowerment in facilitating multilingual communication, addressing longstanding cultural colonisation book review studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 146-151, 2023 147 concerns, and achieving language diversity and social justice. she does this by drawing from a wealth of ethnographic interviews with staff in international and national ngo offices (e.g., amnesty international, goal, oxfam gb, save the children uk, tearfund uk)1 with impactful active operations in the global south. 2 as such, this book contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary research in social justice from the perspectives of anthropology, sociolinguistics, language policy, and t&i studies. theoretically, the author proposes the notion of “translation as empowerment” by concentrating on two closely intertwined concepts: social justice and language choice (p. 10). on the social justice front, she endorses two conceptual models: bell’s (2016) framework of participatory social justice and fraser’s (2005) political representation. bell’s framework considers social justice both as a goal and a participatory process. the process is respectful of an inclusive justice that balances human diversity and agency. by comparison, fraser’s model views social justice from the perspective of political representation. in the context of ingos’ communication, the language and translation policies of ingos may impact political representation and participatory rights of local staff whose native languages do not fall within the ingos’ working language. it may deny local staff equitable access to vital information and other opportunities. on the language policy front, tesseur advocates spolsky’s (2004) concept of language policy, which synthesises language management (the formulation of an explicit plan or official policy in formal written documents), language practices (what people do), and language beliefs or ideology (what people think they should do). methodologically, the author presents a robust account of social justice through the lens of t&i studies in the context of ngos. the strength of this book is the author’s use of rich sources of authentic empirical data from three credible research projects: (1) tesseur’s (2015) doctoral research on translation policies in amnesty international (see chapters 2, 3, and 4), funded through an eu marie curie action grant (2011-2014); (2) her research project, translation as empowerment: translation policies at amnesty international (tesseur, 2019), which is about human rights in the global south (2019-2021), funded through the caroline co-fund postdoctoral fellowship programme from the irish research council and marie skłodowska-curie actions, and conducted with goal’s meal team (monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning) in and outside ireland on the role of translation in multilingual covid-19 information campaigns (see chapter 6); and (3) the uk-based research project, the listening zones of ngos: languages and cultural knowledge in development programmes (2015-2018) (intrac, n.d.), which 1according to a 2015 report by the active learning network for accountability and performance in humanitarian action (alnap) on the state of the humanitarian system, the five named organisations represent roughly 31% of ngo humanitarian expenditure worldwide (alnap, 2015). 2tesseur’s use of the term “global south” is intended to include poorer or less economically developed countries in interdisciplinary discussions (p. 14). ran yi studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 146-151, 2023 148 was funded by the arts & humanities research council (ahrc), and includes case studies developed in kyrgyzstan, malawi, and peru on the role of cultural knowledge and languages in relationship-building between international and local ngos (see chapter 8). the book is clear in its structure and readable in its writing style. chapter 1 sets the scene by providing an evolutionary account of ingos’ language and translation policies over time. as noted above, chapters 2 to 6 present empirical findings from language and translation work that are presented in relation to the concepts of social justice and language choice. these chapters mainly focus on two types of ingos: those with integrated t&i functions and those without such functions. for those with t&i operations (see chapters 2 and 3), drawing on archival evidence, the author adopts a historical approach to examine language and translation policy within each organisation and then applies a comparative approach to assess developments in similar practices in other organisations. while writing these closely knitted chapters, the author also highlights motivations and challenges behind these developments: (1) the low profile of language and translation work in ingos and essential “language silence” throughout the history of taken-for-granted work (p. 26); (2) the need for organisational growth and “decentralization” (p. 34); (3) competing demands for “accuracy and consistency” in multilingual communication (p .49); and (4) the “complexity” of global communication and the diversity of “voices” in representations (p. 50). shifting from the professionalisation of internal t&i practices to discussions of informal translation, chapter 4 ruminates on the risks and consequences of volunteer translation by sharing useful examples of successful collaborations. for ingos without internal t&i operations, chapters 5 and 6 concentrate on language and translation policy discussions, potential risks and problems, and solutions. in chapter 5, the author analyses the paradox between english as a lingua franca and an inclusion and empowerment device for diverse language communities. drawing on data from 29 semi-structured interviews with staff from five ingos that use english as a bridging language without an internal translation department, the author identifies two distinctive approaches to language and translation policies. one approach is english as a lingua franca, which prioritises cost-effectiveness and efficiency. the other approach is mutual language learning and translation. the former approach encourages all non-native english-speaking staff in all countries to learn and use english as a working language, which puts the native english speakers in an advantageous position and runs the risk of upholding and exacerbating language inequalities. in contrast, the latter approach endorses the “translanguaging” practice in sociolinguistics to overcome barriers in interlingual communication. for example, each person speaks their language, or speakers draw on their entire multilingual repertoire to make communication work. nevertheless, tesseur points out, both approaches highlight the necessity of a translation budget, as ingos are highly dependent on donor funding and require high-quality and book review studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 146-151, 2023 149 effective language communication across various functions in all countries. in chapter 6, the author critically examines three common options for interlingual communication in different contexts (day-to-day v. crisis response), practices (human v. machine; individual v. multi-agency), and language needs (official language v. local dialect): (1) free machine translation (e.g., google translate); (2) multilingual staff as language aides; and (3) collaborative, multi-agency translation process. due to time constraints, and a lack of trained professionals for a given language pair or in a specific location, ad hoc or informal translation practices are considered to be more practical, affordable, or feasible options. however, drawing on three cases studies of informal translation and interpreting solutions, the author raises awareness of interlingual and intercultural challenges and their implications for ingos’ social justice values, as locally based staff, staff from local partner organisations, and local communities may be excluded from opportunities without the equitable access to information. for free machine translation, the author raises the ethical issue of potential data breaches on confidential donor information, such as personal financial data and the issue of translation quality, as the lack of contextual information could lead to misunderstandings. for multilingual staff as language aides, the author touches on the loss of staff time to translation or language training instead of their formal work, frustration and anxiety among staff members who carry the extra burden of multilingual work without support or recognition. for the collaborative and multi-agency translation process, ingo staff consider it empowering, as it brings out the synergy of language and translation, cultural adaptation, and health information dissemination that allows local communities to access the same information in their native language by participating in information campaigns. chapters 7 and 8 serve as the conclusions to this book. in chapter 7, the author summarises the main findings of t&i provisions in ingos concerning social justice values (p. 135). here tesseur points out that the growing needs for translation and interpreting have paved the way for the institutionalisation of translation through developing empowerment-driven language and translation policies and establishing internal translation departments (e.g., tearfund uk and amnesty international). however, based on bell’s (2016) social justice framework, current language and translation policies do not ensure equitable access to opportunities in ingos’ programme development, information access and ownership, dialogue, and accountability practices. moreover, the insufficient provision of translation and interpreting may further undermine the importance of local cultures and lead to inequalities between staff within the organisation. in chapter 8, the author evaluates the impact of her research using a theory of change, which is a widely employed framework for planning and evaluation in government and non-profit sectors. this theory is intended to enable evaluation of the situation in which the change happens, the stakeholders who need to be engaged in relation to the sought-after goal, the trigger element, and the underlying assumptions on which the vision of change is based. using this ran yi studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 146-151, 2023 150 theory, tesseur identifies that the importance of language and translation have not been fully recognised as core elements of ingos’ work, which may affect inclusion, accountability, and programme effectiveness when operating field missions in non-english native-speaking local communities in global south countries. thus, she proposes a long-term vision for ngos to create more linguistically inclusive policies and practices to empower changes in beliefs, knowledge, and attitudes about language and translation. for example, one suggested approach is integrating quality translation and multilingual communication efforts with existing institutional policies and actions, such as using multilingual versions and providing t&i options as a tool of empowerment when monitoring peace-building projects, drafting reports and blog posts, and organising workshops and seminars. tesseur maintains that this approach has the potential to fulfil the rights of participation held by local and minority language communities and put them on an equal footing with native english-speaking communities in ngos’ communication, particularly in peace-building and conflict resolution scenarios. overall, this book exemplifies the value of engaged research with critical reflexivity and radical integrity. although the author honestly acknowledges that the book may show compromises induced by her positioning, worldviews, privileges, and other limitations, translation as social justice: translation policies and practices in non-governmental organisations remarkably demonstrates three distinctive contributions. firstly, for international ngo general offices, it raises awareness of the link between social justice, power, and language work. for example, the book sheds light on the less-explored aspect of linguistic racism based on accent, dialect, and speech patterns, which may be effectively addressed by the strategic use of t&i-focused training and inclusive solutions. secondly, for national ngos with or without t&i functions, it inspires contemplation on their practices and impactful solutions to optimise their current operations. in this regard, the author provides evidence-based solutions by eliciting less-heard voices from developing countries such as kyrgyzstan, malawi, and peru language communities. thirdly, for research funders and universities, this book invites meaningful collaborations with non-academic partner institutions to create impactful language choices from a broader perspective. given these contributions, this book is a helpful reference for interdisciplinary researchers and scholars in social justice and t&i studies. references alnap. (2015). the state of the humanitarian system report, 2015. https://www.alnap.org/helplibrary/the-state-of-the-humanitarian-system-report-2015 bell, l. a. (2016). theoretical foundations for social justice education. in m. adams, l. a. bell, k. y. joshi & d. j. goodman (eds.), teaching for diversity and social justice (pp. 3-26). routledge. fraser, n. (2005). reframing justice in a globalizing world. new left review, 36, 69-88. book review studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 146-151, 2023 151 intrac. (n.d.). the listening zones of ngos: languages and cultural knowledge in development programmes. retrieved january 6, 2023, from https://www.intrac.org/projects/listening-zones-ngos/ spolsky, b. (2004). language policy. cambridge university press. tesseur, w. (2015). transformation through translation: translation policies at amnesty international [unpublished doctoral dissertation]. aston university. tesseur, w. (2019). translation as empowerment: translation as a contributor to human rights in the global south. https://sites.google.com/view/translation-as-empowerment united nations. (2015). transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda united nations sustainable development group. (2022). operationalizing leaving no one behind: good practice note for un country teams. https://unsdg.un.org/sites/default/files/202204/operationalizing%20lnob%20-%20final%20with%20annexes%20090422.pdf dickenson & cattapan final nov 23 16 correspondence address: alana cattapan, novel tech ethics, faculty of medicine, dalhousie university, 1379 seymour street, halifax, ns, b3h 4r2; email: alana.cattapan@dal.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 10, issue 2, 342-351, 2016 dispatch on bioethics and the commodified body: an interview with donna dickenson donna dickenson university of london, england alana cattapan dalhousie university, canada an emeritus professor of medical ethics and humanities at the university of london, research associate at the university of oxford, and visiting fellow at the university of bristol, donna dickenson is a trailblazer in thinking about the commodification of the body. in her 40 year career dickenson has made many contributions to examining the intersections between the embodied subject, labour, gender, property and care including (among other publications) her books property in the body: feminist perspectives (2007) and body shopping: the economy fuelled by flesh and blood (2008). in her keynote address to the 2015 symposium on consuming intimacies: bodies, labour, care, and social justice, dickenson spoke on “the commodification of women’s reproductive tissue: the lady has vanished and is still missing,” referencing her well-known, oft-cited article (dickenson, 2006) on the absence of the women who provide eggs for the creation of embryonic stem cells from the stem cell debate. this keynote address provided critical insights about the ongoing utility of the term “commodification” to describe the systematic marketization of women’s reproductive capacities and tissues, providing a corrective to the language of “choice” that focuses on the individual. using the examples of the sale of eggs for in vitro fertilization and research, the banking of umbilical cord blood, international commercial surrogacy, and mitochondrial replacement techniques, dickenson demonstrated how women’s interests and voices continue to be largely absent from scholarship and debate over new technologies and treatments related to their reproductive bodies. following dickenson’s keynote address, alana cattapan (cihr postdoctoral fellow in the faculty of medicine, dalhousie university) on bioethics & the commodified body studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 342-351, 2016 343 interviewed her about the important contributions of her career, the challenges she has faced, and her thoughts about the future of scholarship on the commodification of the body. -- alana cattapan (ac): thank you so much for joining me. i want to hear first about one of your best known works, body shopping, which examines how the body has been, and continues to be, parceled into discrete parts and how this has been manifest in law. what was your inspiration for this work? donna dickenson (dd): i started writing about eggs and sperm back in the 1990s, and at that point in the uk we were going through a number of consultations on the reimbursements. for egg donation, it was set at £15 – now it’s £750 – so it shows you how much things have changed. and i was taken with the idea that in a way, eggs and sperm are not our property. they are only lent, in a way as they are passed on to future generations. this is true for many other technologies, which we’re now looking at, like human engineering and so forth. but it was these questions about the effects on future generations that interested me. i was also just interested in the disparity. at that point, men were being paid £15 for sperm donation, a very minimal amount. women were not being paid anything, and were in fact not being repaid expenses, so they were in effect, paying to donate. and that didn’t seem right. i wasn’t at all convinced – i’m still not at all convinced – that the road we’ve gone down in the uk is right either. so that’s how it started. but as you know, body shopping actually goes well beyond gametes and includes issues like private umbilical cord blood banking, which i think is another form of commercialization. it doesn’t include surrogacy, but surrogacy will be included in a second edition of my property in the body book, which includes quite a wide range of other topics as well. ac: what challenges did you face when you started doing this work, and which ones are you still working to overcome? dd: i think one obstacle that you always encounter in bioethics is that people question the importance of the field, assuming that bioethics is not needed. you get the steven pinker phenomenon – that we had this summer – with his claim that there is one moral imperative for bioethicists: to get out of the way. i don’t believe that this is true, and this claim relies on the assumption that science, whatever science can do, it should do. there have been technologies in the last twenty years that bioethicists were told to stand back and simply let happen. the most obvious one was the stem-cell fraud of hwang woo-suk, a korean professor who claimed to have created individual personalized stem cell lines. as you know, that was a donna dickenson, alana cattapan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 342-351, 2016 344 fraud, he hadn’t in fact done so. at the time, a few of us were waving our arms around and saying, “okay, we know that the technique that you’re talking about, somatic cell nuclear transfer, requires human eggs. we also know that a similar technique, which was used to create dolly the sheep, required huge numbers of sheep eggs to produce one dolly. something like 400.” we knew that the figures he was quoting – of a very small number of egg donors to produce eleven cell lines – just couldn’t be right. but nobody really wanted to know. eventually, through a number of journalists’ work, and a number of feminist groups’ work, it did become known. and then there was a mad rush in the other direction. the obstacle is that there’s always that pressure not to say anything. sometimes that pressure can be exerted on you from quite powerful forces, both commercial and university. sometimes it can just be other bioethicists. sometimes it can be scientists. i very rarely find that clinicians want us to step out of the way. i’ve worked with a lot of clinicians, and unless you’re going to come in and tell them what to do (which is not how you go about working with clinicians), then usually they are also people with moral sensibilities. they like discussing these issues. our job then, is to help elucidate bioethical issues. it might be that we can provide legal advice or provide some facts that maybe they don’t know. in the area of body shopping, that does happen quite a lot because of the ambivalent position of the body in the common law. people don’t always know that, they think you own your body. sometimes we can provide right answers. mostly our job is to help elucidate and sometimes it is to say “slow down” or “let’s talk this through.” and it may be that we will decide that science should proceed. but to just say that bioethicists should get out of the way totally abdicates our responsibility. ac: the commercialization of the body has changed a lot since you started working in the field, and as you just described, it continues to change. what do you think are the major developments in the commercialization of the body in the last decade or so since body shopping was first published? dd: there have been major developments in both directions in favor of commodification and against commodification. i think the main development against commodification has been the myriad genetics case on patenting of the human genome, which was contested all the way from district court to supreme court in the us. and while it doesn’t directly affect canadian jurisprudence, or english jurisprudence (because we’re both common-law jurisdictions), i think that the principles would hold. this has put a major brake on the phenomenon [of gene patenting], which was galloping along. in 2005, one in five human genes was the subject of a private patent. people always find this difficult to believe. they say, “you mean the genetic test was the subject of the patent,” and i say, “no, the gene itself was the subject of the patent.” meaning that no on bioethics & the commodified body studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 342-351, 2016 345 one could invent around it unless they had a license from the patent holder, which is rarely going to be of any interest of the patent holder to grant. when the myriad genetics case was decided, basically it overthrew 31/32 of the patents that were held on this particular breast cancer gene, well, two genes (brca1 and brca2). this then set a precedent for all of those other private patents. while some of them still hold – because it may take individual actions to overturn them – the decision in myriad genetics will be a deterrent, at the very least, for other companies or universities or researchers from taking out more patents. and it will probably result in patents being scaled back. so i think that’s a really major development. on the other side, i think we have had more commodification of surrogacy. we have had more commodification of eggs and sperm, particularly eggs. we’ve had the development of quite a differentiated market in eggs, differentiated by phenotype. you know what the stereotypes are: tall, blonde, musical, athletic, intelligent students. this is now being carried out on a global scale. you have advertisements in american college newspapers calling on young women to travel abroad. the one i like best – i don’t know about best – but one really striking one is an advertisement that appeared in a us college newspaper that exclaimed, “girls! sell your eggs and enjoy the nightlife of chennai!” when you’ve been going through ovarian hyperstimulation, you’re not going to be in any mood to enjoy any nightlife. and it’s trivializing of the time that goes into egg provision: sixty hours or so of ovarian stimulation that must be put in before you can “harvest” eggs. not to mention the risks, which are quite major. i’m concerned about those developments. ac: i think that one of the most important insights that your recent work has offered, at least for me, are the complex ways that neoliberal capitalism and the use of biotechnologies speak to one another. and i know that you recommend state regulation of biotechnologies as a means to guard against corporate ownership of the body and its tissues. what countries and laws are doing a good job of regulating this field? dd: just to take you back a minute, i’m not saying that we should always regulate but i’m saying that the possibility should always be on the table. the neoliberal approach would be to say the possibility should rarely be on the table. the presumption should be against regulation. and i’m saying the opposite. the presumption should be in favor, because these are matters that affect the common good. and therefore there is a job for government here. as to countries that are doing it well… i think thailand was very interesting. there was a scandal in the previous year involving a surrogate pregnancy where the commissioning couple were paying extra for twins, and one of the twins had down syndrome. the commissioning couple withdrew the extra payment for the second twin. they refused to take him. the birth mother took care of him, but she was not compensated for it. this case donna dickenson, alana cattapan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 342-351, 2016 346 demonstrated very clearly that surrogacy is about the sale of a child, and not about the pregnancy. the commissioning couple was willing to pay for the child who wasn’t, as they saw it, “damaged goods.” and that, to me, shows that it is baby selling, which is my view of it. thailand has now passed legislation against commercial surrogacy, particularly against international commercial surrogacy, which had been quite a busy business there. they passed this law, which i think is actually pretty brave, given the momentum that has been going in favour of commercial surrogacy elsewhere. france has traditionally been quite strong on regulating commercial surrogacy, on regulating egg sale, and most of the reproductive “services.” however, their most recent report on private umbilical cord blood banking and public umbilical blood cord banking, to my mind, went in the wrong direction. they are strongly encouraging women to donate cord blood in the name of the patrimony, even though donating cord blood can be a hazardous procedure. so i would have said france, but i’m less certain now. ac: if you remember, last october [2014], when apple and facebook announced that they'd be paying for egg freezing, claims that the technology is liberating and allows women to choose when to become mothers was repeated in the media again and again. and we also saw counter narratives that framing egg freezing in this way privileged one sort of choice over broader reproductive autonomy, that is, real, meaningful decision making about when and how to become a parent that might be enabled in other ways. but this is an old argument – choice versus autonomy – that has been raised previously in relation to egg donation, surrogacy, genetic testing, and a wide variety of other biotechnologies. so we don’t need to rehash the argument, but have you seen a change over the course of your career in the ways that this dichotomy – choice versus autonomy – has been presented in relation to reproductive biotechnologies? dd: i think if anything, certainly in the uk, it’s even more dominant, and it’s dominant in new fields. for example, the competing narratives of choice and autonomy are apparent in discussion of the enhancement technologies, both chemical and genetic. the argument that’s being made is that you have the right to be the best person you possibly can be, and the best person you can be is going to be the enhanced person. it’s a very simplistic view of what makes you more autonomous. and certainly, a simplistic view of what makes further generations more autonomous. and in terms of crispr [a new genome-editing technology] engineering, you know, you’re then talking about removing autonomy of a future generation. and yet it’s presented as enhancing the autonomy of current generations. the autonomy arguments about extending new reproductive technologies to “non-standard” families – gay couples, for example – is an autonomybased argument, but it masquerades as a family-based argument. you could see it that way, and i’m certainly not denying that the desire to have children on bioethics & the commodified body studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 342-351, 2016 347 is extremely important, and being frustrated in that desire can be really devastating. i’m certainly not denying any of that. but to see it only in terms of the autonomy of the commissioning couple and not the autonomy of the surrogate, and to end the discussion of the autonomy of the surrogate with the argument that she chose to do it, is really just not good enough. what you need is a more evolved analysis of the possibility of exploitation. and i have tried to do that with some of my recent work. whereas exploitation is viewed as a propaganda term, choice is viewed as a factual term. now to my mind, it’s the other way around. i think choice is a propaganda term. i think the argument that whatever we do we have chosen to do is probably false, and it is bad philosophy. we need to develop an analysis of some counter terms, such as exploitation. relational autonomy is another, which feminism in the early 1990s was certainly very interested in developing, particularly in relation to surrogacy, and that’s fine. i think we face so much pressure to accept the choice argument, and i don’t think that has gone away. if anything, it is important to consider that we do have neoliberal governments in many western countries, certainly in england. notice that i do not say the uk because scotland doesn’t (well done scotland), but england and wales most certainly do. and canada.1 i think there have been political pressures as well that have ratified and strengthened the neoliberal doctrines about choice, and i think you know it’s a more difficult road to hoe for young scholars and i hope people will do that. ac: you mentioned that you’re working on a new edition of property in the body that will include work on surrogacy, which i am personally excited about. can you speak more to the things that are coming up next for you and the kinds of technologies and interventions that you’re thinking about? dd: i also wrote a book two years ago called me medicine vs. we medicine [dickenson, 2013]. i’m still doing quite a lot of work in that area. it’s about personalized medicine, which is sometimes called “stratified medicine” or “precision medicine.” i thought all medicine was precision medicine, but i guess not. the idea, then, is that what is “personalized medicine” very much depends on the discourses of autonomy and choice, using those terms as favourable, and the idea that personalizing medicine involves more choice over what drugs you would use or what treatments you would have based on your own genetic profile, your individual genetic profile. you can see the same common threads among various technologies, such as private umbilical cord blood banking, which i have dealt with in body shopping and property in the body. i also dealt with this in me medicine because that is a personalized technology, but personalized for the baby. so 1 this interview took place in october 2015, just prior to the election of justin trudeau’s liberal government. donna dickenson, alana cattapan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 342-351, 2016 348 umbilical cord blood collection is sold on the basis of being uniquely personalized, the cord blood is personalized to the baby’s own genetic profile. so some of those areas are the same. i also wanted to move into a discussion about the commons, genetic commons, and the idea of the commons in biotechnology. some of that has already been done by other scholars, for example in james boyle’s shamans, software, and spleens [1996] which draws a parallel between the enclosure of the commons in england and the clearances in scotland to the modern enclosure of the genetic commons through the kinds of patents that we were talking about earlier. i think that’s a really powerful metaphor, but i think that it’s also interesting that we have seen movement towards a charitable trust model, like the one which has been developed by david winickoff at berkeley, to treat research subjects as if they were the commoners really, as if they had certain rights in the resource of the research and the work of any biobanks. and beyond that, to give them rights similar to those that would be held by the trustees of a charitable trust. and he, winickoff, has worked out quite specific rights, what those would be, and they’re very practical. i think it’s nice that we’ve got some development against the mentality of individualism in terms of broadening who stands to benefit from the genetic commons, which differs from this rather amorphous idea that well, science will automatically benefit humanity. it is important to consider exactly how, exactly who, and exactly when benefits will accrue. the people who are contributing research materials, they might not necessarily want or deserve financial remuneration, but they might still have some other rights. for example, they might have the right to control some uses of the tissue, so that people can object to their being used for cosmetics, or other purposes that they see as trivial. i think i wanted to expand on these ideas in me medicine to look more at the commons, and i did do that in the final chapter. and i brought in the idea of “we medicine,” that is, medicine like public health medicine or vaccinations that have a public benefit in mind rather than personal private medicine. and i’m still working in that area. it seems to be an encouraging sort of area, an important sort of area. ac: this may be a selfish question, but i think that it’s always useful to know when you’re talking to senior scholars in the field, what pieces of advice you wished you had when you were starting out. what advice would you give to young scholars working in bioethics and on biotechnologies? dd: i was very lucky in that i was working at imperial college school of medicine, i had a number of colleagues who were keen to work with ethicists. i was also sort of the clinical ethics person at a psychiatric hospital in oxford, and i was able to work with a lot of clinicians there. and i’ve worked with a number of reproductive medicine clinicians and other contacts. i’ve always found clinicians to be generous with their time and their on bioethics & the commodified body studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 342-351, 2016 349 knowledge. at that point, i don’t think i knew very much about medicine. but they were willing to tell me what i should be reading and i did go out and read it and we worked together. and anything that i got wrong, they would put me right, which is what you want. i think clinicians find it really annoying when philosophers come in and start throwing their weight around without knowing their medicine, and rightly so. i think you should know as much you can about the subject you’re collaborating with the clinician on. when i was collaborating with a renal surgeon on a transplant committee at st. mary’s in london, we had a decision to make on the clinical ethics committee there about hand transplants. we were asked to approve the first human hand transplant. i didn’t know anything about hand transplants, so there was a very quick learning curve there. but my colleague, the renal surgeon, was very helpful. we were able to make an informed decision, which was to go beyond the autonomy of the patient. he turned out actually to have mental health issues. we asked for a psychiatric referral, the team decided to go elsewhere, someplace that wasn’t going to be quite so demanding, although where they finally went they had an ethics committee and went through the proper procedures. so, i would advise to really use clinicians’ knowledge, and to collaborate with as many clinicians as you can. i also think that this helps you to get around the problem we were talking about earlier, which is the idea that bioethicists should just get out of the way. if you don’t know your medicine, then you’ll be much more vulnerable to that argument. if you do know your medicine, then there may be cases when you can actually say, as some of us feminist scholars did […] “look, we’ve read the dolly papers, we know how many ova that took, we know it took 400 initially and then after enucleation, it took 267, and you produced one dolly. and your technology is so similar, even though you’re not cloning an individual, but nevertheless using the same technology to clone a cell line.” and when you can make that sort of argument, then you’re on much stronger ground. so you need to know your philosophy, law, and clinical or research medicine. ac: this is my last question. we’re here at the social justice research institute at brock university, and your work has really been about social justice in a number of ways. so if your work could lead to one concrete social justice intervention or outcome, what would you like that to be? dd: wow. that’s a very tough one…. ac: you can have two… dd: can i have big one and a slightly smaller one? i would like to see this idea of the commons get more traction. that’s the slightly smaller one. donna dickenson, alana cattapan studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 342-351, 2016 350 and i would like to see the idea of the bundle concept in property used more. that is, in the common law, as you know, we have the notion that property is not unitary. property is a bundle of rights: the right to own an object, to manage the use of an object, to perhaps derive income from an object, to prevent others from access to the object. these are separate rights. we can see these differentiated rights, for example, in the case of the vote. i have the right to manage my vote, which you could construe as the right to give my vote to the candidate i please. but i do not have the right to sell my vote, and i don’t even have the right to give it to another person. so, property in our law is differentiated. now, i’m very keen to use the concept of property as a differentiated bundle in order to prevent incursions by biotechnology companies, or researchers, such as the patent rush that we were talking about before. sometimes when i say that we might try viewing the genome as property, people claim that doing so would be commercializing it. and to that i say, step back, thinking about the genome as property could be a means to prevent commercialization. for example, you could say that a private company might have the right to work on a gene, but not necessarily a right to all the revenue from any invention deriving from it; rather, perhaps there should be benefit sharing. some of it might go to the group that has been the research subject. and we’ve seen that with something like the pxe group where a particular gene was patented and the group whose children have this gene have worked in collaboration with a biotech firm (i’m not against biotech firms as such). and what they’ve developed is a really good model because the biotech firm comes in and sponsors further research with the profits, so a certain percentage of the profits have to go to further research on pxe. of course then, they get the benefit of the cooperation with the patient group and the access to research subjects and biobanks. so, it seems to me you could have a really good collaboration in many areas. we don’t have to be looking at regulating with an iron hand all the time. we could be looking at encouraging collaborations and i think we can do that if we bear in mind that we have an advantage in our law in that property is not unitary. it’s more unitary in the civil law jurisdictions, but even they have ways around it. but in common law jurisdictions we have this resource of property as a bundle. and i would really like to see us use it more. ac: thank you so much for speaking with me today. dd: thank you for having me. references boyle, j. (1996). shamans, software, and spleens: law and the construction of the information society. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. on bioethics & the commodified body studies in social justice, volume 10, issue 2, 342-351, 2016 351 dickenson, d. l. (2006). the lady vanishes: what’s missing from the stem cell debate. journal of bioethical inquiry, 3(1), 43-54. dickenson, d. l. (2007). property in the body: feminist perspectives. cambridge: cambridge university press. dickenson, d. l. (2008). body shopping: the economy fuelled by flesh and blood. oxford: oneworld. dickenson, d. l. (2013). me medicine vs. we medicine: reclaiming biotechnology for the common good. new york: columbia university press. correspondence address: suzan ilcan, department of sociology and legal studies, and balsillie school of international affairs, university of waterloo, waterloo, ontario, canada n2l 3g1, tel.: 519 888 4567 ext.31022, email: suzan.ilcan@uwaterloo.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 1-6, 2013 networks of social justice: transnational activism and social change suzan ilcan university of waterloo, canada anita lacey the university of auckland, new zealand transnational activism is broad in scope and scale and underscores forms of activism and struggles that operate within, across, and beyond the state. we understand the term transnational activism to designate a range of synchronized cross-border activities, campaigns, and movements on the part of networks of activists working counter to various state actors, international actors, or international institutions. it includes a diverse array of participants engaging in activist networks—from those working in local and regional groups to those associated with national and international organizations— with the aim of bringing about social, economic, and political change across borders. over the past several decades, the establishment of transnational forms of activism has emerged in response to themes relating to interventions by states and international actors around issues ranging from the privatization and commodification of land, to neo-colonial and imperial processes of the appropriation of assets, to gender, sexuality, class, and race relations, to undocumented migrants, border control, and immigration policies, to human and citizenship rights. in many spaces and places around the globe, we can identify several transnational forms of activism. there are grassroots activist groups and movements that operate in local and national circles and that have a transnational reach, and aim to bring awareness to issues of social injustice. we may think here, for example, of the global days of action in seattle, genoa, gleneagles, and elsewhere against neoliberal institutions and state governments (see gill, 2000; klein 2002; routledge & cumbers, 2009), the formation of the world social forum and numerous regional forums, the antifree trade agreement activisms waged in widely varied locales like south korea, ecuador, and thailand, and the diversity, scale, and significance of studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 2 suzan ilcan & anita lacey the arab spring movement and other activist movements such as the global justice movement and the zapatista movement. the global justice movement is a transnational movement of grassroots activists and organized advocacy groups working for global justice on economic, social, political, and environmental levels, and working against the neoliberal model of international development and the policies of the states and international institutions that advance it (hadden & tarrow, 2007, p. 215). it can be traced back to the international movements of the 1970s and 1980s relating to such social justice issues as peace, human rights, development, ecology and women’s rights, and has since been building and consolidating stable networks (pellow, 2007; pianta & marchetti 2007). likewise, the zapatista movement, which initially began on january 1, 1994, is well known for fostering economic and political support through its grassroots struggles for autonomy and contestations against the mexican government, for condemning the hunger, poverty, and lack of democratic institutions available to indigenous and other communities in the mexican republic and elsewhere, and for politicizing activists’ interconnected grievances primarily against neoliberalism (see andrews, 2011, p. 139). these transnational forms of activism draw our attention to particular forms of contested knowledge about state and international institutional support for neoliberal agendas, to the diverse identities or subjectivities of the network of activists involved, and to grassroots demands for social justice and social change. in addition to grassroots forms of transnational activism, there are transnational activist organizations that address a wide spectrum of social justice issues which extend beyond the territory of a state, such as those ranging from demands for fair trade, fair treatment, and human rights for vulnerable groups, to the eradication of poverty, violence against women, and authoritarian forms of rule. such forms of activism frequently engage in diverse struggles that can push social justice demands for human, migrant, and citizenship rights, gender equity relations, and sustainable public health, housing, and education rights and services to the transnational community agenda, despite conflicting pressures from certain states, private agencies, and international organizations (basok & ilcan, 2013; ilcan 2013a). these struggles involve equally diverse agendas, goals, and movement tactics. concurrent to transnational struggles for social justice are those movements that seek to exclude and define the social and political community in limiting and exclusionary ways, such as antigay or racist, xenophobic activism. in general, political participation in these and other similar forms of transnational activism is increasingly enhanced by information and communication technologies (icts) through, for example, quicker interaction, the sharing of strategies and information across massive distances, and the low costs of interactive communication (see bennett, breunig, & givens, 2008; gillan & pickerill, 2008). but gillan and pickerill (2008) also emphasize that activists have revealed concerns regarding uneven accessibility, surveillance, enigmatic and diffuse audiences, and difficulties in building trust online. given the diversity of goals, approaches, and political identities of the studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational activism and social change 3 participants involved, transnational activism cannot be easily understood in comparable or equivalent terms. rather, it is influenced by the actions and engagements of specific kinds of participants, by the orientations and perspectives that guide the demand for future social, economic, and political transformations, and by the successes, challenges, and limitations that characterize its forms. for example, no borders—which emerged in 1999 with the aim of connecting pro-migrant and anti-capitalism protests against restrictive border controls, anti-migrant policies, and deportations—is an expanding coalition of diverse grassroots groups (anarchists, feminists, civil liberties groups, and migrant and refugee organizations) that works to interconnect people from different political practices and with different regional experiences (no borders, 2011). from our perspective, it is crucial to consider the historical, social, and political conditions that shape transnational forms of activism, that raise social justice questions about state and international practices and policies, and that foster rhizomatic links to other anticipated contestations, forms of knowledge, and everyday transformations (see also ilcan, 2013b; lacey, 2013). the articles in this special issue on transnational activism alert us to how transnational activism and struggles can involve different local, regional, national, transnational, and international activities that are fluid and characterized by varying network groups, agencies, and organizations that cannot be simply territorialized at the level of the nation state. in the first article on struggles against bilateral free trade agreements (ftas), aziz choudry explores the apparent disconnect between northern movements against global and regional free trade negotiations, such as through the world trade organization, and southern struggles against specific free trade agreements. he argues that a wide range of localized resistance movements have countered ongoing and specific trade agreements, including in south korea, central american free trade agreement countries (costa rica, honduras, nicaragua, el salvador and guatemala, and the dominican republic), ecuador and thailand, but with little attention from or engagement with transnational global justice activism. choudry contends that the successes (and sometimes lack thereof) and modes of activism arising from these mainly southern struggles could inform both global justice movements’ practice and thinking and dominant scholarly and movements’ conceptions of global justice. his analysis calls for greater attention from the north to the south, recognizing that connections are slowly forming between south-based anti-fta activists and that these social movements are vitally producing and sharing knowledge pertinent to the struggles against global capitalism. this role of networks is highlighted by luisa veronis in her examination of the role of non-profit sector networks in contributing to immigrant political participation. specifically, veronis explores the potentials and limits of the hispanic development council’s (hdc) networks at the community, city, and transnational levels. this council serves as an umbrella advocacy organization for agencies assisting latin american immigrants in toronto, canada. the ethnographic study of hdc seeks to address the role of networks studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 4 suzan ilcan & anita lacey of immigrant non-governmental organizations (ngos) and advances the argument that hdc networks demonstrate that advocacy in a context of neoliberal governance is possible. further, veronis demonstrates that nonprofit sector ngos, like hdc, can navigate multiple modes and scales of engagement simultaneously, and that they do not have to choose between a centre, margin, or middle ground position. knowledge production and dissemination as power is a central argument of carol harrington’s article that considers transnational feminist networks. harrington makes use of social movement and governmentality theories to explore the ways in which transnational or global women’s organizations have contributed to knowledge of women as a population category. in the field of development, for example, european and u.s. women’s organizations promoted international standards on women’s status, producing data and rankings, as a means to include women in global government. likewise, internationally networked women’s organizations have produced knowledge on who is safe, who is insecure, and how women are to be made safe. harrington provides a rich account of the power of international women’s organizations, and she argues that their power lies in production and dissemination of a category for government, that of women as cross border population category. in a very different focus on women’s activism to that provided by harrington, liza mügge presents an analysis of the extent to which turkish and kurdish migrant women in the netherlands have engaged in transnational activism before and after the fall of the berlin wall. the two women’s groups that are the focus of mügge’s study—the turkish women’s federation in the netherlands (htkb) and the international free women’s foundation (ifwf), present unique case-studies of transnational turkish and kurdish politics in the netherlands, which she argues is otherwise almost completely male-dominated. for both groups of women activists, mügge found that struggles for or concerns with gender equality were distinctly secondary to broader ideological focuses, which stem from political parties in their homelands. while gender remained subordinate as an issue for activism in these two organizations, mügge argues that after the end of the cold war, new social justice claims emerged and the groups continue to evolve as their transnational links with the “homeland” also change. marcia oliver’s article on transnational antigay activism’s interaction with and impact on local dynamics in uganda offers further insight into the complex relationship between local and transnational activist knowledge transfers. oliver demonstrates that antigay activism in uganda is shaped by the politics of the u.s. christian right’s pro-family agenda as well as local manifestations and interpretations of colonial-inspired notions of “african” sexuality and the increasing impacts of global neoliberalism. along with post-colonial scholars and activists, oliver argues that these latter effects are not only manifest in antigay activism but can also inform northern activists and donors working in defense of gay and lesbian rights, providing vital lessons for social justice activists’ engagement with local communities. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational activism and social change 5 oliver’s contextualized examination of uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill offers awareness into the complex dynamics and expressions of local and transnational antigay activisms. she demonstrates that while the u.s. christian right continues to impact antigay discourse and politics in uganda, these influences are shaped by legacies of colonialism and the flow of capital and inequalities wrought by neoliberal globalization. moreover, this activism is also shaped by specific local particularities relating to “african” culture and tradition, neo-colonial influence and power, and national sovereignty and identity struggles which in turn present a keen sense of dynamism that belies a simple uni-directional notion of power in transnational activism. the next article provides a consideration of pro-same-sex marriage and anti-proposition 8 activism in california, u.s.a. alexa degagne examines the activism of three californian pro-same-sex marriage organizations, equality california, join the impact, and the courage campaign. she argues that these organizations adopted, challenged, or appropriated neoliberal and social conservative political rationalities in their strategies to promote greater social inclusion with regard to marriage. she finds that in the course of their campaigns all three organizations espoused certain elements of social conservative and neoliberal political rationalities in order to attempt to gain greater inclusion through same-sex marriage. degagne highlights the potential dangers of such movement strategies that potentially re-imagine spaces of exclusion. the exploration of these three elements of the “no on proposition 8” movements is also a pertinent reminder from degagne that the politics and movement tactics of the three organizations highlights the diverse politics of wider gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual movements. in the final article, nandi bhatia explores social justice-oriented south asian drama in canada. bhatia examines the dramas’ use of notions of home of origin to portray and bring to the fore issues of social justice and discrimination. she argues that this type of south asian drama serves as a vital art form for diaspora and non-diaspora as it provides a social text on rightsbased struggles. south asian drama therefore acts as political movement; its producers, participants, and audiences simultaneously produce and are introduced to new ideas of the homeland, as well as the new home, and social justice enacted in these spaces. this volume’s contributions provide compelling evidence that it is critical to consider how various forms of transnational activism can produce short or long-term change, contribute to new forms of knowledge and knowledge mobility, offer the potential for enlarging the social and political spaces of transnational activism, locally and globally, and raise questions about the role of powerful organizations and states in these and other similar processes (see also lacey, 2005; olesen, 2011; routledge & cumbers, 2009). continued research is needed on transnational activism to show how different forms of activism at the local, national, and international level are activated, how connections and fissures are created within and across groups and organizations, and how activist networks, agencies, and organizations are enlisted and how they imagine their efforts towards attaining social justice studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 6 suzan ilcan & anita lacey and social change. these and other related issues can be fruitfully explored through the expanding, interdisciplinary research that is currently being conducted on this theme, including the articles in this special issue. although outwardly diverse, the seven articles in this volume examine how various forms of transnational activism aim towards bringing about a more sociallyjust world and, equally, how vital it is to understand those that do not. these articles contribute to understanding the complexity of movement organizing and knowledge production across transnational social and political space, as well as the widely varied instrumental and less recognizable impacts of movements for change. it is our hope that these contributions will inspire further debates. references andrews, a. (2011). how activists “take zapatismo home”: south-to-north dynamics in transnational social movements. latin american perspectives, 176(38), 138-152. basok, t. & ilcan, s. (2013). issues in social justice: citizenship and transnational struggles. toronto: oxford university press. bennett, w. l., breunig, c., & givens, t. (2008). communication and political mobilization: digital media and the organization of anti-iraq war demonstrations in the us. political communication, 25, 269-289. gill, s. (2000). towards a postmodern prince? the battle of seattle as a moment in the new politics of globalisation. millennium, 29(1) 131-140. gillan, k. & pickerill, j. (2008). transnational anti-war activism: solidarity, diversity and the internet in australia, britain and the united states after 9/11. australian journal of political science, 43(1) 59-78. hadden, j. & tarrow, s. (2007). the global justice movement in the united states since seattle. in d. della porta (ed.), the global justice movement. cross-national and transnational perspectives (pp. 210-231). boulder, co: paradigm publications. ilcan, s. (ed.). (2013a). mobilities, knowledge and social justice. montreal and london: mcgillqueen’s university press. ilcan, s. (2013b). paradoxes of humanitarian aid: mobile populations, biopolitical knowledge, and acts of social justice in osire refugee camp.” in s. ilcan, (ed.), mobilities, knowledge and social justice. montreal and london: mcgill-queen’s university press. in press klein, n. (2002). fences and windows. dispatches from the front lines of the globalization debate. london: flamingo. lacey, a. (2013). symbolic knowledge mobilities and biopolitical governmentalities of resistance of soloman islands’ pipol fastaem. in s. ilcan, (ed.), mobilities, knowledge and social justice. montreal and london: mcgill-queen’s university press. in press. lacey, a. (2005). spaces of justice: the social divine of global anti-capital activists’ sites of resistance. canadian review of sociology and anthropology, 42(4) 403-20. no borders. (2011). homepage. retrieved from http://www.noborder.org/iom/ olesen, t. (2011). introduction. in t. olesen, (ed.), power and transnational activism (pp. 1-20). london and new york: routledge. pellow, d. n. (2007). resisting global toxins: transnational movements for environmental justice. cambridge, ma: mit press. pianta, m. & marchetti, r. (2007). global justice movements. the transnational dimension. in d. della porta (ed.), the global justice movement. cross-national and transnational perspectives, (pp. 29-51). boulder, co: paradigm publications. routledge, p. & cumbers, a. (2009). global justice networks: geographies of transnational solidarity. manchester and new york: manchester university press. correspondence address: nandi bhatia, department of english, faculty of arts and humanities, western university, university college 57, london, on n6a 3k7, canada, tel.: (+1) 519 661 2111 ext. 85817, email: nbhatia2@uwo.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 125-141, 2013 diasporic activism and the mediations of “home”: south asian voices in canadian drama1 nandi bhatia western university, canada abstract critical analyses of literatures of the indian diaspora discuss the “home” of origin as a subtext and a site to which diasporas aspire to return even though it remains an unachievable ideal that is refracted through nostalgic retellings of a space that remains at best “imaginary” (mishra 2007). alternatively, some critics, as roger waldinger and david fitzgerald point out, view diasporas’ relationship with the homeland in terms of “loyalty,” obscuring in the process the antagonisms that may arise depending upon one’s circumstances, antagonisms that produce “interactions” between homes of residence and those of origin (2012). in south asian drama in canada, many of the concerns regarding race, multiculturalism, job discrimination and violence against women and other marginalized groups are propelled by their links to the playwrights’ “home” of origin. with attention to selected plays, this paper will analyze how the networks between home and spaces of residence in multicultural canada come alive on theatre stages through visual motifs, actors, props, and photographic collages, which confront the different trajectories of “home” that resurface in these plays. through live scenes of imagination that speak to spectators, several plays under discussion in this essay expose how, while providing emotional sustenance for some, the baggage of “home” may also pose challenges in the home of residence. so the questions i raise are: how does home appear? to what end? and what does returning “home” teach us about the inequalities and injustices underlying the current global order? introduction this article examines south asian drama in canada as a critical site of activism that addresses issues pertaining to social justice and discrimination through themes and tropes in which the home of origin has a significant role to play. like literary criticism, south asian canadian drama “has passed through its nascent stages and is now part of the theatrical life in several canadian cities” (mcgifford, 1992, p. xii). despite its contribution to literature and the arts and its commitment to social activism and human rights, this drama has only studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 126 nandi bhatia recently begun to receive attention in canadian literature anthologies such as mcgifford’s the geography of voice (1992), which includes two plays and devotes a couple of paragraphs to south asian drama in the introduction. it has, however, yet to become the object of extensive critical inquiry and interpretation. such an undertaking is, therefore, crucial because it offers new ways of thinking about the importance of dramatic performances as social texts that enable alternative visions of the homeland, visions that render visible the entanglements of networks of power that shape nations, localities, and regions. critical analyses of literatures of the indian diaspora discuss the home of origin as a subtext and a site to which diasporas aspire to return even though it remains an unachievable ideal that is refracted through nostalgic retellings of a space that remains at best imaginary. the “diasporic imaginary,” identified as “any ethnic enclave in a nation-state that defines itself consciously, unconsciously or through self-evident or implied coercion, as a group that lives in displacement” (mishra, 2007, p. 14), is, as vijay mishra argues, marked by a sense of loss and trauma. the need to compensate for this loss produces a return of this repressed object in diasporic narratives. mishra provides examples of novelists and creative artists who belong to the old and new indian diasporas: the old diasporas of indenture and classical capitalism who relocated to the caribbean and fiji under the british empire, and the new diasporas of transnational capital of the late twentieth century, whose experiences of home are mediated through the discourse of mobility. alternatively, some critics, as roger waldinger and david fitzgerald (2012) point out, view diasporas’ relationships with the homeland in terms of “loyalty,” obscuring in the process the antagonisms that may arise depending upon one’s circumstances, antagonisms that produce interactions between homes of residence and those of origin and “involve a multiplicity of actors coming together in a broad range of combinations” (p. 1186). refugees, for instance, may have no home or may be in a position of fighting to have a home in places from which they are displaced or where they relocate (p. 1188). in the case of south asian drama in canada, a corpus that has resulted from the efforts of playwrights, many of whom are first-generation immigrants, one does not necessarily detect narratives of melancholia, trauma, loss, loyalty or interest deemed as defining features of diasporic literatures. rather, many of the concerns regarding issues of racism, multiculturalism, job discrimination and violence against women and other marginalized groups, concerns that constitute the subject of plays by rahul varma, rana bose, ajmer rode, sadhu binning, and uma parmeswaran, surjit kalsey, anosh irani, and anusree roy, among others, are propelled by their links to the playwrights’ homes of origin. even though this home may not be the physical site of action in many of the plays, it appears in multiple dimensions and gets reproduced in terms of a productive tension that serves as the springboard for the thematic/activist content of the plays, content that negotiates the interests of minorities and migrants across home and diaspora. this is accomplished studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 south asian voices in canadian drama 127 through dialogue and reflection on the enmeshment of home in contemporary diasporic contexts through a collaborative medium that attempts to bring actors, activists and spectators into partnerships for social action, a partnership sometimes encouraged through post-performance discussions which are “another common way to connect the stage to the ‘reality’ outside” (high, 2011, p. 52) and which provide spectators an occasion to engage in conversations beyond the staged play.2 south asian canadian drama’s activist dimension thus acquires special relevance: first, it calls for the proliferation of a dialogue about issues of social justice through a comparative framework that examines the interconnectedness of different contexts (canada and india in many of these plays). additionally, it complicates critical diaspora theories, theories that link diasporic communities to home through the lens of nostalgia, longing, and belonging and focus primarily on the subtext of loss and return. this additional layer of analysis has been perhaps overlooked because drama and theatre have remained largely absent from critical discussions of the literatures of the indian diaspora, as aparna dharwadker (2003) has astutely pointed out based on her survey of the field (p. 303-305). as the discussion that unfolds demonstrates, many of the playwrights have chosen theatre as a means of fostering discussions on politically relevant issues that address the context of canada but whose energies are inspired by the mediations of home. the networks between home and spaces of residence which generate “not one, but a multiplicity of imagined communities organized along different, often conflicting principles whether related to the scale of aggregation (local or national) or to the opposing visions of the community in question” (waldinger & fitzgerald, 2012, p. 1178) come alive on theatre stages through visual motifs, actors, props, and photographic collages, which confront the different trajectories of home that resurface in the immigrant imagination. through live scenes of imagination that speak to spectators, several plays under discussion in this essay expose how, while providing emotional sustenance for some, the baggage of home may also pose challenges in the home of residence. so the questions that i raise are: how does home appear? to what end? and what does returning home teach us about the inequalities and injustices underlying the current global order? my attempt to answer these questions calls for an examination of some of the plays performed over the last thirty years or so. contextual overview at the outset, it is necessary to acknowledge that the plurality of diasporic drama in canada defies its generalization into one particular slot; yet it is important to note that what it offers collectively is a social forum in canada. until the 1980s, south asian drama in canada was a little known field. the three companies that propelled this drama into an identifiable movement are vancouver saath (initiated by sadhu binning and other punjabi activists in 1982), rahul varma’s teesri duniya (co-founded with rana bose in 1981, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 128 nandi bhatia the title translates as third world) and rana bose’s montreal serai, in 1985. concerned with immigrant life in canada, these playwrights laid out a clear agenda for theatre. for vancouver saath, which began “as an informal discussion forum by a group of politically conscious punjabi writers and community activists” (binning, 1993, p. 22), it was critical that “literature and art should be created for the betterment of society” (binning, 1993, p. 22). inspired by the saaths in punjabi villages in india, which promote friendships and solidarity without a formal or heirarchical structure through free-flowing conversations, saath activists envisioned theatre as a particularly suitable forum for raising issues pertaining to punjabi immigrants, namely, employment, bc’s anti-labour legislation, the divisive impact of the movement for self-determination in punjab on the punjabi community in bc in the 1980s, and the rights of women, youth and the elderly at home and in the workplace. in this, the genres of drama and theatre acquired a centrality. unlike benedict anderson’s (1983) formulations regarding print culture as being central to the formation of “imagined communities,” saath members questioned the effectiveness of print for raising critical awareness and instead found drama and theatre as more efficacious media for addressing their concerns. so, while such issues were locally addressed in journals such as watno dur and canada darpan, saath members questioned the power of the printed word on the audience: “we realized that most of the punjabis were not in the habit of reading serious articles in the best of times, let alone at a time when they were simply too involved in their daily struggles to establish themselves in a new land. this realization led us to experiment with theatre” (binning, 1993, p. 23). from its inception, then, the group’s mandate was to form an audience-oriented theatre, one that also aimed to achieve a nonhierarchical framework through plays written and directed collectively and enacted by members from the community, many of whom had never acted before. affiliated with the professional association of canadian theatres, teesri duniya identified its ultimate goal as creating “a shared social space in which visible minorities are recognized as different but equal” (varma, 2009, pp. 193-194). since its formation, teesri has sought to achieve this goal “through politically engaged, high quality art that examines relevant issues, challenges audiences and supports the cause of social justice” (varma, 2009, p. 194). the serai collective, which also runs an arts magazine montreal serai (the name given to its theatre) aims at promoting “works that reflect and assert the diverse world we live in” so as to “counteract exclusion, separation, and marginalization when they occur in the arts and in society at large” (montreal serai, 2013). the themes addressed by these groups were various: for saath, exploitation of farm workers, gender discrimination within the family, social exclusion, racism and discrimination of immigrants based on the lack of english language proficiency were some issues that took center-stage. for serai, multiculturalism against ghettoization became a looming concern, and teesri dealt with topical issues in a forthright manner. simultaneously, and even before the 1980s, women’s theatre groups studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 south asian voices in canadian drama 129 proliferated in various parts of canada. of note are surjeet kalsey’s contributions to women’s theatre in vancouver and uma parameswaran’s in winnipeg. kalsey organized plays that foregrounded women-centered issues in canada in the early 1980s. an actor, playwright and director with several years of experience in broadcasting, kalsey’s first play, which she wrote, “daughters behind the palace doors” was staged in 1982 in carpenter hall in new westminister, b.c. considered a landmark production in punjabi theatre, the play “addressed the issue of family violence for the first time in the indo-canadian community through the medium of drama therapy” at a time “when it was hard even to talk about such issues in the community” (kalsey, n.d.). instead of professional actors, kalsey prevailed upon women, who had been victims of domestic abuse and sex selection, to perform in the play, offering the play itself as a site for therapeutic expression. this was a significant step in exposing imposed restrictions, regressive notions of female identity, and patriarchal attitudes that accord primacy to the male child. in this, the genre of theatre itself served as an enabling device through which women could speak, especially those who may be confined within the restrictive parameters of domestic spaces. kalsey’s other contributions include nirlujj saman (shameless times), a four-act play on sex selection staged in 1994, with subsequent performances in 1994 and 1995 in abbotsford; poh de agan (holy fire: lohri), a three-act play staged on the occasion of the lohri festival in abbotsford in 1998 to raise awareness about celebrating the birth of a girl; vizay ton baad (after getting visa), a one-act play that focuses on the dynamics of procuring a visa for canada and the ways in which the protagonist’s life unfolds after relocation to canada, performed on the occasion of the vaisakhi festival of 1997 in abbotsford, and chetna (awareness), co-authored with ajmer rode, a play on “four different issues facing the indo-canadian community such as drinking, wife abuse, parentchild conflict and safety of women” staged in vancouver in 1982 and in abbotsford in 1983” (kalsey, n.d.). dhian pardesnan (daughters abroad), a three act play “depicting the current situation of indo-canadian women and their sponsors” was staged on the occasion of the teeyan festival in abbotsford in 1997, and sat paraiann: ghar da supna (distant women: dreaming of home) was staged in abbotsford in 1996 ” (kalsey, n.d.). as these groups attempted to establish themselves and fulfill their mandates, they looked toward india for their inspirational lessons. likewise, the community of writers that formed vancouver saath initially turned to punjabi playwright gursharan singh when he visited canada with his theatre group amritsar natak kala kender for its intellectual and activist energy. together with the punjabi cultural association, community members began to perform punjabi plays, something that saath continued when it decided to produce its first play in 1984. the first few plays used punjab as the subject matter as in panjab di awaaz (the voice of punjab), gusharan singh’s kursi, morcha, te hawa vich latke log (chair, battlefield and people dangling in the air, presented at an elementary school auditorium in vancouver, march 1984) and tootan wala khoon (a well with mulberry trees), a play about studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 130 nandi bhatia the 1947 partition of punjab which sought to communicate a message against communal divisions, especially relevant in the wake of the punjab problem in india and the demand for khalistan which had spilled over into the diaspora (see binning, 1993). similarly, the opening stage directions of rana bose’s on the double, a play with a feminist theme, which shows the emergence of new forms of patriarchy in an indo-canadian setting, clearly states that the “inspiration for this play was a theatre performance by a group of new delhi women players, but in form and content the play reflects montreal and canadian reality” (bose, 1999, p. 213). in the early years when these theatre companies were trying to get off the ground, it was theatre from home, in various languages, that served as the inspirational impetus. varma initially wrote plays in hindi, “which served as a cultural unifier for the south asian diaspora” (varma, 2009, p. 180). according to varma (2009) teesri duniya: was launched, in 1981, with badal sircar’s groundbreaking play julus [processions) and until 1985, produced plays in hindi from india including: sharad joshi’s ek tha gadha urf aladad khan [a donkey called aladad khan] (1982), anil barve’s thank you mr. glad (1983), gursharan singh’s gaddha [pothole] and ahsaas [realization], and kishan chander’s darwaze kho dou [open doors] between 1983-1984. during that period, the company also produced locally created plays in hindi dealing with issues affecting the lives of south asian immigrants to canada. these plays included bhanumati ka pitara [pandora’s box], ghar ghar ki kahani [household story, which was written by rahul varma] and nazme-faiz [faiz’s poetry] by azra naqvi. (varma, 2009, p. 180). and binning and other punjabi playwrights wrote plays in punjabi, many of which were subsequently performed in english translation. even though uma parameswaran (1998) notes that indo-canadian playwrights deal with “‘here’ canada, and not with ‘there,’ halfway across the world,” (p. 3), her own plays returned to india through mythological stories, for example, meera: a dance drama in order to celebrate, “indian art traditions and at the same time to educate the outsider into our culture” (parmeswaran, 1996a, p. ii). over time, the annihilation of the idea of a mythical (hindu) india led to a plurality in the way home came to be represented and drama took on an activist dimension in the 1980s and onwards in order to address concerns shaped by multiculturalism, transnational capitalism and its local effects, violence against women, and the effects of war and displacement on women and their families. such activism became particularly visible in south asian women’s theatre in toronto with the staging of south asian sisters in solidarity’s play baysharam (shameless, 1991), cahoots theatre project’s a canadian monsoon (1993), company of sirens’ all whispers/no words (1995), “a one-hour piece about south asian women in canada…[and] their experience of violence” (james, 1998, p. 48) and stree theatre productions’ old wives tales by sri lankan born siva mohan sumathy, a play that attempted to raise awareness about the civil war in sri lanka through a plot that “focuses on six women gathered in a kitchen who speak candidly about the war and the effects it has on their lives” (james, 1998, p. 49). in 1996, old studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 south asian voices in canadian drama 131 wives tales was adapted to a theme that “would move between sri lanka and canada” (james, 1998, p. 49). also significant here is the fact that the actors, directors, and artists for many of these companies belong to diverse cultural, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.3 rahul varma’s bhopal to elaborate my point further, i turn to an analysis of bhopal, a play set in the indian city of bhopal, the site of the biggest industrial disaster in 1984, at the american corporation union carbide’s pesticide factory, which claimed 3000 lives overnight. bhopal represents a watershed moment for locating home and the status of powerless groups in the larger context of transnational corporate developments. the play was first produced in montreal in september 2001 (under the direction of jack langedijk) by the teesri duniya theatre at the arts interculturels and was next produced by the cahoots theatre project at the theatre centre, toronto, in october/november 2003. its hindi translation, zehreeli hawa (poisonous air), was produced by habib tanvir’s naya theatre, india, in december 2002, and under tanvir’s direction, it was performed in six indian cities. tanvir, in fact, wrote the songs in a language that drew upon the idioms of the chattisgarhi dialect and interspersed the hindi play with english words. paul lefebvre translated the play into french, after which it was produced at the theatre periscope in quebec city and, under the direction of philippe soldevilla, performed at the espace libre in montreal during 2005-2006. this expansive approach, which includes a multilingual cast of actors who performed the play in multiple languages (english, french, and hindi) in different localities and international venues is not only inspirational but also performs a politically expedient function. it emphasizes the scope of theatrical representations by drawing in a range of viewers who speak vastly different languages (english and french in canada and hindi/chattisgarhi and english in india) and intersects with local aesthetic forms to perform politically meaningful theatre. a play such as bhopal then becomes the site of an emerging political consciousness that can encourage the fostering of cross-border alliances based on an identification of power relations that operate transnationally, and its far-reaching influence can be gauged by its ongoing presentation by theatre groups in canada, the usa, and india.4 dedicated “to the victims of the bhopal disaster,” bhopal was written to raise awareness about the union carbide disaster and its debilitating effects. union carbide came to india in 1905 when india was under british rule. known for manufacturing eveready batteries, it moved into the production of agrochemicals in the 1960s and became “one of india’s largest manufacturers of chemical fertilizers and pesticides” by the 1970s (varma, 2004, p. iii). according to varma, the “company’s promotional film showed healthy green crops blowing in the wind, birds singing, and men, women and children beaming with happiness as the line scrolled across the screen: ‘union carbide studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 132 nandi bhatia will touch every life in india’” (varma, 2004, p. iii). contrary to such images, says varma, when the union carbide’s pesticide plant exploded on the night of december 3, 1984, the effects of the poisonous fumes that engulfed the city as a result were deadly: small children fell like flies, men and women vainly scurried for safety like wounded animals, only to collapse, breathless and blinded by the gas. by morning, the death toll was more than 500, by sunset, 2,500. by the following day, numbers had no meaning. that night, bhopal became the largest peacetime gas chamber in history…. union carbide did indeed touch many lives in india: more than 20,000 people have died so far, more than 10,000 were seriously injured, 20,000 were disabled, and thousands have suffered the ravages of respiratory diseases, madness, cancer, and other unidentified illnesses. (varma, 2004, p. iii) in varma’s words, the play represents “global environmental issues and their ramifications for living conditions in the third world,” conditions that “hinge on the relationship between the developed and developing worlds” and the “unstoppable mass murder of the poor—murder which is legitimized in the name of progress, development, and the state” (varma, 2009, p. 186). home then returns in this play to showcase “poverty’s relationship to development” (varma, 2009, p. 188) and its emergence in this form makes bhopal “a play against forgetting” (varma, 2009, p. 189). varma zeroes in on the play’s central issue through a focus on bodies— particularly of children, born and unborn, who are maimed and deformed even before birth. this is highlighted through a plot that includes a canadian doctor, sonya labonte, who is skeptical of the developmental promises made to residents of a slum by devraj sarthi, a non-resident indian who has returned to india to serve as company manager of carbide international. the latter convinces the chief minister to grant him a licence for setting up a plant to produce an agro-chemical known as karbide thunder on the pretext that it would increase agricultural output and accrue profits for the country. convinced that people, animals and babies, many of them deformed at birth, are succumbing to “diseases unknown to medical science” because of the poison emitted by the chemical, sonya undertakes research that serves as scientific evidence after the disaster strikes at the plant. her research subjects include a local woman by the name of izzat, whom she compensates financially for showcasing her deformed baby girl zarina as exemplary of what varma calls the “corporate inhumanity” operative at the plant (2004, p. iv). the plot takes a complicated turn when the corporate manager’s secretary and lover, who is carrying his child, faces the prospect of giving birth to a deformed baby. while showing the complicity of local politicians with american multinational corporations, a complicity that facilitated the disaster with fatal consequences, the play forcefully references the malformed bodies at home that continue to be affected by the policies and practices of multinational corporations with little or no accountability. such a lack of accountability and the motivations of greed on the part of american corporations that amass their fortunes through exploitation of third world subjects and through the studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 south asian voices in canadian drama 133 complicities of local politicians interested in accruing political gains highlight the asymmetries of power between first and third worlds by showcasing for the audience bodies that don’t matter. this is especially emphasized through izzat, who, determined to survive her acute poverty, takes advantage of the compensation offered by adversarial groups: from sonya, on the one hand, and the company manager devraj, on the other, from whom she takes money to hand out to villagers for erasing from public knowledge any news of their dying babies and animals. the impaired bodies represent both literal and psychic maiming through a realism that showcases bodies infected with disease in the aftermath of the diaster. the allusions to the effects on the corporeal body intensify the message of the play and thereby seek to shatter spectatorial complacency about the debilitating effects of the disaster and highlight the connections between state violence, multinational corporations and local players. this is something that varma reinforces in his introduction: “even after twenty years, mothers who inhaled poisonous gas on or after the explosion are giving birth to horribly deformed babies. while still in the womb, babies are inheriting unformed limbs, melted skin, and holes in their brain tissue” (varma, 2004, p. iv). beyond bhopal: remembering “home” through gender, caste, and class while bhopal takes up the specific issue of the effects of the union carbide disaster, it is of importance to note that south asian (indian) drama in canada is not homogenous, nor does it offer homogenizing concerns. within what we may identify as a corpus of activist drama are plays produced, written and performed by urban first-generation professionals, by working-class groups, and semi-literate women. in these, home is remembered and enacted differently in different sociopolitical contexts. in some plays, it becomes a site of yearning for return which has emerged as a result of racism and exploitation, as in the case of an “old female worker,” a character in sadhu binning’s play, lesson of a different kind who, because of her exploitation as a janitor who lacks a union to support her rights, dreamily longs for her home in punjab: “i want to sit in the winter sun on the roof-top of my home in the village and watch the little children play” (binning, 1996, p. 87). or it appears as a way of understanding the “loss” of home in canada, as in varma’s no man’s land, where an immigrant muslim family links the impending loss of home in quebec in the wake of its demand for separation from canada to the loss of the family’s home during the 1947 partition. here home appears as an ideological space, a space of tension, and even oppression. in uma parameswaran’s (1996) play rootless but green are the boulevard trees, jayant, a child of first-generation migrants in winnipeg, ruptures his father’s nostalgia by describing his home in india as “a sprawling, handed down untouched form from the time of the peshwas, where you have to walk half a mile to get to the shithouse” (p. 77). this description not only sets studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 134 nandi bhatia up a contrast with the setting of the family’s home in winnipeg with all the trappings of middle-class comfort as described in the stage directions; it also offers a foil to the home in canada that jayant imagines as being idyllic. as jayant and his friends start discussing race relations and inter-generational conflicts over lunch, they soon discover that the south asian community too is marked by intra-community tensions and hostilities, exposing the narrow conception of community that gets consolidated in a bid to protect itself from racism and biased perceptions. but underlying the reference to the peshwas5 is also the allusion to larger spaces and this points to the inequities of social caste. parmeswaran’s focus on caste encourages a rethinking of caste practices, which are not only operative at home, as pointed out by activists and theatre groups operating in india, but also continue to play out in diasporic spaces. hence, this drama remembers home not only in idealized terms to construct what rushdie (2010) calls, “imaginary homelands” which are versions with little correspondence to the reality of the homeland. but, its preoccupation with real life characters and situations, makes it an enterprise that foregrounds class, caste, gender, and race in the domain of middle-class drama and venues. for example, the performance of ajmer rode’s the rebirth of gandhi at the association of commonwealth languages and literature studies (aclals) held in british columbia in 2007 raised the topic of caste prejudice and mistreatment of dalits. rather than foregrounding this bordercrossing practice in terms of the ambivalence that is associated with diasporic experience and remembering this drama engages in a diasporic activism whose themes of social justice link them to the most radical social activist theatre in india, as in varma’s bhopal, and rana bose’s the death of abbie hoffman, a play which is adapted from badal sircar’s procession. remarkably, several plays, such as varma’s equal wages and binning’s lesson of a different kind, also provide a language that addresses the gendered diaspora through a focus on female farmworkers in binning’s play, and through home-working in varma’s play, where immigrant women in canada sew garments at home for the garment industry but do not have the protection of labour laws. home-working, as gayatri spivak (1996) points out, is an urgent topic involving “women in the transnational world,” since it concerns women who “do piece-work at home with no control over wages; and thus absorb the cost of health care, day care, work place safety, maintenance, management” (p. 246). in such situations, suggests spivak, the “concept of a diasporic multiculturalism is irrelevant. . . . the women stay at home, often impervious to organizational attempts through internalized gendering as a survival technique” (p. 246). but such internalization about gendered roles also results from expectations that migrants bring into diasporic spaces. for this reason, points out mala pendurang (2003), in any discussion of diasporic women, it is equally necessary to focus on spaces of departure, spaces that get left out in critical accounts that focus mainly on the enigmas and difficulties of arrival. for, a discussion of the cultural expectations of home, especially with regard to gender, is crucial for understanding gender-relations in the studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 south asian voices in canadian drama 135 diaspora. as the plays of surjeet kalsey and several plays by vancouver saath show, home emerges as cultural baggage that travels into the diaspora and prescribes limited and patriarchal roles for women, adding to the strains of marginalization based on color and class, as in the case of the farm-workers in british columbia. at the same time, showing female farm-workers fighting for their rights on the picket lines in a play such as binning and sukhwant hundal’s picket line, inspired by immigrant (punjabi) women’s demands for farm workers’ rights in british columbia in 1984, highlights the ways in which diasporic relocation creates contradictory conditions of empowerment and repression. while disempowering when patriarchal ideologies from india are rearticulated here, relocation can also be empowering as women transition from their identities as wives, homemakers, and mothers to wage earners and protectors of their labour rights. revisiting “home” in a 2003 article, aparna dharwadker applauded south asian drama in canada for maintaining a critical distance and detachment from “the culture of origin” and embracing “the experience of residence in the host culture” (p. 305) in order to produce “original” drama. “without this detachment from origins, diaspora theatre,” argues dharwadker, “can only re-present the culture of the nation, in expatriate plays about ‘home,’ local productions of plays from home, and full-scale imports. . . . in canada, where the indian expatriate communities are older, often visibly unprivileged, and entangled in post/colonial histories, an emergent culture of original playwriting and performance has offered a critique of the nation-state as well as of conditions in the diaspora ” (dharwadker, 2003, p. 305). but is detachment from home possible or even necessary? since connections between home and diasporic spaces are ever-present and lasting (manifested in all their unevenness and differentiated formulations), such an argument produces a potential disconnect between home and diaspora, which risks eliding experiences that are necessary for examining social processes in diasporic spaces and assumes that “attachments to the home left behind are imports that inevitably fade as immigrants and their descendants gradually assimilate into a mainstream whose ties are bounded at the water’s edge” (waldinger & fitzgerald, 2012, p. 1193). at a time when the climate of globalization demands a complex negotiation of local, national and global networks, plays produced by diasporic playwrights in canada seem to be making a concerted effort to engage with the entanglement of issues at home as well as in diasporic spaces, and so they create the conditions for progressive intercultural partnerships. in the more recent plays, home once again seems to be the central site of action: bombay in the case of anosh irani and calcutta in anusree roy’s work. in irani’s the matka king, a play about hijras (eunuchs), which premiered at the vancouver arts club in october 2003, the protagonist top rani (the head queen), a eunuch in his thirties, who was castrated at the age of ten, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 136 nandi bhatia says in the prologue: “in this city [of bombay], no one is free. i realized that when i was ten years old. i was sent here by my father to work as a servant boy. i had dreams then. now i can hardly remember what [the dreams] were. the truth is there is no such thing as an indian dream” (irani, 2007, p. 5). instead of a nostalgic journey into bombay, a city where irani grew up and which continues to inspire him, he presents us with a horrific tale of ruptured dreams, broken hearts and social entrapment and marginalization of hijras, prostitutes, and the working poor. roy’s pyaasa, first produced by theatre jones roy at theatre passe muraille in toronto in september, 2007, presents the tragic story of chaya, an eleven year old dalit girl, for whom her mother arranges employment at a local tea stall run by a woman of a higher caste, and renders visible for her audiences, chaya’s exploitation, her giving up of her dreams of continuing her school education so that she can earn money for the family, and her eventual marriage to a much older man after she is raped by the tea stall owner. and roy’s letters to my grandma is set in the pre and postworld war ii period in india and in toronto. first produced by theatre passe muraille, toronto, in november and december, 2009, this play foregrounds the protagonist molobee’s discovery of her grandma’s survival of the 1947 partition through her letters, a struggle that enables bee to deal with her own process of resettlement in toronto. even though the partition, one of the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century that coincided with india’s independence and led to unprecedented material and personal loss through forced migration across the newly created borders of india and pakistan and the violence against humanity that erupted, is not slotted in parallel terms with voluntary immigration, the play attempts to show the dislocation of immigrants whose identities are circumscribed by these historical memories, which complicate the processes of resettlement. to highlight the impact of interwoven memories, roy’s time-frame shifts back and forth between toronto, india at the time of partition, and in the contemporary moment, a moment in which spectators encounter the grandmother’s experiences through the phone conversations and letters between bee and her grandma. not only do these overlapping time frames, of historical memory and the present, show viewers how one age constructs another; they also explain the grandma’s communal sensibilities, as she struggles with the idea of bee, the granddaughter, marrying a muslim in toronto and subsequently accepts the fact as she begins to confront her own act of bigotry during the partition riots, when she had a muslim woman thrown off a jeep so she could take her place in order to safeguard her new-born child. bee overlays these communal memories with other forms of bigotry she confronts in toronto when people call her a “paki,” a racist term used for south asians. through an aesthetic framework that makes use of a single actor to play the different roles the individual’s multiple roles and identities are also foregrounded. like her grandma, who posed both as a muslim and a hindu when the partition carnage threatened her and her newborn baby girl, bee too finds herself shifting into a multiplicity of roles that she has to constantly negotiate as an immigrant woman: an obedient daughter who is expected to carry out the roles studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 south asian voices in canadian drama 137 and responsibilities of a hindu woman, a young woman with independent opinions, and an immigrant faced with racism. at the very least, viewers are reminded of the value of revisiting home and its history for understanding the complexities of relationships in the present. overall, irani and roy’s plays subject india and canada to critical scrutiny and examine the effects of power networks on those living on the margins (hijras, bar dancers, prostitutes, and beggars). this scrutiny is especially useful at a time when images of a shining india have been promoted and center-staged in the global imagination. some concluding remarks if the plays forcefully tackle sociopolitical issues, then the activism they have engendered has also not been without achievements. as thomas morgan jones writes in the introduction to roy’s play, “anusree roy writes plays because she truly believes that they have the power to change the world” (roy, 2010, p. iii), something that is confirmed by the audience’s reaction after the performance of her plays, described, as follows, by jones:. following each performance, audience members were compelled to speak with anusree. they wanted to share their stories and their personal experiences. letters to my grandma moved audiences to offer stories about their grandparents, and about their own families’ experiences with war. there was one instance, following a performance of pyaasa, where a woman admitted that she had spit on one of her untouchable servant’s face while living in india, and tearfully asked anusree for her forgiveness. each conversation with each stranger spoke to a deep and meaningful connection they made with the writing. it was as if the writing invited the audiences into anusree’s world(s) while allowing them to access new perspectives in their own lives. (roy, 2010, p. iv) many playwrights/groups who often operate under little economic support and have to deal with funding practices that provide financial support only if the plays fulfill a certain notion of culture that reproduces the idea of the exotic to accommodate the demands of official multiculturalism have extended their activism to secure more funding. teesri duniya, for example, managed to effect reforms in the ways in which the canada council for the arts parsed out funds for multicultural theatre events, funds that led to the eventual growth of the company.6 as a result, teesri duniya managed to become “one of the few culturally inclusive theatre companies in canada” (varma, 2009, p. 180) and has produced “cutting edge political plays involving other groups” (varma, 2009, p. 182). the moment that teesri began to receive arts funding from the canada council of the arts marks a turning point in the company’s history. the result was a string of avant-garde plays which were properly workshopped and featured actors of colour who were paid unionized salaries. these plays were produced at fully equipped venues known by the theatre-going public and, until that time, exclusively used by anglo-french companies. (varma, 2009, p. 182) studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 138 nandi bhatia additional funding has thus allowed groups such as teesri duniya and vancouver’s neworld theatre to collaborate on joint productions of plays such as my name is rachel corrie in montreal and vancouver, a play about a 23 year old woman by this name, who was bulldozed to death by israeli defense forces while protesting the destruction of palestinian homes. even though teesri started as a company to address the needs of the south asian community, like many other groups in recent year, it has continued its commitment to raising awareness about global political issues by launching truth and treason, a play about the war in iraq.7 such commitment shows itself again in rahul varma’s most recent play, state of denial, (2012) a play that grew out of concordia university’s history department project, “montreal life stories” and premiered in march 2012 in montreal under the direction of deborah forde to celebrate, in its associate artistic director edward (ted) little’s words, “the culmination of a five-year partnership between teesri duniya theatre and the performance working group—one of seven research clusters comprising the social sciences and humanities research council (sshrc) funded project, life stories of montrealers displaced by war, genocide and other human rights violations” (varma, 2012, p. 3).8 the play works with layers of gendered histories of genocides, of armenians in turkey in the early 20th century and in rwanda, later in the century, to reflect upon the silence that women are subjected to as a result of brutality and violence perpetrated on communities and their bodies. through a plot in which a rwandan-born canadian documentary filmmaker and researcher named odette attempts to uncover the secret of sahana, an elderly turkish woman who dedicates her life to helping female armenian survivors of the genocide, and who ships off her baby daughter to canada for safety, varma tackles several issues. on one level, the play examines the ethics of interviewing and collecting oral histories from displaced and vulnerable victims of war; on another level, varma unpacks the notion of “cultural diversity” in canada to throw light upon the manifold reasons for which people migrate to canada—in this case political refuge, personal survival and safety from war-torn territories. such a trajectory, then, does not idealize the homes immigrants leave behind; rather, it exposes the fraught histories of war and power-relations and presents them as global problems against which we might understand the stories of refugees in canada and their difficulties as they wade through a maze of bureaucracy, legal issues and governmental rules. to this end, varma expands the notion of multiculturalism from recognition of cultural diversity and co-existence to a deeper understanding of the reasons why the (unstable) national pasts of some migrants continue to haunt them (not always nostalgically) in diasporic spaces. the play seeks to achieve its aims through minimalist props and multiple characters, victims, survivors, researchers and state officials, through whose engagement with issues regarding breaking the silence about violence, murder and rape, and the ethics of speaking and listening, a complex and nuanced understanding can emerge. in his writer’s statement about the play, varma says that, as “a part of the studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 south asian voices in canadian drama 139 montreal life stories” project, he “read many testimonies of survivors of genocide” and “books and biographies of survivors from armenia, rwanda, south asia and the balkans, and spoke to their descendants now residing in canada” (varma, 2012, p. 7). based on these, he produced a play that “is not a documentary but an imagined play consisting of multiple personal stories weaved into one and told through characters that come from different continents,” (varma, 2012, p. 7). yet, instead of placing emphasis “on the authenticity of the stories being performed on stage,” an important element of “verbatim theatre” or “theatrical performances based on interview transcripts” (high, 2011, p. 52), varma offers what steven high (2011) identifies as “a combination of verbatim and self-authored material” (p. 52), along with post-performance discussions held with audience members after some of the shows, to engage a forum for exchange and groupthink regarding the subjectivities and lived experiences of those displaced by similar human rights violations. one reviewer, who calls the play “highly worthwhile,”9 affirms varma’s mandate that “in the face of such shameless denial [of human rights violations] awareness is our only hope” (varma, 2012, p. 7). in a 1998 article, sheila james asserted that “south asian canadian theatre is not a movement or a scene unto itself…[but] grows in tandem with first nations and people of colour theatre communities” (p. 46). varma’s state of denial and ongoing projects by playwrights who address the implications of cross-border movements, examine the lived experiences of minorities and survivors and open up topics related to human rights through live bodies that “function as one of the most charged sites of theatrical representation” (gilbert & tompkins, 1996, p. 203). their work attests to the ways in which south asian canadian drama continues its political engagements on community, regional, national and international stages. notes 1 an earlier version of this paper was presented as part of a panel titled, “whither south asian drama in canada?” at the festival of south asian literature and arts (fsala), held from september 30-october 2, 2011, at the university of toronto. i would like to extend my grateful thanks to the panelists, especially rahul varma, for sharing his insights about teesri duniya, to teresa hubel for her critical input on earlier drafts and to chelva kanaganayakam and rajesh macwan for inviting me to participate in the panel. 2 for a description of this process, see sheila james (1998), “south asian women: creating theatre of resilience and resistance.” canadian theatre review, 94, pp. 45-50, and sadhu binning (1998), “vancouver saath: south asian canadian theatre in vancouver.” canadian theatre review, 94, pp. 14-17. 3 for more commentary on this issue, see rahul varma (1998), “contributing to canadian theatre,” canadian theatre review, 94, pp. 25-27 and sheila james (1998), “south asian women: creating theatre of resilience and resistance.” canadian theatre review, 94, pp.45-50. 4 bhopal was presented by the masquerade youth theatre in association with the madras players in 2011 in india. (for a review of the play, see shonali muthalaly, “lots of smoke, no fire.” the hindu june 27, 2011. http://www.thehindu.com/arts/ theatre/article2138995.ece). illinois state university’s school of theatre presented the play in spring 2011 (http://www.cfa.ilstu.edu/pguithe/theatre/iisbhopal/index. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 140 nandi bhatia html). and to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the bhopal gas disaster, a staged reading of the play was presented on march 26, 2010, by the association for india’s development, theatre rasa nova, and friends of south asia (fosa) in san francisco, usa. 5 a titled designation in marathi which means prime minister, peshwa was created by shivaji (1674-1680) during the growth of the maratha empire, which ended when the british annexed it to the british empire in 1818. 6 some examples of plays that varma provides include “main street collective’s divided we stand (1994), directed by harry standjofski; jason sherman’s reading hebron (2000), directed by wajdi mouawad; sylvija jestovic’s noah’s arc 747 (2002), directed by paulina abaraca; camyar chai, marcus youssef and guillermo verdecchia’s ali &ali and the axis of evil (2004), directed by guillermo verdecchia; nina lee-aquino and nadine villasin’s miss orient(ed) (2005), directed by sarah stanley; and most recently, alan rickman and katharine viner’s controversial play my name is rachel corrie (2008), directed by sarah stanley” (2009, p.182). 7 for information on the play see http://southasianplaywrights.org/?p=1131 8 see http://www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca 9 see http://www.teesriduniya.com/reviews.html references anderson, b. (1983). imagined communities. reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso. binning, s. (1993). vancouver saath: a profile by sadhu binning. rungh: a south asian quarterly of culture, comment and criticism. 2(1 & 2), 22-126. retrieved from http://www. tru.ca/cicac/readings/rungh_v2_n1-2.pdf binning, s. (1996). lesson of a different kind. saclit drama. in. u. parameswaran (ed.), plays by south asian canadians (85-98). bangalore: ibh prakashana. binning, s. (1998). vancouver saath: south asian canadian theatre in vancouver. canadian theatre review, 94, 14-17. binning, s. (2006) punjabi-canadian literature: a brief introduction. journal of punjab studies, 13(1&2), 279-285. retrieved from http://www.global.ucsb.edu/punjab/13.1.2_binning.pdf bose, r. (1999). on the double. in the death of abbie hoffman and other plays. calcutta: seagull books. dharwadker, a. (2003). diaspora and the theatre of the nation. theatre research international. 28(3), 303-325. gilbert, h., & tompkins, j. (1996). post-colonial drama: theory, practice, politics. london: routledge. high, s. (2011). embodying the story: oral history and performance in the classroom. alt. theatre: cultural diversity and the stage. 9(2), 50-54. irani, a. (2007). the bombay plays. the matka king. bombay black. toronto: playwrights canada press. james, s. (1998). south asian women: creating theatre of resilience and resistance. canadian theatre review, 94, 45-50. kalsey, s. (n.d.) stage plays/performing arts. retrieved from http://surjeetkalsey.wordpress. com/writings/stage-plays mcgifford, d. (1992). the geography of voice: canadian literature of the south asian diaspora. toronto: tsar. mishra, v. (2007). the literature of the indian diaspora: theorizing the diasporic imaginary. oxon: routledge. montreal serai. (2013). about serai. retrieved from http://montrealserai.com/_archives/other/ about_serai.htm parameswaran, u. (1996a). introduction. in u. parameswaran (ed.), saclit drama. plays by south asian canadians (pp. i-xxv). bangalore: ibh prakashana. parameswaran, u. (1996b). meera: a dance drama. in u. parameswaran (ed.), saclit drama. plays by south asian canadians (pp. 1-8). bangalore: ibh prakashana. parameswaran, u. (1996c). rootless but green are the boulevard trees. in u. parameswaran studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 south asian voices in canadian drama 141 (ed.), saclit drama. plays by south asian canadians (pp. 25-84). bangalore: ibh prakashana. parameswaran, u. (1998). editorial: drumming towards a better future. canadian theatre review, 94, 3-4. roy, a. (2010). pyaasa & letters to my grandma. toronto: playwrights canada press. pendurang, m. (2003). conceptualizing emigrant female subjectivity: possible entry points. in. n. puwar & p. raghuram (eds.), south asian women in the diaspora (pp. 87-98). oxford: berg. rushdie, s. (2010). imaginary homelands. essays and criticism 1981-1991. india: random house. spivak, g. c. (1996). diasporas old and new: women in the transnational world. textual practice, 10(2), 245-269. varma, r.. (1995). no man’s land. in a. ravel (ed.), canadian mosaic: six lays (pp. 164-212). toronto: simon and pierre,. varma, r. (2004). bhopal. toronto: playwrights canada press. varma, r. (2009). teesri duniya theatre: diversifying diversity with relevant works of theatre. south asian popular culture, 73(3), 179-194. varma, r. (2012). program booklet. state of denial. presented march 16-april at mccord museum, montreal. waldinger, r., & fitzgerald, d. (2004). transnationalism in question. american journal of sociology. 109 (5), 1177-95. retrieved from http://works.bepress.com/roger_waldinger/25/. luka et al final galley mar 8 16 correspondence address: mary elizabeth luka, sensorium centre for digital arts & technology, school of arts, media, performance & design, york university, toronto, on, m3j 1p3; email: meluka@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 scholarship as cultural production in the neoliberal university: working within and against ‘deliverables’ mary elizabeth luka york university, canada alison harvey university of leicester, uk mél hogan illinois institute of technology, usa tamara shepherd university of calgary, canada andrea zeffiro mcmaster university, canada abstract this article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable ‘deliverables.’ using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they undertook as part of a broader research group of emerging canadian scholars working in different international contexts between 2012 and 2015. the research conversation began in academic roundtables in 2013, and was furthered through a content analysis of articles collected from scholarly and general interest blog posts, newsletters, and magazines published online from july 2012 to april 2014. in this article, the authors explore emerging themes and document pressures to conform to neoliberal practices within the corporatized university, as well as suggest pathways for dissent and reinvention of academic labour. keywords cultural production; neoliberal university; academic precarity; collaboration scholarship as cultural production in the neoliberal university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 177 introduction: scholarship as cultural production current attempts by universities to redefine their role in society – given late capitalist demands for tangible value to be derived from education – have prompted a renaissance of research practices expressed through an economic lens. under these conditions, the concept of scholarship as cultural production is articulated through ideas about economically impactful deliverables, including a narrowly defined set of public engagement and outreach activities. in this context, ‘deliverables’ is a corporate management term used to denote tangible and quantifiable outcomes, valued for their capacity to be packaged and delivered to ‘clients’ (shore, 2010). examples include public talks and media appearances designed primarily to promote university products and personalities to the general public and funders who seek ‘impact,’ but who do not necessarily want to engage with the critical components of research. within this promotional framework for economically-related deliverables, the most important indicators of success might include the size of audiences at such events, revenue streams generated by university research and development, and the ability to attract higherpaying students. in contrast, we understand scholarship as cultural production to more broadly include the role of public intellectuals, community activists, and other forms of participation in work, research, and creative endeavours both inside and outside the academic sphere. this article reflects on two aspects of scholarship as cultural production, informed by (a) a purposive sampling (yin, 2009, pp. 116-117) of online discussions about the neoliberal environment producing academic precarity, combined with (b) concerns arising from two roundtables at academic conferences in 2013 and 2014. we first consider the pressures academics face to efficiently produce monetizable ‘deliverables,’ and then analyze the rise in academic employment precarity as expressed in non-scholarly blog and professional articles written predominantly by academics. this primary research was generated by seven researchers from 2012 to 2015, of which five participated in writing this article.1 alison harvey is a lecturer in media and communication at the university of leicester, and tamara shepherd is an assistant professor of communication at the university of calgary. both draw on their experience of feminist participatory action research with local communities of game designers. 1 the other two researchers on this project are jacqueline wallace, a postdoctoral fellow at concordia university in montreal who has significant experience in graphic design and social media start-ups, and mélanie millette, an assistant professor of communication and social media at the université de québec à montréal (uqam) in montreal and a former advertising professional. our ongoing dialogues included roundtable discussions inviting input and sharing of others’ experiences as well as our own. they were held at the association of internet researchers in october 2013 with hogan, luka, millette, and wallace; and at the canadian communication association in june 2014 with harvey, hogan, luka, millette, shepherd, and zeffiro. mary elizabeth luka, alison harvey, mél hogan, tamara shepherd, andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 178 additionally, shepherd and mary elizabeth luka make use of their critiques of broadcast policy development for this article. luka is a banting postdoctoral fellow at york university in toronto, investigating creative citizenship at sites of collaborative interaction for which she mobilizes her extensive experience as a culture sector consultant and media director. mél hogan is an assistant professor of communication at illinois institute of technology (iit) in chicago and is interested in how scholarship relates to labour dynamics in research creation projects and collaborative productions between academics, designers, and other practitioners, including through her own entrepreneurial start-up. andrea zeffiro is an assistant professor of communication studies and multimedia and the academic director for the lewis and ruth sherman centre for digital scholarship at mcmaster university. zeffiro draws on a decade of experience working in collaborative and interdisciplinary research networks and community-based social justice initiatives. by 2012, all of us were emerging scholars interested in the exciting potential for crossovers between academic and non-academic spheres. drawing on our experience as scholars and professionals, we wondered how economically-based deliverable imperatives would encroach on our potential scholarly research projects involving long-term, value-based partnerships with communication and creative professional associations, entrepreneurial start-ups and non-profits, media production and distribution organizations and activities, and video game production initiatives for women. these networks and research sites focus largely on equity, activism, and alternative approaches to mainstream or for-profit imperatives. the pressure for such partnerships to also beget financially-productive deliverables for the universities where we work exists alongside such value-based approaches. our projects incorporate a wide range of online collaboration, co-creation, and experimentation activities including, for example, advocacy toolkits, frameworks for analyzing government data and policies, and collaboratively produced websites and promotional materials. these forms of scholarship as cultural production are desired by the ‘corporatized university’ insofar as they contribute to an institution’s public profile. however, as darin barney’s (2008) provocative analysis of participation and agency toward knowledge production suggests, knowledge cannot always be packaged as a publicity event, nor should it be. if academic workers are already mobilizing knowledge in their daily labours, whether it be mediated through research portfolios, channelled through pedagogical practices involving relevant groups of people, or reflected on and shared with colleagues and comrades in daily encounters, then why the push for publicity if not to demonstrate economic benefit? moreover, despite the ongoing potential of collaborative projects to broaden academic inquiry into new public and private spaces, many collaborations remain peripheral to traditional academic systems for recognition and advancement. academic recognition still relies foremost on scholarship as cultural production in the neoliberal university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 179 peer-assessed scholarly publications as well as on the ability to secure substantial research funding or otherwise contribute to university revenue streams. in other words, when conceived as outputs, some highly valued scholarly ‘deliverables’ paradoxically inhibit the collaborative processes and long-term commitments at sites of activist engagement in order to ‘produce’ scholarly research. this has significant implications for the corporatized university, an institution whose modern history reflects the transition from enlightenment idealism to corporate pragmatism, as we explore in detail below. concerns about the emphasis on economic deliverables are shared by academic unions and associations across canada, as has been made evident by recent labour conflicts in higher education (e.g., brown, 2015; cbc news, march 31, 2015). participation in and analysis of the student-led carré rouge movement in quebec indicate how systemic tensions involving economically-focused deliverables, in combination with precarious academic labour, provide the foundation for neoliberal academia.2 so do similar critiques emerging in the uk (hall, massey & rustin, 2013), ireland, and other parts of europe and north america (see hanke & hearn, 2012). these critiques of the corporatized university circulated widely in academic literature, online forums, and informal conversations during the period from 2012 to 2015 when many of us were completing our doctoral studies and preparing to enter the academic workforce. we synthesize several such critiques below to set the stage for our subsequent discussion of the on-line articles we researched and the roundtables we developed. the corporatized university: deliverables in relation to labour practices the late capitalist context provides ideal grounding for the creation of the corporatized university and its preoccupation with monetizable deliverables (couldry & mcrobbie, 2010; hall, massey & rustin, 2013). our analysis of the corporatized university is underpinned by the theoretical traditions of the political economy of communication (e.g., garnham, 1995; mckercher & mosco, 2006; melody, 2007), and the methodological approaches used in production studies (e.g., gitlin, 1983; mayer, 2011; mayer, banks & caldwell, 2009; tuchman, 1978). political economy offers an important critical lens through which to study labour practices as systems of economic production. in the context of our discussion here, these practices are mainly forms of labour emblematic of late capitalism marked by western versions of 2 in the spring of 2012, tens of thousands of quebec post-secondary students went on strike to protest proposed tuition fee hikes, holding protests throughout the province, especially in montreal. faculty and staff supporters, unions, activist groups, and members of the public participated in the protests, with more than 250,000 people on the streets. for details, see wi journal of mobile media, 2012a & 2012b. mary elizabeth luka, alison harvey, mél hogan, tamara shepherd, andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 180 knowledge work, such as cultural and creative industries (huws, 2003; terranova, 2004). as catherine mckercher and vincent mosco (2006, p. 493) note, for scholars like us who are interested in media (ownership and social construction), messages (content and discourse), and audiences (reception), the “labouring of communication” is of critical concern. more specifically, the implications of a political economy of communication perspective can be made more explicit through a production studies approach, which helps us think through what it means to be engaged on the ground with labour practices that materially generate cultural products, economies, and identities. by thinking about the material working practices and conditions of contemporary scholars as a form of cultural production, we are able to attend to sites where negotiations of power, compensation, and productivity measures occur (see mayer 2011, and stevens 1998, for examples related to television production and architecture, respectively). in our case, academic newsletters, articles and blogs, coupled with conference roundtables, provided critical inroads. to observe academic precarity, we found it useful to illuminate the informal and formal hierarchies that structure scholarship as cultural production, as pierre bourdieu (1993) would suggest, by highlighting how scholars produce writing and analysis to negotiate those hierarchies. such analyses complement bill readings’ (1996) influential account of the “university in ruins,” which portrays an institution unsure of its role in contemporary social, economic, and cultural life. “the re-conception of the university as a corporation,” he argues, results in a paradoxical relationship between higher learning and culture within a bureaucratic setting, “one of whose functions (products?) is the granting of degrees with a cultural cachet, but one whose overall nature is corporate rather than cultural” (readings, 1996, p. 11; parenthetical insertion in original). so, although the university still “draws its legitimacy from culture” (readings, 1996, p. 65), that legitimacy has to be re-cast within corporate management paradigms that demand, above all else, ‘excellence’, which translates into (primarily economic) deliverables. an intensification of the trends noted by readings in the mid-1990s has been observed by several scholars commenting on changes in the university in relation to economic globalization and privatization (aronowitz, 2000; delanty, 2001; mignolo, 2003; tudiver, 1999), commodified learning (archibald & feldman, 2010; grineski, 2000), management culture (burgan, 2006; deem, hillyard & reed, 2007; giroux & myrsiades, 2001), and precarious academic employment (jubas & kawalilak, 2012; levin, kater & wagoner, 2006; rajagopal, 2002). for scholars working in this milieu, simply ignoring or denying the changes wrought by the corporatization of the university is no longer feasible. simultaneously, it is crucial to be precise about what those changes mean for the status of academic values associated with teaching, learning, and scholarship (steck, 2003) within institutional cultures of production that increasingly demand outputs beyond traditional scholarly publication. scholarship as cultural production in the neoliberal university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 181 reflecting on what has been characterized as the neoliberal political arrangement working to accelerate university corporatization (ball, 2012; rutherford, 2005), and to reshape other knowledge-work sectors (including, in our own direct experiences, public broadcasting, civil service, entrepreneurial start-ups, and non-profits), we agree with jubas & kawalilak: (2012, p. 1): expectations that staff will ‘do more with less,’ forego salary increases that keep pace with inflation, secure outside funding for research, and adopt a hypercompetitive mindset, all while exposing themselves to new forms of surveillance to check compliance, are as present in the academy as they are in any other workplace. one of the most vivid ways in which neoliberal logic has permeated academic work as cultural production has been through the introduction of indices seeking to measure ‘impact’ (uk), ‘knowledge transfer’ (us), and ‘knowledge mobilization’ (canada) (see de angelis & harvie, 2009; horn, 2015; researchimpact.ca). this “audit culture” that informs the measurement of scholarly outputs “confuses ‘accountability’ with ‘accountancy’ so that ‘being answerable to the public’ is recast in terms of measures of productivity, ‘economic efficiency’ and delivering ‘value for money’” (shore, 2008, p. 281; see also edu-factory collective, 2011). in the process, cris shore (2008) argues, managerialism seeps into academic thinking and subjectivities, producing a “corrosive effect” (p. 292) that undermines autonomy and devalues the work of scholarship as cultural production, by reducing rich incarnations of knowledge to measurable deliverables. this neoliberal and managerial approach to academic work stands in contrast to evidence of activism as cultural production. although it has been plagued by “messy” (law, 2004) political asymmetries and false dichotomies between academia and the non-academic milieu (autonomous geographies collective, 2010), scholar activism as a component of scholarship as cultural production has long been a site for knowledge production responsive to social expression and struggle. examples include jamming media signals, producing human rights videos, networking community radio efforts, and sharing tape recordings by hand (branwyn, 1997; miller & allor, 2009; rodriguez & el gazi, 2007; sreberny-mohammadi & mohammadi, 1997). in the context of a corporatized university where non-traditional scholarly work has been subsumed under the logic of audit culture, something about the messiness of social engagement on the part of scholars eludes managerial techniques of measurement (illner, 2011). moreover, the possibilities for scholarly production to cut across disciplinary formations in the service of broader social justice and social transformation reflect the potential for academics to tap into a “mass intellectuality” that can open up “enormous scope for new alliances and forms of resistance” (terranova & bousquet, 2004). the roundtables and content analysis we conducted between 2012 and 2014 mary elizabeth luka, alison harvey, mél hogan, tamara shepherd, andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 182 enabled us to examine how this process manifests in the lives of emerging scholars within and beyond the canadian context. understanding the messiness of scholarly outputs: the association of internet researchers (aoir) roundtable to understand scholarship as cultural production today – as both complicit with and resistant to neoliberal academia – our research group looked to other academics for guidance on how to navigate the field. this was no accident of timing; our research on this topic emerged from a genuine interest in realizing professional success in the academic job market, thinking critically about our labour practices and ongoing commitments to collaborative and partnershipbased work, including previous community and artistic relationships that are central to our research practices today. in preparation for the 2013 annual conference of the association of internet researchers (aoir) in denver, colorado, hogan, luka, millette, and wallace collaboratively created a series of provocations for a roundtable chaired by labour theorist vicki mayer. the roundtable explored how the academic research milieu connects with specific entrepreneurial, social enterprise, and creative environments (e.g., public arts funding, public broadcasting, advertising, podcasting, graphic design, and website service companies). it drew on the participants’ and audience members’ work experiences in order to reflect on the challenges of valuing these experiences in the academic environment. topics addressed included how creative labour, design-thinking, and activism fit together with academic methods and processes (e.g., in research-creation, commercialization partnerships, and action research, respectively). the panel analyzed the challenges and opportunities of what has come to be termed “research-creation,” defined as the mobilization of creative practice in the production of original scholarly research (see e.g., sawchuk & zeffiro, 2012). such creative practices and their accompanying methods, including digital ethnography, self-critical observation, and digital media art production, were discussed as activities that could help or hinder legitimacy in the academy. participants drew on their own experiences and challenges to exemplify these points. the recounting of non-academic work experiences by panelists from a feminist, critical labour point of view generated significant dialogue amongst attendees, who responded by noting the ways they too sought to integrate and combine their own academic, corporate, volunteer, and creative responsibilities. during the roundtable discussion, concerns were raised regarding how difficult it is to cite, document, and represent collaborative fieldwork in the standard academic curriculum vitae and other scholarly forms. for example, the skilled teamwork often required to edit a documentary, co-create a toolkit for community activism, or build a website for a research project is not often reflected in the form of individually authored peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarship as cultural production in the neoliberal university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 183 the gold-standard of research outputs. thinking more critically about the possibilities for scholarship in the corporatized university, it seemed improbable that creative research-creation outputs or long-term collective research, based on values such as equity and access, could be reconciled with current academic publishing demands dependent on individual authorship. indeed, the complexities inherent in collaborative work simultaneously resist the model of single-author scholarly publication and resituate the university as a participant in social struggles rather than as an ivory tower for distanced contemplation (casas-cortés & cobarrubias, 2007). another topic noted during the roundtable included inequities in pay for similar work in different arenas, such as graduate research assistant hourly rates and part-time teaching contracts versus corporate consulting rates to lead workshops, conduct research, organize strategic planning sessions, and manage creative production teams. furthermore, some roundtable participants and audience members commented that they had been asked by supervisors or other academic authorities to narrow their expectations about the kind of academic career to expect, because they brought production skills drawn from digital media making, applied design, and project management experiences to the academic sphere. these individuals were not being encouraged to pursue research-based careers, but instead to return to corporate environments, or to become teachers in technical and professional programs. such discouragement would seem to be changing given the emergence of academic collaborative processes in the field of digital humanities (burdick, drucker, lunenfeld, presner & schnapp, 2012), which aims to mobilize humanities research in ways that sometimes seem analogous to community-based activism or artist-led initiatives. but its similarity to the corporatized rapid-response nature of creative entrepreneurial business models and design-thinking often clash with more established forms of activism, creative production, and the individualized academic model of teaching and learning. current scholarly funding mechanisms, such as the social sciences and humanities research council of canada and the research councils in the united kingdom, ratchet up these tensions through ‘engagement’ and ‘impact’ initiatives. these challenge scholars as producers of knowledge, artists, community members, and entrepreneurs to reach out to non-academic communities. such initiatives are often explicitly connected to corporate agendas, prioritizing citizen involvement as ‘client’ engagements with commercializable research. similarly, the requirement in uk funding applications to include ‘impact’ statements focuses on both social and economic benefits to non-academic users. this indicates the obligation to quantify outcomes from external research funding, which is crucial for career advancement in the academic environment. the key point here is that financial (‘commercializability’) and instrumental (‘impact indicators’) objectives restrict the capacity for researchers to resist the neoliberal status quo (o’meara, 2014; horn, 2015). for example, holding a feminist mary elizabeth luka, alison harvey, mél hogan, tamara shepherd, andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 184 positionality in the academy often means producing additional justification for the value of research and community engagement, related to cooperative or jointly determined social goals, that may not result in measurable economic impacts (see e.g., zeffiro & hogan, 2015). such forms of legitimation include bridging social values with creative and workforceoriented life skills, such as shared knowledge, collaboration, self-expression, community involvement, and diverse cultural influences (see e.g., branwyn, 1997; miller & allor, 2009; rodriguez & el gazi, 2007). the aoir roundtable provided us with examples of the challenges of scholarship as cultural production, including lack of recognition for collaborative work. it also indicated forms of resistance concerning wage equity and access to resources for non-economic goals. these articulations of resistance subsequently motivated our collection of newsletter, magazine, website, and blog articles on the topic of academic employment prospects for emerging scholars, which subsequently informed a second proposed roundtable at the canadian communication association (cca) annual conference in 2014. narratives of academic precarity: articles, blog posts and media coverage we purposively sampled 29 news items and commentaries from several sources by searching on a periodic basis for anything on the topic of academic employment for emerging scholars. our sources included the two leading professional newsletters regarding the academy in the us and canada (the chronicle of higher education and university affairs), two respected ‘national’ newspapers in the uk and the us that have a comprehensive online presence and regularly reference employment and related matters (the guardian and the new york times), and a range of other websites and individual blogs written by journalists and scholars over a seven-month period from november 2013 to june 2014 that explicitly referenced academic employment.3 each sampled item included three to six links to other articles, reflecting various facets of recent or current situations in canadian, american, and british universities. we analyzed the design of the items and the images used in each item’s presentation, and conducted a discourse analysis of the headlines, assessing whether the content of the articles matched the headlines and visual images used to illustrate them. the trajectories and complaints we came across online amplified our concerns about the path to a tenure-track job. headlines reflected a narrative of precarity and uncertainty. several articles connected each writer’s personal lack of tenure-track employment – or that of the individuals they had 3 the full list of blogs and websites can be viewed here: http://moreartculturemediaplease.com/scholarly/scholarship-as-cultural-production/ scholarship as cultural production in the neoliberal university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 185 interviewed – to the structural problems of the corporatized university. the headlines, which we collected as screengrabs, became a visual and discursive archive, which we built into a powerpoint presentation for use at the cca roundtable.4 this documentation of shared misery, frustration, or trauma provided overwhelming testimony about the emotional investments of precarious academic workers struggling to negotiate the linear academic career path associated with traditional scholarship, which many writers simultaneously romanticized and critiqued for being out of touch. some typical insights are presented below, gleaned from analyzing the 29 items. we found that the majority of authors tried to make sense of whether personal or systemic failures (or both) were the crucial issues. the struggle to articulate the fraught nature of relatively limited opportunities within the highly stratified postsecondary system without whining or sounding entitled appeared in many of the blog posts, newsletters, and media/magazine articles. indeed, it was a struggle for us to find evidence to the contrary: there was a dearth of optimism about the potential to find work in the field in the content we reviewed. we were discouraged by the volume of complaints, and so redoubled our efforts to identify affirmative experiences by rereading the publications we surveyed, and reflecting in greater depth about the experiences shared by audience members at the aoir (and later, the cca) roundtable(s), including by some of our supervisors, mentors and colleagues. many of the latter came to tenured jobs and promotions in academia in different eras and although they struggled with other issues in their time, they were baffled by the anger and frustration expressed in the articles we tracked. the predominance of the ‘escape-from-scarcity’ narrative within the collection of articles we surveyed demonstrates that numerous current and “ex-academics” are venting publicly as a means of resisting corporatization in the academy, and many are leaving the profession entirely. for example, in an article for slate titled “thesis hatement,” rebecca schuman (2013) laments: “i’ve finally gotten it through my thick head that i will not get a job – and if you go to graduate school, neither will you.” presented as a reality check of the paucity of tenure-track positions, the articles we surveyed focused on “recovered academics” who survived the “great disappointment” and moved on. many of the articles we reviewed feature images that are dark or apocalyptic, while their headlines describe academic labour through a distressing range of metaphors, from the hunger games (odinshoot, 2014) and fast-food workers (hoff, 2014), to warzones and drug gangs (afonso, 2013; see figure 1). some highlighted the “big lie” about the availability of tenure-track positions (benton, 2010). although tenured and non-tenured 4 the powerpoint slides can be viewed here: http://moreartculturemediaplease.com/scholarly/scholarship-as-cultural-production/slideshow-ofimages/ mary elizabeth luka, alison harvey, mél hogan, tamara shepherd, andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 186 academics are framed as labourers, in some case they are also – however critically – described as “frauds,” “imposters” (barcan, 2014), and even “whores” (mcmillan cottom, 2013). figure 1. screengrab of alexandre afonso’s personal blog, november 21, 2013. in many of the articles we examined, we also found numerous expressions of concern about the corporatized university as a site that, as discussed above, positions knowledge in the form of monetizable deliverables rather than intellectual engagement. for example, john warner’s (2014) account of arizona state university’s (asu) plan to increase the teaching load for writing instructors from 4/4 to 5/5 without an increase in pay, paints a sombre scene. asu is not the only higher education institution to take advantage of its contingent and casual work force. when warner (2014) writes, “tenured faculty are largely in the business of producing graduates who become human shields, working for substandard wages in order to protect the 2/2 teaching loads of their privileged tenured professors,” his remarks may seem extreme. however, he is clearly asking each of us to challenge the academic “assembly line,” and to be aware of our own contributions to manufacturing fraudulent futures (see e.g., dalgleish & powell, 2014). scholarship as cultural production in the neoliberal university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 187 the assembly line critique can be merged with critiques of the exploitative undertones of the “do what you love” mantra in both academic (zeffiro & hogan, 2015) and cultural work (hesmondhalgh & baker, 2008; luka, 2014a, 2014b; mcrobbie, 2003; wallace, 2014). authors of the articles we analyzed bemoaned terms such as ‘assembly line’ and ‘do what you love’ to describe the affective experience of precarity within a rigid academic hierarchy. in other words, doing what you love, or think is crucial for the advancement of society, is eclipsed by a multitude of written accounts of exploitation, diplomas attached to tremendous debt, and belated discovery of the preparation required to lead precarious academic lives. figure 2. screengrab of anna maria tremonti’s the current (canadian broadcasting corporation), january 27, 2014, © cbc licensing. for example, according to shannon higgens and sarah grant on an episode of cbc’s the current (2014; see figure 2), the last decade alone has seen the number of phd graduates in canada double, meaning that twice as many qualified applicants vie for a limited number of jobs. because new jobs are not being created at the same rate as doctorates are conferred (not that they ever were), the shift in employment opportunities means that most mary elizabeth luka, alison harvey, mél hogan, tamara shepherd, andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 188 academics can hope to get their first tenure-track job in their mid-40s, which is ten years later than it was in the 1970s (higgens & grant, 2014). it also means more competition in a time of diminishing resources, where fewer professorial posts in an environment of growing student numbers leads to increased class sizes and heavier administrative workloads for faculty in tandem with higher expectations around publication and grant acquisition (higgens & grant, 2014). recent countervailing enrolment trends nuance these pressures, especially in the humanities. when the number of highschool graduates decreases because of demographic shifts, humanities enrolment decreases more quickly, even while canadian and international student enrolment at large urban universities increases (brown, 2014). moreover, in canada, where tenured professors are among the best paid in the world, half the teaching work is done by part-time lecturers, a number that is only likely to increase under these conditions (brown, 2012). figure 3. screengrab of sarah kendzior’s personal blog, october 8, 2013. in addition to concerns about the growth of the employee pool and the incidence of part-time work, we also found class and gender issues discussed in the surveyed publications (dunn, 2014; faunce, 2010; odinshoot, 2014). as just one example, sarah kendzior (2013; see figure 3) notes that being “well-published, in top journals, with strong teaching evaluations and a solid reputation” in her field was not enough to secure a tenure-track job in the us. she identifies corollary class issues pertaining to funding and wealth. in the us, students with money “pay to play,” as she puts it, while others accrue enormous debt and are more likely to drop out of graduate school, ensuring that they will never secure a tenure-track position. in addition, students from scholarship as cultural production in the neoliberal university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 189 a lower socio-economic background often cannot afford to participate in unpaid internships or engage in the free labour that fills a vaguely required line on the cv that may – or may not – pay off later, either in the academy or in professional work (sears & cairns, 2014). furthermore, some of the authors we surveyed, including miya tokumitsu (2014) and karen o’donnell (2015), highlight the gendered dimension of such labour in their discussions of the still-common practice in the academic milieu of dismissing scholarly research driven by emotion and passion. one more time with feeling: the canadian communication association (cca) roundtable and its aftermath drawing from our growing visual and textual archive, in may 2014, harvey, hogan, luka, millette, shepherd, and zeffiro assembled at the cca annual conference to discuss the issues described above in a panel titled “scholarship as cultural production in the corporatized university.” the conversation covered a range of topics. the neoliberal political context of the canadian and uk university systems was articulated through discussion of the cultural clashes at play in research that aligns with increasing pressure from funding agencies and academic institutions to collaborate across academic, artistic, public, and corporate sectors. potential strategies were discussed for gaining recognition (such as publication, funding, academic positions, and tenure) when engaging in non-traditional approaches, research design and outputs. throughout the discussion, the slideshow we created from our research sample played in the background. provoked by these images, audience participation focused on the mental health of academics (see e.g., academica group, 2014) and the lessons we can learn as canadian scholars from the managerial culture dominating the uk higher education landscape. a recent article by rosalind gill (2014) on the failure of academics to reflexively understand the structural conditions underpinning their own working environments and subjectivities, and the ways these conditions mirror those of cultural and creative workers, became the centerpiece of the conversation. participants noted that even the most banal parts of academic work, such as the endless tide of emails and the impact of a mobile working mode (e.g., the ubiquity of portable computers, smart phones and requirements for rapid responses to 24-hour-a-day emails and texts) on individual well-being, can be linked to the transformation of the university over the last 30 years. resembling workers in other creative fields marked by increasing neoliberal values and corporate management techniques (garnham, 1995; hesmondhalgh & baker, 2008; huws, 2003), academics increasingly experience this always-on ‘crunch time,’ as well as pressure to engage in reputation management and self-promotion on personal social networks. gill describes this shift, which is informed by increasing instrumentalization of mary elizabeth luka, alison harvey, mél hogan, tamara shepherd, andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 190 research, as producing “a new form of ‘academic capitalism’” (2014, p. 12). consequently, although the work academics do is most certainly privileged, we must also address the underbelly of flexible and casualized labour upon which it is built, and the ways in which the increasingly affective dimensions of scholarly work (gregg, 2011) can lead to “self-exploitation” (gill, 2014). the cca roundtable discussion suggested that if we acknowledge the historical roots and structural characteristics of the neoliberal university, we can better understand our labour practices critically, and thus organize collective action in response. participants also pointed out that in addition to the tremendous financial, social, and education capital required to gain entry into the academic realm, being able to provide deliverables requires further cultural capital to access the stakeholders acting as gatekeepers to governmental, community, institutional, and business worlds. one example we offered focused on how involving canada’s public broadcaster in a partnership project depends on the previous professional networks of the academics themselves. a broader example included the carré rouge movement in quebec. the conversation in the room echoed an earlier publication documenting the movement, which described what was at stake as “a struggle over our values as a society and [our current] watershed moment that must be understood as part of a larger resistance to [...] budgets and policies that are decimating social services and public institutions” (wi journal of mobile media, 2012b). in both cases, the question centres on how the contemporary university might address broader public values as well as its own internal needs for economic deliverables. moreover, discussion at both the aoir and cca roundtables, along with our analysis of the articles we reviewed, suggested that the most visible method the university employs to position itself in a demanding economic environment is by using promotional material that draws on tropes of knowledge expansion, enlightened thought, and critical thinking. these tropes obscure the part pervasive demands for deliverables plays in the devaluation of non-economic knowledge outcomes. this approach can be found in the majority of social sciences, arts and humanities phd programs, where degrees are framed as upholding the virtues and liberties of an ideal university (institute for the public life of arts and ideas, 2013). yet, our examination shows that the pressure to produce scholarly research has a double-edged imperative: the commitments to deliverables serve to perpetuate the ongoing neoliberal corporatization of the university just as they offer potential means for resistance to it. our concluding comments suggest a few such pathways for resistance. moving forward: resituating scholarship as cultural production in this article, we have critically reflected on the state of scholarship as cultural production, by analyzing public discussions about the rise in scholarship as cultural production in the neoliberal university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 191 academic precarity, and examining the recent history of scholarly discourse and commentary emphasizing the financial and instrumental nature of academic deliverables. identifying the problems tends to be less complicated, however, than generating concrete solutions. we cannot resolve the tensions we have outlined, but we can propose ways of moving forward as we reflect on our own situations within the corporatized university. we do this from the position of having occupied precarious ‘emerging’ academic roles – as doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, contract and part-time instructors, and more recently for some, as tenure-track professors. as part of a larger constellation of knowledge workers, scholars have a responsibility to question the conditions under which contributions are made to a broader ‘knowledge economy.’ as discussed above, visibility and selfpromotion naturally accompany a corporatized culture, requiring deliverables and impact to stand in for a broader conception of scholarship as cultural production. indeed, knowledge mobilization, as it is often referred to under the auspices of neoliberalism (particularly in canada), is focused on measuring output and strategizing visibility. in the process, knowledge becomes converted from a social relationship into a deliverable; from a means into an end in itself. the old adage ‘publish or perish’ might thus be updated to ‘public and publish, or perish.’ tracing the decades-long resonances of economic privatization, garry potter (2015) describes the neoliberal university in canada and its management strategies, especially the casualization of its teaching labour force, as the “walmartization” of higher education, a process also at play in the american, uk, and irish higher education sectors. the traditional unions and faculty associations that operate in canada play an important role in resisting such ongoing instrumentalization of the workforce. yet, the voluntary unionization of higher education in the uk has little to no organizing power against changing workplace norms such as those ushered in by the research excellence framework (the uk’s national, standardized system for assessing scholarship across institutions; see http://www.ref.ac.uk/). more informally, conversations about the historical segregation of full-time stable labour from precarious adjunct and contract work in unionized and non-unionized environments alike erupted over the cca’s mailing list during the summer of 2014. reflecting on what tenured professors could do to address academic precarity in their own institutions resulted in tangible commitments during the labour conflicts of 2015 at york university and the university of toronto, to make videos, walk the picket lines and otherwise articulate support for part-time and contract academics. in our research group, organizing for more inclusive and equitable working conditions is at the core of our training as feminist scholars, activists, artists, entrepreneurs and policy makers. our positioning entails investment in scholarship and research within the university, and in cultural and political initiatives and programs outside of it, including attempts to secure stable employment, tenure, promotion, and to maintain one’s research profile. it is mary elizabeth luka, alison harvey, mél hogan, tamara shepherd, andrea zeffiro studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 192 in straddling these spaces that academics may come to see the university as a site of cultural production that continues to be contested and can be reshaped. according to the articles we surveyed, for a contingent labour force, energies are often expended in amassing short-term teaching contracts to meet a living wage, fulfilling those contracts and anticipating future options. the roundtables we conducted highlighted how, outside of teaching commitments and funded peer-reviewed publications, one is expected to continue with unpaid scholarly output should one hope to maintain a competitive edge in the academic job market (e.g., community engagement, activist work, the production of unfunded research for peer-reviewed publications and conferences, and the establishment of a public persona during unpaid periods of time). in coming to terms with the state of the corporatized university, however, we also recognize the significance of engaging in what we were trained to do. alternate routes can be carved out within and around the university to rethink where and how energies (i.e., labour) are invested. our research suggests that by engaging in a sustained interrogation of the conditions under which we are expected to do academic labour across the corporatized university, we are also involved in critical knowledge production as individuals and as a cohort, in official and unofficial spaces. of course, simply thinking about it is not enough, no matter how many are collectively involved in that thinking. we need more of the critical considerations analyzed in this article to find their way into administrative leadership perspectives, including those of university boards of governors, presidents, deans and faculty chairs. we also need to continue to mobilize dialogue into strategic action through involvements in protests, academic governance, collaborative and creative work, and mentorship, regardless of whether these activities are paid. it is also necessary to continue to have public dialogues – including at conferences and within collaborative pieces such as this – so that we may iteratively re-engage with long-standing and emerging issues, especially as we navigate individual trajectories within, alongside, and outside of academia. this too takes time, and one’s ability to speak candidly and engage in public action is supported by a certain level of professional stability and sustenance. for these reasons, we find strength in collaboration. it is from within such formal and informal collectivities that we see directions for transitioning private conversations and individual experiences into public dialogue, research and action. acknowledgements luka thanks the canadian social sciences and humanities research council for funding support through the vanier scholarship and banting fellowship during the research and writing of this article. the authors thank the article writers referenced, roundtable attendees and others for their frank scholarship as cultural production in the neoliberal university studies in social justice, volume 9, issue 2, 176-196, 2015 193 assessments, and for permission to use the materials featured, as well as the reviewers 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(2015). suture and scars: evidencing the struggles of academic feminism. in k. silva & k. mendes (eds.), feminist erasures: challenging backlash culture (pp. 36-53). new york: palgrave macmillan. correspondence address: peter nikolaus funke, department of government and international affairs, university of south florida, 4202 east fowler avenue, soc 107, tampa, fl, 33620, usa. email: pnfunke@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 1, 27-44, 2014 building rhizomatic social movements? movement-building relays during the current epoch of contention1 peter nikolaus funke university of south florida, usa abstract this article investigates the movement building dynamics of contemporary social movement milieus (such as particular protests, social forums or occupations). it develops the concept of the “relay” to introduce four ideal-type movement building relays understood as distinct movement milieus: clustering relay, networking relay, coalitioning relay, and organizing relay. each ideal-type captures different points on a continuum of increasing movement building and thus for generating commonalities, shared understandings and identities, mobilizations and strategies. focusing on what i call the current “rhizomatic movement epoch,” which ranges from roughly the zapatistas to the recent occupy-type protests, the relay framework can provide a larger conceptual umbrella or schemata for movement-to-movement transmissions. moreover, focussing on “the situated” element of movements, the relay seeks to highlight the milieu of cooperation attempts, the physical, social and psychological space, the political-economic and socio-cultural setting, in which actors and groups interact. it focuses on those elements that are between the outside of the broader political economy and political opportunity structures (which arguably pre-structure the particular relay) and the “inside” of intra-group or movement behaviour (which in turn feeds back on the particular relay dynamics). while drawing on selected empirical examples from protests, social forums and other networking attempts, this article has a conceptual focus, exploring possibilities by adoption of such a relay lens to further our understanding of the achievements and challenges of current movement building dynamics and temporalities of social movements, the current movement milieu and social movement theory more generally. as such, my hope is to raise questions and open further research avenues of interest to social movement organizers and scholars. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 28 peter nikolaus funke introduction examining the lack of viable opposition to the bonapartist coup in france on 2 december 1851, karl marx (1978) argued that it was the lack of connections, “manifold relations” and absence of “political organization” (p. 124) that prevented the smallholding peasantry in 19th century france to organize and mobilize as a class. contrary to the lassallean view of the inherent backwardness of the peasantry, marx’s argument in the eighteenth brumaire of louis bonaparte did not in fact dismiss the revolutionary capacity of the smallholding peasants but emphasized their lack of linkages and cooperation to realize it. as marx (1856) stipulates in a letter to engels, it was the isolation of the smallholding peasants which prevented them from representing and forging connections with towns and “possibilities of backing the proletarian revolution.” manifold relations and political organizations are an arguably timeless concern for resilient movement building. as tilly and wood (2013) argue, (effective) activists and organizers for social change have always sought to generate sustained and organized efforts at collective claim making, organizing meetings, rallies and demonstrations, creating associations, coalitions and movements to further their cause. from workers’, peasants’ and civil rights’ movements to today’s “arab spring,” broad mobilizations for emancipation thus require efforts at generating cooperation and linkages among activists and groups. the arguably lasting and essential problematique of generating linkages and cooperation for sustained and resilient movement building describes a core concern for scholars and movement organizers. this “cooperation requirement” might have become even more urgent and complex in today’s globalized world, where neoliberal capitalism is leading to more isolation, atomization and an apparent splintering of the working class (lash & urry, 1987; sites, 2007; wacquant, 2010; wolfson 2014), which is no longer confined to national borders (if it ever was) and composed “of more socially heterogeneous groups (including peasants, workers, indigenous people, middle-classes, scientists, etc.)” (rucht, forthcoming). this article investigates cooperation, linkages, and the movement-building dynamics of this “multitude” (hardt & negri, 2004). building on the work of scholars such as fox (2004), katsiaficas (2010), mcadam (1995), meyer and whittier (1994), bandy and smith (2004), and tarrow (2011), who have investigated collaborations and connections, the following begins to develop the concept of the movement-building relay to gain analytic purchase on the workings and dynamics of linkages and cooperation of groups and activists. starting from ohlemacher’s (1996) conception of a relay as “protest-proliferating contexts of networks [which] in the process of protest mobilization act as the fertile ground where seeds of protest can germinate and then [function] as a catalyst for mobilization efforts to flourish beyond the networks” (p. 201), the article introduces four idealtypical conceptions of movement-building relays: clustering relay, networking studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 building rhizomatic social movements? 29 relay, coalitioning relay, and organizing relay. heuristically, each ideal-type captures different points on a continuum of increasing movement building and thus describes higher stages of commonalities, shared understandings and identities, mobilizations and strategies. while, clustering relays describe the lowest degree of convergence, shared identity and struggles, organizing relays conceptually characterize the highest level of confluence and shared strategy, political values, and identities. while this article has a conceptual rather than an empirical focus, it provides stylized illustrations of the workings of such a relay lens from the ongoing arch of movement politics, protests and mobilizations. as i argue elsewhere in more detail (funke, 2015), movement politics from at least the zapatista uprising in chiapas in the 1980s to the mass demonstrations against neoliberal globalization and war around the turn of the century to the most recent occupy-type protests and encampments can be understood as constituting a distinct and integrated arch of mobilizations—what mcadam & sewell have called “epochs of contention” (2001). contrary to scholars who stress the differences between these protest cycles of, for example, the global justice movement or occupy wall street, i hold that while we can understand the zapatistas or the more recent occupy-type protests as distinct protest cycles, they are nevertheless phenomena within or rather cycles that make up an integrated and identifiable movement epoch. the commonality of, for example the zapatista or occupy wall street, lies in their shared metalogic of movement politics. this logic informs the politics of each particular protest cycle—albeit in variegated and contextual ways—and constitutes the distinct and current epoch of contention. drawing on deleuze and guattari’s (1980) concept of the rhizome, i argue that the current and ongoing epoch of contention ranging from at least the zapatistas to the recent occupy-type protests, is informed by a shared “rhizomatic logic.” deleuze and guattari develop the concept of the rhizome as an image of thought to describe an alternative way of conceptualizing the world. unlike a tree structure, with only one path from one particular point to any other point, rhizomes represent non-hierarchical structures where any point can connect to any other point, generating links that can stretch, unevenly and asymmetrically, across spaces and times, scales, issues or strategies. as such, rhizomatic structures have “multiple entranceways and exits” (deleuze & guattari, 1980, p. 21). unlike a tree structure, with its “root node” or starting point and end-points or “leaf nodes,” rhizomatic structures can be entered and exited from any point. analogously, the currently dominant rhizomatic movement logic thrives on multiplicity and thus lacks a dominant core, center or axis. it enables the multi-connectivity and heterogeneity of current protest and mobilizing formations which lack a central actor, issue, strategy or ideology beyond opposition to neoliberalism and demands for “real” democracy. this rhizomatic logic is able to accommodate the considerable diversity and the multiplicity of struggles and possible futures, bringing about amorphous sets of associated and loosely linked organizations, groups and movements including anti-war, labour, studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 30 peter nikolaus funke environmental, feminist, peasant, indigenous and student groups from the political left that oppose corporate globalization and neoliberal capitalism, imperialism and war (conway, 2013). on the basis of this shared rhizomatic movement logic, i suggest that the current “rhizomatic epoch of contention” is distinct from prior epochs of contention. diverging from the so-called “old” movements of labour unions or political parties, which converged around the central class struggle of bourgeoisie and proletariat and different from the de-centering of that core struggle by the “new movement wave” of identity politics, civil rights, gender or environmental concerns,2 the dominant rhizomatic movement logic, on the other hand, seeks to bring together core characteristics of both the old and new movement left. current protests and mobilizations largely situate their resistance in the old movements’ concerns with capitalist exploitation dynamics while accepting and embracing the heterogeneity of actors and struggles, internal networking logics and mobilization strategies characteristic of the new movements. while autonomy and diversity are defining elements of the rhizomatic epoch of mobilizations, the multitude’s congregating and networking at demonstrations, forums or occupy-type protests, however, suggest patterns of interactions and mechanisms for collaboration. to gain analytic purchase on these linkage and cooperation dynamics, this article develops the conceptual framework of the movement-building relay, briefly illustrating its dynamics and challenges with references from the ongoing rhizomatic epoch of contention. linkages and cooperation scholars have investigated various dynamics of linkages among activists and forms of cooperation and transmissions between groups and movements. drawing on herbert marcuse, george katsiaficas (1989), for example, argues that mobilizations come about through what he calls the “eros effect.” the concept of the eros effect refers to “the transcendental qualities of social movements, to what occurs in moments of suddenly popular social upheavals, which dramatically transforms established orders” (p. 1). critically distinguished from earlier social movement theories such as crowd behaviour (le bon, 1895/1960), convergence theory (cantril, 1941) or emergent norm theory (turner & killian, 1987), katsiaficas’ (1989) concept of the eros effect seeks to “affirm the emotional content of social movements” (p. 3), referring to “the capacity of ordinary people, acting together, to profoundly change the basic facts of social life . . . in moments of the eros effect, love ties exist between people that are some of the most exhilarating feelings imaginable [revealing] the aspirations and visions of the movement in their lived meaning” (2010, p. 242). the pioneering work of katsiaficas has been furthered through the literature on passion and social movements (e.g. goodwin, japser, & poletta, 2001). studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 building rhizomatic social movements? 31 another prominent research focus has been on movement-to-movement transmissions, such as so-called “movement spillover” (meyer & whittier, 1994), “movement spillout” (hadden & tarrow, 2007), as well as the relationship between initiator movements and spin-off movements (mcadam, 1995). meyer and whittier conceptualize social movement spillover as explaining the ways that “ideas, tactics, style, participants and organizations of one movement often spill over its boundaries to affect other social movements” (1994, p. 290), whereas the notion of spin-off differentiates between two groups of movements. the first “initiator movement” sets off a particular protest cycle and inspires “spin-off” movements (mcadam, 1995). while changes in the political opportunity structures are identified as important explanatory factors (tarrow, 2011), others focus on frame alignments, where particular constructions of meanings, issues, etc. become linked (snow, rochford, wordern, & benford, 1986). in addition to movement spillover, hadden and tarrow have suggested that “social movement spillout” can be identified as a distinct dynamic. movement spillout describes “the hollowingout of a social movement when its activists shift their activities to a cognate, but differently structured movement” (2007, p. 360, italics in original). based on these insights, this article develops the conceptual framework of the movement-building relay to provide a broader analytic or heuristic rubric to structure and conceive of movement emergence and development as the result of group, network or movement linkages and cooperation.3 the relay framework, i want to suggest, can provide a conceptual umbrella or larger schemata for the above-outlined perspectives on movementto-movement transmissions. while social movement research has often “resulted in a highly static view of collective action that privileges structures over process and single movements over cycles of protest” (mcadam, 1995, p. 218), the relay framework provides a more sequential, connected or capacious perspective, emphasizing the linkage and cooperation dynamics of multiple groups or networks. rather than regarding the emergence or development of a particular social movement as a discrete event, the relay framework conceptualizes movement-building as the result of structured processes embedded in particular epochs of mobilizations and informed by distinct “mobilizing milieus” (such as particular protests, social forums or occupations, for example). as such, the relay framework also promises to be of analytic value when theorizing the temporality of social movements. movement-building relays generally speaking, a relay is an electrical switch that opens a higher-voltage circuit with a lower-voltage signal. since relays control higher-voltage circuits with a lower-input signal, they can be regarded as a form of amplifier. with respect to radios, relays are used as a device that receives a signal from low-power or distant transmitter and retransmits it in order to increase the coverage area. put differently, in the “radio-world,” relays are devices that studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 32 peter nikolaus funke receive signals from lower-powered transmitters or from transmitters that are further away and pass the signal on in order to increase the area that the signal can travel. correspondingly, group and movement linkages and cooperation can be conceptualized as emerging through dynamics echoing relay processes. activists, groups or networks, as well as particular protests, forums or occupations, can be thought of as operating as a sort of catalyst or amplifier for generating group connections, linkages or cooperation that could spread across space and time. thus, relay dynamics can generate new networks and movements or “charge” pre-existing contacts in new ways and “spread the mobilization of networks outside themselves” (ohlemacher, 1996, p. 201). furthermore, the concept of the movement-building relay shifts the analytic focus towards investigating the social movement environment or milieu. generally speaking, the emphasis of much research has been on either the “outside” of movements, such as the political opportunity structures or on the “inside,” including (often dyadic) interactions of groups and activists. leaning on staggenborg’s (1998) conception of the “social movement community,” which leads her to argue that “the culture of community of a protest cycle, rather than political opportunity, attracts many participants and provides organizational and tactical opportunities for new movements” (p. 180), the relay concept brings into focus the protest or movement-building milieu. taking the latin/french root of milieu as the “middle place,” such a relay lens thus investigates the connecting area, the (infra)structure within which cooperation, such as protests, forums, occupations or longer-term convergence attempts including social or workers’ centers’ activities, can occur. the relay thus seeks to highlight the milieu of cooperation attempts, the physical, social and psychological space, the political-economic and socio-cultural setting, in which actors and groups interact. it focuses on those elements that are between the outside of the broader political economy and political opportunity structures (which arguably pre-structure the particular relay) and the “inside” of intra-group or -movement behaviour (which in turn feeds back on the particular relay dynamics). to develop this relay framework for movement-building dynamics and dovetailing with recent work by jeffrey juris and his co-authors who have started to investigate ways of “thinking about movement building as an outcome of gatherings such as forums” (juris et al., 2013, p. 3; italics in original), i focus here on what scholars have called “the situated” element of movements. the situated is a central space for generating linkages and cooperation. in addition to “the virtual” (electronic mailing lists, websites, etc.) and “the textual” (flyers, newsletters, etc.), the situated element of movements refers “to spaces and places of physical co-presence such as protests sites, encounters . . . social forums . . . and festivals all of which involve considerable ‘facework’—close interaction, trust building etc.” (chesters & welsh, 2011, p. 121). the situated as relay can thus be analyzed as receiving a host of weaker signals, bundling them and transmitting them across time and space. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 building rhizomatic social movements? 33 moreover, “the situated” idea itself is being conveyed across space and time, taken up in other locations to then be enacted in context and locationspecific ways. for example, various zapatista-inspired initiatives have been organized in places such as los angeles, adapting and altering zapatismo tenets, reflecting the location and context specificity of los angeles (zugman, 2008). similarly the indymedia movement has spread globally (wolfson, 2014). similarly, the social forum idea “traveled” the globe. since the first world social forum in porto alegre, brazil in 2001, countless regional, national or local social forums have been organized in ways that are reflective of the particular location and its dynamics. as janet conway writes, wherever the world event is organized, it enacts its own culturally-specific, geographically rooted social movement processes. . . . every edition of the world social forum is “placed” but transnational. the world-wide process is made up of myriad place-based processes, indisputably localized but both taken as a whole and in many of its constitutive parts, characterized by an expanding globality. (2005)4 most recently, the occupy wall street idea traveled from zuccotti park in new york city to over 95 cities across 82 countries, ranging from sydney to frankfurt, from los angeles to hong kong, rome, mexico city and tokyo, (thompson, 2011) taking on location and context-specific characteristics while retaining occupy-type similarities or rather wittgensteinian “family resemblances” (occupy wall street activists, 2011–2012). while this article centers on the situated element, there is no reason to a priori exclude the virtual or textual from the relay lens. similarly, a more comprehensive analysis of the relay concept would of course also need to take the broader political economy as well as the political opportunity structures and intraand inter-movement dynamics into account. for the purposes of this article, however, i am sidestepping these vital dimensions, which will be integrated in a subsequent article. the major aim in the following is to begin suggesting a particular way of conceptually thinking about and developing ideal-typical categorizations of diverse movement milieus as relays for distinct cooperation outcomes and thus broader movement-building dynamics. akin to relays in the field of electrical engineering, we can further distinguish between particular types of movement-building relays which enable distinct forms of cooperation. bandy and smith’s (2004) edited volume provides a fruitful starting point for thinking about forms of cooperation and their enabling dynamics. the book investigates a range of transnational alliances and how they come about, examining “organizational mechanisms designed to encourage the formation of transnational solidarity” (p. 3). bandy and smith (2004) start off from jonathan fox’s distinction between three forms of transnational cooperation: networks, coalitions, and movements (p. 476).5 without claiming a necessary or wanted progression from one form of cooperation to the next, bandy and smith (2004) stipulate that “while networks have the lowest levels of formal organizational ties and integration, movements incorporate the most formal transnational structures. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 34 peter nikolaus funke these greater levels of organizational integration signal higher levels of communication and action, allowing for possibilities for consensus building among participants in a movement’s ideology and culture” (p. 3). as such, they suggest that networks describe generally informal ties and the dissemination of ideas follows unorganized or merely minimally structured paths. coalitions describe cooperation patterns that tend to display the beginnings of more formal structures and routinized communication and resource flows. finally, movements for bandy and smith (2004) are comprised of even more formally organized “transnational social movement organizations” (p. 4) which articulate decision-making procedures. the relay concept intervenes or seeks to further this line of research. it provides a framework which emphasizes or rather elaborates on the connecting links between a particular milieu, environment or (infra)structure as well as its respective dynamics and the realization (or not) of cooperation outcomes. based on these insights, with movement building relays as the connective tissue, the environment or (infra)structure within which various forms of cooperation (such as networks, coalitions, movement organizations) are generated can heuristically be separated into four ideal-types: clustering relays describe the lowest degree of convergence(s), prioritizing the protection of the participants’ autonomy while seeking to loosely connect them; networking relays denote more pro-active milieus, encompassing dynamics that advance the institutionalization of more routinized linkages, shared actions and campaigns; coalitioning relays are based on longerterm strategy and commitment to generating shared ideologies, values and political identities; organizing relays represent milieus with the highest level of confluence, in which compromises and shared identity production become core concerns. analytically linking these relay conceptions to cooperation outcomes would render the following heuristic schematic: clustering relays can generate networks networking relays can generate coalitions coalitioning relays can generate organizations organizing relays can generate antisystemic movements6 this simplified representation of relay dynamics and cooperation outcomes can be visualized as being different points on a continuum, describing increasing levels of shared identity and synergy creation and thus tighter movement-building dynamics. true to the definition of a continuum, which describes a succession or an aggregate, the four ideal-types are closely linked, overlapping and bleeding into each other and thus neatly distinguishable from each other merely for heuristic and analytic reasons. the following outlines the four suggested relay types and references stylized illustrations from the current rhizomatic epoch of mobilizations. clustering relays the dominant logic of clustering relays as movement-environments or studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 building rhizomatic social movements? 35 -milieus for cooperation and linkages lies in safeguarding the autonomy of participants and groups and thus embracing diversity of tactics and struggles while still assembling them under a loosely defined umbrella. while participating groups and activists rarely share the same ideology, political culture or material interests (fox, 2009), clustering relays enable the building of contacts and awareness of others’ struggles and strategies and provide the environment to engage in joint actions with other groups and activists without foregoing one’s own autonomy or having to compromise much of one’s particular group identity. clustering relays can enable loose coordination for short-term campaigns such as protest mobilizations, allowing groups and activists to agree on demonstrations and protest sites while accepting a host of different tactics and demands, thus acknowledging an equality and plurality of fronts of struggles. the outcomes are often more re-active and short-term activities such as “protest swarming,” congregating on a given target and then quickly detaching again. the series of protests against neoliberal globalization such as the 1999 seattle world trade organization protests can be conceptualized as having functioned as clustering relay, generating massive protests of a diversity of actors and groups, engaging in their autonomous yet linked protest forms. the 2001 genoa mobilizations against the group of eight summit coordinated by the genoa social forum (gsf) are illustrative of the functioning of a clustering relay milieu. the 300,000-strong genoa protest was organized on the basis of the gsf framing document, which required all organizations and groups to accept and safeguard the diversity and autonomy of all participating groups. to accommodate this demand for autonomy, the roughly 700 participating groups ultimately agreed to demonstrate separately, albeit under one umbrella, against the group of eight summit (neale, 2002). the imperative of accepting the groups’ autonomy and the unwillingness or inability to give up much of one’s particular group identity and strategic outlook as well as the rejection of consolidating action and strategies towards any concrete overarching transformational project define clustering relay milieus. as the genoa protests showed, the gsf as clustering relay enabled a multiplicity of groups and their various protest tactics to come together in a particular demonstration and to do so without subordinating their own tactics and demands to any other group or collective compromise. however, this example of a clustering relay also illustrates shortcomings or challenges for resilient movement building. prioritizing autonomy and diversity does not generate much more commonality beyond accepting differences. accepting differences might function well as strategy for protests such as in genoa, seattle or elsewhere, where the target is given. it is, however, insufficient, i would argue, for more active movement building attempts, where targets are not given and participants seek to move beyond mere protest swarming activities and towards more pro-active movementbuilding work. while clustering relays do not necessarily move beyond this stage of cooperation and linkages among the participants, they can generate networks, studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 36 peter nikolaus funke the lowest form of cooperation indentified by fox and bandy & smith. the series of protests against neoliberal globalization at the turn of the century could be conceptualized as having catalyzed the so-called anti-globalization movement or more precisely the alter-globalization networks. the alterglobalization networks propelled the world social forum and the global social forum process, an example of a networking relay. networking relays networks can evolve into more regular and pro-active phenomena through movement-milieus, which i call networking relays. networking relays denote processes, which maneuver activists and groups past the dynamics of clustering relays. beyond fostering contacts and sharing information and experiences as well as joint actions based on loose and short-term coordination, networking relays generate dynamics that include the beginnings of processes that start advancing loosely institutionalized and longer-term linkages, joint actions and campaigns. while clustering relays function well to generate “swarming activities” such as protests, through networking relays cooperation is increasingly based on mutually-agreed-upon minimal goals beyond, for example, the identification of demonstration targets such as in seattle or genoa. networking relays thus describe tendencies towards less re-active actions, often relying on constructing more intentional and pro-active spaces or strategies. while networking relays are characterized by a loose agreement on minimal goals and broad strategies, they do not necessarily rely on shared ideologies and political cultures or identities, still embracing a host of diverse actors, strategies, and fronts of struggle. the world social forum and its global process provide insightful illustrations of networking relay dynamics. taking place in the aftermath of the 1999 anti-world trade organization protest in seattle, the first world social forum (wsf) in 2001 started out with the hope of moving beyond more re-active demonstrations and mass protests and, specifically, to move beyond “the failure of seattle [which] was the inability to come up with a common agenda, a global alliance at the world level to fight against globalization (klein, 2001),” as christophe aquiton of attac who helped to organize the first wsf put it. since 2001, these unprecedented gatherings of social movements, networks, unions, non-governmental and other civil society organizations from the political left have functioned as an incubator of, for instance, the massive globally coordinated anti-iraq war protests on 15 february 2003, the abovereferenced anti-g8 demonstrations in genoa, the european marches against poverty, and, to a lesser degree, the electoral victories of social movementpowered governments in latin america. social forums have fuelled the antiausterity mobilizations in europe, served as an important context for the revolution in tunisia in 2010/11 and as nurturing and inspirational ground for the global justice networks writ large and the more recent occupy-type protests. the wsf’s networking relay milieu is based on the minimal goals enshrined studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 building rhizomatic social movements? 37 in the charter of principles of the world social forum.7 the charter stipulates a loosely enough defined common ground (such as opposition to neoliberalism and armed struggle as well as for participatory democracy) which is still able to assemble a multitude of actors with very variegated ideological outlooks, tactics and strategies. however, the social forum linkages are constructed with a view towards more structured or institutionalized and longer-term horizons. networking relay dynamics can thus enable more sustainable convergences and cooperation among groups and activists beyond a “onetime” demonstration or campaign. the organization of the wsf itself provides an indication of how increased commonality is attempted. while this process has changed over time, since 2005 the program of the wsf has been entirely made up of self-organized and -governed activities proposed by the participating groups and movements themselves. on the basis of the proposed activities, the wsf organizing committee creates thematic terrains8 which are meant to be “the favoured context for expressing the plurality and diversity that are one of the main features and major strengths of the movement of resistance to neoliberal globalization. nonetheless, any thematic fragmentation of discussions that may hamper or prevent achieving the above aims of convergence and synthesis is to be avoided.”9 linking the networking relay dynamics to cooperation outcomes identified by fox and bandy and smith (i.e. networks, coalitions, movement organizations), social forums have fostered, re-charged and furthered coalition building. while groups and networks such as the world march of women or the peasant network via campesina have used the world social forum to further their respective groups’ convergence(s) since the beginnings of the social forum process (conway, 2013), it was, for example, the latest wsf in tunis in 2013 which has since enabled the transnational network for communication rights and free media to consolidate their participants, groups, and networks and to build or re-charge coalitions, drawing in activists from the maghreb region such as reporters sans frontières (tunisia), radio regueb (tunisia) as well as media activists and journalists from morocco, algeria and egypt, among others (plöger, 2013).10 while social forums have been incubators and performed important networking relay functions, they have been less able than many had hoped to serve as vehicle for sustained organizing and durable movement building. as one activist put it, “a mobilization for a mass movement, which many have dreamed of, has not really happened” (cited in bahn & haberland, 2003, p. 43). the emphasis on autonomy and diversity of actors, strategies and fronts of struggle still dominates networking relay milieus such as social forums. networking relays display a wariness of institutions and organizational mechanisms that are geared towards working through differences and coming up with new synthesis, for which non-consensus-based decision-making, leadership development and a certain degree of hierarchy are necessary. to put it differently, networking relay milieus such as social forums and also occupy-type protests privilege networking over movement building. subsequently, the result tends to lead to transient cooperation and coalition studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 38 peter nikolaus funke linkages rather than resilient and longer-term organizing. the occupy-type mobilizations are indicative of these dynamics. i would argue that, despite having mobilized very quickly and accelerated in 2011, they have not been able to organize in a sustainable and resilient way in spite of the ongoing presence of groups working under the label “occupy” such as occupy sandy, occupy sec or the related european blockuyp actions against the european central bank in frankfurt, germany. the reasons, as i shall suggest below, also have to be seen in the particular rhizomatic logic undergirding the current epoch of contention or mobilizations and thus movement or activist politics today, which make “higher levels” of movement-building challenging. coalitioning relays conceptually speaking, networking relay milieus and resulting coalitions can propel cooperation towards the next stage of movement building, by functioning as coalitioning relays. coalitioning relays encompass the characteristics of the former two phases but further deepen and institutionalize cooperation, generating increasing synergies and commonality. coalitioning relays are arguably based on even more long-term strategy and tend to rely on more commitment to developing shared ideologies, values and political identities for movement building. coalitioning relays thus refer to movementbuilding processes that further the compression and coagulation of group or movement intersections, seeking more resilient formations and more unitary fronts. they encompass more explicit visions of aspired movement outcomes, more direct and focused interactions, and a more articulated and sharpened common identity. coalitioning relays provide the possibilities for sustained organizing of constituencies and warrant agreeing upon decisionmaking procedures and leadership development aspects. compromises and shared identity production become core concerns within coalitioning relay milieus for which mechanisms have to be devised that approach difference not as absolutes but rather as something to transcend and through which to arrive at a new synthesis (nunes, 2006). this does not necessarily mean that difference and autonomy are sacrificed but it does suggest that they are less dominating concerns. in fox and bandy and smith’s categorization, coalitioning relays can generate (transnational) movement organizations which they describe as “more formal structures to help routinize communications and resource flows as well as to articulate procedures for making decisions that affect the alliance” (bandy & smith, p. 4). with the important exception of the zapatista and more local initiatives such as the media mobilizing project11 (funke & wolfson, 2013) that have been able to generate organizing relay milieus for their distinct and bounded spheres, the broader alter-globalization networks, the social forum process or occupy-type mobilizations have arguably not been able to generate successful organizing relay milieus for movement building despite various attempts. two unsuccessful attempts aimed at more unifying projects with the potential to generate movement organizations came out of the broader wsf studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 building rhizomatic social movements? 39 orbit: the “porto alegre manifesto” in 2005 and the “bamako appeal” a year later. 12 both “appeals” expressed the wish of some to move the wsf away from being merely an “open-space,” or in this article’s framework a networking relay, and more toward being a political actor, proposing potential converging topics and working on shared strategies. within a relay perspective, the attempt was to generate organizing relays and to further movement-building dynamics and organizations. while it is beyond the scope of this article to analyze the host of reasons that help explain the lack of resonance of these initiatives, i suggest, as referenced earlier, that the dominant rhizomatic movement logic is challenging for more concentrated movement building. safeguarding diversity and autonomy, multiplicity of struggles, strategies and possible futures, and preserving horizontalism, which is arguably at the core of the dominant rhizomatic logic, are high hurdles for such initiatives and more long-term movement-building strategies. the latter requires the willingness to transcend the acceptance of “diversity for diversity sake” and to generate more coherent fronts of struggle and movement capacity beyond mere networking. such convergence processes would, however, challenge core tenets of the dominant rhizomatic movement logic and thus would likely sow derision among today’s diverse and autonomous groups and movements. nevertheless, a still on-going attempt to generate coalitioning relay environments that can foster more unitary fronts and further movement coagulation and intersections can be seen in developments within the united states social forum (ussf). ussf organizers emphasize more than other forums the need to move towards “establishing a space with a particular racial and class composition, balance of power, and movement building strategy” (juris, 2008, p. 364). what jeffrey juris calls the creation of “intentional spaces” illustrates for our purposes here potential transitions from networking relay milieus to coalitioning relay environments, as the ussf space is intentionally designed to allow for the construction of spaces that foster movement-building capacities and thus (movement) organizations as cooperation or relay outcomes. with respect to the ussf, this intentionality strategy was also devised to overcome the glaring whiteness and middle class nature of forums and to thus empower the voices from lower-class constituencies and more racially diverse participants. while this might appear as merely accommodating more diversity, the conscious encouragement of more diversity was in fact geared towards generating more wilful connections and thus furthering a more focused movement-building approach. beyond overcoming the middle-class bias, the intended inclusion of lower classes and racially diverse constituencies is also necessary as effective and resilient movement building needs to be grounded in communities and led by those most disaffected by neoliberal capitalism. organizing relays the final stage in this stylized and ideal-type continuum of movementbuilding relays could be thought of as organizing relays, which would describe studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 40 peter nikolaus funke movement milieus and (infra)structures that lead movement organizations (as outcomes of coalitioning relays) to paraphrasing marx’s famous dictum, to begin transforming a movement “in itself” towards a movement “for itself.” organizing relays would thus further increase the dynamics of compressing and converging of actors, strategies, and struggles. compromises and shared identity production become core concerns for which mechanisms of organizing and decision-making are needed to generate sustainable commonalities or agreements and thus movement-building capacity that can lead towards generating antisystemic movements (arrighi, hopkins & wallerstein, 1989). core organizers of the 2007 anti-group of eight protests in heiligendamm (germany) put it succinctly, stating that now needed is not “different political currents engaging in different forms of action—in a spirit of solidarity but without jeopardizing their own identities [but] in the direction of a ‘becoming-other, together.’ this meant collectively devising and carrying out forms of action new to all, actions and alliances that took people beyond their comfort zones towards the practical constitution of new commons, and therefore new common potentials” (move into the light, 2007, p. 4). in sum, organizing relay dynamics arguably transcend core characteristics of the rhizomatic logic. they move away from privileging grassroots democracy and prefigurative politics and a politics of horizontality and decentralization gives way to more structured networks with hierarchical elements and decision-making processes as well as leadership development. moreover, it entails building a shared identity, which ultimately asks participating groups to generate new and shared connections and convergences beyond their particular struggle. concluding remarks this article is a first attempt to provide a framework of how to conceptualize various movement-building milieus. using the metaphor of the relay and conceptualizing it as a continuum, this article sketched four ideal-types: clustering, networking, coalitioning, and organizing relays as related yet heuristically distinct types of movement-building milieus. while this framework is of course a stylized schemata, the relay rubric is nevertheless helpful, i believe, in beginning a process of identifying and examining particular and varying movement-building dynamics and cooperation outcomes by focusing on the milieu, the (infra)structure or environment in which groups and activists engage and seek linkages and cooperation. as a continuum, clustering relays describe processes which allow for the first beginnings of shared movement practices and commonalities, potentially leading to network forms of cooperation. networks could then catalyze networking relays, which can be thought of as beginning to build movement coalitions, condensing and converging around overlapping dimensions or transversal axes and building more intentional processes of generating studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 building rhizomatic social movements? 41 commonalities for strategizing and organizing, employable across a host of situations and particular struggles. put differently, networking relays enable the beginnings of transcending particularisms and generating novel synergies and shared identities, possibly ushering in movement coalitions. coalitioning relays are subsequently geared towards fostering a more pointed front of struggle in order to further developments towards shared and more strongly institutionalized movement organizations. finally, we can conceptualize an organizing relay milieu or (infra)structure which is conducive to enabling developments, which can lead towards the construction of broader and resillient antisystemic movements. this article also suggests that the dominant rhizomatic movement logic impacts cooperation potentials in general and relay milieus in particular. embracing autonomy and the diversity of actors, strategies and fronts of struggles, this logic is well geared to amplifying lower cooperation dynamics such as clusteringand networking-relay milieus. hence, this rhizomatic logic helps explain the surprising “degree to which the global left has not fractured into its historical constituent parts of liberalism, marxism, and anarchism-autonomism” (reitan, 2011, p. 52, italics in original). it has thus arguably allowed for a stunning coming together of groups and movements, having “relayed” and facilitated mobilizations and forged new constellations by linking various groups and movements across space and diverse issue areas (olesen, 2011). while the rhizomatic texture thus arguably allows for unprecedented ties as well as the tempering and managing of the movement epoch’s inherent antinomies, its logic simultaneously limits the degree of congealed and resilient movement building in general and the construction of coalitioning or organizing-relay milieus in particular. integral characteristics of the rhizome foster a rather thin articulation of commonalities and convergences, which results in a politics that is often unable to move beyond mere symbolic acts, re-active resistances and loose networking rather than towards a politics of organizing for concrete and long-term movement building. the rhizomatic logic is thus a double-edged sword, operating well as clustering and networking relay, generating awareness, contacts, and linkages of the various struggles without encroaching on the independence of groups and movements. yet, this rhizomatic logic that promotes and protects diversity is at the same time less able to function as a coalitioning or organizing relay for movement building that can credibly aim at meaningful changes in social structures. the latter, i suggest, would arguably require more transversal mechanisms and structures that could generate new syntheses across movements and groups, but this is simultaneously a project that would likely provoke resistance from among today’s diverse and autonomous groups. while this article was only able to briefly sketch empirical illustrations of the relay continuum, a next step would be to investigate further movementbuilding examples to ascertain the usefulness of such a relay lens. more empirical cases would also allow us to make more concrete the conceptual differences between the four ideal relay types outlined above. moreover, studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 42 peter nikolaus funke expanding the empirical data would arguably lead to an expansion or increased differentiation of the relay continuum. an additional research avenue dovetailing with the arguments in this article would be to investigate the relationship between relays and the conceptions of protest cycles, which tarrow defines as a “phase of heightened conflict across the social system with intensified interactions between challengers and authorities, which can end in reform, repression and sometimes revolution” (tarrow, 2011, p. 153). in what way, for instance, might networking and coalitioning relays be seen as attempts to break the cyclical rise and fall of protest and social movement activities? how successful (or not) are they, respectively? finally, i hope this article also might be of interest to activists and organizers in more directly thinking about or rather having the beginnings of some categories with which to conceptualize their own work and to further successful and resilient movement-building strategies. notes 1 i would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for invaluable feedback and suggestions as well as tanya basok, nicole noel and the copyeditor for their editorial guidance and very helpful substantive advice. 2 while recognizing the problematic nature of periodization (calhoun, 1993) since they neglect continuities and hide dissonance within specific moments, thinking in periods as jameson suggests (1990) allows us to see patterns where we would otherwise merely see a cacophony of phenomena. 3 for a related an account stressing organizational density as vital element of protest cycles see minkoff (1997). 4 see also: janet conway (2008). 5 the focus of their edited volume is on transnational cooperation but these three forms are not a priori limited to the transnational sphere. 6 on antisystemic movements see arrighi, hopkins, wallerstein (1989). 7 http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/main.php?id_menu=4&cd_language=2 8 such as “asserting and defending the common properties of land and the peoples”, “art and creation: building the cultures of resistance of the peoples”, “sovereign economies by and for the peoples: against neoliberal capitalism”, “social fights and democratic alternatives: against neoliberal domination”, “peace and demilitarization: fight against war, free commerce and the debt”. 9 http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/dinamic.php?pagina=eixo_transv_2005_ing 10 on media and social movement networks see wolfson (2013 & 2014). 11 the media mobilizing project (mmp) is a network of organizations across the philadelphia metro-region. established in 2005, mmp aims to “build a movement to end poverty led by the poor and working class, united across color lines.” mmp engages in long-term movement building, seeking to foster tight connections between its constitutive groups, which range from high school students, to janitors, cab drivers, nurses and security guards (see: http://www.mediamobilizing.org/). 12 for a discussion of the appeal of bamako see for instance: sen & kumar (2007). references arrighi, g., hopkins, t. k. & wallerstein, i. 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(2013) social movements, 1768-2001 (3rd ed.). boulder, co: paradigm publisher. turner, r. h., & killian, l. m. (1987). collective behavior. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. wacquant, l. (2010). crafting the neoliberal state: workfare, prisonfare and social insecurity, sociological forum, 25(2), 197-220. wolfson, t. (2013). democracy or autonomy? indymedia and the contradictions of global social movement networks, global networks 13, 3, 2013, pp. 410-424. wolfson, t. (2014). digital rebellion: the birth of the cyber left. champaign: university of illinois press. zugman, k. (2008, september). the “other campaign:” the ezln and new forms of politics in mexico and the united states, new political science: a journal of politics and culture, 20(3), 347-367. correspondence address: dejan guzina, department of political science, wilfrid laurier university, 75 university ave., w. waterloo, on n2l 3c5, canada tel.: + (1) 519 884 0710 ext.: 2225, email: dguzina@wlu.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 2, 245-263, 2013 local uses of international criminal justice in bosnia-herzegovina: transcending divisions or building parallel worlds? dejan guzina and branka marijan1 wilfrid laurier university, canada abstract transitional justice mechanisms and the international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia (icty) have had only a limited success in overcoming ethnic divisions in bosnia-herzegovina. rather than elaborating upon the role of local political elites in perpetuating ethnic divisions, we examine ordinary peoples’ popular perceptions of war and its aftermath. in our view, the idea that elites have complete control over the broader narratives about the past is misplaced. we argue that transitional justice and peace mechanisms supported by external actors are always interpreted on the ground in context-specific ways, creating different citizens’ experiences, “memories” of the war, and their respective hopes and disappointments in regards to the relationship between peace and justice in bosnia. we suggest that analyses of the post-conflict developments in bosnia-herzegovina must take into account what gives the narratives of exclusion their power, and what are the objective political, social and economic constraints that continue to provide a fertile ground for their widespread support. introduction in their response to the signing of the 1995 dayton peace agreement, which ended the war in bosnia-herzegovina, antonio cassese, the first president of the international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia (icty), and justice richard goldstone, a prosecutor at the icty, noted that: justice is an indispensable ingredient of the process of national reconciliation. it is essential to the restoration of peaceful and normal relations between people studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 246 dejan guzina & branka marijan who have had to live under a reign of terror. it breaks the cycle of violence, hatred and extra-judicial retribution. thus peace and justice go hand-in-hand (icty, 1995). firmly asserting the linked nature of peace and justice, cassese and goldstone outlined many of the hopes of the international community for the icty and for its role in the bosnian peacebuilding process. moreover, the current president of the icty, theodor meron, noted in his annual report that the icty has pioneered a new world order “in which the question is not if but when and where they (perpetrators) will be called to account” (icty, 2012). in contrast to these sentiments, twenty years since the hague tribunal opened its doors (1993), most of the local population in bosnia-herzegovina (hereafter bosnia) seems to be united in its belief that icty did not live up to its high expectations. the aim of this article is to analyse this empirical puzzle of the emerging gap between the international praises of the role of icty and transitional justice (tj) mechanisms in contributing to peace and justice in bosnia and the disappointment and resignation, but also increasing lack of interest, of the bosnian population in the reconciliatory potentials of icty and tj in bringing bosnian communities together. the article demonstrates that, while the icty could rightly be seen as a pioneer of a new normative trend of supranational prosecutions of war crimes and human rights violations, its contribution to the reconciliation and social reconstruction on the ground has been limited. we argue that transitional justice and peace mechanisms supported by external actors are always interpreted on the ground in context-specific ways, creating different citizens’ experiences, “memories” of the war, and their respective hopes and disappointments in regards to the relationship between peace and justice in bosnia. contrary to the expectations of the international actors and scholars arguing in favour of tj mechanisms, analysis of the post-conflict developments in bosnia shows that local actors have yet to come to terms with the historical narrative that would transcend ethnic divisions. in other words, bosnian local communities continue to be segregated both physically and mentally from each other. the disconnect between the internationally supported goals of reconciliation and the “local” acts of contestation and communal citizenship practices is most visible in the popular perceptions of war and its aftermath in two major bosnian cities: sarajevo and banja luka. whereas before the war these cities, together with mostar, represented the multiethnic and multicultural centres of bosnia, after 1995 they emerged as symbols of division and mutually contradictory nation building projects. the different interpretations of the history of the war are cogently captured by a member of one community organization in banja luka: “when it comes to the past, the war, the consequences of the war there exist two parallel worlds, one with the center in sarajevo and the other in banja luka” (personal communication, june 7, 2012). through the evaluation of tj literature, but also drawing on field work and interviews conducted in sarajevo and banja luka in june 2010 and may and june of 2012, this article examines the contested ways in which the views of justice have been shaped by local bosniak and serbian populations since studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 local uses of international criminal justice 247 1995. the interviews were conducted primarily with key informants, namely local bureaucrats working for the international organizations in bosnia, civil society representatives and activists engaged in issues of reconciliation and peacebuilding. this article proceeds as follows: we examine the international approach to peacebuilding within the broader socio-economic context in bosnia. then we turn to the scholarly debates about the contribution of external justice mechanisms, particularly focusing on the icty. finally, we review the overlooked importance of ethnic identity politics in shaping responses to the overall approach of transitional justice. we also turn to specific examples of the ways in which the local population responded to the icty ruling and how it deals with the legacies of war. we then examine issues pertaining to peace and justice from the ground up by focusing on local concerns raised about living with the legacy of the conflict. we argue for a more grounded analysis of transitional justice mechanisms, an analysis that incorporates local contexts and the process of the localization of global norms and goals (acharya, 2004). thus, we argue for a particular focus on the ways in which justice and peace are interpreted, supported, or contested in the local social and political space and emphasize the agency of the local population in appropriating tj mechanisms according to their own specific needs rather than in the interests and goals of international policy makers. a blueprint for dayton bosnia-herzegovina the 1995 dayton peace agreement has been successful in bringing about a cessation of hostilities and violence. at the same time, it has also been criticized for further cementing the divisions in bosnian society by ensuring that the three constituent peoples (bosniaks, croats and serbs) are represented in state institutions and leadership positions according to the rigid rules of ethnic representation. moreover, bosnia emerged as a federation comprised of the bosniak/bosnian croat federation of bosnia and herzegovina and the bosnian serb-led republika srpska (rs). the peace agreement simply legitimized the structures that emerged from the war by incorporating them into the bosnian constitution. the international community has tried to provide a balance between the differing ethnic interests, most visibly through the office of the high representative (ohr). it has also sought to ensure compliance with the icty and stressed the importance of addressing war crimes that were committed during the conflict. the active role of the international community in bosnian politics and indeed in engineering the bosnian state, however, has led some western scholars to argue that as an internationally supported state, bosnia has become an “inverted state” (chandler, 2009, p. 74), or a state that is overly shaped by external agendas rather than by local processes. in his work on bosnia and other post-conflict states, oliver richmond has argued that such a top down approach to peacebuilding has resulted in “virtual peace” studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 248 dejan guzina & branka marijan on the ground (2008, p.440). richmond argues that many of these externally created institutions are disconnected from citizens and from the dynamics on the ground. yet, despite the growing critique, the external approach to peacebuilding is also mirrored in the efforts of the international community to bring about transitional justice to the region, and thus connects peace with justice as the only viable alternative to the current state of affairs of the continuation of war through the means of politics. but to what extent can we expect externally driven processes of peacebuilding to resonate in local contexts? the original intention of external state builders in bosnia was to compensate for the overtly rigid power-sharing arrangements in the political field by creating powerful constitutional and institutional arrangements that would (in principle) allow for the development of civil society and human rights. according to this logic, those interested in politics would enter the political arena with explicit and somewhat contradictory aims of simultaneously building democracy, on the one hand, and defending one’s national interest, on the other. those disinclined to enter politics would have other venues open to them such as joining any of the externally-financed civil society organizations that were supposed to counter-balance the paralyzing effects of various power-sharing arrangements in the respective countries. the hope was that through the active engagement of the international community (ic), some of the ethnic aspects of power-sharing arrangements would eventually be replaced with more integrative institutions along the civil society model allowing the pursuit of tj to be accepted across the ethnic boundaries. this, however, never fully materialized. instead, the political arrangement and institutionalization of power sharing, on one side, and the failures of the reversal of ethnic cleansing on the other, have created a particular post-war demographic reality of the current bosnian state where most of the regions are clearly dominated by one ethnic group over the other. in addition, and often pointed to as one of the reasons for the continuing hold of the nationalist narratives, is the bosnian economic reality whereby the unemployment rate is at 28% with youth unemployment estimated to be twice that rate (world bank, 2012). moreover, according to the latest transparency international report (2012), bosnia is one of the most corrupt states in europe: its annual index of corruption perception ranks bosnia as 72nd out of 176 countries in the world (jukic, 2012). of course, the reality behind these numbers points towards the systematic nature of bosnian corruption; that is the fact that corruption is one of the pillars of the bosnian economic and political system. in summary, the unclear role of the ic, the never-ending political crisis of the bosnian state, its economic and social uncertainties, rising poverty, state-wide corruption, and demographic failures of multiethnic integration, all represent the context within which bosnian narratives co-exist. while we focus here on nationalism and a politics of reconciliation as seen through identity lenses, we fully recognize that identity narratives never exist in a vacuum. rather, they are malleable and change in response to the day-today bosnian economic, social and political realities. it is only within this studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 local uses of international criminal justice 249 broader context that we assess the initial icty goals of individualizing criminal responsibility, legitimizing a historical record and contributing to reconciliation; that is we assess how these goals have been appropriated and transformed into hotly contested, essentialized and ethnicized arguments over what is “ours” and what is “theirs,” who are the victims and who are the perpetrators, and over the very nature of the war itself, whether it was a civil war or an act of aggression and genocide against the bosniak population. transitional justice remedies for bosnia’s symptoms the competing narratives over the war in bosnia revolve around whether republika srpska is a legitimate entity or not. in the eyes of bosniaks, it is not, for they were victims of genocide; in the eyes of the bosnian serbs, republika srpska is a legitimate expression of their need to protect themselves against the potential physical threat of other communities in bosnia. in order to support this claim, the 1992-1995 war in bosnia is being connected to the bosnian serbs’ horrific experiences during wwii. the way in which these competing narratives are posited against each other leaves little room for compromise. more than seventeen years after the signing of the dayton agreement, these narratives still hold sway over both local populations and their respective elites. passionate debates over the question of who is right and whose justice should be served are fully understandable. after all, at the heart of this debate is the question of moral and legal responsibility for the crimes committed in one’s national name. the general premise of tj mechanisms, well summarized by cassese (2004), has been to individualize the guilt and stop perpetuating divisive categories of framing the conflict exclusively in group terms. according to such an understanding, cecile aptel observes, “it is reasonable to assume that criminal justice, including international and hybrid jurisdiction, can contribute to the reconciliatory process in divided societies, as long as significant portions of all communities accept the legitimacy of the accountability mechanisms” (2011, p. 180). in bosnia this is precisely the issue because accountability mechanisms, such as the icty and domestic trials, are increasingly seen as political theatre of the absurd rather than the mechanism that would allow the truth about the war to be discovered and shared by members of different bosnian ethnic groups, ultimately leading to their mutual recognition and reconciliation. thus, bosnian experience with tj seems to go against both international policy makers’ expectations and the scholarly literature’s claims that the need to address past violence is a necessary step in ensuring sustainable peace (leebaw, 2008, p. 96). more recently, lara j. nettelfield (2010) has further elaborated on the significance of tj for postwar states. in her book, courting democracy in bosnia and herzegovina: the hague tribunal’s impact in a postwar state, she focuses exclusively on the role of the icty and hybrid jurisdiction in bosnia. even though she appears to emphasize only the legal elements of tj, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 250 dejan guzina & branka marijan her main conclusion is that the real benefit of the hague process and other forms of tj is their contribution toward “positive democratic development inside bosnia,” and particularly the “creation of new postwar identities based on the rule of law and participation” (nettelfield, 2010, p. 15). drawing upon the work of mark drumbl, she is doubtful that retributive and deterrent goals of domestic justice can be easily replicated in the context of international criminal law. after all, the central tenets of international criminal law are: to uncover the truth about the past atrocities, punish perpetrators and help victims; provide the rule of law, support reconciliation, and serve as deterrent for future crimes (nettelfield, 2010, p. 10). while fully accepting drumbl’s caution about retribution and deterring potentials of international justice, nettelfield argues that the extra-legal rationale for international tribunals still stands. thus, it would seem that nettelfield departs from the general thrust of the tj literature, while still endorsing the tj mechanisms. for her, the broader normative impacts of tj mechanisms are more important than some other goals of international criminal law. that is, the justification for international prosecutions lies in “the messaging value of punishment to affirm respect for law, reinforce a moral consensus, narrate history and educate the public” (drumbl, quoted in nettlefield, 2010, p. 11). from this perspective, nettelfield concludes that “the work of court encouraged political participation by representatives of family associations and civil society groups who might otherwise have lacked legitimacy; it provided them and elites with a language about accountability and, in some cases, a set of tools, namely, law, with which they could lobby for forms of redress” (nettelfield, 2010, pp. 273274). in other words, even though bosnians failed to receive justice, they received democracy (or, at least, they started moving in that direction), and through the work of international and hybrid courts certain forms of civic and political engagement have developed that otherwise might not have been possible. from a policy perspective, this conclusion radically steps away from the conventional understanding of tj and yet still heavily relies on the same assumptions about the possibilities of tj to contribute to reconciliation on the ground. jelena subotic (2009) offers yet another insight about the unintended consequences of tj mechanisms. she argues that tj institutions have become very popular in addressing past abuses in post-conflict societies, while at the same time such states “use these mechanisms to achieve goals quite different from those envisioned by international justice institutions and activists” (2009, p. 6). thus, she recognizes yet another layer of the top-down approach in bringing justice to post-conflict societies. while the mainstream literature evaluates the workings of the international agencies, she believes that between the local populations and external state builders, local elites have the power to filter policies in ways that are clearly not foreseen by the international court of justice or any other international organizations dedicated to bringing justice to these countries. thus, subotic insists that analysts should not only focus on whether or not states comply with a tj framework, but also how and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 local uses of international criminal justice 251 why they may comply. subotic proposes an analytical framework that is based on distinguishing between four major state and societal coalitions: true believers who fully support the normative principles of tj; norm resisters; instrumental adapters; and international norm promoters. her argument is very simple but effective —in situations when norm resisters and instrumental adopters are stronger than true believers, the normative and institutional compliance will take the forms that are unanticipated by the international promoters (subotic, 2009, pp. 6-8). in other words, various coalitions within a post-conflict state will engage in appropriating tj initiatives according to their own respective political objectives. subotic’s contribution to transitional justice literature lies in pointing out some of the unforeseen consequences of tj initiatives. but, there must also be a critical examination of the key justification of transitional justice institutions: they create a historical record of the systematic violence that stands in counter to the denial of the extent and impact of the violence (leebaw, 2008, p.107). the lack of an accepted historical record of the events in bosnia during the conflict is evident from an examination of the speeches of various ethnic leaders, the divided curriculum and the national subject of history, and through discussions on the ground which can often reveal the ethnic group which the story represents. the insight gained from subotic’s research is that far from coming to a single version of events the various elites have used the past to pursue their own political goals. isabelle delpla summarizes the issue when she states that, “judiciary truth established in the hague is far from achieving public acknowledgment in bosnia” (2007, p. 216). rather than creating a historical record about the conflict what has resulted in bosnia is a use of the past by elites to play to their own ethnic group in order to pursue nation building projects. this is further shown by the fact that without international pressure there is also an unwillingness to prosecute members of their own community (zoglin, 2005). hence, the various mechanisms including the icty and icj have not been able to bring out an agreed upon record of the bosnian past. any effort to do so was, and still is, thwarted by various local actors’ countermoves, or in subotic’s terminology, by the countermoves of norm resisters and instrumental adapters. however, despite the challenges facing the approaches to peace and justice at the political level, some scholars have argued for caution on purely principled grounds of the incompatibility between reconciliation and punishment. they doubt that it is possible to expand the legal mandate of tj to include reconciliation if the ultimate goal of justice is the prosecution of war crimes (fletcher and weinstein, 2004, p. 30). yet, despite reconciliation not being central in the un resolution that created the icty (fletcher and weinstein, 2004, p. 37), it became central in the subsequent interpretations of the role of the icty. in addition, vanessa pupavac suggests there is a darker side of internationally supported policies of reconciliation: “war crimes tribunals and truth and reconciliation commissions are championed as political therapy, facilitating closure for traumatized nations” (2004, p. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 252 dejan guzina & branka marijan 378). rightly critical of the approach of treating the post-violence state as a mentally unfit patient, pupavac shows that such an approach to tj simply puts the finger of blame on the local population itself. similarly, chandra lekha sriram argues that “in particular, the very institutionalisation of these processes [tj mechanisms] means that they may seem, or actually be, disconnected from the individuals and societies they are designed to benefit, or be viewed as externally imposed and illegitimate by some of the putative beneficiaries” (2010, p. 290). so what is the state of reconciliation in bosnian society? valery perry (2009) rightly notes that “reconciliation” is a word rarely mentioned in good faith in bosnia. in her survey of reconciliation processes, she divides them into the following tracks: a non-governmental reconciliation (such as the incorporation of the experiences from other countries through the work of the so-called “conflict resolutionaires,” mediation efforts sponsored by the ic, the association of citizens-truth and reconciliation); research, training and education; and official governmental reconciliation. however, despite identifying certain progress in these areas, the overall conclusion is hardly optimistic as the principles of the zero-sum game are as prevalent in the sphere of reconciliation as they are in the more traditionally perceived world of politics (perry, 2009). nevertheless, the question of the underlying causes for the failures of tj cannot and should not be looked at only from the viewpoint of the bosnian zero-sum game. such understanding puts too much emphasis on the role of the local elites as primarily responsible for the failures of tj. the underlying assumption is then that if only there were more enlightened political elites in bosnia tj mechanisms would work well. as already discussed, subotic clearly outlines how domestic elites have hijacked the tj processes. however, she relies too heavily on insights from the rational choice approach to collective action problems, focusing exclusively on the initiatives of bosnian ethnic and civic entrepreneurs. according to this view, various moves and counter-moves of ethnic representatives ultimately lead to attracting necessary support for their respective political agendas. the extent to which they are successful also represents the extent to which they are in charge of the collective action problem; that is, they are in a position to impose or attract members of their respective local communities to share and support their political views on the causes of and possible solutions to the crisis in the bosnian society. in our view, the idea that elites have complete control over the broader narratives about the past is misplaced. this elite centered view corresponds to what rogers brubaker refers to as the “elite manipulation” analysis of ethnic politics (1998, p. 289). brubaker argues that the elite dominance perspective is limiting because it brushes over the complex process of the constitution of interests and their role in the identity formation. elites cannot simply set agendas dominated by their own interests. their ability to do so is shaped by the issues that resonate within their communities and a particular community’s understanding of its relevant identity. for brubaker, the “elite manipulation” argument misses the variation in “conditions of responsiveness” studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 local uses of international criminal justice 253 or the reasons why in certain areas and in certain communities inflammatory politicians succeed with their nationalist narratives (1998, p. 291), and in some others they do not. in relation to the yugoslav conflicts, he emphasizes the importance of already existing conditions of unofficial narratives about past persecutions that influence further the ways in which individuals respond to various forms of elite manipulations. the same argument can be adjusted to explain why international elites are not able to impose a particular order or their own interests on local populations. roger mac ginty (2011) aptly describes the interaction between the “internationals” and “locals” as being hybrid in character, where international actors are not only trying to influence local actors, but are being influenced equally in return. international actors involved in the tj processes become involved in the various narratives, often because their actions have unintended consequences (for example, being seen as expressing support for one side over the other). more importantly, mac ginty stresses that local resistance to external agendas can be both positive and negative, and that sectarian and selfish interests motivate some acts, though not all. regardless, he notes that, “in some cases, resistance leads to a better form of peace: a peace that is more comfortable and sustainable for the communities that must live that peace. a great difficulty is that many international actors and perspectives are unable to accept such hybrid forms of peace as ‘peace’” (mac ginty, 2011, p. 212). following the lead of brubaker and mac ginty, we argue that the local context is a two-way street in which ordinary citizens are not simply puppets passively responding to entrepreneurial actions of various elites. they do have, and exert their own agency, however, not always to the liking of those believing in the principles of tj and liberal peace building. moreover, in the context of the competing narratives over the recent past in bosnia, neither domestic nor international actors can impose simply what they deem as legitimate accounts of the war. local populations are actively engaged in creating and disseminating stories about tj on their own to the extent that such narratives provide meaning to the their actions. a ground up view of peace and justice in bosnia-herzegovina why do tj mechanisms fall short of expectations? paige arthur (2011) argues that tj concepts and policy approaches do not take seriously enough the role that our identities play in channelling our actions. following fearon and laitin, she reminds us that ethnic identities are different from other social identities “because they are constructed around the idea of descent, as well as social and biological reproduction” (arthur, 2011, p. 273). as such, they are composed of “cultural attributes” (religion, language, custom, myths), neither of which could be easily handpicked by individuals (fearon and laitin, 2000, p. 848). arthur does not dismiss the individualist constructivist arguments; nevertheless, she points out that there are limits to which studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 254 dejan guzina & branka marijan identities can be constructed. this, however, has important consequences for our understanding of tj, for, as arthur explains, ethnic violence can never be reduced to political violence (2011, p. 273). accordingly, an overtly formulaic approach that shies away from the problem of the salience of ethnic identities is bound to fail when tj measures become translated by local populations to fit their preconceived notions of identity. in similar fashion, will kymlicka maintains that the concept of tj is very closely tied to a civic understanding of nation building that assumes that all citizens, irrespective of their cultural differences, share the same vision of political community. however, despite the strong support for such a model of political community both among the scholars and external policy makers, this model is quite often untenable in societies where more than one cultural community shares the same space and memories (kymlicka, 2011, pp. 303307). under such conditions, the members of other communities quite often perceive the support for political community that will transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries as an open policy of assimilation. in more extreme cases, this will lead to open ethnic conflicts where all kinds of mass crimes are committed in the name of one’s nation. thus, in the context of post-conflict development, divided societies quite often perceive conventional polices of so-called citizenization with distrust, for they can always be interpreted as more beneficial to the majority or the dominant group in such a state. in other words, a purely civic form of nationhood quite often (whether inadvertently or not) leads to clashes over the issues of ethnicity (language, identity, customs, religion, memories of the past). overall, the politicization of ethnic and religious ties shapes citizens’ responses to various tj mechanisms. engagement with tj mechanisms is shaped by in-group mentalities according to which individuals are primarily wishing to represent one’s own community concerns and grievances. in this context, storytelling emerges as one of principal ways to interpret recent past events, and in the process, strengthen the boundaries between members of one particular ethnic group and those of the other. the case of bosnia is symptomatic in this regard; two examples, namely, the oric trial and the correct number of the war casualties in the bosnian war, illustrate the ways in which the norms and institutions of tj were appropriated for the purposes of further delineating the boundaries between the bosniak and serb communities in bosnia. but, why focus on these two cases: the oric trial and the body count? from the perspective of liberal peace building and tj literature, they can be dismissed in favour of some other accounts of successes and failures of tj in bosnia. in that respect, the oric case is particularly problematic given that the bosniak authorities closely cooperated with the ic and thus were actively engaged in oric’s surrender. in support of this view, we cite a very rich literature dealing with some of these issues, including, delpla, bougarel and fournel (2012), nettelfield (2010), and clark (2009). nevertheless, we do not deal with the technical aspects of the mechanisms of tj, but rather with the perceptions of these efforts on local populations and how they understand it. as marc howard ross explains: studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 local uses of international criminal justice 255 in long-term intransigent conflict, strong threats to identity are an essential part of the conflict dynamics, and any efforts to defuse such a situation must take seriously the stories that participants recount, and the perceived threats to identity. the point, after all, is not whether participants’ accounts are true or false from some objective point of view but that they are meaningful to the parties involved. (1997, p. 64) from this perspective, the oric case and the number of war casualties are central to local bosniak and serbian efforts to deal with the legacies of the war, and how to make meaning of the war. this aspect in no way should be understood to be the replacement for the debates about individual responsibility of those involved in war crimes, or of the role of impartial institutions in making reconciliation possible. it simply recognizes local communities’ efforts to deal with the past that do not correspond necessarily to the internationally prescribed political objectives for bosnia. without understanding them on their own merit, we simply cannot see how a more integrative counter narrative can be developed successfully. the oric case was the first case that tested bosniaks’ trust in the work of the icty; for the first time, it was one of their own that was on trial. naser oric was a bosniak war commander in the area around srebrenica. the nato forces arrested him in 2003 for the crimes committed against the bosnian serbs in the serbian villages surrounding srebrenica in 1992 and 1993. despite the bosnian government’s support for oric’s arrest and his transfer to the hague, the action provoked many bosniaks to accuse the hague tribunal as playing the ethnic balance game (kebo, 2005). thus, for the bosniak side, such an arrest was, in the words of one of the representatives of the ngo mothers of srebrenica, a shameful act because his only crime was, in the words of many, to “defend his own people.” others in the bosniak community have argued that oric’s crimes, the killing of seven serbs, are far less serious than the offences committed by thousands of former serb soldiers, none of whom have been indicted. on the other side, as a journalist reported at the time, a local serb, and the head of the association of war invalids in a serbian village, bratunac, had said, “naser’s departure to the hague proves that justice will reach everyone. we are beginning to believe a bit more that the hague is not biased, that it is not arresting only serbs, but all those suspected of committing crimes” (kebo, 2005). in july 2006, oric was sentenced to two years in prison to be immediately released for time already served. on his way back from the hague, oric enjoyed a hero’s welcome home, which once more indicated to local serbs that the icty is biased against them and that it could not be trusted (subotic, 2009, p. 131). moreover, as subotic has poignantly described, the most controversial aspect of the entire case is the judicial justification of the sentence, according to which the abysmal conditions in srebrenica “led to such a breakdown of law and order that oric could not be held accountable for the crimes committed by his troops” (2009, p. 130). so, was justice served in bosnia? many scholars and policy makers seem studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 256 dejan guzina & branka marijan to think so by emphasizing the historical role that icty has played. but people in bosnia are resigned in their evaluation of the icty’s lofty goals and achievements, albeit for different reasons. fadila memisevic, president of the society for threatened peoples in bosnia-herzegovina, was recently quoted by radio free europe as saying: we were naïve that the tribunal will put an end to this evil [of mass atrocities, mass rapes, crimes against humanity, and genocide during the war], and yet we still keep moving in circles. this is not a nuremberg trial with clear understanding of who is the defeated side in the war. the worst of all, those who were sentenced can now, after they are released from prison, assume their political careers. … this is absurd. the [icty] verdicts do not fit the crime, and i don’t think that the justice has been served [in bosnia]. (quoted in dzenana halimovic, october 15, 2012) against memisevic’s statement, we can quote the words of janko velimirovic, director of the centre for investigating war crimes in republika srpska: we have the result that [among the accused in the hague] 58% are serbs, 25% croats and 9% bosniaks. this has created a particular understanding of the war in the public that is very hard to change and that does not reflect the reality. the available proof and documentation clearly do not support the percentages [of guilt] that are emerging out of the hague tribunal. (quoted in dzenana halimovic, october 15, 2012) the two narratives once again reflect the different perspectives and struggles in post-war bosnian society. the perspective of memisevic brings out the view of many bosniak victims’ groups that do not feel that the prosecutions reflect the punishment required, given the scale of the violence during the war. velimirović’s view is reflective of the serb victims’ groups who do not feel that their story has been heard and addressed. both of these concerns, even though are very similar in the need for the perpetrators to be held responsible, unfortunately have been subsumed by broader narratives. these broader narratives are the delegitimization of the republika srpska’s existence because of the lack of widespread punishment for the scale of the violence committed by those who created this entity. bosnian serbs tend to group around the narrative of the defense of the legitimacy of republika srpska’s existence and argue that the court in the hague does not equally address the crimes against the bosnian serbs. ultimately, the victims’ concerns for justice are being fused with radically different bosniak and serb nation building goals and visions for bosnia-herzegovina. evident in the reactions surrounding oric’s trial, and in subsequent discussions over whether or not justice was served, is the link between the two narratives and the opposing perceptions about srebrenica. from the very beginning of dayton bosnia, bosniaks have shared an understanding that they were victims of genocide. subotic rightly asserts that this was the reason why they were much more interested in the genocide case in front of studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 local uses of international criminal justice 257 the international court of justice (icj) than in the individual cases before the icty (subotic, 2009, p. 154). the genocide conviction was first passed in 2001, when the icty clearly stated in its verdict against the bosnian serb commander radislav krstic, “[b]y seeking to eliminate a part of the bosnian muslims [bosniaks], the bosnian serb forces committed genocide. they targeted for extinction 40,000 bosnian muslims living in srebrenica, a group that was emblematic of the bosnian muslims in general” (prosecutor vs. krstic, 2004). this ruling was hailed as historic by the bosnian media. it also created optimism that a similar ruling would soon follow in the case of bosnia vs. serbia at the international court of justice. the hope was that by winning the genocide case against serbia, the bosnian war should be finally redressed as a war of aggression and genocide against bosniaks, which would then have necessitated the abolition of republika srpska and serbian reparations to bosnia. in other words, what could not have been achieved during the dayton negotiations could have been finally achieved through the court ruling. however, in february 2007, the icj issued a ruling that cleared serbia of direct responsibility for the genocide and any complicity in the genocide that happened between 1992 and 1995. also, the ruling reiterated the icty decision that the only confirmed case of genocide in bosnia is the one committed by the bosnian serb forces in srebrenica (goldstone & hamilton, 2008). finally, as much as the bosniak intellectuals and leaders experienced the icj’s ruling as an insult, serbia’s authorities were relieved. the decision vindicated them and effectively undermined the bosniak claims that the war was one of serbian aggression and genocide against bosniaks. thus, whether justice has been served by the oric case and others depends on which group representatives are consulted. overall, there is widespread agreement on the part of the local population that the icty has done little to support or inspire reconciliation between the communities. in his analysis of the impact that the icty has had on “societal peace,” james meernik finds little support for the argument that the icty has had a positive impact on the society. he finds that “[m]ore often than not, ethnic groups responded with increased hostility towards one another after an arrest or judgment” (meernik, 2005, p. 287). finally, how many people died in the bosnian war? during the war, the international media reported the loss of more than 200,000 lives. this figure was based on the un expert commission’s report on war crimes in bosnia that was released in 1994. however, even before the release of the report, similar figures were freely circulating in the media without journalists apparently ever bothering to substantiate them. after the war, these figures were further supported by claims that 160,000 victims were bosniaks, 30,000 croats, and 25,000 serbs (srebrenica genocide blog, http://srebrenicagenocide.blogspot.ca/). it is no wonder then that everybody was caught by surprise when an ngo based in sarajevo, the research and documentation center, first published its data (the so-called book of dead) on the number of dead in the war. the center confirmed that 95,949 people were killed in studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 258 dejan guzina & branka marijan the war (60 percent soldiers and 40 percent civilians), a much smaller figure than the one usually circulated in media reports following the war. according to the ethnic demographic of the dead, 64,036 were bosniaks, 24,905 serbs, and 7,788 croats (that is, around 66 percent of all victims were bosniaks, 25 percent were bosnian serbs, 5 percent croats, and 2 percent other). at the same time, the statistics are rather different for the civilian casualties: more than 80 percent of civilian victims were bosniaks, 10 percent were bosnian serbs, and around 5 percent bosnian croats (the figures are regularly updated by the center. they can be accessed on the center’s website: http:// www.idc.org.ba/).2 in december 2005, when the first results of the research and documentation center became public, the bosniak political and intellectual elites publicly attacked the center’s projects on the following grounds: methodology, integrity of the people involved in it, sources of finding, and so on (the center is internationally sponsored, like any other ngo in bosnia). what was hard for the bosniak leadership to accept was that the head of the project was a bosniak himself, mirsad tokaca, whose center works under the slogan “truth now, peace forever”. of course, the rationale for dismissing the work of the center has been the fear that a decrease in the reported numbers of dead will undermine the official narrative that the war against the bosniaks was genocidal in its character and thus that the republika srpska, as an illegal state, an illegitimate outcome of such a war, should be abolished. of course, this is exactly how this was interpreted by the bosnian serb (and also serbian) media. however, as mirsad tokaca has aptly explained: “genocide is not a question of numbers; it is the matter of the identity of the victims” (quoted in subotić, 2009, p. 155). the figures do support both the fact and the consequences of the bosnian serb policies of ethnic cleansing towards bosniaks. after all, more than 80 percent of the civilian casualties are identified as bosniak. the debates about the character of the war, the right number of dead, and the oric case show how the lack of trust between local communities continues to shape the content of their respective narratives. at the same time, the inability of the ic to address these narratives on their own terms leads to seemingly out of touch approaches by donors, especially in the context of issues of reconciliation. this is clearly evident in the case described below where the well-intentioned push to create cross community linkages between youth disregarded the reality of a post-war environment. as a member of a religious organization in sarajevo stated: they [international donors] were insisting on a project that would bring children from a primarily bosniak town and to get them to go to stay with a serb or croat family in another town. this was unacceptable to the parents and we had to explain the extent of these fears. maybe you can do this type of thing in a society which has not experienced conflict but you cannot do that here. the context is simply different. (personal communication, may 26, 2012) in the end, the organization did not receive funding because they were not studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 local uses of international criminal justice 259 willing to comply with donor specifications. from the donor’s perspective, this might be hard to understand. after all, bosnia has experienced no reoccurrence of violence since 1995. however, as both sarajevo and banja luka’s interviewees have pointed out, the sense of fear and resentment still continues to shape interactions between individuals (personal communication, may/june, 2012). through their lyrics, young musicians from the bosniak and serb communities have attempted to address these fears and to show their understanding of the other community’s perspective but they still find it difficult to deal with the level of hate speech about the other that has become normalized (karabeg, 2012). two musicians in particular, adnan hamidovic frenkie, from tuzla, and djurica stulagrof djuraz, from banja luka, believe that hate speech has been misunderstood as patriotism by younger generations, but also as the politicians’ way on both sides to avert the public attention from the dire economic reality. djurica concludes that, while he does not consider himself a separatist, the continuation of inter-communal distrust and fear will eventually lead to the division of the country as the only viable option. adnan, in his song, “letter for milan”, tackles the subject of the extent of the fear and anger between the bosniak and serb communities (hamidovic, 2012). the song is written to a bosnian serb, milan, and touches on such sensitive topics as the labelling of the serb community as a “genocidal nation” by some of his bosniak compatriots. perhaps most striking in his lyrics is his frank discussion of how there are always two different perspectives on the causes and consequences of the bosnian war: “our story” and “their story”. he acknowledges the danger that within his own bosniak community he might be seen as somebody who turned his back on them by simply tackling the issue of reconciliation in his songs. frenkie raps that it is hard even to attempt to reconcile with the other because “this will be met with your own community ostracizing you,” while there is also no guarantee that the other will return the gesture. thus, despite their civic engagement the two musicians are fully aware of how relevant and powerful the group narratives of separation are in shaping interactions between the youth. similar sentiments are expressed by a young activist from banja luka who argues that there is a “sarajevo story” which, she explains, is the version of the past perceived to be favoured by the bosniak population and often espoused by bosniak politicians (personal communication, june 7, 2012). she has found that she is distrusted in her hometown because of her contacts with groups from sarajevo that keep insisting on their work on srebrenica. the connection between someone from republika srpska to the “sarajevo story” is not readily accepted and vice versa in the case of an inhabitant of sarajevo. as a civil society member from sarajevo points out, “i think we lack people who are strong enough not to pay attention to how they will be judged for their actions in their respective communities… as it stands right now, the pressure and judgement of the community is paramount” (personal communication, may 30, 2012). studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 260 dejan guzina & branka marijan in other words, while there are those who are ready critically to address the issues of the past, or reconcile with their former neighbours, it does not necessarily follow that this often-romanticized resistance on the ground against the domineering practices and narratives of exclusion is widespread or supported. nor does it follow that such efforts at reconciliation are solely being restrained by nationalist politicians. the situation on the ground is more complex. while there is certainly potential for overcoming the divisions and for many individuals to connect with one another, there are still strong feelings about the past in many parts of bosnia. stef jansen (2007) points to the role of pre-war local power dynamics, demographics, geography and history in shaping the experience of the violence. jansen argues that this means that not only do people remember the conflict in subjective ways but that judicial institutions and scholars need to be aware of these dynamics (2007, p. 207). janine natalya clark (2009) also points this out in her research with ordinary bosnian citizens, some of whom wanted a broader responsibility to be addressed in relation to the crimes committed in the past. some individuals, particularly those in srebrenica and potocari, felt that both serbian and dutch governments should be held responsible for the events that occurred there (clark, 2009, p. 472). hence, the idea of widespread reconciliation does not seem to be supported by bosnian experience. it also shows that whatever success can be achieved in dealing with the past in bosnia it is going to be far from uniformly supported because the conflict was more prominent in particular areas with shifting narratives of blame and guilt. to summarize, the above discussion has sought to connect two key arguments. the first is that while there are organizations and local actors in bosnia focusing on reconciliation, their work is not always widely supported within their own communities. the post-war narratives that have emerged in the two main bosnian cities keep members of various bosnian communities separated from each other. this leads to the second point: without the widespread support of the communities themselves for broader reconciliation, little reconciliation can be achieved. externally supported and top down approaches to reconciling peace and justice in bosnia have had little effect. conclusion international efforts to stop perpetuating divisive categories of framing the responsibility for the bosnian conflict exclusively in collectivist categories have had only limited success in the bosnian context. in a somewhat paradoxical fashion, in the few cases when tj seems to have been working, this has not been so much because of its restorative or democratizing potential; rather, various local civic and political organizations have always been ready to accept tj mechanisms to strengthen their own respective political agendas. in the process, however, the normative and institutional potentials of tj have studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 local uses of international criminal justice 261 quite often been weakened. this is not to say that there is not acceptance of tj principles in bosnia, but overall, the voice of those who support tj continues to be rather weak. there are of course many voices for peace and for a multicultural vision for bosnia. however, we find that the ethnicized political environment, the harsh socio-economic reality, and the experience of the conflict have contributed to the persistent fears within the population, making the stories of division much more powerful than the stories of possible integration. between the narratives of the uncertain future and the irreconcilable stories of the past, people are prone to find more meaning in the latter. social interactions at the local level are crucial to the analysis of the tj and peace-building process. the reason that various international organizations in bosnia have not been as successful in achieving the admittedly lofty goals of reconciliation is because most international representatives have underestimated the role the local population plays and have focused exclusively on the actions of various local ethnic and civic elites. however, the parallel existence of competing state and nation building projects in bosnia and their dominance over externally-supported projects of reconciliation cannot be explained simply by relying on one overarching variable: bosnian nationalist elites work towards their own selfish interests and against the interests of the people. seventeen years of peace in bosnia have shown that bosnians have agency and that they know how to use it. the stories that people share are many and they compete with each other: some are inclusive, some less so, and some are downright exclusionist. nevertheless, they always provide a meaningful frame of action that allows members of various local communities to cope with the exigencies of everyday life in bosnia. some of those narratives should not be dismissed simply because they are overtly nationalistic. instead, a more suitable approach requires an analysis of what makes these stories so powerful and what are the objective political, social and economic constraints that continue to provide a fertile ground for their widespread support. recognizing these narratives as meaningful, however, does not mean accepting their content. rather, it is about analyzing the power such content has in framing actions at the local level. notes 1 dejan guzina is associate professor in political science at wilfrid laurier university in waterloo (ontario, canada). his major research interests are in comparative democratization, state building and ethnic politics (email: dguzina@wlu.ca). branka marijan is a ph.d. candidate in global governance at the balsillie school of international affairs (wilfrid laurier university). her research interests are focused on issues of peacebuilding, citizenship and civil society in post-conflict countries (email: bmarijan@balsillieschool.ca). the authors would like to thank kimberly rygiel and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. 2 the most detailed account to date on the number of casualties in the wars in the former yugoslavia in 1990s can be found in tabeau, e. conflict in numbers: casualties of the 1990s wars in the former yugoslavia (1991-1999) published by the helsinki committee in serbia, belgrade. it can be accessed online: http://www.helsinki.org. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 262 dejan guzina & branka marijan rs/projects_cin.html. belgrade humanitarian law centre and sarajevo research and documentation center have jointly published the book of death in the bosnian war (january 2013). not surprisingly, the association for camp inmates in republika srpska has immediately reacted by publicly dismissing the validity of its findings. their reaction can be found in maksimovic, d. (january 25, 2013). rs ne prihvata ‘bosansku knjigu mrtvih’, deutsche welle, retrieved on january 28, 2013 from http:// www.dw.de/rs-ne-prihvata-bosansku-knjigu-mrtvih/a-16549104. references acharya, a. (2004). how ideas spread: whose norms matter? norm localization and institutional change in asian regionalism. international organization, 58 (2), 239-275. aptel, c. (2011). international and hybrid criminal tribunals: reconciling or stigmatizing? in p. arthur (ed.), identities in transition: challenges for transitional justice in divided societies (pp. 149-186). cambridge: cambridge university press. arthur, p. (2011). fear of the future, lived through the past: pursuing transitional justice in the wake of ethnic conflict. in p. arthur (ed.), identities in transition: challenges for transitional justice in divided societies (pp. 271-302). cambridge: cambridge university press. brubaker, r. 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(2009). hijacked justice: dealing with the past in the balkans. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. world bank. (2012). south east europe regular economic report: from double-dip recession to accelerated reform (no.3). retrieved from http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/ worldbank/document/seerer_3_report_final_eng.pdf zoglin, k. (2005). the future of war crimes prosecutions in the former yugoslavia: accountability or junk justice? human rights quarterly, 27(1), 41-77. correspondence address: liz brosnan, department of sociology university of limerick, castletroy limerick, co. limerick, ireland. email: liz.brosnan@ul.ie issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 6, issue 1, 45-66, 2012 power and participation: an examination of the dynamics of mental health service-user involvement in ireland liz brosnan department of sociology, university of limerick abstract discourse and rhetoric of service-user involvement are pervasive in all mental health services that see themselves as promoting a recovery ethos. yet, for the service-user movement internationally, ‘recovery’ was articulated as an alternative discourse of overcoming and resisting an institutionalized and oppressive psychiatric model of care. power is all pervasive within mental health services yet often overlooked in official discourse on user-involvement. critical research is required to expose the unacknowledged structural and power constraints on participants. my research problematizes practices of user involvement in one mental health service area in ireland. part i of this article examines the background context of policies and practices of user-involvement from the service-user perspective and explains developments in relation to service-user involvement in the case of ireland. participants in my study articulate their motivation for engagement with mental health service reform in terms of the right to participate in social justice terms, of wanting to improve services and humanise care. power dynamics emerge as one of the primary obstacles to equitable involvement. part ii of this article presents an explanatory framework of power, using a model developed in the field of development studies; gaventa’s (2006) ‘power cube.’ the three dimensions of the cube represent the forms, spaces and levels of power. the explanatory potential of this model to highlight how hidden and invisible power operates in mental health services is illustrated by selected comments from the same participants. the power cube is a useful tool to illuminate the dynamics occurring in service-user involvement spaces. showing how different forms of power operate in the spaces and levels of mental health involvement can develop service-users’ awareness of the hidden and invisible aspects of power. through this awareness, they can strategize around their potential to influence decision-making in mental health services. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 46 liz brosnan introduction service-user1 involvement strategizes to challenge social injustices rooted in institutional practice, demonstrated to be endemic throughout mental health services in ireland (brennan, 2012; hyde, lohan, & mcdonnell, 2004; rafferty, 2011; sapouna, 2006). yet the underlying power dynamics operational in mental health services transfer into the spaces opened up by official policies of service-user involvement. critical research is necessary to highlight the dynamics often overlooked in official discourses, in order to expose the social inequities and injustices experienced by mental health service-users. this article argues that service-user involvement must be problematized by highlighting hidden and invisible aspects of power operating within these spaces. the argument is presented in two parts. part 1 introduces the context for service-user involvement by tracing the links between recovery and serviceuser involvement discourses as articulated by service-users. these discourses are grounded in ideas of social justice, particularly status recognition (lewis, 2009) and participatory parity (frazer, 2007). these concepts, and their importance to service-users, will be illustrated by comments from participants in my current empirical research on service-user involvement. part i also explains the development of policies and practices of service-user involvement in the uk and the responses of the uk service-user movement. finally i consider the irish case, reviewing two published studies on the service-user movement and service-user involvement in ireland. i discuss official policy and subsequent developments. one significant challenge for service-user involvement stands out from this review of the service-user experience to date: namely the complexities of power operating within the mental health system. part ii presents a conceptual model of power, the ‘power cube’ developed by gaventa (2006), as a useful framework for understanding power as it operates in the mental health services. the three dimensions of the cube represent the forms, spaces and levels of power. the power-cube has the potential to heighten service-users’ consciousness of how power/knowledge operates in relation to service-user involvement. thus it could become a useful social movement tool for activists seeking to right some of the inherent injustices experienced in these spaces of unequal power. it is only through heightened awareness of the obstacles to be overcome that service-users can hope to achieve their aims of engagement. the social justice concerns of user involvement and the explanatory potential of the power cube to expose the operations of power are illustrated by selected comments from interviews and ethnographic observation in my own study at a local mental health service over nine months in 2010/2011. this empirical study forms part of my current phd research on mental health service-user involvement in ireland. there are three sample groups in the overall study; eight service-users involved in various committees, mental health professionals, both at the local study site, and service-user movement studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 power and participation 47 leaders with a national perspective. however, the article will be limited to the perspectives of the local service-users, three of whom were employed as peers-advocates, the other five as unpaid advisors. feminist standpoint theory formed the basis of my epistemological approach and the resulting development of a survivor standpoint that underpinned my methodology (beresford, 2003; sweeney, 2009). my own standpoint is that of an irishborn woman with experiences of different types of encounters with mental health services, and of being active in service-user-led research, advocacy and involvement spaces since 2000. part i: recovery and service-user involvement recovery2 was articulated by the service-user/survivor movement as a way of overcoming and resisting institutionalized and oppressive psychiatric care (beresford & wallcraft, 1997). from a service-user perspective, recovery is a concept that focuses on attitudes of hope, coping strategies and supportive relationships which offer people a belief that it is possible to live a meaningful life with or without the presence of symptoms of emotional distress (ralph, 2000). recovery-oriented mental health services seek to redress the imbalance of traditional services’ control over people’s lives and to encourage people to recover autonomy, to re-integrate into their communities and to re-build a meaningful life (repper & perkins, 2003; stickley & wright, 2011). turnercrowson and wallcraft (2002) discuss some of the concerns british serviceusers had about the importation of recovery language into mental health service discourse, including issues regarding professionals defining recovery in terms of service outcomes. this can result in services referring to people as not being ‘compliant’ with their recovery plans. they highlighted the fears of service-users in relation to non-achievement of recovery measures and outcomes, and the effect this might have on their social welfare provisions. turner-crowson and wallcraft stress the importance, for the service-user movement and mental health service reformers, of continuing to focus on the “complementary themes” to recovery, such as early intervention, suicide prevention, user involvement, practical measures for social inclusion, strategies for living, surviving and coping, and most importantly keeping hope alive (2002, p. 252). recovery entered official irish discourse in 2005 with the publication of a discussion paper on recovery by the mental health commission3. in irish government policy (a vision for change: report of the expert group on mental health policy, 2006)4, a recovery ethos is evident within parts of this document. service-users in my study had expectations about what recoveryfocused services would offer, and chief among these expectations was hope for a greater range of choices than the traditional service model. an important focus for the participants was at the individual level of involvement, peoples’ therapeutic relationship, and allowing people opportunities to learn and develop by taking personal responsibility for their choices. at the most studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 48 liz brosnan fundamental level people wanted more treatment choices: service-users have to be at the centre, . . . and they don’t have the choices that they need. . . . it’s no good saying we’re a recovery-focused service but all that we’re offering you is a psychiatrist and drugs. it’s about having a wider multidisciplinary team, service-user involvement in that . . . the service allowing the service-user to take responsibility, allowing them to make mistakes and starting again. (female peer-advocate) for this participant, recovery and service-user involvement are interdependent, if a service is providing choices it will include meaningful service-user involvement, and not just at an individual level. service-user involvement does not occur in a vacuum. service-users frequently experience care as coercive and controlling, without choices as to refusing care, what kinds of care may be considered, or over who provides this care. mcgruder (2001) documents how seeking help results in the person losing autonomy, as the professionals take over. lewis (2010, p. 3) observes how the experience of using mental health services and the constant threat of compulsory detention create a culture of fear and domination, a form of “affective power.” service-user involvement is understood by participants in my study as a way to contest this individual and systemic oppression. there is a sense of injustice evident in how the participants describe their own experiences of care as well as in their observations of the position and treatment of long-term residents. a significant thread throughout one advocate’s interview, and evident in many others, was the importance of empowering people to speak up for themselves, to know their rights and take control over their lives. she gave an example to illustrate how for years a long-time resident in services never felt he could visit his mother’s grave. she was angry about how people can be left dependent because choice and volition is removed from their lives: “something is deadened inside.” providing opportunities for people to regain the agency to make choices was a major motivator for this woman in her work as a peer-advocate. she saw this as a fundamental human right. another female peer-advocate claimed that using human rights discourses to advocate against injustices within the mental health system could be useful: “it’s something that we can say, you know, i’m sorry but you can’t do this because you’re breaking human rights laws.” a third peer-advocate described his motivation: “i’ve always believed in social justice and that people should be able to offer other people a helping hand.” two other participants also mentioned “injustices in the system” as motivation for becoming active in the unpaid advisory committee work that they were involved in. clearly the opportunity to do something about their concerns, in relation to the way the mental health services interact with those receiving care, was a motivating factor for these participants. having explained why service-user involvement is a matter of social justice to service-users, it may be instructive to examine what has influenced the policies and rhetoric around user-involvement. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 power and participation 49 consumerist or democratic drivers for service-user involvement beresford (2002), with a particular interest in service-user involvement in research, traces the development of the rhetoric of user involvement/ partnership/empowerment, and identifies two powerful driving forces, neoliberalism and the rise of user movements. while both emphasize participation and user involvement, they result in two distinct models of participation, which he labels “consumerist” and “democratic.” the consumerist model of involvement, identified with a neo-liberalist agenda, is consultative by nature & primarily focuses on data collection methods of involvement. pilgrim (2009, p. 87) points out that this is “analogous to the consumerist process of, say, hotels asking guests to fill in a satisfaction survey.” this understanding of involvement certainly fails to recognize the fact that many of the acute units are “unambiguous sites of coercive social control,” according to rogers (as cited in pilgrim, 2009, p. 88). pilgrim (2005, p. 25) also points out that user-involvement is “in the gift” of services, in that it is discretionary as to whether service-users are invited to participate or under what conditions. other developments in wider society which influenced the enthusiasm for service-user involvement have been identified, such as a trend towards more participative forms of governance, and the changing relationship between the public and the medical profession as trust in professionals declined following several well publicized medical and social care failures (hyde, lohan & mcdonnell, 2004, p. 240; kemp, 2010). beresford (2002) traces the democratic approach to participation emerging from civil rights movements, including the service-user movement, which prioritizes inclusion, autonomy, independence and self-advocacy. as an approach it is explicitly political, seeking to influence the power dynamics of participation. beresford (2002) argues that the logic of the democratic approach is for “user-led” and “user-controlled” services, whereas the consumerist approach seeks to influence the provider-led approach to policy and services. two british service-users have observed service-user involvement “is a ‘must do’ for the mental health system and ‘an opportunity to do’ for those using mental health services” (mckinley & yiannoullou, 2012, p. 115). the service-user movement and service-user involvement wallcraft, read and sweeney (2003) surveyed the english mental health service-user movement and found that, after self-help and social support at 79%, user involvement was the second most common activity with 72% of 318 local groups taking part in some form of consultation with mental health professionals and decision-makers. service-user involvement work was often linked to implementation of the uk government policy for mental health services. there were variations in the forms and perception of influence of much involvement at local level. wallcraft et al. (2003) clearly assert studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 50 liz brosnan that the service-user movement is more active than just being involved in decision-making bodies. while service-user involvement is an important part of the movement’s activities, service-user/survivor groups exist for many other reasons and some decided not to do service-user involvement work. importantly, the movement exists independently of its role in service-user involvement activities. rose, fleischman and schofield (2010) list eight different forms of service-user involvement. these can mean being consulted about staff recruitment, having a role in selection of candidates or being involved in staff performance evaluations. service-users also can advise on local mental health services, and be involved in research. this is usually consultation but there is a growing body of user-led and controlled research. service-users have been involved in training professionals; indeed it is often mandatory to demonstrate this. increasingly in the uk, service-users are employed in services as peer-workers and there are growing numbers of user-led services. there is now a long established tradition of peer advocacy, and this is the most established aspect of service-user involvement in ireland. and finally rose, et al. (2010) identify campaigning and anti-stigma initiatives as another form of service-user involvement. rose, et al. (2010) do not include the individual relationship of a serviceuser with service providers as a form of service-user involvement. however this is what many service-users and mental health practitioners in my study first mentioned when asked about their understanding of service-userinvolvement. this is likely to be because, apart from peer advocacy, the other forms described by rose, et al. (2010) are not established in irish mental health services. currently, there are one or two fledgling initiatives in ireland to develop peer-support worker roles within mental health services. there are growing critiques of what user involvement has achieved in terms of addressing the structural inequalities experienced by service-users in the uk. campbell (2001) argued that when service-users do work together with service-providers, the discourses of partnership and collaboration can mask power imbalances and differing agendas. service-users have articulated resistance to deal with the power and social inequities inherent in the position of service-users and the failure of many involvement initiatives to make any difference to users’ lives (campbell, 2005; rose & lucas, 2007; wallcraft, 2008). campbell (2001, p. 88) points out that service-user involvement has made no impact on the “clinical authority” of the mental health worker. the policies and practices of user involvement are not without their academic and practitioner critics. some of the more critical academic commentators (carey, 2009; forbes & sashidharan, 1997; pilgrim, 2005) argue that without addressing power imbalances service-user involvement may simply be a way for decision-makers to legitimize their decisions. these writers address the position service-users are in vis-à-vis the mental health services and highlight the coercive nature of many mental health service-users’ encounters with services. therefore participation within the mental health services has a distinctly different quality to other types of patient involvement. the power studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 power and participation 51 imbalances are more acutely felt as every service-user is aware there is always a possibility they can be picked up and detained against their will (pilgrim, 2009, pp. 115-118), without having committed any crime, a unique power under mental health legislation. pilgrim notes two ways user involvement can be considered worthwhile from the user perspective, not only as a human right, but also as a “trojan horse” (2009, p. 86). he refers to the way the service-user movement can regard user involvement as an opportunity to contest how they have been treated and present oppositional views to the coercive, bio-medical approach of mental health services. pilgrim (2005) has also highlighted the co-option of the voice of protest into servicing the needs of the mental health establishment. he describes the tension between on the one hand the democratic impulses of the service-user movement5 to improve the care offered by mental health services, and on the other hand the agenda of the health care providers to co-opt the service-user voice in a corporatist, neo-liberal effort to achieve stated policy objectives and outcomes (pilgrim, 2005). research continues to raise concerns about quality of involvement, tokenism and the lack of resources for user involvement (mcdaid, 2009). all of these obstacles to meaningful service-user involvement are issues of social injustice, stemming from processes of “misrecognition and maldistribution” described by fraser (2007) and experienced by service-users both within the mental health services and in wider society. these issues are also evident in the irish case. irish experience of service-user involvement speed (2002) offers a critical discourse analysis of general literature by mental health social movement organizations (smo) in ireland plus detailed consideration of department of health documents as evidence of the development of a consumer ethos (speed uses crossley’s (1998) development of bourdieu & wacquant’s (1992) concept of habitus to explain this ethos). both smos examined in his study (schizophrenia ireland, now known as shine, and aware, an smo focused on depression) demonstrated a consumerist rhetoric where the service-user was referred to as a “consumer” but the thinking was still influenced by the concept of “patient.” families were included in the definition of consumer, but no guidelines offered as to their role. the four smos most active in the field were consumer organizations, comprising in one case of entirely seconded health service employees and another organization employing one or two service-users at lower levels (speed, 2002, p. 77). the organizations by and large completely accepted the biomedical model. as such, these groups offered little in the way of active user involvement or dialogue. speed (2002) argued that the irish mental health field offered no challenge to psychiatric hegemony and this was a direct result of the lack of an organized user-led movement (p. 77). in fact he suggests that this consumer habitus was primarily driven by government policies, imposed from the top down, rather than emerging from service-users themselves. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 52 liz brosnan speed (2002) also observed that even though community care was the most self-evident and quantifiable transformation in the literature, there was a failure to legislate for it. this remains the case today. achieving a legislative framework to progress the tardy implementation of the recommendations in vision for change (2006) is a core objective of an ongoing campaign by amnesty international, ireland (ai). the irish branch of ai has focused on the government’s neglect of the mental health services as a failure to provide for the human rights of mental health service-users. there has been an active campaign by ai ireland to lobby for improvements since 2003 (amnesty 2003, 2006). an expert by experience advisory group was established by ai in 2008 to inform and advise on the development and implementation of the current mental health campaign. since speed’s 2002 analysis, there is now an emergent service-user movement. the irish advocacy network (ian) has emerged as a strong presence in the field of mental health in ireland. an island-wide ngo serviceuser run organization, it provides peer-advocacy services throughout the island of ireland, with health service executive (hse) contracts to provide peer-advocacy services at approved centres (licensed centres to detain people under the mental health act 2001) in all but one of the 26 counties. in the northern ireland (ni) jurisdiction, ian provides peer-advocates in the community working independently alongside community mental health services. in addition, other more radical voices such as mad pride ireland, mind freedom ireland and critical voices network have emerged over the past decade to create spaces of resistance to psychiatric hegemony. irish policy on mental health service-user involvement appears in chapter three of vision for change (2006) under the title of “partnerships in care: service users and carers.” the overall policy was developed by diverse stakeholders, including psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, yet it contains relatively strong statements about commitments to serviceuser involvement. it asserts that service-user involvement is more than simply consulting; service-users and carers must be at the centre of decision-making, from the level of decisions about their own care through to the strategic development of local services and national policy. some attention is given to the role of peer-advocacy, with a clear recommendation that advocacy should be provided as a right in all parts of the country. peer-run services are discussed, with evidence about the benefits to service-users generally, the peer providers, and the savings to the services in terms of improved outcomes for service-users. to date, six years on, there is no evidence of the emergence of peer-run mental health services. at the level of operational involvement, it is recommended that service-users need to be included on the local catchment area management teams. in terms of involvement at the national level, vision for change recommended the establishment of a national service user executive (nsue) with the brief of informing national planning and regulatory bodies on “issues relating to user involvement in planning, delivering, evaluating and monitoring services, including models of best practice and to develop and implement best practice guidelines between studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 power and participation 53 the user and provider interface.” (2006, p. 27). the chapter also includes principles that should guide service-user involvement. these are based on those published by uk service-users devan & reid, (as cited in wallcraft, et al., 2003, pp. 63-4). these principles include assertions that service-user involvement is a right, and should be incorporated into how professionals work. they maintain support should be provided to service-user organizations: that imbalances of power need to be acknowledged and addressed; that serviceusers be allowed to decide what they want to do rather than having to adapt to others’ plans for them; that the existing experience, knowledge and skills of service-users be valued even though these may challenge those of some professionals, and that service-users should be reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses at the same rates as health professionals.6 the principles conclude by noting that service-users and carers are not interchangeable: service-users can often be made to feel disempowered by well-meaning carers, and in some instances may be in direct conflict with carers. users and carers should not be considered a homogenous group. the understanding of the term service-user is very broad in the official discourse of public and patient participation. the official irish hse understanding of the term “service-user” is so broad that it could become meaningless. it includes not only “patients”; but also carers, parents and guardians; representative ngos and “communities” and “anyone who is a potential user of health services and social care interventions” (dohc & hse, 2008, p. 6). such a definition is problematic; leaving aside the question of inclusion of the entire population, the inclusion of ngos and ‘communities’ as representative of mental health service-users raises many issues about representative justice (fraser, 2007; lewis, 2009). as noted above, many ngos may have conflicting values and less than inclusive practices. of particular note in these principles is that the interests of service-users and carers are not interchangeable. pilgrim discusses the managerial “amalgam discourse” (2009, p. 86) of conflating service-users and carers as problematic for mental health service-users especially. there are points on which the agendas of both can differ significantly. service-users can often be made to feel disempowered by well-meaning carers, and in some instances may be in direct conflict with carers. for instance, pilgrim (2009, p. 91) explains how improved communication by service providers with carers about risk assessment and prediction of relapse, can embroil family and friends in role tension. this includes dilemmas about whether they are acting as an extension of the mental health services, or if their first loyalty is to their loved one. also, while carers often have common cause with service-users in seeking improved mental health care, sometimes there are differences in how they define better care. many relatives of service-users are dominant in the ngos active in the field, (sane and rethink in the uk, the national alliance for the mentally ill in the usa, shine in ireland). they are more likely to be supporters of a bio-medical model (speed, 2002), and to place greater emphasis on inpatient care and the coercive control of madness (pilgrim, 2009, p. 91). it is generally recognized that service-users and carers have different identities and concerns, and that the concerns of relatives are given studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 54 liz brosnan higher credence when there are conflicting accounts of satisfaction with services (rogers & pilgrim, 2005, p. 219). there is an increasing recognition of the social justice issues involved in the caring role played by relatives across the wide range of health and social care fields, including concerns about the feminization of care and the non-recognition of the value of caring in society generally (barnes & cotterell, 2012, p. 228; lynch & walsh, 2009). notwithstanding these concerns, a clear separation between both groups is preferred by many service-users because of the different identities and the possibilities of conflicting agendas. during the process of the establishment of the nsue in ireland in 2007, it was decided that this representative body would include carers as well as service-users in a ratio of three service-users to one carer. people are elected onto the nsue from a body of voters consisting of self-selected members. service-users and carers have separate ballots and panels. people are elected onto the nsue to represent the four regions of the hse, on a four year rotation, with one election to take place every year. therefore, there should in theory be a constant turnover of service-users and carers on the nsue. it is a challenging task to become elected onto the nsue, as there is little available in terms of resources to support potential candidates. there is no local presence in the regions, and members of nsue have to meet their own travel and other costs. establishing a proportional representational electoral system for a fledgling, tentative user movement may not have been the wisest move in terms of supporting “participatory parity” (fraser, 2007, p. 27) or the development of a strong grassroots movement given the marginalization of service-users (national economic and social forum, 2007) generally in society. the process of representational democracy can foster a culture of powerful elites, compared to participatory democracy which values each voice equally (beresford, 2010; chambers, 1997; kirby & murphy, 2009; young, 2000). heenan (2009, p. 459) claims that the establishment of the nsue is a move forward in terms of developing the service-user perspective on mental health services, by ensuring that service-users are “at the epicentre of developments, using their insights and knowledge to shape the direction of policy and practice.” she is focused on the challenges of implementing service-user involvement in northern ireland (ni) where there has also been lack of action in relation to the promises of the policy review of mental health services in that jurisdiction. the ni review held out promise of greater service-user involvement, but like the policy for mental health services set out in vision for change (2006), a structural reconfiguration of mental health services in relation to the general health service has meant that many of the finer aspirations about more recovery-focused mental health services which include the service-user in planning, evaluation and monitoring of services have not materialized (keogh, 2009). the amalgamation of the service-user and carer voice has not helped. in addition there is emerging disquiet within the service-user movement in ireland that the relatively well-funded nsue is not sufficiently accessible to local service-users who are removed from the studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 power and participation 55 operations of their designated representative body (lakeman, mcgowan, & walsh, 2007). it has to date produced three reports on a survey of its members, reporting that the majority are “happy with their local mental health service,” and feel their local services “promote recovery” (nsue, 2010, 2011, 2012). the last survey has incorporated some more nuanced qualitative accounts of satisfaction, and lack of same, with mental health services. on the basis of these surveys the nsue has established annual awards for the best performing services. it would appear that the nsue, which may have been a good idea as initially proposed, has lost credibility as a critical force for change. thus a potential opportunity to develop a participative democratic base for the user movement in ireland has not materialized and obstacles to user involvement on the ground remain entrenched. research by mcdaid (2009) highlights these obstacles. mcdaid (2009) conducted interviews with 20 irish mental health serviceusers from an egalitarian perspective. she applied the equality of condition framework, (baker, lynch, cantillon, & walsh, 2004) as a mechanism to identify the full range of structural obstacles faced by service-users engaged in strategic decision-making. the equality of condition framework prioritizes creating more equal power relations in society, identifying four different dimensions of inequality which include; power, respect and recognition, resources, and “love care and solidarity.” the power dimension refers to both “power over” and to empowerment. power over covers coercion, disciplinary power, the power of authority and power/knowledge. respect refers to acceptance of both individual and social diversity, and recognition refers to the social esteem held by members of different groups. resources include all that is needed by an individual in order to participate in strategic decision-making, including economic resources but also time, cultural resources such as context specific knowledge, physical and mental resources. the final category refers to the affective domain and the ways relationships and affiliations with peers and allies impact on inequality. solidarity allows space for the emotional content of public participation, a domain particularly relevant for service-users as emotional expression delegitimizes mental health service-users. mcdaid (2009) demonstrates empirically how each of these domains of inequality were present, thereby illustrating the range of structural inequalities service-users face, which affects their opportunity for equal participation. one of the most intractable structural inequalities is the power domain, which will be examined now in part ii. part ii: a strategic model of power for service-user involvement power imbalances are a dominant feature of the environment in which service-users engage with mental health services. gaventa and colleagues have examined issues of power within the field of development work. gaventa (2006) suggests a three dimensional model of power based on the rubix cube: the power cube (see figure 1 below). using this model, he studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 56 liz brosnan explores how power interacts with marginalized or subaltern groups who participate in initiatives to include their voice, and the spaces for participation. he suggests that the discourse of participation by powerful players in the development field such as the world bank and the international monetary fund obscures the power dynamics that underlie the reality of participation for marginalized communities. the same dynamics are at play within the mental health field and in the adoption of the discourses about recovery and service-user involvement by the mental health services (campbell, 2005). the lessons learnt from the experiences of participation by marginalized or disadvantaged groups around the world can inform service-users engaging in participatory forums of mental health services. the topics of concern for the participants may be different but the processes of involvement are similar. hence it is worth examining this work as it can problematize issues of power and participation experienced by mental health service-users. the power cube in all its different layers is presented first and then applied to mental health services, with illustrations from participants’ voices from my study. figure 1: the power cube: levels, spaces and forms of power (gaventa, 2006, p. 25 and http:// www.powercube.net) gaventa (2006) presents the power cube as it relates to levels of development work, which includes governments and international agencies, so this dimension of his model needs modification before it might be applicable to the field of mental health service-user involvement. however, the concepts of forms of power and spaces for participation are useful conceptual tools readily applicable to service-user involvement. gaventa (2006) proposes three forms of power, based on lukes’ (1974, 2005) influential ideas. power can have three forms: visible, hidden and invisible. visible power determines the agenda for participation including the way decision-making forums operate, the rules and procedures adopted. this level concerns the political processes of policy making; the who, what and how of decision-making. however, the next levels are often over-looked when considering how power influences opportunities to become involved. hidden power is that held by those powerful actors who can influence what is or is not allowed onto the http://www.powercube.net http://www.powercube.net studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 power and participation 57 agenda, what knowledge is valid for consideration, but more importantly who is not allowed to the decision-making table. the final form of power is the invisible: shaping of the psychological and ideological boundaries of participation. significant problems and issues are not only kept from the decision-making table, but also from the minds and consciousness of the different players involved, even those directly affected by the problem. (as cited in gaventa, 2006, p. 29) gaventa (2006) presents cornwall’s (2002) ideas about the spaces that people occupy in relation to participation. she noted that metaphors for participation include terms like “opening-up, widening, broadening opportunities and deepening democratic processes for citizen participation” (cornwall, 2002, p. 52). she observed that decision-making occurs in different spaces, which can be characterized as closed, invited or claimed spaces. closed spaces are those where decision-making is not accessible to any outside the small circle of privileged elected officials, professionals and bureaucrats. gaventa defined closed decision-making spaces as places where “decisions are made by a set of actors behind closed doors, without any pretence of broadening the boundaries for inclusion” (2006, p. 26). cornwall describes invited spaces as “those into which people (as users, citizens or beneficiaries) are invited to participate by various kinds of authorities” (as cited in gaventa, 2006, p. 26). claimed/created spaces are those that people create for themselves: examples include informal gatherings or citizen juries, or other events citizens create to hold the powerful to account, using methodologies including human rights based approaches. these are ‘organic’ spaces which emerge out of common concerns or identities as a result of popular mobilization. they may result from the activities of social movements, or more simply be the places where people meet to gather, discuss and strategize before or after formal participation with authorities. soja has referred to these as ‘third spaces’ where people can gather to reject hegemonic space (as cited in gaventa, 2006, p. 26). in terms of power within these spaces, gaventa (2006) points out that those who create these different spaces are most likely those who hold power within them. also, there are dynamic relationships between these spaces, and there remains potential for transformation within and between them. for instance, those in closed spaces may seek to increase their legitimacy by creating invited spaces for people to participate in some aspects of their decisionmaking. equally, invited spaces can be created by those in independent social movements, who initiate consultation and participation opportunities with more powerful decision-makers in closed spaces. power gained in one space, through increasing capacity skills and knowledge, can be used to gain entry into other spaces. gaventa (2006) cautions there is always a risk of ‘capture’ by the more powerful state agencies unless claimed/created spaces are maintained where countervailing forces can challenge the hegemony of powerful discourses. the final dimension of gaventa’s power cube is that of levels of involvement. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 58 liz brosnan as he refers to local, national and global levels where civil society may seek to engage with decision-makers around development issues, this dimension requires adaption to make it applicable to service-user involvement. baggott (2005) defines patient and public involvement in the nhs as being concerned with “decision-making domains” (p. 535). these he classified, using the previous work of charles and demaio, into three different levels: macrolevel policy planning, decisions about service planning and resources, and matters relating to individual treatment. these classifications correspond with the terms used here: strategic, operational and individual, to refer to decision-making domains in which service-users engage. the top level is strategic, where there may be service-user involvement nationally (or internationally) in shaping the future development of mental health services: shaping legislation, staff recruitment, delivering training to professionals and developing peer-support worker roles or peer-run services such as crisis houses. the next level of service-user involvement is consultation about operational and functional concerns: how the service is delivered. this may involve attending committees that are concerned with operational issues, developing local policies and practices that are more responsive to serviceusers’ needs. it may also involve monitoring and evaluation of services, and user involvement in research on local services. at the individual level of involvement, service-users have concerns about decision-making in relation to their own care, the choices they can exercise about treatments, about their individual care plans. a model for power relating to service-user involvement, based on gaventa’s (2006) power cube, would look like this (see figure 2). it is a model that is intuitively easy to understand but allows for the incredibly, complex, messy processes of the real world of mental health services and service-user involvement initiatives. it may seem simple but as anyone knows who tried to re-align a disturbed rubix cube, it is a very tricky, challenging task, and seems appropriate as a representation of the complexity of power dynamics in user-involvement processes. figure 2: the power cube, levels, spaces, and forms of power operational in mental health service-user involvement, (adapted from gaventa, 2006, p. 25) studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 power and participation 59 the power cube and mental health service-user involvement masterson and owen (2006) apply lukes’ theory of power to the mental health field, and illustrate it using the example of decision-making around medication. the traditional weberian understanding of power is apparent at the first face of power: here the authority of a psychiatrist is very visible. in addition though, covert use of power controls the agenda of what can be discussed. if both the psychiatrist and the service-user were to discuss the relative merits of different drugs, with the final decision resting with the service-user, this can be considered an equal exercise of power at the level of covert (hidden) power. what is more common, however, is that the discussion might preclude the use of expensive medications, or that the service-user could cope without medication. these issues are not on the agenda for discussion, as the psychiatrist sets the agenda and uses covert power to preempt the decision-making process. masterson and owen (2006) link the final face of latent power to a foucauldian understanding of power to shape the discourse within the mental health field, to de-legitimize any other alternative explanations than the psychiatric orthodoxy of a biochemical explanation for mental distress. this positive power to create the boundaries of acceptable understandings of mental distress means that considerations of issues such as treatment options for people are predetermined as a priori facts, and so people remain acquiescent and compliant to a psychiatric interpretation of their needs. pilgrim (2005, p. 25) points out that service-users engaging in user involvement do so from the basis of acceptance that mental health services exist and will continue to do so. therefore any changes will be modifications to pre-existing service configurations. what is never at issue is the a priori assumption that mental health services are the most appropriate place for mental distress to be treated or controlled. the taken-for-grantedness of mental health services within society is another manifestation of invisible power. returning to gaventa’s power cube, the analyses of power within the mental health system by masterson and owen (2006) and pilgrim (2005, 2009) demonstrate how the dimension of the three forms of power can be useful to explain the mental health field. there was ample evidence from participants in my study about the visible forms of power at meetings, illustrated by this comment by a female peer-advocate: “i’ve been to meetings where the consultant psychiatrists and nurses have completely ignored me, i mean you would not be there for them.” denials of recognition in general are an issue of social justice, (lewis, 2009; mcdaid, 2009;), and a prominent feature of user-involvement dynamics also evident in my participants’ accounts. hidden power defines the boundaries of what can and cannot be discussed, as another participant points out. he had given a lot of consideration to the power dynamics operating within the mental health services. he explicitly refers to the dimensions of power: if you’ve ever studied power, the dimensions of power, you have certain people who are gatekeepers. you can actually use procedures to prevent something studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 60 liz brosnan being discussed that you don’t want discussed. so there are very many covert ways that certain things can be manipulated, i’m not even saying this happened consciously but i’m very well aware that certain people, … can manipulate situations where the service-users do not become involved. (male peer-advocate) here, the peer advocate highlights the ability of “gate-keeping” professionals to prevent service-user involvement by blocking discussion of the need to consult service-users about initiatives being established. he is met by silence when questioning if service-users were consulted about an initiative. he also referred to the power of psychiatry and other powerful agents to determine what can and cannot even be discussed, which undermines the perspective of service-users. the same participant gives another example of power, this time of the invisible power of the cultural mindset. he observed the influence of the “professional knows best” attitude: “their opinion because it’s an expert opinion is worth more than the service user’s perspective … for some people that’s so set, it’s such an integral part of their mindset that it’s virtually impossible to change.” thus, the service-user perspective is always on the defensive, given the taken-for-grantedness of the dominant psychiatric professional perspective. gaventa’s (2006) power cube suggests different decision-making spaces exist. closed spaces abound; committees at the highest level nationally where decisions about budget allocations are taken; organizations for mental health professions (closed in the sense that membership requires long years of study and significant resources) and mental health tribunals. all are examples of closed spaces where service-users have no say in decision-making. there was also ample evidence of how power plays out in the invited spaces of involvement, those within the ‘gift’ of the mental health services. these included formal operational meetings in various mental health settings. one participant referred to how she felt “belittled and it bloody well hurt” after meetings in her early days, before she developed strong defences against hurtful power dynamics. another participant spoke about the exclusion she experienced in some meetings: i have felt excluded . . . my self-esteem would get lower and lower, i’d be powerless, i wouldn’t have a voice so would be sitting in a big blob of fear not able to talk. and very often i would have really, really good stuff in my head … but i’d be too frightened to say it and then low and behold somebody else at the table would say it and i would realise what i was going to bring to the meeting was very valuable but i would lose it because i would feel this sense of isolation around the table. (female peer-advocate) this participant is very explicit about her experience of exclusion. there was also, however, evidence of support and solidarity created by de-briefing sessions after meetings such as these. participants discussed the challenges of participating in difficult meetings with the more experienced service-users and professional allies, thereby forming solidarity bonds as a strategy of resistance in the created/claimed spaces. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 power and participation 61 created/claimed spaces were evident through social activities that occurred outside the formal meetings and training courses. part of what occurred in claimed spaces was a gain in ‘power within.’ gaventa (2006, p. 24) defines power within as gaining a sense of self-identity, confidence and agency that presupposes political action. solidarity increased participants’ resilience, enabling them to persevere and also acted as a countervailing response to the feelings of powerlessness generated at meetings. positive support from each other allowed the participants to develop their own power within as individuals. ‘power with’ describes a form of collective group strength people develop as a result of the opportunity claimed spaces can create. gaventa (2006, p. 24) defines this form of collective power with as a synergy which can emerge through partnerships and collaboration with others, or through processes of collective action and alliance building. there was evidence of participants developing power within and power with in the created/claimed spaces, as illustrated by this participant: i think the more the service-user is empowered the more changes will happen . . . the more i’m empowered, i’m not going to go in and let somebody tell me what he or she thinks i should be doing, so there’s a change. sometimes they’re very small changes that are happening but they will ripple out, a bit like armstrong on the moon, one small step for man. (female peer-advocate) the participants provided evidence in relation to power operating at the second two levels of involvement, operational and individual. participants reported positive experiences in the operational committees of the team in the study, of feeling listened to and respected. however dismissive attitudes were also reported, which can be effective in reducing any sense of agency a service-user can feel: “there is still an element of, well some [professionals], they make their disdain pretty obvious.” participants were clear about the importance of the therapeutic relationship: “i think the understanding of how important that therapeutic relationship is also feeds back into how important it is for the service user’s voice to be heard, you can’t have one without the other.” one female participant expressed a common fear of the consequences of speaking out: “it could affect my treatment you know and they might stop listening.” clearly power dynamics were experienced as obstacles by the participants at the operational and individual levels. before i conclude my discussion of the power-cube as a useful tool for problematizing user involvement, i present a final illustrative anecdote related by a participant: i went with an advocate to a meeting where we presented bullet points of what service-users thought was good in the services and what they think needs attention. and a really nice kind of involving service provider clapped the advocate on the shoulder, “oh well done, well done.” i mean if we would do that to a consultant who just gave a presentation, go up to the consultant, tap his shoulder and [say] “oh well done, oh didn’t you do great there, well done, well done, how did it feel, how did it feel?” i don’t think that would be appreciated. (female peer-advocate) studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 62 liz brosnan this comment is an example of the positive force of power which is significant from the participants’ perspective. this forms a countervailing force to the power-over experienced at a personal human level from too many psychiatrists. yet the power imbalance in their respective positions renders the supportive gesture and verbal congratulations far more loaded than intended. once the power imbalance is pointed out in a graphic reversal of the gesture, the incongruousness of a subordinate service-user clapping a psychiatrist on the shoulder is illustrative of the power dynamics at play. as a particular incident of power we can place it onto the power cube along all three power dimensions. the power is visible in that the consultant psychiatrist has the visible power of his position as team director to invite the service-users to present to the professionals. he has set the agenda (hidden power), in this case to give some space to service-users to present their perspective. this is an opportunity for them to contest their positioning (invisible power) within the power structures by naming practices that position them in devalued disempowered positions. the other two dimensions are ‘operational’ involvement, then on the ‘invited’ spaces dimension. this example illustrates the explanatory potential of the model to critique the different elements interacting between powerful and subordinate actors. conclusion this paper sketched out some of the history of service-user involvement within the uk, our nearest neighbour, and closest model for developments in irish mental health services. the lessons learnt by the service-user movement elsewhere are applicable to current trends influencing mental health services in ireland. service-user involvement is a new development in the irish context, resisted fiercely by some interests, and welcomed as a potential source of reform by others. like recovery, it is being incorporated into the official discourses without sufficient attention being paid to the complexities of the social justice issues inherent in the user-perspective and failing to problematize the power dynamics service-users must engage with if they choose to enter the new spaces into which they are being invited. gaventa and cornwall (2008) describe the interplay between knowledge and power in situations where the knowledge and experience of subaltern groups is sought out by professionals in participatory forums. there is a real risk that the presence of service-users at the table legitimizes the practices of the establishment, providing a more democratic face by appearing to include service-users. without addressing the underlying power dynamics one must ask to what extent the energy and radical potential of the serviceuser movement is being hijacked by illusionary inclusion. the power cube (gaventa, 2006) was presented as a conceptual tool to frame some of the power dynamics service-users encounter if they accept the invitation into these participatory spaces. in order to avoid becoming pawns for legitimizing establishment decision-making, service-users must become studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 power and participation 63 aware of the hidden and invisible forms of power and learn to assess their potential influence on decision-making. awareness of the power dynamics operating in user involvement forums can be heightened by strategic adoption of the power cube as a social movement tool to illuminate power inequities. participants in my research had many years of experience between them, and were optimistic about the spaces being created by one mental health team, but aware also of how difficult it is to influence a system steeped in long institutionalized ways of working. they believe service-user involvement can change the way services deliver care. time will tell. acknowledgements i want to thank the editors of this special issue, jijian voronka and alison howell and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. i also want to acknowledge the generous contribution of dr. odette clarke, and anne o’dea in editing the current version and dr. mary keys who advised on the statutory aspects of the mental health act 2001. i would also like to thank my colleagues: jim walsh, louie maguire and stephan gharbaoui for their comments on the current service-user movement in ireland. finally i wish to thank my phd supervisors, dr. orla mcdonnell, university of limerick, and dr. elizabeth mckay, brunel university, for their constant support. i also wish to acknowledge the support of the irish social sciences platform (issp) funded by the higher education authority under the programme for research in third-level institutions, cycle 4, which is providing a doctoral scholarship for my research at the university of limerick. notes 1 the term service-user is used here to refer to people with experience of mental illhealth and/or of past or current use of mental health services. this is the commonly used terminology in ireland and the uk. language and how people are labeled is an important social justice issue, given the widespread stigma and discrimination associated with mental health issues. service-user is a slightly less contentious term than the other usage in the anglophone world, that of consumer of services. the use of the term service-user is a rejection of the associated neo-liberal meaning which developed from notions of marketization of health care. a more politicized term is that of survivor. however the concept of being a survivor of mental health services does not readily sit with the idea of engaging in participatory practices with the very system which is considered oppressive. a term gaining in acceptance by the serviceuser movement is that of “expert-by experience.” 2 recovery is written with a capital r throughout as it refers to a particular form of discourse within mental health services. 3 the mental health commission, a statutory body, was established following the enactment of the mental health act 2001.this act replaced the old legislation dating back to 1945. it was enacted as breakthrough legalization in response to pending criticism from the european court of human rights for failure by the irish government to protect the human rights of people detained in psychiatric institutions (keys, 2002; o’neill, 2008). the mental health commission has statutory powers to oversee the operation and licensing of approved mental health centres and to publish standards and guidelines to promote best practice. it established the mental health inspectorate team in 2001 and operates mental health tribunals since 2006, following enactment of part two of the mh act 2001. mental health tribunals review the detention of involuntary patients within 21 days, unless the patient is discharged before the mh tribunal. in that case, a patient has the right to request a tribunal. for a recent review of studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 64 liz brosnan the effectiveness of the mental health commission in protecting the rights of serviceusers see (murray, 2011). 4 irish government policy on mental health services was updated from the previous policy, the psychiatric services planning for the future, which dated from 1984, in the long awaited publication of a vision for change: report of the expert group on mental health policy (2006). 5 it is important to point out the diversity of the service-user movement. there are many strands within the movement who resist, even reject altogether, the care offered by mental health services. groups such as mad pride, mind freedom, and hearing voices network are alternative spaces of resistance. (see chamberlin, 2004, for a discussion of user-run alternatives to traditional services). 6 recently published policy guidelines for payment of expenses to service-users attending approved meetings with health officials fall far below these rates. there is no reference to payment for time. (hse 2011) references amnesty international, ireland. [n.d.] http://www.amnesty.ie/mentalhealth amnesty international. (2003). mental illness: the neglected quarter. dublin: amnesty international, irish section. retrieved from: http://amnesty.ie/reports/mental-health amnesty international. (2006). briefing paper, mental health, let’s make it happen. dublin: irish section. retrieved from http://amnesty.ie/reports/mental-health. baggott, r. (2005). a funny thing happened on the way to the forum? reforming patient and public involvement in the nhs in england. public administration, 83(3), 533-551. baker, j., lynch, k., cantillon, s., & walsh, j. (2004). equality from theory to action. basingstoke, new york: palgrave macmillan. barnes, m., & cotterell, p. (eds.). (2012). critical perspectives on user involvement. bristol, chicago: the polity press. beresford, p. (2002). user involvement in research and evaluation: liberation or regulation? social policy and society, 1(02), 95-105. beresford, p. (2003). it’s our lives: a short theory of knowledge, distance and experience. london: osp for citizen press. beresford, p., & wallcraft, j. (1997). psychiatric system survivors and emancipatory research: issues, overlaps and differences. in c. barnes & g. mercer (eds.), doing disability research (pp. 66-87). leeds: the disability press. brennan, d. (in press). the rise and fall of irish asylum utilisation: a theoretical exploration. in p. m. prior (ed.), asylums, mental health care and the irish: historical studies 1800-2010. dublin: irish academic press. campbell, p. (2001). the role of users of psychiatric services in service development: influence not power. psychiatric bulletin, 25, 87-88. campbell, p. (2005). from little acorns—the mental health service user movement. in a. bell & p. lindley (eds.), beyond the water towers: the unfinished revolution in mental health services 1985-2005 (pp. 73-82). london: sainsbury centre for mental health. chamberlin, j. (2004). user-run services. in j. read, l. r. mosher, & r. p. bentall (eds.), models of madness psychological, social and biological approaches to schizophrenia (pp. 283-290). hove: routledge. chambers, r. (1997). whose reality counts? putting the first last. london: intermediate technology publications. carey, m. (2009). critical commentary: happy shopper? the problem with service user and carer participation. british journal of social work, 39(1), 179-188. cornwall, a. (2002). locating citizen participation. ids bulletin, 33(2), 49-58. department of health. (1984). the psychiatric services—planning for the future. report of a study group on the development of the psychiatric service. dublin: stationery office. department of health and children. (2006) a vision for change: report of the expert group on mental health policy. dublin: stationary office. department of health and children, & health service executive. (2008). national strategy for service user involvement in the irish health service 2008-2013. retrieved from http://www. http://www.amnesty.ie/mentalhealth http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/publications/your_service,_your_say_consumer_affairs/strategy/service_user_involvement.pdf studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 power and participation 65 hse.ie/eng/services/publications/your_service,_your_say_consumer_affairs/strategy/ service_user_involvement.pdf. keogh, f. (2009). from vision to action? an analysis of the implementation of a vision for change. dublin: mental health commission. forbes, j., & sashidharan, s. p. (1997) user involvement in services incorporation or challenge? british journal of social work, 27(4), 481-498 fraser, n. (2007). feminist politics in the age of recognition: a two-dimensional approach to gender justice. studies in social justice, 1(1), 23-35. gaventa, j. (2006). finding the spaces for change: a power analysis. ids bulletin, 37(6), 23-33. gaventa, j., & cornwall, a. (2008). power and knowledge. in p. reason & h. bradbury (eds.), the sage handbook of action research, participative inquiry and practice (pp. 172-189). london, thousand oaks ca, new delhi, singapore: sage publications heenan, d. (2009). mental health policy in northern ireland: the nature and of extent of user involvement. social policy and society, 8(04), 451-462. hyde, a., lohan, m., & mcdonnell, o. (2004). sociology for health professionals in ireland. dublin: institute of public administration. kemp, p. (2010). introduction to mental health service user involvement. in j. weinstein (ed.), mental health, service user involvement and recovery (pp. 15-29). london: jessica kingsley publishers. kirby, p. & murphy, m. (2009). state and civil society in ireland: conclusions and mapping alternatives. in d. o’broin & p. kirby (eds.), power, dissent and democracy—civil society and the state in ireland (pp. 143-159). dublin: a & a farmar. lakeman, r., walsh, j., & mcgowan, p. (2007). service users, authority, power and protest: a call for renewed activism. mental health practice, 11(4), 1216. lewis, l. (2009). politics of recognition: what can a human rights perspective contribute to understanding users’ experiences of involvement in mental health services? social policy and society, 8(02), 257-274. lewis, l. (2010). it’s people’s whole lives: gender, class and the emotion work of user involvement in mental health services. gender, work & organization, 19(3), 225-344. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2009.00504.x lukes, s. (1974). power: a radical view. new york: macmillian. lukes, s. (2005). power: a radical view (2nd ed.). houndsmills, basingstoke, and new york: palgrave macmillan. lynch, k., & walsh, j. (2009). love, care and solidarity: what is and is not commodifiable. in k. lynch, k, j. baker, & m. lyons (eds.), affective equality love, care and injustice (pp. 35-53). houndsmills, basingstoke, hampshire: palgrave macmillan. masterson, s., & owen, s. (2006). mental health service user’s social and individual empowerment: using theories of power to elucidate far-reaching strategies. journal of mental health, 15(1), 19-34. mcdaid, s. (2009). an equality of condition framework for user involvement in mental health policy and planning: evidence from participatory action research. disability & society, 24(4), 461-474. mckinley, s., & yiannoullou, s. (2012). changing minds: unleasing the potential of mental health service users a critical perspective on current models of service user involvement and their impact on wellbeing and “recovery.” in m. barnes, & p. cotterell (eds.), critical perspectives on user involvement (pp. 115-128). bristol, chicago il: the polity press. mcgruder, j. (2001). life experience is not a disease or why medicalizing madness is counterproductive to recovery. occupational therapy in mental health, 17(3), 59-79 mental health commission (2005) a vision for a recovery model in irish mental health services. dublin: mental health commission. murray, c. (2011). the role of the mental health commission in irish mental health law: interrogating the effectiveness of the statutory functions of the commission. medico legal journal of ireland, 93(17). national economic and social forum. (2007). mental health and social inclusion. dublin: national economic and social development office. national service user executive. (2010). second opinions 2009. dublin: national service user executive. retrieved from http://www.nsue.ie/news/2010/jan/29/launch-second-opinionssummary-report-nsue-survey-/ http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/publications/your_service,_your_say_consumer_affairs/strategy/service_user_involvement.pdf http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/publications/your_service,_your_say_consumer_affairs/strategy/service_user_involvement.pdf studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 66 liz brosnan o’neill, a.-m. (2008). irish mental health law. dublin: first law. pilgrim, d. (2005). protest and co-option-the voice of mental health service users. in a. bell & p. lindley (eds.), beyond the water towers: the unfinished revolution in mental health services 1985-2005 (pp. 17-26). london: sainsbury centre for mental health. pilgrim, d. (2009). key concepts in mental health. london: sage. rafferty, m. (2011). behind the walls. in m. r. m. films. ireland: rte. ralph, r. o. (2000). recovery. psychiatric rehabilitation skills, 4(3), 480-517. repper, j., & perkins, r. (2003). social inclusion and recovery, a model for mental health practice. edinburgh, london, new york, oxford, philadelphia, st louis, sydney, toronto: bailliere tindall. rogers, a., & pilgrim, d. (2005). a sociology of mental health and illness (3rd ed.). berkshire, new york: open university press, mcgraw-hill education. rose, d., fleischman, p., & schofield, p. (2010). perceptions of user involvement: a user-led study. international journal of social psychiatry, 56(4), 389-401. rose, d., & lucas, j. (2007). the user and survivor movement in europe. in m. knapp, d. mcdaid, e. mossialos, & g. thornicroft (eds.), mental health policy and practice across europe (pp. 336-355). maidenhead, new york: open university press. sapouna, l. (2006). tracing evidence of institutionalisation in the process of de-institutionalisation; the irish case. in l. sapouna & p. herrmann (eds.), knowledge in mental health; reclaiming the social (pp. 85-99). new york: nova science. speed, e. (2002) irish mental health social movements: a consideration of movement habitus. irish journal of sociology, 11, 62-80. stickley, t., & wright, n. (2011). the british research evidence for recovery, papers published between 2006 and 2009 (inclusive). part one: a review of the peer-reviewed literature using a systematic approach. journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing, 18, 247–256. sweeney, a. (2009). so what is survivor research? in a. sweeney, p. beresford, a. p. faulkner, m. nettle, & d. rose (eds.), this is survivor research (pp. 22-37). ross-on-wye, pccs books ltd turner-crowson, j., & wallcraft, j. (2002). the recovery vision for mental health services and research: a british perspective. psychiatric rehabilitation journal, 25(3), 245. wallcraft, j. (2008). jan wallcraft explains why she has resigned from the uk mental health research network. mental health today, feburary 2008. wallcraft, j., read, j., & sweeney, a. (2003). on our own terms: users and survivors of mental health services. working together for support and change. london: user survey steering group, sainsbury centre for mental health. young, i. m. (2000). inclusion and democracy. oxford: oxford university press. property, propriety and democracy studies in social justice volume 5, issue 2, 149-165, 2011   correspondence address: mark devenney, faculty of arts, university of brighton, brighton bn2 0jy, united kingdom. tel.: +44 (0) 1273 600900; email: m.devenney@brighton.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 property, propriety and democracy mark devenney faculty of arts, university of brighton, united kingdom abstract the redefinition of rights of equality and liberty by radical and deliberative democrats during the last decades of the 20th century resulted in the denial that a consideration of property is integral to political philosophy. theorizing property as intrinsically political demands a return to marx but on terms he may not have recognized. i outline a politics of property in this paper contending that there can be no universal justification for any regime of property. property is by definition the institution of a wrong. the articulation of something as property establishes a border, determining what can be owned, how far ownership extends, where it is limited, as well as terms of use and terms of abuse. it establishes a set of property relations, and defines a vocabulary of the proper. here sovereign state power is enlisted to enforce relations of property beneficial to some, but not all. a challenge to any political regime must of necessity put in to question both the forms of proper behaviour, and the regime of property. these are intrinsically related to each other. i conclude by arguing that democracy is always improper. property, in all of its forms entails enclosure. enclosure requires the drawing and the maintenance of boundaries of exclusion and inclusion. the sovereign determination of the proper, as well as of the exception to the proper defines trespass. trespass is a form of democratic enactment when, and if, it destabilises enclosure. introduction writing in the mid-1980s, gerry cohen challenged locke’s liberal presumption of a property in the self which legitimates expropriation of resources external to the self. cohen’s arguments assume, counter-intuitively, that the world is jointly owned. the division of the world into mine and thine is thus subject to the potential veto of any co-owner. challenging nozick’s arguments in anarchy, state and utopia cohen writes that “a union of self ownership and unequal distribution of worldly resources leads to indefinitely great inequality of private property in external goods and, hence, to inequality of condition, on any view of what equality of condition is” (cohen, 1995, p. 69). twenty-five years later property is rarely considered as an intrinsically political matter for political philosophers. this article assumes, with cohen, that property is of the essence of politics. it defends a politics of impropriety, and of the improper, contending that regimes of property are the axes around which inequality is maintained. however, i reject both the liberal account of property in the self 150 mark devenney   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   ultimately derived from locke and cohen’s marxist defence of original joint ownership of the world. instead, i develop an account of property as a contingent political intervention which articulates something as property in the very act of appropriating it. in insisting that all property claims are contingent, as opposed to natural, this argument politicizes all attempts to limit access to worlds recast as property. in doing so, i also explore the failure of post-marxist and deliberative theorists to engage with the politics of property. thus, in retrieving a political tradition which rejects the naturalization of property, whether communal or individual, i delineate a radical political theory which rejects any marxist essentialism, while nevertheless insisting that a properly political theory must contend with the politics of property. what is proper to politics? three exemplars let me begin with three moments in the history of democratic politics and thought: solon plutarch’s lives records that in 594bc solon determined that all the debts of athenian citizens should be forgiven, and that debt using one’s own body as security would henceforth be illegal. as plutarch writes: “...the first thing which he settled was that what debts remained should be forgiven, and no man, for the future should engage the body of his debtor for security” ref. solon abolished the mortgage system for athenian citizens, causing, as plutarch again notes, much anxiety among the wealthy. it is thus perhaps unsurprising that aristotle later characterized democracy, with barely concealed dismay, as “…when the indigent, and not the men of property, rule” (aristotle politics, book 3). while solon’s reforms preceded the development of athenian democracy, he established a crucial link between freedom and property, explicitly contending that debt should never be taken out using the body as a guarantee, and that mortgages enslaved the poor ensuring the appropriation of resources crucial to the living of life. locke and rousseau in “of property”, the key chapter in locke’s 17th century defence of liberal democracy, two treatises on government, he contends that every individual is an inalienable property, in themselves. the right to life, locke contends, is god-given. because this is an unalienable right no man can assent to become a slave. however, given their self-ownership, men can sell their labour. crucially, then, locke attributes natural rights to all men in a state of nature, natural rights which are accorded to us by god, and which serve to distinguish men from the beasts, over whom men collectively exercise proprietary rights: …it is evident, that though the things of nature are given in common, yet man, by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it, had still in himself the great foundation of property; and that, which made up the great part of what he applied to the support or comfort of his being, when invention and arts had property, propriety and democracy 151 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   improved the conveniencies of life, was perfectly his own, and did not belong in common to others. (locke, ii. s.5) the central claim here is that the free individual (man) has property in himself, thus establishing a crucial nexus linking property and liberty. as balibar has argued, locke does not treat property merely as the enumeration of things, but instead develops a thesis of “legitimate appropriation… . in this sense, to speak of a property in one’s person or in oneself is not exactly to issue a contradictory proposition, pushing persons in to the order of things; it rather tries to designate the ultimate point where propriety meets with property, where “to be” rejoins with “to have”’ (balibar, 2002, p. 303). locke may thus be said to develop a liberal political theory founded upon an ontology of being. to be free, one might argue, is to have property over oneself. once property in self is alienated from the self, one is no longer free, and thus no longer a self. it is in this way that the mixing of individual labour with the external world renders private that which is originally given as common. in his initial formulations of property, locke limits what can be owned, arguing that no man should own so much that there is insufficient for others, and that that which is owned should not spoil. money however, removes these limitations: . … before the desire of having more than one needed had altered the intrinsic value of things, which depends only on their usefulness to the life of man; or had agreed, that a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay, should be worth a great piece of flesh, or a whole heap of corn; though men had a right to appropriate by their labour, each one of himself, as much of the things of nature, as he could use; yet this could not be much, nor to the prejudice of others, where the same plenty was left to those who would use the same industry. (locke, ii. 5. 37) the introduction of money engenders economic inequality, but does so on terms which allow men to assent to this inequality, through the exchange of a durable measure of exchange—money. locke, then, justifies the existence of private property on the basis of his view that each individual has property in themselves. property in self is an expression of the natural right to life and liberty, given to all men, by god. but god is of course problematic. in the absence of any proof of god’s existence locke cannot justify this idea of property in the self, or indeed the property we have in the external world. he is left with a sovereign fiat, secured only through belief. thus he is left in a position close to that of rousseau, who begins his discourse on the origin of inequality thus: the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. from how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” (rousseau, 1754) in this text rousseau contends that inequality, generated as a consequence of the enclosure of the world, is social, not natural. for rousseau the very existence of 152 mark devenney   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   property depends upon finding people “simple enough to believe.” this phrase is no mistake: property requires unquestioned belief if it is to be sustained. thus rousseau ascribes the origin of property to innocent belief and an original act of enclosure which that belief permits. marx marx extends rousseau’s argument. he contends that the existence of private property, and of private ownership and control of the means of production, forces those who legally own nothing but their labour into selling it as a commodity. note only two key moments in this analysis: those who own property do not have to work; those who own no property have their labour legally redefined as a property which can then be sold in return for a wage. enclosure both rearticulates land as private property and forces those who hold traditional claims over land to sell their labour as property. rather than analyzing property in terms of a primitive ontology which presupposes ownership over the self, then, marx understands property in relation to the articulated totality that is capital. if locke derives property from an ontology of the individual, marx views the individual as a derivation of a particular set of political conditions. he interprets the liberal individual as the ideological counterpart to the relations of property established in capitalist society. private property, for marx, is the means whereby labour is alienated both from itself and from what it produces and it is thus that he writes, “the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property” (marx & engels, 1985, p. 498). these examples are in one sense all too familiar. but they serve as an initial indication of the central role played by debates about property in critical political work. let me introduce my substantive argument by identifying four key elements in these debates. first, property has to be justified because there is no foundation or essence which justifies its existence a priori. in the absence of god, locke can justify private property only on the premise that an individual has property in himself. however, this rests merely on a belief. the maintenance of property, the definition of what is proper and improper, is political from the beginning precisely because justification has to be found. in this sense it is properly a concern of the demos. second, there is an intrinsic link between sovereign power and property. solon’s act is extraordinary because it violates the normal order of things. in most instances sovereign power guarantees the order of property, through both legal and violent means. there is no means whereby property, as a relation of exclusion, may be maintained, other than through the exercise of legal, and thus sovereign, power. third, this regime of property delimits possible relations between humans. it is political not only in the sense that it is caught in an abyssal search for its own justification, but in the equally important sense that the claim to property requires the exclusion of some. property relations structure social relations in a dynamic fashion, as they are always contested, and are inevitably a site of antagonistic struggles. rancière’s distinction between the police and politics is useful here, and i shall contend that it is the police who maintain established legal bounds of property. politics must therefore put these forms of policing into question. fourth, because property has no foundation in nature, politics is in part about the property, propriety and democracy 153 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   reactivation of the bounds of the proper. this reactivation may occur in three related dimensions, which are nonetheless relatively autonomous of each other. the bounds which maintain property as exclusive may be transgressed. this transgression refuses the division of worlds into mine and thine. second, this violation is also a form of impropriety, an attack on the bounds of common sense: a particular order of property correlates with certain forms of behaviour, forms of behaviour which in being reiterated delineate the bounds of the sensible. third, the violation of an established regime of property, or of the forms of propriety associated therewith, rearticulates subject relations. a dominant ordering of property categorizes some as legal owners, some as criminals, some as enforcers, others as creators. this distribution of possible subject positions is disturbed by acts which challenge the relation between property boundaries, the certain distribution of the sensible and subjective possibility. despite this lineage, property is rarely addressed in contemporary democratic theory. there are notable exceptions, mostly in the marxist tradition (e.g. gerry cohen) but the “democratic common sense” after the central and eastern european revolutions of 1989 has tended to depoliticize property. in the next section i outline this common sense, before returning to a politics of property and the proper. in contrast to the radical democratic and deliberative positions, i contend that an analysis of property is intrinsic to the very definition of the political. the democratic common sense in the past twenty years two innovative accounts of democracy have recast stale debates between liberals and marxists about democracy. deliberative accounts of democracy were inspired by habermas’s between facts and norms (1996) while radical democratic accounts were inspired by laclau and mouffes’ hegemony and socialist strategy (1985). authors working in one or other tradition insist upon fundamental differences between these approaches: but as visions of democracy, they share a common sense which occludes certain questions and privileges others. in particular, arguments concentrate on questions concerning democratic willformation, a pluralisation of substantive conceptions of the good, insistence upon the complexity of modern societies and a rejection of marxism. contingency these accounts all affirm the contingency of all political claims we make. for postmarxist theorists such as laclau, contingency has ontological status: he insists on the “… impossibility of the a priori transcendental constitution of any positive content” (laclau, 2000, p. 186). for deliberative democrats, contingency concerns all substantive claims about how to organize society, but there are certain quasitranscendental preconditions for the thinking of democratic will-formation, most clearly formulated by habermas in between fact and norms. despite disagreement about the universality of the quasi-transcendental conditions of communicative rationality,1 the common sense asserts that no consensus is ever fixed, that democratic practices challenge established consensus and the best that democracies can achieve is a tenuous consensus, open to further challenges, within a set of rules more or less agreed. this represents an uneasy compromise between agonistic and 154 mark devenney   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   deliberative accounts. deliberative democrats claim the universality of certain constitutive rights, which, they argue, guarantee the very possibility of deliberation. while post-marxists contend that these basic rights are not sacrosanct, insisting that what rights mean is itself part of the agonistic struggle, and thus concerns substantive matters. for radical democrats such as mouffe constitutional rights are the contingent outcome of political struggle which already delimit ways of being, and are thus not value neutral. nonetheless, both accounts privilege the possibility of putting into question rules of the democratic game which once seemed sacrosanct, while recognizing that certain constitutional and political arrangements are more suited to democratic politics than others. for both accounts substantive questions about how to live the good life admit only of contingent answers.2 pluralism because all substantive versions of the good life are deemed contingent, authors in these traditions insist upon an irreducible pluralism, in some cases an axiomatic pluralism, against all forms of monism. this characterizes deliberative accounts, spinozist versions of the multitude, as well as radical democratic accounts of hegemony. pluralism entails that there is no common good, that any consensus about values is partial and ultimately that democracy should institutionalize this pluralism. importantly, this pluralism extends to all aspects of organized political life, including for example property relations; and this immediately points to a crucial limitation of these accounts. while it is certainly the case that there are many different accounts of what a just system of property might be, the very existence of a particular regime of property requires that some are excluded and thus cannot participate on equal terms. this must mean that certain regimes of property are incompatible with democratic politics, and thus that there are restrictions on democratic pluralism. radical democrats would simply respond that pluralism is axiomatic and ontological, and that while there are no a priori reasons for privileging one form of life over another, what in fact prevails is the outcome of hegemonic political struggles. in the realm of ontological purity this may well be the case: but any sort of radical democrat committed to pluralism must concur with the view that certain regimes of property are antagonistic to a radical democratic politics.3 articulation for deliberative and radical democratic theorists, politics does not address a preexisting political will. instead, it concerns the articulation of a will through argument, disagreement and sometimes antagonism. deliberative accounts foreground the possibility of a consensus, premised upon an implicit idea(l) of reason, which underpins communicative interaction. radical democrats point to the antagonistic nature of political interaction. either way, politics concerns the formation of a will which does not pre-exist the process of agonistic deliberation. in part because these debates have been shaped by a concern over the status of communicative idealization, there has been less of a focus on the politics of property, production and reproduction. there are, though, elements of these property, propriety and democracy 155 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   theories which lend themselves to this conclusion. thus, issues such as abortion, or genetic intervention, are recast as matters to be argued about, but which cannot finally be resolved. the consequence is that less attention is devoted to the analysis of the ramifications of such interventions for the very constitution of political life. deliberative democrats, to be crude, insist that what is of most concern is the ethical self-understanding of the species. at the moment when this ethical selfunderstanding is challenged by the rendering contingent of nature, either a quasireligious invocation of nature is invoked or we are asked to speculate about how a future human made by us might feel, given that we exercised control over the production of their life. in contrast, radical democrats, having insisted upon the radical contingency of so called nature, do not even think through how to address the rendering contingent of the genetic code for life. moreover, there is no recognition that the rendering contingent of our “underlying nature” has determinate rather than contingent consequences for the lives of those to come. what is never focused on is the regime of property which accompanies these technological developments.4 reframing democratic subjectivity deliberative and radical democratic theorists contend that liberalism is wrong to essentialize the subject of rights, both in methodological terms and as the basis for a naturalization of human rights. far from being pre-political, rights are always contested. this critique of liberalism is supported by the rejection of a marxism which assumes the existence of political subjects whose interests precede those thematized in argument and antagonistic debate. in its most idealistic versions, the social whole represents itself to itself. politics occurs under the constraint of unanimity, as in rousseau’s account of the general will: the state is simply an administrative body implementing, without complication, decisions which emanate from the gathered citizenry (ollman, 1977, p. 33). instead of individual subjectivity, we are presented with the transparency of a macro-subject, society, which like a healthy body is in full control of all its functions, but which, unlike a human body, does not suffer the complications of illness, age and uncertainty. on these accounts, by contrast, the democratic subject is itself the contingent outcome of political struggles which put into question the claim that the subject is in possession of itself, and knows in advance its wants or needs. four key claims thus ground these accounts. politics is contingent; the outcome of any political struggle is not determined in advance; a political will is articulated in the context of an irreducible pluralism; and the subject has no essential interest, ontologically prior to this articulation. but what happens to property, to the analysis of ownership and control over the means whereby we produce our collective lives? i ask this question, given that both accounts of democracy trace their roots back to the radical democratic tradition, a tradition which has insisted upon challenging the various forms of enclosure of our worlds. this focus on pluralism and contingency does not of course foreclose the politicization of property relations. however, property is not viewed as intrinsic to the very definition of the political. property is that which may be politicized, but it is not political in itself. whereas for locke, rousseau or marx, to think the political is to think relations of property, for late twenty-first century radical democratic theorists, this link is rendered contingent. the critique of marxism undertaken by 156 mark devenney   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   both deliberative and radical democratic theorists thus results in the depoliticization of property.5 for many post-marxists, the attempt to interrogate property-relations has the whiff of a marxist essentialism. for deliberative democrats, influenced by habermas, systemic issues require complex forms of decision-making which are not necessarily in keeping with arduous and demanding democratic practices. habermas contends that economic inequalities are damaging to democracy: one of his earlier texts, legitimation crisis, analyzed how the welfare state offsets the damaging consequences of capital accumulation. however, a central contention of his between facts and norms is that economic rights are derivative of the primary right to equal participation in deliberation. the text justifies the universality of certain basic rights—to liberty, status, legal protection and political autonomy—as preconditions for the formulation of a sovereign will. but he then writes: … the rights listed thus far imply the following: 5. basic rights to the provision of living conditions that are socially, technologically and ecologically safeguarded, insofar as the current circumstances make this necessary if citizens are to have equal opportunities to utilise the civil rights listed in (1) through (4) … (habermas 1996, p. 122 ). the next sentence puts this radical gesture firmly in its place: “i limit my comments to the four absolutely justified categories of civil rights; the category of social and ecological rights, which can be justified in relative terms [emphasis added], i postpone to the final chapter” (habermas 1996, p. 123). in that final chapter habermas argues that the development of a social welfare paradigm within law recognized that legal freedoms were meaningless when actual freedom could not be exercised as a consequence of real inequalities. the transformation of bourgeois law in western europe thus resulted in a series of entitlements such as pensions, welfare provision, and property. both property law and contract law, were, he notes, restricted to compensate for asymmetries in economic power. however, the social welfare model engenders a welfare state paternalism which impairs the individual autonomy it is supposed to encourage. the mistake of the social and the liberal paradigms of law is, he contends, that both focus on the question of how to ensure private autonomy. neither sees the relationship between private and public autonomy as necessary, and thus both underplay the legitimacy derived from the forms of communication through which alone autonomy is expressed (habermas, 1996, pp. 402-409). politics concerns processes of will-formation, rather than the conditions within which lives are produced and reproduced. it might be thought that a more recent generation of deliberative and radical democrats had begun to question these delimitations of politics. two recent examples demonstrate that this is not the case. norval’s text, aversive democracy, aims to rescue an analytic/wittgensteinian account of ordinary language, in order to rethink deliberative and post-marxist accounts of democracy. she reconstructs the grammar of democracy, asking: how is it we become democratic subjects; how do claims emerge as political claims, as opposed to the ordinary activities of citizens; and, last, how might existing grammars be challenged? these concerns lead her to focus on the rhetorical practices, vocabularies and practical needs central to the ongoing re-enactments of property, propriety and democracy 157 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   a democratic ethos. her account of aversive democracy is admirably succinct and generous in its engagement with both deliberative and post-marxist accounts. for norval democracy concerns how to institutionalize democratic practices and how to dislocate existing grammars insofar as they delimit the sayable and the doable, thus encouraging aspect changes. however, there is no discussion of the primary factor that delimits the sayable and the doable: property and the limitations that lack of access to property sustain. her work, along with that of many others in this tradition, claims to engage with the practical needs and the demands that active citizens make, but fails to engage with the forms of delimitation which frame those practical demands in every actual society. rather than democracy being seen as some ideal type against which existing democracies may be judged as failures, norval’s attention to the grammars and practices of citizens in the process of becoming democratic certainly avoids pie in the sky idealism. it is ironic then that it avoids also any engagement with the material “grammars” necessary to the thinking of any engaged democratic debate. guttmann and thompsons’ text, why deliberative democracy? defends a radicalized version of deliberative democracy. i am not interested in their answer to the question “why,” but in their definition of democracy: “most fundamentally deliberative democracy affirms the need to justify decisions made by citizens and their representatives … reasons … should be accepted by free and equal persons seeking fair terms of cooperation” (guttman and thompson, 2004, p. 2). all decisions require justification. justification entails giving reasons, although as i have noted in an exhaustive critique of deliberative democracy elsewhere, the giving of reasons is not exhaustive and is not independent of the operations of power (devenney, 2009). guttman and thompson assert that reasons can only be accepted by those who are free and equal. but what does “free and equal” mean? it is nowhere specified other than as an ideal of a society where, freed from coercion, all citizens may present reasons without fear of violence. this move echoes a long tradition in political philosophy, a lineage which includes hannah arendt, john stuart mill’s earlier texts and the various works inspired by habermas and rawls’ account of the original position. on these accounts democracy concerns the formation of a political will through means that are fair to all. while democratic will-formation might entail making decisions about, for example, productive or reproductive relations, these are not considered as intrinsic to the definition of democratic living together. it is thus that habermas characterizes equality rights as secondary, that arendt laments the confusion between the public and private sphere, and that liberals, while concerned with a realm of free debate, are less bothered about whether or not that realm itself has other conditions which are prerequisites for its operation. the consequence is that, while property may be politicised, it is not deemed intrinsically political. the authors might respond that theirs is an account of how democratic subjects act, of how claims are made and then contested, of how a consensus is forged between antagonists, who become agonists; that relations of inequality which are economic in origin can be thematized in such democratic practices and are not exempt from political interventions; and, moreover, that an established consensus is only ever contingent, especially in the context of a necessary pluralism. but the definition of deliberative democracy gives the lie to such claims: reasons can be accepted only by free and equal persons. the question which neither guttman and 158 mark devenney   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   thompson nor norval address concerns what “free and equal” means, what fair terms of cooperation entail, what the conditions are under which all may contest existing grammars. the attempt to institutionalize deliberative debate as the underlying premise of democracy fails if the majority cannot participate on equal terms. the legal regulation of property establishes rules in which lives are unequally lived, and freedom is but an ideal for those with little or no access to property of their own. the democratic common sense assumes that property relations are not intrinsic to democratic practices. this failure to relate democracy to those conditions which undermine the very possibility of engaging in democratic life renders their accounts failures on the very terms which they themselves specify. to put this point bluntly: equality does not stop with communication. allowing everyone to speak, to vote or to contest established relations of power makes no difference if those relations are structured in such a manner that inequality limits who can participate, if relations of property also establish a regime of the sensible and thus of what is deemed improper and if it is already regarded as a form of impropriety to put into question the very existence of private property. rethinking the proper of democracy the current consensus assumes that democracy cannot challenge established property relations. the neo-liberal worldview assumes the sanctity of a set of principles which require continued faith, despite their repeated failure. the state, in theory the bearer of sovereign democratic authority, maintains the borders that delimit land masses and imposes the laws that protect the various forms of property against trespass. however, it is not, even in potentia, the bearer of a democratic will. its claim to serve the interests of all naturalizes and neutralizes relations of property, which demarcate the bounds of the demos. states secure the circulation of goods, protect private property and maintain the ever expanding balloon of financial capital. all governments insist that their primary imperative is to maintain economic stability, while preserving the current system for the ordering and distributing of life chances. what distinguishes the present neo-liberal conjuncture, however, is that the market state itself participates in the market, commissioning and providing services in direct competition with the private sector. the state both secures the conditions for market competition and acts in the market it preserves. the liberal ideal of the state as a neutral arbiter, above the fray of contestation, no longer holds, if it ever did. this is not simply a reinvention of an argument first deployed by poulantzas (1978), namely that fractions of capital compete for influence over state policy and lawmaking and that the autonomous state organizes the universal interest led by a dominant fraction of capital. rather, the state itself acts as a fraction of capital, articulating its own interests within a market against the interests of others. moreover, the state is not an actor with one single interest. states own property, have rights and interests in property and secure conditions under which property relations are maintained. the transformation of states during the past three decades has resulted in the breaking up of the distinction between private and public. property, propriety and democracy 159 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   resources once deemed public are either redirected to the private sector (as witnessed during the recent banking crises) or the state extends its own ownership of resources, especially through the varying forms of intellectual property rights. in many instances states pursue profit on terms no different from those of the private sector. the state as stakeholder does not act as an agent of the people it represents, but as a competitor in the market, offering contracts to other parts of the state in direct competition with private providers. this shifting terrain makes explicit the key relationship between sovereignty and property, as principles not so much in competition but rather as overlapping elements of an articulated property, state and capital complex. democratic demands for the extension of the state, and for law to regulate the excesses of the market, no longer resonate. such interventions are the acts of quasi public/private institutions whose interests cannot be made to correspond to the legitimation functions once performed by the welfare state. theorizing politics in terms of a sovereign demos capable of acting upon itself legitimates an ancient fiction, a fiction which clads the oligarchies of today with the cloak of democracy. the sovereign democratic state does not exist, if it ever did. this imaginary beckons us to act in a manner that is already impossible: recognizing that the link between sovereign power and democratic power is broken in part helps explain, for example, the deployment of ancient rules of sovereign exception during the past decade of the “war on terror”. sovereign power is not democratic power. the improper politics i defend rejects the markers of certainty which inspired leftist politics for much of the twentieth century. the imaginary which sustains such fantasies should not foreclose all discussion of an other democracy, a democracy which works through what it might mean for a people to exercise power, even as these terms (“people” and “power”) demand conceptual reworking. in this light i now set out the terms of just such a reworking. i begin with five claims. democracy presupposes an axiom of equality no account of democracy makes sense if it requires that those deemed free and equal members of the polity participate on unequal terms. this entails that politics is collective and relational. the demand for equality is made by a collective living in unequal conditions. inequality is naturalized through the invocation of nature, race, intelligence, class and property—or whichever contingent factor is best suited to maintaining a dominant constellation. if monarchical power is characterized by the strict delimitation of politics premised upon a natural inequality which is loudly proclaimed and practiced, then statist democracy reverses this premise, presuming an equality which it cannot practice. for this reason democratic equality must be thought at a distance from the state. the democratic demand the democratic demand is not that those excluded, marginalized or exploited are extended the same rights and obligations as dominant “races” and classes. it is not a demand for a restitution of an original state of equality. rather it is a demand for a re-articulation of the body politic which transforms the conditions in which lives are lived, the terms on which subjects recognise each other and themselves. such 160 mark devenney   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   demands cannot be recognized within the co-ordinates of the dominant order. for this reason democracy is from the first improper. a map of inequality this requires a map of inequality specifying the structural limits on equality. this real abstraction understands the political in relation to the articulated totality within which the production and reproduction of lives is organized. it maps the relations between political reason (deliberative practices in the public sphere so beautifully analyzed by habermas); productive and reproductive relations ( or discursive materiality, systematically analyzed in the marxist tradition but then reduced to a metaphysical determinant of all human life); the distribution of violence and its legitimation to maintain this order (perhaps best analysed in schmitt’s account of the exception); the repressed that is expressed only symptomatically but which as the indirect representative of that order does not challenge it; and, last, the potential for a different order which cannot be recognized within an existing order. the abstraction presented is best understood as history rendered natural, an ordering which protects the continual violation of possible equality, and which recruits future possibility to inequality. democratic politics is antagonistic not agonistic or deliberative. democratic politics is antagonistic not agonistic or deliberative. this is the statement of an absolute condition of the political, not the assertion of a condition which it is the aim of political struggle to overcome. democracy is not an existent order, but the processes through which such ordering is challenged, as much as it is the redefinition of the rules delimiting what is open to challenge. laclau (1985) certainly theorized the political in these terms, but i would insist that antagonism always emerges from a particular constellation which articulates the elements outlined above into a regime of the proper and of property. impropriety democracy is as a consequence improper. what might this mean? i explore this further below but let me make some preliminary comments. property, in all its forms, entails enclosure. enclosure requires the drawing and the maintenance of boundaries of exclusion and inclusion. the sovereign determination of the proper, as well as of the exception to the proper, defines trespass. trespass is a form of democratic enactment when, and if, it destabilizes enclosure. who are the figures of the trespasser in contemporary politics? they are the immigrant, the squatter, the suicide bomber. these three figures stand in for different forms of refusal of enclosure. the first violates the sovereign delimitation of citizenship rights. the second violates the laws of property which structure the earth. the third transgresses the legal, political and actuarial controls exercised over bodies and instantiated in various forms of property law. crucially, enclosure is not simply the putting up of fences around that which is ontologically prior to the enclosure. enclosure defines space in the very act of enclosing. to posit the commons as an alternative is to miss the point (hardt & negri, 2000). this claim operates on the property, propriety and democracy 161 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   same terrain, presuming that there are forms of the proper which have simply to be reclaimed. instead, to engage in a politics of property is to redefine both ourselves and our world, requiring leaps of faith and of passion which redraw the bounds of the given. property politics let me briefly summarize the argument thus far. the liberal democratic and marxist problematics linked property, liberty and equality. the radical democratic and deliberative democratic nexus unties this knot. in one respect this makes perfect sense. marx had already recognized that the rights to liberty and equality belie the inequality which the right to property, in a free market, institutionalizes. his all too quick dismissal of these rights to life, liberty and equality, however, ties them to individuals, thus taking the liberal democratic tradition at face value, without exploring other justifications for rights. however, the redefinition of rights of equality and liberty by radical and deliberative democrats resulted in the denial that a consideration of property is integral to the thinking of the political. the intrinsic link between the critique of property and radical democracy must be rescued. i propose that there are at least six elements to this critique. first, we must dispense with any justification of property which draws on an anterior account of “human” nature. rights are social and political. they entail relations with others, institutions which secure them, mechanisms for their enactment and disciplinary procedures to enforce them. in this sense property rights delimit the worlds in which we live. in so doing they secure certain ways of being. because property rights cannot be derived from nature, or from god—or indeed from any other primordial essence—they must be considered as a particular way of articulating our being together. property, as a bundle of rights, sediments certain social relations and institutionalizes practices which define and distribute rights of access to resources. property, however, is not a right in the sense that freedom and equality, as empty signifiers, might be deemed rights. while equality and liberty may be laid claim to by those who do not have rights, property relations establish and maintain inequality. if democracy’s premise is an axiomatic equality, property relations are inherently undemocratic. they delimit differential forms of access to the means required for the reproduction of life. second, given that property is a social relation, it must be viewed as a politically articulated delimitation of our world. this is a shifting terrain. until very recently, for example, it was not possible to have property in the genetic code of the human species. what is defined as property, and the rights of the proper thus attached to property, depends upon a politics of articulation, which is always antagonistic. in this regard property outlaws, thieves and the various forms of resistance against modern enclosure movements (squatters for example) all re-politicize property with a view to it being other than the exclusive property of the few. property is a key node in maintaining certain social relations. it is intrinsically political insofar as it by definition requires exclusivity of access and benefit. this entails, third, that the articulation of something as property establishes a border, determining what can be owned, how far ownership extends, where it is limited, as well as terms of its use and abuse. it establishes a set of property relations and 162 mark devenney   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   defines a vocabulary of the proper. this vocabulary of the proper is itself open to challenge. today it is constrained within and by a set of global rules and practices which delimit the very definition and possible thinking of democracy. fourth, if property as social and political establishes limits to what is proper, then it requires laws and norms of trespass. the definition of certain actions as criminal establishes a violation of the use of resources “rightfully” limited to some; where bodies are entitled to be (which country, which property, which premises and the like); and what one is entitled to do with one’s own body during certain times. here, sovereign state power is enlisted to enforce relations of property beneficial to some, but not all. this regime of property also delimits forms of impropriety. it establishes when it is improper to transgress not only territorial or legal boundaries, but also behavioural boundaries. fifth, while property legalizes exclusion, it always entails both recognition and violence. recognition may be legally enforced but it relies upon the acceptance of established regimes of property. in certain cases the legal, the social and the violent are all central to the maintenance of property. exclusivity requires violence and necessitates the exercise of force over and against others. in this sense property rights verge on rights to exercise violence. sixth, there are certain subjects of property. in capitalist societies rights of property are not first and foremost the rights of individuals: they are conferred upon individuals as persons, but more often are the exclusive privilege, secured by legal and violent fiat, of fictive persons, corporations, which are either private, public or a combination of the two. the subject of property is a legal subject, a subject whose rights are enforced by legal coda, by violence and always by exclusion. property establishes rights of use and access, protected by law and violence, which delimit the proper. in light of this i conclude by sketching an improper politics. towards an improper politics an improper politics begins with an account of the distribution and organization of property, as an articulated but contingent totality. this distribution of the proper establishes an order of property, as well as defining forms of propriety. delimiting the proper, maintaining property and specifying propriety all point towards a politics of property. the forms of violation vary in each case, but all entail trespass,6 theft or violation of what is deemed proper to the self. i thus defend the claim that democracy is improper, and that intrinsic to the definition of democratic politics is both the improper and impropriety. one of the less noted aspects of rancière’s defence of democracy is the claim that impropriety is at its heart. “democracy… is the product of an operation, at once inaugural and indefinitely renewed that aims to ward off an impropriety pertaining to the very principle of politics” (rancière, 2007, p. 37). for rancière democracy is the very principle of politics. it is improper from the point of view of any established ordering of politics, or, to use his term, the police. democracy cannot appeal to any natural principle to justify rule. rather, it undermines all attempts at establishing foundational principles of natural government. it is premised upon the simple assumption that all are equal regardless property, propriety and democracy 163 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   of qualification, of competence or of profession. democracy thus “disjoins entitlements to govern” (rancière, 2007, p. 39) and is founded on disagreement, rather than consensus. up to this point rancière’s account differs little from a broadly post-marxist account, which recognizes that no established consensus is stable, and that a counter hegemony is always possible. however, rancière is not content to remain with this formal account of impropriety. he maintains that the unwritten rule which fashions critiques of democracy is the defence of wealth. democracy means two things: first, it meant the unavoidability of conflict, the war of the poor against the rich… . and so the forms of good, peaceful government are, in fact, a form of that war... . secondly… the government of the poor doesn't mean…the government of the lower class; it means the government of those who are nothing—the government of those who have no title, no qualification for ruling. there are a number of powers, based on birth, knowledge, virtue, wealth, and there is the last form, the government based on nothing, nothing but the lack of basis, the lack of an entitlement or qualification for ruling. this means, properly, anarchy—the absence of any arche, meaning any principle leading from the essence of the common to the forms of the community. (rancière, 2003, p. 11) rancière links the critique of wealth and power with the improper, that which has no place. the impropriety he defends pertains to thinking what is intrinsic to the demos, a thinking at odds with what is. this is not merely a weakened version of marxism. the proletariat, for marx, hold a privileged position in revolutionary struggle because they embody the very principle of capitalist society, as the becoming subject-object of history. the proletariat are the proper of democracy, because the only property they have is their labour. by contrast, the lumpenproletariat is deemed by marx a class incapable of achieving class consciousness, a flotsam not engaged in production and thus marginal to any form of revolutionary struggle. as marx and engels write of the lumpen proletariat in the communist manifesto: the “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. (marx and engels, 1985, p. 92) marx and engels are wary of the people of no property, in part because they have no privileged knowledge of the dynamics of capitalist production. rancière’s account is more radical than this. democracy is an impropriety which disrupts consensus in attacking unequal wealth in all of its forms. this approach is in direct contrast with the deliberative democrat’s founding assumption, namely that there is a proper, a moment of perfect propriety, laid claim to in the very act of communicating. yet the analysis of the relations between production and reproduction first developed by marx demand a politics which is improper. where rancière’s account fails to develop an analysis which ties together production, reproduction, property and dissensus, marx insists upon a politics of property which disciplines dissensus in linking it to the actions of a privileged class, those who are able to sell their labour. thus an improper politics must begin 164 mark devenney   studies in social justice, volume 3, issue 1, 21-36, 2009 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011   with the regime of property dominant now. this regime is a structured totality, always contingent, which reifies certain behaviours, and delimits the forms of the proper. dissensus begins with those who break the bounds of the proper, and is often located at the margins where those bounds are maintained. the delineation of a regime of property as a critical theoretical exercise both specifies its borders, and indicates the moments of trespass and transgression which suggest other ways of being, which fashion another world. such an improper account of democratic theory is no longer marxist in any strict sense, but it begins with the question bequeathed to us by marx: the question of who owns and controls the means whereby we reproduce our lives, and how might we disrupt this account of the proper. notes   1 i have written about this in chapter 4 of ethics and politics in contemporary theory. 2 connolly, 1995; laclau, 1990; and tonder and thomassen, 2005 all provide good overviews of radical democratic theories. 3 this all too brief discussion of pluralism hints at a theoretical problem which i have no intention of exploring here. radical democrats are very quick to confuse the ontological premises of their arguments with either a quasi-empirical description of the world or normative prescriptions for the world. an ontology implicitly committed to the view that all is possible in all possible worlds should not, however, be confused with the limited ways in which this infinity may find itself presented in actual worlds. these arguments all too quickly become the sneering aside of the cynic who glibly notes that nothing is ultimately true anyway, deriding the passionate commitments of political subjects. 4 see for example habermas, the future of human nature. 5 see for this the discussion of class in the first two chapters of laclau’s hegemony and socialist strategy. laclau contends that the relations of production are not in themselves antagonistic, and because the definition of the political is that it is antagonistic, the relations of production are deemed but one area of possible politicization. 6 the latin word “passus” means step. the origin of the word trespass, is to take a step into another’s domain. however, there is another etymology for “passus,” as the perfect past participle of “patior,” meaning to suffer. this etymological uncertainty better captures what trespass in fact entails. references aristotle. (2000). the politics. london: penguin classics. balibar, e. (2002). possessive individualism reversed: from locke to derrida. constellations, 9(3), 299317. cohen, g. a. (1985). nozick on appropriation. new left review, 150, 89-105. cohen, g. a. (1995). self ownership, freedom, and equality. cambridge: cambridge university press. connolly, w. (1995). the ethos of pluralization. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. devenney, m. (2004). ethics and politics in contemporary theory. london: routledge. devenney, m. (2009). the limits of communicative rationality and deliberative democracy. journal of power, 2(1), 137-154. gutmann, a., & thompson, d. (2004). why deliberative democracy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. habermas, j. (1996). between facts and norms. cambridge: polity. habermas, j. (2003). the future of human nature. cambridge: polity. laclau, e. (2000). identity and hegemony. in j. butler, e. laclau, & s. zizek (eds.), contingency, hegemony, universality (pp. 44-89). london: verso, locke, j. (1988). two treatises on government. cambridge: cambridge university press. property, propriety and democracy 165 studies in social justice, volume 5, issue 2, 2011     marx, k., & engels, f. (1985). the communist manifesto. london; penguin classics. norval, a. (2007). aversive democracy. cambridge: cambridge university press. nozick, r. (1975). anarchy, state, and utopia. new york, ny: basic books. plutarch. plutarch’s lives. retrieved from http://penelope.uchicago.edu/thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/lives/solon*.html poulantzas, n. (1978). classes in contemporary capitalism. london: verso. rancière, j. (2003). comments and responses. theory and event, 6(4). rancière, j. (2007). hatred of democracy. london, verso. rousseau, j. j. (1754). discourse on the origin of inequality. retrieved from http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq.htm. tonder, l., & thomassen, l. (eds.). (2005). radical democracy: politics between abundance and lack. manchester: manchester university press. correspondence address: timothy donais, global studies, wilfrid laurier university, 75 university avenue west, waterloo, ontario, canada n2l 3c5. tel.: (+1) 519 884 0710 ext. 3295, email: tdonais@wlu.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 2, 189-210, 2013 power politics and the rule of law in post-dayton bosnia timothy donais wilfrid laurier university, canada abstract over the past two decades, the rule of law has emerged as a key priority within contemporary peacebuilding efforts. drawing on examples from post-dayton bosnia, this article examines the impact of rule of law reform efforts on broader patterns of power and political authority in peacebuilding contexts. it suggests that in the case of bosnia, the use of rule of law strategies to restructure political life has largely failed. thus, despite some notable achievements on the rule of law front, the core dynamics of bosnia’s political conflict remain intact, and country’s peace process is as fragile as ever. the article concludes by noting that charting a course between accepting the political status quo and fundamentally transforming it requires more nuanced approaches that advance the rule of law even while accepting its limits as an instrument of deep political transformation. introduction some years ago in bosnia, i met a canadian civil servant who had been seconded to the office of the high representative (ohr) and who was tasked with helping to develop state-level transportation legislation. after months of extensive consultations with relevant stakeholders across the country, he had become disillusioned with the divisiveness of bosnian politics, and resolved to spend his remaining months in the country producing a draft law in the quiet, uninterrupted comfort of his sarajevo office. i do not know what became of the man or his legislation, but his story has stayed with me. it illustrates the wide gap that exists between the lofty ambitions of the broader international community in terms of bringing justice and the rule of law to war-afflicted countries and the messy, compromising realities of the effort to translate that vision into practice. the canadian’s story is also a good example of the technocratic impulse at work in contemporary rule of law programming, a studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 190 timothy donais tendency rooted in the broader hope that good laws, whatever their origin, ultimately can triumph over bad politics. as david chandler (2004) has argued, however, the belief that international officials can develop better laws than the citizens of post-conflict states or their elected representatives is often little more than a bureaucratic fantasy; the obvious danger is that “law that is disassociated from the political process of consensus-building … is more a rhetorical statement of policy intent than a law of the land” (p. 578-579). such considerations open up an even broader set of questions about the means and ends of rule of law reforms in post-conflict settings, and about the broader linkages among the rule of law, peace, and justice. while the promotion of the rule of law has become part of the standard recipe for postconflict peacebuilding—indeed, brian tamanaha (2004, p. 4) suggests that the rule of law may in fact be “the preeminent legitimating political ideal in the world today”—the widespread consensus surrounding its inherent desirability obscures a troubling lack of consensus around what it actually is or how it can be brought into being. definitional debates surrounding the rule of law typically span the spectrum from thin versions, which emphasize the need for all government action to be authorized by law, to thicker versions, which stress the capacity of law to limit or constrain government action and may even imply “the affirmative duty of the government to make the lives of citizens better, distribute resources justly, and recognize the right to dignity” (jensen, 2008, p. 123). opinion is also divided on how to meet the challenge of constructing the rule of law in environments where it does not exist, such as in the vast majority of war-torn contexts in which peacebuilding is undertaken. the conventional view, which is influenced by modernization theory and its embedded assumptions about the linearity of development processes, focuses on institutional isomorphism and the orderly importation of western norms and institutions into non-western contexts. this perspective has increasingly come under fire however, by those who contend that rule of law reforms must take into consideration pre-existing norms, customs, practices, and even politics of the reforming society if they are to take root (park, 2010; peterson, 2010). on this account, the normative underpinnings of the rule of law are no less critical than its formal institutional structures. rendering rule of law reforms in ways that are familiar and legitimate to both powerful domestic elites and society writ large is essential to their long-term viability; in this sense, rule of law reformers must carefully navigate both political interest and political culture if they hope to make a sustainable difference. set within this broader context, this contribution focuses on the impact of rule of law reform efforts on broader patterns of power and political authority in peacebuilding contexts. this emphasis is premised on the argument that at its core, the rule of law is about power: how it is constituted, how it is exercised, and how it is controlled. hence, a key part of the rule of law’s attractiveness in peacebuilding contexts lies in its potential role in re-ordering and re-structuring power relations as one key element of the larger task of reconstituting a new social contract between state and society (pouligny, 2005). taking post-dayton bosnia as a case study, the analysis studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 power politics and the rule of law 191 of the relationship among power, law, and peace is used to explain an apparent paradox of contemporary peacebuilding in bosnia: that despite considerable emphasis, and substantial achievements, on the rule of law front in recent years, the country’s peace process remains as fragile as ever, while few bosnians would consider themselves to be inhabitants of a just society. the primary argument to be developed here is that despite the manifest institutional changes brought about in the name of the rule of law in bosnia, the underlying structure and core dynamics of political power and political contestation remain largely unaltered, which perpetuates a condition of structural injustice. thus, while rule of law reforms may be may have inherent value, the bosnia experience suggests that they in fact may be of limited use as a means to achieve broader political goals, at least within the relatively narrow time frames of conventional peace operations. peacebuilding and the rule of law in the post-cold war era, the rule of law has emerged as part of the contemporary common sense of post-conflict peacebuilding, and stands along with human rights, democracy, and free markets as one of the key pillars of the dominant liberal peacebuilding paradigm. indeed, while there has been considerable critical scrutiny of the practical consequences of both economic liberalization and political democratization in post-war environments (paris, 2004), the desirability of advancing the rule of law in post-war settings has remained largely unchallenged. no doubt this is partly caused by the inherent undesirability of alternatives; neither lawlessness nor the rule of the gun has much to commend it as policy prescription. it is also because of the particular nature of the rule of law as a foundation or background condition without which many of the other key public goods viewed as essential to peace—from economic development to responsible, accountable government to universal human rights protections—cannot be realized. in bosnia, as elsewhere, a deepening appreciation of the importance of the rule of law to meeting the challenges of peace, order, and good government has been a key driver of the rapidly-expanding international peacebuilding agenda in recent decades. while the original focus on mediating and monitoring political settlements among warring factions remains, peacebuilding has increasingly come to be associated with statebuilding (call & wyeth, 2008), and the scope of rule of law interventions has subsequently expanded to fill this much broader framework. from traditional rule of law work such as vetting and training judges and law enforcement personnel, the rule of law agenda now typically includes, inter alia, drafting and promulgating legislation from constitutions to civil and criminal procedure codes, combating organized crime and corruption, enforcing property rights, prosecuting war criminals, and working to ensure access to justice. as well, it includes strengthening the full range of domestic institutions charged with upholding the rule of law, including oversight and accountability mechanisms. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 192 timothy donais to the extent that the means, if not the ends, of the rule of law agenda in contemporary peacebuilding have been questioned, a key critique has zeroed in on the extent to which the rule of law has been seen as a means through which political conflict in post-war environments can be either transcended or circumvented by the technocratic application of legal reforms. augustine park (2010) refers to this as the “rule of law fable,” rooted in the belief that war and its end presents “an opportunity to build a new liberal legal culture that pledges peacefulness—a goal to be accomplished through technical institution-building” (p. 414). the fundamental premise here, as park notes, is that “to be peaceful is to be like us,” (p. 413) the implication being that war-torn societies should embrace uncritically the rule of law paradigm, with its roots firmly in the western liberal democratic tradition, as both inherently superior to their own traditions of socio-political order and as the most reliable route to a sustainable, just peace. similarly, oliver richmond and jason franks (2007) argue that the persistent belief on the part of western interveners that liberal-democratic norms and institutions can be transferred progressively to fragile war-torn states is a manifestation of liberal hubris, and suggests that this practice has led more often than not to cases of “virtual peace,” in which external norms and institutions are thinly-rooted and have minimal impact on domestic governance practices. while much rule of law work is inherently technical and legalistic, it is also both normative and political. as has long been understood, the rule of law comprises both macro-level structures and micro-level commitments (stromseth, wippman, & brooks, 2006, p. 13). the practical experiences of post-cold war peacebuilding have exposed as naïve the belief that the introduction of liberal democratic institutions could, within a relatively short period, not only contain and ultimately resolve conflict but also transform the interests, goals and values of those actors who have to live with, and animate, the rule of law in their own cultural contexts. as robert fatton (2002) has suggested, there is a profound difference between writing a constitution and constitutionalism, “between writing a founding charter and adhering to its norms and rules” (p. 158). more precisely, the rule of law operates through both the logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness: citizens and officials need to adhere to, and feel bound by, the rule of law not only because they fear the consequences of being on the wrong side of the law, but also because they believe that being on the right side of the law is the appropriate thing to do. to the extent that the international community has absorbed the lesson that rule of law reforms themselves do not necessarily generate either law-abiding citizens or public service-oriented officials, the search for supplementary sources of legitimacy in which to ground the rule of law has generated growing interest in informal and/or traditional justice practices within conflictaffected states. there has been, more generally, a rediscovery of “the local” among both scholars and practitioners of peacebuilding in recent years. there is also a growing acceptance that local practices, institutions, and cultures may represent not simply obstacles to be transcended but also resources that studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 power politics and the rule of law 193 could be harnessed in the name of peace. this shift has been represented in the growing attention to questions of national or local ownership (donais, 2012), as well as in the growing literature on hybridity, which increasingly takes for granted that peacebuilding outcomes cannot be precisely engineered by outsiders, but rather emerge from the dynamic interplay of norms, practices, and politics across the international-domestic divide (mac ginty, 2011). the development assistance committee of the organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd), in fact, has recently argued that “grounded legitimacy,” pursued through “deliberate strategies for supporting the marriage of indigenous, customary and communal institutions of governance with introduced, western state institutions, with a view to creating constructive interaction and positive mutual accommodation,” should be a key guiding principle in efforts to rebuild fragile or war-torn states (oecd, 2011, p. 38). the practical implications of the growing emphasis on local agency and local culture can already be seen in the practices of post-conflict rule of law reform, even if they have not yet been internalized fully. there is growing acceptance among international practitioners that the search for ways to ground rule of law reforms in locally-legitimate practices and traditions may be essential to their acceptance and longer-term sustainability. this can be seen in the widespread international endorsement of, and interest in, the use of gacaca trials in rwanda as a homegrown alternative to conventional outside-in forms of transitional justice (betts, 2005), and in the increased attention paid to non-state and informal justice mechanisms in contexts such as afghanistan (dempsey & coburn, 2010). what may be emerging gradually, therefore, is a shift towards viewing the rule of law in terms of the pursuit of context-specific outcomes which blend elements of the local and the international but remain largely acceptable across both sides of this divide. however, such a synthesis may prove difficult to generate in practice. just as domestic actors may view the institutional practices and normative principles of liberal peacebuilding as foreign impositions, international actors should not be expected to compromise easily, or publicly, on core universal principles (human rights being perhaps the most iconic), in the name of cultural relativism. park (2010), for example, suggests that it is already possible to discern one international strategy that has emerged in response to the challenge of culture in peacebuilding contexts, which is formally “multicultural accommodationist” in orientation but which, in reality, “hollows out, contains and tames culture within the authority of the rule of law” (p. 427). second, the greater objective of advancing the rule of law in post-conflict contexts is a political project just as much as it is a normative project. rule of law reforms aim to alter to greater or lesser degrees the way in which political power is allocated, exercised and controlled. indeed, one of the primary goals of the rule of law is to channel social and political behaviour among both citizens and governments along regularized, institutionalized, and predictable patterns. in this sense, if peacebuilding can be understood studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 194 timothy donais as an ongoing effort to establish a legitimate, stable socio-political order— an understanding which is consistent both with the use of social contract theory in the context of war-to-peace transitions and with the association of state building with the strengthening of state-society relations—then the terms of this new order are likely to be contested fiercely by those domestic political forces that stand to win or lose from it. the ultimate goal may be to reach a point where the rule of law serves, largely unseen and unchallenged, as a neutral and apolitical arbiter among contending social and political forces. given the stakes involved, however, the process of negotiating such a framework—especially in acrimonious, fearful, and mutually-distrustful post-conflict landscapes—can never be above politics. in contrast to recent advances in thinking about the role of culture in post-conflict rule of law reforms, on issues of power and politics the debate remains suspended between what georg sorensen (2006) has termed the liberalism of restraint and the liberalism of imposition. despite the widely-recognized limitations of a strictly technical approach to rule of law reform among practitioners, there remains considerable discomfort with the implications of accepting rule of law reform as an explicitly political project that would be aimed self-consciously at re-structuring power relations within post-conflict spaces. indeed, the rule of law fable may serve a useful legitimating function for international intervention, which enables external actors to frame the liberal reform agenda as neutral and unthreatening, and therefore acceptable to existing power-holders. however, as paul kingston (2012) has recently noted, the broader peacebuilding project also displays contradictory impulses in its relationship to the domestic power structures of post-conflict states. while the practices of elite pact-making contribute to the legitimation and consolidation of the power of existing elites (whose participation in peacemaking processes is usually contingent on such legitimation), the centrality of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law in contemporary peacebuilding is simultaneously geared towards empowering “the unorganized, and poor, and the marginalized” (pp. 333334). in the context of rule of law reforms, this tension between continuity and change—or more precisely between acknowledging and subverting existing power relations—predictably has often led to both inconsistent policies and suboptimal outcomes. for example, international efforts to deal with post-conflict warlords often run the gamut from appeasement and cooptation to criminalization and marginalization, while newly-introduced or newly-reformed rule of law institutions are often vulnerable to elite capture. finally, all of this points back to the nature of international power and authority in post-conflict contexts: if, as is increasingly clear, the rule of law paradigm does not possess unquestioned legitimacy among all relevant actors in peacebuilding contexts, the outcomes of rule of law reforms will depend mainly on how the capacity of international actors to advance the rule of law (through the deployment of economic resources, political pressure, or physical coercion) matches up against the capacity of key domestic actors to resist, subvert, or redirect reform efforts. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 power politics and the rule of law 195 post-dayton bosnia provides a rich case study through which to explore the political dynamics of rule of law reforms in peacebuilding contexts. not only is bosnia a mature peacebuilding operation, it is also one in which various rule of law reforms have played a central role. bosnia is also a context in which cultural questions—particularly as they relate to the rule of law—have been largely absent. since few indigenous legal traditions or institutions have survived the ongoing transition both from conflict and from socialism, there has been little debate on either side of the international-local divide about the extent to which rule of law reforms need to be reconciled with the pre-war traditions and practices of the yugoslav state. stripped of the complicating dimensions of culture and tradition, therefore, the political nature of—and the political contestation around—the international community’s rule of law agenda in bosnia become readily apparent, even if the dilemmas they present for international policy and practice are not so readily resolved. peacebuilding through the rule of law in bosnia fully 17 years after the signing of the dayton peace accords, which brought nearly four years of ethnic conflict to a halt in late 1995, bosnia stands as a paradox of contemporary peacebuilding, with both success and failure in nearly equal measure. on the positive side, much progress has been made in transforming the empty shell of the bosnian state that remained after dayton, a condition reinforced by the peace agreement, which vested most governing authority in two ethnically-defined entities, the muslim-croat federation and republika srpska (rs), into something resembling a contemporary, even westphalian state. today, the bosnian state now can claim almost a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, with a single national armed forces (multi-ethnic bosnian units even serve abroad as peacekeepers) as well as a state-level border service and intelligence agency under the control of the state government in sarajevo. the country’s judicial and law enforcement apparatus also, increasingly resembles that of other federal states, and the country’s state-level court has even taken on responsibility for contentious domestic war crimes cases. bosnia, as the us diplomat douglas davidson (2009) has noted, now possesses “most of the necessary trappings of a modern liberal democratic state” (p. 1) finally, the presence of ratko mladic and radovan karadzic at the international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia in the hague is also a tremendously important signal that longdelayed justice for war crimes is slowly being delivered. despite the considerable progress that has been made toward the development and consolidation of a bosnian state and society governed by the rule of law, bosnia remains deeply dysfunctional, mired in an ongoing existential and constitutional crisis, and unable to govern itself for the wider benefit of its citizens. following the most recent round of national elections in october 2010, fourteen months of divisive political wrangling were required to form a state-level government (which broke down after less than studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 196 timothy donais six months), while progress towards european union accession—widely accepted by all sides as the logical endpoint of the peacebuilding process— has stalled completely. relations among bosnia’s three main ethnic groups have deteriorated to the point where some observers have openly raised the prospects of renewed warfare (azinovic, bassuener, & weber, 2011), while the gap between the governors and the governed is wider than ever. recent polling numbers, in fact, suggest that is reflected in recent polling numbers which suggest that nearly 85 per cent of bosnians consider their country to be heading in the wrong direction (ndi, 2010). as the international crisis group (2012, p. 1) has recently noted, tension between bosnia’s two entities and three main ethnic groups is reaching a breaking point and there is an ongoing crisis of governance at both state and entity levels, all while “politicians ignore difficult policy choices and seem immune to domestic or international pressure.” ultimately, despite more than a decade and a half of intrusive peacebuilding efforts by the international community, the fundamental issue that precipitated yugoslavia’s disintegration—whether its different ethnic communities could, or wish to, live together—remains not only unresolved in the bosnian case but continues to serve as a core obstacle on the country’s path towards normalization. reconciling the significant advances on the rule of law reform front with the dismal political realities of contemporary bosnia requires an understanding of the relationship between the international community’s broader statebuilding agenda and the persistence of a resilient political economy of ethnic nationalism within bosnia. while the original dayton deal was based on the assumption that the local parties to the agreement would serve as its primary agents of implementation, the manifest absence of progress over the first several years of implementation exposed such hopes as radically misplaced. dayton is, in fact, more of a ceasefire than a comprehensive political settlement, and its fundamental ambiguity on key issues such as the return of refugees and displaced persons meant that for the local parties, the post-dayton period was more about continuing the conflict by other means—reversing clausewitz, as roberto belloni (2009, p. 360) has noted—than about collaborating across ethnic lines to build a new bosnian state. indeed, for the bosnian serbs, and to a lesser extent the bosnian croats, the very existence of a sovereign bosnian state within the original republican borders of bosnia’s yugoslav incarnation has remained a fundamental point of contestation (hayden, 2005). beyond failing to provide a durable framework for the resolution of bosnia’s underlying conflict, the dayton agreement has also sustained this conflict through a consociational political system which institutionalized ethnic divisions at all levels of the country’s political system. similarly, by allowing the country’s political parties to avoid having to seek support beyond their own ethnic constituencies, bosnia’s electoral system has consistently rewarded hardline political positions, discouraged the politics of conciliation and moderation, and undermined the development of bonds of accountability between electors and the elected. locked as it is in a political dynamic characterized by zero-sum ethnic politics, bosnia’s political system, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 power politics and the rule of law 197 as one political analyst has suggested, “is not capable of self-reform.”1 thus, the shift towards a more intrusive international approach to the problems of peacebuilding in bosnia, and the adoption of an explicit state building agenda as the manifestation of this new approach, can be traced back to the fundamental ambiguities of the original peace deal, to the profound ambivalence of bosnia’s three main ethnic communities towards it, and to a set of political incentive structures that reinforced rather than reversed the politics of ethnic confrontation. the so-called bonn powers, which were adopted by an obviously frustrated international community in late 1997, dramatically shifted both legislative and executive power away from bosnia’s own duly-elected authorities and towards the office of the high representative (ohr) in the name of re-energizing a moribund peace process and creating the institutional foundations of a functioning bosnian state. in the process, they also worked against bosnia’s emerging democracy, most dramatically by making the country’s elected officials more accountable to dayton’s international guarantors than to the bosnian electorate. the bonn powers represented a signal shift in international approach towards a liberalism of imposition, and until the international state building agenda lost steam in 2006 with the departure of the paddy ashdown as high representative, a great deal of institutional reform was achieved, and much of it was implemented in the name of the rule of law. with the benefit of hindsight, however, it now seems apparent that while reforms were wideranging they were also thinly-rooted, and structural reforms failed to alter fundamentally either political power structures or political behaviour. as the ohr’s mark wheeler has noted, “we kept waiting for reforms to generate self-sustaining momentum, but it never happened.”2 with regard to rule of law reform specifically, this dynamic can be seen in two key areas of the broader reform agenda: police reform and anti-corruption. police reform operating at the interface between state and society, police are the most prominent, and arguably the most important, manifestation of the rule of law in practice, and they represent an indispensable element of both good governance and sustainable peace. as paddy ashdown remarked during his tenure as high representative, “professional police forces, operating within the rule of law, and at the service of the citizen, are the hallmark of any decent, peaceful, civilized community” (cited in collantes celador, 2005, pp. 364-365). however, in practice the challenges of reforming police are considerable in the best of situations. the task of moving law enforcement agencies in postwar contexts—in which the police have been corrupted, politicized and even criminalized to greater or lesser degrees—along the continuum towards an ideal-typical model of a professional, impartial, and apolitical public service has proven to be both politically sensitive and enormously complicated. as studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 198 timothy donais with any complex organization, reforming law enforcement agencies involves both institutional and socio-cultural components: structures must be altered to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability, while the individuals operating within that structure must progressively internalize the values inherent in the rule of law (muehlmann, 2007, p. 378). at the same time, the reform process involves both technical and political dimensions: personnel need to be trained, equipped, and managed appropriately while in democratic contexts the need for appropriate political oversight must be balanced against the dangers of inappropriate political interference. indeed, in the case of police reform, the political stakes are especially high since authority over policing—and hence over a central instrument of state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force—is a source of enormous political power. in mid-2012, more than a decade-and-a-half of formal international police assistance to bosnia came to a close with the winding-down of the european union police mission (eupm). the eupm had succeeded the un’s international police task force (iptf) at the end of 2002. perhaps the most accurate characterization of the balance-sheet of both missions is that while they succeeded in ensuring that bosnia’s police forces, in the context of the broader peacebuilding challenge in bosnia, are no longer part of the problem, they were less successful in making the police part of the solution (collantes celador, 2005, p. 372). important technical and institutional reforms have been put in place that have improved policing practice in bosnia considerably, which in turn has contributed to a relatively stable public security environment and to fewer human rights abuses within the police services. on the other hand, the reform record has been less positive on the political and socio-cultural front. bosnia’s police remain embedded within a deeply-polarized political environment, and efforts both to depoliticize the police and to insulate them from political interference have produced generally disappointing results. similarly, hopes and expectations have not been met in any meaningful way that serving bosnian police officers and their political overseers could be socialized over time into accepting and internalizing western standards of democratic policing, and even potentially serving as a model of renewed and functional multi-ethnicity for the rest of the country. as gemma collantes celador (2005, p. 369) has observed, bosnia’s police reform experience offers precious little empirical support for the theory that “strong group identities can be subsumed by an overriding, apolitical, professional police identity.” specifically, bosnia’s experience with police reform serves as a cautionary tale of using rule of law reforms as a substitute for political consensusbuilding as a means of advancing a peacebuilding agenda. in other words, it raises questions about the extent to which reforms aimed at advancing the rule of law—in the field of law enforcement as elsewhere—can be a cause, rather than a consequence, of broader socio-political change, particularly in contexts where domestic political actors possess robust powers of veto. an early example of this tension in practice relates to the role of police reform in the return of refugees and displaced persons to their pre-war homes in the studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 power politics and the rule of law 199 war’s aftermath.3 as noted above, the peace agreement was deeply ambiguous on the question of return, affirming the right of return while simultaneously acknowledging the legitimacy of ethnically-cleansed and ethnically-defined entities such as republika srpska. thus, the return process was bitterly contested during the first half-decade of dayton, and so police reform— and specifically the re-generation of multiethnic police forces—emerged as one instrument through which the international community attempted to influence the process in favour of those wishing to return to their pre-war homes, especially in cases where returnees would be living as minorities. in order to both facilitate and promote such “minority returns,” the iptf championed the recruitment of minority police officers, with the explicit aim of helping to roll back ethnic cleansing “by offering returnees and wouldbe returnees some assurance that ‘their’ people are represented among the guardians of law and order in their former towns and villages” (icg, 2002, p. 41). while ambitious targets were set for minority recruitment—fully 28 per cent of police in the federation were to be drawn from minority communities—and considerable pressure applied to local officials both to accept and to implement such targets, minority police recruitment ultimately proved to be a marginal factor in the returnee process. administrative footdragging on the part of local officials led to missed targets and delays in implementation, while cases of overt intimidation of minority police officers and the tendency for them to be assigned to desk positions raised suspicions about the extent to which minority police recruitment actually contributed to better security for minority returnees in general. similarly, while potential minority returnees were clearly sensitive to security concerns, broader socio-economic considerations such as access to employment and public services were equally important factors in the calculus of return. overall, in the absence of support on the part of domestic political elites for minority returns, the effort to promote them through the broader police reform process made relatively little impact. a more dramatic example of the limits of police reform as an instrument of broader political change was the controversial bosnia-wide police restructuring process that began in 2004. part of the broader shift “from dayton to brussels,” police restructuring was pitched not only as a means to help bosnia prepare for eu accession, but also as a means of rationalizing a national policing system characterized by too many uncoordinated levels of policing at cantonal, entity, and state levels, and too few cooperation mechanisms (perdan, 2008, p. 259). as the process unfolded, the police restructuring agenda was distilled down to three key principles; the shift of all legislative and budgetary competencies for policing to the state level, the removal of all political interference from operational policing, and the establishment of functional policing areas based on technical rather than political criteria. acceptance of these three principles was made then a key condition for bosnia to sign a stabilization and association agreement (saa) with the european union. despite the considerable pressure brought to bear by the international studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 200 timothy donais community, the police restructuring process met with considerable domestic resistance, particularly from the bosnian serbs. while restructuring was framed by the international community in the context of bureaucratic rationalization and of bringing bosnian policing into line with international and specifically european standards, for their part the bosnian parties saw police reform “in terms of a domestic balance of power and not in terms of efficiency or the effectiveness of the police forces” (juncos, 2011, p. 384). bosnian opponents also saw through the “european standards” argument, rightly pointing out that the eu contains diverse models of policing, including models where policing jurisdictions quite clearly correspond to political jurisdictions (collantes celador, 2009, p. 239). the bosnian serbs in particular viewed the overall police restructuring process, not without justification, as a direct assault on the integrity and quasi-sovereignty of their entity. in a very real sense, the bosnian serb leadership was being asked to choose between the european union and republika srpska, and these leaders made it clear that if they couldn’t have both, they preferred the latter. in the end, the effort to instigate a radical restructuring of political authority in bosnia through the mechanism of police reform—a restructuring which, in its centralizing tendencies, would have clearly favoured bosnia’s muslim majority—unraveled completely. after a face-saving but relatively meaningless agreement which allowed bosnia to sign an saa, the bosnian serbs withdrew from the agreement in 2007. shortly after this agreement was struck, a wider governance crisis began to take hold in bosnia as relations declined between the country’s entities and ethnicities, and police reform as well as the original three principles of police restructuring were relegated to the back burner of the country’s reform agenda. anti-corruption the struggle against corruption in bosnia represents a second key rule of law issue marked by an ongoing failure to consolidate progress and deepen reforms, to the extent that the country’s current political crisis is now eroding earlier anti-corruption achievements. while the corruption question was at best a second-tier peacebuilding priority during the initial period of dayton implementation, a 1999 new york times article claiming that up to $1 billion (us) in international reconstruction funds had disappeared into the pockets of corrupt bosnian politicians raised key questions about the extent, and the costs, of corruption (hedges, 1999). more generally, it was also becoming increasingly clear at the time that wartime alliances between organized criminals and nationalist political elites had survived the end of armed violence, and were integral elements of entrenched political power structures that stood in the way of peace implementation. writing in 2000, peter singer described the increasing criminalization of the bosnian body politic and the “tightening vise of corruption and cronyism” (2000, pp. 31-32), echoing earlier comments from the head of the bosnia mission of the organization studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 power politics and the rule of law 201 for security and co-operation in europe (osce) that the nexus of “extremist politicians, the remnants of the old security services, and organized crime in this country represents the single greatest obstacle to democratic reform, economic investment, and membership in euro-atlantic institutions” (cited in dziedzic, rosen, & williams, 2002, p. 9). with the growing acknowledgement of the pervasive threat posed by corruption to the broader peace process in bosnia, the fight against corruption emerged as a central pillar of the internationally-driven strategy of peacebuilding through state building that was gathering steam at the turn of the millennium. in addition to the elaboration of an explicit anti-corruption agenda by the ohr, anti-corruption goals featured strongly in many of the institutional reforms undertaken during this period and were grounded in a four-pronged strategy of eliminating opportunities for corruption, working towards greater transparency in public institutions, strengthening controls and penalties, and fostering greater public awareness of the costs of corruption (oecd, 2005, p. 25). the creation of the state border service and reforms to the customs administration were motivated largely by the goal of reducing both fraud and the smuggling of people and goods at bosnia’s border crossings. similarly, wide-ranging reforms to bosnia’s banking sector and tax bureaucracy were all aimed at least in part at reducing opportunities for graft and corruption within the public service. meanwhile, a principle aim of justice sector reforms—including ongoing efforts to professionalize both the police and the judiciary—was not only to root out the corrupt and the criminalized within both institutions but also to strengthen the country’s own capacity to detect and prosecute corruption. concurrently, aggressive international moves against the economic bases of nationalist power structures—including the 2001 takeover, with the support of nato forces, of the mostar-based hercegovacka banka, which was alleged to be bankrolling a network of illegal parallel institutions in croat-controlled herzegovina—were accompanied by a growing willingness on the part of the high representative to remove elected officials from office for corruption and abuse of office (chandler, 2006). unquestionably, while such efforts made a difference in reining in the most egregious forms of corruption in post-dayton bosnia, it is equally clear that, in important ways, corruption “remains endemic as a way of life in bosnia” (cited in soberg, 2008, p. 718). recently, a study ranked bosnia last among european states in terms of its anti-corruption efforts, while a recent european commission report sharply criticized the “very limited progress” made by bosnia on this front (jukic, 2011; woehrel, 2012, p. 8). along with unemployment, corruption continues to top public opinion polls among bosnians of all ethnicities in terms of the country’s most serious problems (mantcheva, karaboev, & warner, 2011, p. 16). despite the growing sense that the corruption problem has worsened in recent years, there is little evidence that bosnia’s justice system is either willing or able to confront it: while neighboring croatia delivered 142 verdicts on corruption-related cases in 2011, the corresponding figure in bosnia was 11 (jukic, 2011). studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 202 timothy donais from the perspective of bosnia’s struggling peace process, while it may be argued that administrative corruption is simply an unavoidable consequence of bosnia’s ongoing transition from a managed to a market economy, more troubling is the persistence of large-scale political corruption, and the perverse incentives it creates for those in power to resist any reforms that threaten their privileges. if a key objective of rule of law reform is to ensure that those in power operate within clear, objective, and enforceable rules, and are held accountable when they break these rules, then it is clear that much remains to be done to consolidate this aspect of the rule of law in post-war bosnia. while the monopoly on power of the three wartime nationalist political parties—the serb sds, the croat hdz, and the bosniak sda—has been broken, it remains fair to say that nationalist power structures across bosnia remain essentially intact. even though a pluralism of sorts has emerged across bosnia over the past decade, the basic pattern of political life remains largely unchanged: the country’s politics remains rigidly segregated along ethnic lines, nationalist rhetoric continues to be the key currency of bosnian political life, and the practice of reaping the spoils of office for the benefit of self or party continues to be the norm regardless of which configuration of political parties holds political power, be it at state, entity, or cantonal level. unsurprisingly, therefore, bosnian political parties are considered by bosnians to be the most corrupt institutions in the country. indeed, corruption is a major reason for the widespread disillusionment, or even disgust, with which ordinary bosnians now respond to politics in general and to the political class in particular (woehrel, 2012, p. 5). there is a strong sense, and evidence as well, that top business leaders and senior government officials are beyond the reach of the rule of law (icg, 2011, p. 9). if anything, impunity of the elite has been reinforced over the past few years with the declining influence of the international community and the reassertion of zero-sum nationalist discourse, which has led to increased political pressure on both the police and the judiciary (azinovic et al., 2011, pp. 5-6). at times, the country’s complex consociational structures have also conspired against the anti-corruption struggle. while a recent report of the state investigation and protection agency implicated republika srpska prime minister milorad dodik and a dozen other senior rs officials for corruption, misuse of office and fraud, the fact that the investigation of such allegations fell under the jurisdiction of the rs prosecutor meant that they were not seriously pursued (icg, 2011, p. 9). ultimately, bosnia’s current crisis may be as much about class as about ethnicity, as a small political and economic elite continue to enjoy the benefits of an unreformed status quo while life for the vast majority of ordinary bosnians is marked by continuing stagnation and growing hopelessness. for all the talk of bosnia’s transition to a free-market economy, it remains the case that for the ruling parties, the control of state-owned companies, as well as the control of access to private-sector opportunities from privatization deals to public procurement contracts, continue to be key sources of power, influence, and authority. to a large extent, the previous nexus between political studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 power politics and the rule of law 203 parties and organized criminals has morphed into the nexus between political parties and legitimate public and private enterprise. as christopher chivvis and harun dogo (2010) have noted, “political leaders control, directly or indirectly, many of the main employment opportunities in the country where private sector employment is underdeveloped and public sector jobs are widely viewed as superior” (p. 110). in the case of state-owned companies in particular, not only do they provide outlets for party patronage, they also provide ruling parties with important sources of revenue; in the words of srdjan blagovcanin, the head of the bosnian branch of transparency international, “the essential problem is political corruption at the highest levels of government where political parties basically use public companies as cash machines” (cited in jukic, 2011). the fight against corruption in bosnia over the past decade is a good example of “partial reform syndrome” (richmond & franks, 2007, p. 31), in which institutional and legal reforms are put into place but fail to transform underlying socio-economic or political dynamics. indeed, as part of its stated objective of joining the european union, bosnia has ratified a wide range of international instruments promoting public integrity and transparency, and as recently as 2010 has established a state-level agency for corruption prevention and the coordination of the fight against corruption (mantcheva et al., 2011). the fact that this agency remains an empty shell is further evidence of the limited ability of laws, or institutions, to promote change themselves. the bosnian example also underlines the reality that, in the fight against corruption as elsewhere, “international peacebuilding actors are … highly dependent on the cooperation of local actors, especially elites” (cheng & zaum, 2012, p. 14). indeed, observers often lament the lack of domestic political will to take up the fight against corruption, yet rarely investigate the sources of this absence. in bosnia’s case, it remains the case that, as peter singer noted more than a decade ago, “the forces of division are making too much money to let go of the status quo” (2000, p. 36). political corruption in bosnia also continues to be justified in the context of the country’s unresolved conflict; to the extent that parties portray themselves as essential defenders of their national interest, corruption is often rationalized in the name of this interest. conversely, heightened ethno-nationalist rhetoric also provides a convenient cover for, or distraction from, business as usual in public life. rs president milorad dodik’s popularity within the rs remains high, despite the odour of corruption that surrounds him and his close associates, largely because of his very public feud with both senior bosniak figures and with the broader international community on the question of the future status of republika srpska within bosnia. conclusion in the aftermath of constitutional changes imposed by the high representative as part of the international community’s broader state building agenda studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 204 timothy donais in bosnia, robert hayden noted in 2005 that the underwhelming impact of such changes could be read as “a cautionary tale about the limits of constitutionalism when there is no social consensus on the character or even the existence of the nation and, thus, not on the establishment of the state” (2005, p. 230). seven years later, a similar conclusion could be drawn about the limits of rule of law reform under similar conditions. for local parties in such a context, respect for, and adherence to, abstract and externally-imposed principles such as justice, accountability, and transparency not only entails greater costs than benefits, but also pales in significance when set alongside zero-sum political contests over fundamentally existential issues and the more prosaic pursuit of political and economic self-interest. reforms may be accepted in response to external carrots and/or sticks, but are rarely embraced with any enthusiasm or implemented with any determination by those whose power they promise to constrain. as the bosnian case shows, the more rule of law reforms threaten to subvert existing structures of power—in which the root causes of the original conflict often reside—the more likely they are to be resisted by those currently in positions of power. such a conclusion, which can be drawn with equal validity from other peacebuilding contexts, including those as varied as haiti, sierra leone, and afghanistan, presents a serious dilemma for contemporary peace builders. if domestic political elites are both indispensable partners and primary impediments in rule of law implementation, precisely how should international actors proceed in their engagement with such actors? even allowing for sufficient political will on the part of international actors to confront recalcitrant domestic elites head-on, it is not clear that more forceful approaches will produce better results. indeed, one of the lessons of bosnia— once described as “the world capital of interventionism” (cited in chandler, 2001, p. 116)—relates to the inherent limits of international power and authority in post-conflict spaces. if intrusive social engineering on the part of international actors has failed to transform bosnia, it is hard to imagine how it could succeed elsewhere. conversely, despite many recent calls for the international community to approach the challenges of peacebuilding with greater humility, it is not entirely clear what this implies in a practical sense. to the extent that it implies leaving problematic domestic power structures untouched and unchallenged, greater humility may translate into little more than an abandonment of rule of law and human rights as policy goals, and an admission that outsiders can do little to tackle the fundamental obstacles to peace in post-conflict environments. given these options, therefore, it is unsurprising that international rule of law promoters often unproductively oscillate between coercion and co-option in their efforts to encourage domestic elites to take genuine ownership over rule of law reforms, which contributes to the suboptimal equilibrium of what michael barnett and christoph zurcher (2009) have termed “compromised peacebuilding.” at the very least, the challenge of successfully charting a course between accepting the political status quo and fundamentally transforming it requires more nuanced approaches that advance the rule of law even while accepting studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 power politics and the rule of law 205 its limits as an instrument of deep political transformation. in bosnia’s case, the recent debacle around police reform provides a clear example of the dangers of promoting an explicitly political agenda under the guise of technocratic and legalistic reforms to a key rule of law institution. the political agenda in this case is a restructuring of relations between the state and the entities. in contrast, the more successful example of property law implementation, through which displaced bosnians regained legal rights to property owned or occupied by them prior to their displacement, suggests in certain circumstances that it is possible to detach rule of law issues from their more contentious and divisive political connotations. while early efforts to implement property rights were explicitly associated with the broader return agenda—and were thus resisted and/or exploited by ethnic nationalists across bosnia—property law implementation gradually came to focus more on the rights of individuals to re-claim their property, which they could subsequently re-occupy or sell as they saw fit, and less on the hotly-contested issue of whether property restitution could be, or should be, an instrument for reversing ethnic cleansing (williams, 2006, p. 39). in this case at least, the pursuit of more modest goals lowered the political temperature around the issue, allowed political obstructionism to be overcome, and ultimately facilitated a process through which local authorities restored hundreds of thousands of properties to their rightful owners (philpott, 2005, p. 21). whatever else one might make of the comparison between these two episodes, the success of the one and failure of the other points to the perils of using rule of law reforms as instruments for the achievements of broader political goals. rule of law promotion, in this sense, may be a poor substitute for an ongoing process of conflict resolution aimed at crafting durable solutions acceptable to all relevant parties. at an even deeper level, the dilemmas posed by post-conflict rule of law promotion raise profound questions about the processes through which the values associated with the rule of law come to be grounded within particular societies, post-conflict or otherwise. as discussed above, the growing attention being paid to questions of culture, and more specifically to the possibilities for grafting western rule of law traditions onto domestic traditions of order and justice, represents one means through which peace-builders have sought to ground rule of law norms in locally-legitimate practices and structures. yet, while the acceptance of both the inevitability and desirability of hybridity represents an important corrective to the early triumphalism of the liberal peacebuilding project, it may provide only a partial answer to the broader questions raised here about the relationship among power, peacebuilding and the rule of law, in large part because these traditional practices may contribute to, and justify, the concentration of power in the hands of an unaccountable few (mac ginty, 2008). finally, it is almost certainly the case that the rule of law in its more substantive forms, in which all citizens are equal before the law and those in power can also be held accountable under the law for their actions, can emerge only through the complex, long-term dynamics of domestic politics. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 206 timothy donais indeed, in western contexts, the rule of law emerged as part of a complex and dynamic process of negotiation and re-negotiation between governors and the governed that can be traced, in the english case at least, as far back as the magna carta. not only does this suggest that the development of the rule of law requires much longer time frames than those associated with contemporary peacebuilding operations, it also suggests that, in the case of bosnia, the failures of the rule of law may be closely associated with the failures of democracy. between the consociational nature of the bosnian settlement, which ensured that all political questions and contests would be filtered through the lens of ethnicity, and the international community’s intrusive statebuilding agenda, which made bosnia’s elected authorities more accountable to the international community than to their own citizens, the dynamics of peacebuilding in bosnia have conspired against the emergence of “normal democratic politics” in which public opinion matters and in which citizens can occasionally pass judgment on the performance of their elected officials. in bosnia’s case, however, elections have served too often as little more than ethnic censuses, while for a considerable period, real decision-making power resided almost exclusively in the office of the high representative. in combination, these dynamics have created an accountability-free political class and an impoverished democratic process that generates no pressure on political elites to either advance or abide by the rule of law. reversing such trends and overcoming the peacebuilding and state building stalemate that currently persists in bosnia will require considerable changes to both top-down and bottom-up political dynamics. no one should expect this reversal to come quickly, or easily. after 2006, the shift to a less-intrusive statebuilding strategy on the part of the international community, accompanied by a growing disinclination to deploy the bonn powers, has placed responsibility for bosnia’s future back in the hands of its elected representatives and thereby has created at least the potential for domestically-driven reform and greater democratic accountability. indeed, the post-bonn era was marked by some initial optimism on the constitutional reform front. reform of bosnia’s dysfunctional dayton-era constitution is widely considered as a prerequisite to the emergence of a more constructive, less-polarized, form of democratic politics. however, the inability to overcome deep divisions over the very nature of the bosnian state doomed constitutional reform talks and eventually deepened the ethnic divide among the country’s political elites. as i have noted elsewhere, the paradox is that while reconsidering the constitutional arrangements negotiated at dayton inevitably will open old wounds and revive old hostilities, it is very difficult to imagine how bosnia can escape chronic, debilitating political crisis without developing new, consensual political arrangements that are broadly acceptable to all of the country’s key political actors (donais, 2012, p. 93). similarly, the renewal of democratic politics in bosnia, which is a politics centred less on zero-sum ethnic competition and more on constructive statesociety relations underpinned by the progressive consolidation of the rule studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 power politics and the rule of law 207 of law, will also require a re-engaged civil society and electorate. ironically, the growing recognition of the importance of bottom-up or participatory peacebuilding (chopra & hohe, 2004) has coincided with the widespread abandonment of such practices by international actors in bosnia. today, bosnian civil society is weak and fragmented, and many voters have given up on the possibilities for achieving progressive change through democratic processes. while it is unclear whether there is any appetite among the international presence in bosnia to re-engage with questions of civil society peacebuilding as one means of bridging the state-society divide and of beginning the inevitably long-term process of re-negotiating a social contract, numerous entry points exist through which such a re-engagement could be initiated. there is no reason, for example, why constitutional reform discussions must remain the exclusive domain of political elites, and engaging bosnians in a constructive discussion about their own future might begin usefully with facilitated, community-level dialogues on basic constitutional questions. similarly, as stefanie kappler and oliver richmond (2011) have recently argued, the push to replicate western forms of civil society in bosnia and elsewhere have often led to the neglect of “deep” civil society (p. 274). given the widely-recognized failures of conventional civil society building efforts, it may be time to reconsider the peacebuilding potential of associational forms such as religious communities that continue to act as repositories of social capital even if they have previously been considered insufficiently liberal to merit outside support. finally, while statelevel democratic processes remain both paralyzed and beyond the reach of ordinary citizens, considerable opportunity continues to exist for efforts aimed at strengthening local-level democracy. as paul risley and timothy sisk (2005) have noted, legitimate local-level governance can not only enable the delivery of essential services, it can also enable ordinary citizens to exercise both voice and agency over decisions that affect their lives directly, facilitating both community engagement and cohesion and contributing over the longer term to the development of a participatory democratic culture. one of the key lessons to be drawn from bosnia’s post-dayton experience with the rule of law ultimately relates to the limits of externally-driven social engineering, especially in the absence of broad-based social and political consensus among those who have to live with such reforms on both the means and the ends of the reform process. as the broader discourse around state building increasingly turns to the importance of strengthening state-society relations (oecd, 2011), it will be imperative to focus less on the agency of international actors as architects, implementers and enforcers of the rule of law in post-conflict environments, and more the ways in which outsiders can facilitate domestic political dynamics that support, over the longer term, the emergence of the rule of law. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 208 timothy donais notes 1 author interview with kurt bassuener, democratization policy council, sarajevo, october 2011. 2 author interview, sarajevo, may 2009. 3 parts of this section are drawn from donais (2006). references azinovic, v., bassuener, k. & weber, b. 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(2012). bosnia’s gordian knot: constitutional reform. icg europe briefing no. 68, sarajevo. retrieved from http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/files/ europe/balkans/bosnia-herzegovina/b068-bosnias-gordian-knot-constitutional-reform.pdf jensen, e.g. (2008). justice and the rule of law. in c. call and v. wyeth (eds.), building states to build peace (pp. 119-142). boulder/london: lynne rienner. jukic, e. (2011, december 14). transparency slates bosnian corruption. balkan insight. retrieved from http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/transparency-slates-bosnian-corruption juncos, a. (2011). europeanization by decree? the case of police reform in bosnia. journal of common market studies, 49(2), 367-389. kappler, s. & richmond, o. (2011). peacebuilding and culture in bosnia and herzegovina: resistance or emancipation? security dialogue, 42(3), 261-278. kingston, p. 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(2010). public opinion poll: bosnia and herzegovina— august 2010. retrieved from http://www.ndi.org/files/ndi_bosnia_poll_report_august_2010.pdf organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd). (2005). international cooperation to fight corruption in southeastern europe: achievements, lessons learned and future challenges. scoping paper, anti-corruption network for transition economies. retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/corruption/acn/library/37152800.pdf organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd).(2011). supporting statebuilding in situations of conflict and fragility. paris: oecd. retrieved from http://browse.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/pdfs/free/4311031e.pdf. park, a. s. j. (2010). peacebuilding, the rule of law and the problem of culture: assimilation, multiculturalism, deployment. journal of intervention and statebuilding, 4(4), 413-432. paris, r. (2004). at war’s end: building peace after civil conflict. cambridge: cambridge university press. perdan, s. (2008). bosnia: ssr under international tutelage. in t. donais (ed.), local ownership and security sector reform (pp. 253-272). zurich/berlin: lit verlag. peterson, j. (2010). “rule of law” initiatives and the liberal peace: the impact of politicized reform in post-conflict states. disasters, 34(s1), s15-s39. philpott, c. (2005). though the dog is dead, the pig must be killed: finishing with property studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 210 timothy donais restitution to bosnia-herzegovina’s idp’s and refugees. journal of refugee studies, 18(1), 1-24. pouligny, b. (2005). civil society and post-conflict peacebuilding: ambiguities of international programmes aimed at building “new” societies. security dialogue, 36(4), 495-510. richmond, o. & franks, j. (2007). liberal hubris? virtual peace in cambodia. security dialogue, 38(1), 27-48. risley, p. & sisk, t. (2005). democracy and united nations peace-building at the local level: lessons learned. stockholm: international institute for democracy and electoral assistance. retrieved from http://www.idea.int/publications/democracy_un/index.cfm singer, p. (2000). bosnia 2000: phoenix or flames? world policy journal, 17(1), 31-37. soberg, m. (2008). the quest for institutional reform in bosnia and herzegovina. east european politics and societies, 22(4), 714-737. sorensen, g. (2006). liberalism of restraint and liberalism of imposition: liberal values and world order in the new millennium. international relations, 20(3), 251-272. stromseth, j., wippman, d., & brooks, r. (2006). can might make rights? building the rule of law after military interventions. cambridge: cambridge university press. tamanaha, b. (2004). on the rule of law: history, politics, theory. cambridge/new york: cambridge university press. williams, r. (2006). the significance of property restitution to sustainable return in bosnia and herzegovina. international migration, 44(3), 39-61. woehrel, s. (2012, february 29). bosnia: current issues and us policy. congressional research service report for congress. retrieved from http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/r40479.pdf correspondence address: melanie bedore, quest university canada, 3200 university boulevard, squamish, bc, canada v8b 0n8. email: melanie.bedore@questu.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 2, 207-228, 2014 food desertification: situating choice and class relations within an urban political economy of declining food access melanie bedore quest university canada abstract while food deserts create whole sets of tangible consequences for people living within them, the problem has yet to be the subject of much normative, in-depth evaluation as an urban political economy of food access. this paper provides a critical analysis of a specific food desert and its responses, drawing on a case study of the low-income, spatially segregated north end of the small city of kingston, ontario, canada. the main thrust of the paper is that the food desert remains a useful yet underexplored phenomenon through which to reveal the complexities and tensions surrounding the treatment of “choice” in a classed society. understood as an urban political economy of declining food access, the food desert phenomenon reveals capital’s complex role in the promotion or violation of dignity through the urban geographies of acquiring food for oneself, family, or household. through the data presented here, the article also argues for a collective pause among critical scholars to radicalize, rather than reject, the role of consumer choice in a more just food system, and for further normative engagement with urban landscapes of retail consolidation. introduction while the social sciences continue to advance many normative campaigns for justice, this has not been the case for over a decade of research on the food desert problem. the food desert concept is used to describe compounding low income and poor access to retail food outlets (wrigley, warm, & margetts, 2003) at scales such as the neighbourhood or census tract. food deserts are the subject of a wealth of mostly quantitative research in fields such as public health, applied geography and critical geographic information systems studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 208 melanie bedore (gis), and urban planning. at its most basic, the lack of walkable, fullservice retail food outlets in poor neighbourhoods is a problem of distributive injustice1. while food deserts create whole sets of consequences and burdens for people living within them (ver ploeg, et al., 2009), the problem has yet to be the subject of much normative, in-depth evaluation of the urban political economy of food access. such analysis is long overdue, for at least two reasons. the first is the historical magnitude and projected continuation of retail food capital flight and consolidation, which are key to understanding food deserts (larsen & gilliland, 2008; mcclintock, 2008; bedore, 2013). in line with the legacy of neil wrigley’s work (2000, 2002, 2003; wrigley, coe, & currah, 2005) in geography, food desert research is incomplete without due attention to the global retail food environment (donald, 2013). while equal consideration must be given to the local-level socio-economic conditions affecting consumer demand in low-income areas, wrigley’s work in particular shows a decadeslong trajectory of continuous reorganization on the part of the world’s most powerful food firms over the last thirty years, reflecting the historic trend of simultaneous expansion (into new global markets) and contraction (through mergers and acquisitions) (boothman, 2009). the canadian grocery retail trade highlights the very recent continuation of this tendency2. in light of the uncertainty of sustained growth by retail food capital brought about by food price fluctuations and global economic recession, retailers are—more so in recent years—aggressively rationalizing costs as they seek out competitive advantages and new economies of scale (eg., wood, 2013). at the same time, research by the usda suggests that over 23 million americans alone live in food desert areas, with 11.5 million of those people coping with simultaneous low income, poor food access, and no personal vehicle (usda economic research service, 2009). critical scholars throughout the social sciences are well positioned to consider these international trends and their more locallevel consequences through social justice research. second, limitations of current research agendas and perspectives could be better contextualized by normative approaches to the food desert problem. the problem currently has good political currency and has been thoroughly rescaled, with responses formulated and implemented at city and neighbourhood scales (through grassroots, urban planning, and mayoral initiatives, for example) through to national-level policy and programming. nevertheless, the longevity of these efforts is uncertain, given that critics are quick to point out the mixed bag of research questions and evidence that is driving current responses3. at the same time, single interventions such as a new grocery store can make for rather draconian solutions to the complexity of poor food access, which is shaped by both the supply-side factors noted above and socioeconomic conditions of particular places. nevertheless, they are currently the most studied food desert interventions, and the results here are similarly mixed (cf., wrigley, 2002; cummins et al., 2005, 2008; sadler, gilliland, & arku, 2013). in addition, public discourse on food deserts aligns itself easily with studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 food desertification 209 condemnation of people’s own poverty, poor choices, and other perceived individual-level failings. as such, it may draw focus, blame, and subsequent “disciplining” policy efforts toward low-income individuals and communities, while paying insufficient attention to the structural economic causes of the problem (guthman, 2011; shannon, 2013). one way to move past these limitations “may entail recognizing the multiple ways in which individuals value and interact with their food environment, rather than elevating a single optimized rationality defined primarily through nutrition and cost” (shannon, 2013, p. 12-13), and adding approaches that “emphasize the multiple normative frameworks that shape these practices, such as how family relationships, concerns over class status, or cultural norms influence food procurement” (ibid.). this paper takes up this call, providing a normative analysis of a particular food desert problem and its responses, drawing on a case study of the low-income, spatially segregated north end of the small city of kingston, ontario, canada. understood as an urban political economy of declining food access, the food desert phenomenon offers a novel way to critically and relationally evaluate the mundane geographies of daily life in a classed society. it is also an entry point for the study of capital’s complex role in the promotion or violation of dignity through the urban geographies of acquiring food for oneself and one’s family or household. as a consumptive act, food procurement is bound up with individual choice, desires, and class status, which are too often dismissed as diversions from more urgent critical evaluation and mobilization around systemic problems with the global food system and restructuring global economy. through the data presented here, i initiate what is hopefully a collective pause among scholars to engage seriously with the food desert problem as a restriction of individual choice and autonomy that, while problematic, are important expressions of power, independence, and belonging by the poor in a consumer society. case study and primary data collection this opportunity to study poor food access emerged in 2006 in kingston, a small city located in the southeastern region of ontario, canada. despite its small population of only 123,000, it is the largest city between the major urban centres of toronto and ottawa. its stable economy and sizeable middle class are owing to its status as a regional service hub and a large public sector employer (see bedore & donald, 2011). kingston has a decades-old reputation for having some of canada’s most visible socio-spatial polarization (finnigan, 1976; osborne & swainson, 1988; lukits, 2009). north kingston is a quintessential ”wrong side of the tracks,” known for an extensive history of poverty, political disenfranchisement, and concentration of high-needs populations. the details of the store closures, north kingston, and the city’s spatialized class divide have been described elsewhere (harris, 1981, 1988; lee, 2000; studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 210 melanie bedore kingston mayor’s taskforce on poverty, 2007; bedore & donald, 2011; bedore, 2013). most important for this study, however, is a brief profile4 of two neighbourhoods within north kingston. first, the neighbourhood of rideau heights saw its closest grocery store, the kingslake iga, close in early 2007 (see figure 1). according to the 2011 national household survey, rideau heights has 6,432 residents, occupying 2,883 dwellings (a. eusebio, personal communication, may 1, 2014). it houses the vast majority of the city’s public housing, including row housing and high-density apartment buildings administered by over a dozen housing providers. in relation to the overall city of kingston figures, the frequency of residents experiencing mental illness, physical disability, food insecurity, unemployment, and single parenthood is high in this neighbourhood, while car ownership, education, access to basic services, and incomes are comparatively low (city of kingston, n.d.; kingston community health centre, 2010). for instance, data from 2006 show that 32% of residents had no secondary or post-secondary school diploma or certificate, and a further 32% had only high school education. median family income in rideau heights was $35,247 in 2005, compared to the city’s median income of $69,530 (city of kingston, n.d.) a door-todoor survey of this neighbourhood undertaken for this research also revealed that over one third of residents in this neighbourhood may experience food insecurity within a given year. anecdotally, public transit service is inconsistent and generally lacking in the area. since rideau heights is a residential neighbourhood bordered by industrial land and major roads, at the time of study residents had some peripheral grocery options that could be walkable depending on one’s location, including a butcher, a produce vendor, and some convenience stores. the iga was, admittedly, a strange fit for the neighbourhood: it was a mid-priced grocery store, located in a strip mall facing a major road, whose target customers were commuters, tourists, and leisure shoppers (hence the liz clairborne women’s apparel store located next to it) rather than rideau heights residents. as such, it was not affordable for some people; however, it was valued as a walkable one-stop option for many of the area’s carless residents. shortly after this closure, another took place in the inner harbour neighbourhood, which has a population of 7,271 residents occupying 3,694 dwellings (a. eusebio, personal communication, may 1, 2014). while the inner harbour is gentrifying, it has a significant number of poor households (statistics canada, 2013) and a historically blue-collar economic and cultural identity (harris, 1981). the inner harbour is adjacent to kingston’s waterfront and downtown area, so it enjoys somewhat better access to walkable services than the more isolated rideau heights, including two grocery stores, a lowercost food basics and a high-priced (and likely cost prohibitive) metro. residents living close to downtown can also access a small independent grocer and a few ethnic food retailers. despite these possible options, inner harbour residents were concerned and angered by the closure of a small, nearly century-old neighbourhood grocery store called grant’s no frills. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 food desertification 211 this store had been an independent, family-owned business; after several decades the family sold it to the loblaw corporation, which closed the store in 2009 (see figure 2). unlike contemporary food retailers that are often located on main streets and in commercially zoned areas, grant’s no frills was constructed prior to modern zoning orthodoxies and hence had the closest possible proximity to the surrounding residential neighbourhood. while it offered almost no parking space, it was extremely walkable—and affordable—for residents at all income levels. this study is theoretically grounded in the urban political economy tradition that embeds class relations in the space of the city and explores the role that urban development, governance, and planning can play in relieving or exacerbating inequality. the approach looks to capitalism as an overarching economic system with clear urban manifestations, namely, the spatiality of uneven power relations and distributional outcomes in the city (cardoso & breda-vásquez, 2007). the article also draws from scholarly dialogues around liberal and political-economic formulations of social justice discussed in the following section. primary source data used for this article was collected by a triangulation of methods between 2006 and 20095 in order to best assemble the perspectives and experiences of low-income north kingston residents. most relevant to this paper are the results of three focus groups held in the north end. adult participants meeting criteria for food insecurity6 were recruited using posters placed in social service agencies, apartment building lobbies, bus shelters and on signposts. lasting two to three hours, each focus group hosted between ten and thirteen participants. twenty-seven people were involved in the three focus groups, nineteen of whom were women. while participants were not asked to identify whether they were members of any visible minority group, only one participant was not visibly caucasian, with english being their non-native language. the lack of racial diversity in the focus groups is not unusual for kingston: the 2011 national household survey estimates that only 6.1% of the population of the kingston census metropolitan area (9,330 individuals) belong to a visible minority group, compared with 25.9% of ontario’s overall population (statistics canada, 2014). perhaps half of participants identified themselves as being parents to children living at home. open-ended questions were designed to explore participants’ experiences accessing food within a broader framework of low income, and to probe the boundaries of participants’ thinking about justice and their ideal food procurement places and experiences. additionally, four widely advertised, open-invitation public meetings about the no frills closure were held in the inner harbour during this time, convened by a local elected city councilor and community activists in order to consider the public’s options for recruiting a replacement grocery store, stopping the closure, or repurposing the vacant building. attendees ranged in age from young post-secondary students to seniors, and—alluding to the gentrification taking place in the neighbourhood—presented as being from a range of socio-economic backgrounds. these meetings, which were eventually formalized as the new frills downtown revitalization project, studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 212 melanie bedore provided a valuable opportunity to collect public comments in a less-contrived setting. i attended each of these meetings, identifying myself as a researcher and recording the proceedings in order to collect local people’s reactions to the store closure and their beliefs about the obligations, motivations, and responsibilities of the parent retail company. data was also collected from forty-two interviews with key local stakeholders, including elected officials, head bureaucrats, commercial property developers, food retailers, anti-hunger activists, retailing experts, and sustainable food systems advocates such as local farmers and paid organizers. these interviewees were targeted for their respective expertise or for their ability to contribute unique perspectives on food access and the challenges within north kingston, food-related or otherwise. finally, as a food researcher i inadvertently earned “insider” status with respect to local and regional food campaigns happening at the time. as such, i was privy to conversations and meetings taking place regarding food system localization and 100-mile diet-type endeavors at the time, and i draw from one particularly insightful meeting in the case analysis presented below. each of these types of primary source data was transcribed and read multiple times by the researcher. they were coded thematically to answer larger research questions about 1) perceptions of kingston’s changing retail food landscape, 2) historical context surrounding local food desertification, and 3) food desertification as social injustice. within these broad themes, a more reflexive identification of sub-themes helped to develop an appreciation for nuanced perspectives on “choice,” “dignity” and other ideas covered below. food access as neglected spatial politics of choice and dignity the issue of poor and declining food access for people with low income is intimately tied to class relations and changing geographies of the built environment in the capitalist city. there is also an undeniable relationship between individual wishes, desires, choices, and preferences and the practices of traveling to, and shopping for, food. these individual subjectivities emerge, harvey (2000) explains, through the availability of circulating variable capital for the working classes. the prospect of spending this disposable income generates complex relations between “needs,” “wants,” and “luxuries” that affect lifestyle choices, status symbols, and fashions as set by the rich, powerful, and famous. these set relative standards for the laboring poor since, as marx also insists, the sense of well-being is a comparative rather than an absolute measure and the gap between rich and poor is just as important as the absolute conditions of sustenance. (harvey, 2000, p. 115) as harvey emphasizes from marx, consumption is biologically and relationally essential within capitalist accumulation, yet this process of acquiring goods and services is complicated by the emotionally charged navigation of needs, wants, consumer choice, and consumer culture. hence, marx is clear that relative or comparative perceptions of well-being are as studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 food desertification 213 important as the absolute measures of the same. socio-spatial processes of food shopping and travelling to get to food reveal class disparities in the emotional consequences of unmet needs, standards, and desires. it is necessary, for this reason, to wrestle with the complex push-and-pull relationship between dignity and the built environment of consumer capitalism. on the one hand, constant restructuring/remaking of this built retail environment is a spatial strategy employed by capital that creates necessary class tensions (harvey, 1973). when understood through the lens of neoliberal urbanism, the burdens of shifting consumer landscapes easily lend themselves to depoliticized narratives about the need for individual responsibility, entrepreneurialism, and prudence (e.g., leitner, peck & sheppard, 2007). at the same time, i show here that engagement with this oppressive geography of retail capital has the immediate individual-level benefit of enhancing dignity of economically marginalized people. there are strong contemporary traditions of liberal philosophy within which to interpret the consequences of food deserts. liberalism considers issues around the relationship between institutions of governance and the individual, and the values of individual freedom, preferences, choice, and dignity (pattanaik, 2009). in their most basic form, sen (1970, p. 87) writes that liberal values seem to require that there are choices that are personal and the relevant person should be free to do what he likes. it would be socially better, in these cases, to permit him to do what he wants, everything else remaining the same. liberalism and the urban spatial form are closely intertwined because of cities’ inherent diversity and uneven power relations (katznelson, 1997), making it an important validating framework through which to understand the emotional subjectivity in food access struggles in light of capitalist class relations. wishes and desires are taken most seriously, perhaps, by sen’s capabilities approach (sen, 1985, 1992, 1999; nussbaum & sen, 1993; nussbaum, 2000), developed over the past thirty years as a critique of rawls’ (1971) preoccupation with the distribution and possession of primary goods. the capabilities approach assigns great importance to people’s ability to express and realize their wishes and desires. it is not commodities—objects and things—in themselves that are important, but rather how commodities enhance and enable our functionings, “what the person succeeds in doing with the commodities and characteristics at his or her command” (sen, 1985, p. 10). as robeyns (2009, p. 43) summarizes, the main claim of the capabilities approach is that in making interpersonal comparisons of advantage, we should focus on people’s real or effective opportunities to do what they want to do, and to be who they want to be, instead of focusing on peoples’ holdings of social primary goods or their mental states (as in certain forms of utility). these beings and doings are called a person’s functionings, and include such basic functionings studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 214 melanie bedore as being healthy, being sheltered, not being mentally ill, engaging in social relations, and more complex and specific functionings such as combining a career with a gender-egalitarian family life. the approach’s contribution to this study is its acknowledgement of the diversity of goals, desires, and aspirations to “be” and “do” among a heterogeneous population of individuals. for this case, people’s functionings could be considered their aspirations for food procurement experiences that promote feelings of dignity, autonomy, and belonging within a broader consumer culture, and for cross-class parity and respectability more generally. these functionings, i argue, are impaired by the narrowed capability for choice in food desert conditions and their consequent exacerbation of class tensions. the spatial embeddedness of dignity and indignity is often taken for granted, yet it situates choice and autonomy as critical to human self-actualization. for jacobson et al. (2007, 2009), the concept draws attention to our beliefs about what standards a society formally or informally considers necessary in order for all individuals to enjoy a “good” life, beginning with basic feelings of self-respect, autonomy, and control over oneself. dignity may be felt and honoured in the “normal, unspoken conventions of mutual respect in everyday life” (sayer, 2007, p. 565), and understood as core feelings of self-command and autonomy, “to be in control of oneself, competently and appropriately exercising one’s powers” (ibid., p. 568). seen in this way, dignity is internally constructed and held; however, it is also profoundly social, being positively or negatively affected by interactions between individuals (jacobson, 2007). dignity, then, is affected by the exercising of choice and autonomy and is profoundly socio-spatial, which jacobson understands in terms of the embeddededness of encounter in place and space. dignity encounters take place in specific settings, public or private social and physical environments. the dignity dimension is related to several sets of conditions: the positions of the individual or collective actors; features of the setting; and properties of the broader social order in which the setting, actors, and encounter are all situated (jacobson et al, 2009, p. 726). the city is a scale of particular interest with respect to the lived experiences of vulnerable populations. within the city, for example, the habitual quest for resources such as affordable food and shelter can promote or violate alreadymarginalized people’s dignity due to the myriad of challenges, burdens, disappointments, and even dangers that complicate the search for essential goods (ibid.). liberal values—as deployed by the capabilities approach and others— do not preclude the importance of assessing the institutions and systems of economic production and social interaction and whether these foster the capabilities needed for people to achieve their subjective goals and values. several contemporary political philosophers do precisely this: young (2000, p. 33) proposes, for example, that social justice be defined as the institutional studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 food desertification 215 conditions for promoting self-development and self-determination7 of a society’s members, and she is principally concerned with the forms of institutionalized oppression that prevent this, such as the limits of local democracy. sayer’s (2005) arguments about the moral significance of class also engage with people’s emotional responses to class inequity, grounded firmly within “the need not only for a politics of recognition but a rejuvenated egalitarian politics of redistribution that confronts the injustice of class inequalities openly” (p. 232). finally, fainstein’s work on the just city (2001; 2005; 2010) attempts to reconcile tensions surrounding democracy, diversity, competitiveness, and cohesion, acknowledging the need to grapple with competing claims from groups marginalized on economic and non-economic grounds. her attempts are lauded for doing so without neglecting “the strong explanatory potential of the political economy tradition” (cardoso & breda-vásquez, 2007, p. 386). this project attempts to walk this same line, recognizing the importance of individual subjective dignity and freedoms within “the constraining power of the global capitalist political economy” (ibid.). north kingston’s food desertification as an urban political economy of food access and choice the emotional consequences of declining retail food access must be understood first of all as one only dimension of vulnerability inherent to food procurement practices for food-insecure individuals and households with low income. life with low income and the restricted mobility that often comes with it are shaped by socio-economic factors that limit access and individuals’ choice sets within retail settings (e.g., mcintyre et al., 2003; wiig & smith, 2009; dachner et al., 2010). these limitations are endemic to the processes of considering, comparing, selecting and rejecting items for purchase (gregson, crewe & brooks, 2002). north end residents situate the costs and burdens of the iga and no frills grocery store closures within a broader context of daily struggle with poverty, noting, for example, that when you feed yourself [poorly], you don’t feel right. you don’t act right. you don’t work properly. the human body is, like, don’t operate well. (inner harbour focus group no. 2, male). people who have families, you gotta get what you can get, you can’t get all them good foods, you just gotta get what you can get. (inner harbour focus group no. 1, female) it is important to acknowledge that grocery store closures and food desertification, then, may be less dire problems in themselves and more ones that further compound the ongoing struggle to do things such as remain healthy, raise children, navigate the social welfare system, and just “get by.” moreover, exposure to negative emotional consequences is commonplace studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 216 melanie bedore for the poor even without the compounding consequences of food desertification. reflecting jackson et al.’s (2006) distinction between choice between stores and choice within stores, even when north enders try to simplify their shopping habits to avoid emotional vulnerability, a gap between disposable income and a person’s wants or needs can lead to embarrassment and degrading situations. these instances must be regularly endured while living on a fixed income, which is often synonymous with dependence on meager social assistance and disability payments, […] with the grocery stores…things are on sale, you see all these people going, buying expensive stuff, stocking up, blades of roast, you’ve got to get other stuff ‘cause you can’t afford to get it. it’s embarrassing no matter what, because you don’t have the money to get it. (inner harbour focus group no. 1, female) oh yeah, it’s really embarrassing when you think you’ve got enough groceries for enough money, and you get up there, and, okay, you’re ten dollars short. okay, i have to put this back and this back and this back, and it’s really embarrassing to do that, because that says ‘you don’t have a lot of money’. and it is embarrassing to say you don’t have a lot of money, especially when you’re buying food, ‘cause that’s an essential part of life. (inner harbour focus group no. 2, female) embarrassment and shame are often confined to internal dialogue and feelings, but they are socially co-constructed, deriving from peoples’ direct or indirect social interactions and encounters with others (eg., chase & walker, 2012). these interactions make visible the disparities between others’ affluence and financial freedoms (as perceived by the poor) compared with their own, whether through a glance at another shopper’s cartload of food or by disrupting the flow at the checkout line to remove or return items they cannot afford. declining choice and its consequences through the lens of declining choice, the north kingston grocery store closures reveal compounding emotional consequences, explored here as two dimensions of individual dignity violation and injustice. first, food desertification creates further narrowing of choice for the poor, which is an important element of self-worth in capitalist society. in the north end, residents acknowledged that the small scale and inner-city location of the no frills made it an important part of people’s personal geographies of food procurement. while it is appreciated by people with cars and no discernible barriers to retail food access (one of whom noted, “i almost go there every day. we have a car, but i walk this way, it’s in the neighbourhood” [january 8 meeting, female]), its importance is far greater among people who face multiple concurrent barriers, including low income, old age, disability, carlessness, and/or limited food storage capacity in a small apartment, when i first moved there, i didn’t realize how important it was to have the studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 food desertification 217 grocery. after a while, you get really dependent on it. you have to have freezers and, like, lots of room in your home if you’re gonna go out and pay money to go out and get groceries and bring them into your home, it’s so much easier to go to the grocery store three times a week, stuff like that, and we have a lot of people in the neighbourhood, i think, who are living in apartments, not able to store groceries, and they need to get affordable groceries. [february 7 meeting, male] [no frills is] a major food source. i know a lot of people need it, they don’t have transportation, they have to walk. the seniors building here at 106 pine street, you’ve got the one on rideau street. they were built because there was grocery sources in the neighbourhood . . . the seniors can walk to buy their groceries. now that’s going to change. [january 8 meeting, male] for various reasons, many people at the no frills public meetings appreciate being able to make shorter trips to a small nearby store, several times a week. among more affluent neighbourhood residents who own personal vehicles and therefore have a greater range of shopping choices available, this pattern constitutes a preference. people with limited means or mobility, with a far more restricted set of choices within a confined geographic area, also express tremendous appreciation for this store’s scale and location because it accommodates their broader socio-economic constraints. these accounts of the store’s importance to people with a variety of socioeconomic situations invoke clarke et al.’s (2004) helpful analysis of choice and retail food geographies. food desert conditions, they suggest, can be read through their impact on already-existing levels of choice at the household level: people’s choice sets are conditional not only on very household-level factors such as income and mobility but also on social and cultural ‘tastes’ and feelings that they are welcome and among people like them. with a nearby store closure, those people unable to overcome “the frictional effects of distance” (p. 91) therefore confront an even smaller range of choices than what is theoretically available. they are effectively deprived of the individual-level benefits of choice, the absence of which can be disconcerting and demoralizing, whereas ample choice can empower consumers, giving them the opportunity to express themselves in a “democratic” fashion. the fundamental benefit of having retail choices available, however, is that it promotes a feeling of equitable treatment in society (ibid., p. 91). similarly, dowler and caraher (2003, p. 60) suggest that to be deprived of choice throughout one’s diet and food procurement practices means that the poor are “excluded from one of the dynamic, leading sectors in society.” such is the growing recognition that dignity is embedded in choiceand payment-based practices that non-profit charities such as food pantries and hot meal programs are doing their best to create choice-based programming. for instance, poppendieck (1998, p. 240) argues in her study of emergency food aid in the us that the importance of choice is such that “shopping is an adult activity; it implies competence and individuality, and it casts the client in an active rather than a passive role.” the indignity associated with lack of studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 218 melanie bedore choice represents, for these authors, a deeply problematic but understandable basis through which the social exclusion of low-income people occurs. through their personal accounts of food shopping constraints, north enders support the idea that geography, in addition to factors such as food costs and cultural acceptability, further constrain one’s available set of choices. before, when [no frills] was down here, we could get anything. i would just go down, drop the boys off in the morning at school and then walk from there to no frills, i’m already half-way, and then walk home. now, it’s like i have to find a ride to get out to [another inexpensive store] if i need anything. (inner harbour focus group no. 2, male). but where are we going to get our groceries? […] i bike and i walk, and i’ve got more metal in my ankle than—that would set off—whatever. and i can’t walk that far, and i bike. i live down by the old woolen mill. so what do i do? (april 4 meeting, female) physical barriers such as steep hills that go unplowed in winter and short crossing times for pedestrians at busy multi-lane streets are severe enough to limit choice within people’s personal geographies of food procurement even further, especially for those who are less mobile in their quest for food. when describing these physical barriers and store closures, people regularly used language such as “stressful, “emotional,” and “scary,” and alluded to annoyance, extra financial and time costs, and anxiety. the food desert concept, then, could be aptly considered as a catalyst for the decline in individual autonomy through the narrowing of choice for the poorest and least mobile of residents. the most marginalized and precariously self-sustaining individuals and households will be more sensitive to minor changes in their respective landscapes of essential services, compounded by other variables affecting food access. for this reason, narrowed choice within food procurement practices stands to exacerbate both interand intra-class inequalities in the emotional risks of everyday consumption and social reproductive practices. moreover, by overemphasizing the food desert problem as one of static outcomes and barren landscapes rather than as uneven processes, a variety of stakeholders (this author included) has tended to overgeneralize the breadth of the problem while failing to appreciate the heterogeneity of socio-economic conditions and resources within a community. in doing so, we may have inadvertently reproduced both those place-based narratives that may have contributed to retail capital withdrawal in the first place as well as the same power imbalances that determine who is included or excluded in defining and diagnosing food deserts. the notion of class paternalism can be a helpful way to explore such dynamics in greater detail. class paternalism the food desert problem and its effect of further narrowing food procurement options for the poor may also lend themselves to class paternalism and the studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 food desertification 219 undervaluing of choice for economically marginalized groups. as a food researcher in a small city, i saw this paternalism firsthand: in late 2008, a meeting was convened by the leaders of a food system relocalization project funded by the national farmers’ union. the meeting, which took place at the building of a charitable meal provider in the north end, was organized— according to its leaders—as a discussion about creating food justice in kingston by connecting food-insecure people with locally, sustainably grown food in a way that would pay farmers a living wage and therefore protect their livelihoods and small businesses. if poor north enders had been present at the meeting, they would have heard comments about themselves that were far from dignity-enhancing, including this idea from a female attendee, that the people who are especially food insecure, there seems to be a lack of knowledge of what to do with that food. when you’ve got a population who’s been living off of convenience foods, boxed foods all their lives, being shown real foods is something new. being told they can go to a farm and dig potatoes and take them home, well they […] they don’t even know that a potato grows underground or how to do that, or what to do with it once they go home. at the same meeting, the loblaw’s chain of grocery stores was roundly dismissed as a possible partner in creating food justice by one attendee because, as one person put it, “they’re not local local.” this comment alludes to regional farmers’ contempt for the company’s ”grown close to home” campaign, a rather vague, thinly veiled marketing exercise to capitalize on the popularity of locavorism. retail food capital, it seems, has no place in a more just food system for the poor, despite the belief that the poor are, apparently, hopelessly inept when it comes to food. this discussion—and likely others like it that are taking place within food activism circles everywhere—is prefaced on an incredibly narrow view of poor people’s food knowledge, skills, and interest, matched by a similar narrow range of options for creating “food justice” for kingston’s north end. its themes suggest that within sustainable food movements, class paternalism can manifest itself as inappropriate, unrealistic, or misguided efforts to create behavioural change or improve food access, with little attention to issues of privilege or disadvantage on the part of outside operatives. when driven by the logic that sustainable food systems in low-income communities should be fostered through self-sufficiency, such responses can deny the importance of retail capital and economic exchange to human dignity in a consumer society. to be sure, this problem is distinct from other forms of paternalism that take place within the food procurement practices. scholars have, for instance, unveiled the underlying class, gender, and race inequities and power imbalances that can pervade alternative food practices (delind & ferguson, 1999; allen, 2004; slocum, 2007; guthman, 2008a, 2008b; alkon & agyeman, 2011; alkon, 2012). as well, paternalism is behind much of the indignity that many people experience when using some charitable food programs and other social services because of excessive, invasive bureaucracy or staff attitudes (kissane, 2003; warshawsky, 2010; zedlewski studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 220 melanie bedore et al., 2003). shannon (2013) also understands the food desert problem as a spatialized form of ”neoliberal paternalism” (soss, fording & schram, 2011), whereby sets of policies are meant to correct the disorderly, mismanaged, unhealthy lives of those in low-income communities, reforming them into economically independent, taxpaying “consumers” of state services. this framework ultimately places the responsibility for, and solutions to, obesity and other food-related problems onto the individuals living these problems. in the case of kingston’s north end, however, paternalism can be read through the patronizing rhetoric spoken by local food elites, which shows a distinct lack of awareness of historicallyand geographically-embedded class relationships within the city. the most subtle message embedded with food system relocalization rhetoric, discerned during this fieldwork, is that it is unproblematic to encourage the poor to resort to urban farming or other alternatives to resolve food access problems amidst the continuing middle-class norms of engaging with retail food capital through shopping and paying for one’s food. the latter is, in fact, the way that most focus group participants wish to acquire food for themselves and their households. north enders consistently noted their preferences for choice-based food procurement activities and acquiring food by paying for it with money. when asked to describe the “best” or “ideal” way to get groceries for themselves and their households, focus group participants are clear. i think the best would be grocery store, because you have all these choices, and you have the money to buy food, so for me, that’s the best case scenario, but even the grocery store with a little bit of money is better than going to a [charity] program. (inner harbour focus group no. 1, female) it’s better having your own money and going out and getting what you want. ‘cause it makes you feel good, you have money in your pocket and you want to go out, decide on what you want. (rideau heights focus group, female) having adequate money and paying for food implies here that the shopper is acting freely and independently, without resorting to charity. engaging in economic exchange, furthermore, is an opportunity to express power and free will as a consumer, and to function in society, in one participant’s words, “just like everybody else” (inner harbour focus group no. 2, female). in all fairness, many focus group participants did note that since the grocery store can be so demeaning for the reasons outlined earlier, using meal programs and charities can actually be preferable, provided that the staff and the ambience of the space are familiar, welcoming, and non-judgmental. by and large, however, underlying the importance of the retail transaction is the desire to enjoy entitlement, belonging, cross-class parity, and the respectability (young, 1990) afforded to people who fit within conventions of the “professional” way of life in modern consumer society. for some north enders, the desire for alternative food provisioning did also include gardening, communal non-monetary cooperatives, and buying locally. resisting the above stereotype that poor people uniformly lack studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 food desertification 221 knowledge, skills, or interest in food and cooking (mclaughlin, tarasuk & kreiger, 2003; stead et al., 2004), focus group participants showed interest in the locality and seasonality of food, and a minority of people in each focus group were interested in alternatives such as food workshares, community gardens, or community-owned food stores as ways that north end residents could have access to healthier, low-cost, locally grown, and/or culturally appropriate foods, i think that with, like a cooperative, you could only take local growers, then it would booster our economy up, ‘cause our farmers are going bankrupt also, and we would only be supplying our stores with ontario-grown products. (inner harbour focus group no. 2, female) yeah, even as an incentive to help something like what’s being started in community gardens… here, you want something out of it? well, put maybe an hour of work into it. even weeding for an hour in a garden will help out a garden, and it also gets you your food, which will help you out. and a lot of people can put away, like, an hour, maybe once a week to go do something, maybe even more [...] (inner harbour focus group no. 2, male) while north enders were not aware of the food justice meeting noted above and did not comment on it during this research, several focus group comments encapsulate the familiar tensions around localism: they feel confident that we should all, presumably, be eating more food that is some variation of homegrown, local or organic, in line with the dominant discourses around the ethics of contemporary global food politics, while at the same time recognizing the income-related challenges to doing so. you really start to get into the food politics. you know. we’re starting to get into more politics, we’re starting to transgress from survival. you know, what about people who want to buy fair trade, but you don’t have money? i don’t have money. i buy the cheapest thing i can, what’s on sale, unless it’s bad, and i won’t buy something that’s noticeably bad. but i always buy on sale. (inner harbour focus group no. 1, female) questions of paternalism and unequal class relations arise, however, when non-market provisioning activities (which are pursued for pleasure, symbolic politics, or as a seasonal supplement to food shopping by the vast majority of the middle class who undertake them) are encouraged as solutions to food access problems or as a means of self-sufficiency. the reproduction of uneven power relations between privileged food movement elites and the poor raises important questions about social justice. in particular, class paternalism in alternative food practices nicely illustrates young’s (1990) notion of cultural imperialism, “the universalization of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm” (ibid., p. 59). as shown in the kingston example, food desert debates and interventions (absent of the very people targeted for assistance) may exacerbate stigma and oppressive class relations by providing an additional studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 222 melanie bedore channel through which the poor find themselves and their alleged foodrelated failings, as young suggests, […] defined from the outside, positioned, placed, by a network of dominant meanings they experience as arising from elsewhere, from those with whom they do not identify and who do not identify with them. consequently, the dominant culture’s stereotyped and inferiorized images of the group must be internalized by group members at least to the extent that they are forced to react to behavior of others influenced by those images (young, 1990, pp. 59-60). food desert responses whose momentum comes primarily from places and people of relative privilege may represent a highly localized form of cultural imperialism based on hardened ideas about class. food desert responses, then, should be considered in light of this form of oppression, interrogating the notion that, since they already have access problems, the poor are an ideal “target market” to become the drivers of certain forms of food system change. under the guise of education, such a goal requires that people somehow overcome their wishes for middle class comforts and standards, while the middle class continues, by and large, those very same consumerist practices. in other words, attempts to create the conditions for economically vulnerable people to “go first” in the incremental movement toward broader long-term food system change may deny those same people dignity as it is presently constituted in their lives. concluding discussion the arguments presented here are meant to strengthen the “return” of class to social science and geographical research agendas, in line with emerging perspectives “more concerned with the ways that class as an identity is forged and experienced” (dowling, 2009, p. 834). to this point, the food desert problem has been studied primarily within scientific and distributive paradigms to gain insights about causal and correlative relationships between diet, health, race, class, food environment conditions, and food access amidst the new retail geography (wrigley & lowe, 1996). when understood as landscapes of poor and declining retail food access resulting from retail food capital restructuring and consolidation, however, food deserts tell a far richer story about the struggles for class parity and dignity in everyday life. this paper has attempted to address the lack of normative analysis of the food desert phenomenon as the narrowing of choice for the underclass. through the data presented here, i have argued that the fact that “each person’s ability to choose, to be a consumer, is both a fundamental right and fundamentally flawed” (shannon, 2013, p. 11) should not deny low-income people’s aspirations for middle-class comforts and norms in the everyday routines of life. this normative proposition is distinct from the trap of “normalizing middle-class ‘foodscapes’ as a model for low-income areas” (ibid., p. 2), which only reinforces a static, homogenized understanding of studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 food desertification 223 food access within a geographic area; there is room for attention to middleclass capabilities that go beyond a purely distributive approach to food deserts. disparities in class capabilities—between who is able and unable to “be” and “do” as they wish in their consumption practices—are reminders that middle-class norms act as benchmarks against which people perceive their own relative well-being or deprivation. among elites advocating for local food system change, there can be a lack of sensitivity to the power of these benchmarks in the lives of the poor and to the multiple meanings of “choice” across classes and income levels. in the process of struggling toward a more sustainable food system, middle-class norms and procurement habits should be the targets of initial change, bringing food options that are, for the most part, currently within the realm of niche markets to the foreground of consumer demand (donald, 2008). as long as the middle class engages only marginally with non-market or sustainable foodways, the poor will continue to derive dignity through capitalist consumerism, and understandably so. if food system activists and change agents truly aspire to change the food system one bite—or dollar—at a time, they must start with those who set the standards to which struggling people aspire. unlike conventional research approaches to the food desert problem, this study does not attempt to measure the absolute costs and burdens of food desertification on a heterogeneous population. rather, it builds on points in recent liberal thinking about social justice and the subjectivity of human self-actualization. that advocates of global food system change and postcapitalist food systems may unwittingly become agents in these oppressive local class relations by perpetuating paternalistic and cultural-imperialistic attitudes toward the poor is pernicious indeed. failing to show sensitivity to the complexity of “choice” for diverse socio-economic groups in late consumer capitalism is just one example of the ways that, in some instances, local food elites may reinforce class disparities rather than overcome them. the class politics of choice and autonomy—who has them, who doesn’t, and why—are a neglected but important dimension of urban food justice debates. it is hoped that the data presented here advance the need for a radical politics of choice within multidisciplinary food studies and political economy by creating stronger conceptual links between normative theory and class politics as they play out in the mundane yet conflictladen practices of everyday life. in particular, ongoing research is needed to understand alternative food practices and discourses not only as they have been presented here as unwitting agents of the reproduction of urban class relations, but also through the hopeful lens of cross-class bridging and solidarity. at the same time, much could be learned by overcoming the dichotomy of “conventional” and “alternative” food business; rather than assuming a complete incompatibility between scaled-up food retail capital and everything else, food justice and planning research and practice would be better served, donald (2008) argues, by engaging more profoundly with food firm dynamics in order to identify lessons in capacity building, up-scaling, and sustainable regional development. this article offers a first step in this studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 2, 2014 224 melanie bedore direction, asserting that the food desert problem must firstly be brought into public discussion as a divisive spatial politics of oppression. notes 1 distributive justice studies are principally concerned with the distribution of resources in society and the principles by which these are justly or unjustly allocated (see rawls, 1971; herbert & smith, 1979; badcock, 1984; also young’s [1990] critique of the distributive paradigm of social justice). 2 two recent domestic examples illustrate this well. in june 2013 safeway’s canadian assets were acquired by sobeys, the country’s second largest grocery retailer. the $5.8 billion acquisition is expected to realize significant economies of scale, and allow sobeys to intensify its market presence in western canada (strauss & ladurantaye, 2013). in july 2013, the loblaw corporation—canada’s largest grocery retailer— purchased the country’s largest drugstore chain, shopper’s drug mart, for $12.4 billion (marotte, 2013). 3 the literature on food deserts and food environments is far too vast to summarize here; however, readers may further explore aggregate results and systematic reviews (beaulac, kristjansson & cummins, 2009; walker, keane & burke, 2010), contrasting studies about whether food deserts exist, where, and in what form (leete, bania & sparks-ibanga, 2011; short, guthman & raskin, 2007), and studies measuring food deserts’ effect on outcomes such as fruit and vegetable consumption, obesity, and dietrelated disease (pearson et al., 2005; bodor et al., 2008; franco et al., 2009). 4 the city of kingston’s most recent in-depth neighbourhood profiles are based on the 2006 census. at the time of submission, the city was able to provide basic population information presented here based on the 2011 national household survey; however, more detailed figures will not be available for some time. 5 while they do not appear in this article, the results presented here are shaped by additional primary data collected in a reminiscing exercise with older kingston residents at a long-term care facility, over 350 door-to-door surveys of rideau heights residents, and archival research on the changing retail food landscapes of the city and the capitalization of the retail food sector. 6 pursuant to those used in the 1998-99 national health population survey (dietitians of canada, 2005), indicators of food insecurity were, at any time in the last year, not having enough food to eat because of lack of money, worrying that there wouldn’t be enough to eat because of lack of money, or not eating the quality or variety of foods that you would like, because of a lack of money. 7 young (2000, p. 33) defines self-development as heterogeneous individuals’ ability to participate in determining their actions and the conditions of their actions. references alkon, a.h. 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(2003). deprivation, diet and food retail access: findings from the leeds ‘food deserts’ study. environment and planning a, 35(1), 151-188 young, i.m. (1990). justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. young, i.m. (2000). inclusion and democracy. oxford: oxford university press. zedlewski, s.r., nelson, s., edin, k., koball, h.l., pomper, k., & roberts, t. (2003). families coping without earnings or government cash assistance. assessing the new federalism occasional paper no. 64. http://www.urban.org:80/publications/410634.html acknowledgement many thanks to luisa veronis for her comments and encouragement on an earlier draft of this paper and to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. figure 1: kingslake iga, 2006 source: author figure 2: grant’s no frills, 2008 source: author introduction studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 1 introduction imagining social justice amidst guatemala’s post-conflict violence m. gabriela torres, wheaton college, ma violence 1 , whether it is understood as individual acts of aggression, structural inequality, or direct acts of coercion by the state, always encompasses injustice. in central america, the postwar period that was begun in the last decade of the twentieth century has been mired by multiple and compounding forms of violence that have magnified injustice. one of the most basic injustices is the reality that residents of guatemala city joined by the residents of its closest urban neighbours of san salvador and tegucigalpa as well as many of their counterparts in other large latin american cities live in fear of armed assaults and other arbitrary crimes that often end in murder (caldeira, 2000; rotker, 2002). a survey of guatemalan families conducted prior to a rise in crime rates after 2004 indicates the level of insecurity: 42 percent of respondent families reported that at least one of their members had been a victim of a crime in 2004 (plataforma de investigación y diálogo intersectorial para el diseño de una política de seguridad ciudadana (polsec), 2004). just over 80 percent of the crimes reported by these families were armed robberies that did not result in physical injury and that took place mainly in city streets mostly between the hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. when individuals tend to engage in shopping and work-related activities. 99 percent of the robberies reported by guatemalan families took place within the municipal limits of guatemala city. amazingly, the threat of robbery was found close to home as 50 percent of the robberies took place within the city zone in which the individual resided. a more recent a survey of guatemala city residents that was conducted quarterly from 2006 to 2007 also demonstrates a growing concern with insecurity. in this survey, 40 percent of residents reported that they expected to be the victim of a violent crime within six months (pnud, 2007b). interestingly, when the same survey asked if the residents had witnessed a violent crime within the last six months, between 40 and 45 percent of respondents responded positively in the 2006 1 violence is conceived in this issue in adherence to bourgois’ suggestion that social science literature has categorized the breadth of social relationships that “buttress inequalities of power” into four interrelated conceptual categories (bourgois 2004). he suggests that the conceptualizations of violence in social science can be arranged into four general categories: direct political violence as is it generally discussed in political science literature, galtung’s (1975) sense of structural violence, bourdieu’s (1997) conception of symbolic violence and sheperhughes (1992) understanding of everyday violence (bourgois 2004). all four expressions of violence are discussed by the authors in this collection but menjivar focuses primarily on everyday and symbolic forms of violence, while drysdale walsh and godoy-paíz focus on symbolic and structural violence. for bourgois as for the authors in this collection, these four expressions of violence are intricately interrelated and in practice the increased intensity of one form of violence sustains and expands its other forms of expression. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 2 2007 period (pnud, 2007b). this is a sharp rise in violence given that in 2004, only 35 percent of respondents had witnessed a violent crime within the six months prior to the survey (pnud, 2007b; polsec 2004). guatemala is undoubtedly undergoing a crisis of “civic insecurity” that is characterized by a combination of high and rising levels of violence, a pervasiveness of impunity 2 , and an inability to comprehensively address the root causes of its post-conflict instability. the inability to find workable approaches to ameliorate what the country’s government calls “citizen insecurity” is not just a problem for official state institutions. effectively addressing post-conflict violence is also a problem for organizations and individuals working to promote social justice in the central american region (wola, 2006). whereas conflict resolution and attenuation were logical focal points for social justice promotion in the later part of the 20 th century, today social justice work needs to revisit the root causes that spurred conflict in the region in the first place. guatemala’s legacy of engrained social suffering, economic inequality, and gender disparity, among other social justice concerns, was left largely unaddressed by the peace process. as manolo vela and juan hernández pico have eloquently argued, guatemala’s peace process came almost as a decreed afterthought (hernández pico, 2005). it came to be an act (rather than a process) that sought to consolidate a nominal democratic transition that was developed without civil society consultations and was explicitly designed to leave the country’s economic or cultural legacies of violence unaddressed (vela, senquén-mónchez & solares, 2001). in 2007, 56 percent of guatemalans were living under the poverty line. inequality measures for the region show that in guatemala, the country with widest income disparity in the region, the poorest 20 percent of the population share in 2.9 percent of the national income while the richest 20 percent have access to 59.5 of the same (pnud, 2007a). nicaragua, the country in the region that followed a more contested process of democratic transition with some degree of civil society participation, now has the smallest income gap in the region where the poorest 20 percent of the population share 5.6 percent of the national income while the richest 20 percent have access to 49.3 percent of the same (pnud, 2007a). interestingly, where high rates of social inequality were present, criminal violence now seems to be working to magnify its social costs. the figures for el salvador, a country with a more comparable democratic transition and peace process, are similar to guatemala where the poorest 20 percent share in 2.7 percent of national income and the richest in 55.9 percent of the same (pnud, 2007a). in guatemala, violence is costly from a number of perspectives. in terms of foreign investment losses, the region’s current poor rankings in the indices suggest that guatemala is less than an ideal choice for foreign capital (estado de la región, 2008). though the social costs of violence are unquantifiable (kleinman, das & locke, 1997), estimates that have been made using figures such as direct health care expenditures, investment and material losses as well as increased investment in private and public security and law enforcement are useful in that they can suggest what the minimal societal impact of rising levels of violence can be. united nations estimates of 2 according to the united nations commission on human rights, impunity is “the impossibility, de jure or de facto, of bringing the perpetrators of violations to account whether in criminal, civil, administrative or disciplinary proceedings since they are not subject to any inquiry that might lead to their being accused, arrested, tried and, if found guilty, sentenced to appropriate penalties, and to making reparations to their victims” (united nations human rights commission, 2005). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 3 the economic and social costs of the post-conflict violence crisis in the region suggest that the levels of violence experienced in 2006 cost 7.6 percent of guatemala’s gdp in that same year (pnud, 2006; estado de la región, 2008). in the country with the highest rates of violence in the region el salvador violence has cost close to 11.5 percent of that country’s annual gdp since 2003 (pnud, 2005; estado de la región, 2008). these figures give a sense of the possible extent of the long term repercussions of violence in the region, and suggest that the current crisis of violence will inevitably have a widespread impact. resources that might have been used for social programs are diverted to responding and reacting to the strain of violence on institutions. looking at the social costs of violence with a qualitative lens, moser and mcilwaine estimate that rising gang and interpersonal violence levels seen early in the post-conflict setting could work to erode families’ ability to successfully participate in economic pursuits and to adequately support the education, health and nourishment of the next generation of guatemalans (moser & mcilwaine, 2001). in her essay in this collection, menjivar picks up where the estimates leave off— by addressing the personal costs of violence and the meanings of social suffering caused by violence in a rural ladino community. drysdale walsh and godoy-paiz in this issue address the growing complexity of the postconflict situation of the region by looking at the sources of violence that can no longer be easily identified. following patterns set by repressive regimes in the region during the 1980s, transnational and local gangs as well as organized crime syndicates have joined states in the use of violence and terror as a tool in their regular business practice (wola, 2006). non-state organizations— including the aforementioned gangs, and organized crime syndicates as well as quasi-police forces and even some rural communities— now engage in the quotidian use of violent acts to enact social control. in these contexts, violent acts have had multiple uses ranging from effective tools of governance to controversial forms of public justice (godoy-paiz, 2006; sanford, 2003). yet, what such violent acts have in common, is that perpetrators of violence are seldom sought or prosecuted, and only very rarely punished (godoy-paiz, 2006). analysts argue that it is perhaps the entrenchment of impunity into the social life of some central american states that has enabled the proliferation of social actors practicing violence (krujit & koonings, 1999). given the continuing concern with inequality in the region, the collection of papers presented here works to understand how the promotion of social justice is possible amidst the complexity of central america’s post-conflict violence. focusing on the ways that violence is lived, understood and addressed in guatemala, this collection of papers is a starting point for thinking through solutions to post-conflict violence that address social justice concerns for the region as a whole. because guatemala presents higher levels inequality and violence in the region, it is a good starting point from which to suggest ways that social justice can be attained through the crafting of policies that take into account “local” or “grassroots” understandings and practices of life with violence and injustice. addressing social justice concerns through local or indigenous knowledge allows analysts and policymakers to take into account the compounding effects of different forms of violence and to address the concerns that central americans find most pressing in their everyday lives. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 4 guatemala in the regional context of post-conflict violence violence in the central american region today is not uniform. the northernmost countries of the region (guatemala, belize, honduras and el salvador), suffer from much higher rates of crime and interpersonal violence than their southern counterparts. though the system devised for reporting of homicides in central america allows for a wide divergence between accepted, actual, and official homicide figures, the homicide rates estimated from official police records in 2006, are 56, 45 and 42 per hundred thousand people for el salvador, guatemala and honduras, respectively (ocavi, 2007a; programa estado de la región, 2008). in comparison, the homicide rates for the same period for costa rica and nicaragua were significantly less at 8 and 13 respectively (ocavi, 2007a; programa estado de la región, 2008). on average, the homicide rates of the northern part of the central american region are more than eight times the u.s. homicide rate and twenty-five times canada’s homicide rate in the same year calculated at 6.1 and 1.9 per hundred thousand respectively (department of justice, 2006; human resources and social development canada, 2008). current homicide rates have risen at alarming rates particularly in the two post-conflict countries of el salvador and guatemala which boast increases of 48 percent and 75 percent respectively since the signing of peace accords (ocavi, 2007b). high rates of violence, however, are not directly associated with civil war legacies, as nicaragua diverges from the high current indices of violence in post-war guatemala and el salvador. the region’s differing textures and levels of violence might be derivative of the different ways that conflicts were managed and “pacified” in the region. increasing levels of violence might be indicative of a number of factors including the geopolitical role of the northern part of central america for drug trafficking or the pervasiveness of impunity in the national legal systems. still, it seems counterintuitive that although the civil wars of the 1980s found nominal resolutions, residents of the region’s northernmost countries continue to live within the seemingly insurmountable spectre of violence and insecurity now outside of the context of war. the papers in this collection suggest that post-conflict violence in guatemala is on the rise because violent interaction has come to find a cultural and legal path through which it can become understood as a norm. addressing social justice concerns in this context requires an understanding of how violence comes to be acceptable and quotidian through institutional, legal and cultural practices. violence and social justice given the region’s shockingly high rates of crime and violence, the growth in social actors perpetrating violence, the variation in the social uses and understandings of violent acts, and the prevalence of impunity, one may ask if it is still possible to imagine an approach to violence attenuation in the region that is based on principles of social justice? the key to a social justice approach in the region lies in understanding how impunity makes the routine practice of violence possible. analysts and our informants have suggested from early on that it is the prevalence of systems of impunity in the region that is likely responsible for the proliferation of social actors engaged in violence (krujit & koonings, 1999; see drysdale walsh in this collection). yet, having perpetrators of violent acts routinely going unpunished studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 5 and, in most cases, not even prosecuted for crimes can also cause a proliferation in the types of violent acts that have characterized the region since peace accords were signed in guatemala and el salvador. given the proliferation of perpetrators of violent acts and types of violence, what alternatives are left for to attenuate violence? are manodurismo 3 or other forms of social dictatorships viable alternatives to reduce violence? is limpieza social or social cleansing commonly authored by communities, paramilitaries and organized crime now the only solution? or can violence be addressed through an adherence to social justice ideals? this collection of papers suggests that violence attenuation in the region is possible in adherence with social justice principles if we focus on local understandings of violence. local knowledge on how violence is lived and spoken about by individuals and how it comes to be defined and addressed by institutions and individuals is key to developing strategies that support social justice. accepting the primacy of local understandings requires coming to terms with the ways that violence can come to be expressed and accepted in understated and sometimes contradictory ways. menjivar’s discussion of illness and drysdale walsh and godoy-paiz’ discussions of guatemalan women’s inability to rely on state authorities for safety are two examples of how individuals are forced to accept and understand violence that is present in their lives. focusing on local understandings also requires appreciating the breadth of local practices through which violence is extended. this is discussed by godoy-paiz’ assessment of the role that guatemala’s legal restructuring has played in femicide maintenance, drysdale walsh’s account of the role of police and the attitudes of justice officials in the arbitration of domestic violence, and by menjivar’s discussion of how town gossip works to extend social control. yet understanding the local experience of violence detailed in the ethnographic accounts and case studies presented in the collection is not enough to construct a social justice approach to violence attenuation in the region. impunity systems 4 , both in guatemala in particular and in the region as a whole, must be understood as obstructions to social justice. systems of impunity working through the selective applications of legal or social sanction (as described by drysdale walsh’s informants) are a priori based on manipulation and prioritization of multiple forms of social injustice. social injustices promoted by systemic impunity in the region— for example, gender-based discrimination through femicide, or governance through the control of brute force by gangs and crime syndicates— do more than make multiple expressions of violence possible. systemic impunity anticipates increasing levels and types of violence. it extends and expands acts of violence into a social norm and forces systems of governance to incorporate what should be the state of exception. from the point of view of anthropology, impunity systems are of interest not just because they promote social inequalities but because they build inequality by further entrenching culturally accepted forms of discrimination. prior to engaging with the arguments found in the other papers in this collection, i want to briefly suggest the role that impunity plays to reconstitute 3 manodurismo as a socially sanctioned form of social control supports private acts of vigilantism, high levels of state-sponsored violence against those who come to be defined as criminals and populist “strongmen” leadership often accompanied by an open disregard for human rights concerns (godoy, 2006). 4 impunity systems include the active naturalization and social acceptance of multiple forms of violence as forms of culture, inefficient, contradictory, un-enforceable and inappropriately constructed laws as well as inadequacies in law enforcement personnel, a lack of institutional supports for citizen-driven solutions, and inadequate levels funding for law enforcement and crime prevention programs. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 6 guatemala’s social life. in keeping with the gender focus of the papers in the collection, i use the case of femicide in guatemala as an illustration of how impunity works to advance violence and inequality by building on culturally accepted forms of intolerance and difference. briefly examining the concept and practice of impunity, i suggest that successful violence attenuation is possible if impunity systems in the region are targeted as key obstructions to social justice. the practice of impunity femicide, defined as the processes through which violence against women becomes socially accepted and quotidian (russell, 1976), embodies the complexities of how impunity continues to be practiced in the context of post-conflict violence in the region. first labelled in mexico, the problem of femicide has gained currency for the region’s governments as foreign aid agencies have become eager to fund solutions to femicide throughout the central american region and academic analyses have rushed to condemn its practice (grais-targow, 2004; constantino, 2006). the pervasiveness of femicide in the region relies on a complex historical, cultural, and institutional legacy of gender-based discrimination (aguilar, 2005). in guatemala, the number of femicides rose from 213 in 2000 and 383 in 2003 to 665 in 2005 and is now in numerical decline to 605 in 2006 and 590 in 2007. as stated earlier, guatemala’s overall murder rates are extremely high and the murder of women is but a fraction of the total number of murders. men are in fact at least ten times more likely to be killed than women. according to an article published in the prensa libre on january 22, 2008, entitled “reportan 76 asesinatos en los primeros ocho días del mandato de colom,” just as femicide has grown, the murders of men too have been growing from 2,904 in 2000 to a height of 5,885 in 2006, with a small reduction to 5,781 in 2007 (ocavi, 2007a). what is astonishing in the murders of both men and women is the number of cases that are not investigated and remain unsolved. in 2007, guatemala’s supreme court, the crown prosecutor’s office and the government ministry sponsored a detailed case study of 553 random murders (fernández, 2008). only three of the 553 murders a rate just under 0.2% ever saw prosecution in a courtroom. looking at the murder records that could have been used to develop a legal file for prosecution, the same study found that half of the records were missing photographic evidence of the crime scene, a third of the records had no indication that forensic evidence from a medical doctor was collected, and in another third of the files no scientific substantiation of the evidence had been attempted (fernández, 2008). perpetrators of murder in guatemala function with impunity that demonstrates not just the state’s tolerance of multiple forms of violence (despite its research initiatives) but the extent to which violence has become naturalized into guatemalan society. nevertheless, as analyzed by berger and reviewed by drysdale walsh in this collection, the prevalence of impunity in guatemala has begun to be questioned as international and national opposition to femicide coalesce in the context of guatemala’s complex women’s rights movement (berger, 2006). the impunity system that supports the country’s high murder rate is rarely emphasized. police make arrests (and not all who are arrested are prosecuted) in only two percent of the more than 5,000 homicides each year in guatemala (menocal, 2006). more disturbingly, in the case of gender-based violence, impunity is even more pervasive; of the 2,300 femicide cases between 2000 and august 2006, only seventeen had been resolved and some of studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 7 those were exonerations. even in exceptionally heinous cases, impunity systems prevail amidst public outcry, as in the case of the murder of a mother and her three girls detailed in a newspaper account in prensa libre on september 28, 2007, entitled “criminales dejan mensaje.” in this case ana maria avila, 26, and her daughters jackelyn caroline, 9, heidi paola, 7, and melia elisabeth, 3, were murdered at the hands of three men that, according to several eyewitnesses, entered into their home one afternoon. jackelyn aged nine was found in the laundry sink where, according to prensa libre’s reporter, “she was presumably attempting to hide so she would not be murdered.” this account is one of many that detailed the horrors of the crime and publicly recoiled at the murder of children. yet, in the murders of jackelyn, her sisters and mother, bureaucratic bungling and a turf war between the ministerio público and the national police’s division of criminal investigations meant that the crime scene was not investigated and that no material evidence was collected immediately following the crime with the exception of a haunting signed note left by the perpetrators. according to the perpetrator, jackelyn and her female kin were murdered as a “consequence” of a romantic betrayal perpetrated by her mother. the reasons why the victims drew the attention of her killers were amply covered in the media, but the effort to seek out the killers received little attention. at the end of december 2007, a profile of the perpetrator had been established by police but no arrests had been made and no suspects had been identified. guatemala’s official response to the social ails that give rise to femicide— impunity, a cultural acceptance of gender inequality, and the presence of other pervasive forms of social inequality— has been complex and centred, as godoy-paiz and drysdale walsh suggest, around the proliferation of agencies, institutions and laws to address some of femicide’s legal supports. institutional responses have also been geared to address, mainly rhetorically, legal inequities and the lack of opportunities available for the education, economic advancement, and political participation of young and ethnic women 5 (secretaría presidencial de la mujer, 2005). president colom’s current approaches actively use the rhetoric of social justice. soon after he took power, colom centralized decision-making on social spending through the social cohesion council (consejo de cohesión social) which is headed by first lady sandra torres de colom. centralizing decision-making on social spending according to torres de colom seeks social justice through concrete and targeted reductions in inequality (gobierno de álvaro colom, 2008). one of the areas where the colom government has hoped to reduce inequity is by addressing disparity in the legal consequences of gender-based violence. after the enactment of the legal changes, described in detail in godoy-paiz paper, sandra torres de colom proudly suggested that she now knew that “women’s lives would be respected as it is now something that is sought in law” (gobierno de guatemala, 2005). such rhetorical support should work to suggest the government’s commitment to redressing inequity and, as drysdale walsh in this collection rightly points out, to readjust the balance in civil rights. unfortunately, the legal potential of these changes are not likely to impact the practice of impunity and thus are not likely to have an impact on the incidence of murders. interestingly, new femicide laws provide many of 5 examples of these types of policies and agencies are the plan for equal opportunities (plan de equidad de oportunidades) developed to cover the period from 1998-2001, or a variety of charity-like programs promoted by the first lady’s social works secretariat (secretaría de obras sociales de la esposa del presidente) since 1991 and aimed at addressing needs of girls and rural women as underprivileged sectors of the society (secretaría presidencial de la mujer, 2005; sosep, 2008). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 8 the same protections already available to male murder victims who, as stated earlier, are killed ten times as often as women. why is this type of legal redress of inequity ineffective at curbing the general practice of impunity? local understandings of post-conflict violence the papers in this collection suggest that the construction of effective solutions to the region’s post-conflict violence crisis needs to be situated beyond the legal and institutional realms. addressing the current crisis of violence must consider inequity in the application of and access to the law, as godoy-paiz does in this issue, and the social practices through which violence and impunity becomes naturalized into culture/society discussed by both menjivar and drysdale walsh in this issue. in essence, effective solutions to post-conflict violence need the deep understanding presented here of how violence is lived and mediated. menjivar’s contribution presents an ethnographic account of the multiple ways through which violence comes to be incorporated into the everyday life of ladino women in a rural guatemalan town. looking at how women are hampered from accessing healthcare resources by poverty and how physical symptoms are clustered into ailments such as nervios or debilidad that can only be endured, menjivar allows us to understand how male domination and violence is actively normalized by women themselves. this argument is furthered in her discussion of the violence of women’s gossip as it is used by both men and women to scrutinize and discipline women’s behaviors. she convincingly argues that understanding violence in this context is not just about understanding resource disparities but also about knowing how the local ways of speaking about and embodying violence are prone to misinterpretation. menjivar’s contribution to this collection suggests that violence is given cultural meaning as it is lived and mediated by social actors and as a result cannot be addressed outside the context of local “meaning-making”. for menjivar, understanding how a life with violence has become cultural norm is key to understanding the cultural supports for the problems of femicide that are taken up by godoy-paiz and drysdale walsh. godoy-paiz analyses the discord between the current high level of legal supports for women’s rights in guatemala and women’s increasing insecurity and physical vulnerability in guatemala city. she argues that the legal reframing that has occurred with much foreign impetus and inspiration is inadequate to address the problem of gender violence as it is lived and practiced in the country. the focus on formal rights decreed by law instead of the local social conditions of poverty and impunity is incongruous with the design of more effective solutions that seek lives with social justice. for godoy-paiz, gender violence in guatemala city is sustained by systemic impunity and poverty that forces victims of violence to accept threats, rapes, and assassinations. drawing on insights from anthropological research on violence and inequality, she suggests that a reframing of the “gender violence problem” in guatemala has to include an understanding of the processes through which both men and women come to socially support the presence of gender violence and impunity in their lives. godoy-paiz’s study of guatemala city residents shows how poverty, patriarchy and legacies of state-sponsored violence limit women’s access to social justice both within and outside of the legal framework. for godoy-paiz, understanding the social supports of gender violence in guatemala will not only serve to promote women’s rights studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 9 but it will also allow for an understanding of impunity systems and the everyday expressions of structural violence (bourgois, 2004). drysdale walsh looks at the way that guatemalan civil society organizations and state have been hampered in addressing the increasing incidence of violence against women and argues that closer coordination between them and international donors would serve to better address the problems of gender violence. she looks at the difficulties caused by the division of labor amongst the eight public policy and justice sector institutional agencies currently defined by the guatemalan state as responsible for addressing the different dimensions of gender violence. she also looks at how the lack of cohesion within the guatemala’s women’s movement and its tense relationship with foreign funding agencies limit the effectiveness of this sector of civil society. despite these caveats, drysdale walsh proposes that social justice can be forged for women in guatemala by coordinating the admittedly flawed knowledge and practices of civil society and the state. focusing on conaprevi (the national coordinator for the prevention of intrafamiliar violence and violence against women) as a case study of how effective civil society/state cooperation could take place, drysdale walsh shows how local understandings of violence from the grassroots rights organizations can be meshed with local institutional practices of the state to define more effective avenues for attaining social justice for women. social justice-inspired approaches to central america’s post-conflict violence must understand, as godoy-paiz does, that violence works at different levels and its multiple forms (gender, class, ethnic) are often superimposed and can be magnified. a social justice approach needs to privilege, as menjivar does, the way that victims themselves come to understand and accept social violence accepting, in menjivar’s example, inequality as “physical illnesses” instead of forms of abuse. yet, it is not just violence that needs to be understood through a “local” lens. drysdale walsh and menjivar show that institutional and individual approaches to the resolution of the region’s crisis can have the opposite effect and inadvertently work to amplify violence. understanding the particular reasons why states prefer to address inequality and violence through ineffective institutional and legal reforms can shed light on why impunity systems continue to function unabashed. the local understandings (meaning-making practices) of violence and institutional practices in this collection are not just illustrative of a social reality lived in guatemala but must be the basis upon which solutions to regional violence are crafted. as presented here, insights into the social life of violence its victims, its meaning, and its reproduction and extension can begin to suggest concrete ways to confront its injustice. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 10 references aguilar, a. l. 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(2001). violence in a post-conflict context: urban poor perceptions from guatemala. washington: world bank. ocavi (observatorio centroamericano sobre violencia) (2007a). tasas de homicidios dolosos en centroamérica y república dominicana por 100,000 habitantes (1999 -2007). retrieved on may 15th, 2008 from http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_378.pdf. ocavi (observatorio centroamericano sobre violencia) (2007b). reporte de las pandillas en el salvador. retrieved on may 15th, 2008 from http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_423.pdf. plataforma de investigación y diálogo intersectorial para el diseño de una política de seguridad ciudadana (polsec) (2004). encuesta de victimización y percepción de inseguridad en la ciudad de guatemala (primera encuesta), vol. 2005. guatemala: polsec (plataforma de investigación y diálogo intersectorial para el diseño de una política de seguridad ciudadana). http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_16.html http://www4.hrsdc.gc.ca/indicator.jsp?&indicatorid=57#moreon_1 http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_378.pdf http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_423.pdf studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 11 programa de las naciones unidas para el desarrollo (pnud) (2007a). human development report data 2007/2008. retrieved in august 23rd, 2008 from http://hdrstats.undp.org/buildtables/rc_report.cfm. programa de las naciones unidas para el desarrollo (pnud) (2007b) informe estadístico de la violencia en guatemala. retrieved on may 15th, 2008 from http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_415.pdf. programa de las naciones unidas para el desarrollo (pnud) (2006). el costo económico de la violencia en guatemala. retrieved on may 15th, 2008 from http://www.polsec.org/images/files/documentos/pdf/costoseconomicos.pdf . programa de las naciones unidas para el desarrollo (pnud) (2005). cuanto cuesta la violencia en el salvador? san salvador: pnud. rotker, s. (2002). citizens of fear: urban violence in latin america. new brunswick: rutgers univesity press. russell, d. e. h. & van de ven, n. (eds.). (1976). crimes against women: proceedings of the international tribunal. milbrae: les femmes publishing. sanford, v. (2003). buried secrets. new york: pallgrave mcmillan. scheper-hughes, n. (1992). death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in brazil. berkeley: university of california press. secretaría presidencial de la mujer (2005). acciones e iniciativas para la implementación del enfoque de género en el ministerio de educación. in organization of iberoamerican states country reports. retrieved on may 15, 2008 from http://www.oei.es/genero/documentos_paises.htm. sosep (secretaría de obras sociales de la esposa del presidente) (2008). misión y objetívos. gobierno de alvaro colom. guatemala city: guatemala. united nations human rights commission (2005). updated set of principles for the protection and promotion of human rights through action to combat impunity. sixty-first session, 8 february, item 17 of the provisional agenda.e/cn.4/2005/102/add.1 vela, m., senquén-mónchez, a. & solares, h.a. (2001). el lado oscuro de la eterna primavera: violencia, criminalidad y delincuencia en la postguerra. guatemala: flacsoguatemala. wola (2006). youth gangs in central america: issues in human rights, effective policing and prevention. washington, d.c: washington office on latin america. http://hdrstats.undp.org/buildtables/rc_report.cfm http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_415.pdf http://www.polsec.org/images/files/documentos/pdf/costoseconomicos.pdf sobey -final correspondence address: sara sobey: email: sara_mation@yahoo.ca, or kim@heartfeltmusic.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 2, 486-495, 2022 creative intervention the grinch 2 sara sobey guest editor’s introductory note (miranda j. brady) sara sobey’s fan fiction rewrite, the grinch 2, follows a lively tradition of creative play and active engagement with popular media texts (jenkins, 2008; hall, 2008). fan fiction borrows characters and storylines from previous works, allowing authors to re-imagine existing narratives (jenkins, 2008), in this case stories based on dr. seuss’ grinch character (1957, 1982). sobey’s piece, which is an excerpt of a longer screenplay, intervenes in dr. seuss’ story through an allegory wherein autistic persecution is legible. her reimagining of the grinch provides an apt metaphor for the profound alienation and cruelty imposed on those deemed “other” to or outside of normative society. ultimately, while sobey’s fan fiction helps us see the world through the perspective of the grinch (and explains why he became so jaded), it invites us to turn a critical lens on the saccharine and compulsory homogeneity of the whos. like ursula k. le guin’s (1973) classic science fiction short “the ones who walk away from omelas,” this story invites us to recognize the whos’ dirty little secret, which enables the apparent utopia in which they delight. it poignantly leads readers to ask what kinds of violence they tacitly support through a social contract designed by and for allistics. sobey is a talented singer and writer, who hopes to see her stories on the big screen someday. the grinch 2 is an exemplar of the multimodal and valuable contributions offered by autistic creatives in all stages of media production. references dr. seuss (t. s. geisel). (1957). how the grinch stole christmas. random house. dr. seuss (t. s. geisel) (writer), & perez, b. (director). (1982, may 20). the grinch grinches the cat in the hat. [tv special on abc]. david h. depatie (executive producer). marvel productions. the grinch 2 studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 486-495, 2022 487 hall, s. (1980/2008). encoding/decoding. in n. badmington & j. thomas (eds.). the routledge critical and cultural theory reader (pp. 234-244). routledge. jenkins, h. (2008). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. nyu press. le guin, u. k. (2017). the ones who walk away from omelas. harper collins. - the grinch 2 prologue whoville was a peaceful, friendly, and cheerful town where the whos, animals, creatures, and even the once grumpy grinch lived. yes! the same grinch who stole christmas to try to make the whos shed a tear and then he grew a heart and brought all the presents back that year. that’s the story you know. one where the town was a friendly place that looked like a gingerbread house with or without snow. i hate to say this, but long ago, the very friendly town wasn’t always that way. years ago, whoville was an unhospitable place for the grinch race. there were a bunch of off limit toy factories where the grinches toiled as slaves. mayor augustus was very strict, just like his ancestors before him. he forced the whos to act happy all the time and instructed them never to see or talk about any grinches or else they would get the blame. it was almost just sara sobey studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 486-495, 2022 488 as bad as the butter battle with the zooks and the yooks – but that’s another story! each time the mayor’s servants saw any who going on strike, they would confiscate their protest boards and flags and bring them in front of the who jury and ultimately ban them from whoville. one day mayor augustus stood at the podium in front of the whos of whoville and proudly stated, “whos of whoville! may i have your attention, please?” every who down in whoville stood at attention in front of the mayor. “i’m giving you all a warning!” said mayor augustus. “as you know, the grinches, those talking cats with hats who poison our minds with nonsense or anything ugly looking are the symbols of evil! they are forbidden to live in harmony with us!” he continued, “but if you see them, don’t go near them or make friends with them! me and my crew will arrest them and turn them into slaves! they are filthy and dangerous! so go back to your activities!” so back to their daily activities the whos went. that night, two illegally married grinches returned to their cell at santa’s toy factory, after all their hard work making christmas toys for the whos. one grinch was pregnant and had long red hair with beautiful green eyes. the other was hazel eyed, and had bushy fur all over. after they returned to the cell, the wife’s water broke and the father had to put her to bed and help deliver the baby. after her baby was born, the grinch’s mother’s eyes filled with bittersweet tears. she was sad that her mother had passed away too soon and about the whos not accepting them. the grinch’s mother played her mother’s music box for him and sang along with the melody. the cooing baby grinch held up his little hands to his mother. the grinch’s mother’s face reached her baby’s hands. “our beautiful little grinch,” said the grinch’s mother as she turned to her husband, who was just as happy as his wife. “look at him, dear.” he said. “he has your beautiful eyes.” he continued, “what are you going to call him?” “i’m going to call him... grinch. jr. the same name as you” his wife replied. “grinch. jr.... that makes me grinch. sr. i like the sound of that.” “but that’s not all he has your smile too,” said the grinch’s mother. “we’ll make sure he’s happy with us, the grinches, and even the whos one day... that way he won’t ever be alone,” she said. the grinch’s father began to feel doubtful that the whos would ever trust them. he felt hatred for them in his heart. the grinch’s father was a lonely guy ever since he was a grinchling. he never made friends with anyone as a child because he was always working alone. his parents had died of exhaustion from work during his childhood and he was bitter at the whos who weren’t there to help them. despite his troubles, the grinch’s father didn’t want to give up so easily. he knew he had to remain hopeful for his wife and their newborn son. the grinch 2 studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 486-495, 2022 489 as mother and father grinch watched their son grow while they kept working away as slaves they had to be careful to hide their son from the mayor’s servants while they worked. the grinch’s mother sang him to sleep every night so he wouldn’t feel lonely while they were gone. by the time the grinch was four years old, his father taught him how to build gadgets to aid them in their failed attempts to escape. there were guards everywhere in whoville. the grinch’s mother painted a portrait of them all happy together in a dream home with the whos and grinches. eventually the young grinch was found out and caught with his parents and he too became a servant. the young grinch worked and worked as the bosses barked their commands. the grinches never got to stay together as much as they wanted to. they never found a better home. they never even celebrated christmas together. the mayor wouldn’t allow it. the grinch slaves just built needless toys that symbolized christmas. the whos would buy them and then years down the line, they would get tired of them and throw them away. the mayor thought that all the grinches had to be punished for all the crimes they had done in the past and present despite the fact that most grinches had never caused any harm. he originally thought of killing them all, but the whos insisted that they be spared. the mayor agreed to this but not without a price – the grinches would have to be his slaves – to most of the whos’ dismay. the whos attempted to protest his decision, but they were threatened if they attempted to speak up again. the mayor said that they would never see their family and whoville again. the young grinch and his family did try to make some friends with some grinches. but the who servants forbade it. they couldn’t help them and they couldn’t sneak into their cells to feed them. santa’s factory had a whole lot of cameras just to keep an eye on them. they all worked alone, with no one to talk to and few breaks. the young grinch couldn’t control his crying when he got separated from his parents for work. every day one servant barked, “get to work, green face!” the other yelled, “stop whining green face!” then more yelled: hey, green face! stop sleeping on the job!” “green faces like you don’t have a future!” “green faces never change no matter how hard they try! they’re too evil!” “you will never be one of us, green face! never!” “green face!” “green face!” “green face!” all the grinches, including the youngest one, had never forgotten how much that name stabbed them in the heart. sara sobey studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 486-495, 2022 490 the young grinch’s tears caused such a flood that he and the servants had to swim to safety. the servants opened the doors to let the tears flow away outside. one of the servants said, “what a crybaby! be a man! you nearly got us killed with your tsunami of tears!” the servants sent the young grinch to his cell. on most nights, the grinch’s mother tucked her son in bed before she went to go back to work. the grinch family was never invited to the whos christmas dinner or anything else. as time went by, the grinch’s father sat on his cell bed and became bitter towards the whos. it became too difficult to forgive them for what they did. the grinch’s father remembered all the times when the whos were so afraid of him and what his parents had warned him about before they passed away. “everything is becoming clear,” said the grinch’s father. “those whos!” said the grinch’s father, as if they we’re a deadly disease. “they are all heartless, evil and cowardly, monstrous jibboos.” he continued, “the whos didn’t save my parents from death. they were too busy with their own petty lives. i’m going to be the grinch they wanted me to be and i’m hoping my son will live it up for me! the whos won’t let me or my wife see my son and they’ll pay for their crimes!” the grinch’s father became cautious with his wife and son’s devotion to the whos as he became more and more bitter towards them. later that night, the grinch’s father descended downstairs to the lower cell. the young grinch was building a sandcastle all alone. he was trying to get the whitsel birds outside the cell to come inside his castle, but they didn’t seem to want to cooperate – they just flew away. just like they flew away from his mother when she tried to whistle to them. the young grinch remembered it well. the young grinch was startled when his father appeared and said strictly, “junior, we need to talk!” the young grinch looked up at his father. he didn’t look like his nicer self. he looked angry. “daddy?” said the curious young grinch. “what happened to you? are you okay?” the grinch’s father said, “listen son. a grinch is not supposed to be nice to the whos! the whos are cruel and selfish! they had my parents killed when we had to work separately!” the grinch felt sorry for his father and his parents. “but come on, daddy!,” he said. “don’t say that all whos are bad! why don’t we give them a chance? and maybe your parents wouldn’t have died. mommy told me she met a who named elizabeth. she was friendly towards her!” the grinch’s father replied, “no! she’s a phony! she set her up to get the grinches captured! turning them into lonely slaves! your mother is naive about this! i just know it! they can’t be trusted, junior! my parents taught me the same lesson! it took me a long time to learn it.” he took a breath and continued, “i tried to be nice to the whos but they never return it! even those the grinch 2 studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 486-495, 2022 491 you think are your friends will betray you eventually. i’ve been there once! i learned this lesson the hard way!” the young grinch shook his head, not wanting to believe it. the young grinch said, “but dad!” the grinch’s father said, “they’re pretending to be nice to you just to fear you! they only think about themselves! especially around christmas day! christmas is the worst day of the year! it’s a day for the whos to do their worst! this is why you should follow your destiny, son! you can’t go.” then the grinch’s father started to mimic a cutesy little child’s voice, “hi, i’m the grinch. wanna hug? will you be my friend?” he mocked. “and the next thing you know...” the grinch’s father said in his normal voice, “they will ignore you and make you a slave! or maybe even kill you or your family! blech! sickening, if you ask me! you have to be mean to them in order to survive! it’s part of your grinch family tree! it’s in your blood! a grinch is a grinch! it’s all part of nature’s plan. one day you’ll learn the whole truth!” “well what if i don’t want to be like those grinches who did bad stuff to them,” the young grinch said, angrily. “can’t we make our own decisions, dad?!” the grinch’s father yelled “don’t you dare talk back to your father!” the young grinch was startled by his father’s loud and commanding voice. the grinch’s father realized what he’d done and said, “look, i’m really sorry i yelled. but you have to learn things the hard way. you need discipline to survive their malice and escape this awful place!” the grinch tearfully whimpered and sniffled. to which the grinch’s father said, “now, now. big boys like you shouldn’t cry. it won’t help you. if you cry, you’ll feel weak and you’ll never want to move on ever again. remember me and your mother cried when you cried every time? it almost made us feel we couldn’t go on either. it will make me and your mother sad and weak too if you keep doing that. i learned it the hard way just now. don’t let your eyes get wet, no matter how tough things get. you’ll understand.” the young grinch wanted to stop crying until this nightmare was over, but he couldn’t help it when he felt depressed every day. maybe he’d think about it. then the grinch’s father heard his wife walking downstairs. she’d heard her husband yelling about everything. the young grinch heard his mother and ran up to her, hugging her sadly. the grinch’s mother looked at her husband in shock and said, “dear, you shouldn’t believe in grinch rules or what your parents had said! you don’t have to be like this! the whos have the potential to be kind! i saw it with my own eyes!” the grinch’s father said, “i didn’t want to believe it either, dear. but it’s becoming clear. the whos will never change. they’re very deceptive and manipulative. you know how bad they treated us grinches! even your so called who friend is one of them! there’s no doubt that she has secretly tried multiple times to get rid of you behind your back. and she succeeded! and look what happened to you and your late mother!” sara sobey studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 486-495, 2022 492 the grinch’s mother said, “that’s not true! i saw honesty in her eyes! she cared about me! she tried to rescue me and my mother! not all whos are bad!” the grinch’s father sighed and said, “you’ll understand the hard way someday! our son needs to stand up to the horrible whos to survive even if we die young!” the grinch’s father looked at the young grinch’s sad, frightened face. he felt regret for hurting his son’s feelings like this. the young grinch saw the regret in his eyes. so did his mother. but his father’s face turned to determination. he had to teach them this harsh reality. then he went upstairs. then the grinch’s mother sat down on the chair and sighed. the young grinch sat down on her knees. he looked up into her sweet, loving eyes and tried his best not to cry. but soon enough he started sobbing and hugged his mother. it was just too much for him to bear to live like this. the grinch’s mother hushed her son gently. she rubbed his back tenderly and said, “i’m right here beside you. your dad’s still a nice guy deep down inside. he’s just angry with the whos right now. maybe we’ll find another who like liz who understands. maybe your father will turn around.” the young grinch sobbed quietly as he hugged her tightly. the grinch’s mother tearfully said, “forget what your father said. just keep crying, shhhhhh. only you can make your own choices. just be your own grinch.” “thanks, mom. i feel better now,” said the young grinch. “but i won’t cry anymore! i don’t want to make you or dad sad. once we find a better life, we won’t have to cry anymore!” the grinch’s mother said. “i’m sure it will happen!” the grinch’s mother was never bothered by her son crying in front of him despite him trying to be strong. but she couldn’t argue with him about it. so she let her son decide and they hugged each other again. as time went by, his mother’s views of the whos remained unchanged. she taught her son about the whos and how they lived and their kindness towards others. the grinch’s mother kept an open mind that not all whos were evil and heartless. she wanted to make sure the young grinch was kind to them too. and maybe, just maybe, they could open up to the grinches someday. the grinch’s mother kept whistling “how do you do” to the whitsel birds despite them being scared of her. as the young grinch watched his mother whistling to the birds, he wished to be as pure hearted as she was when he grew up. but the grinch’s father’s behaviour became worse and worse. he became more depressed and angry by the day. the young grinch heard his father repeat the grinch’s oath his parents taught him. because of praying to the underworld, his father grew more vengeful and angry. the next night on christmas eve, the grinch’s mother tucked her son in to bed. she felt stressed and sad about her husband’s behaviour. but despite all this, she and her son read a christmas book the grinch 2 studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 486-495, 2022 493 together to keep their minds off it for a while. the young grinch looked at the picture of the gingerbread house. “look at the gingerbread house with vanilla icing on top, mommy!” said the young grinch. the grinch’s mother replied, “that’s beautiful, isn’t it?” the young grinch pointed at the picture of a family of gumdrops. “they’re a family of gumdrops too!” said the young grinch. the grinch’s mother replied, “that’s right.” the young grinch asked, “mommy, will we ever spend time together a lot? even on christmas day like the gumdrop family? maybe the whos could invite us too.” the grinch’s mother said, “i’m sure of it my dear.” the grinch’s mother felt doubtful but she tried to remain positive for her family. so, she said, “even if the rules in whoville are unfair, we’ll still keep trying. and we’ll even have the best christmas ever! i’ll make sure of it. we’ll find a nice job and get you to school and make new friends!” the young grinch asked, “cross your heart?” the grinch’s mother said, “cross my heart, hope to die!” and she drew an x on her chest with her finger. the grinch’s mother said, “one of my who friends, pearl, once told me how she met a rare cat in a hat who made children happy by doing magic tricks with his hat and sometimes even going on adventures. he once told her that sometimes it’s okay to break rules as long as one doesn’t take it too far.” “there was a cat in the hat who did magic tricks with his magical hat? wow!” said the young grinch. the grinch’s mother said, “yep! who knows, maybe someday we’ll meet one too.” the young grinch said, “that would be wonderful. mom – when we live a more peaceful life – we’ll always be together no matter what, right?” the grinch’s mother said, “yes. but there’s one thing you must remember, even if i’m gone. i’ll always be there for you. even if you can’t see me. it’s sad sometimes, but it’s okay to feel sad sometimes.” the young grinch said, “i don’t understand mommy. i don’t want to be sad. i don’t want you to disappear. i want to be happy with you.” the grinch’s mother said, “you will understand someday, son,” and the young grinch and his mother hugged each other tenderly. almost tearfully, the young grinch said, “please don’t go.” to which the grinch’s mother replied, “i won’t.” the young grinch thought about what his mother had said. what did she mean? how was it possible to be there for someone even if he couldn’t see her? but the young grinch wanted to keep that sad thought off of his mind. he wanted to avoid crying more than ever. so the young grinch asked, “can you sing me a lullaby, please?” the grinch’s mother said, “i’d love to.” then she turned on his music box and sang her lullaby to her son. his mother’s singing voice had a beautiful soothing sound to it. downstairs, the grinch’s father sat on the chair depressed and angry again. then he heard his wife singing upstairs. the grinch’s father came upstairs and watched them tenderly. the grinch’s father loved her singing ever since he first met her. it would warm his sad soul every time. the grinch’s mother sara sobey studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 486-495, 2022 494 gazed at him. although they had recently had disagreements about the whos, they still loved each other with all their hearts. then suddenly, the servants of mayor augustus barged into their cell. the grinch’s father growled and snapped, “what do you want from us?!” servant #1 replied, “since your son is old enough, we’ve come to take him away from you.” the grinch’s mother and father were beyond shocked. “he’s too whiny to be around! his tears nearly got us drowned!” said the #2 servant. “so, we decided to take him to another toy factory,” he continued. “since he’s old enough, you will never see him again!” “what?!” the mother yelled. servant #1 said, “he would be perfect for the job! the mayor is a genius!” the grinch’s mother said, “no! you can’t possibly – please reconsider! make peace with the grinches!” servant #1 said, “sorry, grinch lady! but these are the rules!” the young grinch was shocked at this. he hugged his parents and said, “mom... dad..... please don’t let them take me away from you!” the grinch’s mother said, “we won’t dear. we promise!” and the grinch’s father said, “we won’t let those whos get their filthy hands on you! we will escape this horrid place! make the whos go away and rescue the grinch slaves! and start a new life with the grinches! we won’t have to be ridiculed or be alone ever again!” servant #1 looked at the music box playing in the young grinch’s hand. “you don’t need this anymore!” said servant #2. the grinch’s parents were shocked at this. the young grinch tried to yank it away from his grasp. “let go of it! it’s mine!” said the young grinch. the grinch’s father yelled, “you can’t do this! you whos are filth!” then the young grinch and the servants dropped the music box. the music box fell on the floor with a thud and broke as it hit the floor. the young grinch gasped as he looked at the broken music box on the floor. “how could you?” he said tearfully. he then ran angrily up to the servants and tried to attack them. servant #1 said, “hey! i will not tolerate such behaviour! you’re coming with us young man!” the young grinch grabbed the remaining parts of his music box. as the servants opened the doors to the cage, the grinch family ran through them. servant #1 yelled “hey! get back here!.” the grinch family ran outside as the servants chased them. “you can’t run from us forever, grinches!” yelled the second servant. the grinches ran and ran and ran until they found a bush where they watched the servants looking everywhere for them in the forest. but they were already surrounded. the grinch’s father had an idea. he turned to his son. “i’m going to put a stop to those whos! you stay here with mommy!” he instructed. “remember, no matter what happens to us, don’t let your eyes get wet, no matter how tough things get! just be strong, tough and happy now and in the future!” said the grinch’s father. the young grinch tried to hide his emotions for his parents. he had to believe that things were going to get better. the grinch 2 studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 2, 486-495, 2022 495 the one servant yelled, “surrender, grinches or you’ll all suffer the consequences!” the grinch’s father put his hands up ran out from the cover of the bush. “okay you caught us!” said the grinch’s father. “but can i do one more thing?” he asked. “alright!” said the servant. “but hurry up!” the grinch’s father took a weird looking block out of his pocket and placed it on the ground. the grinch’s mother whispered, “dear, what are you doing?” the grinch’s father smiled maliciously without answering her and took a button mechanic out of his pocket as well. the grinch’s father chuckled as he pressed it. suddenly, the block was coming into being faster and faster and then grew and grew bigger. the roof of santa’s toy factory broke off as the machine grew. “prepare yourselves, you miserable whos!” said the grinch’s father. “you see, i already built it right under your pathetic little who noses!” the frightened who servants gasped in horror as they looked up as the box revealed its own scary looking moving mechanic. the grinch’s mother and the young grinch looked up in horror too. “oh no.... don’t tell me you’re…!” said the grinch’s mother worriedly. the grinch’s father said, “i have to do this, my love! for our kind! for our son! and for you!” the grinch’s father turned to the who servant and quickly hopped on the machine which began to move and shoot laser beams. the whos scattered and got out of the way without getting shot or getting stomped on. the grinch’s father pulled the lever to move the arms. the robotic hands grabbed the roof of each factory and pulled them right off. the grinch prisoners looked up in awe at the grinch’s father and his machine. “be free, my grinch friends!” he yelled. all the grinch prisoners rejoiced by unchaining themselves and attacking the bosses who had kept them enslaved and then they ran out of whoville. in loving memory of audrey geisel, 1922-2018. kowlessar final before ts correspondence address: julianna kowlessar, graduate program in communications & culture toronto metropolitan university, toronto, on, m5b 2k3; email: jkowlessar@ryerson.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 662-665, 2022 book review belly of the beast: the politics of antifatness as anti-blackness harrison, d. l. (2021). north atlantic books. isbn 978-1623175979 (paper) cdn$19.95. 144 pages. julianna kowlessar toronto metropolitan university, canada in his 2019 song, flaws and sins, late american rapper juice wrld sings, “i’m all, i’m really all in; in love with all your flaws and sins; your scars are really gorgeous; ain’t that a weird way to give compliments?” (higgins, 2019). throughout belly of the beast: the politics of anti-fatness as anti-blackness, da’shaun l. harrison places a substantial emphasis on human flaws and delineates how the “flaws” of diverse groups, and in this case those of fat, black, masc individuals, are used to further segregate and dehumanize them. the author implies that, on a broad scale, people must rethink their consideration of human “flaws,” acknowledging and appreciating them, instead of capitalizing on them to coerce individuals into doubting their worldly existence and self-presentation. fundamentally, as harrison posits, anti-fatness and anti-blackness coexist and must be viewed together to understand how they work to oppress fat, black individuals. da’shaun l. harrison is an american author who identifies as black, fat, queer, and trans. in addition to writing, harrison works at scalawag magazine as the editor-at-large and speaks on the topics of “blackness, queerness, gender, fatness, disabilities, and their intersections” (harrison, 2021, para. 1). they also serve as an abolitionist in atlanta, georgia. they believe in documenting the lived experiences of subjugated groups, which may eventually lead to a sense of freedom, grounded in understanding and empathy. in keeping with these themes, harrison has written an array of online publications that have been incorporated in various magazines and websites. similarly, harrison’s book provides an in-depth examination of the history of anti-fatness as anti-blackness and the oppressive systems that have book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 662-665, 2022 663 converged throughout history to incessantly catalyze the exploitation of fat, black individuals. fundamentally, the author examines how anti-fatness and anti-blackness have been amalgamated by several systems of oppression. to do this, harrison structures the book thematically, with chapters focussing on the inadequacy of self-love, “desire/ability,” healthcare, policing, the wars on drugs and obesity, gender identity, and abolitionism in relation to freeing fat, black bodies. to understand how these converging systems of oppression have operated to exclude fat, black bodies, harrison discusses race as a manufactured concept instead of one that is innate, explaining that “[africans] became objects to be subjugated, poked and prodded, and turned – at least through language and especially through the ways in which they were engaged – into beasts” (p. 33). in the first chapter, harrison opens by expressing that self-love and body positivity are not sufficient to mitigate the harmful effects of anti-fatness and systemic violence (pp. 4-5). although there has been a recent shift in social media trends toward encouraging individuals to engage in self-acceptance and body positivity, such acts of kindness towards oneself do not help dismantle ingrained systems of oppression that seek to marginalize fat, black individuals. as harrison implies, self-love solely seeks to solve conflicts with oneself on an individual level, as opposed to a societal one (p. 4). therefore, notions of self-love and body positivity promote an excessive individual focus, which may create blind spots in identifying the myriad of other complex societal issues. highlighting injustices that stem from physical appearances, the author goes on to explore and discuss identities that are privileged enough to experience beauty, explaining that conjointly viewing “fatness as blackness” is not desirable (pp. 12, 18). this categorization of groups who are entitled to advantages based on their outward appearance speaks to the superficiality of society, which continues to favour specific individuals who look a certain way over others. to further outline systems of oppression, in chapter three harrison explores dominant norms around race and health that have been imposed on fat, black individuals. the author examines the negative framing around exercise as a means of discipline and restriction and, more critically, the only way to counteract fatness (p. 37). similar rules apply to diet culture, where individuals are taught to view their relationship with food as foreign, as opposed to one that is innate, persuading them to eat in certain ways for the goals of weight loss, thinness and desirability (pp. 40-41). specifically, harrison posits that “anyone who still has a vested interest in diet culture, intentional weight loss, and/or these types of programs is making the active decision to invest in systemic anti-fatness, anti-blackness, ableism, misogyny/-noir, and capitalism” (p. 44). however, this statement could be construed as a primary weakness of the book. in particular, while this framing challenges status quo equations of weight and health, readers who are engaged in intentional weight loss based on a sense that it enhances their quality of life, may not understand why harrison brands diet and exercise as anti-fat or anti-black. consequently, julianna kowlessar studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 662-665, 2022 664 the author’s firm position on the harmfulness of diet and fitness industries may be read as leaving little latitude for individual autonomy. in chapter four, harrison looks at how factors such as weight and size, coupled with racist tendencies, contribute to the conceptualization of black individuals as beasts (pp. 50, 58). in relation to this, the author states that “black subjects are not denied humanity, or dehumanized through slavery, but rather are forced to become the beast of humanity; the lowest on the scale of hegemonic humanity and placed among ‘the animal’” (p. 57). this classification provides insight into the lived experiences of fat, black individuals, which often include struggles to be accepted for who they are as well as misdirected fear that results in the ongoing exploitation of and violence towards such individuals. in chapter seven, harrison discusses ways for abolition to take shape, particularly in relation to the liberation of fat, black individuals (p. 106). as an example of abolition, the author explains that “one reason for defunding police could be to allocate those additional funds to education programs, or to fund affordable housing and shelters for folks without homes” (p. 106). serving as a strength of the book is the emphasis placed here on viewing abolition as an ongoing process, whereby fat, black individuals, along with allies, strategize ways to achieve freedom by deconstructing the hegemonic norms ingrained in an array of social institutions including but not limited to those associated with education, healthcare, employment, and the law (pp. 106-109). harrison’s ability to unpack and fluidly discuss the intersections of anti-fatness as anti-blackness, drawing on several oppressive systems, is fused in this final chapter with the introduction of abolition as a means of moving forward and healing. this allows readers to contemplate ideas around transformation as they approach the end of the text. in conclusion, throughout belly of the beast: the politics of anti-fatness as anti-blackness, harrison eloquently outlines many ways that anti-fatness converges with anti-blackness, illustrating that for a complete understanding, they must be viewed in tandem (pp. 1-3). the attention harrison places on human flaws, and specifically on how the perceived flaws of fat, black masc individuals are used against them in the context of multiple interlocking systems of oppression, provides readers with a comprehensive overview of how societal structures and systems are implicated in the persistent discrimination of marginalized groups. returning to juice wrld’s lyrics in flaws and sins, this text points to the importance of critically analyzing the multiple ways and reasons why fat, black individuals are deemed “flawed” and subsequently illuminating how accepting these not as flaws, but rather as deeply ingrained forms of discrimination, can lead to radical transformation and healing. in other words, readers who are interested in the application of intersectional theory to better understand the ways dominant societal structures are implicated in the oppression of subordinated individuals will appreciate and learn a lot from this text. book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 662-665, 2022 665 references harrison, d. l. (2021). about da'shaun l. harrison. https://dashaunharrison.com/about/ higgins, j. a. (2019). flaws and sins [song]. on death race for love [album]. grade a productions; interscope records. stasiulis final jan 26 17 correspondence address: daiva stasiulis, department of sociology & anthropology, carleton university, 1125 colonel by drive, ottawa, k1s 5b6; email: daiva.stasiulis@carleton.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti: the erosion of canadian citizenship through citizenship deprivation daiva stasiulis carleton university, canada abstract as part of the larger trend towards “securitization” of citizenship, citizenship deprivation in canada is becoming increasingly normalized, resulting in some cases in statelessness. in this article, i pursue a sociology of statelessness by examining its localized production and connections to a broader network of social and material relations. i do this through a case study of canadian-born deepan budlakoti, who at age 22 was informed that he was in fact not canadian, and lacking any other citizenship, was rendered stateless. actor-network theory is employed to trace how it is that legal documental and heterogeneous networks of humans and things (e.g., a “legal technicality”) have been enrolled to produce a legal decision declaring that budlakoti, despite his canadian birth certificate and passports, was never a canadian citizen. yet because he has not exhausted all avenues to acquisition of some citizenship (e.g., in india or canada), he also has failed to secure recognition of his statelessness. a particular innovation in this analysis is the exploration of the exemption in the canadian citizenship act from jus soli citizenship for children born to foreign diplomatic staff. networks of immigration tribunal and court judgements, and documents treated as evidence have connected and translated into establishing budlakoti’s fit with this exemption, despite countervailing evidence and a lifetime of documented and state-assisted reproduction of his canadianness. while robbed of his legal and social identity, and suffering the egregious consequences of statelessness, budlakoti continues to campaign for restoration of his right to have rights within his country of birth. keywords statelessness; citizenship revocation; citizenship policy daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 2 introduction statelessness is an exceptional phenomenon in a world where having a nationality is not only a human right but also the statistical norm.1,2 it is a phenomenon more familiar in transitional regions of state dissolution, succession or breakup, involving structural discrimination against peoples and minority groups in asia, europe, africa and the middle east (mandel & gray, 2014). by way of contrast, statelessness appears to be a relatively foreign concept in the canadian context. in comparative perspective, canada’s citizenship laws have been regarded as among the most liberal and generous in the world, offering multiple avenues to full citizenship – jus soli and jus sanguinis at birth, and through naturalization for immigrants who as permanent residents already enjoy many citizenship-type rights. yet, as i explore here in the case of a canadian-born stateless man, deepan budladkoti, statelessness exists in canada. as importantly, mechanisms and reforms in canadian law and administrative practices serve to produce statelessness. gradational citizenship, where the rights specifically to retain citizenship have been differentiated between canadianand foreign-born, as well as by race and ethnicity, is nothing new in the canadian context. indeed, as anderson (2008, p. 88) points out, “the basic tension between the equality of all citizens and the authority of the state to revoke the citizenship of foreignborn canadians has existed since confederation.” citizenship revocation and deportation have variously targetted “dangerous european” labour radicals in the interwar years (avery, 1979), japanese canadian citizens during world war ii, and nazi war criminals since the early 1990s (anderson, 2008, p. 88). nonetheless, the contemporary reputation of canadian citizenship has been of “statefullness” (kerber, 2007, p. 7) whereby full and permanent citizenship status has been either automatic at birth or relatively easy to gain and nearly impossible to lose. yet, recent reforms in canadian citizenship legislation and procedures during the near decade of conservative rule (2006-2015), couched in language about “strengthening canadian citizenship” and “protecting the security and safety of canadians,” have again made citizenship a conditional privilege that is more difficult to acquire and easier to lose (government of canada, 2014b, 2014a, p. 1; national immigration law section, canadian bar association, 2014). citizenship stripping reforms introduced in the strengthening canadian citizenship act (former bill c-24), implemented in 1 there is no consensus on the difference between the two terms “nationality” and “citizenship;” the distinction between these terms also varies from country to country. they are frequently used synonymously to refer to full legal membership in a nation-state. the latter convention will be adopted in this paper. 2 article 15 of the universal declaration of human rights (united nations, 1948) states: “1. everyone has a right to a nationality. 2. no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 3 the dying days of the harper government, specifically targeted canadian-born individuals convicted of certain offences against the state (government of canada, 2014a).3 such reforms are significant insofar as they introduce new mechanisms for producing de facto statelessness among the canadian-born. as explored in this article, there are other, less scrutinized mechanisms in canadian citizenship law (such as the “diplomatic exception” to jus soli), and administrative practice that can strip the citizenship of canadian-born individuals in a political climate where citizenship deprivation becomes increasingly normalized as part of the larger trend towards “securitization” of citizenship. in this article, i pursue a sociology of statelessness by examining its localized production and connections to a broader (and in some instances, transnational) network of social and material relations. i do this through a case study of canadian-born deepan budlakoti, who at age 22 was informed that he was in fact not canadian, and lacking any other citizenship, was rendered stateless. i utilize actor-network theory (ant) as an analytical guide for exploring how budlakoti’s citizenship was extinguished. the article is organized to, first, discuss the scholarly contribution of a sociology of statelessness to current debates on this most abject of statuses. here, i examine the potential relevance of ant to provide conceptualization of deprivation of citizenship, and its particular bearing on budlakoti’s translation from a canadian birthright citizen to a stateless person. second, the article briefly addresses some dimensions of contemporary statelessness in canada, including its context of production through reforms in citizenship revocation, its prevalence and the consequences for those holding this abject legal status. third, i explore the budlakoti case to reveal the networked production of statelessness. here legal documental networks were central in creating the lived status of citizenship only to be replaced by another network of documents and other forces, which expunged that citizenship and produced statelessness. in the fourth part of the paper, i focus on how the government has utilized a listed exception in the canadian citizenship act to jus soli citizenship, exempting the children born of foreign diplomats and their employees, to negate the two decades of budlakoti’s government-assisted identity as a canadian citizen. finally, in the conclusion, i reiterate the social justice implications of the networked extinguishment of budlakoti’s canadian 3 until recently, the canadian-born have largely been secure in their citizenship status whereas there has been a long-standing tradition of revocation of citizenship for the foreign-born. indeed, the grounds for revocation have undergone a process of expansion and contraction. since 1868, grounds have expanded from misrepresentation or fraud during the process of naturalization, to “disloyalty to his majesty” in 1919 to grounds of severe criminality in 1920 (anderson, 2008, p. 85). in order to limit the discretionary powers of the government and promote the equality of all citizens, the 1976 immigration act made false representation or fraud during application for citizenship the sole ground for revocation (anderson, 2008, p. 85). daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 4 citizenship and briefly address the role of contestation, especially by budlakoti himself, in resisting legal and social erasure. actor-network theory (ant) and the sociology of statelessness although scholarship on citizenship deprivation and statelessness in the canadian context is fairly nascent, there has recently been a flurry of debate, engaged in primarily by legal scholars, political theorists and ethicists on the legal and normative (i.e., human rights) aspects of statelessness in canada, the u.s., australia and the european community (edwards & van waas, 2014). an under-explored dimension of the literature is sociological analysis of the social relations, mechanisms, agency of multiple actors, documents, accidents (nyers, 2009), bureaucratic errors, etc., that produce statelessness for certain subjects and populations, and of the lived experience and identities of stateless individuals and communities. ethnographic and other qualitative methodologies have been illuminating of citizenship as not exclusively a juridical relationship between individuals and states involving particular statutory rights and obligations, but as importantly a negotiated and dynamic relationship within a network of institutions and social interactions spanning the state and civil society (stasiulis, 2013; stasiulis & bakan, 2005). similarly, sigona (2016, p. 267) has argued that a sociological understanding of statelessness would place “the investigation of the everyday, concrete manifestations at its core, while being attentive also to the process of institutionalization of ‘statelessness’… [as] a technology of power operating across different scales and in different locales.” sociological analysis would enrich our appreciation of the social relations of power that underlie the making and unmaking of citizenship and of the everyday experience of statelessness. it is essential for producing socio-legal comprehension of statelessness, illuminating how the social and legal realms interact and intertwine to produce this most abject of legal and social identities. citizenship is usually regarded as far more than a mere legal bond between state and individual, albeit that legal status is fundamental to the enjoyment often of even basic human rights. 4 it is also (in most cases) the lived experience of that legal bond or what the international court of justice (icj) in the 1955 nottebohm case referred to as the “genuine link” basis for citizenship defined in terms of “the social fact of attachment, a genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments, together with the existence of reciprocal rights and duties.”5 the genuine link (also called the “real and 4 even in the early u.s. and french declarations of rights, there was a recognition that “natural rights” or what are now commonly referred to as “universal human rights” granted to all individuals at birth, “could only be recognized and enforced in a practical way through membership in a state” (david weissbrodt, quoted in howard-hassmann, 2015, p.1). 5 nottebohm (liech. v. guat.), 1955 icj 4, 23. nottebohm was a man who was born in germany, had german citizenship, but lived for 34 years in guatemala, where he never became a citizen. the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 5 effective nationality”) criterion for citizenship is by no means the only or most desirable principle for deciding or extinguishing citizenship.6 de groot, vink and honohan (n.d.), however, in their review of citizenship revocation patterns in europe, argue that “[t]he fundamental principles governing provisions for loss of citizenship should be the absence of a genuine link and avoiding statelessness” (p. 6, emphasis added). a sociological study of statelessness, attentive to the quotidian denial of the relevance of the genuine link, and the stripping of a stateless person’s “reciprocal rights and duties” is critical for documenting the unremitting human rights violations and indignities suffered by those deprived of citizenship. linda kerber (2007, p. 31) argues that statelessness today “is most usefully understood not only as a status, but as a practice, made and remade in daily decisions of presidents and judges, border guards and prison guards, managers and pimps.” yet, the process of legally and discursively producing statelessness involves not only decisions of various human agents, but also the agency of objects, particularly documents. as actor-network theory (ant) insists, human action is entangled with its physical environment and material objects. following kerber and the insights of ant, this paper seeks to understand deepan budlakoti’s extraordinary statelessness as a process of production involving heterogeneous networks of various prison and immigration officials, tribunals and courts, documents produced in different jurisdictions, and circumstances that have stripped him of his citizenship and left him vulnerable to indefinite immigration detention and removal from the only country he has ever known or where he has held meaningful ties. only limited, albeit critical, segments of his ongoing networked production of statelessness will be examined here to explore how a “narrow question of fact” has served to extinguish a person’s lifelong formal and lived membership in canada and create statelessness (budlakoti v canada (citizenship & immigration), 2015 fca 139, para 10).7 ant provides a on the eve of world war ii, nottebohm applied for and received citizenship from liechtenstein, a country where he had few to no ties, in order to become a citizen of a neutral country rather than a belligerent one. upon returning to guatemala, he was refused entry on the grounds that he was an enemy alien, since guatemalan authorities refused to recognize his change of nationality and regarded him as german. the international court of justice (icj) applied the “genuine link” test to decide against nottebohm’s claim to citizenship in lichtenstein. 6 the genuine link theory stemming from nottebohm does not purport to regulate nationality for all purposes. sloane argues that the genuine link theory of citizenship, which has “developed into a kind of unreflective dogma” throughout the international law of nationality, is misguided and anachronistic. as people travel, work and live internationally, social attachment to nation states attenuates. instead, he proposes that international law should regulate nationality in terms of its functions, “so as to better effectuate the diverse roles that nationality serves today” (sloane, 2009, p. 4). nonetheless, he concedes that in some areas of law, such as in certain human rights cases, nottebohm’s dicta may remain appropriate and effective, “serving to protect precisely the kind of deep social bonds emphasized in nottebohm against a formal nationality imposed by law” (sloane, 2009, p. 5, emphasis added). 7 the “narrow question of fact” referred to by justice stratas in the federal court of appeal decision of june 2015 is whether mr. budlakoti’s parents’ employment with the indian high commission ended before or after his birth. if before, then deepan enjoyed jus soli citizenship; if daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 6 useful methodology to study the social action and networks of socio-legal objects especially legal documents such as passports, birth certificates, tribunal and court decisions and supporting documentation, and fundamental pieces of legislation such as the canadian citizenship act, as they become entangled with human decision-making. actor-network theory (ant) was developed in the 1980s by science and technology studies scholars bruno latour and michel callon and sociologist john law (callon & latour, 1981). ant has since been utilized in many different fields, including socio-legal studies (cloatre, 2008; cowan & carr, 2008; grabaham, 2011; levi & valverde, 2008). as john law points out, the actor-network approach is more of research method than a theory, grounded in empirical case studies, “a sensibility to the messy practices of relationality and materiality of the world” (2009, p. 142). a distinctive and innovative contribution of ant is its “posthumanism” that subverts dualisms such as “human and non-human, meaning and materiality, big and small, macro and micro, social and technical, nature and culture…” (law, 2009, p. 147). human actors and non-human objects, all positioned in a “network of heterogeneous materials,” are treated equally as “actants,” determinants of social interactions and outcomes (law, 1992, p. 381). the effort to identify significant processes producing the deprivation of budlakoti’s canadian citizenship (thus minimally creating de facto statelessness) is guided by ant and its illuminating applications in sociolegal studies .8 for one of ant’s founders, bruno latour, law is a “network of people and things in which legality is not a field [with any sort of internal autonomy] to be studied independently” (levi & valverde, 2008, pp. 806, 818). rather, law is “an attribute that is attached to events, people, documents and other objects when they become part of the decision-making process…” (levi & valverde, 2008, p. 818). latour’s approach to law both records the “often stammering human interaction that produces law” that is obscured by the public and impersonal voice of law (levi & valverde, 2008, p. 814), and brings notice to the “materiality of legal cases,” whereby case files are compiled and put together with rubber bands, staples and paper clips, a fact that can affect court decisions (e.g., because pages might be missing, outdated “facts” are reiterated, etc.) (levi & valverde, 2008, p. 816). the network of relations among various documents (birth certificates, employment contracts, witness affidavits, etc.) that may be transformed into evidence for a case constitutes legality. once a “file is sufficiently ripened – after, then he was excluded from birthright citizenship through “diplomatic exception” under paragraph 3(2)(a) or 3(2)(b) of the citizenship act, 1985 (budlakoti v. canada (citizenship and immigration), 2015 fca 139 para 10). 8 the practical difference in access to rights between de jure and de facto statelessness is often minimal. a de jure stateless person is one “who is not considered as a national by any state by the operation of its laws” (1954 u.n. convention relating to the status of stateless persons). a de facto stateless person is one who “without having been deprived of their nationality no longer enjoy[s] the protection and assistance of their national authorities” (quoted in brouwer, 2012, p. 20). the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 7 with an increasing number of documents added to it” from different offices and bureaucracies, “the alchemy of legal decision making takes place” (levi & valverde, 2008, p. 817). networks under ant are regarded as “flows of translations,” referring to “all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence” by which an authority speaks or acts on behalf of another actor or force (cowan & carr, 2008, p. 152). they are mobile but also “hold patterns of links stable, at least for a period of time” (cowan & carr, 2008, p. 152). participants in networks are active mediators as opposed to passive intermediaries, shaping the social, and “making it bifurcate in unexpected ways” (latour in cowan & carr, 2008, p. 152). documents or texts frequently feature as key actants within actor-network analysis, and legal-documental networks are often studied in socio-legal applications of ant (law, 1986; grabaham, 2011). given that many of the points of contention in the budlakoti case involve interpretation of documents and their circumstances of production (e.g., the passports issued in bureaucratic “error,” the affidavits judged to be tainted by faulty memory, etc.), ant, with its focus on the “agency” of material objects such as documents, is an attractive tool to analyze the particularities of this case. ant explores the hows and not the whys of the social (law, 2009, p. 148). in order to examine the reasons why canadian authorities questioned and denied citizenship status to budlakoti, it is additionally important to examine the racialization of processes of citizenship revocation and statelessness, and the securitization of immigration and citizenship policies through a critical race and intersectional lens.9 statelessness in canada as those who study statelessness both in canada and internationally have observed, “data on statelessness is notoriously difficult to obtain and often unreliable” (brouwer, 2012, p. 58). in the 2006 canadian census, 1,455 persons self-identified as “stateless” when asked to select their country of origin (brouwer, 2012, p. 58). despite the relatively small numbers of stateless in canada (or born of canadian citizens), there are pressing reasons to make the production of statelessness in canada a focus of research, analysis and public awareness. first, there is evidence of statelessness in canada and new policy innovations that increase the likelihood of statelessness. second, canada has made an international commitment to reduce future statelessness by virtue of having signed and (in 1978) ratified 9 given the limitations of space in this article, the analysis of the racialized and intersectional dimensions of the broader context of social relations of power are treated here in a fairly cursory manner. daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 8 the 1961 un convention on the reduction of statelessness.10 third, the fact that in 2014, the unhcr embarked on a 10-year global campaign to end statelessness offers a unique contemporary moment to examine and address statelessness in canada. what does it mean to be stateless in a country that has an international reputation for “statefullness,” characterized by a relatively democratic and socially inclusive citizenship regime? a stateful country accords some rights to stateless persons; but with far less legal obligation to the denationalized, these are not rights but discretionary privileges provided by a “generous” state. for those stripped of nationality, if additionally (as likely) deemed to be “inadmissible to canada” for reasons such as serious criminality, treason, or terrorism, the stateless are prone to indefinite detention or banishment. statelessness in canada, as elsewhere, becomes a form of “political and civil death,” the total destruction of the individual’s status in organized society (lavi, 2011, p. 800, citing trop v dulles). to be a stateless person is to face endless legal and practical erasure, suspicion, rejection and punishment on a daily basis. this includes the inability to prove one’s identity, register one’s marriage or birth of one’s children, move freely, and access health care, education, employment and other social services. not having citizenship or permanent residence leaves stateless persons as ineligible to leave the country and robs them of the right to return, even to a country where they may have resided their entire lives. one who has had their citizenship extinguished and lacks the protection of any sovereign conforms to giorgio agamben’s concept of homo sacer: having been stripped bare of citizenship, the “accursed man” (or “sacred man,” a figure in roman law) exists in a wasteland between exile and belonging, between life and death. deprived of rights, homines sacri such as the stateless experience only “bare life” (agamben, 1995). agamben’s “states of exception,” such as promulgated by the global war on terrorism have produced homines sacri through laws to curtail, contain and monitor the state’s own citizens through illiberal and non-democratic means. citizenship reforms in canada, the united states, australia and several european countries during the past decade have broadened grounds and paths for revocation and extinguishment of citizenship,11 opening up what linda kerber (2007, p. 24) calls new categories of “instability and potential statelessness.” citizenship, long thought of as an “inalienable right,” particularly for those born with this status, is now increasingly recast as conditional upon conduct through the emergence of new “regimes of 10 as of may 8, 2016, 65 state parties had ratified or acceded to the convention (united nations, 2016). importantly, canada has yet to ratify the 1954 convention, which would require canada to actually put in place some kind of specific protections for stateless people. principally, this could include a statelessness determination procedure separate from the refugee status determination process (brouwer, 2012). 11 as of 2014, 22 countries in europe had passed laws permitting denaturalization for terrorism or other behavior contrary to the national interest (forcese, 2014). the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 9 citizenship deprivation” meant particularly to target citizens who have engaged in or are suspected of supporting terrorist activity (forcese, 2014; lenard, 2016; macklin, 2014). through strengthening the “security state,” many liberal democracies are now sliding down the slippery slope in extinguishment policies, beginning with naturalized citizens, continuing with dual citizens, then moving to birthright citizens in revocation directed at socalled “homegrown terrorists,” and finally countenancing such extinguishment even if the end product is statelessness.12 as barbara jackman, a lawyer specializing in immigration law has pointed out, the move to citizenship deprivation was preceded in canadian immigration law by several reforms that diminished the rights of permanent residents to remain in canada for reasons of criminality and national security and strengthened executive powers to remove permanent residents (jackman, 2014). in the canadian context, permanent residency has traditionally provided a broad range of citizenship-like rights, and often was seen as almost equivalent to canadian citizenship. in the post-9/11 era, permanent residence had already become an increasingly precarious status.13 the conservative government, under stephen harper (2006-2015), introduced significant reforms that render canadian citizenship conditional on meeting new criteria for conduct. the rationale for fortifying two-tiered citizenship was couched in terms of protecting national security through “refusing citizenship to individuals who pose a security risk,” and reinforcing the “value” of canadian citizenship by making it harder to acquire and retain, and easier to revoke (government of canada, 2014b). in june 2015, the federal government’s bill c-24, the strengthening canadian citizenship act came into effect, permitting the stripping of citizenship, not only among naturalized canadians but also among those born in canada holding a second nationality. moreover, the law’s reach has been interpreted by some critics as applying not only to dual nationals, but to those simply having the imputed ability to acquire a second nationality “in another state through a parent or more distant relative” (national immigration law section, canadian bar association, 2014, pp. 17-18). as delineated below, this creates a “reverse 12 for a discussion of the trend in europe and north america toward denationalization of citizens as a counter-terrorism strategy, manifesting the “securitization of citizenship” see the eudo citizenship forum debate (macklin & bauböck, 2015; see also forcese, 2014; macklin, 2014). 13 as non-citizens, permanent residents enjoy many but not all of the same rights as citizens; excluded are the right to vote and the right to travel abroad with a canadian passport. canadian citizens also enjoy privileged access to the federal public service. the status of permanent residence is also more easily revocable than that of canadian citizenship, leaving permanent residents more vulnerable to deportation. thus, under sections 33 and 77 to 85 of the immigration and refugee protection act, permanent residents, but not citizens, may be inadmissible to canada if suspected of violating human rights, having membership within organized crime, or perceived to be a threat to national security. those issued “security certificates” are subject to removal orders. daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 10 onus,” whereby individuals have to prove that they are not citizens elsewhere in order to retain their citizenship in canada. in the 2015 federal election campaign, the harper government acted on the controversial new law, and moved to strip the canadian citizenship of several men convicted of terrorist-related charges who were either incarcerated or had recently been released after serving their criminal sentences. the string of revocation notices provoked both human rights and security questions regarding the implications of banishing convicted terrorists, the revival of the medieval practice of “exile” as appropriate punishment in the “age of global terror,” and the use of “double punishment” (incarceration and deportation) by the government in its actions against its citizens convicted of terrorism (macklin, 2014; macklin & bauböck, 2015; forcese, 2014; lenard, 2016). the augmented conditionality, distinctions among different “classes” of citizens, and revocability of citizenship were in keeping with the views, articulated by then citizenship and immigration minister chris alexander, when sponsoring bill c-24, strengthening canadian citizenship act, that “citizenship is not a right, it’s a privilege” and that it is not and never was inalienable (quoted in black, 2014, n.p.). since the october 2015 federal election, the liberal government of justin trudeau, whose election promise was to restore equality among all canadian citizens, has moved quickly to make good on its promise to repeal the parts of c-24 that applied to those convicted of terrorism-related crimes, ensuring that they can keep their canadian passports.14 an important question that arises with the shift from the conservative to the liberal policies governing citizenship is what happens to those persons, such as budlakoti, deprived of canadian citizenship under the conservatives and now caught in the transition between these two citizenship regimes? 14at the time of writing (december 2016), bill c-6, an act to amend the citizenship act and to make consequential amendments to another act had passed final reading in the house of commons and was in the process of second reading in the senate (www.parl.gc.ca/content/sen/chamber/421/debates/077db_2016-11-28-e.htm?language=e#37) – bill c-6 halts the government’s ability to strip citizenship from convicted terrorists and those who commit treason against canada. critics have charged, however, that bill c-6 has failed to fix the lack of procedural fairness and safeguards for individuals facing citizenship revocation due to misrepresentation or fraud by ensuring that they have the right to an independent hearing and to consideration of compassionate and humanitarian factors (kwan, 2016). it is also striking that the trudeau government was reported as more aggressively pursuing citizenship revocation than the harper conservatives. according to dyer (2016, n.p.), “the 184 revocation decisions of the first 10 months of the trudeau government nearly match the total number of decisions over a 27-year period between 1988 and the last month of the harper government in october 2015.” as jenny kwan, ndp immigration, refugees and citizenship critic, argues: “it also does not matter that the misrepresentation is a result of an honest mistake even if you are a child and your parent presented misinformation on the application for whatever reason. your citizenship could still be revoked and you cannot argue your case based on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. this is wrong” (kwan, 2016). the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 11 deepan budlakoti’s journey to statelessness how does a person who is born in canada, has a canadian birth certificate and passport, and who has spent his entire life in this country as a documented citizen face extinguishment of his citizenship and exile because of a “technicality”? utilizing the logic of ant, the production of deepan budlakoti’s statelessness can be traced through networks or “rhizomes” involving immigration administrative tribunals, citizenship law, discourses of fit citizenship, racial profiling and bordering processes, documents in more than one country, other realms of (e.g., criminal, anti-terrorism) law, the courts, and authorities connected with penal law. budlakoti was born in ottawa’s grace hospital on october 17, 1989. he has been resident in canada throughout his life. his parents were indian nationals who came to canada in 1985 to work as private household help – gardening, cleaning and cooking for the indian high commissioner. as the judgment by mr. justice phelan in federal court states, the parents’ “employment [with the indian high commission] terminated at some point in 1989 – the exact date is hotly contested and the facts in this record are difficult to make out” (budlakoti v. canada (citizenship and immigration), 2014 fc 855, para. 17). according to one set of documents, submitted by budlakoti’s lawyers (discussed below), his parents began working for a medical doctor in nepean, ontario beginning in june 1989.15 according to the documentary evidence favoured by the immigration and refugee board (irb) and courts, one or both parents continued to work for the indian high commissioner until december 1989, two months after budlakoti’s birth. in 1992, budlakoti’s parents applied for and were granted permanent residence (pr) for themselves and for deepan, whom they listed as a dependant child in their application16 in 1995-97, his parents applied for and received canadian citizenship for themselves; they did not submit a citizenship application for deepan since by then they understood that through his birth in ottawa, he already had (jus soli) canadian citizenship. this 15 “in the irb proceedings, the mother claimed that while pregnant with the applicant, she had stopped working for the high commission. the father testified that he had left his job in june 1989, applied for a canadian work visa in boston and moved into his new employer’s home. additionally, their new employer (dr. dehejia) testified that he travelled to boston with the applicant’s father in the summer of 1989 to regularize the father’s status” (budlakoti v. canada (citizenship and immigration), 2014 fc 855, para. 11). 16 if deepan had jus soli citizenship, his inclusion in his parents’ application for permanent residence was redundant. the courts have decided that the inclusion of deepan in his parents’ pr application is evidence that they were employed by the indian high commission at the time of his birth, rather than based on an error on their part. the courts have also decided that the noninclusion of his name in his parents’ citizenship application is simply a neutral fact or at best an unfortunate circumstance, rather than evidence supporting his claim to jus soli citizenship. see budlakoti, 2015, fca, 139, para 5: “it is not clear why the appellant did not apply or why no application was made on his behalf. in any event, only the parents were granted canadian citizenship.” daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 12 understanding was further reflected in budlakoti’s inclusion in 1997 on his mother’s canadian passport until he was 14 years old, and his own separate successful application for a canadian passport thereafter. the government “clearly had no issue with his status” in issuing these canadian passports to budlakoti (behrens, 2015, n.p.). for two decades after his 1989 birth and the issuance of a canadian (ontario) birth certificate, arguably a powerful actant that enrols other documents that are gateways to canadian citizenship rights (e.g., passports, social assistance, health care coverage), deepan’s networked existence as a canadian citizen was unremarkable. the courts in budlakoti dismiss such evidence of deepan’s citizenship by simply arguing that the issuance of passports is “not determinative of citizenship” and merely reflects administrative errors on the part of passport-issuing authorities (budlakoti v. canada (citizenship and immigration), 2014 fc 855, para. 39). like many children of working class parents, budlakoti had a difficult childhood; he ran away from home and became a ward of the ontario state, where he witnessed and experienced violence in group homes. like many other troubled canadian youth in foster care, he fell into a life of crime as a young adult, was incarcerated and served his sentences. in december 2009, he was convicted of break and entry and was sentenced to four months. in late 2010, he was convicted of both weapons and narcotics trafficking and sentenced to three years in jail. while incarcerated, a prison official profiled budlakoti as someone whose citizenship status should be investigated by canadian immigration officials. this instigated private discussions of budlakoti’s status among officials of citizenship and immigration canada leading to a decision in 2011 that he was in fact not a canadian citizen. it also led to a decision that as a permanent resident, budlakoti was inadmissible to canada on the grounds of “serious criminality” under the provisions of s. 36(1) of the immigration and refugee protection act (s.c 2001, c 27). one can only speculate what combination of his brown skin, dark beard and “foreign” name became significant actants in casting suspicion on deepan budlakoti’s “genuine” status as a canadian citizen. budlakoti’s case has often been treated unsympathetically by the mass media.17 unlike victims who are portrayed as innocent or hapless, insofar as he has had significant brushes with the law, notice paid to his criminal convictions has often superseded focus on the fact that after two decades of his life as a documented and canadian-born citizen with full protection of the state, he was deprived of his canadian citizenship and rendered stateless. viewed through the lens of “crimmigration,” however, the decidedly hostile and punitive action of the conservative government to the issue of budlakoti’s legal status reflects “double punishment,” the revival of practices 17 according to kane’s (2013) analysis of canadian print media’s coverage on the stateless in canada, the stateless are frequently depicted as enemies, dangerous and tricksters. the stateless are deemed blameworthy and the harsh effects of their legal and/or de facto statelessness diminished by the print media’s use of quotation marks or the qualifier “so-called” when discussing “stateless” persons. the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 13 of banishment and exile intersecting with erosion of rights of persons accused or convicted of crime (hernández, 2013; macklin, 2014).18 in the irb tribunal and courts, the extinguishment of budlakoti’s canadian citizenship has been rendered in terms of: “a significant factual dispute between the parties [and even by the federal court of appeal as a “narrow question of fact,”] as to whether the applicant’s parents left their indian high commission employment before or after his birth. if the parents left their employment before his birth, then the applicant was entitled to canadian citizenship by virtue of his birth.” (budlakoti v. canada (citizenship and immigration), 2014 fc 855, para.10) in the latter case, he would be considered as having acquired the right to citizenship under section 3(1)(a) of the citizenship act. if not, he would be ineligible for jus soli citizenship by virtue of being “not applicable to children of foreign diplomats” under section 3(2)(a) or 3(2)(b) of the citizenship act. citizenship and immigration canada officials,19 the irb, and the courts have thus far decided that deepan is not a canadian citizen and also that it is premature to conclude that he is stateless, because he has not applied for either canadian or indian citizenship.20 in 2011, the minister of citizenship and immigration concluded that deepan was a permanent resident, not a canadian citizen. the government’s contention is not that they have revoked his canadian citizenship, but that “despite his passport,” he has never been a canadian citizen. as they determined that his parents were employees of the indian high commission at the time of his birth, deepan was thus subject to the exception to jus soli citizenship applied to children born in canada of diplomatic or consular officers or other representatives or employees in canada of a foreign government. in october 2011, the irb held an admissibility hearing, ruled budlakoti inadmissible on the grounds of “serious criminality,”21 and issued a removal order to india, a country in which he had no social connection or familiarity. by the end of 2012, having served out his criminal sentence, he 18 the effort to exile citizens convicted of criminal acts is in keeping with long-standing conservative party policy that regards deportation as an effective strategy to support the safety and security of legitimate canadians. thus, in stand up for canada, the 2006 conservative party of canada federal election platform, “effective deportation laws” are touted as a key strategy in keeping canada’s borders safe from foreign criminals within and abroad (conservative party of canada, 2006, p.27, cited in kwak, 2016). 19 soon after the new liberal government of canada took office in november 2015, the federal department citizenship and immigration canada (cic) was renamed immigration, refugees and citizenship canada (ircc). 20 hon. justice phelan who heard the case in federal court, stated that “india has denied that the applicant is a citizen of india or entitled to citizenship but the record on this issue is sketchy at best” (budlakoti v. canada (citizenship and immigration), 2014 fc 855, para. 5.) 21 under s. 36(1)(a) of the immigration and refugee protection act, a permanent resident or a foreign national will be considered criminally inadmissible if he or she has been convicted (in canada) of an offence: carrying a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 10 years; or for which a term of imprisonment of more than six months has been imposed. daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 14 was transferred into customs and border protection agency custody in toronto’s metro west detention centre pending removal in accordance with the removal order. in april 2013, he was released from custody on certain bonds and under strict conditions and surveillance. the government has been unsuccessful in its attempt to deport him to india as indian authorities have found that he is not an indian national and refused to issue him travel documents.22 stripped of his canadian citizenship, budlakoti has been “left in a vulnerable position whereby his country of birth and residence has withdrawn his citizenship, thereby rendering him stateless” (hameed, 2013, pp. 3-4). today, as a stateless person, budlakoti’s life is full of hardship, mental health issues, uncertainty, and crushing debt incurred from continuous litigation. he has worked for wages intermittently, waiting in some cases six months for work permits, and is ineligible for social assistance. his low educational level, criminal record, statelessness and threat of deportation have made it impossible for him to financially support himself. the government’s insistence that budlakoti fill out documents to apply for a work permit confers foreignness upon him as only temporary foreign workers need fill out such forms. similarly, in 2012 budlakoti’s transfer from the prison where he was serving out his term to the west detention centre in toronto, where he was detained under immigration law, established his foreignness, as such spaces are reserved for non-citizens. just as citizenship is produced through documental networks, providing access to publicly funded health care, social services and basic democratic and legal rights, a reverse documental and material network has been enrolled to translate an erasure of budlakoti’s legal and substantive citizenship. a particularly harsh effect of the extinguishment of his citizenship has been the cancellation of budlakoti’s ontario health insurance program entitlements, and given his impoverishment, his inability to purchase private insurance. this withholding of public health care also reinforces his production as a non-citizen, whereby he joins “the ranks of an estimated half a million people in canada [including the undocumented and new immigrants in the first three months of arrival] without access to medical care because of their immigration status” (bozinoff, goel, jones, & shahid, n.p., 2015). despite a medical diagnosis that he has ptsd, he is unable to access therapy and health care more generally. in all realms of daily life where he has encountered the impossibility of retaining relationships, supporting himself, maintaining his health, etc., his experience reflects how an individual’s slide 22 as the applicant’s record argues in deepan budlakoti and minister of citizenship and immigration, “significantly, the indian government indicates that the applicant is not an indian citizen, a fact which is undisputed by [the minister of citizenship and immigration.] a relevant communication made by india to cbsa on march 18, 2013 regarding its position on the applicant’s nationality [never communicated to budlakoti]…was later discovered by the applicant in september 2013 through a personal information request made by him under the privacy act” (hameed, 2013). the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 15 to statelessness results in the most egregious of harms.23 in january 2016, budlakoti was incarcerated on a new charge and subsequently released in august 2016 under strict monitoring and curfew conditions and subject to unannounced visits to his residence from canadian border services agency officials. at different points, budlakoti’s citizenship extinguishment involved the seizure by authorities of those documents which had long been “proof” of his legal identity as a citizen (e.g., his passport and later his birth certificate). thus far, budlakoti has engaged in a fruitless round of litigation to regain his canadian citizenship, having had his case decided first by citizenship and immigration (cic) officials and the immigration and refugee board (irb), and then heard by the federal court and the federal court of appeal. the courts have refused to decide on “a factual matter” that had already been decided upon by the irb. thus, the irb can be said to have enlisted the federal court and federal court of appeal to form an “eddy” of common opinion regarding the “factual matter” (the dates of budlakoti’s parents’ cessation of employment with the indian high commission). the courts have also refused to provide a bare declaration of citizenship, arguing that budlakoti had not exhausted all avenues or grounds for acquiring citizenship either in canada or in india, the country of his parents’ birth. in january 2016, the supreme court declined budlakoti’s request for leave to appeal. his legal team has since worked to prepare an application under the citizenship act to the citizenship minister, assembling the documents that provide an alternative narrative to the “administrative error” and “diplomatic exception” stories created through the documental networks of the irb and canadian courts. the “diplomatic exception” to birthright citizenship i will now turn to one of the key junctures or interaction of elements in the networked production of deepan’s statelessness – the rulings of immigration officials, an irb tribunal, the federal court and federal court of appeal that budlakoti was not a canadian citizen under paragraph 3(1)(a) of the canadian citizenship act. thus far, all administrative and legal rulings have argued against the suggestion that the canadian government revoked budlakoti’s citizenship. rather, they contend that budlakoti had never been a canadian citizen, as the offspring of parents employed by the indian high commission at the time of his birth; as such, his citizenship status was governed by section 3(2) of the citizenship act, which prohibited canadian 23 trop v. dulles, 356 u.s. 86 (1958), was a federal case in the united states in which the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that it was unconstitutional for the government to revoke the citizenship of a u.s. citizen as a punishment. chief justice earl warren described citizenship revocation as “a form of punishment more primitive than torture” as it inflicts the “total destruction of the individual's status in organized society” and “subjects the individual to a fate of ever-increasing fear and distress.” daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 16 citizenship at birth. as discussed above, what was presented through the network of litigation of his case were several documents and conflicting evidence about the dates of termination of employment of budlakoti’s parents with the indian high commission. however, it is illuminating to first examine the assumptions underlying the section 3(2) exception in the canadian citizenship act to birthright citizenship and its application to the case of budlakoti. foreign diplomatic missions and consular posts are governed by the vienna convention on diplomatic relations, based upon principles of diplomatic immunity originating more than 3,000 years ago (castro, 2014, p. 355). the vienna convention grants diplomats and their families numerous protections, including immunity from criminal and civil jurisdiction of receiving states (castro, 2014, p. 353). the exception to birthright jus soli citizenship that excludes children born of parents who are representatives of foreign nations is widely assumed to be fair and equitable in those countries such as the united states and canada that take this “expansive” approach to citizenship (guendelsberger, 1992; feere, 2011). 24 this is the “one area of solid agreement” among advocates on both side of the ongoing debate about automatic citizenship granted to children born of non-citizens (feere, 2011, p. 1). the exemption from jus soli citizenship for children born to foreign diplomatic staff is based on the perceived unfairness of automatic recognition of this citizenship where it would confer both the rights of diplomatic immunity from criminal and civil law in the country of birth and all the benefits of birthright citizenship. in a relatively wealthy country with a robust social rights and human rights record, the gain to the diplomat’s child of acquiring the rights, benefits and opportunities of the country of birth would be substantial. the fear is that lax regulation of jus soli citizenship for a child of foreign diplomats would create a “super citizen” who not only enjoys all the benefits of birthright citizenship but whose diplomatic immunity also puts him or her above the law (feere, 2011, p. 1). notwithstanding the consensus on the “diplomatic exception” to children gaining jus soli citizenship, in practice, an unknown number of children of foreign mission employees “mistakenly” receive jus soli citizenship. in the u.s. context, feere (2011, p. 2) suggests that “the limiting language in the 14th amendment’s citizenship clause has been effectively rendered a nullity as a result of a lack of regulations aimed at birth certificate and ssn [social security number) issuance.” his contention is that “today’s application of the citizenship clause is so lax that the united states has a de facto universal 24 the citizenship clause of the 14th amendment in the u.s. constitution provides: “all persons born or naturalized in the united states, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the united states and of the state wherein they reside.” the exception regarding children born to parents who are representatives of foreign nations is based on the fact that they are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the united states and are therefore not to be granted u.s. citizenship (feere, 2011, p. 1). the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 17 birthright citizenship policy that denies u.s. citizenship by birth to no one, including children born to foreign diplomats” (feere, 2011, p. 2). the suggestion that the practice also occurs in canada is reflected on the global affairs canada website (n.d.) which provides redress instructions to diplomat parents of children “born in canada who did not acquire canadian citizenship,” and yet who had obtained a canadian passport warning that “application for such a passport can be construed as misconduct,” and that any such passport should be surrendered. the “error” of granting birthright citizenship to children of diplomats is created through a chain of documents. as global affairs canada (n.d.), notes, “children born of foreign representatives would normally obtain a provincial birth certificate.” the birth certificate in turn permits acquisition of a social insurance number and a canadian passport. notably, birth certificate request forms do not require declaration of parental diplomatic status. this practice is significant insofar as a canadian long-form birth certificate in fact is a portal to citizenship – the key identity document to establishing one’s access to canadian passports for children. it is not known how many canadian-born children of foreign diplomats have followed the network of documents issued by canadian federal and provincial government agencies from canadian provincial birth certificate to acquisition of canadian passport and access to a lifetime of treatment by all levels of the canadian state as a canadian citizen. in canada, the issue of ethically questionable application of jus soli has focused primarily on socalled “birth tourism” and “passport babies,” born to foreign women who come to canada for the express reason of gaining canadian citizenship for their canadian-born children rather than children of foreign diplomats or employees (wong, 2014). in the united states, the heated debate over intended scope of the 14th amendment’s citizenship clause has focused primarily on u.s.-born children of “illegal immigrants.” interestingly, in the u.s. context, feere argues that the state department has determined that birth to a foreign diplomat “may not necessarily bar an individual from being considered a u.s. citizen at birth.” the u.s. state department’s determination “required a fact based analysis to determine whether he/she was born subject to the laws of the united states,” skirting the issue of whether such a child was “subject to the jurisdiction of” the u.s. (quoted in feere, 2011, p. 5, emphasis added). how has the issue of birthright citizenship and the diplomatic exception been applied in the case of deepan budlakoti? as mentioned earlier, deepan’s parents were never part of diplomatic staff; rather they were employed as low-level household workers for the indian high commissioner. citizenship and immigration officials, the irb and the federal court and federal court of appeal have all agreed that budlakoti’s parents’ employment ended after their son’s birth, concluding that he had never been a canadian citizen under s. 3(1)(a) of the citizenship act, his lack of such status governed by s. 3(2) of the citizenship act. daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 18 budlakoti’s contention that he was born after his parents had concluded their employment with the indian high commission is supported by (among others) his ontario certificate of live birth which lists a nepean doctor’s address rather than the indian high commission as the residence of his parents, and affidavits signed by both the former indian high commissioner and the nepean doctor. irb officials and judges in subsequent court proceedings have treated with suspicion documents and forms of legal evidence that support budlakoti’s contention that he was born after his parents left the indian high commission and therefore is entitled to jus soli canadian citizenship. instead they have favoured an alternative set of documents that indicate budlakoti’s parents were still employed by the high commission at the time of his birth. thus, the affidavit evidence of the former indian high commissioner is reported to be “undermined” by the fact that the “3rd page of the four-page affidavit is missing” (budlakoti, judgment and reasons, 2014 fc, para 22). the government and the courts relied on several documents from the indian high commission and an employment authorization from the canadian government whose dates place the work departure of budlakoti’s parents from the indian high commission in december 1989, about two months after deepan’s birth. the integrity of these documents are never questioned by the irb or federal court, even though the former indian high commissioner stated that the december date is in error. central to ant is the concept of “translation,” whereby all the actors in the network agree that the network is worth building and defending. translation “requires a performative definition in which power is the consequence of an intense activity of enrolling, convincing and enlisting” (cowan & carr, 2008, p. 152). in budlakoti’s case, this network where state power has been invested is one of extinguishment of his citizenship and production of statelessness. documents that are enrolled to support this position and treated as factual are those that reinforce deepan’s exemption from birthright citizenship (regardless of the possibilities that they may express administrative error, laxity or lag). those that contradict this claim are here enrolled as lacking in integrity, undermined by several other documents, internally inconsistent, or (as in the case of budlakoti’s passports) dismissed as having been produced in error and of no significance to his efforts to regain state and judicial recognition of his status as a canadian citizen. if one pierces the thin technical argument regarding the determination of budlakoti’s birthright citizenship, the rationale behind the section 3(2)(b) exception to birthright citizenship simply does not apply in this case. the ambivalence expressed by the u.s. state department to birthright citizenship of u.s.-born children of foreign diplomats, suggesting that it depends on whether they were “born subject to the laws of the [u.s.]” in fact suggests a deeper socio-legal understanding of citizenship. deepan has never had access to a life of diplomatic privilege where he was not subject to the jurisdiction or the laws of canada. quite the contrary – in his troubled youth, he was a ward the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 19 of the ontario state. justice phelan (quoting justice shore in al-ghamdi, 2007) states: “the objective of paragraphs 3(2) (a) and (c) of the citizenship act is to ensure that citizenship is not accorded to someone who is immune from almost every obligation of citizenship (e.g., paying taxes and respecting criminal law). this is manifestly an important objective” (budlakoti v. canada (citizenship and immigration), 2014 fc 855, para. 48). yet budlakoti was never immune from the obligations of canadian citizenship. he has been subjected to the full force of canadian criminal law in his convictions and sentences. more sympathetic readings of his brushes with canadian law have pointed out how his pleas and sentencing have reflected his status as a young and low-income person, and the particular vulnerabilities associated with his racialized otherness (behrens, 2015). the approach taken by the government and courts is a “reverse onus” approach, which places responsibility on individuals, faced with canadian citizenship revocation, to show that they do not have citizenship in some other country, rather than on the state to prove that the decision to deprive individuals of citizenship will not render them stateless. since the first determination by canadian authorities that his citizenship had been issued in “administrative error” given his parents’ presumed employment with the indian high commission at the time of his birth, only those objects (mainly documents) in legal-administrative networks that reinforce his noncitizenship in canada have been enlisted to support the canadian government’s case that budlakoti is a non-citizen of canada. the government’s actions were to his detriment in that budlakoti had opportunity during this time to apply for canadian citizenship. yet he (and his parents) were implicitly discouraged from doing so by the reiterated assurances by the canadian government, which issued deepan passports (which involves vetting applicants to ensure that they are indeed canadian), documents involved in his becoming a ward of the state, an ohip card, etc., indicating he was indeed a canadian citizen. a justice-based argument to restore budlakoti’s citizenship would accept that his case is one of “detrimental reliance:” to his detriment, the canadian state made him believe for about 20 years through its various document-issuing actions that he was a canadian.25 the canadian courts have thus far also refused to engage with a fuller socio-legal understanding of citizenship, following nottebohm, based upon a “genuine link” to a state, and “a social fact of attachment.” the genuine link principle of citizenship may be limiting in an era of globalization whereby more people are living and working internationally, and individual’s social and affective ties to nation-states have attenuated. however, in cases such as budlakoti’s involving extinguishment of citizenship, nottebohm’s dicta remain appropriate and effective, “serving to protect precisely the kind of deep social bonds emphasized in nottebohm against a formal nationality 25 i would like to thank audrey macklin (personal communication) for bringing this argument to my attention. daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 20 imposed by law” (sloane, 2009, p. 5, emphasis added). a test of “effective nationality” seems appropriate in the budlakoti case, whereby genuine links in canada, created in part by the state’s repeated treatment and verification of budlakoti as a citizen for over 20 years, provide strong arguments for the “rerecognition” of his citizenship. the courts have also declared budlakoti’s statelessness to be “premature” in that he has not pursued other grounds than birthright citizenship, such as “special and unusual hardship” of subsection 5(4) of the canadian citizenship act. they also have suggested that budlakoti should explore application for indian national status or citizenship: they import essentialist reasoning to assert that since he was “born of two indian nationals” this gives him “considerable connection with india” (budlakoti v canada (citizenship & immigration), 2015 fca 139, para. 32, 49). the courts define mr. budlakoti’s legal status as not necessarily and prematurely stateless, arguing that his circumstances are not beyond his control. it can be very difficult to provide satisfactory evidence of statelessness as it requires proving a negative, the absence of a nationality. it is also unjust that some one who has had his life-long citizenship extinguished in the country where he was born and lived his entire life has additionally to undergo overwhelming financial debts and prolonged process to prove that he has no nationality (in this case in india). in the interim stretch of many years, his everyday life is plagued by the indignities and “protection gap” of de facto statelessness. conclusion as the most abject “other” to the citizen, the stateless serve an important boundary function for the state in securing its sovereignty and stabilizing its borders (kerber, 2009, p. 31). the “stateless serve the state,” writes linda kerber, “by signaling who will not be entitled to its protection, and throwing fear into the rest of us” (kerber, 2009, p. 31). the decision by the conservative government to strip mr. budlakoti’s citizenship was clearly shaped by the motivations underlying its citizenship revocation reforms that “tethers citizenship revocation to criminal convictions” (macklin, 2014, p. 29). by making citizenship alienable on the basis of a sliding scale of “criminality,” citizenship is no longer a right but a “revocable privilege” and is downgraded to an “enhanced form of conditional permanent residence” (macklin, 2014, p. 29). under the conservative government, which stripped budlakoti of both his citizenship and basic human rights, an application to the citizenship minister under the prior government was perceived by budlakoti to be tainted by pre-judgments regarding his criminality as grounds for citizenship stripping and exile (keung, 2013) utilizing the insights of actor-network theory (ant), the production of budlakoti’s statelessness has been traced through heterogeneous networks the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 21 involving prison officials, racial profiling and bordering processes, immigration administrative tribunals, the citizenship act, discourses of fit citizenship, documents in more than one country, other realms of (e.g., criminal, anti-terrorism) law, the courts, lawyers and judges. immigration lawyers such as barbara jackman are critical of the manner in which under the conservative government, the canadian courts have built case law in terms of a stack of negative cases, which permit the cavalier extinguishment of an appellant’s citizenship and human rights. referring to a context of “gutting of charter rights since the supreme court imposed a standard of ‘reasonableness’,” jackman (2014) argues the “the ability of people to challenge cases…has gone experientially down since the supreme court imposed that standard [of reasonableness].” she specifically refers to justice phelan’s federal court ruling extinguishing budlakoti’s citizenship, as the “most demeaning decision in terms of deepan’s rights as a human being” (see budlakoti vs. canada (citizenship and immigration) 2014, fc 855). how is it the case that once the “error” (of daily treating and confirming a person’s citizenship all his life) is unearthed, the courts can decide that their course of action need not be, in justice phelan’s words, “the least impairing imaginable,” but only necessary to ensure that “the law falls within a range of reasonable alternatives” (budlakoti, fc 2014 855, para 77)? as i have argued in this paper, certain “simple facts of law” such as the diplomatic exception to birthright citizenship in the canadian citizenship act are worthy of scrutiny as they hold tremendous power over persons’ lives. the regulation of this diplomatic exception is clearly not cut and dry: as a document-requiring nation, canada has relied on birth certificates for issuance of citizenship cards, thus permitting an untold number who might technically fit the diplomatic exception to slip by without notice, to have their lives legitimated through a legal documental network produced by multiple agencies that reinforces their canadianness. for those, like budlakoti, who are documented citizens all their lives, the courts need to import richer, more rights-based and genuine link notions of citizenship rather than snuff out their citizenship on the basis of a technicality. this is the argument made by budlakoti (e.g., in 2013 at the federal court) where he “emphasized the importance of citizenship to personhood and one’s sense of belonging and well-being” (budlakoti v. canada (citizenship and immigration), 2014 fc 855, para. 18). this historically prior legal documental network, that establishes that budlakoti was since birth a canadian, needs to be identified and enrolled to contest the administrative error and diplomatic exception stories narrated in tribunal and court decisions that argue budlakoti was never a canadian citizen. this is precisely what budlakoti himself and the justice for deepan committee (online and through various events) are attempting to do in an ongoing campaign to educate various publics and elected officials about the injustice of budlakoti’s citizenship extinguishment, while daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 22 supporting a legal and now administrative process to win back his citizenship.26 despite severe limitations on his geographic mobility imposed by cbsa, budlakoti has himself been an activist – raising funds and awareness of his situation through a speaking tour in several canadian cities. he has also supported other causes within his experience, such as the inhumane conditions of prisoners in criminal detention. budlakoti has clearly galvanized and created several new networks as justice-minded lawyers and university students have been working on different files governing his status. impressively, it was the awareness of his experience through one of his speaking engagements in toronto that led to the founding in 2014 of the new advocacy-focused canadian centre on statelessness (n.d.). 27 despite the enrollment of the governmental networks in effecting a legal erasure and reduction to “bare life,” budlakoti has clearly refused banishment from canadian society and the status of homo sacer (agamben, 1995). currently, under a new liberal government that has made it clear that “a canadian is a canadian is a canadian,”28 there is some hope though no guarantee of reinstatement of budlakoti’s birthright citizenship. an important question posed by his case is what happens when individuals fall between the cracks in the transition between two citizenship regimes. the trudeau government’s bill c-6, which amends the citizenship act, contains a provision that would restore the citizenship of any convicted terrorists who lost it as a result of changes brought in by the previous conservative government (bell, 2016). in addition, the current citizenship minister has promised not to take any further action against nine terrorists who had received notices informing them their citizenship was being revoked (bell, 2016). this suggests an openness in the current government to a solution supporting restitution of budlakoti’s human right to his birthright citizenship rather than permitting the punitive ethos of the prior conservative government to govern the final disposition of his legal identity. more broadly, this extraordinary case of statelessness exposes how the strengthening of canadian citizenship requires that it become more difficult rather than easier to lose. 26 see www.justicefordeepan.org/, budlakoti’s latest effort to build support for his case involves showing a 15-minute documentary, “stateless” directed by amar wala, about his case to audiences in various canadian cities. as of writing, budlakoti’s lawyers are preparing a citizenship application to the minister (of immigration, refugees and citizenship). 27 see also www.statelessness.ca/about-us.html. 28 this was a slogan repeatedly used by current prime minister justin trudeau during the 2015 federal election campaign. the extraordinary statelessness of deepan budlakoti studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 23 acknowledgements an earlier version of this paper was presented at the “citizenship and immigration canada panel” of the 2016 annual meeting of the law and society association, new orleans, june 2. i am very grateful for the insightful comments and helpful suggestions for revision provided by jamie liew, tanja juric, aditya rao and two anonymous reviewers for studies in social justice. references agamben, g. 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(treaty series, vol. 989, p. 175) retrieved from https://treaties.un.org/pages/viewdetails.aspx?src=ind&mtdsg_no=v4&chapter=5&clang=_en daiva stasiulis studies in social justice, volume 11, issue 1, 1-26, 2017 26 unhcr (un refugee agency). (n.d.). what is statelessness? retrieved from www.unhcr.org/statelessness.html wong, j. (2014, may 20). canada’s birthright citizenship policy makes us a nation of suckers. toronto life. retrieved from http://torontolife.com/city/jan-wong-canada-birthrightcitizenship-nation-of-suckers/ correspondence address: alison howell, humanitarian and conflict response institute (hcri), ellen wilkinson building, the university of manchester, oxford road, manchester, m13 9pl, united kingdom, tel.: +44 (0)161 275 8967, email: alisonr.howell@manchester.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 6, issue 1, 1-7, 2012 introduction: the politics of resilience and recovery in mental health care alison howell humanitarian and conflict response institute, the university of manchester, united kingdom jijian voronka ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada recovery and resilience are now two of the central frameworks for organizing mental health care in the western world. these frameworks posit that mental health “patients” can recover from their illnesses, and that resilience may be developed as a strength in order to avert or prevent so-called mental illness from the outset. the turn to “recovery” and to “resilience” has occurred in a context wherein mental health governance models based centrally on institutionalization had been the subject of much political resistance from those who have been psychiatrized, and also in a context of the retrenchment of state services through neo-liberal restructuring and cost-cutting measures. large-scale deinstitutionalization in the second half of the 20th century was met with the development of “community-based” care as an alternative. currently, those negotiating mental health services often find themselves subject to a mixture of institutional and community based mental health services, as well as other secondary institutional systems that offer mental health interventions (universities, work places, primary education, etc). although such shifts apparently respond to the concerns expressed in the political resistance directed at total institutions (see goffman, 1961), these new models of community care have arisen within a neo-liberal context, wherein social services are increasingly subject to prove their effectiveness through efficiency models that require community agencies to meet targets, ensure flow-through, and collect evidence-based data on their effectiveness. simultaneously western states are downloading their social responsibilities to the voluntary sector and to citizens themselves. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 2 alison howell, jijian voronka whilst the concepts of resilience and recovery, then, originated in antiinstitutionalization movements, they have increasingly been incorporated into, and some would say co-opted by, medical reason and mental health policy. they have thus been re-figured: psychiatric experts now iterate that through recovery and resilience those who are deemed to have disordered minds can live “meaningful lives” despite the ostensible permanence of their “illness.” this understanding works to deny the possibility of a kind of recovery that would place patients or “clients” outside the remit of medical authority. whereas twenty years ago resilience and recovery were harnessed as organized frameworks for psychiatric survivors to avert the medical system through alternate means (including peer knowledge and support), they are now harnessed to incorporate psychiatric survivors into medical systems. they now work in ways that attempt to make psychiatric survivors responsible for their own adherence to prescribed ways of governing their interior lives, while at the same time leaving medical authority intact, since psychologists and psychiatrists have become experts in recovery and resilience. this raises serious questions about the social justice implications of these ostensibly humane approaches to mental health. approaching mental health through a social justice lens can reveal rich connections that highlight some of the most important themes in social justice research: inclusion, power, recognition, political economy, difference, equity and rights. and yet, the richness of this area of research has not been fully explored by social justice studies. this relates, in part, to the questionable notions of progress that surround psychology and psychiatry. with the march of time, we are told, these professions have become humane, liberal, and scientifically advanced. the sporadic attention to mental health in social justice studies also relates to the inadequacy of predominant approaches in the field. to be sure, any number of connections could be drawn between social justice and systems of mental health governance, but a limited number of approaches have been explored. for instance, connections have been drawn between social justice and mental health through the analysis of the psychological consequences of injustices. scholars working in this vein (see shephard, 2002) argue that high rates of, for example, depression in women or schizophrenia in afrocaribbean men, are the result of, or exacerbated by, societal unfairness. mental illness, in this approach, is essentially figured as the result of social injustice. while laudable in attempting to raise social questions to the overarchingly individualistic disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, this approach, however, fails to question psychiatric authority and its diagnoses, including “depression” and “schizophrenia.” the result is that this approach merely supplements a medical or biological model by providing complementary social explanations. it fails, however, to account for how marginalized people (such as the poor, colonial subjects, racialized people, queers and gender variant people, the disabled) tend to get disproportionately diagnosed or pathologized by the psychiatric profession, and how the psychiatric profession has been implicated in processes of colonialism, racism, sexism studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 introduction 3 and heterosexism, as well as in disability and war-making (howell, 2011; metzl, 2010). a second line of inquiry into the connections between mental health and social justice focuses on fair and equal access to health services and welfare provision. here, concerns over the decline of the welfare state and in particular of public health care provision are transposed onto questions of mental health, though again, without adequately questioning the authority of psychiatric practice. as such, questions about how “stigma” prevents the mentally ill from accessing services, or how socio-economic status, race and/or gender can impede or accelerate access to diagnoses and treatments are explored (corrigan, watson, byrne, & davis, 2005; cook & ngwena, 2007; kronenfeld, 2008; who, 2008), but the authority of such diagnoses and treatments, and the psychiatric professions more generally, go largely unquestioned. more recently scholarship located broadly in the field of critical disability studies has opened up new ways of thinking through the connections between social justice and mental health, precisely by challenging the norms that underpin the very value of “mental health” or “mental illness” as useful categories or ways of thinking about people. this scholarship takes inspiration, in particular, from re-invigorated activism that has developed out of anti-institutionalization and the service user/ consumer/survivor/expatient movements (church, 1995; crossley, 2006; everett, 2000), as well as the mad movement (morrison, 2005; fabris, 2011), which is exploring the positive valuing of madness as a form of difference, particularly through activism carried out under the banner of mad pride. this coincides with developments in critical disability studies, where scholarship on the human rights of people living with disabilities is complemented by scholarship illustrating that disability is a matter not of deficit, but of difference in embodiment. it may further take inspiration from studies in the history and sociology of medicine that trace the very contingent rise of psychiatric and psychological authority (hacking, 1995; rose, 1998; young, 1997), and also highlights a broader unease with bio-medicalism. at the same time, methods for peer/survivor research are increasingly being pursued, wherein survivors themselves contribute to knowledge production through user-controlled research (beresford, 2002; faulkner, 2004; faulkner & nicholls, 1999; godfrey, 2004; sweeney, beresford, rose, faulkner, & nettle, 2009). readers might best approach the articles in this special issue by suspending any belief in the authority of psychology and psychiatry, and questioning the bio-medicalism that deems some people normal, and others abnormal. indeed, the articles included here help those interested in social justice to pose questions about sanism, which, for perlin and dorfman, “is inspired by (and reflects) the same kinds of irrational, unconscious, bias-driven stereotypes and prejudices that are exhibited in racist, sexist, homophobic and religiouslyand ethnically-bigoted decision making” (perlin & dorfman, 1993, p. 49). further, we must query how and why it is that we are able to continue to approach the “thinking differently” of thoughts, experiences, behaviours and knowledge that is evoked through madness as inherently a studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 4 alison howell, jijian voronka problem that needs to be eradicated. thus, the articles included here can be approached with an eye to viewing madness not as a deficit, but as a matter of difference, so as to view those who are subject to diagnosis as rightfully able to make choices about their engagements—or disengagements—with systems of mental health care, as well as medical and other authorities. this is not only a political stance: it can open up rich avenues for re-thinking the connections between mental health and social justice, and furthermore, for re-thinking social justice itself. indeed, the articles included here do just that, in particular by examining how the concepts of resilience and recovery are put to work in contemporary systems of mental health governance. why resilience and recovery? the answer: precisely because these concepts appear so benign at first glance. unpacking these notions can reveal the ways in which they are powerful tools in the governance of those deemed mentally ill, and also by extension, all citizens. in the case of recovery, what was once a term that was generated from the survivor movement, the focus was on “recovery in,” whereas its current reiteration has transformed into “recovery from.” to distinguish, the idea of “recovery in” presumes “that recovery must be grounded in a focus on survivor rights, peer support and recovering from the oppressive effects of being a mental patient” (poole, 2011, p.15). however, as mental health systems have yielded to demands that they be more recovery-oriented, the social justice-orientation of “recovery in” has shifted into a model that has become “recovery from.” focusing on problematic neoliberal individualist principles including hope, empowerment, self-determination and responsibility, and the offering that with client-centred intervention and support, some can find cure, others “resume normalcy” while still others can build meaningful lives while living with mental illness (poole, 2011), thus reinstating the expertise and authority of psychiatry and psychology. importantly, “recovery from” has become a quantifiable measurable concept, model, and framework that practitioners are now busily receiving grants for and providing evidencebased research on, and through which they have found a place where they can remain central professionally. as for resilience, the concept parallels the notion of recovery. where recovery posits the ability of subjects to recover from an illness, the notion of resilience ostensibly recognizes the innate capacities of people to “bounce back” in the face of challenges or sources of distress. the capacity to be resilient is not, however, left to chance: psychologists have become authorities in instilling resilience, especially through the increasingly authoritative techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy, or “positive psychology.” these changes are deeply tied to broader austerity measures: getting citizens to be resilient in the face of challenges is not only cheap (in that it diverts patients out of public health care systems, in favour of self-help and positive thinking), it is also about aspiring to create a resilient citizenry, able to cope with uncertainty. this is a technology of looking inward: rather than confronting austerity measures or other matters of social justice through political action, citizens are enjoined to look inward, gather their strengths, studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 introduction 5 and be resilient. recovery and resilience, then, are notions deeply embedded with both the economic and the social imperatives of contemporary neoliberalism. the articles included in this special issue engage these themes across a number of national settings, institutional spaces, and empirical sites, from universities to mental health commissions, to national policy in an international context. they focus, especially, on canada, ireland and the united kingdom, where recent and significant changes in mental health governance have relied heavily on the notions of recovery and resilience, often to questionable effect. they deal, as we have said, with some of the most central themes in social justice studies. we have highlighted the question of difference above, but the question of inclusion also bears heavily on the discussion of mental health and social justice. in particular, many of the articles in the issue tackle the exclusion of users of psychiatric services and those who identify as mad from decision making, and the ways in which peers and service users can and should be meaningfully included in mental health provision, policy, and in the conduct of research. the articles also explore the pitfalls of inclusion, as recovery and resilience models within mental health systems now depend on inclusion as a best practice to prove that they are “doing the recovery model right,” raising questions about what happens, both to service users and systems of power, in the process. just as scholars in other fields (chaun ku, 2003; minh-ha, 1989; spivak, 1999) have inquired about the appeal, process and result of the inclusion of native informants (spivak, 1997), so too must we think through what limits and to what effect the conditions of mental health service user participation is constituted. as one of us has previously noted, the harnessing of the mad informant (voronka, 2010) into mental health institutions has continuously failed to decentre the hegemony of biomedicalism. this raises question about meaningful participation, the management of diversity, what interests are being served by such inclusion, and whether playing the mad informant secures notions of individuals as mentally ill for medical professionals. evoking such questions, as several of the following articles do, about practices of giving voice, inclusion, and storytelling, foregrounds the dangers involved in participation and inclusion, especially given that those who have had contact with the mental health system are often still denied basic human rights. in putting together this special issue, then, we worked to include authors who identify as mad, as service users, as allies, and as activists in the field of mental health reform, and to privilege research that meaningfully involves such groups, or that tackles the broader discursive and policy frameworks within which notions of recovery and resilience circulate and gain power. in their article on “uncovering recovery” david harper and ewen speed trace the increasing dominance of the recovery and resilience models across the psychiatric survivor movement, the third sector, and especially, mental health policy in the uk. they focus on how the recovery and resilience models of mental health individualize social problems, how they remain embedded in a notion of difference as deficit, obscuring structural causes of distress studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 6 alison howell, jijian voronka in the process. they thus raise significant questions about the social justice implications of the rise of the resilience and recovery models in mental health policy in the uk and beyond. marina morrow and julia weisser, in their article “towards a social justice framework of mental health recovery,” provide an analysis that foregrounds an understanding of power in the mental health care system, highlighting interlocking forms of oppression through an intersectional analysis. based on a research project they conducted in vancouver, canada, which included both researchers and participants with lived experience of mental health service use, they raise pressing questions about the professional and bio-medical dominance over the meaning of recovery, to the exclusion of questions of social justice in the mental health field, such as the erosion of social welfare supports. by focusing on how user involvement in mental health service provision in ireland is unfolding, liz brosnan’s article on “power and participation” highlights the power relations inherent in attempts to include mental health service users. by drawing attention to the invisible aspects of power in operation in the recovery model, brosnan draws attention to the ways in which social inequalities and injustices experienced by service-users are often overlooked in mental health service provision and policy. katie aubrecht’s paper draws attention to the ways in which resilience discourses are harnessed in a particular institution: the university, and the ways in which resilience programming is strategically deployed so as to enjoin students to think positively about their experiences of university life and thus avert any experience of distress or disability. the aim of producing a healthy and “well” student body, however, fails to address inequalities amongst students, nor how such inequalities might be important in addressing student distress. finally, the special issue concludes with an article written by a number of activists and advocates in the field of mental health reform and psychiatric survivor/mad pride activism who are working together as the recovering our stories collective. it details an event which they organized in toronto, canada that sought to highlight some of the social justice issues involved in sharing personal stories of recovery with and for mental health professionals. it explores the ways in which the once transgressive act of sharing survivor narratives in order to “talk back to psychiatry” has now become a solicited commodity by mental health organizations in order to further their own stakeholder status as progressive, recovery-oriented service providers. as a collection, the articles help us think through some of the pressing political questions about social justice that have arisen with the adoption of the mantras of resilience and recovery in mental health governance. references chaun ku, j. s. (2003). producing the native informant: third world immigrant women’s activism and self-making practices in the immigrant services sector (unpublished doctoral dissertation). toronto: unpublished oise/university of toronto. church, k. (1995). forbidden narratives: critical autobiography as social science. amsterdam, overseas publishers association. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 introduction 7 cook, r.j., & ngwena, c.g. (eds.) (2007). health and human rights. aldershot, england: ashgate. corrigan, p.w., watson, a.c., byrne, p., & davis, k.e. (2005). mental illness stigma: problem of public health or social justice. social work, 50(4), 363-368. crossley, n. (2006). contesting psychiatry: social movements in mental health. new york: routledge. everett, b. (2000). a fragile revolution: consumers and psychiatric survivors confront the power of the mental health system. waterloo, on: wilfred laurier press. fabris, e (2011). tranquil prisons: chemical incarceration under community treatment orders. toronto: university of toronto press. goffman, e. (1961). asylums: essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. new york: doubleday anchor. hacking, i. (1995). rewriting the soul: multiple personality and the sciences of memory. princeton: princeton university press. howell, a. (2011). madness in international relations: psychology, security and the global governance of mental health. london: routledge. metzl, j. (2010). the protest psychosis: how schizophrenia became a black disease. boston. ma: beacon press. minh-ha, t.t. (1989). woman, native, other: writing post-coloniality and feminism. bloomington and indianapolis, in: indiana university press. poole, j. (2011). behind the rhetoric: mental health recovery in ontario. halifax & winnipeg: fernwood. perlin, m.l., & dorfman, d.a., (1993). sanism, social science, and the development of mental disability law jurisprudence. behavioral sciences and the law, vol. 11, 47-66. morrison, l.j. (2005). talking back to psychiatry: the psychiatric consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement. new york, ny: routledge. rose, n. (1998). inventing ourselves: psychology, power, and personhood. cambridge: cambridge university press. spivak, g. c. (1997). diasporas old and new. in a. kumar (ed.), class issues: pedagogy, cultural studies, and the public sphere. new york, ny: new york university press: 87-116. spivak, g. c. (1999). a critique of postcolonial reason: towards a history of the vanishing present. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. shephard, b. (2000). a war on nerves. london: jonathan cape. sweeney, a., beresford, p., rose, d., faulkner, a., & nettle, m. (2009). this is survivor research. hay-on-wye: pccs. voronka, j. (june 2010). consuming consumer narratives: a struggle over how to eat and how to be eaten. opening plenary presented at critical inquiries. centre for the study of gender, social inequities, and mental health, simon fraser university, vancouver. world health organization (2008). mental health gap action programme: scaling up care for mental, neurological, and substance use disorders. geneva: who press. young, a. (1997). the harmony of illusions: inventing post-traumatic stress disorder. princeton, nj: princeton university press. correspondence address: giorgio baruchello, faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of akureyri, solborg v/nordurslod, is-600 akureyri, iceland. tel.: +354 460 8664, email: giorgio@unak.is issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 175-179, 2013 comment on rights and value: the committee on economic, social and cultural rights addresses the environment giorgio baruchello university of akureyri, iceland rachael lorna johnstone university of akureyri, iceland in our 2011 analysis of the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (icescr) and the work of the committee (escr committee) established to monitor states’ compliance under the same, we commented that: the icescr does not address environmental concerns for their own sake. for that reason, the escr committee cannot make broad statements of law or policy on environmental issues but can only address the environment from a strict anthropocentric perspective. in other words, under the icescr, the environment has no intrinsic value, but is only valuable to the extent that it maintains or improves humans’ abilities to enjoy their economic, social, and cultural rights. as a result, the committee has no self-standing general comment on the environment or the need for the development required to fulfil economic, social, and cultural rights to be “sustainable.” (baruchello & johnstone, 2011, p. 110) the escr committee has not entirely neglected the environment, as we demonstrated with reference to a number of general comments on housing, health, water, food and education (p. 112), but had not at the time of publication made any statement dedicated to the environment on which humans rely to satisfy their economic, social and cultural rights and the relationship between human rights and environmental concerns. this changed in 2012 when the committee took the opportunity of the rio +20 summit to issue the “statement in the context of the rio+20 conference on ‘the green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication’” (escr committee, 2012). this statement was part of a loose studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 176 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone package of human rights contributions to rio emerging from the office of the high commission on human rights (ohchr, 2012). the statement is short (just two and a half pages) in contrast to the much lengthier general comments that the committee is used to producing. it is therefore short on detail and this may have been a deliberate strategy to make it more appealing to busy rio delegates. the escr committee demonstrates a genuine concern for the environment and recognizes that the realization of economic, social and cultural rights is dependent upon a healthy environment: one that can provide the necessities of life. without adequate life support systems, the human rights upheld by the icescr and, a fortiori, by the international community as represented by the united nations (un), cannot be plausibly attained on a universal scale. by demonstrating such a concern, the escr committee implicitly acknowledges further the foundations of the icescr in the life-ground, hence being a token of civil commons, as we discussed in our original 2011 contribution to this journal (pp.103-9). the escr committee’s statement is reminiscent of the earlier environmental declarations of states at stockholm (1972) and rio (1992) by refusing to compromise human development. the escr committee cites “sustainable development” eleven times in only two and a half pages of text, including in the title, and sustainable development is indeed the key to its approach. this term came into common use with the rio declaration, of which the first principle is: “human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. they are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.” (rio declaration, 1992) a sustainable development approach views environmental protection as integral to, rather than in competition with, development. the rio declaration considers the right to development as the key to both human and environmental well-being. this perspective emerges from the negotiations twenty years prior, at stockholm, during which states had agreed that in developing countries, environmental degradation was in most cases a result of underdevelopment and saw economic development as the key to better environmental conditions (stockholm declaration, 1972). with this in mind, the stockholm declaration called on developed states to increase financial and technical assistance to developed countries (principle 9). the escr committee encourages the states at rio 2012 to integrate a human rights perspective more explicitly into environmental protection and into the final declaration in particular, with increased emphasis on the relationship between the green economy and sustainable development. human rights and development are not interchangeable; each can lead to the other, but does not necessarily do so. the same considerations apply to sustainable development. sustainable development, if poorly conceived, can lead to a diminution of human rights, including economic, social and cultural ones. far from being a purely academic hypothesis, this diminution has been frequently denounced by rights-holding indigenous populations (e.g. carling, 2012) vis-à-vis the world bank’s self-professed “sustainable development” studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 comment on rig hts and value 177 and “green growth” strategies (the world bank group, 2011-2) which are currently being reviewed for this very reason (jim, 2012). noting first of all that “many provisions” of the icescr “link with environment and sustainable development,” the escr committee’s statement reminds the states parties of their general comments and other interchanges with states parties through the treaty monitoring process (para 5. the statement then points to the most relevant provisions of the icescr and goes beyond the bare text to remind states of circumstances that hinder both sustainable development and human rights fulfilment. these include: a reminder of the provision of article 2(1) that encourages international cooperation to ensure economic, social and cultural rights as well as a call for sustainable development. with this in mind, and repeating many exchanges with states parties through the periodic reporting and monitoring process, the escr committee recommends that states (though not solely developed states) devote 0.7% of gdp to international development assistance, in conjunction with a human rights approach to development. the position of women is highlighted, both in terms of the positive contributions that they can bring to conservation, use and management of resources as well as their potential vulnerability when the environment becomes degraded. states are reminded of their treaty obligations to provide a healthy working environment. the right to food receives a little more detailed attention, recognizing the obligation to ensure that traditional food sources are not unduly compromised by environmental damage but also to ensure that “green technologies” are not introduced blindly without assessment of adverse impacts on access to food and water. the right to health is addressed and the escr committee underlines the dependency of human health on a healthy environment, pointing to rights to safe water and sanitation and the dangers posed by waste disposal. the right to the highest attainable standard of health is also recognised in light of the opportunities offered by protecting biodiversity for developing pharmaceuticals, but the escr committee reminds states that any exploitation must protect the cultural rights (intellectual property in western-speak) of indigenous and other local communities. indigenous and forest dwellers are further considered in light of their inherent rights to the land which they have traditionally used, the need for prior and informed consent to any other economic activities on these lands (such as logging), and the close relationship between these peoples and the habitats in which they live. the destruction of the habitat threatens the very existence of whole communities. more generally, the escr committee reminds states of the right to development and their responsibility to ensure that development within a state is equitably enjoyed: that “development efforts meet the beneficiaries of development” (para. 6h). states are advised of their responsibility vis á vis private actors (in this case, the corporate sector) to exercise due diligence in regulating and monitoring non-state conduct to ensure that the rights of individuals are not compromised. (this consideration is also highlighted by the high commissioner for human rights, 2012a). environmental studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 178 giorgio baruchello & rachael lorna johnstone impact assessments have long been recognized as an essential element in environmental protection, but the escr committee also urges states to undertake “human rights assessments” of their policies and gives the pertinent example of protecting communities from forced displacement based on ostensible environmental considerations (escr committee 2012, para. 7; and see also high commissioner for human rights, 2012a). the statement concludes with a summary of four key principles that should be integrated into the rio +20 outcome document: namely, to reaffirm the rio declaration 1992; to reaffirm the human right to development; to link the green economy closely to sustainable development; and to mainstream human rights, especially the rights recognised and endorsed by states parties to the icescr. the ecsr committee’s statement is cautiously worded, but is summed up in more direct and dramatic fashion by the high commissioner: human rights matter to this debate [at rio 2102]. the only way to ensure that the green economy is not a green-washed economy is to insist on a human-rights based approach, putting people and their rights, rather than government power or corporate profit at the centre. in this heavy politicized discussion, human rights are not a regional bargaining chip, but rather a global imperative (p. 4 19, june a). . . . the difference between a green economy and a green-washed economy is a human-rights based approach (high commissioner for human rights, 2012b, p. 2). the high commissioner makes explicit that which can only be read between the lines of the escr committee’s statement: (a) that ostensibly green measures may inadvertently impact negatively on human rights, but also (b) that, at worst, green measures might be used as a smokescreen to deprive individuals and groups of their basic human rights by, for example, conversion of agricultural land to produce fuel and diversion of rivers from providing basic water supplies and fish to providing energy for corporate profit. significantly, the escr committee recognizes the symbiotic relationship between some groups living traditionally and the environment in which they live, referring twice to indigenous peoples and the dangers they face from unsustainable destruction of their homes and theft of their traditional knowledge. whenever alleged development strategies, albeit sustainable or green in name, violate human rights, they fail a basic axiological test: they are no longer universal, for they benefit a group while damaging another. in this respect, they do not count as civil commons as defined and discussed in our previous contribution (baruchello & johnstone, 2011, pp. 97-8). moreover, another lesson can be inferred from the fate of the indigenous peoples whose human rights may have been sacrificed to develop, perhaps at times even “sustainably” develop, the nations in which they happen to reside. the lesson is that growth, even of the green kind, can be pursued so that some may benefit at the expense of others. the appropriation of civil commons for class or elite benefit, which we addressed in our previous contribution via reference to john mcmurtry’s work (p. 98), does studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 comment on rig hts and value 179 not need to be confined to the realm of interactions between indigenous and non-indigenous groups. as planet-wide as well as local life support systems shrink in both present and future availability (un, 2002-12), while income inequality grows between and within countries (un development programme, 2010-2011), the fundamental human needs listed in mcmurtry’s well-being index (baruchello & johnstone, 2011, p. 105) and addressed by several articles in the icescr (ibid, pp.106-8) can be attained by some, but not by all, human beings. depending on the needs at issue, this partial satisfaction translates into life for some, death for others. such an outcome may please social darwinists and devotees of nietzsche’s superman, but human rights legislation is grounded neither in herbert spencer’s work nor in the philosophy of the author of also sprach zarathustra: ein buch für alle und keinen. human rights, most certainly economic, social and cultural ones, are not only a matter of securing a better life for all human beings (e.g. labour standards, housing, access to higher education), but also a matter of securing life as such, that is, as opposed to death. references baruchello, g. & johnstone, r. l. (2011). rights and value: construing the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights as civil commons. studies in social justice, 5 (1), 91-126. carling, j. (2012, june 24). indigenous peoples’ letter to the incoming president of the world bank. retrieved from http://www.aippnet.org/home/statement/908-indigenous-peoples-letterto-the-incoming-president-of-the-world-bank. escr committee. (2012, may 18). statement in the context of the rio+20 conference on “the green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication” [statement adopted by the committee on economic, social and cultural rights at its 48th session, 30 april to 18 may 2012, e/c.12/2012/1] retrieved from http://www2.ohchr.org/ english/bodies/cescr/statements.htm. high commissioner for human rights. (2012a, june 19). statement of high commissioner for human rights navi pillay at the ohchr-unep joint side event on human rights in sustainable development—human rights at the heart of sustainable development: honouring principle 1. retrieved from http://www.ohchr.org/en/newsevents/pages/ displaynews.aspx?newsid=12255&langid=e. high commissioner for human rights. (2012b, june 19). remarks of high commissioner for human rights navi pillay at rio+social. retrieved from http://www.ohchr.org/en/ newsevents/pages/displaynews.aspx?newsid=12254&langid=e. jim, y. k. (2012, 6 august). reply to the indigenous peoples’ letter to the incoming president of the world bank. retrieved from https://docs.google.com/file/d/0b2vnefme6p1auunkui1xu3bfule/ edit?pli=1. ohchr. (2012, 27 september). office of the high commissioner for human rights, rio+20 united nations conference on sustainable development. retrieved from http://www.ohchr. org/en/newsevents/rio20/pages/statementspeeches.aspx. rio declaration. (1992) on environment and development 31 international legal materials 876. stockholm declaration. (1972) on the human environment 11 international legal materials 1416. the world bank group. (2011-2). sustainable development [official website]. retrieved from web.worldbank.org http://go.worldbank.org/57gvyjeen0. united nations. (2002-10). encyclopedia of life support systems. paris and oxford: eolss publishers. retrieved from eolss.org http://www.eolss.net. united nations development programme. (2010-2011). human development reports. retrieved from hdr.undp.org http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/. introduction studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 79 the sport nexus and gender injustice ann travers, simon fraser university abstract: male-dominated and sex segregated elite professional and amateur sport 1 in north america constitutes a "sport nexus" (burstyn, 1999; heywood & dworkin, 2003) that combines economic and cultural influence to reinforce and perpetuate gender injustice. the sport nexus is an androcentric sex-segregated commercially powerful set of institutions that is highly visible and at the same time almost completely taken for granted to the extent that its anti-democratic impetus goes virtually unnoticed. the sport nexus’s hegemonic role in defining sporting norms (coakley & donnelly, 2004) means that its role in shaping lower level amateur and recreational sporting institutions and cultures is highly significant. fraser (2007) defines gender justice, and hence democracy, in terms of "participatory parity," that is, material and cultural equality for women. the sport nexus itself is characterized by highly gendered occupational segregation (coventry, 2004). it further contributes to gender injustice, homophobia and transphobia by promoting the ideology of the two sex system (fausto-sterling, 2000) and gendering citizenship as fundamentally male (burstyn, 1999). feminist strategies for sport reformation attempt to reduce or eradicate the role of the sport nexus in legitimating and perpetuating gender injustice. in this article i consider the potential of these strategies and conclude with a set of recommendations for transforming organized sport at both elite and recreational levels. fraser (2007, 2000, 1997, 1993, 1987) has a long history of writing within the tradition of feminist political science/feminist theorizing on democracy and the public sphere (see also pateman & mills, 2007; pateman, 1989; paxton & hughes, 2007; barnes, newman, & sullivan 2007; conway, 2004; young, 2000; benhabib, 2004, 2002, 1996). such feminist criticism of liberal-democratic theories and their supposed representation in western democracies is a wellestablished intellectual tradition. this work reveals that granting women de facto citizenship has not alleviated the problems resulting from the androcentric biases of liberal democratic theory and western democracy: the very role of citizen has been conceptualized and actualized as a male role (pateman & mills, 2007; pateman, 1989; young, 2000). in her most recent work, fraser contributes the concept of “participatory parity” as a measure of gender justice (2007). she contends that gender justice is a condition of democracy defined by cultural equality (recognition) and material equality (redistribution) (2007, p.25). gender injustice results when women are denied participatory parity by being culturally devalued and economically marginalized. for a society to be considered genuinely democratic, therefore, fraser argues that women need to be culturally and economically included. as fraser (2008, p.1) explains in a recent interview, gender justice, and hence democracy, requires 1 at the world and olympic level studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 80 social arrangements that permit all members to participate in social interaction on a par with one another. so that means they must be able to participate as peers in all the major forms of social interaction: whether it's politics, whether it's the labour market, whether it's family life and so on. and parity of participation is quite demanding. it is not enough that there be simply the absence of legal discrimination; it means that you have all the effective conditions for really being able to participate. the realm of sport in general and that constituted by the sport nexus, in particular, clearly qualifies as a “major form of social interaction.” as such, conditions of participatory parity that are undermined in or by the sport nexus are incompatible with democracy. the power of participatory parity as a measure of gender justice depends on the very definition of gender justice itself. if gender justice is defined in accordance with a narrow focus on women as an uncomplicated category, many of the failings of second wave feminism – to address the interlocking social forces of gender, race, class and sexuality (lemert, 1999) – are likely to be replicated. furthermore, without queer feminism's anti-essential reading of sex, gender and sexuality (fausto-sterling, 2000; burke, 1996; butler, 2004, 1990; haraway, 1997, 1991), much of the role of the sport nexus in contributing to gender injustice will remain invisible. the ideology of the two sex system itself is centrally implicated in gender hierarchy and supports sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. the sport nexus normalizes and reinforces the ideology of the two sex system to the detriment of women, gays and lesbians and the non-normatively gendered (gender queer and transgender persons). a queer (anti-essential) approach to the concept of participatory parity and gender justice reveals the role of the sport nexus elite male dominated sex segregated professional and amateur sport in normalizing, legitimating and perpetuating the cultural and material marginalization of women and the non-normatively gendered. common sense views of sport including its portrayal by mainstream media tend to insulate the sport nexus from critical examination, whether by trivializing it as merely entertainment, recreation or as a hobby for spectators or valorizing it as a grand expression of so-called national or universal values. in keeping with the critical tradition of sport sociology, i draw attention to the role of the sport nexus in promoting and perpetuating gender injustice through the cultural and economic marginalization of women and the non-normatively gendered. much of the critical work on gender and sport that documents its role in reinforcing orthodox masculinity and perpetuating sexism, however, fails to challenge the sex segregated structure of sport itself. this structure is coercive and in itself represents gender injustice (mcdonagh & pappano, 2008). the role of the sport nexus in contributing to gender injustice includes the institution‟s powerful role in normalizing and legitimating the ideology of the two sex system (faustosterling, 2000). this ideology plays a significant cultural and economic role in the attendant devaluation of women, gays and lesbians, and transgender people. it is no accident that faustosterling‟s sexing the body (2000) begins with a devastating critique of gender verification (sex) testing at the highest levels of sport to establish the failure of science to demarcate boundaries between male and female bodies. the measuring of bodily capacity and limitations that the sport nexus is purportedly organized around underscores its significant cultural role in the hierarchical demarcation of both sex and race boundaries (douglas & jamieson, 2006). that these socially studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 81 generated boundaries are culturally understood as natural and unmediated by social forces makes them all the more unassailable. the sport nexus and citizenship the sport nexus plays a significant role in gendering citizenship as male (and white and heterosexual). in her analysis of sport in western society as a “sacred rite,” canadian scholar varda burstyn (1999) documents the ways in which sport functions as a “men‟s club” that is used to consolidate male domination. her specific claim is that sport solidifies masculine privilege and the related masculine subtext of citizenship and national identity. mcdonagh and pappano (2008) observe that american women's second-class citizenship in the world of sport translates into and mirrors women's second class citizenship in the nation itself. in contrast to such racially inadequate accounts of masculine privilege, however, there is evidence to suggest that african-american and african-canadian male participation in the sport nexus may actually reinforce racist assumptions about black physicality and unintelligence thereby, somewhat ironically, perpetuating racism through inclusion (hoberman, 1997; abdel-shehid, 2005). my focus in this article is on the antidemocratic role of the sport nexus in perpetuating gender injustice (the cultural and material devaluation of women and gender transgressors), through its role in celebrating hegemonic masculinity and normalizing the two sex system, thereby institutionalizing and reinforcing gender inequality, homophobia and transphobia. the sport nexus genders citizenship as male by defining and reinforcing hegemonic masculinity and justifying (white, heterosexual) male supremacy (connell, 1987; anderson, 2005). in this role it complements and increasingly supplants the criteria of military service as a masculine qualifier for full citizenship (mosse, 1988). in one of her earlier contributions, fraser (1993) outlines the historical process whereby the role of citizen was conceptualized and actualized as a male role since it was ultimately dependent on an individual‟s ability to participate in political debate and, crucially, to defend his country in time of war. these qualities have been historically constructed as masculine rather than feminine (fraser, 1987). while i grant the claim that fraser and others make (solaro, 2006; feinman, 2000; young, 2000) concerning the historical connection between masculinity, military service and citizenship, i contend that the role of the soldier and the military in embodying and celebrating orthodox masculinity in the west has declined considerably since the vietnam war. this can be attributed to the public‟s awareness of the extent to which military forces are disproportionately made up of marginal rather than privileged members of the male population in terms of class and race (jeffreys, 2007) and the public‟s increasing skepticism about the justness of wars starting with vietnam, then the falklands, through to the two u.s. led campaigns against iraq and canada‟s military involvement in afghanistan (solaro, 2006). the highly publicized and celebrated battles that men wage on the football field, the baseball diamond, on the basketball court and on the ice provide powerful pedigrees for male leadership in both sporting and non-sporting arenas. and not incidentally, the more closely a sport is tied to national identity, the greater the emphases are on its inherent masculinity and the need to erect barriers to female participation (ring, 2008). for example, the sport of hockey is proclaimed by many to be "canada's game." the canadian men‟s hockey team victory over the soviet union in 1972 is understood as a defining moment in canada's nationhood; former star hockey player studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 82 wayne gretzky's celebrity status in canada is much higher than that of any of the nation's political leaders (whitson & gruneau, 2006). and in the united states where the sport of baseball is heralded as the "national pastime," legal challenges were necessary to enable girls to participate in little league. even so, little league responded to the legal requirement to gender integrate by establishing a softball division and streaming girls into it (ring, 2008; mcdonagh & pappano, 2008). at the college level, efforts to resist gender equity requirements resulting from the passage of civil rights legislation (title ix) culminated in the successful but dubious achievement of a "contact sport" designation and hence exemption for baseball (ardell, 2005). with the exception of individual „cheaters‟ who are caught using illegal performance enhancing substances, the heroic status of the successful male athlete and the appropriateness of the sport nexus for conferring such noble status are beyond mainstream reproach (beamish & ritchie, 2003). the image of the white male or (good) black male athlete tiger woods as opposed to michael vick (banet-weiser, 2004; zirin, 2007) as heroic warrior in the sport nexus (burstyn, 1999) resonates historically, nationally (miller, lawrence, mckay & rowe, 2001) and symbolically to produce a gendered (and raced) cultural understanding of citizenship that denies women equal recognition. this has both cultural and economic consequences. the sport nexus and the gender binary while sport in north america (and much of the world) is organized around binary notions of biological difference between males and females (kirby & huebner, 2002), queer feminist science and theory (butler, 2004, 1990; fausto-sterling, 2000, 1992; haraway, 1997, 1991) reveals the extent to which the taken-for-granted gender binary is as much constituted by assumptions about its existence as by the existence of distinctive and natural differences between only two sexes (butler, 2004; fausto-sterling, 2000, 1992). insights from postmodernism and queer feminist science have been incorporated into the literature on gender and sport to contribute powerful insights regarding the role of sport in normalizing and reinforcing the ideology of the gender binary and male supremacy (pronger, 1990; kane, 1995; rothblatt, 1995; theberge, 2000). the revelation that this two sex system is ideological rather than natural (fausto-sterling, 2000) underscores the role of sport in promulgating a vision of a stark biological divide between male and female bodies that is intricately bound up with gender injustice for women and gender transgressors throughout society. as kane notes, the establishment of gender difference is a “product of patriarchal social construction” (1995, p. 191). „male‟ and „female‟ bodies are produced, in corporeal terms, in social contexts that assume and privilege male athletic competence at the expense of female physical development (young, 1998; pronger, 1990). the institutionalization of the two sex system as natural through the maledominated, sex segregated sport nexus contributes to the cultural and economic marginalization of women and gender transgressors in the world of sport itself and beyond. the sport nexus not only demarcates hierarchical boundaries between men and women that resonate throughout society but plays a role in normalizing compulsory heterosexuality and gender conformity. this has powerful consequences for gays and lesbians, genderqueer and transgender people. because of their equation with effeminacy, openly gay male athletes, or suspected gay male athletes, have been overtly discriminated against, harassed, and occasionally victimized by homophobic violence. no gay male participant in the elite levels of north studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 83 american team sport has come out of the closet prior to retirement (anderson, 2005); women athletes – regardless of their sexuality or personal tastes, for that matter are routinely required to conform to orthodox heterosexual feminine norms in response to homophobia. for women, homophobia is a tool of sexism in restricting women‟s access to athletic development and participation in sport. homophobia equates female athletic accomplishment with lesbianism. thus, for men, the higher one‟s achievements in the sporting realm, the less suspicion there exists regarding homosexuality. in contrast, the more success a woman achieves in sport -with some differences depending on the sport the more suspect her sexuality becomes (griffin, 1998). the sport nexus is no more a welcoming place for gender deviants than it is for gays and lesbians. despite recent policy changes at the highest levels of organized sport to include postoperative transsexuals, the very investment of this policy in the two sex system closes doors. in 2003, the international olympic committee (ioc) adopted a policy to allow transsexual athletes to compete in their legal gender category provided they have been fully (surgically and hormonally) transitioned for two years prior to competing (bbc sport, november 14, 2003). this policy serves to reinforce binary gender and preserve the assumption of male athletic superiority. several scholars (teetzel, 2006; sykes, 2006; cavanagh & sykes, 2006) have observed that institutional anxiety about transsexual participation in sport is for the most part limited to concerns about male to female transsexual athletes rather than female to male transsexual athletes. this anxiety rests on the taken for granted convictions that men and women are fundamentally different and that all males are athletically superior to all females. the predominant assumption of male athletic superiority that characterizes this “unfair advantage discourse” (sykes, 2006) in sporting policy has a powerful hold on western consciousness. in spite of evidence that human variation is inconsistent with a two sex system (fausto-sterling, 2000) and failed attempts by the international olympic committee‟s medical commission to develop a definitive test for female athletes (fausto-sterling, 2000; sykes, 2006), gender deviant athletes must achieve dimorphic physical and hormonal conformity or face exclusion. the sport nexus normalizes, legitimates and reinforces the ideology of the two sex system with marginalizing consequences for girls and women, gays and lesbians and gender transgressors within the world of sport and beyond. the gendered economy of the sport nexus key sports in north american society are characterized by material (economic) gender injustice; but the role of these sports in celebrating masculinity and normalizing assumptions about female inferiority and the underlying ideology of the two sex system have a powerful cultural effect which in turn shapes economic opportunities. sport plays an important role in normalizing gender inequality by emphasizing differences between male and female bodies to celebrate masculine superiority and by disproportionately rewarding male participants through extensive opportunity structures and disproportionate patterns of remuneration (heywood & dworkin, 2003; hall, 2002; theberge, 2000; burstyn, 1999). the fact that the names of professional women‟s sport associations need to be specifically gendered while men‟s remain unmarked (for example, ladies professional golf association vs. professional golf association; women‟s national basketball association vs. national basketball association) is a powerful example of studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 84 the cultural assumption that sport is a male realm. sport is simply assumed to be a male prerogative unless an exception is noted. the combination of its highly masculinist character and its importance in valorizing competition, hierarchy and nationalism (coakley & donnelly, 2004) makes the sport nexus a key player in contributing to gender injustice. a symbiotic relationship exists between elite sport and mainstream sports media to the extent that such sports media needs to be understood as an integral part of the sport nexus. mainstream sport media play an important cultural and economic role in the sport nexus‟s celebration of masculinity through male sports and male athletes and the diminishment of women athletes and women‟s athletics (walton & butryn, 2006; messner, dunbar, hunt, 2000; van sterkenburg & knoppers, 2004). the role of sport media in making men‟s sports economic juggernauts underscores the relationship between economic and cultural social forces, the very dimensions that fraser draws on in her definition of participatory parity. studies of print and television media coverage of sport demonstrate the extreme marginalization of women's sport and women athletes (messner et al., 2000; van sterkenburg & knoppers, 2004). when women's sports and women athletes are covered, they are far more likely to be sexualized than their male counterparts (vincent, 2004). when women make progress in arenas typically identified as exclusively male, sexual representations are used to establish cultural boundaries that reproduce male supremacy (birrell & mcdonald, 2000; robinson, 2002). it is no accident that danica patrick's success in formula one racing was coupled with a semi nude photo shoot in sports illustrated’s hallowed (soft porn) "swimsuit edition" in 2008. this strategy for preserving male supremacy is borne out in a recent study (kane, 2008) on the effect of sexist marketing strategies for women‟s sports. kane found that the use of sexual objectification as a marketing tool, rather than building a greater fan base and greater interest in women‟s sports, actually undermines the female/pro-female (parents of girls, for example) fan base of women‟s sports while failing to generate a male fan base. the economic gender injustice that characterizes key sports is evidenced in occupational segregation and pay inequity (kay, 2003). many of the most lucrative sports are sex segregated and exclusively male at the professional level (hockey, baseball, football). where opportunities for women to play sport professionally do exist, significant pay inequity is the common condition. ladies professional golf association winnings fall considerably below (mens) professional golf association winnings; only recently has the sport of tennis begun the practice of paying men and women equally. the example of pay inequity in the one major north american professional sport that has a women‟s league as well as a men‟s league is powerful. i provide below a comparison of national basketball association (nba) and women‟s national basketball association (wnba) salaries. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 85 table i: nba vs. wnba 2006/2007 nba* wnba** base salary $427,163 $30,000 (rookies) $42,000 (veterans) maximum $18,257,750 $79,400 average $4,500,000 $55,000 notes: * http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/basketball/nba/team.salaries/index.html ** http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/sports/basketball/19wnba.html this, of course, leaves out perks (nba per diem of $106 versus wnba per diem of $60) and sponsorship deals with advertisers (lebron james ranks #1 with a $90 million deal over 7 years). in an article in forbes (www.forbes.com), on july 28, 2004, kurt badenhausen states that the income inequality that exists between men and women isn't just taking place in the boardroom or on the factory floor-it's also taking place on the playing fields of profession-al sports. in the united states women only earn 77 cents for every dollar a man does. in the world of sports the gap is even bigger. the world's 50 best paid athletes is the only forbes list comprised entirely of men. the 50th highest-paid athlete over the past 12 months was basketball's andre miller, who made $15 million. the top-paid female athlete during that time was serena williams, who earned $9.5 million, followed by her sister venus, who made $8.5 million. the top-paid men: tiger woods and michael schumacher, who both banked $80 million. you could put together a list of the 100 highest-paid athletes and still not find a woman on it. in a 2006 update, the top paid male athlete for that year was tiger woods who earned $87 million. the top paid female athlete in 2006 was maria sharapova who pulled in over $20 in sponsorship deals in addition to her prize money from tennis tournaments (difficult to ascertain but probably not more than 3 million). like anna kournikova, sharapova‟s marketability relates largely to her physical appearance rather than to her feats on the court, even though she is far more accomplished than the former. sharapova‟s stereotypical blonde beauty marks her as an appropriate object of male heterosexual desire (crissey & crissey honea, 2006; stead, 2003) – in contrast to the black noncompliance of the williams sisters (douglas, 2005) or the openly lesbian and heavily muscled amelie mauresmo. feminist strategies for reforming the sport nexus feminist strategies for reorganizing sport away from its role in promoting gender injustice fall loosely into four different approaches. in order to increase gender justice in and through sport we should: http://www.forbes.com/ studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 86 1. replace the current institutional structure of sport with non-competitive, non-hierarchical celebrations of physicality (radical feminist); 2. focus on and support elite women athletes as gender troubling figures and hence agents of change (third wave); 3. entirely eliminate sex as an organizational category (postmodern feminist); or 4. eliminate male-only sporting spaces while maintaining sporting spaces for girls and women (liberal feminist; queer). i examine these strategies for their potential to increase participatory parity for women and gender transgressors and conclude with recommendations for reforming professional and amateur sport to achieve greater gender justice. 1. we should: replace the current institutional structure of sport with cooperative, non-hierarchical celebrations of physicality; radical and cultural feminist scholarship shares the belief that "male supremacy and the subjugation of women [is] indeed the root and model oppression in society and that feminism[has] to be the basis for any truly revolutionary change (donovan, 1987). it is up to feminists to model institutions and processes characterized by internal democracy that is, shared decision-making in a nonhierarchical context (heywood & dworkin, 2003). while not all of the authors i invoke here are necessarily inclined to identify as radical or cultural feminists, their critiques of the sport nexus and recommendations for change are highly consistent with this paradigm. these scholars (burstyn, 1999; pronger, 1999; birrell & richter, 1987) indict sport in its current patriarchal capitalist iteration and seek to replace it with cooperative and nonhierarchical celebrations of physicality and play based on feminist principles of cooperation and inclusion. they seek sweeping changes to eliminate sports‟ endemic violence and hierarchical structure and call for new social institutions and practices that include and benefit everyone. such an approach equates the competitive and hierarchical organization of sport with a destructive (orthodox) version of masculinity and advocates for feminist sport reformation away from hierarchy and competition and towards recreation, expression, play and cooperation. critics of the current masculinist, competitive, hierarchical model of sport do not necessarily see the recent increase in women's participation as a step toward gender justice (suggs, 2005). from this perspective, nike‟s recent "just do it" campaign aimed at women consumers is an encouragement to define gender equality as the ability to play with the boys without questioning the rules of the game or its purpose. the rules of the game, however, are linked, at a fundamental level, to gender inequality, homophobia and transphobia. burstyn articulates a cultural feminist critique of sport as a men‟s club that consolidates male power and is thus anti-democratic. she makes a connection between masculine and corporate dominance of sport and advocates the de-masculinizing and de-corporatization of the sport nexus. burstyn condemns “the „sacrificial‟ nature of sport for both sexes” (1999, p. 275) and the brutality sport inflicts upon boys and men and models as appropriate social behaviour. she seeks a societal and institutional shift away from aggressive and competitive structures that harm both sexes and exclude many from participation to cooperative and physical recreation activities that involve and benefit the majority. advocating what i would term a postmodern cultural feminist approach to sport, pronger (1999) views gender as a relationship rather than as an identity assigned to a body. this is studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 87 significant in that he believes that women are as capable as men are of performing orthodox heterosexual masculinity. pronger contends that sport promotes a specific and narrow form of masculinity: one that focuses on territorial expansion (penetration) and resistance to incursion: “the team whose desire produces the most invasive phallus, which is called offensive strategy, and tightest asshole, known as defensive strategy, wins the game” (1999, p. 382). while challenging essentialist notions of sex difference by viewing masculinity as a cultural construction that women can partake in, pronger emphasizes the role of sports in normalizing the subjugation of women through the construction of “a set of binaries that emanate from the traditional homophobic construction of desire: winner/loser, top/bottom, dominant/submissive, phallus/asshole.” these binaries, “have their fundamental logic in the patriarchal construction of masculine/feminine as the proper dispositions of men and women, respectively” (1999, p. 384). in the world of sport as it is currently practiced, pronger observes, there are no “willing bottoms.” he links this kind of performance to gender injustice and advocates for nonmasculinist and anti-homophobic sporting practices for everyone. in tandem with feminist critiques of the sport nexus as fundamentally masculinist, cultural and radical feminist sport scholarship celebrates feminist possibilities for the transformation of sport (birrell & richter, 1987; lenskyj, 2003). key feminist principles of sport include cooperation and shared power and decision-making (an end to hierarchical and competitive relations in sport between players and between coaches and players); and the creation of an environment that emphasizes participation, inclusion, safety and joy over ability and winning. such a cultural and radical feminist overhaul of sport would obliterate the sport nexus and much of amateur sport as we know it. in its place, i surmise that the varied recreational activities for people of all ages and walks of life typical of municipal community center programming would be expanded infinitesimally. 2 prognosis for gender justice condemning and seeking to transform aggressive/combative/hierarchical sporting places and practices as expressions of heterosexual masculinity embraces an essentialist view of nonegalitarianism as fundamentally masculine and therefore deleterious. such a position is reminiscent of the sex wars of the 1980s that saw some feminists defining out of the movement so-called „male-identified‟ women who advocated pro-sex, anti-censorship, s-m-embracing politics (duggan & hunter, 1995). the institutional privileging of certain traits as inherently masculine or feminine even if you believe, as pronger (1999) does, that these traits can be performed by anyone simply rearranges the terrain of gender injustice rather than reducing it. in addition, such an inadequately nuanced analysis of male power fails to address the dynamics of race and class (carrington, 1998) that produce different relationships of privilege and inclusion for women and for men. this oversight reflects an analysis of gender relations as the foundation of all oppression (donovan, 1987); an analysis much-maligned by antiracist, queer and postmodern critiques of second wave feminisms (hines, 2005; heywood & dworkin, 2003). 2 for example, http://vancouver.ca/parks/cc/mtpleasant/index.htm. http://vancouver.ca/parks/cc/mtpleasant/index.htm studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 88 2. we should: focus on and support elite women athletes as gender troubling figures and hence potential agents of change in response to the fracturing of the essentialist identity politics of feminism‟s second wave, particularly by antiracist, postmodern and queer critiques, a tradition of scholarship selfidentified as "third wave" emerged. third wave feminism integrates postmodern, queer and antiracist deconstructions of essential identities and binary based epistemologies. according to hines, “in third wave feminism, multiple female identity positions are recognized and attention is paid to the ways in which women's identities are constructed in relation to difference" (cited in reger, 2005, p. 73). a third wave feminist perspective on sport and gender justice focuses on the role of the sport nexus in constructing women's identities and the potential of elite women athletes to resist and trouble stereotypical gender norms. (heywood & dworkin, 2003). third wave feminists contest radical and cultural feminist arguments that view competition as a „male‟ trait. critical of gender essentialism, they view progressive and competitive physicality in sport as neither fundamentally male nor fundamentally bad. not only should fiercely competitive and highly successful women athletes enjoy feminist legitimacy, they insist, but they should be valued for the powerful sociocultural role they play in the disruption of the gender binary (heywood & dworkin, 2003). drawing on a foucaultian analysis of oppression and activism that emphasizes resistance and refusal (foucault, 1982), third wave feminism celebrates and promotes resistance to gender norms in and through the highly public setting of competitive sport as a mechanism for achieving greater gender justice. according to this perspective, by refusing and resisting rather than accepting and actualizing stereotypical gender norms, gendered power relations are inevitably altered. far from viewing contemporary women athletes as being co-opted by a corporate, antifeminist nexus of domination as burstyn does, or as performing, albeit ably, for pronger, an oppressive masculine script, heywood and dworkin argue for the value and potential of sport as “the stealth feminism of the third wave” (2003, p. 29). stealth feminism celebrates the role of women athletes in actively resisting and refusing the ideology of the two sex system in particular and binary based epistemologies in general. much of the gender troubling potential of powerful women athletes rests on possibilities for media representation. a third wave feminist emphasis on representation directs critical attention to the role of mainstream sport media as part of the sport nexus in perpetuating a male dominated two sex system. in a highly influential article kane (1995) argued that the gender binary paradigm in sport is grounded in biologically deterministic notions of gender polarity and features an emphasis on difference and the dismissal and deliberate invisibility of similarities between male and female athletes. this invisibility is essential for upholding male dominance and is achieved through the symbiotic relationship between mainstream sport and mainstream sport media (kane, 1995, p. 191). kane insists that a more accurate model for sport reporting portrays the gender continuum. a third wave feminist perspective celebrates the gender troubling leakages that are occurring in traditional sport media reporting as a result of women's participation. coverage of women athletes whose performance flies in the face of assumptions of male athletic superiority undermines the ideology of the two sex system by making the gender continuum visible. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 89 prognosis for gender justice what is particularly powerful about this third wave strategy of focusing on and celebrating women athletes as gender troubling figures and hence potential agents of change is that it is already happening if only in a small way with the increasing visibility of powerful women athletes in north american society. we are seeing greater attention to gendered overlaps and performance – one has only to think of the nike ads of the new millennium pitting a sweatsoaked mia hamm against michael jordan on a seemingly level playing field even at the same time as male athletic superiority remains virtually taken for granted. resistance is powerful: attention to gendered overlaps in performance has the potential to undermine assumptions about sex difference that rationalize gender inequality; the joy and empowerment that some girls and women experience and demonstrate in competitive athletics disrupts common sense assumptions about women, about sports, and about men. glimpses of the gender continuum can be found in mainstream media coverage of "crossover athletes" (roberts, 2005, p. 7) elite women athletes who are competing in traditionally male only sporting contexts and the occasional reporting of performance overlap between male and female athletes. while western history is replete with examples of women competing against men in sport, a postwar amnesia regarding this history seems to have taken hold (ring, 2008; hall, 2002). even the explicitly feminist challenge to male dominance in sport and beyond made on the tennis court and in mainstream media by billie jean king in 1973 seems to have disappeared from cultural memory. beginning in the early 1990s, seemingly without this historical precedent, a number of women have competed with and against men in typically male-only sporting arenas. called "crossover athletes" by the new york times, a term that continues to emphasize binary gender, these women include manon rheaume and hayley wickenheiser in hockey, annika sorenstam and michelle wie in the pga, and danica patrick in formula one auto racing. while most sports media coverage reinforces the status of these athletes as interlopers or mere spectacles, the cultural visibility of such women engenders third wave feminist excitement. there are also glimmers of doubt regarding male/female athletic performance gaps. successful male athletes, such as ernie els of the pga, have publicly stated their support for a gender integrated elite professional golf tour (sportsnet canada 3 ), for example. in its october 23, 2007 nba preview issue, sports illustrated features a four page pull-out centerfold under the caption “inch by inch: the all-time, all-size all-stars.” 4 the subtitle asked “who‟s the best at every height? pro, college, men and women all included? is it bird or magic? elgin or oscar? shaq or wilt? calvin murphy or sue bird?” this colourful centerfold displays a tallest to the smallest lineup of players who are purportedly the best ever by height. it begins at 7‟7” with manute bol and ends at 5‟3” with mugsy bogues. both these players are men but the 5‟8” slot is awarded to sue meyers, the 5‟6” to dawn staley and 5‟4” to suzie mcconnell. in addition to the three women who are identified as the best ever at their heights, 11 of the 72 runners up, listed under the winner of each height category, are women – starting at 6‟4” and ending at 5‟3”. in this continuum-based showcase of the best north american basketball players of all time by height, out of 101 players listed, 14 are women. this is precisely the kind of sport journalism that third wave feminists are calling for sport journalism that 3 see http:www.sportsnet.ca 4 sport illustrated. october, 23, 2007 studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 90 renders the gender continuum visible! given the discrimination that girls and women experience in sport, it is rather incredible that more than 1 out of 10 of the best basketball players are women. we can only imagine what this centerfold might look like if potential female professional basketball players were sought out and nurtured to the same extent that male players are! the overlap between elite men and women players could only increase! i share the third wave feminist sense of excitement and possibility in response to the increased visibility of powerful women athletes and i feel vindicated by evidence that some women dominate not just other women but the entire field as well. but while i grant the power of sports media coverage of gendered overlaps and performance, the gender troubling figure of the elite woman athlete championed by sport media continues to have a white and heterosexual subtext. a few individual women superstar athletes have emerged – notably soccer player mia hamm, thanks in large part to nike‟s use of her image in an effort to increase its consumer base among women. mia is a gender troubling figure in terms of stereotypes of feminine frailty but her cooptation has played a role in the selling of a new “beauty myth” (wolf, 1992) for women that combines heterosexual femininity and a “six pack.” she is white and heterosexual; a good girl. the absence of the black and powerful tennis superstar williams sisters often subjected to censure from sport media for uncorroborated poor sportsmanship (douglas, 2005) or openly lesbian amelie mauresmo in sport marketing speaks to the kind of gender troubling that will be tolerated. 3. we should: entirely eliminate sex as an organizational category in sport queer postmodern feminism‟s deconstruction of the two sex system as ideological rather than natural (fausto-sterling, 2000, 1992; haraway, 1997, 1991; butler, 2004) supports an argument for the elimination of sex segregated sport. this argument can be summed up as follows: first, differences in men‟s and women‟s athletic performances can be attributed to social, political, economic, and psychological discrimination rather than biological factors. given the cultural context within which athletes develop and perform, there is no uncontaminated data to support essential performance related differences between men and women (pronger, 1990). second, sport is implicated in translating the ideology of the two sex system into the material reality of bodies that conform to sexist expectations (young, 1998). as such sport helps to mask the very gender diversity it plays such an important role in containing (fausto-sterling, 2000). third, the very separation of girls from boys and women from men constitutes gender injustice. the legal reforms that require equal facilities and equal investment in sport and recreation opportunities and facilities for girls and women reinforce rather than diminish gender injustice. rothblatt (1995) argues that just as racial segregation in sport has been abolished on the basis of the revelation that race is not meaningful as a biological category, so too should sex segregation. drawing on the landmark court case brown versus board of education 1954 to make the case that sex segregation is no more acceptable than racial segregation, rothblatt states that "separate is never equal" (1995, p. 73). for these reasons, therefore, all levels of sport should be radically restructured to eliminate sex identity as a basis for organizing, separating or grouping individuals. for similar reasons, sex should be eliminated as an identifying category in government documents, in legal requirements for marriage, and as a basis for separate public facilities such as washrooms. in sport, this strategy would see the elimination of sex categories in all levels of competition. no sporting organizations would be closed to women and indeed all studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 91 sporting organizations would be sex integrated including those for girls and women. sex identity would cease to be relevant as an organizing category or in terms of eligibility requirements. prognosis for gender justice such an across-the-board elimination of sex as a category for structuring sport might benefit a small minority of athletes currently categorized as girls and women possessed of an extreme degree of athletic ability, including the mental toughness required to play with and against men, many of whom can be expected to resist their inclusion. for a few of north america's most elite women athletes who are denied equal material opportunities and cultural rewards, such a restructuring could be unprecedentedly beneficial. consider canadian women's hockey superstar hayley wickenheiser , for example, or teenage golf phenom, michelle wie. hayley wickenheiser is considered to be the best female hockey player in the world and her play in multiple olympic games has been dominant. while there is a long tradition of women playing hockey in north america (theberge, 2000), opportunities have been scant in comparison to those available to boys and men. there is no professional women‟s hockey league to parallel the men‟s minor league system not to mention the national hockey league and indeed no expectation that any will develop in the near future; only the establishment of women‟s ice hockey as a medal sport in the 1998 olympics has created more (non-professional) opportunities for women. where separate leagues for girls do not exist in canada and the united states, girls have used the courts to gain the right to play on boys‟ teams (theberge, 2000). regardless of the increasing participation of women, hockey continues to be a male preserve (adams in whitson & gruneau, 2006). the identity of hockey as a sport is explicitly linked to canadian masculinity and the nhl in particular is an “arena of masculinity” (pronger, 1990). wickenheiser broke ground and held her own among men as the first female player other than a goaltender to play in a men's professional hockey league when she played on a swedish team for parts of two seasons in 2003 and 2004. she has just signed a contract to play for a third tier swedish men's hockey team (spencer, 2008, p. s5). michelle wie provides another powerful example. in addition to her ability to drive a golf ball more than 300 yards on par with many male golfers wie has made headlines and suffered scathing commentary from male and female players alike for playing both professional golf association (pga) and ladies professional golf association (lpga) events (millward, 2008) 5 . while she has not been particularly successful in pga events mostly failing to make the cut many of her male competitors have fared worse without experiencing criticism from media and fellow athletes for playing in the event at all. if professional golf ceased to be sex segregated and was organized, instead, by an ability-based (handicap) hierarchy, players like wie would participate in tournaments they were able to qualify for. this would be a big step, at least in 5 most recently, in the july 30, 2008 edition of the globe and mail, lpga legend and one time female interloper in a pga tournament annika sorenstam, chastised wie for forgoeing the lpga british open in favour of a pga tournament. sorenstam and other members of the lpga tour have said that wie should instead be learning to win on the women's tour, not attempting to qualify on the men's tour. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 92 formal terms, considering that several high-profile golf clubs in canada and the united states continue to be restricted to men only. eliminating sex segregation entirely, however including spaces and organizations reserved for girls and women would constitute a major setback for the participation of girls and women in sport. just because something is socially constructed in this case, the two sex system with its assumption of female inferiority does not mean it is not "real"; social forces have material consequences (young, 1998; lemert, 1999). eradicating single-sex sporting spaces for girls and women without a prior cultural overhaul would mean that girls and women would be subjected to sexist and masculinist sporting cultures that discourage their participation. rather than make visible the considerable overlap between sex categories and sporting outcomes, a sharp decline in female participation would reinforce cultural beliefs about sex differences and female inferiority. the tiny minority of elite women athletes who would flourish under such a restructuring would be so distanced from the majority as to be viewed as abnormal. entirely eliminating sex as an organizational category in sport would result not in participatory parity and hence gender justice but in greater cultural and material marginalization. one potential advantage of this strategy, however, relates to transgender participation. the irrelevance of sex status would put an end to the contested and difficult social negotiation and assignment of individuals to the gender binary. there would be no need, for example, for an international olympic committee policy for transsexual participation or for transgender persons to produce official documents attesting to their sex category assignment. in this regard, then, a measure of gender justice might be achieved. 4. we should: eliminate male-only sporting spaces while maintaining sporting spaces for girls and women going beyond the above strategy for eliminating sex as a basis for organizing all sport, this strategy makes a distinction between coercive and voluntary forms of segregation (mcdonagh & pappano, 2008). it calls for an end to male-only sporting spaces while maintaining the right of girls and women to organize separately. the adoption of this strategy would require sporting spaces and institutions that are currently all-male to abolish formal and informal mechanisms for single-sex recruitment, development, participation, leadership and employment. the strategy of pursuing greater gender justice by eliminating sex segregation in sport is consistent with a liberal feminist emphasis on individual rights, freedom from discrimimation and meritocracy (madsen, 2000), values that are purportedly fundamental to western democracies. the abolition of sex segregation in sport at both the highest levels and in many recreational contexts is required to achieve the formal gender equality – enacted thus far through occupational and human rights measures outlawing sex discrimination that western nations take such pride in (ware, 1992). an absolute end to discrimination in sport is yet another step in ensuring that merit, not ascription, determines opportunity and reward structures. the discrimination against women codified in professional and amateur sport policy and institutions is one of the last legal frontiers in the struggle against sexist discrimination. in an interesting parallel, liberal feminists have advanced similar arguments to justify the full inclusion of women in the military including combat roles (d‟amico & weinstein, 1999). a rights-based liberal feminist approach includes affirmative action measures to address inequalities in abilities that result from long term discrimination. mcdonagh and pappano (2008) call for an end to sex studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 93 segregation in sport with the proviso that single-sex sporting spaces be retained for girls and women: “all sports competitions should be based on the abilities of the individuals who seek to play, not on stereotypical attributes of sex or race groups. the only exception…is voluntary segregation for a subordinate group in order to compensate for past discrimination” (mcdonagh & pappano, 2008, p. 28) this liberal feminist emphasis on meritocracy supports an analytical parallel between sex segregation and racial segregation and their eradication as a necessity for social justice. mcdonagh and pappano (2008) claim that the coercive nature of sex segregated sport in north america is an injustice and must be abolished. coercively sex segregated sport makes women second class citizens off the field and fails to reflect actual physical differences between the sexes. mcdonagh and pappano draw on the same u.s. legal decision brown vs. board of education, 1954 that rothblatt does as noted above to assert similarities between racial and sex segregation. the forced separation of girls and boys and women and men is related to gender inequality; the very assumption of difference amounts to injustice. this strategy for reducing gender injustice requires an end to the social, political and legal tolerance of sex discrimination that characterizes north american sport today. but the abolition of sex segregated sporting spaces and institutions should not extend to those organized as single-sex spaces for girls and women. as a subordinate group, girls and women should be able to "choose participation on either a sex integrated or voluntary sex segregated basis" (mcdonagh & pappano, 2008, p. 80). from this perspective, voluntary segregation aimed at increasing group standing is an acceptable social practice for minority groups but not for dominant groups. potential for gender justice while gender inequality persists in canada and the united states, civil rights-based challenges to occupational segregation have eliminated most legal barriers to the full participation of women in all aspects of society (matthews & beaman, 2007; mcdonagh & pappano, 2008). and some of the major barriers to the full participation of girls and women in (mostly amateur, that is, nonfinancially remunerative) sporting activities have been removed (yurako, 2002). but while legal challenges have resulted in the integration of some sporting spaces (little league baseball, for example, ring, 2008; mcdonagh & pappano, 2008), most coercively sex segregated sporting spaces remain a taken for granted fact of life. title ix the most significant civil rights legislation relating to the participation of girls and women in sport in the united states – amounts to both a step forward and a step backward in the fight for gender justice in sport and beyond. title ix‟s requirement that federally funded institutions and programs offer equal access and opportunity to girls and women has contributed to gender justice by recognizing girls and women as athletes and providing institutional structures for their sporting activities (cooky & macdonald, 2005). in spite of considerable increases in the participation of girls and women in sport following the signing into law of title ix, however, this legislation continues to reinforce and promote gender injustice for girls and women by emphasizing the distinct and inferior status of women athletes. according to mcdonagh and pappano (2008), this is because the ultimate impact of title ix was to normalize female inferiority rather than to promote real gender justice. while they acknowledge that title ix "was important, even critical.... it unfortunately reinforced-rather than challenged-the belief that women are inherently inferior to men" (p. 223). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 94 abolishing single-sex sporting spaces for boys and men while maintaining them for girls and women would increase gender justice in sport and beyond in several ways. first, it would send a clear message through legal stipulations preventing male only policies and practices that sexist discrimination directed at girls and women is no more tolerable than racist discrimination directed at people of colour. gender integrating the sport nexus would put an end to the last formal institutional frontier for enacting and showcasing sexist discrimination. this would have powerful positive cultural and material consequences for the status of women. secondly, allowing girls and women to learn sport and compete with boys and men would improve their athletic ability, thereby lessening the culturally produced disadvantage that is the product of sexist discrimination. mcdonagh and pappano (2008) cite educational research that demonstrates the performance improvement of disabled students in integrated that is, nonsegregated classroom environments to draw a parallel with the merits of sex integration. they insist that enabling girls and women to compete with boys and men in sport will increase female performances. thirdly, this strategy for reducing the role of the sport nexus in perpetuating gender injustice would maintain important single-sex opportunities for girls and women that are necessary as long as their minority status persists. this strategy‟s distinction between coercive and voluntary segregation supports the abolition of one and the maintenance of the other in a manner that is consistent with rawls‟ (1999) „difference principle‟ for social justice, according to which discrimination is considered acceptable only when it reduces the marginalization of disadvantaged groups in society. the current male-dominated, sex segregated sport nexus maintains the status quo of gender injustice; forcing gender integration of this institution would be a step towards attaining participatory parity for women. the potential of this strategy for increasing gender justice in sport and beyond requires attention to a few challenges. first, maintaining single-sex sporting spaces for girls and women may perpetuate gender injustice if these spaces adopt binary based policies for inclusion. second, where sporting spaces are currently gender integrated, many are characterized by a climate of sexism and misogyny that keeps all but the bravest and almost freakishly talented girls and women from participating. as mentioned before, little league baseball responded to legal requirements to include girls by developing a program of little league softball and streaming girls into it (ring, 2008; mcdonagh & pappano, 2008). it took more than 25 years after that for a girl to actually participate at the highest level of little league baseball in the 2005 little league world series (about.com:baseball). and, in an attempt to break out of a recent batting slump, members of the chicago white sox major league baseball team used their bats to symbolically rape a blow up doll in their locker room (sportsnet canada). many male-only sporting spaces are sexist, misogynist and homophobic; harsh informal resistance to gender inclusion can be expected. it is not just that so many of the spaces of the sport nexus are male only; they tend to be fundamentally misogynist, homophobic and transphobic as well. abolishing formal barriers to the participation of women cannot be assumed to address this foundational component of sport. furthermore, to take up the parallel between racial and gender segregation in sport that rothblatt and mcdonagh and pappano draw: desegregation does not necessarily reduce social injustice. hoberman‟s (1997) indictment of the role of racially desegregated sport in perpetuating racism suggests that just as racism has been accomplished through inclusion (emphasis on black physicality over intellect; invisibility of blacks who are not athletes, entertainers or criminals; drawing black youth away from the classroom and onto the sportsfield; the illusion that desegregation means that racism is a problem of the past) sexism and studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 95 gender injustice may morph and survive through inclusion. danica patrick‟s recent formula one racing success and concurrent sexualization suggests this possibility. in addition to these concerns there are the inherent problems associated with liberalism‟s celebration of meritocracy as the ultimate expression of democracy. fraser‟s concept of participatory parity incorporates an economically socialist dimension in its indictment of hierarchy as inconsistent with democracy. i suggest that combining a queer feminist suspicion of the naturalness of all bases of hierarchy (fausto-sterling, 2000; haraway, 1997, 1991) with fraser‟s standard of participatory parity has the potential to sufficiently radicalize the liberal feminist basis of this fourth strategy to increase its inclusive potential. fraser‟s concept of participatory parity as a measure of gender justice complements queer feminist science‟s deconstruction of the two sex system as ideological and provides a powerful mechanism for the indictment of the sport nexus as anti-democratic. sport, like other social institutions that operate to privilege some members of society while marginalizing others, must be transformed away from binary-based biological epistemologies that privilege white corporate masculinity. applying a queer feminist turn to this strategy for reducing gender injustice by eliminating coercive segregation in sport ensures that the struggle for gender justice includes not only women and girls but gays, lesbians and gender transgressors as well. this makes it possible to generate both concrete, justifiable structural and procedural changes to sport institutions and practices, while retaining sufficient open-endedness to push for ever-increasing parity for all participants. below is a list of recommendations for institutional change that begin to provide a vision of this approach‟s power for change: recommendations the sport-nexus and sport media eliminate legal protection for male only professional sporting spaces; require all levels of sport to conform to occupational human rights standards relating to non-discriminatory practices with regard to development, recruitment and promotion. provide women and transgender persons with the option of sharing the general locker room with men or utilizing an equally equipped separate space while ensuring that formal team meetings and discussions are conducted in an inclusive space. adopt a zero tolerance policy for racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia with consistent and meaningful consequences for violations; consider and grant requests for government accreditation and support only for sporting organizations that demonstrate compliance with human rights requirements relating to the inclusion of women and gender transgressors; grant and renew broadcast licenses only to organizations that demonstrate a commitment to gender justice in their organizational structure and in all aspects of sports coverage. amateur sport eliminate legal protection for male only sporting spaces at all levels of sport; studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 96 provide women and transgender persons with the option of sharing the general locker room with men or utilizing an equally equipped separate space while ensuring that formal team meetings and discussions are conducted in an inclusive space. adopt a zero tolerance policy for racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia with consistent and meaningful consequences for violations; require amateur sport at all levels to invest equal resources into the recruitment, development and support of male and female athletes; certify and provide public facilities exclusively to amateur sporting associations that require all leadership personnel to undertake formal accredited training relating to gender justice in sport. allow and support organizations for girls and women only; require such organizations to adopt trans-inclusive policies (travers, 2006). the sport nexus: as solid as the berlin wall the abolition of sex-based structural barriers to the participation of girls and women is, arguably, only a few court cases away. legal challenges have already resulted in the ability of girls to play on boys‟ teams when no girls‟ teams are available and even when there are (less competitive) girls' teams available. in contrast, boys‟ efforts to play on girls‟ teams have failed (mcdonagh and pappano, 2008). this indicates that lower courts in the united states seem to have distinguished at least implicitly between coercive sex segregation as sexist discrimination and voluntary sex segregation for girls and women as a partial, legal remedy for decades of discrimination. these legal challenges have begun to alter the structure of amateur sport but this process will not be complete until a pivotal case or two reaches the highest courts and to parallel the impact brown vs. board of education 1954 had on the formal structure of racism results in an end to the structure of legal sex discrimination. the legal erosion of institutional gender injustice in amateur sport will inevitably ripple up to professional sport at all levels. increased opportunities for girls and women to participate in sport and the emergence of powerful women athletes – both those who excel in women‟s sport and those who “cross over” – have created fertile ground for pivotal legal challenges to male-only sporting spaces. the celebration of girls and women as athletes represents a cultural shift. this shift is generating a powerful group of pro-girl allies in the quest to end at least some facets of gender injustice in sport. importantly, these allies include parents of girls and women – a small but astute percentage of “soccer moms” and hockey dads who are angered by sexist discrimination against their daughters and are willing and able to use the courts to fight back. challenging as it is, changing the sexist structure of sport is relatively easy compared to the difficulty of transforming the entrenched mysoginist, homophobic and transphobic culture of sport and sporting spaces. after all, the inclusion of men of colour in formerly white, male sporting spaces has only partially changed the culture and material consequences of racism in sport and beyond and not necessarily in ways that decrease racial injustice. gay men participate in sporting spaces through amateur to elite levels but often pay the price of secrecy, fear and sexist and homophobic collusion in order to do so. it is entirely valid, therefore, to criticize liberal feminist strategies aimed at achieving legal change for failing to provide means for altering the culture of gender injustice that is foundational to male-dominated sporting spaces. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 97 merely including girls and women in these spaces is insufficient to accomplish this. and yet, the cultural power of inclusion is never insignificant as it provides a basis of legitimacy for further social justice initiatives. the shake-up of sport i propose is incredibly radical and yet consistent with the democratic norms north americans so ardently codify and pay lipservice to. it is this consistency that creates an opening for legal challenges to achieve at least some of the above recommendations. as a result, it is not as impossible as it seems. as history has shown, significant institutional social change is never out of the question. for example, african americans in the united states have used democratic ideology to de-legitimize racism through legal challenges and the achievement of civil rights legislation that prohibits racism. heroically fought for, this civil rights legislation has had an impact: racial inequality remains a fact of life but racism is disavowed and formal barriers to equality have been eliminated (morris, 1984). the 1947 racial integration of major league baseball that is so celebrated and taken for granted by the sport today was bitterly resisted at the time and for more than a decade after (lapchick, 2001). while many people never expected same-sex marriage to be legalized in canada, homophobia persists and same sex marriage is but one component of efforts to reduce it. this legal victory provides increasing legitimacy to struggles against homophobic gender injustice. the sport nexus contributes significantly to gender injustice but its ability to do so will be eroded as the legality of its practices of exclusion is contested. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 98 references abdel-shehid, g. 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(2004). game, sex, and match: the construction of gender in british newspaper coverage of the 2000 wimbledon championships. sociology of sport journal, 21 (4), 435-456. ware, v. (1992). beyond the pale: white women, racism and history. london: verso. walton, t. & butryn t. (2006). policing the race: u.s. men‟s distance running and the crisis of whiteness. sociology of sport journal, 23 (1), 1-28. whitson, d. & gruneau, r. (2006). artificial ice: hockey, culture and commerce. peterborough, ontario: garamond press. wolf, n. (1992). the beauty myth: how images of beauty are used against women. new york: w. morrow. young, i. m. (2000). inclusion and democracy. oxford and new york: oxford university press. yurako, k. (2002). title ix and the problem of gender equality in athletics. gender issues. 20 (2/3), 65-80. zirin, d. (2007). welcome to the terrordome: the pain, politics and promise of sports. chicago, illinois: haymarket books simeone et al final correspondence address: nicola piper, school of law, queen mary university of london, london en 41s, uk. email: n.piper@qmul.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 when food is finance: seeking global justice for migrant workers lisa simeone independent scholar, usa nicola piper queen mary university of london, uk stuart rosewarne university of sydney, australia abstract the steady growth of international labour mobility has been one of the defining features of globalization. alongside the liberalization of international trade, labour mobility has been a key dynamic propelling economic development in the new millennium. in recent years, migrant labour is increasingly regulated via temporary schemes, deepening and widening migrant precarity. this paper argues that a growing reliance on temporary migrant workers reflects the financialization of global agriculture. drawing on conceptual debates among scholars of critical finance studies, migration governance and food systems, it explores the implications of financialization for social justice work, asking how a systemic understanding of the migrant experience with financial institutions and practices might enhance rights-based advocacy. keywords financialization; assetization; global food system; farm worker migration; global governance of labour migration; advocacy introduction historically, states have embraced migration during periods of high labour demand and disavowed it during recessions. this has been particularly true of migrant farmworkers who are tied to the seasonal demands of agriculture (luna, 1998). from an economic standpoint, this is a simple case of supply and demand. local populations generally avoid these precarious, poorly paid jobs if they can, and since migrants generally earn less than citizens for the same work (amo-agyei, 2020), they keep labour costs down and are thereby profitable. from a human rights standpoint, however, everyone is entitled to decent work. this has been the double-bind of migration governance: when food is finance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 11 economic arguments prioritizing growth counter legal arguments prioritizing rights (branco, 2009). although both sides of this debate envision a more equitable future, they represent incommensurate belief systems. for the former, equal rights are a regulatory cost that stifles development (ruhs, 2015); for the latter, equal rights would prevent the race to the bottom that perpetuates socioeconomic inequality (piketty, 2020). with the ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1980s, confidence in the equalizing effects of free markets eclipsed the rights-based approach. a global migration regime has coalesced around the notion that managing temporary migrant labour, on one hand, and workers’ remittances to countries of origin, on the other, will achieve the goals of economic development. yet civil society actors lament that international policy fora have become “talk fests” resulting in little systematic action to eliminate migrant exploitation and abuse (fanning & piper, 2021). as migrant workers have become an essential component of certain sectors worldwide, xenophobic political movements have spread, undermining political will to defend migrants. in fact, the conviction that globalization would eventually eliminate inequality within and across borders seems to have prevented effective measures to protect migrant rights. since the covid-19 pandemic, the contradiction between migration economics and migrant rights has become even more pronounced. the simultaneous interruption of global supply chains and human mobility created an unprecedented contraction of economic activity. under lockdown, migrants performed much of the “essential work” that kept local economies afloat (robertson & gebeloff, 2020). since the crisis, widespread labour shortages and rising food prices indicate a persistent demand for their work, yet restrictions on admissions and social protection remain the norm. some international organizations have responded to this growing deficit of labour by championing greater efficiencies through investments in technology (oecd, 2019; world bank, 2016). according to the un food and agriculture organization (fao), for example, farm labour is declining worldwide, incentivizing automation and creating opportunities for skilled rural workers (fao, 2022). according to this reasoning, declining birthrates and gains in development are reducing the availability of low-cost labour, forcing growers to adopt more efficient technologies. while such scenarios are possible, however, prospects are less optimistic for small-scale producers and migrant workers, especially in the global south. as the international labour organization (ilo, 2020, p. 63) points out, it is difficult to calculate the impact of automation and self-employment on income and distribution, especially in developing countries. linear narratives of progress disregard the complexity of a global food system which capitalizes on inequality to attract and reward investors. contrary to neoliberal predictions, the globalization era has witnessed unprecedented volatility in the agricultural sector and precarity for the migrant workers on which it depends. as financial markets have reorganized processes of capital accumulation, labour accounts for a decreasing share of production lisa simeone, nicola piper & stuart rosewarne studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 12 value and an increasing degree of risk (ilo, 2020). this is because the system is dominated by agribusiness conglomerates which are in turn dominated by financial traders seeking to spread the risk of investment portfolios. local producers are drawn into complex supply chains in which every factor – seeds, land and water, produce, transport, processing and retail – is priced for conversion into financial commodities (clapp & isakson, 2018). accordingly, efficiency is defined in terms of short-term returns for financial investors, transforming the nature of competition across the agricultural industry and destabilizing conditions for both growers and workers. within a rapidly changing system, employers are addressing logistical pressures by demanding workers “just-in-time” and only as needed to get the job done at minimal cost. this paper argues that a growing reliance on temporary migrant workers reflects the financialization of global agriculture. financialization departs from a key premise of neoliberalism, that markets tend towards equilibrium by generating wealth through volatility. this distinction has strategic implications for social justice, we assert, because the normative approach that orients advocacy on behalf of migrants often proposes legal interventions without considering the systemic changes that condition their application. with respect to labour, there is a significant conceptual divide between rights-based institutions, such as the united nations and the international labour organisation, and institutions of global economic governance, such as the world trade organization and the world bank. for the former, labour is not a commodity but a collective legal subject with a political claim to recognition. for the latter, labour is a factor of production which, along with land, capital, and raw materials, is bought and sold in a market for a price. financialization, however, calls for a reorientation of global governance from linear logics of legal compliance, on one hand, and supply and demand, on the other, to one of resilience within a complex adaptive system. we draw on conceptual debates among scholars of critical finance studies, migration governance and food systems to shed new light on global trends and explore possibilities for collaboration. in so doing, this paper pursues a conceptual goal: rather than presenting empirical data, the emphasis here is on bringing the literature on financialization into conversation with debates on agricultural labour supply, employment relations and migration governance. we begin by introducing the macro-economic concept of financialization, with a focus on how it influences the pricing of labour in agriculture through assetization: the conversion of commodities into return-bearing assets. the following section considers the influence of these trends on the governance of food systems and migrant labour, with a focus on how temporary migrant workers are erased as legal subjects with individual and collective rights. finally, we bring these insights to bear on the vital issue of how civil society might incorporate an understanding of financial institutions and practices into their advocacy agenda. critical to such an agenda, we argue, is the participation of migrants as political actors in the systems that shape their lives. when food is finance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 13 financializing food systems in recent years, a growing cross-disciplinary literature has explored the centrality of finance to the integration of global markets. during the 1980s, while labour’s share of national income declined in industrialized countries, pensions and mortgages were channeled into mutual funds and derivatives as vehicles of investment (martin, 2002; langley, 2008). with the deregulation of the financial sector, a tidal wave of mergers and acquisitions reoriented u.s. corporations from managerial control over production to the “shareholders’ right” to short-term monetary gain (davis, 2009). concurrently, the withdrawal of the social safety net accompanied the promotion of entrepreneurial livelihood strategies that are heavily reliant on both formal and informal circulation of debt (horodnic et al., 2018).1 this shift in the organizational logic of capital accumulation was exported as a development strategy through conditional loans that created fertile ground for financialization. trapped by rising interest rates and low export prices, debtor countries had no choice but to gut public services and promote microfinance programs that raised cash through loans and remittances (roy, 2010). by means of these structural adjustments, international financial institutions facilitated the conversion of their sovereign debt into “frontier market” investments (bracking, 2009). the impact of financialization on labour has been highly variable across sectors, geographies and employers. in the united states, for example, employees are increasingly treated as entrepreneurial subcontractors, bearers of human capital who may be laid off at any time (lin & tomaskovic devey, 2013). even in the european context, where organized labour remains relatively strong, financialization has been associated with increasing workforce segmentation and weakening labour market institutions (santos, 2017; darcillon, 2015) internationally, competitive pressures have impelled local businesses to subcontract with transnational corporations, an arrangement that encourages downsizing, outsourcing and greater reliance on part-time and temporary employment. in this way, the growing importance of financial returns for public corporations has had a domino effect through the reorganization of production, logistics and services into spatially diffuse supply chains (milberg & winkler, 2013). the food industry is central to this financialization vortex (ouma, 2020). futures markets originated as a strategy for hedging the natural uncertainties intrinsic to farming (cronon, 1991), and governments have subsidized agricultural loans since the 19th century. the architects of the world trade organisation (wto) hoped that multilateral trade would take the guesswork out of agriculture by distributing production and consumption according to the principle of comparative advantage (krugman, 1998). however, these neoliberal idealists did not consider the effect of mergers and acquisitions on 1 there have been significant national variations in neoliberal adjustments of the welfare state. for a recent overview, see béland et al. (2021). lisa simeone, nicola piper & stuart rosewarne studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 14 the firms that process and distribute food. financial risk management has become a central function of the transnational corporations that dominate the industry, encompassing the supply chain from major input manufacturers – such as seeds and agrichemicals – to wholesale vendors and grocery chains (burch & lawrence, 2013). these non-financial conglomerates have morphed into financial behemoths, serving as the primary banks of the industry and attracting unrelated investors such as sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, mutual funds, and hedge funds seeking to spread the risk of their investment portfolios (fuchs et al., 2013; murphy et al., 2012). managing the wealth of third-party investors, as well as their own, these firms hold so many positions in futures and derivative markets that any disruption, such as the subprime mortgage crisis, distorts world food prices and aggravates food insecurity around the world (daviron & douillet, 2013; ghosh, 2010). financialization has had a profound effect on employment relations throughout the food system by exerting downward pressure on labour costs. in both industrialized and developing countries, agribusinesses coordinate webs of subcontractors – smallholders, logistical intermediaries, research laboratories, financial subsidiaries – in order to exploit existing markets and create new ones in areas that are still reliant on local farms. neoliberal policies have deregulated marketing boards, abolished rural assistance schemes and eliminated price supports, while speculation in land and water rights have become critical sources of accumulation, driving up costs (rosewarne, 2019). in global markets, transnational supermarket chains and fast-food outlets demand low prices that only producers operating at greater economies of scale can deliver at a profit. food manufacturing firms are also consolidating, and in many cases relocating to take advantage of lower labour costs, while free trade agreements flood consumer markets with cheap imports, eroding the market share of domestic producers and intensifying competition locally and internationally. thus, both government and market incentives favor the replacement of family farms with commercial enterprises requiring a reliable supply of low-cost, seasonal wage labour. in short, financialization has intensified worker exploitation by driving down wages and undermining employment standards. farmers complain that they cannot find enough seasonal workers to meet their needs, yet their claims coincide with a parallel complaint that there are no decent jobs in the countryside, which spurs a mass exodus to the city. “missing from the narrative is an understanding of this conundrum: if recruiting workers is such a challenge, why does the industry have such a poor record in retaining a resident workforce and so persistently fail to comply with employment standards?” (rosewarne, 2019, p. 191). temporary migrant workers are in such demand partly because they are workers whose terms of engagement prevent their ability to demand higher wages or oppose exploitative conditions. within global supply chains, the variable capital of labour is subjected to unrelenting downward pressure from a world’s worth of investors. for a predetermined contractual period, temporary migrant workers may actually be living under when food is finance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 15 forced labour conditions, trapped with inadequate food and shelter (corrado, 2018). they may have been trafficked to their worksite by criminal networks and subjected to rape, abuse, even murder (peksen et al., 2017). unable to make enough money where they live, they have traded their freedom of mobility for an investment in the future. assetization, the conversion of objects into return-bearing assets, is critical for understanding the impact of financialization on agriculture (ouma, 2020). while the buying and selling of commodities is the central function of an enterprise, it is the reliability rather than the amount of profits that determines its value for investors in those commodities when their prices are abstracted into securities for trading in financial markets. labour is the input factor over which producers have the most control, especially in volatile global markets where prices of land and natural resources tend to fluctuate. in order to ensure a consistent, flexible labour supply, producers may circumvent labour shortages and workers’ rights obligations by offering limited-duration contracts on the global labour market. to facilitate this process, a “migration industry” has emerged linking labour supply and demand through brokers, money lenders, recruiters and placement agencies that manage logistical volatility within supply chains (xiang & lindquist, 2014). by recruiting seasonal workers through intermediaries, employers manage the logistical volatility of the labour supply chain by outsourcing the risk of hiring workers directly. thus, while migrant labour is commoditized as a factor of production, it is also managed as an asset by intermediary agents and by migrants themselves. employers pay broker’s fees obligating the holder of this asset – the intermediary or “trader” – to provide labour at an agreed-upon place, time and cost. temporary labour supply chains are notoriously difficult to regulate due to their transnational scope and decentralized organization (gordon, 2015). under certain conditions, the management of a temporary labour contract may deprive workers of the right to enter freely into an exchange relation with the employer. while migrants are, strictly speaking, the broker’s employees, they are available just-in-time because they have surrendered their bodily freedom for the length of the contract, under possibly coercive conditions. in some countries, temporary work authorization prohibits mobility between jobs, preventing reports of abuse due to fear of retaliation. yet migrants may tolerate this arrangement as an opportunity to assetize their own labour as owners of human capital (tsing, 2009). understood in this way, temporary migrant workers mortgage their labour to finance social reproduction at home. this is comparable to homeowners who live in their homes while their mortgages serve as collateralized debt obligations. workers’ prospective earnings provide collateral against which they can borrow the funds to meet the costs of migrating, while their actual wages generate the financial means to reimburse lenders and keep cash flowing lisa simeone, nicola piper & stuart rosewarne studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 16 in communities of origin.2 within some social networks, remittances may operate like interest payments which provide migrants’ relatives, “investors” in their human capital, with a regular source of income (omeje & githigaro, 2018; åkesson, 2011). unlike permanent residents, who may build lives where they work, temporary labour migrants must contribute their earnings exclusively to the financialization of consumer markets in their countries of origin. for the duration of their contracts, they have waived their legal right to use their own labour. within the labour supply chain, migrants figure as corporate liabilities rather than the subjects of labour law (anner et al., 2013). the bifurcation of global governance the assetization of labour presents a conceptual challenge to international institutions because it occupies the contradiction between human rights and economic governance. the incompatible belief systems of human rights and market fundamentalism each have a blind spot with respect to temporary migrant workers who participate as financial actors in global supply chains. on the one hand, the rights framework privileges citizenship as the foundation for legal claims to recognition (arendt, 1951); on the other, neoliberalism assumes that markets will tend towards equilibrium (centeno & cohen, 2012). temporary migrant workers have been systematically excluded from rights protections at both the national and international level, while the demand for their labour throughout the global system has been an effect of the volatility wrought by financialization on labour markets. like the parable of the blind men and an elephant, international institutions interpret complex systems in ways that reinforce their mandate. these inconsistencies are not only ideological; they also reflect the bifurcated structure of the global governance regime. the architects of the multilateral system envisioned a form of universalized capitalist democracy, governed by cross-border institutions and legislated by binding treaties. born out of crisis, the ilo was created after world war i to prevent unjust labour conditions that had the potential to create widespread worker unrest and endanger world peace (mieres & kuptsch, 2022). the united nations system expanded the scope of inter-governmental, rights-based governance after world war ii, delegating implementation among specialized agencies, including the ilo, on a range of social policy issues. concurrently, the 1944 bretton woods conference established international financial institutions to coordinate economic policy in the three arenas of money, trade, and development. unlike the un, however, this multilateral architecture of financial governance did not survive the political and economic weather of the postwar period. 2 on the historical connections between work and consumer debt in the united states, see cooper (2015). when food is finance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 17 whereas the universal aspirations of human rights and political equality were suited to a fixed legal framework, the fluctuating patterns of political economy demanded a more improvisational approach. for example, the regime of financial stability supervised by the international monetary fund (imf) required that the united states maintain a positive balance of payments so that its currency could provide liquidity to the rest of the global economy. however, the economic and political centrality that underwrote the hegemony of the dollar also motivated spending that violated that imperative, forcing the dollar off the gold standard in 1971. likewise, plans for an international trade organization did not survive the u.s. congress; instead, the executive branch was authorized to negotiate the general agreement on tariffs and trade (gatt), a series of periodic, provisional agreements that would eventually coalesce as the world trade organization. the systemic transformations of financialization have made their mark on the institutional structures charged with governing both migration and agriculture. the expansion of financial markets was central to a broader project of economic liberalization that emerged amidst the ruins of the postwar boom. when u.s. federal reserve chairman paul volker raised interest rates to combat stagflation in 1979, countries holding dollar reserves benefitted while dollar-denominated debt mushroomed, plunging developing countries into fiscal crisis. global inequality widened as deregulation of capital controls increased access to credit among wealthy financial actors. in 1989, a “washington consensus” of u.s. officials and international financial institutions proposed a set of economic policy prescriptions that would become a standard blueprint for development financing, predicated on the assumption that international trade would gradually distribute global wealth (stiglitz, 2002). reliant on the extension of credit to fund their governments and service their debt, developing countries had little room to negotiate “structural adjustments” such as the privatization of state enterprises, legal security for property rights, the abolition of tariffs protecting domestic production and free exchange rates. with financialization, the critical economic governance institutions have become central banks, which are advised by a new “wall street consensus” to expand capital markets and adjust monetary policy to attract institutional investors (gabor, 2021). this history of inequality has created the material conditions driving the increasing international mobility of labour. given that many countries in the global south rely on agricultural commodities as their primary exports, the food system has been a litmus test of the market ideology underlying globalization. from its inception in 1995, the world trade organization (wto) has been riven by debates over unfair terms of trade in agriculture. india sought to incorporate labour mobility rights for “natural persons” into the organization’s founding treaty, a move that was rejected by countries of the global north for fear that enhanced labour mobility would impact their sovereignty. political opposition to structural asymmetries in the global system galvanized protests during the wto’s 1999 ministerial lisa simeone, nicola piper & stuart rosewarne studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 18 conference in seattle, and again during the 2008 food price crisis, when the largest exporters protected their domestic markets at the expense of poorer countries (daviron & douillet, 2013). not only did the resulting food insecurity roll back more than a decade of gains (fao et al., 2020), it also challenged the founding premise of the wto: that market liberalization would result in the more stable and equitable distribution of resources. like global financial governance, global migration governance has emerged through a cumulative, ad hoc process that “manages” migrant workers more effectively than it protects them. although international migration has been on the un agenda for many decades, it was only identified as a key global issue in the early 2000s by general secretary kofi annan, who established a global commission on international migration in 2003. that year, the icrmw,3 which had been languishing since 1990, finally acquired enough ratifications to enter into force. a series of auspicious events followed: a un high level dialogue on international migration and development (unhld) in 2006, an annual global forum on migration and development (gfmd) beginning in 2007, and then, in 2015, the inclusion of “safe, orderly and regular migration” within the sustainable development goals (sdg). that same year, the sudden inflow of migrants and refugees into europe led the un general assembly to adopt the new york declaration for refugees and migrants, which committed to a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration (gcm) to be adopted by the un general assembly in 2018. each of these global migration governance processes has sidelined the icrmw in favor of voluntary compliance. this is not because migrants’ rights claims are in doubt, we argue, but because labour mobility is driven in large part by an economic rationality of supply and demand which cannot not be reconciled with the individual entitlement to rights (simeone & piper, 2018). the gfmd credits its informal structure for breaking the deadlock of international labour migration policy (gfmd, 2018). the gcm has been celebrated as the pinnacle of global migration governance, a comprehensive, whole of society, whole-of-government approach to various intersecting aspects of migration. however, its emergence also reveals the financialization of a process that spans the thematic concerns of social and economic policy. while it involved a formal un negotiation process, the gcm adopted the soft law form of a voluntary compact rather than a binding convention, which has led to doubts regarding its enforceability. rights discourse among stakeholders is in stark contrast to restrictive and selective national migration laws (hennebry & piper, 2021). states prefer to address labour shortages on a temporary basis, through non-binding declarations, bilateral hiring agreements and bipartite government alliances, all “soft law” techniques that undermine the enforcement of rights articulated in the gcm. 3 the acronym icrmw refers to the international convention on the protection of the rights of all migrant workers and members of their families when food is finance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 19 accordingly, these global migration governance discussions have consistently showcased the convergence of migration and finance in the form of remittances. though migrant workers have always supported communities of origin, the volume of international monetary transfers has grown exponentially in recent years, leading to claims that accelerating growth in developing countries has been due, at least in part, to “globalization from below” (guarnizo & smith, 1998). in addition, the flow of strong currencies into weak economies constitutes an important source of foreign exchange, prompting states in the global south to establish state-sponsored remittance strategies (singer, 2010). the world bank has been at the forefront in proselytizing the “migration-remittances-development nexus,” emphasizing that migrant workers can leverage prospective earnings to borrow and invest in human capital and business enterprise (bakker, 2015; ratha, 2015). with the 2008 financial crisis, the focus of this debate shifted from entrepreneurial investment to financial inclusion. the goal is less investment in productive activities that grow the economy than access to credit that develops the financial infrastructure. by enlisting migrants and the receivers of their regular payments within formal monetary circuits, developing countries have been able to improve credit ratings by converting transfers into financial securities (hudson, 2008). in addition, new financial services such as diaspora bonds, migrant mutual funds and transnational loans create new opportunities for intermediaries to derive gain from the global remittance flows (wernecke-berger, 2022). in short, the financialization of remittances is a means of assetization, in which migrants manage their own labour as a form of capital that hedges risk. initiatives to train the public in managing its own risk have also become prevalent in the agricultural development sphere. in 2016, for example, the world bank published an agricultural sector risk assessment framework to aid in resilience training among development practitioners. farmers are encouraged to address problems “in advance of a risky event” through “ex ante risk management strategies” such as investment in infrastructure, technology, and financial instruments (world bank, 2016, p. 77). a similar technooptimism drives the announcement by laboure and deffrennes (2022) that a “fintech revolution” will “democratize finance” by providing the world’s “unbanked” with access to money and liberating them from agricultural work. these recommendations anticipate the advent of “precision agriculture”, digital management strategies that promise to stabilize food supply chains, preventing food insecurity and environmental degradation (miles, 2019). yet the authors mention migration only in passing, as a coping strategy for poor business outcomes rather than as a source of labour. policy tools such as these simultaneously reinforce and disrupt existing arrangements in unpredictable ways. their one-size-fits-all format seeks to standardize the functioning of global supply chains in order to generate useful information in a form that can be monetized. in this respect, they may be understood as calculative devices that operationalize the rationality of finance lisa simeone, nicola piper & stuart rosewarne studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 20 (callon & muniesa, 2005). by monetizing qualitative factors, such as labour, commodities, and nature, they price risk as a means for accounting, strategic planning and speculative financing (ouma et al., 2018; pedraza-acosta & mouritsen, 2018; prasad et al., 2020). these techniques of financial inclusion articulate persons and things within global value chains that reorganize relations of production and consumption as collateral for the expansion of credit and the accumulation of debt. global migration processes have not only introduced financial policies in financial legal forms; they have also adopted financial rationalities to implement those policies. the 2006 appointment of peter sutherland, chair of goldman sachs international, as un special representative for international migration was more than symbolic in this regard. formerly director-general of the world trade organization, he was uniquely qualified to introduce private-public partnerships into the migration policy toolkit (bexell & moerth, 2010). his leadership was largely responsible for the gfmd, which initially included business within its definition of “civil society stakeholders.” a dedicated “business mechanism” – including banks, money transfer services, private foundations, and employer associations – has developed proposals promoting greater mobility of skills, entrepreneurship training, electronic payment systems, diaspora investments, and circular migration. these and other recommendations have been included in the gcm, as well as the migration governance framework that directs the activities of the international organization of migration (iom). formally incorporated within the un system in 2016, the iom is tasked with developing indicators and collecting data to measure the progress of global migration governance (iom, 2019). like the assetization of labour within global supply chains, these performance measures operate as calculative devices that quantify qualitative phenomena, rationalizing the flow of resources throughout the system and identifying targets for intervention (ilcan & phillips, 2010). “in this way,” roy (2010, p. 47) points out, “financial norms come to supersede social norms in the making of development.” democratizing the financialization of migration? the conceptual tensions that operate within and among international organizations express an operational divergence between the rights-based governance of social policy and the soft law experimentation of financial management. whereas multilateral organizations constitute a structure mirroring the political negotiations of representative democracy, the “minilateral” management of risk operates through a network logic that adapts to spatiotemporal change (brummer, 2014). in this respect, finance capital, which reproduces itself through the pricing of risk, creates an infrastructure that cuts across the political and institutional structures of modern democracy (xiang & lindquist, 2014). the international coordination of fiscal stimulus when food is finance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 21 during the pandemic illustrates the improvisational efficacy – and precarity – of such infrastructural governance. “in 2020,” observes economic historian adam tooze (2021, p. 294), “at least as far as the financial system is concerned, managerialism once again prevailed, but it was less an exercise in all powerful technocratic manipulation than a scrambling effort to preserve a dangerous status quo.” the same could be said of the spontaneous coordination through which irregular and temporary migrants were trapped as “essential workers” during the pandemic. when the pandemic disrupted the global flow of people and things, wealthy states were compelled to extend their safety net to the public, as well as banks and businesses. this was not welfare in the traditional sense, accompanied by means-tests and behavioral requirements; it was a tax-exempt cash grant that enabled “new recipients of financial risk” to meet their monetary commitments (imf, 2005, p. 89).4 whether consumers spent the money on food, a new car, or an old debt, their economic activity served as collateral, reassuring panicked investors that the system would not collapse. it is telling that irregular and temporary migrant workers all over the world were abandoned during the pandemic: excluded from pandemic payments and social protections, on one hand, and excluded from countries of origin, on the other (datta & guermond, 2020). forced to support themselves, they carried the risk of the pandemic, performing the work that sustained the economy and kept remittances flowing. their assetized labour provided fiscal stimulus while their rights as workers went unaddressed. the availability of migrant workers during the pandemic provided resilience to the system by preventing collapse. financial markets fluctuated madly, but the continuation of basic social functions sustained confidence among investors that their wealth would be preserved. the increasingly restrictive management of migration has the same effect by generating the impression of national security vis-à-vis external invaders. thus, even as essential workers were celebrated as heroes in the media, the increasingly restrictive management of migration has served financial rather than social policy objectives. this observation raises the question of how migrant rights might be framed within the financial system rather than in opposition to it. normative arguments have not carried much weight in the context of economic governance, but what about challenging the viability of exploitative labour practices? what if rights are critical to the resilience of the global system? this position is not a concession to economic rationality; it refuses abstract formulations of neoliberalism and human rights in favor of a rights-based approach that participates strategically within a complex global system. the 4 we refer here to a passage from the international monetary fund’s 2005 global stability report: “overall, there has been a transfer of financial risk over a number of years, away from the banking sector to nonbanking sectors, be they financial or the household sector. this dispersion of risk has made the financial system more resilient, not the least because the household sector is acting more as a ‘shock absorber of last resort’. but at the same time, these new recipients of financial risks must learn how to manage the newly acquired risks.” lisa simeone, nicola piper & stuart rosewarne studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 22 movement for food justice has confronted this problem in their advocacy to protect small farmers and promote food security within a global food system that is increasingly reliant on financial mediation in global trade (iatp, 2020). as jennifer clapp (2014) points out, financialization of the food system has had a “distancing” effect on causal relations: extending geographical space between farm and table, introducing more actors in supply chains, abstracting commodities into financial derivatives, and creating knowledge gaps about the social and environmental impact of food production. this complexity obscures the links between financial actors and system outcomes, presenting new challenges for civil society. migrant rights advocates have tackled the problem of distancing in labour supply chains through tort law. “in most jurisdictions,” explains gordon, “[employment] law excuses the actors at the top of the chain from responsibility for the violations that take place lower down, even though those abuses reduce labour costs and deliver greater profits” (2015, p. 15). under joint and several liability schemes, however, they may be held accountable for failing to prevent harm (barenberg, 2008; anner et al., 2013). since few firms voluntarily change profitable practices, this legal strategy creates negative market consequences for an employer’s logistical distance from the production process. this is an effective deterrent in the labour migration context because a complaint may be filed against any of the involved parties. financial incentives and penalties that influence calculations at the top of a supply chain translate into demands for compliance from recruiters, reshaping the market for temporary migrant labour. furthermore, by protecting the right to report abuse and seek damages, joint liability reinstates the legal personhood of subcontracted migrant workers whose labour has been assetized. joint liability may be established through both administrative and judiciary measures. states such as canada, the netherlands and the philippines have adopted public licensing and voluntary certification schemes with a private right of action, so that workers can bring claims in court. this is a particularly important innovation for migrant farmworkers, who have been historically excluded from labour protections (luna, 1998). in the united states, where legislative efforts have yet to systematically impose liability on employers for recruiter violations, unions and civil society organizations have led the way (gordon, 2015). the united farmworkers union (ufw), for example, founded the equitable food initiative (efi), a multi-stakeholder initiative developed with the support of oxfam and in collaboration with floc and other migrant and farmworker organizations (gordon, 2015). retailers are invited to require efi certification from their growers, and to fund growers’ compliance by paying slightly more for certified produce. similarly, the coalition of immokalee workers (ciw), a membership-based farmworkers organization based in florida, carried out a 15-year fair food campaign that eventually convinced 12 agribusinesses, including mcdonalds, sodexo, whole foods, and walmart, to adopt its fair food code of conduct. in both campaigns, farmworkers were involved in designing, monitoring, and when food is finance studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 23 organizing these calculative devices, and serve as peer educators to promote compliance. these joint liability campaigns have “democratized” the labour supply chain by incorporating workers themselves within the governance process (reinecke & donaghey, 2020). that the moniker of “democratization” has been applied to financial inclusion is a point of contention among social justice scholars and practitioners. as critics of the migration and development paradigm point out, access to capital cannot compensate for unfair terms of trade and a sovereign debt burden (de haas, 2010; withers, 2019). on the contrary, while remittances may alleviate poverty for a migrant’s personal network, it also exacerbates inequality within structurally polarized economies. low migrant wages and the pressures of cumulative debt may undermine efforts to invest migrant income. in fact, microfinance programs can do more harm than good, intensifying gender and class asymmetries when they disrupt existing ecologies of debt. like the sub-prime loans that triggered the 2008 financial crisis, “poverty capital” represents a source of financial extraction which rewards predatory lenders at great cost to borrowers who default. yet ananya roy (2010) argues for a distinction between the financialization of development and the “democratization of capital.” the former is predicated on the neoliberal presupposition of subjectivity as rational self-interest and money as the neutral flow of wealth, disembedded from historical and social context (kunz et al., 2022). the latter, however, rejects the top-down agenda of financial institutions to ask how capital is already circulating among people at the bottom of the currency hierarchy, and how their practices might translate into collective projects that subvert the hegemony of big finance. engaged research is an important source of information that departs from formulaic expectations. at the university of california, irvine, the institute for money, technology and financial inclusion (imtfi) funds scholars in developing countries to study emergent financial practices. while greater access to capital may mean the “individualization of development” (warneckeberger, 2022), it may also be a source of monetary innovation and political agency within shifting global assemblages of material, collective and discursive relations (schwittay, 2011; collier & ong, 2005). approaching materially poor people as financial subjects who act in culturally grounded ways, imtfi gathers, analyzes and disseminates ethnographic knowledge as an alternative to the quantitative data that informs economic governance (maurer, 2010). thus, rights operate within particular contexts not only as an abstract ideal but as interventions through which people assert their needs and seek to meet them. by illuminating how materially poor financial actors manage and monitor microfinance initiatives on the ground, imtfi brings migrant voices to bear on calls for greater sustainability, transparency, and regulation to prevent predatory practices. global governance today is as highly fragmented as the global value chains that have replaced globalization in the lexicon of the world bank. within this complex and disjointed institutional arena, international organizations compete lisa simeone, nicola piper & stuart rosewarne studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 10-27, 2023 24 with one another in their efforts to prove their ongoing relevance and thus generate the required funding for staffing and programing (hughes & haworth, 2011). common to them all, however, is a macroeconomic environment that is increasingly driven by the dual imperatives of capital and labour liquidity. that these cross-cutting concerns are often overlooked is an indication not of their irrelevance but of their contextual significance within a system of knowledge production that encourages myopia. global governance is characterized by a multiplication of actors who come at issues from very different perspectives and principles (drahos, 2017). the rising number of stakeholders leads to competition for space, influence and funding (jarosz, 2009; piper, 2022). the complexity and scale of the issues surrounding labour migration in a postcovid world requires cooperation of institutional actors and collaboration across policy fields. it also demands new ways of thinking about the “policrises” that confront us. acknowledgements we are indebted to sophia murphy, of the institute for agriculture and trade policy, whose insights and scholarship broadened our knowledge of global food systems advocacy. references åkesson, l. 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(2019). sri lanka’s remittance economy: a multiscalar analysis of migrationunderdevelopment. routledge. world bank (2016). agricultural sector risk assessment: methodological guidance for practitioners. world bank group. world bank (2019). the changing nature of work. world bank group. xiang, b., & lindquist, j. (2014). migration infrastructure. international migration review, 48(1s), s122-s148. correspondence address: darla fortune, university of waterloo, department of recreation and leisure, 200 university ave. w., waterloo on n2l 3g1, canada. phone: 519.888.4567 ext. 33530, email: dbfortun@ahsmail.uwaterloo.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 1, 79-107, 2014 rethinking community within the context of social inclusion as social justice: implications for women after federal incarceration darla fortune university of waterloo, canada susan m. arai university of waterloo, canada abstract very little is known about how women’s experiences with inclusion or exclusion shape their entry into community after they have been incarcerated. thus, the purpose of this study was to examine inclusion from the perspective of women entering community after release from a federal prison in ontario, canada. this research project combined feminist participatory action research with anti-oppressive theories. women who had been incarcerated were asked to come together to discuss ideas around inclusion and explore ways to foster a more inclusive environment. as women described the kind of community they experienced before and after incarceration, themes of being pushed out of community, being pulled into community, and negotiating issues of responsibility were evident. at the core of these themes was a powerful sense of difference. findings suggest that deep societal change is needed for women to truly experience social inclusion upon their release from federal prison. they also suggest a role for community in supporting personal change and growth. we argue that if principles of social justice guided inclusion efforts, there would be dialogue and negotiation aimed at re-imagining social inclusion and creating a space that is hopeful and inclusive for all citizens. introduction there have been times in recent history when canadians have expressed a desire to become more caring, accepting, and socially just members of society. one example of such expression was our collective reaction to a studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 80 darla fortune & susan m. arai message delivered to canadians by jack layton, the former leader of the federal new democratic party and official leader of the opposition to canada’s conservative government. prior to his death in august 2011, layton expressed these sentiments: love is better than anger. hope is better than fear. optimism is better than despair. so let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. and we’ll change the world. (layton, 2011) in the days and weeks that followed his death, layton’s words went viral on social media sites around the country and triggered an outpouring of emotion. canadians were clearly moved and personally inspired by his message of shared hope and optimism for a better future. public support for the ideals of shared hope and optimism are particularly reassuring when we consider their implications for women who worked with the first author of this paper on a participatory research project aimed at critically examining social inclusion for women who enter community after federal incarceration. this study was guided by an anti-oppressive theoretical framework. as moosa-mitha (2005a) explained, anti-oppressive researchers adopt a difference-centered stance by recognizing that oppression is based on multiple differences. research guided by anti-oppressive theories strives to expose dominant constructions of reality by questioning normative structures that serve the interests of a particular class, namely, those who are included. as salojee (2005) argued: the intersection of an anti-oppression discourse with social inclusion as process and outcome is an incredibly powerful impetus to social change and political solidarity. it presents a radical alternative to the dominant discourse that is steeped in liberal notions of formal equality. (p.201) during this study critical attention was given to inclusionary practices that encourage women to fit into normative structures within society. consideration was also given to the relevance of liberal theories that do not challenge normative practices and assumptions (moosa-mitha, 2005a). for this study women were invited to engage in dialogue intended to re-imagine what social inclusion might look like if we moved away from adopting the dominant discourse on inclusion and take a more difference-centered approach. this study was designed as a feminist participatory action research (fpar) project. fpar centers gender and women’s experiences while challenging forms of patriarchy, transforming power relations, and promoting social change (reid & frisby, 2008). using fpar to explore how issues of difference and oppression shape social inclusion helped to critically reimagine social inclusion for women whose relationships and aspirations are often different from the assumed norm. since inclusion and participation are central to fpar (frisby, reid, millar & hoeber, 2005), this approach was appropriate for a study about social inclusion and responded to lister’s (2000) call for strategies aimed at inclusion to be inclusive also in their development and implementation. this project sought to not only understand studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 81 the nature of social inclusion from the perspective of women who have entered community but also to encourage their involvement in creating a more inclusive environment. conducting fpar from an anti-oppressive perspective can help deepen our understanding of how issues of difference shape inclusion efforts. it also reveals the need for societal change if women are going to truly experience social inclusion upon their release from federal prison. similar to the work of other researchers (e.g., hall, 2005; reid, 2004), this study revealed a strong connection between social inclusion and social justice. as much as this study was concerned with social inclusion, it was also grounded in social justice and the belief that moving toward a socially just society is integral to our collective well-being. canadians may be ready to embrace a sense of shared optimism for a better future but are we also willing to acknowledge our shared responsibility for addressing social inequality and fostering conditions of hope? in particular, as it relates to this research project, are we willing to share the responsibility for fostering a hopeful space in community where women leaving federal prison can feel included and supported? there is a long-standing but tenuous connection between the idea of shared responsibility and the future of women who are federally incarcerated in canada. the idea of shared responsibility was identified over twenty years ago as a key principle that ought to guide women’s corrections in canada. in 1990 the task force on federally sentenced women (tffsw) released a report called creating choices which proposed a new women-centered model of corrections based on the belief that women’s successful reintegration into community has to be grounded in shared responsibility. as stated in the report: the holistic programming and multifaceted opportunities which support an environment in which women can become empowered can only be built on a foundation of responsibility among a broad range of community members. currently, because the correctional service of canada has legal obligations for federally sentenced women, responsibility for federal women is too narrowly assigned to correctional systems. (tffsw, 1990, p. 111) the principle of shared responsibility emphasizes a role for the federal correctional system, the government, and community when it comes to fostering conditions that support women’s empowerment. this principle not only responds to the charge that responsibility has traditionally been too narrowly assigned to correctional systems; it also addresses a lack of responsibility taken by the larger society which accepts and nurtures social conditions that produce criminal activity. the idea of collective or shared responsibility for crime and for individuals who commit crime necessitates a more inclusive and socially just society. the purpose of this paper is two-fold. first, by sharing the insights and experiences of women who participated in the research, we show how their experiences of community before and after they were incarcerated can be studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 82 darla fortune & susan m. arai compared and contrasted with the caring, accepting, and socially just society we seem to desire. second, by keeping social justice at the forefront of discussions on inclusion, we argue that inclusion as a measure of social justice has to be more than a matter of self-determination and personal responsibility; it has to move toward shared responsibility and a shift to mutuality if there is to be any hope and optimism for a better world. underlying this purpose is the idea that at the centre of exclusion and social injustice is often a powerful sense of difference. bell (1997) explained that social justice holds to a vision in which individuals are both self-determining and interdependent while there is a sense of social responsibility aimed at addressing social inequities. bach and rioux (1996) described the connection between individual and social well-being when they explained that “individuals cannot attain well-being by themselves. they do so in the context of the communities in which they belong” (p. 71). individual well-being is enhanced when communities provide the social, economic, cultural, and environmental context for supporting the well-being of its diverse members (wilkinson & marmot, 2003). despite our apparent desire for a caring, accepting, and socially just society and despite proposed philosophical changes to women’s corrections connected to notions of social justice, tensions exist when it comes to embracing notions of shared responsibility for women who have entered our federal justice system. one such tension can be seen in the passing of bill c-10 by canada’s conservative government in march 2012. commonly referred to as the omnibus crime bill, bill c-10 groups together nine bills that strongly endorse a get-tough-on-crime agenda. aspects of bill-c which most impact women are the increases to mandatory minimum sentences for certain minor and non-violent offenses (barnett, dupuis, kirkby et al., 2012) and the accompanying loss of judges’ discretionary power. as himelfarb (2011) explains, when judges’ discretion is compromised it is difficult for them to fit the penalty to the circumstances by addressing aggravating and mitigating factors to crime. changes called for in bill c-10 are believed to unfairly target women who are arguably already among the most susceptible to inequitable treatment in the justice system (giroday, 2011). there is a fundamental contradiction between notions of shared hope and responsibility and our seemingly unrelenting resolve to punish people who have broken the law. similar contradictions were inherent in this research when women involved in the project grappled with issues of responsibility during discussions around social inclusion. to give context to the insights and experiences women shared regarding inclusion in community, we will first explore the idea of social inclusion as social justice. social inclusion as social justice efforts to create more socially inclusive communities have been receiving greater attention in recent years and it has been argued that for social inclusion studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 83 to be a reality, all members of society should be able to participate as valued, respected, and contributing citizens (laidlaw foundation, 2002). from an anti-oppressive perspective, experiences of inclusion and exclusion are often a result of normative social beliefs that construct difference as inferior (moosa-mitha, 2005a). social inclusion as social justice is primarily about addressing issues of power and difference (shakir, 2005). of importance here is what is required to shift if inclusion is to occur for women entering community after incarceration. the challenge of opposing exclusion is the risk of assimilation if the inherently inequitable and unmovable centre does not change (labonte, 2004; lister, 2000). shakir (2005) argued that “the problem with social inclusion discourse in canada is that it has integration of the margin into the centre as its desirable end” (p. 212). there is a similar “desirable end” being advanced in literature pertaining to the reintegration and social inclusion of women entering community from prison. for example, uggen, manza, and behrens (2004) suggested that reintegration and social inclusion efforts will be enhanced and the stigma of incarceration minimized if offenders are able to adopt a pro-social identity upon release from prison. pro-social identities are considered to occur when offenders become productive, responsible, and active citizens in the work, family, and community domains. in this sense, social inclusion is linked to becoming a “productive citizen at work, a responsible citizen at home, and an active citizen in the community” (uggen et al., p. 263). thus, encouraging the pro-social behaviour of offenders is not unlike encouraging assimilation into the centre (shakir). linking pro-social behaviour to inclusion for women entering community from prison is problematic on several levels. for example, it is naive to assume that women will automatically feel a sense of community responsibility upon release from prison since, like many women in our society, they were apt to live in communities that were male-dominated, often inescapable, and void of opportunities for women to resist oppressive social roles (frazer & lacey, 1993). further, a woman’s path to incarceration is often paved with issues such as abuse, poverty, inadequate education, and drug abuse (pedlar, arai, yuen, & fortune, 2008; pollack, 2008; richie, 2001). thus, it can be argued that the inability of communities to tackle these systemic issues results in the marginalization and desperation of vulnerable individuals. why would women marginalized by community structures automatically place a high priority on becoming active community citizens? it is also difficult to believe that power relations present in community can support women trying to achieve a meaningful level of productivity after incarceration. stigma associated with a prison sentence often limits participation in community life and detracts from civic reintegration (uggen et al., 2004). porter (2000) argued that social exclusion is a gendered term which rests on norms associating inclusion with the male sphere of production. gendered processes, such as the consideration of paid work as work and the neglect of domestic work, are central to the idea that women are more susceptible to social exclusion (jackson, 1999). studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 84 darla fortune & susan m. arai women, already at a disadvantage in terms of being included through paid employment, are at an even greater disadvantage if they have spent time in prison (pedlar et al., 2008; pollack, 2008). unemployment and subsequent poverty is a shared reality for many incarcerated women (faith, 2006; richie, 2001). prospects for social inclusion are further diminished when women in prison are portrayed as evil, aggressive, and pathological outcasts and are subsequently denied opportunities to exercise their capacity as contributing citizens (pedlar, arai, & yuen, 2007). stigma is even more pronounced if the woman who has offended is a mother and the marginalization that ensues from having committed a crime is deepened when the idea of motherhood comes with normative cultural expectations associated with being wholesome and responsible (pedlar et al., 2008). when theories of civic reintegration and the adoption of pro-social identities are privileged in the reintegration literature, insufficient attention is given to systemic issues of inequality, control, and oppression as explored by feminist researchers, indigenous scholars, and critical race theorists. radosh (2002), for example, explained that female offenders have been victimized through multiple stages of patriarchy when she stated, “structure, oppression, economic exploitation, and marginalized social opportunity explain almost all of women’s crime” (p. 303). where notions of pro-social identities suggest the only way women can achieve social inclusion is by conforming to dominant social norms, this literature overlooks how women’s agency and efforts to resist oppression may foster their social inclusion. to achieve an understanding of social inclusion that is socially just, it is necessary to consider that both structural determinants and individual agency lie at the heart of inclusion processes (dominelli, 2005; lister, 2000). definitions of inclusion that emphasize personal agency consider “how individuals transcend structural limitations to create resources that promote inclusivity” (dominelli, 2005, p. 16). however, if efforts at inclusion ignore the ideological, material, and political structures that unequally benefit some and disadvantage others, there is the risk of assimilation whereby the agency of those who are less powerful becomes assimilated by the mainstream (lister, 2000). increasing attention has been given to ways structural dimensions shape the inclusion process (shookner, 2002). for example, efforts to enhance inclusion have started to address social issues such as poverty with an aim to reducing barriers that limit access to employment, education, and other material resources (mitchell & shillington, 2005). when social inclusion efforts involve respect for difference and removal of barriers to participate in public life (salojee, 2005), we see the beginning of a movement toward social justice. there are many definitions of social inclusion and exclusion. they are considered multi-dimensional since disadvantage takes place in a variety of domains (mitchell & shillington, 2005). for example, salojee (2005) noted social inclusion: is about social cohesion plus, it is about citizenship plus, it is about the removal of barriers plus, it is anti-essentialist plus, it is about rights and responsibilities studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 85 plus, it is about accommodation of differences plus, it is about democracy plus, and it is about a new way of thinking about the problems of injustice, inequalities and exclusion plus. (p. 198) multi-dimensional understandings of social inclusion, such as salojee’s are often rooted in classic liberal theory and a focus on issues of citizenship, rights, and responsibilities which is often criticized for presenting culturally specific social relations as universal norms and encouraging assimilation under the guise of integration (luxton, 2005). therefore, there is a need to examine social inclusion from other perspectives using methodologies which allow for voice and difference to be honoured while countering prevailing ideologies and power relations. such goals are central to anti-oppressive (moosa-mitha, 2005b) and feminist participatory action research (reid & frisby, 2008) approaches. a gendered and anti-oppressive analysis of social inclusion can move us away from paternal policy options that fail to challenge existing power imbalances and obstruct the creation of any real change (shakir, 2005). methodology the overall purpose of this study was to examine social inclusion from the perspective of women who entered community after release from federal prison. the project employed the tenets of anti-oppressive research (aor). combining fpar with aor helped to ensure that research being conducted was both critical and difference-centered. this approach was particularly useful for examining discourse that privileges normative assumptions about social inclusion because it promotes the idea that knowledge is owned by and belongs to groups experiencing marginalization (moosa-mitha, 2005b; potts & brown, 2005). following hall’s (2005) argument that negotiating the discourse of inclusion and exclusion requires a critical re-imagining of inclusion as social justice, women who participated in this study were engaged in dialogue aimed at re-imagining what inclusion means for women entering community after incarceration. in keeping with the participatory nature of this study, there was an emphasis on the value of collaborative learning. thus, rather than adhering to a rigid research design, the project unfolded over time and was influenced by the decisions of women who participated and the knowledge exchange that occurred. women who had been federally incarcerated at grand valley institution (gvi) in kitchener, ontario and who were living in the waterloo region were invited to form a research group to explore alternate ways to conceptualize inclusion that would help foster a more inclusive environment for women entering community after their release from prison. nine women participated at various stages of the project. four women who responded to the initial recruitment letter formed a research group and held seven meetings throughout the first phase of the study. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 86 darla fortune & susan m. arai although the research project was still in its formative stage, when the group held its seventh meeting only one woman was still interested and able to participate in the project. other members of the group, for different reasons that were all personal in nature, were no longer able to participate. at this time the research group disbanded. shortly before disbanding, the group discussed ways to collect and represent the data by considering the group’s strengths and interests and what methods would be complementary. photovoice was identified as a viable method and disposable cameras were distributed to each woman. photovoice has three goals (macdonald, sarche, & wang, 2005) that complement the aims of this research project. first, it enables participants to record and reflect on their personal and community strengths and concerns. second, it promotes critical dialogue and knowledge about personal and community issues through group discussion of photographs. third, photovoice is often intended to reach and touch policy makers, which was an explicit goal identified by women who participated in the first phase of the study. photovoice provides researchers with an opportunity to see the world from the view of participants and it provides participants with the opportunity to describe what their photos mean and reflect on their meaning (wang & burris, 1997). members of the research group were asked to take pictures of people, places, and things in the community that contributed to feeling either like they belonged or did not belong. they expressed excitement about this particular method and identified the potential for photovoice to be a vehicle for changing public perceptions about women who had spent time in prison. in one of the group’s last meetings, women shared and spoke about the pictures they had taken. these pictures powerfully demonstrated women’s experiences with inclusion and exclusion upon entering community, and, as they described their pictures, the stories of these experiences were further brought to light. when women who participated in phase one left the project, attention was directed toward honouring the decisions that had been made regarding the use of photovoice. therefore, with the help of one remaining research group member, additional women were recruited to participate in the project and invited to engage in photovoice. five additional women participated in this second phase of the project which also involved the use of photovoice. conversational interviews were then conducted with each woman about the pictures she had taken. throughout this phase the first author continued to connect with women who participated in the first phase of the project. follow-up interviews with women who were part of the research group shed additional light on their experiences of inclusion and exclusion in the community. in each phase of the study there were opportunities for women to share, through group discussion and personal interviews, their insights and experiences relating to social inclusion after federal incarceration. women who participated in this study ranged in age from early twenties to early fifties. the range of time since being released from gvi was between studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 87 two months and two-and-a-half years. seven women were white and two women were black. seven women indicated that they had drug and alcohol addictions and that their incarceration was directly related to their addictions. women differed with respect to sexual orientation and at the time of the study one woman was married, one woman was engaged, and all other women were either single or in casual relationships. four women were mothers, but only one had dependent children at the time of the study. there were variations in employment status, with one woman working a part-time job while going to university, one woman temporarily laid off from a seasonal job, one woman who had just finished employment through a summer grant, one woman starting a part-time at-home business, and other women choosing to work on their addiction recovery before searching for employment. there were also variations in education levels. one woman was a full-time university student, one woman was taking university courses through correspondence and had been accepted into full-time studies in the fall, and one woman was taking courses in preparation for university. several other women spoke about taking their general educational development (ged) test while in gvi. women who participated in this study were similar to other women leaving federal prison when it came to addiction issues. as stated above, seven out of nine women indicated that they had drug and alcohol addictions. this compares with other studies that acknowledged a high proportion of women in federal prisons were there because of drug related offenses (pedlar et al., 2008; taylor and flight, 2004). women in this study varied from the profile of women who have been federally incarcerated in terms of education and employment levels since most had higher levels of education and lower employment-related needs than what is commonly reported (cf. pedlar et al., 2008; pollack, 2008). insights about social inclusion after federal incarceration data presented in this paper came from conversations during research group meetings, conversations with women who had engaged with photovoice, and individual interviews with women in follow-up from their participation in the research group. throughout each phase of data collection, women offered insight into the contested nature of community and how idealized and normative it could be at times. this ideal was compared to and contrasted with the kind of community women experienced before and after a period of incarceration. women described times when they felt they were being pushed out of community and times when they were being pulled into community. they also highlighted tensions around the necessary supports and resources for personal change and growth as they negotiated issues of responsibility. the central themes in this study, being pushed out of community; being pulled into community; and negotiating issues of responsibility pertaining to social inclusion, reveal the ambiguous nature of social inclusion for women who have broken the law and raise critical questions about social justice. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 88 darla fortune & susan m. arai being pushed out of community: vulnerability to exclusion and stigma this theme highlights complexities associated with seeking to belong while faced with insufficient supports and resources, threats to independence, and feelings related to difference and stigma. at first glance, idealized notions of community may seem to offset this complexity, suggesting that as women become part of a community they will share in its promise of inclusivity and belonging. however, it has been argued that the ideal of community, offered as a response to prevailing conditions associated with alienation and fragmentation, provides a totalizing perspective of community that denies difference (young, 1989). experiences and perceptions shared by women in this study are in accordance with this difference-denying culture. exclusion, in the form of being pushed out, was experienced by women in several aspects of their lives and impacted the extent to which they could relate to notions of the community ideal. for all nine women, the ultimate form of exclusion was being sent to prison. each woman who participated in this project identified with being pushed out of community when they were removed from their communities and subsequently incarcerated in a women’s federal prison. exclusion was most evident when women invoked notions of the ideal community and its attendant promises. the promise of community, as described by bauman (2001), holds that when we belong to a community we can count on each other’s good will. at times women spoke as though they believed that when they entered community after incarceration they would receive the help and support they needed from community members and organizations to enable them to be included. missie, for example, explained that if there were sufficient resources in place for women entering community after incarceration they might start to feel like they were being included upon release: (lack of) housing has made me not feel included in the community. i feel i am being discriminated against because of my record. if i had more help from the community, from the resources available to help you be part of the community, then i would feel like i belonged. (missie) for women in this study, being pushed out of community started long before they went to prison and persisted after they were released. this theme highlights challenges for women who did not consider themselves to be part of mainstream society because their experiences with poverty, addictions, and incarceration precluded them from measuring up to a normative ideal. lucy described this normative ideal as having a family, money, social support, and good health: sometimes i feel like i don’t belong in society because of my past, because i don’t have family, because i don’t have money, because i don’t have proper support, because i’m a drug addict, because of my health. (lucy) studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 89 during one of our conversations missie posed and reflected on the following question: “where do we fit into society when we get out of prison?” this question not only gets to the core of this theme; it gets to the heart of the study. some women in this study had a history of poverty and addiction which presented challenges in terms of fitting into society. these challenges often led them to withdraw from society and not participate in conventional ways. liz contrasted people she considers to be part of normal society with people who have addictions based on the ability to participate in society: because most of society aren’t addicts. most of society are normal, working people with children and they’re working or going to school or whatever. they’re participating. they participate in life. so part of being normal is participating. when you’re an addict, you’re not participating in society. (liz) tina emphasized the difficulty associated with being included in a society when there are scarce resources available for women after incarceration. she stated: “being incarcerated for a long period of time, people have a very hard time living in society. trying to live on what society wants you to live on is hard” (tina). to illustrate her point, tina took several pictures (see figure 1) capturing the extra assistance she required just to obtain such basic necessities as food and clothing: figure 1 missie further emphasized pressures women experience as they try to get established in community when resources are scarce and there is the added stress of trying to provide for children: studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 90 darla fortune & susan m. arai i‘ve only been living here for a month and i don’t want to go to my landlord and tell him that i can’t afford the place. so i joined the food bank. i paid $9/month so you can go through the food bank store. it’s good to a point but they only have certain things. i don’t want my kids to feel like they’re going to live with mom so they can’t have fresh fruit anymore. (missie) the financial stress of providing for children that missie describes above is an example of an exclusionary factor that impacts women leaving prison to a greater extent than men since mothers in prison are far more likely than fathers to be in the primary caregiving role before and after incarceration (siegel, 2011). christie discussed the need for improved resources to be available to women after they leave prison. as she explained, there is unlikely to be positive change for women who return to an unhealthy environment without any transformation in circumstances: if i could change one thing i would change the resources that are available for establishing a new normal for everyday living. i’m not the only one who’s seen women get out of prison and go right back to the environment that was unhealthy, unsafe, and problematic in the first place. how can someone change their life if they go right back to the same neighbourhood, the same friends, abuse, addictions? for a person to change their life, they need to have a change of fundamental circumstances. (christie) it has been argued that the contested nature of community and its push toward shared identity and common values has a tendency to repress difference and exclude those who do not share in its commonality (young, 1990). the exclusionary consequences of desiring community can be seen in descriptions of women’s experiences. women described being excluded not only because of scarce resources, but also because they were not participating in the types of activities they considered to be the norm and because they did not have access to the same standard of living enjoyed by other members of the community. two commonly recognized indicators of exclusion, lack of participation in mainstream activities and deprivation of resources associated with an accepted standard of living (taket et al., 2009), reveal the normative aspects of inclusion. practices of exclusion disproportionately impact people who are unemployed, poorly educated, homeless, single parents, as well as people with disabilities, addictions, and criminal records (rose, 2000; taket et al., 2009). these practices cause one to question whether the ideal of community creates any room for difference. rather, as women involved in this research project describe, difference can too easily be perceived as a problem and lead to experiences of stigmatization. stigma of incarceration women often described being pushed out of community because of the enduring stigma of incarceration. karen explained that a lot of fear is attached studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 91 to trying to find a job when women perceive they are being stigmatized because of their past: “there are just so many fears. when you’ve been in for a long time and you come out there’s the fear of looking for a job, fear of people looking down on you.” feeling stigmatized also has a detrimental effect on sense of belonging. missie described how women believe they are perceived by society can influence the extent to which they can belong in community. after moving from a place deemed unlivable to a place she considered to be upscale and located in a nice community, missie explained, “i never thought i belonged in a nice community like this”. when asked why she felt this way missie clarified: because of the lifestyle that i’m used to, getting out of prison, still being on parole, not having a lot of money, not having my kids. i wasn’t very confident about where i should be and where i would fit in the community…. and if you look at the way society looks at criminals and people who have lost their children, they don’t think we’re good people, they don’t think we deserve any better than what we have or we don’t deserve as much as they have. so that’s [referring to her previous accommodation] where i thought society thought that i belonged. (missie) missie’s comments are demonstrative of the double stigma that comes with being a mother who has been incarcerated. they also suggest that even when there is an improvement in material conditions, stigma can still preclude women from feeling included. although feelings of stigma were quite real for women, some spoke about the perceived nature of stigma since it was something they carried internally. liz spoke about how women tend to believe everyone knows their history even though this is often not the case: “yeah, sometimes you feel like everybody knows even though nobody knows and nobody cares” (liz). missie described how a conversation with one of her supports helped her realize that despite how she feels she is perceived by others, most people in society cannot detect anything about her past when they meet her: well i mentioned to one of my supports that every time i went out i felt like i had “crack head” written on my forehead and that everyone knew i used to use crack and i was in prison. and she said, “you know, if i didn’t meet you in prison i would never have thought that.” that one thing she said changed my whole perspective. (missie) bella reflected on the effect stigma has on women’s feelings of acceptance and belonging. she concluded that while the stigma of incarceration is something that women carry inside, it is also something that exists in society: stigma is probably the biggest thing that’s both something within you, like the fear within you of what people think of you but it’s also a reality because people do think of you differently if they know. (bella) bella’s comments suggest that society has an understanding of what the label associated with incarceration means but not an understanding of the studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 92 darla fortune & susan m. arai experiences of women who are connected with this label. when incarceration contributes to women being marked as different, there is greater propensity for exclusion, particularly when mutual identification with others hinges on totalizing notions of community. for example, as young (1990) argued, “the most serious political consequence of the desire for community, or for co-presence and mutual identification with others is that it often operates to exclude or oppress those experienced as different (p. 234).” the experiences of women in this study were in accordance with young’s critique. exclusion appeared to be most pronounced for women when they viewed community as relatively homogenous and recognized the ways their social status and life experiences made them different and susceptible to stigmatization when opportunities for mutual identification were absent. this theme highlighted the ways women were pushed out and excluded from community. the next theme captures the ways women were pulled into community and the times they found inclusion from stabilizing supports and judgment-free spaces. being pulled into community: finding stabilizing supports and judgment-free spaces this theme captures the support women derived from groups, sponsors, volunteers, helping professionals, and reassuring family members. women considered this social support essential for establishing connections in community. this theme also captures the comfort found in judgment-free spaces where women were not made to feel different from others in the community. bella highlighted the need for women entering community from prison to have people available and willing to welcome them: we’re talking about getting us involved in community. well, the word community comes from the word communal—to share something. so it’s not a community unless we’re in it and we’re sharing it with others. and we can’t get into it unless we have people who are already on the inside pulling us into it, helping us. (bella) with this comment bella acknowledged the sharing aspect of community and suggested that for community to be shared, people must help others be included. lucy explained that having a support group in the community was critical for helping her make the transition to community, particularly in the absence of family: they drive me places if i need to go places, they do one-on-one counselling, they give me vitamins and bus tickets. they’ve just been there for me and i don’t have family so having that has been huge. so my support group is something that i really leaned on. if i feel like putting a pipe to my lips i call them and they talk me out of it or they come and get me and we go for coffee. (lucy) studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 93 being able to call people in a time of need helped lucy manage her addiction. she admitted she would be struggling to be in community if it were not for her support: “if i didn’t have the support i have, i don’t know. i couldn’t even imagine” (lucy). sloan considered support from her stride circle1 to be integral for helping her settle in a new area: so i decided to come to kitchener and i went into transitional housing. i had huge support from my circle. i was new to this city and they helped me. they went above and beyond the call of duty. i reached out to people that would help me. (sloan) missie also pointed to the need for women to have supports in community that extend beyond family. she presented a picture she had taken with her stride circle volunteer (not included here for purposes of confidentiality) and explained how this relationship helped her make inroads to finding employment: [this picture] is of me and my stride support. she is also my christian mentor. i met her through a chaplaincy program at gvi and then she took the stride training so she could support me in the community and she’s just been amazing. since i’m struggling right now financially i made up a flyer to do some cleaning and she’s given it out at church so i’ve gotten a couple of odd jobs that way. (missie) women described having access to various forms of social support pulling them into community when they were released from prison and they attributed this support to helping them feel included. social support is often conceived as psychological and material resources intended to help people manage adversity and cope with stress (cohen, 2004; thoits, 1995). researchers have often emphasized the importance of social support for women entering community. richie, freudenberg and page (2001), for example, explained that social support is essential for providing women with the strength they need to resist being pulled toward substance abuse, familiar yet abusive relationships, and past criminal behaviours. similar acknowledgement of the importance of support was made by women in this study when they explained how volunteers, family members, support groups and social groups were integral in helping them get re-established and resist the pull of addiction. conversely, women are apt to feel alone when they enter community in the absence of family and community supports. misha experienced loneliness during her transition phase and identified a need for women who have already transitioned to support other women entering community: i think it would be great if women who come out and are successful could help other women come out and be successful. you know, give them information on housing and information on jobs, that kind of thing. like a support group that meets once a month. when i came out i felt like i was totally alone and it would have been nice to have someone to talk to. (misha) studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 94 darla fortune & susan m. arai pollack’s (2009) research highlighted the importance of peer support and friendship for women who enter community after incarceration. she explained that when women get released from prison they are often unfamiliar with community resources, have difficulty forging new relationships, and ultimately feel disconnected and othered. women in pollack’s study considered connecting with other women who shared the lived experience of a prison sentence imperative for minimizing feelings of isolation and stigma. while misha identified a need for women who transitioned from prison to community to support others going through this phase, other women in the study indicated they preferred to distance themselves from women who have been in prison, opting instead to seek assistance from volunteers and support groups. these associations seemed to help women disconnect from the prison population and feel more connected with others in community. misha eventually found some of the support she needed to be pulled into community by joining a social group. she took a picture of women in her social group, the red hat society, and explained, “(we are) women over fifty who want to get together. (we) wear red hats and purple outfits and we really don’t give a shit what people think of us” (misha). while misha joined the red hat society to find connection in community, a reading of goffman’s (1963) work suggests she will not truly find belonging within this group. according to goffman, people who are part of a stigmatized group can only be their authentic selves within this group. he further argued when a person is stigmatized, he or she can be part of other groups but can never really be considered as one of them. not only does this idea offer little hope for women in this study to move beyond their criminalized identities and make meaningful connections with others in the community, it also suggests stigmatized individuals can be pulled so far into community but cannot truly belong. this idea also suggests that individuals and groups are stigmatized when community, holding to normative ideals, rejects difference. the mission of the red hat society emphasizes building relationships with other women and, beyond the requirement of being female; there are no restrictions on who can join (son, yarnal, & kersletter, 2010). thus, it appears to be a group to which any woman can conceivably belong. it is also considered to be a group from which women can access social support in a non-judgmental environment (son et al., 2010). however, a strict dress code and a busy social schedule would likely preclude women who are not financially well off and have other more pressing needs to attend to from either joining or feeling a sense of affiliation with other members. the red hat society is just one example of a group women may choose to join as a means of finding connection to people beyond their stigmatized group of formerly incarcerated women. yet, if goffman’s (1963) argument holds true and women in this study can never truly belong to a group which does not share their experiences of stigma, it follows that women may continue to find themselves in superficial relationships where they find some form of social support but will unlikely feel any true sense of inclusion. in addition to discussing relationships with people in community, women studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 95 described their relationships to community spaces. they discussed the importance of having community spaces that were judgment free where people either did not know about their criminal past or, if they did know, treated them no differently than anyone else. spaces that are judgment free and accepting of difference when describing her ideal community lucy explained: “feeling comfortable in your surroundings, non-judgmental, like, i’m not going to look down at the kid with the mohawk. everyone is different and that’s okay. it takes all different people to make a community” (lucy). liz and karen also recognized the value in having organizations in community that are judgment free and make them feel comfortable. for example, liz took a picture of a place in community where she attended a support program (see figure 2) and described it as: “(one of the places) where i feel most welcome. they don’t judge you” (liz). figure 2 tina spoke fondly of a place where she attended community support meetings because she considered it to be a place she could belong and not experience the stigma of incarceration: “this is where i go for my home of the heart meetings. they don’t make you feel like you’re a criminal. they’re there to help no matter who you are” (tina). women also expressed appreciation for public spaces in community where they were not made to feel any different than everyone else who used the services even when their history of incarceration was revealed. liz took a picture of the library (see figure 3) and explained she did not feel looked down on by library staff even though they could tell by the address on her library card that she lived in the halfway house: like going to the library, they know when you’re from the halfway house but they don’t treat you any different. i often have a problem with the machine to sign things out and when i tell them that they are right there to help just like i was somebody else. i don’t feel looked down on when i’m there. (liz) studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 96 darla fortune & susan m. arai figure 3 similar to liz’s, karen’s view of acceptance was tied to the idea of not feeling judged. she explained she gets this kind of acceptance when she visits her mother in a nursing home: “i go visit my mom in the nursing home every day…i feel comfort there because they don’t know (about my past) and they don’t care. they don’t look down on you. they just accept you for who you are” (karen). nowell, berkowitz, deacon and foster-fishman (2006) found that the meanings assigned to community spaces can have substantive implications for individuals’ sense of self and sense of belonging. as a departure from the ideal of community and its propensity for identifying with others based on commonality, being in judgment-free spaces where there is acceptance of difference seemed to remove pressure for women to conform to dominant expectations of behaviour in order to gain acceptance. block (2009) explained how a sense of belonging can occur when people have opportunities to connect with those who previously were strangers and relate in new ways across differences. social differentiation without exclusion was possible in spaces where women felt they could be themselves, be anonymous, be different, just be. however, if judgment-free spaces are void of mutual connection, it raises doubt about the extent to which women will experience social inclusion in community. this idea is given further attention in the next theme as women discuss issues of responsibility in community entry as they relate to social inclusion and social justice. negotiating issues of responsibility pertaining to social inclusion this theme explores ideas about where responsibility should lie when it comes to social inclusion for women entering community from prison. dominant discourse assumes that social inclusion for women who have been incarcerated means they must enter community as responsible citizens. tensions are revealed in the way women think about responsibility as they waver between change as conformity and change as a process of mutual studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 97 cooperation involving choice and support. the idea that women should take sole responsibility for making changes in their lives after incarceration has been critiqued by pollack (2007). she explained that a consequence of living in an individualistic society is that women who do not self-reform will be unlikely to experience social inclusion upon release from prison. allspach (2010), maidment (2006), and pollack (2008) have all argued that notions of self-reform remain unchallenged as long as neo-liberal policies shape the way society responds to issues affecting citizens who are most marginalized. change as conformity women in this project identified things that needed to be changed when entering community and often suggested it was up to the individual to take responsibility to enact this change. bella effectively captured women’s proclivity for individual responsibility when she explained: “you gotta fall in line. so either you’re in society or you’re outside society” (bella). misha was also quick to acknowledge that if she wanted to be part of community she was the person responsible for making it happen: i’m the one who has to make the step because for the longest time i sat home waiting to go out but being afraid that everybody knew what i did. you know, how do i explain where i’ve been? now i’m more into going out and shedding that past so i’m more into my community now. (misha) during a conversation with lucy and bella, lucy indicated that, despite changes needed in the environment into which women are entering, focusing solely on external factors undermines women’s resiliency and capacity to redirect their lives away from crime: bella: some people think the consequences aren’t harsh enough to stop people from going out and committing crime. i don’t think it’s that the consequences aren’t harsh enough; i think it’s that the environment hasn’t changed enough for these people to have a good reason not to commit crimes. lucy: well we have a good reason not to so what’s any different? it’s because we want to change. i’m making myself have a good life. i want better for me. i want to end the cycle. my mother was the same—my mother was me. her mother was her. i’m just stopping the cycle. i refuse to be the victim. lucy also argued that responsibility for self-reform should start while women are still incarcerated. she provided examples of opportunities available for women to improve themselves and suggested prison offers women a new start in life. lucy: well, you know if you want to take that negative situation and let it be a negative situation or you can take that negative situation and turn it into a positive situation. get your grade twelve, do all the courses, take the college studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 98 darla fortune & susan m. arai courses that they offer and then become a better person. it’s an opportunity to start clean with a fresh slate, right? researcher: so you think prison does work on some level? lucy: i think the two of us [referring to herself and bella] are proof of that. women acknowledged that certain changes had to be made before women entering community could really belong. changes identified were individual in nature and suggested a desire to conform to normative standards. for the most part, these changes pertained to the way women presented themselves in public. bella, for example, described changes she felt she had to make pertaining to her manner of dress: when i got arrested and i was on bail living with my mother, she said, “you can’t continue to dress the way you dress. you have to start to dress like you’re a member of society.” i used to wear those baggy pants and i looked like a wannabe black boy. over time i’ve come to terms with it but every now and then i still like to put on my comfortable clothes and i don’t care what people think of me because i look good and i feel good. i had to change that to become a part of society and i had to look a certain way to fit in. (bella) misha also explained that perception plays an important role in finding a job and emphasized this as an area where women need the most help to conform to society’s expectations: maybe what has to be done is to go to the halfway houses and this is where you start teaching them how to do a resume, this is where you teach them time management, this is where you teach them how to dress for an interview so they’re not going to an interview with their jeans hanging half way down their ass. so teach them etiquette because it’s all about perception. that’s how society works, it’s all about perception. (misha) misha viewed attempts to encourage society to be more caring and accepting of women who had been in prison as futile. in her view, effort should instead go toward changing women. she explained: well i think one of the things that has to be done is women have to lose their prison persona when they come out. you’re not going to be able to change society’s mind so you have to change the women. you know make them more approachable. i don’t know what it is. like people look at me and they don’t think i’ve been in jail. people look at [name of another woman in the group] and they think she’s been in jail. it’s all about image. (misha) it is not surprising that women in this study bought into notions of individual responsibility since this idea is privileged in the correctional system. as hannah-moffat (2000) explained, correctional service of canada’s (csc) rhetoric of shared responsibility and empowerment translates into female offenders being responsible for their own rehabilitation. the discourse of empowerment adopted by csc highlights the need for changes in structural studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 99 inequities experienced by female offenders and the need for changes in female offenders (tffsw, 1990). hannah-moffat argued, however, that a model of empowerment for women who are federally incarcerated can be more aptly termed a model of individual responsibility. empowerment is considered to be a process which supports women in gaining insight into their situation so they can take positive action to assume control over their lives. the state is no longer responsible for women’s rehabilitation; rather, women are now expected to rehabilitate themselves (hannah-moffat, 2000). if a woman is not able to change her circumstances, it is believed she lacks the ability to make choices necessary to guide this transformation. pollack (2004) has been quick to point out, however, that a lack of consideration is given to the idea that the same choices are not equally available to everyone. individual responsibility for change versus cooperative approaches to change conversations with women during this project largely focused on the ways they needed to change. change was not often considered within the context of limited choices. insufficient attention was also given to the ways community may need to cooperate with a woman’s push for change and help to open up access to additional choices. missie stressed the role community ought to play in supporting women trying to make changes in their lives: “the community and people around us ought to help us make that change. if more community got involved in the transitional phase, accepting us and being more of a support” (missie). bella also emphasized the need for support to change but as her comments suggested, she felt conflicted about the extent to which this support is already available: i think the person needs to change but society needs to give them opportunities to change. the problem is i want to say that but the reality is that there are so many opportunities out there, like free resume writing workshops, free social services. there is a place for everybody to go out and get support. i want to say that society needs to change but at the same time there is a lot of help available. (bella) despite feeling ambiguous about the supports and choices they had available, women generally agreed that changes in public perception were needed when it came to women entering the community. these perceptual changes were deemed necessary to move closer to a community of acceptance and judgment-free space. public awareness and knowledge were identified as necessary ingredients for change. as karen explained, people’s perceptions about women entering community might change if they had more knowledge: “we’re not all bad people. so i think that stereotypes are something that i would like people to get knowledge about and maybe it would change their perception” (karen). similarly, liz considered education and knowledge as studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 100 darla fortune & susan m. arai necessary for curbing judgmental attitudes and behaviours toward women. she believed if people acquired knowledge, they may have a different point of view about people whom they would ordinarily judge as the other: people who don’t know and don’t know what to expect will judge but if you give them knowledge and educate them they might start to look at it from a whole new perspective. you know, it’s like now that i talked to you, now that i know you as a person, i might have a totally different outlook. so it’s education and knowledge. (liz) despite an expressed interest in bringing knowledge and awareness to the public, women also voiced some skepticism about how much potential there is to change societal perceptions of women entering community after incarceration. misha, for example, spoke about people living with adversity who she felt would and should receive societal support before women who have spent time in prison: why should society support someone who is living off society when they can support a single mother who is out working and needs child care? why should my money go toward that person instead of someone who needs it? my sympathies don’t lie with—my sympathies don’t even lie with myself. (misha) while christie did not seem to believe such a community could exist, she described wanting to live in a community where there is shared responsibility among citizens, one in which there is equity in resources and support available to people facing adversity. for the community described by christie to be a reality, deep-seated changes are needed at the societal level: i don’t know how this could be possible, but i’d also like a community with well-developed resources available to all for dealing with life’s problems. i believe ending up in prison comes after a descent down a long slippery slope, and an ideal community would be able to intercede and help before things got bad with at least a large amount of the current incarcerated population. (christie) women who participated in this study suggested that support from community may not always be forthcoming when it comes to helping address challenges women face as they leave prison and enter community. some women spoke about not being able to find or access community resources they thought should be available to help them find connection to community. other women questioned whether people in the community would or should care about women getting out of prison and speculated about where the responsibility lay when it came to women getting re-established in their postprison lives. christie’s comments about prison being the end of a descent down a slippery slope, which signifies community’s failure to intervene earlier, highlighted the sheer absence of support available in community before a woman enters prison. the breakdown of community resources for women who go to prison is a trend that can be seen elsewhere in the literature. women who participated in pollack’s (2008) study, for example, referred to situations where they felt studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 101 their communities had failed them before they entered prison. indications of inadequate levels of community support for women who end up in prison can also be observed in the overreliance on the penal system to manage social problems (wacquant, 2001). wacquant referred to the international trend of prisons for women becoming prisons of poverty since persistent cycles of poverty and dependence are often precursors to women entering the prison system. women in this study expressed ambivalence regarding where responsibility lay when it came to a woman being included in community. they held two opposing beliefs: women leaving prison should be ultimately responsible for making personal changes that contribute to their inclusion, and, also, women could not do it alone. recognition was given to the notion of an ideal community where, as christie described, there is shared responsibility among citizens; a community in which there is equity in resources and support available for people in the face of adversity. for this ideal community to be a reality, a shift is needed, away from individualism, and toward a more socially just society. discussion: a shift away from individual responsibility and movement toward social justice women in this study realized they were culpable for offenses that brought them to prison and expressed the desire to make positive changes in their post-prison lives. at times they conveyed a sense of powerlessness and desperation in the face of such overwhelming life challenges. exposing their vulnerabilities, some women held fast to a belief that members of the community were an integral part of their quest for change. other women held firm to the belief that women leaving prison should be solely responsible for making personal changes that would ultimately contribute to their inclusion. as women negotiated issues of responsibility, there was an underlying tension around whether social inclusion and subsequent movement toward social justice could ever be a reality. indeed the idealized community and its assurance of inclusion may seem like a fabrication for individuals who have broken the law (pedlar et al., 2008; pollack, 2008). as foucault (1975) pointed out, the act of breaking the law means the criminal is seen as having offended all of society and must be punished so society may obtain retribution for the crime. the resulting exclusion can be difficult to overcome. the challenge of overcoming exclusion associated with offending society is most evident in the dominant language around notions of selfreform and “redeemability” (maruna & king, 2009). uncritical acceptance of reformation and redemption suggests that individuals who have been convicted of crimes are in a constant state of flux where their acceptance is always impermanent and fragile. worrall (1997) emphasizes the fragility of inclusion for individuals who break the law and provides a glimpse at the direction canada could be heading if we continue to enact punitive and studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 102 darla fortune & susan m. arai exclusionary policies such as bill c-10: while the term [community] may appeal to a warm, nostalgic sense of “belonging” among the self-proclaimed law-abiding citizen, its promise of inclusivity can be interpreted in contradictory ways when applied to those who break the law and are criminalized. far from demonstrating that it is resourceful, tolerant, and healing, the community is then rejecting, excluding and intolerantly punitive. (worrall, 1997, p. 47) if we view inclusion and belonging as a goal of social justice, we begin to see the ways shared responsibility and mutuality are necessary for women to be included in community. reid (2004) explained, “[social] injustice is how people are excluded, the depths to which they suffer, and the obligations we bear in this regard” (p. 245). from this statement we can infer that social justice is how people are included and the obligations we also bear in this regard. inclusion for women who have offended may seem unconscionable in a society that prides itself on the strengths of individualism and an ability to overcome adversity. however, crime does not occur in a vacuum (fortune, pedlar, & yuen, 2010). rather, as christie previously described, crime usually arises out of social conditions fostered in society. thus, it seems a society that accepts and nurtures these conditions ought to share part of the responsibility for the adverse effects created and help to take steps that lead to social change. it was this very notion that prompted the tffsw (1990) to incorporate the principle of shared responsibility into creating choices when it considered the changes that needed to be made to women’s corrections. women in this study recognized the need to make changes in their lives. after enduring years of social and personal betrayal within community (fine et al., 2004), they predictably found it difficult to accept that community suddenly had a role to play in supporting these changes. however, if we admit to social injustices being present in our society and we embrace the hope that comes in the form of messages encouraging social change (e.g., layton, 2011), we must also admit that inclusion, as a measure of social justice, is a social and therefore shared responsibility and its full expression requires a shift to mutuality in our relationships and understandings. conclusion: a new vision of inclusion that values difference and encourages mutuality women who participated in this research project were diverse and had varied experiences prior to their incarceration and when entering community. yet, feelings of exclusion were common as they spoke of entering community with insufficient support networks, resources, and acceptance from others. they articulated how the stigma of being an offender tends to persist long after a prison sentence is complete and can impact the extent to which they feel connected to community upon release. women in this study had a heightened studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 103 awareness of their culpability for offenses that brought them to prison and expressed wanting to make positive changes in their post-prison lives that would enhance their feelings of inclusion. importantly however, embedded within their views of inclusion were distinctions between the choice to make change and conformity. the element of choice was inherent in the descriptions of the ways they embraced change on their own terms. being with people who accepted them and supported their efforts to change and spending time in spaces where they felt accepted and free from judgment not only augmented their efforts but also started to set the stage for inclusion and belonging. when conformity was at the forefront of discussion, women perpetuated the belief that difference is antithetical to inclusion and social inclusion will remain an aberration for individuals who do not adhere to dominant societal expectations. many issues raised throughout this study are specific to women who are entering community after incarceration. the deep exclusion experienced by people placed outside community and sent to prison is arguably unparalleled and women who spend time in prison are particularly susceptible to exclusion. however, this project is ultimately concerned with society’s tendency to exclude people based on a devaluation of difference. exclusion is an inevitable outcome when differences are viewed as problems to solve (block, 2009). we take steps toward inclusion when we view difference as sources of community vitality and hold ourselves accountable for the wellbeing of others in community (block, 2009). women in this research project often found it difficult to look beyond notions of self-reform and therefore searched for acceptance and inclusion by trying to adopt pro-social identities. such personal changes placed each individual woman at the centre of the solution to social problems related to exclusion. however, an anti-oppressive view of social inclusion that is also socially just would take into consideration that both structural determinants and individual agency lie at the heart of inclusion processes (dominelli, 2005; lister, 2000). when it comes to achieving inclusion, sin and chung yan (2003) assert that “the challenge for society is how to share power, relegate privileges, and give space for people at the margins to define and locate the centre as a strategy of anti-oppressive struggles” (p. 33). in this sense the margins can be sites for resistance and creative spaces that encourage new perspectives. some women who participated in this project took pictures indicating they valued spaces in community where their differences did not impact how they were treated by others. with their pictures they suggested they did not necessarily want to move from the margin to the centre by conforming to mainstream society and pretending differences did not exist. rather, inclusion was about the creation of a space where people who are different from mainstream society are not made to feel inferior. when women in this study felt free to participate in the life of their community in ways that did not undermine their sense of self and their differences, they were in the process of being included. findings from this study suggest we need to be better at studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 104 darla fortune & susan m. arai creating space for difference and social inclusion to co-exist. johnson (2006) wrote that, “reducing people to a single dimension of who they are separates and excludes them, marks them as ‘other,’ as different from ‘normal’ (white, heterosexual, male, nondisabled) people and therefore as inferior” (p. 19). johnson also explained that exclusion inevitably results when differences that have no inherent connection to social inequality are seized on and become a basis for oppression. women were asked to participate in this research project because they had spent time in prison. beyond that, however, they were not homogeneous and varied with respect to many aspects of their identity, such as social class, race, and sexual orientation. yet, there was a common experience of exclusion linked to their incarceration as well as the ways their experiences before and after incarceration marked them as different from an assumed norm. incarceration has very real implications for social inclusion that is tied to ongoing social control and marginality and this has been found to be particularly the case for women (allspach, 2010). however, as this research showed, even if women do not explicitly identify with being marginalized due to practices of social control after their release from prison, the extent to which they are included in community can be jeopardized by idealized notions of community and their experiences of difference. for women to be in community (as opposed to prison), change is needed in terms of desistance from criminal activity. given the multifaceted nature of criminal activity, this type of change may not be simple or straightforward. however, for women to be included in community after release from prison, dynamics surrounding change can be even more complex. when women believe they need to change fundamental aspects of who they are in order to be valued and accepted by others, there is reason to be critical of the ways that social inclusion can undermine difference. similarly, when women’s quests for personal change and growth are dependent on the extent to which there is support and shared responsibility for addressing the issues of inequality they are faced with, there is reason to advocate for social inclusion as an aspect of social justice. this research suggests a need for social change and identifies the role of community in supporting personal change and growth. it is imperative that community not only collectively strive to diminish social inequalities, but accept difference without trying to change it and understand that people’s limitations are intertwined with their gifts (mcknight & block, 2012). in practical terms, this would translate to actions that involve advocating for movement away from punitive and exclusionary policies toward policies and programs that are socially just. it would also involve each of us embracing our mutual obligation for the well-being of others and engaging in dialogue aimed at creating space that is hopeful and inclusive for all citizens. after all, as canadians, this is the hopeful space we are longing for. acknowledgements we wish to thank the women who participated in this research project. your studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 implications for women after federal incarceration 105 willingness to share your insights and experiences and engage in critical and sometimes difficult discussions is very much appreciated. this work would not have been possible without you. notes 1 the stride circle program is available to women at grand valley institution for women in kitchener, ontario. it is a program facilitated by community justice initiatives, an agency founded on principles of restorative justice. a stride circle is typically comprised of a woman who is seeking support as she transitions from prison to community and two or three trained community volunteers who care about her and want to be part of this journey. references 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(1990). justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. basok & piper (intro) final correspondence address: tanya basok, department of sociology & anthropology, university of windsor, windsor, on, n9b 3p4; email: basok@uwindsor.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 1, 1-9, 2023 editors’ introduction farm work, migration and the diverse forms of struggle for social justice tanya basok university of windsor, canada nicola piper queen mary university of london, uk this themed issue was conceived during the first year of the covid-19 pandemic, when border closures, temporary measures adopted by most countries to contain the spread of the virus, impeded the arrival of migrant farm workers and consequently highlighted the essential contributions migrant labour made to food production, while simultaneously shedding light on the deplorable conditions and lack of protections for most migrant workers employed in agriculture. many of these appalling conditions had already existed prior to the covid-19 pandemic but they became particularly visible during the global health crisis. in many countries throughout the globe, the employment of migrant workers has become a structural element of agri-food systems built around the increasing integration within long supply chains and characterized by extreme market concentration and global competition among producers for a favourable place within this global industry (kinga et al., 2021; palumbo et al., 2022; rogaly, 2008). the marketization and financialization of the global food production (simeone et al., this issue) generates extreme power imbalances, and employment of poorly paid migrant workers deprived of rights and protections has become a widely popular practice within this global agri-food regime, not only in agriculture but in other food industries such as fishery (e.g., vandergeest & marschke, 2021) or meat packing (e.g., bragg & hyndman, 2022). farm work is considered one of the most hazardous, arduous yet poorly remunerated occupations (e.g., décosse, 2013; preibisch & hennebry, 2011). labour shortages prevalent in agriculture are often filled by migrant workers on temporary contracts, or by migrants who lack legal authorization to stay or tanya basok & nicola piper studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 1-9, 2023 2 work in a country (commonly known as undocumented migrants, a term that many researchers reject in favour of such concepts as illegalized migrants). both groups of migrants have precarious legal statuses (goldring et al., 2009), and as such they are often denied access to workplace and social rights (such as healthcare) and protections from unhealthy and abusive workplace conditions. as a result migrant agricultural workers, especially women, have experienced workplace abuse, exploitation, wrongful dismissals and workplace pressure under threats of deportation, as has been widely documented by researchers worldwide (e.g., basok & bélanger, 2016; cohen & caxaj, 2018; garcía-colón, 2020; gertel & sippel, 2014; griffith, 2006; güell & garcés-mascareñas, 2020; hennebry & preibisch, 2012; melossi, 2021; palumbo & corrado, 2020; sok, 2019; vosko, 2018, 2019). migrant workers often reside in substandard accommodations and lack adequate access to health care or other social services (hennebry et al., 2016; rojas, 2018). covid-19 has impacted both labour supply and migrants’ working conditions. states and employers adopted special measures to recruit and manage these “essential workers,” yet very little was done to protect their health and safety during the pandemic. furthermore, migrant farm workers have faced intensified labour exploitation, mobility restrictions, and increased xenophobia during the pandemic (palumbo & corrado, 2020; vosko et al., 2023). although these socially unjust conditions are well documented, insufficient research has been done on attempts by migrants, pro-migrant activists, labour rights and human rights grassroots organizations, as well as international organizations to resist injustice, advocate for changes, and engage in activism to claim the rights of these workers to dignity, security, higher wages, and healthier living and working conditions (but see basok & lópez-sala, 2015; cohen & hjalmarson, 2020; dias-abey, 2018; gabriel & macdonald, 2014; mešić & wikström, 2021; vosko, 2019). this special issue addresses this gap by bringing together researchers analyzing these struggles in different countries and regions (i.e., costa rica, canada, spain, italy, central america, and mexico) as well as by drawing attention to the global policy sphere and the role of international organizations. it includes papers, written from different disciplinary angles, that focus on campaigns, actions and visions for social justice for migrant farmworkers before and during the pandemic. in analyzing visions and struggles for social justice, it is important to recognize that the “what” of social justice is contextual, and specific claims for social justice are tied to forms of injustice, the nature of groups seeking redress, as well as the specific time and space that engender mobilizations and other forms of resistance. the specific objectives and claims related to social justice, namely (a) access to protections, benefits, and privileges; (b) democratic political participation; and (c) recognition and acceptance of cultural diversity (basok & ilcan, 2013), are articulated uniquely under different circumstances. in this volume, we approach the “agriculturemigration nexus” (to borrow the phrase from kinga et al., 2021) holistically, including the circumstances in home countries that propel migration among farm work, migration & the struggle for social justice studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 1-9, 2023 3 small farmers and farmworkers, migratory journeys, migratory patterns (including various facilitation and recruitment mechanisms), and the diversity of migratory statuses. depending on the specific time and location within the agriculture-migration nexus that is at stake, the specific meaning of social justice many include the right to not migrate and remain in one’s home community, the right to a safe and unimpeded journey, the right to a secure legal status, and the right to workplace protections. our understanding of social justice, therefore, recognizes both the time (particularly in relation to specific opportunities and challenges posed by the covid-19 pandemic; see in this issue, basok et al.; candiz et al., voorend et al.) and space (i.e., specific locations in migratory trajectories) of the agriculture-migration nexus (see in this issue, álvarez velasco & de genova; candiz et al.). the right not to migrate in the context of the agriculture-migration nexus is related to struggles to protect small producers from land grabs by extractive industries or agri-food conglomerates (harvey, 2010; sassen, 2014). la via campesina and other national and transnational civil society organizations have mobilized small agricultural producers to defend their lands and combat global trade policies that undermine their livelihood by turning food into a volatile commodity (desmarais, 2021). migrant rights organizations have also targeted global governing actors to draw attention to conditions in the countries of origin and the destabilizing impacts that marketization and financialization of food has had on rural producers (simeone et al., this issue). the right not to migrate has been linked by labour activists and national and transnational advocacy groups to access to sustainable development and global trade policies that protect rural and urban poor, and guarantee them adequate means of survival (bacon, 2014; bassoli, 2013; piper & rother, 2014). furthermore, there is growing evidence that climate extremes are having a devastating impact on agriculture. the livelihoods of millions of farmers have been impacted as both droughts and floods have imposed serious financial costs on farming in many rural areas (wfp, 2019). environmental devastations have become an important driver of migration (falcoa et al., 2019; iom, 2018; álvarez velasco & de genova, this issue), and therefore struggles for the right not to migrate are (or should be) entwined with global climate change action. for those whose lands and livelihoods cannot be protected from encroachment by corporations and devastation by climate-change-related processes, migration is almost inevitable. many displaced farmers and farmworkers have been able to participate in guest worker programs in such countries as the usa, canada, australia, new zealand, spain, and uk (basok, et al., this issue; candiz, et al., this issue; consterdine & samuk, 2018; griffith, 2022; güell & garcés-mascareñas, 2020; petrou & connell, 2018), and some european countries have recently launched new programs for agricultural workers (palumbo et al., 2022). those displaced from agriculture who lack opportunities to participate in guest worker programs (or choose not to join them), may journey towards other countries without legal authorization (álvarez velasco & de genova, this issue). the dangers and obstacles they tanya basok & nicola piper studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 1-9, 2023 4 encounter en route toward their desired destinations are well documented (e.g., álvarez velasco & de genova, this issue; basok et al., 2015; schapendonk & steel, 2014). the right to a safe and unimpeded journey requires that migrants adopt certain creative strategies to resist border violence and assert their right to mobility (álvarez velasco & de genova, this issue). migrants recruited to work on farms on a guest worker contract as well as those who find jobs on farms on their own without work authorizations or contracts, often face the dismal conditions as a result of their precarious legal status. while guest workers on temporary programs have legal authorization to work on farms, employer-tied contracts make their employment insecure (vosko et al., 2023). the main struggles for these migrant workers involve the right to a secure legal status (basok et al., this issue), the right to dignity, and work environments protected from occupation risks, abuse, and intimidation (vosko et al., 2023). these struggles are often combined with informal acts of resistance (candiz et al., this issue). in addition to the what of social justice, this volume also addresses the who of social justice claims. lacking full legal status, agricultural workers on temporary contracts and those who lack authorization to live and work in a specific county are less likely to claim rights than legal residents and citizens (varsanyi, 2008). it is well recognized that for migrants without secure status, the risks of engaging in visible political acts are far greater than for those who have access to at least some form of documentation, no matter how insecure. (nordling et al., 2017). the disposability and “deportability” of migrant agricultural workers as well as the temporariness of seasonal contracts make it particularly difficult for these migrants to engage in political action (basok & bélanger, 2016; gansemans & d’haese, 2020; vosko, 2018). under these circumstances, the role of solidarity organizations in assisting migrants to overcome obstacles, obtain aid and protection, and frame and claim rights is particularly vital (see e.g., basok et al, this issue; candiz et al., this issue; ataç et al, 2017; schwiertz & schwenken, 2020; voorend et al., this issue). labour unions, in particular, have contributed to the struggles for the rights of migrant farmworkers (e.g., basok & lopez, 2015; dias-abey, 2018; gabriel & macdonald, 2014; russo, 2018). furthermore, the role of international organizations in regulating working conditions and attempting to extend internationally-accepted rights to migrants is essential. global standards provide local advocacy organizations and transnational networks with legitimacy for their claims making, and are the product of transnational advocacy networks (grugel & piper, 2007). the application of rights-based approaches and the evolution of the global architecture to implement these rights is a topic that has been of rising interest to migration scholars, with particular focus in recent years on domestic work eclipsing the agricultural sector. in this context, it is the particular role of the international labour organization (ilo) as the un organization at the forefront of developing standards for labour migrants that requires scholarly analysis. ilo has been an important forum for advocacy to be shaped and farm work, migration & the struggle for social justice studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 1-9, 2023 5 networks to be forged. unfortunately, the literature on the global governance of migration has so far tended to focus more on the role of the iom and unchr (geiger & pécoud, 2020), to the detriment of paying more attention to the important role of the ilo in the governance of labour migration (piper, 2022), and particularly the migration of agricultural workers. the right to claim rights may be disconnected from national citizenship as per international human rights and labour standards, and enshrined in the fundamental rights to collective organising on the basis of “worker status,” rather than citizenship status. transnational advocacy networks and “networks of labour” (piper & rother, 2022; zajak et al., 2017) are evidence of advocacy and claims making being disassociated from national citizenship. the agricultural or plantation sector has also been subject to such type of activism (pye 2017). the transnational struggles based on international human rights and labour standards are addressed in this issue by simeone et al. (this issue). finally, this issue also considers the “how” of social justice struggles, or the specific mechanisms used to bring about change. contentious action theorists have drawn attention to discourses and actions by grassroots activists and the significant role political context plays in creating or stifling opportunities for mobilizations (goodwin & jasper, 2012; mcadam & tarrow, 2019). paying particular attention to political opportunities that may have arisen during the covid-19 pandemic to improve the working and living conditions of migrant agricultural workers, several article in this issue (e.g., basok et al.; voorend et al.) present analysis of contentious action by migrants, grassroots activists who struggle to advance migrant rights and have organized rallies, engaged social and mainstream media, and petitioned the states to address the injustices migrant farmworkers face. this special issue is comprised of five articles. the first provides a macrolevel discussion of the link between a growing reliance on temporary migration schemes worldwide and other economic and institutional trends, such as the financialization of global agriculture. the authors (simeone, piper & rosewarne) explore the implications of this trend for social justice work by highlighting the divide between global institutions that are rights-based and the key institutions of global economic governance. the disjointed arena of global actors is replicated by global advocacy organizations that face enormous challenges navigating the complexity and interconnections of global policy areas such as food, migration, and labour justice. the second article, by álvarez velasco and de genova, features an interview with a honduran journalist, and situates the interview in an analysis of dispossessions and displacements in the honduran countryside and the perilous journey of a migrant caravan from honduras through mexico. the interview and analysis vividly depict how displaced people defy the border control regime by marching through mexico. the authors, along with the migrant journalist they interviewed, see this rebellious movement of people as an undeniable force that forges socially just alternatives that permit an unstoppable movement of people despite rancorous barriers. tanya basok & nicola piper studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 1-9, 2023 6 third, voorend, alvarado abarca and sáenz leandro shift our attention to conditions at costa rica’s northern border, where farmers benefit from nicaraguan migrants as key labor. drawing on a novel database on protest and collective action, the authors utilize opportunity structures that arose in the context of covid-19 to analyze demands put forward by migrants as well as those who opposed the presence of migrant workers in their communities. as their findings suggest, the state responded predominantly to market concerns and anti-immigrant interests, while marginalizing most demands presented by the migrants. the struggles for secure status for migrant farmworkers, both on temporary contracts and working without authorization, are presented in the fourth article, by basok, lópez-sala, and avallone. focussing on the analysis of contentious action frames, the authors shed light on the discourses advanced by activists (both migrants and grassroots solidarity actors) calling for secure status for migrant farmworkers in spain, italy and canada. the authors demonstrate that the discursive frames adopted by the activists produced no more than “ambivalent resonance” among the policymakers in these countries. as a result, policy changes approved by state authorities during the covid-19 pandemic were inconsistent, and inadequate to address the root causes of migrants’ vulnerabilities. fifth, in the article by candiz, basok and bélanger, the authors turn attention to migrant farmworkers recruited under canada's temporary employment programs for agricultural workers who were working in the province of quebec during the covid-19 pandemic. the authors document informal acts of citizenship adopted by migrant farmworkers to assert their rights to dignity and safety. one of such acts that became particularly prominent during the covid19 pandemic was an escape from abusive conditions. in their analysis of these acts, the authors draw attention to two particular conditions and opportunities that arose at that time in quebec emphasizing the temporal and spatial dimensions of migrant struggles. this special issue on migrant and pro-migrant activism and advocacy revisits the discussion started on the pages of studies in social justice in 2009-2010. the 2010 special issue of studies in social justice on migrant rights activism (volume 4, issue 2) documented how migrant and migrants’ rights mobilizations can bring about social justice for migrants by disrupting political order that denies them existence, voices, subjectivity, and rights (basok, 2010). the present issue continues the discussion 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(2019). the political context of social movements. in d. a. snow, s. a. soule, h. kriesi & h. j. mccammon (eds.), the wiley blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 19-42). blackwell. melossi, e. (2021). ‘ghetto tomatoes’ and ‘taxi drivers’: the exploitation and control of subsaharan african migrant tomato pickers in puglia, southern italy. journal of rural studies, 88, 491-499. mešić, n. & wikström, e. (2021). ruptures and acts of citizenship in the swedish berry-picking industry. journal of rural studies, 88, 518-526. nordling, v., sager, m., & söderman, e. (2017). from citizenship to mobile commons: reflections on the local struggles of undocumented migrants in the city of malmö, sweden. citizenship studies, 21(6), 710-726. doi: 10.1080/13621025.2017.1341660 palumbo, l., & corrado, a. (eds). (2020). covid-19, agri-food systems, and migrant labour: the situation in germany, italy, the netherlands, spain, and sweden. open society european policy institute. palumbo, l., corrado, a., & triandafyllidou, a. (eds.). (2022). special issue – migrant labour in the agri-food system in europe: unpacking the social and legal factors of exploitation. european journal of migration and law, 24(2). petrou, k., & connell, j. (2018). we don’t feel free at all: temporary nivanuatu workers in the riverina, australia. rural society, 27(1), 66-79. https://doi.org/10.1080/10371656.2018.1443415 farm work, migration & the struggle for social justice studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 1-9, 2023 9 piper, n. (2022). the international labour organisation as nodal player on the pitch of networked governance: shifting the goalposts for migrant workers in qatar. global social policy, 22(2), 323-340. https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181211065240 piper, n., & rother, s. 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(2018). en el borde: ser trabajadora agrícola inmigrante en chiapas. carta económica regional, 30(121), 145-171. russo, r. (2018). collective struggles: a comparative analysis of unionizing temporary foreign farm workers in the united states and canada. houston journal of international law, 41(1), 5-55. sassen, s. (2014). expulsions: brutality and complexity in the global economy. harvard university press. schapendonk, j., & steel, g. (2014). following migrant trajectories: the im/mobility of subsaharan africans en route to the european union. annals of the association of american geographers, 104(2), 262-270. schwiertz, h., & schwenken, h. (eds.). (2020). special issue on inclusive solidarity and citizenship along migratory routes in europe and the americas. citizenship studies 24 (4). simeone, l., piper, n., & rosewarne, s. (2023). when food is finance: seeking global justice for migrant workers. studies in social justice, 17(1), 10-27. sok, s. (2019). challenges and constraints in achieving appropriate working and living conditions for cambodian temporary migrant workers in malaysia. south east asia research, 27(4), 361-377. vandergeest, p., & marschke, m. (2021). beyond slavery scandals: explaining working conditions among fish workers in taiwan and thailand. marine policy, 132, 104685 varsanyi , m. (2008). immigration policing through the backdoor: city ordinances, the “right to the city,” and the exclusion of undocumented day laborers. urban geography, 29(1), 2952. doi:10.2747/0272-3638.29.1.29 voorend, k., alvarado abarca, d., & sáenz leandro, r. (2023). a lost opportunity? collective demands and migrant farmworkers in costa rica during the pandemic. studies in social justice, 17(1), 48-67. vosko, l. f. (2018). legal but deportable: institutionalized deportability and the limits of collective bargaining among participants in canada’s seasonal agricultural workers program. industrial & labor relations review, 71(4), 882-907. vosko, l. f. (2019). disrupting deportability: transnational workers organize. cornell university press. vosko, l. f., basok, t., & spring, c. (2023). transnational employment strain in a global health pandemic: migrant farmworkers in canada. palgrave wfp (world food program). (2019, april 25). erratic weather patterns in the central american dry corridor leave 1.4 million people in urgent need of food assistance. https://www.wfp.org/news/erratic-weather-patterns-central-american-dry-corridor-leave-14million-people-urgent-need zajak, s., egels zanden, n., & piper, n. (2017) introduction – networks of labour: collective action across asia and beyond. development and change, 48(5), 899-921. correspondence address: tanya basok, department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology, university of windsor. windsor, ontario n9b 3p4, canada tel.: 519-253-3000, ext.: 3498 email: basok@uwindsor.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 1, 1-4, 2014 introduction reclaiming democracy and social justice: the arab spring, occupy, and radical imaginaries in the 21st century tanya basok university of windsor, canada in the last few years we have witnessed a wave of mass protests against authoritarianism, corporate monopoly, privatizations, and the decline of social protections. the uprisings against neoliberal policies and corrupt, authoritarian and repressive governments in egypt, tunisia, libya, and syria, coined the “arab spring,” have inspired other similar forms of activism such as: the occupation of the wisconsin statehouse by the organized labour movement and their supporters; teachers’ strikes in chicago; rallies against economic austerity measures in madrid and other spanish cities organized by the indignados; protests against economic injustice in athens and tel aviv; the yosoy132 movement in mexico; the mass mobilizations in new york against global economic injustice known as occupy wall street; followed shortly by a plethora of other occupy movements in north america, europe and elsewhere; and, a wave of student protests in quebec, canada. using the metaphor of “1% versus 99%,” these various movements have questioned the global economic order that has resulted in wide disparities in economic wealth and political power. employing the model of consensus decision-making, these movements have attempted to establish alternative models of grassroots democracy that michael hardt and antonio negri (2005) have described as the “multitude form.” now, almost three years after the occupy camps sprung up, it is important to explore the impact of these movements. more specifically, it would be pertinent to ask the following questions. to what degree have these resistance movements advanced new languages, metaphors, and imaginaries of social struggle? how similar or studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 2 tanya basok different are these movements from earlier forms of social unrest? how inclusive have these movements been of diverse voices of protest? how has the consensus model of decision making worked in practice? have there been any practical achievements? what has happened to the occupy movement once the camps closed down? what has been the impact of these mobilizations on the participants? what is the future of global resistance? these questions relate to many issues that have been debated by social movement theorists in the past several decades. scholars like alberto melucci, charles tilly, doug mcadam, sydney tarrow, jackie smith and others have raised important questions concerning social movements. do post-modern social activists aim to bring about political change or foment new identities, social relations, and life styles (e.g. melucci, 1989; buechler, 2000)? are they more likely to succeed when “political opportunities structures” are more open (e.g. mcadam, mccarthy, & zald, 1999)? how do they address issues of gender, class, racial, and other diversities (e.g. m. smith, 2008)? what impact has globalization had on various forms of protest (j. smith & johnston, 2002)? are transnational forms of activism more effective (tarrow, 2005; j. smith, 2008; routledge & cumbers, 2009)? how do social movements articulate new visions of democracy and equality (hardt & negri, 2005)? what is the importance of the cognitive frames they advance (snow & benford, 2000)? the recent wave of activism compels social movement scholars to revisit some of the old question and pose new ones. on may 17 and 18, 2013, a workshop exploring these and other issues was held at the university of windsor. this international workshop was organized by the editors of studies in social justice with the support of the university of windsor’s now-closed centre for studies in social justice and funded in part by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. coming from different regions and academic disciplines, twenty-one scholars from canada, usa, the uk, germany, australia, the netherlands, and the czech republic attended the workshop. in their presentations they focused on different aspects of these forms of so-called “contentious politics” (mcadam, tarrow, & tilly, 2001). these participants came from a variety of disciplines such as anthropology, comparative literature, political science, education, and sociology, and all have grappled with various questions concerning this recent wave of protests. this special issue contains four articles presented at the workshop, with more to come in a forthcoming issue focusing on austerity measures and labour movements. the four articles included in this issue explore a number of issues debated at the workshop. foran discusses the recent transformations of political cultures of opposition that fomented 20th century social and anti-colonial revolutions. he points out that the 21st century non-violent radical movements illustrate the virtues of “prefigurative politics” or the politics that shifts away from the goals of state control toward the construction of alternative visions for a more socially just society (also discussed by alex khasnabish in this issue) and horizontalist (as opposed to hierarchical) ways of action (or what funke calls “rhizomatic” movement logic in this issue). foran calls the emergent studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 reclaiming democracy and social justice 3 political cultures “political cultures of creation”, (in this issue khasnabish discusses one specific way these cultures are forged.) foran further compares three paths to bringing about social and political change: (1) the electoral challenge to state power as exemplified by the electoral victories of the leftofcentre parties in some latin american countries; (2) the establishment of autonomous spaces both below the state at the community level (e.g. the zapatistas and occupy) or above it at the global level (e.g. the global justice movement); and (3) the path that evolves from massive non-violent direct action to a protracted struggle for democracy (e.g. the arab spring). he distinguishes all these forms of political activism from the earlier struggles, focusing on the political cultures that gave impetus to each of them. he proposes that the future of radical social change may result from various intersections of deeply democratic social movements and diverse new parties and political coalitions inspired by political cultures of creation as well as opposition. starting with the premise that all political mobilizations require effort to build cooperation and linkages among activists, funke’s article examines movement-building dynamics by introducing the notion of “movementbuilding relays.” he asserts that current-day struggles are characterized by the “rhizomatic movement logic” that thrives on multiplicity which lacks a central actor, issue, strategy or ideology beyond opposition to neoliberalism and demands for “real” democracy. this rhizomatic movement logic, according to funke, allows for considerable diversity and the multiplicity of struggles and visions while bringing together diverse loosely linked organizations, groups and movements. yet, these diverse “multitudes” congregate and network at demonstrations, forums or occupy-type protests, suggesting patterns of interactions and mechanisms for collaboration. by focusing on the milieu, the (infra)structure or environment in which groups and activists engage and seek linkages and cooperation, or what he calls “movement-building relays,” funke explores movement-building dynamics and cooperation outcomes between multiple groups or networks. he also contends that the dominant rhizomatic movement logic affects both the ability to cooperate and the relay activities. he concludes that, due to its rhizomatic nature, current activists are not likely to articulate commonalities and convergences. the result is a “politics that is often unable to move beyond mere symbolic acts, re-active resistances and loose networking rather than towards a politics of organizing for concrete and long-term movement building” (p. 41). khasnabish presents an insightful, introspective discussion of the role of politically engaged social science research in articulating radical imaginaries that inspire and impel social justice struggles. his discusses the halifax radical imagination project grounded in ethnography and participant-action research and its efforts to convoke radical thinkers in halifax and beyond. as co-founders of this project, khasnabish and his colleague mobilized their positions and resources as academic researchers in an effort to further stimulate and articulate knowledge production that various community activists were already engaged in with uneven levels of commitment and studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 4 tanya basok success. khasnabish calls for critical research that, in addition to identifying structures and expressions of violence, exploitation and oppression and movements’ responses to these injustices, would “participate in facilitating collective, grassroots ways of envisioning and, ultimately, materializing alternatives to systemic forms of oppression and exploitation” (p. 62). finally, barnartt questions whether recent protests organized by people with disabilities in egypt are linked to egypt’s 2011 pro-democracy protests. demonstrating that disability protests happened during and after the prodemocracy movements and in close physical proximity to them, she suggests that the language of “rights” articulated by the pro-democracy protests might have spread to the disability protests, although egypt’s adoption of the un convention on the rights of persons with disabilities might have contributed to this development as well. in exploring the relationship between the two movements, barnartt presents an example of the “movement spillover.” drawing on meyer and whittier’s (1994, p. 290) definition of the social movement spillover as a process through which ideas, tactics, and styles of one movement affect other social movements (1994, p. 290), funke (this volume) identifies the “movement spillover” as one mechanism through which different activists cooperate and establish linkages. by examining the rights discourses of the two movements in egypt, as covered in englishlanguage media, barnartt contributes to this discussion. references buechler, s. m. (2000). social movements in advanced capitalism. new york: oxford university press. hardt, m., & negri, a. (2005) multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire., penguin. mcadam, d., mccarthy, j. d., & zald, m, y. (eds). (1999). comparative perspectives on social movements. political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings (cambridge studies in comparative politics), cambridge. mcadam, d., tarrow, s. & tilly, c. (2001). dynamics of contention. cambridge and new york: cambridge university press. melucci, a. (1989). nomads of the present: social movements and individual needs in contemporary society. new york: random house. meyer, d., & whittier, n. (1994). social movement spillover, social problems, 41(2), 277-298. routledge, p., & cumbers, a. (2009). global justice networks: geographies of transnational solidarity. manchester and new york: manchester university press. smith, j. (2008). social movements for global democracy. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. smith, j., & johnston, h. (eds.). (2002). globalization and resistance: transnational dimensions of social movements. boulder, co: rowman & littlefield. smith, m., (ed.). (2008). group politics and social movements in canada. toronto: broadview press. snow, d.a., & benford, r. d. (2000). framing processes and social movements: an overview and assessment. annual review of sociology 26: 611–39. tarrow, s. (2005). the new transnational activism. new york, ny: cambridge university press. correspondence address: gustavo barahona-lópez, university of california, santa barbara, ca, 93106-9430, usa. email: gustavoalopezh@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 1, 109-111, 2014 review of against the tide: immigrants, daylaborers, and community in jupiter, florida. gustavo barahona-lópez university of california at santa barbara, usa against the tide: immigrants, day-laborers, and community in jupiter, florida. written by sandra lazo de la vega & timothy j. steigenga. the university of wisconsin press, (2013) isbn: 9780299291037 as noted by sandra lazo de la vega and timothy j. steigenga, the authors of against the tide: immigrants, day-laborers, and community in jupiter, florida, immigration is among the most contentious issues in contemporary politics. with comprehensive immigration reform currently being negotiated in congress, this book adds an important perspective to the discourse around migration. as migrants begin to settle in “new” locations all over the united states, local governments attempt to deal with the conflicts that arise in various ways. lazo de la vega and steigenga give an account of one particular response, namely, the creation of el sol, jupiter’s neighborhood resource center. by presenting one way to address migration-related issues in a systemic, human-oriented manner, the authors make a timely intervention in immigration policy discussions with public policy impacts nationwide. the book argues that building day labour centers through broad-based public/private coalitions is an effective way of dealing with the tensions caused by upsurges in migration. lazo de la vega and steigenga show that investing in community centers and making an effort to build bonds with migrant communities are far more effective ways of addressing local qualityof-life issues than depending on purely punitive local ordinances1. the book follows the emergence of a coalition seeking solutions for standard-of-living issues in jupiter, florida and the successful outcome of its organizational efforts; el sol. jupiter was a town with relatively few immigrants for most of its history. however, in the 1990’s and 2000’s, rapid economic growth studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 110 gustavo barahona-lópez in the town created a demand for construction workers and other service sector labourers that were met mostly by guatemalan migrant workers. the informal day-worker hiring site on center street became a flashpoint of resident concerns over the demographic changes occurring in jupiter. after much deliberation, el sol opened in 2006 through the efforts of a huge coalition which included, but was not limited to, saint peter catholic church, corn maya inc., catholic charities, neighbourhood residents, the immigration issues committee of people engaged in active community efforts (peace), the jupiter democratic club, wilkes honors college of fau, the guatemalan consulate, a huge number of volunteers, and many politicians and staff members from the local government. lazo de la vega and steigenga reveal the story of how this coalition came to be, the obstacles they faced, their growing pains, and their accomplishments which include over $883,044 estimated value in yearly services rendered on an annual budget of just over $200,000 (p.152). one significant aspect of against the tide is lazo de la vega and steigenga’s place within the book’s narrative. steigenga helped found both corn maya inc. and the el sol center itself and he continues to invest himself in the operation of these institutions. likewise, lazo de la vega has served as the president of the corn maya inc. student group at florida atlantic university. this positionality allowed them unparalleled access to the internal dynamics of the center and the coalitions that built it. the authors, though, remain committed to an empirical analysis of the processes they witnessed and helped shape. their participant-observation methodology is also corroborated with newspaper articles, interviews with diverse individuals with a stake in the process, as well as the transcripts of various speeches and jupiter town meetings. the text is written in accessible language, likely for the benefit of an intended audience from diverse backgrounds and educational levels. nevertheless, against the tide could still be enhanced. the project may have benefited from a greater temporal distance from the creation of el sol in order to see how changing political winds, time, and changing personnel/ members would have impacted the evolution of the center. also, while the authors do describe the obstacles faced by pro-center coalitions, the book could have further analyzed the structural reasons why other day labor centers struggle to replicate el sol’s success. this book tackles some of the central theoretical concerns of assimilation theory, immigrant incorporation, bonding and bridging social capital, immigration studies, citizenship studies, local governance, labour studies, and even social movements. consequently, against the tide is a contribution to many academic disciplines and fields. scholars in these areas of study would benefit greatly from reading this text. furthermore, local politicians dealing with increased migration or conflict over day labor, activists, community advocates, and trade unionists working to organize migrant workers could gain practical knowledge in the pursuit of their interests. over all, i consider this book to be indispensible for anyone interested in immigration. against the tide is a complicated, compelling, measured account studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 review of against the tide 111 that empirically proves its claims. lazo de la vega and steigenga show the reader the tribulations affecting both migrant and non-migrant residents of jupiter when relating to migration. the authors further demonstrate how el sol surpassed its own proposed goals in resolving what were localized standard-of-living issues. perhaps most importantly, however, the book offers a tested, concrete solution to some of the many problems faced by migrants and the communities they call home. notes 1 the authors discuss at length the negative effects of local ordinances targeting migrants such as the hazelton illegal immigration and reform act of 2006. those impacts include the closing of local businesses due to the departure of migrants, the cost of legal fees in defense of unconstitutional policy provisions, and alienating migrant communities from the local government and police. see pgs. 149-151. candiz et al final before ts correspondence address: guillermo candiz, human plurality studies & research centre, université de l’ontario français, toronto, on, m5e 0c3; email: guillermo.candiz@uontario.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 acts of citizenship in time and space among agricultural migrant workers in quebec during the covid-19 pandemic guillermo candiz université de l’ontario français, canada tanya basok university of windsor, canada danièle bélanger université laval, canada abstract migrant farm workers recruited under canada’s temporary employment programs work in difficult environments, under poor working conditions, and live in unsafe housing in remote rural communities. fearful of repatriation or replacement, many accept their working and living conditions as part of a necessary sacrifice to improve their living conditions and those of their families in the countries of origin. at the same time, some migrant farm workers assert their agency by escaping from farms, subverting regulations, or challenging various forms of discipline used to control their bodies and activities. following isin and nielsen (2008), we refer to these actions as “acts of citizenship.” drawing on research conducted among migrant farm workers during the covid-19 pandemic in the province of quebec, canada, we situate these acts, particularly the tendency to escape from abusive and exploitative working relationships, in a particular space and time shaped by the covid-19 pandemic. more specifically, we demonstrate the link between these acts and certain conditions and opportunities that arose at that time, such as increased support for migrant farmworkers by a non-governmental organization and the facilitation of movement of migrant farmworkers across the canada-u.s.-border by the “migration industry.” keywords migrant farm workers; canada; covid-19; acts of citizenship; political assertiveness as widely documented, migrant farmworkers recruited to work in canada on temporary employer-tied contracts toil in difficult and risky environments while living in crowded and unsafe accommodation in remote, rural guillermo candiz, tanya basok & danièle bélanger studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 92 communities (basok, 2002; binford, 2013; hennebry et al., 2016; preibisch & otero, 2014). they are pressured to work long hours, fast, and with little rest (basok et., 2014; bélanger & candiz, 2015; hennebry et al., 2016). fearful of being repatriated, replaced by other workers, or disciplined in another fashion, migrant workers often have to comply with these demands (basok & bélanger, 2016; mclaughlin, 2010). they accept their working and living conditions as a necessary sacrifice they must make to improve the living conditions of their families and provide a more secure future for their children (mclaughlin et al., 2017). at the same time, despite their precariousness and “deportability” (basok et al., 2014; vosko, 2019), some migrant farmworkers assert their agency by escaping, subverting regulations, or challenging various forms of discipline that are used to control their working bodies, leisure activities, as well as expressions of sexuality and love. these forms of resistance can be collective or individual, formal (i.e., strikes, rallies and protests) or informal “everyday forms of resistance,” to use scott’s (1985) famous expression (basok, 2002; basok & bélanger, 2016; cohen & hjalmarson, 2020; grez, 2019; perry, 2020). in this article, we explore how the covid-19 pandemic created new conditions and opportunities among migrant farmworkers to assert their rights and engage in “acts of citizenship” as we call them, borrowing this concept from isin and nielsen (2008). we refer to these actions as acts of citizenship because these workers do not merely engage in resistance, but rather, they claim rights to access protections and benefits that are denied to them by virtue of their insecure residency status in canada. the canadian state generally reserves these rights to those who are legal citizens or residents, and by engaging in acts of citizenship, migrants challenge the exclusionary boundaries of belonging. drawing on research conducted among migrant farmworkers during the covid-19 pandemic, we illustrate how migrant farmworkers confront their employers either on their own or with the help of solidarity organizations, in addition to adopting certain informal or minor acts of citizenship. furthermore, we contend that migrant farmworkers resist exploitative and abusive conditions by escaping from farms, a practice we call “mobile acts of citizenship” in this article. these acts aim to disrupt the socially unjust treatment migrant farmworkers experience in canada. following isin (2009), we see these acts of citizenship as “instances of rupture” that have emerged in response to new opportunities and particular measures and practices adopted under the covid-19 pandemic. we, therefore, situate these acts of citizenship in a particular space and time, namely, in quebec during the covid-19 pandemic. first, the pandemic raised new risks and concerns for migrant workers and triggered new fears and anxieties among them. in an atmosphere characterized by heightened stress, some workers, dissatisfied with their working conditions or treatment by their employers, may have felt more determined than ever before to seek alternatives. second, in an effort to contain the spread of the covid-19 virus and regulate the safety of such “essential” workers, the canadian federal state and provincial authorities provided funding acts of citizenship among agricultural migrant workers studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 93 to some non-governmental organizations to support farmworkers by welcoming them at the airport and providing them with information about the virus. these organizations were thus able to establish contact with a wide range of workers in quebec and instruct them not only about covid-19 but also about their labour and social rights as farmworkers in canada. in this study, we analyze how the initial contact between migrant workers and rattmaq (assistance network for migrant agricultural workers in quebec) enabled workers to access to rattmaq’s support when they needed to confront their employers or seek other solutions. and third, the presence and growing visibility in the region under study of a “migration industry” that facilitates the unauthorized movement of migrants from canada to the usa has presented migrant farmworkers with an alternative to working in canada, prompting some to escape from their farms. in the sections that follow we start by reviewing the conceptual literature on acts of citizenship. we then outline our methodology and present an overview of the two streams of recruitment of agricultural workers under the canadian temporary foreign worker program (tfwp). we then discuss specific acts of citizenship among the migrant farmworkers employed in quebec during the pandemic, focusing, in particular, on escape or acts of mobile citizenship, as we call them. by relating these acts to specific conditions that emerged during the global health crisis in quebec, we draw attention to the situatedness of acts of citizenship in time and space. acts of citizenship non-citizen migrants are often excluded from many rights, protections, and benefits reserved for citizens. even though they face numerous obstacles to asserting their agency, they nevertheless engage in activities that challenge exclusionary practices. critical citizenship scholars see these forms of agency as acts of citizenship aimed at redrawing the boundaries of inclusion (isin 2009; isin & nielsen 2008; nyers, 2015). for isin (2009), acts of citizenship are “those acts that transform forms (orientations, strategies, technologies) and modes (citizens, strangers, outsiders, aliens) of being political” (p. 383). emphasizing the transformative potential of these acts, researchers (e.g., nyers, 2015; rygiel, 2011; schwiertz, 2021; squire, 2017) have documented that by making claims for rights and recognition, migrant citizens, as nyers (2015) calls them, transform the legal regimes and institutions of citizenship. while voicing concerns individually may be a risky alternative for many migrant farmworkers, collective strategies of resistance have been possible, particularly when assisted by unions or grassroots organizations (e.g., basok & bélanger, 2016; mešić & wikström, 2021; sexsmith, 2016). by collaborating with grassroots organizations, such as rattmaq, as in our case study, these workers transformed themselves into actors capable of asserting their agency. guillermo candiz, tanya basok & danièle bélanger studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 94 migrants may decide, depending on their circumstances, whether to engage in formal forms of mobilization or employ informal contestations (paret & gleeson, 2016; rogaly, 2021). among temporary migrant farmworkers in canada, such informal practices of resistance may include collective slowdowns (as is the case among the migrant farmworkers discussed below), working in unauthorized jobs, reappropriating farm produce, and falsifying hours of work (cohen & hjalmarson, 2020). these forms of resistance exemplify what some critical citizenship scholars would call minor or informal acts of citizenship (darling 2017, p. 189; squire, 2011), including speech acts (isin, 2009), that is, linguistic expressions of new understandings of actors as subjects worthy of having and claiming rights. critical citizenship scholars see these and similar acts of citizenship as performances. by creating a scene, actors constitute instances of rupture with established scripts perpetuated through habitus, practice, conduct, discipline, and routine (isin 2009, p. 379). as mešić and wikström (2021) elaborate, ruptures constitute “a break from existing understandings, practices and routines of citizenship, with the result that the order of things no longer remains compatible with what it previously had been” (p. 521). by rendering visible migrant farmworkers and the conditions under which they toll on foreign lands these instances of rupture may provoke public and political action to bring about greater respect for the migrant workers and the contributions they make to local economies (mešić & wikström, 2021). in addition to speaking up against social injustice, migrants may opt to switch to another employer or get transferred to another position within the same organization (gansemans & d’haese, 2020, p. 399). when these options are impossible, they may decide to quit their job, an option hirschman (1970) identified as “exit.” in the canadian context, several researchers (e.g., basok & bélanger, 2016; mclaughlin & hennebry, 2013; perry, 2020) documented that when faced with abusive working conditions, some migrants, recruited through the tfwp, absconded from their authorized job placements, and remained in canada without status. perry (2020) and basok and bélanger (2016) recognize subversive subjectivities in these acts of escape. perry (2020) sees them as “ordinary yet powerful agential practices” that take place “outside the realm of the visible” (p. 428). he contends that while exit from work does not destabilize the systemic nature of exploitation, “it can provide workers with a dignified means of refusing unfree labour relations and a life overtaken by work… thereby providing a channel for expressing autonomy in the face of everyday precarity” (perry, 2020, p. 434). by escaping from their current employers, workers thus remove themselves from the space of institutionalized precarity and “carve out an autonomous life that is at once meaningful and imperceptible to institutional mechanisms of power” (p. 436). emphasizing migrants’ autonomy in shaping migratory trajectories and overcoming obstacles, mezzadra (2004) draws attention to escape as a way through which migrants subvert “rigidities of the international division of acts of citizenship among agricultural migrant workers studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 95 labour” and thus “constitute one of the eradicated and denied motors of the radical transformations which have influenced capitalist modes of production” (p. 274). castracani (2019) uses mezzadra’s notion of the right to escape as a form of resistance among temporary farmworkers in quebec. we label these acts of resistance as acts of mobile citizenship. by “mobile citizenship” basok and candiz (2020) refer to “the right to move safely and securely within a territory without fear of being detained, robbed, assaulted, or kidnapped,” while the “acts of mobile citizenship” are conceptualized as strategies adopted by migrants to continue the journey without interruption (p. 2). even though this concept was developed to address the mobility of transit migrants (that is, those who travel through certain territories and countries towards a preferred destination), we suggest in this article that it can also be used to capture the mobility of migrant farmworkers in the labour market, including escape to a neighbouring country. in this article, we are interested not only in the acts of citizenship but also in the structural conditions that contribute to these acts. situating our analysis at the macro-level constituted by the covid-19 pandemic, we link it to changes at the microand meso-levels. at the micro-level, the pandemic magnified tensions in workplaces that were already present on farms employing migrant workers even before this health crisis commenced. at the meso-level, we recognize that the changing role of rattmaq in the lives of migrant farmworkers in quebec was made possible by new forms of funding during the pandemic. finally, we suggest that border restrictions put in place during the covid-19 pandemic may have contributed to the emergence of new opportunities for the “bastard migration industry” (hernández-león, 2013) that facilitated the illicit movement of migrants across the borders. we see the rise in visibility of this illicit industry among the workers as another meso-level structural component that made the escape strategy possible. in identifying these structural conditions at the microand meso-levels during the covid-19 pandemic, we situate the acts of citizenship we discuss in a specific space and time. the study this research project was conducted in the greater quebec city and chaudièreappalaches region (see figure 1) between july and october 2021 in partnership with the quebec city regional office of rattmaq.1 this region, known for its production of fruit and vegetables, particularly strawberries and raspberries, receives approximately 2,000 agricultural workers annually. in the last 20 1 this partnership project was funded by social sciences and humanities research council (sshrc) partnership development grants. no 890-2020-0024. this research has been approved by the research ethics committee of université laval; reb clearance # is 2021208 a-8 r-1 / 29-06-2022. guillermo candiz, tanya basok & danièle bélanger studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 96 years, the introduction of late strawberry varieties has led to the intensification of agriculture and the extension of the season (bélanger & candiz, 2015). we conducted a total of 22 qualitative interviews with migrant farmworkers recruited to work in canada through the temporary foreign worker program (tfwp): 18 from guatemala recruited through tfwp’s agricultural stream and four from mexico employed under the seasonal agricultural workers program (sawp), also a component of tfwp (see table 1). the absence of women in our study reflects their under-representation in the program. according to zhang et al. (2021), in 2017 only 7.6% of foreign workers in agriculture were women. furthermore, in the region where research was conducted very few farms employ women. in-depth qualitative interviews, conducted in spanish by the authors in public places, focused on the decision to participate in the program, strategies for being admitted into the program, the impact of covid-19 on participation in the program, working and living conditions in canada before and during the covid-19 pandemic, as well as their knowledge about their eligibility and access to rights and services. rattmaq was instrumental in the recruitment of study participants. during the pandemic, rattmaq was in a unique position to provide outreach to most (if not all) workers in quebec, as discussed in more detail below. we accompanied rattmaq staff to meetings with workers in public places, such as supermarkets, restaurants, soccer fields or parks, as well as farm visits requested by workers who experienced problems with their employers. we used the opportunity to distribute information about our project to migrant farmworkers and invite them to participate in our study. we also used the snowball technique by asking the workers we interviewed for the names of others who would be willing to participate in our study, thus correcting the over-representation in our sample of the workers who had had previous interaction with rattmaq and who, as a result, would be more aware of their rights. the interviews were transcribed and analyzed using nvivo software. acts of citizenship among agricultural migrant workers studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 97 table 1. characteristics of participants. 2 all names used in the chart and in the article are pseudonyms. participants2 age sex country of origin program number of seasons sector adrian 33 h guatemala tfwp 2 aviculture cristian 39 h guatemala tfwp 12 fruits & vegetables enzo 35 h mexico sawp 1 fruits & vegetables rogelio 25 h guatemala tfwp 5 fruits &vegetables ernesto 41 h guatemala tfwp 13 fruits & vegetables guillermo 29 h guatemala tfwp 1 pigs leandro 26 h guatemala tfwp 2 aviculture hernan 33 h mexico sawp 7 fruits & vegetables lionel 30 h guatemala tfwp 6 fruits & vegetables ignacio 39 h guatemala tfwp 10 fruits & vegetables dante 31 h mexico sawp 4 fruits & vegetables javier 26 h mexico sawp 3 fruits & vegetables gaspar 26 h guatemala tfwp 3 nursery wilfredo 31 h guatemala tfwp 1 pigs adán 26 h guatemala tfwp 4 fruits & vegetables reinaldo 23 h guatemala tfwp 4 fruits & vegetables maximiliano 40 h guatemala tfwp 5 fruits & vegetables melchor 42 h guatemala tfwp 6 dairy gregorio 35 h guatemala tfwp 11 dairy guido 20 h guatemala tfwp 2 fruits & vegetables nestor 38 h guatemala tfwp 10 fruits & vegetables fernando 31 h guatemala tfwp 11 fruits & vegetables guillermo candiz, tanya basok & danièle bélanger studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 98 figure 1. quebec city and chaudière-appalaches region (source: department of geography, université laval). the canadian temporary agricultural worker program rooted in the 1966 bilateral agreement with jamaica, the sawp has expanded to include other commonwealth caribbean countries and mexico. additionally, in 2002, canada introduced a new program, known currently as the agricultural stream of the temporary foreign workers program (tfwp), that allows employers to recruit workers from any country, and, unlike sawp, it requires no bilateral agreements with sending countries. in the agricultural stream program, most of the workers come from guatemala (statistics canada, 2022a). in 2021, canada received a total of 61,000 farmworkers recruited on tfwp contracts (vosko et al., 2022). among the 18,216 farmworkers authorized to work in quebec in 2021 (statistics canada, 2022b), most were granted employer-tied contracts through the agricultural stream program. under tfwp, migrant workers authorized to work in canada are “permanently temporary” (hennebry, 2012; rajkumar et al., 2012); that is, they lack access to permanent residency and corresponding social and political rights. furthermore, tied by contracts to specific employers, they are subject to unequal power relations (gayet, 2010), an important factor in their vulnerability and precarity. in this sense, tfwp is responsible for an institutional production of precarity (goldring & landolt, 2013) that shapes working conditions of the migrant farmworkers and their access to health, social relations, and housing conditions. acts of citizenship among agricultural migrant workers studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 99 research on migrant farmworkers in canada has also emphasized the disproportionate power granted to canadian growers to select ideal workers for their farms by granting them the unilateral power to assess workers’ performance and thus playing a decisive role in migrants’ current and future opportunities to remain the program (basok, 2002; mclaughlin, 2010). fearing deportation, migrants often perform their submission (mclaughlin, 2010; basok & bélanger, 2016) to employers. deportation, in this case, refers not only to the immediate repatriation of contract workers to their home countries following their dismissal by an employer, but also to the denial of future opportunities for these workers to participate in the program (basok et al., 2014; vosko, 2019). employers who threaten the repatriation and replacement of workers create an environment of fear that forces migrants not only to increase their productivity and compliance, but also to compete with other workers, whether from their country or nationals of other countries, for what they view as scarce positions in the program (basok et al., 2014; basok & bélanger, 2016; perry, 2018). yet, even under these conditions, migrants engage in certain acts of citizenship, albeit informal, to break their subordination. migrant farmworkers in quebec: compliance and resistance whether migrant farmworkers will assert their rights and challenge the socially unjust treatment on the part of growers depends in part on whether the policy framework permits workers to change employers. by and large, those who are not permitted to do so tend to accept harsh living and working conditions (fialkowska & matuszczyk, 2021), a strategy that some researchers coin “constrained loyalty” (gansemans & d’haese, 2020; sexsmith, 2016). the lack of mobility within the labour force and the disproportionate power granted to employers to determine whether a worker is to remain in the program or be repatriated supress agency among migrant farmworkers in canada. in fact, agricultural employers often opt for those workers who are perceived to be more docile (preibisch & binford, 2007). it is noteworthy that in quebec, mexican agricultural guest workers were gradually replaced by guatemalan workers (preibisch 2012, p. 72), believed to be more obedient. guatemalan migrant workers interviewed by valarezo and hughes (2012) mentioned that in their pre-departure seminars, iom trained them to be docile and submissive (valarezo & hughes, 2012, p. 106).3 a guatemalan worker interviewed in our previous research project,4 confirms that guatemalans are obedient, something he sees as their advantage over 3 until 2010, iom guatemala was the official partner for recruitment services of f.e.r.m.e (fondation des entreprises en recrutement de main-d’œuvre agricole étrangère) 4 “a decision to become undocumented: mexican migrants in leamington, ontario" funded by the joint centre of excellence for research on immigration and settlement (ceris) in 2011, directed by t. basok in collaboration with d. belanger and h. rivas sanchez. guillermo candiz, tanya basok & danièle bélanger studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 100 mexican workers: “they tell the guatemalan, ‘your job is to do this and very well,’ and he goes, and he does it… and the guatemalan doesn’t make the decision to do a job however he or she pleases but prefers to ask first instead.” yet, in the current study, we came across many workers, guatemalan and mexican, who did not wish to accept the status quo and engaged in acts of citizenship that challenge the stereotypes of docility and obedience (côtéboucher, 2008). they asserted their rights in various ways. although rare, some migrants chose to confront their employers and demand better working conditions and justice for themselves and others. ernesto assisted a co-worker who had been injured by an automated harvester to obtain compensation from la commission des normes, de l’équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (cnesst): it was risky for me, but i have been helping many co-workers who have been injured by machines at work… and the bosses do nothing, they say nothing, and they even started to fix the machine to make it look as if it was his fault. but i recorded them, and they didn’t want that, i took photos because the machine wasn’t right. the boss pressured my co-worker to work faster, and he grabbed the chain, and then all three fingers came off. nobody did anything, they wanted us to be quiet and i told him that we were going to fight. he went a month without pay. he didn’t want to apply for workers’ comp because the boss did not want to waste time to fill out papers. and then i decided to take the risk and that’s why i got in trouble, because i insisted that these things be done for him. and he did receive compensation, something like $10,000. (ernesto) the threat of dismissal from their jobs and subsequent repatriation is always present. however, there are certain conditions that at least some workers find unbearable, forcing them to confront their employers. among them are situations of physical or verbal abuse, or refusal on the part of employers to assist injured or sick workers on their farms. enzo recalls how he reminded his employer of his responsibilities to take care of the migrant workers that work for him: i told my boss: ‘thanks to us, you have what you have, yes, and i speak on behalf of everyone... if we get sick, if we need this or that, you have to take care of us as the boss. and you don’t.’ here, the priority is my health and my rights, and i don’t want them [the bosses] to consider us as garbage or as slaves who manage us as they please, it shouldn’t be like that. (enzo) fearful of confronting their employers directly, some workers seek help from their countries’ consulates, although consular officials are often reluctant to protect their co-nationals (see basok, 2002; basok et al., 2014; binford, 2013; valenzuela-moreno, 2018). rodolfo was one worker who requested and received support from the guatemalan consulate. in this case, and contrary to what has been reported in other studies, the guatemalan government representative took the workers’ side and reassured them they have a right to assert rights. as cristian recalls: acts of citizenship among agricultural migrant workers studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 101 they told the boss that if he was going to treat his workers badly, he was going to pay a $300 fine or he would be thrown out of the program.5 the migrant workers have the same rights as the local workers, they said to him. they told us that we should not be afraid, and that we should feel free to tell them what was going on here. they were there to help. (cristian) through these acts, workers seek to protect themselves against abuse. unable to join unions, they are forced to develop alternative resistance strategies by confronting the employer directly and seeking help from consular offices, even though these acts may jeopardize their future in the program. for reinaldo, a guatemalan worker, requesting help from consulates is worth the risk involved: i am going to do it. not just for myself but for the other workers who will continue to work here. i don’t want them to worry. we have to put pressure on the consulates so that they come to see how we are doing, and the bosses are going to feel more pressure, they are going to know that we have someone who defends us, who supports us. (reinaldo) the workers are fully aware of the risks they take when they assert their rights, however, they prefer taking these risks to tolerating their current conditions. as gaspar elaborates: i’ve just arrived here. it’s possible that they will send me back to guatemala, and this is the fear that we all have. if they send me back to my country, i will not be able to come back to canada. and that’s why many workers do not say anything to the boss. ‘we better keep quiet, even if we don’t get paid fully for our work.’ but i say to them, ‘well, at least in my case, i am not going to accept it.’ we are human beings, not animals. (gaspar) in the examples presented above, reinaldo and gaspar are engaging in a speech act (isin, 2009) in which they proclaim themselves and their co-workers as subjects with rights. by doing so, they denounce the daily injustices they face under this program. and, while proclaiming the right to assert rights is not the same as confronting employers to demand these rights, the former may under certain circumstances lead to the latter. the least risky option within this context of deportability is to adopt hidden or informal strategies of resistance. to counter the pressure to increase productivity, some workers engage in collective slow-down, as was the case on ernesto’s farm. ernesto explains that they adopted this strategy to protect those who could not keep up from dismissal: “we go at the same pace so that no one 5according to immigration, refugees and citizenship canada (2021a), an employer found noncompliant can receive either a monetary penalty (averaging $13,000; see regino, 2022), a ban from participating in the program, or both. guillermo candiz, tanya basok & danièle bélanger studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 102 is left behind. so, among ourselves we take care of this problem and help our co-workers” (ernesto). confronting the employers on their own or with the help of consular officials, employing informal strategies (such as collective slow-down), and engaging in speech acts that represent and articulate the understanding of one’s rights, are among the citizenship acts used by migrant farmworkers in quebec (and elsewhere) before and during the covid-19 pandemic. while escaping from the farm had been another act of citizenship, or what we call acts of mobile citizenship, prior to 2020, the global health crisis has created new opportunities that enable workers to consider abandoning their current employment, as we discuss in the sections that follow. acts of mobile citizenship among migrant farmworkers as mentioned earlier, research on migrant farmworkers in ontario has documented cases of workers who absconded from their farms and stayed behind in canada without a work permit (e.g., basok & bélanger, 2016; mclaughlin & hennebry, 2013; perry, 2020; preibisch & binford, 2007). among the infrastructural elements that made the escape possible were social networks with members of their diasporic community, the presence of contractors supplying undocumented workers to employers, and the high demand for agricultural workers, whether legally authorized or undocumented (basok et al., 2014). these conditions were predominantly absent in the quebec city region in the past (bélanger & candiz, 2014, 2015). furthermore, paternalistic relationships with their employers, as well as constant surveillance of the farmworkers at work, at home, and in other spaces within the communities that received them, made it nearly impossible for these migrants to abandon their jobs (basok et al., 2015; bélanger & candiz, 2015). yet, the present study, conducted during the covid-19 pandemic, paints a different picture. among the migrant farmworkers we interviewed, some left their farms or knew of others who had left. some attempted to cross into the usa, while others tried to obtain an open work permit. we discuss each escape strategy below. the first type of escape is from the country. according to f.e.r.m.e. (fondation des entreprises en recrutement de main-d’œuvre étrangère), a grower service organization responsible for the administration of tfwp for agricultural workers in quebec, in 2021 225 workers brought to quebec as temporary workers abandoned their employment, and most of them tried to cross into the united states. at least 22 of them were intercepted at the border, although the number of those who succeeded in crossing the border is unknown (dussault, 2021; also see e.g., bélanger & candiz, 2021; blackburn, 2021; cloutier, 2021; dussault, 2021). for guatemalan workers, it is the lack of alternative employment that forces them to consider becoming undocumented migrants in the u.s. rogelio acts of citizenship among agricultural migrant workers studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 103 explains: “if we make a mistake or we don’t work as fast as the boss wants, we are sent back, and we’ll never come back.” for guatemalan workers, according to our study participants, the recruitment companies operating in guatemala do not permit changes. rogelio continues: the majority of those who go to the u.s. are guatemalans, because mexicans have more opportunities here… if things don’t work out for mexicans, they are sent to another farm. if we guatemalans sometimes make a mistake, we then try to emigrate to the u.s. (rogelio) those who request changes are uncertain if they will secure future contracts. as cristian comments, “my brother-in-law asked to be switched to another farm, but now he doesn’t know if he is going to canada this year… this is just too risky.” the uncertainty about one’s future in the program, combined with the fear of asserting one’s rights, forces the workers to seek alternatives elsewhere. adán tells us: there are bad bosses, there are places, that is, houses that are not fit to live in and the workers who suffer from this do not speak, partly for fear that they will no longer be able to return to work. and that makes some escape to the united states. a lot of them have already done it. (adán) unable to obtain a transfer to another farm, some workers choose to attempt their luck on u.s. farms. adán told us about his friend who was about to be sent home after two months of work because the harvesting season ended earlier than expected. he reflects on his friend’s decision to go to the u.s.: “i imagine that it is something that he did not plan, but he had no choice, because he came to work here, but because of what happened he had no choice, he made the decision to leave.” secondly, some workers escaped from the program by obtaining an open work permit. under the open work permit for vulnerable workers program (r207.1-a72), migrant workers on valid employer-specific work permits who are experiencing abuse in their workplace, or who are at risk of workplace abuse, are eligible to receive an open work permit valid for one year and thus escape the violent or abusive situation they experience in their current employment (ircc, 2021b). a total of 2,481 workers applied for open permits under this program between june 2019, when the program was initiated, and july 2021. the approval rate was less than 60% (regino, 2022). to obtain an open permit, workers are required to apply directly to ircc by filling out an online application in either english or french, including a letter that details the abuse, or risk of abuse, and provide additional evidence. without the help of grassroots organizations or unions, workers find it virtually impossible to do this. in quebec, rattmaq assisted many workers in applying for open permits. among them was melchor, whom we interviewed and who is still awaiting the decision while being housed at a rattmaq guillermo candiz, tanya basok & danièle bélanger studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 104 shelter. while these two strategies existed prior to the pandemic, we argue that the pandemic created a context for enhanced political awareness that resulted in acts of mobile citizenship. in the section that follows we outline how at the micro-level the pandemic intensified tensions between workers and employers on the farm, and at the meso-level it strengthened the infrastructure that made an escape (as well as other acts of citizenship) possible. tensions and opportunities during the covid-19 pandemic increased tensions at work during the pandemic, migrant farmworkers were recognized as being essential for economic growth in the agricultural sector and the food security of the canadian population (vosko et al., 2022). however, this recognition did not translate into structural changes within the program that would result in a reduction of their precarity (bélanger & candiz, 2021). if anything, their conditions deteriorated, not the least due to health risks posed by the virus, as evidenced by the high number of outbreaks that have occurred on farms (champagne, 2021b). upon arrival, workers were required to stay in quarantine for 14 days. the federal government required employers to support workers during this period, including paying wages equal to 30 hours of work per week (haddad, 2020; esdc, n.d.). under the mandatory isolation assistance program for temporary foreign workers, employers received up to 1,500 canadian dollars per temporary foreign worker to “[mitigate] the effects of the covid-19 pandemic on the supply of canada’s food supply, helping the agricultural sectors” (government of canada, 2021). for most workers, the support they received from their employers during this period was lower than the amount they might have earned working during this time. furthermore, some workers had the costs of food deducted from their pay cheques. isolation, reduced earnings, and fear of infection while in initial quarantine or during outbreaks, generated elevated levels of anxiety among the workers we interviewed. the rising importance of community organizations: the case of rattmaq responding to the need to protect migrant farmworkers (and local communities) from the spread of the virus, federal and provincial authorities provided funding to community organizations who were to provide information and care for migrant workers. in the province of quebec, various government departments similarly funded several community organizations to assist migrants. rattmaq, for instance, received funds from the ministry of agriculture and ministry of labour to provide information to the workers about health measures and accompany them to health clinics. between april 1, 2020, acts of citizenship among agricultural migrant workers studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 105 and march 31, 2021, rattmaq welcomed 17,7000 migrant farmworkers at the airport in montreal. while informing workers about current health measures, rattmaq also educated these workers about their rights and distributed rattmaq’s contact information. during the same period, they received over 3,500 calls requesting information and assistance, and they were able to intervene or take legal action in 50 cases of rights violations by employers (rattmaq, 2021). guillermo tells us how he sought assistance from rattmaq when his company ignored his request for protection, and how this action also helped him realize that migrant farmworkers did not need to fear asserting their rights: i needed to have the second dose [of the covid-19 vaccine], and i asked the company to take an appointment for me. i waited, but they never replied. so, i reached out to rattmaq, and they made an appointment and took me to get vaccinated. i didn’t see any support from my company… i used to be afraid to talk [to organizations] because all my co-workers used to say that if we talked to them, we would lose a job. but when rattmaq explained to us that we had rights, i realized that i don’t need to be fearful. (guillermo) in addition to greeting workers at the airport, providing information on covid-19 and workers’ rights, assisting workers in applying for open work permits, and providing other forms of help, rattmaq has been extending legal advice to migrant workers who have been apprehended by authorities while trying to cross into the u.s. with the help of smugglers, as was the case of nestor. as nestor’s family was a victim of extortion in guatemala, rattmaq advised him to seek asylum in canada. without rattmaq’s help, nestor would have been deported back to his country. workers are able to stay in touch with this organization through text messages, phone calls, or social media. as maximiliano explains, they [rattmaq] gave us a whatsapp number and we could call it anonymously and ask for help and ask if they could come and see what was happening. i feel that the bosses are going to feel pressured [to improve conditions] because we have someone who defends and also supports us. (maximiliano) one of rattmaq’s most important victories was the recognition by the administrative labour tribunal (tat) of non-hodgkin’s lymphoma as an occupational injury caused by exposure to pesticides. the case involved armando lazzo bautista, a mexican worker who was required to spray pesticides on apple trees and blueberry plants without a mask, protective clothing or glasses on a farm located in the montérégie region in quebec between 2012 and 2016. rattmaq assisted the worker in presenting a claim to the tat. this case forms an important legal precedent that has the potential to transform work practices in agriculture in canada (champagne, 2022; pilon, 2022) and empower other migrant farmworkers. in sum, it is clear that guillermo candiz, tanya basok & danièle bélanger studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 106 rattmaq has enabled many migrant farmworkers to assert their rights by seeking information or assistance from this organization. the rising relevance and visibility of the bastard migration industry escape from agricultural farms is facilitated by smugglers who advertise their services through whatsapp and in-person contacts as well as in public places frequented by workers, such as supermarkets. as ernesto notes, “they understand our needs and they take advantage of us. they say, ‘look, i can take you to the u.s.’ but sometimes, they trick us. they vanish and no one ever sees them again.” nestor was one of the migrant farmworkers who was deceived by smugglers. he found the working environment on his farm in canada intolerable. furthermore, he was determined to reunite with his daughter, a victim of extortion, who had fled from guatemala to california. he was initially asked to pay $7,000 to be taken to california, but unable to pay this amount, he agreed to pay $5,000 to get to new york. once he was smuggled over the border, he was instructed to call a contact person. however, the contact person never showed up, and eventually, nestor was apprehended by police and returned to canada, where he was placed in a hotel to await deportation to guatemala. it is because of this type of deception and abuse that some researchers label this branch of the migration industry “bastard” (hernándezleón, 2013). similar stories of abandonment surfaced in the canadian media in 2021and 2022. although these smuggling networks already existed prior to the covid-19 pandemic, the additional border control measures adopted in response to the pandemic may have given more prominence to this shady economy. at the same time, many farmworkers whose working and living conditions deteriorated during the covid-19 pandemic were easily lured by false promises made by smugglers. conclusion in this article we expanded the notion of acts of citizenship introduced by isin and nielsen (2008; isin, 2009) and applied to many instances of migrants’ agency by other scholars (e.g., nyers, 2015; rygiel, 2011; schwiertz, 2021; squire, 2017) to situate the ways migrant farmworkers in québec, canada, claimed rights in particular time (i.e., the covid-19 pandemic) and space (i.e., the province of québec). more specifically, we demonstrated that during the covid-19 pandemic certain developments unfolding in québec made it possible for migrant farmworkers to engage in particular acts we characterize as instances of rupture (isin, 2009). among them are speech acts and attempts to confront unsafe working conditions. we highlighted one form of agency, namely, escape from demeaning, exploitative and unsafe working and living conditions. as we document in this article, some workers abandoned their acts of citizenship among agricultural migrant workers studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 107 farms by trying to escape from the country across the canada-us border while others sought an open work permit that would allow them to obtain employment on a different farm. we called these strategies acts of mobile citizenship, borrowing this notion from basok and candiz (2020). we situated these acts of mobile citizenship in time and space by analyzing three changes that unravelled during the covid-19 pandemic in québec: enhanced tensions in the workplace, new funding provided to community organizations to offer pandemic-related support to farmworkers, and the growth of the migration industry that facilitates unauthorized border crossing. we pointed out that the support offered by community organizations during the pandemic also included action to raise awareness among migrant farmworkers with regard to their rights. however, even though migrant farmworkers became more aware of their rights during the pandemic, their actions to liberate themselves from precarity and exploitative working conditions were generally individual, and among other responses required escape. collective forms of right claiming processes to challenge structural conditions that produce abuse and demand fundamental changes that would challenge employers’ power and workers’ subordination are yet to emerge. employer-tied work permits and the inability to unionize for most workers severely hampers any hope of collective forms of contestation. despite these structural limitations, a few instances of collective protests emerged in québec over the summer of 2021. in one case, workers contacted the media to unveil very poor and unsafe housing conditions; in another case, they contacted a union (tuac) to claim their right to financial compensation offered to workers by the federal government during the pandemic (champagne, 2021a; lavigne, 2021). this indicates that, in some rare instances, workers may act in solidarity with each other to make claims, despite the risk of being deported. the awareness of being considered essential during the pandemic may have contributed to these courageous and collective acts reported by journalists. finally, the pandemic made it obvious to the general public that migrant farmworkers played a crucial role in local food production chains. while prepandemic media coverage of migrant farmworkers tended to underscore how the tfwp benefits employers, sending countries, and the workers (the infamous “triple win”), and that cases of migrant workers’ abuse were attributable to individual “bad apples” among the employers (bauder, 2008), new media coverage squarely uncovered the structural role of foreign workers in local, provincial, and national economies, and local food production, as well as the fundamental problems these migrants faced (as discussed by basok, lópez sala & avallone, 2023). media discourses adopted during the pandemic made it clear to the general public that their preference to consume locally produced products, a concern exacerbated during the pandemic and the closure of borders, depended on the availability (and the well-being) of the migrant labour force. in the context of sharply increasing food prices and environmental concerns, migrant farmworkers seem to be garnering more support from the guillermo candiz, tanya basok & danièle bélanger studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 91-111, 2023 108 public than ever. more generally, the awareness of the essential contributions migrants make to the canadian economy may be conducive to facilitating more citizen support for non-residents and non-citizens who have no political power, and to generating more pressure on the federal government to make structural changes to the temporary migration programs. in its turn, the growing support by citizens may embolden migrant farmworkers to claim their rights through various acts of citizenship. acknowledgements we express our sincere gratitude to the migrant farmworkers who generously shared their wisdom and insight with us. we also extend our thanks to marieeveline touma for her assistance in conducting interviews. additionally, we would like to thank rattmaq and the association for the rights of household and farm workers (dtmf-rhfw) for their unwavering support. references basok, t. 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(2022). understanding migrant farmworkers’ health and well-being during the global covid-19 pandemic in canada: toward a transnational conceptualization of employment strain. international journal of environmental research and public health, 19(14), 8574. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19148574 zhang, y., ostrovsky, y., & arsenault, a. (2021). foreign workers in canadian agriculture. economic and social reports, statistics canada. correspondence address: luisa veronis, department of geography, university of ottawa, 60 university, simard hall, room 017, ottawa, on k1n 6n5, canada, tel.: (+1) 613 562 5800, ext. 1046 e-mail: lveronis@uottawa.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 27-46, 2013 the role of nonprofit sector networks as mechanisms for immigrant political participation luisa veronis university of ottawa, canada abstract issues of immigrant political incorporation and transnational politics have drawn increased interest among migration scholars. this paper contributes to debates in this field by examining the role of networks, partnerships, and collaborations of immigrant community organizations as mechanisms for immigrant political participation both locally and transnationally. these issues are addressed through an ethnographic study of the hispanic development council, an umbrella advocacy organization representing settlement agencies serving latin american immigrants in toronto, canada. analysis of hdc’s three sets of networks (at the community, city, and transnational levels) from a geographic and relational approach demonstrates the potentials and limits of non-profit sector partnerships as mechanisms and concrete spaces for immigrant mobilization, empowerment, and social action in a context of neoliberal governance. it is argued that a combination of partnerships with a range of both state and non-state actors and at multiple scales can be significant in enabling non-profit organizations to advance the interests of immigrant, minority and disadvantaged communities. introduction among the most exciting recent developments in immigration scholarship has been an increased interest in immigrant political incorporation (e.g., de graauw & andrew, 2011; ramkrishnan & bloemraad, 2008a; american behavioral scientist, 2011) in parallel to the growing field of transnational politics (levitt & jaworsky 2007; smith & bakker 2008). this paper builds on this work by responding to calls for more research on the role and significance of networks, partnerships and collaborations that studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 28 luisa veronis immigrant community organizations establish with a range of state and non-state actors both locally (de graauw & andrew, 2011; ramakrishnan & bloemraad, 2008b) and transnationally (orozco and rouse, 2012). the aim is to investigate the potentials and limits of non-profit sector networks as mechanisms for immigrant political participation by examining the findings of ethnographic research on the hispanic development council (hdc), an umbrella advocacy organization representing agencies serving latin american immigrants in toronto, canada. the focus is on three sets of networks that hdc developed since the 1970s with multiple actors both in toronto and in latin america. this case study contributes new insights into the role of immigrant organizations and the mechanisms for immigrant mobilization, empowerment and social action by examining a canadian umbrella organization whose primary mandate is advocacy rather than service provision. these issues are significant in light of debates regarding the nonprofit sector’s loss of autonomy and legitimacy as a result of welfare state restructuring since the 1980s and 90s (wolch 1990) and limited avenues for advocacy and resistance amidst neoliberal forms of governance (leitner, peck, & sheppard, 2007). the paper provides a geographical analysis combined with a relational approach that focuses on the nature and scale of hdc’s networks, the circumstances of their formation, and the actors involved to shed light on the significance of non-profit sector collaborations as concrete spaces for information sharing, negotiation, mobilization and social action both locally and transnationally. the main argument is that by engaging in a variety of networks and partnerships with both state and non-state actors and at multiple scales, ngos can augment their capacity for advocacy and political participation and even achieve a degree of recognition and policy influence. the first section provides a review of the relevant literature on immigrant political incorporation and transnational politics. this is followed by a presentation of the methodology and case study. the bulk of the paper examines hdc’s three networks paying particular attention to their potentials and limits for a critical analysis of the role and significance of non-profit sector partnerships as mechanisms for advocacy and participation. immigrant political incorporation and transnational politics growing scholarship on immigrant political incorporation has sought to map out the diversity of immigrant experiences and practices with various state and non-state actors. the novelty of this literature lies in its focus on immigrants’ participation not only in formal politics (voting, elections, representation), but also increasingly in informal politics (civic engagement, activism, community development) (de graauw & andrew, 2011; ramakrishnan & bloemraad, 2008a; american behavioral scientist, 2011). concomitantly, immigrant politics have drawn a great deal of attention in transnationalism studies generating studies on the new social fields of immigrant politics and activism across national borders (levitt & japokva, 2007; smith & bakker, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 the role of nonprofit sector networks 29 2008). the following discussion reviews issues in immigrant political incorporation and transnational politics relevant for the analysis of hdc’s networks. the recent focus on immigrants’ participation in informal politics has been significant for theorizing the wide range of immigrant experiences and practices in relation to civil society, including grassroots initiatives, community organizing, and activities for social development typically through community-based, non-profit and nongovernmental organizations (ngos). moving beyond the traditional focus on national politics, this literature has narrowed the analytical lens to immigrants’ involvement at the local, community, and urban levels. the focus is increasingly on immigrant community organizations, including their role and daily operations, in order to understand the influence of structures, actors, opportunities, and limits to immigrant community organizing. according to ramakrishnan and bloemraad (2008b), research on immigrant organizations can provide rich insights on the openings and challenges to immigrant participation. immigrant organizations are significant channels for immigrant political incorporation because they represent an avenue toward formal political participation while also being a source of policy influence at the local level (de graauw & andrew, 2011, p. 193). a growing number of empirically-based studies document the diverse landscape of immigrant organizing (e.g., ramakrishnan & bloemraad, 2008a; de graauw & andrew, 2011; landolt, goldring, & bernhard, 2011). in an effort to theorize the role of immigrant community organizations, ramakrishnan & bloemraad (2008b) developed a conceptual and analytical framework that stresses the significance of place, ethnic groups, and types of organizations as important factors in shaping the form and practices of immigrant political participation. in particular, the significance of place, or context, has been under great scrutiny to understand the processes, opportunities, and barriers that influence the successes and failures of immigrant political mobilization; these include: structures and institutions; national policies; local political culture; and the countries of exit and of settlement (bloemraad, 2011; landolt, goldring, & bernhard, 2011; mahler & siemiatycki, 2011; ramakrishnan & bloemraad, 2008b). it is important to underline that empirical studies are sensitive to the role of context and factors at different scales, from the local to the national and transnational level. the significance of context is demonstrated in a recent special issue of the american behavioral scientist (2011) dedicated to cross-national comparisons of immigrant political incorporation in the usa and canada, two seemingly similar countries in terms of histories of immigration and immigrant integration. bloemraad (2011) stresses that even small differences in national, urban and local contexts can influence the form and nature of immigrant political practices. in particular, she underlines the role of national policies of immigration and integration, the provision of settlement services, state responsibilities and funding structures. relevant here is the fact that immigrant organizations in canada belong studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 30 luisa veronis to the so-called “shadow state” (wolch, 1990) of non-profit organizations that serve community needs with government funding. critics have pointed out that such arrangements make the non-profit sector directly accountable to the state, thus reducing its autonomy, legitimacy, and ability to engage in advocacy (wolch, 1990; 1999). further, their dependency on state funding made canadian immigrant organizations vulnerable to state restructuring and the adoption of neoliberal policies in the 1980s and 1990s (creese, 2006). in addition to downloading and cutbacks to social programs, important changes to funding structures—a shift from core-funding to project-funding—reinforced the non-profit sector’s need to focus on service provision and performance rather than advocacy (phillips, 2003). moreover, service providers have been under tremendous stress as they compete for a smaller pool of funding (creese, 2006). these contextual factors have meant that since the 1990s advocacy has been low on the radar of immigrant organizations in canada with important implications for immigrants’ political participation. it is in light of this context that the case of hdc is particularly compelling. while the significance of context is indisputable, landolt et al. (2011) are critical of efforts to theorize immigrant political participation solely from this perspective because, they argue, so far it has not been possible to discern any real patterns or predictable outcomes between different groups or types of organizations. they propose a relational approach that focuses on the dialogical interactions and negotiations between a diversity of actors and agendas that need to be understood in addition to the existing political opportunity structures. they advance the notion of “agenda setting” to capture the complex dialogue processes that take place both in-group and out-group for community organizing. they argue that such an approach can help to understand the emergence and development of immigrant community organizations and how they evolve over time, while also shedding light on immigrant politics in practice. while considering the impact of changing opportunity structures, the ethnographic study of hdc takes a relational approach to understand how the changing needs and interests of various actors, both in-group and out-group, shaped the council’s three networks over time. in spite of significant efforts to outline the diverse landscape of immigrant ngos, less attention has been paid to the relationships, partnerships and collaborations that they develop, the reasons for doing so, and the role of these networks. this is surprising given debates on the “shadow state” and potential options for a weakened non-profit sector to respond to community needs, increase its influence, and initiate progressive social change within a framework of neoliberal governance. on the one hand, salamon (1999) argues for “holding the centre” by developing stronger collaborations with government; on the other, wolch (1999) believes that ngos should “decentre” and join the margins to become a site of resistance—in her eyes, the only route to regaining autonomy and legitimacy. brock (2003; see also mayer, 1995, 2007) provides a middle ground alternative by suggesting that nonprofit sector coalitions and partnerships can provide a viable and legitimate studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 the role of nonprofit sector networks 31 strategy to respond to government initiatives while advancing community interests. creese’s (2006) study of a coalition of settlement agencies in vancouver illustrates this middle ground approach. her case demonstrates that the impacts of state restructuring can serve as an impetus for building non-profit coalitions and increased advocacy amidst neoliberal governance. creese provides valuable insights into the role of ngo partnerships for mobilization, action and social change around immigrant issues at the municipal level. similarly, viswanathan’s (2010) study of the alternative planning group (apg) discusses the formation of a coalition of umbrella organizations to represent immigrant and visible minority groups in local politics and its attempts to transform dominant social planning in the context of toronto’s neoliberal governance. while creese (2006) and viswanathan (2010) each focus on one kind of coalition, which in both cases addresses immigrant issues at the urban level, the study of hdc builds on their work to show that ngos can develop a range of networks with both state and nonstate actors and at multiple scales, thus simultaneously “holding the centre”, joining the margin, and opting for the middle ground. the field of transnational politics can offer some insights for the study of networks while also being sensitive to scale given its focus on immigrant politics and activism across national borders. levitt and jaworsky (2007, p. 136) distinguish three main research foci: (1) homeland politics comprises immigrant political activism in the country of settlement around issues in the country of origin and sometimes also involvement in formal politics; (2) immigrant politics refers to political activities to improve the status of an immigrant group in the country of settlement—it can be transnational when involving resources from the country of origin; and (3) translocal politics includes activities undertaken mostly by latin american and caribbean hometown associations (htas) to improve infrastructure in the communities of origin often by working with the local state. much effort has focused on dispelling the myth that migrants’ involvement in home country politics impedes their incorporation in the country of settlement (levitt & jaworsky, 2007). on the contrary, research has shown that transnational politics complement and even strengthen immigrant incorporation (smith & bakker, 2008). even more, it is argued that often the same actors tend to become involved in “homeland, new land, and international politics” (levitt & jaworsky, 2007: 137), which suggests that immigrant social and political action may involve practices at multiple scales simultaneously—an issue that will be illustrated with the case of hdc. most research in transnational politics examines how individual migrants, particular migrant groups or hometown associations engage in political practices and development projects primarily in the country or community of origin (glick schiller, basch, & blanc-szanton, 1992; smith & bakker, 2008; smith & guarnizo, 1998). less attention has been paid to transnational social action that involves multiple actors at multiple scales and that is multilocal or multi-sited. one such example is law’s (2003) study of a network of migrant labour organizations advocating for migrants’ labour rights studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 32 luisa veronis across asia. her work examines the role of electronic communications in fostering transnational political communities—which she calls “transnational cyberpublics”—that occasionally also meet in real spaces during conferences or workshops. the case of hdc will further advance understanding of the role and nature of transnational networks that represent real spaces for immigrant social and political action both locally and transnationally. finally, orozco and rouse (2012) found that most immigrant organizations that engage in development work—generally htas—tend to be small and have limited human and financial resources as well as expertise and therefore their ability to effectively implement projects in the countries of origin is greatly diminished. they argue that htas could improve their role as development players by working in partnership with other organizations, foundations and governments. this paper builds on these insights from the literature on immigrant political incorporation and transnational politics to investigate the potentials of non-profit sector networks and partnerships as mechanisms for immigrant participation and activism both locally and transnationally. the hispanic development council and latin american immigration to toronto the findings presented here are part of a broader project on latin american social participation, collective organizing, and transnationalism in toronto conducted from 2001 to 2003. data were collected using an ethnographic approach involving a variety of qualitative methods, including: 65 personal interviews and one focus group interview with community leaders, representatives of community organizations, social workers, clients and volunteers; participant observation at community events, meetings, and immigrant organizations; and consultation of secondary sources such as community and government documents, ngo reports and newsletters, archives, and local spanish-speaking media. the hispanic development council played the important role of gatekeeper and thus was instrumental in providing access to information, key informants, and community events. in particular, this paper draws on the findings from personal interviews with all members of hdc’s staff and board of directors, one focus group interview with the executive directors of the alternative planning group, and participant observation at hdc’s meetings, events, and activities during the research period. founded in 1978, hdc is a grassroots, community-based non-profit organization representing over seventy settlement agencies serving spanishspeaking immigrants in toronto. the council is an umbrella organization with an advocacy mandate to improve the quality of life of latin american immigrants, and to some extent that of other immigrant, visible minority, and disadvantaged groups in toronto. hdc’s activities involve primarily research and policy analysis on issues of concern to latin americans to document their needs and legitimize their demands. the council is also responsible for studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 the role of nonprofit sector networks 33 improving service provision through its network of agency members and by lobbying the government and funders. while not a direct service provider, hdc offers a number of programs in key areas of interest to latin americans. in the late 1990s and early 2000s, these included a counselling program for at-risk latin american youth, the young international professionals program (discussed below), and a social ecology program to raise environmental awareness while addressing social needs in toronto. moreover, hdc is involved in various collaborations such as the alternative planning group that contribute to its advocacy mandate. most of hdc’s funding comes from various federal and provincial ministries, the city of toronto, and mainstream organizations such as the united way. this funding supports mostly the delivery of its direct services. hdc’s history is linked to latin american settlement in canada. while relatively recent, latin american immigration to canada is diverse with the arrival of a number of different waves (veronis & smith, 2011), including two significant waves of refugees: the coup wave fleeing military dictatorships in south america (mostly from chile) in the mid-1970s, and the central american wave (especially guatemala and el salvador) in the 1980s. the 1990s and 2000s saw a diversification of migration with the arrival of skilled migrants from throughout latin america, refugees from colombia and mexico, temporary migrants, and to a lesser extent undocumented migrants. latin american immigrants tend to be relatively disadvantaged when considering socioeconomic indicators such as income, homeownership, and incidence of low-income families (ornstein, 2000; veronis & smith, 2011). this situation can be explained by the significant share of refugees combined with discrimination and systemic barriers; latin american professionals face challenges such as the accreditation of foreign credentials and the lack of “canadian work experience” in spite of higher levels of education (bauder, 2003; veronis & smith, 2011). hdc’s activities have evolved in response to latin americans’ changing interests over time (see veronis, 2010). in the late-1970s the main concern was with meeting the needs of south american refugees because there were no culturallyand linguistically-sensitive services; they had to organize to provide to their specific demands—including legal and settlement counselling, and services for survivors of violence and torture. the emerging latin american community needed an organization to represent and advocate for its needs, lobby the government for funds, and coordinate service provision. these issues defined and shaped hdc’s original purpose and activities, including the formation of its network of agency members. the arrival of central american refugees in the 1980s coincided with a period of consolidation of service provision and diversification to address the needs of interest groups such as latin american women and youth. since the mid-1990s, hdc’s work has responded to two simultaneous processes: the diversification of latin americans’ needs with the arrival of more socially diverse migrants; and the impacts of state restructuring both on the non-profit sector itself and on disadvantaged communities such as immigrants (creese, 2006; viswanathan, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 34 luisa veronis 2010). in this context, hdc diversified its activities, including the provision of a few direct programs and the development of partnerships with various organizations in toronto and in latin america. hdc’s networks as mechanisms for immigrant political participation hdc’s network of settlement agencies central to hdc’s early work was the organization of “network meetings” among spanish-speaking social workers to discuss issues regarding latin american immigrants’ needs, exchange information, and organize services. at the beginning, the meetings were unstructured and service workers attended as individuals interested in improving service provision. gradually, the meetings became more structured—generally organized around common issues of interest—and service workers attended as representatives of their respective organizations. topics have varied depending on the issues affecting latin american immigrants and conditions of service provision at a given time (e.g., legal aid, housing, mental health, families and children, seniors, etc.). as hdc’s membership grew in the 2000s, the network meetings were opened to service workers regardless of whether their organization is a member of the council. since the beginning, hdc’s network of agencies has been instrumental in providing a space for networking, mobilization, and social action. one board member explained that hdc’s mission is “to provide a space to share and to exchange,” and described the meetings as “a forum for networking and to talk about a particular issue that is important to everybody” (personal interview, 31 march 2003). the idea of “space” here is not just metaphorical; two examples will illustrate the material role of hdc’s network of agencies as a space and mechanism for immigrant participation and action in practice. first, hdc’s network was significant for the development of a web of services for spanish-speaking immigrants in the 1970s and 80s. through the network meetings, service workers were able to discuss the group’s needs, become informed about existing programs, and coordinate the design of new services. given the absence of services in spanish and of specialized programs for refugees, the network made a significant contribution to meeting the specific needs of the growing latin american community at the time. once service provision was consolidated, hdc and its members were then able to focus on social policy, community development, and capacity building to advance the group’s interests. for example, in the 1980s, hdc’s network played a key role in mobilizing the latin american community and in lobbying the canadian government to create a special immigration program to sponsor central american refugees (hdc, 2003a). similarly, in the early 1990s, hdc organized a series of conferences to address issues facing latin american women. from a different perspective, the network meetings were beneficial to service workers as individuals and professionals. research participants studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 the role of nonprofit sector networks 35 stressed that thanks to the information gained through the meetings, they are better able to serve their clients. service workers can also address community issues and the role they and their organizations can play. one participant explained: i believe that the network meetings are vital . . . because . . . all the themes that are addressed are of interest to all the community workers. . . . this is also an incentive for community workers to converse about the problematique, and for them to feel that there is this kind of support and that they are not on their own. . . . thus, it is very important to know that there are other people in the same situations, that there are initiatives, that contacts are being established, that there is this network process that is very important. (personal interview, march 20, 2003) these findings illustrate the significance of hdc’s network of agencies for improving service provision, and for coordinating and facilitating the work of service workers and their organizations. further, they underline the role of the network as a space not only for information sharing, but also for mobilization and concrete social action. second, hdc’s network became even more significant in the 1990s. the focus of the network meetings shifted to address the impacts of state restructuring on the non-profit sector itself and on disadvantaged immigrant communities. service workers met to discuss the challenges of new funding structures and changing work conditions, and to provide anecdotal evidence of the impacts on their organizations and clients. one board member described hdc’s new role in this context: since they [the governments] have introduced all these changes . . . the council has seen itself becoming this entity . . . towards which all [the agencies] were running as to a saviour. . . . [the] council, from one day to the other had to play the role of a protector, of looking for more information than what is stated in our mandate; . . . of being a mediator, including for the organizations in terms of funding sources and establishing the dialogue with different government bodies, something that we did not do before. each organization used to write its proposals, send them off and that was the end of it. now they are calling for the council to add its voice within this process. (personal interview, march 20, 2003; emphasis original) by the early 2000s, hdc and the network played an important role in supporting service agencies as organizations to access funds, write grant proposals, find new funding opportunities, and get in touch with funders. the council’s support and contacts became vital to the survival of service agencies that were struggling to remain afloat in a rapidly changing environment. in a context of increased competition for reduced funding, hdc encouraged collaborations among agencies. these collaborations had several advantages: they helped ngos to work together instead of competing for reduced funds, to make the most of their limited resources by sharing their areas of expertise, and in turn, to coordinate their programs in response to community studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 36 luisa veronis needs (see trudeau & veronis, 2009). the existence of hdc’s network was essential in the development of these collaborations. the network meetings also continued to support service workers as individuals. state restructuring altered work conditions in the non-profit sector—including casualization through part-time and contract work (ilcan & basok, 2004; creese, 2006)— causing much stress among community workers already overworked due to decreasing resources. one participant described the network meetings as “a kind of vitamin bomb” (personal interview, 31 march 2003) to suggest that they provided the psychological and practical support they needed to carry out their daily work. in addition to these important material contributions for the survival of service agencies, the changes brought by state restructuring reinforced the mobilization role of hdc’s network. an outreach committee was formed in 2002 with the aim to foster an environment that could lead to action: in the meetings . . . , the message that we were trying to give is a call for social action to workers in order for them to become aware of the role that we can play and this role can be from the microto the macro-level: educating the clients that come to see us about their rights, their obligations, and the barriers that they face; discussions with our managers or the board of directors of our respective agencies, making them see that it is necessary to be involved in the process. (personal interview, december 6, 2002; translated from spanish) notwithstanding, hdc’s ability to initiate concrete change has been limited due to a lack of resources within both the council and its agency members. aware of these limitations, in the early 2000s hdc worked to reach out to the broader latin american community in order to develop more concrete strategies. for example, it tried to improve its visibility by inviting the community to its meetings and to increase participation by opening its membership to independent professionals such as lawyers and paralegals working with immigrants. hdc also developed contacts with a variety of latin american interest groups, such as associations of professionals and seniors’ associations (the latter led to the organization of a one day forum on latin american seniors). finally, hdc established collaborations with non-latin american organizations representing immigrants in toronto and partners in latin america, which will be the focus below. hdc’s network of agencies corresponds to a grassroots network at the margins as advocated by wolch (1999). in this case, the main limitations include a lack of resources and little ability to initiate significant structural change. nevertheless, one of hdc’s strengths is that through its network of agencies, it can play a strategic role in the process of mobilizing service agencies and the community on a given issue, it can get help from other organizations, and therefore might be more likely to have success and visibility. so far, there have been no such spaces where latin americans can come together as a community in toronto, discuss the issues they face, and mobilize to address them. to this extent hdc’s network of agencies represents a social and political space for immigrant empowerment and participation studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 the role of nonprofit sector networks 37 with some potential for concrete action to improve latin americans’ wellbeing in toronto. the alternative planning group1 hdc has not been acting alone and its focus has not been solely on the latin american community. in 1998, it established a partnership with the chinese canadian national council toronto chapter (ccnc-to) and the council of agencies serving south asians (cassa)—two umbrella organizations that like hdc represent agencies serving immigrants and visible minorities in toronto. in 2003, the african canadian social development council (acsdc) joined the partnership and together the four councils formed the alternative planning group (apg). the four organizations and their communities share several important similarities. first, the four councils represent agencies serving their respective groups. next, each community has a complex history of immigration to canada and is internally diverse (teixeira, li, & kobayashi, 2011). notwithstanding differences between and within the four groups, they also face similar challenges in the processes of settlement and incorporation, including systemic barriers and discrimination. all four communities are relatively disadvantaged and tend to concentrate in toronto’s poorest neighbourhoods (ornstein, 2000; viswanathan, 2010). one apg member summarized: all of our communities are immigrant communities, . . . racialized communities. . . . by racialized i mean social, economic, and political marginalization. . . . our communities are also facing the same challenges of settlement in terms of service delivery, . . . the same issues of empowerment, of participation, of equity, of access. . . . [there] is a lot more in common amongst us than that is not common. (focus group interview, may 29, 2003) moreover, these communities are underrepresented at all levels of the canadian government and structures of decision-making regardless of their size and time of settlement in canada (siemiatycki, 2011). this point is significant and apg’s formation needs to be examined in relation to the broader context of provincial and municipal politics. hdc’s partnership with ccnc-to and cassa began in 1998, just one year after the amalgamation of the city of toronto, when the non-profit sector and disadvantaged groups were increasingly feeling the effects of neoliberal state restructuring (viswanathan, 2010). the political climate of the time was significant in motivating the formation of apg. in addition to being treated as a single group within the structures of local government, immigrants and visible minorities were left out of the dominant debates regarding the province’s decision to amalgamate toronto (siemiatycki & isin, 1998). this situation was compounded by the fact that downloading and cutbacks hit immigrant and visible minority communities particularly hard. apg’s formation was thus based on a common concern with the conditions of vulnerable groups, and a desire to advocate, collaborate and coordinate actions on issues of studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 38 luisa veronis common interest in order to achieve a stronger voice in local politics. one of hdc’s board members explained: we, as the spanish-speaking community, we are not going to win on a lot of things because we belong to what is called the “immigrant community.” but there are also other immigrant communities that are suffering [from] the same problems . . . in terms of discrimination, lack of participation, racism, lack of . . . economic opportunities. . . . [one] of the ways that we could achieve something is to unite with those communities and to present a united voice before the government sources and before different forums to make our voice . . . stronger. and we have done that . . . [to] a great degree of success. (personal interview, april 1, 2003) together, the four groups represent a significant portion of toronto’s population—a “majority of minorities” (focus group interview, may 29, 2003)—that the government cannot ignore. they can have more influence not only because of their sheer size, but also because their ideas and actions can have more legitimacy in the face of dominant discourses and practices given that they are the outcome of negotiations amongst four diverse immigrant groups. apg was formed to initiate change. the executive directors emphasized that apg’s “job is to change the system” (focus group interview, may 29, 2003), including dominant structures, policies, and discourses. in particular, apg is concerned with the exclusion of immigrants and visible minorities from dominant practices of social planning in large metropolitan areas where most of these groups reside. its aim is to identify and eliminate systemic barriers preventing immigrants and minority groups from participating in local processes of decision-making, and to develop more inclusionary approaches—referred to as “alternative social planning”—that take into account the diversity of canada’s population. apg’s executive directors elaborated: the other change is that anything that we do . . . by definition will become something different [from the dominant practices]. . . . we are also changing the whole discourse of social planning. we are not [just] doing planning for people. we are looking at planning in a very holistic way . . . for the fact that we work together . . . to us, that is planning for equity because . . . we have to negotiate our differences. (focus group interview, may 29, 2003) as the quotes suggest, the experience of working together has been empowering for apg’s members since minority groups tend traditionally to be isolated and struggle on their own within dominant structures of decisionmaking. through this partnership, the four councils managed to strengthen their individual organizations, build capacity within their communities, and promote community development for all four groups. their aim is to change social planning for canadian society at large and they believe that apg can serve as a model of governance given that negotiation of difference is core to the organization’s functioning. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 the role of nonprofit sector networks 39 apg’s work has focused mostly on lobbying the municipal government and it managed a number of achievements. since the beginning, the councils presented joint deputations at city hall. the most significant of these were against proposed cuts in the 2002-2003 budget to social and community grants allocated to local ngos, which they successfully prevented. more significantly, apg managed to gain legitimacy and consolidate its position in local politics by writing reports outlining its views on social planning and inclusion starting in 2003 (apg, 2003a, 2003b). the academic quality of its work helped apg to achieve a degree of recognition and to reach a new level of dialogue with the municipal government. the city became interested and contracted apg to write a report assessing the state of toronto’s social planning and to make recommendations for future directions (apg with ocasi and pin, 2004). these collaborative projects represent significant achievements showing that government institutions, funders, and ngos increasingly recognize apg as an actor in local governance. while apg has played an important role as an alternative think tank drawing attention to the concerns and viewpoints of marginalized groups in toronto, questions remain regarding its power to bring about real change. apg managed to disrupt dominant practices of token representation. moreover, the group’s reports and its recognition suggest that non-profit coalitions have the potential to become significant actors in local politics and policy development. notwithstanding, apg needs to put into practice the alternative social planning model for which it advocates. apg’s goal to transform the local structures of governance seems rather unlikely given that canadian municipal governments lack constitutional status and are “creatures of the legislature” (sancton, 2000, p. 426): they have little independent autonomy because their authority derives from provincial governments. nevertheless, in 2005 the canadian federation of municipalities was advocating for a “new deal for cities” to give large municipalities more autonomy and power within their jurisdictions (siemiatycki, 2011). a small step in this direction was achieved in 2005 with the signing of the canada-ontario immigration agreement, which featured a special provision to include municipalities as partners in the coordination of settlement programs. as canada’s largest and most diverse city, toronto gained some leverage, but more change has yet to come. since the completion of this research, apg has been collaborating on a number of internal projects (especially for youth and seniors) and external projects for advocacy with national networks, including the coalition for just immigration and refugee policy and the national anti-racism council (narc), while occasionally writing sponsored reports (e.g., apg, 2009). apg corresponds to the middle ground approach and responds to brock’s (2003) call for non-profit coalitions that can mobilize and coordinate to represent the interests of marginalized groups in the face of government initiatives. it also corroborates mayer’s (1995, 2007) description of new actors in neoliberal urban governance whose significance stems from their power to mobilize, negotiate and create pressure on local authorities. to this extent, the partnership between the four councils represents a mechanism and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 40 luisa veronis concrete space for immigrant advocacy, empowerment, and incorporation in urban politics. finally, important to the argument here is that hdc’s partnership with apg is entwined with its network of agency members. the two networks are mutually constitutive and interdependent insofar as apg feeds on each council’s intra-group work, while in turn allowing each organization to voice its community’s interests at the table of urban politics. the young professionals international program hdc’s third network—the young professionals international (ypi) program—involves transnational collaborations with partners (ngos, universities, research institutes) throughout latin america on a variety of projects depending on local interests, including: international development, policy, youth programs, information technology, and environmental education (hdc, 2003b). the council began to work in international cooperation after an initiative (launched by its network of agencies) to provide aid to communities affected by hurricane mitch in guatemala and honduras in 1998 (hdc, 2003a). based on this experience, in 1999 hdc started the ypi, an internship program to send post-graduates (mostly but not exclusively latin american) to work in latin america. it is important to note that this program consists of one of hdc’s direct services and also that it depends on the financial support of the canadian department of foreign affairs and international trade (dfait).2 as such, the nature of this network differs from the other two in that it consists of direct integration with government— salamon’s (1999) call for “holding the centre.” at the time of research, the yip was of tremendous significance to hdc because it represented its most significant source of funding and helped to cover core expenses such as staff salaries and infrastructure. while examination of the yip’s material contributions in latin america is beyond the scope of this paper, the goal is to analyze its potential as a mechanism for immigrant participation and activism across borders. according to its executive director, the fact of doing international work is integral to hdc’s holistic approach to community development (personal interview, 9 may 2003), which is based on a broad notion of “community” with latin americans in toronto being one community among others. hdc’s aim is to improve the well-being of communities both in canada and elsewhere, and thus by extension benefit the global community. one board member explained: the idea of being connected with our latin american countries is very beneficial because [many within] the latin american community . . . are still very connected to back home. . . . and this is [how] we can say that we [hdc] not just care about people here. it’s more of a global vision—that we are connected over there—and we care for the things that happen in latin america and we want to make sure that we use our resources to benefit not just the people [in] latin america, but also. . . the people here. . . part of [the canadian] system. . . . [it’s] a mutual benefit. (personal interview, february 12, 2003) studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 the role of nonprofit sector networks 41 this account provides valuable insight into the council’s approach to immigrant advocacy and activism by mobilizing, coordinating, and developing activities to improve the lives of communities in multiple locales and at multiple scales simultaneously. in contrast to most studies that examine transnational involvement to improve conditions in specific communities of origin (levitt & japatova, 2007; smith & bakker, 2008), hdc’s transnational partnerships connect to partners across latin america with the aim to promote community well-being and empowerment at both ends of the migration continuum. communities in latin america benefit from the program’s direct human and financial support, expertise in various areas of development, and its potential for advocacy and activism. by assisting post-graduates with their careers, the program also contributes to the economic welfare of the latin american community in canada, its capacity building and community development, and even its ability to mobilize. some members of hdc’s board believe the internships are valuable because they make the youth more aware of the issues that latin american people face across the americas. in turn, the interns will be more likely to become involved in activities to help advance latin americans’ interests, whether in the home countries or in canada. in her article on “transnational cyberpublics,” law (2003) explores the potentials of transnational social and political spaces that involve multiple actors in multiple places for labour migrants and advocacy groups across asia by focusing on the use of advanced communication technologies. while law’s case involves a “cyber” space, hdc’s transnational network arguably provides a more concrete space to the extent that post-graduates spend six months in latin america working with local partners and communities. moreover, the interns spend several months at hdc to undergo training before going abroad, and again upon their return to write an internship report. furthermore, many yip participants stay in touch and volunteer with hdc after the completion of their internship; a few were even hired by the council for specific projects. in this sense, hdc’s partnerships across latin america form a transnational social and political space with the potential for mobilization and action in multiple locales simultaneously. but reliance on state funding has its drawbacks. in this case, the yip put significant strain on hdc’s staff for its everyday administration and offered limited financial stability because it required applying for funding on an annual basis. in 2005, hdc opted to stop the yip program in order to consolidate its local youth programs, which had the advantage of streamlining hdc’s services while receiving provincial and municipal funding for two to three-year projects. nevertheless, hdc remains committed to playing a role in building and consolidating sustainable transnational linkages between canada and latin america.3 studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 42 luisa veronis non-profit sector networks as mechanisms for political participation while the findings presented here were collected in the early 2000s, they are still significant for understanding mechanisms for information exchange, mobilization, community organization, political participation, and even action for progressive social change that can be relevant to ngos beyond those working with immigrants. the analysis of hdc networks demonstrates not only that advocacy is possible in a context of neoliberal governance and that non-profit sector partnerships and coalitions can be instrumental in the process, but also that ngos do not necessarily have to choose between “holding the centre” (salamon, 1999), moving to the margin (wolch, 1999), or opting for a middle ground (creese, 2006). each type of network comes with its own set of potentials and limitations, and thus multiple paths are available for ngos and communities to advance their interests. further, this case suggests that a combination of partnerships with a range of state and non-state actors can help to overcome, at least partially, the limitations of each kind of network. similarly, a combination of networks at multiple scales can contribute to the process. indeed, a combination of different types of networks may offer more than the sum of their parts, and thus provide a potential strategy for the non-profit sector to sidestep some of the “structural dilemmas” of neoliberal governance (mayer, 2007, p.109). while hdc’s network of agencies, an example of wolch’s (1999) decentering approach, provides significant autonomy and legitimacy at a community level, it is limited in terms of resources and suffers from a number of disadvantages, including: reliance on volunteer work, dependency on the individuals involved, and ad hoc action. it has little power to initiate structural change—i.e., it suffers from a “mismatch between the scales of life-world experience and the scales of political and economic decisionmaking” (mayer, 2007, p.109). it can only develop tactics within existing structures—like collaborations between agencies, which are important in meeting a community’s material needs, but do not address sources of inequity, discrimination and injustice. moreover, this kind of grassroots network carries the risk of legitimizing neoliberal discourses on community responsibilization (ilcan & basok, 2004). where this network falls short, apg—the middle ground approach—fills in by voicing immigrants’ interests in municipal politics and influencing local policy. yet it also suffers from a scalar mismatch in that it is unable to transform more macro-scale structures. in addition, it is vulnerable to cooptation and the trap of mobilizing community work for neoliberal agendas (visvanathan, 2010). finally, the role of the yip program—salamon’s (1999) “holding the centre”—and its interdependency with hdc’s other networks is somewhat more complex. as a funded project, it was critical in supporting hdc’s daily operations and thus indirectly other activities such as advocacy for which it receives little to no direct funding. significant here is that hdc responded tactically to funding restructuring by tapping into funds available at the federal level. this adaptability and flexibility to work with new actors and at studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 the role of nonprofit sector networks 43 different scales enabled hdc to survive the worst years of state restructuring it faced as an organization. in this case, engaging with government was useful as a short-term strategy, but made hdc subject to government requirements and vulnerable to unpredictable shifts in funding structures. further, the yip program serves to shed light on the role of scale. hdc’s transnational partnerships in latin america complemented its local community work by connecting both ends of the migration continuum. arguably, the source of latin americans’ inequality in canada begins in their countries of origin, which themselves face the challenges of postcolonial and global processes of uneven development. one of hdc’s board members reflected on this issue: i am not really sure if the link with latin america will . . . grow further. . . . [now] with . . . globalization, . . . there will be more links because there are more immigrants coming here. . . . [with the free trade agreements] . . . our links to latin america are very important. especially because we [hdc] want to make sure . . . that this whole process of globalization that’s . . . affecting latin american people in so many ways, . . . making them go into more poverty, the multinationals taking over, and all... so i’d like to see the council take a part in eradicating all that. i’m not sure how, . . . but it’s my vision. (personal interview, february 12, 2003) this quote helps to contextualize hdc’s transnational approach to advocacy and underlines the significance of networks that are multi-scalar for enhancing political participation and social change. while it is difficult to assess the material implications of hdc’s transnational collaborations, they seem to also suffer from a scalar mismatch between meeting local community needs and addressing the structural sources of inequality. finally, it is important to recall that the drawback of partnerships is that they are time-consuming and require significant human resources (creese, 2006; trudeau & veronis, 2009; viswanathan, 2010). thus, engaging in multiple networks can bring additional challenges as ngos have to simultaneously navigate between the agendas of multiple partners and the limitations of each set of collaborations. conclusion the primary aim of this paper was to contribute to emerging scholarship on immigrant political incorporation and transnational politics by examining the nature and role of non-profit sector partnerships and collaborations as mechanisms for immigrant political participation both locally and transnationally. the case of hdc demonstrates that such networks can be instrumental for advocacy and have the potential to influence policy, mobilize for concrete social action, and generally improve the well-being of communities in multiple locales. analysis of hdc’s three networks illustrates the diverse nature of partnerships that a single organization can studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 44 luisa veronis establish with different sets of actors, for different purposes, and at different scales. although the power of each network to instil structural change at the macro-level is limited, the council’s experiences show that partnerships can provide real spaces for networking, mobilization, negotiation, empowerment, and capacity building that contribute to the social and political participation of disadvantaged communities such as immigrants. further, this study shows that attention to context combined with a relational approach can provide useful analytical insights on the processes that shape the nature of non-profit sector partnerships. the diverse and multi-scalar nature of hdc’s networks was significant in enabling its survival to state restructuring while reinforcing its advocacy role amidst neoliberal forms of governance. it was demonstrated that the three networks are interdependent and co-constitutive, each reinforcing, complementing and supporting the others. efforts were also made to critically highlight the limitations of hdc’s networks, especially their tactical nature which may leave ngos vulnerable to structural changes, administrative hurdles, and the agendas of multiple actors. more systematic research is needed to further evaluate and theorize the potentials and limits of non-profit sector partnerships and their significance not only for the political participation of marginalized groups, but also for concrete social transformation at multiple scales. acknowledgements i wish to thank hdc and all the research participants for their interest and contributions to the project. without them, this research would not have been possible. i also acknowledge the financial support of the university of toronto and of the ethnic and pluralism studies program during my doctorate. i thank brian ray for his feedback on an early draft of the paper and the centre for academic leadership at the university of ottawa for providing wonderful writing retreats. i am also grateful to suzan ilcan and anita lacey for their invitation to contribute to this special issue. finally, i am deeply indebted to the anonymous reviewers for providing invaluably constructive comments. notes 1 for a detailed discussion of the alternative planning group and its significance for immigrant participation in the context of toronto’s neoliberal governance, see viswanathan (2010). 2 the federal government launched the yip as part of a broader initiative to facilitate the school-to-work transition of post-secondary graduates under 30 years of age by providing them with international experience. another objective of the yip is to promote canadian international relations and canadian culture abroad. 3 see hdc’s website for a description of its vision with this regard (http://www. hispaniccouncil.net/the-americas-spain.html). studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 the role of nonprofit sector networks 45 references american behavioral scientist. 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(2009). enacting state restructuring: ngos as “translation mechanisms.” environment and planning d: society and space, 27(6), 1117-1134. veronis, l., & smith, h. a. (2011). latin american immigrants: parallel and diverging geographies. in c. teixeira, w. li, w., & a.l. kobayashi (eds.), immigrant geographies of north american cities (pp. 256-287). don mills: oxford university press. veronis, l. (2010). immigrant participation in the transnational era: latin americans’ experiences with collective organizing in toronto. journal of international migration and integration 11(2), 173-192. viswanathan, l. (2010). contesting racialization in a neoliberal city: cross-cultural collective formation as a strategy among alternative social planning organizations in toronto. geojournal 75(3), 261-272. wolch, j. (1990). the shadow state: government and voluntary sector in transition. new york, ny: the foundation center. wolch, j. (1999). decentering america’s non-profit sector: reflections on salamon’s crisis analysis. voluntas, 10(1), 25-35. correspondence address: alex khasnabish, department of sociology and anthropology at mount saint vincent university in halifax, 166 bedford highway, halifax, nova scotia, b3m 2j6. phone: (902) 457-6565 e-mail: alex.khasnabish@msvu.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 1, 45-65, 2014 subterranean currents: research and the radical imagination in the age of austerity alex khasnabish mount saint vincent university, canada abstract against a backdrop of austerity, securitization, and the rampant enclosure of public spaces and democratic processes including the university and scholarship, this article critically explores what prefigurative engaged research—research capable of not simply documenting what is but contributing to struggles for social justice and social change—might look like, what it can contribute, and what its limitations are. beyond familiar calls for a “public” or “applied” social science and drawing on a two-year-long project focused on radical social movements and the radical imagination in halifax, nova scotia, canada, this article explores what politicallyengaged social science research might offer to social justice struggles aiming to construct a more just, democratic, dignified, liberated, and peaceful world. for the majority world—for everyone outside the enclaves of privilege located disproportionately, though by no means exclusively, in the global north—globalized neoliberal capitalism and its logic of accumulation by dispossession (harvey, 2003; mcnally, 2011) has been only the most recent chapter in a more-than-five-century history of genocide, colonialism, and imperialism. in the global north, the social violence unleashed by neoliberalism (increasingly precarious or nonexistent work, entrenched and deepening inequality and immiseration, the evisceration of public services, the enclosure of public space, the augmentation of the state’s repressive apparatuses alongside the withering of its commitments to even the most basic elements of social welfare) has meant a low-intensity war declared against actors, institutions, and practices identified as contrary to this neoliberal order. in this context, the university has become a key site of struggle both in terms of what a remade academy could offer to capital (research studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 46 alex khasnabish and development, resources, expertise) and what it does not (an imperfect space of critical and free inquiry), a struggle that has manifested within the academy along clearly disciplinary lines. this is not a lament for the by-gone days of the liberal university imagined as a place of free inquiry, democratic participation, and critical discussion. indeed, we would do well to remember that dominant institutions like the university have always been tied to the production and reproduction of the social order in which they are enmeshed (wallerstein, 1996). rather, at issue is how institutions like the university and academic disciplines function to either facilitate the construction of more just, democratic, egalitarian, and liberated socio-political and economic orders or how they work to entrench, defend, and deepen power, privilege, and inequality. knowledge work, particularly in its academic disciplinary formation, has often lived a complex and frequently compromised relationship with systems of power and privilege (lal, 2002; l. smith, 1999; wallerstein, 1996). for example, as someone trained in the anthropological tradition, i am bound up in a discipline shaped by powerful interests, specifically imperial and colonial ambitions. it is not my intention here to delve deeply into this troubled history and anthropology’s relationship to empire-building, colonization, and genocide, nor do i want to suggest that this is all that anthropology is or could be. rather than dwelling on the profoundly compromised history of anthropological knowledge production, i want to acknowledge this history and use it as a starting point for further exploration. indeed, if this history is troubling—as it should be—the ongoing weaponization of anthropology and other disciplines should be equally so and certainly be more cause for action and intervention today (network of concerned anthropologists, 2009; price, 2011). of course, cultural knowledge has always been seen by occupying forces as central to realizing dreams of domination and exploitation, but this kind of knowledge is now seen as absolutely central as elites confront unconventional challenges to the status quo with the aim of achieving “full spectrum domination”—control over the production and reproduction of social life itself—rather than success or failure measured in conventional battlefield terms (hardt & negri, 2004). in the face of concerted attacks on critical thought and independent inquiry which have only deepened under the banner of “austerity” unfurled in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, some social researchers embedded in the increasingly neoliberal university have sought to render service to corporate, political, and economic elites and so secure their own positions. instead of shedding light on the nature and causes of social violence and inequality or the movements aiming to challenge them, research ensconced within the repressive apparatus of the neoliberal state facilitates the repression of struggles and defends established systems of power, privilege, and authority (hedges, 2010). rather than seeking accolades, security, or relevance by offering up social research in the service of empire, reloaded of course for the 21st century, we would do well to consider what engaged, critical social science research might offer to living struggles for social justice. without studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 subterranean currents 47 trying to speak for or give direction to movements or to merely archive them and thus speak for and about them as we accumulate academic capital, what can the engaged social researcher contribute to efforts to confront the entrenched and deepening violence, inequality, and injustice that continue to characterize so many people’s contemporary social realities? in what follows, i explore what engaged social science research might offer to struggles for social change and the construction of a more just, democratic, dignified, liberated, and peaceful world. drawing on a two-year-long project focused on radical social movements and the radical imagination in halifax, nova scotia, canada, i attempt to chart, albeit in a preliminary and incomplete way, what prefigurative engaged research—that is, social research capable not simply of documenting what is but of participating in collectively bringing something into being—might look like and what it can offer. radical imagination, method, and prefiguration in august 2010, funded by a standard research grant from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada, a four-person research team consisting of two research assistants from the local activist community, my project co-director, and myself began “the radial imagination: a research project about movements, social change and the future.” from its earliest planning stages, my co-director and i conceived of the project as an explicit attempt to “convoke” the radical imagination—that is, to call something which is not yet fully present into being—in collaboration with activists self-identifying as “radical” in halifax, nova scotia, canada. from the perspective of our collective project, the term “radical” names movements or approaches that understand the social problems that concern them to be irresolvable within the current political system and so seek systemic change. in particular, both as researchers and political actors, we are interested in radical social movements that have emerged in the wake of the so-called “antiglobalization movement” and that stress values of participatory democracy, radical equality, and anti-oppression in pursuit of social, economic, and ecological justice (day, 2005; graeber, 2009; juris, 2008; khasnabish, 2008; maeckelbergh, 2009; sitrin, 2012; wood, 2012). as for the radical imagination—the capacity to project how the world might be otherwise—we have argued (haiven & khasnabish, 2010; khasnabish & haiven, 2012) that the imagination is a collective process rather than an individualized thing, and that its wellspring is not the romanticized and fetishized image of the genius-at-work but communities and collectivities as they work their way through the world. the radical imagination, a term which is seemingly ubiquitous in its invocation today but almost nowhere critically defined, helps us frame the way radical social movements and those who constitute them seek to refashion the space of the political by stressing radical notions of democracy, responsibility, participation, and a politics of the act over dominant liberal paradigms of a studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 48 alex khasnabish politics of representation and demand (day, 2005; solnit, 2004). historian ian mckay (2005) has called such radical political initiatives “experiments in living otherwise”—social laboratories for the generation of alternative relationships, subjectivities, institutions, and practices that prefigure the world these movements seek to build (conway, 2004). “prefigurative politics” refers to the general shift in emphasis away from attempts to seize the state apparatus or influence existing socio-political systems and toward the construction of alternative futures in line with the aspirations animating social justice struggles (holloway, 2002a). the politics of prefiguration that are so central to many contemporary forms of radicalism can be traced to peace, queer, anti-racist, student, feminist, and ecological struggles (the socalled “new social movements”) that emerged in the wake of world war ii (bagguley, 1992; epstein, 1991; melucci, 1985; polletta, 2002; touraine, 1988). these struggles focused not only on influencing dominant political, social, and economic institutions but on the transformation of the production of everyday life itself (epstein, 1991; katsiaficas, 2006; polletta, 2002). examples of such prefigurative struggles include, but are in no way limited to, alternative education initiatives (day, de peuter, & coté, 2007; haworth, 2012), migrant justice collectives (lowry & nyers, 2003; walia, 2013), squats and politicized housing cooperatives (bockmeyer, 2003; katsiaficas, 2006; wachsmuth & pasternak, 2008), direct action affinity groups and networks (graeber, 2009; juris, 2008), indigenous solidarity groups (keefer, 2007), and radical attempts to build relations of solidarity rather than charity across borders (featherstone, 2012; katsiaficas, 1987; khasnabish, 2008). our research-based intervention into the field of radical imagination and radical politics seeks to address a central problem identified by recent scholarship on radical social movements in north america and elsewhere which has demonstrated that established methods and theories are insufficient to address the rise of a politics of prefiguration (day, 2005; holloway, 2002b; juris & khasnabish, 2013; katsiaficas, 2006; polletta, 2002; selbin, 2010). in our project, we have argued that the radical imagination defines not something radical social movements like those listed above have but something they do. without visions of how the world might be different than it is, social change action lacks the force necessary to animate it. the radical imagination is the spark that animates them and exists only in the context of the dialogic encounters between actors. unlike ideology which is a fairly coherent, structured, and elaborated system of interlocking ideas about the world and one’s place in it, the radical imagination can be thought of as a shifting horizon of possibility that, like all horizons, recedes as we walk toward it. as a result, the study of the radical imagination necessitates the crafting of new methodologies capable of participating in this process, not merely describing it from afar. but why ground this project in halifax, nova scotia as opposed to any of the large, cosmopolitan urban centres that have served as backdrops for many of the summit spectacles so characteristic of the heyday of the alterglobalization movement? in the first place, we chose halifax because it is studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 subterranean currents 49 where we live. rather than seeking the most exotic and dramatic locale for our research, we have sought instead to ground our work in our own space and place and to try to contribute something to radical social movements and the fabric of struggle from our own location as engaged researchers. beyond this, there are several other factors that make halifax an ideal site for our project. a mid-sized city of approximately 300,000, halifax is a regional military, administrative, and economic hub on the periphery of the canadian state. in locating this project in halifax, we sought to both mobilize our pre-existing knowledge of the city and its activist history as well as to shed light on a unique location whose radical social movement fabric was—and, at the time of this writing, still is—in the process of reconstituting itself. a formerly prominent colonial centre, in recent years halifax has found itself marginalized with respect to national and global politics and economics. measured by almost any index (population, economic growth, immigration rates, gdp, etc.) halifax is by no means a substantial influence on national, let alone global affairs. and yet, in an age of globalization, even the margins are traversed by lines of power and globalizing economic, institutional, cultural, military, and political flows (appadurai, 1996). as an example of this, in june 2007 halifax played host to the atlantica summit of canadian and us political and economic leaders eager to transform the north-eastern seaboard into a free trade zone. complete with a race-tothe-bottom for labour and environmental standards, the goal of the summit was to lay the groundwork to turn the region into a “gateway” for goods produced in asia to enter the continental united states while simultaneously accelerating energy exports to the us (sinclair & jacobs, 2007). this summit was an obvious target for radical activists in the halifax area and beyond given the neoliberal paradigm it exemplified and protests were planned along the lines of the convergence model that had become so prominent through the alter-globalization movement. despite the appropriateness of the target and the established protest repertoire, the protests themselves resulted in what almost all participants and observers report to be an unqualified disaster. entrenched disagreements over protest tactics and inadequate collective participation in the protest planning process led to a poisonous polarization between more conventional protesters and a “black bloc” engaged in clashes with police. veteran activists note that the event ruptured relations of trust and cooperation that had been built over decades, toxifying the local ecology of radical activism. fragmentation and sectarianism followed closely on the heels of this fracturing of the field of radical politics. at the same time, this situation affords us a unique opportunity to study the radical imagination in action as radical movements seek to reconstitute themselves in a relatively small socio-political space. social movements have long been objects of social scientific inquiry. particularly from the 1960s on, social movement scholarship has, at its best, shed important light on how, why, and with what consequences people have organized themselves to try to achieve some kind of social change outside of formal political structures and processes. in contradistinction to earlier studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 50 alex khasnabish generations of sociological work which cast social movements as little more than irrational, unwashed mobs that functioned, at best, as “escape valves” maintaining the equilibrium of the status quo, social movement research since the 1960s has taken social movement action seriously and sought to understand these collective actors not only in terms of the structural factors affecting their lifespan (tarrow, 1988) but also their capacity to mobilize resources (zald & mccarthy, 1979), take advantage of openings in the political system (meyer, 2004), advance claims and frame issues (benford & snow, 2000), deploy consciousness, emotion, biography, and culture as social change tools (goodwin, jasper, & polletta, 2001; jasper, 1999; mansbridge & morris, 2001), and network their efforts across national borders (bandy & smith, 2005; della porta, kriesi, & rucht, 2009; keck & sikkink, 1998; j. smith, 2008). this is all important and insightful work but the bulk of it also positions social movements as political actors vying for influence and leverage within the established political system, rendering it insufficient for the study of contemporary radical tendencies whose aspirations are a direct challenge to the very form of the socio-political itself and which are embodied by a variety of unconventional actors outside of political parties and ngos. in response to the inability of more conventional methodologies to perceive and make sense of radical challenges to the status quo and attempts at cultivating alternatives to it, in the radical imagination project we have turned to methods grounded in ethnography and participant-action research to develop an approach better attuned to these new radical tendencies (conway, 2004; graeber, 2009; juris & khasnabish, 2013; juris, 2008; khasnabish, 2008; maeckelbergh, 2009; sitrin, 2012). engaging social movements as living entities produced and reproduced through the interactions of those individuals and groups that constitute them, as well as through the interventions they undertake in relation to the wider social world, demands a research methodology that takes seriously and treats as primary living social realities rather than approaches that offer diagnostics of movements, mapping them onto a political landscape delimited by dominant socio-political and economic institutions, powerful actors, and their attendant ontologies and epistemologies. there are important threads within the tremendously broad ethnographic methodological field from which to draw in order to achieve these ends. understood not just as a set of qualitative research methods, ethnography is a mode of analysis and writing that aims via “thick description” to communicate complex social realities to broader audiences. this attention to the lived is the crux of ethnography’s analytical utility as well as the basis for its potential political significance. in this regard, it should come as no surprise that ethnographers have been compelled—often by the very people with whom they have worked—to address the politics of knowledge production if for no other reason than because ethnographic work is grounded in the lives of others. critiques of ethnographic research are certainly nothing new, having been raised by feminists, indigenous peoples, and anti-colonial struggles (l. smith, 1999), among others, going back decades. within anthropological circles, it was the “crisis of representation” in the mid-1980s studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 subterranean currents 51 that shook objectivist and positivist approaches to ethnography (clifford & marcus, 1986), advancing the banal but fundamental observation that every act of representation is also an act of power and naming anthropology’s historical imbrication with systems of power and domination. confronting these challenges, engaged researchers have plumbed the political potential of ethnography by exploring it as a form of socio-political and cultural intervention. indeed, an emerging body of work produced by politically engaged scholars testifies to the utility of ethnography as a research method particularly well-suited to research with social movements. this is due in large part to the fact that as a methodology it insists on the explicit positioning of the researcher in relation to her research “field” and those who occupy it. even for researchers who seek to eschew the political, this positioning is unavoidable. this self-reflexivity and the willingness to be a part of and, potentially, to be transformed by the act of engaged research is something that is all too often absent from more conventional investigations of social movements. additionally, because of its focus on lived realities, ethnographic methods are particularly well-placed to facilitate a serious exploration of social movements as producers of knowledge rather than simply objects of research (conway, 2004; juris & khasnabish, 2013; maeckelbergh, 2009; sitrin, 2012). david graeber has gone so far as to suggest that ethnography could be a model for the “would-be nonvanguardist revolutionary intellectual” because it offers the possibility “of teasing out the tacit logic or principles underlying certain forms of radical practice, and then, not only offering the analysis back to those communities, but using them to formulate new visions” (2007, p. 310). terming it “militant ethnography,” jeffrey juris has articulated a similar vision of radicalized ethnographic practice which refuses the valourization of “objective distance” and the tendency within the academy to treat social life as an object to decode (2008, p. 20). instead, juris argues that in order “to grasp the concrete logic generating specific practices, one has to become an active participant” and within the context of social movements this means participating in and contributing to the work of these movements themselves (2008, p. 20). juris (2007, 2008) describes a militant ethnographer as someone who not only sympathizes with the struggles of those with whom she works but who is committed to being directly involved in a given struggle over the long term by taking on work, responsibilities, and risks borne by activists themselves. this does not mean that the militant ethnographer only produces tactical or strategic analysis for the movement in which she is involved; indeed, such an ethnographer should produce engaged research capable of speaking to a variety of constituencies. the practice of militant ethnography also does not imply an erasure of issues of power and privilege or the abandonment of commitments to rigorous research methods; rather, its deep logic is grounded in the premise that taking sides is something everyone is already doing and, in the context of social justice struggles, rather than being a violation of ethical research, is directly a part of it. but while militant ethnography resonates with the methodological approach we advance in the halifax studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 52 alex khasnabish radical imagination project, it remains a posture whereby researchers tend to disappear into movements. our own approach tries instead to mobilize the weird autonomy—compromised, privileged, imperfect, unjust, but nonetheless potentially productive—of the academic vocation in order to help collectively craft a space and a process capable of calling something into being which is not yet fully present (khasnabish & haiven, 2012). in the absence of sustained, radicalized mass movements (the surprising emergence of the occupy movement notwithstanding), in the midst of concerted attacks by political and economic elites on hard-won social justice gains, and faced with the waning of previously compelling imaginations of radical political possibility, our research-based intervention in the field of radical imagination must do more than explore fetishized invocations of it, it must participate in the process of collectively calling it into being. convoking the radical imagination the halifax radical imagination project goes further than most ethnographic accounts of social movement activism in the sense that it seeks not merely to observe but to convoke the radical imagination, to catalyze a public dialogue between those who make up radical social struggles and understand radical imagination as a dialogic process. we have sought to achieve this through several different project stages. the team’s active research phase began in september 2010 and was constituted by one-on-one interviews and focus groups, supplemented by our attendance at movement events and a selfreflexive process involving regular team debriefings. project outreach was carried out by placing advertisements in local alternative media sources (print, radio, and on-line), postering and pamphleting in public spaces, using preexisting research and activist connections with groups and individuals, and word-of-mouth participant recruitment. since september 2010, we have conducted nearly thirty one-on-one in-depth and open-ended interviews with diverse members of the halifax activist community. our participants included student activists, radical publishers and academics, anarchists, trade unionists, feminists, queer activists, punks, marxists of various stripes, independent media makers, local food and climate justice activists, and members of direct action collectives. focused on getting research participants to reflect on their own political biographies, notable moments of radicalization, perceptions of opportunities and barriers to radical social transformation, and visions of the future, these interviews aimed to collect an archive of radical activism in halifax at a particularly crucial time marked, on the one hand, by movement reconstitution and, on the other, by an ascendant right wing agenda. we believe this kind of archive has utility not only for social movement scholars but for future generations of activists and organizers, particularly given the absence in so many grassroots, non-institutional movements of a place or process to intentionally curate the collective memory of struggle. the interview stage of this project constituted our initial attempt to provoke studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 subterranean currents 53 a wider dialogue amongst the activist community in halifax. flowing from the interview phase were two critical and interrelated processes. the first was constructing our project website (radicalimagination.org), an interactive space serving as a digital archive of thematically-organized interview clips from consenting interviewees as well as hosting project publications and other outcomes (including an hour-long audio documentary) and providing up-to-date information to participants and the broader public about ongoing project events. at the time of this writing both the website and the audio documentary are still in the final stages of production but both are aimed at expanding the dialogic process of convoking the radical imagination we initiated through our research in halifax. we will strive to disseminate the audio documentary more broadly once it is completed, particularly via activist and other independent media. the second process emerging from the interview stage was the organization/ planning/hosting of a series of three events we configured as “dialogues on the radical imagination” held in the winter and spring of 2011. the dialogues were free events, held in a community rather than academic space, and open not only to project participants but the broader public. rather than simply being a forum for the research team to present our analysis to the community, we structured the dialogues in a way that foregrounded our project participants and positioned the research team as facilitators. each dialogue session was initiated by an invited panel of project participants who took turns offering short (generally 5-10 minutes) and often provocative statements based on personal experiences of organizing and activism that served as springboards for moderated, open discussion amongst project participants and members of the broader community. lasting two hours each, these dialogues orbited around three key problematics: building resistance and alternatives in an age of austerity; the relationship between anti-capitalism and struggles against other structural oppressions; and the question of how we organize effectively for social change. the objective of these sessions, from the perspective of the research team, was not to “solve” these complex issues or chart a singular way forward for radical leftists in halifax but to open a space and a process where it could be possible to safely—though not necessarily comfortably or in ways free of conflict—explore these contested and diverse terrains. these dialogues, in turn, served as a gateway into the project’s final stage (the radical imagination speaker series) which involved inviting speakers with experience in a variety of radical struggles from outside of the halifax context to participate in public talks followed by engaged, critical discussion sessions. in this final stage, our intention was to bring a selection of perspectives and experiences not necessarily found within the local context in order to provide new fuel for the dialogic process of convocation we aimed to stimulate. what i have sought to provide here is an overview of our attempt to build a research-based intervention capable of participating in social change processes and not just cataloguing them. there will, of course, be much more to say as the research team critically engages not only with the reflections offered by our research participants in interviews, on-line, and studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 54 alex khasnabish in public discussions but with our own reflexive analysis along with those of our participants of the process itself. we suspect that at the end of this dialogic process we will have many more questions than answers about the radical imagination and its relationship to radical social change struggles. nevertheless, we are also convinced that our attempt at developing this dialogic, engaged process has already been productive in terms of generating discussion and possibilities concerning the ways engaged research may be used as a radical social change tool, particularly at a time when the horizons of what is socio-politically possible are obscured by crisis, austerity, and an evermore augmented repressive apparatus. notably absent from our research process is any description of what the radical imagination looks like at this moment in halifax. while some may find such an absence curious, this neither surprised nor troubled the research team at all. as i have noted throughout this piece, the radical imagination is not a thing; it is a collective process. our research intervention into the field of social justice struggle in halifax aimed not to catalogue the characteristics of the radical imagination of individuals or collectives but to provide a new space and process capable of offering opportunities to those engaged in radical social justice struggles in which to consider in an open, expansive, and non-sectarian way where their struggles have come from, where they are now, and how they might move forward. elsewhere, we have discussed how one of our key research outcomes was the realization, derived largely from our interview process and a key question we asked each participant about what it would mean to “win” (turbulence collective, 2010), that movements do not spend their lives occupying the airy heights of victory or mired in the depths of defeat but in the “hiatus”–the everyday, unromantic space between success and failure that is the space of social reproduction and persistence (haiven & khasnabish, 2013). our research was therefore not an attempt to catalogue movement wins and losses or to help resolve tactical or strategic debates or to offer an analysis of a specific movement milieu at a particular moment in time, but to explore how research mobilized from the unjustly quasi-autonomous and privileged location of the university might assist movements in learning how best to make use of and dwell within this hiatus. it is our conviction that the hiatus between success and failure is the vital space of daily life (indeed, as each of us probably intimately understands, it is where we as individuals spend most of our lives) and, as such, it is the space in which movements and those who constitute them are produced and reproduced as living social entities. marxist-feminist scholars and activists such as maria mies (1986) and silvia federici (2003, 2012) have demonstrated the centrality of the work of (feminized, invisibilized, unremunerated) social reproduction—that labour that brings labour power into existence and which nurtures and sustains it—not only to capitalist accumulation but to the forms of social life upon which we collectively depend. social movements are, therefore, also sites of social reproduction, and the ways in which this labour is carried out and the ends to which it is directed (what kinds of social spaces and subjectivities it produces) are perhaps all the more significant when we studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 subterranean currents 55 think about radical movements as sites of prefiguration. the reproduction of systems of oppression and exploitation within movements is a deeply troubling dynamic commented upon by numerous scholars and activists (bishop, 2002; featherstone, 2012; graeber, 2009; martinez, 2000; mohanty, 2003; osterweil, 2010; polletta, 2002; walia, 2013). while the forces propelling this internalization of systemic injustice are complex, movements have often deferred addressing the perpetuation of oppression within their own spaces through recourse to a more “urgent” or “immediate” set of concerns, crises, or struggles (bishop, 2002; mies, 1986). movements and their participants often claim they lack the time and space necessary to deal with systematic oppressions and the perpetuation of injustices within their own ranks in the face of a multitude of external crises demanding their urgent attention. this kind of rationalization, one we encountered not infrequently in our own research in halifax, ultimately endlessly postpones the work of coming to terms with these poisonous dynamics and perpetuates the very violence and injustices social justice movements purport to oppose. without claiming that our research intervention successfully resolved this vexing problem in the radical milieu in halifax, our dialogic, convocatory method furnished tools and a context capable of making time for activists and organizers to confront and collectively work through such everyday realities. while our research team was, collectively, averse to conceptualizing research only or even primarily as a form of “radical therapy,” we were nonetheless regularly struck by and remain convinced of the fact that university-based research with social movements undertaken in a spirit of solidarity is capable of offering opportunities that movements and those who comprise them cannot or do not offer themselves. rather than operationalizing and cataloguing movements’ political efficacy or lack thereof and so reinforcing and reproducing conventional notions of “success” and “failure,” our research led us to problematize notions of what counts as “success” and “failure” for solidaristic social movement research and to ask honest questions about what we as engaged researchers can offer. the result was not a disavowal of the hiatus between success and failure either for movements or those who study them; instead, it highlighted the importance of devising strategies of dwelling well in the hiatus and seeking to understand and intervene in it as the space and time of movement reproduction. critical reflections there are some important insights to be drawn from the radical imagination project and its process. first, an admission: nothing in our research at the time gave us even a hint of the emergence of the occupy movement beginning in september 2011. occupy came to halifax in october 2011 with a lively occupation of the grand parade grounds in the heart of the city’s downtown core and involved many people outside of the “usual suspects” in activist terms. that it did not detect the subterranean currents of dissent that studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 56 alex khasnabish would ultimately explode into occupy is not necessarily an indictment of our research but such an absence does and should give us pause and compel us to consider how our own positions as engaged researchers carry with them their own set of assumptions, prejudices, and blindspots. or perhaps we did not miss this percolating dissent; rather, it is possible that our own initiative simply was not built to intersect with this gestating movement. further critical reflection on the project, participant feedback, and research team debriefing is necessary before anything definitive can be said on this point. one vexing question with which we have contended since the earliest stages of this project is whether or not conducting social movement research like this contributes, however unintentionally, to the surveillance, repression, and demobilization of social justice struggles. for example, by curating an on-line archive of activist interview clips, are we not furnishing the state’s security apparatus with a searchable database that renders the fabric of radical social change movements visible to those who seek to disrupt them? and yet, we are equally convinced that if systems of violence, exploitation, and repression are to be successfully challenged, it will only be through mass collective action capable of challenging the status quo and building alternatives to it. engaging people in an accessible, collective, and dialogic way is essential to catalyzing these kinds of movements and convoking the radical imagination essential to inspiring them. this approach, facilitated to varying degrees by the research team, is also methodologically rigorous and robust, providing the framework for critically productive encounters to occur between people committed to a variety of social justice struggles. any and all information relating to social justice struggles is prized by those invested in defending the status quo and the interests it serves. recognizing this, our project has carefully avoided collecting anything that might be considered “operational information” as it relates to activists and their movements. indeed, the project’s focus has always remained squarely on facilitating a collective space and process to convoke the radical imagination with radicals in halifax rather than collecting information about strategies, tactics, and balance of movement forces. of course, we have also sought to strictly protect the confidentiality of all our participants and the anonymity of those who have requested it. none of this makes the risk of our research being co-opted disappear, but it does, at a minimum, build in safeguards that mitigate against it. we remain convinced, as we were at the outset of this project, that having these conversations is now more necessary than ever but only if they truly do contribute to movements and the radical imagination animating them. if not, they are either exercises in academic capital accumulation or group therapy sessions, neither of which meet our identified objectives. many participants reported positive outcomes from the project. they found the interview phase useful, providing a rare opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue about their political biographies, social change commitments, and ideological orientations in an unconventional format not tied to the day-to-day work of their activism. appreciation was often studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 subterranean currents 57 expressed for the archiving of these dialogues through the project (specifically the website) in a way that would be accessible to other activists and the broader public, although this was frequently joined by a wry skepticism that people would actually take the time to read and engage each other’s reflections. others, however, expressed their frustration with the emphasis on “dialogue” and “debate,” contending that such practices were overvalued and could even function to obscure profound ideological and personal tensions within the activist community. some activists simply refused to participate, judging the process from a distance as too disconnected from the pressing issues confronting them in the context of their own social change work or too compromised by its academic location. still others participated but did so anonymously, some choosing to do so out of a wariness of state surveillance, others out of concern for what they perceived to be a highly judgmental community. while we never expected the project to engage everyone in the activist community in halifax and we are loathe to read too much into these dynamics without more evidence and further reflection, it is safe to say that, to some extent at least, this unevenness reflects the deep fractures that continue to scar the landscape of racial activism in halifax and the inability of a process like ours to assist members of this community to work through them. from a methodological perspective, many participants criticized our recruitment strategy, suggesting that “activism,” “radicalism,” and social movement participation cannot be limited to those who self-identify as such, noting that such self-identification highlights the voices of those with social privilege. we were also faced with skepticism about the goals of the project itself, with more than a few activists expressing the belief that it was designed, first and foremost, to accumulate academic capital and only secondarily to benefit the community. some participants challenged the ethical framework guiding the project, claiming that, despite its commitment to engaging primarily anti-hierarchical social movements and the extensive consultation of the activist community during its design phase, it nevertheless lacked formal mechanisms ensuring community direction and oversight. the dialogue sessions produced similarly ambivalent outcomes. on a positive note, many participants spoke of appreciating taking part in a collective process aimed at discussing “big” ideas and sharing political experiences, motivations, and commitments in a space they perceived to be neutral. many agreed that such spaces were relatively rare in their political experience and they also reported being inspired by the sessions. from our perspective as researchers, we were pleased with the relatively high turnout for each session (between thirty and forty in each case) as well as the fact that many returned for all three sessions. but the dialogue sessions did not escape criticism. for example, some participants with more political experience expressed frustration that the dialogues did not contribute tangibly or practically to movement strategy or solidarity. on this point, it is worth remembering that forging solidarity and answering tactical or strategic questions were not actually the goals of the sessions or the project. quite the studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 58 alex khasnabish opposite, in fact, was true, as the dialogues were intended to make differences and disagreements more transparent, lay bare some of the oppressions and injustices internalized within the space of movement reproduction, and stimulate broader collective visions of socio-political possibility. other criticisms raised concerned the choice of the panelists we invited to initiate each session. due to reasons ranging from schedule conflicts to lack of interest, our panelists were often less diverse that we had initially imagined, both in terms of their backgrounds and their political positions. for those more experienced politically, the relatively open nature of the dialogues inhibited their ability to engage one another directly in more sophisticated— and often animated—strategic debates for fear of alienating less seasoned attendees. compounding this, many of our participants from marginalized constituencies—queer, african-nova scotian, and even women—felt that the events’ open-ended and lightly-moderated format did not allow for an effective exploration and practice of anti-oppression politics, thus allowing the sessions to be dominated by the familiar cast of privileged characters. this concern was highlighted during the second dialogue session which aimed to stimulate critical discussion about the intersection of oppression and capitalism and oppression within social movements. while the free-flowing discussion was lively, it rested almost exclusively on the question of capitalist oppression and exploitation and conspicuously avoided the more troublesome and all-too-often submerged issue of movement participants’ own behaviours and practices as they relate to the reproduction of systemic oppressions within and outside of movements. this issue came to the fore again in the leadup to the final dialogue session as issues of sexual aggression, patriarchy, and sexism within the movement were brought up by a number of activists. many participants felt that the project ought to commit time and resources to assisting the community in working through these dynamics, but we have yet to succeed in crafting an effective, collaborative, and engaging way of doing so. this is a prime illustration of the importance of the space—the hiatus— between “success” and “failure” that movements so often dwell within and the quotidian work of reproduction that takes place there. our inability to address in a deeper and more satisfying way the reproduction of oppressive systems within this space does not attest to the impossibility of solidarity research doing so; it only illuminates the importance of the attempt and the limits of our own specific approach. on the whole, however, the research team has been pleased by the community response to the radical imagination project. while not every activist, organizer, or self-identified radical in halifax responded to the project with unequivocal enthusiasm, many were excited to take part in it, others saw a qualified utility in it, while for some it was met with disinterest and skepticism. given that the objectives of the project were never instrumental or tactical, along with our conviction as researchers that the radical imagination is both a subterranean current in collective thought and an everyday manifestation and process, the impact or outcomes of the project are difficult to measure. for those disappointed or frustrated by the fact that we did not studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 subterranean currents 59 provide a snapshot of what the radical imagination in halifax looked like as we wound down our active research phase, we would only remind them that this was never our objective. from the outset we eschewed using research to capture a picture of a specific movement at a specific moment in time and in a specific context and then using this data to generate explanatory models about how movements work, what the relationship between different kinds of social change “variables” is, or how movements “succeed” or “fail.” instead, we sought to mobilize our position and resources as academically-located researchers in order to contribute to processes of knowledge production that movements are already engaged in, albeit in a tremendous diversity of ways and with varying levels of commitment and success. in this respect, we were heartened by the fact that many of those who took part in the radical imagination project reported positive experiences and a broader capacity to collectively envision the future. and yet, from our perspective as researchers, we also feel that the critical discussions carried on through the phases of this project did not achieve the kinds of innovation, provocation, and inspiration for which we had hoped at the outset. in this sense, the radical imagination project as surveyed here was our first attempt at learning to work in the hiatus—in the everyday spaces between euphoric victories and demoralizing defeats—and something we must refine and refocus as we strive to do so better. in some critical ways our methodological toolbox relied too much on methods steeped in conventional assumptions of “successful” research outcomes (good data, novel outcomes, contributions to “the field”) and “successful” social movements (wellestablished, clearly organized, capable of influencing political institutions and decision-makers). indeed, from our perspective—further confirmed by the reflections provided by participants—the critical, engaged discussions our project aimed to catalyze were largely a rehashing of debates that have taken place amongst radicals at least since the 1960s. indeed, as the project proceeded, it was the conviction of some members of the research team that despite our committed attempts to create a novel, radicalizing process capable of convoking the imagination, we simply did not push far enough beyond a relatively conventional qualitative research paradigm and so never managed to facilitate a truly collective, dialogic research space or process. this realization, in part, stimulated the third stage of the project focused on inviting speakers from outside of halifax to come to the city and give talks on issues relating to the radical imagination and radical social change. the first iteration of the radical imagination speakers series ran in january 2012 and featured dr. glen coulthard, a member of the yellowknives dene first nation and a professor in the first nations studies program and the department of political science at the university of british columbia. in two talks over two days—one aimed at a broader community audience, the other held in a university space and attended primarily by academics—coulthard focused on indigenous struggles, place-based imagination, de-colonization, and the fabric of radical struggle for social change in the context of the canadian state. the talks stimulated considerable interest and critical discussion amongst studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 60 alex khasnabish those who were in attendance. they were also digitally audio recorded and posted to the halifax media co-op website and will ultimately be uploaded to the radical imagination project’s website. the second installment of the series took place in august 2012, featuring dr. gary kinsman, a long-time queer liberation, anti-poverty, and anti-capitalist activist and a professor of sociology at laurentian university. kinsman’s talk, held in a public library in the historically marginalized but currently gentrifying north end of halifax, was entitled “queer liberation history: resisting capitalism and oppression and challenging the neoliberal queer.” much like coulthard’s talks, kinsman’s presentation generated considerable interest in the activist community and was also digitally recorded for archival purposes. in november 2012, max haiven, my radical imagination project codirector and a professor at the nova scotia college of art and design, gave a presentation based on his experiences working with occupy sandy, the grassroots mutual aid response to superstorm sandy that devastated the new york metropolitan area in october 2012. focusing on how the idea and practices of the commons provide a means of resistance to “disaster capitalism” (klein, 2008), haiven’s presentation generated fruitful dialogue on questions relating to community capacity-building and the role of the state in the age of austerity. we continued the series in the fall of 2013 when academics and activists silvia federici and george caffentzis visited in october and delivered a series of lectures on the politics of the commons. in these public talks, federici and caffentzis discussed themes including women and the global economy, the politics of work under capitalism, anti-debt struggles, and the concepts of the commons and their enclosure. their visit took place alongside a public celebration of the 250th anniversary of the halifax commons, a large parcel of land in the middle of the city, some of which remains public parkland and some of which has been privatized or used to house hospitals and other public institutions. it also occurred alongside the halifax people’s history conference, a two-day event aimed at presenting the rich and diverse histories of people’s struggles for social justice in nova scotia. the conference was organized by a non-sectarian, grassroots, anti-capitalist initiative called solidarity halifax, a group that emerged as our primary research phase was drawing to a close and that represents an important and exciting initiative in the social movement landscape of nova scotia. in november 2013, the radical imagination project hosted two talks by harsha walia, a vancouver-based feminist and anti-racist organizer and author of undoing border imeprialism (2013) noted for her work with no one is illegal, a direct action collective committed to migrant justice. walia’s first talk focused on feminism, anti-oppressive practice, and solidarity while the second was about people’s movements challenging border imperialism and both generated significant interest within the local social justice community. the following week, the project co-hosted the book launch of yellow ribbons: the militarization of national identity in canada (2013) by studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 subterranean currents 61 local author and activist a. l. mccready. we are currently planning further instalments of the radical imagination speakers series. the feedback we have received from participants to date and our own impressions of it to date confirm the utility of this project stage for activists seeking to rebuild movements and spark their radical imaginations. our hope for this stage of the project continues to be that voices from outside the halifax community will catalyze and provoke new ideas and conversations that might otherwise not be possible. this is not because our research participants lack the necessary imagination, but because, as we discovered in our interviews, dialogue sessions, and conversations, complicated personal and political histories render some important issues and debates essentially taboo. outside perspectives and voices may allow us to navigate fractures and fissures that otherwise might be impassable. conclusion: social research, social change, and the future at a historical moment marked by limitless crisis, war, austerity, deepening inequality, social decay, and an ever augmented repressive state apparatus, researchers and other intellectuals willing to offer ideological and technocratic fixes in defense of the dominant order and the elite interests it represents are now cast as “public” social scientists par excellence. but, as janet roitman (2013) has so perceptively noted, declarations of “crisis” today are not simply descriptions of empirical realities; they are invocations of the powerful that serve to open up certain pathways for action while foreclosing others. as traditional sources of funding for research and post-secondary education dry up, withered in the neoliberal desert, more and more universities, faculties, departments, and academics have felt compelled to court private, vested interests—particularly from the corporate sector—to replace them and, in so doing, have paid for their continued existence with their autonomy, integrity, and critical capacity. in this sense, the trope of crisis has served as a powerful disciplining tool reshaping the ways research, critical inquiry, and education are envisioned, valued, and practiced. against research as technocracy, i have attempted to chart an alternative approach to what a practice of solidarity research might look like. while it should be abundantly clear the radical imagination project is far from perfect, as an experiment in innovating an ethnographically-based research method capable not only of documenting social movements and social change struggles but actually engaging them it has proven promising. more than this, our project has also demonstrated that it is possible to conduct engaged, committed research that participates in efforts to realize a better world without sacrificing academic rigour or our imperfect autonomy as researchers in so doing. indeed, through this work we fruitfully explored the utility of the weird and always unjust autonomy of the academy as a way to do research with social movements that contributes something to them that they are not doing for themselves. in this sense, our project not only provided studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 62 alex khasnabish resources and neutral space for activists to have discussions they were not having elsewhere, it also intervened in the frenzied temporality of activism so frequently characterized by urgent mobilizations to defend against both the erosion of gains won and fresh attacks to the fabric of social justice. this slower space and time provided by our solidarity research, as i have discussed throughout this piece, allowed for critical moments of deep reflection and afforded the opportunity for activists to have conversations about “big ideas” that they felt they did not have the time or luxury for in the course of their day-to-day activities. this is, hopefully, not all solidarity research can do, but it is nonetheless a satisfying and useful place to start. the systemic forms of violence, inequality, and exploitation shaping our world today will not be solved through technocratic fixes or through the proper application of expert knowledge. in fact, if the latest convulsions of global capitalism reveal anything, it is that our systems of knowledge production and application have largely become far too enmeshed in the status quo and the dominant interests it reflects. what is needed, then, at least in part, are approaches to critical research that seek not only to describe a given phenomena or to ruminate endlessly on its complexity but to participate in facilitating collective, grassroots ways of envisioning and, ultimately, materializing alternatives to systemic forms of oppression and exploitation. critical and engaged research grounded in rigorous, principled methods matters—perhaps now more than ever given the ideological, mystifying nature of the ascendant right’s assault on basic principles of reason, justice, democracy, equality, freedom, and peace—and while it is not the only or even the most important piece in the social change puzzle, it has the potential to assist social justice struggles in ways that go beyond providing good information or reliable analysis. today we face a concerted attempt to enclose our collective imagination of the politically possible by those with vested interests in diminishing our capacity to envision and live otherwise. in the face of this, critical social research must not only help reveal structures and systems of violence, exploitation, and oppression—as well as those who benefit from their perpetuation and those who are consumed by them; it must also contribute to people’s capacity to imagine and forge paths beyond them. references appadurai, a. 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(1979). the dynamics of social movements: resource mobilization, social control, and tactics. cambridge, ma: winthrop. estrada et al (intro) final correspondence address: marcela suárez estrada, lateinamerika-institut, freie universität berlin, 14197 berlin, germany; email: marcela.suarez@fu-berlin.de issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 2, 152-159, 2023 editors’ introduction women in movement & feminisms: critical materialisms & environmentalisms marcela suárez estrada freie universität berlin, germany sabina garcía peter freie universität berlin, germany renata campos motta university of heidelberg, germany as an example of a global model of devastating accumulation, the americas present extreme situations that challenge a variety of feminisms flourishing there to rethink the very feasibility of nature, matter and life itself. governments throughout the region on the left and right have opted for an extractive development model based on the over-exploitation of communities and the environment (arsel, 2013; marston, 2020; schilling-vacaflor, 2017). processes of migration (or expulsion) linked to poverty and violence have been exacerbated by the effects of climate change and environmental destruction. furthermore, the limited efforts towards democratization and consolidation of redistributive policies is aggravated by the growing expansion of religious fundamentalisms with an anti-gender agenda, representing an extreme form of cultural expression in line with a hegemonic neoliberal development model (biroli, 2020). in light of this onslaught on life itself, whose effects reverberate unequally and harm the most vulnerable populations, both established and emerging anti-capitalist feminist struggles are striking out in new directions to rethink core elements of emancipatory politics in the region under the current configurations of global entangled inequalities (jelin et al., 2017). in this context, critical materialisms are garnering growing interest to understand feminist struggles in the region and to link body politics to diverse forms of labour and its exploitation at various scales such as communities, subaltern territorialities and various ecologies. secondly, feminist struggles appear to be increasingly intertwined with ecological ones. third, and related to this, feminist movements also appear to be engaging in mutually beneficial women in movement & feminisms studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 152-159, 2023 153 cross-movement alliances with activists who are not primarily focused on feminism (conway, 2017). feminists are expanding their core agenda in directions such as environmentalism and food sovereignty, while also trying to sensitize other movements to feminist issues (conway, 2018; masson et al., 2017). finally, latin american-situated knowledges, practices and mobilizations have revealed the diversity of feminisms in the region, rendering visible the intersections not only of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexual orientation but also of categories of difference that inform important intersections such as nationality and spatialities – e.g., the diverse forms of rurality – that remain under-conceptualized (motta & teixeira, 2021). these power relationships are best understood by combining discourses and material practices, inquiring into the role that these play in both the domination of bodies and nature, but also in their strategies of resistance to capitalism, patriarchy and environmental destruction in the rural context and beyond. in this special issue, we engage in a discussion on how renewed critical materialism can contribute to feminist knowledge and struggles through an interdisciplinary dialogue and by recounting experiences of resistance in latin america. situated in the specific, concrete struggles at this moment of abysmal crisis, what can critical feminist materialism offer? what are the new dimensions of politics, agency and difference? are there openings, nuances or opportunities for novel thinking, acting and resisting in rural spaces? along with the environmental crisis, violence has shaken the americas, which the contributions in this issue seek to address within the new materialisms research agenda. therein, the political role of the body amidst extreme violence becomes an object of debate and analysis. as souza (2019) argues, the body speaks to the political. violated bodies speak volumes about the violence against women – even and especially if they end up lifeless – despite the patriarchal (non-)response from authorities and institutions, covering for the culprits. in an act of reverberation, ever more bodies are moving through protests and collectives to strategize and fight against patriarchal violence (gago, 2020; segato, 2014). while the internet has served to empower women’s organization, it also represents a further space where gender violence has made its presence felt (suárez, 2021). the female body is at the center of such politics. material bodies are thus at issue here, and new materialisms represent a pluralistic research agenda for analyzing the multiple relations between and with matter (barad, 2007; coole & frost, 2010). bodies are a crossroads: simultaneously the very sites of oppression and the vessel for renewed agency (baer, 2016; souza, 2019) that goes beyond the sole act of resisting to encompass a variety of ways of participating in the political arena. science and technology studies (barad, 2003; haraway, 1991; suchman & weber, 2016) constitute another fruitful area of new materialisms that disputes the discourses of neutrality and objectivity of techno-scientific knowledge. in their contributions to this field, authors such as haraway (1991) and barad (2003) encourage us to look beyond binaries in discourse, matter, bodies and marcela suárez estrada, sabina garcía peter & renata campos motta studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 152-159, 2023 154 machines to explore forms of transgression. the emblematic figure for the embodiment of technologies is haraway’s (2016) cyborg, which unveils the scientific-technological, military, patriarchal, racial, colonial matrix of technology, as well as the role of women in what the author calls the integrated circuit of networks of infrastructures and technologies. by drawing connections between the physical and non-physical, and at the same time between the divisions of humans, organisms and machines, the cyborg transgresses dualities to embrace mutability and the dynamic nature of aforementioned “divisions” (haraway, 1991; lynes, 2015). for her part, barad’s (2003) proposal of posthuman performativity emphasizes that not only discourses are performative, but matter is as well. barad’s work allows one to grasp the materiality beyond the focus on discourses. debates on critical and new materialisms appear against this background as a helpful tool to analyze, understand and decry the injustices suffered by women. the articles submitted and selected for this issue incorporate the multiple relations of rule (mohanty, 2003; smith, 1987): capitalist exploitation over labour and land, patriarchal power over bodies, destructive relations to environments, and power and violence through technology, among others. the articles that make up this special issue pay renewed attention to the materialist approach that understands capitalism as not simply an economic system but a civilizational project with powerful social, gendered, colonial and ecological dimensions (see in this issue, calcagni; kunin; fontana & miramonti; mitrović; and suárez estrada). to do so, each article engages in a dialogue between critical materialism and the feminist analytics of intersectionality (see dunbar winsor & sheppard, this issue). this feminist contribution to discuss the multiple dimensions of inequalities originally called attention to the specific situation of black women within feminist and antiracist struggles in the united states (crenshaw, 1991) and is now deployed to critically consider how inequalities are entangled – and thus what other dimensions should be also taken into account in new feminist materialism. furthermore, the articles incorporate the contribution of feminist epistemologies, including the commitment to recognize knowledge production as situated knowledge (haraway, 1991) that broadens the conception of materialism itself (see calcagni’s contribution in this issue). the categories “woman” or “feminism” should not be understood as an essentializing or universalizing unity, nor as merely ontological (see sempertegui’s contribution in this issue). rather, the situatedness in question is to be traced back to her social and spatial location. the materiality of different experiences has direct consequences on theorizations and conceptualizations. this implies that knowledge production must take into account not only the context of the subject who produces knowledge but also the need to make connections between differently situated struggles. in order words, a feminist point of view about knowledge production is committed to certain values, namely that of emancipation vis-a-vis relations of domination operating via class, gender, race, colonialism, etc. (harding, 1991). for instance, “subsistence” is related women in movement & feminisms studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 152-159, 2023 155 to indigenous or peasant societies. the concept has been prescribed since modernity as a pre-industrial societal characteristic; as “natural” and premodern. but it is also a reference to pre-capitalist production systems as well as racist-colonial power constellations based on eurocentrism (see kunin’s paper in this issue). this brings us to the material entanglements of environmental issues: due to global dynamics of capitalist accumulation and state development projects affecting rural areas and their struggles, environmental activism seems to deepen contexts of common struggles (mohanty et al., 1991) to broaden the spectrum of social movements and collective action in the region, often with decolonial and feminist inspirations. many movements articulate powerful decolonial concepts such as food sovereignty, self-determination and bodyterritory, and explore new means of embodiment. some surprising new coalitions are coalescing around the shared goal of preserving and protecting the environment. thus, how different actors and movements produce knowledge on socio-natural worlds, conceive and relate to matter, and offer a broader view of embodiment and body politics is our topic of enquiry. we bridge rural areas and environmental struggles to urban mass protests and online harassment, among other spatialities. inspired by new materialisms, we consider the agential role of technologies such as prisons and social networks over women’s bodies as well as possibilities for resistance and change. from this perspective, we would like to examine women in movement resisting digital violence aimed at their activism and study their strategies to embody the internet as a political space (see suárez estrada’s paper in this issue). this special issue includes five articles and two creative interventions. each contribution sheds light on instances of women in movement in the americas. the first article “peasant struggles in times of crises: the political role of rural and indigenous women in chile today” by mariana calcagni is about the struggle of the women’s unionist movement anamuri (national association of rural and indigenous women). based on political ecology of food, decolonial and economist perspectives, the main argument of the article is that peasant and indigenous women are key political actors, influencing the political agenda in the struggles for social change in the 21st century. the author analyzes documents, statements, reports and bulletins of anamuri and their main narratives and strategies to influence the political scenario in chile. the article cites evidence of renewed women’s agency that manifests in terms of strategies for social change: alliances and political articulations, social and political training, unionism and women’s labour rights, and political advocacy. along the same lines, the article “rural women redefining care and agency in the argentine pampas” asks the question: is care always oppressive for women? by focusing on three levels of care: (1) care of their children; (2) global care and (3) green care under a postcolonial feminist perspective, the article departs from eurocentric feminist impulses that claim that care work can only be oppressive for women. instead, the author, johana kunin, argues marcela suárez estrada, sabina garcía peter & renata campos motta studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 152-159, 2023 156 that caregiving involves a type of agency that can also be emancipatory and anti-patriarchal. through an ethnographic approach that involved conducting field research from 2014 to 2017 resulting in 40 interviews from the buenos aires province (argentina), the author argues that caregiving can be better understood as productive agency in which care practices are not limited to the “domestic” but are both public and political. also situated in the rural and indigenous context, the article “weaving the spiderweb: mujeres amazónicas and the design of anti-extractive politics in ecuador” by andrea sempértegui, shows the always moving and changeable character of indigenous women’s cultural and social identities through their strategic deployment of reproductive practices. working together with an indigenous network called mujeres amazónicas, sempértegui analyzes how their organizing is characterized by a political design that merges public expressions of resistance – such as mobilizations, protest marches and other public actions – with communitarian practices that reproduce human and morethan-human life in the amazon. the article concludes that mujeres amazónicas are historical and political subjects with the power to shape the lines of political confrontation vis-à-vis the state and extractive capital, and to build global connections between indigenous and non-indigenous ways of living. moving away from rural worlds in south america to the confinement of a prison in canada, katharine dunbar winsor and amy sheppard’s article “dance as revolution: exploring prisoner agency through arts-based methods” confronts us with the paradox between prison and the movement of female bodies through dance. by definition, prison involves a restriction of movement, yet the authors argue freedom can take on new meaning when it focuses on self-care while women are confined. freedom is thus situational and performative. through a workshop-based methodological approach, the authors observe how, when female bodies are in motion, dance becomes a revolutionary act that stimulates an agency in the very place that remains limiting to the movement of female bodies. marcela suárez estrada’s article addresses the question: what are the strategies of feminists against digital violence in mexico city and how do they relate to performative forms of social justice? with the lens of new feminist materialisms and through a digital ethnography that involved following two feminist collectives in mexico city, the author argues that these are embodying the internet and mobilizing the body as a political and material category to innovate in forms of social justice to fight digital violence. these embodied strategies are related to the critical questioning of technologies to repoliticize digital violence and to render visible the memories and affects of violence in women's bodies, as well as to mobilize a new feminist positioning called “hackfeminist self-defense.” mirjana mitrović's creative intervention “pink. glitter. violence.” raises the question: how can a protest, ranging between popular feminism and destructive anger, be documented and perceived, represented and remembered in public women in movement & feminisms studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 152-159, 2023 157 and private spaces? the intervention is the result of a photographic exhibition based on ethnographic notes by the artist and researcher about the feminist protests from august 12 and 16, 2019 in mexico city, sparked by the sexual violence perpetrated by policemen against two minors. in both protests, women mobilized rage as a repertoire to fight against police sexual violence; in response, a public discussion and attempts to discipline the protesters ensued. finally, a contribution based on the artistic intervention, “women in wildfire crises: exploring lived experiences of conflict through forum theatre” by lorenza fontana, angelo miramonti and caleb johnston, presents space for dialogue on the entangled gendered, social and cultural politics of wildfires in the amazon. in this region, women are mostly affected by wildfires that caused and were caused by long term violence, dispossession, corruption and extreme inequality. in a forum theatre workshop in march 2022, 28 participants relived the experiences of 21 different communities affected by fires in chiquitania in the amazon region. the participants were indigenous people, peasant migrants, farmers and farm labourers. in this context, the forum theatre provides evidence of women’s heroic survival and resilient agency. taken together, the articles in this special issue showcase the diverse ways in which women on the move are breaking into the political arena. from canada to the argentinean pampas, passing through mexico, the amazon and chile, women give account of a renewed feminist agency that materializes in political practices of care, political mobilization and influence, resilience, performance, dance, hacking, embodiment and politicizing violence. as the title of the issue indicates and all articles agree, women are key actors in movement in the americas, defining the political agenda for social change and exhibiting innovative political practices. references arsel, m. 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(2019). when the body speaks (to) the political: feminist activism in latin america and the quest for alternative democratic futures. contexto internacional, 41(1), 89-112. suárez, m. (2021). feminist struggles against criminalization of digital violence: lessons for internet governance from the global south. policy & internet, 14, 410-423. suárez estrada, m. (2023). feminist strategies against digital violence: embodying and politicizing the internet. studies in social justice, 17(2), 241-258. women in movement & feminisms studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 152-159, 2023 159 suchman, l., & weber, j. (2016). human-machines autonomies. in h.-y. liu, s. beck, n. bhuta, r. geiss & c. kress (eds.), autonomous weapons systems – law, pthics, policy (pp. 75-102). cambridge university press. correspondence address: jelena subotic, political science, georgia state university, po box 4069, atlanta, georgia 30302-4069, usa. email: jsubotic@gsu.edu issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 2, 265-283, 2013 remembrance, public narratives, and obstacles to justice in the western balkans jelena subotic1 georgia state university, usa abstract twenty years since the onset of the traumatic wars of yugoslav secession, the countries of the western balkans continue to nurture narratives of the past that are mutually exclusive, contradictory, and irreconcilable. the troubling ways in which states in the region remember their pasts provide continuing obstacles in the search for acknowledgment and justice. in this essay, i develop an argument for understanding the relationship between justice and remembrance of the past. to illustrate this relationship, i explore ways in which education and memorialization projects contribute to justice efforts. i critically analyze a few ongoing education and memory projects in the region, and then present alternative ideas on mechanisms of public memory that would be more conducive to building the foundational blocks of justice based on trust, respect, and dignity. introduction on his first day in office in june 2012, the newly elected serbian president tomislav nikolić said that no genocide took place in srebrenica, and that, in any case, genocide was “difficult to prove in court” (b92, 2012). bosnian presidency chairman bakir izetbegović responded immediately that nikolić’s statement was “untrue and offensive for bosniacs, especially for the survivors of srebrenica genocide . . . serbian leaders and serbian people need to face the truth about crimes committed in bosnia-herzegovina in order to improve state relations and enable that the future in the region is better than its past” (b92, 2012). but this was not nikolić’s first foray into historical justice debates. just before the second round of presidential elections, he declared that a “greater serbia was [his] unrealized dream” and that “vukovar was a serbian town to which croats should not return” (pavelić, 2012a). while he quickly backtracked and denied this claim given in an interview to a german studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 266 jelena subotic newspaper, his original statement caused an uproar in croatia and was the subject of much passionate debate on croatian tv in days to come. the croatian president, ivo josipović, gave a stern response: “croatia knew how to defend its sovereignty [in the past] . . . it will know how to defend it today” (pavelić, 2012a). twenty years after the start of the yugoslav wars, the countries of the region are still stuck in public narratives of the past that are mutually exclusive, contradictory, and irreconcilable. i suggest that there is a direct link between ways in which different states remember their pasts and efforts to bring justice for past wrongs in the western balkans. instead of being productive instruments of transitional justice, official remembrance efforts in the region in the areas of history education and national memorialization have been largely used to entrench further mutually incompatible versions of the past and contribute to a renewed cycle of mistrust, untruth, and injustice. i suggest that memory projects need to be redesigned to include a much broader regional focus which would compel states in the region to confront their pasts directly, and not dwell on their own victimization in isolation. regional commissions of inquiry, comprehensive education reform, and multi-state memorialization projects should, therefore, not be thought of as secondary initiatives, but as critical steps in pursuit of regional justice based on trust, respect, and dignity. however, profound political change must take place first. the essay is structured as follows. first, i present a brief argument about the relationship between justice and remembrance of the past. then i explore ways in which education and memorialization projects contribute to justice efforts. next, i illustrate the state of contemporary public debates about the past in serbia, croatia and bosnia with a focus on education and memorialization policies. i conclude by proposing mechanisms of public memory that would be more conducive to long-term reconciliation and regional justice, understood here as the basic tenets of transitional justice: reckoning with past wrongs, acknowledging victims’ suffering, and repairing broken societies. justice and remembrance of the past transitional justice, which is a set of mechanisms aimed at addressing legacies of violence, has greatly expanded and deepened over the past twenty years as a field of inquiry. early efforts at systematically addressing crimes of the past focused mostly on trials of perpetrators and on truth commissions and they were dominated by legal models and solutions (teitel, 2003). transitional justice as a field has since been broadened to include a much wider range of mechanisms, ideas, and policies (bell, 2009). the principal assumption of transitional justice, however, remains that finding out the truth about past wrongs, identifying the perpetrators, and punishing them appropriately, achieves justice by ending impunity (mendeloff, 2004). studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 remembrance, public narratives, and obstacles to justice 267 the claim that finding out the truth and that remembering the past accomplishes justice is an ambitious one and can be broken down to a few analytical steps. first, the creation of a reliable record of past events offers a platform for victims to tell their stories and restore the dignity of the victim, while also integrating the perpetrator back into society, which is the goal of restorative justice. second, exposing the truth and public remembrance can result in proposing legal or political remedies to avoid future violence, and also in determining individual responsibility and punishment of perpetrators (a form of retributive justice). richard goldstone, the first prosecutor of the icty, even argued that “the public and official exposure of the truth is itself a form of justice” (goldstone, 1995, p. 491). finally, public remembrance can repair the injury suffered by victims through restitution, reparations, or apologies, which is a form of reparative justice (minow, 1998). at the individual level, remembrance is thought to bring individual victims justice by acknowledging their suffering, hearing their stories, and helping to heal the trauma that results from violence. remembrance can also lead to justice by preventing revenge killing and instead placing retribution for atrocity within the framework of individual criminal accountability, and avoiding collective guilt. when justice is delivered through criminal prosecutions of individual perpetrators, it can break the cycle of violence by ending impunity. at the public level, states can institutionalize a certain practice of remembrance through education, such as in history textbooks, but also through public commemoration practices such as monuments, museums, street names, memory sites, and national holidays. public remembrance that produces a new, authoritative historical record of past violence can help create a new, shared history of groups in conflict, which then opens up the possibility for group reconciliation and more peaceful coexistence in the future. public education is critical for this effort. creating a credible account of past violence can provide an opportunity for a traumatized society to learn from its criminal past and prevent similar atrocities from happening in the future (hayner, 1994). germany’s waves of postwar education reform and its impact on understanding the legacies of violence and the changing political culture of modern germany is very well documented, especially in contrast to the lackluster efforts of education reform in japan (buruma, 1994; hein & selden, 2000). more recently, the truth commission in chile has made the connection between education and human rights promotion quite explicit, in recommending that human rights be integrated into all taught subjects so that students can use this knowledge as they learn to understand and deal with contemporary political problems (united states institute of peace, 1993). in guatemala, the truth commission report invigorated the discussion about the violent past and motivated teachers and schools to incorporate the report into their official curricula (oglesby, 2007). in argentina, every 24 march (anniversary of the 1976 coup) all schools are required to teach special classes on the meaning of human rights and the dictatorship. there are also many organized school trips to former concentration camps like escuela de studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 268 jelena subotic mecánica de la armada (esma) in buenos aires or la perla in cordoba. post-conflict education, therefore, has the potential to “demystify the past” and inculcate the public culture of human rights (sarkin, 1999) or, even broadly, the culture of peace (oglesby, 2007). public education about the violent past is especially important for “perpetrator states,” where society has yet to undergo a profound repudiation of the criminal past (dimitrijević, 2008). changing entrenched narratives is a difficult task. uncontested public memories of past conflicts become salient because they are assimilated into public discourse and become very difficult to challenge, reproducing themselves over time, and taking on a life of their own (mcgrattan, 2010). these public beliefs then become integrated into social institutions that act as “collective memory archives” (aguilar, 2002) for different political actors to draw upon. public education after conflict is, therefore, important in order “to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in the public discourse” (ignatieff, 1998, p. 173). further, schools themselves are often spaces where profound systemic injustices are reproduced, through inclusion or exclusion of different groups, classes, and types of students and through teaching of stories of exclusion, separation, and isolation (cole, 2007). schools are, therefore, unique locations of a wider societal repair (weinstein, freedman, & hughson, 2007). history education in particular is critical to the success of a broader transitional justice project in post-conflict societies. how citizens understand history is crucial to a society’s ability to deal with the difficult past and build a more just future (cole, 2007). history education is an integral part of the larger transitional justice effort as it can deepen and personalize official acknowledgment of the harm done and suggest ways to embark on social repair. teaching of the past, however, is fraught with analytical, ethical, and interpretive minefields. history education, especially at the pre-college level, has traditionally been the most conservative area of education, focusing much more freely on the distant than on the recent past, and therefore the area of education most scrutinized by the state (cole, 2007). further, history will and should always be contested, and the idea of multi-perspectivism is a growing trend in historical pedagogy. while this means that multiple interpretations of past events may be welcomed, it also means that a new reinterpretation of the past can be used for a renewed conflict in the future (cole, 2007). the next section evaluates a few recent efforts at state remembrance of the past in the western balkans as preconditions for the pursuit of post-conflict justice in the region. the analysis of remembrance, broadly understood, is especially needed in the scholarship on the balkans, since most of the transitional justice literature on the region has focused almost exclusively on the retributive justice efforts, namely trials for perpetrators of war crimes before domestic courts and the international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia/icty (nettelfield, 2010a; orentlicher, 2008, 2010; subotić, 2009). the emphasis on retributive justice in western balkans scholarship studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 remembrance, public narratives, and obstacles to justice 269 has followed the same emphasis in international policymaking, as most international efforts and incentives were designed to improve investigations and prosecutions of individual perpetrators. this focus on retribution has then effectively equated the larger field of transitional justice with just its one possible dimension, punishment, and has de-emphasized many other available mechanisms that are designed to work on societal reparation or restoration. that is why this essay focuses deliberately on two other measurements of transitional justice: history education and national memorialization. my research shows that, instead of being used as instruments of transitional justice in the region, official remembrance projects in public education and commemoration have been used to entrench mutually incompatible versions of the past and contribute to a renewed cycle of mistrust, untruth, and injustice. remembering the past in the western balkans there are few better ways to reconstruct state remembrance of its past than analyzing history textbooks. as mendeloff has argued, history textbooks embody lowest common denominator history as “a distilled version of popular history and historical memory that appeals to the widest possible audience” (mendeloff, 2008, p. 37). history textbooks are important barometers of dominant state remembrance because they are explicitly designed to inculcate particular views of the past into future generations. but memories of the past and the understanding and interpretation of history are always rewritten for the purposes of the political present (stojanović, 2011). the problem with history education in the western balkans, then, is that this region’s histories are multiple, contradictory, and mutually exclusive. far from being a tool for social cohesion and healing, they continue to be instruments of political othering, alienation, and further injustice. serbia after president slobodan milošević was removed from power in 2000, new, revised, history textbooks were published in serbia.2 while the language was improved and some of the more overt hate speech from earlier textbooks toned down, the fundamental view about serbia’s past, especially as it relates to the breakup of the former yugoslavia, remained mostly intact. the serbian state continues to be represented as a victim, and yugoslavia as a country destroyed by separatists in slovenia, croatia, and bosnia, who worked against the interests of the serbian nation (stojanović, 2011). serbian regional territorial aspirations, therefore, are interpreted not just as defensive, but also as preventive, to stop the inevitable crimes against the serbian people. this political concern is what has guided the new serbian president nikolić to warn of an “impending genocide against serbs in kosovo” (the guardian, july 29, 2012). this state effort at keeping silent about the serbian criminal past has been largely successful. surveys consistently show that the public mostly refuses studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 270 jelena subotic to believe that serbs had committed war crimes, and serbs blamed other nations and ethnic groups for starting the wars (ramet, 2007). in a recent large survey of popular knowledge about serbian history, only 34% of the respondents correctly identified the victims of srebrenica as bosniacs, and only 10% reported that croats, not serbs, were killed in a mass atrocity in ovčara, outside vukovar, croatia in 1991 (manojlović pintar, 2010, p. 97). it is difficult to ascertain whether this is simply ignorance of past events, or a more profound strategy of a “conspiracy of shame” (ćurgus kazimir, 2005), where traumatic events for which we are responsible become a deeply buried family secret, never to be discussed aloud. while at the level of retributive justice, the transfer of the last remaining war crimes fugitives to the hague, and the ongoing trials before the serbian war crimes chamber are very significant and demonstrate improved commitment to the rule of law, in terms of reparative justice and state apologies, serbia has made a few contradictory moves. for example, the serbian parliament in march 2010 adopted the domestically very controversial “declaration on srebrenica,” which acknowledged the massacre at srebrenica while never mentioning the term “genocide.” this rhetorical strategy is an example of “interpretive denial,” where crimes of the past are not denied as outright lies, but are interpreted in a manner that gives past events a very different meaning (cohen, 2001). another example of interpretive denial of the srebrenica genocide is the shift in focus of denial in the serbian intellectual discourse. while the events at srebrenica used to be flatly denied, they are now begrudgingly accepted as valid, but the number of victims is now dramatically lowered in most of the media reports (helsinki committee for human rights in serbia, 2011). the declaration on srebrenica, therefore, was a missed opportunity for the serbian government to make a clean admission and to deconstruct the public remembrance of serbia’s past. instead, it served to entrench further the dominant memory of the past in serbia and to foreclose on opportunities for engagement and dialogue with victims of serbia’s war effort. what serbia remembers most from the wars of the 1990s is, of course, its own victimization, the nato intervention in 1999. the nato war only further solidified serbian feeling of being a victim and suffering a great sense of injustice at the hands of great powers. in fact, a succession of serbian governments post 1999, even after milošević’s ousting in 2000, consciously decided to promote the memory of serbians’ sense of martyrdom during the nato air war “as if it were the central motive of the wars in the 1990s” (david, 2012). the evidence of this story is clear even with a cursory look at the official serbian national calendar, “the state program for commemorating the anniversaries of historic events of the serbian liberation wars,” which was adopted after much discussion and delay in march 2009. according to this official government document, the wars of yugoslav succession in the 1990s either never happened, or did not involve serbia as a major participant. various historical events representing serbian victimhood or injustice suffered are, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 remembrance, public narratives, and obstacles to justice 271 however, present in seven commemorative national holiday days (david, 2012).3 similarly, the serbian state embarked on a comprehensive project of renaming city streets, replacing all names associated with communist or antifascist heroes which were numerous since 1945, with heroes or heroic events more broadly associated with serbian tradition, anticommunism, nationalism, and especially the orthodox church (govedarica, 2012).4 what the state wants citizens to remember, therefore, are instances of loss, injustice, and pain inflicted on heroic serbs of the past. what it wants these citizens to forget are any memories of the serbian state and its citizens inflicting pain or misery on others, or even acknowledge the suffering beyond its borders. even what is considered the historical incidence of suffering par excellence, the holocaust, is first memorialized as a crime against serbs, and only then as a crime against jews and others (byford, 2007). the understanding of serbia’s past, therefore, continues to shape its future. serbia’s remembrance is not inclusive of the memory of others. it is exclusionary, isolating, and far from ready for the reconciliatory narrative reconstruction necessary for continuing justice efforts. croatia the central tenet of croatian remembrance of the past as derived from its history education is that “croats never fought aggressive, but only defensive wars” (agičić & najbar-agičić, 2007, p. 204). this view is also reflected in the historical interpretation of croatia’s homeland war of the 1990s, which is taught exclusively as the consequence of serbian aggression and terrorism, without any broader context of yugoslav succession. most textbooks dedicate considerable space to discussing serbian crimes against croatian civilians, but only one textbook even mentions, in passing, that thousands of serbs were forced to leave croatia in 1995 during the ethnic cleansing campaign that accompanied operation storm (agičić & najbar-agičić, 2007). while the textbook market was liberalized in 2000 and opened to competition since then (a process still not undertaken in serbia), many of the books in circulation still use extreme nationalist language and concepts, not much reformed since the early 1990s. the fascist independent state of croatia is often glorified, and crimes of the ustasha5 regime marginalized or avoided (pavasović trošt, 2012). in fact, most of the croatian textbooks currently in use “create in students the impression that croatia has always been inhabited exclusively by croats, while other ethnic groups appear as malicious newcomers and instigators of conflicts and problems” (agičić & najbar-agičić, 2007, p. 212). in 2005, a controversy erupted in croatia regarding a new contemporary history textbook supplement, a textbook written by a younger generation of croatian historians, which included a critical analysis of croatian efforts in the 1990s, as well as a statement that croatian forces had committed war crimes against serb civilians. the croatian education ministry refused to approve this supplement, and a number of distinguished croatian historians wrote open letters accusing the supplement authors of lack of patriotism. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 272 jelena subotic the authors were criticized for not using the term “liberation” when discussing operation storm, for overemphasizing the suffering of serbs, and for painting operation storm in a “negative light” (agičić, 2011, pp. 361362). the critics also offered this bold statement: “history textbooks must take into consideration not only scientific and pedagogic standards, but also national and state criteria” (agičić, 2011, p. 362). it is hard to find more direct evidence of the role history education plays in nation-building projects than this attitude of the croatian intellectual elite. on numerous occasions, the croatian parliament had legislated the memory of the war in croatia and offered laws on how this event is to be commemorated, understood, and interpreted. various members of parliament have put forward proposals for how to memorialize the war appropriately. in 2000, the parliament adopted the “declaration on the homeland war,” which compels “all officials and official organs of the republic of croatia to protect the fundamental values and dignity of the homeland war” (croatian parliament, 2000), which in practice meant to discourage any discussion of croatian war crimes. the declaration explicitly states that croatia “led a just and legitimate, defensive and liberating, and not aggressive nor occupying war against any one; instead it defended its territory from greater serbian aggression within internationally recognized borders” (croatian parliament, 2000). in 2006, the croatian parliament adopted the “declaration on operation storm,” which requests from “the croatian parliament, croatian scientific community, croatian institutions of science and education, as well as media, to over time turn operation storm into a battle that will become part of croatia’s ‘useful past’ for its future generations” (croatian parliament, 2006). croatia’s state remembrance is evident in many other official memorialization practices. for example, croatian government continues to finance commemorations to croatian fascist ustasha troops executed by communists in 1945 at bleiburg (kolsto, 2010). the croatian state also implicitly downplays the number of genocide victims killed during the world war ii fascist-era croatia, most notably in the way in which the contemporary exhibit is laid out and interpreted at jasenovac concentration camp memorial site (pavasović trošt, 2012; pavlaković, 2008).6 ironically, however, the former croatian prime minister ivo sanader used the occasion of the holocaust commemoration at jasenovac in 2005 to make a remarkable equivalency claim between croatian suffering during the homeland war of the 1990s and the holocaust: “we should not forget the aggression that croatia endured because we too were victims of a terrible madness of nazism and fascism, and we, croatian citizens, croats, know the best what it is like to suffer from aggression” (banjeglav, 2012, p. 115). seemingly lost on the prime minister is the fact that the memorial site itself is a commemoration of the indigenous croatian fascist movement and not of croatian victimization. the choice of croatia’s national holidays also demonstrates the official state strategy of what is to be remembered and how. there are three new national holidays that commemorate key moments in croatia’s so-called studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 remembrance, public narratives, and obstacles to justice 273 homeland war: the day of victory and homeland thanksgiving (august 5, the date of the resolution of operation storm), independence day (october 8, the date croatian parliament declared croatia’s independence from the former yugoslavia), and the fall of vukovar (november 18). the august 5 celebration is especially significant in this context because since 2004, the croatian government made it a practice for the entire croatian political leadership (the president, prime minister and speaker of the parliament) to attend the memorial in knin. the site of knin is additionally symbolic since it was historically the seat of the former croatian kingdom, and during the 1990s war the headquarters of the croatian serb rebellion (pavlaković, 2010). it is during one of these commemorations, in 2006, that prime minister sanader proclaimed that “‘storm’ was not a crime; ‘storm’ defeated the crime” (jutarnji list, august 6, 2006). in 2010, a youth organization erected a small plaque/monument for the serbian victims of operation storm outside of knin. the plaque was placed by the side of the road leading north of the city, to symbolize the thousands of serb refugees who fled their homes during and after the military operation. within 24 hours, however, the plaque was removed by the knin city authorities, who claimed that the plaque did not have the necessary permits, even though it was built with croatian government support which was later denied (banjeglav, 2012). the public remembrance of the city of knin, therefore, is an example of the mutually exclusive power of memory: for croatia, it is the site of triumph and independent statehood. for serbia, it is the site of its failed croatian project, and of the memory of serbian exodus and loss. more broadly, the way in which the recent, and even distant past, is remembered makes state narratives in croatia and serbia incompatible. croatia remembers operation storm as the pinnacle of its fight for independence, an event that made the contemporary croatian state possible. serbia remembers operation storm as a site of serbian defeat, and a site of ethnic cleansing of serb civilians. for the croatian narrative, this criminalization of operation storm is inconceivable, because it criminalizes the croatian state itself. the two narratives are speaking past each other; there is no discursive space in either of them for inclusion of an alternative, conciliatory, story. these are stories of exclusion and separation; these are not stories that build a sense of community. the fact that in november 2012 the icty acquitted two croatian generals from any responsibility for the war crimes that followed operation storm (international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia, 2012) has given further fuel to these narratives: in croatia, of the purity and nobility of operation storm; in serbia of another historical injustice against the serbian people. bosnia in bosnia, even more so than in serbia or croatia, history has developed an ethnicity of its own. in the aftermath of the dayton accords and the administrative partition of bosnia, education policy has been decentralized and put in the hands of local authorities (jones, 2012). like everything else studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 274 jelena subotic in postwar bosnia, education has come to represent ethnic politics of the majority population in a particular region. attempts at centralizing education platforms or unifying efforts in this sphere have failed, a consequence of the dayton political reality that locked ethnic politics in their place and gave two major bosnian political entities trappings of statehood (mcmahon & western, 2009; perry, 2013). what this means for the practice of history education is that not only are history narratives in bosnia incompatible with those in serbia and croatia, but the three versions of the bosnian past (serbian, croatian, and bosniac) are incompatible within bosnia itself. bosnian students still use three very different sets of history textbooks: historija for the bosniac students printed in sarajevo, povijest for the croatian students and imported from croatia, and istorija for the serbian students published in belgrade, with an additional supplement written specifically for the bosnian serb education market (torsti, 2013). the absurdity of this ethnicization of education results in the fact that only the bosniac-language textbook, historija, reflects the history of bosnia in any systematic way, while the croatian and serbian versions refer to croatia and serbia, respectively, as ethnic homelands and mostly build on croatian and serbian historical narratives, different from, and largely opposed to, the narrative of the new bosnian state. for example, historija narrates the war of the 1990s through stories of bosniac suffering, the unfair nature of war events, and responsibility of outside powers for the conflict. it explains the cause of the war as aggression on the independent bosnian state. the serbian textbook, however, interprets the war as the result of slovenian, croatian, and bosnian separatism that broke the former yugoslavia apart, while the croatian textbook does not specify the cause of the war at all (torsti, 2003). over the past 15 years, there have been multiple efforts, mostly driven by international actors, to reform bosnian education curricula, especially in history and the social sciences. as part of the conditions for bosnian admission to the council of europe in 1999, bosnia was required to eliminate potentially offensive material from their textbooks. however, since they ran out of time to publish new textbooks, the education authorities instead agreed to blank and annotate the existing textbooks in sections deemed controversial. this rather absurd solution then led to equally absurd outcomes, such as student efforts to read through the blanked out text, even further elevating the importance of these “forbidden texts” (torsti, 2013). almost two decades since the end of the war, these problematic textbooks are still in circulation in bosnia. the 2007 open society institute review found that bosnian history textbooks are “dividing and spreading hatred toward other national groups by relying on idealized auto-stereotypes of one’s own groups and negative hetero-stereotypes of the other national groups,” with croatian and serbian books being the biggest offenders (quoted in torsti, 2013). the problem with bosnian education, however, is not only textbook content, but also the structural issues of education segregation. it follows studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 remembrance, public narratives, and obstacles to justice 275 larger patterns of ethnic segregation in postwar bosnia, and manifests itself in various models of physical segregation: demographic segregation that is the result of wartime ethnic cleansing and population displacement, the “separate but equal” model of “two schools under one roof,” school busing policies that reinforce ethnic segregation by sending children to distant schools in order to educate ethnic groups “with their own kind,” or mixed schools where minority students study “sensitive” national subjects (history, geography, language, religion) separately from everyone else (perry, 2013). integral to this effort of ethnicizing history is the obsession with language distinctions. bosnian serbs have come to use the cyrillic alphabet exclusively to differentiate their written language from its bosniac and croatian counterparts. however, the bosniac and croatian linguists have gone out of their way to construct increasingly separate language variants: the bosniac version includes ever more turkisms; the croatian version brings back old-croatian elements. this is all in the effort to make the serbo-croatian language (historically the principal unifier of the region) increasingly a marker of divergence and ethnic difference. these education strategies have created a new form of school geography, which is built on and further reproduces ethnic symmetry and division (hromadžić, 2008). the way in which the story of bosnia is told in history education, therefore, is the story that serves further ethnic division and politicization of the past in the country. the bosnian political predicament influenced history education, but history education also served to perpetuate the political status quo: the insistence on ethnic difference, the lackluster efforts at reconciliation, the victimization of one’s group and the lack of acknowledgment of the suffering of others. aside from ethnicization of education, the way in which bosnia memorializes its past is also profoundly ethnically driven, serving a specific political purpose for each of the three major groups. for bosnian serbs, the past is remembered in museums, memorial sites, and contemporary books in a way that justifies claims to a separate political entity in republika srpska. for croatians, memorialization efforts are used to emphasize the croatianization of the bosnian space, the affinity with croatia as the principal homeland, and the unique catholic character of the bosnian croatian ethnic group (torsti, 2004). for bosniacs, the past is put to use to justify political projects of unitary, majority-bosniac bosnia, a state built on the memory of great injustice, victimization, suffering and genocide (plant, 2012). it is this particular narrative of bosnia as a state victim of genocide that bosniac political elites have tried so hard to maintain. the power of the narrative has been evident, for example, in another project aimed at memorializing bosnia’s past: the comprehensive database of bosnian wartime losses, also known as the bosnian book of the dead. this massive database project carried out over many years by the bosnian non-governmental organization, research and documentation center, was meant to provide a narrative about every bosnian victim, including known biographical information, family relations, as well as the circumstances of their death. when the project was studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 276 jelena subotic completed in 2007, it provided evidence of close to 100,000 deaths, which, while still an incredibly high number, was much lower than the number of 200-250,000 deaths that has been circulating in the media for much of the past decade.7 instead of providing a sense of relief, even solace, that many fewer people have perished in the war, the findings of the project released a firestorm of hostility in bosnia, including death-threats against the project director (nettelfield, 2010b). the main problem with the project was that the revised death toll figures conflicted with the predominant narratives of victimhood and the character of the bosnian conflict, a narrative in which bosniac elites have a strong stake. the curious fact, however, is that international courts have already settled the issue of genocide that was committed in bosnia—first in icty vs. krstić and then in the bosnia vs. serbia genocide claim before the icj. both of these cases provided convincing evidence that bosnian serbs, with serbian support, had intended to destroy, at least in part, an ethnic group solely because of who they were, which is a definition of genocide. in fact, the bosnian book of the dead provided even more hard evidence for the bosniac claim that the war was predominantly an anti-bosniac endeavor, as the final ethnic breakdown of civilian victims, 83% bosniac, 10% serb, and 5% croat, showed clearly the majority of the victims.8 in the light of this breakdown, how many total victims the war produced is much less significant, which makes the backlash against the project that much more bizarre. this behavior only makes political sense if the bosniac political elite insisted on maintaining the inflated death toll numbers in order to argue for a unitary bosnia and to delegitimize republika srpska as a genocidal creation (nettelfield, 2010b). the memory of the past, again, is being used to advance the political needs of the present. existing efforts—recom and textbook reform while official public space for reconciliation and justice projects has been constrained, civil society groups throughout the region have remained active and have put forward a series of proposals to deal with legacies of violence. among many projects that have been initiated since the end of the conflict, two merit special attention: the recom commission initiative, and the regional history textbook project. the initiative for recom (regional commission tasked with establishing the facts about all victims of war crimes and other serious human rights violations committed on the territory of the former yugoslavia in the period from 1991-2001) was launched in 2004.9 today it brings together a network of more than 1800 nongovernmental organizations (ngos), associations, and individuals who represent and promote the effort to establish a lasting regional commission. recom is not the first attempt to create a truth/ research commission to investigate the violence of the 1990s. serbia in fact had a short-lived truth commission in the early 2000s, but this institution was studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 remembrance, public narratives, and obstacles to justice 277 quickly co-opted by the government, and closed without issuing any report or obtaining any witness testimonies. a few ngos in bosnia also attempted to create a truth commission there, but this initiative did not have broad support either (subotić, 2009). what makes recom different is the regional, not state-centered, aspect of the project, as well as its origins in the civil society sector in serbia, croatia, and bosnia. the recom project is also different from current mechanisms of transitional justice in the region, both international and domestic trials, in its emphasis on fostering public debate and sharing testimonies about the past, but not on individual prosecution (jeffrey & jakala, 2012). since 2004, recom has held dozens of conferences, multiple workshops and hearings around the region and collected half a million signatures demanding that states in the region officially recognize the commission and put its recommendation into state practice. herein lies the paradox of recom. while building on the strength of civil society activism and expertise in its multiple layers of addressing the injustice of the violent past, recom also must rely on state institutions in order to make its recommendations official and hence, truly meaningful and broadly transformative. recom has already been hampered by internal obstacles within the organizational structure of the broader human rights movement for which it is not equipped and should probably not supplant investigative prosecutorial efforts of the state (kurze & vukusic, 2013). at the same time, what the region needs is change in public remembrance practices, education policies, and enforcement of transitional justice mechanisms, all changes that need to come from state agencies in order to be implemented (irvine & mcmahon, 2013). without official adoption of recom recommendations by regional governments, recom’s worthwhile efforts will remain in the isolated sphere of civil society and human rights groups. they will remain aspirational, not operational. another regional initiative worth discussing briefly is the joint history project initiated by the greece-based centre for democracy and reconciliation in southeast europe (cdrsee) in 2005. this broader regional initiative aimed to offer four alternative history textbook supplements to teachers throughout the balkans, focusing on different perspectives on the historical experience of countries in the region, including the conflicting memories of war and violence. while also placing itself within the larger body of reconciliation efforts, this project did not aim for a uniformed, and mutually agreed upon, truth, but rather to the premise that historical disagreement and dissent, and management of differences, are a path to reconciliation (johnson, 2012). while the textbook supplements were published and distributed, very few, if any, teachers in the region have adopted them. the obstacle to new textbook adoption primarily stems from the fact that textbook publishing and adoption remains heavily centralized and requires arduous bureaucratic approval by the ministries of education (gasanabo, 2006). being state agencies, education ministries are also reluctant to approve texts which are radically different in tone, language, narrative, and message than the ones that have been used for years. the state control of the textbook industry makes reform incredibly studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 278 jelena subotic hard to initiate and maintain. history teachers, therefore, see no clear benefit to adopting textbook supplements that are not sanctioned or approved by the state and would, presumably, require them to do more work than if they only relied on official textbook materials. conclusion this essay provided snapshots of contemporary state practices of remembrance in serbia, croatia, and bosnia, and it makes an argument as to why these conflicting identities continue to be barriers to building a sustainable justice framework in the western balkans. the ways in which states remember their pasts are mutually exclusive. serbian remembrance is built on the sense of serbian victimization by croats and bosniacs, croatian remembrance on liberation from serbian aggression, and bosniac remembrance on being survivors of the serbian genocide. these histories cannot possibly all be true in their totality; parts of them are true, others exaggerated, yet others neglected. the region also faces a unique challenge in that victims and perpetrators no longer live with one another in the same state, a consequence of yugoslav partition which has made domestic calls for justice much more difficult to push through official state channels. a related problem is that, in the western balkans, values continue to be defined on an ethnic basis; ethnic identity is still the ordering principle of political life, as is witnessed in the efforts at education remembrance and memorialization projects. the past in the western balkans has an ethnicity of its own. this pessimism, however, does not mean that nothing should be done. quite the opposite, much needs to be done. there are multiple available mechanisms of dealing with the past that have yet to be systematically implemented in the region. in addition to retributive justice and individual war crimes trials, models of reparative justice (such as state apologies or restitution to victims) have not even been considered seriously. the bosnian genocide claim submitted to the icj was denied and those opportunities for reparations to victims and official state apology from serbia have been squandered. however, a preferable mechanism would be for the state implicated in mass crimes to issue apologies or provide reparations on its own prompting, without the tools of international law. this would hold for serbia and its crimes against croatia and bosnia, and for croatia and its crimes against bosnia. this idea may not be far-fetched. willing to engage state responsibility for past violence can be useful for new governments politically, as they can use it to signal, both domestically and abroad, a profound break with the past. serbia and croatia should also offer to pay either reparations to victims individually or through generous community gifts (roads, schools, parks, memorial sites). while the prospects for this kind of profound political change are not immediately favorable, there have been some important gestures in this direction, mostly from croatian president josipović. the croatian president has been, for the regions’s standards, at studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 remembrance, public narratives, and obstacles to justice 279 least, unusually open and reconciliatory in his invitations for non-croat refugees to return to croatia, open to pushing for inter-ethnic dialogue, and openly directly apologizing on behalf of the croatian state for crimes commmited against non-croat civilians during the war (banjeglav, 2013). he has also tied croatia’s reconciliatory behavior to its european ambitions, arguing that if croatia is to join the european union as a liberal democracy, it should act like one, especially in the area of human rights (pavelić, 2012b). it is possible to imagine a similar set of circumstances developing in serbia and bosnia, if political leaders face significant and sustained international incentives for domestic political change. further, all three states should accept an official regional commission of inquiry into past atrocities, as well as commit to broadly disseminating the results of the commission and implement its recommendations into state policy. the ongoing recom initiative has that potential but it will not accomplish enough without official recognition by regional governments, a key piece that is still missing.10 finally, all three states should implement comprehensive education reform, which includes textbook and curriculum reform that clearly presents evidence of crimes committed, the nature of the conflict, and the political environment that made the atrocities possible and even popular among wide segments of society. they should promote media professionalization, specialization, and education in the field of transitional justice—how to investigate war crimes, how to write about them, how to present evidence, how to protect the victims. the states in the region, and this is especially important for serbia and croatia, should also create national days of memory for victims of atrocities their own troops have committed, and set up museums or other types of memorial sites to remember victims and survivors. continuing efforts by human rights groups are important, but so are maintaining the interest of the media and, above all, the will of major political actors. this is not something that can develop overnight, but it is a social transformation that can be motivated by external incentives (such as, for example, requirements of european union membership), or by subtle mechanisms of international socialization and persuasion. this kind of slow transformation is already underway in croatia and there is no reason to foreclose on the possibilities of similar developments elsewhere in the region. these memorialization efforts are important in their own right, but they are a necessary component of a comprehensive post-conflict justice framework. the states of the western balkans are far from creating sustainable justice architecture, but revisiting how they remember their pasts is a key starting point. and some political leaders in the region seem to understand that more than others. at the most recent august 5, 2012 celebration of the homeland war, croatian president ivo josipović made significant steps in this effort when he said, “croatia won the war, it is a great achievement . . . but croatia still has to battle to win in peace. winning in peace means also extending a hand to our serb citizens, acknowledging and bowing to their victims” (agence france-press, august 2, 2012). it is a simple message, an elegant studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 280 jelena subotic message, and it should be the start. notes 1 i should like to thank diane enns, nataša govedarica, dana johnson, fernando reati, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments and suggestions. 2 some of the material covering history textbook debates in serbia and croatia is adapted from subotić, 2013). 3 the days in question commemorate serbian victims of the battle against the turks in 1809; serbian losses in wwi and wwii, including at the greek front in 1918, from german air attacks in 1941, and from nazi genocide; and serbian victims of the nato air war in 1999. 4 the city of belgrade alone has renamed 1,500 or about one fifth of its street names since the early 1990s. 5 the ustasha movement was a croatian armed militia which, inspired by german and especially italian fascists, ran croatia in the 1940s as a puppet nazi state. the ustasha were responsible for mass atrocities against hundreds of thousands of jews, serbs, roma and other “undesirable” [sic] non-croat populations during world war ii. 6 the number of victims at jasenovac varies fantastically from the minimal number offered by croatian nationalists (40,000) to the vastly exaggerated number circulated by serbian nationalists (700,000). most comprehensive scholarly analyses put the probable number at somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 killed (graovac & cvetković, 2005). 7 the research findings have since been published in tokača, 2013. 8 data from tokača, 2013. 9 detailed information about recom is available at the organization’s website portal http://www.zarekom.org. 10 an encouraging recent development, however, has been the official interest in the project by croatian 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(1993). report of the chilean national commission on truth and reconciliation. washington, dc: usip. weinstein, h. m., freedman, s. w., & hughson, h. (2007). school voices: challenges facing education wystems after identity-based conflicts. education, citizenship and social justice, 2(1), 41-71. correspondence address: marcia oliver, program of law and society, wilfrid laurier university, grand river hall 135, 73 george street, brantford, on n3t 2y3, canada, tel.: (+1) 519 756 8228 ext. 5557, email: moliver@wlu.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 83-105, 2013 transnational sex politics, conservative christianity, and antigay activism in uganda marcia oliver wilfrid laurier university, canada1 abstract in october 2009, a private member introduced the anti-homosexuality bill to uganda’s parliament for consideration. this article analyzes the bill within a broader context of transnational antigay activism, specifically the diverse ways that antigay activism in uganda is shaped by global dynamics (such as the u.s. christian right’s pro-family agenda) and local forms of knowledge and concerns over culture, national identity, and political and socio-economic issues/interests. this article lends insight into how transnational antigay activism connects to and reinforces colonialinspired scripts about “african” sexuality and the deepening power inequalities between the global north and south under global neoliberalism, and raises some important questions about how the racial and gender politics of the u.s. christian right’s pro-family agenda travel and manifest within the ugandan context. introduction now the church must wake up to the reality that the so-called “culture war” is, more than anything else, a contest between the opposing and contradictory philosophies of activist homosexuals and christians (lively, 2009a, p. v) we have this—i don’t know what to call it. it’s some kind of invasion, a big invasion about what they think homosexuality is—a pentecostal, evangelical invasion (personal interview march 2011). uganda made international headlines in october 2009 when a member of parliament, david bahati, proposed the anti-homosexuality bill, which would broaden the offence of homosexuality and impose harsh penalties for those who engage in, and are deemed to “promote,” same-sex relations. despite the bill’s widespread support from some of uganda’s conservative evangelical public, the proposed legislation has been highly controversial, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 84 marcia oliver rife with questions of culture and tradition, citizenship, and outside influence and power. the enacting of the bill is not the first time that homosexuality and antigay sentiments have entered public discourse and debate in uganda; there has been a dramatic increase in talk about homosexuality since the late 1990s (hassett, 2007; tamale, 2007). nor is the bill simply the product of uganda’s political and religious elite. contemporary struggles and discourses around homosexuality find roots in the nation’s pre-colonial and colonial history, post-colonial struggles for national identity and sovereignty, and the transnational linkages formed with conservative evangelicals in the global north. the aim of this article is to set uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill within this broader context and begin to explore the complexity of power relationships, strategies and tactics of action, and frames of meaning that are used by “principled and strategic actors” (keck & sikkink, 1998, p. 2) in the struggles over homosexuality and lgbti rights in uganda. examining the diverse accounts and constructions of homosexuality that circulate through conservative antigay campaigns reveals the diverse ways that sexual politics are infused with transnational and local forms of knowledge and power struggles over “which sexual desires, acts, identities, and relationships should be socially supported and which should be socially punished and repressed” (seidman, fischer, & meeks, 2006, p. 430). this examination also raises some important questions about how transnational antigay activism connects to and reinforces colonial-inspired scripts about “african” sexuality and deepening power inequalities both within uganda and between the global north and south under global neoliberalism. yet, as post-colonial scholars and activists have pointed out, it is not only antigay values and discourses that embody neo-colonial assumptions and practices. rather, often lurking beneath the apparent defense of gay and lesbian rights by northern activists and donors (including the latter’s threat to cut aid to governments that persecute homosexuals) are racialized and paternalistic assumptions that view the “west” as the guardian of civilization and modernity and “africa” as a homogenous site of homophobia and unbridled violence. accompanying this racialized discourse is the re-positioning of “african” sexual minorities as “victims” in need of western protection and liberation (haritaworn, 2012; kalende, 2011; puar, 2007). this paper is inspired by the rise of conservative christianity in global politics, which is often overlooked in studies on transnational activism. with a few notable exceptions (e.g., buss, 2004; buss & herman, 2003; haynes, 2001; hassett, 2007; hearn, 2002), these studies have focused mainly on forms of activism that are considered “progressive” or “left-wing,” such as those concerned with issues of social justice, human rights, humanitarian aid, and neoliberal development. rather than focusing on the realm of progressive pro-gay activism that has emerged trans/nationally to support sexual minorities and lgbti rights in uganda, this paper focuses on the representations of homosexuality that are produced by and circulate through conservative evangelical networks between the global north and south studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational sex politics 85 (hassett, 2007; lewis, 2004). as kaoma’s (2009) research reveals, it is many of the same u.s. christian right organizations (hereafter cr) that are active in domestic antigay politics that are playing a role in african antigay politics. moreover, herman’s (1997) observation that the cr’s antigay activism is primarily a white movement in the u.s. also holds at the international level; it is primarily white, christian, pro-family organizations (directed by men) that are leading the cr’s “pro-family” agenda at the international level and are a visible presence in uganda’s recent wave of antigay activism. this raises some important questions about how the racial politics of the cr’s so-called family values travel and manifest within the ugandan context, values which, according to mcwhorter (2009), have been racialized and gendered all along. yet, this is not simply a matter of northern white conservatives exporting their antigay agenda to a “passive” global south (anderson, 2011; hassett, 2007). some of the most vocal religious and political antigay activists in uganda have connections with cr actors and organizations (including president museveni, mp david bahati, and reverend martin ssempa). moreover, rather than simply reproducing cr discourses, conservative ugandan leaders formulate their antigay positions by drawing on culturally specific discourses and concerns that not only resonate with the wider public (anderson, 2011), but also may help serve their own interests and political ends. my analysis is loosely informed by materialist feminist accounts of power that attend to both the politics of representation and the material and structural forces that shape social relationships and practices in certain (and unequal) ways, including colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, religious fundamentalism, and global capitalism (see jackson, 2001). these accounts remind us that although discourse and cultural representations are integral to the constitution of social life and the formation of particular subjectivities (see lewis, 2011), they cannot fully account for the structural inequalities characterizing local and global contexts that benefit some people and entire nations while excluding, regulating, exploiting and, at times, inflicting violence on marginalized others. this point alerts us to the egregious effects of anti-gay activism on the lives of sexual minorities throughout the world, which in uganda include being denied access to social services, having their personal details published in national tabloids (e.g., rolling stone and red pepper), and horrific forms of harassment (death threats), violence, and even death, such as the murder of ugandan gay rights activist, david kato, in january 2011. my analysis also draws on a small but growing body of scholarship that has emerged since the introduction of the anti-homosexuality bill (2009). scholars have analyzed the bill in terms of its legal content and implications (tamale, 2009; civil society coalition, 2009; human rights watch, 2009), media representations of homosexuality (vanderbeck, andersson, valentine, & ward, 2012) and pro-gay advocacy efforts (strand, 2011), and international debates over sexual orientation (anderson, 2011). this paper contributes to these studies by examining the diverse ways that antigay activism in uganda is shaped by global dynamics (and in particular the u.s. christian right) and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 86 marcia oliver local forms of knowledge and concerns over culture, national identity, and political and socio-economic issues/interests. the following analysis is based on on-line newspaper articles, editorials and commentaries from international and national sources, audio and video coverage of public speeches and antigay seminars, position papers of evangelical and human rights organizations, and interviews with human rights activists that i conducted in kampala in may 2008 and march 2011. this article is divided into two sections. the first section attempts to contextualize the emergence of the anti-homosexuality bill by highlighting its key provisions, the diverse range of national and international responses it provoked, and the rise of the u.s. christian right in global struggles over sexuality and recognition of gay and lesbian rights. i offer some insights into why the cr has turned its attention to the international realm and, more specifically, to africa to spread its “pro-family” agenda, highlighting its relationship with other elements of global christianity that are more firmly entrenched in uganda’s colonial history. the second section maps the forms of trans/national knowledge shaping antigay campaigns in uganda, with a particular emphasis on the local manifestations of christian right discourse, and attempts to think through some of the ways that antigay campaigns serve as a vessel for sustaining and challenging broader global insecurities and inequalities. situating uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill on october 14, 2009, ugandan member of parliament david bahati introduced the anti-homosexuality bill to uganda’s parliament, known in some circles as the “kill the gays bill,” the “bahati bill,” and the “anti human rights bill.” although homosexuality is already an offence under the current penal code act (a legacy of the british colonial era), this bill seeks to “fill the gaps” in the provisions of existing laws by serving as a “comprehensive and enhanced legislation to protect the cherished culture of the people of uganda” and to “strengthen the nation’s capacity to deal with emerging internal and external threats to the traditional heterosexual family” (bill no.18, 2009). of particular concern, the bill identifies “the attempts of sexual rights activists seeking to impose their values of sexual promiscuity on the people of uganda” (ibid). the proposed law further criminalizes homosexuality to include “attempted” homosexuality, the “promotion” of homosexuality and the failure to disclose knowledge of any offence under the act to relevant authorities within twenty-four hours. it imposes mandatory testing for hiv and the death penalty for certain acts classified as “aggravated homosexuality.” finally, the bill allows uganda the opportunity to nullify any international treaty, protocol, or declaration that contradicts the spirit of the bill and applies to ugandan citizens who commit an offence under this legislation while outside the country (bill no. 18, 2009). at the time of this writing, the bill is under review by uganda’s legal and parliamentary affairs committee, which is required by parliamentary procedure to examine studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational sex politics 87 proposed legislation, make recommendations, and return the bill to the house for debate and vote. based on a previous report to parliament, if the committee endorses the bill, it is likely that it will recommend removing the death penalty for certain homosexual acts (ni chonghalle, 2012) and the provisions that criminalize “attempted” homosexuality, “conspiracy to commit homosexuality,” failure to disclose homosexuality, and the clauses granting extra-territorial jurisdiction (human rights watch, 2011). human rights activists have warned that even if president museveni refuses to assent to the bill, uganda’s constitution stipulates that a bill can become law with the support of at least two-thirds of parliamentary members. international and national responses to the bill have been divided, with support mainly voiced by other african nations considering similar legislation and some of uganda’s (mostly pentecostal) religious leaders and political elites, many of whom have connections with cr actors and organizations. for instance, jeff sharlet’s (2008) research connects david bahati, james buturo, and president museveni to the fellowship (otherwise known as the family), a broad network of evangelical organizations, with extensive links to the white house and the host of the national prayer breakfast in washington; pastor martin ssempa (an outspoken advocate of the bill) has close ties with california mega-church pastor rick warren; and steven langa of uganda’s family life network has hosted numerous antigay rallies with u.s. antigay speakers (such as lou engle from the call). in addition, there are also many religious and political leaders who agree with the overarching spirit of the bill, but reject the severity of some of its provisions (namely the death penalty). they include a number of cr organizations and members who have distanced themselves from the bill (including us pastor rick warren and holocaust-revisionist scott lively) (see kwon, 2009), as well as uganda’s catholic and anglican church leaders who have publicly condemned the bill as “un-christian,” while retaining the view that homosexuality is immoral and a violation of god’s will and supporting tougher legislation on homosexuality.2 the anti-homosexuality bill has also been widely and fervently opposed by international and national pro-gay activists and supporters, including sexual minorities, human rights advocates, feminists, public health and hiv/aids organizations, academics, and international donors (with some threatening to cut aid if the bill is passed, like britain and the u.s.). there is also a small number of religious leaders in uganda who have contested the bill on human rights grounds, arguing that “homosexuals should enjoy all the rights and benefits that heterosexuals enjoy” (ssenyonjo cited in hasselriis, 2010). of particular note is retired bishop christopher ssenyonjo, who has been a consistent voice for lgbti equality in uganda, offering ministry to sexual minorities and speaking out at human rights conferences, urging people to understand the complexities of human sexuality and, above all, to love one another as god loves all human beings.3 one of the most significant initiatives to emerge in response to the bill is the civil society coalition on human rights and constitutional law, established in october 2009 by studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 88 marcia oliver a small number of lgbti organizations [personal interview march 2011]. today, the coalition consists of roughly fifty civil society organizations that have been at the forefront of exposing the repressive and unconstitutional effects of the bill for all ugandans (see civil society coalition, 2009; strand, 2011; tamale, 2009). human rights activists have also reached out and forged new international allies with western ngos and lobbied western state leaders to denounce the bill; they have emphasized the human rights and public health implications of the bill and pressured government ministries to include lgbti concerns (e.g., ministry of health on hiv/aids); and they have engaged the public in dialogue about sexuality in relation to questions of culture and tradition, christian values, individual choice and privacy, state responsibility, and continued neocolonial influence [personal interviews march 2011]. finally, they have refused to treat lgbti rights as a single or “special” issue, choosing instead to entrench lgbti rights within a broader social justice movement that opposes all forms of oppression and is committed to building an inclusive human rights culture in uganda and throughout the continent. a significant part of this struggle is challenging western donors, feminists and gay and lesbian activists for supporting racist and imperialist campaigns that equate “african” countries with homophobia and sexual repression and “western” countries with a “modern” progressive and liberated sexuality. this is particularly relevant in the post 9/11 era, which has witnessed not only a reinvigorated heteronormative nationalism that celebrates heroic white men for “saving” non-white women from repressive regimes, but also the emergence of what jasbir puar has called “homonationalism”: a “modern” western normative homosexual identity which displays the “right” patriotic values and authorizes nationalist projects in the name of freedom (2007, pp. 39, 46; see haritaworn, 2012). questions of western power and influence have also been raised with regards to the timing of the bill, which was introduced just months after three cr speakers led a seminar in kampala (in march, 2009) on “exposing the truth about homosexuality and the homosexuals’ agenda.” they were caleb lee brundidge, an ex-gay man and member of richard cohen’s international healing foundation for homosexuals, don schmierer of exodus international, an umbrella group for ex-gay advocacy organization, and scott lively, president of california’s abiding truth ministries and coauthor of the pink swastika (which claims that nazism was, at its core, a militaristic homosexual movement). although much international attention has identified this seminar as a key moment in the bill’s creation, there is nothing particularly unique about this event or the antigay rhetoric espoused there. conservative christians have been formulating their antigay positions in the u.s. for decades (see herman 1997) and they have been an increasing presence in global politics concerning gender and sexuality-related matters since the mid-1990s and even more so in africa in the last decade (as i elaborate below). in 2005, the bbc’s “focus on africa” reported: “africa is being colonized and christianized all over again. the colonizers this time studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational sex politics 89 are american, not europeans, and the brand of belief they are bringing to africa is evangelical christianity” (cited in huliaras, 2008). thus, the scott lively et al. seminar offers a glimpse into the shifting terrain of the cr’s global activism and the local manifestations of cr’s antigay discourses in the global south. the u.s christian right and the global “pro-family” movement the u.s. christian right is a powerful force in shaping national and global struggles over sexuality and recognition of gay and lesbian rights. its membership is conservative, largely evangelical protestant, and white, though it has increasingly reached out to african americans for support on religious and social issues (but much less so on economic issues) (wilcox, 1990). for my purposes here, i am less concerned with the cr’s constituency and more with the “broad coalition of pro-family organizations and individuals who have come together to struggle for a conservative christian vision in the political realm” (herman, 1997, p. 9). the crs politics are also antifeminist and anti-welfarist; it blames the welfare system for destroying the “natural” family, most notably for marginalizing men from their “provider” role and fostering a culture of dependency (and sexual promiscuity) amongst the poor. although the cr’s politics are rhetorically genderand race-neutral, it is african americans, hispanics, and single women who are overrepresented amongst the u.s. (and global) poor and thus the main targets for welfare reform and “family-strengthening” programs. with deep political ties to the republican party and equipped with a well-funded and highly organized infrastructure, the cr has exerted significant influence in shaping national policies in terms of its minimalist state and socially conservative worldviews. more recently, it has extended its reach and influence globally, forging alliances with other conservative evangelical christians and orthodox faiths around the world to defend the moral foundations of society against the perceived dangers of an encroaching “global liberal agenda” (buss and herman, 2003). while there is nothing “natural” or “traditional” about the cr’s vision of the family, it has come to inform a worldwide alliance that is mobilized around defending a particular vision of the family as “inscribed in nature and defined by heterosexual marriage whose primary purpose is procreation” (buss, 2004, p. 57). the cr’s global reach and influence can be seen in the explosion of christian right broadcasting in the global south, such as the christian broadcasting network, a “global ministry committed to preparing the nations of the world for the coming of jesus christ through mass media” (cbn website). the cbn airs gospel programs (e.g., the 700 club) in more than 136 countries around the world, including 38 different african countries, and distributes videos and literature through an elaborate global network of national and regional television stations, ministry centers, and a range of humanitarian projects and missionary activities (ibid). the cr’s global studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 90 marcia oliver influence can also be seen in u.s. foreign policies on family planning and hiv/aids prevention (especially the latter’s emphasis on abstinence and fidelity programs), its increased activism at the united nations, as well as in the enormous growth of conservative evangelical organizations working overseas since the 1990s (hearn, 2002). this begs the question: why has the christian right turned its attention to the international realm at this particular moment and, more specifically to africa, to spread its “pro-family” and antigay agenda? since the mid1990s, a number of events have transpired that offer some insight into this development. first, a number of united nations (un)-hosted conferences on the rights of women and population policy stirred concern among cr organizations that the un was promoting world government and liberalsecular values that threatened to destroy the “traditional natural” family. to grasp the utter dread that this provoked among cr actors, it is important to consider cr understandings of biblical prophecy and the second coming of christ. although end-times accounts vary, more recent evangelical writings (like the “left behind series”) associate the anti-christ with the united nations and cultural degeneration (herman, 1997). thus, for some conservative christians, the emergence of terms like “sexual orientation,” “sexual rights,” and “gender identity” in official un documents (e.g., the beijing platform for action, 1995) signaled the rise of a satanic agenda: an explicit attack against christian faith and, most notably, the “natural” family. numerous christian right groups have been granted consultative status as ngos at the un (including focus on the family, concerned women for america, and the family research council) and numerous scholars have documented the significant role played by the christian right in building alliances with other evangelicals and orthodox faiths (e.g., jewish and muslim groups) to prevent this language from entering final un documents and agreements (anderson, 2011; buss and herman, 2003; chamberlain, 2006; petchesky, 2000). second, recent debates and divisions within the anglican communion over issues of homosexuality have provided fertile ground for cr actors and renewal movements (like those of the institute on religion and democracy) to join forces with conservative episcopalians and allies in the global south to defend biblical sexual morality.4 as miranda hassett (2007) notes, beginning in the mid-1990s, episcopal conservatives began to reach out to southern church leaders out of frustration with the loss of orthodoxy in the u.s. episcopal church (e.g., blessing same-sex unions and ordaining gay and lesbian bishops). a key aspect of this development is the changing demographics and power dynamics within the anglican communion itself, with power increasingly concentrated in countries that were former british colonies. with roughly 80 million members worldwide, over 30 million of its members reside in africa (with the vast majority living in nigeria, uganda and kenya) (kaoma, 2009). as such, african bishops have become prominent players in anglican communion politics, especially in defending biblical orthodoxy on matters of human sexuality. for instance, at the 1998 studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational sex politics 91 lambeth conference, african bishops were integral to passing a resolution that declared homosexuality to be “incompatible with scripture” and recommended against the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of homosexuals as bishops (see anderson, 2011; hassett, 2007; hoad, 2007). moreover, following the u.s. episocopal church’s decision in 2003 to ordain an openly gay man, gene robinson, as bishop of the diocese of new hampshire, several southern provinces have broken ties with the episcopal church, rejected funding from mainline denominations (the washington times, 2005), and offered their churches to us episcopal dissidents. the church of uganda has become a popular “spiritual home” for u.s. churches that have declared independence from the episcopal church (hassett, 2007) and, as daly (2001) notes, ugandan bishops comprise the largest contingent in the u.s. conservative episcopal movement’s growing international network. third, the election of former president george w. bush (a self-identified born-again christian) bolstered the cr’s global reach. christian conservatives attained a level of political power within the bush administration that is unprecedented in u.s. history and many of its foreign policies reflect this christian influence (especially concerning sexuality-related matters like abortion, hiv/aids, and international trafficking).5 moreover, through a number of faith-based initiatives, president bush further eroded the boundaries separating church and state and drastically increased the amount of federal funding and the number of contracts available to faithbased organizations.6 while this increased engagement with faith-based organizations is clearly part of a broader shift in development thinking that relies on an expanding civil society to deliver services to the poor, it is also a “vital component in the globally expanding evangelical network between the northern and southern hemispheres” (hofer, 2003, p. 375). moreover, the bush administration’s response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 fused christian morality with neoconservatism’s pro-militarism in unprecedented ways. not only was the war against global terrorism justified in religious terms, pitting the “goodness” of christianity against the “evil empire” of islam, but it also entailed a renewed u.s. nationalism that was tied to (w)hite, heterosexual norms and expectations (puar, 2007). recall that it was christian right folks like jerry falwell who blamed the “pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians” for the attacks (cnn, 2001). moreover, racist depictions of muslim women as “‘victims’ of violence or of ‘islamic barbarism’” (haritaworn, 2012, p. 73) provided yet another justification for g.w. bush’s mission to spread freedom around the world and support a christian-based pro-family agenda. finally, the cr’s growing interest in africa can be seen as part of a broader change in political strategy that emerged in the u.s. in the early 1990s. anticipating that the movement’s history of racism (e.g., claiming a biblical basis for segregation) might hamper its fight against liberal-secularism and moral corruption, christian right leaders sought to disrupt any potential alliance that may form between gay and black communities. in doing so, they began calling for racial reconciliation and urging white followers to transcend studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 92 marcia oliver racial and denominational barriers (see deparle, 1996), while simultaneously manufacturing antigay campaign materials that positioned white gay and lesbians as threats to black civil rights (stone & ward, 2011). the racial underpinnings of the “natural” (euro-american) family are mitigated by the emphasis on universal “post-racial” christian values, which has become the foundation of the cr’s global activism and is widely regarded as the future of a worldwide conservative evangelical movement. this movement calls for christian unity in jesus christ and a revival of biblical orthodoxy as the basis for moral-political order throughout the world. it is these values that enable the cr to reach out and forge alliances with other conservative elements of global christianity and revival movements that have a much longer history and hold on africa, such as anglicanism (which spread around the globe with british colonialism). in uganda, the first anglican missionaries arrived in buganda in 1877, a kingdom in what is today the southern part of the country. french catholic missionaries arrived in 1879 and proponents of islam in the 1840s (hassett, 2007). following years of religious conflict, the arrival of the british in the 1890s assured the dominance of anglicanism in the region.7 the regulation of familial, gender, and sexual relations was central to colonial rule and its “civilizing” missions. in contrast to the “superiority” of “western” victorian bourgeois mores, “african” bodies and sexualities were depicted as primitive, deviant, and ruled by instinct and sexual desire (tamale, 2011). by depicting black people as the essence of nature, colonialists could not imagine african sexuality to be anything but heterosexual and procreative (lewis, 2011). through a broad range of tactics, colonial authorities targeted those aspects of ugandan culture that were deemed “immoral” and against the “laws” of nature. for instance, colonial laws based on judeo-christian values were enacted to “encourage” ugandans to reject their “immoral” ways and to adopt the victorian white patriarchal family as the site for sexual expression and procreation. one of the lasting legacies of british colonialism is legislation criminalizing homosexuality, such as uganda’s current penal code that defines homosexuality as a crime “against the order of nature.” the east african revival of the 1930s and 1940s is also central to the development of christianity in uganda. known as the balokole (the saved ones), the movement offered individuals a deeper experience of christianity with its emphasis on high moral standards and clean living, open confession of sin, and conversion or receiving salvation in christ (ward, 2012). the balokole movement has been central to reactivating protestant spirituality in uganda, and it is key to understanding the anglican church’s moral energy and influence in debates over homosexuality both nationally and within the global anglican communion (hassett, 2007). moreover, in the last few decades, uganda has seen an influx of pentecostal churches, whose lively and creative worship style is particularly appealing to the young and educated. this has posed significant challenges to the church of uganda and the catholic church, with many churches responding by injecting the strengths of pentecostalism into its worship style and spirituality (hassett, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational sex politics 93 2007; kasibante, 2012). although competition and divisions exist within christianity in uganda, these are minimized by the broader global trend in conservative christian movements to emphasize the power of christian unity in defending biblical “fundamentals.” in the words of pastor samuel mukiibi (of the uganda revival network), “the outpouring of the holy spirit is now evident in almost all christian denominations. the lord is doing something new. he is changing people’s perceptions about salvation, especially those who have been limiting it to their denominations” (vision reporters, 2010a). opposing homosexuality is one issue that unites conservative christians globally, albeit, i would argue, in diverse ways and for diverse reasons. there is also an almost exclusive concern with male homosexuality, especially the dangers it presents to boys. as sylvia tamale (2007) argues, the erasure of lesbian sexuality in african societies reinforces a normative hetero-patriarchal gender hierarchy whereby women’s sexuality is reduced to reproduction and “real” sex is defined in terms of penetration and male desire. when lesbianism is present in anti-gay discourses, it is often confined to psychological frameworks that provide explanations for the “causes” of women’s same-sex intimacies, such as sexual abuse. the following section examines how homosexuality and the lgbti movement are constructed through trans/national antigay campaigns in uganda and also attempts to situate these within broader considerations of global power inequalities and insecurities. transnational sex politics: representing homosexuality and the lgbti movement numerous studies have documented the sexual and racial politics of antigay and gay movements in the united states, highlighting the use of blackness by whites to achieve specific moral and political ends (see stone and ward, 2011; herman, 1997). less has been said about how the cr’s racial politics shape its international activism and, in turn, how racial arguments manifest themselves and are translated in national and local contexts in the global south. as i noted above, cr groups have stressed racial reconciliation since the 1990s in an effort to gain african american support for their moral and political agendas, while simultaneously supporting anti-immigration and anti-welfare policies. the cr’s global activism can therefore be seen as an extension of this shift in political strategy, with universal, post-racial christian “family values” serving to mitigate the racial and colonial legacies of the “natural” (white) family (mcwhorter, 2009). sin and civilization perhaps the most obvious way that conservative christians across the globe promote post-racial pro-family values is through declarations of biblical studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 94 marcia oliver “truth” that identify homosexuality as an irrefutable sin, an immoral act condemned by god. this position is well rehearsed in cr antigay discourse by ugandan religious and political leaders and is widely circulated through the ugandan press (eyalama, 2008; kagolo, 2010; muhofa, 2008). according to the church of uganda’s formal position on homosexuality, “homosexual practice has no place in god’s design of creation, the continuation of the human race through procreation, or his plan of redemption” (church of uganda, 2009). while it is clearly the case that biblical injunctions against homosexuality unite conservative christians across the globe, it is important to situate african bishops’ positions against homosexuality as part of a broader response to the perceived loss of orthodoxy within the anglican communion itself and their insistence on the “right to speak for, and as, the anglican universal” (hoad, 2007, p. 66). moreover, as ugandan churches face increased competition to retain or attract new members, antigay rhetoric is one way for religious leaders to build their public standing by demonstrating their commitment to biblical morality and their refusal to submit to perceived western sexual norms. take, for example, the antigay actions of pentecostal preacher, martin ssempa, who has attracted international attention for showing gay fetish pornography and providing graphic depictions of gay sex to members who attend his antigay workshops (see bbc news, 2010). ssempa’s performance reflects what desiree lewis (2011) calls a “theatrical display of patriarchal authoritarianism” (p. 212), whereby political and religious leaders gain public support by engaging in performative displays of power (or spectacles) to demonstrate their commitment to the nation and practices defined as “african” (lewis, 2011, p. 211). i would add that ssempa’s controversial performances can also be understood in more crude market terms, whereby pre-existing antigay sentiments in the country are purposefully exploited in an effort to attract new congregants while simultaneously bolstering his public standing at national and international scales. as seen above in the church of uganda’s formal position on homosexuality, biblical injunctions are often accompanied by fears over reproduction and the decline of human civilization. for instance, the former ethics and integrity minister, james nsaba buturo, warned the parliament that “if the government were to legalise marriages between men and men and women and women, we would be talking about a threat to human civilization” (quoted in olupot & musoke, 2009). newspaper commentaries echo this concern: “if all of us were to become gay, where would the next generation come from?” (muhanga, 2009); “scientifically, sex is a means to an end, the end being the propagation of the human race” (eyalama, 2008); “homosexuality [is] one way of making the world extinct” (namutebi, 2008). sadgrove and others (2012) have contextualized these concerns in relation to constructions of marriage and childbearing in uganda, noting that these familial arrangements are often considered essential to the acquisition of material goods and the wellbeing of extended kinship groups. thus, claims made in the name of an individualized gay or lesbian identity signal the rejection of one’s reproductive studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational sex politics 95 responsibility, which is perceived to threaten both “the nature of the family and, at a deeper level, social relations within uganda” (sadgrove et al., 2012, p. 119). this is particularly significant in the context of global neoliberalism, which, in the name of free market competition, has deepened inequalities and shifted the responsibility of welfare to individuals and families. of course, concerns over reproduction and civilization are also deeply entrenched in colonial and euro-american discourses, which have relied on racialized constructions of the “normal” and “natural” white heteropatriarchal family as superior to (and in need of protection from) the predatory sexual practices of racialized others and gender deviants. within this logic, homosexuality was constituted as a threat to the white nuclear family and, more importantly, to the continuation of the white race (mcwhorter, 2009). today’s manifestation of this legacy is complex, especially in the context of an emergent global movement that is mobilized to defend the “natural” family. in many ways, the explicit racism of imperial “civilized” sexual norms has largely been mitigated by a christian universalism based on biblical orthodoxy (hoad, 2007), which partly explains the shared obsession of the u.s. christian right and african religious elites with sexual deviation from hetero-patriarchal family forms. however, race is also made more explicit in the rhetorical and political antigay strategies of the u.s. christian right and, more recently, contemporary trans/national antigay campaigns, whereby “blackness is invoked by [christian] conservatives as the opposite of, and yet fundamentally vulnerable to, homosexuality” (stone and ward, 2011, p. 610). politics of immutability and antigay rights positioning gay and black communities as mutually exclusive and oppositional groups has been a key political strategy of the u.s. christian right since the 1990s. in the u.s. context, these campaigns were designed to disrupt any potential solidarities that may arise between gay and black voters by depicting lesbian and gay men as white “minority imposters” who are undeserving of civil rights (stone & ward, 2011). white cr actors have pursued this strategy globally by distributing knowledge and quasi-scientific “facts” to african audiences to frame homosexuality as distinct from race as a chosen, rather than innate, behavior. for instance, scott lively told his kampala audience: they say “gays are born that way and it has been ‘proved.’” that is a lie. that is what’s called a lie. it is not true. there is no definitive scientific study that has ever proved that homosexuality is innate. . . . now let’s bring in race, let’s bring in skin colour because this is really common in the united states and around the world in which race is being used as equivalent to homosexuality to claim rights. . . . how many people can tell me what’s wrong, what’s morally, physically, behaviourally wrong with having a black skin? . . . so you can really see that there’s absolutely nothing that correlates between skin colour and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 96 marcia oliver homosexuality. (2009b) as lively’s words illustrate, the cr’s global activism involves more than biblical orthodoxy; it also relies on secularized antigay right messages that construct homosexuality as a willful behavioural choice (unlike race) that is undeserving of rights. this logic is reiterated by the former ethics and integrity minister, james buturo, who stated, “ugandans have rejected this labeling or marketing by arguing that homosexuality is not an in-born condition like race and colours are. . . . they do not accept that it is a human rights issue” (kigongo, 2012) and warned “ugandans who are choosing to promote illegality should not abuse the rights of the majority” (namutebi, 2009). moreover, the racial and sexual politics underpinning conservative attacks against gay and lesbian rights are clearly exemplified in pastor martin ssempa’s letter to human rights watch (a u.s.-based organization): i can certainly understand why organizations like yours [human rights watch] want people to think that homosexuality is fixed, like race, and cannot be changed, because you know that would make people more sympathetic to your “sexual rights” agenda which conflicts with the strong family values of uganda. (ssempa, 2007) within these antigay right and nationalist discourses, homosexuality and race are constructed as distinct and mutually exclusive categories, albeit in ways that identify homosexuality with the west (and implicitly raced white) and blackness with an earlier colonial era script of natural heterosexuality. for anti-immutability arguments to be effective, conservative forces position heterosexuality as outside power relations, which has been widely challenged by critical sexuality and gender studies that contest the homosexual/ heterosexual binary by revealing the multiple understandings of sexual practices and identities across time and space and highlighting the multiple and intersecting systems of power that both bring sexuality into being and attempt to regulate it according to narrow hetero-patriarchal norms (see hoad, 2007). moreover, conservative religious and political actors exert enormous efforts to construct uganda as a god-fearing, family-oriented nation that is under moral attack by liberal, secular forces. while some of these forces are internal to uganda, like the national media or the failure of parents to instill “good” values (see sadgrove et al., 2012), transnational antigay activists are principally concerned with what they perceive as an encroaching “global gay agenda” that “wants to create a utopia with a new moral compass where there is absolutely no restriction on sexual practices” and replace the “marriagebased family with sexual anarchy” (langa, 2009). the global gay agenda and seduction within this discourse, children are frequently seen as particularly vulnerable to moral corruption and persuasion, and therefore require protection from studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational sex politics 97 sexual predators and homosexual seduction. the “homosexual as predator” theme is clearly visible in the vicious antigay campaign that was launched by a weekly tabloid, rolling stone, in october 2010. in addition to publishing the personal details of members of the lgbti community, the tabloid went so far as to claim that the gay movement aims to “recruit 1,000,000 children by 2012” and an inside headline read “hang them; they are after our kids.” a similar message was delivered by stephen langa at his antigay workshop: “what we’re dealing with here is not a joke. and of course, their cause—they don’t care about you. they want your children!” (langa, 2009). the direct influence of cr literature on uganda’s antigay campaigns is clearly apparent in langa’s antigay seminar, where he described richard cohen as one of “the most authoritative writers who has written on the subject [of homosexuality]” (ibid). this is particularly alarming not only because cohen was expelled in 2002 from the american counseling association for ethics violations, but also because his text, “coming out straight” (2000), cites the widely discredited research of dr. paul cameron (director of the family research institute, colorado springs) that claims homosexuals are more likely to abuse children.8 langa’s performance also included a dramatic narration of a passage from michael swift’s (1987) “gay revolutionary,” which is somewhat of a staple in cr publications (herman, 1997), including lively’s “redeeming the rainbow.” despite the text’s explicit satirical nature, trans/ national antigay campaigns use it as “evidence” of an elaborate homosexual conspiracy to take over the world. sadgrove and others (2012) draw our attention to the profound anxieties in uganda over the power of money to motivate immoral behavior, including homosexuality. for instance, numerous newspaper articles report on the widely held perception that homosexuality is on the rise in secondary schools, especially same-sex boarding schools (ahimbisibwe, 2005; businge, 2007; buyera, 2009), with religious and political leaders warning young people against “receiving money from people who may want to lure them into homosexuality” (mugabi, 2009). understandings of money as having a corruptive influence on sexual morality implicate “sexual morality in a critique of the ways in which the capitalist order disrupts kinship solidarities” (sadgrove et al., 2011, p. 117). these concerns also reveal the tensions that lie at the heart of postcolonial identity, which, as hoad (2007) notes, involves defending the nation as an agent of modernity in terms of economic and cultural progress and as the custodian of tradition and morality. it is perhaps little surprise, given the continued imposition of neoliberal development policies on the global south by northern actors, that international donors and organizations are singled out as the main threats to “african” tradition and the global financiers/promoters of homosexuality in the country. as reverend kasibante (2009) explains, “the threat must be built into a real threat. so it is said that there is a heavily funded campaign from usa and europe to promote homosexuality in uganda’s institutions” (anonymous, 2009a). in a statement issued to parliament, james nsaba buturo warned that many schools had been infiltrated by international organizations (like studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 98 marcia oliver amnesty international, unicef, and human rights watch) and that these organizations work discreetly and with local groups to spread homosexuality in the local population (in olupot and musoke, 2009). the understanding that the “west and their puppets are doing all they can to train little children to be gays so as to have a following” (walakira, 2003) relies on a particular construction of the global gay movement as “a well-funded and organized homosexual machinery” (langa in vision reporters, 2009) that threatens to morally corrupt and destroy “african” culture and tradition. homosexuality as “un-african” in uganda, as in other formerly colonized settings in africa, denouncing homosexuality as “un-african” not only represents an explicit rejection of “new” universal sexual norms and continued neocolonial influences but it also seeks to construct a postcolonial national identity that is based on a fictive and essentialist understanding of “african” culture. president museveni has articulated this position on numerous occasions in commending the church for “resisting homosexuality, a decadent culture being passed on by the western nations” (eyalama, 2008; see also kagolo, 2010; olupot and edyegu, 2008). similar statements are echoed in national newspapers. for example, archbishop orombi has claimed, “in uganda, homosexuality is against our culture” (vision reporters, 2010b), and james buturo has identified homosexuality as “repulsive to our culture and traditions” (2005) and, on a different occasion, claimed “we shall not allow those people from the west to define our identity and destiny” (in anonymous, 2009b). an editorial reminded readers that, “homosexuality never existed in africa before the external cultures were introduced here . . . engaging in homosexuality is . . . not part of our history or tradition” (ankunda, 2006). in their varied ways, statements declaring the “un-african-ness” of homosexuality rely on making claims to culture—imagined as a particular way of life that is historically fixed, authentic, belonging to a group of peoples, and fundamentally different from the “west.” within these narratives, sexuality represents a key marker of post-colonial identity and sovereignty and a site where ideological independence from western influences is expressed. one of the most common ways conservative evangelicals express “african” resistance to homosexuality is through a retelling of the story of the ugandan martyrs; the execution of more than thirty christian pages in 1886 by kabaka mwanga (the king of the baganda monarchy) for resisting his homosexual advances. each year, on june 3rd, the martyrs are honoured for their courage in resisting sexual immorality in mwanga’s palace. the martyrs have come to represent the quintessential christian subject: “their faith in christ emboldened them to stand against homosexuality, resisting to the point of shedding blood” (ssempa, 2009). although there are a number of frameworks through which this event could be told (see hoad, 2007)—such as the dangers of intolerant dictatorships, the kabaka’s resistance to colonial expansion and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational sex politics 99 rule, or the colonial making of an (abject) homosexual subject—the dominant framework that conservative christians use in their recounting emphasizes the irreconcilable tensions between (white) homosexuality and (heterosexual) “african” culture to make the point that ugandan christians will accept death before they accept homosexuality. notwithstanding the explicit ironies that underpin this narrative, notably the colonial imposition of christianity and “civilized” sexual norms themselves, the martyrs have become an important transnational symbol of antigay sentiment and resistance. moreover, the symbolic caricature of king mwanga as a homo-despotic ruler who imposed an anti-christian morality on “unwanting” subjects has a remarkable similarity to the representations conservative christians invoke concerning the global “gay agenda” (see ssempa, 2005; 2009). the framing of homosexuality as “un-african” and a neocolonial imposition not only erases the colonial roots of christianity, but also the sexual pluralism and diversity that comprise african cultures and traditions. in the words of the director of a ugandan ngo, “you know the funny thing is monogamy is a western import, more than homosexuality actually” (personal interview march 2011). the same sentiment is echoed in a newspaper article published in the independent: those opposed to homosexuality argue that it is un-african. but they do not point to any specific tradition and cultural sanctions against gays in any particular pre-colonial african society. instead, they point to christianity—a religion that is not african and is indeed against many african traditions. (mwenda, 2009) a rich body of scholarship on african sexualities and identity politics poses a tremendous challenge to antigay claims made in the name of some “pure” and “timeless” “african culture.” these studies show that african cultures are no more homogeneous in sexual practices than those found elsewhere in the world. same-sex relationships have been documented among different peoples (e.g., in uganda among the banyoro, the iteso, the baganda) (tamale, 2007) and social approval of same-sex intimacies has varied enormously across time and space. as hoad (2007) argues, it is impossible to assign any single meaning to same-sex intimacies; they have assumed numerous social meanings in the african context ranging from sin to the most noble form of love, as well as a means to establish hierarchy or exercise political resistance through history. moreover, in her public address at makerere university, sylvia tamale provided numerous examples of sexual and familial diversity within african cultures (including marriages between blood-related kin and non-sexual female partnerships), arguing it is “next to impossible to mark a particular institution as the one and only ’traditional’ african family” (2009). the antigay assertions that homosexuality offends “african” culture and tradition or that ugandans must endlessly oppose homosexuality for the sake of the nation rely on an imagined and essentializing construction of culture that has never existed in reality. as desiree lewis eloquently remarks, “invocations of static culture are fictions. even the most seemingly pristine and unchanged cultural practices are affected by history, globalization, and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 100 marcia oliver social struggles” (2011, p. 210). a director from a ugandan ngo that supports transgender and intersex people also noted, “we are closing our eyes to the fact that our culture is changing, we’re being affected by modernization, and we have to adapt, we just have to adapt” (personal interview march 2011). anti-colonial rhetoric and claims to “african” culture can be read, on the one hand, as an attempt to “defend institutions of the nation and family that are increasingly hamstrung in the reproduction of social life under neoliberalism” (hoad, 2007, p. 66), and as a potent tool for political and religious leaders to legitimate and maintain authoritarian and hetero-patriarchal forms of power, on the other. for instance, critical commentaries have highlighted how the “resurrection of official gay-bashing” (olopade, 2012) diverts from view the government’s neglect of socio-economic issues and official abuses of authority (which, for the most part, have been met with silence by northern donors and conservative christians). the rise of public dissent and protest movements in the country (such as the recent walk-to-work campaign led by opposition leader kizza besigye) suggests that ordinary ugandans are not just equally, but more concerned with the deepening inequalities accompanying global neoliberalism and the government’s illiberal (and often militaristic) response to political dissent than with further criminalizing homosexuality. critics have also charged the government with spending reckless amounts of money on fighter jets, museveni’s 2011 re-election campaign, and his swearing-inceremony, while the country faces soaring costs of living, an insufficient social infrastructure (like health), staggering unemployment rates (especially for youth) and, for those with employment, poor labour conditions and wages (gatsiounis, 2011; ssenkabirwa, 2012). conclusion this paper has sought to provide a contexualized understanding of uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill through an analysis of the transnational and local forms of knowledge and power struggles that shape conservative antigay activism in the country. as this paper demonstrates, much of the highly charged antigay rhetoric underpinning the campaigns of uganda’s evangelical leaders resonates with cr antigay discourses and, at times, is a direct reproduction of cr strategies and knowledge. however, i have also shown that conservative evangelicals in uganda are not “passive” recipients of cr antigay discourses. rather, their antigay positions are formulated with reference to culturally specific discourses and concerns over “african” culture and tradition, neocolonial influence and power, and struggles over national sovereignty and identity. thus, it is more apt to see ugandan antigay politics as taking on hybrid forms and articulations with transnational sources (like the u.s. christian right), rather than being determined by or produced in isolation from them. the legacies of colonialism and its “civilized” sexual norms, the flow of capital and the deepening inequalities accompanying studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational sex politics 101 neoliberal globalization, the transnational relationships that exist between the global north and south, and the global reach of the u.s. christian right’s “pro-family” agenda complicate our understanding of the antigay politics in uganda and the nationalist claims made in the name of some authentic and timeless “african” tradition and culture. while this paper has attempted to provide some insights into the various ways antigay claims intersect with global neoliberalism and the racial and sexual politics of colonial and u.s. christian right scripts of the “natural” family, further research is needed to investigate both the legacies and effects of how the historical interconnections between sexuality and racial otherness are manifested in both contemporary gay and antigay movements that transcend national borders, albeit in ways that are locally and culturally situated in post-colonial contexts. acknowledgements the author gratefully acknowledges the many people in uganda who contributed their time and insights to this research and the uganda national council for science and technology for granting her permission to conduct this research. she also acknowledges the financial support that was received by the chsrf/cihr chair in health services at york university (canada) and wilfird laurier university (from a grant partly funded by wlu operating funds and partly by the sshrc general research grant awarded to wlu). the author is grateful for the research assistance of jesse carlson and kaitlyn ammerman and the research support from peals at newcastle university (uk) and the international institute for the sociology of law (spain). finally, she thanks members of the canadian network for critical sociology, the ssj editors and the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. notes 1 wilfrid laurier university, 73 george street, brantford, on, n3t 2y3, canada 2 the church of uganda (anglican) recommends amending existing legislation to address current loopholes associated with homosexuality, namely promotion, recruitment and dissemination of literature (church of uganda, 2009). 3 see the website for the civil society coalition on human rights and constitutional law for video coverage of speeches made by ugandan human rights activists: http://www. ugandans4rights.org/video_template.php. 4 it is important to note that sexual and gender norms have long been discussed and contested by anglican bishops at the decennial lambeth conferences. in 1888, the church condemned polygamy; one hundred years later (1988) anglican bishops agreed to allow baptism to polygamous men and their families so long as they promised not to marry again (as long as the wives were alive) [resolution 26, 1988]. an interesting question concerns how the cr reconciles its global “pro-family” agenda (which is defined in terms of heterosexual monogamy) with the existence of polygamy in many african countries. i am inclined to see the perceived threat that polygamy poses to white christian sexual norms as minimized by polygamy’s focus on male authority and the institution of hetero-patriarchal ”marriage.” studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 102 marcia oliver 5 for instance, president g.w. bush reinstated the global gag rule, which prohibits family planning organizations from performing or providing information about abortions; his administration also institutionalized abstinence-only, pro-marriage and anti-prostitution directives into us foreign policy on hiv/aids and international trafficking. 6 in 2001, the faith-based and community initiatives act was approved by congress and a faith-based and community initiatives office was established in the white house. this was followed by an executive order that led to the creation of similar offices in five governmental departments, including the agency for international development (usaid). a 2004 ruling prohibited usaid from discriminating against organizations that combine development or humanitarian activities with religious activities, such as worship or religious instruction. 7 close to 80% of ugandans are christians today, with roughly 40% of the population protestant (anglican, orthodox, pentecostal), 35% catholic and 10% muslim, and the remainder nonreligious or members of indigenous or minority religions like hinduism. because buganda was so closely associated with colonial power and anglican religion, its ties led to much resentment by other regions and peoples in uganda, which may account for the slight majority held by roman catholicism in uganda from the early 20th century onward (hassett 2007). 8 paul cameron’s research is also cited in scott lively’s text, “redeeming the rainbow” (2009a). references ahimbisibwe, f. 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(2008). the family: the secret fundamentalist at the heart of american power. new york, ny: harper collins. ssempa, m. (2005, june 2). when faith, state and state-inspired homosexuality clash. new vision. retrieved from http://www.newvision.co.ug/d/8/459/437768 ssempa, m. (2007, september 4) homosexuality is against our culture. new vision. retrieved from http://www.newvision.co.ug/d/8/459/584917 ssempa, m. (2009) a letter to rick warren. christianity today. retrieved from http://www. christianitytoday.com/ct/special/pdf/1217ssempaletter.pdf ssenkabirwa, al-mahdi (2012, april 7). rising youth unemployment in uganda, a ticking time bomb. saturday monitor. retrieved from http://www.monitor.co.ug/ specialreports/-/688342/1381200/-/item/0/-/gawh35z/-/index.html stone, a., & ward, j. (2011). from “black people are not a homosexual act” to “gay is the new black”: mapping white uses of blackness in modern gay rights campaigns in the united studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational sex politics 105 states. social identities: journal for the study of race, nation and culture, 17(5), 605-624. strand, c. (2011). kill bill! ugandan human rights organizations’ attempts to influence the media’s coverage of the anti-homosexual bill. culture, health & sexuality: an international journal for research, intervention and care, 13(8), 917-931. swift, m. (1987, february 15-21). gay revolutionary. gay community news (reprinted from the congressional record). retrieved from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/swift1.asp tamale, s. (2011). introduction. in s. (ed.), african sexualities: a reader (pp. 1-7). cape town: pambazuka press. tamale, s. (2009). a human rights impact assessment of the anti-homosexuality bill. in the civil society coalition on human rights and constitutional law (ed.), uganda’s antihomosexuality bill: the great divide (pp. 19-22). kampala: the civil society coalition on human rights and constitutional law. tamale, s. (2007). out of the closet: unveiling sexuality discourses in uganda. in c. cole, t. manuh, & s. miescher (eds.), africa after gender? (pp. 17-29). indiana: indiana university press. the washington times (2005, june 7). african bishops reject aid. the washington times. retrieved from http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2005/jun/07/20050607-115436 7061r/ vision reporters (2010a, october 23). disturbing perception of salvation. new vision. retrieved from http://newvisionuganda.info/d/120/525/735913 vision reporters (2010b, august 25). african bishops maintain antigay stand. new vision. retrieved from http://www.newvision.co.ug/d/8/12/729779 vision reporters (2009, may 29). is money fuelling the gay war? new vision. retrieved from http://www.newvision.co.ug/pa/9/621/682978 walakira, g. (2003, february 10). gay rights not a priority in uganda. new vision. ward, k. (2012). introduction. in k. ward & e. wild-wood (eds), the east african revival: history and legacies (pp. 3-10). surrey: ashgate publishing limited. wilcox, c. (1990). blacks and the new christian right: support for the moral majority and pat robertson among washington, d.c. blacks. review of religious research, 32(1), 43-55. introduction studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 12 corporeal dimensions of gender violence: ladina’s self and body in eastern guatemala cecilia menjívar, arizona state university abstract: based on 30 in-depth interviews with ladina women and field work conducted in a rural town in eastern guatemala, i examine the physical expressions that violence can take on the women's bodies, such as common physical ailments that result from emotional distress as well as sicknesses that are caused directly by the conditions in which they live. a central theme in the discussion is the embodiment of violence as it is expressed in the control of the women's body in the social milieu, such as the control of their socializing and visiting. i use a sociologicallyand anthropologically-informed lens to situate corporeal questions within structures of social inequalities and human suffering and, thus, this examination contributes to debates about the relationship between body and society, macro and micro processes in the social world, as well as explorations between the women's lives and their rights. as such, this examination permits to unveil embedded structures of violence that assault the women's dignity and provoke suffering, as well as those instances in which gender solidarity is created. this examination allows us to explore implications for gender-based social justice. sutton (2005) notes that the body bridges the personal and the political, macro processes and micro interactions and thus connects women‘s bodies to extra-local, and even global, realms. within social science theory there have been multiple approaches to examine bodily themes and questions surrounding the body, from postmodernist to post-structuralist currents (see williams, 1999). in an excellent special issue on the embodiment of violence, green (1998) calls for attention to concrete manifestations of suffering in theorizing about suffering and the body, to examine explicit manifestations of how violence and suffering are embodied, as violence inscribes the body with message and significance. in this article i discuss concrete corporeal manifestations of different forms of violence on ladina women in eastern guatemala. heeding green‘s (1998) call, i use a sociologicallyand anthropologically-informed approach that is substantively more grounded. this lens situates corporeal questions within structures of social inequalities and human suffering and, thus, contributes to debates about the relationship between body and society. thus, in contrast to examining issues of representation or sexuality, i follow farmer (2004) and other critical anthropologists and social scientists writing from latin american (e.g., torres-rivas, 1998; martín-baró, 1991) to focus on concrete expressions of social suffering, on how multiple forms of violence and macro forces coalesce and result in social suffering for women that becomes normalized and part of the social order. physical expressions that injustices can take in the women‘s bodies include common physical ailments that result from emotional distress as well as sicknesses that are caused directly by the conditions in which the women live. social injustices are transformed into expressions of studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 13 violence because they lead to suffering. there is another dimension of how the embodiment of violence is expressed, such as the control of the body in the social milieu, including the control of women‘s socializing and visiting. an examination of both, the physical and social dimensions of violence on the body brings to the fore the invisible, yet pervasive effects of gender inequalities that make possible women‘s domination that are manifested even in the most intimate spheres of the women‘s lives. this examination makes evident forms of inflicting pain and harm that are not confined to those expressed in a direct physical manner but that in the end produce similar results, such as fear, pain, and suffering. the expressions to which i call attention also encompass mental and emotional forms of inflicting pain (see walter, 1969). this focus also helps to clarify, in bourgois‘s (2004) conceptualization, the chains of causality that link structural, political and symbolic violence in the production of everyday violence that buttresses unequal power relations and distorts social relations. as such, i also highlight key links to structural violence (torres-rivas, 1998) and to symbolic violence (bourdieu, 19961997) as all these forms of violence combine in the women‘s lives and affect one another. i do not treat each of these forms of violence separately because that is not how they appear in the women‘s lives. indeed, a better understanding of the links among the individual, the social and the political becomes possible when all these lenses are superimposed to examine women‘s lives. this examination fits well with efforts to make women‘s experiences of gender inequality relevant for discussions of social justice. as okin (1989) notes, it is not only the differentiation between women and men that is relevant for discussions of justice, but the domination of women by men being natural. thus, i underscore the normalization of this domination and examine it in a personal, intimate sphere of guatemalan women‘s lives—the more immediate, physical sphere of body ailments, as well as the social arena of socializing and control of movement. in line with arguments that call attention to how gender inequality in different areas of life, including work and the family, contribute to women‘s vulnerability, my examination underlines how gender role expectations of behavior reinforce gender inequalities and create pain and suffering for women. this approach draws attention to injustices in the lives of women that are made possible by unequal treatment and gender ideologies that normalize discrimination and vulnerability. in doing so, this analysis contributes to unearth sources of injustice and suffering for women that derive from male domination and ideologies that are so entrenched in this social milieu as to appear part of the ―culture.‖ as such, this examination brings to light normalized and routinized forms of violence that are often left unquestioned and some scholars even take them as part of ―culture‖ and thus not as a basis for inquiry. 1 deeply entrenched and institutionalized gender differences have violent effects and consequences for the lives of women, some more obviously related to direct physical violence than others. the focus is on non-indigenous, ladina women who live away from the altiplano, where more direct and brutal forms of violence (many linked to the 30-year old bloody political conflict in the country) did not take place. women in western guatemala, mostly indigenous, have received the attention of scholars (and with good reason) who are interested in unearthing the brutality of state terror and its gendered expressions in guatemala (see green, 1999). my discussion builds on this previous research among mayas to render a depiction of the broad reach of violence, including those instances that are so common place as to become invisible. an examination of 1 i thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this observation. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 14 the multiple forms of violence in the lives of women in eastern guatemala, who are nonindigenous and lived away from the zones where direct political terror was ―a way of life‖ (green, 1999), exposes the deep and broad consequences of living in a society engulfed in violence, where the population was brutalized and life became fragile and cheap, thus depicting the ―long arm of violence‖ (menjívar, 2008). importantly, in pointing to the violence in women‘s lives i do not seek to pathologize them or to portray them solely in abject gender subordination. these women‘s lives are much more complex; in their moments of suffering they often turn to others, often other women, for comfort and solace, which opens spaces for opposition and permits a form of sociality that can engender collective responses. it is for this reason that in my presentation in this article i intersperse these instances of comfort with narratives of suffering. however, it is my project to focus the analytical gaze on the violence and suffering so as to retrieve them from the normality of the women‘s lives. in the following sections i present a two-part discussion that highlights the embodiment of gender injustices. the first focuses on the physical suffering produced on the body and the second focuses on the hidden injuries generated as a result of control of the body‘s movement. together they evince the normalized, naturalized practices that produce suffering in the women‘s lives. before i turn to that discussion i will present a brief note about the empirical observations on which my discussion is based. methods and data observations come from thirty in-depth interviews and field work i conducted among ladina women in eastern guatemala between late 1994 and 2000 in a town i call san alejo. 2 during my initial visits and conversations i did not ask the women questions about violence, as the objective of the project was to study how women‘s informal networks help them deal with pregnancyrelated health care and with their children‘s illnesses. however, in an inductive (and emic) fashion, this topic evolved from my conversations and observations during fieldwork, as it was the women‘s own words that guided my attention to this aspect of their lives. for this project i also conducted field work among indigenous in the altiplano, among whom i had expected to hear instances of violence (which i did). however, i had not anticipated that ladinas would bring up violence (in its different forms) in our conversations as well. the comparative analytical angle between the two sites helped me to discern the violence in the ladinas‘ lives. in addition to the interviews and follow up conversations, i talked with the women‘s friends, neighbors, and family members, and met with community leaders and workers, including health care workers, catholic priests, and evangelical pastors, who complemented greatly my informants‘ own stories. my starting points to access the women in both sites were the local health posts, which gave me access to a wide range of social positions for the women, including class and age variation. even though the focus in both sites was on the women‘s lives, i also spoke informally with men during the course of the fieldwork, but these conversations were mostly restricted to when women were present. 2 all the women‘s names (and the town‘s) are pseudonyms. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 15 the ladinas in this study come from different socio-economic and educational backgrounds. their educational level ranged from 0 years to high school; three were teachers and one was an accountant. their ages ranged from 20 to 51 years. eleven were formally married, three were widows and the rest were in consensual unions. those who mentioned earning an income outside the home worked as teachers, street vendors, comadronas (midwives), store clerks, domestics; one worked seasonally as a tomato picker; one made cusha (clandestine liquor for sale); and another was a photographer. there were a couple of former college students. health and the somatization of social suffering the multiple forms of violence in the lives of the women i met in san alejo were often embodied in illness (see also green, 1998-1999). the overwhelming majority of the women with whom i spoke had some form of ailment about which they wanted to talk. sometimes such complaints appeared to be of a physical nature, whereas at other times they seemed to be of psychological character, but in reality the two were so closely linked that it was difficult to categorize them simply as one or the other. moreover, as green (1998, p.5) aptly notes, ―to categorize suffering simply as a manifestation of a clinical syndrome or as a culture-bound construct of reality dehistoricizes and dehumanizes the women‘s experiences.‖ thus, i link the first to aspects of health and health treatments that illustrate the physical manifestations of social suffering resulting from intertwined forms of violence. these include the consequences of unequal access to treatment and medicines, and the naturalized view that the health of others in the family comes before the women‘s own health. the second dimension reveals embodied manifestations of distress, including headaches, stomachaches, and such ―folk‖ ailments as nervios and pena, conditions that at times may appear to be simply ―psychological‖ or ―part of the culture‖ but that upon close examination reflect the deeply entrenched violence and gender injustice in the women‘s lives. these two dimensions illustrate how structures of violence translate into everyday suffering and become embodied and routinized and, in bourdieu‘s term, ―misrecognized,‖ that is, they express the somatization of socially instituted gender differences (bourdieu, 1996-1997). misrecognition, fraser (2007) notes, is fundamental to gender inequality. guatemala is one of the worst performers in terms of health care outcomes in latin america; it has one of the highest infant mortality rates and one of the lowest life expectancies at birth (gragnolati & marini, 2003). although supply-and demand-side constraints play a role, it has been found that supply plays a more central role in rural areas (gragnolati & marini, 2003). the total expenditure on health as a percentage of the gdp in 2003 was 5.4 percent, and health expenditure represented 15.3 of the total government expenditure (world health organization, [who], 2006). there are 0.9 physicians and 4 nurses per 1,000 population and 5 hospital beds per 10,000 inhabitants (who, 2006). and overall, public health spending benefits disproportionately the highest quintiles of the income distribution of the population (gragnolati & marini, 2003). in a study that examines access to health care in rural guatemala (goldman, pebley & gragnolati, 2002), poverty emerged as a serious constraint on a family's choices about how to treat children‘s illnesses, and the availability of modern health facilities within a community—both government-sponsored facilities and private doctors—had a substantial impact on the type of providers sought to treat children‘s illnesses. and although research has shown studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 16 that guatemalans often resort to multiple sources and simultaneous use of home remedies, curanderos, herbalists, midwives, pharmacists, physicians, public and private health clinics and hospitals (cosminsky & scrimshaw, 1980), recent research notes that modern medical care plays a central role in the treatment of infectious illness in rural guatemala, with visits to pharmacists, doctors and the staff at government health facilities occurring much more frequently than visits to curers and other traditional practitioners (goldman & heuveline, 2000). within this overall scenario, social position, dictated by social class, ethnicity, and gender, shapes critically who ultimately gets medical treatment and who does not; indigenous groups, particularly poor indigenous women, fare even worse than the rest of the population. a lack of access to health care based on class position and ethnicity is often compounded for women by the naturalized ideology that they put the health of others before their own. the embodiment of structural, symbolic, and everyday forms of violence in san alejo is often expressed in malnutrition and its multiple manifestations. to be sure, malnutrition is an expression of structural violence that affects poor men as well, and poor ladinos and maya men also suffer from lack of access to good quality medical care. however, how such lack of access is perceived and ―naturalized‖ differs for men and women, an expression of the socialization of gender differences (and injustices) itself. thus, using a different analytical lens, observations that i classify as forms of violence can be easily interpreted as exemplifying the suffering mother in latin america, a representation that is often uncritically attributed to ―cultural‖ dictates and linked to the highly contested term ―marianismo.‖ viewed through the analytical lens i use here, leaving reproductive and personal decisions to their partners even when the woman‘s life is in danger, putting the health of others before their own, and the normalization of taking the last place in the family to get treatment—practices that are so routine and commonplace in san alejo—result from a combination of gender and gendered, symbolic, and structural violence. the women with whom i spoke in san alejo often mentioned ―debilidad,‖ or weakness, as an illness that affected their partners, children and themselves. women sometimes would buy pills or tonics over the counter at a pharmacy, from vendors on market day, or the physician at the local health post would prescribe something for them to alleviate their ―debilidad.‖ for instance, mirna, a 28 year old and mother of 5 children, often talked about what it is like for her and her family to live lacking what she considered important components of their daily diet. ―sometimes my mother comes by to see if i have a little bit of coffee left over because she gets headaches if she doesn‘t drink coffee every day. and me too, if i don‘t have a cup of coffee in the morning and at night, i have a terrible headache the next day. the thing is that we don‘t often have enough [money] to drink coffee everyday because we need that money so that the children can eat. also, my husband needs to eat so that he can work. so then [laughing] it‘s me, i am the one who often wakes up with a headache.‖ a health post worker told me that she often hears about such headaches from women, and explained that these are not the result of not having had a cup of coffee, but are serious cases of malnutrition that result from the women‘s ―descuido‖ (or disregard) for their own health. even though the health care worker linked the headaches to malnutrition and lack of access to food, she misdirected the root of the problem to the women themselves and their ―fault‖ and away from the structures of inequality (and specifically gender inequality) that lead to the these consequences of malnutrition. susana‘s is another case that brings to the fore how different forms of violence coalesce in the women‘s bodies. she was 26 years old when we first met and had quit school midway through the second grade. she was the mother of four children (a fifth had died as a newborn); the studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 17 following year i saw her pregnant for the sixth time (she eventually had a miscarriage). as other women also mentioned, susana pointed out that they often ran out of money to buy her own medicine, particularly when others in the family were ill or had other necessities that were considered to be urgent. however, she said that her husband had something to do with their ill health. she suffered interpersonal violence in the home, physical and psychological, and in our conversations articulated that this was the reason for her poor health. the owner of a nearby pharmacy knows of her situation and often gives her medicine on credit or sometimes even for free, particularly when it is for the children. in susana‘s words, ―the owner of the pharmacy knows me; she knows my husband and our situation. she knows that my husband takes money from food and spends it in alcohol. the other day i was supposed to buy my pills because this headache leaves me unable to do anything. but he [the husband] took the money and went to get drunk, maybe with women too…who knows…who cares. i went to the pharmacy and she [the owner] gave me 3 pills, so that at least i could go to sleep. she has mercy on me.‖ although susana had apparently internalized the structural and gender violence that contributed to her own dehumanization, in her moments of suffering she could turn to the owner of the pharmacy to temporarily alleviate her pain. this is what i noted earlier; women‘s lives do not constitute only circles of violence or social pathology; they are complicated and at times even contradictory. my task is to expose systematic patterns that are neither natural nor necessary. like susana, other women also mentioned people ―having mercy‖ on them; however, such attitude from others depended on many issues, including the women‘s reputation. a striking case is that of leticia. i met her one afternoon in the dark, damp, one-room structure with dirt floor that she shared with her two young daughters. it took a few minutes for my eyes to get used to the darkness of the room, and then i began to discern leticia‘s emaciated facial features. she was 27 years old and had never attended school. eventually she died of complications from hiv/aids two and a half years after her husband also died from the same causes. according to people who knew her, she ―left this world very sad; she worried so much about her girls because she knew they would be left orphans. her last three months of life were so sad for her that she even lost her mind a little.‖ she knew she was dying and that her girls would be separated, as neither set of the grandparents could take care of both. during leticia‘s last year of life no one would mention the name of her illness but everyone seemed to know what ailed her. some people would ―take pity‖ and help her, while others tried to avoid her. however, in leticia‘s eyes, those who helped her did so because she was a single mother and a widow, and most of all, respectable. in her words, ―because people see me alone, that i‘m responsible for everything in the home, so people help me. they allow me to pick tomatoes, to sell them, and that‘s help. sometimes i would like to go to visit my family, but that costs q. 10 for the bus fare and it‘s difficult for me to save that. once in a while people help me with that too.‖ but not everyone ―took pity‖ on leticia. i also heard from her sister and a health post worker that there were people who did not want anything to do with her and had been, in fact, cruel to her. such attitudes are related to symbolic violence that persons infected with hiv/aids experience (see smith, lucas & larkin, 1999). however, as i discuss in a later section, a woman‘s image of propriety exacerbated the effects that structural violence could have. her image in the eyes of others was key in accessing resources, as a good reputation would likely garner benefits, regardless of the women‘s position. this is related to normative expectations of women‘s behavior that can constrain women‘s lives to the point of suffering and pain. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 18 nervios, headaches, and the everyday embodiment of distress nervios (―nerves‖) is one of those ―folk‖ ailments, a popular label that refers to multiple symptoms, more likely associated with a loss of emotional control, which some researchers have linked to cultural, demographic, environmental, and personality factors. in their study of puerto ricans in puerto rico and in new york, guarnaccia, lewis-fernandez, and rivera (2003) argue that there are different categories and experiences of nervios and that an examination of these multiple categories provides insights into how suffering is experienced and expressed, pointing to different social sources of distress. other researchers have noted that nervios is a syndrome of brief duration seen primarily in spanish-speaking people of the caribbean (oquendo, howard & martinez, 1992) and, thus, they note that it as a cultural-specific syndrome. perhaps there is a relationship between geographical location (e.g. latin america and the caribbean) and nervios. however, from my analytical angle, rather than endorsing the notion that nervios has roots in a presumed common culture, i would argue that nervios is related to the high levels of inequality in the region, which are the highest in the world. and nervios is a condition that usually ails women. thus, in this discussion i elaborate on the links between nervios and the multiple forms of violence in which the guatemalan women in this study live. naturally, situating this phenomenon, as well as headaches and other embodiments of suffering, within a social and structural framework that underscores the injuries of inequality, necessitates a shift away from individualistic and ―cultural‖ approaches to the study of these illnesses. the eyes of ivette, a ladina who was married to a man in the altiplano, shifted nervously and blinked constantly when we talked even as she kept on reiterating what a good life she had. she later confessed that her nervios made her gastritis flare up, and needed to take maalox regularly because she was almost never without pain. and isabel, a 41-year old mother of 2 girls, told me that a year before we met her nervios were simply ―killing her.‖ ―i was very thin, like this (showing her pinky finger); i didn‘t want to eat anything. people gave me thousands of recommendations, of advice, ‗here, take this or that herb,‘ teas, injections, pills, sh, you name it. i got to a point where i didn‘t even care about my girls. i didn‘t want anyone to talk with me. it was at a time when i was suffering from a great pena (grief), and couldn‘t find consolation in anything. an evangelical lady started praying for me, and i started to feel better.‖ at first i asked isabel if her great pena had been of an economic nature, and she said it was. but months later she explained that she had been concerned about her husband and an affair he was having, which would also have financial consequences for her, she confessed, because there was the possibility that he would abandon her. other women i met in town mentioned how much isabel had suffered in those days because her husband would apparently parade himself with his mistress in front of the house he shared with isabel; he would go to parties with his mistress, and did not seem to care who saw him or when. according to isabel‘s neighbors, it was this humiliation that was literarily killing her. they agreed that these kinds of penas could kill anyone, as ―your nervios get destroyed from thinking.‖ a woman said that this kind of suffering, which women ―always‖ experience, is so painful psychologically that in her view, it amounts to torture. symbolic, structural, and gender forms of violence are also expressed in illness that are associated with nervios, such as insomnia, high blood pressure, and headaches. any of these symptoms may be caused by poor diet or malnutrition (themselves expressions of structural or symbolic violence), or a range of other ailments. however, in the women‘s own view, these were caused by situations linked to the (violent) context in which they lived. thus, because the women studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 19 interpreted them in this manner, they merit examination through the lens i propose here. significantly, expressions of nervios were not confined to the women who were poor. delfina is a case in point. a 35 year old teacher whose family and that of her husband are landowners and quite well off, delfina was not immune to these ailments. sitting in an elegant living room with chandeliers and ornate and expensive furniture, she said that she often felt that her ―nervous system is altered,‖ that her ―nervios are destroyed,‖ and that she lives on the verge of a breakdown. even though she takes medicine for her nervios, nothing helps because, she has realized, the cause of her nervios does not come from her, but from her husband. 3 her mother-inlaw and others have recommended that she go to see a neurologist in guatemala city, and perhaps seek therapy there. but she cannot do this because she is in a catch 22 situation. ―i can‘t go to get treatment in guate because i work all the time. well, i actually like to go to work because i forget my situation at home. and if i want to go to guate, who‘s going to make my husband his meals? who‘s going to take care of him? he doesn‘t let me go. i wish i could go because i really feel like i need to be treated by a specialist. oh no, he doesn‘t let any of our servants serve him; it always has to be me. god forbid i‘m not home and available to serve him his meals exactly how he likes them! it turns into a scandal. not even his mother can substitute for me. i truly live esclavizada (enslaved).‖ similarly, gloria linked her headaches and nervios to her ―situation‖ at home and had resorted to taking medication regularly. she explained that sometimes her problems got to a point where her nervios had led to convulsions, which she had suffered since she was a little girl but have worsened in the last years of her marriage. in her words, ―he won‘t change, so i have to do something. and what i can do is to take my medication and make sure that i see the doctor. that‘s all. i have to find treatment for myself if i don‘t want to completely lose my mind.‖ gossip, image, reputation and the control of movement not all embodiments of gender and other forms of violence are expressed in illnesses, nervios, or physical pain. there are other dimensions that are less tangible but equally harmful; we might call these the hidden injuries of corporal inequality and they are linked to how others interpret women‘s behavior and attribute meaning to their actions. thus, this aspect of violence (and injustice) to women‘s bodies involves meaning construction, socially-embedded but veiled injury, and the inscription of deeply unequal power relations. one of the most powerful and efficacious forms of control in the women‘s lives was gossip. taking gossip out of context or in a different discussion or situation might make this practice a ―cultural‖ expression unrelated to violence in the way i am arguing it could be linked. however, in this milieu, where other forms of suffering act on one another, gossip acquires the form of violence because it becomes a weapon of social control and a source of humiliation, pain, and affliction in the women‘s lives. the women i met worried about gossip and how it could hurt their reputation as well as the consequences it might have for their lives, including abandonment or diminished support and decreased opportunities to find (and keep) a partner. 3 delfina, like the health care worker i mentioned earlier, attributed direct culpability to an individual even when the roots of the situations they pinpointed lied in structures away from individuals. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 20 regardless of their social standing, the women were extremely careful in conducting themselves so as to not call negative attention to themselves and not to lead anyone to suspect them of ―misbehaving‖ either in the streets or at home. as the sullk‘atas in bolivia in van vleet‘s (2003) study, the women in san alejo carried out their daily lives constantly aware of the talk and attention of others, which conditioned their actions, words, postures, and movements. gossip, as it was explained to me more than once in san alejo, can destroy women‘s lives. it is in this light that i discuss the place of gossip in this study. gossip defines power relations; talking (as well as keeping silent) about others disciplines, manages, and creates categories of virtue and deviance (foucault, 1978). thus, gossip permeates formal spheres of social control and as such it becomes conversation that shapes reputations (merry, 1984; haviland, 1977). 4 in this manner, as the women in san alejo often implied, gossip can be a dangerous tool (haviland, 1977); it can be used to control others by managing impressions (goffman, 1959) about those who gossip as well as about whom people gossip (haviland, 1977). my discussion of gossip is situated within these analytical observations, and reflects the women‘s views and actions around talking about others and being talked about. it highlights the women‘s formidable efforts to portray a positive image, their efforts to avoid a negative reputation (mostly by avoiding anything that could be misconstrued negatively), and the control of the women‘s physical movement. as such, it underscores the injuries of gender and symbolic violence in the form of gossip in women‘s lives. for the women i met in san alejo it was vitally important to create a positive image about themselves as mothers, wives, and daughters. they were well aware that being perceived as dutiful, virtuous, and devoted would not only command respect and admiration, but also could bring pecuniary as well as non-tangible benefits to them and their families. in other words, they were fully aware that a positive image of themselves could translate into what can be called ―moral capital‖ and this was accomplished by adhering (or seeming to adhere) to prescribed norms regarding their behaviour. the women went through lengths to be seen in a positive light, particularly by other women, even if doing so meant sacrifices, pain, and suffering that, as several women confided, they just kept to themselves. in this context, therefore, gossip could not simply be attributed to ―cultural practices.‖ focusing on the significance it has for the women permits to unveil its destructive consequences as a form of social control. the destructive consequences of gossip are intimately related to the control of physical movement. often husbands and male partners, aided by their families and friends when needed, controlled where their partners and wives could or should go, how long they had for errands or visits, who could accompany them, and could determine whether the reasons for going to a particular place were warranted. the end result was an overwhelming sense of control of physical movement that constrained women and curtailed their interactions and as such became a source of distress in their lives. as with other forms of violence, this intense form of control is normalized in the context of male protection of women. often women would even interpret such control as an expression of the men‘s love. it was clear that a woman‘s reputation needed to be protected and one way to do so was to control their movements. this translated into forms of anguish, as women 4 importantly, gossip also has been characterized as a tool to resist the control of the more powerful, as a ―weapon of the weak‖ (see scott, 1985). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 21 endured completely unwanted long periods of separation from friends, co-workers, and loved ones, and ultimately served much more to protect the men‘s reputations and less the women‘s safety. silvia was particularly concerned about this situation. she was 20 years old when we first met and had a toddler boy. she and her partner met while he was stationed as a guard in her hometown on the coast, but since they became a couple and she became pregnant, he decided that she should move in with his parents in his hometown. i was curious about this arrangement since in my mind it would have made more sense for silvia to stay in her town, living with her own family and also close to him. even if patrilocality was the norm, she explained, ―well, when we got together he said that he needed to control me more, that he didn‘t like to imagine where i was when i wasn‘t with him and i know a lot of people in my town. since he couldn‘t be with me all the time because he was working, he said that i should come to live with his parents. this way i‘m more controlled. it‘s just that he likes to control. so i always have someone watching over me. i can‘t even go to the corner store without asking for permission from his parents. yes, controlled, he needs to control me like that.‖ living in her husband‘s town silvia faced an added complication; she was originally from a coastal town and women from there had a ―bad reputation‖ in san alejo. and with her husband away, she hardly left the house for fear that people would talk. in her words, ―if people see me going around in the street, they‘ll think i‘m looking for men, so he [the husband] says that i should just stay home, so he doesn‘t have any problems with me or with his family. sometimes i go out of the house with my sisters-in-law, but i don‘t go out alone because i prefer to avoid problems.‖ in fact, silvia almost never left the room in which she lived because she did not like to mingle much with her other sisters-in-law and the large family of in-laws, and preferred the solitude of her own room. indeed, i came to associate silvia with the light green walls of her room, since i rarely saw her in other parts of the house. she usually looked quiet, perhaps even sad, when she talked about her ―situation.‖ what was most distressful to her was that her partner had allowed her to visit her parents only once every eight months, when he could take her for the visit himself, even though he worked in her home town and would only come home one weekend per month. from his, and his family‘s, point of view, avoiding gossip about silvia was more important for the family‘s reputation. one of the most intriguing aspects of the women‘s explanations was not just the level of control the men exerted in their lives or how much their physical movements were constrained, but rather how normalized this aspect of their lives seemed to be. for instance, for estrella, a 46 year old photographer who supported her entire household with her work, it was just how things were. her current husband was about 15 years her junior and she needed to be out of the house to go take photographs at different events, which posed difficulties. she explained in a matter-of-fact manner why it was difficult for her to be ―alone‖ when her husband was not in town. ―yes, i would very much like for my husband to be here with me, you know, it‘s the man that lends respect to the house. for instance, he can tell me where to go, where not to go. i can‘t go out at night, yes, even for work, because i don‘t want people to talk. and it‘s dangerous here now, with robberies and bad things. he has already told me that i can‘t go out at night. he says that he worries about me. they [husbands] think and think and they become preoccupied. i want to avoid him any headaches. as a woman, one has to obey and not create problems, right? such is life.‖ for many women restrictions on physical movement left them feeling lonely, and they usually spoke of ―accepting‖ their situation—often stated as rhetorical questions—because that is how things were. in some cases, however, the women spoke about the serious effects of these constraints in their lives, such as being restricted from going to work, completing a course of study, or even studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 22 visiting their own parents, as in the case of silvia, mentioned above. in such situations, the women would seem to be more aware of the downside of this form of ―protection‖ and even though they still pointed to its normality, they would note the negative consequences it had for them. in emilia‘s case her husband measured the time it took for her to get home from work and vice versa, and would get upset if she took longer for any of those trips. sometimes she had work-related meetings in a city half an hour away, but she tried not to attend those when he was in town; luckily, she said, he worked in the united states nine months out of the year and somehow this made things easier for her. she explained, ―when he isn‘t in town it‘s fine; i can attend the meetings and work in a more relaxed way. but when he is in town, i live tormented because i have to be home exactly on time. i have to leave work even if my boss gets upset at me because my husband gets very angry. yes, when he‘s in town i feel really constrained, almost not alive.‖ at work her colleagues knew about her home situation and understood that when ―the husband‖ was in town emilia barely said hello to anyone and rushed home as soon as she could. a co-worker told me, ―she looks so bad when he‘s around. the moment he goes back to the states her face changes and she seems to be happy; yes she can be happy but only if he‘s not here (laughs hard). no, it‘s true, everyone knows that.‖ in the case of hortencia, her partner sometimes would not even allow her to finish her work. sometimes she would take clothes to wash for other people to make a little extra money, but her partner would not allow her to do that, particularly if it involved walking around town, so she would come up with strategies to give back the clothes behind his back. once she took advantage that he was not at home so she washed but had to give the clothes wet to her client before his return. she would do anything to earn extra money ―in a decent way‖ but her partner would oppose anything that would require her to go out of the house more than he thought was necessary. as in silvia‘s case earlier, other women seemed more affected emotionally when the restrictions also applied to visits to their parents. delfina, who often described her husband as simply ―malo‖ (bad, mean), would complain about the rules her husband had imposed on her visits to her family, who lived in a town about one hour drive from san alejo. in her words, ―well, he lets me go, but i can‘t ever stay there over night. since i got married 17 years ago i‘ve never slept outside of our house, not even at my parents‘ because he‘s so strict about that. it‘s the same with our daughters. he doesn‘t even let them get into cars with their own (male) cousins. he says to me, ‗you and i know that they‘re cousins, but other people just see men in the car, and i don‘t want people to go around saying that my daughters were seen riding around with some men.‘ oh, you should see how he gets. i would love to stay at least one saturday night at my parents‘ but that‘s not possible (her intonation denoted assertion). i have to serve him his breakfast and then come to serve him lunch. one day he got upset because i wasn‘t home to serve him a glass of lemonade! imagine? another time he was looking for his black boots and couldn‘t find them and i wasn‘t home and he got angry. can you imagine?‖ delfina pointed out that her husband was old enough to find his own boots, but that he acted in this way just to control her and to determine how long she can stay when she visits her relatives. ―usually, i just go, quickly, and then have to rush home. i think my mother suffers for me, but she won‘t say anything because it‘s my husband.‖ emilia was happy that her husband had changed a little since they were first married. at first he would only give her half an hour to go visit her parents, and this was never enough. ―he used to control me and give me half an hour to go. so i would go in and out of my parents‘ house like lightening because he would go wait for me but thanks to god he is not like that anymore. my mother and even my mother-in-law talked to him because life was getting to be unbearable for me.‖ and gracia spoke of visits to her mother‘s as if they were something to hide. she explained, ―you studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 23 know, once in a while me doy mis escapaditas (i escape a little) to go and talk with my mother a little bit. but it‘s really not good for me because i‘m always afraid. i am always busy around the house, cleaning, cooking, washing, and so i don‘t have time to get out. and imagine if my husband sees that nothing has been done in the house and i‘m out visiting? and he doesn‘t like me going out just to visit. oh god no! he has even gone to get me from my mother‘s house to bring me home.‖ thus, while the presence of other women creates spaces for sociality that complicates the descriptions of violence in the lives of women, these do not always constitute arenas for resistance. control of physical movement would take place even when the men were living and working in the united states. sometimes a husband or male partner would call on the phone to express his wishes for where his partner should reside or where she could go and with whom, and often his relatives in town would enforce his decisions. for lucía, a 42 year old teacher and mother of three young children, life had been going well since she got married. her husband had been traveling to the united states seasonally for the previous five years and she had been able to live with her parents in her hometown all that time. but one day, out of the blue, her husband called from connecticut to tell her that he had decided that she move to san alejo. in her words, ―he said, either you come here with me or you go to live in san alejo. i was so surprised, i thought, why? but what could i say? i couldn‘t say no, right?‖ apparently, her husband had gotten the idea from the compatriots with whom he lived and worked in connecticut, who had done the same with their partners. it was hard for lucía to move to san alejo because she much preferred to live with her family while her husband was in the united states, but she said she had no choice. and in the case of mercedes, a 51 year old mother of 8, her husband was in guatemala when she was visiting her ailing father in chicago. according to the doctors her father was in critical condition and was not expected to make it through the week, but mercedes had promised her husband that she would be back in guatemala sooner. so she called her brother in guatemala city so he could intercede on her behalf and plead with her husband to allow her to stay in chicago until her father passed. ―luckily, beto (the husband) gave me permission to stay, but i was really nervous because he had said no before and what would keep him from saying no now?‖ discussion and conclusion the lens i use here allows an examination of body ailments, malnutrition, unequal access (or lack thereof) to health care, as well as the control of gossip and movement and socializing as arenas where social suffering becomes visible and recognized. examined through other lenses these instances could be taken as indicators of inequality, perhaps gender inequality, and some could even be interpreted as part of tradition, as internally-driven and linked to culture. however, the women‘s words and stories and their posture, body language, and expressions as they related their experiences brought out key links to multiple structures of violence and gender injustice. as the women narrated their lives, visible forms of suffering—couched in a language of fear, pain, and distress—arising from structural, symbolic, everyday, gender and gendered violence could be discerned. in this way, the ailments, gossip, and control of movement are not simply expressions of tradition or culture; they are the embodiment of violence in their worlds, of the suffering, fear, and neglect. i simply could not dismiss the harmful consequences of control and of the deeply unequal power relations in the women‘s lives; even if these were not as evident as the direct physical or even political violence present in other regions of guatemala (or in other studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 24 contexts), they had profoundly injurious consequences for the women i came to know in san alejo. equally distressing was the normalization of their suffering, even in cases where the women‘s reflections had a hint of questioning the way things were. unearthing suffering and violence in the women‘s lives is crucial because the unquestioned embeddeness of culture and the normalization of pain conceal structures that facilitate harming women in more direct, physical ways, such as in the case of the femicides that are taking place all over guatemala. the politics of recognition are a key component of any efforts toward gender justice. in a discussion of the somatization of socially-instituted gender differences, bourdieu (19961997) observes that female acts of cognition are inevitably ―acts of misrecognition‖ that make acceptance of dominance possible. for bourdieu and wacquant (2004) gender domination represents the paradigmatic form of symbolic violence. my focus on quotidian instances in the women‘s lives permits to unveil (perhaps to scratch the surface of) embedded structures of violence that assault the women‘s lives and provoke suffering and humiliation. and just as issues of ―family justice,‖ (okin, 1989) including terms of divorce and domestic and family violence, have become increasingly visible, other, less obvious but equally harmful forms of gender injustice need to be pinpointed and understood. neglect is another form of violence. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 25 references bourdieu, p. (1996-1997). the goffman prize lecture: masculine domination revisited. berkeley journal of sociology, 41, 189-203. bourdieu, p. and l. wacquant. (2004). symbolic violence. in n. scheper-hugues & p. bourgois (eds.), violence in war and peace (pp. 272-274). malden, ma: blackwell publishing. bourgois, p. (2004). us inner-city apartheid: the countours of structural and interpersonal violence. in n. scheper-hugues & p. bourgois, (eds.), violence in war and peace (pp. 301-308). malden, ma: blackwell publishing. cosminsky, s. & scrimshaw, m. (1980). women and health care on a guatemalan plantation. social science and medicine, 25 (10), 1163–1173. farmer, p. (2004). an anthropology of structural violence. current anthropology, 45 (3), 305-325. fraser, n. (2007). feminist politics in the age of recognition: a two-dimentional approach to gender justice. studies in social justice, 1 (1), 23-35. foucault, m. 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(2003). toward a puerto rican popular nosology: nervios and ataque de nervios. culture, medicine and psychiatry, 27 (3), 339-366. haviland, j. (1977). gossip, reputation and knowledge in zinacantan. chicago and london: university of chicago press. martín-baró, i. (1991b). violence in central america: a social psychological perspective. in j. hassett & h. lacey (eds.), towards a society that serves its people: the intellectual contributions of el salvador’s murdered jesuits (pp. 333-346). washington d.c: georgetown university press. menjívar, c. (2008). violence and women‘s lives in eastern guatemala: a conceptual framework. latin american research review, 43 (3), 109-136. merry, s. e. (1984). rethinking gossip and scandal. in d. black (ed.) toward a general theory of social control: the fundamentals (vol i), (pp. 277-301). new york: academic press. okin, s. m. (1989). justice, gender, and the family. new york: basic books. oquendo m., horwath, e. & martinez, a. (1992). ataques de nervios: proposed diagnostic criteria for a culture specific syndrome. culture, medicine and psychiatry, 16 (3), 367-376. scott, j. c. (1985). weapons of the weak: everyday forms of resistance. new haven: yale university press. smith, l. c., lucas, k.j. & latkin, c. (1999). rumor and gossip: social discourse on hiv and aids. anthropology & medicine, 6 (1), 121-131. sutton, b. (2005). body politics and women’s consciousness in argentina. ph.d. dissertation, university of oregon. http://ssrn.com/abstract=636328 studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1, 2008 issn: 1911-4788 26 torres-rivas, e. (1998). sobre el terror y la violencia política en américa latina. in r. papadopoulos (ed.). violencia en una sociedad en transición (pp. 46-59). programa de naciones unidas para el desarrollo. san salvador, el salvador. van vleet, k. (2003). partial theories: on gossip, envy and ethnography in the andes. ethnography, 4 (4), 491-519. walter, e. v. (1969). terror and resistance: a study of political violence, with case studies of some primitive african communities. new york: oxford university press. williams, s. j. (1999). is anybody there? critical realism, chronic illness and the disability debate. sociology of health and illness, 21 (6), 797-819. world health organization. (2006). core health indicators. retrieved from: http://www3.who.int/whosis/core/core_select.cfm http://www3.who.int/whosis/core/core_select.cfm correspondence address: lucy costa, the empowerment council, 1001 queen st. w. room 160, toronto, on m6j 1h4, canada. email: ms.lucycosta@gmail.com issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 6, issue 1, 85-101, 2012 recovering our stories: a small act of resistance lucy costa the empowerment council, canada jijian voronka ontario institute for studies in education, university of toronto, canada danielle landry school of disability studies, ryerson university, canada jenna reid critical disability studies, york university, canada becky mcfarlane ryerson university, canada david reville school of disability studies, ryerson university, canada kathryn church school of disability studies, ryerson university, canada abstract this paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient “personal story.” the sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having “lived experience” has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. however, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. we explore how personal stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from “agents of change” towards one of “disability tourism” or “patient porn.” we mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool for socio-political change. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 86 kathryn church, lucy costa, danielle landry, becky mcfarlane, jenna reid, david reville, jijian voronka we all have stories. many of our stories are deeply personal. some of our stories are painful, traumatic, hilarious, heroic, bold, banal. our stories connect us— they reflect who we are and how we relate to one another. stories are extremely powerful and have the potential to bring us together, to shed light on the injustice committed against us and they lead us to understand that not one of us is alone in this world. but our stories are also a commodity—they help others sell their products, their programs, their services—and sometimes they mine our stories for the details that serve their interests best—and in doing so present us as less than whole. becky mcfarlane, recovering our stories event, june 2011 introduction sharing experiences through stories or “testimonies” by people who selfidentify as having psychiatric disabilities has been central to the history of organizing resistance and change in and outside the psychiatric system (church, 1995; cresswell, 2005; morrison, 2005; on our own, 1980-1990). in the last decade, however, mental health organizations have begun to use and rely on personal stories from users of mental health services—people who are often homeless or struggling to survive below the poverty line. it is now commonplace for mental health organizations to solicit personal stories from clients—typically, about their fall into and subsequent recovery from mental illness. these stories function to garner support from authority figures such as politicians and philanthropists, to build the organizational “brand” regardless of program quality, and to raise operating funds during times of economic constraint. this paper discusses an event called “recovering our stories” which was held in toronto, canada in june 2011 (from this point forward, we refer to event organizers as “the collective”). it was intended to interrupt the proliferation of this popular type of storytelling within the mental health sector—judging it to be not just problematic but “pornographic.” by pornographic we mean that, while some people reveal their most intimate personal details, others achieve relief through passive watching, while still others profit from the collaboration of those on the front lines in compromised positions. today storytelling is far from being an unstoppable juggernaut: rather, it is in our hands how stories can be used and abused as sought after commodities. “writing up” the june event is our call for further action and reflection from other psychiatric survivors/consumers about how to reclaim personal stories and efforts at mobilization. “people with lived experience” has become the catch-phrase to designate those who speak directly to “living” lives affected by mental illness. but lives are shaped and constructed by social, political, economic, and cultural realities that necessitate an analysis of inequity. our “small act of resistance” was an imperative: resistance to the hegemonic influence of biomedical determinism that occurs by way of a most personal avenue—self disclosure. we offered people an opportunity to focus discussion on the ability of the mentally ill to studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 recovering our stories 87 organize and work towards change using a social justice agenda (crossley, 2006; fraser, 1987). just as feminist, anti-colonial, im/migrant, migrant, racialized, disabled, and aboriginal (first nations, metis, and inuit) activist groups in canada have worked towards reclaiming subjectivities that are of value, so too has the consumer/survivor movement fought for its worth and dignity. our social justice agenda transcends the goals that are commonly assumed to bind mental health mandates and mission statements—locally and nationally. it calls for more than simply working towards improving access to services, increasing peer involvement, bettering client care, and other concerns related to the mental health system. like the authors of mad pride-mad culture, our agenda “asserts the rights of ‘mad’ people without pleading for minor concessions, but instead changes the world into a fit place for us to live” (curtis, dellar, leslie, & watson, 2000, p. 8). grounded in the recognition that there are many ways to “be” and “understand,” our “politics of resistance” fundamentally calls into question the ways in which mental health mandates are normalized and assumed as “truth.” more pointedly, it questions the ways in which mental health systems have begun to promote their own agendas by co-opting the language of social justice itself. fraser (1987) has commented that the means of interpretation and communication tied to the cultural imperialism of dominant groups is their ability to express its values, goals and achievements as the norm as well as attaining and sustaining cultural status through these norms. here, we seek to explore how the resignification of language such as “resilience” and “recovery,” as told through client accounts, is a means by which mental health service systems have been able to absorb resistance accounts, sanitize them, and carry them forward in ways that are useful for them, without disrupting their dominant practices. it is precisely through this recalibration of norms that mental health systems are able to maintain their cultural and economic status which occurs partially through the incorporation of the patient story wherein this incorporation ruptures away from the history of psychiatric survivor storytelling to radicalize, towards one that uses stories to further solidify hegemonic accounts of mental illness. this disregards the original purpose of storytelling to work towards radical change. the situation is very similar to that of other social action groups, such as non-status migrants, “who are generally denied the right to express themselves as political beings, [however] engage in a political act or an assertion of political subjectivity” (basok, 2010, p. 99) in order to better organize for change. psychiatric survivor organizing that attends to broader issues of social justice (discrimination, not stigma; employment; human rights violations) disrupts the traditional focus on the psychiatrized as “mentally ill” patients in need of a cure. it orients away from medical intervention and towards a broader impetus for respecting, responding, and incorporating difference into the social milieu. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 88 kathryn church, lucy costa, danielle landry, becky mcfarlane, jenna reid, david reville, jijian voronka stories on parade and stagnant welfare rates how and why did getting the mentally ill to divulge their lives become so pervasive in the last decade? grappling with that urgent question motivated us to create a forum for larger discussion and exploration. within the collective, many were familiar with being asked to speak. familiar, as well, with being asked quite explicitly for “the story” of diagnosis, treatment and recovery: this by contrast with, for example, being asked to speak of the actual employment/activist work that we do within various settings. our initial thoughts on how we might best intervene on this growing practice revolved around the idea of developing a series of workshops for current and future psychiatric survivor/consumer storytellers. we knew that many of the individuals who were active on the storytelling circuit could be quite critical of the broader mental health system and, if given the opportunity, were more than capable of developing a useful critique of this intensifying practice. we thought of venues in which to deliver workshops or educational sessions of this nature. we knew also that there were other psychiatric survivors/consumers who would be interested in engaging in this project, if only because the opportunities for learning within the actual mental health system were few and far between. so, we knew why a set of workshops might be useful and we knew where we wanted to hold them. the question of content was more challenging. should the workshops focus on ideological questions, such as, “who profits from your story?” or should they be practically based and offer “tips,” such as, “how not to say something you will regret later”? over a number of weeks, our deliberations caused us to shift away from the workshops and towards planning a public event that would include a keynote speaker (american poet and story-teller eli clare was our final choice), as well as locally-based individuals who could speak to storytelling within aboriginal, consumer/survivor, and academic communities. in our view, the three sectors or “circuits” of story solicitation would complement the questions we hoped to raise by the end of the forum. we favoured a public event over a workshop because we recognized that a workshop directed at consumer/survivors who tell their stories would interrupt only their practice; it would have no impact on those that were soliciting stories (both individuals and institutions). we wanted researchers, service providers, and psychiatric institutions to know that we knew they were using our stories—not in consumer/survivor interest—but for the benefit of professionals. we wanted to make it public so that, at the very least, they might hesitate before they asked us to bare our souls for their gain. personal and political storytelling originated with psychiatric survivors who were eager to counter the silence and dehumanization that was core to the experience of being a “mental patient” (chamberlin, 1978; on our own, 1980-1990; reville, 1988; shimrat, 1997). the consumer/survivor movement fought long and hard to have the voices and narratives of their members understood as politicized accounts, and not just delegitimized rants of people who are routinely dismissed because of diagnosis (berkenkotter, studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 recovering our stories 89 2008). in the 1980’s and 1990’s, psychiatric survivors began to insist that their perspectives represented real knowledge of how the psy-complex worked1, and that this knowledge must be taken seriously in public decisionmaking (for more on the psy-complex see rose, 1990). like other social movements, we found venues to speak back to psychiatry (both inter and intraorganizationally) (crossley, 2006). over time, these acts of resistance were systematically co-opted as psy industries learned how to manipulate these stories to their own purposes. in the last decade, as capitalist societies have emphasized the substantial losses in productivity associated with mental illness2 and the potential profit inherent particularly in pharmacology (whitaker, 2010), personal stories have entered the marketplace (jamison, 1997; steele & berman, 2001). campaigns to normalize mental illness feature well-known “talking heads” who use their status and public profile to propagate the message that “it can happen to you.” in canada, they include broadcasters shelagh rogers and valerie pringle, singer steven page, and margaret trudeau. to popularize the message that mental illness affects us all3 social service agencies have recently cornered the market on personal storytelling. for a twenty dollar honorarium and a couple of transit tokens, select psychiatric survivors are recruited and paraded in front of institution staff, patients, boards of directors, and local politicians in an effort to prove that the golden road to recovery will reveal itself—but only if you take your medication and listen to your mental health care providers. issues of systemic poverty and discrimination, an appalling lack of choice in services, and mistreatment are conveniently left out of the story. favoured stories feature the uplifting message that with a little hard work and perseverance, you too can be cured. common themes include: how this or that service saved my life; how this or that medication saved my life; and how this or that pursuit of a normal existence saved my life. the ubiquitous message is that mental illness is a biological problem and treatment (i.e. pharmaceuticals) the solution. funding to do critical work that challenges the way the mental health system conducts itself is difficult to find. quantitative data and statistics take precedence and most philanthropy is dedicated towards research that explores brain functioning or chemistry.4 given the dominance of this bio-medical storytelling, rarely are organizational funds directed towards autonomous and critical narratives. the recovering our stories collective was not sponsored by an organization or institution; all of its activities and products were created by volunteers and through donations in kind. in ontario, the struggle to be included as full participants in civic engagement began on a shoestring. it came about with the support of volunteers and other allies who were doing social movement organizing in the 1990s (church & reville, 1989; church, 1995; nelson et al, 2006; reaume, 2002). the 90s also saw the rise of psychiatric survivor/ consumer-run support groups and organizations that stressed the importance of inclusion and consumer/survivor voice within mainstream mental health agencies. zines, books, and reports were produced by mad people themselves, studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 90 kathryn church, lucy costa, danielle landry, becky mcfarlane, jenna reid, david reville, jijian voronka independent of mental health institutions (campbell, 2011). a number of these consumers/survivor organizations have since been defunded and/ or absorbed into larger mental health organizations, but the legacy of their practice has made it increasingly difficult to exclude persons with psychiatric disabilities from the formal governance of mental health organizations and institutions (reville & church, 2012). by the late 1990s, practices of “client-centered care” and the involvement of people with “lived experience” became requirements if an organization was to represent itself as a community based or community involved service provider (bhui, aubin, & strathdee, 1998, crawford, 2001; department of health, 1989). at the same time, the methods by which organizations sought participation remained rooted in conservative and paternalistic values. psychiatric survivors and the more radically marginalized were not recruited; instead, those who called themselves “consumers” and those more or less appeased by the mental health services they had received were the first to be chosen to sit, speak, and represent on various boards, in consultations, and on panels. while the collective was well aware that lived experience was important, we were concerned that some lived experiences were not being relayed. sanitized stories were preferred—but they do little to change the way that agencies function or to address broader issues such as poverty, unemployment and discrimination. these conditions persist despite the work of social service providers, police, government and other powerful institutions capable of implementing systemic change.5 a pressing item on our agenda was to equip those who were being paid, cajoled, and/or manipulated into storytelling with some basic tools that would enable them to question and/or resist the practice. to acknowledge that, for decades—even centuries—the very institutions that had deliberately and systemically erased the experiences of psychiatric survivors in their charge were suddenly scrambling to squeeze every salacious and gory detail out of their journey to recovery was an exercise in consciousness-raising. a further complication in the evolution of storytelling lies in the paradoxical gains levered out of research that champions consumer/survivor participation and harnesses discourses of inclusion. as literature and more importantly “evidence” is being constructed as to the importance of inclusion so too are these discourses being co-opted into the flexible agendas of liberalism for its own gains (cooke & kothari, 2011; mcruer, 2006). the very research that is supposedly conducted to empower those with psychiatric disabilities (and more generally, across-disability communities) becomes the research which is enveloped into the “talk” of managing the disabled. for critical researchers wanting to do emancipatory work the challenges are daunting. in the qualitative paradigm, narrative researchers in particular tend to think of themselves as “the good guys.” they are not trading in large scale surveys and cold, hard statistics to make their living. rather, they are interested in purpose and meaning, and draw on methodologies that attempt to counter “the dominant perspectives representing the hegemonic studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 recovering our stories 91 interests of ruling groups” (o’shaughnessy & krogman, 2012). in general, they take the time to cultivate trust with participants. they are sensitive to power, empathic, even emotional when eliciting various dilemmas of social justice. but often unremarked is how it is precisely this type of researcher who may pose the most threat: the ones who, by their very self-reflexivity have discovered how to be really effective at stealing stories for their own academic gain. ironically, efforts made to deliver genuine involvement in mental health research, while significant, also demonstrates the need for further reflection on methods and practice. communications and social media as resistance as a collective, our project was to alert the community to the dangers of storytelling. at a time when language, public debate and opposition are censored or overly regulated, not only by authorities but by the professional helpers who “regulate personhood” (hook, 2007; rose, 1990;), the collective engaged various audiences on this highly taboo subject. from intent to implementation, all of our products (posters, info-cards and a public discussion) were created to resist the technologies that encourage people to tell bio-medical stories. social media allowed an even broader reach and an expanded dialogue. in designing the event poster, a major consideration was to ensure that all elements of the design conveyed an aesthetic that would have cross-cutting appeal to not just our primary target audience: people in the radical queer/ disability studies arena. we recognized the need to be inviting to a highly diverse group: consumer/survivors who are actively engaged in storytelling (as individuals and in groups); service providers and mental health experts who benefit from survivor narratives; individuals in the disability community who were already concerned about the interests that such voicing serves. we debated the language we should use to describe those who have had psychiatric encounters. consumers would speak to service providers, an important constituency that the group agreed was crucial to have in attendance. we wanted to ensure that those who solicit “patient porn”6 for their organizations were present. at best, we wanted to unsettle the takenfor-granted language of their work. others pointed out that using the term consumer would alienate the psychiatric survivor/mad/ex-patient movement, and not appeal to the politicized. we bantered back and forth on whether to use “consumer,” “consumer/survivor,” or “psychiatric survivor” to describe those that were telling such stories. we decided against using “service users” (common in the uk lexicon); “mad” (too radical); “ex-patient” (too antiquated?) for the text of the poster. finally, one member declared herself unwilling to use consumer just to appeal to service providers. to do so would debase our purpose and ensure that the poster had no political weight for the rest of us. in the interest of creating a poster that we would all be proud to hang on our walls, we settled on, “in studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 92 kathryn church, lucy costa, danielle landry, becky mcfarlane, jenna reid, david reville, jijian voronka whose interest? how psychiatric survivors can use our stories to change the world.” claiming the word our signified that the event was organized mostly by psychiatric survivors. the phrase, “use our stories to change the world,” gave the title an uplifting, hopeful twist. it also acknowledged the potential of our narratives, if used collectively, to challenge power. for the info-postcard, we chose the slogan, “hands off our stories.” it was derived in part from an experience in which someone grafted their emotional desires/deficiencies onto the personal narrative of one of our members. “go get your own agony!” they replied. another option we tossed around was, “back off, and get your own story,” cheeky words derived from a sandwich commercial.7 both slogans connote what audiences do (and do with) when confronted by pain, oppression, and systemic discrimination in which they are unwittingly or unconsciously implicated. what audiences do when they listen to a story depends on where they are positioned. audience members who work within psy service systems often pull on stories in ways that work for them. they also hear in ways that protect them from being implicated in systems the storyteller is naming as oppressive, unjust, or discriminatory. sherene razack calls this “stealing the pain of others.” the “pleasures of flinching” allows an audience to vicariously and safely descend into degeneracy, reemerging unscathed, without having to confront their implication and collaboration in the storyteller’s narrative (razack, 2004; 2007). the gleeful “hands off our stories” was at once a reclamation of our own life histories (ones that had been relegated to case files and whispers), and a declaration that these “tragedies and triumphs” belonged to us. they could not be claimed by systems of intervention that simultaneously took credit for our recoveries and remained distanced from the “unbeautiful” struggles and resistances that have been unexplored in recent storytelling. a gaze more familiar to the freak shows of the past has been finding its way forward into meetings, fundraisers, and research (clare, 1999; fausto-sterling, 1995; garland-thomson, 2009; longmore, 2005; garlandthomson, 1996;). it is a modern day voyeurism whereby, in listening to a cast of characters, spectators continue to justify the “otherness” of madness while curbing the watcher’s anxiety. as late as the mid-20th century, visiting asylums for voyeuristic entertainment was a common form of amusement. joseph workman, former superintendent for what is now called the centre for addictions and mental health, once criticized such spectators as “emptyheaded visitors” who came to “stare and laugh” at patients (reaume, 2002, p. 182). somewhat later, foucault wrote: madness here was erected as spectacle above the silence of the asylums, and it became, for the joy of all, a public scandal. unreason was hidden away discreetly in houses of confinement, but madness was a continued presence of the world stage, more strikingly than ever before. (2009, p. 144) thus, mad stories have become a kind of pornography that is produced and studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 recovering our stories 93 consumed in the interest of the audience itself. like those inmates paraded out in the past, the storyteller is barely acknowledged, and rarely appropriately compensated. in addition to the info-postcard, the collective created buttons to remind our audience of the nature of this consumption and to encourage conversation beyond the event itself. a local artist created the design; a small circle pin displaying the words patient porn stroked out by a red diagonal line. this visual exemplified the use of stories as exploitation as well as the refusal to have stories used as patient porn. a humorous memento, the buttons were a small token from us to the audience, transmitting a simple yet provocative message—and encouraging people to fill out an evaluation form. enticed by the message, audience members were eager to own such a provocative pin. some found the graphic language too strong but for the collective, again, it provoked a notion of resistance. the front of the info-card featured an image of four hands grasping for a microphone alongside the christened slogan “hands off our stories.” for the collective, this image symbolized attempts to reclaim the voice which has been a site of contention and co-optation. but the info-card was also meant to inform. on the reverse was a list of suggestions, written from a critical perspective and intended as a reminder of the potential for stories to be stolen and appropriated by organizations and institutions. six tips cautioned that: • participation is voluntary. you can always say no. • ask yourself, who profits from you telling your story? • what purpose does personal story sharing serve? • how do large organizations use stories to make material change? • story telling as an exercise of labour/work. do you get paid? • the internet lasts forever. because of the technology available today, your interview or story will likely be accessible to the public for a very long time. that includes future employers and landlords. finally, the info-cards served to connect torontonians to the recovering our stories website, email address and facebook page. the group strategically disseminated the postcards throughout the city, targeting community dropin centers, institutional settings, university mental health centers, and so on. this distribution launched the communication of ideas between the collective members and the greater toronto community. in addition to providing practical advice to potential storytellers, the cards were meant to stir interest leading up to the recovering our stories event. the collective also created a website (www.recoveringourstories.ca), a facebook page, an electronic e-invite and a gmail account to manage inquiries. we circulated the posters electronically as well as posting them in hotspots. we drew on our varied personal contacts to ensure that researchers, academics, consumer/survivors, service providers, journalists, critical students, politicos and all who intersect across such nexuses were invited and would spread the word. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 94 kathryn church, lucy costa, danielle landry, becky mcfarlane, jenna reid, david reville, jijian voronka interlocking social justice: disability, race and queer politics june 28, 2011 was the big day. we chose it to coincide with the anniversary of the stonewall riots, an informal event on the toronto lgbtq pride schedule. with this political reference, we hoped to stress the importance that resistance struggles have played as vehicles for social change, and to acknowledge the interlocking issues that queer and mad communities face. a few days ahead of time, columnist helen henderson (2011) covered the event for the toronto star. her piece got the word out. “grassroots group takes back patients’ stories,” declared the headline: some call it “patient porn,” which is not exactly the same as “disability tourism,” but not totally different either. both are ways in which the world in general does the quickie exploration tour of the world of disability. we might as easily talk about gender tourism or racial tourism or any other expedition into otherness, any trip into what travelers call unchartered territory. they peak, peep, peer, probe, poke their noses in and come away thinking they have gained perspective. this may or may not be true, but either way the risks are huge for those who find themselves the object of such study, no matter how wellintentioned or how scholarly. (henderson, 2011) we held the event on the campus of ryerson university in toronto’s downtown core—close to the lgbtq pride toronto activities with easy access for most people. on that rainy afternoon, one of our members welcomed the packed house by articulating the purpose that brought us together. we chose to quote these passages in length out of a respectful attempt to leave our members thoughts intact: our collective came together with very specific goals in mind. we were not interested in establishing another organization—all of us belong to a number of organizations and are engaged in a great many examples of resistance. here, we wanted to: a) produce some tips for psychiatric survivors who have been asked or who might be asked to share their personal stories—which we have done and which is available at the registration table. b) put on an event that brought together people that represented many different interests to think, listen, and learn about the difference between storytelling as an act of community building or as an act of personal resistance—and the solicitation of personal stories that fit the specific agenda of an institution, organization or agency. c) call attention to the importance of solidarity—by hosting an event that looks at storytelling from different perspectives—recognizing that the kind of “patient porn” that has become prevalent within the psychiatric survivor community is a phenomenon that other marginalized communities can relate and respond to. another of our members marked the historical transition from oppositional studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 recovering our stories 95 storytelling to patient porn: for the longest time, the mental health system wasn’t interested in our stories. our stories, after all, were the stories of mad people and, therefore, not credible. by the mid80s, though, some parts of the mental health system began to think that what we had to say might be of interest. so, in 1985, the canadian mental health association national published a pamphlet called “listening to people who have directly experienced the mental health system.” as the idea of consumer participation became more popular, more and more of us were invited to tell our stories. telling our stories didn’t make us rich. one storyteller, expecting to receive an honorarium for telling his story, instead was presented with a small bag. in it, he found a pack of cigarettes, a pack of chewing gum and a bag of peanuts. we’re not speaking for peanuts anymore. our stories have gone mainstream. if you have been selected by the mental health system to tell your story, you will be familiar with people coming up to you and telling you how courageous you are, how you must have been misdiagnosed, how you are a hero for getting out of bed in the morning. if you’re like me, you will attempt to set people straight—no, it’s not courage, you may say, it’s my life—and you will wonder why people have such a hard time getting it. if you’re like me, you may wonder, too, if you have become part of the “patient porn” industry. you may be looking to create spaces where you can reclaim your story and tell it in solidarity with others who are seeking social justice. many people had come to hear eli clare, our keynote speaker. white, disabled, and queer, eli has a book of essays on disability, queerness and liberation (1999, 2009) and a recent collection of poetry (2007). proudly claiming a penchant for rabble-rousing,” he is a huge draw across the disability and queer communities. we believed that eli could speak to the political nuances of storytelling in ways that would not alienate our audience. we knew that his presence would attract those who otherwise might spend a summer afternoon elsewhere. others in the audience were consumers/ survivors familiar from other events; many were mental health providers, and there was a strong showing of young students. the concluding panel of commentators included an academic who tries to use consumer/survivor narratives to elucidate systemic oppression. she argued that researchers: need to conceptualize our studies outside of the dominant narratives that govern people’s lives—the psychiatric narrative, as a prime example. much of what i read in the community mental health literature fails to question biomedical disease formations. our studies remain encased in diagnostic categories, even when they enact participant involvement that is quite admirable. these categories are not just debatable; they are being actively contested. we need to weigh in against them, openly, wherever we can. following the lead of community-based research, we should be as participatory as possible in the enactment of our studies—working closely not just with people or in sites where we are comfortable but with strong leaders studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 96 kathryn church, lucy costa, danielle landry, becky mcfarlane, jenna reid, david reville, jijian voronka from politicized organizations and communities who will challenge us to push the envelope. as we do this, we need to know that even impeccable participation is no guarantee against difficulty in working across difference. in our research, if we listen only for the “lived experience” of individuals, and only for processes of illness and recovery—we will miss many other vital storylines. we need to complicate what we are listening for: to listen less for stories of healing and recovery and more for stories of resistance and opposition, collective action and social change. our event only touched the surface of a myriad of questions. we have yet to unpack the ways in which stories within the mental health sector perpetuate racism or homophobia. another one of our invited panelists spoke to the difficulty of relying on “social determinants of health,” a discourse that at its core is meant to address inequity. however, with a focus on “outcomes” based on clinical indicators and standards, are such priorities authentic or do they further shift racialized stories and voices into more comfortable and digestible narratives? further, intergenerational trauma talk is now also commonplace with its commitment to “healing,” but can that inadvertently coerce familial relations (healing) when it may not be the desired choice? who benefits from stories of reparation? what psychiatric abuses have yet to be reconciled? and further, as gorman (2013 forthcoming) has identified, race is still only being discussed as “stigma” or “trauma” in the psychiatric paradigm. next steps? “honour stories. respect survivors.” the collective had previously decided that some form of feedback, participation and/or criticism from the audience was an important outcome from the day. it would enable us to gauge peoples’ perceptions and engagement with the questions we had raised at the event and identify whether there were others who had similar concerns and questions. it was also meant to guide us in any next steps we might need to take on as a group. following the event, an evaluation form was offered at a table near the exit along with a small reward for its completion—the no patient porn pins—and a promise of confidentiality.8 of the 200 plus who attended, 63 people took the time to complete the form. apart from one likkert scale and a list of identifiers, it was open-ended. feedback was generally positive. on a scale of one to ten, respondents gave the event an average rating of 8.8. the collective was interested in knowing whether both of the groups we targeted in our marketing had showed up at the event: those caught up in the politics of storytelling and those implicated in the institutional practice of appropriating stories. we included a series of tick boxes beside various identifiers as a means of collecting data on the diversity of social locations in the crowd. these identifiers included, “psychiatric survivor/consumer/mad,” service provider/worker,” researcher,” student,” media,” and “other” (with an studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 recovering our stories 97 open field). as hoped, all groups were represented. the majority of attendees also selected more than one of the listed identifiers. the open-ended questions were designed to find out whether the audience had heard our messages. as well, they offered a further opportunity for reflection, inviting respondents to revisit the dilemmas that storytelling presents. questions included: “what did you learn about storytelling within the psychiatric survivor/consumer/mad peoples’ community?” “what did you learn about the process or ethics of sharing personal stories?” and “what do you think would improve the way people tell their story?” a surprising number of respondents took the time to write lengthy, thoughtful responses. others kept their comments brief and to the point: “honour stories. respect survivors.” a few detractors expressed feeling overwhelmed: “but too much in 1 session. overwhelmed, where to go next.” anonymous respondent “2 workshops in terms of content. break needed. realize that folks are on board, no need to push.” anonymous respondent the other comments section that we included at the end was generally left untouched, apart from a few general responses about the length of time: “a very good integration of issues for many communities. excellent use of limited time frame for presentations.” anonymous respondent “i would have liked more time.” anonymous respondent responses to the open-ended questions ranged from recapping to simply echoing lines from eli clare’s talk and those of the other presenters and panelists. however, some respondents reflected on their own use of storytelling practices: “as a journalist, it really made me think about how i navigate my craft and how my colleagues navigate their storytelling and how i need to reflect on how i will take that into my future endeavours.” anonymous respondent “as a researcher, i need to further problematize my relationship with those who are researched and how our research gets framed (i.e. recovery and not resistance).” anonymous respondent the responses confirmed that the audience was receptive to and engaged with the speakers’ messages. however, the evaluation does not tell us whether attendees who are implicated in the institutional practice of appropriating stories will be compelled to act to change those practices. indeed, a follow up column by joe fiorito from the toronto star on the event offered a bizarre and confusing analysis. in his column, “telling stories is part of being human,” fiorito (2011) wrote about being distracted at the event by the workmen studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 98 kathryn church, lucy costa, danielle landry, becky mcfarlane, jenna reid, david reville, jijian voronka outside while listening to the talk, from which experience he concluded that the only story was the “human story.” as a journalist, fiorito is in the business of writing the human story of the tragic and unfortunate, and this “working class” news often includes stories about psychiatric survivors/consumers, living in poverty or dying as a consequence of horrendous living conditions and systemic discriminations. these stories are often told within a “last stop” or “end stop” narrative— when things have gotten dangerously bad or, even better for a salacious story, have resulted in death. however this “end story” too is a narrative form, one that is valuable within journalistic circles often competing for coverage not only with other journalists but with the barrage of stories and testimony that fill our newspapers, books, journal articles, government reports and legal proceedings. and these stories are governed by parameters that fit the page and are accessible to the “average reader.” the fact that these stories are often left unwritten until an end, and that it is difficult or uninteresting to shed light on the history or moments when individuals were treated as objects, as less than human, appear to have been lost on fiorito. butler (2004) poignantly has queried, “who counts as human? whose lives count as lives? and finally, what makes for a grievable life?” (p. 20). popular media coverage that waits until an ultimate end story is easy, lewd and indecent media. is this coverage meant to redress, or rather is it caught up in similar processes that the collective wishes to expose—stories used as a way to sustain journalistic stakeholder gain on front-page headlines? the collective hoped for something more, something beyond the regulation of stories that re-create a dualistic tragedy/heroic disability chronology. conclusion the recovering our stories collective formed as a purposeful group organized with the intent to agitate and unsettle leading assumptions that individual stories can single-handedly change deeply embedded, oppressive and interconnected powerful social structures. we seek to question the use and propagation of personal narratives, and elucidate how our stories are increasingly being used as a way to harness support, funding, or press coverage for the systems that we recognize as being part of the problem. our discussion is meant to add to the ongoing work that is beginning to call these practices out as suspect and damaging. we hope to further explore a theory of storytelling and practices of storytelling (we have in fact, told a complicated story here) that allows and mobilizes psychiatric service users to have the freedom to create, build and be innovative their own identities and histories, which would simultaneously enable and allow a basis through which psychiatric survivor/consumers can resist unethical exploitation. finally, survivor/consumer storytelling is intricately connected to narrative control and history-building. in the past, voices and stories were relegated to case histories and most often been used as evidence to incriminate and abuse. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 recovering our stories 99 reclaiming our stories as political knowledge that elucidates social injustices has, over the last half-century, been a founding movement strategy to connect and collaborate with others. this paper traces how our stories have suddenly been understood as useful by dominant hegemonic orders and incorporated into neoliberalist mental health agendas in order to support and sustain the validity of health service systems. we seek to mark and disrupt this trajectory, asking those who reveal their stories to consider doing so in a way that is politically accountable and focused on social justice change. and through this small act of organizing resistance, we inform those that solicit stories that we are now asking, in whose interest? notes 1 attempts to be inclusive and engaged in participatory initiatives or research bolster the optics for large organizations. there is increasingly more grant funding available for those with the resources to apply for them. however, most committees, advisories, etc. with clients/patients are extremely vague on how they reach their decisions (e.g. consensus, vote) and rarely measure the inclusion of patient voice. 2 the organization for economic co-operation and development found people with mental illness are often off sick from work, and between 30 and 50 per cent of all new disability benefit claims in oecd nations are now due to poor mental health (oecd, 2011). 3 for example, mental health affects us all was the title of a human rights seminar presented by the public service alliance of canada in dec. 2010. 4 for example, in toronto the centre for addiction and mental health received a $30 million donation from the daughters of the late audrey campbell and their families. it is the largest private donation ever made to a mental health centre in canada. it will fund a research institute focused on brain science (camh connexions, 2012). 5 in 2010 and 2011 there have been a number of reported shootings by police on individuals identified as having a mental health issue. the toronto star commented that police training was inadequate (tapper, 2011). 6 lucy costa recalls hearing the phrase patient porn in approximately 2005 from fellow activist lana frado. lana in turn, references heather mckee as coining the provocative term. 7 the “back off, get your own sandwich” commercial produced by maple leaf meats for their product, lean ‘n’ lite sandwich meat held a tv spot entitled: “sandwich defense” (circa 2000). 8 names and email addresses were collected upon arrival for possible use in future organizing. references basok, t. (2010). introduction: opening a dialogue on migrant (rights) activism. studies in social justice, 4(2), 97-100. berkenkotter, c. (2008). patient tales: case histories and the uses of narrative in psychiatry. columbia, sc: university of south carolina press. bhui, k., aubin, a., & strathdee, g. (1998). making a reality of user involvement in community mental health services. the psychiatrist, 22, 8-11. butler, j. (2004). precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. new york: verso. campbell, s. (2011). unsettled: discourse, practice, context and collective identity among mad people in the united states 1970-1999. doctoral dissertation. york university. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 100 kathryn church, lucy costa, danielle landry, becky mcfarlane, jenna reid, david reville, jijian voronka centre for addiction and mental health. (2012). camh connexions: a publication of the centre for addiction and mental health,12(1). church, k. (1995). forbidden narratives: critical autobiography as social science. amsterdam: international publishers distributors, & routledge (reprinted by routledge, london, no date) and transferred to digital printing 2003). church, k., & reville, d. (1989). user involvement in the mental health services in canada. canada’s mental health, 37(2), 22-25. chamberlin, j. (1978). on our own: patient controlled alternatives to the mental health system. new york: mcgraw-hill book company. clare, e. (1999). exile and pride: disability, queerness, and liberation (reprinted in 2009). cambridge ma: south end press clare, e. (2007). the marrow’s telling: words in motion. ypsilanti, mich: homofactus press. cooke, b., & kothari, u. (eds.) (2011). participation: the new tyranny? london: zed books. crawford, m. (2001). involving users in the development of psychiatric services—no longer an option. the psychiatrist, 25, 84-86. cresswell, m. (2005). psychiatric “survivors” and testimonies of self-harm. social science & medicine, 61(8), 1668-1677. crossley, n. (2006). contesting psychiatry: social movements in mental health. new york: routledge. curtis, t. dellar, r. leslie, e., & watson, b. (eds.) (2000). mad pride: a celebration of mad culture. london: spare change books. department of health. (1989). working for patients. london: hmso. fausto-sterling, a. (1995). gender, race, and nation: the comparative anatomy of “hottentot” women in europe, 18151817. in j. terry & j. urla (eds.), deviant bodies, (pp. 19-47).bloomington, in: indiana university press. fiorito, j. (2011, july 6). telling stories is part of being human. the toronto star. retrieved from http://www.thestar.com/article/1020089--fiorito-telling-stories-is-part-of-being-human foucault, m. (2009). history of madness. (j. murphy & j. khalfa, trans.). new york: routledge taylor and francis group. (original work published 1961). fraser, n. (1987). social movements versus disciplinary bureaucracies: the discourses of social needs. chs papers, 8, (1-37). center for humanistic studies, university of minnesota. garland-thomson, r. (1996). freakery: cultural spectacles of the extraordinary body. new york: nyu press. garland-thomson, r. (2009). staring: how we look. oxford: oxford university press. gorman, r. (forthcoming 2013). mad nation? thinking through race, class, and mad identity politics. in r. menzies, g. reaume, & b. lefrancois (eds.), mad matters: a critical reader in mad studies. toronto: canadian scholars press, inc. henderson, h. (2011, june 25). grassroots group takes back patients’ stories. the toronto star. retrieved from http://www.thestar.com/printarticle/1013300. hook, d. (2007). foucault, psychology, and the analytics of power. new york: palgrave macmillan. jamison, k. r. (1997). an unquiet mind: a memoir of moods and madness. new york: vintage books. longmore, p. (2005). the cultural framing of disability: telethons as a case study. pmla, 120(2), 502-508. mcruer, r. (2006). crip theory cultural signs of queerness and disability. new york: new york university press. morrison, l. j. (2005). talking back to psychiatry: the psychiatric consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement. new york: routledge. nelson, g., ochocka, j., janzen, r., & trainor, j. (2006). a longitudinal study of mental health consumer/survivor initiatives: part 1—literature review and overview of the study, journal of community psychology, 34(3), 247–260. o’shaughnessy, s., & krogman, n.t. (2012). a revolution reconsidered? examining the practice of qualitative research in feminist scholarship. signs, 37(2), 493-520. on our own. (1980-1990). phoenix rising: the voice of the psychiatrized. toronto. retreived from: http://www.psychiatricsurvivorarchives.com/phoenix.html organisation for economic co-operation and development. (2011). sick on the job? myths and realities about mental health at work. retrieved from: http://www.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/ studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 recovering our stories 101 display.asp?k=5kg6tl4jzcs4&lang=en&sort=sort_date%2fd&stem=true&sf1=title&st 1=mental+health&sf3=subjectcode&st4=not+e4+or+e5+or+p5&sf4=subversioncode&ds =mental+health%3b+all+subjects%3b+&m=1&dc=4&plang=en razack, s. (2004). dark threats and white knights: the somalia affair, peacekeeping, and the new imperialism. toronto: university of toronto press. razack, s. (2007). stealing the pain of others: reflections on canadian humanitarian responses. review of education, pedagogy, and cultural studies, 29(4), 375-394. reaume, g. (2002). lunatic to patient to person: nomenclature in psychiatric history and the influence of patients’activism in north america. international journal of law and psychiatry, 25(4), 405-426. reville, d., & church, k. (2012). mad activism enters its fifth decade: a snapshot of psychiatric survivor organizing in toronto. in a. choudry, j. hanley, & e. shragge (eds.), organize! building from the local for global justice. oakland ca: pm press/between the lines. reville, d. (1988). don’t spyhole me. in b. burstow & d. weitz (eds.), shrink resistant: the struggle against psychiatry in canada (pp. 157-197). vancouver: new star books. rose, n. (1990). governing the soul: the shaping of the private self. florence, ky: taylor & francis/routledge. shimrat, i. (1997) call me crazy: stories from the mad movement. vancouver: press gang publishers steele, k., & berman, c. (2001). the day the voices stopped: a memoir of madness and hope. new york: basic books. tapper, j. (2011, november 23). mental health advocates find police training inadequate. toronto star. retrieved from http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1068090--mentalhealth-advocates-find-police-training-inadequate whitaker, r. (2010). anatomy of an epidemic: magic bullets, psychiatric drugs, and the astonishing rise of mental illness in america. new york: broadway paperbacks. correspondence address: vesna bojicic-dzelilovic, department of international development, the london school of economics and political science, houghton street, london wc2a 2ae, united kingdom. tel.: +44 (0) 20 7955 6606, v.bojicic-dzelilovic@lse.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 2, 211-228, 2013 informality, inequality and social reintegration in post-war transition vesna bojicic-dzelilovic the london school of economics and political science, united kingdom abstract this article seeks to reconceptualize the notion of informality in the post-war context in order to investigate the neglected aspect of inequality which is associated with this kind of practice. it locates the problem of widespread informality in the social transformation triggered by the war that has been sustained by the post-war elite accommodation. inequities created by a routine resort to informal arrangements in accessing assets and resources generate mistrust at the interpersonal, inter-group and institutional levels, sharpen a sense of discrimination and social injustice, and in the end, undermine post-war social reintegration. the argument draws on observations from bosnia-herzegovina. introduction it has become commonly understood that the rise of informal economy and of systemic corruption are the sores that are eating into the very foundations needed to support recovery from recent wars in the western balkans. both represent social mechanisms of informal redistribution and both are linked to poverty, inequality, social exclusion, and to a growing sense of social injustice that the policies of post-war reconstruction have not been able to reverse (undp, 2011). in the academic debates, the types of inequality linked to informality as an umbrella term for various forms of non-compliance with rules and regulations including informal economy and corruption, are rarely addressed. the analysis of inequality and social exclusion in the western balkans has followed in the footsteps of the mainstream scholarship on the subject (ruggeri laderchi & savastano, 2013; stubbs, 2009; matkovic, 2006; studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 212 vesna bojicic-dzelilovic undp, 2007; world bank, 2012). this is peculiar insofar as discrimination through informality operates in a transversal fashion, cutting across other categories of exclusion /inclusion as it determines access to resources and opportunities—the possession of which mitigates social exclusion. a substantial body of scholarly and policy literature deals with the subject of informal economy and corruption in a post-war context, often including the western balkans, and bosnia-herzegovina in particular, as a case study. this scholarship provides wide-ranging perspectives on the nature of the phenomenon, its origins, and effects. this article responds to the existing approaches to the problem of informal economy and corruption in the postcommunist, post-conflict context of the western balkans by drawing on the insights from the regulation theory to explain their origins and account for their persistence, with specific reference to bosnia-herzegovina. rather than focusing on bosnia-herzegovina as an in-depth case study, the primary ambition is to reframe the concepts of informality and inequality better to reflect the post-war transition context. based on the proposed reconceptualization, the article investigates the implications of informality in terms of social justice outcomes and social reintegration as critical aspects of post-war rehabilitation. the argument is that social transformation in the course of the 1992-1995 war, underwritten by the proliferation of informal and criminal activity involving state institutions, was a critical moment in the transformation of state/society relations and their informalization in bosnia-herzegovina. a notion of economic criminalization is used as a framework to bridge various strands of explanations and to demonstrate that informality is socially embedded in post-war bosnia-herzegovina. it was built into economic foundations of the post-war elite bargain around a three-way division of power along ethnic lines. to an important degree, the sources of ethnic elites’ political and economic power remain linked to informal economic practices in which all three groups engage. the result is a discriminatory system of rule that rests on informal arrangements, and these arrangements produce an ambiguous effect in terms of social justice outcomes. to a certain degree, informality may have ameliorative effects across the society, while at the same time it bolsters the social status of those well-connected political and economic heavyweights. but the inequities that result generate mistrust at the interpersonal, inter-group, and institutional level and also sharpen a sense of discrimination and social injustice, which makes post-war social reintegration an elusive goal. the paper is organized in three sections. the first is a selective overview of the literature on corruption and informal economy against which the concept of economic criminalization, originally developed to explain widespread informality during post-communist transition, is introduced, and is applied to a context of war and post-war transition. drawing mainly on examples from bosnia-herzegovina, supplemented by relevant evidence from the broader western balkans context, the second section analyzes various facets of inequality associated with widespread informality, which affects studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 post-war transition 213 every individual in the country, and demonstrates its destructive impact on rebuilding interpersonal and institutional trust in post-war society. the third section summarizes and concludes. post-war informality: an alternative synthesis since the early 1970s, when the notion of informal economy first entered development economics discourse, the literature on the subject has proliferated. a host of terms now aim to capture the phenomenon of economic exchange outside the remit of state-sanctioned regulations (guha-khasnobis, kanbur, & ostrom, 2006). with the institutional turn in social science, informal economy research has transgressed into several other social science disciplines. consequently, a range of related terms operate in conjunction with the notion of informal economy, including, informal institutions, informal rules, informal structures, and informal networks, to name but a few (meyer, 2008). these notions are employed in tandem with a conceptual arsenal designed to capture the nature of ties operating through informal, personalized arrangements such as clientelism, patronage, corruption, influence and collusion (stefes, 2006; upchurch, 2012). in discussions of informality as a social phenomenon and a field of academic inquiry, the above terms are commonly and quite routinely cited in an interchangeable fashion. this results, according to ravi kanbur (2009), in a literature that is burdened by the very imprecision indicated by the nature of the subject matter, which embraces a variety of approaches and provides no theory as such—in other words, “a mess” (p.4).1 it is useful to mention two key traditions in the study of informal economy that will prove crucial to the argument this paper develops in relation to conflict-affected countries. studies in economic tradition generally take a definitional approach to informal economy, since their main objective is to measure its size.2 in contrast, the behavioural approaches are more concerned with the origins and types of informal economy. common to both traditions is to consider compliance with the established judicial, regulatory and institutional frameworks regulating certain types of activities as the principal criteria by which to identify informal economy.3 the focus on rule compliance situates the origins of informal economy in the relations between the state and the economy. consequently, in explaining the causes of noncompliant behaviour, the ultimate question for the majority of scholars is that of appropriateness of the state-sanctioned rules and their effective enforcement. the standard argument posits that informal economy develops as a response to limitations posed by rules and regulations devised and enforced by the state (de soto, 2001). by this definition, the two “sides,” namely the state and the actors who do not heed its rules, are institutionally distinct and exist in opposition to each other. this reasoning is captured by policy debates in which the discourse focuses on how to “formalize,” or, how to bring informal activities and/or their protagonists into the realm of studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 214 vesna bojicic-dzelilovic the formal. such an approach is translated into a set of policies which aim to reduce and regulate state interference in the economy (world bank, 2007). yet simultaneously, the mainstream economics discourse is not concerned with the question of why the rules are inadequate, let alone why, beyond identifying inadequate institutional (essentially, bureaucratic) capacity as a problem, their enforcement falls short. the supposition of the key role of the state as a rule-making and a ruleimplementing authority in the explanation of informal economy as identified in the mainstream economics tradition has been analytically upended by scholarship on post-communist transition. at the core of transition to a market economy is the reconfiguration of the role of the state and its relations with the economy so as to enable free market competition (aslund, 1999; gross & steinher, 2004). hence, any analysis of the incidence of non-compliance with rules sanctioned by the state in the context of the post-communist transition has to factor in the transformation of the state itself. while the driving logic, rooted in the neoclassical economics tradition, of why non-compliance with rules occurs (it is because the rules are inadequate and/or poorly enforced) is maintained, the main explanations on both accounts attribute it to a mismatch between formal and informal institutions. resorting to ingrained behavioural patterns rooted in assumed norms and traditions, which involve personalized transactions, is arguably a logical response to the upheaval of institutional transformation provoked by the state’s changing role in the economic domain (grzymala-busse, 2010; helmke and levitsky, 2004; ledeneva 2006; meyer, 2008). the resilience of informal institutions has been identified as an important and initially neglected aspect in explaining the slow pace of transition reforms and its unpredictable patterns (raiser, 1997). thus economists discovered that the informal economy expanded in the early transition period to resemble more closely patterns typically seen in the developing world, that the informal economy was not easily distinguishable from the formal economy, which is characterized pointedly by a co-existence of state and non-state actors (johnson, kaufmann, & zoido-lobaton, 2000; simon, kaufman, & shleifer, 1997). the latter insight resonated with findings from the political science tradition, which identified corruption, both in terms of its systemic nature, as well as its specific forms such as state capture, to be the hallmark of informality in the post-communist transition (hellman, jones & kaufman, 2000). once informal economy and corruption were identified as the two foremost types of non-compliance with formal rules during the post-communist transition, various explanations of their linkage went so far as to establish that the two moved largely in the same direction (i.e. more corruption is associated with a larger informal economy). overall, the scholarship stopped short of weaving informal economy and corruption into an integrated analytical framework to provide an explanation of widespread informality in a post-communist transition centred on the transformation of the state as the principal rule-setting authority.4 almost a quarter of a century since the onset of transition towards liberal market democracy in the former communist world, informal economy and corruption continue to thrive, a studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 post-war transition 215 testimony to the insufficient explanatory potential of the dominant approaches neither to account for their enduring nature, nor to provide guidelines for an effective policy response. a different view of the problem of expansion in informal economy and its pervasiveness in an early post-communist transition comes from the stream of french regulation theory, which serves to conceptualize that corruption is in fact integral in the expansion of informal economy and also its transformation. by placing the transformation of the state itself at the centre of enquiry, jacque sapir (2006) has challenged the mainstream approaches to informal economy and its links to corruption under post-communist transition. his critique questions a narrow focus on the legal content of rules in the mainstream scholarship on informal economy, or neoclassical economics, and draws attention to the importance of social legitimacy of rules as a critical factor in explaining (non-)observation of rule-compliance. sapir posits that rule compliance depends on whether society perceives the rule-making process and rule enforcement, which involves state institutions in charge of implementing rules, as legitimate. for the legal norms to be effectively binding, and to provide a meaningful boundary between illegal and criminal activity, both the rules and the institutions charged with their implementation require societal acceptance. social legitimacy of rules and institutions that implement them can be undermined because of a number of reasons, including: rules being externally imposed, frequent changes in rules, incomplete rules, or compromised rule enforcement institutions. further, all of these reasons were amplified in the context of radical transformation of the communist state, an economic regression, and a sudden impoverishment of masses across former communist countries. this complexity created a context in which rule non-compliance came to be accepted by society in general. sapir explains how, as a consequence of the conflation of economic and political transition, the post-communist state weakened and the resort to illegal and criminal methods5 involving the agents of the state, proliferated. in the economic domain, as the formal economy shrank, outright criminal activity expanded. most importantly, the economic space in between those two poles of “formal” (regulated economy) and criminal (operating in breach of state laws), namely the activities characterized by the use of informal, including illegal and criminal, means to produce and exchange formal (legal) goods and services expanded. when the communist countries opened their borders and began economic liberalization all types of activities, which involved a breach of rules and regulations, such as smuggling, tax evasion, and money laundering, proliferated (feige & ott, 1999). echoing the proposition of preston-whyte’s and rogerson’s (1991) to study informal economy as a process, sapir calls the collusion of a shrinking formal and an expanding criminal economy, along with an increasing resort to illegal and criminal means in economic exchange by economic actors, the process of “economic criminalization,” a term that depicts the pervasive nature of informality in post-communist transition at the core of which is the transformation of the state. the state’s involvement in breaching the very studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 216 vesna bojicic-dzelilovic rules it sets and is expected to enforce—inaptly conveyed by the standard understanding of corruption as the abuse of public office for private gain (mungiu-pippidi, 2011)—is instrumental in understanding the erosion of the social legitimacy of state-sanctioned rules, and why and how informality becomes a widely accepted societal practice. socio-economic hardship and the communist legacy of rule non-compliance operate as an additional set of factors feeding “economic criminalization” dynamic. transposing the analytical framework of “economic criminalization” to post-conflict (and post-communist) transition6 in bosnia-herzegovina, in the aftermath of a war in which statehood itself was contested by the three dominant ethnic groups, provides a more appropriate lens through which to analyse types of informality, their persistence and consequences beyond their economic costs in the post-war milieu. within the context of bosniaherzegovina’s 1992-1995 war, “economic criminalization” manifested itself in an accentuated form. the disintegration of the state through the fusion of violence, crime, and extremist politics gave birth to extreme forms of informalization in the way state, society, and markets interact. the war economy that developed was by any measure illegal and criminal (andreas, 2004; donais, 2005; pugh, 2004), and included agents of the state among its key protagonists, alongside multiple other actors both local as well as regional and international (devine & mathisen, 2005; esi, 1999). this fusion erased any meaningful distinction between formal/informal economy based on legal grounds as per the standard definition of informal economy, as well as the distinction between public and private domains as the definitional axiom for corruption. the same group of actors controlled both the polity and the economy. the political and economic fragmentation of the country through the identity politics pursued by the three ethnic elites—bosniak, croat and serb—enabled the groups, within their own ethnic kin constituencies, to implement strategies of legitimation which involved mobilization of resources through illegal and criminal activity (donais, 2003; usip, 2002). those ranged from organized crime in arms, drugs, and people-trafficking, looting of business compounds and commercial premises, to theft and dispossession of citizens (griffith, 1999; newman, 2007). not only did such practices fail to meet legal and social sanctions—the ultimate justification being that they were a necessary means to protect ethnic group interests—but they permeated the public body at large. ordinary people, too, engaged in petty crimes, violent expropriation through ethnic cleansing often aimed at their immediate neighbours, former colleagues, or friends, or they partnered with organized crime—not to mention taking up less sinister survival activities, albeit through illegal means such as widespread selling of smuggled goods. consequently, the social order that emerged in the aftermath of conflict had in its economic foundations a profoundly criminalized economy, in the sense that formal economy occupied a minority share of bosnia-herzegovina’s economic space.7 resort to informal practice was, and still is, by the conventional measures of informal economy, widespread, which arguably is one of the legacies of bosnia’s war economy. informal economy in bosniastudies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 post-war transition 217 herzegovina amounted to around 36.7% of gdp in 2003 and was second only to the then union of serbia and montenegro with 39.1% (schneider, 2006). similar size of informal economy was recorded in the former yugoslav republic of macedonia (fyr macedonia) (36.3%) and slightly lower in albania (35.3%) and croatia (35.4%) while other sources variously estimated the size of informal economy in kosovo between 39-53% of gdp (haas, 2011). the data from various sources on informal employment estimate the percentage of informal economy in the western balkans at around 25-35% (ilo, 2011) and specifically in bosnia-herzegovina at around 30%; using a different measure of informal employment, informal economy in bosniaherzegovina between 2001-2004 is estimated at 42% (krstic & sanfey, 2007). a recent study of serbia’s informal economy identifies it as a multifaceted, heterogeneous, and deeply rooted phenomenon, whereby over time, the entire society in various forms was involved (fren, 2013, p. 21). a similar assessment applies to many parts of the western balkan region, bosnia-herzegovina included, which suggests that a shared experience of wars in the region coupled with difficult post-communist transition has had a distinct impact on the patterns of informality. various assessments of crime and organized crime show that organized crime, which flourished during the wars of former yugoslavia’s succession, remains a problem; in particular, narcotics, human trafficking, prostitution, and smuggling of various goods (anastasijevic, 2010; unodoc, 2008). explanations of its persistence commonly point to the close links between the agents of the state and various criminal actors, which during the war in bosnia-herzegovina were symbiotic, and proved difficult to terminate in its aftermath. a similar pattern can be observed across the successor states of the former yugoslavia, but perhaps most pronouncedly in kosovo. the reality is, according to donais (2003), that crime and corruption have been institutionalized as a result of a collusion of ethnic elites, criminal elements, and state officials (p. 360). thus, informality in post-war bosnia-herzegovina, and one can plausibly argue kosovo and fyr macedonia too, does not appear to be just a transitory postwar phenomenon. certainly, incentives to disregard formal rules have been potent during bosnia-herzegovina’s slow and convoluted post-conflict economic transformation aggravated by political instability, which is captured in the statistics on the incidence of tax avoidance, smuggling, and corruption (divjak & pugh, 2008; transparency international, 2012). in the final analysis, the persistence of informality as a modus operandi for the post-war social order in bosnia-herzegovina whereby resources are mobilized through informal means, underwrites an “elite bargain” (hesselbein, 2011) among bosnia-herzegovina’s three ethnic groups,8 and shapes political institutions based on a three-way division of power and authority along ethnic lines. this pattern of informal resource mobilization was firmly established during the war and consolidated in its aftermath. the impressive accumulation of wealth and power among the members of ethnic elites who were prominent wartime players, and those connected to them, has continued into the post-war era, creating a system which has encouraged a reliance on informal channels to studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 218 vesna bojicic-dzelilovic obtain privileged positions in accessing resources and opportunities. a tacit agreement on “the rules of the game,” which is lodged in a political settlement lacking a shared vision of bosnia-herzegovina’s statehood necessary to legitimate state-sanctioned rule, allows three ethnic elites, or “ethnocracies” in mungiu-pippidi’s terminology (2011, p. 28), to control access to power and opportunities for wealth accumulation. the consequence is an arbitrary system of rule in which an ethnic filter is the main, although not exclusive, criterion for accessing resources and opportunities. this system of rule serves to preserve the outcomes of social transformation triggered by violence through which wealth was redistributed and society was stratified. even though it often pales in significance against the dominant narrative of interethnic violence, the contest over the power to control resources was an integral aspect of the 1992-1995 war (woodward, 2011) and economic criminalization through the involvement of the agents of the state, ensued. therefore, informality, which is woven into the economic foundations of the post-war social order in bosnia-herzegovina, is both a structural and more pernicious phenomenon than standard scholarship on informal economy and corruption would lead us to think. it is a social order in which the sources of political and economic power are located outside formal institutional sites, and in which informal arrangements through personalized relations are instrumental in gaining access to resources and opportunities both at the elite and grass roots level. the following section outlines the main features of this system of rule characterized by widespread informality and explores its implications for equity and social justice outcomes in the process of post-war recovery in bosnia-herzegovina. inequality, trust, and post-war social reintegration the evidence of the experience of war-affected countries worldwide proves unequivocally that post-war transition to a stable “positive peace” depends on reconstructing the relationship between state and society. in countries where varying groups engage in “competitive statebuilding” (staniland, 2012) such as bosnia-herzegovina, kosovo, and fyr macedonia, this presents a monumental challenge, as evidenced by on-going loggerheads over acceptable political arrangements. in bosnia-herzegovina, nearly 20 years after the end of the 1992-1995 war, there does not appear to be “a collective vision of a shared national project” (odi, 2012, p. 25) that would provide a glue to repair those relations and bind the bosnian nation afresh, lending legitimacy to the nascent state. recent research (world bank, 2011) draws attention to the role of political leadership in guiding the process of restoration in state/society relations, and in particular, to the importance of building inclusive coalitions that would create a sense of fairness and social justice across the population (p.124). this is because exclusionary institutions undermine the trust between the state and societal groups as well as among the groups themselves (lindeman, 2008; odi, 2012; putzel & di john, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 post-war transition 219 2012), and these institutions prevent society from dealing with its legacies of conflict. bosnia-herzegovina’s three-way political settlement along ethnic lines institutionalizes discrimination of its people, the case in point being the infamous sejdic-finci case—the appeal by a bosnian jew and a roma to the european court of human rights claiming discrimination by the bosnian state, which won a positive verdict in 2009. ethnic discrimination in the workplace is common in bosnia-herzegovina (amnesty international, 2006), as is segregation in education, where the problem of “two schools under one roof” remains unresolved despite millions of dollars in international aid which was spent to expunge this outrageous and antiquated practice. the ethnic dimension of social inequity, particularly in terms of constitutional rights and freedoms, protrudes in any discussion of social justice in the context of restoration of state/society relations and overcoming the legacy of war in bosnia-herzegovina and more broadly in the western balkans as a whole. this reflects certain myopia in the academic and policy debates, which overwhelmingly focus on the politics of bosnia-herzegovina’s statehood, without sufficient appreciation that the politics of statehood are inseparable from its economic foundations (connolly, 2013). therefore, it is no surprise that there has been much less emphasis in this context on how the widespread informality that is endemic in the economic foundations of the local “elite bargain” struck against the disaccord over the future of the bosnian state, operates as a parallel mechanism of exclusion which extends across discrimination and inequities associated with the primacy of the ethnic principle around which the state, society, and economy are organized. informality operates through a system of personalized relations. a survey of the bosnian population reveals that personal connections are instrumental in accessing information, contacts, resources, and opportunities. in the undp (2009) poll as many as 95% of the people surveyed reported that stela and veza —a colloquial shorthand for finding a fixer —was a decisive factor in gaining access to resources and opportunities, and only 10% of those interviewed believe that most people can be trusted. in this respect the patterns in bosnia-herzegovina resemble the patterns observed in a wider region, and particularly in kosovo and fyr macedonia, where the legacy of war and a weak economy combine to restrict the resource base, which, in turn, intensifies the scramble for a right access channel. inequities in access to jobs, business opportunities and social welfare are a common experience and point of conversation across bosnia-herzegovina, and kosovo and fyr macedonia, too (b&s, 2010; undp, 2011; icg, 2002; kostovicova, martin & bojicic-dzelilovic, 2012). looking for a job without prior arrangement with an insider in the tight job market in bosnia-herzegovina is almost certain to end in failure and paying the mediator, particularly in the relatively safe, prestigious public sector jobs, is not uncommon. reports in the local media frequently feature cases that illustrate privileged access to bank loans, particularly in the two majority state-owned banks in bosnia-herzegovina’s two entities, granted to individuals close to elite groups, or who have privileged access to business contracts. despite significant progress in studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 220 vesna bojicic-dzelilovic business environment reforms that served to reduce the red tape, thereby narrowing opportunities for the abuse of rules and regulations, the system of bypassing the rules through personal connections holds firmly in place (bojicic-dzelilovic & kostovicova, 2013). this kind of arbitrary system is seen right down to the most commonplace of transactions, where access to credit backed by suspect collateral9 or securing preferred premises to start up a business (or access to healthcare, a secure place at the university and so on) is often mediated through personal channels and involves some sort of rule non-compliance. for anyone who has followed the intricacies of bosniaherzegovina’s most recent round of welfare system reform under the current stand-by agreement with the imf, which has focused on overhauling and streamlining the bloated and non-transparent system of benefits to the war veteran population, an astounding portrait of a nation has appeared: ethnic fragmentation combined with personal connections, has created an army of false claimants milking the system (see for example: fbih: pravo na invalidnine izgubilo 929 korisnika, 2011). this is only one of many ways in which the state continues to be stripped and undermined through informal practices entrenched through the ethnic elites’ rule. devine and mathisen (2005) aptly sum up bosnia-herzegovina’s predicament in the following way: political parties control state assets, licencing, housing policy . . . appointments to public office and to management and executive functions of state owned companies, privatisation process, tax collection, public institutions, the security sectors etc. still today, anyone wanting to move up the social or economic ladder within his or her ethnic group has to have support from one or more of political parties and the wider network that supports the status quo. citizens use parallel structures to make things work and these parallel structures are often corrupt and criminal. (pp. 12-13) these examples provide only a snapshot of some of the common forms of discrimination through informal arrangements involving disregard of rules and regulations observed in bosnia-herzegovina that allow privileged access to assets and resources. they serve to highlight that hidden privileges to those better connected are sometimes more impactful than any issues of ethnic lineage. according to blundo and sardan (2006), informality as a social mechanism of redistribution of resources and power that operates on a principle of privilege generates inequity and exclusion (p. 6). the findings of the undp research (2011) on social exclusion in the post-socialist countries of europe and central asia suggest that in the western balkans, informal economy is less a social cushion and is more prone to criminality, corruption, and informal institutionalization thereby making the problems of poverty, inequality and social exclusion particularly troubling. informal arrangements to access assets and resources operate through unequal relationships. as a consequence, inequality in the final line reproduces power relations in society (bebbington, dani, de haan, & walton, 2008, p. 66) and thus allows the survival of bosnia-herzegovina’s ethnic elites. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 post-war transition 221 the results of the bosnian population survey quoted above and the subsequent discussion serve to point at the structural nature of informality and its societal acceptance as a feature of an inequitable post-war social order in which ethnic elites’ interests are prioritized over general public interest. it is important to understand that in this kind of social order, which affords privilege to narrow groups, anyone can be excluded, regardless of the categories covered by the standard measures of social exclusion10 which occupy central place in the assessment of social cohesion, and by extension, post-war social reintegration the most recent social exclusion data on bosniaherzegovina , which assess exclusion at the group level11, find that 33% of the population is at risk of poverty, and that exclusion is more concentrated in rural areas, among older age groups, and youth. data on material deprivation show that over 70% of households appear to be unable to cover the unexpected expense of a certain magnitude, including life threatening events such as major illness in the family. material deprivation is associated more with elderly, rural and less educated population (world bank, 2012, pp. 23-27). in earlier surveys refugees and displaced people were reported as one of the groups most affected by social exclusion (undp, 2007). these group data on social exclusion disguise the issue that within each category, including that of displaced people, arguably among the most vulnerable of all, informality acts as an additional vector of differentiation with an ambiguous impact. it allows an individual’s agency to change her/his predicament and to escape social exclusion (for this argument in a kosovo case, see: kostovicova, martin, & bojicic-dzelilovic, 2012). but simultaneously, because such problems may only be temporarily resolved, and because any resolution still stems from an innately unequal relationship, the outcome is what wood and gough (2006) call “adverse inclusion” in terms of long term well-being and equity.12 this method of resolving one’s problems—and wood and gough focus on economic security—may involve coercive and exploitative relations and lead to dependence, which often result in long-term vulnerabilities. societal acceptance of informality captures a disposition that suggests at least some of those caught in this inequitable web of social relations are unaware that the domination exists, which results in the perpetuation of informality (for similar arguments see: bourdie as quoted in meyer, p. 90). how does inequality, as inscribed in the type of discriminatory practice described above, affect social reintegration in a post-war context? informality cuts across various forms of formal institutional exclusion/inclusion of different groups and individuals, and, as stated before, it can lead to a kind of adverse societal incorporation that perpetuates vulnerabilities, reinforces unequal social relations, and erodes social cohesion.13 but there is also an additional important dimension as to how informality-related inequality impacts on social cohesion as the foundation upon which state/society relations are rebuilt. it is manifested through trust—inter-personal as well as institutional. trust is vital in supporting socially just outcomes by rebuilding the implicit social contract amongst individuals and between citizens and the state. there is a strong view in much of the literature, particularly on informal studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 222 vesna bojicic-dzelilovic economy and the role of social networks, that personal relations as an instrument in negotiating access to assets and resources are trust-enhancing (meagher, 2010). other scholars have asserted that sometimes personal relations mobilized to gain advantage in accessing information, resources, and services can be permeated by distrust and rivalry and can reinforce social inequality (bourdie as quoted in meyer, 2008). in post-war bosniaherzegovina, where relations with the state involve resorting to informal networks and personal relations, the latter type of relations seems prominent. thus, not only is institutional trust likely to be undermined, but the interpersonal trust too. surveys of interpersonal and institutional trust repeatedly show that in bosnia-herzegovina, as indeed in most former communist countries, trust is low. the undp (2011) survey reveals an important finding in relation to trust; while people overall do not trust institutions, they often trust individuals who work in those institutions and help them “get things done” (undp, 2011, p. 31). this finding lends support to the claim of the prominence of socially destructive relations associated with pervasive informality inflicting bosnia-herzegovina society where reliance on informal arrangements in resolving everyday needs has become a norm. when the institutions in question concern access to goods and services to which individuals aspire, this dependence on informal arrangements as much as it is tacitly condoned, deepens the sense of injustice at an inter-personal level (p. 31). the same undp survey data reveal that trust in people, including those in close proximity, such as neighbours, along with trust in institutions is not only low, but has been weakening in the region.14 while the experience of war was being defined in the breaking of social ties at the work place, in the local community, even in many cases within ethnically mixed families, the post-war social order that reproduces structural inequality has contributed to deepen the mistrust. vankovska, commenting on the western balkans (2007) claims: “in these countries, people live their separate lives in fear and distrust, unable to comprehend their common interest” (p. 273). trust, according to mungiu-pippidi (2011, p. 9), is an expectation based on experience. it is unlikely to develop when people believe that others have advantage, because equal opportunity, along with economic equality, lie at the foundation of trust (rothstein & uslaner, 2005, pp. 42-47). nor is it likely to strengthen in the presence of state institutions involved in rule-breaking and rule-evading, usually reported in the form of “systemic corruption” that allegedly plagues bosnia-herzegovina’s dysfunctional institutions. it has been argued earlier that in the war in bosnia-herzegovina, the source of widespread informality was a social transformation due to the economic criminalization that shaped the post-war economy and its surrounding elite. looking at a different country context, kathleen sexsmith (2009, p. 82) has shown that the type of wartime social transformation can have constructive or destructive impacts on post-war societal reintegration. in bosnia-herzegovina, widespread informality and its attendant inequality have created inequities, which are not easy to reverse.15 the consequences in terms of social justice and societal reintegration have been perilous. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 post-war transition 223 conclusion in this article, i have looked at the impact of informal practices including corruption and informal economy on social justice and societal reintegration in the aftermath of war, drawing on the examples from bosnia-herzegovina. central to the argument the article makes is the reconceptualization of the notion of informality. to study the problems of widespread informal economy and corruption in post-war bosnia-herzegovina, i have proposed to apply the concept of “economic criminalization.” it serves as a “conceptual pivot” which provides a framework to understand various forms of disregard for formal rule in the context undergoing fundamental change, in which according to blundo and de sardan (2006), “individual and collective relations to power and institutions are also changing” (p. 30). the double transition from communism and war in bosnia-herzegovina has created such a context in which the state is not clearly differentiated from other societal actors and engages in informal practices itself. this suggests that pervasive informality is structural feature of the country’s post-war transition. any war-affected country’s transition to peace depends crucially on the nature of political settlement among its main elites, since without a shared vision over a country’s future, it is impossible to generate the kind of dynamics necessary to deal with the legacy of war and to set a path to societal reconstruction. the nature of political settlement is fundamental because it defines how relations between the state and society are structured. in bosnia-herzegovina, the political settlement around the three-way ethnic division of the country, in which ethnic criteria permeate every aspect of life, shapes distribution of power and resources within society. the ethnic elites are the main protagonists in the informal practices which permeate bosnia-herzegovina body politics and economy and keep the country in a sort of protracted limbo preventing renegotiation of the political settlement which is necessary to break out of the deadlock. it is important to understand that informality is not just, or primarily, an economic problem but its roots are also political, socio cultural, and psychological. consequently, the effects are equally multifaceted. the mainstream explanations of informal economy and corruption fail to capture the intricate way in which politics and economics mix in bosniaherzegovina’s context, and the implications it has on the social legitimacy of rules. therefore, they cannot account for the link between elite level informality and that involving ordinary citizens. the combination of the legacy of non-compliance with state-sanctioned rule, the pressures and constraints in dealing with and overcoming the legacy of war, and the opportunities that exist in the context of weak institutions all combine to make a resort to informal practice a way of how society operates. although exclusion along ethnic lines is institutionalized in bosniaherzegovina, and captures the attention of the scholars studying the country’s political economy, it is not the only axis along which exclusion studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 224 vesna bojicic-dzelilovic and discrimination in fact happens. this analysis has demonstrated that informality, whose pervasive nature is attributed to the relation between the state and society in post-war bosnia-herzegovina, operates as another (hidden) mechanism of discrimination. it is not confined to a particular group or a category of individuals, but applies across the board. an important, and perhaps paradoxical, aspect is that although informality is anchored in inequitable social relations, it is nevertheless tolerated in everyday life. as we have shown in our other work (kostovicova, martin, & bojicic-delilovic, 2012), an individual does not question that he/she has to look for a contact or even pay a bribe, but the frustration is how to find the right agent who could facilitate access to valued resources and opportunities. a backward loop from informality to inequitable social relations operates, reinforcing exclusion and marginalization. in this way, informality-related indirect discrimination in accessing valued resources, such as jobs, income generation opportunities, healthcare and so on, which is prominent in a depressed economic context of bosnia-herzegovina, easily translates in the popular perceptions into an ethnically-related discrimination (vankovska, 2007). thus the two dynamics, one a discrimination that stems out of an ethnified state, and the other an informal practice that permeates its institutions, interlock to undermine societal reintegration. the victim of this destructive spiral is trust, both interpersonal and generalized trust in state and its institutions. this makes “bottom up” pressure that would disturb the status quo and would make the democratic process difficult to develop. the absence of the credible counterforce to ethnic rule is also linked with the failure to deal with the legacy of war economy and its protagonists early into the post-war reconstruction phase. according to cheng (2012), this has sent the signal to the population that “the rules of the post-war game have already been fixed,” and has worked to sustain the power of ethnic elites. social justice is about equity and equality of opportunity, and these are distorted when informality, such as that manifested in post-war bosniaherzegovina, is widespread, and equality of access is denied to individuals. this paper has drawn attention to the importance of understanding contextspecific drivers of exclusion and marginalization which undermine long term goals of societal reintegration as the cornerstone of post-war rehabilitation. notes 1 kanbur argues, as have a number of scholars before him, that ultimately the nature of informal economy, and more broadly informality itself, depends on the aims of each particular research in question (kuchta-helbling, 2000). 2 there is a large literature that provides an overview of various definitions and debates on informal economy. an understanding of informal economy as unrecorded economic transactions that are not captured by the relevant statistics, commonly used in economics, illustrates definitional approach. 3 for a detailed discussion of these two broad traditions of studying informal economy, see: kuchta-helbling, 2000. 4 a case in point is recent important research on corruption outside fully developed studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 post-war transition 225 liberal market democracies by alina mungiu pippidi and her colleagues (mungiupippidi, 2011). this, in many respects important research that aptly captures the conceptual traps and shortcomings in the mainstream literature on corruption, keeps informal economy at the margins of analysis, and does not address violent conflict at all. 5 the emergence of “violent entrepreneurs” is representative of this process. 6 in bosnia-herzegovina the two processes are conflated, which generates distinct dynamics worth noting when discussing informality. see: donais, 2008. 7 according to the office of high representative, formal economy amounted to some 20% of bosnia-herzegovina output in 1995, while the rest was “gray” and “black” economy. cited in usip, 2002 p. 6. 8 according to hesselbein, the profile of informal economy provides important insights in the nature of “elite bargain” as common understanding of the “rules of the game” by the elite at any given point in time (hesselbein, 2001, p. 1). 9 the statistics on default consumer loans with bosnia-herzegovina commercial banks are illustrative in this respect. 10 social exclusion discourse which focuses on formal rights and entitlements elides this type of inequality which is produced by social practice and insufficient enforcement of relevant regulation. 11 the undp regional human development report, beyond transition: towards inclusive societies breaks ground in its approach to social exclusion in that it departs from income-based measures of poverty and develops a methodology for quantifying a complex nature of social exclusion with a focus on an individual. 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(2007). the human security doctrine for europe: a view for below. international peacekeeping, 14(2), 264-281. wood, g. & gough, i. (2006). a comparative welfare regime approach to global social policy. world development, 34(20), 1696-1712. woodward, s. (2011). state-building for peace-building. what theory and whose role? in r. kozul-wright & p. fortunato (eds.), securing peace: state-building and economic development in post-conflict countries (pp.87-113). new york: bloomsbury academic. world bank. (2011). conflict, security and eevelopment. washington: the world bank. world bank. (2012). social exclusion in bosnia and herzegovina and the global crisis. washington: the world bank. world bank (2007). informality, exit and exclusion. washington: the world bank. correspondence address: melissa dearey, department of social sciences, room 266, wilberforce building, university of hull, cottingham road, hull, hu6 7rx, united kingdom. tel.: +44 (0) 148 246 5817, email: m.dearey@hull.ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 173-174 2013 review of criminalisation and advanced marginality: critically exploring the work of loïc wacquant melissa dearey university of hull, united kingdom criminalisation and advanced marginality: critically exploring the work of loïc wacquant edited by peter squires and john lea, bristol, uk: the policy press, 2012, isbn: 9781447300014 this book is presented as “the first full-length critical and interdisciplinary assessment of loïc wacquant’s work in english.” apart from the final chapter, most of the eleven chapters comprising the book originated in a conference devoted to the work of wacquant organized by the university of brighton criminology group in september 2010. the final chapter is a commentary and response to these papers by wacquant himself, an interesting and unusual contribution to an edited volume of its kind. though the book is described as an interdisciplinary study, it is perhaps advisable to qualify this for the general reading audience. as the organization of the original conference indicates, the approach across the chapters is distinctively social scientific, to be sure sociological if not overtly criminological. while of course those of us in the criminology community would commonly see ourselves as embracing interdisciplinarity within the academy—and to some extent this would be justified—others (including myself, who came to criminology from the humanities) would find this claim perhaps a little exaggerated. certainly there is a wealth of scholarship in terms of relating many of wacquant’s theses to the classical and critical traditions of criminology, making this a most useful resource for teaching criminological and social theory, and indeed penology in particular. while there is a good deal of philosophical theory referenced throughout and across the chapters, and a chapter focusing on women and gender, generally speaking, this book mailto:m.dearey@hull.ac.uk studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 174 melissa dearey is firmly located in the terrain of social scientific research and social theory. no bad thing, necessarily, but something that readers who have other and broader interpretations of interdisciplinary approaches might wish to bear in mind. also it is worth noting that the works of wacquant focused and commented upon within this volume are punishing the poor (2009) and urban outcasts (2007). again, two important works by wacquant, though in the current intellectual climate of interdisciplinary scholarship, it might have been interesting and innovatory to have a chapter more thoroughly devoted to wacquant’s work on the body and carnality within and without the social sciences (as for example in his work on boxing), as these represent key themes in the development of interdisciplinary scholarship. having said this, the body does on occasion feature en passant, as for example in lynda measor’s citation of wacquant’s perception of “blemished bodies” being emblematic of “scorched communities” in the chapter on gender and cultures of resistance, and in john j. roger’s interrogation of the potent metaphors of the body in the “social bulimia” (borrowing jock young’s phrase) of global market capitalism. the main theme that emerges in reading across the contributions contained in this essay is the emphasis on critical. while there is evidence of some critical assessment of wacquant’s work in light of recent social events, for me the criticality concerned very much echoes what in the advent of the age of administrative criminology relates to the critical (read “radical”) tradition in criminology. and from where i am standing, as a teacher of social theory, this is a very good thing. too long the critical/radical tradition in criminology has been seen as a depleted and dead force, an anachronism of criminological theory that has been superseded and has faded into obscurity along with its hippy constituency. of course, as witnessed by its heirs in anarchic criminology, this is not the case; at the same time, it is welcome to see this tradition of criminological/sociological analysis of the penal/ welfare state emerge from its shadows at the “margins” in the academy, and begin its task by unapologetically and fundamentally adopting a thorough critique of neoliberalism. this certainly echoes and indeed contributes to broader changes in the discipline of criminology that incorporates “green” crime and issues pertaining to crimes committed by omission or commission by the institutional organizations of the state and the nefarious interests of global corporations, resulting in the widespread suffering to individuals and communities and indeed proliferation of “the precariat” and harm to the environment through new mechanisms of coercion and social control. for this alone, this volume is to be welcomed as in many ways a refreshing reminder and change of voice. at the same time, it is debatable how appealing this book will be to those within the administrative school of thought and their compatriots in terms of its fundamental intellectual, ideological and political premises, but that is another matter. while some will find such views polemical at best, outdated or biased at worst, they are still powerful and worthy of broadcast and dissemination. microsoft word reischfinal.doc studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 67 social justice and multiculturalism: persistent tensions in the history of u.s. social welfare and social work michael reisch, university of michigan abstract social justice has been a central normative component of u.s. social welfare and social work for over a century, although the meaning and implications of the term have often been ambiguous. a major source of this ambiguity lies in the conflict between universalist views of social justice and those which focus on achieving justice for specific groups. this conflict has been masked by several long-standing assumptions about the relationship between social justice and multiculturalism – assumptions which have been challenged by recent developments. the assumption that the pursuit of social justice requires the creation of a more egalitarian society has been challenged by the new political-economic realities of globalization. the assumption that the maintenance of individual rights complements the pursuit of social equality has been challenged by racially-based attacks on social welfare benefits and civil rights. most significantly, the assumption that a socially just society is one in which different groups share a compatible vision of social justice has been challenged by the realities of multiculturalism. this paper explores the evolution of four themes regarding the relationship between social justice and multiculturalism during the past century and discusses their implications for the contemporary demographic and cultural context of the u.s. these themes are: the relationship of cultural diversity to the nation’s values and goals; the contradiction between coerced cultural assimilation and coerced physical and social segregation; the relationship between individual and group identity and rights; and the linkage between “americanization” and the equal application of justice. introduction since the turn of the 20th century, social justice has been a central normative component of u.s. social welfare and social work, although its definition and implications have often been ambiguous (van soest and garcia, 2003; reisch, 2002; morris, 2002; grogan, 2000). today, while this ambiguity persists, mainstream social welfare organizations have established social justice as an ethical and curricular imperative of the field (council on social work education, 2001; national association of social workers, 1996). a major source of this ambiguity lies in the conflict between views of social justice which focus on the problems of class and economic inequality and those that emphasize differences in race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, which are now grouped under the studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 68 label “multiculturalism” (ewalt, freeman, kirk, and poole, 1996). recent attempts to resolve this conflict largely rely on rawls’ version of modern liberalism – which attempts to balance equality of individual and group rights and opportunities (rawls, 1999, 2001) – or an updated expression of social democratic ideals (gil, 1998). prigoff (2003) asserts that a “social justice framework” includes access to vital resources, participation in critical decision making processes, and respect for human rights and the various dimensions of personal identity, particularly culture. these rights implicitly focus on individuals, consistent with the “person-in-environment” paradigm that has dominated u.s. social work for a century. in current discourse, therefore, social justice is presumed to be consistent with multiculturalism – another term fraught with ambiguity – and with the reconciliation of individual and group rights and responsibilities (fraser, 1995; ramakrishnan and balgopal, 1995; van soest, 1995; caputo, 2000; platt and cooreman, 2001; marsh, 2004). yet, as yee and dumbrill (2003) point out, social justice is not an inevitable consequence of multiculturalism. they argue provocatively that by “essentializing and circumscribing people’s social identities” multiculturalism maintains oppressive structures, undermines efforts to generate social action, and ignores the historical context that produces various forms of injustice (108-110). potockey (1997) makes a similar criticism about the application of social justice to the international arena. thus, efforts to expand the original meaning of social justice to reflect 21st century demographic realities have produced new conflicts and contradictions. these contradictions have emerged because proponents of both social justice and multiculturalism have based their arguments on several debatable assumptions. first, that the pursuit of social justice requires the creation of a more egalitarian society whose principles of social organization reflect “the subordination of market price” (marshall, 1950, quoted in katz, 2002, p.1). today, this assumption is challenged by the new political-economic realities of globalization and their accompanying ideological rationales (pugh and gould, 2000; reisch, 2003). a second assumption is that the maintenance of individual rights is complementary, if not essential, to the attainment of social equality. this assumption has been undermined by racially-based attacks on legal entitlements to social welfare benefits and efforts to roll back civil rights and opportunities through both judicial and legislative means (piven, 2002). in the 2006 u.s. elections, many voters who supported ballot measures to increase the minimum wage also supported anti-immigrant and antiaffirmative action propositions. a third assumption is that a socially just society is one in which both “economic and social differences between social classes and groups are markedly reduced” (jansson, 2005, p. 24, emphasis added). this presumes that all groups in a society regard the reduction of social differences as socially just and desirable and that they share a common or at least compatible vision of what social justice means. differences over gay rights, the status of women in families, and the role of organized religion in communities are merely the more controversial illustrations of divergent conceptions of social justice. throughout u.s. social welfare history, the discourse on social justice has largely occurred on a parallel track to those over racial, ethnic, gender or sexual equality. yet, debates over the relationship between social justice and social welfare inevitably involve conflicts over the meaning of such terms as race, citizenship, and culture (katz, 2002; studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 69 gerstle, 2001; foner, 1999). during the past two decades, the public furor over multiculturalism has made explicit these underlying and largely unacknowledged tensions (yee and dumbrill, 2003; caputo, 2000; potockey, 1997; gould, 1996). the concept of multiculturalism recurrent conflicts over the consequences of diversity reflect the tumultuous history of racial and ethnic relations in the u.s. since the first half of the 19th century, proponents and critics of assimilation have battled over issues such as immigration, linguistic difference, and social equality. the underlying issue – whether cultural diversity constitutes a threat to the nation’s values and goals – remains unresolved. a related conflict emerged in the 20th century reflecting the contradiction between coerced cultural assimilation and coerced physical and social segregation. the views of both dominant and minority groups have alternated between an embrace of cultural amalgamation (i.e., the “melting pot”) and a celebration of cultural separatism. this has shaped the debate about the nature of social justice in an increasingly diverse society. a third theme involves the relationship between individual and group identity and rights. through the mid-1960s, social justice in the u.s. was usually equated with the application of “colour-blind” meritocratic principles – in martin luther king, jr.’s words (1963), that individuals be judged “not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” the emergence of multiculturalism in the past several decades has been, in part, a reaction against both the ideal and the reality of a colour blind society. its proponents argue that in order to affirm individual identity it is essential to recognize the existence of systematic discrimination on the basis of group identity, which persists, in part, because of the conceptualization of racism and sexism in individual-to-individual terms (johnson, 2001; hill collins, 2000; young, 1990). as the controversy over affirmative action demonstrates, the u.s. is still struggling over the application of justice concepts based on individual rights to policies that address group needs. a fourth theme involves the linkage between “americanization” and the equal application of justice (foner, 1999). this linkage not only concerns the meaning of citizenship, i.e., legal rights, but also the balance between the attainment of universal ideals of life and liberty and the preservation of cultural distinctions regarding the meaning of the “pursuit of happiness” (katz, 2002). the question of how common political, economic, and social goals can be achieved in the context of increasingly cultural heterogeneity has yet to be answered.1 this paper explores the evolution of these themes in the u.s. during the past century and its implications for social justice in contemporary social welfare. it discusses the challenges of constructing a definition of social justice within changing demographic and cultural realities and its implications for contemporary social policy and social work. 1 unfortunately, recent scholarship continues to be plagued by definitional ambiguity and conflicting principles. a content analysis of documents in the field of social welfare conducted by the author unearthed no less than 25 terms that have been used, in one form or another, as synonyms for multiculturalism. each of these terms, however, has different nuances of meaning and serves different purposes. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 70 the emergence of social justice within social welfare the term “social justice” first appeared in the social welfare field during the progressive era (~1890-1917) as a synthesis of religious and secular ideas (leiby, 1978). it also reflected enlightened self-interest among elites in response to growing inequality and the perceived destruction of community bonds (elshtain, 2002; reisch and andrews, 2001). “justice,” in their view, implied the substitution of charitable principles, norms, and relationships with universal standards of decency that would be enforced by the state and rationalized by new methods of social science (addams, 1902; wise, 1909; tucker, 1913; holder, 1922; abbott, 1924). these definitions of social justice combined liberal and social democratic principles including equal rights, the diminution of class privileges (especially those based on birth), the preservation of individual dignity, and the establishment of equal opportunity in the marketplace. these tenets, however, were applied primarily to white men of northern and western european ancestry. the history of u.s. social welfare in the past century reflects the struggle to make these rights and principles universal. in depicting this struggle, two important points are often overlooked. first, groups striving to overcome various forms of social injustice, such as white male workers, women, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, and the disabled, did and do not – to this day – define either the concept of social justice or social justice-oriented goals in the same way. in fact, part of the struggle of each group has been a struggle to modify universal definitions of social justice, based on hegemonic values, to fit their particular historical circumstances and aspirations. this struggle has frequently caused tension and conflict between these groups and their mainstream allies, between different “minority groups” themselves, and even within their own ranks. these tensions have often made the development and maintenance of broad-based social justice coalitions difficult. this leads to a second observation. although it is widely accepted that the progress of social justice has been neither linear nor unidirectional, it is less frequently recognized how efforts to create a just society have transformed the meaning of social justice itself. over the past several decades, the introduction of such concepts in the policy arena as affirmative action, comparable worth, reasonable accommodations, and gay marriage have expanded the meaning of social justice well beyond the elimination of discrimination and class or gender-based privilege. while the rhetoric of social justice in the social welfare field reflects this changing definition, the complex policy and practice implications of applying social justice principles to an increasingly diverse and contentious society have been generally ignored. part of the problem lies in a failure to understand the peculiar evolution of these concepts. the origins of multiculturalism in contrast to debates over social justice, the discourse on what is now termed “multiculturalism” occurred in a variety of contexts, often without a clear or consistent focus. in the u.s., its central concern has been in relation to race, “a crucial line of division in american society since … the beginning of the 17th century” (foner, 1999, p. 12). ironically, at the turn of the 20th century, when social welfare leaders first proposed studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 71 re-orienting the field toward social justice, the nation was “more thoroughly racialized … than at any point in american history” (foner, pp. 12-13). although white proponents of social justice focused on the expansion of rights, the concurrent institutional and ideological abandonment of inclusive ideas of citizenship significantly stunted the growth of social justice within social welfare from the outset (katz, 2002; reisch, 1998). unlike european immigrants, people of colour did not have access to most whiterun social service agencies, even many settlement houses which professed social justice goals. in response, through the services developed by women’s clubs, churches, mutual aid and self-help groups, and benevolent societies, they forged a concept of racial or ethnic uplift, which combined elements of cultural pride and social assimilation that contrasted with mainstream conceptions of social justice which stressed “the general welfare” (gordon, 1991). these efforts were severely constrained by a lack of resources and resistance from both white social welfare leaders and members of their own community (day, 2003; waites, 2001; carlton-laney, 2001; iglehart and becerra, 1996). yet, given their “profound distrust of white people, the race lens through which [african americans viewed] nearly all of life’s circumstances” made perfect sense (carltonlaney, 2001, p. xiii). similar justifications existed among asian and mexican immigrants in the west and southwest and catholic and jewish immigrants in major eastern and midwestern cities. mexicans created mutual aid and self-help organizations to maintain their cultural equilibrium under oppressive social and economic conditions (beito, 2001; rivera, 1987; hernandez, 1983). chinese, japanese, korean, and filipino immigrants focused on economic gains and educational advancement and achieved considerable success on the west coast (chan, 1991; rivera and erlich, 1998). catholic and jewish immigrants from europe developed highly structured systems of social services, which included many features later adopted by mainstream organizations (o’grady, 1931; morris and freund, 1966). while these strategies enabled minorities to retain their heritage, languages, and customs, and provided them with some modicum of material, psychological, and physical security, they maintained the gap between the social welfare mainstream and those at its margins and made it more difficult to develop a unified vision of a socially just society. ultimately, these different perspectives on social justice produced different varieties of social services and emphasized policy changes that went beyond the social reforms proposed by mainstream social welfare leaders to incorporate more comprehensive advocacy of racial and social equality (hamilton and hamilton, 1997; reisch and andrews, 2001). in this regard, it is important to note that during the progressive era the concepts of race and culture were not equated as they are today. for example, while african american reformers agreed with white leaders of the settlement movement about the compatibility of cultural differences and the possibility of social integration, they added the critical dimension of race (and, occasionally, gender) as distinct components of the assimilation process (lasch-quinn, 1993; gordon, 1991; gordon, 1994). by expanding the idea of social justice to include themes of self-help, humanitarianism, and social equality, african american philanthropists and social service leaders redefined social justice in ways that would eventually have implications for the entire nation (carson, 1993). studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 72 the creation of alternative social welfare institutions was a response to the failure of social welfare leaders to recognize how their focus on universal rights ignored the structural and ideological sources of racism and sexism. well into the 1920s they accepted 19th century hierarchical conceptions of race, which conflated physical, behavioral, and cultural traits with social status (johnson, 1923; goldenweiser, 1922; drachsler, 1922; sturges, 1920). while remaining largely indifferent to issues affecting african americans and other racial minorities, they continued to believe that so-called immigrant “races” – hebrews, slavs, and italians, for example – could ultimately be assimilated through a combination of coercion and benevolence (carson, 1990). they viewed education and equality of rights as the ultimate solutions to the problems of prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination, yet continued to assume that common ground and shared interests could be found without major structural adjustments in society (wenocur and reisch, 1989). thus, racist and sexist attitudes about the implications of demographic and cultural diversity influenced the development of the idea of social justice even within the relatively sympathetic confines of the social welfare field. most of its leadership – predominantly white and protestant – believed that social justice rested on either christian or secular moral foundations which emphasized democracy and equality before the law, rather than equality of resources or power. concepts such as cultural equality were not seriously considered, even by settlement leaders such as jane addams, who were aware of cultural diversity (addams, 1902; lasch-quinn, 1993; elshtain, 2002). these views were reinforced by their personal, professional, and cultural isolation from the diverse populations who were the objects of their concern. as margolin (1997) writes, “given the sudden convergence … of different races, nationalities, languages, faiths, customs, and political ideas, it is not surprising that people were profoundly suspicious of one another… that the monied classes were fearful of uprisings and mass violence… and that the impoverished foreigner would be the focus of these fears” (p. 14). social justice and racial justice although most white social welfare leaders in the u.s. were tainted by racism, ethnocentrism, and religious prejudice, others such as addams, florence kelley, edith abbott, lillian wald, and sophinisba breckinridge, tried to incorporate racial equality in their vision of a socially just, pluralistic society (sklar, 1995, 1998; daniels, 1989; elshtain, 2002). inspired by african american scholars and activists, particularly w.e.b. dubois and ida wells barnett, they began to develop the bases for the late 20th century concept of multiculturalism (bent-goodley, 2001). addams’ ideas, for example, combined a belief in democracy, humanism founded on religious principles, and a respect for cultural heterogeneity (addams, 1902). influenced by her ideas, studies by louise koven bowen in chicago and mary white ovington in new york, modeled in part on dubois’ 1899 work, the philadelphia negro, documented widespread discrimination in employment and housing against african americans, even in the north (lundblad, 1995; elshtain, 2002; sklar, 1998). research by mary van kleeck (1915) under the auspices of the russell sage foundation made similar contributions regarding the conditions of industrial workers, particularly women and girls. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 73 yet, with few exceptions, u.s. social welfare leaders could not embrace a vision of social justice that incorporated full social equality. their acceptance of “segregation as either inescapable or desirable” and their failure to distinguish between the obstacles faced by european immigrants and african americans, or immigrants from latin america or asia, severely constrained even the best-intentioned efforts at reform (katz, 1986, p. 177). by regarding “the problems of all minorities as coextensive with the problems of immigrants, they failed to recognize that the social legislation passed during the progressive era had minimal impact on african americans and that conditions facing [them during this period] … were … unlike those of white citizens and legal aliens” (axinn and stern, 2005, p. 133). consequently, their support for cultural pluralism, while laudable for its day, tried unsuccessfully to balance the rhetoric of a universal humanity and the recognition of unique social and economic problems, which required selective approaches to social policy. the conflict between rights-feminists and maternalists is just one example (gordon, 1995). although their language and sensibilities were decidedly different from those of reformers in later periods, they were struggling with similar ideological and professional dilemmas – specifically, whether the goals of social justice as they defined them and the preservation of a multicultural (i.e., pluralistic) society were compatible. this attempt to reconcile diverse ends was not simply a matter of acknowledging the impact of cultural assimilation on terms dictated by hegemonic social groups. it would also require a philosophic and practical reorientation of goals and methods that was beyond the capacity, or even the comprehension of the vast majority of u.s. social welfare leaders. throughout the 20th century, these shortcomings prevented the development of policies and programs that reflected social justice principles (reisch, 1998). in response, minority communities constructed alternative strategies to achieve their own ideal of social justice. the rejection of assimilation prior to world war i, through such organizations as the ywca’s committee on interracial cooperation, the methodist women’s missionary societies, and the association of southern women for the prevention of lynching, white social welfare leaders demonstrated some willingness to work as equals with african americans in multicultural coalitions (weatherford, 1919; hammond, 1917, 1920). they helped organize the naacp and the national urban league, and served as delegates to the 1921 pan-african congress under dubois’ leadership. by the first world war, the national conference of social work (ncsw) had begun to integrate the ideas of social welfare leaders from minority groups into its conferences on a limited basis. yet, throughout this period, even the most reform-minded settlement houses continued to be racially segregated and the ncsw paid little attention to issues affecting racial minorities (chandler, 2001; carlton-laney and burwell, 1995; iglehart and becerra, 1995; lasch-quinn, 1993). few mainstream social welfare leaders spoke out against restrictions on immigration, particularly those directed at chinese, japanese, filipino, and mexican immigrants, who were largely regarded as either undesirable or “inassimilable” (axinn and stern, 2005). some joined anti-immigration organizations studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 74 which expressed anti-semitic and anti-catholic views (becker, 1968; leiby, 1962). much to her later regret, jane addams remained at the 1912 progressive party convention even after theodore roosevelt refused to seat african american delegates from southern states (elshtain, 2002; rosenberg, 1992). in response to this persistent racism and ethnocentrism, a few distinctive trends began to emerge among racial minority groups which shaped their pursuit of social justice. one was the rejection of the conception of assimilation. at ncsw conferences, african american speakers (wright, 1920; burns, 1920) charged that “melting pot” goals involved the loss of critical aspects of their communities’ ethnic heritage. roosevelt wright declared in 1919, “the negro wants a democracy, not a whiteocracy” (p. 286). this would include mutual respect, the end of oppressive laws and institutions, and equal rights and responsibilities. similar appeals were made on behalf of mexican immigrants (alvarado, 1920). another trend was the appearance of splits among white social justice proponents over the issue of race. florence kelley, a lifelong socialist who helped found the naacp and served as a delegate at the 1921 pan-african congress, criticized the national women’s party (on whose executive committee she sat) for its failure to promote the needs of african american women (sklar, 1995). years later, at her funeral, dubois eulogized her unique commitment to social justice and her opposition to “every single attempt to perpetuate in new law the old discrimination against american negroes” which distinguished her beliefs from those of her erstwhile allies who failed “to see the plight of the american negro as an integral part of the problem of american society” (dubois, 1935, quoted in aptheker, 1966, pp. 99-100). a third trend was the use of specific issues, such as lynching in the south or industrial conditions for women workers, to create multi-racial and multi-ethnic coalitions in pursuit of social justice goals. in 1920, in cooperation with the national federation of colored women’s clubs and both white and african american churches, the ywca (1920) published a powerful indictment of southern racial violence and specifically linked the anti-lynching movement to the cause of social justice and the preservation of the u.s. constitution. even these worthy efforts, however, were not without their ironies. in its attempt to bridge the gap between african american and white women, “the ywca used a language of christian sisterhood to articulate their concerns about racial relations” (robertson, 1987). this ignored the work on behalf of racial justice by jewish leaders, such as lillian wald, and many african american activists in the south, which antedated that of the ywca (wald, 1915; carlton-laney, 2000; salem, 1990; hine, 1990). in addition, many white women in the ywca had difficulty acknowledging the equal status of their african american “sisters” and were incapable of abandoning either their long-standing privilege or decades of social custom. one of the leaders of the antilynching crusade, lily hardy hammond, continued to believe that racial justice and racial segregation were compatible (hammond, 1917; chandler, 1995). a fourth and most significant trend was the emergence of increasingly vocal and visible contributions by african americans to the national dialogue over social justice and racial equality. marcus garvey’s movement for african american self-determination built upon and reinforced long-standing traditions of self-help. it also underscored the studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 75 importance of culture, not just race, as an organizing force and political rallying cry for other oppressed groups in u.s. society (gerstle, 2001; simon, 1994). perhaps the strongest argument for incorporating racial justice into universal conceptions of social justice in the 1920s appeared in the work of e. franklin frazier and chandler owen. a lifelong ally of labor pioneer, a. philip randolph, owen’s view of social justice combined a critique of capitalism, feminist ideas, and elements of “racial uplift” (owen and randolph, 1920). frazier’s writings (1924) reflected what dubois earlier termed the “dual consciousness” of african americans regarding racial justice and social justice and the ongoing tension it creates in their lives and work. the pursuit of the “dual agenda” implied in this consciousness distinguished african american efforts to achieve social justice from those of their white allies throughout most of the 20th century (hamilton and hamilton, 1997). the welfare state and social justice beginning with the new deal in the 1930s, the establishment of welfare state policies created, at least in theory, the political vehicle through which structural inequalities in u.s. society could be reduced, if not eliminated. from the outset, however, these policies sustained and even strengthened institutional racism and ignored the disproportionate effects of the great depression on african americans and other racial minorities in urban and rural areas alike (washington, 1934; haynes, 1935; bunche, 1940). like their predecessors during the progressive era, white reformers did not distinguish between the effects of poverty and those of racism, and refused to support policies that would compensate african americans for the long-standing discrimination they had experienced (jansson, 2005). in fact, the roosevelt administration consistently appeased racist sentiments (masked in the rhetoric of states’ rights) in such critical areas as employment, public assistance, and child welfare (patterson, 2000; hamilton and hamilton, 1997; rose, 1994). few social welfare leaders spoke out when mexican americans, many of them u.s. citizens, were deported during the 1930s (galarza, 1929; batten, 1930; hanna, 1935; anderson, 1940) or when japanese americans were incarcerated during world war ii (ennis, 1943; pickett, 1943; powell, 1943). the failure of u.s. social welfare leaders to make the elimination of racism a component of their social justice goals can not be explained by prejudice, ignorance, social custom, and privilege alone. the american association of social workers and other social welfare organizations were far ahead of other professional groups in banning racial discrimination within their ranks. some settlement houses had begun to target services to african americans and mexican americans in the 1930s (fisher, 1980). yet, all but the most radical social workers could not envision a socially just society or even a socially just system of social welfare except in terms of white, working and middle class concerns (trolander, 1975). as a result, within mainstream political and social movements, the pursuit of social justice in the u.s. lacked a complementary drive to achieve racial justice until the resurgence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. one explanation for this failure is that the national mobilization required by the depression, world war ii, and the cold war forced americans to adopt, at least symbolically, an appearance of national unity which masked the persistence of social studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 76 inequalities based on race, religion, ethnicity, and gender. although some movements for racial justice began during the war, it was not until the late 1940s that widespread protests against racial or religious discrimination re-emerged. it took even longer for similar reactions to appear among other minority groups. the roots of a post-war resurgence of social justice activity, however, can be found in wartime presentations at the national conference of social work (cramer, 1943; granger, 1944; lett, 1944). in 1944, edwin embree made these prescient remarks: the white man of the western world is offered his last chance for equal status in world society. if he accepts equality, he can hold a self-respecting place – maybe a leading place – in the new order…but if the western white man persists in trying to run the show, in exploiting the whole earth, in treating hundreds of millions of his neighbors as inferiors, then the fresh might of the … nonwhite, non-western people may in a surging rebellion smash him into a non-entity (p. 109). a second explanation is that post-war economic prosperity partially hid the existence of long-standing social divisions behind a veil of consumption, while the growth of suburbs isolated many white americans from the problems of urban racial minorities (sugrue, 1995). during the post-war period, therefore, most social justice work in the social welfare field focused on eradicating discrimination in employment, education, and housing, fostering inter-group and intercultural relations at the community level, and promoting civil rights through statutory means, even among radicals (culberson, 1946; thomas, 1947; marcus, 1948; gentile, 1951; valien, 1949). the idea of the melting pot was still widely embraced as the means through which a socially justice society could ultimately be achieved (mead, 1949). in addition, the repressive climate of mccarthyism led large segments of the public to equate social justice movements, however modest, with communist subversion. many organizations that promoted social justice lost their tax-exempt status and experienced a precipitous drop in contributions and staff (schrecker, 1998; reisch and andrews, 2001). nevertheless, considerable progress occurred on several fronts, including the desegregation of the armed forces, annulment of anti-japanese laws and the establishment of a congressional commission to settle claims for damages suffered during their forced evacuation, and judicial attacks on school segregation, restrictions on voting rights, and the “separate but equal” doctrine (baldwin, 1949). a final explanation lies in the drive for professional status among social workers, which fostered a search for “universalist” theoretical frameworks that largely ignored the particular issues confronting racial and ethnic minorities and women or characterized differences in cultural norms as deviant (kluckhorn, 1951; barrabee, 1954; labarre, 1957; rohrer, 1957). these tendencies persisted as the social welfare field began to grapple with the complex issues of class and caste, and the challenges of desegregation in the aftermath of the historic 1954 brown decision (warner, 1953; mitchell, 1955; rowan, 1956; simons, 1956; ryland and wilson, 1954; klineberg, 1957; young, 1960). even during the relatively activist period of the 1960s, there was a paucity of literature on racism. leading publications, such as social work and the encyclopedia of social work did not devote much attention to the subject until the early 1970s, long after studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 77 the ferment of activism had subsided (simon, 1994). the first nasw code of ethics (1960) did not address race and ethnicity explicitly. it was not until 1967 that the term “nondiscrimination” was added. papers at the national conference on social welfare focused on civil rights rather than institutional racism, although several speakers emphasized the linkage between race and poverty, and presented the different cultural orientations of african americans in terms of equivalency rather than inferiority (berry, 1963; killian, 1964; riessman, cohen and pearl, 1964; collins, 1965). at the 1965 national conference on social welfare, whitney young (1965) made an explicit connection between “equality for negro citizens” as a right and economic and social justice (p. 53). although the national association of social workers formally called for the abolition of white racism in 1969, pressure to preserve professional prerogatives produced growing tensions between mainstream social service agencies and communitybased organizations in which racial and ethnic minorities played major roles (rose, 1972). a particularly vivid illustration of this conflict occurred at the 1969 ncsw conference in new york city when demonstrators from the national welfare rights organization used confrontation-style tactics to present their demands (proceedings of national conference on social welfare, 1969, 1970). during the 1960s, the divergence of social justice and racial justice goals was also inadvertently undermined by the writings of activists and intellectuals of all races and ideologies. in his influential book, the other america (1963), michael harrington, a democratic socialist, reinforced the long-standing notion that profound cultural differences existed between racial minorities and white, middle class americans. conservatives like edwin banfield and james q. wilson (1963) used similar arguments to critique the anti-poverty policies that harrington’s book had inspired. influential spokespersons, such as malcolm x (1964), and charles hamilton (1967), underscored the cultural differences of minority groups as part of a strategy to use enhanced cultural identity as a vehicle for community empowerment and liberation. over the next decade, this approach was adopted by feminists, gay and lesbian activists, and leaders of disability rights movements. these trends had several contradictory effects. on the one hand, by providing powerful rationales for the creation of separatist movements within communities of colour (and, to a lesser extent, among women, gays and lesbians, and the disabled), they inspired the development of new forms of scholarship, new models of social services and community development, and new theoretical frameworks that considerably expanded and revised the meaning of social justice in u.s. society (nussbaum, 1999; morris, 2002; young, 1990; hill collins, 2000; johnson, 2001). at the same time, the critique and widespread rejection of the liberal goals of assimilation, acculturation, and integration provided conservatives with a rationale to attack anti-poverty programs and other legislative or judicial attempts to achieve social justice (murray, 1984; mead, 1992). under the guise of promoting the use of social and behavioral science to inform public policy, even well-intentioned liberals resuscitated the social darwinist tendency to analyze social issues through the lens of group, rather than individual characteristics.2 2 ironically, liberal precedent for such arguments existed in the use of kenneth clark’s research to support the plaintiffs’ case in the 1954 brown decision and even as far back as 1909 in the testimony women settlement house leaders provided in the landmark case of muller v. oregon. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 78 paradoxically, this legitimated the use of research for both anti-egalitarian and social justice purposes. the controversies over the moynihan report (1965) about poverty in the african american community and billingsley and giovannoni’s indictment of racism in the child welfare system (1972) are vivid examples of these diverse responses. in the process of critiquing mainstream theoretical constructs about culture, society, and human needs, authors from racial minority groups and women often subsumed a universal emphasis on social justice within the more immediate concerns of confronting group-specific inequalities and oppression rooted in social identity (chestang, 1970). moore (1970) criticized the application of inappropriate paradigms to “groups who entered american society not as volunteer immigrants but through some form of involuntary relationship” (p. 463). there were calls within the social welfare field for a new separatism or “tribalism” to repair the social fabric and overcome the “virus of racism” (dodson, 1970; olan, 1971; shannon, 1970; morales, 1971). by the late 1970s, ethnic or gender-specific practice had become the norm in social welfare fields as diverse as youth work, services to the aging, mental health, and community development, often framed with the newly popular language of empowerment (bretz, 1978; ragan, 1978; morales, 1978; miranda, 1979). revisions of the nasw code of ethics (1979) gave official sanction to these trends. the emergence of so-called “identity politics” produced tensions among former allies over social justice goals and strategies, which became particularly acute between african american and jewish intellectuals, activists, and professionals (becker, 1971). admittedly, the relationship between individual and group identity and the pursuit of social justice was a delicate problem to negotiate both intellectually and politically. except among conservatives, there was broad acceptance of the need to address the systemic causes of social inequality and injustice and to analyze the effects of structural inequities within group constructs. james dumpson’s (1972) proposal to shift the field’s “emphasis on individual pathology and rehabilitation” to a focus on “the basic systematic changes … [including] the removal of socioeconomic and racial barriers to an equitable redistribution of the power, wealth, and income of the nation” reflected this shift (pp. 45).3 yet, the persistence of “selective” approaches to the problems of poverty and inequality and the resurgence of cultural identity among racial and ethnic minorities combined to reinforce prevailing beliefs about the cultural divide between racial groups and genders (de anda, 1984; gilligan, 1982). some observers criticized such debates for essentializing the concepts of race and gender and separating them from their social construction. it was difficult to envision an over-arching conception of social justice that satisfied these diverse tendencies (longres, 1997). in the political arena, the identification of anti-poverty programs as “black programs” and their equation with the social welfare system as a whole generated increased hostility toward “welfare” among whites (edsall and edsall, 1992). other significant political developments complicated efforts to expand the concept of social justice to include the emerging demands of women, gays, and lesbians. one was the 1965 3 the recurrence of this criticism throughout u.s. social welfare history, in slightly different form, is remarkable. see, for example, h. specht and m. courtney, unfaithful angels: how social work abandoned its mission (new york: free press, 1994). what is equally remarkable is how little has been done to address these concerns. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 79 immigration act which “represented a sharp ideological departure from the traditional view of america as a homogeneous white society” (takaki, 1994, p. 419). another was the controversial “maximum feasible participation” provision of anti-poverty programs created by the office of economic opportunity, which gave considerable power to local community action agencies, especially in african american neighborhoods, and supported the preservation of indigenous cultural activities among native americans (moynihan, 1965). a third was the passage of title ix of the 1964 civil rights act and the supreme court decision in roe v. wade, which gave women legislative and judicial mandates to push for greater gender equality (deckard, 1979). a fourth was the growing opposition to the use of affirmative action policies to achieve racial and gender equality, symbolized by the bakke case (farmer, 1978). the movement for gender equality was particularly significant because for most of the 20th century the connection between women’s rights and social justice had been largely ignored in the social welfare field (chambers, 1986). most feminist writing, research, and activism focused primarily on the specific needs of women, rather than their relationship to broader justice concepts. they tended to overlook the perspectives and needs of women of colour (abramovitz, 1999; gordon, 1991; gordon, 1994). by the late 1970s, however, themes such as the “feminization of poverty” helped women forge fragile alliances across racial and class lines (deckard, 1979; rosenberg, 1992). although bolstered by the growing output of feminist research in the 1980s, efforts to create greater solidarity among women attempted to substitute, with limited success, the centrality of gender for that of race or class. many activists and intellectuals of colour objected and, as a result, the fusion of universal social justice goals with more specific racial or gender justice goals was no closer to reality, despite the optimistic forecasts of some white feminists (hooyman and bricker-jenkins, 1984). in sum, the liberation movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s highlighted the contradictions between the prevailing rhetoric of social justice and the continuing focus of u.s. social welfare on individual, family, or community pathology, often tied (not always subtly) to racial, gender, or ethnic characteristics. the affirmation of group identity at the heart of these movements sought to overturn not only obvious manifestations of individual and institutional discrimination and inequality, but also to undermine the more benign, paternalistic thinking upon which they were based (young, 1990). to achieve these goals, members of the dominant group (largely white, male heterosexuals) had to acknowledge their ignorance, recognize and renounce their privilege, and confront their role in maintaining various forms of societal injustice and oppression. it was never clearly established, however, how an egalitarian, social justiceoriented society (or even social welfare system) was to emerge from this intellectual and cultural catharsis (johnson, 2001). post-modernism, multiculturalism, and social justice the growing popularity and influence of perspectives once identified as solely the province of feminists, such as social constructionism, paved the way for the broader acceptance within the social welfare field of ideas derived from post-modernism (leonard, 1997). during the past fifteen years, this development has produced a variety studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 80 of efforts to link the goals of social justice more closely with those of multiculturalism. they have challenged the dominant culture and normative power structure, particularly the oppressive relationships and unequal distribution of tangible and intangible resources they produce (hyde, 1998; leonard, 1995). although some scholars continue to regard discriminatory policies and institutions as the principle roots of societal injustice, others have forcefully linked social justice to the eradication of the structural and relational sources of both racism and poverty. they have proposed ways to emancipate people from oppressive social arrangements through radical redistributive measures or alternative organizing strategies (gibelman, 2000; beck and eichler, 2000). by the 1990s, the concept of multiculturalism had evolved substantially from its original emphasis on racial justice and its assimilationist roots based on cultural pluralism. it had primarily become a means to encourage racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural diversity, strengthen group identity, consciousness, and esteem, and promote what would have formerly been regarded as separatist practice (gross, 1995; keyes, 1991). among some scholars, multiculturalism has been limited to the addition of perspectives on race, gender, and sexual orientation into existing theoretical and conceptual frameworks (gutierrez, 1997; lum, 2000). writings on multiculturalism tended, therefore, to focus narrowly on alternative practice or research models rather than broad structural analyses aimed at more general social justice goals. a few scholars, however, have attempted to clarify the often ambiguous meaning of multiculturalism. wohl (1995) disputed media criticisms of multiculturalism – which had characterized it--in language remarkably similar to that of a century ago--as a threat to national unity and as an outgrowth of racism and gender bias. in contrast, he defined multiculturalism as a series of “initiatives to discover through interchange across multiple diversities, the strengths of personal and group identity and the human treasure to be mined out of the richness of our cultural and historical differences” (p. 81). fellin (2000) echoed this sentiment and proposed four principles of multiculturalism: inclusion, recognition, multiple identities, and demographic/cultural change. unlike previous discourse on civic equality, however, most u.s. scholars in the 1990s defined multiculturalism in terms which go beyond race, gender, and ethnicity (greene and mcguire, 1998). while a few writers distinguished the concept of diversity from multiculturalism (de anda, 1997; dungee-anderson and beckett, 1995), most authors do not link either concept explicitly with social justice (greene, watkines, mcnutt, and lopez, 1998). according to goldberg (2000), three conflicts emerge from these developments, including the “conflict between respecting the contents of all cultures versus supporting basic human rights” (p. 13). it is unclear how the remedy she proposed – that all people have “an unconditional right to their cultural identity” – can be translated into public policy when different identities clash with each other or take issue with universal conceptions of justice or rights. van soest and garcia (2003) also struggle to bridge the gaps between social justice and multiculturalism. they define the latter in terms of representation and democratic inclusiveness, rooted in the connections between politics and power, and the long-term consequences of institutional racism. in their recent analysis of five competing contemporary theories of justice, however, they identify only one which specifically addresses issues of race, ethnicity, or culture. nevertheless, they argue that a focus on the effects of racism and oppression is inextricably linked to the promotion of social justice. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 81 based on a human rights perspective, they posit eight core “social justice values”: life; freedom and liberty; equality and non-discrimination; justice; solidarity; social responsibility; evolution; peace and non-violence; and relations between humankind and nature (pp. 65-67). unfortunately, their lack of specificity, tautological argumentation, and subjectivity in defining and applying these concepts render them more of an ideological statement than a guide for policy change or political organization. in sum, recent developments in the social welfare field have further obscured the relationship between social justice and multiculturalism and made their goals appear less congruent than ever. scholars have sought to reconcile these concepts through different means. one is a return to pragmatic liberalism. another is a synthesis of the identity focus at the heart of post-modern and post-structural theory with earlier analyses based on marxism. a third is through the use of alternative “bridging concepts” such as the recapture of public space, the construction of multiple domains of power, or the promotion of social development (caputo, 2000; leonard, 1995; fisher and karger, 1997; hill collins, 2000; midgley, 1991). to date, no single synthesis has been widely embraced despite frequent entreaties from social welfare leaders (marsh, 2004). conclusion despite the increasing sophistication of scholarly inquiry, u.s. social welfare continues to be impeded by several outdated assumptions about the relationship between social justice and multiculturalism. first, that the divisions within u.s. society occur primarily along a “majority-minority” axis that juxtaposes a dominant cultural group (e.g., males, whites, heterosexuals) with “others.” second, that “minority” groups will remain in minority status – in terms of power and resources, if not numbers – for the indefinite future. third, that the expansion of social provision, whether through the market, the state, non-governmental organizations, or some combination thereof, will gradually create a more egalitarian, colour and gender-blind society, in which invidious discrimination will eventually disappear or significantly diminish. fourth, that as society becomes more demographically diverse there will be increased support for more egalitarian policies among all populations and that a consensus will evolve about the roles of various sectors in achieving broadly defined social justice goals. fifth, that concerns over multiculturalism are fully compatible with other social justice-related goals. finally, that the resolution of racial, gender, and cultural inequalities is compatible with the maintenance of the major features of the u.s. economic and political systems. the persistence of these assumptions, many of which have been challenged by recent trends, is both intellectually frustrating and politically constraining. at the most obvious level, new demographic realities underscore the increasing contradiction between the numerical status of so-called minority groups in many urban areas and the workforce as a whole and the persistence of institutional economic and social inequalities in employment, education, housing, and health care (u.s. census, 2005). prevailing assumptions also often fail to acknowledge that not all differences of status or privilege are equally significant in the distribution of societal goods, power, and opportunities. less obviously, they obscure the growth of social and political tensions among and within minority communities which are reflected, for example, in conflicts over such studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 82 issues as abortion, faith-based social services, gay marriage, stem cell research, child welfare laws, school vouchers, welfare reform, and immigration. although there is widespread rejection of the “melting pot,” it is not clear what alternative concept will provide the “social glue” to bind together an increasingly fractious multicultural society. nor is it clear which principles of social justice can go beyond “feel good” rhetoric (demographic “mosaics” and cultural “salads”) and shape meaningful policies which recognize the significance of differences without stereotyping them. a “human rights framework” appears to offer some promise as a bridging concept, but it, too, has been challenged because of potential cultural biases. yet, without some commonly shared guidelines, what vision of social justice can be adopted in societies where some communities’ ideal of social justice directly contradicts those of others? answering this question is increasingly important as the u.s. becomes simultaneously more socially isolated and unequal. unless the meaning of both social justice and multiculturalism is redefined in ways that make them more compatible, the possibility of their attainment will diminish under the increasing and inevitable pressures of economic, environmental, and physical insecurities in the years ahead. studies in social justice volume 1, issue 1, winter 2007 issn: 1911-4788 83 references abbott, g. 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(1965). civil rights – unfinished business, part two: civil rights and a militant profession. proceedings of the national conference on social welfare (pp. 42-54). new york: columbia university press. wilson final correspondence address: amanda wilson, school of social innovation, saint paul university, ottawa, on, k1s 1c4; email: awilson@ustpaul.ca issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 unpacking the prison food paradox: formerly incarcerated individuals’ experience of food within federal prisons in canada amanda wilson saint paul university, canada abstract this paper presents findings from a survey conducted with formerly incarcerated individuals on their experiences of food and food systems within federal prisons in canada. beyond affirming the many problems with the quality and quantity of food provided to incarcerated individuals, the findings discussed in this article highlight the multi-faceted and paradoxical role of food behind bars. food was a tool of punishment and a site of conflict, yet it simultaneously provides an important source of community and camaraderie. while there can be no “just” carceral food system because carceral systems are inherently unjust systems, a conversation about food provisioning within prison helps bring into focus opportunities to improve the material conditions of incarcerated individuals in the short-term as well as openings to question the logic and legitimacy of carceral institutions more broadly. as we are all bound-up in carceral food systems, there is a collective responsibility to interrogate and make visible the realities of carceral food systems in order to work towards non-carceral futures. keywords carceral food systems; food justice; federal prisons this paper presents findings from a survey conducted with formerly incarcerated individuals on their experiences of food and food systems within federal prisons in canada. correctional services canada (csc) is tasked with providing “essential food services” for federally incarcerated individuals that meet the appropriate safety and nutritional standards (csc, 2000; csc, 2019a). however, there is growing consensus that food in prison is anything but safe and nutritious (ellacot, 2017; johnson et al., 2018; office of the correctional investigator, 2019; senate standing committee on human rights, 2021). beyond its material importance for basic sustenance, food is used as a tool of punishment and resistance (brisman, 2008; chalit hernandez, unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 281 2022; jimenez murguia, 2018), and also plays a crucial social and cultural role within prisons (de graaf & kilty, 2016; earle & phillips, 2012; godderis, 2006a, 2006b). while there is growing recognition of the importance of food to understanding carceral systems and experiences of incarceration, it remains an understudied topic within the academic literature, particularly within the canadian context (struthers monford, 2022; wilson, 2022). in addition, much of the existing literature exploring food in prisons does so through case studies of a particular institution. while such an in-depth approach offers valuable detail, the data presented here offers a complement in breadth, drawing on the survey responses of 43 formerly incarcerated individuals, spanning 23 federal institutions across multiple time periods. beyond affirming the many problems with the quality and quantity of food provided to incarcerated individuals, the findings discussed in this article highlight the multi-faceted and paradoxical role of food behind bars. the paradoxical framing of food manifests in two ways. first, the ways in which incarcerated individuals experienced food while incarcerated, show that the different meanings and symbolism ascribed to food are in many ways contradictory and in conflict. for the survey respondents, food was simultaneously a source of community and a source of conflict, a symbol of both punishment and persistence. this complex experience of food suggests multiple meanings across people with different experiences of incarceration, but also highlights the ways in which food embodies multiple meanings for the same individual. second, an examination of these experiences and possible remedies leads us to confront the impossibility of trying to achieve “just food” within an inherently unjust system. i argue that this paradoxical positioning can serve as an opening to bring to light other inherent tensions within prisons and work towards non-carceral futures. while firmly grounded in an abolitionist perspective on carceral systems, this paper argues that a conversation about food within prison helps bring into focus opportunities to improve the material conditions of incarcerated individuals in the short-term as well as to question the logic and legitimacy of carceral institutions more broadly. ultimately, the objectives of this paper are two-fold: first, to elevate the voices of formerly incarcerated persons and position their experiences as valuable and insightful forms of knowledge; and second, to illustrate the possibilities of food and food provisioning as a fruitful site of abolitionist actions and imaginaries. carceral food systems is an emerging term used to refer to the various activities, actors and relationships that encompass food provisioning and consumption within prisons as well as the ways in which food systems more broadly intersect with carceral institutions (hatch, 2019; kathuria, 2021, 2022; wilson, 2022). they are emblematic of what reese and sbicca call the “budding field of critical food and carceral studies” (2022, p. 2). this includes the various food consumed within prisons, as well as food-based programming and food-based employment. however, the lens of carceral food systems can also be extended further, to understand the connections between prisons, amanda wilson studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 282 agriculture and immigration, for instance, as well as the various corporate entities that profit from contracts to provide food and food services to prisons. as kathuria clearly articulates “understanding the contemporary crisis of correctional food means understanding how our social relationships – between ourselves and others, between land, between food – have been torn asunder, ruptured through centuries of oppression, and reconstituted along the lines of violence and alienation” (2022, n.p.). an analysis of food and food provisioning can thus help to understand the various harms and injustices at play within carceral systems. it can also be a powerful tool to challenge current realities and construct alternative possibilities. this positioning of food parallels that of food justice theorists and practitioners, who highlight the power relationships underpinning questions of food provisioning, and the ways in which particular food systems are structured by capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy (alkon & agyeman, 2011; cadieux & slocum, 2015; sbicca, 2018). the lens of carceral food systems also draws on food systems approaches, which seek to understand food in relationship to the myriad of activities, actors and relationships involved in the production, harvesting, transportation, exchange, consumption and disposing of food (ericksen et al., 2010; ingram, 2011). as levkoe et al. (2023, p. 3) articulate: a food systems approach recognizes that these components do not operate in a vacuum but instead, influence and shape one another. it also recognizes the impact of historical and ongoing oppressions such as the institutions of white supremacy, patriarchy, and settler colonialism in shaping the dominant food system. food in federal prisons in canada canadian correctional services (csc) currently incarcerates approximately 12,500 individuals in 54 federal institutions across canada, who are serving sentences of more than two years (this includes multiple facilities with different security levels housed in the same complex) (csc, 2019b). these numbers are noticeably lower than in previous years; the 2019 data puts the number of federally incarcerated persons at just over 14,000. this 10.5% drop was largely the result of decreased admissions into federal prison during the covid-19 pandemic, as courts were delayed and not operating at their usual capacity. for instance, between march to october 2020, the federally incarcerated population dropped from 13,957 to 12,652 (statistics canada, 2021) while there was pressure from advocates and allies to decarcerate, the majority of prison depopulation during the pandemic occurred at the provincial level, rather than within federal institutions (iftene, 2021; office of the correctional investigator, 2021; ricciardelli et al., 2021). federal prisons have one of several food service models. the first is tray service, where food is pre-portioned into individual trays and brought to unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 283 incarcerated individuals in their cells. the second is cafeteria style, where incarcerated individuals line-up to receive their food and then eat together. in an “open line,” they can see what is being served as it is added to their tray; in a “closed line,” an individual just receives a tray with the food items already added. finally, there is small group meal preparation (sgmp), where individuals housed together in pod-style living quarters receive a grocery allowance to order food items from a pre-approved list and then cook for themselves. individuals are “strongly encouraged” by csc to purchase and prepare food together (csc, 2007a; csc, 2007b). following the 2014 food services modernization initiative (csc, 2016), food in federal prisons is prepared using a cook-chill system, whereby food is cooked at regional facilities, packaged into large plastic bags and then transported to individual institutions, where it is stored and subsequently reheated.1 the food served is supposed to follow a four-week national menu, which csc claims meets the canada food guide as well as caloric requirements for an inactive male between the age of 31-50, at 2,600 calories per day. it is worth noting that previous iterations of the national menu were found to be in excess of the canada food guide recommendations on salt intake (graham, 2019). further, a 2019 internal audit of food services found that the national menu did not meet the canada food guide recommendations 21% of the time (six out of 28 days) (csc, 2019c). the failure of csc to meet something as fundamental as the canada food guide is reflective of the overall assessment of food by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons. at the federal level, much of the criticism stems from the introduction of the fsmi, described in the previous paragraph. complaints to the office of the correctional investigator increased, and articles written by incarcerated individuals highlight mounting problems with the quality and quantity of food, the availability of healthy items and the overwhelming disregard shown by csc in responding to these critiques. for instance, trevor bell (2017) and an anonymous individual incarcerated at bath institution (joseph, 2017) both argue that the food served is inedible, while a group of anonymous persons incarcerated at kent institution suggest “the food appearance is grotesque, consistent with vomit. the taste is often worse than the appearance” (anonymous prisoners kent institution, 2017, p. 266). jeanpaul aubee insists the food is so bad it made a number of people ill (clancy, 2015). others have highlighted the impact of changes to food activities and programming, such as reduced access to the barbecue, new requirements that all food from visitors be packaged and store-bought and an end to food drives (anonymous prisoner #4 fraser valley institution for women, 2017; joseph, 2017). rachel fayter and sherry payne argue that the impact of restricting the items available to incarcerated individuals goes beyond nutrition, making it 1 this does not include the small group meal preparation model, where incarcerated individuals cook their own food. amanda wilson studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 284 more difficult for individuals to express their culture and identity through food (fayter & payne, 2017). this cultural element of food makes it all the more important to acknowledge the ways in which carceral food systems, and indeed federal prisons in general, are structured by racism and white supremacy. while the survey data presented in this paper is not disaggregated based on race or ethnicity (see the methods section for further discussion), the fact that the percentages of both indigenous and black peoples in prison vastly exceed their representation within society at large is a stark reminder of the ways in which colonialism and racism permeate and animate carceral systems. indigenous people make up 28% of the federal prison population yet represent five percent of the overall population in canada (office of the correctional investigator, 2022).2 black people make-up 9.2% of the federally incarcerated population, significantly more than the 3.5% of black people within the broader population of canada (office of the correctional investigator, 2022). despite a landmark study released by the office of the correctional investigator in 2013 highlighting the overrepresentation of black people in federal prisons, csc has yet to address “the systemic issues related to racism and discrimination against federally sentenced black persons” (office of the correctional investigator, 2022, p. 43), and federal prisons remain colonial institutions that marginalize and overincarcerate indigenous peoples (2022, p. 93). in this context, questions of access to culturally appropriate food and cooking environments, as well as the right to observe religious holidays in prison, become all the more pertinent. evan polchies, an indigenous man incarcerated at springhill institution, has launched a human rights complaint against csc for its failure to provide him with an indigenous diet (polchies, 2022). as he asserts: “it is unacceptable for the prison system to disrespect my way of life and culture by force feeding me a westernized diet” (polchies, 2022, p. 2) food justice and abolition the necessity and urgency of moving beyond carceral logics has long been articulated by abolitionist scholars and activists. abolition is both a vision and an everyday practice of prefiguration (heynen & ybarra, 2020). as ruth wilson gilmore asserts, an abolitionist perspective commits us to “the possibility of full and rich lives for everybody” and the long-term practice of collective organizing to support ourselves and one another (lloyd, 2012, p. 52). at its core, abolitionism seeks to de-anchor the prison as society’s response to harm and injustice (davis, 2003, p. 21) 2 is it important to acknowledge and affirm that many indigenous people do not consider themselves “canadian,” pointing to canada as an on-going colonial project built upon the unceded and unsurrendered territory of various indigenous nations. as a result, i am mindful of the language used here to describe their representation within the population that inhabits the portion of turtle island referred to as canada. unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 285 abolitionism is not just reactive in seeking an end to carceral logics, it is proactive in conceiving of and actively building alternative institutions, spaces and communities. as angela davis articulates, drawing on the work of du bois, abolition requires both tearing down and building up: destroying harmful institutions and practices, but also creating new, just and restorative institutions to replace them, along with acquiring the necessary resources to make them accessible to all. this “abolition democracy” would entail “the creation of an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison, thereby helpful to render the prison obsolete” (davis, 2005, p. 97). abolition is thus much more than “the isolated dismantling of the facilities we call prisons and jails” (davis, 2005, p. 73). rather, abolition calls on us to fundamentally alter the economic, social and political conditions through which prisons are allowed, and indeed required, to maintain the current social order. this includes calling into question the very notion of imprisonment, policing and surveillance as well as borders, citizenship and the legitimacy of the nation-state, to recognize the ways in which carcerality is premised on white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism. palacios (2020) outlines three tools that have been put forth by indigenous and racialized women advocates within white settler societies to pursue prison abolitionism: (1) the analytic capacity to connect the various institutions bound up in carceral systems and underscore the ways in which they work together to produce and assign conditions of difference that both harm and kill particular groups of people; (2) a centering of gender politics within anti-racist and anticolonial perspectives, and a critique of mainstream feminist and anti-violence formations that support and shore-up the carceral state; and (3) “inclusive organizing strategies and tactics” (p. 534) that cultivate a practice of prison abolition capable of challenging the racialized and gendered violence of carceral systems. heynen and ybarra (2020) echo these insights, noting that an abolitionist politics invites us to relearn lessons from past liberation struggles that have often been lost, or more likely erased, through what gary kinsman (2010) calls the social organization of forgetting. these lessons include the value in centering women’s involvement and leadership within liberatory struggles, particularly the voices and actions of indigenous women. abolitionist histories also remind us of the importance of coalitions and place-based solidarity in addressing structural harms, to create a shared understanding that also leaves room for the “pluralities of histories of oppressed peoples” and the “production of place” (heynen & ybarra, 2020, p. 25). an analysis of carceral food systems is thus well-placed to take up the project of prison abolitionism, as it seeks to expose and make visible the various connections between different areas of society commonly thought of as separate and distinct. at the same time, carceral food systems also lend themselves to an appreciation of the particularities of place, and the solidarities and possibilities that emerge from a shared meal or the freedom to express amanda wilson studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 286 one’s culture and identity through food. in particular, the lens of carceral food systems contributes to our understanding of prisons as a web of social relations rather than just a physical site. as gilmore argues, conceptualizing prisons and the prison industrial complex as a “regime” shifts our thinking away from “some building ‘over there’ …[to] a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere” (gilmore, 2007, p. 242). key to an abolitionist politics in relation to carceral food systems is a focus on land relations and the relations between land and people, which are always situated in place and contextual in nature. two recent contributions offer examples of how we might begin to build out the possibilities for food as a tool and site of abolitionist futures. mckeithen (2022) outlines three principles to inform what they call an abolitionist politics of nourishment. the first is a rejection of top-down knowledge production to recenter the embodied experience and diverse knowledges of incarcerated peoples. second, an abolitionist politics of nourishment does not consider prison food in isolation; it must be linked to the overall “political violence of incarceration” and questions of “carceral power, justice and liberation” (p. 77). finally, drawing on reese and sbicca, mckeithen argues that there is “no such thing as food justice inside prisons” (2022, p. 77); an abolitionist approach does not take the potential for good or just food within prison as a given. hazelett (2023) offers a slightly different approach, seeing more possibility in the actual practices and interactions inside prisons to create moments of what he calls a carceral food justice. hazelett (2023, p. 448) defines carceral food justice, drawing inspiration from definitions of food justice more broadly, as: the continuous commitment to using food to defy carceral logics of control, dehumanisation and mind-body degradation by centering survival and humanisation, maximizing agency and cooperation, co-producing critical awareness of social, racial, and agrifood injustices, and forming community partnerships with outsider organisers and activities. while mckeithen names three broad principles that together make-up an abolitionist politic of nourishment, hazelett offers a longer series of commitments, which he suggests can be present in partial and uneven ways. although they each offer a slightly different interpretation, i do not necessarily seem them as contradictory, as a commitment to carceral food justice can be understood as a path towards enacting an abolitionist politics of nourishment. one concern with the framing of hazelett’s carceral food justice is that it may prove too multifaceted and malleable, as some of the priorities identified (e.g., collective understanding, agency and cooperation, community partnership) can easily be taken up within reformist and rehabilitative framings without centering the critique of carceral logics themselves. i return to the question of an abolitionist politic within carceral food systems at the end of the paper to outline some possible avenues through which to enact carceral food justice and an abolitionist politics of nourishment. unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 287 methods the purpose of the survey upon which the following analysis is based was to gain a broad understanding of the experiences of food in federal prisons, covering a range of institutions and time periods. as part of a larger study investigating the experiences of food and food systems in federal prison, but also exploring the ways in which food becomes a site and tool of contestation, it was important to begin with an understanding of some of the common experiences, challenges and tensions at play. a central principle of this research is to centre the perspectives and insights of current and former incarcerated individuals, continuing in the tradition of many critical scholars who emphasize the standpoint of incarcerated persons for both methodological and epistemological reasons (fisher, 2021; harlow, 1992; phillips, 2014; piché & walby, 2018). the survey ran between may 17th and july 4th 2022, and was open to anyone who had been incarcerated at a federal prison in canada. to solicit respondents, recruitment emails were sent to a variety of organisations across canada who provide services to, and engage in advocacy with, current and formerly incarcerated individuals. the survey was also shared over social media (facebook) and posters were also put up in federal halfway houses in the ottawa area.3 there were a total of 43 responses (33 in english, 10 in french). respondents had been incarcerated at numerous prisons across canada (see table 1) between the years 1985-2021. twelve were incarcerated at an institution for women. none of the respondents had been incarcerated at prisons located in saskatchewan (saskatchewan penitentiary) or manitoba (stony mountain institution).4 the survey posed a mix of closed and open-ended questions, touching on several different components of carceral food systems, including their assessment of the food served, their participation in and assessment of social activities and programming related to food, employment in the kitchens and prison farms, and the role and meaning of food. this paper focuses primarily on data pertaining to food services and social activities; data related to foodbased employment and food-based programming was not included in the analysis. 3 this additional recruitment method in ottawa was largely opportunistic in nature, due to geographical proximity of the research team, and due to the fact that one member of the research team had previously lived at halfway houses in ottawa. 4 there are no federal prisons located in newfoundland, pei, northwest territories, yukon or nunavut. amanda wilson studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 288 institution province * institution province * atlantic institution nb 1 jolliette institution for women qc 3 archambault institution qc 3 joyceville institution on 7 bath institution on 4 kent institution bc 1 beaver creek institution on 7 matsqui institution bc 1 cowansville institution qc 1 millhaven institution on 8 cff 6099 et cff 600 (federal training centre) qc 2 mission institution bc 1 collins bay institution on 5 port-cartier institution qc 1 drummond institution qc 1 springhill institution ns 1 dorchester institution nb 1 warkworth institution on 5 edmonton institution for women ab 4 fenbrook (merged with beaver creek in 2014) on 1 fraser valley institution for women bc 2 kingston penitentiary (closed in 2013) on 1 grand valley institution for women on 3 (* number of survey respondents per prison; some respondents were incarcerated at more than one institution, so the total number is higher than the total number of respondents.) table 1. list of federal prisons at which survey respondents were incarcerated. i did not ask for demographic details from respondents as part of the survey. as experiences of incarceration are difficult and traumatic for many, it was important to create an environment where individuals felt as comfortable as possible to share their perspectives. as it is difficult to establish relationships of trust through an online survey, i instead prioritized anonymity. i wanted to ensure there was no suggestion or possibility that they could be identified based on their responses.5 two limitations result from this approach. one is that the data does not allow for a fulsome understanding of potential differences between regions and specific institutions. these particularities are significant, as they serve as a reminder that institutional systems are not as totalizing and seamless in their practical manifestations as we might assume. second, as mentioned above, the data also does not include demographic information about respondents, which is undoubtedly an important factor in how individuals experience food in prison, and what role food plays in the overall experience of incarceration. additional insights were drawn from a review of csc documents, both publicly available and obtained through access to information requests. the 5 as part of the broader research project, follow-up interviews were conducted with formerly incarcerated individuals, as well as those in support and advocacy roles, where basic demographic information was recorded. unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 289 latter includes meeting minutes from the national menu and recipe committee, copies of the 2021 and 2022 national menus, correspondence from csc food services management and documents related to internal food service audits. findings in analysing the findings, a series of contradictions emerged as central themes, where the role and experience of food held divergent and in some ways contrasting meanings. put together, these contradictions represent a paradox of sorts, where food is simultaneously a source of disgust and valued nourishment, a tool of oppression and a source of community, an arena of conflict and consensus. “the food had no nutritional value” unsurprisingly, the vast majority of respondents did not have good things to say about the food during their incarceration. the words “slop” and “bland” were common descriptors, and the food was frequently referred to as unhealthy, or without nutritional value. one respondent claimed that “the food had no nutritional value meat had pink fillers, the alleged turkey would bounce off the floor like a rubber ball… [they] fed us 6-8 pieces of bread a day.” as described in the previous section, csc claims that their national menu adheres to canada’s food guide, and the various meals listed within the fourweek rotation appear to include a variety of grains, protein, fruits and vegetables. how then, to square this with the descriptions provided by formerly incarcerated individuals? the responses provide several explanations for the discrepancies. a few noticed differences between what was officially being served, according to the menu, and what they tasted on their plate. one individual recounted that certain dishes would be without meat, even though meat was listed on the menu, and that various sauces would be diluted. another wrote that “the food was not seasoned, despite what was written in the csc cookbook.” one respondent noted that changes to the menu were always for the worse, to remove or reduce particular items: “changes to the menu were always to cut more (e.g., milk, cereal in the morning, fruit, etc.)” (translated by author). more than one respondent said the cook-chill system needed to go, and that individual institutions should once again run their own kitchens. others wanted to see a return of food nights and culinary training programs, both of which had been scaled-back and in some cases eliminated all together as a result of the conservative government’s deficit reduction action plan (comack et al., 2015; jeffrey, 2015), which also paved the way for the food services amanda wilson studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 290 modernization initiative. a lack of useful education and training was noted as an issue with the sgmp model, as respondents did not feel that all incarcerated individuals had the skills or knowledge to prepare nutritious meals. “we cooked it ourselves so it was great” there was a noticeable difference in how people described the food within different food service models. generally, people’s description of the food was much better within the sgmp than other models of food service, such as cafeteria or tray service. as one respondent explained: we received groceries once a week. the options were ok. and some things like condiments were expensive and we were given 48$ a week. so it took time to build up certain things. fruit and vegetables could be pricey in the winter months. but every house on the medium compound had gardens that we could get vegetables from in the summer. they compared this food to what is provided through tray service, which they were subjected to during pandemic lockdowns, calling it “horrible, with the odd good day.” from this comment we can see that it was not so much that the food within the sgmp was amazing, but that it was far better than the alternative option. similarly, another respondent compared the food served within a maximumsecurity facility to the food they could purchase within the sgmp model: “in eifw [edmonton institution for women] [the food was] a bit better but that also depended who was ordering for your unit – some women just wanted desserts or sweets so then there would not be any vegetables or fruits.” one respondent spent the first two years of their incarceration at a provincial prison that also housed federally sentenced women, and their description of the food was also grounded in the comparison between food service models: my first two years of my incarceration were at bccw [burnaby corrections centre for women] where the food was horrible but, once at fraser valley it was 200% better because we had an on-site commissary where we could order groceries; it was just as good as any grocery store you shop in every day. beyond the comparison to other, less desirable food service models, the benefits of the sgmp were primarily about the control and autonomy it provided. by the same token, the loss of autonomy and control with cafeteria and tray service created problems specific to those models. for instance, one respondent noted that the heated tray carts were often left unplugged, meaning the food was served cold. food in prison may pertain primarily to sustenance and enjoyment (taste), but it is also a tool to enact agency, bodily autonomy and exert some small level of control over one’s life by making one’s own purchasing decisions and deciding what is put into one’s body. one respondent unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 291 went so far as to say they appreciated the need to stretch their weekly food budget, as it helped them build useful skills they would use on the outside: “i appreciated it [the weekly per diem] being low as it made me think longer-term with my purchases and be a better shopper.” further, the ability to purchase ingredients and cook one’s own food is one of the few instances where incarcerated individuals can more freely perform their identity while incarcerated (de graaf & kilty, 2016; earle & phillips 2012), as it allows individuals to prepare culturally meaningful dishes and express their individual preferences through food. it is worth noting that the negative assessment of food was not unanimous, even outside of the sgmp. one respondent noted the food within central feeding was “surprisingly good,” however the vast majority of respondents were highly critical of the food provided to them. “i filed a complaint and was told no action would be taken” in response to the problems identified by respondents in relation to the food in prison, many individuals had filed complaints or sought to bring about change through different channels. respondents referenced both informal and formal complaints, complaints to the office of the correctional investigator, and in one case a hunger strike, to try to achieve change. nearly one in four respondents (23%) indicated they had filed complaints or formal grievances about food during their incarceration. one person recounted an instance in a maximum-security prison where the entire range refused the food to protest its poor quality. one respondent who had worked within food services while incarcerated noted that they were “constantly… advocating for better quality food, cheaper prices, more options, and a higher weekly food budget.” csc appears to have done little in the way of changes to respond to these complaints. as one respondent clearly stated, “i filed a complaint and was told no action would be taken.” one individual described realizing a problem with the per diem system for smgp whereby newly arrived individuals end up missing a week’s per diem due to gaps between when orders are submitted and when they arrive. they tried explaining the issue to prison staff, but they were left disappointed with their response: i sat down and wrote out the nature of the ordering problem and explained the gap in the per diem and i was dismissed with a response vacillating between addressing the issue and the issue not existing. i chose not to submit a formal complaint because i’ve submitted other, more serious complaints over the years that have received little or no valid response other than to evoke some passive aggressive response that have created supervision barriers for me. regardless of whether, or how, csc or prison staff respond to complaints, the fact that incarcerated individuals continue to advocate for better food and better food environments is notable. indeed, the office of the correctional amanda wilson studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 292 investigator receives a steady stream of complaints related to food every year, with a significant spike in the years following the adoption of the fsmi (wilson, 2022). food as community: “good meals and good conversation” in a recent article on food within provincial jails in ontario, struthers munford refers to food as the “embodiment of contempt” (2022, p. 237). the survey respondents characterized food in federal institutions in a similar way; yet that was only a part of the narrative. while the food provided by csc was largely panned by respondents, food also provided a valued source of community and connection. over half of respondents (61%) indicated they had participated in food drives, cultural food nights or other food-related social activities during their incarceration. the importance of food in creating a sense of community was visible in how respondents spoke of opportunities to come together and share food with one another. this was often through special events such as movie nights, family visits or programming from particular groups (religious groups or outside organizations). respondents described both formal and informal gatherings around food. for instance, sometimes for someone’s birthday they would organize a small party and share food with one another. while some of these social gatherings were sanctioned by prison staff, others were not, and incarcerated individuals risked retribution from guards. in most cases, the simple act of sharing food between incarcerated individuals is prohibited.6 the food available through these events was described as far superior to the food typically provided by the prison. in particular, holiday meals were a highlight, as were family visits, in part because you could purchase special foods (using your own funds) that are not usually available to incarcerated individuals. one respondent gave the example of fish sauce, which was not typically accessible to incarcerated individuals, but is an important ingredient for certain cultural diets. another respondent noted that it was “the best food available, higher quality, better nutrition and taste. looked forward to the events for weeks.” speaking of the various social activities they had helped organize during their time incarcerated, one respondent explained that “the food was always good because we ran it and did the right things with it.” formerly incarcerated individuals, particularly those in the sgmp living units, also spoke of resource pooling where you could purchase groceries together, sharing the cost of individual items across several people. one person gave an example of pooling resources and each purchasing different ingredients so they could make nanaimo bars together. 6 individuals within sgmp are allowed to cook together, but they are prohibited from sharing food with individuals outside of their living unit. unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 293 the value of these events and gatherings was not just about having access to better food. respondents highlighted the social connections that came from these events, the opportunity to build friendships and a sense of community. sixty-three percent of respondents recalled instances of community-building or solidarity amongst incarcerated individuals over food. one respondent reflected, “it was huge, we were able to enjoy friendships as well as a decent item to eat that we wouldn’t normally get on canteen or dinner/lunch menus.” another respondent shared “they were very important to help keep us on a more sane path. reminded us of home cooking.” as one person put it, eating food together provided a chance to relax and unwind. as this respondent notes, food was a vehicle for connection and relationshipbuilding, yet the threat of punishment for engaging in sharing activities was ever-present: sharing food with others is a great way to connect socially. i attended different cultural food nights during my time. i also joined with friends to cook thanksgiving and christmas dinners, birthday dinners, and good-bye dinners for prisoners being released. it was our main social practice and [a] way to have fun and connect with one another. the guards did not make it easy and often broke up these events and stole our food. as some of the previous examples highlight, the model of food service experienced by incarcerated people shapes what opportunities are available for socializing and relationship-building through food. in minimum or some medium-security prisons, incarcerated individuals are housed in pods where they have access to kitchen equipment and purchase groceries, giving them the option to cook and eat together on a regular basis. this contrasts with those on the tray system, where trays are brought to incarcerated individuals in their cells. in these circumstances, the opportunity to socialize and share food may only come in the form of special events or through unsanctioned sharing of food items purchased at the canteen. unfortunately, as a result of the pandemic and related health measures, many of the opportunities for social gathering around food have been removed. in their 3rd covid status update, published in february of 2021, the office of the correctional investigator notes a “slow, inconsistent and uneven pace of easing restrictions, resuming programs, restoring visits, opening of gyms, yards and prison libraries” (2021, p. 11). the pandemic also impacted the ways in which food was provided, as institutions increasingly adopted individual, as opposed to communal, approaches to food service. dean roberts describes the early days of the pandemic at mission institution – medium: “at mealtimes, staff ordered you to place a chair inside the cell door and stand at the back of your cell. a styrofoam take-out tray from the institutional kitchen was dropped on the chair and the door slammed as fast as they could” (roberts, 2022, p. 103). amanda wilson 294 a tool of both conflict and consensus food acted as a unifying force amongst incarcerated individuals: “food was the one thing all guys would get behind. it crossed all lines within the joint. it is a[n] issue that unites all within the population.” similarly, one respondent reflected that the shared experience of bad food in and of itself became a source of community building, as it was something upon which everyone agreed, creating a sense of camaraderie: “the poor quality of the food was a running joke. when someone made a comment about the food, pretty much everyone agreed with them” (translated from french by author). at the same time, food was also a source of much conflict, in particular because of problems associated with the poor quality and insufficient provision of food. nearly all respondents (87%) recalled instances of conflict over food during their incarceration. as one respondent observed, “the lack of adequate food (or the lack of adequate resources to purchase food from the canteen or weekly grocery order) fuels and exacerbates conflict amongst incarcerated people.” a common example of conflict was food being stolen, or someone’s food being eaten by someone else. as one person described, “there’s an entire underground food reselling economy.” another respondent noted they themselves commonly bought vegetables that had been stolen. other respondents mentioned fights and riots breaking out over food. more than one respondent explained the ways in which power dynamics played out in relation to food. in the case of the smgp, some individuals said that the person responsible for putting in the grocery order would sometimes abuse that power to control what was put in the order, or would keep some items from the group order for themselves or their friends. another individual, speaking of the line to get food in the cafeteria model, explained that those with power went first and that friendships generated extra helpings: “every meal line-up was a big deal. guys who run the range at the front. extra helpings for server buddies. lots of issues around who was where in [the] line.” here we see that food was not the source of the conflict, but a means through which to exert power, thereby creating conflict. similarly, one respondent also spoke of conflict between incarcerated people and the guards or prison staff over food: “guards frequently destroyed or stole what little food we had during searches where they destroyed our kitchen and cooked food that was left out. they also broke up special dinners and events that prisoners organized, which caused a lot of tension” again, we see an example of food as a tool, whereby the guards assert their power by destroying people’s food. one individual recalled an intense conflict over a change in menu: “at millhaven they put celery in the sunday pancakes. this was a bad plan because the boys lost it. 200,000 dollars in damages later, celery was taken off the menu.” this highlights the importance that food holds within prison, but also the potential collective power that can be generated to challenge injustice. as hatch notes, “food is a powerful technology for direct and indirect political struggles in prison environments” (2019, p. 67). food is sometimes the subject studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 295 of a grievance, and other times it is a tool in expressing a grievance. for instance, one respondent spoke of collective action within a rotating hunger strike – where everyone would refuse to eat, then collectively have a meal, and then alternate back and forth together. a recent article by erica brazeau details a 2020 hunger strike at the ottawa correctional detention centre (ocdc), a provincial jail, where she and other incarcerated persons sought a range of changes, including access to fresh fruit and vegetables and adherence to the canadian food guide. brazeau highlights the deep impact a poor diet can have on the well-being and mental health of incarcerated persons, yet the response of the prison staff was minimal at best. as she reflects, “it really hurt me having to beg for something that my body needs and getting punished for it, to be treated like my problems were a joke when they were serious” (brazeau, 2020, p. 129). this type of response by prison management is typical in situations of hunger strikes or collective action, seeking to ignore, diminish and dismiss both the concerns and the collective agency of incarcerated persons. discussion hatch (2019) uses the term “nutritional punishment” to describe the ways in which correctional staff “use the quantity or nutritional quality of consumed food as a form of punishment” (p. 67). the experiences of incarcerated individuals from the survey certainly evoke elements of this, from lack of accountability to ensure that what is on the menu is actually being served, to disregard for complaints, and retributions imposed for the simple act of sharing food. as one responded bluntly concluded, “to make passable food is easy but the institution seem[s] to go out of their way to make the food shit.” at the same time, it is clear from the survey responses that food was much more than a tool of punishment and conflict, simultaneously providing an important source of community and camaraderie. there is both great frustration and a sense of possibility in unpacking the role of food in prison. these conflicting meanings and experiences of food highlights a paradoxical quality to food behind bars, making it impossible to reduce to one overarching understanding or conclusion. several scholars have noted similar tensions and contradictions within carceral food systems and spaces. in chennault and sbicca’s (2023) critical review of prison agriculture in the united states, they develop what they term a disciplinary matrix, to highlight the diverse and at times competing rationales that drive these activities, oscillating between forms of discipline, exploitation and rehabilitation. in hazelett’s (2023) exploration of the possibilities for carceral food justice within prison garden programs, he concludes that prison gardens represent a duality (perhaps a paradox even) in that they are fundamentally reformist in nature, but also offer moments of resistance and possibility to work towards carceral food justice. here we can see parallel amanda wilson studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 296 dynamics play out in the experiences and meanings of food shared by survey respondents, where food offers both community and solidarity as well as punishment and conflict. this complexity is not a justification for inaction, rather it is an invitation to consider the full scope of possibilities in how to respond. there are many things that could and should be done, in the short term, to improve the quality and experience of food within federal prisons. for example, while csc claims to adhere to the canada food guide recommendations, the latest version speaks not only to servings of particular food groups, but also to the conditions under which food is consumed, under the tagline “healthy eating is more than the food you eat.” csc’s approach to food services appears to directly contradict two of those recommendations: “cook more often” and “eat meals with others,” as many incarcerated individuals do not have the opportunity to cook their own food or eat their meals with others (health canada, 2022). creating more opportunities for incarcerated individuals to cook for themselves, and share food with others, would promote the social and community roles of food, while also increasing the freedom and autonomy incarcerated individuals experience during their incarceration. losing opportunities to socialize around food, and build community through food, is a common complaint of federally incarcerated persons, as highlighted by several authors with lived experience cited earlier in this paper (see anonymous prisoner #4 fraser valley institution for women, 2017; joseph, 2017). the newly revised canada food guide may provide a strategically useful tool in advocating for policy change in this area, which may provide incarcerated individuals greater freedom in their food choices. while mckeithen (2022) argues we must be careful of mobilizing nutritional compliance as a tool of improving food in prison, because it reifies the state’s authority and narrows the terrain of contestation, these nutritional guidelines extend beyond counting calories or nutritional science. the differing assessments of food from the sgmp model versus cafeteria or tray service are a reminder that expanding the autonomy and choice of incarcerated individuals is meaningful change that might signal a small step towards a carceral food justice, as described by hazelett (2023). however, echoing mckeithen (2022), although such a policy change might offer meaningful improvements, i want to strongly caution against believing that “good food” in prisons is possible. despite the public discourse of rehabilitation and reintegration, prisons in canada are deeply punitive places (dawe & goodman, 2017). in addition to the deplorable food, incarcerated individuals are faced with woefully inadequate healthcare, overcrowding, prolonged isolation and inactivity, as well as structurally-induced instances of lateral violence; all contributing to a situation that is untenable (ling, 2019; macalpine, 2019; office of the correctional investigator, 2016; senate standing committee on human rights, 2021). given the impact that these conditions can have on one’s health and well-being, it should be no surprise that the life expectancy of an individual incarcerated at a federal prison is 20 unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 297 years lower than the canadian average (iftene, 2020). these issues are not just mistakes or oversights – they are manifestations of the carceral logic at play in federal prisons. as g.s., an incarcerated individual, reflects, “the problems that exist in the correctional service of canada (csc) and within our justice system cannot be fixed without fixing the problems with society first” (g.s., 2020, p. 123). prisons are, fundamentally, harmful institutions that must be completely dismantled, not just reformed. despite these realities, correctional institutions, and the state as a whole, continually try to mask the fundamental truths about prisons. as pat carlen eloquently articulates: since the inception of penal incarceration, the punitive function of the prison has been multiply veiled by governmental, professional or reforming claims that prisons – especially women’s prisons – are, or could be, for something other than punishment: for psychological readjustment, training in parenting, drugs rehabilitation, general education or whatever else the ‘programmers’ of the day may deem to have been lacking in a prisoner’s life… more and more people (including this reviewer) appear to have fallen into the trap of forgetting that the main function of prison is the delivery of pain. (carlen, 2002, p. 116; emphasis added) carlen explains this cognitive dissonance as the carceral clawback, the “power of the prison constantly to deconstruct and successfully reconstruct the ideological conditions for its own existence” (2002, p. 116). o’malley (1999) comes to a similar conclusion, noting widespread inconsistencies and contradictions within contemporary penal policy, where competing discourses of punishment, enterprise, incapacitation, restitution and reintegration are mobilized simultaneously across various programs, approaches and initiatives. this carceral clawback has been particularly evident in the case of carceral food systems, where everything from prison farms, to cooking classes and bee hives (even abattoirs!) are presented as tools of rehabilitation and recidivism, denying the inherent violence of the context in which these activities take place. the ability of carceral systems to hold space for seemingly opposing discourses highlights the importance of ensuring any reforms are abolitionist reforms, so as to resist co-optation into carceral logics. for instance, a reform that takes-up a framing of reintegration (such as food-based employment training or horticulture therapy) may appear to improve the conditions of incarcerated individuals in the short term, but without questioning the broader legitimacy of prisons it remains an individualizing response, bound-up in the neoliberal and neo-conservative rationalities that continue to impose punitive and inhumane conditions on incarcerated populations (o’malley, 1999). rather than tools of rehabilitation, opportunities to engage with food and food provisioning should be structured as moments of autonomy and agency, to expose and lay bare the contradictions of this carceral clawback and create space to challenge the inherent violence and separation of prison. hazelett makes a similar claim in his conceptualization of a carceral food justice praxis, which includes activities around food that invite critical reflection and amanda wilson studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 298 collective understanding of the systemic injustices of carceral institutions and agri-food systems (2023, p. 448). the discussion above makes that clear; there can be no “just” carceral food system because carceral systems are inherently, fundamentally, unjust systems. as kathuria writes “creating a ‘humane’ eating environment in prison – where incarcerated folks are able to access foods that meet their physical needs and are culturally, emotionally, and mentally nourishing – is thus a paradox” (2022, n.p.). the goal cannot simply be to improve the quality of food services in prison, as this goes against the fundamental logic of prisons. one survey respondent made this point explicitly in asserting, “nutrient deprivation is supported by the inherent nature of physical, social, emotional deprivation of carceral spaces.” the question, then, is how do we make meaningful change that has a direct impact on the lives of incarcerated individuals, while also working towards a transformative justice that seeks to fundamentally re-imagine society’s approach to harm and punishment? the stories and examples from formerly incarcerated persons described in this paper highlight that shared experiences around food have the potential to create openings of community and solidarity, despite a broader context that is highly punitive and dehumanizing. building on these openings, i believe we can work towards enacting an abolitionist politics within carceral food systems that centers both food justice and transformative justice, whether conceptualized as a practice of carceral food justice, or a vision of an abolitionist politics of nourishment. heynen and ybarra, speaking of abolitionism more broadly within political ecology, note that we can: …learn from grassroots movements and abolitionist thought to make freedom as a place. much like the kitchen table, it is the everyday experiences of teaching each other about native plants (carroll, 2015), making shared dinners as a community (mei-singh, 2020), and singing freedom songs (ranganathan & bratman, 2019) that make structural transformations possible. (heynan & ybarra, 2020, p. 24) in the context of carceral food systems, making “freedom as a place” could involve the creation of opportunities for community-building and connection through food between incarcerated and non-incarcerated individuals. examples include the victory bus project in new york where loved ones visiting incarcerated family members are provided with free transportation to and from the prison along with fresh vegetables from local farms, or emma’s acres in british columbia where incarcerated individuals volunteer at an organic vegetable farm side by side those who have been victims of crimes. although these may appear somewhat reformist in orientation, their liberatory potential comes from breaking down barriers and creating spaces outside the direct control of prison staff where we can collectively deconstruct the structural harms found within food systems and prison systems, and collectively imagine possible alternatives. hazelett makes a similar observation in his work on prison gardens, suggesting that gardens can be a unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 299 space where “carceral subjectivities can begin to unravel, and humanisation of oneself and the other can occur” (2023, p. 449). the survey responses emphasize the value and significance of community-building through food in settings where incarcerated folks are able to experience greater freedom and autonomy, taking small steps to defy carceral logics of control and confinement. work is also required to build stronger links and coalitions across food movements and prisoner justice and transformative justice movements, to continue to explore the linkages and interconnections between food systems and carceral systems. this could create a broader pool of allies and active participants in prison abolitionist movements, as well as movements to transform our food systems. for example, the recent campaign against the proposed new prison in kemptville ontario, led by capp (coalition against the proposed prison), has effectively linked the issues of prisoner justice and food security, by highlighting the social and ecological consequences of building a new prison on prime agricultural lands (see https://www.coalitionagainstproposedprison.ca/). finally, an abolitionist politics within carceral food systems could be expressed through the co-creation of alternative institutions and processes to facilitate collective access to clean and safe environments (water, land, air), and equitable social relations of labour. in the context of a settler-colonial state such as canada, this could manifest as active support for and in engagement in what simpson calls indigenous renaissance and resurgence, to rebuild indigenous knowledge systems, cultures, forms of governance, education, care, etc., without “the sanction, permission or engagement of the state, western theory, or the opinions of canadians” (simpson, 2011, p. 17). coulthard takes a similar stance, urging a “resurgent politics of recognition” to rebuild and strengthen indigenous culture and traditions, political systems, and knowledges (2014, p. 179). in practical terms, this might mean direct support for and participation in land back struggles (such as wet’suwet’en, and land back lane), revitalizing indigenous food systems, including harvesting traditional foods, and reclaiming indigenous agricultural practices (such as the anishinaabe moose committee, the tr’ondëk hwëch’in (th) farm, black duck wild rice or the white corn resurgence garden project). support for indigenous governance and food sovereignty may not appear directly related to addressing the concerns over the state of food in federal prisons, however, the analysis in this paper has sought to illustrate that we cannot “fix” carceral food systems without dismantling carceral systems themselves as well as the structures that perpetuate them. as mckeithen (2022) outlines in their abolitionist politics of nourishment, food in prisons cannot be isolated from the surrounding carceral context; rather it must be understood in relation to these broader systems and structures. just as the survey respondents highlighted ways in which conflict over food is a manifestation of unequal power relations both between incarcerated individuals and between incarcerated individuals and prison staff, so too can food in prison be used as amanda wilson studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 300 a tool to analyze and highlight the fundamental injustices of carceral systems. an abolitionist perspective urges us to examine the full web of relations that connect carceral institutions to the rest of society, identifying points of leverage and moments of opportunity to first make the harms of prisons visible, challenge their legitimacy, and then begin the work of imagining and coconstructing alternative institutions, practices and relationships. the complexities and contradictions that surface in analysing the experiences of food in prison are one such leverage point, opening the door to analysing the full web of food provisioning relationships within and beyond prison walls, to consider how these relationships could be re-imagined and re-structured in support of both food justice and transformative justice. conclusion the data presented in this paper is part of a larger research project examining food as “contested terrain” (brisman 2008) within the canadian federal prison system, mapping the various actors and relationships implicated in carceral food systems and bringing to light particular moments where food has been taken up as a tool to contest the treatment of incarcerated individuals and articulate alternative possibilities. while the survey did not speak directly to questions of alternatives, the paradoxical role and symbolism of food that emerged from the responses provides insight into how food can be mobilized as a tool of change within the carceral context, to not merely reform but directly challenge and de-legitimize carceral logics. despite the poor quality and highly restrictive setting, incarcerated individuals still found ways to build community around food and contest the arbitrary rules of confinement through sharing food, filing complaints and engaging in collective action. far beyond just a tool of punishment, food within the carceral context holds a complex and contradictory meaning for incarcerated individuals, acting as a source of conflict and consensus, nutritionally deficient but also socially nourishing, a symbol of both their imprisonment and a reminder of what is beyond prison walls. the paradoxical meaning and symbolism of food within prison parallels the paradox of trying to improve the experience of food under the current carceral realities; just as food in prison cannot be distilled down to one thing, efforts to reform carceral food systems cannot be reconciled with the harms of carceral systems. according to davis (2003), part of the challenge in imaging and pursuing a world without prisons is that there is an inherent distancing that takes place within society’s relationship with prison. prisons are positioned as natural and inevitable, and yet we do not want to know any details about them and what goes on inside. carceral food systems presents an opportunity to challenge that disconnection by highlighting the ways in which the paradoxical position of food in prison parallels the complexities many individuals within the wider community face in relation to food. building spaces of connection and unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 301 relationship-building through food and food provisioning between incarcerated individuals and the broader community works to challenge the socially constructed barriers between incarcerated individuals and the rest of society, counteracting the distancing and disconnection that davis notes. the act of sharing food and engaging in collective activities of food provisioning can have a unique ability to disarm people and create a sense of connection, challenging the profound “otherness” that is required for society’s continued acceptance and complacency around the realities of prisons (davis, 2003, p. 16). to be effective, this will require pushing back against the narrow rehabilitative positioning of food – where food and food programming is seen as a tool to heal and reform incarcerated individuals – to envision a much broader set of possibilities where food becomes a site and a tool of fundamental reimaging and social transformation. csc’s handling of the covid pandemic further deteriorated the conditions of incarceration within canada’s federal prisons (see anonymous from saskatchewan penitentiary, 2020; roberts, 2022). however, the pandemic also created a space in which abolitionism gained new ground as a practical response to the harms of prison. for instance, the abolition coalition, a coalition of academics, organizers and formerly incarcerated persons utilized a diversity of tactics from education and advocacy to solidarity and direct support to expose the harms of incarceration that were exacerbated by the pandemic, and also to point to alternative approaches founded on community building and mutual aid (chartrand, 2021). there is perhaps now, more than in recent decades, a strategic opening to bolster the value and necessity of an abolition politic within our understanding of carceral food systems, to position food in prison as both a site and tool of important social change. acknowledgements i would like to express my gratitude to all those who took the time to fill-out the survey and share their experiences of incarceration. i would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous and helpful comments, as well as research assistants julie courchesne and ghassan zahran for their contributions to this project. finally, i would like to acknowledge financial support provided by the social sciences and humanities research council for this research. references alkon, a. h., & agyeman, j. 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(2011). dancing on our turtle’s back: stories of nishnaabeg re-creation, resurgence, and a new emergence. arbetier ring publishing. unpacking the prison food paradox studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 2, 280-305, 2023 305 statistics canada. (2021, july 8). after an unprecedented decline early in the pandemic, the number of adults in custody rose steadily over the summer and fell again in december 2020. government of canada. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/dailyquotidien/210708/dq210708a-eng.htm struthers monford, k. (2022). the embodiment of contempt: ontario provincial prison food. social & legal studies, 32(2), 237-256. wilson, a. (2022). exploring carceral food systems as sites of contestation and possibility in canadian federal prisons: the food services modernization initiative. critical criminology. online advanced publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09628-x correspondence address: diane enns, department of philosophy, mcmaster university, 1280 main street west, hamilton, ontario, canada l8s 4k1. tel.: (+1) 905 525 9140 ext. 27529, email: ennsd@mcmaster.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 2, 181-187, 2013 justice after violence: critical perspectives from the western balkans diane enns mcmaster university, canada introduction ... to many people who lived through the war in bih justice would be a world, a life, a history in which the war had not happened.—stef jansen two decades after violence broke out following the dissolution of yugoslavia, considerable obstacles continue to challenge those struggling for justice in the region. in bosnia-herzegovina1 especially, the success of nationalist ideologies and the ethnic cleansing that was their outcome—ending in an awkward internationally engineered system of governance—have left in their wake a host of vexing, interrelated problems. by now, their effects are well known to scholars and peace-building practitioners working in the region: an impoverished political framework that remains starkly divided along ethnic lines and is rife with corruption, a deep distrust of political leaders, persistent inequality, and little interest in reconciling with those who became wartime enemies. how to deal with past atrocity and its legacy in the western balkans is a matter of ongoing debate and frustration, often exacerbated by the gap between local and international perspectives and by competing paradigms in the peacebuilding, human rights and transitional justice fields. post-war justice mechanisms have focused on the prosecution and punishment of a select few war criminals, neglecting questions of broader responsibility and fostering resentment over the lack of justice at the community level or over what is perceived to be a biased application of the law. rising inequality and poverty, institutional breakdown, and the long-term effects of trauma, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 182 diane enns add to the immense challenges of rebuilding societies after war. under these circumstances, peaceful relations across nationalist lines, a flourishing civil society, and responsible state leaders mutually engaged in creating a better future, seem utterly remote. we are presented here with an opportunity to reflect on the complicated relationships between justice, rule of law, reconciliation, inequality, politics, and peace. each of the contributors to this issue of studies in social justice takes on the challenge of this opportunity, engaging with different aspects of these relationships and their contradictions, primarily in the context of post-war bosnia-herzegovina, which bore the brunt of the violence, from 1992-95, but also in neighbouring croatia and serbia, and in the western balkans more generally. if there is a common thread that runs through these essays it is that a juridical form of justice is limited in what it can do in the aftermath of violent conflict. for many scholars and practitioners this is by no means a surprising conclusion, but it does run contrary to the reigning paradigm of what i will call the global post-conflict justice industry. since the 1990s, transitional justice has become the favoured approach for countries dealing with past atrocities, promoting criminal prosecutions, truth-seeking commissions, reparations, and reconciliation programs as effective methods of responding to war crimes and human rights abuses. but many have criticized its almost exclusive dependence on a criminal justice framework at the expense of other approaches to dealing with the past—approaches initiated by the affected communities themselves, by a politically active civil society supported by strong institutions and by capable leadership. my own view is that transitional justice, now taking precedence over other paradigms like reconciliation, conflict transformation, or even peacebuilding, puts too much faith in the law as the best method of dealing with the aftermath of political violence. the promise of law to rectify the injustices of the past is an appealing one, but the catharsis that victims experience in being heard and in hearing the truth about war crimes, and their relief or elation when perpetrators are sentenced, are limited, if valuable, experiences. despite this promise, truth commissions and criminal prosecutions on their own do not often foster social repair and might even hamper much needed social and political change. that we are now in danger of placing too great an emphasis on judicial mechanisms to deal with the effects of violent conflict is borne out in the essays that follow. but the authors in this issue also caution against placing too much faith in the promise offered by discourses on peace and reconciliation. the moral imperative to reach across ethnicized and nationalized enemy lines and forgive past grievances in the interests of peace is often externally imposed, based on an international mischaracterization of the conflict as an eruption of historic ethnic hostilities and a reductive understanding of the factors that caused the violence. a simplistic version of reconciliation might conflict with the need for justice—not only legal, punitive justice, but social justice—including the immediate material needs of a population whose daily lives have been altered beyond recognition. the essays in this issue thus point to an important lacuna in the fields studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 justice after violence 183 of transitional justice and peacebuilding. this lacuna is politics; specifically, a robust civil society politics, which, by all accounts, is sorely lacking in the region. the demands for justice as rule of law on the one hand, and for reconciliation and peace on the other, tend to neglect politics, if by politics we mean collective congregating, speaking and acting with the interests of a pluralist public in mind. justice must be viewed and practiced within a broader social and political context, alongside other elements necessary for rebuilding societies and states devastated by war. without an active civil society and the will to bring about social, political, and economic change, justice may end up meaning very little. our point of departure is timothy donais’s accurate assessment of the gap that exists between “the lofty ambitions of the international community in terms of bringing justice and rule of law to afflicted countries, and the messy, compromising realities of the effort to translate vision into practice” (p. 189). in post-dayton bosnia, despite the emphasis on rule of law, and what donais believes are “substantial achievements” on this front, the peace process remains as fragile as ever (p. 191). structural injustice continues, perpetuated by an underlying structure of political power that remains largely unaltered since the end of the war. bosnia’s political system remains dysfunctional, with leaders unable to govern competently a population rigidly divided along ethnic lines with little evidence of improved relations in several decades. nationalist rhetoric, donais notes, is still “the key currency of political life” (p. 202). in such a dismal political context—steeped in acrimony, fear, and mutual distrust—the rule of law cannot simply function as a neutral arbiter. this is evident in donais’s analyses of two prominent manifestations of rule of law practice in bosnia: police reform and efforts to curb widespread political corruption. in recognition of its limits, donais suggests that rule of law should be more broadly connected to peace and justice. to this end he calls for significant changes to the current political dynamics, the development of consensual arrangements acceptable to all key political actors, and a reengaged civil society. the widespread corruption to which donais alludes is the subject of our next contribution by vesna bojicic-dzelilovic, who analyzes the relationship between informality and inequality and its effects on the social reintegration process in bosnia-herzegovina. the rise of an informal economy in conjunction with corruption, which has given rise to a discriminatory system of rule which rests on informal relations was due to the disintegration of the bosnian state through the fusion of violence, crime, and extremist politics. informality, as bojicic-dzelilovic defines it, has an ambiguous effect in terms of social justice outcomes; it is linked to poverty, corruption, inequality, and social injustice, but is tolerated at the everyday level. if informality was triggered by war, it has been sustained by post-war elites. but the fact that the same group of actors controls both the polity and the economy is often overlooked in current analyses of the bosnian state. bojicic-dzelilovic complains of the myopia concerning inequality in certain academic and policy debates that focus overwhelmingly on the politics of studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 184 diane enns bosnia’s statehood, for politics is inseparable from its economic foundations. to complicate this relationship further, she calls attention to the destructive impact of informality on interpersonal and institutional trust, since trust does not develop when some individuals benefit from the inequities created by informal arrangements. unequal access to assets and resources, bojicicdzelilovic explains, especially the accumulation of wealth and power on the part of ethnic elites who were prominent war-time players, exacerbates a sense of discrimination and social injustice and ultimately undermines social reintegration. bojicic-dzelilovic concludes that any analysis of noncompliance with state sanctioned rules, in states transitioning from communism and/or war has to factor in the transformation of the state itself. in bosnia-herzegovina, the transition to a stable “positive peace” requires a reconstruction of the relationship between state and society (p. 218). this is proving to be an extraordinary challenge, as donais also pointed out, since twenty years after the end of the 1992-95 war there is still no “collective vision of a shared national project” that would repair social relations. thus, while the political leadership has a significant role to play, given bosnians’ lack of trust in their leaders, and even disgust for politics, the public pressure required to disturb the status quo and invigorate democratic process is not forthcoming. stef jansen addresses the relationship between justice and politics from a different angle, throwing into question the demand for reconciliation as a requirement of justice. concerned with the explicitly political dimension of justice, manifest in a liberal reconciliation discourse in bosnia-herzegovina that serves to reinforce a nationalist version of history, jansen considers whose reconciliation is being desired in this region, by whom, for whom and for what? pre-war encounters with neighbours, strangers, or family members across national lines—distinctions that only acquired their current significance through war—were simply “practical dimensions of everyday life” (p. 233). jansen asks: why would anyone now perceive these “international” or “ethnonational” encounters as virtuous acts of reconciliation? “to accept such a reductionist definition of ‘sides’ in an identitarian matrix,” he suggests, “would represent the ultimate crown on the nationalist hegemonizing projects of the 1990s” (p. 232). the desire for justice evokes more than judiciary procedures, jansen insists. in a post-war context, however, the meaning of justice is difficult to pin down. beyond retributive justice, punishment and reparations, justice may evoke much broader utopian notions of balance. but the object of hope for most people, he observes, is “a normal life.” people do not engage with one another based on an abstract notion of common humanity—the kind of equal and inalienable humanity that reconciliation projects assume we all share—but as persons who establish some degree of mutual recognition based on specific social positionings and identifications. this mutual recognition beyond reductive nationalist identities is the most promising, yet most challenging, requirement for an alternative to bosnian “politika;” challenging given that politics is blamed for the cause of the war and the studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 justice after violence 185 suffering that was its outcome. in jansen’s view however, a situation that is widely seen as caused by politics cannot be overcome or even improved without recourse to politics. active politicization would bring about a more just future. the next two essays point to the power of ethnicized narratives in shoring up this resistance to such politicization, and to the limits of the law in easing this resistance. dejan guzina and branka marijan elaborate a critique of the use of international criminal justice in bosnia-herzegovina, claiming that transitional justice approaches and the international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia (icty) have not overcome divisions but constructed parallel worlds in the region. in fact, they remark that the icty and domestic trials “are increasingly seen as political theater of the absurd rather than the mechanism that would allow the truth about the war to be unearthed.” while transitional justice approaches are touted as capable of inspiring respect for rule of law, and of creating a valuable historical record, guzina and marijan outline the political abuses of these methods: bosnian elites use the past to play to their own ethnic groups in order to pursue nation building projects. there is a reluctance to acknowledge one’s own guilt and responsibility, as evidenced by the naser oric trial. elites are not alone, however, in determining the outcomes of transitional justice processes. local actors have yet to come to terms with a historical narrative that would transcend ethnic divisions, a process stymied by the fact that bosnian local communities continue to be physically and psychologically segregated from one other. but bosnians are not simply puppets passively responding to elites. guzina and marijan examine popular perceptions of war and its aftermath in sarajevo and banja luka in particular, to show the disjunct between internationally sponsored goals of reconciliation and local acts of contestation and citizenship practices. before the war, these cities were the multiethnic and multicultural centers of bosnia; after 1995 they emerged as symbols of division and mutually contradictory nation building projects. the narratives that help sustain these changes cannot be simply dismissed, guzina and marijan argue—the stories that people tell themselves enable them to cope. the authors conclude that analyses of the conflict in bosnia must take into account what gives these narratives their power, and what are the objective political, social and economic factors that continue to provide a fertile ground for their widespread support. jelena subotic is also concerned with public narratives of the past in bosnia, croatia, and serbia that remain mutually exclusive, contradictory, and irreconcilable. practices of remembrance or memorialization, whether in the form of public commemoration efforts or history classes in schools, have served to entrench incompatible versions of the past and contribute to further mistrust and the prevention of truth and justice. memory projects tend to reflect each state’s interest in deflecting responsibility for atrocities committed by its own leaders and citizens, justified as defensive action. history education, which subotic argues is naturally “fraught with analytical, ethical, and interpretive minefields” (p. 268), is particularly problematic in studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 186 diane enns bosnia-herzegovina, where education policy is decentralized and controlled by local authorities. history has come to represent the ethnic politics of the majority population; in bosnia itself, three different sets of history textbooks circulate, each providing an ethnicized version of bosnia’s past. subotic argues that to rectify this ethnicized memory work we need a reparative sense of justice that leads to practices that show states are willing to acknowledge responsibility for past violence. to this end all three states should accept an official regional commission of inquiry into past atrocities and should initiate comprehensive educational reform and memorialization efforts such as establishing memorial sites. these are necessary for a comprehensive post-conflict justice framework. crucial in this process are memory projects that forego dwelling on their own victimization in isolation and include a broader regional focus. as our other authors have argued, subotic stresses that in order to take these critically necessary steps in pursuit of regional justice, profound political change must take place first. finally, in a review essay of angelina jolie’s much publicized film in the land of blood and honey (2011), in tandem with juanita wilson’s and hanschristian schmid’s related feature films, as if i am not there (2010) and storm (2009), brian phillips considers whether film can contribute to justice processes in the aftermath of violent conflict. like the other contributors to this issue, phillips makes the case that courts of law leave an unfortunate lacuna in the requirements of justice. rape in particular falls into this lacuna, as courts struggle unsuccessfully to accommodate the experience of victims of rape in war. filmmakers have risen to the challenge of filling the need for complementary processes alongside juridical procedures in the long struggle for justice and recovery after war. while jolie’s film appears to offer victims of sexual violence a sense of justice by giving them a voice, phillips argues emphatically that this film does not fulfill such a promise, and in places actually exploits victims’ suffering. thus for phillips, the film raises serious moral concerns about the recreation of scenes of atrocity in cinema in general, and the retelling of the bosnian tragedy in particular. he questions the therapeutic function of “giving voice” that is commonly highlighted in human rights and peacebuilding discussions more broadly; a therapeutic model tries to reconcile people with their past, not materially transform their lives. it is social justice that populations need, phillips asserts, not therapeutic measures. phillips concludes that rather than imagining that a film can on its own offer some alternative form of justice for victims by recreating their experience, “the real potential of film as a contribution to the transitional justice toolkit perhaps lies in its capacity to shred the comforting, formulaic prescriptions about dialogue, dealing with the past, and reconciliation that are too often voiced in peacebuilding enterprises—those wishful strategies for social reconstruction that show little understanding of just how long and hard the road to post conflict justice can be…” these are appropriate sentiments on which to end this issue, for it is clear studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 justice after violence 187 from all of these contributions that there are no easy or comforting formulas to apply in the struggle for justice in the wake of destructive violence—only partial, imperfect, and contingent answers that must arise out of collective political engagement. there is no justice without politics. notes 1 scholars writing on bosnia-herzegovina variously refer to the country as bosnia, bosnia-herzegovina or its abbreviation, bih. the authors in this issue each have their own preferences. correspondence address: marina morrow, faculty of health sciences, centre for the study of gender, social inequities and mental health, simon fraser university. 11514 blusson hall, 8888 university ave, burnaby, british columbia v5a 1s6, canada. tel.: +(778)782-6906, email: mmorrow@sfu.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 6, issue 1, 27-43, 2012 towards a social justice framework of mental health recovery marina morrow faculty of health sciences, centre for the study of gender, social inequities and mental health, simon fraser university julia weisser1 centre for the study of gender, social inequities and mental health simon fraser university abstract in this paper we set out the context in which experiences of mental distress occur with an emphasis on the contributions of social and structural factors and then make a case for the use of intersectionality as an analytic and methodological framework for understanding these factors. we then turn to the political urgency for taking up the concept of recovery and argue for the importance of research and practice that addresses professional domination of the field, and that promotes ongoing engagement and dialogue about recovery as both a personal and social experience. to this end, we describe a unique project that sought to deepen our understanding of how recovery is being thought about and applied in the current context of mental health care in vancouver, bc, with a specific focus on how, and whether, people are taking up and addressing dimensions of power that we see as critical to the operationalization of recovery within a social justice framework. emerging from our research and discussion is a set of critical questions about whether or not the political moment in canada with respect to re-invigorating recovery should be embraced, versus a rejection of the concept of recovery as too limiting in its scope and too vulnerable to professional co-optation. “recovery is not a concept that i really relate to because i don’t think that i’m recovering from my life experiences, i’m incorporating them. i’m not surviving, i’m becoming.” – world café participant studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 28 marina morrow & julia weisser the idea of recovery originally had its roots in the psychiatric survivor movement. yet while this movement has had empowerment and resistance to the dominance of psychiatry as its main goals, the concept of recovery has since shifted in recent years. this has led to vigorous discussion about the usefulness of the concept, and about its uses in the context of the increasing authority of biomedicalism and neoliberal policy regimes (jacobson, farah & the toronto recovery and cultural diversity community of practice, 2010; mental health “recovery” study working group, 2009; morrow, wasik, cohen, & perry, 2009; morrow, in press; poole, 2001; rossiter & morrow, 2009). thus, a canadian debate is emerging that is concerned with the ways in which recovery has become distanced from its roots in psychiatric survivor activism, and its role in an evolving mental health system is being questioned (poole, 2011). in our view, central to any discussion about recovery must be recognition of the profound discrimination faced by people who have been psychiatrized, and the connections between recovery and the social and structural barriers that shape, facilitate or impede recovery. these social and structural aspects are articulated and enacted through a number of dimensions of power such as biomedicalism, racialization, sanism2, sexism, ageism, heterosexism, etc., calling out for an intersectional social justice analysis of recovery. that is, an analysis that foregrounds an understanding of power as it is distributed in the mental health care system, and the accompanying interlocking forms of oppression through which it operates (burman, 2004; burman & chantler, 2003; lefrancois, 2011; rossiter & morrow, 2011). in this paper we set out the context in which experiences of mental distress occur with an emphasis on the contributions of social and structural factors and then make a case for the use of intersectionality as an analytic and methodological framework for understanding these factors. intersectionality is a theory which can be used to examine the ways in which various social and cultural categories (such as race, sex, class, etc.) intertwine, as well as the relationships between them (crenshaw, 1991; knudsen, 2006). thus, it is a powerful tool for exploring the various social, political and economic processes through which people experience oppression and privilege (hankivsky, 2011). we then turn to the political urgency for taking up the concept of recovery and argue for the importance of research and practice that addresses professional domination of the field, and that promotes ongoing engagement and dialogue about recovery as both a personal and social experience. to this end, we describe a unique project that sought to deepen our understanding of how recovery is being thought about and applied in the current context of mental health care in vancouver, bc, with a specific focus on how, and whether, people are taking up and addressing dimensions of power that we see as critical to the operationalization of recovery within a social justice framework. emerging from our research and discussion is a set of critical questions about whether or not the political moment in canada with respect to re-invigorating recovery should be embraced, versus a rejection of studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 towards a social justice framework 29 the concept of recovery as too limiting in its scope and too vulnerable to professional co-optation. in this respect, our work highlights a number of key issues, such as: given the dominance of the biomedical paradigm in mental health and the focus of resources on acute and psychiatric care, how can the social and structural barriers faced by psychiatrized individuals be addressed in recovery? if the participation of people with lived experience in mental health system reform, as advocates and peer support workers, is one of the cornerstones of a recovery-oriented system, what does it mean when peers face ongoing discrimination and become co-opted by professionalism? finally, but perhaps most significantly, drawing on our research participants’ call for a social justice framework in mental health, we consider the components of an intersectional social justice framework and the possibilities this has to offer vis-à-vis recovery and a transformed mental health care system. mental health and social and structural inequities experiences of mental illness and distress, regardless of their origins, take place in a social, cultural and historical context (e.g., hacking, 2002; porter, 2002) which includes environments of discrimination that are structured through legal, medical and psychological practices and policies. these practices and policies play out in distinct ways for different groups within society. there are now substantive bodies of literature which illustrate the ways in which the practices of psychiatry have served historically to pathologize some groups of people (e.g., women, racialized peoples, people living in poverty) over others (baker & bell, 1999; caplan, 1995; caplan & cosgrove, 2004; metzl, 2009; van os, kenis, & rutten, 2010). this has resulted in, for example, psychiatric diagnoses being disproportionately applied to certain groups (e.g., schizophrenia to black men) and the psychiatrization of women’s normal life experiences such as the post partum period and menopause (metzl, 2009; ussher, 1991; 2011). researchers have further documented the effects of social inequities such as homelessness, racism, colonialism and poverty on mental health, both with respect to exacerbating existing distress and/or creating distress (boyer, ku, & shakir, 1997; kirmayer, brass, & tait., 2001; mental health commission of canada, 2009). furthering the literature on stigma against people diagnosed with “mental illness” is a burgeoning scholarship which argues that diagnoses and labels of mental illness themselves constitute a form of inequity. this is referred to as “sanism,” (birnbaum, 2010; fabris, 2011; ingram, 2011; perlin, 2000) or in lefrancois’s (2011) terms, “psychiatrization,” which she sees as the practice, or result, of sanism. sanism and psychiatrization are thus used to understand the discrimination against people diagnosed with mental illness, but also go further in their aim to unsettle assumptions about rationality, normality and madness. finally, more medically oriented literature has made the argument that certain groups in society are more vulnerable to mental illness and are thus at studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 30 marina morrow & julia weisser risk of not receiving services and supports (patterson, somers, mckintosh, shiell, & frankish, 2008; standing senate committee on social affairs, science and technology, 2009). taken together, these varied ways in which social and structural inequities in mental health operate tell us something about the ways in which power is distributed in the mental health system. chief among these forms of power is biomedicalism and the pharmaceutical industry, which when coupled with the dramatic erosion of the social welfare system in canada over the past 15 years, has led to a system that rations resources based on diagnosis and severity of symptoms, and responds primarily through medication and medication management over and above social supports and responses. biomedicalism also operates discursively within society to ensure that the dominant way of understanding distress is through the lens of neurobiology, eclipsing all other possible frameworks and approaches. we counter this trend with a call towards applying the analytic lens of intersectionality to the study of and amelioration of social and structural inequities in mental health. intersectionality involves the examination of the social, political and economic processes through which oppression and privilege are experienced by individuals (e.g., lefrancois, 2011; rossiter & morrow, 2011). as asserted by many, we see intersectionality as necessarily coupled with a social justice framework, which understands social and health inequities to be about differential access to power and resources (burgessproctor, 2006; collins, 1990; hankivsky, & cormier, 2009). although in recent years mental health has gained a profile on the national policy agenda, the social and structural aspects of mental health continue to be marginalized as do the voices of people with lived experience of mental distress, especially those that challenge psychiatry. it is in this context that recovery is being re-invigorated and to which we turn to next. recovery as political exigency recovery as a concept and as a framework for guiding the mental health care system is currently being re-imagined and re-animated in the canadian context. following several decades of focus on health reform, canada as a nation has only recently turned its attention to mental health with a focus on scrutinizing the existing mental health service system (see kirby, 2006), the outcome of which has been the establishment of a mental health commission which had a mandate to develop a national framework and strategy for mental health (mental health commission of canada, 2009). the establishment of a recovery-oriented mental health system is the cornerstone of the strategy, which was released in the spring of 2012 (mental health commission of canada, 2012). thus, recovery as a concept and as a guiding framework for mental health care must be addressed with some urgency as policy decision makers and mental health planners and providers are primed to integrate recovery into the mental health care system and/or re-invigorate existing recovery-oriented programming and practice. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 towards a social justice framework 31 recovery has been conceptualized in a myriad of ways but in general the literature and discussion of recovery falls into three camps: that which emphasizes recovery as a personal journey; that which addresses the social aspects of recovery; and that which rejects the concept of recovery outright for its contribution to both sanism and the process of psychiatrization. the first camp has dominated the conceptualizations and practice of recovery in the mental health care system and too easily plays into purely biomedical understandings of mental illness (morrow, in press). that said there is an emergent discussion of recovery in the context of rights, anti-oppressive practice and intersectionality, all of which have social justice as their goals. on the issue of rights there is a long tradition within psychiatric survivor activism of identifying the ways in which the rights of individuals and psychiatrized people as a group have been breached (fabris, 2011). some of this work has been integrated into discussions about recovery (mental health “recovery” study working group, 2009; repper, 2011). repper, for example, writing in the uk context looks at recovery and social inclusion using a civil rights frame, and focuses on the idea that everyone—including those deemed “mentally ill”—have the right to determine the course of their own lives, regardless of whether or not they are regarded to possess insight (2011). another promising approach is that which is emerging from intersectionality frameworks and anti-oppressive practice. although these approaches have not been widely adopted within the mental health system (rossiter & morrow, 2011; van mens-verhulst & radtke, 2008) there is some evidence to suggest that they could be applied to discussions of recovery (burman, 2004; poole, 2011; rossiter & morrow, 2011; van mens-verhulst & radtke, 2008). anti-oppressive practice bears much in common with intersectionality approaches but it emerges from social work and is focused primarily on how to engage with social and structural inequities in practice from the perspective of providers (poole, 2011); it may or may not operationalize an intersectional framework. like intersectionality, however, anti-oppressive practice recognizes the role of structural and systemic barriers in differentially shaping the lives of groups and individuals. missing, however, from both frameworks is an explicit recognition of sanism as a form of oppression, that is, the valuing of rational thinking and socially acceptable forms of behavior, and the subsequent ostracization and/or punishment of people who do not or cannot conform. some argue that sanism must be seen as a form of oppression akin to that of sexism or racism (ingram, 2011; lefrancois, 2011), however, more analytic work is required to think through the varied ways in which sanism systematically oppresses people. in the canadian context, with some exceptions, (jacobson, farah, & the toronto recovery and cultural diversity community of practice, 2010; mental health “recovery” study working group, 2009) the research literature has not substantively investigated what people with lived experience of psychiatrization have to say about recovery and its meaning vis-à-vis their lives and connections to the mental health care system. further, studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 32 marina morrow & julia weisser recovery as a paradigm for mental health care system transformation has only recently begun to be discussed and empirically investigated (o’hagan, 2004; morrow, pederson, smith, josewski, jamer, & battersby, 2010; myers, 2010; piat & subetti, 2009) and questions remain as to whether recovery is the best conceptual framework for system change. the research we present next constitutes an attempt to begin to redress these gaps and further the dialogue on recovery as it is occurring in contemporary mental health practice. the research our project began with the formation of a research team that included people who identified as having had lived experience of mental distress and use of the mental health care system; health policy decision makers in our local health authority; service providers; and academics, all of whom had an interest in exploring social inequities in mental health recovery (morrow, jamer, & weisser, 2010). the collaborative research team was intentionally sought to help build connections between people differently positioned in relation to the mental health care system, with the idea that this would generate beneficial discussions as well as useable research outcomes. the purpose of the study was to explore conceptualizations of recovery in the mental health field that addressed social and structural inequities in mental health, with a particular interest in foregrounding people’s lived experiences of mental health issues and system use. the study involved a scoping review of the literature (arksey & o’malley, 2005), a world café (brown & isaacs, 2005), and creative knowledge exchange. scoping review methodology, “aim (s) to map rapidly the key concepts underpinning a research area and the main sources and types of evidence available, and can be undertaken as stand-alone projects in their own right, especially where an area is complex or has not been reviewed comprehensively before” (mays, roberts, & popay, 2001, p. 194). a scoping review of mental health and other relevant literatures was conducted in order to identify current definitions, models, and conceptualizations of recovery and to explore recovery in its intersections with social inequities (weisser, morrow, & jamer, 2011). world café methodology involves concurrent round table discussions which are focused around a set of questions of relevance to the issue being explored. brown & isaacs (2005) refer to this approach as “conversations that matter,” in part because it allows for multi-layered discussions which build upon one another, and fosters the expression of multiple perspectives and kinds of knowledge (in this case personal, professional, academic). our world café was structured around four discussion questions, each relating to different aspects of the team’s interest in mental health and social inequities (morrow, jamer, & weisser, 2010). the questions evolved out of dialogue among the research team members, over a number of meetings and included: 1) what are some of the social and structural barriers that impact studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 towards a social justice framework 33 people’s mental health recovery?; 2) what are the strengths and weaknesses of current mental health recovery models with respect to addressing social and structural inequities?; 3) what would components of a recovery model look like that integrated social and structural inequities and how would we get there?; 4) how can people’s experiences with mental health issues inform the development and practice of recovery? what would it take to support and implement this model? the world café participants included twenty four mental health and social service front line workers; mental health and addictions managers; policy makers; people with lived experience of mental distress; family members; and community leaders engaged in mental health work. although many participants wore several hats (such as service user and service provider, family member and policy maker, etc.), about half of the participants identified as having lived experience, and about half were service providers, managers, or policy actors in the mental health field. throughout the world café participants moved from table to table, not as a group but in different formations each time, to ensure that everyone attending would come into contact with each other at some stage of the process. each discussion table had a facilitator and a note taker who recorded and tracked the emerging conversations. the notes from the world café were organized thematically and then analyzed in order to begin to identify some of the key components of a mental health care system that would be informed by multiple perspectives and would be responsive to social and structural inequities. the last stage of the project involved creative knowledge exchange through the development of a series of four skits illustrating each of the four topics mentioned above. the skits were linked with some analysis, quotes from the world café, and a discussion of the findings for presentations to relevant audiences (morrow, jamer, weisser, willow, & omura, 2011a; morrow, jamer, weisser, willow, & omura, 2011b; morrow, jamer, weisser, willow, omura, & ingram, 2011). the four skits were respectively titled, “revolving door,” “the multiple meanings of recovery,” “round peg, square hole” and “medical model.” each skit highlighted an aspect of the current mental health care system in bc to which practitioners and service users could relate. for example, the “revolving door” skit shows how the system is currently crisis oriented and the ways in which services (both psychiatric and social ) are tied to psychiatric diagnosis and level of severity, which acts as a disincentive towards recovery for some service users for fear that getting better will mean losing housing, disability benefits or other valuable supports. “round peg, square hole” illustrates the ways in which the mental health care system is largely unable to deal with the complexities of people’s lives. people often have to seek services and supports from a variety of places rather than being able to have a range of needs met within all services. in what follows, we detail both the findings from our scoping review and from the world café noting those of relevance to our contention that an intersectional social justice framework is needed for mental health system transformation. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 34 marina morrow & julia weisser the findings recovery in the literature: the scoping review in order to surface literature that might tell us something about the intersections between social and structural inequities in their relation to recovery, a scoping review of the literature was conducted. the literature reviewed was from 1980 onward and was from canada, the united states, the united kingdom, australia, or new zealand. using purposive sampling and a search of social science databases, both peer-reviewed and grey literature (e.g., non-published reports and project descriptions) was reviewed in order to identify current models and frameworks for mental health recovery. attention was paid to whether, and to what degree, existing literature addressed social and structural inequities in mental health and the degree to which the development, application and evaluation of recovery models are professionally versus experientially driven (weisser, morrow, & jamer 2011). emerging from the literature review were several broad themes, including: the concept of recovery as potentially oppressive or harmful; the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the term recovery; the concept of second class citizenship for people diagnosed with mental illness; recovery as a cornerstone of mental health system transformation; and the need for a framework that makes use of the social determinants of health and/or the social model of disability. finally, there is an emerging conversation about social justice in mental health. there are two different schools of thought in the current literature about why the concept of recovery may be harmful. the first is the idea that recovery offers a false sense of hope, that it implies a return to the pre-illness self, and is therefore misleading (whitwell, 1999). peyser (2001) argues that recovery is not possible for those who are extremely mentally ill, and that concepts such as empowerment cannot help those who are completely held hostage by their “illnesses.” according to peyser, people who “lack insight” are simply unable to effectively use the tenets of recovery (2001). in contrast to this viewpoint are those who accuse recovery of being either a passing trend or a cash grab—a way to download responsibility from the state to the service user (davidson, o’connell, tondora, styron, & kangas, 2006; dickerson, 2006; ridgway, 2001). that is to say, the imperative to recover is viewed simply as an extension of the neo-liberal agenda (morrow, in press) and a call for citizen productivity (myers, 2010). this literature, from two different philosophical positions, raises questions about the usefulness of the concept of recovery—some authors, for example, suggest that recovery cannot be realized in the context of discrimination (myers, 2010), while others feel that the concept is inadequate in the context of the medical realities of mental illness (peyser, 2001; whitwell, 1999). myers (2010) also discusses the concept of the mental health service user as “second class citizen,” one to whom much-needed cultural capital is denied (p.300). he speaks specifically of those who are disenfranchised socially and economically to the point where the general tenets of recovery are no studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 towards a social justice framework 35 longer possible or available to them (myers, 2010). myers’ work is consistent with the many personal narratives of psychiatrized people who document the ways in which they have been oppressed and marginalized by the system (blackbridge, 1997; blackbridge & gilhooly, 1985; capponi, 1992, 1997, 2003; fabris, 2011; shimrat, 1997). literature on mental health system transformation focuses not just on individuals but on the ways in which the system as a whole can become recovery-oriented (adams, daniels, & compagni, 2009; friedli, 2009; mental health commission of canada, 2009; o’hagan, 2004; piat & subetti, 2009). although this process has not yet been fully documented or empirically studied in most regions, there are some promising signs for its success. for example, new zealand as a nation has perhaps gone the furthest in terms of moving away from individual conceptualizations of recovery towards one that views cultural (re)integration as recovery, and has applied this concept directly to system change (o’hagan, 2004). so, for example, with the support of its mental health commission, new zealand has had success in educating its mental health workers about culturally diverse perspectives on mental health, including recovery. in the literature, social inequities were rarely mentioned, and where mentioned race, ethnicity, immigration, and culture were privileged above other types of inequities such as disability, age or sexual orientation. additionally, when issues such as racism were mentioned, it was almost always in the context of the individual’s struggle with racism; that is to say, racism as a structural and systemic problem was rarely discussed. even literature that did focus on structural barriers, culturally appropriate services, or an overhaul of the mental health system (jacobson, farah, & the toronto recovery and cultural diversity community of practice, 2010; o’hagan, 2004), did not go so far as to address the overlapping and intersectional nature of oppression in mental health or the complex relationship between social inequities and recovery. for example, some excellent canadian work has been done which focuses in on the cultural relevance of the concept of recovery. jacobson, et al., (2010) identify a “culturally-responsive model of recovery” (p.19) which places the individual in context (family, community, geography, culture, oppression/ privilege, social determinants of health, history, etc.) but their analysis discusses each form of oppression separately rather than as interlocking. almost all of the literature tends to address one aspect of social inequity at a time in its relationship to recovery. so for example, o’brien and fullagar (2008), address gender; myers (2010), addresses class; lapsley, nikora, and black (2002), jones, hardiman, and carpenter (2007), ida (2007), and armour, bradshaw, and roseborough (2009) all address culture; and daley (2010), addresses sexual orientation. thus, the recovery literature mimics what is found in the mental health literature more generally, that is to say that the literature tends to treat social processes as variables that can be used as discrete categories of analysis. the literature also tends to privilege certain categories over others (e.g., gender and culture are privileged over sexual studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 36 marina morrow & julia weisser orientation) (rossiter & morrow, 2011). despite this there is some evidence, as discussed earlier, of an emergent literature which addresses rights and social justice as components of recovery (mental health “recovery” study working group, 2009; repper, 2011). the world café in this section we discuss the themes emerging from the world café that focused on intersectional issues such as: power and control in mental health; social and structural inequities; the co-optation of peer workers in mental health; and social justice. social and structural inequities: addressing power and control. i don’t see the connection between recovery and the mandates of mental health teams. it’s kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if the mental illness must be “serious and persistent” in order to get funding, how can a person “recover” from it? (world café participant) the system has been very limited in the way it understands mental health. recovery goes beyond the medical model, in that it includes the medical model but it can include much more. it [recovery] is more holistic and goes away from the reductionist understanding of mental health. (world café participant) the quotes above reflect a common theme emerging from the world café, that is, that people who are entrenched in the mental health system often have very little control over their own lives, which necessarily makes recovering difficult or impossible. participants noted often that the mental health care system and associated support systems are designed to perpetuate themselves, by upholding people’s dependence upon them. many participants, for example, spoke about the ways in which the mental health system rewards pathology, and how it is oriented towards crisis rather than prevention, leaving those to fall through the cracks who are more stable but still need help. participants felt that if there were adequate treatment resources available to everyone who needed them, people might feel freer to get better, as they would not be worried about the possibility of losing their support systems and access to treatment. in this vein, numerous examples of the ways in which policies and bureaucratic practices work against recovery were discussed, with a focus on poverty, disability benefits, service mandates, and resource constraints. thus, by using local examples, participants illustrated the ways in which social assistance and disability benefits are set up so as to trap people in cycles of dependence and poverty, rather than assisting them to move forward with their lives when they are ready and able to do so. for example, the prohibition against accumulation of assets when on disability benefits or income assistance, and restrictions related to the amount one can earn studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 towards a social justice framework 37 in paid work while on benefits, were cited as formidable barriers in terms of people being able to improve their financial situations and also as a discouragement from seeking employment. this combined with substantial barriers to employment (lack of workplace accommodations for mental health disabilities, discrimination, etc.,) form insurmountable obstacles. several issues related to service mandates and resource constraints were raised during the world café. it was noted that some people are excluded from receiving much-needed treatment because they do not fall into the increasingly crisis-oriented mandates that organizations must follow. similarly, world café participants noted that the disconnect between different services/sectors can negatively impact recovery; for example, a 30 day in-patient hospital stay can result in a loss of housing, which can impact a person’s ability to get well. the corporatization of peers at the world café we found that participants were extremely interested in discussing how people with lived experience might play more meaningful roles in policy development and peer support positions. the world café participants focused their discussion on those who work in mental health, such as peer support workers and facilitators, peer specialists, peer researchers, advocates, consultants, and board members. the discussion centred around ways in which these roles could move beyond tokenism and instead involve the full integration of peers into the mental health system, in a way that is meaningful both to them and to the people they are supporting. historically, peer support workers within mental health have been poorly compensated and typically hired on short term contracts3. many peers are being integrated into pre-existing bureaucratic structures; however, problems exist in terms of genuine integration. many of these problems have to do with the system itself, and the ways in which these structures and their practices may not always be comfortable for all peers. in relation to this, one participant in the world café coined the phrase “the corporatization of peers,” and another the “loss of peerness,” to describe how the peer role has been co-opted by professionalism over time, descriptions which were eagerly taken up by many others at the table. these terms were used to describe both the subtle, and not so subtle, ways in which peer support workers who are part of mental health teams or who work in hospitals are encouraged to act “normal,” professional, or well socialized—thus losing the very essence of what makes them peers in the first place. many participants argued that this need to appear professional creates distance between the peer support worker and the person they are supporting. additionally, many peer support workers are expected to uphold the values of the medical model, regardless of whether they or the person they are supporting agree with this model. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 38 marina morrow & julia weisser a social justice approach to mental health in the world café discussions, participants raised the idea of a social justice approach to mental health. specifically, this conversation was tied to discussions of the ways in which psychiatrized people were viewed by society and discriminated against. so, for example, participants wanted society to become more accepting of the full expression of the human condition and experience, rather than viewing people solely through a biomedical lens which some felt unduly pathologized people. further, some participants pointed out the fact that social expectations of mental health get taken up in conceptualizations of recovery, creating standards about what a recovering person should look and act like. among other comments were discussions about the role of the pharmaceutical industry in propping up narrow biomedical definitions of mental health, and a call for more expansive ideas about what constitutes knowledge about mental health, with a focus on the role of lived experience. despite widespread enthusiasm at the world café for frameworks of recovery that were rooted in notions of social justice, it was our observation that participants often struggled with framing recovery in terms of social and structural inequities. although social justice was named, there was a tendency for people to revert back to more individualistic framings of recovery, or to discussions about specific barriers in the system, rather than to understand these barriers as structurally produced and differentially experienced. the one exception was that participants were able to articulate how individual notions of recovery may not resonate with people from non-dominant, ethno-racial groups. for example, some cultures value collectivity over individuality, or inter-dependence over independence, as well as hold a place for unique behaviors in a way that contemporary western society does not. in these instances culture was still viewed more as an individual attribute and discussions of how systemic racism and/or ethnocentrism might be at play in the mental health system were not raised (morrow, jamer, & weisser, 2011). thus, participants themselves were so embedded in the current mental health system and its discursive practices that they appeared to struggle to move away from individualistic framings, even as they began to name forms of discrimination such as racism, sexism and—importantly—sanism, in relation to recovery. this is not surprising given how few spaces currently exist to discuss the social and structural aspects of mental health. further, we observed that even in the context of our world café the discussion became polarized between the role of the biomedical and the role of the social in mental health, and around the needs and concerns of different “stakeholders.” the latter was most obvious with respect to debate about the role of families, especially with respect to making treatment choices on behalf of their family members. as a way of untangling these tensions and challenges we suggest that one method of framing recovery is to attend to social and structural inequities through the lens of intersectionality (morrow, jamer, & weisser, 2011). intersectionality, for example, would allow the power dynamics in families studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 towards a social justice framework 39 to be explored, and would surface the ways in which loss of rights for people diagnosed with mental illness are a part of those dynamics that cannot be ignored or eclipsed by discourses of care and treatment. in general, using the framework of intersectionality allows a way out of polarizing the biomedical and the social, by revealing that people’s “mental illness symptoms” might be linked or produced in simultaneous ways with conditions of poverty, homelessness, and other forms of inequity (weber, 2006). intersectionality also allows for an analysis of the ways in which power is at play in the mental health care system. the driving force behind this viewpoint is “the pursuit of social justice” (weber, 2006). in summary, our findings suggest that service providers and users in the mental health care system struggle to resist the idea of recovery as a personal journey, but are often thwarted in these attempts due to the systematization of biomedicalism. the authority of biomedicalism works to undermine broader social and structural understandings of recovery. it also reflects a sanist ethic in its treatment of people in the mental health system and of the peers who are trying to support them. an intersectional social justice framework for mental health recovery in our view to answer the world café question, “what would it take to transform the mental health care system and does recovery have a role in this transformation?’, a reformulation of recovery as embedded in particular social and structural contexts which foreground an intersectional social justice approach is required. the components of such an approach are as follows: • recognize and address the ways in which active discrimination against people diagnosed with mental illness is systemic, and the ways in which this is compounded by other experiences of oppression (e.g., sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, ageism, classism, heterosexism). thus, sanism must be understood as a key critical analytic lens for understanding mental distress. • psychiatric survivors must be at the forefront in leading the re-invigoration of recovery as it was originally characterized by the psychiatric survivor movement, and in so doing, develop new structures and ways of organizing the mental health care system so that “peerness” can be retained. • rebalance the mental health care system to address both the biomedical and social needs of people. specifically, we need to: 1. enact changes to the social welfare system that would allow for people to break the cycles of poverty and dependence. this would include: i) raising the rates for social assistance and disability benefits to bring them in line with the cost of living; ii) allowing people on disability benefits to hold assets and have asset accumulation; iii) allowing people more flexibility to go on and off disability benefits. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 40 marina morrow & julia weisser 2. challenge biomedicalism and open up a discursive space for discussion about mental illness that does not preclude the biomedical, but that allows for a wider range of understandings and approaches. as canada moves towards adopting a recovery framework for mental health it will be critically important for regions and communities to actively engage in “recovery dialogues” and to support the active leadership of psychiatric survivors in this process. in this way we can begin to re-capture the roots of recovery in claiming the humanity of psychiatrized people, expose the abuses of psychiatry, and prove that people whose lives are marked by distress can continue to live full and meaningful lives with dignity. it is clear from our work that active discrimination against people with mental illness is systemic, that sanism continues without being questioned and that much work needs to be done in order to incorporate a social and structural analysis of mental health and recovery into the current mental health care system. further, recovery without a full recognition of the current social and political context which has eroded social welfare supports will be impotent to foster real systemic change. thus, mental health providers, advocates and decision makers must strongly resist further trends toward biomedicalism. this does not mean a rejection of the role of biology in mental health, but rather, recognition that the biological occurs within a social context that involves interlocking forms of oppression which impact mental health and erode social justice. only if these conditions are met can we truly seize the political moment for re-invigorating, and we would argue, re-inventing recovery. notes 1 the authors would like to thank the centre for the study of gender, social inequities and mental health, writing group and particularly, brenda jamer and our two anonymous reviewers, 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(2008). intersectionality and mental health: a case study ist-travelling. retrieved from: http://www.vanmens.info/verhulst/en/wp-content/ intersectionality%20and%20mental%20health2.pdf van os, j., kenis, g., rutten, bp. (2010) the environment and schizophrenia. nature 468(7321), 203-212. weber, l. (2006). reconstructing the landscape of health disparities research: promoting dialogue and collaboration between feminist intersectional and biomedical paradigms. in a. j. schultz, & l. mullings (eds.), gender, race, class and health: intersectional approaches (pp. 21-59). indianapolis: wiley. weisser, j., morrow, m., & jamer, b. (2010). a critical exploration of social inequities in themental health literature. vancouver: centre for the study of gender social inequities http://www.socialinequities.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/recovery-scopingreview.final_.style_.pdf whitwell, d. (1999). the myth of recovery from mental illness. psychiatric bulletin, 23(10), 621-622. world health organization. (2008). closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health. geneva: world health organization http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/2008/who_ier_csdh_08.1_eng.pdf http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/andre-picard/mental-health-strategy-draft-doesnt-go-far-enough/article2149012/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/andre-picard/mental-health-strategy-draft-doesnt-go-far-enough/article2149012/ http://www.vanmens.info/verhulst/en/wp-content/intersectionality and mental health2.pdf http://www.vanmens.info/verhulst/en/wp-content/intersectionality and mental health2.pdf voorend et al final correspondence address: koen voorend, school of collective communication sciences, university of costa rica, san jose, costa rica; email: koen.voorend@ucr.ac.cr issn: 1911-4788 volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 a lost opportunity? collective demands and migrant farmworkers in costa rica during the pandemic koen voorend university of costa rica, costa rica daniel alvarado abarca university of costa rica, costa rica ronald sáenz leandro university of costa rica, costa rica abstract the covid-19 pandemic induced an overexposure of migrant farmworkers’ poor working and living conditions in costa rica’s northern border area and underscored the country’s dependence on migrant labor. this created a unique opportunity to position pro-migrant concerns and demand actions from the state. in this article, we assess if and to what extent the actions of the costa rican state were influenced by migrant demands, or whether other priorities guided policy. based on a novel database on protest and collective action (protestas-iis) that is fed with national and local newspaper articles, we analyze the demands made by migrants, the private sector and nimby movements, and state responses. our findings suggest that the latter prioritized market concerns and antiimmigrant interests, thereby underscoring lessons from the literature that migrants are among the politically most disenfranchised in society. their demands were only partially responded to by the state, and only concerning issues that aligned directly with public concerns, in this case related to health. keywords migrants; collective demands; farmworkers; covid-19; costa rica; nicaragua introduction the costa rican economy’s dependency on migrant workers, as well as the workers’ precarious working conditions, became especially apparent during the covid-19 pandemic, presenting a unique opportunity to position these collective demands & migrant farmworkers in costa rica studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 49 issues in the political debate and demand actions from the traditionally strong costa rican state. migrants, especially from nicaragua, form an indispensable part of the labor force for costa rica’s agricultural sector, where they constitute 30% of the sector's workers, and between 70% and 80% of low-skilled farmworkers (baumeister, 2021; herrera, 2019). especially in the northern border region, the harvest of various crop, such as pineapple, orange, banana, and sugar cane, highly depends on permanent and temporary nicaraguan migrants (oecd, 2018). in all, migrants’ contribution is estimated at 12% of the gross domestic product (oecd, 2018) despite their key contribution to productivity (o´neill, 2022), low skilled agricultural jobs are poorly paid and insecure with high levels of informality (i.e., lacking formal work contracts and corresponding benefits), low levels of unionization and dismal working conditions (voorend et al., 2021). in addition, migrants face problems of regularization, access to social rights and discriminatory treatment (voorend, 2019). such vulnerabilities were feared to worsen in the face of the pandemic; human rights and health protocol violations on farms in early 2020 were highlighted in the national news headlines (bosque, 2020). in costa rica, the pandemic underscored “the precarious situation in which thousands of workers, including a large number of migrants, have long been living and working” (alvarez-echandi, 2020, p. 379). this article uses a demands-response scheme to analyze whether the pandemic conjuncture (2020-2021) served as an opportunity for migrant farmworkers in costa rica to influence state actions to improve working and living conditions. we assess whether this opportunity was capitalized on to influence the design of state actions when the extraordinary situation provoked by the pandemic revealed migrants’ importance to the costa rican economy. we argue the dispute over state support was quite complex with proand anti-migrant voices and structural factors influencing state responses. the political opportunity for migrants (and allies) to advance structural demands to working and living conditions was confronted by the reality of a state limited in its role to offer protection as a result of several decades of cutting back public social expenditure (martínez-franzoni & sánchez-ancochea, 2019). instead, the state prioritized market concerns (specifically, farms that hired migrant labor) and aligned its actions with voices of some community groups that opposed (irregular) migration and blamed migrants for the covid-19 virus infections. this response reinforces the warning in the academic literature that in contexts where states are struggling to provide social protection for their national populations, the rights of migrant populations are not prioritized and may be left unattended (vera espinoza, et al., 2021; voorend, 2019). in what follows, we discuss some conceptual and methodological considerations that facilitate our analysis. second, we outline the context situating the costa rican state’s policies during the pandemic and the implications for migrant farmworkers. third, we analyze the collective koen voorend, daniel alvarado abarca & ronald sáenz leandro studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 50 demands expressed by migrant farmworkers and highlight the role of community mobilizations against migrants as a tonic during the conjuncture. fourth, the ways in which the state responded to these demands are presented, showing how the state attended to migrant farmworkers. the final section provides some final reflections. theoretical and methodological considerations this article positions migrants theoretically as a group subject to state coverage and its scope of action, but also as potential agents of activism who through collective actions can seek to influence state decisions in contexts that demand political actions, directly or indirectly related to their living and working conditions. we consider that migrants should be conceived as subjects of rights without any restrictions. at certain conjunctures, collectives in this case, migrants) can be more active in seeking to raise their demands onto the political agenda. the political opportunity approach, which has been promoted since the 1990s (e.g., goodwin & jasper, 2012; mcadam & tarrow, 2019; tarrow, 1994; tilly, 1995), argues that the opportunity for collectives to advocate depends on political dimensions such as the degree of political openness, political-party alignments, elite cohesion and the availability of influential allies. we are particularly interested in the first of these dimensions, which refers to the level of acceptance of collective demands that exists within the institutions, and the degree of advocacy that social collectives have within the structure to alter political action (favela, 2002). brockett (1991) called this collectives’ capacity to influence “access points” in the institutional framework (p. 260). martínez-franzoni & sánchez-ancochea (2022) point out that covid-19 had the potential to be seen as an opportunity for the introduction of social demands. from this perspective, the state emerges as an arena of power and conflict but also as the main actor called on to respond to the collectives’ demands. migrants had an opportunity to integrate their demands during the pandemic by taking advantage of the exposure given to their working and living conditions. however, there were also other groups seeking this political opportunity, such as private organizations (farm companies) or “not in my backyard” (nimby) activists, theorized by mcadam & tarrow (2019) as community groups activated to react against what they perceive as threats brought by outsiders. the literature on international migration contends that migrants often play a minimal role in political advocacy. migrant farmworkers face poor working conditions, like those in costa rica, with temporary contracts, low remuneration, restricted access to state social protection, labor exploitation and threats of deportation, which have been shown to disincentivize political engagement (basok & belanger, 2016), and political advocacy is often compromised or silenced (varsanyi, 2008). however, while state prioritization collective demands & migrant farmworkers in costa rica studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 51 of migrant demands is often limited (voorend, 2019), the covid-19 pandemic could serve as a political opportunity for migrants (and anti-migrant activist groups) to influence policy decisions and actions as a potential collectivity (ataç et al., 2017; basok & candiz, 2020). to analyze these political opportunities, we use data from a novel database on protest and collective actions (protestas-iis), based on the protest event analysis (pea) methodology (koopmans & rucht, 2002). pea is a commonly used methodology in the study of social protest, which consists of monitoring protest events from different sources for their subsequent reconstruction based on analysis categories which usually highlight actors, their modalities – or repertoires – of protest, and their claims. among the most used sources are the official statistics of institutions related to the management of protest, such as police reports, or newspaper articles. for this research, we review national and local newspapers, as well as specialized sources in the study of social protest in costa rica (i.e., the protestas-iis project and the community observatory of collective actions (ocac-iis)). these projects conduct periodic monitoring of news on the occurrence of protests in costa rica, which are codified according to the following categories: (1) the spatial and temporal dimension of the events (where and when?); (2) the protest repertoires (how?); (3) the actors of the protest (who?); (4) the claims (what?); and (5) the actors to whom the claims are directed (to whom?). in preparing this article, we created a database from the compilation of 60 newspaper articles related to claims of migrant farmworkers, covering the 2020-2021 period. we include pro-migrant protests and claims, but also nimby movements. based on this data, we provide an exploratory analysis of activism related to migrant farmworkers by mapping different actors and their claims. based on a revision of institutional documents and presidential decrees this activism is then contrasted with policy outcomes in the form of state action during the pandemic that had direct effect on migrant farmworkers’ living and working conditions. while causal relations are difficult to establish between these protests and policy outcomes due to the methodological scope of the research and the difficulties in establishing a larger sample of protest events, the policy outcomes do provide insight into the dominant position held by the costa rican state, and whether these align more with voices calling for migrant farmworkers’ rights and improvements in their conditions or the narrative against migrants that blames them for the spread of the virus. koen voorend, daniel alvarado abarca & ronald sáenz leandro studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 52 contextualization: state and migrant farmworkers before the pandemic. even though costa rica´s economy has grown steadily throughout most of this century, just before the pandemic in 2020 it was facing the highest fiscal deficit since 1981. the already high levels of unemployment (12%) grew to over 20% at the peak of the pandemic (and back to 14% by 2022) (world bank, 2022). social inequality, labor market informality and poverty rates have been on the rise for the past 25 years, with approximately 35% of the population considered socioeconomically vulnerable, and a poverty rate of around 23% (6% in extreme poverty) (national institute of statistics and censuses, 2021). despite being one of the longest-lived and most universal social protection systems in the latin american region, with high coverage levels (around 87% of total population) and strong performance indicators (martínez-franzoni & sánchez-ancochea, 2013; voorend & alvarado, 2021), the covid-19 pandemic hit at a time when the foundations of this system were substantially eroded following three decades of austerity measures, inefficient management and financial deterioration (carrillo et al., 2011; paho, 2011). migrants already bore much of the burden of this waning state protection (voorend, 2019). before the pandemic, only about 60-65% of migrants had health insurance, leaving over 30% of migrants uninsured (voorend, 2019). the ministry of agriculture and livestock (mag) estimates that approximately 73,000 foreign workers are required to harvest crops each year.1 between 60% and 70% of low-skilled farmworkers are foreigners (herrera, 2019), mainly middle-aged (around 32 years) male migrants (87%, versus 13% female migrants) from nicaragua (baumeister, 2021). the agricultural sector has reproduced patterns of (migratory) irregularity and labor informality, implying high levels of vulnerability in the face of the pandemic. indeed, in agriculture 50.3% of permanent farm jobs among nicaraguans are informal, and similar numbers (48.3%) had an irregular migratory status (baumeister, 2021). temporary workers are most likely worse off as their hiring is subject to harvest cycles with low job stability (baumeister et al., 2008). a usual hiring practice is through intermediaries who in turn hire crews (voorend & robles-rivera, 2011). where the intermediary is often formally contracted by the farm, the crew is considered the intermediary’s responsibility and is not controlled by the farm administration. this leads to high levels of informality of labor relations, which helps explain why access to the country’s state social protection has historically been lower for migrants than for nationals (voorend, 2019). these occupations have a higher risk of accidents because of the vigorous physical requirements, the handling of tools, and higher exposure to diseases due to the climate (baumeister et al., 2008). 1 agriculture in costa rica still plays a key role in the country’s economy, especially as a result of its transformation from traditional, family-based agriculture to intense export-oriented agriculture. in recent years (2017-2020) agricultural exports totaled almost five billion dollars annually (baumeister. 2021; sepsa, 2021) and in 2021, banana and pineapple exports alone were worth close to two billion dollars (gatica & voorend, 2021). collective demands & migrant farmworkers in costa rica studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 53 these practices create high job instability and keep wages low. for example, 32% of nicaraguans working in the agricultural sector earn less than the minimum wage (aravena & carazo, 2016; baumeister, 2021), which is itself substantially below a living wage (voorend et al., 2019).2 some of these issues can be addressed through unionization and collective discussion, however, migrant farmworkers are among the most politically disenfranchised workers in costa rica. there is ample anecdotal evidence that they are threatened with dismissal if they claim their rights in terms of job security (baumeister, 2021; baumeister et al., 2008). legally, migrant farmworkers are admitted in costa rican trade unions, but they cannot hold managerial positions (article 47, political constitution of the republic). as a result, there is hardly any record of unionization among migrants and it is believed their affiliation numbers are severely limited (voorend et al., 2021). migrant and anti-migrant demands during the pandemic during the pandemic, a substantial number of labor inspections were carried out on farms by the national authorities, which publicly exposed the deficient working and living conditions migrants’ workers often face. notorious headlines made the news about undignified, overcrowded living conditions in poorly built housing in a state of disrepair (bosque, 2020). such conditions were alerted to the press and government, exposing a worrisome situation not only for the farms or migrants but for the entire country, since it could facilitate the spread of the virus throughout the national territory. at the same time, the inspections underscored the high levels of informality, especially through outsourcing of hiring processes through contractors, and low levels of social security affiliation (ávalos & recio, 2020). the inspections also exposed hiring practices that encouraged daily transport of irregular migrants from the border to the farms (pérez & montoya, 2021). in other words, the pandemic came to expose what was already known about the vulnerable conditions of farmworkers in the agricultural sector and reaffirmed the high dependence on migrant labor in agriculture. this provided an opportunity to position pro-migrant issues in the public debate. media coverage could put pressure on the state to act and respond to abuses against migrants in a critical context that demanded social protection. 2 labour payment practices in agriculture make it extremely difficult to estimate monthly wages. for example, the minimum wage in costa rica's agricultural sector is calculated based on a daily pay, which is then multiplied by 30 days. this is not realistic, as workers do not work 30 days a month, considering sundays, sick days, national holidays, etc. (voorend et al., 2019). also, payment for these activities is sometimes made per task or per day. for example, in pineapple production, voorend et al. (2013) point out that one practice for the payment of wages is to divide the sum of daily production by the number of people working that day on the farms. other modalities include payment by bag (in orange production) or by trunk (in coffee). koen voorend, daniel alvarado abarca & ronald sáenz leandro studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 54 the database constructed for this article shows that there was more activity during the first year of the pandemic (2020), especially during the first eight months, when there was much uncertainty regarding the virus and before the state’s first actions to address the situation. the demands, however, mostly addressed non-structural issues regarding the living and working conditions of farmworkers. collective actions by migrant groups revolved around immediate issues, such as the guarantee of sanitary protocols. at the same time, parallel nimby expressions increased significantly, based on a xenophobic narrative (alvarado alcazar et al., 2021). migrant farmworkers and collective demands during the pandemic the first expressions of discomfort relating to migrant farmworkers were in line with the socioeconomic effects of the pandemic registered since march 2020, just after the country confirmed its first coronavirus case and the borders were closed. these first pro-migrant demonstrations were supported and sustained by strategic allies that helped voice migrant farmworkers’ claims and were the basis of a strategic alliance that would be the norm for future collective demands during the pandemic, serving as a platform with a wider range of outreach. organizations such as the private sector workers union (sitrasep) raised their voice following reports of (regular and irregular) migrant workers in the pineapple sector being unable to access health insurance. employers had stopped covering health insurance to reduce operation costs leading to a deprivation of healthcare access during the pandemic emergency (shd, 2020a). at the same time, sitrasep denounced farm companies failing to implement the instructions of the ministry of health and the ministry of labor to combat contagion (quesada, 2020). the generalized vulnerability of (migrant) farmworkers and the deficient health protocols in the northern region caused outbreaks of infected farmworkers in june 2020, to the extent that several pineapple companies were closed for non-compliance with sanitary measures and for lacking operating permits from the ministry of health (quesada, 2020). in the period that followed, and in response to increasing infections, farmworkers organized several collective actions, expressing discomfort with their workplaces. in several banana farms located in the atlantic part of the country, strikes were held to get the company administration to put in place basic sanitary measures, such as soap and sinks with drinking water (shd, 2020b). for example, in june 2020, 200 unionized workers of the company corporación de desarrollo agricultural del monte, stopped working as an act of protest until sanitation protocols were improved. once again, such demands were voiced and supported by strategic allies, such as sitrasep or the leftwing political labor party, the partido de los trabajadores, which has collective demands & migrant farmworkers in costa rica studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 55 organizational presence in many of the packing and fruit companies in north costa rica (álvarez-echandi, 2020). as contagion in agricultural companies increased through the months of july and august 2020, another organization, the national union of agroindustrial and allied workers (sinatraa), started voicing concerns about the spread of the virus as the affected farmworkers dispersed to different areas where their work was required in harvesting, packing and preparation. these concerns also included other occupations such as bus drivers or commercial workers (shd, 2020c). by august 2020, a new collective action was carried out by a group of farmworkers from a pineapple farm called piñas cultivadas de costa rica s.a, located in medio queso, los chiles, in northern costa rica. this action, as reported by sitrasep, was the only registered demand related to aspects not associated with virus control but to structural aspects of work conditions. its general objective was to demand the respect of workers’ rights, pressuring the company to ensure minimum wage compliance and overtime pay, as well as to obtain protective equipment, conform to rules on hydration and rest during work, and institute protocols on covid-19 to avoid contagion (shd, 2020d; sitrasep, 2020). in late 2020, another topic emerged in costa rica’s northern region after it was heavily affected by hurricane eta. the hurricane highlighted the deficient housing conditions of a group of migrant farmworkers, which led to police intervention resulting in the eviction of several families, mainly irregular migrants, living on a private property. this situation was widely denounced by the northern peasant alliance (alianza campesina del norte) as the intensified police persecution of migrant populations continued, especially in the region of los chiles. this alliance is a strong ally of irregular migrant families living in the border region, especially in the towns of medio queso, monteverde, los llanos, la cruz and la virgen (observatorio de bienes comunes, 2021). early 2021 saw a decline in workers’ collective action. this is largely explained by the beginning of the vaccination campaign, the gradual expansion of the immunization process, and the implementation of the binational agreement to regulate the recruitment and hiring of migrant farmworkers in the region (explained in more detail below). as a result, the demands recorded in the database registered fewer claims related to health and housing issues, and more of the habitual claims related to labor irregularity in border areas and the persecution of union activists on farms (ocac, 2020; sitrasep, 2020). in august sitrasep made public statements against the companies for what they considered a clear violation of the organization of migrant farmworkers to achieve payment of minimum wages, overtime, improvements in the treatment of foremen, and occupational health and protection protocols against covid-19 outbreaks on the farms (sitrasep, 2020). however, over the remainder of 2021, we found no further evidence of collective demands by or in the name of migrant farmworkers. this does not necessarily mean there koen voorend, daniel alvarado abarca & ronald sáenz leandro studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 56 were none, as the lack of evidence could reflect the substantially decreased media coverage of these issues, thereby closing much of the political opportunity window that the pandemic initially presented. “the dark side” of protest: nimby movements and the rise of xenophobic narratives the database also documents a substantial record of protests and demands by people from communities in the northern part of the country calling for restrictions on and control of the entry of migrants into the country. nicaraguan farmworkers were commonly blamed for the wave of covid-19 infections that increased mainly during june of 2020. this public opinion was strongly reinforced by the national press (chaves, 2020) and added to already existing tensions around migrant integration in costa rica (sandoval, 2007; voorend, 2019). as a result, xenophobic demonstrations took place in several parts of the country with claims blaming migrants for the health crisis (alvarado alcazar et al., 2020a). this general discourse in the border communities was influenced by state actions, as even the government made polemic declarations suggesting that costa rica had managed the pandemic effectively so far, but that the main “threat” to state efforts came from the uncontrollable and illegitimate influx of nicaraguans (chaves, 2020). as a result, sporadic nimby movements took advantage of this rhetoric to organize against migrant populations in the region. these demonstrations included various repertoires, such as rallies, and even violence directed towards nicaraguan migrants. in terms of social mobilization, the official narrative led to a police force “manhunt for nicaraguan migrants” (shd, 2020a) in the north, heavily supported by nimby groups. in the canton of san carlos, for example, a group of residents from santa rosa de pocosol tried to prevent nicaraguans infected with covid-19 from entering a community hotel that was operating as a temporary isolation shelter. faced with community pressure, the nicaraguan citizens who were in isolation there were transferred by the red cross authorities and police officers to the community hall in the neighboring canton, san ramón, where a makeshift isolation center had to be installed (cascante, 2020). similarly, in turrialba, a group of people organized to prevent the entry of irregular immigrants to the canton. in an official petition addressed to the migration authorities, the ministry of health and the police, they requested authorization to enter the coffee harvesting areas, especially the places known as “holes,” to corroborate the immigration status of foreigners employed as coffee pickers (alvarado alcazar et al., 2020b). these types of claims, as well as collective and even vigilante-style actions, were typically justified as “humanitarian requests” for regularization and control, to protect the health of costa ricans. that is, the protagonists did not articulate their concerns as “anti-immigrant” per se, but as against irregularity. collective demands & migrant farmworkers in costa rica studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 57 presented as advocacy for immigration status regularization and the concerns for the health of the costa rican population, these acts increased the calls for the deportation of migrants. state responses towards migrant farmworkers during covid-19 the systematization of the actions carried out by the state to manage the situation shows that its responses related to migrant farmworkers during the covid-19 juncture concentrated on two main topics: controlling the spread of the virus in the border areas, and regulating the hiring of migrant farmworker labor.3 regarding the first, the state implemented a restrictive migration policy at the borders in line with the nimby demands but also with the government narrative itself. these actions were justified as an intent to accompany the health policy and its attention on avoiding further covid-19 infections among the population in costa rican territory. there was a widespread concern that newcomers, from neighboring nicaragua, would be a serious risk to public health, because the sanitary measures in the latter country were considered far inferior to those carried out in costa rica (arce, 2020; presidencia de la república, 2020). the costa rican health authorities developed a series of inter-institutional coordination actions for the execution of inspections and monitoring of health protocols at different establishments, including farms. these allowed the previously observed demands by pro-migrants to request better sanitary protocols for their workplace. also, the state implemented an early warning system of covid-19 cases and announced the decision to attend to any person with covid-19 symptoms, regardless of their insurance or migratory status, although migrants in irregular status or lacking documents were charged a fee for post-care services (navas, 2020), as regulated by law (general health law no. 5395, 1973).4 these measures were considered to work better if there was not a constant inflow of new migrants. the formal closure of the borders was announced in early 2020, a decision that meant a halt to the (formal) arrival of nicaraguan migrants, including 3 a third possible topic was the social protection given to migrants. however, access to costa rican state support was limited for migrants in general and especially to farmworkers. most support programs reproduced already existing barriers to access, usually associated with migratory status or formal labor ties (voorend et al., in press). although hypothetically migrants did have access to medical checkups for covid-19 symptoms, and later, vaccination programs and socioeconomic support packages, in practice many migrants could not participate because they lacked migratory documentation or proof of employment, which were a common requirement for these programs (voorend et al., in press). 4 article 61 of the health insurance regulations establishes that “services provided to uninsured foreign nationals living in poverty who cannot be granted insurance by the state shall be billed to the corresponding government agency for collection purposes.” koen voorend, daniel alvarado abarca & ronald sáenz leandro studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 58 farmworkers. at the same time, regular migrants in costa rica were discouraged from travelling to their country of origin: any denizen who left the country were stripped of their temporary or permanent residency permit (ugarte, 2020). academics and pro-migrant organizations considered this a discriminatory measure since there was no such prohibition or any other sanction for nationals wishing to leave the country and re-enter (voorend et al., in press). an executive decree (decree 42405-mgp-s) was also put in place to support the migration directorate, strengthening their authority to reject persons at the border who at some point had entered the country irregularly. all this led to a substantial reinforcement of border security controls, with investments in surveillance equipment and increased police personnel leading to several interceptions of nicaraguans who entered or sought to enter costa rican territory irregularly (chavarría, 2020). likewise, the government announced monetary sanctions on companies that were encouraging the entry of farmworkers in an irregular manner through intensified programmed inspections (gudiño, 2020).5 this set of actions forged a state narrative closely aligned with nimby demands and projected a rejection of and desired halt to the arrival of new immigrants to the country. its xenophobic overtones affected the implementation of health policy measures. local institutions even rejected attending to migrants seeking covid-19 health attention, particularly in the health area of los chiles, when authorities declared that they would not provide services to irregular migrants without police presence. this explicitly contradicted the national directive that all persons in the country with covid19 symptoms would receive medical attention. likewise, in contrast with the emergency directives that guaranteed free medical services related to covid19, local authorities referenced national law to charge for provided medical services if a patient did not have insurance (vega, 2020). an unintended result of this restrictive immigration policy was that it laid bare the extreme dependency of the agricultural sector of migrant labor. the shortage of migrant labor became especially noticeable as the pandemic extended. initially, the situation was not dire, as the production of crops with year-round production, such as banana and pineapple, could be maintained using national labor and already established migrants, and the first months (march-may) of border closure were not during the harvest period for many seasonal crops.6 however, once these crops were almost ready for harvest (july-august) there was a sense of urgency to fill the labor gap, leading the state to take action to regulate the hiring of migrant labor (chavarría, 2020). in 5 these types of fines were established by costa rica's immigration law before the pandemic; however, they were highlighted as a warning in the context of covid-19. fines range from 900,000 to 5.4 million colones, and apply to the agricultural, agro-export and agro-industrial sectors (gudiño, 2020). 6 the land border closure was effective from march 2020 to april 2021. in august 2020, air and sea entry had already become more flexible. collective demands & migrant farmworkers in costa rica studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 59 an effort to ensure labor availability, the state facilitated an exception for the migratory regularization of migrant workers in the agricultural sector, which allowed them to obtain regular migratory status or a work permit if they could show that they had entered and remained in costa rican territory between january 2016 and january 2020 (decree 42.406-mag-mgp). despite these measures the agricultural sector faced labor shortages. the initial expectation that available workers could meet demand did not consider the competition that arose between farms cultivating different agricultural crops to recruit foreign labor in the country (baumeister, 2021). also, the regularization initiative did not result in massive regularization due to the extensive paperwork and costs it implied, which were typically undertaken by migrants (baumeister, 2021; pomareda, 2020).7 in addition, despite high levels of unemployment, nationals were not enticed to work in the agricultural sector given its working conditions. illustrative of this trend was the call made by the costa rican coffee institute (icafé) for the 2020-2021 coffee harvest. the sector projected that at least 70,000 farmworkers were needed in the harvest, and in view of the concern about the low number of migrants available for these tasks, they opted to make an extraordinary appeal to the national population to cover the demand for labor (barquero, 2020a; garza, 2020). this call went largely unanswered. by october 2020, only about 20,000 people (nationals and resident foreigners) had signed up (garza, 2020). inevitably, agricultural employers started noticing that labor demand could not be met by the available labor force, which typically did not have experience in agricultural production and exhibited low levels of productivity (garza, 2021). farm companies quickly became an important lobby to influence state actions. by the end of 2020 and into 2021 they called for initiatives to allow migrants residing outside the country (especially nicaraguans) to enter the country to join the harvests (barquero, 2020b). the state responded by adopting protocols and agreements that facilitated the regulated entry of new nicaraguan farmworkers to join the crop harvests under the so-called “binational agreement regulating the temporary hiring of nicaraguan workers in costa rica.” signed in november 2020, the agreement was put in place to enable the safe mobility of more than 20,000 nicaraguan migrants as temporary farmworkers, and included strict health protocols, covid-19 tests, the requirement of regular immigration documents and labor permits, and inspections of agricultural farms (efe, 2020). although the agreement fell 7 previously, in 2019, a similar decree, 41969-mag-mgp, had been developed that sought to regularize migrants but only received 22 applications (pomareda, 2020). among the requirements to be presented were an affidavit from the employer showing that they had a contract or job offer, or a mag certification if they are self-employed. applicants had to pay $60 and were not eligible if they had a criminal record in their country of origin or in costa rica. koen voorend, daniel alvarado abarca & ronald sáenz leandro studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 60 short of the targeted number, it facilitated the migration and hiring process for 6,683 persons and was renewed for the 2021-2022 harvest (efe, 2021). in its second iteration the agreement was framed more specifically as the “general protocol for labor migration for the harvest season within the framework of the covid-19 alert, 2021-2022,” prepared by several ministries and the general directorate of migration and foreigners (dgme). it establishes six steps prior to the entry of migrant workers, which include registry and verification of lodging for the personnel to be hired, the offering of authorized private transportation for their mobilization, drawing up lists of persons to be hired, requesting their temporary work permits from the ministry of labor (mtss), and verifying their immigration requirements and the legal documentation necessary for their entry into the country (ministry of agriculture et al., 2021).8 this protocol was a direct response to the demands of agricultural companies, who cited the market interests of ensuring labor supply. it also responded in part to the health concerns articulated by migrant groups and allies. final reflections: a lost opportunity? the covid-19 pandemic was a particularly conflictual conjuncture for nicaraguan farmworkers in northern costa rica. the border operations to control the passage of migrants by land, following the border closure decree during the national emergency declaration due to covid-19, led to a highly discriminatory social context for migrants in costa rica (as in many places around the world), especially those from nicaragua. they were identified as “great threats” for the spread of the virus and (wrongly) accused of being responsible for the spike in positive cases in the first months of the pandemic (esquivel, 2021). two main narratives emerged as a result, in terms of demands and responses. first, migrant farmworkers voiced their demands relating to concerns over a need for adequate sanitary protocols on farms. before the pandemic, social conflicts in northern costa rica mainly related to migrants’ migratory status, their labor and legal insecurity, and violations of labor rights (alvarado alcazar et al., 2020c). during the pandemic, media coverage drew attention to the inhumane living and working conditions of farmworkers. in this context, collective demands of migrant farmworkers and their strategic allies (mainly local trade unions) steered away from structural issues, focusing instead on immediate aspects related to healthcare access and protection measures. these demands were permeated by the general discourse of migrants as subjects 8 the protocol also outlines the obligations of the various parties involved in the process of entry and exit of nicaraguan migrant harvesters. these include migration and health personnel at the border, private transportation, as well as agricultural companies and requesting employers, the workers themselves, and finally, the parties providing health services already in costa rican territory (ministry of agriculture et al., 2021). collective demands & migrant farmworkers in costa rica studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 61 prone to the contagion of the virus. most demands were channeled through strategic allies, such as sitrasep, sinatraa, the partido de los trabajadores or the alianza campesina del norte, which functioned as channelers of grassroots demands boosting migrant activism (geiger & pecoud, 2020; piper, 2022).9 however, the potential to use this specific conjuncture to position those more structural demands was hardly capitalized upon if at all. second, nymby groups voiced visceral xenophobic demands of rejection of migrants. in this narrative, migrants were identified as vectors of contagion, mainly in the northern border regions of upala and los chiles of alajuela where the irregular passage of people to work on pineapple, banana, orange, and sugar cane farms has historically been common. national and local media largely aligned with and fueled these xenophobic narratives, and seem to have inspired state action more than the pro-migrant narratives. the development of state responses was complex given the different pro and anti-migrant demands. the state did not aim to systematically address irregular and informal hiring practices in agriculture, the informal hiring through intermediaries, or the high cost and delays of regularization procedures and work permits. instead, the top of priorities of state actions seems to have been to contain the spread of the virus. indeed, restrictive migration polices (especially in the first stage of the pandemic) were in line with demands voiced by nimby activists to restrict irregular migration. also, the state prioritized market concerns about the provision of labor in the agricultural sector. for example, the state promulgated the binational agreement (later protocol) in november 2020 for the regulated entry of migrant farmworkers and relaxed its restrictive migration policy to allow nicaraguan migrants to enter to work in crop harvests, albeit with strict monitoring of health protocols to avoid contagion. this indirectly benefited the demands of migrants, as it resulted in improved sanitary protocols on farms and increased the number of labor inspections. however, these actions were motivated more by concerns for the spread of the virus and to secure the workforce than for the demands voiced by pro-migrant collectives. they did not address structural problems that were at the root of migrants being considered prone to contagion: their deplorable housing and working conditions. if anything, our analysis shows major limitations in the costa rican state responses to migrant farmworkers’ vulnerabilities. 9 the methodological implication is that most sources recording the situation of migrant farmworkers in the first months of the pandemic come from alternative media that have historically covered migrant labor issues, such as socialismo hoy (official newspaper of the partido de los trabajadores), or surcos digital (media that works closely with the unions and has a logic focused on costa rican rural territories). koen voorend, daniel alvarado abarca & ronald sáenz leandro studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 62 figure 1 summarizes state action for migrant farmworkers in the first 13 months of the covid-19 pandemic, as well as some of the main collective actions mapped by migrants’ farmworkers and nimby groups. note: colors represent state actions (green); migrant farmworkers (blue); nimby movements (red); agricultural employers (black). figure 1. timeline of state actions and protests related to migrant farmworkers in costa rica (2020-2021) (source: authors). martínez-franzoni and sánchez-ancochea (2022) argue that covid-19 opened an opportunity to discuss and reposition the state’s role in safeguarding state social protection and welfare. we argue that a similar window of opportunity may have opened to advance the discussion on the working conditions of migrant populations on farms in northern costa rica. however, this opportunity was not capitalized upon, and the government's punitive narrative and actions were more in line with already existing, but strongly reinforced, xenophobic discourses in favor of strict control and deportation of immigrants. following the political opportunities approach, the article argues that the greatest leverage for accessing the institutional framework seems to be associated with nimbys groups and market (i.e., farms’) interests, reproducing a narrative of censuring irregular migration without addressing its causes, such as the informal hiring practices of farmworker migrants. the antiimmigrant discourse and the restrictive state action mutually reinforced each other during the pandemic leaving a scenario which normalized anti-migratory narratives instead of conceptions of social justice and integral improvement of farm laborers’ working and living conditions. more broadly, the costa rican case highlights lessons for the growing international literature on the role of migrants in activism and their capacity to capitalize on political opportunities (basok & lopez-sala, 2015; cohen & hjalmarson, 2020; dias-abey, 2018; mešić & wikström, 2021). former studies have warned us that when migrants publicly demand changes to their conditions, they become vulnerable to retaliations by employers, risking deportation or being fired from their jobs (gansemans & d'haese, 2020; vosko, 2019). their activism is more digestible for the public if migrant collective demands & migrant farmworkers in costa rica studies in social justice, volume 17, issue 1, 48-67, 2023 63 demands align with more generalized concerns, in this case health related. this may help explain why migrant farmworkers in costa rica focused their demands on the more conjunctural demands related to health during the pandemic, instead of demanding more structural changes to their labor and living conditions. references alvarado alcázar, a., cortés sequeira, s., & sáenz leandro, r. 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(2020, june 22). para detener los contagios: cuarentena con salario y atención en salud para todos. socialismo hoy. https://socialismohoy.com/para-detener-contagioscuarentena-salario-atencion-salud-para-todos/ vera espinoza, m., prieto rosas, v., zapata, g. p., gandini, l., fernández de la reguera, a., herrera, g., lópez villamil, s., zamora gómez, c. m., blouin, c., montiel, c., cabezas gálvez, g., & palla, i. (2021). towards a typology of social protection for migrants and refugees in latin america during the covid-19 pandemic. comparative migration studies, 9(52). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-021-00265-x voorend, k. (2019). ¿un imán de bienestar en el sur? migración y política social en costa rica. universidad de costa rica. voorend, k., & alvarado, d. (2021). costa rica's social policy response to covid-19: strengthening universalism during the pandemic? 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(2013). nicaragüenses en el norte: condiciones laborales y prácticas de contratación de hombres y mujeres migrantes en la región huetar norte. ilo. vosko, l. (2019). disrupting deportability: transnational workers organize. cornell university press. world bank. (2022). costa rica. overview. retrieved june 20, 2022, from https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/costarica/overview#1 correspondence address: john foran, social sciences & media studies bldg., university of california, santa barbara, ca, 93106-9430, usa. phone: 805-893-8199, email: foran@soc.ucsb.edu issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 1, 5-25, 2014 beyond insurgency to radical social change: the new situation1 john foran university of california, santa barbara, usa abstract the arab spring and u.s. occupy movements surprised the world in 2011, showing that movements for radical social change remain viable responses to the intertwined crises of globalization: economic precarity, political disenchantment, rampant inequality, and the long-term fuse of potentially catastrophic climate change. these movements possess political cultural affinities of emotion, historical memory, and oppositional and creative discourses with each other and with a chain of movements that have gathered renewed momentum and relevance as neoliberal globalization runs up against the consequences of its own rapaciousness. three paths to radical social change have emerged that differ from the hierarchical revolutionary movements of the twentieth century: 1) the electoral path to power pursued by the latin american pink tide nations, 2) the route of re-making power at the local level or seeking change at the global level, both by-passing the traditional goal of taking state power, and 3) the occupation of public space to force out tyrants, as in tunisia and egypt. this paper assesses the strengths and limitations of each path, arguing that social movements and progressive parties together may possess the best chances for making radical social change in this new situation. these threads of resistance may also point toward a future of radical social change as we imagine their enduring results, selfevident and more subtle. “if egypt could get rid of mubarak, wisconsin can get rid of walker!” john nichols, in uprising, tells of a demonstrator in madison who was holding up this sign on a cold february night in 2011, the words written in arabic. when he asked the man how he had come to know arabic, he said, “i don’t. i had it translated on google last night.” nichols comments that when a middleaged unionized american is inspired enough by the arab spring to use the studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 6 john foran internet to translate a slogan for his struggle in wisconsin into arabic, then something is going on (nichols, 2012). and something is indeed going on. egyptian activist maor eletrebi sent a letter to wisconsin, in which he wrote: “the beauty of tahrir square you can have everywhere, on any corner, in any city, or in your heart…. breathe deep, wisconsin, because justice is in the air” (quoted in nichols, 2012, p. 1). later in the year, when adbusters called for an occupation of wall street, they asked “are you ready for a tahrir moment?” (adbusters, 2011). radical social change, in the sense of a deep transformation of a society, community, region, or the whole world in the direction of greater economic equality and political participation, and accomplished by the actions of a strong and diverse popular movement, is clearly in the air we now breathe. the signs are everywhere: the events of 2011 were of a world-historical order. the arab spring brought the overthrow of dictators by non-violent mass popular resistance in tunisia and egypt, by force of arms in libya, with syria in agony (and by the time you read this?), and with the courageous stands of ordinary people in the streets of bahrain, yemen, and elsewhere. the occupy wall street movement seemed to come out of nowhere six months later, and morphed with astonishing speed into like-minded occupations in hundreds of u.s. cities within six weeks. just before and after 2011, we also witnessed the indignados’ revolt in spain, student protests in santiago, london, and quebec, street demonstrations and battles in england and greece, movements around corruption in india and housing in israel, striking miners in south africa, pussy riot in russia, and workers wild-catting and communities fighting pollution across china, and finally, the american autumn of occupy wall street. in mid-2013, egyptians took to the streets again to oust their one-year old morsi government, citizens protested throughout brazil at the high cost of buses and the olympics, and the occupation of a park in central istanbul by a few green activists brought thousands out to protest the authoritarianism of their government. though state power was taken only in tunisia and egypt, the breathtaking scale and speed of events marked 2011 as one of the most militant years in the history of radical social change. something is indeed going on. explosions of change always raise the question: where do they come from? it looks like these dramatic events just happen. but there is always a history, and a context. their global sweep affirms the need for what hamid dabashi (2012) has termed a “liberation geography,” and leads to another question: are these events connected? what—if any—threads of affinity do they share, and what explains their simultaneity and common sensibilities? we are witnessing the rise and articulation of new political cultures of opposition and creation on a global scale, not altogether unprecedented but very different from those that inspired the great social revolutions of the twentieth century. and these changes may also point towards future prospects as we try to imagine their enduring results and impacts—self-evident and more subtle. it seems likely that these will be many, widespread, and long-lasting, no matter what happens in the next election or at the next public confrontation. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 beyond insurgency to radical social change 7 political cultures of opposition as the threads of creation in taking power: on the origins of revolutions in the third world (foran, 2005), i proposed a hypothesis about the origins of revolutions that brought together the economic and social dislocations of dependent capitalist development, the political vulnerabilities of dictatorships (and, paradoxically, of truly open polities where the left could come to power through elections), and a conjunctural economic downturn accompanied by a favorable moment in the world system where leading outside powers did not (or could not) intervene. looking at the world since 2009, we see versions of each of these: the glaring contradictions of neo-liberal capitalist globalization, the persistence of personalist regimes (especially in the arab world) and wide disenchantment at the hollowing out of representative democracies in europe, north america, and latin america, the deepest and most dangerous global economic downturn since the 1930s, and finally, the attenuation of u.s. power due to the military occupations of iraq and afghanistan, growing public debt, the rise of asian economic centers, and the financial bubbles that brought on the great recession. in the twentieth century, when all of these more or less structural conditions presented themselves, the final, requisite piece for fundamental social change was one of agency and culture: the ability of revolutionaries and ordinary citizens to fashion powerful political cultures of opposition capable of bringing diverse social groups to the side of a movement for deep social change, as happened in the mexican, russian, chinese, cuban, nicaraguan, and iranian revolutions. it should be noted that there are also political cultures of legitimation that states draw on, and that these can fray for many reasons, so that in a gramscian sense there are always multiple political cultures on both sides of a particular state/civil society divide, whose proponents constantly maneuver for position, and ultimately for hegemony. the origins of radical political cultures lie in the experiences of people, in the subjective but shared emotions and dynamics that animate their daily lives and colour their politics. at the same time, revolutionary discourses, in the form of consciously articulated ideologies—such as socialism, nationalism, democracy, or radical interpretations of religion in the twentieth century— travel from revolutionary groups into local settings, as well as circulate between revolutions. meanwhile, historical memory, cultural experience, and “idioms” or folk understandings also circulate in communities, putting people’s concerns in everyday terms such as fairness, justice, dignity, or freedom, or as concretely as “bread, land, and liberty,” “death to the shah,” or “patria libre o muerte!” in any society, there may exist more than one political culture of opposition, for people don’t necessarily share the same experiences, speak the same idioms, or respond to the same formal ideologies. the most effective revolutionary movements of history have found ways of tapping into whatever political cultures emerge in their society, often through the creation of a common goal—“the regime must step down” or “the foreign studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 8 john foran powers must leave.” when this happens, a radical or revolutionary movement can gain enough committed followers to take power when other favourable conditions are present. the forging of a strong and vibrant political culture of opposition is thus an accomplishment, carried through by the actions of many people, and, like revolutions themselves, is relatively rare in human history. it now appears clear that the political cultures of opposition that enabled the great social and anti-colonial revolutions of the twentieth century are being transformed in new directions. what we might term the “old” or classical cultures of revolution typically featured armed insurgents who directly engaged the state and its military, though they were aided in all cases by nonarmed groups and organizations who provided crucial support activities of many kinds [see figure 1]. figure 1 the making of “old” political cultures of opposition in the mexican, russian, chinese, cuban, iranian, and nicaraguan revolutions in russia and china, and more loosely in nicaragua and cuba, socialist political parties existed alongside the revolutionary armies and gave direction to them. in iran, the network of mosques and clerics provided the organizational base for the mass demonstrations and general strike that undermined the shah’s government without taking up arms. a common thread across cases is the hierarchical structure of the movements, with well-identified individuals at their head—emiliano zapata and pancho villa, lenin and trotsky, mao tse-tung, fidel castro and che guevara, khomeini, and the somewhat less famous sandinista leadership of the ortega brothers. the hierarchical nature of guerrilla militaries, socialist parties, and religious leadership meant that influential figures—always male, and often privileged in background—would lead in the name of the people. all of this was equally studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 beyond insurgency to radical social change 9 true of the great anti-colonial revolutions in vietnam, algeria, angola, mozambique, and rhodesia/zimbabwe. these political cultures produced broad and powerful revolutionary movements, defeating highly militarized states with powerful external backers (usually, in fact, the united states). once in power, however, they too often fragmented, as different groups had their own aims, and the common bonds that had united them all proved fragile and difficult to sustain. i am not suggesting that the limitations of these revolutions can be laid entirely at the feet of the political cultures that made them—far from it. of substantial weight in the outcomes of each were other factors that acted independently of political culture and human agency: external intervention and disadvantageous positions in the world-economy chief among them. but the possibility remains that despite the strength and solidity of these revolutionary political cultures, so indispensable in overthrowing the states they opposed, they still possessed features—especially the combination of the leaderships’ emphases on formal ideology over popular idiom, and the hierarchical nature of the organizations that came to power—which must be counted among the achilles heels that led to the disappointing and limited outcomes that followed. in the twenty-first century, the nature of movements for what we might now call radical social change rather than revolution has itself changed, as activists, reformers, dreamers, and revolutionaries globally have pursued nonviolent paths to a better world, intending to live and act as they would like that world to be. that is, the ends of justice are no longer held to justify the means of violence, but the means of non-violent resistance reflect and guarantee the ends that they seek. in this, they embody and illustrate the virtues of “prefigurative politics” (polletta, 2002) and in particular, horizontalist ways to realize them (sitrin, 2006, 2012; zibechi, 2010). i have recently begun to call these positive, alternative visions “political cultures of creation” (foran, 2013). movements become even stronger when to a widely felt culture of opposition and resistance they add a positive vision of a better world, an alternative to strive for to improve or replace what exists. in this sense, some of the differences between old and new movements for radical social change seem to include the attempt to get away from the hierarchical organizations that made the great revolutions and move in the direction of more horizontal, deeply democratic relations among participants; the expressive power of using popular idioms more than ideological discourses; the growing use of nonviolence; and the salience of political cultures of creation alongside political cultures of opposition and resistance. [see figure 2]. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 10 john foran figure 2 the emergence of “new” political cultures of opposition and creation in the twenty-first century (dotted lines indicate relationships that are more loosely connected): the zapatistas and the global justice movement are bolded so as to stand out from the italicized pink tide of elected left governments in latin america, with commonalities in plain text to the century-old problem posed by lenin—who is not a particular favorite of the movements under discussion—“what is to be done?”2 (at least he got the question right!), social movements in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first dozen years of the present one have been offering some strikingly new and interesting answers. two distinct and rather different paths to change have been pitted against each other by scholars and practiced by participants on the ground: the electoral path to state power being pursued by the elected left-of-center governments of the latin american “pink tide,” most radically in venezuela, ecuador, and bolivia, and the opposite route of turning one’s back on state power, and instead carving out autonomous spaces both below it at the level of the community as the zapatistas and occupy are doing, or above it, as the global justice movement and global climate activists have sought to do. the arab spring opens up a third new path, starting with massive non-violent direct action and following up with a protracted struggle for new democratic institutions. all of these paths can be distinguished from what came before, not least in the new political cultures that have attracted people to them. global affinities precursors. it may be that the first harbinger of the new movements was the events of may 1968 in france. as in 2011, they seemed to come out of nowhere, and grew with an unprecedented intensity and speed from small studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 beyond insurgency to radical social change 11 actions into a wave of revolt, involving occupations of schools and factories, demonstrations and direct action in the cobble-stoned streets of paris, democratic, open debate with participation for everyone with something to say, and a massive general strike. the movement’s tactics grew out of a vision of a different mode of everyday life, of a new community that would be personally liberating and empowering. it presaged a world of direct, participatory democracy, on as large a scale as possible. in its best moments, “many people, not only students, but old and young, men and women, intellectuals and workers, the specialized and the unskilled, spoke simply about what shape the world should take, what should they do and be, what life should be like” (poster, 1975, p. 385). it set a high standard for political cultures of creation, and marked a new departure in the culture of movements for radical social change. yet, with no agreed-upon common demands or goals, and no organized political outlet, the forging of a political culture strong enough and effective enough to hold together the disparate parts of the movement eluded them; by mid-june the movement seemingly vanished into thin air as suddenly and surprisingly as it had appeared. or did it? though the protests around the world in 1968 ended in defeats almost everywhere—perhaps most consequentially in france, czechoslovakia, and mexico—they created significant political and cultural legacies of protest which have come down to us in the form of new social movements today. as cohn-bendit told paris-match: “a different world is going to be made over” (quoted in labro et al., 1969, p. 53). this is a remarkable prefiguring of the global justice movement’s famous slogan a generation later: “another world is possible.” and as immanuel wallerstein observed: “the spirit of 1968 flows through [the] arab spring and [the] occupy movement” (wallerstein, 2011). the may and other global protests of 1968 marked the beginnings of something new, and their most striking feature may well have been their vibrant political cultures of creation. another twentieth-century precursor followed close on the students’ heels when chilean socialist salvador allende led the popular unity coalition to power with a slim plurality in the 1970 elections and began to construct what his supporters called “the chilean path to socialism” through legal, constitutional means and with massive popular enthusiasm and support, departing sharply from the armed struggle path to power of previous revolutions, and achieving a share of state power that had eluded the explosion in france. the political cultures of chile’s left and centrist social forces—perhaps two-thirds of the population—initially presented a lively, varied panorama of social justice-oriented, class-conscious, and articulate reformers and democratic revolutionaries. but in the vise tightened by u.s. economic and political destabilization, chilean society polarized politically. the democratic center and the democratic left lost confidence in each other, and in their own capacity for unity (see the accounts in cooper, 2001; spence, 1978; valenzuela, 1979). when the military seized power on september 11, 1973, the dictatorship that followed and the world’s first neostudies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 12 john foran liberal economic model condemned chileans to a reign of terror and loss. chileans would restore their fragile democracy only fifteen years later, after numerous demonstrations, through a decisive repudiation of pinochet at the polls. the allende years represent an incalculably precious missed opportunity for the transformation of society through democratic means. many observers at the time argued that revolutionary democratic paths to a better world were doomed by internal contradictions and powerful counter-revolutionary intervention, and the experiences of the grenadian and sandinista revolutions in the 1980s reinforced this view. yet a quarter century later, the experiences of the pink tide governments in latin america suggest that the chilean path to socialism contains more positive lessons, with venezuela, bolivia, and ecuador pursuing a “twenty-first century socialism” that is democratic and original, reminding us that flexibility and imagination should temper historical analysis and political action itself. a democratic socialism for the twenty-first century in latin america. in the late 1990s a democratic route to radical social change unfolded throughout much of latin america, most vigorously in the venezuela of hugo chávez, first elected in 1998, and in bolivia under its indigenous president evo morales, first elected in 2006. chávez (who died in 2013) and his supporters have made gains in education, literacy, nutrition, and health care, with significant and growing popular participation among the poorer two-thirds of venezuelan society, including residents of barrios and shanty towns, indigenous and afro-venezuelan people, women, and workers. in both bolivia and venezuela there has been far less emphasis on an ideological appeal to socialism by the leaderships of these elected left-ofcenter governments, and in its place we find an upsurge in new, popular conceptions of social justice. in fact, chávez coined the term “21st-century socialism” precisely to emphasize its democratic roots in the allende and post-1979 sandinista experiences. when asked what he understood by “socialism,” evo morales, the president of bolivia, replied: “to live in community and equality…. it is an economic model based on solidarity, reciprocity, community, and consensus. because, for us, democracy is a consensus…. and beyond that, [it means] respecting mother earth, the pacha mama” (quoted in dieterich, 2006). felipe quispe, an aymara indigenous leader who is critical of all politicians, including morales, adds to this a strand of nationalism: “the foreigners can stay as long as we get 90 percent of the power. if not, there will be war…. we will rewrite history with our own blood. there will be a new sun, and even the rocks and the trees will be happy” (quoted in parenti, 2005, p. 18). carlos laime, a 33 year-old tailor, makes this connection: “i feel more bolivian since an aymara is in power. now we can talk about majorities, and in [public] offices the people who are served are not only those wearing ties” (quoted in manrique 2006, p. 8). for morales, “if globalization does not admit difference and pluralism, it’s a selective globalization, therefore it will be almost impossible to resolve environmental issues and save humanity…. so studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 beyond insurgency to radical social change 13 we’re talking about a profound change in the economic models and systems” (morales, 2007). such a change will clearly draw on and require the embrace of new political cultures of creation by a wide coalition of people, differently located but imbued with some common desires and dreams of deeply radical social change. despite their differences, recent center-left governments of brazil, uruguay, bolivia, ecuador, el salvador, paraguay, venezuela, chile, and argentina have all tapped into political cultures that differ markedly from the older revolutionary tradition, highlighting instead a democratic route to power and the effort to build a more participatory political system. the current of socialism is being reworked in new, more democratic directions in the post-cold war era, and the depth of the democratic ideal is arguably proving a more solid barrier to external and internal intervention than in the more polarized era of the allende experiment with this form of revolution in the 1970s. in looking at all of these cases together, we find a democratic route to power and the effort to build a more participatory political system on the parts of significant sectors of their populations. “we want a world in which many worlds fit:” re-making the nature of power through direct action. just before the emergence of the pink tide, the zapatistas opened the twenty-first century on january 1, 1994, the same evening that the mexican and u.s. governments were celebrating their north american free trade agreement deal. behind masks of anonymity they rose to visibility and issued an invitation to join them that resonated powerfully with the first stirrings of the global justice movement, which heard the call that “another world is possible.” zapatismo is not an ideology, but rather a new way of making radical change, embracing the vision of changing the world without taking power, as the title of john holloway’s 2002 book so aptly puts it, and instead attempting to remake the nature of power altogether. here we are clearly in the presence of a new political culture of creation, expressed in stories, myths, dreams, and poetic narrative. the encounter of the western revolutionary tradition with indigenous values and practice in chiapas has shaped the nature of radical social change to this day (conant, 2010; gunderson, 2013). turning their backs on established ideologies, and drawing instead on their own political idioms, indigenous communities provided core zapatista principles such as mandar obedeciendo (to rule by obeying), arguing that leaders should serve the community and struggle for its issues rather than the community existing to further the vision of the leadership. another innovative zapatista practice is suggested by the phrase dar su palabra (literally, to have one’s say). the goal is to make decisions that benefit from the diverse insights of all present, thereby seeking solutions which have eluded them in the past. such discussions can take much longer than formal debates followed by votes, but once decided they endow the group’s choices with a broader legitimacy. for javier eloriaga, “we have to do politics in a new way. you can’t accept only what is possible because it will bring you into the hands of the system. this is a very difficult struggle. it is very, very difficult” (quoted studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 14 john foran in dellacioppa, 2009, p. 73). or marcos: “zapatismo is not an ideology. it is not a bought and paid for doctrine. it is an intuition” (big noise, 1998). part of this involves “walking at a slower pace,” acknowledging that change is a long and slow process, not secured with the mere seizure of power or electoral victories. indeed, the zapatistas have said that they do not aspire to take state power in the traditional sense, but rather, to create “a free and democratic space for political struggle” (quoted in hayden, 2002, p. 226). they have inspired activism far beyond their own communities, drawing the emergent global justice movement to their 1996 “intergalactic encounter” against neoliberalism, and captured the imagination of north american and european youth (and a few sociology professors!), among many others. the latter half of the 1990s witnessed the rise of a global justice movement, a “movement of movements” that achieved public visibility when a broad gathering of students, union activists, and environmentalists joined in civil disobedience and direct action to shut down the meetings of the world trade organization in seattle in november 1999. if we focus especially on the political cultures of creation that animate the global justice movement, we can see some further novel features, many of them paralleling the zapatista rebellion. on the subjective side of experience and emotion, it is useful to point out that love—of life, of people, of justice—often nurtures the vital force that impels ordinary people into extraordinary acts. expressing hope and optimism, it provides a constructive counterpoint to those other powerful animating emotions, hatred and anger. to this, we may add the subjective experience of hope (is hope an emotion?), which offers people a positive vision of the future to counter feelings of hopelessness and despair. in the words of david solnit, one of the organizers of the spectacular seattle action of 1999: “hope is key. if our organizations, analysis, visions and strategies are lanterns, then hope is the fuel that makes them burn bright and attracts people to them” (d. solnit, 2004a). hope and love sustain the emotional foundations of the new political cultures of creation, as attested in the 2013 film occupy love (ripper). as with the zapatistas, we can also discern here a sharp turn toward popular ways of speaking over ideological texts. it should be observed that this rejection of ideology does not mean that these movements are “nonideological” so much as they are “anti-ideological,” steeped in ideas and ideals even as they reject all “isms.” this vision entails radically different modes of struggle for an age of globalization where the location of the enemy is the increasingly interlocked institutions of global capitalism in the form of the wto, imf, world bank, transnational corporations, and rich and majority world states. global justice activists have mixed old and new modes of struggle: sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, and occupations of land or factories with civil disobedience, occupations of schools and public spaces, world gatherings such as the world social forum (a prime site for the elaboration of political cultures of creation), web-based campaigns and networks of activists, the building of community-based institutions such as co-ops, people’s kitchens, clinics, and a hundred other forms of direct action aimed at undermining and studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 beyond insurgency to radical social change 15 transforming the system rather than reproducing it. in a no doubt conscious echo of the zapatistas, direct action organizer david solnit writes: “the world cannot be changed for the better by taking power…. capturing positions of state power, either through elections or insurrection, misses the point that the aim of uprooting the system is to fundamentally change the relations of power at the root of our problems” (d. solnit, 2004a, 2004b, xix). occupy would emerge from and take a page from this movement. before this happened, however, the u.s. response to the september 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on new york’s twin towers effected a large setback for projects of deep social change, militarizing the clintonian course of globalization from above by a transnational elite and opening up a new and uncertain economic and geopolitical period. it also broke the growing momentum of the global justice movement with its “war on terrorism” discourse. it created horrifying facts on the ground in a shattered iraq and afghanistan that defy restitution, and conjured paralyzing new fears and amorphous threats in the united states where none existed before (shadid, 2006). the cause of global justice was put on the defensive, forced to organize an anti-war movement, which in fact coordinated the largest antiwar demonstration ever on february 15, 2003, a month before the invasion.3 by 2006, the bush administration had finally overplayed its hand, at home and abroad, stumbling in its prosecution of the war in iraq, its response to hurricane katrina, the wire-tapping of its own citizens, its budget priorities and massive indebtedness, and its studied inaction on global warming and climate change, thereby giving renewed momentum to a movement that would eventually sow the seeds of occupy. the new political cultures and 2011 we arrive at last to the movements that shook the world in 2011. in january and march, long-entrenched dictators fell to popular uprisings in tunis and cairo, and newly elected political leaderships offered greater hope for positive social change than had existed in the region in decades. this came about through massive occupations of public space by broadly-based social forces that resolutely resisted state repression with non-violent, ongoing, and creative direct action (“civil disobedience” seems too mild a term for this). in both cases, and unlike elsewhere in the greater arab spring (libya, syria, and bahrain), the regimes they faced and the armies that supported them gave way to popular demands and stepped aside. the u.s. scrambled from stubborn disbelief and compromise maneuvers to withdrawing its support for the “democratic dictatorships” of zayn al-abidine ben ali and husni mubarak, each of whom then ceded power. after these clear targets were sent into exile or prison, the movements faced the structural obstacles of old regimes of the economic and (especially in egypt) military elites and quickly (in tunisia) or slowly (in egypt) pushed them into elections that cemented these non-violent political revolutions (anderson, 2011, 2012). studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 16 john foran it is possible to make sense of these revolutions in terms of the patterns of the great revolutions of world history, and the model of social revolutions put forward in taking power. namely, a political economy of dependent, neoliberal capitalist development sharpened the grievances of populations living with high and rising levels of unemployment, the highest in the world, in fact, for women and for youth under 25 (achcar 2012; beinin 2011, pp. 26-27; goldstone 2011, p. 36). that this is a globalization story is suggested by the fact that it was the youth generation of 2010 that made the revolts, not that of 1990 at the dawn of globalization’s effects in the region. the regimes that ruled both countries were classic cases of the type of personalist dictatorship most vulnerable to revolutions historically: amassing riches while excluding the majority of the population from a meaningful vote and repressing dissidents ruthlessly. this meshing of the economic and political elite made the dictators in each case a clear target of popular wrath. the conjunctural elements of revolutionary outbreaks were also present by the end of 2010: the effects of a teetering global economy on already desperate populations fueled the economic downturns (again, a question of timing: 2010, not 2007 before the crisis). the interconnectedness of global crises meant that one could “read the world in a loaf of bread,” as christian parenti put it: the hot summer of 2010 devastated the russian grain harvest, raising the cost of the egyptian people’s staple later in the fall and bringing many to the point of rebellion (gelvin, 2012, pp. 21-23; parenti, 2011). the international conjuncture was also critical to the movements’ success. this is most obvious in the case of libya, where nato’s intervention stopped qadhafi’s counter-offensive just short of benghazi, then crippled his air force and the movement of heavy armor out of tripoli. in the cases of egypt and tunisia, the timing of the revolutions owed much to favourable turns in the world system: the events in tunis moved so swiftly that neither france nor the united states could react to them before ben ali was gone, while in egypt, the us wavered uncertainly in its support of mubarak, and ultimately decided to cast him to the winds while trying to maintain its influence on the army, which wisely stood aside to protect its own interests and stay on the winning side. in syria and bahrain, rebels enjoyed no equivalent geopolitical opening. in terms of the political cultures of opposition and creation that underlay the arab spring, we might comment first on an emotional aspect. as mehran kamrava (forthcoming) notes, the pillars of the ruling bargains born in the national liberation movements of the 1950s, “once sources of comfort and mass ebullition, now [were] comprised of fear, loathing, suspicion, and submission.” when crowds poured into the central squares and roundabouts of tunis, cairo, tripoli, and manama, they broke this fear, and perhaps, with it, long-structured or assumed patterns of deference more generally. it is also clear that the arab spring revolts were driven less by appeal to any ideology than by tapping into popular idioms of everyday concern. these were concentrated in the slogans chanted by crowds, in the first instance against the dictatorships: in egypt, “we won’t leave until he leaves” (khalil, studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 beyond insurgency to radical social change 17 2011, p. 5). in tunisia, “bread, water, and no ben ali” adroitly captured the twinned economic and political demands of the movement (anderson, 2011). in tunis, “the tone of the protests was rather one of reappropriating patriotic language and symbols: women and men lay in the streets to spell ‘freedom’ or ‘stop the murders’ with their bodies and worked together to tear down and burn the gigantic, stalin-style portraits of ben ali on storefronts and street corners” (marzouki, 2011). and though the state responded with violence, the call in the crowds of tahrir square was typically for salmeya—staying peaceful (khalil, 2011, p. 1). on top of these demands for an end to authoritarianism and a turn toward meaningful democracy were the economic and social demands. in egypt, alongside the popular demand for “dignity, democracy, social justice” were heard calls for “bread, freedom, social justice,” and most direct, “we want to live! we want to eat!” (beinin, 2011, p. 25). graffiti in sidi bouzid, tunisia, the cradle of the revolution, read “no to youth unemployment,” and “no to poverty” (knickmeyer, 2011, p. 124). it is no surprise that in the uprising in sidi bouzid on december 17, 2010 the words “employment is a right, you band of thieves!” were heard, an echo of an earlier uprising of miners in 2008, or that the french revolution’s “liberty, equality, fraternity” was transposed into “work, liberty, national dignity” (achcar, 2012). a coalition of young people and labour formed the backbone of the arab spring. class and generation combined to create the nucleus of broad popular movements that provided both the numbers and the slogans that animated the political cultures in play. students, including significant numbers of women, had engaged in anti-mubarak demonstrations since the early 2000s, and on the day the us launched its invasion of iraq, march 20, 2003, they and others were numerous enough to break the security force’s cordon around tahrir square and hold it for several hours, with alternating cries of “down with america!” and “down with mubarak!” (khalil, 2011, pp. 39-41). in the summer of 2004, a movement of young leftists proclaiming its message in its name—kefaya, enough—emerged to challenge the official elevation of mubarak’s son gamal as his eventual successor (khalil, 2011, p. 43ff). it is of interest that the zapatistas’ rallying cry had been “ya basta!” (enough already) and that the youth movement in georgia that led the rose revolution in november 2003 took the name kmara! with the same meaning, while the ukraine’s orange revolution’s youth activists called themselves pora (it’s time) (rosenberg, 2011, p. 132). the core activists and more than 70,000 on-line members of the april 6 movement (the date of a major workers’ revolt in 2008) came out of kefaya and used social media and organizing skills learned in serbia and elsewhere to facilitate and coordinate actions in egypt’s 18 days of revolt (rosenberg, 2011, p. 127ff). young egyptian activists of the april 6 movement had visited serbia to learn the techniques of non-violent civil disobedience from the otpor! (resistance!) youth movement that helped unseat slobodan milošević in october 2000; otpur! had also helped train the georgian and ukrainian groups named above. serbian youths, in turn, had read the works studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 18 john foran of u.s. political theorist gene sharp, steeped in the examples of gandhi and martin luther king, jr.4 they then set up the center for applied nonviolent action and strategies (canvas) in belgrade, which trained april 6 activist mohammad adel in the summer of 2009. april 6 took otpor’s distinctive clenched fist for their own logo, and carried it into tahrir square on their flags in the first days of the uprising (rosenberg, 2011, p. 141). and just after the events started on january 25, a 26-page pamphlet, widely attributed to april 6, came out, entitled “how to protest intelligently” (rosenberg, 2011, p. 141).5 when textile workers at the state-owned misr spinning and weaving company rose up against the police in mahalla al-kubra on april 6, 2008, they were riding a wave of labour actions that had been ongoing since 2004, and gave impetus to a new wave of labour actions in the run-up to 2011 that repudiated the state-controlled unions and forced economic issues such as a minimum wage onto the public stage (khalil, 2011, pp. 51ff; mason, 2012, pp. 19-22). elsewhere, as gilbert achcar had observed, “nobody can ignore the fundamental role played by the tunisian general labor union” (achcar, 2012). mahmoud al-shaar, who had been a leader at one of the occupied textile factories, said in 2011: “there is a spirit of optimism between all workers, in every sector. during the revolution, we were here from day one. but now it’s reached the point where we look around and we recognize these other delegations from the days in tahrir square, people from totally different sectors: we know each other’s faces, we shake each other’s hands, we slap each other on the back” (mason, 2012, pp. 22-23). one indication of the youth and class composition of the tahrir demonstrators was provided by a medical volunteer: “among the dead who fell during the recent demonstrations was found not a single well‐known oppositionist, nor even a known activist. these are young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods, who put themselves on the front lines” (hennion, 2011, quoted in anderson, 2011). nor were all participants from the middle and working classes; inhabitants of cairo’s slums, such as the garbage-pickers (mostly young men and children) of moquattam, joined in (mason, 2012, pp. 6-7). the originality of this approach to overthrowing dictators suggests that yet another path to radical social change has opened up in the twenty-first century: the sustained occupation of public space followed by the struggle for a more open democratic polity, a kind of third way between taking national power through elections and re-making power by wresting communities from neo-liberalism’s clutches. as the arab spring turns three, the challenge now is to turn the political revolutions into social ones, and for the voices of workers, youth, and women to make themselves heard as they were when bringing down the dictatorships. whether the political revolutions in tunisia, egypt, and libya can be pushed further toward social transformation aimed at alleviating crushing poverty and redressing class inequality is an open question. a crucial difference is that the winning political parties in these first elections have studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 beyond insurgency to radical social change 19 not voiced the sentiments or responded to the desires of the people who have come out into every capital square, as the mass demonstration that brought about the coup against the morsi government and the mass demonstrations by morsi’s supporters afterwards showed in 2013. what can be predicted is that their futures depend on the courageous engagement of the social movements and civil society organizations that forced the democratic openings and their ability to shape the direction and composition of the newly elected democratic leadership and parties (in egypt this has proven extraordinarily difficult, perhaps impossible). and this, in turn, depends on the complex (and undoubtedly long-term) process of forging, sustaining, and reconciling the new political cultures of creation—of democracy, reformist islam, and popular sovereignty—that brought victory in the first place. experience, emotions, and idioms all must find organizational expressions equal to this daunting task, or perhaps better put, movements and parties must find a language to bridge their differences. occupy everything. the second half of the year witnessed the rise of an equally improbable challenge at the heart of the system. occupy wall street succeeded against all the historical and cultural odds to electrify ordinary americans in the fall of 2011. it drew on some of the threads of resistance that we have traced since 1968: discussion-based decision making, occupations of the commons, nonor post-ideological ways of speaking, affinity groups dedicated to addressing particular issues and sustaining the encampments— in sum, new yet not-so-new ways of doing a creative politics. its makers tapped the arab spring’s techniques of struggle and the liberating public festivals of occupation in spain, the street confrontations and creative actions in austerity-hammered athens, and the temporary occupations in the english and chilean student movements over the course of 2010 (among the best of the earliest accounts to date are mason, 2012; flank, 2011; solomon & palmieri, 2011; taylor et al., 2011; van gelder et al., 2011). to these, the occupy movement added its own versions of general assembly and a brilliant discursive attack on the political and economic elites, seen as “the one percent” responsible for the deteriorating lives of “the ninety-nine percent.” the process and the message resonated widely across the us, spreading quickly from new york to other major metropolitan areas (los angeles, boston, oakland, chicago, detroit), smaller cities and towns, and educational institutions such as the university of california. an immense national discussion on the crisis was held, knocking the american political and economic establishments off balance for a time. by mid-autumn, there were occupations in motion across the globe. the system struck back in late fall with a police offensive coordinated by u.s. mayors across the country, using strong arm tactics to force occupy to abandon most of its public spaces. the movement merged into many smaller, local forms in the course of 2012 (including occupy the hood, occupy debt, and occupy sandy in the wake of the disastrous hurricane of november 2012), with the occupiers discussing and acting on the ways to do this most effectively in the new conjuncture (schneider, 2012; r. solnit, 2012, 2013). sociologist keith kahn-harris studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 20 john foran has termed the movements of 2011as “the movement without a name,” the expression of “a trend, a direction, an idea-virus, a meme, a source of energy that can be traced through a large number of spaces and projects. it is also a way of thinking and acting: an agility, an adaptability, a refusal to accept the world as it is, a refusal to get stuck into fixed patterns of thought” (kahnharris, 2011). in sum, it marked the further growth of political cultures of creation. problems and prospects the obvious political question is: can these new political cultures of opposition produce—or at least contribute to—some type of global transformation of the sort that is needed to deal with a world in crisis? these cases have shown their ability to move beyond ideology in favor of the strengths of popular idioms demanding social justice and have shown us some of the advantages of horizontal networks over vertical hierarchies. but how to fashion largescale popular spaces for democracy, and how to articulate the discourses that will bring together the broadest coalitions ever seen onto a global stage constitute great challenges. the left has achieved state power in an important set of latin american countries; does it have the will, internal support, and global room for maneuver to redirect resources to the poorest sectors of society? the experience of obama and the european center-left has shown rather clearly the limited room for maneuver and the dimming prospects for significant reform, domestically or globally, through these parties. the zapatistas have registered concrete gains on a local level; will they be able to generalize these accomplishments beyond chiapas? the global justice movement has raised significant opposition to neoliberal globalization. can this movement, with all the others, reverse the tide of neoliberal capitalism? as the zapatistas argue, and the disappointing experience of lula and the workers party in brazil who watered down their radical program once in power has shown, elections are not a magic solution to undoing fundamental structures of exploitation. this should be a continuing task for the post-arab spring decade that is underway. but neither is direct democracy a panacea, as the zapatistas’ containment in chiapas and the dispersal of occupy suggest. and yet, the capacity to re-occupy public space is crucial for the long-term success of the arab spring, as the vigorous protests which culminated in the coup against president mohammad morsi in egypt and the flash uprisings in turkey and brazil reminded us in the summer of 2013. what, then, lies between or beyond direct action and elections? one idea is to combine electing “progressive” governments and forging social movements to push them from below and beside to make good on their promises, and to make links with other movements, nations, and organizations everywhere. in other words, rather than the dichotomous choice between seeking to change the world through elections versus building a new society from the bottom studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 beyond insurgency to radical social change 21 up, the future of radical social change may well lie at the many possible intersections of deeply democratic social movements and equally diverse and committed new parties and political coalitions. the pink tide is already working near this intersection. other struggles that point toward this include the long movement for radical reforms in kerala, india, the experiences of the world’s green parties, the political movement that grew up in iceland after the great crash of 2008, and the global climate justice movement. in kerala, for example, a series of elected, non-charismatic (in a positive sense) left-of-center governments over the past fifty years have raised the quality of life—whether measured by nutrition, health, life span, access to food and shelter, and literacy education—to standards that are superior to elsewhere in india and would be the object of envy in most of the world. they have done this despite a lack of monetary resources, a low per capita gnp, and even with deep structural unemployment, because they have been pushed from below by strong, independent social movements in civil society of workers, women, and lower castes. this synergetic relationship has succeeded in forging and maintaining relatively equitable, more participatory conditions of life for the more than 30 million people who live there, even in periods when the left has not been in power (franke & chasin, 1994, heller, 1999). the world’s green parties also embody a new political culture of creation, sometimes themselves acting to bridge the divide between those who seek to take state power and those who seek to transform the very nature of power. though far from power in many places—notably the us and uk— and having made truly invidious compromises when in government as in germany (jachnow, 2013), they also hint at the powerful combination of social movement dynamism from below and a new kind of party organization. moreover, they are transnational in vision and organization in a way that other parties, including those on the left, are not. iceland undertook a hopeful political experiment dubbed the “saucepan revolution” when the raucous banging of pots and pans in popular street protests in january 2009 forced the right-of-center government responsible for the precipitous collapse of iceland’s banks to yield power to a new governing coalition of socialists, democrats, greens, and the left, who were affirmed in a general election in april 2009. in the face of a horrific economic crisis, the creative actions of the left-green movement and social democratic alliance government, and the many networks that pressure and support them, produced solutions such as the 2009 referendum in which 98 percent of the population rejected the previous government’s agreement to repay the foreign debt of the failed banks, another indication of this new political culture (chataigne 2009; krugman, 2011; júlíusson & helgason, 2013; magnason, 2008; r. solnit, 2008; wade & sigurgeirsdottir, 2010). the fragility of the new situation was laid bare in the april 2013 elections which returned the center-right to power. 2011 ended with the impact of occupy on the un climate negotiations in durban, south africa, carried forward again at the end of 2012 in doha, studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 22 john foran qatar. the negotiations themselves produced the expected non-ambition and irresponsible delay, but a growing coalition of progressive countries inside the negotiations, young activists who raised their voices and built their own strong ties, and the global climate justice organizations that stood and sat with them in an occupation of the corridors and streets worked together to deliver a rather different outcome from the triumphalist official one or the pessimistic verdict of some movement leaders (foran & widick, 2013). the actions and communication processes established between the state actors inside and the social movements outside continue to work together for a fair and binding treaty to lower greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps the most pressing issue of our time. conclusions it is entirely possible that the future of radical social change lies at the various intersections of deeply democratic social movements and equally diverse and committed political coalitions. hamid dabashi, the first great theorist of the arab spring, proposes that we consider the events a new kind of “openended” revolution. that ever-expanding public space and political participation are precisely what inform my idea of open-ended revolution, in which the distinction no longer exists between the french [revolution’s] (social) and american [revolution’s] (political) model, in arendt’s terms. but in fact the fusion of the two will have created a third model, closer to what trotsky meant by “permanent revolution” (and that we hear in the egyptian slogan al-thwarah al-mustamarrah), but this time in a more gradual, systematic, and grounded manner in which not just the working class but also women and students—that is, the two social formations that expand the economic into public space—will be integral to the revolutionary unfolding. (dabashi, 2012, p. 247) it will take time for these open-ended revolutions to blossom and reach their full potential. important to this process will be the articulation of powerful political cultures based on participatory (not formal, representative, elitecontrolled) democracy and on economic alternatives that challenge the neoliberal capitalist globalization that created the conditions for their flowering in the first place—namely, political cultures of creation as well as opposition. the people in each of these places—the most radical ones, the younger ones, the most savvy—rejected the dysfunctional social and political systems they had inherited. they were not about renegotiating anybody’s ruling bargain. and they succeeded. or at least they haven’t failed. and, like their counterparts everywhere, they are not done yet. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 beyond insurgency to radical social change 23 notes 1 this essay draws substantially on its older sister, “global affinities: the new cultures of resistance behind the arab spring,” forthcoming in kamrava. 2 in anna karenina, tolstoy’s protagonist asks “what is to be done? what is to be done? what’s the best way to act in this terrible situation?—that’s what we must think about”: see the new york times magazine (december 23, 2012), 46. 3 in fact, “between january 3 and april 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the iraq war” according to french academic dominique reynié (cited in callinicos 2005). 4 amazon’s webpage asserts that “from dictatorship to democracy was a pamphlet, printed and distributed by dr gene sharp and based on his study, over a period of forty years, on non-violent methods of demonstration. now in its fourth edition, it was originally handed out by the albert einstein institution, and although never actively promoted, to date it has been translated into thirty-one languages. this astonishing book travelled as a photocopied pamphlet from burma to indonesia, serbia and most recently egypt, tunisia and syria, with dissent in china also reported. surreptitiously handed out amongst youth uprisings the world over how the ‘how-to’ guide came about and its role in the recent arab uprisings is an extraordinary tale”:http://www. amazon.com/dictatorship-democracy-gene-sharp/dp/1846688396/ref=sr_1_1?s=bo oks&ie=utf8&qid=1355440345&sr=1-1&keywords=gene+sharp april 6 compiled its own manual based on a range of sources and members’ own experiences (ishani 2011, 144). for a trenchant critique of the politics of april 6, see roberts 2013. 5 it is true that otpor took money from, among others, rightwing and counterrevolutionary democracy-promoting institutions like the notorious national endowment for democracy in the united states, and that the einstein institution had similar links, as my reviewer pointed out to me. likewise, among the funders of canvas are to be found freedom house. that this makes them guilty of being “in the service of imperial projects” (see barker 2011), is, i feel, a stretch too far. references adbusters. 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(2010, september-october). lessons for iceland. new left review (65), 5-29. wallerstein, i. (2011, november 4). the contradictions of the arab spring. al-jazeera. retrieved from http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111111101711539134.html zibechi, r. (2010). dispersing power: social movements as anti-state forces. oakland: ak press. diels-neufeld final before ts correspondence address: julie diels-neufeld, department of sociology, kwantlen polytechnic university, surrey, bc, v3w 2m8; email: jd@juliediels.com issn: 1911-4788 volume 16, issue 3, 669-672, 2022 book review narrative art and the politics of health brooks, n., & blanchette, s. (2021). anthem press. isbn 978-1785277108 (cloth) cdn$160.98; isbn 978-1785277122 (e-book) cdn$41.62. 264 pages. julie diels-neufeld kwantlen polytechnic university, canada at a time when our understandings of health, whose lives hold value, disparities in access to healthcare, and restrictions on reproductive rights are overtly and undeniably shaped by political and social forces, narrative art and the politics of health, edited by neil brooks and sarah blanchette, is an important contribution to medical discourse and health humanities scholarship. this collection of essays written by a diverse group of academics and artists challenges our epistemological and ontological knowledges and offers critical insights and case studies that require readers to reconsider how we define “health,” and how health is informed by and reinforces economic interests, racism, and ableism. in introducing this collection of essays, brooks and blanchette discuss how the contributions are inevitably going to be read against, and framed by, the pandemic (p. 1) they suggest that as an overarching consideration of the book, the “critical role of narrative in the politics of health” underscores the importance of critical analysis of the discourses, policy responses and disparate consequences of covid-19 on marginalized communities and developing nations (p. 1). as a white settler on the unceded ancestral and traditional territories of the kwantlen, katzie, musqueam, semiahmoo, tsawwassen, qayqayt and kwikwetlem peoples, i have benefited from privilege ascribed, not earned. i have much to learn, and as such i spent significant time reading and rereading each chapter of this book, because i was hungry for stories and perspectives that disrupt and reorient us towards inclusive narratives. i found myself deeply engaged and challenged when reading this book, forced to confront the narrow lens by which i considered some of the topics. i benefited personally and julie diels-neufeld studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 669-672, 2022 670 academically from the editors and authors querying the ways in which health care and narratives are political and intertwined, and how these narratives create distinctions that privilege and reflect white bodies and interests, subsequently devaluing unruly bodies and stories that deviate from social norms. in the same way that the social model of disability reveals the complexities of disability beyond the curative focus of the medical model of disability, this book successfully brings together an interdisciplinary analysis of health narratives that are typically simplified and bounded by scientific authority. the essays in part one focus on institutional narratives undergirded by white supremacy as the very foundation of how western society conceives and responds to “health.” the chapters weave together seemingly separate areas of focus that connect at the structural level with devastating consequences. beginning with a case study on the medical authority of ship doctors and captains during the slave trade, the origins of “health” being defined in relation to potential for production are elucidated, detailing how the slave trade served as the racist foundation for contemporary understandings about health, illness, disability and economic productivity (gauvin, chapter 1). the second chapter, by kelly, boyce and rice, examines the use of performative technology such as slide shows in schools and universities as a delivery mechanism for eugenics ideology, or “destructive knowledges,” as part of white heteronormative nation building strategies (p. 9). chapter three, by poole and galvan, explores the medicalization of grief responses via the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm), workplace bereavement policies, and public expressions of grief since the start of the pandemic to introduce the concept of “grief supremacy” and the “rules around grievability” that are produced by, and reinscribe, white supremacy (p. 63). concluding this section, eli clare (chapter 4) focuses on the power of naming and the role of seemingly innocuous systems of categorisation, such as library classifications, in constructing difference, moving beyond the analysis of more obvious systems of classification that pathologize us, such as those listed in the dsm-5, to see the reach and power of institutional narratives. in part two, the various authors elaborate on sociocultural narratives surrounding vaccination, philanthrocapitalism, eugenics, and mental health. in a particularly timely chapter, polzer and wakewich (chapter 5) deploy a critical health studies perspective to offer distinctions between anti-vaxxers and vaccine hesitancy and engage in complex discussions about the politics of public health, parenthood and cultural anxieties regarding neoliberal governance. in attending to one of the most discussed social and scientific issues of our time (vaccination), the authors problematize the mobilization of responsible parenthood (in particular motherhood), and how public health narratives and policies reflect and reaffirm neoliberal rationalities (p. 98). polzer and wakewich necessarily complicate understandings of vaccine discourse beyond the binary of anti-vaxxers and pro-vaccination, thus laying the groundwork to understand, develop, and deploy new social narratives that book review studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 669-672, 2022 671 are nuanced and potentially less polarizing. in chapter six, martin, barrera garza, khan and mckenzie discuss the corporate co-optation of altruism as a particular form of branding that is packaged as corporate responsibility instead of being critiqued as a predatory commodification of “under resourced bodies” (p. 117). in chapter seven, graham elucidates linkages between 19th century spiritualism, madness, eugenics, early feminism, and 21st century conservatives. the section concludes with a focus on narratives about suicide and mental illness that have cross-cultural differences (e.g., anomie, atonement, liberation and madness), arguing that suicide must be understood and addressed in culturally appropriate ways (marsden, chapter 8). the contributions in part three, which analyse fictional narratives in literature and stage performances, together explore ways in which institutional and sociocultural norms are normalized, consumed, and reified. departing from narratives that centre white women, milanes (chapter 9) skillfully details the complexities of depression faced by black women as “a symptom and a result” of institutional and social factors and highlights the importance of community as a site of support and a potentiating factor in health and wellbeing (p. 175). lockett’s contribution (chapter 10) on the value of lives, medical paternalism, health inequities, and assisted death engages in deep analysis of the life of an author and his body of work. this is especially timely and relevant. in light of the ongoing covid-19 pandemic and 2021’s passage of medical assisted death (maid) in canada, the sanctity of life and collective social obligation to reduce and prevent human suffering is fleshed out in the nuances of his essay: maid advocates argue for a person’s agency and rightto-die, while others have raised concerns that assisted suicide may be seen as the only alternative because of insufficient (or absent) social and medical supports. poli’s essay (chapter 11) works especially well when read alongside clare and marsdens’ contribution: it delves into the complexities and power of diagnostic categories, stigmatization of mental illness, and inadequate options for people who require mental healthcare (as well as their families) from the perspective of a family in rural india. tomkinson (chapter 12) examines the unassuming ubiquity of casts and shows that how we view casts, and how they are fictionally deployed, reflect and perpetuate ableism and the construction of difference that ascribes harmful, negative connotations to disability. this collection of essays is thought provoking and an excellent addition to scholarship on health narratives. each chapter is a departure from narratives that are underpinned by white normativity, challenging readers to analyze the historic and ongoing racist structural foundations and contemporary understandings of health. when read against the particular era in which it was created, the timing of the book’s publication serves as a strength and potential weakness. the immediacy and relevance of covid-19, structural racism, mental health, ableism, and economic interests are of direct importance in 2022. academic consideration and analysis in real-time are essential; conversely, the book doesn’t benefit from the added perspective that comes with the passage of time in the same way that later publications will. indeed, julie diels-neufeld studies in social justice, volume 16, issue 3, 669-672, 2022 672 brooks and blanchette signal that the timing of the book and the impacts of the pandemic affected potential contributors, resulting in some intended areas of focus left unaddressed; tending to fat studies, socioeconomic status, privatization, addiction, sports, the sterilization of indigenous women and birth alerts, abortion and reproductive rights, and the wellness industrial complex will be welcome additions for future editions. nevertheless, this book is a powerful compilation of interdisciplinary essays that overlap in significant and surprising ways to deconstruct narratives and the politics of health as a foundation to understand the complexities of institutional, sociocultural, and fictional factors that shape and influence our perspectives individually and collectively. narrative art and the politics of health challenges readers to reconsider and disrupt established, oppressive narratives about health and to imagine new possibilities for how we can conceive of health and healthcare now and in the future. correspondence address: sharon barnartt, department of sociology, gallaudet university, 800 florida avenue ne, washington, dc 20002. tel.: 202-448-7162. email: sharon.barnartt@gallaudet.edu issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 8, issue 1, 67-78, 2014 the arab spring protests and concurrent disability protests: social movement spillover or spurious relationship? sharon n. barnartt gallaudet university, usa abstract protests from different social movements sometimes coincide, but does that mean that one movement is influencing the other and increasing its “action mobilization,” or are different sets of factors causing the coincident protests? this paper examines that question in reference to two sets of coincident protests: those of people with disabilities and those of the pro-democracy protests of 2011. it shows that, although disability protests did not start at the same time as the pro-democracy protests, a number happened during and after, and in close physical proximity to, those protests. neither set of protests acknowledged or referred to the other. while it is likely that a new law in egypt and the un convention on the rights of persons with disabilities were among the mobilizing factors for people with disabilities, it also appears that the language of “rights” began to diffuse from the pro-democracy protests to the disability protests. introduction many protests have occurred in egypt in the period from early 2010 to2011. some of these were the pro-democracy protests which were widely publicized and considered to be part of the “arab spring.” others were not widely publicized. they related to disability and were conducted by disabled people. this paper analyzes the coincidence of the pro-democracy and disability protests before, during, and after the period called the arab spring. many scholars have addressed questions related to protest in egypt, its frequency, its relationship to the political structure or process, the different types of protest, and the results of protests for subsequent political processes studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 68 sharon n. barnartt (e.g. glover, 2010; beinin, 2009). most of these discussions were from a political science point of view, and none of the materials that this researcher could find discuss disability-related protests, except for glover (2010), who mentions them in passing. disability is not a small problem in egypt, a similarity shared by other developing countries (or developed countries, for that matter). estimates of the number of people with disabilities vary from seven million (egyptian people with disabilities must not be forgotten, 2011) to 10 million (disabled protest in egypt continues, 2011) people with disabilities in egypt. however, since many people openly discuss the fact that families hide their disabled members, in part to assure the marriageability of other family members (reynolds, 2006), this is likely to be an underestimation. there is inadequate special education or integrated education. although this is also true for children without disabilities, the ratio is 1 school per 454 non-disabled children as opposed to 1 specialized school per 44,850 disabled children (mahmoud, 2012). there is social and cultural discrimination as well as economic and political inequality. despite these factors, little has been heard in the protest arena from people with disabilities until fairly recently. many scholars have written about disability protests or movements in specific countries. scholars who have investigated disability protests in one country include barnartt and scotch (2000) about the united states, barral (2007) about france, bugg (2001) about south africa, hayashi and okuhira about japan (2001), heyl (1998) and heyer (2002a) about germany, tucker (2007) about jamaica, and oliver (1990, 1996) about the uk. some scholars have compared disability protests in two or a small number of countries (barnartt, 2008; barnartt & rotman, 2007; heyer, 2002b; olson, penna, & veith, 2004). however, there has been no research that this author could find in english about disability protests in egypt. this paper asks what type of relationship existed between disability protests and the concurrently occurring pro-democracy protests. did the latter protests in any way cause the disability protests, or were the sets or protests independently caused? theoretical framework protests, those “in your face, in the street” demands for change, happen for many reasons. many answers have been proposed to the question, “what types of social conditions facilitate the growth of protests and social movements?” (mcadam, mccarthy, & zald, 1988). the presence of grievances or inequalities is necessary but not sufficient, as are a number of other conditions. these include social structural strain (smelser, 1962), inequities in access to resources (mccarthy & zald, 1973), the presence of existing social networks (morris, 1984), the absence of competing solidarities, the presence of aggrieved and otherwise powerless people (lipsky, 1968; piven & cloward, 1979), relative deprivation (davies, 1963), changes in the studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 social movement spillover or spurious relationship? 69 structure of political opportunities (tarrow, 1989), lack of repressive social control, suddenly imposed grievances (opp, 1988), the presence of formal organizations or informal groups (mcadam, 1982; mcadam, mccarthy, & zald, 1988; morris, 1984), and the existence of collective action frames that fit into existing cultural assumptions (snow & benford, 1988, 1992; snow, rochford, worden, & benford, 1986).protests are not the only, or even the most radical, actions that social movements can take. this is especially true across cultures. for example, disability rights organizations in japan started their own personal attendant care programs in the 1980s (hayashi & okuhira, 2001). in the united states, that might not have seemed to be a radical action on par with a protest, but, in japan, at that time, it was pioneering and probably paradigm-changing. however, protests are the only type of tactic analyzed here. analysis of any set of protests raises the question of mobilization. how did the participants become mobilized enough to be “in the streets?” generally, disabled people have tended not to mobilize for protests, for reasons related to the logistical difficulties of getting to and participating in protests, the lack of a collective consciousness, and their separation into impairment-related groups with little in common with other groups (scotch, 1988). yet, in egypt, disabled people, who had not been reported to have fomented protests very often before that, did engage in protests in 2010 and 2011 with or near the pro-democracy protesters. the central question of this paper is whether the pro-democracy protests caused the disability protests or whether the sets of protests were caused by different third factors. if two events occur simultaneously, there are three possible explanations. one is that the first one causes the second one. the second is that they are both caused by the same external variables. the third is that each is caused by a different external variable. let us examine these possibilities. based upon the fact that social movements do not appear in a vacuum but rather often appear in clusters, causally related to each other, mcadam (1995) distinguishes between “initiator” and “spin-off” movements, while meyer and whittier (1994) talk about social movement “spillover.” for both, one social movement precedes, and is causally related to, the later one. mcadam emphasizes mechanisms of diffusion, network ties, organizational structures, and attributions of similarity in the transition from the initiator to the spin-off movement. meyer and whittier emphasize frame alignment, tactical repertoires, overlapping leadership or personnel, and changes in the political opportunity structure as mechanisms by which spillovers happen. simultaneous protests could also be caused by some common third factor. these might be spillovers from prior movements or changes in factors which themselves increase social movement activity in all sectors. these could include changes in the social structure, culture, or political opportunity structure. in this case, in statistical terms, the third variables are spurious. the third variable is causing both of the simultaneously occurring protests. another possibility is that there might be different factors or variables studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 70 sharon n. barnartt which are causing each of the sets of protests. these could include changes in the specific demands, organizational structure, consciousness and other aspects of the social movement of which the protest is a part. or they could include changes in several aspects of the society. in this case the simultaneous protests are parallel events which are not linked to each other but to other, different, variables. this paper attempts to determine which type of relationship was at work in this situation. methodology this paper is part of an on-going event history analysis of disability-related protests which have occurred since 1970. awareness of the simultaneity of the disability protests and the arab spring protests was a serendipitous result of this research. reports of protests were collected from online newspapers, using print indices and lexus-nexus as searching tools. there are, of course, problems in depending upon newspaper reports of protests. one problem which occurs in locating cross-cultural cases of protest relates to language. while many countries now have newspapers in english, on line or in print, not all do, and for many it is a very recent phenomenon. thus the reports do not always go back very far. additionally, mccarthy, mcphail, & smith, (1996), mueller (1997), and snyder & kelly (1977) argue that media reports always substantially under-represent protests. they show that media reports are biased towards covering more disruptive protests—those which are longer, larger, and more violent. in general, more disruptive protests are more likely to be receive newspaper coverage than are less disruptive protests (barnartt and scotch, 2000). the data reported here are based upon the social and cultural context of us protests, even though, in other countries, activities such as petition drives may be non-normative and therefore do constitute protests (kriesi, koopmans, duyvendak, & guigni, 1997), voter registration drives, lobbying, fund-raising, petitions, or lawsuits were not defined as constituting protests in the us and so information about them was not gathered. additionally, even though an event may be similar (e.g. people marching down a street holding banners and placards), the cultural and political meanings, including the interpretation of the threat level posed and the degree of acceptance of the tactics, may be completely different. this paper does not attempt to assess the meanings of the protests within the egyptian context but to examine the relationships between the two sets of protests. this paper attempts to analyze protests within the egyptian context but with these caveats. other types of activities which would be viewed as being protests by disabled people in egypt may have occurred at the same time, but protests fitting the us definition will be the focus of this paper. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 social movement spillover or spurious relationship? 71 results the first disability protest this researcher could find in the english language newspapers occurred in december 1996. in this protest, approximately 3000 students protested the expulsions of about 300 students who were reported to have falsified their applications (to a special program which exempted handicapped students from requirements applied to other students) or to have been “not fully handicapped.” the students chanted anti-government slogans and threw stones at police; the police responded by arresting some of them (“egyptian students demonstrate,” 1996.) the protests continued for more than a week. on the second day, the police used tear gas against the protesters (“egyptian government bows,” 1996.) after negative publicity from a number of sources, the government gave in and announced that all handicapped students would be admitted to government-run universities, “regardless of the degree of handicap.” figure 1 the second set of protests began in february, 2010, and continued through may 6 of that year (salam, 2010; salem, 2010). 1 a group of disabled protesters who were interviewed on april 30 said they had been there for 47 days by that time. having set up a tent city, they were part of a group described as factory workers, government workers, employees of a telephone company, and employees of a yarn factory. all were banging pots, pans, and bottles and chanting, demanding jobs, housing, and better incomes (slackman, 2010). mahmoud (2012) reported that several hundred disabled people participated in these protests. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 72 sharon n. barnartt the third protest, which began on june 17, 2011, was the first which actually occurred during the pro-democracy protests. this two-day protest demanded that the government “preserve and protect their rights and help them get jobs in the ministries and private sector” (“disabled protest in egypt,” 2011). protesters were quoted as stressing their right to get a job, their need for more training programs and demanding the enforcement of a 2010 law which mandated that 5% of jobs be given to disabled people. this is the first time that the words “right” or “rights” appeared in a newspaper article. the fourth protest began on october 25, 2011 and continued, off and on, for 6 days. it began with a sit-in in front of the egyptian parliament building, but it expanded to include blocking a major street and the threat by some protesters to set themselves on fire (one protester had already doused himself with gasoline before police intervened). at various times during this protest, other groups, including hospital workers and oil company workers, were protesting on the same street in close proximity to the disabled protesters (“famous streets,” 2011). demands in this protest included “the provision of job opportunities through government schemes, an increase in the quotas for hiring disabled people into government service from five to 10 percent, the provisions of transportation capable of accommodating people with disabilities, and free apartments for disabled married couples (ismail, 2011). about two weeks later, on november 14, disabled protesters blocked a large, popular road, holding up banners as police and people passing in cars watched them. an article in the egyptian gazette entitled “helplessness is the keyword” (2011) suggests that this was one of many protests which had been held in this location from “a feeling of helplessness.” in particular, this time the protesters held up a banner reading “the revolution of the disabled” in order to protest the “government’s disregard of their suffering.” disability protests did not cease with the installation of the new government of mohammed morsi. one short protest occurred in alexandria in june, 2012 (elshami, 2012), and a long protest occurred in cairo from the 9th to the 23rd of october, 2012. the latter initially had similar demands related to jobs and housing, but, after clashes with police left some demonstrators injured, the protest focus shifted to the lack of freedom to protest. much has been written about the pro-democracy protests which occurred in egypt at the same time as those protests called “the arab spring.” the protests began on january 25, 2011, and continued until june 30, 2012 in cairo. demands initially focused on the overthrow of mubarak, who resigned in february, 2011. subsequent demands called for various aspects of democracy, including open elections. the first round of parliamentary elections occurred in november, 2011. thus three of the disability protests occurred at the same time as the democratization protests, although two had occurred earlier [and several, some not shown here, have occurred since.] studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 social movement spillover or spurious relationship? 73 discussion protests have become ubiquitous in advanced industrialized societies (meyer & tarrow, 1998). however, protests are not new in egypt either. rather, as arafa (2011) points out, there have been protests in egypt since as early as 724 ce. anderson (2011) begins by describing big protests that occurred in 1919 which sound quite similar to those in 2011. more recently, beinin (2009) points out that, by his estimation, over 2 million people participated in 2623 factory occupations, strikes, demonstrations or other types of collective actions between 1998 and 2008. he notes: during the strike waves of 1984-89 and in the early 1990s, egypt experienced 25-80 collective actions a year. from 1998 to 2003, this increased to an average of 118 workers’ collective actions a year. in 2004 there were 265 collective actions—more than double the 1998-2003 average. (2009, p. 450) most of these actions were conducted by workers, especially those in the textile industry. as in many other countries, many textile workers are women, and this was true among these protesters, also. some of the actions were strikes which were quite large and quite successful (rowles & stretcher, 2011). beinin (2009, p. 454) also notes that grievances other than those related to labour situations began to emerge around the time of the second palestinian intifada and the 2003 invasion of iraq. militancy among civil servants and educational personnel began to emerge. in fact, he claims that a culture of protest was inculcated around this time which led to the consciousness of citizenship and rights which had not shown up during the prior protests. glover (2010) echoes beinin when she says that “the egyptian street has re-emerged as the site of contention, and that protests are an everyday occurrence” (p. 2) this “normalization of protest” emerged in the early 2000s, and has “opened up a political space to be used by many” (p. 3). olesen (2005) argues that the changes in the focus of protests from workers’ issues to democracy issues show the emergence of the “latent master frame of democracy,” and he argues that this was spread by globalization. if this is the case, it suggests that the two sets of protests were at least partially caused by different external factors, since the disability protesters lagged behind the pro-democracy protesters in their use of this frame. until the latest of the protests, the disability protests had not used the “latent master frame of democracy.” rather, when their protests began, their demands were for services related to one specific situation. by 2011, the protests were beginning to use the frame of rights, but the rights they demanded were a mixture of what americans would call services and what they would call rights (pfeiffer, 1988). the protests demanded more jobs (services), accessible transportation (rights) and free housing (services).2 it was not until late in 2011 that the disability protests were more aligned with the pro-democracy frame when they demanded accessible voting places. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 74 sharon n. barnartt figure 2 klandermans (1984; 1988) argued that beliefs, which he calls consensus mobilization, exist before social movement actions, which he calls action mobilization. barnartt (1994) argued that sometimes the actions do come first, and then beliefs or ideologies develop. sometimes action mobilization will occur before the social movement has a “frame,” let alone a clearly articulated ideology. what we see here is a case of this. people with grievances [i.e. disabled people], in a society in which protest was common, took to the streets. they first protested about their specific grievances, and then later began appropriate a frame [“rights”], from other apparently successful protests, with which to align what they wanted with the cultural discourse of the society. only in the most recent protests did their frame begin to align with that used in the pro-democracy protests. while at this time there was an increasing climate of, and rhetoric about, rights and citizenship in the general culture in egypt, there was another specific change for disabled people there. in 2010, egypt had passed a law requiring that five percent of jobs in both the public and private sectors be allocated to people with disabilities (“disabled protest in egypt continues,” 2011), with jail sentences and fines possible for those who refused to hire disabled people. additionally, egypt had ratified the un convention on the rights of persons with disabilities in 2008. this meant that there were now two legal successes for people with disabilities, in addition to the success garnered by the 1996 protest. in line with the idea of a “revolution of rising expectations” (davies, 1963), people with disabilities began to expect, and ask for, more than they previously had. if nothing else, they wanted the law regarding employment to be enforced so that people actually got the jobs which were legally promised to them. there was little reference within the newspaper coverage of disability studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 social movement spillover or spurious relationship? 75 protesters reacting to the pro-democracy protests or protesters. no one was quoted as saying, for example, “we saw those people on the streets getting what they wanted, so we decided to protest, too.” although, logically, the omission cannot be used to support an argument of commission, it seems as if someone would have said that if it had been true. so, it is not clear that the larger non-disabled protests were the genesis of the smaller, disabilityrelated ones.3 except in the case of the 1996 protest, it did not appear that pro-democracy protesters joined or assisted in the disability-related protests. it is not even clear to what extent the pro-democracy protesters were aware of these concurrent protests, and there is no evidence that they attempted to make use of the disability protests in order to gain more influence or to produce more disruption. rather, the disability protesters appear to have been affected by the other types of changes mentioned above. neither group expressed hope that it would gain strength from the presence of the other, although the disabled protesters did gain one thing from their contemporaneous protesters. that one thing, which may have “spilled over” from the pro-democracy protests, was the language of rights. as noted above, that language did not appear until it was used in articles about those disability protests which occurred during the prodemocracy protests. because the language was used in newspaper articles, we cannot be sure whether it was protest participants or the journalists who actually used the language of rights. but several articles did quote protesters using that language. that language may also have percolated down from the un convention. if the language of rights did spill over from the pro-democracy protests, it was a significant change in discourse from the earlier protests. in some societies, such as germany, there is no civil rights tradition or frame (heyer, 2002a, p. 726). frames for disability most often are related to “charity” (scotch, 1984), although they may also include slogans such as “disability does not mean inability,” as used in zimbabwe in the 1990s (barnartt, 1992). elshami (2012) indicates that the most common frame for disability in egypt revolved around charity instead of jobs or the integration of people with disabilities. in general, the development of a rights tradition or frame, and especially the extension of that frame to people with disabilities (altman & barnartt, 1993) represent a big leap forward for disability activism (barnartt & scotch, 2000). so, even if it was only that a journalist applied that frame, it represents the beginning of a significant change in the frame through which disabilities were being viewed. in sum, this paper has suggested that, although the two sets of protests may have arisen initially for different reasons, there may have been a spillover from the pro-democracy protests to the disability protests. we cannot with certainty link the rise of disability protests and the discourse of rights to the pro-democracy protests, because of the methodological limitations of this study. but we can propose that an as hypothesis requiring further research. it would be necessary to interview participants in the disability protests in order to gain stronger support for that hypothesis. studies in social justice, volume 8, issue 1, 2014 76 sharon n. barnartt notes 1 mahmoud (2012) indicates that protests occurred for over 3 months in 2010, but he does not specify the precise dates. 2 it may be that using one category called “rights” and another called “services” may not create fine enough distinctions in societies in which there is no clear civil rights tradition. rather, it might be better to use several sub-categories within each category. this points to the problem of cross-cultural comparison, mentioned above. 3 as i have argued elsewhere (barnartt, 2010), disability protests in other countries do not seem to be related to globalization or external economic and cultural trends spreading around the world. references altman, b., & barnartt, s. 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(2007). local strategies in a global network: disability rights advocacy in jamaica. dissertations & theses: full text database. publication no. aat 3292585. correspondence address: carol harrington, school of social and cultural studies, victoria university of wellington, room 1022, murphy building, kelburn parade, kelburn campus, wellington, 6140, new zealand, tel.: (+64) 4 463 7451, email: carol.harrington@vuw.ac.nz issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 1, 47-63, 2013 governmentality and the power of transnational women’s movements carol harrington victoria university of wellington, new zealand abstract feminists have celebrated success in gendering security discourse and practice since the end of the cold war. scholars have adapted theories of contentious politics to analyze how transnational feminist networks achieved this. i argue that such theories would be enhanced by richer conceptualizations of how transnational feminist networks produce and disseminate new forms of global governmental knowledge and expertise. this article engages social movement theory with theories of global governmentality. governmentality analysis typically focuses upon governmental power rather than political contention or the collective agency of political outsiders. however, i argue that governmentality analysis contributes to an account of feminist influence on the fields of development and security within global politics. the governmentality lens views politics as a struggle over truth and expertise. since experts have authority to speak the truth on a given issue, governmentality analysis seeks to uncover the social basis of expertise. such analysis of expertise can illuminate important aspects of the power of movements. the power of transnational women’s movements lies in production and dissemination of knowledge about women within global knowledge networks. introduction social movement accounts of women’s movements’ impact conceptualize movement power as compelling masculine elites to act against their own preferences through mechanisms of leverage and framing. from this perspective, elites compromise in the face of persuasive rhetoric and lobbying. social movement theory posits a clear divide between elites and nonelites, situating social movements as acting for the excluded. nevertheless, movement theorists acknowledge the significance of networks between social movement organizations and elites to their success. after reviewing social studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 48 carol harrington movement perspectives, this article argues that governmentality theory offers a fuller account of the power of women’s organizations. governmentality theory focuses upon the social effects of knowledge and posits a less dichotomized understanding of power than social movement theory. i show how international women’s movement organizations originating in europe and the us during the nineteenth century established themselves as experts on women, as a global category suffering inequality. women’s organizations set up sections around the globe, collecting narratives of women’s oppression and data on women. they supported global institutions dedicated to defending global categories of people oppressed by states or by statelessness. this article considers the contribution of women’s organizations to knowledge of women as a population category within development and, more recently, security. the global power of women’s movements lays in how such movements constructed women as a category for concern nested within discourse and knowledge of civilizational hierarchies that delineate particular populations and territories as objects for international governmental intervention. social movement theories of the power of movements social movement studies addresses problems of power, political exclusion and collective resistance to oppression, thus providing a useful framework for analyzing feminism. leading social movement theorists, charles tilly and sidney tarrow, distinguish between political elites who have routine access to public decision makers and the majority of people who have limited means to influence government (buechler, 2011, pp. 125–140; tilly, 1985). tilly provided a detailed historical analysis of “contentious performances” such as strikes, street theatre, petitions and demonstrations in great britain from 1758-1834, a period when distinctive new forms of collective action emerged among european non-elites. when contentious political actors develop sustained social networks and self-organization then, tarrow argues, we can speak of a “social movement” (tarrow, 2011, p. 16). thus, the concept “social movement” captures a distinctive combination of political campaign, repertoire of contention and public display that emerged in europe and north america from about the mid-eighteenth century and included women’s movements. women’s movement organizations emerged in europe and the us when faster international transport, printing technologies and the spread of literacy created possibilities for new kinds of collective action and imaginings of political community. while new notions of national sovereignty threatened old empires by fuelling national movements new ideals of individual rights created grounds for movements based in transnational identifications which sought influence on distant governments and social practices. douglas stange recounts how in the mid-nineteenth century unitarian abolitionists in the united kingdom felt justified in chastising us unitarians about the evils of slavery because “america was no longer a distant land it was only studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational women’s movements 49 two weeks away” (stange, 1984, p. 96). people and ideas travelled rapidly while increasing literacy among politically excluded workers, women and slaves provided them with, in the words of fugitive slave frederick douglass, “tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul which had frequently flashed through my mind and died away for want of utterance” (douglass 1845, 39). narratives of oppression and treatises on social reform circulated around the globe among abolitionists, pacifists, socialists, and workers, women’s and black associations, among others. international associations of all kinds proliferated throughout the long nineteenth-century. new associations formed out of political debates within established groups. for example, by excluding women the 1840 world anti-slavery congress in london laid the ground for an 1888 international congress of women in washington dc which founded the international council of women (icw) headquartered in zurich (whittick, 1980, p. 22). still active today, the icw set out to build national sections around the world which would provide women a voice within their states and allow for sharing information internationally. the international women’s suffrage alliance formed in 1904 out of dissatisfaction with the icw’s refusal to campaign for the vote (whittick, 1980, p. 22). the first international women’s association also had roots in abolitionism, josephine butler’s international federation for the abolition of the state regulation of vice, founded in 1875 (berkovitch, 1999, p. 160). this association formed in opposition to a call from an 1873 international medical congress for international co-ordination on state regulation of prostitution so as to prevent disease travelling across borders (berkovitch, 1999, p. 35). according to berkovitch, between 1875 and 1914 twenty two international women’s organizations formed alongside numerous other international organizations seeking social reform (berkovitch, 1999, p. 160). social movement theorists analyze movement power as a form of compulsion, where political outsiders find a way to exercise leverage over elites. tilly’s emphasis on social movements’ public displays of “worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment” emphasizes movement influence as residing in their capacity to compel political change against elite preferences (tilly & wood, 2009, pp. 4–5). confronted with repeated public displays of mass commitment to change, elites sometimes feel compelled to surrender or compromise on social movement demands to ensure the stability of the broader political order. social movements may also exercise leverage through recruiting elite actors to their cause. while elites have routine access to public decision making they may have political cause to align themselves with social movements. thus, while women’s movements emerged through political exclusion they have thrived on alliances with political insiders and according to keck and sikkink (1998) successfully employed leverage politics. keck and sikkink (1998) combine social network analysis and social movement theory in their analysis of “transnational advocacy networks” which they define as “those relevant actors working internationally on an issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 50 carol harrington dense exchanges of information and services” (p. 2). such networks include actors from social movements, ngos, media, academia, foundations, regional and international intergovernmental organizations and the state. their work calls attention of the connectedness of women’s movement networks and broader governmental processes involving media, state, academic and intergovernmental bodies. in their case study of the international campaign on violence against women keck and sikkink (1998) argue that activists succeeded by coordinating transnational networks to campaign for states and intergovernmental organizations to support particular internal reforms, such as changing police practices, and to use their influence on other states and organizations in favour of the reform. as well as power through leverage politics, social movement theorists use the concept of “framing” to analyze how movements exercise persuasive power by consciously framing their grievances in politically compelling ways. for example, keck and sikkink’s discussion of international feminist advocacy on violence against women relates how in the early 1990s feminist activists began to promote the slogan “women’s rights are human rights” and to frame violence against women as a human rights violation. this framing situated the problem “within larger ‘master frames’ or ‘metanarratives’ of violence and rights” (keck & sikkink, 1998, p. 196). keck and sikkink (1998) analyze the success of this campaign in terms of the “adjacency principle” whereby movements that manage to line up their claim in terms of already accepted instances of political injustice and violations of rights have greater impact (p. 196). in their account: the women’s rights campaign is a story of self-conscious activists who are simultaneously principled and strategic. they are principled in their motivation for action: international feminist activists believed deeply in equality and rights for women everywhere. but they chose their organizing foci and campaign tactics strategically. they hoped to build alliances with women worldwide, knowing it would be difficult. (p. 196) according to this analysis: “it was the activists themselves who created the category [of violence against women], and who, through their organizing, placed it on the international agenda” (keck & sikkink, 1998, p. 196). this version of framing theory attributes the construction of new political categories to clever actors’ manipulation of meaning and reflexive understanding of existing political frames. from this point of view, feminist political leadership located in us-based un women’s networks constructed a new social category: violence against women. keck and sikkink (1998) argue that “when wife battering or rape in the united states, female genital mutilation in africa, and dowry death in india were all classified as forms of violence against women, women could interpret these as common situations and seek similar root causes” (p. 197). this new categorization linked disparate female experiences around the globe as similarly violent and pointed to male dominance as the cause. furthermore, feminist leaders successfully persuaded legal elites that “violence against studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational women’s movements 51 women” should be counted as a human rights violation, and in particular circumstances as genocidal violence, a crime against humanity and a war crime. feminist leaders, or “issue entrepreneurs” as keck and sikkink call them, consciously deployed this framing for the political end of uniting women across borders in opposition to male dominance. like much social movement theory, keck and sikkink’s adoption of framing theory over-emphasizes purposeful political leadership in the construction of social categories and issues. thus, while they discuss how activists re-framed various gendered acts as violence against women and a human rights violation they take for granted that human rights provided a compelling frame for interpreting such acts. additionally, they suggest that bodily integrity violations provide an intrinsically compelling issue (keck & sikkink, 1998, p. 195). their analysis treats bodily integrity and human rights as self-evident categories available for feminist deployment. yet genealogical analysis of the governmental categories “human rights”, “bodily integrity” and “women” reveals that they have undergone rapid political transformation in mutual interaction during the late twentieth and early twenty first century (harrington, 2010). these shifts in meaning shaped feminist campaigns’ claims to expertise and ability to enter into discourse on global security. the value of social movement theory lies in its focus upon delineating movements as vehicles for collective agency of people who do not have access to elite decision making. however, social movement theory treats political struggle as concerned with leverage, compulsion, and conscious persuasion. below, i argue that women’s movements do not simply compel elites to make concessions and cleverly manipulate words and images, women’s movements produce governmental knowledge and truth about populations subject to government. by looking at women’s movements through the governmentality lens, my analysis highlights how they participated in the construction of rationalities and techniques for governing women’s inequality and unfreedom. the power of women’s movements lies in their construction of knowledge about women as a transnational category of persons. global governmentality and women’s movements governmentality offers a richer framework for understanding the power of movements than concepts of framing and leverage. michel foucault (1990) famously connected power to resistance in his introduction to the history of sexuality v1, with his oft-quoted claim that power and resistance always occur together and resistance should not be viewed as exterior to power (p. 95). governmentality theory continues foucault’s conceptualization of power as productive of resistant subjects rather than as oppressing pre-given subjects. yet, with some exceptions, a gap in governmentality theory concerns the resistance of those governed (zanotti, 2011, p. 31). in a review article merlingen (2006) notes that most governmentality literature investigates how governmental techniques work to produce particular forms of conduct rather studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 52 carol harrington than how government produces resistant subjects (p. 190). foucault’s concept of power avoids static oppressor/oppressed dichotomies and allows analysis of how resistant subjects may themselves claim governmental authority and produce resistant knowledge. women’s movements emerged in resistance to masculine power and claimed power through knowledge. resistance to the masculine liberal governmental gender order manifested as women’s movements in europe and the us. these movements problematized female unfreedom and crafted their own authority to govern women as a transnational category of persons. european and us women’s movement organizations acted as an engine for the construction of new liberal governmental problems and knowledge clustered around questions of gender inequality. foucault (1991) gave the term governmentality two related meanings: mentalities of government and government of mentalities. in the former sense of the term, governmentality refers to mentalities, or knowledge, of appropriate government, encompassing answers to questions who or what should be governed by whom, how they should govern, and why government is necessary in specific contexts (rose, o’malley, & valverde, 2009, p. 3). governmentalities treat government as thoughtful human activity, both science and art. they delineate domains of governmental knowledge and practice such as the economy, society and the state. governmentalities delineate populations, peoples and places and specify techniques for intervening in them. international women’s movements that participate in the un system established themselves as experts on women as a global category of people and asserted that women knew best how to govern other women (berkovitch, 1999; harrington, 2010; rupp, 1997). equally importantly, the term also refers to “government of mentalities” signalling how concerns with shaping subjectivities and producing appropriate forms of personhood permeate governmental practices. thus, nikolas rose (1996) suggests that governmentality analysis requires a genealogy of personhood that attends to: problematizations of types, personhood, or conduct, the authoritative knowledge that produces problematizations, the technologies used to change problematized persons or conduct, and how problematizations and technologies fulfil broader objectives concerning proper government (pp. 131–134). much work on governmentality focuses upon the mutual construction of welfare states and free but responsible forms of personhood (barry, osborne, & rose, 1996; cruikshank, 1999; dean & hindes, 1998; rose, 1999). womenhood became a global category within global governmental processes. larner and walters (2004) call for genealogical analysis of “global governmentality” which would investigate fields of expertise and knowledge such as “development,” “modernization,” “global economy” and “global security.” global governmentalities produce non-state spaces of government, such as “the developing world,” or the global south or east. global governmentalities also delineate populations such as women as requiring government outside of state frameworks and sometimes as needing studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational women’s movements 53 defence against the states in which they reside. some scholars use the term “developmentality” to analyze governing mechanisms that shape distant populations to conform to the development agendas of wealthy and powerful actors (deb, 2009; fendler, 2001; ilcan & phillips, 2010). the women’s movements originating in europe and the us during the nineteenth century shaped twentieth century global governmentalities through their production and dissemination of knowledge more than in bending political elites to the will of the masses. their power lay in embedding feminist knowledge within governmental institutions and practices. they constructed alternative problems for government, such as “gender inequality,” or “violence against women”. they contributed to 20th century global governmentalities by constructing women as a transnational category with shared problems in need of international resolution. nineteenth-century european and us women’s organizations claimed to represent women across the globe and set up sections in colonized countries. in their formal politics international women’s organizations aspired to a vision of women as sharing common political problems while respecting differences. rupp’s research on early twentieth century women’s organizations shows the tension involved in this stance because us groups had much more funding than others and both european and us women’s organizations sought to mentor women in other countries. black women formed separate organizations because of racism in the international women’s suffrage alliance (rupp, 1997, p. 75). during the inter-war and post war period, european and us led international women’s organizations emphasized national differences as well as shared experience. they often supported national independence movements and sought to encourage the emergence of national women’s leadership and organizations (rupp, 1997). women’s organization networks and knowledge made their support politically valuable to european and american elite efforts at constructing post-colonial forms of global government as old empires gave way to pressure from nationalist movements. as internationalists, women’s organizations agreed on the need for inter-governmental congresses and treaties to address social issues and called for an inter-governmental organization which could regulate international space and mediate international conflict. women’s movement organizations provided an important constituency supporting the league of nations and the international labour organization following world war i and the united nations following world war ii (miller, 1994; rupp, 1997; seary, 1996, p.20). several women’s organizations established at the turn of the century gained governmental status and expertise within international governmental organizations, among them the icw and some of its offshoots. the international labour organization, league of nations and un all consulted women’s organizations on matters such as female employment and trafficking in women (berkovitch, 1999; leppänen, 2009; reanda, 1999; willetts, 1996). women’s organizations also monitored the activities of these international bodies (miller, 1994). their relentless advocacy led the league of nations studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 54 carol harrington to establish a committee of experts on women that formed the basis for the united nation’s committee on the status of women. thus, the establishment of the united nations ushered in a period in which women had become a problematized category of people requiring international government based upon particular forms of knowledge and expertise. as women’s movement organizations contributed to the construction of international intergovernmental institutions and processes these institutions shaped women’s movement organizations around the globe. the un constructed its accountability and responsibility in relation to transnational citizens’ associations rather than simply to state members: the un could address and govern transnational collectives of individuals such as “workers,” “women” or “displaced people” and even defend these people against states. the united nations coined the term “non-governmental organization” (ngo) and carefully regulated which organizations counted as “international” and their eligibility for consultative status with its economic and social council (ecosoc) (willetts, 1996, p. 40). un definitions of ngos eligible for ecosoc consultative status emphasize that they should have independence from national governments and accountability to an international membership (willetts, 1997, p.42). usually, the un stipulates that consultative ngos should represent transnational entities, such as “workers,” “women,” professional associations such as teachers or doctors, and international associations devoted to cross border questions, such as the environment, disease control, trafficking in people and goods, displaced peoples and so forth (ecosoc, 1996, p. 31). women’s organizations and developmentality women’s international organizations have recognized authority only to speak on topics that international governmental elites consider “women’s issues” which became a subcategory of other governmental problems. governmental knowledge forms within broader institutional discourses which categorize problems for government in terms of “economy,” “development,” “culture,” “human rights,” “security” and so forth. these categories shape discursive possibilities in the formation of social knowledge. for much of the twentieth century international policy on women as women took place in the un development bureaucracy. international women’s ngos advocated for women within a governmentality that rationalized governmental interventions in distant economies and populations because it would help them develop toward the model of wealthy countries. the earliest us and european international women’s organizations, which later participated in un politics, articulated grievances based in their comparative knowledge of women’s experiences of poverty, illiteracy and health problems. by the late nineteenth century states increasingly collected population statistics and social science information about populations (cole, 2000). in this context, women’s movement organizations established studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational women’s movements 55 themselves as knowledgeable about the government of women and keepers of statistics on women. indeed, european and us women’s movements pioneered the sorts of calculative governmental practices that governmentality theory has highlighted. governmentality analysts emphasize the significance of calculative practices to government of populations at a distance. international governmental organizations collect population statistics, comparing and ranking populations against each other and with quantifiable governmental goals and standards. suzan ilcan and lynne phillips note that the un’s calculative practices have been crucial to global governmentalities that attempt to standardize the conduct of populations in terms of fields such as education, consumption and trade (ilcan & phillips, 2010, p. 850). likewise, michael merlingen analyzed the osce’s practice of ranking and grading east european countries according to their treatment of ethnic minorities as involving surveillance, examination and normalizing judgement that allows the european union to discipline populations to its east (merlingen, 2003). measurement and reporting on democratization, human rights and women’s status attempts to render these social issues as amenable to technocratic management by global authorities. the international council of women produced knowledge that constructed gender inequality as a measurable social problem amenable change through social policy. their bureau of information kept country statistics on women’s employment, education and activities. in 1909 they asked national councils to report on legal inequalities in their respective countries and in 1912 published a report documenting gender inequality in seventeen countries (berkovitch, 1999, p. 3; international council of women., 1912). as berkovitch observes, “using standardized measures, the status of women is compared to that of men, and the gap that is found (and it always is) is defined as discrimination considered to be a social problem and treated as an injustice to be rectified and corrected through state action and state policy” (berkovitch, 1999, p.3). thus, european and us women’s organizations struggled for inclusion in global government by producing data and ranking countries in terms of women’s freedom. they promoted international standards on women’s status. within development discourse feminist scholars emphasized how improving women’s educational, health and economic status would have positive outcomes for both child well-being and economic growth, thus instrumentalizing women’s well-being as contributing to elite governmental goals (boserup, 1970). women’s advocates within the un system won resources for the field of “women and development” which constructed women as mothers and marginalized workers and made “third world women” a particular object of concern (kabeer, 1994; mohanty, 1991). international women’s organizations advocated for women within a developmentality that rationalized international bodies’ governmental interventions in distant economies and populations because it would help them develop toward the model of wealthy countries. gendered knowledge of populations contributed to a global governmentality which divided the globe according to “advanced” civilizations where women enjoyed studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 56 carol harrington political equality and nurtured small healthy families and “under-developed” civilizations where women had more children than they could adequately nurture and suffered because of such cultural norms as arranged marriage and polygamy. throughout the twentieth century, british and north american feminist arguments for women’s rights depended upon liberal civilizational discourse, contrasting the patriarchal cultures of the east with the relative gender egalitarianism of the west and equating gender equality with modernization and progress. for example, an influential book in defining british and us images of women in the colonies, katherine mayo’s mother india (1927), made child marriage in india a political issue in britain and led to the child marriage restraint act, 1929 (liddle & rai, 1998, p. 503). as liddle and rai point out, while focusing on the abuse of women and girls mayo’s argument locates the causes of this abuse in the backward culture typical of colonised people, drawing parallels between indians and filipinos in their cultural brutality and need for government by a superior civilization (mayo was also author of isles of fear: the truth about the phillippines, published in 1925). mayo presents the solution to indian women’s oppression in continued british rule, while ignoring indigenous women’s liberation campaigns against such abuse and the abuse of indian women by british men. mayo’s work influenced the anglo-american stereotype of the abused eastern, or third world woman in need of rescue, which has continued to shape british and american feminist discourse. for example, liddle and rai point out that such a classic feminist text as mary daly’s gyn/ecology: the metaethics of radical feminism (daly, 1978) actually uses mayo as a source about gender customs in india (liddle & rai, 1998, pp. 495–520). along similar lines, jo doezema analysed discourses produced by the coalition against trafficking of women showing that position of “third world woman” in such discourse is innocent victim of brutal patriarchal cultures (doezema, 2001, pp. 16–38). empowerment discourse provided an important point of intersection between women’s movement organizations and distant donors and governmental actors. barbara cruickshank (1999) wrote about welfare state social policy that aimed to empower women victims of male violence imagined as helpless and in need of state intervention in their day to day lives. she argued that liberal governmentality produced empowerment as a rationale for governing free individuals by constructing particular kinds of people, such as female victims, as unfree. critical work on empowerment has highlighted how it allows distant authorities to micro-manage the lives and political struggles of individuals in target populations. empowerment individualizes political problems such as poor health or exposure to violence and disease (finn & sarangi, 2008). gender empowerment discourse also reinscribes global civilizational hierarchy. ilcan and phillips (2010) critiqued the millennium development goals for reformulating and standardizing political priorities, including how to measure “gender empowerment.” the “gender empowerment index” (gem) purports to measure women’s influence in economic and political studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational women’s movements 57 life and produces country rankings, concerning itself with “agency” rather than “well-being” (klasen, 2006, p. 257). the value given to income in construction of the gem makes wealthy countries likely to score high and poor countries likely to score low (klasen, 2006, p. 258). thus, the index provides quantitative confirmation of a civilizational hierarchy whereby men from wealthy countries treat “their” women better and thus prove their superiority. women’s organizations, advanced liberal governmentality and global knowledge networks the language of empowerment frequently characterizes programs based in “advanced governmentality”. technologies of agency and responsibilization provide important themes of advanced liberal governmentality. scholars developed theories of advanced liberalism in analysis of late twentieth century transformations in welfare state policies which sought to “responsibilize” and “empower” people to take care of their own health, education and well-being. according to dean (2009), “technologies of agency” engage the governed in monitoring and correcting their own conduct, treating them as responsible agents capable of meeting governmental norms and targets once provided with appropriate information and training. advanced liberal global governmentalities seek to responsibilize and empower developing countries to find solutions to their own economic problems. donor states and organizations recast their relationship with aid recipients as “partnerships” whereby aid projects and priorities would be decided upon by the communities they sought to assist (abrahamsen, 2004). donors also sought to work with ngos “on the ground” rather than through state agencies (musto, 2008, pp. 9–10). private actors, businesses and ngos, rather than states, became cast as the drivers of development (fowler, 2000, p. 2). following the end of the cold war changes in the regulation of international markets created an environment more favourable for ngos to receive funding from distant donors (pinter 2001, p. 198). advanced liberal governmentality favours networks and short term contracts as the best formations for governmental interventions at a distance. government increasingly takes place through networks of state, international governmental organizations (igos, for example the world bank, imf, united nations) and ngos, the latter including ngos with social movement links. networks often exist as a series of contracted partnerships between donors, transnational ngos and community based ngos. such networks produce and circulate information, theories and techniques of government. a governmental program, such as a rape crisis centre, at any given location may depend on the activity of both local and transnational feminist groups, human rights and humanitarian ngos, local government, state institutions, philanthropic foundations, corporate donors and international organizations. such networks furnish global governmental actors with data on women and techniques for “empowering women” at various locations. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 58 carol harrington new practices of contracting women’s ngos to deliver services and provide gender policy advice fuelled a late twentieth century “ngo boom” among women’s organizations (alvarez, 2009, p. 175). sonia alvarez (2009) argues that the resources for research and communications provided by international donors had allowed feminism to develop from a movement on the streets to an authoritative governmental discourse because ngos could afford to conduct and disseminate research on women’s social conditions. as the vast constellation of knowledge products generated by ngos wind their way through feminisms’ multi-layered political-communicative webs, they also often cross over into other (overlapping) networks of social movements, civil society organizations, and social and political institutions. feminisms’ discursive “baggage” thus sometimes travels “unaccompanied,” so to speak. (alvarez, 2009, p. 178) scholars of human rights ngos have noted that transnational movements’ influence occurs through a politics of information fuelled by professional ngo research (ron, ramos, & rodgers, 2005). this politics of information involves not simply collecting and disseminating data and narratives but also theories and analysis. furthermore, ngos frequently produce and disseminate techniques of government in the form of training materials and models of service provision. from a governmentality perspective, women’s organizations participate in a global knowledge network made up of a “fluid configuration[s] of organizations, institutions, groups and people” concerned with gendered human conduct (ilcan & phillips 2008, pp. 713-714). women’s movement based ngos provide significant nodal points in this network because of their capacity to produce and disseminate knowledge of women and theories of gender (alvarez, 2009, p. 177). global knowledge network theory develops governmentality theory to emphasize how mobile knowledge, expertise and governmental techniques construct forms of personhood that facilitate the government of distant populations. visions of appropriate forms of personhood provide points of intersection between contentious actors at a given location and distant authorities seeking to influence that location. thus, global knowledge networks emerge within broader governmental configurations around shared teleologies, values, and practices concerning appropriate forms of personhood. these networks facilitate movement of knowledge, expertise, and governmental techniques around the globe in efforts to foster particular habits, conduct, and self-understandings. global security and female empowerment feminist discourse and knowledge travels alongside the most coercive manifestations of global governmentality. as dean observed, although liberal governmentality developed as a critique of authoritarian government it does not exclude coercive governmental techniques; liberal security practices often studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational women’s movements 59 have a simultaneous coercive and capacitating dimension (dean, 2002, p. 42). post cold war un peacekeeping practices exemplify this dimension of advanced liberal global governmentality. the un has become more hands-on in monitoring and co-ordinating negotiated peace settlements, supervision of post-conflict administrative structures, constitutional, judicial and electoral reforms, elections, economic reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, monitoring of human rights and implementation of refugee return programs. thus, questions formerly categorized as to do with development have become security issues and underdevelopment conceptualized as a security risk. these advanced liberal security practices construct security as dependent upon liberal markets and constitutional models (duffield, 2001; gaer, 2003; jaeger, 2010; richmond, 2003). within liberal security rationality the deployment of armed force anywhere on the globe can be justified by the need to secure human rights and humanitarian goals, including the bureaucracies and ngo networks required to monitor such goals. the un sanctions armed forces in the form of military personnel, police and private security contractors. such operations routinely seek links with local women’s organizations and include an institutional nod to gender expertise in the form of under resourced gender officers or focal points (harris & goldsmith, 2010; olsson, 2001; ospina, 2006; puechguirbal, 2003). violence against women forms a significant theme in post-cold war peacekeeping and democracy-building discourse. narratives of violence against women and other atrocities justify military interventions to protect women from violent men who adhere to backward patriarchal cultures and routinely violate human rights (hunt, 2006; sagan, 2010). peacekeeper training materials represent women in post conflict zones as likely traumatized by sexual violence (dpko, 2002; harrington, 2006). the most significant efforts to document violence against women globally developed alongside new forms of peacekeeping and international justice (buss, 2007; harrington, 2010a, pp. 124-127). in december 1992, the security council declared itself “appalled by reports of the massive, organized and systematic detention and rape of women, in particular muslim women, in bosnia and herzegovina” and these reports formed part of the case for intervention (resolution 798). in 1994 the un general assembly appointed a special rapporteur on gender based violence began producing information on violence against women around the globe (pietilä and vickers, 1996, pp.142-145; united nations 1993, 1994, 1996a; 1996b, 1996c, unhcr 1993). regional powers now monitor violence against women in their sphere of influence, for example australian and new zealand police run domestic violence programs for police from tonga, samoa, the cook islands and kiribati (ppdvp 2010; afp 2010). authoritative knowledge of violence against women remains the province of feminist discourse and women’s organizations. the earliest women’s movements in europe and the us produced narratives of marital violence and other violations of female bodily integrity (trumble, 2004). feminists argued that women had a special interest in peace because of wartime sexual studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 60 carol harrington violence (ogden & sargant, 1915). quantification of violence against women developed in the 1970s and 1980s as part of resurgent feminist activism on the issue (gavey, 2005). feminist efforts at quantifying violence against women linked with human rights efforts at documenting torture and analysis of bodily violation as psychological trauma (harrington, 2010b, pp. 98-117). feminist knowledge provided numbers and narratives that made sense of military intervention and increased international policing. the un adopted the slogan the power to empower which casts female peacekeeping security personal, including soldiers and police, as agents of empowerment of women in countries subjected to international military intervention in the name of liberal peace and democracy. un publicity materials cast female peacekeepers as role models for women in postconflict situations (e.g. united nations 2010, 2009). the slogan power to empower has even been worked into a song for un peacekeepers, employing social movement practices of building unity through song (united nations police division female global effort, 2011). the un seeks to connect peacekeeping to feminism through representing peacekeeping policewomen as a manifestation of “female global effort.” publicity materials emphasize un policing as empowering to women in countries where the un deploys armed force. oddly, the un facebook page publicity about activities of female police represent their performance of mundane disciplinary activities such as arresting female drunk drivers, while a bbc documentary following female peacekeepers in sierra leone showed them harassing marijuana smoking homeless teenagers (bbc, 2007; united nations police division female global effort, 2011). conclusion while the social movement lens has focused more upon resistant political processes than governmentality research, global knowledge network theory provides a fuller account of transnational feminist networks’ impact on global politics. the power of international women’s organizations lies in production and dissemination of knowledge and techniques for the government of women as a cross border population category. development and global security, as major post-colonial fields of knowledge and power, have engaged with knowledge of female poverty and insecurity produced by internationally networked women’s organizations. women’s movements originating in europe and north america during the nineteenth century engaged in calculative practices from their foundations. however, measures of gender empowerment and other liberal calculative practices that rank or score states according to gender equality typically conform to global hierarchies that rank europe and north america as models for the rest of the world to emulate. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 1, 2013 transnational women’s movements 61 references abrahamsen, r. 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(1993). economic and social council. commission on human rights. rape and abuse of women in the territory of the former yugoslavia. report of the secretary general. e./cn.4/1994/5. united nations general assembly resolution. (1993). declaration on the elimination of violence against women. a/res/48/104. 85th plenary meeting, 20 december. retrieved from http:// www.un.org/documents/ga/res/48/a48r104.htm united nations security council. resolution 798. 1992. adopted by the security council at its 3150th meeting on 18 december 1992. s/res/798 retrieved from http://daccess-dds-ny. un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n92/828/82/img/n9282882.pdf?openelement zanotti, l. (2011). governing disorder: un peace operations, international security, and democratization in the post-cold war era. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press. correspondence address: stef jansen, social anthropology, university of manchester, manchester m13 9pl, united kingdom. tel.: +44 (0) 161 275 3993, email: stef.jansen@manchester. ac.uk issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 2, 229-243, 2013 if reconciliation is the answer, are we asking the right questions? stef jansen university of manchester, united kingdom abstract this article critically examines the normative, liberal assumptions that most frequently underlie scholarly, activist, and policy calls for reconciliation in bosnia and herzegovina. rather than measuring how reconciliation is progressing, i suggest we ask ourselves whose reconciliation is being desired here: by whom, for whom, and for what? which important alternative questions remain unasked and which latent answers are ignored or downplayed in the process? particular attention is paid to the ways in which liberal reconciliation discourse tends to depoliticize questions of justice. introduction the concerns most frequently underlying scholarly, activist, and policy approaches to justice in bosnia and herzegovina (bih) presume a normative, liberal notion of inter-national reconciliation: “how to reconcile people in bih?” or, “how is reconciliation in bih advancing?” the urgency with which such concerns are formulated, and their visibility in domestic and outside public spheres, reflect programmatic and funding priorities of foreign intervention. ever since i began ethnographic research in the post-yugoslav states in 1996—first in serbia, then in croatia, and then in bih, where most of my work has been conducted during the last decade—i have felt uncomfortable with these priorities, even if i have sometimes actively taken part in initiatives that could be classified as reconciliation work. it is not just that the ways in which reconciliation is promoted demand the downplaying of pain, anger and desire for retribution in ways i find hard to swallow, but i have always sensed that this approach also constitutes a particular problematic studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 230 stef jansen and depoliticizing liberal political project. thus, while i sympathize with the sincere and noble intentions of many people who are working towards international reconciliation—and while i sometimes join them in their efforts—i have long felt uneasy with the long-term implications i discerned for the politics of justice in bih and beyond. as the words “felt” and “sensed” above indicate, my engagement with these questions remained on a largely unarticulated level. first, i cannot claim expertise on justice or reconciliation, and my ethnographic investigations— on antinationalism, on home-making and displacement, on remembering and forgetting after violence, on masculinity, on borders, and on statecraft—have never focussed explicitly on either. neither can i properly claim to speak for people in the post-yugoslav states, or even in bih when it comes to questions of justice. in fact, i can state confidently that very few people in the region and very few of my research participants share my interest in the explicitly political dimension of justice, nor in my personal-political belief that a juster future would be served by active politicization and a reinvigoration of ideological debate. this brings me to the second reason why i have not articulated such concerns explicitly before: politics [politika], as we shall see, has an extremely bad name in the region and any association with it is likely to be experienced as the kiss of death for any activist effort towards a better future, including projects seeking to foster inter-national reconciliation. in such a context, perhaps an insistence on re-politicization would do more damage than good. in any case, the seething resentment any mention of politics in bih elicits is such that one wonders if it is at all possible to salvage anything from the term after disentangling it from its connotation of a sleazy universe of cynical, corrupted and self-interested power games. while i have never tackled justice as a central concern in my research or writings, my ethnographic studies have always touched upon questions of justice, partly precisely because of my commitment to foreground domestic and global political dimensions. in this article,1 i attempt to systematize retrospectively some reflections on justice arising from that research, especially my work on experiences of home-making and return on both sides of the inter-entity boundary line in north-east bih (20002001). i also try to learn from my activist engagements in dialogue projects, meetings and trainings in the post-yugoslav “civil sector” and from my social interactions and exposure to the media as someone who spends much of his life—workwise and otherwise—in the bih capital sarajevo. without denying the value and urgency of many efforts to foster “reconciliation,” my main objective is to draw attention to negative feedback effects they may entail and to open up questions of justice beyond their particular focus. so, rather than presenting conclusions drawn from a specific research project, i try to ask better and perhaps much more vexing questions with regard to justice in bih. rather than measuring the progress of reconciliation in bih, i suggest we ask ourselves whose reconciliation is being desired here: by whom, for whom, and for what. this reformulation then leads me to discern a tentative route to a renewal of debates over the politics of justice. at the studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 if reconciliation is the answer 231 core of my effort lies this provocative and hopefully productive question: if reconciliation is the answer, are we asking the right questions? which important alternative questions remain unasked and which latent answers are ignored or downplayed in the process? defining the “sides” of reconciliation if to reconcile means “to render no longer opposed” (borneman, 2002, p. 281), it is important to point out that the currently dominant liberal approaches to reconciliation in bih as well as elsewhere are usually normative. they start from the presupposition that reconciliation is by definition beneficial for all involved. taking a step back implies asking why dissolving opposition is considered desirable. the beneficial character of reconciliation, then, is not accepted as self-evident. instead, it requires argument and we should try to understand the basis on which people argue for it. next, if and where it is considered desirable, the question is which opposition should be considered as the key one to be dissolved. if people argue for reconciliation in a certain context, if they work towards the dissolution of an opposition, this always implies a political exercise of defining the opposing “sides.” this means it can have rather diverse implications, depending on who advocates it and for what ends. if we look at it this way, it is important to remind ourselves that reconciliation has actually been a major priority for post-yugoslav nationalist elites since the late 1980s. their focus was squarely on the intra-national level. often aimed at dissolving oppositions between fellow-nationals associated with opposed ideologies in world war ii, these efforts effectively amounted to programmes of national homogenization. they can be understood as attempts to erase antagonisms that exist within national groups. as is well-documented, all those intra-national reconciliation efforts have served to exacerbate international relations—indeed, they became part of the 1990s wars. after those wars inter-national reconciliation became a major preoccupation for the foreign intervention agencies in bih, whose funding and support was important to its promotion. in their approach, the different sides that needed to be rendered no longer opposed were conceived of as nations. notwithstanding the tendency of nationalist elites to use this matrix, and despite the noble intentions of many of those working for reconciliation, this reductionist definition of the sides in the war remains disputable. its suggestion of symmetry fails to account for the fact that while two of the main sides explicitly proclaimed themselves, and exclusively functioned, as ethnonational (serbian and croatian) collectives, the third included ethnonational (bosniak) dimensions, but also incorporative bih ones.2 moreover, reducing the war in bih to a simple three-way fight among bosniaks, serbs and croats obscures the fact that the violence encompassed, for example, a scramble for resources between party political elites from within and from outside bih, and an opportunity for looters and other businessmen. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 232 stef jansen it neglects the fact that the war was to a large extent the crystallisation of a conflict over state formation and citizenship—namely, over whether bih should exist as a polity or not, and how its inhabitants should be represented institutionally. it clouds vast power differentials, diverging war aims and legitimacy claims of different orders (bougarel, 1996). unsurprisingly, as in so many other conflicts, political party elites sought to represent themselves as organically encompassing “their” respective undivided nations (although, as mentioned, not entirely symmetrically), and these efforts did have real effects. studying such elite self-representations and their relative resonance amongst the population is important to understand the course of the violence, yet reproducing them by speaking simply of a “war between bosniaks, serbs and croats” precludes such understanding: such a “groupist” (brubaker, 2002) imposition of an exclusively national matrix on the war is itself a depoliticising intervention pretending to name neutrally existing categories. this has implications for reconciliation discourse too. the predominantly national definition of the “sides” in liberal reconciliation discourse in bih reinforces a version of history, both wartime and pre-war, that is itself nationalist (jansen, 2003, 2005). underplaying the complexities of belonging, including national belonging, in the region, it disambiguates history into discrete collective actors—nations—who fell out with each other in the 1990s and must now be ushered towards a renewal of harmonious neighbourly relations in a mosaic-like “national order of things” (jansen, 2002; malkki, 1995). national belonging is, and has long been, important to many people in bih, but to accept such a reductionist definition of sides in an identitarian matrix would represent the ultimate crown on the nationalist hegemonizing projects of the 1990s. when is an encounter a reconciliation, and for whom? during the first post-war decade, the ambitions of inter-national reconciliation efforts in bih were modest by necessity. with the 1990s conflict, which had radically unmixed the population in terms of nationality, very real national boundaries had emerged even for those who had not previously considered them to be of determining significance. indeed, people had come to be understood as nationals first, to a high degree and in many contexts, and the relationships between those of different nationalities now required navigation of socially-sanctioned segregation and often, former frontlines. reconciliation efforts such as those promoted by the foreign intervention agencies in divided bih thus usually simply attempted to bring about some degree of rapprochement between people of different nationalities. reconciling nations (since that is how the sides were conceived) concretely required encounters between persons defined as nationals, but the significance of national divisions had intensified so much that this was not self-evident for most people in most parts of this now deeply segregated polity. still, in one way or another even relatively shortly after the war, hundreds of thousands studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 if reconciliation is the answer 233 of people in bih engaged in some inter-national encounters, in everyday life and through initial steps towards return and repossession. yet, did they see such interactions as moral acts in a reconciliation process? the liberal and normative view dominant in most foreign scholarly and geopolitical-humanitarian discourses on bih during the first post-war decade tended to consider inter-national encounters—the crossing of boundaries between presumably clearly demarcated groups—to be morally commendable acts. far from rendering the different sides no longer opposed, most initiatives of inter-national reconciliation were thus aimed at merely allowing people to cross the boundaries between those “sides” and thereby rendering them slightly less actively opposed as nationals. hence, reconciliation was framed in a mosaic model, which—like liberal multiculturalism—tended to solidify national-cultural dividing lines and to represent them as discrete at the expense of other differences and struggles. as we saw, the idea then, was to return the conflicting “sides” to their presumed pre-war status of coexisting “peoples.” in this framework, inter-national interactions were portrayed as more desirable than intra-national ones—and, as every non-governmental organization (ngo) worker in bih knows, a project proposal that included beneficiaries with different nationalities was on average much more likely to attract foreign funding than one that did not. there were, of course, rather obvious reasons for this, and it is not my intention here to criticise such funding prioritizations. what i aim to highlight is that inter-national encounters came to be seen as a vanguard for reconciliation in the foreign gaze. but what about the people engaging in them? remembered mundane pre-war inter-national encounters— if they had been experienced as such at all—had normally not been selfconsciously reconciliatory acts but practical dimensions of everyday life. this has implications for the post-war situation too, since the sides engaged in the violence cannot be simply nationally defined and for some people— predominantly in a few larger cities—post-war inter-national interaction was simply a continuation of everyday practice that had not disappeared during the 1990s, although it had been drastically reduced due to war-related population movements. for them, radical changes in context had led others to impose the national matrix onto life practices they still considered to be oblivious to it. for example, it was not uncommon for persons who before the war married someone who did not share their family’s national background to emphasise that their marriage had apparently become “mixed” during the 1990s. indeed, as we shall see below, the focus on the special bridging value of inter-national encounters after the war in bih glossed over the way in which other-than-national differences were sometimes more difficult to bridge (and, apparently, bridging them was considered less urgent anyway). but even in other cases, where encounters did involve crossing former frontlines (for example, in initiatives for the return of displaced persons), were they necessarily experienced as geared toward reconciliation? i found that many people in bih treated inter-national reconciliation first of all as a western-imposed idea. regardless of their particular positionings, even studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 234 stef jansen many of those who argued in favour of reconciliation believed it should be preceded by apologies, punishment and compensation. some, of course, rejected reconciliation altogether. others incorporated it in an effort to avoid discussions of wartime responsibility. in such a context, can reconciliation be legitimized by invoking a higher goal such as bih, euro-atlantic integration, god or peace (see brudholm, 2006)? should we not acknowledge instead that, from the perspective of those who would be reconciled, the desirability of reconciliation did not emerge as a fact but as an open question? importantly such different views should not be reduced simplistically to people’s background in national “sides”, but must be seen in terms of possible futures too. from my research it emerged in the first decade after the 1990s war that, the main preoccupations for most people in bih were perhaps best summarized as justice and survival [preživljavanje]. yet for many, including myself, justice is rather difficult to pin down, even when specifically related to the post-war situation in bih. justice may concern judiciary procedures leading to punishment, retribution, restitution and compensation, but it may also evoke much broader notions of utopian balance and fullness. ultimately, and importantly, i suggest that to many people who lived through the war in bih, justice would be a world, a life, a history, in which the war had not happened. in any case, because justice was both hard to define and since most people considered its establishment out of their reach, everyday practice largely focused on securing an immediate future. even people who explicitly agitated for justice often tended to formulate their demands in relatively concrete and locally-specific ways, far removed from the dizzy heights of reconciliation (e.g. delpla, 2010; helms, 2010). as i have argued elsewhere (jansen, 2008, 2013), i have found that the object of hope for many ordinary people was a “normal life.” of course, past “normal lives” (a key reference point) had included inter-national coexistence, but with regard to hopes for the future this aspect was much less prominent. so, if people now associated with opposing national “sides” met, why would they define this as an example of a crossing of national boundaries in a mosaic that was good in and by itself? why would they reinterpret previous interactions as such? previously, life with people who were positioned differently with regard to nationality had been just one part of “normal life”, and it was that normal life which featured as their main object of desire. after the war, insofar as crossing former frontlines might further the continuation or, more frequently, the re-establishment of some dimensions of “normal life” for themselves and their households, some were prepared to engage in such encounters. reconciliation, then, seemed to appear on people’s horizon if at all, not as a priority but as a side effect of a desire for reducing “abnormal” precariousness. some embraced this potential, some rejected it, and most never felt called upon to acknowledge it, preoccupied as they were with what they considered the far more pressing concerns of reestablishing a degree of “normal life.” studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 if reconciliation is the answer 235 which socially sanctioned positionings allow mutual recognition? with such evocations of “normal life” as the common ground on which many cross-frontline encounters existed, how can people find common ground to engage with each other? i ask this not in a metaphysical way, but as a very practical question that i believe is relevant to any attempts to facilitate rapprochement between ordinary people. reconciliation projects in the abrahamic tradition (derrida, 1999) are grounded in the assumption that the various sides share equal and inalienable humanity. they require that those who seek reconciliation mutually recognize each other as full and worthy human beings. as derrida points out, this approach is rooted in the religious traditions that share abraham as a key figure (judaism, christianity and islam), in which all people are ultimately equal before god. its impact, however, goes far beyond the religious domain. early after the 1990s war in bih, i found that such a universal humanistic framework underpinned much antinationalist activism and religious and non-religious efforts to restore some form of rapprochement and coexistence. it underpinned theoretical writings; it structured possible meetings, summer schools, and campaigns, and it ran through the expression with which post-war encounters across former frontlines were often justified on the most elementary level: we are all people! yet people do not engage with each other based on some abstract common humanity. any concrete form of reconciliation, however we understand it, requires encounters on the ground between actual persons. and on that practical level, encounters across former frontlines, regardless of whether they are seen as reconciliatory efforts by those involved, necessarily rely on mutual recognition between persons of specific social positionings. this implies that we must expect stark differences between such encounters: for example, persons associated with the different sides of the war could meet as young daughters from urban middle-class families at a sarajevo art exhibition, or as middle-aged, unemployed fathers who trade pirate cds on the arizona market in north bih. as has been pointed out, gender and kinship are crucial here (focaal, 2010; helms, 2007). people establish some degree of mutual recognition not as unmarked human beings, but for example, as fathers who experience similar difficulties in taking responsibility for their families. common humanity is thus not lived as an abstract principle, but it is given specific, socially-sanctioned (here: patriarchal) shapes in particular contexts. this is not only relevant to actual encounters between persons but also on the more general level of people’s attitudes towards imagined others, and therefore, of broader discourses of reconciliation. social positionings also channelled the ways in which people did or did not express some degree of empathy during the early post-war years, when the freshness of war suffering and related tensions made concrete encounters less likely for most. for example, during my research on both sides of the inter-entity boundary line in north-east bih, many women expressed a degree of empathy for their counterparts associated with the enemy army. while retaining physical studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 236 stef jansen distance, they established a degree of mutual recognition as mothers, pointing out that they understood the suffering of “their” mothers too. for men who had fought in the conflict, one possible post-war ground for mutual recognition could be a reconstruction of their war experience as lack of choice in extraordinary circumstances, where men, especially as fathers, were forced to take responsibility to protect their families (bašić, 2004). in any case, we cannot expect people to simply meet as human being x and human being y; they are always multiply positioned persons. thus, from the perspective of reconciliation efforts, one may ask: which socially-sanctioned subject positions (in terms of gender, class, urban/rural divisions, etc.) allow people to engage in mutual recognition across former frontlines? and which ones are more likely than other ones to do so in a just manner? reconciliation, restoration and emancipation the fact that mutual recognition requires individuals to be socially positioned, together with the power of the notion of “normal life”, provide a glimpse of the particular social order that such encounters presupposed. men and women establishing mutual recognition through reference to patriarchal kinship thus may reinforce existing social patterns of inequality. from my observations, it emerges that the “shared presents” that borneman (2002, p. 291) considers central to successful reconciliation, can often be rather closed, and display little tendency for transformation. i do not suggest that they were always conservative, nor that all reconciliation efforts must intrinsically be so, but, if a politics of justice is to be developed, it seems to me that this is a challenge that needs to be addressed. while borneman (2002) argues that these “shared presents” should acknowledge “the heterogeneity of life projects” and explore “new experiences of sociality” (p. 291), we should be open to the possibility that they more frequently reinforce existing inequalities in terms of gender, class, urban/rural differences, among others. while aiming to overcome war-related oppositions, they may actually strengthen other inequalities and divisions. some studies of how this works in gendered terms are included in a special issue of the journal focaal (2010). another example is the much-documented tendency amongst many people in post-yugoslav cities to compare the way of life of their prewar fellow-citizens of different nationalities positively with the “primitivism” of their fellow-nationals who moved into the cities during and after the war. here, an expression of respect for national others (i.e. a reduction of national antagonism) is achieved through negative judgments of co-nationals from villages (i.e. a reinforcement of urban/rural antagonism). perhaps the conservative potential of reconciliation discourse is not so surprising. after all, in english at least, the very term reconciliation indicates a restorative movement, a reconstruction of a past situation. the term pomirenje in bih too evokes peaceful acceptance rather than mobilization or action. reconciliation projects in other parts of the world (such as guatemala studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 if reconciliation is the answer 237 or cyprus), similarly have been found to confirm existing social patterns that crosscut the sides involved. the most famous example, the south african truth and reconciliation commission, which is often praised for its facilitation of a transition from apartheid to a democratic south africa without recourse to revenge, has been criticized for leaving the structures of socio-economic and gender inequality that underlay apartheid relatively untouched (e.g. feldman, 2002; ross, 2003; wilson, 2001). this introduces a pressing question for emancipatory understandings of politics of justice: which social practices and relations of inequality are consolidated by particular definitions of sides to be reconciled? sides can be constituted as claim-making parties in a struggle over material and other resources, and the way they are configured and legitimized in a particular set-up is an important dimension of justice with wide-ranging implications. here i suggest a potentially productive route of scholarly investigation is indicated by the feminist critical theorist nancy fraser (2007). in her work on the political philosophy of justice, spanning over two decades, fraser traces particular intersections of, and tensions between, claims for recognition, for redistribution, and most recently, for representation. it seems to me that a fruitful encounter could be constructed between such writings and the study of post-war bih, in a context in which the preoccupation with ethnonational identity privileges questions of recognition and representation to a large extent. the resulting relative absence of questions of redistribution from both domestic and foreign policy-making, public discourse, and scholarly work is, i believe, a particularly sharp indication of how the insistence on the identitarian matrix renders invisible other inequalities. interestingly, i have found in my research on bih that questions and answers about justice do not always match in expected ways. to put it schematically, when asking questions focused on issues of recognition, one is likely to get answers that emphasise maldistribution as much as misrecognition. and, when asking about distribution, people are likely to launch into a litany that targets misrecognition as much as it does maldistribution. both dimensions, then, are present and important in people’s concerns. yet, domestic and foreign dominant discourses strongly favour the voicing of recognition-related issues, and there is virtually no public register available that facilitates the reasoned articulation of concerns with maldistribution, let alone the manner in which they intersect with questions of recognition and representation. here, angry and cynical anti-political dismissals tend to be as good as can be expected. in this respect, i think, scholars undertaking empirical social scientific research in bih may learn from developments and debates in the political philosophy of justice, and in return, their insights may contribute to the difficult task of articulating an emancipatory politics of justice in a world marked by globalizing, neoliberalizing trends. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 238 stef jansen reconciliation, politics and the future the generally short-lived and partial cross-frontline encounters i have observed in the first post-war decade in bih relied not only on the consolidation of certain existing social patterns, but they also tended to display a relative absence of discussions of politics. for those concerned with reconciliation, this consensual silencing, in line with the liberal multiculturalist desire to flatten out any social antagonism that cannot be understood as “cultural” (žižek, 1997), begs the question to what extent such meetings may be developed into less superficial bonds. the examples mentioned earlier, of men and women finding a degree of mutual recognition in terms of fatherhood and motherhood, not only involve deeply gendered notions of common humanity, but both also rest on a representation of the war as a catastrophe that suddenly and violently overcame people. ordinary people, in this view, were only pawns in a cynical struggle for power and wealth by politicians, who carry exclusive responsibility for the war. this perspective seemed overwhelmingly dominant in my observations, and it is of course supported by quite a lot of historical documentation. steps towards mutual recognition based on such a shared view were perhaps more dependent on what was not said than on what was said. i have found that an important way to avoid controversial issues was to emphasise precisely the extraordinariness of wartime, contrasting it with the “normal life” one recalled from before the war. in actual encounters across former frontlines, matters of wartime responsibility, justice and a collective future were avoided, and mutual recognition was often established on a shared aversion of politika. for most people in bih, the word politika expresses an almost universal disgust with the corruption and cynical hunger for power of individual politicians (for an ethnographic discussion of how the term functions in everyday contexts in bih, see e.g. kolind, 2008). i do not claim that this is unique to bih. nor, unfortunately, do i think that its depiction of the actual behaviour of many politicians is far off the mark as a diagnosis in this country or in many others. yet what may be particular to bih is the extreme difficulty of discerning any alternative conceptions of politics, let alone any attempts to reclaim political debate as something that transcends self-interested machinations. one could say that the figure of politika has absorbed politics in its entirety. this has serious implications for reconciliation efforts, and indeed for any other forms of transformatory action. first, it hinders mobilization, as the visceral rejection of politika spills over into many other collective initiatives. there is widespread suspicion that many participants in the “civil sector,” including those engaged in efforts to foster reconciliation, are themselves irredeemably contaminated by politika. unfortunately, the occasional emergence of evidence of self-interested collusions between major ngo players and leading politicians does little to convince people of the opposite. other activists find themselves struggling to motivate people to engage in any social activity that goes beyond the realm studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 if reconciliation is the answer 239 of their own family. no doubt this is difficult anywhere, but the levels of cynicism in bih today appear to make it particularly challenging to persuade people to contribute to organized socio-political activity for a common good, however it is defined. second, in addition to distancing the speaker from immorality, greed, and lack of scruples, the blanket use of the term politika seems to imply something else too. it evokes some kind of pandora’s box containing knowledge, feelings, practices, and processes that are seen to be crucial to the suffering of the last two decades but that have to be boxed up in order to attain a sufficient degree of mutual recognition to even start talking across former frontlines. since there is broad consensus amongst domestic and foreign actors that this box must remain closed at any price, one cannot address many issues that are, by general agreement, crucial to any understanding of the war as well as to any possible improvement. i believe that we must ask ourselves if this pattern does not represent a risk for many activities that work towards some form of rapprochement and reconciliation. politika is blamed for the outbreak of war, for all the suffering it brought, for the fact that things are not getting any better and for the feeling that there are no signs that “normal life” is about to re-emerge. in most people’s view, politika is represented as the source of all evil: it has caused everything that is wrong in bih today. in response, many of the efforts to promote reconciliation—or at least some degree of rapprochement, coexistence, or reduction of tensions— rely on mutual recognition precisely through a shared aversion to politika and through an unspoken agreement to silence anything deemed political. while this represents a common distancing from the filthy machinations of politicians, it also entails a much more incisive and far-going process of depoliticization. yet how can a situation that is widely seen to be caused by politics, be overcome or even improved without recourse to politics? i suggest we can detect processes of depoliticization of two different orders. the first concerns the reach and form of administration over the territory of bih. we could call this its anatomy of government. the current institutional arrangement, a foreign-supervised and—enforced labyrinth of nationally organized collective representation, is considered to be unsatisfactory by virtually everyone in bih. in institutional terms, some would like to see more decentralization or separation (in the national key), whereas others would like to see the downgrading or dismantling of war-produced sub-polities (entities and cantons). this stalemate has characterized the existence of bih since the 1995 signing of the us-brokered dayton agreement. reconciliation initiatives tend to sweep such issues under the carpet as part of politika, leaving untouched glaring disagreements between people associated with different sides.” as mentioned earlier, at the most basic level opposing sides in the war crystallized around the question of the very existence of a bih polity and on the modalities of its citizenship regime. wartime lives in contexts marked by their differential implementation structured people’s contrasting experiences of that period and their views of the legitimacy of war aims and actions. unlike the situation in south africa, for example, there is no broad studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 240 stef jansen agreement over the relevant polity unit in bih reconciliation initiatives, and this complicates the raising of key questions of wartime responsibility, legitimacy, and the desired future anatomy of government in bih. this silencing is understandable: if a topic associated with the anatomy of government in bih is addressed, it could result in heated disputes on wartime responsibility and legitimacy, and ultimately, deadlock along national or nonnational lines (jansen, 2007). so this may be counterproductive for activist purposes. moreover, the anatomy of government gets plenty of airtime in the largely separate public spheres in bih. politicians regularly launch monologues about it, sometimes addressing opponents, but usually seeking legitimacy from amongst “their own.” as many analysts have pointed out, the ethnopolitical rhetoric that permeates bih is largely existential: it represents questions of government as questions of national survival (mujkić, 2007). ideologically bare, such monologues are organized almost exclusively within the identitarian matrix, and in this configuration it is extremely difficult to develop an alternative political register for the articulation of questions of the anatomy of government. yet if today, the legitimacy of bih’s anatomy of government is still a matter of dispute, does not this division, rather than a “groupist” model of competing nations, form the key antagonism to be addressed by reconciliation efforts? if so, how can one even begin to think of how to render those sides no longer opposed? this brings us to the second order of depoliticization that, in my view, bedevils reconciliation efforts. authors like borneman (2002), who see a remedy in rendering different sides no longer opposed, may interpret the “pandora-boxing” of politics as a grassroots replication of titoist top-down selective silencing of world war ii memories, so often blamed for the outbreak of 1990s violence. more important than this possible similarity, in my view, is a radical difference. yugoslav socialist reconstruction after world war ii was an integral part of a revolutionary project of social transformation. practical collective tasks of building a new society were legitimized, often through authoritarian means, with regard not to purity, tradition, and continuity (as in the current nationalist discourses), nor to individual enterprise, property, and liberal rights in a mosaic (as in the current foreign intervention), but to a common, qualitatively different future-to-be-built. this, of course, included a radical rethinking of the stakes of politics, and therefore of the ways in which sides were to be conceived of in the first place. in this light, the most challenging questions, i believe, concern the imagination of a societal future beyond reconciliation across former frontlines. with understandings of politics reduced to the figure of politika, everyday conversations in bih leave no place for a conception of politics as the collective development of a future-oriented societal project, as ideological debate, as vocation or as responsibility. what kind of future do reconciliation efforts project for society, not only in terms of the anatomy of government, but also of economic policy, social welfare, or sustainability, and so on? even if there was consensus on the reach and form of the polity, how do they imagine freedom, equality and, above all, solidarity in the future society to studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 if reconciliation is the answer 241 which reconciliation is supposed to contribute? i believe this is particularly important in current times, when certain neoliberalizing societal models are globally presented as if they need no justification, as if they are a natural order for which no alternatives exist. reconciliation efforts often reproduce depoliticization through the consensual silencing of sensitive wartime issues and questions of the anatomy of government, through ritual confirmations of the importance of “normal life,” but also through a belief, in tune with neoliberalism, that the sphere of politics should be as small as possible. does not the shared reluctance to address politics, through its reduction to politika, carry enormous risks? namely, does it not leave the definition of the societal future in the hands of those who have no interest to work towards any change at all? this would be a pity, because if there is one point of broad agreement in the exasperated litanies of people across bih beyond the attribution of blame to politika, it is the belief that things should not stay the way they are today. such dissatisfaction concerns recognition, representation and redistribution, although the dominance of the identitarian matrix renders the latter largely invisible in the public spheres. if dominant discourses of reconciliation assume that less politics will make the world more just, this resonates nicely both with current local public opinion in bih and with the neoliberally-framed foreign intervention. scholarly studies of bih should take up the responsibility, i suggest, to ask questions that go beyond the framework set by such domestic and foreign policy priorities. when exploring which processes of social change can turn ceasefires into starting points for better futures, reconciliation may, of course play a role, but we should dare to go beyond questions that elicit reconciliation as the answer. we would do well to exploit responsibly the privilege of scholarly reflection to think provocatively against the tide and to recalibrate questions of the politics of justice in bih and beyond. notes 1 this text elaborates some questions developed in a short text published in bosnianserbian-croatian under the title, “pet teških pitanja o pomirenju” (transl. a semić & m ostojić) in trauma i pomirenje, an in-house publication of the sarajevo-based trauma centar, part of the ngo kruh svetog ante. 2 in addition to paramilitary units closely related to political parties in bih, croatia, and serbia/montenegro, three main armies fought in the war. hvo (croatian defence council) was controlled by the croatian nationalist hdz and, to a large degree, by its mother party and army in croatia. vrs (army of republika srpska) was controlled by the serbian nationalist sds and, to a large degree, by its mentors in the government of serbia (or the federal republic of yugoslavia) and its army (the main inheritor of the yugoslav people’s army). the stated war aims of hdz and sds, which had gained large aggregate majorities of the vote amongst “their” respective nationals in 1990, were to defend “the croats” and “the serbs” from each other and, increasingly over time, from the consolidation of the republic of bih (rbih), in which those who declared bosniak (bosnian muslim) nationality in the 1991 census would form a relative majority. they established military control over large territories, “cleansed” their populations and sought adhesion to their “mother states.” yet a minority of people who they sought to interpellate as croats or serbs actually favoured rbih sovereignty, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 242 stef jansen which had been supported by 62.68% of the electorate in a 1992 referendum. these people continued to live in territories controlled by arbih (army of the republic of bih). some fought in that army and others occupied positions of responsibility in rbih institutions. over time, however, arbih’s struggle to defend rbih increasingly came to imply a defence of bosniaks. this was a result of population movements, of the military strategies of their opponents which caused disproportional numbers of victims, especially civilian ones, amongst bosniaks, and of increasing control by the bosniak nationalist party sda. still, against a three-way symmetrical picture, the rhetoric and practice of sda and arbih always remained ambiguous, including bosniak ethnonationalism and bih inclusivism. note also that north-west bih saw heavy fighting between arbih and a separate bosniak-dominated army controlled by a local political-economic patron, formerly a top figure in sda, and that elsewhere too alliances and factions emerged on the local level that blurred a straightforward national definition of “sides.” references bašić, n. 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(2008). post-war identification: everyday muslim counterdiscourse in bosnia herzegovina. aarhus: aarhus up. malkki, l. (1995). refugees and exile: from refugee studies to the national order of things. annual review of anthropology 24, 495-523. mujkić, a. (2007). mi građani etnopolisa. sarajevo: šahinpašić. ross, f. c. (2003). bearing witness: women and the truth and reconciliation commission in south africa. london: pluto. wilson, r. a. (2001). the politics of truth and reconciliation in south africa. cambridge: cambridge university press. žižek, s. (1997). multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism. new left review 225, 28-51. correspondence address: katie aubrecht, nova scotia centre on aging, mount saint vincent university, 166 bedford highway, halifax, nova scotia b3m 2j6, canada. tel.: +1 902 457 6193, email: katie.aubrecht@msvu.ca issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 6, issue 1, 67-83, 2012 the new vocabulary of resilience and the governance of university student life katie aubrecht nova scotia centre on aging, mount saint vincent university, canada abstract this article examines the governance of student life in university settings through an examination of discourses of wellness and resilience in the university sector, and in particular at the university of toronto. resilience, it is argued, is strategically deployed in ways that enjoin students to think positively about their experiences of university life so as to avert any experience of distress or disability. this is undertaken with the aim of producing a healthy and ‘well’ student body, but does little to address inequalities amongst students, nor how such inequalities might be important in addressing student distress. focusing on an analysis of the university of toronto student life programs and services programs and publications, and in particular pamphlets and newsletters, such as health & wellness: helping students make the most of the university experience (2009), it seeks to understand the role of resilience in the production of student life and the governance of the university experience. the purpose of this analysis is to examine the possibilities and limits of a new vocabulary of resilience (seligman, 2009), which posits an expectation of suffering as a resource which can be drawn on in times of stress, and the “positive” disciplinary regimes this vocabulary enforces. this examination is carried out with the overall aim of disrupting unexamined relations to representations of institutional sites and services as resources, and to demonstrate how such representations rely on and reproduce notions of difference, disability and distress as difficulties to be both renounced and exploited. it is also to provoke greater recognition within social justice studies of how university health services texts such as the health & wellness pamphlet and newsletters directed at students strategically deploy notions of resilience to govern interpretations of resistance as illness, rather than emancipatory action. introduction there is the growing sense in the university, and popular culture, that mental illness in students is not only “normal,” but a fact of life. the proliferation of discourses on a “hidden problem” (tamburri, 2012) and even a “crisis” studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 68 katie aubrecht (dehaas, 2011) in student mental health and illness is helping it to become one of the dominant modes of interpreting and negotiating student survival and success. at the university of toronto, a major cosmopolitan university in toronto, ontario, canada with more than 75,000 students across three campuses, as with many other universities throughout north america and the westernized world, faculty, staff and students are now receiving frequent formal and informal instructions to view student services as a valuable and necessary tool in the preservation of academic standing, not only for students individually, but for the university as a whole. university health and wellness publications demonstrate a significant investment in the school of thought advanced by psychologist martin seligman (2008) who has pioneered the notions of “positive health,” a close derivative of “positive psychology” (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). seligman has previously piloted similar programs in schools both in the u.s. and in the u.k., as well as in the united states army (howell, 2012). such notions are now increasingly being taken up in university settings across the globe, in the u.s. (collopy, 2011), the u.k. (carter, 2010), australia (martin & marsh, 2006), finland (jamk, 2012), and as will be discussed in detail, the university of toronto. vocabularies and models of resilience are now even being embedded in tertiary curriculum (stallman, 2011). as such, programs and publications aimed at increasing student resilience constitute a case study of the ways in which the new trend in “positive thinking” offers a means for understanding the university as an institution organized by neoliberal governance. a critical analysis of the research of this self-proclaimed “new science” (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000) in action in university health services literature also creates space to reflect on the role of the university in shaping the structures of governance. there is debate concerning the precise meaning and definition of resilience, but much of the current literature on resilience primarily tends to converge on positive adaptation despite adversity (bottrell, 2009; cassen, feinstein & graham, 2008; goodley, 2005; mohaupt, 2008; seligman, 2011; sriskandarajah, bawden, blackmore, tidball, & wals, 2010). p.a. atkinson, c.r. martin, and j. rankin describe this adaptation in terms of a “capacity to recover from extremes of trauma and stress” (2009, p. 137). for seligman, resilience offers a “new vocabulary” (2009, p. 18) which can redirect the gaze within the discipline of psychology away from the “pathological” and towards the “positive features that make life worth living” (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 5). he says that his thirty years of scientific research on “learned helplessness” and “learned powerlessness” had positive results: “we have learned not only how to distinguish those who will grow from those who will collapse, but also how to build the skills of people in the latter category” (seligman, 2011, p. 101). helplessness and powerlessness, in this formulation, are not matters of social justice, but of individual responsibility and capacities. at the crux of the positive psychology movement is the idea that people can learn to be resilient, if given the skills and encouragement to do so. based on this belief, university wellness services now see students studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the new vocabulary of resilience 69 as improvable subjects, capable of resilience. disability, or the possibility that students might become disabled by the experience of distress or other mental health difficulties, lies at the heart of this. wellness services implicitly view disability negatively, as something that must be prevented through resilience programming, with the aim of preserving or improving the health of the student body, and thus the academic standing of the university more generally. i examine how contemporary depictions of university students as resilient subjects exemplify a “transformation in rationales and programs of government” (original emphasis; rose, 1998, p. 62). for nikolas rose (1998) this transformation is one aspect of “the techne of psychology” (p. 62); its “mode of practicing or acting upon the world” (p. 62). a consideration of neoliberal governmentality, or “conduct of conduct” (foucault, 1988, p. 221; 1991), is central to this analysis. governmentality studies (foucault, 1997; rose, o’malley, & valverde, 2006) offer critical conceptual tools for unpacking the historical specificity of our ordinary doings, and for situating the language of health and wellness within contemporary western social, political and economic relations of power (tremain, 2008). through my analysis of commonplace texts in circulation at the university of toronto, i show how, despite a claim to “organize, simplify, and rationalize domains of human individuality and difference” (rose, 1998, p. 62), the certain mode of thinking that characterizes positive psychology is itself neither internally consistent, nor wholly coherent, but is nonetheless productive of versions of the successful and resilient self both prized and expected within the ordinary orders of university life. this makes it possible to examine the relationship between the current focus on resilience and the demand for a skilled, flexible, and productive labour force characteristic of capitalist economies under neoliberal governance. i draw on a critical disability studies perspective as a means of exposing these practices, and the ways in which resilience-based programming and publications in the university are aimed, simultaneously, at governing and erasing disability. according to catherine kudlick (2003), disability studies is, “an interdisciplinary field dating from the mid-1980s that invites scholars to think about disability not as an isolated, individual medical pathology but instead as a key defining social category on a par with race, class, and gender” (2003, para. 2). within disability studies, interpretive analysis of disability knowledge is understood “as crucial for understanding how western cultures determine hierarchies and maintain social order as well as how they define progress” (2003, para. 3). further, a disability studies perspective perceives disability as social oppression, rather merely “a humanitarian, medical, administrative or economic issue” (oliver, 1984, p. 22). however, for helen meekosha and russel shuttleworth (2009), “what unites cds [critical disability studies] theorists is an agreement that disabled people are undervalued and discriminated against and this cannot be changed simply through liberal or neo-liberal legislation and policy” (p. 65). through an examination of the university of toronto pamphlet health & studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 70 katie aubrecht wellness: helping students make the most of the university experience, and related publications, i consider how a focus on resilience, broadly understood in terms of a “positive adaptation in the face of adversity” (cassen, feinstein, & graham, 2008, p. 73), is used to justify and conceal exploitative social and economic relations. the biomedical frame in the pamphlet is explicit, but the areas and fields of experience it targets and describes are not intuitively medical. their presentation in the university of toronto health services literature appeals to a notion of everyday experience as the proper subject of western clinical and applied science and research. this is most visible in the university of toronto student life quarterly publication, the student body, mind, and spirit, which includes articles on everything from personal relationships, familial estrangement and faith, to note-taking, intoxication, sexuality, and peer-pressure. the student body, mind & spirit newsletters began circulation in 2008. they are circulated within the university community via electronic list serves, the university’s counseling and psychological services website, departmental and program coordinators, and university-wide public health workshops. the newsletters halted publication in 2011 with the introduction of the now widely distributed student health 101 (student health, 2011), a global wellness communication system housed in the us and adopted throughout canadian university systems. the newsletters, available in print in student life offices, posted on bulletins boards and electronically accessible through hyperlinks on university webpages, targeted students, primarily undergraduate students, with the principal focus of the promotion of academic performance through education about student health and wellness. within the newsletters, an article titled, “investing in resilience,” included a recommendation to think about mental health, and more importantly, to “protect” and “enhance our capacity to enjoy life more fully,” through resilience (vorderbrugge, 2008, p. 2). another pamphlet produced by student life titled, “build on your strengths,” opens with the assertion that, “there is no health without mental health” (university of toronto, 2012). the task of “building strengths” involves learning to: “build resilience,” “build healthy relationships,” “cope with stress,” “understand depression,” and “understand anxiety” (university of toronto, 2012). the description for building resilience illustrates how coping is constructed at the university as an academic task. coping is represented as a skill that students can use to transcend the difficulties of university life (university of toronto, 2012). conceived as such, learning to cope becomes part and parcel of learning to succeed (and in lieu of success, survive) and a strategy for dealing with institutional change. the interest in innovation, creativity and flexibility evident in the strategic objectives of universities throughout canada and the u.s. (rhoades & torres, 2006) and across much of the western world (de bary, 2010), construct change as a measure that can be used to assess the success of neoliberal programs and policies. within a market mentality, change is understood in reductive terms as a technology in the successful reproduction and hegemony of cultural systems. difference is framed within studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the new vocabulary of resilience 71 a developmental schema as a mode of adaptation, and one which can be more or less successful given the particular historic and economic conditions of a specific socio-cultural locale. framing resilience in terms of health and wellness because the resilience agenda attempts to prevent distress and disability in all members of a given population, its message must be circulated widely. resilience and wellness publications in university settings are distributed widely in the student population, with the aim of reaching students experiencing distress, who may experience distress in the future, or who know another student experiencing distress or other barriers to “wellness.” rather than providing direct (and expensive) services to all students, pamphlets, newsletters, and other publications are circulated broadly so as to reach the entire student body, making them a key tool in the resilience agenda. in collected papers ii: studies in social theory, alfred schutz says (1976, p. 82), [in the common situation] the individual members are at “home,” that is, they find their bearings without difficulty in the common surroundings, guided by a set of recipes of more or less institutionalized habits, mores, folkways, etc., that help them come to terms with beings and fellowmen belonging to the same situation. pamphlets and newsletters are not merely routine sources of information. instead, they are historically-situated social phenomenon and a mode of communication which helps students “find their bearings” (shutz, 1976, p. 82). the pamphlet has come to occupy a central role in attempts to organize and represent university life, so much so that it has been constituted as a selfevident response to questions, concerns, or comments. within the university, pamphlets and newsletters are routinely viewed as important resources to have and make use of, as well as pathways to other resources, and even other pamphlets. as modes of communication these publications coordinate how the university can be known as a universal experience and a common situation open to surveillance, assessment and evaluation. the pamphlet both preserves and circulates established knowledge of the various locations of authoritative knowledge about the university experience—programs, projects, services, websites, buildings, centres, offices, experts and educational events. in doing so, it standardizes how the university can be experienced in the form of questions of knowing where to go, who to ask, and what to ask for. the language of student life constructs the student body as a focal point of activity, authority and social relations within the university. in its appearance in the pamphlet, vocabularies of resilience map an axis of authority—a principal line of movement that directs the reader to places and resources that can validate their personal university experience. student life is a mobile focal point that makes it possible to connect widely dispersed studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 72 katie aubrecht centers of activity located within a particular geographic region—in this case, the university campus. the realities of student life become questions which, when asked, give an impression of the university (and university experience) as a coherent unity and cohesive whole: it assembles a population of students. wellness-oriented publications attempt to govern student experience with the aspiration of instilling resilience and warding off the experience of disability, so as to create a population of “positively healthy” students. this is undertaken in a broader neo-liberal market context, wherein universities must compete for student enrollment and other resources. in directing public attention to the possibility of success despite the prediction of failure, vocabularies of resilience offer one way to legitimize hegemonic power relations. vocabularies of resilience operate as insurance for the university against critique that the social organization of everyday life and distribution of resources within the university contribute to suffering and to the appearance and experience of uncertainty (represented as depression and anxiety) in students’ lives. in encouraging students to self-monitor, regulate and manage, and in effect, become their own entrepreneurs knowing when and where to seek help and refer others, the language of resilience offers a means of financial (de)regulation within the university. this language is circulated within a context of shrinking resources within the university, wherein more traditional (and labour intensive) pastoral care is difficult to carry out given, for example, growing class sizes, lower staff to student ratios, and the increasingly pervasive use of lower-paid temporary contract lecturers within universities. in other words, these publications exist not only to increase student resilience, but they do so in a broader neo-liberal context. the university of toronto health & wellness (2009) pamphlet begins with the following statement: wellness refers to one’s overall physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social and economic condition, as well as the impact experienced as a result of one’s environment and occupation. wellness does not refer simply to the absence of illness, nor does it suggest that someone with chronic illness can not be and feel well. most university students share a common goal—academic success. the capacity to learn and be academically successful is greatly influenced by your physical and psychological health. in the process of securing a relationship between the objective appearance of wellness and the meaning of the university experience, the statement produces a rationale to explain the attitudes and behaviour of the university toward students perceived as unhealthy. the assertion that wellness is “more than the absence of illness” orients the reader to a code for making sense of student life. students appear as students only in so far as they can be recognized as making a positive contribution to the overall wellness of the university environment. contributions are positive which can be viewed as in explicit accordance with conventional understandings and expectations of the meaning and purpose of the university. in this way, the pamphlet serves as a reminder of the existence of multiple ways of interpreting the university studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the new vocabulary of resilience 73 experience. however, to be perceived as legitimate members of the university community they must learn how to view themselves, others, and the world as it does. students who can be perceived as following the university’s advice are implicitly acknowledged as worthy of the university’s attention and assistance in “helping [them] make the most of the university experience” (university of toronto, 2009). this is not to suggest that students are necessarily following the instructions of pamphlets or newsletters, or even reading them for that matter. nonetheless, university student health and social services literature as found at the university of toronto and on campuses across this increasingly globalized world are here taken up as expressions of the dominant rationalities and power relations that currently organize consciousness of the university experience, and with it, a belief in the existence of a universal student subjectivity that can be achieved and perfected through an investment in evidence-based promising practices. such texts can thus be read both as displays of the “relations of ruling” (smith, 1996) within the university and in this case, the university of toronto, and as political technologies that shape collective understandings of a relationship between academic performance and student mental health. at the university of toronto, although disability and mental illness represent distinct categories of existence and experience, individuals identified as disabled and those identified as “mentally ill” are routinely treated in ways which make them appear “the same but different” (beresford & wallcraft, 1997, p. 66). for university of toronto accessibility services, a unit of the division of student life programs and services, both categories of student, and the heterogeneous “conditions” they collect, fall under the shared rubric of “chronic illness,” which is seen as an unpredictable and emergent, but ultimately controllable, crisis. textual representations of disability in textual exemplifications of student life orient the reader to a universal and hierarchal conception of student embodiment which privileges what rosemarie garland thomson refers to as the “normate” (1997, p. 8). for garland thomson, “the term normate usefully designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings” (1997, p. 8). the pamphlet relies on and reinforces medicalized knowledge about what constitutes normate embodiment—being and feeling well—within an institutional environment that is structured to produce bodies that do better than well academically. cultural assumptions concerning the stresses students experience in their effort to do what ordinary university students are expected to do, succeed academically, are negotiated with medicalized knowledge about the limits of the body in relation to the world. the materialization of stress in and on the study body can thus be read as providing a code for categorizing different types of students. with the help of psychiatric knowledge and practices, the appearance of students that are stressed-out (i.e., for whom the condition of stress obstructs their full participation in the university setting) is readily interpreted as the product of a medically-verifiable undesired differentness in embodiment. the pressures studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 74 katie aubrecht of the university setting are depicted as leaving unwanted impressions on students preconceived as having a distorted world view. these imprints, made identifiable in such physiological conditions such as high blood pressure and colds and flu, are interpreted as signs of “wrong” ways of relating to the full meaning of the university experience. students who are perceived to be ‘too sensitive’ are assumed to be naturally less-than capable of managing their relations. for them, the world is assumed to appear much larger or smaller than it actually is, making everything seem much closer or further than it is from a more “objective,” “realistic,” or “positive” perspective. their appearance as students is therefore bracketed by the recognition of the pathological condition of their “natural” ways of relating, whether these ways are the product of traumatic experience, poor parenting, or bad genes (but never as a matter of social injustices). knowledge of stress thus marks the body as something remarkable, and remarkably troublesome for academic success. depictions of student stress posit students’ experiences as the natural subject of medical knowledge. within this domain, students are not marginalized by the institutional organization of the university experience and the neoliberal values of flexibility and productivity it espouses, but by personal deficiencies which place them in a position of a natural disadvantage. learning to stay on track the pamphlet orients the student to experiences of difficulty in meeting the normative demands of university life as a symptom of bodies that are less capable of mediating the reality of the university environment. this produces a communication breakdown, and heralds the need for a language which can bridge the divide between the subjective experiences of individual students and the objective reality of the university environment, “helping students make the most of the university experience” (university of toronto, 2009). this language is the language of student life. its mantra—discovery, diagnosis, intervention (michalko, 1998)—interweaves the meaning of university culture with medical knowledge. within the discourse on health wellness, which includes the physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social and economic aspects of the university experience, disability appears as an obstacle to the participation of individual students in the collective experience of university culture. disabled embodiment is perceived as an impediment to a clear view of the university experience in its entirety, a distortion (michalko, 2002). this perspective, which seeks the disclosure of objective knowledge about student subjectivity and claims its embodiment in student life, provides a means of habituating would-be members of the university community to the increasing institutionalization of space, place and identity. through the pamphlet, student life programs and services introduce students to practices of self-governance which will help mitigate the negative impact disability is assumed to have on disabled students’ capacity to be like studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the new vocabulary of resilience 75 ordinary students. further, it attempts to prevent the experience of disability precisely by fostering wellness and resilience. it aims to put forward an unambiguous and objective understanding of the meaning of disability as a source of adversity (both for student and university), and a clear view to why feeling and being ordinary matters in the university context. in the delivery of practical knowledge about stress, and when/where/how stress becomes a problem for students, the pamphlet constitutes disabled students as members of the university community. their membership, however, is represented as provisional since a continued failure to succeed academically could lead to their expulsion. further, the membership of disabled students is also represented as contingent on the success of institutional programs and services designed to help them be more like “most students.” taken-for-granted assumptions which view disability as a source of stress, both for disabled and nondisabled persons, and an obstacle to participation, leads to an understanding of disability as a potential cause of mental illness. it is thus that even though no direct or explicit mention is made of disability, disability is brought to life in the appearance of stress, depression and/or anxiety. disability is implicitly positioned throughout as the negative consequence of a failure to be resilient or well. within the language of student life, mental illness matters because it prevents students from succeeding academically; because it produces alienation and students who are less-than fully alive, and because it can even result in death. seligman (2011) proposes optimism as the cure to “learned helplessness” which he also frames as depression and anxiety (p. 102). the task at hand is no longer to locate the cure, but in pandemic fashion, how to “immunize” through positive thinking (seligman, 2011, p. 102). for seligman, such a pursuit also contributes to the building of a more resilient psychology, as displayed in the following assertion, “this science and practice [of positive psychology] will also reorient psychology back to its two neglected missions—making normal people stronger and more productive and making high human potential actual” (seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 8). we may do well to consider how disabled and marginalized students figure within an institutional setting oriented by a desire to protect, restore, actualize and enhance normalcy, and what effects such projects can be expected to have on the material and social circumstances of disabled students. in his analysis of a “prescriptive text” (foucault, 1990) published by the australian law students association titled depression in australian law schools, matthew ball (2010) responds to representations of stress as a “central cause of depression” (p. 3) within university environments. according to ball, “the government of stress in order to pre-empt depression provides the conditions for an extension of government to include the student’s study habits and time management practices, and opens a space wherein students are encouraged to become time-managing and disciplined selves, governing their mind and body in productive ways” (ball, 2010, p. 3). in university of toronto health services literature, depression and anxiety provide landmarks of students embodying the tensions of the university; when and where the studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 76 katie aubrecht university is present in the body of the student, at certain times of year when term papers are due and exams must be written. at the university of toronto, the perspective of student life, presents a medicalized, and bureaucratized perspective informed by the language and practices of positive psychology (seligman, 2008; seligman & csikszentmihalyi, 2000). it relies on professional and supposedly common sense notions of resilience to frame difference in divisive terms. difference is depicted in terms of deviation from the norm of wellness, and disability as differentness embodied. disabled students are perceived as inherently alienated, and alienation is understood as an individual problem which can be resolved once the source of this problem can be isolated, identified, and expunged. this is a perspective that invites the reader to understand the university of toronto’s (2010b) presentation of itself in its branding as “canada’s answer to the world’s questions” as a product of the superior command with which the university constructs, organizes, and manages its internal divisions. the university’s vision of student subjectivity could then be interpreted as the university’s response to the question of what a university experience means in a neoliberal political and economic context. the answer it provides relies on the textual erasure of the essential role that biomedical conceptions of difference play in the production of knowledge about student life. the pamphlet inscribes student life with a system of reference points and coordinates interaction, uniformly spaced differences that cross lines of intersections which for normal patterns of thinking, feeling and acting support networks and control of information. the aims of student life are inscribed on student life in the reiteration of three simple statements: “what students say…,” “what you can do…,” and “why it matters…” (university of toronto, 2009). the strategies for coping, managing and adjusting which students bring with them may have to be replaced, discarded, reworked or more finely tuned given the particularities of the university environment. these strategies may also contradict one another. take, for example, one recommendation to seek out opportunities for self-discovery. it enjoins students to “maintain a hopeful outlook” and “keep things in perspective,” while acknowledging that the self that is “discovered” may not coincide with the self that was expected or desired; hence the preceding suggestion to “set realistic goals,” and the suggestion which follows: “be ready to give and accept help” (university of toronto, 2009). this approach models an individualistic and meritocratic understanding of academic failure. it encourages an interpretation of high attrition rates or failures as an indication that students are not working hard enough to maintain the level of health and wellness required for success. according to such an approach it becomes possible to treat students perceived as not participating in the university are represented as self-segregating (viviene, 2011), and to address the problem of non-participation through the introduction of online resilience training modules students can access from home (ryan, shochet, & stallmen, 2010). hence, no need for radical change or revolution. studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the new vocabulary of resilience 77 in the student life pamphlets and newsletters, descriptions of the prevalence, and therefore unexemplary character of the challenges students face, provide for the production of knowledge about what students can do within the university environment. one thing that students can do is mediate the presence or absence of a range of influences which can negatively impact perception of the university experience. representations of disability as a “challenge,” “demand,” and “stress” occasion conversations on a necessity to monitor, manage, and control the university experience. when disability “happens,” it produces an impact which has the potential to derail students from the institutional pathways to success. at the same time, with the “help” of student life programs and services students can ostensibly learn how best to recognize and respond to troubling displays of a disruption in student life both in themselves and others, and to read those displays as evidence of a deficiency in university experience. erving goffman (1963) suggests that such “advocated codes of conduct, … provide the stigmatized individual not merely with a platform and a politics, and not merely with instruction as to how to treat others, but with recipes for an appropriate attitude regarding the self. to fail to adhere to the code is to be a self-deluded, misguided person; to succeed is to be both real and worthy, two spiritual qualities that combine to produce what is called “authenticity.” (p. 111) where for most students academic success is perceived as the common goal, expectations for students who are recognized as off-track are conceivably lower. for the university to measure its progress towards its outcome goals, students who are not excelling academically are placed in a separate category. perception of students placed in this category is structured by a normative assumption that they are only capable of meeting the minimum standards of achievement, and will not succeed academically. this type of student appears against the backdrop of preconceived notions about what most students are capable of achieving. once categorized this way, both the student identity and the disabled student’s membership in the university community become precarious. as a critical disability studies perspective has illustrated, it is not disability per se that is the barrier, but the ways in which university life constitutes barriers for disabled students that is at issue. we need to question what resilience means. disability studies researcher dan goodley (2005) suggests that disabled people have shown resilience in the face of a “disabling world” (p. 334). according to goodley, “resilience often exists despite disablement, outside self-advocacy groups and in response to disabling community” (p. 333). how resilience is conceptualized is central to building interventions. rather than building resilience, per se, dorothy bottrell (2009) situates resilience in relation to social inequities and social processes in an attempt to address what she understands as a lack of theorizing of resilience. resilience is not just “common sense” (daniel, wassell, & gilligan, 1999). it is a historically contingent western construct inseparable from processes of industrialization, modernization, and neoliberal capitalism. recognizing this, studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 78 katie aubrecht bottrell (2009) advocates for alternative understandings of resilience which challenge normative and individualizing assumptions that define marginality in terms of vulnerability and disadvantage. for bottrell, critical theorization of the socio-political and economic contexts within which resilience is takenup and practiced conditions the possibility of recognizing resilience as a recent invention, and redefining it in collective terms as resistance, protest, and a question of social justice. and yet, the desire for or development of a theory of resilience is only the beginning, given that, “[m]ainstream resilience theory may readily be incorporated into neoliberal policy emphasis on individual responsibility for coping, competence and success, largely defined in terms of enterprise and contribution to economic rather than social well-being” (bottrell, 2009, p. 334). resilience and the restoration of normalcy within the language of student life, images of disability which treat disability as a metaphor for difficulties in learning, living, and succeeding, constitute desire for academic excellence as the ‘common denominator’ in student lives. all students are assumed to want the same thing, academic success, but from the perspective of student life some students are naturally predisposed with an inability to realize their desire. the biomedical assumptions about disability as a deficiency in the overall condition of individual bodies in health & wellness provide an effective way to rationalize differences in academic performance as individual problems. even when the predisposition is not directly attributed to a pre-existing genetic “disorder,” biomedical knowledge and practices at the basis of a psychiatric approach to embodied difference provide a way to make people perceived to have a wrong way of experiencing the world, right. the promise of biomedicine to make right is expressed in the pamphlet’s assertion that the negative impact of unhealthy attitudes and behaviours can be mitigated by students’ deferral to “services on campus” that can “assist them in getting back on track” (university of toronto, 2009). before this promise can be fulfilled, and the student returned to a correct course of action within the relegated domain of university procedure, a clear view of disability as obstruction must be established. this understanding, however biomedical, anticipates meritocratic forms of governance. if powerlessness is something learned, it is something which can and should be unlearned. where failure is treated as a question of knowledge of correct action, bodies perceived as having the knowledge and power to overcome failure and powerlessness, and yet still fail to achieve power become perceivable as hopeless cases. the pamphlet can thus be read as a blueprint that structures how challenge is to be perceived and understood in a way that will provide for its reversal: challenge is conceptualized as an opportunity to demonstrate what you can do, and with it, the right to act. this blueprint guides students toward locales within the university environment studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the new vocabulary of resilience 79 which it claims can provide perspective on the common goal of academic success. the aforementioned “ensemble of practices” (de certeau, 2002, p. 11) delivered with and through the pamphlet, authorizes the command of a biomedical approach to knowing the student body. it guides the reader towards the understanding that following the paths inscribed by student life with “health & wellness” will lead students to a place where they can exert mastery over the university environment through the realization of the norm. students are directed to offices, departments, programs, services and resources in and with the help of which they are supposed to gain a new perspective on their situations. however, before they can make good use of the services designed to “help” them, they must first and foremost find their way back to the grid. the student who is well is perceivable on the basis of the student’s doing better than well academically. doing well despite adversity, and perhaps even because of it shifts attention and labour from protesting inequitable social structures and systems, toward projects aimed at facilitating student adjustment to these structures. the issue becomes one of navigation and adaptation, of knowing where to go and what to expect so that one is not only prepared for disappointment, but prepared to make the most of it. these resilience models ask students to change their perspective on their situations, but never their situations. here, positive thinking trumps political action. this sets the resilience agenda in direct opposition to any kind of social justice. students are taught to accept and think positively about their situations, rather than try to change them. an article in the student body, mind and spirit titled, “beyond language” (hyland, 2009) portrays mental illness as something that can happen to anyone. it includes the assertion that, “mental illness does not discriminate; it crosses all cultural, economic and social divides” (2009, p. 3). in doing so, it organizes a conception of adversity as a neutral, non-political entity that “does not discriminate.” this understanding is also reflected in another article, “where does your story begin,” which provides eight strategies for “coping with the transition to university”: 1) develop your learning skills; 2) seek out people who want to be successful; 3) know where your supports are; 4) get involved; 5) get organized; 6) find rest spaces; 7) recognize the loss; 8) keep an open mind (garbutt, 2008, pp. 3-4). these pragmatic ways of relating to adversity as something which can be transitioned into and out of offer the reassurance that because mental illness is “highly treatable,” with the “professional help” and “early intervention” already at their fingertips, “with some effort” (vorderbrugge, 2008, p. 4) there is a good probability that students can begin to achieve a greater semblance of a normal healthy, happy and socially productive life. an even greater probability is envisaged if students can learn to do so in “meaningful communities” (haworth, 2009, p. 3). studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 80 katie aubrecht conclusion: what is resilience doing? treating university health services pamphlets and newsletters as technologies in the production of university students as resilient subjects (o’malley, 2010) can illustrate how the redistribution of resources under the auspices of social justice is rife with unintended consequences, and necessarily relies on and reproduces cultural assumptions, stereotypes, stigmas and distinctions couched in western neo-liberal values of autonomy, agency, self-sufficiency, independence, and personal strength. i considered how vocabularies of resilience in such ordinary and overlooked texts as health services pamphlets and newsletters produce a version of the individual student as entrepreneur, and social location as something which can be enhanced and overcome through hard work and ingenuity. these vocabularies rely on a depoliticized notion of power as something that can be recovered through positive thinking and selfcare. positive psychology illustrates how notions of empowerment become bound up and enmeshed in neoliberal agendas. a critical analysis of this selfproclaimed “new science” (macdonald & o’callaghan, 2008; seligman & csikszentmaihalyi, 2000) raises some very important questions concerning the direction in which university governance is headed, particularly with respect to the potential pathologization of resistance. discourses of resilience teach students that contemporary neoliberal normalcy can help them negate the damaging potential of a disability identity, what goffman (1963) refers to as “stigma.” not only is it true that students can survive adversity, but thrive off of adversity through the adoption of positive thinking and the investment in meaningful communities and productive identities. all they have to do is build social capital, diversify their portfolios, and learn how to organize their activities, experiences and attachments in ways that will help them cope with adversity in more socially productive ways. fitting within the frame of resilience as something which can and ought to be learned in order to survive requires that students accept medicalized definitions of situations. within this frame student anguish, resistance, distress and dissent can be collapsed and rationalized as the outcomes of a lack of learning or common sense, and a symptom of an inherently inferior subject position. rather than a consequence of the exploitative conditions that organize how higher learning gets done within the context of a competitive labour market productive of surplus peoples, distress is perceived as living proof of the need for flexible relations to adversity as a problem that can be accommodated through restructuring and adjustment. vocabularies of resilience promote a notion of adversity as an opportunity for individuals to demonstrate that they know how to make the most of their experiences. adversity thus understood, occasions the appearance of new, perhaps more efficient and economical relations to increasingly scarce resources. in this way, university students who experience distress, or are identified as distressed, are constructed as inflexible and maladjusted and as such, naturally prone to experience life as a strain (stewart, 1994). their grievances are therefore to be interpreted as a symptom of their conditions studies in social justice, volume 6, issue 1, 2012 the new vocabulary of resilience 81 and judged differently than students who are perceived to embody, or at least resemble, normative ideals of productivity. in a review of the literature on resilience and social exclusion sarah mohaupt (2008) shares her finding that the core word of resilience is “resilo,” which means to jump back (2008, p. 63). this is in line with the dominant way of understanding resilience as bouncing back from adversity. the health & wellness pamphlet and student body, mind and spirit newsletters, however mundane, banal, ordinary and inconspicuous, are cultural productions by which student readers should not only be taken aback, but from which we should jump back and reconsider our normative attitudes about the good of life as usual. a critical reading of resilience illustrates how powerlessness and helplessness are not merely attributes which can be learned, and potentially overcome, as seligman (2011) suggests, but conditions of neoliberal governance. this raises the important issue of whether and how the university represents a living laboratory for testing new techniques in sustainable governance. wellness publications and programs in the university should thus be viewed as attempts to work not only on student subjectivity, but also as techniques for governing the meaning and experience of difficulty and distress. instead, we should see embodied and emotional difference as expressions of agency, protest and affirmation, rather than simply signs of passivity, sites of exploitation, or barriers to success that can be overcome through resilience. this shift in perspective, then, is very much a matter of social justice within the university setting, and beyond. references atkinson, p.a., marint, c.r., & rankin, j. 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(2011). embedding resilience within tertiary curriculum: a feasibility study. higher education research & development, 30(2), 121-133. stewart, d. w. (1994). using the mmpi-2 college maladjustment scale in a canadian university setting. canadian journal of counselling and psychotherapy, 28(2), 135-141. student health 101. (2011). about us. retrieved from http://www.studenthealth101.com/about_ us.htm tamburri, r. (2012). universities to examine their role in students’ mental health. university affairs. retrieved february 6, 2012 from http://www.universityaffairs.ca/universities-toexamine-their-role-in-students-mental-health.aspx tremain, s. (ed.). (2008). foucault and the government of disability. michigan: university of michigan. university of toronto. (2009). health & wellness: helping students make the most of their university experience [brochure]. student life programs & services. retrieved from http:// healthservice.utoronto.ca/pdfs/health--wellness-brochure.htm university of toronto. (2010a). discover u of t: health + wellness: student crisis response programs. retrieved from http://discover.utoronto.ca/health-wellness university of toronto (2010b). this is u of t. retrieved from http://www.thisisuoft.utoronto.ca/assets/strategic+c ommunications+digital+assets/this+is+u+of+t/u+of+t+one+pagers/overview.pdf university of toronto. (2012). build on your strengths. retrieved from http://www. healthycampus.utoronto.ca/all-about-wellness/building-on-your-strenghts.htm viviene, c. (2011). resilience, transition and the international student experience in diverse university settings. leeds metropolitan university. retrieved from http://www.srhe.ac.uk/ conference2011/abstracts/0225.pdf vorderbrugge, j. (2008, september). investing in resilience. student body, mind & spirit, 1(1), 2 & 4. http://www.studenthealth101.com/about_us.htm http://www.studenthealth101.com/about_us.htm http://www.universityaffairs.ca/universities-to-examine-their-role-in-students-mental-health.aspx http://www.universityaffairs.ca/universities-to-examine-their-role-in-students-mental-health.aspx http://healthservice.utoronto.ca/pdfs/health--wellness-brochure.htm http://healthservice.utoronto.ca/pdfs/health--wellness-brochure.htm http://discover.utoronto.ca/health-wellness http://www.thisisuoft.utoronto.ca/assets/strategic+communications+digital+assets/this+is+u+of+t/u+of+t+one+pagers/overview.pdf http://www.thisisuoft.utoronto.ca/assets/strategic+communications+digital+assets/this+is+u+of+t/u+of+t+one+pagers/overview.pdf http://www.healthycampus.utoronto.ca/all-about-wellness/building-on-your-strenghts.htm http://www.healthycampus.utoronto.ca/all-about-wellness/building-on-your-strenghts.htm introduction studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 27 women in guatemala’s metropolitan area: violence, law, and social justice paula godoy-paiz, mcgill university abstract: in this article i examine the legal framework for addressing violence against women in post war guatemala. since the signing of the peace accords in 1996, judicial reform in guatemala has included the passing of laws in the area of women‘s human rights, aimed at eliminating discrimination and violence against women. these laws constitute a response to and have occurred concurrently to an increase in violent crime against women, particularly in the form of mass rapes and murders. drawing on fieldwork conducted in guatemala‘s metropolitan area, this paper juxtaposes the laws for addressing violence against women to guatemalan women‘s complex, multilayered and multi-dimensional life experiences. the latter expose the limitations of strictly legal understandings of the phenomenon of gender-based violence, and highlight the need for broad social justice approaches that take into account the different structures of violence, inequality, and injustice present in women‘s lives. on april 9, 2008, amid cheers and applause from the public tribune, the guatemalan congress passed the ley contra el femicidio y otras formas de violencia contra la mujer (law against femicide and other forms of violence against women) 1 . this law, which calls for penalties of up to fifty years in prison for those found guilty of violent crimes committed against women, and specific institutional measures to be taken for addressing the problem, came after years of activism and lobbying on the part of human rights and women‘s organizations in guatemala directed at eradicating distinct forms of violence against women. the approval of this law also signifies a response to the mass wave of gender-based violence that has swept guatemala in the first decade of the 21 st century. more than a decade after the signing of peace agreements in 1996, which brought about the negotiated end to one of the bloodiest armed conflicts in latin america‘s recent history, guatemala remains haunted by the consequences of war and faces serious problems of insecurity and violence, including growing homicide rates and organized crime (pnud, 2007). furthermore, in this ―post-conflict‖ context, there has been an alarming increase in rates of violence against women, particularly in the form of mass rapes and killings (amnesty international, 2005; pnud, 2007). this article is concerned with the gendered dynamics of violence in post war guatemala, and focuses on the experiences of women, who have historically been among the most vulnerable and unacknowledged victims of violence in the country. drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted throughout the year 2007 in guatemala city and surrounding municipalities, what is referred to as the guatemalan metropolitan area (área metropolitana de guatemala), i examine 1 for short, i use ―law against femicide‖. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 28 the multiple ways in which a context of gender-based violence and generalized insecurity affect women‘s lives, and consider what social justice might mean for women situated at a crossroads of multiple, diverse, and converging processes of injustice and violence. i examine the legal framework for addressing violence against women in the country, particularly three laws aimed at reducing and eliminating gender-based discrimination and violence: the ley para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia intrafamiliar (law to prevent, saction, and eradicate violence within the family), the ley de dignificación y promoción integral de la mujer (law for the dignification and integral promotion of women), and the ley contra el femicidio y otras formas de violencia contra la mujer (law against femicide and other forms of violence against women). 2 i argue that the emergence of these laws represents a significant victory for guatemalan women, that should be situated within the converging processes of peace negotiations and a growing women‘s movement on the one hand, and escalating generalized violence, insecurity, and crime, where violent murders of women have been on the rise, on the other. i juxtapose the legal framework for addressing violence against women to guatemalan women‘s complex, multilayered and multi-dimensional life experiences. this juxtaposition exposes the limitations of strictly legal understandings of the phenomenon of gender-based violence promoted by the state, which tend to shift the focus away from the social, political, economic and historical factors underlying violence toward women in guatemala. women at a crossroads of violence before the justification was ―you are not going out because you are a woman‖. now, mothers with good reason say, ―you can‘t go out because you could be raped, you could be killed‖. last month in my colonia there where two or three killings in one week. imagine, in one week! -ana 3 living in the barrio el limón, one of the countless so-called ‗red zones‘ of guatemala city with a reputation of high gang activity and crime, thirty year old ana, a mayan k‘iche‘ woman, fears for her safety every day. every morning when she gets on to the camioneta to travel to her workplace, she is uncertain whether she will make it to work and return home safely at night without incident. for ana, like many residents of guatemala city and adjacent municipalities, fears that she may be robbed, assaulted, injured, or killed at any moment are not unfounded. twelve years after the signing of the peace accords in guatemala, the country is described as, ―one of the most violent countries in the world officially in peace, where the human rights of the population continue without being fully respected‖ (pnud, 2007, p.9). thus guatemala has followed the worrying trend described by researchers of latin america (e.g. balán, 2002; caldeira, 1996; rotker, 2002) – namely, that despite certain recent democratic reforms, systemic human rights violations, as well as everyday crime and insecurity continue to thrive. in guatemala, in addition to continued political violence in the form of intimidation and violent attacks against human rights workers or individuals for political purposes, the country faces growing homicide rates, including increasing rates of murders of women, children and youth, 2 for full text of the laws see: congreso de la república de guatemala (1996, 1999, 2008) respectively. 3 i use pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of research participants. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 29 escalating gang activity and organized crime, high rates of fire arm possession and use, as well as high incidences of armed robberies, kidnappings, and theft (del alamo, 2004; amnesty international, 2005; asturias & del águila, 2005; logan, bain & kairies, 2006; caldh, 2006; ciidh, 2006; pnud, 2007; urías, 2005). moreover, there are indicators that problems of violence have intensified in the current post-peace agreement era. one report indicates, for example, that ―in the past seven years homicidal violence has increased more than 120%, going from 2,655 homicides in 1999 to 5,885 in 2006‖ (pnud, 2007, p.9). many explanations are offered for the persistence of violence in ―post-conflict‖ guatemala. not surprisingly, these vary depending on who is doing the analyzing of incidents and forms of violence, and for what purpose. while mareros (youth gang members) are often cited in governmental 4 and everyday discourses as the principle cause of current violence in guatemala, a deeper analysis of the present situation brings other factors to the fore. these include vast social inequalities and high levels of poverty along class, ethnic, gender, and geographical axes; rampant legal impunity; and clandestine groups (often linked to powerful individuals) that profit from illicit activities such as the trafficking of human beings, arms and drugs (pnud, 2007, p. 10). guatemala‘s long history of violence and state repression toward vast segments of its population spanning the colonial period, then through a long line of conservative and liberal dictators, and most recently exacerbated by decades of horrific internal armed conflict, is also at the core of persistent and ubiquitous violence today. the armed internal conflict, emerged in the cold war context and endured from 1960 to 1996. claiming the lives of 200,000 people and displacing 1.5 million, the war has been one of the bloodiest conflicts in latin america in the last quarter of the twentieth century. while both sides, the military and the insurgency, committed acts of violence, the u.n. sponsored truth commission found that over 90 per cent of acts of violence were carried out by agents of the state. mayan indigenous peoples, who were seen by the state as guerilla supporters, represented over eighty per cent of the victims of violence (ceh, 1999; odhag, 1998). during the war, women were among the targeted victims of state-sponsored violence: indeed, government agents carried out mass sexual violence, particularly in the form of rape and sexual torture, against women. the greatest proportion of this violence was directed at indigenous women, as a means of damaging the social fabric of indigenous communities, and to create a climate of terror in the country (ceh, 1999; odhag, 1998). as in other war-torn countries, such as rwanda, sierra leone or kosovo and bosnia-herzegovina (irin, 2004), rape and sexual assault of women in guatemala were part of the machinery of war. in the aftermath of the armed internal conflict, violence against women has been on the rise across guatemala. while human rights organizations and activists have long laboured to prove that genocide occurred during guatemala‘s armed conflict, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the concept of femicide—the killing of women by men because they are women 4 in 2007 the army general otto pérez molina of the partido patriota ran for president on a platform centered on battling crime in guatemala through attempting to quash gangs. though ultimately defeated by álvaro colom caballeros of the national unity for hope (unidad nacional de la esperanza, une), advertisements in newspapers, billboards and television for pérez molina commonly indicated that his party would take a mano dura (clenched fist) position for battling gangs and crime in the country. indeed, the clenched fist was his party‘s symbol. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 30 (russell, 2001, p.3)—has gained currency among women‘s organizations as they attempt to evidence the existence of this insidious, systematic form of violence against a targeted group. present-day violence against women in guatemala, particularly the increase in the killings of women, demonstrates all too well the ongoing violence that pervades guatemala‘s ―postconflict‖ era. various studies (e.g., amnesty international, 2005; caldh, 2006; pnud, 2007) attest to the disturbing increase, over the past eight years, in the murder rate of guatemalan women. for example, the amnesty international (2005) report, guatemala: no protection, no justice: killings of women in guatemala, which has played a central role in drawing attention to this disturbing issue, indicates that the number of women murdered annually over the three years spanning 2002 to 2004 almost tripled (from at least 163 women in 2002, to 383 in 2003, to over 527 in 2004). a subsequent report produced by the united nations development program for guatemala indicates that the numbers of murdered women in 2005 and 2006 were 518 and 603 respectively (2007, p. 30); these figures evidence an alarming trend that has received little attention by the guatemalan government and the international community. femicide in guatemala is occurring in a context of generalized violence affecting great segments of the population. both women and men face a situation marked by fear and the potential of being victims of violence at any given moment. moreover, a woman and a man‘s experiences of life in guatemala are influenced by their various social locations, including ethnicity, class, age, and geographic location. thus, not all women in guatemala experience life and violence in the same ways. while women‘s experiences vary, a focus on their lives is necessary as the violation of their bodies has constituted a virtually normative practice in guatemala. as certain scholars (e.g., few, 2002; nelson, 1999) highlight, since the spanish conquest, ethnic relations as well as national and state formation in guatemala have been maintained and (re)produced through gender and gendered violence. analogous to different historical periods in guatemala, including during the armed internal conflict, in the ―postconflict‖ context men are murdered with more frequency than women. however, there are indicators that proportionally the violence directed at women has increased at a higher rate in this period than the proportional increase in violence directed against men (e.g. see, palma & sas, 2007). furthermore, violent crimes against women often entail rape and other forms of sexual violence, and their bodies frequently show signs of mutilation of facial features and sexual organs (amnesty international, 2005). the patterned, gruesome, sexualized and misogynist nature of violence perpetrated against women is a central factor for distinguishing violence toward women and men, and suggests a need to carefully interrogate violence against women in particular. a number of factors impede accuracy in the recording of the murders of women in guatemala. a lack of public confidence in state institutions, indifference on the part of officials, and deficiencies within the judicial system to deal adequately with these cases, all contribute to the under-registration of violent crimes against women. in addition, it is widely believed that police forces collude with organized crime, as has been observed for other latin american contexts (caldeira, 2000; goldstein, 2003), and may thus be complicit in violence against women. the chronic lack of reporting, investigation, and prosecution of these crimes has resulted in a situation where the perpetrators of these acts remain largely unidentified and unpunished, which can be seen as exacerbating the climate of fear and insecurity present in guatemala. in guatemala, as in countless societies throughout history and around the globe, violence has been perpetrated on women‘s bodies for the purposes of sustaining patriarchal systems, nation studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 31 building and nationalism, and for the waging of war (das, 1997; giles & hyndman, 2004; malkki, 1995; olujic, 1998). finally, certain observers (e.g., del alamo, 2004; urías, 2005) have pointed out how documented rates of domestic abuse—a less publicly visible form of violence— are also alarmingly high in guatemala. due to the secrecy that often accompanies domestic violence and the great methodological challenges it poses for researchers (ellsberg, heise, pena, agurto & winkvist, 2001), the figures on such incidents are much more scarce, and perhaps even less accurate than the figures on cases of femicide. nevertheless, there are indicators that this form of violence in guatemala constitutes a serious social problem (e.g., see asturias & del águila, 2005; del alamo, 2004; la hora, 2003; urías, 2005). in her research on gender relations before, during and after the guatemalan civil war, anthropologist judith zur (1998), for example, listened to many women in the war‘s aftermath who told her that for them, men‘s alcoholism and violence in the home were central issues of concern. my study is focused on the metropolitan area (área metropolitana de guatemala, amg) 5 in the department (province) of guatemala. the guatemalan metropolitan area includes the municipality of guatemala city – guatemala‘s capital city – and surrounding municipalities including mixco, villa nueva, chinautla, and san juan sacatepequez. this area contains three million of the country‘s thirteen million inhabitants. as rotker et al. (2002) observe for other post-conflict and post-dictatorship countries in latin america, violence in guatemala in the postwar period has moved increasingly to urban areas, with the department of guatemala, and especially the metropolitan area, topping the list as the most crime-ridden area. in its statistical analysis of violence in guatemala, the united nations development program found that the department of guatemala, ―has accumulated during the last years more than 50 percent of the illicit activities that are registered in the country‖ (pnud 2007, pp.16-17). furthermore, 35 percent of the registered illicit activities at the national level are carried out in the municipality of guatemala city alone (pnud, 2007, pp. 16-17). as such, the report also indicates that, ―guatemala city is one of the most violent places on the continent‖ (pnud, 2007, p.24). as well as being the site of a large percentage of violence and crime in the country, the metropolitan area of guatemala also holds a significant portion of the country‘s urban poor (gellert, 1999, p.38). while the city remains the centre of political, commercial and industrial power, great segments of its population do not earn a sufficient income to cover their most basic 5 the area covering guatemala city and neighboring municipalities, such as mixco, villa nueva, chinautla, and san juan sacatepequez is commonly referred to as the área metropolitana de guatemala or área metropolitana de la ciudad de guatemala (metropolitan area of guatemala -amg). however, there is some disagreement about what constitutes the amg, with some researchers referring to the entire department of guatemala as the amg (gellert, 1999). in this article, i use the former definition as this was the definition i found was most commonly used during my fieldwork in guatemala. 6 at a national level, there are also indices of growing social inequalities and low human development trends. while in 1989 the extreme poverty strata represented five times the proportion of the population found in a situation of ‗high development‘, in 2004 it represented nearly ten times the same population (pnud, 2005). malnutrition among guatemalan children is extremely high: 64% of extremely poor and 53% of poor children suffer from malnutrition (world bank, 2003, p.14). compared to other countries in latin america, guatemala ranks poorly with respect to health indicators: life expectancy (65 years) is the lowest and infant mortality (40-45 per thousand) is the highest in central america (world bank, 2003, p.14). furthermore, literacy in guatemala ranks far below average in latin america; with an illiteracy rate of 31% in 2000, primarily represented by women, the poor and rural residents, only nicaragua and haiti rank worse (world bank, 2003, p.63). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 32 needs (valladares cerezo, 2003, p.5). according to a study of urban slums in guatemala city, approximately sixty per cent of the population of the metropolitan area can be classified as ―poor‖ (valladares cerezo, 2003, p.6). 6 in addition, it is estimated that one third of the inhabitants of the metropolitan area live in precarious settlements, many without running water, drains and sewage systems (valladares cerezo, 2003, p.3). thus, valladares cerezo (2003) points out that, in recent years the city has been characterized, by considerable horizontal expansion, with peripheral commercial sub-centres, an inefficient public transport system, proliferating precarious settlements, a free market economy and a decrease in state attention to housing needs. this article emerges from a larger doctoral project focusing on the impact of intersecting forms of violence on the quotidian experiences, lives, and social relations of differently-positioned women in contemporary urban guatemala. i utilized a combination of research methodologies during the course of this year-long study. participation observation served as an important research method: i immersed myself in everyday life in guatemala city, and spent time with women, and their families, in their homes throughout the urban area. during my initial months in guatemala, i sat in on a woman‘s support group, which was run by guatemala city-based institution that supports families of murdered women and victims of domestic as well as other forms of violence. with the permission of the support group participants, i was able to sit in on all of their by-weekly sessions over the four and a half month period their group met. i later interviewed various support group participants individually in their homes. in addition, throughout my stay in guatemala, i conducted structured and semi-structured with a range both indigenous and non-indigenous (ladina/mestiza) 7 women—including women not aligned to any particular institution—ranging in age from twenty to forty-five years, all of whom resided in the metropolitan area of guatemala. i also interviewed activists, human rights workers, as well as government and ngo employees whose work was related to, in broad terms, advancing women‘s rights and, specifically, aiding women in situations of violence. i selected guatemala city and its surrounding municipalities as the focus of my study as it represents an area little-studied in academic analyses of the impact of war on daily life and postwar reconstruction. literature on the consequences of wartime violence in guatemala has tended to focus—with valid reason—on rural areas of the northwest highlands, which saw the bulk of massacres during the armed conflict (e.g., see manz, 2004; zur,1998). however, as both truth commission reports (ceh, 1999; odhag, 1998) document, state sponsored violence during the first two decades of the war (1960s and 1970s) had an urban character. during the period from 1954 to the late 1970s, when u.s.-sponsored counterrevolutionary forces targeted politicians, academics, students, and trade unionists (committing ―selective‖ killings), acts of political violence were primarily committed in guatemala city (ball, kobrak & spirer, 1999; ceh, 1999; odhag, 1998). for instance, paul kobrak (1999) documents the systematic attack by state forces on leading intellectuals in the city, particularly those affiliated to the university of san carlos. furthermore, three of the most publicized war-time incidents – the 1980 burning of the spanish embassy that killed 39 k‘iche‘ peasants (including the father of nobel laureate rigoberta menchú), the vicious stabbing to death of anthropologist myrna mack chang in 1990, 7 in guatemala, the term ladino/a is used to refer to european descendents or (usually) to persons of mixed mayan and spanish ancestry. sometimes the term is used interchangeably with mestizo/a. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 33 and the 1998 murder of bishop juan gerardi (two days after he had presented the nunca más report outlining the horrific abuses of the guatemalan military) – all occurred in downtown guatemala city. moreover, the severity of violence in guatemala city during the post-war period signals a need to include an urban focus in analyses of the multiple effects of war on people‘s everyday lives and social relations in its aftermath. guatemala’s legal framework for addressing violence against women the laws passed in guatemala in the area of gender-base violence are the result of the convergence of both local and global processes. guatemala is among numerous states in the post-cold war era (see nyamu-musembi, 2006; ulrich, 2000) that have made judicial reforms in the area of violence against women. in the past two decades, international organizations and donors, within a framework of ―strengthening the rule of law‖, have paid increased attention to gender-based violence, and countries around the globe have passed laws against violence toward women (ulrich, 2000). in guatemala, since the signing of peace accords in 1996, the national congress has approved three important laws specifically directed at addressing gender disparities and protecting women against different forms of violence: the ley para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia intrafamiliar (1996), the ley de dignificación y promoción integral de la mujer (1999) and, most recently, the ley contra el femicidio y otras formas de violencia contra la mujer (2008). at this historical juncture, women in guatemala are protected by law against violence more than in any time in the past. paradoxically, widespread violence against women in guatemala in the post war period has been concurrent to women‘s increased legal protection against various forms of violence and discrimination. why, then, does violence against women persist? why has violence increased as laws to prevent it have been simultaneously passed? and, how far-reaching can the laws against violence toward women be in a context where the judicial system does not function effectively and impunity is rampant? the discrepancy between increased legal protection against violence and rising figures of violence against women suggests that the approval of laws for the reduction and eradication of violence toward women is not sufficient to address this social problem, and may only be a part of larger social changes required for its amelioration. the laws passed in guatemala aimed at reducing and eliminating distinct forms of violence toward women must be seen in relation to women‘s growing activism and lobbying. without the efforts of individual activists and women‘s and feminist organizations such as grupo guatemalteco de mujeres, tierra viva, the national coordinator of guatemalan widows (conavigua), and the no violence against women network, among others, that have worked tirelessly to raise awareness surrounding women‘s subordination in both the private and public spheres, it is unlikely the present laws would have even been proposed. their efforts have made violence against women an issue worthy of attention by members of congress, human rights groups, and segments of the guatemalan population—hardly a simple task considering the extent to which violence against women in guatemala is sanctioned both culturally, but also arguably by the state. the achievements of the guatemalan women‘s movement, particularly in relation to the laws on gender-based violence have significant historical roots. for instance, an organized women‘s studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 34 movement was already present in guatemala in the 1940s, with the creation of the alianza femenina guatemalteca, the first collective organization aimed at mobilizing women (carrillo, 2004, p.156). yet, it is in the last three decades in particular that the movement gained significant momentum and visibility. during this time, the women‘s movement expanded its organizational structure and increased its visibility (berger, 2006). furthermore, it placed the eradication of all forms of violence, including violence against women, at the centre its political agenda. though internally diverse and historically fractured along ethnic, class, and urban-rural lines, the women‘s movement has become a powerful player in shaping national policy (berger, 2006)—as the passing of laws in the area of women‘s rights attests. in their present struggles for social justice, guatemalan women are increasingly utilizing the instruments of international conventions and law as part of multi-faceted efforts to advance their rights and promote gender equality. on the one hand, an international human rights movement has created spaces for women to articulate their demands for greater social equality. the last two decades have given rise to a shift in the ways in which marginalized groups throughout the globe, such as ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and women, are making claims for their rights. where nation-states are becoming weakened, or they assuage themselves of the responsibilities for providing for their citizens, due largely to neo-liberal reorganization, collectivities increasingly seek social justice redress in international forums (e.g., niezen, 2003; merry, 2006). accordingly, guatemalan women are utilizing the new opportunities emerging from international law and its forums for debate and exchange, such as meetings of the united nations (un), to advance their rights as women in guatemala. on the other hand, women‘s rights are challenged by an international human rights framework that draws on liberal rights ideals, and promotes formal equality universally. feminist scholars are critical of human rights discourses and practices precisely because of their universalist, as well as masculinist, orientations (e.g., merry, 2006; molyneux and razavi, 2002, p.7). the promotion of liberal rights and universal equality is often at odds with appeals for the recognition of the specific needs of particular peoples, such as women, and/or efforts to maintain cultural diversity (merry, 2006, p.131). transnational processes, and ―legal globalization‖ 8 , have nonetheless been an integral part of judicial reform in the area of gender based violence in guatemala. in addition to national factors, the international context has been an important part of the emergence of laws on women‘s rights in guatemala. the concept of femicide is an imported one in guatemala. in the 1990s, the cruel rapes, disappearances, and murders of hundreds of women in ciudad juárez, mexico drew international attention (e.g., see inter-american commission on human rights, 2002; ensalaco, 2006; olivera, 2006), and victims groups as well as feminist organizations ultimately came to utilize the concept of femicide to describe the situation. when a similar pattern of murderous violence against women was observed in guatemala, human rights and women‘s groups drew comparisons to the case of women in ciudad juárez. subsequently, women‘s groups in guatemala have participated in information exchanges and networking with women‘s groups in mexico, across different latin american countries, and beyond. local efforts to draw attention to the grave dimensions of the problem of violence against women in guatemala have both led to, and been supported by, international attention to the issue. for instance, in 2004 the un 8 i borrow this term from sieder (2004). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 35 special rapporteur on violence against women, yakin ertürk, visited guatemala to investigate the situation of women in the country and produced a report (ertürk, 2005) outlining her findings and specific recommendations for the guatemalan state and the international community for responding to the realities of guatemalan women. international flows of money into the country for ―peace‖ and ―democracy‖ building are also significant factors behind judicial reform in guatemala, and for understanding the emergence of laws against discrimination and violence toward women. in the post-cold war era, judicial reform is a central component of state and internationally driven initiatives for post-conflict and post-dictatorship rebuilding and democratization. these efforts, as is particularly evident in the guatemalan case, are often donor-driven (that is, they stem from external pressures), and do not necessarily emerge from within the state. donors including the world bank, the inter-american development bank, the united nations development program, or country donors such as the united states agency for international development (usaid) invest in democracy building, legal reform, and promotion of human rights (sieder, 2004, p.3), even while they promote a neoliberal market framework that ultimately makes their intentions suspect. nonetheless, legal reorganization and reform of the state together with promotion of human rights are now central components of armed conflict rebuilding and transition (sieder, 2004, p.3). judicial reform was a central component of the united nations brokered peace accords in guatemala, which included an accord specifically focused on reforming the guatemalan legal system. in particular the agreement for strengthening of civilian power and the role of the armed forces in a democratic society signed in september of 1996 outlined various measures for decreasing and redefining the role of the military, which had previously gone unchecked, and increasing the role of legal institutions in promoting internal security (see jonas, 2000). the agreement on strengthening civilian power, came after the comprehensive accord on human rights, signed in march of 1994. unlike other accords, that were to be implemented after the official signing of peace, the human rights accord would come into effect immediately (jonas, 2000, p. 71). under this accord, the government and the guatemalan national revolutionary unity (urng) vowed to meet their obligations under international law. as sieder (2004) observes, the peace settlement‘s focus on human rights meant that in the years following the signing of peace, strengthening the rule of law was on the agenda of the government, civil society, and the international community. among the peace accords signed, there was a comprehensive accord on human rights, accords for addressing social and economic aspects of the agrarian situation, for strengthening civilian power, and an accord on the rights of indigenous persons. however there was no accord that directly addressed women. women‘s rights are referred to by some as the ―missing‖ accord (e.g. jonas, 2000, p.86). susanne jonas suggests that this elision was largely the result of, ―long standing lack of attention to gender issues by both negotiating parties and the late development of the women‘s movement in guatemala‖ (2000, p. 86). nonetheless, the peace negotiations, which saw creation the sector de mujeres (women‘s sector), as part of the national assembly of civil society opened up spaces for a debate specifically around gender (berger, 2006, pp. 3436). the participation of the women‘s sector in the peace process also facilitated the organizational structure of the movement, which has increasingly come to work within governmental structures, not merely providing pressure from outside (ibid.). given the transnational influence on judicial reform in guatemala, the different laws aimed at reducing and eradicating gender-based discrimination and violence in the country draw upon studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 36 international law and conventions, in particular the convention for the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (cedaw) and the inter-american convention on the prevention, punishment and eradication of violence against women (convention of belém do pará), both ratified by the guatemalan government —all of which frame women‘s rights in the language of human rights. the definition of violence within the family as a human rights violation is the most basic premise of the first of these laws, the ley para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia intrafamiliar (the ‗domestic violence law‘, approved in 1996). article one of the law‘s first chapter indicates that, violence within the family constitutes a violation of human rights […] and should be understood as an action or omission that directly or indirectly causes physical, sexual, psychological and/or economic harm or suffering both in the private and public sphere, on the part of relatives, partner, or ex-partner or with whom children have been procreated (congreso de la república, decreto 97-96, capítulo 1, artículo 1). this law represented an important victory for guatemalan women. in defining violence against women as a human rights violation, the law holds potential for legitimizing women‘s denunciations of abuses against them within their homes, a violence that is all too often hidden and silenced. for instance, up until recently rape was not considered ―rape‖ if it occurred in the context of marriage. 9 with the approval of the ley para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia intrafamiliar, women gained the possibility of prosecuting their aggressors for harmful actions committed against them that previously may not have been considered forms of violence. moreover, in addition to making it possible for women to denounce domestic abuse as a crime and violation of their rights, and calling on institutions to provide legal assistance to victims, the law makes ―security measures‖ (medidas de seguridad) possible. the ―security measures‖ are an important component of this law, making it possible for the accused aggressor to be ordered to leave the common residence immediately, have his/her weapons decommissioned, and child visitation rights suspended in cases of sexual aggression against minors (artículo 7). though it represents a significant victory for women in guatemala, the domestic violence law contains significant shortcomings. first among them is the law‘s failure to directly address domestic violence against women; its focus is violence within the family generally. in other words, it is possible under this law for a male spouse, grandparents, or children to be considered the victims of domestic violence. through its use of gender-neutral language, constant throughout all articles, the law fails to denounce violence against women. political scientist susan berger (2006, p.46) argues that the gender-neutrality of this law is not an accident. women‘s groups had pushed for and lobbied for a law that would address violence against women specifically, as it was premised on international conventions for addressing the rights of women ratified by the guatemalan state. however, berger explains, proponents of the law could not garner enough support within the national congress, and thus proposed in its place the ley para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia intrafamiliar. the fact that in the end, the law was framed in a gender-neutral manner, and focuses on individual victims and aggressors, 9 article 200 of the guatemalan penal code, which established that criminal responsibility for rape could be waived where the victim was over 12 years old and the perpetrator married the victim was only suspended in 2005 (amnesty international, 2007). studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 37 reflects the de-politicizing process that took place in its framing and approval. gender imbalances with respect to who is likely to be a victim of domestic violence were systematically ignored. furthermore, structural conditions such as the feminization of poverty, as well as social and historical factors that make women more vulnerable to domestic violence, were ignored by the law. in many ways the subsequent laws on women‘s rights and violence have built on and served as correctors of the ley para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia intrafamiliar. for instance, the ley de dignificación y promoción integral de la mujer (law for the dignification and integral promotion of women), approved in 1999, was broader in scope than the domestic violence law, and directly addressed women. its central objectives were, ―to promote the integral development of women and their participation at all levels of economic, political, and social life in guatemala‖ (congreso de la república, decreto 7-99, artículo 2a). this law had the potential to be far-reaching as it emphasized not only eliminating violence toward women, but also eradicating different forms of social discrimination against women, for instance in educational institutions or in the labour force. this law was also guided by the framework of human rights and had among its objectives promoting women‘s development in the different spheres of their lives as outlined in the guatemalan constitution, as well as international conventions on women‘s rights. the most recent law, the law against femicide, similarly corrects some of the shortcomings of the original law on violence within the family. while the ley para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia intrafamiliar failed to specifically address women, and the ley de dignificación y promoción integral de la mujer was general and hence difficult to apply, the law against femicide is both specific in its terms of application and directly addresses women. the first article of the first chapter states, the present law has as its objective to guarantee the life, liberty, integrity, dignity, protecttion, and equality of all women under law, particularly when because of their gender within relations of power or trust, in the public or private sphere, the aggressor commits against them discriminatory or physically, psychologically, economically violent practices, or disrespects their rights. the aim is to promote and implement dispositions oriented toward eradicating physical, psychological, sexual, economic violence or any type of coercion against women, thus guaranteeing them a life free of violence, based on stipulations in the political constitution of the republic and international instruments regarding women‘s human rights ratified by guatemala (congreso de la república, decreto22-2008, capítulo 1, artículo 1). the subsequent chapters and articles of the law against femicide are detailed in outlining penalties for different crimes against women, compensation for the victims, and obligations of the state. the law is also significantly more detailed than its predecessors in defining violence against women and the different forms this takes. one of the criticisms of the ley para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia intrafamiliar that i heard frequently during my research from staff within institutions that offered services to victims of domestic violence (such as the public ministry‘s office for attention to victims), was that the law still made it nearly impossible to try domestic abuse. i was told this was particularly the case when dealing with situations of psychological or emotional abuse, since the guatemalan penal code does not contain necessary studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 38 articles that would make such a crime possible to effectively prove in a court of law. thus, women‘s legal representatives had to work diligently to find other articles available, such as on physical assault, to mobilize in a court setting. the added detail of the articles contained in the law against femicide can thus partly be understood as a response to these criticisms. the passing of the laws in the area of women‘s rights and gender-based violence illustrate, as berger (2006) points out, that the women‘s movement in guatemala has put gender on the government‘s social, political, and economic agenda. moreover, there have been certain concrete results stemming from the passing of the laws. chief among them is the creation of the national coordinator for the prevention of violence within the family and against women (conaprevi), an organizational body that oversees the implementation of the ley para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia intrafamiliar. conaprevi has mixed, government and civil society, representation and has developed the national plan for the prevention of violence within the family (planovi 2004-2014). this ten-year plan establishes lines of actions for addressing violence within the family and against women, including research and statistical analyses of violence against women; prevention activities such as educational campaigns; providing, legal, psychological, and medical services to victims of violence; and strengthening of institutions that work in the area of gender-based violence prevention. limitations of the laws & women’s everyday experiences a mere review of written laws against violence toward women in guatemala is insufficient for understanding the reach and dimensions of problems of violence on women‘s lives, as well as the potential and limitations of legal reforms in this area. laws gain their significance in relation to the context out of which they emerge and where they are applied. thus, it is important to ask, what happens when the laws against violence toward women in guatemala are put into practice? what do the implications of judicial reform and the passing of laws in the area of gender-based violence really amount to for women living in a context where residues of war-time violence as well as post-war crime and insecurity intersect with gender-based discrimination, and constantly operate in tandem to intensify the other‘s effects? in her multi-sited analysis of laws against gender-based violence, anthropologist sally engle merry (2006) examines the complex interplay between a global rights-based women‘s movement, guided by the principles of human rights, and the implementation of international laws on gender in particular local settings. merry concludes that a global human rights approach often does not adequately accommodate the particularities and intricacies of local settings. drawing on the insights of merry it is important to ask, how far does the current legal framework for addressing violence in women‘s lives go to reduce incidences of violent acts, and as important, the quotidian processes and experiences of violence and injustice for women in guatemala? feminists scholars criticize liberal law making on the grounds that it disregards social justice through a focus on formal rights rather than substantive outcomes (molyneux & razavi, 2002, p.8). for instance, they argue that while neo-liberalism is premised on the freedom of contract, if the subjects of rights lack the conditions and resources to exercise their rights, freedom of contract does not truly constitute freedom (elson, 2002; nussbaum, 2002). with the passing of laws in the area of gender-based violence, a woman in guatemala now has the formal right to a life free of violence. however, what does this right mean to her if she is unable to freely walk studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 39 around her neighborhood without fear of attack or leave her home without being subject to family and/or community control? a strictly legal, formal rights-based, framework such as the one ascribed to by the guatemalan state, treats violence as an act involving an individual perpetrator and victim. this approach is problematic as it ignores the social conditions that give rise and sustain relations of domination. as the emergent body of social science literature on violence underscores, violence is contextual, therefore, the outcome of particular social, cultural, political, and economic structures and process that sustain and legitimize the suffering of certain groups of people (scheper-hughes & bourgois, 2004; caldeira, 2000; das, kleinman, ramphele & reynolds, 2000; malkki, 1995). moreover, the state‘s legal framing of violence against women not only ignores a woman‘s life history and context, but also that of the ―aggressor‖. we could learn a great deal about the social problem of violence against women by considering why men resort to violent actions. addressing violence toward women does not imply addressing only women‘s lives, but the conditions of the relations between individuals (men and women) and between individuals and their communities. women in guatemala confront a ―multidimensionality of systems of subordination‖ (forster, 1999, p.58) where political, structural, economic, interpersonal and symbolic violence intersect (menjívar, 2008), and synergetically manifest themselves on their everyday experiences. a global human rights approach to addressing violence against women, with a tendency to ignore particularities of the local context and an emphasis on individual victims and perpetrators, fails to capture the multilayered and multi-causal experiences of violence of women in guatemala—in itself a highly diverse segment of the population. indeed, the need to take into account, in state and institutional responses to violence against women, the various layers of violence in women‘s lives became more than apparent to me during the course of my research. in by-weekly sessions the women‘s support group for victims of domestic abuse and family members of murdered women i sat in on during my fieldwork, women not only discussed abuse suffered at the hands of their spouses, but also fears about other forms of violence either towards themselves or their children. for instance, doña celeste, a k‘aqchikel (indigenous) woman and mother i met in the support group and then later visited and interviewed in her home, shared the problems she regularly experienced with her spouse, including his drinking and abusive behaviours toward her and her children. doña celeste‘s life, however, was also layered with the pain she consistently carried with her since her first-born, nineteen year-old lorena, had been raped and murdered in 2003. the death of her daughter, she told me, changed everything for her and her family. if having to endure this tragedy were not enough, now she constantly worries about her other children. for example, her seventeen year-old daughter veronica (now her only living daughter), must walk past the home of her sister‘s suspected killer every day on her way to school. for a time, celeste and her husband pulled veronica out of school for this very reason. the decision of whether veronica should continue her studies was influenced by violence and fear of further violence. doña celeste also worries that the accused and his family may take reprisals not only on veronica but possibly against her other children. fear of reprisals was similarly an issue for other women i came to know during my research, such as thirty-nine year-old, doña rosa. doña rosa shared with me how one day she came home after work to find her home surrounded by neighbors and police officers, one of whom coldly asked her, ―are you the mother of the girl that was raped?‖. rosa described this as the worst moment in her life, as it turned out she was indeed the mother. her then thirteen year-old daughter, mildred, had been the victim of a vicious sexual assault by a man known to the family. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 40 furthermore, because mildred protected her nine year-old sister by hiding her in her arms, she was cruelly beaten and nearly killed. hers was one of those cases of femicide where the victim happened to survive—the cases that often do not make the headlines or official statistics. today, seven years later, the aggressor has not been sentenced, as his legal representatives have employed different legal measures to draw out his trial, doña rosa explained. as a result, doña rosa constantly worries that the aggressor may take reprisals on mildred or her other five children. gender-based violence against lorena and mildred, the daughters of doña celeste and doña rosa, had horrific consequences for the victims; in the case of lorena, it claimed her life. however, these stories of violence do not end there. these horrendous events are the beginning points of other stories, of other life and family trajectories, that must bear their consequences. both doña celeste and doña rosa, as well as their respective spouses and children now must also live the after-effects; the reverberations of those violent events and their adverse effects. husbands and male children also suffered as a result of the gender-based violence committed against these young women, a point often ignored by analyses of violence toward women. doña celeste‘s partner told me how he has to work alongside, and ―shake the hand‖ of the man he suspected was responsible for lorena‘s death. this daily act of symbolic violence angered him, but he could do nothing about it, he shared. his own violent behaviour toward celeste and their children might be seen in relation to his own condition of disempowerment and inability to act in other spheres of his life, including the injustice of lorena‘s death. both women told me they felt that a sense of just closure would result from their daughter‘s aggressors being punished, but it would not alleviate their fears of reprisals or concerns about crime in guatemala city or their concerns about mere economic survival. both women are poor; they make a living from making and selling tortillas, and do not read and write. their opportunities for social ascendency are extremely limited. what is more, stepping forward to denounce crimes against their daughters (that was possible with the assistance of the guatemala city based organization providing legal and psychological assistance to victims of violence where i met celeste and rosa) created its own set of problems for them. for instance, doña celeste believes that it was her own cousin that was responsible for her daughter, lorena‘s death. however, the cousin was declared innocent in court of any wrongdoing in the case. doña celeste‘s family has now turned against her. ―this hurt me‖, she stated: they are happy, and i am here with pain. they have humiliated my family in front of everyone. they even held a special church service, in front of my husband and other children, where they accused us of lorena‘s death, because we let her go out. this hurt me so much and i don‘t speak to my side of the family since then. my husband and children were there, we were all there when they said this to us. when the lawyers called me to be present at another public hearing, i said, why should i be there if justice is not made? as well as experiencing fear that the accused aggressor and those close to him might take reprisals on her other children, bringing lorena‘s case to court caused great divisions between doña celeste and her extended family. here, it is possible to draw parallels to the observations of sally engle merry in her research in hawai‘i and the battered-women‘s movement in the united states. merry illustrates how the sense of self promoted by a human rights approach, drawing on notions of the autonomous self, was often at odds with a sense of self rooted in the family, studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 41 religion and community for women in her study (2006, p.181). as a k‘aqchikel woman, for whom her extended family, religion and community were fundamental aspects of her sense of self, having to cut ties to her extended family has been for doña celeste a particularly painful experience. the guatemalan women‘s movement has effectively utilized instruments of international law to advance claims based on their collective identity as women. at the same time, the category of women is not a homogenous one, and the passing of laws against violence may have different outcomes for women depending on their situation in guatemalan society. the dominant legal system in guatemala, as with other state institutions in the country, has historically been guided by racist, classist, and sexist ideologies and practices, and has thus worked to reinforce existing social inequalities. in her analysis of justice and gender in rural guatemala between 1936 and 1956, historian cindy forster (1999) highlights the class and racial violence in the country that often paralleled incidents of sexual violence. using as her historical referent court cases of instances of rape of women and infanticide during the dictatorship of general jorge ubico and the subsequent democratic revolution, forster highlights patriarchal, as well as class and racial biases that underpinned legal proceedings and rulings, and thereby contributed to the routinization of violence against certain groups of persons. forster highlights how in a historical period marked by struggle over land – when class and racial identities tightly intertwined as ―elite fears of class war were expressed in racial language‖ (1999, p.56) – sexual violence against poor and indigenous women did not count in official terms as violence. indigenous women and women from lower socio-economic social strata were deemed dishonourable, and in some cases even ―bad women‖ (mujeres malas) by virtue of their social positioning, and thus their ―morality‖ could not be defended in court. forster cites cases where even documented physical proof of assault was not enough to convict an assailant. the social revolution of 1944 brought about changes in social attitudes towards rape and other forms of violence against women, forster points out. civil society, was less willing to condone violence against women after 1944, stemming in part from the new discourse of social equality between 1944 and 1954 (forster, 1999, p. 60). forster argues that the numbers of rape cases brought to trial increased in the revolutionary period; however, most men charged were never imprisoned or otherwise punished. in addition to the force of legal apparatuses to reinforce social inequalities, there is unequal access to legal institutions in guatemala. doña celeste and doña rosa‘s access to legal representation for their daughters‘ cases was facilitated by their residence in the department of guatemala, where most government and social services are found. had doña celeste and doña rosa resided in rural guatemala, accessing services of the state—however inadequate—would have proved particularly challenging. in a comprehensive study of indigenous women‘s access to justice in guatemala, the defensoría de la mujer indigena (demi) found that indigenous women encounter numerous obstacles when seeking out legal aid. these include their low socioeconomic status; 77% of indigenous women are poor and 58.3% illiterate (demi, 2007, p.28). other obstacles identified include language barriers (the great majority of institutions work in spanish not indigenous languages), discrimination and racist treatment, as well as insensitivity and the tendency for officials to blame women for their situations (demi, 2007). doña rosa experienced this insensitivity when the police officer asked her about the rape of her daughter without concern for the pain such news might cause her as a mother. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 42 furthermore, as revealed by the experiences of doña celeste and doña rosa, many guatemalans are deeply suspicious of state institutions (sieder, 2004, p.3). in a context where the state has been extremely repressive against its citizens, where the military has controlled the judiciary and acted with impunity, and police forces routinely partake in illegal activities, it is not surprising there would be such prominent mistrust among the population. thus, in the last decade and a half guatemala has seen the emergence of ―parallel states‖ (caldeira, 1996), and forms of justice, such as lynchings where groups have taken justice into their own hands and injured or stoned suspected individuals. 10 conclusion the passing of laws in guatemala in the area of women‘s rights, aimed at eradicating discrimination and violence toward women, are immensely important victories. against a historical backdrop of state, institutional, and culturally sanctioned disrespect for women‘s bodies and dignities, the significance of the laws against gender-based violence, cannot be undermined. nevertheless, as this article has illustrated, the assembly of laws for addressing gender-based violence in guatemala is not without certain shortcomings and limitations. among the weaknesses of the state‘s legal framework, is the conceptualization of violence against women as representing synchronic events, rather than on-going social processes. state and institutional approaches for addressing gender-based violence in guatemala could go further in situating the phenomenon of gender-based violence within social structures that contribute to its emergence and proliferation, including growing economic disparities and poverty, as well as enduring patriarchal practices and ideologies. the laws on their own fail to take into account how women‘s experiences of violence in post-war guatemala are multilayered and embedded in global and local structures of power and domination. in addition, it is not only gender-based violence that affects women; their experiences are layered with structural, political, class and ethnic violence that similarly need the attention that femicide and, to a lesser extent, domestic violence, have received. through framing violence toward women as merely interpersonal, the laws depoliticize gender-based violence. it remains to be seen how far the body of laws reviewed in this article can go in reducing rates of gender-based violence, especially when impunity is widespread in guatemala. at a national level, less than 2% of murders of women end in conviction (orantes, 2008). judicial reform thus far has been insufficient to halt increasing rates of violence against women; on the contrary, rates have significantly increased, parallel to the passing of laws on discrimination and violence against women. the passing of laws in the area of women‘s rights and eradicating violence toward women is one (important) aspect of a series of reforms that would be necessary for effectively addressing the prevalence of violence in women‘s lives. other reforms might include the actual application of the specific laws in this area and breaking the wall of impunity, the full 10 the united nations mission for verification in guatemala (minugua, 2001, p.1) found that between 1996 and 2001, there were a total of 421 linchamientos committed. the linchamientos occur primarily in communities that were affected by the violence of the armed conflict (in the northern and north western altiplano). various explanations are offered for the linchamientos including the high levels of insecurity in guatemala, the exclusion and lack of trust of the majority of the population in the judicial system, and the impunity prevalent in the country. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 43 implementation of the 1996 peace accords and subsequent recommendations of the truth commission report (ceh, 1999), as well as increased investment in human development. rather than be taken as solutions to the problem, which implies a finality the laws do not provide, laws in the area of gender-based violence could be taken as starting points for wider debates about the multiple and intersecting structures of inequality and injustices present in women‘s lives, and about how to begin adequately responding to them. judicial reform in relation to violence against women, and the spaces opened by the peace process (jonas, 2000) could serve as a platform for broader discussions and more holistic efforts to find solutions for the problems of violence in post-war guatemala. the question of justice in relation to violence toward women in guatemala needs to be reframed by national and international actors as one about social justice. scholars, policy makers, and governmental and non-governmental institutions should more readily look to the complexities of women‘s lives and take cue from guatemalan women‘s activism, which highlights the multiple spheres on which women‘s rights must be fought. formal legal rights are one important step in women‘s larger struggles for social justice. acknowledgements this research was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada, the mcgill trauma & global health program, and the mcgill centre for research and teaching on women. i am grateful to kristin norget, ellen corin, ismael vaccaro and nikki porter for their helpful comments and suggestions. i also wish to thank ronald niezen for providing a forum in his legal anthropology class for me to explore my ideas. studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 44 references amnesty international. 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(1999). parte i. el cuadro global. in g. gellert & s.i. palma (eds.). precariedad urbana, desarrollo comunitario y mujeres en el área metropolitana de guatemala (pp. 5-52). guatemala, guatemala: flacso. giles, w., & hyndman, j., (eds.). (2004). sites of violence: gender and conflict zones. berkeley, ca: university of california press. goldstein, d. (2003). laughter out of place: race, class, and sexuality in a rio shantytown. berkeley, ca: university of california press. integrated regional information networks (irin), un office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs. (2004). our bodies – their battle ground: gender based violence in conflict zones. irin web special on violence against women and girls during and after conflict. retrieved september 15, 2005, from www.irinnews.org inter-american commission on human rights. (2002). violence against women in ciudad juárez: overview of the problem. retrieved september, 27 2005 from http://www.cidh.oas.org/annualrep/2002eng/chap.vi.juarez.2.htm jonas, s. (2000). of centaurs and doves: guatemala‘s peace process. boulder. co: westview press. kobrak, p. (1999). organizing and repression in the university of san carlos, 1944 to 1996. american association for the advancement of science. retrieved april, 10, 2008, from http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/org_rep/ la hora. (2003, july 4). más de cinco mil denuncias conoce fiscalía de la mujer. la hora. retrieved september 25, 2005 from http://www.lahora.com.gt/03/07/04/paginas/nac_1.htm logan, s., bain, b., & kairies, k. (2006, march 14). deportation feeds a cycle of violence in central america: americas program special report. irc americas. retrieved september 15, 2006, from http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3152 malkki, l. (1995). purity and exile: violence, memory and national cosmology among hutu refugees in tanzania. chicago, ill: the university of chicago press. manz, b. (2004). paradise in ashes: a guatemalan journey of courage, terror and hope. berkeley, ca: university of california press. http://www.iigov.org/gbz/print.drt?edi=14233&art=14234 http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g05/108/17/pdf/g0510817.pdf?openelement http://www.irinnews.org/ http://www.lahora.com.gt/03/07/04/paginas/nac_1.htm http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3152 studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 46 menjívar, c. (2008). violence and women‘s lives in eastern guatemala: a conceptual framework. women and international development working paper #290. centre for gender in global context, michigan state university. merry, s.e. (2006). human rights and gender violence: translating international law into local justice. chicago, ill: university of chicago press. minugua (misión de verificación de las naciones unidas en guatemala) (2001). los linchamientos: un flagelo contra la dignidad humana. resumen de informe de verificación de minugua. molyneux, m., & razavi, s. (2002). introduction. in m. molyneux & s. razavi (eds.), gender justice, development, and rights (pp. 1-42). oxford: oxford university press. nelson, d. (1999). a finger in the wound. berkeley, ca: university of california press. niezen, r. (2003). the origins of indigenism: human rights and the politics of identity. berkeley, ca: university of california press. nussbaum, m. (2002). women‘s capabilities and social justice. in m. molyneux & s. razavi (eds.) gender justice, development, and rights (pp. 45-77). oxford: oxford university press. nyamu-musembi, c. (2006). ruling out gender equality? the post-cold war rule of law agenda in sub-saharan africa. third world quarterly, 27(7), 1193-1207. oficina de derechos humanos del arzobispado de guatemalaodhag. (1998). guatemala: nunca más. guatemala. olivera, m. (2006). violencia femicida: violence against women and mexico‘s structural crisis. latin american perspectives, 33(2), 104-114. olujic, m. b. (1998). embodiment of terror: gendered violence in peacetime and wartime croatia and bosnia-herzegovina. medical anthropology quarterly, 12(1), 31-50. orantes, c. (2008).cicig ve impunidad en casos de femicidio. prensa libre, may 23, p. 8 retrieved june 26, 2008 from http://www.prensalibre.com/pl/2008/mayo/23/239895.html palma, c. & sas, á. (2007). violencia: por cada mujer muerta, nueve hombres son asesinados. el periodico, dec 14. retrived june 25, 2008, from http://www.elperiodico.com.gt/es/20071214/pais/46677 pnud (programa de las naciones unidas para el desarrollo) (2005). diversidad étnico-cultural: la ciudadanía en un estado plural. informe nacional de desarrollo humano 2005. ciudad de guatemala: magna terra editores s.a. pnud (programa de las naciones unidas para el desarrollo) (2007). informe estadístico de la violencia en guatemala. programa de seguridad ciudadana y prevencion de la violencia del pnud guatemala. ciudad de guatemala: magna terra editores s.a. rotker, s. (2002). cities written by violence: an introduction. in s. rotker (ed.), citizens of fear: urban violence in latin america (pp. 7-22). piscataway:, n.j.: rutgers university press. russell, d. (2001). introduction: the politics of femicide. in d. russell & r. harns (eds.) femicide in global perspective (pp.3-11). new york: teachers college press. scheper-hughes, n. & bourgois, p. (2004). introduction: making sense of violence. in n. scheperhughes & p. bourgois (eds.) violence in war and peace, an anthology (pp.1-31). malden, ma: blackwell publishing. sieder, r.(2004) legal globalization and human rights: constructing the ‗rule of law‘ in post-conflict guatemala. retrieved may 15, 2008 from http://www.usal.es/~dpublico/areacp/doctorado0304/seminario_investigacion03/sieder04.pdf ulrich, j. (2000). confronting gender-based violence with international instruments: is a solution to the pandemic within reach? indiana journal of global legal studies, 7(2), 629-654. urías, t. (2005). guatemala: reino del ―feminicidio‖. revista hablemos, january 16. retrieved february 5, 2006 from http://www.elsalvador.com/hablemos/2005/160105/160105-3.htm http://www.usal.es/~dpublico/areacp/doctorado0304/seminario_investigacion03/sieder04.pdf studies in social justice volume 2, issue 1 issn: 1911-4788 47 valladares c., c.e. (2003). the case of guatemala city, guatemala. urban slums report. retrieved may 10, 2008 from http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/global_report/pdfs/guatemala.pdf world bank. (2003) poverty in guatemala. report no. 24221-gu. retrieved on sep. 20, 2004, from www.wds.worldbank.org/external/default/wdscontentserver/wdsp/ib/2003/04/05/000094946_0303 2104003172/rendered/pdf/multi0page.pdf zur, j. (1998). violent memories: mayan war widows in guatemala. boulder, co: westview press. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/global_report/pdfs/guatemala.pdf correspondence address: brian phillips journal of human rights practice, oxford university press, great clarendon street, oxford ox2 6dp, united kingdom, email: briandphillips@yahoo.co.uk issn: 1911-4788 studies in social justice volume 7, issue 2, 285-309, 2013 review essay in the land of celebrity humanitarianism: reflections on film and transitional justice in bosnia-herzegovina brian phillips journal of human rights practice, oxford university press, united kingdom following a special sarajevo screening of angelina jolie’s in the land of blood and honey for representatives of bosnian war victims’ associations, a woman who had been raped during the conflict said of her initial response to the film: “i first vomited, from the sheer force of my suffering...angelina touched our souls” (hopkins, 2011b). in another news report about the screening, this same woman added that “from the moment the film began, i was back in april 1992. my life passed through this film completely” (hopkins, 2011a). referring to the central character of the film, a second woman, also a victim of sexual violence in the bosnian war, declared: “i am ajla...this is what i went through in the rape camp in vlasenica in 1992” (hopkins, 2011b). the leader of a group of women whose sons were murdered in the 1995 srebrenica massacres likewise praised the film and expressed gratitude to jolie “for her intellectual and financial investment in making this movie that will tell the world the truth about bosnia’s war” (smajilhodžić, 2011). similarly, the male head of a group of former prisoners of war explained that “this movie is deeply moving for the victims who experienced all of these things...it is completely objective and it really tells the facts of what happened during the war” (smajilhodžić, 2011). these impassioned responses to jolie’s film immediately give rise to a number of questions concerning the possibilities for film and other cultural forms to contribute to long-term processes of truth-seeking and justice in the wake of violent conflict. on the surface, at least, the above responses studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 286 brian phillips of victims to in the land of blood and honey may suggest that filmmaking (among other forms of culture production) has considerable potential to serve as a vital additional vehicle for post-war transitional justice (in the broadest sense of that term). in recent years, scholars and activists have frequently charged that judicial processes dealing with crimes of this magnitude are chiefly focussed on “legal requirements (that) may bypass the individuality of the victims, including their needs as traumatized persons” (dembour & haslam, 2004, p.154). such critics suggest that victims of these crimes may therefore “need an entirely different platform” to tell their stories (dembour & haslam, 2004, p.154). in this quest for alternative platforms for testimony, how might creative works like films, plays and novels help to fill in something of that painful gap left by limited judicial processes? can the production and distribution of films like in the land of blood and honey which aim to tell representative stories of suffering and loss help to secure that all-important sense of recognition and the validation of personal and community experience sought by many victims as an essential component of what they understand to be justice? the literature cataloguing the numerous insufficiencies of international and national judicial mechanisms and the inability of these bodies alone to deliver justice to victims of violation or atrocity in the wake of the 1992-95 bosnian conflict is now a sizeable one (clark, 2009; delpla, 2007; dembour & haslam, 2004; henry, 2009, 2010; hodžić, 2007, 2010; mertus, 2004; stover, 2005; subotić, 2009). indeed, even as the transitional justice boom gathered its incredible momentum over the past couple of decades, some scholars working in this field were moving well beyond assessments of the specific merits and flaws of ad hoc judicial mechanisms like those created to deal with crimes committed during the wars of the former yugoslavia or the rwandan genocide raising more wide-ranging questions about the overwhelmingly dominant discourse of legalism in the emerging discipline (fletcher & weinstein, 2002; mcevoy, 2007 osiel, 2000). with regard to the experiences of rape and other sexual violence during the bosnian conflict that are at the heart of jolie’s film, numerous scholars have dwelt on the limitations of what are otherwise lauded as the groundbreaking trials and judgements of the international criminal tribunal for the former yugoslavia (icty) dealing directly with these crimes. writing of the icty’s track record in these proceedings, henry (2010), for example, speaks for a number of analysts of the tribunal when she asserts that “language, particularly legal language, cannot adequately capture the pain and trauma of rape” (p. 1113). henry notes that, as a result, “courts have struggled to accommodate the experiences of survivors of rape” (p. 1113). mertus (2008) likewise maintains that the icty processes dealing with rape and other sexual violence have shown that “squeezing women’s experiences of abuse into the narrow confines of traditional legal cases requires a willingness, on the women’s part, to give up on telling the whole story, i.e. in their words and with their individual priorities” (p. 1298). what these critiques and others like them have in common is an emphasis studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 287 on the need for complementary processes and forums running alongside the necessary judicial proceedings—a variety of initiatives and approaches aimed at promoting what mcevoy (2007) has called “a thicker understanding of transitional justice” (p. 414). in addition to discussions of the potential of state-established bodies such as truth commissions to provide complementary vehicles for victim story-telling and acknowledgement, the desirability of various forms of what jeffrey and jakala (2012) have described as “informal practices of transitional justice” (p. 3) have also been much contemplated by both scholars and activists inside and outside the post-yugoslav region in recent years1. in their critique of the icty as a vehicle for victim and witness story-telling, dembour and haslam (2004) have, for example, stressed the need for “the development of other forms of memory in the wake of mass atrocity and trauma” (p. 176), arguing that “these should be fostered both at individual and collective levels, for example through therapy, film-making, art production, literature, history research, school textbooks” (p. 176). two decades on from the start of the bosnian conflict, local filmmakers have arguably taken up this challenge in earnest. among films produced by artists working in bosnia-herzegovina itself, jamila žbanić’s grbavica, aida begić’s snow and children of sarajevo, and danis tanović’s academy awardwinning no man’s land and cirkus columbia stand out as accomplished works that tell powerful stories of the war, its origins and its aftermath. each of these films has resonated with audiences both in bosnia-herzegovina and globally. but filmmakers not native to the region have also been drawn to the cinematic potential of this war and its legacy, and to the ongoing struggles for justice for its victims. interestingly, among films dealing with the 1992-95 conflict and its aftermath produced outside the country, three of the most recent of these focus specifically on rape and other crimes of sexual violence against women. given widespread criticism of many aspects of the icty’s handling of these crimes—from the treatment of witnesses taking the stand in the trial chamber (henry, 2009; mertus, 2004) to the tribunal’s failure to involve bosnian women’s ngos more thoroughly in its work (mertus, 2008)—it is especially interesting to consider whether this trio of international films can somehow be said to “do justice” to the stories of women who experienced and survived these horrors in ways that the icty either has not or could not have done. given the reported cathartic impact of the film on at least some victims of rape and other sexual violence in the bosnian conflict, a more sustained critical appraisal of angelina jolie’s in the land of blood and honey (2011) is surely in order. indeed, a consideration of this much-publicized film’s potential as a catalyst for remembrance and reckoning—in tandem with a brief look at juanita wilson and hans-christian schmid’s related feature films, as if i am not there (2010) and storm (2009) —may offer us some initial sense of what potential, if any, film might have to “fill out” some of the requirements of justice not adequately met by courts of law alone. studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 288 brian phillips in the land of blood and honey in the land of blood and honey tells the story of ajla, a gifted young bosniak2 painter, who shares an apartment with her sister in sarajevo in the spring of 1992. as the country moves toward war, she meets danijel, an initially charming bosnian serb police officer, one evening at a café where they dance and flirt and discover a mutual attraction. but suddenly, their budding romance is interrupted by the emerging conflict. several months later, bosnian serb troops raid the apartment complex where the sisters are living murdering many male residents and selecting numerous women and girls for transport to a military installation outside the city. there the women are required to cook and serve and clean for the soldiers stationed at the barracks. one particular group of younger women, including ajla, will be forced to become sex slaves for the troops. just as ajla is about to be raped by a soldier, danijel recognizes her and intervenes to stop the assault. he is the captain in charge of the facility and clearly a rising star in the bosnian serb forces, where his father is a renowned general. danijel’s attraction to ajla proves stronger than his identification with the murderous bosnian serb nationalist project. when he can, without raising suspicions amongst his colleagues, danijel offers ajla protection in what has effectively become a rape camp. ajla is torn between her fear and repulsion at everything around her, and her own lingering attraction to danijel. after enduring humiliation and torture at the hands of another soldier at the base, ajla throws caution aside and takes refuge in a covert relationship with the captain—giving rise to a highlycharged, endlessly ambivalent (and hugely improbable) combination of sanctuary and imprisonment that continues over the next two and a half years and that will ultimately have tragic consequences for them both. jolie’s film is directed with great fluidity, and she elicits powerful performances from a number of her excellent bosnian and serbian actors—most particularly from zana marjanović in the central role of ajla. two decades of acting in hollywood movies have certainly taught jolie how to shape and edit a scene effectively. the decision to shoot the film simultaneously in both bosnian and english, producing two separate versions to guarantee a wider audience in the region and elsewhere, was an ambitious and entirely commendable one. but frankly stated, jolie`s screenplay is fairly artless. the film is burdened by ludicrous plotting from the start and a kind of crassness that includes presenting danijel and ajla’s first moment of physical intimacy in a soft focus sex scene, their encounter scored with the kind of sensitive piano music you might expect to hear in a fragrance commercial. jolie has said that she wanted the film to be about the lost possibilities of this relationship—the way in which (but for the absurd conflict that arbitrarily divides them) this might have been a happy couple, making a shared life and raising a family together. she has said that she wanted an audience watching the scene to consider whether ajla and danijel are “trying to hold on to something beautiful when everything around them has turned so ugly” (borger, 2012). but given the grave issues with which she is dealing in the studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 289 film, this very hollywood-flavoured scene comes across as crude and entirely inappropriate.3 no less tasteless is a later scene where a conflicted and angry danijel is shown subjecting ajla to a much more brutal sexual act—an assault which culminates in his whispering into ajla’s ear: “why couldn’t you have been born a serb?” historical exposition and political comment in this film is not just plodding, but positively thudding. characters speak whole paragraphs of background information to one another in casual conversation. for example, when danijel visits his father early in the film, the grizzled warrior instructs his son as they walk along: “one million serbs were killed during the second world war. this land is soaked in serbian blood. and now they want us to live under muslim rule? in a muslim state?” the film is more than a little tone deaf to the ways in which families and communities might actually discuss politics and history. there are also some very basic improbabilities regarding the degree of movement which would have been possible for these characters in and around sarajevo (where much of the film is set) during the siege. in the summer of 1995, for example, danijel gives his soldiers a “night off” and drives his captive mistress, ajla, into the centre of town to what is said to be the “sarajevo municipal art gallery”—one of ajla’s favourite places in the city before the war. when a subordinate arrives to inform danijel he is needed immediately at a meeting of senior officers, he tells ajla to simply find her way back “home” to the barracks where she is a prisoner (“just follow the road up the hill”). but it is jolie’s casual deployment of historical image for sensational effect that begs the most pressing questions about the depth of her research and her insistence that she “tried to bring as much information and as much truth and as much reality” to the making of the film (cooper, 2011).4 while one cannot doubt the sincerity of jolie’s commitment to the idea of making this film and to engaging with the issues it explores so graphically, the result definitely demands a much more rigorous ethical critique than it was given by mainstream media on release. jolie’s decision to graft an image of atrocity from a very specific time and place elsewhere in bosnia-herzegovina into her own narrative, presumably with the well-intentioned aim of underlining further for the audience the scope of cruelty and suffering experienced in the conflict, is especially disturbing. thus in a scene where danijel is travelling from his sarajevo base to a meeting with his father, meant to be taking place in the winter of 1994, he drives past a recreation of the infamous 1992 images of emaciated and terrified detainees held in the trnoplje and omarska camps near prijedor in northwest bosnia. of course, jolie has never said that her film is a documentary. her stated aim is clearly to raise awareness about what people endured during the long conflict, and the film is stocked with a catalogue of real offences about which jolie must have read and heard about in what she says were her many conversations with victims. her point, as she has emphasized again and again in interviews, was to educate herself and her audience about the bosnian conflict, to get her audience to ask how these things could have happened in the 1990s and why was it allowed to go on for studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 290 brian phillips so long with no one intervening to stop them. so do any of these jarring inaccuracies matter when most if not all of them are likely to go completely unnoticed by a non-specialist audience? after all, there is a long tradition of producing historical drama that pays scant attention to the accuracy of detail while bringing the spectator to what are said to be larger truths about a period and its protagonists. nobody goes to see shakespeare’s julius caeser or schiller’s mary stuart for a scholarly account of internal conflict in the roman empire or the machinations of the tudor court. but scrupulous attention to historical accuracy surely matters more when we are dealing with a very recent conflict—one that has been thoroughly documented and carefully chronicled in a now vast and very accessible literature produced by academics, journalists, non-governmental organizations, and courts of law. the men and women in those 1992 images of trnoplje and omarska suffered very real and very specific crimes in that particular time and place. to simply appropriate what jolie must have decided was a defining image of the truth of the war in bosnia is to somehow turn the unique sufferings of victims in that context into a kind of generic symbol of cruelty, “bypassing the individuality of the victims” just as surely as dembour & haslam (2004, p. 154) have suggested that courts have sometimes done. arguably, in the transposition of that image, the men and women who suffered in trnoplje and omarska have been done yet another kind of injustice.5 and yet, if even a few of those who have suffered most from the unspeakable horrors of the bosnian conflict have found a measure of satisfaction in seeing a film that bears at least some resemblance to their own experience, isn’t it clear that jolie has indeed offered victims of wartime rape and other sexual violence some “thicker” sense of justice? those unqualified endorsements of the film (included at the start of this essay) are surely a sterling example of the much-heralded imperative of “giving voice” to victims—incontrovertible evidence of the remedial impact of a broader conception of justice that understands how “the adversarial process alone does not honor their assertion of agency, their resistance to power and their will to survive” (mertus, 2004, p. 125). but while one’s first instinct may be to affirm these positive responses, it does not follow that our empathy with these individuals and their histories should muzzle critical disagreement with their conclusions about the film’s merits. i would argue that intellectual honesty in this instance requires that one say emphatically that this film does not “do justice” to its subject. given the film’s explicit recreation of scenes of rape and other forms of violence, jolie’s film quite understandably prompted visceral responses from some victims. but those responses should certainly not trump lingering concerns that aspects of the film are actually exploitative of victims’ sufferings. rejecting the verdict of these particular individuals on jolie’s film should not be confused with callousness or a lack of respect toward victims. tough minded as it may seem, human rights practitioners and scholars need to be able to assert that the victim does not necessarily have a kind of ultimate authority here in judging the film’s strengths and studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 291 weaknesses. in the land of blood and honey is simply not a good film, and it raises serious aesthetic and moral concerns about the recreation of scenes of atrocity in cinema and the retelling of a particularly tragic chapter in bosnia’s recent history. the recreation of violent acts like rape in a film such as in the land of blood and honey are not in themselves perforce a vindication of the victim’s experience, and any claim that the film adds something crucial to our deeper understanding of what constitutes justice after war should therefore be vigorously disputed. it is certainly worth considering, too, whether the assumed “therapeutic” function of this form of victim recognition actually becomes a diversion from more pressing concerns facing those who have survived wartime atrocities. as pupavac (2004) has argued with reference to postwar bosnia: the interpretation of justice in therapeutic terms has been cultivated by westerners and projected onto populations who do not necessarily share the precepts, even where they have adopted therapeutic models in their claimmaking. therapeutic justice aspires to reconcile people with the past rather than materially transform people’s lives. yet, when asked about their priorities in reconstruction assistance, populations persist in emphasizing substantive social justice, including material issues, rather than symbolic justice. (p. 392) many if not most scholars and practitioners working in the field of transitional justice would agree that justice conceived of exclusively as an “adversarial process” does not adequately account for or recognize victim agency, resilience and resourcefulness. transitional justice experts now regularly draw a distinction between the inevitably partial justice of the courtroom and a more inclusive concept of justice that is usually understood as being grounded in individual victim experience and in what some scholars have termed “the everyday” (alcalá & baines, 2012, pp. 385-393). this approach to transitional justice is more inclined to focus on “the practices and processes with which people live through violence and seek to make sense of and resist violence” (alcalá & baines, 2012, p. 387), and one might then argue that those powerful victim responses to jolie’s film indicate that a cultural product can indeed become a vital part of that process of sense-making. there is no doubt that there is much to be gained in this “locational shift away from the high-altitude, immobilized and abstracted view of mechanisms, mandates and processes that has characterized standard transitional justice interventions” (alcalá & baines, 2012, p. 387). but at the same time, those victim reactions to in the land of blood and honey should also remind us that this shift brings with it its own risks of an uncritical over-valorizing of those “perspectives and practices of survivors and ordinary people” that is at the very least condescending—and at worst a misguided notion that “the victim is always right.” furthermore, invocations of agency, of resilience, and of everyday processes as hitherto neglected dimensions of justice can also be very vague—involving a kind of ritual sounding of academic buzz words about the various “performances” and “spatial practices” (alcalá & baines, 2012) of victims that at their most theoretical can paradoxically seem studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 292 brian phillips just as remote from the daily lives they are meant to describe and celebrate as any room full of gowned adjudicators pronouncing on truth in narrow legal terms. whatever the limitations of justice conceived of primarily as the rather distant business of securing convictions and handing down sentences at the icty or at the war crimes chamber of the court of bosnia-herzegovina, there is arguably a concreteness to that definition that sometimes eludes those who insist (and not without reason) that “the privileging of the rule of law, human rights and democratization in the dominant transitional justice discourse sidelines the perspectives and practices of survivors and ordinary people” (alcalá & baines, 2012, p. 386). the still unmet need for recognition one hears expressed in the voices that greeted jolie’s film so effusively may help to remind us that transitional justice discourse must always move beyond the courtroom and out into the city streets and back roads of post-conflict societies. but that movement toward more localized, victim-centered definitions of justice must be coupled with an awareness of what anyone who has worked with victim communities in post-conflict settings knows well. victims’ voices, perspectives and analyses can indeed be enlightening, generous, wise and impartial. but they can also be confused, biased, or at times manipulative or subject to manipulation by others. many victims are indeed resilient, committed, and noble in thought and deed. but in those everyday “spatial practices” in these communities, one person’s empowered, resourceful individual might even become another person’s autocrat, bully or bigot. if that which “the everyday renders visible and audible” (alcalá & baines, 2012, p. 389) is to be given due regard in thinking and speaking about transitional justice, scholars and practitioners must be no less rigorous in interrogating these localized alternative conceptions of justice than they have been in relation to more restricted definitions focussed on legal institutions and their proceedings. it is important to note here, too, that the effusive praise for the film from some bosnian war victims was by no means shared by every victim of rape or other sexual violence in the country. in a much-publicized 2010 conflict of views among bosnian women war victims’ associations about jolie’s announced intention to make what would become in the land of blood and honey, the leader of one group, bakira hasečić, attracted international headlines with her strenuous objections to the idea of what was then rumoured to be a film about a romantic relationship between a rapist and his victim. initially, hasečić’s highly controversial campaigning persuaded the bosniancroat federation minister of culture to deny jolie permission to film in the federation—a decision then reversed after the official had been allowed to read the screenplay. much of the film was subsequently shot in hungary (beaumont, 2010; cbc news, 2010). but jolie had waded into the highlypoliticized and sometimes very divisive world of war victims’ associations in the region. one group (founded after a 2006 split with hasečić’s association) attacked hasečić’s domineering leadership (and alleged close links to bosniak nationalist politicians) and denied she had the authority to speak on behalf of all women victims. hasečić’s group formally protested to the united nations studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 293 high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) that jolie’s “ignorant attitude to victims” (child, 2010) made her unfit to continue in her role as a goodwill ambassador for that organization (beaumont, 2010; child, 2012). bolstered by the support she had received from the rival women’s group, jolie herself dismissed hasečić as “one person who has a gripe” (cbc news, 2010). but hasečić remained stridently unreconciled to the project, and in november 2010 was quoted as saying that “as far as we are concerned a love story could not have existed in a camp. such an interpretation is causing us mental suffering” (child, 2010). not surprisingly, hasecić was not invited to attend the december 2011 sarajevo special screening for war victims. having watched only the trailer for the film, hasečić still believed she had seen enough to tell the guardian: “a love story between the captured muslim and a serb war criminal never happened during the war in bosnia; it is impossible, a concept unthinkable, even as the idea that it displays. and from the clips from the movie—and i could not even watch the full two minutes—what she has done is hard and disgusting. it became painful to watch, and still is. i felt like i was beaten, tortured and raped again, like i have once again returned to the camp. as if they raped me again. it is shameful!” (hopkins, 2011b). in another 2011 report, hasečić adds that she “saw pictures of the film on the internet. i do not know what the film is about, but what i have seen is that the victim is in a five-star hotel, she paints, enjoys freedom. this did not exist!” (smajilhodžić, 2011). it is perhaps doubtful that anyone external to the bosnian context could have untangled and fully comprehended the complicated public and personal politics of local victims’ associations in that country today. nevertheless, one would have liked to see jolie do more to pre-empt this painful clash among survivors over the project by first establishing some sort of consensus among victims’ groups about an appropriate approach to issues of rape and other sexual violence in the film. jolie is perhaps correct when she says that “there’s no safe way to tackle this subject matter” (amanpour, 2011). yet in spite of her invocations across various interviews of the enormous burden of responsibility she felt making the film, what seems clear here is that jolie might have taken still more care not to inflame these internal conflicts further before embarking on such a controversial project. of the 2010 conflict over the permit and between women war victims’ groups, jolie insisted in an interview on the cbs news program, sixty minutes, that she “didn’t know it was going to be as sensitive” at the time she was first writing her script (simon, 2011). but it doesn’t seem sufficient then to brush the matter off (as jolie did in some interviews) by saying it was all only a minor misunderstanding—an unfortunate case of people jumping to conclusions about the content of the film based only on rumour and before they had had the chance to read the screenplay (smiley, 2011). in the era of “kony 2012” style populist campaigning, there may be little one can do to infuse the juggernaut of celebrity humanitarianism and human rights witnessing with a greater sense of the need for sustained reflection before any action is taken studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 294 brian phillips or intervention is made. but when filmmakers and other artists like jolie announce their wish to make use of the stories of victims and witnesses in their work, human rights advocates everywhere should be much more vocal in continually calling on individuals like jolie (who appear to believe they are doing all the homework necessary before launching out into projects like in the land of blood and honey6) to become much more self-aware and to take ever greater pains to avoid stirring complex local animosities of the kind discussed here. in various interviews recorded at the time of her film’s premiere, jolie repeatedly struck a humble pose regarding her intentions in making in the land of blood and honey—speaking, for example, of her cast of local actors and insisting that “it’s their film, it belongs to them, it’s their country, it’s their history, their language” (cooper, 2011). but one cannot help but wonder whether such laudable conviction might have been better directed toward jolie using her global profile and financial resources to enable more bosnian filmmakers lacking funding for their projects to create their own films about the conflict and its aftermath? while jolie’s frequently expressed deep affection for her local cast may be very real, why not devote your abundant resources to enabling these gifted artists to appear in more films produced in the region itself? when jolie appeared on american journalist anderson cooper’s talk show along with several leading actors from the film, cooper encouraged the cast to share some of their personal reminiscences and experiences of the conflict in their country. after actress vanesa glodjo (who plays ajla’s sister in the film) relates her story of being injured by shrapnel after a direct hit by a shell on her sarajevo home, cooper declares: “angelina, you’re giving these people a voice, who haven’t really had a voice before” (cooper, 2011). ironically, the time allotted in the program to these cast members’ memories and reflections was rather short compared with cooper’s much larger interest in the details of jolie’s family life with brad pitt and how “possibly the biggest star on the planet” (as cooper refers to jolie) balances her career with the demands of motherhood.7 the “voices” of her bosnian actors were in actual fact relatively little heard on this occasion. with regard to raising awareness of the issue of rape and other forms of sexual violence against women during the bosnian war, why did jolie not simply use her superstar status to bring larger audiences to a domestically-produced film like grbavica (screened as esma’s secret in the united kingdom)—bosnian director jamila žbanić’s acclaimed 2006 work about a young girl being raised in sarajevo by a single mother and coming to understand that she is the product of her mother’s rape during the war? set alongside žbanić’s powerful film (which was awarded the golden bear at the 2006 berlin film festival), in the land of blood and honey looks a rather pale companion piece indeed. some might argue that at a time when bosnia is no longer a highly visible issue in the media and much less central to the work plans and budgets of international ngos, it is enough that an actress of jolie’s standing has attempted to bring attention back to this now-neglected corner of europe. but celebration of the mere fact of a studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 295 celebrity director choosing such a project (which was certainly the prevailing storyline in north american media markets on the film’s release in december 2011) should in any case not preclude much greater consideration of these and other urgent queries. as if i am not there any viewer of both in the land of blood and honey and irish director juanita wilson’s as if i am not there cannot help but be struck immediately by the fact that the two films cover rather startlingly similar ground. curiously, in discussing her film in the media, jolie never seems to acknowledge this earlier film or to offer any insight into why she felt she needed to make her own film about the systematic rape of women in bosnia just a year after the release of wilson’s work. closely based on a 1999 novel by croatian author, slavenka drakulić, as if i am not there begins with an idealistic schoolteacher’s journey from her native sarajevo to a remote mountain village in the spring of 1992.8 just as samira (called simply “s.” in the novel) sets out on what was to have been a temporary assignment at the local school, she finds herself in the midst of the country’s rapid descent into violence. bosnian serb forces take control of the village and carry out a brutal expulsion of its bosniak inhabitants. as in jolie’s film, they first murder many of the village’s men and then load women and children onto buses bound for a detention camp at a military installation. once at the camp, a group of young women (and a girl) are likewise selected to become the sex slaves of the soldiers based at the site. confined to a single room with an armed guard at the door, the women effectively become the property of the soldiers—taken out, raped and beaten at random for days and nights on end. during this ordeal, the commander of the camp chooses samira for his exclusive, personal use. this new “role” offers samira a degree of protection from the routine indignities and violence heaped upon the other women confined to the room, but leaves her deeply conflicted about playing the role of mistress to her captor. when the detention camp is closed down and its surviving prisoners (including the women held as sex slaves) are released in an exchange, samira eventually makes her way to sweden as a refugee. there, samira learns that she has become pregnant while in the detention camp. on being told by a doctor that it is too late for her pregnancy to be terminated, samira initially resolves to give the child up for adoption once it has been born. but the powerful encounter she has with the child in the days after its birth—and her recognition of something of her lost sister’s face in the face of the infant—results in samira choosing a new life with her son. wilson’s film is a much more credible and compelling piece of work, and superior to jolie’s film on just about every level. hers is a surprisingly quiet film—generally more intent on an almost dispassionate witnessing and recording of the violent dissolution of a community and the terror and torment of a group of captive women than stoking up the drama and piling studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 296 brian phillips on images of atrocity. much of that tone of stunned detachment, so central to drakulić’s novel, is communicated through the performance of macedonian actress, nataša petrović, whose haunted eyes effectively become the central actor in this story. in showing us samira’s fixation on a fly crawling lazily across a wall in the squalid room where she is being raped in succession by three of her captors, wilson underlines the character’s reliance on a kind of willed self-removal as a strategy for survival in the unimaginable hell in which she finds herself. however, that immensely painful-to-watch scene does once again raise nagging questions about precisely how much atrocity we need to have concretely re-created for us in a film in order to grasp the horrific reality of a crime being perpetrated? in such an assured, well-crafted film as as if i am not there, one at least feels confident that juanita wilson has herself given serious thought to the representations of violence here, and the degree to which it may be necessary to include such graphic scenes in order to communicate the truth about these crimes. but it still feels important to ask whether we really need to see samira serially raped in real time by all three men in the room to understand fully what is taking place in the camp. regardless of what appears to be the authenticity of this kind of graphic scene, we ultimately always know that what we are watching is an enactment of the violence. there is then an attendant danger that critics and spectators and those who bestow awards on films will end up focussing more on the skill and “bravery” of the actors and directors in “putting themselves through” the enactment than on the real-life violence (and on those directly affected by it) upon which the scene is based. the actor’s skill in simulating such intense suffering often becomes our chief conversation point as we exit the cinema. one certainly heard something of that shift happening in one interview with angelina jolie and a cast member in advance of the us release of in the land of blood and honey. speaking of the impact on her cast of recreating scenes of violence and degradation, jolie recalled how “every actor at one time or another had to just separate themselves and cry because it was reminding them of something or it was just too much…even the men who had to be the aggressors—they just didn’t want to do it. they just couldn’t do what they had to do” (smiley, 2011). speaking with jolie and her team of actors on his daytime talk show, anderson cooper expressed similar interest in how making a film about wartime rape had affected the cast—given, as he said, that “it’s obviously such a heavy subject” (cooper, 2011). “what was it like,” cooper asked, “day in and day out to be that person, to be in that role” (cooper, 2011)? viewers of as if i am not there (and in the land of blood and honey) certainly ought to reflect on these issues of representation at length, considering afresh those crucial questions asking how we know about human rights abuses and how we respond (or not) to that knowledge.9 not surprisingly, wilson’s largely faithful adaptation of the source novel follows author slavenka drakulić’s resolution of samira’s dilemma about keeping her newborn son. but is that hard choice to raise the child born of rape presented here in a way that “does justice” to what such a decision studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 297 might actually mean in the life of a victim? in her critique of the novel, magdalena zolkos takes issue with what she sees as drakulić’s perhaps too easy option for a kind of closure here—turning samira’s choice into a “story of redemption” and a decision clearly meant to signify “hope for a new individual, and consequently, for a collective future achieved through confrontation and reconciliation with the past” (zolkos, 2008, p. 224). for zolkos, the novel’s ending is especially problematic in so far as it “offers no space or inclusion to those individual stories and experiences that do not conform with or distrust its redemptive promise” (pp. 224-225), the effect of which is “…to close up or delegitimize alternative stories—individual stories of rejection, resentment, lack of forgiveness and lack of reconciliation” (p. 224). given the vivid sense of samira’s agony over this choice that is clearly there in both the novel and the film, zolkos may be pushing her charge of the exclusion of tougher, “alternative stories” a little too far here. but the risks of an artist reaching too quickly for a story of uplift (customarily held up as a testament to the “resilience of the human spirit to overcome the bad things that can happen,” as wilson indeed does describe her film in one interview) with which to end what is otherwise an unblinking tale of enormous suffering are certainly grounds for vigilance.10 storm after watching the unsparing focus on crimes of sexual violence at the time of their commission in jolie and wilson’s films, it is fascinating then to consider how hans-christian schmid’s film storm seeks to examine and even to judge how effectively the icty has dealt with these atrocities (and with those individuals directly affected by rape and other forms of sexual violence in bosnia-herzegovina) in the succeeding decades. as storm opens, a no-nonsense, tough-talking icty prosecutor, hannah maynard, has just assumed responsibility for seeing to its conclusion what appears to be an open-and-shut case against a former bosnian serb general. general goran đurić has been charged with the “ethnic cleansing” of the bosniak population of a town called kazmaj at the start of the war. when the testimony of a star witness, alen hajdarević, is called into question and then proved to be less than wholly accurate, what had been the expected successful outcome (“a piece of cake,” as another prosecutor describes it) of this key case suddenly appears to be in doubt. frustrated at the tribunal’s dismissal of his continuing insistence that the general is indeed guilty as charged (despite the credibility of his own “eyewitness” account having been disproved) alen commits suicide after an enraged hannah upbraids him for having wrecked the case with his “idiotic testimony” just as a conviction was within reach. desperately keen to rescue the case against đurić from total collapse, a guiltwracked hannah embarks on a personal quest to discover more about alen and his determination to see the general convicted at any cost. (“i believe in this court. it’s the only thing i have left” alen tells hannah shortly before studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 298 brian phillips taking his life). hannah soon learns that alen had been driven by a search for justice for his sister, mira. it had been his wish to see đuric convicted not only for the “ethnic cleansing” of his family’s hometown, but to bring to the world’s attention the crimes committed against bosniak women (including mira) at a hitherto unknown rape camp in a resort hotel complex called vilina kosa, where deported women from kazmaj had been taken. a grieving mira is initially reluctant to cooperate with hannah in her search for the truth about the camp and đurić’s command of the facility. having survived the camp and the war, mira has built a new and happy life for herself in germany, where she has married and now lives with her husband and son. back in sarajevo for alen’s funeral, her first contact with hannah leads to a terrifying reminder that those keen to protect đurić’s secrets are more than willing to use violence to ensure mira’s continuing silence. but mira’s reservations about revisiting the horrors of the war and her imprisonment in the rape camp are soon pushed aside by hannah’s relentless appeals for justice to be done in this case. mira eventually agrees to testify against đurić and to reveal his role in running the vilina kosa rape camp. but back in the hague, the tribunal’s bureaucracy quickly moves into high gear with a sharp refusal to agree to the introduction of the vilina kosa crimes into a nearly completed case. prolonging the trial, hannah is told, would impede the tribunal’s completion strategy. that insistence on “exchanging justice for convenience,” as hannah’s outraged assistant describes the decision—plus a convoluted bit of maneuvering involving domestic politics in republika srpska and the european union (eu) enlargement process—all combine to derail hannah’s plan to deploy mira as an irrefutable witness to the full scope of đurić’s crimes. initially defeated by the institutional forces ranged against her, hannah is forced to tell mira that a deal has been done that will restrict her testimony to the “ethnic cleansing” of kazmaj alone. the truth about the vilina kosa rape camp, and đurić’s command there, is to go unmentioned in the trial. feeling betrayed by those she has trusted to relieve her of the terrible burden of the past, an embittered mira asks hannah: “what kind of court is this? what the hell is it actually for”? but once mira is on the witness stand, hannah’s determination to secure full justice returns. going against all agreed procedure, she cues mira to uncover the full story of general đurić’s crimes and the atrocities at vilina kosa to a stunned courtroom. hannah’s core conviction wins the day—that in mira “we have a woman who needs to be heard. she has to tell her story”. schmid is a highly skilled director, and his film certainly moves at the pace of a cracking political thriller. particularly notable here is his creation of a convincing atmosphere of menace, of imminent physical and moral danger in settings as disparate as a small town with much to hide in republika srpska and in charmless offices and hotel rooms in the hague. there is undoubtedly much intelligence on display here, and some fine performances from actors like kerry fox, stephen dillane, and most especially, from the luminous romanian actress, anamaria marinca, as mira. storm does have a few rough edges in its relationship to historical and political realities. for example, it studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 299 seems highly implausible that the existence of a rape camp on the scale of the fictional vilina kosa would have remained completely unknown to the outside world, and to the tribunal’s investigators, as late as 2007 or 2008 when the film would appear to be set. likewise, an official representing republika srpska in eu accession talks describes his entity as “a sovereign state” during a tense meeting with an eu negotiator. this may well be wishful thinking on the part of this particular character, but it is a phrase unlikely to have been spoken aloud on such an occasion. nevertheless, one feels a measure of sheer gratitude for a director (schmid was also co-screenwriter here) committed to making an accessible, literate film about an institution like the icty and its complex inner workings. but does storm ultimately “do justice” to this particular strand of “justice,” as it were—“justice” in terms of what a highly imperfect, sometimes stumbling, often inadequate, and yet arguably indispensable body like the icty has actually achieved in spite of all its many faults? for the portrait of the icty in storm is not just a critical or even unflattering one, but one that more often than not presents “an international judicial system that is failing its fundamental mission, getting lost in politics and bureaucracy” (film movement, 2010), as one of the film’s global distributors puts it. it is at times not difficult to imagine a non-specialist audience watching storm and concluding that the icty was a hopelessly political and ethically compromised body—one that for the last twenty years had largely done its job indifferently if not very poorly indeed. this is not to argue that schmid ought to have painted a picture of the tribunal as a kind of shining judicial knight in armour—slaying dragon-like warlords and culpable state officials efficiently and unfailingly, and always compassionately rescuing victims and witnesses from their trauma and a fearful future. the literature chronicling and analyzing the tribunal’s many sins of commission and omission is an abundant one. as mentioned earlier in this essay, there is ample ground for detailed criticism of everything from the tribunal’s sentencing policy (clark, 2009; hodžić, 2012; stover, 2005) to its lapses in care and courtesy regarding victims and witnesses (dembour & haslam, 2004; henry, 2010; hodžić, 2012; mertus, 2004; stover, 2005); from its sluggishness in recognising that it was not connecting very well with its prime constituencies on the ground in the countries of the former yugoslavia (hodžić, 2007, 2012) to its uncertain contribution to longer term processes of reconciliation in the region (clark, 2009, 2012).11 but schmid rather consistently applies a fairly broad brush to his canvas in storm, and one wonders whether he could perhaps have subtly but pointedly done a bit more in the film to make plainer that the icty’s record is not an altogether blemished one. of course, there is much evidence to support richard wilson’s assertion (2005) that “the icty has left us with a qualitatively distinctive historical record of the origins and contours of mass atrocities” in the post-yugoslav region (p. 940). it is especially worth noting again that with regard to the issues of central concern in each of the three films under discussion here, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 300 brian phillips “the icty (has) delivered several landmark decisions expanding the understanding of sexual violence under international law” (mertus, 2008, p. 1318)—and that “each case bears the imprint of women acting in very public positions as judges, prosecutors, investigators, and witnesses and behind the scenes as advocates” (mertus, 2008, p. 1318). by its own accounting, in the tribunal’s history to date, “more than seventy individuals have been charged with crimes of sexual violence including sexual assault and rape. as of early 2011, almost thirty have been convicted” (icty: crimes of sexual violence landmark cases, 2012). storm’s take on this history is generally less than nuanced, however—never more so than in the especially negative impression that it gives of the tribunal’s treatment of victims and witnesses. when hannah protests to her superior that it is unacceptable to tell mira at the last minute that she will not in fact be permitted to speak about the rape camp in her testimony, that appeal to a victim-centred approach to justice is met with her colleague coldly replying that “she’s not the first witness to feel a bit hard done by by this court and she won’t be the last. it’s not meant to be fucking therapy”. while the experience of victims and witnesses cooperating with the tribunal is in part a tale of numerous oversights and insufficiencies, there is alongside those disappointments a parallel record of satisfactions and even, in some instances, real gratitude (stover, 2005). in trials for crimes such as rape, as the icty`s web site explains, “a number of innovative procedures…were introduced to cater to the specifics needs of survivors of sexual violence. these procedures became part and parcel of modern international criminal justice, with the creation of special guidelines for the presentation of evidence, protective measures for vulnerable witnesses, and support and counselling from trained professionals` (icty: crimes of sexual violence innovative procedures, 2012). but schmid seems eager to push aside what is at the very least a mixed report card on the tribunal’s performance in favour of the dramatic punch of an emphasis on its occasional heartlessness and self-interest. there is in some sense a classic movie storyline at work here (think mr. smith goes to washington, think dead poets society, or perhaps even top gun). hannah, the fierce and often clumsy maverick, does battle with a sclerotic and unresponsive institution that wants to thwart her pursuit of the good at every turn. she becomes the archetypal moral crusader against a complacent, unfeeling system and its self-serving minions. as schmid himself has written, hannah is “a woman for whom the fulfillment of duties had been the highest priority for years, who all of a sudden finds herself an outsider because of her persistence; who is confronted with the fact that a system, which she had always believed in and passionately supported, turns against her” (schmid, film movement, 2010). the spectator’s pleasure in seeing that narrative of steadfast opposition unfold, and then reach its inevitable conclusion, is in part what makes storm such an engrossing couple of hours’ viewing. and hannah’s bucking the system with her triumphant facilitation of mira’s testimony in that climactic courtroom scene is indeed thrilling to watch. but it’s an odd experience watching a film set at the icty where the villainy of studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 301 the war criminal ultimately feels a little bit overshadowed by the alleged indecency of the court established to bring individuals like him to account. when the film ends with mira (somewhat tentatively) thanking hannah for what she has done to make this release from her hidden past possible, it seems clear–whatever schmid’s intention—that in this particular story of “justice done” it is the moral heroism of the prosecutor and her ultimate vindication rather than the victim’s experience and agency that is actually the main event. concluding reflections in an interview about her adaptation of as if i am not there, juanita wilson has said that “the aim of the film…is to try and, naïve as it sounds, to make sure that (the mass rape of women during the bosnian conflict) doesn’t happen again” (mcmahon, 2011). each of these three films under discussion here is unquestionably infused with that same robust spirit of advocacy. in very different and sometimes less than subtle ways, each film is appealing to its audience: “look at this! how could this happen? isn’t this unjust? we must not look away. we must honour victims by acknowledging their experience and by ensuring their stories are heard”. but can these films in some way be said to “offer an alternative module of justice in the former yugoslavia structured around a sense of shared public narrative of events of the past” (jeffrey & jakala, 2012, p. 1)? that’s a very great weight of expectation to place on any cultural product, and there are many now wellestablished historical truths reflected upon in each of these three films that are more than likely to remain unacknowledged by significant portions of the region’s communities for some years to come. the evolution of any kind of “shared public narrative” about the tragic events of the 1990s is at the very least a multi-generational project, to be sure.12 furthermore, if a critical appraisal of these three films tells us anything about the likelihood that a creative work can serve as a catalyst for dealing with the past and “doing justice” to the stories of war victims, it may be that (despite the best intentions of their creators) such offerings are just as likely to displace or re-direct our attention away from the actual crimes and the victims of those crimes as they are to bring satisfaction or a sense of vindication to those whose pain is being represented and whose stories are being told. as directors and screenwriters interpret and package victims’ experience and then hit the festival and art house circuits, the unmediated voices of those victims are apt to become muffled in the process. in films such as these under review here, incomprehensible tragedy and grief without end are sometimes turned to a more audience-friendly mix of promise and catharsis, while the producing artists themselves are almost ritually showered with awards and congratulated on their “humanitarian” efforts. try as these artists might to steer the conversation elsewhere, the incalculable pain and loss of the victims often ends up as the occasion for someone else’s walk down the red carpet.13 studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 302 brian phillips in jolie’s film, above all, it was the sheer fact of a hollywood star choosing to make a film about a “difficult” subject that became the centre of attention. in the end, it was jolie who was duly praised for her “moral leadership” (kristof, 2011), for being “brave” and “courageous” (amanpour, 2011)— and feted by the hollywood industry with its stanley kramer award for having produced a film which “illuminates provocative social issues in an accessible and elevating fashion” (pond, 2011). in bosnia itself, the hugely popular sarajevo-based daily newspaper, dnevni avaz, named jolie as its “person of the year” and called the american actress and director “the angel of bosnia.” the paper even ventured that the film should be considered “a historical document”—as significant a contribution to the country’s recent history as the 1995 dayton agreement itself (drakulić, 2012).14 so what does this very twenty-first century instance of adulation and celebrity humanitarianism tell us? i have written elsewhere of the contemporary trend in artistic and media circles of granting disproportionate attention and bestowing rapidly-multiplying accolades on “human rights messengers” rather than on “human rights defenders facing truly lifethreatening risks in their work” (phillips, 2010). in that discussion, i also noted that the standard script for the acceptance of such kudos by the celebrated artists in question also seems to include an obligatory reference to the way in which they have been “humbled” by their contact with victims and witnesses. accompanying (and at the same time perhaps undercutting) that posture of humility, the garlanded “human rights messenger” then frequently seeks to establish the authority of his/her play or film with what i have called “human rights product endorsement”—the assurance that “the victims themselves have vouched for the veracity of your work” (phillips, 2010). conforming to this pattern, a number of jolie’s interviews publicizing her film contain just those elements of expressed humility and victim-certification. on the american television network pbs, for example, jolie spoke of her intense anxiety before the sarajevo screening of the film for war victims, and her subsequent relief at discovering that “they’ve embraced it” (smiley, 2011). jolie’s lead actor, zana marjanović, likewise added that in bosnia “people are very happy that this film is being made” (smiley, 2011). in the round of media appearances for the us premiere of in the land of blood and honey, members of jolie’s cast were frequently called upon to effectively join the ranks of victims in proffering an endorsement of the film’s authenticity. almost always pointedly introduced by jolie as individuals coming from communities on all sides of the bosnian conflict who had lived through the war themselves (and therefore best qualified to pass judgement on the film), her actors were then often asked by interviewers to share their views on the script and on what it was like to work with angelina—an inevitable cue for praise for their director and confirmation of her skill and dedication. “she was protecting and guiding us,” one of her actors testifies when thus prompted in a television interview (cooper, 2011). i am certainly in no position to doubt the sincerity of these actors’ views regarding jolie’s commitment, kindness and support for them throughout the filmmaking studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 303 process. but that there might also be a distorting power dynamic at work affecting the agency of these local artists here was of course never mentioned. listening to these conversations, one cannot help wondering: if you were a chronically under-employed bosnian actor given a plum role and a rare, decent paycheck for appearing in a film directed by one of hollywood’s hottest properties, would you be inclined to say anything remotely critical about your experience of working on the film—or indeed, about the quality of the script itself? certainly, given the script’s numerous improbabilities and indelicacies, hearing one of jolie’s actors exclaim that when she first read the script she felt that it was “so true…(it) had to be written by a bosnian” (amanpour, 2011) is cause for some bewilderment.15 responding to the 1956 berlin premiere of the theatrical adaptation of the diary of anne frank, british critic kenneth tynan famously argued that this event had been one of those occasions when the historical and moral significance of a particular cultural product was so great that the aesthetic criteria by which we would customarily judge a play, film or book needed to be set aside. following the performance, tynan wrote that he had “survived the most drastic emotional experience the theater has ever given me. it had little to do with art, as the play was not a great one, yet its effect, in berlin, at that moment of history, transcended anything that art has learned yet to achieve…i tried to stay detached, but the general catharsis engulfed me… all of this, i am well aware, is not drama criticism. in the shadow of an event so desperate and traumatic, criticism would be an irrelevance. i can only record an emotion that i felt, would not have missed, and pray never to feel again” (tynan, 2000, pp. 147-148).16 this phenomenon of the play, book or film which renders criticism “irrelevant” on the grounds that it deals with an incredibly grave subject or an urgent contemporary issue will be familiar to anyone who has tracked the reception of human rights-related work in the theatre, the cinema and in literature in recent decades. when presented with such works, audiences and critics too often slip obediently into a kind of default reverential mode—simply because the work on view seeks to represent or interpret historical events involving great human suffering or loss. at times, it is as if the mere fact of a novel, play or film being about atrocity or violation secures for the work an automatic exemption from any sort of real scrutiny of its artistic merits or shortcomings. the question of whether or not the work is actually any good is apt to become smothered in a heap of critical pieties about the overwhelming value of the kind of “general catharsis” and “drastic emotional experience” which tynan claimed to have had while watching the diary of anne frank. much of the 2010 discussion around jolie’s proposed film centred on the question of whether or not anyone has the right to say who can or cannot make a film about any given subject—including one as sensitive as a film about mass rape in wartime. that’s a debate likely to continue as more and more contemporary artists mine the dramatic potential of victim and witness testimony and choose to place those stories on stage and screen, with varying degrees of attentiveness to crucial ethical matters like obtaining the informed studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 304 brian phillips consent of their sources. but regardless of whether the producing artist is an “insider” or an “outsider” to the context at hand, those conversations must also give ample room for fundamental questions about the quality of the final product. few human rights practitioners would argue that angelina jolie had no right to make her film on the basis that she herself never experienced sexual violence in war or that she is not native to the region and therefore cannot truly know its history or culture. but practitioners certainly need to sharpen their critical tools and avoid rushing to capitalize on the media attention invariably given to such starry cultural enterprises. human rights organizations should be much more wary of reflexively championing projects like in the land of blood and honey (or perhaps even the somewhat more deserving as if i am not there or storm) simply because they may at least for a fleeting moment raise a bit of awareness about a neglected issue or provide the occasion for lucrative benefit performances and high profile publicity events. badly written films which sensationalize, simplify or sentimentalize the pain and loss of victims ultimately do little to honour that experience or to satisfactorily “tell the parts of their story which do not interest the law” (dembour & haslam, 2004, p. 156). vulnerable individuals convinced that full justice has been denied them may for a time feel grateful for the solidarity of a global celebrity—the “angel” who swoops in and for a moment appears to illuminate their ongoing sufferings with the glow of his or her superstar wattage. but isolated and often forgotten victims and witnesses of atrocity left disappointed by the results of limited judicial processes deserve much more than the dubious consolation of imagining they have seen themselves in somebody else’s mediocre movie. whatever their more modest faults, both as if i am not there and storm will most likely retain a degree of enduring value as films which at the very least prompt serious reflection on what constitutes justice after extreme violence and the place of the victim’s experience in both legal and extra-legal processes of accountability and memory. but not even the most gripping or insightful moments in those two well-made features illuminate the victim experience more starkly or pose more profound questions about post-conflict justice than one unforgettable sequence in american filmmaker pamela hogan’s 2011 documentary, i came to testify. the film chronicles the experience of 16 bosniak women who agreed to appear as witnesses for the prosecution at the historic 2000 icty trial dealing with the enslavement and systematic rape of women and girls in the town of foča in 1992. at the close of kunarac et al, three bosnian serb army officers were found guilty of rape as a crime against humanity. throughout the documentary, these women—their faces obscured and their names withheld—recall their difficult but determined journeys to see justice done in the hague and speak of their subsequent, still-haunted lives in bosnia in the decade since three of their captors and tormentors were convicted. but it is the further efforts of a group of these women to secure a very specific form of extra-legal acknowledgment at the site of their suffering which underscores how the justice inscribed in the court’s findings in studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 305 kunarac et al cannot by itself bring full redress for the horrific wrongs done to those who survived the rape camps of foča. in september 2004, a group of these survivors travelled to foča to place a plaque commemorating their painful history at the town’s partizan sports hall—a building which had been used as one of the rape camps in 1992. footage incorporated into hogan’s film shows how upon arrival in foča that day the women were met with a line of local policeman at the site—their linked arms forming a barrier between them and an angry mob bent on preventing the installation of the memorial at partizan. the mob hurls insults at the survivors, with one local woman reportedly saying of them: “they must have had such a great time. they had to come back for more” (hogan, 2011). that terrifying moment suggests that rather than imagining that a film can by itself offer some alternative form of justice for victims through the recreation of their experience, the real potential of film as a contribution to the transitional justice toolkit perhaps lies in its capacity to shred the comforting, formulaic prescriptions about dialogue, dealing with the past, and reconciliation that are too often voiced in peacebuilding enterprises—those wishful strategies for social reconstruction that show little understanding of just how long and hard the road to postconflict justice can be in a place like foča. notes 1 as jeffrey & jakala (2012) have noted in their work, the efforts of ngos in several post-yugoslav states to create a regional commission for establishing facts about war crimes and other gross violations of human rights committed on the territory of the former yugoslavia (recom) an example of just such an extra-judicial enterprise—one that has generated much debate in the region. one of the virtues of this particular initiative, they suggest, is that it “pluralizes the targets of transitional justice by orienting attention on victims and seeking to cultivate a longer-lasting public dialogue” (p. 2). one of the activities of recom mentioned in jeffrey and jakala’s article is “a small-group regional consultation with artists in december 2006” (p. 2). 2 “bosniak” refers to an inhabitant of bosnia-herzegovina who identifies as a bosnian muslim with regard to nationality, “ethnicity” and/or religion. 3 in his conversation with jolie following the sarajevo public premiere of the film in february 2012, guardian journalist julian borger commented that while the audience had indeed given the film a standing ovation at the end, during this particular scene “everyone around me was very uneasy”. he suggested that the way jolie had depicted danijel and ajla’s intimacy here clearly “made people feel very uncomfortable” (borger, 2012). the conversation is available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2012/feb/15/angelina-jolie-threats-land-of-blood-and-honey. 4 in her accounts of the film’s evolution, jolie stresses the contribution of her company of local actors throughout the process: “we all spoke about every speech, every scene, and made sure that it was right and true…we all adjusted the script together” (sixty minutes, 2011). “we had the good fortune that all the actors are from the area and lived through the war, so they could call us on it if it wasn’t right” (eastwood, 2011). in the film itself, however, jolie is given sole screenwriting credit. 5 interestingly, in an interview with radio free europe/radio liberty following the 2011 sarajevo screening for representatives of war victims’ associations, one omarska survivor and the leader of the association of camp prisoners of bosnia-herzegovina reportedly expressed regret for his earlier opposition to the making of in the land of blood and honey. murat tahirović is quoted as saying that “it is a very good movie, studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 306 brian phillips extraordinarily well done. it deals with the very substance of the war in bosnia. all the main points are there—camps, torture, crimes, and—worst of all—crimes against the honor of women” (arnautović, 2011). but do we assume tahirović speaks for all omarska survivors here? what place do we give to the victim as film critic in our assessment of a cultural product dealing with atrocity? 6 in an interview with reuters at the 2012 sarajevo film festival, jolie said: ”i think it’s important for film-makers to know what they are trying to say when they make a film. if you’re gonna do something about another country, make sure to surround yourself with extraordinary people from that country and really know that country and let that country speak through you. don’t try to give the country your own voice” (zuvela, 2012). 7 likewise, in her interview with jolie on “abc nightline,” journalist christiane amanpour appeared just as interested in jolie’s private life as in her work on the film, posing such questions as “do you plan to get married to mr. brad pitt?...do you guys have date night?...what’s the key to keeping it all together?” the celebrity lifestyle agenda again sat rather uncomfortably alongside the discussion of rape in wartime bosnia (amanpour, 2011). 8 see drakulić, s. (1999) as if i am not there: a novel of the balkans. london, uk: abacus. 9 see the classic study of these questions, cohen, s. (2001). states of denial: knowing about atrocities and suffering. cambridge and oxford, uk: polity. 10 with regard to the risks of uplift and the temptation to comfort an audience in the telling of this harsh story, in another interview wilson says that “what i loved most about the book was that it starts and ends with the birth of a baby and for me that just gives hope which i think is really important so you’re not just asking people to sit through very difficult and grim circumstances but you are at the end offering them hope that the human spirit is strong enough and has enough love to survive without turning it into hate and giving up” (mcmahon, 2011). 11 refik hodžić, whose publications are cited here, also co-wrote and co-directed (with aldin arnautović) a brilliant documentary on these same concerns in 2004, justice unseen (slijepa pravda), produced by xy films (sarajevo). for further information about the film, see http://www.xyfilms.net/content/view/19/31/lang,english/ 12 underscoring the scope of that culture of denial, in her 2011 balkan insight article on in the land of blood and honey, journalist valerie hopkins noted that “branislav dukić, president of the republika srpska (rs) association of detainees, told reporters that he is ‘exasperated by the fact that the serbs are once again assigned the role of main villain’, and pledged that he and other members of his organisation would lobby the rs government to ban the film. dukić has not seen the film, but said ‘the response from bosnian (war victims’) associations and their enthusiasm testify that the main message of this film is to re-charge the serbs as the sole culprits for the war’” (hopkins, 2011a). at the time of in the land of blood and honey’s february 2012 sarajevo public premiere, guardian journalist julian borger reported that jolie and some of her serbian actors in the film had been threatened online—with one actor also having a car window smashed and another having his mobile phone hacked (borger, 2012). in its october 2012 report on the lack of reparations in republika srpska (rs) for those who experienced wartime rape, amnesty international states that “in the rs, the true extent of sexual violence during the conflict has never been acknowledged by the authorities or society more broadly. survivors of wartime sexual violence are not recognized in law and their needs are not being met in practice” (amnesty international, 2012). however, bosnian serb ex-detainee and leader of the association of prisoners from visegrad, dragisa andrić, attended the special december 2011 screening of in the land of blood and honey for war victims and was quoted as saying that “people, especially young people and those who did not live through the war, must watch this film to see what war brings, that is, nothing good. they must realize war is an evil, so that it never happens again” (hopkins, 2011a). 13 in addition to the awards given to jolie and to in the land of blood and honey discussed in the succeeding paragraph, storm received the amnesty international film prize and the guild of german art house cinemas prize at the 2009 berlin film studies in social justice, volume 7, issue 2, 2013 in the land of celebrity humanitarianism 307 festival, the award for best narrative feature at the 2009 flyway film festival, and was nominated for the 2009 “prix lux”—the european parliament film prize. at the 2011 irish film and television academy awards, as if i am not there received awards for best film, best director, and best screenplay. 14 jolie was also made an honorary citizen of sarajevo at the 2012 sarajevo film festival (zuvela, 2012). what was described as the first public appearance of her $500,000 engagement ring also made headlines on this occasion (huffington post, 2012). 15 on the anderson cooper talk show, actress zana marjanović likewise stated that the script was “so bosnian, so true, so authentic”—and that it was “quite unbelievable that you (jolie) would know so much about bosnians and what we went through” (cooper, 2011). in a variation on the victim-certification process, even some of those interviewing jolie were eager to display their “i was there—so i know how it was” credentials for the audience. both anderson cooper on his daytime talk show and abc’s christiane amanpour included clips of their own coverage as reporters during the siege of sarajevo in their programs about jolie and in the land of blood and honey. 16 i am grateful to professor andrea most of the university of toronto for bringing the kenneth tynan review and its implications for the reception of cultural products like the theatrical adaptation of anne frank’s diary to my attention. references alcalá, p.r. and baines, e. 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